Obviously, standards only emerge when a practice has been agreed upon. Further innovation leads to a development of a new standard.
Exactly. Except that many standards groups have fallen into the habit of inventing standards, instead of standardizing existing practice. Handing responsibility for R&D to standards bodies is an insanely bad idea. It just ends up as design by committee. I'm thinking of IPv6, that horribly ill-conceived and over-engineered attempt by the IETF to solve the IP address exhaustion problem. Classic design by committee: instead of having a bunch of guys with their heads in the clouds think the thing up according to their personal biases, it should have been fully developed and tested in, say, a large university environment. The usability flaws would have been readily apparent, and after going back to the drawing board, then maybe there'd be something worth writing a standard for.
The angry rant that slashdot carried a while ago, from one of the BSD developers, was regarding great similarity between a couple of header (.h) files consisting mostly of constants and codes relating to that particular piece of hardware, not actual executable code he had written.
The BSD license says it's perfectly ok to use any BSD code in Linux. Got a link?
Don't be too quick to assume the moral highground. Linux devs are just as capable of cheating and failing as any other person.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about. There is now, and always was, *zero* interest in using anything from SCO's source, not least because Linux is better, on the whole.
Hmm, could you please explain how can a CEO engage in insider trading? Isn't s/he inside by definition? And how would Ballmer sell stock otherwise, when he manages the company and probably knows pretty much all that's going on?
The full name for this crime is "trading on inside information". That is, it's not illegal to be an insider, it's not illegal to be an insider who trades, but it is illegal to make those trades on information known to the insider, not the general public. The timing of a trade would be a key factor in determining whether someone acted on insider information or not. This crime is as old as the stock market, and lots of rich people have done jail time for it, some of them have lost their fortunes as well.
That's insider trading. You can't do that. You can go to prison for it in the United States and most other civilized countries in the world.
Yes, well, in theory that's true, but remember which administration is running the country.
If you want to see a nice example of insider trading, look at the movement of SCOX in the three weeks *before* the suit was launched against IBM. You might want to compare SCOX against other technology stocks as well, which were mostly headed the other way.
...the city of Munich made that decision in large part to save money. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that a major international hub has decided to embrace OSS, but let's not kid ourselves. Money talks. The diversity of OSS apps may have gotten our foot in the door, but the cash is what sealed the deal.
That's not correct: Microsoft offered a 90% discount, i.e., nearly free, so money was hardly a factor. So, will you still try to say that the Linux software is horribly hard to use, compared to Microsoft's? If so... tried KDE lately?:)
Microsoft did what any hungry business does to open doors to a good market: undercut every other. This ain't illegal anywhere.
You're sure? You've never heard of dumping? Or predatory pricing then?
Advice for you: think hard about what you just said, or you're likely to make some remarkably poor decisions in the future with respect to ethics and the law, if you ever get into management.
and before anyone uses the excuse, "but they could of had it free all along", the learning curve (and training) between open source OSes and MS OSes is obviously night and day.
Oh, interesting. Are you implying that open source OSes are harder to learn than ones from Microsoft? If so, how would you explain the fact that the city of Munich reached a different conclusion?
Would that be at full retail price? And what would be the level of the tax benefit claimed, considering that the cost to Microsoft is roughly $0.00 per piece, if you round it down.
Do you know what happens when a ship starts to sink? The rats start to jump off, that way they don't get sucked down with it. (Rats are excellent swimmers.)
So you see, the news is really about the rats. It's news because of the size of the rats, how high they're jumping, and which ship they're jumping off of.
Your logic would be correct if stock price was the only factor determining a stocks worth. Stock splits alone change the price of the stock, but not the value to a particular shareholder. What used to be a $50 for Ballmer is now twice as many shares for ~$25. It's essentially the same value. Considering his volume this is a great time to sell.
Hooboy, you have not looked at a chart of MSFT recently, have you? With your street smarts and that cunning grasp of higher mathematics, you'll go far, grasshopper.
Note that Steve does agree with you: now is a fine time to sell MSFT.
A company with $40 Billion in the bank is essentially isolated from any kind of market failure...
Not necessarily. Remember, that MS could in theory be fined up to a trillion dollars if things go badly for them over the Passport[tm] security flaws. That's, um, 25 times $40 billion.
All of the top brass at Microsoft regularly sell off parts of their shares. Gates has been doing it for years, at a relatively regular pace.
The thing is, most of the upper management of Microsoft that have been with the company from early on have most of their wealth in Microsoft shares. The problem is that they have to sell it off slowly or they wouldn't manage to get a decent price for it.
What's interesting about this particular sale is the timing of it (never mind that it's one of the largest insider stock sales ever). With MS stock price so low and the MS/SCO suit going so well, you'd think he'd see it as a good time to buy.
Diversifying is one thing, selling at a stupidly low price is quite another. So naturally enough, we're all wondering what Steve knows that we don't.
Really, that's all I care about. For that reason, my next laptop will be a Powerbook 15", just because it has Radeon graphics, hence an open source driver.
"Probably because if they don't someone else will come along (maybe even NVIDIA) with open source drivers and kill them off."
Why, in order to satisfy a few thousand users who demand them?
Get real. I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy, but money talks. There simply isn't enough of it in the hands of users to cast a meaningful vote. That's the real reason it hasn't been done yet. There simply isn't enough cash coming in from linux users to justify it, regardless of whether or not there's licensed IP or top-secret code in there.
It's not just the absolute numbers of Linux gamers (which are increasing exponentially, incidently) it's the fact that Linux users tend to be opinion leaders. Marketdroids understand that.
3DFX was dead before NVidia bought them. It wasn't NVidia that killed 3DFX. 3DFX did that all by themselves. Between unreasonable product delays and abysmal financial mismanagement, they doomed themselves.
Don't forget, trying to own the Glide interface (R.I.P.) as well, and, like NVidia, being evil about publishing hardware specs.
Oh for God's sake. Despite your protestations to the contrary, unlawfully copying somebody else's intellectual property is depriving them of deserved reward. Calling it anything other than theft or stealing is simply trying to make yourself feel better for the enormous collection of MP3's and divX's on your machine.
illegally copying IP *is* theft. Make no bones about that.
You're trying to redefine a dictionary word. Theft is when you take something from somebody and they don't have it any more. Copying, though it may be illegal under certain circumstances, is clearly not theft per the accepted definition.
On the other hand, you may be referring to the Newspeak dictionary definition...
The IETF has been increasingly willing to standardise patented technologies. Examples involve Cisco's HSRP/VRRP patent and IPsec NAT traversal (with a semi-free waiver). I'm sure there are many more.
It is wonderful that the w3c is willing to keep data formats and the higher protocol levels unencumbered (this is a real victory to all the people who made their opinions known), but the infrastructure is even more important.
Indeed. Personally, I've just been waiting for the W3C policy to become official before beginning serious work on getting the IETF policy changed. Everybody surf on over to IETF and sign up for a working group please.:-)
this issue finally made me cough up the bucks and im damn glad i did
should have done it long ago
and i challenge anyone else who hasn't done so, to join now. its not a whole lot of money and they really need the support.
very good news to hear it went our way this time
While you're at it, could you please join the IETF as well (it's free, basically, you choose your working group, sign up for the mailing list, and you're in). The issue is: IETF does allow patented standards, and we want them to stop that. But a significant and influential portion of the incumbants don't see why they need to change. So we need new incumbants.
I doubt that this will be that great a deal - instead, look for the W3C to become less and less relevant going forward. In the next few years, you'll see more proprietary development, or worse yet, alternative coalitions made up of proprietary vendors who don't care to give their IP away for free...
Respectfully, you are talking out of your butt. In fact, this move was made precisely to keep the W3C from becoming irrelevant, by ensuring it will put forth only standards that can be generally implemented.
"But the group also included an exception provision that will make it possible for members to consider alternate licensing terms when it's deemed impossible to meet the royalty-free goal, he said."...
"Don Deutsch, vice president of standards strategy at Oracle Corp., said the provision was a last-minute compromise designed to address the concerns of IBM and Microsoft. Deutsch added that he expects it to be approved."
All the news reports I saw mentioned royalty-free. This is the first I've heard about an exception.
It looks like a last-minute double-cross to me, all right.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, standards only emerge when a practice has been agreed upon. Further innovation leads to a development of a new standard.
Exactly. Except that many standards groups have fallen into the habit of inventing standards, instead of standardizing existing practice. Handing responsibility for R&D to standards bodies is an insanely bad idea. It just ends up as design by committee. I'm thinking of IPv6, that horribly ill-conceived and over-engineered attempt by the IETF to solve the IP address exhaustion problem. Classic design by committee: instead of having a bunch of guys with their heads in the clouds think the thing up according to their personal biases, it should have been fully developed and tested in, say, a large university environment. The usability flaws would have been readily apparent, and after going back to the drawing board, then maybe there'd be something worth writing a standard for.
"The idea of persuading SCO to launch a lawsuit against IBM had been under consideration prior to the idea of getting a SCO license"
Just my opinion.
The angry rant that slashdot carried a while ago, from one of the BSD developers, was regarding great similarity between a couple of header (.h) files consisting mostly of constants and codes relating to that particular piece of hardware, not actual executable code he had written.
The BSD license says it's perfectly ok to use any BSD code in Linux. Got a link?
Don't be too quick to assume the moral highground. Linux devs are just as capable of cheating and failing as any other person.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about. There is now, and always was, *zero* interest in using anything from SCO's source, not least because Linux is better, on the whole.
Hmm, could you please explain how can a CEO engage in insider trading? Isn't s/he inside by definition? And how would Ballmer sell stock otherwise, when he manages the company and probably knows pretty much all that's going on?
The full name for this crime is "trading on inside information". That is, it's not illegal to be an insider, it's not illegal to be an insider who trades, but it is illegal to make those trades on information known to the insider, not the general public. The timing of a trade would be a key factor in determining whether someone acted on insider information or not. This crime is as old as the stock market, and lots of rich people have done jail time for it, some of them have lost their fortunes as well.
That's insider trading. You can't do that. You can go to prison for it in the United States and most other civilized countries in the world.
Yes, well, in theory that's true, but remember which administration is running the country.
If you want to see a nice example of insider trading, look at the movement of SCOX in the three weeks *before* the suit was launched against IBM. You might want to compare SCOX against other technology stocks as well, which were mostly headed the other way.
...the city of Munich made that decision in large part to save money. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that a major international hub has decided to embrace OSS, but let's not kid ourselves. Money talks. The diversity of OSS apps may have gotten our foot in the door, but the cash is what sealed the deal.
:)
That's not correct: Microsoft offered a 90% discount, i.e., nearly free, so money was hardly a factor. So, will you still try to say that the Linux software is horribly hard to use, compared to Microsoft's? If so... tried KDE lately?
Microsoft did what any hungry business does to open doors to a good market: undercut every other. This ain't illegal anywhere.
You're sure? You've never heard of dumping? Or predatory pricing then?
Advice for you: think hard about what you just said, or you're likely to make some remarkably poor decisions in the future with respect to ethics and the law, if you ever get into management.
and before anyone uses the excuse, "but they could of had it free all along", the learning curve (and training) between open source OSes and MS OSes is obviously night and day.
Oh, interesting. Are you implying that open source OSes are harder to learn than ones from Microsoft? If so, how would you explain the fact that the city of Munich reached a different conclusion?
$1 billion annually
Would that be at full retail price? And what would be the level of the tax benefit claimed, considering that the cost to Microsoft is roughly $0.00 per piece, if you round it down.
And for the charities: what price pain?
Exactly! Why is this news?
Do you know what happens when a ship starts to sink? The rats start to jump off, that way they don't get sucked down with it. (Rats are excellent swimmers.)
So you see, the news is really about the rats. It's news because of the size of the rats, how high they're jumping, and which ship they're jumping off of.
"With MS stock price so low"
Your logic would be correct if stock price was the only factor determining a stocks worth. Stock splits alone change the price of the stock, but not the value to a particular shareholder. What used to be a $50 for Ballmer is now twice as many shares for ~$25. It's essentially the same value. Considering his volume this is a great time to sell.
Hooboy, you have not looked at a chart of MSFT recently, have you? With your street smarts and that cunning grasp of higher mathematics, you'll go far, grasshopper.
Note that Steve does agree with you: now is a fine time to sell MSFT.
A company with $40 Billion in the bank is essentially isolated from any kind of market failure...
Not necessarily. Remember, that MS could in theory be fined up to a trillion dollars if things go badly for them over the Passport[tm] security flaws. That's, um, 25 times $40 billion.
Massive XBox cluster, subsidized by Microsoft
All of the top brass at Microsoft regularly sell off parts of their shares. Gates has been doing it for years, at a relatively regular pace.
The thing is, most of the upper management of Microsoft that have been with the company from early on have most of their wealth in Microsoft shares. The problem is that they have to sell it off slowly or they wouldn't manage to get a decent price for it.
What's interesting about this particular sale is the timing of it (never mind that it's one of the largest insider stock sales ever). With MS stock price so low and the MS/SCO suit going so well, you'd think he'd see it as a good time to buy.
Diversifying is one thing, selling at a stupidly low price is quite another. So naturally enough, we're all wondering what Steve knows that we don't.
Can you do 3D visualisation on the desktop? Yes.
Really, that's all I care about. For that reason, my next laptop will be a Powerbook 15", just because it has Radeon graphics, hence an open source driver.
"Probably because if they don't someone else will come along (maybe even NVIDIA) with open source drivers and kill them off."
Why, in order to satisfy a few thousand users who demand them?
Get real. I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy, but money talks. There simply isn't enough of it in the hands of users to cast a meaningful vote. That's the real reason it hasn't been done yet. There simply isn't enough cash coming in from linux users to justify it, regardless of whether or not there's licensed IP or top-secret code in there.
It's not just the absolute numbers of Linux gamers (which are increasing exponentially, incidently) it's the fact that Linux users tend to be opinion leaders. Marketdroids understand that.
3DFX was dead before NVidia bought them. It wasn't NVidia that killed 3DFX. 3DFX did that all by themselves. Between unreasonable product delays and abysmal financial mismanagement, they doomed themselves.
Don't forget, trying to own the Glide interface (R.I.P.) as well, and, like NVidia, being evil about publishing hardware specs.
Oh for God's sake. Despite your protestations to the contrary, unlawfully copying somebody else's intellectual property is depriving them of deserved reward. Calling it anything other than theft or stealing is simply trying to make yourself feel better for the enormous collection of MP3's and divX's on your machine.
illegally copying IP *is* theft. Make no bones about that.
You're trying to redefine a dictionary word. Theft is when you take something from somebody and they don't have it any more. Copying, though it may be illegal under certain circumstances, is clearly not theft per the accepted definition.
On the other hand, you may be referring to the Newspeak dictionary definition...
The IETF has been increasingly willing to standardise patented technologies. Examples involve Cisco's HSRP/VRRP patent and IPsec NAT traversal (with a semi-free waiver). I'm sure there are many more.
:-)
It is wonderful that the w3c is willing to keep data formats and the higher protocol levels unencumbered (this is a real victory to all the people who made their opinions known), but the infrastructure is even more important.
Indeed. Personally, I've just been waiting for the W3C policy to become official before beginning serious work on getting the IETF policy changed. Everybody surf on over to IETF and sign up for a working group please.
this issue finally made me cough up the bucks and im damn glad i did
should have done it long ago
and i challenge anyone else who hasn't done so, to join now. its not a whole lot of money and they really need the support.
very good news to hear it went our way this time
While you're at it, could you please join the IETF as well (it's free, basically, you choose your working group, sign up for the mailing list, and you're in). The issue is: IETF does allow patented standards, and we want them to stop that. But a significant and influential portion of the incumbants don't see why they need to change. So we need new incumbants.
I doubt that this will be that great a deal - instead, look for the W3C to become less and less relevant going forward. In the next few years, you'll see more proprietary development, or worse yet, alternative coalitions made up of proprietary vendors who don't care to give their IP away for free...
Respectfully, you are talking out of your butt. In fact, this move was made precisely to keep the W3C from becoming irrelevant, by ensuring it will put forth only standards that can be generally implemented.
Go away, astroturfer.
"But the group also included an exception provision that will make it possible for members to consider alternate licensing terms when it's deemed impossible to meet the royalty-free goal, he said." ...
"Don Deutsch, vice president of standards strategy at Oracle Corp., said the provision was a last-minute compromise designed to address the concerns of IBM and Microsoft. Deutsch added that he expects it to be approved."
All the news reports I saw mentioned royalty-free. This is the first I've heard about an exception.
It looks like a last-minute double-cross to me, all right.
Yes, Linux has been ported to the... 80286.
However, it's not clear from the elks homepage that it runs in 286 protected mode at this time. Maybe this is just a website lag problem?
Yes, Linux has been ported to the 8088, 8086, 80186 (bet you never heard of that one)...
Not only have I heard of that one, but I own one, and it is still happily in service, running Geoworks.