They are not allowed to look up material about the case. The definition of a term in general may or may not be about the case. That's a complex question of law. Say for example this rape occurred on an "Ottoman" and a juror looked up what that word meant...
Frankly I think the judge over reacted by declaring a mistrial.
A perfect example of why its so important to allow jurors to ask questions. If councils and the judge had known the jury had questions on Rape Trauma Syndrome they could have addressed this in a legal way. Judges that have tried it say it works great. There is no reason it shouldn't be SOP in US courts.
I'm not disagreeing with you on KDE's chicken and the egg problem. Its entirely possible that people wouldn't write to the 4.0 spec before 4.0 came out. KDE has always been very fast and loose, still is, and they might not have had the credibility with developers to tell them "yes this is the final spec", or "yes this is a version with the API locked". The might very well have had to go through the whole 4 release cycle doing that sort of thing and only had the credibility for KDE 4-> 5.
But that doesn't change the fact that KDE 4.0 wasn't a 4.0 release. Moreover if the developers actually wanted genuine end users then by trying to achieve that they were declaring the release to be ready.
I agree the ABI/API should have been stable enough for developers to develop against the version early. They didn't want to, they wanted to wait until the users starting moving over. A chicken and egg problem. A.0 release is a end user release. If the developer community was demanding an end user release before they would start targeting that indicates that KDE had a political problem with its developers. They lacked their trust. Lying about the state of KDE was not the best way to get it back.
It was effective in convincing the developer community that KDE was serious about the API/ABI but the downside was they got graded on the.0 release. You seem to be trying to have it both ways, that the.0 release wasn't really a release and that it had to be an actually release to get developers on board. Microsoft and Apple both have this problem and they have a much better and much longer track record with developers.
BTW in reading the last two paragraphs I think I see the root of the problem. The nomenclature for beta, alpha, release candidate.... comes from the closed source world. There is no grabbing the latest from revision control, even for internal groups.
This is simple a distributor is going to spend X dollars on DEs. They can:
a) Spend most of it one one, call that Z b) Spread it around
going from a to b reduces support for DE Z. How hard it is does matter. Distributions like Suse and Mandrake pulled money out of KDE to move it over to Gnome support. Their applications became less KDE centric. Their look and feel became less vanilla KDE all of those things were bad for KDE.
I'd question whether this is different art in a copyright sense. I think its close enough to constitute a derived work. And of course there is the trademark violation everyone is addressing.
I had mixed feelings about NetInfo. On the one hand I think it started to move things away from complex configuration files. On the other hand an undocumented database is worse than config files as the Windows registry shows. But I understand why people have mixed feelings.
In terms of innovation I give them credit for inventing most of the concepts of an object oriented GUI, WebObjects the first application server, magneto-optical media and later the CD-ROM drive. That's in addition to major innovations in programming languages. Call me someone who drank the kool aide but I only wish we were seeing that much innovation today.
Got it. I've seen lots of companies mix this stuff up that's not uncommon. What's important for the KDE discussion though is that regardless of definition a.0 release is not a beta anymore. We all agree that KDE 4.0 just had a frozen API, which in your scheme would have made it a pre-alpha in in my scheme would have made it a beta.
So your scheme makes things worse. The fact that I don't like your scheme for the reason that was apparent. By having alpha's be so late in the process What do you call developer releases where you don't want end user bug reports at all? More generally the problem I have with that scheme is that it confuses what sorts of bug reports are useful with where the software is in the development process. Its possible that software could alpha step, where stuff doesn't get into the main tree until its reasonable finished. So if it runs at all, naive bug reports are fine. Which is why that setup isn't generally applicable.
I don't know if you are checking replies but fully supported desktop environments is hard to do. Further most distributions have custom apps. There are enough distributions I don't mind the distributions picking a primary environment.
I was objecting to comparing KWord, to the Word processor with arguably the best layout algorithms around. And of course the latest versions have all sorts of complex features for tablets in terms of layout and assisted writing. Looking at the features KWord is bragging about, they aren't there.
If you don't want the features of Pages I can see not liking it. I love Keynote for the layout but even I find the templates a bit restrictive. OTOH I find Numbers unusable.
Anyway, I agree Open Office should be looked at. And for that matter abiword isn't bad either, though its out of date.
I don't know what they were doing. My point is I'm not sure it was an obviously bad strategy in 2000. It didn't pan out but lots of gambles that were the right move don't necessarily pan out.
You are missing the point. Solaris was better than the Linuxes of the 1990s. Open Source was behind Solaris for those years. "Solaris was Linux" was a comment regarding Linux's development path, it was quite deliberately targeting Solaris features.
Now can you answer the question. When were people putting Linux on Sun hardware in large numbers?
How could they have done that? RedHat has grown along with Linux. Even if you assume that Sun could capture RedHat plus Suse plus Turbo Linux but Ubuntu that would have been a fraction of what they were worth in 2000. At the time Sun was "missing the party" they were at a white house dinner, to use your analogy.
The money wasn't in Linux until Sun, IBM, Compaq, Digital, SGI... all died to Linux.
One thing the article discusses quite clearly was McNally's desire to move the low end to Intel in the late 1990s. It appears he regrets not becoming an Intel vendor much earlier. Its interesting I wonder how they would have handled having a Sun branded line which was much cheaper when it really would have been undercutting sales of their Sparc workstations and low end servers.
What did they have? Sparc chips with 32 cores on them. If that had worked out at a reasonable cost they could have been producing boxes in the $50k range with say 200 CPUs. Entirely different types of applications become possible.
Nothing would have happened in 2007 by then it was much too late. If Sun had gone open source with Solaris in 1997 they might have killed off Linux, but at that point such a move would have made no sense. That's the problem with disruptive technologies. Once it makes sense to do anything about them its far too late.
Nice to talk to someone from back then:) What I find interesting is that with OSX, IOS, Android.... we might start seeing the same problems for notebooks with a dozen major OSes. We see it already on cell phones.
Anyway I think the real solution to the Unix wars was open source / compile on the new system. Linux still has terrible binary compatability. Windows may be the last OS that values binary compatibility.
You are right. The big boxes got killed in every sphere. Sun benefited from that as people moved from $1m machines to $50k machines and got killed as they moved from $50k machines to $2k machines.
RedHat is a much younger company. The analogy would be if another Unix clone came along which was improving rapidly and would over the next decade or so likely be much better than Linux and RedHat had to navigate the switch of RedHat off of Linux to that clone.
When Microsoft was doing this move Sun was still rapidly expanding. The Microsoft was inevitable killed of VMS, Digital Unix it helped Sun because McNally never bought into it.
I disagree with you on Sparc. When SGI dropped MIPS they dropped the reason to buy SGI. Sun was well aware of that. And sure enough when they dropped Sparc they died soon thereafter. If anything they needed to pour more money into Sparc and keep it ahead or move over to Power and work with IBM.
If they were going to drop Sparc and switch to Intel they needed to really offer distinctive stuff on the rest of the system. In other words something like SGI's Visual Workstation, but for servers not workstations. That's been Apple's strategy and it is a very tough game but doable. Sun's whole value proposition was they were not a commodity.
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They are not allowed to look up material about the case. The definition of a term in general may or may not be about the case. That's a complex question of law. Say for example this rape occurred on an "Ottoman" and a juror looked up what that word meant...
Frankly I think the judge over reacted by declaring a mistrial.
The question is whether that is research about the case or not. Its very borderline and sanctions require intent.
A perfect example of why its so important to allow jurors to ask questions. If councils and the judge had known the jury had questions on Rape Trauma Syndrome they could have addressed this in a legal way. Judges that have tried it say it works great. There is no reason it shouldn't be SOP in US courts.
I'm not disagreeing with you on KDE's chicken and the egg problem. Its entirely possible that people wouldn't write to the 4.0 spec before 4.0 came out. KDE has always been very fast and loose, still is, and they might not have had the credibility with developers to tell them "yes this is the final spec", or "yes this is a version with the API locked". The might very well have had to go through the whole 4 release cycle doing that sort of thing and only had the credibility for KDE 4-> 5.
But that doesn't change the fact that KDE 4.0 wasn't a 4.0 release. Moreover if the developers actually wanted genuine end users then by trying to achieve that they were declaring the release to be ready.
I agree the ABI/API should have been stable enough for developers to develop against the version early. They didn't want to, they wanted to wait until the users starting moving over. A chicken and egg problem. A .0 release is a end user release. If the developer community was demanding an end user release before they would start targeting that indicates that KDE had a political problem with its developers. They lacked their trust. Lying about the state of KDE was not the best way to get it back.
It was effective in convincing the developer community that KDE was serious about the API/ABI but the downside was they got graded on the .0 release. You seem to be trying to have it both ways, that the .0 release wasn't really a release and that it had to be an actually release to get developers on board. Microsoft and Apple both have this problem and they have a much better and much longer track record with developers.
BTW in reading the last two paragraphs I think I see the root of the problem. The nomenclature for beta, alpha, release candidate.... comes from the closed source world. There is no grabbing the latest from revision control, even for internal groups.
This is simple a distributor is going to spend X dollars on DEs. They can:
a) Spend most of it one one, call that Z
b) Spread it around
going from a to b reduces support for DE Z. How hard it is does matter. Distributions like Suse and Mandrake pulled money out of KDE to move it over to Gnome support. Their applications became less KDE centric. Their look and feel became less vanilla KDE all of those things were bad for KDE.
I'd question whether this is different art in a copyright sense. I think its close enough to constitute a derived work. And of course there is the trademark violation everyone is addressing.
I had mixed feelings about NetInfo. On the one hand I think it started to move things away from complex configuration files. On the other hand an undocumented database is worse than config files as the Windows registry shows. But I understand why people have mixed feelings.
In terms of innovation I give them credit for inventing most of the concepts of an object oriented GUI, WebObjects the first application server, magneto-optical media and later the CD-ROM drive. That's in addition to major innovations in programming languages. Call me someone who drank the kool aide but I only wish we were seeing that much innovation today.
Got it. I've seen lots of companies mix this stuff up that's not uncommon. What's important for the KDE discussion though is that regardless of definition a .0 release is not a beta anymore. We all agree that KDE 4.0 just had a frozen API, which in your scheme would have made it a pre-alpha in in my scheme would have made it a beta.
So your scheme makes things worse. The fact that I don't like your scheme for the reason that was apparent. By having alpha's be so late in the process What do you call developer releases where you don't want end user bug reports at all? More generally the problem I have with that scheme is that it confuses what sorts of bug reports are useful with where the software is in the development process. Its possible that software could alpha step, where stuff doesn't get into the main tree until its reasonable finished. So if it runs at all, naive bug reports are fine. Which is why that setup isn't generally applicable.
Out of curiosity what industry are you in?
Sun wasn't losing business to Microsoft in 1999. It never really lost business to Microsoft.
I don't know if you are checking replies but fully supported desktop environments is hard to do. Further most distributions have custom apps. There are enough distributions I don't mind the distributions picking a primary environment.
Good point, if we don't count people who make out of the box hardware then Cisco doesn't count either.
I can't either. Using a non keyboard seems torturous. Which is why the fact that people like the IOS version of pages is a serious tribute to Apple.
I agree you meet his criteria.
I was objecting to comparing KWord, to the Word processor with arguably the best layout algorithms around. And of course the latest versions have all sorts of complex features for tablets in terms of layout and assisted writing. Looking at the features KWord is bragging about, they aren't there.
If you don't want the features of Pages I can see not liking it. I love Keynote for the layout but even I find the templates a bit restrictive. OTOH I find Numbers unusable.
Anyway, I agree Open Office should be looked at. And for that matter abiword isn't bad either, though its out of date.
I don't know what they were doing. My point is I'm not sure it was an obviously bad strategy in 2000. It didn't pan out but lots of gambles that were the right move don't necessarily pan out.
Doc --
You are missing the point. Solaris was better than the Linuxes of the 1990s. Open Source was behind Solaris for those years. "Solaris was Linux" was a comment regarding Linux's development path, it was quite deliberately targeting Solaris features.
Now can you answer the question. When were people putting Linux on Sun hardware in large numbers?
How could they have done that? RedHat has grown along with Linux. Even if you assume that Sun could capture RedHat plus Suse plus Turbo Linux but Ubuntu that would have been a fraction of what they were worth in 2000. At the time Sun was "missing the party" they were at a white house dinner, to use your analogy.
The money wasn't in Linux until Sun, IBM, Compaq, Digital, SGI... all died to Linux.
One thing the article discusses quite clearly was McNally's desire to move the low end to Intel in the late 1990s. It appears he regrets not becoming an Intel vendor much earlier. Its interesting I wonder how they would have handled having a Sun branded line which was much cheaper when it really would have been undercutting sales of their Sparc workstations and low end servers.
What did they have? Sparc chips with 32 cores on them. If that had worked out at a reasonable cost they could have been producing boxes in the $50k range with say 200 CPUs. Entirely different types of applications become possible.
Nothing would have happened in 2007 by then it was much too late. If Sun had gone open source with Solaris in 1997 they might have killed off Linux, but at that point such a move would have made no sense. That's the problem with disruptive technologies. Once it makes sense to do anything about them its far too late.
Nice to talk to someone from back then :) What I find interesting is that with OSX, IOS, Android.... we might start seeing the same problems for notebooks with a dozen major OSes. We see it already on cell phones.
Anyway I think the real solution to the Unix wars was open source / compile on the new system. Linux still has terrible binary compatability. Windows may be the last OS that values binary compatibility.
Right but in terms of the death of Sun as commodity hardware improved the number of things that could be reduced to commodity hardware increased.
You are right. The big boxes got killed in every sphere. Sun benefited from that as people moved from $1m machines to $50k machines and got killed as they moved from $50k machines to $2k machines.
RedHat is a much younger company. The analogy would be if another Unix clone came along which was improving rapidly and would over the next decade or so likely be much better than Linux and RedHat had to navigate the switch of RedHat off of Linux to that clone.
When Microsoft was doing this move Sun was still rapidly expanding. The Microsoft was inevitable killed of VMS, Digital Unix it helped Sun because McNally never bought into it.
I disagree with you on Sparc. When SGI dropped MIPS they dropped the reason to buy SGI. Sun was well aware of that. And sure enough when they dropped Sparc they died soon thereafter. If anything they needed to pour more money into Sparc and keep it ahead or move over to Power and work with IBM.
If they were going to drop Sparc and switch to Intel they needed to really offer distinctive stuff on the rest of the system. In other words something like SGI's Visual Workstation, but for servers not workstations. That's been Apple's strategy and it is a very tough game but doable. Sun's whole value proposition was they were not a commodity.