My comment was a little extreme, you were right to point that out. Nevertheless, my main point still stands.. one never knows when, as a customer, my needs will become, as you say, a minority or orphaned market in the eyes of a CSS vendor I have become dependent on. Who needs that? With OSS, at least, I could go out and hire a person or company to continue maintenance on a piece of software critical to my operations. That is rarely possible with CSS. I may have been off calling that a `cavalier attitude' on the part Metrowerks, since they have not actually come out with a product to drop as yet. But for other vendors which actually have dropped products and left their customers in the lurch, I say again that it is a cavalier attitude. Other industries don't do this to their customers (think auto parts for example), so leaving customers in the lurch should not and need not be a prevalant feature of the software industry.
Yet Another Reason Not To Depend On Closed Source Products -- your future is not in your own hands.
I don't see the point of complaining. A cavaliar attitude towards customers is an inherent feature of closed source software. Even if you manage to get Metrowerks to reverse, what about the next closed source product you decide to depend on? You going to spend your life doing these kinds of battles?
The best certificate is your reputation. This form of certification for Linux work has been wildly successful so far. Do we really want to water this down with a bureaucratic, rules laden, corrupt paper certification system modeled on Microsoft's laughably ineffective MSCE?
And, I can't help but remember that hoary old rule, the good drives out the excellent, the barely adequate drives out the good. If the PHBs get their way with this paper certification stuff, we can expect to see corporate contributions to Linux eventually drop to the same low standards they are at in the Wintel world.
The improvement in communication amoung the population that has been fostered by the Internet, with Slashdot as the poster child, may mark the end of those too-good promotions where the company expects to come out ahead due to the general populations' misunderstanding of the terms of the deal.
The author sees today's good times as the hopeful beginnings of Utopia. I see them as a nearly-exact recreation of the accomplishments and attitudes of the Victorian era. And we all know what followed that.
> Do we actually need laws to stop these people from bringing stupid lawsuits up? Though IANAL, there did exist at one time the concept in law of a `trivial lawsuit'. That is, anyone was allowed to file a lawsuit for any reason, no matter how silly or nefarious, but before going to trial, and before much money was spent, the suite would be reviewed by a judge. If the judge thought the case had no merit, it was simply thrown out. This mechanism largely prevented the use of meritless lawsuits as a weapon to browbeat opponents into submission.
The trivial lawsuit is a faint concept today. It has been crushed by a flood of contradictory and excessively vague laws that in effect, make nontrivial nearly every potential lawsuit that can be dreamed up. For that we can blame our legislatures.
Roblimo, please post a followup when they throw this out of court. Don't leave us thinking that the world never corrects it's errors.. as an ordinary newspaper would do to it's readers.
A corporation couldn't completely coopt GPL'ed software away from us, but it could do so partially. Perhaps the most important design point of the GPL is that it requires improvements from whatever source to go back to the community. Stolen software by definition fails this test. Nothing is more discouraging to a public-spirited developer than to see lots of enhancements made to their cool software, but each appearing in a seperate, sealed, proprietary package, unmergable and unimprovable by those that get the itch to do so, while all the while the common publicly-available base sits there, rotting away, ignored by all but the origional developer. By forcing contributions to be public, I feel that this feature of the GPL is the single greatest factor accounting for the growth of free software in the world today and is the driving engine for the success of the bazaar model, simply because it requires those with the itch to improve to contribute their work to others that develop that same itch to improve.
...which argued that scientists got the important patent in 1990 by misrepresenting their experiments and falsely claiming advances over previous discoveries.
I love this phrasing! It applies to almost all software patents in existance today.
Too bad the `falsely claiming advances' argument would have to be used to invalidate each software patent one-by-one, instead of en-masse, as they deserve to be.
My method of avoiding RSI is simplicity itself. When my mom said `get your elbows off the dinner table', I ignored her. So now, I both eat and type with my elbows up on the table. The wrists are relaxed and in a natural-feeling position, and I have no pressure being applied to their insides like those who use wristpads. Of course, you have to push your monitor and keyboard back a foot or two, which no one around here except me seems to want to do..
Its seems that not too many people remember the Bad Old Days when the only two options available to a developer were to claim full ownership via copyright or release his software public domain. Public domain had the serious problem that, if the program was any good at all, nearly everyone that made an enhancement would re-release the whole package as privately-owned software. This goes against the spirit of giving back to the community what you took from it, which was the intent of what many authors had wanted when they released their software public domain. Now, with the GPL, that desirable attribute can be accomplished. Calling this effect virii I feel is a complete misdirection of the intent and the accomplishment of the GPL.
The problem with this is that the government need merely to pass a law making it illegal for you to defend your computer against their attacks. If done right they would, in fact, make that the worst crime possible you could do with a computer.
Thankfully, just because they have the "legal" right to crack your computer doesn't mean they "can" crack your computer. We will just have to keep beefing up security until they don't have a chance in hell of ever getting in!
Rather than spoofing a lamp, replace one of the ubiquitous router boxes scattered throughout the lab with one with a little more `capability'. That would eliminate the `why in the heck does this lamp have an Ethernet connection' giveaway.
Killfiles are not the correct answer to threats
on
Usenet Gag Order
·
· Score: 2
Those posts suggesting that killfiles are the answer are just plain wrong. A killfile in response to a threat is a fancy way of playing ostrich, of sticking your head in the sand to avoid seeing the dangers around you.
I, as a reader and USENET contributor, care about my life. I don't want to miss potential, credible threats to my life and property with an improper setup of my killfile. I want to know what is happening around me. Heck, I even care about my reputation. I don't want to miss a smear because the smearer is in my killfile.
My rule-of-thumb summary: a killfile should be used only to remove the killjoys from your life, not the killers.
You're forgetting that MS doesn't have to release IE under the GPL. It is perfectly free to continue to use its standard proprietary license. And there is no requirement that IE be any more `decent' than it is today: enough people like IE just the way it is, and it is just those people would make it a serious contender for the Linux browser market.
As other posters have stated, the embedded market is a realtime (or more properly, low latency) market, which Linux does not support well. Fortunately, the drive to finer grained semaphoring to support ever larger SMPs also, quite accidently, goes a long way to making Linux a low latency kernel.. which is exactly what the embedded device world needs.
Slashdot Mirror
The EFF fulfills this function beautifully. I and many other /.'ers sent in our $65 after their recent TRO victory in California.
Artistic expression is what a design patent protects. Apple would be wise to file for one. [the usual IANAL disclaimer]
My comment was a little extreme, you were right to point that out. Nevertheless, my main point still stands .. one never knows when, as a customer, my needs will become, as you say, a minority or orphaned market in the eyes of a CSS vendor I have become dependent on. Who needs that? With OSS, at least, I could go out and hire a person or company to continue maintenance on a piece of software critical to my operations. That is rarely possible with CSS. I may have been off calling that a `cavalier attitude' on the part Metrowerks, since they have not actually come out with a product to drop as yet. But for other vendors which actually have dropped products and left their customers in the lurch, I say again that it is a cavalier attitude. Other industries don't do this to their customers (think auto parts for example), so leaving customers in the lurch should not and need not be a prevalant feature of the software industry.
Yet Another Reason Not To Depend On Closed Source Products -- your future is not in your own hands.
I don't see the point of complaining. A cavaliar attitude towards customers is an inherent feature of closed source software. Even if you manage to get Metrowerks to reverse, what about the next closed source product you decide to depend on? You going to spend your life doing these kinds of battles?
And, I can't help but remember that hoary old rule, the good drives out the excellent, the barely adequate drives out the good. If the PHBs get their way with this paper certification stuff, we can expect to see corporate contributions to Linux eventually drop to the same low standards they are at in the Wintel world.
An excellent primer on video codec technology may be found here.
My apologies.
The improvement in communication amoung the population that has been fostered by the Internet, with Slashdot as the poster child, may mark the end of those too-good promotions where the company expects to come out ahead due to the general populations' misunderstanding of the terms of the deal.
This only goes to show that the best web hosting site is on your own computer.
The author sees today's good times as the hopeful beginnings of Utopia. I see them as a nearly-exact recreation of the accomplishments and attitudes of the Victorian era. And we all know what followed that.
Though IANAL, there did exist at one time the concept in law of a `trivial lawsuit'. That is, anyone was allowed to file a lawsuit for any reason, no matter how silly or nefarious, but before going to trial, and before much money was spent, the suite would be reviewed by a judge. If the judge thought the case had no merit, it was simply thrown out. This mechanism largely prevented the use of meritless lawsuits as a weapon to browbeat opponents into submission.
The trivial lawsuit is a faint concept today. It has been crushed by a flood of contradictory and excessively vague laws that in effect, make nontrivial nearly every potential lawsuit that can be dreamed up. For that we can blame our legislatures.
Roblimo, please post a followup when they throw this out of court. Don't leave us thinking that the world never corrects it's errors .. as an ordinary newspaper would do to it's readers.
A corporation couldn't completely coopt GPL'ed software away from us, but it could do so partially. Perhaps the most important design point of the GPL is that it requires improvements from whatever source to go back to the community. Stolen software by definition fails this test. Nothing is more discouraging to a public-spirited developer than to see lots of enhancements made to their cool software, but each appearing in a seperate, sealed, proprietary package, unmergable and unimprovable by those that get the itch to do so, while all the while the common publicly-available base sits there, rotting away, ignored by all but the origional developer. By forcing contributions to be public, I feel that this feature of the GPL is the single greatest factor accounting for the growth of free software in the world today and is the driving engine for the success of the bazaar model, simply because it requires those with the itch to improve to contribute their work to others that develop that same itch to improve.
Strange. I noticed the opposite. Did you miss those deprecating quotes in the sidebars?
The end of the article clearly states that the defendents did not retain counsel. If they had, the results very likely would have been different.
I love this phrasing! It applies to almost all software patents in existance today.
Too bad the `falsely claiming advances' argument would have to be used to invalidate each software patent one-by-one, instead of en-masse, as they deserve to be.
My method of avoiding RSI is simplicity itself. When my mom said `get your elbows off the dinner table', I ignored her. So now, I both eat and type with my elbows up on the table. The wrists are relaxed and in a natural-feeling position, and I have no pressure being applied to their insides like those who use wristpads. Of course, you have to push your monitor and keyboard back a foot or two, which no one around here except me seems to want to do ..
Its seems that not too many people remember the Bad Old Days when the only two options available to a developer were to claim full ownership via copyright or release his software public domain. Public domain had the serious problem that, if the program was any good at all, nearly everyone that made an enhancement would re-release the whole package as privately-owned software. This goes against the spirit of giving back to the community what you took from it, which was the intent of what many authors had wanted when they released their software public domain. Now, with the GPL, that desirable attribute can be accomplished. Calling this effect virii I feel is a complete misdirection of the intent and the accomplishment of the GPL.
Rather than spoofing a lamp, replace one of the ubiquitous router boxes scattered throughout the lab with one with a little more `capability'. That would eliminate the `why in the heck does this lamp have an Ethernet connection' giveaway.
I, as a reader and USENET contributor, care about my life. I don't want to miss potential, credible threats to my life and property with an improper setup of my killfile. I want to know what is happening around me. Heck, I even care about my reputation. I don't want to miss a smear because the smearer is in my killfile.
My rule-of-thumb summary: a killfile should be used only to remove the killjoys from your life, not the killers.
You're forgetting that MS doesn't have to release IE under the GPL. It is perfectly free to continue to use its standard proprietary license. And there is no requirement that IE be any more `decent' than it is today: enough people like IE just the way it is, and it is just those people would make it a serious contender for the Linux browser market.
Forcing users to change their passwords once a month is bad security. That just means /everyone/ writes them down somewhere near their terminal.
As other posters have stated, the embedded market is a realtime (or more properly, low latency) market, which Linux does not support well. Fortunately, the drive to finer grained semaphoring to support ever larger SMPs also, quite accidently, goes a long way to making Linux a low latency kernel .. which is exactly what the embedded device world needs.