He seems a politician.. he doesn't really answer the questions asked of him, simply says the same old things over and over and over again.. Reminds me of gates at the press conference MS held after being declared a monopoly.. his answer to every questions was something along the lines of "We are simply trying to make innovative software".
I've actually met Marc Steigler, and had dinner with him, and worked on his computers.. He's a smart guy, with a lot of great ideas.. He also writes some decent sci-fi, and I've seen his latest book, earthweb, I think it's called, at all the bookstores.. check it out..
Wow.. Keep looking for those 75k/year jobs.. My recent research into salary surveys shows that 75k is just about right.. I work down near wall street as an admin of ~8 Linux boxes, pull down 55k/year, expect a 10% bonus, and have a paid for ISDN line and soon 2Mb SDSL.. So I do alright with benefits, but I have the suspicion that my skill set is good enough to get all those things _and_ 75k..
Maybe this won't be too much help but, the last thing on earth you want to use for this is MicroSoft Exchange. we have 4 exchange servers where I work on World Class hardware, serving about 700 people, and these things crash on a semi-daily basis. Not to mention that they are _SLOW_ as cold molasses. And I've heard other reliable accounts as to how exchange cannot scale. Last I heard, Microsoft was using a huge exchange cluster (700+ machines, I think) and each machine averaged 1300 messages a day at full bore. Man, that's pathetic. For less cost you could hire someone to type all your e-mails up and fedex them.
Talk to the people at Sendmail, Inc. If you are prepared to shell out the dough for exchange (any idea what 25,000 licenses are going to cost?) you might as well pay the sendmail folks to set the system up for you. For enough $ they may even write in custom changes for you.
This isn't entirely true. If you look into what Chaos theory has to say about this, there are observeable patterns in seemingly random data. Like Katz said, history has shown that Crime patterns are cyclical. Global weather patterns, while difficult to predict on a local or even national scale sometimes, become orders of magnitude easier to predict accurately when you change the time frame from days to decades, centuries, or even millenia. So why not a computer that can tell us that in 25 years, there will be starvation in some such part of the world. Or that if certain crop growing areas fail to rotate their crops correctly their yields will start decreasing in 8.4 years or something. Even vague ideas about what will happen in the future can be exploited for gain, whether that gain is buisiness or humanitarian. So, with enough background data, we actually can use a simple (relatively) simulation to get accurate results. You just can't expect too much granularity from those results.
They have this already in numerous locations in NYC.. I'd use when I heat there, but the dual T's at work and my desk full 'o PC's are much more fun.. They have web cams tho, you can send 'video postcards.' whee.
I'm sure that as teenagers, they drank plenty of {Pepsi,Coke,Etc}. Since they went and killed people, it's plainly obvious that caffine makes you kill people. Never mind the hundreds of millions of other people who drink caffine on a regular basis, since they did, it's true. I think we have a responsibility to put up a web site and inform people about the evils of caffine. And perhaps we should all turn ourselves in to our local police stations now, since most of use drink caffine and have also played doom. We are a menace to society.
This one solution, but I don't think it would give all the benefits provided by a corporation specifially for protecting Open Source Programmers. Especially if it were incorporated in another country. I imagine many companies would just start ignoring the little people if they had to bring a lawsuit against a foreign corporation.
Also, as far as legal defence, imagine if we could get 1000 people to donate 50$ each (tax deductable, of course. I think there is precedent for donating money to a charity that will turn around and use that money in your legal defence if needed.) to OpenSource, Inc.. 50k$ for legal defence. perhaps per year. Add into that lawyers who are willing to work at substantially reduced prices for non-profit corps. and we've got a very robust solution. A disclaimer. I make no claim that I know anything about this. it's just some random cruft off the top of my head, but it may have potential..
Allowing criminal prosecution for a corporation becomes dangerous, because then "innocent" employees and their familes are affected by the actions of others. We can't legally punish someone simply by association. But I agree w/ the corporate bill of rights. corporations shouldn't have all the rights plus some that a flesh and blood citizen has. But, perhaps we can use this to our advantage. The other idea I had was that time spent programming, donating the work to "OpenSource, Inc." could be considered charity and therefore tax deductable..
Well, the proposed corporation could have control over the signing of NDA's and whatnot. if someone wants to develop something under NDA, great, fine, go ahead. but not under OpenSource, Inc. basically it would be a minimalist approach. a corporation that has no capital, no income, no expenditures, but exists to bring all under it's umbrella together as a single entity. Of course, this does introduce the possibiliy that with some legal manuevering someone could screw us all en masse. It's just an offhand idea though, perhaps someone with more legal knowledge than myself can take the base premise and turn it into a workable idea.
I find that the recent trend of Corporations suing the "little guy" to be deeply disturbing. For all of it's potential, the American legal system has fallen quite far from the nest of individual freedom and liberty that it was founded on. Let's not forget that many of our laws and freedoms were in direct response the heavy handed monarchy that we escaped from. How is our current situation any better? Instead of the king of england, we now have faceless corporations, supposed to be a single legal entity under law (just as _any_ citizen is supposed to be) rising to power and using their near-limitless resources to stop the actions of those, who, in many circumstances, are promoting their brand name and public awareness without asking for a single dime in return. A corporation is (to my understanding) A way to insulate owners and employees from damages resulting from the actions of the corporation as a whole. This should not be a get out of jail free card. this concept does not sit well with a lassaiz-faire (sp?) economy. It basically allows and corporation to break the law (or at least bend it, and abuse it) and face little or no consequences, because, as we all know, it's bad for government to interfere in the private sector. Perhaps the Open Source community should band together and form a non-profit corporation under which programmers can "officially" volunteer their time and skills for the corporation, then, and legal challenges would go up against that entity, and it would insulate the individual from legal damages, as well as making it much harder for the "unenlightened" companies to continue their behaviour as of late.
Sorry for rambling, this just really jerks my chain. Contructive criticism always welcomed, flames to/dev/null.
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely right.. Let me amend my previous statement to read "an inept politician".
He seems a politician.. he doesn't really answer the questions asked of him, simply says the same old things over and over and over again.. Reminds me of gates at the press conference MS held after being declared a monopoly.. his answer to every questions was something along the lines of "We are simply trying to make innovative software".
Ehh.. I always screw up the last name.. Anyhow, I agree, David's Sling was pretty good..
I've actually met Marc Steigler, and had dinner with him, and worked on his computers.. He's a smart guy, with a lot of great ideas.. He also writes some decent sci-fi, and I've seen his latest book, earthweb, I think it's called, at all the bookstores.. check it out..
Wow.. Keep looking for those 75k/year jobs.. My recent research into salary surveys shows that 75k is just about right.. I work down near wall street as an admin of ~8 Linux boxes, pull down 55k/year, expect a 10% bonus, and have a paid for ISDN line and soon 2Mb SDSL.. So I do alright with benefits, but I have the suspicion that my skill set is good enough to get all those things _and_ 75k..
Keep looking!
Maybe this won't be too much help but, the last thing on earth you want to use for this is MicroSoft Exchange. we have 4 exchange servers where I work on World Class hardware, serving about 700 people, and these things crash on a semi-daily basis. Not to mention that they are _SLOW_ as cold molasses. And I've heard other reliable accounts as to how exchange cannot scale. Last I heard, Microsoft was using a huge exchange cluster (700+ machines, I think) and each machine averaged 1300 messages a day at full bore. Man, that's pathetic. For less cost you could hire someone to type all your e-mails up and fedex them.
Talk to the people at Sendmail, Inc. If you are prepared to shell out the dough for exchange (any idea what 25,000 licenses are going to cost?) you might as well pay the sendmail folks to set the system up for you. For enough $ they may even write in custom changes for you.
This isn't entirely true. If you look into what Chaos theory has to say about this, there are observeable patterns in seemingly random data. Like Katz said, history has shown that Crime patterns are cyclical. Global weather patterns, while difficult to predict on a local or even national scale sometimes, become orders of magnitude easier to predict accurately when you change the time frame from days to decades, centuries, or even millenia. So why not a computer that can tell us that in 25 years, there will be starvation in some such part of the world. Or that if certain crop growing areas fail to rotate their crops correctly their yields will start decreasing in 8.4 years or something. Even vague ideas about what will happen in the future can be exploited for gain, whether that gain is buisiness or humanitarian. So, with enough background data, we actually can use a simple (relatively) simulation to get accurate results. You just can't expect too much granularity from those results.
They have this already in numerous locations in NYC.. I'd use when I heat there, but the dual T's at work and my desk full 'o PC's are much more fun.. They have web cams tho, you can send 'video postcards.' whee.
Matt
I'm sure that as teenagers, they drank plenty of {Pepsi,Coke,Etc}. Since they went and killed people, it's plainly obvious that caffine makes you kill people. Never mind the hundreds of millions of other people who drink caffine on a regular basis, since they did, it's true. I think we have a responsibility to put up a web site and inform people about the evils of caffine. And perhaps we should all turn ourselves in to our local police stations now, since most of use drink caffine and have also played doom. We are a menace to society.
This one solution, but I don't think it would give all the benefits provided by a corporation specifially for protecting Open Source Programmers. Especially if it were incorporated in another country. I imagine many companies would just start ignoring the little people if they had to bring a lawsuit against a foreign corporation.
Also, as far as legal defence, imagine if we could get 1000 people to donate 50$ each (tax deductable, of course. I think there is precedent for donating money to a charity that will turn around and use that money in your legal defence if needed.) to OpenSource, Inc.. 50k$ for legal defence. perhaps per year. Add into that lawyers who are willing to work at substantially reduced prices for non-profit corps. and we've got a very robust solution. A disclaimer. I make no claim that I know anything about this. it's just some random cruft off the top of my head, but it may have potential..
Matt
Allowing criminal prosecution for a corporation becomes dangerous, because then "innocent" employees and their familes are affected by the actions of others. We can't legally punish someone simply by association. But I agree w/ the corporate bill of rights. corporations shouldn't have all the rights plus some that a flesh and blood citizen has. But, perhaps we can use this to our advantage. The other idea I had was that time spent programming, donating the work to "OpenSource, Inc." could be considered charity and therefore tax deductable..
Good thoughts,
Matt
Well, the proposed corporation could have control over the signing of NDA's and whatnot. if someone wants to develop something under NDA, great, fine, go ahead. but not under OpenSource, Inc. basically it would be a minimalist approach. a corporation that has no capital, no income, no expenditures, but exists to bring all under it's umbrella together as a single entity. Of course, this does introduce the possibiliy that with some legal manuevering someone could screw us all en masse. It's just an offhand idea though, perhaps someone with more legal knowledge than myself can take the base premise and turn it into a workable idea.
I find that the recent trend of Corporations suing the "little guy" to be deeply disturbing. For all of it's potential, the American legal system has fallen quite far from the nest of individual freedom and liberty that it was founded on. Let's not forget that many of our laws and freedoms were in direct response the heavy handed monarchy that we escaped from. How is our current situation any better? Instead of the king of england, we now have faceless corporations, supposed to be a single legal entity under law (just as _any_ citizen is supposed to be) rising to power and using their near-limitless resources to stop the actions of those, who, in many circumstances, are promoting their brand name and public awareness without asking for a single dime in return. A corporation is (to my understanding) A way to insulate owners and employees from damages resulting from the actions of the corporation as a whole. This should not be a get out of jail free card. this concept does not sit well with a lassaiz-faire (sp?) economy. It basically allows and corporation to break the law (or at least bend it, and abuse it) and face little or no consequences, because, as we all know, it's bad for government to interfere in the private sector. Perhaps the Open Source community should band together and form a non-profit corporation under which programmers can "officially" volunteer their time and skills for the corporation, then, and legal challenges would go up against that entity, and it would insulate the individual from legal damages, as well as making it much harder for the "unenlightened" companies to continue their behaviour as of late.
/dev/null.
Sorry for rambling, this just really jerks my chain. Contructive criticism always welcomed, flames to
Same here.. even cleared my cache and reloaded.
It's the same old site!
Isn't this a bit like saying "You cannot read the legal document in your hands until you have signed it." ?????