I was an avid Everquest fan when it was released... played it for years, grew frustrated with bad interface, bad customer support, bad policy... and quit. Reactivated later, grew frustrated with bad interface, bad customer support, bad policy, bad design... and quit. Reactivated later, grew bored with bad content, bad customer support, bad design... and quit.
From what I remember, McQuaid's "vision" was what stifled EQ development and gameplay for many years.
I've had quite enough of his "vision" to last me a lifetime. Thank you, but no thanks. I was looking forward to Mythica. Too bad.
excellent idea! thus making anybody who has uncapped their modem vulnerable to large monetary loss. could even have different rates for upstream vs downstream! yes!
couldn't they just have the system automagically cut off service when the packets start flowing too fast, rather than getting into the legal minefields?
You have obviously lost touch with your inner lawyer.:)
IMHO, the best solution is to alter the terms of all contracts with users (those who wish to cancel service can do so)... the new contract should have a monetary charge in the order of cents per kilobit per second in excess of whatever the modem cap is. anybody that wants to uncap their modem, therefore, is welcome to do so... and get a big ass bill the next month.
this one is even more stupid than M$ solution of the server sending an "expensive" equation to the client to solve before it sends a message.
rule #1) you can't tax a frikkin internet protocol. why, you ask? because there IS NO FRIKKIN WAY TO REGULATE IT!
lets assume this "email tax" were implemented in the US. what kind of infrastructure would it take? the job of taxation would either fall on the owner of the email server (highly improbably at best) or on the government... now what would it take for the government to "tax" mail... well, they'd have to know how much mail was sent... so, they'd have to route ALL MAIL. hello. lets all change the MX records for our domains to point to mail.postoffice.gov... ha ha ha ha. whew. nevermind the "paranoid" ramifications of having all your email routed thru a government network... but how much would THAT system cost the taxpayers? insane i say.
now lets just say that a working "revenue collection" system were in place... whats to keep any individual from firing up their own copy of sendmail and bypassing the whole deal? i know... a government body could intercept and monitor all internet protocl traffic pointed at port 25! well, what if my firewall portmaps internal 25 to external 10025... and my "destination" firewall portmaps external 10025 to internal 25? i know! that same government body could intercept and monitor ALL internet protocol traffic EVERYWHERE! ha ha!
ok ok... lets say that all that monitoring and enforcement stuff works... but i want to get an email from my buddy in canada? or korea? now who pays what to whom? whats to keep the intelligent programmer community from then developing a different, more secure, mail protcol... thus making obsolete all the infrastructure that was built for this half baked plan?
wait... wouldn't it be better to just START with a redesign of mail protocols? build checkpointing and accountability into the system from the beginning? keep the old mail and new mail systems completely separate... anybody running a gateway between old & new systems would thus become accountable for all traffic originating from the gateway. sure you'd have a period of time during transition where things might get a little chaotic, but you could always run 2 mail clients until all your contacts get onto the new system. surely there is some IETF committee working on this.
i can imagine the public service messages on tv even now... 10yr old child in front of computer turn to call over his shoulder, "Daddy! I've got another penis enlargement mail!! Make it stoooooooooppp...". Father figure pans into the picture, "No problem, son! I've just signed up for NewMail! It looks the same as your old mail, but without all the spam!"
Mising the point entirely, as I see it. Apparently I HAVE the source code since I HAVE linux sources. There is no trade secret involved here since they have already made all the code public by distributing linux sources themselves.
As I see it, they just don't want the public to know which segments they are laying claim to... because every example they have give the public so far has been correctly attributed to other sources by the open source community. They want to obfuscate the truth by moving the case into a realm where only lawyers can see the evidence (who may not be as adept at tracking down source code origins).
A good recourse for IBM would be to hire on retainer the "code trackers" who identified previous source code origins, use them to identify all the source code origins, and use tham directly against SCO in court. Of course, who really wants to get tangled up in this debacle? Nobody with any sanity. That is what SCO is betting on, IMHO.
Don't they have to PROVE!!!?!?! they own what they are trying to collect fees for?
of course not, silly mortal. SCO can bill whomever they want. nobody is obliged to pay, however. SCO wants some poor schmuck of an accountant to point out that it would be cheaper to pay SCO than litigate... thus building the appearance of legal precedent. this is nothing more than fuel for the SCO stock pumping scheme.
I read somewhere (can't remember where, sorry) that Torvalds had already received the subpoena as of yesterday (11/13/2k3). I think the same source said that neither Perens nor Stallman had received their subpoenas... and that Transmeta & Digeo didn't know if they had received them yet, but both were boggled when informed they had been targeted for them by SCO.
Re:Be excellent to eachother
on
Software Exorcism
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You can also take a no-BS stance and do the following:
1. Tell the truth. 2. Stay out of other people's business. 3. Do the right thing.
While this is a noble endevour, it by no means precludes you from the type of environment discussed in the review & book.
I, for example, worked for years at a large telecom company (i'll not name them, but will tell you they are as infamous as enron and are now in chpt 11 bankruptcy). During my stint there as a programmer, I tried very hard to work by a set of rules very similar to what kneecarrot described above. The reality of the situation, however, was that despite my good intentions, my senior manager was a scheming political beast who, when the situation was politically advantageous, would point me like a gun and pull the trigger, thus releasing my "truthful and honest intentions" on his target.
Because of that environment, I left the company as soon as I found a suitable replacement job. I'm not recommending the book under review, however... merely pointing out that every work environment consists of more than 1 worker's ethics.
I think it boils down to a question of morals. I know that I have, in the past, disassociated myself with people whom I find morally reprehensible. An unwillingness to do this denotes, in my mind, displays an acceptance of the associated person's behavior.
By continuing to work for McBride, SCO's employees endorse his corporate behavior. Everyone working for SCO is saying, "YES. I AM WILLING TO PROFIT FROM THIS VENTURE," and I say they should be held responsible for their actions. There must be risk and accountability.
While I agree with Damage Studios' general principal, I think it was implemented poorly. I would not reject a resume based strictly on a line item in it's employment history... rather I'd likely want to interview the subject (especially in the case of SCO) to find out their personal disposition during the time of employment.
I suspect, in this case in particular, the result of said interview would reveal a person who had low moral values, no concept of responsibility, or just plain stupidity for not realizing how they were being used. There are always exceptions, of course.
As a side note, I think it'd be an interesting poll idea... "Have you ever told your boss 'NO' when asked to do something unethical?"
I think this may be getting blown out of proportion... in a previous post, i reported that their insider activity was spread around 5 execs from SCO... i'm not sure where the 119,000 share number comes from either... unless you're mis-calculating Form144 & Form4Option into the mix.
For the record, a Form144 is not a sell, but simply an insider registration of stock previously unknown to the public float... and a Form4 Option is an exercise of options at a pre-determined stock price. These forms are usually, but not always, closely followed by Form4 Sells.
By my calcs, the execs have cashed out for a total of 75k shares worth <$900k between the 5 of them. Not exactly the criminal mastermind plot the article made it out to be...
There is a lot to bash SCO about nowdays... and certainly some execs have made a some money on the over-inflated price... but this level of paranoia just makes/. look bad.
SCO has buried itself. I can't believe that anyone is still buying their stock, all they are doing is making McBride richer.
If you look carefully at stock market data on SCOX, you'll eventually find an interesting stat on "Short Interest" which Nasdaq defines as...
Short Interest
The total number of shares of a security that have been sold short by customers and securities firms that have not been repurchased to settle short positions in the market.(See also Short Selling,Days to Cover, Settlement Date,and Average Daily Share Volume.)
SCOX short interest in April was ~40k shares, May was ~30k shares, June was ~280k shares, July was ~390k shares. About mid-May was when SCOX stock price jumped from ~$4 to ~$10.
Based on this, i'd opinion that many brokers don't believe the SCO FUD either. Many are positioning themselves for a hefty profit when SCOX claims are proven in court (which i believe to be inevetable) to be null & void.
Personally, I very nearly exited a BAD stock position, thus taking a significant $ hit on my portfolio, in order to short SCOX at $15 near the end of July. I may regret not doing so for a long time.
As to makeing McBride richer, according to the SEC, he hasn't cashed out on any of his stock yet. 5 of his employees, however, (2 Sr Vice Presidents, 2 Vice Presidents, and their CFO) have cashed out a total of ~75k shares for a grand total of ~$884k. Combined, the 5 of them have at LEAST 395k more shares which can be sold... current market value of over $5mil. This doesn't take into account options which they may hold, or aquisitions beyond the 2 year timeframe that my source shows.
Those are the facts as near as I can gather with my meager resources.
I have to agree that many musicians can survive by using recordings as a way of promoting live performances, but this model doesn't fit every musician. When was the last time you heard of that monster Dead Can Dance tour?
IMHO, the dinosaur that is RIAA needs an overhaul that puts a larger % of sales income in the hands of the musicians and less % in the hands of the leeches. Overall music "cost" to the consumer could be lowered while at the same time increasing income to musicians... and embracing technology for distribution is the key.
I don't pretend to have any of the answers for how to do this while protecting the musician's copyright, but it is clear enough that RIAA is trying their hardest to make everybody that knows how to point-and-click look like a potential thief.
To RIAA: If you think you are having problems now, just wait 5 years. Technology is not slowing down.
When my old manager used to talk about "leveraging the synergies inherit in a business relationship", all i ever heard was "blah blah blah more work for you blah blah blah."
It's only fair that when I talk about SMP architectures, S-ATA, Terabytes, 64-bit, distributed model computing, TCP, UDP, server farms, load balancers, and quad-port ethernet adapters... that he think "blah blah blah boy that sounds expensive blah blah blah."
Either 1) a legal precedent combined with an assload of cash with which to flog the rest of the civilized world (and, of course, raise their stock price so they can dump & retire stupid rich), or 2) be "aquired" as a company (and, of course, raise their stock price so they can dump & retire stupid rich).
So, you see, it really all boils down to their stock price... which, if you look at a recent stock chart has been doing amazingly well in the past few days. It will be interesting to see how many SCOX insiders sell & in what quantities... that will be real test to see when they think they have gone as far as they can go. Luckily for us, the SEC has just implemented a requirement that all insider stock transactions must be reported thru Form 4 Edgar filings within a few days of the transaction (rather than a few months like in the old system). I know I'll be watching that closely.
Do they think they really have a case?
You don't need a case to sue, thank you very much american legal system. Their PR machine is now feeding misinformation at a steady trickle, and the internet is running rampant with it from there. SCO is currently in PR nirvana.
Is this just some blatant attention-getting tactic?
Kindof, yeah. It's really more about their stock price, tho.
on a sideline note, you may find this unix timeline interesting.
IMHO, SCO has been an irrelevant sideline player in UNIX for my entire computing career. I do not expect that to change now that their business model has evolved to litigation rather than programming.
at $200 per card, i'd still say this was worth it. we installed mod_gzip quite a while back in order to save on network bandwidth and saw an immediate benefit there, however our web servers did register a hit on their cpu utilization in the order of 10-20%.
yes, we do run a load balancer with multiple servers... and know we'd never approach the 32MB/s limits of the 1st version of this card on a per-server basis, but if i even suspected it'd give me back that 10-20% to serve more content per server, i'd jump at the chance to test it further.
being able to stream gzip 32MB/s is quite impressive by itself, but i'd still like to find out how it handles 100s of smaller tranasctions rather than one big one.
while i'm sure that support for this card doesn't currently exist in mod_gzip, it shouldn't be too awfully difficult to get it to work.
Gzip already uses minimal processor time
i think the definition of "minimal" might be useful here. if you have access to a reletively high volume web server (something on the order of 1mil+ hits per day), take a look at MRTG graphs with and without mod_gzip running... you might be shocked.
if this card is in the sub$200 range, i'd outfit my server farm with it immediately (if not sooner).
wtf? this would be incredibly useful. what else did your Xeon 2.8Ghz do while gzipping at a sustained 71MB/s? For any web server running dynamic content (database backend of some flavor) & mod_gzip, any reduction in CPU consumption is a godsend... PLEASE let me buy this cheap PCI card to extend the life of my server!
now if the limit of your use of gzip consists of sitting at a command prompt and typing tar xvfz pr0n.tar.gz/home/luser/.pr0n/ then you are correct... this card is not for you.
You're right, if the Man wants to read your email, he's going to do it. PGP isn't designed to be a totally secure system, just a mostly secure one.
Preach on, brotha SweetAndSourJesus! If you wish to be completely private, i suggest you no longer use the internet, computers, telephones, or cable tv. The software is named Pretty Good Privacy for god's sake.
People who are impressed only by eye-candy fail to impress me. The grassroots commercial should be commended for a noble effort by loyal fans, not bashed as "not being flashy."
Farscape was one of the 3 or 4 shows on my 130 channels that was worth watching. The people who said it had a lot of backstory are absolutely correct... and that is the reason it gained such a loyal following. Quality scripts, a brilliant cast, and a "lets have fun" attitude gave this series some truely rememberable episodes. To this day, I say that nobody can act "insanity" quite as well as Ben Browder.
Slashdot Mirror
I was an avid Everquest fan when it was released ... played it for years, grew frustrated with bad interface, bad customer support, bad policy ... and quit. Reactivated later, grew frustrated with bad interface, bad customer support, bad policy, bad design ... and quit. Reactivated later, grew bored with bad content, bad customer support, bad design ... and quit.
From what I remember, McQuaid's "vision" was what stifled EQ development and gameplay for many years.
I've had quite enough of his "vision" to last me a lifetime. Thank you, but no thanks. I was looking forward to Mythica. Too bad.
excellent idea! thus making anybody who has uncapped their modem vulnerable to large monetary loss. could even have different rates for upstream vs downstream! yes!
You have obviously lost touch with your inner lawyer.
IMHO, the best solution is to alter the terms of all contracts with users (those who wish to cancel service can do so)
this one is even more stupid than M$ solution of the server sending an "expensive" equation to the client to solve before it sends a message.
... now what would it take for the government to "tax" mail ... well, they'd have to know how much mail was sent ... so, they'd have to route ALL MAIL. hello. lets all change the MX records for our domains to point to mail.postoffice.gov ... ha ha ha ha. whew. nevermind the "paranoid" ramifications of having all your email routed thru a government network ... but how much would THAT system cost the taxpayers? insane i say.
... whats to keep any individual from firing up their own copy of sendmail and bypassing the whole deal? i know ... a government body could intercept and monitor all internet protocl traffic pointed at port 25! well, what if my firewall portmaps internal 25 to external 10025 ... and my "destination" firewall portmaps external 10025 to internal 25? i know! that same government body could intercept and monitor ALL internet protocol traffic EVERYWHERE! ha ha!
... lets say that all that monitoring and enforcement stuff works ... but i want to get an email from my buddy in canada? or korea? now who pays what to whom? whats to keep the intelligent programmer community from then developing a different, more secure, mail protcol ... thus making obsolete all the infrastructure that was built for this half baked plan?
... wouldn't it be better to just START with a redesign of mail protocols? build checkpointing and accountability into the system from the beginning? keep the old mail and new mail systems completely separate ... anybody running a gateway between old & new systems would thus become accountable for all traffic originating from the gateway. sure you'd have a period of time during transition where things might get a little chaotic, but you could always run 2 mail clients until all your contacts get onto the new system. surely there is some IETF committee working on this.
... 10yr old child in front of computer turn to call over his shoulder, "Daddy! I've got another penis enlargement mail!! Make it stoooooooooppp...". Father figure pans into the picture, "No problem, son! I've just signed up for NewMail! It looks the same as your old mail, but without all the spam!"
rule #1) you can't tax a frikkin internet protocol. why, you ask? because there IS NO FRIKKIN WAY TO REGULATE IT!
lets assume this "email tax" were implemented in the US. what kind of infrastructure would it take? the job of taxation would either fall on the owner of the email server (highly improbably at best) or on the government
now lets just say that a working "revenue collection" system were in place
ok ok
wait
i can imagine the public service messages on tv even now
Went to sleep last night after working on a program all day which was generating SIGSEGV for no apparent reason ... this morning, I suddenly knew why.
Not just a myth.
No.
Mising the point entirely, as I see it. Apparently I HAVE the source code since I HAVE linux sources. There is no trade secret involved here since they have already made all the code public by distributing linux sources themselves.
... because every example they have give the public so far has been correctly attributed to other sources by the open source community. They want to obfuscate the truth by moving the case into a realm where only lawyers can see the evidence (who may not be as adept at tracking down source code origins).
As I see it, they just don't want the public to know which segments they are laying claim to
A good recourse for IBM would be to hire on retainer the "code trackers" who identified previous source code origins, use them to identify all the source code origins, and use tham directly against SCO in court. Of course, who really wants to get tangled up in this debacle? Nobody with any sanity. That is what SCO is betting on, IMHO.
of course not, silly mortal. SCO can bill whomever they want. nobody is obliged to pay, however. SCO wants some poor schmuck of an accountant to point out that it would be cheaper to pay SCO than litigate
I read somewhere (can't remember where, sorry) that Torvalds had already received the subpoena as of yesterday (11/13/2k3). I think the same source said that neither Perens nor Stallman had received their subpoenas ... and that Transmeta & Digeo didn't know if they had received them yet, but both were boggled when informed they had been targeted for them by SCO.
I, for example, worked for years at a large telecom company (i'll not name them, but will tell you they are as infamous as enron and are now in chpt 11 bankruptcy). During my stint there as a programmer, I tried very hard to work by a set of rules very similar to what kneecarrot described above. The reality of the situation, however, was that despite my good intentions, my senior manager was a scheming political beast who, when the situation was politically advantageous, would point me like a gun and pull the trigger, thus releasing my "truthful and honest intentions" on his target.
Because of that environment, I left the company as soon as I found a suitable replacement job. I'm not recommending the book under review, however
somebody PLEASE mod this +1 Funny. the irony is killing me.
that all of the misrouted alcohol suddenly appeared at my house this morning. the party is ON! y'all are all invited.
*cheers*
I think it boils down to a question of morals. I know that I have, in the past, disassociated myself with people whom I find morally reprehensible. An unwillingness to do this denotes, in my mind, displays an acceptance of the associated person's behavior.
... rather I'd likely want to interview the subject (especially in the case of SCO) to find out their personal disposition during the time of employment.
... "Have you ever told your boss 'NO' when asked to do something unethical?"
By continuing to work for McBride, SCO's employees endorse his corporate behavior. Everyone working for SCO is saying, "YES. I AM WILLING TO PROFIT FROM THIS VENTURE," and I say they should be held responsible for their actions. There must be risk and accountability.
While I agree with Damage Studios' general principal, I think it was implemented poorly. I would not reject a resume based strictly on a line item in it's employment history
I suspect, in this case in particular, the result of said interview would reveal a person who had low moral values, no concept of responsibility, or just plain stupidity for not realizing how they were being used. There are always exceptions, of course.
As a side note, I think it'd be an interesting poll idea
I think this may be getting blown out of proportion ... in a previous post, i reported that their insider activity was spread around 5 execs from SCO ... i'm not sure where the 119,000 share number comes from either ... unless you're mis-calculating Form144 & Form4Option into the mix.
... and a Form4 Option is an exercise of options at a pre-determined stock price. These forms are usually, but not always, closely followed by Form4 Sells.
...
... and certainly some execs have made a some money on the over-inflated price ... but this level of paranoia just makes /. look bad.
For the record, a Form144 is not a sell, but simply an insider registration of stock previously unknown to the public float
By my calcs, the execs have cashed out for a total of 75k shares worth <$900k between the 5 of them. Not exactly the criminal mastermind plot the article made it out to be
There is a lot to bash SCO about nowdays
If you look carefully at stock market data on SCOX, you'll eventually find an interesting stat on "Short Interest" which Nasdaq defines as...
SCOX short interest in April was ~40k shares, May was ~30k shares, June was ~280k shares, July was ~390k shares. About mid-May was when SCOX stock price jumped from ~$4 to ~$10.
Based on this, i'd opinion that many brokers don't believe the SCO FUD either. Many are positioning themselves for a hefty profit when SCOX claims are proven in court (which i believe to be inevetable) to be null & void.
Personally, I very nearly exited a BAD stock position, thus taking a significant $ hit on my portfolio, in order to short SCOX at $15 near the end of July. I may regret not doing so for a long time.
As to makeing McBride richer, according to the SEC, he hasn't cashed out on any of his stock yet. 5 of his employees, however, (2 Sr Vice Presidents, 2 Vice Presidents, and their CFO) have cashed out a total of ~75k shares for a grand total of ~$884k. Combined, the 5 of them have at LEAST 395k more shares which can be sold
Those are the facts as near as I can gather with my meager resources.
I have to agree that many musicians can survive by using recordings as a way of promoting live performances, but this model doesn't fit every musician. When was the last time you heard of that monster Dead Can Dance tour?
... and embracing technology for distribution is the key.
IMHO, the dinosaur that is RIAA needs an overhaul that puts a larger % of sales income in the hands of the musicians and less % in the hands of the leeches. Overall music "cost" to the consumer could be lowered while at the same time increasing income to musicians
I don't pretend to have any of the answers for how to do this while protecting the musician's copyright, but it is clear enough that RIAA is trying their hardest to make everybody that knows how to point-and-click look like a potential thief.
To RIAA: If you think you are having problems now, just wait 5 years. Technology is not slowing down.
When my old manager used to talk about "leveraging the synergies inherit in a business relationship", all i ever heard was "blah blah blah more work for you blah blah blah."
... that he think "blah blah blah boy that sounds expensive blah blah blah."
It's only fair that when I talk about SMP architectures, S-ATA, Terabytes, 64-bit, distributed model computing, TCP, UDP, server farms, load balancers, and quad-port ethernet adapters
Either 1) a legal precedent combined with an assload of cash with which to flog the rest of the civilized world (and, of course, raise their stock price so they can dump & retire stupid rich), or 2) be "aquired" as a company (and, of course, raise their stock price so they can dump & retire stupid rich).
So, you see, it really all boils down to their stock price
You don't need a case to sue, thank you very much american legal system. Their PR machine is now feeding misinformation at a steady trickle, and the internet is running rampant with it from there. SCO is currently in PR nirvana.
Kindof, yeah. It's really more about their stock price, tho.
on a sideline note, you may find this unix timeline interesting.
IMHO, SCO has been an irrelevant sideline player in UNIX for my entire computing career. I do not expect that to change now that their business model has evolved to litigation rather than programming.
Thats right ... you too can use 1s and 0s in your computer ... and all i ask is $0.00001 per bit!
at $200 per card, i'd still say this was worth it. we installed mod_gzip quite a while back in order to save on network bandwidth and saw an immediate benefit there, however our web servers did register a hit on their cpu utilization in the order of 10-20%.
... and know we'd never approach the 32MB/s limits of the 1st version of this card on a per-server basis, but if i even suspected it'd give me back that 10-20% to serve more content per server, i'd jump at the chance to test it further.
yes, we do run a load balancer with multiple servers
being able to stream gzip 32MB/s is quite impressive by itself, but i'd still like to find out how it handles 100s of smaller tranasctions rather than one big one.
i think the definition of "minimal" might be useful here. if you have access to a reletively high volume web server (something on the order of 1mil+ hits per day), take a look at MRTG graphs with and without mod_gzip running
if this card is in the sub$200 range, i'd outfit my server farm with it immediately (if not sooner).
wtf? this would be incredibly useful. what else did your Xeon 2.8Ghz do while gzipping at a sustained 71MB/s? For any web server running dynamic content (database backend of some flavor) & mod_gzip, any reduction in CPU consumption is a godsend ... PLEASE let me buy this cheap PCI card to extend the life of my server!
/home/luser/.pr0n/ ... this card is not for you.
now if the limit of your use of gzip consists of sitting at a command prompt and typing
tar xvfz pr0n.tar.gz
then you are correct
Preach on, brotha SweetAndSourJesus! If you wish to be completely private, i suggest you no longer use the internet, computers, telephones, or cable tv. The software is named Pretty Good Privacy for god's sake.
People who are impressed only by eye-candy fail to impress me. The grassroots commercial should be commended for a noble effort by loyal fans, not bashed as "not being flashy."
... and that is the reason it gained such a loyal following. Quality scripts, a brilliant cast, and a "lets have fun" attitude gave this series some truely rememberable episodes. To this day, I say that nobody can act "insanity" quite as well as Ben Browder.
Farscape was one of the 3 or 4 shows on my 130 channels that was worth watching. The people who said it had a lot of backstory are absolutely correct
I mourn the loss of the show.
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