> But we found both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically
Well, duh. Obviously stuff like that would change over time. The only reason anyone would *ever* assume otherwise is to make radioactive dating sound slightly less preposterous.
> McDonald's still makes crappy food no matter how many patents they apply for.
McDonald's is not a gourmet restaurant. It's a fast-food chain. Their goal isn't to make better food. Okay, sure, I imagine they do give some consideration to that, so maybe it's *a* goal. But it's not *the* goal. The goal is speed, and they never forget it.
They want to make the food faster, to better keep up with demand, because people are not willing to wait -- especially during the lunch hour. If the drive-through line is too long, people will drive right on past and go somewhere else, but if the line is short, another car will always pull in. Always. There's about an hour and a half every day (roughly, from 11:15 to 12:45, though this varies a bit depending on location) where this is true: it's impossible to empty out your drive-through line, no matter how fast you turn out the food. There will always be another car. So you try to get the orders out as fast as you can, to meet demand. Improving speed has a direct impact on profits, in a way that improving food quality would not. That's the business McDonald's is in.
Other times of day they have somewhat different goals, especially at night, when the goal centers more on wasting as little as possible and keeping costs down, because there's not so much profit to be made in fast food at night. It's just enough to be worth staying open, but not enough to warrant putting well-trained employees on that shift. (Don't go to McDonald's at night. Don't. Go at 10:45 am, when the lunch crew is on duty but the rush hasn't started yet. Go at 3pm, when at least a couple of the employees who came in for lunch are still around. Don't go at night. If you think the food quality is low in the daytime, you really don't want to see it at night. At night you order a pizza, because that's when the pizza places do most of their business and put their good employees on.)
They're not concerned with making one sandwich, really. I mean, yes, that's part of it, but you're taking it out of context. What concerns McDonald's is how to make sandwiches quickly and efficiently enough that a small number of employees can make the sandwiches as fast as people can order them during the lunch hour. They're trying to get every drive-through order out in twenty seconds or less, even if it's got twenty or thirty sandwiches on it, plus fries and drinks. (You think I'm kidding only if you've never worked fast food.)
> The sandwich making process they list in their claims is not > tied to a particular device, but is implemented by human hands.
Are you certain this is so? Having worked at McDonald's a few years ago, I cannot think of a single sandwich they make without using a device of some kind, usually several. Some of them are pretty cool, too. I wouldn't mind having one of their ketchup shooters at home. Not the kind out in the lobby for putting the ketchup in the little paper cups; I'm talking about the kind on the assembly line for evenly distributing the ketchup over the whole sandwich at once. It's actually a very convenient and efficient device. I assume other fast food chains must have comparable devices as well, or they wouldn't be able to compete.
IANAL and have not looked at the patent in question, but are you sure it covers making a sandwich by hand? I bet it doesn't. McDonald's doesn't even do things that way.
Most sausage isn't made in the traditional way anymore these days. It's just ground meat and spices, in a synthetic casing, put together by a mechanical assembly-line machine.
> Seriously, though. If people have a problem with killing to eat, they shouldn't eat vegetables, either.
Doesn't that depend on the vegetable? Sure, some vegetables you have to kill the plant to get the part we eat (carrots, for instance (which, incidentally, are one of my favorites)), but that's not universally the case. Eating a stalk of rhubarb, for instance, is not fatal to the plant and, indeed, doesn't seem to harm it at all (provided you don't take all the stalks at once or some fool thing, which you wouldn't do anyway because then you wouldn't get any more rhubarb).
The really controversial point (well, controversial if we were to grant the premise that plants have rights and must be treated ethically) would be eating the part of the plant that includes the seeds, such as we do with beans and fruits and grains.
I think it's interesting that this whole question is starting to come up at just about the *same* point in history when we, for the first time, have developed the theoretical capability to synthesize our own food using chemistry and alternative energy sources (nuclear, solar, whatever). I mean, sure, we don't currently have the infrastructure in place to be able to make nearly enough food to feed all of us. But we *do* know how to do it, which wasn't really true a hundred years ago. Certain vitamins would probably be a problem, but even there, if we put chemists to work on the problem, it's probably easier to solve than a lot of the medical problems they've been working on.
(I'm not saying we should do this. Personally, I like eating plants. Sometimes I eat animals as well, albeit not in as great a quantity as plants. But I think it's interesting that we *could* do it, and now the issue is starting to pop up.)
> I must refer back to Genesis in this respect. God gave Adam > dominion of all life on the earth to use as he saw fit.
Umm, before you cite Genesis in support of your ideas, maybe you should read Genesis more carefully so you can get your citations right. God instructed Adam to look after the animals, but he gave him plants for food. Adam was a vegetarian. Genesis is very clear on this point.
Animals *were* given as food also, but not until the time of Noah (i.e., hundreds of years later) and even then one of the conditions was that you not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it, a restriction many people today no longer observe.
Later, even more dietary restrictions were placed on the Jewish nation, such as not eating pork, but those things never applied to Gentiles, unless they became proselyte Jews. The instructions given to Noah apply, presumably, to the entire human race, since we're all descended from Noah.
> There are people out there who REALLY think milk comes from the factory. That > meat is produced in a machine. They really have no idea where an egg comes from.
Sure, and there are also people who think that spaghetti noodles might grow on trees, that buying a sticker to put on their cellphone can improve the battery life, that homeopathy works, that the government could make us all rich just by printing more money if they were only willing to do so, that they won't need to work for a living or pay their mortgage anymore if Obama[1] is President, and all manner of other nonsense. What's your point?
[1] Note to Obama fans: it's just an example. I'm not blaming Obama for the fact that there are idiots in the world. Obviously, if Obama had never run for President, there would be idiots in the world anyway. That's not his fault. It's an immutable fact of life. And I'm sure you can think of an idiotic claim someone has made in support of a candidate from the other party. As I said, people believe all kinds of nonsense.
> They are at their best when putting up billboards against chaining up dogs.
Yeah, I kind of actually agree with them on that one. Dogs are *social* animals. Getting one and then just chaining it up in the back yard all the time and never going out there except once or twice a day to feed it, like so many people do, is *cruel*. If you don't want a dog in your house, then don't get a dog.
Having outdoor dogs is okay if you have a lot of space, some other animals for them to hang around with, spend a fair amount of time outdoors yourself... like on a farm, for instance. But when people who live in a city just chain the dog out back where it's alone all the time, that's mean.
Hypothesis: if they do manage to clone a Neanderthal and raise him in an approximately normal environment, they'll find out he's pretty much the same, in every way that matters, as a clone of a modern human. If anything, the Neanderthal is probably less inbred (and therefore likely to be healthier and smarter) than the average human today.
> Most of us just have a bigger recycling plant than they do.
My thoughts exactly. Distillation is distillation, whether it takes place in the natural hydrological cycle or a man-made apparatus; chemically, exactly the same thing is happening. Rainwater *is* recycled muck. Mud, swamp water, human urine, cow saliva, chicken blood, seawater, pond water, you name it, if it's at all common and has some water in it, the water you drink every day has been there in the past. So what? It's water now. Steep some tea leaves in it for a moment or two and you've got yourself a beverage.
> for one reason or another people like to use this example to bash the GPL, > not mentioning that you could equally well see it as a problem with the CDDL
I view it as a fundamental flaw in non-permissive open-source licenses generally. Personally I do not consider software to be *properly* open-source unless the license is permissive (like BSD, MIT, etc). I consider non-permissive licenses like the CDDL and the GPL to be inherently proprietary in nature, because they're too incompatible with too many things and you can't use them even with eachother. With licenses like that, each license creates its own universe and you can't mix them. To me, that's not open in any useful way. It's closed, self-isolating, and proprietary.
> Sorry to say it, but it sounds like you just didn't know what you were doing.
He probably came from the Linux universe, where it is expected (nay, taken for granted) that things like CPAN.pm will Just Work right out of the box. Solaris is old-school Unix, so it doesn't share this assumption.
I would say it is the GPL that is not free, because it does not allow the code to be re-used as part of a larger product with a variety of licenses on the different parts. If you want your code to actually be really free you give it a permissive license, like the BSD license, the MIT license, or cetera, and then you don't have license compatibility issues when you link it against something slightly different.
> It just seems crazy to me that Red Hat which virtually WAS linux for > the first decade of Linux has been relegated to near irrelevance?
Quite frankly, Red Hat (the company) did that to themselves through a series of moves wherein they shuffled around their branding in various ways that may or may not have made any since from the company's perspective (I don't know, I wasn't there) but definitely did NOT make sense from the community's perspective. I don't remember the exact order any more (it was all a jumble, since it happened so quickly, and it was a few years ago now), but among other things they stopped redistributors from using the name "Red Hat" to label (even exact) copies of their distribution, and either before or after that (I forget which) they announced that they were discontinuing the Red Hat distribution (to focus exclusively on the other, more enterprisey product line), then at some point they renamed the you-must-pay Enterprise distro to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and when they figured out they needed to maintain a non-Enterprise distro after all, they started that back up under a different name (Fedora). I think there were a couple of other changes as well. It was all very disorienting.
If you'd suggested a Fedora userland, you might have got a slightly better response, although frankly I don't see what makes Ubuntu such a bad choice either.
> An elegant blend would be "Ilanga" (Zulu for Sun) or "Humanitas" (Latin for Ubuntu).
How about Ilanitas? Or, since the company behind it is called Nexenta, we could blend that in and get Ilanexenitas. That has a nice ring to it.
> Don't mind me. I just hate portmanteaux.
Wow, you must find the English language pretty annoying then, considering almost three quarters of the words in the language are built from more than one root.
That is, unless you're using the more narrow Lewis-Carol-ish meaning of portmanteau in which the roots necessarily overlap, but in that case all the examples we've used in this thread are not actually portmanteau words. They're crasses rather than compounds (because some of the roots are not used in their full form), but they're not portmanteau words in that narrow sense because there's no overlapping. It would be difficult to create a portmanteau of Ubuntu and Solaris in the style of Lewis Carol, since the words are not very similar, but if you did manage it you'd probably end up with something extremely awkward like Usblarntuis, which I sincerely hope nobody would ever use as a product name.
> Let's face it, if (hypothetically) Silverlight happens to become a common-place tech used on the Internet
There are lots of things that hypothetically *could* happen in the future. Hypothetically, so many Muslims could immigrate to Europe that France and Germany could eventually end up under Sharia law. Hypothetically, China and Taiwan could pass special referenda and join into a single combined country with a democratically elected government that's officially "communist" on paper but supports free market economics in practice. Hypothetically, General Electric could decide to start making their own line of home and office computers (running, oh, I don't know, a clone of VMS with an improved three-dimensional user interface supported by special I/O hardware), gain market traction, and eventually become the industry leader in that market. Hypothetically, string theory could eventually lead to something scientifically verifiable. Hypothetically, somebody could discover an O(log n) algorithm for prime-factoring large numbers.
Personally, I'm inclined to cross those bridges if and when we come to them.
> what silverlight seeks to achieve that isnt currently offered in the web browsing experience?
Microsoftness.
> I have flash in linux
Yeah, but Flash was created by Macromedia and is currently maintained by Adobe. Microsoft wants Silverlight to be used instead of Flash because Silverlight is a Microsoft product. From anyone else's perspective it's a solution in search of a problem, but from Microsoft's perspective they're trying to get into the game.
I don't really see the point of Moonlight, though. If there were websites that actually *used* Silverlight, other than the demo sites Microsoft set up to show it off, then I could see some people on Linux might want to be able to view those sites. But as it stands, I just don't see the point.
I used to refuse to have Flash installed, but then FlashBlock came along, which allows you to have it installed but *not* let Flash plugins run every time you load a web page that tries to use one. So you happily browse day-to-day in a Flash-free web, and then once every three months when there's one that you actually want to run, you activate it and it plays, no need to install the plugin (and uninstall afterward), no need to restart the browser, no hassles, no problems. Very nice. If you have the Flash player installed but don't like it bothering you by playing blinky flashy things on the web all the time, you need FlashBlock.
> Realistically, how many viewers did he lose? 1000?
By making the site require Silverlight? He lost more than 99% of all potential viewers, at least for the time being. That may change if its deployment rate goes up, but so far, as near as I can tell, it's pretty much a non-starter.
> Not very many people use Linux.
I'm pretty sure more people use Linux than have Silverlight installed. Actually, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if more people use NetBSD than have Silverlight installed.
I mean, yeah, most people are using Windows XP, and most of the rest are using Windows 98, but as a general rule they don't have Silverlight installed. Why would they? Was it installed when they bought the computer? No. Has it come out via Automatic Updates? No. Is it required at work for some of that weird proprietary mission-critical line-of-business software that hasn't been updated since 1997? No. Is it required for viewing popular websites like YouTube? No. Why would people install it then?
There *are* people who have installed it, because, you know, Microsoft says it's going to be the Next Big Thing, and that's good enough for them. But we're talking about a very small number of people here, probably a single-digit percentage of Vista users.
> > What you don't get is that unless MS fully supports silverlight in Linux, > > that guy that has that website that uses silverlight will lose viewers.
> What, all 2 of them?
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
> Given that OS X still has higher desktop penetration rates than Linux,
I was thinking all 2 people who have Silverlight installed, though. Linux may or may not have as much desktop penetration as OS X (this is difficult to estimate with any accuracy), but I'm pretty sure it's got at least two orders of magnitude on Silverlight. (Unless Microsoft at some point while I wasn't paying attention started including Silverlight in the Automatic Updates... that would certainly increase its deployment rate.)
There can be various technical reasons why a support tech or engineer or sysadmin or whoever looks at data that most people would think of as personal, but the engineer isn't seeing what other people are seeing. He's seeing technical stuff other people would never notice. I don't know a lot about phones, because I don't really support those, so I'll use email as an example instead. As a tech guy, I have on a number of occasions had reasons to look at a coworker's email (albeit, usually with their knowledge in my case), but if you'd asked me thirty seconds later who they'd received messages from or what they were about, I'd have had no idea. Maybe I was looking at whether messages were being retrieved from the server all the time in the background, or only when the inbox was open. Maybe I was looking at whether their outgoing messages were getting correct date headers and Message-IDs. Maybe I was sending a test message to myself to see how fast it went through, and the reply back. I'm sure there were other things, and I'm sure I don't remember every occasion, because it's not weird or unusual; it's a normal part of my job duties.
If I *wanted* to surreptitiously read the actual content of my coworkers' email, I would certainly be technically capable of doing that, and could be fairly confident of not being detected. But in the first place that wouldn't be ethical, and in the second place very little is of less interest to me than the content of my coworkers' email messages.
I am not saying the people who looked at Obama's calling records were doing so for legitimate reasons. I'm only saying that it's *plausible*, and the phone company is right to investigate _before_ taking any irrevocable action.
Incidentally, some people may be thinking that paid leave is letting them off easy, but having been through a situation where my employer had someone on paid leave for a while, I can say that in some instances the reason for doing this is because it allows the employer to place some kinds of restrictions on the employee that they wouldn't be able to place on them if they weren't being paid. I don't know for certain that this is the phone company's reason in this case, but it potentially could be. (It could also be they just don't want to penalize them until they investigate and determine for sure whether they did anything wrong. That could also be valid, from a cover-your-legal-self-in-case-of-lawsuits perspective if nothing else.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd prefer Soft Construction with Boiled Capacitors: A Premonition of Browser Wars.
> if I discovered a way to browse webpages on my screwdriver,
> I'd probably be able to patent it legitimately
Nah, I've got prior art on that. I use the tip of the screwdriver to bridge the wires...
> But we found both the variety and relative abundances of minerals have changed dramatically
Well, duh. Obviously stuff like that would change over time. The only reason anyone would *ever* assume otherwise is to make radioactive dating sound slightly less preposterous.
> McDonald's still makes crappy food no matter how many patents they apply for.
McDonald's is not a gourmet restaurant. It's a fast-food chain. Their goal isn't to make better food. Okay, sure, I imagine they do give some consideration to that, so maybe it's *a* goal. But it's not *the* goal. The goal is speed, and they never forget it.
They want to make the food faster, to better keep up with demand, because people are not willing to wait -- especially during the lunch hour. If the drive-through line is too long, people will drive right on past and go somewhere else, but if the line is short, another car will always pull in. Always. There's about an hour and a half every day (roughly, from 11:15 to 12:45, though this varies a bit depending on location) where this is true: it's impossible to empty out your drive-through line, no matter how fast you turn out the food. There will always be another car. So you try to get the orders out as fast as you can, to meet demand. Improving speed has a direct impact on profits, in a way that improving food quality would not. That's the business McDonald's is in.
Other times of day they have somewhat different goals, especially at night, when the goal centers more on wasting as little as possible and keeping costs down, because there's not so much profit to be made in fast food at night. It's just enough to be worth staying open, but not enough to warrant putting well-trained employees on that shift. (Don't go to McDonald's at night. Don't. Go at 10:45 am, when the lunch crew is on duty but the rush hasn't started yet. Go at 3pm, when at least a couple of the employees who came in for lunch are still around. Don't go at night. If you think the food quality is low in the daytime, you really don't want to see it at night. At night you order a pizza, because that's when the pizza places do most of their business and put their good employees on.)
They're not concerned with making one sandwich, really. I mean, yes, that's part of it, but you're taking it out of context. What concerns McDonald's is how to make sandwiches quickly and efficiently enough that a small number of employees can make the sandwiches as fast as people can order them during the lunch hour. They're trying to get every drive-through order out in twenty seconds or less, even if it's got twenty or thirty sandwiches on it, plus fries and drinks. (You think I'm kidding only if you've never worked fast food.)
> The sandwich making process they list in their claims is not
> tied to a particular device, but is implemented by human hands.
Are you certain this is so? Having worked at McDonald's a few years ago, I cannot think of a single sandwich they make without using a device of some kind, usually several. Some of them are pretty cool, too. I wouldn't mind having one of their ketchup shooters at home. Not the kind out in the lobby for putting the ketchup in the little paper cups; I'm talking about the kind on the assembly line for evenly distributing the ketchup over the whole sandwich at once. It's actually a very convenient and efficient device. I assume other fast food chains must have comparable devices as well, or they wouldn't be able to compete.
IANAL and have not looked at the patent in question, but are you sure it covers making a sandwich by hand? I bet it doesn't. McDonald's doesn't even do things that way.
Most sausage isn't made in the traditional way anymore these days. It's just ground meat and spices, in a synthetic casing, put together by a mechanical assembly-line machine.
> Seriously, though. If people have a problem with killing to eat, they shouldn't eat vegetables, either.
Doesn't that depend on the vegetable? Sure, some vegetables you have to kill the plant to get the part we eat (carrots, for instance (which, incidentally, are one of my favorites)), but that's not universally the case. Eating a stalk of rhubarb, for instance, is not fatal to the plant and, indeed, doesn't seem to harm it at all (provided you don't take all the stalks at once or some fool thing, which you wouldn't do anyway because then you wouldn't get any more rhubarb).
The really controversial point (well, controversial if we were to grant the premise that plants have rights and must be treated ethically) would be eating the part of the plant that includes the seeds, such as we do with beans and fruits and grains.
I think it's interesting that this whole question is starting to come up at just about the *same* point in history when we, for the first time, have developed the theoretical capability to synthesize our own food using chemistry and alternative energy sources (nuclear, solar, whatever). I mean, sure, we don't currently have the infrastructure in place to be able to make nearly enough food to feed all of us. But we *do* know how to do it, which wasn't really true a hundred years ago. Certain vitamins would probably be a problem, but even there, if we put chemists to work on the problem, it's probably easier to solve than a lot of the medical problems they've been working on.
(I'm not saying we should do this. Personally, I like eating plants. Sometimes I eat animals as well, albeit not in as great a quantity as plants. But I think it's interesting that we *could* do it, and now the issue is starting to pop up.)
> I must refer back to Genesis in this respect. God gave Adam
> dominion of all life on the earth to use as he saw fit.
Umm, before you cite Genesis in support of your ideas, maybe you should read Genesis more carefully so you can get your citations right. God instructed Adam to look after the animals, but he gave him plants for food. Adam was a vegetarian. Genesis is very clear on this point.
Animals *were* given as food also, but not until the time of Noah (i.e., hundreds of years later) and even then one of the conditions was that you not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it, a restriction many people today no longer observe.
Later, even more dietary restrictions were placed on the Jewish nation, such as not eating pork, but those things never applied to Gentiles, unless they became proselyte Jews. The instructions given to Noah apply, presumably, to the entire human race, since we're all descended from Noah.
> There are people out there who REALLY think milk comes from the factory. That
> meat is produced in a machine. They really have no idea where an egg comes from.
Sure, and there are also people who think that spaghetti noodles might grow on trees, that buying a sticker to put on their cellphone can improve the battery life, that homeopathy works, that the government could make us all rich just by printing more money if they were only willing to do so, that they won't need to work for a living or pay their mortgage anymore if Obama[1] is President, and all manner of other nonsense. What's your point?
[1] Note to Obama fans: it's just an example. I'm not blaming Obama for the fact that there are idiots in the world. Obviously, if Obama had never run for President, there would be idiots in the world anyway. That's not his fault. It's an immutable fact of life. And I'm sure you can think of an idiotic claim someone has made in support of a candidate from the other party. As I said, people believe all kinds of nonsense.
> They are at their best when putting up billboards against chaining up dogs.
Yeah, I kind of actually agree with them on that one. Dogs are *social* animals. Getting one and then just chaining it up in the back yard all the time and never going out there except once or twice a day to feed it, like so many people do, is *cruel*. If you don't want a dog in your house, then don't get a dog.
Having outdoor dogs is okay if you have a lot of space, some other animals for them to hang around with, spend a fair amount of time outdoors yourself... like on a farm, for instance. But when people who live in a city just chain the dog out back where it's alone all the time, that's mean.
Hypothesis: if they do manage to clone a Neanderthal and raise him in an approximately normal environment, they'll find out he's pretty much the same, in every way that matters, as a clone of a modern human. If anything, the Neanderthal is probably less inbred (and therefore likely to be healthier and smarter) than the average human today.
> Most of us just have a bigger recycling plant than they do.
My thoughts exactly. Distillation is distillation, whether it takes place in the natural hydrological cycle or a man-made apparatus; chemically, exactly the same thing is happening. Rainwater *is* recycled muck. Mud, swamp water, human urine, cow saliva, chicken blood, seawater, pond water, you name it, if it's at all common and has some water in it, the water you drink every day has been there in the past. So what? It's water now. Steep some tea leaves in it for a moment or two and you've got yourself a beverage.
> for one reason or another people like to use this example to bash the GPL,
> not mentioning that you could equally well see it as a problem with the CDDL
I view it as a fundamental flaw in non-permissive open-source licenses generally. Personally I do not consider software to be *properly* open-source unless the license is permissive (like BSD, MIT, etc). I consider non-permissive licenses like the CDDL and the GPL to be inherently proprietary in nature, because they're too incompatible with too many things and you can't use them even with eachother. With licenses like that, each license creates its own universe and you can't mix them. To me, that's not open in any useful way. It's closed, self-isolating, and proprietary.
> Sorry to say it, but it sounds like you just didn't know what you were doing.
He probably came from the Linux universe, where it is expected (nay, taken for granted) that things like CPAN.pm will Just Work right out of the box. Solaris is old-school Unix, so it doesn't share this assumption.
I would say it is the GPL that is not free, because it does not allow the code to be re-used as part of a larger product with a variety of licenses on the different parts. If you want your code to actually be really free you give it a permissive license, like the BSD license, the MIT license, or cetera, and then you don't have license compatibility issues when you link it against something slightly different.
> It just seems crazy to me that Red Hat which virtually WAS linux for
> the first decade of Linux has been relegated to near irrelevance?
Quite frankly, Red Hat (the company) did that to themselves through a series of moves wherein they shuffled around their branding in various ways that may or may not have made any since from the company's perspective (I don't know, I wasn't there) but definitely did NOT make sense from the community's perspective. I don't remember the exact order any more (it was all a jumble, since it happened so quickly, and it was a few years ago now), but among other things they stopped redistributors from using the name "Red Hat" to label (even exact) copies of their distribution, and either before or after that (I forget which) they announced that they were discontinuing the Red Hat distribution (to focus exclusively on the other, more enterprisey product line), then at some point they renamed the you-must-pay Enterprise distro to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and when they figured out they needed to maintain a non-Enterprise distro after all, they started that back up under a different name (Fedora). I think there were a couple of other changes as well. It was all very disorienting.
If you'd suggested a Fedora userland, you might have got a slightly better response, although frankly I don't see what makes Ubuntu such a bad choice either.
> An elegant blend would be "Ilanga" (Zulu for Sun) or "Humanitas" (Latin for Ubuntu).
How about Ilanitas? Or, since the company behind it is called Nexenta, we could blend that in and get Ilanexenitas. That has a nice ring to it.
> Don't mind me. I just hate portmanteaux.
Wow, you must find the English language pretty annoying then, considering almost three quarters of the words in the language are built from more than one root.
That is, unless you're using the more narrow Lewis-Carol-ish meaning of portmanteau in which the roots necessarily overlap, but in that case all the examples we've used in this thread are not actually portmanteau words. They're crasses rather than compounds (because some of the roots are not used in their full form), but they're not portmanteau words in that narrow sense because there's no overlapping. It would be difficult to create a portmanteau of Ubuntu and Solaris in the style of Lewis Carol, since the words are not very similar, but if you did manage it you'd probably end up with something extremely awkward like Usblarntuis, which I sincerely hope nobody would ever use as a product name.
> Let's face it, if (hypothetically) Silverlight happens to become a common-place tech used on the Internet
There are lots of things that hypothetically *could* happen in the future. Hypothetically, so many Muslims could immigrate to Europe that France and Germany could eventually end up under Sharia law. Hypothetically, China and Taiwan could pass special referenda and join into a single combined country with a democratically elected government that's officially "communist" on paper but supports free market economics in practice. Hypothetically, General Electric could decide to start making their own line of home and office computers (running, oh, I don't know, a clone of VMS with an improved three-dimensional user interface supported by special I/O hardware), gain market traction, and eventually become the industry leader in that market. Hypothetically, string theory could eventually lead to something scientifically verifiable. Hypothetically, somebody could discover an O(log n) algorithm for prime-factoring large numbers.
Personally, I'm inclined to cross those bridges if and when we come to them.
> what silverlight seeks to achieve that isnt currently offered in the web browsing experience?
Microsoftness.
> I have flash in linux
Yeah, but Flash was created by Macromedia and is currently maintained by Adobe. Microsoft wants Silverlight to be used instead of Flash because Silverlight is a Microsoft product. From anyone else's perspective it's a solution in search of a problem, but from Microsoft's perspective they're trying to get into the game.
I don't really see the point of Moonlight, though. If there were websites that actually *used* Silverlight, other than the demo sites Microsoft set up to show it off, then I could see some people on Linux might want to be able to view those sites. But as it stands, I just don't see the point.
> Having the Flash player is bad enough already.
I used to refuse to have Flash installed, but then FlashBlock came along, which allows you to have it installed but *not* let Flash plugins run every time you load a web page that tries to use one. So you happily browse day-to-day in a Flash-free web, and then once every three months when there's one that you actually want to run, you activate it and it plays, no need to install the plugin (and uninstall afterward), no need to restart the browser, no hassles, no problems. Very nice. If you have the Flash player installed but don't like it bothering you by playing blinky flashy things on the web all the time, you need FlashBlock.
> Realistically, how many viewers did he lose? 1000?
By making the site require Silverlight? He lost more than 99% of all potential viewers, at least for the time being. That may change if its deployment rate goes up, but so far, as near as I can tell, it's pretty much a non-starter.
> Not very many people use Linux.
I'm pretty sure more people use Linux than have Silverlight installed. Actually, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if more people use NetBSD than have Silverlight installed.
I mean, yeah, most people are using Windows XP, and most of the rest are using Windows 98, but as a general rule they don't have Silverlight installed. Why would they? Was it installed when they bought the computer? No. Has it come out via Automatic Updates? No. Is it required at work for some of that weird proprietary mission-critical line-of-business software that hasn't been updated since 1997? No. Is it required for viewing popular websites like YouTube? No. Why would people install it then?
There *are* people who have installed it, because, you know, Microsoft says it's going to be the Next Big Thing, and that's good enough for them. But we're talking about a very small number of people here, probably a single-digit percentage of Vista users.
> > What you don't get is that unless MS fully supports silverlight in Linux,
> > that guy that has that website that uses silverlight will lose viewers.
> What, all 2 of them?
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
> Given that OS X still has higher desktop penetration rates than Linux,
I was thinking all 2 people who have Silverlight installed, though. Linux may or may not have as much desktop penetration as OS X (this is difficult to estimate with any accuracy), but I'm pretty sure it's got at least two orders of magnitude on Silverlight. (Unless Microsoft at some point while I wasn't paying attention started including Silverlight in the Automatic Updates... that would certainly increase its deployment rate.)
> > Some of the employees may have accessed the information for legitimate purposes
> Like what?
Well, that's presumably why they're investigating.
There can be various technical reasons why a support tech or engineer or sysadmin or whoever looks at data that most people would think of as personal, but the engineer isn't seeing what other people are seeing. He's seeing technical stuff other people would never notice. I don't know a lot about phones, because I don't really support those, so I'll use email as an example instead. As a tech guy, I have on a number of occasions had reasons to look at a coworker's email (albeit, usually with their knowledge in my case), but if you'd asked me thirty seconds later who they'd received messages from or what they were about, I'd have had no idea. Maybe I was looking at whether messages were being retrieved from the server all the time in the background, or only when the inbox was open. Maybe I was looking at whether their outgoing messages were getting correct date headers and Message-IDs. Maybe I was sending a test message to myself to see how fast it went through, and the reply back. I'm sure there were other things, and I'm sure I don't remember every occasion, because it's not weird or unusual; it's a normal part of my job duties.
If I *wanted* to surreptitiously read the actual content of my coworkers' email, I would certainly be technically capable of doing that, and could be fairly confident of not being detected. But in the first place that wouldn't be ethical, and in the second place very little is of less interest to me than the content of my coworkers' email messages.
I am not saying the people who looked at Obama's calling records were doing so for legitimate reasons. I'm only saying that it's *plausible*, and the phone company is right to investigate _before_ taking any irrevocable action.
Incidentally, some people may be thinking that paid leave is letting them off easy, but having been through a situation where my employer had someone on paid leave for a while, I can say that in some instances the reason for doing this is because it allows the employer to place some kinds of restrictions on the employee that they wouldn't be able to place on them if they weren't being paid. I don't know for certain that this is the phone company's reason in this case, but it potentially could be. (It could also be they just don't want to penalize them until they investigate and determine for sure whether they did anything wrong. That could also be valid, from a cover-your-legal-self-in-case-of-lawsuits perspective if nothing else.)
> Engineers use Matlab.
Still? What, do they keep an old DOS system sitting around just for that?