Some VPNs only route traffic meant for certain destinations through the VPN as one network interface and allow traffic to the public Internet use the actual established connection. Further, it sounds as if he's placing DNS servers for the VPN-connected network in the adapter confirguration in addition to any DNS servers that were assigned by DHCP or PPoE from the ISP.
This setup will work if the client machine sees failures from the ISP's DNS then checks the VPN's configured DNS, but it will still always create traffic to the ISP's DNS. If the ISP redirects all unknown domains, then it won't work because the client will have received a valid IP address from the DNS query.
What needs to be done is for the VPN's DNS to be the only DNS the client machine uses whenever it is connected to the VPN, even if the other traffic meant for the public Internet isn't tunneled through the VPN.
Well, with the 4 billion in new bonds and the 25 billion in cash, not to mention probably being willing to swap some portion stock-for-stock, MS could offer more than the full current capitalization of Time Warner, which today is 28.8 billion. That's not that much higher than Dell's 21.4 billion.
I imagine the real purpose is to buy back MSFT while it's cheap, as others have said. However, if it's to finance a buyout I doubt it's Dell. I doubt Microsoft would be allowed to have a PC manufacturer on top of an over 80% share of desktop OS sales, XBox, etc.
An interesting hedge against Intel, HP, IBM, and Oracle might be to grab Sun out from under Oracle's nose and release Windows 7 for Sparc at the same time as for x86. I doubt that'd get through regulators either though. It'd be more likely to be approved, I think, than a major x86 desktop seller, though.
I think grabbing Borland before the Micro Focus deal closes wouldn't be a bad move on Microsoft's part, either, if that could be pushed through. Visual Studio and.NET are two of their big selling points for Windows. Allowing two decent development tool companies that have both had sparks of greatness in the past to merge threatens their tools market.
NYCL is a New York Country Lawyer, which means he doesn't have to talk to anyone to have an attorney's opinion. Don't be surprised if you hear about him asking another attorney about something, though, because law is a broad topic. Even if he doesn't formally hire someone else as an expert in a particular kind of law, you can bet he'd run some things outside his expertise past a friend or acquaintance informally.
The whole reason the OP posted to/. is that he isn't an expert on this sort of thing. If he feels the need to ask someone, asking an expert (a lawyer, for example) is probably better than asking the Slashdotters.
Now, if he wanted to know the proper way to get 50 more megahertz out of his processor or the proper way to bitch about Apple or Microsoft, then this is the place to ask.
No, you wouldn't call a professional to clean up spilled pet food, except if it's spilled in a pet supply store.
Then you'd call the janitor, who may or may not have a high-school diploma but probably could tell you which of the brooms in the back room will clean up the mess without getting the crumbly little dust particles of the gerbil food stuck to the bristles.
See? Level of education has less to do with knowledge of a specialized area than area-specific education and training do. That's the whole damn point.
You're an idiot. Do you really think every.223 caliber rifle fires every different.223 caliber cartridge with different weights, powder charges, and projectile types at the exact same muzzle velocity?
You do know, of course, since you attempt to be so condescending, that if you see a single rating for muzzle velocity then that is measured using a recommended round or is the average of several tests, right?
You do know that different rifles firing the same Remington.223 ammo may have different muzzle velocities, due to chamber shape, gas venting muzzle brakes, and upward-venting recoil compensation, right?
Come on, AC, if you're going to be a condescending troll you'll need to do better than that.
What's the proper pressure through your car's PVC valve? Your mechanic probably knows.
How long do you cook a 2" thick steak on a 675F flat grill to get it medium rare? I bet some high school kid in your town can tell you from his job at a restaurant.
What's the best type of broom for cleaning up a spill of damp gerbil food? Is it nylon, polyester, horsehair, palmyra, PVC, or straw?
What's a typical range of muzzle velocity of a Remington.223 rifle?
How do you write a 32-bit adder in 6502 assembly language?
Whats the technical flood stage of the Mississippi river at St. Louis, MO's official measuring point?
What's the third note of the melody in Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries?
Come on, you should know all of these things without looking them up or asking anyone. After all, you're educated, aren't you?
It depends, I think, on what other assets Time Warner wants to unload. MapQuest, MovieFone, and TW Cable make sense on some level as part of an AOL spinoff. That would quiet some regulatory issues about HBO, the CW, the Turner channels, etc. and their dealings with the satellite and other cable providers.
Even if the suit doesn't block the sale, it's time lost and legal fees spent. It could get dismissed quickly and cheaply, but it could drive the total cost of the acquisition up to the point the shareholders want even if they aren't the ones who get the money in the end. It's not as big a discount if the cost to perform the transaction goes up. What's more is if it doesn't get settled quickly, other potential buyers have longer to consider what they are willing to offer.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
A good practice for the employee is to never say anything regarding your employer's business that you have not been authorized to say on your employer's behalf, period. Another is to never allow your personal opinion about something outside your company be mistaken as a company statement. The usual "these thoughts do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer" disclaimer is usually effective for the latter.
It's scary that they are having people agree to something through harassment, though. Everyone should have notice and a chance to show it to their own counsel before signing it.
That's called a "reverse split", and it is done. One reason to do it is to make it easier to manage the paperwork. Another is to raise the price-per-share.
If you have twice the price per share on half as many shares, though, you're not giving your shareholders twice the value. That's especially the case if you have a per-share dividend that does not double during the reverse split. You'd need to double the dividend in a 2:1 reverse split for the shareholder to come out even.
By buying back shares when they are cheap, there are fewer shares not just on paper, but an actual lower percentage of the company is in shareholder hands rather than within the company. That means that in order to buy stock, at least until another issue from the company, one must buy it from the shares that remain in public shareholders' hands. That means that all else being equal, the price of the same number of shares goes up. It also means that the dividends the company might pay (and MS does pay dividends) are only paid on the stocks remaining out in public.
In a low-interest bond sale, they might save a good portion of the interest they'll be paying in dividends they won't be paying to shareholders. They'll also have that many shares they can issue again later to raise funds once the share price recovers from the generally weak economy.
After the economy recovers, MS will be in a stronger position from being able to borrow in a weak economy when many companies couldn't. Their competitors with poorer bond ratings might not get bonds sold right now, and definitely not as cheaply. Once the economy recovers, interest rates will go back up across the board.
It's smart to attain assets when they are cheap. It's also smart to take on your debt when debt is cheap. Right now, MS can take on cheap debt, buy cheap assets, then sell expensive assets to pay back the cheap debt later.
I'm sure MS would love to do that, but it'd never get past the DOJ, SEC, and FTC. Maybe under Bush it would have had a chance. Maybe it's AOL now that Time Warner wants to spin it off, though, since they're having trouble acquiring Yahoo.
Sun might not be as big a discount as was previously thought, what with the class-action shareholder suit to block the sale to Oracle because it undervalues shareholder equity and all.
There are distros that offer paid packages in their repository.
There is even at least one app store with support for both Debian-based and RPM-based distros. See cnr.com for information about Click'n'Run for example.
I prefer to buy my stuff directly from the software vendor's site if I'm buying rather than using gratis software, and I care more about what fits my needs than what is the hot trend this week. However, if you want an app store, Linux has that.
What your post and the parent to your post both point out is further evidence of unfair anti-competitive practices by a dominant player in the industry. The chip is an x86 compatible chip, and NVidia has paid money to Intel for the rights to build chipsets for x86-compatible CPUs. To refuse to sell the chips just because it opens Intel to competition from NVidia will likely not go so well with the antitrust regulators or the judges in the antitrust suit brought by AMD.
There are reasonable limits to liability in all of those cases.
The doctor might have prescribed a reasonable medication that happens not to work for you or happens to cause a detrimental side effect when there was another medication that might not have had those issues. If you're made aware of the risks and benefits of the two medications and accept the doctor's recommendation of one over the other, then the doctor probably isn't liable. If it really is the absolutely wrong medication, then is it based on the doctor's misunderstanding or is it based on a separate independent lab messing up your tests? Yes, it's possible the doctor is liable. It's not guaranteed that if your doctor doesn't help you recover that the doctor did something wrong.
A really well-built house can withstand hurricane-strength winds or major earthquakes pretty well if it is maintained properly. Some other house right next door might be reasonably well built, but in an area of low incidence of earthquakes, it might not make it through the quake. Is the builder responsible if all the neighbors' houses withstood an event with minor damage and yours collapses? Maybe. if someone can point to the specific failings in the architecture or the construction process, then yes. If not, then it my just be left to fortune or providence.
There's probably some brilliant and wise way to translate all of that to software. Don't count on the first huge, clumsy attempt at it to be brilliant or wise.
How do you define fitness for purpose other than on a case-by-case basis, though?
Let's take a very simple example case. Let's say I wrote the new flashy, bells and whistles text editor all the kids want. You buy it. You lose a document. If I, as a software seller, advertise that I can save and restore your text editing data with 99.9999% reliability and you buy it, can you win a case suing me if you lose a document in that 0.00001%? Let's say I can run an automated test for the court that shows that 99.9999% of documents are safely stored and retrieved, but that some freakishly rare confluence of states in the software cause 0.00001% of documents to be corrupted upon saving. Have I or have I not, then, sold you a "suitable" product?
Once you determine suitability, what is the liability? Go ahead and assume your attorney proved I let you down. Do I owe you the cost of labor for your employee to type the document? Did the employee pause to think about the document while the program was running? Am I liable for that time, or only the time during which data was actually input? Am I instead liable for the lost sale opportunity because your checklist of features missed your customer's deadline for proposals? Am I only liable for the purchase price of the software? Perhaps the ruling is for the cost of replacement software and the labor to install it?
There's no guarantee that every bug will be gone just because there's a law requiring licensing. Insurance companies will love such a law. Developers might be somewhat more careful. You'll keep the worst of the worst out of the business perhaps. Usually, the worst of the worst go out of business on their own.
Generally in my area for secondary school education, they want someone with a degree in at least one of the subjects they teach and enough education classes to be certified as a teacher. An education degree is for someone teaching primary school, someone who wants to teach education, or one who wants to be a school administrator.
In general you're right. In the specific cases of running some legacy closed-source application on top of Linux, you're wrong. Binary compatibility is really good when all you have is a binary copy of something. Binary compatibility of kernel modules isn't that important, sure. Binary compatibility of applications linked against your shared libraries within the same major version is.
Shipping the proper version -- and putting it in a private directory -- would have been nice back in the dark days of Win95 and Win98. I'm betting many software houses never had to deal with the further hell of specifying in which order applications needed to be installed, and which DLLs needed to be hand-copied back into place in DOS mode after the last of them. The desktop consultants in the field wrote manuals for the IT staff about how to build disk images for their users because installing two applications in the wrong order would break the earlier one altogether. Everyone figured out the "proper" DLLs to ship, and then overwrote everyone else's "proper" versions anyway rather than keeping them separate.
If you can't version, don't share promiscuously. Make a shared copy for all of your own applications, perhaps, but don't stuff a particular version of a library another software house is using into a common directory.
Many of them became so skilled with computers because they isolated themselves from people. Then, they find that they are working with other people on the software and are ill-prepared for it.
If the on-drive controller of an IDE/ATA drive fails completely, it can look to the interface on the motherboard as if the drive is completely missing, too. It's rare these days, but I'm guessing it's still possible.
We used to have to make up WD Diag error codes to get Dell to give warranty RMAs on drives that worked one day and then just couldn't even be detected. The replacement drives worked fine hooked to the same port with the same cable. The drives were just... dead. No read/write errors, no SMART errors, no bad sectors, and no controller reports. One morning a system wouldn't boot, and the BIOS nor the diagnostic software could tell there was a hard drive present. It was a real problem with Western Digital 6 to 8 GB drives in certain Dell Optiplex business desktops. Some went through three or four drives while under warranty.
Before that time range and after, I've never had much problem with Western Digital drives. I've always wondered if the systems were providing them with insufficiently controlled voltage or current, but we couldn't bill the customer for that kind of test when replacing the drives under warranty and restoring their disk image got the systems working.
Slashdot Mirror
It was the year of the Linux desktop five years ago. It's just that 95% of the users are behind the trend.
Some VPNs only route traffic meant for certain destinations through the VPN as one network interface and allow traffic to the public Internet use the actual established connection. Further, it sounds as if he's placing DNS servers for the VPN-connected network in the adapter confirguration in addition to any DNS servers that were assigned by DHCP or PPoE from the ISP.
This setup will work if the client machine sees failures from the ISP's DNS then checks the VPN's configured DNS, but it will still always create traffic to the ISP's DNS. If the ISP redirects all unknown domains, then it won't work because the client will have received a valid IP address from the DNS query.
What needs to be done is for the VPN's DNS to be the only DNS the client machine uses whenever it is connected to the VPN, even if the other traffic meant for the public Internet isn't tunneled through the VPN.
Well, with the 4 billion in new bonds and the 25 billion in cash, not to mention probably being willing to swap some portion stock-for-stock, MS could offer more than the full current capitalization of Time Warner, which today is 28.8 billion. That's not that much higher than Dell's 21.4 billion.
I imagine the real purpose is to buy back MSFT while it's cheap, as others have said. However, if it's to finance a buyout I doubt it's Dell. I doubt Microsoft would be allowed to have a PC manufacturer on top of an over 80% share of desktop OS sales, XBox, etc.
An interesting hedge against Intel, HP, IBM, and Oracle might be to grab Sun out from under Oracle's nose and release Windows 7 for Sparc at the same time as for x86. I doubt that'd get through regulators either though. It'd be more likely to be approved, I think, than a major x86 desktop seller, though.
I think grabbing Borland before the Micro Focus deal closes wouldn't be a bad move on Microsoft's part, either, if that could be pushed through. Visual Studio and .NET are two of their big selling points for Windows. Allowing two decent development tool companies that have both had sparks of greatness in the past to merge threatens their tools market.
NYCL is a New York Country Lawyer, which means he doesn't have to talk to anyone to have an attorney's opinion. Don't be surprised if you hear about him asking another attorney about something, though, because law is a broad topic. Even if he doesn't formally hire someone else as an expert in a particular kind of law, you can bet he'd run some things outside his expertise past a friend or acquaintance informally.
The whole reason the OP posted to /. is that he isn't an expert on this sort of thing. If he feels the need to ask someone, asking an expert (a lawyer, for example) is probably better than asking the Slashdotters.
Now, if he wanted to know the proper way to get 50 more megahertz out of his processor or the proper way to bitch about Apple or Microsoft, then this is the place to ask.
No, you wouldn't call a professional to clean up spilled pet food, except if it's spilled in a pet supply store.
Then you'd call the janitor, who may or may not have a high-school diploma but probably could tell you which of the brooms in the back room will clean up the mess without getting the crumbly little dust particles of the gerbil food stuck to the bristles.
See? Level of education has less to do with knowledge of a specialized area than area-specific education and training do. That's the whole damn point.
You're an idiot. Do you really think every .223 caliber rifle fires every different .223 caliber cartridge with different weights, powder charges, and projectile types at the exact same muzzle velocity?
You do know, of course, since you attempt to be so condescending, that if you see a single rating for muzzle velocity then that is measured using a recommended round or is the average of several tests, right?
You do know that different rifles firing the same Remington .223 ammo may have different muzzle velocities, due to chamber shape, gas venting muzzle brakes, and upward-venting recoil compensation, right?
Come on, AC, if you're going to be a condescending troll you'll need to do better than that.
What's the proper pressure through your car's PVC valve? Your mechanic probably knows.
How long do you cook a 2" thick steak on a 675F flat grill to get it medium rare? I bet some high school kid in your town can tell you from his job at a restaurant.
What's the best type of broom for cleaning up a spill of damp gerbil food? Is it nylon, polyester, horsehair, palmyra, PVC, or straw?
What's a typical range of muzzle velocity of a Remington .223 rifle?
How do you write a 32-bit adder in 6502 assembly language?
Whats the technical flood stage of the Mississippi river at St. Louis, MO's official measuring point?
What's the third note of the melody in Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries?
Come on, you should know all of these things without looking them up or asking anyone. After all, you're educated, aren't you?
It depends, I think, on what other assets Time Warner wants to unload. MapQuest, MovieFone, and TW Cable make sense on some level as part of an AOL spinoff. That would quiet some regulatory issues about HBO, the CW, the Turner channels, etc. and their dealings with the satellite and other cable providers.
Even if the suit doesn't block the sale, it's time lost and legal fees spent. It could get dismissed quickly and cheaply, but it could drive the total cost of the acquisition up to the point the shareholders want even if they aren't the ones who get the money in the end. It's not as big a discount if the cost to perform the transaction goes up. What's more is if it doesn't get settled quickly, other potential buyers have longer to consider what they are willing to offer.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
A good practice for the employee is to never say anything regarding your employer's business that you have not been authorized to say on your employer's behalf, period. Another is to never allow your personal opinion about something outside your company be mistaken as a company statement. The usual "these thoughts do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer" disclaimer is usually effective for the latter.
It's scary that they are having people agree to something through harassment, though. Everyone should have notice and a chance to show it to their own counsel before signing it.
I'm having fun imagining him trying to lift and lightly toss 35 thousand pounds of anything.
That's called a "reverse split", and it is done. One reason to do it is to make it easier to manage the paperwork. Another is to raise the price-per-share.
If you have twice the price per share on half as many shares, though, you're not giving your shareholders twice the value. That's especially the case if you have a per-share dividend that does not double during the reverse split. You'd need to double the dividend in a 2:1 reverse split for the shareholder to come out even.
By buying back shares when they are cheap, there are fewer shares not just on paper, but an actual lower percentage of the company is in shareholder hands rather than within the company. That means that in order to buy stock, at least until another issue from the company, one must buy it from the shares that remain in public shareholders' hands. That means that all else being equal, the price of the same number of shares goes up. It also means that the dividends the company might pay (and MS does pay dividends) are only paid on the stocks remaining out in public.
In a low-interest bond sale, they might save a good portion of the interest they'll be paying in dividends they won't be paying to shareholders. They'll also have that many shares they can issue again later to raise funds once the share price recovers from the generally weak economy.
After the economy recovers, MS will be in a stronger position from being able to borrow in a weak economy when many companies couldn't. Their competitors with poorer bond ratings might not get bonds sold right now, and definitely not as cheaply. Once the economy recovers, interest rates will go back up across the board.
It's smart to attain assets when they are cheap. It's also smart to take on your debt when debt is cheap. Right now, MS can take on cheap debt, buy cheap assets, then sell expensive assets to pay back the cheap debt later.
Then sell once it's up and use that cash to pay back the bonds.
I'm sure MS would love to do that, but it'd never get past the DOJ, SEC, and FTC. Maybe under Bush it would have had a chance. Maybe it's AOL now that Time Warner wants to spin it off, though, since they're having trouble acquiring Yahoo.
Sun might not be as big a discount as was previously thought, what with the class-action shareholder suit to block the sale to Oracle because it undervalues shareholder equity and all.
Heh. I at first read that as: MSBSDISM
There are distros that offer paid packages in their repository.
There is even at least one app store with support for both Debian-based and RPM-based distros. See cnr.com for information about Click'n'Run for example.
I prefer to buy my stuff directly from the software vendor's site if I'm buying rather than using gratis software, and I care more about what fits my needs than what is the hot trend this week. However, if you want an app store, Linux has that.
What your post and the parent to your post both point out is further evidence of unfair anti-competitive practices by a dominant player in the industry. The chip is an x86 compatible chip, and NVidia has paid money to Intel for the rights to build chipsets for x86-compatible CPUs. To refuse to sell the chips just because it opens Intel to competition from NVidia will likely not go so well with the antitrust regulators or the judges in the antitrust suit brought by AMD.
There are reasonable limits to liability in all of those cases.
The doctor might have prescribed a reasonable medication that happens not to work for you or happens to cause a detrimental side effect when there was another medication that might not have had those issues. If you're made aware of the risks and benefits of the two medications and accept the doctor's recommendation of one over the other, then the doctor probably isn't liable. If it really is the absolutely wrong medication, then is it based on the doctor's misunderstanding or is it based on a separate independent lab messing up your tests? Yes, it's possible the doctor is liable. It's not guaranteed that if your doctor doesn't help you recover that the doctor did something wrong.
A really well-built house can withstand hurricane-strength winds or major earthquakes pretty well if it is maintained properly. Some other house right next door might be reasonably well built, but in an area of low incidence of earthquakes, it might not make it through the quake. Is the builder responsible if all the neighbors' houses withstood an event with minor damage and yours collapses? Maybe. if someone can point to the specific failings in the architecture or the construction process, then yes. If not, then it my just be left to fortune or providence.
There's probably some brilliant and wise way to translate all of that to software. Don't count on the first huge, clumsy attempt at it to be brilliant or wise.
How do you define fitness for purpose other than on a case-by-case basis, though?
Let's take a very simple example case. Let's say I wrote the new flashy, bells and whistles text editor all the kids want. You buy it. You lose a document. If I, as a software seller, advertise that I can save and restore your text editing data with 99.9999% reliability and you buy it, can you win a case suing me if you lose a document in that 0.00001%? Let's say I can run an automated test for the court that shows that 99.9999% of documents are safely stored and retrieved, but that some freakishly rare confluence of states in the software cause 0.00001% of documents to be corrupted upon saving. Have I or have I not, then, sold you a "suitable" product?
Once you determine suitability, what is the liability? Go ahead and assume your attorney proved I let you down. Do I owe you the cost of labor for your employee to type the document? Did the employee pause to think about the document while the program was running? Am I liable for that time, or only the time during which data was actually input? Am I instead liable for the lost sale opportunity because your checklist of features missed your customer's deadline for proposals? Am I only liable for the purchase price of the software? Perhaps the ruling is for the cost of replacement software and the labor to install it?
There's no guarantee that every bug will be gone just because there's a law requiring licensing. Insurance companies will love such a law. Developers might be somewhat more careful. You'll keep the worst of the worst out of the business perhaps. Usually, the worst of the worst go out of business on their own.
Generally in my area for secondary school education, they want someone with a degree in at least one of the subjects they teach and enough education classes to be certified as a teacher. An education degree is for someone teaching primary school, someone who wants to teach education, or one who wants to be a school administrator.
In general you're right. In the specific cases of running some legacy closed-source application on top of Linux, you're wrong. Binary compatibility is really good when all you have is a binary copy of something. Binary compatibility of kernel modules isn't that important, sure. Binary compatibility of applications linked against your shared libraries within the same major version is.
Shipping the proper version -- and putting it in a private directory -- would have been nice back in the dark days of Win95 and Win98. I'm betting many software houses never had to deal with the further hell of specifying in which order applications needed to be installed, and which DLLs needed to be hand-copied back into place in DOS mode after the last of them. The desktop consultants in the field wrote manuals for the IT staff about how to build disk images for their users because installing two applications in the wrong order would break the earlier one altogether. Everyone figured out the "proper" DLLs to ship, and then overwrote everyone else's "proper" versions anyway rather than keeping them separate.
If you can't version, don't share promiscuously. Make a shared copy for all of your own applications, perhaps, but don't stuff a particular version of a library another software house is using into a common directory.
Many of them became so skilled with computers because they isolated themselves from people. Then, they find that they are working with other people on the software and are ill-prepared for it.
If the on-drive controller of an IDE/ATA drive fails completely, it can look to the interface on the motherboard as if the drive is completely missing, too. It's rare these days, but I'm guessing it's still possible.
We used to have to make up WD Diag error codes to get Dell to give warranty RMAs on drives that worked one day and then just couldn't even be detected. The replacement drives worked fine hooked to the same port with the same cable. The drives were just... dead. No read/write errors, no SMART errors, no bad sectors, and no controller reports. One morning a system wouldn't boot, and the BIOS nor the diagnostic software could tell there was a hard drive present. It was a real problem with Western Digital 6 to 8 GB drives in certain Dell Optiplex business desktops. Some went through three or four drives while under warranty.
Before that time range and after, I've never had much problem with Western Digital drives. I've always wondered if the systems were providing them with insufficiently controlled voltage or current, but we couldn't bill the customer for that kind of test when replacing the drives under warranty and restoring their disk image got the systems working.