Isn't it self contradictory on one hand to produce a product as Open Source - releasing the
content IP to the world freely - while fighting vigorously to protect the trademark - restricting
identification/brand name IP from the world?
Not at all. Trademarks exist so that an individual company that has built good will based on a particular, recognizable product name will not have that good will hijacked by others seeking to either slander it or profit from it. This may be even more relevant in the open-source world, where anyone can take your source code and do what they want with it.
Say I release an open-source software package called Foo. The package receives a following and I decide to trademark the name.
Example 1: Somebody takes the source and corrupts it (e.g., by opening security holes), then releases a competing package also called Foo.
The public becomes confused because of this "bad Foo", and good will based around my package called Foo is lost, due to this competing version.
Example 2: A company -- let's call them MacroSoft -- takes the source and uses it to release a closed source version which they call "Foo for MacroSoft". Let's say I used a license other than GPL so that there's no licensing issue, and they sell the product for a tidy profit. In this case MacroSoft is profiting on the good will created by my hard work, even though they did very little themselves, while I see nothing.
So, in other words, to prevent OS projects from becoming corrupted, I believe trademarking is not only consistent with the aims of OS, but necessary for it.
How the hell did you do that? I mean, after you're down around -10 or so, you start posting at -1 by default, so that means you can't lose any more karma, right? Or did you do something to deliberately piss off the editors?
has a
bug that over time loses track of bomb-grade nuclear materials
even though their location is still in the database, and that this
feature can be used to divert the materials for profit unbeknownst
to the nuclear accountants.
"That's not a bug, that's a feature!" said the guy from tech support.
I guess it all depends on your point of view, doesn't it?
1. Something -- anything -- that doesn't suck. Since Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Generations, the suckage of everything produced under the Star Trek trademark has increased monotonically.
2. Something that I can talk about in public without seeming like a social outcast. Maybe they should do a sitcom -- "Star Trek: Friends" with the lovely Jennifer Aniston as Yeoman Rachel.
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was
growing up.
Part 2
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room
213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter
of the maid who had escaped from the pirates? The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men
rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An
uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly,
he had learned something about life.
To analyze your ideas, let me direct you to the
Crackpot Index. In particular you will find the following lines helpful:
It's just a theory, and as such has yet to be conclusively proven. * 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a
point against it.
A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels * 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
Including the -5 starting credit, I score your post at a crackpot level of 25. Not bad.
I disagree that the problem of global warming will be the first scientific or technological issue to attract massive public attention. Instead, the issue of radiation and fallout from above-ground nuclear tests, and the related issues of nuclear power and weapons proliferation, attracted public attention decades ago.
The results were decidedly mixed. Although public pressure stopped above-ground nuclear testing (which is a good thing), public paranoia about radiation in any form has yet to recede. We see this in many forms - remember the panic about radon gas in basements a few years ago? I'm also convinced that the issue of cell-phone "radiation" is covered by the same fear, in spite of the fact that RF energy from cell phones is low frequency and non-ionizing -- but just try explaining that to Joe Sixpack. Ironically, nuclear power represents a short-term solution to the greenhouse effect, by giving an immediately practical alternative to coal- and gas-fired generators.
this would be a great reason to sue the company to fucking smithereens, but unfortunately it has
probably already folded so one couldn't collect anything.
What? Sue Canada Post to smithereens? Canada's national mail service, owned by the Government of Canada? Actually, counting the national debt, the finances of the company are in the red by about $500 billion, which is not unlike most dot-coms.
Oh well... one can always visit the homes of its boardmembers with a cigar-cutter, mafia-style, and
make yourself a nice necklace of fingers
Let me give you the address of the Chairman: 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. You can't miss it; it's the one with big tall gates, security cameras, and badass RCMP everywhere.
The reason why we're not seeing many successful IP Telephony systems is because these companies have to lease bandwidth from Telcos... the same Telcos against which they are competing in the long distance market.
The technology already exists, but until a major Telco comes out in support of a provider (i.e., one of their subsidiaries), it's unlikely that these ventures will be successful.
Somebody's looking for free advertising
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 3
Given the number of posts above to the effect of "What the heck is Ruby?" -- as well as the lack of any critical details in the post (such as comparisons between Ruby and the alternatives) -- one can't help but get the impression that the poster is merely looking for free advertising for his/her pet language.
Aren't we always mocking the 31337 h4x0rz for their lack of actual programming skill? So without the rootkits, the h4x0rz would be basically harmless. With the gun analogy, there's always the possibility of murdering someone another way - by knife, poison, etc.
There's this cool chapter in the book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" in which the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman describes how he could calculate all kinds of complicated expressions in his head, simply by being very familiar with log tables and basic arithmetic. Unfortunately, in the calculator age this skill has been lost.
Example: Someone asks Feynman to calculate e to the power 3.3, and then to the 3:
"I happened to know three numbers -- the logarithm of 10 to the base e... which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and... I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is.69315 (so I also knew that e to the 0.7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2.71828. The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3 -- ten -- times e, or 27.18. I knew I couldn't do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3, that's e to the 2.3 times e to the.7, or 10 times 2. So I knew it was 20.something, and when they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the.693."
This is covered by fair use, I hope. But seriously - go get the book. It's an excellent read.
There's a great scene in Apollo 13 where a group at mission control frantically works with slide rules to calculate information before a computer on the ship is shut off.
Yes, that was a cool scene from a cool movie. However, the calculation they were performing was addition (from Lovell's line to the effect of "check my addition"), and I'm told that this is something slide rules can't calculate.
Do you suppose that the State of Colorado will use Microsoft FaceScan? No doubt this will be bundled with other software packages in the Tyrant2000 suite. The "good" and "progressive" governments, who are only interested in public order rather than despotism, will of course use the open source alternative, GNUFace.
Float trial balloon with extremely controversial idea.
Observe public reaction.
If people are sufficiently upset to consider switching to Linux, tone down the idea and go back to 1, looking like the public-sensitive hero. Else implement the idea and make a bundle of money.
Following the attacks on open source by agents of Microsoft, claiming it's anti-business, there's been quite a bit of discussion on this site concerning business models for companies dealing in open source.
I am interested that your company does both open- and closed-source programming.
My question is: How does your business model balance the benefits of open-source programming with the requirement to be a profitable software business? In your opinion, is it possible for a for-profit company to work purely with open-source, and sell support (or whatever)?
I used to be at a military college, and we had some computers for the cadets' use. One fine day, somebody left their computer while still logged in. We had e-mail aliases that could access everyone in the entire college, and for reasons I have yet to understand they were accessible by anyone. Anyway, somebody found this computer logged in and sent an obscene message to the universal alias - so everyone from the General to the lowliest first year got the message, apparently from this hapless guy who left himself logged on.
The best part is that the colonel in charge of cadets, who mustn't have known much about computers, thought that this represented a breach of national security and nearly court-martialed the guy who left his computer logged on. I think somebody in the engineering faculty straightened it all out and very little ended up happening, though.
Re:Easier than the current method I guess
on
Movies in Space?
·
· Score: 1
although I'm not sure many movie stars would want to go through getting up into
space to film stuff either.
I can see it now: (Whiny Actor): I just can't work with this material! I'll be in my trailer. (Real Astronaut): No!! Don't open that hatch! Blam!
its good to see IBM
standing up for something that it seems to believe in: open source. It makes me proud to be an
employee.
On the contrary; the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. If slashdot had been around 20 years ago the object of its obsessions would have certainly been IBM. Not so long ago IBM's questionable trade practices in the mainframe industry was the subject of a Slashdot post. Yet here is IBM, complaining that a company that their market dominance helped build has turned into a monster, and is acting arrogantly.
Don't kid yourself; IBM is embracing open source only to the extent that it can give them an advantage over MS in the marketplace. Not that I think that's bad; but let's be clear about their motives.
as it applies to modeling the weather
--- that is to say, modeling the planet
The article's a little misleading. It starts with a discussion of the weather, then moves on to discuss modelling of the climate. It's basically impossible to predict the weather -- meaning the exact temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, etc. -- more than a week in advance, because you have to specify the model with essentially infinite precision or chaotic effects take over. In fact weather prediction was one of the earliest manifestations of chaos theory. The climate -- meaning long term averages -- can exhibit stable behaviour that is possible to model in the long term. Don't look for this technology to dramatically improve weather prediction.
Firstly, the supersoaker is made of plastic, which would be dissolved by gasoline. Secondly, again with the plastic, it would melt under all but the briefest flame bursts - and if the fuel reservoir melted you'd be having a bad day. Thirdly, you need some way of keeping the flame away from the outlet so that it's not sucked back into the fuel container, and it wasn't designed with this in mind.
Ports is just a random collection of programs, some of which may solve specific problems, and most of which are written in the Unix style of minimal luser support. Which is the way I like it, but not the way most people like to deal with their computer.
Ports depends on someone figuring out how to compile various packages on new systems - no centralized point of authority (or, more importantly, blame). Furthermore, there's no equivalent of a device-independent language for writing new applications.
So, I use Linux because it's a good operating system, and you can't beat the price. I like pine and pico, and I don't believe that the entire world should be evangelized to Open Source. Does such use of Linux violate the GPL?
It's kind of fun to see ideological rants like this article, and illustrates how easy it is to yank the chains of hard-core OSS types.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it self contradictory on one hand to produce a product as Open Source - releasing the content IP to the world freely - while fighting vigorously to protect the trademark - restricting identification/brand name IP from the world?
Not at all. Trademarks exist so that an individual company that has built good will based on a particular, recognizable product name will not have that good will hijacked by others seeking to either slander it or profit from it. This may be even more relevant in the open-source world, where anyone can take your source code and do what they want with it.
Say I release an open-source software package called Foo. The package receives a following and I decide to trademark the name.
Example 1: Somebody takes the source and corrupts it (e.g., by opening security holes), then releases a competing package also called Foo. The public becomes confused because of this "bad Foo", and good will based around my package called Foo is lost, due to this competing version.
Example 2: A company -- let's call them MacroSoft -- takes the source and uses it to release a closed source version which they call "Foo for MacroSoft". Let's say I used a license other than GPL so that there's no licensing issue, and they sell the product for a tidy profit. In this case MacroSoft is profiting on the good will created by my hard work, even though they did very little themselves, while I see nothing.
So, in other words, to prevent OS projects from becoming corrupted, I believe trademarking is not only consistent with the aims of OS, but necessary for it.
Yes, well done Queen's. You may have your solar car, since we all know that U of T is the best school in Canada, nay, the Universe. Who names a school "Queen's", anyway?
You're talking to a man with -108 karma here
How the hell did you do that? I mean, after you're down around -10 or so, you start posting at -1 by default, so that means you can't lose any more karma, right? Or did you do something to deliberately piss off the editors?It's kind of like the DeCSS fiasco: once the technology gets out, there's nothing you can do to put it back in the bottle.
But at least you can't write a nuclear bomb in six lines of perl. Or can you?
has a bug that over time loses track of bomb-grade nuclear materials even though their location is still in the database, and that this feature can be used to divert the materials for profit unbeknownst to the nuclear accountants.
"That's not a bug, that's a feature!" said the guy from tech support.
I guess it all depends on your point of view, doesn't it?
1. Something -- anything -- that doesn't suck. Since Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Generations, the suckage of everything produced under the Star Trek trademark has increased monotonically.
2. Something that I can talk about in public without seeming like a social outcast. Maybe they should do a sitcom -- "Star Trek: Friends" with the lovely Jennifer Aniston as Yeoman Rachel.
by Snoopy
Part 1
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
Part 2
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates? The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.
The End
It's just a theory, and as such has yet to be conclusively proven.
* 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels
* 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
Including the -5 starting credit, I score your post at a crackpot level of 25. Not bad.
I disagree that the problem of global warming will be the first scientific or technological issue to attract massive public attention. Instead, the issue of radiation and fallout from above-ground nuclear tests, and the related issues of nuclear power and weapons proliferation, attracted public attention decades ago.
The results were decidedly mixed. Although public pressure stopped above-ground nuclear testing (which is a good thing), public paranoia about radiation in any form has yet to recede. We see this in many forms - remember the panic about radon gas in basements a few years ago? I'm also convinced that the issue of cell-phone "radiation" is covered by the same fear, in spite of the fact that RF energy from cell phones is low frequency and non-ionizing -- but just try explaining that to Joe Sixpack. Ironically, nuclear power represents a short-term solution to the greenhouse effect, by giving an immediately practical alternative to coal- and gas-fired generators.
this would be a great reason to sue the company to fucking smithereens, but unfortunately it has probably already folded so one couldn't collect anything.
What? Sue Canada Post to smithereens? Canada's national mail service, owned by the Government of Canada? Actually, counting the national debt, the finances of the company are in the red by about $500 billion, which is not unlike most dot-coms.
Oh well... one can always visit the homes of its boardmembers with a cigar-cutter, mafia-style, and make yourself a nice necklace of fingers
Let me give you the address of the Chairman: 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. You can't miss it; it's the one with big tall gates, security cameras, and badass RCMP everywhere.
Actually us Canadians prefer to express our displeasure non-lethally, with pies in the face and such. But don't get too close, he's been known to personally handle protesters by the neck. Probably something he learned from watching Hockey Night in Canada.
The reason why we're not seeing many successful IP Telephony systems is because these companies have to lease bandwidth from Telcos ... the same Telcos against which they are competing in the long distance market.
The technology already exists, but until a major Telco comes out in support of a provider (i.e., one of their subsidiaries), it's unlikely that these ventures will be successful.
Given the number of posts above to the effect of "What the heck is Ruby?" -- as well as the lack of any critical details in the post (such as comparisons between Ruby and the alternatives) -- one can't help but get the impression that the poster is merely looking for free advertising for his/her pet language.
Aren't we always mocking the 31337 h4x0rz for their lack of actual programming skill? So without the rootkits, the h4x0rz would be basically harmless. With the gun analogy, there's always the possibility of murdering someone another way - by knife, poison, etc.
There's this cool chapter in the book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" in which the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman describes how he could calculate all kinds of complicated expressions in his head, simply by being very familiar with log tables and basic arithmetic. Unfortunately, in the calculator age this skill has been lost.
Example: Someone asks Feynman to calculate e to the power 3.3, and then to the 3:
"I happened to know three numbers -- the logarithm of 10 to the base e ... which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and ... I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is .69315 (so I also knew that e to the 0.7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2.71828. The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3 -- ten -- times e, or 27.18. I knew I couldn't do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3, that's e to the 2.3 times e to the .7, or 10 times 2. So I knew it was 20.something, and when they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the .693."
This is covered by fair use, I hope. But seriously - go get the book. It's an excellent read.
There's a great scene in Apollo 13 where a group at mission control frantically works with slide rules to calculate information before a computer on the ship is shut off.
Yes, that was a cool scene from a cool movie. However, the calculation they were performing was addition (from Lovell's line to the effect of "check my addition"), and I'm told that this is something slide rules can't calculate.
Do you suppose that the State of Colorado will use Microsoft FaceScan? No doubt this will be bundled with other software packages in the Tyrant2000 suite. The "good" and "progressive" governments, who are only interested in public order rather than despotism, will of course use the open source alternative, GNUFace.
The Microsoft Algorithm:
Following the attacks on open source by agents of Microsoft, claiming it's anti-business, there's been quite a bit of discussion on this site concerning business models for companies dealing in open source.
I am interested that your company does both open- and closed-source programming. My question is: How does your business model balance the benefits of open-source programming with the requirement to be a profitable software business? In your opinion, is it possible for a for-profit company to work purely with open-source, and sell support (or whatever)?
I used to be at a military college, and we had some computers for the cadets' use. One fine day, somebody left their computer while still logged in. We had e-mail aliases that could access everyone in the entire college, and for reasons I have yet to understand they were accessible by anyone. Anyway, somebody found this computer logged in and sent an obscene message to the universal alias - so everyone from the General to the lowliest first year got the message, apparently from this hapless guy who left himself logged on.
The best part is that the colonel in charge of cadets, who mustn't have known much about computers, thought that this represented a breach of national security and nearly court-martialed the guy who left his computer logged on. I think somebody in the engineering faculty straightened it all out and very little ended up happening, though.
although I'm not sure many movie stars would want to go through getting up into space to film stuff either.
I can see it now:(Whiny Actor): I just can't work with this material! I'll be in my trailer.
(Real Astronaut): No!! Don't open that hatch!
Blam!
its good to see IBM standing up for something that it seems to believe in: open source. It makes me proud to be an employee.
On the contrary; the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. If slashdot had been around 20 years ago the object of its obsessions would have certainly been IBM. Not so long ago IBM's questionable trade practices in the mainframe industry was the subject of a Slashdot post. Yet here is IBM, complaining that a company that their market dominance helped build has turned into a monster, and is acting arrogantly.
Don't kid yourself; IBM is embracing open source only to the extent that it can give them an advantage over MS in the marketplace. Not that I think that's bad; but let's be clear about their motives.
as it applies to modeling the weather --- that is to say, modeling the planet
The article's a little misleading. It starts with a discussion of the weather, then moves on to discuss modelling of the climate. It's basically impossible to predict the weather -- meaning the exact temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, etc. -- more than a week in advance, because you have to specify the model with essentially infinite precision or chaotic effects take over. In fact weather prediction was one of the earliest manifestations of chaos theory. The climate -- meaning long term averages -- can exhibit stable behaviour that is possible to model in the long term. Don't look for this technology to dramatically improve weather prediction.
Firstly, the supersoaker is made of plastic, which would be dissolved by gasoline. Secondly, again with the plastic, it would melt under all but the briefest flame bursts - and if the fuel reservoir melted you'd be having a bad day. Thirdly, you need some way of keeping the flame away from the outlet so that it's not sucked back into the fuel container, and it wasn't designed with this in mind.
Ports is just a random collection of programs, some of which may solve specific problems, and most of which are written in the Unix style of minimal luser support. Which is the way I like it, but not the way most people like to deal with their computer.
Ports depends on someone figuring out how to compile various packages on new systems - no centralized point of authority (or, more importantly, blame). Furthermore, there's no equivalent of a device-independent language for writing new applications.
So, I use Linux because it's a good operating system, and you can't beat the price. I like pine and pico, and I don't believe that the entire world should be evangelized to Open Source. Does such use of Linux violate the GPL?
It's kind of fun to see ideological rants like this article, and illustrates how easy it is to yank the chains of hard-core OSS types.