First: I think you people need to read the yahoo policy before you go off. Yahoo is not claiming ownership. They are claiming broad rights to use works posted to their site (too broad, I would argue, but not motivated by malice)
Second: When did Slashdotters become so proprietary about IP?
I do not dispute that the new agreement is unacceptable and odious, but I don't think it is motiviated by malice. It may well be underlayed with laziness though.
Their lawyers's aren't stupid and they almost certainly saying a lot of what they should have said in order to come up with an enforcable agreement. The more clauses they insterted the greater their vulnerability in the courts.
Unfortunately, their management should have realized that such a conservative approach wouldn't cut it. They have risked alienating their contributors instead of taking a risk in a lawsuit. Their business would probably be better off if they tried the latter. This frontier of copyright law needs homesteaders!
First: This does not mean that "... anyone who has a page on Geocities no longer has the rights to what they have created. "
It grants yahoo a perpetual, transferable & non-exclusive, sublicensable right to the content. This does not mean that the original author is not free to use or sell their content, though it means that in theory, yahoo, or one of their partners could sell the content themselves.
Second: Yahoo maintains that their intent is not to deprive authors of their rights, but rather to avoid lawsuits in the future. I am inclined to believe them and I think others should take them at their word as well.
This is not to say that people shouldn't complain vociferously to Yahoo about this new policy. It is sufficiently broad that it leaves the door open to future abuse and it needs amendmant.
Unfortunatly, even if they want to do the right thing, there is a long road ahead. This verbiage exists because current copyright conventions are not a good fit for the modern age.
The latest revision of the copyright conventions was supposed to take into account the realities of this modern age, but it is clearly a failure. It may or may not represent the interests of large copyright holders. It clearly fails to represent the interests of small copyright holders and the publising industry that has sprung up around them.
So, instead of antagonizing Yahoo, and their ilk, treat them as allies. They have the resources & economic interest to make a positive change.
Some people are objecting to the foolishness of people who sent these flames using real, traceable e-mail address. I think they are missing an important point:
Don't be a jerk & don't abuse the anonymity offered by various forums on the Internet to say things in a way that you would be ashamed to say in Real Life.
Anonymity is an important tool. It allows people to say things that should be said with less personal risk, but abusing it weakens its value for everyone. Every jerk who spews sub-articulate hate through an anonymous channel undermines cogent criticisms arriving by any means.
Anonymity should not be a license to act irresponsibly.
I would also suggest that you don't abuse the anonymity offered by various forums on the Internet to say things in a way that you would be ashamed to in Real Life.
Anonymity is an important tool. It allows people to say things that should be said without reprecussions, but abusing it weakens its value for everyone. Every jerk who spews sub-articulate hate through an anonymous channel undermines cogent criticisms arriving by any means.
Companies buy other companies for lots of reasons. Diversifying their product line is only part of the reason.
Companies often buy other companies to take control of their destiny. They may buy a competitor to gain more market share, and with market share, greater ability to steer the market with respect to pricing and product cycles.
They may buy a customer to gain more influence on the consumer side of their market. I think this is the case with S3. Diamond is probably one of their biggest customers. Diamond is on shakey ground financially, and if they flounder it would be very bad for S3.
Buying a customer has other advantages as well. If your customer happens to be a big customer of one of your competitors as well you can buy them and close off one of your competitors major distribution channels.
This can adversely effect your competitors cashflow for some period of time and allow you to gain the upper hand. A position you might exploit in the future by buying up the weakened competitor.
I don't know if copper cloth with cut it, but reatively thin sheet metal should do it. This is what they use for a lot of plastic cased PCs Make sure that the sheets are well sealed and are electically contiguous.
I hate US west as much as the next guy, but your AT&T/TCI lovefest is a bit premature.
1. As any AT&T data customer can tell you, their customer service is abysmal. Lies go down, tickets are opened, vice presidents are written, no explanation ever comes.
2. AT&T is quite happy to demand access to other people's cable pants, but they bitch and moan and throw a fit when people want access to theirs. Fair is fair.
3. TCIs customer service is even worse than AT&Ts.
4. Forcing people to provide access to their infrastructure at competitive rates can work rather well for the consumer. If we had to rely on USwest for DSL in seattle we would be getting nowhere fast. Fortunatly, Covad can rent copper from USwest and hook it to their own network. The result: When US west was promising 3 month install times, covad was doing in three weeks. USwest is feeling the competition too. Their install times have dropped and they just cut their prices by $20. This from a company who has been trying to jack up the price on ISDN for years.
2. MaBell was assembled from various regional companies before they were broken up in the 80s.
3. I didn't think that Qwest actually bought the rail lines outright, I thought they just acquired rights of way from the railroads. Isn't it interesting that the governments big give away to the railroads is being used to shrink time and space further.
Good point about MCI, never the less, they wouldn't be where they are today without goading the government into going after MaBell with the sharp knives.
I thought Rochester was a scrap from AT&T.
Clearly though, telcom is totally inbred and has been for a long time.
If this has you worried, I have to wonder where you have been.
A fragmented background on many of the players.
1st. Bell Atlantic and USwest are made of peices carved from old MaBell. Other peices include present day AT&T. 2nd. MaBell was formed by balling up all sorts of small regional telcos in the earlier part of this century. 3rd. Qwest was started by a former AT&T guy and a former railroad guy (he knew how to get rights of way for all that fiber!)
Elsewhere we have MCI/Worldcom which was formed from MCI and worldcom. MCI was at the vanguard of the charge to break up MaBell in the first place. Worldcom was made from MFS, Wiltel and UUnet, among others (I think). As part of the MCI merger, MCIs IP backbone was sold to Cable & Wireless who themselves strung the first transatlantic cable.
Wiltel's fibernetwork was built by Williams in Williams old Natural gass piplines. Williams sold of the network, signed a noncompete, used that time to build capital and now that the noncompete has lapsed, they are building a new network.
Back to MFS. After selling out, some MFS founders decided to build Level3 communications which is currently leasing fiber from Frontier/globalcenter while they build their own network.
Frontier, I believe, is formed from an old baby bell.
I may have some of this wrong, but not so wrong that it makes the whole post wrong. Point is, telecom is heavily inbred. Brothers, mothers, sisters, cousins, all interbreding.
When trademarks are held, they have to be actively enforced or the Trademark looses its validity. It seems to me that a trademark on "Open Source" would be uninforcable, at least without spending a lot of money and generating a lot of ill will, so it seems better to me that it remain untrademarked.
There are two problems with this.
1) MS, or someone evil, will register the trademark and make things difficult for Open Sources. They have the resources, but I hardly think it would be worth their while, given the difficulty of reclaiming "Open Source" from the violent and chaotic sea that washes upon it.
2) Someone will abuse the term. Possible, even likely, but I think it is better to mobilize grass roots to deal with these than to have an organization that owns the trademark and arbitrates what is or isn't open source.
Whatever it is, I hope it is smarter about sampling methods than perfmon.exe.
Perfmon only really performs spot measurements of things like CPU utilization. It can't tell you the true average CPU utilization of a process over a 10 minute interval. It can just tell you the average of instananeous CPU utilization at 0 minutes and 10 minutes. This bugs the hell out of me, especially since NT keeps a running count of execution time for each process.
One thing to be clear on. The cat is out of the bag. The world may never see another public release of Kaffe source code from transvirtual, but that doesn't stop other individuals or groups from forking off the existing code base and improving it with ongoing maintainance & development.
Then sony has trouble selling anything in the US due to putative trade restrictions.
I think they would rather forgo the current Chineese market than the current US market, especially given the weakness of the Japanese economy these days.
1. a) First, AT&T opened UNIX because if they tried to make money off of it, the feds would have raised anti-trust issues. b) I believe SCO has been profitable. Their entire business is UNIX. c) A lot of hardware companies have made money off of UNIX because UNIX has helped them move lots of boxes.
2. Hard to comment, the guy knows so little about OS architecture that his thoughts have melted into mush. I really don't want to try to educate him. Clearly, he is confusing APIs with userinterfaces, that much is easy to say.
3. VA Linux, loosing $130mill, can we substitute some facts here? Beyond that, RedHat is very deliberate about contributing back to the core. I am not sure what he means by "breaking UNIX" but RedHat is doing a lot more than other commercial distributors to avoid forking of the collective codebase.
4. Redhat isn't like AOL or Microsoft. They may be benifitting from volunteerism, but they also give back free stuff that other people, volunteers or not, can use without paying RedHat a dime, ever. Microsoft & AOL take volunteer effort and sell it back to the volunteers and the rest of their customers. RedHat is clearly engendering some ill will, but there is less justification for it than that which led to lawsuits against AOL.
5. Oracle & IBM, at least, make a lot of their money off of services & support. Sun makes it off of hardware. Service, support & hardware is nothing like software. The incremental cost of software is vanishingly small, which means the price can be set just about anywhere, including free. These other things have large incremental costs. Know what else, none of these companies make much, if any, money off of selling OS licenses. Linux makes little or no difference to their bottom line, while creating the opportunity to sell more of the things that do.
Nice hatchet job on my post. I will not bother giving you a clue other than to say that I no more tolerate crackers who exploit the security holes they fine than I tolerate someone who tries all the doors on my house, finds an open one and then walks inside. In most states, I can kill you, nice and legal.
Slashdot Mirror
First: I think you people need to read the yahoo policy before you go off. Yahoo is not claiming ownership. They are claiming broad rights to use works posted to their site (too broad, I would argue, but not motivated by malice)
Second: When did Slashdotters become so proprietary about IP?
I do not dispute that the new agreement is unacceptable and odious, but I don't think it is motiviated by malice. It may well be underlayed with laziness though.
Their lawyers's aren't stupid and they almost certainly saying a lot of what they should have said in order to come up with an enforcable agreement. The more clauses they insterted the greater their vulnerability in the courts.
Unfortunately, their management should have realized that such a conservative approach wouldn't cut it. They have risked alienating their contributors instead of taking a risk in a lawsuit. Their business would probably be better off if they tried the latter. This frontier of copyright law needs homesteaders!
First: This does not mean that "... anyone who has a page on Geocities no longer
has the rights to what they have created. "
It grants yahoo a perpetual, transferable & non-exclusive, sublicensable right to the content. This does not mean that the original author is not free to use or sell their content, though it means that in theory, yahoo, or one of their partners could sell the content themselves.
Second: Yahoo maintains that their intent is not to deprive authors of their rights, but rather to avoid lawsuits in the future. I am inclined to believe them and I think others should take them at their word as well.
This is not to say that people shouldn't complain vociferously to Yahoo about this new policy. It is sufficiently broad that it leaves the door open to future abuse and it needs amendmant.
Unfortunatly, even if they want to do the right thing, there is a long road ahead. This verbiage exists because current copyright conventions are not a good fit for the modern age.
The latest revision of the copyright conventions was supposed to take into account the realities of this modern age, but it is clearly a failure. It may or may not represent the interests of large copyright holders. It clearly fails to represent the interests of small copyright holders and the publising industry that has sprung up around them.
So, instead of antagonizing Yahoo, and their ilk, treat them as allies. They have the resources & economic interest to make a positive change.
I know people who have hooked wavelan cards up to directional antennas to get a few miles, line of sight.
RAID5 is not striping and mirroring.
I think SGI has their own technology for rendering quickly to an X-window, since that has been a lot of their business.
I think though that they have opened a lot of this technology and it may actually be part of the Xfree effort.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't be suprised if full support for their display is only available in binary-only form.
Some people are objecting to the foolishness of people who sent these flames using real, traceable e-mail address. I think they are missing an important point:
Don't be a jerk & don't abuse the anonymity offered by various forums on the Internet to say things in a way that you would be ashamed to say in Real Life.
Anonymity is an important tool. It allows people to say things that should be said with less personal risk, but abusing it weakens its value for everyone. Every jerk who spews sub-articulate hate through an anonymous channel undermines cogent criticisms arriving by any means.
Anonymity should not be a license to act irresponsibly.
I would also suggest that you don't abuse the anonymity offered by various forums on the Internet to say things in a way that you would be ashamed to in Real Life.
Anonymity is an important tool. It allows people to say things that should be said without reprecussions, but abusing it weakens its value for everyone. Every jerk who spews sub-articulate hate through an anonymous channel undermines cogent criticisms arriving by any means.
Companies buy other companies for lots of reasons. Diversifying their product line is only part of the reason.
Companies often buy other companies to take control of their destiny. They may buy a competitor to gain more market share, and with market share, greater ability to steer the market with respect to pricing and product cycles.
They may buy a customer to gain more influence on the consumer side of their market. I think this is the case with S3. Diamond is probably one of their biggest customers. Diamond is on shakey ground financially, and if they flounder it would be very bad for S3.
Buying a customer has other advantages as well. If your customer happens to be a big customer of one of your competitors as well you can buy them and close off one of your competitors major distribution channels.
This can adversely effect your competitors cashflow for some period of time and allow you to gain the upper hand. A position you might exploit in the future by buying up the weakened competitor.
Nope.
What was your point?
I don't know if copper cloth with cut it, but reatively thin sheet metal should do it. This is what they use for a lot of plastic cased PCs Make sure that the sheets are well sealed and are electically contiguous.
If you have everything you need on your Palm then why can't it all be copied to someone elses Palm?
I hate US west as much as the next guy, but your AT&T/TCI lovefest is a bit premature.
1. As any AT&T data customer can tell you, their customer service is abysmal. Lies go down, tickets are opened, vice presidents are written, no explanation ever comes.
2. AT&T is quite happy to demand access to other people's cable pants, but they bitch and moan and throw a fit when people want access to theirs. Fair is fair.
3. TCIs customer service is even worse than AT&Ts.
4. Forcing people to provide access to their infrastructure at competitive rates can work rather well for the consumer. If we had to rely on USwest for DSL in seattle we would be getting nowhere fast. Fortunatly, Covad can rent copper from USwest and hook it to their own network. The result: When US west was promising 3 month install times, covad was doing in three weeks. USwest is feeling the competition too. Their install times have dropped and they just cut their prices by $20. This from a company who has been trying to jack up the price on ISDN for years.
Yeah, but god has all the good private peering arangements.
2. MaBell was assembled from various regional companies before they were broken up in the 80s.
3. I didn't think that Qwest actually bought the rail lines outright, I thought they just acquired rights of way from the railroads. Isn't it interesting that the governments big give away to the railroads is being used to shrink time and space further.
Good point about MCI, never the less, they wouldn't be where they are today without goading the government into going after MaBell with the sharp knives.
I thought Rochester was a scrap from AT&T.
Clearly though, telcom is totally inbred and has been for a long time.
If this has you worried, I have to wonder where you have been.
A fragmented background on many of the players.
1st. Bell Atlantic and USwest are made of peices carved from old MaBell. Other peices include present day AT&T.
2nd. MaBell was formed by balling up all sorts of small regional telcos in the earlier part of this century.
3rd. Qwest was started by a former AT&T guy and a former railroad guy (he knew how to get rights of way for all that fiber!)
Elsewhere we have MCI/Worldcom which was formed from MCI and worldcom. MCI was at the vanguard of the charge to break up MaBell in the first place. Worldcom was made from MFS, Wiltel and UUnet, among others (I think). As part of the MCI merger, MCIs IP backbone was sold to Cable & Wireless who themselves strung the first transatlantic cable.
Wiltel's fibernetwork was built by Williams in Williams old Natural gass piplines. Williams sold of the network, signed a noncompete, used that time to build capital and now that the noncompete has lapsed, they are building a new network.
Back to MFS. After selling out, some MFS founders decided to build Level3 communications which is currently leasing fiber from Frontier/globalcenter while they build their own network.
Frontier, I believe, is formed from an old baby bell.
I may have some of this wrong, but not so wrong that it makes the whole post wrong. Point is, telecom is heavily inbred. Brothers, mothers, sisters, cousins, all interbreding.
When trademarks are held, they have to be actively enforced or the Trademark looses its validity. It seems to me that a trademark on "Open Source" would be uninforcable, at least without spending a lot of money and generating a lot of ill will, so it seems better to me that it remain untrademarked.
There are two problems with this.
1) MS, or someone evil, will register the trademark and make things difficult for Open Sources. They have the resources, but I hardly think it would be worth their while, given the difficulty of reclaiming "Open Source" from the violent and chaotic sea that washes upon it.
2) Someone will abuse the term. Possible, even likely, but I think it is better to mobilize grass roots to deal with these than to have an organization that owns the trademark and arbitrates what is or isn't open source.
Whatever it is, I hope it is smarter about sampling methods than perfmon.exe.
Perfmon only really performs spot measurements of things like CPU utilization. It can't tell you the true average CPU utilization of a process over a 10 minute interval. It can just tell you the average of instananeous CPU utilization at 0 minutes and 10 minutes. This bugs the hell out of me, especially since NT keeps a running count of execution time for each process.
One thing to be clear on. The cat is out of the bag. The world may never see another public release of Kaffe source code from transvirtual, but that doesn't stop other individuals or groups from forking off the existing code base and improving it with ongoing maintainance & development.
"They've never had an original idea. Copy, copy, copy, copy..."
Linux, on the other hand, is a wholly original work, bearing no resemblance to any pre-existing software, commercial or free
Then sony has trouble selling anything in the US due to putative trade restrictions.
I think they would rather forgo the current Chineese market than the current US market, especially given the weakness of the Japanese economy these days.
My own take:
1. a) First, AT&T opened UNIX because if they tried to make money off of it, the feds would have raised anti-trust issues. b) I believe SCO has been profitable. Their entire business is UNIX. c) A lot of hardware companies have made money off of UNIX because UNIX has helped them move lots of boxes.
2. Hard to comment, the guy knows so little about OS architecture that his thoughts have melted into mush. I really don't want to try to educate him. Clearly, he is confusing APIs with userinterfaces, that much is easy to say.
3. VA Linux, loosing $130mill, can we substitute some facts here? Beyond that, RedHat is very deliberate about contributing back to the core. I am not sure what he means by "breaking UNIX" but RedHat is doing a lot more than other commercial distributors to avoid forking of the collective codebase.
4. Redhat isn't like AOL or Microsoft. They may be benifitting from volunteerism, but they also give back free stuff that other people, volunteers or not, can use without paying RedHat a dime, ever. Microsoft & AOL take volunteer effort and sell it back to the volunteers and the rest of their customers. RedHat is clearly engendering some ill will, but there is less justification for it than that which led to lawsuits against AOL.
5. Oracle & IBM, at least, make a lot of their money off of services & support. Sun makes it off of hardware. Service, support & hardware is nothing like software. The incremental cost of software is vanishingly small, which means the price can be set just about anywhere, including free. These other things have large incremental costs. Know what else, none of these companies make much, if any, money off of selling OS licenses. Linux makes little or no difference to their bottom line, while creating the opportunity to sell more of the things that do.
Nice hatchet job on my post. I will not bother giving you a clue other than to say that I no more tolerate crackers who exploit the security holes they fine than I tolerate someone who tries all the doors on my house, finds an open one and then walks inside. In most states, I can kill you, nice and legal.
Somewhere in the low billions of years, according to best estimates.
Consider this, my dumb-ass title is a more intelegent comeback than the previous posters entire post.