Once again, I said it was a grey area. The law seems to have some contradictory statements as to what's allowed and what's not allowed. I personally think that regardless of the actions, contracts like these are sleezy and unethical, regardless of what the law says.
And no, it's not solely the university's problem. An illegal contract is unenforcable, no exceptions. If the non-disclosure clause of this contract is found to be illegal then one of two things will happen: a) The pricing will be made public or b) They'll nullify the contract and renegotiate, in public.
In some places what they're doing is not legal. Michigan's foia law, for example, seems to put their agreement in a a very grey area, legally. I can't say that MS did nothing wrong, because the facts don't seem to support that.
Personally, I think that's probably the best solution. Dump MS's crapware and move to platforms and companies that know and understand that FOI laws are in place to protect the public from unscrupulous entities.
read the laws in question. they say that any contract must be public. So yes, the government does have special say in these matters. once again, these laws have been in place for longer than microsoft has been a company. If MS doesn't like it, then there's no one forcing them to do business with the government.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. Once again, these are government agencies. The rules are different from private companies, but they are still straightforward, and have been in place for a long time, longer than MS has been in business. The reason these deals are in place is so that deals based on things other than cost benefit analyses cannot take place; government contracts and back room deals don't mix. They are in place for everything, too - essentially any requisition/purchase order can be requested under the FOIA.
Even if you do replace the word secret with confidential, it's still a bad thing. I want to know whose feet I should hold to the fire if they made a bad deal, who is to blame for wasting taxpayer money. Everyone knows that software vendors sell to academia at a substatial discount; it's pretty much a given. All that making these agreements public does is it makes MS have to formalize, and standardize their site license policies for when dealing with academia. Not with the business world, not with individual consumers, just academia.
RTFA. These are public universities, partially funded with taxpayer dollars. If these were private universities, I'd have no problem, MS could have as many secret agreements as they want. These schools, on the other hand, are government run/controlled universities, and I trust them to act like any other government institution.
Yes there is something wrong. I'm paying taxes, so they're negotiating with my money. If the school is getting the short end of the stick in this deal, you're damn right I want to know about it so I can raise a fuss, so I can yell at the right people, so I can try to change things. I don't want my money being thrown down the drain in a deal that's worse off for the taxpayers, the schools, and the students, and I don't want deals like this being made if it means that students will only be taught programming for MS operating systems, and not the diverse range of systems out there. MS is not always going to be this big, and if we hobble college students, the future of the tech/IT industry, with lousy license agreements, we've failed them.
Hear, Hear! The biggest problem I can see is that someof the more "fringe" issues do have a chance to get whitewashed over/ignored. However, IMO (and this is coming from a bi male who is at least slightly ts/tg here), those are issues that should probably be brought up by a parent, then they feel the child is ready for them. My societal views may be pretty liberal, but I know that there are things that kids should not see, they're not emotionally/mentally ready to handle certain issues. Am I suggesting hard limits? No. Every kid is different. What could be fine for one nine year old is over the top for a 12 year old down the street.
Oh, and goatse.cx isn't that bad; I've seen far more disturbing images. Did you know that he's got a wedding ring on? Or that some site interviewed him some months back? Wish I'd saved the interview.
How in the hell are people who *do* have a mortgage and a family to pay for supposed to compete with that?
The site you link to, ninenine.com, is a porn site, non? Offering "free" porn through referral links to pay sites, non? In essence, a business model different from traditional porn selling. In many ways, GPLed software is much the same way. There are many businesses, such as redhat, making money with GPLed software, only most of their money is made in a different way than with direct retail or business to business sales. Instead, they make money through support, through sponsorships, and through sales of related products. Yes, to some it's unfair, but capitalism, and the free market, isn't fair. It never has been, and never will be.
And, let's say that these OSS kids put a bunch of software developers & companies out of business... are those really the people that we should be relying on for software? People who have no stake in it whatsoever?
And businesses are more accountable, more reliable? If you haven't realized, businesses go under all the time, with little to no accountability to anyone. Also, who's to stop the company you bought your product from from deciding to stop supporting your product? When it comes right down to it, businesses are just as falliable, just as unreliable as people are.
That is to say, the GPL (and apparently this licence as well, though i only skimmed over it) require that software derived from GPL-ed code have the full source code openly available to the public.
No. All the GPL says is that if you give them binaries, you have to give them source as well. I've bought GPLed software before - Cygwin's tweaked version of GCC - because it was better than the alternatives for what I wanted to use it for.
Though the issue of businesses based on GPLed software is an odd one. Selling free software itself is a very new idea, essentially only a few years old. So, it's obvious a lot of businesses are going to fail. Failure happens all the time in the business world, software isn't, and shouldn't be, an exception. Many early names in the microcomputer world are now long gone, though I think most people would agree that PCs are, by and large, a success.
Bull-fucking-shit. Neither this, nor the GPL, prevents the formation of successful software businesses. Why do you claim that either of these licenses does such a thing? Because you have to agree to their terms, that you have to give end users the right to redistribute your software? What's to stop you from talking with the developers themselves, negotiating some other form of licensing, or *gasp*, writing your own code to do the same thing? How are commercial licenses which preclude "reasonable" distribution any different?
Part of capitalism is the right to set your own costs however low you want them to be. That includes giving your product away if you so desire. If you can't compete, that's your problem, not the problem of developers who decide to give things away.
Ok so if you are at war and you kill a friendly the game is over, right?
Not necessarily, but many parts of training are already different from war. This simulator would only have been small portion of a soldier's combat training. You put a grunt in front of one of these for a while before putting them in a Bradley so that they aren't totally gung ho with the artillery. This way you teach a soldier to be a bit more calm under fire, so they don't go blasting away and getting others, or themselves, sent home in a box.
And yes, some friendly fire incidents do result in a game over situation. The military hates losing men, losing face, etc due to someone's itchy trigger finger. People who are involved in friendly fire incidents can be, and are, court marshalled for their negligence, and are subject to being booted out of the service, imprisoned, etc.
RTA. This is not a sim to help train personnel on combat tactics, but rather, to teach the importance of ammo conservation, and more importantly, identifying who you've got in your crosshairs before you pull the trigger. You shoot a friendly, it's game over man, game over.
You've done it. Now, once I get all the non-computer stuff ready for moving, I'm going to have to get all my computer crap arranged, and photographed. I will be the first to admit that I am in awe of your quantity - that is a metric fuckton of computers. However, it seems to be pretty homgeneous. Where are the macs, and the suns, and the SGIs? I've got to get a pic of it, but here is my current line of crap -
Sun - Ultra 2, SS4, SS10, IPC (2), IPX, Classic, LX, SS 1+ (3), ELC, SLC, 3/80, 3/60
SGI - Indy (3)
Dec - Vaxstation 3100 (2)
Apple - Duo 280, Duodock, Powermac 7200, Quadra 840, LC III, IICX
PowerComputing Powerbase 180
HP - Apollo 715/75, Visualize B132L, Envisex (xterm)
IBM - 7006, 7011
NeXT - Nextstation
3 PCs, generic - 1 Duron, 1 K6-2, 1 Pentium
Plus a shitload of old laser printers, monitors, keyboards, mice, drives, etc.
Before anyone asks:
Yes, I have imagined a beowulf cluster of those - I just can't do it because the wiring in my current apartment is 70 years old
I do get action - my boyfriend is a real sweetie, thankyouverymuch. Long distance relationships are hell, though.
and finally, the most important answer, why not?
I'm not a guru in HA, but what about setting up a script in your inittab to check to see if the box is getting a heartbeat signal from the other system? If it is getting a heartbeat, then it'll know that it's the fallover system, and to wait around until the other system flatlines.
There seem to be several different companies offering HA solutions. It seems like there's a huge range of products out there, from the companies after someone building a small cluster to do fallover, etc for a small website, to small render farms, to huge companies that want fallover/load balancing for massive computer farms.
According to one maker of a real time linux system, latency is about 15 microseconds. The article for this story, however, finds a worst-case latency on a PowerPC to be on the order of.48 milliseconds or 480 microseconds. Ouch. That's pretty bad.
Apples and oranges. The RTLinux system is totally different from the Pre-emptive kernel patch. RTLinux is designed for Realtime, preemptive services, and from what I understand, is a fairly heavily tweaked kernel, the Preemptive patch was designed more to give a bit more response to a mostly stock kernel - for times when you need responsiveness, but don't want to pay the massive performance hit for getting response right here, right now.
It means it's telling you to load Letter sized paper into the Paper Cartridge, as opposed to the Manual Feed, which gave my personal favorite error of MF Load Letter - best expanded to Mother Fucker, Load the Letter =3.
Erorrs like this are usually caused by the fact that many embedded devices, like the procs in laser printers, have very small roms, and very small displays, which means they are almost forced to, by design, give just enough of an error message to send you scurrying to the manual to find out what's "really" wrong with the printer.
To add to what the previous poster said, memory addresses may only be 32 bits, but as NTFS is a 64 bit filesystem, I imagine that much of the I/O code is 64 bits as well, which leads to the unwieldy hardware addy. The first error was probably caused by a hardware problem; the programmers hadn't anticipated that particular error, but realized that shit does happen, and created a generic error handler that could still be useful for debugging be causing the person the error happened to describe how they brought about the bugm Much better than simply saying "An unknown error has occurred" in my opinion, because that message still leaves the user wondering what next.
One thing I do wonder though, is environmentally how will a disposed of fuel cell treat the environment as opposed to a disposed of battery?
I'd imagine it would be much, much more environmentally friendly. The batteries currently found on laptops are full of fairly toxic heavy metals, which is why you really shouldn't take them to a landfill when they give up the ghost. In contrast, a spent fuel cell couple be as simple as a piece of plastic that can be easily recycled. Far less waste, and far better for the surroundings.
You're being silly here. None of this is going to happen, because other countries are considering, or have already enacted, laws just as bad, if not worse than, the DMCA. Check out the information on the EU directive known as the European Union Copyright Directive, or the Digital Agenda Act, which is Australia's answer to the DMCA. The DMCA is on shaky constitutional grounds in the US, is the act your country going to pass be?
I will admit that it's not 100% transparent, yet, but it is getting extremely close, much closer than you believe. Pretty much the only thing missing, which was in prior versions of enigmail, is the ability to automatically transport keys to and from the key registries that already exist, such as that found at Keyserver. Much of the underlying software, such as pgp and gpg, already have the ability to pull keys from these centralized sites.
Also, there is no need for one centralized email key registry, just like there is no need for one centralized SSL depository. Just like you can have SSL certificates from different depositories, you can have different email key depositories. Authories could be built up much like the current SSL authorities, through being trusted in other areas involving sensitive information, or being known for having a strong stance on privacy. People could make money just like they do with SSL certs - charging a nominal fee for storage of their verified keys.
Do a little homework on this - it's not as tough as you make it out to be.
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And no, it's not solely the university's problem. An illegal contract is unenforcable, no exceptions. If the non-disclosure clause of this contract is found to be illegal then one of two things will happen: a) The pricing will be made public or b) They'll nullify the contract and renegotiate, in public.
Software as in computer programs written by university staff, not contracts on software, dumbass.
In some places what they're doing is not legal. Michigan's foia law, for example, seems to put their agreement in a a very grey area, legally. I can't say that MS did nothing wrong, because the facts don't seem to support that.
Personally, I think that's probably the best solution. Dump MS's crapware and move to platforms and companies that know and understand that FOI laws are in place to protect the public from unscrupulous entities.
read the laws in question. they say that any contract must be public. So yes, the government does have special say in these matters. once again, these laws have been in place for longer than microsoft has been a company. If MS doesn't like it, then there's no one forcing them to do business with the government.
I know microsoft isn't a fucking government agency. However, the schools are. Thus the requirement for open contracts.
Even if you do replace the word secret with confidential, it's still a bad thing. I want to know whose feet I should hold to the fire if they made a bad deal, who is to blame for wasting taxpayer money. Everyone knows that software vendors sell to academia at a substatial discount; it's pretty much a given. All that making these agreements public does is it makes MS have to formalize, and standardize their site license policies for when dealing with academia. Not with the business world, not with individual consumers, just academia.
RTFA. These are public universities, partially funded with taxpayer dollars. If these were private universities, I'd have no problem, MS could have as many secret agreements as they want. These schools, on the other hand, are government run/controlled universities, and I trust them to act like any other government institution.
Yes there is something wrong. I'm paying taxes, so they're negotiating with my money. If the school is getting the short end of the stick in this deal, you're damn right I want to know about it so I can raise a fuss, so I can yell at the right people, so I can try to change things. I don't want my money being thrown down the drain in a deal that's worse off for the taxpayers, the schools, and the students, and I don't want deals like this being made if it means that students will only be taught programming for MS operating systems, and not the diverse range of systems out there. MS is not always going to be this big, and if we hobble college students, the future of the tech/IT industry, with lousy license agreements, we've failed them.
Oh, and goatse.cx isn't that bad; I've seen far more disturbing images. Did you know that he's got a wedding ring on? Or that some site interviewed him some months back? Wish I'd saved the interview.
Interesting hack, nonetheless. Personally, though, I'd rather have a cam in a model rocket or plane, something that can give aerial shots.
The site you link to, ninenine.com, is a porn site, non? Offering "free" porn through referral links to pay sites, non? In essence, a business model different from traditional porn selling. In many ways, GPLed software is much the same way. There are many businesses, such as redhat, making money with GPLed software, only most of their money is made in a different way than with direct retail or business to business sales. Instead, they make money through support, through sponsorships, and through sales of related products. Yes, to some it's unfair, but capitalism, and the free market, isn't fair. It never has been, and never will be.
And businesses are more accountable, more reliable? If you haven't realized, businesses go under all the time, with little to no accountability to anyone. Also, who's to stop the company you bought your product from from deciding to stop supporting your product? When it comes right down to it, businesses are just as falliable, just as unreliable as people are.
No. All the GPL says is that if you give them binaries, you have to give them source as well. I've bought GPLed software before - Cygwin's tweaked version of GCC - because it was better than the alternatives for what I wanted to use it for.
Though the issue of businesses based on GPLed software is an odd one. Selling free software itself is a very new idea, essentially only a few years old. So, it's obvious a lot of businesses are going to fail. Failure happens all the time in the business world, software isn't, and shouldn't be, an exception. Many early names in the microcomputer world are now long gone, though I think most people would agree that PCs are, by and large, a success.
Part of capitalism is the right to set your own costs however low you want them to be. That includes giving your product away if you so desire. If you can't compete, that's your problem, not the problem of developers who decide to give things away.
Not necessarily, but many parts of training are already different from war. This simulator would only have been small portion of a soldier's combat training. You put a grunt in front of one of these for a while before putting them in a Bradley so that they aren't totally gung ho with the artillery. This way you teach a soldier to be a bit more calm under fire, so they don't go blasting away and getting others, or themselves, sent home in a box.
And yes, some friendly fire incidents do result in a game over situation. The military hates losing men, losing face, etc due to someone's itchy trigger finger. People who are involved in friendly fire incidents can be, and are, court marshalled for their negligence, and are subject to being booted out of the service, imprisoned, etc.
RTA. This is not a sim to help train personnel on combat tactics, but rather, to teach the importance of ammo conservation, and more importantly, identifying who you've got in your crosshairs before you pull the trigger. You shoot a friendly, it's game over man, game over.
Before anyone asks:
Yes, I have imagined a beowulf cluster of those - I just can't do it because the wiring in my current apartment is 70 years old
I do get action - my boyfriend is a real sweetie, thankyouverymuch. Long distance relationships are hell, though.
and finally, the most important answer, why not?
I'm not a guru in HA, but what about setting up a script in your inittab to check to see if the box is getting a heartbeat signal from the other system? If it is getting a heartbeat, then it'll know that it's the fallover system, and to wait around until the other system flatlines.
There seem to be several different companies offering HA solutions. It seems like there's a huge range of products out there, from the companies after someone building a small cluster to do fallover, etc for a small website, to small render farms, to huge companies that want fallover/load balancing for massive computer farms.
Apples and oranges. The RTLinux system is totally different from the Pre-emptive kernel patch. RTLinux is designed for Realtime, preemptive services, and from what I understand, is a fairly heavily tweaked kernel, the Preemptive patch was designed more to give a bit more response to a mostly stock kernel - for times when you need responsiveness, but don't want to pay the massive performance hit for getting response right here, right now.
Erorrs like this are usually caused by the fact that many embedded devices, like the procs in laser printers, have very small roms, and very small displays, which means they are almost forced to, by design, give just enough of an error message to send you scurrying to the manual to find out what's "really" wrong with the printer.
To add to what the previous poster said, memory addresses may only be 32 bits, but as NTFS is a 64 bit filesystem, I imagine that much of the I/O code is 64 bits as well, which leads to the unwieldy hardware addy. The first error was probably caused by a hardware problem; the programmers hadn't anticipated that particular error, but realized that shit does happen, and created a generic error handler that could still be useful for debugging be causing the person the error happened to describe how they brought about the bugm Much better than simply saying "An unknown error has occurred" in my opinion, because that message still leaves the user wondering what next.
I'd imagine it would be much, much more environmentally friendly. The batteries currently found on laptops are full of fairly toxic heavy metals, which is why you really shouldn't take them to a landfill when they give up the ghost. In contrast, a spent fuel cell couple be as simple as a piece of plastic that can be easily recycled. Far less waste, and far better for the surroundings.
You're being silly here. None of this is going to happen, because other countries are considering, or have already enacted, laws just as bad, if not worse than, the DMCA. Check out the information on the EU directive known as the European Union Copyright Directive, or the Digital Agenda Act, which is Australia's answer to the DMCA. The DMCA is on shaky constitutional grounds in the US, is the act your country going to pass be?
Also, there is no need for one centralized email key registry, just like there is no need for one centralized SSL depository. Just like you can have SSL certificates from different depositories, you can have different email key depositories. Authories could be built up much like the current SSL authorities, through being trusted in other areas involving sensitive information, or being known for having a strong stance on privacy. People could make money just like they do with SSL certs - charging a nominal fee for storage of their verified keys.
Do a little homework on this - it's not as tough as you make it out to be.