When I pay a buck for a 24 oz. Coke in a cup at the local convenience store I know their cost was about three cents, and two of those were for the cup.
I also know it's still a good enough deal for me, because a 16 oz. Coke in a bottle is going to cost me more.I'll pay the buck.
It's good business all around, even though I'm paying more than I theoretically need to for the Coke.
If, however, I own and operate a convenience store, drink Cokes at three cents a pop out of the business profits, but charge my financial partner a buck a Coke when he comes into the store and stick 97 cents of it in my own pocket, that isn't "good business." That's being a scum sucking bastard.
The American Dream(tm) has been a bit perverted of late. It has come to mean getting a Good Job and acquiring lots on money and stuff so that you may hire people to wipe your ass for you.
This isn't The American Dream. The American Dream was becoming independant, unbeholden to anybody, on one's own property no matter how poor one was, because land and independence is the greatest wealth. The mortgage burning party used to be a big deal. It meant you had bought your freedom. Now everyone will take you for a financial idiot if you aren't indebted to the maximum your creditors will allow, simply because you can't acquire the most money and stuff otherwise.
Free software is The American Dream applied to "intellectual property." Its dream is to insure that the code remains independent, no matter how poor.
But you may be right in that the dream of Open Source(tm) is more akin to The American Dream(tm) and that this is the primary division between rms and esr.
The GPL is still squarely aimed at independence, however.
SCO will not have the resources to adequately defend itself. IBM will be able to pound away and, at the very least, force SCO to a settlement on IBM's terms, the very opposite of what SCO had intended by this whole legal schmegegy; and at most leave a smoking crater whose bones it can pick at its leisure.
SCO goes bankrupt, IBM won't be able to collect anything. Unless that's a false assumption. . .
Assets man, assets! They claim one rather valuable one in particular.
. ..why continue spending money on attornies when it's coming out of your own budget?
The simplest reason is that they are the defendant. The plaintif is in the driver's seat. IBMs only choices are to see out the case or settle. Countersuits are offense as defense; and if someone's been pounding you in the courts you might feel inclined to pound back a little longer and harder than is strictly necessary when you get the upper hand. Especially if you know the suit was only filed in the first place out of some scum sucking corporate business tactic that has no real merit on its own.
But I believe the more pressing issue is what I wrote in my very first post on the whole SCO "thing."
Millions for defense. Not one damned cent for tribute.
IBM does not seem inclined to settle. Go figure. It is simply in IBMs, indeed the entire industry's, best interests to leave a smoking crater where SCO used to stand to serve as a practical example of what happens to people who file a lawsuit in an attempt to force a buyout.
No matter what it costs. Otherwise you might just as well paint a huge target around your asshole, put sand in the Vaseline, and bend over....assuming that SCO loses, and goes bankrupt, don't they get to rise back from the ashes?
No. There are two kinds of bankruptcy. The first kind is for those businesses that if it weren't for the debt load would still be viable businesses. Somehow, somewhere along the line, they acquired debt that is crushing the company, but business is good. So the courts absolve them of enough of their debt and/or restructure some of it to make them a going concern again. It's a cashflow issue and a win/win for everybody, because a going concern turning a profit is better able to pay debt monies. And taxes.
This is the sort of bankruptcy that saved Man(Gag!Choke!Vomit!)diva. In the Rolls-Royce case the court was perspicacious enough to realize that the debt of only one division was dragging the whole company down, which was otherwise profitable, and allowed the car division to live on as a seperate entity unencumbered by the debts of the aero engine division, which it liquidated.
There are also laws to protect viable companies from being bankrupted by court judgments, since a bankrupt company cannot pay the judgment. ..or taxes. A judgement must be within the means of the company to pay it or everyone loses. Thus all those godzillion dollar judgments that you read about juries handing down are always reduced at a later date, or, at the very least, structured in such a way that amounts to a reduction (you owe plaintif $1 a year for a legal eternity, not to exceed payments of a godzillion dollars)
Then there's the other kind of bankruptcy. Liquidation. The kind applied to the aero engine division of Rolls-Royce. If you're so far down the hole that you not only can't pay your debts, but have no means of producing income either, then you are not allowed to rise from the ashes. From ashes you came, to ashes you shall return.
In this case the courts absolve you of debts, but sieze the assets of the company to be used in defraying them. Assests may be distributed directly or, as is more often the case, auctioned off to raise money. There's nothing left of a company after this but a piece of paper. They have no debts, but no income, no assets, and very likely a bunch of pissed
When I was 10, growing uncomfortably close to 4 decades ago, we didn't have video games, so we actually set things on fire, used real explosives to blow up model airplanes and actually beat the crap out of each other as our form of entertainment.
I remember this well, so I have a hard time figuring out why I would object to my kid playing Mortal Kombat in lieu of such behavior.
Of course if I'd ever caught my daughter trying to watch one of the movies I might well have beat the crap out of her, but that would have been perfectly legitimate behavior for her own protection.
There are some things young minds simply aren't prepared to cope with.
As radio communications with Apollo seemed to work just fine at relative speeds of about 25,000 mph. As others have noted EMR is really, really fast and doppler shift is relative to that speed.
In any case they have invented these things called "variable resistors" that can be used to make a simple circuit popularly refered to as a "tuner." They gone even further and created circuits that automatically seek and lock onto a signal, popularly known as "scanners." The radio in your car can probably serve as an example of one of these (FM signals can drift far more than you're ever going to see from a doppler shift on your wireless equipment).
Note that the radio in your car works just fine no matter how fast you go, but please, don't tell the officer about this post, K?
Damn, there goes that "I'm sorry officer, but the kids in the back seat were driving me nuts with that video game thingy, so I just put it to the floor," excuse for that speeding ticket.
An artist will certainly create art out of whatever comes to hand. If all he has is a pile of dirt he will create an artful pile of dirt, but he won't create Keat's Grecian urn.
If, however, all he has is dirt, and he creates art out of it, and is taken to task for not creating a ceramic urn out of it, well, the fault lies with the accuser.
If my writing sucked, so be it, it often does and I'll often be the first to piss and moan about it, but in this case the subject matter was supplied to me by someone else. I did what I could with a car analogy given my paucity of talent and a pile of dirt.
I would have fared better had I been supplied with porcelain. I could at least have made an urn. Maybe a little out of round, and the glazing might have come out a bit crudely, but at least it would have held water.
For sufficiently small quantities of "hold."
Similarly an artist may do wonderful things with VB, and if that choice is made for him (or, for that matter, if chooses to use it for the sheer artistic challange of it), for one reason or another, I'll certainly not take him to task for using it, nor gainsay the quality of his own work over my issues with VB.
I understand what you're saying, but your analogy is flawed, nonetheless.
The difference is like purchasing a Fiat as opposed to being given a Ferrari.
Now, I've never owned a Ferrari, but I have owned an equivelent Maserati as well as several Fiats, so I can appreciate the difference that cost of operation alone can entail.
But here's the thing, if you can already do your own Fiat repair and maintenance in house you already have most of the skills and physical plant needed to maintain a Ferrari in house. Yes, you'll need a bit of training, but can acquire that bit by bit as you need it, while you keep your Fiat fleet running alongside until you're up to speed on Ferraris.
But here's the other thing, your Ferrari parts and much tecnical information is going to be available just as freely as your Ferrari was . ..
But the Fiat stuff is going to continue to cost you. ..through the nose.
Yes, as well as a being a Maserati owner I have also converted a business from a Windows only shop to a Linux only shop.
We handled everything in house because the very first time we called MS for support they told us, "Ummmmm, have you tried reinstalling?"
So what the fuck good is their "support" anyway? We learned to do things ourselves, and when we started to wonder what the fuck good MS was in general we learned to do things with Linux ourselves as well.
You can too. For God's sake man, go read a book or something. (Unless, for some reason, you really want to give me $500/hr to read the book for you, I've got my eye on a bench built violin. I'll take your money, but, believe it or not, I'd really rather spend my time learning a Bach violin partita on my cheap Chinese fiddle)
When you do you'll find you've plugged into a source of free Ferraris for everybody, forever.
RyanFenton, posting in the computerized cars for traffic control thread:
I'd MUCH rather trust a reasonably engineered computerized system than the thousands of other drivers around me on my way about town.
I didn't post there, but my very first reaction on reading was:
"And just where the hell do propose to find one of those?"
This story illustrates my reaction. Imagine thousands of cars around you on your way about town that have suddenly lost all control.
Without the introduction of computers cars are actually not that complicated. They consist of a relatively few number of parts mechanically linked in such a way that any child can intuitively grasp their operation. You can teach yourself a fair amount of auto mechanics through entirely empirical methods, just sitting down with the device, taking it apart, putting it back togehter, and grasping how the whole thing works by such observation.
Nobody's going to write a virus checker that way, or a car control system. The computer is too complicated, consisting of billions of invisible "parts" whose operation is entirely abstracted from their function.
To the extent that cars are complicated these days, to the further extent that even formally trained mechanics cannot figure out what's wrong with them without plugging them into a computer, it is because they now contain. ..computers.
So refering to cars as an example of something that's complicated but reliable is not factual ( and I myself have found myself sitting by the side of the road with a mechanically sound car that refused to run because a control chip died), but also begs the question.
I guess the race is on to see who can write the biggest "hello" program.
Dude, please, don't say shit like that. It might be taken as a challange. Next thing you know we'll be having people bragging about their "Hello" programs including Feel-O-Round support.
Actually, this is a quantum leap in computing. The leaps have gone in the sequence 4,8,16,32,64. I leave it as an exercise for the student to determine what the next quantum leap in the sequence might be.
Now, let's not always see the same hands.
MS simply made the jump a bit later than some.
AMD supplied the needed energy to jump to the next, ummmm, shell, by applying a cattle prod to their collective posteriors.
. . . voila they've discovered something that the Math majors have taken for granted since 1600.
Except for the fact that they get it wrong. There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years.
. ..the others are making a ton of money in the real world.
And they're welcome to it, but they should still learn their math. It is the basis of engineering and compute-ers.
No, I'm not ensconced in the ivory tower. I've been out in the real world for decades, banging my head against the wall dealing with all the problems that "engineers" create with their "practical solutions," that ignore even the most basic of mathematical "theory."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'd like to go back and rewrite that one, because it didn't come out quite right, because it was a hastily done rewrite.
The original was longer, better, more accurate and a bit less "snippy," but got eaten by the computer Gods before posting.
KFG
When I pay a buck for a 24 oz. Coke in a cup at the local convenience store I know their cost was about three cents, and two of those were for the cup.
I also know it's still a good enough deal for me, because a 16 oz. Coke in a bottle is going to cost me more.I'll pay the buck.
It's good business all around, even though I'm paying more than I theoretically need to for the Coke.
If, however, I own and operate a convenience store, drink Cokes at three cents a pop out of the business profits, but charge my financial partner a buck a Coke when he comes into the store and stick 97 cents of it in my own pocket, that isn't "good business." That's being a scum sucking bastard.
KFG
That's part of the Open Source dream, IMHO.
The American Dream(tm) has been a bit perverted of late. It has come to mean getting a Good Job and acquiring lots on money and stuff so that you may hire people to wipe your ass for you.
This isn't The American Dream. The American Dream was becoming independant, unbeholden to anybody, on one's own property no matter how poor one was, because land and independence is the greatest wealth. The mortgage burning party used to be a big deal. It meant you had bought your freedom. Now everyone will take you for a financial idiot if you aren't indebted to the maximum your creditors will allow, simply because you can't acquire the most money and stuff otherwise.
Free software is The American Dream applied to "intellectual property." Its dream is to insure that the code remains independent, no matter how poor.
But you may be right in that the dream of Open Source(tm) is more akin to The American Dream(tm) and that this is the primary division between rms and esr.
The GPL is still squarely aimed at independence, however.
KFG
What purpose would it serve to wait?
.why continue spending money on attornies when it's coming out of your own budget?
...assuming that SCO loses, and goes bankrupt, don't they get to rise back from the ashes?
.or taxes. A judgement must be within the means of the company to pay it or everyone loses. Thus all those godzillion dollar judgments that you read about juries handing down are always reduced at a later date, or, at the very least, structured in such a way that amounts to a reduction (you owe plaintif $1 a year for a legal eternity, not to exceed payments of a godzillion dollars)
SCO will not have the resources to adequately defend itself. IBM will be able to pound away and, at the very least, force SCO to a settlement on IBM's terms, the very opposite of what SCO had intended by this whole legal schmegegy; and at most leave a smoking crater whose bones it can pick at its leisure.
SCO goes bankrupt, IBM won't be able to collect anything. Unless that's a false assumption. . .
Assets man, assets! They claim one rather valuable one in particular.
. .
The simplest reason is that they are the defendant. The plaintif is in the driver's seat. IBMs only choices are to see out the case or settle. Countersuits are offense as defense; and if someone's been pounding you in the courts you might feel inclined to pound back a little longer and harder than is strictly necessary when you get the upper hand. Especially if you know the suit was only filed in the first place out of some scum sucking corporate business tactic that has no real merit on its own.
But I believe the more pressing issue is what I wrote in my very first post on the whole SCO "thing."
Millions for defense. Not one damned cent for tribute.
IBM does not seem inclined to settle. Go figure. It is simply in IBMs, indeed the entire industry's, best interests to leave a smoking crater where SCO used to stand to serve as a practical example of what happens to people who file a lawsuit in an attempt to force a buyout.
No matter what it costs. Otherwise you might just as well paint a huge target around your asshole, put sand in the Vaseline, and bend over.
No. There are two kinds of bankruptcy. The first kind is for those businesses that if it weren't for the debt load would still be viable businesses. Somehow, somewhere along the line, they acquired debt that is crushing the company, but business is good. So the courts absolve them of enough of their debt and/or restructure some of it to make them a going concern again. It's a cashflow issue and a win/win for everybody, because a going concern turning a profit is better able to pay debt monies. And taxes.
This is the sort of bankruptcy that saved Man(Gag!Choke!Vomit!)diva. In the Rolls-Royce case the court was perspicacious enough to realize that the debt of only one division was dragging the whole company down, which was otherwise profitable, and allowed the car division to live on as a seperate entity unencumbered by the debts of the aero engine division, which it liquidated.
There are also laws to protect viable companies from being bankrupted by court judgments, since a bankrupt company cannot pay the judgment. .
Then there's the other kind of bankruptcy. Liquidation. The kind applied to the aero engine division of Rolls-Royce. If you're so far down the hole that you not only can't pay your debts, but have no means of producing income either, then you are not allowed to rise from the ashes. From ashes you came, to ashes you shall return.
In this case the courts absolve you of debts, but sieze the assets of the company to be used in defraying them. Assests may be distributed directly or, as is more often the case, auctioned off to raise money. There's nothing left of a company after this but a piece of paper. They have no debts, but no income, no assets, and very likely a bunch of pissed
My hopes for the future of humanity are somewhat restored. Thank you.
KFG
When I was 10, growing uncomfortably close to 4 decades ago, we didn't have video games, so we actually set things on fire, used real explosives to blow up model airplanes and actually beat the crap out of each other as our form of entertainment.
I remember this well, so I have a hard time figuring out why I would object to my kid playing Mortal Kombat in lieu of such behavior.
Of course if I'd ever caught my daughter trying to watch one of the movies I might well have beat the crap out of her, but that would have been perfectly legitimate behavior for her own protection.
There are some things young minds simply aren't prepared to cope with.
KFG
Cell phones seem to work just fine at 100mph+
As radio communications with Apollo seemed to work just fine at relative speeds of about 25,000 mph. As others have noted EMR is really, really fast and doppler shift is relative to that speed.
In any case they have invented these things called "variable resistors" that can be used to make a simple circuit popularly refered to as a "tuner." They gone even further and created circuits that automatically seek and lock onto a signal, popularly known as "scanners." The radio in your car can probably serve as an example of one of these (FM signals can drift far more than you're ever going to see from a doppler shift on your wireless equipment).
Note that the radio in your car works just fine no matter how fast you go, but please, don't tell the officer about this post, K?
KFG
Damn, there goes that "I'm sorry officer, but the kids in the back seat were driving me nuts with that video game thingy, so I just put it to the floor," excuse for that speeding ticket.
KFG
An artist will certainly create art out of whatever comes to hand. If all he has is a pile of dirt he will create an artful pile of dirt, but he won't create Keat's Grecian urn.
If, however, all he has is dirt, and he creates art out of it, and is taken to task for not creating a ceramic urn out of it, well, the fault lies with the accuser.
If my writing sucked, so be it, it often does and I'll often be the first to piss and moan about it, but in this case the subject matter was supplied to me by someone else. I did what I could with a car analogy given my paucity of talent and a pile of dirt.
I would have fared better had I been supplied with porcelain. I could at least have made an urn. Maybe a little out of round, and the glazing might have come out a bit crudely, but at least it would have held water.
For sufficiently small quantities of "hold."
Similarly an artist may do wonderful things with VB, and if that choice is made for him (or, for that matter, if chooses to use it for the sheer artistic challange of it), for one reason or another, I'll certainly not take him to task for using it, nor gainsay the quality of his own work over my issues with VB.
It's still a shitty VB program.
Good though.
KFG
Since before the time a shoal of fish became something to do with formal education.
KFG
Hey, so long as we get to spend lots and lots of weekly time with Gungans what could possibly go wrong. . .go wrong. . .go wrong. . .go. . .
KFG
"... what else would he use..."
vi obviously. He knows to much about emacs.
KFG
Sorry dude, but an artist is only as good as his materials, and I was supplied the materials, I didn't choose them.
KFG
I understand what you're saying, but your analogy is flawed, nonetheless.
.
.through the nose.
The difference is like purchasing a Fiat as opposed to being given a Ferrari.
Now, I've never owned a Ferrari, but I have owned an equivelent Maserati as well as several Fiats, so I can appreciate the difference that cost of operation alone can entail.
But here's the thing, if you can already do your own Fiat repair and maintenance in house you already have most of the skills and physical plant needed to maintain a Ferrari in house. Yes, you'll need a bit of training, but can acquire that bit by bit as you need it, while you keep your Fiat fleet running alongside until you're up to speed on Ferraris.
But here's the other thing, your Ferrari parts and much tecnical information is going to be available just as freely as your Ferrari was . .
But the Fiat stuff is going to continue to cost you. .
Yes, as well as a being a Maserati owner I have also converted a business from a Windows only shop to a Linux only shop.
We handled everything in house because the very first time we called MS for support they told us, "Ummmmm, have you tried reinstalling?"
So what the fuck good is their "support" anyway? We learned to do things ourselves, and when we started to wonder what the fuck good MS was in general we learned to do things with Linux ourselves as well.
You can too. For God's sake man, go read a book or something. (Unless, for some reason, you really want to give me $500/hr to read the book for you, I've got my eye on a bench built violin. I'll take your money, but, believe it or not, I'd really rather spend my time learning a Bach violin partita on my cheap Chinese fiddle)
When you do you'll find you've plugged into a source of free Ferraris for everybody, forever.
KFG
The enemy of my enemy is my friend - even if they're my enemy.
KFG
Begs what question?
The complication of cars compared to computers.
KFG
RyanFenton, posting in the computerized cars for traffic control thread:
.computers.
I'd MUCH rather trust a reasonably engineered computerized system than the thousands of other drivers around me on my way about town.
I didn't post there, but my very first reaction on reading was:
"And just where the hell do propose to find one of those?"
This story illustrates my reaction. Imagine thousands of cars around you on your way about town that have suddenly lost all control.
Without the introduction of computers cars are actually not that complicated. They consist of a relatively few number of parts mechanically linked in such a way that any child can intuitively grasp their operation. You can teach yourself a fair amount of auto mechanics through entirely empirical methods, just sitting down with the device, taking it apart, putting it back togehter, and grasping how the whole thing works by such observation.
Nobody's going to write a virus checker that way, or a car control system. The computer is too complicated, consisting of billions of invisible "parts" whose operation is entirely abstracted from their function.
To the extent that cars are complicated these days, to the further extent that even formally trained mechanics cannot figure out what's wrong with them without plugging them into a computer, it is because they now contain. .
So refering to cars as an example of something that's complicated but reliable is not factual ( and I myself have found myself sitting by the side of the road with a mechanically sound car that refused to run because a control chip died), but also begs the question.
KFG
It's just like base 10 really. . .if you're missing two fingers.
KFG
I guess the race is on to see who can write the biggest "hello" program.
Dude, please, don't say shit like that. It might be taken as a challange. Next thing you know we'll be having people bragging about their "Hello" programs including Feel-O-Round support.
KFG
We aren't talking quantum leaps in computing. . .
Actually, this is a quantum leap in computing. The leaps have gone in the sequence 4,8,16,32,64. I leave it as an exercise for the student to determine what the next quantum leap in the sequence might be.
Now, let's not always see the same hands.
MS simply made the jump a bit later than some.
AMD supplied the needed energy to jump to the next, ummmm, shell, by applying a cattle prod to their collective posteriors.
KFG
I don't even know what it is!
That's ok, neither does its "inventor." That's part of the problem with it.
KFG
Dude, I'm an physicist who works as an engineer. I have nothing to do with any comp program and thus no deparmental bias to defend in that regard.
I'm also wondering if you got your links and conclusion inversed as a joke, or if that's what you really meant.
KFG
So dude, do you mean like, real valve stems, or like, metaphysical ones, dude?
Yes. That's the point.
KFG
Yes, it just might.
KFG
. . . voila they've discovered something that the Math majors have taken for granted since 1600.
.the others are making a ton of money in the real world.
Except for the fact that they get it wrong. There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years.
. .
And they're welcome to it, but they should still learn their math. It is the basis of engineering and compute-ers.
No, I'm not ensconced in the ivory tower. I've been out in the real world for decades, banging my head against the wall dealing with all the problems that "engineers" create with their "practical solutions," that ignore even the most basic of mathematical "theory."
KFG