Thanks for the reminder of why I stopped visiting SysCon. (Actually there was another reason. They did something truly flagrant...but I haven't bothered to remember what.)
Whatever, that ad is a sure guarantee that I won't be adding them back to my "occasionally visit this site" list. (I didn't bother to read the story, as I don't really care *why* someone prefers Ubuntu over MSWind. Any reason is good enough if I'm not going to be relying on his future judgement.)
It's moderately interesting that SysCon would publish something putatively favorable about Linux. (I didn't read the article, so forgive my doubts that it's actually favorable. I remember SysCon from before I dropped them.) It's not enough to cause me to start considering them to be as reliable vendor of news as is, say, Slashdot.
I think it's only fair to give warning to those contemplating a purchase from Dell what kind of an abusive relationship they may be entering. Some people won't see that they have any choice, and will go ahead, but at least they will have been warned.
Remember, Dell isn't the only party to the sale. The customer is involved too. This is at least warning him that Dell may be polite, but it isn't dependable. That deals are subject to being unilaterally renegotiated AFTER Dell has taken you money. That's an important warning. I don't think that Dell has any assets within the county, so I might not be able to seek redress via small claims court, but I CAN avoid them.
If you don't feel that unilaterally renegotiating the deal AFTER you've collected the money is grounds for a suit... then welcome to serfdom.
That was Eli Whitney's problem. He never did solve it. Lots of little manufacturers that he couldn't keep track of, and did work at the "village blacksmith" level, so it would have cost more to sue them than he could have gotten in return.
Russia MAY have been headed towards communism for a few years under Lenin. Never since then has it even tried to be communist. They used the rhetoric, but that's something different.
FWIW, this was probably wise of them. I may not like dictatorships, but at least they can be made to, sort of, work. I'm not convinced that communism could ever be made to work on larger than a village scale. Even then it's iffy. And I doubt that Marxism could ever work on ANY scale. Groups that I'm aware of that have seriously tried have come apart at the seams withing a year, and that's will all members at least claiming to be doctrinally committed. (Admittedly, I'm talking about a very small number when I say "that I'm aware of", and that, in and of itself, is an indication that it's rather unsuccessful.) Usually either the groups disintegrate, or they devolve into a dictatorship. I've knowledge of ONE that turned into a rather unsuccessful democracy. (I don't know whether or not they ever voted to adopt Robert's Rules of Order...but there were a fantastic number of "committee meetings".)
...The Russians make a mockery of the G-8 and its principles. This demand for licensing fees on supposed patents of a 60-year-old technology is the latest in a string of non-Western activities...
That doesn't sound non-Western to me. I wish it did, but wishes don't make truth.
Unfortunately, the RIAA wrote that law. It was only slightly amended...and not all of the amendments were improvements.
I have come around to the opinion that breaking the copyright laws is a good thing in and of itself. It's also a recklessly foolish thing to do. You'd be better off convicted of killing an RIAA director than to have the full weight of the copyright law come down on you. Sell paraquat to teenagers...the punishment is less. (Mind you, it's rare for the full penalties to be imposed for copyright violation, but if they are you can spend more time in jail than for murder.)
I may be misinformed. I hope so, but I don't believe it.
Tivio wasn't exactly the target. The fact that the term Tivioisation is used is purely coincidental. That's just how some people mispronounce MS-Novell.
My general feeling is: "Too bad. They can't continue to get rich by copying other people's work and not giving anything back." At first I wrote "stealing", but that's slightly stronger than I meant. It's like calling copyright violaters pirates...only not as flagrantly off-scale. Then I substituted taking, but copying is the exact term. It just doesn't include the feeling, which is due to their locking it into a black-box and refusing to let people see what's inside. My feeling is if they were capable of stealing it, they would, and without moral qualm. I would not mourn to see them die. If they all died today, humanity's ethical average would improve slightly. (Only slightly, and they are far from the worst around. This doesn't make them good, or even average.)
It's quite a difficult job, but MS has been quite successful at it. They've made PR statements even less trustworthy than they used to be. And, amazingly, they've been able to keep it up for several years running. I think that they hold the undisputed title for most years in the past decade. Many years they even debase political PR.
Now, of course, this is assuming that you tar all PR with the same brush. And there may well be honest PR people out there. Sorry, but if they are offended, then they should send their complaints to the offenders.
I can see a lot of merit in the sticky-foam suggestion. I'm not sure about pepper-spray in a confined space with restricted air circulation.
What makes most sense to me is to allow the pilots to adjust the oxy ratio till everyone passed out. Of course, the bad guys would soon decide to carry their own oxy...still, hypo-oxy can be sneaky. And someone with sticky-foam on part of their face is going to be at a disadvantage in doning an air-mask. Besides, someone with a weak heart would die, and they pilot or airline would get sued. It's a pity there still isn't a decent anesthetic. Something without a slender range where it's active but not fatal, which isn't explosive, and which could be carried through the skin in a DMSO mist. (Equipment to get around something like that would be blatant.)
Probably the best answer would be to issue each passenger on boarding a seven-inch switchblade. The passengers might not be good with it (but some would have mis-spend childhoods), but it would help even the odds. There should probably be a couple of air-marshalls in each flight, also, who would probably carry pellet pistols (less risk of a puncture). They'd be in random seats near the cabin door with a mode of 3 rows back and aisle.
Back around Mac OS 7.5 there was a language called Prograf which (logically speaking) could handle this problem easily. It required thinking slightly differently, but that wasn't it's real problem. It's real problem was that it didn't have any compact textual representation. Also that is only ran on the Mac. (I believe that it died during an attempt to transition to MSWind, as so many other programs did.)
They called it a dataflow architecture. (Well, with the Mac being a single processor system the "architecture was entirely software, but...).
However it could handle common parallelizations quite easily. A node of the program was defined in terms of what it required to operate, and what it did. The compiler did a kind of reverse sort, starting with the answer it built the required availability of data sources, and chained backwards. There were a few explicitly sequential steps, but they weren't common. E.g., addition was defined as (approx.) to get the answer you need two numeric inputs...THESE, add them together to get the answer. Then the compiler figures out how you are telling it to get THESE.
I understand that there are still a couple or three dataflow languages around, but the last time I checked two were special purpose and one was obscure. (Well, it's been a few months. There were reasons in each case why I didn't check further into using them.)
Erlang can also handle the stated problem, but it's SLOW. I don't know if this is inherent or can be fixed. (It may not be fixed even if it can be, becasue it's fast enough for what it was designed to do.) Still I keep coming back to Erlang, because it appears to be the best thing currently active that handles THAT part of the problem space. Then I look at how it handles the rest of the problem space and look for something better.
Currently I'm quite unsatisfied with all of the parallelization tools that I know of. This isn't something intrinsic in the problem, but because it hasn't been of serious concern among large numbers of people for very long. Good answers exist (in principle), they just don't appear to be currently available.
FWIW, I have heard that if you heat aspartamine in water part of it dissociates into a cyanide (molecule? ion?).
I don't assume that this means that it's unsafe, but I rather think it might be unsafe to heat in a microwave, or to cook with in some other way.
OTOH, I've read other studies that said that artificial sweeteners damage the bodies ability to tell how many calories your are consuming. (They didn't say which sweeteners they tested.) I.e., unless you very carefully control your diet, drinking artificially sweetened soda may result in you gaining more weight that you would if you drank soda sweetened with sugar. I've never seen reports of a follow-up study, and I don't have a reference to the original, so make of this what you will. I generally avoid all artificial sweeteners.
Tyrants may be unavoidable, but you can reduce their scope and their power. If a project can be forked at need, then "absolute control over the code base" means until people get so upset that a group forms to fork the code. This can take lots of provocation, but X Window experienced just such an event a year or two ago.
OpenSuSE may mean that Novell is already facing a quiet insurrection. It also may not. (I'm not a SUSE user, so I haven't been following them. But even if it doesn't mean that now, it could change to mean that at any time.)
Guido may have the title "Benevolent Dictator For Life", but if enough people got unhappy with his decisions, a new language would fork off of Python. (It doesn't even require that someone be unhappy. Greg Ewing could decide to develop Pyrex into a full language rather than leaving it to be an intermediate between Python and C, and that would do it in and of itself.)
So there are lots of "Petty tyrants", both benevolent and otherwise. In the FOSS community their power over each person is generally quite limited.
That Novell has ever *been* a member of the FOSS community is debatable. SuSE has been, but a corporation buying you doesn't automatically make that corporation a part of the community.
I used to like Novell, and considered them ethical. That was from around 1980 to a few months ago. Since then I've been in "don't commit" status. Now, actually seeing the agreement, and reading people's interpretations of various pieces (did you know that several of the terms are defined in a web page on a domain that doesn't resolve?), most of the respect that I had for Novell has evaporated. And it was Novell that killed it, not Stallman or anyone else. Novell.
I trust that the GPL3 will be released *SOON*!!, and I hope that they either eliminate the grandfather clause, or give it some reasonable date...like Apr. 1, 20001. I realize that this won't affect any already extant software, but it will make the updates more useful.
P.S.: The deal appears to give developers just as little protection as I had heard, i.e., none. This is Novell attempting to sell us down the river, and if the backlash bankrupts them, it's less than what they deserve. If it were to bankrupt not only the company, but also the corporate officers, it would still be less than they deserve. (I'm a bit unhappy with them.)
"Patent reform" is a quite ambiguous phrase, which could be used to describe ANY change in the patent laws. Not all changes would make things better. Just as an example, extending the term of patents to 70 years could be described as patent reform, though I don't think many here would consider that a fair way to use the term. So when Novell is proposing to "help the EFF with patent reform" we don't really have a clue as to what they are proposing. They could be describing a lobbying effort to get the EFF to accept some particular "reform" that they want to have pushed. Say, something that would get rid of "patent trolls" without affecting "legitimate companies". (Note that the phrases in quotes haven't been defined. Now try to guess what definitions might be used if Novell is acting as an MS front group.)
So I don't know how to judge them. What I mentioned is a kind of "worst case scenario", but there are many in-between cases that I also wouldn't be in favor of. I'll decide how I feel about them when I find out what they are really proposing, pushing, and/or accomplishing.
Novell isn't yet, quite, in my list of totally untrustworthy companies. They seem determined to get there, but for now I'm willing to not condemn this move before I see the results. For now.
This doesn't mean that I'm willing to use or recommend Novell software. That appears wantonly reckless. Perhaps *AFTER* I seen the agreement with MS, and decide whether the redacted parts might be larger than a couple of words, and get some reactions from independant lawyers. Perhaps after that I'll be more willing to trust them. Maybe. And maybe just the opposite. The weasel words so far used in public commentaries don't inspire any confidence at all. They're rather like the MS pledge that "We don't currently have any plans to sue...". They could change their mind at any minute, and they aren't obligating themselves to give any warning. And there could exist plans right now that this spokes-thing just doesn't know about, possibly on purpose. Novell seems to aim more towards incoherence than ambiguity, but the effect is the same. The promises appear worthless, and certainly not legally binding. (And if a corporation is carefully insuring that its public statements aren't legally binding, what does that imply about its trustworthiness?)
Well, possibly these were off-the-cuff remarks, and not carefully thought out. Possibly. But they have explicitly refrained from making any carefully thought out statements that address the topic...unless they were so vague as to be worthless. (Or unless they were statements about how someone else would behave, which they obviously can't be responsible for.)
We'll see what gets published about the MS-Novell deal, and we'll see how this quest for "patent reform" works out. Perhaps after those resolve we'll decide that Novell was merely clumsy about what they did and were misunderstood. Possibly. Until then, however... well, Safety First. And that means avoiding Novell, as well as MS.
No, Eric Flint has his own sins to account for. I'm primarily thinking of what he did to the James H. Schmitz reprints, but not only that. He's a lousy editor, and weakens whatever he alters. (He also tends to disrupt series integrity, but that's probably because he only reads works in isolation.)
Good points, but handleable. They would need to license the rights from many different people who would themselves be the ones who would own the copyrights of the pieces. (They already do this, by the way. It's rare for a studio to own all the copyrights involved in the production of a movie.)
OTOH, I'm not "I'm drawing a line in the sand!" about corporations not owning copyrights. Just about them not owning them for an extensive period of time. Say 20 years for a person and 10 for a corporation?
FWIW, this is a VERY streamlined version of what I really think is just. I've posted more extensive comments earlier, but apparently they were too long (or boring) and nobody responded.
The copyright is already too long by about 50 years (in the US). I can imagine detailed arguments over the fine details, but 10-20 years is the right range. And corporations should not be allowed to own copyrights, only to license them from the owners for a limited period of time. Also copyrights should die immediately when the owner of the copyright dies. Families don't have any respect for the artistic integrity of the works of authors, so why should they be allowed to control it. (Sometimes I don't like what an author does, and prefer an earlier version of his work, but I respect his right to alter it. I don't respect the grant of that right to the works of dead authors for people who don't bother to read and understand the original. Here I'm thinking of Eric Flint and the incongruous prequels to the Dune series. E.E. Smith, OTOH, did have the right to write "Skylark DuQuesne", however much it mutilated the world of the previous Skylark books.)
I will grant that this will mean that families won't be able to protect the integrity of the works of their ancestors. They don't anyway. They usually don't appear to even understand them. (Christopher Tolkien may understand, but he's not the writer his father was.)
Also, neither Cinderella nor "The Beauty and the Beast" were Walt Disney originals. Finding the original sources, however, has become a challenge. Or try a somewhat tougher one: What were the traditional words and tune to "Geordie" (not the Joan Baez version). The indefinitely extended copyright has caused it to be VERY dangerous to attempt to create music on a traditional basis. Somebody is likely to have copyrighted a part of any variation of it that you can make (which also sounds good). Actually, they're quite likely to have copyrighted the traditional version as their own. Proving this, however, is difficult. A copyright that expires in a reasonable amount of time minimizes this problem (and it's quite reasonable that ressurecting a traditional favorite DOES deserve SOME reward...but not an unending copyright.)
If you can't find the applications that you want for Linux, check Mac. It has nearly everything. Linux hasn't been a large enough market until quite recently, so the scattering of titles is still quite small.
That said, if it's games you want, the Mac probably isn't the answer. Gameboy? Nitendo? (Nothing I currently consider accessible measures up to Civilization II. Alpha Centuari comes pretty close, though. And it's on Linux.)
Or switch to Linux, and run MSWind2000 under an emulator. That will let you get what you need from both places... you'll need a faster machine, but not as much faster as you'd need for MSVista.
It all depends on which group you are calling "they". If you are talking about the general troops, up to the rank of, at a guess captain (line officer), then you may well be right. The officers will generally believe that force is justified, but that's not so unusual among normal people. Once you get to the higher ranks, or away from line officers, things start to change. Many of these are people who have risen by gaming the system for their own benefit, and they tend to have less concern about what happens to the people. They have the concern for their troops that a chessmaster has for his pieces.
If you get into the area of intelligence operations...these are people who live in and on deceit. Don't expect them to honest when it's to their disadvantage. They have a great ability to justify, or they couldn't be successful at their job.
These opinions don't require either conspiracy or denial (though it has been said that a group of tradesmen never gather for a beer without conspiring against the general public...you might want to consider that point of view, and it's justice, before denying the reality of conspiracies).
Why should you need to totally seal it? Just have a very small hole blocked by a very tight filter. This would effectively seal the case, while allowing pressure changes to equalize slowly. (Is that what they do? It used to be that air circulation / exchange with the outside was used to cool the drive. And driven by a fan.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the reminder of why I stopped visiting SysCon. (Actually there was another reason. They did something truly flagrant...but I haven't bothered to remember what.)
Whatever, that ad is a sure guarantee that I won't be adding them back to my "occasionally visit this site" list. (I didn't bother to read the story, as I don't really care *why* someone prefers Ubuntu over MSWind. Any reason is good enough if I'm not going to be relying on his future judgement.)
It's moderately interesting that SysCon would publish something putatively favorable about Linux. (I didn't read the article, so forgive my doubts that it's actually favorable. I remember SysCon from before I dropped them.) It's not enough to cause me to start considering them to be as reliable vendor of news as is, say, Slashdot.
I think it's only fair to give warning to those contemplating a purchase from Dell what kind of an abusive relationship they may be entering. Some people won't see that they have any choice, and will go ahead, but at least they will have been warned.
... then welcome to serfdom.
Remember, Dell isn't the only party to the sale. The customer is involved too. This is at least warning him that Dell may be polite, but it isn't dependable. That deals are subject to being unilaterally renegotiated AFTER Dell has taken you money. That's an important warning. I don't think that Dell has any assets within the county, so I might not be able to seek redress via small claims court, but I CAN avoid them.
If you don't feel that unilaterally renegotiating the deal AFTER you've collected the money is grounds for a suit
That was Eli Whitney's problem. He never did solve it. Lots of little manufacturers that he couldn't keep track of, and did work at the "village blacksmith" level, so it would have cost more to sue them than he could have gotten in return.
That's a straw-man.
Russia MAY have been headed towards communism for a few years under Lenin. Never since then has it even tried to be communist. They used the rhetoric, but that's something different.
FWIW, this was probably wise of them. I may not like dictatorships, but at least they can be made to, sort of, work. I'm not convinced that communism could ever be made to work on larger than a village scale. Even then it's iffy. And I doubt that Marxism could ever work on ANY scale. Groups that I'm aware of that have seriously tried have come apart at the seams withing a year, and that's will all members at least claiming to be doctrinally committed. (Admittedly, I'm talking about a very small number when I say "that I'm aware of", and that, in and of itself, is an indication that it's rather unsuccessful.) Usually either the groups disintegrate, or they devolve into a dictatorship. I've knowledge of ONE that turned into a rather unsuccessful democracy. (I don't know whether or not they ever voted to adopt Robert's Rules of Order...but there were a fantastic number of "committee meetings".)
...The Russians make a mockery of the G-8 and its principles. This demand for licensing fees on supposed patents of a 60-year-old technology is the latest in a string of non-Western activities...
That doesn't sound non-Western to me. I wish it did, but wishes don't make truth.
Unfortunately, the RIAA wrote that law. It was only slightly amended...and not all of the amendments were improvements.
I have come around to the opinion that breaking the copyright laws is a good thing in and of itself. It's also a recklessly foolish thing to do. You'd be better off convicted of killing an RIAA director than to have the full weight of the copyright law come down on you. Sell paraquat to teenagers...the punishment is less. (Mind you, it's rare for the full penalties to be imposed for copyright violation, but if they are you can spend more time in jail than for murder.)
I may be misinformed. I hope so, but I don't believe it.
Tivio wasn't exactly the target. The fact that the term Tivioisation is used is purely coincidental. That's just how some people mispronounce MS-Novell.
My general feeling is: "Too bad. They can't continue to get rich by copying other people's work and not giving anything back." At first I wrote "stealing", but that's slightly stronger than I meant. It's like calling copyright violaters pirates...only not as flagrantly off-scale. Then I substituted taking, but copying is the exact term. It just doesn't include the feeling, which is due to their locking it into a black-box and refusing to let people see what's inside. My feeling is if they were capable of stealing it, they would, and without moral qualm. I would not mourn to see them die. If they all died today, humanity's ethical average would improve slightly. (Only slightly, and they are far from the worst around. This doesn't make them good, or even average.)
It's quite a difficult job, but MS has been quite successful at it. They've made PR statements even less trustworthy than they used to be. And, amazingly, they've been able to keep it up for several years running. I think that they hold the undisputed title for most years in the past decade. Many years they even debase political PR.
Now, of course, this is assuming that you tar all PR with the same brush. And there may well be honest PR people out there. Sorry, but if they are offended, then they should send their complaints to the offenders.
I can see a lot of merit in the sticky-foam suggestion. I'm not sure about pepper-spray in a confined space with restricted air circulation.
What makes most sense to me is to allow the pilots to adjust the oxy ratio till everyone passed out. Of course, the bad guys would soon decide to carry their own oxy...still, hypo-oxy can be sneaky. And someone with sticky-foam on part of their face is going to be at a disadvantage in doning an air-mask. Besides, someone with a weak heart would die, and they pilot or airline would get sued. It's a pity there still isn't a decent anesthetic. Something without a slender range where it's active but not fatal, which isn't explosive, and which could be carried through the skin in a DMSO mist. (Equipment to get around something like that would be blatant.)
Probably the best answer would be to issue each passenger on boarding a seven-inch switchblade. The passengers might not be good with it (but some would have mis-spend childhoods), but it would help even the odds. There should probably be a couple of air-marshalls in each flight, also, who would probably carry pellet pistols (less risk of a puncture). They'd be in random seats near the cabin door with a mode of 3 rows back and aisle.
Back around Mac OS 7.5 there was a language called Prograf which (logically speaking) could handle this problem easily. It required thinking slightly differently, but that wasn't it's real problem. It's real problem was that it didn't have any compact textual representation. Also that is only ran on the Mac. (I believe that it died during an attempt to transition to MSWind, as so many other programs did.)
...).
They called it a dataflow architecture. (Well, with the Mac being a single processor system the "architecture was entirely software, but
However it could handle common parallelizations quite easily. A node of the program was defined in terms of what it required to operate, and what it did. The compiler did a kind of reverse sort, starting with the answer it built the required availability of data sources, and chained backwards. There were a few explicitly sequential steps, but they weren't common. E.g., addition was defined as (approx.) to get the answer you need two numeric inputs...THESE, add them together to get the answer. Then the compiler figures out how you are telling it to get THESE.
I understand that there are still a couple or three dataflow languages around, but the last time I checked two were special purpose and one was obscure. (Well, it's been a few months. There were reasons in each case why I didn't check further into using them.)
Erlang can also handle the stated problem, but it's SLOW. I don't know if this is inherent or can be fixed. (It may not be fixed even if it can be, becasue it's fast enough for what it was designed to do.) Still I keep coming back to Erlang, because it appears to be the best thing currently active that handles THAT part of the problem space. Then I look at how it handles the rest of the problem space and look for something better.
Currently I'm quite unsatisfied with all of the parallelization tools that I know of. This isn't something intrinsic in the problem, but because it hasn't been of serious concern among large numbers of people for very long. Good answers exist (in principle), they just don't appear to be currently available.
Within every disorder there is order, just as within every order there is disorder. This is called the Hodge-podge.
I am not a KFSC.
FWIW, I have heard that if you heat aspartamine in water part of it dissociates into a cyanide (molecule? ion?).
I don't assume that this means that it's unsafe, but I rather think it might be unsafe to heat in a microwave, or to cook with in some other way.
OTOH, I've read other studies that said that artificial sweeteners damage the bodies ability to tell how many calories your are consuming. (They didn't say which sweeteners they tested.) I.e., unless you very carefully control your diet, drinking artificially sweetened soda may result in you gaining more weight that you would if you drank soda sweetened with sugar. I've never seen reports of a follow-up study, and I don't have a reference to the original, so make of this what you will. I generally avoid all artificial sweeteners.
When I want to drink something sweet my preference is Southern Comfort. (It's great when you have a sore throat.)
OTOH, my usual preference is black coffee. Barring that, green tea.
OTOH!! When it comes to things to eat, I'm less restrained. Pity, as I'd really like to lose weight.
Tyrants may be unavoidable, but you can reduce their scope and their power. If a project can be forked at need, then "absolute control over the code base" means until people get so upset that a group forms to fork the code. This can take lots of provocation, but X Window experienced just such an event a year or two ago.
OpenSuSE may mean that Novell is already facing a quiet insurrection. It also may not. (I'm not a SUSE user, so I haven't been following them. But even if it doesn't mean that now, it could change to mean that at any time.)
Guido may have the title "Benevolent Dictator For Life", but if enough people got unhappy with his decisions, a new language would fork off of Python. (It doesn't even require that someone be unhappy. Greg Ewing could decide to develop Pyrex into a full language rather than leaving it to be an intermediate between Python and C, and that would do it in and of itself.)
So there are lots of "Petty tyrants", both benevolent and otherwise. In the FOSS community their power over each person is generally quite limited.
That Novell has ever *been* a member of the FOSS community is debatable. SuSE has been, but a corporation buying you doesn't automatically make that corporation a part of the community.
I used to like Novell, and considered them ethical. That was from around 1980 to a few months ago. Since then I've been in "don't commit" status. Now, actually seeing the agreement, and reading people's interpretations of various pieces (did you know that several of the terms are defined in a web page on a domain that doesn't resolve?), most of the respect that I had for Novell has evaporated. And it was Novell that killed it, not Stallman or anyone else. Novell.
I trust that the GPL3 will be released *SOON*!!, and I hope that they either eliminate the grandfather clause, or give it some reasonable date...like Apr. 1, 20001. I realize that this won't affect any already extant software, but it will make the updates more useful.
P.S.: The deal appears to give developers just as little protection as I had heard, i.e., none. This is Novell attempting to sell us down the river, and if the backlash bankrupts them, it's less than what they deserve. If it were to bankrupt not only the company, but also the corporate officers, it would still be less than they deserve. (I'm a bit unhappy with them.)
Great! You're *just* the kind of customer MicroSoft deserves. But you'd better keep your profile low.
You don't understand.
"Patent reform" is a quite ambiguous phrase, which could be used to describe ANY change in the patent laws. Not all changes would make things better. Just as an example, extending the term of patents to 70 years could be described as patent reform, though I don't think many here would consider that a fair way to use the term. So when Novell is proposing to "help the EFF with patent reform" we don't really have a clue as to what they are proposing. They could be describing a lobbying effort to get the EFF to accept some particular "reform" that they want to have pushed. Say, something that would get rid of "patent trolls" without affecting "legitimate companies". (Note that the phrases in quotes haven't been defined. Now try to guess what definitions might be used if Novell is acting as an MS front group.)
So I don't know how to judge them. What I mentioned is a kind of "worst case scenario", but there are many in-between cases that I also wouldn't be in favor of. I'll decide how I feel about them when I find out what they are really proposing, pushing, and/or accomplishing.
Novell isn't yet, quite, in my list of totally untrustworthy companies. They seem determined to get there, but for now I'm willing to not condemn this move before I see the results. For now.
This doesn't mean that I'm willing to use or recommend Novell software. That appears wantonly reckless. Perhaps *AFTER* I seen the agreement with MS, and decide whether the redacted parts might be larger than a couple of words, and get some reactions from independant lawyers. Perhaps after that I'll be more willing to trust them. Maybe. And maybe just the opposite. The weasel words so far used in public commentaries don't inspire any confidence at all. They're rather like the MS pledge that "We don't currently have any plans to sue...". They could change their mind at any minute, and they aren't obligating themselves to give any warning. And there could exist plans right now that this spokes-thing just doesn't know about, possibly on purpose. Novell seems to aim more towards incoherence than ambiguity, but the effect is the same. The promises appear worthless, and certainly not legally binding. (And if a corporation is carefully insuring that its public statements aren't legally binding, what does that imply about its trustworthiness?)
Well, possibly these were off-the-cuff remarks, and not carefully thought out. Possibly. But they have explicitly refrained from making any carefully thought out statements that address the topic...unless they were so vague as to be worthless. (Or unless they were statements about how someone else would behave, which they obviously can't be responsible for.)
We'll see what gets published about the MS-Novell deal, and we'll see how this quest for "patent reform" works out. Perhaps after those resolve we'll decide that Novell was merely clumsy about what they did and were misunderstood. Possibly. Until then, however... well, Safety First. And that means avoiding Novell, as well as MS.
No, Eric Flint has his own sins to account for. I'm primarily thinking of what he did to the James H. Schmitz reprints, but not only that. He's a lousy editor, and weakens whatever he alters. (He also tends to disrupt series integrity, but that's probably because he only reads works in isolation.)
Good points, but handleable. They would need to license the rights from many different people who would themselves be the ones who would own the copyrights of the pieces. (They already do this, by the way. It's rare for a studio to own all the copyrights involved in the production of a movie.)
OTOH, I'm not "I'm drawing a line in the sand!" about corporations not owning copyrights. Just about them not owning them for an extensive period of time. Say 20 years for a person and 10 for a corporation?
FWIW, this is a VERY streamlined version of what I really think is just. I've posted more extensive comments earlier, but apparently they were too long (or boring) and nobody responded.
Greed, however dispicable, is unsurprising.
The copyright is already too long by about 50 years (in the US). I can imagine detailed arguments over the fine details, but 10-20 years is the right range. And corporations should not be allowed to own copyrights, only to license them from the owners for a limited period of time. Also copyrights should die immediately when the owner of the copyright dies. Families don't have any respect for the artistic integrity of the works of authors, so why should they be allowed to control it. (Sometimes I don't like what an author does, and prefer an earlier version of his work, but I respect his right to alter it. I don't respect the grant of that right to the works of dead authors for people who don't bother to read and understand the original. Here I'm thinking of Eric Flint and the incongruous prequels to the Dune series. E.E. Smith, OTOH, did have the right to write "Skylark DuQuesne", however much it mutilated the world of the previous Skylark books.)
I will grant that this will mean that families won't be able to protect the integrity of the works of their ancestors. They don't anyway. They usually don't appear to even understand them. (Christopher Tolkien may understand, but he's not the writer his father was.)
Also, neither Cinderella nor "The Beauty and the Beast" were Walt Disney originals. Finding the original sources, however, has become a challenge. Or try a somewhat tougher one: What were the traditional words and tune to "Geordie" (not the Joan Baez version). The indefinitely extended copyright has caused it to be VERY dangerous to attempt to create music on a traditional basis. Somebody is likely to have copyrighted a part of any variation of it that you can make (which also sounds good). Actually, they're quite likely to have copyrighted the traditional version as their own. Proving this, however, is difficult. A copyright that expires in a reasonable amount of time minimizes this problem (and it's quite reasonable that ressurecting a traditional favorite DOES deserve SOME reward...but not an unending copyright.)
If you can't find the applications that you want for Linux, check Mac. It has nearly everything. Linux hasn't been a large enough market until quite recently, so the scattering of titles is still quite small.
That said, if it's games you want, the Mac probably isn't the answer. Gameboy? Nitendo? (Nothing I currently consider accessible measures up to Civilization II. Alpha Centuari comes pretty close, though. And it's on Linux.)
Or switch to Linux, and run MSWind2000 under an emulator. That will let you get what you need from both places... you'll need a faster machine, but not as much faster as you'd need for MSVista.
No, you've got to understand,
All windows users are software pirates. That's why they don't deserve sympathy.
It all depends on which group you are calling "they". If you are talking about the general troops, up to the rank of, at a guess captain (line officer), then you may well be right. The officers will generally believe that force is justified, but that's not so unusual among normal people. Once you get to the higher ranks, or away from line officers, things start to change. Many of these are people who have risen by gaming the system for their own benefit, and they tend to have less concern about what happens to the people. They have the concern for their troops that a chessmaster has for his pieces.
If you get into the area of intelligence operations...these are people who live in and on deceit. Don't expect them to honest when it's to their disadvantage. They have a great ability to justify, or they couldn't be successful at their job.
These opinions don't require either conspiracy or denial (though it has been said that a group of tradesmen never gather for a beer without conspiring against the general public...you might want to consider that point of view, and it's justice, before denying the reality of conspiracies).
Why should you need to totally seal it? Just have a very small hole blocked by a very tight filter. This would effectively seal the case, while allowing pressure changes to equalize slowly. (Is that what they do? It used to be that air circulation / exchange with the outside was used to cool the drive. And driven by a fan.)