20 years down the track, one of my kids becomes incredibly rich due to hard work, clever investments and so on.
Why wouldn't I be able to claim he or she as a "derived work" of mine, and loot their bank account?
Suddenly old age stretches out before me like a path of gold...
Isn't this "derivative work" argument a bit rich?
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 4, Interesting
After all, as the author points out, pretty much everything in current software is a derivative of what's gone earlier.
Using this argument, surely: - Perl is derived from C, sed, awk, etc. - Ada (design commissioned by US DoD, no less) is derived from Pascal, Algol and many others - virtually every procedural language is derived from Algol - MS Windows and the Mac UI are derived from X Windows and/or Xerox PARC's work (not 100% sure about the sequence of these, but the point still stands if the list has to be reordered) - (add other examples till you get tired of it)
My point is that this is an entire industry built on "standing on the shoulders of giants". Nobody, *nobody* creates anything entirely from scratch.
Ridiculous derivations aside, I'd have thought that if SCO's (re-)definition of "derivative works" stands up, then surely all x86-based servers would be derived from IBM's original PC. After all, that's tangible hardware you can put your hands on such that a relative layman could see obvious derivations, not a bunch of lines of code where any proof of illegal copying is going to depend on accepting CVS-type logs as solid evidence. If the US legal system holds this to be true, then that could be used to kill off all non-IBM x86 hardware development since the early 1980s.
God forbid that Ada Lovelace's (frequently credited as "the first programmer") descendants read this rubbish and call their lawyers for a chat...
I'd take the stance that, if the work is that important to my employer, then that employer should be willing to give me some (more?) equity in the company itself. *That's* your win-win; if the company does well out of all this, then they should be willing to share some of this with me *after* it's all over.
It sounds like you're not going to get overtime; maybe your company has bet its future to some extent on this piece of work, and paying employees extra when there's no guarantee of a successful outcome probably isn't going to happen.
Someone higher up in your company has stuck his neck on the line, saying "we can do this" when presumably the workers have said "no we can't". You can bet that, if you pull this off, that "we can do this guy" will become a golden child, and he'll be getting a bonus or equity or some other tangible form of compensation. However, if you don't pull this off, that guy will be gone.
You need to align yourself with this guy's win/lose approach; if you win, you should both win by virtue of sharing in some tangible loot-like compensation, and if you lose, you get nothing. It sounds like you're already getting the "nothing" courtesy of your employer's "work-for-free" scheme, so put it to them in this light.
"If I do this, then I want something, but only if we all succeed" - that's your approach in a nutshell
> This isn't the usual "it's no good because you > can't get your work done" thing", this is the > "it's no damn fun" thing.
As someone who used to work from home 1-2 days a week, I can sympathise with this. I got around it by partnering up with a work colleague who also worked from home and working together at either his or my house every so often. Having another human around can make things a lot easier, especially if there's always a subconscious concern of "do people really think I'm productive when I'm working at home?" in the back of your mind...
That said, having worked from home shortly after the birth of my first child, there's plenty of times when you really do want to be home alone. In my case, I resorted to getting 8hrs work done in a 24hr period, however possible; when you're rocking a baby to sleep at 2am, you actually can get some work done (even reading printed documents) and neither of my 2 kids have developed obvious social problems because their Dad read a few documents while they were dozing off with a bottle.
> 1) Tax credit? How do you manage that? I just get > a deduction, which is a reduction of my taxable > income rather than a credit on my tax. The best > charitable contributions can do is reduce your tax > to $0 by reducing your taxable income to $0
While I don't want to come across as an apologist for Microsoft here, I have to compare my own charitable contributions with your list:
1. Tax credit - I claim tax deductions on my own contributions, whenever the amount of money involved makes it actually worthwhile. It's not just a freak of nature that tax credits exist for this type of stuff; governments realise that they can't financially support every single worthy cause out there, so they provide tax credits as a way of encouraging individuals to kick in their own dollars to the causes they're personally interested in
2. Press - MS gets it, I don't. MS probably gets good and bad press in roughly equal amounts, when you read about it across a broad spectrum of press sources. I figure this probably is a mild plus for them, since most decision makers responsible for MS product purchases would read press that would be broadly favorable to MS in terms of their charitable contributions
3. Good will of the charities - while this is (maybe) relevant to me personally, I don't think MS gives a stuff whether Charity Inc talks up MS or not. MS may even make visible displays of goodwill a condition on the supply of charitable contributions, but I can't see how that differs from corporate sponsorship of arts (such as opera) that aren't capable of being self-funding.
4. Making themselves feel like good citizens - guess what? That's a large component of why I personally donate to charities, and I bet that applies to most individuals. I certainly don't do it to make myself feel bad, and I can't see how you could criticise MS on this count
5. Keep open source from gaining mindshare - this doesn't directly apply to me, but I'd draw a parallel between this statement and someone like Christopher Reeve donating time to collecting money via charities for spinal research that's obviously in his own personal interest. While you could argue Reeve could devote his own time and influence towards something like curing AIDS (assuming he has no personal stake in an AIDS cure), why should he? If curing his own problems also results in cures for 1000s of others, so be it. I'm sure MS sees keeping open source under wraps as a benefit for society as a whole; everything they've said and done on this issue over the last few years demonstrates that the MS company absolutely believes open source=bad for the world at large
My point: nobody, NOBODY donates time and money to charity for absolutely altruistic reasons. At the very least, they get a feeling of satisfaction out of doing so, which is totally selfish (and totally reasonable as well).
I did some work with an extremely large corporation's charity spin-off many years ago; although that spinoff donated hundreds of millions of dollars each year, they had way more applications for money from deserving groups than they could actually support. Based on this, and among other criteria, they selected those causes that gave a good corporate return, if only so the underlying corporation could continue to prosper and thus have money to donate the following year... None of the people who worked there thought this was at all strange, and to a man they felt they were "doing good" for society as a whole. Maybe they were all fooling themselves, but I don't think so.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
The problem with this approach is that it only deals with the issue on a national level. Although I've never checked, my guess is that the majority of spam I receive comes from either the US, China or Korea - and I don't live in any of these countries.
*My* government could impose whatever anti-spam laws it likes, and it isn't going to stop me getting piles of crap in my email every day.
Legislation, in ANY form, isn't going to work, and any politician who promotes that model as a valid solution is either an uninformed idiot or is trying to win votes. Here in Australia, we're stuck with an IT minister who's both incompetent and chasing votes, so I know what's going to happen...
First, we're talking about a browser and a database. They're hardly interchangeable.
I never really stopped to consider I was using "Mozilla" even though it's obviously derived from crappy Japanese movies, or "Phoenix" with its "born from the ashes" undertones; if they'd been called "Cuttlefish" and "Rob Schneider", I wouldn't have cared less.
Since it seems to have come along later, change the name of the damn browser and let's get on with life. If there's some mysterious proof that the browser came along before the database, change the name of the database.
If they'd been called "Lilo" and "Stitch", everyone would have been up in arms if/when Disney came along with a "cease and desist" note. They're not; it's all OSS, so let's all get along nicely like good anarchists should.
> How many times have I watched people here applaud > when a former cracker gets appointed to a top > position in security?
I think the main issue in this case is the combination of the Bush government - not a leader in the protection of individual privacy - and DoubleClick - ditto - being put in charge of the shop.
Unlike e.g. employing Kevin Mitnick as a security guy for a private company, people don't have the choice whether they deal with Bush Inc; there is no competition across the road where they can take their business. I'm sure if Kevin Mitnick was put in as security head honcho for the US Govt, then similar concerns would be voiced as in this case.
> With M$'s army of lawyers, any attempt to organize > such a project will quickly be shot down by any > one of a number of current laws.
They wouldn't happen to be US- or EU-only laws, would they? There's a lot of us in countries where we don't have to worry about DMCAs and such, and I'm betting the Palladium cracking project will have many times more focus than the XBox cracking project has had...
I've got to commiserate with her experience. I've just installed Mandrake 9.1 on my main desktop; it installed everything I wanted in about an hour, then I spent another hour tracking down why my sound card didn't work (Soundblaster Live driver installed in the wrong directory...), about 10-20 minutes downloading the NVidia driver and getting it built and going, another 20 minutes working out why Samba didn't want to print any more, and there's probably a few other surprises waiting for me still.
My Dad, who's very technically knowledgeable but not especially expert with computers, went through hell upgrading from Win 98 to XP a couple of months ago. It took him maybe 15-20 hours total sitting in front of the computer, tracking down and re-installing all his apps from the CDs, downloading security patches galore from MS over a 56k modem, rebooting, downloading more patches, rebooting again, finding some apps don't work on XP and having to upgrade to new versions,...
Then, Mum wanted a computer of her own because she couldn't get Dad away from his... Solution: I spent about 3 hours building a Lycoris box for her, removing every menu option that she wouldn't use, adding a few extra bits and pieces and locking up the box like a drum. She can do everything she wants to do, and has virtually no way of screwing up the OS or apps because I've locked them down tight. Barring something like a hard disc failure, her system isn't going to need any maintenance.
Meanwhile, Dad has found some of the new functionality in XP pretty weird, and is now getting close to having to reinstall again because he's stuffed a few things up. I'm going over there today to try to get everything working again, but I kind of suspect he's facing another reinstall.
*That's* where Linux has it over Windows. Once you set it up how you want it, it can be locked down so inexperienced users can't break it. Using a Linux Terminal Server model, a reasonably competent admin can easily and reasonably quickly set up a locked down office or school environment, roll it out to many users, and it'll stay locked down.
Windows, on the other hand, makes this much more difficult. You *can* lock down the user environment, but it'll cost significant extra dollars in licence costs to do this (a Win2k Server running as a domain controller, for starters). Even then, it's still difficult to totally lock down a Windows box, as is evidenced by the number of user box rebuilds that have to be performed by the IT departments of large companies.
I'd say both Windows and Linux are still too difficult to set up, but Linux needs much less fixing over time. You can't consider the install cost/difficulty in isolation, and ignore the cost/difficulty of ongoing maintenance of the platform.
> In the commercial, closed source world you'll > find:
> * A limited set of tools to address a given > problem. If they don't work, you have to create > from scratch.
Actually, the far more common solution is that you wind up trying to change your problem to fit the available solution.
Hardly any piece of software, OSS or otherwise, is the exact fit to your specific problem. You either find (a) some features that don't "fit" the way you want to use them, (b) way too many features (and often too much demand on your hardware as a result), or (c) not enough features to solve your problem.
Onee big plus with OSS is that you have the option of changing the code to exactly fit your problem. With closed-source, you don't have that option; you have to solve your problems in the way the author/s of the code think you should solve it.
> In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand > united
There is no "we"!
So many people on/. speak in terms of "we have to do this" or "we must not do that". "We have to get better documentation written", "we have to improve OOo's ability to import Word documents",...
I'm all for rallying behind the OSS warcry, but "we", as individuals, don't have any say over the collective OSS output of the rest of the world. OSS is written by individuals who have itches to scratch; they start scratching their itch, release some code, and maybe other people with the same itch jump in to help out and it snowballs from there.
One potential outcome of this is that this group of people could disband when their product is ready for *them* to use, and that might be before they've written lots of documentation to allow everyone else in the world to easily use their product.
If you think "we" should do something, then maybe *you* should be the one doing it.
-- darnok, grumpy as hell after a very long flight home...
I see this as a very big step forward, and congratulations to all involved. Contrary to some of the knee-jerk responses, there are valid places where audio encryption could be very useful for society as a whole.
To quote just one, audio evidence is regularly admitted in court. However, there is a significant possibility that this evidence can be tampered with. If the "source" audio was recorded+encrypted on the fly on a "closed" piece of hardware, maybe even with a GPS to capture the geographic location and time of day, it'd be possible to get an extra level of confidence that the audio was kosher and thus give it more weight in evidence.
Now I'm sure that it would be theoretically possible to tamper with such evidence, but it makes it that much tougher to do than e.g. people taking a conversation sample on cassette tape, then editing it using the appropriate tools and rewriting it to tape again.
Because if they did, then other countries might do a similar thing and start taxing the import of software from the US. As the US is the largest producer of commercial software, and is in an economic hole, this would hurt the US more than it would any other country.
It might have worked a few years ago, before there were viable options to Windows and (low- to mid-range) Solaris and HP systems, but now Linux and BSD make it viable to run companies without US-produced commercial software.
> The "high class" consutlants and developers will > be using DB2 and MS SQL forever, because a) > they're told to do so by the people who can fire > them b) they're used to it, and used to touting > its glory c) they have a ton of tools for it.
On the contrary, I get paid a reasonably high consulting rate (well, it's high for the current climate...) because I save people from having to fork out for DB2, Oracle, etc.
Think about it: if you can front up to the decision makers in an organization and demonstrate conclusively how you can save them large slabs of money, then you're in a good position to ask for a cut of what they've saved. Tell me one IT decision maker these days who won't listen to someone credible who offers to save them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in software licence fees...
Even at the lower levels, IT departments are being asked to shed staff, and if you can tell them they can cut costs elsewhere and maybe retain their existing staff as a result, you'll generally get someone prepared to listen.
> That said, many enterprise users use Oracle in > cases where MySQL would be much more cost > effective, and probably better performing as well.
It's remarkable how many shops will choose Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server over MySQL or Postgres for even the most mundane tasks, and choose to pay HUGE licencing fees as a result.
One project that I worked on had the (Web-based) clients sending out parallel requests to a mainframe DB2 backend, and progressively assembling the results in an "intermediary" SQL Server database. Once all the results from the DB2 database had been collated together, the data would then be sent from the SQL Server database back to the client. Although this wasn't a particularly high-throughput app, the sheer quantity of iron that was required for the SQL Server DB boggled the mind - I think it was something like a 4-way active-active cluster - and the SQL Svr licence fees were something over $100k - **for a database that only ever held transient data**!!!
MySQL would have been perfect for this job. It would have saved big bucks on licences alone, then it would've saved more due to its much faster throughput and lower resource requirements. If really necessary, it could've run on hardware bigger than the biggest Intel boxes, which obviously wasn't an option with SQL Server.
Why didn't they go with this? Three words - Microsoft Consulting Services.
I know your original message said something about using an OS "other than a terminal", but you might consider bringing it up as an XTerm. From the wording of your question, I'm guessing that you've got a more modern Linux box somewhere that you yourself use, so why not install your kid's apps on that and let him run riot accessing it via an XTerm?
Advantages: - given that you'll probably be installing Linux and X on the old laptop anyway, it should be easier to install just enough to have it run as an Xterm, rather than having to install several games, drawing programs, etc. into limited space - you'll probably get more life out of it, given that there's very little that's going to have to change on it once it's up and going properly - you can send him cute messages from your other PC (don't underestimate how exciting kids find this!) - very little software on his PC means very little to go wrong - if/when he breaks or outgrows it, you can quickly get another clunker PC and bring it up as another XTerm
Disadvantages: - you'll need a network card, which you may or may not have in this laptop. It should be pretty cheap to track down an old Xircom or something similar
FWIW, my two boys (6 and 4) have been playing games and surfing Web sites on one of my Linux PCs for years - basically, they started "helping" me work before they could walk. There's lots of games and drawing programs out there if you look around. They're yet to show OTT geek tendencies, or any inability to use a MS OS, as far as I can detect - you should be safe!
Slashdot Mirror
"MSFT appears to be a bargain at the moment - press left button 3 times, then right button twice to buy"
20 years down the track, one of my kids becomes incredibly rich due to hard work, clever investments and so on.
Why wouldn't I be able to claim he or she as a "derived work" of mine, and loot their bank account?
Suddenly old age stretches out before me like a path of gold...
After all, as the author points out, pretty much everything in current software is a derivative of what's gone earlier.
Using this argument, surely:
- Perl is derived from C, sed, awk, etc.
- Ada (design commissioned by US DoD, no less) is derived from Pascal, Algol and many others
- virtually every procedural language is derived from Algol
- MS Windows and the Mac UI are derived from X Windows and/or Xerox PARC's work (not 100% sure about the sequence of these, but the point still stands if the list has to be reordered)
- (add other examples till you get tired of it)
My point is that this is an entire industry built on "standing on the shoulders of giants". Nobody, *nobody* creates anything entirely from scratch.
Ridiculous derivations aside, I'd have thought that if SCO's (re-)definition of "derivative works" stands up, then surely all x86-based servers would be derived from IBM's original PC. After all, that's tangible hardware you can put your hands on such that a relative layman could see obvious derivations, not a bunch of lines of code where any proof of illegal copying is going to depend on accepting CVS-type logs as solid evidence. If the US legal system holds this to be true, then that could be used to kill off all non-IBM x86 hardware development since the early 1980s.
God forbid that Ada Lovelace's (frequently credited as "the first programmer") descendants read this rubbish and call their lawyers for a chat...
> Where are we going to draw the line between a
> "patriot" and a "terrorist"?
A patriot is a terrorist who's on our side; a terrorist is a patriot who's on their side
Got any more?
E-Q-U-I-T-Y
I'd take the stance that, if the work is that important to my employer, then that employer should be willing to give me some (more?) equity in the company itself. *That's* your win-win; if the company does well out of all this, then they should be willing to share some of this with me *after* it's all over.
It sounds like you're not going to get overtime; maybe your company has bet its future to some extent on this piece of work, and paying employees extra when there's no guarantee of a successful outcome probably isn't going to happen.
Someone higher up in your company has stuck his neck on the line, saying "we can do this" when presumably the workers have said "no we can't". You can bet that, if you pull this off, that "we can do this guy" will become a golden child, and he'll be getting a bonus or equity or some other tangible form of compensation. However, if you don't pull this off, that guy will be gone.
You need to align yourself with this guy's win/lose approach; if you win, you should both win by virtue of sharing in some tangible loot-like compensation, and if you lose, you get nothing. It sounds like you're already getting the "nothing" courtesy of your employer's "work-for-free" scheme, so put it to them in this light.
"If I do this, then I want something, but only if we all succeed" - that's your approach in a nutshell
> This isn't the usual "it's no good because you
> can't get your work done" thing", this is the
> "it's no damn fun" thing.
As someone who used to work from home 1-2 days a week, I can sympathise with this. I got around it by partnering up with a work colleague who also worked from home and working together at either his or my house every so often. Having another human around can make things a lot easier, especially if there's always a subconscious concern of "do people really think I'm productive when I'm working at home?" in the back of your mind...
That said, having worked from home shortly after the birth of my first child, there's plenty of times when you really do want to be home alone. In my case, I resorted to getting 8hrs work done in a 24hr period, however possible; when you're rocking a baby to sleep at 2am, you actually can get some work done (even reading printed documents) and neither of my 2 kids have developed obvious social problems because their Dad read a few documents while they were dozing off with a bottle.
There's been so many discussions related to this case that surely it deserves its own icon by now.
I propose a big picture of a bum with a giant fist coming out of it
Better ideas welcome
> 1) Tax credit? How do you manage that? I just get
;->
> a deduction, which is a reduction of my taxable
> income rather than a credit on my tax. The best
> charitable contributions can do is reduce your tax
> to $0 by reducing your taxable income to $0
That's why I don't live in the US
While I don't want to come across as an apologist for Microsoft here, I have to compare my own charitable contributions with your list:
1. Tax credit - I claim tax deductions on my own contributions, whenever the amount of money involved makes it actually worthwhile. It's not just a freak of nature that tax credits exist for this type of stuff; governments realise that they can't financially support every single worthy cause out there, so they provide tax credits as a way of encouraging individuals to kick in their own dollars to the causes they're personally interested in
2. Press - MS gets it, I don't. MS probably gets good and bad press in roughly equal amounts, when you read about it across a broad spectrum of press sources. I figure this probably is a mild plus for them, since most decision makers responsible for MS product purchases would read press that would be broadly favorable to MS in terms of their charitable contributions
3. Good will of the charities - while this is (maybe) relevant to me personally, I don't think MS gives a stuff whether Charity Inc talks up MS or not. MS may even make visible displays of goodwill a condition on the supply of charitable contributions, but I can't see how that differs from corporate sponsorship of arts (such as opera) that aren't capable of being self-funding.
4. Making themselves feel like good citizens - guess what? That's a large component of why I personally donate to charities, and I bet that applies to most individuals. I certainly don't do it to make myself feel bad, and I can't see how you could criticise MS on this count
5. Keep open source from gaining mindshare - this doesn't directly apply to me, but I'd draw a parallel between this statement and someone like Christopher Reeve donating time to collecting money via charities for spinal research that's obviously in his own personal interest. While you could argue Reeve could devote his own time and influence towards something like curing AIDS (assuming he has no personal stake in an AIDS cure), why should he? If curing his own problems also results in cures for 1000s of others, so be it. I'm sure MS sees keeping open source under wraps as a benefit for society as a whole; everything they've said and done on this issue over the last few years demonstrates that the MS company absolutely believes open source=bad for the world at large
My point: nobody, NOBODY donates time and money to charity for absolutely altruistic reasons. At the very least, they get a feeling of satisfaction out of doing so, which is totally selfish (and totally reasonable as well).
I did some work with an extremely large corporation's charity spin-off many years ago; although that spinoff donated hundreds of millions of dollars each year, they had way more applications for money from deserving groups than they could actually support. Based on this, and among other criteria, they selected those causes that gave a good corporate return, if only so the underlying corporation could continue to prosper and thus have money to donate the following year... None of the people who worked there thought this was at all strange, and to a man they felt they were "doing good" for society as a whole. Maybe they were all fooling themselves, but I don't think so.
The problem with this approach is that it only deals with the issue on a national level. Although I've never checked, my guess is that the majority of spam I receive comes from either the US, China or Korea - and I don't live in any of these countries.
*My* government could impose whatever anti-spam laws it likes, and it isn't going to stop me getting piles of crap in my email every day.
Legislation, in ANY form, isn't going to work, and any politician who promotes that model as a valid solution is either an uninformed idiot or is trying to win votes. Here in Australia, we're stuck with an IT minister who's both incompetent and chasing votes, so I know what's going to happen...
if (!used_by_good_guys) { ...
blow_up_in_faces();
exit(1);
} else {
Sometimes the only answer to stupidity is even more stupidity
First, we're talking about a browser and a database. They're hardly interchangeable.
I never really stopped to consider I was using "Mozilla" even though it's obviously derived from crappy Japanese movies, or "Phoenix" with its "born from the ashes" undertones; if they'd been called "Cuttlefish" and "Rob Schneider", I wouldn't have cared less.
Since it seems to have come along later, change the name of the damn browser and let's get on with life. If there's some mysterious proof that the browser came along before the database, change the name of the database.
If they'd been called "Lilo" and "Stitch", everyone would have been up in arms if/when Disney came along with a "cease and desist" note. They're not; it's all OSS, so let's all get along nicely like good anarchists should.
> How many times have I watched people here applaud
> when a former cracker gets appointed to a top
> position in security?
I think the main issue in this case is the combination of the Bush government - not a leader in the protection of individual privacy - and DoubleClick - ditto - being put in charge of the shop.
Unlike e.g. employing Kevin Mitnick as a security guy for a private company, people don't have the choice whether they deal with Bush Inc; there is no competition across the road where they can take their business. I'm sure if Kevin Mitnick was put in as security head honcho for the US Govt, then similar concerns would be voiced as in this case.
> With M$'s army of lawyers, any attempt to organize
> such a project will quickly be shot down by any
> one of a number of current laws.
They wouldn't happen to be US- or EU-only laws, would they? There's a lot of us in countries where we don't have to worry about DMCAs and such, and I'm betting the Palladium cracking project will have many times more focus than the XBox cracking project has had...
I've got to commiserate with her experience. I've just installed Mandrake 9.1 on my main desktop; it installed everything I wanted in about an hour, then I spent another hour tracking down why my sound card didn't work (Soundblaster Live driver installed in the wrong directory...), about 10-20 minutes downloading the NVidia driver and getting it built and going, another 20 minutes working out why Samba didn't want to print any more, and there's probably a few other surprises waiting for me still.
...
My Dad, who's very technically knowledgeable but not especially expert with computers, went through hell upgrading from Win 98 to XP a couple of months ago. It took him maybe 15-20 hours total sitting in front of the computer, tracking down and re-installing all his apps from the CDs, downloading security patches galore from MS over a 56k modem, rebooting, downloading more patches, rebooting again, finding some apps don't work on XP and having to upgrade to new versions,
Then, Mum wanted a computer of her own because she couldn't get Dad away from his... Solution: I spent about 3 hours building a Lycoris box for her, removing every menu option that she wouldn't use, adding a few extra bits and pieces and locking up the box like a drum. She can do everything she wants to do, and has virtually no way of screwing up the OS or apps because I've locked them down tight. Barring something like a hard disc failure, her system isn't going to need any maintenance.
Meanwhile, Dad has found some of the new functionality in XP pretty weird, and is now getting close to having to reinstall again because he's stuffed a few things up. I'm going over there today to try to get everything working again, but I kind of suspect he's facing another reinstall.
*That's* where Linux has it over Windows. Once you set it up how you want it, it can be locked down so inexperienced users can't break it. Using a Linux Terminal Server model, a reasonably competent admin can easily and reasonably quickly set up a locked down office or school environment, roll it out to many users, and it'll stay locked down.
Windows, on the other hand, makes this much more difficult. You *can* lock down the user environment, but it'll cost significant extra dollars in licence costs to do this (a Win2k Server running as a domain controller, for starters). Even then, it's still difficult to totally lock down a Windows box, as is evidenced by the number of user box rebuilds that have to be performed by the IT departments of large companies.
I'd say both Windows and Linux are still too difficult to set up, but Linux needs much less fixing over time. You can't consider the install cost/difficulty in isolation, and ignore the cost/difficulty of ongoing maintenance of the platform.
> In the commercial, closed source world you'll
> find:
> * A limited set of tools to address a given
> problem. If they don't work, you have to create
> from scratch.
Actually, the far more common solution is that you wind up trying to change your problem to fit the available solution.
Hardly any piece of software, OSS or otherwise, is the exact fit to your specific problem. You either find (a) some features that don't "fit" the way you want to use them, (b) way too many features (and often too much demand on your hardware as a result), or (c) not enough features to solve your problem.
Onee big plus with OSS is that you have the option of changing the code to exactly fit your problem. With closed-source, you don't have that option; you have to solve your problems in the way the author/s of the code think you should solve it.
> In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand
/. speak in terms of "we have to do this" or "we must not do that". "We have to get better documentation written", "we have to improve OOo's ability to import Word documents", ...
> united
There is no "we"!
So many people on
I'm all for rallying behind the OSS warcry, but "we", as individuals, don't have any say over the collective OSS output of the rest of the world. OSS is written by individuals who have itches to scratch; they start scratching their itch, release some code, and maybe other people with the same itch jump in to help out and it snowballs from there.
One potential outcome of this is that this group of people could disband when their product is ready for *them* to use, and that might be before they've written lots of documentation to allow everyone else in the world to easily use their product.
If you think "we" should do something, then maybe *you* should be the one doing it.
-- darnok, grumpy as hell after a very long flight home...
I see this as a very big step forward, and congratulations to all involved. Contrary to some of the knee-jerk responses, there are valid places where audio encryption could be very useful for society as a whole.
To quote just one, audio evidence is regularly admitted in court. However, there is a significant possibility that this evidence can be tampered with. If the "source" audio was recorded+encrypted on the fly on a "closed" piece of hardware, maybe even with a GPS to capture the geographic location and time of day, it'd be possible to get an extra level of confidence that the audio was kosher and thus give it more weight in evidence.
Now I'm sure that it would be theoretically possible to tamper with such evidence, but it makes it that much tougher to do than e.g. people taking a conversation sample on cassette tape, then editing it using the appropriate tools and rewriting it to tape again.
> "Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston,
> Pink, TLC and Kenny G."
> That's just too easy.
That's true - Rodney Dangerfield based an entire career on less material than that one sentence.
That does it. /.ers unite! Let's not buy any more Kenny G, Pink, TLC or Whitney music till this heinous decision is reversed!
Oh wait...
> No mention of which titles will be affected, but
> Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston,
> Pink, TLC and Kenny G."
Gee, all those pirates that have based their business plans on copying & distributing Whitney and Kenny G music will be pissed.
> Why doesn't the US tax the import of software?
Because if they did, then other countries might do a similar thing and start taxing the import of software from the US. As the US is the largest producer of commercial software, and is in an economic hole, this would hurt the US more than it would any other country.
It might have worked a few years ago, before there were viable options to Windows and (low- to mid-range) Solaris and HP systems, but now Linux and BSD make it viable to run companies without US-produced commercial software.
> The "high class" consutlants and developers will
> be using DB2 and MS SQL forever, because a)
> they're told to do so by the people who can fire
> them b) they're used to it, and used to touting
> its glory c) they have a ton of tools for it.
On the contrary, I get paid a reasonably high consulting rate (well, it's high for the current climate...) because I save people from having to fork out for DB2, Oracle, etc.
Think about it: if you can front up to the decision makers in an organization and demonstrate conclusively how you can save them large slabs of money, then you're in a good position to ask for a cut of what they've saved. Tell me one IT decision maker these days who won't listen to someone credible who offers to save them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in software licence fees...
Even at the lower levels, IT departments are being asked to shed staff, and if you can tell them they can cut costs elsewhere and maybe retain their existing staff as a result, you'll generally get someone prepared to listen.
> That said, many enterprise users use Oracle in
> cases where MySQL would be much more cost
> effective, and probably better performing as well.
It's remarkable how many shops will choose Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server over MySQL or Postgres for even the most mundane tasks, and choose to pay HUGE licencing fees as a result.
One project that I worked on had the (Web-based) clients sending out parallel requests to a mainframe DB2 backend, and progressively assembling the results in an "intermediary" SQL Server database. Once all the results from the DB2 database had been collated together, the data would then be sent from the SQL Server database back to the client. Although this wasn't a particularly high-throughput app, the sheer quantity of iron that was required for the SQL Server DB boggled the mind - I think it was something like a 4-way active-active cluster - and the SQL Svr licence fees were something over $100k - **for a database that only ever held transient data**!!!
MySQL would have been perfect for this job. It would have saved big bucks on licences alone, then it would've saved more due to its much faster throughput and lower resource requirements. If really necessary, it could've run on hardware bigger than the biggest Intel boxes, which obviously wasn't an option with SQL Server.
Why didn't they go with this? Three words - Microsoft Consulting Services.
I know your original message said something about using an OS "other than a terminal", but you might consider bringing it up as an XTerm. From the wording of your question, I'm guessing that you've got a more modern Linux box somewhere that you yourself use, so why not install your kid's apps on that and let him run riot accessing it via an XTerm?
Advantages:
- given that you'll probably be installing Linux and X on the old laptop anyway, it should be easier to install just enough to have it run as an Xterm, rather than having to install several games, drawing programs, etc. into limited space
- you'll probably get more life out of it, given that there's very little that's going to have to change on it once it's up and going properly
- you can send him cute messages from your other PC (don't underestimate how exciting kids find this!)
- very little software on his PC means very little to go wrong
- if/when he breaks or outgrows it, you can quickly get another clunker PC and bring it up as another XTerm
Disadvantages:
- you'll need a network card, which you may or may not have in this laptop. It should be pretty cheap to track down an old Xircom or something similar
FWIW, my two boys (6 and 4) have been playing games and surfing Web sites on one of my Linux PCs for years - basically, they started "helping" me work before they could walk. There's lots of games and drawing programs out there if you look around. They're yet to show OTT geek tendencies, or any inability to use a MS OS, as far as I can detect - you should be safe!