No, its not too early to be a/. story IMO. If, because he read about it here, some VC with an ailing parent decides to underwrite a larger scale of testing to bring it to market that much quicker, and the testing indicates its good to go, then the "wasted ink" on/. will have been worth it.
Serendipity, the keyword here, because you never know who's reading/. Will it help me? Doubtfull, as I'm already 71 & watching my sugar, so a heart or other circulatory problem will probably write my last chapter.
No mention of the reduction is probably the result of it not being legal to kill the people so the brain can be assayed. I know this is/. & you must be new here, but doesn't anyone actually think anymore?
Well, it's not being run by retarded meerkats, but it's also not being run by mensa-spanking geniuii either. It's being run by former MBA students.
Who, in my experience, rate slightly above the retarded meerkat level.
There may be a few near genius (I think thats what you were trying to spell above, never seen it mangled quite that badly before:) people there, but really, whoever gave you the idea that anybody with any real brains would be allowed access to the same floor the boardroom is on? You know of course that part of Balmers job description is stand guard at the elevator shaft, with a chair in one hand ready to bean anybody with a spark of IQ showing in their eyes when the door opens.
A pox on MBA's and their extreme near term market mentality. Between lawyers and MBA's, I'd help fund a bounty system to remove their Ken Lay attitude's from society forever. I just haven't figured out how to make it look as if they won the Darwin Award yet.
I once had a general manager who was a more or less ok human, till he took some time off and went after an MBA, driven by his woman I think, she was a classic example of a bitch. Once he got the MBA, then he came back and got the GM's job. He lasted about 2 years before his lies caught up with him, two years that I spent proving many times that in a battle of wits, he was totally unarmed, and I quite enjoyed the first 18 months of it. I did get so sick of the lies I was ready to turn in my resignation that day, but hadn't told anybody when the owner walked in un-announced with his accountant, and in 30 minutes found enough to have him escorted from the premises. So in the end I did win, and I went on to finally retire from there 3 years ago.
In any event, I have to agree with the previous posters regarding M$ having the arrogance to make such a statement in public. Here is another area where I suspect they will fail, after all, google has at least a 5 year head start at understanding how a search engine is supposed to work. Couple that with what may be a better working environment at google, and I suspect the outcome 15 years on down the log will be as predicted in that M$ will by then be a footnote in the history of computing. I'd like to be here to watch it, but that would make me 86 years old then, and I'm diabetic so my chances of that are pretty slim.
The only problem I see in your argument is non-transferability. If you prohibit transfer, the copyright becomes economically worthless, or at least much more difficult to use. That which cannot be transferred cannot be sold. Of course, perhaps (probably, I think) I'm reading you wrong as to what you mean by transferability.
This has been the mainstay of my argument regarding copyright law remolding for many years. The fact that the original artist/writer/whathaveyou must actually sell his copyright, and I mean every right & title he ever had in the work as the originator, to some megacorp publisher/exploiter in order to realize a damned dime for his effort, is the most rancorous thing in the current law once the outragious time its now valid has been brought back under control.
The title to the work should IMO, be locked in the originators name, for the duration of the copyright granted to him/her, and not for sale, ever. He should be able to negotiate a publication agreement for a fixed term of say 5 years, with that publisher then having the "copy" right to exclusive use of that work within the bounds of that contract. At the end of that contract, that publishers right to publish (copy) is terminated unless a new contract seems to make viable business sense, and the copyright itself remains with the original author for as long as the copyright is deemed to last, beit 10 years or whatever. If the publisher hasn't done a good job, then the author should be free to negotiate with another publisher once the first publishers "copy" right granted in that contract has expired.
As the system currently works, most authors die as paupers. Occasionally one hits the big time, like J. K. Rowlings, but in todays near monopoly over access to a printing press, those are rare birds indeed.
Considering that they miss-micro-managed for years and finally closed up their local store 6 months ago, I don't think much of the last sputter of a dying corporations campfire.
The applications may not be available NOW, but that doomsday scenario won't fit for long, and the coders who will be asked to duplicate/improve the NLA M$ stuff will suddenly find they've got all the work they can handle. Things might get rough for a month or 2, but IMO one year down the log, most will be better off, and 2 years down the log everyone will be asking themselves "why the hell didn't we do this in the first place?"
That won't be done behind soundproof walls and razorwire fences either, it will filter out to the rest of the world. At that point, M$ becomes irrevelant unless they actually have a better product. Vista will make or finish them and the choice is M$'s to make.
But, what do ya wanna bet? Rather than compete on a level playing field, they'll spend obscene amounts of money on lawyers, the other scourge of civilization.
If they really cared about this fine they'd refuse to pay it and watch the uproar that would ensue when it became illegal to sell Windows in the EU.
It will never happen. Even if (which I doubt as they'll at least try to kill eons with negotiations) Bill has to write the check (and keep writing them daily until the EU is satisfied) there is no way in hell that M$ will just let the EU default to linux or the various bsd's.
As for the price per day, ISTR seeing someplace that the fine was chosen to match the estimated sales per day within the EU. Can anyone deny/confirm that? If true, then I don't see it as excessive. Were I setting it, given the testimony thats been given ink that I've seen, I think I'd have chosen it to be a net loss per sale, of the price of the sale, or 2x the street price.
I'm with Linus in this: "If we change how microsoft does business, then we will have won".
As for the billions Bill has, I would wager that if he actually did business on the merits of his product, 2 things would have already happened. 1. Windows would be a hell of a lot more stable and secure than it historicly has been, and 2. He would have made even more money! Of course that would have had to happen 20 years ago in order to head linux off at the pass. I don't recall what his worth was then, but it surely would have been sufficient to survive the corporate direction change that would have required. One things for sure, M$ has enough in the bank to survive a rebirth in the business office, so I fail to see why the hint isn't being taken other than the corporate blinders are causing a total, identifiable by any optometrist, case of tunnel vision.
Hence if someone wishes to donate computer time it will be useful if all one had to do is to download a BOINC like client that will then run whatever the server sends it. Of course you'd need a reputable institution with a sensible scientific board running the server...
And thereby hangs the tale. I ran seti since about a month after it started, and had a ranking of 99.98% in the world at one point, in the top 10,000 in other words. All the while it ran on my linux boxes, it ran at a priority of 20, meaning the instant anything else wanted some cpu cycles, they got them with no interference from seti whatsoever. You never knew it was there until you did a top & found it was using 97+% of the cpu most of the time.
Then they switched it to Boinc. Boinc was apparently developed on a windoze box and had no knowledge of mutiltasking priorities. None, nada. I modified the script to launch it with the proper priority, but when it changed packets, which is a 4-9 times a day occurance with my hardware, it forgot it and launched the next session at full 0 priority, and I lost my machines as everything else came to a glacial speed crawl. I fought with that for about 6 months, but everytime they'd update BOINC, it was back to square one. Then the email address for the helpline went dead, and there was no way to contact anyone. Problems with the winderz version appeared to be the subject of mad overnight fixit sessions cause it usually got fixed the next day. But fresh executables for linux? Maybe 4 in the 6 months I tried to be a nice guy. 2 of which were, IIRC, incompatible with their predecessors requireing a full wipe & reinstall.
Then they changed the stats pages, and didn't carry your old rankings over to the new system. There was supposedly a registration page that would enable that feature, but it didn't work the first time and refused to take an entry from me ever again.
And there still wasn't a working email address for the project. No bounces, but it was very effective as a black hole in that no messages were ever acknowledged in any manner. I sent a dozen or more.
At that point I had had enough and commented all my scripts out and rebooted the two boxes that were running it. Frankly, I wouldn't mind doing a little climate prediction work, but I won't touch it with a 20 foot pole until Boinc, and the people involved in it are out of the picture.
The keyword here, in case there is a Boinc person reading this, is that these machines are MINE not yours, and if your software attempts to take full control of MY machines as was the case when I stopped Boinc over a year ago now, then such obnoxious behaviour will be dealt with by stopping the project. You can have my spare cycles, but I'll be damned if you'll get them all.
I'd say that the penalty was fair. It's not necessary to drive the company out of business - just necessary to give them a sting so that they don't do it again.
No, sorry, that doesn't cut it with this old fart. Until they are put out of business, and their database put in escrow for purposes of forensics traceing only, with it to be preserved on non-networked servers that it takes a federal court order to gain access to, such shennanigans will continue. While they're at it, I'd be in favor of the top floor executives haveing a hand amputated in the grand old arab justice manner. Maybe both hands for the President of such a company.
I frankly could care less about the collateral damages from putting many of such a companies rank & file people out of work, they knew full well the type of business they were working for. I cannot seriously seperate those people from all the 419 scammers in Nigeria. They're all birds of a feather. Put them out of business, mark them physicly for life and make it damned clear that this is what will happen to everyone that abuses the data they are in charge of. Then and only then will these leaches turn honest.
Chuckle, Hadron indeed. Leave it to Bruce to come up with something like that. Me, I'm just a simple old fart, with a CET & a GED, (in that order) but in 71 years my reading has gotten me a pretty decent grasp of the physical world & its rules & regulations.
The nice thing about the world I make my living in is that so far, within my lifetime, not one law of physics has changed in any way shape or form. Extended the number of digits to the right of the decimal point to the point of being ridiculous maybe, but no REAL changes.
That tends to make me think that we do in fact, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics. IMO, the only thing we're missing is the "gravity to the rest of it" connection, confounded by the inconvienient fact that gravity appears to be the only force in the universe which is apparently instantainious over galactic distances. Go work any celestial orbital mechanics problem, including the orbit of the earth around the sun, and try and make it work if the gravitational attraction vector is assumed to be toward where the sun appears to be now (as opposed to where it is right now instead where it was 8 minutes ago when that light left the suns position then). By adding any delay, the orbit falls apart, and our earth would have spiraled into the sun many billions of years ago.
I've made several attempts to get my head around this 'string' thing, all of which usually leaves me with not a hadron, but a headache. I can take a pill for that.
What I think we are seeing here is the first child, who not knowing any better, points out that the emperor's new clothes aren't just lightweight and airy, but wholly non-existant. Except, I suspect this 'child' would be considerably better off in taking a mensa application than I as my one IQ test (not a mensa test FWIW, but the Iowa test of 55 years ago) only indicating about 147.
Hold up on the bulldozer for another day, I've got parts made out of pure un-obtainium that I'd like to get this side of the state line. Then I'll buy that dozer the first tank of fuel...
Somebody should send this Horn person a copy of the Bill of Rights, with the appropriate ones (pural) that she wants to violate circled in red. And duplicates to the local papers for use on the editorial page.
What I want to know, is how does such a person manage to get into such a position of authority? If its an elected position, then come the next election, they should be remembered. And so would those who appointed this person is its an appointed position. If you live there, look it up folks, and act like you care by applying the 2nd box of liberty, the ballot box next election day.
Then its time for the 4th of those famous boxes to be used. I'm sure you are all familiar with that saying re the 4 boxes to protect and defend liberty? Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
So far in this thread, this is the only post that actually makes sense.
Just two flies in this otherwise tasty bowl of soup though.
1. The makers haven't the manpower to do anything but wholesale deletion of the messages that would be generated by such a setup. They would be forced to resort to that because their mail servers hard drives will be filled to 100% with unread messages eventually. I have serious doubts that very many of them would even have multlingual employees who could translate our rantings in whatever language might be our native tongue, into something that can be read to TPTB in the boardrooms.
2. Knowing this, there is no way in hell any of them will ever give out an actual, working, email address for us dissatisfied users to mailbomb.
The only way I can see for that to work, and even that will take way too much time, is to publicise on this list, those makers that refuse to co-operate in this regard, in that way giving the potential buyer notice that this maker doesn't have any interest in FOSS/linux, or how a free market works, so this product, regardless of what final product its incorporated into, is to be avoided. If such a list could be used to haul them out behind the woodshed for an introduction to the board of education, as administered to their bottom line with ever increasing obviousness as FOSS takes over from M$, thats all to the better IMO. For M$, the handwriting has been on the wall for several years now. There is no legal way they can win, but we need to be very carefull of their attempts to make legal, what is absolutely, totally, morally wrong in order for M$ to maintain their near monopolistic grip on the OS software arena.
Is this morally blackmail? A definite maybe, but I think its called free market economics by the spin doctors.
I'm fur it, that way I wouldn't have to stand there and read all the fine print thats getting harder to read all the time, hopeing to find, someplace on the friggin label, the now famous Phillips CD logo. Cause if it doesn't have it, there is a 99% probability will never make it into MY shopping cart.
All carefully explained to the floor walkers trying to keep the kids from sticking the latest sample of the noise they call music into their baggy pants. It of course goes in one ear and out the other as the rantings of a senior citizen who hasn't been taking his medicine regularly cause they haven't a clue what DRM stands for, and haven't got pair of quarters to call someone who might be able to explain it to them in one syllable words.
now all we need to do is centralize breeding and we're set.
In case you hadn't noticed, we get bred, whether we're in season or not, by our all omnipotent government everytime we walk out the door into the real world. The only real difference between us and a prostitute is that the prostitute usually gets paid for it, whereas we all pay for the 'priviledge' of getting bred.
Minor semantics difference, usually lost in the rest of the crowd noise.
The problem has escalated to the PITA level over the last year, and I know of at least one project that went someplace else because we users could rarely get cvs to work, and the developers had access maybe one day a week. That was emc, both versions. We got to trading personal emails with patches attached since the listserver doesn't allow attachments.
There have been other desertions but I don't recall their names ATM as I don't use them all that often.
sourceforge claimed they had found some bad hardware 2-3 weeks ago, and that the situation should 'improve'. Improve to me, means the problem isn't as bad. To which I'll reply, why the heck hasn't it been fixed? If they are to offer this service, it should Just Work(TM).
Personally, I find the thought of one single place for 95% of our source code scarey as hell. What if they should go away without notice? The Open Source movement in general would be dealt a huge blow that it would take a year+ to recover from, and some would never come back because the programmer isn't interested in re-inventing the wheel yet again.
Yeah, among my retirement 'hobbies' I have a small cnc mill, run by emc-2.
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:The diplomatic response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So what do you suggest? That every project must generate a "stable" release for every single patch that goes into CVS, or that every single patch must be back-ported to the "stable" branch and then generate a "stable" build?
Seriously, this whole argument is fucking bullshit. I say this as someone who has to manage a big project; a single release takes us weeks to generate and test, and this clown is whinging because I don't have the time to release more than once every two months if I'm lucky? What an ass.
Damn, who pissed in your cherrio's? I for one only have one problem with cvs, and its specific to sourceforge. Specifically its pure bullshit that their server for any one project is down 90% of the time. I don't mind being told that its fixed in cvs, if I could goto cvs and suck the fixed code right then and there, while the iron is hot. This bullshit of screwing around when you can think of it for anywhere up to a weeks worth of days or nights before you catch that server in the mood to actually let you get the code sucks donkey balls.
Well, actually I have 2 problems since I use an rpm based distro, and that is the comparative inability to manage a system where, because the friggin rpms won't do what needs to be done, so you garb the tarball or the cvs if you can make it work, and make away. But then yum et all have NFI whats on the system and insists that it knows better and tries to rip out everything related to printing because you've installed gutenprint due to the available rpms all being gimp-print-4.2.7, which doesn't YET support a 5 year old Epson printer. But thats an entirely separate bitch, which is only going to get fixed with each distro taking checkinstall under its wing, and making up preconfigured versions of it already customized to work with the package manager that distro uses. It can be done, I've done it for my FC2 system at home.
Now, go get a fresh bowl of cherrios, and point the accusing finger at the source of the frustration, in this case sourceforge itself.
Ah, to be young. I remember when I was you age. I was an idealist too. Once you get out in the real world and reality sinks in, that will change.
Then whats my excuse? I'm a youngster of 71, and I totally fail to detect the sarcasm I'm sure you intended when you wrote that. We obviously need a sarcasm smiley.
In any event, what I want to know is "where do I sign up to get into what is going to be the biggest class action suit ever won, because this one certainly is?"
I'm not kidding, nor am I trying to be sarcastic. I don't have any connections that I know of to any of these so called terrorists, I'm just an old fart thats been trying to retire for the last 4 years, failed miserably, but it nobodys business but mine who I call, or who calls me for that matter.
So where do I sign up, I need to fatten my teeny little SS nestegg.
Obviously you are not an american citizen. However, that doesn't make you automaticly wrong, because you are righter than you can imagine. I'm not one of the 40% that didn't vote, and I can claim that I didn't vote for either of those jerks in the last go-round. IMNSHO, neither of those those 4 phsychopaths the republicrats ran were fit to sit in that chair!
Bush, for all his illegal bullshit, was in retrospect, the better choice of the two because the dems ran a couple of screaming idiots against him. Give the voters who did vote credit for being able to see which was the lesser evil. Some of us voted for 3rd and 4th party people, knowing full well it was just pissing into the wind, but it was better than the alternative in our view.
But the level of evil between them is only relative. We, my wife and I, perceived both offerings as being less than what we needed. But thats how we (the people) voted, so everyone is fully justified in saying that we got exactly what we deserved. What we need in that office is an honest to God Patriot, one with enough balls to clean out the rest of the mess.
But you know what? For 2 reasons, there is no way in hell he could get elected. Reason #1 is that if he is an honest man, he in all probability won't be able to mount a campaign of any real consequence because he won't have the sheckels to pay for it. The other, 2nd reason of course is that a quite large percentage of the Joe Sixpacks that do stumble into the polling place and vote, will vote for what they perceive as someone who won't upset the status quo, and thats exactly what a real patriot would do. We're scared of change, AND THATS THE WHOLE, UNFORTUNATELY PURE BULLSHIT TRUTH!
If we don't fix this in 2008 with the ballot box, then there is little hope of the jury box doing any real good (Bush has already seen to that), and that leaves the ammo box. The choice is ours to make.
As to the person who said we couldn't do anything if the military shows up, but we still have the posse commitatus (check that spelling) which will give them 2nd thoughts, and some of us are pretty good shots. I've worn out 3 rifle barrels at the range over the last 40 some years, and I've brought venison home 4 times that was well over 400 yards away when the first cap was cracked, one from 640 yards. And I have a lot of company in the form of the deer & other large game hunters that annually spend several billion on the pursuit of a little fun or meat from our sport. And it won't cost me $2 to crack a cap, I load my own. Would I turn into a guerilla sniper in a case like that? I'm already had a pretty full life at my age, and if I could leave this country a little better for my great-grandchildren, then you can figure out what I'll do.
I'm reminded of a statement made late in WWII by a japanese commander who had been captured, when he was asked why, when they were off the coast of California in '42, they didn't attempt a landing and invasion before we were well mobilized? His reply was that they weren't that dumb, and were fully aware that every 3rd house they would march by was occupied by citizens with guns who would not even consider holding their fire. We knew we would be decimated before we had marched 5 miles. Country boy dumb he might have been, but he sure as hell wasn't stupid. We common citizens (the "militia" in the 2nd amendment) DO represent a powerfull force should the occasion demand action.
I'm not currently a member of the NRA, but have been in the past, parting ways basicly over the sheer tonnage of pleas for money that found its way into my mailbox in an average month. OTOH, without their contribution to the political scene helping to protect not just the 2nd amendment, which is of course their major focus, but all 10 of them when push comes to shove (their last suit in federal court was a 1st amendment issue), we would not have today a single surviving right contained in the original "Bill of Rights". They're still being nibbled to death by ducks, but they have largely survived. A bit battle scarred in places, but at least they are still on the books.
Thanks for giving me a platform to speak from, and writing the triggering bit of well phrased prose.
Love it. And it would certainly serve all those self-rightious idiots trying to set the nations educational system back 100,000 years about right. What the hell ever became of the strain of humans that lived in Kansas in 1895? Go look up the 8th grade final exam used by the Salinas KS schools in 1895 (see google). I dare say that not one person living today could get an A on that test. And yet its all common sense daily useage problems of an everyday practical nature even in todays world.
But to put this back on topic a bit, the next question I come up with is: How many gallons of shit does it take to make a gallon of this stuff, and on the same vein, how efficiently would we have to be in following range cattle around in order to meet that quota in gallons per year in order to become self-sufficient?
Conversely, are we removing its final value as a fertilizer to replenish the soil? Spreading the used cowbarn bedding on the fields is a time honored way to actually improve the soils over time, and is still done today with at least 99% of it. The other 1% is probably going into tightly covered methane producing ponds that on a per site basis for large operations, is indeed making those operations self-sufficient in producing the electricity they need to run the operation. And they can still use the sludge as fertilizer. If we take that out of it, so the soil is not replenished, then I don't care how efficient the process can be made, its purely for short term gain, something the average MBA understands all too well. There ought to be a bounty on them critters as it seems to me the single most obvious requirement to become an MBA is to throw away any and all shreds of common sense God may have given them in the first place. But thats another rant entirely.
Interesting questions, but the VC folks, before they'll even get upwind of the project, will want to know all these things in order to figure out the feasability of turning a profit in a reasonable time frame. And too many of them are 90 day wonder MBA's.
US tells company to grow up and deal with it like everyone else.
Only in your wildest dreams as long as there's a republican in the white house.
If your memory hasn't yet succumbed to alzheimers, you'll recall that when he came to power, justice was just a few more hearings from issueing a probable breakup order that would make Judge Greens AT&T order look like THE precedent setting order of the century.
He gets sworn in on the 20th of January, and by Feb 1, justice has been told to stand down in no uncertain terms.
Then, just because 'he needs to finish this war' he gets another 4 years to play God from the sheeple. Methinks theres some confusion in his mind as to just who is God, him or the real one.
I didn't vote for him the second time, and I damned sure hope the dems can come up with a candidate that doesn't come with all the baggage the last 2 had a huge excess of, even turning off diehard deomcrats because they were actually seen as the worst of 2 evils. So the sheeple here voted for the lessor of 2 evils, not fully understanding the depths of the ranking on a true scale.
As a senior citizen who may not have that many more elections to exersize my right to vote in, I am truely sad for my country.
And I would hope, probably futily, that washington will have the decent good sense to stay the hell out of this dogfight, its not theirs, although their past in-actions HAVE certainly allowed it to become one. Its been business as usual in Redmond for 6 years that should never have been allowed to happen IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
No, its not too early to be a /. story IMO. If, because he read about it here, some VC with an ailing parent decides to underwrite a larger scale of testing to bring it to market that much quicker, and the testing indicates its good to go, then the "wasted ink" on /. will have been worth it.
/. Will it help me? Doubtfull, as I'm already 71 & watching my sugar, so a heart or other circulatory problem will probably write my last chapter.
Serendipity, the keyword here, because you never know who's reading
--
Cheers, Gene
No mention of the reduction is probably the result of it not being legal to kill the people so the brain can be assayed. /. & you must be new here, but doesn't anyone actually think anymore?
I know this is
--
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, but he's the president, and a republican to boot, so he's guaranteed to be off the wall.
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Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, my spelling isn't that good either according to my wife the school teacher.
--
Cheers, Gene
Well, it's not being run by retarded meerkats, but it's also not being run by mensa-spanking geniuii either. It's being run by former MBA students.
:) people there, but really, whoever gave you the idea that anybody with any real brains would be allowed access to the same floor the boardroom is on? You know of course that part of Balmers job description is stand guard at the elevator shaft, with a chair in one hand ready to bean anybody with a spark of IQ showing in their eyes when the door opens.
Who, in my experience, rate slightly above the retarded meerkat level.
There may be a few near genius (I think thats what you were trying to spell above, never seen it mangled quite that badly before
A pox on MBA's and their extreme near term market mentality. Between lawyers and MBA's, I'd help fund a bounty system to remove their Ken Lay attitude's from society forever. I just haven't figured out how to make it look as if they won the Darwin Award yet.
I once had a general manager who was a more or less ok human, till he took some time off and went after an MBA, driven by his woman I think, she was a classic example of a bitch. Once he got the MBA, then he came back and got the GM's job. He lasted about 2 years before his lies caught up with him, two years that I spent proving many times that in a battle of wits, he was totally unarmed, and I quite enjoyed the first 18 months of it. I did get so sick of the lies I was ready to turn in my resignation that day, but hadn't told anybody when the owner walked in un-announced with his accountant, and in 30 minutes found enough to have him escorted from the premises. So in the end I did win, and I went on to finally retire from there 3 years ago.
In any event, I have to agree with the previous posters regarding M$ having the arrogance to make such a statement in public. Here is another area where I suspect they will fail, after all, google has at least a 5 year head start at understanding how a search engine is supposed to work. Couple that with what may be a better working environment at google, and I suspect the outcome 15 years on down the log will be as predicted in that M$ will by then be a footnote in the history of computing. I'd like to be here to watch it, but that would make me 86 years old then, and I'm diabetic so my chances of that are pretty slim.
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Cheers, Gene
The only problem I see in your argument is non-transferability. If you prohibit transfer, the copyright becomes economically worthless, or at least much more difficult to use. That which cannot be transferred cannot be sold. Of course, perhaps (probably, I think) I'm reading you wrong as to what you mean by transferability.
This has been the mainstay of my argument regarding copyright law remolding for many years. The fact that the original artist/writer/whathaveyou must actually sell his copyright, and I mean every right & title he ever had in the work as the originator, to some megacorp publisher/exploiter in order to realize a damned dime for his effort, is the most rancorous thing in the current law once the outragious time its now valid has been brought back under control.
The title to the work should IMO, be locked in the originators name, for the duration of the copyright granted to him/her, and not for sale, ever. He should be able to negotiate a publication agreement for a fixed term of say 5 years, with that publisher then having the "copy" right to exclusive use of that work within the bounds of that contract. At the end of that contract, that publishers right to publish (copy) is terminated unless a new contract seems to make viable business sense, and the copyright itself remains with the original author for as long as the copyright is deemed to last, beit 10 years or whatever. If the publisher hasn't done a good job, then the author should be free to negotiate with another publisher once the first publishers "copy" right granted in that contract has expired.
As the system currently works, most authors die as paupers. Occasionally one hits the big time, like J. K. Rowlings, but in todays near monopoly over access to a printing press, those are rare birds indeed.
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Cheers, Gene
Considering that they miss-micro-managed for years and finally closed up their local store 6 months ago, I don't think much of the last sputter of a dying corporations campfire.
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Cheers, Gene
The applications may not be available NOW, but that doomsday scenario won't fit for long, and the coders who will be asked to duplicate/improve the NLA M$ stuff will suddenly find they've got all the work they can handle. Things might get rough for a month or 2, but IMO one year down the log, most will be better off, and 2 years down the log everyone will be asking themselves "why the hell didn't we do this in the first place?"
That won't be done behind soundproof walls and razorwire fences either, it will filter out to the rest of the world. At that point, M$ becomes irrevelant unless they actually have a better product. Vista will make or finish them and the choice is M$'s to make.
But, what do ya wanna bet? Rather than compete on a level playing field, they'll spend obscene amounts of money on lawyers, the other scourge of civilization.
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Cheers, Gene
If they really cared about this fine they'd refuse to pay it and watch the uproar that would ensue when it became illegal to sell Windows in the EU.
It will never happen. Even if (which I doubt as they'll at least try to kill eons with negotiations) Bill has to write the check (and keep writing them daily until the EU is satisfied) there is no way in hell that M$ will just let the EU default to linux or the various bsd's.
As for the price per day, ISTR seeing someplace that the fine was chosen to match the estimated sales per day within the EU. Can anyone deny/confirm that? If true, then I don't see it as excessive. Were I setting it, given the testimony thats been given ink that I've seen, I think I'd have chosen it to be a net loss per sale, of the price of the sale, or 2x the street price.
I'm with Linus in this: "If we change how microsoft does business, then we will have won".
As for the billions Bill has, I would wager that if he actually did business on the merits of his product, 2 things would have already happened. 1. Windows would be a hell of a lot more stable and secure than it historicly has been, and 2. He would have made even more money! Of course that would have had to happen 20 years ago in order to head linux off at the pass. I don't recall what his worth was then, but it surely would have been sufficient to survive the corporate direction change that would have required. One things for sure, M$ has enough in the bank to survive a rebirth in the business office, so I fail to see why the hint isn't being taken other than the corporate blinders are causing a total, identifiable by any optometrist, case of tunnel vision.
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Cheers, Gene
Hence if someone wishes to donate computer time it will be useful if all one had to do is to download a BOINC like client that will then run whatever the server sends it. Of course you'd need a reputable institution with a sensible scientific board running the server...
And thereby hangs the tale. I ran seti since about a month after it started, and had a ranking of 99.98% in the world at one point, in the top 10,000 in other words. All the while it ran on my linux boxes, it ran at a priority of 20, meaning the instant anything else wanted some cpu cycles, they got them with no interference from seti whatsoever. You never knew it was there until you did a top & found it was using 97+% of the cpu most of the time.
Then they switched it to Boinc. Boinc was apparently developed on a windoze box and had no knowledge of mutiltasking priorities. None, nada. I modified the script to launch it with the proper priority, but when it changed packets, which is a 4-9 times a day occurance with my hardware, it forgot it and launched the next session at full 0 priority, and I lost my machines as everything else came to a glacial speed crawl. I fought with that for about 6 months, but everytime they'd update BOINC, it was back to square one. Then the email address for the helpline went dead, and there was no way to contact anyone. Problems with the winderz version appeared to be the subject of mad overnight fixit sessions cause it usually got fixed the next day. But fresh executables for linux? Maybe 4 in the 6 months I tried to be a nice guy. 2 of which were, IIRC, incompatible with their predecessors requireing a full wipe & reinstall.
Then they changed the stats pages, and didn't carry your old rankings over to the new system. There was supposedly a registration page that would enable that feature, but it didn't work the first time and refused to take an entry from me ever again.
And there still wasn't a working email address for the project. No bounces, but it was very effective as a black hole in that no messages were ever acknowledged in any manner. I sent a dozen or more.
At that point I had had enough and commented all my scripts out and rebooted the two boxes that were running it. Frankly, I wouldn't mind doing a little climate prediction work, but I won't touch it with a 20 foot pole until Boinc, and the people involved in it are out of the picture.
The keyword here, in case there is a Boinc person reading this, is that these machines are MINE not yours, and if your software attempts to take full control of MY machines as was the case when I stopped Boinc over a year ago now, then such obnoxious behaviour will be dealt with by stopping the project. You can have my spare cycles, but I'll be damned if you'll get them all.
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Cheers, gene
I'd say that the penalty was fair. It's not necessary to drive the company out of business - just necessary to give them a sting so that they don't do it again.
No, sorry, that doesn't cut it with this old fart. Until they are put out of business, and their database put in escrow for purposes of forensics traceing only, with it to be preserved on non-networked servers that it takes a federal court order to gain access to, such shennanigans will continue. While they're at it, I'd be in favor of the top floor executives haveing a hand amputated in the grand old arab justice manner. Maybe both hands for the President of such a company.
I frankly could care less about the collateral damages from putting many of such a companies rank & file people out of work, they knew full well the type of business they were working for. I cannot seriously seperate those people from all the 419 scammers in Nigeria. They're all birds of a feather. Put them out of business, mark them physicly for life and make it damned clear that this is what will happen to everyone that abuses the data they are in charge of. Then and only then will these leaches turn honest.
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Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, Hadron indeed. Leave it to Bruce to come up with something like that. Me, I'm just a simple old fart, with a CET & a GED, (in that order) but in 71 years my reading has gotten me a pretty decent grasp of the physical world & its rules & regulations.
The nice thing about the world I make my living in is that so far, within my lifetime, not one law of physics has changed in any way shape or form. Extended the number of digits to the right of the decimal point to the point of being ridiculous maybe, but no REAL changes.
That tends to make me think that we do in fact, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics. IMO, the only thing we're missing is the "gravity to the rest of it" connection, confounded by the inconvienient fact that gravity appears to be the only force in the universe which is apparently instantainious over galactic distances. Go work any celestial orbital mechanics problem, including the orbit of the earth around the sun, and try and make it work if the gravitational attraction vector is assumed to be toward where the sun appears to be now (as opposed to where it is right now instead where it was 8 minutes ago when that light left the suns position then). By adding any delay, the orbit falls apart, and our earth would have spiraled into the sun many billions of years ago.
I've made several attempts to get my head around this 'string' thing, all of which usually leaves me with not a hadron, but a headache. I can take a pill for that.
What I think we are seeing here is the first child, who not knowing any better, points out that the emperor's new clothes aren't just lightweight and airy, but wholly non-existant. Except, I suspect this 'child' would be considerably better off in taking a mensa application than I as my one IQ test (not a mensa test FWIW, but the Iowa test of 55 years ago) only indicating about 147.
Thanks for the grin, Bruce.
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Cheers, Gene
Hold up on the bulldozer for another day, I've got parts made out of pure un-obtainium that I'd like to get this side of the state line. Then I'll buy that dozer the first tank of fuel...
Somebody should send this Horn person a copy of the Bill of Rights, with the appropriate ones (pural) that she wants to violate circled in red. And duplicates to the local papers for use on the editorial page.
What I want to know, is how does such a person manage to get into such a position of authority? If its an elected position, then come the next election, they should be remembered. And so would those who appointed this person is its an appointed position. If you live there, look it up folks, and act like you care by applying the 2nd box of liberty, the ballot box next election day.
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Cheers, Gene
Then its time for the 4th of those famous boxes to be used. I'm sure you are all familiar with that saying re the 4 boxes to protect and defend liberty? Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
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Cheers, Gene
Obviously D, all of the above.
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No cheers on this one, Gene
So far in this thread, this is the only post that actually makes sense.
Just two flies in this otherwise tasty bowl of soup though.
1. The makers haven't the manpower to do anything but wholesale deletion of the messages that would be generated by such a setup. They would be forced to resort to that because their mail servers hard drives will be filled to 100% with unread messages eventually. I have serious doubts that very many of them would even have multlingual employees who could translate our rantings in whatever language might be our native tongue, into something that can be read to TPTB in the boardrooms.
2. Knowing this, there is no way in hell any of them will ever give out an actual, working, email address for us dissatisfied users to mailbomb.
The only way I can see for that to work, and even that will take way too much time, is to publicise on this list, those makers that refuse to co-operate in this regard, in that way giving the potential buyer notice that this maker doesn't have any interest in FOSS/linux, or how a free market works, so this product, regardless of what final product its incorporated into, is to be avoided. If such a list could be used to haul them out behind the woodshed for an introduction to the board of education, as administered to their bottom line with ever increasing obviousness as FOSS takes over from M$, thats all to the better IMO. For M$, the handwriting has been on the wall for several years now. There is no legal way they can win, but we need to be very carefull of their attempts to make legal, what is absolutely, totally, morally wrong in order for M$ to maintain their near monopolistic grip on the OS software arena.
Is this morally blackmail? A definite maybe, but I think its called free market economics by the spin doctors.
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Cheers, Gene
I'm fur it, that way I wouldn't have to stand there and read all the fine print thats getting harder to read all the time, hopeing to find, someplace on the friggin label, the now famous Phillips CD logo. Cause if it doesn't have it, there is a 99% probability will never make it into MY shopping cart.
All carefully explained to the floor walkers trying to keep the kids from sticking the latest sample of the noise they call music into their baggy pants. It of course goes in one ear and out the other as the rantings of a senior citizen who hasn't been taking his medicine regularly cause they haven't a clue what DRM stands for, and haven't got pair of quarters to call someone who might be able to explain it to them in one syllable words.
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Cheers, gene
now all we need to do is centralize breeding and we're set.
In case you hadn't noticed, we get bred, whether we're in season or not, by our all omnipotent government everytime we walk out the door into the real world. The only real difference between us and a prostitute is that the prostitute usually gets paid for it, whereas we all pay for the 'priviledge' of getting bred.
Minor semantics difference, usually lost in the rest of the crowd noise.
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Cheers, Gene
The problem has escalated to the PITA level over the last year, and I know of at least one project that went someplace else because we users could rarely get cvs to work, and the developers had access maybe one day a week. That was emc, both versions. We got to trading personal emails with patches attached since the listserver doesn't allow attachments.
There have been other desertions but I don't recall their names ATM as I don't use them all that often.
sourceforge claimed they had found some bad hardware 2-3 weeks ago, and that the situation should 'improve'. Improve to me, means the problem isn't as bad. To which I'll reply, why the heck hasn't it been fixed? If they are to offer this service, it should Just Work(TM).
Personally, I find the thought of one single place for 95% of our source code scarey as hell. What if they should go away without notice? The Open Source movement in general would be dealt a huge blow that it would take a year+ to recover from, and some would never come back because the programmer isn't interested in re-inventing the wheel yet again.
Yeah, among my retirement 'hobbies' I have a small cnc mill, run by emc-2.
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Cheers, Gene
So what do you suggest? That every project must generate a "stable" release for every single patch that goes into CVS, or that every single patch must be back-ported to the "stable" branch and then generate a "stable" build?
Seriously, this whole argument is fucking bullshit. I say this as someone who has to manage a big project; a single release takes us weeks to generate and test, and this clown is whinging because I don't have the time to release more than once every two months if I'm lucky? What an ass.
Damn, who pissed in your cherrio's? I for one only have one problem with cvs, and its specific to sourceforge. Specifically its pure bullshit that their server for any one project is down 90% of the time. I don't mind being told that its fixed in cvs, if I could goto cvs and suck the fixed code right then and there, while the iron is hot. This bullshit of screwing around when you can think of it for anywhere up to a weeks worth of days or nights before you catch that server in the mood to actually let you get the code sucks donkey balls.
Well, actually I have 2 problems since I use an rpm based distro, and that is the comparative inability to manage a system where, because the friggin rpms won't do what needs to be done, so you garb the tarball or the cvs if you can make it work, and make away. But then yum et all have NFI whats on the system and insists that it knows better and tries to rip out everything related to printing because you've installed gutenprint due to the available rpms all being gimp-print-4.2.7, which doesn't YET support a 5 year old Epson printer. But thats an entirely separate bitch, which is only going to get fixed with each distro taking checkinstall under its wing, and making up preconfigured versions of it already customized to work with the package manager that distro uses. It can be done, I've done it for my FC2 system at home.
Now, go get a fresh bowl of cherrios, and point the accusing finger at the source of the frustration, in this case sourceforge itself.
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Cheers, Gene
And of course its been instantly /.'d. Great work there kiddies.
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Cheers, Gene
Ah, to be young. I remember when I was you age. I was an idealist too. Once you get out in the real world and reality sinks in, that will change.
Then whats my excuse? I'm a youngster of 71, and I totally fail to detect the sarcasm I'm sure you intended when you wrote that. We obviously need a sarcasm smiley.
In any event, what I want to know is "where do I sign up to get into what is going to be the biggest class action suit ever won, because this one certainly is?"
I'm not kidding, nor am I trying to be sarcastic. I don't have any connections that I know of to any of these so called terrorists, I'm just an old fart thats been trying to retire for the last 4 years, failed miserably, but it nobodys business but mine who I call, or who calls me for that matter.
So where do I sign up, I need to fatten my teeny little SS nestegg.
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Cheers, gene
Obviously you are not an american citizen. However, that doesn't make you automaticly wrong, because you are righter than you can imagine. I'm not one of the 40% that didn't vote, and I can claim that I didn't vote for either of those jerks in the last go-round. IMNSHO, neither of those those 4 phsychopaths the republicrats ran were fit to sit in that chair!
Bush, for all his illegal bullshit, was in retrospect, the better choice of the two because the dems ran a couple of screaming idiots against him. Give the voters who did vote credit for being able to see which was the lesser evil. Some of us voted for 3rd and 4th party people, knowing full well it was just pissing into the wind, but it was better than the alternative in our view.
But the level of evil between them is only relative. We, my wife and I, perceived both offerings as being less than what we needed. But thats how we (the people) voted, so everyone is fully justified in saying that we got exactly what we deserved. What we need in that office is an honest to God Patriot, one with enough balls to clean out the rest of the mess.
But you know what? For 2 reasons, there is no way in hell he could get elected. Reason #1 is that if he is an honest man, he in all probability won't be able to mount a campaign of any real consequence because he won't have the sheckels to pay for it. The other, 2nd reason of course is that a quite large percentage of the Joe Sixpacks that do stumble into the polling place and vote, will vote for what they perceive as someone who won't upset the status quo, and thats exactly what a real patriot would do. We're scared of change, AND THATS THE WHOLE, UNFORTUNATELY PURE BULLSHIT TRUTH!
If we don't fix this in 2008 with the ballot box, then there is little hope of the jury box doing any real good (Bush has already seen to that), and that leaves the ammo box. The choice is ours to make.
As to the person who said we couldn't do anything if the military shows up, but we still have the posse commitatus (check that spelling) which will give them 2nd thoughts, and some of us are pretty good shots. I've worn out 3 rifle barrels at the range over the last 40 some years, and I've brought venison home 4 times that was well over 400 yards away when the first cap was cracked, one from 640 yards. And I have a lot of company in the form of the deer & other large game hunters that annually spend several billion on the pursuit of a little fun or meat from our sport. And it won't cost me $2 to crack a cap, I load my own. Would I turn into a guerilla sniper in a case like that? I'm already had a pretty full life at my age, and if I could leave this country a little better for my great-grandchildren, then you can figure out what I'll do.
I'm reminded of a statement made late in WWII by a japanese commander who had been captured, when he was asked why, when they were off the coast of California in '42, they didn't attempt a landing and invasion before we were well mobilized? His reply was that they weren't that dumb, and were fully aware that every 3rd house they would march by was occupied by citizens with guns who would not even consider holding their fire. We knew we would be decimated before we had marched 5 miles. Country boy dumb he might have been, but he sure as hell wasn't stupid. We common citizens (the "militia" in the 2nd amendment) DO represent a powerfull force should the occasion demand action.
I'm not currently a member of the NRA, but have been in the past, parting ways basicly over the sheer tonnage of pleas for money that found its way into my mailbox in an average month. OTOH, without their contribution to the political scene helping to protect not just the 2nd amendment, which is of course their major focus, but all 10 of them when push comes to shove (their last suit in federal court was a 1st amendment issue), we would not have today a single surviving right contained in the original "Bill of Rights". They're still being nibbled to death by ducks, but they have largely survived. A bit battle scarred in places, but at least they are still on the books.
Thanks for giving me a platform to speak from, and writing the triggering bit of well phrased prose.
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Cheers, Gene
tell them God did it
Love it. And it would certainly serve all those self-rightious idiots trying to set the nations educational system back 100,000 years about right. What the hell ever became of the strain of humans that lived in Kansas in 1895? Go look up the 8th grade final exam used by the Salinas KS schools in 1895 (see google). I dare say that not one person living today could get an A on that test. And yet its all common sense daily useage problems of an everyday practical nature even in todays world.
But to put this back on topic a bit, the next question I come up with is: How many gallons of shit does it take to make a gallon of this stuff, and on the same vein, how efficiently would we have to be in following range cattle around in order to meet that quota in gallons per year in order to become self-sufficient?
Conversely, are we removing its final value as a fertilizer to replenish the soil? Spreading the used cowbarn bedding on the fields is a time honored way to actually improve the soils over time, and is still done today with at least 99% of it. The other 1% is probably going into tightly covered methane producing ponds that on a per site basis for large operations, is indeed making those operations self-sufficient in producing the electricity they need to run the operation. And they can still use the sludge as fertilizer. If we take that out of it, so the soil is not replenished, then I don't care how efficient the process can be made, its purely for short term gain, something the average MBA understands all too well. There ought to be a bounty on them critters as it seems to me the single most obvious requirement to become an MBA is to throw away any and all shreds of common sense God may have given them in the first place. But thats another rant entirely.
Interesting questions, but the VC folks, before they'll even get upwind of the project, will want to know all these things in order to figure out the feasability of turning a profit in a reasonable time frame. And too many of them are 90 day wonder MBA's.
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Cheers, Gene
US tells company to grow up and deal with it like everyone else.
Only in your wildest dreams as long as there's a republican in the white house.
If your memory hasn't yet succumbed to alzheimers, you'll recall that when he came to power, justice was just a few more hearings from issueing a probable breakup order that would make Judge Greens AT&T order look like THE precedent setting order of the century.
He gets sworn in on the 20th of January, and by Feb 1, justice has been told to stand down in no uncertain terms.
Then, just because 'he needs to finish this war' he gets another 4 years to play God from the sheeple. Methinks theres some confusion in his mind as to just who is God, him or the real one.
I didn't vote for him the second time, and I damned sure hope the dems can come up with a candidate that doesn't come with all the baggage the last 2 had a huge excess of, even turning off diehard deomcrats because they were actually seen as the worst of 2 evils.
So the sheeple here voted for the lessor of 2 evils, not fully understanding the depths of the ranking on a true scale.
As a senior citizen who may not have that many more elections to exersize my right to vote in, I am truely sad for my country.
And I would hope, probably futily, that washington will have the decent good sense to stay the hell out of this dogfight, its not theirs, although their past in-actions HAVE certainly allowed it to become one. Its been business as usual in Redmond for 6 years that should never have been allowed to happen IMO.
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Cheers, Gene