Such viruses would be an exact parallel to the attacks against postscript printers and font licensing that forced Adobe to rethink their licensing position on fonts.
Imagine such a virus being propagated through e-mail like the 'Melissa' virus. If that ever happens, I'll have to call in sick from uncontrollable spasmic laughter...
I do not want my Health Insurance co seeing that I only use pure butter, not margrine, or that I got some Jack Daniels the other day.
Anyone silly enough to buy groceries or booze with a credit or debit card can probably assume that their insurance company already knows about all of their bad habits.
Why should Microsoft pay someone to port.net when the community will do it for free and get a much higher quality port than Microsoft would if they did it themselves.
Microsoft's trial balloon about disallowing the use of "potentially viral" software is undoubtedly intended to be part of the legal protection for.Net. Microsoft cannot allow competition.
You can expect to see some new (or old?) purchased, globally enforceable legislation that will prevent interoperable implementations of.NET. Not that MS.NET will be allowed to interoperate with older versions of itself from one mandatory monthly upgrade cycle to the next.
I hate it when people use contracted names like "KIllustrator". They should use the long form, "Kill Illustrator"! There should be no name confusion with the long form either.
Re:Torched SUV Dealership
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
OTOH, they probably torched it with ethanol rather than dirty gasoline! It all balances out...
Intel may have good compilers, but they don't give 'em away
Well, they should, and they should open-source them as well. Intel is primarily in the business of selling processors, not compilers, so getting their P4 performance optimizations into as many third-party compilers should be their top priority.
Better general compiler support for the P4 would be an effective way to compensate for its hardware inferiority to the Athlon.
Well, not "immortality" in the sense that it is guaranteed that people will continue to use it, but immortality in the sense, as you allude, that people *can* continue to use it, that anyone can resurrect it at any later date, and that anyone can lift useful bits and pieces of code out of the programs for use in a different GPLed project.
If it's released without any copyright, thus into the public domain, then can't anyone just appropriate it, alter it trivially, and claim copyright on the whole work? And thus GPL their trivially different strain?
I assume so, but so what? Any corporation that wants to use the code can just grab a public-domain copy and do whatever they want with it. The GPL will only protect the changes made to your own derived strain.
If you're hoping to eliminate the public-domainness of the original release, it seems very doubtful that that would have any legal force. Otherwise, corporations would circle like vultures waiting for any any public-domain release, and instantly remove the release for the public domain. This doesn't happen. Instead, corporations must rely on tactics like embrace-and-extend, where the legal rights only apply to their derivative works but not to the original.
turn <a href="http://redhat.com">Redhat</a> into plain old Redhat
No, it would turn the Redhat link into:
Redhat engineers are weenies
Re:Good story, but they left out one thing...
on
Fortune on Rambus
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· Score: 2
Maybe the next Slashdot Poll should be a Rambus Dead Pool: when do you expect Rambus to go bust: (1) next Tuesday, (2) six months, (3) 12 months, (4) two years, (5) five years, (6) 1996, (7) CowboyNeal.
(Todays managers ruthless and sadistic enough to do something like that)
It seems very clear that the managers at Rambus are primarily interested in money, so you may rest assured that when Rambus goes bust, its managers will be selling whatever legitimate technology Rambus owns for every penny they can get.
In addition to assuming that SDRAM technology will stand still, you're also assuming that Rambus will still be around in 12 months and that any chip maker would ever trust them enough again to license any of their technology.
This could be a pretty dangerous manouver for a provider of high-speed networking. If you eliminate newsgroup porn, many customers may figure out that they no longer need a high-speed, 24-hour/day connection!
Slashdot Mirror
Such viruses would be an exact parallel to the attacks against postscript printers and font licensing that forced Adobe to rethink their licensing position on fonts.
Imagine such a virus being propagated through e-mail like the 'Melissa' virus. If that ever happens, I'll have to call in sick from uncontrollable spasmic laughter...
Oligopoly!
Is the logical implication of this that Lyons Partnership are prepared to give those who ask permission to brutally savage Barney?
If the price is right.
It's a corporation first and a children's entertainer second. Think Disney.
We need govt. regulation for this kind of stuff
Move to Canada. Your privacy is actually protected there.
I do not want my Health Insurance co seeing that I only use pure butter, not margrine, or that I got some Jack Daniels the other day.
Anyone silly enough to buy groceries or booze with a credit or debit card can probably assume that their insurance company already knows about all of their bad habits.
Why should Microsoft pay someone to port .net when the community will do it for free and get a much higher quality port than Microsoft would if they did it themselves.
.Net. Microsoft cannot allow competition.
Microsoft's trial balloon about disallowing the use of "potentially viral" software is undoubtedly intended to be part of the legal protection for
You can expect to see some new (or old?) purchased, globally enforceable legislation that will prevent interoperable implementations of .NET. Not that MS .NET will be allowed to interoperate with older versions of itself from one mandatory monthly upgrade cycle to the next.
Adobe Threatens KIllustrator Over Name
I hate it when people use contracted names like "KIllustrator". They should use the long form, "Kill Illustrator"! There should be no name confusion with the long form either.
OTOH, they probably torched it with ethanol rather than dirty gasoline! It all balances out...
"ma" == "'metric' alternate"
"kibobyte," "mebabyte," "gibabyte"
It might sound slightly less ridiculous to use Homer Simpson-esque words "kilomabyte", "megamabyte", "gigamabyte"...
"Saxamaphone"...
128GB (gigabytes of 2^30 bytes), which is 137GB (gigabytes of 10^9 bytes)
Calling both of these "gigabytes" is confusing. The second figure should be referred to as "metric gigabytes"!
It is ignorant to argue that you should normalize for clock speed.
A better way to normalize would be bang/buck.
the Pentium 4 clocks in at about 1140 flops
Wow, 1140 flops. With some tight code, my VIC-20 would be competitive with this!
Intel may have good compilers, but they don't give 'em away
Well, they should, and they should open-source them as well. Intel is primarily in the business of selling processors, not compilers, so getting their P4 performance optimizations into as many third-party compilers should be their top priority.
Better general compiler support for the P4 would be an effective way to compensate for its hardware inferiority to the Athlon.
Well, not "immortality" in the sense that it is guaranteed that people will continue to use it, but immortality in the sense, as you allude, that people *can* continue to use it, that anyone can resurrect it at any later date, and that anyone can lift useful bits and pieces of code out of the programs for use in a different GPLed project.
After all its OUR money which funds government projects...
Corporations have been known to pay taxes too.
If it's released without any copyright, thus into the public domain, then can't anyone just appropriate it, alter it trivially, and claim copyright on the whole work? And thus GPL their trivially different strain?
I assume so, but so what? Any corporation that wants to use the code can just grab a public-domain copy and do whatever they want with it. The GPL will only protect the changes made to your own derived strain.
If you're hoping to eliminate the public-domainness of the original release, it seems very doubtful that that would have any legal force. Otherwise, corporations would circle like vultures waiting for any any public-domain release, and instantly remove the release for the public domain. This doesn't happen. Instead, corporations must rely on tactics like embrace-and-extend, where the legal rights only apply to their derivative works but not to the original.
GPL == immortality.
turn <a href="http://redhat.com">Redhat</a> into plain old Redhat
No, it would turn the Redhat link into:
Redhat engineers are weenies
Maybe the next Slashdot Poll should be a Rambus Dead Pool: when do you expect Rambus to go bust: (1) next Tuesday, (2) six months, (3) 12 months, (4) two years, (5) five years, (6) 1996, (7) CowboyNeal.
(Todays managers ruthless and sadistic enough to do something like that)
It seems very clear that the managers at Rambus are primarily interested in money, so you may rest assured that when Rambus goes bust, its managers will be selling whatever legitimate technology Rambus owns for every penny they can get.
In addition to assuming that SDRAM technology will stand still, you're also assuming that Rambus will still be around in 12 months and that any chip maker would ever trust them enough again to license any of their technology.
It's not a fine art if it requires skills that established fine artists lack.
This could be a pretty dangerous manouver for a provider of high-speed networking. If you eliminate newsgroup porn, many customers may figure out that they no longer need a high-speed, 24-hour/day connection!