It's not soo much even that. It's the fact that they're interfering with a commercial service that "donates to campaigns". The big bad corporate body didnt want bad press about their systems, so have Mr. bought_off_senator stop FBI.
Try reading the article first. It was stopped through the legal system, congress had nothing to do with it and federal judges are appointed.
Your paranoid conspiracy theory is compelling, it just happens not to be grounded in any facts in this case.
He can _use_ GPL'ed software now, he just can't include it in non-GPLed products. I doubt he does, but it's there if he wants to.
I think we can all understand that when someone refers to Gates benefiting from software, it implies a benefit to his ability to sell software. No one cares about Bill's software usage (unless it turned out he was a closet Linux user at home). Obviously, we're talking about selling, and that prevents him from using GPL.
BSD-style software has certainly been useful to him - how long did it take Hotmail to move to running on Microsoft products?
Certainly true, which is why I was atempting to discern what the original poster meant by "free." Because BSD software is the only free software Bill can legally benefit from (assuming, again, that we don't care what he uses at home)
.NET is a marketting term for a safer, easier to use Windows API. It is a set of technologies including a virtual machine and a series of wrappers around DLLs outside of the VM.
FWIW, I can think of a lot of ads from MS that basically used.Net as a catchphrase to mean anything they wanted to sell to big business. Which seems to be what HP is doing here.
Linus Torvalds is not the only one with more resources because of the open source community. Everyone, including Bill Gates, has more resources at their disposal, because of the open source community.
That will be true when Bill is willing to GPL his software. Until then, Bill is relegated to software that is free (as in do whatever you want with it), as opposed to Free (as in RMS).
So I'd say that the bulk of what is referred to as Open Source is quite inaccessible to Bill. And as for benefits to Bill through competition, no way. Bill doesn't benefit by making windows better - he benefits by selling more copies of windows. If linux were not around, he could sell more copies of windows with less effort put into improvements.
I think Bill would be hard-pressed to find anything about the Open/Free/free software movement that he likes.
IBM has long been one of Cravath's largest and most loyal clients -- in fact, I noticed that Cravath is representing IBM in the SCO matter. I can't help but wonder if one of the main reasons Boies agreed to represent SCO is to go head-to-head with his former parters at Cravath. It wouldn't surprise me if that is his main motivating factor. Boies does not need the money or any more notches in his belt.
If that's the case, I couldn't imagine a worse scenario for him - a client he can't control, and an opponent with unlimited resources and the resolve to smash him like a bug on the great IBM windshield.
I know/. seems to have a bit of groupthink going on here as regards SCO's success. That said, I really do think Boies best-case scenario is to drag things out long enough to get everybody on their side mucho dinero. But that's not going to impress the former partners.
Folding SCO's case everyone cashes out won't make him look good. Losing in court after the same will really make him look bad. Either way, it's a lose/lose situation in the prestige department - it's only in the rankings of "America's top ambulance chasers" that he'll increase his standing.
The only way I see him increasing his legal prestige is either winning in court or strongarming a great settlement. IBM has made it pretty clear that the chances of either of those is near nil. So while you may be spot-on regarding Boies' motives, I can't see what he's thinking. Or the whole thing could be coincidence.
All credit to this interviewer, who refused to swallow the crap this VP kept spewing
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like.Net all over again. What the hell was.Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
How could Linux compete with SCO's products?
on
SCO News Roundup
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· Score: 1
"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."
I think Darl is going to have to prove that if he wants to enforce that no-compete clause in the contract.
That's going to be tough. How linux could be found to compete with a string of frivolous lawsuits (SCO's core product) I don't really understand.
Sun says Linux isn't the future, yet they have no qualm of selling a million of them to China:)
That they couldn't figure out where the future is going in the "enterprise" computing market. Give 'em a Ouji board, a crystal ball, and a pack of tarot cards, and they'll still fuck it up.
I'm no zealot, but if they don't think linux is the future, it's more a sign that they're clueless than anything.
Chess is all about memorizing moves and running through as many combinations of potential moves as possible as fast as you can. Clearly, a computer can do both of these tasks much faster.
...then no human would be able to compare to even a modest computer. The fact is that chess is more about recognizing patterns and situations, which is much more difficult than memorizing the same. This is why a human can beat a computer, even though the human considers 3 moves per turn and the computer an enormous number.
Newer iPods support Windows. He was using an older one that doesn't. Using the device under Windows worked fine for him, when he was using software that provided a workaround to the filesystem incompatibility. iTunes does not provide this workaround, and so the device could not play any of the tracks *downloaded from iTunes*. Apparently works fine for other tracks, though.
It *used* to. It seems not to now. That's the crux of the argument. Reinstalling firmware didn't work. And that's pretty inexcusable.
If you can spare the time, can you give me your thoughts on the distribution? Thanks.
Personally, I like the streamlined config files. First, none of that Sys-V foolishness. Second, there's usually one config file for each type of service. The printers are only controlled by the/etc/printcap file. Samba is controlled by 2 files that need user editing -/etc/smb.conf and a password file for samba users. You control basically everything internet related through editing inetd.conf and/or running netconfig, which quickly and easily sets up the internet.
On startup, everything's really quite easy. You startup from the CD, and run setup, which it then takes you through. It prompts you where to put your swap, your root directory, etc. If you have extra partitions, it will give you the option of setting up extra mount points (for/usr/local, for instance). It detects windows partitions. It automatically puts all that in your fstab.
Other distros do the same (well, some of them), but slack has a nice compromise between prompting you to do the defaults and still giving you the ability to easily do what you want.
Install is a breeze. Also, I've noticed slack starts up a damn sight faster than RedHat. And like you say, unlike RedHat, the guts are standard. You need another kernel with slack, get the source and compile the damned thing.
Some people bitch about the package handling with slack - personally, I love it, and think it's quintessentially slack. It's as simple as can be, without unneeded frills. They use *.tgz for packages, which as standard as can be. That said, they can convert rpms as well (as should be!) with rpm2tgz. Works for me! But personally, I recompile most things from source anyway. Lightning fast that way.;)
I will say this - slackware does teach you linux, because you do stuff yourself. Friend of mine's been using SuSelinux on his laptop for a while. He went to install it as dual-boot on a machine we had at work and wiped the windows partition because he didn't know what he was doing. He'd been using Linux for 2 years, yet didn't understand such basic stuff.
To me, it's not a machismo thing. I've never tried Debian (I'm happy with slack), so I can't compare them. But if debian works for ya, go with it.
Actually, the Canadian dollar is rising against the USD... when I traveled to Canada last march, I got about 1.6 canadian dollars, and now it's about 1.3
That's true, but I'm so used to heaping shit on the Canadian currency after *years* of it tanking that it's like a reflex now.;)
US is still up a bit over the last 10 years tho.
Only thing about a weak dollar is it makes good German beer more expensive. Fucking Greenspan.
Expecting a Mac iPod to work with Windows is silly.... might as well try to install windows on your macintosh without emulation and then be surprised.
There is no story here.
Not silly when apple claims windows support for iPods, unless you have had your head in the sand (or, uh, elsewhere;>) and haven't seen their TV commercials to that effect. They support windows, and using their device with windows fries the device. That is not acceptable, I don't care who the the vendors of the OS and device are. If older iPods simply weren't able to interface with windows, that would be one thing. Actually having them fail in permanent fashion is quite another.
Switch things around - if MS made a device that fatally shit itself when interfacing with Mac OS, you know that you, me, and most other people on this site would be screaming bloody murder about MS, all the while laughing at the fools who bought the device.
In the name of avoiding hypocrisy, Apple now deserves the same contempt we'd be heaping on MS for the same feat.
GNU is more like the frame. Or maybe it's like the Steering wheel, Tail lights, break pads, cigarette lighter, etc. You need all that stuff to have a car, but by itself it's not one, and there a lot in a car that is not part of it as well. Lots of important stuff in a Distro is GNU, but lots of things of varying importance are not.
This news comes as fresh amusement because I am on the verge of converting my CD collection to cassette tape. Cassettes are cheaper media, devoid of DRM, and my car came with a cassette player by default.
Attendance almost always goes down with increasing sequels. No one jumps in at movie 2, usually, certainly not 3 - and there are always people (not hard core fans) who get bored with things. It happens.
Also, the movie studios have noticed that attendance at a bad movie drops off extremely quickly these days thanks to the internet etc, which makes "word of mouth" much faster. So if they release a dog, they'll lose a ton of fans.
The real fans bought the extended versions anyway - the promise of a real ending was never necessary. If the released edition sucks, they'll lose the casual fan. They might even lose the hard-core fans who decide just to wait for the extended-edition DVD to see the movie at all.
I maintain that screwing up the movie intentionally isn't a great idea.
This news comes as fresh amusement because I am on the verge of converting my CD collection to cassette tape. Cassettes are cheaper media, devoid of DRM, and my car came with a cassette player by default.
I used to think it was weird that every band I listened to had snakes doing backup vocals. I knew all those metal bands liked to have pet snakes and shit during concerts, but I thought it was weird having them actually on the tape. I thought all that was pretty bad ass until I heard the snakes on my sister's Whitney Houston tape. Then someone explained that fucking tape hiss and it made a little more sense.
..or does it almost sound as a setup so the fans "must have" the Special Edition? I got the SE of the first, was hidiously expensive, but well... I had to have it. Stayed away from the 2nd SE, we'll see about the third when I've seen the (cut) movie...
That would be monstrously stupid. As we all know, almost all movies derive the lion's share of their revenue from the theater. Granted, the fraction of DVD sales will be higher for a movie with a cultlike fanbase like LOTR (I include myself there, no flame obviously intended). However, there still seems to be no reason to release a crappy, chopped-up version of the movie with the ending removed! I'd think even non-purists might not be so thrilled with that.
It's possible your right, but damn that would be dumb. (Or is it damb, that would be dumn?)
You're wrong. Mass looting does not an efficient system make.
Nope. Efficiency, when applied to an economy, is exactly the rate with which value is added to goods or services, and that has to ultimately start with raw materials (ie looting). Note I didn't say that was the BEST system, but it is most certainly the most efficient. What we want to/should do is another matter that I wasn't debating in the first place.
More or less, the Western world exploits the third world more efficiently. We pollute the third world countries to produce the finished products for us and dirty their places instead of ours.
If you don't mind a few degrees of separation there. They make their own laws, and have deemed that having some exports is worth trashing their land, etc. And it only supports my point, really - once they get on board with the first world, pollution/Joule plummets. Check out Japan in the last 50-75 years.
Do you see any electrical plants or any smoke stacks at all? (Besides the oil refineries in Long Beach area). Energy is produced elsewhere, like hundreds if not thousand of miles away.
Long Beach is still America; they might be upset to discover otherwise. Also, America refines most of its oil and generates all its own electricity. So you're losing that one. The west is the only area in the world that requires strict emission controls.
This is utterly BS for the same reason.
Do you have some numbers? I do. The question isn't whether the west engages in economic imperialsim - it does. The point is simply that blaming the west for all things ecological is poorly founded. Note my Soviet Union point you convieniently ignored. If it weren't for western technology, the third world wouldn't have the means to support the population it does. And if the unindustrialized world increases economically, every form of pollution BUT CO2 will decrease. I won't bore you with the science and numbers, but it's unequivocal.
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Try reading the article first. It was stopped through the legal system, congress had nothing to do with it and federal judges are appointed.
Your paranoid conspiracy theory is compelling, it just happens not to be grounded in any facts in this case.
I think we can all understand that when someone refers to Gates benefiting from software, it implies a benefit to his ability to sell software. No one cares about Bill's software usage (unless it turned out he was a closet Linux user at home). Obviously, we're talking about selling, and that prevents him from using GPL.
BSD-style software has certainly been useful to him - how long did it take Hotmail to move to running on Microsoft products?
Certainly true, which is why I was atempting to discern what the original poster meant by "free." Because BSD software is the only free software Bill can legally benefit from (assuming, again, that we don't care what he uses at home)
FWIW, I can think of a lot of ads from MS that basically used .Net as a catchphrase to mean anything they wanted to sell to big business. Which seems to be what HP is doing here.
That will be true when Bill is willing to GPL his software. Until then, Bill is relegated to software that is free (as in do whatever you want with it), as opposed to Free (as in RMS).
So I'd say that the bulk of what is referred to as Open Source is quite inaccessible to Bill. And as for benefits to Bill through competition, no way. Bill doesn't benefit by making windows better - he benefits by selling more copies of windows. If linux were not around, he could sell more copies of windows with less effort put into improvements.
I think Bill would be hard-pressed to find anything about the Open/Free/free software movement that he likes.
Where might BSD and linux users both be en masse sometime in the next month...
...couldn't be the LOTR-ROTK opening, could it?
See you in line. I'll bring my pitchfork and penguin bill.
If that's the case, I couldn't imagine a worse scenario for him - a client he can't control, and an opponent with unlimited resources and the resolve to smash him like a bug on the great IBM windshield.
I know /. seems to have a bit of groupthink going on here as regards SCO's success. That said, I really do think Boies best-case scenario is to drag things out long enough to get everybody on their side mucho dinero. But that's not going to impress the former partners.
Folding SCO's case everyone cashes out won't make him look good. Losing in court after the same will really make him look bad. Either way, it's a lose/lose situation in the prestige department - it's only in the rankings of "America's top ambulance chasers" that he'll increase his standing.
The only way I see him increasing his legal prestige is either winning in court or strongarming a great settlement. IBM has made it pretty clear that the chances of either of those is near nil. So while you may be spot-on regarding Boies' motives, I can't see what he's thinking. Or the whole thing could be coincidence.
Great post, btw.
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
I think Darl is going to have to prove that if he wants to enforce that no-compete clause in the contract.
That's going to be tough. How linux could be found to compete with a string of frivolous lawsuits (SCO's core product) I don't really understand.
That they couldn't figure out where the future is going in the "enterprise" computing market. Give 'em a Ouji board, a crystal ball, and a pack of tarot cards, and they'll still fuck it up.
I'm no zealot, but if they don't think linux is the future, it's more a sign that they're clueless than anything.
I've seen Strange Brew. All you do up there is play ice hockey with jedi knights all day long. That's the impression I got at least.
The conversion may not be great but from what I hear hourly wages and salaries in the great ol' US_of_A don't amount to shit.
Don't know how you'd go about evaluating that. For people who actually get up off their ass and work, the quality of life seems pretty good.
...then no human would be able to compare to even a modest computer. The fact is that chess is more about recognizing patterns and situations, which is much more difficult than memorizing the same. This is why a human can beat a computer, even though the human considers 3 moves per turn and the computer an enormous number.
...when I read it in the article. Try R'ing TFA instead of going for FP next time.
It *used* to. It seems not to now. That's the crux of the argument. Reinstalling firmware didn't work. And that's pretty inexcusable.
Personally, I like the streamlined config files. First, none of that Sys-V foolishness. Second, there's usually one config file for each type of service. The printers are only controlled by the /etc/printcap file. Samba is controlled by 2 files that need user editing - /etc/smb.conf and a password file for samba users. You control basically everything internet related through editing inetd.conf and/or running netconfig, which quickly and easily sets up the internet.
On startup, everything's really quite easy. You startup from the CD, and run setup, which it then takes you through. It prompts you where to put your swap, your root directory, etc. If you have extra partitions, it will give you the option of setting up extra mount points (for /usr/local, for instance). It detects windows partitions. It automatically puts all that in your fstab.
Other distros do the same (well, some of them), but slack has a nice compromise between prompting you to do the defaults and still giving you the ability to easily do what you want.
Install is a breeze. Also, I've noticed slack starts up a damn sight faster than RedHat. And like you say, unlike RedHat, the guts are standard. You need another kernel with slack, get the source and compile the damned thing.
Some people bitch about the package handling with slack - personally, I love it, and think it's quintessentially slack. It's as simple as can be, without unneeded frills. They use *.tgz for packages, which as standard as can be. That said, they can convert rpms as well (as should be!) with rpm2tgz. Works for me! But personally, I recompile most things from source anyway. Lightning fast that way. ;)
I will say this - slackware does teach you linux, because you do stuff yourself. Friend of mine's been using SuSelinux on his laptop for a while. He went to install it as dual-boot on a machine we had at work and wiped the windows partition because he didn't know what he was doing. He'd been using Linux for 2 years, yet didn't understand such basic stuff.
To me, it's not a machismo thing. I've never tried Debian (I'm happy with slack), so I can't compare them. But if debian works for ya, go with it.
That's true, but I'm so used to heaping shit on the Canadian currency after *years* of it tanking that it's like a reflex now. ;)
US is still up a bit over the last 10 years tho.
Only thing about a weak dollar is it makes good German beer more expensive. Fucking Greenspan.
There is no story here.
Not silly when apple claims windows support for iPods, unless you have had your head in the sand (or, uh, elsewhere ;>) and haven't seen their TV commercials to that effect. They support windows, and using their device with windows fries the device. That is not acceptable, I don't care who the the vendors of the OS and device are. If older iPods simply weren't able to interface with windows, that would be one thing. Actually having them fail in permanent fashion is quite another.
Switch things around - if MS made a device that fatally shit itself when interfacing with Mac OS, you know that you, me, and most other people on this site would be screaming bloody murder about MS, all the while laughing at the fools who bought the device.
In the name of avoiding hypocrisy, Apple now deserves the same contempt we'd be heaping on MS for the same feat.
...$0.37 American these days, right? You can do better than that making shoes in Thailand.
Nice troll tho!
And a lot of it is BSD too.
Right - a car without an engine is not a car. Same with OS's
Attendance almost always goes down with increasing sequels. No one jumps in at movie 2, usually, certainly not 3 - and there are always people (not hard core fans) who get bored with things. It happens.
Also, the movie studios have noticed that attendance at a bad movie drops off extremely quickly these days thanks to the internet etc, which makes "word of mouth" much faster. So if they release a dog, they'll lose a ton of fans.
The real fans bought the extended versions anyway - the promise of a real ending was never necessary. If the released edition sucks, they'll lose the casual fan. They might even lose the hard-core fans who decide just to wait for the extended-edition DVD to see the movie at all.
I maintain that screwing up the movie intentionally isn't a great idea.
I used to think it was weird that every band I listened to had snakes doing backup vocals. I knew all those metal bands liked to have pet snakes and shit during concerts, but I thought it was weird having them actually on the tape. I thought all that was pretty bad ass until I heard the snakes on my sister's Whitney Houston tape. Then someone explained that fucking tape hiss and it made a little more sense.
Fucking tape hiss. Long live digital.
That would be monstrously stupid. As we all know, almost all movies derive the lion's share of their revenue from the theater. Granted, the fraction of DVD sales will be higher for a movie with a cultlike fanbase like LOTR (I include myself there, no flame obviously intended). However, there still seems to be no reason to release a crappy, chopped-up version of the movie with the ending removed! I'd think even non-purists might not be so thrilled with that.
It's possible your right, but damn that would be dumb. (Or is it damb, that would be dumn?)
Nope. Efficiency, when applied to an economy, is exactly the rate with which value is added to goods or services, and that has to ultimately start with raw materials (ie looting). Note I didn't say that was the BEST system, but it is most certainly the most efficient. What we want to/should do is another matter that I wasn't debating in the first place.
If you don't mind a few degrees of separation there. They make their own laws, and have deemed that having some exports is worth trashing their land, etc. And it only supports my point, really - once they get on board with the first world, pollution/Joule plummets. Check out Japan in the last 50-75 years.
Do you see any electrical plants or any smoke stacks at all? (Besides the oil refineries in Long Beach area). Energy is produced elsewhere, like hundreds if not thousand of miles away.
Long Beach is still America; they might be upset to discover otherwise. Also, America refines most of its oil and generates all its own electricity. So you're losing that one. The west is the only area in the world that requires strict emission controls.
This is utterly BS for the same reason.
Do you have some numbers? I do. The question isn't whether the west engages in economic imperialsim - it does. The point is simply that blaming the west for all things ecological is poorly founded. Note my Soviet Union point you convieniently ignored. If it weren't for western technology, the third world wouldn't have the means to support the population it does. And if the unindustrialized world increases economically, every form of pollution BUT CO2 will decrease. I won't bore you with the science and numbers, but it's unequivocal.