Does that mean because Windows Vista is an inferior design to XP does that mean natural selection could play a role in "weeding out" this particular direction the Windows world is taking? Definitely an "unsustainable approach" as far as I'm concerned.
It could play a role. But that does not imply that it will lead to the desired result.
One thing that I often notice when topics like natural selection (and evolution) are being debated, is that people cite an example in which the "stronger" or "better" animal or system has lost to claim that this proves selection and survival of the fittest are nonsense. But this is a fallacy. Reversing the logic: it is not because natural selection is at work that better designs always win. Selection is a statistical phenomenon in any case and - as noted in the article - it can also be ofset by "external" factors that influence or (radically) change the environment. E.g. Microsoft has so much resources/power that they surely can push Vista to take over even if XP is better. On the long run, doing this might not be best for Microsoft itself, but that's another matter.
In Soviet Russia, where the real hacking studs live, hackers soon will massively distribute DRM-ed versions of Sony's DRM-free music, just to show the world how much they hate the established music industry, irrespective of what it does.
In the US, some wannabe high-school hackers will briefly attempt the same, but will be sued into the ground by RIAA laywers intent on showing who still owns the copyrights to and patents on the DRM concept.
With respect to Blu-Ray, you've just been slightly overruled (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1CPtUYPjrBQ). As long as nobody knows who'll win the "battle of the DVDs", there's no incentive to switch to either, as neither of them is so superior as to make it a no-brainer for masses of end-users. But once either Blu-Ray or HD DVD has won - be it on technical grounds or on purely commercial and power ones - the winner will start to push the good old traditional DVD out of the market. My bet is on Blu-Ray.
Math-wise there is a year 0 only if your reference point lasts a year. But the birth of Christ didn't take a year, just a few hours (or a single second if you consider that we generally say that someone was born on YYYMMDD at hh:mm, irrespective of labour). Therefore, in Christian/western historical counting there is no - and has never been - a year 0. Year 1 AD starts at the moment of his birth (being the first year after his birth), Year -1 AD stops at that very same momment (being the last year before it). As long as you know this and take it into account, the math works all fine.
Note that I'm not saying he was ever really born, let alone on the date we historically claim. But that's irrelevant to how counting has been done since over 200 years.
This kind of opt-out cookie is not new and Omniture is not alone. The ad-sleaze-company par-excellence Doubleclick has supported such an opt-out cookie for many years.
The normally accepted method is that if a site is unable to get/set cookies this indicates that the machine has told them to buzz off
This still applies to and works with Omniture as well. If you block them, they have to buzz off. In general (I don't know whether what follows applies to the Omniture / Adobe case) a local opt-out cookie (or let explicitly me call it a good old-fashioned "flag" instead, to make clear what I'm about to say) could also be used locally to prevent any connection from ever being established. Assuming of course that the local app has the ability to read it and that it actually uses that ability. If the lcoal app is just a standard browser displaying a html page that may be a bit tricky, but if the app has custom code - even if only top of an embedded browser - it can do anything it wants as a long as it can read the cookie from disk. The latter is something it normally always should be able to do.
>> The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
> I think that says it all.
Yes, but it does not say what you seem to imply. If the original author did not grant permission, you can not use the code (but you can implement the same algorithm yourself, at least as long as there is no patent preventing that). Note that the author does not have to include such a permission in every piece of code. It can be in an accompanying file, or it can even be in the Terms of Use of whatever bulletin board or website he used to publish it. But you have to check that.
Granted, as long as you do not distribute the source, nobody will spot a 200 line piece of code and this kind of copying indeed happens all the time, but that does not make it legal in the strict sense of the word. I once wanted to use a small library that is floating about out there without any license/copyright statement. As it would have been possible for our customers to spot the use, I checked with our legal department and they were very firm: if I could get the author to explicitly approve it, it was OK, otherwise not. He did not reply, so I had to scrap the idea.
Even worse is the reaction of the developers when they found that after about 40 minutes of driving things became uncontrollable (without safe failure mode, as you point out). They just decide to reboot the system based on a mere timer without understanding what's going on or where the 40 minutes time frame originates. And on top of that they don't seem to mind that their reboot might occur at a critical moment as well, which not only does not address the original "accident waiting to happen", but introduces a second one as well! These people are dangerous and should never be let loose in an engineering environment at all.
If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view.
While I agree that it's way to easy to claim hidden messages that were never there in the first place, it's wrong to say that, in case there is a message, the artist was trying - and deeded - to conceal it. People, especially those with bright minds like Leonardo, have been and still are doing this kind of thing for fun and "just because they can" (I know I have done similar things a few times myself, and I'm not a Da Vinci). On top of that, in Leonardo's days there really was a lot more to art than throwing a few buckets of paint against a wall. Weaving in multiple symbolisms that only the initiated would read was "basic painting skill number two" (the actual painting techniques being number one).
So the message is not hidden as in "concealed because it needed to be", but hidden as in "non-obvious and thus likely forgotten/lost until rediscovered".
I'm not telling anyone what to do with their time and I've said so numerous times in this discussion. All I'm telling them to do is not to claim that the driver problem does not exist because there are not enough kernel driver problems for them left to solve.
Before you waste your time posting cowardly crap like that, maybe you should bother to also click in the link behind that sig. Done that by now? Good, then you will now know that you just wasted your own time more than anyone else's and you haven't achieved anything in doing so. You're barking up the wrong tree, man...
PS: Just in case you still don't get it: I did a lot more than just using Linux. But that's not the point of that sig and that's not needed to make my point in this discussion either. And no, I will never change that sig, no matter how unimpressed you are.
Of course I don't believe these 300 people are doing nothing (where did I even remotely say anything like that?). But if they're fully booked with other stuff, they should not be on the list. If they are on the list and the feed of things for them to do there is running dry, they should either get off (in which case I don't care one iota what else they do as long as they don't claim that all problems they did not want to look at have been solved as well) or they should be willing to widen the scope of the activities the list is involved in.
The driver availability problem could very well be overstated when it applies to kernel space drivers.
Indeed it could. And if then if that's what they'd communicate, I'm perfectly fine with it. But instead, they talk is of "drivers", and then whenever someone says "look at all the user space problems" they add "yes, but we don't do that and don't want to". Again, it's their right not to want to, but then they should (learn) to communicate that accurately and clearly from the start without extrapolating claims to areas they don't cover anyway. Communication skills are important, even for geeky kernel insiders (like I once was).
And how do you know they don't? (the kernel developers that is)Another advantage of open source is that the coders can go where they are needed. So if there isn't any kernel drivers needed right now, they can go do something else instead of sitting around waiting for something to do. Like perhaps http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting [linux-foundation.org]
He wants a working system, so he should go to the people who sell (or give away) working systems.
So? Those people can only provide working systens after somebody made them work. If the distributors can't get hold of some hardware specs, someone has to reverse engineer, but it doesn't matter who made does that, the distributor or the guys upstream. Especially since quite a few distributirs pay some of those "guys upstream" anyway (kernel developers and user space developers alike).
Of course, anyone has a right to proudly declare that they're done. But they shouldn't claim that that means there's just plain nothing left to do. If they want to "retire" and can afford to, more power to them. But if they need something to do (irrespective of whether that's for financial reasons or just for fun), they should look at what else needs doing with an open mind. Especially if they proudly proclaimed that there's nothing much left to do on their old job (or "job"). Then, if they decide they really don't like user space work, they can still decide to quit, but shouldn't complain.
... complaining that a free service of 'A' offered by someone doesn't include 'B' because you want it to is ridiculous
I'm not complaining that a free service of 'A' offered by someone doesn't include 'B' because I want it. I'm stating that it is wrong for that someone (whether or not he is a provider of 'A') to claim that the 'B' thing that I want is a non-issue simply because he does not want to work on it (irrespective even of the reason why he doesn't). To me, all reasons for not wanting to do it are valid, no matter even how silly, but they shouldn't complain about not finding a job if they don't want to take/learn the jobs that are offered to them.
Besides that, you're not going to tell me that people smart enough to learn how to code a kernel can not learn how to implement a user space printer driver. I'm not saying that they have to do that, but they sure can if the want to. In my nearly 20 years of coding, I've done just about every kind of work. I'm sure I could also become a windows kernel developer if I wanted to and MS would let me.
A general linux user does not care how the distro has been put together. He or she just wants it to work.
I respect anyone's choice to work only in kernel-land if they so desire, but collecting hundreds of people who say "I only can or want to do kernel" only to then complain that these folks don't have enough work to do while on the other side of the wall there are Himalayan mountains of work left over is just plain ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous, is to claim that "the linux driver problem is overstated" simply because of this kind of self-selected mismatch.
To follow up on your analosy: a Windows developer can not go fix an Epson driver even if he wants to, but a Linux kernel developer can help fix a userspace driver problem if only he wants to. That's the big advantage of Open Source.
PS: Before flaming me for being ignorant about linux and kernels, read my sig.
So if a comment has been marked as insightful by many, and interesting by fewer, then the output should be "(Score:5; Insightful, Interesting)".
Yes, indeed. Or if only a single world can be displayed, the one that was used most should be chosen. Right now, a true +5 insightful can be sort of "destroyed" by a single subsequent malicious "-1 troll". OK, the resulting "+4 troll" still is a sign that the post might be worth something, but the annotation looses the reason why. Malda, are you reading this?
Because as a reader I tend to value "+X insightful" over "+X interesting". Yes, the really insightful ones will likely also be interesting, but not the other way around. Look at it this way: if I'm a crow looking for a mate, I'm not interested in just any black bird, but I sure am interested in other crows (even those of the wrong sex, as they are unwanted competition:-) ).
Asking for that change means that you don't understand what the word insightful means. Don't worry, you're not alone: quite a few moderators don't. But please allow those who do understand to use the words properly. There are enough of us around to still make the distinction work.
Of course the profit could be coming from somewhere else than just sales. Where did I exclude that possibility? Actually, in stating that I wouldn't be surprised to see Novell being involved from before the start, I'm also opening up the path to the idea of additional profit channels. After all, Novell will not get any real money out of SCO anyway unless somebody who actually has money steps in.
Having said that, any alternative profit making scheme must exist in order to exist. By which I mean: looking at the bottom line of the entire construction (public and non-public parts put together) the party doing the dirty work must have a good expectation of actually making an overall profit. So it will inevitably leave traces at some level.
Looking at who YCM are and what they do, I doubt any YCM (or BayStar, for that matter) would still do today what BayStar did in 2004. The legal landscape in this case has changed dramatically since then and it has become much much harder to explain such an investment as "we think it's a good deal" while knowing that in reallity it only is a good deal because "you're doing your friend Bill a favour and will recuperate some greenbacks from him later". Especially given that YCM very much tout their "make as few losses as possible" approach as one of the reasons why people and funds should rely on them. As a manager of 11 billion dollars, they wont just throw that away for the sake of a few million and/or a smile from Mr. Ballmer. And definitely not in such a high-profile cases as this one. BayStar actually is the perfect example of what could happen if they're not careful.
For me flaming/insulting starts with "100% wrong" blanket claims that are obviously incorrect. If you want no flame wars, learn how to properly word the things that you want to say.
Of course you didn't claim it was MS FUD. Read again what I wrote before firing off replies: I said that to me the claim that MS is involved likely is a case of FUD.
So because you see a +5 post with incorrect info, and even one that in its first sentence warns about the possibility that it might be wrong, you decide to attack the author for being a moron who is only oh-so-happy to get +5 out of anything? And you see a need to pull in toilet words? Seems to me you're a bit trigger happy, but that's of course just my humble opinion.
Just a few notes: 1) I couldn't care less about +5 or -5 (as this post will show), as I'm long past that age; 2) I did go to groklaw (wanna see the proxy logs?), I just didn't dig deep enough (my mistake), so stop making black-and-white assumptions in whatever way you like and stop pulling in needlessly childish toilet words in order to defend them; 3) you carefully did not adress my critique of your "100% false" claim, as you know you can't beat that; 4) please note that I at least explicitly mentioned that I was using only "the limited info I had" (ref. my original post), that I also explicitly left open the option that I might be wrong (second post), and finally also have the courage to write "my mistake" in this one.
TFA claims that YCM would also get the litigation claims, and that's what I used as a basis. Yes, I tend to RTFA before posting.
But in any case, what I wrote cannot be "100% wrong", as you claim with assumed god-like superiority. Irrespective of their motives and who is behind it (I personally don't believe the "it has to be MS" FUD party line myself, but who knows maybe I'm actually wrong on that one...), fact remains that firms like YCM do not step into risks - be they major or only reasonable - without prior analysis and an outlook on a sizeable ROI.
Hmmm, so there might well be about 4 or 5 terrorists in my company. Or quite a few more, actually, because I doubt that your average Chinese farmer or miner stands as big a chance of being on there as those of us who leave traces outside their home village. Hmmmm.... And then to think that we also handle security sensitive stuff. Seems like I'd better find the key to my virtual cubicle door and give ol' George a warning ring before all those bad guys get a chance to elimi....
PS: At one point I personally knew someone who personally knew Mohamed Atta of 9/11 fame before that fateful day. So I guess I better go into hiding from both parties now.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean because Windows Vista is an inferior design to XP does that mean natural selection could play a role in "weeding out" this particular direction the Windows world is taking? Definitely an "unsustainable approach" as far as I'm concerned.
It could play a role. But that does not imply that it will lead to the desired result.
One thing that I often notice when topics like natural selection (and evolution) are being debated, is that people cite an example in which the "stronger" or "better" animal or system has lost to claim that this proves selection and survival of the fittest are nonsense. But this is a fallacy. Reversing the logic: it is not because natural selection is at work that better designs always win. Selection is a statistical phenomenon in any case and - as noted in the article - it can also be ofset by "external" factors that influence or (radically) change the environment. E.g. Microsoft has so much resources/power that they surely can push Vista to take over even if XP is better. On the long run, doing this might not be best for Microsoft itself, but that's another matter.
In Soviet Russia, where the real hacking studs live, hackers soon will massively distribute DRM-ed versions of Sony's DRM-free music, just to show the world how much they hate the established music industry, irrespective of what it does.
In the US, some wannabe high-school hackers will briefly attempt the same, but will be sued into the ground by RIAA laywers intent on showing who still owns the copyrights to and patents on the DRM concept.
With respect to Blu-Ray, you've just been slightly overruled (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1CPtUYPjrBQ). As long as nobody knows who'll win the "battle of the DVDs", there's no incentive to switch to either, as neither of them is so superior as to make it a no-brainer for masses of end-users. But once either Blu-Ray or HD DVD has won - be it on technical grounds or on purely commercial and power ones - the winner will start to push the good old traditional DVD out of the market. My bet is on Blu-Ray.
Math-wise there is a year 0 only if your reference point lasts a year. But the birth of Christ didn't take a year, just a few hours (or a single second if you consider that we generally say that someone was born on YYYMMDD at hh:mm, irrespective of labour). Therefore, in Christian/western historical counting there is no - and has never been - a year 0. Year 1 AD starts at the moment of his birth (being the first year after his birth), Year -1 AD stops at that very same momment (being the last year before it). As long as you know this and take it into account, the math works all fine.
Note that I'm not saying he was ever really born, let alone on the date we historically claim. But that's irrelevant to how counting has been done since over 200 years.
This kind of opt-out cookie is not new and Omniture is not alone. The ad-sleaze-company par-excellence Doubleclick has supported such an opt-out cookie for many years.
The normally accepted method is that if a site is unable to get/set cookies this indicates that the machine has told them to buzz off
This still applies to and works with Omniture as well. If you block them, they have to buzz off. In general (I don't know whether what follows applies to the Omniture / Adobe case) a local opt-out cookie (or let explicitly me call it a good old-fashioned "flag" instead, to make clear what I'm about to say) could also be used locally to prevent any connection from ever being established. Assuming of course that the local app has the ability to read it and that it actually uses that ability. If the lcoal app is just a standard browser displaying a html page that may be a bit tricky, but if the app has custom code - even if only top of an embedded browser - it can do anything it wants as a long as it can read the cookie from disk. The latter is something it normally always should be able to do.
>> The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code.
> I think that says it all.
Yes, but it does not say what you seem to imply. If the original author did not grant permission, you can not use the code (but you can implement the same algorithm yourself, at least as long as there is no patent preventing that). Note that the author does not have to include such a permission in every piece of code. It can be in an accompanying file, or it can even be in the Terms of Use of whatever bulletin board or website he used to publish it. But you have to check that.
Granted, as long as you do not distribute the source, nobody will spot a 200 line piece of code and this kind of copying indeed happens all the time, but that does not make it legal in the strict sense of the word. I once wanted to use a small library that is floating about out there without any license/copyright statement. As it would have been possible for our customers to spot the use, I checked with our legal department and they were very firm: if I could get the author to explicitly approve it, it was OK, otherwise not. He did not reply, so I had to scrap the idea.
Even worse is the reaction of the developers when they found that after about 40 minutes of driving things became uncontrollable (without safe failure mode, as you point out). They just decide to reboot the system based on a mere timer without understanding what's going on or where the 40 minutes time frame originates. And on top of that they don't seem to mind that their reboot might occur at a critical moment as well, which not only does not address the original "accident waiting to happen", but introduces a second one as well! These people are dangerous and should never be let loose in an engineering environment at all.
If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view.
While I agree that it's way to easy to claim hidden messages that were never there in the first place, it's wrong to say that, in case there is a message, the artist was trying - and deeded - to conceal it. People, especially those with bright minds like Leonardo, have been and still are doing this kind of thing for fun and "just because they can" (I know I have done similar things a few times myself, and I'm not a Da Vinci). On top of that, in Leonardo's days there really was a lot more to art than throwing a few buckets of paint against a wall. Weaving in multiple symbolisms that only the initiated would read was "basic painting skill number two" (the actual painting techniques being number one).
So the message is not hidden as in "concealed because it needed to be", but hidden as in "non-obvious and thus likely forgotten/lost until rediscovered".
Who, or what, are you faulting?
See here.
I'm not telling anyone what to do with their time and I've said so numerous times in this discussion. All I'm telling them to do is not to claim that the driver problem does not exist because there are not enough kernel driver problems for them left to solve.
Before you waste your time posting cowardly crap like that, maybe you should bother to also click in the link behind that sig. Done that by now? Good, then you will now know that you just wasted your own time more than anyone else's and you haven't achieved anything in doing so. You're barking up the wrong tree, man...
PS: Just in case you still don't get it: I did a lot more than just using Linux. But that's not the point of that sig and that's not needed to make my point in this discussion either. And no, I will never change that sig, no matter how unimpressed you are.
Of course I don't believe these 300 people are doing nothing (where did I even remotely say anything like that?). But if they're fully booked with other stuff, they should not be on the list. If they are on the list and the feed of things for them to do there is running dry, they should either get off (in which case I don't care one iota what else they do as long as they don't claim that all problems they did not want to look at have been solved as well) or they should be willing to widen the scope of the activities the list is involved in.
The driver availability problem could very well be overstated when it applies to kernel space drivers.
Indeed it could. And if then if that's what they'd communicate, I'm perfectly fine with it. But instead, they talk is of "drivers", and then whenever someone says "look at all the user space problems" they add "yes, but we don't do that and don't want to". Again, it's their right not to want to, but then they should (learn) to communicate that accurately and clearly from the start without extrapolating claims to areas they don't cover anyway. Communication skills are important, even for geeky kernel insiders (like I once was).
And how do you know they don't? (the kernel developers that is)Another advantage of open source is that the coders can go where they are needed. So if there isn't any kernel drivers needed right now, they can go do something else instead of sitting around waiting for something to do. Like perhaps http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting [linux-foundation.org]
Thanks for making my exact point! :-)
He wants a working system, so he should go to the people who sell (or give away) working systems.
So? Those people can only provide working systens after somebody made them work. If the distributors can't get hold of some hardware specs, someone has to reverse engineer, but it doesn't matter who made does that, the distributor or the guys upstream. Especially since quite a few distributirs pay some of those "guys upstream" anyway (kernel developers and user space developers alike).
Of course, anyone has a right to proudly declare that they're done. But they shouldn't claim that that means there's just plain nothing left to do. If they want to "retire" and can afford to, more power to them. But if they need something to do (irrespective of whether that's for financial reasons or just for fun), they should look at what else needs doing with an open mind. Especially if they proudly proclaimed that there's nothing much left to do on their old job (or "job"). Then, if they decide they really don't like user space work, they can still decide to quit, but shouldn't complain.
I'm not complaining that a free service of 'A' offered by someone doesn't include 'B' because I want it. I'm stating that it is wrong for that someone (whether or not he is a provider of 'A') to claim that the 'B' thing that I want is a non-issue simply because he does not want to work on it (irrespective even of the reason why he doesn't). To me, all reasons for not wanting to do it are valid, no matter even how silly, but they shouldn't complain about not finding a job if they don't want to take/learn the jobs that are offered to them.
Besides that, you're not going to tell me that people smart enough to learn how to code a kernel can not learn how to implement a user space printer driver. I'm not saying that they have to do that, but they sure can if the want to. In my nearly 20 years of coding, I've done just about every kind of work. I'm sure I could also become a windows kernel developer if I wanted to and MS would let me.
A general linux user does not care how the distro has been put together. He or she just wants it to work.
I respect anyone's choice to work only in kernel-land if they so desire, but collecting hundreds of people who say "I only can or want to do kernel" only to then complain that these folks don't have enough work to do while on the other side of the wall there are Himalayan mountains of work left over is just plain ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous, is to claim that "the linux driver problem is overstated" simply because of this kind of self-selected mismatch.
To follow up on your analosy: a Windows developer can not go fix an Epson driver even if he wants to, but a Linux kernel developer can help fix a userspace driver problem if only he wants to. That's the big advantage of Open Source.
PS: Before flaming me for being ignorant about linux and kernels, read my sig.
So if a comment has been marked as insightful by many, and interesting by fewer, then the output should be "(Score:5; Insightful, Interesting)".
Yes, indeed. Or if only a single world can be displayed, the one that was used most should be chosen. Right now, a true +5 insightful can be sort of "destroyed" by a single subsequent malicious "-1 troll". OK, the resulting "+4 troll" still is a sign that the post might be worth something, but the annotation looses the reason why. Malda, are you reading this?
Because as a reader I tend to value "+X insightful" over "+X interesting". Yes, the really insightful ones will likely also be interesting, but not the other way around. Look at it this way: if I'm a crow looking for a mate, I'm not interested in just any black bird, but I sure am interested in other crows (even those of the wrong sex, as they are unwanted competition :-) ).
- combining +1 Interesting with +1 Insightful
Asking for that change means that you don't understand what the word insightful means. Don't worry, you're not alone: quite a few moderators don't. But please allow those who do understand to use the words properly. There are enough of us around to still make the distinction work.
Of course the profit could be coming from somewhere else than just sales. Where did I exclude that possibility? Actually, in stating that I wouldn't be surprised to see Novell being involved from before the start, I'm also opening up the path to the idea of additional profit channels. After all, Novell will not get any real money out of SCO anyway unless somebody who actually has money steps in.
Having said that, any alternative profit making scheme must exist in order to exist. By which I mean: looking at the bottom line of the entire construction (public and non-public parts put together) the party doing the dirty work must have a good expectation of actually making an overall profit. So it will inevitably leave traces at some level.
Looking at who YCM are and what they do, I doubt any YCM (or BayStar, for that matter) would still do today what BayStar did in 2004. The legal landscape in this case has changed dramatically since then and it has become much much harder to explain such an investment as "we think it's a good deal" while knowing that in reallity it only is a good deal because "you're doing your friend Bill a favour and will recuperate some greenbacks from him later". Especially given that YCM very much tout their "make as few losses as possible" approach as one of the reasons why people and funds should rely on them. As a manager of 11 billion dollars, they wont just throw that away for the sake of a few million and/or a smile from Mr. Ballmer. And definitely not in such a high-profile cases as this one. BayStar actually is the perfect example of what could happen if they're not careful.
For me flaming/insulting starts with "100% wrong" blanket claims that are obviously incorrect. If you want no flame wars, learn how to properly word the things that you want to say.
Of course you didn't claim it was MS FUD. Read again what I wrote before firing off replies: I said that to me the claim that MS is involved likely is a case of FUD.
So because you see a +5 post with incorrect info, and even one that in its first sentence warns about the possibility that it might be wrong, you decide to attack the author for being a moron who is only oh-so-happy to get +5 out of anything? And you see a need to pull in toilet words? Seems to me you're a bit trigger happy, but that's of course just my humble opinion.
Just a few notes: 1) I couldn't care less about +5 or -5 (as this post will show), as I'm long past that age; 2) I did go to groklaw (wanna see the proxy logs?), I just didn't dig deep enough (my mistake), so stop making black-and-white assumptions in whatever way you like and stop pulling in needlessly childish toilet words in order to defend them; 3) you carefully did not adress my critique of your "100% false" claim, as you know you can't beat that; 4) please note that I at least explicitly mentioned that I was using only "the limited info I had" (ref. my original post), that I also explicitly left open the option that I might be wrong (second post), and finally also have the courage to write "my mistake" in this one.
Come back when you've learned some more manners.
TFA claims that YCM would also get the litigation claims, and that's what I used as a basis. Yes, I tend to RTFA before posting.
But in any case, what I wrote cannot be "100% wrong", as you claim with assumed god-like superiority. Irrespective of their motives and who is behind it (I personally don't believe the "it has to be MS" FUD party line myself, but who knows maybe I'm actually wrong on that one...), fact remains that firms like YCM do not step into risks - be they major or only reasonable - without prior analysis and an outlook on a sizeable ROI.
Hmmm, so there might well be about 4 or 5 terrorists in my company. Or quite a few more, actually, because I doubt that your average Chinese farmer or miner stands as big a chance of being on there as those of us who leave traces outside their home village. Hmmmm.... And then to think that we also handle security sensitive stuff. Seems like I'd better find the key to my virtual cubicle door and give ol' George a warning ring before all those bad guys get a chance to elimi....
PS: At one point I personally knew someone who personally knew Mohamed Atta of 9/11 fame before that fateful day. So I guess I better go into hiding from both parties now.
Capital management firms like YCM care about nothing else than making a decent/good profit. They don't even go after the peanut-sized profits.