Gravastar sounds way too much like a new SUV. As in, "I may have to trade in my Canyonero and buy me one of those Gravastars. I wonder what color I should get."
Is you know someone who is a music trivia nut. Best guess from a friend of mine is either Bonnie Raitt or Patty Griffin. There aren't too many red-headed females in the rock music genre.
Games are a bad example because the market has a tendency to ignore the rules. In your example, Alanis cannot force you to play the game as you described it (rules favoring her); only the government can. IBM pushing Linux is an example of market pressures resulting in a company "breaking the rules" in order to compete with an entrenched competitor.
Government (and remember libertarians are anti-government) tends to make rules that favor the status quo. The example you give of extending copyright laws is precisely this type of *government* intervention in favor of the status quo. Hint: from my point of view you should be criticizing the two established parties who both accept contributions and are thus both willing to sell anything to the highest bidder; not libertarians who would say that the government has no business sticking its nose into business. The same can be said for the libertarian point of view with regard to UCITA and some of the other attempts of established businesses to cement their position by bribing, err making campaign contributions to, selected legislators. People look at the liberarian position and say what will stop businesses from taking advantage and the answer is other business who can compete only on a level playing field once the government stops making rules that favor the status quo.
The invisible hand doesn't work in monopoly conditions.
Something for you to consider: commercial, enterprise quality GNU/Linux is to some extent a result of the "invisible hand" of the market finding a way to create a competitor to the Microsoft. If anything, Microsoft's monopoly has been a driving force in motivating contributions to GNU/Linux both from individuals and heavy hitters such as IBM. IBM provides a great example since they saw a market for an alternative to Microsoft but they found that Microsoft's hold on the market wouldn't work with a traditional alternative (OS/2). They now compete with Microsft with a product they don't produce but which they carefully nurture.
The tricky thing with noticing the action of the "invisible hand" is that it is invisible. I can not prove nor can you refute what I have said above which is why I just ask for you consider the possibility. My contention is that that the market abhors a lack of choice the same way the physical world abhors a vaccuum. It may take time to create a viable alternative and it may be unpleasant while and until it is created but one will come into existence because that's the way a free market works.
Water is free, even given away in public fountains- but people still pay for the bottled stuff.
All you libertarians out there who trust the invisible hand- it's put up or shut up time.
As a libertarian, I only care that the person who chooses to buy bottled water have the choice. That the water in the bottle is any better or different than what comes out of the tap is between the buyer and the seller. It is not for me or the government to outlaw that choice because we don't think its a "good choice." Likewise, I don't want to see the government outlaw either proprietary software or free software because one choice is supposedly better than another. The "invisible hand" of the market will easily determine over time which is the better choice. In all likelyhood, both will continue to co-exist with a tendency toward proprietary software in more specific applications.
Libertarianism isn't about making money; its about the freedom to choose based on how each individual perceives he should act. In not outlawing certain choices, some people will probably make money by fulfilling the choices other people will make. If you prevent these people from making money whether by outlawing certain things or taxing their profits, the governement simply takes away a choice from everyone. This is what libertarianism is against.
(Hint as to which way I think the market will go: My choice is I work for a company with a Linux based product and I run Linux at home.)
I don't think that Sun has ever really figured out exactly what to do with the x86 platform. They have tried to both have their own hardware (Cobalt servers) and provide a platform neutral software solution (Solaris for x86) as well as provide a Linux solution (we tested my employer's product on a Sun Cobalt server with Sun's OEM version of Red Hat - called White Rabbit - about a year ago). None of these initiatives have been that successful in either market share or revenue.
You may be right that they simply picked an opportune momment to get a license to SCO's platform specific stuff in order to build up Solaris x86. This would fit with their strategy of Linux for entry level, Solaris on x86 for the next step and Solaris on SPARC for the top end. In order for this to work, Sun really needs to make a case for Solaris and SPARC being a better return on assets than the comparable dollars will get with Linux on Intel. So far, they haven't been that successful at making this case. Likewise, Sun doesn't seem to have the service organization IBM has to compete as a service provider for their Linux solutions which means they have a real problem.
I used Sun hardware running SunOS and Solaris from the early to late 90s and I've seen what it could do. I doubt if Sun has been sitting still but they really need to make the case that they can provide "more bang for the buck" if they're going to survive.
Cutting back gradually works. I'm probably doing it a little more gradually than you want to but I cut down from 12 to 15 cups a day when I was an undergrad in the late '70s to only five or six cups a day now with no ill effects. In the those days I was working third shift and going to classes during the day which meant sleep had to be fit in when I could. Lots of caffeine helped make that possible and I only had caffeine shakes (muscle tremors) once.
I doubt if I'll try to drop my caffeine intake any lower unless some specific health issues come up since I love having a good cup of coffee. A somewhat funny side effect of cutting back on my overall intake is that I can no longer drink caffeinated coffee late (e.g., after dinner) without it messing up my sleep.
There was an equally funny episode on a similar topic in Santa Barbara, CA in the '60s or '70s. Seems the city council passed a law banning topless sunbathing on the city beaches. A quick examination showed that the way the law was worded it only banned being topless on the beach. A dozen or so women protested the law by going around town topless and carefully not straying onto a beach. At most they could have been charged with "creating a public nuisance" and had a lawyer from the ACLU all over the town for violating their right to free speech.
I don't think the law got repealed but the protest was quite interesting.
Hopefully there is a provision in CAN-SPAM to keep him from selling his opt-out list to other spammers.
The problem with an opt-out list is all a spammer has to do is "re-invent" his business every so often and then send to the list of known good e-mail addresses he has accumulated from various spam opt-out lists. Something like OptInRealBig.com goes out of business and OptInReallyReallyBig.com buys the assets and starts spamming again generally with a holding company that controls both making sure everything happens the way its supposed to behind the scenes. It just means a spammer has to split his profits with a corporate lawyer who makes sure that all the legalities are correctly followed.
I run my own mail server so it will be easy enough to set up a short-lived e-mail account and submit it to Ralsky's opt-out list, then delete the account and see how many spam bounces show up in my sendmail log. Since the account won't exist when the spam hits, my only cost other than time and effort will be the MTA connection being refused for a non-existent account. This could be fun.
You got it backwards. The "leap second" was needed because the Earth *was* taking a little longer. For some reason it has stopped being slow by a second. If anything, its the Democrats trying to get Bush out of office a little sooner.
While you can stretch the truth and obfuscate on a resume, its a really bad idea to lie. Generally you will get caught out and things can get really ugly.
Especially someone technical who had nothing to do with the decision processes that led to the Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/SCO type insanity should put an accurate employment history on their resume and be prepared to bring an interview back to the correct subject: their ability to perform the job they are applying for. It would be a good idea to have answers for "questions" like: "Why did you stay there?", "Convince me that you had nothing to do with their accounting practices.", etc. These will be issues for some people so be ready for them.
Be prepared to address someone who keeps drifting back to the company and its policies directly with a "I had nothing to do with the upper management who did this stuff." This is also a good place to brown-nose a little and say that one of the things that attracted you to the company you're interviewing with is their good repuatation, etc. since this also puts your role at Enron or whoever into perspective to the person interviewing you. It should bring up for the interviewer how little control they have over such things.
Yeah, but somebody dinged me for being off topic anyway. Now does that mean they disagreed with what I said or they really thought the post was off topic?
There is an interesting recursion in your post. So predicting that you will get modded down means your karma isn't affecting by the moderation, eh? HeHeHeHe.
Slashdot moderation is supposedly done on the quality of the post. This, indeed, sometimes happens. More often than not, positive moderation (insightful, interesting, underrated) just means the moderator agrees with the post and negative moderation (troll, flamebait, overrated) just means that they don't. The system could easily be simplified as: "I agree ==> +1", "I disagree ==> -1", and "I got the joke ==> +1" (sadly, there is no prerequisite of a sense of humor for being a moderator).
I see you've already gotten dinged as a troll for daring to disagree. It will be interesting to see how much karma I burn with this post.
Your quote of Blake Stowell's interview is consistent with everything in the letter *except* the list of header files. The letter seems to be addressed specifically to existing SCO Unixware customers and seems to be aimed at keeping them from fleeing Unixware by way of running their old SCO applications under Linux using the Linux ABI.
I would think asserting an absurd copyright to a bunch of standard header files would weaken SCO's claim with little or nothing in return since their claim to hold copyright to these files will be rapidly shown to be false. On the other hand, they can probably claim that running some SCO Unixware programs under Linux using the Linux ABI violates some portion of the SCO EULA. The only thing I can think of is they are attempting to assert copyright to the defining ABI header files as a means of making the EULA violation enforceable under copyright law.
Odd coincidence: a finding in SCO's favor that an unauthorized, third-party ABI infringes their copyright would also allow Microsoft to go after Lindows and WINE.
The Rocky Mountain News had this article when when the suits hit. It provides quite a bit more detail and points out that apparently OptInRealBig, Synergy6, and Delta 7 (some of his various DBAs) already use overseas relays to circumvent spam blocks.
The Rocky Mountain News is the more conservative of Denver's two mainstream, treeware newspapers. The Denver Post probably also has coverage.
In 1987 I was just finishing off running a three year software development effort that had a peak staff of around 30 people and a little over $2M budget. The overall project (my part was about 40% of the the software) was a radar system for the Navy (ROTH-R) and was written in FORTRAN and ran on VAXes. Everyone was wondering who would replace Ronald Reagan in 1988 and the biggest thing going on in software was everyone was learning Ada.
There now. Hopefully, you don't feel so old anymore and you didn't even have to respond to some spam that promised to make you feel young again. BTW, I started using perl in 1992 (perl 2.0) after I bailed out of management.
The Changelog is only the changes from 2.6.0-test11 to 2.6.0, which isn't very illuminating at all.
Well, you could have helped test 2.5.X during development or been only a partial wuss and at least have run some of the 2.6.0-testX series. Then you would have known.
Sadly, you'll have to rely on those of us who did to say, "Its great. Try it, you'll like it." Oh, if it somehow isn't compatible with your hardware. Sorry. You should have helped test.
The CNN article points out that the Wright brothers spent another two years refining their ability to control the flyer. It was only after they felt they could reliably control it that they considered it a success. That being said, the guy in New Zealand quit trying after he crashed primarily because he had no idea as to how to effect control. No idea on the other folks but there is direct lineage from the Wright brothers flyer to modern aircraft control techniques even if they did have to spend another two years perfecting it.
There are a couple of good articles on (you guessed it) www.groklaw.net in which the kernel contributions of a couple of SCO developers are *very* thoroughly documented. This includes contact with the developers and confirmation that their contributions to the kernel were made with SCO management approval (they have both moved on to other employers). Some other folks on groklaw have managed to dig out old SCO marketing blurbs that highlight these features and the ones that they are now suing IBM over as being part of the Caldera Linux distribution.
The argument that SCO "accidently" distributed Linux with their precious trade secrets, etc. doesn't hold any water. They *marketed* Caldera Linux as having SMP, NUMA, RCU, etc. support and their own developers contributed to these projects.
These facts are probably why Darl has floated the idea of contesting the GPL. If it comes down to who contributed what and copyrights, Darl doesn't have a leg to stand on with regard to the contributions being "accidental."
Probably easier to just find some recipients of her e-mails that either live in Virginia or are either on AOL or MCI. This way we don't have to feel guilty about her going bankrupt since she will be staying at the state of Virginia's expense.
Here's the previous article if you don't know what I'm talking about. Probably not that bright of her to announce in public what she does.
It was the work in progress when he died, and it's not what his other work was. It did give me the line, "Did the universe just shift again?"
Err, ummm, no. The Number of the Beast was published quite a few years before RAH died. I read it in the mid-80s and it wasn't new then. The last two books by Heinlein were Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Cat Who walked Through Walls (in that order IIRC). You're probably thinking of "Job" since it involved the universe shifting without warning.
The Number of the Beast was decidedly not RAH at his best. "Job", on the other hand, was really quite funny and a decent read. The Door Into Summer is worth the read just for RAH's description of the cat looking for "the door into summer.
I enjoy describing the book as, "Heinlein's first novel which is also his last novel but there were several others published in between and this one was published after he died."
There are no contradictions. If you think something is contradictory, examine your premises (or on/. RTFA).
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Gravastar sounds way too much like a new SUV. As in, "I may have to trade in my Canyonero and buy me one of those Gravastars. I wonder what color I should get."
Is you know someone who is a music trivia nut. Best guess from a friend of mine is either Bonnie Raitt or Patty Griffin. There aren't too many red-headed females in the rock music genre.
Games are a bad example because the market has a tendency to ignore the rules. In your example, Alanis cannot force you to play the game as you described it (rules favoring her); only the government can. IBM pushing Linux is an example of market pressures resulting in a company "breaking the rules" in order to compete with an entrenched competitor.
Government (and remember libertarians are anti-government) tends to make rules that favor the status quo. The example you give of extending copyright laws is precisely this type of *government* intervention in favor of the status quo. Hint: from my point of view you should be criticizing the two established parties who both accept contributions and are thus both willing to sell anything to the highest bidder; not libertarians who would say that the government has no business sticking its nose into business. The same can be said for the libertarian point of view with regard to UCITA and some of the other attempts of established businesses to cement their position by bribing, err making campaign contributions to, selected legislators. People look at the liberarian position and say what will stop businesses from taking advantage and the answer is other business who can compete only on a level playing field once the government stops making rules that favor the status quo.
Something for you to consider: commercial, enterprise quality GNU/Linux is to some extent a result of the "invisible hand" of the market finding a way to create a competitor to the Microsoft. If anything, Microsoft's monopoly has been a driving force in motivating contributions to GNU/Linux both from individuals and heavy hitters such as IBM. IBM provides a great example since they saw a market for an alternative to Microsoft but they found that Microsoft's hold on the market wouldn't work with a traditional alternative (OS/2). They now compete with Microsft with a product they don't produce but which they carefully nurture.
The tricky thing with noticing the action of the "invisible hand" is that it is invisible. I can not prove nor can you refute what I have said above which is why I just ask for you consider the possibility. My contention is that that the market abhors a lack of choice the same way the physical world abhors a vaccuum. It may take time to create a viable alternative and it may be unpleasant while and until it is created but one will come into existence because that's the way a free market works.
Libertarianism isn't about making money; its about the freedom to choose based on how each individual perceives he should act. In not outlawing certain choices, some people will probably make money by fulfilling the choices other people will make. If you prevent these people from making money whether by outlawing certain things or taxing their profits, the governement simply takes away a choice from everyone. This is what libertarianism is against.
(Hint as to which way I think the market will go: My choice is I work for a company with a Linux based product and I run Linux at home.)
I don't think that Sun has ever really figured out exactly what to do with the x86 platform. They have tried to both have their own hardware (Cobalt servers) and provide a platform neutral software solution (Solaris for x86) as well as provide a Linux solution (we tested my employer's product on a Sun Cobalt server with Sun's OEM version of Red Hat - called White Rabbit - about a year ago). None of these initiatives have been that successful in either market share or revenue.
You may be right that they simply picked an opportune momment to get a license to SCO's platform specific stuff in order to build up Solaris x86. This would fit with their strategy of Linux for entry level, Solaris on x86 for the next step and Solaris on SPARC for the top end. In order for this to work, Sun really needs to make a case for Solaris and SPARC being a better return on assets than the comparable dollars will get with Linux on Intel. So far, they haven't been that successful at making this case. Likewise, Sun doesn't seem to have the service organization IBM has to compete as a service provider for their Linux solutions which means they have a real problem.
I used Sun hardware running SunOS and Solaris from the early to late 90s and I've seen what it could do. I doubt if Sun has been sitting still but they really need to make the case that they can provide "more bang for the buck" if they're going to survive.
Cutting back gradually works. I'm probably doing it a little more gradually than you want to but I cut down from 12 to 15 cups a day when I was an undergrad in the late '70s to only five or six cups a day now with no ill effects. In the those days I was working third shift and going to classes during the day which meant sleep had to be fit in when I could. Lots of caffeine helped make that possible and I only had caffeine shakes (muscle tremors) once.
I doubt if I'll try to drop my caffeine intake any lower unless some specific health issues come up since I love having a good cup of coffee. A somewhat funny side effect of cutting back on my overall intake is that I can no longer drink caffeinated coffee late (e.g., after dinner) without it messing up my sleep.
There was an equally funny episode on a similar topic in Santa Barbara, CA in the '60s or '70s. Seems the city council passed a law banning topless sunbathing on the city beaches. A quick examination showed that the way the law was worded it only banned being topless on the beach. A dozen or so women protested the law by going around town topless and carefully not straying onto a beach. At most they could have been charged with "creating a public nuisance" and had a lawyer from the ACLU all over the town for violating their right to free speech.
I don't think the law got repealed but the protest was quite interesting.
Hopefully there is a provision in CAN-SPAM to keep him from selling his opt-out list to other spammers.
The problem with an opt-out list is all a spammer has to do is "re-invent" his business every so often and then send to the list of known good e-mail addresses he has accumulated from various spam opt-out lists. Something like OptInRealBig.com goes out of business and OptInReallyReallyBig.com buys the assets and starts spamming again generally with a holding company that controls both making sure everything happens the way its supposed to behind the scenes. It just means a spammer has to split his profits with a corporate lawyer who makes sure that all the legalities are correctly followed.
I run my own mail server so it will be easy enough to set up a short-lived e-mail account and submit it to Ralsky's opt-out list, then delete the account and see how many spam bounces show up in my sendmail log. Since the account won't exist when the spam hits, my only cost other than time and effort will be the MTA connection being refused for a non-existent account. This could be fun.
You got it backwards. The "leap second" was needed because the Earth *was* taking a little longer. For some reason it has stopped being slow by a second. If anything, its the Democrats trying to get Bush out of office a little sooner.
While you can stretch the truth and obfuscate on a resume, its a really bad idea to lie. Generally you will get caught out and things can get really ugly.
Especially someone technical who had nothing to do with the decision processes that led to the Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/SCO type insanity should put an accurate employment history on their resume and be prepared to bring an interview back to the correct subject: their ability to perform the job they are applying for. It would be a good idea to have answers for "questions" like: "Why did you stay there?", "Convince me that you had nothing to do with their accounting practices.", etc. These will be issues for some people so be ready for them.
Be prepared to address someone who keeps drifting back to the company and its policies directly with a "I had nothing to do with the upper management who did this stuff." This is also a good place to brown-nose a little and say that one of the things that attracted you to the company you're interviewing with is their good repuatation, etc. since this also puts your role at Enron or whoever into perspective to the person interviewing you. It should bring up for the interviewer how little control they have over such things.
Yeah, but somebody dinged me for being off topic anyway. Now does that mean they disagreed with what I said or they really thought the post was off topic?
There is an interesting recursion in your post. So predicting that you will get modded down means your karma isn't affecting by the moderation, eh? HeHeHeHe.
Slashdot moderation is supposedly done on the quality of the post. This, indeed, sometimes happens. More often than not, positive moderation (insightful, interesting, underrated) just means the moderator agrees with the post and negative moderation (troll, flamebait, overrated) just means that they don't. The system could easily be simplified as: "I agree ==> +1", "I disagree ==> -1", and "I got the joke ==> +1" (sadly, there is no prerequisite of a sense of humor for being a moderator).
I see you've already gotten dinged as a troll for daring to disagree. It will be interesting to see how much karma I burn with this post.
Your quote of Blake Stowell's interview is consistent with everything in the letter *except* the list of header files. The letter seems to be addressed specifically to existing SCO Unixware customers and seems to be aimed at keeping them from fleeing Unixware by way of running their old SCO applications under Linux using the Linux ABI.
I would think asserting an absurd copyright to a bunch of standard header files would weaken SCO's claim with little or nothing in return since their claim to hold copyright to these files will be rapidly shown to be false. On the other hand, they can probably claim that running some SCO Unixware programs under Linux using the Linux ABI violates some portion of the SCO EULA. The only thing I can think of is they are attempting to assert copyright to the defining ABI header files as a means of making the EULA violation enforceable under copyright law.
Odd coincidence: a finding in SCO's favor that an unauthorized, third-party ABI infringes their copyright would also allow Microsoft to go after Lindows and WINE.
The Rocky Mountain News is the more conservative of Denver's two mainstream, treeware newspapers. The Denver Post probably also has coverage.
In 1987 I was just finishing off running a three year software development effort that had a peak staff of around 30 people and a little over $2M budget. The overall project (my part was about 40% of the the software) was a radar system for the Navy (ROTH-R) and was written in FORTRAN and ran on VAXes. Everyone was wondering who would replace Ronald Reagan in 1988 and the biggest thing going on in software was everyone was learning Ada.
There now. Hopefully, you don't feel so old anymore and you didn't even have to respond to some spam that promised to make you feel young again. BTW, I started using perl in 1992 (perl 2.0) after I bailed out of management.
Sadly, you'll have to rely on those of us who did to say, "Its great. Try it, you'll like it." Oh, if it somehow isn't compatible with your hardware. Sorry. You should have helped test.
The CNN article points out that the Wright brothers spent another two years refining their ability to control the flyer. It was only after they felt they could reliably control it that they considered it a success. That being said, the guy in New Zealand quit trying after he crashed primarily because he had no idea as to how to effect control. No idea on the other folks but there is direct lineage from the Wright brothers flyer to modern aircraft control techniques even if they did have to spend another two years perfecting it.
There are a couple of good articles on (you guessed it) www.groklaw.net in which the kernel contributions of a couple of SCO developers are *very* thoroughly documented. This includes contact with the developers and confirmation that their contributions to the kernel were made with SCO management approval (they have both moved on to other employers). Some other folks on groklaw have managed to dig out old SCO marketing blurbs that highlight these features and the ones that they are now suing IBM over as being part of the Caldera Linux distribution.
The argument that SCO "accidently" distributed Linux with their precious trade secrets, etc. doesn't hold any water. They *marketed* Caldera Linux as having SMP, NUMA, RCU, etc. support and their own developers contributed to these projects.
These facts are probably why Darl has floated the idea of contesting the GPL. If it comes down to who contributed what and copyrights, Darl doesn't have a leg to stand on with regard to the contributions being "accidental."
Here's the previous article if you don't know what I'm talking about. Probably not that bright of her to announce in public what she does.
Well, for SCO that is remarkable and worthy of a headline.
The Number of the Beast was decidedly not RAH at his best. "Job", on the other hand, was really quite funny and a decent read. The Door Into Summer is worth the read just for RAH's description of the cat looking for "the door into summer.
I enjoy describing the book as, "Heinlein's first novel which is also his last novel but there were several others published in between and this one was published after he died."
/. RTFA).
There are no contradictions. If you think something is contradictory, examine your premises (or on
1) Announce Service: $699 Linux IP license.
2) Make Mistakes: "Oh, we really don't have any provable IP in Linux."
3) ?*?*?*...: Check out their latest fiaSCO on GrokLaw.
4) Profit!!!!: $50M from sucker investors who think this will succeed plus pumping up the stock price.