Developing a product in a team environment requires that all the team members be committed listeners as well as providers of opinions. Team members must also be able to compromise when their disagreements threaten the well-being of the project. In no case can a team member be allowed to hold up the project because he has an ideological obsession (unless this team member is the project designer, and even there he has to be diplomatic about it and show some willingness to compromise or else risk losing his team).
Commercial programmers coming into the Open Source world have two basic problems: 1) lack of face-to-face communications. EMAIL is quite limited compared to face-to-face and it is easy to give the wrong impression -- or get the wrong impression -- when all you have is flat text to go by. And 2) Lack of knowledge of the basic "culture". Part of which is "what have you done?" rather than "what is your position?", something especially confusing to commercial software project leaders and managers who are accustomed to coming in an "managing" a project. If you try to "manage" an open source project, the programmers will simply add you to their killfile and you can rant and rave as you like with no effect -- something extremely disconcerting to these types.
'Nuff. Time to get back to work (took this break 'cause I was getting frustrated with the program I'm working on, which will write, read, but won't do both during the same invocation...AGH!).
The point is when the commercial developer hires someone with no experience in the free software community, and said commercial developer's new hire ends up trashing the list with "bug reports" that in fact reflect his own personal opinions of how "things should be" rather than real bugs. This can be extremely disruptive of the development process.
This happens within commercial companies too, BTW. What we do, when that happens, is move that person off that part of the project onto something else where he can't hurt the development process. I know that I find it irritating when some dude we hired off the street, who doesn't have any experience in our industry, starts telling the two seniormost programmers in the company "how it should be" without listening to a bit of our input as to what functionality the GUI needs. Unfortunately, the KDE team can't move this Corel guy to another part of the project, all they can basically do is "fire" him by putting him in their kill filters.
I don't know what the solution is, other than have people with experience in the free software community be the ones who the commercial companies hire to do the work. I don't think anybody has had any objections to the way further MTX development has taken place, for example, even though EST paid me to do the work of bringing MTX up to date to work with the latest/greatest tape libraries. On the other hand, people with experience in the Linux industry or with Open Source are rarely in the job market -- I know, we've been trying to find some of them to hire, and finding people who have the skills we need, in this industry, has been difficult.
Microsoft was the first commercial Unix licensee. They bought a license to Unix System III.
Now, you must remember that at this time Microsoft was a considerably smaller company. In fact, they only had a few dozen employees, hardly enough to handle their other product lines. So they contracted with a consulting outfit called The Santa Cruz Operation to port Unix System III to the various 16-bit microcomputers that were being introduced. The result was called "Xenix". Radio Shack had a version for their 68000-based business system, I believe Altos had a version for their 8086-based business system, but I don't recall Xenix being sold for standard "PC Clones" by Microsoft at that time -- it was, at the time, a strictly OEM deal, where an OEM wanting Unix had to go to Microsoft, pay money up front for the port, then Microsoft would pass along most of the money to SCO for SCO to do the actual work.
Eventually, Microsoft decided Xenix wasn't going to be particularly profitable, especially with IBM shoving tons of money at them to make OS/2 be foremost on their plate. They handed off Xenix to SCO in exchange for some cash, future royalties on future sales of Xenix that included Microsoft-paid-for work, and a large share of SCO stock (just hedging the bets in case Xenix DID take off).
So anyhow: yes, Xenix originally WAS a Microsoft product. But no, Microsoft didn't write Xenix (or at least not the majority of Xenix), though most of the early Xenix work was a "work for hire" done by SCO for Microsoft (and thus like all such "work for hire" was property of Microsoft). A fact which led to a lot of acrimony and lawsuits in later years.
Basically, SCO over the past ten years has destroyed any credibility they ever had with "suits". By offering outdated, buggy products, in a multitude of confusing configurations, for a price that was often twice as much as an equivalent Windows NT server, they basically have destroyed any real credibility they ever had with "suits".
They still have some credibility with solutions vendors -- folks who, e.g., make custom medical records systems and other such things -- but even ISV's are inching away from SCO and towards Linux. Most of the "name" Linux wins lately have been the result of this migration.
But Fortune 500? I know of no Fortune 500 company that would consider buying SCO Unix or dealing with SCO. If they have Unix, they have "real" Unix (Solaris or AIX). Or Linux, in certain special-purpose instances. SCO Unix rates behind even IRIX and HP/UX on my list of "sales into Fortune 500", though the solutions vendors still sell lots of it indirectly.
Don't forget the rest of the things that make SCO perfect for the Linux world:
* Rude technical support people who don't provide much help! (Modelled after Linux distribution ).
* EXPENSIVE rude technical support people who don't provide much help! (Puts them on par with everybody else offering Linux support contracts:-).
* Prices that constantly inch upwards.
* Enough Unix OS's in their coffers to confuse any marketroid, much less SCO's clueless ones!
* Obsolete versions of everything, or incompatible versions of everything! (I am going to have to port 'mtx' to SCO Unix, I shudder at the very thought).
Yes, folks, SCO. I'd say "Just say no", but then, who cares enough to listen?
Perhaps the most important question was when the witness was asked whether the MPAA lawyer was his lawyer. The answer was "I am a hired expert witness", then Mr. Gold put a quick stop to that line of questioning. Attorney-client privilige only applies to discussions between an attorney and his client, which the witness was not. No wonder Garbus was livid in his appeals to the court to get the MPAA to quit abusing the attorney-client and work-product priviliges!
This was clarified elsewhere in the deposition, where it was clarified that by "Linux" they were referring to Linux developers or Linux-related companies.
RSA public key encryption has to be the #1 most influential algorithm in the Internet age. Yeah, the DoD junkies care more about computing missile trajectories (one of their algorithms on their "top 10" list, regarding celestial bodies, is applicable towards that), but without RSA public key encryption, e-commerce would not exist. At the time that e-commerce was first envisioned, RSA public key encryption was the *ONLY* real public key encryption algorithm (elliptic curve encryption has now entered the picture), and it is at the heart of the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption used to secure e-commerce.
And finally, DES *has* to at least be an "honorable mention". DES, despite being dated on the day it was created with its 56-bit keys, was the first publically-implemented Feistel-class symmetric cipher, and brought S-boxes and other encryption techniques now commonplace out of the world of spooks and into common parlance. All ciphers since DES have been either inspired by DES or have been a reaction to what people view as flaws in DES. If that isn't "influential", I don't know what is!
One thing to remember is that trademarks can be declared invalid if they are not defended. Thus Fuji *MUST* pursue violations of their trademarks, or lose them. Almost all of these sites were infringing upon Fuji's trademarked logos etc., and should have received a cease and desist on that simply because Fuji had to.
This does not, however, explain why Fuju would want to be such jerks about copyrights, especially since many of the clips involved were well within the domain of the "fair use" clause (i.e., they did not duplicate the entirity or majority of the copyrighted material, they were presented for review and critical purposes, etc.). Remember, copyrights and patents don't need to be defended in order to remain valid -- though, in the case of patents, you must pursue the violation within x years (I forget the x) or you lose the right to pursue THAT PARTICULAR INFRINGEMENT (but not all other infringements).
After all, it's not like Napster, where entire copyrighted songs have been placed online. I guess folks like Fuji have these law critters on staff that gotta justify their hefty retainers, and a minor trademark issue wasn't enough for them to justify the hefty sum they charged Fuji (shrug).
As a former school teacher, I can tell you first-hand that the doctrine of "in loco parentis" is no longer the default law of the land when it comes to schools. "in loco parentis" would give schools 100% control of speech, dress, and behavior that they do not like. However, the courts have ruled that students do have rights in school beyond those that would be granted by the "in loco parentis" doctrine. For example, during the Vietnam War several students wore a black armband to school in protest. The school expelled them when they refused to remove the armbands, and stated that this was valid because the school was operating in loco parentis. The courts overturned the expulsion, saying that the students were engaged in constitutionally protected speech.
In general, schools can only discipline students for 1) behavior that occurs during school, a school event, or on school property, and 2) behavior which is disruptive, interferes with the learning process, or constitutes a danger to others. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools may not censor critical speech by students unless it meets both of the criteria above. In the case of the black armbands, the students involved did not disrupt classes in any way, did not rave and rant in the hallways, and were engaged in critical speech (albeit silently). Thus it was protected by the Constitution.
Of course, in reality, principals and school districts routinely ignore the law. This is especially true in small rural school districts which are not under the sort of strict oversight that big-city school districts are, and which do not have the systematic rules and procedures that big-city school districts have. I still must say, though, that this is a really weird case altogether. I taught in a small rural school, and I cannot imagine my principal suspending or expelling a student for something that happened off campus. Heck, I had enough trouble getting him to suspend a student for cussing me out and walking out of my classroom when I denied him permission to get up in the middle of my lecture and go to the bathroom! I can't imagine any of my principals suspending someone for stuff said off-campus... and some of these guys were, well, nuts. (shrug) Guess things have changed in the 6 years since I left the teaching profession...
The body you're thinking of is the NIST, the arm of the federal goverment that amongst other things sets FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standardcs). The signed declaration that you mention was required in order to participate in the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) contest. The NIST has reminded the participants several times that they agree to give up rights to all patents on the algorithms they submit in the event of winning the AES contest, and has stated bluntly that it will pursue anti-trust action with all the power of the federal government against any company which attempts to patent portions of the eventual AES winner.
I believe the IEEE has done something of the same with their proposed public key encryption standards. Unfortunately, until the RSA patent expires, those standards are caught in never-never land.
A change of venue and recusal of judges may be easy enough in a state court of law, but it very much depends upon the state. In federal court, the judge involved has to sustain the motion for change of venue or for self-recusal. His decision can be appealed to the appeals court, but generally appeals courts will uphold the trial judges' decision in such matters unless you have presented clear evidence of a conflict of interest or inability to get a fair trial in a particular location.
I am not a lawyer, but I was once a teacher. In today's world there's not much difference:-).
Sorry. I have read the actual patent law involved. It is quite clear and explicit. Once a patent is granted, it is yours, period. You do not lose a patent for failing to defend it. You can state "Anybody can use my patents for GPL'ed software" without affecting your right to royalties from non-GPL'ed software, for example.
The only right you lose for failing to enforce your patent is the right to sue for a PARTICULAR infringement if you wait more than 5 years after learning of the infringement before suing. That does not affect your right to sue for royalties from all OTHER infringements.
This is the law. It is online. Read it. Congress has it online, and Cornell University Law Library has a good search engine. I'm too lazy to look it up yet once more (I post this message every time some moron who has never read the law says "you lose your patent if you don't defend it").
is that in Phoenix, AZ, any vehicle built before 1994 is basically undrivable because the air conditioning doesn't work. Cars built before 1994 use the old 'Freon' stuff, which is basically now unobtainable. Upgrading these cars to use the new refrigerant usually costs more than the car is worth. Thus hasn't been done.
You don't drive a car in Phoenix's 110 degree heat without air conditioning. Unless you work as a day laborer where the stench and crusty salt stains don't matter, or can shower when you get to where you're going:-).
I'm not aware that TurboLinux ever had many 100K per year employees. The company has always been run rather leanly.
If they chopped their U.S. staff and boosted their Asian staff it would be simple recognition of where their future lies. With Red Hat's domination of the U.S. Linux server market, it is unlikely that they can get market share with "just another distro" in the U.S. Thus it makes sense to chop money-losing efforts and re-focus their efforts elsewhere.
And of course the REAL problem is that government regulations prevent an adequate supply of housing from being built. Said government regulations being: zoning, environmental, etc. regulations.
Zoning regulations are a way for people who already live in a place to screw people who want to move there (and incidentally drive up their own property values). "Free enterprise" and "zoning" are inherently incompatible concepts.
Even here in Phoenix, where "free enterprise" is a religion, a city councilman actually sent out letters boasting about how he'd defeated proposals to build apartments because they would "cause traffic hassles".
Of course, the reason they would cause traffic hassles is because there is no mass transit. And the reason there is no mass transit is because the housing density is too low to make it cost effective. Classic catch 22.
Don't get me started about how the rich developers here defeat all proposals to relax zoning ordinances in "blighted" areas to allow manufactured housing. We could demolish all the substandard housing in Phoenix and replace it with brand-new manufactured housing (at $20K apiece), which would be far cheaper than subsidizing rent or building new housing complexes for the poor (since land is still relatively cheap in the Phoenix area), but the developers who run Phoenix don't want that. They're hoping that, once the blighted areas run down far enough, they can pick up the land for cheap, demolish the crumbled remains of the substandard housing, and build luxury apartments and golf course resorts. They've already started doing that in the area just north of South Mountain.
Since the government in the Phoenix area is run by developers, they also make sure that zoning and development ordinances are used to effectively red-line areas that developers wish to redevelop. For example, one area south of the downtown area is being eyed by developers for luxury apartment complexes. The city has red-lined this area by re-zoning it as commercial/industrial, meaning that homeowners can't get permits to expand or remodel their homes and basically can't sell their homes (which are on too small of lots for commercial/industrial use). Thus homeowners end up moving out, and renting their former homes to whoever will pay, and the area becomes more and more blighted. And whenever the developers want, they can re-zone the land for multi-family dwelling (apartment), due to the fact that they own the city councel and thus can over-ride the zoning board any time they wish. The individual homeowners, of course, cannot do so, since they don't have enough money to buy city counsellors. Thus the developers who run Phoenix ensure their profits with the power of government at the expense of homeowners.
-E
Re:Common Problem in Technical Fields
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Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 2
Actually, it's not a common problem in most technical fields outside of the computer industry. For example, chemical engineers, civil engineers, and mechanical engineers typically stay in their field until retirement. It is only in the computer industry that we put people out to pasture at age 40. (Less than half of the people who graduate with a CS degree are still in the field 10 years later).
Part of that is that mechanical engineering today isn't much different from what it was 40 years ago, except that the tools are a lot better (who really prefers drawing blueprints by hand as vs. on a 3-d CAD program?!). Perhaps as the computer industry matures, maybe that same could be said 40 years from now, but I doubt it.
I think it's important to distinguish between "underskilled" and "stupid". The two are different entities. We hired a kid straight out of college who was "underskilled". But he was not stupid, and when we pointed him to the books he needed to read, he picked the skills right up. Not to mention myself, I knew nothing about cryptography or SCSI media changers before I joined my current employer, and now I'm the guy in charge of those components for my employer... I am NOT right out of college, BTW. I've been in this industry more years than I'd want to count. Still learning new things though.
In the meantime, I have encountered morons who I wouldn't hire to shine my shoes. Not because they're underskilled. But because they're *STUPID*. They lack curiousity, and they lack the ability to learn new things swiftly. One thing I like to do, in employment interviews (the few that I've conducted:-), is find out something that the prospective employee does not know (but that I do know, and happen to have a book on), point them towards the book, say "I'm going to be back in a few minutes, why don't you take a look at that book and tell me what you think about technology 'foo'?", then go take a coffee break. If I come back and they have the book on their lap engrossed in it, I give'em a brownie point, and another one if they can tell me a little bit about what they've read. If, on the other hand, they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs, it's time to show them out of my office...
BTW, my bosses don't let me interview potential hires too often because I scare them (potential hires) too much:-).
If Linux had 30% of the performance of Windows for 3d gaming, it would be performing "poorly". 90% to 98% of Windows performance isn't anything to write home about, but it's credible.
There is a type of FUD called "exaggerating differences", where a small % advantage for one platform or another is turned into a big deal. Let's not engage in FUD here.
-E
Driver specs for hardware from dead companies
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Goodbye, Number Nine
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· Score: 2
Unfortunately, driver specs for hardware from dead companies is almost never available. This is because companies never really "die" -- rather, their assets are sold at auction to the highest bidder (at the most extreme, Chapter 7 liquidation), including all "intellectual property". The "intellectual property" (chip specs, patents, etc.) tend to be bought out by companies (often former competitors of the dead company) who want the patents to add to their own patent blackmail portfolio (that is, as counter-patents for other people's patents), who have no interest in the actual hardware designs or drivers.
Unfortunately, rousing such people to do anything with the aquired "intellectual property" is pretty much impossible. The actual hardware designs are not viewed as something that could make money, but it would cost money to get somebody off their duff to dust them out and publish them, and the accountants would scream about how "hey, you're giving away something we paid for! How do we account for this on our depreciation charts?!". So dead, generally, means dead...
A shame, really. It'd be great if somebody could set up a "dead hardware specs exchange" that would pay these companies for the specs to this dead hardware, and then publish it. But the problem is, how would such a "dead hardware specs exchange" be funded? That's the #1 problem keeping such an idea from happening.
BTW, the problem of dead software companies is even worse... that's one reason why Microsoft became so big (people being scared to buy from a company that might not be around in five years, thus choosing the "safe" choice), and also, BTW, the reason why Linux has gained market share lately while, e.g., Be Inc. has not (Be might not be around in five years, while it would take a massive nuclear war with resulting destruction of humanity to rid the world's hard drives of the Linux source code).
You could get a PC Unix from Interactive for around $500. The cost of PC Unix wasn't the problem. The cost of the hardware was. An 80 megabyte SCSI hard drive in 1989 costed $499. Even though Interactive Unix wasn't GUI-based and thus did not use the astounding sums of disk space that modern Unixes do, you would need at least three of those 80 megabyte SCSI hard drives to have a reasonable system. So we're talking $1500 just for the hard drives. Then let's talk memory. 4 megabytes of memory would get you a reasonable Interactive Unix setup. Okay, 4 megabytes of memory was actually somewhat reasonable by comparison to the hard drive -- that'd only set you back by $400 or so.
I looked at the costs of PC Unix, gulped, and simply added more memory to my (even then) aging Amiga. It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.
The problem with the argument that "much of Motif's usage remains very much behind closed doors" is that the commercial Unix desktop market is dying -- and dying fast. I haven't heard of any large-scale deployments of Unix on the desktop for quite some time. Linux, yes. Unix, no.
While most current commercial Linux programs are based upon the Motif toolkit (e.g., Applix Office, Wordperfect 8, Netscape 4.x, etc.), note that these all originated in the Unix desktop world. As the Unix desktop world has shrunk over the past few years, the Linux desktop world has expanded geometrically, to the point where there are probably more Linux desktops than Unix desktops deployed. None of which come with Motif as a standard component, and thus developers who are now entering the Unix market are looking at toolkits other than Motif. Which means bad news for current Motif vendors, who are seeing their marketplace evaporate before their eyes.
Thus I don't buy the argument that Motif would remain popular without the Linux community. Motif would have ended up like OS/2, a marginalized product used for a few embedded-type projects but otherwise ignored. As market share shrunk, Motif vendors would have started going out of business (that's already started, to a certain extent), and all the new projects are being done with GTK+ or QT -- my own employer has a major (commercial) project in the works based on GTK+, we did not consider Motif for a microsecond.
In other words, without the Linux community, Unix is dead on the desktop. And if Unix is dead on the desktop, so is Motif -- unless it becomes popular on Linux.
Err, Solaris already comes with Motif. Why would you want to compile your own Motif rather than use the vendor-provided one?
I agree that this isn't as good as true Open Source. The "open source OS" bit was obviously intended to protect their revenue stream from Sun/SGI/etc. license fees (since they get practically zilch from sales of Linux versions of Motif, it costs them nothing, revenue-wise, to release Motif for free to that environment). On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from writing commercial applications against the Free Motif and then re-compiling them against the Non-Free Motif on Solaris... for the most part, Motif is Motif. For better or for worse.
The commercial environment is all based upon CDE, which is layered on top of Motif. Motif alone is not going to make Linux any more or less viable in corporate environments.
Besides, it's swiftly becoming irrelevant. Commercial desktop Unix in the corporate environment is dying, and dying fast, replaced mostly by Windows NT but partially by Linux. This obviously is not good news for those companies that have built their business upon providing drag'n'drop interface builders and such for Motif -- they see their market evaporating before their eyes. This release of Motif as semi-Open Source is a last-ditch attempt to keep those companies alive by trying to make Motif popular in another environment. Whether it will work or not is questionable -- Motif still remains a clunky, difficult-to-use (though very powerful) toolkit, no matter how much the Motif fanatics try to deny it. Otherwise you would not see so many interface builders etc. for Motif.
Slashdot Mirror
Commercial programmers coming into the Open Source world have two basic problems: 1) lack of face-to-face communications. EMAIL is quite limited compared to face-to-face and it is easy to give the wrong impression -- or get the wrong impression -- when all you have is flat text to go by. And 2) Lack of knowledge of the basic "culture". Part of which is "what have you done?" rather than "what is your position?", something especially confusing to commercial software project leaders and managers who are accustomed to coming in an "managing" a project. If you try to "manage" an open source project, the programmers will simply add you to their killfile and you can rant and rave as you like with no effect -- something extremely disconcerting to these types.
'Nuff. Time to get back to work (took this break 'cause I was getting frustrated with the program I'm working on, which will write, read, but won't do both during the same invocation...AGH!).
-E
This happens within commercial companies too, BTW. What we do, when that happens, is move that person off that part of the project onto something else where he can't hurt the development process. I know that I find it irritating when some dude we hired off the street, who doesn't have any experience in our industry, starts telling the two seniormost programmers in the company "how it should be" without listening to a bit of our input as to what functionality the GUI needs. Unfortunately, the KDE team can't move this Corel guy to another part of the project, all they can basically do is "fire" him by putting him in their kill filters.
I don't know what the solution is, other than have people with experience in the free software community be the ones who the commercial companies hire to do the work. I don't think anybody has had any objections to the way further MTX development has taken place, for example, even though EST paid me to do the work of bringing MTX up to date to work with the latest/greatest tape libraries. On the other hand, people with experience in the Linux industry or with Open Source are rarely in the job market -- I know, we've been trying to find some of them to hire, and finding people who have the skills we need, in this industry, has been difficult.
-E
Microsoft was the first commercial Unix licensee. They bought a license to Unix System III.
Now, you must remember that at this time Microsoft was a considerably smaller company. In fact, they only had a few dozen employees, hardly enough to handle their other product lines. So they contracted with a consulting outfit called The Santa Cruz Operation to port Unix System III to the various 16-bit microcomputers that were being introduced. The result was called "Xenix". Radio Shack had a version for their 68000-based business system, I believe Altos had a version for their 8086-based business system, but I don't recall Xenix being sold for standard "PC Clones" by Microsoft at that time -- it was, at the time, a strictly OEM deal, where an OEM wanting Unix had to go to Microsoft, pay money up front for the port, then Microsoft would pass along most of the money to SCO for SCO to do the actual work.
Eventually, Microsoft decided Xenix wasn't going to be particularly profitable, especially with IBM shoving tons of money at them to make OS/2 be foremost on their plate. They handed off Xenix to SCO in exchange for some cash, future royalties on future sales of Xenix that included Microsoft-paid-for work, and a large share of SCO stock (just hedging the bets in case Xenix DID take off).
So anyhow: yes, Xenix originally WAS a Microsoft product. But no, Microsoft didn't write Xenix (or at least not the majority of Xenix), though most of the early Xenix work was a "work for hire" done by SCO for Microsoft (and thus like all such "work for hire" was property of Microsoft). A fact which led to a lot of acrimony and lawsuits in later years.
-E
They still have some credibility with solutions vendors -- folks who, e.g., make custom medical records systems and other such things -- but even ISV's are inching away from SCO and towards Linux. Most of the "name" Linux wins lately have been the result of this migration.
But Fortune 500? I know of no Fortune 500 company that would consider buying SCO Unix or dealing with SCO. If they have Unix, they have "real" Unix (Solaris or AIX). Or Linux, in certain special-purpose instances. SCO Unix rates behind even IRIX and HP/UX on my list of "sales into Fortune 500", though the solutions vendors still sell lots of it indirectly.
-E
* Rude technical support people who don't provide much help! (Modelled after Linux distribution ).
* EXPENSIVE rude technical support people who don't provide much help! (Puts them on par with everybody else offering Linux support contracts :-).
* Prices that constantly inch upwards.
* Enough Unix OS's in their coffers to confuse any marketroid, much less SCO's clueless ones!
* Obsolete versions of everything, or incompatible versions of everything! (I am going to have to port 'mtx' to SCO Unix, I shudder at the very thought).
Yes, folks, SCO. I'd say "Just say no", but then, who cares enough to listen?
-E
Perhaps the most important question was when the witness was asked whether the MPAA lawyer was his lawyer. The answer was "I am a hired expert witness", then Mr. Gold put a quick stop to that line of questioning. Attorney-client privilige only applies to discussions between an attorney and his client, which the witness was not. No wonder Garbus was livid in his appeals to the court to get the MPAA to quit abusing the attorney-client and work-product priviliges!
This was clarified elsewhere in the deposition, where it was clarified that by "Linux" they were referring to Linux developers or Linux-related companies.
And finally, DES *has* to at least be an "honorable mention". DES, despite being dated on the day it was created with its 56-bit keys, was the first publically-implemented Feistel-class symmetric cipher, and brought S-boxes and other encryption techniques now commonplace out of the world of spooks and into common parlance. All ciphers since DES have been either inspired by DES or have been a reaction to what people view as flaws in DES. If that isn't "influential", I don't know what is!
-E
This does not, however, explain why Fuju would want to be such jerks about copyrights, especially since many of the clips involved were well within the domain of the "fair use" clause (i.e., they did not duplicate the entirity or majority of the copyrighted material, they were presented for review and critical purposes, etc.). Remember, copyrights and patents don't need to be defended in order to remain valid -- though, in the case of patents, you must pursue the violation within x years (I forget the x) or you lose the right to pursue THAT PARTICULAR INFRINGEMENT (but not all other infringements).
After all, it's not like Napster, where entire copyrighted songs have been placed online. I guess folks like Fuji have these law critters on staff that gotta justify their hefty retainers, and a minor trademark issue wasn't enough for them to justify the hefty sum they charged Fuji (shrug).
-E
In general, schools can only discipline students for 1) behavior that occurs during school, a school event, or on school property, and 2) behavior which is disruptive, interferes with the learning process, or constitutes a danger to others. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools may not censor critical speech by students unless it meets both of the criteria above. In the case of the black armbands, the students involved did not disrupt classes in any way, did not rave and rant in the hallways, and were engaged in critical speech (albeit silently). Thus it was protected by the Constitution.
Of course, in reality, principals and school districts routinely ignore the law. This is especially true in small rural school districts which are not under the sort of strict oversight that big-city school districts are, and which do not have the systematic rules and procedures that big-city school districts have. I still must say, though, that this is a really weird case altogether. I taught in a small rural school, and I cannot imagine my principal suspending or expelling a student for something that happened off campus. Heck, I had enough trouble getting him to suspend a student for cussing me out and walking out of my classroom when I denied him permission to get up in the middle of my lecture and go to the bathroom! I can't imagine any of my principals suspending someone for stuff said off-campus... and some of these guys were, well, nuts. (shrug) Guess things have changed in the 6 years since I left the teaching profession...
-E
I believe the IEEE has done something of the same with their proposed public key encryption standards. Unfortunately, until the RSA patent expires, those standards are caught in never-never land.
-E
I am not a lawyer, but I was once a teacher. In today's world there's not much difference :-).
-E
The only right you lose for failing to enforce your patent is the right to sue for a PARTICULAR infringement if you wait more than 5 years after learning of the infringement before suing. That does not affect your right to sue for royalties from all OTHER infringements.
This is the law. It is online. Read it. Congress has it online, and Cornell University Law Library has a good search engine. I'm too lazy to look it up yet once more (I post this message every time some moron who has never read the law says "you lose your patent if you don't defend it").
-E
You don't drive a car in Phoenix's 110 degree heat without air conditioning. Unless you work as a day laborer where the stench and crusty salt stains don't matter, or can shower when you get to where you're going :-).
-E
If they chopped their U.S. staff and boosted their Asian staff it would be simple recognition of where their future lies. With Red Hat's domination of the U.S. Linux server market, it is unlikely that they can get market share with "just another distro" in the U.S. Thus it makes sense to chop money-losing efforts and re-focus their efforts elsewhere.
-E
Zoning regulations are a way for people who already live in a place to screw people who want to move there (and incidentally drive up their own property values). "Free enterprise" and "zoning" are inherently incompatible concepts.
_E
Of course, the reason they would cause traffic hassles is because there is no mass transit. And the reason there is no mass transit is because the housing density is too low to make it cost effective. Classic catch 22.
Don't get me started about how the rich developers here defeat all proposals to relax zoning ordinances in "blighted" areas to allow manufactured housing. We could demolish all the substandard housing in Phoenix and replace it with brand-new manufactured housing (at $20K apiece), which would be far cheaper than subsidizing rent or building new housing complexes for the poor (since land is still relatively cheap in the Phoenix area), but the developers who run Phoenix don't want that. They're hoping that, once the blighted areas run down far enough, they can pick up the land for cheap, demolish the crumbled remains of the substandard housing, and build luxury apartments and golf course resorts. They've already started doing that in the area just north of South Mountain.
Since the government in the Phoenix area is run by developers, they also make sure that zoning and development ordinances are used to effectively red-line areas that developers wish to redevelop. For example, one area south of the downtown area is being eyed by developers for luxury apartment complexes. The city has red-lined this area by re-zoning it as commercial/industrial, meaning that homeowners can't get permits to expand or remodel their homes and basically can't sell their homes (which are on too small of lots for commercial/industrial use). Thus homeowners end up moving out, and renting their former homes to whoever will pay, and the area becomes more and more blighted. And whenever the developers want, they can re-zone the land for multi-family dwelling (apartment), due to the fact that they own the city councel and thus can over-ride the zoning board any time they wish. The individual homeowners, of course, cannot do so, since they don't have enough money to buy city counsellors. Thus the developers who run Phoenix ensure their profits with the power of government at the expense of homeowners.
-E
Part of that is that mechanical engineering today isn't much different from what it was 40 years ago, except that the tools are a lot better (who really prefers drawing blueprints by hand as vs. on a 3-d CAD program?!). Perhaps as the computer industry matures, maybe that same could be said 40 years from now, but I doubt it.
-E
In the meantime, I have encountered morons who I wouldn't hire to shine my shoes. Not because they're underskilled. But because they're *STUPID*. They lack curiousity, and they lack the ability to learn new things swiftly. One thing I like to do, in employment interviews (the few that I've conducted :-), is find out something that the prospective employee does not know (but that I do know, and happen to have a book on), point them towards the book, say "I'm going to be back in a few minutes, why don't you take a look at that book and tell me what you think about technology 'foo'?", then go take a coffee break. If I come back and they have the book on their lap engrossed in it, I give'em a brownie point, and another one if they can tell me a little bit about what they've read. If, on the other hand, they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs, it's time to show them out of my office...
BTW, my bosses don't let me interview potential hires too often because I scare them (potential hires) too much :-).
-E
There is a type of FUD called "exaggerating differences", where a small % advantage for one platform or another is turned into a big deal. Let's not engage in FUD here.
-E
Unfortunately, rousing such people to do anything with the aquired "intellectual property" is pretty much impossible. The actual hardware designs are not viewed as something that could make money, but it would cost money to get somebody off their duff to dust them out and publish them, and the accountants would scream about how "hey, you're giving away something we paid for! How do we account for this on our depreciation charts?!". So dead, generally, means dead...
A shame, really. It'd be great if somebody could set up a "dead hardware specs exchange" that would pay these companies for the specs to this dead hardware, and then publish it. But the problem is, how would such a "dead hardware specs exchange" be funded? That's the #1 problem keeping such an idea from happening.
BTW, the problem of dead software companies is even worse... that's one reason why Microsoft became so big (people being scared to buy from a company that might not be around in five years, thus choosing the "safe" choice), and also, BTW, the reason why Linux has gained market share lately while, e.g., Be Inc. has not (Be might not be around in five years, while it would take a massive nuclear war with resulting destruction of humanity to rid the world's hard drives of the Linux source code).
-E
I looked at the costs of PC Unix, gulped, and simply added more memory to my (even then) aging Amiga. It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.
-E
While most current commercial Linux programs are based upon the Motif toolkit (e.g., Applix Office, Wordperfect 8, Netscape 4.x, etc.), note that these all originated in the Unix desktop world. As the Unix desktop world has shrunk over the past few years, the Linux desktop world has expanded geometrically, to the point where there are probably more Linux desktops than Unix desktops deployed. None of which come with Motif as a standard component, and thus developers who are now entering the Unix market are looking at toolkits other than Motif. Which means bad news for current Motif vendors, who are seeing their marketplace evaporate before their eyes.
Thus I don't buy the argument that Motif would remain popular without the Linux community. Motif would have ended up like OS/2, a marginalized product used for a few embedded-type projects but otherwise ignored. As market share shrunk, Motif vendors would have started going out of business (that's already started, to a certain extent), and all the new projects are being done with GTK+ or QT -- my own employer has a major (commercial) project in the works based on GTK+, we did not consider Motif for a microsecond.
In other words, without the Linux community, Unix is dead on the desktop. And if Unix is dead on the desktop, so is Motif -- unless it becomes popular on Linux.
-E
I agree that this isn't as good as true Open Source. The "open source OS" bit was obviously intended to protect their revenue stream from Sun/SGI/etc. license fees (since they get practically zilch from sales of Linux versions of Motif, it costs them nothing, revenue-wise, to release Motif for free to that environment). On the other hand, there's nothing preventing you from writing commercial applications against the Free Motif and then re-compiling them against the Non-Free Motif on Solaris... for the most part, Motif is Motif. For better or for worse.
-E
Besides, it's swiftly becoming irrelevant. Commercial desktop Unix in the corporate environment is dying, and dying fast, replaced mostly by Windows NT but partially by Linux. This obviously is not good news for those companies that have built their business upon providing drag'n'drop interface builders and such for Motif -- they see their market evaporating before their eyes. This release of Motif as semi-Open Source is a last-ditch attempt to keep those companies alive by trying to make Motif popular in another environment. Whether it will work or not is questionable -- Motif still remains a clunky, difficult-to-use (though very powerful) toolkit, no matter how much the Motif fanatics try to deny it. Otherwise you would not see so many interface builders etc. for Motif.
-E