While this certainly sounds like a devious, underhanded and nasty thing to, is astroturfing in this manner a crime?
IANAL but it seems like fraud to me. They are claiming that Mrs. Johnson or John Doe believes that "X is the right thing to do" when in reality it is just Microsoft propaganda. I don't know how far a case of fraud like this would get in court but I am sure it will make them look bad in their anti-trust case- they just don't know how to take their foot out of their mouth.
Compiler, assembler, linker, C library, shell. Everything except a kernel. Linus took those tools and added the final piece, the kernel.
So if I write a new operating system (called Nifty_New_OS) but I use Borlands compilers and toolset, Borland should have the right to insisting it be called Borland/Nifty_New_OS? Frankly I think RMS is off his rocker.
What exactly are the advantages of using these 3" cds over the normal sized ones?
I would love to have an mp3 player that could fit in my shirt or pants pocket like a walkman and it would be nice if I could easily flip a new album in like I do with tapes. Ram mp3 players are good but you have to plan ahead of time what you are going to want to listen to. 5+ inches of a media is just very bulky to carry around.
Or are they never going to get to the Mozilla 1.0 stage?
Mozilla essentially decided to write everything from scratch from graphics libraries to bugzilla to the browser and so on (which slowed down the project to no end). But now that all the peices are almost fully worked out, they should be able to get done soon.
My guess is that it will be ready around december. It would be a nice "community Christmass present". My predictions are:
0.9.4 will be great but still have things wanted done. 0.9.5 will be probably a good candidate release. They will probably do some more final cleanup which will lead to release 0.9.6 which will cleanly become 1.0.0 when people say they are happy with it.
I have no insider information but I have been following this project for a long time (downloading since Milestone 13) and this "feels right" to me. I always thought people were too optimistic about when the release time for Mozilla would be considering the scope of the project.
Since we routinely let murderers and rapists out on the street on unjustifiably puny bails, what exactly is the danger of letting this guy out on bail while they figure out how embarassing/politically damaging it's potentially going...
I am not saying any of this is morally right but I think they believe that a "criminal" with money and a home in Russia might just find his way onto a plane and see no reason to step foot on American soil again.
The "low lifes" of American society who get out on little bail ussually don't have the money to flee or anywhere they can go.
Sklyarov is really screwed in this one. He is in a fight he might not even have known was an issue, in a country that is not his own and put on political display.
The best answer to "And after we destory MS what then ?" is that the hero and heroin (in this case lawyers - yuck but doable) get married and live happily ever after. Don't you know that is the ending to all "good triumphs over evil stories". You might get a scene of the enslaved population crying with joy or a celebration and a feast... that part varies.
Sweet Zombie Jesus. When Next Generation was released, people complained that it wasn't Just Like TOS(TM). Then DS9 came along and people complained that it wasn't Just Like NG(TM). Then Voyager, and now Enterprise
TOS was cheap B TV that only became really popular after the series was off the air but it was fun to watch. TNG was the best star trek done and DS9 started out ok but the religion and the rest just blew the show. It became stupid. Voyager was just awfull and should have been killed off a long time ago. You can't please all of the people all of the time so of course people will complain!
BTW- it took two years for TNG to get good... Dianna Troy was SOOO annoying in the beginning with the stupid telepathic abilities and almost all episodes revolving around Wesly should be burned.
Good movie- Bad ending(SPOILER)...
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
The ending was awfull for a movie that was going so good. The aliens bit was stupid. As a plot twist it just made no sense. I think the movie was MEANT to end when david was underwater and staring at the statue but my guess is that somebody in hollywood said "that is too sad" and so speilberge said "ok- we will tack on some aliens to lighten it up. At least I HOPE that is the justification for that ending and as another poster said "I hope they come out with a phantom edit".
Training (in my view) is geared to the lazy and incompetent. They wish to be spoon fed the info. A hungry mind should be able to feed itself from the documentation and the system at hand rather then being read PPT slides.
When employees are not on the job, they are supposed to be doing other stuff with thier lives. A class gives people motivation and reason not to do other things with thier lives after work. I think classes are a great BENEFIT to companies because you get to have your employees work to be more productive for you outside the 40 hour job week. All you have to do is pay for the course and employees might spend another ten hours a week to do thier job better. Tell them they have to make a "B" in the class and you have them working thier buts off "after hours" that will eventually make them more productive on the job. And the employee is happy to do it! This hungry mind and lazy stuff is all bullshit. If you are lucky enough to have a "hungry mind" at your job, I will be surprised if they stick around long- "the hungry minds" tend to like companies that want to "feed those minds".
This being/., I would think there would be more redundancy on the hardware level as well...
You have to be making money to spend money. If Slashdot had real profit margins, then I am sure they would do it, but I doubt the banner adds give them the budget to really go hardware shopping (or large support staff).
I actually miss the apple][ sometimes... All the games I loved as a kid were on that machine and I never went seriously back to gaming after I moved to the x86 arch. When apple decided that the mac was the future- I just forgot about apple as a company. No more command line interface? Forget about it!
...because you can use parts of it in a commercial product and not HAVE to release the new code to the public. And that is true, the BSD license does give you more freedom...
It gives the USER or perhaps ABUSER more freedom but does not give the DEVELOPER more freedom. If I wrote this really neat program and gave the source away under a BSD lisence, others can turn around and just add a few proprietary lines of code and sell binaries and I would have no rights to say "hey- wait a minute! You just ripped me off". Under the GPL, developer can't get ripped off and the USER has as much freedom as they should want.
The way programmers are pushed today the first x.0 is mostly more of a beta than a release.
Actually what is happening is that as the tools we create and use become more and more sophisticated (and thus more lines of code in use), the harder it becomes to catch all the possible things that could go wrong in an application. With big projects like the Linux Kernel, GCC, Mozilla (now in beta), KDE, Gnome, XFree86- it is just realistic to assume that even though the developers worked very hard for a stable release, people will find bugs.
The people who contribute to Free software are not there because they have to and can leave anytime they want. This fact makes your argument about conditions mute. People help with Free sofware because they like what they are doing while MS employees sit at thier desk because if they weren't, they would not get paid. Yes MS pays its employees BUT most of the revenues is owned by the most upper management who are the furthest removed from the creation of the products thier employees make. In Free software, it is a labor of love, but the people who make it happen, get all the credit. At Microsoft Bill Gates gets all the credit and does none of the real work of producing its products- he is most famous for being the richest man on earth. Now I am not saying upper management should not be well payed but the disparity between Upper management and those that do the real work is very dichotemous and indicating that they are not a good model of employee/employer social contract.
GPL'd code is not going to be the most profitable way to sell software you write. And if I were you, I would not GPL what you write unless you have no plans to sell it. But lets face it- if someone could sell the air you breath, you would probably have to buy it. The GPL is providing for the future of humanity. It gives society a collective way to solve problems that would be too difficult for one person to solve alone. And a method to use computers in ways others have not thought to use them. The GPL is not designed to be a bussiness model but a social contract:
"I give you this code with the idea that if you have anything to contribute, you share it with the rest of us."
That is because they started HIRING the people who were interested in developing it. I remember when Mozilla was just getting off the ground and Netscape was giving job offers to those that were doing the first improvements to it. And I would suspect that most opennings (though I don't know this for a fact) are probably filled by people who have made improvements in the past to Moz. So yes - Netscape probably does do the bulk of Moz developement but ONLY because they suck up the good independent developers by hiring them. I don't see this as a bad thing but I don't see it as a phenominon (sp?) that is any big deal to the future developement of Moz if Netscape losses interest. BTW- 80% sounds way too high.
Wow- the Vax at UB... brings back memories but it is odd that my experience is so much different. I attended UB and I did not remember any of these fights.
When was Quattro Pro (correct spelling) a database? AFAIK (and I own a copy!) it is a spreadsheet, originally designed to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. The database was Paradox.
The article says that IBM is prepared to dump a billion dollars into Linux development this next year... but I have to ask, how do they expect to make a return on this?
IBM sells hardware and Wintel is really making life hard for them. IBM used to be the "all in one solution" but that spot is now Microsofts and Microsoft does not play nicely with others. IBM is hoping Linux will take off big because it will give IBM a lot of opportunities to sell hardware and thier bussiness solutions software. If Microsoft continues to creep into everything, SQL server will replace DB2; Outlook will replace Lotus Notes; IBM servers will be replaced with NT servers. IBM makes some of the best bussiness solutions you can buy but they are affraid of the day when people say "but it is not compatible with Windows". At one time, Word Perfect was the best word processor, Lotus 123 was the best spread sheet, Quatro Pro was the best personal database, Borland made the best developement software, Corel Draw was everywhere and Netscape was the number one browser. Microsoft squeezed them all out with predetory bussiness tactics and this makes IBMers sleep badly at night. In the past, Microsoft products were not trusted with any serious "Bussiness Logic" but in the last few years, that has changed and IBM is concerned! That is why IBM has joined the "grass roots" movement of Linux. With Linux, IBM is hoping to thwart MS's progress to monopolizing the "low end" server market. If that happens, the writing will be on the walls for IBM's survival.
... but I doubt that this will "change the way people type" for the simple reason that nobody's grandmother could use it.
You don't need a grandma as your example. I have been programming since I was 9 years olds (first computer was a TI-99) and I can say at age 28, I will NEVER learn to use that keyboard!
As a sidenote: My grandmother is a profesional typist. She might like one.:)
It is simple statistics. Insurance companies look for indicaters to risk/reward. They are looking to find the best way to have a client pay more in the long term (on average) than they would have to pay out for any given incident.
What a ridiculous concept. The security of an infrastructure is far more the people and dedication to keeping on top of issues more than it's the operating system.
The reason Linux probably gets lower rates, is because on average, the people who use it are more security concious and technically astute in comparison to win32 admins. Insurence companies DON'T CARE WHY there is a diference. They probably just fed statistics into a computer and gave these results. Just like men at age 24 have higher rates then women at age 21 for car insurence- statistics. It has nothing to do with any individual driver.
At the same time, I do think that for a short time at least, this will lead to lax security in companies which do purchase these policies.
I highly doubt that. If a company spends money on security like this, it implies that they take security seriously- not the reverse. In order to take out a policy like this, a company must realize that security cracks are always a potential (thus why they took out such a policy) and will probably take the time to keep up on security issues.
Journaling IS important and reason enough. ReiserFS and XFS were not designed for speed but for far better data integrity. It is very impressive that for file systems that have to do so much more, are on par with the performance of ext2.
It is not *too* dificult to create your own opperating system. Many colleges even have a course (usually in a masters program) where you have to create your own OS. The diference between Linux and any other number of fledgling opperating systems is that Linus never stopped developement for it after he got it to work. He ported some gnu stuff to it and the ball just kept rolling. It will be interesting to see if any of these new fledgling OS's "keep the ball rolling".
Slashdot Mirror
While this certainly sounds like a devious, underhanded and nasty thing to, is astroturfing in this manner a crime?
IANAL but it seems like fraud to me. They are claiming that Mrs. Johnson or John Doe believes that "X is the right thing to do" when in reality it is just Microsoft propaganda. I don't know how far a case of fraud like this would get in court but I am sure it will make them look bad in their anti-trust case- they just don't know how to take their foot out of their mouth.
Compiler, assembler, linker, C library, shell. Everything except a kernel. Linus took those tools and added the final piece, the kernel.
So if I write a new operating system (called Nifty_New_OS) but I use Borlands compilers and toolset, Borland should have the right to insisting it be called Borland/Nifty_New_OS? Frankly I think RMS is off his rocker.
What exactly are the advantages of using these 3" cds over the normal sized ones?
I would love to have an mp3 player that could fit in my shirt or pants pocket like a walkman and it would be nice if I could easily flip a new album in like I do with tapes. Ram mp3 players are good but you have to plan ahead of time what you are going to want to listen to. 5+ inches of a media is just very bulky to carry around.
Mozilla essentially decided to write everything from scratch from graphics libraries to bugzilla to the browser and so on (which slowed down the project to no end). But now that all the peices are almost fully worked out, they should be able to get done soon.
My guess is that it will be ready around december. It would be a nice "community Christmass present". My predictions are: 0.9.4 will be great but still have things wanted done. 0.9.5 will be probably a good candidate release. They will probably do some more final cleanup which will lead to release 0.9.6 which will cleanly become 1.0.0 when people say they are happy with it.
I have no insider information but I have been following this project for a long time (downloading since Milestone 13) and this "feels right" to me. I always thought people were too optimistic about when the release time for Mozilla would be considering the scope of the project.
I am not saying any of this is morally right but I think they believe that a "criminal" with money and a home in Russia might just find his way onto a plane and see no reason to step foot on American soil again.
The "low lifes" of American society who get out on little bail ussually don't have the money to flee or anywhere they can go.
Sklyarov is really screwed in this one. He is in a fight he might not even have known was an issue, in a country that is not his own and put on political display.
The best answer to "And after we destory MS what then ?" is that the hero and heroin (in this case lawyers - yuck but doable) get married and live happily ever after. Don't you know that is the ending to all "good triumphs over evil stories". You might get a scene of the enslaved population crying with joy or a celebration and a feast... that part varies.
TOS was cheap B TV that only became really popular after the series was off the air but it was fun to watch. TNG was the best star trek done and DS9 started out ok but the religion and the rest just blew the show. It became stupid. Voyager was just awfull and should have been killed off a long time ago. You can't please all of the people all of the time so of course people will complain!
BTW- it took two years for TNG to get good ... Dianna Troy was SOOO annoying in the beginning with the stupid telepathic abilities and almost all episodes revolving around Wesly should be burned.
The ending was awfull for a movie that was going so good. The aliens bit was stupid. As a plot twist it just made no sense. I think the movie was MEANT to end when david was underwater and staring at the statue but my guess is that somebody in hollywood said "that is too sad" and so speilberge said "ok- we will tack on some aliens to lighten it up. At least I HOPE that is the justification for that ending and as another poster said "I hope they come out with a phantom edit".
When employees are not on the job, they are supposed to be doing other stuff with thier lives. A class gives people motivation and reason not to do other things with thier lives after work. I think classes are a great BENEFIT to companies because you get to have your employees work to be more productive for you outside the 40 hour job week. All you have to do is pay for the course and employees might spend another ten hours a week to do thier job better. Tell them they have to make a "B" in the class and you have them working thier buts off "after hours" that will eventually make them more productive on the job. And the employee is happy to do it! This hungry mind and lazy stuff is all bullshit. If you are lucky enough to have a "hungry mind" at your job, I will be surprised if they stick around long- "the hungry minds" tend to like companies that want to "feed those minds".
You have to be making money to spend money. If Slashdot had real profit margins, then I am sure they would do it, but I doubt the banner adds give them the budget to really go hardware shopping (or large support staff).
I actually miss the apple][ sometimes... All the games I loved as a kid were on that machine and I never went seriously back to gaming after I moved to the x86 arch. When apple decided that the mac was the future- I just forgot about apple as a company. No more command line interface? Forget about it!
You make my case for me which is why I would never reliese anything under the BSD.
It gives the USER or perhaps ABUSER more freedom but does not give the DEVELOPER more freedom. If I wrote this really neat program and gave the source away under a BSD lisence, others can turn around and just add a few proprietary lines of code and sell binaries and I would have no rights to say "hey- wait a minute! You just ripped me off". Under the GPL, developer can't get ripped off and the USER has as much freedom as they should want.
Actually what is happening is that as the tools we create and use become more and more sophisticated (and thus more lines of code in use), the harder it becomes to catch all the possible things that could go wrong in an application. With big projects like the Linux Kernel, GCC, Mozilla (now in beta), KDE, Gnome, XFree86- it is just realistic to assume that even though the developers worked very hard for a stable release, people will find bugs.
The people who contribute to Free software are not there because they have to and can leave anytime they want. This fact makes your argument about conditions mute. People help with Free sofware because they like what they are doing while MS employees sit at thier desk because if they weren't, they would not get paid. Yes MS pays its employees BUT most of the revenues is owned by the most upper management who are the furthest removed from the creation of the products thier employees make. In Free software, it is a labor of love, but the people who make it happen, get all the credit. At Microsoft Bill Gates gets all the credit and does none of the real work of producing its products- he is most famous for being the richest man on earth. Now I am not saying upper management should not be well payed but the disparity between Upper management and those that do the real work is very dichotemous and indicating that they are not a good model of employee/employer social contract.
GPL'd code is not going to be the most profitable way to sell software you write. And if I were you, I would not GPL what you write unless you have no plans to sell it. But lets face it- if someone could sell the air you breath, you would probably have to buy it. The GPL is providing for the future of humanity. It gives society a collective way to solve problems that would be too difficult for one person to solve alone. And a method to use computers in ways others have not thought to use them. The GPL is not designed to be a bussiness model but a social contract:
"I give you this code with the idea that if you have anything to contribute, you share it with the rest of us."
That is the GPL in a nutshell.
That is because they started HIRING the people who were interested in developing it. I remember when Mozilla was just getting off the ground and Netscape was giving job offers to those that were doing the first improvements to it. And I would suspect that most opennings (though I don't know this for a fact) are probably filled by people who have made improvements in the past to Moz. So yes - Netscape probably does do the bulk of Moz developement but ONLY because they suck up the good independent developers by hiring them. I don't see this as a bad thing but I don't see it as a phenominon (sp?) that is any big deal to the future developement of Moz if Netscape losses interest. BTW- 80% sounds way too high.
Wow- the Vax at UB... brings back memories but it is odd that my experience is so much different. I attended UB and I did not remember any of these fights.
When was Quattro Pro (correct spelling) a database? AFAIK (and I own a copy!) it is a spreadsheet, originally designed to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. The database was Paradox.
You are right! Thank you for the correction.
The article says that IBM is prepared to dump a billion dollars into Linux development this next year... but I have to ask, how do they expect to make a return on this?
IBM sells hardware and Wintel is really making life hard for them. IBM used to be the "all in one solution" but that spot is now Microsofts and Microsoft does not play nicely with others. IBM is hoping Linux will take off big because it will give IBM a lot of opportunities to sell hardware and thier bussiness solutions software. If Microsoft continues to creep into everything, SQL server will replace DB2; Outlook will replace Lotus Notes; IBM servers will be replaced with NT servers. IBM makes some of the best bussiness solutions you can buy but they are affraid of the day when people say "but it is not compatible with Windows". At one time, Word Perfect was the best word processor, Lotus 123 was the best spread sheet, Quatro Pro was the best personal database, Borland made the best developement software, Corel Draw was everywhere and Netscape was the number one browser. Microsoft squeezed them all out with predetory bussiness tactics and this makes IBMers sleep badly at night. In the past, Microsoft products were not trusted with any serious "Bussiness Logic" but in the last few years, that has changed and IBM is concerned! That is why IBM has joined the "grass roots" movement of Linux. With Linux, IBM is hoping to thwart MS's progress to monopolizing the "low end" server market. If that happens, the writing will be on the walls for IBM's survival.
You don't need a grandma as your example. I have been programming since I was 9 years olds (first computer was a TI-99) and I can say at age 28, I will NEVER learn to use that keyboard!
As a sidenote: My grandmother is a profesional typist. She might like one. :)
The reason Linux probably gets lower rates, is because on average, the people who use it are more security concious and technically astute in comparison to win32 admins. Insurence companies DON'T CARE WHY there is a diference. They probably just fed statistics into a computer and gave these results. Just like men at age 24 have higher rates then women at age 21 for car insurence- statistics. It has nothing to do with any individual driver.
I highly doubt that. If a company spends money on security like this, it implies that they take security seriously- not the reverse. In order to take out a policy like this, a company must realize that security cracks are always a potential (thus why they took out such a policy) and will probably take the time to keep up on security issues.
Journaling IS important and reason enough. ReiserFS and XFS were not designed for speed but for far better data integrity. It is very impressive that for file systems that have to do so much more, are on par with the performance of ext2.
It is not *too* dificult to create your own opperating system. Many colleges even have a course (usually in a masters program) where you have to create your own OS. The diference between Linux and any other number of fledgling opperating systems is that Linus never stopped developement for it after he got it to work. He ported some gnu stuff to it and the ball just kept rolling. It will be interesting to see if any of these new fledgling OS's "keep the ball rolling".