I think this guy does have something of a point. Then again, if the software that the OSS movement was trying to mimic was OSS in the first place, they'd have no need to try to mimic it. The broader point is:
OSS works better when all software is OSS, but CSS works better when BSD-style OSS projects exist alongside CSS. Niether side benefits from the current situation (FlameProofing: this is a very simple generalization): GPL-style Open Source alongside ommercial CSS (or commercial CSS alongside GPL-style OSS, whichever you prefer) simply fosters mistrust and forces OSS developers to waste resources on copying popular CSS programs.
GAIM is open source, and it already has a pretty neat feature to log all messages. Why couldn't a wealthy brokerage firm, or several of them, or even the NASD itself, simply commission a version of GAIM with all the necessary features. I for one would love seeing the logging features of GAIM made more customizable...
Regardless of how TOG defines UNIX, it has become in the public eye a geneic standard. The UNIX label does not carry with it, in general view, anything having to do with the open group. I'd be willing to wager that few people have heard of TOG, but most people have heard of UNIX -- and have some idea of what UNIX is.
Apple does not have a "UNIX like" thing. Apple actually has a UNIX, broadly defined. OS X uses the Mach core, derived from BSD through the BSD licsening scheme, and altered by Apple. They have as much a right to call OS X UNIX as Linux Kernel hacks have a right to call their *highly* modified versions of Linux a UNIX. I know people running their own Linux distros, or even those who deal with embedded distros on a regular basis, which have less in common with, say, Red Hat (the UNIX variant from which they spring) than OS X has with BSD.
Open Group thinks they define UNIX. What I'm saying is that UNIX has become too general to be defined by one group, and that legally TOG's trademark -- and action against Apple -- won't hold up in court. The public expectation of the UNIX label, which is what I believe is legally important here, and which is the basis of TOGs claim, has absolutely nothing to do with TOGs definition.
At the very worst, Apple may be required to add in the fine print "Not endorsed by TOG..." but I find even that unlikely.
You raise a good issue. However, it's worth pointing out that Kleenex -- and other generic terms like "Xerox," and even "Xerographic" -- are still trademarked and cannot be used by competitors in marketing.
Still, I believe that Apple has a legitimate claim to the Unix name, and that, contrary to what you say, OS X probably qualifies as a UNIX; at least as much as, say, Solaris does. Furthermore, I think that the case you bring up concerning Microsoft is probably trivial. Microsoft would open itself up to lawsuits based on false advertising, or false representation of goods or services.
I think legally the "UNIX" label carries with it a set of generic expectations on behalf of the general public, and nothing more. The public would clearly feel misled if Microsoft started marketing Windows as "Unix," as you suggest -- it clearly does not meet the generally accepted definition of what a "Unix" is. Apple's OS X, on the other hand, from any reasonably technical standpoint, clearly meets that definition. This definition is left intentionally vauge by this post, as I firmly believe the defition of a "unix" is vauge indeed.
So here's an interesting question that's been floating around in my head... If Apple comes out with a line of Macs based on the 970, and the OS that supports it, and I buy a PowerPC 970 Linux Workstation from IBM -- and happen to have the Mac OS/Panther CD lying around -- do you all think I'd be able to install the 970-Compatable Mac OS on the IBM workstation?
This is a sort of throw-around question. It's not something I'd probably ever do, but I'm curious to see if people think it would be possible...
I can see certain elements of criminal law being applied to online situations. Theft/destruction of property (let's say your house in the sims can be considered intellectual property, with standard disclaimers to those/. posters who believe such property doesn't exist). I imagine with time a whole new set of common law will apply to the digital realm.
As for civil law? I can't see this happening. Sexual harassment lawsuits against avatars? Gender and disabled rights in a pre-industrial or post-apocalyptic online world? Right to trial by jury? These are fantasy worlds people, c'mon...
This does not happen in modern nuclear power plants, only in very, very old nuclear power plants. Modern containment technology has solved this problem.
Yes, but in this case the sysadmin is showing wrongdoing on behalf of an employee, not the company, which is different.
A good analogy is adultery, which is illegal in some states. If you know your boss is having an affair with the secretary, it is definately within his rights to fire you if you start spreading it around...
Re:The writer TOTALLY doesn't get it.
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
He's right. The penny is kept in circulation by the Illinois Congressional Delegation -- after all, who's on it?
Have the telco run broadband to the local phone switch (I assume everybody has phones). From there, you folks can buy and install your own DSL equipment using the regular copper to each house.
Actually, better still, you could get the telco to do it for you. If they'll centrally install T1, they'll also probably install DSL if there are enough customers interested. They'll put it anywhere if they have a sufficient subscriber base (30-50+ users). This has been done before in rural areas, or in new development communities.
I agree with the Anon. Coward. I do a fair bit of consulting work for architectural firms, and they simply can't buy Macs because AutoCAD -- and pretty much all of the top-end CAD packages -- are PC-only (with, in some cases, SPARC/Solaris and IRIX support).
Apple would do itself a HUGE favor if it could get AutoDesk to port AutoCAD to the Macintosh. Vectorworks in ok, but its not AutoCAD...
Yeah, the real problem with NAS is that the guy wants to use it for video. Unless it's being archived, that means he needs at least FireWire, if not SCSI/ATA (RAID).
I'm a media tech consultant. RAID does no good (for video) if its at the end of (even) a gigabit ethernet connection -- you need it on the local bus. The only point of server RAID is for reliability/redundancy, and it sounds as if this guy wants workstation RAID.
So why buy a Mac at all? When PC hardware is so much cheaper (okay, speed arguments aside, but I've never seen YDL breaking the sound barrier), why not just run an x86 distro? There's even choice. If you're notan Intel fan, run AMD.
Granted, for laptops, the iBook is a sweet piece of hardware -- but parallels do exist. And they're faster than a 900 (or 700, or 800) mhz G3.
2) It's enterprise-level and high quality. All Cisco equipment (for the university).
3) Geographically disparate dorm rooms. 200 rooms over 4 doors over a campus about 4 x 4 miles...
Yeah, I guess I neglected to make clear... it was an complete upgrade -- not just the wiring. Cat5e wiring + Cisco 10/100 routers/switches, with a gigabit backbone, which is basically what you'd want if you were assembling an industrial-strength netowkr.
If I understand the original post, wiring for ethernet, at least in his 160 condo set-up, would be extremely expensive: depending on the geographical distribution of the condos, installing Ethernet could be on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I recently helped consult with a University who wanted to upgrade all two dorms from 10bT to 100bT, and rewire with Cat5e. Just rewiring -- conduits already dug and easily accessible, mind you -- was going to cost them $50,000-$80,000 for two hundred dorm rooms.
Anyway, the advantages of DSL should be obvious: no new cable needs to be laid. You can just install the DSL equipment at the central phone switch of the condos, and then give each resident a DSL modem. Much simpler, much cheaper.
But I agree -- a T1 isn't going to cut it for 160 heavy users. If you only expect moderate use, you might be able to squeak by. I'd combine multiple T1s (better redundency) or spring for a T3 (nominally cheaper per megabit). The choice is yours.
Yes and no. See, making the Music Store available for windows doesn't necessarily mean porting iTunes to windows. HUGE difference. Apple could easily add Music Service to MusicMatch, which is what they currently suggest to connect to iPods.
Just burn them to CD-Audio, which is a universal format. If you want to play them elsewhere, re-encode as MP3. AAC files can also be read on both Linux and Windows -- all the DRM is in the interface (iTunes) and not in the file itself.
Some of it might be royalties with the bands. A lot of one-hit-wonders (and the grandchildren of one-hit-wonders) are living off of the royalties to their one-hit of yore. Generally speaking, these one-hit-wonders have amazingly favorable contracts with the music studios. Something tells me that the studios could not in good faith uphold their contracts with artists and their estates if they offered these one-hit-wonders.
Yeah, but most of us don't like entire CDs -- most of us like individual songs. We have no artist loyalty. If a song sounds good, we listen to it. The mass public isn't made up of music groupies, or people who question the artisic integrity of listening to a music mix.
It used to be, if I wanted to listen to one song. One song! off of a CD, I had to buy the entire $15-$18 CD, even if I thought that the rest of the songs were shit. I have stacks and stacks of CDs from the early 90s, on which I might like one track.
So for me, it used to be $16/track. Now it's $.99/track. That's a nice bargain.
I also started my own consulting firm, and I completely agree with the above post, but I'll extend the financial details a little further:
Do not start your own business unless:
1) You have enough money in the bank to support yourself (and your family) for AT LEAST three if not six months OR you have a spouse who makes enough money to support you and your family (I started my business just after my wife got a major promotion, so we had money to spare)
2) You have AT LEAST $6,000 start-up cash for every three months you plan to lose money. For instance, if you think your business will be profitable after six months, start with $12,000. Expect your expenses to be at least $2,000/month, not the $500 in the parent post. If you go under budget, put the money in a reserve -- don't just spend it the next month.
When I started, I had just quit my job as a partner at a much, much larger business consulting house. Though I'd worked my way up from being an associate, I hadn't realized how much of the "little stuff" the company took care of for us. Everything from office supplies to the phone bill, xeroxing, marketing etc.
Don't start from home. Find an office, even a cheap one. Home is too distracting. Good luck!
The issue of secure software is not an issue of a totalitarian society. Secure software environments, like GPS systems, can be considered weapons. There should be certain options available only to military use, and which the Government -- whose agents have sworn an oath to defend this country from all enemies -- has an obligation to prevent those weapons -- in this case secure software, which is just as much a weapon as an F-14 or a 80mm mortar.
You can restrict software without trampling on peoples civil liberties. We have the right to bear arms, but does that translate into being able to purchase F-14s with the ensuing classified technology? Of course not. Does anybody think that civil liberties are being trampled as a result? Well, maybe some people, but I think you can see the point.
Software -- secure software in particular -- can be a weapon, kind of like atomic energy. We need to start treating it as such.
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OSS works better when all software is OSS, but CSS works better when BSD-style OSS projects exist alongside CSS. Niether side benefits from the current situation (FlameProofing: this is a very simple generalization): GPL-style Open Source alongside ommercial CSS (or commercial CSS alongside GPL-style OSS, whichever you prefer) simply fosters mistrust and forces OSS developers to waste resources on copying popular CSS programs.
Game theory, folks. Nobody wins.
GAIM is open source, and it already has a pretty neat feature to log all messages. Why couldn't a wealthy brokerage firm, or several of them, or even the NASD itself, simply commission a version of GAIM with all the necessary features. I for one would love seeing the logging features of GAIM made more customizable...
Apple does not have a "UNIX like" thing. Apple actually has a UNIX, broadly defined. OS X uses the Mach core, derived from BSD through the BSD licsening scheme, and altered by Apple. They have as much a right to call OS X UNIX as Linux Kernel hacks have a right to call their *highly* modified versions of Linux a UNIX. I know people running their own Linux distros, or even those who deal with embedded distros on a regular basis, which have less in common with, say, Red Hat (the UNIX variant from which they spring) than OS X has with BSD.
Open Group thinks they define UNIX. What I'm saying is that UNIX has become too general to be defined by one group, and that legally TOG's trademark -- and action against Apple -- won't hold up in court. The public expectation of the UNIX label, which is what I believe is legally important here, and which is the basis of TOGs claim, has absolutely nothing to do with TOGs definition.
At the very worst, Apple may be required to add in the fine print "Not endorsed by TOG..." but I find even that unlikely.
Still, I believe that Apple has a legitimate claim to the Unix name, and that, contrary to what you say, OS X probably qualifies as a UNIX; at least as much as, say, Solaris does. Furthermore, I think that the case you bring up concerning Microsoft is probably trivial. Microsoft would open itself up to lawsuits based on false advertising, or false representation of goods or services.
I think legally the "UNIX" label carries with it a set of generic expectations on behalf of the general public, and nothing more. The public would clearly feel misled if Microsoft started marketing Windows as "Unix," as you suggest -- it clearly does not meet the generally accepted definition of what a "Unix" is. Apple's OS X, on the other hand, from any reasonably technical standpoint, clearly meets that definition. This definition is left intentionally vauge by this post, as I firmly believe the defition of a "unix" is vauge indeed.
They can say billions and billions "served"
This is a sort of throw-around question. It's not something I'd probably ever do, but I'm curious to see if people think it would be possible...
As for civil law? I can't see this happening. Sexual harassment lawsuits against avatars? Gender and disabled rights in a pre-industrial or post-apocalyptic online world? Right to trial by jury? These are fantasy worlds people, c'mon...
This does not happen in modern nuclear power plants, only in very, very old nuclear power plants. Modern containment technology has solved this problem.
A good analogy is adultery, which is illegal in some states. If you know your boss is having an affair with the secretary, it is definately within his rights to fire you if you start spreading it around...
He's right. The penny is kept in circulation by the Illinois Congressional Delegation -- after all, who's on it?
Actually, better still, you could get the telco to do it for you. If they'll centrally install T1, they'll also probably install DSL if there are enough customers interested. They'll put it anywhere if they have a sufficient subscriber base (30-50+ users). This has been done before in rural areas, or in new development communities.
Apple would do itself a HUGE favor if it could get AutoDesk to port AutoCAD to the Macintosh. Vectorworks in ok, but its not AutoCAD...
I'm a media tech consultant. RAID does no good (for video) if its at the end of (even) a gigabit ethernet connection -- you need it on the local bus. The only point of server RAID is for reliability/redundancy, and it sounds as if this guy wants workstation RAID.
Granted, for laptops, the iBook is a sweet piece of hardware -- but parallels do exist. And they're faster than a 900 (or 700, or 800) mhz G3.
2) It's enterprise-level and high quality. All Cisco equipment (for the university). 3) Geographically disparate dorm rooms. 200 rooms over 4 doors over a campus about 4 x 4 miles...
Yeah, I guess I neglected to make clear... it was an complete upgrade -- not just the wiring. Cat5e wiring + Cisco 10/100 routers/switches, with a gigabit backbone, which is basically what you'd want if you were assembling an industrial-strength netowkr.
Anyway, the advantages of DSL should be obvious: no new cable needs to be laid. You can just install the DSL equipment at the central phone switch of the condos, and then give each resident a DSL modem. Much simpler, much cheaper.
But I agree -- a T1 isn't going to cut it for 160 heavy users. If you only expect moderate use, you might be able to squeak by. I'd combine multiple T1s (better redundency) or spring for a T3 (nominally cheaper per megabit). The choice is yours.
-Shylock
Yes and no. See, making the Music Store available for windows doesn't necessarily mean porting iTunes to windows. HUGE difference. Apple could easily add Music Service to MusicMatch, which is what they currently suggest to connect to iPods.
Just burn them to CD-Audio, which is a universal format. If you want to play them elsewhere, re-encode as MP3. AAC files can also be read on both Linux and Windows -- all the DRM is in the interface (iTunes) and not in the file itself.
Some of it might be royalties with the bands. A lot of one-hit-wonders (and the grandchildren of one-hit-wonders) are living off of the royalties to their one-hit of yore. Generally speaking, these one-hit-wonders have amazingly favorable contracts with the music studios. Something tells me that the studios could not in good faith uphold their contracts with artists and their estates if they offered these one-hit-wonders.
It used to be, if I wanted to listen to one song. One song! off of a CD, I had to buy the entire $15-$18 CD, even if I thought that the rest of the songs were shit. I have stacks and stacks of CDs from the early 90s, on which I might like one track.
So for me, it used to be $16/track. Now it's $.99/track. That's a nice bargain.
Do not start your own business unless:
1) You have enough money in the bank to support yourself (and your family) for AT LEAST three if not six months OR you have a spouse who makes enough money to support you and your family (I started my business just after my wife got a major promotion, so we had money to spare)
2) You have AT LEAST $6,000 start-up cash for every three months you plan to lose money. For instance, if you think your business will be profitable after six months, start with $12,000. Expect your expenses to be at least $2,000/month, not the $500 in the parent post. If you go under budget, put the money in a reserve -- don't just spend it the next month.
When I started, I had just quit my job as a partner at a much, much larger business consulting house. Though I'd worked my way up from being an associate, I hadn't realized how much of the "little stuff" the company took care of for us. Everything from office supplies to the phone bill, xeroxing, marketing etc.
Don't start from home. Find an office, even a cheap one. Home is too distracting. Good luck!
The issue of secure software is not an issue of a totalitarian society. Secure software environments, like GPS systems, can be considered weapons. There should be certain options available only to military use, and which the Government -- whose agents have sworn an oath to defend this country from all enemies -- has an obligation to prevent those weapons -- in this case secure software, which is just as much a weapon as an F-14 or a 80mm mortar.
You can restrict software without trampling on peoples civil liberties. We have the right to bear arms, but does that translate into being able to purchase F-14s with the ensuing classified technology? Of course not. Does anybody think that civil liberties are being trampled as a result? Well, maybe some people, but I think you can see the point.
Software -- secure software in particular -- can be a weapon, kind of like atomic energy. We need to start treating it as such.
$10/month for unlimited data? Do you have a link to that?