I rarely use Windows, so I'm no expert on spyware. What I have seen is that the spyware is installed on your computer in return for goods or service (e.g. a program). If these are transactions between adults they should be legal, no matter how crappy the spyware is. If the spyware has side effects that degrade the computer, the spyware providers should take some responsibility.
If the spyware is installed without the permission of the owner, then other laws are broken. This should be handled under the laws that are used against virus writers/distributors.
I also notice (by R'ingTFA) that this law also outlaws "context based" tools. This might be interpreted as outlawing google's new email service, that many/.ers seem to be eager to sign up for.
The bad news is that the article implies that these cells are closed units, designed to not be refuelable by the user. Disposable fuel cells have been proposed before, so this is not a new idea. (of course it will be about a week before someone posts on the web a method for drilling a hole in the cell, pouring out the water and refilling with methanol, and finally covering the hole with duct tape) I think the lawyers are worried about the liability of geeks sloshing around methanol.
I can't see me spending $50 to run my laptop for 5 hours and then throwing away the fuel cell.
I think the interesting thing about this is that it is a brand new offensive from SCO. We should have known this was coming when we saw the BS from Ken Brown claiming that Linux had Minix source in it. This shows that SCO has run out of plausible claims and is now making up really silly stuff that has already been refuted.
If anything, this shows that SCO is not going away merely because they don't have a case. The will keep grinding away as long as they have funding.
The local schools see this as free money. They can put in the biggest, stupidest possible proposal to the feds. If it is approved, great! Remember, the guys in DC that administer the program are paid to give out money to schools, not to teach them about networks.
If the local schools thought it was important to wire the schools, they would find the funds and would design a much more cost-effective system. This has the effect of concentrating power in Washington. I think that local school boards should avoid starting to rely on a steady stream of free money from DC. The money is free now, but might come with a lot of strings later.
In the late 70s the US Dept of Energy (DOE) funded the development of a chemical process simulation system. This software is used by chemical engineers in the design and analysis of chemical plants or refineries. The development was done at MIT and was planned to meet the needs of the synthetic fuels industry (think gasoline made from coal)--needs not met by the currently available commercial systems.
The product of this project, called Aspen, was released as public domain (might have been a BSD-style license). The public domain version was very buggy and not particularly complete. I led a group of engineers that were using the public version of Aspen to do simulations. I spent almost all of my time fixing bugs.
Meanwhile, the core development team formed a company called Aspen Tech to further develop Aspen and to distribute it (as closed source). Aspen Tech had their closed-source version of Aspen (called Aspen Plus) debugged and running very nicely in no time. Aspen Tech has since been very successful and Aspen Plus is now one of the leading process simulators in industry.
So here's the results of this story: 1. Taxpayers paid for a system. 2. Aspen Plus users paid Aspen Tech for the system. 3. The companies that sold competing systems had their tax dollars used to fund a competitor that eventually put most of them out of business. 4. $$$$ (For the guys from the MIT development team.)
There was a movement to get universities, national labs, etc. to cooperate on the public version to debug and support it. There was not a lot of interest in this at the time.
I think the interesting thing about this article is that distributing the software was apparently an afterthought.
All of the details about who holds the copyright and distribution of sources or binaries should be in the contract. I don't see how you could negotiate a price without doing this. For example, I might deliver the system more cheaply if I own the code.
The government, or each department, should have a policy on how contract software development is done.
A small percentage of gifted technical people have the interest or the aptitude to become good managers. One way to get a PHB is to promote your best tech guy into the manager job. One way to be a good manager is to "know what you don't know." That means that you leave the tech stuff to the tech guys and focus on managing. This is where a lot of new managers (with tech backgrounds) screw up. They figure that the reason they got the job was that they were the smartest tech guy, so they should make all of the tech decisions. The way to avoid this is to have a high ratio of tech guys to managers, so that the managers are too busy managing to dive into the tech details.
With that said, I've been a manager or a manager of managers for 15+ years and still occaisionally dive into the details. I only do it when (I think) I have something to contribute and the project is already fubar and requires an intervention. That doesn't mean that I don't routinely ask a lot of pointed technical questions to make sure the tech guys are using their pointy heads. But mostly I let the tech guys be tech guys.
Of course, but is there an ERP package that isn't bloat-ware?
My experience is that the big ERP systems are pretty bloated. One of the things that went on with these systems was that every company had to have a whole set of "modifications" to make the ERP system fit their business. These mods were often poorly done, poorly controlled and caused no end of reliability problems. These mods often contributed to the implementation projects being way over budget and way late. These mods, that almost all of their customers did, became a major obstacle to installing new versions. One of my past employers had a highly modified ERP system that they wanted to upgrade from 2.x to 3.y. They spent serverl hundred thousand dollars implementing the mods on version 3.y and finally just gave up because it was too hard. (I wasn't on that project!) They kept using 2.x until they were acquired by a competitor (who was actually using something older, more modified, and worse).
The ERP systems companies started making their software more "customizable" or "configurable" in an attempt to prevent mods. This made these already very large programs into true behemoths. A lot of companies still want their mods and that still causes a lot of cost and grief.
There are some systems that are not bloated--these are often called mid-range or tier 2 systems. One that I have used is Fourth Shift. It is not a perfect system, but it is low bloat and can be implemented pretty quickly and reasonably painlessly. I've installed FS into 4 businesses and each of those projects went very well. Some of these suppliers of smaller systems don't allow mods by the simple expedient of not distributing source code.
Brown says that Linux should be called GNU/Linux because Linus used GCC. He goes on to say "Without the compiler, it is very likely that the Linux project would not have succeeded." This is implying to those who do not understand such things that Linux somehow illegitamately used GCC to make Linux. Linus was using GCC exactly as GNU (Richard M Stallman) intended. If GNU wanted any program compiled with GCC to be named GNU/{program name}, RMS would have written it into the license.
It may be true that Linux may not have succeeded without GCC. While Linux could have been written for other C compilers, GCC is the ubiquitous, free, standard.
Brown is writing this to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc. That is something like over 95% of Americans. The real target of this is the cadre of congressional staff drones that advise Senators and Representatives. What he wants is (not in order):
1. ensure that software produced with government funding is released under a BSD-type license rather than GPL
2. prevent the government from using GPL software
3. legislation passed to outlaw the GPL
I think that he has missed an opportunity to blame off-shore out sourcing on Linux/GPL. Maybe that will be in the book.
Aside from his ad hominem attack on Linus Torvalds, what Brown has to say is that nonrestrictive OS licenses are good (e.g. BSD), closed source is good, but GPL is bad. The reason that GPL is bad is because people are stealing code and contributing it to GPL projects, making the result "hybrid" code.
This implies that it is OK for someone to steal proprietary code and contribute it to BSD. (Same for stealing code and contributing it to a closed source project??) Stealing code is bad, regardless of where it might be contributed.
Brown calls Linux (meaning GPL) a leprosy; Microsoft calls it a virial operating system. I think the thing that these critics miss is FREEDOM and OWNERSHIP (of private property). Freedom and private property are two important factors in making the US an economic powerhouse. If you write software it is yours to dispose of as you please. You are free to copywrite it and then distribute it under the licence of your choice.
One reason is to pull lots of geeks into your site.
All you have to do is make an oblique reference to Linux in the review of a not-ready-for-prime-time product. With any luck you get on the front page of slashdot and just like magic you have the most hits you've ever had.
I asked him if he knew where that came from (I, of course, thought he must have heard that from me). I think baseball references and cliches are pretty widespread these days. Blame us travelling Americans and the fact that our tv shows are shown everywhere.
A lot of people are interested in American sports. Even baseball shows on up New Zealand cable TV once a week or so (in season). I much prefer rugby to baseball.
Imagine you're the defendant. The prosecutor has been showing the jury pictures of truly horrifying sexual acts committed on small children that were uploaded from your IP. He says that your are a purveyor of child porn.
Your lawyer doesn't dispute that these were uploaded from your IP, but makes this explanation about how you decided not to secure your wireless network so that anyone can use it and that the state has not proven you were the one uploading the pictures.
The prosecutor will have made sure that no juror understands wireless networks.
So now Intel and AMD can put more transistors on their high-end chips(as usual)--but what to do with them? In the past it has been more cache, pipelining, MMX, vector operations, etc., etc. and etc.
Since this is a pretty big move for intel, you would expect that they have done a lot of research on how to use these transistors. It is interesting that intel and AMD have headed off in pretty different directions.
The petition was filed by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), not Clear Channel. There is nothing in the article that shows that Clear Channel is involved in the petition. Reuters inserts Clear Channel into this by describing the NAB as representing radio conglomerates like Clear Channel. Of course the NAB also represents many smaller broadcasting businesses. It is good business for Reuters and Slashdot to throw Clear Channel into this because they are a current bogey man because of their association with some conservative talk shows, like Rush Limbaugh.
Secondly, how is local radio a failed business model? There are thousands of profitable local radio stations in the US and one of the reasons that Clear Channel is hated is that it is so large and profitable. So which is it? Clear Channel has a failed business model or that they are so successful that they can suppress free speech?
The headline of this article is clearly incaccurate--the editors should read the articles and use a little thought.
very--The main way that water puts out fire is by cooling. (the other way is by covering the fire and, therefore, excluding oxygen). If this stuff boils in the fire it will cool even better because of the latent heat of vaporization. The vapor will help exclude oxygen, too.
That just means that Sun has to cut their costs even more. There has to be some margin left for Microtel, too. They are going to sell a PC for $i99 (i = 2.. 5; depending on "features") and Wal Mart, Sun and Microtel split the profit??
Selling cheap boxes at Wal Mart will be a nightmare, not a dream. They are going from selling high value, high margin, professional workstations and servers to selling cheap, low value, low margin home computers. To do this effectively they have to construct an efficient supply chain and they have to have to build a cost saving culture--fractions of a cent matter in that market. In other words, they have to change everything about their company. Why go compete with Dell, HP, e-machines, Gateway, etc., etc. on the low end?
Looking at this from the other angle--that is, they are only selling software so they can sell their software. Their software is already free! (Linux and OO.o, not Solaris.) To put this strategy in dot.com language:
1. lose money on hardware 2. give away software 3. ? 4. profit!
They would be better off to send each stockholder her share of the $2B and lock the doors.
WalMart is not strong arming suppliers--the suppliers don't have to supply WalMart if they don't want to. What WalMart is doing is telling suppliers that they must have low prices and good service, if they are going to remain a supplier. When I say good service in this context it means that you supply the correct quantity, meeting spec, and on time.
My plant supplies WalMart and they suddenly wanted us to supply in (much) more expensive packaging and told us it had to be at the same price as the old packaging. We went to the Wal Mart buyer with the facts of what the new packaging would cost and they were OK with a price increase representing the increased cost. My experience is that they are good business people and they expect their suppliers to be good. If you can't supply quality product on time and at a competitive cost, you won't be a WalMart supplier.
Slashdot Mirror
I rarely use Windows, so I'm no expert on spyware. What I have seen is that the spyware is installed on your computer in return for goods or service (e.g. a program). If these are transactions between adults they should be legal, no matter how crappy the spyware is. If the spyware has side effects that degrade the computer, the spyware providers should take some responsibility.
/.ers seem to be eager to sign up for.
If the spyware is installed without the permission of the owner, then other laws are broken. This should be handled under the laws that are used against virus writers/distributors.
I also notice (by R'ingTFA) that this law also outlaws "context based" tools. This might be interpreted as outlawing google's new email service, that many
The third ammendment:
No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law.
The movie business uses Roman numerals in two ways:
1) Their copyright notices.
2) Their sequel numbers (Godfather II, etc)
Good thing they never have to multiply MCMLXXXVIII times Rocky VI.
These fuel cells use methanol, not hydrogen.
The bad news is that the article implies that these cells are closed units, designed to not be refuelable by the user. Disposable fuel cells have been proposed before, so this is not a new idea. (of course it will be about a week before someone posts on the web a method for drilling a hole in the cell, pouring out the water and refilling with methanol, and finally covering the hole with duct tape) I think the lawyers are worried about the liability of geeks sloshing around methanol.
I can't see me spending $50 to run my laptop for 5 hours and then throwing away the fuel cell.
I think the interesting thing about this is that it is a brand new offensive from SCO. We should have known this was coming when we saw the BS from Ken Brown claiming that Linux had Minix source in it. This shows that SCO has run out of plausible claims and is now making up really silly stuff that has already been refuted.
If anything, this shows that SCO is not going away merely because they don't have a case. The will keep grinding away as long as they have funding.
The local schools see this as free money. They can put in the biggest, stupidest possible proposal to the feds. If it is approved, great! Remember, the guys in DC that administer the program are paid to give out money to schools, not to teach them about networks.
If the local schools thought it was important to wire the schools, they would find the funds and would design a much more cost-effective system. This has the effect of concentrating power in Washington. I think that local school boards should avoid starting to rely on a steady stream of free money from DC. The money is free now, but might come with a lot of strings later.
In the late 70s the US Dept of Energy (DOE) funded the development of a chemical process simulation system. This software is used by chemical engineers in the design and analysis of chemical plants or refineries. The development was done at MIT and was planned to meet the needs of the synthetic fuels industry (think gasoline made from coal)--needs not met by the currently available commercial systems.
The product of this project, called Aspen, was released as public domain (might have been a BSD-style license). The public domain version was very buggy and not particularly complete. I led a group of engineers that were using the public version of Aspen to do simulations. I spent almost all of my time fixing bugs.
Meanwhile, the core development team formed a company called Aspen Tech to further develop Aspen and to distribute it (as closed source). Aspen Tech had their closed-source version of Aspen (called Aspen Plus) debugged and running very nicely in no time. Aspen Tech has since been very successful and Aspen Plus is now one of the leading process simulators in industry.
So here's the results of this story:
1. Taxpayers paid for a system.
2. Aspen Plus users paid Aspen Tech for the system.
3. The companies that sold competing systems had their tax dollars used to fund a competitor that eventually put most of them out of business.
4. $$$$ (For the guys from the MIT development team.)
There was a movement to get universities, national labs, etc. to cooperate on the public version to debug and support it. There was not a lot of interest in this at the time.
I think the interesting thing about this article is that distributing the software was apparently an afterthought.
All of the details about who holds the copyright and distribution of sources or binaries should be in the contract. I don't see how you could negotiate a price without doing this. For example, I might deliver the system more cheaply if I own the code.
The government, or each department, should have a policy on how contract software development is done.
A small percentage of gifted technical people have the interest or the aptitude to become good managers. One way to get a PHB is to promote your best tech guy into the manager job. One way to be a good manager is to "know what you don't know." That means that you leave the tech stuff to the tech guys and focus on managing. This is where a lot of new managers (with tech backgrounds) screw up. They figure that the reason they got the job was that they were the smartest tech guy, so they should make all of the tech decisions. The way to avoid this is to have a high ratio of tech guys to managers, so that the managers are too busy managing to dive into the tech details.
With that said, I've been a manager or a manager of managers for 15+ years and still occaisionally dive into the details. I only do it when (I think) I have something to contribute and the project is already fubar and requires an intervention. That doesn't mean that I don't routinely ask a lot of pointed technical questions to make sure the tech guys are using their pointy heads. But mostly I let the tech guys be tech guys.
My experience is that the big ERP systems are pretty bloated. One of the things that went on with these systems was that every company had to have a whole set of "modifications" to make the ERP system fit their business. These mods were often poorly done, poorly controlled and caused no end of reliability problems. These mods often contributed to the implementation projects being way over budget and way late. These mods, that almost all of their customers did, became a major obstacle to installing new versions. One of my past employers had a highly modified ERP system that they wanted to upgrade from 2.x to 3.y. They spent serverl hundred thousand dollars implementing the mods on version 3.y and finally just gave up because it was too hard. (I wasn't on that project!) They kept using 2.x until they were acquired by a competitor (who was actually using something older, more modified, and worse).
The ERP systems companies started making their software more "customizable" or "configurable" in an attempt to prevent mods. This made these already very large programs into true behemoths. A lot of companies still want their mods and that still causes a lot of cost and grief.
There are some systems that are not bloated--these are often called mid-range or tier 2 systems. One that I have used is Fourth Shift. It is not a perfect system, but it is low bloat and can be implemented pretty quickly and reasonably painlessly. I've installed FS into 4 businesses and each of those projects went very well. Some of these suppliers of smaller systems don't allow mods by the simple expedient of not distributing source code.
You know you're posting to Slashdot, right?
Brown says that Linux should be called GNU/Linux because Linus used GCC. He goes on to say "Without the compiler, it is very likely that the Linux project would not have succeeded." This is implying to those who do not understand such things that Linux somehow illegitamately used GCC to make Linux. Linus was using GCC exactly as GNU (Richard M Stallman) intended. If GNU wanted any program compiled with GCC to be named GNU/{program name}, RMS would have written it into the license.
It may be true that Linux may not have succeeded without GCC. While Linux could have been written for other C compilers, GCC is the ubiquitous, free, standard.
Brown is writing this to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc. That is something like over 95% of Americans. The real target of this is the cadre of congressional staff drones that advise Senators and Representatives. What he wants is (not in order):
1. ensure that software produced with government funding is released under a BSD-type license rather than GPL
2. prevent the government from using GPL software
3. legislation passed to outlaw the GPL
I think that he has missed an opportunity to blame off-shore out sourcing on Linux/GPL. Maybe that will be in the book.
Aside from his ad hominem attack on Linus Torvalds, what Brown has to say is that nonrestrictive OS licenses are good (e.g. BSD), closed source is good, but GPL is bad. The reason that GPL is bad is because people are stealing code and contributing it to GPL projects, making the result "hybrid" code.
This implies that it is OK for someone to steal proprietary code and contribute it to BSD. (Same for stealing code and contributing it to a closed source project??) Stealing code is bad, regardless of where it might be contributed.
Brown calls Linux (meaning GPL) a leprosy; Microsoft calls it a virial operating system. I think the thing that these critics miss is FREEDOM and OWNERSHIP (of private property). Freedom and private property are two important factors in making the US an economic powerhouse. If you write software it is yours to dispose of as you please. You are free to copywrite it and then distribute it under the licence of your choice.
One reason is to pull lots of geeks into your site.
All you have to do is make an oblique reference to Linux in the review of a not-ready-for-prime-time product. With any luck you get on the front page of slashdot and just like magic you have the most hits you've ever had.
One of my New Zealand friends once said to me:
"Now you're batting a thousand."
I asked him if he knew where that came from (I, of course, thought he must have heard that from me). I think baseball references and cliches are pretty widespread these days. Blame us travelling Americans and the fact that our tv shows are shown everywhere.
A lot of people are interested in American sports. Even baseball shows on up New Zealand cable TV once a week or so (in season). I much prefer rugby to baseball.
Imagine you're the defendant. The prosecutor has been showing the jury pictures of truly horrifying sexual acts committed on small children that were uploaded from your IP. He says that your are a purveyor of child porn.
Your lawyer doesn't dispute that these were uploaded from your IP, but makes this explanation about how you decided not to secure your wireless network so that anyone can use it and that the state has not proven you were the one uploading the pictures.
The prosecutor will have made sure that no juror understands wireless networks.
I think you are in big trouble.
So now Intel and AMD can put more transistors on their high-end chips(as usual)--but what to do with them? In the past it has been more cache, pipelining, MMX, vector operations, etc., etc. and etc.
Since this is a pretty big move for intel, you would expect that they have done a lot of research on how to use these transistors. It is interesting that intel and AMD have headed off in pretty different directions.
That is, of course, a felony in the US. (Failure to obey the instructions of a uniformed crew member.)
The petition was filed by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), not Clear Channel. There is nothing in the article that shows that Clear Channel is involved in the petition. Reuters inserts Clear Channel into this by describing the NAB as representing radio conglomerates like Clear Channel. Of course the NAB also represents many smaller broadcasting businesses. It is good business for Reuters and Slashdot to throw Clear Channel into this because they are a current bogey man because of their association with some conservative talk shows, like Rush Limbaugh.
Secondly, how is local radio a failed business model? There are thousands of profitable local radio stations in the US and one of the reasons that Clear Channel is hated is that it is so large and profitable. So which is it? Clear Channel has a failed business model or that they are so successful that they can suppress free speech?
The headline of this article is clearly incaccurate--the editors should read the articles and use a little thought.
very--The main way that water puts out fire is by cooling. (the other way is by covering the fire and, therefore, excluding oxygen). If this stuff boils in the fire it will cool even better because of the latent heat of vaporization. The vapor will help exclude oxygen, too.
That just means that Sun has to cut their costs even more. There has to be some margin left for Microtel, too. They are going to sell a PC for $i99 (i = 2 .. 5; depending on "features") and Wal Mart, Sun and Microtel split the profit??
Selling cheap boxes at Wal Mart will be a nightmare, not a dream. They are going from selling high value, high margin, professional workstations and servers to selling cheap, low value, low margin home computers. To do this effectively they have to construct an efficient supply chain and they have to have to build a cost saving culture--fractions of a cent matter in that market. In other words, they have to change everything about their company. Why go compete with Dell, HP, e-machines, Gateway, etc., etc. on the low end?
Looking at this from the other angle--that is, they are only selling software so they can sell their software. Their software is already free! (Linux and OO.o, not Solaris.) To put this strategy in dot.com language:
1. lose money on hardware
2. give away software
3. ?
4. profit!
They would be better off to send each stockholder her share of the $2B and lock the doors.
Just another sign that BSD is dead.
WalMart is not strong arming suppliers--the suppliers don't have to supply WalMart if they don't want to. What WalMart is doing is telling suppliers that they must have low prices and good service, if they are going to remain a supplier. When I say good service in this context it means that you supply the correct quantity, meeting spec, and on time.
My plant supplies WalMart and they suddenly wanted us to supply in (much) more expensive packaging and told us it had to be at the same price as the old packaging. We went to the Wal Mart buyer with the facts of what the new packaging would cost and they were OK with a price increase representing the increased cost. My experience is that they are good business people and they expect their suppliers to be good. If you can't supply quality product on time and at a competitive cost, you won't be a WalMart supplier.