It's like the business world's version of "suicide by cop"...
Re:Cancel this project now
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Given the money already spent, is is at all plausible to shelve the program, write off the development costs, and come back in ten years hoping to make an economical plane using what was learned? Maybe the Raptor will cost a quarter billion, but surely the engineers have learned a hell of a lot and solved a lot problems no one foresaw.
In other words, don't buy Raptors: buy the engineers, and let them try again, the wiser for the experience.
Re:This has been coming for a while
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 1
And you smell bad, too.
I'm reminded of the story from World War II, about how the first generation of torpedoes the Americans built had a firing pin sticking out the front; when the pin struck something, it set off the torpedo's warhead.
The problem was that the pins weren't strong enough. When the torpedo struck a ship at 40 knots, the pin broke off, and the torpedo didn't explode. One missed kill, and you've given your position away.
It's their apparent inaction that makes me think they're really serious about kicking SCO's ass.
Think about it. SCO, who's full of shit, is whining loudly and spreading as much FUD as it can, trying to scare Linux users and IBM's customers. IBM is sitting back, smug, waiting for its day in court, and quietly reassuring its customers. They're walking softly, which makes me think they're the ones with the big stick.
Now if IBM lowered itself to SCO's level, trying to win in the court of public opinion, then I'd be worried.
The problem with workers telecommuting is that they need to be managed individually; the lure of Indian outsourcing is that someone else is managing them. In short, if the relationship with the Indian shop is set up correctly (specs go one way, code goes the other), the management overhead goes down as well as the cost. The interface is (theoretically) cleaner. I've never heard of an Indian outsourcing arrangement where the coders were in India and their immediate supervisor was in the U.S.
The comparison with telecommuting is shallow, and not very good.
My recommendation is to look at the threat from a business perspective, because whether or not it's a real threat, it's going to cost you to deal with it. The one box in our DMZ is a linux box, so it's hanging right out there. SCO goes to our web page and checks what the server is, they'll connect a company to an installation of Linux and maybe say "Hmm... here's our first target."
That doesn't mean you roll over. It means you compare costs. If there's pro bono legal help from the EFF, I'd count that in the costs, as well as legal defense fund money.
Here's the thing: it works both ways. For SCO to sue us costs thousands of dollars in court fees alone; to actually get us into a courtroom costs tens of thousands. So they're not going to sue us to cough up a $1,000 licence fee. Most likely, we'd stall, waiting for SCO's money or will to run out. In civil cases, you can stall for years, and if you're playing defensively, your legal bills go up more slowly than theirs.
I'll make a prediction right now: SCO will not actually sue anyone, even on the principle of making an example. They can't afford to lose that battle, and the return on the lawsuit would never cover the costs. So they'll keep dishing the FUD, hoping to skim small licence fees off the weak-willed.
Yeah, you are foolish. Using Linux, not so much; emailing SCO and daring them, very much. You'll pay tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer and court fees (getting the other side to pay lawyers fees is a joke, essentially impossible without prior written agreement that the loser pays); meanwhile, your business will suffer for lack of attention and the possibility of losing, all for your self-righteousness.
Yeah, you are foolish. Your dialogue is more accurately rendered as:
you: scox has absolutely no legal basis to assert their claim.
the judge: Mr. Byrd, the next time you open your mouth I'll hit you with contempt of court. We haven't even started with pre-trial motions yet. We've got months before we get to the point where you can have your say.
Remember, it costs tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees just to get to court. By the time you made your grandiose statement (which SCO would dispute with a truckload of paper that's all bullshit but that a lawyer still has to go through at $250/hour), you'd already be $50,000 in the hole.
Take it from someone who's been through a couple lawsuits for his employer: if at all possible, don't go there.
Re:In somewhat related news
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
I think it's a little better than that: it's quiet. I hate loud desktops. I don't turn on my computer to see the visual equivalent of a rock concert.
Because copyright infringement is a civil issue, not a criminal issue, and the proper avenue for redressing civil claims is to sue for damages--which is exactly what SCO is doing to IBM, and threatening to do to any Fortune 1500 company running Linux.
I've used it as my default browser since 1.0. Faster rendering and tabbed browsing were really the issues for me. I had a brief flirtation with Phoenix for 0.3 and 0.4, but switched back to Mozilla for greater stability. This is on Win32, so the only other option for me Opera, and I didn't want to pay money for a good browser.
...will understand that quick-and-dirty is sometimes necessary or useful in business, but that correct-and-proper should be the norm; if the latter isn't the norm, then there's something fundamentally wrong in the business.
Keep in mind, though, that there's a vast spectrum between the two, and that correct-and-proper is only one end of it. Cost-benefit should rule the choice, not ideology. The norm should really be something like "sufficiently correct and proper for now and the reasonable future."
The article says differently. It says that playing the cards is a better strategy, and the fact that the last world champion was a 100% cyber-player tends to support that.
For a clerk in a cube, that's still more machine than they need. Hardware has far outstripped common business needs, and I'm expecting that in two years, the machines I'm purchasing for the office will be better than that for less than $300.
The story on Cnet is a puff piece that's advertising for Reasoning. "We do code analysis, and we found that OSS is as good as proprietary software. Want to know how your code stacks up?" By repeating it here, Reasoning gets more exposure for stating something everyone here knows anyway.
...is that the concept assumes that office dweller knows what she wants.
I'm not being facetious. I work in an office, and I can't think of anyone who's particularly well-organized. The people who do their jobs well have good job habits, not a rigid system that an adaptable computer system can learn to predict.
The basic problem with anticipatory decisions by computers is that, if it offers something the user wants, it's accepted; if it offers something the user doesn't want, it's not just rejected, it's an irritant, an interruption. The cost of being wrong far outweighs the benefit of being right. Like branch prediction in the CPU, it has to be right far more often than it's wrong to be of practical value, and human behaviour is far harder to analyse and predict than computations.
Since code should be free, copying code should also be free, by RMS' philosophy. However, since it's moral to follow the law (while working legally to change things), and immoral to break it, one should not copy Unix code.
In other words, the sin is in breaking the law, not copying the code in the general case.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft can't simply drop the price of a Windows licence for a single bottom end manufacturer without pissing off Dell, HPaq, Gateway et al, and causing them to bundle Linux to compete. They also can't cripple Windows enough to bring it down to $20/licence without losing out on the feature list against a Lindows box. In short, they can't do it without giving up the mother ship.
Re:Creation of a blue collar computing segment
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 1
"street smart" computer users who with a little more formal training could be sysadmins and jump into the IT sector with the corresponding higher wages.
Except that if the blue collar moves into the IT positions, there will be corresponding drop in wages because businesses will get skilled workers cheaper. I don't see this as a path up the ladder for those "street smart" users, and that's the social angle I dislike: education with computers, practical or formal, should be reflected by higher wages.
Creation of a blue collar computing segment
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have a suspician based on the successful sale of these low-cost, Linux based PCs. The PC market has been stable for a few years now, since the failure to drop prices below $500-700 means that a large segment of the population effectively can't own new home PCs. With $200 PCs available that are relatively useful, the market is expanding downwards to include a new class of computer users: the working poor.
What this means, I think, is that we're starting a new generation on cheap PCs that will be more maintenance heavy than Dells and Apples. This will have the same effect that cars have had over the last forty years: since new cars are so expensive, and the only option for the poor to own one is to get a used one or an extremely cheap one. There's a pool of talent/skill that gets built in the lower classes around practical maintenance.
In other words, the same way that my brother's Lexus is worked on by someone with a high school education who tinkered a lot with cars, the sysadmins of tomorrow will generally come from blue collar backgrounds, while the white collar users will move further out of the ability to generally maintain computers. In a business, the IT department will become less educated overall, while having a much stronger base of practical skills.
I'm already seeing this at my workplace, a manufacturer of household commodities. Lots of the factory workers ask if they can buy/have old PCs that we're getting rid of; several have built their own from old pieces they scrounged. We have a developing pool of computer knowledge that comes from nothing but the tinkering of people who can't afford to do otherwise.
While I dislike the possibility of computer expertise segmenting along economic lines (for social reasons), I do see some benefits: clearer cut job descriptions and areas of expertise, and increased adoption of open source software simply because of the price. To get to that $200 price point, you need Linux (or BSD...)
Re:Why I'm Not Really Worried...
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sure IBM does screw up, and on a scale that only an IBM can screw up on. But against that, you've got a huge, well-funded legal department full of experienced IP lawyers who are familiar with just how dirty the fight can get. I don't think anyone's wearing a white hat; it's just that IBM's self-interest coincides with the Right Thing (tm) here.
What surprises me is that SCO has escalated the stakes to the point where IBM can't settle, because if they do, that's a massive public admission of error. When Microsoft settles, they write a cheque that's chump change to them and say "go away, kid, yer botherin' me." And you rarely hear about it. But the SCO v. the world of Unix battle is so big, at SCO's insistence, that IBM virtually has to win, if only to retain market respectability for their products. It's become a massive game of chicken, and IBM can take a lot more damage from not flinching than SCO can.
Remember how IBM handled their antitrust case: 17 years of low intensity warfare that ended with people saying "there was an antitrust case against IBM?" They simply fought a staying action, making the occasional concession, until it all went away. And SCO doesn't have the staying power of the U.S. government.
Why I'm Not Really Worried...
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From Cringely's article:
IBM has the largest legal department of any company in the world. They are INCREDIBLY sensitive about IP ownership, which produces for them more than $1.5 billion per year in license fees. They have embraced the GPL very carefully for their Linux work. The very fact that this code was released under the GPL indicates it was vetted and found acceptable by the IBM legal department. It's not like sometimes they don't bother to go through this procedure.
Sometimes, stickup artists like SCO pick the wrong victim...
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
God, I hate to think of all the high school kids who'll read that and decide to skip their CS degree because they figure the CGI scripts they write for their website are good enough to land them a job. I've interviewed a million of these kids, and they all suck. They read an article on B-trees so they could use the term in an interview, and can't implement one to save their lives.
There are people out there who don't need school, yes; they can read an O'Reilly book and come out knowing more than someone who took the course at university. Those people are few and far between. And in principle, anyone can be that way. In fact, almost nobody is. And without the breadth of topics you're exposed to in a CS degree, you're severely limited in the working world.
That doesn't mean that a BSCS is a guarantee of skill and knowledge. Just like there are people who learn more out of class than in, there are people who manage to get straight As and still come out with the brains of a stick. Boo fucking hoo, the system isn't perfect, and some people can ace tests and still get fired for incompetence.
A CS degree is still your best bet for a good general education in computing. The basic problem with self-taught people is that they're ignorant of what they haven't yet run into or needed to learn (which is why, after five years as a programmer, I'm taking evening classes towards an MSCS, and three semesters with good professors have shown me how little I knew). Everyone, and I mean everyone, overestimates their own skills. Between two people who say they know what an algorithm is, I trust the person who got an 'A' in "Data Structures and Algorithms" more than the person who knows how to read The Jargon File. I could be wrong, but I think the odds are in my favor.
MS may just be covering their butt after reading a nastygram from SCO lawyers.
I doubt that Microsoft would flinch at a nasty letter and pony up millions without first checking the legal background. I'm virtually certain that MS always knew that SCO's claims were bogus, and paid anyway, which makes it a strategic move to prop up a punching bag while SCO survives.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the business world's version of "suicide by cop"...
Given the money already spent, is is at all plausible to shelve the program, write off the development costs, and come back in ten years hoping to make an economical plane using what was learned? Maybe the Raptor will cost a quarter billion, but surely the engineers have learned a hell of a lot and solved a lot problems no one foresaw.
In other words, don't buy Raptors: buy the engineers, and let them try again, the wiser for the experience.
And you smell bad, too.
I'm reminded of the story from World War II, about how the first generation of torpedoes the Americans built had a firing pin sticking out the front; when the pin struck something, it set off the torpedo's warhead.
The problem was that the pins weren't strong enough. When the torpedo struck a ship at 40 knots, the pin broke off, and the torpedo didn't explode. One missed kill, and you've given your position away.
It's their apparent inaction that makes me think they're really serious about kicking SCO's ass.
Think about it. SCO, who's full of shit, is whining loudly and spreading as much FUD as it can, trying to scare Linux users and IBM's customers. IBM is sitting back, smug, waiting for its day in court, and quietly reassuring its customers. They're walking softly, which makes me think they're the ones with the big stick.
Now if IBM lowered itself to SCO's level, trying to win in the court of public opinion, then I'd be worried.
The problem with workers telecommuting is that they need to be managed individually; the lure of Indian outsourcing is that someone else is managing them. In short, if the relationship with the Indian shop is set up correctly (specs go one way, code goes the other), the management overhead goes down as well as the cost. The interface is (theoretically) cleaner. I've never heard of an Indian outsourcing arrangement where the coders were in India and their immediate supervisor was in the U.S.
The comparison with telecommuting is shallow, and not very good.
My recommendation is to look at the threat from a business perspective, because whether or not it's a real threat, it's going to cost you to deal with it. The one box in our DMZ is a linux box, so it's hanging right out there. SCO goes to our web page and checks what the server is, they'll connect a company to an installation of Linux and maybe say "Hmm... here's our first target."
That doesn't mean you roll over. It means you compare costs. If there's pro bono legal help from the EFF, I'd count that in the costs, as well as legal defense fund money.
Here's the thing: it works both ways. For SCO to sue us costs thousands of dollars in court fees alone; to actually get us into a courtroom costs tens of thousands. So they're not going to sue us to cough up a $1,000 licence fee. Most likely, we'd stall, waiting for SCO's money or will to run out. In civil cases, you can stall for years, and if you're playing defensively, your legal bills go up more slowly than theirs.
I'll make a prediction right now: SCO will not actually sue anyone, even on the principle of making an example. They can't afford to lose that battle, and the return on the lawsuit would never cover the costs. So they'll keep dishing the FUD, hoping to skim small licence fees off the weak-willed.
Yeah, you are foolish. Using Linux, not so much; emailing SCO and daring them, very much. You'll pay tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer and court fees (getting the other side to pay lawyers fees is a joke, essentially impossible without prior written agreement that the loser pays); meanwhile, your business will suffer for lack of attention and the possibility of losing, all for your self-righteousness.
Yeah, you are foolish. Your dialogue is more accurately rendered as:
you: scox has absolutely no legal basis to assert their claim.
the judge: Mr. Byrd, the next time you open your mouth I'll hit you with contempt of court. We haven't even started with pre-trial motions yet. We've got months before we get to the point where you can have your say.
Remember, it costs tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees just to get to court. By the time you made your grandiose statement (which SCO would dispute with a truckload of paper that's all bullshit but that a lawyer still has to go through at $250/hour), you'd already be $50,000 in the hole.
Take it from someone who's been through a couple lawsuits for his employer: if at all possible, don't go there.
I think it's a little better than that: it's quiet. I hate loud desktops. I don't turn on my computer to see the visual equivalent of a rock concert.
Because copyright infringement is a civil issue, not a criminal issue, and the proper avenue for redressing civil claims is to sue for damages--which is exactly what SCO is doing to IBM, and threatening to do to any Fortune 1500 company running Linux.
I've used it as my default browser since 1.0. Faster rendering and tabbed browsing were really the issues for me. I had a brief flirtation with Phoenix for 0.3 and 0.4, but switched back to Mozilla for greater stability. This is on Win32, so the only other option for me Opera, and I didn't want to pay money for a good browser.
...will understand that quick-and-dirty is sometimes necessary or useful in business, but that correct-and-proper should be the norm; if the latter isn't the norm, then there's something fundamentally wrong in the business.
Keep in mind, though, that there's a vast spectrum between the two, and that correct-and-proper is only one end of it. Cost-benefit should rule the choice, not ideology. The norm should really be something like "sufficiently correct and proper for now and the reasonable future."
The article says differently. It says that playing the cards is a better strategy, and the fact that the last world champion was a 100% cyber-player tends to support that.
For a clerk in a cube, that's still more machine than they need. Hardware has far outstripped common business needs, and I'm expecting that in two years, the machines I'm purchasing for the office will be better than that for less than $300.
The story on Cnet is a puff piece that's advertising for Reasoning. "We do code analysis, and we found that OSS is as good as proprietary software. Want to know how your code stacks up?" By repeating it here, Reasoning gets more exposure for stating something everyone here knows anyway.
/.
Way to shill for free,
...is that the concept assumes that office dweller knows what she wants.
I'm not being facetious. I work in an office, and I can't think of anyone who's particularly well-organized. The people who do their jobs well have good job habits, not a rigid system that an adaptable computer system can learn to predict.
The basic problem with anticipatory decisions by computers is that, if it offers something the user wants, it's accepted; if it offers something the user doesn't want, it's not just rejected, it's an irritant, an interruption. The cost of being wrong far outweighs the benefit of being right. Like branch prediction in the CPU, it has to be right far more often than it's wrong to be of practical value, and human behaviour is far harder to analyse and predict than computations.
Since code should be free, copying code should also be free, by RMS' philosophy. However, since it's moral to follow the law (while working legally to change things), and immoral to break it, one should not copy Unix code.
In other words, the sin is in breaking the law, not copying the code in the general case.
Microsoft can't simply drop the price of a Windows licence for a single bottom end manufacturer without pissing off Dell, HPaq, Gateway et al, and causing them to bundle Linux to compete. They also can't cripple Windows enough to bring it down to $20/licence without losing out on the feature list against a Lindows box. In short, they can't do it without giving up the mother ship.
"street smart" computer users who with a little more formal training could be sysadmins and jump into the IT sector with the corresponding higher wages.
Except that if the blue collar moves into the IT positions, there will be corresponding drop in wages because businesses will get skilled workers cheaper. I don't see this as a path up the ladder for those "street smart" users, and that's the social angle I dislike: education with computers, practical or formal, should be reflected by higher wages.
I have a suspician based on the successful sale of these low-cost, Linux based PCs. The PC market has been stable for a few years now, since the failure to drop prices below $500-700 means that a large segment of the population effectively can't own new home PCs. With $200 PCs available that are relatively useful, the market is expanding downwards to include a new class of computer users: the working poor.
What this means, I think, is that we're starting a new generation on cheap PCs that will be more maintenance heavy than Dells and Apples. This will have the same effect that cars have had over the last forty years: since new cars are so expensive, and the only option for the poor to own one is to get a used one or an extremely cheap one. There's a pool of talent/skill that gets built in the lower classes around practical maintenance.
In other words, the same way that my brother's Lexus is worked on by someone with a high school education who tinkered a lot with cars, the sysadmins of tomorrow will generally come from blue collar backgrounds, while the white collar users will move further out of the ability to generally maintain computers. In a business, the IT department will become less educated overall, while having a much stronger base of practical skills.
I'm already seeing this at my workplace, a manufacturer of household commodities. Lots of the factory workers ask if they can buy/have old PCs that we're getting rid of; several have built their own from old pieces they scrounged. We have a developing pool of computer knowledge that comes from nothing but the tinkering of people who can't afford to do otherwise.
While I dislike the possibility of computer expertise segmenting along economic lines (for social reasons), I do see some benefits: clearer cut job descriptions and areas of expertise, and increased adoption of open source software simply because of the price. To get to that $200 price point, you need Linux (or BSD...)
I'm sure IBM does screw up, and on a scale that only an IBM can screw up on. But against that, you've got a huge, well-funded legal department full of experienced IP lawyers who are familiar with just how dirty the fight can get. I don't think anyone's wearing a white hat; it's just that IBM's self-interest coincides with the Right Thing (tm) here.
What surprises me is that SCO has escalated the stakes to the point where IBM can't settle, because if they do, that's a massive public admission of error. When Microsoft settles, they write a cheque that's chump change to them and say "go away, kid, yer botherin' me." And you rarely hear about it. But the SCO v. the world of Unix battle is so big, at SCO's insistence, that IBM virtually has to win, if only to retain market respectability for their products. It's become a massive game of chicken, and IBM can take a lot more damage from not flinching than SCO can.
Remember how IBM handled their antitrust case: 17 years of low intensity warfare that ended with people saying "there was an antitrust case against IBM?" They simply fought a staying action, making the occasional concession, until it all went away. And SCO doesn't have the staying power of the U.S. government.
From Cringely's article:
IBM has the largest legal department of any company in the world. They are INCREDIBLY sensitive about IP ownership, which produces for them more than $1.5 billion per year in license fees. They have embraced the GPL very carefully for their Linux work. The very fact that this code was released under the GPL indicates it was vetted and found acceptable by the IBM legal department. It's not like sometimes they don't bother to go through this procedure.
Sometimes, stickup artists like SCO pick the wrong victim...
You can't hurt SCO by taking business away from: they don't make any money selling Unixware. Their business plan is to sue and settle.
Thanks for the FUD.
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
God, I hate to think of all the high school kids who'll read that and decide to skip their CS degree because they figure the CGI scripts they write for their website are good enough to land them a job. I've interviewed a million of these kids, and they all suck. They read an article on B-trees so they could use the term in an interview, and can't implement one to save their lives.
There are people out there who don't need school, yes; they can read an O'Reilly book and come out knowing more than someone who took the course at university. Those people are few and far between. And in principle, anyone can be that way. In fact, almost nobody is. And without the breadth of topics you're exposed to in a CS degree, you're severely limited in the working world.
That doesn't mean that a BSCS is a guarantee of skill and knowledge. Just like there are people who learn more out of class than in, there are people who manage to get straight As and still come out with the brains of a stick. Boo fucking hoo, the system isn't perfect, and some people can ace tests and still get fired for incompetence.
A CS degree is still your best bet for a good general education in computing. The basic problem with self-taught people is that they're ignorant of what they haven't yet run into or needed to learn (which is why, after five years as a programmer, I'm taking evening classes towards an MSCS, and three semesters with good professors have shown me how little I knew). Everyone, and I mean everyone, overestimates their own skills. Between two people who say they know what an algorithm is, I trust the person who got an 'A' in "Data Structures and Algorithms" more than the person who knows how to read The Jargon File. I could be wrong, but I think the odds are in my favor.
MS may just be covering their butt after reading a nastygram from SCO lawyers.
I doubt that Microsoft would flinch at a nasty letter and pony up millions without first checking the legal background. I'm virtually certain that MS always knew that SCO's claims were bogus, and paid anyway, which makes it a strategic move to prop up a punching bag while SCO survives.
Which won't be long.