I think it's extremely dopey. Check this out:
[root@localhost patrick]# hdparm -t/dev/sdc/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 30 MB in 3.04 seconds = 9.87 MB/sec
[root@localhost patrick]# hdparm -t/dev/hde/dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 120 MB in 3.02 seconds = 39.78 MB/sec;
sdc is a flash drive, hde is an ATA 100 drive. Enough said.
Seinfield gave us the "Show About Nothing"
Now Science has given us the "Computer About Nothing".
Q: What's the computer doing?
A: Nothing.
Q: Nothing?
A: That's right. It's doing absolutely nothing.
Depositions rarely go on the date set forth in the subpeona. You can expect delays in getting the documents requested which are needed with time for examination before taking the depositions. That's pretty much par for the course in civil litigation; you set an arbitrary date and the parties later agree on the real date.
The more interesting question is why IBM waited until now to request this info. If they wanted to assert additional claims against MS or Sun, it's pretty late in the day to be adding parties to this litigation; that would only further delay things. You can be sure there is a definite reason for issuing these subpeonae now. My guess is IBM may have recently come by some new info, probably from some insider and probably in the form of some smoking gun documents. They must now feel justified in pursuing this line of inquiry more aggressively even though there is a potential for delaying the resolution of this case if they attempt to assert new claims against MS or sun in the sco case.
Intel had something to say about this as well. I doubt that Dell would have been thrilled about competing with Apple in the windows on intel hardware market. No business wants a new competitor, especially one like Apple that can offer a lot that Dell can't, i.e. OSX as well as the style and fashionability of the Apple brand. Dell may have pressured intel to not make this easy with the threat that Dell would have to reconsider its intel only policy if intel didn't play along.
The Sony corporation has engaged John Cleese to issue an apology on Sony's behalf:
"All right, all right, I apologize. I'm really, really sorry. I apologize unreservedly. I offer a complete and utter retraction. The rootkit was totally without basis in fact and was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my rootkit may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such rootkit at any time in the future."
I don't get your reasoning re windows running at "native speeds" in a "Virtual PC" like product. What evidence do you have to support this conclusion? The programs you mention, VMWare, Virtual PC, and qemu, do not run at anywhere near native speeds on current intel architectures under windows and/or linux. Wine has been in development for years and only recently became beta. Xen is promising but in the early stages of development. Your optimism for early release of quality products for the macintel capable of running windows at any acceptable speed seem unfounded to me.
Let's not get carried away on Jobs' oracular skills - he's had his missteps too. For one he failed to see that being a software company on an open hardware platform is a superior business model to being a hardware company on a closed hardware platform. There's a reason why Gates and MS cleaned Jobs' and Apple's clock back in the day apart from the usual MS underhanded tactics and just plain good luck. Their business model and vision of the future was superior in a pure business, not technological, sense.
I think you have it wrong. MS is in a much different competitive position re on line music than they are with office suites where they have a virtual monopoly. When MS has to play technological catchup the tried and true formula has always been embrace, extend, extinguish. So here, I'm sure MS would be willing to license from the market leader, Apple, which would be the "embrace" step followed by "extend" and "extinguish".
Probably Ford. Remember the Pinto's exploding gas tank? Internal documents produced by Ford in product liability suits on the pinto showed that this is precisely the methodology used. This resulted in huge punitive damages being awarded against Ford as a deterrent. Ford was also criminally prosecuted for wreckless homicide in Indiana based on this conduct but was acquited. It was the first time that a corporation had been criminally prosecuted for a common law crime IIRC.
I think it's really stretching things to refer to anything that writes at 17MB/sec as having "blazing speed". Sure it's faster than most thumb drives but that's like bragging about being the world's tallest midget.
As an attorney I can tell you that lawyers tend to have a better grasp of technology than many other professional groups that I come in contact with. You have to be pretty smart to get into law school these days and that generally translates into a better understanding of current technology. Furthermore, I doubt that Sony's rootkit scheme was unconditionally approved by legal. Lawyers tend to be very conservative when giving advice. I can't imagine any competent lawyer giving the green light to this type of thing given the patchwork of laws regulating and potentially impacting the legality of this scheme and that's just within the US, nevermind internationally. Companies, especially large companies like Sony, are not run by attorneys; they're run by professional managers. It's not uncommon for managers to end run legal or simply ignore legal advice when it's not what they want to hear.
The empty head and pure heart defense doesn't work with copyright. Even unknowingly distributing a copyrighted work is actionable. Sony is on the hook here and they can no more claim ignorance than you can if they sue you for some copyrighted file you have in your P2P share folder.
"Documentation hosted on Mill's site as well as comments on the HSG claim that he already has a great deal of funding from a number of major corporate backers. He has never, according to anything I've seen on any of these pages, looked for private donations like many of the other "free energy" scam artists. This doesn't mean he isn't running a hoax, but it lends doubt to that idea."
This makes no sense. You don't wind up with "a great deal of funding" without looking for it. The notion that "major corporate backers" have beat a path to his door and begged him to accept their funding, all unsolicited by him is just not credible. The fact that the major corporate backers are unidentified adds to the scamlike quality of the whole deal.
MS Office is more efficient at handling its own closed format files than Open Office 2.0. Who would of thunk it??
Look at the time differences. Apart from the specially crafted spread sheet, we are talking about tenths of seconds for MS office as opposed to one or two seconds for OO. Generously assuming the average worker opens maybe 100 documents a day, we're talking less than two minutes a day difference. People waste more time than that scratching their buts.
I'm not saying this is not an issue which should be addressed by the developers of OO, but to sensationally report that OO is seven times slower without giving equal emphasis to the number range you are really talking about(tenth of second vs. 1 second)smacks of the usual marketing FUD from Redmond.
Also, there is no indication that any care was exercised to insure that the documents used in the test are representative of the types of docs encoutered by most people. I strongly suspect they were chosen to cast OO in the worst light possible. I have opened many.doc documents with OO 2.0 and did not notice any significant time lag(less than half a second for typical 100KB.doc file) although its obviously a little slower than MS Office.
So what you have here is some self appointed blogger with an apparrent axe to grind against open source posting his supposed test of OO and MS Office in a skewed and sensationalist manner and with results that are contrary to any real world experience or concerns. This is not news; it's marketing FUD.
Ultimately, everything fails; it's called the law of entropy. It's a question of how fast it fails. I'm sure there are plenty of egalitarian human endeavors that have failed too and perhaps more rapidly than their authoritarian counterparts.
I know this is slashdot and no one reads the article but really. This was a criminal prosecution for price fixing brought by the US Dept of Justice and I can assure you those government attorneys will be getting their usual monthly slalary. The $300 million metioned in the article is a criminal fine to be paid to the government. And for the other legal retards out there, criminal fines are not normally divied up among members of the community; it goes into the treasury.
I disagree. The GPL prevents the author of the code from being the only one that can lawfully distribute the product. It allows for competing vendors for the code by design, not by accident. What better protection from vendor lock-in?
Can't you MS apologists find some another choice of words in your anti OSS diatribes. Ever since Balmer first uttered the words "cobbled together" to describe open source, these words have been repeatedly used in MS propaganda ever since. Let's face it; MS products are also cobbled together by paid lackeys that hate their jobs. Does that make you feel any better.
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I think it's extremely dopey. Check this out: [root@localhost patrick]# hdparm -t /dev/sdc /dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 30 MB in 3.04 seconds = 9.87 MB/sec
[root@localhost patrick]# hdparm -t /dev/hde /dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 120 MB in 3.02 seconds = 39.78 MB/sec;
sdc is a flash drive, hde is an ATA 100 drive. Enough said.
Seinfield gave us the "Show About Nothing" Now Science has given us the "Computer About Nothing". Q: What's the computer doing? A: Nothing. Q: Nothing? A: That's right. It's doing absolutely nothing.
Depositions rarely go on the date set forth in the subpeona. You can expect delays in getting the documents requested which are needed with time for examination before taking the depositions. That's pretty much par for the course in civil litigation; you set an arbitrary date and the parties later agree on the real date. The more interesting question is why IBM waited until now to request this info. If they wanted to assert additional claims against MS or Sun, it's pretty late in the day to be adding parties to this litigation; that would only further delay things. You can be sure there is a definite reason for issuing these subpeonae now. My guess is IBM may have recently come by some new info, probably from some insider and probably in the form of some smoking gun documents. They must now feel justified in pursuing this line of inquiry more aggressively even though there is a potential for delaying the resolution of this case if they attempt to assert new claims against MS or sun in the sco case.
That will be quite enough Mr. Torvalds.
First year law school: "or" gives "ee" gets. LicensOR gives a license; licensEE gets a license. Ms, the licensor, will not be choosing the licensee.
Intel had something to say about this as well. I doubt that Dell would have been thrilled about competing with Apple in the windows on intel hardware market. No business wants a new competitor, especially one like Apple that can offer a lot that Dell can't, i.e. OSX as well as the style and fashionability of the Apple brand. Dell may have pressured intel to not make this easy with the threat that Dell would have to reconsider its intel only policy if intel didn't play along.
The Sony corporation has engaged John Cleese to issue an apology on Sony's behalf: "All right, all right, I apologize. I'm really, really sorry. I apologize unreservedly. I offer a complete and utter retraction. The rootkit was totally without basis in fact and was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my rootkit may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such rootkit at any time in the future."
I don't get your reasoning re windows running at "native speeds" in a "Virtual PC" like product. What evidence do you have to support this conclusion? The programs you mention, VMWare, Virtual PC, and qemu, do not run at anywhere near native speeds on current intel architectures under windows and/or linux. Wine has been in development for years and only recently became beta. Xen is promising but in the early stages of development. Your optimism for early release of quality products for the macintel capable of running windows at any acceptable speed seem unfounded to me.
Let's not get carried away on Jobs' oracular skills - he's had his missteps too. For one he failed to see that being a software company on an open hardware platform is a superior business model to being a hardware company on a closed hardware platform. There's a reason why Gates and MS cleaned Jobs' and Apple's clock back in the day apart from the usual MS underhanded tactics and just plain good luck. Their business model and vision of the future was superior in a pure business, not technological, sense.
I think you have it wrong. MS is in a much different competitive position re on line music than they are with office suites where they have a virtual monopoly. When MS has to play technological catchup the tried and true formula has always been embrace, extend, extinguish. So here, I'm sure MS would be willing to license from the market leader, Apple, which would be the "embrace" step followed by "extend" and "extinguish".
Probably Ford. Remember the Pinto's exploding gas tank? Internal documents produced by Ford in product liability suits on the pinto showed that this is precisely the methodology used. This resulted in huge punitive damages being awarded against Ford as a deterrent. Ford was also criminally prosecuted for wreckless homicide in Indiana based on this conduct but was acquited. It was the first time that a corporation had been criminally prosecuted for a common law crime IIRC.
I think it's really stretching things to refer to anything that writes at 17MB/sec as having "blazing speed". Sure it's faster than most thumb drives but that's like bragging about being the world's tallest midget.
As an attorney I can tell you that lawyers tend to have a better grasp of technology than many other professional groups that I come in contact with. You have to be pretty smart to get into law school these days and that generally translates into a better understanding of current technology.
Furthermore, I doubt that Sony's rootkit scheme was unconditionally approved by legal. Lawyers tend to be very conservative when giving advice. I can't imagine any competent lawyer giving the green light to this type of thing given the patchwork of laws regulating and potentially impacting the legality of this scheme and that's just within the US, nevermind internationally. Companies, especially large companies like Sony, are not run by attorneys; they're run by professional managers. It's not uncommon for managers to end run legal or simply ignore legal advice when it's not what they want to hear.
The empty head and pure heart defense doesn't work with copyright. Even unknowingly distributing a copyrighted work is actionable. Sony is on the hook here and they can no more claim ignorance than you can if they sue you for some copyrighted file you have in your P2P share folder.
I'd recommend a book from O'Reilly Publishing entitled "Running Linux". Another good book is "Linux Power Tools" by Roderick W. Smith.
You are so right. I installed my Sony rootkit in windows without a hitch. Just popped in the cd and clicked on the EULA. Try doing that in linux.
"Documentation hosted on Mill's site as well as comments on the HSG claim that he already has a great deal of funding from a number of major corporate backers. He has never, according to anything I've seen on any of these pages, looked for private donations like many of the other "free energy" scam artists. This doesn't mean he isn't running a hoax, but it lends doubt to that idea."
This makes no sense. You don't wind up with "a great deal of funding" without looking for it. The notion that "major corporate backers" have beat a path to his door and begged him to accept their funding, all unsolicited by him is just not credible. The fact that the major corporate backers are unidentified adds to the scamlike quality of the whole deal.
In other news, a hail of flying chairs inexplicably rained down on Google hedquarters today.
MS Office is more efficient at handling its own closed format files than Open Office 2.0. Who would of thunk it?? Look at the time differences. Apart from the specially crafted spread sheet, we are talking about tenths of seconds for MS office as opposed to one or two seconds for OO. Generously assuming the average worker opens maybe 100 documents a day, we're talking less than two minutes a day difference. People waste more time than that scratching their buts. I'm not saying this is not an issue which should be addressed by the developers of OO, but to sensationally report that OO is seven times slower without giving equal emphasis to the number range you are really talking about(tenth of second vs. 1 second)smacks of the usual marketing FUD from Redmond. Also, there is no indication that any care was exercised to insure that the documents used in the test are representative of the types of docs encoutered by most people. I strongly suspect they were chosen to cast OO in the worst light possible. I have opened many .doc documents with OO 2.0 and did not notice any significant time lag(less than half a second for typical 100KB .doc file) although its obviously a little slower than MS Office.
So what you have here is some self appointed blogger with an apparrent axe to grind against open source posting his supposed test of OO and MS Office in a skewed and sensationalist manner and with results that are contrary to any real world experience or concerns. This is not news; it's marketing FUD.
Ultimately, everything fails; it's called the law of entropy. It's a question of how fast it fails. I'm sure there are plenty of egalitarian human endeavors that have failed too and perhaps more rapidly than their authoritarian counterparts.
I know this is slashdot and no one reads the article but really. This was a criminal prosecution for price fixing brought by the US Dept of Justice and I can assure you those government attorneys will be getting their usual monthly slalary. The $300 million metioned in the article is a criminal fine to be paid to the government.
And for the other legal retards out there, criminal fines are not normally divied up among members of the community; it goes into the treasury.
Does this really have to be asked? What's your next pole:"Why do you avoid setting your hair on fire?"
I disagree. The GPL prevents the author of the code from being the only one that can lawfully distribute the product. It allows for competing vendors for the code by design, not by accident. What better protection from vendor lock-in?
If the alternative is to give control to such bastions of free expressions as China, Iran and Cuba, I say let the yanks keep it.
Can't you MS apologists find some another choice of words in your anti OSS diatribes. Ever since Balmer first uttered the words "cobbled together" to describe open source, these words have been repeatedly used in MS propaganda ever since. Let's face it; MS products are also cobbled together by paid lackeys that hate their jobs. Does that make you feel any better.