We're in a grand solar minimum, so the rest of this century will be much cooler, not warmer. The US is right to ignore alarmist claims that increasing CO2 emissions will heat up the climate. The CO2 level is increasing, but that hasn't warmed the climate for the last 20 years, so it's obvious that the carbon climate hysteria is just a scam.
PC Authority ripped off this story, word for word, from The Inquirer. The author at The Inquirer, Charlie Demerjian, ought to sue their pants off for copyright infringement.
IBM has answered SCO's complaint and lodged several counterclaims against SCO. So, even if *all* SCO's claims against IBM are disposed of before any trial, the lawsuit won't end there. IBM will be entitled to have its counterclaims against SCO adjudicated. And before IBM is done, SCO will be in receivership and quite possibly some people will be facing jail.
There's a reason you don't see CIOs and CTOs at big companies giving interviews about their major Linux initiatives. It is a very simple reason, really.
These people regard using Linux in mission critical roles as a competitive advantage.
No way David Boies is doing this pro bono. It's a commercial dispute (or a set of related commercial disputes), and lawyers - especially well-known trial lawyers - don't take those on for fun and good publicity.
We don't know what Boies law firm is charging SCO, as that's between them. I'd doubt they're working on full contingency, but they might have cut their rates in exchange for a percentage of any future recovery from IBM.
But Boies is out of his field here. He's an antitrust lawyer (he defended IBM for 10 years, then prosecuted US vs Microsoft). It's possible SCO hired him because he knows IBM's lawyers, and SCO might have thought he could smooth a buyout by IBM. Well, that obviously didn't work out, but now Boies is stuck with his sleazy client, SCO.
But he's not an intellectual property lawyer, so he's at some risk of focusing on irrelevancies and paying insufficient attention to what's really important. Just for example... business correspondence (including email), statements in business meetings, and patterns of conduct are important in antitrust law, because they show intent and acts to further anticompetitive practices. But such factors mean little in intellectual property cases, where the emphasis is on concrete facts. So Boies might screw up here, if he has to actually go to trial. He could be as badly mismatched to the contest as a swordsman at a gunfight.
I think it's more likely that suits (seeking injunctions, primarily)
Won't work. To get a preliminary injunction, you have to put up a cash bond against the defendant's potential business losses due to the injunction. SCO could "estimate" it in millions of dollars and get a judge to go along.
That's why SCO hasn't asked for a preliminary injunction against IBM selling AIX -- it can't afford a bond.
But the article also talks about funding OSS development or forming a vendor consortium to develop a common tool. This isn't likely to happen....
Of course, different companies will choose to be involved to lesser or greater degrees. Most (more than 90%) will be users primarily, rather than getting involved. Of the relative few that do contribute, most of those will just submit bug reports and apply patches. The few that do get more involved will likely be in niche businesses where their cost savings from using open platforms are greater than added customization costs: a few percent at most.
But that doesn't mean that a few won't actively contribute, where their costs of doing so will be less than continuing to pay high annual license fees for commercial software.
Collaborative competition won't be adopted in large companies with major R&D efforts, as you say. But small companies in vertical industries can benefit by pooling their efforts, and it can be expected that some will try.
It doesn't help that OSS gained critical mass at the same time the tech economy collapsed...
I disagree. I believe IT budget pressures in this economic retrenchment are of great help in motivating IT managers to look into OSS for cost savings, even if they don't 'get' the larger benefits of escaping vendor lock-in initially.
Secondly, how many people really use only Linux? Even the most hardcore Linux geeks I know have Win2k or WinXP dual-boots. No need to make Office there.
I use only Linux anymore. I use it for everything, and don't have a Windows partition. I used that MS OS crap for 10 years and hated it. Never again will Windows darken my system.
Crossover Office at $55 is a good investment for those few things (like Excel macros and VBA code, PowerPig presentations) that really require MS software to work. Fortunately, a large company bought Office2K for me awhile ago, so I use it.
OpenOffice is good enough for simple documents, but it's not completely format and bug compatible with Microsoft Office. It's not good enough yet.
Has anyone written up the implication for
MicroSoft if their stock loses value? Would
be an interesting read.
Microsoft's capitalization is such a big part of the stock market that economic anxiety probably had a lot to do with this plutocrats-whores Administration deciding to back off on the Antitrust case.
See the following analysis of Microsoft's financial pyramid for enlightenment:
Except that RAM only works when the machine is turned on. You need something more reliable for long-term storage.
MRAM (Magnetic RAM) is going to be the solution -- persistent memory, i.e., data is retained over power off/on cycles. Once manufacturers figure out how to make it inexpensive enough, we'll have "instant on" computers with all software and operating states in MRAM, and (optional) disk storage only used for large volume storage -- and perhaps not even for that, if the data is valuable enough to justify using MRAM. (Expect MRAM will always be more expensive than cheap high-density disk storage.)
The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.
Yeah, it's really so strange how being laid-off from a job that paid mid 5-figures up to near six-figures or more, scraping by on unemployment, really cuts down on consumers' willingness to plonk for newer technology. But companies saved staffing costs...
Especially when their "old" (2-3 years) home desktop or notebook PC works just fine for email and surfing job-search websites.
Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them. Today's overpaid and overprivileged corporate executive class seems to have lost sight of this. Refusing to pay more than rock-bottom wages destroys demand for their own high-tech products.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the federal goverment does what the people as a whole want.
What, you're not happy working 5 months out of every year to pay taxes? How dare you, you ingrate! Shut up and pay, peasant.
Maybe you don't like the federal government spending over 50% of the available US budget on imperial warmaking (er,... defense, that's it) on behalf of the US-based oil cartel? Well guess what, they bought this Administration, they're damn well going to get their moneys worth, and they don't care _what_ you might think about it. Don't like that? Well... you can just go pound sand.
Or, in November (and two years later, too), you can vote _for_ candidates who stand a chance of defeating slimy Republicans.
For the dense, that's _not_ Libertarian or Green party candidates. Voting for fringe ideologies just reelects the monsters, as the results of the 2000 elections should have burned into the conscience of every Nader voter. Congratulations,... you elected Bush!
"Windows 98" and "safety" in the same sentence is a patent oxymoron. Perhaps this is obvious, but apparently not to the people at Microsoft, Volvo, or MSNBC.
But if GPL3 says 'You can distribute modified binaries without releasing the source.' then it would be kinda bad, because all the evil companies would use version 3 then. Am I correct?
Good point. The present wording that you may use the as-released GPL or a later one (at your option) presents a potential loophole. The FSF is naively saying, in effect, "Trust us, we'll never gut the GPL." But the GPL itself contains no language that prevents any later versions from eviscerating its essential copyleft nature. Could this really ever happen? Well yes, almost anything is possible.
The FSF should fix this. One way to do this while protecting users' key rights and obligations might be to refine the "current or later version" section to identify what provisions of the current license must survive in any later version in order for it to be valid and that, in these specified respects, the terms of the as-issued license will remain in force and prevail over any later version's provisions with respect to those terms. The lawyers over at the FSF need to sharpen their pencils and repair this little oversight.
Damn! According to the so-called "conventional wisdom" of ZDnet, Gartner, Mindcraft and the rest of those paid Microsoft shills (including Asscrack's DoJ), there must be Mach-3 supersonic pigs screaming through the raging ice-storms down in Hell today.
There's suddenly an affordable, easily usable by Joe and Jane SixPack, and completely Microsoft free PC on sale to even ordinary consumers! Eric Raymond's prophecy is realized much earlier than anyone might have thought. He even nailed the price point at $300. Few people who buy these PCs will shell out as much or more for Microsoft Office since it already comes with OpenOffice all loaded up and ready to use. This is just awesome. Right on, Eric! It's all downhill for Microsoft now; they're done, dead, gone.
Wal-Mart's cheap (but good enough) consumer PCs will force Dell, HPQ, and other vendors to match their price, which they won't be able to do with Windows and Office preloaded. They will simply have to offer Microsoft-free PCs to compete, or they'll lose marketshare. And that's more important to them than their former subservience to Microsoft. Look for Dell, HPQ, even IBM PCs sprouting Linux or Lindows real soon. Hopefully after you manage to sell any Microsoft stock you might have in your portfolio.
I'm telling all my non-37337 relatives and friends to jump on this before Wal-Mart sells out all their stock and/or recognizes the tremendous demand and raises their prices. Shee-it, a $300 Internet-ready, M$-Office compatible, multimedia PC? Anyone who doesn't have a fast and capable machine already is going to want one of these things, if only because it's the price of a game console and can do so much more! Amazing, great, wonderful, all those things. Microsoft is toast, their stranglehold on the PC is broken.
The way I see you looking at it, it appears that you're saying, "Well, superstring theory seems really complicated... too complicated for my tastes. Hence, I'll reject it." This is generally a bad idea when it comes to scientific hypotheses or theories.
Well, this thread is getting stale, but let me respond anyway. (I couldn't care less about the karma hits -- sitting at 50 is boring and Slashdot should raise the cap to 100, perhaps with a net plus rating on a post only raising karma by a +1... or something like that).
Yes, I'm arguing against overly complex theories to explain physical reality. Though I'm not sure I agree with Wolfram and his cellular automata analogies, I think they're interesting and worth some thought and exploration. Too bad he's so self-centered....
Simplicity is very compelling, whereas complexity is the enemy of any efficiency -- and the Universe is nothing if not extremely efficient. While I'm not near ready to agree with Wolfram that the laws of the Universe are "four lines of code," I'd also welcome this if turned out to be the case. Simple is a cardinal virtue, when it comes to fundamental physics, at least in my iconoclast book.
The fundamental issue is that General Relativity (GR) doesn't intersect with Quantum Mechanics (QM) whether QM is represented by the (lately dubious) Standard Model (SM) or some variety of Superstring Theory (ST) -- of which there are several competing flavors. My objection is that they are all too complex, and that they don't resolve the basic problem of accounting for GR gravity! Maybe someone well versed in ST might convince me that they have it covered, but I haven't seen that yet. Any better theories?
See Occams Razor (the original statement, much abused since), which was roughly "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity."
To me, that translates to deprecate imaginary dimensions in quantum mechanics, beyond necessity. Necessary means observable.
To me, superstring theory is just too fantasical to stand. Sorry, Hawking, et al. I don't buy it, the Universe doesn't work like that.
I think we ought to demote most of the physicists in academia to teaching positions - no "research" for about 5 years or so. Then let students loose on the issues, but with none of that former apprenticeship culture that has held back several generations of scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
We're in a grand solar minimum, so the rest of this century will be much cooler, not warmer. The US is right to ignore alarmist claims that increasing CO2 emissions will heat up the climate. The CO2 level is increasing, but that hasn't warmed the climate for the last 20 years, so it's obvious that the carbon climate hysteria is just a scam.
Starbucks is a nasty company. Its CEO Howard Schultz is a fanatical Zionist; if you patronize Starbucks, you're supporting Israeli genocide.
PC Authority ripped off this story, word for word, from The Inquirer. The author at The Inquirer, Charlie Demerjian, ought to sue their pants off for copyright infringement.
IBM has answered SCO's complaint and lodged several counterclaims against SCO. So, even if *all* SCO's claims against IBM are disposed of before any trial, the lawsuit won't end there. IBM will be entitled to have its counterclaims against SCO adjudicated. And before IBM is done, SCO will be in receivership and quite possibly some people will be facing jail.
There's a reason you don't see CIOs and CTOs at big companies giving interviews about their major Linux initiatives. It is a very simple reason, really.
These people regard using Linux in mission critical roles as a competitive advantage.
Think about it.
In the non-fiction category, Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" gets my vote. It's simply excellent.
No way David Boies is doing this pro bono. It's a commercial dispute (or a set of related commercial disputes), and lawyers - especially well-known trial lawyers - don't take those on for fun and good publicity.
We don't know what Boies law firm is charging SCO, as that's between them. I'd doubt they're working on full contingency, but they might have cut their rates in exchange for a percentage of any future recovery from IBM.
But Boies is out of his field here. He's an antitrust lawyer (he defended IBM for 10 years, then prosecuted US vs Microsoft). It's possible SCO hired him because he knows IBM's lawyers, and SCO might have thought he could smooth a buyout by IBM. Well, that obviously didn't work out, but now Boies is stuck with his sleazy client, SCO.
But he's not an intellectual property lawyer, so he's at some risk of focusing on irrelevancies and paying insufficient attention to what's really important. Just for example... business correspondence (including email), statements in business meetings, and patterns of conduct are important in antitrust law, because they show intent and acts to further anticompetitive practices. But such factors mean little in intellectual property cases, where the emphasis is on concrete facts. So Boies might screw up here, if he has to actually go to trial. He could be as badly mismatched to the contest as a swordsman at a gunfight.
Won't work. To get a preliminary injunction, you have to put up a cash bond against the defendant's potential business losses due to the injunction. SCO could "estimate" it in millions of dollars and get a judge to go along.
That's why SCO hasn't asked for a preliminary injunction against IBM selling AIX -- it can't afford a bond.
Of course, different companies will choose to be involved to lesser or greater degrees. Most (more than 90%) will be users primarily, rather than getting involved. Of the relative few that do contribute, most of those will just submit bug reports and apply patches. The few that do get more involved will likely be in niche businesses where their cost savings from using open platforms are greater than added customization costs: a few percent at most.
But that doesn't mean that a few won't actively contribute, where their costs of doing so will be less than continuing to pay high annual license fees for commercial software.
Collaborative competition won't be adopted in large companies with major R&D efforts, as you say. But small companies in vertical industries can benefit by pooling their efforts, and it can be expected that some will try.
I disagree. I believe IT budget pressures in this economic retrenchment are of great help in motivating IT managers to look into OSS for cost savings, even if they don't 'get' the larger benefits of escaping vendor lock-in initially.
Because that's all their reader sent them.
That's precisely what it does.
Linux, the movie.
Do try to keep up, Slashdot.
I use only Linux anymore. I use it for everything, and don't have a Windows partition. I used that MS OS crap for 10 years and hated it. Never again will Windows darken my system.
Crossover Office at $55 is a good investment for those few things (like Excel macros and VBA code, PowerPig presentations) that really require MS software to work. Fortunately, a large company bought Office2K for me awhile ago, so I use it.
OpenOffice is good enough for simple documents, but it's not completely format and bug compatible with Microsoft Office. It's not good enough yet.
Well, there's the Open Source Software Institute that lobbies for Open Source in government and academic organizations.
Some vendors are low-profile sponsors. I believe they also accept individual donations, which are tax-deductible because they're a non-profit.
Microsoft's capitalization is such a big part of the stock market that economic anxiety probably had a lot to do with this plutocrats-whores Administration deciding to back off on the Antitrust case.
See the following analysis of Microsoft's financial pyramid for enlightenment:
Microsoft Fraud Facts
Except that RAM only works when the machine is turned on. You need something more reliable for long-term storage.
MRAM (Magnetic RAM) is going to be the solution -- persistent memory, i.e., data is retained over power off/on cycles. Once manufacturers figure out how to make it inexpensive enough, we'll have "instant on" computers with all software and operating states in MRAM, and (optional) disk storage only used for large volume storage -- and perhaps not even for that, if the data is valuable enough to justify using MRAM. (Expect MRAM will always be more expensive than cheap high-density disk storage.)
The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.
Yeah, it's really so strange how being laid-off from a job that paid mid 5-figures up to near six-figures or more, scraping by on unemployment, really cuts down on consumers' willingness to plonk for newer technology. But companies saved staffing costs...
Especially when their "old" (2-3 years) home desktop or notebook PC works just fine for email and surfing job-search websites.
Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them. Today's overpaid and overprivileged corporate executive class seems to have lost sight of this. Refusing to pay more than rock-bottom wages destroys demand for their own high-tech products.
I'm not sure I'd agree that the federal goverment does what the people as a whole want.
... you elected Bush!
What, you're not happy working 5 months out of every year to pay taxes? How dare you, you ingrate! Shut up and pay, peasant.
Maybe you don't like the federal government spending over 50% of the available US budget on imperial warmaking (er,... defense, that's it) on behalf of the US-based oil cartel? Well guess what, they bought this Administration, they're damn well going to get their moneys worth, and they don't care _what_ you might think about it. Don't like that? Well... you can just go pound sand.
Or, in November (and two years later, too), you can vote _for_ candidates who stand a chance of defeating slimy Republicans.
For the dense, that's _not_ Libertarian or Green party candidates. Voting for fringe ideologies just reelects the monsters, as the results of the 2000 elections should have burned into the conscience of every Nader voter. Congratulations,
"Windows 98" and "safety" in the same sentence is a patent oxymoron. Perhaps this is obvious, but apparently not to the people at Microsoft, Volvo, or MSNBC.
But if GPL3 says 'You can distribute modified binaries without releasing the source.' then it would be kinda bad, because all the evil companies would use version 3 then. Am I correct?
Good point. The present wording that you may use the as-released GPL or a later one (at your option) presents a potential loophole. The FSF is naively saying, in effect, "Trust us, we'll never gut the GPL." But the GPL itself contains no language that prevents any later versions from eviscerating its essential copyleft nature. Could this really ever happen? Well yes, almost anything is possible.
The FSF should fix this. One way to do this while protecting users' key rights and obligations might be to refine the "current or later version" section to identify what provisions of the current license must survive in any later version in order for it to be valid and that, in these specified respects, the terms of the as-issued license will remain in force and prevail over any later version's provisions with respect to those terms. The lawyers over at the FSF need to sharpen their pencils and repair this little oversight.
Damn! According to the so-called "conventional wisdom" of ZDnet, Gartner, Mindcraft and the rest of those paid Microsoft shills (including Asscrack's DoJ), there must be Mach-3 supersonic pigs screaming through the raging ice-storms down in Hell today.
There's suddenly an affordable, easily usable by Joe and Jane SixPack, and completely Microsoft free PC on sale to even ordinary consumers! Eric Raymond's prophecy is realized much earlier than anyone might have thought. He even nailed the price point at $300. Few people who buy these PCs will shell out as much or more for Microsoft Office since it already comes with OpenOffice all loaded up and ready to use. This is just awesome. Right on, Eric! It's all downhill for Microsoft now; they're done, dead, gone.
Wal-Mart's cheap (but good enough) consumer PCs will force Dell, HPQ, and other vendors to match their price, which they won't be able to do with Windows and Office preloaded. They will simply have to offer Microsoft-free PCs to compete, or they'll lose marketshare. And that's more important to them than their former subservience to Microsoft. Look for Dell, HPQ, even IBM PCs sprouting Linux or Lindows real soon. Hopefully after you manage to sell any Microsoft stock you might have in your portfolio.
I'm telling all my non-37337 relatives and friends to jump on this before Wal-Mart sells out all their stock and/or recognizes the tremendous demand and raises their prices. Shee-it, a $300 Internet-ready, M$-Office compatible, multimedia PC? Anyone who doesn't have a fast and capable machine already is going to want one of these things, if only because it's the price of a game console and can do so much more! Amazing, great, wonderful, all those things. Microsoft is toast, their stranglehold on the PC is broken.
The way I see you looking at it, it appears that you're saying, "Well, superstring theory seems really complicated... too complicated for my tastes. Hence, I'll reject it." This is generally a bad idea when it comes to scientific hypotheses or theories.
Well, this thread is getting stale, but let me respond anyway. (I couldn't care less about the karma hits -- sitting at 50 is boring and Slashdot should raise the cap to 100, perhaps with a net plus rating on a post only raising karma by a +1... or something like that).
Yes, I'm arguing against overly complex theories to explain physical reality. Though I'm not sure I agree with Wolfram and his cellular automata analogies, I think they're interesting and worth some thought and exploration. Too bad he's so self-centered....
Simplicity is very compelling, whereas complexity is the enemy of any efficiency -- and the Universe is nothing if not extremely efficient. While I'm not near ready to agree with Wolfram that the laws of the Universe are "four lines of code," I'd also welcome this if turned out to be the case. Simple is a cardinal virtue, when it comes to fundamental physics, at least in my iconoclast book.
The fundamental issue is that General Relativity (GR) doesn't intersect with Quantum Mechanics (QM) whether QM is represented by the (lately dubious) Standard Model (SM) or some variety of Superstring Theory (ST) -- of which there are several competing flavors. My objection is that they are all too complex, and that they don't resolve the basic problem of accounting for GR gravity! Maybe someone well versed in ST might convince me that they have it covered, but I haven't seen that yet. Any better theories?
(Great sig you have - what does it really say?)
See Occams Razor (the original statement, much abused since), which was roughly "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity."
To me, that translates to deprecate imaginary dimensions in quantum mechanics, beyond necessity. Necessary means observable.
To me, superstring theory is just too fantasical to stand. Sorry, Hawking, et al. I don't buy it, the Universe doesn't work like that.
I think we ought to demote most of the physicists in academia to teaching positions - no "research" for about 5 years or so. Then let students loose on the issues, but with none of that former apprenticeship culture that has held back several generations of scientists.