This is just stupid. You're telling me that AOL would first pay for Red Hat and then release Linux as closed source? Why would they want to do the first part, when they can just take the source code now, and re-release it as closed (and hope their lawyers can defend their practice)? If these were their plans, there would be no need for them to buy up an OSS company.
I bet you that competitive darts players get the same rush of testosterone, as well as billiards, foozball, hearts, scrabble, etc.
The article tries to make us think there is something special about chess, but they give absolutely no evidence at all. It would be a much less interesting story if it were found that games in general, when played competitively and at the highest levels, cause similar reactions. But I'm pretty sure that this less interesting conclusion is the correct one, that there is nothing hormonally different about a victory in chess and, say, in bowling.
OK, I've read all of the comments over +1, and despite a few clumsy efforts, no one has come up with good reasons to think this buyout could hurt Linux.
Remember that
1. Linux is fundamentally incorruptible, because it's open source.
2. The rest of the Linux community would not have to ape AOL's decisions about what to put in their distributions. However, all Linux users could presumably benefit from the software that AOL wrote for Linux.
3. Linux needs a big brother with iron fists and media clout. People have mentioned that Winmodems would suddenly get Linux drivers if AOL bought Red Hat. But also consider that graphics cards would suddenly get proper Linux drivers too, that many people would seriously consider writing games that run on Linux (game makers can't afford to ignore the rich and dumb, and those are exactly the people on AOL's crack!).
4. Userspace projects that need a kick in the butt before the average AOL user can feel comfortable with Linux would get a Mozilla-like infrastructure + paid programmers. I'm thinking specifically of WINE, which would have to work reasonably well if AOL has any hopes of transitioning its flock to Linux. I estimate that with a lot of work, it could be "good enough" in two years.
5. Nobody could come up with a plausible scenario in which Linux loses market share through this deal. If RedHat 9.0 sucks ass and is full of DRM, I'll use Mandrake or SuSE. If enough others do too, maybe one of these firms can be the next to play the Red Hat role. They can even hire staff away from AOL, or just train new people. Basically, Linux can't be embraced-and-smothered.
In summary, OSS was designed for exactly this moment. No form of attention can hurt it; only obscurity can. Every corporate takeover will have good and bad effects on the thing that's taken over. But if it's OSS, then we are free to keep the good while ditching the bad. This is true even if AOL's extensions to Linux are closed-source. Those closed-source additions will represent more options for every Linux user. I'm sure AOL will make bad things too, but by the nature of Linux, they will be optional. Linux really has nothing to lose, and so much to win... the more I think about it, the more I want this merger to happen.
What's more, if AOL thought, say, the performance of GCC were falling too far behind the commercial compilers, it would have the muscle to aquire whatever was needed to improve it (specs from chipmakers, routines from Borland, etc.).
Sorry, but this is just dumb. If their plan was to take Red Hat's source code and make it "closed source" they wouldn't have to buy the damn company, since they can download the code now.
Seriously, this is not a terrible idea. Except I suspect Lindows isn't much more than farts and vapor. The good idea here is that AOL could afford to be much more brave with forcing people to their user-friendly linux-based OS if WINE were working correctly (and seamlessly).
In my best-case scenario, AOL hires a few active members of the WINE team and assigns a bunch of their own to the job, along with a huge bugzilla-type database running on AOL servers. Then they distribute the code under the MPL, or better, keep it BSD. With a massive, Mozilla-like effort to improve WINE, I estimate that in two years they really could release a Linux distro where "everything works" (TM), even according to AOL sensibilities.
The alternative is to migrate AOL users from Windows apps to Linux-native apps. The latter are improving quickly, but even if they were better than the former, AOLers would still complain--a lot-- about being forced to learn new apps. WINE would be the obvious solution.
Red Hat stock would be traded for AOL-TW stock at some approved exchange rate. Even if Red Hat as we know it is completely gutted after the takeover, the board should approve it if the resulting AOL-TW stock their shareholders end up with will be worth more than what Red Hat stock would have been had the merger not happened.
... helping the US be more of an automated imperialist. This may be clever, but even if it is, it makes me sad that in a country with so many problems, some of our greatest minds are used to create smarter tools to kill and opress.
I don't think that's necessarily so. The early universe is obviously not a stable structure. If this theory is true, it doesn't render a point mass impossible--it only says that such systems are never stable, and tend to inflate into hollow spheres propped up by quantum foam or something (that part I don't get too well).
This might actually be one interesting way to test the theory: It would seem that if there were this phase transition in black-hole-like conditions, these conditions would certainly have existed in the early universe. This means there would have been some sort of an inflation caused by the same forces that keep these gravstars hollow. This should leave traces that are observable to this day. If we don't find those traces, the theory is false.
Re:Big Bang, Black Holes, Quantum Computing, etc..
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Sounds like someone flunked their intro Physics class and refuses to believe it's because they're stupid.
Re:You can still get sucked in
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No. Black holes are singlarities. They are not solid, they are point-masses. It's less like a marble and more like a geometric point.
Yo misunderstand. Marx says "from each according to ability, to each according to need." The idea is that everybody contibutes whatever they can, and receives whatever they need. A Communist kernel hacker can have a much nicer computer than a Communist carpenter, who in turn has other tools. As for the Chinese president--if a shower in his plane helps him do his very important job, I don't see anything about Communism that should prevent him from having it.
If AOL bought Correl [sic], she would be very happy indeed
You know, now that you mention it, I bet you they will. They appear to be building a stable of runner-ups. Maybe once they have the second-best product in every area where MS leads the market, they will release them all in one big lump (and we'll probably have AOL DVDs as coasters).
But seriously, if AOL can credibly threaten MS that it might defect form Windows, there has to be an office program that AOL would feel comfortable transitioning its customers to. Buying Corel is one option, another would be to contribute to OpenOffice to get it ready for AOLers. The latter would be pretty good news...
Sure, people can post what they want, but a part of the fun of Slashdot is making fun of people who just talk out of their ass, hoping others (who know even less about the topic at hand) will stroke their ego and moderate them as "insightful."
Of course, to observe that this accounts for much of the traffic on Slashdot is itself not terribly insightful.
Re:Need to shine a little experimental light.
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 2
Umm, I see you didn't read the article. For something this wacky and new, they already have a good idea of how to look for these things.
Um... let me get this straight: an American spy plane fucked up a Chinese plane over their territory, killing the pilot, and you think that WE are the ones who should retaliate? I might be missing something, but I suspect it's not me.
Finally, a post with a little thought behind it. I also think we should consider the possibility that the USA was deliberately looking for an incident, and here's why: Everybody in the Bush administration whose voice matters (Bush is not one of these) is a fossil of the cold war. They can't understand foreign policy without a cold war structure.
There is plenty of evidence the US took active steps to reawaken a cold war, this time with China as the enemy. For a while we were doing absolutely everything we could to piss them off: We bombed their embassy "by mistake," we made it obvious that our spy planes are over their country (one of them crashed), Rumsfeld canceled the decades-long practice of mutual military inspections with China, we are building SDI again, and a bunch of other stuff. All of this shows a clear pattern: we were trying to provoke China to do something that we could point at and say: Hey, look at how evil China is! Then we'd have a "justification" to retaliate with something totally disproportionate, pissing them off even more, and that's all it takes to have a cold war! Fortunately, China appears to have a much more civilized foreign policy than the US and they didn't take the bait.
Remember that the microphones were planted before September 2001, and the order to plant them is older still. Fortunately for our warmongering administration, bin Laden handed them a kinder present than anything they could have imagined. Now they have a new enemy that they can indiscriminately call "evil" and the world makes sense to them again. This takes the heat off China, but we can't debug the plane by remote control.
Oh, come on. Do you know how many Americans live in gutters and under bridges, while our president has already taken two months of vacation in his first year in office? Jesus, where do you get off. You think the president of China shouldn't have a shower or a $5000 TV when he goes to conferences that might help decide the fate of the world? Fuck you.
I remember some ancient Greek philosophers thought that if you put a donkey exactly between a bucket of water and a bail of hay, it will be paralyzed there and die, because it wants both of those things but can't decide which one to go to.
I'm reminded of this because this will be the situation for many AOL asses if AOL decides to be a Linux-only ISP. The asses would have to make the heartbraking decision about whom they love more, AOL or MS. Some might choose AOL, if RedHat is reborn AOL'led down by a few notches.... maybe. You might think this is the only way to draw people from Microsoft, but I actually doubt it would work. M$ has enough $ to run a huge M$N advertizing blitz right about when AOL becomes Linux-mandatory (offer it free for 6 months to people switching from AOL, a "free" OS upgrade, etc.) I'm almost certain if AOL'lers are forced to choose, they will join MSN instead of ditching Windows.
Exactly, and as we have found out, the DMCA prevents you from exercising your 'fair use' rights. So basically, you have a right to record it as long as you don't break copy protection schemes. If everyone puts a token protection scheme into everything (and the DMCA stands), the betamax precedent has absolutely no legal bearing. At least that's how I understand it, thought IANAL and was never into studying law.
How much would it cost to remove snow from the dome itself? I can't imagine they'd want to leave it up there--it would get pretty dark below. Also, with all the cars in Manhattan, they would need to have a constant wind blowing in clean air from the outside. This would probably minimize any benefits, like protecting pedestrians from winter cold, etc. I guess no one would need umbrellas.... Still, it seems like a dome would work better in a place that has no snow.
I think the insides of this iMac must look really cool, so it makes me wonder why the shell is opaque and white. Maybe they could make future models candy-colored and translucent? You probably wouldn't see too deep into the thing because it's so cramped, but it would be cool anyway. Well, just an idea...
If you look more carefully, they meant April 1, 2001. Not that this makes the date selection any more shrewd, but it does help to show the irrelevance of this particular article.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just stupid. You're telling me that AOL would first pay for Red Hat and then release Linux as closed source? Why would they want to do the first part, when they can just take the source code now, and re-release it as closed (and hope their lawyers can defend their practice)? If these were their plans, there would be no need for them to buy up an OSS company.
The article tries to make us think there is something special about chess, but they give absolutely no evidence at all. It would be a much less interesting story if it were found that games in general, when played competitively and at the highest levels, cause similar reactions. But I'm pretty sure that this less interesting conclusion is the correct one, that there is nothing hormonally different about a victory in chess and, say, in bowling.
Remember that
1. Linux is fundamentally incorruptible, because it's open source.
2. The rest of the Linux community would not have to ape AOL's decisions about what to put in their distributions. However, all Linux users could presumably benefit from the software that AOL wrote for Linux.
3. Linux needs a big brother with iron fists and media clout. People have mentioned that Winmodems would suddenly get Linux drivers if AOL bought Red Hat. But also consider that graphics cards would suddenly get proper Linux drivers too, that many people would seriously consider writing games that run on Linux (game makers can't afford to ignore the rich and dumb, and those are exactly the people on AOL's crack!).
4. Userspace projects that need a kick in the butt before the average AOL user can feel comfortable with Linux would get a Mozilla-like infrastructure + paid programmers. I'm thinking specifically of WINE, which would have to work reasonably well if AOL has any hopes of transitioning its flock to Linux. I estimate that with a lot of work, it could be "good enough" in two years.
5. Nobody could come up with a plausible scenario in which Linux loses market share through this deal. If RedHat 9.0 sucks ass and is full of DRM, I'll use Mandrake or SuSE. If enough others do too, maybe one of these firms can be the next to play the Red Hat role. They can even hire staff away from AOL, or just train new people. Basically, Linux can't be embraced-and-smothered.
In summary, OSS was designed for exactly this moment. No form of attention can hurt it; only obscurity can. Every corporate takeover will have good and bad effects on the thing that's taken over. But if it's OSS, then we are free to keep the good while ditching the bad. This is true even if AOL's extensions to Linux are closed-source. Those closed-source additions will represent more options for every Linux user. I'm sure AOL will make bad things too, but by the nature of Linux, they will be optional. Linux really has nothing to lose, and so much to win... the more I think about it, the more I want this merger to happen.
What's more, if AOL thought, say, the performance of GCC were falling too far behind the commercial compilers, it would have the muscle to aquire whatever was needed to improve it (specs from chipmakers, routines from Borland, etc.).
Sorry, but this is just dumb. If their plan was to take Red Hat's source code and make it "closed source" they wouldn't have to buy the damn company, since they can download the code now.
In my best-case scenario, AOL hires a few active members of the WINE team and assigns a bunch of their own to the job, along with a huge bugzilla-type database running on AOL servers. Then they distribute the code under the MPL, or better, keep it BSD. With a massive, Mozilla-like effort to improve WINE, I estimate that in two years they really could release a Linux distro where "everything works" (TM), even according to AOL sensibilities.
The alternative is to migrate AOL users from Windows apps to Linux-native apps. The latter are improving quickly, but even if they were better than the former, AOLers would still complain--a lot-- about being forced to learn new apps. WINE would be the obvious solution.
Red Hat stock would be traded for AOL-TW stock at some approved exchange rate. Even if Red Hat as we know it is completely gutted after the takeover, the board should approve it if the resulting AOL-TW stock their shareholders end up with will be worth more than what Red Hat stock would have been had the merger not happened.
AOL-TW and MS both already support the SSSCA. The former's becoming an OS vendor will not influence a single vote in Congress.
... helping the US be more of an automated imperialist. This may be clever, but even if it is, it makes me sad that in a country with so many problems, some of our greatest minds are used to create smarter tools to kill and opress.
This might actually be one interesting way to test the theory: It would seem that if there were this phase transition in black-hole-like conditions, these conditions would certainly have existed in the early universe. This means there would have been some sort of an inflation caused by the same forces that keep these gravstars hollow. This should leave traces that are observable to this day. If we don't find those traces, the theory is false.
Sounds like someone flunked their intro Physics class and refuses to believe it's because they're stupid.
No. Black holes are singlarities. They are not solid, they are point-masses. It's less like a marble and more like a geometric point.
Yo misunderstand. Marx says "from each according to ability, to each according to need." The idea is that everybody contibutes whatever they can, and receives whatever they need. A Communist kernel hacker can have a much nicer computer than a Communist carpenter, who in turn has other tools. As for the Chinese president--if a shower in his plane helps him do his very important job, I don't see anything about Communism that should prevent him from having it.
You know, now that you mention it, I bet you they will. They appear to be building a stable of runner-ups. Maybe once they have the second-best product in every area where MS leads the market, they will release them all in one big lump (and we'll probably have AOL DVDs as coasters).
But seriously, if AOL can credibly threaten MS that it might defect form Windows, there has to be an office program that AOL would feel comfortable transitioning its customers to. Buying Corel is one option, another would be to contribute to OpenOffice to get it ready for AOLers. The latter would be pretty good news...
Mandrake is in France; RedHat is not very far from Virginia. Maybe that helps.
Of course, to observe that this accounts for much of the traffic on Slashdot is itself not terribly insightful.
Umm, I see you didn't read the article. For something this wacky and new, they already have a good idea of how to look for these things.
Um... let me get this straight: an American spy plane fucked up a Chinese plane over their territory, killing the pilot, and you think that WE are the ones who should retaliate? I might be missing something, but I suspect it's not me.
There is plenty of evidence the US took active steps to reawaken a cold war, this time with China as the enemy. For a while we were doing absolutely everything we could to piss them off: We bombed their embassy "by mistake," we made it obvious that our spy planes are over their country (one of them crashed), Rumsfeld canceled the decades-long practice of mutual military inspections with China, we are building SDI again, and a bunch of other stuff. All of this shows a clear pattern: we were trying to provoke China to do something that we could point at and say: Hey, look at how evil China is! Then we'd have a "justification" to retaliate with something totally disproportionate, pissing them off even more, and that's all it takes to have a cold war! Fortunately, China appears to have a much more civilized foreign policy than the US and they didn't take the bait.
Remember that the microphones were planted before September 2001, and the order to plant them is older still. Fortunately for our warmongering administration, bin Laden handed them a kinder present than anything they could have imagined. Now they have a new enemy that they can indiscriminately call "evil" and the world makes sense to them again. This takes the heat off China, but we can't debug the plane by remote control.
Oh, come on. Do you know how many Americans live in gutters and under bridges, while our president has already taken two months of vacation in his first year in office? Jesus, where do you get off. You think the president of China shouldn't have a shower or a $5000 TV when he goes to conferences that might help decide the fate of the world? Fuck you.
I'm reminded of this because this will be the situation for many AOL asses if AOL decides to be a Linux-only ISP. The asses would have to make the heartbraking decision about whom they love more, AOL or MS. Some might choose AOL, if RedHat is reborn AOL'led down by a few notches.... maybe. You might think this is the only way to draw people from Microsoft, but I actually doubt it would work. M$ has enough $ to run a huge M$N advertizing blitz right about when AOL becomes Linux-mandatory (offer it free for 6 months to people switching from AOL, a "free" OS upgrade, etc.) I'm almost certain if AOL'lers are forced to choose, they will join MSN instead of ditching Windows.
Exactly, and as we have found out, the DMCA prevents you from exercising your 'fair use' rights. So basically, you have a right to record it as long as you don't break copy protection schemes. If everyone puts a token protection scheme into everything (and the DMCA stands), the betamax precedent has absolutely no legal bearing. At least that's how I understand it, thought IANAL and was never into studying law.
How much would it cost to remove snow from the dome itself? I can't imagine they'd want to leave it up there--it would get pretty dark below. Also, with all the cars in Manhattan, they would need to have a constant wind blowing in clean air from the outside. This would probably minimize any benefits, like protecting pedestrians from winter cold, etc. I guess no one would need umbrellas.... Still, it seems like a dome would work better in a place that has no snow.
I think the insides of this iMac must look really cool, so it makes me wonder why the shell is opaque and white. Maybe they could make future models candy-colored and translucent? You probably wouldn't see too deep into the thing because it's so cramped, but it would be cool anyway. Well, just an idea...
If you look more carefully, they meant April 1, 2001. Not that this makes the date selection any more shrewd, but it does help to show the irrelevance of this particular article.