as a going away present...Could you set the PCs BIOS to boot off of CD-ROM ahead of the HD? Then one of these days, you could put a Knoppix CD in each one before you leave. Next time the machine reboots: "Hey this screen looks funny..."
Locking out the floppy drives is probably a "security" directive that dates back to the days when most virii were transmitted by idiots booting with an unsecured floppy in the drive.
yeah, but at least you haven't poured $4.95 a month or whatever down the drain to a "backup service" that doesn't provide any compensation if they are unable to restore your data.
You can buy a lot of blank DVD-Rs or CD-Rs for $4.95 a month.
Well, yeah. But if the telco loses four normal voice-line subscribers because they are now using Vonage through your Wi-Fi base, yes it will put them out of business.
>(you only have to provide the source to people you give the binaries to).
That depends on how the GPL defines "third parties". For example in the following snipppet does "third parties" refer to those who have already received your binary code, or does it refer to anybody who asks for the source?
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a
notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide
a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on
the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
They may also be in violation of the "at no charge" portion of 2 b), regardless of to whom it is distributed. The GPL doesn't make any distinctions between beta and final software.
This is true. Tech TV is like the Tonight Show of the computer industry. Vendors get on the shows to display their latest stuff like the actors that bring Leno their latest movie clip.
Give them credit though. Television is not a medium designed for in-depth reviews. The best you can hope for is a quick overview of a product and a thumbs up or down as a recommendation. Like PC Magazine in its time, they always find something good to say about a product because they are dependent on the vendors' largesse. Taken with an appropriate amount of salt, they can be informative.
Will you stop it?
This thread addresses your claim about the license.
All you've demonstrated is that you have an axe to grind against your competition.
IBM continues to lead all other companies in US patents granted each year. And hundreds of these are for business processes and software. The GPL protects for licensing of patented code that IBM provides, but if a 3rd party contributes code that violates an IBM patent, IBM can legally enforce its patent against the 3rd party.
While IBM's current business model of providing services provides good cover and support for OSS, remember that up until the 1980's IBM was a hardware company. EDS was the computer services leader. If IBM's business model is forced to change again (for example due to competition from Asian outsourcing companies), OSS could become a target.
Another scenario is If an Open Source project becomes a meaningful competitor that impacts a strategic piece of IBM's business, that project will be targeted as described by Anonymous.
The timing has to be considered too. "Unauthorized release under GPL" is plausible if it is removed from the company website after a few days or even weeks. It isn't plausible if the software is up for months before it is pulled.
That's one reason SCO is in deep doo-doo. They GPLed their code for nearly a year, and now they claim it was a "mistake".
After this my boss gets scared and thinks that there is legitimate risk involved with going to Linux. Then he thinks, "Why go with Linux and spend extra $$$ on insurance when I can just go with Windows or something else."
Well you should point out to him that if Microsoft includes code in Windows that violates someone's patent, and he runs that code on his computer, he could be liable for violating the patent, since he is performing a patented business process. If he's really concerned about IP liability, he should buy the liability insurance for Windows, too.
This issue isn't restricted to Open Source software, it's just that Software vendors haven't wanted to draw attention to it until they started losing sales to OSS.
And speaking of "boiling into the atmosphere", what environmental effects does this substance have in the air and ground water? I bet nobody knows yet, but with the exotic properties it has, it could easily have some exotic carcinogenic or thermal properties that would exacerbate existing environmental issues.
Of course, if we're dealing with the outer solar system, nuclear is the way to go: you can't get enough energy from solar, and you don't have to worry about the nukes contaminating our atmosphere, except during launch.
I see this more as a "we can't do this yet" limitation, rather than a "this violates the laws of thermodynamics" limitation.
It is physically possible to send up large satellites that are solar powered (see the International Space Station). The problem is the cost that would prevent us from sending up very many of them.
Because while people may have expanded their notion of community to the level of Nationhood, the "one-world" movement still hasn't convinced a single government to take action on the premise that everybody on the planet deserves the same level of civil rights, economic opportunity and social support.
This would require current nations to surrender too much power to the UN (or a successor). So the "Nation" is the largest political unit that is able to act as a cohesive economic entity.
I would say that the body of laws represents a social contract, more than a moral code. A society can have a social contract (or a moral code) that is not based on religion. It is difficult to imagine, because all societies (even China and N. Korea) today descend from societies where at some point in their history, religion was a state-sponsored institution or was the state itself. So all countries have laws so ancient that they date back to religious doctrine.
But why did so many religions come up with a set of common rules? Could it be that groups of people develop a shared sense of justice, and recognize the need to restrict behaviors that can hurt the members of the group, the group as a whole, or even the structures that enable the group to function?
Wouldn't it be nice if the US could get away without supporting any dictatorships. But our own national interests have to have some weight in our decision of which governments to support and how we support them.
Case in point: Pakistan. If Pakistan were to become a democracy today, we would have an Islamist radical nuclear power on our hands. So what is your transition plan to go from the current military dictatorship to a moderate democratic state that doesn't pose much of a threat to us (or India, for that matter)?
If you're going to be in NYC there are dozens of small computer/camera/Electronics shops in Manhattan alone. Spend a day strolling 5th avenue and nearby cross streets. I bought a NEC laptop there several years ago for about 20% less than CompUSA had it.
As someone else mentioned J&R music world is a big local retailer. There might be Erol's in the city, too. 47th Street Photo has also traditionally had good prices on Electronics, but their website looks pretty thin on computers.
There are plenty of negligible software makers out there. They're just soooo tiny you need a magnifying glass to see them.
As far as negligent software makers are concerned, the EULAs all contain severability clauses, so even if the section denying responsibility is to held invalid, they (theoretically) can enforce the rest of the agreement.
Globalization will raise quality of life for developing countries, and lower quality of life in first-world countries. As long as the economic standards are different in each country (e.g., middle class == $10k/year), this will continue to be the case.
Exactly! We have to face the fact that wages for US white collar jobs are going to seriously drop over the next couple of decades. The only question is how many of these jobs will migrate to Asia.
Since (barring new technology or an economic paradigm shift) wages are going to drop anyway, I propose a policy that will at least keep a larger percentage of the jobs in the US: Liberalize high tech worker visas for foreign workers, particularly India and China. This liberalization could take the form of allowing transfers of H1Bs between employers, renewals of H1Bs or conversion into green cards, or simply allowing a grace period to find a new sponsor before having to leave.
The downside of this is that it will accelerate the decline of wages in the US and could accelerate negative environmental impacts, but there are multiple upsides:
Wages will increase more quickly in India and China because the supply of available programmers will shrink (or grow more slowly). This will more quickly decrease the motivation for businesses to outsource to India and China and reduce the number of jobs that actually leave.
The equilibrium point for wages in the US will be reached more quickly and may be higher. The liberalized immigration will accelerate the convergence of the wage/price conditions in the US and India by opening the labor market here. By acquiring Indian developers before the Indian middle class grows any larger, we can introduce greater scarcity in the Indian labor market than by a slower approach where more middle class Indians will have the chance to put their children through college. Workers that emigrate to the US would have their children here, rather than in India, so we would have the benefit of those resources.
It will help resolve the Social Security and other budget deficits by increasing the number of US taxpayers and reducing the average age of the workforce.
Combined with tax disincentives for moving work offshore, we actually could come out ahead in the long run.
Yes, people should be very careful when coding in languages and on architechtures which allow buffer overflow, but the real solution is at a level lower than the coder's.
I disagree that this is out of the coder's hands. If your program is doing that many memory allocations on the stack, you're better off using a dedicated memory manager and using the heap instead. Then you can turn on array-bounds checking on your memory manager during the compile phase, and capture the buffer overflows.
IM(NS)HO, programmers shouldn't use C unless they know assembler. C is really just an Assembler abstraction layer that standardizes the appearance of the hardware while still allowing full access to all system resources (Subject to OS limitations).
It's kind of analogous to driving a standard shift car vs. an automatic with cruise control. If you don't know how to use the clutch pedal, you're better off with the automatic, even though you might wish you had the acceleration of the stick shift. Maybe developers should be fined for coding C without a license?
A more immediate application could be a CCD in combination with a neural interface to create an artificial retina for sufferers of macular degeneration and other diseases.
Slashdot Mirror
>Unlimited liability (in case of failure) is not something any business is eager to provide.
But there are plenty of juries who can make it come close.
as a going away present...Could you set the PCs BIOS to boot off of CD-ROM ahead of the HD? Then one of these days, you could put a Knoppix CD in each one before you leave. Next time the machine reboots: "Hey this screen looks funny..."
Locking out the floppy drives is probably a "security" directive that dates back to the days when most virii were transmitted by idiots booting with an unsecured floppy in the drive.
yeah, but at least you haven't poured $4.95 a month or whatever down the drain to a "backup service" that doesn't provide any compensation if they are unable to restore your data.
You can buy a lot of blank DVD-Rs or CD-Rs for $4.95 a month.
Well, yeah. But if the telco loses four normal voice-line subscribers because they are now using Vonage through your Wi-Fi base, yes it will put them out of business.
Or the infamous integrated SCM product: "Software Engineering Control System" whose slogan was "The best SECS you'll ever have."
That depends on how the GPL defines "third parties". For example in the following snipppet does "third parties" refer to those who have already received your binary code, or does it refer to anybody who asks for the source?
They may also be in violation of the "at no charge" portion of 2 b), regardless of to whom it is distributed. The GPL doesn't make any distinctions between beta and final software.This is true. Tech TV is like the Tonight Show of the computer industry. Vendors get on the shows to display their latest stuff like the actors that bring Leno their latest movie clip.
Give them credit though. Television is not a medium designed for in-depth reviews. The best you can hope for is a quick overview of a product and a thumbs up or down as a recommendation. Like PC Magazine in its time, they always find something good to say about a product because they are dependent on the vendors' largesse. Taken with an appropriate amount of salt, they can be informative.
Will you stop it? This thread addresses your claim about the license. All you've demonstrated is that you have an axe to grind against your competition.
Actually, this means "most hobbled". "Hobbliest" was just too awkward.
;-)
Example: The hobbiest competitor was forced to drag a large ball and chain all the way around the track.
So McOrmond was probably just saying that it isn't crippleware.
Or maybe not
"As the IBM portfolio begins to expire ..."?
IBM continues to lead all other companies in US patents granted each year. And hundreds of these are for business processes and software. The GPL protects for licensing of patented code that IBM provides, but if a 3rd party contributes code that violates an IBM patent, IBM can legally enforce its patent against the 3rd party.
While IBM's current business model of providing services provides good cover and support for OSS, remember that up until the 1980's IBM was a hardware company. EDS was the computer services leader. If IBM's business model is forced to change again (for example due to competition from Asian outsourcing companies), OSS could become a target.
Another scenario is If an Open Source project becomes a meaningful competitor that impacts a strategic piece of IBM's business, that project will be targeted as described by Anonymous.
The timing has to be considered too. "Unauthorized release under GPL" is plausible if it is removed from the company website after a few days or even weeks. It isn't plausible if the software is up for months before it is pulled. That's one reason SCO is in deep doo-doo. They GPLed their code for nearly a year, and now they claim it was a "mistake".
After this my boss gets scared and thinks that there is legitimate risk involved with going to Linux. Then he thinks, "Why go with Linux and spend extra $$$ on insurance when I can just go with Windows or something else."
Well you should point out to him that if Microsoft includes code in Windows that violates someone's patent, and he runs that code on his computer, he could be liable for violating the patent, since he is performing a patented business process. If he's really concerned about IP liability, he should buy the liability insurance for Windows, too.
This issue isn't restricted to Open Source software, it's just that Software vendors haven't wanted to draw attention to it until they started losing sales to OSS.
And speaking of "boiling into the atmosphere", what environmental effects does this substance have in the air and ground water? I bet nobody knows yet, but with the exotic properties it has, it could easily have some exotic carcinogenic or thermal properties that would exacerbate existing environmental issues.
And even if it did come down to military vs. civilians on U.S. soil, can you guarantee which side the soldiers would choose to fight on?
Lincoln offered command of the Union army to Robert E. Lee at the start of the Civil War, but he declined.
Of course, if we're dealing with the outer solar system, nuclear is the way to go: you can't get enough energy from solar, and you don't have to worry about the nukes contaminating our atmosphere, except during launch.
I see this more as a "we can't do this yet" limitation, rather than a "this violates the laws of thermodynamics" limitation. It is physically possible to send up large satellites that are solar powered (see the International Space Station). The problem is the cost that would prevent us from sending up very many of them.
Because while people may have expanded their notion of community to the level of Nationhood, the "one-world" movement still hasn't convinced a single government to take action on the premise that everybody on the planet deserves the same level of civil rights, economic opportunity and social support.
This would require current nations to surrender too much power to the UN (or a successor). So the "Nation" is the largest political unit that is able to act as a cohesive economic entity.
I would say that the body of laws represents a social contract, more than a moral code. A society can have a social contract (or a moral code) that is not based on religion. It is difficult to imagine, because all societies (even China and N. Korea) today descend from societies where at some point in their history, religion was a state-sponsored institution or was the state itself. So all countries have laws so ancient that they date back to religious doctrine. But why did so many religions come up with a set of common rules? Could it be that groups of people develop a shared sense of justice, and recognize the need to restrict behaviors that can hurt the members of the group, the group as a whole, or even the structures that enable the group to function?
Wouldn't it be nice if the US could get away without supporting any dictatorships. But our own national interests have to have some weight in our decision of which governments to support and how we support them.
Case in point: Pakistan. If Pakistan were to become a democracy today, we would have an Islamist radical nuclear power on our hands. So what is your transition plan to go from the current military dictatorship to a moderate democratic state that doesn't pose much of a threat to us (or India, for that matter)?
If you're going to be in NYC there are dozens of small computer/camera/Electronics shops in Manhattan alone. Spend a day strolling 5th avenue and nearby cross streets. I bought a NEC laptop there several years ago for about 20% less than CompUSA had it.
As someone else mentioned J&R music world is a big local retailer. There might be Erol's in the city, too. 47th Street Photo has also traditionally had good prices on Electronics, but their website looks pretty thin on computers.
There are plenty of negligible software makers out there. They're just soooo tiny you need a magnifying glass to see them.
As far as negligent software makers are concerned, the EULAs all contain severability clauses, so even if the section denying responsibility is to held invalid, they (theoretically) can enforce the rest of the agreement.
Exactly! We have to face the fact that wages for US white collar jobs are going to seriously drop over the next couple of decades. The only question is how many of these jobs will migrate to Asia.
Since (barring new technology or an economic paradigm shift) wages are going to drop anyway, I propose a policy that will at least keep a larger percentage of the jobs in the US: Liberalize high tech worker visas for foreign workers, particularly India and China. This liberalization could take the form of allowing transfers of H1Bs between employers, renewals of H1Bs or conversion into green cards, or simply allowing a grace period to find a new sponsor before having to leave.
The downside of this is that it will accelerate the decline of wages in the US and could accelerate negative environmental impacts, but there are multiple upsides:
I disagree that this is out of the coder's hands. If your program is doing that many memory allocations on the stack, you're better off using a dedicated memory manager and using the heap instead. Then you can turn on array-bounds checking on your memory manager during the compile phase, and capture the buffer overflows.
IM(NS)HO, programmers shouldn't use C unless they know assembler. C is really just an Assembler abstraction layer that standardizes the appearance of the hardware while still allowing full access to all system resources (Subject to OS limitations).
It's kind of analogous to driving a standard shift car vs. an automatic with cruise control. If you don't know how to use the clutch pedal, you're better off with the automatic, even though you might wish you had the acceleration of the stick shift. Maybe developers should be fined for coding C without a license?
Besides "on the internet no one knows you're a ...", so how can they tell if you're a girl, boy, dog or hermaphroditic alien from the planet Wombo?
A more immediate application could be a CCD in combination with a neural interface to create an artificial retina for sufferers of macular degeneration and other diseases.