Bravo! Finally someone says it. Investigative Journalism in America is a farce and has been since the days of the Watergate. Anymore, the media has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for whoever has the most money. It's rather sickening.
I should like to point out, however, that OSS is 'communist' in much the sense that Marx and Engels understood the term. It is not 'communist' in the sense that the old men in Beijing understand it. Indeed, it would perhaps be better to say that the Chinese are Maoist (as they themselves say) than to say that they are communist.
Communism is a far more subtle political/economic theory than most give it credit for being. For instance, the fact that United Airlines is owned by its employees is an example of a communist system in a larger capitalist economy. Further, the revolution in tech firms of making employees part-owners steps into the communist domain.
The key insight to communism is that the means of production ought to be owned and benefit those who produce.
Too bad that idea got perverted into totalitarianism and terror at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Ok, I've read through a hundred or so of these comments. To be sure, there are lots of extremely smart people working for the NSA. We spend, what, 13 or so billion for them? We also learn what they do and why they do it.
What no one has bothered asking is why, with so much money and so many smart people, they fuck-up so regularly? No, this is not a troll. Here's a shortlist of incidents where a little real intelligence would have gone a long ways...
Castro taking over Cuba
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait
The India/Pakistani nuclear tests
North Korean Missile tests ("3 stages?" oops)
The location of Chinese embassies
and I'm sure others can supply more examples.
Give me just one good example where intelligence gathered by the NSA has done the world any substantial good.
I can think of many other things to do with with 13 billion dollars and thousands of brilliant minds.
"No, those parachuters are doing their own acting."
It's a show you have to watch over and over to catch all the subtle satire. Best if watched drunk.
Re: Typical Bigotry vs. excellent propoganda
on
CrackThisBox Updates
·
· Score: 1
Read "The Microsoft Files" if you have any doubt about Gates' Napoleonic excesses.
Even in the ludicrously under-regulated U.S. economy, there is a presumption that you don't steal and you don't lie. Gates, et. al., are famous for doing both - pathologically, you might say.
No one minds success when it comes from hard work and talent. But success which comes from lying, cheating, and stealing is intolerable even in the U.S.
Morality, you see, is not at all subjective. By any possibly true moral normative theory - Utilitarianism, Contractarianism, or Deontological Theory - lying, cheating, and stealing are demonstrably morally wrong.
If a person is evil because they consistently do what is demonstrably morally wrong, then Bill Gates is clearly evil. End of story.
It doesn't help, of course, that their products mostly suck. Mostly.
No, you're not missing anything. The people that are getting all upset about this guy's death are the people who remember seeing him as a little kid in the white house.
For the rest of us, it's old history. It's not even interesting history anymore, unless you want to start talking about who really killed JFK (senior!)
As an aside, is there anything more nauseating than the funereal - low, somber- voices broadcasters suddenly adopt? The same people who cheerfully report that another mass grave was found in Kossovo? It's like a race to see who can pretend to be more deeply mournful.
Not at all. Suppose every fertile female human had just two offspring. Then the population explosion would halt in its tracks. Now suppose every fertile female human had just one offspring. Then the population would halve in one generation -> from 6 billion to 3 billion. Now suppose that incentives were given to people to avoid procreating. 2 billion is not so far-fetched. Death camps? You're being silly, I think.
About your second point: I'm not for mutilation of any sort. I'm not even happy about circumcision, but that's another story.
I don't know what to do about superstitions which say that one will be a sexual superhero if one drinks tea made with ground up tiger bones.
But, clearly, something needs to be done. The Chinese have eradicated their tiger and bear populations. India's populations of the same and like animals are rapidly following suit. Poaching of bear gall-bladders on U.S. soil to help satiate the extraordinary demand in Asia is sky-rocketing.
My viagra suggestion was merely a tongue-in-cheek rhetorical point that maybe it would help to offer them alternatives to exotic animal products.
Of course, I never said that all Asian men have small penises. But I do question the judgment of cultures which kill anything to extinction - mine (US) being no exception.
Which brings me to another point: What I said in the original post was not racist, nor was it intended to be a troll. But the fact that it got downgraded with a "troll" rating says a great deal about the moderators.
This is true. Service industries don't make anywhere near the money manufacturing industries do. But keep in mind that part of the OSS revolution is based in part on the idea that programming is a service, as opposed to manufacturing, industry. The fact that software companies have been thought to be manufacturing entities has, of course, made incredible amounts of money. But one of the reasons so much money has been made is that software company economics simply don't follow traditional manufacturing--i.e., the old "a billion copies of software is just as easy to produce as a single copy" argument. Without a Star-Trek matter replicator, making a billion cars is a billion times harder than making one car (well, not quite, but you get the idea).
The OSS revolution is really a complete subversion of the traditional software production business model. The question of whether or not to invest in OSS dependent companies (VA, Redhat, Cygnus, Corel, Caldera, and, increasingly, IBM) is the question of whether or not you think the OSS business model is superior to the CSS model employed by companies like Microsoft. It is not the question of whether service industries are better or worse to invest in than manufacturing industries. If you invest in Redhat and the rest, then you are placing a bet that OSS will, eventually, replace CSS. In effect, you're betting that OSS is better than CSS AND that corporations will see that OSS is superior to CSS.
I think OSS is fundamentally superior, if only because the development cycle outstrips anything the CSS community can possibly handle. But others have more eloquently stated the utilitarian arguments in favor of OSS over CSS far better than I can.
Of course, the personal argument is the best: I use only OSS, and people who use CSS and see my setup are 1) astonished at what a computer can actually do, and 2) bug me silly to convert them over to OSS.
So I think, and maybe I'm just trying to convince myself, that we are at the start of a radical revision of how software business is conducted. I'm willing to bet 20k$ or so on it--although not all on Redhat, I assure you. That would be crazy.
As I've said before, what we need to do is get some OSS sympathetic financial guru type to setup an OSS mutual fund which disperses it's investments across the gamut of OSS promoting/dependent/friendly companies. I just don't know, offhand, how to go about getting the ball rolling on this. But I am making inquiries.
(If I had real testicular fortitude, I would short sell a few thousand shares of Microsoft stock. The value of MS is going to plummet, I expect, in the next 5 years or so. But whatever else one can say about Billy G., it's better to overestimate his abilities and Napoleonic character--he must have a very, very small penis--than underestimate them, as a long trail of damaged and ruined companies have discovered. So I chicken out on that game.)
Is it possible, just possible, that the NSA intentionally "screwed up" the targeted that resulted in the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade getting bombed?
I mean, since the end of the cold war, the CIA and the NSA have been hard-pressed to justify their existence. No more nasty commies. But wait, there's a whole bunch of 'em over in China. Yeah, that's it. Our new enemy! Our new reason for being! Hey, give us more money, NOW!
Likely it's not true, I know. But it's fun to speculate. And, really, after hearing about the DOE's radiation experiments on mental patients, I'm not inclined to put much beyond a government.
NSA refusal on the basis of attorney/client privilege isn't just "dubious"--it simply doesn't make sense to me, at least. Of course, I'm no lawyer. Any lawyers out there who might explain a/c privilege in such a way that the NSA's move makes sense?
Moreover, doesn't Congress have final say over every (federal) governmental program? This is just plain spooky (no pun intended). The idea that an organization like the NSA feels itself beyond any oversight is disconcerting, to say the least.
I'm afraid your example, Kosovo, does not serve as a counter to my argument.
Clinton et.al. have given several arguments in favor of intervention in Kossovo. Their favorite argument is that we are morally obligated to stop ethnic cleansing.
I think we can all agree that there does exist just such an obligation (although I'm unconvinced that bombing is the best way to handle the problem.)
But that is not, repeat, not, why we are in Kossovo. For if we were genuinely motivated by the moral imperative to stop ethnic cleansing, then consistency would require that we conduct such interventions where-ever they occur. But we don't. The most egregious case was the active lobbying by the US to stop--yes, you read it correctly, stop--UN intervention in Rwanda in '95, which resulted in the wholesale slaughter of not less than 500,000 people. Men, women, and children.
So the argument that we're in Kossovo in virtue of our moral obligation to stop ethnic cleansing doesn't hold water, unless moral obligations only apply sometimes or in someplaces, which is, to borrow your phrase, silly.
So why are we in Kossovo? The other arguments given by Clinton et.al. are more pursuasive. For economic and security reasons, we need a stable Europe. But, as history has repeatedly shown, in order to have a stable Europe, we need a stable Balkans.
So there you go. It, once again, comes down to paranoia and greed. But as I said before, these are not always vices. In this case, we actually helping some people.
At the same time, of course, that we hurt many others.
Um, excuse me, but in what way am I a troll? If you don't agree with the argument, refute it. Show that it's unsound. Show that US policy isn't largely run by paranoia and greed.
It's called public debate. I welcome you to join it responsibly.
How much money do we put into the intelligence agencies, anyway? And how much of that money goes towards economic surveillance.
I'm sorry, but the US is not the moral paradigm so many of its citizens seem to believe.
The list of murderous dictators the US has put in power and supported--yes, for self-proclaimed economic and security reasons--is too long to list here.
It's not all that surprising, really. The guiding principles of the founding of the US were Paranoia and Greed. Even the most superficial research into the Puritans and the economic interests invested in colonial america reveal this much. The order of importance has flip-flopped at various times in our development, but the principles never change. They continue to guide US intra and inter-governmental policies. Examples are easy to come by:
1. The USAUK program for intercepting private communication, with the information being used to promote--ala industrial spying--US commercial interests.
2. A drug war that costs billions, has failed miserably, and yet has gone on longer, amazingly enough, than prohibition did. Believe me, there are a lot of people making lots of money off the war on drugs. They can seize anything and use it for their own purposes, including cars, boats, and planes.
Of course, Paranoia and Greed aren't necessarily vices--they just usually are.
It appears that we are at the beginning of an exponential growth in Linux distribution. That's precisely when an IPO is most useful, since value will continue to accumulate for a long time to come.
What puzzles me is why Augustin is puzzled over how to compensate Linux developers.
Well, let me back up: it's absolutely terrific that Augustin wants to secure some sort of compensation for Linux developers.
But why is he puzzled about it? The answer seems obvious. Dedicate a chunk of stock to be distributed across the developers. Stock can be gifted, you know. Perhaps someone from within VA (Chris?) could give us some insight on Augustin's thinking.
Then, when the company goes public, the developers can (after a year, I believe) get some monies out--perhaps to help support additional development.
Another interesting question is how the rest of the Linux--Open Source, generally--community can be allowed to get a stake in the growth of Open Source.
Perhaps a Linuxphilic Mutual Fund could be set up which invests largely in Open Source dependent companies.
Does anyone know how to go about doing this sort of thing?
Of more immediate concern are the impending IPO's.
Perhaps if a fund were set up to allow rabid open source fans like myself to collect together a huge amount of money, and then do the hardest thing possible--get in on the ground floor of an IPO.
To those who fear IPO's as risky: You are quite right to be cautious. But the growth of OSS, and the frankly astonishing growth of companies like VA (as I lovingly caress my VARstation) and Redhat, makes these IPO's a very different proposition from the typical IPO.
Keep in mind that stock markets are a good investment only so long as companies continue to grow. Can't we be somewhat confident that OSS will continue to grow?
I think we can. I've read the arguments in favor of OSS--I've even given some of them in my IT-Ethics class. The arguments in favor of OSS over CSS--some ethical, many economic--are all fo them sound. OSS will continue to grow.
It's time to hitch your wagon up to the OSS train.
The rest of this trial will consist of posturing on the part of Microsoft to get the best deal.
To that extent, the story is dead. What remains to be seen is just how intelligently the Judge will curtail the monopoly that we know and love to hate as "microsoft".
Hopefully, the Judge will see that breaking Microsoft up is no solution.
As has been argued quite effectively in a number of places, the key is requiring open standards (API/Networking/etc). But will the Judge appreciate this fact?
Let's hope so. Requiring open standards would effectively de-claw what, so far as I can tell, is the only weapon Microsoft can use against the open source community: closing or "decomoditizing" (sp?) standards.
Regardless of the source, the idea that white males, simply in virtue of being white males, cannot be abused is exactly as dangerous as the sort of racism and sexism Jane Dark presumably reviles.
What this demonstrates is just how absurd the left-wing/academic/ultra-liberal/relativistic/we-s peak-for-the-oppressed side really is.
Their concern is not so much that some one group has power over others as who that group is. White males, of course, are evil!
Evidence has been mounting that a cell's lifespan has a genetic basis. It's not, in otherwords, that cells suffer damage until they eventually 'give out'. Rather, some cells have a genetic cron|kill function.
Now the trick is going to be to figure out how to reset the function.
Don't underestimate Microsoft; they can deploy some very smart people, if sufficiently concerned.
They are now sufficiently concerned--the giant has awakened. Indeed, the point of this group will not be to generate FUD, as so many of you seem to be assuming.
Has the Open Source Community imagined all the possible moves open to Microsoft?
Have we any counter-strategies?
Doubtless, Microsoft is already thinking three and four moves ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Bravo! Finally someone says it. Investigative Journalism in America is a farce and has been since the days of the Watergate. Anymore, the media has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for whoever has the most money. It's rather sickening.
I should like to point out, however, that OSS is 'communist' in much the sense that Marx and Engels understood the term. It is not 'communist' in the sense that the old men in Beijing understand it. Indeed, it would perhaps be better to say that the Chinese are Maoist (as they themselves say) than to say that they are communist.
Communism is a far more subtle political/economic theory than most give it credit for being. For instance, the fact that United Airlines is owned by its employees is an example of a communist system in a larger capitalist economy. Further, the revolution in tech firms of making employees part-owners steps into the communist domain.
The key insight to communism is that the means of production ought to be owned and benefit those who produce.
Too bad that idea got perverted into totalitarianism and terror at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Ok, I've read through a hundred or so of these comments. To be sure, there are lots of extremely smart people working for the NSA. We spend, what, 13 or so billion for them? We also learn what they do and why they do it.
What no one has bothered asking is why, with so much money and so many smart people, they fuck-up so regularly? No, this is not a troll. Here's a shortlist of incidents where a little real intelligence would have gone a long ways...
Castro taking over Cuba
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait
The India/Pakistani nuclear tests
North Korean Missile tests ("3 stages?" oops)
The location of Chinese embassies
and I'm sure others can supply more examples.
Give me just one good example where intelligence gathered by the NSA has done the world any substantial good.
I can think of many other things to do with with 13 billion dollars and thousands of brilliant minds.
Many, many other things...
Ah, but who can forget such classic exchanges as:
"Are those actors doing their own parachuting?"
"No, those parachuters are doing their own acting."
It's a show you have to watch over and over to catch all the subtle satire. Best if watched drunk.
Read "The Microsoft Files" if you have any doubt about Gates' Napoleonic excesses.
Even in the ludicrously under-regulated U.S. economy, there is a presumption that you don't steal and you don't lie. Gates, et. al., are famous for doing both - pathologically, you might say.
No one minds success when it comes from hard work and talent. But success which comes from lying, cheating, and stealing is intolerable even in the U.S.
Morality, you see, is not at all subjective. By any possibly true moral normative theory - Utilitarianism, Contractarianism, or Deontological Theory - lying, cheating, and stealing are demonstrably morally wrong.
If a person is evil because they consistently do what is demonstrably morally wrong, then Bill Gates is clearly evil. End of story.
It doesn't help, of course, that their products mostly suck. Mostly.
I sort of meant that as a joke. Especially after the anti-linux-IPO template. Sorry.
When's Loki going public???
No, you're not missing anything. The people that are getting all upset about this guy's death are the people who remember seeing him as a little kid in the white house.
For the rest of us, it's old history. It's not even interesting history anymore, unless you want to start talking about who really killed JFK (senior!)
As an aside, is there anything more nauseating than the funereal - low, somber- voices broadcasters suddenly adopt? The same people who cheerfully report that another mass grave was found in Kossovo? It's like a race to see who can pretend to be more deeply mournful.
Gag.
Not at all. Suppose every fertile female human had just two offspring. Then the population explosion would halt in its tracks. Now suppose every fertile female human had just one offspring. Then the population would halve in one generation -> from 6 billion to 3 billion. Now suppose that incentives were given to people to avoid procreating. 2 billion is not so far-fetched. Death camps? You're being silly, I think.
About your second point: I'm not for mutilation of any sort. I'm not even happy about circumcision, but that's another story.
I don't know what to do about superstitions which say that one will be a sexual superhero if one drinks tea made with ground up tiger bones.
But, clearly, something needs to be done. The Chinese have eradicated their tiger and bear populations. India's populations of the same and like animals are rapidly following suit. Poaching of bear gall-bladders on U.S. soil to help satiate the extraordinary demand in Asia is sky-rocketing.
My viagra suggestion was merely a tongue-in-cheek rhetorical point that maybe it would help to offer them alternatives to exotic animal products.
Of course, I never said that all Asian men have small penises. But I do question the judgment of cultures which kill anything to extinction - mine (US) being no exception.
Which brings me to another point: What I said in the original post was not racist, nor was it intended to be a troll. But the fact that it got downgraded with a "troll" rating says a great deal about the moderators.
We should
1. Drop human population levels down to 2 billion or so, which could easily be done in one generation, and
2. Figure out someway of keeping superstitious asian men with small penises happy. Viagra donations, anyone?
Fact: As the OSS tide sweeps over MS, we're going to be hearing a lot of flailing, silly, shouting-in-the-wind FUD about OSS--Linux, in particular.
But it really does get boring after awhile. Is there anyway for me to filter out FUD articles like this one?
Note: I'm still interested in reading genuine, honest challenges. But this FUD is just getting tedious.
This is true. Service industries don't make anywhere near the money manufacturing industries do. But keep in mind that part of the OSS revolution is based in part on the idea that programming is a service, as opposed to manufacturing, industry. The fact that software companies have been thought to be manufacturing entities has, of course, made incredible amounts of money. But one of the reasons so much money has been made is that software company economics simply don't follow traditional manufacturing--i.e., the old "a billion copies of software is just as easy to produce as a single copy" argument. Without a Star-Trek matter replicator, making a billion cars is a billion times harder than making one car (well, not quite, but you get the idea).
The OSS revolution is really a complete subversion of the traditional software production business model. The question of whether or not to invest in OSS dependent companies (VA, Redhat, Cygnus, Corel, Caldera, and, increasingly, IBM) is the question of whether or not you think the OSS business model is superior to the CSS model employed by companies like Microsoft. It is not the question of whether service industries are better or worse to invest in than manufacturing industries. If you invest in Redhat and the rest, then you are placing a bet that OSS will, eventually, replace CSS. In effect, you're betting that OSS is better than CSS AND that corporations will see that OSS is superior to CSS.
I think OSS is fundamentally superior, if only because the development cycle outstrips anything the CSS community can possibly handle. But others have more eloquently stated the utilitarian arguments in favor of OSS over CSS far better than I can.
Of course, the personal argument is the best: I use only OSS, and people who use CSS and see my setup are 1) astonished at what a computer can actually do, and 2) bug me silly to convert them over to OSS.
So I think, and maybe I'm just trying to convince myself, that we are at the start of a radical revision of how software business is conducted. I'm willing to bet 20k$ or so on it--although not all on Redhat, I assure you. That would be crazy.
As I've said before, what we need to do is get some OSS sympathetic financial guru type to setup an OSS mutual fund which disperses it's investments across the gamut of OSS promoting/dependent/friendly companies. I just don't know, offhand, how to go about getting the ball rolling on this. But I am making inquiries.
(If I had real testicular fortitude, I would short sell a few thousand shares of Microsoft stock. The value of MS is going to plummet, I expect, in the next 5 years or so. But whatever else one can say about Billy G., it's better to overestimate his abilities and Napoleonic character--he must have a very, very small penis--than underestimate them, as a long trail of damaged and ruined companies have discovered. So I chicken out on that game.)
Hey, for you conspiracy buffs--
Is it possible, just possible, that the NSA intentionally "screwed up" the targeted that resulted in the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade getting bombed?
I mean, since the end of the cold war, the CIA and the NSA have been hard-pressed to justify their existence. No more nasty commies. But wait, there's a whole bunch of 'em over in China. Yeah, that's it. Our new enemy! Our new reason for being! Hey, give us more money, NOW!
Likely it's not true, I know. But it's fun to speculate. And, really, after hearing about the DOE's radiation experiments on mental patients, I'm not inclined to put much beyond a government.
NSA refusal on the basis of attorney/client privilege isn't just "dubious"--it simply doesn't make sense to me, at least. Of course, I'm no lawyer. Any lawyers out there who might explain a/c privilege in such a way that the NSA's move makes sense?
Moreover, doesn't Congress have final say over every (federal) governmental program? This is just plain spooky (no pun intended). The idea that an organization like the NSA feels itself beyond any oversight is disconcerting, to say the least.
I'm afraid your example, Kosovo, does not serve as a counter to my argument.
Clinton et.al. have given several arguments in favor of intervention in Kossovo. Their favorite argument is that we are morally obligated to stop ethnic cleansing.
I think we can all agree that there does exist just such an obligation (although I'm unconvinced that bombing is the best way to handle the problem.)
But that is not, repeat, not, why we are in Kossovo. For if we were genuinely motivated by the moral imperative to stop ethnic cleansing, then consistency would require that we conduct such interventions where-ever they occur. But we don't. The most egregious case was the active lobbying by the US to stop--yes, you read it correctly, stop--UN intervention in Rwanda in '95, which resulted in the wholesale slaughter of not less than 500,000 people. Men, women, and children.
So the argument that we're in Kossovo in virtue of our moral obligation to stop ethnic cleansing doesn't hold water, unless moral obligations only apply sometimes or in someplaces, which is, to borrow your phrase, silly.
So why are we in Kossovo? The other arguments given by Clinton et.al. are more pursuasive. For economic and security reasons, we need a stable Europe. But, as history has repeatedly shown, in order to have a stable Europe, we need a stable Balkans.
So there you go. It, once again, comes down to paranoia and greed. But as I said before, these are not always vices. In this case, we actually helping some people.
At the same time, of course, that we hurt many others.
Um, excuse me, but in what way am I a troll? If you don't agree with the argument, refute it. Show that it's unsound. Show that US policy isn't largely run by paranoia and greed.
It's called public debate. I welcome you to join it responsibly.
How much money do we put into the intelligence agencies, anyway? And how much of that money goes towards economic surveillance.
I'm sorry, but the US is not the moral paradigm so many of its citizens seem to believe.
The list of murderous dictators the US has put in power and supported--yes, for self-proclaimed economic and security reasons--is too long to list here.
It's not all that surprising, really. The guiding principles of the founding of the US were Paranoia and Greed. Even the most superficial research into the Puritans and the economic interests invested in colonial america reveal this much. The order of importance has flip-flopped at various times in our development, but the principles never change. They continue to guide US intra and inter-governmental policies. Examples are easy to come by:
1. The USAUK program for intercepting private communication, with the information being used to promote--ala industrial spying--US commercial interests.
2. A drug war that costs billions, has failed miserably, and yet has gone on longer, amazingly enough, than prohibition did. Believe me, there are a lot of people making lots of money off the war on drugs. They can seize anything and use it for their own purposes, including cars, boats, and planes.
Of course, Paranoia and Greed aren't necessarily vices--they just usually are.
It appears that we are at the beginning of an exponential growth in Linux distribution. That's precisely when an IPO is most useful, since value will continue to accumulate for a long time to come.
What puzzles me is why Augustin is puzzled over how to compensate Linux developers.
Well, let me back up: it's absolutely terrific that Augustin wants to secure some sort of compensation for Linux developers.
But why is he puzzled about it? The answer seems obvious. Dedicate a chunk of stock to be distributed across the developers. Stock can be gifted, you know. Perhaps someone from within VA (Chris?) could give us some insight on Augustin's thinking.
Then, when the company goes public, the developers can (after a year, I believe) get some monies out--perhaps to help support additional development.
Another interesting question is how the rest of the Linux--Open Source, generally--community can be allowed to get a stake in the growth of Open Source.
Perhaps a Linuxphilic Mutual Fund could be set up which invests largely in Open Source dependent companies.
Does anyone know how to go about doing this sort of thing?
Of more immediate concern are the impending IPO's.
Perhaps if a fund were set up to allow rabid open source fans like myself to collect together a huge amount of money, and then do the hardest thing possible--get in on the ground floor of an IPO.
To those who fear IPO's as risky: You are quite right to be cautious. But the growth of OSS, and the frankly astonishing growth of companies like VA (as I lovingly caress my VARstation) and Redhat, makes these IPO's a very different proposition from the typical IPO.
Keep in mind that stock markets are a good investment only so long as companies continue to grow. Can't we be somewhat confident that OSS will continue to grow?
I think we can. I've read the arguments in favor of OSS--I've even given some of them in my IT-Ethics class. The arguments in favor of OSS over CSS--some ethical, many economic--are all fo them sound. OSS will continue to grow.
It's time to hitch your wagon up to the OSS train.
It's a pity that these crackers fail to understand the stereotype their actions reinforce.
Yes, they are angry with good reason.
Yes, they are unjustifiably persecuted.
But the answer is education, not retaliation. The answer has never been retaliation, even against a fearful, callous government.
Forget about the government. Teach the people.
Microsoft has lost, folks.
The rest of this trial will consist of posturing on the part of Microsoft to get the best deal.
To that extent, the story is dead. What remains to be seen is just how intelligently the Judge will curtail the monopoly that we know and love to hate as "microsoft".
Hopefully, the Judge will see that breaking Microsoft up is no solution.
As has been argued quite effectively in a number of places, the key is requiring open standards (API/Networking/etc). But will the Judge appreciate this fact?
Let's hope so. Requiring open standards would effectively de-claw what, so far as I can tell, is the only weapon Microsoft can use against the open source community: closing or "decomoditizing" (sp?) standards.
Regardless of the source, the idea that white males, simply in virtue of being white males, cannot be abused is exactly as dangerous as the sort of racism and sexism Jane Dark presumably reviles.
s peak-for-the-oppressed side really is.
What this demonstrates is just how absurd the left-wing/academic/ultra-liberal/relativistic/we-
Their concern is not so much that some one group has power over others as who that group is. White males, of course, are evil!
Unfathomably irrational.
Evidence has been mounting that a cell's lifespan has a genetic basis. It's not, in otherwords, that cells suffer damage until they eventually 'give out'. Rather, some cells have a genetic cron|kill function.
Now the trick is going to be to figure out how to reset the function.
Immortality, anyone?
Don't underestimate Microsoft; they can deploy some very smart people, if sufficiently concerned.
They are now sufficiently concerned--the giant has awakened. Indeed, the point of this group will not be to generate FUD, as so many of you seem to be assuming.
Has the Open Source Community imagined all the possible moves open to Microsoft?
Have we any counter-strategies?
Doubtless, Microsoft is already thinking three and four moves ahead.
Let the game begin...
If you're seeing performance degradation and you're running on *nix, don't forget to run it nice--15 or above should do the trick.
I've no clue if such a feature exists on the windows/mac clients.
Does anyone know how to set up a script which will run two clients (SMP) and dial up for data return/retrieval on demand from the clients?