It sure is a good thing that Linux is free and open source. Because that clearly makes it impossible for anyone who had a different opinion than your own to use it.
Madmen always take the most simple and logical path to reason their madness. SCO wants money at the expense of everyone else, so naturally they must assert themselves as superior to everyone else.
It seems to me that they will build an ingeniously incorrect case, bring it in front of a court of law, play the justice system like a card table in Vegas, and if they win... well that would be bad.
I'm not trying to apologize in a prophylactic matter, nor am I trying to enforce stereotypes. I'm simply trying to gain understanding, as I'm a free thinker. I didn't even know anything about the FLOSS movement prior to your mentioning it. As it seems I was confusing I'll try to do better in future phraseology.
I sent the following e-mail as a comment, if anyone here can help me out I'd love to understand.
--
Hello,
My name is Brian Landsberger, and while I am sure that you have received a number of ridiculous and scathing e-mails concerning this article I would like to start off by saying this is not one of them. I fully respect your opinion and that is what I am curious about. I would like to understand what logic, beliefs, school of thought, etc. you used in order to come to this conclusion.
I obviously take a different stance entirely, but from my understanding society tends to congregate and make rules of engagement for that group. The world has been moving to the concept of a "free world", where people are able to congregate freely and make whatever rules (within the confines of law) that they desire. If Group A (the Open Source / FSF camp) decides to create tools based on open knowledge Group B (product based capitalism) should fully respect that decision, especially if they elect to use some of the fruits in their own pursuits.
It can be said that Linksys / Cisco could have continued to developed their own IP and 802.11 stacks. However they elected to use what has been conditionally made available to the public. In mind your response seems unreasonable, if you could help shed some light here I would appreciate it.
I'm not a linguist or a neurologist but I think that pattern matching is a different process entirely from reading a structured language. (I.e. Latin, English, music)
Mentally speaking pattern matching seems akin to pictographs and ideographs. As evidenced by the existence of linguistics I imagine that reading a structured language is a different process entirely.
However through my study of western humanities I can say with certitude that this knowledge (or perhaps wisdom) was common until the Renascence. This is why Latin has been preserved the way it has. One of the many functions that the "scribes" had was to safeguard the official language from confusion.
Makes me curious about how many glaring errors I made in typing this...
In today's world we are taught "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". In the 18th century common society didn't really have much of a concept of an economy. We forget that life during those times consisted mainly of... well... just surviving. When Marie Antoinette (supposedly) said "Let them eat cake" the common man compared the rotten food they were being forced to eat with the good food the royals had... that and dessert? While all they had worked for... thier livelyhood... even their very lives were at stake?
Needless to say we all know what happened. In today's world we have come up with systems to make sure that most of our basic physical needs are to met until we are old enough to retire and die. Government doesn't so much govern humans anymore as they govern the systems in which we live our lives. Capitalism, the economy, lobbyists, etc. Quite frankly we have a pathetic excuse for a government.
Getting back to Marie Antoinette... now unless I'm a way off base I'm pretty sure that people are still people. If our very survival is threatened we tend to get mean. In today's world if the very base systems are threatened I don't know what people are capable of.
<insane example>
SCO wins it all, they own all UNIX/Linux. They kill open source. Say 20 years has passed and in that time you've found someone and settled down. Perhaps this means a family. Perhaps this means "just a lot of debt". Who cares? In the end you have some form of life and responsibility.
Of course you never believed in the US Supreme Court ruling where Linus Torvalds had to sign Linux over to SCO. So you moved away from the US to another country. You started a small software firm based on Linux, GNU, Open Source... and the like.
All at once international copyright and trademark law come into being. Suddenly SCO decides to change the licensing of Linux to $1,000,000 per seat. Within 2 hours a 16 year old collection boy accompanied by a fleet of lawyers and the UN police come up to your home with a bill for (Dr. Evil Voice) ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. Due upon receipt.
</insane example>
Would you lash out? Would all Linux hackers lash out? Would you revolt against the entire world for messing with your way of life? Being some place they have no right whatsoever to be?
Let's be realistic... SCO is just a bunch of shareholders in a dead corporation with a few bucks in the bank. There hadn't been a unified development movement in the entire UNIX world in oh... about the time that the GNU project and Linux met each other head on. Linux is a tool that has helped a number of us build a life... and now some crusty shareholders want to charge the very people who have been developing, building, testing, and using that tool?
It stands to reason that it may be time for us hackers to stop being so cynical, bitchy, and nonchalant about these issues. Wishing they would just "go away" thinking "everyone will wise up eventually". And realistically this is stupid, and if we're not careful our government is going to give one of our more important tools (our own work) away to someone else... and then you're going to have to pay them to use the tools you wrote. This isn't capitalism... it's madness.
Law and ethics should not mix to the extent of sitting still. Especially if you are the sort of person who has something that needs to be protected (which is what the DMCA is supposed to do). I look at the law as a tool, and as all tools go you use the best one for the job. If there is only a single tool you know about and you have an ethical dilemma I would suggest consulting the tool-smiths (in this case an IP lawyer). You may actually learn something about the document you hate so much, and use the experience to educate the legal system on your method of thinking.
Soap box moment:
Corporate America makes extensive use of the law, they hire fleets of lawyers and make them loyal to the thinking patterns that are used there. This is why America's law is so tightly bound to corporations these days. You know, the whole "We hold these Truths to be self-evident that all Men are created equal" idea? Essentially we have (in general) failed quite a bit in making technology into what the "people" want and into what "we" want. Open Source, Freedom of Speech, and all that jazz while being a great idea has done very little for common people DIRECTLY (at least as they perceive). If we want the legal recognition that we honestly think we deserve we must go to them, not the other way around. Instead of simply "attacking" the DMCA and saying "it's stupid" as a reason and being brash and nasty about it to common people we must talk them through it with real life examples. Technology is still a "product" to many people, and not a way of life. Honestly technology will never be a way of life for everyone, for most people it will be a tool to help them live a life.
All good parodies bring to light something that is "wrong" while suggesting corrective action. Usually that corrective action is absurd and this is why it is a parody. The parody that comes to mind (from a literature standpoint) is Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", and while his is a little more grizly the real meaning of the paper comes out crystal clear. I suspect that a lot of people on slashdot may be shocked and sort of disgusted at this parody - but there is a very real problem with video game abuse (not the video games or the industry) these days.
I knew someone, let's just call him Joe Geek. He'd wake up at 3am every day, play EverCrack until he leaves his home for work at 8:52am (of course Joe is supposed to be at work at 9am). Then Joe would stumble in to work and do little for a few hours while checking the boards... then a few hours of hard core work while dosing on caffiene and nicotine to keep awake until he left early at 4:25. The moment he got back to his house he would play until he passed out around 1am. Then his 3am alarm would go off and he'd start it all over again. After a few months of this he looked like a crystal meth freak and had to be torn away from the game.
Addiction and abuse are real no matter what the thing that is being abused is. Personally I think this is a good parody.
This was one of the best games ever, long have I kept my 3do around simply for this game. The graphics were fantastic 10 years ago, the sound was unrivaled, the dialog, and storyline are (in my opinion) still unmatched. This game was created when gaming seemed more pure... It's a breath of fresh air to get it out and play it once every so often... how surface and cliche' the game appears - and how deep the rabbit hole actually goes.
This makes me happy, perhaps it will help to spur game makers out of the "wow, it's fast and cool... look at the graphics and sound... whee!" toddler phase - and perhaps put focus back on the story.
First and foremost I'm a wireless guy, landline is pretty much a black hole to me these days....
Telecom has been undergoing many changes at the lowest levels for a few years. Most UNIX systems in telephony are used as SCP's (Signaling / Service control points) / HLR's VLR's.. etc. A SCP will provide a service such as SMS, E-911, prepay, or something over the SS7 network. The SS7 network is at the lowest levels very similar to DAP, being a heavyweight protocol that requires its own circuits (ISDN, T1, ATM, etc.). While SS7 has been fabulous for creation of large and wonderful telecom networks it is becoming harder and harder to find people who understand even the basics of it. What's worse is the SS7 solutions of yesteryear (produced by say Lucent, NewNet, and Tandem) are no more. The newer SS7 solutions (say SignalWare, Distributed7, etc.) haven't really been able to cut the mustard. Things have been getting worse for a while, and people know it... but the fine people at ANSI and IEEE, Lucent, Nortel, IBM, and the like have come up with a solution. Make SS7 lightweight (I.e. IP based like LDAP).
Many things have happened in order to get SS7 (a very demanding protocol indeed) to work over IP. The first milestone was essentially dumping TCP for SCTP/IP. Much has been going on in this realm, the lk-sctp project has been busily cranking out code for the 2.5 series kernel, and will likely make Linux one of the first *NIX based operating systems to have a NATIVE SCTP implementation. Adding SS7 to the top of this is about as easy as creating an SCTP daemon.
While SCTP and the Sigtran suite of protocols (M3UA / SUA ) are moving ahead quickly there are other projects that are working on implementing a heavyweight implementation of SS7 - such as openss7, and even the PBX / softswitch project asterisk.
While all this may be nice and good, it may be worth noting that Inet Inc. has an SS7 network monitoring solution called GeoProbe. While some parts of the system run on a solaris server the actual cardcages and "proprietary" equipment actually run Linux. (at over 300k a site, that's a pretty big win for Linux).
As always I'd love to hear what's going on in other sectors of telecom with Linux.
I just glanced at the about.com reasons to never accept a counter-offer. They seem geared towards a disgruntled employee who has no loyalty to a company. In reality counter-offers are good tools to maintain fairness in the job market. This answer seems like a "union-shop" answer, and many people in technology companies do not participate... or have them at all.
If a potential company seeks you out it is your right to check it out. This is one of the many ways that you can do market research. If you are worth 80 thousand anywhere else in the market and only getting paid 50 - most companies don't readily give out 30 thousand dollar raises (unless your Enron;>)
As for loyalty, I've stayed (essentially) at the same company through 15 managers, and a buyout. Essentially the entire food chain above me changed... if I wasn't for me keeping on the ball my salary would be the same too.
Doesn't government have better things to do than threaten the citizens and tell them how to live? This is the sorta crap that revolutions are made up of.
I've been looking at solutions for my Zaurus as well - I think that the Buffalo, Symbol, and Socket wireless lan cards all use the same chipset as the Linksys CF cards (Prisim 2.5) - but they do not have the annoying overhang that the d-link or linksys do.
However I've been thinking of not doing 802.11 and just doing bluetooth as the support is coming along quite nicely - plus I have a T68i with Voicestream's GPRS... 56k anywhere I go baby;-)
1) Religion, spirituality, and instinct are all a product of faith. More than 90 percent of all people worldwide live by some degree of faith. So I'm quite sure that by current human reasoning faith indeed does hold water.
2) "It" refers to any object of faith - sorry for the confusion.
Simply because someone has a belief that cannot be immediately justified it does not mean that they live in fear of the unknown. All this actually means is that they have a belief in something not proven.
Some things are beyond the scope of human ability to prove or disprove - God, ESP, Aliens, and the like are good examples. Personally I think that both faith and science are both easy things to back a dogma into. The real problem is when we start to invalidate other people's beliefs simply because they conflict - or are simply not with our own. This is the sort of stuff that tension, war, and general hatred are made up of.
Science doesn't prove anything. Science proposes that under certian conditions something is true most of the time. Science doesn't discount ANYTHING - a true scientist would have to admit that anything is possible - perhaps unlikely, but almost never impossible. If we say "something doesn't exist because science hasn't proven it does yet" (e.g. alien abduction, ESP, psychic powers) then we are backing ourselves into a "science" based dogmatic society. Don't fear crackpots, or the unknown - because they are often times the ones who are hailed as genius hundreds of years after they die.
Slashdot Mirror
It sure is a good thing that Linux is free and open source. Because that clearly makes it impossible for anyone who had a different opinion than your own to use it.
I sure am glad I switched to Gentoo....
Madmen always take the most simple and logical path to reason their madness. SCO wants money at the expense of everyone else, so naturally they must assert themselves as superior to everyone else.
... well that would be bad.
It seems to me that they will build an ingeniously incorrect case, bring it in front of a court of law, play the justice system like a card table in Vegas, and if they win
yeah whatever, someone just did this in photoshop
I'm not trying to apologize in a prophylactic matter, nor am I trying to enforce stereotypes. I'm simply trying to gain understanding, as I'm a free thinker. I didn't even know anything about the FLOSS movement prior to your mentioning it. As it seems I was confusing I'll try to do better in future phraseology.
Thanks!
Brian
I sent the following e-mail as a comment, if anyone here can help me out I'd love to understand.
--
Hello,
My name is Brian Landsberger, and while I am sure that you have received a number of ridiculous and scathing e-mails concerning this article I would like to start off by saying this is not one of them. I fully respect your opinion and that is what I am curious about. I would like to understand what logic, beliefs, school of thought, etc. you used in order to come to this conclusion.
I obviously take a different stance entirely, but from my understanding society tends to congregate and make rules of engagement for that group. The world has been moving to the concept of a "free world", where people are able to congregate freely and make whatever rules (within the confines of law) that they desire. If
Group A (the Open Source / FSF camp) decides to create tools based on open knowledge Group B (product based capitalism) should fully respect that decision, especially if they elect to use some of the fruits in their own pursuits.
It can be said that Linksys / Cisco could have continued to developed their own IP and 802.11 stacks. However they elected to use what has been conditionally made available to the public. In mind your response seems unreasonable, if you could help shed some light here I would appreciate it.
Thank you!
Brian Landsberger
I'm not a linguist or a neurologist but I think that pattern matching is a different process entirely from reading a structured language. (I.e. Latin, English, music)
Mentally speaking pattern matching seems akin to pictographs and ideographs. As evidenced by the existence of linguistics I imagine that reading a structured language is a different process entirely.
However through my study of western humanities I can say with certitude that this knowledge (or perhaps wisdom) was common until the Renascence. This is why Latin has been preserved the way it has. One of the many functions that the "scribes" had was to safeguard the official language from confusion.
Makes me curious about how many glaring errors I made in typing this...
In today's world we are taught "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". In the 18th century common society didn't really have much of a concept of an economy. We forget that life during those times consisted mainly of ... well ... just surviving. When Marie Antoinette (supposedly) said "Let them eat cake" the common man compared the rotten food they were being forced to eat with the good food the royals had... that and dessert? While all they had worked for... thier livelyhood... even their very lives were at stake?
... and then you're going to have to pay them to use the tools you wrote. This isn't capitalism... it's madness.
Needless to say we all know what happened. In today's world we have come up with systems to make sure that most of our basic physical needs are to met until we are old enough to retire and die. Government doesn't so much govern humans anymore as they govern the systems in which we live our lives. Capitalism, the economy, lobbyists, etc. Quite frankly we have a pathetic excuse for a government.
Getting back to Marie Antoinette... now unless I'm a way off base I'm pretty sure that people are still people. If our very survival is threatened we tend to get mean. In today's world if the very base systems are threatened I don't know what people are capable of.
<insane example>
SCO wins it all, they own all UNIX/Linux. They kill open source. Say 20 years has passed and in that time you've found someone and settled down. Perhaps this means a family. Perhaps this means "just a lot of debt". Who cares? In the end you have some form of life and responsibility.
Of course you never believed in the US Supreme Court ruling where Linus Torvalds had to sign Linux over to SCO. So you moved away from the US to another country. You started a small software firm based on Linux, GNU, Open Source... and the like.
All at once international copyright and trademark law come into being. Suddenly SCO decides to change the licensing of Linux to $1,000,000 per seat. Within 2 hours a 16 year old collection boy accompanied by a fleet of lawyers and the UN police come up to your home with a bill for (Dr. Evil Voice) ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. Due upon receipt.
</insane example>
Would you lash out? Would all Linux hackers lash out? Would you revolt against the entire world for messing with your way of life? Being some place they have no right whatsoever to be?
Let's be realistic... SCO is just a bunch of shareholders in a dead corporation with a few bucks in the bank. There hadn't been a unified development movement in the entire UNIX world in oh... about the time that the GNU project and Linux met each other head on. Linux is a tool that has helped a number of us build a life... and now some crusty shareholders want to charge the very people who have been developing, building, testing, and using that tool?
It stands to reason that it may be time for us hackers to stop being so cynical, bitchy, and nonchalant about these issues. Wishing they would just "go away" thinking "everyone will wise up eventually". And realistically this is stupid, and if we're not careful our government is going to give one of our more important tools (our own work) away to someone else
Opinions?
Quick answer:
Law and ethics should not mix to the extent of sitting still. Especially if you are the sort of person who has something that needs to be protected (which is what the DMCA is supposed to do). I look at the law as a tool, and as all tools go you use the best one for the job. If there is only a single tool you know about and you have an ethical dilemma I would suggest consulting the tool-smiths (in this case an IP lawyer). You may actually learn something about the document you hate so much, and use the experience to educate the legal system on your method of thinking.
Soap box moment:
Corporate America makes extensive use of the law, they hire fleets of lawyers and make them loyal to the thinking patterns that are used there. This is why America's law is so tightly bound to corporations these days. You know, the whole "We hold these Truths to be self-evident that all Men are created equal" idea? Essentially we have (in general) failed quite a bit in making technology into what the "people" want and into what "we" want. Open Source, Freedom of Speech, and all that jazz while being a great idea has done very little for common people DIRECTLY (at least as they perceive). If we want the legal recognition that we honestly think we deserve we must go to them, not the other way around. Instead of simply "attacking" the DMCA and saying "it's stupid" as a reason and being brash and nasty about it to common people we must talk them through it with real life examples. Technology is still a "product" to many people, and not a way of life. Honestly technology will never be a way of life for everyone, for most people it will be a tool to help them live a life.
Thank you
-Brian
All good parodies bring to light something that is "wrong" while suggesting corrective action. Usually that corrective action is absurd and this is why it is a parody. The parody that comes to mind (from a literature standpoint) is Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", and while his is a little more grizly the real meaning of the paper comes out crystal clear. I suspect that a lot of people on slashdot may be shocked and sort of disgusted at this parody - but there is a very real problem with video game abuse (not the video games or the industry) these days.
I knew someone, let's just call him Joe Geek. He'd wake up at 3am every day, play EverCrack until he leaves his home for work at 8:52am (of course Joe is supposed to be at work at 9am). Then Joe would stumble in to work and do little for a few hours while checking the boards... then a few hours of hard core work while dosing on caffiene and nicotine to keep awake until he left early at 4:25. The moment he got back to his house he would play until he passed out around 1am. Then his 3am alarm would go off and he'd start it all over again. After a few months of this he looked like a crystal meth freak and had to be torn away from the game.
Addiction and abuse are real no matter what the thing that is being abused is. Personally I think this is a good parody.
This was one of the best games ever, long have I kept my 3do around simply for this game. The graphics were fantastic 10 years ago, the sound was unrivaled, the dialog, and storyline are (in my opinion) still unmatched. This game was created when gaming seemed more pure... It's a breath of fresh air to get it out and play it once every so often ... how surface and cliche' the game appears - and how deep the rabbit hole actually goes.
This makes me happy, perhaps it will help to spur game makers out of the "wow, it's fast and cool... look at the graphics and sound... whee!" toddler phase - and perhaps put focus back on the story.
Then again...
I said "screw it" when a while back and decided to get fink as all of my playlists are in m3u format - ogg just came naturally =]
First and foremost I'm a wireless guy, landline is pretty much a black hole to me these days....
Telecom has been undergoing many changes at the lowest levels for a few years. Most UNIX systems in telephony are used as SCP's (Signaling / Service control points) / HLR's VLR's.. etc. A SCP will provide a service such as SMS, E-911, prepay, or something over the SS7 network. The SS7 network is at the lowest levels very similar to DAP, being a heavyweight protocol that requires its own circuits (ISDN, T1, ATM, etc.). While SS7 has been fabulous for creation of large and wonderful telecom networks it is becoming harder and harder to find people who understand even the basics of it. What's worse is the SS7 solutions of yesteryear (produced by say Lucent, NewNet, and Tandem) are no more. The newer SS7 solutions (say SignalWare, Distributed7, etc.) haven't really been able to cut the mustard. Things have been getting worse for a while, and people know it... but the fine people at ANSI and IEEE, Lucent, Nortel, IBM, and the like have come up with a solution. Make SS7 lightweight (I.e. IP based like LDAP).
Many things have happened in order to get SS7 (a very demanding protocol indeed) to work over IP. The first milestone was essentially dumping TCP for SCTP/IP. Much has been going on in this realm, the lk-sctp project has been busily cranking out code for the 2.5 series kernel, and will likely make Linux one of the first *NIX based operating systems to have a NATIVE SCTP implementation. Adding SS7 to the top of this is about as easy as creating an SCTP daemon.
While SCTP and the Sigtran suite of protocols (M3UA / SUA ) are moving ahead quickly there are other projects that are working on implementing a heavyweight implementation of SS7 - such as openss7, and even the PBX / softswitch project asterisk.
While all this may be nice and good, it may be worth noting that Inet Inc. has an SS7 network monitoring solution called GeoProbe. While some parts of the system run on a solaris server the actual cardcages and "proprietary" equipment actually run Linux. (at over 300k a site, that's a pretty big win for Linux).
As always I'd love to hear what's going on in other sectors of telecom with Linux.
Crack out the Mt. Dew AMP and get a few Ephedrine... you'll be up for a long time with no problems whatsoever...
;-)
except for that wacky warbling noise.....
As far as I know the 802.11 spectrum is designated for public (non-commercial) use. I wonder what would happen if the FCC got wind of this?
Burger King! Where all Dragon Masters eat!
I just glanced at the about.com reasons to never accept a counter-offer. They seem geared towards a disgruntled employee who has no loyalty to a company. In reality counter-offers are good tools to maintain fairness in the job market. This answer seems like a "union-shop" answer, and many people in technology companies do not participate... or have them at all.
;>)
... if I wasn't for me keeping on the ball my salary would be the same too.
If a potential company seeks you out it is your right to check it out. This is one of the many ways that you can do market research. If you are worth 80 thousand anywhere else in the market and only getting paid 50 - most companies don't readily give out 30 thousand dollar raises (unless your Enron
As for loyalty, I've stayed (essentially) at the same company through 15 managers, and a buyout. Essentially the entire food chain above me changed
Just my $0.02.
Doesn't government have better things to do than threaten the citizens and tell them how to live? This is the sorta crap that revolutions are made up of.
+sigh+
I've never been much of a NIN fan so those lyrics are new to me - however they do ring clear of "1985". What song is that?
Seems to me that the only one it supports is the socket card - which is fine. I just wanna be able to be in a meeting and not be uber bored :-)
I've been looking at solutions for my Zaurus as well - I think that the Buffalo, Symbol, and Socket wireless lan cards all use the same chipset as the Linksys CF cards (Prisim 2.5) - but they do not have the annoying overhang that the d-link or linksys do.
... 56k anywhere I go baby ;-)
However I've been thinking of not doing 802.11 and just doing bluetooth as the support is coming along quite nicely - plus I have a T68i with Voicestream's GPRS
... and I though Oracle licensing was bad ...
1) Religion, spirituality, and instinct are all a product of faith. More than 90 percent of all people worldwide live by some degree of faith. So I'm quite sure that by current human reasoning faith indeed does hold water.
2) "It" refers to any object of faith - sorry for the confusion.
Simply because someone has a belief that cannot be immediately justified it does not mean that they live in fear of the unknown. All this actually means is that they have a belief in something not proven.
Some things are beyond the scope of human ability to prove or disprove - God, ESP, Aliens, and the like are good examples. Personally I think that both faith and science are both easy things to back a dogma into. The real problem is when we start to invalidate other people's beliefs simply because they conflict - or are simply not with our own. This is the sort of stuff that tension, war, and general hatred are made up of.
So I gather that you believe
* Faith "holds no water" because if science haven't conclusively proven that something is likely to occur
* The above being true, it probably never will occur.
* Therefore, if in the unlikely event that it does occur then it's still probably not worth your time to care about.
If I've gathered anything incorectly I would love to hear a non-cynical reply.
Science doesn't prove anything. Science proposes that under certian conditions something is true most of the time. Science doesn't discount ANYTHING - a true scientist would have to admit that anything is possible - perhaps unlikely, but almost never impossible. If we say "something doesn't exist because science hasn't proven it does yet" (e.g. alien abduction, ESP, psychic powers) then we are backing ourselves into a "science" based dogmatic society. Don't fear crackpots, or the unknown - because they are often times the ones who are hailed as genius hundreds of years after they die.