It's not a problem for the latest tactic. If a Judge determines that SCO bought Calera -- without knowing that Caldera was distributing their stolen copyrighted code -- and they continued the normal operations of Caldera until such time as they figured out that "Hey, this is our code!" , then they promptly took legal action, it could be argued that they did not knowingly agree to the license.
Under this tactic, SCO is saying "well, fine, we won't distribute Linux (thus we won't be subject to the GPL), we'll just attack distributors who don't have licenses for our copyrighted code by taking them to court for copyright infringement.
Under this scenario, SCO doesn't care if the GPL is valid or invalid. SCO doesn't care if the IP was wrongfully contributed and distributed under the GPL... Under this scenario, SCO would be arguing that they haven't done any distributing, and thus they can prevent people from distributing these unauthorized copies of their work... unless they have a license... because SCO is a third party who has nothing to do with the GPL granted between the code-theif and the recipient.
Of course this means that they can't knowingly continue to violate the GPL by distributing Linux in any form.
The critical flaw with this whole scenario is in the GPL's clause indicating that the code cannot be distributed period if there is a license encumbrument. It goes a little weird when the contribution is by a code-theif who can't be trusted to reveal all their contributions and that the copyright is in the hands of a third party who won't reveal what the code-theif contributed either.
Unfortunately, if SCO is aruging that the code is a trade secret and is protected by copyright, they might just make it nearly impossible for anyone to definitively purge the secretly copyrighted code from the kernel.
So under this maligned idea, this will either push the kernel back a few years, or blow over when a Judge decides that either 1. SCO did release the code under the GPL, 2. The code is not stolen, 3. that the code is not a trade secret and SCO has an obligation to minimize everyone's damages by revealing where the copyrighted code resides.
IANAL, etc, it's just an idea. I think any judge in their right mind would at least argue #3. #1 and #2 are not crystal clear to me. After all, if Caldera for example, was cooking their books, would SCO be on the hook by discovering it and revealing it, even months after buying them?
SCO is arguing that Caldera, like everyone else distributing Linux is/was guilty of an illegal act.
I personally like the GPL because it strongarms management into accepting open solutions in big, faceless companies. In these situations, coders generally can't control licensing.
Example: I can solve a problem by extending cron so that it triggers on a solar and lunar calendar. It can be used to anticipate a user's hormonal cycle.
BSD license:
Our cron has a BSD license, so we can lock down our lunar-hormonal-cron in our demo versions.
GPL
Our cron has a GPL license, so we have to grant people access to the source for the cron if we distribute it.
Two months later, some other project comes along at work which requires a lunar-cron. Under situation 'A' 20 members of middle management meet to carefully study your request to adap the intellectual property from one project to another. Realizing that they need a lawyer to figure out the requiremetns of their own intellectual property, they decline your request. Also, you have to re-write the solution from scratch. You may have to ask a peer to do it because you might be tainted. Under Situation 'B', the GPL component meant that you can grab the source code from the demo version... and management's decision changes to that of "do we accept this free component into this project?"
Since in the real-world, there exists BSD and GPL cron, we will never know how many times lunar-cron has been implemented.
N.B. the GPL is not viral for individual components of projects!!!
I have no idea what mod-clipboard is. Can you provide a reference?
I'm talking about "Linux on the Desktop", if you're going to divide desktops up into "Linux" "KDE" and "Gnome" when you want to say that desktop applications interact well, you can't turn around and argue that "Linux on the desktop" has a lot of full featured applications.
With the clipboard, I'm talking about copying and pasting stuff more complex than plain text, using something more sophisticated than the X primary selection middle-button buffer. I also mean doing so beyond a carefully crafted unified destkop environment like KDE or Gnome. You may be able to point to bleeding edge projects to get the KDE and Gnome clipboards to speak plainly to one another, or some pre-1.0 ware which allows you to fudge some kind of bizzare behaviour from non-standard applications... but my point is not that it is impossible, just that these are problems Linux is still struggling with but Win3.1 had solved 12 years ago.
It's an API with a GUI. It just happens to be packaged with an OS, but as shown when migrating from Win9x to Win2k and even Lindows, the underlying OS can be changed without much trouble.
The problem with printing under Linux is that there is no API to do it. Rendering something on screen does not mean that you can print it. Windows 3.1 had this figured out. In Linux you have to re-write everything so that it can be rendered in X and rendered again in Postscript (semantics about creating your own abstraction layers to generate the Postscript and X stuff aside).
Middle-click copy and paste is to me, a pain in the ass. Select-to-copy is pretty bad as it wipes out your clipboard with the slip of your mouse. And accidentally clicking the middle button over a terminal window shouldn't give you a sinking feeling. It's kind of spiffy to be able to copy and paste with the mouse like that, but first, I can do all of that without the mouse in Windows, and second, I can't do any of that without the mouse in Linux.... and if I really wanted to, I could dig up some Logitech driver which would let me customize my middle button for copy and paste... but again, it wouldn't be any fun.
Can you select a region of a graphic in the Gimp and paste it into Open Office yet? How about Abiword? It might work for Gnumeric, and hey, who knows, maybe the next time I check out Linux on the Desktop, somebody will have figured out how to get different applications with different forms of data to speak to one another using common intermediate formats/methods like CGM or OLE (which both suck, but existed in Win3.1 and are far better than what Linux has).
As for sound, with ESD, if I hit the 'Stop' button on XMMS, I get a noticable lag waiting for the audio to stop. Disabling ESD corrects this. The best way to get sound working well under Linux is to find a card which will do the mixing in the driver. I never had that problem in Win3.1 either.
And I didn't say that Windows was great, just that the Linux desktop is in many important ways inferior to Windows 3.1
If you want to shoot down Win3.1, you can talk about the stability, GDI limitations and real-mode drivers.
Setting up a network printer is a one-time task, setting up networking and file sharing are one-time tasks. Those tasks were performed under DOS or using special utilities, it was honestly no harder than doing it under Linux, and at least under Windows, the print driver could speak the language of the printer.
Cutting and pasting are regularly performed tasks. Printing is a regularly performed task. Consistent editing keys and keystrokes (home, end, shift to select, select without wiping out clipboard contents, double-click to highlight a word, ctrl-arrow to advance or retreat a word etc..)
And all this stuff about Linux having a marvellous and thoroughly advanced clipboard is baloney. Every time a limitation pops up, there are 20 people screaming why the limitation is there, and why it is better than Windows.
The real reason to get rid of Win3.1 and Win9x is because the OS under that API is rotten to the core. MS is getting better at the OS with 2k and XP, but there are still rough edges.
In 1995, Linux showed a lot of promise on the Desktop. Win3.1 didn't have a good underlying OS, and neither did Win95.
But now, as it was in 1995, the best Desktop for a Linux environment is a Windows machine. Linux's strengths are so network transparent that a good terminal emulator on Windows was all you needed to have a solid GUI and still be able to use Linux on your network.
I can run OpenOffice, Mozilla, and the whole Cygnus Gnu environment on Windows. Why should I bother with a Linux Desktop?
Linux on the desktop still barely has the functionality of Windows 3.1. Win3.1 still has a more tightly integrated clipboard, a good printing system, excellent screen fonts, no crazy sound managers, etc etc etc.
The Windows product is not an OS, it is an API. 'Linux' as a desktop OS still doesn't have a 1.0 API. And who would target or invest in a moving platform?
The fact that MS Office on Win3.1 worked well on a 386 with 8MB of RAM should cause people to pause for thought.
We're all just squishy blobs of chemicals who react with happiness or despair to splurts and oozings of various horomones.
To some people, statements like 'mission', 'accomplishment' and 'bennefit the world' are all fluff, for others, they're words which give them happiness. As politically correct the statements may be, 'mission', 'accomplishment' and 'bennefitting the world' don't provide happiness for everyone.
It's best to go with your own flow, find whatever causes your body to keep oozing happy horomones into your brain and enjoy. If nothing can do that without making your life terminally short or causing long-term despair, then find somebody who can splut happy horomones into your brain for you.
And here I thought it was so that they would be able to choose what code they wanted to release, when and if they wanted to release it, and make proprietary any significant improvements to the OS by locking down the source.
A 5-lb notebook is a bigger notebook, it means carrying a larger bag.
Take this from someone who carried a 7-lb notebook, a 5-lb Targus bag, along with a power supply, kensington lock, a book to read, lunch and papers... (no extra battery)
That's 15-20-lbs of dead weight.
Now carry that bag onto public transit. It's a PITA. It has to be guarded too -- you can't put it down very often, and you can't wear a backpack on a crowded subway.
If you have a car, you can't leave the bag in the trunk, it's company equipment, and too valuable.
Don't forget that in the military, you're wearing fatigues. Remember that with this bag, you're wearing business-casual. You also can't look like you're tired of carrying it, nor can you get sweaty. You also may be in worse-than-average physical shape.
In the evening, you might want to go out with some friends, but if you have to take your machine home, you'll be carrying that monster.
Finally, think of things like grocery shopping, Christmas shopping, etc.
A 3-lb notebook instantly shaves off 4lbs. The bag can be a well-made soft backpack with a notebook liner, shaving off another 3lbs. You can carry it in your hand while on a crowded train and throw it over one shoulder when boarding and leaving busses etc.
"Give us what we want that's not in your own best interests or we'll tell people how to break your machine and potentially lose more money by having people buy XBOXes for uses other than buying the games that make them money."
It's a little more like:
"You know that problem you wouldn't help us with? Well, we figured it out, but we don't think you'll like the solution. Can you help us with an alternative solution which is in your best interest? No? Ok, then we'll just do it our own way."
Then the office administrator walks up to the loud guy and says "hey, Jim here wants you to stop talking to your wife on speakerphone". Cut it out or I'll have to disable it.
The loud guy will then speak louder, and more often on his speakerphone.
When you bring it up to the office admin again, they'll say "talk to your manager"
Your manager will tell you that he'll have a word with his manager... and then they'll promptly forget.
When you remind your manager, your manager will tell you about how you should be more tolerant of other people. After all, it's a cubicle environment.
This will come up in your yearly review and affect your performance rating. You'll need to participate in some team-building exercises and try to develop your "soft skills".
It's probably safer to just pour superglue in the speakerphone button.
Get a good travel pack, one that is both an internal frame pack and a suitcase with wheels. Pack light, get a money belt. Never display american money on the street if possible.
One last, somewhat strange piece of advice, you may also want to sew a small Canadian flag to your pack. I've had far less problems since I did.
It's far, far better not to display any signs of affluence.
So when you're wheeling that suitcase/backback down the street with the Canadian flag on it, people will think "hey, a local."
Travelling light and blending in is the best advice. Forget the interior frame suitcase/backpacks. They're unbalanced, oversized and overweight. If you need to wheel your pack, it's very conspicuous and far too heavy! Carry the kind of pack that a highschool student would carry. You can only squeeze a couple sets of lightweight clothes in there and some maps & stuff. If you have money, most problems are easy to solve.
Don't use maps in public, don't bring out any travel guides in public.... and don't bring $2000 worth of digital camera equipment unless you're willing to hand it over when you're jumped in a dark alley. (Hide some bills in a very concealed location, don't keep your passport with your money, and keep a 'fake' wallet (a few bills and some domestic book cards) handy. (while you're at it, I've taken to scanning travel documents and putting them on a password protected website. Get companions to carry copies of your docs too, and carry copies of theirs.)
You're probably blending in alright when people start asking you for directions. It's impossible to blend in completely, you just don't want to make it obvious that you're a tourist, and you don't want to make it obvious that you're carrying lots of valuable stuff.
I like the disposable camera idea. I also like the idea of a cheap digital with CF or SmartMedia cards.
Youth hostels are o.k., some suck, who cares. If you're not carrying that flag-laden wheeling suitcase, sleeping in a park shouldn't be a problem. I tend to avoid it because I'm a small person and I'm not normally good with the local language. It's not safe if you can't answer the vagrant/drug dealer/police officer.
I don't know how much room there is for innovation or originality in some of these key algorithms. After years of studying, tweaking and profiling by experienced software developers who work in the same field of study and work to similar standards for style and documentation, I think it would be quite likely that not only would the C-source be nearly identical, but the compiled binary would be so close, that the differences would be evidence of inefficiencies in the compiler...
The "common source" could easily be the same textbooks, similar educations, identical CPU architectures, identical programming languages all being applied at the same time to solve the same problems for similar operating systems.
I would be surprised if there weren't overwhelming similarities.
Yeah, they can never be sure. After all, sexual dimorphism almost always leads to larger males, and all the femur, hip-bones and other skeletal remains with good sexual indicators have been accompanied by skull casings which are consistent with larger brains.
It's quite possible that men had birthing hips and would bear children. Of course they would need vaginas and breasts, and women would need penises, but that doesn't make the men less manly or the women less womanly.
The bottom line is that the skulls are probably those of males. It would be remarkable if they turned out to be female, but there's no direct evidence either way, and since no other hominid has larger females than males, it's a reasonable assumption.
Saying that there is a patriarchal bias, is to say that you percieve something inherently better about a larger brain. This advantage you attribute to sexual lines. That's not only sexist, but it belittle both men's and women's contributions to anthropology.
Or maybe he was just afraid that they'd drag him so long and hard through the courts that no matter how bad $12k is to him now, it will be nothing compared to what will happen when they're finished with him.... even if he wins.
Quite right, I knew I should have checked that one. I only just stopped getting his name mixed up with Christopher Reeves. Lee, Reeves, Lloyd, you see the similarity?
So when Christopher Lloyd says that he always wanted to act in the Lord of the Rings, he really meant that he always thought he could make lots of money from a Lord of the Rings movie?
Ditto for Peter Jackson, the special effects people and everyone else involved.
Saying that the movie was created to make money is not quite accurate. The movie would have been stopped if they felt it couldn't make money.
And so saying that Golumn was pandering to the masses is saying that the director, actors etc, all deviated from their original intent. Whether or not that was for money, or for showing off special effects, who knows?
It wasn't very creative. Slagging Dobby was funny, but going on like that was over the top.
On the other hand, there are probably many real people who say very similar things after such award ceremonies...
I still think that although Gollum was a cool effect, the character was over-acted. They were pandering to the masses. Just imagine if Boromir had scenes where he were talking to himself about how much he wants the ring. It would be utterly stupid.
I would have been suprised if somebody tried to write an acceptance speech which would have been in-character and didn't draw on the crowd pleasing split personality scene.
Oh well. I'm not saying Gollumn was done poorly, I think he was done as well as can be expected. I just don't think the character is anything spectacular.
MS has been trying to figure out a way to stop the upgrade cycle for some time now. They've been looking at software rental and time limited licensing.
In 1999(ish), customers wanted to keep Office 97. It did everything they needed.
Microsoft wanted people to buy new software. They crammed all the features they could into Office 2000, but aside from making Clippy easier to get rid of, people weren't compelled. It wasn't until Microsoft refused to sell Office 97 licenses that Office 2000 sales really picked up.
OpenOffice has a competitive edge here. As long as the Win32 api sticks, or Linux is ported to modern CPUs, you will always be able to put OpenOffice on a new machine.
So, Microsoft needs to be competitive (long term... short term OO is unnoticable). Microsoft needs revenue. Customers need to write, read and share information.
.Net offers them this ability, and their new licensing offers them this ability. If they supported fat client software with the tenaciousness of IBM (e.g. Office 97 will be supported until some nutty year like 2020 and the file format will always be supported), or if they went to that screwed up ASP model with.net, they can lock customers in to regular fees, but they can also offer continual improvements and pay-per-use features.
People hate the upgrade cycle. Where I work, we're only deploying Windows XP and Office XP because Microsoft will eventually drop support for 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a problem for the latest tactic. If a Judge determines that SCO bought Calera -- without knowing that Caldera was distributing their stolen copyrighted code -- and they continued the normal operations of Caldera until such time as they figured out that "Hey, this is our code!" , then they promptly took legal action, it could be argued that they did not knowingly agree to the license.
Under this tactic, SCO is saying "well, fine, we won't distribute Linux (thus we won't be subject to the GPL), we'll just attack distributors who don't have licenses for our copyrighted code by taking them to court for copyright infringement.
Under this scenario, SCO doesn't care if the GPL is valid or invalid. SCO doesn't care if the IP was wrongfully contributed and distributed under the GPL... Under this scenario, SCO would be arguing that they haven't done any distributing, and thus they can prevent people from distributing these unauthorized copies of their work... unless they have a license... because SCO is a third party who has nothing to do with the GPL granted between the code-theif and the recipient.
Of course this means that they can't knowingly continue to violate the GPL by distributing Linux in any form.
The critical flaw with this whole scenario is in the GPL's clause indicating that the code cannot be distributed period if there is a license encumbrument. It goes a little weird when the contribution is by a code-theif who can't be trusted to reveal all their contributions and that the copyright is in the hands of a third party who won't reveal what the code-theif contributed either.
Unfortunately, if SCO is aruging that the code is a trade secret and is protected by copyright, they might just make it nearly impossible for anyone to definitively purge the secretly copyrighted code from the kernel.
So under this maligned idea, this will either push the kernel back a few years, or blow over when a Judge decides that either 1. SCO did release the code under the GPL, 2. The code is not stolen, 3. that the code is not a trade secret and SCO has an obligation to minimize everyone's damages by revealing where the copyrighted code resides.
IANAL, etc, it's just an idea. I think any judge in their right mind would at least argue #3. #1 and #2 are not crystal clear to me. After all, if Caldera for example, was cooking their books, would SCO be on the hook by discovering it and revealing it, even months after buying them?
SCO is arguing that Caldera, like everyone else distributing Linux is/was guilty of an illegal act.
And they're all hypothetical reasons to explain an annecdotal speed increase which conveniently fail to mention any application compatability issues.
Windows software is buggy enough under Windows. Putting it under a non-Windows environment is begging for trouble.
I personally like the GPL because it strongarms management into accepting open solutions in big, faceless companies. In these situations, coders generally can't control licensing.
Example: I can solve a problem by extending cron so that it triggers on a solar and lunar calendar. It can be used to anticipate a user's hormonal cycle.
BSD license:
Our cron has a BSD license, so we can lock down our lunar-hormonal-cron in our demo versions.
GPL
Our cron has a GPL license, so we have to grant people access to the source for the cron if we distribute it.
Two months later, some other project comes along at work which requires a lunar-cron. Under situation 'A' 20 members of middle management meet to carefully study your request to adap the intellectual property from one project to another. Realizing that they need a lawyer to figure out the requiremetns of their own intellectual property, they decline your request. Also, you have to re-write the solution from scratch. You may have to ask a peer to do it because you might be tainted. Under Situation 'B', the GPL component meant that you can grab the source code from the demo version... and management's decision changes to that of "do we accept this free component into this project?"
Since in the real-world, there exists BSD and GPL cron, we will never know how many times lunar-cron has been implemented.
N.B. the GPL is not viral for individual components of projects!!!
I have no idea what mod-clipboard is. Can you provide a reference?
I'm talking about "Linux on the Desktop", if you're going to divide desktops up into "Linux" "KDE" and "Gnome" when you want to say that desktop applications interact well, you can't turn around and argue that "Linux on the desktop" has a lot of full featured applications.
With the clipboard, I'm talking about copying and pasting stuff more complex than plain text, using something more sophisticated than the X primary selection middle-button buffer. I also mean doing so beyond a carefully crafted unified destkop environment like KDE or Gnome. You may be able to point to bleeding edge projects to get the KDE and Gnome clipboards to speak plainly to one another, or some pre-1.0 ware which allows you to fudge some kind of bizzare behaviour from non-standard applications... but my point is not that it is impossible, just that these are problems Linux is still struggling with but Win3.1 had solved 12 years ago.
It's an API with a GUI. It just happens to be packaged with an OS, but as shown when migrating from Win9x to Win2k and even Lindows, the underlying OS can be changed without much trouble.
The problem with printing under Linux is that there is no API to do it. Rendering something on screen does not mean that you can print it. Windows 3.1 had this figured out. In Linux you have to re-write everything so that it can be rendered in X and rendered again in Postscript (semantics about creating your own abstraction layers to generate the Postscript and X stuff aside).
Here's a spiffy article about it I just pulled out of Google. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6729
Middle-click copy and paste is to me, a pain in the ass. Select-to-copy is pretty bad as it wipes out your clipboard with the slip of your mouse. And accidentally clicking the middle button over a terminal window shouldn't give you a sinking feeling. It's kind of spiffy to be able to copy and paste with the mouse like that, but first, I can do all of that without the mouse in Windows, and second, I can't do any of that without the mouse in Linux.... and if I really wanted to, I could dig up some Logitech driver which would let me customize my middle button for copy and paste... but again, it wouldn't be any fun.
Can you select a region of a graphic in the Gimp and paste it into Open Office yet? How about Abiword? It might work for Gnumeric, and hey, who knows, maybe the next time I check out Linux on the Desktop, somebody will have figured out how to get different applications with different forms of data to speak to one another using common intermediate formats/methods like CGM or OLE (which both suck, but existed in Win3.1 and are far better than what Linux has).
As for sound, with ESD, if I hit the 'Stop' button on XMMS, I get a noticable lag waiting for the audio to stop. Disabling ESD corrects this. The best way to get sound working well under Linux is to find a card which will do the mixing in the driver. I never had that problem in Win3.1 either.
And I didn't say that Windows was great, just that the Linux desktop is in many important ways inferior to Windows 3.1
If you want to shoot down Win3.1, you can talk about the stability, GDI limitations and real-mode drivers.
Setting up a network printer is a one-time task, setting up networking and file sharing are one-time tasks. Those tasks were performed under DOS or using special utilities, it was honestly no harder than doing it under Linux, and at least under Windows, the print driver could speak the language of the printer.
Cutting and pasting are regularly performed tasks. Printing is a regularly performed task. Consistent editing keys and keystrokes (home, end, shift to select, select without wiping out clipboard contents, double-click to highlight a word, ctrl-arrow to advance or retreat a word etc..)
And all this stuff about Linux having a marvellous and thoroughly advanced clipboard is baloney. Every time a limitation pops up, there are 20 people screaming why the limitation is there, and why it is better than Windows.
The real reason to get rid of Win3.1 and Win9x is because the OS under that API is rotten to the core. MS is getting better at the OS with 2k and XP, but there are still rough edges.
In 1995, Linux showed a lot of promise on the Desktop. Win3.1 didn't have a good underlying OS, and neither did Win95.
But now, as it was in 1995, the best Desktop for a Linux environment is a Windows machine. Linux's strengths are so network transparent that a good terminal emulator on Windows was all you needed to have a solid GUI and still be able to use Linux on your network.
I can run OpenOffice, Mozilla, and the whole Cygnus Gnu environment on Windows. Why should I bother with a Linux Desktop?
Linux on the desktop still barely has the functionality of Windows 3.1. Win3.1 still has a more tightly integrated clipboard, a good printing system, excellent screen fonts, no crazy sound managers, etc etc etc.
The Windows product is not an OS, it is an API. 'Linux' as a desktop OS still doesn't have a 1.0 API. And who would target or invest in a moving platform?
The fact that MS Office on Win3.1 worked well on a 386 with 8MB of RAM should cause people to pause for thought.
We're all just squishy blobs of chemicals who react with happiness or despair to splurts and oozings of various horomones.
To some people, statements like 'mission', 'accomplishment' and 'bennefit the world' are all fluff, for others, they're words which give them happiness. As politically correct the statements may be, 'mission', 'accomplishment' and 'bennefitting the world' don't provide happiness for everyone.
It's best to go with your own flow, find whatever causes your body to keep oozing happy horomones into your brain and enjoy. If nothing can do that without making your life terminally short or causing long-term despair, then find somebody who can splut happy horomones into your brain for you.
Yeah, it comes in thin, eats more than anyone else and spends too much time in the washroom after every meal.
And here I thought it was so that they would be able to choose what code they wanted to release, when and if they wanted to release it, and make proprietary any significant improvements to the OS by locking down the source.
Quite right
A 5-lb notebook is a bigger notebook, it means carrying a larger bag.
Take this from someone who carried a 7-lb notebook, a 5-lb Targus bag, along with a power supply, kensington lock, a book to read, lunch and papers... (no extra battery)
That's 15-20-lbs of dead weight.
Now carry that bag onto public transit. It's a PITA. It has to be guarded too -- you can't put it down very often, and you can't wear a backpack on a crowded subway.
If you have a car, you can't leave the bag in the trunk, it's company equipment, and too valuable.
Don't forget that in the military, you're wearing fatigues. Remember that with this bag, you're wearing business-casual. You also can't look like you're tired of carrying it, nor can you get sweaty. You also may be in worse-than-average physical shape.
In the evening, you might want to go out with some friends, but if you have to take your machine home, you'll be carrying that monster.
Finally, think of things like grocery shopping, Christmas shopping, etc.
A 3-lb notebook instantly shaves off 4lbs. The bag can be a well-made soft backpack with a notebook liner, shaving off another 3lbs. You can carry it in your hand while on a crowded train and throw it over one shoulder when boarding and leaving busses etc.
Every little bit helps.
"Give us what we want that's not in your own best interests or we'll tell people how to break your machine and potentially lose more money by having people buy XBOXes for uses other than buying the games that make them money."
It's a little more like:
"You know that problem you wouldn't help us with? Well, we figured it out, but we don't think you'll like the solution. Can you help us with an alternative solution which is in your best interest? No? Ok, then we'll just do it our own way."
Then the office administrator walks up to the loud guy and says "hey, Jim here wants you to stop talking to your wife on speakerphone". Cut it out or I'll have to disable it.
The loud guy will then speak louder, and more often on his speakerphone.
When you bring it up to the office admin again, they'll say "talk to your manager"
Your manager will tell you that he'll have a word with his manager... and then they'll promptly forget.
When you remind your manager, your manager will tell you about how you should be more tolerant of other people. After all, it's a cubicle environment.
This will come up in your yearly review and affect your performance rating. You'll need to participate in some team-building exercises and try to develop your "soft skills".
It's probably safer to just pour superglue in the speakerphone button.
Each doc has its own window. But you can turn that off if it bugs you.
An Office 2000 -> Office XP upgrade didn't make me wretch, but I'm not a heavy Office user.
IMHO it's probably not worth an upgrade if it means that people who receive your document might need to upgrade to work with some new fancy feature.
Get a good travel pack, one that is both an internal frame pack and a suitcase with wheels. Pack light, get a money belt. Never display american money on the street if possible.
One last, somewhat strange piece of advice, you may also want to sew a small Canadian flag to your pack. I've had far less problems since I did.
It's far, far better not to display any signs of affluence.
So when you're wheeling that suitcase/backback down the street with the Canadian flag on it, people will think "hey, a local."
Travelling light and blending in is the best advice. Forget the interior frame suitcase/backpacks. They're unbalanced, oversized and overweight. If you need to wheel your pack, it's very conspicuous and far too heavy! Carry the kind of pack that a highschool student would carry. You can only squeeze a couple sets of lightweight clothes in there and some maps & stuff. If you have money, most problems are easy to solve.
Don't use maps in public, don't bring out any travel guides in public.... and don't bring $2000 worth of digital camera equipment unless you're willing to hand it over when you're jumped in a dark alley. (Hide some bills in a very concealed location, don't keep your passport with your money, and keep a 'fake' wallet (a few bills and some domestic book cards) handy. (while you're at it, I've taken to scanning travel documents and putting them on a password protected website. Get companions to carry copies of your docs too, and carry copies of theirs.)
You're probably blending in alright when people start asking you for directions. It's impossible to blend in completely, you just don't want to make it obvious that you're a tourist, and you don't want to make it obvious that you're carrying lots of valuable stuff.
I like the disposable camera idea. I also like the idea of a cheap digital with CF or SmartMedia cards.
Youth hostels are o.k., some suck, who cares. If you're not carrying that flag-laden wheeling suitcase, sleeping in a park shouldn't be a problem. I tend to avoid it because I'm a small person and I'm not normally good with the local language. It's not safe if you can't answer the vagrant/drug dealer/police officer.
I don't know how much room there is for innovation or originality in some of these key algorithms. After years of studying, tweaking and profiling by experienced software developers who work in the same field of study and work to similar standards for style and documentation, I think it would be quite likely that not only would the C-source be nearly identical, but the compiled binary would be so close, that the differences would be evidence of inefficiencies in the compiler...
The "common source" could easily be the same textbooks, similar educations, identical CPU architectures, identical programming languages all being applied at the same time to solve the same problems for similar operating systems.
I would be surprised if there weren't overwhelming similarities.
Yeah, they can never be sure. After all, sexual dimorphism almost always leads to larger males, and all the femur, hip-bones and other skeletal remains with good sexual indicators have been accompanied by skull casings which are consistent with larger brains.
It's quite possible that men had birthing hips and would bear children. Of course they would need vaginas and breasts, and women would need penises, but that doesn't make the men less manly or the women less womanly.
The bottom line is that the skulls are probably those of males. It would be remarkable if they turned out to be female, but there's no direct evidence either way, and since no other hominid has larger females than males, it's a reasonable assumption.
Saying that there is a patriarchal bias, is to say that you percieve something inherently better about a larger brain. This advantage you attribute to sexual lines. That's not only sexist, but it belittle both men's and women's contributions to anthropology.
Or maybe he was just afraid that they'd drag him so long and hard through the courts that no matter how bad $12k is to him now, it will be nothing compared to what will happen when they're finished with him.... even if he wins.
I think they imagined that such a problem would be solved by a revolt. Voting is for honest governments.
I tend to agree with the original post, but I'll take it one step further: capitalism is killing democracy.
Quite right, I knew I should have checked that one. I only just stopped getting his name mixed up with Christopher Reeves. Lee, Reeves, Lloyd, you see the similarity?
So when Christopher Lloyd says that he always wanted to act in the Lord of the Rings, he really meant that he always thought he could make lots of money from a Lord of the Rings movie?
Ditto for Peter Jackson, the special effects people and everyone else involved.
Saying that the movie was created to make money is not quite accurate. The movie would have been stopped if they felt it couldn't make money.
And so saying that Golumn was pandering to the masses is saying that the director, actors etc, all deviated from their original intent. Whether or not that was for money, or for showing off special effects, who knows?
It wasn't very creative. Slagging Dobby was funny, but going on like that was over the top.
On the other hand, there are probably many real people who say very similar things after such award ceremonies...
I still think that although Gollum was a cool effect, the character was over-acted. They were pandering to the masses. Just imagine if Boromir had scenes where he were talking to himself about how much he wants the ring. It would be utterly stupid.
I would have been suprised if somebody tried to write an acceptance speech which would have been in-character and didn't draw on the crowd pleasing split personality scene.
Oh well. I'm not saying Gollumn was done poorly, I think he was done as well as can be expected. I just don't think the character is anything spectacular.
Editors... :-)
MS has been trying to figure out a way to stop the upgrade cycle for some time now. They've been looking at software rental and time limited licensing.
In 1999(ish), customers wanted to keep Office 97. It did everything they needed.
Microsoft wanted people to buy new software. They crammed all the features they could into Office 2000, but aside from making Clippy easier to get rid of, people weren't compelled. It wasn't until Microsoft refused to sell Office 97 licenses that Office 2000 sales really picked up.
OpenOffice has a competitive edge here. As long as the Win32 api sticks, or Linux is ported to modern CPUs, you will always be able to put OpenOffice on a new machine.
So, Microsoft needs to be competitive (long term... short term OO is unnoticable). Microsoft needs revenue. Customers need to write, read and share information.
.Net offers them this ability, and their new licensing offers them this ability. If they supported fat client software with the tenaciousness of IBM (e.g. Office 97 will be supported until some nutty year like 2020 and the file format will always be supported), or if they went to that screwed up ASP model with .net, they can lock customers in to regular fees, but they can also offer continual improvements and pay-per-use features.
People hate the upgrade cycle. Where I work, we're only deploying Windows XP and Office XP because Microsoft will eventually drop support for 2000.