If they do read slashdot for a free technical review, they can hardly ignore the same points raised over and over again:
1. Technically infeasable and economically ruinous for ISPS to scan all network traffic (unless you want to pay them for their trouble, MPAA? you could indemify us all for the resultant Internet slowdown perhaps?). You've been told so many times, you can't be that stupid.
2. Copy-protection can always be broken. It's like King Canute live action when I go to see a movie and be insulted by MPAA movie-theft ads.
3. If you drive the people to encryption, a lot more than your precious assets will go byebye, it will bring down the gravy train for everyone else, and won't they thank you for it.
Using Occam's Razor I ask which is more likely: that they either don't read slashdot or do so in such a way as only read it for the pictures.
Guess what most scientists in the world do for a living? Give up? They work in military R&D. Even the US, which has more R&D budget per GNP applied to general science than anywhere else, has more scientists working for the military-industrial complex than anywhere else.
Now, we know they want that Alaskan oil. No eskimo, caribou or sanctuary are going to stop them. And you think a bunch of *scientists* are going to fight back? With whose grant/tenure? They're already owned, forget it.
As with many of the reports, The Register only got half the message: sure, IBM doesn't get its cake now. But there's nothing to stop IBM refiling that submission after discovery. To be blunt, SCO has to put up or shut up. It has to pay lots of money to outsiders to do the discovery work, which may well trigger their lawyer's fee limit, that means Boise and Co. drop their client. Even after all that, if SCO still can't show anything substantial, IBM refile their summary judgement request, and this time it's airtight. No appeals court in the land will conceivably grant SCO another go.
The simple fact that the judge denied IBM's request means that no loose end will be left dangling for SCO to slide out on. And IBM haven't even started with their side. Groklaw has, as usual, far more meat to these bones for the picking.
Ern Malley
It's an older, more insidious hoax but a goodie. And it bit the perpertrators in the end: the hoax poems popularized the very thing they hated, modernist poetry. They also destroyed Max Harris's reputation but that was an added bonus.
If this is true, and it's sure hard to find Buck anywhere, then its's rather poorly-executed astroturfing. CTO's of World Banks do tend to have past histories, y'know.
What's even funnier is that anonymous posters can moderate the comments ala slash. Perhaps some judicious moderation of the Buck question might make OSdir think again about pro-Linux FUD?
According to one sharp-eyed poster he apparently existed for this, but that's no proof either.
If this is any indication of a company's direction immediately after releasing a new product, I'd be selling. Now. After the deal they just made with Microsoft, and the current crop of lame "why don't they think is cool?" comments, you're looking at the most defensive OS rollout I've ever seen. It is the difference between "what can we make" and "what can we save". I haven't seen anything this undignified since the slow collapse of DEC.
Re:Linux Desktop Thoughts...
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 1
I'm with stratjakt on this - you only have to look at what happened to xfree86 as a cautionary tale of the dangers facing desktop developers. And that was just over a license. The whole problem with the organization never had to be faced because it disappeared.
Sun or IBM would be perfectly capable of providing this, but at what cost to the community? I'm not saying it can't be done in the OSS world either, Apache proves that, as does MySQL, but the challenges are awesome.
He must be monitoring all the clueless Romanians who keep invading my channel wanting warez and ops. What's with that, has Romania suddenly discovered the Net?
Hooray!
After a year of trying to push my local chapter of encompass to even properly process my registration so I could get an OpenVMS license, this is a godsend. They do not do themselves any favours, and the closed nature of the license program is puzzling considering their competition with *nix.
It seems that my purchase of An Introduction to Algorithms has borne fruit. I actually understood the patent application, although it's probably the worst description of a hash table ever. It's worth reading the patent, BTW, it has an unintentionally silly background history for its case.
Insofar as it's a specialized implementation of a hash table, how altnet thinks it has a case is beyond me. Code containing the word TrueName would be a dead giveaway, otherwise this is just harrassment litigation.
If you read the article you would realize that the Starter Edition is a clever, well-designed marketing juggernaut. This version is tailored to take the market away from the OSX's and Linux's and deliver permanent mindshare to Microsoft. Starter Edition is exactly that: the first baby-step for a new generation of MS drones, at least that's what MS hopes. It's shiny, it's simple, it's in their language. See how cleverly even the backgrounds reassure the Asian newcomer.
Anyone dismissing this needs to understand: it's just like xbox(n+1). They have all the stakeholders on their side now. Good luck competing with that.
There are a number of things in the Gates interview that I take exception to, but to cover the communist slur first, any American businessman who wants to get his way is going to call any opposition to that desire a "communist". It's your classic syllogism: "they" want to restrict me = communists want to restrict me = "they" are communists. Add to that the perennial canard that left-wing=communist and you've got a winner. This goes back to Henry Ford to whom Bill more than resembles these days (shudder).
No prizes for guessing that Bill still wants to be the centre of attention, but do you really want targeted advertising that you can't avoid? Do you want the centre of your home controlled by Microsoft DRM? And there's that horrible word 'ecosystem' again. And the Xbox vampire marches on..
What to make of the Firefox comments? At once complacent (like much of the interview's tone), but also threatening, just CEO-speak for 'I still keep up to date'? To say nothing of his IE security bravado.
Now WTF is the Office 'franchise'? How can a software product be a franchise? What does Bill want us to believe when he calls it that?
Finally, if it wasn't obvious before, Bill spells it out: Microsoft WANTS everyone on broadband. Probably because it makes XP look more productive.
There is so much that is wrong with this revision that it's difficult to start, but here's some thoughts anyway:
Replacing linux zealotry with apple zealotry is not only redundant, it makes you look defensive and shrill. Too many examples here to mention.
After five years, couldn't we start saying that NO OS matters anymore? They're all good at something, why not be platform-neutral while we're waiting for $OS_DEITY to conquer us all?
In the same vein, command-line vs. GUI is horses for courses. It makes sense for a server, but even $80 wireless routers have web interfaces now.
Distributed computing is on the verge of critical mass. Discuss. Use vnc and putty as instructive examples.
Call me a fuddy-duddy, but a cellphone with video compares unfavourably to a computer with a webcam. Experiments like this are made all the time, it does NOT prove the death of the PC. Especially when I can't afford to even RUN a cellphone with video. And how many gadgets with a planner do you really need?
Anyone who's given up to the extent that they only use computers for actual WORK has dishonoured the name of code-monkey. They should be beaten up by a Linux Monkey and have their epaulettes torn off. Then they should be forced to use Office on an XP box.
It turns out that not every Linux user/developer/vendor thinks the same way. Who knew? It also turns out that the tech media tends to see everything in terms of competition between MS and anyone. Or is linux copying Apple like everyone else? Is it only about choice as long as the choice is MS? Since when did MS need to compete with a crappy little Unix clone?
The whole article underscores MS's paranoia about developer mindshare, and need to create the perception of competition. They need people to believe this so that sides will be taken. The only reason to care about the article is to point this out, so that people are better informed about the so-called choices they are too often manipulated into. Do you think that's worth caring about?
You can't blame Tolkien for not checking your sources. Even the Tale of Years is under suspicion, but at least it provides a factual basis. You might get away with such remarks about Galadriel for instance, but Gollum is much firmer ground even if the odd errant statement about the Ring got out. And remember, if you find a discrepancy, point it out, don't just run away with theories. You didn't even post where you found that line, so the non-geeks could check.
But I didnt add Smeagols apparent age at the time of finding the Ring. 587 is a very good guess, but he could have been as old as 611 (55 at the time).
You are SO wrong. If there was a prize for geeky wrongness, you are it. You are the wrongest LoTR geek on the planet and here is why: you didn't read the book.
The book says in Appendix B, The Tale of Years, Third Age and I quote
2463 The White Council is formed. About this time Déagol the Stoor finds the One Ring and is murdered by Sméagol.
Which makes him only 556 years old. I hereby banish you to an eon of nerd. Go, and never return! And take those medical students with you!
because as good as their intentions are, it's never really going to happen.
If we pretend for one moment that Linux is all about the desktop market, the LSB is only going to have relevance to the top two or four distributions, period. The server market is more restrictive, only two distributions, most likely sharing the desktop market. Forget the embedded market totally.
NOTHING else will register, and there's no reason why it ever should.
Of course he's an influential executive. Executive in being the final arbiter of the most massive community-resourced code effort the planet has ever seen. Influential in that his role cannot be ignored just because he isn't paid obscene amounts or makes cute statements aimed at brokers. It's like something out of Lao-Tze, he has become the still point in an endlessly churning industry.
My God, the entire culture should take a leaf out of his book. Ownership does nothing. Sharing is what makes things happen. It is a practical philosophy.
You know, this is getting repetitive, but if you don't like GPL rules, don't play the GPL game. Oh? You want to play with GPL code but you don't like it's rules? Tough. Find some code under some other licence. Nothing is stopping you from making a few bucks - look at Bram Cohen. Vilifying FSF's lawyers is cheap.
If your idea of grey is this black and white, you're not just new here. You're working for The Other Side.
I don't really care about the Chernobyl issue. Serpent's Wall was far more educational and entertaining, particularly "Elena's" sardonic sense of humour. Probably more honest also. Bring back fertility festivals!!
The sort of fudging of facts in the headline here is how you get people who are nearly insane with hatred who post here making the linux crowd look totally unstable to the mainstream.
and tell me if you're worried about the Government's proposed unfair dismissal laws?
For the rest of you, our esteemed PM wants to make sure that companies like EA continue to enjoy their favourite employment practices. He's selling it like it's a burden on small businesses, but big business wants mandatory overtime, so who's kidding who? Oh well, you're all getting outsourced anyway, who cares.
Alternately, if the developers had an investment in the company (the kind that iD coders have), you'd see a very different attitude to employees in this industry.
Slashdot Mirror
If they do read slashdot for a free technical review, they can hardly ignore the same points raised over and over again:
1. Technically infeasable and economically ruinous for ISPS to scan all network traffic (unless you want to pay them for their trouble, MPAA? you could indemify us all for the resultant Internet slowdown perhaps?). You've been told so many times, you can't be that stupid.
2. Copy-protection can always be broken. It's like King Canute live action when I go to see a movie and be insulted by MPAA movie-theft ads.
3. If you drive the people to encryption, a lot more than your precious assets will go byebye, it will bring down the gravy train for everyone else, and won't they thank you for it.
Using Occam's Razor I ask which is more likely: that they either don't read slashdot or do so in such a way as only read it for the pictures.
beta is the third or fourth patch in the computer games industry! OSS quake2 is still beta...
Guess when Microsoft decided we could do their beta testing for them, it all kinda fell into place for the rest of us...
Guess what most scientists in the world do for a living? Give up? They work in military R&D. Even the US, which has more R&D budget per GNP applied to general science than anywhere else, has more scientists working for the military-industrial complex than anywhere else.
Now, we know they want that Alaskan oil. No eskimo, caribou or sanctuary are going to stop them. And you think a bunch of *scientists* are going to fight back? With whose grant/tenure? They're already owned, forget it.
As with many of the reports, The Register only got half the message: sure, IBM doesn't get its cake now. But there's nothing to stop IBM refiling that submission after discovery. To be blunt, SCO has to put up or shut up. It has to pay lots of money to outsiders to do the discovery work, which may well trigger their lawyer's fee limit, that means Boise and Co. drop their client. Even after all that, if SCO still can't show anything substantial, IBM refile their summary judgement request, and this time it's airtight. No appeals court in the land will conceivably grant SCO another go.
The simple fact that the judge denied IBM's request means that no loose end will be left dangling for SCO to slide out on. And IBM haven't even started with their side. Groklaw has, as usual, far more meat to these bones for the picking.
Ern Malley
It's an older, more insidious hoax but a goodie. And it bit the perpertrators in the end: the hoax poems popularized the very thing they hated, modernist poetry. They also destroyed Max Harris's reputation but that was an added bonus.
If this is true, and it's sure hard to find Buck anywhere, then its's rather poorly-executed astroturfing. CTO's of World Banks do tend to have past histories, y'know.
What's even funnier is that anonymous posters can moderate the comments ala slash. Perhaps some judicious moderation of the Buck question might make OSdir think again about pro-Linux FUD?
According to one sharp-eyed poster he apparently existed for this, but that's no proof either.
If this is any indication of a company's direction immediately after releasing a new product, I'd be selling. Now. After the deal they just made with Microsoft, and the current crop of lame "why don't they think is cool?" comments, you're looking at the most defensive OS rollout I've ever seen. It is the difference between "what can we make" and "what can we save". I haven't seen anything this undignified since the slow collapse of DEC.
I'm with stratjakt on this - you only have to look at what happened to xfree86 as a cautionary tale of the dangers facing desktop developers. And that was just over a license. The whole problem with the organization never had to be faced because it disappeared.
Sun or IBM would be perfectly capable of providing this, but at what cost to the community? I'm not saying it can't be done in the OSS world either, Apache proves that, as does MySQL, but the challenges are awesome.
He must be monitoring all the clueless Romanians who keep invading my channel wanting warez and ops. What's with that, has Romania suddenly discovered the Net?
Hooray!
After a year of trying to push my local chapter of encompass to even properly process my registration so I could get an OpenVMS license, this is a godsend. They do not do themselves any favours, and the closed nature of the license program is puzzling considering their competition with *nix.
It seems that my purchase of An Introduction to Algorithms has borne fruit. I actually understood the patent application, although it's probably the worst description of a hash table ever. It's worth reading the patent, BTW, it has an unintentionally silly background history for its case.
Insofar as it's a specialized implementation of a hash table, how altnet thinks it has a case is beyond me. Code containing the word TrueName would be a dead giveaway, otherwise this is just harrassment litigation.
If you read the article you would realize that the Starter Edition is a clever, well-designed marketing juggernaut. This version is tailored to take the market away from the OSX's and Linux's and deliver permanent mindshare to Microsoft. Starter Edition is exactly that: the first baby-step for a new generation of MS drones, at least that's what MS hopes. It's shiny, it's simple, it's in their language. See how cleverly even the backgrounds reassure the Asian newcomer.
Anyone dismissing this needs to understand: it's just like xbox(n+1). They have all the stakeholders on their side now. Good luck competing with that.
I dispute the notion that somehow visual and music artists are a different breed to the "artistic" programmer.
To demonstrate this fallacy: I am all three. Here are my free pictures. Here is some free music. And here is some free software.
There is a bunch more personal expression out there than you know. What do you make of this story, for instance? Or this site?.
I'm certain there are more and better examples out there.
There are a number of things in the Gates interview that I take exception to, but to cover the communist slur first, any American businessman who wants to get his way is going to call any opposition to that desire a "communist". It's your classic syllogism: "they" want to restrict me = communists want to restrict me = "they" are communists. Add to that the perennial canard that left-wing=communist and you've got a winner. This goes back to Henry Ford to whom Bill more than resembles these days (shudder).
No prizes for guessing that Bill still wants to be the centre of attention, but do you really want targeted advertising that you can't avoid? Do you want the centre of your home controlled by Microsoft DRM? And there's that horrible word 'ecosystem' again. And the Xbox vampire marches on..
What to make of the Firefox comments? At once complacent (like much of the interview's tone), but also threatening, just CEO-speak for 'I still keep up to date'? To say nothing of his IE security bravado.
Now WTF is the Office 'franchise'? How can a software product be a franchise? What does Bill want us to believe when he calls it that?
Finally, if it wasn't obvious before, Bill spells it out: Microsoft WANTS everyone on broadband. Probably because it makes XP look more productive.
There is so much that is wrong with this revision that it's difficult to start, but here's some thoughts anyway:
Looks like another revision is necessary!
It turns out that not every Linux user/developer/vendor thinks the same way. Who knew? It also turns out that the tech media tends to see everything in terms of competition between MS and anyone. Or is linux copying Apple like everyone else? Is it only about choice as long as the choice is MS? Since when did MS need to compete with a crappy little Unix clone?
The whole article underscores MS's paranoia about developer mindshare, and need to create the perception of competition. They need people to believe this so that sides will be taken. The only reason to care about the article is to point this out, so that people are better informed about the so-called choices they are too often manipulated into. Do you think that's worth caring about?
You can't blame Tolkien for not checking your sources. Even the Tale of Years is under suspicion, but at least it provides a factual basis. You might get away with such remarks about Galadriel for instance, but Gollum is much firmer ground even if the odd errant statement about the Ring got out. And remember, if you find a discrepancy, point it out, don't just run away with theories. You didn't even post where you found that line, so the non-geeks could check.
But I didnt add Smeagols apparent age at the time of finding the Ring. 587 is a very good guess, but he could have been as old as 611 (55 at the time).
You are SO wrong. If there was a prize for geeky wrongness, you are it. You are the wrongest LoTR geek on the planet and here is why: you didn't read the book.
The book says in Appendix B, The Tale of Years, Third Age and I quote
Which makes him only 556 years old. I hereby banish you to an eon of nerd. Go, and never return! And take those medical students with you!
because as good as their intentions are, it's never really going to happen.
If we pretend for one moment that Linux is all about the desktop market, the LSB is only going to have relevance to the top two or four distributions, period. The server market is more restrictive, only two distributions, most likely sharing the desktop market. Forget the embedded market totally.
NOTHING else will register, and there's no reason why it ever should.
The smartest monkey I ever saw runs the company! He must practice hard...
Of course he's an influential executive. Executive in being the final arbiter of the most massive community-resourced code effort the planet has ever seen. Influential in that his role cannot be ignored just because he isn't paid obscene amounts or makes cute statements aimed at brokers. It's like something out of Lao-Tze, he has become the still point in an endlessly churning industry.
My God, the entire culture should take a leaf out of his book. Ownership does nothing. Sharing is what makes things happen. It is a practical philosophy.
You know, this is getting repetitive, but if you don't like GPL rules, don't play the GPL game. Oh? You want to play with GPL code but you don't like it's rules? Tough. Find some code under some other licence. Nothing is stopping you from making a few bucks - look at Bram Cohen. Vilifying FSF's lawyers is cheap.
If your idea of grey is this black and white, you're not just new here. You're working for The Other Side.
I don't really care about the Chernobyl issue. Serpent's Wall was far more educational and entertaining, particularly "Elena's" sardonic sense of humour. Probably more honest also. Bring back fertility festivals!!
yeah, well every little bit helps :)
and tell me if you're worried about the Government's proposed unfair dismissal laws?
For the rest of you, our esteemed PM wants to make sure that companies like EA continue to enjoy their favourite employment practices. He's selling it like it's a burden on small businesses, but big business wants mandatory overtime, so who's kidding who? Oh well, you're all getting outsourced anyway, who cares.
Alternately, if the developers had an investment in the company (the kind that iD coders have), you'd see a very different attitude to employees in this industry.