Re:It stems from something beyond software.
on
Microsoft vs. Ximian
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· Score: 2
The argument is not so different from the scientific community. If scientists started withholding their data, their abstracts, their papers, noone would be able to build upon prior knowledge and the inventive forward motion of the human race would hit a brick wall.
The irony is that one of the ways used to encourage scientists to share their data/etc is to offer them patents to protect their intellectual property - something which is largely antithetical to your argument.
Having conversed with her on a number
of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.
Well, given your esteemed recommendation, we need no more convincing as to JC (who??)'s intelligence. If a Slashdot editor thinks someone is smart, hell, that should be good enough for all of us, huh ?
This isn't a tale of Linux winning over Microsoft. This is a tale of Linux helping an organization make choices.
Actually, I would say it is more a case of Microsoft losing then Linux winning or doing much of anything. It seems clear the real deal breaker was the fact that Linux is free. There was nothing about special about Linux here that would have prevented someone from replacing 'Linux' with 'OS/2', except that Linux is free. It was Microsoft who kept screwing them over on outrageously escalating licensing fees. It was Microsoft that penalizes their customers for not having the faith to jump whenever Microsoft yelled. If MS had more generous/less expensive licensing fees then this (supposed) company likely would still have stayed with MS.
And I would like to add my voice to the chorus that is somewhat suspicious of the article. Companies often are NOT shy about announcing changes they make to their infrastructure, especially as they relate to the bottom line.
Why post something as pointless as your comment? What you enjoy is not necessarily what other people might enjoy. The game got great reviews from magazines, and I personally rather
enjoyed the demo
Is his comment pointless just because he didn't like this game ? And since you point out that "what you enjoy is not necessarily what other people might enjoy", why did you even bother indicating 1) that the magazines enjoyed it, 2) that you enjoyed it ? Doesn't that rate your post equally as "pointless" as the original ?
Once he was a genius. Then along came the pathetically bad Dilbert TV series, and now this stupid ultimate cubicle thing. When I saw the article on CNN, I assumed he had actually designed a functional cubicle with amenities people really need, and was interested. Instead I find I wasted 20 seconds and 2 mouse clicks to read crap about a boss-cam and hammocks. And some design firm actually is advertising their involvement with this ?
Get a clue, open source DOES NOT equal a valid buisness model.
This may be true. But I wonder what it would take to convince open-sourcers ? Is the validity of open source as a business strategy a valid, debatable hypothesis, or is its validity really just a matter of faith that could never be questioned no matter what ?
The problem with this idea is
on
Pirates!
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Worried that too much computer gaming stunts your social skills?
Somehow I suspect that interacting with the kind of people who would play this game would just further stunt/. reader's social skills.
Branded drugs (e.g. Bayer asperin) compete successfully with their generic counterparts even after patents expire.
Your examples are absurd. Bayer asperin (sp?) competes successfully with generics precisely because of the market recognition and trust that developed as a result of Bayer's patent protection. And I would love to understand exactly why corporations are going to form consortia to do research and spend huge amounts of clinical trials and FDA hoops and marketing costs just to bring to market a drug which they brand but cannot realize proportionately large profits from.
As for your example of defense spending...I seriously hope you don't want to use defense spending as an example of how the government really should be allocating resources. They have achieved wonderful technologies, to be sure, but at ridiculously high costs that few can deny. And from your stances I hazard a bet that you are just the sort of person who probably decries government military spending all the time except just now. Don't you ?
On the contrary, monopolies aren't even *possible* without government intervention. You're thinking of 'oligarchies'.
Huh ? Monopolies ARE possible without government intervention. They certainly do NOT require government intervention - though this is often needed to BREAK monopolies.
I would love to hear how. Outside of the government being the only source of R&D I fail to see how it would work in the drug industry.
See my other response. Quick options include government supported research (as you allude to), the formation of private research consortia with branding and certifications (e.g. there are free UNIX knockoffs, but only one UNIX brand which has stringent licensing and compliance requirements to use), research funded by private non-profits (think Jerry's Kids), etc.
Your first and third suggestions (not sure about the second one but it sounds crazy anyways) already happen. Yes, government sponsors research, and non-profits also fund research. Do you think research would really get done if every pharma shut down tomorrow ? Do you think Jerry's Kids and the March of Dimes and the literal hundreds of cancer-related charities and the Federal government are going to pony up the needed billions to do the research and conduct the clinical trials and bring these drugs through the FDA ? If so, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING SO NOW ?
Why aren't these machines patched yet?
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 2
How is it that all this time after Code Red first hit the news, so many machine still remain unpatched ? Are the Koreans being disproportionately affected, or is it having major impact over here too ? And if the Koreans are being disproportionately affected, why ? Is press coverage of the virus less prevalent over there ? Could it be something as silly as Koreans not being as adept at the English language ?
And how can the Koreans as sysadmins be so bad, when Koreans in Age of Empires: The Conquerors are so good ? Maybe the Persians and Turks are being hit badly by Code Red as well ?
I get a couple of hundred e-mails from them daily.
What acrock. I bet Britney Spears doesn't get a couple of hundred e-mails a day. With every article Katz shows himself to be more and more drunk with his own self-importance than I ever dreamed anyone could be. Katz, here's a bit of information that you may find useful: those emails about extending your penis and learning how to make $10000 a day are NOT NECESSARILY WRITTEN BY 15-YEAR OLDS.
The teenage stock-manipulator and the AskMe would-be lawyer were hardly expert in their 'fields', so if these were indeed the kinds of experts the author uses to bolster his argument, then his must be a pretty weak argument indeed. The kid who was manipulating stocks was not an expert stock-picker, he was just pretty good at manipulating over-greedy speculators who themselves knew nothing about the thinly traded issues he was pumping. As for the kid who played AskMe legal expert, his rating as a legal guru largely comes from ratings from people soliciting free legal advice...in other words, a selected-for group likely to know very little about the law thmselves. So who are they to rate someone a guru ? These two exemplars only go to show that today, one need not be very smart to fool a bunch of fools, just as was the case yesterday and yesteryear. The only thing that has changed is that the Net has now made it infinitely easier to con people, and infinitely easier to mask one's credentials or lack of same.
Now, for a REAL computational challenge, make a computer that can play Magic, the Gathering worth a darn. Talk about "limited
information" - you don't know what cards the other player has, you may not know the powers of the cards, and you may not even
know what's coming up in your deck next. Make a machine that plays that well and I'll be impressed.
This is a bad idea. If you write a program that plays "Magic, the Gathering" well it will get beaten up and overwritten by other, cooler programs that don't want to have such loser programs in the same address space. Not to mention the fact that you will be fair game to every bully on your block. Hell, regular "Magic, the Gathering" players may well be entitled to beat you up...you would be that low on the totem pole.
It's interesting how every other copyright- or IP-related lawsuit gets shit here. Why is it that some people think every copyright except the GPL is unreasonable ? Others here have argued (not entirely convincingly, mind you) that if the GPL is unenforceable, other licenses may be as well. In a similar but stronger vein, the GPL copyright depends on the validity of the right to protect IP by copyright - if you want to discard notions like IP and copyright, you might as well throw out the GPL too. But some people seem to think all forms of copyright violation are OK, EXCEPT GPL violations, which are somehow sacrosanct. You can't have it both ways.
If you read the submission carefully, note that it says that copied CDs can cause distortion, and it is this distortion that can damage audio equipment - evidently, the original CD will not do this. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but all the hysteria here about suing Sony for 'defective' CDs seems misplaced : what is going to ruin any equipment are the copied CDs, so if anything is defective it is these copied CDs - not the originals.
This is NOT a flame, but does anyone know what sort of regulations Euronext/Marche Libre has on shorting IPOs ? Is there some sort of lockout period ? I looked on their (i.e. Euronext) website but couldn't find any information (sure was hard to navigate there). Hell, I couldn't even find a way to get a damn quote !! I found some quotes on fr.finance.yahoo.com but it doesn't seem to be live...there's no volume showing and the last price was the opening price.
In my opinion, someone should force MS to take responability for issuing a product recall...just like in any other industry.
And what would you suggest happen if someone installed a stock (say) RedHat box that (say) had telnet open, and someone worked their way in there and brought it down ? Would you hold RedHat liable ? What about if there was some bug in the kernel which brought down some number of machines - would you hold Linus Torvalds liable, and should he be responsible for contacting all Linux users for a 'recall'? If not, why not ? Who do you think we should hold liable for the sendmail worm of yore ? When you install an OS you accept a certain amount of responsibility for taking reasonable steps to assure its security. AFAIK, there were alerts and patches put out some time ago, so Microsoft's culpability is mitigated greatly, but even if there were not, it is too much to expect companies to accept liability for bugs in there software. Now, if MS had known about the bugs but kept that information quiet, that would be different.
I thought people on Slashdot wanted Bruce Campbell (Autolycus in Xena and Hercules) to replace Mulder. That didn't happen, so they picked
Lawless as a second choice?
Yeah, that's it, they hired Lucy Lawless in order to pacify Slashdot readers. Is this place getting full of itself or what.
Or, more precisely, if Linux makes it onto a cell-phone it may well prove to be cancer-causing. Guess the guys at MS will be rubbing their hands in glee at the press-hay they could make on this one. You see, Win CE wouldn't stay up long enough to irradiate your brain cells enough to cause mutations.
It has been asked before, but it begs asking again. Why would such a thing be even desirable ? If anyone is really trying to suggest Linux is a half-way suitable OS for a cell phone, they have to be crazy or a zealot or both. Come on guys, the right tools for the right jobs, not the same tool everywhere at any cost.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony is that one of the ways used to encourage scientists to share their data/etc is to offer them patents to protect their intellectual property - something which is largely antithetical to your argument.
I bet you don't use Emacs, do you. Notepad all the way, baby !!!
of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.
Well, given your esteemed recommendation, we need no more convincing as to JC (who??)'s intelligence. If a Slashdot editor thinks someone is smart, hell, that should be good enough for all of us, huh ?
Actually, I would say it is more a case of Microsoft losing then Linux winning or doing much of anything. It seems clear the real deal breaker was the fact that Linux is free. There was nothing about special about Linux here that would have prevented someone from replacing 'Linux' with 'OS/2', except that Linux is free. It was Microsoft who kept screwing them over on outrageously escalating licensing fees. It was Microsoft that penalizes their customers for not having the faith to jump whenever Microsoft yelled. If MS had more generous/less expensive licensing fees then this (supposed) company likely would still have stayed with MS.
And I would like to add my voice to the chorus that is somewhat suspicious of the article. Companies often are NOT shy about announcing changes they make to their infrastructure, especially as they relate to the bottom line.
Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?
Then we could call it RedHat 8.0.
enjoyed the demo
Is his comment pointless just because he didn't like this game ? And since you point out that "what you enjoy is not necessarily what other people might enjoy", why did you even bother indicating 1) that the magazines enjoyed it, 2) that you enjoyed it ? Doesn't that rate your post equally as "pointless" as the original ?
Once he was a genius. Then along came the pathetically bad Dilbert TV series, and now this stupid ultimate cubicle thing. When I saw the article on CNN, I assumed he had actually designed a functional cubicle with amenities people really need, and was interested. Instead I find I wasted 20 seconds and 2 mouse clicks to read crap about a boss-cam and hammocks. And some design firm actually is advertising their involvement with this ?
This may be true. But I wonder what it would take to convince open-sourcers ? Is the validity of open source as a business strategy a valid, debatable hypothesis, or is its validity really just a matter of faith that could never be questioned no matter what ?
Worried that too much computer gaming stunts your social skills? /. reader's social skills.
Somehow I suspect that interacting with the kind of people who would play this game would just further stunt
Your examples are absurd. Bayer asperin (sp?) competes successfully with generics precisely because of the market recognition and trust that developed as a result of Bayer's patent protection. And I would love to understand exactly why corporations are going to form consortia to do research and spend huge amounts of clinical trials and FDA hoops and marketing costs just to bring to market a drug which they brand but cannot realize proportionately large profits from.
As for your example of defense spending...I seriously hope you don't want to use defense spending as an example of how the government really should be allocating resources. They have achieved wonderful technologies, to be sure, but at ridiculously high costs that few can deny. And from your stances I hazard a bet that you are just the sort of person who probably decries government military spending all the time except just now. Don't you ?
Huh ? Monopolies ARE possible without government intervention. They certainly do NOT require government intervention - though this is often needed to BREAK monopolies.
See my other response. Quick options include government supported research (as you allude to), the formation of private research consortia with branding and certifications (e.g. there are free UNIX knockoffs, but only one UNIX brand which has stringent licensing and compliance requirements to use), research funded by private non-profits (think Jerry's Kids), etc.
Your first and third suggestions (not sure about the second one but it sounds crazy anyways) already happen. Yes, government sponsors research, and non-profits also fund research. Do you think research would really get done if every pharma shut down tomorrow ? Do you think Jerry's Kids and the March of Dimes and the literal hundreds of cancer-related charities and the Federal government are going to pony up the needed billions to do the research and conduct the clinical trials and bring these drugs through the FDA ? If so, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING SO NOW ?
And how can the Koreans as sysadmins be so bad, when Koreans in Age of Empires: The Conquerors are so good ? Maybe the Persians and Turks are being hit badly by Code Red as well ?
Well if he wasn't one of the guys scheduled to get the axe, I bet he is now !
What acrock. I bet Britney Spears doesn't get a couple of hundred e-mails a day. With every article Katz shows himself to be more and more drunk with his own self-importance than I ever dreamed anyone could be. Katz, here's a bit of information that you may find useful: those emails about extending your penis and learning how to make $10000 a day are NOT NECESSARILY WRITTEN BY 15-YEAR OLDS.
The teenage stock-manipulator and the AskMe would-be lawyer were hardly expert in their 'fields', so if these were indeed the kinds of experts the author uses to bolster his argument, then his must be a pretty weak argument indeed. The kid who was manipulating stocks was not an expert stock-picker, he was just pretty good at manipulating over-greedy speculators who themselves knew nothing about the thinly traded issues he was pumping. As for the kid who played AskMe legal expert, his rating as a legal guru largely comes from ratings from people soliciting free legal advice...in other words, a selected-for group likely to know very little about the law thmselves. So who are they to rate someone a guru ? These two exemplars only go to show that today, one need not be very smart to fool a bunch of fools, just as was the case yesterday and yesteryear. The only thing that has changed is that the Net has now made it infinitely easier to con people, and infinitely easier to mask one's credentials or lack of same.
(Didn't the Deep Blue team get to tweak it between matches as well ? That seems like it would make the competition unfair too.
This is a bad idea. If you write a program that plays "Magic, the Gathering" well it will get beaten up and overwritten by other, cooler programs that don't want to have such loser programs in the same address space. Not to mention the fact that you will be fair game to every bully on your block. Hell, regular "Magic, the Gathering" players may well be entitled to beat you up...you would be that low on the totem pole.
It's interesting how every other copyright- or IP-related lawsuit gets shit here. Why is it that some people think every copyright except the GPL is unreasonable ? Others here have argued (not entirely convincingly, mind you) that if the GPL is unenforceable, other licenses may be as well. In a similar but stronger vein, the GPL copyright depends on the validity of the right to protect IP by copyright - if you want to discard notions like IP and copyright, you might as well throw out the GPL too. But some people seem to think all forms of copyright violation are OK, EXCEPT GPL violations, which are somehow sacrosanct. You can't have it both ways.
If you read the submission carefully, note that it says that copied CDs can cause distortion, and it is this distortion that can damage audio equipment - evidently, the original CD will not do this. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but all the hysteria here about suing Sony for 'defective' CDs seems misplaced : what is going to ruin any equipment are the copied CDs, so if anything is defective it is these copied CDs - not the originals.
This is NOT a flame, but does anyone know what sort of regulations Euronext/Marche Libre has on shorting IPOs ? Is there some sort of lockout period ? I looked on their (i.e. Euronext) website but couldn't find any information (sure was hard to navigate there). Hell, I couldn't even find a way to get a damn quote !! I found some quotes on fr.finance.yahoo.com but it doesn't seem to be live...there's no volume showing and the last price was the opening price.
And what would you suggest happen if someone installed a stock (say) RedHat box that (say) had telnet open, and someone worked their way in there and brought it down ? Would you hold RedHat liable ? What about if there was some bug in the kernel which brought down some number of machines - would you hold Linus Torvalds liable, and should he be responsible for contacting all Linux users for a 'recall'? If not, why not ? Who do you think we should hold liable for the sendmail worm of yore ? When you install an OS you accept a certain amount of responsibility for taking reasonable steps to assure its security. AFAIK, there were alerts and patches put out some time ago, so Microsoft's culpability is mitigated greatly, but even if there were not, it is too much to expect companies to accept liability for bugs in there software. Now, if MS had known about the bugs but kept that information quiet, that would be different.
Yeah, that's it, they hired Lucy Lawless in order to pacify Slashdot readers. Is this place getting full of itself or what.
Or, more precisely, if Linux makes it onto a cell-phone it may well prove to be cancer-causing. Guess the guys at MS will be rubbing their hands in glee at the press-hay they could make on this one. You see, Win CE wouldn't stay up long enough to irradiate your brain cells enough to cause mutations.
It has been asked before, but it begs asking again. Why would such a thing be even desirable ? If anyone is really trying to suggest Linux is a half-way suitable OS for a cell phone, they have to be crazy or a zealot or both. Come on guys, the right tools for the right jobs, not the same tool everywhere at any cost.