...because these guys aren't trolls. They're not writing their "research" hoping to cause a flamewar, rather, they're doing it hoping that the research will be read by policy makers who might swallow it hook, line and sinker.
The only way to minimise the chance of that "research" being taken seriously is to make sure that whenever some policy guy googles and finds the research he'll also find a few thousand links to people picking holes in it (and this slashdot story does that).
I wonder what the morale must be like among the programmers/technicians employed by MS? Every day they must be reading about MS security holes, crashing MS apps, or the latest MS abuse of market power. Their karma must but so low when they shuffle off to pick up their pay cheque.
If the problem is that free == worthless then the writer should find the price point that consumers will be willing to risk giving it a try - say, 30-40% of the average WinOS-only price.
Then a salesperson can say to the customer, "Not only do you get this nifty OS, but you also get a whole bunch of apps - and for under half the price you would pay for just the WinOS."
It'll be hours before Slashdot posts a another story about the SCO litigation, but I can't wait to ask a question, so a post to this story will have to do.
Presumably if IBM really submitted a bunch of code that they had ripped off from SCO, then there would either be a huge single posting of the code to LKML, or a tight bunch of smaller postings.
So, has anyone identified postings to the list on behalf of IBM that look suspicious?
I read Cryptonomicon and Deepness, and think the judges (voters?) made the right decision.
[Doing this from memory, so my apologies if I don't get it right...]
I found myself struggling to finish Cryptonomicon, it left me uninvolved with the characters and didn't seem to introduce any new ideas. This is disappointing because the concept had great potential, but in the end it came down to rather blunt corporate manouvering (which I think was included to cover up the problems with the data warehouse concept), and a hunt for some war booty (and then it was only gold!).
In the end it felt like the author ran out of steam midway and then thought "hey, didn't I read about X in Popular Mechanics?", and sticks a reference to it in the story.
On the other hand, Deepness stayed with me. For the first time I realised the immense power (both in the good and bad sense) inherent in 'pervasive computing'. I assume this may be old-news to those who read Cyberpunk genre, but i'd not encountered it before.
Also, I really liked the way Vinge envisaged layer upon layer of computer architectures accumulating over thousands of years. I seem to recall that he implied that down in the deep depths file names were 8.3...
However, everything isn't perfect, while Vinge's aliens (the arachnids) are interesting, they are not as alien as the SMP creatures from his first book. Vinges description of alien buildings was really clever - from the point of view of the aliens they were described the way we would describe a room, warm, cozy, but from the point of view of the humans the rooms were darkly alien.
Also, Vinge is an IT academic, and he treads the line between speculative and fantasy very well.
They could put the satellite inside a shrinkwrap licence with an NDA that expires in 50,001. That would say more about our society than any CD content...
Titan will be visited by the Huygens lander which is due to enter Titan's atmosphere in November 2004. It is capable of floating for a few minutes should it land in one of these oceans.
So, assuming it was designed to be able to float (rather than just bobbing around for a minute while it fills with 'water'), why could the engineers only manage to get it to float for a few minutes??
To answer my own question, perhaps the low temperature of the 'water' will eventually reduce the effectiveness of whatever the probe uses for boyancy?
Then again, maybe its waterwings will freeze and shatter:)
Slashdot Mirror
...because these guys aren't trolls. They're not writing their "research" hoping to cause a flamewar, rather, they're doing it hoping that the research will be read by policy makers who might swallow it hook, line and sinker.
The only way to minimise the chance of that "research" being taken seriously is to make sure that whenever some policy guy googles and finds the research he'll also find a few thousand links to people picking holes in it (and this slashdot story does that).
I wonder what the morale must be like among the programmers/technicians employed by MS? Every day they must be reading about MS security holes, crashing MS apps, or the latest MS abuse of market power. Their karma must but so low when they shuffle off to pick up their pay cheque.
If the problem is that free == worthless then the writer should find the price point that consumers will be willing to risk giving it a try - say, 30-40% of the average WinOS-only price.
Then a salesperson can say to the customer, "Not only do you get this nifty OS, but you also get a whole bunch of apps - and for under half the price you would pay for just the WinOS."
It'll be hours before Slashdot posts a another story about the SCO litigation, but I can't wait to ask a question, so a post to this story will have to do.
Presumably if IBM really submitted a bunch of code that they had ripped off from SCO, then there would either be a huge single posting of the code to LKML, or a tight bunch of smaller postings.
So, has anyone identified postings to the list on behalf of IBM that look suspicious?
[Doing this from memory, so my apologies if I don't get it right...]
I found myself struggling to finish Cryptonomicon, it left me uninvolved with the characters and didn't seem to introduce any new ideas. This is disappointing because the concept had great potential, but in the end it came down to rather blunt corporate manouvering (which I think was included to cover up the problems with the data warehouse concept), and a hunt for some war booty (and then it was only gold!). In the end it felt like the author ran out of steam midway and then thought "hey, didn't I read about X in Popular Mechanics?", and sticks a reference to it in the story.
On the other hand, Deepness stayed with me. For the first time I realised the immense power (both in the good and bad sense) inherent in 'pervasive computing'. I assume this may be old-news to those who read Cyberpunk genre, but i'd not encountered it before.
Also, I really liked the way Vinge envisaged layer upon layer of computer architectures accumulating over thousands of years. I seem to recall that he implied that down in the deep depths file names were 8.3...
However, everything isn't perfect, while Vinge's aliens (the arachnids) are interesting, they are not as alien as the SMP creatures from his first book. Vinges description of alien buildings was really clever - from the point of view of the aliens they were described the way we would describe a room, warm, cozy, but from the point of view of the humans the rooms were darkly alien.
Also, Vinge is an IT academic, and he treads the line between speculative and fantasy very well.
They could put the satellite inside a shrinkwrap licence with an NDA that expires in 50,001. That would say more about our society than any CD content...
To answer my own question, perhaps the low temperature of the 'water' will eventually reduce the effectiveness of whatever the probe uses for boyancy?
Then again, maybe its waterwings will freeze and shatter :)