Interesting history, and your comment really sheds some light on why SCO may feel that code was duplicated, as it might well be the same code!
If UnixWare's SMP originally came from Sequent, and IBM later (2001) bought Sequent, then I would not be surprised if IBM had incorporated "their" SMP code from Sequent into Linux. If that's the case then SCO would be correct, but absolutely unable to prevail in the suit (as IBM did nothing wrong) as long as there are no licensing problems with Sequent/IBM claiming the rights to that code (e.g. if the code was written independantly and the version that was merged into SVR4 was a derived work, then SCO can claim no rights to the original, but if the code was written as changes to SVR4, then SCO might have a claim, but a much weaker one than they have been trying to make it sound!)
Heh, good point, still it's a useful benchmark that we have documentation for May, '98. Please feel free to cite an earlier date if you have a citation for it (or want to scrounge through the code on the ftp sites and find the earliest SMP). But, so muc for my quick google search... heh.
It turns out that the "real" date depends on your point of view, but the first stable release was 2.0 in June of '96. Here's a link to the LI press release.
When I posted this, I saw no comments to which this was redundant. If something got modded up since, I'm still a bit frustrated that what I see as a valid, informative comment was modded down capriciously. Is there some reason that leaving this at the default score of 2 was unacceptable? Was my comment so tragically hurtful to the threat that it was worth the mod points? I hope these moderators get what they deserve in meta-moderation, I really do.
Back to the topic: Using liquid N in your ice cream is beneficial for a few other non-obvious reasons: small canisters of the stuff can be had almost as cheaply as rock-salt and cleanup is much easier. Because the temperature of the liquid is a result of the pressure that it is kept under, no refrigeration is required as it would be with the ice that you would normally use in conjunction with the rock salt. Also, of course the stuff is just plain fun!;-)
Hmmm.. that's a fine point, and I'm not sure I agree with you.
First off, it depends on your definitions. Having a port to a platform that isn't part of the core project, IMHO does not count (especially since that port is not techinically what SCO is claiming IBM took).
UnixWare, AFAIK, did not have a core SMP capability prior to Linux. SCO Unix on the other hand may have, I'm not sure. Those are, of course, very different products, and again I think SCO is claiming that the Unix license that was sold to IBM *prior* to SCO's acquisition of the rights are the point of "IP loss", so claiming that they had it first in SCO would not help.
I would love to hear people who used to work for Novell weigh in on the timeline. I know that Linux had SMP on certain limited motherboards VERY early on and as early as v0.27, 05 may 1998, the new motherboards were being added to the already growing list of Linux SMP platforms....
Hey, MS spends $5bn in R&D for a lousy OS. A single chappie named Linus maintains the entire Linux kernel in his spare time! Can't say that any more...
On the other hand, the Linux kernel supports many, many more platforms than Windows, has hundreds of features that Windows does not and handles hundreds of devices, filesystems, network topologies and tools that Windows has never added or given up on for lack of resources.
That the relatively small number of people maintaining Linux can do so without having to get rid of large portions of the OS is actually rather staggering. Just look at how hard it is for the BSD folks. They do a good job, and I don't belittle them at all. But, it takes a long time to add new features, and they are now in a perpetual mode of catch-up except in a few key areas that each of the BSDs focuses on and manages well.
Linus has managed Linux VERY well, and while many of his choices were controvercial, the end result has always been a platform that held together and held developers longer than any other project I've ever seen (on average, certainly some other projects like sendmail or bind have had key developers much longer).
Kudos to Linus and may Linux live long and prosper.
N-based ice cream is better than regular ice cream, IMHO because the crystals are formed faster, and are therefore smaller. This results (when done properly) in a creamier ice cream that really tastes great (the taste is actually unaffected, but the creaminess fools your tastebuds into thinking it's richer than it is).
Ok, IANALBIJTTO (I am not a lawyer, but I just talked to one) about this, and here's the scoop, which is kind of obvious if you think about it:
SCO can do this if, and only if
They own the original rights
They have allowed for revocation in the license
They have allowed for revocation of any and all sub-licenses in the agreement as well
So, you see the mold is already cast here. It's all in the license, and who owns the rights. The question is, what are the exact terms of the license, and can IBM get out of those terms on the basis of the capricious damage to their business or other grounds?
I'm not a lawyer, this is a lawyer friend't assesment based on very little info and then translated through me, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think the general idea that SCO could not revoke the sub-licenses due to the damage to the market (as someone suggested) would be kind of moot, since SCO only has to demonstrate that THIS agreement allows such. Of course, IBM would be foolish to have allowed such a thing....
Let me make one more comment on that, I was responding to the Slashdot headline and article, not the referenced article. What Slashdot said was purely wrong. You cannot substantiate what Slashdot said. You can substantiate a wildly different claim, but that doesn't make Slashdot right.
TV is *clearly* not the only factor at work here. In the US, we looked at the result of the sexual revolution (increased sex as a result of effective contraceptive availability for women), the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 50s, 60s and early 70s, the decaying faith in government and the deterioration of the nuclear family and we somehow decided that sharp rises in violence, disease and broken homes (the origin of the word "dork", for example) were the result of television and pornography... uh, no they weren't. When the work ethic in america broke down as a result of the switch from "get a good job and keep it" to the 80s "get a good scam and milk it" we again turned externally (to the Japanese mostly) to explain our inferior workforce's inability to sell product.
I look at claims like the ones made by Slashdot, and I'm just disgusted. It's re-inforcing the same sorts of bad science that lead to creationism and Windows... well, ok, maybe not Windows;-)
My point was that you can't have a proof if you have more than the number of variables that you control for. Period.
Not to say television is all good, but....
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Has anyone bothered to corolate against other conditions. Seems like if TV is just becoming legal there are other MAJOR social changes under way, and attributing any result to TV is kind of silly.
FWIW, I have not read the article, as this kind of voodoo sociology has never interested me. If someone who HAS read it feels that Slashdot put the wrong spin on it, please let me know, and I'll spend some time actually reading it.
Someone in my office has a program that stays up all the time, and displays a hand in various positions to tell him when he should be resting. There's also a number of programs refered to from The Typing Injury FAQ
Using a computer is not a significant risk. I think we all knew this. What *is* a significant risk is
Typing more than 10 hours per day without significant breaks every 1-2 hours.
Typing very repetitive, and/or difficult sequences for hours at a time (think Ctrl-Meta-Backspace-LeftElbow-Delete... in some applications).
pressure on wrists while typing (if you rest your wrists on the desk while typing, you need to break that habit!)
From my own personal experience, here's what you need to do if you start to get warning signs (e.g. tingling wrists, fingers / pain in the elbow / numbness)
Take a break. Really, it helps a lot. And if you have a foozeball, air hockey or ping pong table THAT IS NOT A BREAK (do it, just don't count it as a break). Breaks should last 10-15 minutes and you should try to relax your wrists and arms.
Watch your posture. This really is key. There are many nerve-related problems that start with hunched shoulders especially. If you experience pain, try taking a break and rotating your shoulders forward and then back, slowly about 5 times each while hanging your arms at your side.
I really hope this helps. Good luck to all you over-achieving hackers who make OSS possible!;-)
Your comments about utilities being saved are out of place. Both of my examples were NOT saved. Countless others were not saved. GM was, but Indian was not (even though Indian had more military business (compared to overall spending) at the time).
No, my examples are of large corporations that fill markets that are static. In those cases, it's about corporate value, not profit.
In the case of small businesses, it's rarely about profit so much as paying your people (e.g. meeting expenses and breaking even). You're thinking of the middle third or so of businesses, and yes they exist and they're important.
What bullshit. Ever worked a farm? Do you understand that mankind existed before 1950? Somehow people managed to cook their own food 50 years ago even after working 14 hours doing backbreaking farm labor. People today are just lazy.
heh... ok, so let's just take it as written that you don't know anything about me. That said, I disagree that farm life prior to 50 years ago (a) constituted the majority of the western world as you seem to imply or (b) involved coming home from a long day of work to cook (quite the oposite, famillies that had specific duties were essential to survival).
Ok, you and I disagree. Fine. But I think the "bullshit" comment was out of line. Have a nice day.
Ok, so what part of the word "profit" was confusing? Making money is not profit, and while it's certianly a goal of most not-for-profits to make money, profit is not a goal!
Let me rephrase, the goal of most corporations of significant size is to make a profit for their shareholders. This was the initial impetus behind the formation of LLCs and remains the primary goal of most LLCs today.
I return you to my original followup, and ask that you refute the example of airlines, but let me broaden that to any utility of sufficient size and age. You go through phases (as we did recently with electricity) where someone tries to squeeze blood from the stone by playing interesting shell games, but basically these businesses do not make a profit. The ones that try to (e.g. Enron, TWA, etc.) will usually do quite well for a while and then collapse.
So, what is a major corportation all about, if it's not about making a profit? Well, for starters all of the people involved make money. This creates a rather strong incentive for them to leave it the way it is. But, don't the investors get upset about the lack of dividends? Why would they? The value of a stock can go up with the pace of inflation and market expansion (e.g. U.S. Airlines serving more and more foreign airports), and that stock value increase doesn't have to represent profit. It profits the investors, surely, but that's an entirely different part of the equation!
In your previous post you argued that the "feedback" system was broken in regards to large corporations and you used fast food as an example. I strongly disagree with this notion.
I still stand by my statements, but in your previous post you re-characterized my statements as having something to do with "evil". I'd like to know where you got that one from.
Now, as for the feedback system being broken: it's a very simple problem for which many, many, many solutions have been tried, and so far none work. The problem is that business dynamics do not scale well unless you are willing to accept businesses as proxy individuals, and in this society we do not tollerate that idea well.
What you state about the nature of fast food doesn't quite track either. People don't just "prefer" the cost of fast food, the economy has adapted to it. That means that people who make fairly little money can neither afford "good" food when they eat out, nor can they afford to have someone who is home long enough to prepare good, cost-effective meals. Coming home at night after working 14 hours to face the prospect of having to cook your own (and perhaps your childrens') dinner is daunting enough to make anyone want to eat at a burger joint.
All that being said, I'll go back to your point about evil. Don't make the assumtion that because I don't think of corporations as evil by default, I automatically discount the idea that they often behave in such a way.
The oft-derided McDonald Coffee lawsuit is a great example of this. Often you'll hear someone poking fun at the fact that someone sued McDonalds for serving them hot coffee and then spilling it on themselves. If you look carefully, though, you'll find that that person won the suit because McDonalds had a) a history of serving coffee a temperatures higher than most other such businesses b) a series of warnings about same from hospitals and government groups c) a series of lawsuits about same settled out of court and d) internal memoranda in which McDonalds decided to ignore the problem because the lawsuits would not cost them as much money as getting a higher grade of coffee that would taste good at lower temperatures! That is what I would refer to as evil, and it exists in a great many companies, governments and just about everywhere else that there are people.
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders.
No, it most certainly is not!
The idea behind the corporation, or more properly Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), was initially to make money.
Ok, so what part of the word "profit" was confusing? Making money is not profit, and while it's certianly a goal of most not-for-profits to make money, profit is not a goal!
...the fact that fast food is actually quite tasteless and bad for you does not overcome [...economy of scale in distribution...]
This is nonsense. As [you] correctly pointed out, this is about economies of scale [...not...] about "evil corporations" but about what people VALUE.
Ok, sure. How exactly did I involve "evil" exactly? I think I said basically what you did.
My point is that corporations and the goods they produce are much more a reflection of our social values than they are the generators of it.
No, they're a part of it. It's always important to realize that "we" and "they" are all a part of the society, and the guy who decides that Burger King will make more sales if they coat their fries in sugar before dipping them in hot grease has to make the same decisions in his life about the quality of the food he wants and the quality he wants for his family as you or I do. No man is an island.
Exodus' customers make them an attractive buy. Residential customers aren't all that valuable, since the wires are what really count in that market. As others pointed out buying Exodus' old datacenters from C&W would net you some pretty large customers like Google. The ability to convert those customers into larger services is probably high on average....
I almost always let this one go, but today, it just got to me...
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders.
No, it most certainly is not!
That might well be the goal of some corporations, but it's probably not even the goal of most, much less all.
First off, there are the not-for-profits. Clearly an exception to your rule, and there are a heck of a lot of those out there.
Second, there are the corporations that are not publicly traded, and they too are not beholden to their customers to make a profit (this is one of the key reasons that Fidelity Investments is probably where I would put my money if I had enough of it that I worried about how it was being invested any more than is covered by throwing it into index funds). Often the profitable route is also the WRONG one for a corporation that values the quality of its product, its employees welfare and the loyalty of its customers.
Ok, so that's almost certainly most of the corporations in the world right there (yes, publicly traded companies are the minority last I checked).
However, it's safe to say that there are a lot of publicly traded "for-profits" (understand here that that term doesn't indicate that you are in business to make a profit, but that you must have revenue that exceeds your costs on a regular basis, or demonstrate that you are a "going concern" in one of a number of other ways in order to count as a corporation, so there is incentive for profit, but not necessarily consistent profit). So, if you narrow your scope to jus these, what then?
The goal of a publicly traded company is very simple: to execute their business plan. That's it, you can go home, you now know everything there is to know on the topic!
Of course, the business plans of most public companies involve at least the hint of how they will become (or remain) profitable, but profit is far from the only or even the primary goal. Often the main goal is to maintain and/or grow market position.
Take airlines for example. Please point out an airline that makes a profit, I will then show you a niche player without even having to add to your list. Why is this? Because hauling people around the world is a next-to-zero (and sometimes negative) margin business. So why do it? Because there's a TON of money to be made! It's not about profit, it's about revenue! When you can break even in a market like that, it means you're raking in billions.
I refuse to turn this into a debate about capitalism and its alternatives
We don't need to, capitalism is not about profit, it's about deriving the structure of your society from the flow of currency. Not-for-profit companies that run on grants and pay their people a salary are doing just that, and they are most certainly a capitalist phenomenon.
At the same time, don't make the mistake of thinking that the U.S. or any other country is a pure capitalist state. We're far from it. Most of our deviations from capitalism came in one of three forms: as part of the anti-trust reforms of the early part of the 20th century; as part of the New Deal of the 30s or as part of the Equal Rights Movement of the 60s and 70s.
when Burger King serves you a bad lunch, is it moral wrongness? Or is it just beacuse they figured that a certain low quality is best for their profits
It is not as simple as either of your proposed answers. It is a flaw in the way that we implement capitalism. The flaw stems from the fact that we have chosen one mechanism for scaling capitalism to 300 million+ people and it's not a very sound approach to the problem. First off, the feedback system that is in place with smaller capitalist systems has eroded in ours, so the fact that fast food is actually quite tasteless and bad for you does not overcome the hurdle that a large corporation crosses a threshhold of size where they can begin to rely on centralized distribution and other advantages of scale to out-price higher quality options.
It's got a lot of those small features that make Apple stuff so damned cool.
That's not innovation, that's featureitis. Different.
Stop/Reload use the same button, depending on whether or not the page is loaded. Why didn't anyone else think of this?
Hmmm... interested, but scary. How often do you hit "stop" only to find that the page had just finished loading and you're now re-loading it? I would think that would happen often.
Still a cool idea, and a useful UI innovation.
Three meg or so download. Remember when Opera could claim this?
Not innnovation, just tight code. As the Mozilla folks have pointed out, this will change as Safari begins to support some of the deeper, darker hair in rendering the Web as it is, rather than as it is specified.... Also a lot of those features that you are so pleased by are not Safari, but rather MacOS. Using the native toolkit is good. That's one of the reasons I'm using Galeon rather than Mozilla to read/post right now. It also makes Galeon and Safari much smaller browsers (the Galeon RPM for my Red Hat 7.3 system is 2855417 bytes).
So, no, it's not going to revolutionize browsing or anything[...]
The question was why is Safari considered "innovative". It sounds like it's got a nice UI, and that's cool, but I'm not sure that justifies calling it "innovative" above and beyond any other browser with a nice UI (e.g. Galeon, Mozilla (whose XUL I think was a true and major innovation, though those who use it most are not browser people), or even IE).
Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.
It wasn't boring before, why would it be in the future? Unless by "boring" you mean no spam, no viruses and no flaming idiots. Then yes it was extremely boring 10 years ago!
You might want to take some of that rose-tinting off of your glasses...
10 years ago was 1993. In 1987, the Internet Worm (a virus/worm hybrid, and what could easily be thought of as the ancestor of all of today's web-server viruses) was the first such beast to get ahold of a large chunk of the Internet, but it was by far not the only such best around, and if you count the DOS virus world, then that was already more successful in many ways than email viruses are today.
Then you have spam... spam was first a phenomenon of USENET in 93 or 94 I think, but email just hadn't caught on enough for it, true.
Flaming idiots, though? Oh, man... I remember the guy who tried to tell anyone who would listen on USENET that killing a homosexual was like kicking a rock, because "they don't breed, so they're not alive"... or how about the hordes of idiots who argrued so badly and so often on alt.altheism that the group had to defensively develop a FAQ around what was and was not a rational debate before ever gettting into the topic at hand.
No, the Net hasn't become "better", or "worse". It's just that with so many more people, it's hard to form tight-knit social circles, and when that happens you get the same sort of fragmentation, dehumanization and other social phenomenon that you have in a large urban environment.
I do think that fracturing the Internet into several networks of 10 million or less people per network would be interesting, but the first thing everyone would want to do is "sign up for all of them"...
I use google all the time, and it's gotten progressively harder over time to find anything even approaching a primary source. It's all shitty blogs, domain squatters, and the like.
I don't think that has much to do with the stuff you are *not* finding. The basic reason for that is just that a ton of stuff went away sometime in the last 2-3 years. I can name one site that, when it died, took 10,000 individual publishing venues with it. TEN THOUSAND!! Now, of those maybe 1% had really useful content, but it's all gone now and google will throw away it's cached versions soon if they haven't already.
Primary sources used to be easy to find on the net because most of what was going on on the Net was going on for the first time. There was no history other than references to external history. Today people cite things that Gene Spafford once said who have absolutely no idea who he is.
it took at least some *effort,* if not intelligence, to throw up a web page, so people who had them at least made them somewhat worth the time
That's rosy vision at it's best. How long do you want to go back? To the days of USENET's prime with "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork"? To permanent September? I was there, and I remember just how crappy it was (and how wonderful it was, and still is). The thing is that you've gotten used to the idea that you can send mail to a guy on the other side of the planet and (sleep cycles willing) he can answer you a few seconds later. You've also gotten used to the idea of being able to use a search engine.
Man, what I wouldn't have given for a decent search engine back when Alta Vista was the best that we could scrape up! And before that? Well, you just knew where you were going to look, or you didn't bother. Places like Cool Site of the Day and catagory listings like Yahoo! were as close as you got to actual search engines.
I know I sound like an old fogy yelling at passersby about the good-old-days, but that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying these ARE the good-old-days, and one day it will seem like a crazy dream that you ever had such free access to information....
Seriously, I disagree. I think you've been spoiled by the instant-gratification of the Net as it exists. Store-and-forward mail and USENET news (especially with the excellent advances in spam filtering technology in the last 2 years) works very well, and I'd get 90% of what I need the Net for just by having a modem that dialed out on demand to a UUCP relay.
They don't care about where you go or where you've been, because there won't be anyplace left to go
Your definition of "go" is far too limiting. Back in the day, the Internet was a collection of accedemic machines, a list of which would fit in a single "HOSTS.TXT", which was the DNS-equivalent at the time.
If the Net were to shrink because of mass ISP cessession, and all that was left were Universities and a few high-tech businesses that were willing to pay for thier own leased-lines to the accedemic backbones then we'd be back to something roughly 1-2000 times as large as the Net was back when HOSTS.TXT was last updated. I could live with that.
I don't need to "go" anywhere.
Leased lines, wireless ad-hoc networks and on-demand dialup mean that I can make my own Internet any time I want.
But that may not need to happen. It depends on how much the ISP's ISPs play ball with them. If places like MCI (aka UUNet) don't play ball, then we're home free. Heck, if everyone in the world shuts me down, I can still form a neighborhood association for Internet use and get a dedicated line from UUNet. Remember that anyone who a) has routed connectivity to an IP network and b) has a modem set to answer incoming calls and c) has a pppd listening on the other side *is* an ISP!
The spam-filled, commercialized to death, every-other-idiot-is-an-AOL'er internet is dying? That the "old school" internet will only persist for those with access to (or know people who run, or pay for access on) relatively open servers?
I'm confused by this attitude, and I encounter it a lot. Right now, I'm using Slashdot. I also use Google and Google Groups. I buy stuff from a few select sources. I do research. I participate in a number of development mailing lists.
Never (and I mean never) do I encounter this "useless" Internet that people keep talking about.
I'll grant that a world given a voice says a lot of stupid crap, but that's the nature of a world given a voice, and I do have to put up with the fact that the guy down the way thinks that "news" is what happened to Britteny Spears this week, because he has to put up with the face that I think that "news" is what happened on some Internet pundit's blog this week....
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting history, and your comment really sheds some light on why SCO may feel that code was duplicated, as it might well be the same code!
If UnixWare's SMP originally came from Sequent, and IBM later (2001) bought Sequent, then I would not be surprised if IBM had incorporated "their" SMP code from Sequent into Linux. If that's the case then SCO would be correct, but absolutely unable to prevail in the suit (as IBM did nothing wrong) as long as there are no licensing problems with Sequent/IBM claiming the rights to that code (e.g. if the code was written independantly and the version that was merged into SVR4 was a derived work, then SCO can claim no rights to the original, but if the code was written as changes to SVR4, then SCO might have a claim, but a much weaker one than they have been trying to make it sound!)
Heh, good point, still it's a useful benchmark that we have documentation for May, '98. Please feel free to cite an earlier date if you have a citation for it (or want to scrounge through the code on the ftp sites and find the earliest SMP). But, so muc for my quick google search... heh.
It turns out that the "real" date depends on your point of view, but the first stable release was 2.0 in June of '96. Here's a link to the LI press release.
Given that the date that I cited was May '98, I would certainly hope that by August, SMP was still in the kernlel! ;-)
When I posted this, I saw no comments to which this was redundant. If something got modded up since, I'm still a bit frustrated that what I see as a valid, informative comment was modded down capriciously. Is there some reason that leaving this at the default score of 2 was unacceptable? Was my comment so tragically hurtful to the threat that it was worth the mod points? I hope these moderators get what they deserve in meta-moderation, I really do.
;-)
Back to the topic: Using liquid N in your ice cream is beneficial for a few other non-obvious reasons: small canisters of the stuff can be had almost as cheaply as rock-salt and cleanup is much easier. Because the temperature of the liquid is a result of the pressure that it is kept under, no refrigeration is required as it would be with the ice that you would normally use in conjunction with the rock salt. Also, of course the stuff is just plain fun!
Hmmm.. that's a fine point, and I'm not sure I agree with you.
First off, it depends on your definitions. Having a port to a platform that isn't part of the core project, IMHO does not count (especially since that port is not techinically what SCO is claiming IBM took).
UnixWare, AFAIK, did not have a core SMP capability prior to Linux. SCO Unix on the other hand may have, I'm not sure. Those are, of course, very different products, and again I think SCO is claiming that the Unix license that was sold to IBM *prior* to SCO's acquisition of the rights are the point of "IP loss", so claiming that they had it first in SCO would not help.
I would love to hear people who used to work for Novell weigh in on the timeline. I know that Linux had SMP on certain limited motherboards VERY early on and as early as v0.27, 05 may 1998, the new motherboards were being added to the already growing list of Linux SMP platforms....
Hey, MS spends $5bn in R&D for a lousy OS. A single chappie named Linus maintains the entire Linux kernel in his spare time! Can't say that any more...
On the other hand, the Linux kernel supports many, many more platforms than Windows, has hundreds of features that Windows does not and handles hundreds of devices, filesystems, network topologies and tools that Windows has never added or given up on for lack of resources.
That the relatively small number of people maintaining Linux can do so without having to get rid of large portions of the OS is actually rather staggering. Just look at how hard it is for the BSD folks. They do a good job, and I don't belittle them at all. But, it takes a long time to add new features, and they are now in a perpetual mode of catch-up except in a few key areas that each of the BSDs focuses on and manages well.
Linus has managed Linux VERY well, and while many of his choices were controvercial, the end result has always been a platform that held together and held developers longer than any other project I've ever seen (on average, certainly some other projects like sendmail or bind have had key developers much longer).
Kudos to Linus and may Linux live long and prosper.
N-based ice cream is better than regular ice cream, IMHO because the crystals are formed faster, and are therefore smaller. This results (when done properly) in a creamier ice cream that really tastes great (the taste is actually unaffected, but the creaminess fools your tastebuds into thinking it's richer than it is).
SCO can do this if, and only if
- They own the original rights
- They have allowed for revocation in the license
- They have allowed for revocation of any and all sub-licenses in the agreement as well
So, you see the mold is already cast here. It's all in the license, and who owns the rights. The question is, what are the exact terms of the license, and can IBM get out of those terms on the basis of the capricious damage to their business or other grounds?I'm not a lawyer, this is a lawyer friend't assesment based on very little info and then translated through me, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think the general idea that SCO could not revoke the sub-licenses due to the damage to the market (as someone suggested) would be kind of moot, since SCO only has to demonstrate that THIS agreement allows such. Of course, IBM would be foolish to have allowed such a thing....
Let me make one more comment on that, I was responding to the Slashdot headline and article, not the referenced article. What Slashdot said was purely wrong. You cannot substantiate what Slashdot said. You can substantiate a wildly different claim, but that doesn't make Slashdot right.
... well, ok, maybe not Windows ;-)
TV is *clearly* not the only factor at work here. In the US, we looked at the result of the sexual revolution (increased sex as a result of effective contraceptive availability for women), the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 50s, 60s and early 70s, the decaying faith in government and the deterioration of the nuclear family and we somehow decided that sharp rises in violence, disease and broken homes (the origin of the word "dork", for example) were the result of television and pornography... uh, no they weren't. When the work ethic in america broke down as a result of the switch from "get a good job and keep it" to the 80s "get a good scam and milk it" we again turned externally (to the Japanese mostly) to explain our inferior workforce's inability to sell product.
I look at claims like the ones made by Slashdot, and I'm just disgusted. It's re-inforcing the same sorts of bad science that lead to creationism and Windows
My point was that you can't have a proof if you have more than the number of variables that you control for. Period.
Has anyone bothered to corolate against other conditions. Seems like if TV is just becoming legal there are other MAJOR social changes under way, and attributing any result to TV is kind of silly.
FWIW, I have not read the article, as this kind of voodoo sociology has never interested me. If someone who HAS read it feels that Slashdot put the wrong spin on it, please let me know, and I'll spend some time actually reading it.
Someone in my office has a program that stays up all the time, and displays a hand in various positions to tell him when he should be resting. There's also a number of programs refered to from The Typing Injury FAQ
- Typing more than 10 hours per day without significant breaks every 1-2 hours.
- Typing very repetitive, and/or difficult sequences for hours at a time (think Ctrl-Meta-Backspace-LeftElbow-Delete... in some applications).
- pressure on wrists while typing (if you rest your wrists on the desk while typing, you need to break that habit!)
From my own personal experience, here's what you need to do if you start to get warning signs (e.g. tingling wrists, fingers / pain in the elbow / numbness)- Take a break. Really, it helps a lot. And if you have a foozeball, air hockey or ping pong table THAT IS NOT A BREAK (do it, just don't count it as a break). Breaks should last 10-15 minutes and you should try to relax your wrists and arms.
- Watch your posture. This really is key. There are many nerve-related problems that start with hunched shoulders especially. If you experience pain, try taking a break and rotating your shoulders forward and then back, slowly about 5 times each while hanging your arms at your side.
I really hope this helps. Good luck to all you over-achieving hackers who make OSS possible!No, my examples are of large corporations that fill markets that are static. In those cases, it's about corporate value, not profit.
In the case of small businesses, it's rarely about profit so much as paying your people (e.g. meeting expenses and breaking even). You're thinking of the middle third or so of businesses, and yes they exist and they're important.
heh... ok, so let's just take it as written that you don't know anything about me. That said, I disagree that farm life prior to 50 years ago (a) constituted the majority of the western world as you seem to imply or (b) involved coming home from a long day of work to cook (quite the oposite, famillies that had specific duties were essential to survival).
Ok, you and I disagree. Fine. But I think the "bullshit" comment was out of line. Have a nice day.
I return you to my original followup, and ask that you refute the example of airlines, but let me broaden that to any utility of sufficient size and age. You go through phases (as we did recently with electricity) where someone tries to squeeze blood from the stone by playing interesting shell games, but basically these businesses do not make a profit. The ones that try to (e.g. Enron, TWA, etc.) will usually do quite well for a while and then collapse.
So, what is a major corportation all about, if it's not about making a profit? Well, for starters all of the people involved make money. This creates a rather strong incentive for them to leave it the way it is. But, don't the investors get upset about the lack of dividends? Why would they? The value of a stock can go up with the pace of inflation and market expansion (e.g. U.S. Airlines serving more and more foreign airports), and that stock value increase doesn't have to represent profit. It profits the investors, surely, but that's an entirely different part of the equation!
I still stand by my statements, but in your previous post you re-characterized my statements as having something to do with "evil". I'd like to know where you got that one from.
Now, as for the feedback system being broken: it's a very simple problem for which many, many, many solutions have been tried, and so far none work. The problem is that business dynamics do not scale well unless you are willing to accept businesses as proxy individuals, and in this society we do not tollerate that idea well.
What you state about the nature of fast food doesn't quite track either. People don't just "prefer" the cost of fast food, the economy has adapted to it. That means that people who make fairly little money can neither afford "good" food when they eat out, nor can they afford to have someone who is home long enough to prepare good, cost-effective meals. Coming home at night after working 14 hours to face the prospect of having to cook your own (and perhaps your childrens') dinner is daunting enough to make anyone want to eat at a burger joint.
All that being said, I'll go back to your point about evil. Don't make the assumtion that because I don't think of corporations as evil by default, I automatically discount the idea that they often behave in such a way.
The oft-derided McDonald Coffee lawsuit is a great example of this. Often you'll hear someone poking fun at the fact that someone sued McDonalds for serving them hot coffee and then spilling it on themselves. If you look carefully, though, you'll find that that person won the suit because McDonalds had a) a history of serving coffee a temperatures higher than most other such businesses b) a series of warnings about same from hospitals and government groups c) a series of lawsuits about same settled out of court and d) internal memoranda in which McDonalds decided to ignore the problem because the lawsuits would not cost them as much money as getting a higher grade of coffee that would taste good at lower temperatures! That is what I would refer to as evil, and it exists in a great many companies, governments and just about everywhere else that there are people.
Exodus' customers make them an attractive buy. Residential customers aren't all that valuable, since the wires are what really count in that market. As others pointed out buying Exodus' old datacenters from C&W would net you some pretty large customers like Google. The ability to convert those customers into larger services is probably high on average....
I almost always let this one go, but today, it just got to me...
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders.
No, it most certainly is not!
That might well be the goal of some corporations, but it's probably not even the goal of most, much less all.
First off, there are the not-for-profits. Clearly an exception to your rule, and there are a heck of a lot of those out there.
Second, there are the corporations that are not publicly traded, and they too are not beholden to their customers to make a profit (this is one of the key reasons that Fidelity Investments is probably where I would put my money if I had enough of it that I worried about how it was being invested any more than is covered by throwing it into index funds). Often the profitable route is also the WRONG one for a corporation that values the quality of its product, its employees welfare and the loyalty of its customers.
Ok, so that's almost certainly most of the corporations in the world right there (yes, publicly traded companies are the minority last I checked).
However, it's safe to say that there are a lot of publicly traded "for-profits" (understand here that that term doesn't indicate that you are in business to make a profit, but that you must have revenue that exceeds your costs on a regular basis, or demonstrate that you are a "going concern" in one of a number of other ways in order to count as a corporation, so there is incentive for profit, but not necessarily consistent profit). So, if you narrow your scope to jus these, what then?
The goal of a publicly traded company is very simple: to execute their business plan. That's it, you can go home, you now know everything there is to know on the topic!
Of course, the business plans of most public companies involve at least the hint of how they will become (or remain) profitable, but profit is far from the only or even the primary goal. Often the main goal is to maintain and/or grow market position.
Take airlines for example. Please point out an airline that makes a profit, I will then show you a niche player without even having to add to your list. Why is this? Because hauling people around the world is a next-to-zero (and sometimes negative) margin business. So why do it? Because there's a TON of money to be made! It's not about profit, it's about revenue! When you can break even in a market like that, it means you're raking in billions.
I refuse to turn this into a debate about capitalism and its alternatives
We don't need to, capitalism is not about profit, it's about deriving the structure of your society from the flow of currency. Not-for-profit companies that run on grants and pay their people a salary are doing just that, and they are most certainly a capitalist phenomenon.
At the same time, don't make the mistake of thinking that the U.S. or any other country is a pure capitalist state. We're far from it. Most of our deviations from capitalism came in one of three forms: as part of the anti-trust reforms of the early part of the 20th century; as part of the New Deal of the 30s or as part of the Equal Rights Movement of the 60s and 70s.
when Burger King serves you a bad lunch, is it moral wrongness? Or is it just beacuse they figured that a certain low quality is best for their profits
It is not as simple as either of your proposed answers. It is a flaw in the way that we implement capitalism. The flaw stems from the fact that we have chosen one mechanism for scaling capitalism to 300 million+ people and it's not a very sound approach to the problem. First off, the feedback system that is in place with smaller capitalist systems has eroded in ours, so the fact that fast food is actually quite tasteless and bad for you does not overcome the hurdle that a large corporation crosses a threshhold of size where they can begin to rely on centralized distribution and other advantages of scale to out-price higher quality options.
It's got a lot of those small features that make Apple stuff so damned cool.
;-)
That's not innovation, that's featureitis. Different.
Stop/Reload use the same button, depending on whether or not the page is loaded. Why didn't anyone else think of this?
Hmmm... interested, but scary. How often do you hit "stop" only to find that the page had just finished loading and you're now re-loading it? I would think that would happen often.
Still a cool idea, and a useful UI innovation.
Three meg or so download. Remember when Opera could claim this?
Not innnovation, just tight code. As the Mozilla folks have pointed out, this will change as Safari begins to support some of the deeper, darker hair in rendering the Web as it is, rather than as it is specified.... Also a lot of those features that you are so pleased by are not Safari, but rather MacOS. Using the native toolkit is good. That's one of the reasons I'm using Galeon rather than Mozilla to read/post right now. It also makes Galeon and Safari much smaller browsers (the Galeon RPM for my Red Hat 7.3 system is 2855417 bytes).
So, no, it's not going to revolutionize browsing or anything[...]
The question was why is Safari considered "innovative". It sounds like it's got a nice UI, and that's cool, but I'm not sure that justifies calling it "innovative" above and beyond any other browser with a nice UI (e.g. Galeon, Mozilla (whose XUL I think was a true and major innovation, though those who use it most are not browser people), or even IE).
Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.
Heh, there's a statement for the archives...
It wasn't boring before, why would it be in the future? Unless by "boring" you mean no spam, no viruses and no flaming idiots. Then yes it was extremely boring 10 years ago!
... or how about the hordes of idiots who argrued so badly and so often on alt.altheism that the group had to defensively develop a FAQ around what was and was not a rational debate before ever gettting into the topic at hand.
You might want to take some of that rose-tinting off of your glasses...
10 years ago was 1993. In 1987, the Internet Worm (a virus/worm hybrid, and what could easily be thought of as the ancestor of all of today's web-server viruses) was the first such beast to get ahold of a large chunk of the Internet, but it was by far not the only such best around, and if you count the DOS virus world, then that was already more successful in many ways than email viruses are today.
Then you have spam... spam was first a phenomenon of USENET in 93 or 94 I think, but email just hadn't caught on enough for it, true.
Flaming idiots, though? Oh, man... I remember the guy who tried to tell anyone who would listen on USENET that killing a homosexual was like kicking a rock, because "they don't breed, so they're not alive"
No, the Net hasn't become "better", or "worse". It's just that with so many more people, it's hard to form tight-knit social circles, and when that happens you get the same sort of fragmentation, dehumanization and other social phenomenon that you have in a large urban environment.
I do think that fracturing the Internet into several networks of 10 million or less people per network would be interesting, but the first thing everyone would want to do is "sign up for all of them"...
I use google all the time, and it's gotten progressively harder over time to find anything even approaching a primary source. It's all shitty blogs, domain squatters, and the like.
I don't think that has much to do with the stuff you are *not* finding. The basic reason for that is just that a ton of stuff went away sometime in the last 2-3 years. I can name one site that, when it died, took 10,000 individual publishing venues with it. TEN THOUSAND!! Now, of those maybe 1% had really useful content, but it's all gone now and google will throw away it's cached versions soon if they haven't already.
Primary sources used to be easy to find on the net because most of what was going on on the Net was going on for the first time. There was no history other than references to external history. Today people cite things that Gene Spafford once said who have absolutely no idea who he is.
it took at least some *effort,* if not intelligence, to throw up a web page, so people who had them at least made them somewhat worth the time
That's rosy vision at it's best. How long do you want to go back? To the days of USENET's prime with "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork"? To permanent September? I was there, and I remember just how crappy it was (and how wonderful it was, and still is). The thing is that you've gotten used to the idea that you can send mail to a guy on the other side of the planet and (sleep cycles willing) he can answer you a few seconds later. You've also gotten used to the idea of being able to use a search engine.
Man, what I wouldn't have given for a decent search engine back when Alta Vista was the best that we could scrape up! And before that? Well, you just knew where you were going to look, or you didn't bother. Places like Cool Site of the Day and catagory listings like Yahoo! were as close as you got to actual search engines.
I know I sound like an old fogy yelling at passersby about the good-old-days, but that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying these ARE the good-old-days, and one day it will seem like a crazy dream that you ever had such free access to information....
Too bad. Get off my Internet :)
Seriously, I disagree. I think you've been spoiled by the instant-gratification of the Net as it exists. Store-and-forward mail and USENET news (especially with the excellent advances in spam filtering technology in the last 2 years) works very well, and I'd get 90% of what I need the Net for just by having a modem that dialed out on demand to a UUCP relay.
Yep, and think about that. Your sales pitch is "when the bad guy cuts into your kid to get this out, we'll know exactly where it happened."
Not gonna fly for many, but there might be enough that are stupid enough to fall for a sufficiently sly pitch that you'd have a market....
They don't care about where you go or where you've been, because there won't be anyplace left to go
Your definition of "go" is far too limiting. Back in the day, the Internet was a collection of accedemic machines, a list of which would fit in a single "HOSTS.TXT", which was the DNS-equivalent at the time.
If the Net were to shrink because of mass ISP cessession, and all that was left were Universities and a few high-tech businesses that were willing to pay for thier own leased-lines to the accedemic backbones then we'd be back to something roughly 1-2000 times as large as the Net was back when HOSTS.TXT was last updated. I could live with that.
I don't need to "go" anywhere.
Leased lines, wireless ad-hoc networks and on-demand dialup mean that I can make my own Internet any time I want.
But that may not need to happen. It depends on how much the ISP's ISPs play ball with them. If places like MCI (aka UUNet) don't play ball, then we're home free. Heck, if everyone in the world shuts me down, I can still form a neighborhood association for Internet use and get a dedicated line from UUNet. Remember that anyone who a) has routed connectivity to an IP network and b) has a modem set to answer incoming calls and c) has a pppd listening on the other side *is* an ISP!
The spam-filled, commercialized to death, every-other-idiot-is-an-AOL'er internet is dying? That the "old school" internet will only persist for those with access to (or know people who run, or pay for access on) relatively open servers?
I'm confused by this attitude, and I encounter it a lot. Right now, I'm using Slashdot. I also use Google and Google Groups. I buy stuff from a few select sources. I do research. I participate in a number of development mailing lists.
Never (and I mean never) do I encounter this "useless" Internet that people keep talking about.
I'll grant that a world given a voice says a lot of stupid crap, but that's the nature of a world given a voice, and I do have to put up with the fact that the guy down the way thinks that "news" is what happened to Britteny Spears this week, because he has to put up with the face that I think that "news" is what happened on some Internet pundit's blog this week....
Imagine all the people, living for today....