I've wondered if this is in response to a feeling of a lack of due process when the U.S. was founded, or if we just have gotten to where anyone feels that they're entitled to sue "just because".
Huh? This fine is a result of LinuxTag's claim against SCO, for commercial speech that would be entirely protected in the US.
Of course, SCO/Caldera being an American company trying to enforce claims in a foreign country that doesn't (yet) have software patents might be partially why.
Again, huh? What does this have to do with software patents. And again, this is LinuxTag's case against SCO.
Install programs? Bluescreens? What the hell are you talking about?
The issue is the cost of developing for one platform or the another. Essentially that comes down to developer time. Like the people at LinuxDevices.com, I'm skeptical of Microsoft's claims of wildly more efficient development (and as Greyfox notes, the lack of licensing fees can make up for a lot of development cost anyway) but your boilerplate Linux zealotry is entirely irrelevant.
Windows XP = money Linux = free to download..I don't see where the money argument comes into play here?
Uh, because there are more costs involved in software development than buying an OS? You're thinking about this like it's you needing an operating system to run a web browser and read email -- where Linux is free and your time is valued at nothing.
Not that I necessary believe their numbers, which probably don't include per-unit licensing costs anyway. But what you're saying makes zero sense.
Before someone says something about TCO let me point out a humorous but true text on how Microsoft actually kills..
Something amusing I just overheard, and thought I'd post before all the flamage sets in here:
Two grad student TA's complaining that they need to grade a stack of midterms by themselves because the other TA has bravely walked out on grading to protest the war.;-)
Well, in his defense, Slashdot posters have been insisting for years that Jon Johansen is being tried for violations of US law. Maybe this will at least put that bit of confusion to rest.
Two other points, as long as I'm writing:
1) Even under US law, double jeopardy only applies to criminal charges, not civic suits. Of course, trying to make that distinction is even tougher than explaing that Johansen isn't being charged with a DMCA violation.
2) If they feel it is fair, legal, whatever, that is their system, their law, their right. -- I'd agree with that more if the Europeans spent less time whining about the death penalty in the US (which their own citizens support with majorities or large minorities, but that's another issue...).
Since I fit in the class of "addicts", I figured I would post my thoughts and observations of myself.
I'd say, no, you're a basically responsible person who used a lot of IRC and MUDing to deal with boredom. If you had lost a job for excessive wasting time, that would be addiction, or at least unhealthy.
Errr, actually, walking into a church and interrupting the service until the "person up front" answers your questions about the GPL or the JPEG patent or whatever the hell it is you're talking about _is_ a really good way to get yourself thrown in jail. Or involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
It's a credit to the church congregations you've harassed that you haven't found that out yet.
Agreed -- I also think that's the likeliest explanation. But doesn't that seem like a funny thing to bring up while aguing that, no, his work isn't especially pedophile friendly?
It's the way he said it, as though Tom Clancy and Nick Hornby are always conversing with pedophiles too. Struck me as odd, anyway.
Sounded to me like he is corresponding with them in order to understand them and perhaps to help them.
Be that as it may, it's (in my experience, anyway) an extremely unusual interest or cause to take up.
I think TibbonZero's reaction was the same as mine -- Anthony is explaining, "No, I don't have any unusual interest in underage sex. I write about abuse of refugees because it was in the news at the time, like any good writer might do. Sure I'll check out a hot 16 year old girl, just like any normal guy would. And I don't have any great interest in pedophilia as an issue. In fact, I write to pedophiles in prison."
I take exception with Kimbro Staken's statement:
"the engineer community is abandoning it left and right for Mac OS X."
I work for a government weapons lab and have seen no great move to OS X. And we are the largest Mac site in the world. What I have seen is people dropping their Macs, Windows boxes, and commercial Unix desktops for Linux in DROVES.
It depends on the area, I suppose. I was at the big Human Genome Project meeting this spring and there were OS X laptops everywhere. (Linux was the only other OS in attendance.) Molecular biology is a Mac-friendly area and there were a lot of Japanese attendees (another big Mac domain) so the jump to OS X for coders and informatics people is smaller than
it would be in areas where Macs are unknown.
Not to feed a "My country is better than yours!" pissing match (personally I think that the difference between the US and France in government portals is due to a) the importance of local governments in the US system, b) the fact that the French are much less wary of government power and c) the French have been moving towards this goal for 20 years) but...
Would it have the highest earning potential per capita?...Would it have the freest citizens?...Would it have the highest standard of living?
Yes, but you're missing what is special about the US -- that while these advantages were being offered to Swiss, Danes and Norwegians, the US offered freedom and prosperity to my grandparents as they fled Europe with the clothes on their backs. (Maybe not as much prosperity as the Swiss obtained by pocketing my family's seized property, but nonetheless..) If Norway and Denmark had absorbed a significant fraction of their population in immigrants from around the world, decade after decade for centuries, they probably wouldn't be leading many lists either.
Heard Tori Amos on the radio [kroq.com] this morning. She had a geat quote: Perspective changes whenever you move.
Not (in all seriousness) to knock on anything that provided you with an epiphany but -- that's what perspective _is_. It's like saying that your position changes whenever you move.
This case involved a woman who was suing the DC police becuase they failed to show up in time to prevent her from being raped. The ruling held that government services are not responsible to help out in any specific instance, and that they are not liable if your house burns down or you get mugged and they fail to prevent it. The primary responsibility for protection falls upon oneself.
I assume the invocation here is to argue that if individuals have primary responsibility for their own defense, they should be allowed the tools to do so.
(Actually, that's a pretty good point. And, despite the horrificness of its syntax, it looks like this CML2 means I won't have to hit 'n' 5000 times as menuconfig asks me if I want support for every sound card on the planet. It's rare that I have one positive thought towards ESR, let alone two at once.)
There was a big hoopla in Times Square last night, but apparently no one pied Bill Gates.
Yeah, good thinking, Michael. Yesterday in New York would have been the perfect time to assault Bill Gates with an unknown white substance.
Honestly, while I support the right to protest and yell as much as you want, I'm baffled by how everyone seems to think hitting someone with a pie is cute and harmless, and not an assault on someone's person. I suppose that's because it's limited to leftish causes -- I suspect if anti-abortionists went around throwing pies at feminists the response would be different.
As loathsome as I find Willie Brown (why can't someone that brilliant use his skills to improve government instead of just manipulating it?) I give him credit for being the one recipient to insist that the attack on him be taken seriously. Second place goes to the elderly UK politician who decked the 20-something guy who pied him. (Said guy than had the nerve to whine about it.)
Now if I were Bill Gates, I'd have offered $10,000 to the first person to pie the guy who nailed him, offer to be repeated on each of the next 60 days. What's the point of being a billionaire if you can't do something like that?
There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable...
There's certainly some clashing between the Mac and Unix worlds (the iTunes installer issue was probably caused by that kind of mutual ignorance) but Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.
The problems described here don't strike me as being a Mac vs free software conflict. They sound a lot more like the stuff Linux developers have been dealing with for the last few years -- LinuxOne-style abuse of redistribution and self-absorbed users who think that because you gave them something you work for them.
Yeah, but updating the 'package list' is a bitch. The graphic front end gives you NO indication as to what it's doing or how long it'll take (or how much it's done).
The front end sucks (and got worse from 8.0 to 8.1, as did a bunch of other things). You'll want to at least launch MandrakeUpdate from the command-line as there is useful feedback there.
Still, I've found the benefits of Mandrake outweigh the disadvantages, and the updater does work if you're careful with it.
Re Fox tonight: Also, Family Guy is now on Thursday, I believe before The Tick. I was thrilled to see that show come back, but it's been changing nights in a way that left me forgetting to watch.
Re TV musicals: I get all the Buffy exposure I can handle from AtAT and don't bother watching, myself. And Salon's TV critic (last I saw which admittedly was over a year ago) is obsessed with the show in a way that's almost creepy. But the show that has done the most recently with musical numbers and other ideas is Drew Carey. I'm not a huge fan of that either but the musical gimmicks tend to be really good, as are the other stunts. For instance, it's the only TV show to do something interesting with a live broadcast (having improv done during it) instead of it just being an ego thing for the cast.
Of all the post-Seinfeld comics to drop their act directly into a sitcom, he's the only one to do anything interesting and novel.
I've tried Evolution and it works nicely, although I prefer a Eudora/KMail style interface for my own use.
What I'm confused about is to what degree it does or doesn't work with Exchange. It's such an obvious Outlook clone and the web site brags about how it "works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes." so I was hoping my wife could use it to replace the web interface to Exchange on her Solaris workstation. (It's not so bad when you have IE available, but it's clunky with Konqueror and awful in Communicator or Mozilla.)
It seems, though, that Evolution supports vCard and the calendar standard (forget its name) but the Exchange mail support is limited to IMAP and POP. Is that right or am I missing something?
By the way, for the people squabbling about Evolution vs KMail -- they're different things. I prefer the lighter interface without features I don't need but it's an apple and orange comparison.
It depends -- if you're this guy (assuming he's not a teenager with an overactive imagination), you're making a huge commitment to Linux without it being a "spending priority" at all. But normally any significant adoption comes with enough costs for hardware, proprietary software, staff and support that the respondant would definitely mention it.
from the the-mouthpiece-pulls-a-mundie dept....From what I can surmise, the speech dealt both with her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Geez, what an insightful, informative writeup.
Taco, I've been reading since the site was run off the server you were adminning at work, and had expectations consistent with your scale of operations. But if you're implementing paid subscriptions, you might also want to apply some of the standards normally expected of professional journalism. In this case, that would involve a writeup that doesn't rate a -1 Flamebait and filing the story under Music, which I have blocked because I simply can't stop myself by flaming every one of these hypocritical file sharing stories, rather than The Almighty Buck.
(Yes, I understand the difference between the submitter's text and the editor's additions. An editor's job involves -- get this! -- editing!)
The reporter seems to interpret it negatively because Fortune 1000 companies aren't dumping Microsoft 100% and going for Linux.
That's certainly a positive spin to put on "...wrote Goldman Sachs analysts Rick Sherlund and Laura Conigliaro. The results brought "some surprises from our IT managers, with Linux...virtually not registering on our survey."
The spin from LinuxToday posters (who tend to be dumber and more zealous than the typical Slashdot +1 poster) is "Of course there isn't much spending on Linux! It's free!" That seems really unlikely to me -- I don't think the question asked was what percentage of your budget is going to software licenses.
I'd offer my own theory, but without seeing the report, it's impossible to say anything meaningful, and what do I know about corportae IT anyway?
That's a great idea! It's an excellent compromise.
As long as I'm posting again, the other idea someone raised here that sounds really good to me is the option to have all articles in a particular subsection appear on the front page.
First of all, the new code seems to be working well. Availability and response time has been much better than before. (Bender code was in place on September 11, right? I was amazed at how well the system held up.)
Four suggestions -- three of which should be easy and the fourth is harder:
The hard one -- I'd love the ability to go back and revise posts for typos or even delete them if I realize I've said something false.
Moderation by editors should be noted as such. This would reduce (or confirm) a lot of the conspiracy theories around here.
I'll also agree that the +1 bonus should be off by default.
How about a lameness filter against HTML posts where more than 30% of the displayed text is formatted? This would help out people who forget to close a tag and don't bother to preview, and reduce readability problems caused by people who want to use all bold. (In a related vein, does the Code option for post formatting do anything but generate unreadable posts? If people want to post code, let them use HTML.)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? This fine is a result of LinuxTag's claim against SCO, for commercial speech that would be entirely protected in the US.
Of course, SCO/Caldera being an American company trying to enforce claims in a foreign country that doesn't (yet) have software patents might be partially why.
Again, huh? What does this have to do with software patents. And again, this is LinuxTag's case against SCO.
Thanks for ranting, though.
The issue is the cost of developing for one platform or the another. Essentially that comes down to developer time. Like the people at LinuxDevices.com, I'm skeptical of Microsoft's claims of wildly more efficient development (and as Greyfox notes, the lack of licensing fees can make up for a lot of development cost anyway) but your boilerplate Linux zealotry is entirely irrelevant.
Uh, because there are more costs involved in software development than buying an OS? You're thinking about this like it's you needing an operating system to run a web browser and read email -- where Linux is free and your time is valued at nothing.
Not that I necessary believe their numbers, which probably don't include per-unit licensing costs anyway. But what you're saying makes zero sense.
Before someone says something about TCO let me point out a humorous but true text on how Microsoft actually kills..
Hey, genius -- you realize that's a joke, right?
Something amusing I just overheard, and thought I'd post before all the flamage sets in here:
;-)
Two grad student TA's complaining that they need to grade a stack of midterms by themselves because the other TA has bravely walked out on grading to protest the war.
Two other points, as long as I'm writing:
1) Even under US law, double jeopardy only applies to criminal charges, not civic suits. Of course, trying to make that distinction is even tougher than explaing that Johansen isn't being charged with a DMCA violation.
2) If they feel it is fair, legal, whatever, that is their system, their law, their right. -- I'd agree with that more if the Europeans spent less time whining about the death penalty in the US (which their own citizens support with majorities or large minorities, but that's another issue...).
I'd say, no, you're a basically responsible person who used a lot of IRC and MUDing to deal with boredom. If you had lost a job for excessive wasting time, that would be addiction, or at least unhealthy.
Errr, actually, walking into a church and interrupting the service until the "person up front" answers your questions about the GPL or the JPEG patent or whatever the hell it is you're talking about _is_ a really good way to get yourself thrown in jail. Or involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
It's a credit to the church congregations you've harassed that you haven't found that out yet.
It's the way he said it, as though Tom Clancy and Nick Hornby are always conversing with pedophiles too. Struck me as odd, anyway.
Be that as it may, it's (in my experience, anyway) an extremely unusual interest or cause to take up.
I think TibbonZero's reaction was the same as mine -- Anthony is explaining, "No, I don't have any unusual interest in underage sex. I write about abuse of refugees because it was in the news at the time, like any good writer might do. Sure I'll check out a hot 16 year old girl, just like any normal guy would. And I don't have any great interest in pedophilia as an issue. In fact, I write to pedophiles in prison."
That's where my eyebrows went up, too.
Hey, you've got to lose karma to get karma back, right? And it is on topic.
"the engineer community is abandoning it left and right for Mac OS X."
I work for a government weapons lab and have seen no great move to OS X. And we are the largest Mac site in the world. What I have seen is people dropping their Macs, Windows boxes, and commercial Unix desktops for Linux in DROVES.
It depends on the area, I suppose. I was at the big Human Genome Project meeting this spring and there were OS X laptops everywhere. (Linux was the only other OS in attendance.) Molecular biology is a Mac-friendly area and there were a lot of Japanese attendees (another big Mac domain) so the jump to OS X for coders and informatics people is smaller than it would be in areas where Macs are unknown.
Would it have the highest earning potential per capita?...Would it have the freest citizens?...Would it have the highest standard of living?
Yes, but you're missing what is special about the US -- that while these advantages were being offered to Swiss, Danes and Norwegians, the US offered freedom and prosperity to my grandparents as they fled Europe with the clothes on their backs. (Maybe not as much prosperity as the Swiss obtained by pocketing my family's seized property, but nonetheless..) If Norway and Denmark had absorbed a significant fraction of their population in immigrants from around the world, decade after decade for centuries, they probably wouldn't be leading many lists either.
Not (in all seriousness) to knock on anything that provided you with an epiphany but -- that's what perspective _is_. It's like saying that your position changes whenever you move.
This case involved a woman who was suing the DC police becuase they failed to show up in time to prevent her from being raped. The ruling held that government services are not responsible to help out in any specific instance, and that they are not liable if your house burns down or you get mugged and they fail to prevent it. The primary responsibility for protection falls upon oneself.
I assume the invocation here is to argue that if individuals have primary responsibility for their own defense, they should be allowed the tools to do so.
(Actually, that's a pretty good point. And, despite the horrificness of its syntax, it looks like this CML2 means I won't have to hit 'n' 5000 times as menuconfig asks me if I want support for every sound card on the planet. It's rare that I have one positive thought towards ESR, let alone two at once.)
Yeah, good thinking, Michael. Yesterday in New York would have been the perfect time to assault Bill Gates with an unknown white substance.
Honestly, while I support the right to protest and yell as much as you want, I'm baffled by how everyone seems to think hitting someone with a pie is cute and harmless, and not an assault on someone's person. I suppose that's because it's limited to leftish causes -- I suspect if anti-abortionists went around throwing pies at feminists the response would be different.
As loathsome as I find Willie Brown (why can't someone that brilliant use his skills to improve government instead of just manipulating it?) I give him credit for being the one recipient to insist that the attack on him be taken seriously. Second place goes to the elderly UK politician who decked the 20-something guy who pied him. (Said guy than had the nerve to whine about it.)
Now if I were Bill Gates, I'd have offered $10,000 to the first person to pie the guy who nailed him, offer to be repeated on each of the next 60 days. What's the point of being a billionaire if you can't do something like that?
There's certainly some clashing between the Mac and Unix worlds (the iTunes installer issue was probably caused by that kind of mutual ignorance) but Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.
The problems described here don't strike me as being a Mac vs free software conflict. They sound a lot more like the stuff Linux developers have been dealing with for the last few years -- LinuxOne-style abuse of redistribution and self-absorbed users who think that because you gave them something you work for them.
The front end sucks (and got worse from 8.0 to 8.1, as did a bunch of other things). You'll want to at least launch MandrakeUpdate from the command-line as there is useful feedback there.
Still, I've found the benefits of Mandrake outweigh the disadvantages, and the updater does work if you're careful with it.
Re TV musicals: I get all the Buffy exposure I can handle from AtAT and don't bother watching, myself. And Salon's TV critic (last I saw which admittedly was over a year ago) is obsessed with the show in a way that's almost creepy. But the show that has done the most recently with musical numbers and other ideas is Drew Carey. I'm not a huge fan of that either but the musical gimmicks tend to be really good, as are the other stunts. For instance, it's the only TV show to do something interesting with a live broadcast (having improv done during it) instead of it just being an ego thing for the cast.
Of all the post-Seinfeld comics to drop their act directly into a sitcom, he's the only one to do anything interesting and novel.
What I'm confused about is to what degree it does or doesn't work with Exchange. It's such an obvious Outlook clone and the web site brags about how it "works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes." so I was hoping my wife could use it to replace the web interface to Exchange on her Solaris workstation. (It's not so bad when you have IE available, but it's clunky with Konqueror and awful in Communicator or Mozilla.)
It seems, though, that Evolution supports vCard and the calendar standard (forget its name) but the Exchange mail support is limited to IMAP and POP. Is that right or am I missing something?
By the way, for the people squabbling about Evolution vs KMail -- they're different things. I prefer the lighter interface without features I don't need but it's an apple and orange comparison.
It depends -- if you're this guy (assuming he's not a teenager with an overactive imagination), you're making a huge commitment to Linux without it being a "spending priority" at all. But normally any significant adoption comes with enough costs for hardware, proprietary software, staff and support that the respondant would definitely mention it.
Geez, what an insightful, informative writeup.
Taco, I've been reading since the site was run off the server you were adminning at work, and had expectations consistent with your scale of operations. But if you're implementing paid subscriptions, you might also want to apply some of the standards normally expected of professional journalism. In this case, that would involve a writeup that doesn't rate a -1 Flamebait and filing the story under Music, which I have blocked because I simply can't stop myself by flaming every one of these hypocritical file sharing stories, rather than The Almighty Buck.
(Yes, I understand the difference between the submitter's text and the editor's additions. An editor's job involves -- get this! -- editing!)
That's certainly a positive spin to put on "...wrote Goldman Sachs analysts Rick Sherlund and Laura Conigliaro. The results brought "some surprises from our IT managers, with Linux...virtually not registering on our survey."
The spin from LinuxToday posters (who tend to be dumber and more zealous than the typical Slashdot +1 poster) is "Of course there isn't much spending on Linux! It's free!" That seems really unlikely to me -- I don't think the question asked was what percentage of your budget is going to software licenses.
I'd offer my own theory, but without seeing the report, it's impossible to say anything meaningful, and what do I know about corportae IT anyway?
As long as I'm posting again, the other idea someone raised here that sounds really good to me is the option to have all articles in a particular subsection appear on the front page.
Four suggestions -- three of which should be easy and the fourth is harder: