If we have as many systems as I think we're going to have in 20 years, and one person can still only effectively manage the same number of systems as they can now, we're going to have big problems.
Really, even if they are 100% right, this is not a bad thing. The less-capable half of sysadmins will have to find something more useful to do. I say "more useful" because, from the larger view, the view of the economy as a whole, IT people are mostly wasted. They don't produce anything (well, they do design and roll out networks, but most of their work is to keep our incredibly brittle systems from falling apart. It would be less wasteful to make less brittle systems.)
Re:There's a preventive vaccine already
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
"Don't be African"? Um, how exactly do you think most Africans get AIDS? They get it primarily from having sex with random people...
(Now, of course there are a number that get it from having their mothers have it. Obviously, my statement does not apply to them.)
Yes, I found her. She's under 40, cooks, and pays the bills. She cleaned until a couple years ago, when as a birthday present I got her someone to come in and clean every other week.
"If she still does this in 5 years"? Try 14. Yes, she still does. And no, she's not a psycho.
Where did I find such a gem? In church. (What, you thought I found someone like that in a bar?)
Note also that (in the grandparent to this) I did not say that Groklaw accused O'Gara of lying; I merely quoted the parent to that (great-grandparent to this).
Well, no, the case is really about trade secrets... no, it's about copyrights... no, it's really about SCO's contract with IBM...
This case doesn't seem to actually be about anything. The current incarnation is mostly about a contract between AT&T/Novell and IBM, which SCO may (or may not) have inherited. But SCO's public statements have been that "it's about Linux!" Court filings do not back that up.
So you want the court to make everything public because the public statements of one party mention something in which you have an interest, but which is irrelevant to the actual case before the court? Forget it. The court doesn't care - and rightly so.
First: Groklaw accused Maureen O'Gara of lying based on eyewitness accounts (note the plural) of a particular hearing in the SCO case. O'Gara claimed that something was said at the hearing that none of the eyewitnesses heard, and O'Gara was not an eyewitness. So, given that, who do you believe?
Second: PJ states that she is torn on this current issue. She would love to be able to read all the documents (including the ~35 that are sealed out of 2-300 that have been filed), but she also sees that merely having someone file a malicious court case shouldn't automatically remove all your right to privacy.
Third: Groklaw isn't just about the facts, and nothing but the facts; it's also about analysis of the facts. But the cool thing about Groklaw is that the facts are there to support the analysis, and if you can make a case that the same facts support a different interpretation, they will listen. They may not agree, but they will listen.
Fourth: Your particular quote has a context, which you didn't provide. The context is that O'Gara stated, "SCO's suit claims IBM improperly incorporated aspects of SCO's Unix operating system in Linux. If proved, it could derail the Linux market and take the open source movement down with it." Well, that statement is in a PR release about filing a motion, not in the motion itself. It also has the problem of not stating how, exactly, even if the Linux kernel goes down in the SCO lawsuits, it will take the whole open source movement with it. OS is much more than the Linux kernel; it's also Apache and gcc and BSD and...
But the point of PJ's comment is that the SCO lawsuits seem almost designed to damage the open source movement, by spreading as much FUD as possible for as long as possible. Note the absense of any concrete claims that can be verified, the presense of lots of widely publicised vague claims that can't really be nailed down, and the constant manipulation of the courts to prevent any concrete judgments from being handed down.
PJ's point, then, is that O'Gara's comment shows what the real game is. (Given her other comments, I don't think PJ is very worried about the judge not getting it, however.)
Not to be a jerk either... but the reason we still know nothing about what SCO alleges was stolen is not because a few court documents are sealed. We still don't know because SCO still hasn't said, sealed or otherwise.
As others have said, there is some need for privacy here. IBM's AIX source code should not be published to the world just because some idiots file a court case and some third-party observer sees it as a chance to get nosy.
You may be able to transfer to a big-name school - but can you get into their CS program?
I attended (1980-1984) a respectable, but not top-of-the-line, school. At that time, for a 20,000+ person university, the CS program size was 30 people per year. You had to have flawless grades to get into it. I would expect that things aren't that bad any more; universities have realized that they need to have bigger CS programs. Nevertheless, the bigger-name the CS program, the harder it is going to be to get accepted as a CS major.
And you may find that, in a battle for admission into the program, your transfered grades don't count as much as the same grades for someone who took all their classes at the big-name school.
Bottom line: Unless you are absolutely guaranteed admission into the CS program, don't transfer!
No Child Left Behind is not useless; it is worse than that. Paying for all these programs winds up sucking the funding out of accelerated/gifted programs. No Child Left Behind becomes No Child Gets Ahead - and the brightest kids mentally drop out of school because it's nothing but boring.
Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"?
Cars. Getting a driver's license requires months of education, plus passing two tests (one written, one actually driving). This doesn't teach you how to build or maintain a car, just how to drive it safely.
Guns. In at least some states, you have to take safety classes to teach you how to use (and store!) a gun safely and responsibly.
There may be others, but those are the two that came to mind immediately...
Well, that's kind of irrelevant, because you don't see very many machines with those OSes getting newly connected to the Internet any more. Some, but not many...
Or maybe, at a minimum, something like, "Fine, if you will roll out broadband into that area within one year of when we propose our wireless network, then we won't do the wireless. Otherwise, we're not in competition with you anyway, so get lost."
Some cold-temperature researchers used a reverse Sterling engine to cool helium (or hydrogen? I think it was helium) to the point of liquefaction. Even better, they used the liquid helium to lubricate the Sterling engine!
I read about this in a thermodynamics text in college physics about 21-22 years ago...
Well, the obvious answer is that the effect is to cool down 6 million acres. If those acres are in central Arizona or inland southern California, this might be considered a good thing.
Seriously, imagine buying up a chunk of the Mojave desert. It won't be expensive (except that the government owns it all, but that's another issue). Then you use this to cool it by 20-30 degrees. Now you can live there without running the air conditioning 24/7/365, you have all the energy you need, and you sell off the rest. Now all you need is a water supply and a job...
If the video has a session on "here's what 'put the CD in the drive' looks like", then that's aimed below the Windows-knowing to the totally-computer-ignorant. If you already know Windows well enough to know how to put a CD in and click the mouse on stuff, you don't need the video. And if you don't know how to put a CD in, no OS in the world can help you with that step...
"Linux is already ahead of Solaris on Intel hardware..."
Depends on what you mean. Others have already commented on hardware support, so I'll talk about speed. While developing Solaris 10, Sun's standard was, "If it's faster on Linux, it's a bug." They explicitly set themselves the goal of beating Linux in terms of performance.
Now, I haven't seen a head-to-head performance shootout on identical hardware, but I wouldn't automatically assume that Linux is ahead...
This, to me, is a big deal. The "any later version" is a blank check where RMS can change your licensing terms under you. However...
I don't always agree with RMS, but here is one place I do trust him. He showed a lot of foresight in the terms he put in the GPL. Also, unless I have totally misjudged him, he would literally kill himself before he would do something that betrays people's freedom.
It might be possible to get the perpetrator's fingerprints off of the papers (if the Good Guys(tm) were careful in how they handled the papers once they found them in the trash).
Um, why exactly is this moderated "troll"? I'd call it "insiteful", myself, but I've burned all my moderation points for the day...
The point is that this is a perfect illustration of why the current copyright length is insane. It's something you can use to explain it to your neighbors, and they might get it. It's even something you might be able to use to explain to your legislator in terms they can understand ("hey, look, long copyrights even get in the way of this perfectly reasonable government project!")
Groklaw's doing it. Groklaw does careful, thorough, detailed work. Slashdot doesn't do the kind of in-depth research. (Semi-obsessively reading both sites, I think that I can objectively say that.)
If you feel strongly that this needs to be done, go over to Groklaw and help.
You have a good point - in general. But applied to Microsoft, you've got to be kidding. I do not want to "reason with" Microsoft. Even more, I do not want to make Microsoft my friend. I've seen what they do to their friends, historically, and it resembles what a female black widow spider does to the male.
See, Microsoft isn't a person. It's a corporation. And it doesn't care how much I want to be friends with it. I'm small enough, Microsoft doesn't even know that I exist. Microsoft is not going to change it's behavior based on whether I try to make them my friend or not. So, given a behemoth with hostile behavior, I have three options: Destroy it, avoid it, or be destroyed.
Yes, I'm partial. I'm against Microsoft. But my partiality is based on impartially reviewing their documented behavior over a period of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, even if they are 100% right, this is not a bad thing. The less-capable half of sysadmins will have to find something more useful to do. I say "more useful" because, from the larger view, the view of the economy as a whole, IT people are mostly wasted. They don't produce anything (well, they do design and roll out networks, but most of their work is to keep our incredibly brittle systems from falling apart. It would be less wasteful to make less brittle systems.)
"Don't be African"? Um, how exactly do you think most Africans get AIDS? They get it primarily from having sex with random people...
(Now, of course there are a number that get it from having their mothers have it. Obviously, my statement does not apply to them.)
I can't speak for the grandparent, but...
Yes, I found her. She's under 40, cooks, and pays the bills. She cleaned until a couple years ago, when as a birthday present I got her someone to come in and clean every other week.
"If she still does this in 5 years"? Try 14. Yes, she still does. And no, she's not a psycho.
Where did I find such a gem? In church. (What, you thought I found someone like that in a bar?)
I believe that you are correct.
Note also that (in the grandparent to this) I did not say that Groklaw accused O'Gara of lying; I merely quoted the parent to that (great-grandparent to this).
Well, no, the case is really about trade secrets... no, it's about copyrights... no, it's really about SCO's contract with IBM... This case doesn't seem to actually be about anything. The current incarnation is mostly about a contract between AT&T/Novell and IBM, which SCO may (or may not) have inherited. But SCO's public statements have been that "it's about Linux!" Court filings do not back that up. So you want the court to make everything public because the public statements of one party mention something in which you have an interest, but which is irrelevant to the actual case before the court? Forget it. The court doesn't care - and rightly so.
Second: PJ states that she is torn on this current issue. She would love to be able to read all the documents (including the ~35 that are sealed out of 2-300 that have been filed), but she also sees that merely having someone file a malicious court case shouldn't automatically remove all your right to privacy.
Third: Groklaw isn't just about the facts, and nothing but the facts; it's also about analysis of the facts. But the cool thing about Groklaw is that the facts are there to support the analysis, and if you can make a case that the same facts support a different interpretation, they will listen. They may not agree, but they will listen.
Fourth: Your particular quote has a context, which you didn't provide. The context is that O'Gara stated, "SCO's suit claims IBM improperly incorporated aspects of SCO's Unix operating system in Linux. If proved, it could derail the Linux market and take the open source movement down with it." Well, that statement is in a PR release about filing a motion, not in the motion itself. It also has the problem of not stating how, exactly, even if the Linux kernel goes down in the SCO lawsuits, it will take the whole open source movement with it. OS is much more than the Linux kernel; it's also Apache and gcc and BSD and...
But the point of PJ's comment is that the SCO lawsuits seem almost designed to damage the open source movement, by spreading as much FUD as possible for as long as possible. Note the absense of any concrete claims that can be verified, the presense of lots of widely publicised vague claims that can't really be nailed down, and the constant manipulation of the courts to prevent any concrete judgments from being handed down.
PJ's point, then, is that O'Gara's comment shows what the real game is. (Given her other comments, I don't think PJ is very worried about the judge not getting it, however.)
As others have said, there is some need for privacy here. IBM's AIX source code should not be published to the world just because some idiots file a court case and some third-party observer sees it as a chance to get nosy.
I attended (1980-1984) a respectable, but not top-of-the-line, school. At that time, for a 20,000+ person university, the CS program size was 30 people per year. You had to have flawless grades to get into it. I would expect that things aren't that bad any more; universities have realized that they need to have bigger CS programs. Nevertheless, the bigger-name the CS program, the harder it is going to be to get accepted as a CS major.
And you may find that, in a battle for admission into the program, your transfered grades don't count as much as the same grades for someone who took all their classes at the big-name school.
Bottom line: Unless you are absolutely guaranteed admission into the CS program, don't transfer!
No Child Left Behind is not useless; it is worse than that. Paying for all these programs winds up sucking the funding out of accelerated/gifted programs. No Child Left Behind becomes No Child Gets Ahead - and the brightest kids mentally drop out of school because it's nothing but boring.
Cars. Getting a driver's license requires months of education, plus passing two tests (one written, one actually driving). This doesn't teach you how to build or maintain a car, just how to drive it safely.
Guns. In at least some states, you have to take safety classes to teach you how to use (and store!) a gun safely and responsibly.
There may be others, but those are the two that came to mind immediately...
Well, that's kind of irrelevant, because you don't see very many machines with those OSes getting newly connected to the Internet any more. Some, but not many...
Or maybe, at a minimum, something like, "Fine, if you will roll out broadband into that area within one year of when we propose our wireless network, then we won't do the wireless. Otherwise, we're not in competition with you anyway, so get lost."
Except said in legislature-speak, of course.
Some cold-temperature researchers used a reverse Sterling engine to cool helium (or hydrogen? I think it was helium) to the point of liquefaction. Even better, they used the liquid helium to lubricate the Sterling engine! I read about this in a thermodynamics text in college physics about 21-22 years ago...
Well, the obvious answer is that the effect is to cool down 6 million acres. If those acres are in central Arizona or inland southern California, this might be considered a good thing.
Seriously, imagine buying up a chunk of the Mojave desert. It won't be expensive (except that the government owns it all, but that's another issue). Then you use this to cool it by 20-30 degrees. Now you can live there without running the air conditioning 24/7/365, you have all the energy you need, and you sell off the rest. Now all you need is a water supply and a job...
If the video has a session on "here's what 'put the CD in the drive' looks like", then that's aimed below the Windows-knowing to the totally-computer-ignorant. If you already know Windows well enough to know how to put a CD in and click the mouse on stuff, you don't need the video. And if you don't know how to put a CD in, no OS in the world can help you with that step...
SecurityFocus says, "The vendor has released version 2.4.28 of the Linux kernel to address these issues."
Depends on what you mean. Others have already commented on hardware support, so I'll talk about speed. While developing Solaris 10, Sun's standard was, "If it's faster on Linux, it's a bug." They explicitly set themselves the goal of beating Linux in terms of performance.
Now, I haven't seen a head-to-head performance shootout on identical hardware, but I wouldn't automatically assume that Linux is ahead...
I don't always agree with RMS, but here is one place I do trust him. He showed a lot of foresight in the terms he put in the GPL. Also, unless I have totally misjudged him, he would literally kill himself before he would do something that betrays people's freedom.
It might be possible to get the perpetrator's fingerprints off of the papers (if the Good Guys(tm) were careful in how they handled the papers once they found them in the trash).
Um, why exactly is this moderated "troll"? I'd call it "insiteful", myself, but I've burned all my moderation points for the day...
The point is that this is a perfect illustration of why the current copyright length is insane. It's something you can use to explain it to your neighbors, and they might get it. It's even something you might be able to use to explain to your legislator in terms they can understand ("hey, look, long copyrights even get in the way of this perfectly reasonable government project!")
No, it'll only be a few times that the winged monkeys are exposed to the nuclear waste...
Groklaw's doing it. Groklaw does careful, thorough, detailed work. Slashdot doesn't do the kind of in-depth research. (Semi-obsessively reading both sites, I think that I can objectively say that.)
If you feel strongly that this needs to be done, go over to Groklaw and help.
See, Microsoft isn't a person. It's a corporation. And it doesn't care how much I want to be friends with it. I'm small enough, Microsoft doesn't even know that I exist. Microsoft is not going to change it's behavior based on whether I try to make them my friend or not. So, given a behemoth with hostile behavior, I have three options: Destroy it, avoid it, or be destroyed.
Yes, I'm partial. I'm against Microsoft. But my partiality is based on impartially reviewing their documented behavior over a period of years.
How about:
Step 1: Move out of California.
Step 2: Profit!
And, yeah, I'm praying for Patrick...