It's a tax on the stores because the stores are the ones that have to pay for the infrastructure needed to collect some other country's tax.
Well, tough cookies--you do business in Europe, you pay the cost like everybody else.
So what you're saying is that international businesses are being penalized for the actions of the EU's own citizens?
No, they aren't being "penalized" at all. If they don't want to do business in the EU, nobody is forcing them to. If they do want to do business, they must comply with regulations, just like when European businesses want to do business in the US.
The funny part is stores in most of Europe can't display the VAT tax separately, because your government is afraid if you saw how much tax you paid every day on necessities, you'd rebel in 6 months.
Everybody knows how much they are paying for VAT. Stores are required to display final prices because it's the consumer-friendly thing to do--it means you understand completely and viscerally how much cold hard cash something is going to cost.
It is a way to force citizens to buy stuff from the EU instead, thus supporting the local industry.
You say that as if it's unfair or a bad thing. I don't think it is. If US companies don't have to pay taxes and European companies do, then US companies have an unfair advantage.
If you want lower taxes, vote for lower taxes. The extra revenue this brings in may even make that more likely to happen.
How can you collect sales tax on a used item? The tax was already paid here by the original purchaser.
I don't know where this notion comes from that you should only pay taxes once on a given item/dollar/... Double taxation is nothing unusual: it occurs regularly in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere, and it has so for millenia. There is nothing wrong with it in principle, at least no more than with any other tax.
These reports must document carefully the reasons why each decision was made in favor of one choice over another.
Not at all: if the organization chooses open source software, they don't have to justify their choice because they haven't spent any money of the software. If they choose software costing millions of dollars in licensing fees, like that from Microsoft, then they bloody well should have to document and justify that if there are free alternatives.
So, no, this doesn't generate any extra paperwork unless a lot of money is at stake. And when a lot of money is at stake, I, for one, want the extra paperwork.
Full control (SCO owns Linux copyright) may be established by asserting Linux is a combination of public domain work (GPL stuff) and copyrighted SCO stuff.
The GPL doesn't allow this. If there is copyrighted or patented SCO stuff in the Linux kernel, then the entire kernel can't be redistributed until that code is removed or until SCO puts it under the GPL.
That provision is in there to prevent exactly this kind of powergrab. Theoretically, SCO could kill Linux, but they can't make it proprietary, at least as long as the GPL and copyrights hold up.
It makes a big difference what you do after you get notified of some copyright/patent violation. Before that, it may have been accidental infringement. If you keep using the software in question and you should have known better, it may become wilfull infringement.
But get this: they're managing to use it! A certain degree of fault tolerance exists within any system, and clearly Windows does not fail often enough to make a change necessary. Perhaps one might be desirable due to potential benefits, but it is not necessary because the work *is* getting done.
Sure, it is "necessary": money spent unneccessarily on one thing is not available for spending on other things.
It may not be "necessary" to overthrow a dictatorship, and it may be easier in the short term not to, but in the long term, it's a good idea, and it's a good idea to do so as soon as possible.
I suppose I need to ask why you think having more government jobs is somehow better than having more private industry jobs.
When Microsoft sells another 10000 licenses of Windows, that creates zero jobs at Microsoft.
(Of course, Windows is so flaky and hard to support that Windows actually creates many more IT jobs than a Linux, even if Microsoft support jobs are roughly the equivalent of a "sanitation engineer".)
I think people greatly underestimate the amount of effort, blood, sweat, and tears it would take to "switch" (so to speak) a government agency (let alone a whole government) to Linux.
Can't be worse than the amount of effort, blood, sweat, and tears involved in upgrading from one Microsoft OS or Office version to the next.
The old adage applies: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It is "broke": Windows is hugely expensive, hard to administer, and unreliable. And on top of all that, its adoption by government agencies often forces regular citizens to buy it, too, whether they want to or not.
We can praise the nations that throw caution to the wind and roll out Linux rapidly. But we should not be so negative to those that take a more cautious stance. Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
Organizations that migrate don't just have their IT staff wake up and say "oh, I think we'll install Linux today, how about that?". They do extensive testing, talk to other users, check reports and bug lists, etc. In different words, with the copious support and widespread adoption of Linux, after spending a few months getting to know Linux and planning for a migration, an IT manager should have enough information to determine what the risks and benefits are. If not, he is in the wrong job.
Each opponent asserted the playing field was level and open-source legislation would introduce unfairness into the procurement process.
Why should free software and commercial software be treated equally? What does this have to do with "fairness"?
I give my government lots of money. I have a right to expect that they don't buy commerical stuff if there are reasonable free alternatives. If they do go out and buy something commercial, they should be required to document carefully the reasons for their choices.
Even if the free software were to require larger IT staffs (which it doesn't), I'd much rather see my tax dollars go into salaries for local government employees than disappear somewhere in Microsoft's bank account up in Washington state soemwhere.
All that's really needed is to either use TCP/IP and add a zeroconf type protocol
Is that all? Only a TCP/IP protocol stack, ZeroConf daemons?
Bluetooth gives you a serial line, something that you can plug into a PIC that costs a few cents, with no protocols, no TCP/IP, nothing.
Such a move makes sense in my opinion, because why should you need two chipsets and two standards to communicate through wireless?
Why indeed. We have Bluetooth for wireless device interconnect. What point would 802.11 serve?
We don't have two cabling standards, so two wireless standards just seems silly in my opinion.
No, we don't have two cabling standards, we zillions. Even Ethernet runs over many different, incompatible cabling standards. For disks, we have USB1, USB2, IEEE1394, Serial ATA, FiberChannel, a dozen different incompatible SCSI standards, and more.
Even if 802.11 were to make a redundant push into the Bluetooth space, wireless would still be much more standardized than cables.
"During that project [Linux Kernel Personality for SCO] we often came across sections of code that looked very similar, in fact we wondered why even variable names were identical. It looked very much like both codes had the same origin, but that was good as the implementation of 95 percent of all Linux system calls on the Unix kernel turned out to be literally 'one-liners'," the source said.
I don't quite understand this. If the guy was working on the LKP project and they discovered similarity between SCO UNIX and Linux during that work, then SCO did not copy that code as part of the LKP project (although they may have copied it before). Or did he join the LKP project late and alleges that other people on the same project copied the code before he joined? Or is he saying that SCO had copied Linux source code for other reasons and they were just discovering that fact during the LKP project at SCO?
And by the time you are done defining a spec for a slower, cheaper, easier to configure, less power hungry version of 802.11 and new protocols over 802.11, a few years have passed, and you essentially have Bluetooth, only that it's incompatible and nothing supports it.
Bluetooth support is pretty much everywhere, in both hardware and software. It works. Why in the world would you want to start from scratch? A low-power 802.11 standard would be redundant.
Also, it appears that Bluetooth actually gets a larger range at the same power as 802.11, probably because it's slower.
However, there are faster versions of Bluetooth coming that use the same protocols and remain software and hardware compatible, so you will get a choice of speed and power tradeoffs.
Re:Why tar/gz and tar/bz2 suck, compared with zip
on
.ZIP Standard to Fragment?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In the meantime, I'll be plucking decompressed files right out of the middle of my zip archives, in a fraction of the time.
That's the difference between gadget freaks and users. Most users extract single files so rarely that they really don't need an entirely different format. For the once-in-a-blue-moon event that they have to find a single file, they probably just untar the whole archive, find the file by browsing the directory tree, and then delete the tree. But gadget freaks are so happy to have just the right gadget for a particular problem that they will go through any cost to acquire and use a gadget.
And when you have an application that needs a random access format, zip is pretty lousy: you'd be better off with a loopback-mounted file system (like MacOS.dmg) or a small database.
"tar" was meant as a tape archive (hence the name), so it is fully justified in having assumptions about sequential reads and writes built into it.
The fact that people ended up using "tar" for so many other things is free choice at work: "tar" works well enough. It just isn't a problem to have to read through and decompress an entire archive just to get the last file for the applications that "tar" is usually used for. Sure, it's a little slower than if you have a monolithic program like zip, but how often do you need to extract single files from a tar archive? In fact, the most common way of extracting a single file from a tar archive is probably to untar everything, copy the file, and remove the untarred files.
If you want random access, use something better than zip. If you just want a decent distribution medium, gzipped tar files are just fine.
There is nothing wrong in principle with patenting things you don't expect to be producing. After all, inventors and scientists aren't businessmen or builders--in theory patents would allow a beneficial separation of labor: inventors invent and they get paid by commercial companies build and produce.
What is wrong with "offensive blocking patents" is that companies can patent trivial things and basically extort money from their competitors. The "brick wall" analogy is quite apt: people patent nearly worthless "bricks" of patents, but if they stack them up in front of their competitors, they can make money from the nuisance of it alone. It really is like if you could legally put a brick wall in front of the entrance to your competitor's factory. If the patent system worked as it is supposed to, it would restrict people to patenting gems, highly valuable and rare ideas that are actually sought out by companies for licensing.
I suspect that if the patent system worked the way it is supposed to, there might be a few thousand patents a year granted at most, not the several hundred thousand patents that are actually granted.
Firstly, "Master recordings" are the final mixed high-quality media, before the darn thing is formatted for CDs, tapes, or vinyl.
The concept of a "master recording" made sense when things were recorded on analog media: there was a clearly distinguished, least degraded recording. In the digital work, it makes no sense at all; people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
A little bit of speaker noise is just about meaningless, but it still effects the quality of the music.
If your ears aren't built to perceive it, it makes no difference. That's why sampling at astronomical frequencies does't help. It's also why recording at astronomical bitrates makes no difference.
I haven't heard any AAC encoded music myself (i use uncompressed wav or 256khz mp3 myself), but Apple allegedly uses the master recordings to encode their files.
Unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell the difference between an MP3 ripped from a "master recording" (whatever that may be) and an MP3 ripped from a CD. And unless you are an alien, a dog, or an infant, you are lucky to hear anything meaninful above 16khz, which means that 44khz sampling is plenty.
Most mp3s or oggs you find out there are from someone's CD-Rom drive, who knows how the disc looked, or how much jitter there was.
Yeah, those MP3s are even worse when people forget to clean and replace the stylus in their CD-ROM drive regularly. Those CD-ROM diamond styluses sure wear down fast. I expect you clean yours regularly, right?
Most important, it's the only home consumer base that flaunts its support for the Wireless Distribution System, which knits multiple access points together to act as a single network.
Ah, it's nice to see someone was paying attention when the network-stack diagrams were being handed out.
Too bad you haven't been paying attention to the very first slide shown in engineering class, though: "fast, cheap, and full-featured--pick any two" (one might add "low power" and "easy-to-use" to that list). Or maybe computer scientists just don't understand the meaning of "engineering tradeoffs"?
Bluetooth is a good engineering tradeoff for its intended purpose; 802.11a/b/g is not a good engineering tradeoff for the same purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole plot of the SCO vs. IBM saga.
you just know the third millenium has arrived.
It's a tax on the stores because the stores are the ones that have to pay for the infrastructure needed to collect some other country's tax.
Well, tough cookies--you do business in Europe, you pay the cost like everybody else.
So what you're saying is that international businesses are being penalized for the actions of the EU's own citizens?
No, they aren't being "penalized" at all. If they don't want to do business in the EU, nobody is forcing them to. If they do want to do business, they must comply with regulations, just like when European businesses want to do business in the US.
The funny part is stores in most of Europe can't display the VAT tax separately, because your government is afraid if you saw how much tax you paid every day on necessities, you'd rebel in 6 months.
Everybody knows how much they are paying for VAT. Stores are required to display final prices because it's the consumer-friendly thing to do--it means you understand completely and viscerally how much cold hard cash something is going to cost.
It is a way to force citizens to buy stuff from the EU instead, thus supporting the local industry.
You say that as if it's unfair or a bad thing. I don't think it is. If US companies don't have to pay taxes and European companies do, then US companies have an unfair advantage.
If you want lower taxes, vote for lower taxes. The extra revenue this brings in may even make that more likely to happen.
How can you collect sales tax on a used item? The tax was already paid here by the original purchaser.
I don't know where this notion comes from that you should only pay taxes once on a given item/dollar/... Double taxation is nothing unusual: it occurs regularly in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere, and it has so for millenia. There is nothing wrong with it in principle, at least no more than with any other tax.
These reports must document carefully the reasons why each decision was made in favor of one choice over another.
Not at all: if the organization chooses open source software, they don't have to justify their choice because they haven't spent any money of the software. If they choose software costing millions of dollars in licensing fees, like that from Microsoft, then they bloody well should have to document and justify that if there are free alternatives.
So, no, this doesn't generate any extra paperwork unless a lot of money is at stake. And when a lot of money is at stake, I, for one, want the extra paperwork.
Full control (SCO owns Linux copyright) may be established by asserting Linux is a combination of public domain work (GPL stuff) and copyrighted SCO stuff.
The GPL doesn't allow this. If there is copyrighted or patented SCO stuff in the Linux kernel, then the entire kernel can't be redistributed until that code is removed or until SCO puts it under the GPL.
That provision is in there to prevent exactly this kind of powergrab. Theoretically, SCO could kill Linux, but they can't make it proprietary, at least as long as the GPL and copyrights hold up.
Apart from all the other howlers in that section, Richard Stallman has never been an "MIT Professor".
It makes a big difference what you do after you get notified of some copyright/patent violation. Before that, it may have been accidental infringement. If you keep using the software in question and you should have known better, it may become wilfull infringement.
But get this: they're managing to use it! A certain degree of fault tolerance exists within any system, and clearly Windows does not fail often enough to make a change necessary. Perhaps one might be desirable due to potential benefits, but it is not necessary because the work *is* getting done.
Sure, it is "necessary": money spent unneccessarily on one thing is not available for spending on other things.
It may not be "necessary" to overthrow a dictatorship, and it may be easier in the short term not to, but in the long term, it's a good idea, and it's a good idea to do so as soon as possible.
I suppose I need to ask why you think having more government jobs is somehow better than having more private industry jobs.
When Microsoft sells another 10000 licenses of Windows, that creates zero jobs at Microsoft.
(Of course, Windows is so flaky and hard to support that Windows actually creates many more IT jobs than a Linux, even if Microsoft support jobs are roughly the equivalent of a "sanitation engineer".)
I think people greatly underestimate the amount of effort, blood, sweat, and tears it would take to "switch" (so to speak) a government agency (let alone a whole government) to Linux.
Can't be worse than the amount of effort, blood, sweat, and tears involved in upgrading from one Microsoft OS or Office version to the next.
The old adage applies: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It is "broke": Windows is hugely expensive, hard to administer, and unreliable. And on top of all that, its adoption by government agencies often forces regular citizens to buy it, too, whether they want to or not.
We can praise the nations that throw caution to the wind and roll out Linux rapidly. But we should not be so negative to those that take a more cautious stance. Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
Organizations that migrate don't just have their IT staff wake up and say "oh, I think we'll install Linux today, how about that?". They do extensive testing, talk to other users, check reports and bug lists, etc. In different words, with the copious support and widespread adoption of Linux, after spending a few months getting to know Linux and planning for a migration, an IT manager should have enough information to determine what the risks and benefits are. If not, he is in the wrong job.
Each opponent asserted the playing field was level and open-source legislation would introduce unfairness into the procurement process.
Why should free software and commercial software be treated equally? What does this have to do with "fairness"?
I give my government lots of money. I have a right to expect that they don't buy commerical stuff if there are reasonable free alternatives. If they do go out and buy something commercial, they should be required to document carefully the reasons for their choices.
Even if the free software were to require larger IT staffs (which it doesn't), I'd much rather see my tax dollars go into salaries for local government employees than disappear somewhere in Microsoft's bank account up in Washington state soemwhere.
All that's really needed is to either use TCP/IP and add a zeroconf type protocol
Is that all? Only a TCP/IP protocol stack, ZeroConf daemons?
Bluetooth gives you a serial line, something that you can plug into a PIC that costs a few cents, with no protocols, no TCP/IP, nothing.
Such a move makes sense in my opinion, because why should you need two chipsets and two standards to communicate through wireless?
Why indeed. We have Bluetooth for wireless device interconnect. What point would 802.11 serve?
We don't have two cabling standards, so two wireless standards just seems silly in my opinion.
No, we don't have two cabling standards, we zillions. Even Ethernet runs over many different, incompatible cabling standards. For disks, we have USB1, USB2, IEEE1394, Serial ATA, FiberChannel, a dozen different incompatible SCSI standards, and more.
Even if 802.11 were to make a redundant push into the Bluetooth space, wireless would still be much more standardized than cables.
"During that project [Linux Kernel Personality for SCO] we often came across sections of code that looked very similar, in fact we wondered why even variable names were identical. It looked very much like both codes had the same origin, but that was good as the implementation of 95 percent of all Linux system calls on the Unix kernel turned out to be literally 'one-liners'," the source said.
I don't quite understand this. If the guy was working on the LKP project and they discovered similarity between SCO UNIX and Linux during that work, then SCO did not copy that code as part of the LKP project (although they may have copied it before). Or did he join the LKP project late and alleges that other people on the same project copied the code before he joined? Or is he saying that SCO had copied Linux source code for other reasons and they were just discovering that fact during the LKP project at SCO?
This is significant, because RAV Antivirus was one of the few antivirus products that provided cross-platform email virus scanning
Yes, that's probably the whole point.
And by the time you are done defining a spec for a slower, cheaper, easier to configure, less power hungry version of 802.11 and new protocols over 802.11, a few years have passed, and you essentially have Bluetooth, only that it's incompatible and nothing supports it.
Bluetooth support is pretty much everywhere, in both hardware and software. It works. Why in the world would you want to start from scratch? A low-power 802.11 standard would be redundant.
Also, it appears that Bluetooth actually gets a larger range at the same power as 802.11, probably because it's slower.
However, there are faster versions of Bluetooth coming that use the same protocols and remain software and hardware compatible, so you will get a choice of speed and power tradeoffs.
In the meantime, I'll be plucking decompressed files right out of the middle of my zip archives, in a fraction of the time.
.dmg) or a small database.
That's the difference between gadget freaks and users. Most users extract single files so rarely that they really don't need an entirely different format. For the once-in-a-blue-moon event that they have to find a single file, they probably just untar the whole archive, find the file by browsing the directory tree, and then delete the tree. But gadget freaks are so happy to have just the right gadget for a particular problem that they will go through any cost to acquire and use a gadget.
And when you have an application that needs a random access format, zip is pretty lousy: you'd be better off with a loopback-mounted file system (like MacOS
"tar" was meant as a tape archive (hence the name), so it is fully justified in having assumptions about sequential reads and writes built into it.
The fact that people ended up using "tar" for so many other things is free choice at work: "tar" works well enough. It just isn't a problem to have to read through and decompress an entire archive just to get the last file for the applications that "tar" is usually used for. Sure, it's a little slower than if you have a monolithic program like zip, but how often do you need to extract single files from a tar archive? In fact, the most common way of extracting a single file from a tar archive is probably to untar everything, copy the file, and remove the untarred files.
If you want random access, use something better than zip. If you just want a decent distribution medium, gzipped tar files are just fine.
There is nothing wrong in principle with patenting things you don't expect to be producing. After all, inventors and scientists aren't businessmen or builders--in theory patents would allow a beneficial separation of labor: inventors invent and they get paid by commercial companies build and produce.
What is wrong with "offensive blocking patents" is that companies can patent trivial things and basically extort money from their competitors. The "brick wall" analogy is quite apt: people patent nearly worthless "bricks" of patents, but if they stack them up in front of their competitors, they can make money from the nuisance of it alone. It really is like if you could legally put a brick wall in front of the entrance to your competitor's factory. If the patent system worked as it is supposed to, it would restrict people to patenting gems, highly valuable and rare ideas that are actually sought out by companies for licensing.
I suspect that if the patent system worked the way it is supposed to, there might be a few thousand patents a year granted at most, not the several hundred thousand patents that are actually granted.
Firstly, "Master recordings" are the final mixed high-quality media, before the darn thing is formatted for CDs, tapes, or vinyl.
The concept of a "master recording" made sense when things were recorded on analog media: there was a clearly distinguished, least degraded recording. In the digital work, it makes no sense at all; people can mix together all sorts of different versions, all having an equal claim to being a "master recording". Hence my comment "whatever that may be".
A little bit of speaker noise is just about meaningless, but it still effects the quality of the music.
If your ears aren't built to perceive it, it makes no difference. That's why sampling at astronomical frequencies does't help. It's also why recording at astronomical bitrates makes no difference.
I haven't heard any AAC encoded music myself (i use uncompressed wav or 256khz mp3 myself), but Apple allegedly uses the master recordings to encode their files.
Unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell the difference between an MP3 ripped from a "master recording" (whatever that may be) and an MP3 ripped from a CD. And unless you are an alien, a dog, or an infant, you are lucky to hear anything meaninful above 16khz, which means that 44khz sampling is plenty.
Most mp3s or oggs you find out there are from someone's CD-Rom drive, who knows how the disc looked, or how much jitter there was.
Yeah, those MP3s are even worse when people forget to clean and replace the stylus in their CD-ROM drive regularly. Those CD-ROM diamond styluses sure wear down fast. I expect you clean yours regularly, right?
Most important, it's the only home consumer base that flaunts its support for the Wireless Distribution System, which knits multiple access points together to act as a single network.
Not true. D-Link sells a wireless access point that can act as a repeater. I think other vendors do, too. And their access points are web configurable.
There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it.
Not true either. There are third party utilities for configuring the AirPort from other operating systems, e.g., here.
MSN author Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves,
Ah, MSN author. Never mind, that explains everything.
Ah, it's nice to see someone was paying attention when the network-stack diagrams were being handed out.
Too bad you haven't been paying attention to the very first slide shown in engineering class, though: "fast, cheap, and full-featured--pick any two" (one might add "low power" and "easy-to-use" to that list). Or maybe computer scientists just don't understand the meaning of "engineering tradeoffs"?
Bluetooth is a good engineering tradeoff for its intended purpose; 802.11a/b/g is not a good engineering tradeoff for the same purpose.