IBM made a point a few years ago of emphasizing that they wanted to be a service company and work with all Linux distributions neutrally, not make their own. If they were to suddenly favor one distro so strongly, it would discard their neutrality, and I think that would hurt their current business model.
If non-computer people can corrupt the usage of hacking, then non-medical people can corrupt medical terminology to their own purposes.
Besides, you understood what was meant, so where is the problem?
And even more, I think it was Andrew Jackson, President of the US around 1820 or 1830, who said "It's a poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."
They have $50 billion in the bank, as ready cash. There are a lot of unemployed programmers, and if they wanted to outsource to India and China, there are a whole lot more even cheaper.
It might take a year or two, but they could squash future bugs if they wanted to. And yes, I know about the mythical man month and adding manpower to a late project, but this is not a single project, it is hundreds of small projects.
Microsoft is still not serious about fixing security holes. They never will be.
MS kept going because their stock was high enough to attract people who thought mostly of making lots of money, integrity and skill be damned. They were happy to grind out feature after feature without worrying too much about how sloppy the feature itself was, or the code that implemented it. The high stock price also kept investors happy, knowing the value would go up and they coudl sell to the next greedy sumbitch. A nice pair of positive feedback circles.
Sooner or later the stock would hit its limit, mainly because of market saturation. Then there would be no increasing revenues, investors would find it harder and harder to unload, and as the stock price stabilized, the opportunistic employees would bail, and new employees would be harder to get.
What amuses me is this new wrinkle, that crappy software has put an extra limit on their market, causing market saturation early. Like adding sugar to hot water, you can only get so much in before it saturates... I did not anticipate the water temperature lowering the saturation limit. This is really interesting!
In addition to investors and opportunistic employees both bailing because the stock price has stabilized, I bet there are a lot of employees who are not happy being assigned to the boring tedious job of auditing old code, hunting down security flaws, and so on. These people have gottne used to adding useless features without any concern for reality, and that was fun. Dredging the muck for security holes is not. I wonder how many employees are bailing because the work has changed.
A nice accelerator to the two feedback loopbacks. Just because feedback is reinforcingly negative does not mean the slope is uphill!
What I want for development is a wall size display with sensors that can tell where my fingers are and what my eyes are looking at. I want it to recognize gestures for scrolling around, linking, backing up, and so on. That's for examining code. When I write code, I want a keyboard. Voice control might be useful for a few queries, such as Who Wrote This, Where Is This Used, but in general I don't want to spend all day yakking to a computer.
For home use, voice response for controlling a/v, lights, etc, that could be handy, to an extent. Door bell rings, the door camera shows on the TV, I yell TALK and the circuit comes alive so I can talk with the person at the door.
Home use is the tricky stuff. Office use is pretty simplistic and regular, and you don't want much voice control because you'd wear yourself out at the end of the day.
I only use this computer, say, 10 hours a day. So I should be able to get a prorated non-usage incentive, right? After all, I could have it doing something 24 hours a day.
I have written programs that query web sites, fill out forms, and post replies, in response to other programs needing to schedule things which are normally done by humans. These programs were smart enough to make sure the downloaded web page hadn't changed since last use. Can you imagine the hassle it would have been for one request every 8 hours to fail because it downloaded the wrong page? Or worse, if it posted the form response and got the parental control page in response? Once every 8 hours, 3 times day... how the hell long would that take to figure out?
I fired off a letter to dear old ericd saying this, and got back an automated reply with a PDF file attachment denying they were hijacking the HTTP stream. Ha! Idiots! More proof of their intelligence, to send a PDF attachment instead of simple text.
Belkin is on my do not use list. I can't imagine what it will take for them to set this straight. They have lost more credibility in a single incident than anything I can remember since dear old Datapoint's stock dropped by a factor of ten when their accountant's funny business was discovered.
Thanks for the thoughts. I know it isn't perfect, and might in fact swing the pendulum the other way, but it does at least swing the pendulum, and I think it would have less justice for money than the current system. There is something really obscene about huge corporations sending out C&D letters and threatening massive legal bills.
Where each side can only spend as much as the other. If I am sued by McD, and only want to spend $100 on my defense, that's all they can spend on their offense. Or if I sue McD, and only want to spend $2000 on the case, that's all they get to spend of defense.
There has to be some minimum, of course, it makes no sense to expect a corporate lawyer to only spend $100 on a case. But no banks of several lawyers deponing hundreds of witnesses just to put the fear of McD in people.
Another aspect would be an escape clause... if McD wants to spend $1M, they have to loan me the difference from what I want to spend, and if they lose, they don't get it back. I have to agree to this loan.
This would apply in all cases, criminal or civil. No more state DAs spending a fortune on sending some illiterate scumbag to the death chamber because his public dedfender only had $300 to spend.
Anyway, I like my scheme:-) Seems like it ought to go a long ways towards reducing the money power in our legal system.
See, the Bush admin supports library filters to the max, hell, they'd probably love to get filters installed on the entire internet. And to think that their work at getting filters in libraries will result in... an anti-gun bias!
You are free to write your own software. If you use someone else's software, you pay their price. If their price is the GPL of your own additions to that software, then don't pay the price, write your own.
What is so hard to understand about that? It's someone else's software, they set the rules for use of their own software.
Someone brought suit to stop the touchscreen voting law, and the appeals court threw out the suit. The court did NOT reject the touchscreen voting law.
A federal appeals court has struck down a lawsuit filed by a California Libertarian that sought to ban electronic voting machines on the grounds that they are susceptible to fraud and software bugs.
I have NEVER heard knots used as a measure of distance, always as speed. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. If you can sho wme some reference, I woudl appreciate it.
My dictionary says that knot is indeed a measure of distance, except not in nautical usage. I have never heard the non-nautical usage as distance, not even by landlubbers, who quite commonly says knots per hour.
That's what I like about the GPL, if someone wants a leg up on the competition or for whatever reason wants to get to market faster and easier, and wants to use somebody's GPL code, they have to pay in the coin of the realm, which is to release their own code under GPL too.
If they don't want other people to use their precious code, then they shouldn't use anybody else's precious code, they should write it all themselves.
... someone realizes that he is breathing an atmosphere shared with actual nuclear weapons, infused with toxic dust from airliners crashing into buildings. There is water vapor which ran thru baby diapers. And others walk over the very land where massive numbers of people died in countless wars, he is following in their very footsteps!
If the GPL is ruled invalid, why would companies only then steal the code? The code is still owned by the copyright holder. All the GPL does is pass on extra permissions to copy. Without the GPL to allow copying, no copying is valid except by the copyright holder.
Why the dickens would thieves wait to steal?
As for the chances of the GPL being ruled invalid, for what cause? It does not remove permissions, it only adds permissions. If it is ruled that it violates the copyright clause of the constitution because it expands on said clause, then every license does, including every EULA out there. You think Microsoft wants that?
I bought some desks from a Canadian company, and some time later got a bill from the shipper. Seems the desks were made in Taiwan, the shipper had paid the customs for me, and now wanted reimbursement, including a hefty surcharge for their trouble.
What pissed me off more than anything was the surprise and the surcharge. If I had known in advance, I probably would still have bought the desks, and I could have paid it with the order, instead of the surprise later. And that surcharge... damn that got my dander up. The Canadian company never said squat useful, just dithered and said they would look into it, and never did.
I haven't looked at Alpha specs in ages, but what impressed me most about it when it first came out was the nice simple clean, you might even call it elegant, design. In particular, I remember the instruction set being a breath of fresh air, logical and simple, and that spoke to me of a good basic design, one that would age well. They started with the proverbial clean sheet and made good choices.
But it's been way too long since I looked at one, I don't know how the current designs stack up.
The news article admits that Microsoft is an investor in BayStar but denies that Microsoft has anything to do with this particular investment. If that is directly true, then you need some indirectness, and that's what would be hard to uncover.
There are two investors; BayStar Capital is the other one, and they are an investment house. Even if you could get a list of BayStar's investors, no doubt those are also investment houses, and trying to track down any M$ investment would take a lot of poking. Especially if they are private, not public, companies...
Look at it this way. Anyone with a brain knows that this $50M is not an investment, because an investment expects a return on investment. You may be able to find a few nutso small time investors who believe every press release they see and buy stock just in case, but those people generally don't have $50M.
The only other reason to spend $50M is to get product in return. All SCO has to offer is its lawsuits against Linux. Now think, who would have use for such a product? So far, two license buyers have shown up, Sun and Microsoft. Sun has already been certified as being immune to the SCO infringement claims. Microsoft just dumped another $8M into SCO for an enhanced license, which is just as useless to them as the previous license purchase.
There may be no proof that Microsoft is behind the $50M, but it looks like a pretty good first approximation.
The MPAA at least represents the true copyright holders, after a fashion, because its member studios don't produce cheap movies. Notice that there really aren't too many complaints about MPAA trying to stop copying, rather the complaints are against region encoding and stupid DeCSS policies that prevent people from watching DVDs that they have bought on their own computers.
But to pretend that the RIAA represents musicians is a different kettle of fish altogether. Musicians don't get any money from RIAA enforcement actions, and their contracts are so twisted and evil to start with that the only people who would lose if the RIAA were to vanish overnight would be RIAA staff.
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IBM made a point a few years ago of emphasizing that they wanted to be a service company and work with all Linux distributions neutrally, not make their own. If they were to suddenly favor one distro so strongly, it would discard their neutrality, and I think that would hurt their current business model.
If non-computer people can corrupt the usage of hacking, then non-medical people can corrupt medical terminology to their own purposes.
Besides, you understood what was meant, so where is the problem?
And even more, I think it was Andrew Jackson, President of the US around 1820 or 1830, who said "It's a poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."
They have $50 billion in the bank, as ready cash. There are a lot of unemployed programmers, and if they wanted to outsource to India and China, there are a whole lot more even cheaper.
It might take a year or two, but they could squash future bugs if they wanted to. And yes, I know about the mythical man month and adding manpower to a late project, but this is not a single project, it is hundreds of small projects.
Microsoft is still not serious about fixing security holes. They never will be.
MS kept going because their stock was high enough to attract people who thought mostly of making lots of money, integrity and skill be damned. They were happy to grind out feature after feature without worrying too much about how sloppy the feature itself was, or the code that implemented it. The high stock price also kept investors happy, knowing the value would go up and they coudl sell to the next greedy sumbitch. A nice pair of positive feedback circles.
... I did not anticipate the water temperature lowering the saturation limit. This is really interesting!
Sooner or later the stock would hit its limit, mainly because of market saturation. Then there would be no increasing revenues, investors would find it harder and harder to unload, and as the stock price stabilized, the opportunistic employees would bail, and new employees would be harder to get.
What amuses me is this new wrinkle, that crappy software has put an extra limit on their market, causing market saturation early. Like adding sugar to hot water, you can only get so much in before it saturates
In addition to investors and opportunistic employees both bailing because the stock price has stabilized, I bet there are a lot of employees who are not happy being assigned to the boring tedious job of auditing old code, hunting down security flaws, and so on. These people have gottne used to adding useless features without any concern for reality, and that was fun. Dredging the muck for security holes is not. I wonder how many employees are bailing because the work has changed.
A nice accelerator to the two feedback loopbacks. Just because feedback is reinforcingly negative does not mean the slope is uphill!
What I want for development is a wall size display with sensors that can tell where my fingers are and what my eyes are looking at. I want it to recognize gestures for scrolling around, linking, backing up, and so on. That's for examining code. When I write code, I want a keyboard. Voice control might be useful for a few queries, such as Who Wrote This, Where Is This Used, but in general I don't want to spend all day yakking to a computer.
For home use, voice response for controlling a/v, lights, etc, that could be handy, to an extent. Door bell rings, the door camera shows on the TV, I yell TALK and the circuit comes alive so I can talk with the person at the door.
Home use is the tricky stuff. Office use is pretty simplistic and regular, and you don't want much voice control because you'd wear yourself out at the end of the day.
I only use this computer, say, 10 hours a day. So I should be able to get a prorated non-usage incentive, right? After all, I could have it doing something 24 hours a day.
I have written programs that query web sites, fill out forms, and post replies, in response to other programs needing to schedule things which are normally done by humans. These programs were smart enough to make sure the downloaded web page hadn't changed since last use. Can you imagine the hassle it would have been for one request every 8 hours to fail because it downloaded the wrong page? Or worse, if it posted the form response and got the parental control page in response? Once every 8 hours, 3 times day ... how the hell long would that take to figure out?
I fired off a letter to dear old ericd saying this, and got back an automated reply with a PDF file attachment denying they were hijacking the HTTP stream. Ha! Idiots! More proof of their intelligence, to send a PDF attachment instead of simple text.
Belkin is on my do not use list. I can't imagine what it will take for them to set this straight. They have lost more credibility in a single incident than anything I can remember since dear old Datapoint's stock dropped by a factor of ten when their accountant's funny business was discovered.
See, you just sue me, and trick me into spending a million defending myself, and I loan you the million, and you spend it!
...
Then I write it off on taxes as a loss, and
Profit!!!
Thanks for the thoughts. I know it isn't perfect, and might in fact swing the pendulum the other way, but it does at least swing the pendulum, and I think it would have less justice for money than the current system. There is something really obscene about huge corporations sending out C&D letters and threatening massive legal bills.
Where each side can only spend as much as the other. If I am sued by McD, and only want to spend $100 on my defense, that's all they can spend on their offense. Or if I sue McD, and only want to spend $2000 on the case, that's all they get to spend of defense.
... if McD wants to spend $1M, they have to loan me the difference from what I want to spend, and if they lose, they don't get it back. I have to agree to this loan.
:-) Seems like it ought to go a long ways towards reducing the money power in our legal system.
There has to be some minimum, of course, it makes no sense to expect a corporate lawyer to only spend $100 on a case. But no banks of several lawyers deponing hundreds of witnesses just to put the fear of McD in people.
Another aspect would be an escape clause
This would apply in all cases, criminal or civil. No more state DAs spending a fortune on sending some illiterate scumbag to the death chamber because his public dedfender only had $300 to spend.
Anyway, I like my scheme
See, the Bush admin supports library filters to the max, hell, they'd probably love to get filters installed on the entire internet. And to think that their work at getting filters in libraries will result in ... an anti-gun bias!
Yeh, I love it.
If you pick it, does it not show as different from any other gray? Would gray by any other name be as 133t?
Oh heck, it sounded funnier when I thought of it. Now it just sounds -1 overrated.
You are free to write your own software. If you use someone else's software, you pay their price. If their price is the GPL of your own additions to that software, then don't pay the price, write your own.
What is so hard to understand about that? It's someone else's software, they set the rules for use of their own software.
Someone brought suit to stop the touchscreen voting law, and the appeals court threw out the suit. The court did NOT reject the touchscreen voting law.
A federal appeals court has struck down a lawsuit filed by a California Libertarian that sought to ban electronic voting machines on the grounds that they are susceptible to fraud and software bugs.
I have NEVER heard knots used as a measure of distance, always as speed. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. If you can sho wme some reference, I woudl appreciate it.
My dictionary says that knot is indeed a measure of distance, except not in nautical usage. I have never heard the non-nautical usage as distance, not even by landlubbers, who quite commonly says knots per hour.
GPL'd code: free as in free to write your own if you don't want to share your code as others have shared theirs.
That's what I like about the GPL, if someone wants a leg up on the competition or for whatever reason wants to get to market faster and easier, and wants to use somebody's GPL code, they have to pay in the coin of the realm, which is to release their own code under GPL too.
If they don't want other people to use their precious code, then they shouldn't use anybody else's precious code, they should write it all themselves.
... someone realizes that he is breathing an atmosphere shared with actual nuclear weapons, infused with toxic dust from airliners crashing into buildings. There is water vapor which ran thru baby diapers. And others walk over the very land where massive numbers of people died in countless wars, he is following in their very footsteps!
Oh, the horror, the horror!
If the GPL is ruled invalid, why would companies only then steal the code? The code is still owned by the copyright holder. All the GPL does is pass on extra permissions to copy. Without the GPL to allow copying, no copying is valid except by the copyright holder.
Why the dickens would thieves wait to steal?
As for the chances of the GPL being ruled invalid, for what cause? It does not remove permissions, it only adds permissions. If it is ruled that it violates the copyright clause of the constitution because it expands on said clause, then every license does, including every EULA out there. You think Microsoft wants that?
You know, the mice that were running the show in the first place ...
I bought some desks from a Canadian company, and some time later got a bill from the shipper. Seems the desks were made in Taiwan, the shipper had paid the customs for me, and now wanted reimbursement, including a hefty surcharge for their trouble.
... damn that got my dander up. The Canadian company never said squat useful, just dithered and said they would look into it, and never did.
What pissed me off more than anything was the surprise and the surcharge. If I had known in advance, I probably would still have bought the desks, and I could have paid it with the order, instead of the surprise later. And that surcharge
Pretty slimy surprise.
I haven't looked at Alpha specs in ages, but what impressed me most about it when it first came out was the nice simple clean, you might even call it elegant, design. In particular, I remember the instruction set being a breath of fresh air, logical and simple, and that spoke to me of a good basic design, one that would age well. They started with the proverbial clean sheet and made good choices.
But it's been way too long since I looked at one, I don't know how the current designs stack up.
The news article admits that Microsoft is an investor in BayStar but denies that Microsoft has anything to do with this particular investment. If that is directly true, then you need some indirectness, and that's what would be hard to uncover.
There are two investors; BayStar Capital is the other one, and they are an investment house. Even if you could get a list of BayStar's investors, no doubt those are also investment houses, and trying to track down any M$ investment would take a lot of poking. Especially if they are private, not public, companies ...
Look at it this way. Anyone with a brain knows that this $50M is not an investment, because an investment expects a return on investment. You may be able to find a few nutso small time investors who believe every press release they see and buy stock just in case, but those people generally don't have $50M.
The only other reason to spend $50M is to get product in return. All SCO has to offer is its lawsuits against Linux. Now think, who would have use for such a product? So far, two license buyers have shown up, Sun and Microsoft. Sun has already been certified as being immune to the SCO infringement claims. Microsoft just dumped another $8M into SCO for an enhanced license, which is just as useless to them as the previous license purchase.
There may be no proof that Microsoft is behind the $50M, but it looks like a pretty good first approximation.
The MPAA at least represents the true copyright holders, after a fashion, because its member studios don't produce cheap movies. Notice that there really aren't too many complaints about MPAA trying to stop copying, rather the complaints are against region encoding and stupid DeCSS policies that prevent people from watching DVDs that they have bought on their own computers.
But to pretend that the RIAA represents musicians is a different kettle of fish altogether. Musicians don't get any money from RIAA enforcement actions, and their contracts are so twisted and evil to start with that the only people who would lose if the RIAA were to vanish overnight would be RIAA staff.