With evidence like this, does anybody seriously doubt that Microsoft people are working underground to discredit Slashdot and other OSDN properties?
How many of the Trolls and Microsoft astroturfers here are actually on the payroll of MS? Years ago, in OS/2 forums on Compuserve there were MS employees talking OS/2 down but not revealing their affiliation with MS. Does anybody seriously believe that their tactics have changed?
If I buy a computer, and I keep using the same software that came out designed for said computer, and I take care of it, I don't keep it in humid environments, I don't let it overheat, etc, then I'm sure it will last long after I am dead too.
Well, you're computer may or may not survive for decades if it's taken care of optimally.
On the other hand, numerous subsystems may fail and if they are no longer manufactured, you may have to retool with one of those new machines.
This is the forward thinking planning that has to go on at places like NASA. If we depend on computers that are decades old, then we have to make usre there are still parts.
Another option for heat would be to utilize a heat gradient for energy via some kind of advanced circuit-kind of like a solar panel. But I have no clue how that would work.
The thermocouple effect. I understand that some Satellites were designed to use thermocouples to generate electricity based on the large temperature gradient from their side facing the Sun vs. the side away from the Sun.
I don't know if it'd be practical, typically thermocouples only generate very small currents, but it is an easy and well understood way of coverting a temperature gradient into a current. If more efficient thermocouple metals were expensive, then this could be something that could be recycled when an old laptop was trashed.
Flame me all you want, but Microsoft reacted the way that any business would when confronted with angry customers.
What's so puzzling about Microsoft's behavior is why are they going after public schools and municipalities for some peanut licensing fees when they have this tremendous cash reserve and a palpable PR problem?
Exactly at the time when they should be using their cash to build good will, they are clawing after pennies at the expense of good will.
Sure, they saw after the damage had been done what bad publicity it was going after School Districts, but why couldn't they have anticipated it? It demonstrates a fundamental lack of empathy and understanding of the greater society.
Perhaps that's just the culture at Microsoft. They recruit puzzle solvers and nerds, but neglect to accommodate those who have social skills. Note that Rick Belluzzo, the highly regarded, easy-going manager who was thought to be instrumental in the growth of HP's printer business is out as MS President now.
I don't think MS is acting like any business. They're acting like Microsoft.
His point was that people like Bill Gates (and other powerful CEO types) might consider all those things as theft, but hypocritically place violating a contract in a different category.
Ebbers may have taken a lot over the years, but he was heavily invested in Worldcom stock which is nearly worthless now. I believe he never sold any Worldcom stock. He's toast.
I couldn't really speak to Lay, but what, exactly, are you accusing Cheney of doing? I never heard of any accusation that he was dealing in Enron stock.
However, there is also an underlying assumption of the system not being rigged in favor of any specific group.
I did address this issue in a very general sense in my last paragraph.
a) they skim off most of the profits (can you say Kenneth Lay? Bernard Ebbers?)
These two examples probably work against your argument. Kenneth Lay will probably be found guilty of insider trading and have to disgorge any profits he made. He may face heavy civil and criminal penalties, also. Bernard Ebbers is out at Worldcom and his $360 million loan to buy now nearly worthless Worldcom stock was not forgiven. Considering that much of Mr. Ebbers assets were tied up in now nearly worthless Worldcom stock, I'd say he's bankrupted as well.
I wouldn't want to be so insensitive as to refer to those who can't find a job as "underbrush", but really, can we expect the job market to be as good for IT people since the Internet bubble burst?
One of the vital processes in market economies that keeps them working is something called clearance. Inefficient methods of operating, like spending venture capital for operating funds for years waiting for a bad business plan to turn a profit, are cleared from the market eventually, leaving room for things that make sense.
This does lead to people being jobless. But, this also encourages everyone to keep their skills current and their pay expectations realistic.
Clearance is something we have to attempt to apply to large Government bureaucracies constantly as market forces don't apply here. The fact that there's not regular market clearance to Government bureaucracies is what helps lead to all the gross inefficiencies there, IMO.
It's business cycles. I don't think they've been abolished, contrary to what some were saying a few years ago. I liken it to winter. Winter does make it hard on a lot of life for awhile, but it sets the stage for Spring.
It does seem unfortunate that those on top in market economies (CEOs and Board Members) are the most insulated from business cycles, with their golden parachutes and other benefits. But, this is like how mankind is more insulated from winter when compared to most of the animal kingdom. It's good to be on top of any food chain, I guess.
I don't really see how this is fundamentally a novel concept...
It may not be a fundamentally novel concept, but it is a demonstration of a new technology, actually creating virus-like entities to manipulate inorganic materials.
but you are mostly correct,
Darwin ran on x86 fairly soon
after it's release.
I had always assumed it had been "since day one" because it was a fallout of porting the FreeBSD stuff to Mach, etc.
If it's not a fallout of the porting effort, why do they support x86 at all? Is this to help the Open Source development community surrounding Darwin, or is it possibly the case that Apple is hedging their bets and thinking of going x86 themselves at some point in the future?
If it means your poor sysadmins are going to die when the precious mainframe catches fire, then no, it isn't an acceptable risk. Period.
Last time I worked where there was a Halon system, I recall distinctly being trained that the alarm goes off some number of seconds (15? 30?) before the dump and that you are to proceed to the exit immediately.
Even if you were caught in the dump, being deprived of oxygen isn't instant death, you know. You have 30 seconds before it even starts to get really uncomfortable. With the alarm going off before the dump, that should give you plenty of time to exit.
Exactly. When Nike said those things, they weren't directly describing a product they were selling. It was more of a debate.
The claim is that Nike is being willfully deceptive about their practices. Describing how you come to manufacture a product is describing a product, in many cases.
For example, I may want to know that only union labor is used in the manufacture of a particular item. Or, I may wish to know that no animals were harmed in the manufacture of a product. A company may have the right not to tell me about their practices, otherwise they could be attacked with endless enquiries on every facet of operation, but they don't have the right to outright lie about them.
If this is just a debate, with differing opinions, then the court should not find Nike guilty of deceptive advertising (note the CA Supreme Court is only allowing the suit to go forward). If, however, they willfully made deceptive statements. That's something else.
I give you my work
you must let your breath go free
we share the same moon
That's a nice one. Most haiku you see on/. doesn't include a seasonal reference, which good haiku requires, in my, admittedly uniformed, opinion. I think that "we share the same moon" is a good, subtle one.
And unlike the heavily criticized Clinton pardons, these were done primarily to protect Bush himself from criminal charges.
First, I don't recall that Bush was never shown to have any involvement whatsoever in Iran/Contra. There was the ridiculous rumor that he flew via SR-71 to Iran to negotiate the release of the hostages which set the stage for later administration involvement in Iran/Contra, but that was shown to be a fatuous lie with no substance whatsoever.
Second, Clinton pardoned a number of people who might have later turned against him, like Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell. Or rather, it was probably the case that they didn't turn against him earlier because of a promise of a pardon later. Either way, the clear appearance is that he pardoned these people to protect himself from prosecution.
Bullshit. This bit of graft has nothing to do with complexity, and everything to do with politics as usual--you fund my re-election, I steer sure-money government contracts your way.
Maybe what you say is true. To pull this off, the politicians had to ensure that the bureaucrats weren't smart enough to ask the right questions that might mess up their plan. Otherwise, these functionaries that are getting the axe now would turn them in, right?
There is some suggestion of that, actually, if you read up on it. It looks like the bureaucrats were being led around by the nose by the Logicon consultants.
Or, maybe I'm naive and that if you follow up on it the bureaucrats will end up sitting pretty somewhere else in a few years.
This isn't strictly true. Software development organizations producing closed-source works need to be very careful about residuals. That is.. they need to prove that no GPL source "leaked" into their code because some programmer saw both some GPL'd utility (or whatever) that they were using and then wrote similar code into the closed-source product.
This is FUD, I think. AT&T couldn't prevail against Berkeley concerning the Free BSD Unix source, when all of the authors had read, studied and practically lived with AT&T Unix source for years, and in fact, similar sequences of source were identified in the (c) AT&T Unix and the BSD Unix. And remember, AT&T had access to both their own source and the BSD Unix source for comparison.
In order to press forward a copyright enfringement case of some closed source product with some GPLd source, you'd first have to gain access to the closed source and then prove that the author lifted segments. Much more difficult than what AT&T had to work with.
(Note: I did not say cut&paste, I said saw-and-wrote-similar) This is a *huge* worry for some companies, and quite validly so. Plenty of potentially expensive litigation lies down that path.
As someone else pointed out, lifting ideas is not a problem with copyright, only patents, you'd really have to cut-and-paste to violate copyright.
There's no reason to believe that anyone could prove "contamination" from GNU source into a closed source product unless someone was terribly blatant about it. This wouldn't be "contamination" but rather a willful move to rip off some GPLd work.
Ahhh, there's something in air, I can smell it distinctly. The fetid smell of an election season is blowing into California.
The guilty will be identified, heads will roll, policies revised...
In the end, nothing will change except it'll be even more difficult for California Departments to buy software than it is now.
Software licensing is really complicated. The typical bureacrat is just not up to it. If State Governments paid what Industry pays for IT executives, especially in California, there might be some chance that this kind of thing could be brought under control.
As it is, they'll just add more people to read over the contracts that none of them understand.
Even if they require contracts over a certain dollar amount to be reviewed by outside experts, the bureacrats will just start letting contracts just under that limit to lower their exposure to review.
Yeah, I don't know what "business press" this guy is following, but the WSJ has been very critical of the MS defense. Some of those stories get page 1 tags, too, if I remembering correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of the Trolls and Microsoft astroturfers here are actually on the payroll of MS? Years ago, in OS/2 forums on Compuserve there were MS employees talking OS/2 down but not revealing their affiliation with MS. Does anybody seriously believe that their tactics have changed?
Well, you're computer may or may not survive for decades if it's taken care of optimally.
On the other hand, numerous subsystems may fail and if they are no longer manufactured, you may have to retool with one of those new machines.
This is the forward thinking planning that has to go on at places like NASA. If we depend on computers that are decades old, then we have to make usre there are still parts.
The thermocouple effect. I understand that some Satellites were designed to use thermocouples to generate electricity based on the large temperature gradient from their side facing the Sun vs. the side away from the Sun.
I don't know if it'd be practical, typically thermocouples only generate very small currents, but it is an easy and well understood way of coverting a temperature gradient into a current. If more efficient thermocouple metals were expensive, then this could be something that could be recycled when an old laptop was trashed.
What's so puzzling about Microsoft's behavior is why are they going after public schools and municipalities for some peanut licensing fees when they have this tremendous cash reserve and a palpable PR problem?
Exactly at the time when they should be using their cash to build good will, they are clawing after pennies at the expense of good will.
Sure, they saw after the damage had been done what bad publicity it was going after School Districts, but why couldn't they have anticipated it? It demonstrates a fundamental lack of empathy and understanding of the greater society.
Perhaps that's just the culture at Microsoft. They recruit puzzle solvers and nerds, but neglect to accommodate those who have social skills. Note that Rick Belluzzo, the highly regarded, easy-going manager who was thought to be instrumental in the growth of HP's printer business is out as MS President now.
I don't think MS is acting like any business. They're acting like Microsoft.
His point was that people like Bill Gates (and other powerful CEO types) might consider all those things as theft, but hypocritically place violating a contract in a different category.
A good story, no doubt, but I think his most famous has to be I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.
I may be wrong...
I couldn't really speak to Lay, but what, exactly, are you accusing Cheney of doing? I never heard of any accusation that he was dealing in Enron stock.
I did address this issue in a very general sense in my last paragraph.
These two examples probably work against your argument. Kenneth Lay will probably be found guilty of insider trading and have to disgorge any profits he made. He may face heavy civil and criminal penalties, also. Bernard Ebbers is out at Worldcom and his $360 million loan to buy now nearly worthless Worldcom stock was not forgiven. Considering that much of Mr. Ebbers assets were tied up in now nearly worthless Worldcom stock, I'd say he's bankrupted as well.
I wouldn't want to be so insensitive as to refer to those who can't find a job as "underbrush", but really, can we expect the job market to be as good for IT people since the Internet bubble burst?
One of the vital processes in market economies that keeps them working is something called clearance. Inefficient methods of operating, like spending venture capital for operating funds for years waiting for a bad business plan to turn a profit, are cleared from the market eventually, leaving room for things that make sense.
This does lead to people being jobless. But, this also encourages everyone to keep their skills current and their pay expectations realistic.
Clearance is something we have to attempt to apply to large Government bureaucracies constantly as market forces don't apply here. The fact that there's not regular market clearance to Government bureaucracies is what helps lead to all the gross inefficiencies there, IMO.
It's business cycles. I don't think they've been abolished, contrary to what some were saying a few years ago. I liken it to winter. Winter does make it hard on a lot of life for awhile, but it sets the stage for Spring.
It does seem unfortunate that those on top in market economies (CEOs and Board Members) are the most insulated from business cycles, with their golden parachutes and other benefits. But, this is like how mankind is more insulated from winter when compared to most of the animal kingdom. It's good to be on top of any food chain, I guess.
It may not be a fundamentally novel concept, but it is a demonstration of a new technology, actually creating virus-like entities to manipulate inorganic materials.
It's definitely news.
So you say. But, I happen to know a Scientist who does nothing all day but xray atoms. What's he looking for if it's not razor blades, hmmm?
but you are mostly correct, Darwin ran on x86 fairly soon after it's release.
I had always assumed it had been "since day one" because it was a fallout of porting the FreeBSD stuff to Mach, etc.
If it's not a fallout of the porting effort, why do they support x86 at all? Is this to help the Open Source development community surrounding Darwin, or is it possibly the case that Apple is hedging their bets and thinking of going x86 themselves at some point in the future?
Last time I worked where there was a Halon system, I recall distinctly being trained that the alarm goes off some number of seconds (15? 30?) before the dump and that you are to proceed to the exit immediately.
Even if you were caught in the dump, being deprived of oxygen isn't instant death, you know. You have 30 seconds before it even starts to get really uncomfortable. With the alarm going off before the dump, that should give you plenty of time to exit.
The claim is that Nike is being willfully deceptive about their practices. Describing how you come to manufacture a product is describing a product, in many cases.
For example, I may want to know that only union labor is used in the manufacture of a particular item. Or, I may wish to know that no animals were harmed in the manufacture of a product. A company may have the right not to tell me about their practices, otherwise they could be attacked with endless enquiries on every facet of operation, but they don't have the right to outright lie about them.
If this is just a debate, with differing opinions, then the court should not find Nike guilty of deceptive advertising (note the CA Supreme Court is only allowing the suit to go forward). If, however, they willfully made deceptive statements. That's something else.
So, are you agreeing with Nike here that deceptive advertising shouldn't be illegal due to First Amendment concerns?
Note that the courts are not holding them accountable for the sweatshops, just their deceptive advertising surrounding same.
That's a nice one. Most haiku you see on /. doesn't include a seasonal reference, which good haiku requires, in my, admittedly uniformed, opinion. I think that "we share the same moon" is a good, subtle one.
First, I don't recall that Bush was never shown to have any involvement whatsoever in Iran/Contra. There was the ridiculous rumor that he flew via SR-71 to Iran to negotiate the release of the hostages which set the stage for later administration involvement in Iran/Contra, but that was shown to be a fatuous lie with no substance whatsoever.
Second, Clinton pardoned a number of people who might have later turned against him, like Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell. Or rather, it was probably the case that they didn't turn against him earlier because of a promise of a pardon later. Either way, the clear appearance is that he pardoned these people to protect himself from prosecution.
Maybe what you say is true. To pull this off, the politicians had to ensure that the bureaucrats weren't smart enough to ask the right questions that might mess up their plan. Otherwise, these functionaries that are getting the axe now would turn them in, right?
There is some suggestion of that, actually, if you read up on it. It looks like the bureaucrats were being led around by the nose by the Logicon consultants.
Or, maybe I'm naive and that if you follow up on it the bureaucrats will end up sitting pretty somewhere else in a few years.
This is FUD, I think. AT&T couldn't prevail against Berkeley concerning the Free BSD Unix source, when all of the authors had read, studied and practically lived with AT&T Unix source for years, and in fact, similar sequences of source were identified in the (c) AT&T Unix and the BSD Unix. And remember, AT&T had access to both their own source and the BSD Unix source for comparison.
In order to press forward a copyright enfringement case of some closed source product with some GPLd source, you'd first have to gain access to the closed source and then prove that the author lifted segments. Much more difficult than what AT&T had to work with.
As someone else pointed out, lifting ideas is not a problem with copyright, only patents, you'd really have to cut-and-paste to violate copyright.
There's no reason to believe that anyone could prove "contamination" from GNU source into a closed source product unless someone was terribly blatant about it. This wouldn't be "contamination" but rather a willful move to rip off some GPLd work.
Or, are you keeping it around for nostalgia stories like this one?
Did you factor in support from one of these organizations in your ROI calculations?
Heck, compare that to a Senior IT Manager in San Francisco that has more than 40 people working for him or her.
The guilty will be identified, heads will roll, policies revised...
In the end, nothing will change except it'll be even more difficult for California Departments to buy software than it is now.
Software licensing is really complicated. The typical bureacrat is just not up to it. If State Governments paid what Industry pays for IT executives, especially in California, there might be some chance that this kind of thing could be brought under control.
As it is, they'll just add more people to read over the contracts that none of them understand.
Even if they require contracts over a certain dollar amount to be reviewed by outside experts, the bureacrats will just start letting contracts just under that limit to lower their exposure to review.
Yeah, I don't know what "business press" this guy is following, but the WSJ has been very critical of the MS defense. Some of those stories get page 1 tags, too, if I remembering correctly.