They have a long record of being in bed with Microsoft. And they happen to run a very similar story about Sun's acquisition of Star Division, citing even more vague sources ("according to sources who claim they obtained their information from researchers with The Gartner Group" - isn't that nice?). So all of this seems just to be the campaign of the week, let's see what's to follow...
They just lost their most important reference customer, Sun (for obvious reasons). Their stock has lost 50% since late august. This BSD piece looks like quite a desperate move to save it in the "low end" market segment.
Where's the problem? Use "cipherpunks/cipherpunks", as everone else does. I don't even consider this cheating, as the NYT people definietely know that account is being used by many people (and why should they care?).
17 is too young to visit Comdex, but at the same time, an 11-year-old is arrested for "incest" because a neighbour saw him and his 5-year-old sister naked. Wicked times we're living in...
They don't claim their system can compose. It's about human instrumentalists vs. the computer. But still I don't think this will really work (see my other comment).
They are watching the symptoms ("higher-order patterns") and replaying them. There's more than that to real style. Any good artist's style evolves over time, so replaying a fixed set of characteristics is like playing the same record again and again. But I guess it works for elevator music, for the TV soundtracks they cite, or for an occasional surprise of hearing something that sounds somewhat "similar" to your favourite artist.
Pleeease, like your in-house staff would actually go and make a 3rd party software Y2K compliant. This is not some weenie program like xv or xanim.
There's a lot of "user" companies who have more developers than Star Divsision had. So it's not at all that far-fetched.
If the company that backs up the software has enough of a customer base that requires a certain compliance, they will do it. Look at SunOS 4.1.3_U1, over 5 yrs old and not intention of being Y2K compliant. With enough customer demand, it was eventually make Y2K ready, along with any fix on various bugs introduced from the release.
Yes, it was fixed because of enough customer demand. Anyone may come to the situation of being the last user of a product left, and not being able to make enough pressure. Even if it's not likely, the additional "insurance" of having access to the source is worth a lot to big companies.
Does anybody see any Linux community still supporting Linux release 0.99? All you hear is upgrade to 2.4.
Very excellent point! What this shows is, to a corporate customer, GPL doesn't help you a bit more than SCSL. If you really rely on something, be prepared to maintain it yourself, so get the source - no matter if it's GPL or SCSL.
Seems pretty stupid to be making that much money and get nailed for doing stupid moves.
Pretty stupid, yes, but not at all uncommon. It seems to be true: The more money you have, the greedier you get. Once people make more than, say, $100,000/year, they start to lose ground contact, doing stupid things to save taxes (especially over here in europe), etc.
Thank God I'm poor (well, relative to Cowpland, at least).
Microsoft is very much a for profit company. They are going to charge quite a handsome sum of money for W2K whenever it comes out.
Hey, it seems they even found an innovative new way to make money out of it: licensing the name for other businesses. Look at the evidence in 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels.
It's hard for me to believe what I'm reading here. Some 5 years ago, the open source community (yes, it was there, albeit without the name) was spread out quite well among the different unices - some people were using their Suns or SGIs at work or school, some people used Linux or *BSD at home, and they all got along quite well. Today we got people claiming a cheap Sparc box is "stealing developers from the Linux community"! Doesn't diversity mean anything to you? Anyone not using Linux is the enemy? Please, think again about what you're saying here!
That company was started 4 years ago, telling everyone that within a year or two, all e-commerce would be done in 3D-"virtual reality" worlds, with users interacting through "avatars" (are they still using that term today?). Now, when buying a book on Amazon, where's the need for a 3D-world?
Like every Internet-related startup, they had their followers in the beginning, but now, after 4 years, what have they achieved? Is anybody seriously using their stuff? Are they making any real money? Heck, they don't even have any noticeable press covering recently! And that's where "Open Source" comes into play. It won't save that company, but at least it created some press echo again.
The Olap Council proposed the MDAPI, a server-independent API for accessing OLAP data, some time ago (first time around '97, I think). They still have some major vendors on their member list, with Oracle seeming to be most actively pushing it (last year, that is). Yet, for about a year, nothing has been heard about it. In the meantime, there is Microsoft's "OLEDB for OLAP", also supported by several server vendors, but, obviously, running only on Windows, so it's not really an alternative. Does anybody know if MDAPI still has any supporters, and if so, what has been going on there in the last year? I can't seem to find any evidence the whole thing is even alive anymore.
AltaVista started out as a technology demonstration for digital machines, without banner ads. Once it became popular enough, however, they added the banner ads, too. I'll take every bet that Google is going to run banner ads.
Sure, when a human writer writes a story, he will modify it until he thinks it's good. But when they claim a computer wrote a story, I expect it to come out of the computer "as is", without some operators' help and intervention. Otherwise, they can just write the story themselves, add a "printf" to every line and, voila, a computer-written story.
The article says the entry has already been written. I wonder how long the software was tweaked and how often it was run to get one reasonable story as output. To make that contest useful, they should run the program once and take whatever comes out.
"the Linux de facto standard desktop"?
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
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· Score: 0
That's the kind of speak I would expect in a Microsoft press release... Has it gotten that far?
I'd agree with you if they were just sending in patches for the features they want, but hiring the maintainer of a project cleary counts as "taking influence". It's not necessarily bad in this case (maybe film features are what everyone wants anyway - I don't know), but I'm still alarmed that a large open source project with many people contributing can be "bought" at the price of two developers.
Wasn't Gimp once started as a kind of Photoshop replacement? And now, two film-oriented companies hire two developers, and, all of a sudden, the whole project is geared towards "features for film work" that "Photoshop really isn't suitable for"? Is it that simple to take over a major open source project?
Slashdot Mirror
They have a long record of being in bed with Microsoft. And they happen to run a very similar story about Sun's acquisition of Star Division, citing even more vague sources ("according to sources who claim they obtained their information from researchers with The Gartner Group" - isn't that nice?). So all of this seems just to be the campaign of the week, let's see what's to follow...
They just lost their most important reference customer, Sun (for obvious reasons). Their stock has lost 50% since late august. This BSD piece looks like quite a desperate move to save it in the "low end" market segment.
Where's the problem? Use "cipherpunks/cipherpunks", as everone else does. I don't even consider this cheating, as the NYT people definietely know that account is being used by many people (and why should they care?).
17 is too young to visit Comdex, but at the same time, an 11-year-old is arrested for "incest" because a neighbour saw him and his 5-year-old sister naked. Wicked times we're living in...
They don't claim their system can compose. It's about human instrumentalists vs. the computer. But still I don't think this will really work (see my other comment).
They are watching the symptoms ("higher-order patterns") and replaying them. There's more than that to real style. Any good artist's style evolves over time, so replaying a fixed set of characteristics is like playing the same record again and again.
But I guess it works for elevator music, for the TV soundtracks they cite, or for an occasional surprise of hearing something that sounds somewhat "similar" to your favourite artist.
$20,000 is quoted as the cost of getting a patent. So, a $10,000 fine wouldn't change that much.
There's a lot of "user" companies who have more developers than Star Divsision had. So it's not at all that far-fetched.
If the company that backs up the software has enough of a customer base that requires a certain compliance, they will do it. Look at SunOS 4.1.3_U1, over 5 yrs old and not intention of being Y2K compliant. With enough customer demand, it was eventually make Y2K ready, along with any fix on various bugs introduced from the release.
Yes, it was fixed because of enough customer demand. Anyone may come to the situation of being the last user of a product left, and not being able to make enough pressure. Even if it's not likely, the additional "insurance" of having access to the source is worth a lot to big companies.
Does anybody see any Linux community still supporting Linux release 0.99? All you hear is upgrade to 2.4.
Very excellent point! What this shows is, to a corporate customer, GPL doesn't help you a bit more than SCSL. If you really rely on something, be prepared to maintain it yourself, so get the source - no matter if it's GPL or SCSL.
Pretty stupid, yes, but not at all uncommon. It seems to be true: The more money you have, the greedier you get. Once people make more than, say, $100,000/year, they start to lose ground contact, doing stupid things to save taxes (especially over here in europe), etc.
Thank God I'm poor (well, relative to Cowpland, at least).
The Urban Legends Reference Pages at www.snopes.com list the pi==3 story as "false", although there was a similar effort in Indiana in 1897.
Hey, it seems they even found an innovative new way to make money out of it: licensing the name for other businesses. Look at the evidence in 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels.
It's hard for me to believe what I'm reading here. Some 5 years ago, the open source community (yes, it was there, albeit without the name) was spread out quite well among the different unices - some people were using their Suns or SGIs at work or school, some people used Linux or *BSD at home, and they all got along quite well. Today we got people claiming a cheap Sparc box is "stealing developers from the Linux community"! Doesn't diversity mean anything to you? Anyone not using Linux is the enemy? Please, think again about what you're saying here!
Like every Internet-related startup, they had their followers in the beginning, but now, after 4 years, what have they achieved? Is anybody seriously using their stuff? Are they making any real money? Heck, they don't even have any noticeable press covering recently! And that's where "Open Source" comes into play. It won't save that company, but at least it created some press echo again.
The Olap Council proposed the MDAPI, a server-independent API for accessing OLAP data, some time ago (first time around '97, I think). They still have some major vendors on their member list, with Oracle seeming to be most actively pushing it (last year, that is). Yet, for about a year, nothing has been heard about it. In the meantime, there is Microsoft's "OLEDB for OLAP", also supported by several server vendors, but, obviously, running only on Windows, so it's not really an alternative. Does anybody know if MDAPI still has any supporters, and if so, what has been going on there in the last year? I can't seem to find any evidence the whole thing is even alive anymore.
AltaVista started out as a technology demonstration for digital machines, without banner ads. Once it became popular enough, however, they added the banner ads, too. I'll take every bet that Google is going to run banner ads.
"They say it's in Java - I have heard of that before.... here... Oh, they call it JavaScript, that sounds far more impressive!"
Sure, when a human writer writes a story, he will modify it until he thinks it's good. But when they claim a computer wrote a story, I expect it to come out of the computer "as is", without some operators' help and intervention. Otherwise, they can just write the story themselves, add a "printf" to every line and, voila, a computer-written story.
The article says the entry has already been written. I wonder how long the software was tweaked and how often it was run to get one reasonable story as output. To make that contest useful, they should run the program once and take whatever comes out.
That's the kind of speak I would expect in a Microsoft press release... Has it gotten that far?
somehow reminds me of the Barbapapa cartoons.
The article says the WWW is 9 years old, not the Internet. The average consumer doesn't know, but the two are not the same.
User Info shows only comments from the last few weeks (and even says so). Karma includes older comments. That's the whole thing.
I'd agree with you if they were just sending in patches for the features they want, but hiring the maintainer of a project cleary counts as "taking influence". It's not necessarily bad in this case (maybe film features are what everyone wants anyway - I don't know), but I'm still alarmed that a large open source project with many people contributing can be "bought" at the price of two developers.
Wasn't Gimp once started as a kind of Photoshop replacement? And now, two film-oriented companies hire two developers, and, all of a sudden, the whole project is geared towards "features for film work" that "Photoshop really isn't suitable for"? Is it that simple to take over a major open source project?
First a story about cloned sheep, then this interview twice... coincidence?