Fifteen years ago all the cool kids would make fun of me and call me a computer geek and never pick me for the baseball team and stuff. Now all the cool geeks are going off forming gangs and taking down servers and I'm still left out! I can't figure this world out...
SCO has won nothing. They have disclosed nothing. They have accomplished nothing. They keep beating their chests and making outlandish statements every time they go a couple days without being in the headlines. But we keep reporting it and acting shocked. Darl McBride and SCO are the corporate equivalent of a kid eating dog poo out of the sand box for attention. Ignore them, they will go away.
"I got really scared. My stomach is all turning," Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.
This is precious, just the kind of screw-up the RIAA didn't need. They sued frickin' Tiny Tim. That's about one degree shy of suing the burlap sack boy. Way to go RIAA, we couldn't buy better press.
My personal opinion is that while ease-of-use is a great thing, the original poster is still correct in saying it's unfortunate that the gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' is growing wider, and snazzy interfaces are partly to blame.
Computers have not changed since their invention, they have bits that they combine into bytes or words and that is how they represent all code and data. While interfaces make things easier to use, they also hide how things work. (Think Oz behind the curtain.) MCSEs today scratch their head when they check a file size in one window and it reads 1MB and in another window it reads 1,048,576 bytes. "What an odd number why on earth would they use such an odd number? Hexadeci-what??!?!" While daily operations are easier with a GUI abstraction layer, if the underlying design never changes then you end up with "dumbed-down" users. When things work as expected it's great, but the second something goes wrong they are completely incapable of handling it.
I've had friends who've bought new computers because TSR's were causing everything to crash. Windows was great at simplifying things such that they didn't need to know what a TSR was, but since the underlying design never changed, they also had absolutely no recourse when a TSR went awry. They had no clue something else was running in the background. Remember the quote, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?
Again, you are making the same mistake the originating author did. You are thinking about things in terms of your present, not the unknown future. You assume robots can replace everything a human does. Well we thought that about factory automation but magically this thing called "information technology" materialized and saved us. Coincidence? Whether it's donkeys or mexicans or robots (sorry for the comparison) when you push jobs further down the value chain those on top invariably move up the chain. People have argued that domestication or globalization or robotics will end all jobs as we know them but mysteriously automation has always done more good than harm, but now I'm expected to believe history is turned on its ear?
The question you have to ask though, is are you replacing the old jobs with better paying new jobs or are you devaluing human capital and reducing real incomes.
Well I think that in a closed system with no other variables the answer has to be "no." Jobs migrate out of the US into Mexico because they are low value and low demand. Whereas in Mexico they are high value and high demand. (I use US and Mexico as examples only, just to illustrate the point.) If these jobs were, in fact, high value then pay would rise, demand would increase, and migration would cease. Simple supply and demand. Now obviously this is simplistic since I think some other factors are involved. I think exclusionary labour policies (like refusing to renew H1B visas or artifically "keeping jobs at home") skew the value model by devaluing things that are in high demand or propping up things that are in low demand. For example, if outsourcing IT jobs to India is more competitive, then these people are in high demand and equivalent workers in the US are in low demand. By using trade barriers to force jobs to stay in the US you prop up the value of something that isn't in demand, inflating the price and becoming uncompetitive. The proper solution is to restore competitiveness or abandon the industry. So that's a roundabout way of saying I think that while in a closed system real incomes don't drop as you scale the value ladder, I think there are some genuinely valuable jobs that are migrating out of the US and you'll see some devaluation of US "human capital" in the next 20 years.
Disclaimer: I know NOTHING about economics so this is my personal opinion, not my educated hypothesis.
I won't quibble over details (like number of years or if computers can ever be "smart" like humans") but the fundamental flaw in his argument is that while he acknowledges technology will continue to mutate and change, he assumes industry and jobs will remain stagnant through 2050. So as robots take over menial jobs nothing is created to take their place. It's like someone saying in the year 1950 "if textiles and commodity manufacturing moves to Mexico and China, then by the year 2000 50% of Americans will be unemployed." Sure, if no other industries are created to replace him. But changes in industry dynamics cause jobs to migrate from one industry to another, not vanish.
Parent is funny but I don't think this is a matter of doom and gloom at all. All the big-name IT companies will continue to support MS alternatives, IBM alone could afford to run Mozilla to secure a great Linux browser that isn't WM-specific. Makers of embedded systems, industry groups, ISPs, all can afford a few bucks to run the foundation and probably are more likely to provide support when there's no partisan link to AOL-TW.
This is another example of a trend in "astronomy" that I'm finding very irritating. From the article:
The color image was created from observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and superposed onto a black-and-white Hubble image of stars in the field.
Didja wonder why the picture looks straight out of "Star Trek"? Were the people who did ST a decade (or two) ahead of their times? Imbued with the ability to imagine realistic astronomical phenomena long before Hubble began to reveal them? Well lesseee... The image is created through "observations" from Hubble, the important part being the fact that they use plural form. So the colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures. The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched, and the stars in the background were added. In addition many of the stars have lens flares which would destroy any scientific value they had which means the lens flares were Photoshopped in afterward! I'm picking on this one example, there have been many "amazing Hubble pics" reported on recently that at best are heavily retouched and at worst border on fabrication. Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? Is this where CNN has taken us? No offense intended to the scientists who are using Hubble to expand our knowledge but I can do without the cheerleaders and P.R. schtick...
Yes even though I picked on mplayer I like it too, some things about it that are better than Media Player:
1. Can FF and RW.ASF files (isn't this a M$ format???) 2. Can step through all AVI files, Media Player can only do some 3. No OS integration
So yes as the original poster I grant you it's nice. But bad things about mplayer:
1. Setup. I am relatively techie and couldn't even get skins working. 2. No generic CODECs, either it's hard-coded or it doesn't work. 3. It's the only thing even remotely usable under Linux! (Okay so this is a benefit of mplayer but a complaint about Linux)
I'm not slagging great free software like mplayer, I'm just saying that the quality and complexity aren't there. Even if mplayer was perfect it's still just a little media player app.
And no flamewar intended, I don't like them either...
Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
<sarcasm> Of course it will! And it's the wealth of commercial-quality software packages that will get it there! Rumba, Photoshop, PageMaker, Framemaker, Flash 6, AutoCAD, MS-Office, Lotus Notes, Cisco VPN client, Acrobat full, Kazaa... These are all cool pieces of software that run better under Linux than Mac. NOT! </sarcasm>
Seriously, Linux is great and all but to compare it to Mac is the height of arrogance. Look at Freshmeat some time. There are six times more projects under Software Development Tools than under Office / Business. There are more damn desktop environments than office projects! 435 text editors and only 66 pieces under Artistic Software. Mplayer is great and all but it still doesn't compare to Media Player. And it's the best there is!
Choice is great and if someone wants to write YATE (Yet Another Text Editor) then go wild. But to suggest Linux will surpass Mac on the desktop within the year? I've never owned a Mac and think that's ludicrous!
Sounds pretty neat to me, after all people have been genetically modifying animals for tens of thousands of years, except the tool has been breeding rather than genetics. It's called domestication. We didn't hear any of these hypocrites moaning about the evils of genetics when they invented Clamato, did we???
First it was a billionaire, then it was a pop star, now it's any tourist with money. Well hell I've got some shiny tin foil I will trade for a ride on the Soyuz.
You want that boy? Sure ya do! Good boy! You want the shiny tin foil? It's worth more than your GDP! Good boy, fetch!
If CNN.com posts one version of a story and dinkyblog.org another one, independently of the actual truth of either story, the CNN version will be considered the truth my most people
You are correct. And therein lies one of the biggest issues with American media. At best CNN is sensationalist eye-candy, at worst it's lies and fear-mongering. The best way to become informed about the world is to stop watching the goddam news.
Of course it's not censorship, I don't think I used that phrase in my post. My point is that web sites should be allowed to post opinions about people and they shouldn't have to pay the cost of bandwidth to host their critics' counter-arguments. The subjects of said opinions should be free to post anything they want in response. There are laws that cover slander and libel and they should be enough, anything you say within the law should be enough. You should not be legally bound to host critical opinions on your dime.
This legislation is really silly. Even if this was ever needed in the past it was because the cost of publishing was a barrier to entry, so if a newspaper slagged you the cost to refute them would be too high to ever get your voice heard. However the beauty of internet is that the cost of entry is almost non-existent. After all, I'm spouting my opinions right here and now and it didn't cost me a penny.
However regardless of the medium I am against anything like this. Declan appropriately quotes the following from a related case tried in the US:
"the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."
Now there's a judge that's got it right. I firmly believe that in order to develop critical thinking you need to be exposed to all sides of an issue, even if many of them are biased or even just wrong. When exposed to multiple views an intelligent person will learn to be critical of what they read and make up their own mind, rather than inherit ideas from others. Thus choice leads to critical thinking and critical thinking negates the need for this type of legislation. This is also why I hold the admittedly unpopular opinion that even some writings classified as "hate" still shouldn't be regulated. These people betray their own ignorance as soon as they open their mouths, it's suppression of their opinions that lend them some sort of inexplicable "mystique." If their views were subject to logical debate in a public forum they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anything that restricts the cacaphony of free speech is a barrier to learning, even when some of the voices are offensive or wrong.
Unless you pay me ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, I, Dr. Evil, will detonate a nuclear weapon at the earth's core... Mwah. Mwah-ha-ha. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Despite the fact that you can't seem to differentiate between a friendly opinion on a web site and a personal attack on you, whoever you are, I will still take the high ground and agree that companies are still all about profit. However don't be so naive as to think that egos aren't a huge factor as companies pursue profit. I work for a Fortune-500 company and have seen multi-billion-dollar mergers scrapped because the respective CEOs wanted to come out the "winner". I've seen Silicon Valley companies ground into dust in a personal vendetta against a competitor. I've seen departments out to crush one another just to beat out an internal competitor. In this instance IBM seems to be taking it personally, and if you think IBM is above crushing a company just to hear the "squish" then not only do you know nothing about corporations, you also know nothing about people. IBM is holding a magnifying glass over SCO on a sunny day. And I sincerely suspect that rather than buy SCO and make them happy, they would rather see them fry in the sun no matter how much it hurts.
And not just that, Gerstner was a "traditional" CEO which is what they needed. Instead of responding to and engaging in the endless personality conflicts and insults that are constantly lobbed around Silicon Valley he basically just shrugged his shoulders and got down to the job of repairing the company and rescuing the stock price. His book is a good read, and the thing I find most interesting is that he didn't have some blinding insight into technology, he just shut his mouth, relied on common sense, and focused on what makes businesses work. It's amazing what a cool head can accomplish.
NanoGator, I think they modded you down because my post quoted the phrase "fear uncertainty and doubt" directly from the IBM press release before I used the acronym FUD. No biggie, we all make mistakes, but thought you might want to know why you got modded down...
Fascinating, I always assumed "FUD" was invented to describe Microsoft tactics but now that you mention it, FUD is a much more accurate description of IBM's tactics in the late-eighties, early-nineties. To coin an old phrase "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Fortunately they have learned a lot from the early-90's crash and although I'm still sure their only motivation is still profit, you have to admit that when you think "FUD" in 2003 it doesn't bring IBM to mind anymore.
SCO has made public statements and accusations about IBM's Unix license and about Linux in an apparent attempt to create fear uncertainty and doubt
I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements since they know it means nothing to the mainstream press but it gets the Linux community all fired up. As petty and transparent as it is, IBM's press announcement can be roughly tranlated as "hey geeks, didja hear that? SCO called Captain Kirk a wimp, you feeling riled?" Well, riled we are...
The second paragraph: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated" is nothing but pissing on SCO's shoes. Beautiful, I can't suppress a beaming smile.
Ok, IANALBIJTTO (I am not a lawyer, but I just talked to one) about this
Well thank God we've got a genuine IANALBIJTTO insight into this case. After all SCO and IBM barely know how to spell L-A-W-Y-E-R, neither have actually hired any. If you hadn't run this by a buddy while you were trimming the hedges we'd still be muddling through this mess. Fortunately the judge in this case will likely read about your neighbour's opinion and make a summary dismissal. Thanks for running this by a lawyer friend, I think we've achieved real closure here!
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, it's still unacceptable that such things happens in the most powerful country in the world.
What, Canada? Don't say such things, we're really very shy.
The government owns it and some laws do protect the costumer.
Wow that's some country, laws to protect costumers no less. What about mimes and jugglers?
When I arrived in the USA I was shocked by the poor quality of your electric system
Well, you're definitely French, I'll grant ya that.
Fifteen years ago all the cool kids would make fun of me and call me a computer geek and never pick me for the baseball team and stuff. Now all the cool geeks are going off forming gangs and taking down servers and I'm still left out! I can't figure this world out...
SCO has won nothing. They have disclosed nothing. They have accomplished nothing. They keep beating their chests and making outlandish statements every time they go a couple days without being in the headlines. But we keep reporting it and acting shocked. Darl McBride and SCO are the corporate equivalent of a kid eating dog poo out of the sand box for attention. Ignore them, they will go away.
"I got really scared. My stomach is all turning," Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.
This is precious, just the kind of screw-up the RIAA didn't need. They sued frickin' Tiny Tim. That's about one degree shy of suing the burlap sack boy. Way to go RIAA, we couldn't buy better press.
My personal opinion is that while ease-of-use is a great thing, the original poster is still correct in saying it's unfortunate that the gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' is growing wider, and snazzy interfaces are partly to blame.
Computers have not changed since their invention, they have bits that they combine into bytes or words and that is how they represent all code and data. While interfaces make things easier to use, they also hide how things work. (Think Oz behind the curtain.) MCSEs today scratch their head when they check a file size in one window and it reads 1MB and in another window it reads 1,048,576 bytes. "What an odd number why on earth would they use such an odd number? Hexadeci-what??!?!" While daily operations are easier with a GUI abstraction layer, if the underlying design never changes then you end up with "dumbed-down" users. When things work as expected it's great, but the second something goes wrong they are completely incapable of handling it.
I've had friends who've bought new computers because TSR's were causing everything to crash. Windows was great at simplifying things such that they didn't need to know what a TSR was, but since the underlying design never changed, they also had absolutely no recourse when a TSR went awry. They had no clue something else was running in the background. Remember the quote, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?
Again, you are making the same mistake the originating author did. You are thinking about things in terms of your present, not the unknown future. You assume robots can replace everything a human does. Well we thought that about factory automation but magically this thing called "information technology" materialized and saved us. Coincidence? Whether it's donkeys or mexicans or robots (sorry for the comparison) when you push jobs further down the value chain those on top invariably move up the chain. People have argued that domestication or globalization or robotics will end all jobs as we know them but mysteriously automation has always done more good than harm, but now I'm expected to believe history is turned on its ear?
The question you have to ask though, is are you replacing the old jobs with better paying new jobs or are you devaluing human capital and reducing real incomes.
Well I think that in a closed system with no other variables the answer has to be "no." Jobs migrate out of the US into Mexico because they are low value and low demand. Whereas in Mexico they are high value and high demand. (I use US and Mexico as examples only, just to illustrate the point.) If these jobs were, in fact, high value then pay would rise, demand would increase, and migration would cease. Simple supply and demand. Now obviously this is simplistic since I think some other factors are involved. I think exclusionary labour policies (like refusing to renew H1B visas or artifically "keeping jobs at home") skew the value model by devaluing things that are in high demand or propping up things that are in low demand. For example, if outsourcing IT jobs to India is more competitive, then these people are in high demand and equivalent workers in the US are in low demand. By using trade barriers to force jobs to stay in the US you prop up the value of something that isn't in demand, inflating the price and becoming uncompetitive. The proper solution is to restore competitiveness or abandon the industry. So that's a roundabout way of saying I think that while in a closed system real incomes don't drop as you scale the value ladder, I think there are some genuinely valuable jobs that are migrating out of the US and you'll see some devaluation of US "human capital" in the next 20 years.
Disclaimer: I know NOTHING about economics so this is my personal opinion, not my educated hypothesis.
I won't quibble over details (like number of years or if computers can ever be "smart" like humans") but the fundamental flaw in his argument is that while he acknowledges technology will continue to mutate and change, he assumes industry and jobs will remain stagnant through 2050. So as robots take over menial jobs nothing is created to take their place. It's like someone saying in the year 1950 "if textiles and commodity manufacturing moves to Mexico and China, then by the year 2000 50% of Americans will be unemployed." Sure, if no other industries are created to replace him. But changes in industry dynamics cause jobs to migrate from one industry to another, not vanish.
Parent is funny but I don't think this is a matter of doom and gloom at all. All the big-name IT companies will continue to support MS alternatives, IBM alone could afford to run Mozilla to secure a great Linux browser that isn't WM-specific. Makers of embedded systems, industry groups, ISPs, all can afford a few bucks to run the foundation and probably are more likely to provide support when there's no partisan link to AOL-TW.
This is another example of a trend in "astronomy" that I'm finding very irritating. From the article:
The color image was created from observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and superposed onto a black-and-white Hubble image of stars in the field.
Didja wonder why the picture looks straight out of "Star Trek"? Were the people who did ST a decade (or two) ahead of their times? Imbued with the ability to imagine realistic astronomical phenomena long before Hubble began to reveal them? Well lesseee... The image is created through "observations" from Hubble, the important part being the fact that they use plural form. So the colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures. The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched, and the stars in the background were added. In addition many of the stars have lens flares which would destroy any scientific value they had which means the lens flares were Photoshopped in afterward! I'm picking on this one example, there have been many "amazing Hubble pics" reported on recently that at best are heavily retouched and at worst border on fabrication. Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? Is this where CNN has taken us? No offense intended to the scientists who are using Hubble to expand our knowledge but I can do without the cheerleaders and P.R. schtick...
Yes even though I picked on mplayer I like it too, some things about it that are better than Media Player:
.ASF files (isn't this a M$ format???)
1. Can FF and RW
2. Can step through all AVI files, Media Player can only do some
3. No OS integration
So yes as the original poster I grant you it's nice. But bad things about mplayer:
1. Setup. I am relatively techie and couldn't even get skins working.
2. No generic CODECs, either it's hard-coded or it doesn't work.
3. It's the only thing even remotely usable under Linux! (Okay so this is a benefit of mplayer but a complaint about Linux)
I'm not slagging great free software like mplayer, I'm just saying that the quality and complexity aren't there. Even if mplayer was perfect it's still just a little media player app.
And no flamewar intended, I don't like them either...
Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?
<sarcasm>
Of course it will! And it's the wealth of commercial-quality software packages that will get it there! Rumba, Photoshop, PageMaker, Framemaker, Flash 6, AutoCAD, MS-Office, Lotus Notes, Cisco VPN client, Acrobat full, Kazaa... These are all cool pieces of software that run better under Linux than Mac. NOT!
</sarcasm>
Seriously, Linux is great and all but to compare it to Mac is the height of arrogance. Look at Freshmeat some time. There are six times more projects under Software Development Tools than under Office / Business. There are more damn desktop environments than office projects! 435 text editors and only 66 pieces under Artistic Software. Mplayer is great and all but it still doesn't compare to Media Player. And it's the best there is!
Choice is great and if someone wants to write YATE (Yet Another Text Editor) then go wild. But to suggest Linux will surpass Mac on the desktop within the year? I've never owned a Mac and think that's ludicrous!
Sounds pretty neat to me, after all people have been genetically modifying animals for tens of thousands of years, except the tool has been breeding rather than genetics. It's called domestication. We didn't hear any of these hypocrites moaning about the evils of genetics when they invented Clamato, did we???
First it was a billionaire, then it was a pop star, now it's any tourist with money. Well hell I've got some shiny tin foil I will trade for a ride on the Soyuz.
You want that boy? Sure ya do! Good boy! You want the shiny tin foil? It's worth more than your GDP! Good boy, fetch!
This isn't going to affect Swedish porn is it?
Dunno, could undoing a bra stap be considered a circumvention technique?
If CNN.com posts one version of a story and dinkyblog.org another one, independently of the actual truth of either story, the CNN version will be considered the truth my most people
You are correct. And therein lies one of the biggest issues with American media. At best CNN is sensationalist eye-candy, at worst it's lies and fear-mongering. The best way to become informed about the world is to stop watching the goddam news.
Of course it's not censorship, I don't think I used that phrase in my post. My point is that web sites should be allowed to post opinions about people and they shouldn't have to pay the cost of bandwidth to host their critics' counter-arguments. The subjects of said opinions should be free to post anything they want in response. There are laws that cover slander and libel and they should be enough, anything you say within the law should be enough. You should not be legally bound to host critical opinions on your dime.
This legislation is really silly. Even if this was ever needed in the past it was because the cost of publishing was a barrier to entry, so if a newspaper slagged you the cost to refute them would be too high to ever get your voice heard. However the beauty of internet is that the cost of entry is almost non-existent. After all, I'm spouting my opinions right here and now and it didn't cost me a penny.
However regardless of the medium I am against anything like this. Declan appropriately quotes the following from a related case tried in the US:
"the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."
Now there's a judge that's got it right. I firmly believe that in order to develop critical thinking you need to be exposed to all sides of an issue, even if many of them are biased or even just wrong. When exposed to multiple views an intelligent person will learn to be critical of what they read and make up their own mind, rather than inherit ideas from others. Thus choice leads to critical thinking and critical thinking negates the need for this type of legislation. This is also why I hold the admittedly unpopular opinion that even some writings classified as "hate" still shouldn't be regulated. These people betray their own ignorance as soon as they open their mouths, it's suppression of their opinions that lend them some sort of inexplicable "mystique." If their views were subject to logical debate in a public forum they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Anything that restricts the cacaphony of free speech is a barrier to learning, even when some of the voices are offensive or wrong.
Unless you pay me ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, I, Dr. Evil, will detonate a nuclear weapon at the earth's core... Mwah. Mwah-ha-ha. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Release the bass...
Despite the fact that you can't seem to differentiate between a friendly opinion on a web site and a personal attack on you, whoever you are, I will still take the high ground and agree that companies are still all about profit. However don't be so naive as to think that egos aren't a huge factor as companies pursue profit. I work for a Fortune-500 company and have seen multi-billion-dollar mergers scrapped because the respective CEOs wanted to come out the "winner". I've seen Silicon Valley companies ground into dust in a personal vendetta against a competitor. I've seen departments out to crush one another just to beat out an internal competitor. In this instance IBM seems to be taking it personally, and if you think IBM is above crushing a company just to hear the "squish" then not only do you know nothing about corporations, you also know nothing about people. IBM is holding a magnifying glass over SCO on a sunny day. And I sincerely suspect that rather than buy SCO and make them happy, they would rather see them fry in the sun no matter how much it hurts.
And not just that, Gerstner was a "traditional" CEO which is what they needed. Instead of responding to and engaging in the endless personality conflicts and insults that are constantly lobbed around Silicon Valley he basically just shrugged his shoulders and got down to the job of repairing the company and rescuing the stock price. His book is a good read, and the thing I find most interesting is that he didn't have some blinding insight into technology, he just shut his mouth, relied on common sense, and focused on what makes businesses work. It's amazing what a cool head can accomplish.
NanoGator, I think they modded you down because my post quoted the phrase "fear uncertainty and doubt" directly from the IBM press release before I used the acronym FUD. No biggie, we all make mistakes, but thought you might want to know why you got modded down...
Fascinating, I always assumed "FUD" was invented to describe Microsoft tactics but now that you mention it, FUD is a much more accurate description of IBM's tactics in the late-eighties, early-nineties. To coin an old phrase "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Fortunately they have learned a lot from the early-90's crash and although I'm still sure their only motivation is still profit, you have to admit that when you think "FUD" in 2003 it doesn't bring IBM to mind anymore.
SCO has made public statements and accusations about IBM's Unix license and about Linux in an apparent attempt to create fear uncertainty and doubt
I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements since they know it means nothing to the mainstream press but it gets the Linux community all fired up. As petty and transparent as it is, IBM's press announcement can be roughly tranlated as "hey geeks, didja hear that? SCO called Captain Kirk a wimp, you feeling riled?" Well, riled we are...
The second paragraph: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated" is nothing but pissing on SCO's shoes. Beautiful, I can't suppress a beaming smile.
Ok, IANALBIJTTO (I am not a lawyer, but I just talked to one) about this
Well thank God we've got a genuine IANALBIJTTO insight into this case. After all SCO and IBM barely know how to spell L-A-W-Y-E-R, neither have actually hired any. If you hadn't run this by a buddy while you were trimming the hedges we'd still be muddling through this mess. Fortunately the judge in this case will likely read about your neighbour's opinion and make a summary dismissal. Thanks for running this by a lawyer friend, I think we've achieved real closure here!