Right, well, like I keep saying, why pay more money for products that I don't need? We haven't had a single infection in over a year. We haven't evaluated Officescan because their Viruswall product has been more than adequate. When was the last time you had a virus infection that didn't come through your mail server?
First off how do you define abuse? Is it deviating from anything but a normal (breaking even) profit? If so, about 90% of businesses would be in violation.
All you have to do to answer these questions is look at existing law. No, there should not be a limit to how much profit a company is allowed to make selling their product. But if they charge too much, there should be an environment where someone can sell a competing product for less.
I totally agree, monopolies suck. However, there MUST be some wiggle room between what sucks and what is ILLEGAL. Monopolies, in and of themselves, are not illegal. What IDIOT would make a law that punished a company simply because their competitors went out of business?
OK, since I'm on Slashdot, and many people here think "monopoly==satan", and my earlier post got modded down as flamebait when it was just stating the facts, I think I'm going to have to spell it out for y'all.
Say, for example, I'm one of two Espresso stands in Iowa. Nobody else in Iowa knows where to buy espresso beans except me and one other guy, who happen to work on the same street. We each sell tall mochas for $2.50. Now, the other guy gets hit by a truck. BAM! I'm a monopoly, and according you you guys, I'm now illegal. I didn't hire the truck to hit the dude, I haven't even changed my prices yet, but you guys think I should be illegal.
Now, I agree, I hate monopolies. But in and of themselves, they should NOT be illegal. Look, even if my espresso stand starts charging $4.00 per mocha, people who don't think it's worth the money will stop buying them. Everyone else who continues to buy them is making a decision that I am providing a service that is valuable to them to the tune of $4.00.
It only becomes illegal when my business gets huge, spreads all over Iowa, I become a major customer of the espresso bean vendors, and I tell my vendors that I will stop doing business with them if they sell beans to anyone else in Iowa. Do you get it now? THAT'S abuse of monopoly power.
Based on the few Business Law and numerous Economics courses I took, I believe the following to be true...
A monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal. Gaining a monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal.
Yeah, that was my point. But I guess saying anything that could possibly be misinterpreted as pro-Microsoft on Slashdot is risking getting labelled "Flamebait". I'm surprised your post wasn't modded down as well, Anti-Bob.
I guess I don't understand why it matters that it's a killer bee versus a regular bee.
The article sez coffee can self-pollinate, so they didn't think insects were required. Killer bees just happened to be the insects that moved in and started improving the cross-pollination between coffee plants. Any other insect would do just as well, but a headline with "Killer Bees" in the title will grab a lot more attention, as evidenced by the Slashdot link.
Like I said, we haven't had a single infection since we installed it a year ago. AV on the desktops is a pain-in-the-tuckus, especially when you have hundreds of them.
You didn't bring up a much more likely scenario: A virus that exploits vulnerabilities in a web or database server to spread, or just infects the files on a file server. We occasionally scan the file server, and we have two copies of desktop AV software that we have just in case of a problem, but they have a lot of dust on them. Sure, you're bringing up valid possible points of entry (if a little paranoid), but why should I pay for 400 desktop AV licenses when I don't have a problem with viruses anymore?
there are some steps you can take on the server side to filter some viruses, but it's not perfect
Actually, I'm using Trend Micro's Viruswall on my mail server at work, and it has been close to perfect. Sure, some recent viruses spread so fast that they get around the 'Net before the auto-update grabs the latest virus defs from Trend (a matter of hours), but we haven't had a single infection since we installed it a year ago. If I remember correctly, Trend has had a working update released within twelve hours of every major virus threat hitting the net over the last year. Most were available and installed on my server before I even knew the virus existed. Even if a virus did get through, once the virus defs were updated to catch it, it would have a difficult time spreading within the company. We have about 400 users. Viruswall's kinda spendy, but if you have a lot of users runnin' Winders I'd say it's definitely worth the money. Especially when you consider how much we've saved in licensing fees and technical headaches we would have if we installed AV software on every desktop. Viruswall is the only part of our entire mail system that isn't free software.
Uh, I haven't read the law, but... how can they make monopolies illegal? I could see making ABUSE of monopoly power illegal, but you can't make monopolies illegal!
Hell, that's what patents are for, granting a temporary monopoly to encourage innovation. If a company vastly outperforms its competitors (FAIRLY!) and it's competitors go out of business because they sucked, should the company be punished? Of course not. Not until they start abusing their monopoly power does it become illegal.
Well, actually, the carbonic acid would quickly be consumed by algae, as carbon is probably the growth-limiting nutrient in ocean environments. We would have massive algae blooms, which would hopefully be consumed quickly by plankton and other critters. Assuming the algae wasn't one of the many highly toxic varieties. Hopefully it won't cause massive red tides and kill off huge populations of... wait, never mind. It still beats having multiple gargantuan hurricaines circling the globe because of global warming. Boy, all this stuff stresses me out. Think I'm gonna take the wife and kids up to the mountains in the Suburban for some fresh air.
Now, I know that an all-winders shop was part of the spec, but I really haven't seen anything that works as well as BackupPC, including some expensive proprietary packages.
BackupPC is a set of very nice Perl scripts and modules that uses Samba to connect to your Winders machines and back up their data to a 'data pool' on the BackupPC server's hard drive. It can be configured to run the backups at night, and will run the backup during the day if it missed the nightly due to the user shutting their machine off or taking their laptop home. It also uses MD5 hashes to check for duplicate files and will make hard links instead of duplicates in order to save space on the server's drive. You can set it up to access client machines via the hidden shares, i.e. C$; there's no software to load on the clients. User data can also be compressed, or just stored on the server's drive as plain files. Makes restoring a snap, and you don't have to worry about aging tapes or corrupted backup databases.
BackupPC as far as I know only works well when the server is running on Linux, as it depends on samba, tar, Apache, etc. Setting it up is easy for someone with a Linux/Unix background, but it can be a learning process for someone new to Linux and Perl.
Actually, it's because they believe that vowels are inherently evil and not to be associated with our L-rd. I am probably going to hell anyway, so I figured I might as well educate people on the way down. Check it out:
Shocking, I know. When Our L-rd personally scribbled the Torah down on paper, He did it in Hebrew because that language doesn't have any of those temptation-inducing, voluptuous sounding vowels. After all, during fornication many people vocalize nothing but vowel sounds. Fortunately, since Y is only sometimes a vowel, it is allowed.
Why Our L-rd took went to the effort of personally appearing as a burning bush before Moses (when he could have just dropped him a note the same way he wrote the Torah) is still a mystery. Perhaps Moses was a skeptic.
If I wrote software that was in the kernel or tools that UnitedLinux was re-distributing, and I released it under the GPL, I would not have given UnitedLinux a license to redistribute my code. They would be distributing my code without copyright permission, i.e., software piracy.
If you wrote that software, you would be more familiar with the GPL than you obviously are. There is no single licence that applies to the entire distribution. There are parts of UnitedLinux that are licensed under the GPL, parts that are licensed under a BSD license, and parts that have this stupid per-seat proprietary license. They are not limiting your right to redistribute the parts that are GPL'd. You have every right to take a UL CD, chop out the proprietary parts, and redistribute the rest. However, because all this different software is available on one CD, you do not have the right to redistribute the whole CD because you don't have the right to redistribute the proprietary stuff.
If you licensed software under the GPL, you did indeed license UnitedLinux to redistribute your software, as long as they make the source code to your software publicly available, along with any modifications they make to your software.
THERE IS NOTHING IN THE GPL WHICH LIMITS YOUR RIGHT TO DISTRIBUTE GPL'D BINARIES ON THE SAME CD AS PROPRIETARY BINARIES AS LONG AS YOU MAKE ALL THE SOURCE FREELY AVAILABLE FOR THE GPL'D SOFTWARE ONLY.
They're not licensing the whole CD per-seat, just the proprietary parts. If you want to chop those out and burn your own UL CDs minus the proprietary stuff (which may not work, but c'est la vie) you have the right to do so. They are not restricting your right to redistribute GPL'd code, but you can't redistribute the whole CD because the CD includes non-GPL'd code.
THEY ARE ONLY LIMITING YOUR RIGHT TO REDISTRIBUTE THE PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE that happens to get distributed on the same CD. That's the only limitation they have the right to enforce.
RMS has proven yet again that he doesn't understand capitalism. That's fine, we wouldn't have all the wonderful software we have today if not for his strange ideas.
I have to say "SO WHAT?!?" to UnitedLinux per-seat licensing. As long as they are still forced to release any changes they make to the source code of any GPL'd application, which they are, then any contributions they make can still be picked up by Debian, RedHat, and other distributions. What does it matter, as long as the source is available?
And if they really CAN sell per-seat licensing to more than three people, which I doubt, more power to them. But if they don't at least offer a free binary distro in addition to the for-pay distro, nobody will be willing to try their distro out anyway. I would consider it near-untested if only their per-seat-paying customers were using it.
RMS needs to relax a little, and have faith in the GPL he wrote. No need to get all up in arms. Stupid people will go out of business. Software written by smart people will dominate the world. It's the Linux way.
I always had the feeling that SCO actually stood for "Symlinks, can't overdo". Then the engineers went on a mad spree to prove that statement incorrect.
Half or more of the files on the systems I had were symlinked by default to something like/var/sys/SCO/install/SCO5432/HJ5678RTYrftyfgF 5w/etc/bin/opt/suck
From a system administrator without a degree (me):
Reasons you should go to college:
1) Getting good at programming will make you a better administrator.
2) The job market isn't great now. You're better off spending your time expanding your skills.
3) Right now, your dream is to be a system administrator. Once you have been a system administrator for a few years, you may find that some other career area looks more interesting. If all you have is your experience, you're stuck. If you have a degree, you can switch around much more easily.
4) Even strictly within the administration field, lots of places require a BS degree just for system administration. Even if you have all the experience, wouldn't it suck to have your resume trashed by some ignorant HR flunky because your resume didn't match everything on their checklist?
5) In hard economic times, if you find yourself looking for a job, people with a degree will be chosen over people without a degree if both are experienced and otherwise qualified.
6) College is fun! Night school is fun, too but not nearly as much fun as it would be if I didn't have to hold down a full-time job at the same time. Whoops, we were talking about you. Oh well, take it from a guy who is five years down the "road less travelled". At this particular fork, you want to take the road more travelled.
They'll get their wrists slapped, change their tactics slightly, and continue pushing the boundaries of the law. The penalties aren't severe enough to warrant changing their behavior.
So... if in a six-month period, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Jeremy Allison, Bruce Perens, Larry Wall, Eric Allman, Brian Behlendorf, Randal Schwartz, and Guido van Rossum died under mysterious circumstances, you would find it only slightly more difficult to believe?
I see your point -- there wasn't really any hard data presented. However, unless you have some hard data yourself, you're just muddying up the picture even more.
By the way, the pizza boy was obviously an agent trained to convince the cops he was innocent. Either that, or her colleague was sick and tired of her ordering pizza instead of cooking for ONCE when it was her turn to cook and couldn't wait until the pizza boy had left before pulling the trigger in a mad rage. I don't know about you, but the pizza-boy-did-it story sounds more convincing to me.
Oh and then there was the guy that died of nitrogen exposure! GOOD GOD! The Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen! AAAAAAHHH! We're all gonna die!!!
Wouldn't it be nice if Apple pitched in with this? Seeing as how Microsoft threatened Apple with discontinuing Office support for MacOS unless they complied with Microsoft terms... one would think Mr. Jobs would be interested in helping develop OpenOffice on the Mac.
Actually, if you read the license for the CIFS spec, it doesn't prohibit you from distributing your work with some other GPL'd work. It does prohibit you from using their spec to create a work and then license it for distribution under an "IPR Impairing License". A quote from Microsoft:
"IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
What's funny is that the GPL and LGPL don't fall into any of categories (a), (b), or (c). There is nothing in the GPL that puts any sort of limitations on software distributed with the GPL'd software. It only limits linking and derivative code. So, you could take the GPL, re-arrange one sentence without changing the meaning, change the name to "Bob's Public License", and then it could not be considered an "IPR Impairing License", according to Microsoft's definition.
They are trying to spin the GPL so people think it limits what software you can distribute with GPL'd stuff. They are trying to convince commercial developers that they will have legal problems if they try to get their commercial packages distributed with Linux.
Either that, or their lawyers suck and can't read the simplest contract. After all, they say never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. Funny how that phrase keeps coming up in every discussion I've had about Microsoft lately...
I'll instead ask you to support your arguement [sic] with evidence, if you have any.
I say, Watson, I don't believe that was an argument at all. Perhaps after a few more years of experience you will learn to recognize irony when you see it.
ironynoun Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE 2 a: The use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning. b: A usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony. c : an ironic expression or utterance.
If it's just code samples or small applications, I'd definitely rather have a link to an online resource. I've never used most of the CD's I have gotten packaged with books. There are two notable exceptions:
1) when the subject material requires access to an application larger than 20-30 MB (big enough so that downloading the latest version isn't practical for some people)
2) a searchable reference. Whether the reference is supplemental to the book or is the exact same material as the book, having it in a searchable electronic format can be very nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, well, like I keep saying, why pay more money for products that I don't need? We haven't had a single infection in over a year. We haven't evaluated Officescan because their Viruswall product has been more than adequate. When was the last time you had a virus infection that didn't come through your mail server?
First off how do you define abuse? Is it deviating from anything but a normal (breaking even) profit? If so, about 90% of businesses would be in violation.
All you have to do to answer these questions is look at existing law. No, there should not be a limit to how much profit a company is allowed to make selling their product. But if they charge too much, there should be an environment where someone can sell a competing product for less.
I totally agree, monopolies suck. However, there MUST be some wiggle room between what sucks and what is ILLEGAL. Monopolies, in and of themselves, are not illegal. What IDIOT would make a law that punished a company simply because their competitors went out of business?
OK, since I'm on Slashdot, and many people here think "monopoly==satan", and my earlier post got modded down as flamebait when it was just stating the facts, I think I'm going to have to spell it out for y'all.
Say, for example, I'm one of two Espresso stands in Iowa. Nobody else in Iowa knows where to buy espresso beans except me and one other guy, who happen to work on the same street. We each sell tall mochas for $2.50. Now, the other guy gets hit by a truck. BAM! I'm a monopoly, and according you you guys, I'm now illegal. I didn't hire the truck to hit the dude, I haven't even changed my prices yet, but you guys think I should be illegal.
Now, I agree, I hate monopolies. But in and of themselves, they should NOT be illegal. Look, even if my espresso stand starts charging $4.00 per mocha, people who don't think it's worth the money will stop buying them. Everyone else who continues to buy them is making a decision that I am providing a service that is valuable to them to the tune of $4.00.
It only becomes illegal when my business gets huge, spreads all over Iowa, I become a major customer of the espresso bean vendors, and I tell my vendors that I will stop doing business with them if they sell beans to anyone else in Iowa. Do you get it now? THAT'S abuse of monopoly power.
Based on the few Business Law and numerous Economics courses I took, I believe the following to be true...
A monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal. Gaining a monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal.
Yeah, that was my point. But I guess saying anything that could possibly be misinterpreted as pro-Microsoft on Slashdot is risking getting labelled "Flamebait". I'm surprised your post wasn't modded down as well, Anti-Bob.
I guess I don't understand why it matters that it's a killer bee versus a regular bee.
The article sez coffee can self-pollinate, so they didn't think insects were required. Killer bees just happened to be the insects that moved in and started improving the cross-pollination between coffee plants. Any other insect would do just as well, but a headline with "Killer Bees" in the title will grab a lot more attention, as evidenced by the Slashdot link.
Like I said, we haven't had a single infection since we installed it a year ago. AV on the desktops is a pain-in-the-tuckus, especially when you have hundreds of them.
You didn't bring up a much more likely scenario: A virus that exploits vulnerabilities in a web or database server to spread, or just infects the files on a file server. We occasionally scan the file server, and we have two copies of desktop AV software that we have just in case of a problem, but they have a lot of dust on them. Sure, you're bringing up valid possible points of entry (if a little paranoid), but why should I pay for 400 desktop AV licenses when I don't have a problem with viruses anymore?
there are some steps you can take on the server side to filter some viruses, but it's not perfect
Actually, I'm using Trend Micro's Viruswall on my mail server at work, and it has been close to perfect. Sure, some recent viruses spread so fast that they get around the 'Net before the auto-update grabs the latest virus defs from Trend (a matter of hours), but we haven't had a single infection since we installed it a year ago. If I remember correctly, Trend has had a working update released within twelve hours of every major virus threat hitting the net over the last year. Most were available and installed on my server before I even knew the virus existed. Even if a virus did get through, once the virus defs were updated to catch it, it would have a difficult time spreading within the company. We have about 400 users. Viruswall's kinda spendy, but if you have a lot of users runnin' Winders I'd say it's definitely worth the money. Especially when you consider how much we've saved in licensing fees and technical headaches we would have if we installed AV software on every desktop. Viruswall is the only part of our entire mail system that isn't free software.
Uh, I haven't read the law, but... how can they make monopolies illegal? I could see making ABUSE of monopoly power illegal, but you can't make monopolies illegal! Hell, that's what patents are for, granting a temporary monopoly to encourage innovation. If a company vastly outperforms its competitors (FAIRLY!) and it's competitors go out of business because they sucked, should the company be punished? Of course not. Not until they start abusing their monopoly power does it become illegal.
Well, actually, the carbonic acid would quickly be consumed by algae, as carbon is probably the growth-limiting nutrient in ocean environments. We would have massive algae blooms, which would hopefully be consumed quickly by plankton and other critters. Assuming the algae wasn't one of the many highly toxic varieties. Hopefully it won't cause massive red tides and kill off huge populations of... wait, never mind. It still beats having multiple gargantuan hurricaines circling the globe because of global warming. Boy, all this stuff stresses me out. Think I'm gonna take the wife and kids up to the mountains in the Suburban for some fresh air.
Now, I know that an all-winders shop was part of the spec, but I really haven't seen anything that works as well as BackupPC, including some expensive proprietary packages.
BackupPC is a set of very nice Perl scripts and modules that uses Samba to connect to your Winders machines and back up their data to a 'data pool' on the BackupPC server's hard drive. It can be configured to run the backups at night, and will run the backup during the day if it missed the nightly due to the user shutting their machine off or taking their laptop home. It also uses MD5 hashes to check for duplicate files and will make hard links instead of duplicates in order to save space on the server's drive. You can set it up to access client machines via the hidden shares, i.e. C$; there's no software to load on the clients. User data can also be compressed, or just stored on the server's drive as plain files. Makes restoring a snap, and you don't have to worry about aging tapes or corrupted backup databases.
BackupPC as far as I know only works well when the server is running on Linux, as it depends on samba, tar, Apache, etc. Setting it up is easy for someone with a Linux/Unix background, but it can be a learning process for someone new to Linux and Perl.
Did I mention it was free?
Actually, it's because they believe that vowels are inherently evil and not to be associated with our L-rd. I am probably going to hell anyway, so I figured I might as well educate people on the way down. Check it out:
... Lord! ... God! ... Yehovah ... Jehovah!
L-rd
G-d
YHVH
Shocking, I know. When Our L-rd personally scribbled the Torah down on paper, He did it in Hebrew because that language doesn't have any of those temptation-inducing, voluptuous sounding vowels. After all, during fornication many people vocalize nothing but vowel sounds. Fortunately, since Y is only sometimes a vowel, it is allowed.
Why Our L-rd took went to the effort of personally appearing as a burning bush before Moses (when he could have just dropped him a note the same way he wrote the Torah) is still a mystery. Perhaps Moses was a skeptic.
FN-RD
Caldera also has a GPL'd installer called Lizard, tho I would probably use Redat's Anaconda.
If you licensed software under the GPL, you did indeed license UnitedLinux to redistribute your software, as long as they make the source code to your software publicly available, along with any modifications they make to your software.
THERE IS NOTHING IN THE GPL WHICH LIMITS YOUR RIGHT TO DISTRIBUTE GPL'D BINARIES ON THE SAME CD AS PROPRIETARY BINARIES AS LONG AS YOU MAKE ALL THE SOURCE FREELY AVAILABLE FOR THE GPL'D SOFTWARE ONLY.
They're not licensing the whole CD per-seat, just the proprietary parts. If you want to chop those out and burn your own UL CDs minus the proprietary stuff (which may not work, but c'est la vie) you have the right to do so. They are not restricting your right to redistribute GPL'd code, but you can't redistribute the whole CD because the CD includes non-GPL'd code.
THEY ARE ONLY LIMITING YOUR RIGHT TO REDISTRIBUTE THE PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE that happens to get distributed on the same CD. That's the only limitation they have the right to enforce.
RMS has proven yet again that he doesn't understand capitalism. That's fine, we wouldn't have all the wonderful software we have today if not for his strange ideas.
I have to say "SO WHAT?!?" to UnitedLinux per-seat licensing. As long as they are still forced to release any changes they make to the source code of any GPL'd application, which they are, then any contributions they make can still be picked up by Debian, RedHat, and other distributions. What does it matter, as long as the source is available?
And if they really CAN sell per-seat licensing to more than three people, which I doubt, more power to them. But if they don't at least offer a free binary distro in addition to the for-pay distro, nobody will be willing to try their distro out anyway. I would consider it near-untested if only their per-seat-paying customers were using it.
RMS needs to relax a little, and have faith in the GPL he wrote. No need to get all up in arms. Stupid people will go out of business. Software written by smart people will dominate the world. It's the Linux way.
I always had the feeling that SCO actually stood for "Symlinks, can't overdo". Then the engineers went on a mad spree to prove that statement incorrect.
/var/sys/SCO/install/SCO5432/HJ5678RTYrftyfgF 5w/etc/bin/opt/suck
Half or more of the files on the systems I had were symlinked by default to something like
From a system administrator without a degree (me):
Reasons you should go to college:
1) Getting good at programming will make you a better administrator.
2) The job market isn't great now. You're better off spending your time expanding your skills.
3) Right now, your dream is to be a system administrator. Once you have been a system administrator for a few years, you may find that some other career area looks more interesting. If all you have is your experience, you're stuck. If you have a degree, you can switch around much more easily.
4) Even strictly within the administration field, lots of places require a BS degree just for system administration. Even if you have all the experience, wouldn't it suck to have your resume trashed by some ignorant HR flunky because your resume didn't match everything on their checklist?
5) In hard economic times, if you find yourself looking for a job, people with a degree will be chosen over people without a degree if both are experienced and otherwise qualified.
6) College is fun! Night school is fun, too but not nearly as much fun as it would be if I didn't have to hold down a full-time job at the same time. Whoops, we were talking about you. Oh well, take it from a guy who is five years down the "road less travelled". At this particular fork, you want to take the road more travelled.
They'll get their wrists slapped, change their tactics slightly, and continue pushing the boundaries of the law. The penalties aren't severe enough to warrant changing their behavior.
LaForge: "Yeah, well I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour."
Scott: "How long would it really take?"
LaForge: "An hour!"
Scott: "Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did you?"
LaForge: "Well of course I did."
Scott: "Oh, laddie, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!"
So... if in a six-month period, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Jeremy Allison, Bruce Perens, Larry Wall, Eric Allman, Brian Behlendorf, Randal Schwartz, and Guido van Rossum died under mysterious circumstances, you would find it only slightly more difficult to believe?
I see your point -- there wasn't really any hard data presented. However, unless you have some hard data yourself, you're just muddying up the picture even more.
By the way, the pizza boy was obviously an agent trained to convince the cops he was innocent. Either that, or her colleague was sick and tired of her ordering pizza instead of cooking for ONCE when it was her turn to cook and couldn't wait until the pizza boy had left before pulling the trigger in a mad rage. I don't know about you, but the pizza-boy-did-it story sounds more convincing to me.
Oh and then there was the guy that died of nitrogen exposure! GOOD GOD! The Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen! AAAAAAHHH! We're all gonna die!!!
Wouldn't it be nice if Apple pitched in with this? Seeing as how Microsoft threatened Apple with discontinuing Office support for MacOS unless they complied with Microsoft terms... one would think Mr. Jobs would be interested in helping develop OpenOffice on the Mac.
Actually, if you read the license for the CIFS spec, it doesn't prohibit you from distributing your work with some other GPL'd work. It does prohibit you from using their spec to create a work and then license it for distribution under an "IPR Impairing License". A quote from Microsoft:
"IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
What's funny is that the GPL and LGPL don't fall into any of categories (a), (b), or (c). There is nothing in the GPL that puts any sort of limitations on software distributed with the GPL'd software. It only limits linking and derivative code. So, you could take the GPL, re-arrange one sentence without changing the meaning, change the name to "Bob's Public License", and then it could not be considered an "IPR Impairing License", according to Microsoft's definition.
They are trying to spin the GPL so people think it limits what software you can distribute with GPL'd stuff. They are trying to convince commercial developers that they will have legal problems if they try to get their commercial packages distributed with Linux.
Either that, or their lawyers suck and can't read the simplest contract. After all, they say never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. Funny how that phrase keeps coming up in every discussion I've had about Microsoft lately...
They still haven't found a solution for bone degradation in space, although exercise seems to help.
For the average couch potato popping these, expect to see problems with tendons that can't handle the strength of the muscles they are connected to.
All right, NOW he's trolling.
I'll instead ask you to support your arguement [sic] with evidence, if you have any.
I say, Watson, I don't believe that was an argument at all. Perhaps after a few more years of experience you will learn to recognize irony when you see it.
irony noun
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
2 a: The use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning. b: A usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony. c : an ironic expression or utterance.
If it's just code samples or small applications, I'd definitely rather have a link to an online resource. I've never used most of the CD's I have gotten packaged with books. There are two notable exceptions:
1) when the subject material requires access to an application larger than 20-30 MB (big enough so that downloading the latest version isn't practical for some people)
2) a searchable reference. Whether the reference is supplemental to the book or is the exact same material as the book, having it in a searchable electronic format can be very nice.