The big danger isn't about slashdot becoming VA oriented. VA could concievably be good for Slashdot. The big danger is what happens if a bigger fish than VA decides to buy out VA.
VA are trying to show themselves as a united open source/linux front, and doing a pretty good job at this. This does leave them open for other sharks. If Microsoft decides that they best way into the Linux market is to buy out VA, what happens then? If another company buys out VA and decides to really interfere in Slashdot, or sell it off to Lycos or Time Warner because it isn't needed or doesn't match the parent companies "vision", Slashdot could really end up suffering this way.
What needs to be done is to make sure that there is an Iron Clad contract that allows Slashdot a way out in the event of a hostile takeover.
They have this in that nobody can fire Taco or Hemos, but after this contract is up for review and Taco and Hemos decides that working for MS or Time Warner isn't where they want to be, Slashdot will fail.
"At the attack's peak, Yahoo! was flooded with one gigabyte of traffic a second -- more than most sites get in a year. Yahoo! serves an average of 465 million page views a day. "
A gigabye of traffic a second, even from a number of points still requires a large clear bandwidth to send.
Do you find being seen as a web journalist rather than a print journalist is a hinderance to the work?
Print journalists have the backing of a name and a press pass. Web journalists often are not seen as "real" writers. Have you ever had problems arranging an interview beacuse of this?
I think the reason is to make sure that more of these companies don't decide to jump on this bandwagon and drag the Linux/Opensource/GNU thing into the swamp and bury it there.
The freedom that is in the internet was by accident. It started as a way for academics to freely exchange ideas. The whole concept of freedom wasn't really thought about - this was in the days when passwords didn't have to exist.
As the internet grew and stopped being purely in the realms of universities, it had to change to fit demands.
Crackers forced the use of passwords and firewalls.
Goverments forced the creation of civil liberites groups such as the EFF.
Parts of the changes are in the way it connects together, part of the changes affect the outside world.
Privacy is important, freedom of speech is important.
The Internet gives people a platform to be heard and to appeal to like minded people.
This is the freedom that needs to be maintained in the future. We don't want to be able to trace a single voice, or to be sued if we feel we are doing the right thing in the face of an opressive system. We want to be able to speak our minds.
The main thing about the Linux movement is that no matter how rich companies like Red Hat and VA Linux systems get, as long as they support the open source movement people will support it.
How many times have you found a bug in a closed source piece of software, and were told to upgrade to the next release at "minimal" cost?
Open source gives us the options of fixing the bugs ourselves or talking directly to the developers that wrote it.
As long as the IPO companies remember this, things will be good, but they have to remember this. If they don't remember that the community is first, then the community would walk away from them.
Imagine for a second that a linux vendor called Purple Cap decides that its shares are falling because someone has a better product. Purple Cap decides to try the corporation approach: It tries to buy out the product, and fails. Next it hacks together a lamer copy of the product (even forking the source) and uses its IPO revenue to advertise it as the greatest thing since Babbage. Their lamer product ends up on the cover of magazines and is given away at Starbucks with each coffee sold.
How would the Open Source community react to this? I think that people would lose faith in that company. There would be a ground swell of opinion against them, people would stop using thier products, sending them code patches, downloading thier version of packages.
As long as there is Open Source there is another alternative. As long as there is another alternative, no company can control everything.
There will always be rogue comanies, such as Linux One. There will always be people that try to fairly or unfairly dominate a market.
As long as there is an alternative the Open Source community will follow what it feels is right.
It is bad, I agree. I'm Irish, my wife is American. For her to move to Ireland and be allowed to live and work, all we had to do was to go the Alien registration section of the police. They looked at my passport, her passport, and our marriage license. They stamped her passport. This allows her to live and work in Ireland, with no restrictions. All that has to be done to stay here is to go back once a year and get the stamp renewed.
Currently we are trying to move back to the US, using an I-130. We've had to fill in several confusing forms. I need to get police certificates from everywhere I've lived since I was 16. My wife needs to get her tax info for the last 3 years from the US (and we hit a snag here because she only worked a half year last year because she moved to Ireland). We need to show assets. To visit the US I have to apply for a visa showing that I will return to Ireland. (I have to get a a letter from my employer for this showing that I have a job).
Most of our weeknights is spent going over forms, or writing letters to people to try and gather all the information thats needed.
Given all this paper work, I'm not surprised that the INS has such a massive backlog.
I know many Irish people that have done the same. The problem seems to be processing those that come into America on company sponsored visas, but who then try to get a green card once they have been working in America for a bit.
I'm going through a different process: My wife is American, but we are living in Ireland, and I'm trying to get an I-130 visa. Its a bit of a paperwork nightmare.
One thing to remember - to be a success you have to conform to the biggest market - currently that X86.
From the sounds of this chip they can do whatever they want with this chip. First they will get the market with it, then they will change it to whats best.
Actually these are Design Marks rather than Trademarks.
You're blocked from using the same words with the same design, but you could use the same works with a different design and/or colours.
Design Marks aren't quite as binding as Trademarks. If you wanted to register www.ThankYou.Com you could be stopped from enforcing it because its a design mark. You could stop someone using your logo though.
This is a freedom of speech thing - the press do have to apologise sometimes.
Things such as this do need to be discussed, and although you make get heat from some for posting this, it does open it up to a wider audience, and even if it gets 2 more people more interested in contributing to the discussions of the GPL, its worth it.
I work for a hospital and I'd agree with the letter too. I had to be in work from 6pm, mostly because the roads through the city were being closed off for parties to occur.
The various bosses arrived about 11:30pm from thier parties, waited to 12:30, saw nothing much happened and went back to the parties again.
I had to stay in work until 8am. At least for the first time in my life I got paid well to hack Linux code for 12 hours.
I'd have much rather been watching the fireworks with my wife.
"Indeed, as a teenager Robert Morris accidentally launched a virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the USA in the 1980s."
This reads better if it becomes:
"Indeed, as a teenager Robert Morris Jr. accidentally launched a virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the USA for several days in the 1980s."
The original statement would probably scare most people away from Unix if it was shut down for the 1980s:)
This is a much better article that the one first proposed. I know a lot of people here won't like it and think that it is too basic/simplistic/misses the point.
Remember that the target audience of this publication are not up on highly technical aspects of this genre. This article will make them think and hopefully move them to realising exactly what the future holds.
If it makes life easier for systems admins to get the backing to secure systems properly, this can only be a good thing.
"When you buy a device, you buy a complete thing--it's not like a PC where you can upgrade the thing whenever you want to," said Phil Holden, product manager for Microsoft's Windows CE group, in explaining the change. "When we're talking to the broader consumer, it's pretty clear that customers care what the device does, but not so much what the underlying operating system is."
I think the consumer cares about a device that works without crashing, that runs quick, and doesn't drain power so you don't have to drag several sets of batteries around with you.
This name change will generate hordes of clueless users that will come back to vendors asking "It says its Windows powered - How can I install Microsoft Office 97 on it?"
Microsoft should concentrate on getting it to work right, and getting it so that its compatible with Windows. If thier programmers were as good as thier marketing people, I don't think anyone would be complaining so much about Microsoft.
Even if we did have a distributed effort and made advances, someone would still have to patent the discovery.
As we have seen with Y2K fixes and other things, making a discovery does not stop someone else patenting the idea.
An open source body would have to be setup to patent the discoveries just so that nobody else could patent them.
This body can declare thier patent open for use.
There is a lot of legal issues here - if you opne your patent too much could you lose it.
Patent law is also a case of boiler plating your patent - you have to ensure that every option is covered and also included on the patent.
This sort of thing is costly, and this is why a lot of companies patent thier ideas. Once they have the patent they recoup thier investment, and then some.
If an open source patent body is set up there will have to a lot of time spent considering patent administration and the costs involved.
In the days of newsprint only, the way things would have gone is like this: 1) Bruce declares a lawsuit 2) The newpaper reporters write up the story 3) Bruce retracts his law suit after taking advice 4) The newpaper reporters get this also, and the editor kills the story, or amends it so that the tone is lessened.
It would have never gotten into the public eye.
With Slashdot and other online news sources, things like this get reported as they happen, and storys get updated as things come in. CNN is a good example of how this is - a story breaks; they publish a short piece on what happened, and update as details come in.
This type of journalism has the same turnaround as open source software. Compared to the old style print, it travels light years faster, and things get fixed just as fast.
I don't think anyone should be berated or flamed for posting a breaking story like the Corel incident. It is news, and should be reported.
This sort of thing will happen again, and people should be aware that whatever they post on the net will be read by a lot of people, and if they are anyway powerful at all, will be reprinted shortly afterwards.
This is not to say that people should say nothing at all.
When making a statement like this people should send out feelers to decide if their idea will fly and will be backed up. This will not always work - it's hard to lead by mob, but with legal issues and major changes of direction its often a good idea to gauge feelings first. rather people should be aware that once they have made a position public, they will have to make sure th
Of course you are right its cracking, not hacking. I apoligse to the set of programmers labelled "hackers"- my brain had switched over to government minister mode to read the legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
The big danger isn't about slashdot becoming VA oriented. VA could concievably be good for Slashdot. The big danger is what happens if a bigger fish than VA decides to buy out VA.
VA are trying to show themselves as a united open source/linux front, and doing a pretty good job at this. This does leave them open for other sharks.
If Microsoft decides that they best way into the Linux market is to buy out VA, what happens then?
If another company buys out VA and decides to really interfere in Slashdot, or sell it off to Lycos or Time Warner because it isn't needed or doesn't match the parent companies "vision", Slashdot could really end up suffering this way.
What needs to be done is to make sure that there is an Iron Clad contract that allows Slashdot a way out in the event of a hostile takeover.
They have this in that nobody can fire Taco or Hemos, but after this contract is up for review and Taco and Hemos decides that working for MS or Time Warner isn't where they want to be, Slashdot will fail.
"At the attack's peak, Yahoo! was flooded with one gigabyte of traffic a second -- more than most sites get in a year. Yahoo! serves an average of 465 million page views a day. "
A gigabye of traffic a second, even from a number of points still requires a large clear bandwidth to send.
Paranoia might be the best way...
Do you find being seen as a web journalist rather than a print journalist is a hinderance to the work?
Print journalists have the backing of a name and a press pass. Web journalists often are not seen as "real" writers. Have you ever had problems arranging an interview beacuse of this?
I think the reason is to make sure that more of these companies don't decide to jump on this bandwagon and drag the Linux/Opensource/GNU thing into the swamp and bury it there.
The freedom that is in the internet was by accident. It started as a way for academics to freely exchange ideas. The whole concept of freedom wasn't really thought about - this was in the days when passwords didn't have to exist.
As the internet grew and stopped being purely in the realms of universities, it had to change to fit demands.
Crackers forced the use of passwords and firewalls.
Goverments forced the creation of civil liberites groups such as the EFF.
Parts of the changes are in the way it connects together, part of the changes affect the outside world.
Privacy is important, freedom of speech is important.
The Internet gives people a platform to be heard and to appeal to like minded people.
This is the freedom that needs to be maintained in the future. We don't want to be able to trace a single voice, or to be sued if we feel we are doing the right thing in the face of an opressive system. We want to be able to speak our minds.
The main thing about the Linux movement is that no matter how rich companies like Red Hat and VA Linux systems get, as long as they support the open source movement people will support it.
How many times have you found a bug in a closed source piece of software, and were told to upgrade to the next release at "minimal" cost?
Open source gives us the options of fixing the bugs ourselves or talking directly to the developers that wrote it.
As long as the IPO companies remember this, things will be good, but they have to remember this. If they don't remember that the community is first, then the community would walk away from them.
Imagine for a second that a linux vendor called Purple Cap decides that its shares are falling because someone has a better product. Purple Cap decides to try the corporation approach: It tries to buy out the product, and fails. Next it hacks together a lamer copy of the product (even forking the source) and uses its IPO revenue to advertise it as the greatest thing since Babbage. Their lamer product ends up on the cover of magazines and is given away at Starbucks with each coffee sold.
How would the Open Source community react to this? I think that people would lose faith in that company. There would be a ground swell of opinion against them, people would stop using thier products, sending them code patches, downloading thier version of packages.
As long as there is Open Source there is another alternative. As long as there is another alternative, no company can control everything.
There will always be rogue comanies, such as Linux One. There will always be people that try to fairly or unfairly dominate a market.
As long as there is an alternative the Open Source community will follow what it feels is right.
I think this is one of these Microsoft announcements to keep people interested and make Microsoft look good.
Don't expect anything usable for about 5 years...
I think reverse engineering something could be good here.
It is bad, I agree. I'm Irish, my wife is American. For her to move to Ireland and be allowed to live and work, all we had to do was to go the Alien registration section of the police. They looked at my passport, her passport, and our marriage license. They stamped her passport. This allows her to live and work in Ireland, with no restrictions. All that has to be done to stay here is to go back once a year and get the stamp renewed.
Currently we are trying to move back to the US, using an I-130. We've had to fill in several confusing forms. I need to get police certificates from everywhere I've lived since I was 16. My wife needs to get her tax info for the last 3 years from the US (and we hit a snag here because she only worked a half year last year because she moved to Ireland). We need to show assets. To visit the US I have to apply for a visa showing that I will return to Ireland. (I have to get a a letter from my employer for this showing that I have a job).
Most of our weeknights is spent going over forms, or writing letters to people to try and gather all the information thats needed.
Given all this paper work, I'm not surprised that the INS has such a massive backlog.
I know many Irish people that have done the same. The problem seems to be processing those that come into America on company sponsored visas, but who then try to get a green card once they have been working in America for a bit.
I'm going through a different process: My wife is American, but we are living in Ireland, and I'm trying to get an I-130 visa. Its a bit of a paperwork nightmare.
True, but it took the theroy of jet propulsion to allow people to figure out how to get a rocket that could break out of the atmosphere.
..but starts with just one.
The development of jet propulsion led to rocket design with lead to geosynchronous satelittes, and in turn to the communications world we know today.
One thing to remember - to be a success you have to conform to the biggest market - currently that X86.
From the sounds of this chip they can do whatever they want with this chip. First they will get the market with it, then they will change it to whats best.
Actually these are Design Marks rather than Trademarks.
You're blocked from using the same words with the same design, but you could use the same works with a different design and/or colours.
Design Marks aren't quite as binding as Trademarks. If you wanted to register www.ThankYou.Com you could be stopped from enforcing it because its a design mark. You could stop someone using your logo though.
As far as I can see Microsoft are grasping at straws with these findings.
They are still putting spin on things rather than trying to get themselves out of the hole.
I think the post was ok, and should be discussed.
This is a freedom of speech thing - the press do have to apologise sometimes.
Things such as this do need to be discussed, and although you make get heat from some for posting this, it does open it up to a wider audience, and even if it gets 2 more people more interested in contributing to the discussions of the GPL, its worth it.
I work for a hospital and I'd agree with the letter too. I had to be in work from 6pm, mostly because the roads through the city were being closed off for parties to occur.
The various bosses arrived about 11:30pm from thier parties, waited to 12:30, saw nothing much happened and went back to the parties again.
I had to stay in work until 8am. At least for the first time in my life I got paid well to hack Linux code for 12 hours.
I'd have much rather been watching the fireworks with my wife.
"Indeed, as a teenager Robert Morris accidentally launched a virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the USA in the 1980s."
:)
This reads better if it becomes:
"Indeed, as a teenager Robert Morris Jr. accidentally launched a virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the USA for several days in the 1980s."
The original statement would probably scare most people away from Unix if it was shut down for the 1980s
This is a much better article that the one first proposed. I know a lot of people here won't like it and think that it is too basic/simplistic/misses the point.
Remember that the target audience of this publication are not up on highly technical aspects of this genre. This article will make them think and hopefully move them to realising exactly what the future holds.
If it makes life easier for systems admins to get the backing to secure systems properly, this can only be a good thing.
CE = Compact Edition
The original vision for CE would be that it was every that Windows 3.1 was, except smaller and ROMable.
My guess is that they failed.
"When you buy a device, you buy a complete thing--it's not like a PC where you can upgrade the thing whenever you want to," said Phil Holden, product manager for Microsoft's Windows CE group, in explaining the change. "When we're talking to the broader consumer, it's pretty clear that customers care what the device does, but not so much what the underlying operating system is."
I think the consumer cares about a device that works without crashing, that runs quick, and doesn't drain power so you don't have to drag several sets of batteries around with you.
This name change will generate hordes of clueless users that will come back to vendors asking "It says its Windows powered - How can I install Microsoft Office 97 on it?"
Microsoft should concentrate on getting it to work right, and getting it so that its compatible with Windows. If thier programmers were as good as thier marketing people, I don't think anyone would be complaining so much about Microsoft.
Even if we did have a distributed effort and made advances, someone would still have to patent the discovery.
As we have seen with Y2K fixes and other things, making a discovery does not stop someone else patenting the idea.
An open source body would have to be setup to patent the discoveries just so that nobody else could patent them.
This body can declare thier patent open for use.
There is a lot of legal issues here - if you opne your patent too much could you lose it.
Patent law is also a case of boiler plating your patent - you have to ensure that every option is covered and also included on the patent.
This sort of thing is costly, and this is why a lot of companies patent thier ideas. Once they have the patent they recoup thier investment, and then some.
If an open source patent body is set up there will have to a lot of time spent considering patent administration and the costs involved.
In the days of newsprint only, the way things would have gone is like this:
1) Bruce declares a lawsuit
2) The newpaper reporters write up the story
3) Bruce retracts his law suit after taking advice
4) The newpaper reporters get this also, and the editor kills the story, or amends it so that the tone is lessened.
It would have never gotten into the public eye.
With Slashdot and other online news sources, things like this get reported as they happen, and storys get updated as things come in. CNN is a good example of how this is - a story breaks; they publish a short piece on what happened, and update as details come in.
This type of journalism has the same turnaround as open source software. Compared to the old style print, it travels light years faster, and things get fixed just as fast.
I don't think anyone should be berated or flamed for posting a breaking story like the Corel incident. It is news, and should be reported.
This sort of thing will happen again, and people should be aware that whatever they post on the net will be read by a lot of people, and if they are anyway powerful at all, will be reprinted shortly afterwards.
This is not to say that people should say nothing at all.
When making a statement like this people should send out feelers to decide if their idea will fly and will be backed up. This will not always work - it's hard to lead by mob, but with legal issues and major changes of direction its often a good idea to gauge feelings first.
rather people should be aware that once they have made a position public, they will have to make sure th
Of course you are right its cracking, not hacking. I apoligse to the set of programmers labelled "hackers"- my brain had switched over to government minister mode to read the legislation.
I always assumed Alpha to be your development versions, and the last couple of versions before release are Beta.
Beta is the stage where you have stopped adding features and are just working on clobbering bugs.
Try having a spook break into your office and mirror your hard-drive... It's allowed for under the propose legislation.