I don't know the details but if they have contractual claims Vongae have a duty on behalf of their share holders to sue.
If I were a director of Vonage and my boss the shareholders could possibly come after me in some manner for negligence if for example the company now sinks. So not only do I want to avoid exposing myself to being unable to be a director (if it were the UK) for a while, prison or huge payouts to the actual shareholders or sue people who were in breach of contract what would I do.
Gosh that is such a tough quesiton.
Any one else noticed how many slashdots turn into debates on the law?
And in fact one of the best ingredients the imaginative can offer their challenged friends (from my experience as a role player) is imagination.
Now specific examples that may or may not work. Well any MMUG could conceivably be run on an open source project much like JBOSS is an application server. So you get a market leading Game server and look after it for the creative talent who want you to hack some neat feature just for them. - It might work, and it is just one example
I suspect there are other business models that might offer a living to the best solution. Who'd have thought someone could get rich selling you phone numbers (OK generic contact) to the people you didn't really like or know from school. It happened.
But the console is so much quicker. The other thing is I don't want to be a mouse guru because using the mouse too long hurts my hand and is slow. A large mouse (or big ball instead) mitigates this to some extent but I still have to use my off hand most of the time and just switch to my better trained hand when I need to be precise.
My question is will you give up speech in favour of just pointing and grunting? Go into bar and order two beers using point, grunt! grunt! Versus the more powerful and expressive two Guiness please. Or perhaps to augment the point and grunt you could carry a set or prepared cards with your limited but main instructions on.
Maybe this idea needs branching to other uses such as.novis [no vision for the partially sited or blind].nomobi [for those with limited dexterity for use of keyboards etc]
I just don't agree that it is a steep learning curve. Having been nothing but a Linux user (and Live BSD and things but no Windows) I have recently had to start using WinXP for some contract work. There are some things I like, mainly that it feels polished. Overall however I (20 years plus experience with computers) am finding it a deeply frsutrating experience and cannot find out how to do things like stop the power settings reverting to 20 minutes turn off.
In all I find XP very hard to use in a powerful way. But to do simplistic things like most users probably do no simpler and usually more clicks required (I'm back to having a mouse hand that hurts).
To me it seems like oh put a computer there and only use it once in a while. If that is a full spec'd machine for say Vista you are really wasting resources. If M$ want to do this they want to provide thin Linux clients running NXFree that attach to M$ servers.
A better bet for them would probably be to aid the progress of something like ReactOS. I imagine there are many problems overall though such as
a; if they support or have hand on old versions of Win still no one moves on to their newer versions and they run higher risk of incurring at least very bad publicity if they don't continue support.
b; helping ReactOS would be to fuel something that could be (medium to long term if they gave aid) a competitor to one of their only big revenue schemes.
Practical modern interpretations of the purpose of business mean it can't be done.
It would be nice in some of these circumstances to see the supposed offender just turn around and say "Fuck Off" take us to court and prove damages if you think you can and we think we are just celebrating them in an acceptable manner and besides by the time you get to court our celebration will be over and you'll just be left as mardy arses wasting money on expensive lawyers.
And in order to do more securely do that perhaps Google should spin off a seperate entity that looks after their portal for them who has nothing but could be sued (for nothing).
And we knnow the towns folk of Sringfield have moved it at least once, why not more than once depending upon which disaster they wanted to leave behind. We just haven't seen those events. Probably have to wait for books to fill them in like they do between events for Star Trek, Buffy etc...
I'm glad someone mention HVDC schemes. I was just sitting here thinking "hold on what about those HVDC systems I worked on 10 years ago and my dad 35 years ago", things like the link under the English Channel or Manitoba or Chandripur and so many more. (I can only name those as they're ones I had something to do with)
Bertrand Russel in the History of Western Philosophy puts it very well
To Summarise
Religion is speculation on matters to which definite knowledge has so far been unascertainable whilst science is the definite knowledge with Philosophy fitting in the middle being questions about things to which we have some knowledge. - page 1 of the introduction.
"All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses deinite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a no man's land -.... philosophy".
I worked for a small company providing a lot of people to develop engine control software for Ford. That distinction didn't persist we were treated like part of the team. I do remember contractors being treated a little differently.
I think the difference was we were from a high quality small company and didn't get paid as well as them package summed. No threat but a lot of respect for being good at what we did.
We were also aloof of the office (company) politics and ladder of progression so again were not a threat. Funny different company cultures. A final difference might have been that Ford had a 2.1 degree minimum but our place was first from Cambridge prefered.
In the end I think it worked because all of the people from my company were nice, the kind of friendly folks you would invite to your party!
He can moan but it just makes him a moaner. Why should anyone listen to a moaner?
Instead he could contribute in one of the many ways such as constructive points about why some things are better than others and even better he could fix or improve something.
On a social level it's like him saying district X is rubbish because all its people are unpaid and they don't spend any of the money they have on (oh hang on they don't have any) fixing up their houses to be as pretty as district Y and oh look they have no money but it is all their fault that the roof leaks.
So yes if he doesn't like living under a leaky roof he can either pay to get it fixed, move out or sit there in a puddle moaning. Now I'll leave it to you to decide what sort of neighbours you would prefer to have. What makes it worse is he is a district Y person come in to district X to look around and chooses to sit in the puddle and moan!
And moaning about Windows is quite different as some times it is broken. You have paid for something that works. If you bought a toaster that didn't toast when the fridge door was open you would probably take it back and demand a refund. (Though they would probably say it was the vacuum cleaners fault, if you didn't have that type of vacuum that causes a bad connection between the toaster and fridge the toaster would work fine. And they might be right!)
Doing a remake with an existing name "The Prisoner" catches peoples existing mind share automoton will sit down and watch it (at least once) mentality.
Things that are competely new are often never recognised as good or classic in their own time. Especially think art. So remakes are in effect cashin in on the past risk taking.
What we all want to know therefore is where are the risk takers providing "The Prisoner" of the future.
On the other hand there is something culturally useful to remakes in that they can post a contempory take on the times for comparison with the past. Allowing futures generations (assuming human survival) to judge us for our era of failing innovation, greed and cowardice. I'll stop there I'm starting to rant in a detracting kind of way
We could just build cars that don't do more than 70mph. The fact that the vast majority don't go out and by cars that are limited to 70mph might be suggestive that the vast mass majority do not want that to happen. It would be cheap too, one line of code (maybe 5) in the engine controller.
We could also require secure loggers on all cars with a major offense if you tamper that can be read at a distance by the police. They recorded your speed but not location at all times. If you speed you can be done.
But no the choice is for a system that allows for the tracking at all times of vehicles. Why? I could easily feel paranoid about this.
The UK intends to bring in GPS based road charging in 5 to 10 years, why waste money on this intervening system?
The whole thing has lots of oddities to it if it is just to stop speeding.
You make a good point. If you stopped next to a terrorist you are likely to end up detained for 28 days whilst they rip your house apart and everything else you own!
I wonder if they will give equal time to my slighlty varied ID theory. That super inteligent pigs in alternate dimensions ate some bad food and in an atrocious bout of IBS fired out into lesser dimensions an expanding mass of cooling matter.
With part of its nature being that of a good fertilser containing the seeds of life along with their psychic control it was shaped into the universe as we know it.
Please don't ask what black holes are under this theory:-)
at least not the way the dot com stuff did. Simply because open source is built to withstand the destruction of its creators. Others can continue the work. So the actual substance will remain.
Mean while the actual financial love affair and cash influx could of course bomb. Then things would be just like they were for the previous twenty years just with the aftermath of an expansion bulge, lots of new code and tools sitting around forming part of the common code available for use.
That sounds a little like saying a critic who reads books to earn a living by writing reviews should only read bits of them to comment on and not the whole because to make a living that in some way involves the whole work is a copyright infringement?
I suppose I'm thinking that if you have a book of 10 thousand sentences and you have 10 thousand people each knowing and answering (having memorised their line) questions on that line you don't infringe but a single person who knows all 10 thousand lines that ansers questions does infringe?
"He probably noticed something Microsoft will need in the future and wants to develop it on his own and then sell it for more biggie bucks."
He better have enough money or the right contract to fight of MS when they say you thought of that whilst employed by us we own it already hand it over.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were a director of Vonage and my boss the shareholders could possibly come after me in some manner for negligence if for example the company now sinks. So not only do I want to avoid exposing myself to being unable to be a director (if it were the UK) for a while, prison or huge payouts to the actual shareholders or sue people who were in breach of contract what would I do.
Gosh that is such a tough quesiton.
Any one else noticed how many slashdots turn into debates on the law?
Now specific examples that may or may not work. Well any MMUG could conceivably be run on an open source project much like JBOSS is an application server. So you get a market leading Game server and look after it for the creative talent who want you to hack some neat feature just for them. - It might work, and it is just one example
I suspect there are other business models that might offer a living to the best solution. Who'd have thought someone could get rich selling you phone numbers (OK generic contact) to the people you didn't really like or know from school. It happened.
My question is will you give up speech in favour of just pointing and grunting? Go into bar and order two beers using point, grunt! grunt! Versus the more powerful and expressive two Guiness please. Or perhaps to augment the point and grunt you could carry a set or prepared cards with your limited but main instructions on.
I think you get the idea.
In all I find XP very hard to use in a powerful way. But to do simplistic things like most users probably do no simpler and usually more clicks required (I'm back to having a mouse hand that hurts).
Somewhere there I might be poking fun.
Or if you are lucky in the first place you look....
a; if they support or have hand on old versions of Win still no one moves on to their newer versions and they run higher risk of incurring at least very bad publicity if they don't continue support.
b; helping ReactOS would be to fuel something that could be (medium to long term if they gave aid) a competitor to one of their only big revenue schemes.
Practical modern interpretations of the purpose of business mean it can't be done.
And in order to do more securely do that perhaps Google should spin off a seperate entity that looks after their portal for them who has nothing but could be sued (for nothing).
I'm sick of money grabbing greedy folks.
And we knnow the towns folk of Sringfield have moved it at least once, why not more than once depending upon which disaster they wanted to leave behind. We just haven't seen those events. Probably have to wait for books to fill them in like they do between events for Star Trek, Buffy etc...
I'm glad someone mention HVDC schemes. I was just sitting here thinking "hold on what about those HVDC systems I worked on 10 years ago and my dad 35 years ago", things like the link under the English Channel or Manitoba or Chandripur and so many more. (I can only name those as they're ones I had something to do with)
Russell should of course be two l. My mistake.
To Summarise
Religion is speculation on matters to which definite knowledge has so far been unascertainable whilst science is the definite knowledge with Philosophy fitting in the middle being questions about things to which we have some knowledge. - page 1 of the introduction.
"All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses deinite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a no man's land - .... philosophy".
This story just gave me the notion of how great it would feel for someone to come along and build a machine for Linux.
Is it anywhere else? Not yet but as they tried to hide this report who the hell knows?
I worked for a small company providing a lot of people to develop engine control software for Ford. That distinction didn't persist we were treated like part of the team. I do remember contractors being treated a little differently.
I think the difference was we were from a high quality small company and didn't get paid as well as them package summed. No threat but a lot of respect for being good at what we did.
We were also aloof of the office (company) politics and ladder of progression so again were not a threat. Funny different company cultures. A final difference might have been that Ford had a 2.1 degree minimum but our place was first from Cambridge prefered.
In the end I think it worked because all of the people from my company were nice, the kind of friendly folks you would invite to your party!
Opera becomes the new IE would be clever because it would also be unbundled from the OS and therefore get around some major legal baggage too.
Instead he could contribute in one of the many ways such as constructive points about why some things are better than others and even better he could fix or improve something.
On a social level it's like him saying district X is rubbish because all its people are unpaid and they don't spend any of the money they have on (oh hang on they don't have any) fixing up their houses to be as pretty as district Y and oh look they have no money but it is all their fault that the roof leaks.
So yes if he doesn't like living under a leaky roof he can either pay to get it fixed, move out or sit there in a puddle moaning. Now I'll leave it to you to decide what sort of neighbours you would prefer to have. What makes it worse is he is a district Y person come in to district X to look around and chooses to sit in the puddle and moan!
And moaning about Windows is quite different as some times it is broken. You have paid for something that works. If you bought a toaster that didn't toast when the fridge door was open you would probably take it back and demand a refund. (Though they would probably say it was the vacuum cleaners fault, if you didn't have that type of vacuum that causes a bad connection between the toaster and fridge the toaster would work fine. And they might be right!)
Things that are competely new are often never recognised as good or classic in their own time. Especially think art. So remakes are in effect cashin in on the past risk taking.
What we all want to know therefore is where are the risk takers providing "The Prisoner" of the future.
On the other hand there is something culturally useful to remakes in that they can post a contempory take on the times for comparison with the past. Allowing futures generations (assuming human survival) to judge us for our era of failing innovation, greed and cowardice. I'll stop there I'm starting to rant in a detracting kind of way
We could also require secure loggers on all cars with a major offense if you tamper that can be read at a distance by the police. They recorded your speed but not location at all times. If you speed you can be done.
But no the choice is for a system that allows for the tracking at all times of vehicles. Why? I could easily feel paranoid about this.
The UK intends to bring in GPS based road charging in 5 to 10 years, why waste money on this intervening system?
The whole thing has lots of oddities to it if it is just to stop speeding.
You make a good point. If you stopped next to a terrorist you are likely to end up detained for 28 days whilst they rip your house apart and everything else you own!
With part of its nature being that of a good fertilser containing the seeds of life along with their psychic control it was shaped into the universe as we know it.
Please don't ask what black holes are under this theory:-)
Mean while the actual financial love affair and cash influx could of course bomb. Then things would be just like they were for the previous twenty years just with the aftermath of an expansion bulge, lots of new code and tools sitting around forming part of the common code available for use.
Worst case doesn't sound too bad?
I suppose I'm thinking that if you have a book of 10 thousand sentences and you have 10 thousand people each knowing and answering (having memorised their line) questions on that line you don't infringe but a single person who knows all 10 thousand lines that ansers questions does infringe?
He better have enough money or the right contract to fight of MS when they say you thought of that whilst employed by us we own it already hand it over.