If you jam the signal and just require that inmates use landlines under prison control, you achieve the same thing at lower cost. There's no way they could sell enough one-off cell phones operating on a private cell network limited to the prison cell phones to recoup the costs of developing such a system. Jammers are cheap; building your own cell network - even a single node - and tying it into the PSTN infrastructure to complete the calls - is not.
Uhhh, that 1 TB limit is for the free developer release of NexentaStor, a NAS product. It is not for Nexenta Core, the general purpose OS built from Ubuntu Hardy with an Open Solaris kernel.
I could bust your chops for lame fact checking, but rather bust the chops of the people who modded you informative; they obviously had no idea whether what you were saying was true or not, but coughed up mod points anyway. Wow, that's just like real life: you don't need to know what you're talking about, you just need to sound like you do:p
Troll?! What, is there some new inverse IQ test being administered for the award of mod points? The dumbing down of/. over the last 5 years has been even worse than the dumbing down of Linux.
OT?! Moderator stupidity has reached a heretofore undreamed-of level. I provide a very specific answer to the original question, clearly framing the entire issue and it somehow gets modded off-topic.
A good argument could possibly be made for this being OT, although OTOH I think there's a pretty good case that identifying an idiot as an idiot is always on topic.
I don't know who/what Alfresco is, but I think I have a good general case answer.
"I am currently selecting a CM tool for a project. Important condition: the software must be OSI compliant. I considered Alfresco, since they call themselves 'open source.' Then I heard from several of Alfresco's partners that they are not allowed to do projects based on Alfresco's GPL edition because their partnership contract denied them the right to do so. They only can support Alfresco's enterprise edition. But Alfresco's VP of business development Matt Asay told me that their enterprise edition is not OSI compliant. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with partner contracts of other OSS vendors? Is it normal that Sun, Red Hat, etc. force their partners to decline projects based on their open source editions? It's probably legal to do so, but do you think it is legitimate and fair?"
Your subject question (Can using open source be denied?) is not the same as your real question (Do you think it's legit and fair?). You've pretty much answered the subject question yourself: yes. To elaborate, the Alfresco partners who do not have the right to develop against the GPL edition are not really being "denied" that right; they voluntarily relinquished it in order to become Alfresco partners and they have a contract that says so. Anytime they want to do so, they can end their relationship with Alfresco and develop against the GPL edition all they want. The fact that they don't do so tends to indicate that they believe it is more profitable to be an Alfresco partner and forego developing for the GPL edition.
Certainly it's legal to do so (IANAL). Is it legitimate? Yes, probably. Is it fair? Yes, probably. I'm a big supporter of the GPL and if I were to release anything I've written to the public, I would do so under the GPL, but the reason I think the Alfresco partner contract is probably legitimate and fair is that Alfresco is basically saying "We'll give you the special access and other things that go with being an Alfresco partner, which will help you make more money. In return, we will ask you to help us make money too, by developing only for the proprietary edition of Alfresco." I don't think that's unreasonable or unfair. Alfresco has released a GPL version of their product, but they do need to make a living, and I don't really see cause for complaint if they require their partners to not use the GPL version.
Now for my good general case answer: "So what?"
To expand on that, Alfresco partners can't develop for the GPL edition, and the Enterprise edition is not OSI-compliant. You have three simple choices
1) Don't use an Alfresco partner. Anyone who is not an Alfresco partner is free to develop for the GPL edition;
2) Don't use Alfresco;
3) Adjust your spec so that OSI-compliance is not required (this is the least desirable of the three and one I would not recommend, but it is a choice).
Maybe the school in question needs some computers, but speaking as a parent of two elementary school kids, the general case is that computers or the lack thereof is usually the least of a school's problems.
Want to hear what they really need? Funds to cover field trips. At my daughters school, 100% of that comes from money raised by the PTA. Funds to pay for enough teachers to handle increases in enrollment. Funds to cover library books. Building maintenance. School supplies. The level of fundraising that I typically see at the suburban public elementary school my daughters attend exceeds by far that which I saw at the private religious high school that I attended. I attended a public elementary school in a similar middle-class neighborhood, and there was never any fundraising. No class bake sales, no hike-a-thons, no scrip sales, nothing.
Despite California enjoying until recently years of windfall profits and public schools receiving a huge percentage of the state budget by statue, public schools seem to be constantly begging for funds for a lot of really basic stuff. This is something most of us here on/. aren't really in a position to fix, especially since much of the problem in California comes from a combination of top-heavy school administration, especially at the state level, combined with drag on the system from illegal aliens in the school system, and you have something really tough to fix.
Asking different interview questions of IT veterans than you would of fresh-from-college types interviewing for the same job mostly (to be brutally honest) indicates that you have been promoted to a position for which you are (not yet) prepared. I don't mean that as a put-down; it's actually pretty common for people to be promoted to management without interviewing skills. Technical skills often get people promoted, but without a skilled mentoring manager to prepare the technically competent for management, they usually get thrown in green. In too many companies, interviews are conducted only by managers. I had the good fortune to have done a lot of interviews when I was an individual contributor, so that when I became a manager, I was already good at interviewing and used those skills to build a great team. But most people aren't fortunate enough to work for such a company.
Whatever the job is, the questions you should be asking on the technical side should be specific to the skill set for the job. If you're hiring somebody to work on a Java project, ask some Java-specific questions that will show whether the candidate can walk what s/he talks. Or Python, C, whatever. If you're hiring a network engineer, ask networking questions. Also, asking about some problem that solved and how it was solved is good. After all, you've already said that you know more experienced staff tend to be better at bringing in the project because of their experience, so don't ask about that. If interviews need to be re-tailored at all, it will probably be for the new graduates rather than the experienced people. For the n00bs, you know they won't have the depth of experience, so your questions need to help you build an informed opinion on whether or not they have sufficient skills or potential to enter your organization and be successful, learning well as they go along and under the guidance of yourself and other more senior staff.
Finally, get your own technical staff involved in the interview process. They can not only be very helpful in vetting people on technical knowledge, but also on personality fit. Personality fit is crucial; I've never made a hire recommendation for someone I felt didn't have personality fit with my team. That's so important that if a candidate doesn't have it, then the technical qualifications just don't matter. Additionally, it will help prepare your team for the day when some of them will themselves step into management roles.
Someone who works at Telia told me this happened because McColo had had a long-standing backup connectivity contract with Telia, and McColo activated the backup provision on a Saturday afternoon on the belief, it is surmised, that anybody who could do anything about it would not be working weekends and they'd be safe until Monday. Wrong. As soon as the routes appeared, contacts at Telia were alerted and they very quickly escalated it to senior management, who returned a verdict to disconnect them. Before this happened, Telia was unaware of who McColo was, but the found out in a hurry and took decisive action.
As far as anyone claiming there was a moral problem goes, they're on crack. The moral problem was in GBLX and HE knowing full well for a very long time what McColo was and doing nothing until the whistle was blown on them by a major media outlet was the moral problem. Taking action to disconnect McColo under their terms of service was neither immoral nor vigilantism. It was an open and shut case of enforcing long-ignored terms of a contract.
As far as vigilantism in general goes, it is most commonly seen when the normal channels are ineffective, so it would have been warranted in the McColo case (but to reiterate, cutting them off for TOS violations is not vigilantism), and IMO the only thing wrong with actual vigilante action is that it tends to suffer from an accuracy problem. As long as the recipient of vigilante justice is the actual perp, it doesn't bother me much. Vigilante justice is still justice.
We have one of those where I work, it works out pretty well. It's popular with those who choose to use it (which isn't most people, so it's also waaaay cheaper than trying to put that stuff on every desk), and it's in a fully sound-proofed room so it doesn't bother anyone else. Rockband is the most popular game these days, and we have a Wii, an Xbox 360, and a Playstation 3 in there, along with an HD projector to put the stuff up on the wall.
If everybody had a game console at her/his cube, hearing people constantly pounding controllers and clicking away was I was trying to work would probably result in a homicide, and I can think of a number of people who would join me. Putting a game console on every desk is insane, unless everyone is in a private office. A reasonably soundproof private office.
Building a dedicate game room is the way to go. I'll be impressed by anyone who can get the budget for that in these tough times, though. Belts are a bit tight everywhere.
No,they are not talking about the OS, they are talking about the distribution, and explicitly said so.
Think marketing doesn't count toward development costs? I can tell right now you're not an accountant.
As for third-party drivers, Microsoft has been known to help defray development costs of drivers.
If you want to count the cost of developing the OS proper only, go ahead. But that's still going to have to include everything you find in Microsoft server OSes, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, plus everything you find in a Microsoft desktop OS, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, too. Development tools, mail server, basically every Microsoft product. Now, go and calculate how much it would cost to develop all of that from scratch, with paid developers, in a proprietary environment, starting now. Think the price will come in at less than $10 billion?
That's not misrepresentation, though. If you add up all that Microsoft has spent developing Windows plus software commonly found together with Windows that is not part of the OS itself (such as MS Office), plus the cost of developing whatever third-party apps and drivers are commonly found on Windows machines,I think you'd be in the $10 billion range easily. Look at this way: if Microsoft has 2000 programmers working on Windows and Office (probably ballpark, because there are hundreds who work on Exchange alone; I used to be in Redmond Bldg. 34, so I know what I'm talking about on this) and those programmers make an average of $75K a year, you're at $150 million a year for salaries alone. Figure the value of benefits, stock options and grants, etc., is worth at least half of the salary amount (it's probably more), and you're up to $225 million/year just for programmer compensation, without factoring in all the other costs, like marketing, legal, administrative, etc., and the fact that Microsoft has been developing Windows and Office for way more than 10 years and that $10 billion figure doesn't look so crazy. Factor in other stuff like compilers, Visual Studio and all the other things MSFT develops and I'm sure you'll find they've probably spent *more* than $10 billion on software development over the history of the company.
I know that sounds like a huge number, but at the time I left Microsoft, they had about $75 billion/in cash/.
Obama wants to pile on more debt, too. You don't think his spending initiatives are *really* funded by tax revenues, do you? Not even with his tax hike plan. Obama will not cut spending anywhere, and he will increase it just about everywhere except probably military spending. Even there, some external force may leave with no choice but to spend more on the military. The only thing worse than a Republican when it comes to spending money is a Democract, and the farther left they are, the more they spend. It's hard to be left of Obama.
A family of four making 40K a year will pay little or no income tax, even if they don't own a home. If they do own a home and have a mortgage on it, the interest and property tax deductions will almost certainly get them to zero.
It's pretty hard for those "most able to pay" to pay less than that.
We need to also keep in mind that there are parts of the country where $40K goes pretty far. In the SF Bay area, where I live, that's practically the poverty line for a family of four, but it's not that way everywhere.
But I think I'll just have to torch your "most able to pay" straw man. Whether someone is able to pay more has nothing to do with it. By "it" I mean, first of all, fairness. The fact that someone is smart, successful, and therefore has more discretionary income is no reason to confiscate (more of) that discretionary income. By "spread the wealth around" Obama is talking about class envy (class struggle is what the socialists and communists call it, and like as not what he really means), and punishing people for success. Read that again. Punishing people for success. His plan is that if you become more successful, the government will take a larger percentage of what you have.
If you want to take people fairly, we could wipe out most of the tax code by taxing income at a flat rate TBD (but I suggest not more than 10% for Federal and a lot less for State and Social Security), and wipe out all, or nearly all deductions and credits. A reasonable floor could be set, below which there is no tax, and a reasonable ceiling should also be set, above which there is no tax.
The second thing I mean by "it" is economic sense. It is very well established that taxes are harmful to economic activity. The more tax, the more harm. Cutting taxes can actually result in revenue increases via increased economic activity. It is also well-established that so-called progressive income taxes are the among most harmful to economic activity because they are a disincentive to making more money.
A lot of very smart people believe that we should abolish corporate income tax completely, and they are right. First of all, because corporate income tax isn't really paid by corporations, anyway. It is folded into the price of their products and paid for by we, who by them. Because that's how it works, corporate income tax makes products more expensive, thus reducing sales, and thus reducing economic activity. If we abolished corporate income tax, the lower cost of products would have an immediate and great effect on our economy. There would also be a long-term knock-on effect: without corporate income tax, the United States would become a tax haven for corporations, bringing a lot of businesses (and jobs) to the United States. The economic activity boost would be huge and offset the perceived loss of revenue caused by the abolition of corporate income tax.
Another knock-on effect would be that much of the IRS would become redundant, thus saving us some government expenditures as those jobs were phased out.
Finally, it is also well-established that the taxes that have the worst effect on an economy are ones that more heavily tax those who make more money, because they are the ones who provide the jobs and investment. Money that goes into tax coffers is money flushed down the toilet, from the perspective of producing jobs. An economy with a high tax burden is like driving your car with one foot on gas and the other on the brake. That's where we're at right now. An Obama presidency would throw on the parking as well.
How could I not vote for him? Uhhh, let's see. Wants to raise taxes? Check. Wants to institute socialized health care? Check. Is probably the most leftist member of the Senate, a guy so far to the left that he makes Joe Biden look like Ronald Reagan? Check.
Oh, yeah, and even Joe Biden didn't think Obama was qualified to be president back when BO (gotta love those initials) and Hillary were duking it out. Then, when he gets asked to be BO's running mate, he throws integrity to the winds and jumps on the band wagon. Joe Biden would have impressed me if he'd told BO to shove it and publicly repeated what he said during the Democratic primaries.
Not that McCain exactly gives me goose bumps, but the Mutt mail client tagline is "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." McCain sucks less than Obama, so I'm voting for him. It's not so much a vote for McCain so much as it is a vote against BO and for Sarah Palin. The best thing about McCain winning is that it will give her a good chance at the presidency in her own right down the road. America is ready for a woman president, but not Hillary.
As the spouse of an immigrant, I could write a very great deal about the green card process, how cumbersome and generally screwed up it is, and how I spent a year and a half living apart from my wife and children (the second of whom I saw when she was born and for 10 days thereafter, then not again until a year later when my wife got her spouse visa), but I'll narrow my field of comment a bit here.
The/plight/ of H-1B workers?
*cough*
Anytime H-1B workers think they have a plight, they're welcome to leave and go back to their home countries. What's that? The reason they're working here instead of in their home countries is because the wages and working conditions are better? What was that about a plight, again? Oh, I see. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
WRT point 3, the H-1B is not supposed to be a path to a green card. It's supposed to be a temporary worker visa.
Easy path to permanent residency, like most countries already have in place? Wow. I lived and worked abroad for nine years. In one of those places, the only practical path to becoming a permanent resident was either to be a refugee who was granted residency (hardly ever happens), or marry a citizen of that country. Other than a few ethnically-based special exceptions, there really was no other way to get permanent residency. On the upside, if you qualified for permanent residency, it was pretty easy to become a citizen for those who wanted to. You could even apply for both at the same time. I know one naturalized person there who did exactly that.
In another of those places, there simply is no permanent residency. There wasn't even a spouse visa at the time, although I understand they recently enacted those. AFAIK they still have no permanent residency. Pretty much, you're either on a tourist visa, a business visa, you're the spouse of a citizen, or you are a citizen.
At least between countries with economic parity, I'm all in favor of drastically easing movement for work purposes. For example, I'd like to see an EU-style relationship for the free flow of skilled labor between the EU, the United States, Canada, Japan, and other countries that have socio-economic parity with those listed. That would give people in each of those places who'd like to go and work in another place complete freedom to do so. Good for everybody.
Why the economic parity clause? To avoid a situation of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. A lot of industries in the United States have had their salaries halved or more by the huge influx of illegal aliens, especially in the southwest. I'm not arguing that/some/ of them aren't necessary to the functioning of our economy, but too many cause disfunction in the economy, particularly when large numbers of them move into lines of work where they are not essential to the function of those lines of work. Am I arguing that illegal aliens should pretty much be restricted to picking crops? Yes. That's one of the few areas where they truly don't take jobs from working poor Americans.
It's also important that any such agreement be largely restricted to skilled labor. Unskilled labor moving around like that can too easily cause an imbalance in one area, harming the poor who are already there.
*buntu puts out quality versions of those things, too. In fact, theyre so good that I moved from Debian Sid to Ubuntu back in 2003 when it was still in beta.
Of course, KDE 4 is at least two point releases (at least two, but probably more) away from even being a patch on the ass of KDE 3.5, so Ubuntu's default KDE 4 in Intrepid and lack of KDE 3.5 even in backports has caused me to migrate back to Debian Sid at work. At home, I'm on the fence between going back to Sid and running Xubuntu Intrepid and running KDE apps in the XFCE environment while I migrate over to GTK stuff. Next step is to set up dovecot on my file server and push all my email over there and access it via IMAP.
KDE 4 will probably be pretty good someday, but I'm not certain it will be so good that it will make me migrate back. My desktop history is FVWM95 -> AfterStep -> Window Maker -> Enlightenmen -> GNOME -> KDE 3.0 -> where I am now, migrating to something other than KDE. KDE 3.0 was so good it blew me away. I switched off of GNOME as soon as I tried it and have been a KDE user ever since. It was a quantum leap forward from KDE 2 in every way. In contrast, my reaction to KDE 4 was - and has been at every release since 4.0, "You've got to be kidding me." There's a lot of potential there, but it's currently very weak on functionality, doesn't have many themes available (just 3 pages on kdelook) and even fewer good ones. The default Oxygen theme is fugly.
I'm hardly the only KDE user to react this way. KDE 4 has been at least as big of a PR and acceptance failure as Vista was for Microsoft. Maybe worse. That could explain the resemblance between Oxygen and Vista, I suppose.
Some in the KDE camp call that a knee-jerk reaction and refusal to try things that are new. If that was true, none of us would be using Linux in the first place. And then, of course, there's the MacBook Pro I was issued when I took my current job. First-time Mac user, I think the thing rocks. I like it so much I bought one for my wife when her ThinkPad bit the dust. The fact is, KDE 4 was, and still is, a balls-up and the KDE devs who have said the problem is the users, not them and their product, are full of it. My dumping KDE comes 75% from the poor usability of 4 and 25% from the poor attitude of (some of) the devs.
You're just working with too small a sample size. In most places in the world, it is the most successful males who get to breed most often and do in fact produce the most children. Often with multiple wives, in some societies (in those societies, the less successful are also more likely to never reproduce at all).
Now, if you restrict your argument to economically advanced countries, there may be something to it. Not only do they have lower birth rates in general, but there is a negative correlation between birthrate and educational level/income.
I'm doing my part - I have three kids - the rest of you geeks need to get with the program:)
I realize this is feeding a troll, but first of all, it was not a scandal; it was security vulnerability. A scandal is when a vendor is aware of a vulnerability and, while failing to fix it and release a patch, seeks instead to just conceal the information from the public and customers alike for as long as possible.
Debian, like most FOSS vendors, fixed the problem, with full disclosure, very quickly. The scandals typically affect proprietary vendors, and you'd have to look long and hard to find one without some of those skeletons in its closet.
Is Linux secure? Sure. Very secure, generally. Absolutely secure? No. No computer is, not even in its original shipping material and powered off with no OS installed. Even then, the machine could be stolen. But on the security continuum, Linux is more secure than Windows or OS X.
No joke. Being from San Diego myself, there's no way I would work for, nor invest in, a Robertson-headed company. Back in the day, my brother interviewed at MP3.com after graduating from UCSD, when MP3.com was still a hot property. It was his good fortune that another company made him an offer first, and he took it. Not to say that Robertson's vision of one way digital music ought to work was necessarily a bad one, but he himself doesn't strike me as being all that capable of successfully implementing a visionary idea. Also, he almost certainly had to have known that he couldn't beat the record companies in court and that they would come after him hard. Whether he's dumb, a crook, or both shall be left as an exercise for the reader.
For those too young to remember these things, once upon a time, IBM mainframes, and only IBM mainframes, ran IBM's MVS operating system.
Then, one day, a former IBM employee named Gene Amdahl starts a company that builds IBM-compatible mainframes. IBM's response to this is basically "You may have a hardware-compatible mainframe, but we're not going to sell you MVS to run on it, nyaah nyaah nyaah nyaaaaaaaah nyaaaaaaaaaaah!"
A court said otherwise, and Amdahl made a pretty good business selling mainframes that were IBM-compatible, only faster and cheaper.
Fast forward to the present day, with the IBM/Amdahl precedent, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple's refusal to license OS X for non-Apple computers go down the toilet if anyone with deep enough pockets care enough to take them to court on it.
"if you license something, and it's used beyond the terms of the license, that's copyright infringement."
No matter what those terms might be?
For example, what if the license says something like "This software is licensed only for use on an XYZ Brand computer" and I install it on an ABC Brand computer instead. Is that copyright infringement? For that matter, is it even enforceable? Can a vendor tell me what brand of computer I have to install its software on, and actually enforce that in court?
Among the many things I miss from my years in Japan are the quality of the Internet connections. Here in the SF Bay area, I have ~15 mpbs down/512 kbps up on my local municipal cable company (so glad I don't have to use Comcast, like most bay area cable users) and I usually get as near to wire speed as TCP allows. That's much faster than most US Internet connections, but pales in comparison to what is widely available in Japan for about the same price I'm paying.
No kidding. The main reason I stay is because both my wife and I have family here. Otherwise, I'd find some other job within my company (nationwide and in most other countries as well). In most places other than California, my salary would be practically a fortune. I make more than most people in California as it is, but living is expensive around Silicon Valley.
Not the cheapskates - the hardware required for this or a homebrew hackintosh to work is not low-end. For what you'd spend building a system like that from scratch, you're well above the price of a Mac Mini, and may (if you also buy a monitor) be above the price of many of the iMacs.
The people who will buy this are people who build fairly high-end desktop systems for themselves and spend as much or more than they would on a pre-built machine because they prefer to build their own hardware. People like me, pretty much. I do own a real Mac (notebook), though, and run Linux on all my desktop machines. I don't really want to bother with a Hackintosh, and being in the security industry, have a not-unreasonable mistrust of third-part binary patches.
However, if I came to a point where I really, really, really wanted a desktop Mac, I'd probably wind up going with a Hackintosh. A Mac Mini is too lightweight, a Mac Pro is more power and expense than I need, and I don't like all-in-one desktops, so that rules out the iMac. As so many people have said, if Apple sold a mid-range headless Mac, I'd be a very likely buyer.
A good model for such a machine might be the Lenovo ThinkCenter, one of which is on my desk at work, running Linux. The BIOS looks just like a Thinkpad BIOS, which makes me suspect this is basically a Thinkpad motherboard stuffed into a desktop case. It has front and rear USB and audio connectors, VGA and DVI, serial, parallel, and an eSATA port, in a roughly 13" x 12" by 4" high case. If Apple sold an equivalent headless machine, they'd have a lot of buyers, some among current Mac owners and especially from PC owners who want to preserve their investment in keyboard, mouse, and (especially) monitor.
Sure, it would pull some sales from the Mac Pro and more from the iMac, but it would still increase overall sales and market share.
Slashdot Mirror
If you jam the signal and just require that inmates use landlines under prison control, you achieve the same thing at lower cost. There's no way they could sell enough one-off cell phones operating on a private cell network limited to the prison cell phones to recoup the costs of developing such a system. Jammers are cheap; building your own cell network - even a single node - and tying it into the PSTN infrastructure to complete the calls - is not.
Uhhh, that 1 TB limit is for the free developer release of NexentaStor, a NAS product. It is not for Nexenta Core, the general purpose OS built from Ubuntu Hardy with an Open Solaris kernel.
I could bust your chops for lame fact checking, but rather bust the chops of the people who modded you informative; they obviously had no idea whether what you were saying was true or not, but coughed up mod points anyway. Wow, that's just like real life: you don't need to know what you're talking about, you just need to sound like you do :p
Troll?! What, is there some new inverse IQ test being administered for the award of mod points? The dumbing down of /. over the last 5 years has been even worse than the dumbing down of Linux.
... but now I just can't remember what it was.
OT?! Moderator stupidity has reached a heretofore undreamed-of level. I provide a very specific answer to the original question, clearly framing the entire issue and it somehow gets modded off-topic.
A good argument could possibly be made for this being OT, although OTOH I think there's a pretty good case that identifying an idiot as an idiot is always on topic.
I don't know who/what Alfresco is, but I think I have a good general case answer.
"I am currently selecting a CM tool for a project. Important condition: the software must be OSI compliant. I considered Alfresco, since they call themselves 'open source.' Then I heard from several of Alfresco's partners that they are not allowed to do projects based on Alfresco's GPL edition because their partnership contract denied them the right to do so. They only can support Alfresco's enterprise edition. But Alfresco's VP of business development Matt Asay told me that their enterprise edition is not OSI compliant. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with partner contracts of other OSS vendors? Is it normal that Sun, Red Hat, etc. force their partners to decline projects based on their open source editions? It's probably legal to do so, but do you think it is legitimate and fair?"
Your subject question (Can using open source be denied?) is not the same as your real question (Do you think it's legit and fair?). You've pretty much answered the subject question yourself: yes. To elaborate, the Alfresco partners who do not have the right to develop against the GPL edition are not really being "denied" that right; they voluntarily relinquished it in order to become Alfresco partners and they have a contract that says so. Anytime they want to do so, they can end their relationship with Alfresco and develop against the GPL edition all they want. The fact that they don't do so tends to indicate that they believe it is more profitable to be an Alfresco partner and forego developing for the GPL edition.
Certainly it's legal to do so (IANAL). Is it legitimate? Yes, probably. Is it fair? Yes, probably. I'm a big supporter of the GPL and if I were to release anything I've written to the public, I would do so under the GPL, but the reason I think the Alfresco partner contract is probably legitimate and fair is that Alfresco is basically saying "We'll give you the special access and other things that go with being an Alfresco partner, which will help you make more money. In return, we will ask you to help us make money too, by developing only for the proprietary edition of Alfresco." I don't think that's unreasonable or unfair. Alfresco has released a GPL version of their product, but they do need to make a living, and I don't really see cause for complaint if they require their partners to not use the GPL version.
Now for my good general case answer: "So what?"
To expand on that, Alfresco partners can't develop for the GPL edition, and the Enterprise edition is not OSI-compliant. You have three simple choices
1) Don't use an Alfresco partner. Anyone who is not an Alfresco partner is free to develop for the GPL edition;
2) Don't use Alfresco;
3) Adjust your spec so that OSI-compliance is not required (this is the least desirable of the three and one I would not recommend, but it is a choice).
Maybe the school in question needs some computers, but speaking as a parent of two elementary school kids, the general case is that computers or the lack thereof is usually the least of a school's problems.
Want to hear what they really need? Funds to cover field trips. At my daughters school, 100% of that comes from money raised by the PTA. Funds to pay for enough teachers to handle increases in enrollment. Funds to cover library books. Building maintenance. School supplies. The level of fundraising that I typically see at the suburban public elementary school my daughters attend exceeds by far that which I saw at the private religious high school that I attended. I attended a public elementary school in a similar middle-class neighborhood, and there was never any fundraising. No class bake sales, no hike-a-thons, no scrip sales, nothing.
Despite California enjoying until recently years of windfall profits and public schools receiving a huge percentage of the state budget by statue, public schools seem to be constantly begging for funds for a lot of really basic stuff. This is something most of us here on /. aren't really in a position to fix, especially since much of the problem in California comes from a combination of top-heavy school administration, especially at the state level, combined with drag on the system from illegal aliens in the school system, and you have something really tough to fix.
Asking different interview questions of IT veterans than you would of fresh-from-college types interviewing for the same job mostly (to be brutally honest) indicates that you have been promoted to a position for which you are (not yet) prepared. I don't mean that as a put-down; it's actually pretty common for people to be promoted to management without interviewing skills. Technical skills often get people promoted, but without a skilled mentoring manager to prepare the technically competent for management, they usually get thrown in green. In too many companies, interviews are conducted only by managers. I had the good fortune to have done a lot of interviews when I was an individual contributor, so that when I became a manager, I was already good at interviewing and used those skills to build a great team. But most people aren't fortunate enough to work for such a company.
Whatever the job is, the questions you should be asking on the technical side should be specific to the skill set for the job. If you're hiring somebody to work on a Java project, ask some Java-specific questions that will show whether the candidate can walk what s/he talks. Or Python, C, whatever. If you're hiring a network engineer, ask networking questions. Also, asking about some problem that solved and how it was solved is good. After all, you've already said that you know more experienced staff tend to be better at bringing in the project because of their experience, so don't ask about that. If interviews need to be re-tailored at all, it will probably be for the new graduates rather than the experienced people. For the n00bs, you know they won't have the depth of experience, so your questions need to help you build an informed opinion on whether or not they have sufficient skills or potential to enter your organization and be successful, learning well as they go along and under the guidance of yourself and other more senior staff.
Finally, get your own technical staff involved in the interview process. They can not only be very helpful in vetting people on technical knowledge, but also on personality fit. Personality fit is crucial; I've never made a hire recommendation for someone I felt didn't have personality fit with my team. That's so important that if a candidate doesn't have it, then the technical qualifications just don't matter. Additionally, it will help prepare your team for the day when some of them will themselves step into management roles.
Someone who works at Telia told me this happened because McColo had had a long-standing backup connectivity contract with Telia, and McColo activated the backup provision on a Saturday afternoon on the belief, it is surmised, that anybody who could do anything about it would not be working weekends and they'd be safe until Monday. Wrong. As soon as the routes appeared, contacts at Telia were alerted and they very quickly escalated it to senior management, who returned a verdict to disconnect them. Before this happened, Telia was unaware of who McColo was, but the found out in a hurry and took decisive action.
As far as anyone claiming there was a moral problem goes, they're on crack. The moral problem was in GBLX and HE knowing full well for a very long time what McColo was and doing nothing until the whistle was blown on them by a major media outlet was the moral problem. Taking action to disconnect McColo under their terms of service was neither immoral nor vigilantism. It was an open and shut case of enforcing long-ignored terms of a contract.
As far as vigilantism in general goes, it is most commonly seen when the normal channels are ineffective, so it would have been warranted in the McColo case (but to reiterate, cutting them off for TOS violations is not vigilantism), and IMO the only thing wrong with actual vigilante action is that it tends to suffer from an accuracy problem. As long as the recipient of vigilante justice is the actual perp, it doesn't bother me much. Vigilante justice is still justice.
We have one of those where I work, it works out pretty well. It's popular with those who choose to use it (which isn't most people, so it's also waaaay cheaper than trying to put that stuff on every desk), and it's in a fully sound-proofed room so it doesn't bother anyone else. Rockband is the most popular game these days, and we have a Wii, an Xbox 360, and a Playstation 3 in there, along with an HD projector to put the stuff up on the wall.
If everybody had a game console at her/his cube, hearing people constantly pounding controllers and clicking away was I was trying to work would probably result in a homicide, and I can think of a number of people who would join me. Putting a game console on every desk is insane, unless everyone is in a private office. A reasonably soundproof private office.
Building a dedicate game room is the way to go. I'll be impressed by anyone who can get the budget for that in these tough times, though. Belts are a bit tight everywhere.
No,they are not talking about the OS, they are talking about the distribution, and explicitly said so.
Think marketing doesn't count toward development costs? I can tell right now you're not an accountant.
As for third-party drivers, Microsoft has been known to help defray development costs of drivers.
If you want to count the cost of developing the OS proper only, go ahead. But that's still going to have to include everything you find in Microsoft server OSes, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, plus everything you find in a Microsoft desktop OS, since a Linux distro comes standard with that stuff, too. Development tools, mail server, basically every Microsoft product. Now, go and calculate how much it would cost to develop all of that from scratch, with paid developers, in a proprietary environment, starting now. Think the price will come in at less than $10 billion?
That's not misrepresentation, though. If you add up all that Microsoft has spent developing Windows plus software commonly found together with Windows that is not part of the OS itself (such as MS Office), plus the cost of developing whatever third-party apps and drivers are commonly found on Windows machines,I think you'd be in the $10 billion range easily. Look at this way: if Microsoft has 2000 programmers working on Windows and Office (probably ballpark, because there are hundreds who work on Exchange alone; I used to be in Redmond Bldg. 34, so I know what I'm talking about on this) and those programmers make an average of $75K a year, you're at $150 million a year for salaries alone. Figure the value of benefits, stock options and grants, etc., is worth at least half of the salary amount (it's probably more), and you're up to $225 million/year just for programmer compensation, without factoring in all the other costs, like marketing, legal, administrative, etc., and the fact that Microsoft has been developing Windows and Office for way more than 10 years and that $10 billion figure doesn't look so crazy. Factor in other stuff like compilers, Visual Studio and all the other things MSFT develops and I'm sure you'll find they've probably spent *more* than $10 billion on software development over the history of the company.
I know that sounds like a huge number, but at the time I left Microsoft, they had about $75 billion /in cash/.
Obama wants to pile on more debt, too. You don't think his spending initiatives are *really* funded by tax revenues, do you? Not even with his tax hike plan. Obama will not cut spending anywhere, and he will increase it just about everywhere except probably military spending. Even there, some external force may leave with no choice but to spend more on the military. The only thing worse than a Republican when it comes to spending money is a Democract, and the farther left they are, the more they spend. It's hard to be left of Obama.
A family of four making 40K a year will pay little or no income tax, even if they don't own a home. If they do own a home and have a mortgage on it, the interest and property tax deductions will almost certainly get them to zero.
It's pretty hard for those "most able to pay" to pay less than that.
We need to also keep in mind that there are parts of the country where $40K goes pretty far. In the SF Bay area, where I live, that's practically the poverty line for a family of four, but it's not that way everywhere.
But I think I'll just have to torch your "most able to pay" straw man. Whether someone is able to pay more has nothing to do with it. By "it" I mean, first of all, fairness. The fact that someone is smart, successful, and therefore has more discretionary income is no reason to confiscate (more of) that discretionary income. By "spread the wealth around" Obama is talking about class envy (class struggle is what the socialists and communists call it, and like as not what he really means), and punishing people for success. Read that again. Punishing people for success. His plan is that if you become more successful, the government will take a larger percentage of what you have.
If you want to take people fairly, we could wipe out most of the tax code by taxing income at a flat rate TBD (but I suggest not more than 10% for Federal and a lot less for State and Social Security), and wipe out all, or nearly all deductions and credits. A reasonable floor could be set, below which there is no tax, and a reasonable ceiling should also be set, above which there is no tax.
The second thing I mean by "it" is economic sense. It is very well established that taxes are harmful to economic activity. The more tax, the more harm. Cutting taxes can actually result in revenue increases via increased economic activity. It is also well-established that so-called progressive income taxes are the among most harmful to economic activity because they are a disincentive to making more money.
A lot of very smart people believe that we should abolish corporate income tax completely, and they are right. First of all, because corporate income tax isn't really paid by corporations, anyway. It is folded into the price of their products and paid for by we, who by them. Because that's how it works, corporate income tax makes products more expensive, thus reducing sales, and thus reducing economic activity. If we abolished corporate income tax, the lower cost of products would have an immediate and great effect on our economy. There would also be a long-term knock-on effect: without corporate income tax, the United States would become a tax haven for corporations, bringing a lot of businesses (and jobs) to the United States. The economic activity boost would be huge and offset the perceived loss of revenue caused by the abolition of corporate income tax.
Another knock-on effect would be that much of the IRS would become redundant, thus saving us some government expenditures as those jobs were phased out.
Finally, it is also well-established that the taxes that have the worst effect on an economy are ones that more heavily tax those who make more money, because they are the ones who provide the jobs and investment. Money that goes into tax coffers is money flushed down the toilet, from the perspective of producing jobs. An economy with a high tax burden is like driving your car with one foot on gas and the other on the brake. That's where we're at right now. An Obama presidency would throw on the parking as well.
How could I not vote for him? Uhhh, let's see. Wants to raise taxes? Check. Wants to institute socialized health care? Check. Is probably the most leftist member of the Senate, a guy so far to the left that he makes Joe Biden look like Ronald Reagan? Check.
Oh, yeah, and even Joe Biden didn't think Obama was qualified to be president back when BO (gotta love those initials) and Hillary were duking it out. Then, when he gets asked to be BO's running mate, he throws integrity to the winds and jumps on the band wagon. Joe Biden would have impressed me if he'd told BO to shove it and publicly repeated what he said during the Democratic primaries.
Not that McCain exactly gives me goose bumps, but the Mutt mail client tagline is "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." McCain sucks less than Obama, so I'm voting for him. It's not so much a vote for McCain so much as it is a vote against BO and for Sarah Palin. The best thing about McCain winning is that it will give her a good chance at the presidency in her own right down the road. America is ready for a woman president, but not Hillary.
As the spouse of an immigrant, I could write a very great deal about the green card process, how cumbersome and generally screwed up it is, and how I spent a year and a half living apart from my wife and children (the second of whom I saw when she was born and for 10 days thereafter, then not again until a year later when my wife got her spouse visa), but I'll narrow my field of comment a bit here.
The /plight/ of H-1B workers?
*cough*
Anytime H-1B workers think they have a plight, they're welcome to leave and go back to their home countries. What's that? The reason they're working here instead of in their home countries is because the wages and working conditions are better? What was that about a plight, again? Oh, I see. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
WRT point 3, the H-1B is not supposed to be a path to a green card. It's supposed to be a temporary worker visa.
Easy path to permanent residency, like most countries already have in place? Wow. I lived and worked abroad for nine years. In one of those places, the only practical path to becoming a permanent resident was either to be a refugee who was granted residency (hardly ever happens), or marry a citizen of that country. Other than a few ethnically-based special exceptions, there really was no other way to get permanent residency. On the upside, if you qualified for permanent residency, it was pretty easy to become a citizen for those who wanted to. You could even apply for both at the same time. I know one naturalized person there who did exactly that.
In another of those places, there simply is no permanent residency. There wasn't even a spouse visa at the time, although I understand they recently enacted those. AFAIK they still have no permanent residency. Pretty much, you're either on a tourist visa, a business visa, you're the spouse of a citizen, or you are a citizen.
At least between countries with economic parity, I'm all in favor of drastically easing movement for work purposes. For example, I'd like to see an EU-style relationship for the free flow of skilled labor between the EU, the United States, Canada, Japan, and other countries that have socio-economic parity with those listed. That would give people in each of those places who'd like to go and work in another place complete freedom to do so. Good for everybody.
Why the economic parity clause? To avoid a situation of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. A lot of industries in the United States have had their salaries halved or more by the huge influx of illegal aliens, especially in the southwest. I'm not arguing that /some/ of them aren't necessary to the functioning of our economy, but too many cause disfunction in the economy, particularly when large numbers of them move into lines of work where they are not essential to the function of those lines of work. Am I arguing that illegal aliens should pretty much be restricted to picking crops? Yes. That's one of the few areas where they truly don't take jobs from working poor Americans.
It's also important that any such agreement be largely restricted to skilled labor. Unskilled labor moving around like that can too easily cause an imbalance in one area, harming the poor who are already there.
*buntu puts out quality versions of those things, too. In fact, theyre so good that I moved from Debian Sid to Ubuntu back in 2003 when it was still in beta.
Of course, KDE 4 is at least two point releases (at least two, but probably more) away from even being a patch on the ass of KDE 3.5, so Ubuntu's default KDE 4 in Intrepid and lack of KDE 3.5 even in backports has caused me to migrate back to Debian Sid at work. At home, I'm on the fence between going back to Sid and running Xubuntu Intrepid and running KDE apps in the XFCE environment while I migrate over to GTK stuff. Next step is to set up dovecot on my file server and push all my email over there and access it via IMAP.
KDE 4 will probably be pretty good someday, but I'm not certain it will be so good that it will make me migrate back. My desktop history is FVWM95 -> AfterStep -> Window Maker -> Enlightenmen -> GNOME -> KDE 3.0 -> where I am now, migrating to something other than KDE. KDE 3.0 was so good it blew me away. I switched off of GNOME as soon as I tried it and have been a KDE user ever since. It was a quantum leap forward from KDE 2 in every way. In contrast, my reaction to KDE 4 was - and has been at every release since 4.0, "You've got to be kidding me." There's a lot of potential there, but it's currently very weak on functionality, doesn't have many themes available (just 3 pages on kdelook) and even fewer good ones. The default Oxygen theme is fugly.
I'm hardly the only KDE user to react this way. KDE 4 has been at least as big of a PR and acceptance failure as Vista was for Microsoft. Maybe worse. That could explain the resemblance between Oxygen and Vista, I suppose.
Some in the KDE camp call that a knee-jerk reaction and refusal to try things that are new. If that was true, none of us would be using Linux in the first place. And then, of course, there's the MacBook Pro I was issued when I took my current job. First-time Mac user, I think the thing rocks. I like it so much I bought one for my wife when her ThinkPad bit the dust. The fact is, KDE 4 was, and still is, a balls-up and the KDE devs who have said the problem is the users, not them and their product, are full of it. My dumping KDE comes 75% from the poor usability of 4 and 25% from the poor attitude of (some of) the devs.
You're just working with too small a sample size. In most places in the world, it is the most successful males who get to breed most often and do in fact produce the most children. Often with multiple wives, in some societies (in those societies, the less successful are also more likely to never reproduce at all).
Now, if you restrict your argument to economically advanced countries, there may be something to it. Not only do they have lower birth rates in general, but there is a negative correlation between birthrate and educational level/income.
I'm doing my part - I have three kids - the rest of you geeks need to get with the program :)
I realize this is feeding a troll, but first of all, it was not a scandal; it was security vulnerability. A scandal is when a vendor is aware of a vulnerability and, while failing to fix it and release a patch, seeks instead to just conceal the information from the public and customers alike for as long as possible.
Debian, like most FOSS vendors, fixed the problem, with full disclosure, very quickly. The scandals typically affect proprietary vendors, and you'd have to look long and hard to find one without some of those skeletons in its closet.
Is Linux secure? Sure. Very secure, generally. Absolutely secure? No. No computer is, not even in its original shipping material and powered off with no OS installed. Even then, the machine could be stolen. But on the security continuum, Linux is more secure than Windows or OS X.
No joke. Being from San Diego myself, there's no way I would work for, nor invest in, a Robertson-headed company. Back in the day, my brother interviewed at MP3.com after graduating from UCSD, when MP3.com was still a hot property. It was his good fortune that another company made him an offer first, and he took it. Not to say that Robertson's vision of one way digital music ought to work was necessarily a bad one, but he himself doesn't strike me as being all that capable of successfully implementing a visionary idea. Also, he almost certainly had to have known that he couldn't beat the record companies in court and that they would come after him hard. Whether he's dumb, a crook, or both shall be left as an exercise for the reader.
>Yes and yes.
What about IBM and Amdahl?
For those too young to remember these things, once upon a time, IBM mainframes, and only IBM mainframes, ran IBM's MVS operating system.
Then, one day, a former IBM employee named Gene Amdahl starts a company that builds IBM-compatible mainframes. IBM's response to this is basically "You may have a hardware-compatible mainframe, but we're not going to sell you MVS to run on it, nyaah nyaah nyaah nyaaaaaaaah nyaaaaaaaaaaah!"
A court said otherwise, and Amdahl made a pretty good business selling mainframes that were IBM-compatible, only faster and cheaper.
Fast forward to the present day, with the IBM/Amdahl precedent, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple's refusal to license OS X for non-Apple computers go down the toilet if anyone with deep enough pockets care enough to take them to court on it.
"if you license something, and it's used beyond the terms of the license, that's copyright infringement."
No matter what those terms might be?
For example, what if the license says something like "This software is licensed only for use on an XYZ Brand computer" and I install it on an ABC Brand computer instead. Is that copyright infringement? For that matter, is it even enforceable? Can a vendor tell me what brand of computer I have to install its software on, and actually enforce that in court?
Love your tagline :)
Among the many things I miss from my years in Japan are the quality of the Internet connections. Here in the SF Bay area, I have ~15 mpbs down/512 kbps up on my local municipal cable company (so glad I don't have to use Comcast, like most bay area cable users) and I usually get as near to wire speed as TCP allows. That's much faster than most US Internet connections, but pales in comparison to what is widely available in Japan for about the same price I'm paying.
No kidding. The main reason I stay is because both my wife and I have family here. Otherwise, I'd find some other job within my company (nationwide and in most other countries as well). In most places other than California, my salary would be practically a fortune. I make more than most people in California as it is, but living is expensive around Silicon Valley.
Not the cheapskates - the hardware required for this or a homebrew hackintosh to work is not low-end. For what you'd spend building a system like that from scratch, you're well above the price of a Mac Mini, and may (if you also buy a monitor) be above the price of many of the iMacs.
The people who will buy this are people who build fairly high-end desktop systems for themselves and spend as much or more than they would on a pre-built machine because they prefer to build their own hardware. People like me, pretty much. I do own a real Mac (notebook), though, and run Linux on all my desktop machines. I don't really want to bother with a Hackintosh, and being in the security industry, have a not-unreasonable mistrust of third-part binary patches.
However, if I came to a point where I really, really, really wanted a desktop Mac, I'd probably wind up going with a Hackintosh. A Mac Mini is too lightweight, a Mac Pro is more power and expense than I need, and I don't like all-in-one desktops, so that rules out the iMac. As so many people have said, if Apple sold a mid-range headless Mac, I'd be a very likely buyer.
A good model for such a machine might be the Lenovo ThinkCenter, one of which is on my desk at work, running Linux. The BIOS looks just like a Thinkpad BIOS, which makes me suspect this is basically a Thinkpad motherboard stuffed into a desktop case. It has front and rear USB and audio connectors, VGA and DVI, serial, parallel, and an eSATA port, in a roughly 13" x 12" by 4" high case. If Apple sold an equivalent headless machine, they'd have a lot of buyers, some among current Mac owners and especially from PC owners who want to preserve their investment in keyboard, mouse, and (especially) monitor.
Sure, it would pull some sales from the Mac Pro and more from the iMac, but it would still increase overall sales and market share.
No, it doesn't beg any question. Begging the question = circular reasoning.