Why do the employees want to steal the IP? Because they feel that they have no stake in the business, and they are just working for "the man". So they swipe some data to sell to a competitor because what have they got to lose?
If all the critical employees (i.e. those with access to the data) owned a non-trivial amount of the company, then they *would* have something to lose and would be much less motivated to try it. And they will work a lot harder and not leave after a year and (perfectly legally) deprive you of critical expertise.
Install and start VNC running on the person's system, open a viewer, then surreptitiously make him have typos and mouseos (?).
Once I wrote an X program that did while (1) XWarpMouse(a few random pixels).. It made the cursor jump around like mad and *everybody* picked up their mouse and looked at the bottom. What did they expect to see - a spastic roach in there or something?
I'm sure they won't be able to change it retroactively for current versions of GPL'ed software. However, new versions might be released under GPL V3. So if you are Amazon et al, and currently using GPL'ed stuff with modifications, you can either (1) upgrade to the new version and release your changes, or (2) stay at the old version and don't release them.
This will have the effect of making lots and lots of users stay with their old modified versions. Not only will this keep their (presumably useful) changes hidden, it will remove any incentive for them to support further development of those programs. Why should they pay somebody to add features they won't be able to use, while they can just pay their in-house developers to maintain their own forks?
That said, I would ask (1) how many users are in this position of running locally-hacked GPL programs, (2) do they mind redistributing them, and (3) is it enough to have some link somewhere on their web site saying "mail here if you want our patches", which should generate a minimal amount of extra work for them.
What's funny is that you get a lot more respect if you have a Dr in front of your name, even if you are doing exactly the same job and doing it the same way as you would if you hadn't taken a few extra years goofing off and getting an extra piece of paper...
So, linux is harder to set up and use than Windows. This is because there's a lot of competition between different ways of doing the same thing, different implementations of the same application, etc. This is an *inevitable* side effect of open source development. There will always be some people who don't like the commonly accepted "standard" way of doing things, and will go and reimplement it. Either they will develop a new app, make a new distro, a new desktop theme, or whatever.
Maybe this looks like chaos to the outsider, but it's evolution in action. The quality of the software is better and it's going to continue to improve because, like a biological system, it's driven by natural selection. Sure, it looks like a mess, but in the end it works.
For users who want more uniformity and lower quality, there's Windows. Microsoft is not going away any time soon but neither is Linux. The open source development model is so fundamentally different from the "unix war" era that it's pointless to even draw this kind of parallel.
Long variable names and using "foo == NULL" rather than "!foo" sometimes makes code harder to read rather than easier. Also it takes longer to type and that slows down code production, so I use i and ! whenever possible...:-)/2
I've thought about putting my sump pump on a UPS but it seems like those things draw a lot of amps when they fire up. Anybody done this and can recommend a good UPS?
I'm guessing that a large part of the radiation from black holes is like synchrotron radiation - charged particles being accelerated in a magnetic field (i.e. temporarily in orbit) will give off radiation. This radiation (and plain old friction) is probably a big reason that the particles don't stay in orbit forever but spiral in eventually.
Stuff almost never falls directly into a black hole... Because of conservation of angular momentum it will generally go into orbit.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this... Any discussion on terraforming Mars should begin with the ideas in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Reasonably good fiction (not great though) but his scientific background to the story is very carefully thought out and, as far as I can tell, pretty accurate. The account of what happens when a space elevator falls down is amazing...
Over 3 years (useful life of the cluster) this adds up to more than $1M.
However there are 26280 hours in 3 years so you would pay $2.6M to rent these hours from Sun (of course, sparc != opteron either in price or power, but...)
So if you expect to keep your cluster more than 38% utilized you win by doing it youself. That is, assuming you have the money up-front...
The SCO execs could have options that take a while to vest, so if SCO hangs on a bit longer it's good for them. Or maybe they have vested options that are underwater and getting a little bounce in the stock price will let them unload. Or maybe they or their backers want a better price to sell shares they currently own. Or maybe the SCO execs are getting paid under the table by Microsoft to drag things out as long as possible. Could be a lot of reasons.
Here's something funny that happened to me... I was doing the NYT crossword puzzle and typed in one of the clues (I think it was "prince valiant's wife") to Google - I know, that's cheating - and the top hit was a Russian site selling Viagra or something. I wonder - do they enter in all the clues to these puzzles as hidden text on their pages and get them Google-indexed in time to catch the many lazy people who do the same thing I did?
Get together with the 20 other people, pool your money, and buy a faster network connection (you could probably get more than a T-1 for that price) with few WAP's on different floors or something. That seems a lot easier than configuring your PC to use multiple connections, etc.
I used to play Rogue a lot (SuperRogue, UltraRogue, Hack, Nethack, etc...) and I used to salivate whenever I saw a % sign... It's pretty unpleasant to have your dreams get stuck in a game, though - it's like if you have a fever and keep dreaming you're a lightbulb and have to screw yourself into a socket but keep falling out, all night...
Re:Top 50 DVD List
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is not an especially useful way to rate movies, IMHO. Like, "This is an awesome computer - it's green and the CDROM drawer makes a neat swoosh sound when it opens." No amount of interesting commentary and level of video transfer is going to make me want to watch Daredevil again...
Just put a gif with a picture of your email address... People will have to type it by hand if they want to send you email but it makes it pretty hard to harvest.
If we can create enormous holes in the ground via strip mining I'm sure it's not beyond us technologically. You'd want to start at the top and break away rock and somehow let it slide into the ocean in a controlled and gradual way. I can't find a picture of the volcano that would suggest how hard this would be, though.
If this were considered a serious enough problem, the money and political will would be found.
As for early warning, a lot of people live on this island and I'm positive they have some kind of seismic equipment that would give advance notice of an eruption. We would definitely hear about it in advance - maybe days or weeks.
Would the US government have the political will or foresight to organize an evacuation of the Eastern Seaboard and the Carribean Islands, and would this even be remotely possible? Probably no on all counts.
I know that's where it came from, but that's not the problem that people run into every day with the GPL - it's the possibility or lack thereof of integrating component technology.
It's not an issue of somebody making a proprietary fork of emacs and selling it. (Actually I guess this type of thing does happen but rarely).
The interesting case is when a developer at a company would like to include some bit of functionality that's encapsulated in a GPL'ed library. No profit-making company these days will allow GPL'ed libraries to be included in their proprietary software, even though there is a way to do this via the LGPL.
What I would like to see is a modified LGPL that would allow companies to pay the developers of these libraries for the right to include them in proprietary packages. (Or if there are such licenses I wish library developers would use them more often.)
That way everybody wins - the developer gets some royalties, the company gets an unencumbered and safe right to use the package, and all the other users still get the benefits of free software.
The rationale used in the LGPL - that end users will want to relink their closed-source apps with new versions of the open-source libraries - has always seemed strange to me. Nobody in their right mind would do that - if they report bugs in the product and then explain what they have done they will get zero help or sympathy from the support staff...
I had an Atari 2600 when I was that age or a bit older and I had many fun hours playing Combat, Gunfight, etc. In a misguided attempt to reclaim my youth I bought one on EBay and found most the games really boring... I'm not a big game player in any case so I don't think I've been spoiled by too many modern ones. I think a lot of those old games were just cranked out with too little thought about playability, because they were new and there was no competition yet.
Actually, even then I found Adventure to be unplayable... Those were the lamest looking dragons ever. You had to have a really exceptional imagination to connect the level of fun promised by the pictures on the boxes with the actual game play.
It was a clever idea, but there was only so far you could take the concept. At the end you were left thinking "WTF???" so of course they needed to make a sequel, which was one of most boring and unwatchable movies I've seen in a long time.
> if you have a hypercube how do you find the area of it's surface
That's like saying "if you have a cube what's the length of its edges". Probably a more relevant question is "what's the surface volume of a hypercube".
Why do all the RMS interviews (seems like one every week is posted to slashdot) have only questions like "Do you think Linus is bad for disagreeing with you in some way?" - why not ask him (and other smart technical people) questions like "What are you working on now or wish you had time to work on?" or "Where do you see the software industry going in the next 10 years?" or "What should people work on who want to make a difference?"
And this whole question of whether free software is good or not is such a waste of time. When somebody invented automatic door openers did people say "think of all the doormen who will be out of a job"? No, they said "isn't it great that these people are now free to find better jobs that contribute more to society". That's what I would say about people who used to spend all their time reinventing the wheel because all the previously invented wheels were proprietary. If Linux succeeds (i.e. is better than Windows and people switch) then the programmers at Microsoft will get to work on new and different things that haven't been done before (and maybe make money on them for the few years before the open source alternatives catch up).
Slashdot Mirror
Why do the employees want to steal the IP? Because they feel that they have no stake in the business, and they are just working for "the man". So they swipe some data to sell to a competitor because what have they got to lose?
If all the critical employees (i.e. those with access to the data) owned a non-trivial amount of the company, then they *would* have something to lose and would be much less motivated to try it. And they will work a lot harder and not leave after a year and (perfectly legally) deprive you of critical expertise.
Install and start VNC running on the person's system, open a viewer, then surreptitiously make him have typos and mouseos (?).
Once I wrote an X program that did while (1) XWarpMouse(a few random pixels).. It made the cursor jump around like mad and *everybody* picked up their mouse and looked at the bottom. What did they expect to see - a spastic roach in there or something?
I'm sure they won't be able to change it retroactively for current versions of GPL'ed software. However, new versions might be released under GPL V3. So if you are Amazon et al, and currently using GPL'ed stuff with modifications, you can either (1) upgrade to the new version and release your changes, or (2) stay at the old version and don't release them.
This will have the effect of making lots and lots of users stay with their old modified versions. Not only will this keep their (presumably useful) changes hidden, it will remove any incentive for them to support further development of those programs. Why should they pay somebody to add features they won't be able to use, while they can just pay their in-house developers to maintain their own forks?
That said, I would ask (1) how many users are in this position of running locally-hacked GPL programs, (2) do they mind redistributing them, and (3) is it enough to have some link somewhere on their web site saying "mail here if you want our patches", which should generate a minimal amount of extra work for them.
What's funny is that you get a lot more respect if you have a Dr in front of your name, even if you are doing exactly the same job and doing it the same way as you would if you hadn't taken a few extra years goofing off and getting an extra piece of paper...
So, linux is harder to set up and use than Windows. This is because there's a lot of competition between different ways of doing the same thing, different implementations of the same application, etc. This is an *inevitable* side effect of open source development. There will always be some people who don't like the commonly accepted "standard" way of doing things, and will go and reimplement it. Either they will develop a new app, make a new distro, a new desktop theme, or whatever.
Maybe this looks like chaos to the outsider, but it's evolution in action. The quality of the software is better and it's going to continue to improve because, like a biological system, it's driven by natural selection. Sure, it looks like a mess, but in the end it works.
For users who want more uniformity and lower quality, there's Windows. Microsoft is not going away any time soon but neither is Linux. The open source development model is so fundamentally different from the "unix war" era that it's pointless to even draw this kind of parallel.
Long variable names and using "foo == NULL" rather than "!foo" sometimes makes code harder to read rather than easier. Also it takes longer to type and that slows down code production, so I use i and ! whenever possible... :-)/2
I've thought about putting my sump pump on a UPS but it seems like those things draw a lot of amps when they fire up. Anybody done this and can recommend a good UPS?
I'm guessing that a large part of the radiation from black holes is like synchrotron radiation - charged particles being accelerated in a magnetic field (i.e. temporarily in orbit) will give off radiation. This radiation (and plain old friction) is probably a big reason that the particles don't stay in orbit forever but spiral in eventually.
Stuff almost never falls directly into a black hole... Because of conservation of angular momentum it will generally go into orbit.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this ... Any discussion on terraforming Mars should begin with the ideas in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Reasonably good fiction (not great though) but his scientific background to the story is very carefully thought out and, as far as I can tell, pretty accurate. The account of what happens when a space elevator falls down is amazing...
Isn't anybody leasing CPU time on, say, amd64 machines? Somebody asked me where they could get that kind of time but I didn't know...
The price of $1/hr seems high, but let's say you want to do it yourself...
Buy 100 amd64 boxes - say $3K each after you factor in racks, switches, etc. $300K
Pay 2 staff people full-time to administer $200K/year
Rent space, pay for power, etc - $2K rent/mo + $1/kwh, 10KW/hr = $10/hr = ~$2000/mo = $48K/year
Over 3 years (useful life of the cluster) this adds up to more than $1M.
However there are 26280 hours in 3 years so you would pay $2.6M to rent these hours from Sun (of course, sparc != opteron either in price or power, but...)
So if you expect to keep your cluster more than 38% utilized you win by doing it youself. That is, assuming you have the money up-front...
Speaking of which... There's a FF movie coming out this year, right? Is it going to be any good?
The SCO execs could have options that take a while to vest, so if SCO hangs on a bit longer it's good for them. Or maybe they have vested options that are underwater and getting a little bounce in the stock price will let them unload. Or maybe they or their backers want a better price to sell shares they currently own. Or maybe the SCO execs are getting paid under the table by Microsoft to drag things out as long as possible. Could be a lot of reasons.
Here's something funny that happened to me... I was doing the NYT crossword puzzle and typed in one of the clues (I think it was "prince valiant's wife") to Google - I know, that's cheating - and the top hit was a Russian site selling Viagra or something. I wonder - do they enter in all the clues to these puzzles as hidden text on their pages and get them Google-indexed in time to catch the many lazy people who do the same thing I did?
Take your pick:
Linux: everything is moderately hard
Windows: 95% of the time it's easy, 5% it's impossible
Get together with the 20 other people, pool your money, and buy a faster network connection (you could probably get more than a T-1 for that price) with few WAP's on different floors or something. That seems a lot easier than configuring your PC to use multiple connections, etc.
I used to play Rogue a lot (SuperRogue, UltraRogue, Hack, Nethack, etc ...) and I used to salivate whenever I saw a % sign... It's pretty unpleasant to have your dreams get stuck in a game, though - it's like if you have a fever and keep dreaming you're a lightbulb and have to screw yourself into a socket but keep falling out, all night...
This is not an especially useful way to rate movies, IMHO. Like, "This is an awesome computer - it's green and the CDROM drawer makes a neat swoosh sound when it opens." No amount of interesting commentary and level of video transfer is going to make me want to watch Daredevil again...
Just put a gif with a picture of your email address... People will have to type it by hand if they want to send you email but it makes it pretty hard to harvest.
If we can create enormous holes in the ground via strip mining I'm sure it's not beyond us technologically. You'd want to start at the top and break away rock and somehow let it slide into the ocean in a controlled and gradual way. I can't find a picture of the volcano that would suggest how hard this would be, though.
If this were considered a serious enough problem, the money and political will would be found.
As for early warning, a lot of people live on this island and I'm positive they have some kind of seismic equipment that would give advance notice of an eruption. We would definitely hear about it in advance - maybe days or weeks.
Would the US government have the political will or foresight to organize an evacuation of the Eastern Seaboard and the Carribean Islands, and would this even be remotely possible? Probably no on all counts.
I know that's where it came from, but that's not the problem that people run into every day with the GPL - it's the possibility or lack thereof of integrating component technology.
It's not an issue of somebody making a proprietary fork of emacs and selling it. (Actually I guess this type of thing does happen but rarely).
The interesting case is when a developer at a company would like to include some bit of functionality that's encapsulated in a GPL'ed library. No profit-making company these days will allow GPL'ed libraries to be included in their proprietary software, even though there is a way to do this via the LGPL.
What I would like to see is a modified LGPL that would allow companies to pay the developers of these libraries for the right to include them in proprietary packages. (Or if there are such licenses I wish library developers would use them more often.)
That way everybody wins - the developer gets some royalties, the company gets an unencumbered and safe right to use the package, and all the other users still get the benefits of free software.
The rationale used in the LGPL - that end users will want to relink their closed-source apps with new versions of the open-source libraries - has always seemed strange to me. Nobody in their right mind would do that - if they report bugs in the product and then explain what they have done they will get zero help or sympathy from the support staff...
I had an Atari 2600 when I was that age or a bit older and I had many fun hours playing Combat, Gunfight, etc. In a misguided attempt to reclaim my youth I bought one on EBay and found most the games really boring... I'm not a big game player in any case so I don't think I've been spoiled by too many modern ones. I think a lot of those old games were just cranked out with too little thought about playability, because they were new and there was no competition yet.
Actually, even then I found Adventure to be unplayable... Those were the lamest looking dragons ever. You had to have a really exceptional imagination to connect the level of fun promised by the pictures on the boxes with the actual game play.
It was a clever idea, but there was only so far you could take the concept. At the end you were left thinking "WTF???" so of course they needed to make a sequel, which was one of most boring and unwatchable movies I've seen in a long time.
> if you have a hypercube how do you find the area of it's surface
That's like saying "if you have a cube what's the length of its edges". Probably a more relevant question is "what's the surface volume of a hypercube".
Why do all the RMS interviews (seems like one every week is posted to slashdot) have only questions like "Do you think Linus is bad for disagreeing with you in some way?" - why not ask him (and other smart technical people) questions like "What are you working on now or wish you had time to work on?" or "Where do you see the software industry going in the next 10 years?" or "What should people work on who want to make a difference?"
And this whole question of whether free software is good or not is such a waste of time. When somebody invented automatic door openers did people say "think of all the doormen who will be out of a job"? No, they said "isn't it great that these people are now free to find better jobs that contribute more to society". That's what I would say about people who used to spend all their time reinventing the wheel because all the previously invented wheels were proprietary. If Linux succeeds (i.e. is better than Windows and people switch) then the programmers at Microsoft will get to work on new and different things that haven't been done before (and maybe make money on them for the few years before the open source alternatives catch up).