You like most other slashdot folks are mixing your metaphors, or IP jargon. Trademarks must be inforced or you lose them, patents not so much. You can selectively enforce patents all you want. The "statute of limitations" on patents is 24 years, or however long patents are good for now... As long as your patent is valid you can sue infringers of that patent.
My main beef with these patents is the following: They patented not doing something. They got a patent on NOT charging late fees. I should patent NOT writing programs as a business model, and then sue all non-software development companies for infringement. How can not doing something be patentable. Also there are tons of companies that provide "all for one" services applying a pricing scheme shouldn't be patentable.
Transfering a call and three way calling is listed as a "feature request", I don't know how you can possibly recommend such obviously alpha telephony software.
I'm not trying to say that Asterisk is the end all be all, its not, and maybe Yate will come up and be a better solution, but right now, without basic PBX features, it is not.
Either that or they could have created some other rules basically dilution rules, stating that their 64% were not subject to dilution (or diluted at a rate of 1% or something) and then issued a couple hundred million shares, basically diluting allens 36% down to nothing, and keeping their 64% stake. At the time back in '82 I'm sure MS only had a couple million shares on the books.. Basically it would work like this:
Say MS had 1 million shares, bill has 64% or 640,000, allen has 360,000... They pass a rule stating that their 640000 aren't subject to dilution (IE any new stock issues they get 64% of) and then proceed to issue 100 million shares... they now have 64,000,000 shares, they stick 35,640,000 shares in a trust to be given to future employees (or sold on the market, or whatever) and allen is left with his 360,000 shares which are now 1/3 of 1% of the company. Thus, he (or his heirs) are effectively removed from any meaningful involvment in the company, and they don't have to give anything (cash or otherwise to them).
This would be totally legal, and 100% possible given majority voting rights.
It is sometimes ok to break backwards compat... However, the way mozilla/firefox does it is not good. As a one time extension developer I can attest to your example. When 1.5 came out, and the entire extension structure changed, I simply abandoned the 6 extensions I was working on...
They are not updated to 1.5, and I have no plans to do so, because I spent a considerable amount of time building, creating, and maintaining these extensions and the amount of time I would have to spend to relearn and redo them is not worth it to me. And guess what! They are doing it again for 2.0 the whole extension mechanism is going to be redone once more, so if I update to 1.5, I'll just have to relearn again in a few months.
On the other hand, GCC has broken compat multiple times, and its relatively painless to go in and fix the bits of code and recompile.... I use apache 2.0 in everything I do, I really doubt your claim that "no one" uses it... It comes standard in all the distros now, and yeah if you have something that is completely dependant on 1.3, maybe you're still running it.
Anyway, your arguments all fall down on the following fact: Hey at least with open source you can keep using 1.3 for as long as you want. You can keep using gcc 2.96 for as long as you want. You can keep using firefox 1.0 for as long as you want. and if you need a fix, you have to code it yourself or pay someone a small fee to come code a fix, but its not like dealing with MS.
MS broke merge letters with dynamic queries in Office 2003. Plain and simple doesn't work anymore (worked fine in 97, 2k, and XP). I work in the legal industry, they use this feature ALL THE TIME. I have spent months in the last 2 years "downgrading" law offices to office xp and 2000 after they upgraded entire offices to 2003 and found that it broke everything... (BTW I did spend the requisite hours/days messing with MS tech support and they finally gave up and said "Yeah I guess that's not supported anymore") and I'm not even talking about using a non ms database (all access or SQL server). There is no fix, the feature is simply not supported anymore, and there is no choice but to keep running the old software, and support/fixes/security fixes will be impossible in another year (2000 support is phased out).
The point is with MS you're stuck, if they break backwards compat (and don't say they never do because they do), you either pound sand and "upgrade" and lose needed functionality, or you keep using the old software that works, but is riddled with security holes that can't/never will be fixed. With OSS you can keep using the old software and at least get security fixes, or someone will code a fix in the new software eventually, and the same features will be available and you can upgrade, either way, you aren't left out in the cold.
Unfortunately if this does go through, more than 90% of all internet users at some point use AT&T, Verizon, or Qwest. Almost all internet traffic hits these networks at some point (try doing a traceroute to a few hundred sites, see how few don't sit on or across one of those networks). Even newer WAN networks will have to use the telco's for backbone access, and there lies the rub. If they are allowed to do this, it will be the end, no one will be able to create a new and innovative web service, because as soon as it gets popular their ISP bills will go through the roof as they have to pay extra just to keep their site up and functional to 90% of all US users.
Basically what they are proposing is double billing all successful internet companies, you pay your regular ISP bill (to XO, or whoever) and then you pay your "User access fee" or "Backbone Access Fee" directly to the backbone providers for however many users they determine went from their network to yours, and you'll get a bill from each "backbone" provider separately, it will be an impossible mess.
What this should do is make P2P technologies the only way to provide a decent internet based service... If you can get your customers to host your service for you somehow so that all of the hits to your site are spread out all over the internet in a P2P manner, then the telcos won't be able to bill you like this, but that's the only way I can see to get around this.
Except as the article states and then quickly dusts under the carpet, this only applies to their parked domains which host no services, no actual sites, and are just place holders. They won't be developing any applications for these domains anyway.
If they were moving actual hosting to windows, then maybe this would be real news, but they can't do that, actual hosting requires offering windows and linux as the platform, they aren't going to force their customers to rewrite all of their php/apache/mysql web sites in asp/iis/sql server
Saying in some countries it may be illegal is not the same as saying "This is illegal". I do know the difference between "illegal" and "wrong". I watch DVDs in Linux all the time, which is "illegal" but I paid for the DVDs and therefore feel absolutely no remorse over breaking the DMCA to watch a movie that I paid for.
I just can't understand how you could think this wouldn't be wrong, it would be wrong just for the copyright violation. It would be akin to distributing modified GPL'd software without distributing the source code for your changes. The price you pay for using GPL'd software is you have to give away your source when you contribute, and the price for windows is measured in $, but both have a price that you pay for getting to use the software, and each is as valid as the next to me. I prefer GPL'd software because I think its a much more sustainable way to develop software, but, stealing windows or distributing gpl'd software without source to me is equally bad.
:) Yeah I've been looking for a year... so good luck:) My business partner and I are about to undertake a sizeable investment to start writing an open source small business accounting/invoicing/quickbooks replacement app cause we haven't found anything and nothing seems to be moving in that direction.
I need a small business app that can do invoices as well as the basic checkbook balancing type stuff... more of a replacement for quickbooks than quicken... but I'll take a look
I have no clue, since I don't have access to the entire process, just a couple snippets here and there... I don't know what part of a running XP system you need, but in theory I don't see why you couldn't use VPC or VMware or some other virtualization tech to do it... but I have no clue....
Hmm, Ok maybe I'll take another look at gnucash, I tried to move from quickbooks to gnucash about a year and a half ago and it was awful. The interface was just horrid, and I couldn't get myself to use it, so I went back to quickbooks...
Um, Distributing a hacked windows xp installation ISO is most certainly illegal in all of the developed countries (US, Canada, UK, EU zone, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea) and probably in any country that has a trade agreement with any of the above listed countries. Microsoft would have the DMCA takedown notice delivered within 30 minutes of a pre-hacked ISO for windows xp being published on the web. It would be pure stupidity for anyone to post such a thing.
I'm not saying that the DMCA is a good law, but there is no way you can suggest that posting a hacked winxp ISO wouldn't be completely illegal by the laws on the books today, and furthermore, it would be a blatant violation of copyright, besides being a DMCA violation. It would be piracy through and through. Yeah if you have a server in China, Russia, or the bahamas, maybe you could post such a thing, and get away with it, but it would just add fuel to the "OSS hackers don't respect IP" FUD that MS is always bantering about.
Just as a quick question, what financial software are you using? that is one thing that still keeps me on windows at least part time, no decent quickbooks/quicken replacement...
Ok, and we IT people complain when companies try to outsource our work to get better rates. Some of these companies I can understand the ratios... CME is an electronic exchange, if that goes down they lose hundreds of millions if not billions in a single day, they are basically an IT shop, its mission critical. Same thing for the banks, and LexusNexus is a tech company, and they provide alot of service over the internet, obviously they are going to have alot of IT staff...
However, from the stats given by the parent, they are 1 in 3, or at best 1 in 5 which puts them in a solid second place on your list behind only CME who is running a 100% mission critical no downtime operation for millions of people to use. All of the other companies you list are large companies with probably thousands of employees, and as things scale, you probably need more headcount to cover all the bases. However for a 150 person office, one office housing one company, if you have more than 2-3 IT staff, you better be either some sort of internet hosting/service company (AKA Yahoo can have more than 2-3 IT for 150 employees, Amazon, etc also qualify) or a software shop, if you're in any other industry you are wasting money.
The only thing you need a winxp box for is to create the winxp installer cd (because you have to hack the installer to get it to work).
The only way they could "finish" it as you request is to start distributing pre hacked WinXP ISOs. Obviously they can't do that, so everyone who wants to dual boot their mac needs to create ON THEIR OWN a hacked WinXP install disk, and that involves using WinXP to do it.
This is the cost of closed software and closed platforms, you need many more actual platforms to get anything done.
Ok, 12 departments, 3-4 IT guys per, that's 36-48 IT guys for a staff of 150? 1/5-1/3 of your staff is IT... wow... Last IT department I worked in 2.5 guys (2 full time 1 part time) for 150 users, and we managed 3 web servers, 2 db servers, 4 file servers a 10TB SAN, 250 switch ports, AD, 5 linux servers running various services, the internet router, the firewall, vpn concentrator, and the phone system....
Oh yeah, and day to day user support and training...
and, most days I spent at least 2-3 hours reading about new tech, studying, testing new stuff just for fun, and messing with our test lab (a router, switch, and 3 servers). So I would say your IT staff is a bunch of slackers if you need that many people to support 150 users. Either that or they are incompotent and don't know how to manage stuff efficiently to keep themselves from running all over the building all day.
Where are all those so-terribly-bright entrepreneurs from the 90s today?
I'd say most of them cashed out a decent chunk of change, and are living quite happily. Yes the companies they founded may have failed, but I bet most of those 20 something's that actually got companies to the IPO stage made out quite nicely. I actually personally know 2 such people, yeah they still work, but they have > 2 million sitting in the bank against a rainy day, not exactly what I would call failure.
ROFL You do know this is slashdot right? If everybody did read the articles, and then only qualified scholars commented there'd be like 3 posts per article.
you aren't missing anything, that is what I meant by missing the defacto standard of skype... you can only talk to people on the same server... your buddy list is in essence managed by the server. You can set that asterisk server up as a peer on the fwd network, and then you and all your friends would be able to call anyone on the freeworlddialup network for free, and dial out to regular phones for a fee (much like skype), but again not people on the skype network, and the fee based services would require some sort of billing solution on the asterisk server to bill your friends for usage...
The asterisk solution is obviously not a drop in replacement for skype, however, if you want something standards based, and something that supports basically limitless possibilities (my family uses our system as a security monitoring/alert system, we have wifi cameras in our homes, they all have phones hooked up to the system, and I run zone minder on the asterisk server. All of the cameras send images to the server, and at certain times, when motion detection is enabled, if it detects it the asterisk server calls out to a list of numbers (cell phones, home phone, etc) to alert the person that motion is detected in their home). We can do video calls, voicemail to email, and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, I feel that our system is well worth the time it took to figure the stuff out, and for what we use it for, it is nice. That said Skype still has some advantages (posting a skype nick on a business card for example, and assuming that a normal person can figure out how to contact you through skype). But if skype is going to arbitrarily limit the usability of the system, then maybe its better to go with the open standards.
You'd have to set up the Asterisk server, but then there are tons of SIP clients that you can give out to your friends/family pre configured, that will connect to asterisk. Of course you aren't going to have the defacto standard of skype, but I do this with about 40 of my friends and family, the server sits in my basement on a dsl connection and we all talk for free whenever we want, and have conferences of up to 30 people...
the main client we use is the xlite softphone, there is a gui configuration menu, basically all they have to put in is a username and password, and the address of the asterisk server, or you can pre-configure it with an xml file if you want to do that, more headache on your side I suppose and putting in a username and password is not that difficult (you have to do the same thing with skype).
Ok, So lets say half the kernel devs say they want to contribute under gplv3... Well as far as I can tell GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2, and if Linus says no the kernel is GPLv2, if you want to make contributions, that's the license, there is nothing the devs can say about it. If Linus decides not to use GPLv3, then the developers will either find a different project to contribute to, or do what Linus wants and continue under the current license.
Because GPLv3 has more provisions in it than GPLv2, which GPLv2 quite clearly disallows, the licenses cannot be compatible. GPLv3 requires the end user to jump through more hoops than GPLv2, which GPLv2 says you cannot do... Therefore no project can have code under both licenses in the same project. Because of this restriction, either all devs (including Linus) of the kernel must choose GPLv3 or, it will stay GPLv2.
Another possibility would be that Linus decides he likes GPLv3 and says "Ok the kernel will be GPLv3, all devs need to approve the change and relicense their code". Either way whether Linus chooses v2 or v3 the devs have little choice... Either contribute under whichever license Linus chooses, or don't contribute... That is their choice, but they don't have a choice of which license they are going to contribute under to the kernel. Which is what the parent was saying. No one is going to choose for Linus what license his project is under, the devs have no choice RMS has no choice, and RMS saying the devs had a choice is completely false.
I am a programmer of the type you describe, I actually love debugging, its alot of fun to apply the scientific method to code... And I was intrigued by the bug you mentioned, as it seems like it would be great fun to figure out. I have never had any stability issues with firefox (any version), and I am a pretty heavy user, 8 tabs open right now, and thats really light usage for me. Normally I'll have 2-3 windows with 10-15 tabs each... I tried to use the gnu libc page, I opened 20 tabs of it, and yeah firefox was using quite a bit of RAM (about 35MB per tab), but I opened 10 windows if IE to that page and each IE window was using 45MB of RAM... so firefox was 10MB per page better as far as RAM usage is concerned... Firefox used more CPU each time I opened a new tab, but also rendered each new page faster than IE, which used less CPU for a longer period of time... I am running Win XP SP2 all patches applied, Firefox 1.5...
The only time I've seen firefox die has been on pages with that really annoying smiley face animated GIF or flash I don't know which banner ad. However, that is not the bug you are describing, so they are most likely not related... and I haven't had that bug crash FF since 1.5 came out. In fact I haven't had FF crash at all since 1.5 was released...
In short if you are having a problem, and people can't recreate it, the only option really is to attach a debugger and get to the bottom of the problem that way. As I explained above I tried to recreate your bug, I'm actually trying it on a 3rd computer right now (Dell latitude d810 512mb ram, white box winxp sp2 1gb ram, mac os 10.3 512MB ram powerbook) none of these computers exhibit the problem.. I would love to help, show me how to recreate it, and I'll gladly try to figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
You like most other slashdot folks are mixing your metaphors, or IP jargon. Trademarks must be inforced or you lose them, patents not so much. You can selectively enforce patents all you want. The "statute of limitations" on patents is 24 years, or however long patents are good for now... As long as your patent is valid you can sue infringers of that patent.
My main beef with these patents is the following: They patented not doing something. They got a patent on NOT charging late fees. I should patent NOT writing programs as a business model, and then sue all non-software development companies for infringement. How can not doing something be patentable. Also there are tons of companies that provide "all for one" services applying a pricing scheme shouldn't be patentable.
For all you people touting Yate as a replacement to asterisk, you do realize it doesn't even have transfer and 3 way capability built in don't you?
r s
http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/index.php/Main/Transfe
Transfering a call and three way calling is listed as a "feature request", I don't know how you can possibly recommend such obviously alpha telephony software.
I'm not trying to say that Asterisk is the end all be all, its not, and maybe Yate will come up and be a better solution, but right now, without basic PBX features, it is not.
Either that or they could have created some other rules basically dilution rules, stating that their 64% were not subject to dilution (or diluted at a rate of 1% or something) and then issued a couple hundred million shares, basically diluting allens 36% down to nothing, and keeping their 64% stake. At the time back in '82 I'm sure MS only had a couple million shares on the books.. Basically it would work like this:
Say MS had 1 million shares, bill has 64% or 640,000, allen has 360,000... They pass a rule stating that their 640000 aren't subject to dilution (IE any new stock issues they get 64% of) and then proceed to issue 100 million shares... they now have 64,000,000 shares, they stick 35,640,000 shares in a trust to be given to future employees (or sold on the market, or whatever) and allen is left with his 360,000 shares which are now 1/3 of 1% of the company. Thus, he (or his heirs) are effectively removed from any meaningful involvment in the company, and they don't have to give anything (cash or otherwise to them).
This would be totally legal, and 100% possible given majority voting rights.
Actually, the whole "Sue linux devs" worked pretty well for SCOs stock price for a while...
It is sometimes ok to break backwards compat... However, the way mozilla/firefox does it is not good. As a one time extension developer I can attest to your example. When 1.5 came out, and the entire extension structure changed, I simply abandoned the 6 extensions I was working on...
They are not updated to 1.5, and I have no plans to do so, because I spent a considerable amount of time building, creating, and maintaining these extensions and the amount of time I would have to spend to relearn and redo them is not worth it to me. And guess what! They are doing it again for 2.0 the whole extension mechanism is going to be redone once more, so if I update to 1.5, I'll just have to relearn again in a few months.
On the other hand, GCC has broken compat multiple times, and its relatively painless to go in and fix the bits of code and recompile.... I use apache 2.0 in everything I do, I really doubt your claim that "no one" uses it... It comes standard in all the distros now, and yeah if you have something that is completely dependant on 1.3, maybe you're still running it.
Anyway, your arguments all fall down on the following fact: Hey at least with open source you can keep using 1.3 for as long as you want. You can keep using gcc 2.96 for as long as you want. You can keep using firefox 1.0 for as long as you want. and if you need a fix, you have to code it yourself or pay someone a small fee to come code a fix, but its not like dealing with MS.
MS broke merge letters with dynamic queries in Office 2003. Plain and simple doesn't work anymore (worked fine in 97, 2k, and XP). I work in the legal industry, they use this feature ALL THE TIME. I have spent months in the last 2 years "downgrading" law offices to office xp and 2000 after they upgraded entire offices to 2003 and found that it broke everything... (BTW I did spend the requisite hours/days messing with MS tech support and they finally gave up and said "Yeah I guess that's not supported anymore") and I'm not even talking about using a non ms database (all access or SQL server). There is no fix, the feature is simply not supported anymore, and there is no choice but to keep running the old software, and support/fixes/security fixes will be impossible in another year (2000 support is phased out).
The point is with MS you're stuck, if they break backwards compat (and don't say they never do because they do), you either pound sand and "upgrade" and lose needed functionality, or you keep using the old software that works, but is riddled with security holes that can't/never will be fixed. With OSS you can keep using the old software and at least get security fixes, or someone will code a fix in the new software eventually, and the same features will be available and you can upgrade, either way, you aren't left out in the cold.
I tried to save the document I wrote, and when I opened it on my local machine it was empty...
might be because of slashdotting...
Unfortunately if this does go through, more than 90% of all internet users at some point use AT&T, Verizon, or Qwest. Almost all internet traffic hits these networks at some point (try doing a traceroute to a few hundred sites, see how few don't sit on or across one of those networks). Even newer WAN networks will have to use the telco's for backbone access, and there lies the rub. If they are allowed to do this, it will be the end, no one will be able to create a new and innovative web service, because as soon as it gets popular their ISP bills will go through the roof as they have to pay extra just to keep their site up and functional to 90% of all US users.
Basically what they are proposing is double billing all successful internet companies, you pay your regular ISP bill (to XO, or whoever) and then you pay your "User access fee" or "Backbone Access Fee" directly to the backbone providers for however many users they determine went from their network to yours, and you'll get a bill from each "backbone" provider separately, it will be an impossible mess.
What this should do is make P2P technologies the only way to provide a decent internet based service... If you can get your customers to host your service for you somehow so that all of the hits to your site are spread out all over the internet in a P2P manner, then the telcos won't be able to bill you like this, but that's the only way I can see to get around this.
Except as the article states and then quickly dusts under the carpet, this only applies to their parked domains which host no services, no actual sites, and are just place holders. They won't be developing any applications for these domains anyway.
If they were moving actual hosting to windows, then maybe this would be real news, but they can't do that, actual hosting requires offering windows and linux as the platform, they aren't going to force their customers to rewrite all of their php/apache/mysql web sites in asp/iis/sql server
In some countries this may be illegal
Saying in some countries it may be illegal is not the same as saying "This is illegal". I do know the difference between "illegal" and "wrong". I watch DVDs in Linux all the time, which is "illegal" but I paid for the DVDs and therefore feel absolutely no remorse over breaking the DMCA to watch a movie that I paid for.
I just can't understand how you could think this wouldn't be wrong, it would be wrong just for the copyright violation. It would be akin to distributing modified GPL'd software without distributing the source code for your changes. The price you pay for using GPL'd software is you have to give away your source when you contribute, and the price for windows is measured in $, but both have a price that you pay for getting to use the software, and each is as valid as the next to me. I prefer GPL'd software because I think its a much more sustainable way to develop software, but, stealing windows or distributing gpl'd software without source to me is equally bad.
:) Yeah I've been looking for a year... so good luck :) My business partner and I are about to undertake a sizeable investment to start writing an open source small business accounting/invoicing/quickbooks replacement app cause we haven't found anything and nothing seems to be moving in that direction.
I need a small business app that can do invoices as well as the basic checkbook balancing type stuff...
more of a replacement for quickbooks than quicken... but I'll take a look
I have no clue, since I don't have access to the entire process, just a couple snippets here and there...
I don't know what part of a running XP system you need, but in theory I don't see why you couldn't use VPC or VMware or some other virtualization tech to do it... but I have no clue....
Hmm,
Ok maybe I'll take another look at gnucash, I tried to move from quickbooks to gnucash about a year and a half ago and it was awful. The interface was just horrid, and I couldn't get myself to use it, so I went back to quickbooks...
Um, Distributing a hacked windows xp installation ISO is most certainly illegal in all of the developed countries (US, Canada, UK, EU zone, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea) and probably in any country that has a trade agreement with any of the above listed countries. Microsoft would have the DMCA takedown notice delivered within 30 minutes of a pre-hacked ISO for windows xp being published on the web. It would be pure stupidity for anyone to post such a thing.
I'm not saying that the DMCA is a good law, but there is no way you can suggest that posting a hacked winxp ISO wouldn't be completely illegal by the laws on the books today, and furthermore, it would be a blatant violation of copyright, besides being a DMCA violation. It would be piracy through and through. Yeah if you have a server in China, Russia, or the bahamas, maybe you could post such a thing, and get away with it, but it would just add fuel to the "OSS hackers don't respect IP" FUD that MS is always bantering about.
Just as a quick question, what financial software are you using?
that is one thing that still keeps me on windows at least part time, no decent quickbooks/quicken replacement...
Ok, and we IT people complain when companies try to outsource our work to get better rates. Some of these companies I can understand the ratios... CME is an electronic exchange, if that goes down they lose hundreds of millions if not billions in a single day, they are basically an IT shop, its mission critical. Same thing for the banks, and LexusNexus is a tech company, and they provide alot of service over the internet, obviously they are going to have alot of IT staff...
However, from the stats given by the parent, they are 1 in 3, or at best 1 in 5 which puts them in a solid second place on your list behind only CME who is running a 100% mission critical no downtime operation for millions of people to use. All of the other companies you list are large companies with probably thousands of employees, and as things scale, you probably need more headcount to cover all the bases. However for a 150 person office, one office housing one company, if you have more than 2-3 IT staff, you better be either some sort of internet hosting/service company (AKA Yahoo can have more than 2-3 IT for 150 employees, Amazon, etc also qualify) or a software shop, if you're in any other industry you are wasting money.
The only thing you need a winxp box for is to create the winxp installer cd (because you have to hack the installer to get it to work).
The only way they could "finish" it as you request is to start distributing pre hacked WinXP ISOs. Obviously they can't do that, so everyone who wants to dual boot their mac needs to create ON THEIR OWN a hacked WinXP install disk, and that involves using WinXP to do it.
This is the cost of closed software and closed platforms, you need many more actual platforms to get anything done.
Ok, 12 departments, 3-4 IT guys per, that's 36-48 IT guys for a staff of 150? 1/5-1/3 of your staff is IT... wow...
Last IT department I worked in 2.5 guys (2 full time 1 part time) for 150 users, and we managed 3 web servers, 2 db servers, 4 file servers a 10TB SAN, 250 switch ports, AD, 5 linux servers running various services, the internet router, the firewall, vpn concentrator, and the phone system....
Oh yeah, and day to day user support and training...
and, most days I spent at least 2-3 hours reading about new tech, studying, testing new stuff just for fun, and messing with our test lab (a router, switch, and 3 servers). So I would say your IT staff is a bunch of slackers if you need that many people to support 150 users. Either that or they are incompotent and don't know how to manage stuff efficiently to keep themselves from running all over the building all day.
Where are all those so-terribly-bright entrepreneurs from the 90s today?
I'd say most of them cashed out a decent chunk of change, and are living quite happily. Yes the companies they founded may have failed, but I bet most of those 20 something's that actually got companies to the IPO stage made out quite nicely. I actually personally know 2 such people, yeah they still work, but they have > 2 million sitting in the bank against a rainy day, not exactly what I would call failure.
ROFL
You do know this is slashdot right?
If everybody did read the articles, and then only qualified scholars commented there'd be like 3 posts per article.
you aren't missing anything, that is what I meant by missing the defacto standard of skype... you can only talk to people on the same server... your buddy list is in essence managed by the server. You can set that asterisk server up as a peer on the fwd network, and then you and all your friends would be able to call anyone on the freeworlddialup network for free, and dial out to regular phones for a fee (much like skype), but again not people on the skype network, and the fee based services would require some sort of billing solution on the asterisk server to bill your friends for usage...
The asterisk solution is obviously not a drop in replacement for skype, however, if you want something standards based, and something that supports basically limitless possibilities (my family uses our system as a security monitoring/alert system, we have wifi cameras in our homes, they all have phones hooked up to the system, and I run zone minder on the asterisk server. All of the cameras send images to the server, and at certain times, when motion detection is enabled, if it detects it the asterisk server calls out to a list of numbers (cell phones, home phone, etc) to alert the person that motion is detected in their home). We can do video calls, voicemail to email, and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, I feel that our system is well worth the time it took to figure the stuff out, and for what we use it for, it is nice. That said Skype still has some advantages (posting a skype nick on a business card for example, and assuming that a normal person can figure out how to contact you through skype). But if skype is going to arbitrarily limit the usability of the system, then maybe its better to go with the open standards.
You'd have to set up the Asterisk server, but then there are tons of SIP clients that you can give out to your friends/family pre configured, that will connect to asterisk. Of course you aren't going to have the defacto standard of skype, but I do this with about 40 of my friends and family, the server sits in my basement on a dsl connection and we all talk for free whenever we want, and have conferences of up to 30 people...
the main client we use is the xlite softphone, there is a gui configuration menu, basically all they have to put in is a username and password, and the address of the asterisk server, or you can pre-configure it with an xml file if you want to do that, more headache on your side I suppose and putting in a username and password is not that difficult (you have to do the same thing with skype).
Ok,
So lets say half the kernel devs say they want to contribute under gplv3... Well as far as I can tell GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2, and if Linus says no the kernel is GPLv2, if you want to make contributions, that's the license, there is nothing the devs can say about it. If Linus decides not to use GPLv3, then the developers will either find a different project to contribute to, or do what Linus wants and continue under the current license.
Because GPLv3 has more provisions in it than GPLv2, which GPLv2 quite clearly disallows, the licenses cannot be compatible. GPLv3 requires the end user to jump through more hoops than GPLv2, which GPLv2 says you cannot do... Therefore no project can have code under both licenses in the same project. Because of this restriction, either all devs (including Linus) of the kernel must choose GPLv3 or, it will stay GPLv2.
Another possibility would be that Linus decides he likes GPLv3 and says "Ok the kernel will be GPLv3, all devs need to approve the change and relicense their code". Either way whether Linus chooses v2 or v3 the devs have little choice... Either contribute under whichever license Linus chooses, or don't contribute... That is their choice, but they don't have a choice of which license they are going to contribute under to the kernel. Which is what the parent was saying. No one is going to choose for Linus what license his project is under, the devs have no choice RMS has no choice, and RMS saying the devs had a choice is completely false.
I am a programmer of the type you describe, I actually love debugging, its alot of fun to apply the scientific method to code...
And I was intrigued by the bug you mentioned, as it seems like it would be great fun to figure out. I have never had any stability issues with firefox (any version), and I am a pretty heavy user, 8 tabs open right now, and thats really light usage for me. Normally I'll have 2-3 windows with 10-15 tabs each... I tried to use the gnu libc page, I opened 20 tabs of it, and yeah firefox was using quite a bit of RAM (about 35MB per tab), but I opened 10 windows if IE to that page and each IE window was using 45MB of RAM... so firefox was 10MB per page better as far as RAM usage is concerned... Firefox used more CPU each time I opened a new tab, but also rendered each new page faster than IE, which used less CPU for a longer period of time... I am running Win XP SP2 all patches applied, Firefox 1.5...
The only time I've seen firefox die has been on pages with that really annoying smiley face animated GIF or flash I don't know which banner ad. However, that is not the bug you are describing, so they are most likely not related... and I haven't had that bug crash FF since 1.5 came out. In fact I haven't had FF crash at all since 1.5 was released...
In short if you are having a problem, and people can't recreate it, the only option really is to attach a debugger and get to the bottom of the problem that way. As I explained above I tried to recreate your bug, I'm actually trying it on a 3rd computer right now (Dell latitude d810 512mb ram, white box winxp sp2 1gb ram, mac os 10.3 512MB ram powerbook) none of these computers exhibit the problem.. I would love to help, show me how to recreate it, and I'll gladly try to figure it out.