good post risen, just started reading it and that looks like some excellent reading for me for tomorrow. i read several similar to it and had done most of my reading on kde.org; I dont think they broke my heart. I can understand it and disagree with it at the same time. I do disagree with their decision I'm glad you caught that much. They are the one calling them rationalizations or excuses what have you (and making them).
but it makes it a hard sell to people im trying to get into linux and kde.. "oh man i saw a new kde version in my update manager today and i installed it and it crapped out my system. what gives"
I know and understand what the point is, and I know where and TO read and understand it. But the problem is lots of people don't, won't and won't be bothered to do so.
i wont lose any sleep over it myself and im sure they will do fine regardless. I just think they could have done better; as equally sure as I am that whenever I release something there will be someone there to tell me what I could/should have done better/differently. Whether or not any dialogue about it will occur on slashdot is another story and probably unlikely:-)
Does it mean I'm going to stop using kde? heck no. it just means im concerned over who will.
Not at all; no where does anyhere talk about suing apple to force them to do anything. Don't you understand negative righs?
All this does is say that apple CANT TELL ME not to do what I will to run my copy of halo3 on my wii.
There is a significantly different point of view from a lawyers prospective.
One is about positive rights, one is about negative rights. No one is talking about suing apple. Only talk is apple not being able to win a suit against 'you'. (they are of course free to sue you because anyone can sue anyone for anything... winning and going to trial are a different story)
Grand parent is spot on. Nothing gives them the right to tell you what hardware you are required to run the software on; but nothing obligates them to provide a version or otherwise assist you in making a version that does so either. They don't have to support you in anyway they just can't take a legal action to prevent you from trying to do so personally.
The two things couldnt be more independent of one another. Classic example? RedHat and CentOS. Red Hat has to make source code available, but aren't under any obligation to compile it for you, give you makefiles, etc, provide modified versions for some arcane architecture that they dont support etc. What you do with the source is your business.
1. No he had it much closer than you did. Which is ironic because what you say demonstrates that you didn't even bother to read or understand that license. They sold you both a medium containing the Operating System and more importantly the right or license for to install and use a single instance (lets stick to COTS product for now) of their Operating System. And if you read the last line of ANY EULA ever they almost always say something to the effect of "these terms may be superceded by the laws of your state" or in this cae when they in item 'F' "except as... or by applicable law"
But more importantly since you don't like to read there is a fundamental difference.
A. Apple's stuff is something you PURCHASE to acquire. The BS invalid eula you are ignoring is a license pretaining to USAGE something they can't restrict.
B. Open source code by definition doesn't ever restrict you from the mere USAGE. It does however much like apple restrict how you distribute it and how you can possibly distribute something that contains it.
Notice how the parent isn't saying he's free to burn duplicates of OS X and give them away to others and sell them.
What's really sad is that the more you read the license the more they try to make it sound like they haven't sold or given you anything. They don't want to be responsible for anything other than collecting money and maintaining control of ho gets to use their crap. I would absolutely love to see some good EULA cases hit the supreme court to end the absurdity that is becoming the shrink wrap license for anything and everything you ever do.
Is that sorta like when ski resorts and amusement parks post signs saying that by entering you wave the right to sue them for injury... yet when you get injured because they were negligent you still have the right to sue them?
The problem with people like you is that you just believe whatever ANYONE tells you without questioning anything. And without any understanding at all of your rights.
The NFL airs a warning stating that any rebroadcast or usage of the game w/o their consent yada yada is prohibited. Do you honestly believe for one second that somehow they get to magically trump fair use? If so then I really hope that you've never discussed any game you've ever watched because according to them you just violated the terms of their license. Think I'm kidding? Even Microsoft agrees.. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/29/the-tech-industry-wants-you-to-support-the-fight-for-fair-use/
They can tell you how you can obtain it, and transfer it (in the sense that you don't get to duplicate it you have to 'cease any usage' if you wish to give it to someone else) but once its yours their really isn't anything they can do to stop you from loading on whatever hardware you might own, dissassmbing and reverse engineering for your own personal use. Not to say that you can go selling any information you may obtain from such a disassembly but they cant stop you from doing it.
Use your brain for a minute; if they could do something like that don't you think they'd do something really basic to prevent anyone working for a competitor from even using it? Much like when all the warez sites say that by entering you agree you are not a law enforcement officer.
If this were the case wouldn't Psystar or this new company just put up a usage agreement on their website that said warning redisplay of any material in a court of law, or on any computer owned by apple is prohibited?
oh right... yeah...
and I'm not even going to touch on the fact that a minor can't enter into a legally binding contract/agreement.
of course, IANAL, but I'm not a dumbass either.
so here's an idea, go over to wikipedia and read up on EULA's and fair use, and while you are at it check out a page on subject verb agreement since you can't seem to get that right either. Doesnt, were, gets, renders, etc.
you make a lot of good points but you show the same lack of intelligence that the devs displayed. It doesn't matter what your/their "rationale" or "explanation" is. Those are excuses. nothing more nothing less. I'm a huge kde fan dont get me wrong... but that's very amature and a good way to piss off your user base and new comers.
If its not a stable usable release which is a functional upgrade from your prior version then DONT put it in STABLE REPO's, dont release it out as a 'finished' product.
KDE is an open source project. Any sense of a timeline for a release is a purely abstract thing. The only 'project deadline' was self imposed. There are no money paying customers who are going to complain that your product is late.
Furthermore as ubuntu demonstrates time and time again the fact that something is a RC or alpha/beta doesnt mean people wont use it and submit patches; it means those who have NO ABILITY TO USE IT OR SUBMIT PATCHES won't use it.
It doesnt matter how much of a complete break on all levels it is, if anything thats just even more of a reason of how obvious it should be that you need to do more testing.
Do you think a consumer cares if version 2.x is written entirely different than 1.x; they dont care if its compiled in different languages, written backwards, upside down on typewriters by monkeys and midgets. They care about one thing only, that it works BETTER; and that if it is not complete and ready for stable use that it wont be presented in anyway to allow them to believe as such.
They take a lot of effort to say that "4.0" is not ready and not a full desktop and not for real use... then don't release it and allow it to run around as a real release.
A lot of people are starting to nail this, clearly a release of some sort was needed; but not as KDE . expecting your user to be "know" that.0 means crap is stupidity. It's also something that most companies are trying to get away from... because in the money world if every one DID listen to that no one would buy version.0 and you'd never make enough to money to produce whatever comes next or you'd screw up your reputation so bad no one would come back.
so what if vista was a failure in that same regard; don't you think that's at least a part of the reason of the surge in linux's popularity, or microsofts reputatation of that in general? maybe if more projects put a little bit more emphasis on QC before releasing as a stable it would go a long way towards converting the masses; oh well..
fair enough; but the question i was responding to was why not IE, not why firefox of the non-ie's.
The big reason far and away for most users is the extensions... which oddly is the same reason I forever loved WinAmp for music and despised anyone I knew who used windows media player (in pre-itunes, pre-drm time) it was crap.
but how many of those are really based on the same engine? isnt konqueror also based on gecko now? I'm honestly not sure, but vaguely remember reading something about that. and for the sake of areas where you actually would choose between them, galeon and konqueror are pretty linux specific although i am aware that you COULD run some of them on windows because of on going stuff with gtk/qt... i cant say i know anyone who does.
I'm on a mac now and I choose firefox over safari. why? because I like having the same browser and plugins on every machine i work on ever, linux/windows/mac. and the more i think about it the more i think safari is just apples slightly less blatant (and more accepting of being dumped) system wide integration of the internet browser like IE was.
When firefox was still firebird i was happily using myIE2 which although still sadly based on the ie engine did have tabs, extensions, themes, etc. and had quite an effective popup blocker. i was naive and youthful and thought i was esaping ie at the time... then i got to college and I learned better and switched to firefox...
whats really ironic and brings this back to a different thread (about outdated browsers) is that with both the release of firefox 2 and 3 I waited a significant portion of time after release to adopt for personal usage. The reason? broken plugins and themes that I really liked. I think the last of them just released w/ compatibility so I might finally switch my personal machine to Firefox3.
wow, way to not read half of what I wrote and just assume I'm a moron.....
The problem is sloppyness of the network admins or in this case a total lack of a network admin! there literally isn't one. the db is just a glorified spreadsheet that some of the developers including myself started putting together so WE could try to track the machines since no one else had made any such information accessible.
as for aliases, I do use them. A LOT.. but as I said the segment I'm discussing is machines for dev and test use, not file serving. The file servers and junk like that I would use their hostnames 9 times out of 10 except our dns has been flaky lately so I'm using IP right now; theres only 3 of them. if it gets changed I'll notice real fast. As for the real issue, the tests are programatic. The test configuration itself has to list IP address for sources and destinations, that's what the programs accept, dns names and aliases can't be used for that. I'm not trying to mount drives, none of this is about that, which you apparently missed earlier. I constantly have to know the ip of the machine that I am "on" or of the set of machines I am using to test out my code or a defect patch, or to assist a tester.
For consistency to ensure that the machine I am connecting to (via ssh) is also the same machine that I'm listing in the script/configfile and then sending packets to, its a lot easier to not use the hostname and only use the IP in my machine for the aliases and the few mappings because of a. lack of consistency in the naming scheme leading to typing the wrong IP in an xml file, and b. I'm constantly using different machines and as such check their IP's frequently just in the course of getting them setup and configured for the test or dev usage.
If I had a static group of machines always assigned to me, you are correct I would just alias them as needed and use their hostnames; but also not have to edit config files ever or regenerate them. But because of the nature of the work I'm constantly moving from one group of several machines to another and having machines "taken and given" to me. One week I'm fixing defects that are only occuring on solaris, the next problem might only be on win32.
Much to your chagrin I could give a damn if they did a network renumbering because I dont tend to work on more than 10 machines at a time, and dont tend to work on the same ten for more than a week. Again I'm a developer using the machines for dev purposes. I'm not an automated tester, I'm not managing automated tests; I'm not managing a build, I'm not in userland. I'm also not a network admin; I just recognize a broken network when I work on one.
I'm not concerned if two machines take the same IP; at least then it is highly probably that whatever machine I end up logged into when i "ssh a.b.c.d" is also the same machine that a udp packet sent to a.b.c.d is going to go to because the same router will direct the packets the same way in a given 10 minute period more often than not. If two things both resolve to the same dns name I don't know which one will get resolved to by ssh for "machineX" but I DO know that packets sent to a.b.c.d are going to a.b.c.d; i dont know if machineX resolves to a.b.c.d or not.
A hostname is only useful if it gives you some piece of information or provides you with something that the IP doesnt. Its a shortcut, an alias. And in an environment of static ip's, and when I have to enter the IP addresses into an XML file ANYWAYS, I have no reason to use the hostname. If th IP's change someone's going to tell me and the net result is that its no different then if someone said "your machines arent x,y,z anymore they are a,b and c". And if they do a renumbering they are going to likely rename as well; and even if they don't at least I'm not sending packets to a machine I'm not logged into wondering how come mine arent arriving.
And there's a reason you missed as to why I'm not a network admin: I have zero interest in being one. The fact that I'm add
my bad totally didnt realize person committing fraud wasnt a minor... thats really sad.. but most of what i said still applies. fucked up, yes. felony? possibly? but is said felony have anything to do with TOS? not unless she was leveraging said fake identity; and even then i doubt it. consequences are usually spelled out in tos as well; which in this case would be being banned. you dont meet TOS you dont get service.
what she did shuold be punishable but should have nothing to do with myspace / tos / fraud here.
it would be a-ok by the law concerning fraud and the internet... but as you said if she verbally abused the girl in person she is guilty of a different crime, assault, verbal abuse, etc. None of which have anything to do with myspace or the TOS. sounds like there is some confusion here. further more i dont know how many of those are felonies.
maybe the person being harassed should say something to someone before offing his/herself? i'd be willing to bet that something could be done between talking to parents,police,myspace admin.
plus if you are under 18 you can't enter a legal contract anyways, IANAL but I'm pretty sure this is what prevents minors from holding stock and numerous other things. if you can't enter a contract then you can't possibly have agreed to the terms of service; if you cant agree to them you cant be bound to them... so im sensing this will probably either fizzle out or new facts will come to light explaining the fraud.
especially while teens caught using fake id's arent being handed felonies (or anything usually other than loss of the fake id) this is absusrd. in those cases the fake id itself is the very fraud thats going on. In this case the only thing the "fraud" provides is anonymity.
waste of time. its myspace / facebook; block people you dont know who arent your friends, ban peopple who are bad, whatever.
I agree completely with that. I didnt mean to say suggest that this was a feature of linux; just that it wasn't a concrete given that you were stuck to one standard. I couldn't agree more that normilization is important. The thought that "that" didn't matter is what prompted much of my response to "interface doesn't matter".
My point was just to say that I suspect that the freedom to deviate is partially responsible for the less consistent gui design within linux desktop ui's.
only for network admins? Who are your "user's"?. I'm a developer, I'm a user and so are my peers. I have to ssh/vnc/remote desktop into multiple machines on a very frequent basis. A poor naming scheme makes my work annoyingly over complicated and forces me to frequently check a database telling me what the machines "are". why do i have to check?
we have a poor naming scheme where the name is a three letter internal designation for our product followed by the network bit. so if the machine's ip is XXX.XXX.XXX.123 its name is XYZ123; This is miserable because this encompasses windows2000,windowsXP, XP64, Vista32,Vista64; rhel3.5 32/64, rhel 4.4-4.6 32/64; rhel 5.1-5.2 32/64; solaris 10.5 (32 and 64) as well as solaris x86-64. Between vlans/virtual machines, multi nics (all have 2+, one for general use and point to point, the other dedicated for multicast..) we fill up several subnets. and with no guarentee that xyz100 is the same type of xyz101 its rather useless. Especially when I need to find a machine on the vlan of X of platform Y. It doesnt help that we only half use nfs and everyone logs in as root on all of these machines. even the windows ones have a user literally named 'root'.
In short: if you have developers names do matter. I'm not talking about naming your mail server or file server or dns server. I agree that no one gives a crap about them; we all are smart enough (or have people smart enough to automate for us the actions) to mount them (through whatever means provided by your workstation). Personally I mount most of those by IP because occasionally a name will go down or get stolen by a nitwit who doesnt realize its reserved. The caveat is also that those machines all have static IP's and the name scheme mentioned above. We recently had a problem where someone used a name already in use which lead to some real hilarity.
the only reason i raise this point is that some moron somewhere is going to (or read this and then going to) make the same profound statement without thinking about what the implications and context are. The result being that his developers suffer while he/she thinks they are "with it". That and lots of people throughout this whole tree of comments seem to be missing the distinction between the two. I wouldn't suggest giving cartoon names to file servers; give them names that are intelligent/useful or whatever.
save the fun and games names for the machines that are "virtually" yours; such that they have a meaningul name to the people who use them. Sorry but I shouldn't need to go to a database period. The machine's MOTD or a readme somewhere should be able to quickly give me whatever info I need that would be in the database that isn't somehow captured in the name.
whatever method you choose, there is one thing that should be universally agreeable: document the naming scheme somewhere accessible.
"If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing"
thats probably the most stupid phrase I have heard all year. A program is worth writing if it gets a job done that you have to do more than once; and whose total time of use and time saved is less than spent writing it. Just because an action might only take a minute doesn't mean I shouldn't have a program that could do it for me in an instant. Further; easy to write for who? the person writing the app or the person using the APP?
2. what the hell is a windows app? (as applied in your usage) I'd like to laugh at an example of a clone and work-alike. If you mention a file system explorer prepare to be slapped over the head.
Along with your whole crud on great developers make great developers. blah blah... have you heard of man pages? make? automake? tools that Visual Studio have been emulating for years; heck mac development relies on unix linux tools.. what compiler do they use? oh gcc right...
The reason windows is polished is because there is a SINGLE standard for the gui's they all have to be the same they all play with the same tool kit; same with mac. Linux gui apps often have to be written to be compatible with one of several.
Furthermore linux gui's can be user customized in a variety of ways which a BASIC user will never do on mac or windows. But more importantly windows and mac both spend a large amount of time and money (more so for mac) on their uniform gui design paradigms. They have a single ethos of how each app is expected to work; linux does not. You are free to do whatever you want. And frankly I think that on a gui side kde and gnome have been on par with linux for awhile; at least since 2005. I'm not going to get into kde4.1 because i havent used it or kde4.0; but as poorly as others have retorted you haven't expressed what about the gui was lacking. what is this mythical 'polish' you speak of?
its as vague as saying "it's not good"; well what is good?
Arrogance? ironically that describes everything that makes windows and osX themselves. there is only one real api set available, and in then end one way to do things. Arrogant people are present everywhere; the OS however is not Arrogant about it which is why you are free to choose whichever gui or lack of one that you want.
which only makes your esoterism line even more pathetic. "Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant." so basically lets throw out all knowledge and study of human computer interaction, human factors in design and principles of user interfaces.? You just made your whole post meaningless because it contradicts everything that you say.
Interface does matter. And if you don't think so and love command line so much, then uninstall X from your linux machine and go knock yourself out. Too bad you can't do that on a windows machine or a mac. Me I'm going to enjoy the combination of command line and GUI.
There are plenty of nonlinux heads who are arrogant too; lots of OS/2 nuts, windows junkies, etc floating around. They also exist in politics, you have conservatives, christian conservatives, etc. The one thing they tend to have in common is those people all seem to be members of the baby boomer generation.
that or just take a vote for your favorite distributed @home project. F&ck cool; you aren't CS nerds. I realize you are never going to turn down budget and say hey we dont need all of this crap; and you probably arent smart enough to save the money for some other occasion (then again the whole spend more to get more thing in academia hits too) but honestly this comes off as a "im a bragging fool with mad cool hardwarez man what should i do now"
if you a bunch of intelligent intellectuals can't come up with a good reason you should turn in your degrees.
then again high performance cluster running java almost made me lose my lunch already.
boot the thing up? so are saying you reboot the cluster or the whole thing is running as virtual machines so that you can waste even more performance?
or return some of your mad cool gear and save the money for when you need it
a. so install bit torrent not that hard. I didn't say ONLY do it via bit torrent; but you might as well supplement it with bit torrent doesn't really hurt you.
b. not at all; how is it multiple downloads installations and troubleshoots? If you want to use bit torrent go use it; if you don't want to, then don't. It's not something firefox has to deal with; in the same way that linux distro's arent worried about it.
that means that THEY aren't it means that joe user such as you and me created a torrent on that website I am talking about creating an OFFICIAL torrent
wouldn't firefox3 be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how effective a bittorrent can be for distributing files. seems like it woulda been a good "legal" demonstration to the non-linux types. yes just about every distro is distrubted through that means, and the same for most VMware appliances; but here's an example mom and pop could have enjoyed.
a. i think i replied to the wrong person to start with somewhat as I have problems with both your conclusion and grand parents.
b. don't put words in my mouth please i didn't even use the word good or phenomenally anywhere in my reply let alone together.
c. I think you latched onto the wrong emphasis of what I was saying; the singularity of me wasn't what mattered or the point. the point was the demonstration of control. Are you correct about the one person point? absolutely; it should have read "ask..." but my statement doesn't change. The results are just as meaningless. They don't imply anything.
as we've both said we agree that there is bias there; my sole point was that the inference made was incorrect and not a valid conclusion from the statistics. Without looking at a trial itself you can't determine partiality; even with 100% ruling one way it might be (and probably is) suggested, likely, and occuring. but the statistic alone can't tell you anything because you have to demonstrate that havent been in order to compare the cases in EDT to somewhere else.
i should have clarified that the only point i was disagreeing with of yours was your last statement "More importantly, what is the national average win rate for cases HEARD? That would indicate whether the court is impartial or not." I agreed with you on the rest.
I can only rate the judges by their rulings and actions; this is correct. However the actions of the legal teams involved play a DIRECT role on the judges rulings and actions because the Judge only rules on the things presented in the trial. Even if I am right and company Z is infringing on my product if I do shitty job in the courtroom and don't prove my case with any sufficient evidence the judge could be correct in handing the defense a victory; or the converse if company Z isn't infringing but doesn't adaquately prove so he could find them infringing when they aren't and this would be a correct finding.
here's a better analogy It's like trying to test or analyze a radar detector's accuracy by calculating what it gives as the average speed after you have a 1,000,000 different people throw baseballs past it and comparing this to the average you get from a different detectors who had different people throwing at them. You can't judge the radar detector's accuracy by comparing the results to results obtained by different radar guns for a different group of people (or even the same people on different throwing attempts) because the averages resulting are dependent upon the data itself.
You even concede my point but then state it would be "strong" indication of bias; which is contradictory to your own statements. Do you know what a strong indication is? this isn't even a weak one because there is no correlation between the cases heard and the judges hearing them; you have to independent variables and not one. you can validly conclude nothing; or validly conclude anything depedning on how you look at it..
there is no such thing as a serious statistic. It doesn't matter if 88% is a big number or a little number; what matter is its statistical significant and we have no reason to believe that its an accurate or valid representation of anything other than what the other courts get.
IANAS but "88% is such a large number" It doesn't matter if it was 1, 50 or 100% the number doesn't matter. It might indicate that a REAL examination might be needed but thats all.
I would agree with your reasoning about expectations for comparison IF and ONLY IF you or whoever can demonstrate a means by which you can correlate the results with one another.
Feel free to take a look at this which will explain the basics of statistical significance. Here's a link from wikipedia; although you could find this in any book on statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
Pay particular attention to the first lines of the page
not only that; but there is a guide to do this on IBM's website that doesn't require you to swap out the hard drive. Why you'd want to do it for any reason other than to develop on / for the platform / or to run something like mythTV is beyond me. the ps3 doesn't exactly pack in much ram for you and its not going to perform well for "desktop" applications because surprise surprise its not designed to.
IANAL but I am also not an idiot and I'm pretty sure they can't legally be prevent you from putting windows on it if you bought a copy of windows expressly for this purpose. I think you'd be prevented by a. it probably wouldnt work but then again i've never tried installing windows on power before... and b. not wanting to do so.
must be a really slow day for news; esp since slashdot publicized the publication of the sdk and challenge issued and the items some MIT students produced working on it a ways back.
did he really say "dad company"? I know what he meant, and I'm sure plenty of others did but the expression is "Parent Company" this has been the case long before the concept of gender neutral writing and PC-ness were as rampant as they are today.
and seeing as Ubuntu isn't a company this is only made more inaccurate. Taken straight from the horses mouth: About Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a community developed and supported project. Since its launch in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world.
Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem. About Canonical Ltd
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities.
Canonical staff and software have deep roots in the open source community and a proven track record of success in the commercial software industry. Team members include leaders from the Gnome, Linux, Debian and Bazaar open source projects, helping Canonical to stay at the forefront of the rapidly changing open source software world.
World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is delivered through the Canonical Global Support Team and its worldwide network of partners.
Canonical currently sponsors the development of a number of important technology products. See sponsored projects for further details.
no it wouldn't; you can't judge partiality based upon comparing the outcome of the cases to average rates elsewhere. well you can compare them; you just dont end up with anything meaningful about partiality.
It doesnt tell you whether or not the cases that won or lost should have won or lost, would have elsewhere, had merit, were tried improperly, etc.
Thats like showing me two products, asking me to choose one and then concluding that because I picked the first shown over the second more often that I was biased to pick the first one... how do you know the first one just wasnt better than the second? you don't, to get a significant statistic you would have to account for ordering and demonstrate control, and that the ordering alone (or in your case the venue ALONE) was what was causing the difference in outcomes.
Do i think based on the article that the area is impartial? yes. But your point can do nothing to either prove or disprove any (im)partiality at all.
a. smells like some nice pr spin from someone at mckool smith. way to not identify yourself.
b. your rational about why these cases "belong" in EDT is pure bs. IANAL, and IANA Law Student. But it seems to me that ANY judge who has the knowledge to be presiding over an IP case would have an entirely different background and knowledge then a judge presiding over a criminal case. What the heck do criminal cases have to do with anything? Sounds to me like a problem with the process to expediate things for the wealthy.
I can't begin to imagine that a judge who generally rules over cases of criminal nature like murder, misdemeanors, theft, etc etc could even begin to be expected to be remotely compentent in his understand of the kind of things being argued about.
It'd be like tossing an english major into the middle of a mathematical debate and asking him to ascertain whos right. He's going to pick whoever can suck up and dumb it down enough for him to comprehend some false paradigm from which he can judge. If you ask me thats the broken aspect of the court system that you get to cut in line and take cases to places that have no relevance to said case other than a record for being favorable to your side.
Brings to mind a case posted on slashdot earlier this year where a judge had the balls in court to ask "what's the internet" and he was sitting ona case where the internet was central to the whole IP debate. If you ask me thats whats broken, that judge who doesn't know crap about topics the patent is about is on said case and either side has no means by which to challenge his adaquecy to preside over the case based on such.
Not to say that he's an inadequate judge, or a bad person, or anything; just that he doesn't know anything about X and they should probably find a judge who DOES. granted this also means that lots of the "good ole boys" may find themselves useless without more continuing education but hey, frees up jobs for rising generation. I think and always will that the concept of tenure be it for teachers or judges or anywhere is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
good post risen, just started reading it and that looks like some excellent reading for me for tomorrow. i read several similar to it and had done most of my reading on kde.org; I dont think they broke my heart. I can understand it and disagree with it at the same time. I do disagree with their decision I'm glad you caught that much. They are the one calling them rationalizations or excuses what have you (and making them).
but it makes it a hard sell to people im trying to get into linux and kde.. "oh man i saw a new kde version in my update manager today and i installed it and it crapped out my system. what gives"
I know and understand what the point is, and I know where and TO read and understand it. But the problem is lots of people don't, won't and won't be bothered to do so.
i wont lose any sleep over it myself and im sure they will do fine regardless. I just think they could have done better; as equally sure as I am that whenever I release something there will be someone there to tell me what I could/should have done better/differently. Whether or not any dialogue about it will occur on slashdot is another story and probably unlikely :-)
Does it mean I'm going to stop using kde? heck no. it just means im concerned over who will.
Not at all; no where does anyhere talk about suing apple to force them to do anything. Don't you understand negative righs?
All this does is say that apple CANT TELL ME not to do what I will to run my copy of halo3 on my wii.
There is a significantly different point of view from a lawyers prospective.
One is about positive rights, one is about negative rights. No one is talking about suing apple. Only talk is apple not being able to win a suit against 'you'. (they are of course free to sue you because anyone can sue anyone for anything... winning and going to trial are a different story)
Grand parent is spot on. Nothing gives them the right to tell you what hardware you are required to run the software on; but nothing obligates them to provide a version or otherwise assist you in making a version that does so either. They don't have to support you in anyway they just can't take a legal action to prevent you from trying to do so personally.
The two things couldnt be more independent of one another. Classic example? RedHat and CentOS. Red Hat has to make source code available, but aren't under any obligation to compile it for you, give you makefiles, etc, provide modified versions for some arcane architecture that they dont support etc. What you do with the source is your business.
1. No he had it much closer than you did. Which is ironic because what you say demonstrates that you didn't even bother to read or understand that license. They sold you both a medium containing the Operating System and more importantly the right or license for to install and use a single instance (lets stick to COTS product for now) of their Operating System. And if you read the last line of ANY EULA ever they almost always say something to the effect of "these terms may be superceded by the laws of your state" or in this cae when they in item 'F' "except as... or by applicable law"
But more importantly since you don't like to read there is a fundamental difference.
A. Apple's stuff is something you PURCHASE to acquire. The BS invalid eula you are ignoring is a license pretaining to USAGE something they can't restrict.
B. Open source code by definition doesn't ever restrict you from the mere USAGE. It does however much like apple restrict how you distribute it and how you can possibly distribute something that contains it.
Notice how the parent isn't saying he's free to burn duplicates of OS X and give them away to others and sell them.
What's really sad is that the more you read the license the more they try to make it sound like they haven't sold or given you anything. They don't want to be responsible for anything other than collecting money and maintaining control of ho gets to use their crap. I would absolutely love to see some good EULA cases hit the supreme court to end the absurdity that is becoming the shrink wrap license for anything and everything you ever do.
amen
Is that sorta like when ski resorts and amusement parks post signs saying that by entering you wave the right to sue them for injury... yet when you get injured because they were negligent you still have the right to sue them?
The problem with people like you is that you just believe whatever ANYONE tells you without questioning anything. And without any understanding at all of your rights.
The NFL airs a warning stating that any rebroadcast or usage of the game w/o their consent yada yada is prohibited.
Do you honestly believe for one second that somehow they get to magically trump fair use? If so then I really hope that you've never discussed any game you've ever watched because according to them you just violated the terms of their license.
Think I'm kidding? Even Microsoft agrees.. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/29/the-tech-industry-wants-you-to-support-the-fight-for-fair-use/
They can tell you how you can obtain it, and transfer it (in the sense that you don't get to duplicate it you have to 'cease any usage' if you wish to give it to someone else) but once its yours their really isn't anything they can do to stop you from loading on whatever hardware you might own, dissassmbing and reverse engineering for your own personal use. Not to say that you can go selling any information you may obtain from such a disassembly but they cant stop you from doing it.
Use your brain for a minute; if they could do something like that don't you think they'd do something really basic to prevent anyone working for a competitor from even using it? Much like when all the warez sites say that by entering you agree you are not a law enforcement officer.
If this were the case wouldn't Psystar or this new company just put up a usage agreement on their website that said warning redisplay of any material in a court of law, or on any computer owned by apple is prohibited?
oh right... yeah...
and I'm not even going to touch on the fact that a minor can't enter into a legally binding contract/agreement.
of course, IANAL, but I'm not a dumbass either.
so here's an idea, go over to wikipedia and read up on EULA's and fair use, and while you are at it check out a page on subject verb agreement since you can't seem to get that right either. Doesnt, were, gets, renders, etc.
you make a lot of good points but you show the same lack of intelligence that the devs displayed. It doesn't matter what your/their "rationale" or "explanation" is. Those are excuses. nothing more nothing less. I'm a huge kde fan dont get me wrong... but that's very amature and a good way to piss off your user base and new comers.
If its not a stable usable release which is a functional upgrade from your prior version then DONT put it in STABLE REPO's, dont release it out as a 'finished' product.
KDE is an open source project. Any sense of a timeline for a release is a purely abstract thing. The only 'project deadline' was self imposed. There are no money paying customers who are going to complain that your product is late.
Furthermore as ubuntu demonstrates time and time again the fact that something is a RC or alpha/beta doesnt mean people wont use it and submit patches; it means those who have NO ABILITY TO USE IT OR SUBMIT PATCHES won't use it.
It doesnt matter how much of a complete break on all levels it is, if anything thats just even more of a reason of how obvious it should be that you need to do more testing.
Do you think a consumer cares if version 2.x is written entirely different than 1.x; they dont care if its compiled in different languages, written backwards, upside down on typewriters by monkeys and midgets. They care about one thing only, that it works BETTER; and that if it is not complete and ready for stable use that it wont be presented in anyway to allow them to believe as such.
They take a lot of effort to say that "4.0" is not ready and not a full desktop and not for real use... then don't release it and allow it to run around as a real release.
A lot of people are starting to nail this, clearly a release of some sort was needed; but not as KDE . expecting your user to be "know" that .0 means crap is stupidity. It's also something that most companies are trying to get away from... because in the money world if every one DID listen to that no one would buy version .0 and you'd never make enough to money to produce whatever comes next or you'd screw up your reputation so bad no one would come back.
so what if vista was a failure in that same regard; don't you think that's at least a part of the reason of the surge in linux's popularity, or microsofts reputatation of that in general? maybe if more projects put a little bit more emphasis on QC before releasing as a stable it would go a long way towards converting the masses; oh well..
fair enough; but the question i was responding to was why not IE, not why firefox of the non-ie's.
The big reason far and away for most users is the extensions... which oddly is the same reason I forever loved WinAmp for music and despised anyone I knew who used windows media player (in pre-itunes, pre-drm time) it was crap.
but how many of those are really based on the same engine? isnt konqueror also based on gecko now? I'm honestly not sure, but vaguely remember reading something about that. and for the sake of areas where you actually would choose between them, galeon and konqueror are pretty linux specific although i am aware that you COULD run some of them on windows because of on going stuff with gtk/qt... i cant say i know anyone who does.
I'm on a mac now and I choose firefox over safari. why? because I like having the same browser and plugins on every machine i work on ever, linux/windows/mac. and the more i think about it the more i think safari is just apples slightly less blatant (and more accepting of being dumped) system wide integration of the internet browser like IE was.
When firefox was still firebird i was happily using myIE2 which although still sadly based on the ie engine did have tabs, extensions, themes, etc. and had quite an effective popup blocker. i was naive and youthful and thought i was esaping ie at the time... then i got to college and I learned better and switched to firefox...
whats really ironic and brings this back to a different thread (about outdated browsers) is that with both the release of firefox 2 and 3 I waited a significant portion of time after release to adopt for personal usage. The reason? broken plugins and themes that I really liked. I think the last of them just released w/ compatibility so I might finally switch my personal machine to Firefox3.
probably because A> IE is a gaping security hole. B> it still sucks and has minimal useful plugins. C> you might be using linux D> choice
tabs were not the main feature; the main feature was the security, lack of popups, lack of exploits and etc.
wow, way to not read half of what I wrote and just assume I'm a moron.....
The problem is sloppyness of the network admins or in this case a total lack of a network admin! there literally isn't one. the db is just a glorified spreadsheet that some of the developers including myself started putting together so WE could try to track the machines since no one else had made any such information accessible.
as for aliases, I do use them. A LOT.. but as I said the segment I'm discussing is machines for dev and test use, not file serving. The file servers and junk like that I would use their hostnames 9 times out of 10 except our dns has been flaky lately so I'm using IP right now; theres only 3 of them. if it gets changed I'll notice real fast.
As for the real issue, the tests are programatic. The test configuration itself has to list IP address for sources and destinations, that's what the programs accept, dns names and aliases can't be used for that. I'm not trying to mount drives, none of this is about that, which you apparently missed earlier. I constantly have to know the ip of the machine that I am "on" or of the set of machines I am using to test out my code or a defect patch, or to assist a tester.
For consistency to ensure that the machine I am connecting to (via ssh) is also the same machine that I'm listing in the script/configfile and then sending packets to, its a lot easier to not use the hostname and only use the IP in my machine for the aliases and the few mappings because of a. lack of consistency in the naming scheme leading to typing the wrong IP in an xml file, and b. I'm constantly using different machines and as such check their IP's frequently just in the course of getting them setup and configured for the test or dev usage.
If I had a static group of machines always assigned to me, you are correct I would just alias them as needed and use their hostnames; but also not have to edit config files ever or regenerate them. But because of the nature of the work I'm constantly moving from one group of several machines to another and having machines "taken and given" to me. One week I'm fixing defects that are only occuring on solaris, the next problem might only be on win32.
Much to your chagrin I could give a damn if they did a network renumbering because I dont tend to work on more than 10 machines at a time, and dont tend to work on the same ten for more than a week. Again I'm a developer using the machines for dev purposes. I'm not an automated tester, I'm not managing automated tests; I'm not managing a build, I'm not in userland. I'm also not a network admin; I just recognize a broken network when I work on one.
I'm not concerned if two machines take the same IP; at least then it is highly probably that whatever machine I end up logged into when i "ssh a.b.c.d" is also the same machine that a udp packet sent to a.b.c.d is going to go to because the same router will direct the packets the same way in a given 10 minute period more often than not.
If two things both resolve to the same dns name I don't know which one will get resolved to by ssh for "machineX" but I DO know that packets sent to a.b.c.d are going to a.b.c.d; i dont know if machineX resolves to a.b.c.d or not.
A hostname is only useful if it gives you some piece of information or provides you with something that the IP doesnt. Its a shortcut, an alias. And in an environment of static ip's, and when I have to enter the IP addresses into an XML file ANYWAYS, I have no reason to use the hostname. If th IP's change someone's going to tell me and the net result is that its no different then if someone said "your machines arent x,y,z anymore they are a,b and c". And if they do a renumbering they are going to likely rename as well; and even if they don't at least I'm not sending packets to a machine I'm not logged into wondering how come mine arent arriving.
And there's a reason you missed as to why I'm not a network admin: I have zero interest in being one. The fact that I'm add
my bad totally didnt realize person committing fraud wasnt a minor... thats really sad.. but most of what i said still applies. fucked up, yes. felony? possibly? but is said felony have anything to do with TOS? not unless she was leveraging said fake identity; and even then i doubt it. consequences are usually spelled out in tos as well; which in this case would be being banned. you dont meet TOS you dont get service.
what she did shuold be punishable but should have nothing to do with myspace / tos / fraud here.
it would be a-ok by the law concerning fraud and the internet... but as you said if she verbally abused the girl in person she is guilty of a different crime, assault, verbal abuse, etc. None of which have anything to do with myspace or the TOS. sounds like there is some confusion here. further more i dont know how many of those are felonies.
maybe the person being harassed should say something to someone before offing his/herself? i'd be willing to bet that something could be done between talking to parents,police,myspace admin.
plus if you are under 18 you can't enter a legal contract anyways, IANAL but I'm pretty sure this is what prevents minors from holding stock and numerous other things. if you can't enter a contract then you can't possibly have agreed to the terms of service; if you cant agree to them you cant be bound to them... so im sensing this will probably either fizzle out or new facts will come to light explaining the fraud.especially while teens caught using fake id's arent being handed felonies (or anything usually other than loss of the fake id) this is absusrd. in those cases the fake id itself is the very fraud thats going on. In this case the only thing the "fraud" provides is anonymity.
waste of time. its myspace / facebook; block people you dont know who arent your friends, ban peopple who are bad, whatever.
I agree completely with that. I didnt mean to say suggest that this was a feature of linux; just that it wasn't a concrete given that you were stuck to one standard. I couldn't agree more that normilization is important. The thought that "that" didn't matter is what prompted much of my response to "interface doesn't matter".
My point was just to say that I suspect that the freedom to deviate is partially responsible for the less consistent gui design within linux desktop ui's.
"Users don't really need hostnames"
only for network admins? Who are your "user's"?. I'm a developer, I'm a user and so are my peers. I have to ssh/vnc/remote desktop into multiple machines on a very frequent basis. A poor naming scheme makes my work annoyingly over complicated and forces me to frequently check a database telling me what the machines "are". why do i have to check?
we have a poor naming scheme where the name is a three letter internal designation for our product followed by the network bit. so if the machine's ip is XXX.XXX.XXX.123 its name is XYZ123; This is miserable because this encompasses windows2000,windowsXP, XP64, Vista32,Vista64; rhel3.5 32/64, rhel 4.4-4.6 32/64; rhel 5.1-5.2 32/64; solaris 10.5 (32 and 64) as well as solaris x86-64. Between vlans/virtual machines, multi nics (all have 2+, one for general use and point to point, the other dedicated for multicast..) we fill up several subnets. and with no guarentee that xyz100 is the same type of xyz101 its rather useless. Especially when I need to find a machine on the vlan of X of platform Y. It doesnt help that we only half use nfs and everyone logs in as root on all of these machines. even the windows ones have a user literally named 'root'.
In short: if you have developers names do matter. I'm not talking about naming your mail server or file server or dns server. I agree that no one gives a crap about them; we all are smart enough (or have people smart enough to automate for us the actions) to mount them (through whatever means provided by your workstation). Personally I mount most of those by IP because occasionally a name will go down or get stolen by a nitwit who doesnt realize its reserved. The caveat is also that those machines all have static IP's and the name scheme mentioned above. We recently had a problem where someone used a name already in use which lead to some real hilarity.
the only reason i raise this point is that some moron somewhere is going to (or read this and then going to) make the same profound statement without thinking about what the implications and context are. The result being that his developers suffer while he/she thinks they are "with it". That and lots of people throughout this whole tree of comments seem to be missing the distinction between the two. I wouldn't suggest giving cartoon names to file servers; give them names that are intelligent/useful or whatever.
save the fun and games names for the machines that are "virtually" yours; such that they have a meaningul name to the people who use them. Sorry but I shouldn't need to go to a database period. The machine's MOTD or a readme somewhere should be able to quickly give me whatever info I need that would be in the database that isn't somehow captured in the name.
whatever method you choose, there is one thing that should be universally agreeable: document the naming scheme somewhere accessible.
"If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing"
thats probably the most stupid phrase I have heard all year. A program is worth writing if it gets a job done that you have to do more than once; and whose total time of use and time saved is less than spent writing it. Just because an action might only take a minute doesn't mean I shouldn't have a program that could do it for me in an instant. Further; easy to write for who? the person writing the app or the person using the APP?
2. what the hell is a windows app? (as applied in your usage) I'd like to laugh at an example of a clone and work-alike. If you mention a file system explorer prepare to be slapped over the head.
Along with your whole crud on great developers make great developers. blah blah... have you heard of man pages? make? automake? tools that Visual Studio have been emulating for years; heck mac development relies on unix linux tools.. what compiler do they use? oh gcc right...
The reason windows is polished is because there is a SINGLE standard for the gui's they all have to be the same they all play with the same tool kit; same with mac. Linux gui apps often have to be written to be compatible with one of several.
Furthermore linux gui's can be user customized in a variety of ways which a BASIC user will never do on mac or windows. But more importantly windows and mac both spend a large amount of time and money (more so for mac) on their uniform gui design paradigms. They have a single ethos of how each app is expected to work; linux does not. You are free to do whatever you want. And frankly I think that on a gui side kde and gnome have been on par with linux for awhile; at least since 2005. I'm not going to get into kde4.1 because i havent used it or kde4.0; but as poorly as others have retorted you haven't expressed what about the gui was lacking. what is this mythical 'polish' you speak of?
its as vague as saying "it's not good"; well what is good?
Arrogance? ironically that describes everything that makes windows and osX themselves. there is only one real api set available, and in then end one way to do things. Arrogant people are present everywhere; the OS however is not Arrogant about it which is why you are free to choose whichever gui or lack of one that you want.
which only makes your esoterism line even more pathetic.
"Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant." so basically lets throw out all knowledge and study of human computer interaction, human factors in design and principles of user interfaces.? You just made your whole post meaningless because it contradicts everything that you say.
Interface does matter. And if you don't think so and love command line so much, then uninstall X from your linux machine and go knock yourself out. Too bad you can't do that on a windows machine or a mac. Me I'm going to enjoy the combination of command line and GUI.
There are plenty of nonlinux heads who are arrogant too; lots of OS/2 nuts, windows junkies, etc floating around. They also exist in politics, you have conservatives, christian conservatives, etc. The one thing they tend to have in common is those people all seem to be members of the baby boomer generation.
it would have nothing to do with gasoline since gasoline doesnt power your house. it would save POWER however it is created.
that or just take a vote for your favorite distributed @home project. F&ck cool; you aren't CS nerds. I realize you are never going to turn down budget and say hey we dont need all of this crap; and you probably arent smart enough to save the money for some other occasion (then again the whole spend more to get more thing in academia hits too) but honestly this comes off as a "im a bragging fool with mad cool hardwarez man what should i do now"
if you a bunch of intelligent intellectuals can't come up with a good reason you should turn in your degrees.
then again high performance cluster running java almost made me lose my lunch already.
boot the thing up? so are saying you reboot the cluster or the whole thing is running as virtual machines so that you can waste even more performance?
or return some of your mad cool gear and save the money for when you need it
a. so install bit torrent not that hard. I didn't say ONLY do it via bit torrent; but you might as well supplement it with bit torrent doesn't really hurt you.
b. not at all; how is it multiple downloads installations and troubleshoots? If you want to use bit torrent go use it; if you don't want to, then don't. It's not something firefox has to deal with; in the same way that linux distro's arent worried about it.
that means that THEY aren't it means that joe user such as you and me created a torrent on that website I am talking about creating an OFFICIAL torrent
wouldn't firefox3 be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how effective a bittorrent can be for distributing files. seems like it woulda been a good "legal" demonstration to the non-linux types. yes just about every distro is distrubted through that means, and the same for most VMware appliances; but here's an example mom and pop could have enjoyed.
anyhow..
and the DVD has been defiling its bloody corpse for nearly a decade now...
why bother putting thought and work into actual gameplay and mechanics when we can just make the game prettier?
sadly all too many gamers are locked into the "better graphics = better game" thinking as well which doesn't help the problem.
a. i think i replied to the wrong person to start with somewhat as I have problems with both your conclusion and grand parents.
..."
b. don't put words in my mouth please i didn't even use the word good or phenomenally anywhere in my reply let alone together.
c. I think you latched onto the wrong emphasis of what I was saying; the singularity of me wasn't what mattered or the point. the point was the demonstration of control. Are you correct about the one person point? absolutely; it should have read "ask
but my statement doesn't change. The results are just as meaningless. They don't imply anything.
as we've both said we agree that there is bias there; my sole point was that the inference made was incorrect and not a valid conclusion from the statistics. Without looking at a trial itself you can't determine partiality; even with 100% ruling one way it might be (and probably is) suggested, likely, and occuring. but the statistic alone can't tell you anything because you have to demonstrate that havent been in order to compare the cases in EDT to somewhere else.
i should have clarified that the only point i was disagreeing with of yours was your last statement "More importantly, what is the national average win rate for cases HEARD? That would indicate whether the court is impartial or not." I agreed with you on the rest.
I can only rate the judges by their rulings and actions; this is correct. However the actions of the legal teams involved play a DIRECT role on the judges rulings and actions because the Judge only rules on the things presented in the trial. Even if I am right and company Z is infringing on my product if I do shitty job in the courtroom and don't prove my case with any sufficient evidence the judge could be correct in handing the defense a victory; or the converse if company Z isn't infringing but doesn't adaquately prove so he could find them infringing when they aren't and this would be a correct finding.
here's a better analogy
It's like trying to test or analyze a radar detector's accuracy by calculating what it gives as the average speed after you have a 1,000,000 different people throw baseballs past it and comparing this to the average you get from a different detectors who had different people throwing at them. You can't judge the radar detector's accuracy by comparing the results to results obtained by different radar guns for a different group of people (or even the same people on different throwing attempts) because the averages resulting are dependent upon the data itself.
You even concede my point but then state it would be "strong" indication of bias; which is contradictory to your own statements. Do you know what a strong indication is? this isn't even a weak one because there is no correlation between the cases heard and the judges hearing them; you have to independent variables and not one. you can validly conclude nothing; or validly conclude anything depedning on how you look at it..
there is no such thing as a serious statistic. It doesn't matter if 88% is a big number or a little number; what matter is its statistical significant and we have no reason to believe that its an accurate or valid representation of anything other than what the other courts get.
IANAS but
"88% is such a large number"
It doesn't matter if it was 1, 50 or 100% the number doesn't matter. It might indicate that a REAL examination might be needed but thats all.
I would agree with your reasoning about expectations for comparison IF and ONLY IF you or whoever can demonstrate a means by which you can correlate the results with one another.
Feel free to take a look at this which will explain the basics of statistical significance. Here's a link from wikipedia; although you could find this in any book on statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
Pay particular attention to the first lines of the page
not only that; but there is a guide to do this on IBM's website that doesn't require you to swap out the hard drive. Why you'd want to do it for any reason other than to develop on / for the platform / or to run something like mythTV is beyond me. the ps3 doesn't exactly pack in much ram for you and its not going to perform well for "desktop" applications because surprise surprise its not designed to.
IANAL but I am also not an idiot and I'm pretty sure they can't legally be prevent you from putting windows on it if you bought a copy of windows expressly for this purpose. I think you'd be prevented by a. it probably wouldnt work but then again i've never tried installing windows on power before... and b. not wanting to do so.
must be a really slow day for news; esp since slashdot publicized the publication of the sdk and challenge issued and the items some MIT students produced working on it a ways back.
did he really say "dad company"? I know what he meant, and I'm sure plenty of others did but the expression is "Parent Company" this has been the case long before the concept of gender neutral writing and PC-ness were as rampant as they are today.
and seeing as Ubuntu isn't a company this is only made more inaccurate. Taken straight from the horses mouth: About Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a community developed and supported project. Since its launch in October 2004, Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world.
Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.
About Canonical Ltd
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities.
Canonical staff and software have deep roots in the open source community and a proven track record of success in the commercial software industry. Team members include leaders from the Gnome, Linux, Debian and Bazaar open source projects, helping Canonical to stay at the forefront of the rapidly changing open source software world.
World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is delivered through the Canonical Global Support Team and its worldwide network of partners.
Canonical currently sponsors the development of a number of important technology products. See sponsored projects for further details.
no it wouldn't; you can't judge partiality based upon comparing the outcome of the cases to average rates elsewhere. well you can compare them; you just dont end up with anything meaningful about partiality.
It doesnt tell you whether or not the cases that won or lost should have won or lost, would have elsewhere, had merit, were tried improperly, etc.
Thats like showing me two products, asking me to choose one and then concluding that because I picked the first shown over the second more often that I was biased to pick the first one... how do you know the first one just wasnt better than the second? you don't, to get a significant statistic you would have to account for ordering and demonstrate control, and that the ordering alone (or in your case the venue ALONE) was what was causing the difference in outcomes.
Do i think based on the article that the area is impartial? yes. But your point can do nothing to either prove or disprove any (im)partiality at all.
a. smells like some nice pr spin from someone at mckool smith. way to not identify yourself.
b. your rational about why these cases "belong" in EDT is pure bs. IANAL, and IANA Law Student. But it seems to me that ANY judge who has the knowledge to be presiding over an IP case would have an entirely different background and knowledge then a judge presiding over a criminal case. What the heck do criminal cases have to do with anything? Sounds to me like a problem with the process to expediate things for the wealthy.
I can't begin to imagine that a judge who generally rules over cases of criminal nature like murder, misdemeanors, theft, etc etc could even begin to be expected to be remotely compentent in his understand of the kind of things being argued about.
It'd be like tossing an english major into the middle of a mathematical debate and asking him to ascertain whos right. He's going to pick whoever can suck up and dumb it down enough for him to comprehend some false paradigm from which he can judge. If you ask me thats the broken aspect of the court system that you get to cut in line and take cases to places that have no relevance to said case other than a record for being favorable to your side.
Brings to mind a case posted on slashdot earlier this year where a judge had the balls in court to ask "what's the internet" and he was sitting ona case where the internet was central to the whole IP debate. If you ask me thats whats broken, that judge who doesn't know crap about topics the patent is about is on said case and either side has no means by which to challenge his adaquecy to preside over the case based on such.
Not to say that he's an inadequate judge, or a bad person, or anything; just that he doesn't know anything about X and they should probably find a judge who DOES. granted this also means that lots of the "good ole boys" may find themselves useless without more continuing education but hey, frees up jobs for rising generation. I think and always will that the concept of tenure be it for teachers or judges or anywhere is absurd.