Uhm.. The "ambulance chasers" were Caldera and the "body" was SCO. The ambulance chasers then quickly assumed the identity of the body and pursued a new career as evil undead...
Yes, there's new management, and I'm sure the engineers at SCO are good enough guys, but the company suing is what used to be Caldera.
IBM has also done nothing to reveal their intended defence. Which is important. Keep in mind that the judge is required to disregard what is reported in the media and consider only the evidence.
So SCO may get attention from media, but not from the judge, and at the same time they keep on blabbering, giving interview after interview, releasing statement after statement that all give IBMs lawyers plenty of information about SCOs strategy, and also give SCO plenty of opportunity to let slip unfortunate statements that might hurt their case if introduced into evidence (which IBM without doubt will attempt)
IBM on the other hand have given SCO nothing.
SCO is doing all this because they have to - they know they don't have a case, and their only hope is dragging this out and making it so painful that someone decides the best way is to write them a fat check. But at the same time they are increasing the risk that they will give IBM too much ammunition.
Personally I don't think IBM will budge. Sure, it might be safer to just pay off SCO, but if they do they'll be targetted by every failing tech company out there.
A country or other jurisdiction (e.g., state, province, etc.) may either: (a) not have either statutory or case law that makes reverse engineering illegal, in which case it would be legal (i.e., that which is not legally forbidden is permitted); or (b) have either statutory or case law that affirmatively states reverse engineering is permitted.
You entirely miss the point. Most countries in the world have laws that explicitly make reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability legal and make any license provisions or contract clauses stating otherwise null and void.
This includes most of Europe - In almost any European country you can not be forced to sign away your right to reverse engineer a product for the purpose of interoperability.
The key questions are as follows. Why should you not be forced to abide by your voluntary, contractual promise? Do we really want the government to say that we don't have the *freedom* to make such binding contracts and promises?
Because some rights are so fundamental and important that they need particular protection. By making it impossible to sign them away, there is nothing to be gained from trying to trick or coerce you into signing them away.
Your freedom has that status in any country on earth: You can't sign yourself into slavery. The reason is that if it were possible, your freedom would be weakened - you could be coerced or tricked into signing it away, and could never change your mind.
Many less vital rights are also protected in the same way: In most countries you can't sign away certain health and safety protections for the workplace, and can't sign away protections against unfair dismissal and similar rights, because the difference in strength between employee and employer in many cases would render the protections worthless if you could sign them away, in particular for the employees with least leverage who would be most likely to suffer from it.
Similarly, reverse engineering is protected in most countries because the right to compete in the marketplace is seen as paramount to a free market in most of the world, and preventing reverse engineering would create massive barriers to entry, and massive potential for consumer lock in.
There are literally hundreds or thousands of rights you have that you can't sign away, or can't sign away without getting specific concessions in return. They are usually there because you would have LESS freedom without them.
I dialled into a local BBS that exchanged e-mail and news via UUCP four times a day. Thanks to various web, ftp and gopher to e-mail services, I was "surfing" with a 6-12 hour delay between request and reply... That was back in '93. A year later I finally got "proper" dialup access to an ISP running Linux 1.0.something...
Bah. Some of us just used a wire on the right pins of the user port - no need for a reset switch...:) And holer for the 5.25" disks? Way too hi tech, a pair of scissors will do just fine.
As someone else have mentioned, it will probably lead to language homogenization, not to stabilisation. On the contrary, I think the internet will lead to more rapid change. Look at the changes that chatrooms and cellphones have led to: A long series of abbreviations are now commondly understood and more or less used as words.
The thing is, the internet means that people all over the world will get exposed to new trends and new words much quicker, making it less likely that different languages will evolve in different directions, but massively increase the number of new words we come in contact with. Some will gain popularity.
Sigh... C descended from BCPL, hence the long standing joke from before C++ of whether the next language would be called D or P. However C++0x isn't a new language, it is the working name for the next version of the C++ standard, just as previous C standards are nicknamed C89 and C99 after the language and year they were completed, and the previous version of the C++ standard is often referred to as C++98. The "0x" is meant to reflex that the new version of the standard is likely to be done sometime this decade, without tieing anyone down to a specific year.
So the "right around the corner" in the article is perhaps a little bit optimistic - they've just barely started working on the new version.
Because we are now getting compilers that properly handle the C++ standard, so it is finally time to start addressing more of the ideas and concerns people have.
While I don't like Reagan, your message is almost entirely devoid of facts. Yes, the Soviet Union (as opposed to Russia, the SSSR consisted of 15 countries, not only Russia) has massive internal problems. However lack of infrastructure, food, water and heat was not among them - people might have had problems getting some types of food (meat, for instance), but the Soviet Union did manage to feed it's population, being nearly self sufficient with most basic food items. It did develop a dependency on grain imports, though, in large part from USA, except for a short period when Carter used a grain embargo to try to punish the SSSR for the invasion of Afghanistan.
Guess who lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union? Reagan.
Regarding infrastructure, the Soviet Union invested a lot in solid infrastructure, in part because it was vital for their massive investments in heavy industries, which depended a lot on solid communications links, electricity and water. Lack of privately owned cars also led to significant investments in building out a large public transport system.
As for Reagans contribution to the end of the cold war, he did certainly have something to do with it. When Gorbachev started opening up the Soviet Union from 85/86 onwards, Reagan did grab the opportunity to start nuclear disarmament. One can discuss whether he could have done more, and he certainly could have done without the massive military expenditure, however trying to pretend he didn't have anything to do with it shows a complete lack of historical perspective.
Could someone else have done better? Possibly, but that would be based purely on speculation
Personally I massively disliked Reagan, but I can still admit that he did take steps towards ending the cold war that were important at the time, even if I see his time as a president mostly as a disaster.
More often than not the data I work on don't fit naturally in a relational structure. A lot of data is more naturally structured in tree structures or graph structures than in a matrix. One of the reasons I like XML is because it fits my data much better than a matrix.
If you feel the pressure to do something quick and dirty, document it.
Don't be strict about development process, be strict about requirements. If your manager want something done quick and dirty, write up a list of the requirements he's asking for, and a short proposal on how to deliver in multiple phases, phase one being the quick and dirty one. Make sure you include a list of risks with launching after completing phase one instead of waiting until completion of the project, and a list of risks of not following up with the fixes/rewrite/whatever.
Insist on signoff, especially if doing it the quick and dirty way would violate your internal processes.
Will the American public be reluctant to be snow-jobbed by this inevitable PR campaign? Or will there be a linger of distrust--especially if WMDs are never found in Iraq? Will common sense prevail?
Stay tuned.
Keep in mind the worrying number of Americans who do believe that WMDs HAVE been found, even if it isn't the case. And the even scarier amount of people who even believe that Iraq USED WMDs in the war....
If that many believe WMDs have been found, how many can be tricked into accepting fantasies about how the war "forced" Hussein into destroying them quickly and other bullshit to counteract any distrust? The same survey referred to in the link above also point out how high the support still was for the war at that point.
It might be possible to prevent the Patriot act from being extended, but not if one relies on the distrust of the public - it will take MASSIVE work to get people to understand what's at stake.
Still, the US is frequently seen by people outside the US as having one of the most brutal, least just legal systems in western world. Contrary to people from the US on here, I don't live in a country where I could end up being detained indefinently without access to a lawyer and without charges if the government decided I was troublesome enough that they'd like to pretend I might be a terrorist, or pretend I might potentially be a material witness for some case.
I know lots of good Americans, and lots of Americans that oppose these laws, but there's still plenty of people in the US who need to realize that perhaps it's time to spend a bit more time worrying about having a mass murdering (see, the death penalty is considered barbaric in most of the civilized world) fascist wannabe (who have done more to take away your rights, and those of anyone unfortunate enough to be in areas under US occupation?) in the White house than trying to police the rest of the world (who, incidentally, would be much more likely to be friendly to Americans if US governments didn't keep on installing and overthrowing murderous dictators on a regular basis, depending on who they prefer today)
And you'd also stop legitimate emergency phone calls or pages, such as from a hospital trying to get hold of a surgeon or similar. As for eliminating the cameras, I wonder what phones you've seen - mine has a few MB's for storage, and it's certainly not top of the range (I couldn't care less about the camera, it came as a free add on, I bought the phone because it's triband, since I do occasionally travel to the US)
Yesterday Software Images declined to do the job, citing intellectual property concerns.
When questioned by the Herald on Friday, Software Images chief executive Allan Morton said his company's wariness of Linux was due to legal action between SCO and Linux over intellectual property issues.
Boies is the least of their cost factors. Remember that as part of this action, they've shut down their Linux sales, they're going through an unprecedented PR backlash that got to affect their sales (people might be worried about Linux, but SCO customers should be seriously worried about what happens to SCO if they either get bought out - IBM doesn't need their technology, and would be likely to just shut them down - or lose, and likely end up on a slippery slope to bankrupcy), as well as the huge costs they'll be incurring in making large parts of their management team spend most of their time focusing on a case that is drawing all attention away from driving sales.
SCO will be extremely lucky if they manage to survive long enough to benefit from any semi-positive outcome (for them) of this case.
Or SCO is eager to show that Microsoft isn't the reason they are suing. So far any action against Microsoft is only words, and being seen as a friend of Microsoft would hurt SCO's credibility even further.
Keep in mind that shorting a stock without either ordering your broker to sell if the share goes too much up or buying options to guarantee you a way out is VERY RISKY. A short sale without any protective measures essentially exposes you to an UNLIMITED potential loss, instead of "just" the risk of losing the original investment as with long orders.
And many works that aren't commercially viable for the copyright owner would be for someone else. Take old movies, for instance, for the large movie studios a large number of their old movies are worthless. It would require a lot of work for them to restore the movies, and it would cost them a lot to relaunch the movie. Additionally they might have to identify other copyright holders, for instance the composer of the music for the movie etc. that they would have to pay royalties for.
The moment the copyrights involved lapse, the cost (even if excluding any royalty payments due) of republishing the work drops dramatically. A third party that might be unable to justify the cost in identifying all the parties that hold copyrights over parts of the work and the cost in negotiating deals with those parties (even if some might forfeit payments etc.) will fall away.
Suddenly many works that have been too expensive to justify republishing might be made available simply because costs have dropped enough that a small company would be able to make a profit of the works even if the sales will be low.
It isn't even necessarily a matter of being profitable or not, but about return on investment. Any company have a limited amount of cash available, and have to make a judgement as to what projects will give them the highest return on their invested capital. If restoring and relaunching an old movie, or republishing an old book only give a projected return on investment of 10% and all your other planned projects have a projected return on investment of 11% or more, it doesn't make financial sense to dig out your old works even if profitable.
But for someone else it might make sense, if they don't have to pay huge sums to get rights to the work. And someone else might even be able to wring higher profits out of it because they're better at reaching the market segments the work would sell to.
Tell that to your sales and marketing team. Or for that matter ANY team in most corporate settings. People treat mail as mostly reliable and instant. If it's an important mail they might call to verify that it got there, but they still expect delivery to be instant.
The point isn't to have a guarantee, but that 99.9% of the time the mail gets there and quickly, so that people can get documents back and forth in electronic form.
If you haven't seen this pattern in mail usage, you can't have been involved in much corporate document exchange.
Often a five minutes delay might be enough to have someone call you to ask where the mail with the document they're waiting for is.
Anything that delays e-mail is simply not an option.
To me publishing a paper in a peer reviewed journal instead of on the web would mean that I'd expect audience to be reduced to a ridiculously small fraction of people that might be interested. If I wanted to publish something I'd do it on the web first, and if it stacks up people I respect would start talking about it and link to it.
Yes, I realize that for "serious" science still expect things to be published in peer reviewed journals, but in most cases I can't help but think that getting the article out there would be more useful. Sure, peer review is important, and somewhere to look for some kind of verification of the value of a paper is useful. But I much prefer the Research Index way, where I can get a good indication of the value of a paper by looking at how many people have cited a paper and WHO have cited a paper.
Anyway, pretending that putting up a document on a website is somehow less publishing a paper than having it printed in a journal, is just plain elitist. You should propably be a bit more critical to papers that are published that you don't know have been through a proper review, especially if you're not a domain expert yourself, but being aware of the source is something that you always need to be.
Agreed. I've been involed in operating a larger (hundreds of thousands of active users) mail system a couple of years ago, and users would complain if their mail took more than seconds. We had to upgrade our system at one point because rapid growth had made mail delivery take a couple of minutes on average, and it caused bad publicity - a lot of users had a clear expectation that e-mail should be delivered in a few seconds and that if it didn't something was wrong.
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.
No, what he is saying is that he agreed to get paid for the kind of results one could deliver within a normal 8 hour workday (though 8 hour is becoming the exception here in Europe, most countries in the EU at least is at 7.5 or below), not twice that.
If management screw up and agree to too short timelines, that is not his fault, and not his responsibility to fix.
In fact, he has no responsibility for advancing the interests of the company - he has a responsibility for carrying out the duties assigned to him in his employment contract. Just as his managers have no responsibility for giving a shit about him, in fact they have a duty to the companys shareholders to exploit him and his coworkers as much as they can within the law in order to maximize profits.
Your employer has no duty to treat you well outside what is mandated by your country's labor laws. That's why millions of people have fought (and many lost their lives, shot by police or executed for crimes they didn't commit, including a significant number in the US) to strengthen labor laws, and ensure adequate protection for workers. Yet people in the US seem to have forgotten the history of their labor movement completely and have this twisted idea that you're not allowed to fight back against your employers when you're mistreated.
It's sad, considering that the US labor movement used to be on the forefront of organized action, kickstarting the fight for the 8 hour working day, and even spawning May day as the international day of labor demonstrations.
The fight of a single employer against a company is significantly uneven. The companys livelihood isn't at stake if you leave, yours is. That's the entire purpose of a union: To put employers and employees on an equal footing in negotiations. But Americans seem to have forgotten that properly run unions have nothing in common with the mob rackets and self serving parasites that some of the more infamous US unions was or is.
Asking people to suck it up is defeatism. Do you ask companies hit by strike to suck it up and give in to everything too? If not, why not? Why should employees allow themselves to be pushed around if employers aren't expected to?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there's new management, and I'm sure the engineers at SCO are good enough guys, but the company suing is what used to be Caldera.
So SCO may get attention from media, but not from the judge, and at the same time they keep on blabbering, giving interview after interview, releasing statement after statement that all give IBMs lawyers plenty of information about SCOs strategy, and also give SCO plenty of opportunity to let slip unfortunate statements that might hurt their case if introduced into evidence (which IBM without doubt will attempt)
IBM on the other hand have given SCO nothing.
SCO is doing all this because they have to - they know they don't have a case, and their only hope is dragging this out and making it so painful that someone decides the best way is to write them a fat check. But at the same time they are increasing the risk that they will give IBM too much ammunition.
Personally I don't think IBM will budge. Sure, it might be safer to just pay off SCO, but if they do they'll be targetted by every failing tech company out there.
You entirely miss the point. Most countries in the world have laws that explicitly make reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability legal and make any license provisions or contract clauses stating otherwise null and void.
This includes most of Europe - In almost any European country you can not be forced to sign away your right to reverse engineer a product for the purpose of interoperability.
The key questions are as follows. Why should you not be forced to abide by your voluntary, contractual promise? Do we really want the government to say that we don't have the *freedom* to make such binding contracts and promises?
Because some rights are so fundamental and important that they need particular protection. By making it impossible to sign them away, there is nothing to be gained from trying to trick or coerce you into signing them away.
Your freedom has that status in any country on earth: You can't sign yourself into slavery. The reason is that if it were possible, your freedom would be weakened - you could be coerced or tricked into signing it away, and could never change your mind.
Many less vital rights are also protected in the same way: In most countries you can't sign away certain health and safety protections for the workplace, and can't sign away protections against unfair dismissal and similar rights, because the difference in strength between employee and employer in many cases would render the protections worthless if you could sign them away, in particular for the employees with least leverage who would be most likely to suffer from it.
Similarly, reverse engineering is protected in most countries because the right to compete in the marketplace is seen as paramount to a free market in most of the world, and preventing reverse engineering would create massive barriers to entry, and massive potential for consumer lock in.
There are literally hundreds or thousands of rights you have that you can't sign away, or can't sign away without getting specific concessions in return. They are usually there because you would have LESS freedom without them.
The good old days :)
Bah. Some of us just used a wire on the right pins of the user port - no need for a reset switch... :) And holer for the 5.25" disks? Way too hi tech, a pair of scissors will do just fine.
The thing is, the internet means that people all over the world will get exposed to new trends and new words much quicker, making it less likely that different languages will evolve in different directions, but massively increase the number of new words we come in contact with. Some will gain popularity.
So the "right around the corner" in the article is perhaps a little bit optimistic - they've just barely started working on the new version.
Because we are now getting compilers that properly handle the C++ standard, so it is finally time to start addressing more of the ideas and concerns people have.
Guess who lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union? Reagan.
Regarding infrastructure, the Soviet Union invested a lot in solid infrastructure, in part because it was vital for their massive investments in heavy industries, which depended a lot on solid communications links, electricity and water. Lack of privately owned cars also led to significant investments in building out a large public transport system.
As for Reagans contribution to the end of the cold war, he did certainly have something to do with it. When Gorbachev started opening up the Soviet Union from 85/86 onwards, Reagan did grab the opportunity to start nuclear disarmament. One can discuss whether he could have done more, and he certainly could have done without the massive military expenditure, however trying to pretend he didn't have anything to do with it shows a complete lack of historical perspective.
Could someone else have done better? Possibly, but that would be based purely on speculation
Personally I massively disliked Reagan, but I can still admit that he did take steps towards ending the cold war that were important at the time, even if I see his time as a president mostly as a disaster.
Because the US government is disliked almost everywhere in the world, and Slashdot have a large number of non-US readers.
More often than not the data I work on don't fit naturally in a relational structure. A lot of data is more naturally structured in tree structures or graph structures than in a matrix. One of the reasons I like XML is because it fits my data much better than a matrix.
If you feel the pressure to do something quick and dirty, document it.
Don't be strict about development process, be strict about requirements. If your manager want something done quick and dirty, write up a list of the requirements he's asking for, and a short proposal on how to deliver in multiple phases, phase one being the quick and dirty one. Make sure you include a list of risks with launching after completing phase one instead of waiting until completion of the project, and a list of risks of not following up with the fixes/rewrite/whatever.
Insist on signoff, especially if doing it the quick and dirty way would violate your internal processes.
Keep in mind the worrying number of Americans who do believe that WMDs HAVE been found, even if it isn't the case. And the even scarier amount of people who even believe that Iraq USED WMDs in the war....
If that many believe WMDs have been found, how many can be tricked into accepting fantasies about how the war "forced" Hussein into destroying them quickly and other bullshit to counteract any distrust? The same survey referred to in the link above also point out how high the support still was for the war at that point.
It might be possible to prevent the Patriot act from being extended, but not if one relies on the distrust of the public - it will take MASSIVE work to get people to understand what's at stake.
I know lots of good Americans, and lots of Americans that oppose these laws, but there's still plenty of people in the US who need to realize that perhaps it's time to spend a bit more time worrying about having a mass murdering (see, the death penalty is considered barbaric in most of the civilized world) fascist wannabe (who have done more to take away your rights, and those of anyone unfortunate enough to be in areas under US occupation?) in the White house than trying to police the rest of the world (who, incidentally, would be much more likely to be friendly to Americans if US governments didn't keep on installing and overthrowing murderous dictators on a regular basis, depending on who they prefer today)
And you'd also stop legitimate emergency phone calls or pages, such as from a hospital trying to get hold of a surgeon or similar. As for eliminating the cameras, I wonder what phones you've seen - mine has a few MB's for storage, and it's certainly not top of the range (I couldn't care less about the camera, it came as a free add on, I bought the phone because it's triband, since I do occasionally travel to the US)
Yesterday Software Images declined to do the job, citing intellectual property concerns.
When questioned by the Herald on Friday, Software Images chief executive Allan Morton said his company's wariness of Linux was due to legal action between SCO and Linux over intellectual property issues.
SCO will be extremely lucky if they manage to survive long enough to benefit from any semi-positive outcome (for them) of this case.
Or SCO is eager to show that Microsoft isn't the reason they are suing. So far any action against Microsoft is only words, and being seen as a friend of Microsoft would hurt SCO's credibility even further.
Keep in mind that shorting a stock without either ordering your broker to sell if the share goes too much up or buying options to guarantee you a way out is VERY RISKY. A short sale without any protective measures essentially exposes you to an UNLIMITED potential loss, instead of "just" the risk of losing the original investment as with long orders.
The moment the copyrights involved lapse, the cost (even if excluding any royalty payments due) of republishing the work drops dramatically. A third party that might be unable to justify the cost in identifying all the parties that hold copyrights over parts of the work and the cost in negotiating deals with those parties (even if some might forfeit payments etc.) will fall away.
Suddenly many works that have been too expensive to justify republishing might be made available simply because costs have dropped enough that a small company would be able to make a profit of the works even if the sales will be low.
It isn't even necessarily a matter of being profitable or not, but about return on investment. Any company have a limited amount of cash available, and have to make a judgement as to what projects will give them the highest return on their invested capital. If restoring and relaunching an old movie, or republishing an old book only give a projected return on investment of 10% and all your other planned projects have a projected return on investment of 11% or more, it doesn't make financial sense to dig out your old works even if profitable.
But for someone else it might make sense, if they don't have to pay huge sums to get rights to the work. And someone else might even be able to wring higher profits out of it because they're better at reaching the market segments the work would sell to.
The point isn't to have a guarantee, but that 99.9% of the time the mail gets there and quickly, so that people can get documents back and forth in electronic form.
If you haven't seen this pattern in mail usage, you can't have been involved in much corporate document exchange.
Often a five minutes delay might be enough to have someone call you to ask where the mail with the document they're waiting for is.
Anything that delays e-mail is simply not an option.
Yes, I realize that for "serious" science still expect things to be published in peer reviewed journals, but in most cases I can't help but think that getting the article out there would be more useful. Sure, peer review is important, and somewhere to look for some kind of verification of the value of a paper is useful. But I much prefer the Research Index way, where I can get a good indication of the value of a paper by looking at how many people have cited a paper and WHO have cited a paper.
Anyway, pretending that putting up a document on a website is somehow less publishing a paper than having it printed in a journal, is just plain elitist. You should propably be a bit more critical to papers that are published that you don't know have been through a proper review, especially if you're not a domain expert yourself, but being aware of the source is something that you always need to be.
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.
Not to mention that his loss is also expected return on investment for any profit reinvested.
If management screw up and agree to too short timelines, that is not his fault, and not his responsibility to fix.
In fact, he has no responsibility for advancing the interests of the company - he has a responsibility for carrying out the duties assigned to him in his employment contract. Just as his managers have no responsibility for giving a shit about him, in fact they have a duty to the companys shareholders to exploit him and his coworkers as much as they can within the law in order to maximize profits.
Your employer has no duty to treat you well outside what is mandated by your country's labor laws. That's why millions of people have fought (and many lost their lives, shot by police or executed for crimes they didn't commit, including a significant number in the US) to strengthen labor laws, and ensure adequate protection for workers. Yet people in the US seem to have forgotten the history of their labor movement completely and have this twisted idea that you're not allowed to fight back against your employers when you're mistreated.
It's sad, considering that the US labor movement used to be on the forefront of organized action, kickstarting the fight for the 8 hour working day, and even spawning May day as the international day of labor demonstrations.
The fight of a single employer against a company is significantly uneven. The companys livelihood isn't at stake if you leave, yours is. That's the entire purpose of a union: To put employers and employees on an equal footing in negotiations. But Americans seem to have forgotten that properly run unions have nothing in common with the mob rackets and self serving parasites that some of the more infamous US unions was or is.
Asking people to suck it up is defeatism. Do you ask companies hit by strike to suck it up and give in to everything too? If not, why not? Why should employees allow themselves to be pushed around if employers aren't expected to?