" Another point i'll make is that these investment banks and brokerage houses really don't give a damn how good a security ACTUALLY is. Whether you, the investor, win or lose money doesn't much affect them. They want to see maximum volume, that is how they make their money. It is in their interest in fact to keep their mouths shut. "
Not entirely true. Sure, brokerage houses would make a lot of money if the volume simply went through the roof by reaping all of the commisions on the sale, but at the same time, this kinda reminds me of a store owner who rips off his customers is small almost unnoticeable amounts - sure, it's good for profits in the short term, but eventually your customers figure it out and go elsewhere - brokerage agencies don't just get you to buy as much as you can, but try to get you to buy what they consider to be quality - otherwise you don't come back. Repeat customers is what makes or breaks the business in any line of work - quick profits by looking out for nothing but your self interest rarely makes the most money in the long haul.
Opinions differ as to whether or not the stocks are actually overvalued or not...I've heard a lot of people including many slashdot posters claim that there's going to be a bloodbath probably this year on the stock market and such.
As it happens, I have a lot of relatives in the securities industry in one form or another. (People who work in pension plans, stock brokers, and so on) They seem to think that the market may be in for some type of "correction" but nothing like a major bloodbath or crash for a long time.
Specifically, I was told that "When your shoeshiner gives you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market" I.e. when everybody and his brother is borrowing money to play the stock market because they've never seen anything BUT a bullish market, you know that it's time to get out, because stocks are being used as a money-making tool completely independant from the company that you're investing in. And that's where the real shit hits the fan. Fortunately, in the opinion of many I have talked to, that hasn't happened yet.
Oh, one other note - maybe that whole stock overvalued thing is a moot point now - check the current price on VA stock (symbol LNUX) - they've been in a tailspin for a while. Mind you, they were so high that you can be in a tailspin for quite a while and still have a decent stock price, but they've lost a lot of ground nontheless.
Why no overall "plays nice with others" score? Well, it's because this isn't a benchmark that's intended to be the end-all, be-all of all benchmark tests. Of course they have to leave a lot of stuff out since operating systems are so complex, that if you were to test every single aspect of them, you would need an entire site, not just one published article, on how they work.
Besides, different people have different priorities - you'll notice how Redhat got slagged on the fact that some of their tools don't have graphical front ends, and some of them like linuxconf do "evil" things like resize to be larger than the size of your display. Horrors!:) But seriously, those things probably wouldn't be an issue if they had a UNIX admin do the test, somebody who was used to not having a graphical front end. In that case, maybe Win2000 would have ended up on the bottom.
The point is, that when you release a benchmark on something as complicated as an OS, you're going to miss a lot since there's too much to cover, and you're also going to be a bit biased by nature of the fact that the guy doing the reviewing probably isn't a seasoned professional on all of the OS's simultaneously. From the sound of the article in fact, he's probably a windows munkey.:)
The drawbacks to the Open Content license that you're pointing out seem to be all of the differences between the OC and the GPL. Think about it - doesn't give you a right to the source? (The GPL does) Doesn't allow you to sell at a profit? (The GPL does)
Check out the earlier comments about how you could actually use the GPL, particularly if you're going to have some type of document "source" ala LaTeX.
I'm unfortunately not going to be able to jump on IRC at that time to ask him some questions, but I'm sure it's going to generate some interesting info.
This is almost like an extended slashdot interview chance in my mind, with more judicious moderation since there will probably be several "Green Beret" IRC ops there to kick/ban anybody who goes off on some damn grits/natalie portman tangent.
Are we going to see an IRC log of this tomorrow? (Please say yes)
Well now we've got the ULTIMATE trojan, AOL version 5.0. Not only does it completely dominate your box, but it has a chirpy voice that says "You've got mail!" Where's that feature in BO2K?
It slices! It dices! It does all kinds of things that you didn't ask it to do that we know are for your own good!
Hmmm...I sort of agree with you, but in Nasdaq, you do seem to be limited to 4 characters to get your point across whereas on the web you can have a hostname like
whereas if that was a ticker symbol, LPR0N wouldn't even fit.:) Maybe it's a question of immediate recognizeability. Also, it may be that with trademarks, it's a game of picking nits, and "Linux Foo" contains the word "Linux" and therefore could possibly infringe on the trademark. But, LNUX, LINX don't contain the word "Linux" (I told you this was picking nits) and therefore don't infringe.
Just throwing out some ideas, I know more about eastern samoan jungle gym construction than I do about trademark law.
I'm not sure I get this...several places it mentions that the seller is rebutting arguments that it's unethical to sell off a piece of earth's history - and there seems to be a vague feel to the article that it may be unethical.
What's unethical about selling a piece of your own property? He mentioned that the ranch where it was found was going to get something like 10%. I don't know if he's obligated to do that or not, but he's doing it.
What could possibly be unethical about selling a T. Rex skeleton? A scientist made a comment about this skeleton "getting away from science" but I don't think that's unethical...just sucks for the scientists.:)
Guys like gates, love them or hate them, usually aren't motivated by money, and while he may make moves that are financially sound, I really doubt much of his motivation for doing anything is his own *personal* wealth. (Obviously he has micros~1's wealth in mind, otherwise he would have been kicked out of the CEO's chair by the stockholders)
Generally speaking, wealth is meausured in terms of orders of magnitude, not total dollar amounts. That's why somebody who has $9 million is in the same bracket as someone who has $1.2 million. Obviously, the difference of 7.8 million is a HUGE difference, but they're both "millionaires" and we leave it as that.
Billy isn't that close to jumping up another order of magnitude, because the higher you go, the harder it is to progress in terms of order of magnitude. In terms of day to day, and even life long decisions including providing for your next 3 generations, *there is no functional difference between having $5 billion and having $9 billion* Again, sure one is a hell of a lot more than the other (to the tune of $4 billion) but that is such an absurd amount of cash that I would think most people never touch the capital to begin with. You just stick it in reasonably conservative investments, and live like a king off of the interest.
Bill isn't dumb, he knows all this since he's probably got a small army of CPAs that just administer his finances. So let's be optimistic and say that with "Baby Bills" he could stand to end up $4 billion richer than he was before. WHO CARES??? He can't spend that amount in his lifetime, and it's doubtful his kids could either. (short of wholesale gambling and simply throwing it away). What's the motivation for earning the extra $4 billion? There isn't one...
Bill gets off on control and ego. He gets off on having one of the largest corporations on earth under his control, and being a celebrity probably. Money just can't be a motivating factor. If it is, then he is WAY more shallow than anyone could possibly have ever imagined. And comfortable living can't be it either, because he achieved that a long time ago.
I used to have 4 different email accounts of mine cracking keys for them on boxes at home, school, work, and I even tried to recruit friends to help me work on it. We had a decent team, and we were doing several thousand keys a day. It was fun.
But we've had problems with bugs in the clients, (like this extremely annoying transparency bug on windows) also the fact that there isn't a way to control your team efficiently - and to top it all off, they recently had a problem over there that DROPPED ALL OF MY MEMBERS FROM MY TEAM.
That was the last straw. That's a serious problem since 2 of the email addresses on my team aren't valid anymore so we can't rejoin that email address to the team. The boxes that are running using that email address are in a location we can't go to to change the setting there.
So, after all of the hassle, it stopped being fun. Particlarly when they dumped so many people from their teams. I stopped participating, and distributed.net lost about 20 clients. Maybe I'll try SETI or some other CPU donation project that has their shit together.
This naming scheme makes a lot of sense to me, but it would be a real bitch to remember domain names like this, not to mention the fact that once you have 40 different trademark areas, and god knows how many countries, instead of having to know only [com|net|edu|org] and so on, you have to know all of those suffixes and trademark areas just to know if the domain name is valid. Like, I think most geeks would recognize that
fooburger.food.mx
is a site in mexico, but not everybody does.
My main concern is that the more distinctions you have moving AWAY from [com|org|net|edu] the more your are taking a domain name and making it into something that can have as many combos as a dotted quad. And if a domain names can be as complicated to remember as dotted quads with ever increasing numbers of trademark domains and country codes, then what's the point of having domain names?
"Since this is a written medium, it's often hard to detect someone's 'tone' by what they're typing. Ever piss someone off because they misinterptreted something you emailed them? Without all of the vocal intonations, it's easy to have the meaning lost in this medium."
This is totally true. My post is just my reactions to the article, but you're right about the fact that you can't tell with the written word. Usually, people use the:) emoticon to tell you that they're not really serious if they say something harsh, and he didn't. I'm not attacking him further, just saying that those were my impressions
"Ever been repeatedly asked the same questions over, and over, and over again? If you were tech supporting some luser who called you three times a day asking which mouse button to use, and you taped a BIG sign to his monitor that said "USE THE LEFT MOUSE BUTTON", and he still called you, how would you behave?:) "
Sure, I can relate to that feeling, I just don't think it applies in this situation for several reasons:
1.) It was posted later on that indeed that is NOT a FAQ.:) 2.) It obviously must be worth answering, because since it was asked of him, it means that it was probably moderated to 5 and enough people thought it was interesting enough to warrant asking Rob about it. 3.) When Rob in this case acts pissy at being asked the same thing several times, he's not being rude to some random luser that asked a FAQ, he's being rude to everyone simulateously on slashdot. Usually there's a higher threshold for people before they'll act that way towards however many THOUSAND people are on slashdot 4.) Hemos seems to have restrained himself like a regular human all through the interview so it's hard for me to think that it's not possible for someone else.
Again, I claim no factual content at all to that, just my impressions.
Is it just me or is CmdrTaco sometimes act like a real ass?
I know this is definately going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really think that sometimes he just acts like an ass for its own sake. I can understand getting frustrated with script kiddies and first posters and the natalie portman statuette mafia etc. etc. etc. but his tone just seems so short and contentious when he writes things sometimes.
Maybe I'm picking nits. But when I see Hemos answer the questions, even when he's probably answered the same thing 10,000 times, he at least answers it graciously. From malda, you get things like "If you ask me again, I'll delay it 24 more hours" (which for me translates to, "If you ask me this question, I'll purposely do something to spite you that isn't productive for either of us") and also the moaning about the fact that somebody asked a FAQ. People ask FAQs all the time, but only elitist flamers from USENET seem to jump all over people who ask FAQs.
I can understand being strung out or busy or even flat out annoyed at the readers of slashdot, but there's no reason to not be at least a little bit gracious or patient with an interview that he decided to submit to himself. I've never met EITHER hemos or cmdrtaco in person, but I just get the feeling that hemos is probably more laid back and personable.
These are only my opinions, hate them as much as you want. (Which I'm sure plenty of you will take me up on)
I don't care to speculate at how many tech people were stuck behind desks while possibly their PHBs were in different rooms getting drunk and dancing on tables when the ball dropped.
I know that at my company, ALL of the UNIX admins and database people were required to be present from at least 11:00PM till whenever they thought it was OK for them to leave (which happened to be in the wee hours of the morning)
You can't really blame the guy for holding a grudge and of course everybody that knows something about the computer was right along with "Joe Computer" in despising the media sensationalism that brought the pseudo-terror to the masses and the very real profits to those of the media that were doing the fear-mongering.
I don't think that this "Open Letter" was the best worded or the best written thing that I've ever seen, but I think it does a decent job of summing up why the whole Y2K thing sucks from the administrator point of view. A decent read, anyway. I'm sure that some of the people at my job would get a chuckle out of it, so I'll pass it along.
With some of the acid in the letter though, I don't understand why the writer bothered to keep up the facade of sarcasm with all of the "Thank You"'s.:)
With the internet and linux in general, things change so fast, that I find it extremely hard to give any credit to people who write reports like this. Not that they're idiots, or that I'm flaming them, or that what they have to say isn't important, I just don't think it's going to be very accurate.
Consider that linux is much much bigger than a few hackers or even a large group of hackers. I've been using linux since the brand new 1.0 kernels, and things have changed so incredibly fast.
Really, if Linus were to write a report about where linux is going to be in 4 years, I don't think I'd believe him either.
I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that as far as technology is concerned, 4 years is practically forever. There are also so many other companies (like transmeta) that have things cooking that nobody knows about yet, I think it's foolish to make predictions about what things are going to be like 1 year from now.
That said, I'm not sure what purpose articles that try to play fortune teller serve.
They don't seem to be restricting the participation in this to developers - they just make you answer a lot of questions to get a temporary account.
I signed up for one, because I'm interested to try it out, but I'm somewhat worried that this could degenerate into a new type of contest - the "Hack Compaq's boxes" contest. I hope the script kiddies stay away...
Gin? Vermouth? Whiskey? Beer? I didn't hear "everclear" did I?
Sounds like my plan - the world may be going to end, and you may end up with hideously fatal wounds that will chew you apart from the nuclear fallout, but they won't even care because they'll be so sauced up they probably won't even look up from whatever game they're playing at the time.
Reminds me of a quote from a RedMeat comic strip -
"You know Karen, I've been troubled lately by the possibility that a giant meteor could come hurtling out of the sky at any moment. The initial cataclysmic impact would kill millions instantly. The ensuing cloud of dust, smoke, and steam would destroy all remaining life over the next few months. During that time, the survivors would play out their remaining days in a grisly carnival of cannibalism and unimaginable agony"
Be that as it may, I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one that will probably be somewhat impaired on new years eve.
You've got some good points - but I should probably point out that AFAIK, his suggestion had to do with elections where there were going to be 2 candidates running against each other. It probably wouldn't make sense to re-run an election like you said above, because it's pretty obvious that the 3rd loser who bombed out just isn't wanted at all whereas there are a lot of people who do want somebody else.
I personally don't like the idea of reallocation of votes - but that's just me. Similarly with previous posters, I feel that voters should vote for whoever is to them the right person for the job, NOT for who they think will win. Of course everybody likes to bet on the winning horse though. The reallocation of votes seems to me like something that would be more geared towards voting for the winner rather than the best guy, but it could possibly be a reasonble options. (i.e. the lesser of the evils between a, b, and c is c, but if C loses and it's just between a and b, then I vote b because b may be bad, but a is much worse)
I hate to be a cynical troll bastard, but the truth of the matter is that they probably would have lost horribly. I agree that it would be a very important precedent setter if they had won, but that knife cuts both ways.
What is the part of the pledge of allegiance that everybody learns but that is never actually *IN* the pledge of allegiance? "With Freedom, and Justice for all those who can afford it". Hate to say it, but whoever has more money generally wins due to better lawyers, and more expendable time/energy/money that gets put into winning it.
Actually, not voting does not mean that you're apathetic or that you don't give a damn. Check out the link in the article that's on the words "not vote" (I'm not looking at the story at the moment, I don't have the text)
It has a link to a site with a large number of philosophical reasons to stay home and avoid voting. And it's not about apathy.
A quote by Jello Biafra comes to mind - I don't really buy it, but it just popped into my head for some reason - "If voting CHANGED anything, they'd make it ILLEGAL. The Republicans are on the outside what the democrats are on the inside"
"I am proud to say that I don't belong to a single political party. Why? Because I make my own decisions. I support the candidate that best fits me, not the candidate with my favorite letter after their name."
Makes sense to me. But I didn't really think all that many people really identify themselves with republicans or democrats so strongly that they don't make their own decisions. It's just that the parties tend to fall in a certain spectrum. For example, if you feel strongly about the need to regulate gigantic businesses through legislation, it's pretty bloody unlikely that you're going to vote republican. Similarly, if you want to get rid of welfame and affirmitive action, I would think it would be very rare that the democrats would put somebody up that you'd want to vote for.
I was the guy who submitted the question - hopefully you checked out the David McReynolds link. I've been thinking more and more about voting for him if I see him on the ticket in my state. (Unfortunately, I find myself in Virginia) I agree with his views more than any other candidate, with some small nitpicking exceptions. In general though, I think it's worth voting for him even though I know he can't win, because IMHO (and I know this could draw flame because other people tend to have NSHO's) a vote for a third party candidate is like a protest vote, or equivalent to a "vote of no confidence"
For those of you who have ever heard any spoken word performances by Jello Biafra (yes, that's his name) he suggested something quite interesting - running the election as usual with an extra option - you could vote "No Confidence" on as many candidates as you wanted. And if any candidate had more than X% (where X is determined through the democratic process) of no confidence votes, the election would have to be redone, BARRING that candidate from the "redo" election, because voters had voted him off the ticket.
You would have to redo the whole thing though, since if there are two candidates, and one gets 60% no confidence, the guy who actually wins obviously wasn't running against a worthy opponent in the public's view. (i.e. it wasn't so much that he was good, but rather "The lesser of the two evils"
"Linux distros need to collude & combat black sheep"
Uhm...no. You do realize that that sounds exactly like something Micros~1 would do.
"If this IPO goes through and there's a fallout afterwards, this may suddenly undermine confidence in Linux, with Microsoft jumping on board and saying "SEE!? I TOLD YOU SO! IT WAS ALL HYPE!" and people who dont know any better, yet have their cash tied up in RedHat, will panic. "
This is likely anyway. Eventually, the economy is going to get to a point where it's not swelling like a zit on a 14 year old's face, and people who are playing the stock market are going to realize that they were smoking crack when they paid $300.00 for VA stock. (Don't get me wrong - I think they're both great companies, VA and Redhat, I just don't think they're worth the money that they're at. The stock price should have something to do with earnings in my book)
When the market corrects itself, redhat and VA are going to fall a bit. They're not going to fall like NetUSA did, but they will fall somewhat until their stock price is a bit more in line with what the company is. All fads wear off.
I agree with you that LinuxOne could catalyze that, (the linux aspect anyway, not the whole economy aspect) but I think it will happen anyway.
"This could spell trouble"
Yeah, well, do like most other people do and don't bother looking at linux or using it as a financial tool. Just use it as a kick ass OS. Again, I like redhat and VA, but I won't buy any of their stock anytime soon because I'm a programmer, and for some reason I just can't understand the brains of investors. The best bet (for me anyway) is to ignore linux IPO happenings when it comes to my own personal finances and enjoy linux as an OS.
"I think there needs to be an overall 'consortium' contributed to by all distributions (...)"
That sounds like a good idea IF you can find somebody who will play the benevolent dictator role. I'm not really worried about this distro though since I think that if a lot of the allegations in the article are true, the company will probably have a total of about 10 users (most of which is the board of the company) a year from now.
I also don't like the thought of a board like that, because it would be very easy for it to fall into an exclusionary game of who gets to play with linux and who doesn't.
Not really suprising that there would eventually be a company that comes up trying to get in on the cash feeding frenzy that seems to go hand in hand with Linux IPOs.
IMHO, any linux company that wants to survive several years past the date of their IPO probably will need to have at least a reasonable amount of goodwill from the community. As I see it, companies like VA and RedHat have that. LinuxOne probably doesn't. (And if they do, they probably won't for long)
There are enough daytraders out there that lost their asses on both redhat and VA (buying at the very peak and then watching it slide down to something more reasonable) and those were good companies. I think that LinuxOne in the IPO market has the real potential to make a few suicidal drunk wifebeating daytraders.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"
Another point i'll make is that these investment banks and brokerage houses really don't give a damn how good a security ACTUALLY is. Whether you, the investor, win or lose money doesn't much affect them. They want to see maximum volume, that is how they make their money. It is in their interest in fact to keep their mouths shut.
"
Not entirely true. Sure, brokerage houses would make a lot of money if the volume simply went through the roof by reaping all of the commisions on the sale, but at the same time, this kinda reminds me of a store owner who rips off his customers is small almost unnoticeable amounts - sure, it's good for profits in the short term, but eventually your customers figure it out and go elsewhere - brokerage agencies don't just get you to buy as much as you can, but try to get you to buy what they consider to be quality - otherwise you don't come back. Repeat customers is what makes or breaks the business in any line of work - quick profits by looking out for nothing but your self interest rarely makes the most money in the long haul.
Opinions differ as to whether or not the stocks are actually overvalued or not...I've heard a lot of people including many slashdot posters claim that there's going to be a bloodbath probably this year on the stock market and such.
As it happens, I have a lot of relatives in the securities industry in one form or another. (People who work in pension plans, stock brokers, and so on) They seem to think that the market may be in for some type of "correction" but nothing like a major bloodbath or crash for a long time.
Specifically, I was told that "When your shoeshiner gives you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market" I.e. when everybody and his brother is borrowing money to play the stock market because they've never seen anything BUT a bullish market, you know that it's time to get out, because stocks are being used as a money-making tool completely independant from the company that you're investing in. And that's where the real shit hits the fan. Fortunately, in the opinion of many I have talked to, that hasn't happened yet.
Oh, one other note - maybe that whole stock overvalued thing is a moot point now - check the current price on VA stock (symbol LNUX) - they've been in a tailspin for a while. Mind you, they were so high that you can be in a tailspin for quite a while and still have a decent stock price, but they've lost a lot of ground nontheless.
Why no overall "plays nice with others" score? Well, it's because this isn't a benchmark that's intended to be the end-all, be-all of all benchmark tests. Of course they have to leave a lot of stuff out since operating systems are so complex, that if you were to test every single aspect of them, you would need an entire site, not just one published article, on how they work.
:) But seriously, those things probably wouldn't be an issue if they had a UNIX admin do the test, somebody who was used to not having a graphical front end. In that case, maybe Win2000 would have ended up on the bottom.
:)
Besides, different people have different priorities - you'll notice how Redhat got slagged on the fact that some of their tools don't have graphical front ends, and some of them like linuxconf do "evil" things like resize to be larger than the size of your display. Horrors!
The point is, that when you release a benchmark on something as complicated as an OS, you're going to miss a lot since there's too much to cover, and you're also going to be a bit biased by nature of the fact that the guy doing the reviewing probably isn't a seasoned professional on all of the OS's simultaneously. From the sound of the article in fact, he's probably a windows munkey.
The drawbacks to the Open Content license that you're pointing out seem to be all of the differences between the OC and the GPL. Think about it - doesn't give you a right to the source? (The GPL does) Doesn't allow you to sell at a profit? (The GPL does)
Check out the earlier comments about how you could actually use the GPL, particularly if you're going to have some type of document "source" ala LaTeX.
I'm unfortunately not going to be able to jump on IRC at that time to ask him some questions, but I'm sure it's going to generate some interesting info.
This is almost like an extended slashdot interview chance in my mind, with more judicious moderation since there will probably be several "Green Beret" IRC ops there to kick/ban anybody who goes off on some damn grits/natalie portman tangent.
Are we going to see an IRC log of this tomorrow? (Please say yes)
You think BO2K is bad???
:)
Well now we've got the ULTIMATE trojan, AOL version 5.0. Not only does it completely dominate your box, but it has a chirpy voice that says "You've got mail!" Where's that feature in BO2K?
It slices! It dices! It does all kinds of things that you didn't ask it to do that we know are for your own good!
AOL 5.0: Ph33r it.
Hmmm...I sort of agree with you, but in Nasdaq, you do seem to be limited to 4 characters to get your point across whereas on the web you can have a hostname like
h ardcore-pr0n.com/
:) Maybe it's a question of immediate recognizeability. Also, it may be that with trademarks, it's a game of picking nits, and "Linux Foo" contains the word "Linux" and therefore could possibly infringe on the trademark. But, LNUX, LINX don't contain the word "Linux" (I told you this was picking nits) and therefore don't infringe.
http://extremely-infringing-linux-site-selling-
whereas if that was a ticker symbol, LPR0N wouldn't even fit.
Just throwing out some ideas, I know more about eastern samoan jungle gym construction than I do about trademark law.
I'm not sure I get this...several places it mentions that the seller is rebutting arguments that it's unethical to sell off a piece of earth's history - and there seems to be a vague feel to the article that it may be unethical.
:)
What's unethical about selling a piece of your own property? He mentioned that the ranch where it was found was going to get something like 10%. I don't know if he's obligated to do that or not, but he's doing it.
What could possibly be unethical about selling a T. Rex skeleton? A scientist made a comment about this skeleton "getting away from science" but I don't think that's unethical...just sucks for the scientists.
Guys like gates, love them or hate them, usually aren't motivated by money, and while he may make moves that are financially sound, I really doubt much of his motivation for doing anything is his own *personal* wealth. (Obviously he has micros~1's wealth in mind, otherwise he would have been kicked out of the CEO's chair by the stockholders)
Generally speaking, wealth is meausured in terms of orders of magnitude, not total dollar amounts. That's why somebody who has $9 million is in the same bracket as someone who has $1.2 million. Obviously, the difference of 7.8 million is a HUGE difference, but they're both "millionaires" and we leave it as that.
Billy isn't that close to jumping up another order of magnitude, because the higher you go, the harder it is to progress in terms of order of magnitude. In terms of day to day, and even life long decisions including providing for your next 3 generations, *there is no functional difference between having $5 billion and having $9 billion* Again, sure one is a hell of a lot more than the other (to the tune of $4 billion) but that is such an absurd amount of cash that I would think most people never touch the capital to begin with. You just stick it in reasonably conservative investments, and live like a king off of the interest.
Bill isn't dumb, he knows all this since he's probably got a small army of CPAs that just administer his finances. So let's be optimistic and say that with "Baby Bills" he could stand to end up $4 billion richer than he was before. WHO CARES??? He can't spend that amount in his lifetime, and it's doubtful his kids could either. (short of wholesale gambling and simply throwing it away). What's the motivation for earning the extra $4 billion? There isn't one...
Bill gets off on control and ego. He gets off on having one of the largest corporations on earth under his control, and being a celebrity probably. Money just can't be a motivating factor. If it is, then he is WAY more shallow than anyone could possibly have ever imagined. And comfortable living can't be it either, because he achieved that a long time ago.
I used to have 4 different email accounts of mine cracking keys for them on boxes at home, school, work, and I even tried to recruit friends to help me work on it. We had a decent team, and we were doing several thousand keys a day. It was fun.
But we've had problems with bugs in the clients, (like this extremely annoying transparency bug on windows) also the fact that there isn't a way to control your team efficiently - and to top it all off, they recently had a problem over there that DROPPED ALL OF MY MEMBERS FROM MY TEAM.
That was the last straw. That's a serious problem since 2 of the email addresses on my team aren't valid anymore so we can't rejoin that email address to the team. The boxes that are running using that email address are in a location we can't go to to change the setting there.
So, after all of the hassle, it stopped being fun. Particlarly when they dumped so many people from their teams. I stopped participating, and distributed.net lost about 20 clients. Maybe I'll try SETI or some other CPU donation project that has their shit together.
This naming scheme makes a lot of sense to me, but it would be a real bitch to remember domain names like this, not to mention the fact that once you have 40 different trademark areas, and god knows how many countries, instead of having to know only [com|net|edu|org] and so on, you have to know all of those suffixes and trademark areas just to know if the domain name is valid. Like, I think most geeks would recognize that
fooburger.food.mx
is a site in mexico, but not everybody does.
My main concern is that the more distinctions you have moving AWAY from [com|org|net|edu] the more your are taking a domain name and making it into something that can have as many combos as a dotted quad. And if a domain names can be as complicated to remember as dotted quads with ever increasing numbers of trademark domains and country codes, then what's the point of having domain names?
I've never been a .sig before. Thanks for my 1.0 E -20 seconds of fame! :)
But of course the way you frame the sig, in that context, it reminds me of a sig that I saw: "Help eliminate and abolish redundancy!!!"
"Since this is a written medium, it's often hard to detect someone's 'tone' by what they're typing. Ever piss someone off because they misinterptreted something you emailed them? Without all of the vocal intonations, it's easy to have the meaning lost in this medium."
:) emoticon to tell you that they're not really serious if they say something harsh, and he didn't. I'm not attacking him further, just saying that those were my impressions
:) "
:)
This is totally true. My post is just my reactions to the article, but you're right about the fact that you can't tell with the written word. Usually, people use the
"Ever been repeatedly asked the same questions over, and over, and over again? If you were tech
supporting some luser who called you three times a day asking which mouse button to use, and you taped a BIG sign to his monitor that said "USE THE LEFT MOUSE BUTTON", and he still called you, how
would you behave?
Sure, I can relate to that feeling, I just don't think it applies in this situation for several reasons:
1.) It was posted later on that indeed that is NOT a FAQ.
2.) It obviously must be worth answering, because since it was asked of him, it means that it was probably moderated to 5 and enough people thought it was interesting enough to warrant asking Rob about it.
3.) When Rob in this case acts pissy at being asked the same thing several times, he's not being rude to some random luser that asked a FAQ, he's being rude to everyone simulateously on slashdot. Usually there's a higher threshold for people before they'll act that way towards however many THOUSAND people are on slashdot
4.) Hemos seems to have restrained himself like a regular human all through the interview so it's hard for me to think that it's not possible for someone else.
Again, I claim no factual content at all to that, just my impressions.
Is it just me or is CmdrTaco sometimes act like a real ass?
I know this is definately going to be an unpopular opinion, but I really think that sometimes he just acts like an ass for its own sake. I can understand getting frustrated with script kiddies and first posters and the natalie portman statuette mafia etc. etc. etc. but his tone just seems so short and contentious when he writes things sometimes.
Maybe I'm picking nits. But when I see Hemos answer the questions, even when he's probably answered the same thing 10,000 times, he at least answers it graciously. From malda, you get things like "If you ask me again, I'll delay it 24 more hours" (which for me translates to, "If you ask me this question, I'll purposely do something to spite you that isn't productive for either of us") and also the moaning about the fact that somebody asked a FAQ. People ask FAQs all the time, but only elitist flamers from USENET seem to jump all over people who ask FAQs.
I can understand being strung out or busy or even flat out annoyed at the readers of slashdot, but there's no reason to not be at least a little bit gracious or patient with an interview that he decided to submit to himself. I've never met EITHER hemos or cmdrtaco in person, but I just get the feeling that hemos is probably more laid back and personable.
These are only my opinions, hate them as much as you want. (Which I'm sure plenty of you will take me up on)
I don't care to speculate at how many tech people were stuck behind desks while possibly their PHBs were in different rooms getting drunk and dancing on tables when the ball dropped.
:)
I know that at my company, ALL of the UNIX admins and database people were required to be present from at least 11:00PM till whenever they thought it was OK for them to leave (which happened to be in the wee hours of the morning)
You can't really blame the guy for holding a grudge and of course everybody that knows something about the computer was right along with "Joe Computer" in despising the media sensationalism that brought the pseudo-terror to the masses and the very real profits to those of the media that were doing the fear-mongering.
I don't think that this "Open Letter" was the best worded or the best written thing that I've ever seen, but I think it does a decent job of summing up why the whole Y2K thing sucks from the administrator point of view. A decent read, anyway. I'm sure that some of the people at my job would get a chuckle out of it, so I'll pass it along.
With some of the acid in the letter though, I don't understand why the writer bothered to keep up the facade of sarcasm with all of the "Thank You"'s.
But then again, is that so bad?
Blatant promotion: http://www.heck.com/annie/
For those who have never heard of Annie Sprinkle, she's a sex positive uhm, performance artist who has some very interesting things to say.
And you can't really say that linux doesn't have anything to do with sex, since ESR has been jerking us around for years
With the internet and linux in general, things change so fast, that I find it extremely hard to give any credit to people who write reports like this. Not that they're idiots, or that I'm flaming them, or that what they have to say isn't important, I just don't think it's going to be very accurate.
Consider that linux is much much bigger than a few hackers or even a large group of hackers. I've been using linux since the brand new 1.0 kernels, and things have changed so incredibly fast.
Really, if Linus were to write a report about where linux is going to be in 4 years, I don't think I'd believe him either.
I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that as far as technology is concerned, 4 years is practically forever. There are also so many other companies (like transmeta) that have things cooking that nobody knows about yet, I think it's foolish to make predictions about what things are going to be like 1 year from now.
That said, I'm not sure what purpose articles that try to play fortune teller serve.
Just my $0.02
They don't seem to be restricting the participation in this to developers - they just make you answer a lot of questions to get a temporary account.
I signed up for one, because I'm interested to try it out, but I'm somewhat worried that this could degenerate into a new type of contest - the "Hack Compaq's boxes" contest. I hope the script kiddies stay away...
Gin? Vermouth? Whiskey? Beer? I didn't hear "everclear" did I?
Sounds like my plan - the world may be going to end, and you may end up with hideously fatal wounds that will chew you apart from the nuclear fallout, but they won't even care because they'll be so sauced up they probably won't even look up from whatever game they're playing at the time.
Reminds me of a quote from a RedMeat comic strip -
"You know Karen, I've been troubled lately by the possibility that a giant meteor could come hurtling out of the sky at any moment. The initial cataclysmic impact would kill millions instantly. The ensuing cloud of dust, smoke, and steam would destroy all remaining life over the next few months. During that time, the survivors would play out their remaining days in a grisly carnival of cannibalism and unimaginable agony"
Be that as it may, I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one that will probably be somewhat impaired on new years eve.
You've got some good points - but I should probably point out that AFAIK, his suggestion had to do with elections where there were going to be 2 candidates running against each other. It probably wouldn't make sense to re-run an election like you said above, because it's pretty obvious that the 3rd loser who bombed out just isn't wanted at all whereas there are a lot of people who do want somebody else.
I personally don't like the idea of reallocation of votes - but that's just me. Similarly with previous posters, I feel that voters should vote for whoever is to them the right person for the job, NOT for who they think will win. Of course everybody likes to bet on the winning horse though. The reallocation of votes seems to me like something that would be more geared towards voting for the winner rather than the best guy, but it could possibly be a reasonble options. (i.e. the lesser of the evils between a, b, and c is c, but if C loses and it's just between a and b, then I vote b because b may be bad, but a is much worse)
I hate to be a cynical troll bastard, but the truth of the matter is that they probably would have lost horribly. I agree that it would be a very important precedent setter if they had won, but that knife cuts both ways.
What is the part of the pledge of allegiance that everybody learns but that is never actually *IN* the pledge of allegiance? "With Freedom, and Justice for all those who can afford it". Hate to say it, but whoever has more money generally wins due to better lawyers, and more expendable time/energy/money that gets put into winning it.
Actually, not voting does not mean that you're apathetic or that you don't give a damn. Check out the link in the article that's on the words "not vote" (I'm not looking at the story at the moment, I don't have the text)
It has a link to a site with a large number of philosophical reasons to stay home and avoid voting. And it's not about apathy.
A quote by Jello Biafra comes to mind - I don't really buy it, but it just popped into my head for some reason - "If voting CHANGED anything, they'd make it ILLEGAL. The Republicans are on the outside what the democrats are on the inside"
"I am proud to say that I don't belong to a single political party. Why? Because I make my own decisions. I support the candidate that best fits me, not the candidate with my favorite letter after their name."
Makes sense to me. But I didn't really think all that many people really identify themselves with republicans or democrats so strongly that they don't make their own decisions. It's just that the parties tend to fall in a certain spectrum. For example, if you feel strongly about the need to regulate gigantic businesses through legislation, it's pretty bloody unlikely that you're going to vote republican. Similarly, if you want to get rid of welfame and affirmitive action, I would think it would be very rare that the democrats would put somebody up that you'd want to vote for.
I was the guy who submitted the question - hopefully you checked out the David McReynolds link. I've been thinking more and more about voting for him if I see him on the ticket in my state. (Unfortunately, I find myself in Virginia) I agree with his views more than any other candidate, with some small nitpicking exceptions. In general though, I think it's worth voting for him even though I know he can't win, because IMHO (and I know this could draw flame because other people tend to have NSHO's) a vote for a third party candidate is like a protest vote, or equivalent to a "vote of no confidence"
For those of you who have ever heard any spoken word performances by Jello Biafra (yes, that's his name) he suggested something quite interesting - running the election as usual with an extra option - you could vote "No Confidence" on as many candidates as you wanted. And if any candidate had more than X% (where X is determined through the democratic process) of no confidence votes, the election would have to be redone, BARRING that candidate from the "redo" election, because voters had voted him off the ticket.
You would have to redo the whole thing though, since if there are two candidates, and one gets 60% no confidence, the guy who actually wins obviously wasn't running against a worthy opponent in the public's view. (i.e. it wasn't so much that he was good, but rather "The lesser of the two evils"
My ~3.2 Pfennigs
"Linux distros need to collude & combat black sheep"
Uhm...no. You do realize that that sounds exactly like something Micros~1 would do.
"If this IPO goes through and there's a fallout afterwards, this may suddenly undermine confidence in Linux, with Microsoft jumping on board and saying "SEE!? I TOLD YOU SO! IT WAS ALL HYPE!" and people who dont know any better, yet have their cash tied up in RedHat, will panic. "
This is likely anyway. Eventually, the economy is going to get to a point where it's not swelling like a zit on a 14 year old's face, and people who are playing the stock market are going to realize that they were smoking crack when they paid $300.00 for VA stock. (Don't get me wrong - I think they're both great companies, VA and Redhat, I just don't think they're worth the money that they're at. The stock price should have something to do with earnings in my book)
When the market corrects itself, redhat and VA are going to fall a bit. They're not going to fall like NetUSA did, but they will fall somewhat until their stock price is a bit more in line with what the company is. All fads wear off.
I agree with you that LinuxOne could catalyze that, (the linux aspect anyway, not the whole economy aspect) but I think it will happen anyway.
"This could spell trouble"
Yeah, well, do like most other people do and don't bother looking at linux or using it as a financial tool. Just use it as a kick ass OS. Again, I like redhat and VA, but I won't buy any of their stock anytime soon because I'm a programmer, and for some reason I just can't understand the brains of investors. The best bet (for me anyway) is to ignore linux IPO happenings when it comes to my own personal finances and enjoy linux as an OS.
"I think there needs to be an overall 'consortium'
contributed to by all distributions (...)"
That sounds like a good idea IF you can find somebody who will play the benevolent dictator role. I'm not really worried about this distro though since I think that if a lot of the allegations in the article are true, the company will probably have a total of about 10 users (most of which is the board of the company) a year from now.
I also don't like the thought of a board like that, because it would be very easy for it to fall into an exclusionary game of who gets to play with linux and who doesn't.
MDA
Not really suprising that there would eventually be a company that comes up trying to get in on the cash feeding frenzy that seems to go hand in hand with Linux IPOs.
:)
IMHO, any linux company that wants to survive several years past the date of their IPO probably will need to have at least a reasonable amount of goodwill from the community. As I see it, companies like VA and RedHat have that. LinuxOne probably doesn't. (And if they do, they probably won't for long)
There are enough daytraders out there that lost their asses on both redhat and VA (buying at the very peak and then watching it slide down to something more reasonable) and those were good companies. I think that LinuxOne in the IPO market has the real potential to make a few suicidal drunk wifebeating daytraders.