Forget if SCO wins or not... the point here is that if someone doesn't articulate clearly why businesses do not need to worry about future IP infringement claims then the risks involved with deploying collaborative open source products is driven up which in turn drives the cost of ownership up. Rewriting major pieces of any project is not a viable option. New code couldn't break anything, would have to perform as well as the old code, and would have to be as bug-free as the production code that was removed. Meeting any of these goals quickly is highly unlikely.
I would argue that collaborative projects like Linux are more susceptible to IP infringement due to the difficulty in controlling and auditing contributed code. Also, the broad (and violently revolting) nature of IP makes it likely that many standard innovations included in open source products may "belong" to a company. Lastly, many companies place broad claims on their employee's work, essentially saying that if you make it while you're employeed by us... it's ours. I would suspect that many contributors to collaborative projects like Linux work for companies with policies like this.
The Open Source Now Fund will fund the OSAA (Open Source Association of America). This non-profit organization's primary mission will be to seek out and prosecute all individuals and organizations that do not respect copyrights and SHARE GNU software. The OSAA will be directed by an independent committee with consisting of leading law experts.
President and CEO - Col. John "Hannibal" Smith Chief Legal Counsel - Sergeant Bosco "B.A" Baracus Chief Financial Office - Captain "Howlin Mad" Murdock Certified Ladies Man - Lieutenant Templeton "Face" Peck
This crime action comedy drama with storylines ripped from the headlines will debut on Tuesday's at 8:00 PM on NBC.
robots are attacking the elderly and stealing their medicine! Once they have you in their iron grip there is no escape. Let's focus on the problem at hand people, not some crazy speculation about what the robots might do next.
But... if we must speculate I have to say that our current scorched earth strategy is brilliant. Hopefully by reducing the # of jobs available and moving them around to the remotest reaches of the planet the robots will lose interest and will stick to stealing old people's medicine.
We must also immediately pass legislation that makes it illegal to use the elderly as bait for the robots. Even clones of the elderly.
Xiph.org's (org. responsible for Ogg Vorbis) explanation of why you shouldn't transfer from one lossy codec to another.
"You can convert any audio format to Ogg Vorbis. However, converting from one lossy format, like MP3, to another lossy format, like Vorbis, is generally a bad idea. Both MP3 and Vorbis encoders achieve high compression ratios by throwing away parts of the audio waveform that you probably won't hear. However, the MP3 and Vorbis codecs are very different, so they each will throw away different parts of the audio, although there certainly is some overlap. Converting a MP3 to Vorbis involves decoding the MP3 file back to an uncompressed format, like WAV, and recompressing it using the Ogg Vorbis encoder. The decoded MP3 will be missing the parts of the original audio that the MP3 encoder chose to discard. The Ogg Vorbis encoder will then discard other audio components when it compresses the data. At best, the result will be an Ogg file that sounds the same as your original MP3, but it is most likely that the resulting file will sound worse than your original MP3. In no case will you get a file that sounds better than the original MP3." -
Xiph Website
From the article in respect to M$ rumored bid - "That pushed the stock up, indicating that investors are betting there could be some sort of bidding war for the company, the traders said."
M$ doesn't care to own either of the companies. I belive they're driving up the cost of the Rational acquisition for IBM by floating rumors that they're goign to jump into the mix. The Boreland rumor adds some credibility to the rumor of a M$ bid for Rational because it looks like M$ has a backup plan. In reality they'll drive the price of Rational up, let IBM pay big bucks for it, and then announce or leak that Boreland just wasn't worth acquiring thereby devaluing the Boreland stock.
And yes... I do believe that the Unmarked Black Helicopters run Palladium.
True and I applaud your thankfullness, but a more efficient building process would probably drive down the cost of building houses and make them more accessible to everyone. If not reduced costs, at least people would get a home that that had a better met their needs.
I mean how much is your boss making at your expense even if he did start the company long before you joined up?
You trade a set amount of work for a set amount of money regardless of the profit. I like the fact that my company can lose money and I'll still get paid. I like the fact that they may not make money on my work for months, but I'll still get paid next week. If you don't like it start your own company.
Additional barriers to cross-functional work. You'd need to have a union-certified programmer write your scripts, and union-certified systems engineer install it. You couldn't perform these functions yourself without getting in hot water with the union.
Barriers to the use of open source software. The logic behind this one is fairly simple. If the majority of your union members work for the biggest companies (Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc.) wouldn't it make sense to for companies hiring unionized workers to use products from these companies?
With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point
As a standard XML offers many of the same benefits of a shared language. It enables us to REDUCE the cost of exchanging information. Granted, with binary files you're fine as long as your only using your language (file format), but as soon as you need to communicate with another app you did not write or get data out of a document in a format other than your own you have to spend a considerable amount of time learning the new language and writing the code to use it.
Have you every actually tried to parse a binary file that you didn't know the exact file spec for? It is no trivial task. To illustrate my point take the following snippets form two documents, one binary (MS Word 9.0) and one XML.
Please identify the author of the document.
Rate on a scale of 1-10 your confidence in changing the name of the author.
For bonus points identify the relation of the ohter individual cited in the document).
Any questions? XML enables software developers to spend more time writing code to actually do useful stuff with information and less time writing code to pull all of that information out of binary file formats.
Combining two shells or two text-based editors isn't that innovative. For the Linux community to really beat the Microsoft machine we need to combine the power of the command line with the ease of use of the GUI. How about kdesh... this shell would work only on high resolution monitors... support 32-million colors and would allow you to customize the background image... all of the possible commands would be listed at the left (or right if you prefer) of the screen for easy access. You could then drag these commands onto the command bar to execute them. Of course there would be a Start> menu for those comfortable with that kind of thing (Start# for administrators of course).
This is only the beginning... with GNOMACS you would have a helpful digital assistant (probably a harmless office product like a paperclip) that would figure out what you wanted in a text editor and then customize it for you.
Ok, I've come up w/ the ideas... now it's time for all of you coders out there to go to work!
An interview w/ John Manderfelli, General Manager of the MS Palladium Business unit, on MS's is worth the read. The following quotes came from the interview.
"The project began about four years ago as an epiphany among a small group of Microsoft employees who were working to solve the problem of content protection for online movies."
"The end result is a system with security similar to a closed-architecture system but with the flexibility of the open Windows platform."
And to stir up the pot a bit.
How would you back data up w/ this system? What if the trusted system burned up... could you still access the archived data?
No doubt MS will charge a premium to use the Palladium "features". So in the home edition of Windows you'll have strong DRM, but you won't be able to secure your own files w/o upgrading to Professional (kind of like it is now).
With corporate IT spending continually declining I have a hard time believing that many companies will abandon their thick air installed base for better encryption. Even if they did, they would most certainly wait until a final thin air standard has been ratified, as most of the current vendor implementations are incompatible.
As some have already noted other applications other then the OS and X11 could use advertising. For example.
=====
loser@markerters-dream>ssh my-other-box NOTICE: SSH brought to you by X10.com
password: ********
*!*!*!*!*!*!* Punch the monkey and win $20,000!
[to punch the monkey type:/usr/spyware/punch-monkey -s 300 -t head] -s = the strength of the punch for 1 to 500 -t = the target of the punch (head, torso, groin) *!*!*!*!*!*!*
loser@my-other-box>ls/usr/spyware/
!!! This directory listing brought to you by the fine folks at YellowBook. "We know a thing or two about directories!"
The tiny college (Bryan College, www.bryan.edu) in Eastern Tennessee that I graduated from has them in every classroom. The boards are great b/c you aren't distracted by having to copy the professor's notes off of the whiteboard, you can just download them after class. It's good to see the rest of the world catching up with rural Tennessee.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget if SCO wins or not... the point here is that if someone doesn't articulate clearly why businesses do not need to worry about future IP infringement claims then the risks involved with deploying collaborative open source products is driven up which in turn drives the cost of ownership up. Rewriting major pieces of any project is not a viable option. New code couldn't break anything, would have to perform as well as the old code, and would have to be as bug-free as the production code that was removed. Meeting any of these goals quickly is highly unlikely.
I would argue that collaborative projects like Linux are more susceptible to IP infringement due to the difficulty in controlling and auditing contributed code. Also, the broad (and violently revolting) nature of IP makes it likely that many standard innovations included in open source products may "belong" to a company. Lastly, many companies place broad claims on their employee's work, essentially saying that if you make it while you're employeed by us... it's ours. I would suspect that many contributors to collaborative projects like Linux work for companies with policies like this.
I could be wrong, and frankly hope I am.
Then, if you do anything of value with it, worst case scenario is they sue you, you settle, everyone's happy.
Please tell me you've never done any Linux development for IBM.
Redhat/NBC - August 4, 2003
The Open Source Now Fund will fund the OSAA (Open Source Association of America). This non-profit organization's primary mission will be to seek out and prosecute all individuals and organizations that do not respect copyrights and SHARE GNU software. The OSAA will be directed by an independent committee with consisting of leading law experts.
President and CEO - Col. John "Hannibal" Smith
Chief Legal Counsel - Sergeant Bosco "B.A" Baracus
Chief Financial Office - Captain "Howlin Mad" Murdock
Certified Ladies Man - Lieutenant Templeton "Face" Peck
This crime action comedy drama with storylines ripped from the headlines will debut on Tuesday's at 8:00 PM on NBC.
robots are attacking the elderly and stealing their medicine! Once they have you in their iron grip there is no escape. Let's focus on the problem at hand people, not some crazy speculation about what the robots might do next.
But... if we must speculate I have to say that our current scorched earth strategy is brilliant. Hopefully by reducing the # of jobs available and moving them around to the remotest reaches of the planet the robots will lose interest and will stick to stealing old people's medicine.
We must also immediately pass legislation that makes it illegal to use the elderly as bait for the robots. Even clones of the elderly.
Xiph.org's (org. responsible for Ogg Vorbis) explanation of why you shouldn't transfer from one lossy codec to another.
{dancing girls queued}
Bilbo... Bilbo Baggins... the greatest little hobbit of them all! {repeat until nauseous}
!! For fun an flavor throw in a lil ole skool hip hop, yo!!
duh-de-duh-de-DOOooo
I said a hip hop a hippity hop a hip hop hippity do!
Terrorists around the world have agreed to begin wearing their "Hug me! I'm a terrorist" badges.
From the article in respect to M$ rumored bid - "That pushed the stock up, indicating that investors are betting there could be some sort of bidding war for the company, the traders said."
M$ doesn't care to own either of the companies. I belive they're driving up the cost of the Rational acquisition for IBM by floating rumors that they're goign to jump into the mix. The Boreland rumor adds some credibility to the rumor of a M$ bid for Rational because it looks like M$ has a backup plan. In reality they'll drive the price of Rational up, let IBM pay big bucks for it, and then announce or leak that Boreland just wasn't worth acquiring thereby devaluing the Boreland stock.
And yes... I do believe that the Unmarked Black Helicopters run Palladium.
True and I applaud your thankfullness, but a more efficient building process would probably drive down the cost of building houses and make them more accessible to everyone. If not reduced costs, at least people would get a home that that had a better met their needs.
You trade a set amount of work for a set amount of money regardless of the profit. I like the fact that my company can lose money and I'll still get paid. I like the fact that they may not make money on my work for months, but I'll still get paid next week. If you don't like it start your own company.
Unions might create the following problems
With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point
As a standard XML offers many of the same benefits of a shared language. It enables us to REDUCE the cost of exchanging information. Granted, with binary files you're fine as long as your only using your language (file format), but as soon as you need to communicate with another app you did not write or get data out of a document in a format other than your own you have to spend a considerable amount of time learning the new language and writing the code to use it.
Have you every actually tried to parse a binary file that you didn't know the exact file spec for? It is no trivial task. To illustrate my point take the following snippets form two documents, one binary (MS Word 9.0) and one XML.
BINARY:
XML
Any questions? XML enables software developers to spend more time writing code to actually do useful stuff with information and less time writing code to pull all of that information out of binary file formats.
Combining two shells or two text-based editors isn't that innovative. For the Linux community to really beat the Microsoft machine we need to combine the power of the command line with the ease of use of the GUI. How about kdesh... this shell would work only on high resolution monitors... support 32-million colors and would allow you to customize the background image... all of the possible commands would be listed at the left (or right if you prefer) of the screen for easy access. You could then drag these commands onto the command bar to execute them. Of course there would be a Start> menu for those comfortable with that kind of thing (Start# for administrators of course).
This is only the beginning... with GNOMACS you would have a helpful digital assistant (probably a harmless office product like a paperclip) that would figure out what you wanted in a text editor and then customize it for you.
Ok, I've come up w/ the ideas... now it's time for all of you coders out there to go to work!
"The project began about four years ago as an epiphany among a small group of Microsoft employees who were working to solve the problem of content protection for online movies."
"The end result is a system with security similar to a closed-architecture system but with the flexibility of the open Windows platform."
And to stir up the pot a bit.
With corporate IT spending continually declining I have a hard time believing that many companies will abandon their thick air installed base for better encryption. Even if they did, they would most certainly wait until a final thin air standard has been ratified, as most of the current vendor implementations are incompatible.
The tiny college (Bryan College, www.bryan.edu) in Eastern Tennessee that I graduated from has them in every classroom. The boards are great b/c you aren't distracted by having to copy the professor's notes off of the whiteboard, you can just download them after class. It's good to see the rest of the world catching up with rural Tennessee.