The difference between a Swiss bank and a bank in another European country is that Swiss banks don't share information about the account balance with the governments of their respective clients. So while having a Swiss bank account doesn't necessarily mean someone is evading taxes, the vast majority of the people evading taxes will use Swiss bank accounts.
I worked on a closed-source product once where one of the customers wanted to pay for a new feature to be developed, but under the condition that it would be included in the main product and not developed as a customer-specific extension. The reason was that they wanted to make sure the feature would be maintained and that the maintenance would be included in the base license costs.
Opening the source could be part of an effort to reduce future maintenance costs, so that would be a way you could sell the idea to your customers. That would obligate you to actually use the same code for multiple customers as much as possible, of course.
In terms of who pays for the hours spent generalizing the code, I don't think it's fair to charge the first customer for this. Either increase your hourly rate and do it in your own time, as one of the other posters suggested, or charge the subsequent customers for it, since they will be the ones benefiting from the fact that the first allowed the source to be opened. Besides, generalizing code while you only have a single customer often leads to bad design decisions since you'll have to make assumptions about the requirements of other customers without having talked to those customers yet.
I never understood how it was supposed to work in the first place. A company doesn't create jobs because it has money left over, it creates jobs when there is more demand for a product than it can satisfy with the current workforce. If you want jobs to be created, you should give money to the people most eager to spend it, which is the people who have the least amount of money.
The alternative is not "sit here", but do something that isn't taxed, such as buying and selling on the black market, growing your own vegetables etc. This will happen if tax levels are extremely high, I doubt the effect is significant at ordinary tax rates though.
Another question is how money gets spent: how fast does it circulate, is it spent locally or abroad, does it pay for infrastructure that will be useful later etc? In the case of taxes, this depends on how the government spends the money, otherwise it depends on who benefits from the tax cuts.
In my opinion, saying that lowering taxes will help economic growth is cheating if you consider government spending to stay at the same level both with and without lowering taxes. Of course the economy will grow if you pump more money into it, the question should be whether the same amount of money is more effectively spent by the government or by the private sector.
The actions of Anonymous aren't based in righteous concern for society. Rather, they're displays of overwhelming power trumping society's established systems, with a thin veneer of altruism to stave off any guilt.
I think many people feel unrepresented by the established systems. A lot of systems have been subverted by companies and organizations to work in their advantage and the systems that do serve the public are often very slow. So they look for alternative ways to exert influence. I don't agree with their methods, but I do understand some of the underlying frustration.
Of course, once they have tasted power, it can become addictive. So it's quite possible that some actions are motivated by the desire to feel powerful, but that's not where it started from.
There is plenty of potential renewable energy and it's not prohibitively expensive either, just not as cheap as fossil fuels used to be. The problem is that our infrastructure is built around cheap fossil fuel and will have to be refitted around slightly less cheap renewable energy. The transition has already started, but is still at a very slow rate; I doubt that we can complete the transition in time at the current speed.
Anyway, your kids should definitely bike to school, but for their health and not because you cannot afford to take them in your electric car.
It works here, in the south of the Netherlands. In my city, bus routes and bike lanes are the first places where snow is removed, often within a few hours after it fell. Also because a lot of people continue biking, even if the snow hasn't been removed, there will be tracks where the people who cycled before you have crushed the snow to the point where it melts. However, our winter day temperatures don't often stay below zero for more than a few days at a time, so a snow period seldom lasts for more than a week. I once visited the middle of Finland at the end of the winter and I think the snow that falls there during the winter doesn't melt until spring; I don't know if that is the case for the Helsinki area as well.
What would be the advantage of putting phone or tablet in a docking station as opposed to putting a simple PC on someone's desk?.
1. Portability. Anyone who spends non-trivial amounmts of time traveling to trade shows, or as part of customer training/support would prefer to carry a phone and plug it into the dock they can expect to be present at the destination, than to carry a self contained laptop which may still need to be connected to something like a projector at the destination.
The people I saw traveling and giving presentations were always tweaking their presentations while on the road, because of new things they learned since leaving the office, to kill time at airports or simply because they didn't have time to polish the presentation earlier. Editing a presentation is far easier on a laptop than on a phone.
2. Bring your own device. If most people have their own phone the bean counters would love to cut the CPU and storage out of the budjet for IT by gettiung people to bring their own phone.
As I wrote in one of the other replies, using the mobile device for storage is a disadvantage. As for cost cutting, I doubt that in the future a small computer would be a significant cost: imagine something like a Raspberry Pi board with tomorrow's specs, integrated into the monitor. People bringing their own phone as their main workstation would increase support costs by much more than you could save on hardware.
3. Scalibility. I may prefer no periphrials while on the subway, a single monitor + keyboard while at the cafe, 2 monitors + keyboard +mouse at work, and a wall monitor + podium mounted display + presentation remote while delivering a presentation.
I certainly believe that laptop + docking station is a viable combination. But a laptop's keyboard, track pad and screen are not all that different from what the docking station offers: the docked versions are superior versions of the same interface devices. For a phone the interface is completely different: no physical keys, touching the screen rather than navigating in a separate space, screen size that is of a different order (you can fit a lot of pixels on a phone screen, but it's still physically small). And because the physical interface is so different, then I don't see a single user interface work well on both, since a good user interface takes the physical properties into account.
The device is your cryptographic keychain for the "cloud".
That sounds less safe than for example biometric identification. Also, there would have to be a backup authentication plan: giving everyone who loses their phone a day off won't be an option.
How many people given laptops switch to a desktop at work, rather than simply use the laptop?
Few, but I think that has a lot to do with a laptop being very similar to a desktop in terms of user interface. The idea of continuing your work after (un)docking your tablet or phone depends on using the same UI for the desktop and mobile device. Microsoft has learned the hard way that a desktop UI doesn't work on mobile devices. Now they're trying a mobile device UI on the desktop and although that is probably less painful, I still don't think it will become a success.
Another aspect that makes me doubt the scenario you propose is the "bring your own device" trend. Many people have strong opinions about which phones they do and do not want, so they're going to be carrying around their own device. The company is likely not going to want to support multiple versions of multiple operating systems or to install their crypto keys on a device that is out of their control. So if the company issues a mobile phone, many employees are going to be carrying around two phones, which defeats the purpose of using a single device for everything.
Dear/., this is an example of naivete and idealism:
Naive? Maybe. I'm not an industry insider, so please educate me if I make incorrect assumptions or overlook important issues.
Idealism? No. I'm typing this on my PC that runs NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver. I'm saying NVIDIA could release an open source driver, not that they should. (*)
NVIDIA for one is nowhere near the size or capacity of Intel, in terms of development, ability to make, influence, dominate markets, set platforms... Secondly, who wants to bet who has more patents, strings and connections, and ways to leverage force in the event that all cards are laid bare?
In a battle with a patent troll, your own patent portfolio, market dominance etc doesn't matter, only that you have a good legal team and deep enough pockets. In a patent battle with a competitor, I don't think open drivers make that much of a difference, since the opponent will have enough expertise to demonstrate patent infringement even without the driver source code.
Anyway, as far as the GPL is concerned, if it's version 2, then they probably wouldn't have to worry:
The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 and that is unlikely to change.
they COULD build inter-operable code and simply...not distribute the GPL code in question, and leave it to the user to download their driver, like, you know, they already do.
This discussion is not about NVIDIA distributing GPL-ed kernel code, it's about which functions a non-GPL driver is allowed to call. The view of the kernel maintainers seems to be that loading a module makes that code part of the kernel, not a separate program and it is therefore bound to licensing rules set by the kernel. If this is not true, then there is no difference between EXPORT_SYMBOL and EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL and there is also no need to change the declaration of the dma-buf symbols.
(*) I would like them to release an open source driver, but I know it's not likely to happen. NVIDIA's driver is designed to run the same code on many platforms, I think there was a presentation that said 90% of the code is platform independent. This approach makes it harder to integrate with Linux though, since NVIDIA has their own solutions for things that Linux and Xorg solve in a different way. So even if the driver source is opened, it would be a lot of work to make the driver integrate well with the existing open source graphics infrastructure. And if that is achieved, NVIDIA would be facing two driver source trees to maintain instead of one, although the Linux-specific one would be considerably smaller than the generic one.
What would be the advantage of putting phone or tablet in a docking station as opposed to putting a simple PC on someone's desk? The amount of CPU power and memory needed for office applications is not expensive now and certainly not in the future. Keyboard, video, mouse would be provided via the docking station, so no money saved there. And using the mobile device for storage would be a disadvantage in my opinion, since it is easy to lose the device; it's much better to put the data on a company server, or in the cloud if you want to be fashionable.
This did not stop Intel from releasing drivers, or AMD from releasing detailed technical documentation. And the Nouveau drivers already expose some of the functionality of NVIDIA's hardware. Also, both AMD and NVIDIA chips are being used in game consoles and those are programmed by sending command lists directly to the GPU, so console game developers have detailed technical descriptions of those GPUs; it's not like their programming interface is so secret that it never leaves NVIDIA HQ.
Ah, I didn't know Intel wrote new drivers from scratch. Still, the fact that Intel can do it shows that NVIDIA could do it as well, if they would choose to do so.
In intelfbhw.c it says that the hardware specific part of the driver is dual-licensed under GPL and the MIT/XFree86 license. The user space code is probably MIT-licensed (I didn't check), but this discussion is about sharing DMA buffers between two kernel modules. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is nothing preventing NVIDIA from shipping a proprietary OpenGL implementation in user space as long as they communicate with the kernel via established interfaces.
Intel releases their drivers as GPL, I don't see why NVIDIA couldn't do the same. They choose not to.
Now, there might be sublicensed code in the driver that NVIDIA doesn't own, so maybe they cannot release it under GPL tomorrow, but it would be feasible as a long term project.
It's not the file system taking up that space, it's the room between sectors. You can fit more sectors into a track, but I think it won't be readable without a special driver then. Same for larger sectors. You can also add more tracks, going up to 82 (from 80) should work with most disks and drives and that might work without a special driver.
This is Google, they do a lot of automated testing and they're good at distributing workloads, so it's likely it did undergo extensive testing in a very short time. Also testing is all about managing risk: what are the chances of this fix introducing something that is worse than the issue itself? This pair of bugs allows an attacker to inject code and escape from the sandbox, which clearly falls into the Bad Things Category.
i) write the code as secure as they can ii) challenge others to find bug iii) issue a press release that despite high bounties, no-one could break their browser
...doesn't require such subterfuge, is $60K cheaper and is also good publicity.
Besides, who says a deliberately injected flaw would be found first by someone attending the event? If it is not found, the plot fails, while if it is found first by a black hat they could be facing very bad publicity if it's being exploited in the wild.
Maybe there is an opposing candidate that would do better, but if you expect improvements in civil liberties from either of the two major parties, I think you'll be disappointed.
There is no need at all to have a credit card associated with a domain. For example, I don't pay for my.org domain by credit card. In fact, here in the Netherlands a lot of people don't even have a credit card, since we have other payment systems that are cheaper and buying stuff on credit is not as common as in the US or UK.
That leads to less liquidity...and that's probably a bad thing.
What sort of time spans are we talking about? I can imagine it can be problematic if it takes weeks to sell your stock, but if you need to take your money out in seconds then you shouldn't have put it in the stock market in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says this is tax paid on their profits; if that is not considered the company's own money then what is?
The difference between a Swiss bank and a bank in another European country is that Swiss banks don't share information about the account balance with the governments of their respective clients. So while having a Swiss bank account doesn't necessarily mean someone is evading taxes, the vast majority of the people evading taxes will use Swiss bank accounts.
Android is unaffected: the bug was introduced after Linux 3.6 and no Android kernel is anywhere near that recent.
I worked on a closed-source product once where one of the customers wanted to pay for a new feature to be developed, but under the condition that it would be included in the main product and not developed as a customer-specific extension. The reason was that they wanted to make sure the feature would be maintained and that the maintenance would be included in the base license costs.
Opening the source could be part of an effort to reduce future maintenance costs, so that would be a way you could sell the idea to your customers. That would obligate you to actually use the same code for multiple customers as much as possible, of course.
In terms of who pays for the hours spent generalizing the code, I don't think it's fair to charge the first customer for this. Either increase your hourly rate and do it in your own time, as one of the other posters suggested, or charge the subsequent customers for it, since they will be the ones benefiting from the fact that the first allowed the source to be opened. Besides, generalizing code while you only have a single customer often leads to bad design decisions since you'll have to make assumptions about the requirements of other customers without having talked to those customers yet.
Trickle down has been proven not to work.
I never understood how it was supposed to work in the first place. A company doesn't create jobs because it has money left over, it creates jobs when there is more demand for a product than it can satisfy with the current workforce. If you want jobs to be created, you should give money to the people most eager to spend it, which is the people who have the least amount of money.
The alternative is not "sit here", but do something that isn't taxed, such as buying and selling on the black market, growing your own vegetables etc. This will happen if tax levels are extremely high, I doubt the effect is significant at ordinary tax rates though.
Another question is how money gets spent: how fast does it circulate, is it spent locally or abroad, does it pay for infrastructure that will be useful later etc? In the case of taxes, this depends on how the government spends the money, otherwise it depends on who benefits from the tax cuts.
In my opinion, saying that lowering taxes will help economic growth is cheating if you consider government spending to stay at the same level both with and without lowering taxes. Of course the economy will grow if you pump more money into it, the question should be whether the same amount of money is more effectively spent by the government or by the private sector.
The actions of Anonymous aren't based in righteous concern for society. Rather, they're displays of overwhelming power trumping society's established systems, with a thin veneer of altruism to stave off any guilt.
I think many people feel unrepresented by the established systems. A lot of systems have been subverted by companies and organizations to work in their advantage and the systems that do serve the public are often very slow. So they look for alternative ways to exert influence. I don't agree with their methods, but I do understand some of the underlying frustration.
Of course, once they have tasted power, it can become addictive. So it's quite possible that some actions are motivated by the desire to feel powerful, but that's not where it started from.
There is plenty of potential renewable energy and it's not prohibitively expensive either, just not as cheap as fossil fuels used to be. The problem is that our infrastructure is built around cheap fossil fuel and will have to be refitted around slightly less cheap renewable energy. The transition has already started, but is still at a very slow rate; I doubt that we can complete the transition in time at the current speed.
Anyway, your kids should definitely bike to school, but for their health and not because you cannot afford to take them in your electric car.
It works here, in the south of the Netherlands. In my city, bus routes and bike lanes are the first places where snow is removed, often within a few hours after it fell. Also because a lot of people continue biking, even if the snow hasn't been removed, there will be tracks where the people who cycled before you have crushed the snow to the point where it melts. However, our winter day temperatures don't often stay below zero for more than a few days at a time, so a snow period seldom lasts for more than a week. I once visited the middle of Finland at the end of the winter and I think the snow that falls there during the winter doesn't melt until spring; I don't know if that is the case for the Helsinki area as well.
What would be the advantage of putting phone or tablet in a docking station as opposed to putting a simple PC on someone's desk?.
1. Portability. Anyone who spends non-trivial amounmts of time traveling to trade shows, or as part of customer training/support would prefer to carry a phone and plug it into the dock they can expect to be present at the destination, than to carry a self contained laptop which may still need to be connected to something like a projector at the destination.
The people I saw traveling and giving presentations were always tweaking their presentations while on the road, because of new things they learned since leaving the office, to kill time at airports or simply because they didn't have time to polish the presentation earlier. Editing a presentation is far easier on a laptop than on a phone.
2. Bring your own device. If most people have their own phone the bean counters would love to cut the CPU and storage out of the budjet for IT by gettiung people to bring their own phone.
As I wrote in one of the other replies, using the mobile device for storage is a disadvantage. As for cost cutting, I doubt that in the future a small computer would be a significant cost: imagine something like a Raspberry Pi board with tomorrow's specs, integrated into the monitor. People bringing their own phone as their main workstation would increase support costs by much more than you could save on hardware.
3. Scalibility. I may prefer no periphrials while on the subway, a single monitor + keyboard while at the cafe, 2 monitors + keyboard +mouse at work, and a wall monitor + podium mounted display + presentation remote while delivering a presentation.
I certainly believe that laptop + docking station is a viable combination. But a laptop's keyboard, track pad and screen are not all that different from what the docking station offers: the docked versions are superior versions of the same interface devices. For a phone the interface is completely different: no physical keys, touching the screen rather than navigating in a separate space, screen size that is of a different order (you can fit a lot of pixels on a phone screen, but it's still physically small). And because the physical interface is so different, then I don't see a single user interface work well on both, since a good user interface takes the physical properties into account.
The device is your cryptographic keychain for the "cloud".
That sounds less safe than for example biometric identification. Also, there would have to be a backup authentication plan: giving everyone who loses their phone a day off won't be an option.
How many people given laptops switch to a desktop at work, rather than simply use the laptop?
Few, but I think that has a lot to do with a laptop being very similar to a desktop in terms of user interface. The idea of continuing your work after (un)docking your tablet or phone depends on using the same UI for the desktop and mobile device. Microsoft has learned the hard way that a desktop UI doesn't work on mobile devices. Now they're trying a mobile device UI on the desktop and although that is probably less painful, I still don't think it will become a success.
Another aspect that makes me doubt the scenario you propose is the "bring your own device" trend. Many people have strong opinions about which phones they do and do not want, so they're going to be carrying around their own device. The company is likely not going to want to support multiple versions of multiple operating systems or to install their crypto keys on a device that is out of their control. So if the company issues a mobile phone, many employees are going to be carrying around two phones, which defeats the purpose of using a single device for everything.
Dear /., this is an example of naivete and idealism:
Naive? Maybe. I'm not an industry insider, so please educate me if I make incorrect assumptions or overlook important issues.
Idealism? No. I'm typing this on my PC that runs NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver. I'm saying NVIDIA could release an open source driver, not that they should. (*)
NVIDIA for one is nowhere near the size or capacity of Intel, in terms of development, ability to make, influence, dominate markets, set platforms... Secondly, who wants to bet who has more patents, strings and connections, and ways to leverage force in the event that all cards are laid bare?
In a battle with a patent troll, your own patent portfolio, market dominance etc doesn't matter, only that you have a good legal team and deep enough pockets. In a patent battle with a competitor, I don't think open drivers make that much of a difference, since the opponent will have enough expertise to demonstrate patent infringement even without the driver source code.
Anyway, as far as the GPL is concerned, if it's version 2, then they probably wouldn't have to worry:
The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 and that is unlikely to change.
they COULD build inter-operable code and simply...not distribute the GPL code in question, and leave it to the user to download their driver, like, you know, they already do.
This discussion is not about NVIDIA distributing GPL-ed kernel code, it's about which functions a non-GPL driver is allowed to call. The view of the kernel maintainers seems to be that loading a module makes that code part of the kernel, not a separate program and it is therefore bound to licensing rules set by the kernel. If this is not true, then there is no difference between EXPORT_SYMBOL and EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL and there is also no need to change the declaration of the dma-buf symbols.
(*) I would like them to release an open source driver, but I know it's not likely to happen. NVIDIA's driver is designed to run the same code on many platforms, I think there was a presentation that said 90% of the code is platform independent. This approach makes it harder to integrate with Linux though, since NVIDIA has their own solutions for things that Linux and Xorg solve in a different way. So even if the driver source is opened, it would be a lot of work to make the driver integrate well with the existing open source graphics infrastructure. And if that is achieved, NVIDIA would be facing two driver source trees to maintain instead of one, although the Linux-specific one would be considerably smaller than the generic one.
What would be the advantage of putting phone or tablet in a docking station as opposed to putting a simple PC on someone's desk? The amount of CPU power and memory needed for office applications is not expensive now and certainly not in the future. Keyboard, video, mouse would be provided via the docking station, so no money saved there. And using the mobile device for storage would be a disadvantage in my opinion, since it is easy to lose the device; it's much better to put the data on a company server, or in the cloud if you want to be fashionable.
This did not stop Intel from releasing drivers, or AMD from releasing detailed technical documentation. And the Nouveau drivers already expose some of the functionality of NVIDIA's hardware. Also, both AMD and NVIDIA chips are being used in game consoles and those are programmed by sending command lists directly to the GPU, so console game developers have detailed technical descriptions of those GPUs; it's not like their programming interface is so secret that it never leaves NVIDIA HQ.
Ah, I didn't know Intel wrote new drivers from scratch. Still, the fact that Intel can do it shows that NVIDIA could do it as well, if they would choose to do so.
In intelfbhw.c it says that the hardware specific part of the driver is dual-licensed under GPL and the MIT/XFree86 license. The user space code is probably MIT-licensed (I didn't check), but this discussion is about sharing DMA buffers between two kernel modules. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is nothing preventing NVIDIA from shipping a proprietary OpenGL implementation in user space as long as they communicate with the kernel via established interfaces.
No, to satisfy a license that covers code that took millions of hours to write. And a large portion of those hours was paid for by companies.
Intel releases their drivers as GPL, I don't see why NVIDIA couldn't do the same. They choose not to.
Now, there might be sublicensed code in the driver that NVIDIA doesn't own, so maybe they cannot release it under GPL tomorrow, but it would be feasible as a long term project.
It's not the file system taking up that space, it's the room between sectors. You can fit more sectors into a track, but I think it won't be readable without a special driver then. Same for larger sectors. You can also add more tracks, going up to 82 (from 80) should work with most disks and drives and that might work without a special driver.
This is Google, they do a lot of automated testing and they're good at distributing workloads, so it's likely it did undergo extensive testing in a very short time. Also testing is all about managing risk: what are the chances of this fix introducing something that is worse than the issue itself? This pair of bugs allows an attacker to inject code and escape from the sandbox, which clearly falls into the Bad Things Category.
Because the alternative:
i) write the code as secure as they can
ii) challenge others to find bug
iii) issue a press release that despite high bounties, no-one could break their browser
Besides, who says a deliberately injected flaw would be found first by someone attending the event? If it is not found, the plot fails, while if it is found first by a black hat they could be facing very bad publicity if it's being exploited in the wild.
Maybe there is an opposing candidate that would do better, but if you expect improvements in civil liberties from either of the two major parties, I think you'll be disappointed.
There is no need at all to have a credit card associated with a domain. For example, I don't pay for my .org domain by credit card. In fact, here in the Netherlands a lot of people don't even have a credit card, since we have other payment systems that are cheaper and buying stuff on credit is not as common as in the US or UK.
Microsoft were among the first with PDAs and tablets, but they didn't succeed in creating a large and profitable market from it.
That leads to less liquidity...and that's probably a bad thing.
What sort of time spans are we talking about? I can imagine it can be problematic if it takes weeks to sell your stock, but if you need to take your money out in seconds then you shouldn't have put it in the stock market in the first place.
There is a new Linux kernel release every two months; Ask Woz is a once in 15 years event.