"I work in a major game retailer in the UK and I have to agree that it is looking pretty grim."
If that's 'Game', they will look pretty grim. Go check out play.com to see how much you're being undercut.
One of the major factors in the UK at the moment is that prices haven't budged before Christmas; there was a time when, like the food retailers, quite a few places would reduce their prices in the run up to increase the short term spending power of the customer...this has all but disappeared in the media and electronics industry (although they're still trying to shift the X-boxes this year.)
BTW, you didn't mention Worms3D, NFS:Underground or Max Payne 2. They aren't selling?
Ah, you mean the person that tacitly lent weight to the last claim of an attack without checking sources, then essentially reprinted a claim of responsibility from someone? An anonymous someone?
Supersmart, that particular move, especially as it supported Darl's claim that SCO was 'relevant' by spewing more crap into the news sites.
Check the facts first, people. SCO are liars and will take any shred of credibility and spin it into something to their credit.
They've even claimed that the Judge giving them 30 days to produce infringing code as a victory.
"Occam's Razor for conspiracy theorists suggests that one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be ascribed to incompetence."
You're mixing, 'Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetance' and 'Do not multiply the entities beyond which is necessary to explain something'.
The latter one is Occam's Razor or the principle of parsimony.
That the gaming industry was suffering from a lack of originality? That idea's brilliant. We can get forty hours of CG in there, prerendered, and some really big names for the voices of the characters.
Let's see this compete with Doom III...that Romero bloke doesn't stand a chance...
"But if you're going to assay the virulence of microorganisms, it stands to reason that you have to have them in micro-gravity for at least one round of cell division"
You're not wrong, but one method is through electronic suspension of liquids...another is using shearing forces on rotating cylinders.
I'd look for references, but I'm on my way home.;)
"'Open source developers often scratch the same itch'"
I prefer to think of this as 'diversity', and some people like to think of it as 'choice'. Both exist in the world at large and are considered a good thing. Nature uses it to refine (before we came along) the whole process of reproduction, and business calls it competition.
If anything, it should be pointed out that Microsoft Word is rapidly approaching a monoculture and that more, not less, word processors should be around.
"OSS, for all its strengths, lacks a commercial leadership."
What?
Is this a bit like pointing out that fish don't have legs?
The thing is that you only have 'commercial leadership' where there's a profit to be had, and this really shouldn't be about profit. profit brings out the very worst in people, as you can see with Darth McBride.
Seriously, if there's anything that OSS _doesn't_ need, it's commercial leadership. Jesus.
Or bifurcation in three dimensions being a darn sight easier than in two dimensions and lacking any downward pressure on the cytoplasm meaning that a simple organism can redirect resources to it's primary function, reproduction...
Empiricism gets really silly when they start going for the showy experiments. For example, is this limited to Salmonella, or do all bacteria show the same increase in virulence?
"Quite honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if it leads to another Great Depression."
I'd be extremely surprised if it did, as so many checks and balances were put in place last time that everyone's _waiting_ for it to happen, but...
The major problem is things like interest rates; they're lowered to stimulate growth, but if people don't spend their money, but are, for example, waiting for impending financial doom that is generally connected with the words 'global recession', then finally your interest rates are in the toilet, and people get used to extremely low rates, relax, start to spend, then panic when the rates go up to curtail spending...
By that point your average Schmo is operating close to margins on all forms of credit (mortgage, hire purchase, credit cards) and a 0.25% increase in the base rate becomes a crippling burden that can only be offset by more borrowing or longer terms. Indentured servitude and debtors prisons are coming close to being revived.
As to whether people should take out credit, where are they warned? Do they educate in schools what 'APR' actually means? Do they look at the bottom line with a clear head, or is our current culture of creating desire for Star Trek Bobblehead dolls really that helpful?
Slightly more offtopic is to consider the relatively irresponsible way that the international banks also encourage spending. Mainly because they know that they'll always be able to squeeze cash out of smaller/developing countries...this is widening the gap between cash rich nations and those that undergo creative leadership and create odious debt. I believe Iraq currently owes roughly $400 billion after being 'liberated'. $100 million by HSBC, which kinda explains why they were bombed in Turkey.
"American society was hugely victorian at the turn of the century"
While Victorian society wasn't as victorian as you might believe, and the parallel starts to completely unravel at that point.
All your other arguments tend to come down on a particular side of hotly debated subjects, and I wouldn't necessarily blame everything on the Conservatives....quite a few of them in the US and UK have contributed to the teen pregnancy rate.
For the humour restricted, the above was a joke with a leedle hint of fact.
There does seem to be a very protective nature towards violence in movies compared with sex, although the BBFC in the past has tried to take these things in context, and it's very difficult to argue as a rules-based issue because of context, but it mostly seems to hinge around the relative ease of explaining violence as something 'other people do' compared with sex as 'Yes, well, erm...mummy and daddy have rolled around in abandon and licked stuff off one another'.
It's largely, in my opinion _only_, connected with that most horrendous of tasks, sex education...something that America has avoided dealing with full stop.
"I seem to recall that one had to had the mark to be able to buy goods."
Buy or sell goods, but John's Apocrypha was a bit loose on specifics and has fuelled a lot of speculation since because it presents an interesting eschatological omega point for those that think the world is ending. Personally I think the human race will continue being assholes to each other for a very long time yet.
I'm with you, though, for extremely sound reasons. Firstly I'm getting out of the credit game as soon as I can. I'm fed up of being charged money for weakening into consumption of crap, or being tied to a financial institution that encourages it.
Can you imagine a situation where changing a credit agency would require surgery?
"However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'."
Nope, they're the roles for straight SM play where there is simply a dominant and submissive role. Master and Slave are still used in deep SM 'arrangements' where implicit consensuality is given, sometimes under marriage, contract or promise. Top and Bottom are sometimes used by the gay community to indicate the 'giver and receiver', further confusing things.
There are occasions when a slave/submissive can 'top from the bottom', which indicates that they're actually in control; although this is usually considered a 'bad thing'.
And yes, I am a practising Master, and consent is my overriding concern at all times.
"As a Londoner, when I went to Glasgow, I couldn't understand a bloody word that anyone was saying, but we were both speaking with "British" accents."
Glaswegian is a dialect, and one of the more insanely divergent ones in the UK, although there are areas of Stoke where Arabic words have become part of the lexicon due to slaves being brought back during the crusades.
The thing is that it may have been an 'impression' of an English accent, which would tend to place it around Sussex...if the inspiration for these accents is purely from passive input, then the woman's age might count for something; Ealing comedies sound a lot different from contemporary English programming and the only human I've ever heard sound like an Ealing comedy was my Great Aunt Dorothy.
Accents vary on a two or three mile radius; I currently live in the nexus point between Black Country, Cannock and Stoke and maintaining a neutral accent is a constant battle.
Americans are funny when they try to do an English accent, though.
"And since SCO has so thoroughly blotted it's copybook with the Linux/Unix community, when SCO loses this fight THEY. ARE. HISTORY. Their revenue stream will vanish like a soap bubble and their stock go into negative values."
Ya think?
The thing is that the brand is going to be worthless, but there's IP in them thar hills...there will be a bit of a scuffle over who gets what.
Imagine the scenario that SCO is handed to IBM as a settlement. It's things like that that keep me warm on these cold nights.
"The thing that kills me is that SCO's stock is still around $14 (up from $1 in March but falling the past week) - which means that most investors believe that SCO will be worth more in the future."
You seem to be missing the volume trading that's going on. It's not investment, it's trading.
The markets have been in a steadily trailing position after the original announcment; go look at the wires on the financial sites and you can see why. SCO execs are dumping stock in pre-planned and triggered trades and they've just printed a bunch to give the lawyers...
"He doesn't talk about specifics. He plays the underdog card VERY heavily."
The trade press may be biased, hypocritical, slanted, bent, misinformed, overly confident in corporate America and generally unknowledgeable, but they aren't stupid. I know I'm splitting hairs here, but even they can count the months since the original claim of 'one million lines of code' and the complete lack of discovery filed so far.
The main problem is that he's getting away with it. Hopefully December 4th should be an interesting time for everyone.
"What I've never understood about the psychology of it is this: do they actually believe themselves? Do they start out knowing they are lying, then convince themselves about it along the way? Or does the notion of truth not even cross their minds, as they are busy trying to define the reality they want?"
There are numerous conditions that can cause this, but one of them is simply being human and convincing yourself that you're right beyond any doubt.
In Darl's case, the amount of money that his company, and therefore he himself, is worth is based on keeping the spin going; keeping the share price high.
He's also the recipient of what you could call 'top notch' law advice from a firm that has a vested interest in the success of the company as well. IOW, you're not looking at individual psychology, but corporate, and corporations judged by individual's psychological standards would be foam-flecked axe wielders with bad hair.
There is, going on the stuff I've seen so far from SCO, a certain desire to bend reality to a paradigm that justifies their claims, but those claims are beginning to lack an internal consistency as time goes by. They're almost becoming about buzzwords rather than actual content, which you can see by the more recent references to BSD. Now *that* is something I'd _love_ them to try in court.
"Our own servers are secure. they run out POS system and security systems."
But not connected to a wider network, the wild, wild internet and quite possibly not running Exchange.
I was being mildly facetious, but smacking a server in the corner of a room and proclaiming that it's secure is a lot different than trying to keep a DMZ machine up and secure, especially if you have 'gifted' users that play with it.
Just wanted to point out that given the scale of things, I'm a 'n00b' compared with someone else, and they'll be a 'n00b' compared with yet another person. One thing that 'should' typify Opensource should be the air of assistance rather than exposing elitism. [shrug]
"The music industry currently finds itself in a world in which there's massive p2p going on."
There's always been massive P2P going on, although your horizon was bounded by the limits of your social network and you were using the bandwidth of blank cassettes. *Now* they have the figures to bleat about to justify any damn thing they want to do.
Similarly government uses peadophiles/Terrorists in the same way as it used drug dealers/communists (and in one example, ethnic groups) to justify draconian measures that people have a 'moral obligation' not to protest about.
The RIAA is a lobby group designed to further one agenda, not some altruistic association.
Personally speaking, the recent actions of the RIAA make me _want_ to see it bleeding.
"Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar."
Erm...they still used the research. In fact Werner Von Braun got a lovely corner office despite work in Peenamunde, while we in the UK got the fruits of the biochemical warfare research.
You seem to be suggesting that government is ethical.
Slashdot Mirror
"I work in a major game retailer in the UK and I have to agree that it is looking pretty grim."
If that's 'Game', they will look pretty grim. Go check out play.com to see how much you're being undercut.
One of the major factors in the UK at the moment is that prices haven't budged before Christmas; there was a time when, like the food retailers, quite a few places would reduce their prices in the run up to increase the short term spending power of the customer...this has all but disappeared in the media and electronics industry (although they're still trying to shift the X-boxes this year.)
BTW, you didn't mention Worms3D, NFS:Underground or Max Payne 2. They aren't selling?
"...by Eric S. Raymond."
Ah, you mean the person that tacitly lent weight to the last claim of an attack without checking sources, then essentially reprinted a claim of responsibility from someone? An anonymous someone?
Supersmart, that particular move, especially as it supported Darl's claim that SCO was 'relevant' by spewing more crap into the news sites.
Check the facts first, people. SCO are liars and will take any shred of credibility and spin it into something to their credit.
They've even claimed that the Judge giving them 30 days to produce infringing code as a victory.
"Occam's Razor for conspiracy theorists suggests that one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be ascribed to incompetence."
You're mixing, 'Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetance' and 'Do not multiply the entities beyond which is necessary to explain something'.
The latter one is Occam's Razor or the principle of parsimony.
That the gaming industry was suffering from a lack of originality? That idea's brilliant. We can get forty hours of CG in there, prerendered, and some really big names for the voices of the characters.
Let's see this compete with Doom III...that Romero bloke doesn't stand a chance...
The above is a joke (in more ways than one)
"But if you're going to assay the virulence of microorganisms, it stands to reason that you have to have them in micro-gravity for at least one round of cell division"
;)
You're not wrong, but one method is through electronic suspension of liquids...another is using shearing forces on rotating cylinders.
I'd look for references, but I'm on my way home.
"'Open source developers often scratch the same itch'"
I prefer to think of this as 'diversity', and some people like to think of it as 'choice'. Both exist in the world at large and are considered a good thing. Nature uses it to refine (before we came along) the whole process of reproduction, and business calls it competition.
If anything, it should be pointed out that Microsoft Word is rapidly approaching a monoculture and that more, not less, word processors should be around.
"OSS, for all its strengths, lacks a commercial leadership."
What?
Is this a bit like pointing out that fish don't have legs?
The thing is that you only have 'commercial leadership' where there's a profit to be had, and this really shouldn't be about profit. profit brings out the very worst in people, as you can see with Darth McBride.
Seriously, if there's anything that OSS _doesn't_ need, it's commercial leadership. Jesus.
"1) Documentation. I get far too many RTFM when the FM was written for software that is 3 versions old."
I have at least four outstanding offers to write documentation for sourceforge projects, and not one person got back to me.
Anecdotal, sure, but I was passing and I recognise this particular problem from my adventures with BSD.
"ok...this is where i trail off..."
Relax, you still got insightful.
"it's relative ease of travel with no gravity"
Or bifurcation in three dimensions being a darn sight easier than in two dimensions and lacking any downward pressure on the cytoplasm meaning that a simple organism can redirect resources to it's primary function, reproduction...
Empiricism gets really silly when they start going for the showy experiments. For example, is this limited to Salmonella, or do all bacteria show the same increase in virulence?
"How do you simulate u-G?"
Drop something. Between the time taken to drop and hit something, you have microgravity.
"How can file sharing in itself be called bad? Isn't the WWW a file sharing network? This is a true triumph of propaganda over common sense."
You wait until they start teaching that sharing is antisocial in schools.
"Quite honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if it leads to another Great Depression."
I'd be extremely surprised if it did, as so many checks and balances were put in place last time that everyone's _waiting_ for it to happen, but...
The major problem is things like interest rates; they're lowered to stimulate growth, but if people don't spend their money, but are, for example, waiting for impending financial doom that is generally connected with the words 'global recession', then finally your interest rates are in the toilet, and people get used to extremely low rates, relax, start to spend, then panic when the rates go up to curtail spending...
By that point your average Schmo is operating close to margins on all forms of credit (mortgage, hire purchase, credit cards) and a 0.25% increase in the base rate becomes a crippling burden that can only be offset by more borrowing or longer terms. Indentured servitude and debtors prisons are coming close to being revived.
As to whether people should take out credit, where are they warned? Do they educate in schools what 'APR' actually means? Do they look at the bottom line with a clear head, or is our current culture of creating desire for Star Trek Bobblehead dolls really that helpful?
Slightly more offtopic is to consider the relatively irresponsible way that the international banks also encourage spending. Mainly because they know that they'll always be able to squeeze cash out of smaller/developing countries...this is widening the gap between cash rich nations and those that undergo creative leadership and create odious debt. I believe Iraq currently owes roughly $400 billion after being 'liberated'. $100 million by HSBC, which kinda explains why they were bombed in Turkey.
"American society was hugely victorian at the turn of the century"
While Victorian society wasn't as victorian as you might believe, and the parallel starts to completely unravel at that point.
All your other arguments tend to come down on a particular side of hotly debated subjects, and I wouldn't necessarily blame everything on the Conservatives....quite a few of them in the US and UK have contributed to the teen pregnancy rate.
For the humour restricted, the above was a joke with a leedle hint of fact.
There does seem to be a very protective nature towards violence in movies compared with sex, although the BBFC in the past has tried to take these things in context, and it's very difficult to argue as a rules-based issue because of context, but it mostly seems to hinge around the relative ease of explaining violence as something 'other people do' compared with sex as 'Yes, well, erm...mummy and daddy have rolled around in abandon and licked stuff off one another'.
It's largely, in my opinion _only_, connected with that most horrendous of tasks, sex education...something that America has avoided dealing with full stop.
"I seem to recall that one had to had the mark to be able to buy goods."
Buy or sell goods, but John's Apocrypha was a bit loose on specifics and has fuelled a lot of speculation since because it presents an interesting eschatological omega point for those that think the world is ending. Personally I think the human race will continue being assholes to each other for a very long time yet.
I'm with you, though, for extremely sound reasons. Firstly I'm getting out of the credit game as soon as I can. I'm fed up of being charged money for weakening into consumption of crap, or being tied to a financial institution that encourages it.
Can you imagine a situation where changing a credit agency would require surgery?
"However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'."
Nope, they're the roles for straight SM play where there is simply a dominant and submissive role. Master and Slave are still used in deep SM 'arrangements' where implicit consensuality is given, sometimes under marriage, contract or promise. Top and Bottom are sometimes used by the gay community to indicate the 'giver and receiver', further confusing things.
There are occasions when a slave/submissive can 'top from the bottom', which indicates that they're actually in control; although this is usually considered a 'bad thing'.
And yes, I am a practising Master, and consent is my overriding concern at all times.
"As a Londoner, when I went to Glasgow, I couldn't understand a bloody word that anyone was saying, but we were both speaking with "British" accents."
Glaswegian is a dialect, and one of the more insanely divergent ones in the UK, although there are areas of Stoke where Arabic words have become part of the lexicon due to slaves being brought back during the crusades.
The thing is that it may have been an 'impression' of an English accent, which would tend to place it around Sussex...if the inspiration for these accents is purely from passive input, then the woman's age might count for something; Ealing comedies sound a lot different from contemporary English programming and the only human I've ever heard sound like an Ealing comedy was my Great Aunt Dorothy.
Accents vary on a two or three mile radius; I currently live in the nexus point between Black Country, Cannock and Stoke and maintaining a neutral accent is a constant battle.
Americans are funny when they try to do an English accent, though.
"she was English as well"
She thought she was a singer, writer, artist, dancer and actor first, so that's not our fault.
"And since SCO has so thoroughly blotted it's copybook with the Linux/Unix community, when SCO loses this fight THEY. ARE. HISTORY. Their revenue stream will vanish like a soap bubble and their stock go into negative values."
Ya think?
The thing is that the brand is going to be worthless, but there's IP in them thar hills...there will be a bit of a scuffle over who gets what.
Imagine the scenario that SCO is handed to IBM as a settlement. It's things like that that keep me warm on these cold nights.
"The thing that kills me is that SCO's stock is still around $14 (up from $1 in March but falling the past week) - which means that most investors believe that SCO will be worth more in the future."
You seem to be missing the volume trading that's going on. It's not investment, it's trading.
The markets have been in a steadily trailing position after the original announcment; go look at the wires on the financial sites and you can see why. SCO execs are dumping stock in pre-planned and triggered trades and they've just printed a bunch to give the lawyers...
"He doesn't talk about specifics. He plays the underdog card VERY heavily."
The trade press may be biased, hypocritical, slanted, bent, misinformed, overly confident in corporate America and generally unknowledgeable, but they aren't stupid. I know I'm splitting hairs here, but even they can count the months since the original claim of 'one million lines of code' and the complete lack of discovery filed so far.
The main problem is that he's getting away with it. Hopefully December 4th should be an interesting time for everyone.
"What I've never understood about the psychology of it is this: do they actually believe themselves? Do they start out knowing they are lying, then convince themselves about it along the way? Or does the notion of truth not even cross their minds, as they are busy trying to define the reality they want?"
There are numerous conditions that can cause this, but one of them is simply being human and convincing yourself that you're right beyond any doubt.
In Darl's case, the amount of money that his company, and therefore he himself, is worth is based on keeping the spin going; keeping the share price high.
He's also the recipient of what you could call 'top notch' law advice from a firm that has a vested interest in the success of the company as well. IOW, you're not looking at individual psychology, but corporate, and corporations judged by individual's psychological standards would be foam-flecked axe wielders with bad hair.
There is, going on the stuff I've seen so far from SCO, a certain desire to bend reality to a paradigm that justifies their claims, but those claims are beginning to lack an internal consistency as time goes by. They're almost becoming about buzzwords rather than actual content, which you can see by the more recent references to BSD. Now *that* is something I'd _love_ them to try in court.
"Our own servers are secure. they run out POS system and security systems."
But not connected to a wider network, the wild, wild internet and quite possibly not running Exchange.
I was being mildly facetious, but smacking a server in the corner of a room and proclaiming that it's secure is a lot different than trying to keep a DMZ machine up and secure, especially if you have 'gifted' users that play with it.
Just wanted to point out that given the scale of things, I'm a 'n00b' compared with someone else, and they'll be a 'n00b' compared with yet another person. One thing that 'should' typify Opensource should be the air of assistance rather than exposing elitism. [shrug]
You are right, though. Largely a non-story.
"I work in a small computer repair shop."
"It's just some n00b rippin on someone that doesn't know how to administer his own server."
Get much call for administering a server in a small computer shop?
"The music industry currently finds itself in a world in which there's massive p2p going on."
There's always been massive P2P going on, although your horizon was bounded by the limits of your social network and you were using the bandwidth of blank cassettes. *Now* they have the figures to bleat about to justify any damn thing they want to do.
Similarly government uses peadophiles/Terrorists in the same way as it used drug dealers/communists (and in one example, ethnic groups) to justify draconian measures that people have a 'moral obligation' not to protest about.
The RIAA is a lobby group designed to further one agenda, not some altruistic association.
Personally speaking, the recent actions of the RIAA make me _want_ to see it bleeding.
"Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar."
Erm...they still used the research. In fact Werner Von Braun got a lovely corner office despite work in Peenamunde, while we in the UK got the fruits of the biochemical warfare research.
You seem to be suggesting that government is ethical.