Do they actually have a snowball's chance in hell of winning any of these cases?
Maybe I am not enough of a Linux geek to understand this, and I guess this is bound to be snowed under given what seems to be the prevailing opinions, but if the fundamental claim made in the interview - that IBM gave away or otherwise violated significant amounts of proprietary code owned by SCO - then of course they have a snowball's chance. Maybe no more since IBM has those basements full of lawyers they feed only the blood of virgin geeks. But if there is significant proprietary code in open source that the owner did not put some type of open license on then any open source project that has that source code in it has a problem - and incidentally, I interpret that as being the intention of the "day of reckoning" comment regarding SuSe and RedHat, not a promise of a lawsuit, just the reality of having to expunge or otherwise deal with any proprietary code mucking up a project.
Whether this makes sense or not, or would work or not, is scarcely relevant, at least in the U.S.A. Anyone who follows the issue of drug law reform in this country knows that the political system is wholly deaf to the concept of harm reduction where criminal justice is involved. We like to punish people more than we like to improve the general social condition. I mean, it isn't as if needle exchange programs are exactly thriving here.
The reality is that our whole criminal justice system is badly broken: too many people locked up too long for the wrong reasons, truly vile and/or psychologically damaged people who ought to be locked up getting out too soon because of the revolving-door necessity of perpetual overcrowding, a for-profit prison system which lobbys powerfully for the continued growth of the inmate population, and a system of incarceration where at best people are rehabilitated in spite of the system, and at worst they are exposed to rape, violence, sexually transmitted disease, pervasive availability of drugs, ending with an individual coming out with AIDS, little possibility of finding anything but the most menial employment, but a lot more exposure to the criminal underworld.
I'm afraid the plight of the incarcerated cracker is a very small worm in a can that no politician with the power to affect the situation has the guts to touch with a ten foot pole.
From the article... "The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections..." (emphasis added). Can someone tell me when the FBI's "Dark Days" ended? As far as I can tell, the FBI is distinguishing itself by "losing" laptops and weapons, failing to act on data related to 9/11 terrorists, punishing its employees when they call it out on its rotten practices, and getting seriously into bed with spies. Yeah, I trust them with my personal data.
How can a responsible thinker so easily shrug off the need to protect oneself from the unknown abuses of the future just because one may think things are relatively agreeable at present?
The question is the answer. The terms "responsible" and "thinker" are not applicable to the majority of people you're worried about.
"Infrasctucture overhauls and their willingness to revamp the system are key to sucess"
And how are these things going to happen without serious investment, when they can't even do their basic work with the money and personnel they have? Maybe we can pass another tax cut. Tax cuts magically make money appear in the economy. That's why we have all these budget surpluses we can't figure out what to do with.
You almost get there... but not quite. Damn straight: Democrats are just as privacy unfriendly, and corporate friendly, for that matter, as Republicans. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" are meaningless, like most polarized labels. 'Fact is, neither of the parties are doing much to uphold their supposed causes. What they do is make hay, play politics, snipe at each other... and keep the American public nicely divided. Meanwhile, we get a bunch of, primarily, well-to-do lawyers running the country at the behest of the corporations and wealthy individuals who finance their increasingly grotesque campaign budgets.
You point to Democrat inconsistencies as if the Republicans were not guilty of inconsistencies. I present the American Voter, ladies and gentlemen. Blind or merely stupid? Smaller, less intrusive government? Yeah, right. Pro-life... but the death penalty is A-OK even though it is demonstrably true that the judicial system puts innocent people on death row. Fiscally responsible... and welcome to a bright new era of massive deficit spending! But hey, don't get me wrong. Democrats are NO BETTER. My personal favorite is advocates of drug law reform supporting Democrats, who are responsible for many of the most draconian additions in drug law policy in the last two decades.
While y'all idiots are playing debate society, this nation has been soundly hijacked by a tiny minority of movers and shakers, and our representatives don't even remotely represent us anymore. The majority of people are too stupid and incapable of true logical analysis, thanks to years of the dumbing down of society, to be blamed for it. But there are a lot of people here that are clearly smart enough that you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for letting these clowns define the dialogue. Have fun discussing important issues.
good point - the redesign is a major improvement. I think you're right though- the only way they will really take on Google is to convince people that their searching is superior in some way (better results, more up-to-date results, or ???). I switched to Alta Vista from Webcrawler when I realized it had superior results. I switched to Google when AV started to suck. If Google starts to suck or something better shows up, I'll switch again.
Global warming is the weakest link in the case for environmentalism. Too speculative, too abstract (I live in Minnesota where the temperatures swing well over a hundred degrees every single year. Even though I KNOW better it's hard to really get worked up over a few degrees rise in the "global" temperature), the consequences too uncertain.
So though I think any statement suggesting that human activity is not contributing to global cclimate change is questionable, why don't I just concede the point. You got me. Global Warming is Junk Science.
Okay, now the only reason to work to replace burning fossil fuels for power is air, land, and water pollution and their expensive impact on public health, acid rain and its expensive impact on natural and manmade resources, the politics of oil and the incredibly expensive impact of diplomatic and military maintenance of world oil supplies, the non-renewable nature of these fuels and the eventual impact on all human society of running out without having developed rational alternatives...
Agreed. The whole point is that Google distinguished themselves AS a search engine... and the minimalist interface and understated, clearly delineated text ads reinforce that idea. Yahoo!, on the other hand, was all about being a portal. When you hear Yahoo! you do not think "search," at least I don't. Never did, frankly.
I went to Yahoo's front page just now (first time in a LONG time I'd been there) and what did I get: jobs, chat, travel, ads, directories, ads, news, ads, groups, ads... It's a mess, frankly. A positive assessment would be "one stop shop," which is I'm sure what they want me to think, but my reaction is "you can do twelve things at once but they're all badly done."
A few cumulative hours of research and a well-organized favorites list makes a Portal completely redundant. Yahoo! would never exist if they tried to start up today with their business model. What they have now is name recognition, leftover juice from the bubble, and a certain amount of inertia.
Umm, why not install a tiny, free, dial up the atomic clock dial-up app on your computer and hand adjust the time on the clock every week or so... considering that, given the dial split up into 60 sections nature of the clock dial, at best you are reading the time on the clock at an accuracy no better than to the half minute (give or take?)
'Cause that's just not geeky.
Re:one app, one desktop, one united front
on
Too Much Free Software
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A question from a non-programmer: does a distinction need to be made between, say, the core software architecture (the... Operating System? The Kernel? Helping we the relatively smart and eager to adopt understand these distinctions would be a good side project for y'all...), and specific applications on the other side? From my unenlightened viewpoint it seems like the challenge is to keep the open, flexible, community developed nature of the core while seeking the happy medium and point of mass agreement to create a basis of reliable, interoperable applications.
Sexist pig... assuming that every healthy, freedom-loving Slashdot reader is either male or a lesbian... Well I'm here to say, ladies, pay-porn-for-protest is your right too!
It's not an April Fool's day story, and it isn't exactly new news - it's another process for converting biomass (the use of turkey as the prime example is unfortunate because it promotes the hoax claim, but given the article was originally published early December it was probably a post-Thanksgiving kind of novel angle thing.
There are a lot of biomass reduction techniques going on to produce combustible fuels. As the article states they all run into the same problem - economics. Nature did all the heavy work on crude oil for us - so naturally from the perspective of in the ground to a watt or a mile or whatever, the price of oil is hard to beat, particularly given its enormous infrastructure advantage. Even if you're using "free" feedstocks (i.e. wastes) the processing cost can be a killer.
So, for these fuels to make any impact, they generally need to be subsidized somehow. The article makes it clear that the economics of this fuel source are far from proven.
There are little startups like this all over the place. So far none of the techniques developed have made a serious impact on our use of oil. Without real public and government support for changing our energy base, this one probably won't either.
Yeah, I'm concerned that if they push the line this fast, they'll release that direct-neuro-input version (what was that, PlayStation 6? 7?) the showed in that one PS2 commercial before the cranial jack technology has really stabilized...
When I was a Junior in high school - 1989 - I bought a Casio scientific calculator, solar powered with a lithium cell back-up, for about 30 dollars. Through high school Trig and Pre-calculus, three college calculus classes, and a chemistry undergraduate degree, I used the thing a ton and it took a beating in the process. 14 years later I'm still using it... and the battery is still good (I guess that solar cell is doing its job.
Oh and another thing - when I first started college, I bought a single Sony double-density 3.5 floppy disk. That's 12 years ago and it still works. Yes, yes, I know, floppies are obsolete... but really, I bought a box of 3.5s (figuring they'd be a lifetime supply) and I'm lucky if I get a dozen rewrites out of them. That original floppy has been overwritten literally thousands of times. What gives with that?
This is just one element of a bigger picture of what's wrong with the way our economy is being run. As market dynamics force a greater focus on shareholder value over solid profit models, and on the short term over the long term, industry is pushed more and more towards a strategy that focuses on the short term bottom line. This reactionary business policy is written all over the current recession: the dot-com collapse, the various business scandals (corporate leadership, consultant and auditor collusion to prop up share values rather than fix broken business models), growing issues of overcapacity (caused by investment in manufacturing capacity based on unrealistic consumer projections - themselves based on the idiotic notion that consumers could and would continue digging themselves into insurmountable credit holes forever). It may look good this quarter but eventually the account must be drawn down.
The return on investment for sound R&D has been well established. Of course, there is a world of interpretation in that little qualifier "sound" but the fact remains that R&D investment is critical to continued, sustainable growth - particularly in the tech world. Unfortunately, the narrow-minded focus on the quarters earnings doesn't permit this kind of rationality that could speed economic recovery. It makes about as much sense as refusing to change the oil in your car because you're short on cash, but hey, that's business.
great, I'm insightful AND funny. Now would you go look at the comment I actually care about - about how Apple's alleged new music service is a bunch of BS?
Agreed. For people that impulse buy albums for singles, this may work fine. For the most part I buy and listen to albums. 99 cents is a so-so price for a single provided it's a full WAV download - I might buy a couple hundred songs over the next 5 years. However, what is this?
The new service would only be available to users of Apple's Macintosh line computers and iPod portable music players, who have been largely overlooked by the legitimate online music services.
How does that work? What exactly are they selling? What about format? What about digital rights management? Where does it say you can burn? Oh, right - nowhere. Because the "industry" will start selling unencumbered full digital WAV files available for burning when one of the two following conditions are reached:
1. Hell freezes over
2. Someone else starts thrashing them in the marketplace doing it first.
Other stuff this doesn't solve: conventional publishing screwing artists. The consolidation and dumbing down of what's produced and what's available. The functional elimination of internet radio as a viable broadcast medium for the hobbyist level individual.
Low on facts, misrepresented and no comment from Apple. Vapor. Can't wait until the next corporate sponsored online music "solution?" Then go to my damn homepage and send me an email saying that you'll review the draft whitepaper of the M.A.P.S. project, fercryin'out loud!
Beware of what? Guess what kids - your culture is being appropriated by the marketeers! (pause for gasps of astonishment and chagrin).
Is there even a line between culture and commerce anymore? In any event, the raging cow site drips with manufactured "kewl" - if you're influenced by this kind of pap you deserve to be sold carbonated milk, or whatever the hell it is.
Exactly. And I'd add - be explicit. I feel like I know my friends - and if I tell them, absolutely don't forward this, I believe they will honor me. If they don't at least I know who to scratch off the list.
I'm afraid I find both the author of this article's sympathy for and defense of Ms. Garrett and his alarm about the memetic and viral nature of digital information misguided.
As to the former, let's get down to brass tacks - if you read the original email, you clearly have a person that is enjoying the cache of being a capital-P Pullitzer Prize Winning Journalist!!! so she gets to hobnob with the Ubermenschen Clubs Rule-da-Woild fun fest. She want to share her aw-shucks I'm a regular girl (but oh so smart and important 'cause see who I'm rubbing elbows with) reactions with a select group of friends. She either doesn't pick her friends too good and/or doesn't explain the rules to them and/or just doesn't get the nature of the internet. And she gets widebanded.
Well, she's embarassed. Why? Because her regular person persona has clashed violently with her respected and erudite journalist persona - the very thing that got her into the "inner circle" to start with. She was, plain and simply, made to look foolish.
Hey, it happens. I more or less left a job out of fallout (or more precisely my reaction to it) to a poorly considered email I wrote. I chose to view it as a learning experience, I certainly didn't see it as an excuse to rail against the facts of the medium. I learned two things - one is, indeed: once you hit send it is out there and you absolutely can't control it. Two: I stand up and take responsibility for what I say, absolutely.
Instead of taking this lesson gracefully, she writes a letter that basically tries to rip down netheads and blame them for the situation. She scoffs at their discussion, how dare these grubby little geeks presume to enter discourse on the high and mighty, compares them to Star Trek fans in full fanatic mode and tells them to get a life. The letter is linked in the sidebar of Metafilter and it is worth a read for the context of this article.
This is the nature of information. This is why my sig says what it does. I'm frsked if I know if information "wants" anything but I know that it is its nature to jump the boundaries, be fungible, replicate and spread. There is no "solution." No solution is needed. Deal with it.
A person who wants to claim to be a professional in the field of disseminating information had better accept this or they will find themselves irrelevant very, very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I am not enough of a Linux geek to understand this, and I guess this is bound to be snowed under given what seems to be the prevailing opinions, but if the fundamental claim made in the interview - that IBM gave away or otherwise violated significant amounts of proprietary code owned by SCO - then of course they have a snowball's chance. Maybe no more since IBM has those basements full of lawyers they feed only the blood of virgin geeks. But if there is significant proprietary code in open source that the owner did not put some type of open license on then any open source project that has that source code in it has a problem - and incidentally, I interpret that as being the intention of the "day of reckoning" comment regarding SuSe and RedHat, not a promise of a lawsuit, just the reality of having to expunge or otherwise deal with any proprietary code mucking up a project.
The reality is that our whole criminal justice system is badly broken: too many people locked up too long for the wrong reasons, truly vile and/or psychologically damaged people who ought to be locked up getting out too soon because of the revolving-door necessity of perpetual overcrowding, a for-profit prison system which lobbys powerfully for the continued growth of the inmate population, and a system of incarceration where at best people are rehabilitated in spite of the system, and at worst they are exposed to rape, violence, sexually transmitted disease, pervasive availability of drugs, ending with an individual coming out with AIDS, little possibility of finding anything but the most menial employment, but a lot more exposure to the criminal underworld.
I'm afraid the plight of the incarcerated cracker is a very small worm in a can that no politician with the power to affect the situation has the guts to touch with a ten foot pole.
From the article... "The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections..." (emphasis added). Can someone tell me when the FBI's "Dark Days" ended? As far as I can tell, the FBI is distinguishing itself by "losing" laptops and weapons, failing to act on data related to 9/11 terrorists, punishing its employees when they call it out on its rotten practices, and getting seriously into bed with spies. Yeah, I trust them with my personal data.
The question is the answer. The terms "responsible" and "thinker" are not applicable to the majority of people you're worried about.
And how are these things going to happen without serious investment, when they can't even do their basic work with the money and personnel they have? Maybe we can pass another tax cut. Tax cuts magically make money appear in the economy. That's why we have all these budget surpluses we can't figure out what to do with.
You point to Democrat inconsistencies as if the Republicans were not guilty of inconsistencies. I present the American Voter, ladies and gentlemen. Blind or merely stupid? Smaller, less intrusive government? Yeah, right. Pro-life... but the death penalty is A-OK even though it is demonstrably true that the judicial system puts innocent people on death row. Fiscally responsible... and welcome to a bright new era of massive deficit spending! But hey, don't get me wrong. Democrats are NO BETTER. My personal favorite is advocates of drug law reform supporting Democrats, who are responsible for many of the most draconian additions in drug law policy in the last two decades.
While y'all idiots are playing debate society, this nation has been soundly hijacked by a tiny minority of movers and shakers, and our representatives don't even remotely represent us anymore. The majority of people are too stupid and incapable of true logical analysis, thanks to years of the dumbing down of society, to be blamed for it. But there are a lot of people here that are clearly smart enough that you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for letting these clowns define the dialogue. Have fun discussing important issues.
good point - the redesign is a major improvement. I think you're right though- the only way they will really take on Google is to convince people that their searching is superior in some way (better results, more up-to-date results, or ???). I switched to Alta Vista from Webcrawler when I realized it had superior results. I switched to Google when AV started to suck. If Google starts to suck or something better shows up, I'll switch again.
So though I think any statement suggesting that human activity is not contributing to global cclimate change is questionable, why don't I just concede the point. You got me. Global Warming is Junk Science.
Okay, now the only reason to work to replace burning fossil fuels for power is air, land, and water pollution and their expensive impact on public health, acid rain and its expensive impact on natural and manmade resources, the politics of oil and the incredibly expensive impact of diplomatic and military maintenance of world oil supplies, the non-renewable nature of these fuels and the eventual impact on all human society of running out without having developed rational alternatives...
Funny, my views on the subject haven't changed.
I went to Yahoo's front page just now (first time in a LONG time I'd been there) and what did I get: jobs, chat, travel, ads, directories, ads, news, ads, groups, ads... It's a mess, frankly. A positive assessment would be "one stop shop," which is I'm sure what they want me to think, but my reaction is "you can do twelve things at once but they're all badly done."
A few cumulative hours of research and a well-organized favorites list makes a Portal completely redundant. Yahoo! would never exist if they tried to start up today with their business model. What they have now is name recognition, leftover juice from the bubble, and a certain amount of inertia.
'Cause that's just not geeky.
A question from a non-programmer: does a distinction need to be made between, say, the core software architecture (the... Operating System? The Kernel? Helping we the relatively smart and eager to adopt understand these distinctions would be a good side project for y'all...), and specific applications on the other side? From my unenlightened viewpoint it seems like the challenge is to keep the open, flexible, community developed nature of the core while seeking the happy medium and point of mass agreement to create a basis of reliable, interoperable applications.
Sexist pig... assuming that every healthy, freedom-loving Slashdot reader is either male or a lesbian... Well I'm here to say, ladies, pay-porn-for-protest is your right too!
There are a lot of biomass reduction techniques going on to produce combustible fuels. As the article states they all run into the same problem - economics. Nature did all the heavy work on crude oil for us - so naturally from the perspective of in the ground to a watt or a mile or whatever, the price of oil is hard to beat, particularly given its enormous infrastructure advantage. Even if you're using "free" feedstocks (i.e. wastes) the processing cost can be a killer.
So, for these fuels to make any impact, they generally need to be subsidized somehow. The article makes it clear that the economics of this fuel source are far from proven.
There are little startups like this all over the place. So far none of the techniques developed have made a serious impact on our use of oil. Without real public and government support for changing our energy base, this one probably won't either.
Because the dark secret of astronomers is that these "meteors" actually ARE Volkswagen bugs! Those damn Germans! Causing trouble again!
Good god, didn't you people learn anything from The Matrix?! Agent-based architecture is the most dangerous type of computer system you can design!
Good lord, it's bright red and bigger than an X-Box...
I mean, "Wallace and Gromit... have to free 24 levels worth of imprisoned baby animals..." and yet no GameCube version?
What?!
Yeah, I'm concerned that if they push the line this fast, they'll release that direct-neuro-input version (what was that, PlayStation 6? 7?) the showed in that one PS2 commercial before the cranial jack technology has really stabilized...
Oh and another thing - when I first started college, I bought a single Sony double-density 3.5 floppy disk. That's 12 years ago and it still works. Yes, yes, I know, floppies are obsolete... but really, I bought a box of 3.5s (figuring they'd be a lifetime supply) and I'm lucky if I get a dozen rewrites out of them. That original floppy has been overwritten literally thousands of times. What gives with that?
The return on investment for sound R&D has been well established. Of course, there is a world of interpretation in that little qualifier "sound" but the fact remains that R&D investment is critical to continued, sustainable growth - particularly in the tech world. Unfortunately, the narrow-minded focus on the quarters earnings doesn't permit this kind of rationality that could speed economic recovery. It makes about as much sense as refusing to change the oil in your car because you're short on cash, but hey, that's business.
The new service would only be available to users of Apple's Macintosh line computers and iPod portable music players, who have been largely overlooked by the legitimate online music services.
How does that work? What exactly are they selling? What about format? What about digital rights management? Where does it say you can burn? Oh, right - nowhere. Because the "industry" will start selling unencumbered full digital WAV files available for burning when one of the two following conditions are reached:
1. Hell freezes over
2. Someone else starts thrashing them in the marketplace doing it first.
Other stuff this doesn't solve: conventional publishing screwing artists. The consolidation and dumbing down of what's produced and what's available. The functional elimination of internet radio as a viable broadcast medium for the hobbyist level individual.
Low on facts, misrepresented and no comment from Apple. Vapor. Can't wait until the next corporate sponsored online music "solution?" Then go to my damn homepage and send me an email saying that you'll review the draft whitepaper of the M.A.P.S. project, fercryin'out loud!
Beware of what? Guess what kids - your culture is being appropriated by the marketeers! (pause for gasps of astonishment and chagrin).
Is there even a line between culture and commerce anymore? In any event, the raging cow site drips with manufactured "kewl" - if you're influenced by this kind of pap you deserve to be sold carbonated milk, or whatever the hell it is.
I'm afraid I find both the author of this article's sympathy for and defense of Ms. Garrett and his alarm about the memetic and viral nature of digital information misguided.
As to the former, let's get down to brass tacks - if you read the original email, you clearly have a person that is enjoying the cache of being a capital-P Pullitzer Prize Winning Journalist!!! so she gets to hobnob with the Ubermenschen Clubs Rule-da-Woild fun fest. She want to share her aw-shucks I'm a regular girl (but oh so smart and important 'cause see who I'm rubbing elbows with) reactions with a select group of friends. She either doesn't pick her friends too good and/or doesn't explain the rules to them and/or just doesn't get the nature of the internet. And she gets widebanded.
Well, she's embarassed. Why? Because her regular person persona has clashed violently with her respected and erudite journalist persona - the very thing that got her into the "inner circle" to start with. She was, plain and simply, made to look foolish.
Hey, it happens. I more or less left a job out of fallout (or more precisely my reaction to it) to a poorly considered email I wrote. I chose to view it as a learning experience, I certainly didn't see it as an excuse to rail against the facts of the medium. I learned two things - one is, indeed: once you hit send it is out there and you absolutely can't control it. Two: I stand up and take responsibility for what I say, absolutely.
Instead of taking this lesson gracefully, she writes a letter that basically tries to rip down netheads and blame them for the situation. She scoffs at their discussion, how dare these grubby little geeks presume to enter discourse on the high and mighty, compares them to Star Trek fans in full fanatic mode and tells them to get a life. The letter is linked in the sidebar of Metafilter and it is worth a read for the context of this article.
This is the nature of information. This is why my sig says what it does. I'm frsked if I know if information "wants" anything but I know that it is its nature to jump the boundaries, be fungible, replicate and spread. There is no "solution." No solution is needed. Deal with it.
A person who wants to claim to be a professional in the field of disseminating information had better accept this or they will find themselves irrelevant very, very quickly.