Bah ... it *proves* that he cares
on
Interview With Linus
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Relevant quote from the article:
I was the technology guy who had no clue about business.
He admits that he does not know enough to have a good opinion, so he keeps it to himself. *Sniff*... smells like "maturity" to me...
I would also like to know Linus's true opinion on the matter, but his voice carries a lot more force than an unknown's voice (like mine!), would. That means that he has a responsibility to be more careful in what he says than I have to be.
I would like to thank theage.com.au for the advertisement for women's underwear that was embedded in a technical article. Apparently, they have not heard that people in the U.S. can get *FIRED* for reading things like that...
Grrrr.
Yes, reloading the page made a different ad pop up in the space, and fortunately, my boss was *not* in my cube at the time.
Also, Yes, our current "harassment" policies are getting out of hand over here, but it will take a while for this puritanical obsession to die out, again.
At a previous employer (in the automotive industry), I was given control of a large materials storage system after the previous programmer had gotten fed up with it and demanded to be transferred. Enter the young and enthusiastic new guy - me.
I spent months analyzing and learning how the physical system worked. There were days when I disabled the standard software and ran the system by hand, just trying to squeeze out a little more performance. Eventually, I took every trick that I had learned, and reworking the software to implenet the tricks that I had learned. Launch day came... and went... with little fanfare. Ahh, sweet success.
Then I started noticing that the software was doing things that surprised me. After review, I pieced together waht it was doing, and it had done exactly what it was supposed to do... but the fact remained that it managed to outperform my expectations. I grew kind of proud of my creation, then, knowing that it was running day in and day-out, making small (or big) adjustments to the way the facility ran... occasionally screwing up, but on the whole, increasing net throughput by roughly 6%.
It did not take too long for my ego to kick in, and I was saying that "I run the plant, even when I am asleep!" Not exactly true, of course, as the algorithms that I had written were not capable of true thought, and my co-workers called me out on it.
"Fine," I replied, "maybe not me, directly, but the decisions being made are based on the way that I think, so it is an echo of me that runs the plant." They could not argue that point, but they had managed to puncture my ego a bit. Draw.
However, it wasn't much of a leap of logic to go from, "an echo of me" to "a ghost of me." And it is independant - I no longer work for that company, but my ghost still works there.
The amusing thing is that every time they have tried to kill my ghost, the replacement software has not been able to maintain the performance. I had sacrificed a bottleneck to get the performance boost, but eventually, my decision became the incorrect thing to do for political reasons. Oops. I told them that there would be a problem, and got so frustrated that I eventually quit so a "yes"-man could tell them that they could undo my change and still meet performance. To date, I know of three failed launch attempts. My own ghost... is fighting back...
... and winning...
... for the moment.
You can say the same thing about any recorded material - Hendrix's ghost continues to play on my CD player, and Sir Alec still acts in my VCR. I have even had a recent argument with the ghost of Socrates - alas, I could not get him to reply to my objections about his assumptions.
Every company that I have worked for has had someone perform a trademark search when they were contemplating releasing a new product. Some ideas would come back in tatters, while others were wide open.
This task is typically performed by a lawyer, although you can pare down some things by checking for the trademark you want at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
It's difficult to quantify, but every accountant that I know manages to put a dollar amount on it.
But, imagine if you will, a computer that doesn't crash, doesn't waste time, doesn't require obscure work-arounds to make everything work... all those customers will then have a little extra time each day to mkae more money and then to spend it on Microsoft Products!
As part of my life at a previous employer (a well known Fortune 500/single-letter stock symbol on the NYSE company), I found out that I was supporting a piece of software for a very large contract with another company... a few days before someone decided to start sending the 2000 model year production units into the database. The previous guy who had supported it had just quit a month or so after the guy who ran the software for three years had quit.
I did not know the software, nor did I know about that decision (Thanks, Pat!) so the unusually large file that I received that day was processed just like every other file had been. And so the fun began.
Two days later, when I pieced together the problem, I asked the DBAs to roll back to the Monday-night database backups. That made the situation worse by undoing three days worth of work by the local engineers. So, we had to roll the damaged database back in, and had to recover the lost data the hard way.
They would build a day's worth of production, and we would put two or three days worth of their missing data back into their system, so we slowly caught back up.
Five weeks later I gave my notice, and went to work in the I/S shop of a Pizza company.
Of course, this was a year and a half ahead of the "day" that the media focused on, so the whole thing was easily kept quiet and dusted under the rug. "Nope! No Y2K problems here!". Just like all of those credit card companies that did not handle "02/00" very well, in 1996.
Title 17 denies the original content creator any royalties on the resale of an item that has already been sold once. Once it has been sold to me, I can immediately turn around and dispose of that particular copy of the work in any fashion I choose, including resale. This is typically at a financial loss to me.
I find this quote notable: Our members want nothing more than a fair opportunity to earn royalties for their book sales whatever the sales outlet. There is a presumption that they are not being treated fairly, when in fact, they are already being treated fairly. One copy of the book has is out in the marketplace, and royalties have been paid, one time, for one copy.
Yes, I believe that most authors are not being compensated for their efforts properly. However, taking away my rights in an attempt to correct a problem is not the way to do things.
In other words, if they were truly professional, and truly respected the rights of their customers, they would have never even sent that letter to Amazon.com.
The Guild cannot dictate business practices to Amazon.com any more than I can. If Amazon.com chooses to continue to sell used books in this way, so be it. If Amazon.com chooses to restrict the sale of used books as they have been requested to, so be it.
However, if Amazon.com (or any other such company) can be intimidated into a course of action that infringes upon my rights (and the rights of others) under Title 17, then the Sherman Act comes into play.
It's the appearance of impropriety that I am objecting to. So long as they do not cross the line between "asking" and "intimidating", they are fine.
Now, what are the chances that anyone can actually intimidate Amazon.com? I'd say zero.
Cornell has the legal text for the Fair Use Doctrine on-line here.
Of note is this text:
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
In other words, the Author's Guild does not have a leg to stand on, until the day someone sells a book that they did not own. If they try to enforce this, they could be eating a Sherman Anti-Trust Act lawsuit.
I checked out that anti-Cassini website under the predictions of doom link, and found that the author's primary complaint was that the 74 pounts of Plutonium might crash into the Earth. Maybe over Africa.
Let's see. Africa has 6,900,000 square miles or so. Seventy-four pounds of plutonium is about 34,000 grams. Assuming that Cassini broke up and only affected a third of Africa (2.3 million square miles), that's 0.014 grams of plutonium per square mile.
Frankly, I would think that the author of that website would be happy to have something that was dangerous and already here to be shipped out into eternity.
Since they want to log all internet communications, and since each machine alters the packets in some small (or not-so-small) way, does this mean that they have to tap each and every wire to comply with the law?
Where are they going to put all of the CDs that they are going to have to burn... will they even fit on the Islands of the UK?
heh
Encrypting information into a printed format (English, for example) can only be decrypted by teaching a human being how to decrypt that information (being taught how to read). Since trafficing in circumvention methods is outlawed under the DMCA, doesn't that mean that teaching reading and arithmetic skills is now outlawed?
What is this absolute need that people seem to have for instant information? How much will your life change if you have to wait five hours for a bit of news?
Canada's gag law basically requires you to stall a few hours before you publish, to give each candidate a fair chance of getting the votes that they deserve. The United States has similar laws, for similar reasons.
Take a close look at that photograph of President/President-elect Truman holding the headline that stated "Dewey defeats Truman". Had that headline been circulating in California before the polls closed, Dewey might have actually won that election in 1948!
Respect Canada's gag law. Anything that helps the election process reflect the truee feelings of all of the citizens of Canada should take precidence over a personal desire to get "the scoop".
I want to be able to choose whether or not I am profiled by a company. If you choose to be profiled by the companies you deal with, great! I have philosophical problems with targetted advertising, as it seems to me that potential sales are lost that way - you cannot target someone who has not purchased X, and they can't know that X is for sale until you advertise to them.
The real problem here is that companies like Toys'R'Us are legally bound by the terms and conditions specified on their web site from the instant that someone agrees to their terms by making a purchase.
U.S. contract law requires both parties to act in a manner to minimize the damages once a contract has been broken - the companies that corrected their privacy policies upon notification of a problem are acting within this rule. Mistakes do happen, after all.
The companies who chose to whine that they are not in violation of the terms and conditions are exposiong themselves to sanctions, which is just plain DUMB.
Company A spams you, but forges the headers and makes it look like Company C is spamming you.
You (failing to realize that Company A is the real culprit) retaliate against Company C.
Guess who is liable for the damages to Company C? (hint: you are)
Even more fun is if their system has an auto-responder. You bounce to them, they bounce to you, bounce to them, bounce to you, bounce to them and so on.
Watch the local Semi-tractor trailer drivers when they approach traffic jams, som day. They do precisely what this guy suggests the Police should do - form a side-by-side slow-moving rolling barrier that consumes the traffic jam.
I've seen it in the midwest so often that I have started assisting them.
Slashdot Mirror
Relevant quote from the article:
I was the technology guy who had no clue about business.
He admits that he does not know enough to have a good opinion, so he keeps it to himself. *Sniff* ... smells like "maturity" to me ...
I would also like to know Linus's true opinion on the matter, but his voice carries a lot more force than an unknown's voice (like mine!), would. That means that he has a responsibility to be more careful in what he says than I have to be.
I would like to thank theage.com.au for the advertisement for women's underwear that was embedded in a technical article. Apparently, they have not heard that people in the U.S. can get *FIRED* for reading things like that ...
Grrrr.
Yes, reloading the page made a different ad pop up in the space, and fortunately, my boss was *not* in my cube at the time.
Also, Yes, our current "harassment" policies are getting out of hand over here, but it will take a while for this puritanical obsession to die out, again.
I have met my own ghost ... and I wrote it.
At a previous employer (in the automotive industry), I was given control of a large materials storage system after the previous programmer had gotten fed up with it and demanded to be transferred. Enter the young and enthusiastic new guy - me.
I spent months analyzing and learning how the physical system worked. There were days when I disabled the standard software and ran the system by hand, just trying to squeeze out a little more performance. Eventually, I took every trick that I had learned, and reworking the software to implenet the tricks that I had learned. Launch day came ... and went ... with little fanfare. Ahh, sweet success.
Then I started noticing that the software was doing things that surprised me. After review, I pieced together waht it was doing, and it had done exactly what it was supposed to do ... but the fact remained that it managed to outperform my expectations. I grew kind of proud of my creation, then, knowing that it was running day in and day-out, making small (or big) adjustments to the way the facility ran ... occasionally screwing up, but on the whole, increasing net throughput by roughly 6%.
It did not take too long for my ego to kick in, and I was saying that "I run the plant, even when I am asleep!" Not exactly true, of course, as the algorithms that I had written were not capable of true thought, and my co-workers called me out on it.
"Fine," I replied, "maybe not me, directly, but the decisions being made are based on the way that I think, so it is an echo of me that runs the plant." They could not argue that point, but they had managed to puncture my ego a bit. Draw.
However, it wasn't much of a leap of logic to go from, "an echo of me" to "a ghost of me." And it is independant - I no longer work for that company, but my ghost still works there.
The amusing thing is that every time they have tried to kill my ghost, the replacement software has not been able to maintain the performance. I had sacrificed a bottleneck to get the performance boost, but eventually, my decision became the incorrect thing to do for political reasons. Oops. I told them that there would be a problem, and got so frustrated that I eventually quit so a "yes"-man could tell them that they could undo my change and still meet performance. To date, I know of three failed launch attempts. My own ghost ... is fighting back ...
... and winning ...
... for the moment.
You can say the same thing about any recorded material - Hendrix's ghost continues to play on my CD player, and Sir Alec still acts in my VCR. I have even had a recent argument with the ghost of Socrates - alas, I could not get him to reply to my objections about his assumptions.
I really like the fact that when you hover over the image of the "Black Boxes" at this URL, the "Alt Text" Field says "Atari 2600".
Cool! The monk's black boxen are Ataris!
Every company that I have worked for has had someone perform a trademark search when they were contemplating releasing a new product. Some ideas would come back in tatters, while others were wide open.
This task is typically performed by a lawyer, although you can pare down some things by checking for the trademark you want at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
"Customer Good Will"
It's difficult to quantify, but every accountant that I know manages to put a dollar amount on it.
But, imagine if you will, a computer that doesn't crash, doesn't waste time, doesn't require obscure work-arounds to make everything work ... all those customers will then have a little extra time each day to mkae more money and then to spend it on Microsoft Products!
Far fetched, of course.
If those fools in Redmond actually did make a better product, there would have been no Open Source Movement to begin with!
Of course, Dan would laugh at the humor ...
As part of my life at a previous employer (a well known Fortune 500/single-letter stock symbol on the NYSE company), I found out that I was supporting a piece of software for a very large contract with another company ... a few days before someone decided to start sending the 2000 model year production units into the database. The previous guy who had supported it had just quit a month or so after the guy who ran the software for three years had quit.
I did not know the software, nor did I know about that decision (Thanks, Pat!) so the unusually large file that I received that day was processed just like every other file had been. And so the fun began.
Two days later, when I pieced together the problem, I asked the DBAs to roll back to the Monday-night database backups. That made the situation worse by undoing three days worth of work by the local engineers. So, we had to roll the damaged database back in, and had to recover the lost data the hard way.
They would build a day's worth of production, and we would put two or three days worth of their missing data back into their system, so we slowly caught back up.
Five weeks later I gave my notice, and went to work in the I/S shop of a Pizza company.
Of course, this was a year and a half ahead of the "day" that the media focused on, so the whole thing was easily kept quiet and dusted under the rug. "Nope! No Y2K problems here!". Just like all of those credit card companies that did not handle "02/00" very well, in 1996.
Then I shall rephrase my point of view, then:
Title 17 denies the original content creator any royalties on the resale of an item that has already been sold once. Once it has been sold to me, I can immediately turn around and dispose of that particular copy of the work in any fashion I choose, including resale. This is typically at a financial loss to me.
I find this quote notable: Our members want nothing more than a fair opportunity to earn royalties for their book sales whatever the sales outlet. There is a presumption that they are not being treated fairly, when in fact, they are already being treated fairly. One copy of the book has is out in the marketplace, and royalties have been paid, one time, for one copy.
Yes, I believe that most authors are not being compensated for their efforts properly. However, taking away my rights in an attempt to correct a problem is not the way to do things.
In other words, if they were truly professional, and truly respected the rights of their customers, they would have never even sent that letter to Amazon.com.
The Guild cannot dictate business practices to Amazon.com any more than I can. If Amazon.com chooses to continue to sell used books in this way, so be it. If Amazon.com chooses to restrict the sale of used books as they have been requested to, so be it.
However, if Amazon.com (or any other such company) can be intimidated into a course of action that infringes upon my rights (and the rights of others) under Title 17, then the Sherman Act comes into play.
It's the appearance of impropriety that I am objecting to. So long as they do not cross the line between "asking" and "intimidating", they are fine.
Now, what are the chances that anyone can actually intimidate Amazon.com? I'd say zero.
Cornell has the legal text for the Fair Use Doctrine on-line here.
Of note is this text:
In other words, the Author's Guild does not have a leg to stand on, until the day someone sells a book that they did not own. If they try to enforce this, they could be eating a Sherman Anti-Trust Act lawsuit.
I checked out that anti-Cassini website under the predictions of doom link, and found that the author's primary complaint was that the 74 pounts of Plutonium might crash into the Earth. Maybe over Africa.
Let's see. Africa has 6,900,000 square miles or so. Seventy-four pounds of plutonium is about 34,000 grams. Assuming that Cassini broke up and only affected a third of Africa (2.3 million square miles), that's 0.014 grams of plutonium per square mile.
Frankly, I would think that the author of that website would be happy to have something that was dangerous and already here to be shipped out into eternity.
Some people just don't think.
Since they want to log all internet communications, and since each machine alters the packets in some small (or not-so-small) way, does this mean that they have to tap each and every wire to comply with the law? Where are they going to put all of the CDs that they are going to have to burn ... will they even fit on the Islands of the UK?
heh
This was covered on Slashdot in October, but here it is again: http://slate.msn.com/diary/00-10-16/diary.asp
Encrypting information into a printed format (English, for example) can only be decrypted by teaching a human being how to decrypt that information (being taught how to read). Since trafficing in circumvention methods is outlawed under the DMCA, doesn't that mean that teaching reading and arithmetic skills is now outlawed?
What is this absolute need that people seem to have for instant information? How much will your life change if you have to wait five hours for a bit of news?
Canada's gag law basically requires you to stall a few hours before you publish, to give each candidate a fair chance of getting the votes that they deserve. The United States has similar laws, for similar reasons.
Take a close look at that photograph of President/President-elect Truman holding the headline that stated "Dewey defeats Truman". Had that headline been circulating in California before the polls closed, Dewey might have actually won that election in 1948!
Respect Canada's gag law. Anything that helps the election process reflect the truee feelings of all of the citizens of Canada should take precidence over a personal desire to get "the scoop".
Maybe Robin Williams will do his flaming fireball impression at the next intergalactic Oscars ...
It's already happening. I found this link on Slashdot within the last month: http://www.opennic.unrated.net.
After it's fly-by on Slashdot effect, how many smaller servers did www.eso.org break into?
If nothing else, all of that extra traffic has heated up the box's network card :).
I want to be able to choose whether or not I am profiled by a company. If you choose to be profiled by the companies you deal with, great! I have philosophical problems with targetted advertising, as it seems to me that potential sales are lost that way - you cannot target someone who has not purchased X, and they can't know that X is for sale until you advertise to them.
The real problem here is that companies like Toys'R'Us are legally bound by the terms and conditions specified on their web site from the instant that someone agrees to their terms by making a purchase.
U.S. contract law requires both parties to act in a manner to minimize the damages once a contract has been broken - the companies that corrected their privacy policies upon notification of a problem are acting within this rule. Mistakes do happen, after all.
The companies who chose to whine that they are not in violation of the terms and conditions are exposiong themselves to sanctions, which is just plain DUMB.
*smack*.
Of course, this is/i? Off-Topic, now.
Company A spams you, but forges the headers and makes it look like Company C is spamming you.
You (failing to realize that Company A is the real culprit) retaliate against Company C.
Guess who is liable for the damages to Company C? (hint: you are)
Even more fun is if their system has an auto-responder. You bounce to them, they bounce to you, bounce to them, bounce to you, bounce to them and so on.
Watch the local Semi-tractor trailer drivers when they approach traffic jams, som day. They do precisely what this guy suggests the Police should do - form a side-by-side slow-moving rolling barrier that consumes the traffic jam.
I've seen it in the midwest so often that I have started assisting them.
Although German law can be recognized by other countries, that does not mean that it applies in those other countries.
Still, a nice precident :).