If you really want to know, ask nicely. On the other hand, if you must resort to ad-hominem then you already know you've lost, and I have nothing more to say to you.
First, this is a guideline. Any company with a "high" number is not automatically a monopoly, is it?
Well, presumptively they are. Whether they are in fact a monopoly is what the court decides on the basis of evidence presented. MS contested the presumption, but lost in court, so now it is established as fact that they are a monopoly. (That is what courts do.)
Since Microsoft also thinks that the court
made an error in its finding of fact, they contested that conclusion in the court of appeals which upheld the basic conclusion. So as far as I can tell, Microsoft is a monopoly; while they and apologists for them may not wish to admit the truth, an impartial juror has concluded that they are, and has had his conclusion backed by the court of appeals.
Not having followed all of the evidence at
trial, I have no opinion on Microsoft market share. Presumably if Microsoft thought that some evidence was in error, they would have provided opposing evidence.
As one of those zealot jackasses whom you would fire, I think I can safely guess that you won't
need to bother. Most of us quasi-religious types
seek employment more in tune with our ethics.;)
Seriously though, it reads to me like you have
a bit of a chip on your shoulder. Those of us
willing to work with a tenth rate OS have at least gotten it to the point of being third rate. Eventually it will get to first rate, just relax, and let us continue developing it.
It must be a short story or essay because I can't find any reference to it at all on any of my usual searches. I likewise am curious what exactly it is that Jon was referring to though.
I used to work for Lockheed, a contractor for the Department of Defense and never have I seen as
much concern for fair rules of business anywhere else. In my five years there we had two security incidents, where secret documents were inadvertently duplicated and dumped in the trash. In both cases there was no attempt at a cover-up at all; we immediately reported the error to our liasons and began a search though the trash bins for as many of the documents as we could locate, then reported the results.
In another case where we were in a competitive bid with Martin Marietta on a new contract one of our managers hopped a taxi from the airport with one of the Martin managers and found after dropping off the other manager that he had left behind a briefcase full of documents. I've never seen people as upset; he returned the briefcase unopened and removed himself from the bid process to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and got a service award from the company for doing the honest thing to boot.
Another contractor I worked for after Lockheed was Unisys Corporation, which had one east coast office which overbilled the government about a hundred million dollars on a time and materials contract. Unisys plead-bargained, and accepted a penalty of close to a billion dollars, and put in internal auditors to make sure that no division would ever do anything like that again, and instituted mandatory company-wide ethics training.
Never outside the DOD contracting industry have I ever met companies as aware or as careful to avoid conflict of interest. I have no direct experience with the DOJ, but if they are anything like the DOD I would think twice before trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
It doesn't even have to be patent free as long as you hold the patents yourselves, and you are willing to let an open source project use them royalty free.
Many open source projects use patented technologies; it is just that since they can't afford any license fee for the patents, when a patent owner gets upset the open source project has to code around the patent, (which has been done more than once.)
Let me explain. I was responding to the post I followed up to; one about AI recognition of SPAM. I was specifically not writing about the community spam identification effort with hashes, as my post clearly shows.
Interesting work, but I notice that you are only examining trigrams, and you are using an even weight factor. To improve selection you probably at least need to use variable weights (a fuzzy logic neural network rather than binary logic) and train the network with more sample spam.
I've been working on a similar project but using additional factors that help identify spam such as violations of the mail RFC's, and other header indicators, in addition to NLP. I have a prototype that I'm using to score all of my inbox e-mail and am using that to tune the weight factors and add in new factors as I encounter them. It would be interesting to combine your approach with mine I think, since I hadn't thought of analyzing trigrams.
Anyway, if you are interested send me an e-mail and I'll give you my current perl code.
Actually I was probably trying to set a variable within the loop and inspecting it after the loop completed. But you made a good call; I generalized
the case that I knew didn't work incorrectly; so thanks for the correction.
That has really been annoying me for a couple of years now, just not enough to really figure out why the hell it was broken.
...runs the last expression in a pipe chain in a subshell. Bizarre.
To be honest, I have yet to run into much trouble with a script starting with #!/bin/sh with/bin/bash, and I've been using the latter for years. If any of you have had problems related to this, please tell us what the problem was and how you solved it.
The following works in UNIX sh, but not in bash:
/sbin/ls -l | while read bits links user group size junk ; do
echo $user $group
done
To work around the bug you can either put the output of ls into a file and redirect input to read from the file, or you can use an immediate mode file (EOF) in the script, but pipes are broken with respect to read.
Xbitmaps using seperate mask and data were included in X11R3 (possibly earlier, but that is the first version I worked with.) XPM which combines the mask into a single file has been around since at least '89, but there are numerous earlier versions of the same thing used for blitter objects and sprites. Alpha masking I'm not sure about, but I'd look for something on antialiased mouse cursors or the like.
The CML project got started when kernel developers started complaining about how hard it was to maintain the current configuration tool. The idea was to stop maintaining xconfig (and brethren), and move wholesale to CML.
That obviously hasn't happened yet, but mostly only because Eric decided to implement CML in Python which a number of kernel hackers refuse to install on their systems (originally because it wasn't GPL compatibly licensed, and these days probably ostensibly because it isn't GPL'd, but more likely because it has icky syntax and they don't want to learn it or reconfigure their editors to edit it.)
Anyway, the idea was not so much to improve on xconfig, but to give you the ability to continue configuring your kernel once xconfig was no longer being maintained.
I hadn't even ever heard of Switch. Here in the US you can get Visa cards in either credit or debit varieties (both from your local bank), so it isn't really important to distinguish between the two.
I had heard that europeans used weird payment systems, but the ones I had heard about were payment from Cell-phone direct billing, and from cell-phone pre-paid cards (neither of which have ever picked up any steam in the US due to infrastructural difficulties; it would take weeks for the phone company to figure out that your debit card or prepaid card had been overdrawn.)
The advantage of open source licenses is that even when the original author loses interest in the project, another maintainer can come along and work with the code. Yes the original source is still owned by the original author, but anyone can maintain the project.
Perhaps it is stupid to be willing to pay for something of value O' Jesus Troll; but if you aren't willing to do that then don't be too surprised when what you value disappears.
And anyway, I think far too many companies assume that the open source community is cheap when in reality we are merely frugal. I don't want to spend money on worthless fluff just to feed the insatiable corporate greed (cable television for instance), but I'm quite willing to give my money to support things that need my support; the EFF for example, or Salon, or the FSF, or my local public radio station...
If anything I think that the open source community has historically had a stronger sense of community involvement, service, and duty.
Personally I think they are going about it all wrong. The valuable service that SF provides is not to businesses, but to the open source community. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount for them to continue hosting my tiny project there, but more
importantly, Sourceforge right now contains just mountains of crap.
Donations to the service would be one way of weeding out dead projects from the list I get back when searching for something interesting. Not that I'd recommend deleting projects that are dead, but it would be nice if dead projects could be taken over by someone so inclined, by making a donation. Like your DNS fees, if you stop donating the name still exists, but it is up for grabs to the next person interested in managing it.
I say this as someone who really could host the whole development of my project on my home server. It isn't that I don't have the connectivity, or the bandwidth, or the expertise. I'd prefer to be on sourceforge because it gives my project some exposure to other developers, but that becomes useless if no one on SF searches for existing projects because 90% of them are dead.
Given the gray area (which I think is also shaped differently depending on whether we're looking at an already heavily promoted act (such as Britney Spears) versus an independent (such as... err... someone I've never, ever heard of),...
The Naked Barbies/Vagabond Lovers are my favorite local band. Seriously, get out and support your local bands; the players are accessible, you don't have to wait in lines or pay hundreds of dollars for front seat tickets, and the music is much more edgy and interesting than yet another crappy Rush album (my favorite commercial band.)
Ridiculous tricks like that wouldn't be required if programmers were encouraged to write applications which were independent of screen resolution.
Last week I was up in Oregon helping a friend who just turned 80 to configure his Windows desktop, and he had it configured for 640x400 on a 17" monitor. I tried upping the resolution to 1024x800 but he couldn't read the text any longer. And from my own experience with Windows, I know that bumping up all font sizes in prefs just makes the Windows application dialogues illegible.
So after showing him my online photo album, I set the resolution back to 640x400.
I agree Microsoft shouldn't force their preferences on anyone (and OEMs should be free to install different CD burning capability if they so choose) but I don't agree with making it illegal for them to supply it.
Oh, but you should care. You should care a lot! When a monopoly includes extra features in a system the features that they choose become the lowest common denominator. If you need more functionality than the monopoly provides, it will be impossible to buy it because all competitors have been starved out of the market.
Take a look for example at MPEG4. Microsoft included the Codec for MPEG4 in Windows, but purposely restricted the quality of the output so that it couldn't encode full-frame video. The feature was already implemented, they just didn't want anyone to have access to it, and because MPEG4 is included with windows it is essentially impossible for another company to offer a competing MPEG4 implementation on a commercial basis (instead you get hacks like DiVX;) which other people will kindly point out to you are 'illegal'.
Ultimately the only way to withstand monopolistic bundling of software is through non-commercial development processes like those of the open source community, and the effectiveness of even those ideas to provide a choice against a commercial monopoly have yet to be proven.
For a real grass-roots open source project you can't
simply send an RFP or an RFQ to the developers. The quoted price is '$0', and the completion date will be 'When I get around to it.'
You could hire contractors on a time contract to assist an open source project that is already going in a direction you think will be valuable to you; or you can go through the standard RFP process to contract for the development of a custom software solution, and then open source the resulting code, but even doing that isn't trivial.
There are companies like CollabNet who specialize in forming communities around software that companies want to open source. Or you can start the community yourselves, but community building is a labor of love -- it takes forever, and you have to be committed. I speak here from personal experience since we tried to form a
community around a product we initially wrote internally and failed miserably in attracting a wider community of interest.
There are a few open source projects that are centered around consulting companies; Jabber is one, but there is also MySQL, Zope, and Lutris among others. If your problem fits one of their areas of expertise, then by all means send them an RFP; but you can't RFP the world. It really doesn't generate interest in people who don't already have a contracting mindset.
IANAL but as I understand it the only effect it would have is on future lawsuits between the RIAA and Napster (or whomever they used their rights against to illegally thwart competition.) In Napster.v. RIAA 2, Napster might be presumptively innocent of copyright violation.
Possibly, but then you would have a follow-up question to probe the answer. Are multimedia applications simply unimportant for Linux, or have you changed your mind re: the government backing free trade.v. microsoft. Linus wasn't being obstinate in the interview, he just wasn't answering questions that weren't interesting -- this approach ties the question back to his own previously stated beliefs, and there are few people so jaded they won't jump to defend something they've previously said.
Give me a break. If you think you can do it better, sign up as a journalist on OSNews and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Please, you are welcome!
No one was claiming it was easy; but even in the case of trained journalists it sometimes happens that the interviewer and the interviewee are completely out of synch. To be interesting and relevant the interviewer needs to get a feel for his subject; with Linus this is incredibly easy. You can refer to kernelnotes for summaries of the linux developer's mailing list, you can get tapes from the Linuxworld conference roundtable discussions he participated in, and you can look back at the myriad interviews he has done.
Use those references to make your questions mor e interesting; for example instead of the question about XP you might have written:
Linus, at the Linuxworld conference in Moscone last month you posited that using Microsoft tools would never become a tax on computer use because that is the prerogative of governments. With XP's current emphasis on adding digital rights management how will Linux be able to continue if it cannot be used in conjunction with emerging media?
Presumably the Judge will have made them release all of the relevant data that could be used for defense. If the executive and judicial branches are both corrupt, there is little point in waiting on the legislators (soul keepers of righteousness that they are) to clean things up. The best you can hope for if that were the case is that the press will somehow get hold of the truth and expose the fraud for what it is.
Honestly though, I don't think it is very likely that either the FBI or the Judge are corrupt in this case, much less both.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the anomymous coward here.
Well, presumptively they are. Whether they are in fact a monopoly is what the court decides on the basis of evidence presented. MS contested the presumption, but lost in court, so now it is established as fact that they are a monopoly. (That is what courts do.)
Since Microsoft also thinks that the court made an error in its finding of fact, they contested that conclusion in the court of appeals which upheld the basic conclusion. So as far as I can tell, Microsoft is a monopoly; while they and apologists for them may not wish to admit the truth, an impartial juror has concluded that they are, and has had his conclusion backed by the court of appeals.
Not having followed all of the evidence at trial, I have no opinion on Microsoft market share. Presumably if Microsoft thought that some evidence was in error, they would have provided opposing evidence.
Seriously though, it reads to me like you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder. Those of us willing to work with a tenth rate OS have at least gotten it to the point of being third rate. Eventually it will get to first rate, just relax, and let us continue developing it.
It must be a short story or essay because I can't find any reference to it at all on any of my usual searches. I likewise am curious what exactly it is that Jon was referring to though.
In another case where we were in a competitive bid with Martin Marietta on a new contract one of our managers hopped a taxi from the airport with one of the Martin managers and found after dropping off the other manager that he had left behind a briefcase full of documents. I've never seen people as upset; he returned the briefcase unopened and removed himself from the bid process to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and got a service award from the company for doing the honest thing to boot.
Another contractor I worked for after Lockheed was Unisys Corporation, which had one east coast office which overbilled the government about a hundred million dollars on a time and materials contract. Unisys plead-bargained, and accepted a penalty of close to a billion dollars, and put in internal auditors to make sure that no division would ever do anything like that again, and instituted mandatory company-wide ethics training.
Never outside the DOD contracting industry have I ever met companies as aware or as careful to avoid conflict of interest. I have no direct experience with the DOJ, but if they are anything like the DOD I would think twice before trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
Many open source projects use patented technologies; it is just that since they can't afford any license fee for the patents, when a patent owner gets upset the open source project has to code around the patent, (which has been done more than once.)
Let me explain. I was responding to the post I followed up to; one about AI recognition of SPAM. I was specifically not writing about the community spam identification effort with hashes, as my post clearly shows.
I've been working on a similar project but using additional factors that help identify spam such as violations of the mail RFC's, and other header indicators, in addition to NLP. I have a prototype that I'm using to score all of my inbox e-mail and am using that to tune the weight factors and add in new factors as I encounter them. It would be interesting to combine your approach with mine I think, since I hadn't thought of analyzing trigrams.
Anyway, if you are interested send me an e-mail and I'll give you my current perl code.
That has really been annoying me for a couple of years now, just not enough to really figure out why the hell it was broken.
...runs the last expression in a pipe chain in a subshell. Bizarre.
The following works in UNIX sh, but not in bash:
echo $user $group
done
To work around the bug you can either put the output of ls into a file and redirect input to read from the file, or you can use an immediate mode file (EOF) in the script, but pipes are broken with respect to read.
Xbitmaps using seperate mask and data were included in X11R3 (possibly earlier, but that is the first version I worked with.) XPM which combines the mask into a single file has been around since at least '89, but there are numerous earlier versions of the same thing used for blitter objects and sprites. Alpha masking I'm not sure about, but I'd look for something on antialiased mouse cursors or the like.
That obviously hasn't happened yet, but mostly only because Eric decided to implement CML in Python which a number of kernel hackers refuse to install on their systems (originally because it wasn't GPL compatibly licensed, and these days probably ostensibly because it isn't GPL'd, but more likely because it has icky syntax and they don't want to learn it or reconfigure their editors to edit it.)
Anyway, the idea was not so much to improve on xconfig, but to give you the ability to continue configuring your kernel once xconfig was no longer being maintained.
I had heard that europeans used weird payment systems, but the ones I had heard about were payment from Cell-phone direct billing, and from cell-phone pre-paid cards (neither of which have ever picked up any steam in the US due to infrastructural difficulties; it would take weeks for the phone company to figure out that your debit card or prepaid card had been overdrawn.)
Perhaps it is stupid to be willing to pay for something of value O' Jesus Troll; but if you aren't willing to do that then don't be too surprised when what you value disappears.
And anyway, I think far too many companies assume that the open source community is cheap when in reality we are merely frugal. I don't want to spend money on worthless fluff just to feed the insatiable corporate greed (cable television for instance), but I'm quite willing to give my money to support things that need my support; the EFF for example, or Salon, or the FSF, or my local public radio station...
If anything I think that the open source community has historically had a stronger sense of community involvement, service, and duty.
Donations to the service would be one way of weeding out dead projects from the list I get back when searching for something interesting. Not that I'd recommend deleting projects that are dead, but it would be nice if dead projects could be taken over by someone so inclined, by making a donation. Like your DNS fees, if you stop donating the name still exists, but it is up for grabs to the next person interested in managing it.
I say this as someone who really could host the whole development of my project on my home server. It isn't that I don't have the connectivity, or the bandwidth, or the expertise. I'd prefer to be on sourceforge because it gives my project some exposure to other developers, but that becomes useless if no one on SF searches for existing projects because 90% of them are dead.
The Naked Barbies/Vagabond Lovers are my favorite local band. Seriously, get out and support your local bands; the players are accessible, you don't have to wait in lines or pay hundreds of dollars for front seat tickets, and the music is much more edgy and interesting than yet another crappy Rush album (my favorite commercial band.)
Last week I was up in Oregon helping a friend who just turned 80 to configure his Windows desktop, and he had it configured for 640x400 on a 17" monitor. I tried upping the resolution to 1024x800 but he couldn't read the text any longer. And from my own experience with Windows, I know that bumping up all font sizes in prefs just makes the Windows application dialogues illegible.
So after showing him my online photo album, I set the resolution back to 640x400.
Oh, but you should care. You should care a lot! When a monopoly includes extra features in a system the features that they choose become the lowest common denominator. If you need more functionality than the monopoly provides, it will be impossible to buy it because all competitors have been starved out of the market.
Take a look for example at MPEG4. Microsoft included the Codec for MPEG4 in Windows, but purposely restricted the quality of the output so that it couldn't encode full-frame video. The feature was already implemented, they just didn't want anyone to have access to it, and because MPEG4 is included with windows it is essentially impossible for another company to offer a competing MPEG4 implementation on a commercial basis (instead you get hacks like DiVX;) which other people will kindly point out to you are 'illegal'.
Ultimately the only way to withstand monopolistic bundling of software is through non-commercial development processes like those of the open source community, and the effectiveness of even those ideas to provide a choice against a commercial monopoly have yet to be proven.
You could hire contractors on a time contract to assist an open source project that is already going in a direction you think will be valuable to you; or you can go through the standard RFP process to contract for the development of a custom software solution, and then open source the resulting code, but even doing that isn't trivial.
There are companies like CollabNet who specialize in forming communities around software that companies want to open source. Or you can start the community yourselves, but community building is a labor of love -- it takes forever, and you have to be committed. I speak here from personal experience since we tried to form a community around a product we initially wrote internally and failed miserably in attracting a wider community of interest.
There are a few open source projects that are centered around consulting companies; Jabber is one, but there is also MySQL, Zope, and Lutris among others. If your problem fits one of their areas of expertise, then by all means send them an RFP; but you can't RFP the world. It really doesn't generate interest in people who don't already have a contracting mindset.
IANAL but as I understand it the only effect it would have is on future lawsuits between the RIAA and Napster (or whomever they used their rights against to illegally thwart competition.) In Napster .v. RIAA 2, Napster might be presumptively innocent of copyright violation.
Possibly, but then you would have a follow-up question to probe the answer. Are multimedia applications simply unimportant for Linux, or have you changed your mind re: the government backing free trade .v. microsoft. Linus wasn't being obstinate in the interview, he just wasn't answering questions that weren't interesting -- this approach ties the question back to his own previously stated beliefs, and there are few people so jaded they won't jump to defend something they've previously said.
It could be a sort of Zen rhetorical question. A sort of 'is it really important if I say more, or less, cosmically speaking?'.
Or he could just be a first post Troll who is wondering how much he has to write to get past the lameness filters. The subject is just a red herring.
Or perhaps I'm hungry. Yes that seems more likely. -- hhgttg
Give me a break. If you think you can do it better, sign up as a journalist on OSNews and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Please, you are welcome!
No one was claiming it was easy; but even in the case of trained journalists it sometimes happens that the interviewer and the interviewee are completely out of synch. To be interesting and relevant the interviewer needs to get a feel for his subject; with Linus this is incredibly easy. You can refer to kernelnotes for summaries of the linux developer's mailing list, you can get tapes from the Linuxworld conference roundtable discussions he participated in, and you can look back at the myriad interviews he has done.
Use those references to make your questions mor e interesting; for example instead of the question about XP you might have written:
Presumably the Judge will have made them release all of the relevant data that could be used for defense. If the executive and judicial branches are both corrupt, there is little point in waiting on the legislators (soul keepers of righteousness that they are) to clean things up. The best you can hope for if that were the case is that the press will somehow get hold of the truth and expose the fraud for what it is.
Honestly though, I don't think it is very likely that either the FBI or the Judge are corrupt in this case, much less both.