@MindKata: "For example, if I buy a console, and then write a manual about how to modify that console, then legally that is wrong."
Is it? I believe I have seen plenty of books on the shelves at B&N that purport teaching you to do something that if you actually carried out the activity described you could be arrested. So I think you're wrong on that score. Did you mean to say "Morally wrong?" cause I'll buy that.
Even so, I think its ridiculous to sentence this guy to term that is equal to the minimum sentence for manslaughter if he is convicted. Someone is out of control, and its not this guy.
(From About Monroe College "At Monroe, students take a Liberal Arts core and combine it with their program of choice to ensure a well rounded, comprehensive education."
Ah. I see that I got caught up in Steorn's doublespeak. If you read the wikipedia article on the company what actually happened was that they finally showed the technology to some independent scientists who were completely unimpressed with what they were shown. In other words; Orbo does not work.
Remember Steorn? Looks like they're still in business, but they haven't file many news blurbs lately. In July they made some kind of stink about their independent testing process being "insanely great" (Steve Jobism by me, not them), but not a whole lot since they started in 2006.
@Ktistec Machine: "We don't seem to be bothering."
Chastising ourselves for our lack of will regarding space exploration is all well and good but the fact of the matter is that space exploration is no light matter. It currently requires a great amount of effort, will, economic consumption, and resolve.
That the US was able to go to the moon during the cold war should not be taken lightly. Of course, the only reason we were able to do both things is that we were still coasting on our fortunes gained from WWII and the economic power of the 50's, and the prestige of going to the moon before the Soviets was invaluable, at the time. Now we're like playboys living off our daddy's legacy, which has run out but our credit is still good. Yes, exploring the moon and space and all that is good but we need to keep the Ferrari gassed up for Friday Night right now, put that on the Master Card please.
That aside, with all the money we and the other countries around the world have printed up devaluing all our economic measures of output, we simply don't have the time. We're all working very hard to pay back all that debt, and of course the US government is working overtime to suck back in all that output and turn it right back into debt. We do not have the economic means to do serious space exploration. China, for all its economic power, is in the same boat, to a lesser & different extent, so don't look to them.
The upshot of all that is to do REAL space exploration, the world will at some point need to be united so that the entire global output can be turned to doing this exploration. If any exocultures have in fact been able to mount a serious exploration of outer space, I suspect they would have had to do the same thing. Even if they've had to hold their noses at dealing with each other, they've probably united their entire "diverse culture" nonsense and made a real, concerted effort to doing this.
From what I can see, if we are representative of carbon-based life forms, this united effort is probably very rare, if its happened at all.
@dskoll: "There are plenty of companies willing to sell netbooks with Linux pre-loaded..."You have a point but I also see value in putting both Amazon and ASUS (and possibly Microsoft as well) on notice that there is a market for Linux, and not simply assume that once their products are imaged with Windows the job is done.
The RIAA simply waves its magic wand and *poof* it happens.
*poof* anything they say becomes law.
*poof* fair use? No use!
*poof* These are not the droids your looking for.
@Craven Coward: "Sounds like somebody skipped Calculus 101..."
Actually, the COBOL contractor put on the job to fix all the Raptor's Y2K issues, introduced by using surplus banking software from the 50's to calculate dates to save some cash, found out his funding was getting cut & skipped out without finishing the job. Of course, who could blame him? No where else in the world can you fund trillion-dollar programs by simply voting cash into existence like a hot, bikini-wearing, blinking Djinn, and still be short on the ducats.
I hope the Stanford Linear Accelerator is in there, took a tour of that machine about two decades ago. Awesome place. The SPEAR experiment target machine alone was worth the price. 40 tons of delicate widgets and gizmos.
@LeneJ: "Ireland is a Catholic country. They are to some degree, still very strict."
Italy is a Catholic country, and its a pretty swingin' place. Too bad Ireland can't take a queue. Or a clue. Any time speech is restricted its a regress, not a progress. Funny how in the 21st century we have a rise in Islamic Fascism, Britain's Big Brother CCTV, America's paranoiac Government, the supposed vanguard of freedom, jailing and victimizing more and more of its own citizens, more violence, and more mass hysteria. Its enough to make one religious.
@jc42: "There's a niche for a simple, basic DB that's fairly fast and has a small footprint."
While I agree, there's a precedent for large corporations stepping on products they've purchased rather than developed in-house, sooner or later. I imagine the sales meetings over time going something like this: "Oh, yeah, we have MySQL, but if you really want a fast, ready-for-prime-time data warehousing solution..."
That said, I can't imagine Oracle would risk the wrath of the OSS community by nulling MySQL. If they really aren't interested in continuing its active development it'll most likely become "Oracle Lite", and quietly, gently, be put down. To sleep, if you will. Over a long period of time.
They should do it. Charging crap is good for the economy. Before you know it; a quintillion here, a quintillion there, pretty soon you're talkin' real money...
@Anubis IV: "Saying that IBM wasn't very "worldly" seems a bit naive."
Given the state of IBM now I'm inclined to disagree. Though perhaps not a sinking ship IBM was perched to completely dominate the computing world yet failed to do so. Why? Because their management wasted that position on a useless hardware business model.
"Blue Gene/L or Blue Gene/P, Cell, Roadrunner, Blade..."
Yeah. Some of them. My point appears to still be standing from where I am...
"As for Jobs, ever heard of VisiCalc?
Yes. Of course. How does that invalidate my point?
"He may not have been a huge success with NeXT, but to suggest that he doesn't care about business at all is just ignoring the facts of his history.
Lets be honest for a second. The iPod is truly great? Unique? Or very well marketed? If Jobs cared about business there's be no question. As successful as he's been, he still left a huge pot on the table, and there are questions about just how genius he is with business in my mind. Perhaps no one can make as fantastic an mp3 player like Jobs. But that product alone can't be questioned? Jobs wanted to change the world. Did he? Really? Come on...
"Errr...you might want to look up IBM's hardware business..."; I have. One of my best friends in the business worked for IBM Canada, he lost his sales job 3 years ago due to cutbacks in IBM's hardware business. That was 3 years ago, not recently. His comment: "It was a bloodbath." Sure, IBM's still in the hardware business. But take a look at IBM's business breakdown then and now; you'll see a big difference. Your comment as I read it seems to say that these things happen in the blink of an eye. Its been a long, slow decline. IBM didn't lose the hardware business overnight. But nor did they hold on to the large slice of the pie they used to have. Their continued grasp of their big iron products until way too late in the game says volumes about their failed philosophy.
Didn't go into the deep philosophical issues of Microsoft's mindset, and I don't care. As light dusting of the topic I think I'm on point. I'll leave it to you to look at the company with a lens.
Gate's & Allen's "innovation" was to (practically) steal an operating system (DOS) from a not very worldly programmer named Tim Patterson, which happened to be appropriate to run on IBM's new (at that time) PC computer. IBM, not being very worldly either, looked toward a bright future selling tons of hardware not realizing that Asia would soon undercut ANYONE making hardware and that the platform was the OS.
The killer app soon followed, Lotus 1-2-3. One showing of this app to anyone in business made DOS so valuable that pc's became as ubiquitous as water. Everyone started making PC's that could run DOS & Lotus 1-2-3. The price of hardware then drops like a rock as everyone started making it and ultimately farming that work out to Asia driving prices down further. Apple never appealed to business, the needs of which really drive innovation. You can appreciate a personal computer as you would a Stradivarius, but that's not a need. Business had a real need for an electronic spreadsheet.
TODAY: IBM is for all intents and purposes out of the hardware business, which has moved to Singapore and S. Korea, and Paul Allen and Bill Gates are two of the richest people in the world. If Microsoft has done anything (aside from swindle people and stomped on innovation as much as possible), its made a platform that Business trusts enough to continue to invest in and employ millions of people that only do work on PC's. Jobs, always a dreamer, never really did care about the needs of Business, and instead appealed to people's vanity, which is why Apple never really took off like it might have.
Redmond's real strength lies in showing people how to be a ruthless company. Innovation is great, but people respect power and those who wield it.
I agree, I think its the right thing to do. I guess he ran into the same problem others with similar ideas are running into; the choice spots for generating solar are so far from the grid the cost of transporting are going to be astronomical. It would be nice if the so-called economic stimulus deal would start doling out ducats to do this.
I really don't know that much about silverlight. I do know that some web sites require me to use IE as their shitty web site breaks on ff. And I do know that annoys me.
I'm a little surprised he's so stuck on pinning the blame on foreign oil suppliers when he should know damn well the '08 spike was driven by market speculation.
You have a point. Actually, I thought of it from an engineering angle. I simply don't know enough about business to make that connection. Hence, I'm not in that line of work.
...if the rest of the web developers who rely on "Silverlight" or Cracktive-X or some other M$-centric technology and worry more about making the web truly platform agnostic we can get on with it and get some business done. I really dislike having to switch from Lynx or Firefox to IE becuase the e-commerce site relies on some stupid feature of IE that no one's been able to translate to the OSS browsers. Happens once in a while, still annoying.
Exactly. Has nothing to do with the quality of either toolkit, some one at Nokia said "Why are we building this product with the competing technology?" I always make a point of supporting both myself where it makes sense. Even though Qt is a nutty blob of nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
@MindKata: "For example, if I buy a console, and then write a manual about how to modify that console, then legally that is wrong."
Is it? I believe I have seen plenty of books on the shelves at B&N that purport teaching you to do something that if you actually carried out the activity described you could be arrested. So I think you're wrong on that score. Did you mean to say "Morally wrong?" cause I'll buy that.
Even so, I think its ridiculous to sentence this guy to term that is equal to the minimum sentence for manslaughter if he is convicted. Someone is out of control, and its not this guy.
(From About Monroe College
"At Monroe, students take a Liberal Arts core and combine it with their program of choice to ensure a well rounded, comprehensive education."
Well there's your problem...
"A planet where apes evolved from men?? Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty microbe!"
Ah. I see that I got caught up in Steorn's doublespeak. If you read the wikipedia article on the company what actually happened was that they finally showed the technology to some independent scientists who were completely unimpressed with what they were shown. In other words; Orbo does not work.
Remember Steorn? Looks like they're still in business, but they haven't file many news blurbs lately. In July they made some kind of stink about their independent testing process being "insanely great" (Steve Jobism by me, not them), but not a whole lot since they started in 2006.
@Ktistec Machine: "We don't seem to be bothering."
Chastising ourselves for our lack of will regarding space exploration is all well and good but the fact of the matter is that space exploration is no light matter. It currently requires a great amount of effort, will, economic consumption, and resolve.
That the US was able to go to the moon during the cold war should not be taken lightly. Of course, the only reason we were able to do both things is that we were still coasting on our fortunes gained from WWII and the economic power of the 50's, and the prestige of going to the moon before the Soviets was invaluable, at the time. Now we're like playboys living off our daddy's legacy, which has run out but our credit is still good. Yes, exploring the moon and space and all that is good but we need to keep the Ferrari gassed up for Friday Night right now, put that on the Master Card please.
That aside, with all the money we and the other countries around the world have printed up devaluing all our economic measures of output, we simply don't have the time. We're all working very hard to pay back all that debt, and of course the US government is working overtime to suck back in all that output and turn it right back into debt. We do not have the economic means to do serious space exploration. China, for all its economic power, is in the same boat, to a lesser & different extent, so don't look to them.
The upshot of all that is to do REAL space exploration, the world will at some point need to be united so that the entire global output can be turned to doing this exploration. If any exocultures have in fact been able to mount a serious exploration of outer space, I suspect they would have had to do the same thing. Even if they've had to hold their noses at dealing with each other, they've probably united their entire "diverse culture" nonsense and made a real, concerted effort to doing this.
From what I can see, if we are representative of carbon-based life forms, this united effort is probably very rare, if its happened at all.
@dskoll: "There are plenty of companies willing to sell netbooks with Linux pre-loaded..."You have a point but I also see value in putting both Amazon and ASUS (and possibly Microsoft as well) on notice that there is a market for Linux, and not simply assume that once their products are imaged with Windows the job is done.
The RIAA simply waves its magic wand and *poof* it happens. *poof* anything they say becomes law. *poof* fair use? No use! *poof* These are not the droids your looking for.
"Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha."
No, I'm not a fan.
user@life.com: ISPADVENT
You are in a suspicious little maze of ISPs, all the same.
ISPADVENT> E
You are in typical little maze of red tape, all alike.
ISPADVENT> SERVICE
You have no service points.
ISPADVENT> N
Oops! The RIAA has eaten you, please play again.
@Craven Coward: "Sounds like somebody skipped Calculus 101..."
Actually, the COBOL contractor put on the job to fix all the Raptor's Y2K issues, introduced by using surplus banking software from the 50's to calculate dates to save some cash, found out his funding was getting cut & skipped out without finishing the job. Of course, who could blame him? No where else in the world can you fund trillion-dollar programs by simply voting cash into existence like a hot, bikini-wearing, blinking Djinn, and still be short on the ducats.
I hope the Stanford Linear Accelerator is in there, took a tour of that machine about two decades ago. Awesome place. The SPEAR experiment target machine alone was worth the price. 40 tons of delicate widgets and gizmos.
@LeneJ: "Ireland is a Catholic country. They are to some degree, still very strict."
Italy is a Catholic country, and its a pretty swingin' place. Too bad Ireland can't take a queue. Or a clue. Any time speech is restricted its a regress, not a progress. Funny how in the 21st century we have a rise in Islamic Fascism, Britain's Big Brother CCTV, America's paranoiac Government, the supposed vanguard of freedom, jailing and victimizing more and more of its own citizens, more violence, and more mass hysteria. Its enough to make one religious.
@jc42: "There's a niche for a simple, basic DB that's fairly fast and has a small footprint."
While I agree, there's a precedent for large corporations stepping on products they've purchased rather than developed in-house, sooner or later. I imagine the sales meetings over time going something like this: "Oh, yeah, we have MySQL, but if you really want a fast, ready-for-prime-time data warehousing solution..."
That said, I can't imagine Oracle would risk the wrath of the OSS community by nulling MySQL. If they really aren't interested in continuing its active development it'll most likely become "Oracle Lite", and quietly, gently, be put down. To sleep, if you will. Over a long period of time.
Yes, Virgina, MySQL could die. Yes indeed.
They should do it. Charging crap is good for the economy. Before you know it; a quintillion here, a quintillion there, pretty soon you're talkin' real money...
Plus I imagine the liberal use of proxies would screw you up too.
@Anubis IV: "Saying that IBM wasn't very "worldly" seems a bit naive."
Given the state of IBM now I'm inclined to disagree. Though perhaps not a sinking ship IBM was perched to completely dominate the computing world yet failed to do so. Why? Because their management wasted that position on a useless hardware business model.
"Blue Gene/L or Blue Gene/P, Cell, Roadrunner, Blade..."
Yeah. Some of them. My point appears to still be standing from where I am...
"As for Jobs, ever heard of VisiCalc?
Yes. Of course. How does that invalidate my point?
"He may not have been a huge success with NeXT, but to suggest that he doesn't care about business at all is just ignoring the facts of his history.
Lets be honest for a second. The iPod is truly great? Unique? Or very well marketed? If Jobs cared about business there's be no question. As successful as he's been, he still left a huge pot on the table, and there are questions about just how genius he is with business in my mind. Perhaps no one can make as fantastic an mp3 player like Jobs. But that product alone can't be questioned? Jobs wanted to change the world. Did he? Really? Come on...
"Errr...you might want to look up IBM's hardware business..."; I have. One of my best friends in the business worked for IBM Canada, he lost his sales job 3 years ago due to cutbacks in IBM's hardware business. That was 3 years ago, not recently. His comment: "It was a bloodbath." Sure, IBM's still in the hardware business. But take a look at IBM's business breakdown then and now; you'll see a big difference. Your comment as I read it seems to say that these things happen in the blink of an eye. Its been a long, slow decline. IBM didn't lose the hardware business overnight. But nor did they hold on to the large slice of the pie they used to have. Their continued grasp of their big iron products until way too late in the game says volumes about their failed philosophy.
Didn't go into the deep philosophical issues of Microsoft's mindset, and I don't care. As light dusting of the topic I think I'm on point. I'll leave it to you to look at the company with a lens.
Gate's & Allen's "innovation" was to (practically) steal an operating system (DOS) from a not very worldly programmer named Tim Patterson, which happened to be appropriate to run on IBM's new (at that time) PC computer. IBM, not being very worldly either, looked toward a bright future selling tons of hardware not realizing that Asia would soon undercut ANYONE making hardware and that the platform was the OS.
The killer app soon followed, Lotus 1-2-3. One showing of this app to anyone in business made DOS so valuable that pc's became as ubiquitous as water. Everyone started making PC's that could run DOS & Lotus 1-2-3. The price of hardware then drops like a rock as everyone started making it and ultimately farming that work out to Asia driving prices down further. Apple never appealed to business, the needs of which really drive innovation. You can appreciate a personal computer as you would a Stradivarius, but that's not a need. Business had a real need for an electronic spreadsheet.
TODAY: IBM is for all intents and purposes out of the hardware business, which has moved to Singapore and S. Korea, and Paul Allen and Bill Gates are two of the richest people in the world. If Microsoft has done anything (aside from swindle people and stomped on innovation as much as possible), its made a platform that Business trusts enough to continue to invest in and employ millions of people that only do work on PC's. Jobs, always a dreamer, never really did care about the needs of Business, and instead appealed to people's vanity, which is why Apple never really took off like it might have.
Redmond's real strength lies in showing people how to be a ruthless company. Innovation is great, but people respect power and those who wield it.
I agree, I think its the right thing to do. I guess he ran into the same problem others with similar ideas are running into; the choice spots for generating solar are so far from the grid the cost of transporting are going to be astronomical. It would be nice if the so-called economic stimulus deal would start doling out ducats to do this.
I really don't know that much about silverlight. I do know that some web sites require me to use IE as their shitty web site breaks on ff. And I do know that annoys me.
I'm a little surprised he's so stuck on pinning the blame on foreign oil suppliers when he should know damn well the '08 spike was driven by market speculation.
You have a point. Actually, I thought of it from an engineering angle. I simply don't know enough about business to make that connection. Hence, I'm not in that line of work.
...if the rest of the web developers who rely on "Silverlight" or Cracktive-X or some other M$-centric technology and worry more about making the web truly platform agnostic we can get on with it and get some business done. I really dislike having to switch from Lynx or Firefox to IE becuase the e-commerce site relies on some stupid feature of IE that no one's been able to translate to the OSS browsers. Happens once in a while, still annoying.
Exactly. Has nothing to do with the quality of either toolkit, some one at Nokia said "Why are we building this product with the competing technology?" I always make a point of supporting both myself where it makes sense. Even though Qt is a nutty blob of nonsense.