IBM pretty much cannot get its legal fees back, and probably never expected that it would. What they can do is utterly crush SCO as a warning to others, and maybe then cut a deal with the other creditors where IBM gets any of SCO's remaining software rights.
I look that the last 50 years of history, and I see the most powerful country in the world during that time saying it's trying to spread democracy.
I also see that, in fact, democracy has been spreading during that time, and the spread accelerated once the most powerful rival to that country during that period collapsed in upon itself.
Perhaps it is actually possible that said country followed a foreign policy designed to genuinely promote democracy overall, even if there were some deviations and errors, both real and merely superficial?
1) What they had time for was somebody to yell at a lower-level guy "Fix this!" and the lower-level guy to make a stupid, half-assed response. Again, have you never dealt with a large organization made up of human beings?
2) The guys who made the original complaint say the new database doesn't rip off theirs. Maybe they're ripping off somebody else's, but you have no evidence of that.
if Google wanted to distance itself from it, they could have done so long ago
So you think less than a week from release of product, to issue raised, to confession of theft and replacement with a genuinely in-house database, isn't a fast-enough response time? So, tell me, is it just that you never have dealt with a large organization before in your lifetime, or is it that you believe that Google management has magic powers?
After all, we know that all Google employees are under Total Management Mind Control, and that Google Knows Everything Everyone's Doing. It's not even remotely possible that a handful of Google employees in China could shadily cut corners (using an already-extant database instead of compiling one from their own company's data) without Sergey Brin and Larry Page having personally authorized it from Mountain View, or that it would actually take a bit of time for upper management to investigate an issue when it's uncovered.
Maybe you should come to Doña Anna County, and look at the actual conditions here.
Joe Engineer, taking one look at the property where someone already lives, will realize that it's hot, dry, sandy-rocky land just like the stuff ten miles closer to the spaceport, that the land closer to the spaceport is cheaper to buy because it's undeveloped, and that it'll be cheaper to develop because he won't have to tear down existing buildings. He won't gentrify because, given the real estate in Doña Anna County, gentrifying is a total waste of money.
By the way, New Mexico limits residential property tax assessment increases to 3% per annum, provided there isn't a sale of the land. It'll take 38 years for the assessment of any home in the area to triple underneath the owner . . . which will happen in any case because that'll be just fast enough to keep up with the dollar's inflation rate.
And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions?
There's too much land for that to happen. Seriously. The county's bigger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and it has a total population of less than 200,000. You could build a thousand huge houses on ten-acre lots apiece, and there'd be absolutely minimal effect on general real estate prices.
Check the antecedent of the pronoun on "Apple will be fine with this". This guy's premise is that Apple will be fine with non-Apple sellers of downloads for iPods that compete with the iTMS, because such sellers will increase the demand for iPods. Yet Apple is clearly not fine with such sellers, or else it wouldn't have dicked around with Harmony. So either such sellers do not increase iPod demand, or they do but that's not good enough for Apple to be fine with it. Either way, then, his claim, taken in its entirety, is bullshit.
the regime's environmental record since they converted from communism to the more lucrative fascism hasn't been anything short of catastrophic for the common Chinese people.
Oh, China's environmental record wasn't any better.
For example, consider the backyard steel smelters Mao Zedong imposed. They were fed ten percent of China's forests in just two years, polluting the air with tremendous quantities of soot and smoke, all to convert vast quantities of scrap iron into worthless slag.
How can one talk about simplifying the x86 architecture without noting that Intel actually tried it? The Intel 80376 was a variation of the 386 that removed support for real mode.
Er, no. The point was that the special license restrictions don't apply in many countries, so there'd be no violation in installing the program on the PC.
However, if you take a singly-purchased copy of a program (even if it came in a bundle) and install it on two machines without explicit permission to do so, you are infringing the copyright by making an unauthorized copy. You're not breaking the license restrictions, you're breaking the copyright laws.
he real question is - can Apple master the enterprise sales challenge toe-to-toe with Microsoft.
The answer is easy. No. The attempt would crash the stock price and cause a shareholder revolt. Jobs understands that.
Steve Jobs deliberately gave up world domination in favor of pulling the Mac back to high-margin segments of the market; this can be seen in his product strategy from day one of his return. And it worked; compare the Apple SEC filings to clonemaker filings. Apple has a huge gross margin percentage compared to any clonemaker, while it states in the same financials that its margin on the iPod/iTunes business is much lower than on its computer business. Assuming Apple isn't lying on its financials, that means it's making a much, much higher percentage per computer than the clonemakers do. And it's been doing do for years now.
In which case, the best reason for Apple not trying to expand its segment choices is margin-protection. If Apple doesn't protect the margins, Wall Street will be unhappy, share prices will plummet, somebody willing to carry out Jobs's 1997-2007 strategy will become the new CEO, and Apple will retreat back into its current segments.
And that same margin-protection is why Microsoft/the clonemakers don't have to worry about Apple too much. If Apple doesn't do a full-spectrum attack on the market, Microsoft/the clones will by default retain control of the other segments (barring, say, Linux suddenly eating MS's lunch). Insofar as there is a network effect between segments, that effect will keep Microsoft/the clones in the game in the segments Apple is competing in, even if Apple manages to "win" those segments. Apple can't win the world-domination game because it isn't playing it.
The real question is if the Mac can survive in the long run in its niches. Microsoft can defeat Apple, because they are in the world-domination game -- that is, MS sells to all computer segments Apple sells in. In that case, Apple just becomes a consumer electronics company; the retreat from the "legacy" computer business is easy to spin to Wall Street as the inevitable result of market forces, as presaged in the change of the company name. This scenario depends on Microsoft getting its act in order, which it currently seems unable to do; the most likely scenario is Apple having a healthy high-margin computer buisiness for quite some time to come.
Industrial land in El Paso, which actually has people living in it that you'd be able to hire to work for you, runs in the range $2.75-$6.00 a square foot. The spaceport is in the middle of nowhere compared to El Paso. While the land is being subsidized relative to the costs, it's not being highly subsidized relative to the value; a private developer who installed utilities wouldn't find customers for the land at $2/SF.
This is Doña Anna County, New Mexico. The land we're talking about is scrub desert too far from anywhere to be of any use for industry, and too dry to be of any use for any form of agriculture. There's lots of land just like it next door. What's getting government-subsidized is the cost of building the utilities and roads, because the land itself is the next thing to free.
but I fully expect that when a tornado or hurricane wipes it out I will have to foot the FEMA bill for it.
This is Doña Anna County in New Mexico. If a hurricane wipes it out, it will have done so after traveling at least 600 miles overland and over a mountain range. If that happens, your FEMA bill is going to be so high you're not even going to notice the extra charge for repairing a spaceport.
Even with unenhanced sight, your subjective experience upon seeing 700 nm light might be identical to the subjective experience I get seeing 500 nm light. We would both call the color at 700 nm "red" because it's the name we were both taught to give to our experience, but to you I might "really" be experiencing blue.
Then there's the next step. We might not even have that much commonality. The experience of red as you experience it might not be the same as any color I am capable of experiencing or imagining. Our experiences might be incomprehensible to each other, even though they have the same objective referent, allowing us to intelligibly communicate about specific objects.
(And lest we assume this is all speculation, we do know people who experience synesthesia have inconsistent secondary perceptions. This doesn't necessarily mean primary perceptions are similarly varied, but since we can't experience living in each others' brains, we can't prove that either way.)
Now if we take the money needed to bring GM mosquito's to market and use it to buy vaccines, how much of the malaria problem can we solve?
None of it. No vaccine exists for malaria, though we've been trying to develop one for decades.
We could spend it on prophylactic drugs, but all the known prophylactics have serious side effects that make them unsuited for long-term use -- and long-term use would be required for people living their whole lives in a malarial area.
Spending the money on indoor residual DDT spraying would work fairly well, but there's an aversion by environmentalists to spraying DDT.
Spending it on bed nets would work well, if it weren't for the fact that proper bed nets make excellent fishing nets, and thus wind up diverted from their intended use. (And then have severe environmental impact as people do things like net an entire river, indiscriminately catching all the fish.)
Slashdot Mirror
IBM pretty much cannot get its legal fees back, and probably never expected that it would. What they can do is utterly crush SCO as a warning to others, and maybe then cut a deal with the other creditors where IBM gets any of SCO's remaining software rights.
Hmm.
I look that the last 50 years of history, and I see the most powerful country in the world during that time saying it's trying to spread democracy.
I also see that, in fact, democracy has been spreading during that time, and the spread accelerated once the most powerful rival to that country during that period collapsed in upon itself.
Perhaps it is actually possible that said country followed a foreign policy designed to genuinely promote democracy overall, even if there were some deviations and errors, both real and merely superficial?
Well, then, clearly we need to create a .notsafe domain for all not-safe sites!
1) What they had time for was somebody to yell at a lower-level guy "Fix this!" and the lower-level guy to make a stupid, half-assed response. Again, have you never dealt with a large organization made up of human beings?
2) The guys who made the original complaint say the new database doesn't rip off theirs. Maybe they're ripping off somebody else's, but you have no evidence of that.
if Google wanted to distance itself from it, they could have done so long ago
So you think less than a week from release of product, to issue raised, to confession of theft and replacement with a genuinely in-house database, isn't a fast-enough response time? So, tell me, is it just that you never have dealt with a large organization before in your lifetime, or is it that you believe that Google management has magic powers?
After all, we know that all Google employees are under Total Management Mind Control, and that Google Knows Everything Everyone's Doing. It's not even remotely possible that a handful of Google employees in China could shadily cut corners (using an already-extant database instead of compiling one from their own company's data) without Sergey Brin and Larry Page having personally authorized it from Mountain View, or that it would actually take a bit of time for upper management to investigate an issue when it's uncovered.
Water is a limiting factor, but not too badly; the Rio Grande runs through the county, after all.
Maybe you should come to Doña Anna County, and look at the actual conditions here.
Joe Engineer, taking one look at the property where someone already lives, will realize that it's hot, dry, sandy-rocky land just like the stuff ten miles closer to the spaceport, that the land closer to the spaceport is cheaper to buy because it's undeveloped, and that it'll be cheaper to develop because he won't have to tear down existing buildings. He won't gentrify because, given the real estate in Doña Anna County, gentrifying is a total waste of money.
By the way, New Mexico limits residential property tax assessment increases to 3% per annum, provided there isn't a sale of the land. It'll take 38 years for the assessment of any home in the area to triple underneath the owner . . . which will happen in any case because that'll be just fast enough to keep up with the dollar's inflation rate.
And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions?
There's too much land for that to happen. Seriously. The county's bigger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and it has a total population of less than 200,000. You could build a thousand huge houses on ten-acre lots apiece, and there'd be absolutely minimal effect on general real estate prices.
Check the antecedent of the pronoun on "Apple will be fine with this". This guy's premise is that Apple will be fine with non-Apple sellers of downloads for iPods that compete with the iTMS, because such sellers will increase the demand for iPods. Yet Apple is clearly not fine with such sellers, or else it wouldn't have dicked around with Harmony. So either such sellers do not increase iPod demand, or they do but that's not good enough for Apple to be fine with it. Either way, then, his claim, taken in its entirety, is bullshit.
Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing
Really? So when is Apple going to stop dicking around with Harmony compatibility?
the regime's environmental record since they converted from communism to the more lucrative fascism hasn't been anything short of catastrophic for the common Chinese people.
Oh, China's environmental record wasn't any better.
For example, consider the backyard steel smelters Mao Zedong imposed. They were fed ten percent of China's forests in just two years, polluting the air with tremendous quantities of soot and smoke, all to convert vast quantities of scrap iron into worthless slag.
How can one talk about simplifying the x86 architecture without noting that Intel actually tried it? The Intel 80376 was a variation of the 386 that removed support for real mode.
Anyone who said "hydrogen" must leave the room immediately.
Nah, anybody who said burning hydrogen has to leave the room. Anyone who said fusing hydrogen just gets to be called foolishly optimistic.
Er, no. The point was that the special license restrictions don't apply in many countries, so there'd be no violation in installing the program on the PC.
However, if you take a singly-purchased copy of a program (even if it came in a bundle) and install it on two machines without explicit permission to do so, you are infringing the copyright by making an unauthorized copy. You're not breaking the license restrictions, you're breaking the copyright laws.
he real question is - can Apple master the enterprise sales challenge toe-to-toe with Microsoft.
The answer is easy. No. The attempt would crash the stock price and cause a shareholder revolt. Jobs understands that.
Steve Jobs deliberately gave up world domination in favor of pulling the Mac back to high-margin segments of the market; this can be seen in his product strategy from day one of his return. And it worked; compare the Apple SEC filings to clonemaker filings. Apple has a huge gross margin percentage compared to any clonemaker, while it states in the same financials that its margin on the iPod/iTunes business is much lower than on its computer business. Assuming Apple isn't lying on its financials, that means it's making a much, much higher percentage per computer than the clonemakers do. And it's been doing do for years now.
In which case, the best reason for Apple not trying to expand its segment choices is margin-protection. If Apple doesn't protect the margins, Wall Street will be unhappy, share prices will plummet, somebody willing to carry out Jobs's 1997-2007 strategy will become the new CEO, and Apple will retreat back into its current segments.
And that same margin-protection is why Microsoft/the clonemakers don't have to worry about Apple too much. If Apple doesn't do a full-spectrum attack on the market, Microsoft/the clones will by default retain control of the other segments (barring, say, Linux suddenly eating MS's lunch). Insofar as there is a network effect between segments, that effect will keep Microsoft/the clones in the game in the segments Apple is competing in, even if Apple manages to "win" those segments. Apple can't win the world-domination game because it isn't playing it.
The real question is if the Mac can survive in the long run in its niches. Microsoft can defeat Apple, because they are in the world-domination game -- that is, MS sells to all computer segments Apple sells in. In that case, Apple just becomes a consumer electronics company; the retreat from the "legacy" computer business is easy to spin to Wall Street as the inevitable result of market forces, as presaged in the change of the company name. This scenario depends on Microsoft getting its act in order, which it currently seems unable to do; the most likely scenario is Apple having a healthy high-margin computer buisiness for quite some time to come.
Industrial land in El Paso, which actually has people living in it that you'd be able to hire to work for you, runs in the range $2.75-$6.00 a square foot. The spaceport is in the middle of nowhere compared to El Paso. While the land is being subsidized relative to the costs, it's not being highly subsidized relative to the value; a private developer who installed utilities wouldn't find customers for the land at $2/SF.
Well, he's got an Ayn Rand quote as his .sig. How do you think he feels about it?
This is Doña Anna County, New Mexico. The land we're talking about is scrub desert too far from anywhere to be of any use for industry, and too dry to be of any use for any form of agriculture. There's lots of land just like it next door. What's getting government-subsidized is the cost of building the utilities and roads, because the land itself is the next thing to free.
but I fully expect that when a tornado or hurricane wipes it out I will have to foot the FEMA bill for it.
This is Doña Anna County in New Mexico. If a hurricane wipes it out, it will have done so after traveling at least 600 miles overland and over a mountain range. If that happens, your FEMA bill is going to be so high you're not even going to notice the extra charge for repairing a spaceport.
Okay. Now I really want to construct a six-angled plane figure with either more or fewer than six sides.
I like the hybrid version best:
The visitor, getting into the swing of things, yells out, "19!"
The room is dead quiet.
The visitor turns to the host and asks, "What, isn't 19 funny?"
And the host replies, "Well, you didn't tell it very well. Try again."
The visitor calls out, "37!"
Silence again meets him. The host says, "Hmm."
The visitor, in desperation, calls out, "Negative one!"
And the house falls down. Nobody'd ever told that one before.
Even with unenhanced sight, your subjective experience upon seeing 700 nm light might be identical to the subjective experience I get seeing 500 nm light. We would both call the color at 700 nm "red" because it's the name we were both taught to give to our experience, but to you I might "really" be experiencing blue.
Then there's the next step. We might not even have that much commonality. The experience of red as you experience it might not be the same as any color I am capable of experiencing or imagining. Our experiences might be incomprehensible to each other, even though they have the same objective referent, allowing us to intelligibly communicate about specific objects.
(And lest we assume this is all speculation, we do know people who experience synesthesia have inconsistent secondary perceptions. This doesn't necessarily mean primary perceptions are similarly varied, but since we can't experience living in each others' brains, we can't prove that either way.)
Remember when you used to get news like this on Slashdot, first?
/. back in 1997.
No, can't say I do. Which means either my memory is getting faulty, or you were reading
Now if we take the money needed to bring GM mosquito's to market and use it to buy vaccines, how much of the malaria problem can we solve?
None of it. No vaccine exists for malaria, though we've been trying to develop one for decades.
We could spend it on prophylactic drugs, but all the known prophylactics have serious side effects that make them unsuited for long-term use -- and long-term use would be required for people living their whole lives in a malarial area.
Spending the money on indoor residual DDT spraying would work fairly well, but there's an aversion by environmentalists to spraying DDT.
Spending it on bed nets would work well, if it weren't for the fact that proper bed nets make excellent fishing nets, and thus wind up diverted from their intended use. (And then have severe environmental impact as people do things like net an entire river, indiscriminately catching all the fish.)