You are an idiot. Environmentalists are not only concerned about the heavy metals emitted by nuclear plants, but about the catastrophic effects of an accident at a power plant.
Have you heard of Chernobyl? Well, if that's too far away for you, maybe you would like to look into the missing fuel rods at this Vernmont nuke plant
A pencil size rod is missing and it is enough to make a dirty bomb and kill thousands. Even if it isn't used in a terrorist act, it will be fatal to anyone who comes into contact with it without being properly shielded. Considering that no one knows where it is, we don't know how many people have already died.
Those are the real concerns of the environmentalists that you ridicule. If you were to fairly criticize them, you would do the honorable thing, which is to fully articulate the position of those that you critique, so that others can really weigh out the arguments.
What he didn't reveal clearly enough is that the damn card does NOT work in Windows 95 or 98 as he claims it does. It only does so through a virtual machine that provides an emulated hardware layer.
His point is thus moot and shown for what it really is: FUD. Big, stinking, FUD of the worst kind.
Couple this with the fact that he does not give out the chipset model of the built-in sound card and I do not believe a word he wrote and neither should you.
At a time when all goverment agencies are complaining that many of the 9/11 leads were not followed due to the fact that they had too much on their plate, it is great to see that the lessons have been learned.
Focus the attention of the police on the odd moviegoer that may have a videocamera, that is surely to do us all a great deal of good.
Since according to the studios, their very existence is on the line, next time a national tragedy occurs, we will be sad but glad to know that at least the studios were and saved and we will be able to go to the movies and realize the redeeming qualities of the Holywood crapola of the day.
Thanks. It's nice to see that we have the pulse of the times.
If the mythical mom was running KDE, she could have sent you a request for remote help by email, which works great. You take over the machine and help things.
And if you had set up the system for your mom, you would have kept the password for root, sshed remotely and done everything for her. Problem solved...
Fine, fair enough. I am obviously not for compulsory unionization.
But your post proves what I had said earlier:
"A lot of people will respond and tell us how angered they are over the injustices that it is being done to their peers. Then, they will move on to the next story, because in America individuality reigns supreme" or might I add now, seek rationalization for their dislike of unions.
Whichever the case, my portrayal of the role that unions worlwide played in helping people achieve fundamental rights is historically accurate, which was really about people helping themselves as unions are made up of people. This may be a subtle but important point.
In light of the historical role of unions, it is more than a little funny to see organizations such as NRTP, which you quote in your post, claiming that it is fighting for human rights.
And when you have organizations with hundreds of thousands of members, sometimes millions, and only occasional cases of corruption, it does not prove your point that all of them are corrupt bureaucracies; rather, it shows that they have done quite well at creating enough trigger mechanisms to detect abuse.
NRTP has a major axe to grind when it comes to unions, just read its misson, so it is hardly an authoritative source on the issues it denounces. It would be worth getting both sides of the story, which you did not do.
I will conclude by saying that the problem is that most public policy issues require concerted action for real solutions to emerge.
People in the US tend to simply distrust organizations so that rather than build transparency mechanisms into them, which requires involvement, they'd rather just walk away and deal with it in their own terms, in your case you claim to "move on".
What if you were in your fifties and you were majorly screwed by the company that you have given twenty years of life to? Screwed out of retirement or out of benefits? In a world without unions and the changes in the law that they helped bring about, you would have little recourse, but you seem to forget that the very legal resources you may have now to fight this wrong often came as the result of unions doing their job and enshrouding in the law all the little niceties that we often take for granted.
But if you want none of it, your choice.
Funny how in American culture, people distrust unions but have come up with a funny adage to avoid structural political change. Last time I checked, it was called changed the system from within. But if there are problems with unions, these are not to be changed from within, just done away with or renounced.
Indeed, no organization is immunte to corruption and you have summarized your point in an easy-to-remember adage.
Yet the solution is not to throw out the baby with the bath water, but to build transparency into those organizations by way of better membership controls.
Additionally, you have to realize that trade unionism in Europe does not have as many of the dark historical episodes that you mention in Europe. In fact, I can hardly think of any serious issues in the last 80 years.
Which means that on a relatevile large sample of industrialized economies, unions have been proven to work fairly well. The challenge is to turn them into one more partner that is acknowledged as such in industrial relations negotiations.
Businesses would be better served by a more loyal workforce that saw its own interests as inherently tied to those of the company. This only occurs when you build trust. For a worker to be able to trust a corporation, he has to feel certain that he has negotiating clout, something which you can often only get by having the support of a Union.
"If your woried aobut you're spelling, you must be knew hear!"
That made me laugh...
On a serious note, I like the emphasis that Slashdot puts on content over form. As long as a post is readable and clear, I appreciate the effort that has gone into it.
As a community it says, substance matters. We'll correct the rough edges on the next.1 release.
I stated that some of these articles are xenophobic, not all of them, simply because they are. If you are to tell me that you have not witnessed the tidal wave of racial slurs that are made after an article of this nature is posted, then as you often hear in Slashdot, "you must be knew here".
I am not insulting anyone. I am rather claiming that the proper context for the understanding of the implications both -policy and personal- of outsourcing is globalization gone wild and specifically a type of globlalization that uses cultural outputs (the media) to co-opt workers into meer puppets of corporations unwilling to cooperate with their peers for the common good.
If you read what I said in context, I fail to see how you can draw the conclusions you do, unless you want to misrepresent my views.
Here's what will happen in reaction to this article.
A lot of people will respond and tell us how angered they are over the injustices that it is being done to their peers. Then, they will move on to the next story, because in America individuality reigns supreme and the media has twisted our common history to the extent that people do not realize that it was trade unions that made possible the establishment of fair labor standards, such as sick pay, vacation time, a 40-hour week, health standards in the workplace, age-limits to enter the workfoce and so forth.
People will complain about the raw deal that they get from corporations, yet fail to understand that they have been co-opted into thinking of trading unions as their enemy.
So long as trade unions are vilified in this country and workers continue to believe that they can beat the system individually if they just continue to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketeable -all good and lofty things but not the solution to this issue- I will remain unimpressed by these stories for two reasons:
1) They contain a pinch of xenophobia, at least most of them do.
2) People are not looking for root causes and fool themselves if they think that foreign workers are not also continuing to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketable.
It's time to collaborate with your peers with the same passion that you work on open source software: Union Makes Strength
For those of you that fail to understand that life is sacrosact and that profits are not everything,do not bother. History has proven you wrong. Only a short time ago, a worker could not hope to reach his thirty's because his working conditions were so inhumane and miserable.
Know your history, know your past. It will empower you to face the future.
The truth is that developers have a bit of clout within Microsoft. Microsoft developers can and have been an element of change within the company before. In fact, if any change at all ever comes it will come from them, not from the guys on top.
*Distraction Tactics to assuage the roars that are sure to ensue after the release of the first Phoenix TCPA bioses.
*Some Microsoft developers appreciate the power of collaboration?
*Vitiate what people understand free software to be by mudding the waters even more. At the next Linux conference, Microsoft will proudly display that they too are contributing to open source. I can just see it now: "We use open source where it makes sense and make use of proprietary best practices to lead the world to a new paradigm of openness, yet realiably supported for the one and only company that you should trust". In other words, newspeak.
I wish to be proven wrong. If a Microsoft employee reads this. Prove us wrong and we'll welcome you. Compete on the strengths of office by providing a documented, free and open XML schema for Office. Make it easy to import openoffice documents by MS Office. While you are a it, open Source CIFS under an OSI approved license.
I am happy to see the wider use of Linux and unhappy to see some of the xenophobic reactions every time that an Asian country announces support for open source.
Some have gone as far as calling this unamerican, thereby furthering the hollow arguments put forth by C. Mundie and co. just a few years ago.
There is a lot to be happy about:
*More bug fixes and more features *Wider and larger hardware support *Better internationalizaton support
And for those of us that also care about free software, I think the OS will have a slow ripple effect throughout the respective societies of Korea, China and Japan.
Eventually, it will take time, students will be empowered to start their own businesses by having the right tools at their disposal; those in Civil Society will also have an easier time finding likeminded individuals and building issue communities that use the power of open source software to coordinate their activities. All of this will take time, but it is possible.
I think FLOSS, if nothing else, opens a window into altruism and the opportunity to build a more open tomorrow. Those ideas will be the seed of change over a few generations.
We already know that Sun and Microsoft are scared out of their wits by Linux, so the settlement between is not a surprise, particularly if we consider that both Sun and Microsoft are SCO supporters, I mean, licensees.
The real news is that SUN is bleeding money incessantly. If you read their published quarterly results and know a bit about accounting, you will realize that rather than use the settlement money as a one-time payment to offset current losses, they plan to spread it out over a number of quarters to pad future potential loses. This shows that Sun has very little faith in its own future.
From a cnet.com article on the same subject:
"For its fiscal third quarter, which ended Sunday, Sun expects revenue of $2.65 billion and a net loss of $710 million to $810 million, or 23 cents to 25 cents per share. The loss includes charges of about $350 million for an increase in the valuation allowance for deferred tax assets and about $200 million to restructure its work force and real estate, Sun said.
Excluding the charges, the loss would have been $200 million to $260 million, or 6 to 8 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thompson First Call was less pessimistic: a loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $2.85 billion.
The company says it has more than 35,000 employees worldwide, so the layoffs account for about 9 percent of its work force. The job cuts will affect all divisions and geographic areas, McGowan said. The majority of cuts will take place by the end of September, he added. Sun already had cut 8,500 employees in two major layoffs in 2001 and 2002."
I give Sun about 5 more years before it's bought out. Only saving grace would be if everyone got fiberoptic lines to their homes in the next few years and they could rent you app space in their sun-rays servers for a few dollars a month. Somehow I don't see that happening...
And Java won't save them unless they turn it into the defacto language for desktop apps, which just isn't likely to happen..NEt seems to be winning the battle for mind-share already. Real shame as I happen to like Java and believe that it could really make a huge difference to our computing if it was in a better steward's hands, those of the open source community.
For further reference on the Sun-SCO relationship, read this piece by David Berlind.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/m ai n/Could_Sun_hold_...
For SUN's initial SCO FUD, read this among many of the articles that they put out:
It is obvious to anyone that cares to look that Sun is between a rock and a hard place.
The reason they called the Java Desktop System (JDS) by that name is so that they can switch from Linux to Solaris and continue to call it by the same name, which is what they intend to do.
People really need to understand that Sun ain't no friend of ours. They opensource StarOffice to spite Microsoft and the community around Openoffice has built something that would have taken Sun years with more than 40 supported languages, more than Office, and another 35 in the works. SUN began to offer Linux servers because customers demanded it, simply because they did not want to be tied into a proprietary OS with proprietary hardware.
If SUN's management had some brains, they would focus on hardware, placed their bets on Linux and put Solaris in maintenance mode for those that really want to run it. I still believe that Solaris is a very good OS for some very limited scenarios, but how will it compare to Linux one, two, three, four and five years down the road?
On the long haul, Sun will be wasting a ton of resources that they could be using to build services higher-up-the-Linux stack. They could also improve their hardware and face the other real challenge that they are going to have a hard time facing: Inte
One of the things keeping me from using Suse was that I simply do not do proprietary distributions. That's why I left the proprietary camp.
I applaud this move. I don't mind paying for tools if I know that the tools will be available if, god forbid, a company goes out of business or is bought out by an unscrupulous company.
Excellent, insightful move that signals that Novell does get the essence of what open source is about.
Now, GPL OpenExchange and let it become the de-facto groupware server in the open source world and watch as the knowledge pool of people who can configure it grow and as it does it quickly eats into Microsoft's exchange sales.
You want to hear about innovation? Ok,let's talk innovation.
Find me a proprietary application that can do what Plone does. http://www.plone.org
Along these lines,find me something as feature-full as the Zope web application server.
Find me a program made by Microsoft that has robust support for the IMAP email protocol. I can list many FLOSS programs here that do
Find me a web server that is as good as Apache or an FTP server that is as good as VSFTP or ProFTP.
Find me a sound server/sound architecture as robust and feature-full as ALSA.
Why is it that Apple uses CUPS? Because it rocks and yes it is open source and it is the best printing system around.
How many file formats does Windows support out of the box?
Find me a clustering solution that is as advanced and as featurefull as those available on Linux? Moreover, find me a piece of proprietary software that matches what a distribution such as ClusterKnoppix offers by allowing you to create a cluster in minutes without having to load any software to the machines themselves?
Find me a faxing system as versatile and robust as Hylafax?
I could go on and on and on.
But all of the above misses the true point of free software, which is that we are enriching humanity by making the tools of tomorrow available to everyone. Our true innovation is at the social level. We remove all boundaries and allow anyone to contribute to the betterment of society. We just ask that if you want to build on our efforts, you share your own and that you play nice.
"Mail import: Evolution can only import from UNIX mbox files and some older versions of Netscape. This makes migration from Windows clients such as Outlook Express problematic to say the least. The easiest solution might in fact be using KMail to migrate the mail to mbox format and then import it into Evolution."
For me the easiest route to getting people out of outlook express and into any open source email client is to open an IMAP email account for them at fastmail.fm or runbox. Then I setup the account under outlook and move all the email to that account. Since IMAP is server-based, they can switch to Linux and all their email is just there.
Then, they can do one of two things. If they are moving permanently to Linux, move all of their emails to the local mbox from the IMAP one and set up their pop service with whoemver they have as their email provider. Or if they are double-booting, continue with the IMAP setup, which allows them to email from both sides of their computing world and makes the transition to full-time Linux user easier.
Why is it wrong for a convicted monopolist to fund a company whose only business is attacking the convicted monopolist's most serious long-term competitor?
If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have published this YET.
Give IT to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and when they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad too.
This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it by speaking a little too soon.
Mods: Please mod the previous comment down and let this one replace it.
If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have publish this YET. Give them to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and what they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad.
This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it.
When I read the headline and the short slashdot summary, I hadn't had a chance to think through the issue as thoroughly as I should have. In fact, this portion of the article is downright scary:
"Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date."
So I retract my comments. I have thought it over and it looks like this law would do more harm than good. I would not oppose something that would codify databases if it did so in very careful terms and for no longer than ten years.
Just a little update on this topic. Oh, the ironies of life:
"The Nevada court where SCO Group has filed a lawsuit against US retailer AutoZone could itself theoretically be subject to legal proceedings because the court is using Linux to run its Web site."
I haven't looked at the details of the bill. I am staunch defender of copyleft and I am the first to oppose the current copyright regime. In fact, all of my work is released under a creative commons license.
But, and here's the part where I get sent to burn in karma hell, there are "collections of facts" that should be copyrightable.
Let me give you an example, quality multi-lingual terminological databases and glossaries are multi-year projects that demand a great deal of capital and human labor.
These terms are out there for anyone to do the work and compile them, yet no one will do this kind of tedious and thorough work unless they have a reasonable guarantee of being properly remunerated for their efforts now and into the future.
I would argue that a 10-year copyright period is more than sufficient for this kind of work to thrive.
In an ideal world, universities would band together to create these works and then release them to the public domain, but most universities these days operate as large corporate conglomerates and have very little interest in producing public goods.
Slashdot Mirror
You are an idiot. Environmentalists are not only concerned about the heavy metals emitted by nuclear plants, but about the catastrophic effects of an accident at a power plant.
Have you heard of Chernobyl? Well, if that's too far away for you, maybe you would like to look into the missing fuel rods at this Vernmont nuke plant
A pencil size rod is missing and it is enough to make a dirty bomb and kill thousands. Even if it isn't used in a terrorist act, it will be fatal to anyone who comes into contact with it without being properly shielded. Considering that no one knows where it is, we don't know how many people have already died.
Those are the real concerns of the environmentalists that you ridicule. If you were to fairly criticize them, you would do the honorable thing, which is to fully articulate the position of those that you critique, so that others can really weigh out the arguments.
What he didn't reveal clearly enough is that the damn card does NOT work in Windows 95 or 98 as he claims it does. It only does so through a virtual machine that provides an emulated hardware layer.
His point is thus moot and shown for what it really is: FUD. Big, stinking, FUD of the worst kind.
Couple this with the fact that he does not give out the chipset model of the built-in sound card and I do not believe a word he wrote and neither should you.
At a time when all goverment agencies are complaining that many of the 9/11 leads were not followed due to the fact that they had too much on their plate, it is great to see that the lessons have been learned.
Focus the attention of the police on the odd moviegoer that may have a videocamera, that is surely to do us all a great deal of good.
Since according to the studios, their very existence is on the line, next time a national tragedy occurs, we will be sad but glad to know that at least the studios were and saved and we will be able to go to the movies and realize the redeeming qualities of the Holywood crapola of the day.
Thanks. It's nice to see that we have the pulse of the times.
If the mythical mom was running KDE, she could have sent you a request for remote help by email, which works great. You take over the machine and help things.
And if you had set up the system for your mom, you would have kept the password for root, sshed remotely and done everything for her. Problem solved...
Stop looking for issues where there are none.
Fine, fair enough. I am obviously not for compulsory unionization.
But your post proves what I had said earlier:
"A lot of people will respond and tell us how angered they are over the injustices that it is being done to their peers. Then, they will move on to the next story, because in America individuality reigns supreme" or might I add now, seek rationalization for their dislike of unions.
Whichever the case, my portrayal of the role that unions worlwide played in helping people achieve fundamental rights is historically accurate, which was really about people helping themselves as unions are made up of people. This may be a subtle but important point.
In light of the historical role of unions, it is more than a little funny to see organizations such as NRTP, which you quote in your post, claiming that it is fighting for human rights.
And when you have organizations with hundreds of thousands of members, sometimes millions, and only occasional cases of corruption, it does not prove your point that all of them are corrupt bureaucracies; rather, it shows that they have done quite well at creating enough trigger mechanisms to detect abuse.
NRTP has a major axe to grind when it comes to unions, just read its misson, so it is hardly an authoritative source on the issues it denounces. It would be worth getting both sides of the story, which you did not do.
I will conclude by saying that the problem is that most public policy issues require concerted action for real solutions to emerge.
People in the US tend to simply distrust organizations so that rather than build transparency mechanisms into them, which requires involvement, they'd rather just walk away and deal with it in their own terms, in your case you claim to "move on".
What if you were in your fifties and you were majorly screwed by the company that you have given twenty years of life to? Screwed out of retirement or out of benefits? In a world without unions and the changes in the law that they helped bring about, you would have little recourse, but you seem to forget that the very legal resources you may have now to fight this wrong often came as the result of unions doing their job and enshrouding in the law all the little niceties that we often take for granted.
But if you want none of it, your choice.
Funny how in American culture, people distrust unions but have come up with a funny adage to avoid structural political change. Last time I checked, it was called changed the system from within. But if there are problems with unions, these are not to be changed from within, just done away with or renounced.
Indeed, no organization is immunte to corruption and you have summarized your point in an easy-to-remember adage.
Yet the solution is not to throw out the baby with the bath water, but to build transparency into those organizations by way of better membership controls.
Additionally, you have to realize that trade unionism in Europe does not have as many of the dark historical episodes that you mention in Europe. In fact, I can hardly think of any serious issues in the last 80 years.
Which means that on a relatevile large sample of industrialized economies, unions have been proven to work fairly well. The challenge is to turn them into one more partner that is acknowledged as such in industrial relations negotiations.
Businesses would be better served by a more loyal workforce that saw its own interests as inherently tied to those of the company. This only occurs when you build trust. For a worker to be able to trust a corporation, he has to feel certain that he has negotiating clout, something which you can often only get by having the support of a Union.
"If your woried aobut you're spelling, you must be knew hear!"
.1 release.
That made me laugh...
On a serious note, I like the emphasis that Slashdot puts on content over form. As long as a post is readable and clear, I appreciate the effort that has gone into it.
As a community it says, substance matters. We'll correct the rough edges on the next
aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhr.
"I meant you must be new here". Must learn to type a little slower and re-read...
I stated that some of these articles are xenophobic, not all of them, simply because they are. If you are to tell me that you have not witnessed the tidal wave of racial slurs that are made after an article of this nature is posted, then as you often hear in Slashdot, "you must be knew here".
I am not insulting anyone. I am rather claiming that the proper context for the understanding of the implications both -policy and personal- of outsourcing is globalization gone wild and specifically a type of globlalization that uses cultural outputs (the media) to co-opt workers into meer puppets of corporations unwilling to cooperate with their peers for the common good.
If you read what I said in context, I fail to see how you can draw the conclusions you do, unless you want to misrepresent my views.
Here's what will happen in reaction to this article.
A lot of people will respond and tell us how angered they are over the injustices that it is being done to their peers. Then, they will move on to the next story, because in America individuality reigns supreme and the media has twisted our common history to the extent that people do not realize that it was trade unions that made possible the establishment of fair labor standards, such as sick pay, vacation time, a 40-hour week, health standards in the workplace, age-limits to enter the workfoce and so forth.
People will complain about the raw deal that they get from corporations, yet fail to understand that they have been co-opted into thinking of trading unions as their enemy.
So long as trade unions are vilified in this country and workers continue to believe that they can beat the system individually if they just continue to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketeable -all good and lofty things but not the solution to this issue- I will remain unimpressed by these stories for two reasons:
1) They contain a pinch of xenophobia, at least most of them do.
2) People are not looking for root causes and fool themselves if they think that foreign workers are not also continuing to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketable.
It's time to collaborate with your peers with the same passion that you work on open source software: Union Makes Strength
For those of you that fail to understand that life is sacrosact and that profits are not everything,do not bother. History has proven you wrong. Only a short time ago, a worker could not hope to reach his thirty's because his working conditions were so inhumane and miserable.
Know your history, know your past. It will empower you to face the future.
I don't dismiss them.
The truth is that developers have a bit of clout within Microsoft. Microsoft developers can and have been an element of change within the company before. In fact, if any change at all ever comes it will come from them, not from the guys on top.
Words that come to mind:
*Trojan Horse - in its original sense
*Strategic Move
*Distraction Tactics to assuage the roars that are sure to ensue after the release of the first Phoenix TCPA bioses.
*Some Microsoft developers appreciate the power of collaboration?
*Vitiate what people understand free software to be by mudding the waters even more. At the next Linux conference, Microsoft will proudly display that they too are contributing to open source. I can just see it now: "We use open source where it makes sense and make use of proprietary best practices to lead the world to a new paradigm of openness, yet realiably supported for the one and only company that you should trust". In other words, newspeak.
I wish to be proven wrong. If a Microsoft employee reads this. Prove us wrong and we'll welcome you. Compete on the strengths of office by providing a documented, free and open XML schema for Office. Make it easy to import openoffice documents by MS Office. While you are a it, open Source CIFS under an OSI approved license.
Then, I might begin believing.
I am happy to see the wider use of Linux and unhappy to see some of the xenophobic reactions every time that an Asian country announces support for open source.
Some have gone as far as calling this unamerican, thereby furthering the hollow arguments put forth by C. Mundie and co. just a few years ago.
There is a lot to be happy about:
*More bug fixes and more features
*Wider and larger hardware support
*Better internationalizaton support
And for those of us that also care about free software, I think the OS will have a slow ripple effect throughout the respective societies of Korea, China and Japan.
Eventually, it will take time, students will be empowered to start their own businesses by having the right tools at their disposal; those in Civil Society will also have an easier time finding likeminded individuals and building issue communities that use the power of open source software to coordinate their activities. All of this will take time, but it is possible.
I think FLOSS, if nothing else, opens a window into altruism and the opportunity to build a more open tomorrow. Those ideas will be the seed of change over a few generations.
We already know that Sun and Microsoft are scared out of their wits by Linux, so the settlement between is not a surprise, particularly if we
.NEt seems to be winning the battle for mind-share already. Real shame as I happen to like Java and believe that it could really make a huge difference to our computing if it was in a better steward's hands, those of the open source community.
,20276755,00.htm
consider that both Sun and Microsoft are SCO supporters, I mean, licensees.
The real news is that SUN is bleeding money incessantly. If you read their published quarterly results and know a bit about accounting, you will realize that rather than use the settlement money as a one-time payment to offset current losses, they plan to spread it out over a number of quarters to pad future potential loses. This shows that Sun has very little faith in its own future.
From a cnet.com article on the same subject:
"For its fiscal third quarter, which ended Sunday, Sun expects revenue of $2.65 billion and a net loss of $710 million to $810 million, or 23
cents to 25 cents per share. The loss includes charges of about $350 million for an increase in the valuation allowance for deferred tax assets and about $200 million to restructure its work force and real estate, Sun said.
Excluding the charges, the loss would have been $200 million to $260 million, or 6 to 8 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thompson First Call was less pessimistic: a loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $2.85 billion.
The company says it has more than 35,000 employees worldwide, so the layoffs account for about 9 percent of its work force. The job cuts will affect all divisions and geographic areas, McGowan said. The majority of cuts will take place by the end of September, he added. Sun already had cut 8,500 employees in two major layoffs in 2001 and 2002."
I give Sun about 5 more years before it's bought out. Only saving grace would be if everyone got fiberoptic lines to their homes in the next few
years and they could rent you app space in their sun-rays servers for a few dollars a month. Somehow I don't see that happening...
And Java won't save them unless they turn it into the defacto language for desktop apps, which just isn't likely to happen.
For further reference on the Sun-SCO relationship, read this piece by David Berlind.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/m ai n/Could_Sun_hold_...
For SUN's initial SCO FUD, read this among many of the articles that they put out:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,20000617 33
It is obvious to anyone that cares to look that Sun is between a rock and a hard place.
The reason they called the Java Desktop System (JDS) by that name is so that they can switch from Linux to Solaris and continue to call it by
the same name, which is what they intend to do.
People really need to understand that Sun ain't no friend of ours. They opensource StarOffice to spite Microsoft and the community around Openoffice has built something that would have taken Sun years with more than 40 supported languages, more than Office, and another 35 in the works. SUN began to offer Linux servers because customers demanded it, simply because they did not want to be tied into a proprietary OS with proprietary hardware.
If SUN's management had some brains, they would focus on hardware, placed their bets on Linux and put Solaris in maintenance mode for those
that really want to run it. I still believe that Solaris is a very good OS for some very limited scenarios, but how will it compare to Linux
one, two, three, four and five years down the road?
On the long haul, Sun will be wasting a ton of resources that they could be using to build services higher-up-the-Linux stack. They could also improve their hardware and face the other real challenge that they are going to have a hard time facing: Inte
Or you could always use KAudioCreator
One of the things keeping me from using Suse was that I simply do not do proprietary distributions. That's why I left the proprietary camp.
I applaud this move. I don't mind paying for tools if I know that the tools will be available if, god forbid, a company goes out of business or is bought out by an unscrupulous company.
Excellent, insightful move that signals that Novell does get the essence of what open source is about.
Now, GPL OpenExchange and let it become the de-facto groupware server in the open source world and watch as the knowledge pool of people who can configure it grow and as it does it quickly eats into Microsoft's exchange sales.
You want to hear about innovation? Ok,let's talk innovation.
Find me a proprietary application that can do what Plone does. http://www.plone.org
Along these lines,find me something as feature-full as the Zope web application server.
Find me a program made by Microsoft that has robust support for the IMAP email protocol. I can list many FLOSS programs here that do
Find me a web server that is as good as Apache or an FTP server that is as good as VSFTP or ProFTP.
Find me a sound server/sound architecture as robust and feature-full as ALSA.
Why is it that Apple uses CUPS? Because it rocks and yes it is open source and it is the best printing system around.
How many file formats does Windows support out of the box?
Find me a clustering solution that is as advanced and as featurefull as those available on Linux? Moreover, find me a piece of proprietary software that matches what a distribution such as ClusterKnoppix offers by allowing you to create a cluster in minutes without having to load any software to the machines themselves?
Find me a faxing system as versatile and robust as Hylafax?
I could go on and on and on.
But all of the above misses the true point of free software, which is that we are enriching humanity by making the tools of tomorrow available to everyone. Our true innovation is at the social level. We remove all boundaries and allow anyone to contribute to the betterment of society. We just ask that if you want to build on our efforts, you share your own and that you play nice.
"Mail import: Evolution can only import from UNIX mbox files and some older versions of Netscape. This makes migration from Windows clients such as Outlook Express problematic to say the least. The easiest solution might in fact be using KMail to migrate the mail to mbox format and then import it into Evolution."
For me the easiest route to getting people out of outlook express and into any open source email client is to open an IMAP email account for them at fastmail.fm or runbox. Then I setup the account under outlook and move all the email to that account. Since IMAP is server-based, they can switch to Linux and all their email is just there.
Then, they can do one of two things. If they are moving permanently to Linux, move all of their emails to the local mbox from the IMAP one and set up their pop service with whoemver they have as their email provider. Or if they are double-booting, continue with the IMAP setup, which allows them to email from both sides of their computing world and makes the transition to full-time Linux user easier.
Why is it wrong for a convicted monopolist to fund a company whose only business is attacking the convicted monopolist's most serious long-term competitor?
Gee, I don't know.
If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have published this YET.
Give IT to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and when they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad too.
This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it by speaking a little too soon.
Mods: Please mod the previous comment down and let this one replace it.
If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have publish this YET. Give them to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and what they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad.
This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it.
A multi-lingual dictionary isn't the same as a glossary or terminological database for a given field. These tend to be much more specialized.
Nonetheless, the wiktionary project just blew me away and is the sort of thing to which I plan to contribute.
When I read the headline and the short slashdot summary, I hadn't had a chance to think through the issue as thoroughly as I should have. In fact, this portion of the article is downright scary:
"Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date."
So I retract my comments. I have thought it over and it looks like this law would do more harm than good. I would not oppose something that would codify databases if it did so in very careful terms and for no longer than ten years.
Just a little update on this topic. Oh, the ironies of life:
"The Nevada court where SCO Group has filed a lawsuit against US retailer AutoZone could itself theoretically be subject to legal proceedings because the court is using Linux to run its Web site."
Read it here
I haven't looked at the details of the bill. I am staunch defender of copyleft and I am the first to oppose the current copyright regime. In fact, all of my work is released under a creative commons license.
But, and here's the part where I get sent to burn in karma hell, there are "collections of facts" that should be copyrightable.
Let me give you an example, quality multi-lingual terminological databases and glossaries are multi-year projects that demand a great deal of capital and human labor.
These terms are out there for anyone to do the work and compile them, yet no one will do this kind of tedious and thorough work unless they have a reasonable guarantee of being properly remunerated for their efforts now and into the future.
I would argue that a 10-year copyright period is more than sufficient for this kind of work to thrive.
In an ideal world, universities would band together to create these works and then release them to the public domain, but most universities these days operate as large corporate conglomerates and have very little interest in producing public goods.