It's a car insurance company called 'Geico'. they had a series of commercials with a large 'waiting room' of people as if they were trying out for a commercial spokesman competition. It was pretty funny.... if you looked through the crowd, they had ALL KINDS of sponsors from commercials past...
Incedentally, GEICO is a large insurer around the washington, DC area... I'm not sure if they are across the U.S. GEICO stands for Government Enployees Insurance Company... but they have been a commercial company serving the general public for a long time (20+ years).
Everyone talks about skipping commercials, but there are actually times I've used my tivo to HUNT DOWN commercials.
The commercials for the Fox show "FireFly" coming out this fall, for instance. There have also been times that I've hunted for humorous commercials... or commercials that tell a 'story'. (Like the car commercial where the guy interrupts the wedding... is there ever going to be a sequal to that?)
During the superbowl, Tivo knew that the most watched commercial was the pepsi/brittany spears ad. That is valulable information to some marketing company willing to shell out a few bucks, I'm sure.
Have you received any of the 'ads' in the Tivo menu? I had one several months ago "watch the lexus commercial and register to win a new lexus', and then commercials for the movie "Mr. Deeds".
Once they know that "Tivo watchers record a lot of "Simpsons" episodes, and that "regular Simpsons viewers buy a lot of Macaroni and Cheese", expect to see some "Watch the Kraft Commercial and register to win" menu items in your tivo.
Now that we can include the mac community in the community of 'unix users', suddenly, the percentage at my workplace jumped.
Instead of having a huge percentage of windows users, then a small minority of Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Bsd variants, we decided to 'consolodate' the statistics into "windows users" and "unix users". IT seems fair, because XP, 2000, NT and so on all count as 'windows'.
Now, we have a significant user base that is using unix, so we get more of the system administrator budget for it!
I'm surprised none of these tings were said when I read through the comments! Sorry I'm coming to the party late...
1) This would wreck the world economy, because so many people get paid "by the hour". If hours got longer, people would earn less!
2) This would completely fuck up our T.V. shows. In order to get an existing rerun of a show like Star Trek or X Files to fill an hour, they would have to pad it with a million commercials!
3) We already have a relevant time for this... It's called StarDate, people! Learn it! Use it! Live it!
4) If we do this, I say forget trying to coordinate the 'year' to seasons. Lets just make a one hundred day year.
5) How would we convert existing holidays (like George Washington's Birthday, or the fourth of july!) to the new calendar?
6) Forget the concept of 'birthday', since the 'date' would not be relevant under the new regime of 100-day years. You will instead have a 'sun-revolution celebration'.
In all seriousness, I used to think that the temperature system the U.S. uses (farenheight) was completely bizarre and arbitrary (32 for freezing? 212 for boiling?) and celcius made much more sense... until I learned where the scale came from... the Farenheight scale was devised so that 0 degrees was about as low as a person could stand, and that 100 was about as high as a person could stand... very metric-ish, but with human perception as the calibration instead of the boiling/freezing points of water. And ya know... it makes a lot more sense in practical terms for weather, too. Farenheight degrees have much more 'precision' to them than celcius does (imnsho).
OK, in order to understand what microsoft was doing, you have to understand part of the packaging structure of the language.
Libraries in java are stored in 'packages'. These package names are typically the domain name of the organization backwards. (Therefore, stuff I write and release is typically under com.fgm.)
Well, the libraries that are part of Java are under package names like 'java.util' and 'java.io'.
According to the agreement with Sun, Microsoft was 1) repsonsible for implementing those libraries for their platform in such a way that they passed Sun's validation tests. 2) releasing anything microsoft specific under 'com.microsoft' package structures.
Microsoft, in their typical 'embrace and extend' way, added 'features' to the APIs of the java libraries. Microsoft claimed "we are just adding useful things - we were responsible for implementing the API- no one said we couldn't ADD stuff to it".
Then they wrote their IDE tools to use these new API 'features'. The end result? Java code that would only work on Microsoft's VM - contrary to the whole point of java.
Sun sued, and won. If Microsoft had played 'nice' and stuck with the part of the agreement that said they would only add their stuff under their package name, none of this would have been an issue. That is what Apple does with their custom code...
Lets get one thing straight in all of this - Microsoft doesn't ship a java VM with windows because THEY don't want to - not because Sun doesn't want them to. If they had just done what they agreed to do, we would probably have an incredibly fast (but probably buggy) version of a Microsoft JVM running J2SE 1.4 today.
OK, this is off-topic, but relevant to this particular comment.
I know the perfect hangover cure. When I have a hangover, I can't sleep... so, oddly enough, after a heavy night of drinking, I'm up early, curled up in the fetal position on a couch cursing my own existance. (At least, when I used to drink a lot thats what I did... but that was 10 years ago).
OK, here's the cure: 1) 2 or more excederin (with both asprin and tylenol as pain releivers, it is always good at taking the edge off - and it has caffeine - a plus for this crowd) 2) a multivitamin, like centrum. 3) a b-complex vitamin suppliment(a lot of drug stores sell this as something like B-100). Alcohol flushes b complex vitamins from your system, which is one of the reasons you will feel like crap. 4) Gatorade. Swallow all of those pills with a big jug of gatorade... it contains a lot of the electrolytes you need, but pissed out because your kidneys were dumping all the alcohol. 5) a high-carbohydrate breakfast. Something like pancakes.
finally, after doing all of that, melt yourself in a warm shower.
Seriously... Do all this, and you will feel a LOT better.
I'm sure Mr. Gates is very happy that you are spreading his FUD for him, free of charge.
Sun's FIRST lawsuit was NOT about Microsoft including Java... It was to force Microsoft to include Java without polluting it with windows-specific crap - Microsoft had signed an agreement saying they wouldn't do this then tried to get out of it.
Sun won, and Microsoft said "Fine... we don't want to play with your toys anyway. We're going home". Basically saying to Sun, "You either let us pollute your language, or we don't want anything to do with it".
To which Sun countered with "Look! Microsoft is using their market leverage to coerce us! Exactly what the anti-trust suit was about!".
And Sun was right.
Don't get me wrong... I have no great love for Sun either, but at least they aren't a convicted felon.
I want a document that has the 10-20 most often heard arguments representing the FUD companies try to spread about Open Source in general and the GPL in particular, and a clear, concise, relevant, non-inflammatory rebuttal to each.
The author's language, such as "the market is a tough bitch" and "hell yes!" will not fly if I ever want to supply a rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.
Take the original paper's example of "a piece of software an engineer writes that represents 5000 hours worth of work, but uses a GPL component that represents 100 hours of effort. Is the GPL'ed component's requirement to release the original work under the GPL 'fair'?"
The proper rebuttal to this is: Imagine that an engineer writes a piece of software representing 5000 hours worth of work, but uses a PROPRIETARY component that represents 100 hours worth of effort. That proprietary component has a license that says 'the engineer will pay $10,000, plus some percercentage of revenue the original work generates". There are PLENTY of proprietary products like that. Is that fair?
It is up to the engineer to decide. If his time-to-market is so critical that those 100 hours are worth $10,000 plus a percentage, then that engineer will do it... otherwise, they will just write it. It is a business decision, like any other.
In both cases, the person who wrote the 100 hour effort component OWN THAT WORK, and get to say what the costs of its use will be. The person using it has to decide what costs they are willing to pay.
In GPL, the cost is not financial (at least, not directly). The 'cost' is to release the 'new' product under the same license. Many other licenses (both Open and Proprietary) put 'costs' on that have nothing to do with monetary value.
I want to see 10-20 arguments like this made. they are clear, concise, NON-INFLAMMATORY, and make a point.
When I go a concert and get a 'program', that program has a lot of ads for sponsors. Especially 'programs' like Playbill magazine that you get at classical concerts, broadway shows, etc. Is there an implicit contract that says I will read those ads?
Is there an explicit contract when I buy time magazine to read all of their advertisements?
OK, I agree that the default under copyright law is to prevent the copying, but my point still holds, that people need to understand that they are ALLOWED to copy linux.
It is completely in the spirit and letter of the license that I can download any linux distro and install it on an infinite number of machines.
Most people instinctively feel that you must be doing something wrong.
The comment from the lawyer makes it sound like they are 'graciously' allowing that.
In fact, now that I think about it, the BSA's role is 'enforcing the license to prevent piracy'... Maybe someone should ask their help the next time someone takes something that is GPL'ed and tries to turn it into a closed-source product... wouldn't that be 'making illegal copies'? The copies don't follow the license agreement the person agreed to...
No... Piracy should be defined as 'breaking the license the software was issued under'.
If they get away with defining 'piracy'=='copying', even in people's perceptions, the main distribution method of linux will be severely hampered. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone receive a burnt CD with 'Red Hat xx' scribbled with a magic marker, and they ask something like, "is this legal?". It just 'feels' like you are doing something dirty.
It is only illegal to copy it if you have specifically given up that right. As the GPL says, "Most lices are created with the purpose of taking away your rights..."
I recently took a new car out for a test drive. While I was going 75 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone, a cop pulled me over. I told the cop, "Officer, I am just testing this car for it applicability to my lifestyle. Once I complete the process and agree to buy this car, I will comply with all applicable laws."
My big desire would be the ability to do something with my email outside of the client... maybe I want to save years upon years of email by writing a program to parse them and store them in a mysql database... something like that.
An XML file format that was something like:
thisdude@greatideas.org
someotherdude@evenbetterideas.org
Hey Dude!, I had another great idea!
and so on, including all of the header information and such. I could then parse it and do whatever I want with it.
As the Pragmattic Programmers said, "Keep Knowledge in Plain Text"
You need to read a book called Peopleware. (Don't have the stats in front of me). It has EXACTLY the data you are looking for, even down to a percentage of increase of effectiveness attributable to square feet of office space.
This book is best described as an 'anti-dilbert manifesto'.
In the article you say "As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3% (that will have to pay more than $5 a month)"
Lets look at what this means...
The people that produce comments worth reading ARE your content... So, you will be charging those people that PRODUCE for you... This seems backwards to me, and if the people that normally comment are turned off, the quality of slashdot will suffer.
I fear that you will just become "another example of how websites can't make money". Noone will ever anlize the fact that you turned away the people that actually made your website worth reading... I certainly am not going to PAY you for the privledge of posting to your website so you can make money off of it.
Turn the concept around the way it SHOULD be. Do something like, "the top 20% highest moderated posters get free access" or something like this. This will, in effect, almost become like a payment to your authors.
But it is probably too late for anyone to read this... There are hundreds of posts already by upset people, and this will just get lost in the noise.
If it always seems like management is out of touch with you, perhaps its you that are out of touch with management. I think that a lot of tech people are out of touch with management, and just think that Dilbet==Reality. In some cases, maybe it just SEEMS like Dilbert to you.
I don't mean that in a 'bad way'... I'm just saying that there are pressures on management that can be more varied and complex than the stuff you deal with... I mean, have you ever really considered WHERE those dollars in your paycheck come from? Really... I mean, WHERE do they COME FROM?
But, I have worked for the same company for over 6 years... a lifetime in this industry. I work with some people who have been here 15 years, even though my company is just 15 years old... We have a turnover rate of less than 6%, and EVERYONE loves working here. I am a software engineer (actually, I consider myself a craftsman), but management does not insulate us... they educate us.
I'm sick of receiving emails from people I know at my company that use outlook... and they are full of some meta-data syntax for meet scheduling and so forth... the responsibility always seems to be mine to figure out what they contain. Now I can do the same thing back to them!
Sad tho, the net is supposed to be about interoperability. first a fence goes up, then another...
Years ago on my mac, I had a program that kept track how many feet I had moved my mouse... I got up to over 2 miles before I got tired of tracking it.
Hows about writing something that kept track of this, and make neat annoucements on the collective like, 'enough mouse-distance to go from MY to LA! enough to go to the moon!', etc?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a car insurance company called 'Geico'. they had a series of commercials with a large 'waiting room' of people as if they were trying out for a commercial spokesman competition. It was pretty funny.... if you looked through the crowd, they had ALL KINDS of sponsors from commercials past...
Incedentally, GEICO is a large insurer around the washington, DC area... I'm not sure if they are across the U.S. GEICO stands for Government Enployees Insurance Company... but they have been a commercial company serving the general public for a long time (20+ years).
Everyone talks about skipping commercials, but there are actually times I've used my tivo to HUNT DOWN commercials.
The commercials for the Fox show "FireFly" coming out this fall, for instance. There have also been times that I've hunted for humorous commercials... or commercials that tell a 'story'. (Like the car commercial where the guy interrupts the wedding... is there ever going to be a sequal to that?)
During the superbowl, Tivo knew that the most watched commercial was the pepsi/brittany spears ad. That is valulable information to some marketing company willing to shell out a few bucks, I'm sure.
Have you received any of the 'ads' in the Tivo menu? I had one several months ago "watch the lexus commercial and register to win a new lexus', and then commercials for the movie "Mr. Deeds".
Once they know that "Tivo watchers record a lot of "Simpsons" episodes, and that "regular Simpsons viewers buy a lot of Macaroni and Cheese", expect to see some "Watch the Kraft Commercial and register to win" menu items in your tivo.
-db
Hey... at least this might save Futurama!
Now that we can include the mac community in the community of 'unix users', suddenly, the percentage at my workplace jumped.
Instead of having a huge percentage of windows users, then a small minority of Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Bsd variants, we decided to 'consolodate' the statistics into "windows users" and "unix users". IT seems fair, because XP, 2000, NT and so on all count as 'windows'.
Now, we have a significant user base that is using unix, so we get more of the system administrator budget for it!
I'm surprised none of these tings were said when I read through the comments! Sorry I'm coming to the party late...
1) This would wreck the world economy, because so many people get paid "by the hour". If hours got longer, people would earn less!
2) This would completely fuck up our T.V. shows. In order to get an existing rerun of a show like Star Trek or X Files to fill an hour, they would have to pad it with a million commercials!
3) We already have a relevant time for this... It's called StarDate, people! Learn it! Use it! Live it!
4) If we do this, I say forget trying to coordinate the 'year' to seasons. Lets just make a one hundred day year.
5) How would we convert existing holidays (like George Washington's Birthday, or the fourth of july!) to the new calendar?
6) Forget the concept of 'birthday', since the 'date' would not be relevant under the new regime of 100-day years. You will instead have a 'sun-revolution celebration'.
In all seriousness, I used to think that the temperature system the U.S. uses (farenheight) was completely bizarre and arbitrary (32 for freezing? 212 for boiling?) and celcius made much more sense... until I learned where the scale came from... the Farenheight scale was devised so that 0 degrees was about as low as a person could stand, and that 100 was about as high as a person could stand... very metric-ish, but with human perception as the calibration instead of the boiling/freezing points of water. And ya know... it makes a lot more sense in practical terms for weather, too. Farenheight degrees have much more 'precision' to them than celcius does (imnsho).
OK, in order to understand what microsoft was doing, you have to understand part of the packaging structure of the language.
Libraries in java are stored in 'packages'. These package names are typically the domain name of the organization backwards. (Therefore, stuff I write and release is typically under com.fgm.)
Well, the libraries that are part of Java are under package names like 'java.util' and 'java.io'.
According to the agreement with Sun, Microsoft was
1) repsonsible for implementing those libraries for their platform in such a way that they passed Sun's validation tests.
2) releasing anything microsoft specific under 'com.microsoft' package structures.
Microsoft, in their typical 'embrace and extend' way, added 'features' to the APIs of the java libraries. Microsoft claimed "we are just adding useful things - we were responsible for implementing the API- no one said we couldn't ADD stuff to it".
Then they wrote their IDE tools to use these new API 'features'. The end result? Java code that would only work on Microsoft's VM - contrary to the whole point of java.
Sun sued, and won. If Microsoft had played 'nice' and stuck with the part of the agreement that said they would only add their stuff under their package name, none of this would have been an issue. That is what Apple does with their custom code...
Lets get one thing straight in all of this - Microsoft doesn't ship a java VM with windows because THEY don't want to - not because Sun doesn't want them to. If they had just done what they agreed to do, we would probably have an incredibly fast (but probably buggy) version of a Microsoft JVM running J2SE 1.4 today.
OK, this is off-topic, but relevant to this particular comment.
I know the perfect hangover cure. When I have a hangover, I can't sleep... so, oddly enough, after a heavy night of drinking, I'm up early, curled up in the fetal position on a couch cursing my own existance. (At least, when I used to drink a lot thats what I did... but that was 10 years ago).
OK, here's the cure:
1) 2 or more excederin (with both asprin and tylenol as pain releivers, it is always good at taking the edge off - and it has caffeine - a plus for this crowd)
2) a multivitamin, like centrum.
3) a b-complex vitamin suppliment(a lot of drug stores sell this as something like B-100). Alcohol flushes b complex vitamins from your system, which is one of the reasons you will feel like crap.
4) Gatorade. Swallow all of those pills with a big jug of gatorade... it contains a lot of the electrolytes you need, but pissed out because your kidneys were dumping all the alcohol.
5) a high-carbohydrate breakfast. Something like pancakes.
finally, after doing all of that, melt yourself in a warm shower.
Seriously... Do all this, and you will feel a LOT better.
I'm sure Mr. Gates is very happy that you are spreading his FUD for him, free of charge.
Sun's FIRST lawsuit was NOT about Microsoft including Java... It was to force Microsoft to include Java without polluting it with windows-specific crap - Microsoft had signed an agreement saying they wouldn't do this then tried to get out of it.
Sun won, and Microsoft said "Fine... we don't want to play with your toys anyway. We're going home". Basically saying to Sun, "You either let us pollute your language, or we don't want anything to do with it".
To which Sun countered with "Look! Microsoft is using their market leverage to coerce us! Exactly what the anti-trust suit was about!".
And Sun was right.
Don't get me wrong... I have no great love for Sun either, but at least they aren't a convicted felon.
I want a document that has the 10-20 most often heard arguments representing the FUD companies try to spread about Open Source in general and the GPL in particular, and a clear, concise, relevant, non-inflammatory rebuttal to each.
The author's language, such as "the market is a tough bitch" and "hell yes!" will not fly if I ever want to supply a rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.
Take the original paper's example of "a piece of software an engineer writes that represents 5000 hours worth of work, but uses a GPL component that represents 100 hours of effort. Is the GPL'ed component's requirement to release the original work under the GPL 'fair'?"
The proper rebuttal to this is:
Imagine that an engineer writes a piece of software representing 5000 hours worth of work, but uses a PROPRIETARY component that represents 100 hours worth of effort. That proprietary component has a license that says 'the engineer will pay $10,000, plus some percercentage of revenue the original work generates". There are PLENTY of proprietary products like that. Is that fair?
It is up to the engineer to decide. If his time-to-market is so critical that those 100 hours are worth $10,000 plus a percentage, then that engineer will do it... otherwise, they will just write it. It is a business decision, like any other.
In both cases, the person who wrote the 100 hour effort component OWN THAT WORK, and get to say what the costs of its use will be. The person using it has to decide what costs they are willing to pay.
In GPL, the cost is not financial (at least, not directly). The 'cost' is to release the 'new' product under the same license. Many other licenses (both Open and Proprietary) put 'costs' on that have nothing to do with monetary value.
I want to see 10-20 arguments like this made. they are clear, concise, NON-INFLAMMATORY, and make a point.
When I go a concert and get a 'program', that program has a lot of ads for sponsors. Especially 'programs' like Playbill magazine that you get at classical concerts, broadway shows, etc. Is there an implicit contract that says I will read those ads?
Is there an explicit contract when I buy time magazine to read all of their advertisements?
-db
OK, I agree that the default under copyright law is to prevent the copying, but my point still holds, that people need to understand that they are ALLOWED to copy linux.
It is completely in the spirit and letter of the license that I can download any linux distro and install it on an infinite number of machines.
Most people instinctively feel that you must be doing something wrong.
The comment from the lawyer makes it sound like they are 'graciously' allowing that.
In fact, now that I think about it, the BSA's role is 'enforcing the license to prevent piracy'... Maybe someone should ask their help the next time someone takes something that is GPL'ed and tries to turn it into a closed-source product... wouldn't that be 'making illegal copies'? The copies don't follow the license agreement the person agreed to...
No... Piracy should be defined as 'breaking the license the software was issued under'.
If they get away with defining 'piracy'=='copying', even in people's perceptions, the main distribution method of linux will be severely hampered. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone receive a burnt CD with 'Red Hat xx' scribbled with a magic marker, and they ask something like, "is this legal?". It just 'feels' like you are doing something dirty.
It is only illegal to copy it if you have specifically given up that right. As the GPL says, "Most lices are created with the purpose of taking away your rights..."
Not just Bill Gates, but US TOO... Copying is against the license agreement, and we are all about enforcing license agreements, right?
I recently took a new car out for a test drive. While I was going 75 miles an hour in a 35 mph zone, a cop pulled me over. I told the cop, "Officer, I am just testing this car for it applicability to my lifestyle. Once I complete the process and agree to buy this car, I will comply with all applicable laws."
My big desire would be the ability to do something with my email outside of the client... maybe I want to save years upon years of email by writing a program to parse them and store them in a mysql database... something like that.
An XML file format that was something like:
thisdude@greatideas.org
someotherdude@evenbetterideas.org
Hey Dude!, I had another great idea!
and so on, including all of the header information and such. I could then parse it and do whatever I want with it.
As the Pragmattic Programmers said, "Keep Knowledge in Plain Text"
-db
No one mentioned that this building is one of the approach paths of Dulles Airport, where the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11th took off from.
Hows THAT for security?
-db
You need to read a book called Peopleware. (Don't have the stats in front of me). It has EXACTLY the data you are looking for, even down to a percentage of increase of effectiveness attributable to square feet of office space.
This book is best described as an 'anti-dilbert manifesto'.
The governments use of the word Open Source is different than what we mean...
To the intelligence community, something like Time Magazine is an open source of information. Open, because everyone can have it.
A phone tap, classified information from another agency, a spy, etc are closed sources of information.
This does not mean that they are reading Slashdot, or reviewing the Linux source code. (I'm sure 'they' ARE, but thats not what this term means...)
In the article you say
"As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3% (that will have to pay more than $5 a month)"
Lets look at what this means...
The people that produce comments worth reading ARE your content... So, you will be charging those people that PRODUCE for you... This seems backwards to me, and if the people that normally comment are turned off, the quality of slashdot will suffer.
I fear that you will just become "another example of how websites can't make money". Noone will ever anlize the fact that you turned away the people that actually made your website worth reading... I certainly am not going to PAY you for the privledge of posting to your website so you can make money off of it.
Turn the concept around the way it SHOULD be. Do something like, "the top 20% highest moderated posters get free access" or something like this. This will, in effect, almost become like a payment to your authors.
But it is probably too late for anyone to read this... There are hundreds of posts already by upset people, and this will just get lost in the noise.
-db
If it always seems like management is out of touch with you, perhaps its you that are out of touch with management. I think that a lot of tech people are out of touch with management, and just think that Dilbet==Reality. In some cases, maybe it just SEEMS like Dilbert to you.
I don't mean that in a 'bad way'... I'm just saying that there are pressures on management that can be more varied and complex than the stuff you deal with... I mean, have you ever really considered WHERE those dollars in your paycheck come from? Really... I mean, WHERE do they COME FROM?
But, I have worked for the same company for over 6 years... a lifetime in this industry. I work with some people who have been here 15 years, even though my company is just 15 years old... We have a turnover rate of less than 6%, and EVERYONE loves working here. I am a software engineer (actually, I consider myself a craftsman), but management does not insulate us... they educate us.
I'm going to follow suit...
I'm sick of receiving emails from people I know at my company that use outlook... and they are full of some meta-data syntax for meet scheduling and so forth... the responsibility always seems to be mine to figure out what they contain. Now I can do the same thing back to them!
Sad tho, the net is supposed to be about interoperability. first a fence goes up, then another...
Years ago on my mac, I had a program that kept track how many feet I had moved my mouse... I got up to over 2 miles before I got tired of tracking it.
Hows about writing something that kept track of this, and make neat annoucements on the collective like, 'enough mouse-distance to go from MY to LA! enough to go to the moon!', etc?
Sure, the DVDs may actually come with some executable code on them, but by and large, THE BITS OF THE DVD REPRESENT DATA.
This data is consumed by software to generate media, but IT IS *NOT* SOFTWARE.
Any good software engineer knows that CODE and DATA should be SEPARATE. I'm glad the court recognizes this as well.