i had a discussion with my sister once in which she railed against the organized workers at her job because they didn't have to work as much and got paid more. ? why is that bad? it's in the power of every worker! (except those working for the tsa, thanks to mr. bush.)
Labor unions are an example of too much of a good thing. Unions started out to level the playing field between labor and management. Now, many unions are out to do no less than screw the company. It is no long about fair treatment. It is about padding pockets, political power, and greed.
You ask why it is bad for employees to work less and get paid more. The answer is that everyone has to pay more for products. And, with overly powerful unions, you get what happened in the 60s and 70s auto market, declining quality.
An example of a labor union hurting more than helping is the UAW and GM. GM needed to lay off some workers to cut costs. Under labor contract, junior workers were laid off first. This caused the production lines to stop. Why you ask? Simple, under the labor contract senior workers couldn't do a junior persons job and all the junior worker jobs were making parts and at the beginning of the assembly line. So, GM was forced to either stop making cars in some plants because they laid off some employees, or closing a couple of plants. But, the UAW didn't want the plants closed and threatened to strike.
The unions didn't care about the health of the company. Because of this, they will hurt the company for a short term gain.
1) This arguement does not stand because once the person downloads the song, the copyright holder is deprived of the income the downloader would have paid for the song.
2)Income is a thing. Theft also incompasses services. If you wish to play with strict interpretation: The original poster wished to know when he became a thief. A thief is one who steals (To take (the property of another) without right or permission) and as you said, it is intellectual property.
3) I will not bother to debate this point. It has merrits. But, the original poster asked whence he became a theif. I gave an answer.
4) Not two people. One person , or group of people individually, taking both stated positions, which happens all the time when these two subjects come up. Repeatedly, the same individuals will decry violations of the GPL ( copyright infringement), then decry a group of people enforcing their copyright.
5) I know the language. I also know the arguements used by both sides and have my own opinions. I did not confuse anything.
I find your ad hominem attacks and condescension to be telling of you.
Well, there ya go. An explanation from someone who bothered to find out.
Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
People who are violating the GPL are taking credit for work that is not theirs and selling it. However, they are not stealing anything other than credit from the copyright holder of GPL software as it is given away anyway.
"Music thieves" are admitting the work is not theirs. They are giving away a product that is not theirs to give away. And, in the processes, depriving the copyright holders of income.
Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Since infringing on copyright deprived the copyright holder of income through the unauthorized distribution of said holder's copyrighted works.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it, copyright holders are deprived of that income.
Unless you can prove that all the people who downloaded the work would never have paid for it, arguing that downloaders would not have bought the music does not stand.
Any other questions?
Side note: I am amazed at the hypocrisy I see when this issue appears. Many people who post they want the GPL upheld using copyright law, turn around and want to deprive others of their rights under copyright law.
As they become successful, people gravitate to these places for a share of the pot of honey. Then you have cliques and factions, and things start to go downhill from there.
I learned long ago that corporate loyalty is an outdated concept because companies are no longer loyal to their employees.
The expression about "commanding respect" does not mean that someone demands respect without earning it, but rather someone that has earned and controls respect. Example: Linus commands the respect of the open source software community.
Oooh, bad code! If Bueller isn't present, this will eat all available memory and crash the Teacher. Improved code: function checkAttendance(){ count=0; while (!isPresent("Bueller")){ echo "Bueller?"; } }
While I won't argue about the growth and take-overs, I would like to remind of one little thing.
IT is never important to a company until the T stops working and the I is unavailable. At that exact moment, IT becomes the center of the universe.
If your accounting dept can't access AP, AR, or the GL because the cobbled together system stopped working and the only person who knows how it works and can get back up was hit by a bus 6 months ago and replaced with "the guy in shipping that knows computers", you can bet IT is the most important thing in the world.
It is just like backups. Backups are never important to anyone outside IT, until they are needed. At that point they become invaluable.
A company with 100 FTEs will not want to spend huge amounts of money for a contractor/consultant to come in and set things straight. And pay they will, just like people pay $1000.00 to get important data off of fried hard drives.
It is better to have a system that is fairly simple, well documented, and easy to maintain and at least two people who know how it all works. Even if one of them is part time, the odds of your entire knowledge base leaving one day is decreased dramatically, as is the odds that something bad will happen during that critical persons vacation.
The reason this is such a hard question to answer is the same reason EMAC vs VI is such a hard question. Everyone has the system they believe is better and will promote it religiously, even if it is not the best solution to the problem.
How many companies out there are sole proprieterships? What about LLCs, where one of the people happens to have/bring in about 80% of the billables.
This is exactly why so many small businesses fail. A sole proprietorship (SP) where the owner is in an accident or gets sick and can't work or an SP with an owner who can't do it all. Great tech but a crappy marketeer, or good salesman but lousy time management or poor quality work. An LLC where one person brings in 80%, and then that person leaves, gets sick, dies, etc. is pretty much doomed to fail. I have seen it happen.
Just about every "owner" or "CEO" fits the "business revolves around one person". Apple now w/o SteveJ? Yeah.
While a small business with consolidated power will revolve around the one or few people with the power, one being the CEO does not mean the business revolves around one. That is the kind of thinking that led to the dot.com bust, Enron, and all the other scandals. It is also the kind of thinking that has caused CxO pay to balloon, while the middle and lower employee's pay has barely increased (it hasn't even kept up with inflation). If what you say is true, then no CEO would ever be unseated because it would be death for the company.
a) You should be able to do what you want with this, and possibly any, version of real time Linux. The real question is what what level of responsiveness do you need?
b) Get the make/model info for the card and see if there isn't already a driver for it. If there isn't, it may be possible to get a driver written, either by finding documentation on the card, or reverse engineering the DOS drivers. Any more of an answer is kind of moot because there isn't enough information in your post.
Could you use a different/newer/supported card for this experimental system?
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
To me, this reads as providing the source to the user. And, FMSLabs does do that.
Actually, it may be very difficult to enforce the Linux trademark because it has not been enforced to date. Granted, I am not a Trademark/Patent/Copyright lawyer, but I have read about the laws and cases.
It will be interesting to see what happens if a dispute goes to court. Non-enforcement of trademarks errodes the basis for the claim, which is why it is "tissue" and not "Kleenex ®" and why they are "photocopies" and not "Xeroxes ®".
Of course, FSMLabs may (already have) pony up the money for a trademark license.
FSMLabs' RTLinuxPro is a tested and validated, hard real-time, POSIX operating system that runs embedded Linux as an application platform...
...FSMLabs patented dual-kernel technology boosts performance and productivity by preventing non-real-time code from interfering with real-time performance...
From this, I gather that RTLinuxPro is an operating system that runs either beside or under neither an embedded Linux kernel.
They do offer RTLinuxFree, which is available with the source. This leads me to think that they are using a customized kernel with chunks removed and replaced by binary kernel modules, ala Nvidia, for RTLinuxPro and a standard kernel for RTLinuxFree.
It looks to me like they have complied with the GPL.
Ok, two things are going on here. First, a cartridge remanufacturer group (ACRA) sued Lexmark because of the Lexmark "Prebate" program. The "Prebate" program allows customers to buy the cartidges at a lower price, if they agree to "agree to return the empty cartridge only to Lexmark for remanufacturing and cartridge recycling". If the customer wishes to use some other recycling service, then the customer can purchase cartidges at the regular price.
Specifically, the ACRA claimed that Lexmark
has no legal right to make such restrictions
provided false and misleading statements about the enforacablity of the post-sale restrictions
has no valid contract with the customer under California law
is engaging in false advertising because Lexmark can not guarentee consumers will pay less for a Prebate cartidge and that the Lexmark implies difference in cost between a Prebate cartridge and a regular cartridge is the cost of the physical cartridge.
Second, ACRA claims the use of the lock-out chip is an unfair business practice.
The courts decision was:
As the patent holder on the cartridges, Lexmark has the legal right to make such restrictions
Because of they have the right to make the restrictions, they can enforce them
Because the customer can read the terms of the Prebate agreement and purchase a non-Prebate cartridge, the contract is valid.
ACRA failed to provide evidence of false advertising or that any claims as to the costs and benifits were made.
Lexmark has the right, under patent law, to enforce the Prebate using the lock-out chips, and that ACRA had failed to show evidence that the chips exceed the patent grant.
"In sum, ACRA has failed to raise a triable issue of fact as to whether Lexmark's restriction on the use of its patented cartridge is valid and, in turn, whether the lock-out chip is a proper mechanism to ensure compliance with the restriction. We affirm the district court's decision on this issue as well."
Some points of interest.
Only the Prebate cartridges cary the restrictions in question, and said restricions are in exchange for a lower price.
No one is being forced to buy Prebate cartridges. There are other cartidges available from Lexmark that cost more, but do not cary any restrictions.
The customer is not prevented from destroying the cartridge or just tossing it out with the trash.
If the customer does toss the cartridge into someone else's recycle bin, they are violating the contract. But, by providing the remanufacturing service, the remanufacturing companies are "inducing" people to break the contract.
Part of this decision will only effect items under current patent.
The contract part only upholds current contact law, because one is not forced to use the Prebate cartidges and the restrictions are printed on the side of the box.
When one purchases a Prebate cartidge, one gets a reduced price for agreeing to recycle the cartidge through Lexmark. If one uses some other service, then one is breaking the agreement. (check out the definition of fraud)
Disclosure: I have been using GNU/Linux almost exclusively for 5 years on my home systems. I have over 15 years experience with UNIX and Windows.
While there are a number of useful, well written programs for GNU/Linux, but by far the majority are, at best, half-finished and poorly documented. The term amaturish comes to mind, but that should not be a surprise, as many of these projects are just hobbies or items the programmers wanted and decided to make available to the public. Development comes to a crawl once it is working well enough for the developer, even if it has a few bugs. Then, there is dependency hell. Often, the best way to make sure software you want will run on your system is to download and compile the source.
Most of the development of the actual kernel appears geared more to servers than desktop user machines.
I just installed SuSE Linux 9.2 on my dual P3 server and a new Toshiba A85 laptop dual booting with WinXP Home. Things started well.
But, on the laptop built in wireless network card is not supported, so I had to install and set up ndiswrapper.
Then, I found out that the firewall rules on the server kept me from using NAT, routing out to the internet, using DHCP, or using SAMBA and every attempt to use the config tools failed to fix it. I ended up manually adjusting the iptables to allow my laptop to connect to my server and route out to the internet.
Then, the laptop stopped updating resolv.conf and the routing table when the wirless interface is started. I still haven't worked this one out. The interface comes up, dhcpcd gets all the info and sets the correct IP, but does not set update resolve.conf or a default route. Of course, when I manually set up the interface it works. When I manually run dhcpcd it works. But, the wifi does not work correctly on boot or when runing ifup or ifdown. Currently, I am working my way through the configuration scripts trying to find what is wrong.
I have also noticed that both GNOME and KDE both bear a strong resemblence to Windows. They may be prettied up and have a few different features, but the look and feel is windowrific all the way. Personally, I prefer WindowMaker.
While GNU/Linux may be ready for some home users, the majority is better off sticking with Windows. Small businesses are the ones who would vastly benefit from using GNU/Linux, the problem is convincing them to adopt it. The issues with hardware compatiblity and the availablity of quality software for small businesses are major stumbling blocks to adoption.
If you made a program that many people wanted, as opposed to either working for a programming house or doing one-off custom work, You would be able to write one program and get paid for it multiple times.
And, because you can count on getting paid multiple times, you can lower the price by spreading the cost.
After all, if one charges say $100/hr for a program that takes say 100 hrs, you end up charging 1 person $10,000, or you can charge 10 people $1000, or 1000 people $10, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Labor unions are an example of too much of a good thing. Unions started out to level the playing field between labor and management. Now, many unions are out to do no less than screw the company. It is no long about fair treatment. It is about padding pockets, political power, and greed.
You ask why it is bad for employees to work less and get paid more. The answer is that everyone has to pay more for products. And, with overly powerful unions, you get what happened in the 60s and 70s auto market, declining quality.
An example of a labor union hurting more than helping is the UAW and GM. GM needed to lay off some workers to cut costs. Under labor contract, junior workers were laid off first. This caused the production lines to stop. Why you ask? Simple, under the labor contract senior workers couldn't do a junior persons job and all the junior worker jobs were making parts and at the beginning of the assembly line. So, GM was forced to either stop making cars in some plants because they laid off some employees, or closing a couple of plants. But, the UAW didn't want the plants closed and threatened to strike.
The unions didn't care about the health of the company. Because of this, they will hurt the company for a short term gain.
See the problem now?
1) This arguement does not stand because once the person downloads the song, the copyright holder is deprived of the income the downloader would have paid for the song.
2)Income is a thing. Theft also incompasses services. If you wish to play with strict interpretation: The original poster wished to know when he became a thief. A thief is one who steals (To take (the property of another) without right or permission) and as you said, it is intellectual property.
3) I will not bother to debate this point. It has merrits. But, the original poster asked whence he became a theif. I gave an answer.
4) Not two people. One person , or group of people individually, taking both stated positions, which happens all the time when these two subjects come up. Repeatedly, the same individuals will decry violations of the GPL ( copyright infringement), then decry a group of people enforcing their copyright.
5) I know the language. I also know the arguements used by both sides and have my own opinions. I did not confuse anything.
I find your ad hominem attacks and condescension to be telling of you.
Well, there ya go. An explanation from someone who bothered to find out.
People who are violating the GPL are taking credit for work that is not theirs and selling it. However, they are not stealing anything other than credit from the copyright holder of GPL software as it is given away anyway.
"Music thieves" are admitting the work is not theirs. They are giving away a product that is not theirs to give away. And, in the processes, depriving the copyright holders of income.
Since infringing on copyright deprived the copyright holder of income through the unauthorized distribution of said holder's copyrighted works.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it, copyright holders are deprived of that income.
Unless you can prove that all the people who downloaded the work would never have paid for it, arguing that downloaders would not have bought the music does not stand.
Any other questions?
Side note: I am amazed at the hypocrisy I see when this issue appears. Many people who post they want the GPL upheld using copyright law, turn around and want to deprive others of their rights under copyright law.
Well, at a glance, I would say the article in this post is FUD if the judge denied the request.
I know about the Prisoner's Dilemma. I just take the view that the Company will always defect.
How about being offered a job in Mexico running a fishing resort with salary, room and board, and all the booze and women you want?
Yes, it exsists. Yes, I am working on getting it. No, you can't have it.
Sounds like feature creep and cruft to me.
Two things:
I learned long ago that corporate loyalty is an outdated concept because companies are no longer loyal to their employees.
The expression about "commanding respect" does not mean that someone demands respect without earning it, but rather someone that has earned and controls respect.
Example: Linus commands the respect of the open source software community.
Oooh, bad code! If Bueller isn't present, this will eat all available memory and crash the Teacher.
Improved code:
function checkAttendance(){
count=0;
while (!isPresent("Bueller")){
echo "Bueller?";
}
}
This version of Steinbot properly executes.
I prefer marshmellows. They are non-lethal projectiles ( yes, there is case law, but I don't have it on me).
And, if you just NEED to shoot a hard projectile, you can freeze them!
While I won't argue about the growth and take-overs, I would like to remind of one little thing.
IT is never important to a company until the T stops working and the I is unavailable. At that exact moment, IT becomes the center of the universe.
If your accounting dept can't access AP, AR, or the GL because the cobbled together system stopped working and the only person who knows how it works and can get back up was hit by a bus 6 months ago and replaced with "the guy in shipping that knows computers", you can bet IT is the most important thing in the world.
It is just like backups. Backups are never important to anyone outside IT, until they are needed. At that point they become invaluable.
A company with 100 FTEs will not want to spend huge amounts of money for a contractor/consultant to come in and set things straight. And pay they will, just like people pay $1000.00 to get important data off of fried hard drives.
It is better to have a system that is fairly simple, well documented, and easy to maintain and at least two people who know how it all works. Even if one of them is part time, the odds of your entire knowledge base leaving one day is decreased dramatically, as is the odds that something bad will happen during that critical persons vacation.
The reason this is such a hard question to answer is the same reason EMAC vs VI is such a hard question. Everyone has the system they believe is better and will promote it religiously, even if it is not the best solution to the problem.
In a word, fanatasism.
This is exactly why so many small businesses fail. A sole proprietorship (SP) where the owner is in an accident or gets sick and can't work or an SP with an owner who can't do it all. Great tech but a crappy marketeer, or good salesman but lousy time management or poor quality work. An LLC where one person brings in 80%, and then that person leaves, gets sick, dies, etc. is pretty much doomed to fail. I have seen it happen.
While a small business with consolidated power will revolve around the one or few people with the power, one being the CEO does not mean the business revolves around one. That is the kind of thinking that led to the dot.com bust, Enron, and all the other scandals. It is also the kind of thinking that has caused CxO pay to balloon, while the middle and lower employee's pay has barely increased (it hasn't even kept up with inflation). If what you say is true, then no CEO would ever be unseated because it would be death for the company.
One stop Identity-theft shopping!
Weee!
You better believe it is a growth industry. I am looking for some good companies to invest in.
a) You should be able to do what you want with this, and possibly any, version of real time Linux. The real question is what what level of responsiveness do you need?
b) Get the make/model info for the card and see if there isn't already a driver for it. If there isn't, it may be possible to get a driver written, either by finding documentation on the card, or reverse engineering the DOS drivers. Any more of an answer is kind of moot because there isn't enough information in your post.
Could you use a different/newer/supported card for this experimental system?
It will be interesting to see what happens if a dispute goes to court. Non-enforcement of trademarks errodes the basis for the claim, which is why it is "tissue" and not "Kleenex ®" and why they are "photocopies" and not "Xeroxes ®".
Of course, FSMLabs may (already have) pony up the money for a trademark license.
From this, I gather that RTLinuxPro is an operating system that runs either beside or under neither an embedded Linux kernel.
They do offer RTLinuxFree, which is available with the source. This leads me to think that they are using a customized kernel with chunks removed and replaced by binary kernel modules, ala Nvidia, for RTLinuxPro and a standard kernel for RTLinuxFree.
It looks to me like they have complied with the GPL.
Ok, two things are going on here.
First, a cartridge remanufacturer group (ACRA) sued Lexmark because of the Lexmark "Prebate" program. The "Prebate" program allows customers to buy the cartidges at a lower price, if they agree to "agree to return the empty cartridge only to Lexmark for remanufacturing and cartridge recycling". If the customer wishes to use some other recycling service, then the customer can purchase cartidges at the regular price.
Specifically, the ACRA claimed that Lexmark
Second, ACRA claims the use of the lock-out chip is an unfair business practice.
The courts decision was:
Some points of interest.
Since they are running on a proprietary UNIX, everything you mentioned involving MS and IE is moot.
More likely, some vendor did give them a discount and a discount on support. And, support is one of the places Linux lags behind proprietary vendors.
This story is not an anti-Linux story. This is a "Linux is losing when some companies do a cost/benefit analysis" story.
Instead of whining, perhaps people should be looking at WHY Linux is (fairly or not) loosing in cost/benefit analysis.
Disclosure: I have been using GNU/Linux almost exclusively for 5 years on my home systems. I have over 15 years experience with UNIX and Windows.
While there are a number of useful, well written programs for GNU/Linux, but by far the majority are, at best, half-finished and poorly documented. The term amaturish comes to mind, but that should not be a surprise, as many of these projects are just hobbies or items the programmers wanted and decided to make available to the public. Development comes to a crawl once it is working well enough for the developer, even if it has a few bugs. Then, there is dependency hell. Often, the best way to make sure software you want will run on your system is to download and compile the source.
Most of the development of the actual kernel appears geared more to servers than desktop user machines.
I just installed SuSE Linux 9.2 on my dual P3 server and a new Toshiba A85 laptop dual booting with WinXP Home. Things started well.
But, on the laptop built in wireless network card is not supported, so I had to install and set up ndiswrapper.
Then, I found out that the firewall rules on the server kept me from using NAT, routing out to the internet, using DHCP, or using SAMBA and every attempt to use the config tools failed to fix it. I ended up manually adjusting the iptables to allow my laptop to connect to my server and route out to the internet.
Then, the laptop stopped updating resolv.conf and the routing table when the wirless interface is started. I still haven't worked this one out. The interface comes up, dhcpcd gets all the info and sets the correct IP, but does not set update resolve.conf or a default route. Of course, when I manually set up the interface it works. When I manually run dhcpcd it works. But, the wifi does not work correctly on boot or when runing ifup or ifdown. Currently, I am working my way through the configuration scripts trying to find what is wrong.
I have also noticed that both GNOME and KDE both bear a strong resemblence to Windows. They may be prettied up and have a few different features, but the look and feel is windowrific all the way. Personally, I prefer WindowMaker.
While GNU/Linux may be ready for some home users, the majority is better off sticking with Windows. Small businesses are the ones who would vastly benefit from using GNU/Linux, the problem is convincing them to adopt it. The issues with hardware compatiblity and the availablity of quality software for small businesses are major stumbling blocks to adoption.
If you made a program that many people wanted, as opposed to either working for a programming house or doing one-off custom work, You would be able to write one program and get paid for it multiple times.
And, because you can count on getting paid multiple times, you can lower the price by spreading the cost.
After all, if one charges say $100/hr for a program that takes say 100 hrs, you end up charging 1 person $10,000, or you can charge 10 people $1000, or 1000 people $10, etc.
Or does that not make sense to you?