Doh. There's no absolute significancy when we talk about money. For some 350k$ is huge amount of money, for some pocket change.
More importantly, check out Red Hat Inc.'s revenue, compare that to said 350k$ in sales, and consider how "insignificant" such a sale would be for the sales guy who pocketed it.
I can guarantee it's anything but insignificant for small (revenue/profit-wise) company like Red Hat. Not necessarily for big corporation's data center, but that's less relevant here.
Bottom line is, the original author would do well to contact Red Hat salesperson and see what kind of a discount they would get, based on size of the purchase in question.
The French intelligence services work very closely with French businesses.
And, to be fair, US intelligence service works occasionally closely with US corporations (there were some cases related to airplane industry where EU was investigating how come US company had found out what some european company was bidding).
Point being that perspective certainly matters, like you say, but also that few government agencies if any are completely above using illegal and/or immoral practices to help "their" companies, anywhere in the world.
Open democracies, and especially free press lessen likelihood of such stunts (by retroactively uncovering them, usually leading to scandals... which act as deterrent in the long run). Unfortunately those 'antidotes' are being threatened especially in US, by latest legislations (from "Patriot" act to DMCA).
I would think it would be a better idea to re-release everything under a new license instead of hiring a pack of lawyers.
Problem being, same "flaw" that caused GPL to be
"invalid" would apply to most all other open source licenses as well. Thus, there wouldn't be any license to use that would be useful to try to guarantee openness of source code. You could only dump it into Public Domain, from which anyone could take it, modify and close derivative work (a la Disney & their 'versions' of classic children's stories).
When you work for someone the copyright on the work you produce during the time that they pay you belongs to them, and they can do what they want with it.
Perhaps you just phrased it badly, but this certainly is not a fact. It depends on your contract with your employer (client, whoever foots the bill). By default whoever creates the
work has the copyright, and that person has to
either explicitly or implicitly (your job contract etc) cede it.
For most people what you say is true, but that's based on their work contract, which usually outlines the rules ("anything you create.... are belong to us", with sometimes minor exclusions, depending on applicable state laws, in case of US), not on default transfer of copyright.
As long as THAT is followed by Dubya attacking SCO, and wiping out SCO leadership (plus their sons), I think that would work out just fine!
And after THAT we can all start looking for those allegedly easy-to-spot infringing lines of code that everyone from FBI to Mossad knew were there, ready to be deployed in 45 minutes!:-)
Everybody. The patent system has driven R&D in the United States for more than two hundred years.
This can potentially kill off alot of inventing.
There is lots of evidence to the contrary. What do you have to support your proposition.
Hmmh. You call his 'bluff' ("back it up with facts"), while doing exactly the same: claiming patents do benefit society as whole via R'n D, without any pointers to anything to back it up. Just your opinion (and vaguely implying others agree). Gee, that's convincing argument there.
Notice that just because there has been lots of innovation in computers and related things is not a proof; without parallel universe to check, it's impossible to say how alternative would have worked out. Personally I think things would have been quite similar, actually; meaning that although I do consider patents in general (and as implemented in particular) harmful, I think there effect has fortunately been limited. But there's a possibility that may change, mostly because:
Industry "maturing", small companies either die or grow big; and big companies tend
to both not remember their origins (small innovative company) and lose their technically
oriented leaders (to be replaced by legally
and/or fiscally oriented successors).
More lawyers getting involved, consider fabricated concept ("intellectual property") having become generally accepted and thus actual property... and where there's property, there are disputes, and thus lawyers making killing.
Finally, claiming big companies want relaxed patent (copyright, trademark) laws is patently absurd. Tbere are die-hard patent-loving propel-hat inventors, too; but the mix of opinions at individual level is MUCH wider than with corporations. Corporations arae pretty unified in their standing favouring strictly enforced patent laws. These are their weapons of choice, especially when things get tough. PHBs and their ilk like the idea of "new frontier" that "intellectual property" represents. There are just those pesky induhvidualist indians (actual inventors) to get rid of, and then the gold is theirs.
Analogy is far from perfect (basic problem with analogies), but the point stands. Incompatibility only matters if devices are to interconnect. There are separate (slightly overlapping but separate) niches for USB, Firewire, SCSI and IDE as well, where one might think at first incompatibility is a huge problem, and only one standard can survive. Reason it ain't so has to do with different price / performance / power usage / cable length trade-offs interfaces have.
Still, you didn't claim something is impossible, just that you don't believe Zigbee has a chance... fair enough, not much point to argue further. Time will tell how things go.
Personally, I don't think there is room for both, so zigbee isn't exactly going to make waves...
You do realize that there are still uses for cheap old Z80A microprocessors, too, what with latest Pentium 9 and UltraSparc VI chips? Don't underestimate different niches that exist for components that have different power/price characteristics.
He now owns something that a person (or group of people) produced and expected payment for. He didn't pay for it. Therefore has prevented the creators from receiving the money they are due. He has stolen directly from them.
I see. There are organizations that keep on sending me christmas cards before christmas (without my ordering anything), and expect me to pay for them; or, to send them back. I have no intention to do either: I ordered nothing, and don't intend to spend my time (which is worth 50$ / hour during business hours, and more outside) for handling unsolicited material.
By your reasoning I am now thief.
There are also fine gentlemen from various African countries (Nigeria, Zimbabwe come to mind) that have business deals to offer (in confidentiality). They have sent me email (which I now possess), and expect a payment to proceed with transaction. Cheap-ass me, I do not pay them, no matter how lucrative those money-making deals are.
My my, I'm stealing from unfortunate African "businessmen"!
Despite the fact I don't have much sympathy for people who illegally download music, copy computer games, and so forth -- while claiming there's absolutely nothing wrong with that -- I don't have much more sympathy for trivialized boyscout attitude you are peddling here either, especially when trying to force the mislabeling of offense in question. Copyright violations do not equal stealing, nor downloaders thieves.
And music/movie industry's lazy leechy monopolistic attitudes, actions and practices make me even less sympathetic for industry here. They try to squeeze all the benefits of digital technology they can get, while sharing none. Costs are way down on production side; prices have suspiciously continued to go up much faster than inflation.
Ethics 101. Laws are often initially created based on majority moral views, and thus legality in general tries to approximate morality. There are other concerns when creating laws (practicality, need to stabilize society, in case of most societies) which may and do further deviate laws from moral values.
Alternatively; check out your favourite dictionary and see if its definition for the words are identical (or even similar). If they are, you have synonyms.
The problem is that there's no one that's doing this in the open source/free software world.
I vaguely recall there having been some companies in OSS world that were planning to solve this problem, like, almost a decade ago.
I think one such company was called "Red Hat", and there were others too. Wonder if they might still be around?
Not everyone rolls up their own kernel from sources you know. There are companies whose main product IS that "warm fuzzy feeling" related to idea of having someone to blame in case of problems.
Wow. So it seems... holy guacamoley, hope I didn't infringe on anyone's trademark there! I KNEW it was too good a name not to have already been taken!:-)
Yeah, but that wouldn't be backwards compatible! (wouldn't compile with current compilers).
So let's see; somebody else already proposed (c++)++ , which is a reasonable suggestion... but... um... how about "c += 2"? For now, it's as concise as
the alternative, but going forward it will scale better (c += 3 vs ((c++)++)++ ).
In case no one has ever told you, there is a very good saying "right tool for the job". C is very useful language, for (nowadays) fairly limited, albeit important, set of problems. Other C-derivatives are superior to C
in many other areas.
check the postal success in countries outside the US
Actually, my experience has been that USPS is worse than any northern european postal service, competing with mediterranean ones (perhaps beating turkish counterpart like you suggest, but not by big margin). And FedEx/UPS/DHL do operate in most areas, even outside industrial world.
I mean, there are countries (especially in Africa), where too many post packets are basically stolen by postal workers, but Europe in general, and western/northern Europe in particular do not really differ that much from USA regarding delivery of packets. So that's unlikely to be the reason.
Right. And you are one of those loonies that send all their mail in postcards and cares not about privacy. Good for you.
Problem though is, if and when goverment officials have access, they (some of them) will use it. For their main job, perhaps; for their entertainment, certainly, for other enterprises, quite possibly.
Not just to listen to "really really bad guys", but gradually smaller fish, down to figuring out if their wifes are cheating them, or what their neighbours are talking about. Or for more enterprenially oriented peons, ways to blackmail people, or to get to some other useful information; be it for job or for personal businesses.
Never underestimate possibilities that open, or blindly assume everyone uses those powers responsibly. Grow up, use your brains, learn more about basic human nature, and corruption power causes.
Hmmh. Do you know any foreigners? Ask them to hear how "easy" it is to come and look. Even for legal aliens, it's royal pain in the ass; for tourists immigration can turn anyone away for any reason (or without one).
If you are lucky, you get in, and all that, but in many ways coming to USA is more difficult than to other western countries.
Aside from that your points are of course valid, and I find it ridiculous anyone's trying to classify either methods or results. Although, my main point is just "so what" factor; knowing every single line of trunk network doesn't help a whole lot. I mean, terrorists can easily find out all bridges, dams, power plants etc; that someone thinks cutting (commercial) communication networks -- assuming it would succeed, which is a big if, knowing that there is lots of redundancy -- is a bigger threat than other targets is ridiculous.
With all current dependency on information networks, it's good to keep in mind that people do not eat, drink or breathe Internet; if it's out, it's out, and comes back up when it comes. No one starves to death. When going down, it does not kill 4000 people, like big buildings do.
All in all, it seems like security folks for gov't just have too much both time and money on their hands, and try to conjure imaginary threats. Business as usual, there, it seems.:-/
Interesting possibilities. However, it probably isn't CPU overheating; I should have clarified type of a lock-up. I can actually log in from laptop connected to intranet to kill X
and to get going again (for a while). Plus
same thing happened on 2 separate systems... And no, I'm not overclocking the card. Not much point as I don't play any 3D games.:-)
Either way, I'll upgrade the card soon, next time I need to do any kind of upgrade... so problems should go away.
[about NVidia]
With Linux, they've always been forthcoming with drivers, even when the kernel supports the cards (in the most basic way).
Hmmh. Too bad their close source driver just keeps on locking my system (both under Windows and Linux so I guess they are not discriminating); not right away, but after a while... really frustrating.
Had to go back to 'basic' kernel driver; for me
that works well enough fortunately.
Googling for solution I found this is unfortunately fairly common, not just for me or my current setup (had same problem with previous system on windows side, but back then never tried Linux closed version).
Iraq and France bashing by association. I know it's the in thing now to bag on "those French cowards"
This is something that's been puzzling me a
fair bit, actually: there were couple of mid-sized countries that stood up to the only
actual superpower, saying it would be wrong to attack Iraq (based on just inconclusive evidence and lots of strong words). And that's cowardice? Knowing US military, political and economic might, that seems fairly brave move on France's (and Germany's) part to me. Note that I'm not commenting on right/wrongness of those actions, just the impression on courageousness (or lack of).
It's bit like people calling 9/11 terrorists cowards; I mean, they were scumsucking evildoing asswipes and all, but still; doing a kamikaze attack like that isn't your every day coward would really do.
I guess it's just using word "coward" as a general derogatory term, and/or applying different criteria for different people (as in "if they weren't such cowards they'd had attacked US army forces directly").
As to France specifically; I know, I know, it is/was just "sore loser's syndrome"; the problem wasn't who's brave who's not, but who is with us or against us. But still... it is scary how sometimes politics get close to Orwell's new world, where war is peace, lies are truth, and bravery is cowardice.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! So that's mr. "Unexpected Bill" that those TV commercials talk about...
More importantly, check out Red Hat Inc.'s revenue, compare that to said 350k$ in sales, and consider how "insignificant" such a sale would be for the sales guy who pocketed it.
I can guarantee it's anything but insignificant for small (revenue/profit-wise) company like Red Hat. Not necessarily for big corporation's data center, but that's less relevant here.
Bottom line is, the original author would do well to contact Red Hat salesperson and see what kind of a discount they would get, based on size of the purchase in question.
And, to be fair, US intelligence service works occasionally closely with US corporations (there were some cases related to airplane industry where EU was investigating how come US company had found out what some european company was bidding).
Point being that perspective certainly matters, like you say, but also that few government agencies if any are completely above using illegal and/or immoral practices to help "their" companies, anywhere in the world.
Open democracies, and especially free press lessen likelihood of such stunts (by retroactively uncovering them, usually leading to scandals... which act as deterrent in the long run). Unfortunately those 'antidotes' are being threatened especially in US, by latest legislations (from "Patriot" act to DMCA).
Problem being, same "flaw" that caused GPL to be "invalid" would apply to most all other open source licenses as well. Thus, there wouldn't be any license to use that would be useful to try to guarantee openness of source code. You could only dump it into Public Domain, from which anyone could take it, modify and close derivative work (a la Disney & their 'versions' of classic children's stories).
Perhaps you just phrased it badly, but this certainly is not a fact. It depends on your contract with your employer (client, whoever foots the bill). By default whoever creates the work has the copyright, and that person has to either explicitly or implicitly (your job contract etc) cede it.
For most people what you say is true, but that's based on their work contract, which usually outlines the rules ("anything you create .... are belong to us", with sometimes minor exclusions, depending on applicable state laws, in case of US), not on default transfer of copyright.
And after THAT we can all start looking for those allegedly easy-to-spot infringing lines of code that everyone from FBI to Mossad knew were there, ready to be deployed in 45 minutes! :-)
There is lots of evidence to the contrary. What do you have to support your proposition.
Hmmh. You call his 'bluff' ("back it up with facts"), while doing exactly the same: claiming patents do benefit society as whole via R'n D, without any pointers to anything to back it up. Just your opinion (and vaguely implying others agree). Gee, that's convincing argument there.
Notice that just because there has been lots of innovation in computers and related things is not a proof; without parallel universe to check, it's impossible to say how alternative would have worked out. Personally I think things would have been quite similar, actually; meaning that although I do consider patents in general (and as implemented in particular) harmful, I think there effect has fortunately been limited. But there's a possibility that may change, mostly because:
Finally, claiming big companies want relaxed patent (copyright, trademark) laws is patently absurd. Tbere are die-hard patent-loving propel-hat inventors, too; but the mix of opinions at individual level is MUCH wider than with corporations. Corporations arae pretty unified in their standing favouring strictly enforced patent laws. These are their weapons of choice, especially when things get tough. PHBs and their ilk like the idea of "new frontier" that "intellectual property" represents. There are just those pesky induhvidualist indians (actual inventors) to get rid of, and then the gold is theirs.
Still, you didn't claim something is impossible, just that you don't believe Zigbee has a chance... fair enough, not much point to argue further. Time will tell how things go.
You do realize that there are still uses for cheap old Z80A microprocessors, too, what with latest Pentium 9 and UltraSparc VI chips? Don't underestimate different niches that exist for components that have different power/price characteristics.
I see. There are organizations that keep on sending me christmas cards before christmas (without my ordering anything), and expect me to pay for them; or, to send them back. I have no intention to do either: I ordered nothing, and don't intend to spend my time (which is worth 50$ / hour during business hours, and more outside) for handling unsolicited material.
By your reasoning I am now thief.
There are also fine gentlemen from various African countries (Nigeria, Zimbabwe come to mind) that have business deals to offer (in confidentiality). They have sent me email (which I now possess), and expect a payment to proceed with transaction. Cheap-ass me, I do not pay them, no matter how lucrative those money-making deals are.
My my, I'm stealing from unfortunate African "businessmen"!
Despite the fact I don't have much sympathy for people who illegally download music, copy computer games, and so forth -- while claiming there's absolutely nothing wrong with that -- I don't have much more sympathy for trivialized boyscout attitude you are peddling here either, especially when trying to force the mislabeling of offense in question. Copyright violations do not equal stealing, nor downloaders thieves. And music/movie industry's lazy leechy monopolistic attitudes, actions and practices make me even less sympathetic for industry here. They try to squeeze all the benefits of digital technology they can get, while sharing none. Costs are way down on production side; prices have suspiciously continued to go up much faster than inflation.
Ethics 101. Laws are often initially created based on majority moral views, and thus legality in general tries to approximate morality. There are other concerns when creating laws (practicality, need to stabilize society, in case of most societies) which may and do further deviate laws from moral values.
Alternatively; check out your favourite dictionary and see if its definition for the words are identical (or even similar). If they are, you have synonyms.
I would also suggest additional plan C that includes learning how to use spellchecker... :-)
I vaguely recall there having been some companies in OSS world that were planning to solve this problem, like, almost a decade ago. I think one such company was called "Red Hat", and there were others too. Wonder if they might still be around?
Not everyone rolls up their own kernel from sources you know. There are companies whose main product IS that "warm fuzzy feeling" related to idea of having someone to blame in case of problems.
Dear respected sir,
I do not, or plan to, own a fool. And if I did, I doubt he/she would belive anything.
ps. please next time spellcheck before you post.
Perhaps his/her spellchecker didn't know proper way of spelling "fucking" to suggest it? :-)
Wow. So it seems... holy guacamoley, hope I didn't infringe on anyone's trademark there! I KNEW it was too good a name not to have already been taken! :-)
So let's see; somebody else already proposed (c++)++ , which is a reasonable suggestion... but... um... how about "c += 2"? For now, it's as concise as the alternative, but going forward it will scale better (c += 3 vs ((c++)++)++ ).
In case no one has ever told you, there is a very good saying "right tool for the job". C is very useful language, for (nowadays) fairly limited, albeit important, set of problems. Other C-derivatives are superior to C in many other areas.
Actually, my experience has been that USPS is worse than any northern european postal service, competing with mediterranean ones (perhaps beating turkish counterpart like you suggest, but not by big margin). And FedEx/UPS/DHL do operate in most areas, even outside industrial world.
I mean, there are countries (especially in Africa), where too many post packets are basically stolen by postal workers, but Europe in general, and western/northern Europe in particular do not really differ that much from USA regarding delivery of packets. So that's unlikely to be the reason.
Right. And you are one of those loonies that send all their mail in postcards and cares not about privacy. Good for you.
Problem though is, if and when goverment officials have access, they (some of them) will use it. For their main job, perhaps; for their entertainment, certainly, for other enterprises, quite possibly. Not just to listen to "really really bad guys", but gradually smaller fish, down to figuring out if their wifes are cheating them, or what their neighbours are talking about. Or for more enterprenially oriented peons, ways to blackmail people, or to get to some other useful information; be it for job or for personal businesses.
Never underestimate possibilities that open, or blindly assume everyone uses those powers responsibly. Grow up, use your brains, learn more about basic human nature, and corruption power causes.
Hmmh. Do you know any foreigners? Ask them to hear how "easy" it is to come and look. Even for legal aliens, it's royal pain in the ass; for tourists immigration can turn anyone away for any reason (or without one). If you are lucky, you get in, and all that, but in many ways coming to USA is more difficult than to other western countries.
Aside from that your points are of course valid, and I find it ridiculous anyone's trying to classify either methods or results. Although, my main point is just "so what" factor; knowing every single line of trunk network doesn't help a whole lot. I mean, terrorists can easily find out all bridges, dams, power plants etc; that someone thinks cutting (commercial) communication networks -- assuming it would succeed, which is a big if, knowing that there is lots of redundancy -- is a bigger threat than other targets is ridiculous.
With all current dependency on information networks, it's good to keep in mind that people do not eat, drink or breathe Internet; if it's out, it's out, and comes back up when it comes. No one starves to death. When going down, it does not kill 4000 people, like big buildings do.
All in all, it seems like security folks for gov't just have too much both time and money on their hands, and try to conjure imaginary threats. Business as usual, there, it seems. :-/
Either way, I'll upgrade the card soon, next time I need to do any kind of upgrade... so problems should go away.
With Linux, they've always been forthcoming with drivers, even when the kernel supports the cards (in the most basic way).
Hmmh. Too bad their close source driver just keeps on locking my system (both under Windows and Linux so I guess they are not discriminating); not right away, but after a while... really frustrating. Had to go back to 'basic' kernel driver; for me that works well enough fortunately.
Googling for solution I found this is unfortunately fairly common, not just for me or my current setup (had same problem with previous system on windows side, but back then never tried Linux closed version).
This is something that's been puzzling me a fair bit, actually: there were couple of mid-sized countries that stood up to the only actual superpower, saying it would be wrong to attack Iraq (based on just inconclusive evidence and lots of strong words). And that's cowardice? Knowing US military, political and economic might, that seems fairly brave move on France's (and Germany's) part to me. Note that I'm not commenting on right/wrongness of those actions, just the impression on courageousness (or lack of).
It's bit like people calling 9/11 terrorists cowards; I mean, they were scumsucking evildoing asswipes and all, but still; doing a kamikaze attack like that isn't your every day coward would really do. I guess it's just using word "coward" as a general derogatory term, and/or applying different criteria for different people (as in "if they weren't such cowards they'd had attacked US army forces directly").
As to France specifically; I know, I know, it is/was just "sore loser's syndrome"; the problem wasn't who's brave who's not, but who is with us or against us. But still... it is scary how sometimes politics get close to Orwell's new world, where war is peace, lies are truth, and bravery is cowardice.
Thanks... that sounds useful. I should be able to find someone with VS (used to have a copy from my previous job but not any more).