Probably Munich was West Germany's biggest city. With reunification, the combined east and west berlin are now bigger than Munich, but Munich is just failing to notice the change in status because it really doesn't want to give up the crown.
I believe, however, that Munich is the capital... Is it possible that that transates to something like 'biggest city"?
This lawsuit is BAD and anything which can get it rightfully thrown out of court gets my vote!
Well, the idea of the lawsuit being bad is good. Trying to get as many people as possible to fess up to where SCO/Novell/AT&T source code was inappropriately available might just backfire. It may give SCO a broader domain in which they can claim that their original source code was (improperly) available, and may allow them to make cross-examination harder on someone who claims that they never had access to UNIX source code.
If someone has a later model digital camera, digital video recorder, mp3 player or some other type of new (or esoteric) hardware.....
People with new and esotheric hardware are pretty much the minority. It's only geeks like us who are generally willing to do a clean and install of a new OS on an out-of-the-box computer. Even so, releases like RH9 contain drivers for the vast majority of late-model equipment. Besides: people who can afford leading=edge equipment are unlikely to have the thai-books as their only computer.
With hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people buying these machines in Thailand, the Thai manufacturers and distributers are going to do what it takes to ensure that their equipment is going to be supported on the government-issue computers, so I expect drier availability to increase dramatically (even if it is thai-language only).
Why do you assume that everybody (or a large percentage) won't wipe the drive and install Windows? Zealotry on either side == unfounded assumptions.
Mostly because not that many people have the knowledge and/or confidence to wipe whatever default OS they get on a machine and install something else.
This is part of the reason why MS has fought soo hard to prevent manufacturers from being able to economically sell machines without Wintendos installed. Most people will use whatever OS they get, as long as it does the job for them.
My mother has Windows on her laptop -- but not because I don't think she'd probably have been better off with Linux. It's because she lives in Edmonton, and by the time I got my hands on the thing, she'd been using it with Windows for a few months. I'm not going to break her concentration by having her learn her way around a new OS again (but if she's forced to re-install the OS one more time, I might just change my mind).
Hey, what's the point of journaling if you are just going to run chkdsk/fsck everytime, anyhow?
If it needs a chkdsk everytime the OS goes down, that leads me to to question whether it's proper to describe it as a journaling filesystem. At best, it sounds like it's the worst implementation of a journaling filesystem in the entire industry.
The fact that Linux has no licensing fee does give these machines a competitive advantage, especially if the user intends on puchasing a pirated copy of Windows.
Grr.. Why do people assume that everybody is going to want to wipe Linux and load Windows?? With these boxes flying off of the shelves as fast as HP (and possibly other manufacturers in the future) can make them, There's going to be a large pool of Linux support companies popping up all over the place. You've already got the tools you need to run most small businesses or home offices.
Why break things by installing an OS that's just going to add to your support costs? I'm betting that most people are going to use these boxes with their native Linux install. In 6 months I wouldn't be surprised to see Thais trashing their Windows installs to load Linux after seeing how nice these boxes work.
One of the biggest barriers to Linux acceptance has been lack of general access to linux-loaded laptops at the storefront. The WallMart boxes are still an anomaly. These things are getting lots of press coverage in Thailand. Thais who don't buy them will be watching closely to see how well they work. I expect good things out of this.
Uhm, The Bungi said that $800 minus a negligible amount would not be $450, and I think that I agree.
Thailand has promised to take over the support and servicing costs for the units. That's worth a good bit. You can also take off marketing costs, because those machines are gonna pretty much sell themselves. Economics of scale will also kick in a bit, because it sounds like they're gonna be selling as many as they can possibly make in the next few years.
I don't know about you, but I don't care if someone presents an obviously biased view.
For my part, I like an obviously biased view. It means you don't have to guess what their bias is. It's not that other sources aren't biased, it's just that they try to hide it (with varied success).
Sue SCO for slander and libel
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We might actually have a legal precedent as the first class-action
libel suit.
Reading thru the OSI document, it became clear to me that the SCO suit and
surrounding PR are an attempt to do to Linux what the USL/BSD suit did to
BSD a decade ago -- that is stall it's adoption in a cloud of legal FUD.
For those who are not aware, back in the early '90s Unix Systems Lab
(the inheritor, at that time, of the bell labs IP in Unix) sued the
BSD people over their attempt to split off the BSD code from the Bell
Labs IP. At that time, they had realized that the BSD code base had
very little code that had actually sourced with AT&T and decided that
it was time to excise what was left of the AT&T code and go their own
non-proprietary way. USL was indignant at this abandonment of fealty
and attempted to sue the BSD group back into compliance.
As the OSI paper succinctly puts it: "The suit was settled after AT&T's
request for an injunction blocking distribution of BSD was denied in terms
that made it clear the judge thought BSD likely to win its defense." --
(and after Berkeley's threat to counter sue AT&T over their own violations
of the BSD copyright and license).
Many people, however, credit the current popularity of Linux -- at
least in part -- to the legal cloud that the AT&T suit placed over the
BSD codebase -- at about the same time that Linus released the early
(and relatively primitive) versions of the Linux kernel with the GNU
utility codebase.It is believed that a number of people decided that it
was easier -- legally speaking -- to throw their lot in with the clearly
IP-intact Linux than to risk getting caught by the BSD license debacle.
As a result, Linux is now the dominant Unix-variant OS OS, and the various
BSDs -- which started with a much more stable and mature codebase are
now holding a relatively niche market space.
SCO's suit along with their rather bombastic and (as shown by the OSI
document) seriously misleading and unfounded PR claims seem intended to
create precisely the same kind of 'chilling environment' around Linux. The
fact that Linux is just about to get into a serious head-on fight with
Microsoft for control of both the server market and the desktop market
may be either coincidental or part of a conspiracy.
Although SCO's legal filings have a limited immunity to claims of slander
and libel, to the extent to which they have repeated those claims in
press releases, public statements, and letters, they are not. Those
public and semi-public statements appear to be a large part of SCO's
'legal' campaign, and open them to some serious libel claims.
I honestly believe that it would be appropriate for the Linux community
to seriously look at suing SCO over the insulting, degrading and clearly
untruthful statements that they've made about us. The intent of those
statements is to degrade the image and financial value of the work of
the Linux community, and if they're allowed to stand, they may succeed
in doing so to a greater degree than they already have.
Re:ESR just couldn't resist...
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 1
'Hacker' is pejorative for many concerned with law enforcement, who do not care about ESR's 'hacker/cracker' agenda. Why not just call them 'contributors' or 'authors'? I don't see references to 'Micro$oft' or even 'Unices' in the document.
Language is a very context-sensitive space. "garbage collection", for example means entirely different things in the context of sanitation engineering than it does in the context of computer engineering. "My partner" can mean very different things depending on whether it is meant to be in a buisness context or a romantic context. Evem phrases such as "nice buns", or "fuck the dog" can have very different meanings depending on context.
None of the meanings is intrinsicly 'wrong'. They simply require the proper context to be unambiguous.+
If you create the proper context for a word, you can use it in any one of it's common meanings. By creating a context for the use of the word 'hacker', the OSI paper was simple being accurate in it's use of language.
I think that SCO's big mistake is that they didn't -- as soon as they realized that there was UNIX code in Linux (or as soon as they decided that they would go after IBM et. al) -- shut down their distribution of Linux. By saying, at the same time that they were going after IBM that they were comitting to continue distributing Linux, they also comitted to distributing the impugned Unix code under the GPL.
It gets a bit more interesting, though. By claiming to go after non-IBM users, they're also effectively limiting distribution of GPL code that they've been distributing. This leaves them in violation of the GPL -- so they've now lost all right to distribute the impugned GPL code. This means (for the moment, anyways -- until and unless they describe which Linux code they're accusing of containing their IP) that if they try to distribute any Linux code, they'll be open to Copyright lawsuits themselves.
Time for the FSF lawyers to get their suits ironed.
(this all, of course, presumes that there really is Unix code in Linux -- which is still a question.)
Too bad. If you consider the purpose of a trial to be to discover the truth and deal with it
Unfortunately, that's not the purpose of a trial. The job of a lawyer is to bend the law to his clients wishes and needs. It's not to find justice.. That's just a vener placed around the legal system to make it palpable to the public. A few prominent lawyers (generally after retiring) have commented in some form or other:
The legal system has nothing to do with Justice.
That's why we have things like alternate treatment paths, arbitrators, sentencing circles, etc. They provide an alternative to the legal system that quite often leaves the participants with much more of a a sense of justice than the legal system.
Between design and implementation, the western legal system gives maximal advantage to the well-heeled psychopath.
He is arguing that he can do anything he likes with glyphosate-resistant plants he finds growing on his property, including harvesting the seed from them and planting it the following year. Possibly a reasonable point of view, but one with no basis whatsoever in Canadian law, which says that one may not grow a patented plant without getting a licence from the patent holder, and gives no exemption from patent laws just because the infringer owns the physical property in question. This may be why he's lost the first two legal rounds: he has not a legal leg to stand on.
I take it that you're the local monsanto rep??
That's not really what the law says... It's really silent on patented life. Some of the (very serious) questions brought up by this court case are "Can you patent life?" and "what are the implications of such a patent?". My understanding of patent law is that it applies more to the process than the result.. Thus the owner of the patent-leather process didn't own all the patent leather shoes ever made. He owned the process of making the leather shiny.
Similarly, I feel that Monsanto should be able to patent the process of creating this roundup-resistance gene.. not the resulting plants.
Even given that Schmeiser had done a (accidental, originally, according to him) test which determined that some of the plants growing on his land were roundup resistant, Monsanto doesn't own the idea of glyphosate-resistance. They really only own the patent on specific genetic alteration which bestows that resistance.
What if someone simply bred themselves some roundup-resistant plants, would Monsanto then have a claim on these plants simply because they're roundup resistant?
Would a farmer lose his work simply because the breeding program succeed, in part, because some Monsanto-tainted pollen made it into his breeding field?
Or what about somebody who accidently sprayed his crop and found that he had a 30% mix of roundup-resistant seeds in his quarter-section? Would he then owe that last 30% of his crop to Monsanto?
Worse yet -- if a Monsanto GM strain were accidently crossbred with some other company's GM strain would a farmer who realized this now owe a copy of his crop to both companies?
There are all sorts of weird things which crop up if you're able to patent self-replicating entities. I doubt that I've even scratched the surface on that one.
A friend of mine said it many years ago and it still sticks:
Capitalism is the world's largest pyramid scheme
Re:I hate math...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Usually, the customer does not have exact change to pay the $x.99 (or can't be bothered to look for pennies)
That doesn't take into account taxes which almost always mess up the totals. Besides.. If you're going to be dishonest, then why not just keep a cache of
pennies on top of the till?
The actual answer is apparently marketing: They definitely do studies on these things. $4.99 is less than $5.00. The fact that it's only infinessimally smaller doesn't quite register on the harried consumer's mind. People seem to think in round things to the nearest 5, because
$4.97 will often seem like more than $4.99. I'm guessing that it's internally converted to more than $4.95.
$*98 is generally almost as good as *99, bur it seems to make some people stop and think.
Similarly *95 works as good as *99. I'm guessing that it works because it's one 'chunk' down (the chunk being $.05, now rather than $.01). My guess as to the reason why *.99 is used more more often than *.95 is that $.04/unit adds up over a million boxes without adding enough sales to make it worthwhile.
SCO Says:
There is no mechanism inherent in the Linux development process to assure that intellectual property rights, confidentiality or security are protected.
There's no mechanism inherent in any development process to assure that IP confidentiality or security are protected. Those Mechanisms are -- almost by definition -- additions to the process. Now, while I would admit that it's pretty hard to protect confidentiality in an open source project, security seems to be better addressed than in most proprietary products and -- at least in the major sections of Linux (like the Kernel), there have been policies in place to ensure that IP rights are respected.
That having been said, I concur with the suspicion of some that the SCO's so-called IP might be code that was placed in the public domain, and then inhaled by Linux. It would be much more amusing, however, if it turned out that some code was first released under the GPL and then inserted into SCO....
because M$ is the only entity that can profit from this. Certainly not SCO.
These threatened lawsuits migh also restrict SCO's ability to support their old Linux clients...
Right now, they're restricting the ability of people to redistribute the code that they sent out under the GPL. That's in violation of the GPL. This means that they now lose any rights to redistribute that same code.
This would include updates.
It's actually the other way 'round. SCO inhereted Xenix -- which was Microsoft's version of Unix back 'round 1983. I have no idea as to just how separated the two are these days, but it's an interesting question.
Why mirror it? It's not like Slashdotting SCO would be a *bad* thing, would it?
I turns out that that link is a link to a copy of the SCO email that was sent out... The email links to the SCO letter which is referenced in the main posting. In other words, it's a different letter and worth reading on it's own.
Re:Gotta love british humor (inside joke?)
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Well, whatever you want to call them, I'd expect that members of the House of Lords get all sorts of requests from the public for them to address various issues in the house. The fact that they're not elected would allow them to make more light of the issue than if they were in the House of Commons.
Uno... I'd be happy if they just named the fast mozilla progeny after some fast-running lizzard (or dinosaur)... (not raptor!) and get on with life..
OK Basilisk (also known as the Jesus Christ lizard because of it's ability to
run on water) is taken -- but how about Cursoris? Eudibamus cursoris was possibly the first creature to walk on two legs (and the fastest in it's class because of it).
Re:Gotta love british humor (inside joke?)
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
I doubt she reads/. , but by calling 0845 070 0702 you can opt out from the fax direct marketing list.
I think that they may be referring to "unwanted" faxes and lettermail from constituants. I doubt that direct marketing lists apply to them (unless it's a fax from The British Direct Tele-Marketing Association).
Slashdot Mirror
I believe, however, that Munich is the capital... Is it possible that that transates to something like 'biggest city"?
Well, the idea of the lawsuit being bad is good. Trying to get as many people as possible to fess up to where SCO/Novell/AT&T source code was inappropriately available might just backfire. It may give SCO a broader domain in which they can claim that their original source code was (improperly) available, and may allow them to make cross-examination harder on someone who claims that they never had access to UNIX source code.
People with new and esotheric hardware are pretty much the minority. It's only geeks like us who are generally willing to do a clean and install of a new OS on an out-of-the-box computer. Even so, releases like RH9 contain drivers for the vast majority of late-model equipment. Besides: people who can afford leading=edge equipment are unlikely to have the thai-books as their only computer.
With hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people buying these machines in Thailand, the Thai manufacturers and distributers are going to do what it takes to ensure that their equipment is going to be supported on the government-issue computers, so I expect drier availability to increase dramatically (even if it is thai-language only).
Mostly because not that many people have the knowledge and/or confidence to wipe whatever default OS they get on a machine and install something else. This is part of the reason why MS has fought soo hard to prevent manufacturers from being able to economically sell machines without Wintendos installed. Most people will use whatever OS they get, as long as it does the job for them.
My mother has Windows on her laptop -- but not because I don't think she'd probably have been better off with Linux. It's because she lives in Edmonton, and by the time I got my hands on the thing, she'd been using it with Windows for a few months. I'm not going to break her concentration by having her learn her way around a new OS again (but if she's forced to re-install the OS one more time, I might just change my mind).
If it needs a chkdsk everytime the OS goes down, that leads me to to question whether it's proper to describe it as a journaling filesystem. At best, it sounds like it's the worst implementation of a journaling filesystem in the entire industry.
'nuff said.
/me test's caluml for existence of a funnybone.
Grr.. Why do people assume that everybody is going to want to wipe Linux and load Windows?? With these boxes flying off of the shelves as fast as HP (and possibly other manufacturers in the future) can make them, There's going to be a large pool of Linux support companies popping up all over the place. You've already got the tools you need to run most small businesses or home offices.
Why break things by installing an OS that's just going to add to your support costs? I'm betting that most people are going to use these boxes with their native Linux install. In 6 months I wouldn't be surprised to see Thais trashing their Windows installs to load Linux after seeing how nice these boxes work.
One of the biggest barriers to Linux acceptance has been lack of general access to linux-loaded laptops at the storefront. The WallMart boxes are still an anomaly. These things are getting lots of press coverage in Thailand. Thais who don't buy them will be watching closely to see how well they work. I expect good things out of this.
Thailand has promised to take over the support and servicing costs for the units. That's worth a good bit. You can also take off marketing costs, because those machines are gonna pretty much sell themselves. Economics of scale will also kick in a bit, because it sounds like they're gonna be selling as many as they can possibly make in the next few years.
At least I get a free trip to Thailand out of it.
For my part, I like an obviously biased view. It means you don't have to guess what their bias is. It's not that other sources aren't biased, it's just that they try to hide it (with varied success).
Reading thru the OSI document, it became clear to me that the SCO suit and surrounding PR are an attempt to do to Linux what the USL/BSD suit did to BSD a decade ago -- that is stall it's adoption in a cloud of legal FUD.
For those who are not aware, back in the early '90s Unix Systems Lab (the inheritor, at that time, of the bell labs IP in Unix) sued the BSD people over their attempt to split off the BSD code from the Bell Labs IP. At that time, they had realized that the BSD code base had very little code that had actually sourced with AT&T and decided that it was time to excise what was left of the AT&T code and go their own non-proprietary way. USL was indignant at this abandonment of fealty and attempted to sue the BSD group back into compliance.
As the OSI paper succinctly puts it: "The suit was settled after AT&T's request for an injunction blocking distribution of BSD was denied in terms that made it clear the judge thought BSD likely to win its defense." -- (and after Berkeley's threat to counter sue AT&T over their own violations of the BSD copyright and license).
Many people, however, credit the current popularity of Linux -- at least in part -- to the legal cloud that the AT&T suit placed over the BSD codebase -- at about the same time that Linus released the early (and relatively primitive) versions of the Linux kernel with the GNU utility codebase.It is believed that a number of people decided that it was easier -- legally speaking -- to throw their lot in with the clearly IP-intact Linux than to risk getting caught by the BSD license debacle.
As a result, Linux is now the dominant Unix-variant OS OS, and the various BSDs -- which started with a much more stable and mature codebase are now holding a relatively niche market space.
SCO's suit along with their rather bombastic and (as shown by the OSI document) seriously misleading and unfounded PR claims seem intended to create precisely the same kind of 'chilling environment' around Linux. The fact that Linux is just about to get into a serious head-on fight with Microsoft for control of both the server market and the desktop market may be either coincidental or part of a conspiracy.
Although SCO's legal filings have a limited immunity to claims of slander and libel, to the extent to which they have repeated those claims in press releases, public statements, and letters, they are not. Those public and semi-public statements appear to be a large part of SCO's 'legal' campaign, and open them to some serious libel claims.
I honestly believe that it would be appropriate for the Linux community to seriously look at suing SCO over the insulting, degrading and clearly untruthful statements that they've made about us. The intent of those statements is to degrade the image and financial value of the work of the Linux community, and if they're allowed to stand, they may succeed in doing so to a greater degree than they already have.
Language is a very context-sensitive space. "garbage collection", for example means entirely different things in the context of sanitation engineering than it does in the context of computer engineering. "My partner" can mean very different things depending on whether it is meant to be in a buisness context or a romantic context. Evem phrases such as "nice buns", or "fuck the dog" can have very different meanings depending on context.
None of the meanings is intrinsicly 'wrong'. They simply require the proper context to be unambiguous.+
If you create the proper context for a word, you can use it in any one of it's common meanings. By creating a context for the use of the word 'hacker', the OSI paper was simple being accurate in it's use of language.
I woulda thought +1 funny.... but I don't have any moderation points, this week.
It gets a bit more interesting, though. By claiming to go after non-IBM users, they're also effectively limiting distribution of GPL code that they've been distributing. This leaves them in violation of the GPL -- so they've now lost all right to distribute the impugned GPL code. This means (for the moment, anyways -- until and unless they describe which Linux code they're accusing of containing their IP) that if they try to distribute any Linux code, they'll be open to Copyright lawsuits themselves.
Time for the FSF lawyers to get their suits ironed.
(this all, of course, presumes that there really is Unix code in Linux -- which is still a question.)
Unfortunately, that's not the purpose of a trial. The job of a lawyer is to bend the law to his clients wishes and needs. It's not to find justice.. That's just a vener placed around the legal system to make it palpable to the public. A few prominent lawyers (generally after retiring) have commented in some form or other:
That's why we have things like alternate treatment paths, arbitrators, sentencing circles, etc. They provide an alternative to the legal system that quite often leaves the participants with much more of a a sense of justice than the legal system.Between design and implementation, the western legal system gives maximal advantage to the well-heeled psychopath.
I take it that you're the local monsanto rep??
That's not really what the law says... It's really silent on patented life. Some of the (very serious) questions brought up by this court case are "Can you patent life?" and "what are the implications of such a patent?". My understanding of patent law is that it applies more to the process than the result.. Thus the owner of the patent-leather process didn't own all the patent leather shoes ever made. He owned the process of making the leather shiny.
Similarly, I feel that Monsanto should be able to patent the process of creating this roundup-resistance gene.. not the resulting plants.
Even given that Schmeiser had done a (accidental, originally, according to him) test which determined that some of the plants growing on his land were roundup resistant, Monsanto doesn't own the idea of glyphosate-resistance. They really only own the patent on specific genetic alteration which bestows that resistance.
- What if someone simply bred themselves some roundup-resistant plants, would Monsanto then have a claim on these plants simply because they're roundup resistant?
- Or what about somebody who accidently sprayed his crop and found that he had a 30% mix of roundup-resistant seeds in his quarter-section? Would he then owe that last 30% of his crop to Monsanto?
- Worse yet -- if a Monsanto GM strain were accidently crossbred with some other company's GM strain would a farmer who realized this now owe a copy of his crop to both companies?
There are all sorts of weird things which crop up if you're able to patent self-replicating entities. I doubt that I've even scratched the surface on that one.Would a farmer lose his work simply because the breeding program succeed, in part, because some Monsanto-tainted pollen made it into his breeding field?
That doesn't take into account taxes which almost always mess up the totals. Besides.. If you're going to be dishonest, then why not just keep a cache of pennies on top of the till?
The actual answer is apparently marketing: They definitely do studies on these things.
$4.99 is less than $5.00. The fact that it's only infinessimally smaller doesn't quite register on the harried consumer's mind. People seem to think in round things to the nearest 5, because
$4.97 will often seem like more than $4.99. I'm guessing that it's internally converted to more than $4.95.
$*98 is generally almost as good as *99, bur it seems to make some people stop and think.
Similarly *95 works as good as *99. I'm guessing that it works because it's one 'chunk' down (the chunk being $.05, now rather than $.01). My guess as to the reason why *.99 is used more more often than *.95 is that $.04/unit adds up over a million boxes without adding enough sales to make it worthwhile.
There's no mechanism inherent in any development process to assure that IP confidentiality or security are protected. Those Mechanisms are -- almost by definition -- additions to the process. Now, while I would admit that it's pretty hard to protect confidentiality in an open source project, security seems to be better addressed than in most proprietary products and -- at least in the major sections of Linux (like the Kernel), there have been policies in place to ensure that IP rights are respected.
That having been said, I concur with the suspicion of some that the SCO's so-called IP might be code that was placed in the public domain, and then inhaled by Linux. It would be much more amusing, however, if it turned out that some code was first released under the GPL and then inserted into SCO....
These threatened lawsuits migh also restrict SCO's ability to support their old Linux clients...
Right now, they're restricting the ability of people to redistribute the code that they sent out under the GPL. That's in violation of the GPL. This means that they now lose any rights to redistribute that same code.
This would include updates.
It's actually the other way 'round. SCO inhereted Xenix -- which was Microsoft's version of Unix back 'round 1983. I have no idea as to just how separated the two are these days, but it's an interesting question.
I turns out that that link is a link to a copy of the SCO email that was sent out... The email links to the SCO letter which is referenced in the main posting. In other words, it's a different letter and worth reading on it's own.
Well, whatever you want to call them, I'd expect that members of the House of Lords get all sorts of requests from the public for them to address various issues in the house. The fact that they're not elected would allow them to make more light of the issue than if they were in the House of Commons.
OK Basilisk (also known as the Jesus Christ lizard because of it's ability to run on water) is taken -- but how about Cursoris? Eudibamus cursoris was possibly the first creature to walk on two legs (and the fastest in it's class because of it).
I think that they may be referring to "unwanted" faxes and lettermail from constituants. I doubt that direct marketing lists apply to them (unless it's a fax from The British Direct Tele-Marketing Association).