More than just vacated, the Appeals Court actually agreed with part of the monopoly findings of Judge Jackson. This is not a reversal in the "overturned" sense, and I wish the media stopped portraying it this way. To quote from the Court's Conclusion:
"The judgment of the District Court is affirmed in part,
reversed in part, and remanded in part."
What is being missed is the clear statement of the court that it has "affirmed in part" Microsoft's monopoly status. Given the past rulings of this Appeals Court, if even they have found Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse, Microsoft is pretty much in big trouble.
What the court really wanted here was for something as big as a breakup ruling to rest on a respected, even-handed judge. Judge Jackson was a little hot on the trigger for a Federal Judge trying a case of this magnitude. That's one of the reasons the Supreme Court didn't take the fast-track appeal. The courts generally (though not always, as in the Infamous Chad of 2000) prefer long, drawn-out, even-handed justice.
So what can we expect to see now? There will probably be a retrial just as was commanded by the Appeals Court, and a judge who is a little more level-headed than Jackson. The court will still most likely find Microsoft guilty, and demand some pretty hefty penalties. An Appeals Court will more likely approve of this new trial, so Microsoft has less chance of winning the next appeal (though they didn't really win this one).
One word on settlement: the settlement issue isn't just up to the DOJ; this is a state-sponsored case as well. Even if the DOJ decides to settle, the states could still pursue their own case. Even if you get everyone to agree to the same settlement, as was done with the Big Tobacco litigation, it still is rife with difficulties and challenges. Also, that litigation was made with an entire industry, not just a single company.
Justice will come. Sometimes it takes time. Be patient, and Microsoft will get its due.
Why do people always get stuck on this "it's powerful enough now" bent? You can always add full 3D physics simulation to your word processor, not that you need it, but then again, do you really need color TV or a palm pilot? I think you could have best summed up your reply:
"640k is all anyone will need for memory." -- Bill Gates, early 80s.
I noticed his paper addressed quantum state change limits, apparently (without saying it) limited to fermions. It doesn't seem that his analysis would apply to bosons as well, particularly photons. His paper seems to say that a given type of computer, a fermion computer, has these limits, but what about a boson computer?
Also, I'm wondering if his article has been peer-reviewed. Intersecting physics and computation has had its problems in the past, especially interpreting the results. Even among experts there are disagreements about what exactly these results mean. I would also have liked to see more tables of comparative results of different sizes and speeds of theoretical computers and graphs of the speed and size tradeoffs. He also gives neutrinos as an example of particles having zero mass, even though they are now known to have a small but finite mass.
And as a caveat, which should have been expressed in the article, the limits given are dependent on our current understanding of physics within the system given (the ultimate laptop), and further discoveries could of course alter these results. Even given current physics, the interpretations of the equations is very speculative and a matter of much debate.
Ha ha, you fool!! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia; and only slightly less well known is this: Never confuse the terms free software with open source when making a post on Slashdot!
[The poster continues to laugh hysterically. Suddenly, he stops and falls right
over. The Programmer in Black removes the blindfold from the Newbie]
Newbie: Who are you?
Programmer in Black: I'm no one to be trifled with. That is all you'll ever need know.
Newbie: And to think, all that time it was your license that was poisoned.
Programmer in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up immunity to licensing issues.
Public Domain, not BSD, is freedom. Of course, it depends on what you mean by freedom; BSD is the freedom to get screwed by some company ripping off your work and making it proprietary.
Why does the FSF obsess over license issues? One word: RMS. I dare you to meet him in person and say something even remotely non-GPL compatible and see what happens. It's not pretty.
Actually, that's a good point about Comdex. The trade shows are rapidly loosing their value because they focus on appealing to a mass-market, when MS pretty much has clinched the mass market with its monopoly. All that's left for most vendors is some niche markets, which aren't the subject of Comdex or the big trade shows.
In fact, my company is now refocusing its sales efforts into user groups rather than trade shows. They basically found that the trade shows were expensive and produced little if any sales. The user groups, however, being focused and with more clueful people, are much more productive.
If you're a linux company out there, don't waste money on the trade shows. Stick with user groups and conferences.
The report was good, by the way. I am thankful for the information as I don't have enough time or money to go myself. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that content prepared for millions to read should at least have one revision from editors.
The first line should read, with bold alterations:
SEWilco has a comprehensive report from the Spring Comdex show in Chicago. A good listing - the show was smaller, but I think there were still some good exhibits put on there. Click through to read more.
Slashdot writers really need to work on their grammar, and need to have an editorial review
process in place.
This stuff really depends on state law, not federal law. I don't know about other state's laws, but I can speak for Texas (other states are broadly similar), and an example that happened at my last company.
A top executive at my last company had an in-row with the CEO and the CEO came out on top. While I won't go into the details, the executive was incensed enough that he went to work in a key position for a well-known and disliked competitor.
There are two legal issues involved in this case: the executive contract, and trade secrets. The executive contract didn't have a non-compete clause, and the executive was in his power to leave the company and work for someone else. No problem there. Trade secrets wouldn't be a problem because he just has to not reveal anything secret from the last company, right? Wrong.
In Texas there's something called the Law of Inevitable Disclosure. It means that if you work in a similar situation as a job involving trade secrets, as a part of doing your job you will inevitabley, even subconsiously, use the trade secrets and thus violate the law. It doesn't matter if you agree not to use the trade secrets; if you work in a similar job where those trade secrets would apply, you loose. And since trade secrets don't have an expiration date, you can never work in a position where the trade secrets would be put at jeporady. You could work in a different position, say if you knew the Coke recipie you couldn't work in Pepsi recipies but maybe in Pepsi sales. This applies to an executive, engineer, regular employee, contract worker, anyone employeed and exposed to trade secrets.
The moral of the story is: know the law. Get a good lawyer before you tick off people with good lawyers. If you're just an engineer and you work for a non-competitive company you're probably okay, but if you're an executive or if you're going to work in a key position at a competing company, you'd better watch out and cover your bases.
The oil companies are more driven by the market than they are drivers of the market. The drivers of the market are the oil producing nations and the oil consuming nations. OPEC produces less, supply goes down, price goes up; America consumes heating oil in a cold winter, demand goes up, price goes up. Most oil companies have now shifted from a cost-based mode (where they limit production to conserve costs) to production-mode (where they produce as much as possible). Their long-term plans are based on a strike price of $10/barrel; the rest is profit.
If all else fails, move to Houston. You'll learn more about the energy economy and will have a job when tech goes sour. That is, until oil gets cheap again...
You should take a step back: Company A wants money. Why? To expand operations? To make up for cash shortfall? To make the company more liquid? That's your first question. Maybe you don't need money at all, maybe instead you can just use existing profits and wait a year or two.
Let's say you've decided you need outside capital, now you have to decide how to get it. Private placement from a big investor? Bringing in some partners and sharing the business? Getting a venture capital company to invest? Going public with an IPO? These are all ways to raise money, and while an IPO is the most glamourous, it is rarely the best way to go about it. Going public is incredibly expensive to a business, and should normally only be done after the company is successful, profitable, and with a solid business plan for spending the excess money.
The moral of the story is: think twice before you IPO. It's almost always better to stay private. Only IPO when you're already successful. This will save you, your employees, and investors alot of time and trouble.
Actually, it's even more amusing, if I'm guessing the tones right, xiao-feng means 'small-air'. So, the name is 'Small-Air Fan'; which is in some respect what was invented. How often do you invent something described by your own name?
I should probably stay out of cooling research, my last name being 'Burns'. I knew there was a reason I left EE for CS...:-)
The HURD is developed from scratch, a pure design,
a working microkernel with an up-and-coming Debian
distribution, and officially supported by the GNU project.
xMach appears to fall short of the HURD in each of these areas, if I'm not mistaken: it's not developed from scratch, has a more mingled design with existing BSDs, in partially-working state and is not part of a funded project.
Not to disparage the xMach team, but as an honest question, how is this use of resources better than simply contributing to the HURD? Is it simply ego?
That brings up another point. How often do free software projects suffer from ego? Not the make-things-better-because I'm good ego, but rather splitting projects, wasting time on personal conflicts, etc. NetBSD vs. OpenBSD, GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs, KDE vs. GNOME, and now xMach vs. HURD; do these competing forks serve a productive purpose in the free software community, or are they simply reminders of the inherit inefficiency prevalent in any organized human endeavour?
You aren't even reading my comment. We are not under the Old Testament Law. It's that simple. But we are not free to practice 'Do what thou wilt shall be all of the law'. As I said, read Galatians and Romans in the New Testament if you're really interested. Otherwise, we don't have the common background and we have misunderstandings like this.
I never said I wouldn't use them, I use them every day, just as we use lots of products developed by people we don't agree with. Oh, let's see, you obey the law, well much of that law was passed long ago by slaveowners so I guess if you follow the law you must be a racist bastard... guess I won't follow the law. Come 'on, give me a break.
Give me a break too, moderators. You mod up this kind of jibberish, I don't know why.
Perhaps you, sir, had better not use TeX, seeing how it was developed by a Christian. Don't use Perl either, because that's Larry Wall's creation, and he's Christian too. Who knows what good-intentioned God-blessed works may be lingering in your computer! The horror of not having everything you see somehow related to Marilyn Manson! How can you live with yourself?
Okay, a little carried away. Just showing you the other side, padre.
That does bother some people about BSD, since of course it would never have been approved to put a Star of David or a Cross as a software logo, but a cute devil is okay. But that's just part of the religious hypocrisy we Christians have to deal with by you so-called free-thinkers.
That being said, even though this probably sounds incredibly ridiculous to you, I think the BSD logo being a devil is one reason Linux is used more (just a Penguin). The average conservative CTO may be a rotten person but he would hesitate to use a bunch of software with devil logos (no matter how cute), for fear of offending customers. I know this sounds silly, but believe me, anyone who's dealt with mainstream customers knows that it's extremely easy to piss them off.
P.S. Don't display you ignorance to all by using 'A message to Christians' as the subject. Plenty of other religions, in fact virtually all religions, recognize evil in some form and demons as representations of that. So you may as well say 'A message to anyone who believes in good and evil'.
Bzzt yourself. Look at the bible. You can only divorce if you were married to a non-Christian who left you.
Being a Christian is a matter of faith. The religious systems you're quoting have substantial non-Christian aspects to them, divorce being one of them. They are wrong, what can I say. Jesus didn't allow it.
Somebody hasn't read the gospels. You know, the part where the disciples wanted to ask God to rain down fire upon some wicked men (as Elias had done in the Old Testament); Jesus strongly rebuked them. God will judge, but it is not our judgement, it's his. As David with Saul, we await his judgement againt blasphemers, like you; may we never lift a hand against you though.
Confusing the Old Testament with the New. Why don't you actually read the bible before you spout such nonsense.
You are confusing the Old Testament with the New. Yes, in the Old Covenant homosexuals were to be killed, and you'd also be killed if you worked on Saturday. But on the cross we died to the law, that we might serve in newness of life (see Galatians). Thus we are not under law; you can be a Christian and practice homosexuality, as some do (Thomas Bushnell, for instance). This is wrong, but it does not mean they are not saved; they just misunderstand God's desire for purity in our life.
True, you just need to accept Jesus to be saved. But your mentioning of pig's flesh or mixed fibres shows you have a serious misunderstanding of the law and it's application in the Christian life. We are free from the law, but not so that we can practice lawlessness, but so that grace may abound. Read the book of Romans and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not embarking down any road leading to bloodbaths. Stating that men having sex with men, or women women, is wrong is not equivalent to killing people, nor does it lead to killing people. In fact, saying certain things are wicked can acutally save many people; for instance, if you state that having abortions is wickedness, some people may agree and choose not to have them. Thus, lives are saved.
I would propose that choosing to ignore evil is a far more dangerous road than denouncing it. Had more people denounced American Settlers as evil, many Indian lives could have been saved, for instance.
But at least phrasing the party line gets you mod points. I'm not afraid to say something different, though.
Sharing the message includes sharing the fact that we are sinners in need of salvation. Homosexuality is one of those sins, but by no means the only one, certainly. I do not agree that we are to ignore the sin, because it is part of "sharing the message". Thank God people didn't come to me saying I was just fine as I was, but I could be even better with a saviour. No, I was in dread need of such a saviour. That's the message.
Slashdot Mirror
More than just vacated, the Appeals Court actually agreed with part of the monopoly findings of Judge Jackson. This is not a reversal in the "overturned" sense, and I wish the media stopped portraying it this way. To quote from the Court's Conclusion:
What is being missed is the clear statement of the court that it has "affirmed in part" Microsoft's monopoly status. Given the past rulings of this Appeals Court, if even they have found Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse, Microsoft is pretty much in big trouble.
What the court really wanted here was for something as big as a breakup ruling to rest on a respected, even-handed judge. Judge Jackson was a little hot on the trigger for a Federal Judge trying a case of this magnitude. That's one of the reasons the Supreme Court didn't take the fast-track appeal. The courts generally (though not always, as in the Infamous Chad of 2000) prefer long, drawn-out, even-handed justice.
So what can we expect to see now? There will probably be a retrial just as was commanded by the Appeals Court, and a judge who is a little more level-headed than Jackson. The court will still most likely find Microsoft guilty, and demand some pretty hefty penalties. An Appeals Court will more likely approve of this new trial, so Microsoft has less chance of winning the next appeal (though they didn't really win this one).
One word on settlement: the settlement issue isn't just up to the DOJ; this is a state-sponsored case as well. Even if the DOJ decides to settle, the states could still pursue their own case. Even if you get everyone to agree to the same settlement, as was done with the Big Tobacco litigation, it still is rife with difficulties and challenges. Also, that litigation was made with an entire industry, not just a single company.
Justice will come. Sometimes it takes time. Be patient, and Microsoft will get its due.
I noticed his paper addressed quantum state change limits, apparently (without saying it) limited to fermions. It doesn't seem that his analysis would apply to bosons as well, particularly photons. His paper seems to say that a given type of computer, a fermion computer, has these limits, but what about a boson computer?
Also, I'm wondering if his article has been peer-reviewed. Intersecting physics and computation has had its problems in the past, especially interpreting the results. Even among experts there are disagreements about what exactly these results mean. I would also have liked to see more tables of comparative results of different sizes and speeds of theoretical computers and graphs of the speed and size tradeoffs. He also gives neutrinos as an example of particles having zero mass, even though they are now known to have a small but finite mass.
And as a caveat, which should have been expressed in the article, the limits given are dependent on our current understanding of physics within the system given (the ultimate laptop), and further discoveries could of course alter these results. Even given current physics, the interpretations of the equations is very speculative and a matter of much debate.
[The poster continues to laugh hysterically. Suddenly, he stops and falls right over. The Programmer in Black removes the blindfold from the Newbie]
Newbie: Who are you?
Programmer in Black: I'm no one to be trifled with. That is all you'll ever need know.
Newbie: And to think, all that time it was your license that was poisoned.
Programmer in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up immunity to licensing issues.
[The scene switches back to Gates and his men]
Public Domain, not BSD, is freedom. Of course, it depends on what you mean by freedom; BSD is the freedom to get screwed by some company ripping off your work and making it proprietary.
Why does the FSF obsess over license issues? One word: RMS. I dare you to meet him in person and say something even remotely non-GPL compatible and see what happens. It's not pretty.
They already control the consumer pc market, and have for over a decade, in case you haven't noticed.
In fact, my company is now refocusing its sales efforts into user groups rather than trade shows. They basically found that the trade shows were expensive and produced little if any sales. The user groups, however, being focused and with more clueful people, are much more productive.
If you're a linux company out there, don't waste money on the trade shows. Stick with user groups and conferences.
The report was good, by the way. I am thankful for the information as I don't have enough time or money to go myself. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that content prepared for millions to read should at least have one revision from editors.
The first line should read, with bold alterations:
SEWilco has a comprehensive report from the Spring Comdex show in Chicago. A good listing - the show was smaller, but I think there were still some good exhibits put on there. Click through to read more.
Slashdot writers really need to work on their grammar, and need to have an editorial review process in place.
A top executive at my last company had an in-row with the CEO and the CEO came out on top. While I won't go into the details, the executive was incensed enough that he went to work in a key position for a well-known and disliked competitor.
There are two legal issues involved in this case: the executive contract, and trade secrets. The executive contract didn't have a non-compete clause, and the executive was in his power to leave the company and work for someone else. No problem there. Trade secrets wouldn't be a problem because he just has to not reveal anything secret from the last company, right? Wrong.
In Texas there's something called the Law of Inevitable Disclosure. It means that if you work in a similar situation as a job involving trade secrets, as a part of doing your job you will inevitabley, even subconsiously, use the trade secrets and thus violate the law. It doesn't matter if you agree not to use the trade secrets; if you work in a similar job where those trade secrets would apply, you loose. And since trade secrets don't have an expiration date, you can never work in a position where the trade secrets would be put at jeporady. You could work in a different position, say if you knew the Coke recipie you couldn't work in Pepsi recipies but maybe in Pepsi sales. This applies to an executive, engineer, regular employee, contract worker, anyone employeed and exposed to trade secrets.
The moral of the story is: know the law. Get a good lawyer before you tick off people with good lawyers. If you're just an engineer and you work for a non-competitive company you're probably okay, but if you're an executive or if you're going to work in a key position at a competing company, you'd better watch out and cover your bases.
If all else fails, move to Houston. You'll learn more about the energy economy and will have a job when tech goes sour. That is, until oil gets cheap again...
On Slashdot, basic high-school science principles can be posted and moderated to Insightful in a matter of minutes.
Yes gentleman (and not-so-gentle women ;-), the world is a better place with Slashdot.
Let's say you've decided you need outside capital, now you have to decide how to get it. Private placement from a big investor? Bringing in some partners and sharing the business? Getting a venture capital company to invest? Going public with an IPO? These are all ways to raise money, and while an IPO is the most glamourous, it is rarely the best way to go about it. Going public is incredibly expensive to a business, and should normally only be done after the company is successful, profitable, and with a solid business plan for spending the excess money.
The moral of the story is: think twice before you IPO. It's almost always better to stay private. Only IPO when you're already successful. This will save you, your employees, and investors alot of time and trouble.
Actually, it's even more amusing, if I'm guessing the tones right, xiao-feng means 'small-air'. So, the name is 'Small-Air Fan'; which is in some respect what was invented. How often do you invent something described by your own name?
I should probably stay out of cooling research, my last name being 'Burns'. I knew there was a reason I left EE for CS... :-)
The HURD is developed from scratch, a pure design, a working microkernel with an up-and-coming Debian distribution, and officially supported by the GNU project.
xMach appears to fall short of the HURD in each of these areas, if I'm not mistaken: it's not developed from scratch, has a more mingled design with existing BSDs, in partially-working state and is not part of a funded project.
Not to disparage the xMach team, but as an honest question, how is this use of resources better than simply contributing to the HURD? Is it simply ego?
That brings up another point. How often do free software projects suffer from ego? Not the make-things-better-because I'm good ego, but rather splitting projects, wasting time on personal conflicts, etc. NetBSD vs. OpenBSD, GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs, KDE vs. GNOME, and now xMach vs. HURD; do these competing forks serve a productive purpose in the free software community, or are they simply reminders of the inherit inefficiency prevalent in any organized human endeavour?
Just some thoughts... thanks.
You aren't even reading my comment. We are not under the Old Testament Law. It's that simple. But we are not free to practice 'Do what thou wilt shall be all of the law'. As I said, read Galatians and Romans in the New Testament if you're really interested. Otherwise, we don't have the common background and we have misunderstandings like this.
Give me a break too, moderators. You mod up this kind of jibberish, I don't know why.
Perhaps you, sir, had better not use TeX, seeing how it was developed by a Christian. Don't use Perl either, because that's Larry Wall's creation, and he's Christian too. Who knows what good-intentioned God-blessed works may be lingering in your computer! The horror of not having everything you see somehow related to Marilyn Manson! How can you live with yourself?
Okay, a little carried away. Just showing you the other side, padre.
That being said, even though this probably sounds incredibly ridiculous to you, I think the BSD logo being a devil is one reason Linux is used more (just a Penguin). The average conservative CTO may be a rotten person but he would hesitate to use a bunch of software with devil logos (no matter how cute), for fear of offending customers. I know this sounds silly, but believe me, anyone who's dealt with mainstream customers knows that it's extremely easy to piss them off.
P.S. Don't display you ignorance to all by using 'A message to Christians' as the subject. Plenty of other religions, in fact virtually all religions, recognize evil in some form and demons as representations of that. So you may as well say 'A message to anyone who believes in good and evil'.
Being a Christian is a matter of faith. The religious systems you're quoting have substantial non-Christian aspects to them, divorce being one of them. They are wrong, what can I say. Jesus didn't allow it.
Confusing the Old Testament with the New. Why don't you actually read the bible before you spout such nonsense.
True, you just need to accept Jesus to be saved. But your mentioning of pig's flesh or mixed fibres shows you have a serious misunderstanding of the law and it's application in the Christian life. We are free from the law, but not so that we can practice lawlessness, but so that grace may abound. Read the book of Romans and you'll see what I mean.
May God give you peace.
I would propose that choosing to ignore evil is a far more dangerous road than denouncing it. Had more people denounced American Settlers as evil, many Indian lives could have been saved, for instance.
But at least phrasing the party line gets you mod points. I'm not afraid to say something different, though.
Sharing the message includes sharing the fact that we are sinners in need of salvation. Homosexuality is one of those sins, but by no means the only one, certainly. I do not agree that we are to ignore the sin, because it is part of "sharing the message". Thank God people didn't come to me saying I was just fine as I was, but I could be even better with a saviour. No, I was in dread need of such a saviour. That's the message.