Well, that's pretty much what I heard, but I was reluctant to name a figure when I posted that because I wasn't sure. It's something like that though.
The main point is that they don't live very bloody long. What a crap job. Unless you have a psychopathic love of football, why give up your life for millions of dollars when you can do a different sport, earn just as much money, and live a normal life.
The funny part about this is that he probably won't have nearly as much long term negative health impact as the average NFL player. I've read in several places that NFL players shorten their lives by many years by punishing their bodies in the way that they do.
Who knows? Some people are junkies for pain, and some people subscribe to the 80's skater creed; "Chicks dig scars, pain is temporary, glory is forever".:)
It's not necessarily "old school" to use xclock and xcalc a lot on your desktop; they're very functional tools that get the job done. Well, ok, it's old school if you happen to be a linux user who spends a lot of time on the bleeding edge of software development (I do sometimes, but I'm not a kamikaze bleeding edger like some people:)
I think the "old school" aspect is less related to the fact that the applications are old, and more related to the fact that the toolkit that they use, be that motif/athena or whatever has an older look and feel to it. I think as more and more time goes by, more and more people get used to the look and feel of KDE or Gnome, which looks better and generally more slick because the looks have been more of a focus point in their development as users don't necessarily have all of the memory/CPU limitations that they did in the past.
That could be total shit, but it's just my opinion. For the record, I use xcalc a whole lot because the math hasn't changed:) and it loads very quickly. Also, if you learn a few tools with standard toolkit options and so on, then you'll be comfortable wherever you go.
I've used it back in the 2.0 tree and a bit in the 3.0 tree, and it's generally pretty nice.
It is very similar to CDE with enough things done differently to throw you off a little bit when you first start, but not enough things to make the transition from CDE to Xfce bad or annoying or anything like that.
I'm not so sure that it lives up to its billing as light weight but then again my machine isn't the beefiest in the world, and there are plenty of things that are slower than it. For example, next to, say, enlightenment, it is very light weight but it's not necessarily all that light compared to maybe afterstep or fvwm2 or some of the more graphically simple window managers. (Which are only graphically more simple in comparison to enlightenment)
It's all around definately worth using though, especially for corporate users who are very much used to the standard stock CDE that comes with so many commericial UNIXen - and it's based off of GTK+ which is a plus as far as I'm concerned.
It's not the end all be all, but it's fairly stable, decent looking, not overly memory hungry, looks familiar (and looks good, if you like the look of CDE) - I wouldn't say that it introduces anything radically new into the idea of window managers, but it's definately worth a look and maybe worth using depending on what you want out of a windowmanager.
There are so many people who want so many different things out of window managers that it's hard to say "This is the best" because they seem to have different domains in my mind. For example, I really like enlightenment/gnome combo, but when I'm coding or doing something where I really don't want to be "visually distracted" then I really don't dig enlightenment. Sure it's arguable that you can set up any window manager to look however you want it to, but I really don't spend all that much time hacking into the deepest darkest corners of window managers - and in that respect, I think xfce is good because it works quite nicely right out of the rpm so to speak.
I also checked out some of the screenshots from the article that is linked in this story, and they seem extremely windowish. Right down to the file manager, whose toplevel entry is "My Linux" (apparently a modification of "My Computer" in windows)
I can understand their desire to appeal to a certain segment of the market, and I think that they're doing just that. But I don't think I'd use it personally because of that. I didn't stop using windows just because I didn't think it was a stable OS (although that was one of the reasons) I stopped using it also because I thought the UI was boring and unimaginative. Look at X, and linux, and you have 2.0E50 choices for how you want to interact graphically with your machine. I would hate to go back to the same old UI after going through the linux learning curve.
Points to them though for making the install easier, and for making linux friendly to new people. I just hope that they don't make it so windowish over time that it loses its soul as a UNIX. That kind of worry is probably premature at this point, but I still wonder.
Seems to me though that another free software distribution stepping to the plate though means one thing - more choice. That's another reason why I'm in linux in the first place too. (Even if I don't plan on using it, I still like the fact that the choice is there)
It seems that the bums are going to be making processors!!!
I feel so used...after all of this time, I was *SURE* that they were going to be making a better suntan lotion or maybe golf visors, and instead they come out with a microchip??? How SHOCKING!!:)
Everytime I come into work at this major corporation that I work for, and find people who manage people, people who manage people who manage people, and people who train the people managing the people who manage the people, and even people who don't do ANYTHING at all, I realize, we've come quite a long way from subsistance farming and feudalism back in 1000 or even 1600 for that matter.
Think about the diverse tasks and how few of us are actually involved in production of the means by which we all live, yet at the same time we all do live. Efficiency gains and technology have allowed 2% of us to feed the other 98%, freeing them up to hack code.:)
They seem to have been quite a good company - cranking out free software and working most notably on egcs I think.
If redhat buys them, it's because they see the value in the company. Let's just hope that redhat doesn't mess with success and lets them continue to do what they're good at and what made them attractive to redhat in the first place.
Come on. Everybody knows that it's fun to slag a pariah like JP.
But seriously...don't worry about it too much. He really isn't any better than just your typical punk ass barely-out-of-his-teens fool who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
You could look at it as a case of a large number of people going on a witchhunt for an innocent person ala McCarthy, or you could look at it as what it probably more likely is, which is openly rebelling and letting a total asshole know what you think of him.
JP Is the "National Enquirer" of computer security. Think about it.
That's pretty interesting, but I don't believe the bit about letting off heat. It makes sense intuitively, but at the same time, in dreaming, and in different types of sleep, your brain is moving very far, very fast at the same time, which you would assume would generate heat.
Just my $0.02. Not that this thread is even remotely on topic anyway.:)
"In the past, I have avoided presuming to speak for the whole Linux community. This time, however, I think I may safely say that this news will come as a vast relief to all of us."
Has he ever avoided speaking for the community? I hadn't noticed. In fact, when he wrote all that rot about "Take my job please" didn't he mention how hard it was being "the spokesperson for the community"?
The People's Republic of China is of course just a hollow dictatorial government, trying to further its own agenda by adopting linux as the official OS. (That is if it even happened - read the article) But why does ESR feel he has to speak up and in some cases speak for the linux community on every issue? He presents himself as the face that we show people that are not in the linux community. I hope that isn't truel
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer? That sounds like definate search and seizure, which I thought couldn't be done without a warrant, definately not done just because a record company wanted you to.
I'm not sure if what he wrote technically qualifies as free software, because I don't know about the license that was on the original PGP, but think about it...PGP deserves something, even if it's past the time when he should have gotten an award.
A good program that you could get the source code to - the first psycho-strong crypto program that I remember that ran on the PC. It might not have been the first, but it was certainly one of the best and it brought "Encryption for the masses" which I remember seeing as a tagline in practically all the README's that came with PGP.
Ahhh..how fondly I remember my pre-win 3.1 DOS days where I would sit about as a total newbie trying to figure out how the hell to use the 10,000 command line switches in PGP.
Anybody have specific info on the license of the original PGP source?
As long as they have a privacy statement? Doesn't that maybe need something particular added on to it, like "An *appropriate* privacy statement"?
Privacy statements can be buried on a page or contain tricky wording that when deciphered can often come out to something like this:
FooSoft promises to never use this information in a way which would be detrimental to our consumer's privacy when it coincides with FooSoft's financial interests. Should the financial interests of FooSoft dictate that distributing information gathered from clients is in the interest of FooSoft's bottom line, appropriate actions will be taken to safeguard investor value in FooSoft.
What do you expect companies to do? Pass up an opportunity to gather important marketing information?
Privacy hasn't been really possible ever since the real marketing sharks started to hit the internet. Remember, even though companies aren't ethical for the most part, they're not stupid. They wouldn't bother getting their codejockeys to put this stuff into the software if it wasn't making them big bucks in one way or another. It doesn't give companies a stiffy to have power over you and use your information, it's just that they're making money off of it, and that's why they do it.
Public companies are a real bitch, because of the diffusion of responsibility. Even if they have people inside the organization that realize something is legal, yet unethical, it still gets done, because there really isn't a big boss that can say "We're doing this, and not that". There is to a point, in the CEO/CFO, but at the same time, they owe their jobs to the board and the stockholders. Failure to be ruthless and relentless in the name of corporate profits for the shareholders results in losing your job if you live in CEO land.
Privacy hasn't existed for years and years. My first internet experience was when AOL was brand new, and I got connected with my state-of-the-art 14.4 modem. Wow was that fast. Even back then I remember getting UCE, and having marketing things tossed at me that were quite strange in their approach. (i.e. why is it that when I started, I saw ads for generic things, but the more I go along, the more specifically computer targetted ads I see? Does that have anything to do with the bulk of information I'm after?)
The only way you can really have privacy is to use other people's networks, never sign up for an ISP or give out your name, address, email, phone, or other information, and keep changing computers so as to dodge cookies, and other "features" of the software that we don't know about yet.
Has it ever occurred to anybody that every once in a while, people will discover one of these privacy violating features and everybody will be shocked and outraged about it - ever wonder how many of them are out there that we don't know about?
It's arguable that people who would go to the trouble to go searching for web articles on a company to check the company's validity and then not read the articles would have fallen into the trap anyway.
I think you're giving LinuxOne more credit for being devious than they really deserve. I don't think that this is a masterminded plot on the part of LinuxOne to screw people over, I think it's a simpleminded unethical scheme, no more, no less.
And besides, what is slashdot supposed to do? See a company that is probably violating the GPL, taking other people's material, lying, and producing nothing but vapor and think to itself "Oh well..." - I don't think that's ever been slashdot's style.:)
Not really for Linux users. I doubt that linuxone will put out anything new that linux users will be interested in having the source to, even it if would be licensed under the GPL. You never know though, they may come up with an ultra-portable, 25 language version of Hello World.
This sounds like stock speculation to me. It also sounds like a bunch of daytraders are going to possibly ruin their lives over companies like this. The article mentions that the CEO's previous venture, NetUSA, nosedived in stock value, and is now sitting at about $0.62. That's pretty incredible. It takes real talent in an economy this hot to have a stock price that bad. And also the fact that the CEO is the only person who owns any stock? If I were him, I would IPO, and as soon as all of the shares were sold that were being offered to the company, sell all of mine, do something stupid, declare bankruptcy, and walk off with god knows how much cash.
Wow, this could be the tech stock scam of the year. I think that a lot of people on wall street are going to see it for what it is before they invest in it, but I think a lot of other people are just going to buy in, trying to get their dollars into the next Microsoft or whatever the hell they think this is going to be.
As far as the software is concerned, I'm just going to ignore it. And if the security problems at their site are as bad as the author of the article suggests, be on the look out for some script kiddie to crack it Real Soon Now.
Copy a distro, slap a penguin on the cover, sell it, IPO, make big bucks,.......and then change your name and move to another state to start the next lame company attempting to ride "the next big wave"
I believe this was in the New Yorker. One of those one-paned cartoons.
A bum sits on the street holding a sign that says "Spare a dime?". He is totally ignored. Look down the street a half a block, and a man is sitting on the street with people crowded around throwing money at him in large amounts. He is holding a sign that says "SpareADime.com"
Just goes to show that in some economic climates you get a feeling that you just can't lose. I think that the stock price for a lot of those high tech companies is vastly overvalued, and therefore bad for the economy, but investors do what they want to, because the stock market and the economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.
I think RedHat is a fabulous company, and of course I wish I had bought their stock when it IPO'd, but I think that even though it's fallen significantly from its highs right after the IPO it's still overvalued. Same with these Cobalt clowns - I don't mean to come down on the company really, I'm just thinking that you can expect their stock price to take a nosedive, and then straighten itself out and begin rising steadily probably in the $80 range or so if Redhat has taught us anything.
One thing is for sure: In IPO land, unless you get in right at the offering price, it sounds like speculative day trading to me. I guarantee many people are going to lose their ass because of cobalt stock within the next 2-3 weeks because of profit takers realizing that the market has gone irrationally high on the price and taking their profits.
I noticed that RMS made some pokes back at the accusations that are often leveled against him - an off the cuff comment about Marxism and so on.
Results are results! RMS wants you to follow his philosophy, but you don't have to agree with the underlying foundations. Consider the fact that in the supreme court when all the justices vote the same way on a case, there could still be more than one opinion written, because sometimes people agree on things *for differnet reasons*.
I'm guessing that probably the majority of us GNU freaks, (of which I am proud to call myself one although I do not claim to speak for everyone) would say to most "doubters" *Use the software*. If you like it, patronize it in whatever way you think is appropriate. If you don't like it, then feel FREE to go your own way.
>Dracula was about a great warrior for good >turning into an evil monster who destroyed and >corrupted all he held dear.
True, true, except for the fact that dracula didn't kill people "because they pissed him off" or smoke dope and inhale freon.
>Looks to me that expanding on the basic concept, >this kids story, rather than a terrorist threat, >could have become a great classic of horror.
Sorry, I don't see it. I remember being in school which was not all that long ago since I'm only 21, and I remember assignments like this. This is the kind of thing that I would write because I wanted to freak my teacher out or get people upset. It's the kind of thing that a kid can do because it fits the assignment, so straight off the bat any punishment is unjust, yet at the same time, it defies the "purpose" of the assignment.
Now I can't believe he got a 100 for that piece of writing, although I don't claim to be up on writing standards for (7th?) graders. But that's beside the point. Seems to me to be primarily a case of neither a dangerous person exposing his intent, nor a case of a completely harmless event, but just a case of a regular smart ass kid, freak/geek or not, who just wanted to rattle people's cages.
Never underestimate the amount of time that people are willing to dedicate to pirating software. I have faith that no matter what microsoft does, there will be *somebody*, *somewhere*, who will figure out how to pirate it so that all the w4r3z d00d2 can put it up on their FTP servers.
It seems like corporations have been fighting a losing battle against piracy ever since the days of the original King's Quest games. I understand why they do it, but I don't know what makes them think they'll actually get ahead this time.
I can't say whether an information system like this is going to be the wave of the future. Truth is, I can't even say what computing is going to be like just one year down the road, and I don't think anybody else can either.
Yadda yadda the industry moves so fast yadda yadda technology is wonderful but aside from the fact that technology does move fast, sometimes it goes in weird directions and just throws everybody for a loop. For example, it could be that instead of worry about these information systems online, somebody is going to build us a working quantum computer, and that will be "the future" or robotic roaches the size of dust particles, (all those nano-tech articles) or maybe brain implants so we can all plug 10baseT into our ears and forgo the computer altogether as far as connectivity is concerned.
Obviously some of those are a bit more plausible than others, but none of them are *impossible* (well, maybe the ethernet idea) Truth be known, it's likely that "the future" is none of those but rather something much more deliciously weird that will leave geeks the world over twitching in technological ecstasy. (If you don't know what technological ecstasy is, expose yourself to a 486 as your only computer for 4 years and then upgrade to a 400Mhz jobbie)
I thought at one point that this would be a good idea, but I'm worried that it would foster too much competition and people just spewing out comments that are OK, or somewhat average, just hoping for a few that might get a few moderation points out of the moderators.
Oh, and I think that I might be able to tell you off hand who some of the people are with the highest karmas - often, somebody who is "known" within the community, e.g. ESR, Perens, maybe Havoc Pennington, or somebody like that will post in response to an article about them or written by them to answer questions relating to the article. Because they are the topic, and they are "known", they almost always get moderated straight up into the sky, because people like them.
I don't have any objection to that, I think if Perens posts about an article relating to himself, that's relevant, and he deserves to be moderated up. Just observing that "known" people usually have ridiculously high karmas.
Oh, and I know what you mean about the offtopic posts - it would be nice to have different moderations like Offtopic-Interesting that would maybe be worth +1 or +0.5 and Offtopic-Troll or whatever that would be the normal -1.
Slashdot Mirror
Now why on earth would SGI sell a company like Cray for less than what it costs to buy one of Cray's boxes? :)
Well, that's pretty much what I heard, but I was reluctant to name a figure when I posted that because I wasn't sure. It's something like that though.
The main point is that they don't live very bloody long. What a crap job. Unless you have a psychopathic love of football, why give up your life for millions of dollars when you can do a different sport, earn just as much money, and live a normal life.
The funny part about this is that he probably won't have nearly as much long term negative health impact as the average NFL player. I've read in several places that NFL players shorten their lives by many years by punishing their bodies in the way that they do.
:)
Who knows? Some people are junkies for pain, and some people subscribe to the 80's skater creed; "Chicks dig scars, pain is temporary, glory is forever".
It's not necessarily "old school" to use xclock and xcalc a lot on your desktop; they're very functional tools that get the job done. Well, ok, it's old school if you happen to be a linux user who spends a lot of time on the bleeding edge of software development (I do sometimes, but I'm not a kamikaze bleeding edger like some people :)
:) and it loads very quickly. Also, if you learn a few tools with standard toolkit options and so on, then you'll be comfortable wherever you go.
I think the "old school" aspect is less related to the fact that the applications are old, and more related to the fact that the toolkit that they use, be that motif/athena or whatever has an older look and feel to it. I think as more and more time goes by, more and more people get used to the look and feel of KDE or Gnome, which looks better and generally more slick because the looks have been more of a focus point in their development as users don't necessarily have all of the memory/CPU limitations that they did in the past.
That could be total shit, but it's just my opinion. For the record, I use xcalc a whole lot because the math hasn't changed
I've used it back in the 2.0 tree and a bit in the 3.0 tree, and it's generally pretty nice.
It is very similar to CDE with enough things done differently to throw you off a little bit when you first start, but not enough things to make the transition from CDE to Xfce bad or annoying or anything like that.
I'm not so sure that it lives up to its billing as light weight but then again my machine isn't the beefiest in the world, and there are plenty of things that are slower than it. For example, next to, say, enlightenment, it is very light weight but it's not necessarily all that light compared to maybe afterstep or fvwm2 or some of the more graphically simple window managers. (Which are only graphically more simple in comparison to enlightenment)
It's all around definately worth using though, especially for corporate users who are very much used to the standard stock CDE that comes with so many commericial UNIXen - and it's based off of GTK+ which is a plus as far as I'm concerned.
It's not the end all be all, but it's fairly stable, decent looking, not overly memory hungry, looks familiar (and looks good, if you like the look of CDE) - I wouldn't say that it introduces anything radically new into the idea of window managers, but it's definately worth a look and maybe worth using depending on what you want out of a windowmanager.
There are so many people who want so many different things out of window managers that it's hard to say "This is the best" because they seem to have different domains in my mind. For example, I really like enlightenment/gnome combo, but when I'm coding or doing something where I really don't want to be "visually distracted" then I really don't dig enlightenment. Sure it's arguable that you can set up any window manager to look however you want it to, but I really don't spend all that much time hacking into the deepest darkest corners of window managers - and in that respect, I think xfce is good because it works quite nicely right out of the rpm so to speak.
Just my $0.02.
Nice review thanks for posting it.
I also checked out some of the screenshots from the article that is linked in this story, and they seem extremely windowish. Right down to the file manager, whose toplevel entry is "My Linux" (apparently a modification of "My Computer" in windows)
I can understand their desire to appeal to a certain segment of the market, and I think that they're doing just that. But I don't think I'd use it personally because of that. I didn't stop using windows just because I didn't think it was a stable OS (although that was one of the reasons) I stopped using it also because I thought the UI was boring and unimaginative. Look at X, and linux, and you have 2.0E50 choices for how you want to interact graphically with your machine. I would hate to go back to the same old UI after going through the linux learning curve.
Points to them though for making the install easier, and for making linux friendly to new people. I just hope that they don't make it so windowish over time that it loses its soul as a UNIX. That kind of worry is probably premature at this point, but I still wonder.
Seems to me though that another free software distribution stepping to the plate though means one thing - more choice. That's another reason why I'm in linux in the first place too. (Even if I don't plan on using it, I still like the fact that the choice is there)
Where did you get all of those links? Were you in contact with the authors that maybe knew where it had been distributed?
2 links would have been good. 5 links would have been great. This is just awesome. Already got the binary and the source. Thanks a lot.
It seems that the bums are going to be making processors!!!
:)
I feel so used...after all of this time, I was *SURE* that they were going to be making a better suntan lotion or maybe golf visors, and instead they come out with a microchip??? How SHOCKING!!
Everytime I come into work at this major corporation that I work for, and find people who manage people, people who manage people who manage people, and people who train the people managing the people who manage the people, and even people who don't do ANYTHING at all, I realize, we've come quite a long way from subsistance farming and feudalism back in 1000 or even 1600 for that matter.
:)
Think about the diverse tasks and how few of us are actually involved in production of the means by which we all live, yet at the same time we all do live. Efficiency gains and technology have allowed 2% of us to feed the other 98%, freeing them up to hack code.
Just-another-gee-whiz-post.
They seem to have been quite a good company - cranking out free software and working most notably on egcs I think.
If redhat buys them, it's because they see the value in the company. Let's just hope that redhat doesn't mess with success and lets them continue to do what they're good at and what made them attractive to redhat in the first place.
Come on. Everybody knows that it's fun to slag a pariah like JP.
But seriously...don't worry about it too much. He really isn't any better than just your typical punk ass barely-out-of-his-teens fool who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
You could look at it as a case of a large number of people going on a witchhunt for an innocent person ala McCarthy, or you could look at it as what it probably more likely is, which is openly rebelling and letting a total asshole know what you think of him.
JP Is the "National Enquirer" of computer security. Think about it.
That's pretty interesting, but I don't believe the bit about letting off heat. It makes sense intuitively, but at the same time, in dreaming, and in different types of sleep, your brain is moving very far, very fast at the same time, which you would assume would generate heat.
:)
Just my $0.02. Not that this thread is even remotely on topic anyway.
From the article:
"In the past, I have avoided presuming to speak for the whole Linux community. This time, however, I think I may safely say that this news will come as a vast relief to all of us."
Has he ever avoided speaking for the community? I hadn't noticed. In fact, when he wrote all that rot about "Take my job please" didn't he mention how hard it was being "the spokesperson for the community"?
The People's Republic of China is of course just a hollow dictatorial government, trying to further its own agenda by adopting linux as the official OS. (That is if it even happened - read the article) But why does ESR feel he has to speak up and in some cases speak for the linux community on every issue? He presents himself as the face that we show people that are not in the linux community. I hope that isn't truel
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer? That sounds like definate search and seizure, which I thought couldn't be done without a warrant, definately not done just because a record company wanted you to.
I'm not sure if what he wrote technically qualifies as free software, because I don't know about the license that was on the original PGP, but think about it...PGP deserves something, even if it's past the time when he should have gotten an award.
A good program that you could get the source code to - the first psycho-strong crypto program that I remember that ran on the PC. It might not have been the first, but it was certainly one of the best and it brought "Encryption for the masses" which I remember seeing as a tagline in practically all the README's that came with PGP.
Ahhh..how fondly I remember my pre-win 3.1 DOS days where I would sit about as a total newbie trying to figure out how the hell to use the 10,000 command line switches in PGP.
Anybody have specific info on the license of the original PGP source?
As long as they have a privacy statement? Doesn't that maybe need something particular added on to it, like "An *appropriate* privacy statement"?
Privacy statements can be buried on a page or contain tricky wording that when deciphered can often come out to something like this:
FooSoft promises to never use this information in a way which would be detrimental to our consumer's privacy when it coincides with FooSoft's financial interests. Should the financial interests of FooSoft dictate that distributing information gathered from clients is in the interest of FooSoft's bottom line, appropriate actions will be taken to safeguard investor value in FooSoft.
Sounds nice. Maybe.
What do you expect companies to do? Pass up an opportunity to gather important marketing information?
Privacy hasn't been really possible ever since the real marketing sharks started to hit the internet. Remember, even though companies aren't ethical for the most part, they're not stupid. They wouldn't bother getting their codejockeys to put this stuff into the software if it wasn't making them big bucks in one way or another. It doesn't give companies a stiffy to have power over you and use your information, it's just that they're making money off of it, and that's why they do it.
Public companies are a real bitch, because of the diffusion of responsibility. Even if they have people inside the organization that realize something is legal, yet unethical, it still gets done, because there really isn't a big boss that can say "We're doing this, and not that". There is to a point, in the CEO/CFO, but at the same time, they owe their jobs to the board and the stockholders. Failure to be ruthless and relentless in the name of corporate profits for the shareholders results in losing your job if you live in CEO land.
Privacy hasn't existed for years and years. My first internet experience was when AOL was brand new, and I got connected with my state-of-the-art 14.4 modem. Wow was that fast. Even back then I remember getting UCE, and having marketing things tossed at me that were quite strange in their approach. (i.e. why is it that when I started, I saw ads for generic things, but the more I go along, the more specifically computer targetted ads I see? Does that have anything to do with the bulk of information I'm after?)
The only way you can really have privacy is to use other people's networks, never sign up for an ISP or give out your name, address, email, phone, or other information, and keep changing computers so as to dodge cookies, and other "features" of the software that we don't know about yet.
Has it ever occurred to anybody that every once in a while, people will discover one of these privacy violating features and everybody will be shocked and outraged about it - ever wonder how many of them are out there that we don't know about?
It's arguable that people who would go to the trouble to go searching for web articles on a company to check the company's validity and then not read the articles would have fallen into the trap anyway.
:)
I think you're giving LinuxOne more credit for being devious than they really deserve. I don't think that this is a masterminded plot on the part of LinuxOne to screw people over, I think it's a simpleminded unethical scheme, no more, no less.
And besides, what is slashdot supposed to do? See a company that is probably violating the GPL, taking other people's material, lying, and producing nothing but vapor and think to itself "Oh well..." - I don't think that's ever been slashdot's style.
Not really for Linux users. I doubt that linuxone will put out anything new that linux users will be interested in having the source to, even it if would be licensed under the GPL. You never know though, they may come up with an ultra-portable, 25 language version of Hello World.
.......and then change your name and move to another state to start the next lame company attempting to ride "the next big wave"
This sounds like stock speculation to me. It also sounds like a bunch of daytraders are going to possibly ruin their lives over companies like this. The article mentions that the CEO's previous venture, NetUSA, nosedived in stock value, and is now sitting at about $0.62. That's pretty incredible. It takes real talent in an economy this hot to have a stock price that bad. And also the fact that the CEO is the only person who owns any stock? If I were him, I would IPO, and as soon as all of the shares were sold that were being offered to the company, sell all of mine, do something stupid, declare bankruptcy, and walk off with god knows how much cash.
Wow, this could be the tech stock scam of the year. I think that a lot of people on wall street are going to see it for what it is before they invest in it, but I think a lot of other people are just going to buy in, trying to get their dollars into the next Microsoft or whatever the hell they think this is going to be.
As far as the software is concerned, I'm just going to ignore it. And if the security problems at their site are as bad as the author of the article suggests, be on the look out for some script kiddie to crack it Real Soon Now.
Copy a distro, slap a penguin on the cover, sell it, IPO, make big bucks,
I believe this was in the New Yorker. One of those one-paned cartoons.
A bum sits on the street holding a sign that says "Spare a dime?". He is totally ignored. Look down the street a half a block, and a man is sitting on the street with people crowded around throwing money at him in large amounts. He is holding a sign that says "SpareADime.com"
Just goes to show that in some economic climates you get a feeling that you just can't lose. I think that the stock price for a lot of those high tech companies is vastly overvalued, and therefore bad for the economy, but investors do what they want to, because the stock market and the economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.
I think RedHat is a fabulous company, and of course I wish I had bought their stock when it IPO'd, but I think that even though it's fallen significantly from its highs right after the IPO it's still overvalued. Same with these Cobalt clowns - I don't mean to come down on the company really, I'm just thinking that you can expect their stock price to take a nosedive, and then straighten itself out and begin rising steadily probably in the $80 range or so if Redhat has taught us anything.
One thing is for sure: In IPO land, unless you get in right at the offering price, it sounds like speculative day trading to me. I guarantee many people are going to lose their ass because of cobalt stock within the next 2-3 weeks because of profit takers realizing that the market has gone irrationally high on the price and taking their profits.
David
I noticed that RMS made some pokes back at the accusations that are often leveled against him - an off the cuff comment about Marxism and so on.
Results are results! RMS wants you to follow his philosophy, but you don't have to agree with the underlying foundations. Consider the fact that in the supreme court when all the justices vote the same way on a case, there could still be more than one opinion written, because sometimes people agree on things *for differnet reasons*.
I'm guessing that probably the majority of us GNU freaks, (of which I am proud to call myself one although I do not claim to speak for everyone) would say to most "doubters" *Use the software*. If you like it, patronize it in whatever way you think is appropriate. If you don't like it, then feel FREE to go your own way.
MDA
>Dracula was about a great warrior for good >turning into an evil monster who destroyed and >corrupted all he held dear.
:)
True, true, except for the fact that dracula didn't kill people "because they pissed him off" or smoke dope and inhale freon.
>Looks to me that expanding on the basic concept, >this kids story, rather than a terrorist threat, >could have become a great classic of horror.
Sorry, I don't see it. I remember being in school which was not all that long ago since I'm only 21, and I remember assignments like this. This is the kind of thing that I would write because I wanted to freak my teacher out or get people upset. It's the kind of thing that a kid can do because it fits the assignment, so straight off the bat any punishment is unjust, yet at the same time, it defies the "purpose" of the assignment.
Now I can't believe he got a 100 for that piece of writing, although I don't claim to be up on writing standards for (7th?) graders. But that's beside the point. Seems to me to be primarily a case of neither a dangerous person exposing his intent, nor a case of a completely harmless event, but just a case of a regular smart ass kid, freak/geek or not, who just wanted to rattle people's cages.
It worked.
Never underestimate the amount of time that people are willing to dedicate to pirating software. I have faith that no matter what microsoft does, there will be *somebody*, *somewhere*, who will figure out how to pirate it so that all the w4r3z d00d2 can put it up on their FTP servers.
It seems like corporations have been fighting a losing battle against piracy ever since the days of the original King's Quest games. I understand why they do it, but I don't know what makes them think they'll actually get ahead this time.
I can't say whether an information system like this is going to be the wave of the future. Truth is, I can't even say what computing is going to be like just one year down the road, and I don't think anybody else can either.
Yadda yadda the industry moves so fast yadda yadda technology is wonderful but aside from the fact that technology does move fast, sometimes it goes in weird directions and just throws everybody for a loop. For example, it could be that instead of worry about these information systems online, somebody is going to build us a working quantum computer, and that will be "the future" or robotic roaches the size of dust particles, (all those nano-tech articles) or maybe brain implants so we can all plug 10baseT into our ears and forgo the computer altogether as far as connectivity is concerned.
Obviously some of those are a bit more plausible than others, but none of them are *impossible* (well, maybe the ethernet idea) Truth be known, it's likely that "the future" is none of those but rather something much more deliciously weird that will leave geeks the world over twitching in technological ecstasy. (If you don't know what technological ecstasy is, expose yourself to a 486 as your only computer for 4 years and then upgrade to a 400Mhz jobbie)
Just my $1E-2.
I thought at one point that this would be a good idea, but I'm worried that it would foster too much competition and people just spewing out comments that are OK, or somewhat average, just hoping for a few that might get a few moderation points out of the moderators.
Oh, and I think that I might be able to tell you off hand who some of the people are with the highest karmas - often, somebody who is "known" within the community, e.g. ESR, Perens, maybe Havoc Pennington, or somebody like that will post in response to an article about them or written by them to answer questions relating to the article. Because they are the topic, and they are "known", they almost always get moderated straight up into the sky, because people like them.
I don't have any objection to that, I think if Perens posts about an article relating to himself, that's relevant, and he deserves to be moderated up. Just observing that "known" people usually have ridiculously high karmas.
Oh, and I know what you mean about the offtopic posts - it would be nice to have different moderations like Offtopic-Interesting that would maybe be worth +1 or +0.5 and Offtopic-Troll or whatever that would be the normal -1.