First, you have the eBay phenomenon. Tons of Sun and HP hardware available for dirt cheap on eBay, and we're talking server class machines for a fraction of their dot.bomb retail prices. That, plus a lot of techs got "free" boxes when their dot.bombs went under and they just sort of "acquired" boxes that would otherwise be repo'd by the creditors.
Did companies using PowerPC based IBM servers manage to stay in business during the dot.bomb? Maybe the saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" has some solid reasoning behind it.
2. He is arguing from a practical point of view, not from a theoretical.
From a practical point of view, the meaning of allows does not change. If he cares enough, he will take the time, learn the skills or hire someone who is capable of understanding and making the modifications he requires. There is no myth in the statement he is trying to debunk with stories of lack of motivation.
If they're going to build off-ramps and the neccessary over/underpasses for turns, why not go the full hog and build an over/underpass for straight through traffic as well. Much safer than a timing based system that assumes nothing will ever go wrong and can be done with existing technology.
Re:interesting idea but I doubt it will succede
on
By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 1
In infrastructure terms britain has the best railway in the world
You must work for Network Rail's PR division. Britain's railway network has been often described as the worst in Europe. Sure the infrastructure is there, but its underfunded, poorly maintained and unable to keep up with capacity.
If asked to pick the best railway infrastucture in the world, I'd have to point to Japan, with 22,000 miles of track (slightly more than Britain in a similar land area) carries several times the capacity with very few delays. Shinjuku station alone carries over 2 million passengers per day, probably a similar number as all the London mainline stations put together.
Tech journalists can be annoying too
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I find anyone who divides the workplace into "IT people" and "business people" annoying. As if IT is not part of the "group".
and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential.
I'm misremembering, and misreading the grandparent's quote from the article. I'm not sure that we were ever charged a different price for email and other traffic (our internet connection predated commericial ISP's like ICONZ, so we were getting billed $4/Mb for our international traffic directly from Waikato University). The FTP by email thing was from before we got our 9600bps leased line and were downloading Usenet and email every night over UUCP.
The $50 was only for international traffic, traffic within NZ was charged at significantly lower rates (or not at all). The Universities got their traffic significantly cheaper, so what would usually happen was that Linux (and other useful free software) would get mirrored on one of the University ftp servers and everyone else would download from there. Binary newsgroups were also useful for more than just warez and porn in those days. The other tricks we used to use were to PASV FTP something onto the University web servers from overseas (without using our own bandwidth) then email the admin and ask them to put it the pub directory so you could download it, and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential. There's nothing like a financial incentive to make you learn how to use the old internet protocols to their fullest.
I'm not saying that $49 is not reasonable for the labour etc involved, I'm saying that the price difference between the binaries and the sources looks very suspicious. Why can they produce binaries so much more cheaply?
I've paid my $20 for the binary releases, and I'm happy to have them. I'd probably be willing to pay more.
So let me get this straight. You paid $20 for a binary subscription, and to get the source you'd have to pay an extra $49? This does not look the same as the scenario the FSF copyright clerk said was OK above.
I was thinking about the gcc they distribute with their version of Unix, not what they use in house. But I guess it is a pretty safe bet that they won't have any customers left to distribute to by the time this is all over.
"In 1995, the year Novell sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, an industry group calling itself the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard and to popularize it and streamline PC software development granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says."
So if SCO had a problem with ELF way back in 1995, why didn't they stop this back then?
What happened with TISC in 1995 is irrelevant. As the Usenet post from 1993 shows, the ELF support in Linux does not come from any code that TISC released into the public domain in 1995 with the support of SCO. It was a clean room implementation based on documented interfaces from "SYSTEM V RELEASE 4 Programmer's Guide:
>ANSI C and Programming Support Tools" (ISBN 0-13-933706-7).
There is no copyright issue here SCO, but have fun taking the US Navy to court over it.
Before tackling Java awareness amongst the general public, you'd think that Sun would start with its own marketing department. Specifically what is and isn't Java (JDS, renaming all the old Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE products to Java... etc).
No wonder the public is no clearer on what Java is than they are about.NET.
The living Beatles, the heirs to Elvis Presley Enterprises, and anyone else who has been suckling at the copyright teat for 40 years
Isn't it Michael Jackson that's suckling the Beatles' copyright teat these days? The idea of copyright as a commodity to be bought and sold is something else I don't about the way the music and movie industries treat copyright.
A clue is in the article, where they state the fact that 35% or corporate desktops are still running Windows 9x as support for their theory. They are clearly talking about 400 million sales over the next 6 years, and if some of them are upgrades from the 600 million they have already counted, then they are going to get counted twice.
Except the original press release wasn't really pro-Linux FUD (or anti-FUD), it was Oracle FUD. The claim was that switching to Oracle 10g got them the performance increase. The fact that it runs on a cluster of Linux boxes was mentioned as a cost factor, not a performance one.
The trolls are wrong. If Emacs had stuck to its original numbering scheme, it would be on 1.21, not 0.21. From ONEWS.1:
Changes in Emacs 13
* There is a new version numbering scheme.
What used to be the first version number, which was 1, has been discarded since it does not seem that I need three levels of version number.
However, a new third version number has been added to represent changes by user sites. This number will always be zero in Emacs when I distribute it; it will be incremented each time Emacs is built at another site.
Slashdot Mirror
Did companies using PowerPC based IBM servers manage to stay in business during the dot.bomb? Maybe the saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" has some solid reasoning behind it.
From a practical point of view, the meaning of allows does not change. If he cares enough, he will take the time, learn the skills or hire someone who is capable of understanding and making the modifications he requires. There is no myth in the statement he is trying to debunk with stories of lack of motivation.
So you're telling me that while I read text left to right, when I read buttons, I read them right to left? Shouldn't they be like this then?
If they're going to build off-ramps and the neccessary over/underpasses for turns, why not go the full hog and build an over/underpass for straight through traffic as well. Much safer than a timing based system that assumes nothing will ever go wrong and can be done with existing technology.
You must work for Network Rail's PR division. Britain's railway network has been often described as the worst in Europe. Sure the infrastructure is there, but its underfunded, poorly maintained and unable to keep up with capacity.
If asked to pick the best railway infrastucture in the world, I'd have to point to Japan, with 22,000 miles of track (slightly more than Britain in a similar land area) carries several times the capacity with very few delays. Shinjuku station alone carries over 2 million passengers per day, probably a similar number as all the London mainline stations put together.
I find anyone who divides the workplace into "IT people" and "business people" annoying. As if IT is not part of the "group".
I'm misremembering, and misreading the grandparent's quote from the article. I'm not sure that we were ever charged a different price for email and other traffic (our internet connection predated commericial ISP's like ICONZ, so we were getting billed $4/Mb for our international traffic directly from Waikato University). The FTP by email thing was from before we got our 9600bps leased line and were downloading Usenet and email every night over UUCP.
The $50 was only for international traffic, traffic within NZ was charged at significantly lower rates (or not at all). The Universities got their traffic significantly cheaper, so what would usually happen was that Linux (and other useful free software) would get mirrored on one of the University ftp servers and everyone else would download from there. Binary newsgroups were also useful for more than just warez and porn in those days. The other tricks we used to use were to PASV FTP something onto the University web servers from overseas (without using our own bandwidth) then email the admin and ask them to put it the pub directory so you could download it, and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential. There's nothing like a financial incentive to make you learn how to use the old internet protocols to their fullest.
I'm not saying that $49 is not reasonable for the labour etc involved, I'm saying that the price difference between the binaries and the sources looks very suspicious. Why can they produce binaries so much more cheaply?
So let me get this straight. You paid $20 for a binary subscription, and to get the source you'd have to pay an extra $49? This does not look the same as the scenario the FSF copyright clerk said was OK above.
They are charging $20 for the binaries. $49 for the source is clearly not "distribution costs".
Surely the origin was a network of zombies. Or were they DDOSing these sites from their own PCs in Russia?
They can't hand out versions of gcc on terms other than the GPL.
I was thinking about the gcc they distribute with their version of Unix, not what they use in house. But I guess it is a pretty safe bet that they won't have any customers left to distribute to by the time this is all over.
Forking won't help. If the code cannot be included in gcc by others, it cannot be included by SCO.
What happened with TISC in 1995 is irrelevant. As the Usenet post from 1993 shows, the ELF support in Linux does not come from any code that TISC released into the public domain in 1995 with the support of SCO. It was a clean room implementation based on documented interfaces from "SYSTEM V RELEASE 4 Programmer's Guide: >ANSI C and Programming Support Tools" (ISBN 0-13-933706-7).
There is no copyright issue here SCO, but have fun taking the US Navy to court over it.
Best of all it affects SCO. If ELF support has to be dropped from gcc, what will they use for a compiler?
US Business Method Patent Application #91704002
Inventor: Michael Robertson
Abstract:
No wonder the public is no clearer on what Java is than they are about .NET.
Isn't it Michael Jackson that's suckling the Beatles' copyright teat these days? The idea of copyright as a commodity to be bought and sold is something else I don't about the way the music and movie industries treat copyright.
There are others that have been around a while, this one seems to be set up by an expat group, but this one claims to be the official site of the DPRK government. Check the Welcome from Kim Jong-Il.
When I was in school, we had a roll call every morning, which is perfectly capable of raising the alarm just as early as a missing RFID tag.
A clue is in the article, where they state the fact that 35% or corporate desktops are still running Windows 9x as support for their theory. They are clearly talking about 400 million sales over the next 6 years, and if some of them are upgrades from the 600 million they have already counted, then they are going to get counted twice.
Except the original press release wasn't really pro-Linux FUD (or anti-FUD), it was Oracle FUD. The claim was that switching to Oracle 10g got them the performance increase. The fact that it runs on a cluster of Linux boxes was mentioned as a cost factor, not a performance one.