I just did a quick review of HP's SEC filing for 3Q 2003. Some interesting results:
Personal Systems Group, $56M Loss on $4.9B Revenue Enterprise Systems Group, $70 Loss on $5.2B Revenue HP Services, $337M Profit on $3B Revenue HP Financial Services, $18M Profit on $442M in Revenue Imaging and Printing $739M Profit on $5.2B in Revenue
So, the HP machine is driven by Imagining and Printing. What fraction of that $740 profit do you think is generated by printer cartridges versus printers?
Printer cartridges are an amazing cash cow and if there was any kind of credible threat (resulting in a drop in pirnter cartridge prices), HP will be in big trouble financially. This is why HP, Lexmark and Epson are vigorously protecting their cartridges.
The answer to the question is not as straight forward as you might think.
I remember reading that the astronauts of Apollo 15 were able to gather an equal the amount of gross geological survey information of all the unmanned spacecraft (the rangers and surveyors totalling about 45 hours) in the first 15 seconds of being on the moon. The astronauts, trained in the expected geology of the moon were able to observe and develop plans for closer study much faster than what was possible with the probes and humans have the ability to move about very easily compared to a robot. Apparently this ratio (three hours of machine time equals 1 second of trained human time) has been proven repeatedly in different studies.
Along with this, despite some amazing work arounds over the years (I'm thinking of the Pioneer 10/11 stuck bits and Galileo's faulty high gain antenna specifically), humans can fix problems at the source and have a high degree of success working with damaged equipment.
So, I think the answer is that we do want a human presence in Earth orbit, the moon is probably just as certain, but going further out, the costs in supplying and protecting humans quickly outweigh their usefulness. I would think that it would never be cost effective to send humans to any of the outer planets.
Probably the more important question is, is it appropriate/cost effective to send humans to Mars and the asteroid belt?
Downloading the "robot.txt" file and doing a quick ctrl-f on different words, I discovered that there are six instances of "Barney" coming up in the robot.txt:
I have two (2, 0b010) HP-16C calculators that are both going on 20 years old and they are one of the best investments I've ever made. Along with them, I've had a variety of gonculators over the years, but these are the only ones I regularly lock up.
Along with the Hex and Binary functions, the cases of the calculators are rock solid (they've been dropped probably a total of 100 times) and the buttons have a nice solid "click" to them to give you feedback saying that the button was pressed. The button legends are molded into the plastic, so you will never wear them off.
The ARM processor, flash memory are nice, but the only thing that would make me consider giving up my everyday TI-83 (and the '16Cs) would be if the case was as rugged as the original HPs, and the buttons where of the same high quality.
Sigh. I somehow keep putting in comments regarding how hard it is to negotiate a license. I guess I've been really scarred lately doing contracts.
In any case, when I first read this, I thought that the reason why the Fortune 1k (top 1024) companies licenses would be negotiated first is because they will be the most difficult and any changes that are required to the basic license will be made here before it is passed down the food chain.
What's going to be really interesting is to see how they prove that their code is theirs (since they haven't done this publicly yet, to the best of my knowledge) and how they are going to word their support of *ix. They're probably asking megabucks for licenses and no buyer in a top 1k company is going to pay for a license without guarantees backed up by support (regardless of what the propeller heads say).
Yes, I would love to see how they expect to do something meaningful with 25GFLOPS while shovelling it through a single PCI bus. I guess you could calculate pi or Napier's constant to whatever decimal place and have enough bandwidth, but I just went through a finite element analysis of a board heating up and I can't believe that you would see a significant jump in performance for an application like this even if you are relying on PCI-X.
Yessir, still in Toronto, survived the provincial election, prepared to get bored through the municipal election and completely ignore the Federal one.
This is true iff the chip is using standard/existing fabrication tools, processes and development/layout tools. Looking at the articles, it seems like the chip is designed using traditional methods, so except for the "ClearConnect Bus", there doesn't seem to be any ground breaking technology. I would be interested in seeing how a packet based network linking 64, 32 bit processors would be implemented on a standard piece of silicon.
From this chip's perspective I would like to understand how data will be shoveled in and out of the chip to allow it to run at full 25 GFLOPS performance - will the performance of the multiple "processing elements" be hindered by the lack of bus bandwidth? 384k ain't a whole bunch of memory for data AND programs for the 64 "processing elements" (only 6k per processor).
You know, that ominous sounding message is actually:
Help, Polly - your receipe for turkey goulash has a gummy taste to it. Can I double the ingrediants so it will fill us all up? Oops, I've got to go, Bill is complaining that the computer's printer port's address is 3bc and I have to show him how to change it. Oh and you were right, Robert Ulrich played Jim Street in the original "SWAT" TV Show. Goodbye
10. The toonie (Two dollar coin with the punch out centre). 9. The Paint Roller. 8. Trivial Pursuit. 7. Tracer Bullets. 6. Dental Mirrors. 5. Superman. 4. The anti-G suit for pilots. 3. Goalie Masks. 2. Duct Tape. 1. Handles on cardboard beer cases.
I've owned a pretty wide variety of vehicles (SUVs, Vans, sports cars) and the one car I've had that generates more interest (by far) than all the other cars combined is my 2002 Prius.
I've had people waiting around the parking lot for me to get back, ask me about the car, to pop the trunk and to see the dashboard in action. People will also give me "thumbs up" while I'm driving, pointing out the car. My wife has had the same experiences, which kind of freaks her out.
I'm surprised that no other Civic/Prius Hybrid owners haven't commented on this.
Anybody can into Windows, but it takes a real hacker to get into Linux.
Seriously, I suspect that difference comes into play when you look at where the servers are used. You'll find that Linux is used in more servers that are much more worthwhile targets (ie credit card transaction processing) than Windows. So going back to the original comment, not only is it less of a challenge to break into Windows, but I suspect that there is also less reason to want to attempt to break into Windows servers.
Bringing in the Tobacco, Gun, and Liquor manufacturers into the fray could be a good tactic for Kazaa and other P2P providers. Each of these industries produce products that can hurt people "if used improperly" and are potentially liable for their customer's use of their products. Along with being in a similar boat to Kazaa, they have truckloads of money to throw at lawyers and often sponsor music concerts which could more directly hurt RIAA companies.
To be fair, I'm mostly advocating bringing the gun, liquor and tobacco companies into the fray simply because any fight with them will be a lot more interesting than 12 year old girls and 71 year old grandfathers.
In story #8 (US/British forces knowingly use illegal depleted uranium weapons in Gulf War) one of the sources quoted is "Hustler" magazine.
I don't know if I can trust someone that buys "Hustler" for the articles.
myke
The lawyers are the problem
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 1
I've seen text in a number of software vendor's EULAs that are identical to SC's idemnity paragraph. Having this clause doesn't mean you don't believe that your product is free of other company's IP, it means that the company's lawyers put it in there and refuse to represent the company if it is modified in any way.
I've seen my company (Celestica) fight it and modify it to the point where the vendor agrees that all their code is undisputedly theirs, but I don't think any will guarantee that the tools used to compile, link and debug the code is free of undisputed code. Many companies will agree to this modification, but some won't. We end up thinking long and hard about the ones that won't and whether or not we should do business with them.
Maybe if more companies pushed back on these clauses they would become much less common.
Amazing, my impression was that Opus was a throw-away character but came into his own when the he was accosted somehow the term in the subject line came out of "Prayer Temples for Hare Krishnas".
In any case, I'm halfway between wetting my pants with joy and cursing that somebody I thought went out with dignity has sold out. The cynical side of me wonders how much of the new strip was required for the Opus movie.
Personally, I enjoyed "Outland" and thought it was a reasonable successor to "Bloom County" which had a stale feeling to it in its last year. So, maybe "Opus" is a logical evolution to the strip.
In any case, I'll buy whatever local paper its in (even if its the "National Post").
I've worked with our (Celestica) corporate procurement folks on a number of software licenses and if our company is in any way representative, SCO will wish it just let this go business as usual and never thought they saw an opportunity to make some bucks from Linux users.
Before Celestica would agree that licenses are appropriate, SCO would have to prove that they own the right to give them out. This will be interesting and while it is going on, the question will be asked are there any distributions that do not have the offending code and, from Celestica's perspective, could we wait for a distribution that SCO has no possible claim of ownership on?
Next a costing agreement would have to reached in which Celestica, which builds systems is licensed for the systems used in house, built, tested but not shipped using Linux as well as built, tested and shipped with Linux installed would have to be presented with a bill that reflects the different uses within the corporation. As part of this, a monitoring agreement would have to be put into place. Oh, did I mention that we built systems in every continent except Africa and Antartica?
Before any cheques would be written, a service agreement would have to negotiated. This is great news for somebody like me - we will not buy software licenses without any terms of support that goes with it.
Finally, an MOU regarding confidentiality would have to be in place between Celestica and SCO so that before new and unannounced systems are introduced to our manufacturing lines there is a process to set up a three way CITR between SCO, Celestica and the OEM to allow development and installation of manufacturing software. As part of this MOU, all existing relationships between SCO and their customers would have to be disclosed along with details so that we can make this process as painless as possible.
Creating a software license of this scope will take us 9 months or more and will include a hefty legal bill for both parties. Our procurement people are pretty sharp and SCO will have a tough time negotiating a price that is more than a fraction of what the street price single processor Linux license will be despite the additional legal costs and support infrastructure investments that will have to be made as part of the agreement.
I don't know if its a testing methodology instead of a design methodology - identify the pieces that are needed for the rocket and design, test, fix each one at a time until you have a complete rocket.
This is an approach that seems to be completely counter-intuitive to the current methodology used to develop aerospace craft.
Take for example the X-33. It was a testbed for an advanced thermal protection system, aluminum-lithium cryogenic tanks, aerospike engines and internal structures. Not to mention the shape that hadn't flown in space for re-entry before or the software that had to be designed to bring everything together for an autonomous landing. When difficulty was encountered in one part (the X-33 fuel tanks being a classic example) the entire project got bogged down. Net result: tons of money spent, little enthusiasm for the project which could be cancelled easily because it had not demonstrated any deliverables.
I personally think Dick Rutan's SS1 has the best chance for winning the X-Prize, but if Carmack could influence how aerospace programs are managed, then he will have done something a lot more significant.
In the news.com article, it states "He [McBride] said the company had spent between $600,000 and $700,000 on legal expenses since March, less than half of the $1 million per quarter it has budgeted for such costs."
SCO is budgeting $333k per month to go up against the company that took on the part of the United States government that literally prints money and won?
Before reading this, I was willing to discount the comments about Darl and his merry men being on crack, but after reading this the only question I have is:
Darl, where can I find some of what you're smoking, swallowing, snorting or injecting?
Personally, I see this as a strategic legal move as part of betting the company.
In court this one company (regardless of how much they paid and who it is) will be touted as a company that agreed with SCO and acknowledged their right to ownership.
If SCO wins, then the buying company probably got a deal on the license while the rest of the world gets screwed.
If SCO looses, then there isn't going to be anything left as assets except for a couple of chairs and a desk. Any creditors or successful plaintiffs will all be fighting over pennies on the dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
Mountain Dew streamed out my nose.
Well done!
myke
I would love to see this implemented.
myke
I just did a quick review of HP's SEC filing for 3Q 2003. Some interesting results:
Personal Systems Group, $56M Loss on $4.9B Revenue
Enterprise Systems Group, $70 Loss on $5.2B Revenue
HP Services, $337M Profit on $3B Revenue
HP Financial Services, $18M Profit on $442M in Revenue
Imaging and Printing $739M Profit on $5.2B in Revenue
So, the HP machine is driven by Imagining and Printing. What fraction of that $740 profit do you think is generated by printer cartridges versus printers?
Printer cartridges are an amazing cash cow and if there was any kind of credible threat (resulting in a drop in pirnter cartridge prices), HP will be in big trouble financially. This is why HP, Lexmark and Epson are vigorously protecting their cartridges.
myke
The answer to the question is not as straight forward as you might think.
I remember reading that the astronauts of Apollo 15 were able to gather an equal the amount of gross geological survey information of all the unmanned spacecraft (the rangers and surveyors totalling about 45 hours) in the first 15 seconds of being on the moon. The astronauts, trained in the expected geology of the moon were able to observe and develop plans for closer study much faster than what was possible with the probes and humans have the ability to move about very easily compared to a robot. Apparently this ratio (three hours of machine time equals 1 second of trained human time) has been proven repeatedly in different studies.
Along with this, despite some amazing work arounds over the years (I'm thinking of the Pioneer 10/11 stuck bits and Galileo's faulty high gain antenna specifically), humans can fix problems at the source and have a high degree of success working with damaged equipment.
So, I think the answer is that we do want a human presence in Earth orbit, the moon is probably just as certain, but going further out, the costs in supplying and protecting humans quickly outweigh their usefulness. I would think that it would never be cost effective to send humans to any of the outer planets.
Probably the more important question is, is it appropriate/cost effective to send humans to Mars and the asteroid belt?
myke
Sony's XBR and WEGA TVs have Memory Stick slots and supporting hardware which means you can put up jpegs of what you consider to be great art.
myke
Downloading the "robot.txt" file and doing a quick ctrl-f on different words, I discovered that there are six instances of "Barney" coming up in the robot.txt:
/holiday/2002/barney/iraq /holiday/2002/barney/text /kids/barney/iraq /kids/barney/text /kids/photoessays/barney/iraq /kids/photoessays/barney/text
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Which is the same number as "cheney", "powell" had 4, "saddam" didn't have any and "bush" only comes up with "bushpets".
Clearly, there is something to do with Barney and Iraq that The White House doesn't want you to know about.
myke
Yeah, I figured that - I guess I'll stick with my old reliables.
Thanx for the pointer,
myke
I have two (2, 0b010) HP-16C calculators that are both going on 20 years old and they are one of the best investments I've ever made. Along with them, I've had a variety of gonculators over the years, but these are the only ones I regularly lock up.
Along with the Hex and Binary functions, the cases of the calculators are rock solid (they've been dropped probably a total of 100 times) and the buttons have a nice solid "click" to them to give you feedback saying that the button was pressed. The button legends are molded into the plastic, so you will never wear them off.
The ARM processor, flash memory are nice, but the only thing that would make me consider giving up my everyday TI-83 (and the '16Cs) would be if the case was as rugged as the original HPs, and the buttons where of the same high quality.
myke
Bill Gate's next goal is to have more dollars than there are electrons in the universe.
myke
Sigh. I somehow keep putting in comments regarding how hard it is to negotiate a license. I guess I've been really scarred lately doing contracts.
In any case, when I first read this, I thought that the reason why the Fortune 1k (top 1024) companies licenses would be negotiated first is because they will be the most difficult and any changes that are required to the basic license will be made here before it is passed down the food chain.
What's going to be really interesting is to see how they prove that their code is theirs (since they haven't done this publicly yet, to the best of my knowledge) and how they are going to word their support of *ix. They're probably asking megabucks for licenses and no buyer in a top 1k company is going to pay for a license without guarantees backed up by support (regardless of what the propeller heads say).
myke
Yes, I would love to see how they expect to do something meaningful with 25GFLOPS while shovelling it through a single PCI bus. I guess you could calculate pi or Napier's constant to whatever decimal place and have enough bandwidth, but I just went through a finite element analysis of a board heating up and I can't believe that you would see a significant jump in performance for an application like this even if you are relying on PCI-X.
Yessir, still in Toronto, survived the provincial election, prepared to get bored through the municipal election and completely ignore the Federal one.
myke
Hey psy,
This is true iff the chip is using standard/existing fabrication tools, processes and development/layout tools. Looking at the articles, it seems like the chip is designed using traditional methods, so except for the "ClearConnect Bus", there doesn't seem to be any ground breaking technology. I would be interested in seeing how a packet based network linking 64, 32 bit processors would be implemented on a standard piece of silicon.
From this chip's perspective I would like to understand how data will be shoveled in and out of the chip to allow it to run at full 25 GFLOPS performance - will the performance of the multiple "processing elements" be hindered by the lack of bus bandwidth? 384k ain't a whole bunch of memory for data AND programs for the 64 "processing elements" (only 6k per processor).
myke
Ummm... Doesn't GPL become invalid or at least greatly diminished (in the eyes of the court) if derived code is not released as part of the package?
myke
You know, that ominous sounding message is actually:
Help, Polly - your receipe for turkey goulash has a gummy taste to it. Can I double the ingrediants so it will fill us all up? Oops, I've got to go, Bill is complaining that the computer's printer port's address is 3bc and I have to show him how to change it. Oh and you were right, Robert Ulrich played Jim Street in the original "SWAT" TV Show. Goodbye
myke
Here's my top ten list of Canadian inventions:
10. The toonie (Two dollar coin with the punch out centre).
9. The Paint Roller.
8. Trivial Pursuit.
7. Tracer Bullets.
6. Dental Mirrors.
5. Superman.
4. The anti-G suit for pilots.
3. Goalie Masks.
2. Duct Tape.
1. Handles on cardboard beer cases.
myke
I've owned a pretty wide variety of vehicles (SUVs, Vans, sports cars) and the one car I've had that generates more interest (by far) than all the other cars combined is my 2002 Prius.
I've had people waiting around the parking lot for me to get back, ask me about the car, to pop the trunk and to see the dashboard in action. People will also give me "thumbs up" while I'm driving, pointing out the car. My wife has had the same experiences, which kind of freaks her out.
I'm surprised that no other Civic/Prius Hybrid owners haven't commented on this.
myke
Anybody can into Windows, but it takes a real hacker to get into Linux.
Seriously, I suspect that difference comes into play when you look at where the servers are used. You'll find that Linux is used in more servers that are much more worthwhile targets (ie credit card transaction processing) than Windows. So going back to the original comment, not only is it less of a challenge to break into Windows, but I suspect that there is also less reason to want to attempt to break into Windows servers.
myke
Bringing in the Tobacco, Gun, and Liquor manufacturers into the fray could be a good tactic for Kazaa and other P2P providers. Each of these industries produce products that can hurt people "if used improperly" and are potentially liable for their customer's use of their products. Along with being in a similar boat to Kazaa, they have truckloads of money to throw at lawyers and often sponsor music concerts which could more directly hurt RIAA companies.
To be fair, I'm mostly advocating bringing the gun, liquor and tobacco companies into the fray simply because any fight with them will be a lot more interesting than 12 year old girls and 71 year old grandfathers.
myke
In story #8 (US/British forces knowingly use illegal depleted uranium weapons in Gulf War) one of the sources quoted is "Hustler" magazine.
I don't know if I can trust someone that buys "Hustler" for the articles.
myke
I've seen text in a number of software vendor's EULAs that are identical to SC's idemnity paragraph. Having this clause doesn't mean you don't believe that your product is free of other company's IP, it means that the company's lawyers put it in there and refuse to represent the company if it is modified in any way.
I've seen my company (Celestica) fight it and modify it to the point where the vendor agrees that all their code is undisputedly theirs, but I don't think any will guarantee that the tools used to compile, link and debug the code is free of undisputed code. Many companies will agree to this modification, but some won't. We end up thinking long and hard about the ones that won't and whether or not we should do business with them.
Maybe if more companies pushed back on these clauses they would become much less common.
myke
Amazing, my impression was that Opus was a throw-away character but came into his own when the he was accosted somehow the term in the subject line came out of "Prayer Temples for Hare Krishnas".
In any case, I'm halfway between wetting my pants with joy and cursing that somebody I thought went out with dignity has sold out. The cynical side of me wonders how much of the new strip was required for the Opus movie.
Personally, I enjoyed "Outland" and thought it was a reasonable successor to "Bloom County" which had a stale feeling to it in its last year. So, maybe "Opus" is a logical evolution to the strip.
In any case, I'll buy whatever local paper its in (even if its the "National Post").
myke
I've worked with our (Celestica) corporate procurement folks on a number of software licenses and if our company is in any way representative, SCO will wish it just let this go business as usual and never thought they saw an opportunity to make some bucks from Linux users.
Before Celestica would agree that licenses are appropriate, SCO would have to prove that they own the right to give them out. This will be interesting and while it is going on, the question will be asked are there any distributions that do not have the offending code and, from Celestica's perspective, could we wait for a distribution that SCO has no possible claim of ownership on?
Next a costing agreement would have to reached in which Celestica, which builds systems is licensed for the systems used in house, built, tested but not shipped using Linux as well as built, tested and shipped with Linux installed would have to be presented with a bill that reflects the different uses within the corporation. As part of this, a monitoring agreement would have to be put into place. Oh, did I mention that we built systems in every continent except Africa and Antartica?
Before any cheques would be written, a service agreement would have to negotiated. This is great news for somebody like me - we will not buy software licenses without any terms of support that goes with it.
Finally, an MOU regarding confidentiality would have to be in place between Celestica and SCO so that before new and unannounced systems are introduced to our manufacturing lines there is a process to set up a three way CITR between SCO, Celestica and the OEM to allow development and installation of manufacturing software. As part of this MOU, all existing relationships between SCO and their customers would have to be disclosed along with details so that we can make this process as painless as possible.
Creating a software license of this scope will take us 9 months or more and will include a hefty legal bill for both parties. Our procurement people are pretty sharp and SCO will have a tough time negotiating a price that is more than a fraction of what the street price single processor Linux license will be despite the additional legal costs and support infrastructure investments that will have to be made as part of the agreement.
"I pity the fools!"
myke
I don't know if its a testing methodology instead of a design methodology - identify the pieces that are needed for the rocket and design, test, fix each one at a time until you have a complete rocket.
This is an approach that seems to be completely counter-intuitive to the current methodology used to develop aerospace craft.
Take for example the X-33. It was a testbed for an advanced thermal protection system, aluminum-lithium cryogenic tanks, aerospike engines and internal structures. Not to mention the shape that hadn't flown in space for re-entry before or the software that had to be designed to bring everything together for an autonomous landing. When difficulty was encountered in one part (the X-33 fuel tanks being a classic example) the entire project got bogged down. Net result: tons of money spent, little enthusiasm for the project which could be cancelled easily because it had not demonstrated any deliverables.
I personally think Dick Rutan's SS1 has the best chance for winning the X-Prize, but if Carmack could influence how aerospace programs are managed, then he will have done something a lot more significant.
myke
In the news.com article, it states "He [McBride] said the company had spent between $600,000 and $700,000 on legal expenses since March, less than half of the $1 million per quarter it has budgeted for such costs."
SCO is budgeting $333k per month to go up against the company that took on the part of the United States government that literally prints money and won?
Before reading this, I was willing to discount the comments about Darl and his merry men being on crack, but after reading this the only question I have is:
Darl, where can I find some of what you're smoking, swallowing, snorting or injecting?
myke
Personally, I see this as a strategic legal move as part of betting the company.
In court this one company (regardless of how much they paid and who it is) will be touted as a company that agreed with SCO and acknowledged their right to ownership.
If SCO wins, then the buying company probably got a deal on the license while the rest of the world gets screwed.
If SCO looses, then there isn't going to be anything left as assets except for a couple of chairs and a desk. Any creditors or successful plaintiffs will all be fighting over pennies on the dollar.
myke