I've been in the same position for the last few months. Suggestions to get by: - make sure you take a lunch break, rather than spending 2 minutes getting food and going straight back to work (this was the biggie for me). Find something on TV to watch; go for a walk; ride a bike; do anything, as long as you're away from where you've been working - use IM to stay in touch with workmates. In particular, if you've got workmates working on the same projects as you, use IM to talk to them as you would in real life; use it multiple times per day, if that's what you'd normally do. Get them to mark themselves "busy" if they don't want interruptions. If they're constantly busy, schedule times to have "meetings" using IM - try to get out of the house at least once or twice each day. It's very easy to get in the habit of never leaving the house, which leads to the feeling of walls closing in. Remember that you're only paid for e.g. 8 hours a day; in that light, down tools when your time is up and go do something else - if you've got a partner, meet her/him for lunch at their work occasionally, and go out for dinner more often. Don't let your home life suffer; now that work is taking place at home, try to live some of your home life outside the house to compensate - if you've got young kids, drop them off and/or pick them up from school. Yep, these will be forced interruptions to your day, but they'll get a kick out of it (at least for a while) and you'll be doing something other than sitting at a desk. Take them out after school for a milkshake or whatever - hobbies and sports. Find or acquire ones that force you to get out of the house. - try to find lots of small pieces of work to do, rather than taking on one big chunk that stretches out over days or weeks. It's important to be hitting work milestones fairly regularly, and getting bogged down in a seemingly-indefinite project really takes it out of you.
Overall, I've found the biggest problem is that I get so tied up in work stuff that I'll regularly put in 12-15 hour work days if I'm not careful. Where that differs from doing 12-15 hours in an office is that it tends to be full-on, really mentally draining work; I'm not taking a break to have a chat to someone in the office while e.g. some code compiles, but instead I'm working on another task till the compile finishes. This really fries your brain when you do it over weeks or months without a break.
Another aspect is the lack of schedules when you're working at home. In an office, you've got meetings, lunches etc. that occur at specific times and which break up the day somewhat; at home, the hours tend to fall in one big grey amorphous mass. I find that giving myself specific tasks and scheduling things to break up that mass really helps.
You know, I wouldn't mind reading this "research" if only the companies involved were forced by some law to declare where their funding's coming from.
"Yep, we've just proven that Linux is the number one desktop in the world today. This statement brought to you by Novell/SuSE" would sit just fine with me; I could file the statement accordingly.
As things currently stand, - I get to treat all such "research" as crap, regardless of whether it is or not. - I get to continually challenge corporate decisions that are made on the basis of such research. "XYZ Research Inc says XYZ is the best product, and they also say they're in no way related to XYZ Inc. It must be true because it's in this magazine"
I know exactly where it all started, and I'm gonna whack those guys from the "Ponds Institute" if I ever find out who they are...
What's needed is something that ISPs can use to block Britney, Aguilera and the remainder of the dross that passes for popular music at present.
Is there a filter than can detect bimbo?
More seriously, there seems to be some sort of sensible middle ground here. If the record companies loosened the reins a bit and allowed people to download selected old stuff that's never going to sell zillions of copies again, they could provide their own P2P/download tool, their own encryption and their own tracking system. They could actually build a market around downloading free music, rather than trying to police it.
I'm quite certain there's musicians around who'd love to have their (old) music available for free download from record company sites, since it might trigger some interest in their new stuff that isn't getting airplay. For example, Duran Duran released music all through the 90s, but nobody bought it because the radio stations weren't playing it and their audience from the mid-80s had grown up. If they had the option of making a few of their old hits available for legitimate free download, they may have picked up a new audience for their newer stuff, and the record companies may have found a nice earner in enhanced sales of their new music.
At the very least, if they tracked stats on downloads from their own sites, they'd be able to work out which artists are ready for their next greatest hits compilation, how to pair up old artists for comeback tours, and so on.
You've got several options: - short sell the stock. That's where you sell the stock, and buy it back later (hopefully at a reduced price) - buy a put option. That lets you sell SCOX at a specific price at any point up to a specified date in the future - sell a call option. That lets someone buy SCOX from you at a specific price at any point up to a specified date in the future - sell CFDs (contracts for difference) on SCOX. Um, this is where it gets complicated; talk to a broker for more info on this... - sell SCOX futures (if they exist)
Be warned: short selling stock is a risky business, certainly riskier than buying, and is generally best left to the professionals. Furthermore, you need to short sell on a price uptick, which means you have to do it when the price is *rising*. When you buy stock, you can only lose 100% of your original stake, and that only applies if the stock price drops to zero. When you short sell, you could lose more than 100%...
Of the above options, buying a put option is probably the safest in that your potential loss is capped at a specific dollar value.
I'd suggest the SEC might have to find and extradite them before they get their fine and jail sentence.
As you say, if they get their big bonuses in cash, they're going to be pretty hard to punish. Also, if they resign first, handing over to appropriate replacement execs who do nothing to disperse the FUD, then start selling off stock a short time later, it'll appear more legitimate. Insider trading charges are notoriously difficult to prove, since the perpetrators tend to be able to arrange the timing and sequence of events to suit themselves.
On current performance, the only two events likely to drive the SCO stock price down significantly would be for one of these legal cases to actually get in front of a judge or for insiders to suddenly dump massive amounts of stock - as long as neither of these happen, they can keep trickle-selling stock quite legimately.
This, from a chunk of the state that put Arnie Schwartz in as Governor. A man who you'd have to say would be as au-fait with "master/slave" in the non-computer sense as just about any high-profile person in the Western world.
"No, I have not ever supported the Nazis". "No, I did not force this woman, or that one, or that one, to submit to my sexual advances".
Your point that "there is a point, when you're losing, that you decide to call it a day..." is normally valid, but I suspect won't apply here.
In this case, SCO's execs have a very clear reason for pushing on, regardless of the apparently diminishing likelihood of a win in court. SCO's share price has gone from about $1 to about $15 (at present), and the SCO execs (a) have a bunch of stock on their hands that's now worth 15x what it was (as others have said, they've been dumping it but they still hold quite a bit), and (b) have employment arrangements in place whereby they get paid a huge bonus if SCO's stock price continues to rise over 4 consecutive quarters. They're now well into their 3rd quarter of rises, so all they have to do is continue pushing for the next 4-5 months and they get their big bonuses. I'd expect the FUD to keep going, possibly getting wilder and sillier, until those bonuses get paid.
If those bonuses are paid in SCO stock, you can bet they'll be dumped fast and the share price will get smashed as a result. All the patsies left holding SCO stock will wonder what's happened...
*That's* the apparent and obvious motivation here, not a desire to do what's "good for the company".
Logically, that will have to wait until the share price drops to nothing and it surfaces that the SCO execs have in fact dumped their stock for a sizeable chunk of change. It's hard to prove a "pump and dump" is going on when the stock price has risen from $1 or so and is still sitting around $15.
You then have to assume the SCO execs are going to be living somewhere from which the US government can extradite them. My betting is that places like Nth Korea, Niugini, the Dominican Republic and Cuba might be the subject of future travel plans for these guys.
> Even more to the point, what is David Boies > trying to accomplish?
David Boies = Patron Saint of big, losing US IT legal cases
I'm guessing he wants to get a lot of money. Regardless of the legal outcome, the lawyers involved will be getting a lot of income out of this.
The SCO shares he got for coming aboard alone will save him having to buy toilet paper for the next several years.
Re:What will drive Linux adoption
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
I should have said "Linux needs a FOSS equivalent of MS Exchange"...
Samsung Contact, while it exists, isn't FOSS. It takes a brave person in these times of cutbacks to commit money to buy an "MS Exchange equivalent"; however, that same person could possibly run a skunkworks project testing a FOSS Exchange-equivalent by putting his/her team's internal stuff on it for a while to see how it goes.
I sort of agree with you when it comes to 3rd party commercial apps. I think some people need them to justify the credibility of Linux on that platform, but I don't think they're required in infrastructure/backoffice systems. These systems (e.g. file/print servers, mail servers, Web servers, proxy servers, database servers,...) are all about reliability and interoperability, and that's where FOSS really shines. The big glaring hole here is a MS Exchange equivalent; FOSS covers pretty much every other infrastructure requirement today, and the solutions are every bit as good as those from any commercial vendor.
Re:What will drive Linux adoption
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, I'd like to think 2004 might be the year Linux gets a feature-for-feature equivalent to MS Exchange, that supports MS Outlook, Evolution and a few other key clients.
When such a solution appears, that will mark a major milestone for Linux in potentially replacing Windows in many organisations.
> But in this case, music purchased from iTMS can be > burned to CD and played on home stereos and in > cars.
My key point is: if I'm going to have to download AAC files (which costs me money), then burn them to CD (which also costs me money) in order to listen to them on my other systems.
I'm still limited in how I can copy the downloaded song (i.e. burn the same playlist to CD 10 times max), and that limitation didn't exist before.
I have to run Windows or OS/X to use iTMS; if I want to listen to my downloaded music on a Linux PC, I have to download the files, burn a CD and rip files off that CD **in order to listen to music in the form that I've already paid for by downloading it in the first place**.
True - the costs involved in downloading individual files and burning them to CD are pretty small, and the effective limitation of number of burns per playlist is close enough to non-existent. However, at US$0.99 a song from iTMS, multiplied by the number of songs on a typical CD, it's awful close to the cost of buying a CD from the shop *and* I've now got less than I used to get buying a physical CD.
The record companies haven't had to create a physical CD, ship it to store, and the bricks-and-mortar shop hasn't had to pay the expense of floor space to have it displayed somewhere. The non-existent shop hasn't had to train and employ people to handle the exchange of goods for cash, nor deal with stock control and cash flow issues that come from operating any physical-goods-for-money business. I'd like the record companies to acknowledge this and pass on these savings via lower costs for purchasing downloaded music.
All that said, iTMS looks to be the best solution out there. If/when it becomes available in my country, I might give it a try. However, the record companies need to acknowledge that they're not giving us a bargain here; they're giving us something not quite equal to what we've had for many years, for about the same price, and they're saving a lot of money through elimating a bunch of middleman costs in the process.
Consider the issue of DRM-enabled music from the perspective of someone who doesn't download illegal music, but who has a mix of devices (home stereo, desktop PC with CD player, MP3 player, laptop PC, car CD stacker,...) that they use to listen to music. At a guess, there are quite a few people who fall into this category.
There was a time just a few years ago when, if I bought a music CD, I could play it anywhere. I could play it at home, on my computer, in my car, in the PC at work... - whereever I wanted to play it, it worked. I could copy it to tape and listen to it in my Walkman, and it was all totally legal.
Today, the record company model appears to be based around consumers buying music for use in exactly one device. Music CDs are now "enhanced" to try to prevent people playing them on their computers; paid-for, downloaded music is now DRM-wrapped so it can't be burned to music CDs and played on home stereos or in cars. Based on this, you have to assume record companies expect people to buy multiple copies of the same piece of music if they want to listen to it on a mixture of devices.
That would be fine if I could buy several copies of a piece of music (as is now necessary to play in all my devices) for the same price or less than I used to pay for a single music CD that I could play on all of them. In fact, it would be a great thing if there was some music (e.g. music that I only listen to while working out, and not on my home stereo) that I only wanted to listen to on one type of device - I wouldn't need to buy the version that played on my home stereo, so I'd be saving some money.
What the record companies have done, however, is to charge full price for each piece of music on each medium. Whereas before I could buy a single music CD for $X and play it anywhere, now I need to buy the music CD and download the DRM-wrapped WMA or AAC file and it costs more money than it did before.
A lot of people would get upset at that point, but even that situation might be tolerable if (a) the record companies offered a bundle of both CD and WMA/AAC files at a suitably discounted cost, (b) they made the purchase process a particularly enjoyable experience, (c) they offered me some bonus over and above the music I'd paid for, such as maybe cheap/free concert tickets or a DVD of a few tracks, (d) any combination of the above. Unfortunately, none of these are happening.
In a nutshell, people are expected to pay multiple times for something they used to pay for once. Not only that, they're told they're "stealing" if they don't, and are faced with ridiculous laws and enforcement techniques.
My guess is that music file sharing won't disappear; it'll just go further underground to something that's more difficult to track back to individual users.
One obvious candidate would seem to be FreeNet. IMHO the only thing stopping FreeNet being used for music file sharing is that most people don't know it exists and there's no music-specific-and-easy-to-use client for it - if/when someone addresses those two issues, it's going to be game over as far as file swapping is concerned.
If drug companies could patent their products with the ease that the USPTO seems to allow IT patents, then the first company to apply for a patent covering "something that makes sick people better" would pretty much have the market cornered.
So that would be the majority consisting of a few hundred SCO employees and Microsoft, but excluding IBM, RedHat, all Linux users, the OSS community in general,...
> Picking a set of apps and decreeing them to be > components of this ideal distribution might work > in some instances -- for instance, in order to > have uniformity through an entire organization -- > but I can't see it working out for home users.
Actually, I think having a single app to do one thing would be a very big plus for home users. The first time I installed Mandrake on my mum's PC, she looked through the menus and found 8 Web browsers, 6 email clients, 5 word processors,... - what she really wanted was to run exactly one of each.
Any one of the email clients, Web browsers, newsreaders etc. would have been fine for her, but she had a huge number of options every step of the way, with slightly different interfaces between tools that do the same task.
In the end, I got rid of all the menu items except for one tool in each category, and she's been fine ever since. I picked the "winning" tool in each group almost solely on what I'd used in the past - for her needs, they were all just about equal.
IMHO, the "home user" desktop should just work with one product in each category. Although zealots might argue the pros and cons, it really doesn't matter which mix of products gets used - just pick one and go with it.
It'd be nice if Mandrake and other distributions had a "home user" install option, that installed 1 browser, 1 email client,..., but they'd be likely to piss off a few people in the process. If you could select from the "home user Mozilla+OOo suite" or the "home user KDE suite" or whatever, that might work
> Theoretically, if both sides play perfectly then > every match will end in a draw
Where did you pull this "fact" from? Chess isn't like noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe); it isn't possible to map out every combination of every move and prove that a draw is guaranteed if each player makes the right moves.
It's quite possible that a "perfectly played" game will end in a white win; it's generally accepted that there is a small advantage to playing white. Alternately, it's plausible that a perfect game woudl result in a black win. There's some ridiculously large number of possible games, so NOBODY KNOWS.
I've had it installed on a box with a 3ware 8506 RAID card and 3 SATA discs in a RAID 5 config. I configured RAID using 3ware's BIOS, and Mandrake saw my 3 80Gb discs as a single 160Gb disc as expected. The install went well, everything worked well afterwards. On bootup, I can see a 3ware driver message flash by, but I can't read what it says.
Yours is the latest of several messages I've seen saying that 2.4 kernels have problems installing to SATA RAID. The consensus of the responses seems to be "wait for 2.6"...
But, for the sake of my own curiosity, what is the problem you're seeing? I'm about to buy a whole slab of these 3ware/SATA RAID systems, and it might be worth going for something other than SATA drives if you and others are seeing problems.
> Should we fine and arrest people who keep > vulnerable systems on the web? I think not.
I think that day is coming.
I think we're at a point of time in computer ownership that was probably a lot like the early days of car ownership.
I'd be fairly certain that there were hardly any rules for the first few years that cars were on the roads, since there wasn't sufficient public perception that lots of rules were required. It was only after enough people got run over, enough cars run off the road, enough general havoc was wreaked that rules against this behaviour were drawn up.
I can even remember the days before seatbelts were compulsory in cars, and when you could drink as much as you liked then drive home. These rules only came in in the last 20-30 years, yet it's almost impossible today to imagine that they didn't exist all along.
As more and more home computers get hijacked and used for "bad things", legislation will start to come in making people responsible for what goes on on their own PCs. Maybe it won't be directed at end users - maybe the responsibility will be put on ISPs, or on the owners of routers that filter traffic into and out of legal jurisdictions - but it *will* be enforced regardless of whether the laws are credible or not.
If not, what will we be left with? - a mass of rogue PCs capable of bringing down major companies and financial and legal systems. No responsible government is going to allow this to happen.
You may or may not like it (personally I've got mixed feelings about it), but it will happen.
I think you're talking about a different market than the OSDL guys are targetting.
They're targetting enterprise desktops (i.e. where the real money is), not SOHO or individual users. Enterprise desktops are managed by a central IT group; they're the ones who'll "whip out terminal" and read man pages, not the users.
Contrary to a lot of Slashdot hype, enterprise IT support people are by and large perfectly capable of transitioning from managing Windows desktops to managing Linux desktops. The disciplines required are exactly the same; it's only the tools and the processes based on those tools that change. There's very little of the hacker/genius-at-work mentality left in enterprise desktop management; those people have been phased out as they pose too great a risk to things like availability and responsiveness SLAs. Instead, the people who support enterprise desktops use things like change control and documented process to do their job; all that needs to change if they migrate from Windows to Linux is the specifics of the documented process, plus a relatively small amount of training in the new tools.
Remember, it's not like everyone who supports Windows will have to become experts in e.g. OpenLDAP, Samba, sendmail/qmail/PostFix, Apache etc. Only a tiny percentage of enterprise support people need to know this stuff; the rest spend their days doing things like backing up stuff, restoring files, adding/deleting users, resetting passwords, etc., and you don't need expert level knowledge in these tools to do that. You need expert-level knowledge to set up e.g. Samba, not to maintain it over time.
I'm not saying that sort of migration is a trivial step, but stack it up against the ongoing maintenance and licence costs of supporting 1000s of Windows desktops and the cost of migration is pretty small.
As far as end-users go, most *enterprise* desktop users use a surprisingly small set of applications. Email, Web browser and Office suite would easily suffice for 90%+ of the users; in other words, only 10% or less of users would *ever* need more than those apps.
As far as training goes, it's quite possible to set up KDE to be extremely Windows-like - look at what Lycoris has done. Graphical Web browsers and email clients have pretty much a standard interface these days; there's no real retraining required to go from IE to Mozilla or Konqueror, since the UIs are almost identical. I'd also suggest that anyone who's been working with e.g. Word through several versions would have little difficulty going from Word to OpenOffice; the differences in UI involved are about the same as the differences between (say) Word 97 and Word/XP. Excel to OpenOffice is about the same, although Powerpoint to OpenOffice is a bit more of a leap.
Finally, if there are some users who absolutely require a Windows app (e.g. ACT, MS Project) to do their work, then they can run Win4Lin, Crossover Office or something similar to use that tool. Remember, they're just tools, not a lifestyle choice; there should be no emotion involved in this decision.
Isn't it normal practice to copy films and distribute them to the people who vote in the Academy Awards and similar Hollywood fluffer events? Normally the movies under consideration for these awards haven't had formal DVD releases, so the copies are one-off DVDs specifically for reviewers.
Got to remind the MPAA watchdogs to check the computers of these reviewers and their kids - it wouldn't surprise at all to find out that some of these voters have teenage kids, and that these kids would like to score points with their mates by putting their one-off copies of the films online every now and then.
IBM has used RedHat's products at several of their sites - primarily US-based sites as far as I'm aware. IBM seems to focus primarily on using SuSE for their European-based customers.
Now that desktop RedHat has been replaced with Fedora, and the consequent loosening of control of the distribution by RedHat, has IBM indicated any change to their business relationship with RedHat?
IBM is now pushing to have more Linux desktop systems out there, and presumably either is or will be sending that message out through their field consultants. Now that you've dropped desktop RedHat, are you concerned that SuSE, or indeed any other Linux vendor, may step in and establish themselves as the dominant desktop Linux platform by riding on IBM's coattails, and that they may be able to leverage this strength to cut into your enterprise sales?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been in the same position for the last few months. Suggestions to get by:
- make sure you take a lunch break, rather than spending 2 minutes getting food and going straight back to work (this was the biggie for me). Find something on TV to watch; go for a walk; ride a bike; do anything, as long as you're away from where you've been working
- use IM to stay in touch with workmates. In particular, if you've got workmates working on the same projects as you, use IM to talk to them as you would in real life; use it multiple times per day, if that's what you'd normally do. Get them to mark themselves "busy" if they don't want interruptions. If they're constantly busy, schedule times to have "meetings" using IM
- try to get out of the house at least once or twice each day. It's very easy to get in the habit of never leaving the house, which leads to the feeling of walls closing in. Remember that you're only paid for e.g. 8 hours a day; in that light, down tools when your time is up and go do something else
- if you've got a partner, meet her/him for lunch at their work occasionally, and go out for dinner more often. Don't let your home life suffer; now that work is taking place at home, try to live some of your home life outside the house to compensate
- if you've got young kids, drop them off and/or pick them up from school. Yep, these will be forced interruptions to your day, but they'll get a kick out of it (at least for a while) and you'll be doing something other than sitting at a desk. Take them out after school for a milkshake or whatever
- hobbies and sports. Find or acquire ones that force you to get out of the house.
- try to find lots of small pieces of work to do, rather than taking on one big chunk that stretches out over days or weeks. It's important to be hitting work milestones fairly regularly, and getting bogged down in a seemingly-indefinite project really takes it out of you.
Overall, I've found the biggest problem is that I get so tied up in work stuff that I'll regularly put in 12-15 hour work days if I'm not careful. Where that differs from doing 12-15 hours in an office is that it tends to be full-on, really mentally draining work; I'm not taking a break to have a chat to someone in the office while e.g. some code compiles, but instead I'm working on another task till the compile finishes. This really fries your brain when you do it over weeks or months without a break.
Another aspect is the lack of schedules when you're working at home. In an office, you've got meetings, lunches etc. that occur at specific times and which break up the day somewhat; at home, the hours tend to fall in one big grey amorphous mass. I find that giving myself specific tasks and scheduling things to break up that mass really helps.
You know, I wouldn't mind reading this "research" if only the companies involved were forced by some law to declare where their funding's coming from.
"Yep, we've just proven that Linux is the number one desktop in the world today. This statement brought to you by Novell/SuSE" would sit just fine with me; I could file the statement accordingly.
As things currently stand,
- I get to treat all such "research" as crap, regardless of whether it is or not.
- I get to continually challenge corporate decisions that are made on the basis of such research. "XYZ Research Inc says XYZ is the best product, and they also say they're in no way related to XYZ Inc. It must be true because it's in this magazine"
I know exactly where it all started, and I'm gonna whack those guys from the "Ponds Institute" if I ever find out who they are...
What's needed is something that ISPs can use to block Britney, Aguilera and the remainder of the dross that passes for popular music at present.
Is there a filter than can detect bimbo?
More seriously, there seems to be some sort of sensible middle ground here. If the record companies loosened the reins a bit and allowed people to download selected old stuff that's never going to sell zillions of copies again, they could provide their own P2P/download tool, their own encryption and their own tracking system. They could actually build a market around downloading free music, rather than trying to police it.
I'm quite certain there's musicians around who'd love to have their (old) music available for free download from record company sites, since it might trigger some interest in their new stuff that isn't getting airplay. For example, Duran Duran released music all through the 90s, but nobody bought it because the radio stations weren't playing it and their audience from the mid-80s had grown up. If they had the option of making a few of their old hits available for legitimate free download, they may have picked up a new audience for their newer stuff, and the record companies may have found a nice earner in enhanced sales of their new music.
At the very least, if they tracked stats on downloads from their own sites, they'd be able to work out which artists are ready for their next greatest hits compilation, how to pair up old artists for comeback tours, and so on.
You've got several options:
- short sell the stock. That's where you sell the stock, and buy it back later (hopefully at a reduced price)
- buy a put option. That lets you sell SCOX at a specific price at any point up to a specified date in the future
- sell a call option. That lets someone buy SCOX from you at a specific price at any point up to a specified date in the future
- sell CFDs (contracts for difference) on SCOX. Um, this is where it gets complicated; talk to a broker for more info on this...
- sell SCOX futures (if they exist)
Be warned: short selling stock is a risky business, certainly riskier than buying, and is generally best left to the professionals. Furthermore, you need to short sell on a price uptick, which means you have to do it when the price is *rising*. When you buy stock, you can only lose 100% of your original stake, and that only applies if the stock price drops to zero. When you short sell, you could lose more than 100%...
Of the above options, buying a put option is probably the safest in that your potential loss is capped at a specific dollar value.
I'd suggest the SEC might have to find and extradite them before they get their fine and jail sentence.
As you say, if they get their big bonuses in cash, they're going to be pretty hard to punish. Also, if they resign first, handing over to appropriate replacement execs who do nothing to disperse the FUD, then start selling off stock a short time later, it'll appear more legitimate. Insider trading charges are notoriously difficult to prove, since the perpetrators tend to be able to arrange the timing and sequence of events to suit themselves.
On current performance, the only two events likely to drive the SCO stock price down significantly would be for one of these legal cases to actually get in front of a judge or for insiders to suddenly dump massive amounts of stock - as long as neither of these happen, they can keep trickle-selling stock quite legimately.
This, from a chunk of the state that put Arnie Schwartz in as Governor. A man who you'd have to say would be as au-fait with "master/slave" in the non-computer sense as just about any high-profile person in the Western world.
"No, I have not ever supported the Nazis". "No, I did not force this woman, or that one, or that one, to submit to my sexual advances".
Priceless
Your point that "there is a point, when you're losing, that you decide to call it a day..." is normally valid, but I suspect won't apply here.
In this case, SCO's execs have a very clear reason for pushing on, regardless of the apparently diminishing likelihood of a win in court. SCO's share price has gone from about $1 to about $15 (at present), and the SCO execs (a) have a bunch of stock on their hands that's now worth 15x what it was (as others have said, they've been dumping it but they still hold quite a bit), and (b) have employment arrangements in place whereby they get paid a huge bonus if SCO's stock price continues to rise over 4 consecutive quarters. They're now well into their 3rd quarter of rises, so all they have to do is continue pushing for the next 4-5 months and they get their big bonuses. I'd expect the FUD to keep going, possibly getting wilder and sillier, until those bonuses get paid.
If those bonuses are paid in SCO stock, you can bet they'll be dumped fast and the share price will get smashed as a result. All the patsies left holding SCO stock will wonder what's happened...
*That's* the apparent and obvious motivation here, not a desire to do what's "good for the company".
Logically, that will have to wait until the share price drops to nothing and it surfaces that the SCO execs have in fact dumped their stock for a sizeable chunk of change. It's hard to prove a "pump and dump" is going on when the stock price has risen from $1 or so and is still sitting around $15.
You then have to assume the SCO execs are going to be living somewhere from which the US government can extradite them. My betting is that places like Nth Korea, Niugini, the Dominican Republic and Cuba might be the subject of future travel plans for these guys.
> Even more to the point, what is David Boies
> trying to accomplish?
David Boies = Patron Saint of big, losing US IT legal cases
I'm guessing he wants to get a lot of money. Regardless of the legal outcome, the lawyers involved will be getting a lot of income out of this.
The SCO shares he got for coming aboard alone will save him having to buy toilet paper for the next several years.
I should have said "Linux needs a FOSS equivalent of MS Exchange"...
...) are all about reliability and interoperability, and that's where FOSS really shines. The big glaring hole here is a MS Exchange equivalent; FOSS covers pretty much every other infrastructure requirement today, and the solutions are every bit as good as those from any commercial vendor.
Samsung Contact, while it exists, isn't FOSS. It takes a brave person in these times of cutbacks to commit money to buy an "MS Exchange equivalent"; however, that same person could possibly run a skunkworks project testing a FOSS Exchange-equivalent by putting his/her team's internal stuff on it for a while to see how it goes.
I sort of agree with you when it comes to 3rd party commercial apps. I think some people need them to justify the credibility of Linux on that platform, but I don't think they're required in infrastructure/backoffice systems. These systems (e.g. file/print servers, mail servers, Web servers, proxy servers, database servers,
Actually, I'd like to think 2004 might be the year Linux gets a feature-for-feature equivalent to MS Exchange, that supports MS Outlook, Evolution and a few other key clients.
When such a solution appears, that will mark a major milestone for Linux in potentially replacing Windows in many organisations.
> But in this case, music purchased from iTMS can be
> burned to CD and played on home stereos and in
> cars.
My key point is: if I'm going to have to download AAC files (which costs me money), then burn them to CD (which also costs me money) in order to listen to them on my other systems.
I'm still limited in how I can copy the downloaded song (i.e. burn the same playlist to CD 10 times max), and that limitation didn't exist before.
I have to run Windows or OS/X to use iTMS; if I want to listen to my downloaded music on a Linux PC, I have to download the files, burn a CD and rip files off that CD **in order to listen to music in the form that I've already paid for by downloading it in the first place**.
True - the costs involved in downloading individual files and burning them to CD are pretty small, and the effective limitation of number of burns per playlist is close enough to non-existent. However, at US$0.99 a song from iTMS, multiplied by the number of songs on a typical CD, it's awful close to the cost of buying a CD from the shop *and* I've now got less than I used to get buying a physical CD.
The record companies haven't had to create a physical CD, ship it to store, and the bricks-and-mortar shop hasn't had to pay the expense of floor space to have it displayed somewhere. The non-existent shop hasn't had to train and employ people to handle the exchange of goods for cash, nor deal with stock control and cash flow issues that come from operating any physical-goods-for-money business. I'd like the record companies to acknowledge this and pass on these savings via lower costs for purchasing downloaded music.
All that said, iTMS looks to be the best solution out there. If/when it becomes available in my country, I might give it a try. However, the record companies need to acknowledge that they're not giving us a bargain here; they're giving us something not quite equal to what we've had for many years, for about the same price, and they're saving a lot of money through elimating a bunch of middleman costs in the process.
Consider the issue of DRM-enabled music from the perspective of someone who doesn't download illegal music, but who has a mix of devices (home stereo, desktop PC with CD player, MP3 player, laptop PC, car CD stacker, ...) that they use to listen to music. At a guess, there are quite a few people who fall into this category.
There was a time just a few years ago when, if I bought a music CD, I could play it anywhere. I could play it at home, on my computer, in my car, in the PC at work... - whereever I wanted to play it, it worked. I could copy it to tape and listen to it in my Walkman, and it was all totally legal.
Today, the record company model appears to be based around consumers buying music for use in exactly one device. Music CDs are now "enhanced" to try to prevent people playing them on their computers; paid-for, downloaded music is now DRM-wrapped so it can't be burned to music CDs and played on home stereos or in cars. Based on this, you have to assume record companies expect people to buy multiple copies of the same piece of music if they want to listen to it on a mixture of devices.
That would be fine if I could buy several copies of a piece of music (as is now necessary to play in all my devices) for the same price or less than I used to pay for a single music CD that I could play on all of them. In fact, it would be a great thing if there was some music (e.g. music that I only listen to while working out, and not on my home stereo) that I only wanted to listen to on one type of device - I wouldn't need to buy the version that played on my home stereo, so I'd be saving some money.
What the record companies have done, however, is to charge full price for each piece of music on each medium. Whereas before I could buy a single music CD for $X and play it anywhere, now I need to buy the music CD and download the DRM-wrapped WMA or AAC file and it costs more money than it did before.
A lot of people would get upset at that point, but even that situation might be tolerable if (a) the record companies offered a bundle of both CD and WMA/AAC files at a suitably discounted cost, (b) they made the purchase process a particularly enjoyable experience, (c) they offered me some bonus over and above the music I'd paid for, such as maybe cheap/free concert tickets or a DVD of a few tracks, (d) any combination of the above. Unfortunately, none of these are happening.
In a nutshell, people are expected to pay multiple times for something they used to pay for once. Not only that, they're told they're "stealing" if they don't, and are faced with ridiculous laws and enforcement techniques.
My guess is that music file sharing won't disappear; it'll just go further underground to something that's more difficult to track back to individual users.
One obvious candidate would seem to be FreeNet. IMHO the only thing stopping FreeNet being used for music file sharing is that most people don't know it exists and there's no music-specific-and-easy-to-use client for it - if/when someone addresses those two issues, it's going to be game over as far as file swapping is concerned.
If drug companies could patent their products with the ease that the USPTO seems to allow IT patents, then the first company to apply for a patent covering "something that makes sick people better" would pretty much have the market cornered.
> We're on the side of the silent majority
...
So that would be the majority consisting of a few hundred SCO employees and Microsoft, but excluding IBM, RedHat, all Linux users, the OSS community in general,
> Picking a set of apps and decreeing them to be
... - what she really wanted was to run exactly one of each.
..., but they'd be likely to piss off a few people in the process. If you could select from the "home user Mozilla+OOo suite" or the "home user KDE suite" or whatever, that might work
> components of this ideal distribution might work
> in some instances -- for instance, in order to
> have uniformity through an entire organization --
> but I can't see it working out for home users.
Actually, I think having a single app to do one thing would be a very big plus for home users. The first time I installed Mandrake on my mum's PC, she looked through the menus and found 8 Web browsers, 6 email clients, 5 word processors,
Any one of the email clients, Web browsers, newsreaders etc. would have been fine for her, but she had a huge number of options every step of the way, with slightly different interfaces between tools that do the same task.
In the end, I got rid of all the menu items except for one tool in each category, and she's been fine ever since. I picked the "winning" tool in each group almost solely on what I'd used in the past - for her needs, they were all just about equal.
IMHO, the "home user" desktop should just work with one product in each category. Although zealots might argue the pros and cons, it really doesn't matter which mix of products gets used - just pick one and go with it.
It'd be nice if Mandrake and other distributions had a "home user" install option, that installed 1 browser, 1 email client,
> Theoretically, if both sides play perfectly then
> every match will end in a draw
Where did you pull this "fact" from? Chess isn't like noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe); it isn't possible to map out every combination of every move and prove that a draw is guaranteed if each player makes the right moves.
It's quite possible that a "perfectly played" game will end in a white win; it's generally accepted that there is a small advantage to playing white. Alternately, it's plausible that a perfect game woudl result in a black win. There's some ridiculously large number of possible games, so NOBODY KNOWS.
> Amazingly, while the US Constitution stands
> eviscerated, America remains the sweet land of
> liberty in comparison to the rest of the world
Yep, provided your "the rest of the world" comprises a maximum of 6 European countries...
You might want to try heading *west* from California, and see what you find there. I promise you won't fall off the edge of the world
if having links that go to sites-that-may-or-may-not-be-naughty is going to be illegal.
Might make a mess of that IPO
I've had it installed on a box with a 3ware 8506 RAID card and 3 SATA discs in a RAID 5 config. I configured RAID using 3ware's BIOS, and Mandrake saw my 3 80Gb discs as a single 160Gb disc as expected. The install went well, everything worked well afterwards. On bootup, I can see a 3ware driver message flash by, but I can't read what it says.
Yours is the latest of several messages I've seen saying that 2.4 kernels have problems installing to SATA RAID. The consensus of the responses seems to be "wait for 2.6"...
But, for the sake of my own curiosity, what is the problem you're seeing? I'm about to buy a whole slab of these 3ware/SATA RAID systems, and it might be worth going for something other than SATA drives if you and others are seeing problems.
> Should we fine and arrest people who keep
> vulnerable systems on the web? I think not.
I think that day is coming.
I think we're at a point of time in computer ownership that was probably a lot like the early days of car ownership.
I'd be fairly certain that there were hardly any rules for the first few years that cars were on the roads, since there wasn't sufficient public perception that lots of rules were required. It was only after enough people got run over, enough cars run off the road, enough general havoc was wreaked that rules against this behaviour were drawn up.
I can even remember the days before seatbelts were compulsory in cars, and when you could drink as much as you liked then drive home. These rules only came in in the last 20-30 years, yet it's almost impossible today to imagine that they didn't exist all along.
As more and more home computers get hijacked and used for "bad things", legislation will start to come in making people responsible for what goes on on their own PCs. Maybe it won't be directed at end users - maybe the responsibility will be put on ISPs, or on the owners of routers that filter traffic into and out of legal jurisdictions - but it *will* be enforced regardless of whether the laws are credible or not.
If not, what will we be left with? - a mass of rogue PCs capable of bringing down major companies and financial and legal systems. No responsible government is going to allow this to happen.
You may or may not like it (personally I've got mixed feelings about it), but it will happen.
I think you're talking about a different market than the OSDL guys are targetting.
They're targetting enterprise desktops (i.e. where the real money is), not SOHO or individual users. Enterprise desktops are managed by a central IT group; they're the ones who'll "whip out terminal" and read man pages, not the users.
Contrary to a lot of Slashdot hype, enterprise IT support people are by and large perfectly capable of transitioning from managing Windows desktops to managing Linux desktops. The disciplines required are exactly the same; it's only the tools and the processes based on those tools that change. There's very little of the hacker/genius-at-work mentality left in enterprise desktop management; those people have been phased out as they pose too great a risk to things like availability and responsiveness SLAs. Instead, the people who support enterprise desktops use things like change control and documented process to do their job; all that needs to change if they migrate from Windows to Linux is the specifics of the documented process, plus a relatively small amount of training in the new tools.
Remember, it's not like everyone who supports Windows will have to become experts in e.g. OpenLDAP, Samba, sendmail/qmail/PostFix, Apache etc. Only a tiny percentage of enterprise support people need to know this stuff; the rest spend their days doing things like backing up stuff, restoring files, adding/deleting users, resetting passwords, etc., and you don't need expert level knowledge in these tools to do that. You need expert-level knowledge to set up e.g. Samba, not to maintain it over time.
I'm not saying that sort of migration is a trivial step, but stack it up against the ongoing maintenance and licence costs of supporting 1000s of Windows desktops and the cost of migration is pretty small.
As far as end-users go, most *enterprise* desktop users use a surprisingly small set of applications. Email, Web browser and Office suite would easily suffice for 90%+ of the users; in other words, only 10% or less of users would *ever* need more than those apps.
As far as training goes, it's quite possible to set up KDE to be extremely Windows-like - look at what Lycoris has done. Graphical Web browsers and email clients have pretty much a standard interface these days; there's no real retraining required to go from IE to Mozilla or Konqueror, since the UIs are almost identical. I'd also suggest that anyone who's been working with e.g. Word through several versions would have little difficulty going from Word to OpenOffice; the differences in UI involved are about the same as the differences between (say) Word 97 and Word/XP. Excel to OpenOffice is about the same, although Powerpoint to OpenOffice is a bit more of a leap.
Finally, if there are some users who absolutely require a Windows app (e.g. ACT, MS Project) to do their work, then they can run Win4Lin, Crossover Office or something similar to use that tool. Remember, they're just tools, not a lifestyle choice; there should be no emotion involved in this decision.
Isn't it normal practice to copy films and distribute them to the people who vote in the Academy Awards and similar Hollywood fluffer events? Normally the movies under consideration for these awards haven't had formal DVD releases, so the copies are one-off DVDs specifically for reviewers.
Got to remind the MPAA watchdogs to check the computers of these reviewers and their kids - it wouldn't surprise at all to find out that some of these voters have teenage kids, and that these kids would like to score points with their mates by putting their one-off copies of the films online every now and then.
IBM has used RedHat's products at several of their sites - primarily US-based sites as far as I'm aware. IBM seems to focus primarily on using SuSE for their European-based customers.
Now that desktop RedHat has been replaced with Fedora, and the consequent loosening of control of the distribution by RedHat, has IBM indicated any change to their business relationship with RedHat?
IBM is now pushing to have more Linux desktop systems out there, and presumably either is or will be sending that message out through their field consultants. Now that you've dropped desktop RedHat, are you concerned that SuSE, or indeed any other Linux vendor, may step in and establish themselves as the dominant desktop Linux platform by riding on IBM's coattails, and that they may be able to leverage this strength to cut into your enterprise sales?