I read sometime ago that Microsoft was considering moving 50 miles up the coast into Canada and complicating the legal picture enormously.
Really though, India seems a better place as it is a) much more corrupt, and Microsoft could have many more government decisions its way for much less money than it lobbies with now, and b) India is not so firmly tied to the WTO so the US could not get at them quite as easily as Canada.
Does anybody know if this plan is still on the back burner?
I disagree; risk-friendly managers can save money.
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"If we didn't have PHP, it would cost us six to seven times as much to operate [our] IT environment," says Kevin Crothers, head of corporate Web systems at WorldCom Inc. WorldCom has used PHP for several major Web projects, both internal and external, including the front end to a searchable database of employees and contractors that contains more than 100,000 records. "It's all LDAP-based," he says, noting that PHP had "the strongest LDAP integration we've been able to find."
It would lead to a lot more than that -- no more social security, medicare, welfare, or any other entitlements.
However, it would also (hopefully) bring an end to the worst of our government's foreign policy. I think that takes priority - I'll take a smashed economy to any more people that hate us.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or
enumeration.
We can say at this point, with absolutely no reservation, that this was a really bad idea. The magnitude of this power is matched only by its abuse.
From what I understand, this was enacted under the Wilson administration, and the rules for the passage of the amendment were not strictly observed (leading to some constitutional challenges for the IRS).
Supposedly, the federal goverment existed largely off tariff income prior to this time.
What would it really take to get the damned thing repealed?
AFAIK, Reiser and XFS both have tremendous speed advantages over ext3 as well.
I've only installed Red Hat 7.2 a couple of times, but it suffers from the same problem as SUSE-Reiser in that it places the file system driver in a module in the initrd.
I much prefer the SGI install "shim" for Red Hat which has compiled XFS in the kernel. I like having a kernel that includes the filesystem support - putting it in a module is just a stupid idea. Any distribution should have its native file system compiled into the kernel, no questions asked.
Red Hat's big reason for not adopting a JFS earlier was the lack of userland repair utilities. I think that they really shafted both the Linux community and SGI, who has released a great and much-needed product. With Red Hat's support, XFS might be in the Linus kernels by now.
But that doesn't seem to stop Compaq and HP from "betting their prospective companies" on IA64, even if it is a dog and they've sold about twelve of them last year...
MHz isn't everything (as Mac people can attest), but I would still like to see SGI start making PC video cards and their own Linux.
If not, I say Red Hat goes it alone. Red Hat is a server OS company; AOL has no interest in this sector.
If AOL had kept iPlanet (or ever done anything with AOLServer), then I might be saying something else, but things are as they are; AOL did it's best to bury Netscape's server product line, and they will with Red Hat's, too.
Worst case, Red Hat hires Raster back and spins him off into the Red Hat Desktop/OS, then sells him to AOL and pockets the change.
Whatever happened to that Corel Linux distribution? I bet AOL could have that for a song.
Red Hat is (AFAIK) the only distribution with absolutely no closed source-software.
Red Hat used to sell some closed-sourced stuff (CDE & Motif come to mind), but they got the religion so hard that they dumped all of it (at least from the standpoint of the Linux environment - the Cygnus stuff is still closed, AFAIK).
Red Hat seemed to be the main reason that TrollTech came up with an open-source license for Qt on UNIX (KDE) - I remember the memos on their website.
Red Hat's fanatical adherence to this open-source philosophy has carried them through some really bad releases (7.0, for example). They also do not take adequate customer input for new release development (I will never run ext[23] again, for example), and the timing of the releases is driven more by marketing/accounting than by quality technology. But you know with a Red Hat distribution that all of it is open, and it will stay open, or it won't be in the distribution anymore.
From this perspective, I wish AOL would buy Mandrake, Suse, or Caldera, and leave the real gem alone.
The very day that Microsoft starts generating RFCs on the MSWord format, then I have no problem with it in email.
Until that day, we should remind others that grafting MSWord into an email defeats the purpose of open-standards, and is yet another example of embrace-extend-extinguish. I'm somewhat surprised that RMS didn't point this issue out.
But then again, if we say this, then we should ban 3/4 of the available MIME types...
An open-source Solaris kernel would be able to integrate the recently-released IBM-JFS and SGI-XFS filesystems (which both seem better than ufs), along with many device drivers from Linux (with some required rewrites, of course).
Sun has come 90% of the way towards really riding the Open-Source wave. 100% would not necessarily require completely opening Solaris.
An open-source Solaris kernel on Itanium would also really screw up your competetors hopes of selling proprietary UNIX on that platform, as well...
The drawback would be that we might be able to see some sensitive information on e1[05]k partitioning and hot-swap features.
...as it is not supported by Oracle 9, so you've probably had growing ammunition for your Linux switch for some time (but not SUSE - anything but that!).
People say that the Sun X server is more stable than xfree86, although I haven't seen that to be the case on Solaris-x86. Still, it would be great if the xfree86 people would agree to supply the X server (esp. for an exchange of GPLed source code).
In fact, Sun should seriously evaluate:
A Linux device-driver (-compatible) interface for the kernel (but this may not work with the gpl - but can anyone litigate if they include just the interface, but no drivers?)
Adopting one of the Linux boot managers (theirs is REALLY ugly)
Even GPLing enough of the kernel to possibly integrate SGI XFS, IBM JFS, or the others into the native Sun kernel (something with dynamic inode creation)
I assume that all the source code has been publicly available for all this stuff, but no one could work on it because of the NDA...
Sun should adopt more creative cost-cutting measures to keep it alive.
The point is, instead of taking a bad product and trying to convince us that it is good, why not spend the time to make a good product?
Imagine also how Microsoft would be perceived if they sold, for example, phonograph records or videotapes. If they started with a baseline compatible player, but then added features to their unit that made their media incompatible with all the other vendors, they would surely face great scrutiny, perhaps greater than what they face now. It seems to me that the fact that this involves "intellectual property" compatibility issues gives them more leeway.
A good product from Microsoft must:
Play by the rules (adhere to the standards)
Not seek to put competetors out of business
Be fairly priced
Have open, stable interfaces
Be serviced for security in a prompt and complete manner
I'd like to see them do a lot more. I'd like to see Gecko used in the next IE (since it's so broken anyway). I'd like to see Apache used as the next IIS (since it's so broken anyway). I'd like to see a sane policy on vulnerability disclosure and patches.
What we have is a bully pushing substandard products. Until this changes, there are many places that thier sales force will never go, in spite of the rhetoric.
Most universities are turning out people who are barely literate in any of the stable, long-term, popular technologies.
You assert that these technologies are only useful in expressing some higher form of cs theory, but the most profound cs theories are already embodied in these very technologies which you disregard as inconsequential.
Think about it this way - would you want a medical doctor to practice medicine the way you believe computer science should be learned and practiced? I think not.
There are a lot of aspects to the field that haven't changed much in the last 20-30 years. For example:
The UNIX shell
C
C++
Motif(?)
Berkeley Sockets/TCP
SQL
Schools should zero in on stuff that doesn't change, and leave OSI, Linda, M68000 asm, Encore Multimax Unix, and all the rest of that useless cruft that I had to learn completely out of the curriculum.
It seems to me that Kazaa, Napster, mp3.com et al have taken relatively orthodox approaches to their legal defense.
Bearing in mind that IANAL, how can one of these companies adopt a legal defense strategy that is the worst nightmare of the RIAA/MPAA and/or the government(s)?
What if Kazaa were to form five more corporations and cross-license its technology with them, then declare bankrupcy in an effort to keep the technology alive?
How could Kazaa involve the largest number of jurisdictions in an effort to dramatically increase the difficulty of prosecution?
What about involving Sealand?
These companies are going to continue to fall to the grim reaper until one of them does with the legal system what the technology has done with the distribution channel.
The next company should insure that it will cost over $1 billion to successfully shut them down.
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I read sometime ago that Microsoft was considering moving 50 miles up the coast into Canada and complicating the legal picture enormously.
Really though, India seems a better place as it is a) much more corrupt, and Microsoft could have many more government decisions its way for much less money than it lobbies with now, and b) India is not so firmly tied to the WTO so the US could not get at them quite as easily as Canada.
Does anybody know if this plan is still on the back burner?
"If we didn't have PHP, it would cost us six to seven times as much to operate [our] IT environment," says Kevin Crothers, head of corporate Web systems at WorldCom Inc. WorldCom has used PHP for several major Web projects, both internal and external, including the front end to a searchable database of employees and contractors that contains more than 100,000 records. "It's all LDAP-based," he says, noting that PHP had "the strongest LDAP integration we've been able to find."
It would lead to a lot more than that -- no more social security, medicare, welfare, or any other entitlements.
However, it would also (hopefully) bring an end to the worst of our government's foreign policy. I think that takes priority - I'll take a smashed economy to any more people that hate us.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
We can say at this point, with absolutely no reservation, that this was a really bad idea. The magnitude of this power is matched only by its abuse.
From what I understand, this was enacted under the Wilson administration, and the rules for the passage of the amendment were not strictly observed (leading to some constitutional challenges for the IRS).
Supposedly, the federal goverment existed largely off tariff income prior to this time.
What would it really take to get the damned thing repealed?
XFS can create inodes on the fly if you run out.
AFAIK, Reiser and XFS both have tremendous speed advantages over ext3 as well.
I've only installed Red Hat 7.2 a couple of times, but it suffers from the same problem as SUSE-Reiser in that it places the file system driver in a module in the initrd.
I much prefer the SGI install "shim" for Red Hat which has compiled XFS in the kernel. I like having a kernel that includes the filesystem support - putting it in a module is just a stupid idea. Any distribution should have its native file system compiled into the kernel, no questions asked.
Red Hat's big reason for not adopting a JFS earlier was the lack of userland repair utilities. I think that they really shafted both the Linux community and SGI, who has released a great and much-needed product. With Red Hat's support, XFS might be in the Linus kernels by now.
Everybody here knows that you need a 64-bit system, that can address large amounts of contiguous memory, for an effective VLDB.
In this realm, Linux and NT are still in the minor leagues, and guess what Larry said about NT today?
And Microsoft, which to date has not produced any benchmarks that scale beyond 300GB, is nowhere to be found in this high-powered performance arena.
(By the way - this record-setting TPC-H benchmark was set with a Sun E15K.)
But that doesn't seem to stop Compaq and HP from "betting their prospective companies" on IA64, even if it is a dog and they've sold about twelve of them last year...
MHz isn't everything (as Mac people can attest), but I would still like to see SGI start making PC video cards and their own Linux.
...or at least buy NVidia.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
...that AOL/TW is a member of the RIAA and MPAA, which are organizations that are funding head-on assaults on our constitutional protections?
Alan Cox no longer feels physically safe in traveling to the United States. Should he willingly work for one of the forces that made this so?
I thought they took that out a long time ago.
I admit, it's very closed source, but did they have any choice?
Any Linux distribution that's going to be serious about the desktop will have to address Wine in a thorough manner.
Yes, it's on Powertools, but it's an afterthought.
Maybe AOL should buy Lindows. I wonder which one would make Gates squirm more?
If not, I say Red Hat goes it alone. Red Hat is a server OS company; AOL has no interest in this sector.
If AOL had kept iPlanet (or ever done anything with AOLServer), then I might be saying something else, but things are as they are; AOL did it's best to bury Netscape's server product line, and they will with Red Hat's, too.
Worst case, Red Hat hires Raster back and spins him off into the Red Hat Desktop/OS, then sells him to AOL and pockets the change.
Whatever happened to that Corel Linux distribution? I bet AOL could have that for a song.
Red Hat is (AFAIK) the only distribution with absolutely no closed source-software.
Red Hat used to sell some closed-sourced stuff (CDE & Motif come to mind), but they got the religion so hard that they dumped all of it (at least from the standpoint of the Linux environment - the Cygnus stuff is still closed, AFAIK).
Red Hat seemed to be the main reason that TrollTech came up with an open-source license for Qt on UNIX (KDE) - I remember the memos on their website.
Red Hat's fanatical adherence to this open-source philosophy has carried them through some really bad releases (7.0, for example). They also do not take adequate customer input for new release development (I will never run ext[23] again, for example), and the timing of the releases is driven more by marketing/accounting than by quality technology. But you know with a Red Hat distribution that all of it is open, and it will stay open, or it won't be in the distribution anymore.
From this perspective, I wish AOL would buy Mandrake, Suse, or Caldera, and leave the real gem alone.
The very day that Microsoft starts generating RFCs on the MSWord format, then I have no problem with it in email.
Until that day, we should remind others that grafting MSWord into an email defeats the purpose of open-standards, and is yet another example of embrace-extend-extinguish. I'm somewhat surprised that RMS didn't point this issue out.
But then again, if we say this, then we should ban 3/4 of the available MIME types...
An open-source Solaris kernel would be able to integrate the recently-released IBM-JFS and SGI-XFS filesystems (which both seem better than ufs), along with many device drivers from Linux (with some required rewrites, of course).
Sun has come 90% of the way towards really riding the Open-Source wave. 100% would not necessarily require completely opening Solaris.
An open-source Solaris kernel on Itanium would also really screw up your competetors hopes of selling proprietary UNIX on that platform, as well...
The drawback would be that we might be able to see some sensitive information on e1[05]k partitioning and hot-swap features.
Do the Sun decision-makers see it differently?
...as it is not supported by Oracle 9, so you've probably had growing ammunition for your Linux switch for some time (but not SUSE - anything but that!).
People say that the Sun X server is more stable than xfree86, although I haven't seen that to be the case on Solaris-x86. Still, it would be great if the xfree86 people would agree to supply the X server (esp. for an exchange of GPLed source code).
In fact, Sun should seriously evaluate:
I assume that all the source code has been publicly available for all this stuff, but no one could work on it because of the NDA...
Sun should adopt more creative cost-cutting measures to keep it alive.
The point is, instead of taking a bad product and trying to convince us that it is good, why not spend the time to make a good product?
Imagine also how Microsoft would be perceived if they sold, for example, phonograph records or videotapes. If they started with a baseline compatible player, but then added features to their unit that made their media incompatible with all the other vendors, they would surely face great scrutiny, perhaps greater than what they face now. It seems to me that the fact that this involves "intellectual property" compatibility issues gives them more leeway.
A good product from Microsoft must:
I'd like to see them do a lot more. I'd like to see Gecko used in the next IE (since it's so broken anyway). I'd like to see Apache used as the next IIS (since it's so broken anyway). I'd like to see a sane policy on vulnerability disclosure and patches.
What we have is a bully pushing substandard products. Until this changes, there are many places that thier sales force will never go, in spite of the rhetoric.
Most universities are turning out people who are barely literate in any of the stable, long-term, popular technologies.
You assert that these technologies are only useful in expressing some higher form of cs theory, but the most profound cs theories are already embodied in these very technologies which you disregard as inconsequential.
Think about it this way - would you want a medical doctor to practice medicine the way you believe computer science should be learned and practiced? I think not.
For the work environment, be purely practical in your pursuit of education.
I have a CompE degree; I am also an Oracle OCP. The Oracle credentials offer much higher salaries - no two ways around it.
Oracle doesn't teach you much about metaphysics, literature, history, or communication though. You may find yourself needing some of these subjects.
ps - Do budget major augmentations to your skillset every five years, either way.
There are a lot of aspects to the field that haven't changed much in the last 20-30 years. For example:
Schools should zero in on stuff that doesn't change, and leave OSI, Linda, M68000 asm, Encore Multimax Unix, and all the rest of that useless cruft that I had to learn completely out of the curriculum.
But I managed to sneak my 8-credit subject exam in chemistry in for their dumb chem class. I guess the secretary liked me.
Iowa State's engineering program also would not accept clep for any science exams - just liberal arts credits.
Stupid policies. Inane schools. I don't miss them.
The very moment that Microsoft gets on the side of the consumer, I will be their loyal customer.
Microsoft could do any or all of these things to cause me to immediately rethink my (currently very dismissive) attitude towards them:
Microsoft management has not yet become bored with greed. I would like to see what happens when they do.
It seems to me that Kazaa, Napster, mp3.com et al have taken relatively orthodox approaches to their legal defense.
Bearing in mind that IANAL, how can one of these companies adopt a legal defense strategy that is the worst nightmare of the RIAA/MPAA and/or the government(s)?
What if Kazaa were to form five more corporations and cross-license its technology with them, then declare bankrupcy in an effort to keep the technology alive?
How could Kazaa involve the largest number of jurisdictions in an effort to dramatically increase the difficulty of prosecution?
What about involving Sealand?
These companies are going to continue to fall to the grim reaper until one of them does with the legal system what the technology has done with the distribution channel.
The next company should insure that it will cost over $1 billion to successfully shut them down.
Sounds reasonable to me, unless Microsoft intends to trademark the whole alphabet.