Seems like the lawsuit here really ought to be "Investors in Sendo v. Sendo Execs".
In MS's defense, there is no (nor should there be any) law against getting into really sweetheart deals at the expense of the other party. If I see an antique on eBay selling for $5 that I know to be incredibly valuable, I should buy it -- I'm under no imaginable obligation to contact the seller and let him know he's an idiot.
And so it appears in this case: whoever was making decisions at Sendo really, really screwed up. They gave MS the power to destroy them, then gave them huge incentive to do so.
They're only 95% sure. I'm 100% sure the universe is over 1000 years old. I'm only 5% away from the top scientists!
That raises a good point. When the hell did scientists start spouting off about how sure they were of anything? What ever happened to "Data heavily suggests" or "according to our new theory"? This is the second time in the last couple of days I've seen something like this -- a couple days ago there was a Cal professor on the radio saying her new study "proved" global warming was affecting animals and she was "100% sure" or her results.
Hell, even the first class which introduced the scientific process in grade school was rather adamant about it -- the best you can "know" anything is to have a really well-tested theory about it (while accepting that you might still be wrong). This, OTOH, seems like a bad direction to be headed in, mindset-wise. My high school physics teacher would not have approved.
Okay, really, an 8.8 billion year range? You're telling me they couldn't me more certain than about 8800000000 years, but they still decided to go ahead and publish anyhow?
I can't tell if this is news or not, really, although 11.2 billion seems awful young if you're going to have two generations of stars before the sun (which is supposedly, what, 4 or 5 billion years old?).
By the way; despite the fact that I'm a 'temporary worker', and can make no claim against Social Security or Medicare, I still must pay SS and Medicare taxes. I wouldn't mind paying if I could claim, or not paying if I couldn't, but the current model is precisely the worst solution. Very unfriendly, if you ask me.;-)
Truth be told, all Americans under 45 right now are probably in the exact same boat with Social Security... We've been paying our whole lives and will probably never see a dime -- the whole thing's a pyramid scheme, and we're at the bottom.
their "standards" are unrealistic and inherently *based* on taking advantage of other nations?
Then that's a little something we call "reality". It may be a foreign concept to most/.'ers, but our entire fucking world is based on the idea of outcompeting others.
The thing most often passed over in this sort of arguement is the real-world fact that some people (Americans like myself) live in a first-world environment, and it's certainly in our own self-interest to perpetuate that.
It might sound unfair to say, "I want to continue living in better circumstances than 98% of the rest of the world, and I will therefore have my government pass laws which favor me and my country to do so", but to expect me to say otherwise is both self-centered and naive.
So, yeah. The US ought to discourage sending jobs overseas and tax companies that use foreign workers. The US ought to heavily discourage companies from hiring foreign workers who'll go back to their countries after X number of years (if they want to make money and stay in the US to spend it, that's something else, but that's not what H1B's are). The US should try to raid the best and brightest from other countries to improve the average IQ level in our own country.
But that's not what we're doing. Instead, we're acting in the next-quarter interests of specific companies, and that's a Bad Thing(tm) for everyone concerned.
Your argument is basically flawed. The H1B was designed as a work visa, not as a method of immigration. If you want to move to the US and become a naturalized citizen, there's already a process for that.
Of course, for software developers, this whole arguement is moot: It's probably too late to save the jobs of most US software developers, anyhow. Their jobs are going to get shipped to a dozen different countries where the cost is a mere fraction of developing in the US, and I don't see how you can stop that short of having Congress pass some kinds of taxes on it (which they certainly won't do in the current pro-business climate).
Were I a mid-level developer in the US, I'd think that it's time to either (a) go back to school and get a specialized advanced degree or (b) figure out what other field I'd like to be in. The party's over.
I know over a dozen people who bought these iMacs, and *NONE* of them meet your description. Pretty piss poor performance of your little analysis despite the small sample size.
Has it occurred to you that maybe, just *maybe*, you move in completely different circles?
Let's expand the sample a little. You see, I'm a geek, but my girlfriend is not. While the Mac users I know fit into your description, the Mac users I know through her fit mostly into the "urban hipster" (or, more accurately, "urban hip-wannabe yuppie scum") catagory. I know it's shocking that we don't have identically shared experience, but it sure looks that way.
Repeat after me: Anecdotal evidence does not a strongly-supported conclusion make.
So here's the big problem with selling designer computers: You can't stop redesigning them.
So far as I can figure, there are two types of people who bought this thing. The first group is predictible and, as such, irrelevant: Mac die-hards who would buy the latest-and-greatest regardless.
Then, there's the people living in this posh little urban apartments who bought it because it'd look cool on their Britanny Computer Desk from Crate & Barrel. These people are a good market, because they have too much money and they use it to buy things to make them seem hip. This may be a slightly down time for these people, but they're still around and you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be back in force the second the economy upticks.
For a little while, it really looked as if that was the new key market for these iMacs -- the designer crowd. But the problem with selling to the designer crowd is that if you don't have something *different* every six months or so, you've destroyed the whole point of the attraction. Once grandmas in the Midwest start getting these things on their desk, it's time to move on.
Well, this thing's overstayed it's time, and there's still no heir apparent. C'mon, Jobs -- you decided on the target market. Start selling.
But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.
This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.
And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.
This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.
Got a tampon that could be a potential blood sample? If you're a man, got a band-aid you don't want them to use against you? Flush it!
Er, ever have to deal with a flushed tampon? Few things on earth will clog a toilet better.
The way it ought to be is that those things which that average person expects to be private (and garbage is *obviously* one of those) ought to be private -- that is, a warrent should be needed to obtain them. The only reason this isn't the case is that we Americans are either (a) too complacent to make them so or (b) deluded that giving up our natural rights is the only road to safety.
Folks, this is not a case of stolen "property". This is an involuntary medical examination; an invasion of privacy to the highest degree.
Liberal nonsense.
Obviously, if this lady cop actually wanted to retain her constituational rights, she should have known better than to put her used tampons in the trash. Instead, she should be stockpiling her tampons like all good freedom-loving American women do.
Seriously, though, this is just another example of an alarming trend in American law: The destruction of rights via the control chokepoints.
For example, if a cop pulls you over on the road, you cannot refuse a breathalizer exam without automatically losing your license. As such, you effectively don't have the right *not* to give up evidence (since the punishment for not giving up said evidence is just like the punishment for the crime of drunk driving, it becomes a moot point). This is technically constituational even though it's blatently a jackbooted tactic.
In this case, they're using your garbage against you. Since we all generate refuse which we need to get rid of, this is another effective way to end-run around our rights. You obviously can get astounding amounts of info from the average person's garbage -- no warrent needed.
We (and I mean "We" as in "We the People") put up with this even though we see it's fascist bullshit. We think it's important to make the police's job easier (even when we're just encouraging random searches that can't earn a warrant), or that we're fighting terrorists. Or maybe we're just too lazy and distracted to care, what with all the bread and circuses.
It sounds to me like you gained without buying. How about supporting the company that made that gain possible? What more to you gain from RedHat?
The real difference here is that RedHat isn't counting on sales of CDs or, worse, the altruism of the community to make money.
Instead, they have displayed good business sense and are creating sell-able services surrounding Linux, such as training and subscriptions to time-saving services (using up2date anytime is worth $60 a server, IMO). This is working out really well for them -- they're suddenly in the black.
If Mandrake can't do the same, well, that's life. They need to either develop a viable for-profit business plan (if they want to remain a for-profit business) or work out another way to survive (go non-profit or get aquired).
In the interests of promoting diversity in Linux choices, I can see giving a few dollars to help an otherwise viable company get over a particular rough patch.
But this doesn't seem to be the case here -- rather, it's beginning to look more and more like Mandrake will never turn a profit. This brings up the spectre of the community supporting a supposedly for-profit company via donations, which just isn't realistic. So it's not a question of the "right thing", but one of eceonomic reality.
Even if I were to give money to Mandrake, what sort of information do I have that would lead me to believe that they wouldn't just be in this hole again six months from now? Throwing good money after bad is a real pet peeve of mine.
IMO, Mandrake is about to get thinned from the herd. And it'll be too bad, since they've provided a lot of leadership in terms of desktop Linux, but I think we're all a lot more realistic about business realities than we were a few years ago.
Your solution is to raise property taxes in an area where real estate is already prohibitively expensive? Discouraging people from buying isn't a good idea...
Bullshit.
What you're actually seeing is yet another example of my parents' generation (the boomers) once again thoughtlessly gorging themselves at the expense of their children.
They run up huge debt rather than pay higher taxes. They extend the pyramid scheme that is social security so they can benefit at their children's expense. And they underfund the educational system so they can live in a slightly larger house than they otherwise would.
The CA system only really benefits people who already own homes, not new home buyers. So, it's just another example of our parents living at our expense.
How long can America keep pumping out students whose test scores are in the cellar for industrial nations and expect to maintain an edge in technology? As it stands, a lot of our brains are already imported from India and China.
I live in CA, which should stand as a dire warning to the rest of the country: They limit their property taxes, their schools go underfunded, and as a result California natives largely end up working to repair the cars and wash the floors of the well-educated from elsewhere.
The US needs to get serious about education, and fast. With the tech boom and the world shinking as it is, this is a really bad time to be stupid.
> Cars kill people. Guns kill people. Steel poles > used to bludgeon someone kill people. I am not > slagging Google here, they are a private company > that can run the way they see fit.
That's an argument which you might get away with over at the Fox News discussion board, but hopefully most/.'ers can think up at least two key flaws in your reasoning:
1. When was the last time someone used a steel pole to kill 20 people at a McD's because his girlfriend broke up with him?
2. If steel poles are so incredibly lethal, why do gang-bangers, soldiers and other folks who kill people and break things for a living seem so dedicated to guns? What, is it just some weird tradition thing?
like baseball bats, telephone cords, vehicles, ball peen hammers, axes?
I might agree with a campaign against handguns, but I have enough common sense to know that shotguns and rifles are a necessity to many people who don't have the luxury of living in an urban setting.
The next time someone walks into a high school and kills seventeen people with a telephone cord, you call me. Otherwise, your post just sounds like you're assuming that everyone else is an idiot (whereas, in reality, only about 60% of other people are actual idiots).
Would you be saying that if, for example, it was Islam they didn't like rather than guns?
It'd be in their perogative (again, it's their world, we just play in it), but I don't think it'd have any useful effect -- what, is the Dome of the Rock going to suddenly go secular because they can't advertise on Google?
Look, I take great pleasure in going to the shooting range and exercising my second-amendment rights. I also don't kid myself about what I'm doing, what the purpose of the tools really is and why I enjoy it so much. Guns are like cigarettes and booze in that way -- they're a real viceral thrill, and they're not a really good thing in the long haul.
Not only do they refuse to advertise for guns, but they won't advertise companies that even sell parts for guns.
1. People who created, run and privately own Google think guns are bad.
2. Google won't advertise guns.
3. Outdoor shops who do a little gun-related bid'ness are enticed to get rid of it.
4. There is one less place to buy parts for things used to kill other people.
5. Google still makes profit, society gets a little more like creators, maintainers and private owners of Google want it to be.
Kudos to them, then, for standing behind their beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's crap, though. If you read the article, they're basically suing MS because MS won't give them more money.
That's like suing your parents after they pay for the first five years of college and then refuse to pay for year six.
In MS's defense, there is no (nor should there be any) law against getting into really sweetheart deals at the expense of the other party. If I see an antique on eBay selling for $5 that I know to be incredibly valuable, I should buy it -- I'm under no imaginable obligation to contact the seller and let him know he's an idiot.
And so it appears in this case: whoever was making decisions at Sendo really, really screwed up. They gave MS the power to destroy them, then gave them huge incentive to do so.
That's life.
That raises a good point. When the hell did scientists start spouting off about how sure they were of anything? What ever happened to "Data heavily suggests" or "according to our new theory"? This is the second time in the last couple of days I've seen something like this -- a couple days ago there was a Cal professor on the radio saying her new study "proved" global warming was affecting animals and she was "100% sure" or her results.
Hell, even the first class which introduced the scientific process in grade school was rather adamant about it -- the best you can "know" anything is to have a really well-tested theory about it (while accepting that you might still be wrong). This, OTOH, seems like a bad direction to be headed in, mindset-wise. My high school physics teacher would not have approved.
I can't tell if this is news or not, really, although 11.2 billion seems awful young if you're going to have two generations of stars before the sun (which is supposedly, what, 4 or 5 billion years old?).
...You mean there are other free OS's out there? No kidding! QUICK! Inform Slashdot!
*Paraphrase of the comments my Dad's brother made to him, about Microsoft, in 1985.
Truth be told, all Americans under 45 right now are probably in the exact same boat with Social Security... We've been paying our whole lives and will probably never see a dime -- the whole thing's a pyramid scheme, and we're at the bottom.
Then that's a little something we call "reality". It may be a foreign concept to most /.'ers, but our entire fucking world is based on the idea of outcompeting others.
The thing most often passed over in this sort of arguement is the real-world fact that some people (Americans like myself) live in a first-world environment, and it's certainly in our own self-interest to perpetuate that.
It might sound unfair to say, "I want to continue living in better circumstances than 98% of the rest of the world, and I will therefore have my government pass laws which favor me and my country to do so", but to expect me to say otherwise is both self-centered and naive.
So, yeah. The US ought to discourage sending jobs overseas and tax companies that use foreign workers. The US ought to heavily discourage companies from hiring foreign workers who'll go back to their countries after X number of years (if they want to make money and stay in the US to spend it, that's something else, but that's not what H1B's are). The US should try to raid the best and brightest from other countries to improve the average IQ level in our own country.
But that's not what we're doing. Instead, we're acting in the next-quarter interests of specific companies, and that's a Bad Thing(tm) for everyone concerned.
Of course, for software developers, this whole arguement is moot: It's probably too late to save the jobs of most US software developers, anyhow. Their jobs are going to get shipped to a dozen different countries where the cost is a mere fraction of developing in the US, and I don't see how you can stop that short of having Congress pass some kinds of taxes on it (which they certainly won't do in the current pro-business climate).
Were I a mid-level developer in the US, I'd think that it's time to either (a) go back to school and get a specialized advanced degree or (b) figure out what other field I'd like to be in. The party's over.
Has it occurred to you that maybe, just *maybe*, you move in completely different circles?
Let's expand the sample a little. You see, I'm a geek, but my girlfriend is not. While the Mac users I know fit into your description, the Mac users I know through her fit mostly into the "urban hipster" (or, more accurately, "urban hip-wannabe yuppie scum") catagory. I know it's shocking that we don't have identically shared experience, but it sure looks that way.
Repeat after me: Anecdotal evidence does not a strongly-supported conclusion make.
So far as I can figure, there are two types of people who bought this thing. The first group is predictible and, as such, irrelevant: Mac die-hards who would buy the latest-and-greatest regardless.
Then, there's the people living in this posh little urban apartments who bought it because it'd look cool on their Britanny Computer Desk from Crate & Barrel. These people are a good market, because they have too much money and they use it to buy things to make them seem hip. This may be a slightly down time for these people, but they're still around and you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be back in force the second the economy upticks.
For a little while, it really looked as if that was the new key market for these iMacs -- the designer crowd. But the problem with selling to the designer crowd is that if you don't have something *different* every six months or so, you've destroyed the whole point of the attraction. Once grandmas in the Midwest start getting these things on their desk, it's time to move on.
Well, this thing's overstayed it's time, and there's still no heir apparent. C'mon, Jobs -- you decided on the target market. Start selling.
But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.
This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.
And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.
This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.
Er, ever have to deal with a flushed tampon? Few things on earth will clog a toilet better.
The way it ought to be is that those things which that average person expects to be private (and garbage is *obviously* one of those) ought to be private -- that is, a warrent should be needed to obtain them. The only reason this isn't the case is that we Americans are either (a) too complacent to make them so or (b) deluded that giving up our natural rights is the only road to safety.
Liberal nonsense. Obviously, if this lady cop actually wanted to retain her constituational rights, she should have known better than to put her used tampons in the trash. Instead, she should be stockpiling her tampons like all good freedom-loving American women do.
Seriously, though, this is just another example of an alarming trend in American law: The destruction of rights via the control chokepoints.
For example, if a cop pulls you over on the road, you cannot refuse a breathalizer exam without automatically losing your license. As such, you effectively don't have the right *not* to give up evidence (since the punishment for not giving up said evidence is just like the punishment for the crime of drunk driving, it becomes a moot point). This is technically constituational even though it's blatently a jackbooted tactic.
In this case, they're using your garbage against you. Since we all generate refuse which we need to get rid of, this is another effective way to end-run around our rights. You obviously can get astounding amounts of info from the average person's garbage -- no warrent needed.
We (and I mean "We" as in "We the People") put up with this even though we see it's fascist bullshit. We think it's important to make the police's job easier (even when we're just encouraging random searches that can't earn a warrant), or that we're fighting terrorists. Or maybe we're just too lazy and distracted to care, what with all the bread and circuses.
And it sucks.
Being a seventh grader, on the other hand, seems far more easy to detect.
The real difference here is that RedHat isn't counting on sales of CDs or, worse, the altruism of the community to make money.
Instead, they have displayed good business sense and are creating sell-able services surrounding Linux, such as training and subscriptions to time-saving services (using up2date anytime is worth $60 a server, IMO). This is working out really well for them -- they're suddenly in the black.
If Mandrake can't do the same, well, that's life. They need to either develop a viable for-profit business plan (if they want to remain a for-profit business) or work out another way to survive (go non-profit or get aquired).
That's just reality.
In the interests of promoting diversity in Linux choices, I can see giving a few dollars to help an otherwise viable company get over a particular rough patch.
But this doesn't seem to be the case here -- rather, it's beginning to look more and more like Mandrake will never turn a profit. This brings up the spectre of the community supporting a supposedly for-profit company via donations, which just isn't realistic. So it's not a question of the "right thing", but one of eceonomic reality.
IMO, Mandrake is about to get thinned from the herd. And it'll be too bad, since they've provided a lot of leadership in terms of desktop Linux, but I think we're all a lot more realistic about business realities than we were a few years ago.
Bullshit.
What you're actually seeing is yet another example of my parents' generation (the boomers) once again thoughtlessly gorging themselves at the expense of their children.
They run up huge debt rather than pay higher taxes. They extend the pyramid scheme that is social security so they can benefit at their children's expense. And they underfund the educational system so they can live in a slightly larger house than they otherwise would.
The CA system only really benefits people who already own homes, not new home buyers. So, it's just another example of our parents living at our expense.
How long can America keep pumping out students whose test scores are in the cellar for industrial nations and expect to maintain an edge in technology? As it stands, a lot of our brains are already imported from India and China.
I live in CA, which should stand as a dire warning to the rest of the country: They limit their property taxes, their schools go underfunded, and as a result California natives largely end up working to repair the cars and wash the floors of the well-educated from elsewhere.
The US needs to get serious about education, and fast. With the tech boom and the world shinking as it is, this is a really bad time to be stupid.
> used to bludgeon someone kill people. I am not
> slagging Google here, they are a private company
> that can run the way they see fit.
That's an argument which you might get away with over at the Fox News discussion board, but hopefully most /.'ers can think up at least two key flaws in your reasoning:
1. When was the last time someone used a steel pole to kill 20 people at a McD's because his girlfriend broke up with him?
2. If steel poles are so incredibly lethal, why do gang-bangers, soldiers and other folks who kill people and break things for a living seem so dedicated to guns? What, is it just some weird tradition thing?
I might agree with a campaign against handguns, but I have enough common sense to know that shotguns and rifles are a necessity to many people who don't have the luxury of living in an urban setting. The next time someone walks into a high school and kills seventeen people with a telephone cord, you call me. Otherwise, your post just sounds like you're assuming that everyone else is an idiot (whereas, in reality, only about 60% of other people are actual idiots).
It'd be in their perogative (again, it's their world, we just play in it), but I don't think it'd have any useful effect -- what, is the Dome of the Rock going to suddenly go secular because they can't advertise on Google?
Look, I take great pleasure in going to the shooting range and exercising my second-amendment rights. I also don't kid myself about what I'm doing, what the purpose of the tools really is and why I enjoy it so much. Guns are like cigarettes and booze in that way -- they're a real viceral thrill, and they're not a really good thing in the long haul.
1. People who created, run and privately own Google think guns are bad.
2. Google won't advertise guns.
3. Outdoor shops who do a little gun-related bid'ness are enticed to get rid of it.
4. There is one less place to buy parts for things used to kill other people.
5. Google still makes profit, society gets a little more like creators, maintainers and private owners of Google want it to be.
Kudos to them, then, for standing behind their beliefs.