the difference between F/OSS and commercial is that commercial software wants the product to be both the "shiny disc" and the "intellectual property license"... i.e a License to use the shiny disc to perform a task. The idea of the source code being the "product" is completely foreign at this point both in practice and legality.
F/OSS is about source code as literature or academic writing, a cookbook to do something, not a product. In GPL terms, binary, shiny discs are ignored because there is no "product" only a "recording" of source code to be played back.
but the investors DID reward those companies... nobody was complaining in the 80's when Microsoft was minting all those millioniares, because backdating is exactly what they were doing way back then. I belive MS stock split multiple times while they were this, so investors were flocking to the companies in droves. I agree, that they shouldn't have been backdating options because it doesn't show the real cost, but like I said, until recently, companies didn't even have to state the value of the options they were carrying (again, the MS, apple, dot com days did this all the time even non-tech industries like McDonald's) I knew this was going on years ago, but investors just kept pumping up the stocks, and punishing the companies that kept honest books but missed a few pennies on the quarterly report... the news is full of companies Wall Street analysts killed because they weren't "agressive" enough in their accounting.
except Apple has the NDAs to use the REAL windows APIs directly. I believe they got those in a lawsuit when MS tried to renig on their deal to co-develop quicktime. They wouldn't be able to mix the code with Wine, but they could do it on their own... They have access to information the Wine people could never, ever see for legal reasons.
this isn't about employee purchase, it's about backdating option the price of options to the lowest price for the calender month. It's about the stock being valued at $3 on one day and $2 earlier the company lets you buy it at $2. The real issue is that until 2000 or so, perhaps even later, companies weren't required to list options as salary, and didn't have to report until the options were cashed in.. so most companies haven't been tracking outstanding options for years. This issue is even less of an issue.
It wasn't "wrong" until 5 years ago at most. The big players that were the worst offenders, Microsoft, etc, got off with being asked nicely years ago. Unfortunately, they set the tone for the industry and the unrealistic expectations of investors, so everbody else did it to keep up. Of course the little people are the ones that don't have huge accounting/legal teams to re-run 5 years of numbers on command for the SEC. The backdating thing is more about droping everything and kissing up to the auditors and throwing lots of money at redoing the books than actual wrongdoing. The trouble is that it does mess with the books, especially when investors are freaking over a single penny on quarterly reports. Most of the companies are doing fine financially, and have cash in the bank, so they're not going to "loose" much money but having their performance adjusted will make the analysts redraw all their pretty pictures with the lines "all wrong".
NASA's problem is over engineering and relying too much on gimmicks rather than more modern designs. In reality of the manufacturing world, NASA is the 30% failure rate... that's why stuff costs so very much to make, because in some cases you may throw away 3 in 10 nearly completed parts because the manufacturing process is simply too complex. I worked in an electronics manufacturing firm that did FDA and military work, and the hoops are terrible, for very little benifit.
We need to design a space plan that can use parts mass-manufactured to Automotive standards. Most automakers mesure error in parts per MILLION and to thousandths of an inch or less. The current NASA way involves massively complex sample parts, impossible to remake, difficult to inspect, so 90% of the work is in trying to prove the part will be usable. In the auto industry lines will stop for 1 bad part in 1000 for the day. If they're serious about a long term space program they need to move to modular, mass produced fail-safe engineered parts.
we may need to jump out of our cars and beat a carjacker terrorist to death with a tire iron... that's true in half the world today, games like GTA are just preparing kids for live outside white-bread america. We should all be doing our civic duty to be prepared at all times to beat down terrorists with whatever is at hand... terrorists even include women and babies now after all.
I see this as forced revenue protection rather than progress. Why are they bothering to release info about 10.1 when 10 isn't even out yet... let alone being used to full potential. This is typical MS. "We're failing now... but look what we'll do next." It's old.
What if the EULA allowed Microsoft to require spyware on your machine. Actualy, the HIPPA crowd had a huge issue with a change a few years ago when MS added the ability with WGA to inspect your machine and documents and phone home at will... that's not in the original EULA of Windows XP. For the HIPPA people that addition could mean non-compliance with the law... by installing a security update? That's taking advantage of the customer needing their product to work in order to better their own position....that's wrong.
you purchase a car with a 70,000 mile warranty, but when you take it into the shop they automatically "upgrade" you to a 60,000 warranty because you recieved "consideration" in form of warranty service? In a court of law that would never hold for automobiles.. and yes, they've tried it.. it's amazing those cases aren't applied to software just as easily.
now that Apple is all intel, they won't need to push the upgrades as often. Apple sells machines based on price point, not gee-wiz new processors now. They will keep the models names the same, but upgrade as new processors come out and prices drop.
apple won't be competing on desktops anytime soon. If you notice their cpu scheme they use only intel notebook and server processors.. NOT the desktop ones. That automatically keeps them from price waring with Dell for components with Intel management. They don't have to pay MS tax, (remember MS gets 85%+ profit per copy so the actual dev cost of Windows on a PC is only $15 or so) so that's $60+ more bucks to negotiate with for extra BOL cost of using better parts. It also pumps up the volume of mobile processors and server processors they are purchasing giving them the buying edge they need to get them first. Apple is probably the biggest individual seller of Core duo right now and will probably be the biggest seller of the new Xeon as well.. because the Windows crowd is busy using the cheapest bulky, power hungry, desktop processors they can use.. and has warehouses full to clean up before they can compete with what Apple is offering.
fact is that Apple puts more consistant hardware in their machines than Dell does. They also don't sell "cheap" machines without basic features like Dell often does. The $300 Dell only has a Celeron D, 256MB ram, intel 800 graphice, no firewire, no wireless, no bluetooth, etc. Apple's opinion is not to sell such a cheap computer because it's useless... The Dell is already obsolete, and really needs upgrades just to run current software. The lowest mac mini uses Core solo, intel 900 graphics, and includes wireless, bluetooth, and firewire... on top of that it's cuter!!
Apple is trying to sell on quality and experience they want you to have, not just the minimum hardware needed to run MS windows. That's the key difference between Apple and everybody else. Apple is trying to do their own thing, everybody else is keeping to the MS line.. too far ahead and MS does something different so it's wasted money; so it's just a race to the bottom of cheapest cost.
no there's not! There's no such thing as "free room and board" when you're put into prison wrongly.. You didn't save any money by being in prison... you weren't there willingly!!! You were given the "choice" by the state of complying with prison time or being killed for fleeing... In a free society there's no monetary value to put on one's freedom... that's why we send soldiers to war to protect it. It's worth all the money in the country to free an innocent man. What they are giving is "conscience money" more than anything. Taking money away from any "compensation" they choose to placiate their conscience with is the lowest form of wrong. The only true way to compensate somebody for lost freedom is to remove the freedom of the offending party.. eye-for-an-eye type stuff.. That would make procecutors think twice when they go after cases for publicity and then years later an innocent man was in jail.
but Microsoft makes an Anti-virus product... i doubt that Windows live will stop production after Vista comes out... so Microsoft has SOME way of integrating AV into the system. If they created an API for security software that didn't need kernel space MS PR would be all over this by now by saying the AV companies "aren't doing it right". But they're not... MS is silent. So the only option is that MS has secret APIs somewhere.. in the kernel or in the OS.. that allow security software to run.
But Microsoft has anti-virus software working on Vista. That's the problem. Anti-virus is not impossible... Microsoft just isn't let anybody else play!!
excellent point, most 32 bit processors don't have the process execution flag enabled.. but nearly ALL 64 bit processors have the feature. When vista comes out, all desktop processors will be 64 bit. I believe Core 2 duo desktop is ready. The second clue would be Apple seems to be gearing for 64 bit as well, so intel will be pushing it heavily in the next 6 months. That processor shift could neatly include the TPC and anything else. Most importantly, the cool new media, protected conntent features could be only available to the new 64 bit processors on the new Vista OS. Minimal backward hacking compatiability because older PCs don't have 64 bits or the SEE3 instructions, registers, processor commands to even allow the hacked code to run. Intersting idea.
no, you still need THEIR anti-virus to protect you. That's the rub. Microsoft now has their own Windows Live anti spyware, anti virus, anti hacking package... so they can obviously write anti virus for new windows, but they don't want anybody ELSE to do it!!!
of the two players this round Blu-ray is better from the political point of view. HD-DVD is heavily tied to Microsoft formats the encoding, the menu programing, and the encryption, ensureing they embrace, extend, extinguish yet another market. Blu-Ray is at least using Open formats like Java and h.264 so that they aren't positioning themselves as an abusive monopoly.
What I thing OSS developers want to know is where their code falls. When I put a project up on sourceforge, is that considered published? If that is the case, then we should be filling sourceforge, google code, etc with every idea we can think of as fast as we can.
My fear is that there will be some court case that invalidates things like sourceforge as prior art in order to "simplify" things because too many companies can't keep from getting sued. That would lead to companies pillaging ideas from the "public". One danger of "first to file" is the idea by certian people in the PTO, already starting to surface, that everything should be patented... so by not filing, they feel entitled to give it to somebody else. That's horribly dangerous for OSS because we don't generally issue patents.
IBM doesn't want the Unix IP because of Anti trust concerns. That was the whole point of the Open group keeping SCO around. If the actual Unix vendors that also ship the big iron Unix servers owned the OS itself, they'd be getting sued by the FTC left and right for the high Unix prices. But with a third party in charge of the IP, "nobody" important owns the OS, so prices for Unix and big iron can't be targeted for anti-trust lawsuits. I think with Linux in the mix now, it could be OK for a "big iron" unix vendor to get the license, but somebody would surely cry foul. After all, if IBM bought them out, then Sun, HP, SGI, etc would all "owe" money to IBM which would be a big problem to the regulators. The way the law works right now somebody has to "own" the rights.. that's why they call it IP... they want it treated like property (land or autos, etc), not legally like a "treat" (beer, chocolate, etc.. that you use it and it goes away)
I live in michigan and my city still has a no spitting law on the books.. up to 100$ or 30 days. When the law was written in the early 1900's there were huge problems with TB... most cities then were still dealing with raw sewage in the streets as a "bad thing" and TB can really be caught THAT easily, by wiping the spit off your shoe. It's sometimes hard to believe all the little "civilities" that we "just don't do" we take for granted in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
F/OSS is about source code as literature or academic writing, a cookbook to do something, not a product. In GPL terms, binary, shiny discs are ignored because there is no "product" only a "recording" of source code to be played back.
isn't that what people do at Raves? techno & X. so it's not that far fetched...Pac-Man is damaging to society!
but the investors DID reward those companies... nobody was complaining in the 80's when Microsoft was minting all those millioniares, because backdating is exactly what they were doing way back then. I belive MS stock split multiple times while they were this, so investors were flocking to the companies in droves. I agree, that they shouldn't have been backdating options because it doesn't show the real cost, but like I said, until recently, companies didn't even have to state the value of the options they were carrying (again, the MS, apple, dot com days did this all the time even non-tech industries like McDonald's) I knew this was going on years ago, but investors just kept pumping up the stocks, and punishing the companies that kept honest books but missed a few pennies on the quarterly report... the news is full of companies Wall Street analysts killed because they weren't "agressive" enough in their accounting.
Boot camp is only "guaranteed" to work with RETAIL XP + SP2, no other version is supported by Apple.
except Apple has the NDAs to use the REAL windows APIs directly. I believe they got those in a lawsuit when MS tried to renig on their deal to co-develop quicktime. They wouldn't be able to mix the code with Wine, but they could do it on their own... They have access to information the Wine people could never, ever see for legal reasons.
this isn't about employee purchase, it's about backdating option the price of options to the lowest price for the calender month. It's about the stock being valued at $3 on one day and $2 earlier the company lets you buy it at $2. The real issue is that until 2000 or so, perhaps even later, companies weren't required to list options as salary, and didn't have to report until the options were cashed in.. so most companies haven't been tracking outstanding options for years. This issue is even less of an issue.
It wasn't "wrong" until 5 years ago at most. The big players that were the worst offenders, Microsoft, etc, got off with being asked nicely years ago. Unfortunately, they set the tone for the industry and the unrealistic expectations of investors, so everbody else did it to keep up. Of course the little people are the ones that don't have huge accounting/legal teams to re-run 5 years of numbers on command for the SEC. The backdating thing is more about droping everything and kissing up to the auditors and throwing lots of money at redoing the books than actual wrongdoing. The trouble is that it does mess with the books, especially when investors are freaking over a single penny on quarterly reports. Most of the companies are doing fine financially, and have cash in the bank, so they're not going to "loose" much money but having their performance adjusted will make the analysts redraw all their pretty pictures with the lines "all wrong".
We need to design a space plan that can use parts mass-manufactured to Automotive standards. Most automakers mesure error in parts per MILLION and to thousandths of an inch or less. The current NASA way involves massively complex sample parts, impossible to remake, difficult to inspect, so 90% of the work is in trying to prove the part will be usable. In the auto industry lines will stop for 1 bad part in 1000 for the day. If they're serious about a long term space program they need to move to modular, mass produced fail-safe engineered parts.
we may need to jump out of our cars and beat a carjacker terrorist to death with a tire iron... that's true in half the world today, games like GTA are just preparing kids for live outside white-bread america. We should all be doing our civic duty to be prepared at all times to beat down terrorists with whatever is at hand... terrorists even include women and babies now after all.
I see this as forced revenue protection rather than progress. Why are they bothering to release info about 10.1 when 10 isn't even out yet... let alone being used to full potential. This is typical MS. "We're failing now... but look what we'll do next." It's old.
What if the EULA allowed Microsoft to require spyware on your machine. Actualy, the HIPPA crowd had a huge issue with a change a few years ago when MS added the ability with WGA to inspect your machine and documents and phone home at will... that's not in the original EULA of Windows XP. For the HIPPA people that addition could mean non-compliance with the law... by installing a security update? That's taking advantage of the customer needing their product to work in order to better their own position....that's wrong.
you purchase a car with a 70,000 mile warranty, but when you take it into the shop they automatically "upgrade" you to a 60,000 warranty because you recieved "consideration" in form of warranty service? In a court of law that would never hold for automobiles.. and yes, they've tried it.. it's amazing those cases aren't applied to software just as easily.
now that Apple is all intel, they won't need to push the upgrades as often. Apple sells machines based on price point, not gee-wiz new processors now. They will keep the models names the same, but upgrade as new processors come out and prices drop.
apple won't be competing on desktops anytime soon. If you notice their cpu scheme they use only intel notebook and server processors.. NOT the desktop ones. That automatically keeps them from price waring with Dell for components with Intel management. They don't have to pay MS tax, (remember MS gets 85%+ profit per copy so the actual dev cost of Windows on a PC is only $15 or so) so that's $60+ more bucks to negotiate with for extra BOL cost of using better parts. It also pumps up the volume of mobile processors and server processors they are purchasing giving them the buying edge they need to get them first. Apple is probably the biggest individual seller of Core duo right now and will probably be the biggest seller of the new Xeon as well.. because the Windows crowd is busy using the cheapest bulky, power hungry, desktop processors they can use.. and has warehouses full to clean up before they can compete with what Apple is offering.
Apple is trying to sell on quality and experience they want you to have, not just the minimum hardware needed to run MS windows. That's the key difference between Apple and everybody else. Apple is trying to do their own thing, everybody else is keeping to the MS line.. too far ahead and MS does something different so it's wasted money; so it's just a race to the bottom of cheapest cost.
no there's not! There's no such thing as "free room and board" when you're put into prison wrongly.. You didn't save any money by being in prison... you weren't there willingly!!! You were given the "choice" by the state of complying with prison time or being killed for fleeing... In a free society there's no monetary value to put on one's freedom... that's why we send soldiers to war to protect it. It's worth all the money in the country to free an innocent man. What they are giving is "conscience money" more than anything. Taking money away from any "compensation" they choose to placiate their conscience with is the lowest form of wrong. The only true way to compensate somebody for lost freedom is to remove the freedom of the offending party.. eye-for-an-eye type stuff.. That would make procecutors think twice when they go after cases for publicity and then years later an innocent man was in jail.
but Microsoft makes an Anti-virus product... i doubt that Windows live will stop production after Vista comes out... so Microsoft has SOME way of integrating AV into the system. If they created an API for security software that didn't need kernel space MS PR would be all over this by now by saying the AV companies "aren't doing it right". But they're not... MS is silent. So the only option is that MS has secret APIs somewhere.. in the kernel or in the OS.. that allow security software to run.
But Microsoft has anti-virus software working on Vista. That's the problem. Anti-virus is not impossible... Microsoft just isn't let anybody else play!!
excellent point, most 32 bit processors don't have the process execution flag enabled.. but nearly ALL 64 bit processors have the feature. When vista comes out, all desktop processors will be 64 bit. I believe Core 2 duo desktop is ready. The second clue would be Apple seems to be gearing for 64 bit as well, so intel will be pushing it heavily in the next 6 months. That processor shift could neatly include the TPC and anything else. Most importantly, the cool new media, protected conntent features could be only available to the new 64 bit processors on the new Vista OS. Minimal backward hacking compatiability because older PCs don't have 64 bits or the SEE3 instructions, registers, processor commands to even allow the hacked code to run. Intersting idea.
no, you still need THEIR anti-virus to protect you. That's the rub. Microsoft now has their own Windows Live anti spyware, anti virus, anti hacking package... so they can obviously write anti virus for new windows, but they don't want anybody ELSE to do it!!!
of the two players this round Blu-ray is better from the political point of view. HD-DVD is heavily tied to Microsoft formats the encoding, the menu programing, and the encryption, ensureing they embrace, extend, extinguish yet another market. Blu-Ray is at least using Open formats like Java and h.264 so that they aren't positioning themselves as an abusive monopoly.
My fear is that there will be some court case that invalidates things like sourceforge as prior art in order to "simplify" things because too many companies can't keep from getting sued. That would lead to companies pillaging ideas from the "public". One danger of "first to file" is the idea by certian people in the PTO, already starting to surface, that everything should be patented... so by not filing, they feel entitled to give it to somebody else. That's horribly dangerous for OSS because we don't generally issue patents.
IBM doesn't want the Unix IP because of Anti trust concerns. That was the whole point of the Open group keeping SCO around. If the actual Unix vendors that also ship the big iron Unix servers owned the OS itself, they'd be getting sued by the FTC left and right for the high Unix prices. But with a third party in charge of the IP, "nobody" important owns the OS, so prices for Unix and big iron can't be targeted for anti-trust lawsuits. I think with Linux in the mix now, it could be OK for a "big iron" unix vendor to get the license, but somebody would surely cry foul. After all, if IBM bought them out, then Sun, HP, SGI, etc would all "owe" money to IBM which would be a big problem to the regulators. The way the law works right now somebody has to "own" the rights.. that's why they call it IP... they want it treated like property (land or autos, etc), not legally like a "treat" (beer, chocolate, etc.. that you use it and it goes away)
I live in michigan and my city still has a no spitting law on the books.. up to 100$ or 30 days. When the law was written in the early 1900's there were huge problems with TB... most cities then were still dealing with raw sewage in the streets as a "bad thing" and TB can really be caught THAT easily, by wiping the spit off your shoe. It's sometimes hard to believe all the little "civilities" that we "just don't do" we take for granted in the USA.
sorry... it seemed like a good idea at the time.