So, everybody agrees that the
universe has billions of years left on
its meter.
So, what's with the rush to pin it down now?
The experiments being run now would be
thousands of times cheaper if we waited
thirty years, or a century. Why not run
them when they're cheap? Maybe after a decade
we'll realize we don't need them at all, and
that some other experiments would be more useful.
Furthermore, why do we need a thousand
cosmologists, or a hundred? Seems like
a dozen should be enough. Sure, it would be
less fun for the rest to spend their time
working out fluid flows around funny wing
shapes, or whatever physicists do nowadays
to try to make themselves useful. Their fun
is their business.
This isn't a question about the usefulness
of basic research, but about timing. Lots
of immediately meaningful basic research is
going undone because of the huge budgets of
physicists in a hurry. Lots of the neglected
research might have equally profound effects on
both our understanding of the universe and on
future industries. So the question is, again,
what's the damned hurry about cosmology?
A side question is, why should a cosmologist care
whether the idea of a truly infinite universe
makes anybody uncomfortable? Anybody who wants
comfort can believe we live on the back of a
big turtle, and sleep soundly.
I worked for a startup that lost all its customers
in the crash, and closed.
We developed lots of code, some of it quite good.
When the company was finally shut down, one of
the founders bid on the software assets at
auction, got them for something like
$1300, and GPLed it all. He's slowly getting
it in shape to post to the net. Some of it was
quite cool. (No doubt you'll hear about it in
coming months, and fail to relate it to this
posting.)
One good thing about the crash, though, is
that a huge pile of really bad code washed
away without doing anybody any harm. It gives
me private pleasure to consider how large a
fraction of that code was in Java.
By demonstrating precedent and a history of
violations, we not only get a much better chance
of winning, we get a much better chance of treble
damages. (That means $600 instead of $200.) I'd
hesitate to do this just for the $200, but for
$600 it would feel a lot more fun.
Of course it would be just a little
awkward if the defendant was IBM. But only
a little.
These power tower things are disappointingly
retro. Thousands of moving parts, big temperature
fluctuations, difficult materials handling
problems.
Australia is building big convection towers.
They are just a big (big!) greenhouse
sloping up in the center, so the hot air
runs up what amounts to a chimney there,
and drives a big windmill -- really, a bunch
of them -- in the chimney. It has only a few
moving parts, and is easy to build with mature
technology.
Simple might not help employ physicists, but
it's the right way to build.
What they carefully left out was that
every place you can think of is flatter than a
pancake. "Nepal is flatter than a pancake"
would have been news to most people, but
not so funny.
If we learned anything in the crash, it should
be that stock options don't count as compensation.
In other words, options are not for your benefit,
they're for the company's benefit. So, depending
on how much and for how long they want to tie you
up, they'll offer more or less, vesting on such
and such a schedule.
While options might make
you more likely to hang around and bust your
hump, they give the company incentive to dump
you if it looks like the options might end up
more valuable than your continued presence.
I've seen this: a friend was at a startup that
laid off all its developers just before they got
any vesting, and hired a new, smaller crew to
finish up. The same friend worked at another
place that, when it was bought, invalidated all
their options and assigned new ones, and reset the
vesting clock to zero.
It's only after you start the job that the options
affect your choices. Then, you trade off future
value of the unvested options against other
opportunities. That is, unless you don't plan
to be there very long. Even then, it might be
unwise to haggle for a bigger salary and smaller
option package, 'cause that will make them think
you don't plan to be there very long, or don't
hold out much hope for their prospects.
Since options' value is so uncertain to begin
with, and because companies have so many ways to
drain whatever value they might gain (e.g.
dilution, strategic bankruptcy, mergers) you're
usually best off just ignoring them until they
vest, and then exercise and sell them if you can
(yet).
There are plenty of good reasons to want to be
able to boot Linux on an unmodified Xbox.
First, there are millions of them out there.
For anybody who already has one, it's not $200,
or $150, it's free (as in beer). Lots
of kids get them as birthday, graduation, or
Xmas presents. We have the opportunity to rescue
all that hardware (and all those kids) from MS
oblivion.
Second, there are millions of Xboxes out there.
Visiting friends or family, and want to check
your e-mail? If they have an Xbox, just boot
up your handy Linux CD and you're on. Want to
demonstrate what Linux is all about? People
would worry about you messing with their computer,
but not about putting your "game" CD in their
Xbox.
Third, Xboxes are going to be $50 on E-bay
pretty soon, and sold at garage sales all over
town. It's cheap hardware in a well-known
configuration. When you see a random P2-533
box on the table, who knows what's in there, or
whether it's worth the $30? With an Xbox, you
know.
The right question to ask is, what kind of support
does my application need? If it needs stuff that
a simpler RTOS doesn't provide, and only Linux does,
the choice is pretty easy, "trouble" or no.
But you don't need Linux just because you need
TCP/IP networking. RTEMS has that, and so does
eCos. Likewise, file systems. So, the real
question is whether you want to run off-the-shelf
programs that expect a full Posix environment.
Furthermore, even if you do need a Unixy
environment, NetBSD may be an equally good choice, or even a better one. (E.g. NetBSD works on lots
of chips that have no mature Linux port.)
Asking the right questions is the only way to
end up with the right answers.
The most persuasive argument I know of is
a track record. Have you already built
systems of that magnitude, that are still
in service, and that your boss can talk
to users of?
If you haven't built anything this big,
what makes you so sure you can? The world
is littered with failed projects by people
too big for their britches. It's saddled
with just as many
projects that should have been cancelled
before they were deployed to wreck the working
lives of those forced to use them.
It is part of your boss's job to be skeptical.
(Would that he were more skeptical of the sales
people who promise to do better than you.)
You can't operate a business on potential income
from a lawsuit that will be thrown out of court
the moment the evidence is presented. You can't
operate a business on income from suing customers
who have a choice.
(Would you buy from such a company?)
We know that, they know that.
Therefore, what outcome can they hope for?
After the suit is thrown out, the suits get jobs
at Microsoft, or anyway kickbacks. The rest get
pink slips, and the smart stockholders get just
long enough of a reprieve to dump their
shares; the rest go down with the ship. In the
meantime, what's the point? The point is to
try to create a legal miasma around free
software. They're succeeding in that. Their
only failure is in overinflating their claims
so that they look like clowns.
David Boies has cause to be embarrassed at having
his name dragged into this, but you don't stay a
lawyer if embarrassment means anything to you.
The proof will be them trying to spin this out for
as long as they can, instead of trying to rush
the case so they can collect their money. If
they really expect to get any, they need it soon.
If they don't really expect to get any, they are
getting their income from MS for spinning it out.
Any progress on finding that neutron star that's
somewhere nearby? Brennan did a right-angle turn
in deep space at tao much less than 1, using it,
if you'll recall...
"it is ok for the open source crowd to simply remove the offending code, but not for those who have GPL violations...?"
That's a troll, but I'll bite anyway...
Once you have violated the GPL, you have lost
the right to distribute the code, no matter
what you do after. Read it, that's what it
says. Before you can regain the right to
distribute it again, you have have to get the
permission of the author(s). Usually that
permission is given once the problems are
corrected, but it's at the authors' discretion,
not the violator's.
If the violator continues distributing without
that permission, it's within the author's rights
under copyright law to get an injunction.
If the violator actually removes all the GPLed
code, then the GPL and copyright law have nothing
to say about further distribution. If OpenTV
would just write their own damn code,
there would be no problem (except perhaps
damages for previous violations).
It would be pretty hard to get a court to award
damages for distributing code that the people
involved didn't have any reason to think was
encumbered. OpenTV, it's claimed, violated the
GPL willfully.
No, I'm not a lawyer, the above is not
legal advice, so sue me.
Once the Euro gets tags that record transactions,
the Euro will cease to have the attributes we
associate with cash. After that, they're more
akin to "negotiable paper".
That would make US dollars a lot more popular
in some important quarters,
which the EU doesn't want.
Therefore, I predict that the Euro will get these
embedded tags
only after the U.S. starts seeding them into its
own currency. The desire to create a "cashless
society" here, and eliminate untraceable commerce,
has a long and sordid history.
The problem with embedding these things is
that they're easily fused, so banks would also
need to start refusing fused notes, and people
would have to start carrying detectors because
they might otherwise end up with undepositable
paper. The alternative is that fused notes
are still negotiable, but then they would all
get fused in short order.
Strangely enough, a much faster machine doesn't
necessarily mean much faster execution. If the
bus isn't much faster, if the disk isn't much
faster, if the program doesn't work nicely with
the cache, then a 2GHz P4 might not run it
more than (say) twice as fast as a 300 MHz P2.
In fact, a 2.4 GHz P4 is slower than a
1.4 GHz P3 for many programs.
So, speculating that (apparently) faster hardware
would take care of the performance problems isn't
good enough -- you really have to have run it
yourself. There are sound evidential reasons for
the hearsay rule.
There's usually nothing to prevent just unscrewing
a cross-threaded screw. You just turn it and it
comes out. The standoff would be damaged, then,
and you'd want to replace it if you could. If
you can't get at the screw on the other end,
though, that's hard.
What the poster may mean is that the screw
head itself is stripped out. Most of the
suggestions above seem to relate to drilling
out a stripped screw head.
I said "usually", above. Sometimes, if it's
cross-threaded, then when you try to unscrew it,
you end up turning the screw and the standoff,
and unscrewing the standoff from the screw on the
other end. If the other-end screw is (or gets)
loose, all three turn freely, and you get nowhere.
Even drilling might not help, because the bit
just spins the whole assembly.
If this is what really happened, the only solution
is to get a grip on either the standoff or the
screwhead. If you manage the former, you can
just unscrew it. If only the latter (e.g. with a
vise-grip) then you can drill it out. You might
want to super-glue the other end of standoff into
place afterward, if you can't tighten that side's
screw.
In general, you should post a more precise
description of your problem if you hope to get
helpful answers.
So now they have discs that you not only
can copy, but must
copy before they evaporate.
Somebody tell me again how this reduces
the impulse to bootleg? They might as
well just sell the nicely-printed cover
art, and let people get the bits from
their friends, or wherever. (Maybe they
can get AOL to send them out.)
Why do the RFC page headers say "OGG" instead of "Ogg"? The headers in other RFCs aren't arbitrarily
capitalized. It's hard enough convincing people
that Ogg isn't an acronym without the RFC itself
making our work harder.
Can they fix this without issuing a new RFC
number?
Lost in all this is that both Phoenix and Firebird
are singularly unimaginative, legally indefensible,
and frankly boring names. I don't see any evidence
that they even considered Emuzilla or Moazilla,
assuming they were after a bird image. Those may
not be pretty, but at least they're fun, and they're
certainly not trademarked by anybody else.
Maybe I should claim the moazilla.org and
emuzilla.org domain names. Who says all the
good domains are taken?
All they need to do to handle legitimate mailing
lists, at least at first, is to
challenge only mail that is not explicitly
labeled with "Precedence: bulk". Legitimate
mailing lists carry that label, but spam
never does.
Once the spammers are obliged to label their
stuff "bulk", half the battle is won. Then
they start collecting a "white list" of
legitimate mailing list sources, and label
every bulk message not on it as "suspected
spam" and dump it in a separate folder.
This reminds me of the classic line from the
brilliant 1958 film, "Queen of Outer Space".
Zsa Zsa Gabor plays the chief scientist of
Venus, where they've done away with all the
men. A spaceship arrives from Earth, and the
crew learns of Venus's plan to destroy
Earth with a death ray that Zsa Zsa has built.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's with the rush to pin it down now? The experiments being run now would be thousands of times cheaper if we waited thirty years, or a century. Why not run them when they're cheap? Maybe after a decade we'll realize we don't need them at all, and that some other experiments would be more useful.
Furthermore, why do we need a thousand cosmologists, or a hundred? Seems like a dozen should be enough. Sure, it would be less fun for the rest to spend their time working out fluid flows around funny wing shapes, or whatever physicists do nowadays to try to make themselves useful. Their fun is their business.
This isn't a question about the usefulness of basic research, but about timing. Lots of immediately meaningful basic research is going undone because of the huge budgets of physicists in a hurry. Lots of the neglected research might have equally profound effects on both our understanding of the universe and on future industries. So the question is, again, what's the damned hurry about cosmology?
A side question is, why should a cosmologist care whether the idea of a truly infinite universe makes anybody uncomfortable? Anybody who wants comfort can believe we live on the back of a big turtle, and sleep soundly.
We developed lots of code, some of it quite good. When the company was finally shut down, one of the founders bid on the software assets at auction, got them for something like $1300, and GPLed it all. He's slowly getting it in shape to post to the net. Some of it was quite cool. (No doubt you'll hear about it in coming months, and fail to relate it to this posting.)
One good thing about the crash, though, is that a huge pile of really bad code washed away without doing anybody any harm. It gives me private pleasure to consider how large a fraction of that code was in Java.
My question is, did Chris Hil do it deliberately in his design to make fun of Slashdotters, or does he have the disease too?
By demonstrating precedent and a history of violations, we not only get a much better chance of winning, we get a much better chance of treble damages. (That means $600 instead of $200.) I'd hesitate to do this just for the $200, but for $600 it would feel a lot more fun.
Of course it would be just a little awkward if the defendant was IBM. But only a little.
Untied we squat.
Australia is building big convection towers. They are just a big (big!) greenhouse sloping up in the center, so the hot air runs up what amounts to a chimney there, and drives a big windmill -- really, a bunch of them -- in the chimney. It has only a few moving parts, and is easy to build with mature technology.
Simple might not help employ physicists, but it's the right way to build.
What they carefully left out was that every place you can think of is flatter than a pancake. "Nepal is flatter than a pancake" would have been news to most people, but not so funny.
In other words, options are not for your benefit, they're for the company's benefit. So, depending on how much and for how long they want to tie you up, they'll offer more or less, vesting on such and such a schedule.
While options might make you more likely to hang around and bust your hump, they give the company incentive to dump you if it looks like the options might end up more valuable than your continued presence. I've seen this: a friend was at a startup that laid off all its developers just before they got any vesting, and hired a new, smaller crew to finish up. The same friend worked at another place that, when it was bought, invalidated all their options and assigned new ones, and reset the vesting clock to zero.
It's only after you start the job that the options affect your choices. Then, you trade off future value of the unvested options against other opportunities. That is, unless you don't plan to be there very long. Even then, it might be unwise to haggle for a bigger salary and smaller option package, 'cause that will make them think you don't plan to be there very long, or don't hold out much hope for their prospects.
Since options' value is so uncertain to begin with, and because companies have so many ways to drain whatever value they might gain (e.g. dilution, strategic bankruptcy, mergers) you're usually best off just ignoring them until they vest, and then exercise and sell them if you can (yet).
Another relevant fact is that it occurs in other mammals mainly under conditions of very high population density, or captivity.
First, there are millions of them out there. For anybody who already has one, it's not $200, or $150, it's free (as in beer). Lots of kids get them as birthday, graduation, or Xmas presents. We have the opportunity to rescue all that hardware (and all those kids) from MS oblivion.
Second, there are millions of Xboxes out there. Visiting friends or family, and want to check your e-mail? If they have an Xbox, just boot up your handy Linux CD and you're on. Want to demonstrate what Linux is all about? People would worry about you messing with their computer, but not about putting your "game" CD in their Xbox.
Third, Xboxes are going to be $50 on E-bay pretty soon, and sold at garage sales all over town. It's cheap hardware in a well-known configuration. When you see a random P2-533 box on the table, who knows what's in there, or whether it's worth the $30? With an Xbox, you know.
But you don't need Linux just because you need TCP/IP networking. RTEMS has that, and so does eCos. Likewise, file systems. So, the real question is whether you want to run off-the-shelf programs that expect a full Posix environment. Furthermore, even if you do need a Unixy environment, NetBSD may be an equally good choice, or even a better one. (E.g. NetBSD works on lots of chips that have no mature Linux port.)
Asking the right questions is the only way to end up with the right answers.
If you haven't built anything this big, what makes you so sure you can? The world is littered with failed projects by people too big for their britches. It's saddled with just as many projects that should have been cancelled before they were deployed to wreck the working lives of those forced to use them.
It is part of your boss's job to be skeptical. (Would that he were more skeptical of the sales people who promise to do better than you.)
Therefore, what outcome can they hope for? After the suit is thrown out, the suits get jobs at Microsoft, or anyway kickbacks. The rest get pink slips, and the smart stockholders get just long enough of a reprieve to dump their shares; the rest go down with the ship. In the meantime, what's the point? The point is to try to create a legal miasma around free software. They're succeeding in that. Their only failure is in overinflating their claims so that they look like clowns.
David Boies has cause to be embarrassed at having his name dragged into this, but you don't stay a lawyer if embarrassment means anything to you.
The proof will be them trying to spin this out for as long as they can, instead of trying to rush the case so they can collect their money. If they really expect to get any, they need it soon. If they don't really expect to get any, they are getting their income from MS for spinning it out.
Any progress on finding that neutron star that's somewhere nearby? Brennan did a right-angle turn in deep space at tao much less than 1, using it, if you'll recall...
That's a troll, but I'll bite anyway...
Once you have violated the GPL, you have lost the right to distribute the code, no matter what you do after. Read it, that's what it says. Before you can regain the right to distribute it again, you have have to get the permission of the author(s). Usually that permission is given once the problems are corrected, but it's at the authors' discretion, not the violator's.
If the violator continues distributing without that permission, it's within the author's rights under copyright law to get an injunction.
If the violator actually removes all the GPLed code, then the GPL and copyright law have nothing to say about further distribution. If OpenTV would just write their own damn code, there would be no problem (except perhaps damages for previous violations).
It would be pretty hard to get a court to award damages for distributing code that the people involved didn't have any reason to think was encumbered. OpenTV, it's claimed, violated the GPL willfully.
No, I'm not a lawyer, the above is not legal advice, so sue me.
That would make US dollars a lot more popular in some important quarters, which the EU doesn't want. Therefore, I predict that the Euro will get these embedded tags only after the U.S. starts seeding them into its own currency. The desire to create a "cashless society" here, and eliminate untraceable commerce, has a long and sordid history.
The problem with embedding these things is that they're easily fused, so banks would also need to start refusing fused notes, and people would have to start carrying detectors because they might otherwise end up with undepositable paper. The alternative is that fused notes are still negotiable, but then they would all get fused in short order.
So, speculating that (apparently) faster hardware would take care of the performance problems isn't good enough -- you really have to have run it yourself. There are sound evidential reasons for the hearsay rule.
What the poster may mean is that the screw head itself is stripped out. Most of the suggestions above seem to relate to drilling out a stripped screw head.
I said "usually", above. Sometimes, if it's cross-threaded, then when you try to unscrew it, you end up turning the screw and the standoff, and unscrewing the standoff from the screw on the other end. If the other-end screw is (or gets) loose, all three turn freely, and you get nowhere. Even drilling might not help, because the bit just spins the whole assembly.
If this is what really happened, the only solution is to get a grip on either the standoff or the screwhead. If you manage the former, you can just unscrew it. If only the latter (e.g. with a vise-grip) then you can drill it out. You might want to super-glue the other end of standoff into place afterward, if you can't tighten that side's screw.
In general, you should post a more precise description of your problem if you hope to get helpful answers.
Somebody tell me again how this reduces the impulse to bootleg? They might as well just sell the nicely-printed cover art, and let people get the bits from their friends, or wherever. (Maybe they can get AOL to send them out.)
Can they fix this without issuing a new RFC number?
Maybe I should claim the moazilla.org and emuzilla.org domain names. Who says all the good domains are taken?
Or is it really a DDOS disguised as a Slashdot news item, designed to punish him for introducing the legislation?
Once the spammers are obliged to label their stuff "bulk", half the battle is won. Then they start collecting a "white list" of legitimate mailing list sources, and label every bulk message not on it as "suspected spam" and dump it in a separate folder.
One word: "Battleship!"
"But how could they aim it?", one exclaims.