All said, I hate Quicktime worse than Real - at least it's easier to reclaim stolen media formats from Real. Installing Quicktime pretty much hoses the machine until the next OS reinstall...
Maybe I should clarify-- I use OS X, where the file permission rules are flexible and easy to fix in case of screwups. And where quicktime is far more well-behaved:)
I don't think this is a good idea. Look at what happened with the ISS, the last time we tried something like that. A big chunk of the countries dropped out, the U.S. wound up picking up the tab for a bunch of them, Russia committed to pay for a huge portion of it and then actually paid for very little forcing the U.S. to cover the gap. The entire thing wound up being far less ambitious and far more expensive than planned and at least part of why seemed to be that large portions of the project wound up being replaced with minimal stopgap measures NASA found themselves having to unexpectedly come up with themselves at the last minute.
Multilateralism's a good thing in foreign policy, and an international space exploration effort is a beautiful idea. But at the moment, I'm not sure it's feasible. After seeing what happened with ISS, I'd say that at the stage technology's at right now, it's hard enough for *one* state beauracracy to stay focused all the way through a project that it doesn't seem like a good idea to bring others in. (The people in power may want it now, but different people may be in power in four years!) If you're going to work on something like this I think you want to make sure that all the pieces are being done where you can keep an eye on them, and not wind up in a situation where vital pieces of the project are subject to the whims of the politics of a country you have no control over...
Seriously. The proofs are there. The proofs are messy, and require actually learning things to understand, and aren't anything that can fit neatly and succinctly into a newsweek article or a slashdot comment. But the fact that you aren't willing to go out and *read* something so you know what the proof is doesn't mean you automatially the right to say that none exists.
There isn't some big smoking gun they found in the FBI basement or something. The "proof" is that information from a number of different disciplines of science, but mostly from atmospheric science, points in a consistent manner toward a certain conclusion. You want me to tell you what the specific evidence is? No. Either pay for your education like everyone else or go to a library. In the meanwhile I would like to respond to some specific misconceptions in what you have said.
First off, the issue isn't "it's raised 0.8 in the last 100 years". The issue is the *rate* of change. The issue is that if you look at a long-term graph, you find a lot of tiny, slow wobbles followed by a very sudden and sharp increase that begins at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues steadily until now. We see the temperature fluctuating a LOT, and it's wobbled back and forth this point of warmth before. But it doesn't *seem* to have changed this quickly. This doesn't prove anything, but it should be the first indication something might be going on.
Second off, it doesn't have to be a large change to have radical and very unpleasant effects. Ever heard of El Nino? El Nino is a very, very, very small change in the temperature of the ocean out by California. Despite how small this is, though, it has incredibly dramatic effects on a huge variety of things, including the entire way in which rain systems move across North America. This is because the weather over North America is a very complex, touchy system where if you change one cause-- like the temperature of the pacific ocean-- just a little, you get drastically different behavior. The world is full of complex systems like this, and this is why global warming is worrying. It isn't like we're going to get suddenly up to 300 degrees and bake to death. But what we might get is something like the drought and fertile areas of the world rearranging themselves. Or, far more likely, a very small increase in world overall temperature would move the freezeline further north, allowing, say, malaria mosquitos to live in areas they never could before.
Third off, we do not *need* recorded records. We have recorded records going back 100 years, yeah. However, we have acceptably accurate proxy records from all over the world going WAY back from a variety of sources, and we have well enough to establish a solid baseline from. Now, given, the further back in this record you go the bigger the possible error gets, but it's still good enough for a number of things. This proxy data includes a wide variety of things from tree rings, to oxygen isotopes in fossils, to air trapped in glaciers. Each of these has a totally different and solid scientific reason why it can be trusted. And these different proxies are overwhelmingly in agreement about what the climate record looks like going back FAR, FAR further back than 100 years. You can say "oh, well how do we know the proxy data works". Well, we have different reasons to believe each proxy works, and if you want to say it doesn't you need to find some way to explain (1) why the scientific basis for that proxy is wrong and (2) if the proxies are wrong, for what reason do they agree?
Lastly, the ice age thing was based on an unreasonable methodology. It was basically certain people looking at a graph of the last really long block of time and seeing that the temperature of the earth got into a cycle of slowly rising, then falling abruptly, then slowly rising, then falling abruptly. They then said, hey, if it did this in the past, it will probably do it in the future. They then rea
They'll just have a scene at the end in court where the post office walks in and dumps thousands of letters from little children on the table saying that they really do believe SCO's IP is real......what, you think a Disney movie about COPYRIGHTS would end with the good guys winning? This is DISNEY.
So, just out of interest...a free player, without spyware...how are they supposed to make money to pay their developers?
To be brutally honest, my answer is: That's not my problem.
The question here OUGHT to be, why on earth should I, the customer, be expected to go to the bother of downloading and installing their product (which, historically, has been an ordeal, and always ends with me worrying their installer covertly snuck in something nasty) when QuickTime is already on my computer and serves all of RealPlayers' functions in a far more pleasant and less obnoxious manner?
This goes double now that Microsoft's anticompetitive tactics have successfully wiped away the few people who were actually serving RealMedia files who hadn't already been driven off by Real itself.
Yes, bitching on slashdot about a commercial product is impotent and tends to be oblivious to the needs of the parent company. But at a certain point it also becomes simply a public way of setting the terms under which you will use their product. And at this point, it seems, Real badly needs customers. If they can't operate under the terms that potential customers demand, it won't matter WHAT their plan for making money is, in the long run they won't be making much of it. The scale of the complaints and the "I don't use Real anymore" comments in this slashdot thread seem to provide a really good indication that Real has not been and apparently still is not satisfying the terms that their potential customers are demanding, and their potential customers are to a large extent blowing them off. This is striking when you consider the goodwill and community standing that Real had at one time, before they started going out of their way to write software that can only be described as obnoxious.
How was actually locating the exe to install? In my past experience with installing RealPlayer, the install was the minor part, and 99% of the bother consisted of trying to navigate Real's labyrinth-like frequently-changing website to find the series of three tiny links in successive pages that would take you to the page where you select your platform and download an installer, while huge, deceptive buttons that make you think they lead to the free version try to lure you off path and into whereever it is that Real sells you their Super Premium Ultra products which requires a credit card number to continue.
Really, this is the part that made me get to the point that now, if someone gives me a media url, if it can't be played in Quicktime or VLC I just don't bother.
One of SCO's contentions is that the GPL is an invalid license. Thus, if (and it seems like a tremendously improbable if) the court upholds their contention, then they really don't have to worry about the limitations that the GPL places on licensing fees. That's certainly got to be one of the reasons that their lawyers are challenging the GPL. If they don't, then they win a Pyrrhic victory...assuming that they can win.
The point is, the GPL is the only thing which grants you the right to use Linux. If the GPL is invalid, you do not have the right to distribute Linux at all. If the licensing fees must be imposed to use linux, the conditions of the GPL cannot be met, and you do not have the right to distribute Linux at all. Like I said, their best case scenario is to force people to BSD, and that could only happen in a hypothetical future lawsuit which as of yet they have not filed.
As for simple damages, it is quite possible SCO's public actions have serverely limited the damages they can recieve, but that is probably beyond the scope of my legal knowledge to argue.
The key issue here is potential; *if* SCO wins, it'll win $3B plus leverage vs every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations, more for more processors; also $39(?) per embedded device). The payoff is huge and Wall Street functions on potential and leverage.
If SCO wins what?
If SCO wins their court case against IBM, which concerns a small contract dispute, they don't get that. They might get some money. That would be about it. They haven't filed any other case. Maybe you mean "IF SCO survives its counter court cases against IBM and Redhat, and IF SCO then produces some legal magic bullet which allows them to declare Linux infringing on something and IF Linux for some inconceivable reason can't simply remove the infringing code, they get liccensing fees.".
Yes, hypothetically SCO could somehow be legally awarded ownership of Linux for no reason whatsoever. But it is also just as likely that this could happen to the Disney Corporation, or the strip club downtown. Why don't you just dump all your money into campbells, becuase IF a giant meteor crashes into the earth and destroys most of the life their stockpiles of soup will be suddenly very valuable.
At any rate, this is a common misconception. SCO winning "every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations" is absolutely not a potential outcome of this or ANY other case. Under the terms of the GPL, you can't charge licensing fees for using linux. If in order to legally distribute linux because of SCO's submarined code you must pay a licence fee, legally, YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE LINUX AT ALL, because doing so would violate the copyrights of all contributors EXCEPT sco.
The best case scenario for sco is everyone is forced to move to BSD.
its agility-- on things like, say, -- drops to zero
I meant to put something there like "making a desktop linux distro where you can easily change the screen resolution from the GUI". I suck at the Preview button.
Even if SCO pulls out some dramatic legal problem with linux, it can be worked around.
The great thing about the open source movement is its agility under pressure. When there's nothing making it move, its agility-- on things like, say, -- drops to zero, but when things HAVE to happen, they can happen blindingly quick. If SCO does in fact have some real proof of some legal issue hidden somewhere-- unlikely, because if they had it they probably would have played it by now-- I'm convinced the Linux community will find some way to resolve the legal issue and keep going without so much as a hiccup.
If such a thing arises, then is the time to worry about it. Until indications such a thing exists, though, there is nothing that can be done to prepare, so I can't see paying much thought to it.
So all we're we're mostly forgetting here-- though I've heard it on slashdot a lot-- is that SCO doesn't have to win to win. All SCO has to do is drag things out. In the end, SCO will lose the case and fade into bankruptcy.
What we're forgetting is that having lost and faded, the SCO execs will walk away rich from stock sales and laughing. Meanwhile, the over a year of SCO propaganda will have sunk deep into the heads of execs everywhere and will not come out easily, since the kinds of publications executives read will have reprinted SCOs initial, easy-to-grasp-without-thinking allegations vertabrim, but then probably once the truth comes out won't cover it at all since it's much messier and harder to write into a quick dramatic story. This is all we have to be afraid of, I think.
This means that anyone who bought a UNIX license under the belief that doing so would give them the license to use SCO's "property" in linux is now being threatened if they do not stop using SCO's property in linux!
So they're being legally threatened for the exact thing they thought they were paying money to avoid being legally threatened for. Whereas the rest of us are still being ignored. If anyone actually fell for this the first time, I'll be they're feeling pretty ripped off.:D
When the "deal" was first announced on slashdot, I heard two comments a lot: "If you accept, you're probably just going to use it as a pretense to extort more money from you later, since by buying the license you're admitting they're right." and: "Only a fool would buy a license from SCO thinking it provides indemnification; SCO has already revoked "irrevokable" licenses multiple times during this lawsuit fiasco."
Now SCO is demanding the people who bought the license either (1) take drastic steps to stop using SCO's competitors or (2) legally implicate themselves further by making a silly "certification" that could be easily accidentally violated, thus offering up a means for SCO to sue them that they didn't have before (because now they can sue you for violating the certification). And if you don't comply with SCO's demands, they'll revoke your license that you thought was irrevokable.
(BTW, I don't at all *mind*, but I think that maybe, if you liked the grandparent comment, you might be like to know where they copied it from. It made a bit more sense in that story's context, though it of course applies here as well.)
How can you kill something that has already been so successful?
Be Microsoft.
For months and/or years, constantly emit a steady stream of announcements about your upcoming iPod competitor, and how many amazing features it will have, and how it will do absolutely everything concievable, and how it will be out Real Soon Now.
Put out a small media blitz about this on the day that Apple is widely rumored to release a new iPod.
Fewer people buy iPods, because they're holding back, waiting for the uber-product Microsoft is supposedly going to release in six months, cutting into Apple's profits.
(Optional) Release something vaguely iPod-like sometime in 2006 with a small subset of your originally slated features.
Profit! (Although only from your operating systems and office software divisions.)
The main power draw in electronic devices is still memory, mainly RAM and hard disk storage if it exists, no? To the point where the power requirements of the chips, short of using a P4 or something, are already dwarfed, right?
So what kinds of real-world applications would this be actively useful for?
And is the fabled "code morphing" ever going to offer the option of running any instruction set other than x86? Is it really worth the bother of tying yourself to the x86 instruction set if you're mainly doing embedded apps anyway, meaning machine code compatibility with desktop hardware is useless?
How can you proclaim as a "failure" a product that's only just barely launched, and for which the marketing effort has yet to so much as start*? You might as well point out that the PlayStation 3 hasn't sold a single unit yet and proclaim it a failure.
LaserDisc
That's going to depend on what you define as a "success". LaserDisc never got anywhere beyond its niche market, but while it lasted, it exploited the hell out of its niche in a way that Apple Computer itself would have been proud of. Among other things, you have to realize that it did much better outside of America. For examplef you spent any time on the relevant sections of USENET in the days before DVDs existed, you would know that before DVDs, for the very specific market of Anime, LaserDisc was an absolutely runaway smash success.
* Of course, this is assuming that Sun actually does market Sun Java Desktop. Which knowing sun, there is no guarantee that they will at all. And if Sun Java Desktop does flop-- which is, I will agree, a definite possibility-- that is the most likely reason why...
drivers for ports that no longer exist. Do you really need punchcard access?
Someday, concievably, historians might.
OK, so maybe having a bunch of "useless" or obsolete software dumped into the quasi-public-domain isn't of much public good. But I still would think it is better than having all of that software simply lost to time forever.
We are going to have a relatively massive memory hole in the future's conception of what programming at the professional level at this time was like caused by the fact that all of the source code of the software we use today is going to be simply lost, since no one has copies except for the companies that made them, and those companies more than likely are not going to bother maintaining or keeping track of that code. No one today cares what the source code for Clarisworks versions 1 through 3 for the Apple//gs looked like. But maybe someone will care in 200 years. Who knows?
And then there's all those little "what if"s. For example, what if there's some huge quantity of deteriorating tapes somewhere containing some information important to someone, and it is determined these things need to be moved off and onto less fragile media, but the tape drives that read them can only be used from old, scarce and broken PDP-11s because they are the only platform for which drivers exist? In that light, device drivers for a dead platform don't sound so useless after all.
Things of that nature. Really, who can say what code that someone someday cold consider "useful"? I say, the more code preserved by the GPL in our cultural memory, the better.
What a wonderful idea for a time capsule that would be. Create a time capsule to be opened in hundreds or thousands of years and place in it some of the diseases which may have died off by then and which the generations of the future will not have had the chance to enjoy.
Infectious disease: The gift that keeps on giving.
So now it's considered a defeat or a "retreat" to create a new and improved version of one of your products?
Hey, I heard that Microsoft just released a new version of their OS and called it "Longhorn". cn I say "Ok, so now that WinXP is on the retreat they try to enter a new area?"
Personally, I would consider "Hm, Microsoft seems to be catching up to us. Let's make something better than current Java OR.net." to be the most extreme sign of life possible. Honestly I wish they'd done it sooner.
Microsoft's plan to instate heavy licensing fees on the use of the steam-powered butter churn, the Phalanx military formation, and the Barnes method for increasing the efficiency of telegraph lines seem to have had little effect as well.
This is a really cool page, but I find it too bad that they left out the absolutely priceless mug shot of Bill Gates from when he was arrested in 1977 in New Mexico on a traffic offense.
Slashdot Mirror
If it has "foo" in the name, I already automatically hate it.
All said, I hate Quicktime worse than Real - at least it's easier to reclaim stolen media formats from Real. Installing Quicktime pretty much hoses the machine until the next OS reinstall...
:)
Maybe I should clarify-- I use OS X, where the file permission rules are flexible and easy to fix in case of screwups. And where quicktime is far more well-behaved
I don't think this is a good idea. Look at what happened with the ISS, the last time we tried something like that. A big chunk of the countries dropped out, the U.S. wound up picking up the tab for a bunch of them, Russia committed to pay for a huge portion of it and then actually paid for very little forcing the U.S. to cover the gap. The entire thing wound up being far less ambitious and far more expensive than planned and at least part of why seemed to be that large portions of the project wound up being replaced with minimal stopgap measures NASA found themselves having to unexpectedly come up with themselves at the last minute.
Multilateralism's a good thing in foreign policy, and an international space exploration effort is a beautiful idea. But at the moment, I'm not sure it's feasible. After seeing what happened with ISS, I'd say that at the stage technology's at right now, it's hard enough for *one* state beauracracy to stay focused all the way through a project that it doesn't seem like a good idea to bring others in. (The people in power may want it now, but different people may be in power in four years!) If you're going to work on something like this I think you want to make sure that all the pieces are being done where you can keep an eye on them, and not wind up in a situation where vital pieces of the project are subject to the whims of the politics of a country you have no control over...
Take a fucking science class.
Seriously. The proofs are there. The proofs are messy, and require actually learning things to understand, and aren't anything that can fit neatly and succinctly into a newsweek article or a slashdot comment. But the fact that you aren't willing to go out and *read* something so you know what the proof is doesn't mean you automatially the right to say that none exists.
There isn't some big smoking gun they found in the FBI basement or something. The "proof" is that information from a number of different disciplines of science, but mostly from atmospheric science, points in a consistent manner toward a certain conclusion. You want me to tell you what the specific evidence is? No. Either pay for your education like everyone else or go to a library. In the meanwhile I would like to respond to some specific misconceptions in what you have said.
First off, the issue isn't "it's raised 0.8 in the last 100 years". The issue is the *rate* of change. The issue is that if you look at a long-term graph, you find a lot of tiny, slow wobbles followed by a very sudden and sharp increase that begins at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues steadily until now. We see the temperature fluctuating a LOT, and it's wobbled back and forth this point of warmth before. But it doesn't *seem* to have changed this quickly. This doesn't prove anything, but it should be the first indication something might be going on.
Second off, it doesn't have to be a large change to have radical and very unpleasant effects. Ever heard of El Nino? El Nino is a very, very, very small change in the temperature of the ocean out by California. Despite how small this is, though, it has incredibly dramatic effects on a huge variety of things, including the entire way in which rain systems move across North America. This is because the weather over North America is a very complex, touchy system where if you change one cause-- like the temperature of the pacific ocean-- just a little, you get drastically different behavior. The world is full of complex systems like this, and this is why global warming is worrying. It isn't like we're going to get suddenly up to 300 degrees and bake to death. But what we might get is something like the drought and fertile areas of the world rearranging themselves. Or, far more likely, a very small increase in world overall temperature would move the freezeline further north, allowing, say, malaria mosquitos to live in areas they never could before.
Third off, we do not *need* recorded records. We have recorded records going back 100 years, yeah. However, we have acceptably accurate proxy records from all over the world going WAY back from a variety of sources, and we have well enough to establish a solid baseline from. Now, given, the further back in this record you go the bigger the possible error gets, but it's still good enough for a number of things. This proxy data includes a wide variety of things from tree rings, to oxygen isotopes in fossils, to air trapped in glaciers. Each of these has a totally different and solid scientific reason why it can be trusted. And these different proxies are overwhelmingly in agreement about what the climate record looks like going back FAR, FAR further back than 100 years. You can say "oh, well how do we know the proxy data works". Well, we have different reasons to believe each proxy works, and if you want to say it doesn't you need to find some way to explain (1) why the scientific basis for that proxy is wrong and (2) if the proxies are wrong, for what reason do they agree?
Lastly, the ice age thing was based on an unreasonable methodology. It was basically certain people looking at a graph of the last really long block of time and seeing that the temperature of the earth got into a cycle of slowly rising, then falling abruptly, then slowly rising, then falling abruptly. They then said, hey, if it did this in the past, it will probably do it in the future. They then rea
They'll just have a scene at the end in court where the post office walks in and dumps thousands of letters from little children on the table saying that they really do believe SCO's IP is real... ...what, you think a Disney movie about COPYRIGHTS would end with the good guys winning? This is DISNEY.
His sig isn't leetspeak, it's perl.
So, just out of interest...a free player, without spyware...how are they supposed to make money to pay their developers?
To be brutally honest, my answer is: That's not my problem.
The question here OUGHT to be, why on earth should I, the customer, be expected to go to the bother of downloading and installing their product (which, historically, has been an ordeal, and always ends with me worrying their installer covertly snuck in something nasty) when QuickTime is already on my computer and serves all of RealPlayers' functions in a far more pleasant and less obnoxious manner?
This goes double now that Microsoft's anticompetitive tactics have successfully wiped away the few people who were actually serving RealMedia files who hadn't already been driven off by Real itself.
Yes, bitching on slashdot about a commercial product is impotent and tends to be oblivious to the needs of the parent company. But at a certain point it also becomes simply a public way of setting the terms under which you will use their product. And at this point, it seems, Real badly needs customers. If they can't operate under the terms that potential customers demand, it won't matter WHAT their plan for making money is, in the long run they won't be making much of it. The scale of the complaints and the "I don't use Real anymore" comments in this slashdot thread seem to provide a really good indication that Real has not been and apparently still is not satisfying the terms that their potential customers are demanding, and their potential customers are to a large extent blowing them off. This is striking when you consider the goodwill and community standing that Real had at one time, before they started going out of their way to write software that can only be described as obnoxious.
How was actually locating the exe to install? In my past experience with installing RealPlayer, the install was the minor part, and 99% of the bother consisted of trying to navigate Real's labyrinth-like frequently-changing website to find the series of three tiny links in successive pages that would take you to the page where you select your platform and download an installer, while huge, deceptive buttons that make you think they lead to the free version try to lure you off path and into whereever it is that Real sells you their Super Premium Ultra products which requires a credit card number to continue.
Really, this is the part that made me get to the point that now, if someone gives me a media url, if it can't be played in Quicktime or VLC I just don't bother.
One of SCO's contentions is that the GPL is an invalid license. Thus, if (and it seems like a tremendously improbable if) the court upholds their contention, then they really don't have to worry about the limitations that the GPL places on licensing fees. That's certainly got to be one of the reasons that their lawyers are challenging the GPL. If they don't, then they win a Pyrrhic victory...assuming that they can win.
The point is, the GPL is the only thing which grants you the right to use Linux. If the GPL is invalid, you do not have the right to distribute Linux at all. If the licensing fees must be imposed to use linux, the conditions of the GPL cannot be met, and you do not have the right to distribute Linux at all. Like I said, their best case scenario is to force people to BSD, and that could only happen in a hypothetical future lawsuit which as of yet they have not filed.
As for simple damages, it is quite possible SCO's public actions have serverely limited the damages they can recieve, but that is probably beyond the scope of my legal knowledge to argue.
The key issue here is potential; *if* SCO wins, it'll win $3B plus leverage vs every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations, more for more processors; also $39(?) per embedded device). The payoff is huge and Wall Street functions on potential and leverage.
If SCO wins what?
If SCO wins their court case against IBM, which concerns a small contract dispute, they don't get that. They might get some money. That would be about it. They haven't filed any other case. Maybe you mean "IF SCO survives its counter court cases against IBM and Redhat, and IF SCO then produces some legal magic bullet which allows them to declare Linux infringing on something and IF Linux for some inconceivable reason can't simply remove the infringing code, they get liccensing fees.".
Yes, hypothetically SCO could somehow be legally awarded ownership of Linux for no reason whatsoever. But it is also just as likely that this could happen to the Disney Corporation, or the strip club downtown. Why don't you just dump all your money into campbells, becuase IF a giant meteor crashes into the earth and destroys most of the life their stockpiles of soup will be suddenly very valuable.
At any rate, this is a common misconception. SCO winning "every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations" is absolutely not a potential outcome of this or ANY other case. Under the terms of the GPL, you can't charge licensing fees for using linux. If in order to legally distribute linux because of SCO's submarined code you must pay a licence fee, legally, YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE LINUX AT ALL, because doing so would violate the copyrights of all contributors EXCEPT sco.
The best case scenario for sco is everyone is forced to move to BSD.
Hmm.
This doesn't really matter, but:
its agility-- on things like, say, -- drops to zero
I meant to put something there like "making a desktop linux distro where you can easily change the screen resolution from the GUI". I suck at the Preview button.
Even if SCO pulls out some dramatic legal problem with linux, it can be worked around.
The great thing about the open source movement is its agility under pressure. When there's nothing making it move, its agility-- on things like, say, -- drops to zero, but when things HAVE to happen, they can happen blindingly quick. If SCO does in fact have some real proof of some legal issue hidden somewhere-- unlikely, because if they had it they probably would have played it by now-- I'm convinced the Linux community will find some way to resolve the legal issue and keep going without so much as a hiccup.
If such a thing arises, then is the time to worry about it. Until indications such a thing exists, though, there is nothing that can be done to prepare, so I can't see paying much thought to it.
So all we're we're mostly forgetting here-- though I've heard it on slashdot a lot-- is that SCO doesn't have to win to win. All SCO has to do is drag things out. In the end, SCO will lose the case and fade into bankruptcy.
What we're forgetting is that having lost and faded, the SCO execs will walk away rich from stock sales and laughing. Meanwhile, the over a year of SCO propaganda will have sunk deep into the heads of execs everywhere and will not come out easily, since the kinds of publications executives read will have reprinted SCOs initial, easy-to-grasp-without-thinking allegations vertabrim, but then probably once the truth comes out won't cover it at all since it's much messier and harder to write into a quick dramatic story. This is all we have to be afraid of, I think.
This means that anyone who bought a UNIX license under the belief that doing so would give them the license to use SCO's "property" in linux is now being threatened if they do not stop using SCO's property in linux!
:D
So they're being legally threatened for the exact thing they thought they were paying money to avoid being legally threatened for. Whereas the rest of us are still being ignored. If anyone actually fell for this the first time, I'll be they're feeling pretty ripped off.
When the "deal" was first announced on slashdot, I heard two comments a lot: "If you accept, you're probably just going to use it as a pretense to extort more money from you later, since by buying the license you're admitting they're right." and: "Only a fool would buy a license from SCO thinking it provides indemnification; SCO has already revoked "irrevokable" licenses multiple times during this lawsuit fiasco."
Now SCO is demanding the people who bought the license either (1) take drastic steps to stop using SCO's competitors or (2) legally implicate themselves further by making a silly "certification" that could be easily accidentally violated, thus offering up a means for SCO to sue them that they didn't have before (because now they can sue you for violating the certification). And if you don't comply with SCO's demands, they'll revoke your license that you thought was irrevokable.
(BTW, I don't at all *mind*, but I think that maybe, if you liked the grandparent comment, you might be like to know where they copied it from. It made a bit more sense in that story's context, though it of course applies here as well.)
The main power draw in electronic devices is still memory, mainly RAM and hard disk storage if it exists, no? To the point where the power requirements of the chips, short of using a P4 or something, are already dwarfed, right?
So what kinds of real-world applications would this be actively useful for?
And is the fabled "code morphing" ever going to offer the option of running any instruction set other than x86? Is it really worth the bother of tying yourself to the x86 instruction set if you're mainly doing embedded apps anyway, meaning machine code compatibility with desktop hardware is useless?
The other 75% of the people are telnetting to port 80 and entering the GET and POST commands by hand.
;)
Well, maybe not ALL of those people are doing that, but the cool ones are
Sun JavaDesktop
How can you proclaim as a "failure" a product that's only just barely launched, and for which the marketing effort has yet to so much as start*? You might as well point out that the PlayStation 3 hasn't sold a single unit yet and proclaim it a failure.
LaserDisc
That's going to depend on what you define as a "success". LaserDisc never got anywhere beyond its niche market, but while it lasted, it exploited the hell out of its niche in a way that Apple Computer itself would have been proud of. Among other things, you have to realize that it did much better outside of America. For examplef you spent any time on the relevant sections of USENET in the days before DVDs existed, you would know that before DVDs, for the very specific market of Anime, LaserDisc was an absolutely runaway smash success.
* Of course, this is assuming that Sun actually does market Sun Java Desktop. Which knowing sun, there is no guarantee that they will at all. And if Sun Java Desktop does flop-- which is, I will agree, a definite possibility-- that is the most likely reason why...
drivers for ports that no longer exist. Do you really need punchcard access?
//gs looked like. But maybe someone will care in 200 years. Who knows?
Someday, concievably, historians might.
OK, so maybe having a bunch of "useless" or obsolete software dumped into the quasi-public-domain isn't of much public good. But I still would think it is better than having all of that software simply lost to time forever.
We are going to have a relatively massive memory hole in the future's conception of what programming at the professional level at this time was like caused by the fact that all of the source code of the software we use today is going to be simply lost, since no one has copies except for the companies that made them, and those companies more than likely are not going to bother maintaining or keeping track of that code. No one today cares what the source code for Clarisworks versions 1 through 3 for the Apple
And then there's all those little "what if"s. For example, what if there's some huge quantity of deteriorating tapes somewhere containing some information important to someone, and it is determined these things need to be moved off and onto less fragile media, but the tape drives that read them can only be used from old, scarce and broken PDP-11s because they are the only platform for which drivers exist? In that light, device drivers for a dead platform don't sound so useless after all.
Things of that nature. Really, who can say what code that someone someday cold consider "useful"? I say, the more code preserved by the GPL in our cultural memory, the better.
What a wonderful idea for a time capsule that would be. Create a time capsule to be opened in hundreds or thousands of years and place in it some of the diseases which may have died off by then and which the generations of the future will not have had the chance to enjoy.
Infectious disease: The gift that keeps on giving.
So now it's considered a defeat or a "retreat" to create a new and improved version of one of your products?
.net." to be the most extreme sign of life possible. Honestly I wish they'd done it sooner.
Hey, I heard that Microsoft just released a new version of their OS and called it "Longhorn". cn I say "Ok, so now that WinXP is on the retreat they try to enter a new area?"
Personally, I would consider "Hm, Microsoft seems to be catching up to us. Let's make something better than current Java OR
Microsoft's plan to instate heavy licensing fees on the use of the steam-powered butter churn, the Phalanx military formation, and the Barnes method for increasing the efficiency of telegraph lines seem to have had little effect as well.
And does anyone remember what crazy, non-magnetic-plate memory technologies that IBM was saying in 2001 would be ready by 2003?
Just checking.
Foiled again
but was just under the table already at that point...
*Looks at photo*
Hmmm.. and if you don't mind me asking, what exactly was he doing down there??
This is a really cool page, but I find it too bad that they left out the absolutely priceless mug shot of Bill Gates from when he was arrested in 1977 in New Mexico on a traffic offense.