This is not quite as ludicrous as it seems, because when Stroustrup implemented the very first versions of C++ in cfront, he was an employee of AT&T. AT&T therefore owned the copyright in that work, and this copyright may have been included in the bundle of old AT&T copyrights which ended up in SCO's possession.
I still think that McBride is blowing smoke, because g++ is an independent implementation of the C++ specification. So his comment might be partly true, but irrelevant.
David Boies' goal is to make a lot of money. It's most unlikely he cares about SCO. He'll do the best he can, and if SCO's case is hopeless, a loss will not damage his career.
the idea of working on what turns out to be an ideal tool for distributing kiddie-porn just gives me the willies
A camera (either digital or film) is an "ideal tool" for generating the kiddie-porn in the first place. Do you oppose the manufacture of cameras? After all, generating the stuff is surely at least as bad as distributing it.
Pedant. Maybe people shouldn't say "Linux" when they mean "GNU/Linux with XFree86 and Gnome or KDE", but we all know that they do, and that that's what most people mean when they say "Linux".
I've been contracting for banks and other financial institutions for the last 8 years, during which I've worked at 5 major banks and 2 other financial institutions, and I've never seen OS/2 in use in that time. Maybe they are running legacy apps on them (I'm a developer) - but a system that nobody is doing new development for is dead. Look at the job ads on the financial sector boards. There is demand for Windows, Solaris, various Unices, Linux, some IBM mainframe. I talk to a lot of other contractors in the financial sector and never met anyone in that time who develops for OS/2. OS/2 people started to "abandon ship" when Windows 3.0 came out. It may be in use but it's basically a "zombie". To compare it with Fortran is ridiculous - Fortrash may be an obsolete language, but people are still using it for new development.
People bad-mouth X because their PC happens not to use its power. They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle. They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace; X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers; it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
There is value in having alternatives. For mobile phones, the power of X is not needed and something lighter might be appropriate. But to all those who persist in bad-mouthing X, I say: look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now. Find out what X is really about. It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors. Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on. Discarding it and going back to a Microsoft-like GUI would be a giant leap backwards.
The Linux community is underestimating SCO's case
on
SCO To Show Copied Code
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The financial marketplace - the smart money - believes SCO is going to win, at least partly. Their stock price has more than doubled since mid-February. (the lawsuit was filed in early March, the stock started to rise about when leaks/rumors from insiders started).
Serious money does not move like this unless the issues have been considered by good lawyers specialized in IP, plus technical advice, etc. Like most/.ers, I don't see how SCO can have a case - but I'm not an IP lawyer.
Tax your own people (income tax of residents) just to give it back to them in the forms of social services
No, the pols don't "give it back" in the form of services. They mostly spend it on, for example, flunkies and bureaucrats who make the pols feel important and get in everybody else's way. A little trickles through in the form of services, but only the absolute minimum to keep the gullible voters content.
We hear this again and again: "Proprietary software is supported, free software isn't".
It's bullshit. If you have problems installing a driver for Windows, do you think Microsoft will give you any support? Have you tried calling Microsoft tech support?
"Be sure to install the latest service pack". That's your tech support from the vendor. You get effective support for M$ products exactly the same way you get effective support for free software - by posting a question on a newsgroup or forum.
I am not yet convinced that the technology exists to make space travel inexpensive enough for any organization that does not have the capability to spend hundreds of millions without seeing a return (like, say government agencies).
If the government didn't steal so much of our money and squander it, there'd be more private organizations that could afford to do space research. For real space travel (as distinct from dinking about in LEO) to become practical, manned launch costs have to be brought down. NASA has made absolutely no progress whatsoever on this in the last 20 years.
Agreed, mostly. But things are worse than you think. You wrote:
"In principal we aren't prisoners yet, as we can theoretically still emigrate if we so choose."
Take a look at Section 877 of the tax code. When your "net worth" exceeds $500,000, the IRS puts serious obstacles in your way if you want to emigrate. That might sound a lot of money to a student, but it 's actually less than what you need at retirement age to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Section 877 will probably apply to most/.ers when they reach their 50s.
the GFDL allows portions of the licensed document to be marked "invariant", meaning you can't change those parts. This is logically equivalent to what you would have if the GPL allowed authors to mark parts of their source code as unmodifiable
No it is not equivalent - you have not read the GFDL. Only a "secondary section" can be an "invariant section". So what's a "secondary section"? It's a section that has got nothing to do with the purpose of the document. For example, if you write a document about Emacs, and license it under the GFDL, nothing that describes any part of Emacs can be a "secondary section". A "secondary section" could be something like an acknowledgement that you got moral support from your spouse/POSSLQ/kids/dog while writing the document; and you could make that an "invariant section" if you wanted to. For Debian to make a fuss about this seems silly to me.
And as much as I hate replying to my own post, he's a 5 time CONVICTED felon.
Notice the stink of self-righteousness? If there's one thing I can't stand, it's the holier-than-thou attitude.
Kevin Mitnick did little or no damage to anyone. If you really look at his case, it's hard to avoid the impression that he was made a scapegoat for public concern about hacking.
Sure he made some mistakes. But show me someone who never made a mistake, and I'll show you somebody who never achieved anything.
His book "The Art of Deception" is terrific, an absolute must-read for anyone with any responsibility for security. This book is contributing more to computer security than Painter and the other pompous assholes who made careers out of screwing Mitnick have contributed in their entire lives.
[The Patriot Act] grants the executive branch almost police state powers,
How do you justify the word "almost" in that sentence? In the USA today, the government can make people simply disappear. The USA already imprisons a larger fraction of its population than any other developed country, and the Patriot Act has barely started to have an effect. What more do you want before you are willing to describe the USA as a police state?
Schindler broke the law because of his greater moral duty
Schindler had no moral duty to take the risks he took. He did what he did because he was a good man, not because he was "doing his duty".
The violation of law that is the subject of this thread is also in a good cause, if a lesser one. The other point is that the draconian penalty is disproportionate to the offense. A few years ago, a man was sentenced to 6 months in prison (and no fine) for attempting to murder a neighbor of mine (in Maryland). He shot him in the chest with a nail gun. The victim survived, just. Of course the important difference is that the would-be murderer only harmed an ordinary citizen, whereas the mod-chip man annoyed a powerful corporation.
Greenspan has done a great job by putting some important questions into context. A century ago, this would have been a useful catalyst for political debate.
Today's world is different. A lot of/.ers (who presumably are better educated than the average American) can't read well enough to understand a long article. Politics is no longer influenced by reasoned debate. When the voters are swayed by sound bites and the pols by money, there's not much room left for reasoned discussion.
Copyright and patent laws will continue to be written by corporations like Disney and IBM, and people who can barely read will go on saying "Copying is theft!" as though it was an unanswerable argument.
Yes - the PNG format. it's free, works as well(if not better than Jpeg)
This is ill-informed rubbish and should not have been modded up to its current level of 5. PNG is a replacement for GIF, not a replacement for JPEG. JPEG is a lossy compression scheme intended for photographic images, which can achieve extremely high compression ratios. PNG is a lossless scheme applicable to any kind of image. For photos, you can easily get a factor of 40 compression with JPEG on an image where PNG would give you a factor of only 5. On the other hand, PNG gives excellent compression on line drawings, which JPEG compresses poorly. Apart from the fact that they can both compress images, they have nothing in common and neither is a replacement for the other.
1) The entire world whole uses Windows, makes money, produces things, and participates in a capitalist commercial society.
2) Filthy stinky hippies who enjoy using some shitty alternative operating system who think they're sticking it to "the man" but really they're just fucking themselves since they can't get any work done. They spend more time editing obscure cfg files and it's a good thing, since they sure as fuck aren't running any apps. Other than the few bullshit ones written by some fat pimply hippy in his mother's basement.[...]smelly Linux...
Presumably you're in the second group, since you know so much about Linux.
Software development is like the Mc Donalds job, anyone can do it,
Of course this is crap - only a small percentage of the population, maybe 2% or something like that, has the aptitude to develop complex software.
But the world can use maybe 100,000 software developers... and 20 million Chinese graduate high school every year... plus 15 million Indians... you don't need calculus to do the math here. The problem facing software developers is not that their job is easy, it's that their job is portable. You can email a spec to Shanghai in 10 seconds. And when the development and testing are done, you can email the source code back in 10 seconds. You don't even have to go thru customs. Shipping costs zilch.
A career in IT is no longer attractive. But the people who whinge that the world is coming to an end because they can't get paid $80,000/year for programming any more deserve NO sympathy.
What few IT jobs are left will migrate to Bangla Desh/India etc. That's a fact. Suck it up. The world does not owe you a living. Instead of whinging, learn to do a job for which there's a demand.
And by the way, if you have a good idea along those lines, I'd like to hear it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
*BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Make your mind up, mate. It can't be both 'dead' and 'dying'.
This is not quite as ludicrous as it seems, because when Stroustrup implemented the very first versions of C++ in cfront, he was an employee of AT&T. AT&T therefore owned the copyright in that work, and this copyright may have been included in the bundle of old AT&T copyrights which ended up in SCO's possession.
I still think that McBride is blowing smoke, because g++ is an independent implementation of the C++ specification. So his comment might be partly true, but irrelevant.
David Boies is a smart man, and surely (...)
David Boies' goal is to make a lot of money. It's most unlikely he cares about SCO. He'll do the best he can, and if SCO's case is hopeless, a loss will not damage his career.
the idea of working on what turns out to be an ideal tool for distributing kiddie-porn just gives me the willies
A camera (either digital or film) is an "ideal tool" for generating the kiddie-porn in the first place. Do you oppose the manufacture of cameras? After all, generating the stuff is surely at least as bad as distributing it.
Heck - Linux doesn't even have a desktop.
Pedant. Maybe people shouldn't say "Linux" when they mean "GNU/Linux with XFree86 and Gnome or KDE", but we all know that they do, and that that's what most people mean when they say "Linux".
lots of banks STILL use OS/2
Which banks are using it for what?
I've been contracting for banks and other financial institutions for the last 8 years, during which I've worked at 5 major banks and 2 other financial institutions, and I've never seen OS/2 in use in that time. Maybe they are running legacy apps on them (I'm a developer) - but a system that nobody is doing new development for is dead. Look at the job ads on the financial sector boards. There is demand for Windows, Solaris, various Unices, Linux, some IBM mainframe. I talk to a lot of other contractors in the financial sector and never met anyone in that time who develops for OS/2. OS/2 people started to "abandon ship" when Windows 3.0 came out. It may be in use but it's basically a "zombie". To compare it with Fortran is ridiculous - Fortrash may be an obsolete language, but people are still using it for new development.
People bad-mouth X because their PC happens not to use its power. They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle. They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace; X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers; it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
There is value in having alternatives. For mobile phones, the power of X is not needed and something lighter might be appropriate. But to all those who persist in bad-mouthing X, I say: look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now. Find out what X is really about. It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors. Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on. Discarding it and going back to a Microsoft-like GUI would be a giant leap backwards.
The financial marketplace - the smart money - believes SCO is going to win, at least partly. Their stock price has more than doubled since mid-February. (the lawsuit was filed in early March, the stock started to rise about when leaks/rumors from insiders started).
/.ers, I don't see how SCO can have a case - but I'm not an IP lawyer.
Serious money does not move like this unless the issues have been considered by good lawyers specialized in IP, plus technical advice, etc. Like most
Tax your own people (income tax of residents) just to give it back to them in the forms of social services
No, the pols don't "give it back" in the form of services. They mostly spend it on, for example, flunkies and bureaucrats who make the pols feel important and get in everybody else's way. A little trickles through in the form of services, but only the absolute minimum to keep the gullible voters content.
We hear this again and again: "Proprietary software is supported, free software isn't".
It's bullshit. If you have problems installing a driver for Windows, do you think Microsoft will give you any support? Have you tried calling Microsoft tech support?
"Be sure to install the latest service pack". That's your tech support from the vendor. You get effective support for M$ products exactly the same way you get effective support for free software - by posting a question on a newsgroup or forum.
I am not yet convinced that the technology exists to make space travel inexpensive enough for any organization that does not have the capability to spend hundreds of millions without seeing a return (like, say government agencies).
If the government didn't steal so much of our money and squander it, there'd be more private organizations that could afford to do space research.
For real space travel (as distinct from dinking about in LEO) to become practical, manned launch costs have to be brought down. NASA has made absolutely no progress whatsoever on this in the last 20 years.
Agreed, mostly. But things are worse than you think. You wrote:
/.ers when they reach their 50s.
"In principal we aren't prisoners yet, as we can theoretically still emigrate if we so choose."
Take a look at Section 877 of the tax code. When your "net worth" exceeds $500,000, the IRS puts serious obstacles in your way if you want to emigrate. That might sound a lot of money to a student, but it 's actually less than what you need at retirement age to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Section 877 will probably apply to most
This wasn't the first web browser. It wasn't the first use of html or http. Those are the significant milestones, not Mosaic.
.....
So why did the Slashdot editors pick this story, while (presumably) rejecting dozens of worthwhile ones? Oh - I get it - it's a repeat
the GFDL allows portions of the licensed document to be marked "invariant", meaning you can't change those parts. This is logically equivalent to what you would have if the GPL allowed authors to mark parts of their source code as unmodifiable
No it is not equivalent - you have not read the GFDL. Only a "secondary section" can be an "invariant section". So what's a "secondary section"? It's a section that has got nothing to do with the purpose of the document. For example, if you write a document about Emacs, and license it under the GFDL, nothing that describes any part of Emacs can be a "secondary section". A "secondary section" could be something like an acknowledgement that you got moral support from your spouse/POSSLQ/kids/dog while writing the document; and you could make that an "invariant section" if you wanted to.
For Debian to make a fuss about this seems silly to me.
And as much as I hate replying to my own post, he's a 5 time CONVICTED felon.
Notice the stink of self-righteousness?
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's the holier-than-thou attitude.
Kevin Mitnick did little or no damage to anyone. If you really look at his case, it's hard to avoid the impression that he was made a scapegoat for public concern about hacking.
Sure he made some mistakes. But show me someone who never made a mistake, and I'll show you somebody who never achieved anything.
His book "The Art of Deception" is terrific, an absolute must-read for anyone with any responsibility for security. This book is contributing more to computer security than Painter and the other pompous assholes who made careers out of screwing Mitnick have contributed in their entire lives.
It will be annoying when they do release the opterons and there is no (64bit) software to run on them.
The full Debian distro for Linux, which includes several CDs full of apps, has been available for several months for Itanium. more info
[The Patriot Act] grants the executive branch almost police state powers,
How do you justify the word "almost" in that sentence? In the USA today, the government can make people simply disappear. The USA already imprisons a larger fraction of its population than any other developed country, and the Patriot Act has barely started to have an effect. What more do you want before you are willing to describe the USA as a police state?
Schindler broke the law because of his greater moral duty
Schindler had no moral duty to take the risks he took. He did what he did because he was a good man, not because he was "doing his duty".
The violation of law that is the subject of this thread is also in a good cause, if a lesser one. The other point is that the draconian penalty is disproportionate to the offense. A few years ago, a man was sentenced to 6 months in prison (and no fine) for attempting to murder a neighbor of mine (in Maryland). He shot him in the chest with a nail gun. The victim survived, just. Of course the important difference is that the would-be murderer only harmed an ordinary citizen, whereas the mod-chip man annoyed a powerful corporation.
Greenspan has done a great job by putting some important questions into context. A century ago, this would have been a useful catalyst for political debate.
/.ers (who presumably are better educated than the average American) can't read well enough to understand a long article. Politics is no longer influenced by reasoned debate. When the voters are swayed by sound bites and the pols by money, there's not much room left for reasoned discussion.
Today's world is different. A lot of
Copyright and patent laws will continue to be written by corporations like Disney and IBM, and people who can barely read will go on saying "Copying is theft!" as though it was an unanswerable argument.
Yes - the PNG format. it's free, works as well(if not better than Jpeg)
This is ill-informed rubbish and should not have been modded up to its current level of 5. PNG is a replacement for GIF, not a replacement for JPEG. JPEG is a lossy compression scheme intended for photographic images, which can achieve extremely high compression ratios. PNG is a lossless scheme applicable to any kind of image. For photos, you can easily get a factor of 40 compression with JPEG on an image where PNG would give you a factor of only 5. On the other hand, PNG gives excellent compression on line drawings, which JPEG compresses poorly. Apart from the fact that they can both compress images, they have nothing in common and neither is a replacement for the other.
I only identify two groups:
1) The entire world whole uses Windows, makes money, produces things, and participates in a capitalist commercial society.
2) Filthy stinky hippies who enjoy using some shitty alternative operating system who think they're sticking it to "the man" but really they're just fucking themselves since they can't get any work done. They spend more time editing obscure cfg files and it's a good thing, since they sure as fuck aren't running any apps. Other than the few bullshit ones written by some fat pimply hippy in his mother's basement.[...]smelly Linux...
Presumably you're in the second group, since you know so much about Linux.
When will Slashdot editors learn to spell "its"?
Software development is like the Mc Donalds job, anyone can do it,
... and 20 million Chinese graduate high school every year ... plus 15 million Indians ... you don't need calculus to do the math here. The problem facing software developers is not that their job is easy, it's that their job is portable. You can email a spec to Shanghai in 10 seconds. And when the development and testing are done, you can email the source code back in 10 seconds. You don't even have to go thru customs. Shipping costs zilch.
Of course this is crap - only a small percentage of the population, maybe 2% or something like that, has the aptitude to develop complex software.
But the world can use maybe 100,000 software developers
A career in IT is no longer attractive. But the people who whinge that the world is coming to an end because they can't get paid $80,000/year for programming any more deserve NO sympathy.
:-)
What few IT jobs are left will migrate to Bangla Desh/India etc. That's a fact. Suck it up. The world does not owe you a living. Instead of whinging, learn to do a job for which there's a demand.
And by the way, if you have a good idea along those lines, I'd like to hear it