SCO cannot throw in the towel. Everyone understands that at the end of this case IBM will make an example of SCO. IBM has already filed some counterclaims and IBM's legal fees alone will empty SCO's warchest. Add to this the claims of Red Hat and others and they'll be picking over the smouldering crater. There will be no profit for SCO in this, only death. I just hope they go after McBride et.al *personally*, but maybe that'll have to wait for the class action lawsuit filed by SCOX investors once SCO is gone.
It's a fact that it did impact the bottom line, let me explain what that means, *they made millions on this on paper*. That's cash in the bank with little to no overheads. For a company like Unisys that represents a huge sum. It's not like revenue where you turn over billions to make millions. It directly contributes millions to to the bottom line that they'd have to grow by literally billions in revenue to make the equivalent impact with real products, something that's often lost on people who stare at the top line of big companies without thinking, and with their top line as large as (revenues in the billions) it is and the lag to respond to the market even a small dip in performance as a result of ill will when revenue is in the billions with fixed overheads you can 't control can entirely wipe out profit and then some. When your margins are tight pure cash makes a huge positive impact and lost revenue makes a huge negative impace so get a clue and take a Prozac. Yes I'd heard of Unisys before gifs I once worked for a major Unix workstation company.
Sigh, you'd think anonymous flamers would think for a nanosecond before spewing.
That is sweeping assumption. I'd suggest that at least it looks like they gained on paper and hopefully they've lost in the long run and in real terms if you could ever know what the alternative ballance sheet looked like.
No I'm not retarded but you must be if you think these games are different, I have played them and you may have noticed both games are loaded with cybernetic creatures and there's even a cybernetic dog in Quake (1 or 2).
As for different stories the stories are largely similar. Enemy monsters & space marines running around a space station.
They have more in common than they have different.
Do you expect the guy who sweeps the floor to issue a press release contradicting PR? Get real.
Re:Typical, you'd think they worked hard from this
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 1
Yup, I hear you, OTOH I just worked for a bunch of pricks that instituted mandatory 80+ hour weeks at their company, they paid for 40, if you worked say 80 hours come Saturday and took Sunday off, come Monday you'd get chewed out. I know *productive* guys this happened to. They finished the project recently and fired a whole bunch of guys who'd been working their asses off like this for months, some of those guys were their best IMHO. The reason given in one case I know about... "too expensive", and no he wasn't even close to expensive.
I got out earlier before it got really bad, fortunately I landed on my feet. But I have never worked for such incompetent and amoral S.O.B.s and have a lot more sympathy for labor laws after a career of viewing them with disdain. I've worked my tail off at great companies and enjoyed it, but some places are clueless and don't know what that kind of company culture is like or how to get there, they just screw people and it's employers like that we need labor laws for. AFAIK nothing they did was illegal or came close to being actionable.
Re:Typical, you'd think they worked hard from this
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 1
I was speaking in general terms. In the USA there is a proliferation, but mainly I'm thinking of peopel who can afford to take a risk starting their own business because they made some money. This has a snowball effect that is never going to happen in europe because once you have a house you are a wage slave unless you want to gamble with everything you have.
Re:Typical, you'd think they worked hard from this
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 1
LOL good one. I don't offer squat, but I have made money from this, & I know others who have. I also get paid a shit load more after moving to America. You see where I come from even white collar tech workers are seriously undervalued in every respect.
Missed expectations? That may have to do with your gif patent expiring and your corporate pigs getting their snouts pulled out of everyone elses troughs. Life is tougher when you have to earn your cash instead of raking in millions for bupkis through legal extortion.
Large companies are not single entities with a single thought process. It is understandable that a company can have multiple product divisions and multiple differing interests. That said they are run by individuals at the highest levels and owned in total by the same stockholders. What Unisys did was despicable, not only did they cash in on a windfall as a result of the incidental inclusion of a trivial compression patent in the gif image standard (which was never challenged in court), but they moved the goalposts throughout the lifetime of their extortion even threatening webmasters who used gifs while trying to license their 'technology' beyond the period of their patent. They got so addicted to their easy and unearned cash that they just couldn't get their snout out of the trough in the end as they sought more and more ways to exploit gif useage sowing confusion & fear as the did so, and little guys everywhere suffered. We can't stop Unisys using GPL'd code, but really who the heck cares, ignore them and certainly don't work with these rats. We know how dangerous a morally bankrupt company can be and the damage they can wreak on a nacent industry. Unisys gave us themselves as that example. They can't comment on past activities, but we sure as heck can and should and we can remember. What other weapon do we have against miscreants who act as Unisys has acted? Where is the incentive to behave better is anyone treats Unisys with anything other than contempt?
Typical, you'd think they worked hard from this.
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, but French socialists are the first to complain when the little guy actually gets a piece of the action from a company instead of the State.
The fact is that in Europe tech employees don't benefit as much from options etc whether at startups or larger corporations. The typical reaction however is not to expect better rewards or demand a piece of the pie (with the corporate tax incentives that are required to encourage it) but to tax the hide off profitable corporations and wealthy individuals a.k.a. "fat cats". There are no angel investors in Europe and almost no engineer level guys who made it rich in the rank & file who are then able to comfortably start their own business.
The typical small business starts out there with one or two guys, no cash (or a bank loan taken against your house) and maybe a grant from the EU or some development commission.
Well HDTV specifies the three colors and it is pretty much sRGB AFAIK, so it may be a while before this gets out there I think.
Should be a boon for photographers etc, now you'll be able to specify a wide gamut image and actually see it instead of it just making things look less vibrant due to cramming wide gamut on an sRGB display.
P.S. compare Quake 1 & 2 to Doom 3, I mean come on! The only diff is the name & technology, they could have called Doom3 a remake of Quake 1 not Doom and nobody would have spotted the difference, Doom3 is closer to Quake than it is to Doom, especially with monsters like Pinky thrown in there.
The amazing thing is they seem to think that Doom & Quake are somehow different games. Newsflash, they're the same game, (look at Quake 1), one franchise is a continuation of the other, they are the same in profound ways (except Q3 Arena which was entirely targeted at a multiplayer experience). Now they're saying that their strength is first person shooters & horror so they would stick to their strengths but do something different.
Or at least IBM should place some serious caveats on any promises. IBM could use it's patent portfolio to defend Linux against patent assault and we shouldn't want to lose that ability. Is someone starts asserting patent rights over Linux IBM's protfolio could be used defensively to to make counterclaims. This is Linux's biggest weakness, it holds no patents and therefore is vulnerable to claims although not being a single entity makes this impossible to enforce.
Yes, but it is a new one for SCO. Because SCO had no copyright case they actually sued former customers on trumped up charges, and so far have lost. I mean it is one thing to sue a customer who screws you over, but SCO were suing customers who had done NOTHING wrong other than perhaps not do as much business with SCO as SCO would like. All this just to create the public impression that SCO was somehow valuable through the public pretence that the lawsuits were over SCO copyrights.
You'd have to be a raving lunatic to do any business with SCO or accept any EULA with them. Thay HAVE used this to sue customers frivilously IMHO. Daryl McBride as the architect of this strategy should be high on the list of assholes to avoid in the business world, wherever he may go in future, AVOID.
It is trivial to look at the SCO claims against IBM, Daimler and AutoZone and conclude that their claims are entirely based on pre existing contracts with those entities. In fact SCO hasn't brought a genuine copyright case against anyone in their long FUD campaign, their strategy is to sue their business partners over any baseless breach of contract claim they can dream up then vaguely assert copyright infringement in press releases. It really takes a spectacularly lazy and inept journalist to miss this. The article restating SCO's blatant lie that the law suit was brought to make Daimler respond to SCO's letter when the truth is that SCO was trounced in court on everything but the letter response time just illustrates how biased the journalist was and how dishonest Blake Stowell is.
No the government didn't abandon these. Infact the government is one of the few remaining purchasers of this type of hardware. It just so happens that a lot of problems including the governments are solved by clusters.
It could be argued that at least *some* of the ASCI (Advanced SuperComputing Initiative) computers had specialized architectures with loads of bandwidth & low latency interconnect (in their day).
It's a bit of a joke complaining about a lack of vector computing when every Intel and AMD CPU sold today has floating point vector instruction set extensions with very interesting operators.
I'd argue that if you take those lamented early 90s supercomputers there's not a problem they can solve faster that a relatively small contemporary cluster or even a single desktop system. A standard 4 CPU single PC desktop system with the right architecture could also spank those legacy systems in memory bandwidth, shocking but true. It just didn't keep pace with the scale and cost reduction of small systems & clusters.
The real problem here is *relative* performance of supercomputers and commodity components, but as it takes hundreds of millions if not billions to develop a new competitive CPU & architecture and manufacture it, scientists pockets aren't deep enough to pay for those costs (and thank goodness because it's our tax dollars). It is rather pathetic to lament that supercomputers have been outpaced by clusters. The economics make it impossible for supercomputers sold in low numbers to keep pace. Or more reasonably stated, the economics of consumer PC systems makes powerful computing ubiquitous and affordable to the point where it no longer makes economic sense to pursue specialized processors and architectures to try to outperform them.
If anything is to be done it would be to increase the bandwidth and reduce the latency of cluster interconnect, and guess what, that's EXACTLY what smart people are working on right now.
As for eating America's seed corn, it is Intel and AMD that sell most CPUs used in clusters today. It is that competition and the pressure of increased development costs that makes custom hardware untennable.
It is just false to imply that supercomputing technologies fed lower end development. It is a romantic vision of trickledown technology but it is not actually how technological development works. Look at computer graphics, since the commodity PC graphics cards beat big iron from SGI there has been more innovation and development in graphics hardware, not less. There is competition and a willingness to experiment with new features. The same is true with CPUs from Intel and AMD and the architectures and innovations in memory bandwidth they constantly drive forward.
How about a bit of ballance, remember that ICANN is *supposed* to police this stuff, and Verisign's actions were just unbelievably bad. Verisign are suing ICANN for finally doing its job, even if you don't like ICANN you can't support Verisign in this.
Everyone with an XBOX game already has an XBOX with 100% compatability. All this means is folks don't throw away their XBOX when they purchase an XBOX Next. That's probably not that huge a deal.
In other words, they're saying that in order to protect the US economy the Government needs to, pay excessively for the software it is using and tie the rest of industry to an ageing software development model and its Monopoly vendor to the detrement of competition.
Yup, that looks like a recipe for a healthy economy, if you live in Redmond. It would screw the rest of the country and damage our international competitiveness.
Look, the very fact that Microsoft is pitching this to the government means it cannot win on fair terms and it knows it. Surely is Microsoft believed it's own story on TCO lobbying government to eliminate the competition wouldn't be required.
They are blinded by ideology. They see Open Source as communist I'll bet. They are out to attack it for the greater good of capitalism, the damned fools. They claim Linus has shown open contempt for intellectual property, when all Linus wants is the freedom to use his own intellectual property and they're trying to steal that from him. It's just amazing how a warped ideology can take an idea and twist it out of shape.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO cannot throw in the towel. Everyone understands that at the end of this case IBM will make an example of SCO. IBM has already filed some counterclaims and IBM's legal fees alone will empty SCO's warchest. Add to this the claims of Red Hat and others and they'll be picking over the smouldering crater. There will be no profit for SCO in this, only death. I just hope they go after McBride et.al *personally*, but maybe that'll have to wait for the class action lawsuit filed by SCOX investors once SCO is gone.
It's a fact that it did impact the bottom line, let me explain what that means, *they made millions on this on paper*. That's cash in the bank with little to no overheads. For a company like Unisys that represents a huge sum. It's not like revenue where you turn over billions to make millions. It directly contributes millions to to the bottom line that they'd have to grow by literally billions in revenue to make the equivalent impact with real products, something that's often lost on people who stare at the top line of big companies without thinking, and with their top line as large as (revenues in the billions) it is and the lag to respond to the market even a small dip in performance as a result of ill will when revenue is in the billions with fixed overheads you can
't control can entirely wipe out profit and then some. When your margins are tight pure cash makes a huge positive impact and lost revenue makes a huge negative impace so get a clue and take a Prozac. Yes I'd heard of Unisys before gifs I once worked for a major Unix workstation company.
Sigh, you'd think anonymous flamers would think for a nanosecond before spewing.
That is sweeping assumption. I'd suggest that at least it looks like they gained on paper and hopefully they've lost in the long run and in real terms if you could ever know what the alternative ballance sheet looked like.
Sigh, no it wasn't troll, it was a valid opinion that threatened the moderators preconceived views.
No I'm not retarded but you must be if you think these games are different, I have played them and you may have noticed both games are loaded with cybernetic creatures and there's even a cybernetic dog in Quake (1 or 2).
As for different stories the stories are largely similar. Enemy monsters & space marines running around a space station.
They have more in common than they have different.
Do you expect the guy who sweeps the floor to issue a press release contradicting PR? Get real.
Yup, I hear you, OTOH I just worked for a bunch of pricks that instituted mandatory 80+ hour weeks at their company, they paid for 40, if you worked say 80 hours come Saturday and took Sunday off, come Monday you'd get chewed out. I know *productive* guys this happened to. They finished the project recently and fired a whole bunch of guys who'd been working their asses off like this for months, some of those guys were their best IMHO. The reason given in one case I know about... "too expensive", and no he wasn't even close to expensive.
I got out earlier before it got really bad, fortunately I landed on my feet. But I have never worked for such incompetent and amoral S.O.B.s and have a lot more sympathy for labor laws after a career of viewing them with disdain. I've worked my tail off at great companies and enjoyed it, but some places are clueless and don't know what that kind of company culture is like or how to get there, they just screw people and it's employers like that we need labor laws for. AFAIK nothing they did was illegal or came close to being actionable.
I was speaking in general terms. In the USA there is a proliferation, but mainly I'm thinking of peopel who can afford to take a risk starting their own business because they made some money. This has a snowball effect that is never going to happen in europe because once you have a house you are a wage slave unless you want to gamble with everything you have.
LOL good one. I don't offer squat, but I have made money from this, & I know others who have. I also get paid a shit load more after moving to America. You see where I come from even white collar tech workers are seriously undervalued in every respect.
Missed expectations? That may have to do with your gif patent expiring and your corporate pigs getting their snouts pulled out of everyone elses troughs. Life is tougher when you have to earn your cash instead of raking in millions for bupkis through legal extortion.
Large companies are not single entities with a single thought process. It is understandable that a company can have multiple product divisions and multiple differing interests. That said they are run by individuals at the highest levels and owned in total by the same stockholders. What Unisys did was despicable, not only did they cash in on a windfall as a result of the incidental inclusion of a trivial compression patent in the gif image standard (which was never challenged in court), but they moved the goalposts throughout the lifetime of their extortion even threatening webmasters who used gifs while trying to license their 'technology' beyond the period of their patent. They got so addicted to their easy and unearned cash that they just couldn't get their snout out of the trough in the end as they sought more and more ways to exploit gif useage sowing confusion & fear as the did so, and little guys everywhere suffered. We can't stop Unisys using GPL'd code, but really who the heck cares, ignore them and certainly don't work with these rats. We know how dangerous a morally bankrupt company can be and the damage they can wreak on a nacent industry. Unisys gave us themselves as that example. They can't comment on past activities, but we sure as heck can and should and we can remember. What other weapon do we have against miscreants who act as Unisys has acted? Where is the incentive to behave better is anyone treats Unisys with anything other than contempt?
Seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, but French socialists are the first to complain when the little guy actually gets a piece of the action from a company instead of the State.
The fact is that in Europe tech employees don't benefit as much from options etc whether at startups or larger corporations. The typical reaction however is not to expect better rewards or demand a piece of the pie (with the corporate tax incentives that are required to encourage it) but to tax the hide off profitable corporations and wealthy individuals a.k.a. "fat cats". There are no angel investors in Europe and almost no engineer level guys who made it rich in the rank & file who are then able to comfortably start their own business.
The typical small business starts out there with one or two guys, no cash (or a bank loan taken against your house) and maybe a grant from the EU or some development commission.
Well HDTV specifies the three colors and it is pretty much sRGB AFAIK, so it may be a while before this gets out there I think.
Should be a boon for photographers etc, now you'll be able to specify a wide gamut image and actually see it instead of it just making things look less vibrant due to cramming wide gamut on an sRGB display.
P.S. compare Quake 1 & 2 to Doom 3, I mean come on! The only diff is the name & technology, they could have called Doom3 a remake of Quake 1 not Doom and nobody would have spotted the difference, Doom3 is closer to Quake than it is to Doom, especially with monsters like Pinky thrown in there.
The amazing thing is they seem to think that Doom & Quake are somehow different games. Newsflash, they're the same game, (look at Quake 1), one franchise is a continuation of the other, they are the same in profound ways (except Q3 Arena which was entirely targeted at a multiplayer experience). Now they're saying that their strength is first person shooters & horror so they would stick to their strengths but do something different.
Translation, same old game with a different name.
Microsoft builds cheap cruise missile.
Or at least IBM should place some serious caveats on any promises. IBM could use it's patent portfolio to defend Linux against patent assault and we shouldn't want to lose that ability. Is someone starts asserting patent rights over Linux IBM's protfolio could be used defensively to to make counterclaims. This is Linux's biggest weakness, it holds no patents and therefore is vulnerable to claims although not being a single entity makes this impossible to enforce.
In doing this Munich have now invited litigation and possibly increased damages should they proceed with their Linux move.
Yes, but it is a new one for SCO. Because SCO had no copyright case they actually sued former customers on trumped up charges, and so far have lost. I mean it is one thing to sue a customer who screws you over, but SCO were suing customers who had done NOTHING wrong other than perhaps not do as much business with SCO as SCO would like. All this just to create the public impression that SCO was somehow valuable through the public pretence that the lawsuits were over SCO copyrights.
You'd have to be a raving lunatic to do any business with SCO or accept any EULA with them. Thay HAVE used this to sue customers frivilously IMHO. Daryl McBride as the architect of this strategy should be high on the list of assholes to avoid in the business world, wherever he may go in future, AVOID.
It is trivial to look at the SCO claims against IBM, Daimler and AutoZone and conclude that their claims are entirely based on pre existing contracts with those entities. In fact SCO hasn't brought a genuine copyright case against anyone in their long FUD campaign, their strategy is to sue their business partners over any baseless breach of contract claim they can dream up then vaguely assert copyright infringement in press releases. It really takes a spectacularly lazy and inept journalist to miss this. The article restating SCO's blatant lie that the law suit was brought to make Daimler respond to SCO's letter when the truth is that SCO was trounced in court on everything but the letter response time just illustrates how biased the journalist was and how dishonest Blake Stowell is.
No the government didn't abandon these. Infact the government is one of the few remaining purchasers of this type of hardware. It just so happens that a lot of problems including the governments are solved by clusters.
It could be argued that at least *some* of the ASCI (Advanced SuperComputing Initiative) computers had specialized architectures with loads of bandwidth & low latency interconnect (in their day).
It's a bit of a joke complaining about a lack of vector computing when every Intel and AMD CPU sold today has floating point vector instruction set extensions with very interesting operators.
I'd argue that if you take those lamented early 90s supercomputers there's not a problem they can solve faster that a relatively small contemporary cluster or even a single desktop system. A standard 4 CPU single PC desktop system with the right architecture could also spank those legacy systems in memory bandwidth, shocking but true. It just didn't keep pace with the scale and cost reduction of small systems & clusters.
The real problem here is *relative* performance of supercomputers and commodity components, but as it takes hundreds of millions if not billions to develop a new competitive CPU & architecture and manufacture it, scientists pockets aren't deep enough to pay for those costs (and thank goodness because it's our tax dollars). It is rather pathetic to lament that supercomputers have been outpaced by clusters. The economics make it impossible for supercomputers sold in low numbers to keep pace. Or more reasonably stated, the economics of consumer PC systems makes powerful computing ubiquitous and affordable to the point where it no longer makes economic sense to pursue specialized processors and architectures to try to outperform them.
If anything is to be done it would be to increase the bandwidth and reduce the latency of cluster interconnect, and guess what, that's EXACTLY what smart people are working on right now.
As for eating America's seed corn, it is Intel and AMD that sell most CPUs used in clusters today. It is that competition and the pressure of increased development costs that makes custom hardware untennable.
It is just false to imply that supercomputing technologies fed lower end development. It is a romantic vision of trickledown technology but it is not actually how technological development works. Look at computer graphics, since the commodity PC graphics cards beat big iron from SGI there has been more innovation and development in graphics hardware, not less. There is competition and a willingness to experiment with new features. The same is true with CPUs from Intel and AMD and the architectures and innovations in memory bandwidth they constantly drive forward.
How about a bit of ballance, remember that ICANN is *supposed* to police this stuff, and Verisign's actions were just unbelievably bad. Verisign are suing ICANN for finally doing its job, even if you don't like ICANN you can't support Verisign in this.
Everyone with an XBOX game already has an XBOX with 100% compatability. All this means is folks don't throw away their XBOX when they purchase an XBOX Next. That's probably not that huge a deal.
In other words, they're saying that in order to protect the US economy the Government needs to, pay excessively for the software it is using and tie the rest of industry to an ageing software development model and its Monopoly vendor to the detrement of competition.
Yup, that looks like a recipe for a healthy economy, if you live in Redmond. It would screw the rest of the country and damage our international competitiveness.
Look, the very fact that Microsoft is pitching this to the government means it cannot win on fair terms and it knows it. Surely is Microsoft believed it's own story on TCO lobbying government to eliminate the competition wouldn't be required.
They are blinded by ideology. They see Open Source as communist I'll bet. They are out to attack it for the greater good of capitalism, the damned fools. They claim Linus has shown open contempt for intellectual property, when all Linus wants is the freedom to use his own intellectual property and they're trying to steal that from him. It's just amazing how a warped ideology can take an idea and twist it out of shape.