Weiss had a conflict of interest in this matter, as a journalist covering the topic area.
I don't quite understand how being a well-known lay expert in the topic (as a financial journalist must be to do his job adequately) causes a conflict of interest. Could you expand on this?
Now the facts are: Naked shorting has cost the US economy billions and billions of dollars.
Evidence?
Mathematical models suggest that naked shorting causes a short-term drop in prices, followed by an increase. This allows naked shorters to make a quick buck at the expense of more traditional investers, and may be regarded as somewhat unfair, but it doesn't actually cost the economy anything.
I understand that there were 30-1 margin ratios in these subprime packages. Why would anyone be surprised at a blowup?
And I trade forex derivitives at a leverage of 100-1. I don't expect to be going bankrupt any time soon.
Leverage is perfectly reasonable and acceptable as long as you take appropriate steps in risk management. Nobody was quite sure how you would go about managing the risks inherent in the kind of deals we're talking about here, which is why they blew up. I mean, you can insure against bad debts, but do too much of that and you'll bankrupt your insurer.
The leverage has little to do with it, except in terms of determining how big the crash was.
Um, he just gave one (naked short selling) in a reply to a post that mentioned two others (Patrick Byrne, Gary Weiss.)
All three of those articles have a _lot_ of editing going on. It clearly isn't all manipulation by the "elite". I think links to diffs would be appropriate, here.
Though, I think it _may_ have played some kind of role in bringing down the shares of the financial brokers faster than anyone thought could happen
Probably not, no. An investor taking a short position actually has less effect than an existing owner selling (due to the fact that the short seller must then buy shares to cover their deal, thus limiting the effect, and a sensible investor will try to cover while the stock is liquid and on its way down, not after it reaches bottom).
to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system
Uhh, no. It's just the foundation of the stock market.
Not really, no.
Look into the difference between M3 and M0 money supply. The gap between them is effectively wealth that is generated out of thin air by leveraging, and is the vast majority of money in circulation today. M3 is the total amount of money everyone thinks they have; M0 (approximately 5% of M3) is how much money there really is.
This has nothing to do with the stock market, and everything to do with banking and credit.
Barring you from working on the same project again (or same field again?) might be unenforceable. Several jobs have non-compete clauses in their contracts, but several judges have struck them down. It really doesn't seem practical, or reasonable, to accept a lifetime ban for a job.
Expanding on my last post. IANAL, but I do read a lot of legal stuff, so this is stuff that should provide a good starting point to talking to your own lawyer about this:
* The enforceability of non-compete agreements like this one depends a lot on where you live. If, say, you lived in California (or could consider moving there after you've finished the job), you'd find the agreement was almost certainly totally unenforceable. California state law really doesn't like things that can get in the way of its tech workers helping improve its economy.
* Non-compete agreements have to be very carefully drafted to be enforceable. They must be limited enough in scope that they should not stop you from continuing a reasonable trade. Typically, this means they must only prevent you from competing directly against your previous employer using your knowledge of the work you did for them to gain an unfair advantage. They must be designed to protect a legitimate business interest (e.g. a trade secret) and must not be any stronger than is absolutely necessary to protect that interest. This may restrict the scope of projects they can prevent you working on. E.g., they could legitimately ask you not to work on anything similar to the extensions you are doing for them (as you would have unfair advantage due to knowledge obtained implementing those extensions) or on bugs you have fixed for them (ditto). On the other hand, it is hard to see their legitimate business interest in preventing you from expanding the software in some totally different direction.
* The agreement should almost certainly be time limited. If it isn't, you'll almost certainly be able to persuade a court to read a time limit (typically 2 years) into it. But you don't want to have to go to court, so talk to your potential employer: their lawyers should understand your position and that they can't effectively force you to give up on this project forever. If you push hard enough, they'll put a time limit in.
You would not ever be able to work on the project? If so, that would be truly excessive.
Non-compete agreements are typically time-limited to somewhere in the region of 2 years. Courts tend to consider longer times unreasonable and therefore unenforceable.
I find the BSD license particularly damaging to open source progress into technology culture and business.
Ironically, a very large proportion of the most widely used open source software in business environments is BSD (or similarly) licensed. If you're a Java programmer (and most large businesses have employed one or two of those in their time), you'll find almost all of those open source libs you use are under BSD licenses.
I don't see how this is damaging anything. If you can provide evidence that these projects are suffering due to their license, I might accept your point, but I really don't see any.
Also, since you have been contributing to a BSD licensed project, I assume that you support and encourage this type of corporate behavior.
How did this troll get modded up? In what way does the BSD license encourage anti-competitive arrangements that prevent people from being able to work on a particular project however they want?
Barring you from working on the same project again (or same field again?) might be unenforceable
+1 on that. Talk to a lawyer, you may just be able to agree to the terms and then ignore them afterwards.
Failing that, try negotiating a more exact definition of what competing would include. They may be happy as long as you agree not to reimplement the exact same feature you're implementing for them (which presumably they feel will give them some kind of competitive advantage).
Though they haven't really improved Photoshop in like a decade. OK maybe slight exaggeration.
I still haven't upgraded from Photoshop 5.0. That was released in, what, 97? 98?
There are a few problems with it that really show. The lack of layer grouping makes working with other people's files problematic (although not impossible -- the file format change was backwards compatible). It completely refuses to work with OpenType fonts (have to convert 'em all to truetype for it to even realise they're there). Kerning gets screwed up with small fonts at low resolutions.
It does, however, work nicely on systems with not very much memory, only uses up 40MB of disk space, and works fine without installation (i.e., I can keep a copy on my USB memory stick).
I'm thinking of an upgrade. I hear version 7 was a particular leap forward.:)
DOS is going to have difficulty meeting the requirement to support lots of modern file systems I'm afeared. (And I could be wrong, if FreeDOS has gotten a LOT better since the last time I looked.)
FreeDOS supports FAT32, which is what the OP asked for. There is a (commercial) driver available for NTFS, but I'm not sure whether or not it's any good.
Which if you check the prices of licenses compared to Exchange is a WHOLE lot cheaper.(Disclaimer-I don't work for Xandros,I just enjoy the ease of use).
Sure. But most businesses don't want to have the hassle of having to buy more MAPI Connector licenses every time they expand.
When we get a new employee at my company, I like to be able to get everything I need from one or two suppliers. This means all software has to be either (a) completely mainstream, so my hardware supplier can supply it with a new PC, (b) site licensed, or (c) free (either sense of the word).
Of course, there are cases where this cannot happen (specialist software requirements, like EDA tools, are a good example), but by following these guidelines I can reduce the amount of work needed to handle a new employee from an entire day of phoning around various suppliers to just a few hours.
BTW is your suoervisor actually the author of any of the software? If not perhaps you could keep him happy by attaching his terms to the copies of the software distributed with the paper and then release it under your preferred terms elsewhere.
As a student/researcher any work the OP did as part of his studies at the university would typically be considered by a court to be the copyright property of the university, at least in as much as they provided the resources (tuition, guidance, computer facilities, access to research grants) that were used to produce it and/or provide the OP with money to live on while it was produced.
IANAL; this is not legal advice. It's true, though.
If you accept the basic premise of EULA's, which specify a contract, then that contract can do basically anything it likes, within the law.
Existing EULA's can and do put restraints on what you are allowed to do with an application. Consider for example 'student' versions of software, such as Matlab, Visual C++, etc, that cannot be used for commercial or research purposes. Also a lot of scientific software has a 'no commercial use' clause.
Before I begin: IANAL. I have, however, read widely on law, particularly copyright and contract law. The following is not legal advice.
What you say is true, as far as it goes.
But you see, saying "you can use this program, as long as what you are doing falls into one of these categories" is entirely different from stating what you can do with the output of the program after you've finished using the program.
Contracts have limits on what they can achieve, and when the requirements of a contract start to seem too onerous, courts tend to decide that the contract's aims are outside of the scope of a contract.
I've never seen a relevant test, but I would expect that a contract that attempts to stifle the freedom of speech of one its parties would be very difficult to enforce, except in very specific circumstances. Such circumstances would probably include stuff like near-equality of bargaining power between the parties, which isn't the case here (where there's a producer/consumer relationship). Contracts that cannot be simply terminated without leaving behind residual obligations are harder to form, too. In this case, you can't just say, "I don't agree to that any more" and stop using the software, because you still have the results that you obtained from the software.
My suggestion to the OP is quite simply this: pick any OSS license you like. I'm fond of BSD/MIT style licenses, and they are (as you can guess by the names) popular with academic institutions, at least in the field of CS. Release the software under that license, and put a note in the documentation politely asking people publishing results obtained from the software to include a citation to the paper about it. Include suitable example references in a number of formats, so it's particularly easy to cite.
Really, people will want to provide a citation. It backs up their paper with more depth, provides additional information about the methods they have used and gives the reader more confidence in their results to know how they were derived.
Unless you already have outlook as part of an MS office suite this isn't going to be cheap.
Which, lets face it, 90%+ of medium/large businesses do. I mean, sure, there are versions of Office that don't include Outlook, but which business is going to skip Office Enterprise, Office Professional, Office Small Business, and Office Standard and go straight for Office Home and Student or Office Basic? And how many businesses, really, don't have Office of some variety?
If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs
It isn't. Like every previous supposedly-open-source Exchange replacement we've seen before, it requires an Outlook MAPI connector which isn't open source, and which they want to charge you 30 euros per user for.
They better start hiring support personnel, because there will likely be profits to be had with service contracts. Maybe even a Redhat buyout/partnership
All of these implementations share one problem, which I believe this server also shares: they require an MAPI Connector module to be present in order to use them with Outlook, and that module is not free software. In fact, it is typically rather expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Weiss had a conflict of interest in this matter, as a journalist covering the topic area.
I don't quite understand how being a well-known lay expert in the topic (as a financial journalist must be to do his job adequately) causes a conflict of interest. Could you expand on this?
Now the facts are: Naked shorting has cost the US economy billions and billions of dollars.
Evidence?
Mathematical models suggest that naked shorting causes a short-term drop in prices, followed by an increase. This allows naked shorters to make a quick buck at the expense of more traditional investers, and may be regarded as somewhat unfair, but it doesn't actually cost the economy anything.
And their stock price going down leaves them with the exact same amount of capital.
Unless they're holding their own shares as a treasury reserve.
I understand that there were 30-1 margin ratios in these subprime packages. Why would anyone be surprised at a blowup?
And I trade forex derivitives at a leverage of 100-1. I don't expect to be going bankrupt any time soon.
Leverage is perfectly reasonable and acceptable as long as you take appropriate steps in risk management. Nobody was quite sure how you would go about managing the risks inherent in the kind of deals we're talking about here, which is why they blew up. I mean, you can insure against bad debts, but do too much of that and you'll bankrupt your insurer.
The leverage has little to do with it, except in terms of determining how big the crash was.
Um, he just gave one (naked short selling) in a reply to a post that mentioned two others (Patrick Byrne, Gary Weiss.)
All three of those articles have a _lot_ of editing going on. It clearly isn't all manipulation by the "elite". I think links to diffs would be appropriate, here.
'Cause, of course, we should all implicitly trust an anonymously-written site with adverts for "adult dating" sites plastered all over it.
(ob. wiki sarcasm) :)
And you realise you've done it now... we can't link to slashdot on wikipedia any more, cause you just linked to an "attack page".
Though, I think it _may_ have played some kind of role in bringing down the shares of the financial brokers faster than anyone thought could happen
Probably not, no. An investor taking a short position actually has less effect than an existing owner selling (due to the fact that the short seller must then buy shares to cover their deal, thus limiting the effect, and a sensible investor will try to cover while the stock is liquid and on its way down, not after it reaches bottom).
to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system
Uhh, no. It's just the foundation of the stock market.
Not really, no.
Look into the difference between M3 and M0 money supply. The gap between them is effectively wealth that is generated out of thin air by leveraging, and is the vast majority of money in circulation today. M3 is the total amount of money everyone thinks they have; M0 (approximately 5% of M3) is how much money there really is.
This has nothing to do with the stock market, and everything to do with banking and credit.
Barring you from working on the same project again (or same field again?) might be unenforceable. Several jobs have non-compete clauses in their contracts, but several judges have struck them down. It really doesn't seem practical, or reasonable, to accept a lifetime ban for a job.
Expanding on my last post. IANAL, but I do read a lot of legal stuff, so this is stuff that should provide a good starting point to talking to your own lawyer about this:
* The enforceability of non-compete agreements like this one depends a lot on where you live. If, say, you lived in California (or could consider moving there after you've finished the job), you'd find the agreement was almost certainly totally unenforceable. California state law really doesn't like things that can get in the way of its tech workers helping improve its economy.
* Non-compete agreements have to be very carefully drafted to be enforceable. They must be limited enough in scope that they should not stop you from continuing a reasonable trade. Typically, this means they must only prevent you from competing directly against your previous employer using your knowledge of the work you did for them to gain an unfair advantage. They must be designed to protect a legitimate business interest (e.g. a trade secret) and must not be any stronger than is absolutely necessary to protect that interest. This may restrict the scope of projects they can prevent you working on. E.g., they could legitimately ask you not to work on anything similar to the extensions you are doing for them (as you would have unfair advantage due to knowledge obtained implementing those extensions) or on bugs you have fixed for them (ditto). On the other hand, it is hard to see their legitimate business interest in preventing you from expanding the software in some totally different direction.
* The agreement should almost certainly be time limited. If it isn't, you'll almost certainly be able to persuade a court to read a time limit (typically 2 years) into it. But you don't want to have to go to court, so talk to your potential employer: their lawyers should understand your position and that they can't effectively force you to give up on this project forever. If you push hard enough, they'll put a time limit in.
You would not ever be able to work on the project? If so, that would be truly excessive.
Non-compete agreements are typically time-limited to somewhere in the region of 2 years. Courts tend to consider longer times unreasonable and therefore unenforceable.
I find the BSD license particularly damaging to open source progress into technology culture and business.
Ironically, a very large proportion of the most widely used open source software in business environments is BSD (or similarly) licensed. If you're a Java programmer (and most large businesses have employed one or two of those in their time), you'll find almost all of those open source libs you use are under BSD licenses.
I don't see how this is damaging anything. If you can provide evidence that these projects are suffering due to their license, I might accept your point, but I really don't see any.
Also, since you have been contributing to a BSD licensed project, I assume that you support and encourage this type of corporate behavior.
How did this troll get modded up? In what way does the BSD license encourage anti-competitive arrangements that prevent people from being able to work on a particular project however they want?
Barring you from working on the same project again (or same field again?) might be unenforceable
+1 on that. Talk to a lawyer, you may just be able to agree to the terms and then ignore them afterwards.
Failing that, try negotiating a more exact definition of what competing would include. They may be happy as long as you agree not to reimplement the exact same feature you're implementing for them (which presumably they feel will give them some kind of competitive advantage).
Though they haven't really improved Photoshop in like a decade. OK maybe slight exaggeration.
I still haven't upgraded from Photoshop 5.0. That was released in, what, 97? 98?
There are a few problems with it that really show. The lack of layer grouping makes working with other people's files problematic (although not impossible -- the file format change was backwards compatible). It completely refuses to work with OpenType fonts (have to convert 'em all to truetype for it to even realise they're there). Kerning gets screwed up with small fonts at low resolutions.
It does, however, work nicely on systems with not very much memory, only uses up 40MB of disk space, and works fine without installation (i.e., I can keep a copy on my USB memory stick).
I'm thinking of an upgrade. I hear version 7 was a particular leap forward. :)
I've seen the following in the Windows "Event Viewer" logs. (Reproduced from memory, so it's not verbatim, but it's pretty close.)
The following problem occurred during installation of Microsoft Office 2003:
Success
Well, to be fair, a successful installation of Office2K3 _is_ a problem.
Why not? It's a perfect solution: an operating system which can edit text, too!
Yeah, but he's looking for a _lightweight_ operating system.
DOS is going to have difficulty meeting the requirement to support lots of modern file systems I'm afeared. (And I could be wrong, if FreeDOS has gotten a LOT better since the last time I looked.)
FreeDOS supports FAT32, which is what the OP asked for. There is a (commercial) driver available for NTFS, but I'm not sure whether or not it's any good.
Which if you check the prices of licenses compared to Exchange is a WHOLE lot cheaper.(Disclaimer-I don't work for Xandros,I just enjoy the ease of use).
Sure. But most businesses don't want to have the hassle of having to buy more MAPI Connector licenses every time they expand.
When we get a new employee at my company, I like to be able to get everything I need from one or two suppliers. This means all software has to be either (a) completely mainstream, so my hardware supplier can supply it with a new PC, (b) site licensed, or (c) free (either sense of the word).
Of course, there are cases where this cannot happen (specialist software requirements, like EDA tools, are a good example), but by following these guidelines I can reduce the amount of work needed to handle a new employee from an entire day of phoning around various suppliers to just a few hours.
MAPI is the native protocol for Outlook/Exchange.
Reread that sentence. Look at what you wrote carefully.
MAPI is not a protocol. MAPI is an API. Specifically, it's the API that's used to interface between Outlook and protocol drivers.
BTW is your suoervisor actually the author of any of the software? If not perhaps you could keep him happy by attaching his terms to the copies of the software distributed with the paper and then release it under your preferred terms elsewhere.
As a student/researcher any work the OP did as part of his studies at the university would typically be considered by a court to be the copyright property of the university, at least in as much as they provided the resources (tuition, guidance, computer facilities, access to research grants) that were used to produce it and/or provide the OP with money to live on while it was produced.
IANAL; this is not legal advice. It's true, though.
If you accept the basic premise of EULA's, which specify a contract, then that contract can do basically anything it likes, within the law.
Existing EULA's can and do put restraints on what you are allowed to do with an application. Consider for example 'student' versions of software, such as Matlab, Visual C++, etc, that cannot be used for commercial or research purposes. Also a lot of scientific software has a 'no commercial use' clause.
Before I begin: IANAL. I have, however, read widely on law, particularly copyright and contract law. The following is not legal advice.
What you say is true, as far as it goes.
But you see, saying "you can use this program, as long as what you are doing falls into one of these categories" is entirely different from stating what you can do with the output of the program after you've finished using the program.
Contracts have limits on what they can achieve, and when the requirements of a contract start to seem too onerous, courts tend to decide that the contract's aims are outside of the scope of a contract.
I've never seen a relevant test, but I would expect that a contract that attempts to stifle the freedom of speech of one its parties would be very difficult to enforce, except in very specific circumstances. Such circumstances would probably include stuff like near-equality of bargaining power between the parties, which isn't the case here (where there's a producer/consumer relationship). Contracts that cannot be simply terminated without leaving behind residual obligations are harder to form, too. In this case, you can't just say, "I don't agree to that any more" and stop using the software, because you still have the results that you obtained from the software.
My suggestion to the OP is quite simply this: pick any OSS license you like. I'm fond of BSD/MIT style licenses, and they are (as you can guess by the names) popular with academic institutions, at least in the field of CS. Release the software under that license, and put a note in the documentation politely asking people publishing results obtained from the software to include a citation to the paper about it. Include suitable example references in a number of formats, so it's particularly easy to cite.
Really, people will want to provide a citation. It backs up their paper with more depth, provides additional information about the methods they have used and gives the reader more confidence in their results to know how they were derived.
Why not just trust people?
Exchange really can't use NAS in a useful way, you are stuck jumping directly to SAN.
Have you considered iSCSI as an intermediate step? It should work in the same way a traditional fiber-channel SAN would, but is substantially cheaper.
Unless you already have outlook as part of an MS office suite this isn't going to be cheap.
Which, lets face it, 90%+ of medium/large businesses do. I mean, sure, there are versions of Office that don't include Outlook, but which business is going to skip Office Enterprise, Office Professional, Office Small Business, and Office Standard and go straight for Office Home and Student or Office Basic? And how many businesses, really, don't have Office of some variety?
If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs
It isn't. Like every previous supposedly-open-source Exchange replacement we've seen before, it requires an Outlook MAPI connector which isn't open source, and which they want to charge you 30 euros per user for.
They better start hiring support personnel, because there will likely be profits to be had with service contracts. Maybe even a Redhat buyout/partnership
Doubt it. They're entering a crowded marketplace:
SuSE Linux OpenExchange
Open-xchange
Scalix (formerly known as HP OpenMail)
All of these implementations share one problem, which I believe this server also shares: they require an MAPI Connector module to be present in order to use them with Outlook, and that module is not free software. In fact, it is typically rather expensive.