copyrights are only good if someone is "actively trying to enforce them" - when you find a violation you must act.
I believe you are confusing copyright and trademark. Trademarks you have to protect because once they become common language - you lose them (think kleenex - if i send you to the store to pick up some kleenex and you come back with Puffs, I'm not going to scream because you did the wrong thing).
The work is going to be on our backs to locate even older code that SCO's predecessors used to write SYS V. I would raise the bar as well and go so far as to attempt to show that SCO's code was itself misappropriated.
Hey man... if we (figurative - the community - I personally have no code in the kernel tree) can split up the work to write the kernel, we can certainly divide an conquer any little bit of code they might throw at us.
You can win by betting against the bad stuff too. Every event has a true and false outcome. You can just as easily bet that the king of jordan will not be overthrown in the 3rd quarter.
I've got some karma to spend, so I'll say it - a certain amount of this will be good for the industry as a whole. A lot of the people getting weeded out by this outsourcing are the ones who took their classes to become a developer and "make the big bucks". Over time we'll realize that IT in the US will be left with the people who think up the cool stuff to do and leave it to the overseas grunts to actually execute.
You know -- that's a beautiful thought, but have you ever seen code that comes out of India? Someone I work with got stuck trying to optimize a package written in PHP with a Mysql backend. The code had places where the record set was being looped over in PHP to calculate the sum of one of the columns instead of a select sum(foo) from table; -- the code was filled with this kind of problem.
And don't get me started on Oracle financials. Talk about a broken product that is largely developed in India. Sure... It works, but it seems kludgy and also lacking any sort of clever hacks. Based on my digging through the schemas, it looks like they're doing constraint handling in the applications rather than using the DBMS to do it - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Outsourcing coding tasks to India is not going to improve the quality of code. You might get more LoC/$ - but we all know that LoC is not the way to measure the productivity of a programmer.
The problem is that they were parodying American McGee by using a registered trademark. They clearly weren't parodying Strawberry Shortcake - if they were, it would be more clear cut. Not that we wouldn't see a C&D letter anyways...
See... Being a young child through the 80s and having a younger sister, I knew about Strawberry Shortcake. Not being much of a gamer, I hadn't really heard about American McGee until that strip. I thought it was a parody of Strawberry Shortcake and was highly amused by it. After looking up American McGee, I'm inclined to believe that both were the target of the parody as it was clear to me that Strawberry Shortcake was the target.
If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25
I chose my ISP because they let me run my own domain for web or e-mail or whatever else. If you think for a second that they should force me to use their SMTP servers, you are missing something important. My mail server delivers directly to the recipients of mail. It doesn't relay. It only serves me. In order for the ISP to provide equivalent service, they would need to host e-mail for my domain as a virtual domain on their server. This seems like a service that would cost me more. I'm already paying a premium price for an AUP that I find acceptable, I shouldn't have to pay more for service that I could provide myself.
By the way, I love my ISP - their customer service is top notch and they are kind enough to provide me with reverse dns service. I don't think you can beat that.
I have had other ISPs decide that they should block incoming mail from all subnets of my ISP. This made it difficult to send e-mail to my mother, and they were very difficult when trying to resolve the issue. It was finally resolved, but they never got back to my request for information as to why they took their course of action or what I could do in the future to expedite the correction of that.
The Wildfires have not given me any reliability problems. The serial console subsystem is a glorious thing. ESC-ESC-scm sometime -- it's a lower level than the system console.
Beyond that, if you don't need an 8way or bigger box, the ES45 (or watch for the ES47 based on the EV7 series processor in the coming weeks) is probably a better bang for the buck proposition. Also the ES80 will be an 8-way ES series -- the notes I have suggest that it will be significantly cheaper. It's also been suggested that if one is spec'ing new systems now, budgeting for the GS80 and acquiring an ES80 when they're released is probably a better option.
We also use Alphas at work -- I love the GS series, I'm happy with the ES and DS series, but the GS series is some damn nice hardware.
I've got reliable sources at HP that tell me to watch for the ES47 and ES80 series boxen as well as the GS1280. All of them should smoke the current EV68 series Alphas. The product line overall is very impressive. The pure scalability of the EV7 architechture is most impressive.
Take a look at this Document from HP and try to keep yourself from drooling.
Though given my personal experience... 90% of the un-educated choose VB. (Almost all of the Web and Applications developers where I work have no college degree.)
Then again, I haven't met anybody that views web development as a serious application of computer science - and you should see some of the SQL queries these guys right -- joins and loops that are O(n!) or so.
I have a cell phone that serves me rather well, but it doesn't do much good if i forget it at home. I needed to get in touch with somebody while I was wandering around downtown Chicago and was looking for a payphone. After trying several L stations and finding the payphones there either behind the revolving gates (and not wanting to pay $1.50 just to use the phone) or not working, I ended up wandering to the one place that I knew had phones.
Would have been nice to find one on a street corner or something
last I checked, each instruction on the alpha architecture was 64 bits. I don't believe the Alpha ever ran Ultrix -- I believe the first unix to run on the Alpha was Digital Unix. And I've been quite impressed with the I/O bandwidth that I see in my systems (incidentally - running a database).
you know -- the current generation still rule
on
End In Sight For Alpha
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I know they had the megahertz win in the early days against intel, but man I love my alphas. The architecture of the entire system that DEC built around them is just so nice. Maybe it's because I haven't played with any E10K or better hardware from Sun or whatever HP has to compete on that level, but I wouldn't give up my Compaq GS series hardware for anything. Not to mention Tru64 and TruCluster -- I swear Tru64 has the best man pages of any Unix - free or commercial. I often find myself going to the Tru64 pages for info on various standard syscalls.
I don't think it's a wise move for HP -- I wish Compaq had known what they were buying when they bought Digital.
. ..glad you're not my lawyer - since nearly EVERY legal scholar agrees that the first amendment was indeed intended to protect political speech. It seems pretty "clear & direct to me" that YOU are entirely clueless on this subject.
I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. Ever legal scholar that I've dealt with will regard political speech as the top of the chain, but the First Amendment protects more than just political speech. It protects parody, expression, opinion, statements of fact etc. It may not protect all things - for instance slander and libel, or "fire" in a crowded theatre - but it certainly does protect more than just political speech.
I don't understand where you get the 1/10th of a Full Time Employee number.
I keep up with 4 or 5 opensource mailing lists and spend 1/10th of my time doing it. So, maybe a more appropriate amount would be 1/40th of a FTE at 80K/yr -- that's $2K/yr... roughly what you'd spend for your support contract with the other product.
Now -- about that support contract. We have support contracts for NetBackup (20% * purchase price/yr... i.e. $17K for our environment) - I have never called on these, NEVER. The online resources of the user community are far better and far faster than the support calls. Same for Tru64. Nothing beats mailing lists for response time and quality of answer. I have posed the same question to the e-mail list when i've called Compaq support (blame management -- i didn't want to call). The e-mail was sent out after the initial phone call, and I had the answer before the call back.
Your analysis is way off... Suppose you're a large company (fortune 500) -- you probably have at least 2500 desktop/laptops in the field (if not 50000). 2500 * $50 = $125000. Now -- suppose you have several open source products. say 5 -- that's $625000.
Now -- to support these apps you hire say 3 full time employees at the ~$90K range (after benefits that's maybe $135K each if you have a nice benefits package). That's $405000 -- $625000 - $405000 is a savings of $220000.
Ok... this is only first year layout and a major over estimate of support personel needed. In their spare time, these same 3 people, can maintain a good number of servers, develop new custom internal apps, enhance old apps, be subject matter experts available within the company and any number of other tasks. In reality, they'd probably be spending less than %15 of their total time on support of the open source desktop apps. So, that's $60750/yr to support those apps... less than 1/10 of the purchase price.
Intentia is one of the world's leading suppliers of collaboration solutions. Our vision is to become the leading global collaboration solutions vendor by supplying our customers with tomorrow's solutions today....
so -- they supply tomarrow's solutions today, but if reuters does it, it's a criminal act?
Can't say that I know any that guarantee security - I can name some that provide for extensive audit trail logging (for instance, any that qualify as C2 or higher). I can name some OS projects that at least state secuity as one of their primary goals (OpenBSD). I can name consulting groups that will provide services designed to minimize risk.
I realize, none of these is guaranteeing security - but there are some industries that have a right to demand it, particularly those using embedded systems at key points in control processes that may have direct impact on safety.
In presenting Microsoft's trustworthy computing initiative, Mundie defended the company's reluctance to follow through and accept legal responsibility for the security of its products. "If we took that responsibility, say for a big contract at Airbus, I would have to take out a giant insurance policy from Lloyds or another insurance broker, and pay a giant invoice," said Mundie. "The product would then cost not 50 euros, but 50 million."
It seems to me that if Microsoft didn't have the reputation that they have with regard to security and reliability, the insurance policy wouldn't cost 'em so much. Kinda like auto insurance -- those that prove they can drive responsibly for a period of time pay far less than somebody who crashes 3 times in a week.
If you need 50TB of online storage for a highly available application, count on buying triple that in disk. You'll likely be using SAN RAID controllers with snapshot capabilities to minimize or eliminate downtime necessary for backups. This is on top of mirroring and striping (RAID 1+0) which doubles your disk needs. Or, using less expensive controllers you could fake the snapshot mode (put the disk in 3 disk mirror sets, break one of the 3 out and reassemble a backup stripeset, mount that and back it up.
Your options in such a large environment are extensive - and managing it can get fun.
I pick my tools based on what works, not based on the marketing. I listen to other developers, check news groups and web commentary, and eventually pick the right tool for the job.
The better the tool, the faster word will spread but it's gotta be a significantly better tool for its intended purpose than what developers are already comfortable with otherwise they'll have no reason to switch. Picking up a new tool requires a temporary drop in productivity - the only way to offset this is to have it be much easier to work with in the long run.
We had a wireless network going across the street from the 9th floor of a building to something like the 7th floor of the one across the street using old lucent antennas sitting inside the buildings. through the glass. it worked just fine.
(these are the old yaggi in a tube ones from like 3 or 4 years ago -- i'm sure there's a more current solution)
If a company starts charging royalties without a patent having been granted, and the application is eventually denied, do those that paid the royalties have a recourse? Can somebody say "I don't believe you'll receive a patent so I'm not paying"?
First thing to do is ask them if they were happy with the level of support they had before. Since you are claiming that some goofballs messed things up, it's best to start with the goofballs and try to define what they did and didn't do right. I wouldn't expect most K-12 institutions to have a good network security policy in place.
In order to get one defined, you need to start talking to administrators. Find out which services they desire to provide and which they don't. Point out that most security and network use policies these days start by defining what you are allowed to do and blocking the rest of the traffic. Put out an request to the staff that they give you a list of applications that they use for purposes of education and then get a group together to review that list. If something strikes you as questionable, ask the person to justify it.
You'll also, more than likely, want to get a list put together of officially supported software and a procedure for getting a piece of software onto the officially supported list. This keeps people from coming to you and saying "I can't download files with Morpheus" because you can just say "Is it on this list? No? Then not my problem." Part of the process of getting something on that list might be a written justification of why it should be there, and for comercial software proof of license.
You don't want to be the only one makeing decisions. You should get a committee together. You'll want an administrator and a staff member on the committee. Decisions about what will and will not be supported will be made by the committee. You need these people because they understand the classroom, that's not your job.
If it comes to it, you might want to take a look at your job description. Figure out what parts of your job you can do, and which parts will need a more defined policy to enable you to do your job properly. This is important -- if your job description says "support educational activities requireing network access and use of the internet," whacking traffic that doesn't fall into those categories is clearly a part of your job as it increases bandwidth availability for educational purposes. When somebody complains, you need something you can point to for the purpose of defending your actions.
Start at the top, schedule some meetings with administrators and express your concerns to them. Most school administrators are reasonable people and when you explain that these things are necessary for a smooth running system they'll understand. Also, most school administrators are scared sh*tless of the words "potential lawsuit", don't be afraid to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is not lost due to lack of enforcement.
Of course, IANAL
You can win by betting against the bad stuff too. Every event has a true and false outcome. You can just as easily bet that the king of jordan will not be overthrown in the 3rd quarter.
You know -- that's a beautiful thought, but have you ever seen code that comes out of India? Someone I work with got stuck trying to optimize a package written in PHP with a Mysql backend. The code had places where the record set was being looped over in PHP to calculate the sum of one of the columns instead of a select sum(foo) from table; -- the code was filled with this kind of problem.
And don't get me started on Oracle financials. Talk about a broken product that is largely developed in India. Sure... It works, but it seems kludgy and also lacking any sort of clever hacks. Based on my digging through the schemas, it looks like they're doing constraint handling in the applications rather than using the DBMS to do it - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Outsourcing coding tasks to India is not going to improve the quality of code. You might get more LoC/$ - but we all know that LoC is not the way to measure the productivity of a programmer.
Not quite -- some bugs are good for open sores as they clean out the dead tissue and allow them to heal faster -- haven't you ever seen Gladiator :P
See... Being a young child through the 80s and having a younger sister, I knew about Strawberry Shortcake. Not being much of a gamer, I hadn't really heard about American McGee until that strip. I thought it was a parody of Strawberry Shortcake and was highly amused by it. After looking up American McGee, I'm inclined to believe that both were the target of the parody as it was clear to me that Strawberry Shortcake was the target.
I chose my ISP because they let me run my own domain for web or e-mail or whatever else. If you think for a second that they should force me to use their SMTP servers, you are missing something important. My mail server delivers directly to the recipients of mail. It doesn't relay. It only serves me. In order for the ISP to provide equivalent service, they would need to host e-mail for my domain as a virtual domain on their server. This seems like a service that would cost me more. I'm already paying a premium price for an AUP that I find acceptable, I shouldn't have to pay more for service that I could provide myself.
By the way, I love my ISP - their customer service is top notch and they are kind enough to provide me with reverse dns service. I don't think you can beat that.
I have had other ISPs decide that they should block incoming mail from all subnets of my ISP. This made it difficult to send e-mail to my mother, and they were very difficult when trying to resolve the issue. It was finally resolved, but they never got back to my request for information as to why they took their course of action or what I could do in the future to expedite the correction of that.
The Wildfires have not given me any reliability problems. The serial console subsystem is a glorious thing. ESC-ESC-scm sometime -- it's a lower level than the system console.
Beyond that, if you don't need an 8way or bigger box, the ES45 (or watch for the ES47 based on the EV7 series processor in the coming weeks) is probably a better bang for the buck proposition. Also the ES80 will be an 8-way ES series -- the notes I have suggest that it will be significantly cheaper. It's also been suggested that if one is spec'ing new systems now, budgeting for the GS80 and acquiring an ES80 when they're released is probably a better option.
We also use Alphas at work -- I love the GS series, I'm happy with the ES and DS series, but the GS series is some damn nice hardware.
I've got reliable sources at HP that tell me to watch for the ES47 and ES80 series boxen as well as the GS1280. All of them should smoke the current EV68 series Alphas. The product line overall is very impressive. The pure scalability of the EV7 architechture is most impressive.
Take a look at this Document from HP and try to keep yourself from drooling.
doht--s/right/write/
Though given my personal experience... 90% of the un-educated choose VB. (Almost all of the Web and Applications developers where I work have no college degree.)
Then again, I haven't met anybody that views web development as a serious application of computer science - and you should see some of the SQL queries these guys right -- joins and loops that are O(n!) or so.
I have a cell phone that serves me rather well, but it doesn't do much good if i forget it at home. I needed to get in touch with somebody while I was wandering around downtown Chicago and was looking for a payphone. After trying several L stations and finding the payphones there either behind the revolving gates (and not wanting to pay $1.50 just to use the phone) or not working, I ended up wandering to the one place that I knew had phones.
Would have been nice to find one on a street corner or something
last I checked, each instruction on the alpha architecture was 64 bits. I don't believe the Alpha ever ran Ultrix -- I believe the first unix to run on the Alpha was Digital Unix. And I've been quite impressed with the I/O bandwidth that I see in my systems (incidentally - running a database).
I know they had the megahertz win in the early days against intel, but man I love my alphas. The architecture of the entire system that DEC built around them is just so nice. Maybe it's because I haven't played with any E10K or better hardware from Sun or whatever HP has to compete on that level, but I wouldn't give up my Compaq GS series hardware for anything. Not to mention Tru64 and TruCluster -- I swear Tru64 has the best man pages of any Unix - free or commercial. I often find myself going to the Tru64 pages for info on various standard syscalls.
I don't think it's a wise move for HP -- I wish Compaq had known what they were buying when they bought Digital.
I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. Ever legal scholar that I've dealt with will regard political speech as the top of the chain, but the First Amendment protects more than just political speech. It protects parody, expression, opinion, statements of fact etc. It may not protect all things - for instance slander and libel, or "fire" in a crowded theatre - but it certainly does protect more than just political speech.
I don't understand where you get the 1/10th of a Full Time Employee number.
... i.e. $17K for our environment) - I have never called on these, NEVER. The online resources of the user community are far better and far faster than the support calls. Same for Tru64. Nothing beats mailing lists for response time and quality of answer. I have posed the same question to the e-mail list when i've called Compaq support (blame management -- i didn't want to call). The e-mail was sent out after the initial phone call, and I had the answer before the call back.
I keep up with 4 or 5 opensource mailing lists and spend 1/10th of my time doing it. So, maybe a more appropriate amount would be 1/40th of a FTE at 80K/yr -- that's $2K/yr... roughly what you'd spend for your support contract with the other product.
Now -- about that support contract. We have support contracts for NetBackup (20% * purchase price/yr
Suppose you're a large company (fortune 500) -- you probably have at least 2500 desktop/laptops in the field (if not 50000). 2500 * $50 = $125000. Now -- suppose you have several open source products. say 5 -- that's $625000.
Now -- to support these apps you hire say 3 full time employees at the ~$90K range (after benefits that's maybe $135K each if you have a nice benefits package). That's $405000 -- $625000 - $405000 is a savings of $220000.
Ok... this is only first year layout and a major over estimate of support personel needed. In their spare time, these same 3 people, can maintain a good number of servers, develop new custom internal apps, enhance old apps, be subject matter experts available within the company and any number of other tasks. In reality, they'd probably be spending less than %15 of their total time on support of the open source desktop apps. So, that's $60750/yr to support those apps... less than 1/10 of the purchase price.
so -- they supply tomarrow's solutions today, but if reuters does it, it's a criminal act?
Can't say that I know any that guarantee security - I can name some that provide for extensive audit trail logging (for instance, any that qualify as C2 or higher). I can name some OS projects that at least state secuity as one of their primary goals (OpenBSD). I can name consulting groups that will provide services designed to minimize risk.
I realize, none of these is guaranteeing security - but there are some industries that have a right to demand it, particularly those using embedded systems at key points in control processes that may have direct impact on safety.
It seems to me that if Microsoft didn't have the reputation that they have with regard to security and reliability, the insurance policy wouldn't cost 'em so much. Kinda like auto insurance -- those that prove they can drive responsibly for a period of time pay far less than somebody who crashes 3 times in a week.
If you need 50TB of online storage for a highly available application, count on buying triple that in disk. You'll likely be using SAN RAID controllers with snapshot capabilities to minimize or eliminate downtime necessary for backups. This is on top of mirroring and striping (RAID 1+0) which doubles your disk needs. Or, using less expensive controllers you could fake the snapshot mode (put the disk in 3 disk mirror sets, break one of the 3 out and reassemble a backup stripeset, mount that and back it up.
Your options in such a large environment are extensive - and managing it can get fun.
I pick my tools based on what works, not based on the marketing. I listen to other developers, check news groups and web commentary, and eventually pick the right tool for the job.
The better the tool, the faster word will spread but it's gotta be a significantly better tool for its intended purpose than what developers are already comfortable with otherwise they'll have no reason to switch. Picking up a new tool requires a temporary drop in productivity - the only way to offset this is to have it be much easier to work with in the long run.
We had a wireless network going across the street from the 9th floor of a building to something like the 7th floor of the one across the street using old lucent antennas sitting inside the buildings. through the glass. it worked just fine.
(these are the old yaggi in a tube ones from like 3 or 4 years ago -- i'm sure there's a more current solution)
If a company starts charging royalties without a patent having been granted, and the application is eventually denied, do those that paid the royalties have a recourse? Can somebody say "I don't believe you'll receive a patent so I'm not paying"?
First thing to do is ask them if they were happy with the level of support they had before. Since you are claiming that some goofballs messed things up, it's best to start with the goofballs and try to define what they did and didn't do right. I wouldn't expect most K-12 institutions to have a good network security policy in place.
In order to get one defined, you need to start talking to administrators. Find out which services they desire to provide and which they don't. Point out that most security and network use policies these days start by defining what you are allowed to do and blocking the rest of the traffic. Put out an request to the staff that they give you a list of applications that they use for purposes of education and then get a group together to review that list. If something strikes you as questionable, ask the person to justify it.
You'll also, more than likely, want to get a list put together of officially supported software and a procedure for getting a piece of software onto the officially supported list. This keeps people from coming to you and saying "I can't download files with Morpheus" because you can just say "Is it on this list? No? Then not my problem." Part of the process of getting something on that list might be a written justification of why it should be there, and for comercial software proof of license.
You don't want to be the only one makeing decisions. You should get a committee together. You'll want an administrator and a staff member on the committee. Decisions about what will and will not be supported will be made by the committee. You need these people because they understand the classroom, that's not your job.
If it comes to it, you might want to take a look at your job description. Figure out what parts of your job you can do, and which parts will need a more defined policy to enable you to do your job properly. This is important -- if your job description says "support educational activities requireing network access and use of the internet," whacking traffic that doesn't fall into those categories is clearly a part of your job as it increases bandwidth availability for educational purposes. When somebody complains, you need something you can point to for the purpose of defending your actions.
Start at the top, schedule some meetings with administrators and express your concerns to them. Most school administrators are reasonable people and when you explain that these things are necessary for a smooth running system they'll understand. Also, most school administrators are scared sh*tless of the words "potential lawsuit", don't be afraid to use it.