What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?
I suppose they can, but telling the difference is not the same as proving it. You need some kind of proof to accuse somebody of making fakes, not just its subjective taste.
I would certainly pay a moderate amount for a High-quality, big pipe site with a wide selection of videos. And I mean wide, none of that "its from this provider, so it's in this other service". Of course with no DRM, I want to see the films at my mom's where there is no broadband. I say "a moderate amount" is a flat rate of about twenty dollars a month, perhaps up to forty if you use really a lot of bandwidth.
In the other corner, rather more likely, seeing what's on offer today, we could have an anemic selection of videos, many of them old, most of them in less-than-optimal quality (meaning you can get them in better quality in bittorrent), with a time lag for new releases, lots of DRM, and lots of service hiccups too.
Nowhere in the article they mention how the data is going to be 'stored'. If you need to be constantly bathing the material with UV light just to keep it dark, there is not much storage going on, IMO. Of course there might be missing data from the article, but they should explain a bit more.
For me the biggest selling point of OSS is not its being free-as-in-beer, but being free-as-in-speech. The biggest selling point of OSS is _control_. You buy a proprietary program, it has a bug that bugs you and nobody else, and you are toast. In OSS you can pay somebody to correct the bug. At least you have the option. If you want to extend the program, you can do it. Difficult and costly, perhaps, but possible at least.
When you buy proprietary, and work to integrate your business's data flow in the proprietary solution, you are in fact a hostage of the software company that has the source code. If Microsoft decided now to start charging 10.000 dollars per Windows license, many people would be forced to pay. It would surely spell doom for Microsoft in the long term, but 'long' is the operative word here. The fact is that if they could do it, and you would have no practical alternative to paying, if your business processes are deeply integrated in Windows.
Remember, it's not for the money, it's for the freedom.
I have a flash drive that started as 8 Gb and is now reduced to 4. The file system answers as 8, you can write as if it was 8, but all that goes after the 4Gb mark is later read as "noise" (yes, it was all audio files:o), instead of what you put in.
You are secured in your castle because you have a tall wall around it. Now you can have two types of walls, one with shrubs and plants on both sides, so you cannot really see the wall, and the other one without them, you see the wall cleanly. If there is a hole in the wall, you cannot easily see it in the hidden wall, but it's also more difficult for the attackers. If there is a hole in the clean wall, the attackers can easily see it, but so can you. Which wall would you prefer?
It's all part of the NewParadigm (TM). The NewParadigm ends with the old-fashioned way of taking money in form of taxes and using it to provide services to the people. The NewParadigm reduces the input of taxes, and makes up the difference by issuing debt, that is in turn bought by the Chinese, that for some cultural superstition of them, like to work hard, sell merchandise, and lend back all the received money to the buyers, to allow them to buy still more stuff.
In the NewParadigm is not wrong for corporations to use tax law loopholes to evade taxes, and even receive bailout money afterwards, because the bailout money is just more debt, and debt is good. The NewParadigm states that the bigger the debt of a country, so much the better, because the debtors will be scared of forcing a default, and will keep on buying debt forever. So now, besides having companies too big to fail, we have countries too big to fail. In the NewParadigm, once you have a company deemed too big to fail, you can stop working, because the government will pay all your costs, as by definition they cannot allow you to fail. If you manage to have a country too big to fail, you also can stop working, and finance yourself just by selling bonds.
The reason because the NewParadigm works is because the world increase of productivity has generated a net production surplus. With the old paradigm, there was no way to use that surplus. If you stopped working to reduce the surplus, you stopped having money, and so you died, or got sick or something, and usually returned to work, very likely coughing. If you kept on working, the surplus just got bigger, and was from time to time wiped out by crisis and wars. However, the increase in production lately has made those two methods rather inadequate anymore. The NewParadigm, however, offers a way out of the dilemma. You can now stop working (or pretending to work in non-productive jobs like marketing or politics or the military) and keep on living well just by adding to your VISA debt balance. A whole country can do that by adding the VISA debt balances of the population and putting them into bonds, and selling the to the Chinese. In that way the surplus is eliminated and global prosperity ensues.
Those that will like to point out the current crisis as a negation of the principles of the NewParadigm should be ashamed of themselves, as the current crisis is obviously produced by _failure_ to fully apply the NewParadigm principles. Some old fashioned thinkers, worried by old fashioned guilt thoughts about getting something from nothing, got cold feet and stopped issuing more debt. But now the good work has been taken up by the governments, and all the VISA debt will be backed up by bonds, that the Chinese will promptly buy. So please don't criticize these companies, they are the backbone of the next step in economical evolution, and you are old fashioned thinkers, probably full of shit too.
I, for one, have a dedicated VMWare virtual machine with Ubuntu installed, and Firefox. Firefox has NoScript installed, is set to saving no user story, and I use it only for banking. I find the setup a bit unwieldy sometimes, but is sure safer.
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products.
it should read :
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the efforts to market its products had been distracting to the company's main litigation activity
There, that's it.
Now a prediction. I predict that they are going to find a very generous buyer, that will pay much, much more than the market value of the actives, allowing the new, rather hollowed-out SCO to keep on litigating for years. Call it a hunch.
Newspapers will not die though. Most of their stories are sourced from the same organizations which source on-line content (reuters, associated press, et al), and they will continue on in their ineptitude and failure to fact check or investigate, as usual.
Aye. And also newspapers are (have always been IMHO) "influencers". They are bought and maintained with the idea of having a way of influencing public opinion. In a democracy, public opinion is a source of money, so the owners of newspapers are richly paid beyond the advertising revenues, in ways not reflected in the accounting books. In short, we are always reading about newspapers dying, but I seem to detect no lack of them in the newsstands.
As far as I can tell, there will be no closing of any door. We have this Universal Scientific Industrial (what a name!) that has a brand called Abit, and puts stickers with that name on some products. Now it finds the value of the brand diminished, and will put other stickers on the products, perhaps change the product line, etc. But for all we know, the total production of the company can be growing apace. In short, the only real material change to be reported by this story, is probably the value of some computer records. But well, this is Slashdot after all, and we are interested in that kind of thing, aren't we?
One is that he has invented the whole situation. It's relatively unlikely that you can program and you cannot get a programming job. It may happen, but that's not my experience.
Two is that he has a problem that is impossible to tell from the distance, like an attitude in the interview, things like that.
Delete it. Say that you graduated and then got to a two-years sabbatical for living the wild life till you settled down and started working like a beast for the rest of your life. That will thrill them. Other stories are also possible, you can use your inventiveness, that same inventiveness that got you to the first Slashdot page.
Don't know if it's a fraud or not, but there is an easy way to tell. If it comes incorporated into your new Honda, then it's for real. If they try to sell it to you as a DIY kit, it's a fraud. The car industry is competitive enough that it would kill for a 3% increase in MPG, let alone more than 10%.
Basically it means that, as a company, you are telling your investors that you cannot really think of a more productive way of spending the money you have. Buying back your company is like giving money back to investors, with the added bonus (from the company side) that you can get it back with no ifs or buts. Also have the advantage of not having to be ever really made. You can make the announcement, and then after a year say that you changed your mind, or the markets are not favorable anymore. It's great.
But, as said, is basically Microsoft saying that they cannot think of any investment, enterprise, new product, etc that is worth its salt, for using that money. Which is all well and good, of course, only a bit disappointing.
Just impossible. Basically because it was the second language (after FORTRAN) that I learned. I don't really understand the fuss about COBOL. Never found it either much worse or much better than other languages. The thing to remember about COBOL is that it was developed to solve a specific kind of problems. Today we would call it a Domain-Specific Language. And that kind of problems it solves with relative straightforwardness. Most of the critics I see of COBOL are for trying to use it as a general-purpose language. I mean, you don't try to write a text editor in PL-SQL, even if you probably could. And nobody criticizes PL-SQL for that reason.
So COBOL is outdated and verbose. True. So what. It's been years since a wrote a line of the beast, but I wouldn't have a problem to start working with it tomorrow. Also, as the set of problems that it was designed to solve was reduced, it as very pliable to being automatically generated.
So, a language is a language, all have their problems and advantages. Me, I care much more about the size of my screen or the strength of the air conditioning in my workplace than about the particular dialect that I have to program this week.
Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.
The problem is of course that they want the biographies "updated" for all the press and other interested parties that are going to hit Google in the first hour after the announcement.
So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
Company 1, is basically a big production plant with supporting back office. About 350 employees, about 50 back office, 1 IT. The IT is sub-contracted, and only works as sysop, no idea of info flow in the company. They work with a solve-it-all CRM from Unit 4 that fails to solve all, as it's generally the case. I work there doing some programming, but there is really _nobody_ that is the IT voice there. It is of course a mess, but they get by, paying by their nose to the Unit 4 subsidiary, but perhaps it would be less than having an IT contact person, who knows. It's a pain to work for them because nobody really knows what's going on, and I have to sort things out by myself.
Company 2, another similar company I work with is a bit bigger, though not much, perhaps 500 people, divided in 5 plants. They have two IT people, both do sysop and analysis, they never write a line. Lines are written by a local company (and myself of course). It's a rather better environment, IT-wise. You have a contact person, but usually you have to work the problems at the user level.
Company 3, similar environment to the second one, also 5 plants, about 500 people. They have 6 IT, including an IT manager. They do all development in-house. The IT is much more controlled, but the IT staff is usually overworked. Projects can take 6 months to get started from the moment they are needed. So they sometimes sub-contract, but the IT people is reluctant to do so, as they would be required to maintain that code if the data structures changed. And they change data structures as needed.
So my take on this is that there are different ways of doing things IT-wise, and it's difficult to know which one is better. I wouldn't advise Company 1 take, but between Company 2 and 3 it's difficult to decide. For Company 2, the vision of the software (for the IT people) is like a black box. It does this and this, and I don't care more. Sometimes they have to sort out things between sub-contractors (changes to the database structure by one of them can crash programs of another one), but they don't really have any responsibility on the code running, it's always a sub-contractor thing, and they are the interface. They are of course limited in flexibility, and speed of action.
Company 3 is more like the linux kernel:-) They control the whole code base there, so they can do really anything with it. But you lose on your ability to sub-contract (think hardware drivers in the linux kernel analogy), as you need to control the output of the sub-contractor, and integrate it in your controlled code base. Also they need 3 times more staff for it, and you have to keep them saturated, because if not, you are wasting resources. So there is always a lag of implementation, and also many possibly effective things never get done.
Slashdot Mirror
What? They can't tell the difference by tasting it?
I suppose they can, but telling the difference is not the same as proving it. You need some kind of proof to accuse somebody of making fakes, not just its subjective taste.
They are usually fat and get stuck in the cannon mouth
I would certainly pay a moderate amount for a High-quality, big pipe site with a wide selection of videos. And I mean wide, none of that "its from this provider, so it's in this other service". Of course with no DRM, I want to see the films at my mom's where there is no broadband. I say "a moderate amount" is a flat rate of about twenty dollars a month, perhaps up to forty if you use really a lot of bandwidth.
In the other corner, rather more likely, seeing what's on offer today, we could have an anemic selection of videos, many of them old, most of them in less-than-optimal quality (meaning you can get them in better quality in bittorrent), with a time lag for new releases, lots of DRM, and lots of service hiccups too.
Well, I can wait.
Nowhere in the article they mention how the data is going to be 'stored'. If you need to be constantly bathing the material with UV light just to keep it dark, there is not much storage going on, IMO. Of course there might be missing data from the article, but they should explain a bit more.
For me the biggest selling point of OSS is not its being free-as-in-beer, but being free-as-in-speech. The biggest selling point of OSS is _control_. You buy a proprietary program, it has a bug that bugs you and nobody else, and you are toast. In OSS you can pay somebody to correct the bug. At least you have the option. If you want to extend the program, you can do it. Difficult and costly, perhaps, but possible at least.
When you buy proprietary, and work to integrate your business's data flow in the proprietary solution, you are in fact a hostage of the software company that has the source code. If Microsoft decided now to start charging 10.000 dollars per Windows license, many people would be forced to pay. It would surely spell doom for Microsoft in the long term, but 'long' is the operative word here. The fact is that if they could do it, and you would have no practical alternative to paying, if your business processes are deeply integrated in Windows.
Remember, it's not for the money, it's for the freedom.
Sure, I formatted it myself in NTFS. Either way, as said, at first it worked full.
I have a flash drive that started as 8 Gb and is now reduced to 4. The file system answers as 8, you can write as if it was 8, but all that goes after the 4Gb mark is later read as "noise" (yes, it was all audio files :o), instead of what you put in.
I'm still using it, up to 4Gb.
You are secured in your castle because you have a tall wall around it. Now you can have two types of walls, one with shrubs and plants on both sides, so you cannot really see the wall, and the other one without them, you see the wall cleanly. If there is a hole in the wall, you cannot easily see it in the hidden wall, but it's also more difficult for the attackers. If there is a hole in the clean wall, the attackers can easily see it, but so can you. Which wall would you prefer?
It's all part of the NewParadigm (TM). The NewParadigm ends with the old-fashioned way of taking money in form of taxes and using it to provide services to the people. The NewParadigm reduces the input of taxes, and makes up the difference by issuing debt, that is in turn bought by the Chinese, that for some cultural superstition of them, like to work hard, sell merchandise, and lend back all the received money to the buyers, to allow them to buy still more stuff.
In the NewParadigm is not wrong for corporations to use tax law loopholes to evade taxes, and even receive bailout money afterwards, because the bailout money is just more debt, and debt is good. The NewParadigm states that the bigger the debt of a country, so much the better, because the debtors will be scared of forcing a default, and will keep on buying debt forever. So now, besides having companies too big to fail, we have countries too big to fail. In the NewParadigm, once you have a company deemed too big to fail, you can stop working, because the government will pay all your costs, as by definition they cannot allow you to fail. If you manage to have a country too big to fail, you also can stop working, and finance yourself just by selling bonds.
The reason because the NewParadigm works is because the world increase of productivity has generated a net production surplus. With the old paradigm, there was no way to use that surplus. If you stopped working to reduce the surplus, you stopped having money, and so you died, or got sick or something, and usually returned to work, very likely coughing. If you kept on working, the surplus just got bigger, and was from time to time wiped out by crisis and wars. However, the increase in production lately has made those two methods rather inadequate anymore. The NewParadigm, however, offers a way out of the dilemma. You can now stop working (or pretending to work in non-productive jobs like marketing or politics or the military) and keep on living well just by adding to your VISA debt balance. A whole country can do that by adding the VISA debt balances of the population and putting them into bonds, and selling the to the Chinese. In that way the surplus is eliminated and global prosperity ensues.
Those that will like to point out the current crisis as a negation of the principles of the NewParadigm should be ashamed of themselves, as the current crisis is obviously produced by _failure_ to fully apply the NewParadigm principles. Some old fashioned thinkers, worried by old fashioned guilt thoughts about getting something from nothing, got cold feet and stopped issuing more debt. But now the good work has been taken up by the governments, and all the VISA debt will be backed up by bonds, that the Chinese will promptly buy. So please don't criticize these companies, they are the backbone of the next step in economical evolution, and you are old fashioned thinkers, probably full of shit too.
I, for one, have a dedicated VMWare virtual machine with Ubuntu installed, and Firefox. Firefox has NoScript installed, is set to saving no user story, and I use it only for banking. I find the setup a bit unwieldy sometimes, but is sure safer.
Where is reads :
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company's efforts to market its products.
it should read :
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the efforts to market its products had been distracting to the company's main litigation activity
There, that's it.
Now a prediction. I predict that they are going to find a very generous buyer, that will pay much, much more than the market value of the actives, allowing the new, rather hollowed-out SCO to keep on litigating for years. Call it a hunch.
Newspapers will not die though. Most of their stories are sourced from the same organizations which source on-line content (reuters, associated press, et al), and they will continue on in their ineptitude and failure to fact check or investigate, as usual.
Aye. And also newspapers are (have always been IMHO) "influencers". They are bought and maintained with the idea of having a way of influencing public opinion. In a democracy, public opinion is a source of money, so the owners of newspapers are richly paid beyond the advertising revenues, in ways not reflected in the accounting books. In short, we are always reading about newspapers dying, but I seem to detect no lack of them in the newsstands.
Yes, we are. Are you sure you're in the right place?
Uhm, not sure. Isn't this "Argument"?
As far as I can tell, there will be no closing of any door. We have this Universal Scientific Industrial (what a name!) that has a brand called Abit, and puts stickers with that name on some products. Now it finds the value of the brand diminished, and will put other stickers on the products, perhaps change the product line, etc. But for all we know, the total production of the company can be growing apace. In short, the only real material change to be reported by this story, is probably the value of some computer records. But well, this is Slashdot after all, and we are interested in that kind of thing, aren't we?
Happens to me too! I'm as smart as, like, Einstein, but everything I can think of, is already invented, or something. I was just born late, I guess.
"Both beautiful to look at adn a striking way"
Pnu intended?
Use silver instead of copper. Silver is an excellent conductor, better than copper in fact. That will surely baffle all those copper thieves.
I'm going to guess that it's two things
I'm also going to guess that it's two things :o)
One is that he has invented the whole situation. It's relatively unlikely that you can program and you cannot get a programming job. It may happen, but that's not my experience.
Two is that he has a problem that is impossible to tell from the distance, like an attitude in the interview, things like that.
Delete it. Say that you graduated and then got to a two-years sabbatical for living the wild life till you settled down and started working like a beast for the rest of your life. That will thrill them. Other stories are also possible, you can use your inventiveness, that same inventiveness that got you to the first Slashdot page.
Don't know if it's a fraud or not, but there is an easy way to tell. If it comes incorporated into your new Honda, then it's for real. If they try to sell it to you as a DIY kit, it's a fraud. The car industry is competitive enough that it would kill for a 3% increase in MPG, let alone more than 10%.
Basically it means that, as a company, you are telling your investors that you cannot really think of a more productive way of spending the money you have. Buying back your company is like giving money back to investors, with the added bonus (from the company side) that you can get it back with no ifs or buts. Also have the advantage of not having to be ever really made. You can make the announcement, and then after a year say that you changed your mind, or the markets are not favorable anymore. It's great.
But, as said, is basically Microsoft saying that they cannot think of any investment, enterprise, new product, etc that is worth its salt, for using that money. Which is all well and good, of course, only a bit disappointing.
and may be the next language you'll be learning
Just impossible. Basically because it was the second language (after FORTRAN) that I learned. I don't really understand the fuss about COBOL. Never found it either much worse or much better than other languages. The thing to remember about COBOL is that it was developed to solve a specific kind of problems. Today we would call it a Domain-Specific Language. And that kind of problems it solves with relative straightforwardness. Most of the critics I see of COBOL are for trying to use it as a general-purpose language. I mean, you don't try to write a text editor in PL-SQL, even if you probably could. And nobody criticizes PL-SQL for that reason.
So COBOL is outdated and verbose. True. So what. It's been years since a wrote a line of the beast, but I wouldn't have a problem to start working with it tomorrow. Also, as the set of problems that it was designed to solve was reduced, it as very pliable to being automatically generated.
So, a language is a language, all have their problems and advantages. Me, I care much more about the size of my screen or the strength of the air conditioning in my workplace than about the particular dialect that I have to program this week.
Pure genius. Take a system you don't really understand, but depend on for living, and drastically modify a variable to see what happens.
At least, after that, the farmers affected with drought, or torrential rains, or whatever, will be able to sue somebody.
Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.
The problem is of course that they want the biographies "updated" for all the press and other interested parties that are going to hit Google in the first hour after the announcement.
So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
That of course if they care enough.
Company 1, is basically a big production plant with supporting back office. About 350 employees, about 50 back office, 1 IT. The IT is sub-contracted, and only works as sysop, no idea of info flow in the company. They work with a solve-it-all CRM from Unit 4 that fails to solve all, as it's generally the case. I work there doing some programming, but there is really _nobody_ that is the IT voice there. It is of course a mess, but they get by, paying by their nose to the Unit 4 subsidiary, but perhaps it would be less than having an IT contact person, who knows. It's a pain to work for them because nobody really knows what's going on, and I have to sort things out by myself.
Company 2, another similar company I work with is a bit bigger, though not much, perhaps 500 people, divided in 5 plants. They have two IT people, both do sysop and analysis, they never write a line. Lines are written by a local company (and myself of course). It's a rather better environment, IT-wise. You have a contact person, but usually you have to work the problems at the user level.
Company 3, similar environment to the second one, also 5 plants, about 500 people. They have 6 IT, including an IT manager. They do all development in-house. The IT is much more controlled, but the IT staff is usually overworked. Projects can take 6 months to get started from the moment they are needed. So they sometimes sub-contract, but the IT people is reluctant to do so, as they would be required to maintain that code if the data structures changed. And they change data structures as needed.
So my take on this is that there are different ways of doing things IT-wise, and it's difficult to know which one is better. I wouldn't advise Company 1 take, but between Company 2 and 3 it's difficult to decide. For Company 2, the vision of the software (for the IT people) is like a black box. It does this and this, and I don't care more. Sometimes they have to sort out things between sub-contractors (changes to the database structure by one of them can crash programs of another one), but they don't really have any responsibility on the code running, it's always a sub-contractor thing, and they are the interface. They are of course limited in flexibility, and speed of action.
Company 3 is more like the linux kernel :-) They control the whole code base there, so they can do really anything with it. But you lose on your ability to sub-contract (think hardware drivers in the linux kernel analogy), as you need to control the output of the sub-contractor, and integrate it in your controlled code base. Also they need 3 times more staff for it, and you have to keep them saturated, because if not, you are wasting resources. So there is always a lag of implementation, and also many possibly effective things never get done.