Eh, although I didn't think my metaphor through all that much, I think a dueling (with swords) is a reasonable metaphor for law.
Parry, thrust, parry and so forth... add in a ton of man hours, a team of assistants, paralegals and clerks, and a tremendous amount of research and you've got law, imho.
I disagree. This court case will not be a test of the GPL at all, it will be a test of the lawyers on either side. My understanding is that SCO alleges that IBM breached their license of whatever it is that SCO owns and inserted it into the Linux kernel. It has nothing to do with the GPL, and the case promises to be so mind numbingly complex that little quality case law will come out of it.
I used to think of SCO as a drunk in a knife fight, wildly stabbing about in the hope of drawing blood. This article indicates to me its more like a duel between two masters. I now understand why IBM has been so slow to act in this case, they understand their opponent and are preparing for a fierce battle.
No, you are absolutely correct. Enron is demolished. But who got hurt? The rank and file took it the ass by losing their jobs and being locked out of moving their 401k's out of Enron stock. The upper management, many of whom caused the whole mess, were getting retention bonuses and golden parachutes.
Okay, not defending Enron in any way here, but this whining about 401ks is bullshit. Here's what actually happened:
- Employees had control over what was held in their personal 401k accounts, be it stocks, mutual funds, whatever. - Employees contribute to their 401ks on a yearly basis. - Enron matched the employees contribution with Enron stock, giving employees a gift of company stock. This was not required of them, it was a nice way of giving employees more money and giving them a vested interest in the performance of the company. - Many many many Enron employees chose to have the rest of their 401k invested in Enron stock, since until the very end it was doing amazingly well. This is a Bad Thing, because it makes the employees 401k entirely not diversified, and opens them up to tremendous risk.
So, Enron tanks, and all these employees find their 401ks valueless. Enron's fault? Maybe, but doubtable. Stupid employees greediness' fault? Probably.
Now, the possibly illegal thing that actually started the media coverage that blew this issue our of proportion is thus: Before the Enron stock tanked, Enron switched managers on their 401k. During this process, no one could modify the holdings of their 401ks, since the whole fund is in an undefined state. The problem was that this process, which usually takes a day or two, took something like 8 days which included the day Enron stock tanked. I am not a financial advisor, but to the best of my knowledge this isn't considered an illegal act.
So yeah, the Enron thing overall was bad, but the people who lost the value of their retirement accounts made poor investment decisions, they didn't get hosed or anything.
Again, I'm not a CFA, but in my humble opinion, being dumb / greedy / not paying attention is not something you get to complain about.
I concur. I had the unfortunate experience of deploying a MacOS 9.x based webserver running a compute-intensive webapp, and it worked so poorly that it was actually unusable. The http server software (AppleShareIP) didn't stay up, and when it died it would do so silently. It also allowed no way to set custom error pages which were direly needed, and the lack of preemptive multitasking failed miserably to utilize the abilities of the dual 600-ish MHz machine.
And yes, all of this was running on the fastest machine you could buy from Mac at the time, with around a gig of RAM.
I don't really want to enter into this debate, but, Good / Peaceful uses for guns:
Good & Peaceful: - Sports / Marksmanship. There are a multitude of Olympic sports based around marksmanship; you may never hear about them because they're boring as all hell to watch (Look how still that guy is being! and so forth) and are never covered, with the exception of the biathlon. - Hunting. Whether this fits your definition of 'peaceful' is up to you, but its still a legitimate form of recreation in the states.
Good but not necessarily peaceful: - Enforcing the law. Most police cars I've seen in the past five years has a shotgun or rifle mounted between the front seats, there's probably a reason for that. - Self protection. If Bad Guys can (and do) have firearms, I would like the option of being at least as well armed as the Bad Guys. - Protection of property. I like it that there are armed gaurds inside and out of nuclear power plants. The same goes for military basis, weapons depots, water supplies, and so forth.
There are more arguments and uses, but if you really wanted to find them, you'd be able to on Google in less than a minute.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Buy it from Amazon.
The book is neither about Zen Buddhism or motorcycle maintenance. Its tremendously good, and thought provoking, particularly for those analytical minds out there. I can't recommend it enough.
I run a small mailserver of a home DSL line. When I send mail to another host, my home server connects via SMTP to that host, and starts a regular SMTP session. I don't have any affiliation with the remote host, so I'm not a "genuine user" and I have nothing to login with. Your proposal works great for spammers sending mail through their ISPs mailserver, but I'd be shocked if any of them actually did that.
RPI costs >$30,000 a year to attend. Assuming this kid is paying full price and living on campus, it comes out to somewhere around $17,000 a semester, plus incidental costs (books, etc). If he needed to do well in his finals to pass his courses, it would be more economical to pay off the RIAA than have a shitty semester.
No matter how good it is, it won't be able to compare to ProTools. A good (i.e., not Free or Light editions) rig includes external DSP hardware, which adds to the cost immensely. Beyond that, there is a huge variety of extremely high quality plugins available for ProTools, most of which require the afore-mentioned external DSP to run.
On that note, I'm going to run off and check the application you mentioned out:).
What about editing? I design sound for theatre, and I can't keep any of my source material or product in MP3 because I don't know where its going to end up. If I keep everything in MP3, then any source material in a given effect might get compressed four or five times before the show opens. The artifacts inherent in MP3 (and most other lossy compressions) make it useless for a lot of things. It may sound good once, but after the third time, christ.
I mean no offense, but since when does KDS have a "good name"? Maybe its just me, but all of the monitors I've ever seen catch on fire (2) were KDS, and I've never heard someone (okay, there was one person) who thought KDS made a quality product.
vpopmail is a MDA (delivery agent). qmail hands off deliveries for virtual domains to vpopmail, which then actually handles the delivery stage.
And yes, you can still access things via Pine, or Mutt, or IMAP, or POP3, or what have you. The mail is stored in the Maildir format, which is tremendously superior to mbox.
And yes, you can set the 'default' rule for a domain; be it to bounce, or deliver to a user.
Although I am not a qmail expert by any stretch of the imagination, I'm pretty damn sure you can do all of that with qmail combined with vpopmail, a reasonably popular virtual-user package (GPL, of course).
Fall-through addresses: Done easily in vpopmail.
Configurable bounce errors: bounce-saying in the.qmail file for that address.
Delivery to a process: put "|/bin/appname" in your.qmail file.
Backup mail spooling: Put the domain you want to be a secondary for in/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts, make sure it doesn't appear in locals.
"list" forwards: Put multiple addresses in your.qmail file, on seperate lines.
Access controls for relaying: Done with ucspi-tcp by setting environment variables based on IP of clients.
Domain mirroring: one command with vpopmail; 'valias'.
All of this is well documented in "Life with Qmail," a great reference.
More accurately: Before MDLP, minidiscs just used ATRAC, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is a psychoacoustic encoding with a compression ratio of around 7:1. At this point an Minidisc, with a capacity of around 120MB, can store as much audio as a CD.
With the advent of portable MP3 players, Sony realized that minidisc would be drastically outmoded if MD could not store more. They came out with a considerably more lossy codec which extended ATRAC and called it MDLP. This codec was a lot more like MP3, as Sony presumed (correctly) that people would be willing to deal with the quality loss, since MP3 is not a hugely high quality codec. At the lowest quality setting its passable only for Audio Books, but it sounds pretty good (in my personal experience) at higher settings.
This MDLP technology is what Sony is using to make up the statistics on this machine. I also bet they're quoting stats at the lowest, hugely crappy setting.
I hope so. MS has (iirc) >$56 billion in cash. (For the purposes of this comment, "cash" mean investments that can be converted to cash within 6 months. This is the standard financial definition.) There's a reason they have that kind of cash, its because they are terribly shrewd investors. MS isn't going anywhere, unless the US government suddenly decides to break them up, and even then I doubt they'd suddenly dissapear. The baby Bells are still around, after all.
So yeah, MS will be around in 10 years to help you (just as much as they do today, which is another argument entirely) because they're smart enough to manage their money and their resources. You don't get to the top by being stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, although I didn't think my metaphor through all that much, I think a dueling (with swords) is a reasonable metaphor for law.
Parry, thrust, parry and so forth... add in a ton of man hours, a team of assistants, paralegals and clerks, and a tremendous amount of research and you've got law, imho.
They don't have to convince the Linux community, they have to convince 12 jurors and a judge. (And appeals courts, but who's counting.)
Oh, and you'd be surprised at the barrier of entry for being an expert witness.
I really don't think the community will be of any use in this case.
I disagree. This court case will not be a test of the GPL at all, it will be a test of the lawyers on either side. My understanding is that SCO alleges that IBM breached their license of whatever it is that SCO owns and inserted it into the Linux kernel. It has nothing to do with the GPL, and the case promises to be so mind numbingly complex that little quality case law will come out of it.
I used to think of SCO as a drunk in a knife fight, wildly stabbing about in the hope of drawing blood. This article indicates to me its more like a duel between two masters. I now understand why IBM has been so slow to act in this case, they understand their opponent and are preparing for a fierce battle.
This is very much bad news.
--
lds
Kudos for the reference. Great flick :).
--
Phil
Okay, not defending Enron in any way here, but this whining about 401ks is bullshit. Here's what actually happened:
- Employees had control over what was held in their personal 401k accounts, be it stocks, mutual funds, whatever.
- Employees contribute to their 401ks on a yearly basis.
- Enron matched the employees contribution with Enron stock, giving employees a gift of company stock. This was not required of them, it was a nice way of giving employees more money and giving them a vested interest in the performance of the company.
- Many many many Enron employees chose to have the rest of their 401k invested in Enron stock, since until the very end it was doing amazingly well. This is a Bad Thing, because it makes the employees 401k entirely not diversified, and opens them up to tremendous risk.
So, Enron tanks, and all these employees find their 401ks valueless. Enron's fault? Maybe, but doubtable. Stupid employees greediness' fault? Probably.
Now, the possibly illegal thing that actually started the media coverage that blew this issue our of proportion is thus:
Before the Enron stock tanked, Enron switched managers on their 401k. During this process, no one could modify the holdings of their 401ks, since the whole fund is in an undefined state. The problem was that this process, which usually takes a day or two, took something like 8 days which included the day Enron stock tanked. I am not a financial advisor, but to the best of my knowledge this isn't considered an illegal act.
So yeah, the Enron thing overall was bad, but the people who lost the value of their retirement accounts made poor investment decisions, they didn't get hosed or anything.
Again, I'm not a CFA, but in my humble opinion, being dumb / greedy / not paying attention is not something you get to complain about.
$ uname -r
1.3.22(0.78/3/2)
mine's harder to read, i win.
I concur. I had the unfortunate experience of deploying a MacOS 9.x based webserver running a compute-intensive webapp, and it worked so poorly that it was actually unusable. The http server software (AppleShareIP) didn't stay up, and when it died it would do so silently. It also allowed no way to set custom error pages which were direly needed, and the lack of preemptive multitasking failed miserably to utilize the abilities of the dual 600-ish MHz machine.
And yes, all of this was running on the fastest machine you could buy from Mac at the time, with around a gig of RAM.
--
Phil
AMEN!
Toys for Tots only takes new, unwrapped toys, if I recall.
:).
But yeah, the idea's a good one
--
Phil
I don't really want to enter into this debate, but, Good / Peaceful uses for guns:
Good & Peaceful:
- Sports / Marksmanship.
There are a multitude of Olympic sports based around marksmanship; you may never hear about them because they're boring as all hell to watch (Look how still that guy is being! and so forth) and are never covered, with the exception of the biathlon.
- Hunting.
Whether this fits your definition of 'peaceful' is up to you, but its still a legitimate form of recreation in the states.
Good but not necessarily peaceful:
- Enforcing the law.
Most police cars I've seen in the past five years has a shotgun or rifle mounted between the front seats, there's probably a reason for that.
- Self protection.
If Bad Guys can (and do) have firearms, I would like the option of being at least as well armed as the Bad Guys.
- Protection of property.
I like it that there are armed gaurds inside and out of nuclear power plants. The same goes for military basis, weapons depots, water supplies, and so forth.
There are more arguments and uses, but if you really wanted to find them, you'd be able to on Google in less than a minute.
Enough conjecture. Can you (or anyone) quote actual statistics?
"... and fewer people die in it."
When was the last manned European space flight?
--
lds
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Buy it from Amazon.
The book is neither about Zen Buddhism or motorcycle maintenance. Its tremendously good, and thought provoking, particularly for those analytical minds out there. I can't recommend it enough.
Uhh, that won't work, as far as I can tell.
I run a small mailserver of a home DSL line. When I send mail to another host, my home server connects via SMTP to that host, and starts a regular SMTP session. I don't have any affiliation with the remote host, so I'm not a "genuine user" and I have nothing to login with. Your proposal works great for spammers sending mail through their ISPs mailserver, but I'd be shocked if any of them actually did that.
--
Phil
Speaking as an RPI student...
RPI costs >$30,000 a year to attend. Assuming this kid is paying full price and living on campus, it comes out to somewhere around $17,000 a semester, plus incidental costs (books, etc). If he needed to do well in his finals to pass his courses, it would be more economical to pay off the RIAA than have a shitty semester.
--
Phil
No matter how good it is, it won't be able to compare to ProTools. A good (i.e., not Free or Light editions) rig includes external DSP hardware, which adds to the cost immensely. Beyond that, there is a huge variety of extremely high quality plugins available for ProTools, most of which require the afore-mentioned external DSP to run.
:).
On that note, I'm going to run off and check the application you mentioned out
--
lds
What about editing? I design sound for theatre, and I can't keep any of my source material or product in MP3 because I don't know where its going to end up. If I keep everything in MP3, then any source material in a given effect might get compressed four or five times before the show opens. The artifacts inherent in MP3 (and most other lossy compressions) make it useless for a lot of things. It may sound good once, but after the third time, christ.
--
Phil
I mean no offense, but since when does KDS have a "good name"? Maybe its just me, but all of the monitors I've ever seen catch on fire (2) were KDS, and I've never heard someone (okay, there was one person) who thought KDS made a quality product.
My opinion.
--
Phil
vpopmail is a MDA (delivery agent). qmail hands off deliveries for virtual domains to vpopmail, which then actually handles the delivery stage.
And yes, you can still access things via Pine, or Mutt, or IMAP, or POP3, or what have you. The mail is stored in the Maildir format, which is tremendously superior to mbox.
And yes, you can set the 'default' rule for a domain; be it to bounce, or deliver to a user.
Although I am not a qmail expert by any stretch of the imagination, I'm pretty damn sure you can do all of that with qmail combined with vpopmail, a reasonably popular virtual-user package (GPL, of course).
.qmail file for that address.
.qmail file.
/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts, make sure it doesn't appear in locals.
.qmail file, on seperate lines.
Fall-through addresses: Done easily in vpopmail.
Configurable bounce errors: bounce-saying in the
Delivery to a process: put "|/bin/appname" in your
Backup mail spooling: Put the domain you want to be a secondary for in
"list" forwards: Put multiple addresses in your
Access controls for relaying: Done with ucspi-tcp by setting environment variables based on IP of clients.
Domain mirroring: one command with vpopmail; 'valias'.
All of this is well documented in "Life with Qmail," a great reference.
--
Phil
More accurately:
Before MDLP, minidiscs just used ATRAC, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is a psychoacoustic encoding with a compression ratio of around 7:1. At this point an Minidisc, with a capacity of around 120MB, can store as much audio as a CD.
With the advent of portable MP3 players, Sony realized that minidisc would be drastically outmoded if MD could not store more. They came out with a considerably more lossy codec which extended ATRAC and called it MDLP. This codec was a lot more like MP3, as Sony presumed (correctly) that people would be willing to deal with the quality loss, since MP3 is not a hugely high quality codec. At the lowest quality setting its passable only for Audio Books, but it sounds pretty good (in my personal experience) at higher settings.
This MDLP technology is what Sony is using to make up the statistics on this machine. I also bet they're quoting stats at the lowest, hugely crappy setting.
--
Phil
That interview contains more whining than anything I've read recently. Its truly collosal.
and by "article" I mean "advertisement"...
way to go, brain.
I find it entertaining that when I went to read the comments, I got to see an article for Visual Studio .NET :).
--
lds
I hope so. MS has (iirc) >$56 billion in cash. (For the purposes of this comment, "cash" mean investments that can be converted to cash within 6 months. This is the standard financial definition.) There's a reason they have that kind of cash, its because they are terribly shrewd investors. MS isn't going anywhere, unless the US government suddenly decides to break them up, and even then I doubt they'd suddenly dissapear. The baby Bells are still around, after all.
So yeah, MS will be around in 10 years to help you (just as much as they do today, which is another argument entirely) because they're smart enough to manage their money and their resources. You don't get to the top by being stupid.
--
Phil