is, IMO a very aggressive technique, and one which I believe they have been forced to back off from.
In general, people call things "brands" which aren't brands. The classic example of a brand is Harley-Davidson -- people are prepared to pay extra for what is, objectively considered, an inferior motorcycle, because it is a Harley Davidson.
Are people prepared to pay more for books, because they come from Amazon? If not, then how can they justify capitalising marketing expenditure? Marketing a "brand" which does not command a brand premium may be a sensible thing to do, but it's not creating anything which is separable from the business as a whole; ie, I believe that Amazon are misleadingly flattering the P&L by bringing internally created goodwill onto the balance sheet.
With respect, bullshit. If they sent in a video person, that person a) would only be able to report on what he saw and b) would have the hashed up Microsoft technology presented to him as a "neat hack" which they were using as a development platform to create their new technology. Or something. The point is that a good conman can make night seem like day, and "tech people" have no magical insight which renders them immune to a snow job. Remember cold fusion? Remember Xanadu? Remember Heaven's Gate? It certainly seems as if there was a core of digital video technology in this company, which, with good presentation, could have been built up into something which would have got through this mystical "tech person"'s screens. Or are you claiming that tech people aren't prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to things that don't currently work, but seem like they might? In which case, you have to account for the popularity of Berlin and HURD.
In any case, it wouldn't take a "video person" to see that this company was a crock; any basic credit check on the founder would have done. If you'd sent in a video person who was as dilligent and intelligent as the investment bankers who did dude diligence on the company, he'd have fucked it up just as badly.
Well, thank you very much for your Yaqui wisdom, oh "Aztlan". Perhaps, as a Wall Street veteran of seven years' black-letter corporate law, you will allow me to respond. I think I speak on behalf of my profession.
Being of Portugese extraction myself, you will understand how much sympathy I have with your plight as a Spaniard -- fuck all.
Let me put it this way; lawsuits are decided on the basis, of which side has the best lawyers. Of course they are. What, did you want them to be decided on the basis of who has the worst fucken lawyers? If that were the way, I can see that the legal lions of Wall Street and Boston would be beating a path to Silicon Valley, for constant observation of Slashdot reveals to me that there is no fucken idiot like a fucken Slashbot. With morons like you guys onside, it would be impossible to lose
But sadly, the fucken race does indeed go to the fucken swift, the battle goes to the strong, and indeed, the ass-kicking contest does not go to the one-legged guy. The laws have been written, by lawyers, for the convenience of lawyers, to allow a minimal modicum of structure for the real business of law -- that of sticking your fucken teeth into the other guy's ass, and biting till the blood runs brown. All the technological shit is just for the picadores and bandilleros to clear the field, so that the matador (the litigator, that's to rhyme with alligator putamadre) can come out and do his stuff
Or indeed, so that the big bad fucken Portugese bull cna come out and trample the pissy little Spanish motherfucker's dick into a necktie.
Such inventions as digital signatures are merely part of this process, by which people who would most certainly be chewed up lip to clitoris in a real man's law court, are encouraged not to enter litigation. Digital signatures are no burden to we lawyers; I don't think even the Slashdot crowd would seriously try to argue against the proposition that the graduating class of Harvard Law School each year represents the cream of the nation's intellect. A half-decent lawyer can understand such arcane trivia as "TCP" "Shell Scripts", "Asymmetric cryptography" and "Linux" over a monring cup of coffee, while reviewing case notes and cruelly dumping a bawling girlfriend, if the case demands it (don't argue with me, I've fucken done it.) THese intellectual feats are par for the course, if you wanna hang in the courtroom. Law is for the lawyers, and the more comlicated it is, the fucken better, because that way, only highly paid specialists will be able to practice it.
My point, as should by now be abundantly clear, is this; fuck you all.
ESR's positions on corporate boards only tell us that he is a high-profile person who is good at managing his own publicity (which we knew anyway). In my experience, speaking as a suit, Eric Raymond is regarded as a nut, and an arrogant, self-important nut to boot. He has no understanding of the realities of business (nobody who has studied "The Catherdral and the Bazaar" in any depth takes it at all seriously), and his constant libertarian rhetoric is tedious. Furthermore, he exalts the role of code-monkeys at the expense of the corporate planners, financiers, bankers and, yes, lawyers who really made the Internet happen.
Obviously the legal status of the GPL is a prime issue to the Open Source and Free Software communities. "
Shurely not? Obviously, the GPL is a prime issue to the Free Software Foundation. Equally obviously, the Open Source "movement", or "tribe", or whatever the amateur anthropolgist ESR has decided to call it this week, couldn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. So long as there are BSD, PAL, public domain, and similar licences, they couldn't give a damn whether or not large applications are "embraced and extended" into the proprietary domain.
As ESR will explain to anyone who sits still for long enough, in loathsome Randian detail, this would just be a case of the heroic capitalists of the market following the logic of A equals A to the virtue of selfishness. He'd never dream of litigating anything against the capitalist heroes who have made him "quite a rich man once the smoke from the Linux IPOs has died down" (can anyone say "uncle Tom", massa?) The only kind of "free" the "Open Source Movement" interested in is not as in "speech", or as in "beer", but more like in "freedom grows out of the barrel of a gun" -- ie, if you're not an educated, property owning white male, you shouldn't expect anyone to look after you and you're basically fucked.
In conclusion, fuck Eric Raymond, and fuck the horse he rode in on. Starting with the horse. And if he writes another dull whiny tract about how hard his life is as a self-appointed spokesman, fuck him again. Until he learns to like it, you know, from behind.
If YANAL, you will remain NAFL after reading this. The use of the word "Journal" is completely fucken pretentious for what is most definitely a newsletter -- I counted no academic contributors, plus damnably few citations of statute or case law. This is not a serious legal journal -- it's aimed at the non-legal community, to allow law firms to tout for business. Clearly it has to make its own reputation, but its starting credibility with me is low.
I have no axe to grind in these matters, except to point out that if Raymond continues to claim on his website that he is an "anthropologist", then he is practising anthropology without a license, and loses the right to complain to the world about who is and isn't entitled to call himself a "hacker"
Stop the presses! In a story today on Slashdot, a Slashdot employee compared Slashdot with other media and concluded that Slashdot was best!!!
Strangely, the stock price of andover.net failed to react to this ringing endorsement of Slashdot by Slashdot.
Jon, the fact that/. editors get their news from "Open" media means damn-all, because where do these places get their information from? By and large, "Closed" media. How many links do you get from Slashdot to the New York Times in a typical week? And how many going the other way? To me, that says that people still want to know that their media is coming from actual journalists, with fact-checkers, standards, and all the other desperately "OLD" standards that stop, to take a wild example, stories about GNOME and KDE being integrated from being posted while they're about a quarter baked.
Hrrrm.... it's an electronic circuit.... it's a Universal Turing Machine.... it isn't like a human brain.... next dull Reuters story, please, nurse, I can still feel my legs....
no, "thank you" was the trademark of the dumb marketing guy, not the dumb consultant. osm occasionally uses "thank you", but if you need a trademark to recognise his style, you're mad. gnarphlager says "thankyougoodnight", and I say "fucken" a lot.
Ummmm... me and my frat buddies were wondering if you could, like tell us where the cool places are round here? Errrr.... maybe introduce us to a few friendly young ladies? We've got money....
It's true! Read the attached article and you'll see that credit is given where it's due -- without the constant pressure of trolls attacking both KDE and Gnome, this project would never have come about. Recognition should be given to this crucial part of the Open Source Model -- after all, if the aim is to "scratch your own itch", then fleas are an important part of the process. Or as the immortal blind bard put it
But surely, if GNOME merges with KDE, then it also merges with all of KDE's licensing problems, and Debian won't be able to use it. That leaves the only 100% Stallman-pure Free Distribution without a GUI. For some reason, I think that would suck.
Re:Diversion from the main task/ counterproductive
on
Terminus Demo Released
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· Score: 1
I assume this is meant to be sarcastic and should be read as such.
No, it wasn't -- are you so bruised by mass culture that you're incapable of taking anything at face value?
A core gaming community is an important foundation for any OS.
The lack of one doesn't seem to have done Unix any harm.
Early Apple made the mistake of ignoring games in favor of "productivity apps".
Apple survives to this day as an extremely profitable company; what's your point?
There is absolutely *no* "damage" that an OS can suffer if its core community promotes and evangelizes games.
Killed off the Amiga, I seem to recall
Dude, if you work in place where the mere existence of games threatens acceptance of the OS, then it's time to get a new f*$king job.
I don't like computer games. I don't think that corporate computers should have computer games. Unlike you, I don't think that there is any "right" to install games on somebody else's property.
Oh I see, you're absolutely right. But "marche ouverte" (applicable to intellectual as well as physical property) would ensure that if the programmer did then distribute the application, then future users would not have their rights under the original licence compromised and (so long as they could trace back ownership to the original violation, and remained reasonably and non-recklessly unaware of the violation) could treat the GPL elements as if they were non-GPL. It's the one loophole in GPL, and it has to be there, because the only way to close it would be to bring in legal concepts more restrictive and less robust than simple copyright, which Stallman & LEssig considered a nondesideratum.
No, but the point is that even a non-compatible license is only non-compatible with software that is licensed under the GPL. Since it's impossible to give away rights which are reserved under the terms of another license, all that this means is that the GPL is not binding in this case; ie when it conflicts with a pre-existing, non-compatible license that the original licensor wishes to maintain. Stallman had a good essay on the subject called "What does it mean to 'license' software"?, in one of the pop law mags. I guess that it will be on the website
The very simple reason is that, just saying that something is GPL'd doesn't mean that it is GPL'd. If, for example, you take something with a license which allows the distribution of proprietary modified versions, and then add some GPL'd code to it, the whole thing does not thereby become GPL'd -- because if it did, you would have been in the position of taking away rights which were not yours to take away. In fact, in this case, the only person who would have been breaking the law would be you, for mixing GPL'd and non-GPL'd code.
the stupidest and most evil thing
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Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
that Mattel have done is to suffer the existence of a product whose name ("Brodcast") a) is a lousy pun and b) only makes sense if you mispronounce the name of the parent company, which has a Scandinavian o-slash rather than an o. People like this should be repeatedly beaten about the body with barbed wire whips.
That script should correctly be called the "Lars-o-Gmatic", recognising the fundamental contribution of Richard Stallman in dying for our sins, and I'll thank you to use the correct name. I am releasing it under a license of my own invention available at my ftp site. I'm also porting it all to PHP (after adding my stunning contribution of s/we/we, by which I mean the band and the management, who are like part of the band/g ), and suing anybody who attempts to run it under Red Hat, whose licence I have ideological disagreements with. You can discuss these changes in IRC if you like, on #larsogmatic, but I frankly doubt you, or anyone else for that matter, will be staying on that channel for very long
And our mascot is an ickle teeny pixie with an "I Luv Jesus" badge.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, people call things "brands" which aren't brands. The classic example of a brand is Harley-Davidson -- people are prepared to pay extra for what is, objectively considered, an inferior motorcycle, because it is a Harley Davidson.
Are people prepared to pay more for books, because they come from Amazon? If not, then how can they justify capitalising marketing expenditure? Marketing a "brand" which does not command a brand premium may be a sensible thing to do, but it's not creating anything which is separable from the business as a whole; ie, I believe that Amazon are misleadingly flattering the P&L by bringing internally created goodwill onto the balance sheet.
In any case, it wouldn't take a "video person" to see that this company was a crock; any basic credit check on the founder would have done. If you'd sent in a video person who was as dilligent and intelligent as the investment bankers who did dude diligence on the company, he'd have fucked it up just as badly.
Being of Portugese extraction myself, you will understand how much sympathy I have with your plight as a Spaniard -- fuck all.
Let me put it this way; lawsuits are decided on the basis, of which side has the best lawyers. Of course they are. What, did you want them to be decided on the basis of who has the worst fucken lawyers? If that were the way, I can see that the legal lions of Wall Street and Boston would be beating a path to Silicon Valley, for constant observation of Slashdot reveals to me that there is no fucken idiot like a fucken Slashbot. With morons like you guys onside, it would be impossible to lose
But sadly, the fucken race does indeed go to the fucken swift, the battle goes to the strong, and indeed, the ass-kicking contest does not go to the one-legged guy. The laws have been written, by lawyers, for the convenience of lawyers, to allow a minimal modicum of structure for the real business of law -- that of sticking your fucken teeth into the other guy's ass, and biting till the blood runs brown. All the technological shit is just for the picadores and bandilleros to clear the field, so that the matador (the litigator, that's to rhyme with alligator putamadre) can come out and do his stuff
Or indeed, so that the big bad fucken Portugese bull cna come out and trample the pissy little Spanish motherfucker's dick into a necktie.
Such inventions as digital signatures are merely part of this process, by which people who would most certainly be chewed up lip to clitoris in a real man's law court, are encouraged not to enter litigation. Digital signatures are no burden to we lawyers; I don't think even the Slashdot crowd would seriously try to argue against the proposition that the graduating class of Harvard Law School each year represents the cream of the nation's intellect. A half-decent lawyer can understand such arcane trivia as "TCP" "Shell Scripts", "Asymmetric cryptography" and "Linux" over a monring cup of coffee, while reviewing case notes and cruelly dumping a bawling girlfriend, if the case demands it (don't argue with me, I've fucken done it.) THese intellectual feats are par for the course, if you wanna hang in the courtroom. Law is for the lawyers, and the more comlicated it is, the fucken better, because that way, only highly paid specialists will be able to practice it.
My point, as should by now be abundantly clear, is this; fuck you all.
Well, I'm personally not homosexual, and I don't want to either own guns or burn the US flag, so I don't give a fuck.
What is your source for this assertion?
+100 points if it was a "suit".
0 points if it was a "hacker"
-100 points if it was ESR.
ESR's positions on corporate boards only tell us that he is a high-profile person who is good at managing his own publicity (which we knew anyway). In my experience, speaking as a suit, Eric Raymond is regarded as a nut, and an arrogant, self-important nut to boot. He has no understanding of the realities of business (nobody who has studied "The Catherdral and the Bazaar" in any depth takes it at all seriously), and his constant libertarian rhetoric is tedious. Furthermore, he exalts the role of code-monkeys at the expense of the corporate planners, financiers, bankers and, yes, lawyers who really made the Internet happen.
Yeah, it goes like this: "Winners keepers, losers weepers".
--montoya
Shurely not? Obviously, the GPL is a prime issue to the Free Software Foundation. Equally obviously, the Open Source "movement", or "tribe", or whatever the amateur anthropolgist ESR has decided to call it this week, couldn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. So long as there are BSD, PAL, public domain, and similar licences, they couldn't give a damn whether or not large applications are "embraced and extended" into the proprietary domain.
As ESR will explain to anyone who sits still for long enough, in loathsome Randian detail, this would just be a case of the heroic capitalists of the market following the logic of A equals A to the virtue of selfishness. He'd never dream of litigating anything against the capitalist heroes who have made him "quite a rich man once the smoke from the Linux IPOs has died down" (can anyone say "uncle Tom", massa?) The only kind of "free" the "Open Source Movement" interested in is not as in "speech", or as in "beer", but more like in "freedom grows out of the barrel of a gun" -- ie, if you're not an educated, property owning white male, you shouldn't expect anyone to look after you and you're basically fucked.
In conclusion, fuck Eric Raymond, and fuck the horse he rode in on. Starting with the horse. And if he writes another dull whiny tract about how hard his life is as a self-appointed spokesman, fuck him again. Until he learns to like it, you know, from behind.
--he's profane, but he's wise, he's streetlawyer
If YANAL, you will remain NAFL after reading this. The use of the word "Journal" is completely fucken pretentious for what is most definitely a newsletter -- I counted no academic contributors, plus damnably few citations of statute or case law. This is not a serious legal journal -- it's aimed at the non-legal community, to allow law firms to tout for business. Clearly it has to make its own reputation, but its starting credibility with me is low.
Apparently so.
And his poetry is shit
And his "Funny Fan Mail" isn't funny.
Don't you mean "GNU/Linux"? After all, if you're going to be a pedantic prick, why be a pedantic prick about only one thing?
Strangely, the stock price of andover.net failed to react to this ringing endorsement of Slashdot by Slashdot.
Jon, the fact that /. editors get their news from "Open" media means damn-all, because where do these places get their information from? By and large, "Closed" media. How many links do you get from Slashdot to the New York Times in a typical week? And how many going the other way? To me, that says that people still want to know that their media is coming from actual journalists, with fact-checkers, standards, and all the other desperately "OLD" standards that stop, to take a wild example, stories about GNOME and KDE being integrated from being posted while they're about a quarter baked.
Anyone who thinks that the human brain is a Turing Machine cannot consistently believe this sentence to be true.
Hrrrm .... it's an electronic circuit .... it's a Universal Turing Machine .... it isn't like a human brain .... next dull Reuters story, please, nurse, I can still feel my legs ....
Oh yeh, and I suppose that if somebody handed you a brand new Ferrari Dino with the bonnet welded shut you'd be happy about that too.
no, "thank you" was the trademark of the dumb marketing guy, not the dumb consultant. osm occasionally uses "thank you", but if you need a trademark to recognise his style, you're mad. gnarphlager says "thankyougoodnight", and I say "fucken" a lot.
Ummmm ... me and my frat buddies were wondering if you could, like tell us where the cool places are round here? Errrr .... maybe introduce us to a few friendly young ladies? We've got money ....
But surely, if GNOME merges with KDE, then it also merges with all of KDE's licensing problems, and Debian won't be able to use it. That leaves the only 100% Stallman-pure Free Distribution without a GUI. For some reason, I think that would suck.
No, it wasn't -- are you so bruised by mass culture that you're incapable of taking anything at face value?
A core gaming community is an important foundation for any OS.
The lack of one doesn't seem to have done Unix any harm.
Early Apple made the mistake of ignoring games in favor of "productivity apps".
Apple survives to this day as an extremely profitable company; what's your point?
There is absolutely *no* "damage" that an OS can suffer if its core community promotes and evangelizes games.
Killed off the Amiga, I seem to recall
Dude, if you work in place where the mere existence of games threatens acceptance of the OS, then it's time to get a new f*$king job.
I don't like computer games. I don't think that corporate computers should have computer games. Unlike you, I don't think that there is any "right" to install games on somebody else's property.
Oh I see, you're absolutely right. But "marche ouverte" (applicable to intellectual as well as physical property) would ensure that if the programmer did then distribute the application, then future users would not have their rights under the original licence compromised and (so long as they could trace back ownership to the original violation, and remained reasonably and non-recklessly unaware of the violation) could treat the GPL elements as if they were non-GPL. It's the one loophole in GPL, and it has to be there, because the only way to close it would be to bring in legal concepts more restrictive and less robust than simple copyright, which Stallman & LEssig considered a nondesideratum.
No, but the point is that even a non-compatible license is only non-compatible with software that is licensed under the GPL. Since it's impossible to give away rights which are reserved under the terms of another license, all that this means is that the GPL is not binding in this case; ie when it conflicts with a pre-existing, non-compatible license that the original licensor wishes to maintain. Stallman had a good essay on the subject called "What does it mean to 'license' software"?, in one of the pop law mags. I guess that it will be on the website
The very simple reason is that, just saying that something is GPL'd doesn't mean that it is GPL'd. If, for example, you take something with a license which allows the distribution of proprietary modified versions, and then add some GPL'd code to it, the whole thing does not thereby become GPL'd -- because if it did, you would have been in the position of taking away rights which were not yours to take away. In fact, in this case, the only person who would have been breaking the law would be you, for mixing GPL'd and non-GPL'd code.
that Mattel have done is to suffer the existence of a product whose name ("Brodcast") a) is a lousy pun and b) only makes sense if you mispronounce the name of the parent company, which has a Scandinavian o-slash rather than an o. People like this should be repeatedly beaten about the body with barbed wire whips.
And our mascot is an ickle teeny pixie with an "I Luv Jesus" badge.