this is precisely what didn't happen with the Xbox - in fact, the Intel CPUs actually went up in price, as they became obsolete and unlike anything else Intel were producing...
Did MS ever recoup any money (or even profit at all) from the original X?
No. They lost nearly $400,000,000 last year on the Xbox division, including games sales.
They're probably around $4,000,000,000 out on the whole Xbox venture, so far.
Their only profitable quarter was the one due to the release of Halo 2.
They're damaging Nintendo (a pure games company) - do you really think Nintendo were or are able to compete? If not, then how is this not anti-competitive? And is this behaviour good for gamers in any case?
Keep buying the Xboxes new and the games secondhand - together we can kill Microsoft!
Absolutely brilliant, Nokia PC Suite. This is the one thing that they should product an Open Source version of - but then until recently they didn't even have a Mac equivalent.
The current version, and its 3 predecessors, are the slowest, buggiest bit of crud on any of my machines - Nokia Audio Manager crashes on both my Athlon 64 and Sempron 64 boxes unless I delete cdmgr.dll, and only recognised phones during the install phase on my K6-2 box until I bought an add-in USB card and disabled the motherboard USB controller.
Support are a nightmare too - they were haughty to the point of rudeness, and refused to discuss the issue last November unless I upgraded to Win XP SP2!
Even when it does work (which seems to be random, and varying with versions - 6.6 does not work for me at all), copying between phones and PCs is like watching treacle dry, whether using IR, Bluetooth or the £30 cable I eventually bought after the frustration of many dropped connections with the wireless options.
Despite the phone itself being very nice, I'm never buying another Nokia - they just can't be arsed to provide decent software or support...
The GPL is based in, and only works because of, copyright law.
The GPL is a copyright license: the means by which a copyright holder publishes their work. That they assign *more* rights to end users than standard copyright would is irrelevant.
He tried to access the system twice and both times was denied access. What does that mean? Was he trying to gain access to a part of the system where access to sensitive information was stored? Was he trying to login, but not knowing how to?
Directory traversal, and using lynx.
He never tried to defraud: What does that mean? Is it because he never gained access? If so, was his intent to try and defraud had he gained access? (In my opinion, if that were the case, he certainly should be considered to have tried to defraud.)
He gave them £30 (at the time, ~ US$58). This is the opposite of defrauding them...
Another defense argument is this guy's actions were merely attempts to verify legitimacy of the fund raising site. So, what exactly was he doing to verify? (And why wouldn't he take more traditional avenues such as Googling, etc. What are the implications of every cynical user of a site attempting "access" to verify legitimacy?)
He clicked on a banner add to donate to the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee's appeal for the December tsunami in Asia, and got no confirmation page. His first thought was that this was a phising site and he'd been scammed. So he panicked and tried the directory traversal...
Has this guy done other things and now authorities, etc., are just using technicalities to shut him down?
No. This was AFAIK his first offence of any sort at all - and now his career's in ruins.
The Computer Misuse Act (1990) is an apalling piece of shoddy law - speaking as an IT professional who's actually had to read it. The only thing it's good for is threatening users.
The sledgehammer is a simple, solid and effective tool, yet requires a modest degree of effort. It is available everywhere there is human settlement, is cheap, and has no running costs. A sledgehammer never requires any form of licence or permit to use. It also just works.
A pump-action shotgun may be easier for the lazy or weak to use; it may even be more fun. It certainly makes it easier to harm your neighbours, or shoot yourself in the foot. Remind you of anything?
Exactly. Which nations have most to lose if knowledge is shared freely - those with lots of "IP" or those with less?
"IP" is simply ideas with a price tag, which ultimately slows down the speed of human development in return for providing shiny things for those of us with too much already.
The answer seems to be that the license gives developers the right to make derivatives of the Open Solaris code, with permission to use these patents in the derivative works.
All changes must be given back to Sun, and if your Open Source project doesn't use their code you don't have a license to use these patents.
You're therefore not allowed to use the GPL for any project which uses the patents!
RTFLicense. This code cannot be used in Linux, as any derivative works must remain licensed under Sun's CDDL, and any derivatives of GPL software must be licensed under the GPL. The 2 are fundamentally incompatible, deliberately.
As for SCO, Sun signed a license with them last year in the run up to this release, which should make any Linux developer very wary of even looking at this codebase.
Funny, but adds to the confusion surrounding IP of various sorts.
For the record, all works not explicitly released into the public domain have copyright protection. The authors may choose to license some rights under the GPL, BSD license, or v6.66 of the Microsoft EULA. Without the protection of copyright, there could *be* no GPL!
Hmm, in my case they're using me to test both. Shame bugzilla reports on FC get ignored. As for quality control, Fedora seems to bypass the concept - FC2 sucks worse than any distro I've ever used, and I've been running everything on RH since the 4.2 days. If FC3 doesn't improve things I'll... bitch some more on Slashdot.
Well, yeah, but was the editor at Slashdot asleep? The story begins:
Enaku writes "Left wing Australian Christian political party Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users in Australia to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level.
... whereas the original, article (to which Enaku links!) begins:
CONSERVATIVE political newcomer Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level.
(Capitalisation in original story too)
I know almost no-one on Slashdot bothers to RTFA any more, but please credit some of us with an ounce of brain.
In this case, they're not. However, Dell have been happily selling me PCs running Red Hat for at least 4 years; first Red Hat Linux, and now Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Of course, being Dell, the machines cost more than the exact same hardware running bloody Microsoft, and the partitioning sucks so I always reinstall from scratch, but that's not the point...
4, Insightful? FFS. Using the CC numbers to buy yourself a small country might be vaguely similar, but if you think it's equivalent you're showing very little regard for the value of a human life.
Picking up a gun you saw/found on a fairground ride and waiving it around shouting "Look, gun!" would be a closer firearms analogy...
So if you knew of an ATM machine near you, and also knew that there was no building behind it, but just a vacant lot, would you tell someone about to pay in their wages?
If they demanded proof, you could show them a photo, but with credit card numbers the only proof is the number itself, and even knowing the number is a crime...
What should we do? Let everyone continue using insecure services in good faith? Criminals will always know the weaknesses in such systems, so why isn't any publicity good publicity? How should the public be informed (which means passing the information in a way that makes Mr Average stop and think "this needs to be fixed before I use it again")?
that, but really isn't the problem that their software was riddled with design and security problems?
That's a pretty common problem with Diebold systems though - they give a very good impression of having no understanding at all of any computer security concepts... pop quiz, would you rather trust them with your votes or your money?
Fuckwits can't even make their ATMs safe from Windoze RPC DCOM worms after M$ put out the patch. Though what we're doing allowing cash machines to run M$OS (with RPC turned on!) is beyond me.
Not sure you can automatically disqualify the guy's company for his political views or activism - but such a fundamental shift in the mechanism for expressing the will of the people shouldn't be introduced without a proper understanding of the issues involved.
Problem is, neither those running the states' electoral systems nor the electorate have a proper grasp of just how hard it is to do this properly - but then it seems Diebold don't either:
Slashdot Mirror
this is precisely what didn't happen with the Xbox - in fact, the Intel CPUs actually went up in price, as they became obsolete and unlike anything else Intel were producing...
No. They lost nearly $400,000,000 last year on the Xbox division, including games sales.
They're probably around $4,000,000,000 out on the whole Xbox venture, so far.
Their only profitable quarter was the one due to the release of Halo 2.
They're damaging Nintendo (a pure games company) - do you really think Nintendo were or are able to compete? If not, then how is this not anti-competitive? And is this behaviour good for gamers in any case?
Keep buying the Xboxes new and the games secondhand - together we can kill Microsoft!
The whole Xbox division of MS loses money - $391m last financial year, on sales of $3.2b.
They're not selling a hook, they're burning money in an attempt to beat everyone else out of the market and pwnz0r your home entertainment forever...
Try telling that to the passengers of the Seabourn Spirit
Absolutely brilliant, Nokia PC Suite. This is the one thing that they should product an Open Source version of - but then until recently they didn't even have a Mac equivalent.
The current version, and its 3 predecessors, are the slowest, buggiest bit of crud on any of my machines - Nokia Audio Manager crashes on both my Athlon 64 and Sempron 64 boxes unless I delete cdmgr.dll, and only recognised phones during the install phase on my K6-2 box until I bought an add-in USB card and disabled the motherboard USB controller.
Support are a nightmare too - they were haughty to the point of rudeness, and refused to discuss the issue last November unless I upgraded to Win XP SP2!
Even when it does work (which seems to be random, and varying with versions - 6.6 does not work for me at all), copying between phones and PCs is like watching treacle dry, whether using IR, Bluetooth or the £30 cable I eventually bought after the frustration of many dropped connections with the wireless options.
Despite the phone itself being very nice, I'm never buying another Nokia - they just can't be arsed to provide decent software or support...
No. They. Haven't.
No-one seriously wants to run a bank on a Beowulf cluster.
The GPL is based in, and only works because of, copyright law.
The GPL is a copyright license: the means by which a copyright holder publishes their work. That they assign *more* rights to end users than standard copyright would is irrelevant.
Directory traversal, and using lynx.
He gave them £30 (at the time, ~ US$58). This is the opposite of defrauding them...
He clicked on a banner add to donate to the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee's appeal for the December tsunami in Asia, and got no confirmation page. His first thought was that this was a phising site and he'd been scammed. So he panicked and tried the directory traversal...
No. This was AFAIK his first offence of any sort at all - and now his career's in ruins.
The Computer Misuse Act (1990) is an apalling piece of shoddy law - speaking as an IT professional who's actually had to read it. The only thing it's good for is threatening users.
Nice OS analogy: allow me to embrace and extend.
The sledgehammer is a simple, solid and effective tool, yet requires a modest degree of effort. It is available everywhere there is human settlement, is cheap, and has no running costs. A sledgehammer never requires any form of licence or permit to use. It also just works.
A pump-action shotgun may be easier for the lazy or weak to use; it may even be more fun. It certainly makes it easier to harm your neighbours, or shoot yourself in the foot. Remind you of anything?
Exactly. Which nations have most to lose if knowledge is shared freely - those with lots of "IP" or those with less?
"IP" is simply ideas with a price tag, which ultimately slows down the speed of human development in return for providing shiny things for those of us with too much already.
But I think Jonanthan Schwartz knows that...
Sun are still working on binary emulation for closed-source code compiled for GNU/Linux.
The CDDL prevents use of the code in Linux or any other GPLed project.
This means those projects don't get a license to use the 1600 patents either.
It might seem to be okay if you don't care about freedom to use the code in any way you like...
The answer seems to be that the license gives developers the right to make derivatives of the Open Solaris code, with permission to use these patents in the derivative works.
All changes must be given back to Sun, and if your Open Source project doesn't use their code you don't have a license to use these patents.
You're therefore not allowed to use the GPL for any project which uses the patents!
RTFLicense. This code cannot be used in Linux, as any derivative works must remain licensed under Sun's CDDL, and any derivatives of GPL software must be licensed under the GPL. The 2 are fundamentally incompatible, deliberately.
As for SCO, Sun signed a license with them last year in the run up to this release, which should make any Linux developer very wary of even looking at this codebase.
SCO also hold zero patents...
Funny, but adds to the confusion surrounding IP of various sorts.
For the record, all works not explicitly released into the public domain have copyright protection. The authors may choose to license some rights under the GPL, BSD license, or v6.66 of the Microsoft EULA. Without the protection of copyright, there could *be* no GPL!
Hmm, in my case they're using me to test both. Shame bugzilla reports on FC get ignored. As for quality control, Fedora seems to bypass the concept - FC2 sucks worse than any distro I've ever used, and I've been running everything on RH since the 4.2 days. If FC3 doesn't improve things I'll ... bitch some more on Slashdot.
Well, yeah, but was the editor at Slashdot asleep? The story begins:
... whereas the original, article (to which Enaku links!) begins:
(Capitalisation in original story too)
I know almost no-one on Slashdot bothers to RTFA any more, but please credit some of us with an ounce of brain.
In this case, they're not. However, Dell have been happily selling me PCs running Red Hat for at least 4 years; first Red Hat Linux, and now Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Of course, being Dell, the machines cost more than the exact same hardware running bloody Microsoft, and the partitioning sucks so I always reinstall from scratch, but that's not the point...
4, Insightful? FFS. Using the CC numbers to buy yourself a small country might be vaguely similar, but if you think it's equivalent you're showing very little regard for the value of a human life.
Picking up a gun you saw/found on a fairground ride and waiving it around shouting "Look, gun!" would be a closer firearms analogy...
So if you knew of an ATM machine near you, and also knew that there was no building behind it, but just a vacant lot, would you tell someone about to pay in their wages?
If they demanded proof, you could show them a photo, but with credit card numbers the only proof is the number itself, and even knowing the number is a crime...
What should we do? Let everyone continue using insecure services in good faith? Criminals will always know the weaknesses in such systems, so why isn't any publicity good publicity? How should the public be informed (which means passing the information in a way that makes Mr Average stop and think "this needs to be fixed before I use it again")?
That's a pretty common problem with Diebold systems though - they give a very good impression of having no understanding at all of any computer security concepts... pop quiz, would you rather trust them with your votes or your money?
Fuckwits can't even make their ATMs safe from Windoze RPC DCOM worms after M$ put out the patch. Though what we're doing allowing cash machines to run M$OS (with RPC turned on!) is beyond me.Yep.
Not sure you can automatically disqualify the guy's company for his political views or activism - but such a fundamental shift in the mechanism for expressing the will of the people shouldn't be introduced without a proper understanding of the issues involved.
Problem is, neither those running the states' electoral systems nor the electorate have a proper grasp of just how hard it is to do this properly - but then it seems Diebold don't either:
Troll?
I suppose you wouldn't call $8,000,000 funding, then?
How about $8,000,000 worth of evidence this quarter alone?
Plus the money Microsoft gave them last quarter...
Try bothering at least to Google for this guy. J. Am. Chem. Soc 125, 43, 13279 - 13283