I respect their satirical style, but their coverage of September 11 and the Tsunami were so offensive, I find it difficult to go to their page now-a-days.
More offensive than the Onion are people who seek attention by proclaiming their own offended victimhood.
Life has down bits that you will have to deal with, and if you find a random satire website occasionally offensive, that may just be your cross to bear. Because most of the rest of us think that it's pretty funny.
No, a line item veto just jacks the power of the Presidency up even more. The Executive branch has generally sucked up steadily increasing amounts of power from the Judicial and Legislative branches ever since the Constitution was ratified.
The right solution is to do what (Minnesota? Some northern state) did and make a Constitutional amendment stating that legislation must not have unrelated items attached to it. If the Supreme Court judges that an item was unrelated, the legislation gets struck down.
Of course, neither the DNC nor the GOP will ever do this, because the power of politicians comes from doing things that is not in the best interest of people (spending excess money on something, bringing pork to one's home state, handing off contracts to friends, etc), and this would make that more difficult.
While it may not be often true, it *is* possible that something that is short-term disadvantageous is long-term advantageous.
To use an extreme example, in retrospect, the National Socialist Party screwing up and losing power probably would have been a pretty darn good thing.
"I usually vote Democrat, so everytime a car-bomb goes off in Iraq, I'm happy because it makes Bush's decision to go to war look worse."
Probably not worth it. Car bombs do kill some people and don't make Bush look particularly bad. If, say, one of our carrier battle groups was destroyed, it'd probably make Bush look bad, but would have an extremely high cost. If Bush did something really embarassing, that might be a good thing, since it might weaken him politically.
"I'm a protestant, so every time another story about a cover-up of pedophile priests comes out, I'm giddy with laughter over the human tragedy, because it's a huge embarrassment to Catholics."
Not a bad thing at all. There is little cost to a cover-up being unveiled. Whether or not it's a good thing or not is more debatable, but Catholicism is arguably a net loss to human society, and in any event, discouraging people from engaging in cover-ups is probably a good thing.
"I'm a Linux user, so every time Microsoft users are hit with a virus which shuts down entire companies for the day and costs the US economy millions of dollars, I can barely contain my joy."
Probably not worth it. Viruses are very costly, and lack of viruses is not a solid, unattackable Linux advantage.
Now, if people were upset because the number of context-switches-per-second that Windows can do sucks, that would be a different story.
Although Microsoft *could* reasonably be said to be forcing people to make a (potentially less-appealing) Linux-and-only-open-source-or-Windows decision, rather than just "Linux-or-Windows".
Umm, Last time I checked Microsoft has no monopoly in the Anti-Virus market. Besides if you are talking about its monopoly in the PC OS market, this move hardly affects it one way or another.
This may actually be a good thing, believe it or not, for ClamAV accuracy. ClamAV was in danger of becoming too popular.
In the very specific-and-limited realm of software that uses heuristics to block malicious content, being the big dog is not necessarily best. There are no network benefits to having many copies of an AV package available (possible exception: those that phone home about new malicious content). It just means that all the malware authors test against and work on bypassing your software.
Let's take a brief look:
* Web browsers. IE is the overwhelmingly dominant browser. Firefox has a number of good architectural decisions made from a security standpoint, but it sure as hell isn't free from potentially-exploitable security holes. It's just that very few people are exploiting them. Why would they want to, when they can get ten times the return by exploiting IE? Sure, maybe after they've attacked IE a zillion ways they might be interested in spending resources on Firefox, but not right away.
* Spam blocking. Spammers now not infrequently run spam past major spam-blocking systems before sending it, and keep tweaking it until it gets past them.
* Desktop Virus scanning. In the past, major antivirus systems (like Norton Antivirus) have been directly attacked and disabled by viruses.
* Email Virus scanners. You think this will be any different?
My main concern is that Microsoft may be positioning itself to begin dictating email standards, which would give it very strong influence over the Internet. (They already tried this with their patent-encumbered SPF alternative, and while I'm not familiar with Exchange, I'm sure that Exchange follows the typical Microsoft pattern and "works better" with other Microsoft clients and servers in a myriad of ways).
Besides who really needs a AV for unix anyway ?
Unix antivirus scanners are used on mailservers to scan for Windows viruses that might affect Windows boxes, not to scan for viruses written for Unix.
Original post states that people overhype Linux, unnecessarily rag on MS.
Your own post immediately overhypes BSD.:-)
Incidently, the reason MS catches an undeserved amount of mudslinging is simple. For many years, MS has made many people very unhappy, many of whom were their customers. Those people couldn't do much to MS at the time, but MS developed a very negative image for itself. Now, at every opportunity, MS gets slagged as people work off years of frusteration with them.
The grandparent and parent post are right that criticism of MS is often overly harsh, but wrong in that MS didn't earn said criticism (it's just many years of irritation being spent now every time a flaw appears). Basically, MS is having to pay now for some profitable-but-unpopular moves in the past like playing off incompatibility, abusing monopoly powers, producing unreliable software, charging a large chunk of change for their products, and not making it particularly easy to reach developers at MS.
The Unix world never needed AV software. Unix AV packages are not for running on Unix systems -- they're for running on mail servers to find Windows binaries. The problem is that Windows clients *do* need antivirus software, and if you're running an *IX mail server (i.e. your mail admin isn't an MCSE), you want to be able to try to reduce the amount of Windows malware hitting the Windows boxes by running some software to catch some of it.
It is also blatantly illegal under the Sherman Act in this case. Don't hold you breath until the DOJ takes action though, we also saw them bought and paid for years ago.
That would be specifically when the Bush administration entered power and dropped the Reno-run Microsoft antitrust case like a hot potato.
Actually, a lot of software in the open source world has really unfortunate names. Yes, those marketers may be a pain in the ass at work, but they do generally produce names that people can deal with.
Nobody demands that people take their volunteer work and then name it something that's maximally useful and no fun for them, but there are some times when it's quite regrettable that people have made choices.
* A good amount of open source and Unixy software is potentially offensive. The GIMP is a very obvious example. Some cultures have a problem with the GNOME startup foot. I've had the phrase "I'll go finger her and find out" elicit a few chuckles. When someone sees the phrase "spawning 50 children...killing children...warning, zombie child present", sure, it makes sense to people who do Unix, but it definitely weirds out some other folks.
* Some names are awkward. GNU/Linux is awkward, and is not going to catch on, ever (Stallman would be better off pushing for "GNUix" or something else). "umount" may be shorter than "unmount", but I doubt the typing savings are worth the confusion caused over the years...same goes for "passwd".
* Some names sound amateurish. "MySQL" is a good example.
* Some names are homonyms. "lynx" was already a pun, and then the "links" browser's name made life much more annoying for text-based browser users. "pyne" and "pine" are similar.
* Some names are inside jokes that then become incomprehensible and confusing to people who lack knowledge of 30 years of computing history. The "elm" email reader spawned "pine", "balsa", and "mahogany". Good luck explaining to someone why they type "mahogany" to read their email. The "more" text pager (which stuck the text "More" at the bottom of each screen, allowing the user to hit enter to see another line of text) was replaced by the "less" text pager -- "less is more" was probably uproariously funny when the code first started being produced, but is now just another barrier for the new Unix user.
* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability. The "dillo" lightweight GTK web browser (aside from the unfortunate similarity to the English word "dildo") comes from "Armadillo".
* There is the infamous "GNOME projects start with 'g', KDE projects with 'k'". At one point, X11 applications went through this same growing phase with "x". GNOME seems to have thankfully stopped doing this, though the KDE folks *still* do this occasionally. Python-based applications frequently have a "py" prefix.
* Some authors (perhaps due to a fear that packagers will rename their software to make its name more difficult to type) make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. "xine" is a good example of this.
* Some authors take delight in difficult-to-say names. Depressingly, I'm writing this on a website called "slashdot.org".
For most of us, probably, but for people that use Photoshop day in and day out for years, the difference is probably something like telling an emacs user to use some other editor in emacs-keystroke-compatibility-mode.
I think GIMP is a fine image editor, but you aren't going to take a rabid Photoshop user and replace his copy with GIMP without making him quite upset.
You know, KIOslaves and gnome-vfs are both really bad ideas. There are great places for virtual filesystem code (kernel, userspace filesystems like fuse or lufs, or for wildly different interfaces, just simple stand-alone libraries), and libraries tied into desktop environments is not one (especially since lots of authors that might enjoy using this functionality aren't interested in tying their apps to KDE or GNOME).
illegal downloaders could be downloading 10X or 10X less than their legal-downloading counterparts. Or people that download legal music could be the biggest "pirates" and this survey would be none the wiser.
And would volume even matter for the purposes of arguing a point?
What if Bob purchases exactly the same artists' CDs that he always did pre-Internet, but downloads infringing copies of *every other single audio track in existence*. Total losses are zero, even though infringing downloads are massive in volume.
The only number that matters for purposes of affecting legislation is total *actual* losses. The MPAA's losses numbers have nothing to do with the actual losses, mostly because it's incredibly difficult to predict what would happen.
The only number that matters in the long term is making people happy (the whole reason that we have an economy, money, IP, the RIAA, etc). If we could be producing more happy people by clamping down hard on infringers, if this produces more and better music and thus makes does a better job of satisfying a desire for music, then we should clamp down.
On the other hand, if an alternate mechanism of handling music produces more happy people, we should use that.
Because no other company has negatively impacted as many Slashdot readers.
Don't like Sun? Avoid 'em! Sun doesn't have a monopoly to use that can let it get away with nasty tricks like playing off file format and network compatibility issues and producing a shoddy product.
And some of it is just plain fun hyperbole, like the Gates-as-a-Borg icon.
If the republican party is in such dire straits that it needs to split, why did they make major gains in every corner of politics in the last election?...uh...you may not understand the US electoral system.
Since each person has only one vote, and it goes to only one party, similar parties weaken each other. Extreme parties also tend to lose votes. The system tends towards two parties becoming increasingly centrist (each fighting for moderate votes from the other side, since they already have their own votes).
The problem is that, at some point, the two parties become so similar (and some will claim that the Democrats and the Republicans are already there; I disagree) that the extreme voters on the far end become so frusterated that they split the closest party and form a more extreme one.
There *is* already a paleoconservative party. It's called the Consitution Party. It is, however, not a party that would be likely to appeal to libertarians, since while libertarians and paleoconservatives are both fiscally conservative, libertarians are socially liberal and paleoconservatives are socially conservative. The Consitution Party is *quite* socially conservative.
Smartcard with on-card display (could be like a calculator) and a contact keypad.
Trusted display and input mechanism.
The down side is that the telcos, who are not stupid, will probably grab this market for cell phones (so we'll have complicated and expensive payment tools).
Gartner did "research" on the 2 databases we have where I work. They produced a 200 page document citing all of the good things from one and all of the bad things from the other. In both cases, the bullet points where either exaggerated or outright lies. Never trust a research firm to investigate your own stuff. They don't know what they are talking about. They just list the things that random people say about it.
Gartner is a company that you pay to provide a report that says what you want. If I wanted to "prove" that all IT jobs are leaving the US, I would pay them whatever they asked and suddenly there would be headlines that "All IT Jobs Are Leaving the US".
Indeed, trusted information is a rare and valuable commodity.
Google has done very well by doing an exceptional job of automating the dredging up of this information.
Diane Morello doesn't get her news or research data from/. or a similar source.
Actually, I once posted a reasonably detailed but off-the-cuff prediction of Linux desktop market share growth on Slashdot under another account, and a couple of weeks later, saw the same thing cribbed by a tech analyst.
Because people with excellent knowledge of technology often have no knowledge of running a company.
You have a group of techies on one hand, looking over at the suits, and wondering why they "don't get it". In the techies' eyes, the suits are money-grubbing bastards who screwed around in school, engage in a lot of BSing and political play, frequently try to talk about and interject themselves into areas where they aren't knowledgeable or wanted -- especially technical decisions, where they somehow think that their business prowess directly translates to technical ability. Plus, they're are out to get rid of techie jobs, which they view as expendable.
On the other hand, you have the group of suits. The suits are looking right back at the techies, and wondering why they "don't get it". The suits see techies as assholes who keep trying to get their paws on fat paychecks and then screw around on company time and not produce anything. In the suits' eyes, the techies are weenies who like to keep bragging about their (totally inapplicable and irrelevant to how helpful the techies are to the company) degree in some field from a school somewhere -- sort of like an artist that won't shut up about their urine painting. The techies engage in a lot of BSing and when they want something (funding, etc) make technical claims that they don't seem to be able to support, but are too involved for a suit to be able to get an effective counterargument against. The techies keep sticking their noses where they aren't wanted or needed, especially in business, where they absolutely feel that their technical prowess somehow makes them automatically competent in the business world. The techies view the suits as interchangeable, expendable parts, and clearly are after their jobs.
Taking code from a GPL'ed library, though, for example, and integrating that into your $10K+ enterprise application, will most likely not be noticed, even though it is just as illegal.
You ever wonder why outsourced code is so cheap?
Oh, there are a number of reasons, but the only occasion I've run into code outsourced to India, it had stolen code present.
I read another story about the CherryOS people doing the same thing (giving the Indians everything they need and clearly asking them to infringe on copyright, and then letting the Indians do the actual illegal work -- when the CherryOS people got charged with copyright violation, they just pointed at the Indians and claimed that their hands were clean).
This is obviously not true of all outsourced software development, but based purely upon the anecdotal evidence that I've run across, it is a significant element -- outsourcing actually being used more as a tool to violate copyright on open source software than as a way to get lower labor costs.
(And while I am a US citizen, my job is not threatened by outsourcing, so this is not simple disgruntlement -- more, I'm irritated about this from the standpoint of big companies seeing a way to "get away with" infringing on OSS software, and claim that they didn't know a thing about it.)
I've seen stories of some cell phone software that took a similar route...
It's not an unreasonable idea. Software often has a short lifecycle, and development cost (and time) is crucial. Companies would desperately love to use OSS software, and the chance of getting caught when nobody can audit your source is pretty low.
The fact that so many companies (router companies, anyone doing embedded systems, etc) are getting nailed on simple, easy-to-hide violations like looking for strings makes me wonder how many clever violators there are out there.
And even those violations are often obvious (someone makes something that runs Linux, so if they didn't publish the source, there's obviously something wrong).
There are a couple solutions I see.
First, the obvious Big Club approach. Let ambulance chasers solve the problem. Let lawyers sue companies for huge amounts of punitive damages. However, this does have drawbacks. We've tried to solve health care quality problems in the US with this solution, and what happens is that those huge payments that buy mansions for law firm members come out of the pockets of everyone that has to buy products -- we have high malpractice insurce costs, and very high health care costs.
Second, it would be possible for some clever open-source developers to write a piece of software that can rapidly scan code for similarities to a database of existing code. You submit all CVS codebases on Sourceforge and that sort of thing to the database. Then it would be easy (a) to audit code, and (b) to require code to be audited against such a database by outsourcing companies as part of due dilligence. (This could actually be done fine by closed-source developers, as it is marketable to universities as an anti-cheating tool, but I'd like to see a FLOSS implementation.) This is not an easy problem to solve -- first, quickly finding similarities in a vast amount of text is a hard computer science problem to solve (comparing IR tree output from GCC might be a better idea, though still not simple). Second of all, those intentionally violating copyright can be expected to run their code against such databases themselves until it "passes the tests", much as any spammer worth his salt tests his spam against SpamAssassin. That means that the system has to be *so* clever that it has to be a comparable amount of work to modify a piece of infringing software to pass the tests as it is to write a new, similar piece of software.
Slashdot Mirror
I respect their satirical style, but their coverage of September 11 and the Tsunami were so offensive, I find it difficult to go to their page now-a-days.
More offensive than the Onion are people who seek attention by proclaiming their own offended victimhood.
Life has down bits that you will have to deal with, and if you find a random satire website occasionally offensive, that may just be your cross to bear. Because most of the rest of us think that it's pretty funny.
No, a line item veto just jacks the power of the Presidency up even more. The Executive branch has generally sucked up steadily increasing amounts of power from the Judicial and Legislative branches ever since the Constitution was ratified.
The right solution is to do what (Minnesota? Some northern state) did and make a Constitutional amendment stating that legislation must not have unrelated items attached to it. If the Supreme Court judges that an item was unrelated, the legislation gets struck down.
Of course, neither the DNC nor the GOP will ever do this, because the power of politicians comes from doing things that is not in the best interest of people (spending excess money on something, bringing pork to one's home state, handing off contracts to friends, etc), and this would make that more difficult.
While it may not be often true, it *is* possible that something that is short-term disadvantageous is long-term advantageous.
To use an extreme example, in retrospect, the National Socialist Party screwing up and losing power probably would have been a pretty darn good thing.
"I usually vote Democrat, so everytime a car-bomb goes off in Iraq, I'm happy because it makes Bush's decision to go to war look worse."
Probably not worth it. Car bombs do kill some people and don't make Bush look particularly bad. If, say, one of our carrier battle groups was destroyed, it'd probably make Bush look bad, but would have an extremely high cost. If Bush did something really embarassing, that might be a good thing, since it might weaken him politically.
"I'm a protestant, so every time another story about a cover-up of pedophile priests comes out, I'm giddy with laughter over the human tragedy, because it's a huge embarrassment to Catholics."
Not a bad thing at all. There is little cost to a cover-up being unveiled. Whether or not it's a good thing or not is more debatable, but Catholicism is arguably a net loss to human society, and in any event, discouraging people from engaging in cover-ups is probably a good thing.
"I'm a Linux user, so every time Microsoft users are hit with a virus which shuts down entire companies for the day and costs the US economy millions of dollars, I can barely contain my joy."
Probably not worth it. Viruses are very costly, and lack of viruses is not a solid, unattackable Linux advantage.
Now, if people were upset because the number of context-switches-per-second that Windows can do sucks, that would be a different story.
I want to see Microsoft buy out ClamAV.
Although Microsoft *could* reasonably be said to be forcing people to make a (potentially less-appealing) Linux-and-only-open-source-or-Windows decision, rather than just "Linux-or-Windows".
Umm, Last time I checked Microsoft has no monopoly in the Anti-Virus market. Besides if you are talking about its monopoly in the PC OS market, this move hardly affects it one way or another.
This may actually be a good thing, believe it or not, for ClamAV accuracy. ClamAV was in danger of becoming too popular.
In the very specific-and-limited realm of software that uses heuristics to block malicious content, being the big dog is not necessarily best. There are no network benefits to having many copies of an AV package available (possible exception: those that phone home about new malicious content). It just means that all the malware authors test against and work on bypassing your software.
Let's take a brief look:
* Web browsers. IE is the overwhelmingly dominant browser. Firefox has a number of good architectural decisions made from a security standpoint, but it sure as hell isn't free from potentially-exploitable security holes. It's just that very few people are exploiting them. Why would they want to, when they can get ten times the return by exploiting IE? Sure, maybe after they've attacked IE a zillion ways they might be interested in spending resources on Firefox, but not right away.
* Spam blocking. Spammers now not infrequently run spam past major spam-blocking systems before sending it, and keep tweaking it until it gets past them.
* Desktop Virus scanning. In the past, major antivirus systems (like Norton Antivirus) have been directly attacked and disabled by viruses.
* Email Virus scanners. You think this will be any different?
My main concern is that Microsoft may be positioning itself to begin dictating email standards, which would give it very strong influence over the Internet. (They already tried this with their patent-encumbered SPF alternative, and while I'm not familiar with Exchange, I'm sure that Exchange follows the typical Microsoft pattern and "works better" with other Microsoft clients and servers in a myriad of ways).
Besides who really needs a AV for unix anyway ?
Unix antivirus scanners are used on mailservers to scan for Windows viruses that might affect Windows boxes, not to scan for viruses written for Unix.
[chuckles]
:-)
Original post states that people overhype Linux, unnecessarily rag on MS.
Your own post immediately overhypes BSD.
Incidently, the reason MS catches an undeserved amount of mudslinging is simple. For many years, MS has made many people very unhappy, many of whom were their customers. Those people couldn't do much to MS at the time, but MS developed a very negative image for itself. Now, at every opportunity, MS gets slagged as people work off years of frusteration with them.
The grandparent and parent post are right that criticism of MS is often overly harsh, but wrong in that MS didn't earn said criticism (it's just many years of irritation being spent now every time a flaw appears). Basically, MS is having to pay now for some profitable-but-unpopular moves in the past like playing off incompatibility, abusing monopoly powers, producing unreliable software, charging a large chunk of change for their products, and not making it particularly easy to reach developers at MS.
If the guy is an ex-pedophile, then presumably he isn't going to feel an urge to have sex with 'em, eh?
The Unix world never needed AV software. Unix AV packages are not for running on Unix systems -- they're for running on mail servers to find Windows binaries. The problem is that Windows clients *do* need antivirus software, and if you're running an *IX mail server (i.e. your mail admin isn't an MCSE), you want to be able to try to reduce the amount of Windows malware hitting the Windows boxes by running some software to catch some of it.
It is also blatantly illegal under the Sherman Act in this case. Don't hold you breath until the DOJ takes action though, we also saw them bought and paid for years ago.
That would be specifically when the Bush administration entered power and dropped the Reno-run Microsoft antitrust case like a hot potato.
No.
And that's why you are a likeable guy who has much less money than Bill Gates.
Actually, a lot of software in the open source world has really unfortunate names. Yes, those marketers may be a pain in the ass at work, but they do generally produce names that people can deal with.
Nobody demands that people take their volunteer work and then name it something that's maximally useful and no fun for them, but there are some times when it's quite regrettable that people have made choices.
* A good amount of open source and Unixy software is potentially offensive. The GIMP is a very obvious example. Some cultures have a problem with the GNOME startup foot. I've had the phrase "I'll go finger her and find out" elicit a few chuckles. When someone sees the phrase "spawning 50 children...killing children...warning, zombie child present", sure, it makes sense to people who do Unix, but it definitely weirds out some other folks.
* Some names are awkward. GNU/Linux is awkward, and is not going to catch on, ever (Stallman would be better off pushing for "GNUix" or something else). "umount" may be shorter than "unmount", but I doubt the typing savings are worth the confusion caused over the years...same goes for "passwd".
* Some names sound amateurish. "MySQL" is a good example.
* Some names are homonyms. "lynx" was already a pun, and then the "links" browser's name made life much more annoying for text-based browser users. "pyne" and "pine" are similar.
* Some names are inside jokes that then become incomprehensible and confusing to people who lack knowledge of 30 years of computing history. The "elm" email reader spawned "pine", "balsa", and "mahogany". Good luck explaining to someone why they type "mahogany" to read their email. The "more" text pager (which stuck the text "More" at the bottom of each screen, allowing the user to hit enter to see another line of text) was replaced by the "less" text pager -- "less is more" was probably uproariously funny when the code first started being produced, but is now just another barrier for the new Unix user.
* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability. The "dillo" lightweight GTK web browser (aside from the unfortunate similarity to the English word "dildo") comes from "Armadillo".
* There is the infamous "GNOME projects start with 'g', KDE projects with 'k'". At one point, X11 applications went through this same growing phase with "x". GNOME seems to have thankfully stopped doing this, though the KDE folks *still* do this occasionally. Python-based applications frequently have a "py" prefix.
* Some authors (perhaps due to a fear that packagers will rename their software to make its name more difficult to type) make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. "xine" is a good example of this.
* Some authors take delight in difficult-to-say names. Depressingly, I'm writing this on a website called "slashdot.org".
For most of us, probably, but for people that use Photoshop day in and day out for years, the difference is probably something like telling an emacs user to use some other editor in emacs-keystroke-compatibility-mode.
I think GIMP is a fine image editor, but you aren't going to take a rabid Photoshop user and replace his copy with GIMP without making him quite upset.
You know, KIOslaves and gnome-vfs are both really bad ideas. There are great places for virtual filesystem code (kernel, userspace filesystems like fuse or lufs, or for wildly different interfaces, just simple stand-alone libraries), and libraries tied into desktop environments is not one (especially since lots of authors that might enjoy using this functionality aren't interested in tying their apps to KDE or GNOME).
illegal downloaders could be downloading 10X or 10X less than their legal-downloading counterparts. Or people that download legal music could be the biggest "pirates" and this survey would be none the wiser.
And would volume even matter for the purposes of arguing a point?
What if Bob purchases exactly the same artists' CDs that he always did pre-Internet, but downloads infringing copies of *every other single audio track in existence*. Total losses are zero, even though infringing downloads are massive in volume.
The only number that matters for purposes of affecting legislation is total *actual* losses. The MPAA's losses numbers have nothing to do with the actual losses, mostly because it's incredibly difficult to predict what would happen.
The only number that matters in the long term is making people happy (the whole reason that we have an economy, money, IP, the RIAA, etc). If we could be producing more happy people by clamping down hard on infringers, if this produces more and better music and thus makes does a better job of satisfying a desire for music, then we should clamp down.
On the other hand, if an alternate mechanism of handling music produces more happy people, we should use that.
Because no other company has negatively impacted as many Slashdot readers.
Don't like Sun? Avoid 'em! Sun doesn't have a monopoly to use that can let it get away with nasty tricks like playing off file format and network compatibility issues and producing a shoddy product.
And some of it is just plain fun hyperbole, like the Gates-as-a-Borg icon.
Because at least some MS employees like and use Linux.
You think all Ford employees drive Fords?
But you would think somebody in R&D would at some point read the latest press on Batman say "Hey! I remember working on that project!"
Nope, because Bruce Wayne got rich by outsourcing his work to cheap labor in India.
If the republican party is in such dire straits that it needs to split, why did they make major gains in every corner of politics in the last election? ...uh...you may not understand the US electoral system.
Since each person has only one vote, and it goes to only one party, similar parties weaken each other. Extreme parties also tend to lose votes. The system tends towards two parties becoming increasingly centrist (each fighting for moderate votes from the other side, since they already have their own votes).
The problem is that, at some point, the two parties become so similar (and some will claim that the Democrats and the Republicans are already there; I disagree) that the extreme voters on the far end become so frusterated that they split the closest party and form a more extreme one.
There *is* already a paleoconservative party. It's called the Consitution Party. It is, however, not a party that would be likely to appeal to libertarians, since while libertarians and paleoconservatives are both fiscally conservative, libertarians are socially liberal and paleoconservatives are socially conservative. The Consitution Party is *quite* socially conservative.
You don't respect Representative Richard Boucher?
Easy fix.
Smartcard with on-card display (could be like a calculator) and a contact keypad.
Trusted display and input mechanism.
The down side is that the telcos, who are not stupid, will probably grab this market for cell phones (so we'll have complicated and expensive payment tools).
Gartner did "research" on the 2 databases we have where I work. They produced a 200 page document citing all of the good things from one and all of the bad things from the other. In both cases, the bullet points where either exaggerated or outright lies. Never trust a research firm to investigate your own stuff. They don't know what they are talking about. They just list the things that random people say about it.
Gartner is a company that you pay to provide a report that says what you want. If I wanted to "prove" that all IT jobs are leaving the US, I would pay them whatever they asked and suddenly there would be headlines that "All IT Jobs Are Leaving the US".
Indeed, trusted information is a rare and valuable commodity.
Google has done very well by doing an exceptional job of automating the dredging up of this information.
Diane Morello doesn't get her news or research data from /. or a similar source.
Actually, I once posted a reasonably detailed but off-the-cuff prediction of Linux desktop market share growth on Slashdot under another account, and a couple of weeks later, saw the same thing cribbed by a tech analyst.
Because people with excellent knowledge of technology often have no knowledge of running a company.
You have a group of techies on one hand, looking over at the suits, and wondering why they "don't get it". In the techies' eyes, the suits are money-grubbing bastards who screwed around in school, engage in a lot of BSing and political play, frequently try to talk about and interject themselves into areas where they aren't knowledgeable or wanted -- especially technical decisions, where they somehow think that their business prowess directly translates to technical ability. Plus, they're are out to get rid of techie jobs, which they view as expendable.
On the other hand, you have the group of suits. The suits are looking right back at the techies, and wondering why they "don't get it". The suits see techies as assholes who keep trying to get their paws on fat paychecks and then screw around on company time and not produce anything. In the suits' eyes, the techies are weenies who like to keep bragging about their (totally inapplicable and irrelevant to how helpful the techies are to the company) degree in some field from a school somewhere -- sort of like an artist that won't shut up about their urine painting. The techies engage in a lot of BSing and when they want something (funding, etc) make technical claims that they don't seem to be able to support, but are too involved for a suit to be able to get an effective counterargument against. The techies keep sticking their noses where they aren't wanted or needed, especially in business, where they absolutely feel that their technical prowess somehow makes them automatically competent in the business world. The techies view the suits as interchangeable, expendable parts, and clearly are after their jobs.
Actually, techies and suits are pretty similar.
And does it provide privacy? Because most ecash solutions seem not to do so.
Taking code from a GPL'ed library, though, for example, and integrating that into your $10K+ enterprise application, will most likely not be noticed, even though it is just as illegal.
You ever wonder why outsourced code is so cheap?
Oh, there are a number of reasons, but the only occasion I've run into code outsourced to India, it had stolen code present.
I read another story about the CherryOS people doing the same thing (giving the Indians everything they need and clearly asking them to infringe on copyright, and then letting the Indians do the actual illegal work -- when the CherryOS people got charged with copyright violation, they just pointed at the Indians and claimed that their hands were clean).
This is obviously not true of all outsourced software development, but based purely upon the anecdotal evidence that I've run across, it is a significant element -- outsourcing actually being used more as a tool to violate copyright on open source software than as a way to get lower labor costs.
(And while I am a US citizen, my job is not threatened by outsourcing, so this is not simple disgruntlement -- more, I'm irritated about this from the standpoint of big companies seeing a way to "get away with" infringing on OSS software, and claim that they didn't know a thing about it.)
I've seen stories of some cell phone software that took a similar route...
It's not an unreasonable idea. Software often has a short lifecycle, and development cost (and time) is crucial. Companies would desperately love to use OSS software, and the chance of getting caught when nobody can audit your source is pretty low.
The fact that so many companies (router companies, anyone doing embedded systems, etc) are getting nailed on simple, easy-to-hide violations like looking for strings makes me wonder how many clever violators there are out there.
And even those violations are often obvious (someone makes something that runs Linux, so if they didn't publish the source, there's obviously something wrong).
There are a couple solutions I see.
First, the obvious Big Club approach. Let ambulance chasers solve the problem. Let lawyers sue companies for huge amounts of punitive damages. However, this does have drawbacks. We've tried to solve health care quality problems in the US with this solution, and what happens is that those huge payments that buy mansions for law firm members come out of the pockets of everyone that has to buy products -- we have high malpractice insurce costs, and very high health care costs.
Second, it would be possible for some clever open-source developers to write a piece of software that can rapidly scan code for similarities to a database of existing code. You submit all CVS codebases on Sourceforge and that sort of thing to the database. Then it would be easy (a) to audit code, and (b) to require code to be audited against such a database by outsourcing companies as part of due dilligence. (This could actually be done fine by closed-source developers, as it is marketable to universities as an anti-cheating tool, but I'd like to see a FLOSS implementation.) This is not an easy problem to solve -- first, quickly finding similarities in a vast amount of text is a hard computer science problem to solve (comparing IR tree output from GCC might be a better idea, though still not simple). Second of all, those intentionally violating copyright can be expected to run their code against such databases themselves until it "passes the tests", much as any spammer worth his salt tests his spam against SpamAssassin. That means that the system has to be *so* clever that it has to be a comparable amount of work to modify a piece of infringing software to pass the tests as it is to write a new, similar piece of software.