I love the mods here, this post is flamebait because it raises real questions. But the parent of it, which slams the US mercilessly, is insightful.
Someone should start a US-only geek board and just block the addresses of the Europeans already. As if we care what they think, it's all "The US Sucks!" anyway. It's enough to make you want to just stop reading. Hey...that's an idea...
Paranoid delusions are often chemical. You should seek help, if you believe the parent poster.
Everyone is going to die. Only idiots think that powerful people have time (and political capital) to waste on stupid things like what OS to run. It's like a telephone. They want it to work.
'What color shoes go with the charcoal pinstripe suit' is more like it.
Maybe if you worked in the US government you might understand. I happen to. If i want to introduce Linux, there is no law necessary. However, it has to work. It doesn't work seamlessly yet, which is why Linux only runs dhcp and Apache in our organization. All the rest is Win32. Never, not even once, has management specified an OS.
Labor unions rely on compulsion in most cases - if you work here, you must belong to the union. This works - no one can circumvent it. Who is going to force geeks to join this union though? So, it's a given it's all-volunteer as you have framed it.
Any volunteer action is by its nature flaky and prone to miscarry. All you have to do is join a fraternal organization (Elks, Moose, one of the veterans groups, etc) to see this. We're talking about disciplined, together people who hold down jobs and run businesses, and getting a Friday night dinner together is a fiasco. People don't show, people don't want to wash dishes, we ran out of ketchup, etc.
Look at all the abandoned Sourceforge projects for an illustration of how ineffective volunteer projects can be. Collective volunteer action is very inefficient and downright maddening in many cases. It is a given then that this has a be a real organization with expenses and a revenue stream, otherwise it just isn't going to happen.
In the abstract, your idea is great. Get every geek to join a group to enforce license restrictions to benefit the consumer. But what happens when the person(s) running the group becomes suspect to some of the group? (think ICANN here) Does the group fork? Probably some people drop out or no longer participate.
How effective is a pressure group without numbers behind it? The NRA wields power because they have the signatures of X million people behind them. (I forget how many...3 million?). We're talking membership dues here just to keep track of all the people to demonstrate your size and power. (they charge $25 a year for a basic membership I think)
How many people really care about this kind of stuff, enough to fork over $20 or whatever a year? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Is that enough to change Microsoft's mind? How about Pkware? How about Intuit?
I don't know the answers to many of these questions, but I have a feeling the answers to some of them are 'no' or 'not', as appropriate.
Lest you wonder why SEA lost the market. Can you imagine something with less class? Wouldn't 'keeping your mouth shut' and letting Katz's awful life speak for itself be more rewarding?
It seemed fairly silly when they were specifically hiring one person to do all their updates.
Re:I Modded Down 5 European Posts
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Damn straight, and a good thing that.
Good job for the traffic throttler too. Hurt 'em where it counts. Assholes.
I hope the moderations get their rocks off - it's about all the pleasure they're likely to get in their socialist paradise.
Re:I Modded Down 5 European Posts
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I've decided to stop logging in here before noon eastern time. That way the Eurotrash basically isn't around and I don't have to worry about the dumbass fuckers.
Great job on the moderation, I appreciate the effort.
Anyone else getting demoralized about this whole thing?
I know in my heart it will be litigated out successfully. I know I wasn't the original author of this OS. I know my job means that I have to use Win32 mostly for business purposes.
Still, this is eating me up, the whole SCO thing. The few Linux boxes I have are like a hope of throwing off the Microsoft yoke at work, and these bozos are threatening to take that all away.
If they weren't awake and responding they wouldn't be there. They're all geeks anyway - even she is one. She's up at 2am chattering away on IM or writing stuff most of the time anyway - it's just a little presumptuous to expect a web site change at 1am on a Friday. It happens she doesn't drink, but I would probably be half in the bag by then...
Because by spending so much on armaments, we are able to exercise hegemony without having to expend lives. It caused fear in you, and will cause fear in others. It's a bargain at any price.
You don't like being afraid? Tough shit, the world is a nasty place, deal with it. When someone attacked our country, we decided to stop being pansy ass and start playing the game by the standard old rules. An enemy who runs away needs not be defeated. You are running away. That is a good thing.
Because you certainly are our enemy, judging by your words.
My girlfriend used to do web site updates for the Jboss group (actually, she worked for Marc Fleury and his wife, listed as Nathalie Mason-Fleury on the website, director of marketing). She was responsible for most of the bio information going up on the site, as well as doing updates to same, updates for whatever conventions they were hosting/doing, etc. She was fresh out of a 4 year CS degree and needed a job and in this market, she took this web jockey gig.
The Jboss crew uses a CVS repository to manage their web site. It sounded fairly dumb to me when I heard it, but I suppose they feel the need for control and verification of who is making what change to the site. Now, she had never done any work with CVS before - she codes a bit in real languages but hasn't worked on any large projects. So she had to ask some help from the Jboss people on how to use CVS.
The developers, Dain for instance, were incredibly helpful. She was able to snag them on AIM at just about any hour of the day or night for whatever little questions she had about their (often malfunctioning) repository. Marc Fleury and his wife, on the other hand, were not. They were demanding, placing calls in the wee hours for changes, and expecting 1-2 hour turnaround whenever they called. When asked questions, more often than not, Mr. Fleury would take a fit on her. She asked the developers about this and one in particular volunteered that "He's an asshole to everyone, not just you".
Eventually she stopped dealing with them because they just sucked too badly to work for. Low pay, rude behavior and weird hours make for a bad mix. I'm sure they hired someone else who was more masochistic perhaps.
A close friend of the Fleurys (she knows them socially in Atlanta) made the comment recently that Marc owns his own company because he would find it impossible to work _for_ anyone else due to his attitude. I suggest that the recent defections might have something to do with the aforementioned.
On a positive note, Mr. Fleury has found a way to make money off of an open source project. I suppose that deserves kudos. I've known a few businessmen who, while they knew how to make money, were unable to keep the business operating long term because they made strategic errors or alienated people. I suspect Mr. Fleury is going to fall into that category. Maybe he'll learn some lessons for his next business (he's the kind of guy who will assuredly hit the ground running no matter what happens)...
I have to wonder about the relationship SCO has with its legal team at this time.
IANAL (of course) but i've both been a plaintiff and defendant in civil suits of various flavors. I've also worked a few years settling BI (bodily injury) claims in the insurance industry, big ticket stuff like truck and bus accidents. Done some grand jury testimony. I've been there.
Every decent lawyer worth his salt retains _tight_ control of what their client says in a public and private forum. One lawyer put it this way to me "Don't get diarrhea of the mouth". He was referring to both the stand/depositions, and to my private communications with any potentially opposing party such as a medical insurer. (civil suit, BI) I have had an assistant DA in Brooklyn throw me under a subpoena completely muting me and preventing me from discussing the case at hand (lasted about 9 months, renewed every 90 days). That was a fraud case with some doctor falsifying medical bills. The same principle applied there.
Now, Boies and team obviously are reasonably competent, though I don't think Boies is particularly prescient regarding what judges and juries will say, evidence getting ripped to shreds on Napster and in the Al Gore fiasco. Still, he knows well enough that having McBride, as an officer of SCO out there arguing his case in this way is dangerous. This should be handled through press people or the lawyers themselves.
So, I must ask the big question. Why are McBride and Sontag out there? What can they be thinking? Their story changes every day, and the statements they make are of public record and _admissible_! Everything they are saying _cannot_ be true. Therefore, they are setting themselves up to be absolutely destroyed in court. Why?
I can think of only two options:
They never expect this to get to court. There isn't sufficient evidence for a win. The endgame strategy is to be bought up, and they have an insurance policy already set up, whereby another firm is committed to buying them even in the event that IBM doesn't. (Think Microsoft, even though there are antitrust issues there). Therefore, it benefits SCO to keep the publicity on high, as it is their only chance for a big win. Think of it as trolling on a corporate level.
The management team are total idiots. They are ignoring their hired gun legal advisers and are having an attack of "diarrhea of the mouth". Perhaps they feel keeping the stock price up is more important than winning this case, in the short term. (Just to afford a little logic to their stance)
The obvious solution, that they have a winning case, is not likely given the fact that they are compromising themselves irrevocably at this time.
I like the concept, but where in this plan does Darl McBride, Sontag, and Boies get the appropriate ass-ramming sans lubrication they so richly deserve?
The fact is that I feel far less threatened by China than America. It's sad, but it's the truth.
Good. That fear will keep us safe in the US. I like that. No use being a world power if people think you are some kind of pushover that is easy to attack.
We're playing the game the Russian way finally. About time we wised up.
Slashdot Mirror
$365 a week as of 1999 (last time I collected, month and a half)
Of course I have kids. YMMV.
Your movement loses mindshare with each person you lose.
The SCO suit, bad attitudes here, and all of a sudden Linux uptake stops. So I will avail myself of your offer. Thanks for making it painless!
I love the mods here, this post is flamebait because it raises real questions. But the parent of it, which slams the US mercilessly, is insightful.
Someone should start a US-only geek board and just block the addresses of the Europeans already. As if we care what they think, it's all "The US Sucks!" anyway. It's enough to make you want to just stop reading. Hey...that's an idea...
Paranoid delusions are often chemical. You should seek help, if you believe the parent poster.
Everyone is going to die. Only idiots think that powerful people have time (and political capital) to waste on stupid things like what OS to run. It's like a telephone. They want it to work.
'What color shoes go with the charcoal pinstripe suit' is more like it.
Maybe if you worked in the US government you might understand. I happen to. If i want to introduce Linux, there is no law necessary. However, it has to work. It doesn't work seamlessly yet, which is why Linux only runs dhcp and Apache in our organization. All the rest is Win32. Never, not even once, has management specified an OS.
What was that you were saying about a clue?
Shows how much of a clue you have about how the US works. None.
It's not my job to educate you either.
Labor unions rely on compulsion in most cases - if you work here, you must belong to the union. This works - no one can circumvent it. Who is going to force geeks to join this union though? So, it's a given it's all-volunteer as you have framed it.
Any volunteer action is by its nature flaky and prone to miscarry. All you have to do is join a fraternal organization (Elks, Moose, one of the veterans groups, etc) to see this. We're talking about disciplined, together people who hold down jobs and run businesses, and getting a Friday night dinner together is a fiasco. People don't show, people don't want to wash dishes, we ran out of ketchup, etc.
Look at all the abandoned Sourceforge projects for an illustration of how ineffective volunteer projects can be. Collective volunteer action is very inefficient and downright maddening in many cases. It is a given then that this has a be a real organization with expenses and a revenue stream, otherwise it just isn't going to happen.
In the abstract, your idea is great. Get every geek to join a group to enforce license restrictions to benefit the consumer. But what happens when the person(s) running the group becomes suspect to some of the group? (think ICANN here) Does the group fork? Probably some people drop out or no longer participate.
How effective is a pressure group without numbers behind it? The NRA wields power because they have the signatures of X million people behind them. (I forget how many...3 million?). We're talking membership dues here just to keep track of all the people to demonstrate your size and power. (they charge $25 a year for a basic membership I think)
How many people really care about this kind of stuff, enough to fork over $20 or whatever a year? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Is that enough to change Microsoft's mind? How about Pkware? How about Intuit?
I don't know the answers to many of these questions, but I have a feeling the answers to some of them are 'no' or 'not', as appropriate.
Slightly more depressing was Thom Henderson's dance on his grave.
Thom Henderson, author of ARC, principal of SEA
Lest you wonder why SEA lost the market. Can you imagine something with less class? Wouldn't 'keeping your mouth shut' and letting Katz's awful life speak for itself be more rewarding?
Apparently not.
Ah, you got an SMC EtherPower card too, huh?
That might explain why your economies are a joke, compared to the US.
It seemed fairly silly when they were specifically hiring one person to do all their updates.
Damn straight, and a good thing that.
Good job for the traffic throttler too. Hurt 'em where it counts. Assholes.
I hope the moderations get their rocks off - it's about all the pleasure they're likely to get in their socialist paradise.
I've decided to stop logging in here before noon eastern time. That way the Eurotrash basically isn't around and I don't have to worry about the dumbass fuckers.
Great job on the moderation, I appreciate the effort.
Anyone else getting demoralized about this whole thing?
I know in my heart it will be litigated out successfully.
I know I wasn't the original author of this OS.
I know my job means that I have to use Win32 mostly for business purposes.
Still, this is eating me up, the whole SCO thing. The few Linux boxes I have are like a hope of throwing off the Microsoft yoke at work, and these bozos are threatening to take that all away.
She didn't call them - she got them on AIM.
If they weren't awake and responding they wouldn't be there. They're all geeks anyway - even she is one. She's up at 2am chattering away on IM or writing stuff most of the time anyway - it's just a little presumptuous to expect a web site change at 1am on a Friday. It happens she doesn't drink, but I would probably be half in the bag by then...
Because by spending so much on armaments, we are able to exercise hegemony without having to expend lives. It caused fear in you, and will cause fear in others. It's a bargain at any price.
You don't like being afraid? Tough shit, the world is a nasty place, deal with it. When someone attacked our country, we decided to stop being pansy ass and start playing the game by the standard old rules. An enemy who runs away needs not be defeated. You are running away. That is a good thing.
Because you certainly are our enemy, judging by your words.
My girlfriend used to do web site updates for the Jboss group (actually, she worked for Marc Fleury and his wife, listed as Nathalie Mason-Fleury on the website, director of marketing). She was responsible for most of the bio information going up on the site, as well as doing updates to same, updates for whatever conventions they were hosting/doing, etc. She was fresh out of a 4 year CS degree and needed a job and in this market, she took this web jockey gig.
The Jboss crew uses a CVS repository to manage their web site. It sounded fairly dumb to me when I heard it, but I suppose they feel the need for control and verification of who is making what change to the site. Now, she had never done any work with CVS before - she codes a bit in real languages but hasn't worked on any large projects. So she had to ask some help from the Jboss people on how to use CVS.
The developers, Dain for instance, were incredibly helpful. She was able to snag them on AIM at just about any hour of the day or night for whatever little questions she had about their (often malfunctioning) repository. Marc Fleury and his wife, on the other hand, were not. They were demanding, placing calls in the wee hours for changes, and expecting 1-2 hour turnaround whenever they called. When asked questions, more often than not, Mr. Fleury would take a fit on her. She asked the developers about this and one in particular volunteered that "He's an asshole to everyone, not just you".
Eventually she stopped dealing with them because they just sucked too badly to work for. Low pay, rude behavior and weird hours make for a bad mix. I'm sure they hired someone else who was more masochistic perhaps.
A close friend of the Fleurys (she knows them socially in Atlanta) made the comment recently that Marc owns his own company because he would find it impossible to work _for_ anyone else due to his attitude. I suggest that the recent defections might have something to do with the aforementioned.
On a positive note, Mr. Fleury has found a way to make money off of an open source project. I suppose that deserves kudos. I've known a few businessmen who, while they knew how to make money, were unable to keep the business operating long term because they made strategic errors or alienated people. I suspect Mr. Fleury is going to fall into that category. Maybe he'll learn some lessons for his next business (he's the kind of guy who will assuredly hit the ground running no matter what happens)...
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
It's great. Just sound like Marx, and you get a 5 Insightful.
They should change the banner on this site from the teal to a nice scarlet red. Just like the posters/mods, in large part.
Sorry dude, the lowest common denominator applies to the mods especially. Bunch of losers mostly. At least M2 weeds out the most pathetic ones.
Thanks for sharing.
True. When we accept the lowest common denominator we get it in spades. I wouldn't blame Mr. Frankel, i'd blame the whole generation for it.
The lack of decorum today is pretty appalling. Maybe someday people will wake up and say 'we liked it the old way'. Not likely anytime soon though.
IANAL (of course) but i've both been a plaintiff and defendant in civil suits of various flavors. I've also worked a few years settling BI (bodily injury) claims in the insurance industry, big ticket stuff like truck and bus accidents. Done some grand jury testimony. I've been there.
Every decent lawyer worth his salt retains _tight_ control of what their client says in a public and private forum. One lawyer put it this way to me "Don't get diarrhea of the mouth". He was referring to both the stand/depositions, and to my private communications with any potentially opposing party such as a medical insurer. (civil suit, BI) I have had an assistant DA in Brooklyn throw me under a subpoena completely muting me and preventing me from discussing the case at hand (lasted about 9 months, renewed every 90 days). That was a fraud case with some doctor falsifying medical bills. The same principle applied there.
Now, Boies and team obviously are reasonably competent, though I don't think Boies is particularly prescient regarding what judges and juries will say, evidence getting ripped to shreds on Napster and in the Al Gore fiasco. Still, he knows well enough that having McBride, as an officer of SCO out there arguing his case in this way is dangerous. This should be handled through press people or the lawyers themselves.
So, I must ask the big question. Why are McBride and Sontag out there? What can they be thinking? Their story changes every day, and the statements they make are of public record and _admissible_! Everything they are saying _cannot_ be true. Therefore, they are setting themselves up to be absolutely destroyed in court. Why?
I can think of only two options:
The obvious solution, that they have a winning case, is not likely given the fact that they are compromising themselves irrevocably at this time.
Alternatives solicited, but this is how I see it.
I like the concept, but where in this plan does Darl McBride, Sontag, and Boies get the appropriate ass-ramming sans lubrication they so richly deserve?
This is a big hole in your plan!
It's a fair characterization you made, but how can you not call it racism to berate other ethnic groups through incorrect generalizations?
Seems to be pretty much the definition of bias.
And yes, i'm one of the 8% of US citizens with a passport.
I thought i'd make sure to let you know that you are correct, before the mods get their way with you.
Sorry dude.
I can't believe that you got modded down for that.
You sir, are actually right.
The fact is that I feel far less threatened by China than America. It's sad, but it's the truth.
Good. That fear will keep us safe in the US. I like that. No use being a world power if people think you are some kind of pushover that is easy to attack.
We're playing the game the Russian way finally. About time we wised up.