I'm going to go out on a limb here, not knowing you personally, and suggest that you didn't invent shit. I know that I, personally, wasn't even old enough to pay taxes when ARPANet was brought online, so I can't really lay claim to the idea that "my tax dollars built the Internet." Have some of my tax dollars gone to it since? Sure. But so have those of lots of other countries.
Your attitude sounds like that of an armchair sports fan -- "We won!" When really it was the team who played the game and won and all you did is kick back and drink beer. It's not a helpful attitude when it comes to diplomacy. Geopolitics isn't a zero-sum game. Everybody else doesn't have to lose for America to win.
And after all, what if everybody else doesn't agree with the "we built it, we run it" rule. What do you propose we do? Take our ball and go home? "Thanks but no thanks, Europe, China, everybody... you guys think you're smarter than everybody so we're not going to let you send us network traffic anymore." Obviously it wouldn't be a bad idea for the U.S. to be willing to capitulate a little bit.
Afterall there are only 2 parties, and the democrats are more liberal than the republicans.
There are more than two political parties in the United States, as you will find out when you reach legal voting age. Just because two parties have achieved special "blessed" status doesn't mean everyone should blindly vote for them even when they don't represent the interests of the voter.
That makes them the most liberal party. It's not rocket science.
Yes, but it doesn't make them the most liberal of parties, which is what the grandparent said. Reading ain't rocket science either.
As far as I can see, the language in question is not exactly "new" anymore, being C#. In other words, this is sort of a demo OS written in a managed-code environment as a way to test various OS principles (which in this case sound a lot like the virtualization stuff that so many other vendors are also doing). Singularity seems like the equivalent of writing an operating system in Java for a school project.
I see that the most liberal of parties opposes what is effectively Free Speech and the party which brought us the Patriot Act is advocating the it.
Umm... most liberal? You are talking about the Democratic Party in the United States, right? Next you'll be telling me that the Republicans are practicing conservative fiscal policy... you know, small government, less spending, etc...
Jack Messman says Novell now has two primary businesses: identity management and open source. That's the business Novell wants to go after, anyway. I think it has a decent amount of what you call legacy-support business as well, but it's constantly shrinking.
Identity management is a pretty hot area right now and a lot of companies want a piece of it, including the big guys like IBM and Sun. Novell remains a leader, however, largely because it has a superior directory product.
I wrote an article profiling Novell and it's current business prospects last year. It still pretty much holds. Try to look past the fact that it quotes Laura DiDio -- before joining the ranks of the "notorious foes of Linux," she covered Novell for years and years.
The latest news is that Novell's shareholders have been pressuring it to focus more and more on Linux and open source. I'm not sure that's necessarily the best move, because I don't think Suse Linux is generating all that much revenue so far. The open source angle seems to be perceived as the "sexiest" way to go forward, however, with the hope of reviving the Novell brand.
At least in Texas, the checking account-linked debit cards offer no protection, and no recompense in the case of fraud.
I'm not sure what you mean by "check card" in the above, but the protections on ATM debit cards in Texas are similar, though not the same, as the protections afforded to credit cards. You are not liable above $50, provided you report the card stolen in a timely fashion.
It has been quoted elsewhere that the cost is roughly 2 percent per million dollars of coverage. So, $2 million coverage would cost you about $40,000 per year. That money can be paid out in different ways under different circumstances, and each client is expected to negotiate a plan and premiums that best suit its own situation.
Note: I am not affiliated with any of these people or this insurance plan, but I have heard the full-length pitch.
I don't think you really need insurence once greedy lawyers figure out how to win these types of cases.
Clearly, it's in the best interests of the greedy lawyers to be on the side of the open source developers. It's the commercial companies, after all, who have the money -- and who need the insurance.
Note, however, that this policy that was announced on Monday does not cover legal costs, only the costs associated with bringing a product into compliance. As such, it does not encourage lawsuits.
I guess I shouldn't be baffled about the level of ignorance Slashdot readers have about what this policy is all about and why companies insure things.
If a company built a warehouse and then decided to get the property insured, would that be evidence of some kind of criminal intent?
If an auto manufacturer buys insurance against wrongful personal injury claims, does that make it an evil company that's in the business of building cars that will injure people?
No. Businesses buy insurance the same way you buy health insurance. In an ideal world, neither you nor they will ever have to file a claim. But we don't live in an ideal world.
Look at the name of the company that developed this product, people. "Open Source Risk Management." The point is to mitigate business risks associated with open source in every way possible. When you reduce business risks you don't get fired. You get promoted.
If there are developments against the GPL or a very popular software pack gets into strife (openoffice or such like), then their are huge liabilities that the insurance company can't meet and everyone sinks.
Not the way Lloyd's of London works. It's not a single company; rather, it's a whole bunch of companies that can syndicate the risks of various insurance products across the whole. It is, in essence, a marketplace. The umbrella Lloyd's of London company also takes a certain amount of money from each underwriter and places it into a general fund, which is used to honor claims even if the underwriting insurer goes out of business. People make jokes about Lloyd's insuring people's body parts and so forth, but the reason Lloyd's is able to build businesses around products like that is because of its unique business model.
Just how does one determine the profit losses from the time spent compliancing software etc?
This is something that the underwriter, Kiln, is very good at. It's what insurance auditors do.
(Yes, I have met with representatives from both OSRM and Kiln.)
As somebody else pointed out the last time OO.o was discussed on Slashdot, bundling all those applications together was more of a marketing innovation on Microsoft's part than a technical innovation. The idea is to create a perception that you get better "value" when you buy all those apps bundled together, even the ones you probably don't need to use very often. When all the apps are free, however, is there really any reason why you should have to install them all at once? Seems like you should be able to install one "core" package that includes any shared libraries and then add whichever of the apps you want.
This is a straw-man argument and it comes up so often that it's virtually a new category of troll.
Fact: Slashdot readers love copyright. The GNU General Public License is a document that depends on copyright. It is a license that documents the terms under which the software developer grants a license to use, copy, and modify the copyrighted work. Fail to comply with the terms and the license is revoked, at which point the customary laws regarding copyright infringement apply.
I don't hear too many people "wailing long and loud" about Microsoft's copyrights. I hear them wailing about Microsoft's crappy software and anti-competitive business practices, but that's not the same thing.
I don't hear anybody "wailing" about the Church of Scientology's copyrights, either. I hear them wailing about what a crackpot so-called religion Scientology is and how it bilks emotionally vulnerable people out of their money.
No principle is being compromised here. I see lots of debate about the National Science Teachers' Association's decision in this thread, in fact, which is a sign of a healthy, engaged public. Please crawl back under whatever dogmatic bridge you came from.
while the cause might seem worthwile in this case, this outlines a worrying feature of the copyright system.
Does it? I'm not sure you really understand what's going on.
A copyright is a state-granted monopoly. To get a given copyrighted text there literaly ARE no other options than to get it from the ONE producer. (exept maybe the used-book market, hardly an option for a school)
That's true, but the school already has the text. What the National Science Teachers Association is upset about is Kansas quoting from their text in its Educational Standards, which the NSTA does not agree with. Kansas wants to create a derivative work from the NSTA's document, in the eyes of the NSTA, and copyright grants the NSTA the right to refuse that privilege.
With a monopoly there should come certain obligations, like an undiscriminatory license. What else a school teaches, or whatever other unrelated thing they do should not have any influence on whether the school can buy a license for this work.
This is patently absurd. Should other industries be compelled to offer "undiscriminatory licenses"? If I manufacture bullets, should I be forced to sell them to both the Allies and the Nazis? If I manufacture fertilizer, should I be forced to sell it to you if I believe you're going to make a bomb with it? Likewise, if I write a short story, should I be forced to let you use it as chapters three through twelve of your latest novel, so long as you pay me some industry-standard sum for it?
Microsoft not selling to people that use Open Source?
They'd be perfectly within their rights, but probably not their best business interests.
O'Reilly not selling books to stores that also carry other tech books?
Ditto. O'Reilly is perfectly free to open its own chain of bookstores and only sell its books there, if that's a business it wants to get into.
Or an association that forbids the use of its texts in institutions that also teach certain other things?
I don't see anyone doing that, so far. Read the letter.
SGI charged for their optimising compiler, so Sun figured they could do the same.
And not just the compiler. If I remember correctly, you had to buy the (four-figure) developer's package from SGI just to get the system header files. So it wasn't even a matter of simply downloading gcc instead.
Correction: When there was no TV, kids read comic books. It was only long after TV became a fixture of American entertainment that comic books became something you sealed in a mylar envelope and stored in a trunk moments after purchase.
Suse is unimportant. It's yet another linux distro, one among many, and it isn't even that different. If Suse disappeared, its users could just switch to another distro.
Hobbyist users, maybe. The point of Novell backing Suse is that they provide enterprise support for the distro and they are in a position to respond to their customers as to what should go into that distro. For example, they put more effort into hardware support than some other distros do. For a large company running mission-critical operations on Suse, having completed all the due diligence etc. that implies, switching distros midstream would be a non-trivial task.
That said, I agree with other posters. Novell's management may suck, but that's been true for a long time. Novell isn't going away anytime soon.
Looks like the page I posted is a little out of date. The real ReClock homepage is at a different URL than the one they list. If you download the software he's got a document inside the Zip file that explains the problem at length -- I'm serious, at length. What's frustrating is that it seems to be a DirectShow problem and nothing else -- I don't think VLC will stutter on the same setup, for example. But VLC doesn't integrate with Media Center 2005.
Perhaps windows media center is sold to OEMs only because they are the ones that know how the machines have to be built to work properly?
Exactly.
After long years of being a Mac-only guy, I broke down and bought an Intel box this year. And guess what? It was a Media Center 2005 PC. And you know what else? It was painless to set up and it works exactly as advertised. This guy seems to be complaining about things like broken S-Video cables... I can hardly see how that should be Microsoft's fault.
On the other hand, he does bring up some important points. With Media Center and the hardware that came in my box, picture quality is not all that great. (I hear the Hauppauge cards offer the best quality; I might try one of those out.) You also can't time-shift FM radio. But then, like many TV tuner cards, mine didn't come with FM radio support, so it's a non-issue anyway.
Also, for a "convergence" device, recording from a video source is exactly as painful as he describes. I could find NO software on my system that would let me record from VHS tape, except for one program that required me to insert DVD media. Unlike his case, it worked for me. But the point remains that this is totally stupid. What if I don't want to burn it to a DVD? What if I'd like to, um, you know... check to see that I was getting a signal from my VCR first? Sorry, no way to do that. Your best option is to set it for a five-minute trial run and check to see if it worked after the program burns the results to a DVD.
Another semi-retarded thing about Windows Media Center is that it records TV in a proprietary Microsoft format, DVR-MS. I am told that this is MPEG internally, but you need to export it with a different piece of software (NeroVision Express works) if you want to get a usable file that you could convert to XviD, for example.
What's more, every video format you play in Windows Media Center is handled with a DirectShow filter. That's good, in the sense that when you install new codecs in XP they are automatically picked up by Media Center, so you can play your DivX, XviD, etc. There is one caveat, however, and that is that you can't stream these formats to another system via a Media Center Connector or whatever you call it, like your Xbox 360. I think only Windows Media and MPEG formats are supported.
And another glitch with the DirectShow involves timing, which inevitably means you get these stutters in your video every few minutes when you're watching them on a TV. The guy who invented ReClock explains it all in great length. The downside is that ReClock doesn't seem to work so well with Media Center yet.
So, yeah, this "review" is dumb, and you shouldn't expect to be able to bash together a Media Center PC in a weekend and expect it to work. In fact, you may just want to spend $1,400 and buy one, like I did. But even if it works, Media Center is pretty far of from being a "TiVo killer" just yet. If all you want is a DVR, you should buy one of those. I bought the Media Center PC primarily because I wanted an x86 PC, and in that dual capacity it works fine for me.
The Oracle Cluster filesystem is also available under the GPL. Dunno if that fits the bill; the description here is sort of vague. It sounds like a seriously ambitious project to approach for someone who doesn't even know what can be done, let alone what's within his budget.
Somebody recently told me... it may have been Sun or AMD, or an industry analyst, I forget who... that some of the customers clamoring the loudest for high-performance, low-power systems are on Wall Street. Aside from the heat concerns mentioned elsewhere (and remember, more heat means more air conditioning which means still more power -- AC is always a line-item on any datacenter budget), a lot of customers run into the problem of there simply not being enough power infrastructure to go around. If you're running a datacenter with a whole bunch of systems in the middle of downtown Manhattan, you can't just pull in a few thousand more watts on a whim.
In case you don't notice a pattern: the half-complete capabilities mentioned here were attained through reverse engineering, a very laborious, time-consuming process; and in the cases where a shortcut has been taken, there are usually legal disincentives and prohibitions to doing so.
The OP wasn't disagreeing with you. He was just listing reasons why people prefer to use Windows over Linux. You think your explanation is likely to change their minds?
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, now that is pretty funny. You really do learn something new every day.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, not knowing you personally, and suggest that you didn't invent shit. I know that I, personally, wasn't even old enough to pay taxes when ARPANet was brought online, so I can't really lay claim to the idea that "my tax dollars built the Internet." Have some of my tax dollars gone to it since? Sure. But so have those of lots of other countries.
Your attitude sounds like that of an armchair sports fan -- "We won!" When really it was the team who played the game and won and all you did is kick back and drink beer. It's not a helpful attitude when it comes to diplomacy. Geopolitics isn't a zero-sum game. Everybody else doesn't have to lose for America to win.
And after all, what if everybody else doesn't agree with the "we built it, we run it" rule. What do you propose we do? Take our ball and go home? "Thanks but no thanks, Europe, China, everybody ... you guys think you're smarter than everybody so we're not going to let you send us network traffic anymore." Obviously it wouldn't be a bad idea for the U.S. to be willing to capitulate a little bit.
As far as I can see, the language in question is not exactly "new" anymore, being C#. In other words, this is sort of a demo OS written in a managed-code environment as a way to test various OS principles (which in this case sound a lot like the virtualization stuff that so many other vendors are also doing). Singularity seems like the equivalent of writing an operating system in Java for a school project.
Jack Messman says Novell now has two primary businesses: identity management and open source. That's the business Novell wants to go after, anyway. I think it has a decent amount of what you call legacy-support business as well, but it's constantly shrinking.
Identity management is a pretty hot area right now and a lot of companies want a piece of it, including the big guys like IBM and Sun. Novell remains a leader, however, largely because it has a superior directory product.
I wrote an article profiling Novell and it's current business prospects last year. It still pretty much holds. Try to look past the fact that it quotes Laura DiDio -- before joining the ranks of the "notorious foes of Linux," she covered Novell for years and years.
The latest news is that Novell's shareholders have been pressuring it to focus more and more on Linux and open source. I'm not sure that's necessarily the best move, because I don't think Suse Linux is generating all that much revenue so far. The open source angle seems to be perceived as the "sexiest" way to go forward, however, with the hope of reviving the Novell brand.
It has been quoted elsewhere that the cost is roughly 2 percent per million dollars of coverage. So, $2 million coverage would cost you about $40,000 per year. That money can be paid out in different ways under different circumstances, and each client is expected to negotiate a plan and premiums that best suit its own situation.
Note: I am not affiliated with any of these people or this insurance plan, but I have heard the full-length pitch.
Note, however, that this policy that was announced on Monday does not cover legal costs, only the costs associated with bringing a product into compliance. As such, it does not encourage lawsuits.
I guess I shouldn't be baffled about the level of ignorance Slashdot readers have about what this policy is all about and why companies insure things.
If a company built a warehouse and then decided to get the property insured, would that be evidence of some kind of criminal intent?
If an auto manufacturer buys insurance against wrongful personal injury claims, does that make it an evil company that's in the business of building cars that will injure people?
No. Businesses buy insurance the same way you buy health insurance. In an ideal world, neither you nor they will ever have to file a claim. But we don't live in an ideal world.
Look at the name of the company that developed this product, people. "Open Source Risk Management." The point is to mitigate business risks associated with open source in every way possible. When you reduce business risks you don't get fired. You get promoted.
(Yes, I have met with representatives from both OSRM and Kiln.)
As somebody else pointed out the last time OO.o was discussed on Slashdot, bundling all those applications together was more of a marketing innovation on Microsoft's part than a technical innovation. The idea is to create a perception that you get better "value" when you buy all those apps bundled together, even the ones you probably don't need to use very often. When all the apps are free, however, is there really any reason why you should have to install them all at once? Seems like you should be able to install one "core" package that includes any shared libraries and then add whichever of the apps you want.
This is a straw-man argument and it comes up so often that it's virtually a new category of troll.
Fact: Slashdot readers love copyright. The GNU General Public License is a document that depends on copyright. It is a license that documents the terms under which the software developer grants a license to use, copy, and modify the copyrighted work. Fail to comply with the terms and the license is revoked, at which point the customary laws regarding copyright infringement apply.
I don't hear too many people "wailing long and loud" about Microsoft's copyrights. I hear them wailing about Microsoft's crappy software and anti-competitive business practices, but that's not the same thing.
I don't hear anybody "wailing" about the Church of Scientology's copyrights, either. I hear them wailing about what a crackpot so-called religion Scientology is and how it bilks emotionally vulnerable people out of their money.
No principle is being compromised here. I see lots of debate about the National Science Teachers' Association's decision in this thread, in fact, which is a sign of a healthy, engaged public. Please crawl back under whatever dogmatic bridge you came from.
Wouldn't you?
That said, I agree with other posters. Novell's management may suck, but that's been true for a long time. Novell isn't going away anytime soon.
Looks like the page I posted is a little out of date. The real ReClock homepage is at a different URL than the one they list. If you download the software he's got a document inside the Zip file that explains the problem at length -- I'm serious, at length. What's frustrating is that it seems to be a DirectShow problem and nothing else -- I don't think VLC will stutter on the same setup, for example. But VLC doesn't integrate with Media Center 2005.
After long years of being a Mac-only guy, I broke down and bought an Intel box this year. And guess what? It was a Media Center 2005 PC. And you know what else? It was painless to set up and it works exactly as advertised. This guy seems to be complaining about things like broken S-Video cables ... I can hardly see how that should be Microsoft's fault.
On the other hand, he does bring up some important points. With Media Center and the hardware that came in my box, picture quality is not all that great. (I hear the Hauppauge cards offer the best quality; I might try one of those out.) You also can't time-shift FM radio. But then, like many TV tuner cards, mine didn't come with FM radio support, so it's a non-issue anyway.
Also, for a "convergence" device, recording from a video source is exactly as painful as he describes. I could find NO software on my system that would let me record from VHS tape, except for one program that required me to insert DVD media. Unlike his case, it worked for me. But the point remains that this is totally stupid. What if I don't want to burn it to a DVD? What if I'd like to, um, you know ... check to see that I was getting a signal from my VCR first? Sorry, no way to do that. Your best option is to set it for a five-minute trial run and check to see if it worked after the program burns the results to a DVD.
Another semi-retarded thing about Windows Media Center is that it records TV in a proprietary Microsoft format, DVR-MS. I am told that this is MPEG internally, but you need to export it with a different piece of software (NeroVision Express works) if you want to get a usable file that you could convert to XviD, for example.
What's more, every video format you play in Windows Media Center is handled with a DirectShow filter. That's good, in the sense that when you install new codecs in XP they are automatically picked up by Media Center, so you can play your DivX, XviD, etc. There is one caveat, however, and that is that you can't stream these formats to another system via a Media Center Connector or whatever you call it, like your Xbox 360. I think only Windows Media and MPEG formats are supported.
And another glitch with the DirectShow involves timing, which inevitably means you get these stutters in your video every few minutes when you're watching them on a TV. The guy who invented ReClock explains it all in great length. The downside is that ReClock doesn't seem to work so well with Media Center yet.
So, yeah, this "review" is dumb, and you shouldn't expect to be able to bash together a Media Center PC in a weekend and expect it to work. In fact, you may just want to spend $1,400 and buy one, like I did. But even if it works, Media Center is pretty far of from being a "TiVo killer" just yet. If all you want is a DVR, you should buy one of those. I bought the Media Center PC primarily because I wanted an x86 PC, and in that dual capacity it works fine for me.
Er, sorry, version 2 is what I meant.
The Oracle Cluster filesystem is also available under the GPL. Dunno if that fits the bill; the description here is sort of vague. It sounds like a seriously ambitious project to approach for someone who doesn't even know what can be done, let alone what's within his budget.
Somebody recently told me ... it may have been Sun or AMD, or an industry analyst, I forget who ... that some of the customers clamoring the loudest for high-performance, low-power systems are on Wall Street. Aside from the heat concerns mentioned elsewhere (and remember, more heat means more air conditioning which means still more power -- AC is always a line-item on any datacenter budget), a lot of customers run into the problem of there simply not being enough power infrastructure to go around. If you're running a datacenter with a whole bunch of systems in the middle of downtown Manhattan, you can't just pull in a few thousand more watts on a whim.