IANAL, but I have many family members who are... You usually can't waive the right to sue for criminal negligence or malice. (At least that's the way it is up here in the Great White North) However, most software failures likely won't fall under the legal definition of negligence or malice.
All OSs have there [sic] place
on
911 Calls Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and NT's place is _definitely_not_ high availability, mission critical, heavily loaded systems. Linux has not yet been proven in this field, but it shows a great deal more promise than NT. If you want a proven system for these purposes, you should be looking for a UNIX or VMS system.
That means that we're talking about 16 byte addresses... Seeing as hardware addresses (MAC addresses) are only 6 bytes, that means there'll be a hell of a lot of extra address space, or MAC addresses will cease to be unique (at least on different subnets) or new cards will have longer MAC addresses?... As opposed to IPv4, where the IP address space is smaller than the MAC address space.
My University has a class called English 101 that every undergrad has to pass before obtaining a degree. If you can't write coherently, you won't pass.
Come on! When evaluating stability of an operating environment, you have to look at how it behaves with misbehaving hardware and software. The reality is that most machines are not locked down boxes that are going to be using only "approved" hardware or software. More to the point, even hardware in the HCL can cause problems, as the tests required for inclusion can't root out every possible situation.
Part of stability is how you handle problems. If user mode stuff acts up, that should _never_ cause a kernel panic or a full system freeze. If hardware acts up, the drivers/OS should be designed in such a manner that minimizes the effects. If we still have problems, then there should be a mechanism to debug and solve the problems. These are all issues that show that Microsoft is _clearly_ not (yet?) stable enough for enterprise applications.
At least with free OS's, you have a mechanism for finding and fixing the problem. Further, I would suggest that at least with BSD, Linux and other UNIXes, you won't find user-mode apps creating serious problems with the kernel, nor will you find misbehaving hardware killing the system.
The fiasco with OS/2 isn't completely attributable to IBM marketing incompetence. IBM has/had a very sophisticated marketing organization. The fact is simply that M$ screwed IBM over royally on OS/2. Microsoft made numerous commitments to the OS/2 project and denied continuing Windows development (and fledgling NT development), while concurrently developing Windows and NT.
If IBM made a mistake, it was that it was too naive. They believed M$'s word, and didn't consider that Microsoft would stand up to them.
Would your rights be more secured if there were Orwellian style surveillance to "delineate between criminals and law abiding citizenry?"
There already is a line in the law. This proposal seeks to move that line in the _wrong_ direction. Any move that makes it easier for any person, government or corporation to legally investigate you without your knowledge is dangerous. More dangerous is the suggestion, implicit in your last sentence that we accept that officers of the law break the law. Moreover, your conclusion from this premise (that we should relax the law that binds these officers) is highly problematic. As over-zealous officers step over the new line, do we move _that_ line back again?
Just because I have nothing to hide, doesn't mean I want people looking at everything.
Good luck getting W2K upgrade for $100. Win 98 SE upgrade is selling at $132.98CDN which is about $90USD. That's $90USD for a product that amounted to little more than a few bug fixes, and made an existing Win 95 system even _less_ stable. For what is a major change in a proprietary, closed Operating System, you can expect to pay a lot more than that.
I'd suggest that that is not the situation we're facing. The situation we're facing is more akin to a group of passengers pointing at nicely sealed portholes and saying "See - that could let water in, and if water gets in we'll sink." Meanwhile, nobody's bothered to point out that the portholes are _NOT_ leaking, and that they're as strong or stronger than when the ship was built 20 years ago. The passengers, positive that they're right, go looking for proof. They find water in the form of ballast. "My god, the ship is taking on water!" They bail the water, and in so doing, throw the ship off balance, causing its demise.
That ship called X is _not_ leaking. It's _not_ sinking. Its design lifetime is _not_ coming to a close.
Simple point. More a propos is the fact that Red Hat does not want their core business to be selling an operating system. Red Hat's core business is and should be support, education and packaging. They have shown that they can make a good deal of money doing this. More importantly, having the operating system freely available _increases_ their support and education revenues.
Further, as they noted in their SEC filings, their business depends to a great deal on the goodwill of the community. The big reason that they can maintain very good margin on OS products that they actually do sell is that people are willing to develop free software that they can use. What do you think would happen to this goodwill if Red Hat were to become closed? Shareholders aren't stupid. Most shareholders (particularly in businesses they don't completely understand) recognize that the CEO knows more about the business than they do.
The affinity group are those involved in the directed shares program. Ask yourself "Did I get _the_letter_?" If yes (and you put in a conditional offer in the first round) - woohoo you're part of the Affinity group. If no - you're SOL, and buy at market value.
Seeing as it's not yet showing up on the delayed tickers, I would assume you got this from the real-time tickers, which means that you are likely violating the agreement that you get when you sign up for real-time quotes by posting this info.
Having read the report linked, I find the content disturbing. Unfortunately, the report relies on developmental research to assert potential damage done to children by teaching through abstraction. This was certainly not what was intended by the research cited. There is no research cited which specifically addresses the supposed pernicious effects of abstract thinking on children. The research cited merely outlines the developmental stages currently understood. Certainly, the effects of the existing education system at the time of these reports (not emphasizing abstraction) cannot be separated from the development of the subjects of this research. My objections to the proposed "solutions" from this report are threefold - personal-anecdotal, developmental, and pragmatic.
My personal situation is perhaps atypical of the general population, but, I would suggest, not atypical of the population of this forum. I was taught basic algebra at home when I was in the second grade (age ~ 7-8). I began to program, using BASIC and LOGO at about the same time. While there were some abstractions and concepts at that time that I could not grasp, my understanding of these concepts developed as I continued to learn. Most importantly, however, I learned to think abstractly. More to the point, this thought method added to, rather than detracted from, my ability to think concretely. Certainly, it has not detracted from my personal relationships - I have maintained "normal" personal relationships, and have achieved some measure of political success. My thought patterns are certainly not constrained by one language (English, French, BASIC, LOGO, Pascal, C, C++, Assembler, LISP, Prolog or FORTRAN), rather, my ability to express concepts through formal languages has alllowed me to think about more complex concepts. Incidentally, having graduated high school at the age of 16, I find your suggestion that one should not learn about software until the age of 17 purely ludicrous.
From a developmental perspective, I find the work of _many_ developmental psychologists to be simply insulting to children. I believe that much research in this field vastly underestimates children's abilities to think abstractly. Certainly, every human sees her world abstractly. We don't think about the wavelength of light - we see a blue table as "blue." We communicate vocally and in written text - that is to say, we are able to associate a concept with a discrete set of phonemes or glyphs. To suggest that abstraction is mentally damaging is dangerous in and of itself. More important is the issue of fixing thought patterns. A child's thought patterns are formed very early. As a result, it is much easier to teach a child to think in a highly abstract manner, than to teach a high school student (whose thought patterns are well established) the same. This leads to a number of problems which _are_ being observed in the later levels of education.
From a pragmatic point of view, we see now a vast demand for information technology workers. However, we see a very small supply. Why is this? In my experience, many students at the high school level studying trigonometry, calculus, or other mathematical sciences are crippled by their lack of high order abstract thought. Many of these students are incapable of developing the thought patterns needed to solve problems of this sort. As a result, many students who might otherwise have been capable, strong thinkers and developers have been spoiled. Students arrive at their first year of university studies, and are presented with the almost completely abstract task of programming. Many fail to move forward. Those who are capable of further higher order work are held back by their classmates who have been failed by the education system. To look at the problem of supply of information technology workers at only the university or high school levels is to miss the point _completely_. The reason most students don't succeed in Computing Science is that they don't know how to think about Computing Science.
I would urge the Des Moines Public School District (named in the report) to examine this report, and the research that it is predicated on thoroughly. I would also urge all educators and parents to actively seek out opposing viewpoints on this _vastly_ important issue. Don't underestimate your children.
"It stays up for weeks at a time without any system crashes." Wow! Weeks at a time - you don't say?
More to the point... anecdotal evidence shows little - on either side of the issue. Win98-SE apparently does have some (severe) problems. If it's working for you, great! That doesn't mean that it's a quality product, though.
As for the Internet gatewaying, NAT/IP masquerading have been around for ages on the sane operating systems. This is not a new feature.
Word to the wise - don't try using PPTP to set up a VPN on your home network. The "security" used is a joke compared to less proprietary protocols like IPSEC. Take a look at l0pht.
"Each guy took a copy and rewrote it and made it better and better."
How would you suggest that we "[take] a copy [of Windows] and rewr[i]te it and ma[k]e it better and better"?
Without the source, we cannot improve things. It just means that Microsoft's (and their OEMS') already overworked undercapable support structures will become worse and more monolithic.
This whole situation is evenn further compounded by Windows' braindead approach and culture around shared libraries. Would any Linux users here be happy if, when an application was installed by an unprivileged user, without asking the user, it went and replaced libc.so or any of the X libs with a newer, incompatible version? This _is_ the accepted way of doing things on Windows. The net result is you have a complex system of applications, all stepping on each others' toes. Would you like to be providing the support for this system?
The guy did spend $700,000 getting all the needed "points." The McLaren F1 road driving version is worth about $866,000 (Wired 7.05 - 50 Ways to Spend a Lot of Money). That's a more reasonable return on investment than the $23 mil Harrier.
"Because if someone with a large stake in Linux needs compatibility with new libraries"...
Tsk tsk... You're thinking in terms of Windows "Can only have on version at a time" shared libraries. Linux, like other *NIXes, actually takes a rational, mature approach to shared libraries that makes it *much* more tolerant of changes to shared libraries than that other OS... There can still arise issues, as with glibc vs. libc - but these are minor compared to the problems provided by, for example the MDAC 2.1 DLLs vs. older versions on Windows.
"... Seriously though, this does happen. It's the problem best exemplified by EGCS. EGCS was a split from the main development track of GCC... Our community is better for it."
This is a great summary of the largest benefit of the GPL. The unfortunate reality that was pointed out in the article is, however, that the mass market does not choose products based on quality or standardization as you or I might.
One of the main reasons that the Open Source model works to select quality now is that most in the market now have the knowledge to judge quality. Without the ability and knowledge to judge quality objectively, a competitive economic system reverts to selecting products on the _perception_ of quality, rather than actual quality. We see this now in the self-feeding mass popularity of Windows.
The suggestion is that a substandard and severely flawed product, standard or distribution could be released. If that product is hyped enough, it could become the new mainstream choice. We would have the advantage (if the company cares about licenses) of having an _open_source_ substandard, flawed product, but the choice of the mainstream could still be a mediocre product if the mainstream is unequipped to make appropriate judgements.
"Let's not forget our Free Software roots. It's terribly important that we focus on the ideals that got us this far, like unabashed source availability and respect for the owners of open source projects"
Hear hear. This is the most important thing to remember. Regardless of what happens with the mainstream in the next few months, if we continue to support free source, free source will be there for those of us not in the mainstream. Free source gives you the power to judge quality. You must give yourself the knowledge to make that judgement.
It would appear that this whole debacle has much less to do with E-Trade than with the SEC in the States. E-Trade does have an obligation to show some diligence qualifying potential investors in a highly speculative investment. Like it or not, this has very little to do with protecting the individual investor. This is about making sure 1929 doesn't happen again. But, hey, if you want to go back to the days when inexperienced investors could buy on margin to overinflate the market... A small price drop can cause a lot of inexperienced investors to panic and jump. This can cause a larger price drop. Then we've got a potentially destructive ripple effect that affects other things than just RHAT stock.
That said, I don't believe that the guys here wanting to get in on the IPO will be into short-selling. I don't believe that the E-Trade questionnaire achieves its purpose of identifying stable potential investors.
BTW - I didn't get The Letter, and I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway - I'm not a U.S. resident...
The answer is to implement appropriate QoS solutions. This does not target the abuses of the users causing problems. This targets selected sites outside the company's network. It is not marketed as a QoS solution, it is marketed as a way to ensure preferential treatment for content providwer partners.
> "you mean, one of your competitors could simply > take your distribution's source code and > repackage it as theirs and sell it?" Bob Young: > "Yes."
Ummm... They already have - there are a number of companies selling Red Hat distributions which are not "Official Red Hat" - CheapBytes, Walnut Creek... This has been going on for quite some time, and it hasn't affected the bottom line... Red Hat's revenues have doubled every year since 1995 (look at the S-1/A filings).
As for the suggestions that RHAT is a poor choice due to the fact that they are not currently making a profit, take a look at MPPP (mp3.comcurrently @ 38 1/8, issued at $28 last week, then shot to $103 before levelling off)...
Let's see... Quarterly numbers for quarter ended Mar for mp3.com, May for Red Hat
Revenues Net income (loss) Red Hat 2,797,000 (2,089,000) mp3.com 665,785 (1,405,628)
so hmm... Red Hat losses last quarter were %75 of revenue. mp3.com's losses last quarter were %211 of revenues.
Even more interesting are the year end figures from last fiscal... Red Hat Revenues 10,790,000 against net loss of 91,000 (%0.8 of revenues). mp3.com revenues 1,162,438 against net loss of 357,538 (%30 of revenues).
So, hey, you know - Red Hat isn't doing that bad...
As someone who lives outside the U.S. I don't accept that as a reasonable solution. All of my traffic that goes out of Canada gets routed through the U.S. Does that put my traffic under the (domestic) jurisdiction of the FBI because it passes through some switches/routers in the States, even though neither of the end points is American?
Now, even if FIDNet has no jurisdiction over me, what about the CIA/NSA? If the U.S. government is putting so much research cash into _spying_on_their_own_citizens_, do we believe that this research will not also be shared with their external agencies?
The right answer is to develop strong encryption methods in a country which does not have stupid hypocritical export regulations, and export everywhere.
"Q: What do you think about American Culture? A: I think it's a good idea." A2: But not a realistic proposition...
In most States, and most provinces in Canada, the "no compete" clause is unenforceable. If you're not getting what you're worth, check with a lawyer and go somewhere where you will get what you're worth...
This is a tool that needs to be run and installed (server-side) juts like anything else. It does not just "allow anyone to remote control a computer." The only security holes that it takes advantage of is the ability to hide itself (a hole that SMS apparently exploits as well) and the ignorance of the users. SMS or pcAnywhere could just as easily be used by someone for inappropriate/illegal purposes...
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I have many family members who are... You usually can't waive the right to sue for criminal negligence or malice. (At least that's the way it is up here in the Great White North) However, most software failures likely won't fall under the legal definition of negligence or malice.
Yes, and NT's place is _definitely_not_ high availability, mission critical, heavily loaded systems. Linux has not yet been proven in this field, but it shows a great deal more promise than NT. If you want a proven system for these purposes, you should be looking for a UNIX or VMS system.
That means that we're talking about 16 byte addresses... Seeing as hardware addresses (MAC addresses) are only 6 bytes, that means there'll be a hell of a lot of extra address space, or MAC addresses will cease to be unique (at least on different subnets) or new cards will have longer MAC addresses?... As opposed to IPv4, where the IP address space is smaller than the MAC address space.
My University has a class called English 101 that every undergrad has to pass before obtaining a degree. If you can't write coherently, you won't pass.
$ netstat -nr
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
192.168.1.2 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
Why have you got an explicit host route for 192.168.1.2? Seems kinda odd when the next rule would do the same thing...
Come on! When evaluating stability of an operating environment, you have to look at how it behaves with misbehaving hardware and software. The reality is that most machines are not locked down boxes that are going to be using only "approved" hardware or software. More to the point, even hardware in the HCL can cause problems, as the tests required for inclusion can't root out every possible situation.
Part of stability is how you handle problems. If user mode stuff acts up, that should _never_ cause a kernel panic or a full system freeze. If hardware acts up, the drivers/OS should be designed in such a manner that minimizes the effects. If we still have problems, then there should be a mechanism to debug and solve the problems. These are all issues that show that Microsoft is _clearly_ not (yet?) stable enough for enterprise applications.
At least with free OS's, you have a mechanism for finding and fixing the problem. Further, I would suggest that at least with BSD, Linux and other UNIXes, you won't find user-mode apps creating serious problems with the kernel, nor will you find misbehaving hardware killing the system.
The fiasco with OS/2 isn't completely attributable to IBM marketing incompetence. IBM has/had a very sophisticated marketing organization. The fact is simply that M$ screwed IBM over royally on OS/2. Microsoft made numerous commitments to the OS/2 project and denied continuing Windows development (and fledgling NT development), while concurrently developing Windows and NT.
If IBM made a mistake, it was that it was too naive. They believed M$'s word, and didn't consider that Microsoft would stand up to them.
Would your rights be more secured if there were Orwellian style surveillance to "delineate between criminals and law abiding citizenry?"
There already is a line in the law. This proposal seeks to move that line in the _wrong_ direction. Any move that makes it easier for any person, government or corporation to legally investigate you without your knowledge is dangerous. More dangerous is the suggestion, implicit in your last sentence that we accept that officers of the law break the law. Moreover, your conclusion from this premise (that we should relax the law that binds these officers) is highly problematic. As over-zealous officers step over the new line, do we move _that_ line back again?
Just because I have nothing to hide, doesn't mean I want people looking at everything.
Good luck getting W2K upgrade for $100. Win 98 SE upgrade is selling at $132.98CDN which is about $90USD. That's $90USD for a product that amounted to little more than a few bug fixes, and made an existing Win 95 system even _less_ stable. For what is a major change in a proprietary, closed Operating System, you can expect to pay a lot more than that.
I'd suggest that that is not the situation we're facing. The situation we're facing is more akin to a group of passengers pointing at nicely sealed portholes and saying "See - that could let water in, and if water gets in we'll sink." Meanwhile, nobody's bothered to point out that the portholes are _NOT_ leaking, and that they're as strong or stronger than when the ship was built 20 years ago. The passengers, positive that they're right, go looking for proof. They find water in the form of ballast. "My god, the ship is taking on water!" They bail the water, and in so doing, throw the ship off balance, causing its demise.
That ship called X is _not_ leaking. It's _not_ sinking. Its design lifetime is _not_ coming to a close.
Simple point. More a propos is the fact that Red Hat does not want their core business to be selling an operating system. Red Hat's core business is and should be support, education and packaging. They have shown that they can make a good deal of money doing this. More importantly, having the operating system freely available _increases_ their support and education revenues.
Further, as they noted in their SEC filings, their business depends to a great deal on the goodwill of the community. The big reason that they can maintain very good margin on OS products that they actually do sell is that people are willing to develop free software that they can use. What do you think would happen to this goodwill if Red Hat were to become closed? Shareholders aren't stupid. Most shareholders (particularly in businesses they don't completely understand) recognize that the CEO knows more about the business than they do.
The affinity group are those involved in the directed shares program. Ask yourself "Did I get _the_letter_?" If yes (and you put in a conditional offer in the first round) - woohoo you're part of the Affinity group. If no - you're SOL, and buy at market value.
Seeing as it's not yet showing up on the delayed tickers, I would assume you got this from the real-time tickers, which means that you are likely violating the agreement that you get when you sign up for real-time quotes by posting this info.
Having read the report linked, I find the content disturbing. Unfortunately, the report relies on developmental research to assert potential damage done to children by teaching through abstraction. This was certainly not what was intended by the research cited. There is no research cited which specifically addresses the supposed pernicious effects of abstract thinking on children. The research cited merely outlines the developmental stages currently understood. Certainly, the effects of the existing education system at the time of these reports (not emphasizing abstraction) cannot be separated from the development of the subjects of this research. My objections to the proposed "solutions" from this report are threefold - personal-anecdotal, developmental, and pragmatic.
My personal situation is perhaps atypical of the general population, but, I would suggest, not atypical of the population of this forum. I was taught basic algebra at home when I was in the second grade (age ~ 7-8). I began to program, using BASIC and LOGO at about the same time. While there were some abstractions and concepts at that time that I could not grasp, my understanding of these concepts developed as I continued to learn. Most importantly, however, I learned to think abstractly. More to the point, this thought method added to, rather than detracted from, my ability to think concretely. Certainly, it has not detracted from my personal relationships - I have maintained "normal" personal relationships, and have achieved some measure of political success. My thought patterns are certainly not constrained by one language (English, French, BASIC, LOGO, Pascal, C, C++, Assembler, LISP, Prolog or FORTRAN), rather, my ability to express concepts through formal languages has alllowed me to think about more complex concepts. Incidentally, having graduated high school at the age of 16, I find your suggestion that one should not learn about software until the age of 17 purely ludicrous.
From a developmental perspective, I find the work of _many_ developmental psychologists to be simply insulting to children. I believe that much research in this field vastly underestimates children's abilities to think abstractly. Certainly, every human sees her world abstractly. We don't think about the wavelength of light - we see a blue table as "blue." We communicate vocally and in written text - that is to say, we are able to associate a concept with a discrete set of phonemes or glyphs. To suggest that abstraction is mentally damaging is dangerous in and of itself. More important is the issue of fixing thought patterns. A child's thought patterns are formed very early. As a result, it is much easier to teach a child to think in a highly abstract manner, than to teach a high school student (whose thought patterns are well established) the same. This leads to a number of problems which _are_ being observed in the later levels of education.
From a pragmatic point of view, we see now a vast demand for information technology workers. However, we see a very small supply. Why is this? In my experience, many students at the high school level studying trigonometry, calculus, or other mathematical sciences are crippled by their lack of high order abstract thought. Many of these students are incapable of developing the thought patterns needed to solve problems of this sort. As a result, many students who might otherwise have been capable, strong thinkers and developers have been spoiled. Students arrive at their first year of university studies, and are presented with the almost completely abstract task of programming. Many fail to move forward. Those who are capable of further higher order work are held back by their classmates who have been failed by the education system. To look at the problem of supply of information technology workers at only the university or high school levels is to miss the point _completely_. The reason most students don't succeed in Computing Science is that they don't know how to think about Computing Science.
I would urge the Des Moines Public School District (named in the report) to examine this report, and the research that it is predicated on thoroughly. I would also urge all educators and parents to actively seek out opposing viewpoints on this _vastly_ important issue. Don't underestimate your children.
More to the point... anecdotal evidence shows little - on either side of the issue. Win98-SE apparently does have some (severe) problems. If it's working for you, great! That doesn't mean that it's a quality product, though.
As for the Internet gatewaying, NAT/IP masquerading have been around for ages on the sane operating systems. This is not a new feature.
Word to the wise - don't try using PPTP to set up a VPN on your home network. The "security" used is a joke compared to less proprietary protocols like IPSEC. Take a look at l0pht.
"Each guy took a copy and rewrote it and made it better and better."
How would you suggest that we "[take] a copy [of Windows] and rewr[i]te it and ma[k]e it better and better"?
Without the source, we cannot improve things. It just means that Microsoft's (and their OEMS') already overworked undercapable support structures will become worse and more monolithic.
This whole situation is evenn further compounded by Windows' braindead approach and culture around shared libraries. Would any Linux users here be happy if, when an application was installed by an unprivileged user, without asking the user, it went and replaced libc.so or any of the X libs with a newer, incompatible version? This _is_ the accepted way of doing things on Windows. The net result is you have a complex system of applications, all stepping on each others' toes. Would you like to be providing the support for this system?
That's why Microsoft gets away with calling NT an Secure, Stable, Scalable Enterprise Solution. I understand now.
The guy did spend $700,000 getting all the needed "points." The McLaren F1 road driving version is worth about $866,000 (Wired 7.05 - 50 Ways to Spend a Lot of Money). That's a more reasonable return on investment than the $23 mil Harrier.
"Because if someone with a large stake in Linux needs compatibility with new libraries"...
Tsk tsk... You're thinking in terms of Windows "Can only have on version at a time" shared libraries. Linux, like other *NIXes, actually takes a rational, mature approach to shared libraries that makes it *much* more tolerant of changes to shared libraries than that other OS... There can still arise issues, as with glibc vs. libc - but these are minor compared to the problems provided by, for example the MDAC 2.1 DLLs vs. older versions on Windows.
"... Seriously though, this does happen. It's the problem best exemplified by EGCS. EGCS was a split from the main development track of GCC... Our community is better for it."
This is a great summary of the largest benefit of the GPL. The unfortunate reality that was pointed out in the article is, however, that the mass market does not choose products based on quality or standardization as you or I might.
One of the main reasons that the Open Source model works to select quality now is that most in the market now have the knowledge to judge quality. Without the ability and knowledge to judge quality objectively, a competitive economic system reverts to selecting products on the _perception_ of quality, rather than actual quality. We see this now in the self-feeding mass popularity of Windows.
The suggestion is that a substandard and severely flawed product, standard or distribution could be released. If that product is hyped enough, it could become the new mainstream choice. We would have the advantage (if the company cares about licenses) of having an _open_source_ substandard, flawed product, but the choice of the mainstream could still be a mediocre product if the mainstream is unequipped to make appropriate judgements.
"Let's not forget our Free Software roots. It's terribly important that we focus on the ideals that got us this far, like unabashed source availability and respect for the owners of open source projects"
Hear hear. This is the most important thing to remember. Regardless of what happens with the mainstream in the next few months, if we continue to support free source, free source will be there for those of us not in the mainstream. Free source gives you the power to judge quality. You must give yourself the knowledge to make that judgement.
It would appear that this whole debacle has much less to do with E-Trade than with the SEC in the States. E-Trade does have an obligation to show some diligence qualifying potential investors in a highly speculative investment. Like it or not, this has very little to do with protecting the individual investor. This is about making sure 1929 doesn't happen again. But, hey, if you want to go back to the days when inexperienced investors could buy on margin to overinflate the market... A small price drop can cause a lot of inexperienced investors to panic and jump. This can cause a larger price drop. Then we've got a potentially destructive ripple effect that affects other things than just RHAT stock.
That said, I don't believe that the guys here wanting to get in on the IPO will be into short-selling. I don't believe that the E-Trade questionnaire achieves its purpose of identifying stable potential investors.
BTW - I didn't get The Letter, and I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway - I'm not a U.S. resident...
The answer is to implement appropriate QoS solutions. This does not target the abuses of the users causing problems. This targets selected sites outside the company's network. It is not marketed as a QoS solution, it is marketed as a way to ensure preferential treatment for content providwer partners.
> "you mean, one of your competitors could simply
> take your distribution's source code and
> repackage it as theirs and sell it?" Bob Young:
> "Yes."
Ummm... They already have - there are a number of companies selling Red Hat distributions which are not "Official Red Hat" - CheapBytes, Walnut Creek... This has been going on for quite some time, and it hasn't affected the bottom line... Red Hat's revenues have doubled every year since 1995 (look at the S-1/A filings).
As for the suggestions that RHAT is a poor choice due to the fact that they are not currently making a profit, take a look at MPPP (mp3.comcurrently @ 38 1/8, issued at $28 last week, then shot to $103 before levelling off)...
Let's see... Quarterly numbers for quarter ended Mar for mp3.com, May for Red Hat
Revenues Net income (loss)
Red Hat 2,797,000 (2,089,000)
mp3.com 665,785 (1,405,628)
so hmm... Red Hat losses last quarter were %75 of revenue. mp3.com's losses last quarter were %211 of revenues.
Even more interesting are the year end figures from last fiscal... Red Hat Revenues 10,790,000 against net loss of 91,000 (%0.8 of revenues). mp3.com revenues 1,162,438 against net loss of 357,538 (%30 of revenues).
So, hey, you know - Red Hat isn't doing that bad...
As someone who lives outside the U.S. I don't accept that as a reasonable solution. All of my traffic that goes out of Canada gets routed through the U.S. Does that put my traffic under the (domestic) jurisdiction of the FBI because it passes through some switches/routers in the States, even though neither of the end points is American?
Now, even if FIDNet has no jurisdiction over me, what about the CIA/NSA? If the U.S. government is putting so much research cash into _spying_on_their_own_citizens_, do we believe that this research will not also be shared with their external agencies?
The right answer is to develop strong encryption methods in a country which does not have stupid hypocritical export regulations, and export everywhere.
"Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea."
A2: But not a realistic proposition...
In most States, and most provinces in Canada, the "no compete" clause is unenforceable. If you're not getting what you're worth, check with a lawyer and go somewhere where you will get what you're worth...
This is a tool that needs to be run and installed (server-side) juts like anything else. It does not just "allow anyone to remote control a computer." The only security holes that it takes advantage of is the ability to hide itself (a hole that SMS apparently exploits as well) and the ignorance of the users. SMS or pcAnywhere could just as easily be used by someone for inappropriate/illegal purposes...