What does it even matter, for chrissakes? Pick the license you want. But at the end of the day, there's simply no denying that Linux is way up there, and BSD is way down there and I think licensing has something to do with it. But this sort of thumb-up-the-ass "I only run BSD" immature bullshit doesn't reflect well on you. If you're running BSD because you like it better, well cool, but if you're running it because you think you're making some grand statement, grow the fuck up pal.
I ran Coherent for a while, it's chief problem no virtual memory support. Still it's UUCP port was good enough for me to transfer files with the Tandy 6000 Xenix machine I was administering. Still, once Slackware came out, Coherent went on a shelf and never came off again until I finally tossed it and the book about six or seven years ago.
Gimme a break. Compared to the BSD install of the time, Slackware was a whiz. My biggest problem was that it took me a few days to download all the 3-1/2" floppy images from the nearest BBS that was hosting them, and then having to spend the time writing all those images to floppy.
Because Tanenbaum has hated Linus and Linux for twenty years. He and his supporters started no small number of flamewars in their day with all sorts of obnoxious claims, especially after Linus poo-pooed on the idea of microkernels.
But it's all pretty irrelevant now. The fact remains that guys like me picked up Linux in those early years in no small part because everyone looked on Minix as a toy and BSD didn't have the hardware support to allow it to run on almost all 386 and 486 machines you could pick up, from IBMs to home-built jobs. Not only that, but when hardware came out that was problematic, there were guys out there who would literally write up a device driver in a few days or weeks. There was, and still is, very much a "make it work" attitude out there.
Microsoft used to think it had an insurmountable lock. Apple is just a company. It is not a god. It does not have a permanent guarantee on anything. I'm not sure whether your post comes from arrogance, or from insecurity.
But how else do you patent "remote control of a computer" and sue everyone out of business if not by first introducing your own product which you can claim is being harmed by those conniving thieves out there.
I can't imagine any company going into a licensing agreement with any other company not having a clause that says "We stop paying you if the patent is invalidated."
The issue always is time and money. Battling crap patents held by large companies like Microsoft will take years and cost a significant amount of money. Even if you win and somehow manage to get damages, they won't cover the whole bill, and you've spent two or three or even more years in a sort of limbo. You can readily understand why many manufacturers have just said "Fuck it" and paid Microsoft to go away. I'm amazed that B&N is fighting this, because I cannot imagine their lawyers were advising them that this was the way to go.
I don't know if there is anything beyond the fact that B&N doesn't want to go forward with someone perpetually having a hand in their pocket. I'll wager their lawyers are screaming bloody murder about this, and certainly as a short-term strategy, it's probably better just to pay Microsoft's extortion demands, but in the long-term, if you trash Microsoft's crap patents, you deny them any involvement in your affairs.
I suspect in large part because most companies' lawyers basically tell them "Paying the licensing fee is cheaper and surer means to an end than fighting." So far as I can tell, it basically amounts to a vast conspiracy of legal departments on both sides of the fence.
Well on top of everything else because we do specialized government contracts, we have archival requirements, and I simply do not accept that harddrives are an adequate archive media. What I have done is bought the so-called gold DVD discs, though I think the 50 year claims are bogus, if the things last ten years then we've fulfilled our contractual requirements.
At the end of the day I still think tape is the longest lasting and most reliable. Not the cheapest, to be sure, but it is very much a tried and tested technology. I simply do not have enough faith in hard drives and flash drives. I do use a hard drive for a weekly secondary backup, but I still feel a little edgy about it.
We abandoned Symantec a few years ago after just a continuous series of fucked up backups and general grief. We went back to using NTBackup. Now that we're upgrading beyond Server 2003 we'll have to look for another solution, or keep a Server 2003 machine running for backup purposes.
The Greeks were a brilliant lot, but they did not possess science as we know it. To clarify, what I mean is methodological naturalism. That didn't really come into existence until the Renaissance, and didn't begin to blossom as a new way of looking at the world until the Enlightenment. Classical Greek thought was most certainly one of the chief antecedents, and the wide distribution of the writings and essays on great Greek thinkers, particularly in the late Middle Ages greatly spurred this revolution, but science in the most formalized definition did not exist prior to that.
Well, the collapse of the Western Empire directly was related to the Germanic tribes (that's right, it was the goddamn Germans as usual), but indirectly the German tribes themselves were being forced by forces deeper into Eurasia; the various tribes of the Asian Steppes who, by the time they were done, had transformed, seized or destroyed a good many of the civilizations of Late Antiquity. The Eastern Empire survived the first waves of barbarian, and might even have survived the Turkic invaders, if it hadn't been for the brutality of the Italian city states in the sacking of Constantinople.
The Empire was already in serious decline by the time of the Edict of Milan. You can't really blame Christianity for Rome's failure. A modern understanding reveals that Rome was thumped by the first major wave of invaders out of the Asian Steppe. The economic dislocation, which came before the outright physical disruption (ie. the Huns) were too much for the Roman economy to bear. This was an Empire basically kept together through massive military spending, and thus the underlying economy had to be strong, but as that was shaken, Rome basically entered an age of reaction, rather than action, and blow after blow took it out down. Everything Rome did from that point on; Diocletian's reforms, debasement of the currency, conversion to Christianity, the filling of the Legions with German tribesmen of dubious loyalty, all amounted to stop-gate measures.
Not that I'm defending Christianity, being an atheist myself, but I just find blaming Christianity for the failure is really a matter of putting the cart before the horse.
There are aspects of some of their complaints I can't disagree with. Where private concerns received public funds to stay afloat, the bonuses should have been squashed, and in all likelihood, the boards and senior management should have been thrown out on the street.
But in general, where you have a private company that has not dipped into the well, that remains strictly the concern of the shareholders, providing those getting bonuses are not violating the law (ie. various forms of what amounts to fraud and theft).
Other aspects of this movement remain very opaque to me. There seems to be a lot of anger at politicians and bankers, but little recognition of how the middle classes were as much the authors of this catastrophe as their betters, buy accessing cheap credit in obscene proportions. To my mind, a good deal of the Occupiers seem to be taking part in a vocal exercise in blame shifting.
I have a feeling that Adobe themselves are probably working furiously on HTML5 tools even as we speak. I think even they know now that the game is almost up, and it's time to move on from Flash.
It's amazing in one respect, and sad in another. The Late Classical Greeks came so close to their own scientific revolution. If it hadn't been for the near culturally fatal effects of the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks may very well have invented science themselves. Can you imagine where we would be now if scientific methodology had fully blossomed 2,300 years ago?
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I cannot wait until you get that incurable, slow, lingering cancer that causes your every moment on Earth to be an unbearable agony.
What does it even matter, for chrissakes? Pick the license you want. But at the end of the day, there's simply no denying that Linux is way up there, and BSD is way down there and I think licensing has something to do with it. But this sort of thumb-up-the-ass "I only run BSD" immature bullshit doesn't reflect well on you. If you're running BSD because you like it better, well cool, but if you're running it because you think you're making some grand statement, grow the fuck up pal.
I ran Coherent for a while, it's chief problem no virtual memory support. Still it's UUCP port was good enough for me to transfer files with the Tandy 6000 Xenix machine I was administering. Still, once Slackware came out, Coherent went on a shelf and never came off again until I finally tossed it and the book about six or seven years ago.
Gimme a break. Compared to the BSD install of the time, Slackware was a whiz. My biggest problem was that it took me a few days to download all the 3-1/2" floppy images from the nearest BBS that was hosting them, and then having to spend the time writing all those images to floppy.
Because Tanenbaum has hated Linus and Linux for twenty years. He and his supporters started no small number of flamewars in their day with all sorts of obnoxious claims, especially after Linus poo-pooed on the idea of microkernels.
But it's all pretty irrelevant now. The fact remains that guys like me picked up Linux in those early years in no small part because everyone looked on Minix as a toy and BSD didn't have the hardware support to allow it to run on almost all 386 and 486 machines you could pick up, from IBMs to home-built jobs. Not only that, but when hardware came out that was problematic, there were guys out there who would literally write up a device driver in a few days or weeks. There was, and still is, very much a "make it work" attitude out there.
At the end of the day, I prefer books to LCD screens. Bookstores aren't going away any time soon.
Microsoft used to think it had an insurmountable lock. Apple is just a company. It is not a god. It does not have a permanent guarantee on anything. I'm not sure whether your post comes from arrogance, or from insecurity.
Clearly these police departments are not familiar with using VisualBasic to make a GUI.
Thanks for that! It looks to be an awesome blog.
The guy is probably a Ron Paul supporter. They tend to spout nonsense like that.
But how else do you patent "remote control of a computer" and sue everyone out of business if not by first introducing your own product which you can claim is being harmed by those conniving thieves out there.
I can't imagine any company going into a licensing agreement with any other company not having a clause that says "We stop paying you if the patent is invalidated."
The issue always is time and money. Battling crap patents held by large companies like Microsoft will take years and cost a significant amount of money. Even if you win and somehow manage to get damages, they won't cover the whole bill, and you've spent two or three or even more years in a sort of limbo. You can readily understand why many manufacturers have just said "Fuck it" and paid Microsoft to go away. I'm amazed that B&N is fighting this, because I cannot imagine their lawyers were advising them that this was the way to go.
I don't know if there is anything beyond the fact that B&N doesn't want to go forward with someone perpetually having a hand in their pocket. I'll wager their lawyers are screaming bloody murder about this, and certainly as a short-term strategy, it's probably better just to pay Microsoft's extortion demands, but in the long-term, if you trash Microsoft's crap patents, you deny them any involvement in your affairs.
I suspect in large part because most companies' lawyers basically tell them "Paying the licensing fee is cheaper and surer means to an end than fighting." So far as I can tell, it basically amounts to a vast conspiracy of legal departments on both sides of the fence.
Well on top of everything else because we do specialized government contracts, we have archival requirements, and I simply do not accept that harddrives are an adequate archive media. What I have done is bought the so-called gold DVD discs, though I think the 50 year claims are bogus, if the things last ten years then we've fulfilled our contractual requirements.
At the end of the day I still think tape is the longest lasting and most reliable. Not the cheapest, to be sure, but it is very much a tried and tested technology. I simply do not have enough faith in hard drives and flash drives. I do use a hard drive for a weekly secondary backup, but I still feel a little edgy about it.
We abandoned Symantec a few years ago after just a continuous series of fucked up backups and general grief. We went back to using NTBackup. Now that we're upgrading beyond Server 2003 we'll have to look for another solution, or keep a Server 2003 machine running for backup purposes.
The Greeks were a brilliant lot, but they did not possess science as we know it. To clarify, what I mean is methodological naturalism. That didn't really come into existence until the Renaissance, and didn't begin to blossom as a new way of looking at the world until the Enlightenment. Classical Greek thought was most certainly one of the chief antecedents, and the wide distribution of the writings and essays on great Greek thinkers, particularly in the late Middle Ages greatly spurred this revolution, but science in the most formalized definition did not exist prior to that.
Well, the collapse of the Western Empire directly was related to the Germanic tribes (that's right, it was the goddamn Germans as usual), but indirectly the German tribes themselves were being forced by forces deeper into Eurasia; the various tribes of the Asian Steppes who, by the time they were done, had transformed, seized or destroyed a good many of the civilizations of Late Antiquity. The Eastern Empire survived the first waves of barbarian, and might even have survived the Turkic invaders, if it hadn't been for the brutality of the Italian city states in the sacking of Constantinople.
The Empire was already in serious decline by the time of the Edict of Milan. You can't really blame Christianity for Rome's failure. A modern understanding reveals that Rome was thumped by the first major wave of invaders out of the Asian Steppe. The economic dislocation, which came before the outright physical disruption (ie. the Huns) were too much for the Roman economy to bear. This was an Empire basically kept together through massive military spending, and thus the underlying economy had to be strong, but as that was shaken, Rome basically entered an age of reaction, rather than action, and blow after blow took it out down. Everything Rome did from that point on; Diocletian's reforms, debasement of the currency, conversion to Christianity, the filling of the Legions with German tribesmen of dubious loyalty, all amounted to stop-gate measures.
Not that I'm defending Christianity, being an atheist myself, but I just find blaming Christianity for the failure is really a matter of putting the cart before the horse.
There are aspects of some of their complaints I can't disagree with. Where private concerns received public funds to stay afloat, the bonuses should have been squashed, and in all likelihood, the boards and senior management should have been thrown out on the street.
But in general, where you have a private company that has not dipped into the well, that remains strictly the concern of the shareholders, providing those getting bonuses are not violating the law (ie. various forms of what amounts to fraud and theft).
Other aspects of this movement remain very opaque to me. There seems to be a lot of anger at politicians and bankers, but little recognition of how the middle classes were as much the authors of this catastrophe as their betters, buy accessing cheap credit in obscene proportions. To my mind, a good deal of the Occupiers seem to be taking part in a vocal exercise in blame shifting.
I have a feeling that Adobe themselves are probably working furiously on HTML5 tools even as we speak. I think even they know now that the game is almost up, and it's time to move on from Flash.
It's amazing in one respect, and sad in another. The Late Classical Greeks came so close to their own scientific revolution. If it hadn't been for the near culturally fatal effects of the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks may very well have invented science themselves. Can you imagine where we would be now if scientific methodology had fully blossomed 2,300 years ago?
I'll wager rather soon.