1st there are some one sided valid contracts. The testament is in example one. One sided founding of a Ltd. limidet an another.
Because one of the principles is the right of pyshical integrity every natural person has from birth until death. It is a legal principle that this fundamental right cannot been taken away from him under no circumstances. (Or else slavery would be legal)
You cannot make a contract with another that allows you to hit him, even he signs.
The main reason why a lot of things are forbidden in contracts is because often unequal partners sign a contract. There are situations one partner has a lot more power than the other has. If legal judgment would put not limits in the contract the empowered side could force the other side into everything.
An example is the typcial consumer-company relationship. Where you as 0815 consumer sign a buying contract with a huge company. Here the law giver is looking very closely on the fingers of the companies not to exploit the people. (for example right of withdrawal in out-of-door business). etc.
Well just because something is written down does not make it legal or valid.
Take in example a contract about slavery. You can write down anything in there, it's just not valid. Contracts about drugs, etc. etc.
Same goes about warrenty. In example in germany the consumer protection law forbids companies to resign themself from warrenty. (However this only applies to company - consumer contracts, in their application field). private person to private person can buy/sell things excluiding warranty, and company to company also. But no typical consumer deals.
Some laws are substutave, meaning they can be changed in contracts, but some laws are forcefully, meaning you cannot change them.
True there are a lot of laws that cannot be bypassed by contract. Luckely. (Or I would write on my car: "Not responsilbe if I hit you")
However the GPL _is_ a contract, like any license is a contract. However in difference to most other contracts it is not signed or accepted explicitly. Under certain conditions contracts can also be accepted implied.
The famous school example is, you offer me to sell you car for 1.000$, I say I don't know yet, give me a week to think about it. You agree. The next day I transfer exactly 1.000$ to your bank account. In this case, without doubt my true intentions are visible, so the contract is valid.
The GPL is something similar, if you redistribute the application it, or modify it, you can only do this when you've accepted the license. So infront of court you can choose if you did not accept the license, and violated IP by distributing, or you accepted the license implicitly. Your choice.
Thats the way the implicit acceptance of the GPL works.
There is something important you forgot, you are not confronting one entity, but two. The ordering customer, and the entity sending the spams. These are usually different. One entity pays the other to send it's spam. The spam customer is not anonymous, the actual spam sender stays anonymous.
Relevance is a relative field. It is not definined by the number of CPUs that run these.
Most CPUs on the world do not have any OS at all. If the whole world would be runned by a central computer, would it's OS be relevant if it only runs on a single box? etc. etc.
You seem not to understand what the concept of java is. To let java applications run equally on all supported OSes. Of course you can make on any OS specific improvements when ignoring compability, but you're violating the concept them.
Second contracts are to be hold. Thats the base of our laws, if microsoft signs a contract they are obliged to it. Point and out. If the contract says not to modify the data they are obliged, no bla bla here or there.
Well sun did that. The contract says the java base classes MAY NOT BE MODIFIED: And now guess how much microsoft cared about that? They violated the contract, took sun code and published a modified java version that is incompatible with sun's.
arker, please do not take that personally, but I think you don't have a glimpse what routing means.
For example "Real" Routers tend to eat up a lot of memory. The IP Tables can grow up to eating hundrets of megabytes. No joke, the routing rules on a higher level are a lot more than your personal 192.168.x.x keep in house everything else let my ISP worry.
So in conditions they have AND need a lot of memory.
They tend to like have very fast buses, the backplanes (where the data runs over) running already for years at Gigaherz level. How fast does the "backplane" run on a even modern PC? The PCI bus doing the same task in PC world still runs at 100 Mhz maximum.
Next measurement you have to take is the response time you add, meaning packet comes in at port A, packet leaves at port B. The time it takes is the time you slow down the connection. Measure this time needed by a good router and the time needed by your P90.
And so on. I'm not telling your P90 can't do your job. But that does not make routers simple devices. Also even in the low end saying a companies decision is better at a P90 than a little router, is not as crystal clear as you want to believe. You have to add both costs for space, power consumsion, installation, maintance, dependence on current personal. The P90 is cheaper at the acquisition price, no doubt, but it is generally more expensive in all other areas.
As usual no exact data. Which provider, what throughput rates etc.
As this, this is a heard-once-somebody-saying story.
Note for example for a PC a packet to be routed it needs to be read by the hardware, read into memory, scanned the IP headers, and then wroten on the same bus outside on the network card again.
This is all slow.
For example a good router supports hardware routing meaning in a TCP connection the first packet is softrouted, and then all other packets are directed directly through the hardware, beside the CPU.
Let me add, """""PC routers are for people who don't see why they should waste money on a dedicated routing device when they have a P90 lying around that is already paid for"""",
and they do not any of these features: * fast put through rates, * high bandwidth through the router, * more than a hand full of network ports, * no fancy V-LANS, * no central SNMP control and monitoring. * no high reliability * no brother devices (two routers controlling each other, don't ask me how it is called). * no space limit in the server room. * do not care the router is a PC and does not fit in a rack. etc. etc.
It's a simple and cheap solution for people having simple needs, thats it, and thats good. But deriving from this that routing is a simple stuff is far off.
Sure, you can do the same thing with CDROM, although human nature being what is it that tends to encourage unecessary bloat
So you put hardware limits to guard your human design failures? stupid concept. Just don't bloat if you don't want to, or set yourself a softlimit.
Yes, you can even boot from hard disk and then unmount the disk. And then someone that compromises your appliance can remount it. Power it down?
Did you read what I wrote? Someone comprises the firewall! Okay thats already the worst thing that can happen. He can use it as relay, and he can take over power everytime he want again. He can access your private networks, he can sent mass spams, etc.etc. If he now can change the harddisk additionally this is only a small addtional failure, which only simplifies his access next time, but thats already all to get.
Today you can power down almost every IDE or SCSI harddisk by software command. under linux issue as root:
"hdparm -Y". And you harddisk stops spinning
As simple as this. Put this at the end of the inittab and you got a quiet nice router.
Keep it simple. A router is a very simple device. Not it is not. What do you think CISCO makes it money from? Making simplistic devices? Well when talking about a -real- -efficient- router it is a rather complicated device. With a PC and linux all you can do is soft routing which is rather slow, direkt routing on hardware is not possible. Look PC-Routers are for the poor. Meaing you need simple routing stuff does not say that there is not much about routing, it's a science itself. Those who need real routing should go out and by a CISCO.
Also a harddisk costs nothing. Especially since most PCs used for soft routing are old sorted out, having already a harddisk.
Floppies are unreliable? Sure they are. So what. You keep a disk image on your workstation and make a new one whenever need be. When the floppy goes bad you'll notice the next time you boot, and replace it. Big deal.
and whats about the continousity of service until you get to exchange the disk?
How about a CDROM? With all this haze about the disk size limit you can make an equal amount of security and service, while having a lot more reliable data carrier. (CDs have a yet to be determined living time).
And come on even with a normal hard disk bootup you can load as well everything in a ramdisk and then unmount and even unpower the harddisk. If someone manages to hack into the server, to power the harddisk, to mount it, and then to change it's data, okay. Well if he has that level of control already you lost already long time ago. So somebody hacks your firewall running from a floppy disk, okay he can't change the disk, but what does he want to do anyway? He want to use the firewall as relay, and nothing hinders him to, he got into it due to a bug, and it will still be there after the next powerup for him to reenter, gained security? Not a lot.
But what are DVD prices? Why does it cost 2x as much to get a DVD over a vhs tape when the DVD costs much less to make. DVDs can be made very quickly, a video tape must spend at least 15 minutes in a very expensive machine.
Simple answer because prices are not set to costs, by the companies, but orient themself on the willingness of people to pay. If they pay twice as much, they get it from them. The costs are only the lower end of the range where you can set your price.
Once again my sum, I read my own post and think the key expression could easily be mistakten.
I want to say, your favorite OS depends on your needs!
If only most people would finally recoqnize that. And not favorite the OS thats optimal for them over others who have different needs, without taking aspects on their needs. (Of course people do you OSes which are not optimal for them, but you have to take aspects on their needs if doing advice and advertisment, and not syllogise from you on others.
Windows is still a bad high-scale server OS. I don't want to say linux is one.
Like every product you can compare them. Linux is better in some issues and worser in others. Rate the OS performance on every issue, this can be done more or less objectivly. Now rate your importance level of every issue, multiply them by the OS perfomance and you get your favorite OS rate.
So it should be clear that with different importance aspects you optimal OS varies.
Linux has in example advantages in: * remote administration. * variable purchase costs (ZERO!) * maitenace possibilities by experts (full debugging possible) * security * security flaw -> patch aviableness turnaround speed * super special customisations (source code available) possible. * more professional maintenance possible. (For example if you have an error on a unix box, a professional unix adminstrator investigates scientifically where the error origins from, and then removes it once for all. How do engineers often pperate on windows boxes? (Seen (and done) this often enough myself. Your only real possiblity is to play around with the box (install random service packs, reinstall random software, turn this feature on-off-on-off, etc.) until the problem suddendly vanishes. You don't know for sure what it made it vanish, you don't know if it comes again, you don't know how to handle it more effectivly if it happens on an another box. Except of course some bug expirience. (I worked as intern in an offical microsoft service department, the best example for this was an install guide for a special hardware equipment, install the base OS, install service pack 2, install the driver, install service pack 3. If broke this order, start from new. Installing the driver with service pack 3 was not anymore possible:o)
Linux has drawbacks against windows at: * price of administrators. (A unix administrator costs much more than a MSCP) * acceptance on higher manager level (everybody know what windows is, but linux is just a heared of it once thing for non technicans) * most important possibility to run windows applications. (wine still ain't perfect) * ease of applications install (not of the OS itself! Believe installed several OSes on a lot of boxes, today suse linux in example install a lot easier) * on server level does not look like your home play OS * is not an OS you knew since childhood, and grew with you, you would have to learn something new. * availableness of games.
I think to summon up for linux the biggest drawback is the missing link from your home/childhood/secratary desktop OS, to your server OS. If for you this link is not important, and you don't care if the server runs a completly different software than the computer you played Doom on, a lot speaks for non windows systems (not only linux, but also i.e. solaris if it meets the requirements better).
It's a company, what would you expect?
Like what companies are supposed to do. To define which is(are) you buisiness area(s), you want to specialize in, and which are not yours, and you leave to others, and/or buy their services in.
Secondly a company needs to define which are it's key attributes that make it special, that make it better other different than the competeting ones. Yes microsoft has these attributes, if we like them or not. (Near-as-good enslavery of it's workers in 80 hour-weeks altough for a lot of money, their only valid marketing strategy is to be dominator of every market they look at etc.). So your companies attributes go well in some buisness areas, and bad in others. Choose those to be yours which match to your attributes. etc. etc. bla bla bla:o)
Well a possible explanation is as company or manager of it you have to do something. For example you own already 95% of the desktop os. So why investigate further there? There is not much to get anymore, investigate just as much as you need to hold that level, but you have resources left, you need to do something, so you don't know what to do, so you run behind every birdy that crosses your path.
"""The question is, is there a benefit to the public to award a time-limited monopoly (aka a patent) for those who bother to go out and discover these things, or isn't there one? If it benefits us, we should do it. If not, we shouldn't."""
Well the key qustion is, is an awarded monopoly (patent) the only possible benefit you get from discovering things, or are there others too?
The answer here is easy. I say of course there are a dozend others. Solving a problem, market benefit, social credit, lower costs, scientific inquisitiveness, etc.
However the key question once again is, how important is the patent benefit and how important are other benefits im comperasion?
I say this applies on the field, and has to be investigated for every field seperatly.
For software I say, there is a high benefit rate for just solving a given problem. Most of the times the competition can't reverse engineer your compiled solution anyway in a market relevant time.
So the important question is where do patents hinder development, and where do they asisst development?
Slashdot Mirror
1st there are some one sided valid contracts. The testament is in example one. One sided founding of a Ltd. limidet an another.
Because one of the principles is the right of pyshical integrity every natural person has from birth until death. It is a legal principle that this fundamental right cannot been taken away from him under no circumstances. (Or else slavery would be legal)
You cannot make a contract with another that allows you to hit him, even he signs.
The main reason why a lot of things are forbidden in contracts is because often unequal partners sign a contract. There are situations one partner has a lot more power than the other has. If legal judgment would put not limits in the contract the empowered side could force the other side into everything.
An example is the typcial consumer-company relationship. Where you as 0815 consumer sign a buying contract with a huge company. Here the law giver is looking very closely on the fingers of the companies not to exploit the people. (for example right of withdrawal in out-of-door business). etc.
Well just because something is written down does not make it legal or valid.
Take in example a contract about slavery. You can write down anything in there, it's just not valid. Contracts about drugs, etc. etc.
Same goes about warrenty. In example in germany the consumer protection law forbids companies to resign themself from warrenty. (However this only applies to company - consumer contracts, in their application field). private person to private person can buy/sell things excluiding warranty, and company to company also. But no typical consumer deals.
Some laws are substutave, meaning they can be changed in contracts, but some laws are forcefully, meaning you cannot change them.
True there are a lot of laws that cannot be bypassed by contract. Luckely. (Or I would write on my car: "Not responsilbe if I hit you")
However the GPL _is_ a contract, like any license is a contract. However in difference to most other contracts it is not signed or accepted explicitly. Under certain conditions contracts can also be accepted implied.
The famous school example is, you offer me to sell you car for 1.000$, I say I don't know yet, give me a week to think about it. You agree. The next day I transfer exactly 1.000$ to your bank account. In this case, without doubt my true intentions are visible, so the contract is valid.
The GPL is something similar, if you redistribute the application it, or modify it, you can only do this when you've accepted the license. So infront of court you can choose if you did not accept the license, and violated IP by distributing, or you accepted the license implicitly. Your choice.
Thats the way the implicit acceptance of the GPL works.
Browser are becoming a mature product in their product life cycle. Why does this need to be bad in the first place?
In our current society we all seem to have hard-wired relationships we don't dare to investigate.
old -> bad
new -> good
Why is everything old bad, or anything new supercool good without further reasoning?
(For example old europe. Okay europe is old, and we are proud of it! Why does Rumsfield think it's something bad?)
mature/less innovation -> bad
(Okay Linux is not really innovative itself. Unix is longer out there. And does this make it anything bad? It IMHO a supreme product anyway)
american way -> good
etc. maybe you find also some examples.
There is something important you forgot, you are not confronting one entity, but two. The ordering customer, and the entity sending the spams. These are usually different. One entity pays the other to send it's spam. The spam customer is not anonymous, the actual spam sender stays anonymous.
That was a taste of philosophy, dude not a lame excuse.
Why should I need to excuse myself?
Relevance is a relative field. It is not definined by the number of CPUs that run these.
Most CPUs on the world do not have any OS at all.
If the whole world would be runned by a central computer, would it's OS be relevant if it only runs on a single box? etc. etc.
You seem not to understand what the concept of java is. To let java applications run equally on all supported OSes. Of course you can make on any OS specific improvements when ignoring compability, but you're violating the concept them.
Second contracts are to be hold. Thats the base of our laws, if microsoft signs a contract they are obliged to it. Point and out. If the contract says not to modify the data they are obliged, no bla bla here or there.
OMG where has slashdot come to?
Instead of publishing every minor version release of linux, it also started publishing a story for every patch from microsoft.
Damm sorry microsoft signed the java license contract with sun, not the otherway around of course.
The base rulling is about sun signing a java license contract, which gave them access to the java technology and source code.
The license included that the JRE base classes may not be modified. And guess what did microsoft? The published a modified version.
Just or unjust?
Well sun did that. The contract says the java base classes MAY NOT BE MODIFIED: And now guess how much microsoft cared about that? They violated the contract, took sun code and published a modified java version that is incompatible with sun's.
Just or unjust?
So? Try reality, nothing also
f +Carrie-Anne+Moss
http://images.google.at/images&q=naked+pictures+o
arker, please do not take that personally, but I think you don't have a glimpse what routing means.
For example "Real" Routers tend to eat up a lot of memory. The IP Tables can grow up to eating hundrets of megabytes. No joke, the routing rules on a higher level are a lot more than your personal 192.168.x.x keep in house everything else let my ISP worry.
So in conditions they have AND need a lot of memory.
They tend to like have very fast buses, the backplanes (where the data runs over) running already for years at Gigaherz level. How fast does the "backplane" run on a even modern PC? The PCI bus doing the same task in PC world still runs at 100 Mhz maximum.
Next measurement you have to take is the response time you add, meaning packet comes in at port A, packet leaves at port B. The time it takes is the time you slow down the connection. Measure this time needed by a good router and the time needed by your P90.
And so on. I'm not telling your P90 can't do your job. But that does not make routers simple devices. Also even in the low end saying a companies decision is better at a P90 than a little router, is not as crystal clear as you want to believe. You have to add both costs for space, power consumsion, installation, maintance, dependence on current personal. The P90 is cheaper at the acquisition price, no doubt, but it is generally more expensive in all other areas.
As usual no exact data. Which provider, what throughput rates etc.
As this, this is a heard-once-somebody-saying story.
Note for example for a PC a packet to be routed it needs to be read by the hardware, read into memory, scanned the IP headers, and then wroten on the same bus outside on the network card again.
This is all slow.
For example a good router supports hardware routing meaning in a TCP connection the first packet is softrouted, and then all other packets are directed directly through the hardware, beside the CPU.
This is fast.
Let me add, """""PC routers are for people who don't see why they should waste money on a dedicated routing device when they have a P90 lying around that is already paid for"""",
and they do not any of these features:
* fast put through rates,
* high bandwidth through the router,
* more than a hand full of network ports,
* no fancy V-LANS,
* no central SNMP control and monitoring.
* no high reliability
* no brother devices (two routers controlling each other, don't ask me how it is called).
* no space limit in the server room.
* do not care the router is a PC and does not fit in a rack.
etc. etc.
It's a simple and cheap solution for people having simple needs, thats it, and thats good. But deriving from this that routing is a simple stuff is far off.
Sure, you can do the same thing with CDROM, although human nature being what is it that tends to encourage unecessary bloat
So you put hardware limits to guard your human design failures? stupid concept. Just don't bloat if you don't want to, or set yourself a softlimit.
Yes, you can even boot from hard disk and then unmount the disk. And then someone that compromises your appliance can remount it. Power it down?
Did you read what I wrote? Someone comprises the firewall! Okay thats already the worst thing that can happen. He can use it as relay, and he can take over power everytime he want again. He can access your private networks, he can sent mass spams, etc.etc.
If he now can change the harddisk additionally this is only a small addtional failure, which only simplifies his access next time, but thats already all to get.
Today you can power down almost every IDE or SCSI harddisk by software command. under linux issue as root:
"hdparm -Y". And you harddisk stops spinning
As simple as this. Put this at the end of the inittab and you got a quiet nice router.
Keep it simple. A router is a very simple device.
Not it is not. What do you think CISCO makes it money from? Making simplistic devices? Well when talking about a -real- -efficient- router it is a rather complicated device. With a PC and linux all you can do is soft routing which is rather slow, direkt routing on hardware is not possible. Look PC-Routers are for the poor. Meaing you need simple routing stuff does not say that there is not much about routing, it's a science itself. Those who need real routing should go out and by a CISCO.
Also a harddisk costs nothing. Especially since most PCs used for soft routing are old sorted out, having already a harddisk.
Floppies are unreliable? Sure they are. So what. You keep a disk image on your workstation and make a new one whenever need be. When the floppy goes bad you'll notice the next time you boot, and replace it. Big deal.
and whats about the continousity of service until you get to exchange the disk?
How about a CDROM? With all this haze about the disk size limit you can make an equal amount of security and service, while having a lot more reliable data carrier. (CDs have a yet to be determined living time).
And come on even with a normal hard disk bootup you can load as well everything in a ramdisk and then unmount and even unpower the harddisk. If someone manages to hack into the server, to power the harddisk, to mount it, and then to change it's data, okay. Well if he has that level of control already you lost already long time ago. So somebody hacks your firewall running from a floppy disk, okay he can't change the disk, but what does he want to do anyway? He want to use the firewall as relay, and nothing hinders him to, he got into it due to a bug, and it will still be there after the next powerup for him to reenter, gained security? Not a lot.
But what are DVD prices? Why does it cost 2x as much to get a DVD over a vhs tape when the DVD costs much less to make. DVDs can be made very quickly, a video tape must spend at least 15 minutes in a very expensive machine.
Simple answer because prices are not set to costs, by the companies, but orient themself on the willingness of people to pay. If they pay twice as much, they get it from them. The costs are only the lower end of the range where you can set your price.
Once again my sum, I read my own post and think the key expression could easily be mistakten.
I want to say, your favorite OS depends on your needs!
If only most people would finally recoqnize that. And not favorite the OS thats optimal for them over others who have different needs, without taking aspects on their needs. (Of course people do you OSes which are not optimal for them, but you have to take aspects on their needs if doing advice and advertisment, and not syllogise from you on others.
Windows is still a bad high-scale server OS. I don't want to say linux is one.
:o)
Like every product you can compare them. Linux is better in some issues and worser in others. Rate the OS performance on every issue, this can be done more or less objectivly. Now rate your importance level of every issue, multiply them by the OS perfomance and you get your favorite OS rate.
So it should be clear that with different importance aspects you optimal OS varies.
Linux has in example advantages in:
* remote administration.
* variable purchase costs (ZERO!)
* maitenace possibilities by experts (full debugging possible)
* security
* security flaw -> patch aviableness turnaround speed
* super special customisations (source code available) possible.
* more professional maintenance possible. (For example if you have an error on a unix box, a professional unix adminstrator investigates scientifically where the error origins from, and then removes it once for all. How do engineers often pperate on windows boxes? (Seen (and done) this often enough myself. Your only real possiblity is to play around with the box (install random service packs, reinstall random software, turn this feature on-off-on-off, etc.) until the problem suddendly vanishes. You don't know for sure what it made it vanish, you don't know if it comes again, you don't know how to handle it more effectivly if it happens on an another box. Except of course some bug expirience. (I worked as intern in an offical microsoft service department, the best example for this was an install guide for a special hardware equipment, install the base OS, install service pack 2, install the driver, install service pack 3. If broke this order, start from new. Installing the driver with service pack 3 was not anymore possible
Linux has drawbacks against windows at:
* price of administrators. (A unix administrator costs much more than a MSCP)
* acceptance on higher manager level (everybody know what windows is, but linux is just a heared of it once thing for non technicans)
* most important possibility to run windows applications. (wine still ain't perfect)
* ease of applications install (not of the OS itself! Believe installed several OSes on a lot of boxes, today suse linux in example install a lot easier)
* on server level does not look like your home play OS
* is not an OS you knew since childhood, and grew with you, you would have to learn something new.
* availableness of games.
I think to summon up for linux the biggest drawback is the missing link from your home/childhood/secratary desktop OS, to your server OS. If for you this link is not important, and you don't care if the server runs a completly different software than the computer you played Doom on, a lot speaks for non windows systems (not only linux, but also i.e. solaris if it meets the requirements better).
It's a company, what would you expect? Like what companies are supposed to do. To define which is(are) you buisiness area(s), you want to specialize in, and which are not yours, and you leave to others, and/or buy their services in. Secondly a company needs to define which are it's key attributes that make it special, that make it better other different than the competeting ones. Yes microsoft has these attributes, if we like them or not. (Near-as-good enslavery of it's workers in 80 hour-weeks altough for a lot of money, their only valid marketing strategy is to be dominator of every market they look at etc.). So your companies attributes go well in some buisness areas, and bad in others. Choose those to be yours which match to your attributes. etc. etc. bla bla bla :o)
Well a possible explanation is as company or manager of it you have to do something. For example you own already 95% of the desktop os. So why investigate further there? There is not much to get anymore, investigate just as much as you need to hold that level, but you have resources left, you need to do something, so you don't know what to do, so you run behind every birdy that crosses your path.
"""The question is, is there a benefit to the public to award a time-limited monopoly (aka a patent) for those who bother to go out and discover these things, or isn't there one? If it benefits us, we should do it. If not, we shouldn't."""
Well the key qustion is, is an awarded monopoly (patent) the only possible benefit you get from discovering things, or are there others too?
The answer here is easy. I say of course there are a dozend others. Solving a problem, market benefit, social credit, lower costs, scientific inquisitiveness, etc.
However the key question once again is, how important is the patent benefit and how important are other benefits im comperasion?
I say this applies on the field, and has to be investigated for every field seperatly.
For software I say, there is a high benefit rate for just solving a given problem. Most of the times the competition can't reverse engineer your compiled solution anyway in a market relevant time.
So the important question is where do patents hinder development, and where do they asisst development?
Okay, so I go first then you guys can follow ;)