Every product on the market gets this kind of PR hit when it ships with a blaringly stupid default (like an sa account that you don't have to go out of your way to leave open). People break in, and the product is blamed. This can be said for many FTP servers under UNIX/Linux, MS SQL and a gob of others.
MS deserves bad press for such a stupid blunder as would any other company or development effort.
I don't see why not. There are plenty of companies that are so certified and yet rely on third-party components. I think the key would be the process that turns those components into a distribution. Documentation of that process and adherance to that documentation would be the basis of certification, as I understand it.
Erm, I don't know about you, but I find Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle a much better explanation for why the known universe is lumpy. If it had been totally smooth while in the singularity, we'd have known the positions and velocities of everything! As it is, there were irregularities in the singularity which are also expressed as lumpiness now.
This is circular. The uncertainty priciple is the result of a complex universe. Why is it complex? Why not an ordered smear of energy that could never result in... well, us; stars; galaxies; etc. What force acted upon the early universe to cause such a dramatic non-uniformity?
I lost a reply to this as Netscape was being wonky (will someone please finish any one of the really nice browser projects for Linux).
Ok, so you made the point that:
1) My karma went up 2 points for this: no it didn't I start at a 2.
2) My weak grasp of physics made me leap to the silly conclusion that space/time could "expand into" something outside of it: nope agian. I am simply putting forth a question, but let's phrase it like this instead. If a singularity at the heart of a largish galaxy were to "explode" (actually I think I remember hearing a theory that this could happen if some massive gravitational force "smeared" the black hole out enough that part of it passed its own event horizon: was that Hawking?) what would we see? I think we would see something very much like a miniature version of our universe's big bang. We would see an area of space-time "expand" outward in the form of a catalysmic explosion and from inside that explosion there would be a beginning of time and a boundary to space that matched the orginal singularity's explosion.
Someone else said that their pet theory for why space is lumpy was the UP. I find this to be a circular answer, as the UP is an artifact of the complexity of our universe. Thus, the question remains: why is our universe complex? Why is everything not ordered in perfect symetry? Was it the hand of some capricious god or is there a force outside of our singularity-borne frame of reference. If there is a force outside of this frame of reference, does it interact with ours in the same way that our region of space would interact with the results of the above explosion? Could we, perhaps detect some trace of that outside?
As to my having the mathematical background to understand graduate-level physics/cosmology texts: no, I don't and I don't really think that should be relavent. In reading some of all and all of some of the sources that you cite for "amatures", I have come across this assumption time after time, and yet no one has ever stooped to explaining why. If the pros are to educate the masses (as I, for example, seek to educate others in the use of computers) simple assumptions must be clarified and explained.
I would, for example, never suggest that in order to question the assumptions of programming languages, a layman should read and understand Knuth's Art of Programming. It often takes a non-computer scientist (like Larry Wall, creator of Perl and a linguist by training) to question assumptions and come up with "the wrong answer". Often that wrong answer is, in fact, wrong. However if you cannot answer without re-stating the assumption (e.g. programming languages should not be context sensitive), you have a problem.
Thank you for the clarification on the current age theories. Last I heard there was a debate that set the lower limit at 9-point-something billion, but it certainly was a while ago, and I appreciate the update.
The most interesting thing is that these objects (theoretically "vieled galaxies") are nearly 14 billion light years away. This means (please correct me if I'm wrong) that either a) the universe is older than we thought (9-12 billon?) or b) there is matter in the universe that pre-dates the big bang.
Personally I'd be prepared to believe the latter. There seems to be a basic assumption that the entire universe must have been contained in the big bang, just becasue space is expanding outward as a result. How does this follow, exactly? Could the "force" of the big bang not be simply expanding a small section of the universe outward? In fact, the influence of surrounding matter would certainly be a good explanation for why the known universe is "lumpy".
I do agree that the matter in "our neck of the woods" would almost certainly all have come from the initial singularity, but why does that say anything about what is at the edge of the big bang propagation?
Then of course, I start wondering: does this mean that somewhere there's another big-bang like event that is speeding toward us at the speed of light? Will I feel it?;-)
Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed.
Bzzzt!
No license agreement can be changed by the license holder (after the product is released) unless the license specifically provides a mechanism for such, and I would debate the legality of such a clause.
On the other hand, I can change the licensing on my GPLed software any time I want. Watch, I'll just nip over to my src directory and replace fubarproject/COPYING with a file that reads "This software has been placed in the public domain. All copyright to it has been reliquished by the author". Hm.... nope, don't like that. I'll change it to "This software is released under the same terms as your mother. Please ask her for details"
The point is that the COPYRIGHT HOLDER can always modify the terms of the licensing for future releases. NO ONE can modify the terms for previous releases (e.g. you can non un-public domain something once you've released it, nor can you un-BSD something, nor un-MIT it, etc). The lincensee may have the right to impose more restricitons (e.g. with the MIT or BSD licenses), but that's a different topic entirely.
Please study up before you post.
Would someone please moderate this thread down. I would like people who see the previous post to see this, but I really don't think either are on-topic for the article.
Try Corel Linux. It's easier to install than Windows. On the other hand, no one installs Windows (at least not non-technical folk). The pre-install market will be where most of the Linux sales come from over the next few years. This is why a strategic investment from this sort of company is so important!
Red Hat has real financial problems. [...] They should have become profitable as soon as they had any reasonable volume. like a hit record. But they're not. This raises real doubts about the business model.
You could not be more wrong without refering to a differnet industry (oh wait, you did).
Red Hat is not a singer belting out a tune. That would become profitable practically instantly becuase the publishing company would already exist. However, if you saw a music publishing company come into existance, you would not expect them to become profitable instantly because they need to build out the infrasturcture to support further records, distributuon, deals, etc.
The same is more true in the software industry. Contrary to popular belief, engineers are cheap. They're expensive compared to many employees, but on the bottom line of a company, they produce more profit than just about anyone. Sales, marketing, PR, HR, facilities, product managers, senior management, accounting/finance and the many other employees are much more expensive in terms of profit produced vs expense (though sales is right up there with engineers in some companies). Then there's the expense of making a name for yourself, maintaining a public comany (not cheap!), growing into foreign markets (way expensive!), acquiring stratigic companies (actually not much more expensive than expanding into foreign markets) and many other operating expenses.
Just as a reality check: let's say Red Hat wanted to build a marketing, distribution and sales enterprise that could rival, say... Microsoft. If that were the case, how much money do you think it would cost to build that infrastructure? Personally, I think they could spend the whole wad they got on the first IPO and still have a long way to go. It'll take years. If they just wanted to be profitable, they could stop spending money on growth at any time. That's not really the point.
Red Hat is planning for the long term, as well they should. They are building a world-class software company, and that will take time and money. If they don't show a profit for another year or so, I'll still be very optimistic about them.
I doubt that they are going to make many large acquisitions. The money would be better spent, at this point, in improving distribution channels, securing large partnerships with hardware manufacturers, opening foreign offices, building more internationalized distributions (easier with Linux/X/GNOME than with most other OSes) and generally becoming the only distribution that people think of when they think Linux. Buying out one of the other competing Linux vendors might also be the way to go.
I say this from a financial point of view, but of course, I still cheer when I see things like Mandrake and TurboLinux. We need a more competitive market than the computer industry has had. It's starting to shape up to be a lot like the car market, and that would be a (reasonably) good thing.
It sounds like you've had dealings with some shady customers. Here's some basiscs in the RULES you should be looking for:
1. They may choose not to tell you how many shares are outstanding. This is a minus, as you cannot make judgements about the value of your shares based on what YOU think the company is worth. None-the-less, you should be told a) the current estimated value per share b) the option price. These two numbers need to be handed to you IN WRITING, or you're being taken for a ride. The percent difference between these is called the "options discount". That is, you are being allowed to buy an item (stock) at a discount. You should expect between 50 and 99% discount. Any less is not much of a deal.
2. They should NOT have a clause in the options plan that allows them to just pull the shares back from you at any time. In reality, they always can, but it's a major pain in the ass. They should *not* be allowed to simply inform you that your options are no longer yours unless you are fired for cause, and even then, stock that you have purchased (e.g. the options have vested, and you paid the option price) should never revert to them.
3. You should either receive your full vesting or there should be a substantial acceleration in the plan in the event of a substantial change of ownership (e.g. you get bought out or go public). You don't want to join the company, have them go public and then not be able to sell your stock, as you watch its price plummet. The ways I've seen this done are: a) 1 year acceleration b) 1/2 of remaining options vest immediately c) the full plan vests immediately, but there is a restriction on when you can sell. Think about this aspect of the plan carefully.
Rule 0, however, is options are barely worth the paper that the contract is printed on (and in many cases less) unless your company succedes. You need to carefully look into the company and its plans.
Some nifty ideas to noodle around with: If you don't have a brokerage account, get one now, don't wait until the last minute. Talk to friends about what their plans are like. See if anyone in the office is willing to discuss the plan (most companies don't like this, but that's their problem).
Can I get some rationale other than the fact that a lot of people would think it would be cool? Like what Loki's actual numbers are?
*BZZTTT* That you for playing!
Loki is a privately held company. This means you have no right to (and will almost certainly not get) that kind of information unless you happen to be one of their backers.
Actually, I happen to know quite a bit about why a company would go public (having worked for several large financial institutions and been through one IPO). The reasons are:
1. To raise cash. A company may be well placed to move forward in the market, but does not have the capitol to market or into key areas. Going public can produce a large amount of cash with which the company can acquire others, market their product/service, hire, open new locations, etc. 2. Make money for their investors. Investors don't invest because they think that they will make enough in dividends to pay them back. They want to take you public or engineer a buyout. 3. Many employees are working for you because they hope those options plans will be worth something one day. If you don't intend to go public, then they can only hope for a buyout. This is sort of the same as #2, but different because your investors can shut down the company, but your employees can kill it slowly if moral is low.
Loki would probably want to public for all of the above reasons. They are definitely in the right place at the right time to go big.
Our stock is not publicly traded, and it is unlikely this will change any time soon. While we are interested in hearing...
This is a standard blub. It likely means that they have given significant thought to going public. If they had not, they would a) not say anything about it or b) say something much less in line with standard soon-to-go-public-so-we-can't-piss-off-the-SEC lingo. There's this interesting dance that goes on when a company is planning on going public (I saw it when I worked for Open Market and in the companies that friends work for) where you have to say things that don't let on to others that you are going public, but by using the standard phrases (the only ones guaranteed not to piss off the SEC) you pretty much broadcast your intentions. It's kind of like Transmeta keeping hush-hush on their CPU work. You know it's something that they have great confidence in because they won't tell anyone about it, and they've very carefully closed off all of the "normal" channels that companies use to inform the public of such things. This is kind of what the quiet period is supposed to prevent, but of course, entering the quiet period not only broadcasts your intention, but informs everyone of where in the timeline you are. Funny isn't it.
The idea of television people (including news reporters) doctoring footage is old. This is just new tech for doing it. Take a look at any sit-down interview on a nightly news program. You will notice subtle background changes between the shots that show the interviewer and the shots that show the interviewee. This is because the interviewer footage is shot later on a sound stage in order to make the reporter look as good as possible. In many cases, it's not even the same reporter.
Babylon 5 (a science fiction show that aired in syndication and later on TNT) did an interesting take on this where a reporter interviewed various people on the show, and they actually used the same technique as a subtle que that the news company was not on the level (this later turned into a plot point when the same news company was under the thumb of an oppressive Earth government).
Same here. This technology will be used for ads first, but the much more valuable tool will be doctoring the news so that it's "acceptable" for mass consumption. Yahoos in the background of street footage will be edited out. Protesters in a rally that have nothing to do with the main story will be removed. These things will all seem reasonable at first (unless you think about it too hard)
The danger is that once the mechanism exists, it will tend to be over-used. The news we see already feeds on itself, downing out events that don't fit the demographics. What happens when the drive is to have the news look more and more like what you're expecting after having switched channels from another station? One edit feeds another, and eventually you'll have "a dramatization" tags at the bottom of every news screen. Or maybe you won't even have that....
So the real question is this: When will Loki go public? They are probably the single hottest Linux company out there in the sense that games are the only sure-bet out there today. People may buy databases at work, but for every database there's 50 employees who go home and play SimKillMyCo-Workers. And then they buy the expansion pack, sequal, cheat books, etc. If Loki can convince the gaming biz to let them do all of the ports, their profits may require a new set of units (the yottabuck may not be sufficient).
That leaves me to wonder when I'll be allowed to buy in. Either that, or are they hiring?;-)
Great to see *BSD in the press, but a more informed article would be nice...
Your problem was with the "convoluted system configuration process" comment or the "you'll need plenty of time to explore" comment? Something else?
Certainly the wizzy graphical "put the CD in, click a few buttons, answer some ISP questions, start writing web content" steps that one goes through with one of the modern Linux distibutions (e.g. Red Hat) makes BSD's install process seem a little like brain surgery. Hell, it makes Windows' install look like brain surgery (which, occasionally it is). And, this guy did say he comes from a Linux background....
Realistically, though, this is not why companies buy an OS. They buy it because of what it will do AFTER they get it up and running. I know that where I work, we'll gladly take a week to get something set up just so, if that will mean that it doesn't go bump in the night.
BTW: Why does Slashdot have no BSD articles since the 27th?
Why not redo it from scratch, if it doesn't work the way you'd like it to [in] GNOME and KDE?
GNOME and KDE are both mammoth libraries with tons of applications, and the complexity of both is growing every day. To start from scratch means coming up with all of that all over again, or sacrificing functionality.
There is a lot of value in learning from the mistakes of others.
Some features like the component object models are very hard to get right, and doing it all over again means developer-years of effort for what will likely be the wrong answer (given that most projects that have embarked on such a quest have either failed or had to re-write at some stage).
Many people already know how to code in those other toolkits, and there are many tools for working with them.
While you're "ripping apart" GNOME or KDE, how can you make sure that all the previously compliant apps aren't broken?
You check.
The bottom line here is that you have a lot to start from, and any leverage that you can get from that is likely to speed development radically. It also reduces the likelyhood that your project with fade into obscurity by a whole lot.
Why is this project being built from scratch? Good gods, someone's actually going back to square one and implimenting drag-and-drop? Why not rip apart GNOME or KDE and re-impliment the desktop GUI there? At least then, you'd have several dozen programs that were already compliant out of the box.
The problem is not that he said something about gun control that was wrong (I take no particular stand there), but that he mixed a gun control comment in with a very important comment about DeCSS, which might have otherwise seemed like it wasn't a rant.
With the added gun-control comment it comes across as someone with a huge chip on his shoulder about random political topics.
Personally, I suspect that that's just his standard Email signature, and the folks that put the message up should have verified with ESR that it was Ok to edit that out for publication.
Oh, and besides the Matrix NOT being a blank slate (it's based on a previous comic series), I can hardly see how it qualifies as the greatest movie of all time.
I'm confused. I never said either of those things. I said that the Matrix was the movie that ended up being the farthest (in a positive direction) from my expectations. I liked it a lot, and mostly because I walked in with my personal expectations being a blank slate. I expected to see mindless SFX candy, and instead I got SFX candy with a plot!
The Matrix was a good film with some serious limitations. It was clearly a film that was a little too enamoured with its own special effects, and its ending was a little too deus ex machina for me. But, I still liked it a lot, and use it often as an example of a film where not having high expectations can result in a much deeper enjoyment of a film.
Harry, unfortunately, seemed to have come down with a case of "greek freak."
Harry is very consistent. He is either a huge fan, a harsh critic or absolutely neutral. His rubber stamp on a movie usually means that some passion went into the making of it, but may not indicate that you'll like it. You harp on some detail points in the story, but I hoe you'll understand that three 2-hour movies will never BE Lord of the Rings. The best it can be is a good set of action films that capture some of the power of those stories.
a little irritating from someone who claims to be a sophisticated movie buff
When has Harry ever claimed that? I'm confused. He's refered to himself as a geek and a fan, but never "a sophisticated movie buff". Harry is very honest, but hardly ever impartial. Take all critics with a grain of salt, but Harry seems to have caught a number of good films I would have otherwise missed.
Is this a change-of-year thing? I'm seeing people posting "XFree86 sucks because I'm not on the development team", "XFree86 sucks because I don't like UNIX domain sockets", "KDE smokes X"
And these are the ones that got moderated UP?!
Look, first, if you don't like the way development is going, grab the source, and do it yourself. Don't necessarily fork the entire project, just take over your corner, and do whatever you like. Keep it in CVS, and merge the new releases in on a vendor branch.
Second, four letters: XSHM
Third, KDE is several layers above X, and requires X to run, so what the heck do you mean SMOKES?
Please, people, do try to pull it together, here.
Imminent demise of Slashdot predicted. Film at 11.
You take me for a newbie sir. I had this debate with RMS when he was first pushing texinfo as the GNU alternative to UNIX man. I told him that it was a mistake then for the same reasons. Basically:
man -k does not find texinfo documents.
Using texinfo docs from EMACS (or an EMACS like tool like info) is cool (do it all the time), but why could man pages not be browsed in the same way? I can think of some reasons, but they are all solved by some basic indexing techniques that were old tech in the seventies.
Texinfo as a format is actually much better than roff. It is more readable, easier to learn and has a more regular syntax. However, it suffers exactly the same problems (e.g. being a general purpose markup language as opposed to a constrained UNIX documentation format) without the established conventions for accessing the documents on a UNIX (like) system.
Richard's response was to claim that roff was a useless format and its use would die out within the next five years. Well, it's been nearly ten since we had that talk, and I think it's time to admit that roff is here to stay. That's fine, plenty of things translate down to roff. The real question is this: how can we best pull all of the available Open Source software documentation together and make one coherent documentation system out of it. My recommendation hinges on using a format which is hostile to anything but the established UNIX standards for documentation reading while maintaining ease of use, low learning curve and maximum back-end file formats.
For an example of this format type "perldoc perlpod". If you have Perl installed, you will see the POD documentation for POD. You can almost certainly also type "man perlpod" and you can also go to the online HTML copy of perlpod. All of these are generated by the tools that are part of the POD distribution which comes with Perl.
Someone suggested that these tools should be separated from be base Perl distribution. This would be a mistake, as they are all written in Perl, so you would always have to install both anyhow. And since most people install Perl these days, anyhow (even Solaris 8 from what I hear), POD is pretty ubiquitous in the first place.
In fact, I think (and boy, could I be way off base here) that POD is the only UNIX documentation format that has commercial support under Windows (given the ActivePerl distribution). Not that that matters much, but it's a datapoint.
The fundamental problem right now is that no one knows what format their documentation should be in, and many people just punt or write minimal documentation as a result. HTML is useless for creating any kind of structured searching (unless you layer a documentation standard on top of it). roff has a decent documentation standard for UNIX, but no one likes it any more. texinfo is nearly impossible to manage since it requires sophisticated tools that don't play nice with anything that anyone actually uses. Plus, it requires a central table of contents which is difficult to manage automatically from un/installation scripts.
I've been thinking about it, and I really believe that Larry Wall's greatest contribution to the world has been POD (not Perl, itself). POD is a very simple documentation format that can be used to follow the roff-ish manual conventions of UNIX, but the format is so simple that it can be converted to man, HTML, texinfo (though texinfo standards usually want more prose than a UNIX manpage has), plain text, etc. This is a very nice solution for someone who's ambitious enough to go through the entire Linux documentation base (HOWTOs, FAQs, man pages, texinfo, PostScript, etc) and convert it all to this one format. Then each distribution could choose it's pet format to render in (probably *both* HTML for the new people and man for those who have "man -k" hardwired into their brains).
It would be nice to layer a few additional features on top of POD:
T which takes a term or phrase and indicates that this particular section of this document defines that term in a way that should be indexed globally. This is not quite the same as LaTeX's indexing. More of an HTML "A NAME=" sort of thing, but where HTMLs mechanism could be called a pull model, T would be a push.
H which takes a semi-colon separated URL and filename. The filename is an image that should be used as a figure in the document (numbered from one on). If the URL is provided, it is the location that should be referenced when users view this document in a text-only setting. The lack of images in POD is the only thing I don't like, and I know that it's quite unreasonable to expect that all Linux users (or UNIX users in general, for that matter) will be viewing documentation under a windowing system, but it would be nice to be able to show diagrams and other figures when the possibility exists.
Given these minor changes, rewriting the documentation would consist of converting all of the extant documentation over to text and then hand-hacking it back to POD (POD is very nearly plain text, with minimal markup that makes HTML look like a general purpose programming language).
While Linux is busy developing a 'kernel-based static http server' the BSD developers are ensuring a perfect blend between new features (as demanded by the market) and stability.
As I've said, I don't think there's much value in this sort of "my OS is better than your OS" discussion. Anything that I point out that Linux has been audacious enough to do alone is an easy target, but the bottom line is that BSD and Linux are both more stable, feature-rich and supported than any commercial OS that I've ever seen.
Linux is taking a bold step with khttpd, and perhaps it will turn out to be a mistake, or perhaps it will be succesful, and the BSDs will adopt it in order to maintain a competitive Web server position. Either way, we're watching the power of open source, and when journalists cite bogus comparisons like "In terms of sophistication, the BSD operating system is better than Linux", I just have to hang my head and sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Every product on the market gets this kind of PR hit when it ships with a blaringly stupid default (like an sa account that you don't have to go out of your way to leave open). People break in, and the product is blamed. This can be said for many FTP servers under UNIX/Linux, MS SQL and a gob of others.
MS deserves bad press for such a stupid blunder as would any other company or development effort.
I don't see why not. There are plenty of companies that are so certified and yet rely on third-party components. I think the key would be the process that turns those components into a distribution. Documentation of that process and adherance to that documentation would be the basis of certification, as I understand it.
Erm, I don't know about you, but I find Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle a much better explanation for why the known universe is lumpy. If it had been totally smooth while in the singularity, we'd have known the positions and velocities of everything! As it is, there were irregularities in the singularity which are also expressed as lumpiness now.
This is circular. The uncertainty priciple is the result of a complex universe. Why is it complex? Why not an ordered smear of energy that could never result in... well, us; stars; galaxies; etc. What force acted upon the early universe to cause such a dramatic non-uniformity?
I lost a reply to this as Netscape was being wonky (will someone please finish any one of the really nice browser projects for Linux).
Ok, so you made the point that:
1) My karma went up 2 points for this: no it didn't I start at a 2.
2) My weak grasp of physics made me leap to the silly conclusion that space/time could "expand into" something outside of it: nope agian. I am simply putting forth a question, but let's phrase it like this instead. If a singularity at the heart of a largish galaxy were to "explode" (actually I think I remember hearing a theory that this could happen if some massive gravitational force "smeared" the black hole out enough that part of it passed its own event horizon: was that Hawking?) what would we see? I think we would see something very much like a miniature version of our universe's big bang. We would see an area of space-time "expand" outward in the form of a catalysmic explosion and from inside that explosion there would be a beginning of time and a boundary to space that matched the orginal singularity's explosion.
Someone else said that their pet theory for why space is lumpy was the UP. I find this to be a circular answer, as the UP is an artifact of the complexity of our universe. Thus, the question remains: why is our universe complex? Why is everything not ordered in perfect symetry? Was it the hand of some capricious god or is there a force outside of our singularity-borne frame of reference. If there is a force outside of this frame of reference, does it interact with ours in the same way that our region of space would interact with the results of the above explosion? Could we, perhaps detect some trace of that outside?
As to my having the mathematical background to understand graduate-level physics/cosmology texts: no, I don't and I don't really think that should be relavent. In reading some of all and all of some of the sources that you cite for "amatures", I have come across this assumption time after time, and yet no one has ever stooped to explaining why. If the pros are to educate the masses (as I, for example, seek to educate others in the use of computers) simple assumptions must be clarified and explained.
I would, for example, never suggest that in order to question the assumptions of programming languages, a layman should read and understand Knuth's Art of Programming. It often takes a non-computer scientist (like Larry Wall, creator of Perl and a linguist by training) to question assumptions and come up with "the wrong answer". Often that wrong answer is, in fact, wrong. However if you cannot answer without re-stating the assumption (e.g. programming languages should not be context sensitive), you have a problem.
Thank you for the clarification on the current age theories. Last I heard there was a debate that set the lower limit at 9-point-something billion, but it certainly was a while ago, and I appreciate the update.
The most interesting thing is that these objects (theoretically "vieled galaxies") are nearly 14 billion light years away. This means (please correct me if I'm wrong) that either a) the universe is older than we thought (9-12 billon?) or b) there is matter in the universe that pre-dates the big bang.
;-)
Personally I'd be prepared to believe the latter. There seems to be a basic assumption that the entire universe must have been contained in the big bang, just becasue space is expanding outward as a result. How does this follow, exactly? Could the "force" of the big bang not be simply expanding a small section of the universe outward? In fact, the influence of surrounding matter would certainly be a good explanation for why the known universe is "lumpy".
I do agree that the matter in "our neck of the woods" would almost certainly all have come from the initial singularity, but why does that say anything about what is at the edge of the big bang propagation?
Then of course, I start wondering: does this mean that somewhere there's another big-bang like event that is speeding toward us at the speed of light? Will I feel it?
Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed.
Bzzzt!
No license agreement can be changed by the license holder (after the product is released) unless the license specifically provides a mechanism for such, and I would debate the legality of such a clause.
On the other hand, I can change the licensing on my GPLed software any time I want. Watch, I'll just nip over to my src directory and replace fubarproject/COPYING with a file that reads "This software has been placed in the public domain. All copyright to it has been reliquished by the author". Hm.... nope, don't like that. I'll change it to "This software is released under the same terms as your mother. Please ask her for details"
The point is that the COPYRIGHT HOLDER can always modify the terms of the licensing for future releases. NO ONE can modify the terms for previous releases (e.g. you can non un-public domain something once you've released it, nor can you un-BSD something, nor un-MIT it, etc). The lincensee may have the right to impose more restricitons (e.g. with the MIT or BSD licenses), but that's a different topic entirely.
Please study up before you post.
Would someone please moderate this thread down. I would like people who see the previous post to see this, but I really don't think either are on-topic for the article.
Thanks.
Try Corel Linux. It's easier to install than Windows. On the other hand, no one installs Windows (at least not non-technical folk). The pre-install market will be where most of the Linux sales come from over the next few years. This is why a strategic investment from this sort of company is so important!
Red Hat has real financial problems. [...] They should have become profitable as soon as they had any reasonable volume. like a hit record. But they're not. This raises real doubts about the business model.
You could not be more wrong without refering to a differnet industry (oh wait, you did).
Red Hat is not a singer belting out a tune. That would become profitable practically instantly becuase the publishing company would already exist. However, if you saw a music publishing company come into existance, you would not expect them to become profitable instantly because they need to build out the infrasturcture to support further records, distributuon, deals, etc.
The same is more true in the software industry. Contrary to popular belief, engineers are cheap. They're expensive compared to many employees, but on the bottom line of a company, they produce more profit than just about anyone. Sales, marketing, PR, HR, facilities, product managers, senior management, accounting/finance and the many other employees are much more expensive in terms of profit produced vs expense (though sales is right up there with engineers in some companies). Then there's the expense of making a name for yourself, maintaining a public comany (not cheap!), growing into foreign markets (way expensive!), acquiring stratigic companies (actually not much more expensive than expanding into foreign markets) and many other operating expenses.
Just as a reality check: let's say Red Hat wanted to build a marketing, distribution and sales enterprise that could rival, say... Microsoft. If that were the case, how much money do you think it would cost to build that infrastructure? Personally, I think they could spend the whole wad they got on the first IPO and still have a long way to go. It'll take years. If they just wanted to be profitable, they could stop spending money on growth at any time. That's not really the point.
Red Hat is planning for the long term, as well they should. They are building a world-class software company, and that will take time and money. If they don't show a profit for another year or so, I'll still be very optimistic about them.
I doubt that they are going to make many large acquisitions. The money would be better spent, at this point, in improving distribution channels, securing large partnerships with hardware manufacturers, opening foreign offices, building more internationalized distributions (easier with Linux/X/GNOME than with most other OSes) and generally becoming the only distribution that people think of when they think Linux. Buying out one of the other competing Linux vendors might also be the way to go.
I say this from a financial point of view, but of course, I still cheer when I see things like Mandrake and TurboLinux. We need a more competitive market than the computer industry has had. It's starting to shape up to be a lot like the car market, and that would be a (reasonably) good thing.
It sounds like you've had dealings with some shady customers. Here's some basiscs in the RULES you should be looking for:
1. They may choose not to tell you how many shares are outstanding. This is a minus, as you cannot make judgements about the value of your shares based on what YOU think the company is worth. None-the-less, you should be told a) the current estimated value per share b) the option price. These two numbers need to be handed to you IN WRITING, or you're being taken for a ride. The percent difference between these is called the "options discount". That is, you are being allowed to buy an item (stock) at a discount. You should expect between 50 and 99% discount. Any less is not much of a deal.
2. They should NOT have a clause in the options plan that allows them to just pull the shares back from you at any time. In reality, they always can, but it's a major pain in the ass. They should *not* be allowed to simply inform you that your options are no longer yours unless you are fired for cause, and even then, stock that you have purchased (e.g. the options have vested, and you paid the option price) should never revert to them.
3. You should either receive your full vesting or there should be a substantial acceleration in the plan in the event of a substantial change of ownership (e.g. you get bought out or go public). You don't want to join the company, have them go public and then not be able to sell your stock, as you watch its price plummet. The ways I've seen this done are: a) 1 year acceleration b) 1/2 of remaining options vest immediately c) the full plan vests immediately, but there is a restriction on when you can sell. Think about this aspect of the plan carefully.
Rule 0, however, is options are barely worth the paper that the contract is printed on (and in many cases less) unless your company succedes. You need to carefully look into the company and its plans.
Some nifty ideas to noodle around with: If you don't have a brokerage account, get one now, don't wait until the last minute. Talk to friends about what their plans are like. See if anyone in the office is willing to discuss the plan (most companies don't like this, but that's their problem).
Can I get some rationale other than the fact that a lot of people would think it would be cool? Like what Loki's actual numbers are?
*BZZTTT* That you for playing!
Loki is a privately held company. This means you have no right to (and will almost certainly not get) that kind of information unless you happen to be one of their backers.
Actually, I happen to know quite a bit about why a company would go public (having worked for several large financial institutions and been through one IPO). The reasons are:
1. To raise cash. A company may be well placed to move forward in the market, but does not have the capitol to market or into key areas. Going public can produce a large amount of cash with which the company can acquire others, market their product/service, hire, open new locations, etc.
2. Make money for their investors. Investors don't invest because they think that they will make enough in dividends to pay them back. They want to take you public or engineer a buyout.
3. Many employees are working for you because they hope those options plans will be worth something one day. If you don't intend to go public, then they can only hope for a buyout. This is sort of the same as #2, but different because your investors can shut down the company, but your employees can kill it slowly if moral is low.
Loki would probably want to public for all of the above reasons. They are definitely in the right place at the right time to go big.
Our stock is not publicly traded, and it is unlikely this will change any time soon. While we are interested in hearing...
This is a standard blub. It likely means that they have given significant thought to going public. If they had not, they would a) not say anything about it or b) say something much less in line with standard soon-to-go-public-so-we-can't-piss-off-the-SEC lingo. There's this interesting dance that goes on when a company is planning on going public (I saw it when I worked for Open Market and in the companies that friends work for) where you have to say things that don't let on to others that you are going public, but by using the standard phrases (the only ones guaranteed not to piss off the SEC) you pretty much broadcast your intentions. It's kind of like Transmeta keeping hush-hush on their CPU work. You know it's something that they have great confidence in because they won't tell anyone about it, and they've very carefully closed off all of the "normal" channels that companies use to inform the public of such things. This is kind of what the quiet period is supposed to prevent, but of course, entering the quiet period not only broadcasts your intention, but informs everyone of where in the timeline you are. Funny isn't it.
Ah, what an... interesting... time to be alive!
The idea of television people (including news reporters) doctoring footage is old. This is just new tech for doing it. Take a look at any sit-down interview on a nightly news program. You will notice subtle background changes between the shots that show the interviewer and the shots that show the interviewee. This is because the interviewer footage is shot later on a sound stage in order to make the reporter look as good as possible. In many cases, it's not even the same reporter.
Babylon 5 (a science fiction show that aired in syndication and later on TNT) did an interesting take on this where a reporter interviewed various people on the show, and they actually used the same technique as a subtle que that the news company was not on the level (this later turned into a plot point when the same news company was under the thumb of an oppressive Earth government).
Same here. This technology will be used for ads first, but the much more valuable tool will be doctoring the news so that it's "acceptable" for mass consumption. Yahoos in the background of street footage will be edited out. Protesters in a rally that have nothing to do with the main story will be removed. These things will all seem reasonable at first (unless you think about it too hard)
The danger is that once the mechanism exists, it will tend to be over-used. The news we see already feeds on itself, downing out events that don't fit the demographics. What happens when the drive is to have the news look more and more like what you're expecting after having switched channels from another station? One edit feeds another, and eventually you'll have "a dramatization" tags at the bottom of every news screen. Or maybe you won't even have that....
So the real question is this: When will Loki go public? They are probably the single hottest Linux company out there in the sense that games are the only sure-bet out there today. People may buy databases at work, but for every database there's 50 employees who go home and play SimKillMyCo-Workers. And then they buy the expansion pack, sequal, cheat books, etc. If Loki can convince the gaming biz to let them do all of the ports, their profits may require a new set of units (the yottabuck may not be sufficient).
;-)
That leaves me to wonder when I'll be allowed to buy in. Either that, or are they hiring?
Your problem was with the "convoluted system configuration process" comment or the "you'll need plenty of time to explore" comment? Something else?
Certainly the wizzy graphical "put the CD in, click a few buttons, answer some ISP questions, start writing web content" steps that one goes through with one of the modern Linux distibutions (e.g. Red Hat) makes BSD's install process seem a little like brain surgery. Hell, it makes Windows' install look like brain surgery (which, occasionally it is). And, this guy did say he comes from a Linux background....
Realistically, though, this is not why companies buy an OS. They buy it because of what it will do AFTER they get it up and running. I know that where I work, we'll gladly take a week to get something set up just so, if that will mean that it doesn't go bump in the night.
BTW: Why does Slashdot have no BSD articles since the 27th?
While you're "ripping apart" GNOME or KDE, how can you make sure that all the previously compliant apps aren't broken?
You check.
The bottom line here is that you have a lot to start from, and any leverage that you can get from that is likely to speed development radically. It also reduces the likelyhood that your project with fade into obscurity by a whole lot.
Why is this project being built from scratch? Good gods, someone's actually going back to square one and implimenting drag-and-drop? Why not rip apart GNOME or KDE and re-impliment the desktop GUI there? At least then, you'd have several dozen programs that were already compliant out of the box.
The problem is not that he said something about gun control that was wrong (I take no particular stand there), but that he mixed a gun control comment in with a very important comment about DeCSS, which might have otherwise seemed like it wasn't a rant.
With the added gun-control comment it comes across as someone with a huge chip on his shoulder about random political topics.
Personally, I suspect that that's just his standard Email signature, and the folks that put the message up should have verified with ESR that it was Ok to edit that out for publication.
The Matrix was a good film with some serious limitations. It was clearly a film that was a little too enamoured with its own special effects, and its ending was a little too deus ex machina for me. But, I still liked it a lot, and use it often as an example of a film where not having high expectations can result in a much deeper enjoyment of a film.
Harry is very consistent. He is either a huge fan, a harsh critic or absolutely neutral. His rubber stamp on a movie usually means that some passion went into the making of it, but may not indicate that you'll like it. You harp on some detail points in the story, but I hoe you'll understand that three 2-hour movies will never BE Lord of the Rings. The best it can be is a good set of action films that capture some of the power of those stories. When has Harry ever claimed that? I'm confused. He's refered to himself as a geek and a fan, but never "a sophisticated movie buff". Harry is very honest, but hardly ever impartial. Take all critics with a grain of salt, but Harry seems to have caught a number of good films I would have otherwise missed.Is this a change-of-year thing? I'm seeing people posting "XFree86 sucks because I'm not on the development team", "XFree86 sucks because I don't like UNIX domain sockets", "KDE smokes X"
And these are the ones that got moderated UP?!
Look, first, if you don't like the way development is going, grab the source, and do it yourself. Don't necessarily fork the entire project, just take over your corner, and do whatever you like. Keep it in CVS, and merge the new releases in on a vendor branch.
Second, four letters: XSHM
Third, KDE is several layers above X, and requires X to run, so what the heck do you mean SMOKES?
Please, people, do try to pull it together, here.
Imminent demise of Slashdot predicted. Film at 11.
Richard's response was to claim that roff was a useless format and its use would die out within the next five years. Well, it's been nearly ten since we had that talk, and I think it's time to admit that roff is here to stay. That's fine, plenty of things translate down to roff. The real question is this: how can we best pull all of the available Open Source software documentation together and make one coherent documentation system out of it. My recommendation hinges on using a format which is hostile to anything but the established UNIX standards for documentation reading while maintaining ease of use, low learning curve and maximum back-end file formats.
For an example of this format type "perldoc perlpod". If you have Perl installed, you will see the POD documentation for POD. You can almost certainly also type "man perlpod" and you can also go to the online HTML copy of perlpod. All of these are generated by the tools that are part of the POD distribution which comes with Perl.
Someone suggested that these tools should be separated from be base Perl distribution. This would be a mistake, as they are all written in Perl, so you would always have to install both anyhow. And since most people install Perl these days, anyhow (even Solaris 8 from what I hear), POD is pretty ubiquitous in the first place.
In fact, I think (and boy, could I be way off base here) that POD is the only UNIX documentation format that has commercial support under Windows (given the ActivePerl distribution). Not that that matters much, but it's a datapoint.
The fundamental problem right now is that no one knows what format their documentation should be in, and many people just punt or write minimal documentation as a result. HTML is useless for creating any kind of structured searching (unless you layer a documentation standard on top of it). roff has a decent documentation standard for UNIX, but no one likes it any more. texinfo is nearly impossible to manage since it requires sophisticated tools that don't play nice with anything that anyone actually uses. Plus, it requires a central table of contents which is difficult to manage automatically from un/installation scripts.
I've been thinking about it, and I really believe that Larry Wall's greatest contribution to the world has been POD (not Perl, itself). POD is a very simple documentation format that can be used to follow the roff-ish manual conventions of UNIX, but the format is so simple that it can be converted to man, HTML, texinfo (though texinfo standards usually want more prose than a UNIX manpage has), plain text, etc. This is a very nice solution for someone who's ambitious enough to go through the entire Linux documentation base (HOWTOs, FAQs, man pages, texinfo, PostScript, etc) and convert it all to this one format. Then each distribution could choose it's pet format to render in (probably *both* HTML for the new people and man for those who have "man -k" hardwired into their brains).
It would be nice to layer a few additional features on top of POD:
T which takes a term or phrase and indicates that this particular section of this document defines that term in a way that should be indexed globally. This is not quite the same as LaTeX's indexing. More of an HTML "A NAME=" sort of thing, but where HTMLs mechanism could be called a pull model, T would be a push.
H which takes a semi-colon separated URL and filename. The filename is an image that should be used as a figure in the document (numbered from one on). If the URL is provided, it is the location that should be referenced when users view this document in a text-only setting. The lack of images in POD is the only thing I don't like, and I know that it's quite unreasonable to expect that all Linux users (or UNIX users in general, for that matter) will be viewing documentation under a windowing system, but it would be nice to be able to show diagrams and other figures when the possibility exists.
Given these minor changes, rewriting the documentation would consist of converting all of the extant documentation over to text and then hand-hacking it back to POD (POD is very nearly plain text, with minimal markup that makes HTML look like a general purpose programming language).
Any thoughts. Should I just duck now?
While Linux is busy developing a 'kernel-based static http server' the BSD developers are ensuring a perfect blend between new features (as demanded by the market) and stability.
As I've said, I don't think there's much value in this sort of "my OS is better than your OS" discussion. Anything that I point out that Linux has been audacious enough to do alone is an easy target, but the bottom line is that BSD and Linux are both more stable, feature-rich and supported than any commercial OS that I've ever seen.
Linux is taking a bold step with khttpd, and perhaps it will turn out to be a mistake, or perhaps it will be succesful, and the BSDs will adopt it in order to maintain a competitive Web server position. Either way, we're watching the power of open source, and when journalists cite bogus comparisons like "In terms of sophistication, the BSD operating system is better than Linux", I just have to hang my head and sigh.
This may have been an attempt at humor, but there is a version of CVS for Windows. You can find it at http://www.cyclic.com/cvs/windows.html
Good luck!