As someone who spent about twenty years of his life as a professional compiler writer, no, that's not the problem. My company marketed compilers for Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++ on the PDP-11, Vax, M68K, Sparc, N3200, MIPS and x86 (not all languages on all platforms). All based on a single technology.
We routinely beat the system vendor's offerings on benchmarks and (more importantly) real programs.
And we went broke a decade ago, oh well. Compilers became a commodity and we didn't figure out the consequences in time...
Microsoft has shown that they'll do their very best to stop you without regard to the law. Raising enough money to fight that isn't very likely to happen (why do you think the only credible threats to MS come from an existing competitor [Apple] and a competitor built by volunteers?)
If Microsoft were a law-abiding monopolist there'd be no problem. Competitors might not flourish but at least there'd be the kind of competitive opportunities that you seem to think exist today (but don't).
Pardon me, but as an old PDP-11 hacker (one who played with Unix in 1974) that dear old machine was perfectly capable of supporting virtual memory.
As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).
Virtual memory was actually old-hat by then in the mainframe world. I don't argue for chops on those grounds, but these early VM efforts on *minicomputers* were significant.
I agree... the historical value is great. I personally have in my possession PDP-11 V7 sources (with my marked-up changes to the terminal driver to change from Multics-style line editing to DEC-style editing) but have no legal right to distribute them.
People will probably bitch that the sources have no *future value* and they'll be right. But... who cares? History is, well, history.
Of course, the concentration camp was invented by the British (in the Boer War). Women, children, and old men. Tens of thousands died. Trust me, Lord Kitchner was neither socialist or communist...
And of course we shoved plenty of our own citizens into concentration camps during WWII, those who happened to be of Japanese descent.
No, these concentration camps weren't anything at all like Nazi extermination camps. Nor as bad as the British camps in the Boer War. People weren't dying of starvation.
Well, I know someone who, when in grad school two years ago, mailed textbooks from LA to Boston. The box arrived full of old phone books... several hundred dollars worth of textbooks missing.
Their citizens are certainly poor compared to those in the West. However they're much less poor than they were before the Communists took over. And they're no longer starving.
Of course, the Communists in China didn't overthrow a democratic state. They replaced an ineffective authoratarian government with an authoritarian government that is at least effective enough to see that its people have enough food to eat.
If you want to see abject poverty, take a trip to India, a democracy. Should we condemn democracy because of India's poverty?
Putting China's screening techniques on the same level as the USA's once again shows your liberal bias.
No, it shows a certain level of ignorance, but ignorance isn't confined to liberals. Plenty of your fellow-traveller right-wingers accuse the US of being a "police state". Gordon Liddy comes to mind. The Posse Comitatus don't think of themselves as being "liberal", nor do those in the "county movement" so prevelant in places like rural Nevada.
Yep, I'd say your posts are pretty fair evidence that those on the right are as frequently ignorant as those on the left...
And their excellent AOLserver is open source, too. They bought NaviServer and shortly thereafter offered binary downloads for free, then switched to a fully open source model two-three years ago.
AOLserverruns big parts of aol.com and digitalcity.com. Say what you may about the quality of AOL's services, but when was the last time you heard of either of those websites going down? Or getting hacked?
BTW biosphere 2 is not dead. It's now run by Columbia which makes use of it to conduct a wide variety of ecological and biological experiments. All the systems which were designed to mimic various existing ecosystems can be made to vary parameters like temperature, humidity, atmospheric chemistry, etc in a very controlled way and on a relatively large scale.
So it's become quite a useful lab despite having been a failure for its original purpose.
It wasn't Lt. Calley who said that, BTW. I see your.sig on Slashdot frequently and the inaccuracy bugs me.
It was said by an Army officer in a famous TV interview, back in the days when villages were being rebuilt into strongpoints that supposedly would then defend themselves against Viet Cong infiltrators. This theory ignored the fact that the villagers mostly despised the current economic system and their obscenely corrupt government, and therefore welcomed the VC as prophets of change, but... never mind that.
The point of the statement was that the old village had to be destroyed and replaced with a new, fortified, Army-built strongpoint in order to save it from the VC. The officer (a Captain IIRC) didn't see the irony of the situation which his statement so succinctly summarized.
I don't remember Calley saying anything particularly memorable. "I was just following orders" was already a trite, worn-out phrase by then.
Bullshit. "VCR's" is archaic and today one would write "VCRs". EXCEPT in the very case you mention, when you use periods in the abbreviation you would properly use an apostrophe as in "V.C.R.'s".
To quote Webster's grammar quide:
An apostrophe is also used to form some plurals, especially the plural of letters and digits. Raoul got four A's last term and his sister got four 6's in the Olympic ice-skating competition. It is no longer considered necessary (but used to be!) or even correct to create the plural of years or decades or abbreviations with an apostrophe. He wrote several novels during the 1930s. There are fifteen PhDs on our faculty. My sister and I have identical IQs . (If you wrote Ph.D. with periods, you would add an apostrophe before the pluralizing "s": Ph.D.'s)
More information on the apostrophe can be found here.
The legal problem is that you've agreed to allow an audit by accepting the terms of the license.
Well, that's only one problem. Probable cause relates to criminal cases, not civil contractual disputes. You sign a contract with me, and I can sue you for non-compliance whenever I want (though a competent judge should throw out any obviously frivolous suits of this nature).
Of course, there's the whole EULA issue, but it's hard for a large organization that employes or retains legal beagles, to argue that they're unaware of the implications of such licenses.
Also, copyright infringement has nothing to do with this. License violations are the issue.
This may fly in the spirit of fair business dealings, but not "due process and the Constitution".
Since no one is claiming that copying licensed software is a right, you're raising a strawman.
That's not the issue. The issue is the non-trivial audit cost to licensees who are legally using the software, and the non-trivial audit costs plus penalties to those who may well have paid for a software license but may've lost the documentation.
And the audit provisions of the licenses are one-way, something ignored by organizations when they signed them.
By this I mean that the vendor has no obligation to record whether or not they've already been paid for a license. They can double-charge legal licensees who may've lost their documentation.
In many cases the customer may've assumed that the vendor keeps customer records, for instance. Given that Microsoft pays large-account sales people in part on a commission basis, we *know* they keep records at some levels. And these records are used, I'm sure, to generate revenue forecasts and to set sales goals.
But the customer being audited has no right to ask Microsoft to prove that they haven't paid, or that their license fees are out of line with the number of copies being used.
Nope. It's all one way, and this means organizations end up paying twice in some cases for software that's been legally licensed.
Now... what the hell does any of the above have to do with your presumption that "people think that illegally copying software is a right", dipshit?
To a certain point we *should* ignore the events of September 11, in terms of changing our daily lives.
This particular tactic has been thwarted. It was thwarted on the fourth plane when passengers elected to stop the hijackers or die trying. We're now making the cockpit entry-proof. Publicize the fact regardless of any number of people killed, bullets fired, bombs threatened that the cockpit door will NOT open, and the problem's solved.
Yes, new tactics will be developed in attempts to take over airplanes. But it has become substantially harder to do, and even last time only two of four caused horrific damage (the Pentagon loss, on the ground and in the plane, was roughly the same as if a fully-loaded 747 had crashed).
As far as antrax goes... the FBI formally contends that they believe the source is domestic, from one of our biological weapons facilities. Surely this suggests more effective ways of dealing with the threat than trying to sanitize each and every piece of mail or parcel shipped by the USPS?
The estimate of a million American dead (actually, the estimate was for casualties, i.e. wounded as well as KIA) was made after the war, in order to quench debate over whether or not the bomb should've been used on Japan.
The invasion planners estimated a far, far lower number, 50,000 or so.
If we'd agreed to let them keep their Emperor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese would've surrendered. We held out for unconditional surrender but, after dropping the two bombs, relented and accepted their surrender and allowed the emperor to remain on the throne..
Eisenhower and Marshall both opposed use of the bomb. In 1962 Eisenhower reiterated his belief that it wasn't necessary and that neither was invasion, that Japan was done and would've surrendered within weeks without either action taking place.
This is all documented (in Richard Rhodes's book, among many other places).
Heh, you laugh. The first useful program I wrote in my life was a bootstrap loader for the PDP-8. You toggled in a few instructions that loaded the loader, then the program from paper tape. DEC's format split 12 bit words into two 6 chunks leaving two bits on the tape unused (one bit was used as a "change address" flag). They'd distribute programs in one long stream with a checksum at the end. TTY 33 tape readers are slow (10 CPS) and unreliable, so after spending 10 minutes loading a program frequently you'd get a checksum error.
My format was a lot nicer, using all 8 bits (shorting load time) and breaking things up into blocks of 256 words, each with a checksum. If you got a checksum error you only had to back up one block rather than reload the whole damned program.
Getting this to work was one of the things that made me realize that writing software was what I wanted to do for a living.
I was in High School and the machine was a PDP-8/S (serial, 36 usecs to add two numbers) that travelled around between several schools, staying several weeks in one place and used to teach programming.
Most of the PDP-8 world used either reliable high-speed (300 CPS) optical paper tape readers, DECtape, or disks. 32 KW head-per-track drives, oh boy! or the RF08 that was 256 KW? something gigantic like that. We had one at the local science museum that died one day when a water-filled exhibit on the floor above dropped its load and gave the drive a shower.
Oracle has similar technology - "InterMedia". It will work with images, categorizing them by general shape and hue structure, letting you search for similar images.
It does audio, too.
Not to mention plain text and MS Word and...
Re:Libertarian Politics Fails Here
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
Living in the land of National Forests (Oregon), would you be so kind as to name those NFs which qualify as the "worst polluted sites in the country"?
Are our National Forests as well managed as they could be? Speaking as someone who has been active in conservation for twenty years, and served on the board of one of the two co-plaintiffs in the Northern Spotted Owl suit for fifteen years, I can attest to the fact that they are not.
However... they're *much* better managed for non-timber resources than the commercial forests in my state. Or, for that matter, the State Forests in my state.
If you read carefully it looks like the study's intended to compare the acres-of-beige-NT box scenario versus the consolidated server scenario (the IBM/Linux ad case now being seen on TV).
That's not anti-Linux per se. Remember that the previous e-mail supposedly leaked by this guy included some rough numbers comparing an IBM solution with a PC/NT solution. IBM may not charge for Linux but they charge a lot for hardware and service...
They assign engineers to study their competition and use that to build web-based and similar resources to help their sales force respond to common claims about that competitor (Linux, Sun/Solaris, whatever). A glorified FAQ backed by internal staff who are paid to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. At least, this is what the e-mail message implies.
There's nothing wrong with this, it's good marketing. I'm sure IBM has technical staff available who know how to run NT networks inside and out and are able to provide support for salesdroids delivering the "consolidated server vs. acres of beige boxes running NT" pitch.
Will the IBM salespeople be more honest than the MS salespeople. C'mon - they're SALESPEOPLE! On commission!
This isn't the homebrew server or even rack of DELL servers market being discussed by the e-mail. They're talking much bigger accounts - fly-by-night.com is hardly a "key account" for this guy's sales staff.
IBM is peppering every NFL game with their "The Heist" Linux ad. This ad is selling EXACTLY the server consolidation message the e-mail you so swiftly proclaim to be a hoax addresses.
The e-mail message mentions names IBM specifically. The last time I looked IBM did not fall into the category of "Linux companies going Chapter 11 left and right".
And the "escalation center" rings like it could be true, too. They're not fighting Debian - they're fighting IBM. IBM is clearly targetting MS in its current marketing campaign, so MS taking specific steps to counter them makes fine sense.
Now... it may be a hoax. But not for any of the reasons you mention.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who spent about twenty years of his life as a professional compiler writer, no, that's not the problem. My company marketed compilers for Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++ on the PDP-11, Vax, M68K, Sparc, N3200, MIPS and x86 (not all languages on all platforms). All based on a single technology.
We routinely beat the system vendor's offerings on benchmarks and (more importantly) real programs.
And we went broke a decade ago, oh well. Compilers became a commodity and we didn't figure out the consequences in time...
Microsoft has shown that they'll do their very best to stop you without regard to the law. Raising enough money to fight that isn't very likely to happen (why do you think the only credible threats to MS come from an existing competitor [Apple] and a competitor built by volunteers?)
If Microsoft were a law-abiding monopolist there'd be no problem. Competitors might not flourish but at least there'd be the kind of competitive opportunities that you seem to think exist today (but don't).
Yes, indeed. This is an example of the Bork that got "borked", not the Bork who's a leading expert on anti-trust law.
Well ... his positions on social issues might not meet your personal criteria of "conservativism for the people". Then again, maybe they would.
What's that book he wrote? "Slouching towards Gomorrah. Modern liberalism and the decline of civilization".
Care to guess what his attitude towards the games you play, music you listen to, body parts you pierce, etc is?
Pardon me, but as an old PDP-11 hacker (one who played with Unix in 1974) that dear old machine was perfectly capable of supporting virtual memory.
:)
As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).
Virtual memory was actually old-hat by then in the mainframe world. I don't argue for chops on those grounds, but these early VM efforts on *minicomputers* were significant.
Mostly because we were poor, of course
I agree ... the historical value is great. I personally have in my possession PDP-11 V7 sources (with my marked-up changes to the terminal driver to change from Multics-style line editing to DEC-style editing) but have no legal right to distribute them.
... who cares? History is, well, history.
People will probably bitch that the sources have no *future value* and they'll be right. But
Of course, the concentration camp was invented by the British (in the Boer War). Women, children, and old men. Tens of thousands died. Trust me, Lord Kitchner was neither socialist or communist ...
And of course we shoved plenty of our own citizens into concentration camps during WWII, those who happened to be of Japanese descent.
No, these concentration camps weren't anything at all like Nazi extermination camps. Nor as bad as the British camps in the Boer War. People weren't dying of starvation.
But they were concentration camps, nonetheless.
Well, I know someone who, when in grad school two years ago, mailed textbooks from LA to Boston. The box arrived full of old phone books ... several hundred dollars worth of textbooks missing.
Of course, that's Boston for you!
Their citizens are certainly poor compared to those in the West. However they're much less poor than they were before the Communists took over. And they're no longer starving.
Of course, the Communists in China didn't overthrow a democratic state. They replaced an ineffective authoratarian government with an authoritarian government that is at least effective enough to see that its people have enough food to eat.
If you want to see abject poverty, take a trip to India, a democracy. Should we condemn democracy because of India's poverty?
I think not.
No, it shows a certain level of ignorance, but ignorance isn't confined to liberals. Plenty of your fellow-traveller right-wingers accuse the US of being a "police state". Gordon Liddy comes to mind. The Posse Comitatus don't think of themselves as being "liberal", nor do those in the "county movement" so prevelant in places like rural Nevada.
Yep, I'd say your posts are pretty fair evidence that those on the right are as frequently ignorant as those on the left...
AOLserverruns big parts of aol.com and digitalcity.com. Say what you may about the quality of AOL's services, but when was the last time you heard of either of those websites going down? Or getting hacked?
The best polygamy tie-in yet is Polygamy Porter, made by the Wasatch brewers in Park City.
Read about it in the NY Times a couple of months ago. Their advertising includes gems like
"One is not enough!"
and
"Pick up a six-pack for the wives!"
Yes, that was the original biosphere 2 plan.
BTW biosphere 2 is not dead. It's now run by Columbia which makes use of it to conduct a wide variety of ecological and biological experiments. All the systems which were designed to mimic various existing ecosystems can be made to vary parameters like temperature, humidity, atmospheric chemistry, etc in a very controlled way and on a relatively large scale.
So it's become quite a useful lab despite having been a failure for its original purpose.
It wasn't Lt. Calley who said that, BTW. I see your .sig on Slashdot frequently and the inaccuracy bugs me.
... never mind that.
It was said by an Army officer in a famous TV interview, back in the days when villages were being rebuilt into strongpoints that supposedly would then defend themselves against Viet Cong infiltrators. This theory ignored the fact that the villagers mostly despised the current economic system and their obscenely corrupt government, and therefore welcomed the VC as prophets of change, but
The point of the statement was that the old village had to be destroyed and replaced with a new, fortified, Army-built strongpoint in order to save it from the VC. The officer (a Captain IIRC) didn't see the irony of the situation which his statement so succinctly summarized.
I don't remember Calley saying anything particularly memorable. "I was just following orders" was already a trite, worn-out phrase by then.
To quote Webster's grammar quide:
An apostrophe is also used to form some plurals, especially the plural of letters and digits. Raoul got four A's last term and his sister got four 6's in the Olympic ice-skating competition. It is no longer considered necessary (but used to be!) or even correct to create the plural of years or decades or abbreviations with an apostrophe. He wrote several novels during the 1930s. There are fifteen PhDs on our faculty. My sister and I have identical IQs . (If you wrote Ph.D. with periods, you would add an apostrophe before the pluralizing "s": Ph.D.'s)
More information on the apostrophe can be found here.
The legal problem is that you've agreed to allow an audit by accepting the terms of the license.
Well, that's only one problem. Probable cause relates to criminal cases, not civil contractual disputes. You sign a contract with me, and I can sue you for non-compliance whenever I want (though a competent judge should throw out any obviously frivolous suits of this nature).
Of course, there's the whole EULA issue, but it's hard for a large organization that employes or retains legal beagles, to argue that they're unaware of the implications of such licenses.
Also, copyright infringement has nothing to do with this. License violations are the issue.
This may fly in the spirit of fair business dealings, but not "due process and the Constitution".
Since no one is claiming that copying licensed software is a right, you're raising a strawman.
... what the hell does any of the above have to do with your presumption that "people think that illegally copying software is a right", dipshit?
That's not the issue. The issue is the non-trivial audit cost to licensees who are legally using the software, and the non-trivial audit costs plus penalties to those who may well have paid for a software license but may've lost the documentation.
And the audit provisions of the licenses are one-way, something ignored by organizations when they signed them.
By this I mean that the vendor has no obligation to record whether or not they've already been paid for a license. They can double-charge legal licensees who may've lost their documentation.
In many cases the customer may've assumed that the vendor keeps customer records, for instance. Given that Microsoft pays large-account sales people in part on a commission basis, we *know* they keep records at some levels. And these records are used, I'm sure, to generate revenue forecasts and to set sales goals.
But the customer being audited has no right to ask Microsoft to prove that they haven't paid, or that their license fees are out of line with the number of copies being used.
Nope. It's all one way, and this means organizations end up paying twice in some cases for software that's been legally licensed.
Now
To a certain point we *should* ignore the events of September 11, in terms of changing our daily lives.
... the FBI formally contends that they believe the source is domestic, from one of our biological weapons facilities. Surely this suggests more effective ways of dealing with the threat than trying to sanitize each and every piece of mail or parcel shipped by the USPS?
This particular tactic has been thwarted. It was thwarted on the fourth plane when passengers elected to stop the hijackers or die trying. We're now making the cockpit entry-proof. Publicize the fact regardless of any number of people killed, bullets fired, bombs threatened that the cockpit door will NOT open, and the problem's solved.
Yes, new tactics will be developed in attempts to take over airplanes. But it has become substantially harder to do, and even last time only two of four caused horrific damage (the Pentagon loss, on the ground and in the plane, was roughly the same as if a fully-loaded 747 had crashed).
As far as antrax goes
The invasion planners estimated a far, far lower number, 50,000 or so.
If we'd agreed to let them keep their Emperor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese would've surrendered. We held out for unconditional surrender but, after dropping the two bombs, relented and accepted their surrender and allowed the emperor to remain on the throne..
Eisenhower and Marshall both opposed use of the bomb. In 1962 Eisenhower reiterated his belief that it wasn't necessary and that neither was invasion , that Japan was done and would've surrendered within weeks without either action taking place.
This is all documented (in Richard Rhodes's book, among many other places).
Heh, you laugh. The first useful program I wrote in my life was a bootstrap loader for the PDP-8. You toggled in a few instructions that loaded the loader, then the program from paper tape. DEC's format split 12 bit words into two 6 chunks leaving two bits on the tape unused (one bit was used as a "change address" flag). They'd distribute programs in one long stream with a checksum at the end. TTY 33 tape readers are slow (10 CPS) and unreliable, so after spending 10 minutes loading a program frequently you'd get a checksum error.
My format was a lot nicer, using all 8 bits (shorting load time) and breaking things up into blocks of 256 words, each with a checksum. If you got a checksum error you only had to back up one block rather than reload the whole damned program.
Getting this to work was one of the things that made me realize that writing software was what I wanted to do for a living.
I was in High School and the machine was a PDP-8/S (serial, 36 usecs to add two numbers) that travelled around between several schools, staying several weeks in one place and used to teach programming.
Most of the PDP-8 world used either reliable high-speed (300 CPS) optical paper tape readers, DECtape, or disks. 32 KW head-per-track drives, oh boy! or the RF08 that was 256 KW? something gigantic like that. We had one at the local science museum that died one day when a water-filled exhibit on the floor above dropped its load and gave the drive a shower.
Oracle has similar technology - "InterMedia". It will work with images, categorizing them by general shape and hue structure, letting you search for similar images.
...
It does audio, too.
Not to mention plain text and MS Word and
Living in the land of National Forests (Oregon), would you be so kind as to name those NFs which qualify as the "worst polluted sites in the country"?
... they're *much* better managed for non-timber resources than the commercial forests in my state. Or, for that matter, the State Forests in my state.
Are our National Forests as well managed as they could be? Speaking as someone who has been active in conservation for twenty years, and served on the board of one of the two co-plaintiffs in the Northern Spotted Owl suit for fifteen years, I can attest to the fact that they are not.
However
And that, sir, is an indisputable fact.
If you read carefully it looks like the study's intended to compare the acres-of-beige-NT box scenario versus the consolidated server scenario (the IBM/Linux ad case now being seen on TV).
That's not anti-Linux per se. Remember that the previous e-mail supposedly leaked by this guy included some rough numbers comparing an IBM solution with a PC/NT solution. IBM may not charge for Linux but they charge a lot for hardware and service...
They assign engineers to study their competition and use that to build web-based and similar resources to help their sales force respond to common claims about that competitor (Linux, Sun/Solaris, whatever). A glorified FAQ backed by internal staff who are paid to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. At least, this is what the e-mail message implies.
There's nothing wrong with this, it's good marketing. I'm sure IBM has technical staff available who know how to run NT networks inside and out and are able to provide support for salesdroids delivering the "consolidated server vs. acres of beige boxes running NT" pitch.
Will the IBM salespeople be more honest than the MS salespeople. C'mon - they're SALESPEOPLE! On commission!
This isn't the homebrew server or even rack of DELL servers market being discussed by the e-mail. They're talking much bigger accounts - fly-by-night.com is hardly a "key account" for this guy's sales staff.
IBM is peppering every NFL game with their "The Heist" Linux ad. This ad is selling EXACTLY the server consolidation message the e-mail you so swiftly proclaim to be a hoax addresses.
... it may be a hoax. But not for any of the reasons you mention.
The e-mail message mentions names IBM specifically. The last time I looked IBM did not fall into the category of "Linux companies going Chapter 11 left and right".
And the "escalation center" rings like it could be true, too. They're not fighting Debian - they're fighting IBM. IBM is clearly targetting MS in its current marketing campaign, so MS taking specific steps to counter them makes fine sense.
Now