Those difficult decisions should not be made by Ben Goodger. I'm sure he's a great, stand-up guy. I've worked with engineers like him before - their code may be fabulous, but their sense of aesthetics is fundamentally broken. I support the idea of a small group *of artists and UI designers* making UI decisions, and a group with some marketing experience to make branding decisions.
I've managed plenty of software development teams before, and you just don't assign any random engineer to make important UI decisions. Some people have the talent for this and some don't. It's part aesthetics, part usability, part style. Very important stuff, and not something you learn getting a computer science degree, hacking Unix, writing HTML rendering engines and so on.
Sorry to sound like a prick, but some of the lead Mozilla developers have turned into incredibly unresponsive pricks that don't know how to delegate and assign authority properly. I respect their hard work immensely, but their attitude and arrogance on certain issues continues to mystify me. Look at this new theme at the top of this thread. This is beyond atrocious. This is because the Mozilla devs don't know how to resolve differences with other people, and they REPEATEDLY have shown a complete indifference to aesthetic issues in the browser and an unwillingness to make use of the talents of the many artists out there who would be very willing to help create good splashscreens, icons and so on, a rather critical part of a mass market desktop application that we want people to adopt (in the interests of a more secure, standards-compliant web).
Yes, Arvid Axelsson, the author of the current default theme (Qute), may have a bit of an ego himself, and may have been reluctant to freely license his artwork under the same MPL terms as the Mozilla codebase. But he's a reasonable person, and he's indicated he's willing to compromise and do a Free license that works for the Mozilla team, because he wants to make sure that Firefox succeeds, and has the best, most aesthetically pleasing look and feel possible.
For God's FUCKING sake you egomaniacs (and anybody who has followed some of these discussions over the last few years knows this is true - see the splashscreen debacle in Bugzilla, the many UI layout discussions, and the naming debacles for examples), we are relying on you and the excellent browser you have created and maintained. We respect immensely all the hard work the Mozilla and Firefox core developers have done, but their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?), the terrible aesthetics of the splashscreens and icon sets they keep putting back in are just unacceptable. Qute was the best thing that ever happened to Firefox and the Mozilla project - compare to the awful looking old versions of the Mozilla browser - ugh.
You are the developers and project leaders of a critical mass-market product. If there is truly an unresolvable licensing issue with the current icons and their author is unwilling to compromise, come out and tell us, and assign a group of artists or other aesthetically inclined technology professionals to consider submissions for a new default. Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons or making terrible off-the-cuff aesthetic decisions that have a negative impact on the adoption of a critical product for the entire Internet's wellbeing.
This is slightly different - this is a private equity fund, they do later stage investments than a venture capital firm. In particular, Baystar Capital specializes in PIPE investments, according to their own web page - Private Investments in Public Equities. These are private placements of capital to companies that are already publically traded in the market, so much later stage than true VC, more likely to be public companies that have stumbled on a cash-strapped period of time, but with well-established businesses and track records behind them.
Generally, you aren't making the same kind of bet that 85% of everything you put money into will flop in private equity, and you don't get the kinds of massive multipliers on success that you get with early stage VC (where a 10 million dollar investment might turn into 200-500 million dollars worth of equity after IPO or a big acquisition deal for the real "blockbuster" companies).
I'd guess that a 2x-4x multiple on their successful investments would be considered quite good (remember, these are mostly already publically traded companies). So actually taking a 50% hit on an investment would not be great for these guys, but it's still par for the course. Some people here are speculating they were partially hedged, though I'm not sure it would be possible to effectively hedge such a massive position in a stock that was difficult to short in the open market, though I guess they could have written their own options.
According to their own site, they've invested $745 million as a fund, which means 50 million was about 8% of their entire fund. So losing half of it, while not devastating, is definitely not a trivial amount even for a fund like this.
Right, about 58 million in cash, which after taking away 50 million dollars, would leave them with 8 million dollars. Not even enough for them to keep operating for a quarter.
As I said, that would effectively shut them down, end their legal pursuits, and so on, or force them to take on new, very unfavorable financing terms from somebody else ASAP.
They realized the 50 million was a big fuck up. The general VC/Private Equity reaction to a big fuck up is to get back what you can, save face for yourself, and try not to destroy/discredit the company publicly if at all possible (it makes it harder for them to get companies to do deals with them in the future).
That's precisely what they are doing here. Getting back what cash they can, getting a bunch of shares they can slow-dump back to the market, and not fighting a big, messy legal battle to get their 50 million back. Of course, SCO doesn't have 50 million in cash to give them and it would effectively shut SCO down, or force other fairly dire measures on them to get together 50 million bucks and still have operating capital - while Baystar itself may not give a crap, it would look quite bad for them to screw over a company they had invested in that badly.
So I guess we are left to wonder why Baystar bought into this deal in the first place. I have no idea, and I know there are lots of sinister motives assigned to this, but I'm sure some of the characters involved just got suckered into what sounded to them like a sure-fire legal get-rich-quick scheme - which is all that SCO's business is at this point.
This is true in Manhattan during normal travel hours these days. Those of us who grew up in NYC in earlier years remember things a bit differently - and I didn't move here til '92 or '93, and things were already improved a lot by then. Nonetheless, back in the early and mid '90s I had a lot of friends who got mugged. And those who remember farther back will recall the time when everybody knew people who had been mugged or attacked on the subway - the 80s weren't safe in NYC.
Even in NYC though, there are still plenty of neighborhoods I wouldn't show my tech off in, especially at night. I think the gentrification of NYC has made me "soft" about this stuff - I used to be perpetually aware, and I never had any real problems when I was in high school here. I don't remember the last time I actually had the "prickly neck" danger response in NYC - it's definitely been a while.
So you're saying some random company sends you a credit card, and you think, hey, I don't have time to check the conditions but what the hell I'll use it anyway?! And you're then surprised when the small print turned out to be designed to fuck you over?
No, I never used a credit card I was sent without permission. Perhaps you missed the part about me not being an idiot? However, I did have to waste time calling these companies and clarifying to them that I never asked for their credit cards and threatening them to convince them to leave me alone. Additionally, I've had American Express, who I do have a credit card with, send me strange credit cards that I didn't expect which I then had to call and specifically cancel.
I'm just saying I understand how a busy person could get confused under the bundle of junk they receive. The only way in which I *have* been screwed was by changes in terms from a credit card company that started out with great rates, but after a single payment is three or four days late once, they double your monthly rates. I'm sure that was buried in the terms I agreed to somewhere but it wasn't exactly clearly or prominently featured, and the above-board credit card companies I've dealt with before have never done it to me.
Your argument is essentially "buyer beware". I think that's fine and all, but without a line of legal defense backing the consumer up, there's no reason for companies to not attempt to fuck people over. This is where the legal concepts of contracts of adherence and "reasonable" terms come into play, and people who think that companies should be legally able to hide any stealth terms they want into an obfuscated contract then blame the buyer for "agreeing" to a stack of 6 point text they were sent with their new credit card are idiots.
Heh, well, I've had credit card companies send me credit cards several times without me asking. I've also had them drastically change my rates on me without my permission. I am not "stupid", but I only have so many hours in my day to fight with semi-fraudulent companies who fuck me out of 20 bucks here or there. But now imagine these companies fucking hundreds of thousands of people out of 20 bucks here or there. That's why they do it - many people don't have enough hours in their day to completely and carefully evaluate everything they are sent in the mail, every offer made to them, and so on.
Without reasonable consumer protection laws, it would be impossible to do business. Yes, there is a tradeoff, businesses and individuals should be able to enter into reasonable contracts with each other, but laws are needed to make sure that people know about unreasonable terms they may be unknowingly agreeing to, and in egregious cases where a company or industry has proven itself incapable of being honest with its customers, the activity needs to be banned.
The other problem here is that if you just force companies to "notify" their customers of certain things, they will often bury the bad stuff under reams of legal mumbo-jumbo in some click-through agreement. Sometimes, laws need to specify the way in which consent is obtained and the explicitness by which that consent is obtained to make sure people are actually being told of the deal they are entering into.
I don't think I ever said I was a Linux "advocate" - I advocate the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's Linux, sometimes it's not.
I take all people's opinions and weigh them based on their own value, unless somebody has demonstrated a track record with me of excellent quality thought. I won't accept anybody's argument by authority, thank you very much. I do however think that everybody has known for some time that Linux kernel development needed more structure, needed SCM and so on, and it's got that now. And I acknowledge that from a business PR perspective, McKusick is probably right, but that his recommendations wouldn't necessarily have prevented a challenge like SCO's from occuring in the first place, and they may well have had other burdensome consequences.
You BSD people need to stop acting like you're right all the time, that's not a very good way to make new friends. Truthfully though, I don't know what I can stand less, the script kiddie types who think they are |33+ because they run Linux, or the supercilious, grumpy old BSD engineer types.
The ad on the right part of the screen is a Microsoft ad claiming that "Mainframe Linux was found to be 10x more expensive than Windows Server 2003" at fileserving. Jeez, apparently you need a mainframe to work as a fileserver these days... sounds like somebody was comparing apples to oranges there. Great ad for "searchenterpriselinux.com".
Also, I would imagine that pretty much every kernel code submission is traceable to it's submitter. As far as I know, every specific line of code that has been brought up by SCO has been tracked down and attributed to it's submitter. Beyond that, there's really no way for BSD, Linux or anybody else to _know_ that the person submitting a patch really owns the copyright to it, or is acting as an authorized agent of their employer who owns the copyright to it. At some point, there is good faith. Yes, a well-documented paper trail would be nice, but requiring patch submitters to submit signed documentation with their patches would place an immense administrative burden on somebody, and it wouldn't prove that no copyright infringement has occurred, it would just blame-shift to whoever submitted the patch. I don't think that would legally remove the possibility that an unscrupulous company could go fishing for damages, a la SCO. It would also effectively remove the bazaar-like openness that Linux has, in contrast with more closed, insular projects with their rigid committer lists and uberpolitical machinations (XFree86 anyone?).
But I guess from a PR perspective this guy has a good point. Having some big pile of papers to point to and say "look, this documents that all contributers have copyright to their patches, and every line of code is accounted for" - this might help dissuade outrageous claims like SCOs and allay the fears of the business community, which likes to know that there are reams of bureaucratic documentation proving that the code is clean.
Okay, usually I'm willing to say most things are a matter of taste, live and let live and all that. But you've gotta be smoking crack if you think Graffiti 2 is anything other than teh suck. After about half an hour of using my Treo 600, I went on the net, found the instructions for the Graffiti 1 "downgrade" and followed them.
I don't recall exactly which characters it was, I think it was the 't' and the 'i' that just killed me. The not-quite-one-stroke system feels terribly broken - most of the characters get recognized after one stroke, but a 't' shows up as an 'l' until you do a crossbar, then it disappears and reappears as a 't'... ugh. Likewise with the 'i'. This caused me some serious cognitive dissonance, and I found it far slower than the old one-stroke characters for 't' and 'i' in Graffiti 1. Yes, the middle-screen capital thing is somewhat nice, but didn't matter on my Treo since there is no dedicated Graffiti area (I had to use Graffiti Anywhere to get Graffiti at all on my Treo 600).
I feel obliged to speak out in this thread. I have seen several psychiatrists in my life. I am a New Yorker - and around here, this isn't an admission of weakness, it's a fairly normal part of teenage life. I've also seen a psychiatrist for a while in my adult life while going through a particularly difficult period of time - my job was going down the tubes, my mother was just diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, etc. I will tell you that truthfully my experiences have been mixed, but that it's not anywhere near as black-or-white as you make it sound.
In my experience, true "talk therapy" is of only very modest use. The kind of therapy where you sit there and try to get to the root of your problems re: your relationship with your father, etc. Well fuck, in truth, my problems were that my boss, the CEO of our company, was a fuckhead - maybe he "reminded me of my father", maybe not, but that's not a useful way to improve my situation. Many problems in our lives just can't be talked through. And for very smart folks, like most of the people reading Slashdot, seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist who is not at your mental level for this kind of talk therapy will be an exercise in frustration. If you really have fucked up issues with your childhood that you have NOT faced, then this might help you. In my case, I was fully aware of the fucked-upedness of my childhood, that I had an abusive alcoholic father who made me resent authority by the way he tried to exert it over my life and so on. If you have never come to terms with bad things that happened to you though, maybe this will be helpful.
However, not all therapy is this sort of therapy. I know people who have undergone cognitive therapy with very impressive results. Cognitive therapy is not about sitting around and chatting about your father and how he relates to all the problems in your life, blaming your family for your personal foibles and so on. In fact it's the opposite - it's about taking responsibility for the way your brain works today and training yourself to alter the way you think about and react to certain stimuli. I've never done this myself, but I've seen fairly impressive results in successful treatment of somebody who had developed an acute case of agoraphobia in fact, as well as dealing with depression caused by real issues - in the case I'm thinking of, depression associated with incurable illness (as opposed to so-called "clinical depression" of the generally depressed - I don't know if it would be as effective for these people).
Now, that's not saying this is right for everybody. My endorsement is not based on any double-blind scientific analysis. Nor would such studies be easy to conduct - because all this stuff is a deeply personal thing. The right chemistry between the psychologist or psychiatrist and the patient and a confluence of techniques that correspond to the realities of the problems you face are key. Shop around and be a conscientious consumer, like you would with anything else.
As for the medication aspect - I've used several of 'em over the years. Xanax for a while when I was a teenager and I was suffering from panic disorder (in this case brought on by a bout of drug use - don't use drugs, kiddies, they CAN fuck with your brain chemistry). Valium during several periods of time to treat acute anxiety associated with the aforementioned problems in my life. Benzodiazepenes (this family of drugs) are good, powerful drugs when used appropriately and in moderation, but they are not long term treatments for anything. As for the long term medications, the Prozacs, Wellbutrin and other SSRIs (selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors) that are widely prescribed, I recommend them as a last resort only. If you are clinically depressed and there seems to be no good reason, nothing you can change about your life to improve it, no way to change your thinking or behavior patterns, no way to improve your outlook through exercise, change of lifestyle and so on, then maybe. Bu
Agreed - I said essentially the same the other day http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107859&cid=917 3066. It is a shame to see de Tocqueville's name used this way. Google him and read a bit about what the man actually wrote if you've never read him before. Agree or not with all of it, he surely would roll over in his grave to be associated with these scumballs.
All your documents are belong to us. Here's 30 bucks to cover your copying costs (in case you didn't get that this is a big "fuck you", let us clarify that for you - "FUCK YOU"). Toodle-oo!
You are absolutely right, Mr. AC. Unfortunately, venture capitalists and mid-level managers seem to be alike in this - they really hate the idea that their businesses only asset is one or two top software developers. The first thing they want to do is make the software development process "repeatable and manageable". They will openly admit they'd rather have 30 average programmers doing the work than 2-3 people who need frequent breaks, time-off, and so-on (and where one person quitting can have a devastating effect on the entire company).
I call this desire the commodification of software developers - I've seen this several times. It's not the best or fastest way to get good software developed, but it feels less risky to some. Unfortunately, from what I've observed in practice, the 1-2 people will generally get a better product out the door than the 30 people. My conclusion is that in practice, it's better to have several crack "teams" that can work on smaller projects highly independently each of which consists of one or two lead programmers and one or two assistants (less experienced people building expertise by doing support programming), with an architect/adviser to help partition problems up. Or if you can keep the products or projects small enough, one team could be managing the development of the entire product/project itself. The project "managers" job should really be bilateral negotiation of featurization and scheduling, the middle man between sales/marketing/etc. and the development teams.
In practice, though, this is hard to implement this kind of organization because it's hard to hire enough people with existing experience in any given problem domain who are also excellent programmers. This is roughly akin to what Steve McConnell calls the "Chief Programmer team" or "surgical team" structure in Rapid Development, an excellent book even if it is from Microsoft Press, that talks about some of these kinds of issues without getting mired in the latest software engineering fads.
From what I've seen, one of the biggest risks any early stage company faces is hiring a Director/VP of Software Development who is a mid-level management type who wants nothing more than to maximize headcount so his role is maximally important. Definitely this is not the best way to get good software written rapidly.
Except your examples don't make any sense. Verizon moving lines - Vonage doesn't provide lines. AT&T unable to provide a level of service - Vonage offers essentially no level of service guarantees, it's all best effort stuff. I wouldn't bank my business on it, but that's what traditional telephony is for. Power outages affecting your telephony service? Again, not Vonage's problem, that's an issue between you, the power company and your ISP who provides you with the infrastructure for your internet service that Vonage runs over.
In short, I don't oppose all regulation of Vonage because they do stuff over the internet, but I don't see the regulation as useful either, and I do see it as potentially a way to overwhelm competition in the VoIP arena by making it too burdensome for new entrants to compete. Vonage service is useful for some - I think it would be extremely misleading for people to expect the kind of reliability they get with POTS service, simply because the reliability is limited by the reliability of power and the underlying internet infrastructure. Vonage has some reliability issues of their own to hammer out too - but even if their reliability were 100%, you would still have far more outages than you get with POTS, at least in my experience.
If you want to force reliability on VoIP, you need to first try to force reliability on the internet. Piling fees onto Vonage and forcing a higher level of service onto them is nonsensical when most of their customers have residential internet access with no level-of-service guarantees, regular outages, no uninterruptible power supplies and so on. Forcing them to be honest in their advertising and about how they compare themselves to POTS wouldn't be such a bad thing, on the other hand.
From what I've observed there are lots of programming projects that are "hard" for companies and large organizations because they aren't so amenable to "early partition" as people would like, and yet are substantially easier for one developer (or two in some cases) who partition the problem using internal divide-and-conquer, thus completely understanding the partitioning scheme right off the bat rather than spending months hashing it out at meetings and miscued early development efforts.
I had an experience where an entire development team of twenty people spent about a year and a half writing a large, grandiose enterprise software system that was supposed to be general-purpose and flexible, but in the end was a real performance turd at the job it was supposed to do. Using what I knew about the actual problem from looking at the previous solution's mistakes and the original problem statement, I rewrote the system from scratch over about 8 weeks at a client's site, averaging about 300 SLOCs a day (coding in Java where I can fly), with one developer helping me on a few specific tasks, and we ended up with a system that was functionally equivalent and about 50 times faster than the previous version because it stripped out all the unnecessary modularity (modularity is good, but if you split something that should be one component into ten, you just get lots of extra overhead) and message-passing that gunked up the original design.
I can't help but think of the analogy between this project and the Linux/MINIX effort. My knowledge of the problem was informed by analyzing the earlier design, but not a line of code was actually derived from it. And the twenty-some-odd man year effort was replaced neatly by a 3-man-month effort that was superior.
The moral of the story is that any of us who've been around in the software world long enough will tell you that most any system, assuming you lift all the crazy featurization constraints, can be written fairly rapidly by one person. And that usually you'll get a better result with an early working product and iterative functionality development than you will with a monolithic development effort, assuming you know the architectural parameters going into the effort by having been able to analyze previous efforts at solving a similar problem.
So the point is... keep the assumptions in mind before you start estimating a project's size and scope, man-hour requirements and so on. Development of UNIX-like OSes was a well-defined, well-understood problem at the time Linus did his work. And don't go claiming that somebody accomplished an impossible task unless you have a REALLY good understanding of the software engineering process in general, and the particulars of the problem they solved - in this case Ken Brown has neither. We didn't really need Mr. Tanenbaum to tell us that, but it shows what a stand-up guy he is that he has made a clear effort to defend Linus despite any past arguments they may have had.
Okay, I know people have gripes against the JBoss Group, and Marc Fleury in particular. But really, most people just want software that works and doesn't suck, and free is a good price, and Open Source is mighty nice too. I used JBoss back about 2-2.5 years ago fairly extensively, and at the time it was substantially better than some of the trash commercial products out there (specifically Weblogic - I had the misfortune of dealing with BEA's 'support' if you can call it that on several occasions). We used JBoss for development and test, and did some smaller deployments on it. I would hardly claim it's perfect, but the commercial products at the time sucked too (there are some decent ones like Orion server, but at the time, the Orion documentation blew, and closed source product without big company behind it == possible money sink that might not be supported in a year).
So now we are supposed to think JBoss sucks because nobody who knows better really uses it, and only shills endorse it (does anybody who knows better really use EJBs anyway? The architecture sucks, and that's Sun's fault, not JBoss'). Fine, so what the hell is the alternative? Apache Geronimo isn't off the ground yet and got off to a rocky start with licensing issues with some reused JBoss code (that whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth about the JBoss people actually, who seemed too eager to try to discredit a competing project).
Thankfully I got out of the enterprise software world two years ago, and if I never have to see another heinous piece-of-shit EJB system for the rest of my life, I can assure you it will be too soon. Nonetheless, for my personal edification and to enlighten those I still interact with who are stuck in that world, what the hell Open Source J2EE platform ought they to be using?
I agree with your take on De Tocqueville and that it is taking his name in vain to associate it with the conservative/big business shill institute. I am not sure that I'd say that the Free Software movement is as much about volunteerism though as I'd like. Definitely the Open Source movement, and other efforts like the Creative Commons project are about volunteerism and the idea of contributing to the commons for both selfish and common benefit. The Free Software movement, unfortunately, seems to alienate more conservative audiences with its association with RMS and others who seem more interesting in subverting the entire existance of closed source software and intellectual property in general.
This concept scares away potential conservative allies - I know that people like the FSF probably don't care since they have a "with-us-or-against-us" sort of attitude that denies the middle ground. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure the ideological connections being drawn here fit - this condemnation of Linux and Linus as a person is despicable and I hope to God these people take a massive public beating over making these kinds of rhetoric-filled accusations.
I gather the brit-spies weren't able to actually stake out the location on the relevant morning to catch the perp in the act of receiving the package?
That's the only part of the story that's a bit of a shame - after all that work, it woulda been nice to have some pics of the fraudster received the p-p-powerbook, not that they necessarily would have opened it on the spot. Oh well. Still, they did succeed in a bit of financial punishment to the scammer with the 27% import duty.
Hmm, scarcity of resources is part of the equation, but it's not all of it. Computers are tools, like a machine shop or CAD design tool, and brains and skill are human resources.
I should point out that the development of designs for many kinds of real-world products is not restricted inherently to those with lots of money either. If you have skills in mechanical engineering, designing a real-world patentable product is no harder than it is for a good software developer to code up any variety of software products - and they use the same tools you mention, brains and computers. A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think software development is inherently easier because they understand the process, and they don't understand other engineering processes. You don't need to actually manufacture anything to obtain a patent on a design for a physical product either (and yes, perhaps that should be a point up for debate too, but I'm talking about the way the system was designed from the outset).
The real difference seems to be that other types of patents are usually subjected to greater scrutiny, AND critically that product development and release cycles outside of the software world are much, much longer (you can design products till the cows come home, but getting it to market and seeing if people want it takes much more time - getting software to market involves putting it up on your website, buying some ads, etc.). Software gets dumped on the market so fast due to the lack of need for machining, tooling, production line setup, and so on, that the industry is 10 steps ahead by the time a patent gets issued, and the ideas behind the patent were so broadly disseminated and used it's quite difficult to figure out who's ideas they even were in the first place. And if you could attribute ownership to them, what damage does it to the market to force lots of products already on the market off because Joe Schmoe happened to get his application to the patent office first (often seemingly patenting something he saw in some other software product or paper first).
So instead of rewarding true innovation, software patents seem to reward patent squatters who track market trends, find a popular product that seems to be doing well, and then patent the innovations that product brought to bear whether or not they actually created that product. The creators, often as not, don't patent it themselves first because they don't perceive what they did as patentable. Then you get things like e-commerce or hyperlinks being issued patents that nobody knows about or takes seriously for years, such that an entire economy has been built around it which is put at risk, and many people's jobs and livelihoods can be ruined.
Incidentally, I don't know if the solution is to get rid of them entirely. But clearly software patents are broken as they exist right now.
The word "virii" certainly goes back at least to the beginning of the 90s, since it was in wide and common use by '92 or '93 when I got involved in the scene. In fact, I never heard them referred to as "viruses" at all, they were always virii. I'd guess it would have had to originate in the 80 to have become so widely used by that point in time.
Agreed, a lot of good points there, most of it stuff we already know packaged together in a way the SEC will understand. The points about option exercise price are particularly interesting, I thought there might be something fishy there when I looked, but I never looked closely enough to notice this - don't know if this has been previously explored by groklaw or others.
I believe them when they say this is a strategic shift. I think we're going to see Microsoft release a lot more Open Source software in the next two or three years. Especially stuff targeted at developers - in fact, I wouldn't be shocked to see substantial portions of the development tools used for Windows to eventually become Open Source. Microsoft has always been willing to give stuff away for free to lock people into the platform, and they will readily extend that model to their source code. They see this as encouraging people in the broader community to develop, for free, better tools for the Windows platform.
It's going to be an interesting couple of years. How will they react when somebody forks their Open Source offerings and makes them cross-platform? How do you win the hearts and minds of developers who are far more saavy than the population as a whole about the many past transgressions of Microsoft? Hell, most people that develop exclusively for Microsoft platforms realize what scum-suckers Microsoft are (except for those snivelling MS-asskisser types, you know the ones I mean).
I think you are sorely mistaken. I'd say "open source enthusiasts", or more accurately, hobbyists, make up a lot of folks on Slashdot. More people than not around here have installed a Linux distro, may have an old box they use as a Linux server or occasional desktop machine, or use some Unix flavors at work. But a lot fewer than the majority here never use Windows - I don't know the exact numbers, but I know Rob Malda has stated that the majority of page views are from Windows boxes, and I know that when I've had links in top comments and stories from Slashdot, I've seen the traffic patterns - sure, there are a lot more Linux users than the average stream of web traffic, but it's more like 10-15%.
Lots of people around here write software for a living, not just as a hobby. Unless you write web software, embedded software or other niche software, it's safe to say that you have to worry about people buying and using the software you write, which means using Windows. No, I'd say the fact that MS buys ads on OSDN indicates they understand the audience on Slashdot fairly well and in fact they want to be associated in these developers minds with the positive aspects of the Open Source community.
Anyway, I am an active Slashdot poster, and I know a fair number of other active Slashdot posters, and as far as I know, relatively few of them can say they exclusively use Linux, FreeBSD, or other Free/Open Source operating systems. I don't know if I would call myself "platform agnostic" - I'm not a zealot, and I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, but when it comes down to it, I need people to buy my software, and ignoring that fact is a fast road to being broke.
Slashdot Mirror
I've managed plenty of software development teams before, and you just don't assign any random engineer to make important UI decisions. Some people have the talent for this and some don't. It's part aesthetics, part usability, part style. Very important stuff, and not something you learn getting a computer science degree, hacking Unix, writing HTML rendering engines and so on.
Yes, Arvid Axelsson, the author of the current default theme (Qute), may have a bit of an ego himself, and may have been reluctant to freely license his artwork under the same MPL terms as the Mozilla codebase. But he's a reasonable person, and he's indicated he's willing to compromise and do a Free license that works for the Mozilla team, because he wants to make sure that Firefox succeeds, and has the best, most aesthetically pleasing look and feel possible.
For God's FUCKING sake you egomaniacs (and anybody who has followed some of these discussions over the last few years knows this is true - see the splashscreen debacle in Bugzilla, the many UI layout discussions, and the naming debacles for examples), we are relying on you and the excellent browser you have created and maintained. We respect immensely all the hard work the Mozilla and Firefox core developers have done, but their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?), the terrible aesthetics of the splashscreens and icon sets they keep putting back in are just unacceptable. Qute was the best thing that ever happened to Firefox and the Mozilla project - compare to the awful looking old versions of the Mozilla browser - ugh.
You are the developers and project leaders of a critical mass-market product. If there is truly an unresolvable licensing issue with the current icons and their author is unwilling to compromise, come out and tell us, and assign a group of artists or other aesthetically inclined technology professionals to consider submissions for a new default. Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons or making terrible off-the-cuff aesthetic decisions that have a negative impact on the adoption of a critical product for the entire Internet's wellbeing.
Generally, you aren't making the same kind of bet that 85% of everything you put money into will flop in private equity, and you don't get the kinds of massive multipliers on success that you get with early stage VC (where a 10 million dollar investment might turn into 200-500 million dollars worth of equity after IPO or a big acquisition deal for the real "blockbuster" companies).
I'd guess that a 2x-4x multiple on their successful investments would be considered quite good (remember, these are mostly already publically traded companies). So actually taking a 50% hit on an investment would not be great for these guys, but it's still par for the course. Some people here are speculating they were partially hedged, though I'm not sure it would be possible to effectively hedge such a massive position in a stock that was difficult to short in the open market, though I guess they could have written their own options.
According to their own site, they've invested $745 million as a fund, which means 50 million was about 8% of their entire fund. So losing half of it, while not devastating, is definitely not a trivial amount even for a fund like this.
As I said, that would effectively shut them down, end their legal pursuits, and so on, or force them to take on new, very unfavorable financing terms from somebody else ASAP.
That's precisely what they are doing here. Getting back what cash they can, getting a bunch of shares they can slow-dump back to the market, and not fighting a big, messy legal battle to get their 50 million back. Of course, SCO doesn't have 50 million in cash to give them and it would effectively shut SCO down, or force other fairly dire measures on them to get together 50 million bucks and still have operating capital - while Baystar itself may not give a crap, it would look quite bad for them to screw over a company they had invested in that badly.
So I guess we are left to wonder why Baystar bought into this deal in the first place. I have no idea, and I know there are lots of sinister motives assigned to this, but I'm sure some of the characters involved just got suckered into what sounded to them like a sure-fire legal get-rich-quick scheme - which is all that SCO's business is at this point.
Even in NYC though, there are still plenty of neighborhoods I wouldn't show my tech off in, especially at night. I think the gentrification of NYC has made me "soft" about this stuff - I used to be perpetually aware, and I never had any real problems when I was in high school here. I don't remember the last time I actually had the "prickly neck" danger response in NYC - it's definitely been a while.
And you're then surprised when the small print turned out to be designed to fuck you over?
No, I never used a credit card I was sent without permission. Perhaps you missed the part about me not being an idiot? However, I did have to waste time calling these companies and clarifying to them that I never asked for their credit cards and threatening them to convince them to leave me alone. Additionally, I've had American Express, who I do have a credit card with, send me strange credit cards that I didn't expect which I then had to call and specifically cancel.
I'm just saying I understand how a busy person could get confused under the bundle of junk they receive. The only way in which I *have* been screwed was by changes in terms from a credit card company that started out with great rates, but after a single payment is three or four days late once, they double your monthly rates. I'm sure that was buried in the terms I agreed to somewhere but it wasn't exactly clearly or prominently featured, and the above-board credit card companies I've dealt with before have never done it to me.
Your argument is essentially "buyer beware". I think that's fine and all, but without a line of legal defense backing the consumer up, there's no reason for companies to not attempt to fuck people over. This is where the legal concepts of contracts of adherence and "reasonable" terms come into play, and people who think that companies should be legally able to hide any stealth terms they want into an obfuscated contract then blame the buyer for "agreeing" to a stack of 6 point text they were sent with their new credit card are idiots.
Without reasonable consumer protection laws, it would be impossible to do business. Yes, there is a tradeoff, businesses and individuals should be able to enter into reasonable contracts with each other, but laws are needed to make sure that people know about unreasonable terms they may be unknowingly agreeing to, and in egregious cases where a company or industry has proven itself incapable of being honest with its customers, the activity needs to be banned.
The other problem here is that if you just force companies to "notify" their customers of certain things, they will often bury the bad stuff under reams of legal mumbo-jumbo in some click-through agreement. Sometimes, laws need to specify the way in which consent is obtained and the explicitness by which that consent is obtained to make sure people are actually being told of the deal they are entering into.
I don't think I ever said I was a Linux "advocate" - I advocate the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's Linux, sometimes it's not.
I take all people's opinions and weigh them based on their own value, unless somebody has demonstrated a track record with me of excellent quality thought. I won't accept anybody's argument by authority, thank you very much. I do however think that everybody has known for some time that Linux kernel development needed more structure, needed SCM and so on, and it's got that now. And I acknowledge that from a business PR perspective, McKusick is probably right, but that his recommendations wouldn't necessarily have prevented a challenge like SCO's from occuring in the first place, and they may well have had other burdensome consequences.
You BSD people need to stop acting like you're right all the time, that's not a very good way to make new friends. Truthfully though, I don't know what I can stand less, the script kiddie types who think they are |33+ because they run Linux, or the supercilious, grumpy old BSD engineer types.
Also, I would imagine that pretty much every kernel code submission is traceable to it's submitter. As far as I know, every specific line of code that has been brought up by SCO has been tracked down and attributed to it's submitter. Beyond that, there's really no way for BSD, Linux or anybody else to _know_ that the person submitting a patch really owns the copyright to it, or is acting as an authorized agent of their employer who owns the copyright to it. At some point, there is good faith. Yes, a well-documented paper trail would be nice, but requiring patch submitters to submit signed documentation with their patches would place an immense administrative burden on somebody, and it wouldn't prove that no copyright infringement has occurred, it would just blame-shift to whoever submitted the patch. I don't think that would legally remove the possibility that an unscrupulous company could go fishing for damages, a la SCO. It would also effectively remove the bazaar-like openness that Linux has, in contrast with more closed, insular projects with their rigid committer lists and uberpolitical machinations (XFree86 anyone?).
But I guess from a PR perspective this guy has a good point. Having some big pile of papers to point to and say "look, this documents that all contributers have copyright to their patches, and every line of code is accounted for" - this might help dissuade outrageous claims like SCOs and allay the fears of the business community, which likes to know that there are reams of bureaucratic documentation proving that the code is clean.
I don't recall exactly which characters it was, I think it was the 't' and the 'i' that just killed me. The not-quite-one-stroke system feels terribly broken - most of the characters get recognized after one stroke, but a 't' shows up as an 'l' until you do a crossbar, then it disappears and reappears as a 't'... ugh. Likewise with the 'i'. This caused me some serious cognitive dissonance, and I found it far slower than the old one-stroke characters for 't' and 'i' in Graffiti 1. Yes, the middle-screen capital thing is somewhat nice, but didn't matter on my Treo since there is no dedicated Graffiti area (I had to use Graffiti Anywhere to get Graffiti at all on my Treo 600).
In my experience, true "talk therapy" is of only very modest use. The kind of therapy where you sit there and try to get to the root of your problems re: your relationship with your father, etc. Well fuck, in truth, my problems were that my boss, the CEO of our company, was a fuckhead - maybe he "reminded me of my father", maybe not, but that's not a useful way to improve my situation. Many problems in our lives just can't be talked through. And for very smart folks, like most of the people reading Slashdot, seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist who is not at your mental level for this kind of talk therapy will be an exercise in frustration. If you really have fucked up issues with your childhood that you have NOT faced, then this might help you. In my case, I was fully aware of the fucked-upedness of my childhood, that I had an abusive alcoholic father who made me resent authority by the way he tried to exert it over my life and so on. If you have never come to terms with bad things that happened to you though, maybe this will be helpful.
However, not all therapy is this sort of therapy. I know people who have undergone cognitive therapy with very impressive results. Cognitive therapy is not about sitting around and chatting about your father and how he relates to all the problems in your life, blaming your family for your personal foibles and so on. In fact it's the opposite - it's about taking responsibility for the way your brain works today and training yourself to alter the way you think about and react to certain stimuli. I've never done this myself, but I've seen fairly impressive results in successful treatment of somebody who had developed an acute case of agoraphobia in fact, as well as dealing with depression caused by real issues - in the case I'm thinking of, depression associated with incurable illness (as opposed to so-called "clinical depression" of the generally depressed - I don't know if it would be as effective for these people).
Now, that's not saying this is right for everybody. My endorsement is not based on any double-blind scientific analysis. Nor would such studies be easy to conduct - because all this stuff is a deeply personal thing. The right chemistry between the psychologist or psychiatrist and the patient and a confluence of techniques that correspond to the realities of the problems you face are key. Shop around and be a conscientious consumer, like you would with anything else.
As for the medication aspect - I've used several of 'em over the years. Xanax for a while when I was a teenager and I was suffering from panic disorder (in this case brought on by a bout of drug use - don't use drugs, kiddies, they CAN fuck with your brain chemistry). Valium during several periods of time to treat acute anxiety associated with the aforementioned problems in my life. Benzodiazepenes (this family of drugs) are good, powerful drugs when used appropriately and in moderation, but they are not long term treatments for anything. As for the long term medications, the Prozacs, Wellbutrin and other SSRIs (selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors) that are widely prescribed, I recommend them as a last resort only. If you are clinically depressed and there seems to be no good reason, nothing you can change about your life to improve it, no way to change your thinking or behavior patterns, no way to improve your outlook through exercise, change of lifestyle and so on, then maybe. Bu
Agreed - I said essentially the same the other day http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107859&cid=917 3066. It is a shame to see de Tocqueville's name used this way. Google him and read a bit about what the man actually wrote if you've never read him before. Agree or not with all of it, he surely would roll over in his grave to be associated with these scumballs.
Dear FSF,
All your documents are belong to us. Here's 30 bucks to cover your copying costs (in case you didn't get that this is a big "fuck you", let us clarify that for you - "FUCK YOU"). Toodle-oo!
Yours truly,
Your buddies at Dewey, Stickham and Howe
I call this desire the commodification of software developers - I've seen this several times. It's not the best or fastest way to get good software developed, but it feels less risky to some. Unfortunately, from what I've observed in practice, the 1-2 people will generally get a better product out the door than the 30 people. My conclusion is that in practice, it's better to have several crack "teams" that can work on smaller projects highly independently each of which consists of one or two lead programmers and one or two assistants (less experienced people building expertise by doing support programming), with an architect/adviser to help partition problems up. Or if you can keep the products or projects small enough, one team could be managing the development of the entire product/project itself. The project "managers" job should really be bilateral negotiation of featurization and scheduling, the middle man between sales/marketing/etc. and the development teams.
In practice, though, this is hard to implement this kind of organization because it's hard to hire enough people with existing experience in any given problem domain who are also excellent programmers. This is roughly akin to what Steve McConnell calls the "Chief Programmer team" or "surgical team" structure in Rapid Development, an excellent book even if it is from Microsoft Press, that talks about some of these kinds of issues without getting mired in the latest software engineering fads.
From what I've seen, one of the biggest risks any early stage company faces is hiring a Director/VP of Software Development who is a mid-level management type who wants nothing more than to maximize headcount so his role is maximally important. Definitely this is not the best way to get good software written rapidly.
In short, I don't oppose all regulation of Vonage because they do stuff over the internet, but I don't see the regulation as useful either, and I do see it as potentially a way to overwhelm competition in the VoIP arena by making it too burdensome for new entrants to compete. Vonage service is useful for some - I think it would be extremely misleading for people to expect the kind of reliability they get with POTS service, simply because the reliability is limited by the reliability of power and the underlying internet infrastructure. Vonage has some reliability issues of their own to hammer out too - but even if their reliability were 100%, you would still have far more outages than you get with POTS, at least in my experience.
If you want to force reliability on VoIP, you need to first try to force reliability on the internet. Piling fees onto Vonage and forcing a higher level of service onto them is nonsensical when most of their customers have residential internet access with no level-of-service guarantees, regular outages, no uninterruptible power supplies and so on. Forcing them to be honest in their advertising and about how they compare themselves to POTS wouldn't be such a bad thing, on the other hand.
I had an experience where an entire development team of twenty people spent about a year and a half writing a large, grandiose enterprise software system that was supposed to be general-purpose and flexible, but in the end was a real performance turd at the job it was supposed to do. Using what I knew about the actual problem from looking at the previous solution's mistakes and the original problem statement, I rewrote the system from scratch over about 8 weeks at a client's site, averaging about 300 SLOCs a day (coding in Java where I can fly), with one developer helping me on a few specific tasks, and we ended up with a system that was functionally equivalent and about 50 times faster than the previous version because it stripped out all the unnecessary modularity (modularity is good, but if you split something that should be one component into ten, you just get lots of extra overhead) and message-passing that gunked up the original design.
I can't help but think of the analogy between this project and the Linux/MINIX effort. My knowledge of the problem was informed by analyzing the earlier design, but not a line of code was actually derived from it. And the twenty-some-odd man year effort was replaced neatly by a 3-man-month effort that was superior.
The moral of the story is that any of us who've been around in the software world long enough will tell you that most any system, assuming you lift all the crazy featurization constraints, can be written fairly rapidly by one person. And that usually you'll get a better result with an early working product and iterative functionality development than you will with a monolithic development effort, assuming you know the architectural parameters going into the effort by having been able to analyze previous efforts at solving a similar problem.
So the point is... keep the assumptions in mind before you start estimating a project's size and scope, man-hour requirements and so on. Development of UNIX-like OSes was a well-defined, well-understood problem at the time Linus did his work. And don't go claiming that somebody accomplished an impossible task unless you have a REALLY good understanding of the software engineering process in general, and the particulars of the problem they solved - in this case Ken Brown has neither. We didn't really need Mr. Tanenbaum to tell us that, but it shows what a stand-up guy he is that he has made a clear effort to defend Linus despite any past arguments they may have had.
So now we are supposed to think JBoss sucks because nobody who knows better really uses it, and only shills endorse it (does anybody who knows better really use EJBs anyway? The architecture sucks, and that's Sun's fault, not JBoss'). Fine, so what the hell is the alternative? Apache Geronimo isn't off the ground yet and got off to a rocky start with licensing issues with some reused JBoss code (that whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth about the JBoss people actually, who seemed too eager to try to discredit a competing project).
Thankfully I got out of the enterprise software world two years ago, and if I never have to see another heinous piece-of-shit EJB system for the rest of my life, I can assure you it will be too soon. Nonetheless, for my personal edification and to enlighten those I still interact with who are stuck in that world, what the hell Open Source J2EE platform ought they to be using?
This concept scares away potential conservative allies - I know that people like the FSF probably don't care since they have a "with-us-or-against-us" sort of attitude that denies the middle ground. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure the ideological connections being drawn here fit - this condemnation of Linux and Linus as a person is despicable and I hope to God these people take a massive public beating over making these kinds of rhetoric-filled accusations.
That's the only part of the story that's a bit of a shame - after all that work, it woulda been nice to have some pics of the fraudster received the p-p-powerbook, not that they necessarily would have opened it on the spot. Oh well. Still, they did succeed in a bit of financial punishment to the scammer with the 27% import duty.
I should point out that the development of designs for many kinds of real-world products is not restricted inherently to those with lots of money either. If you have skills in mechanical engineering, designing a real-world patentable product is no harder than it is for a good software developer to code up any variety of software products - and they use the same tools you mention, brains and computers. A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think software development is inherently easier because they understand the process, and they don't understand other engineering processes. You don't need to actually manufacture anything to obtain a patent on a design for a physical product either (and yes, perhaps that should be a point up for debate too, but I'm talking about the way the system was designed from the outset).
The real difference seems to be that other types of patents are usually subjected to greater scrutiny, AND critically that product development and release cycles outside of the software world are much, much longer (you can design products till the cows come home, but getting it to market and seeing if people want it takes much more time - getting software to market involves putting it up on your website, buying some ads, etc.). Software gets dumped on the market so fast due to the lack of need for machining, tooling, production line setup, and so on, that the industry is 10 steps ahead by the time a patent gets issued, and the ideas behind the patent were so broadly disseminated and used it's quite difficult to figure out who's ideas they even were in the first place. And if you could attribute ownership to them, what damage does it to the market to force lots of products already on the market off because Joe Schmoe happened to get his application to the patent office first (often seemingly patenting something he saw in some other software product or paper first).
So instead of rewarding true innovation, software patents seem to reward patent squatters who track market trends, find a popular product that seems to be doing well, and then patent the innovations that product brought to bear whether or not they actually created that product. The creators, often as not, don't patent it themselves first because they don't perceive what they did as patentable. Then you get things like e-commerce or hyperlinks being issued patents that nobody knows about or takes seriously for years, such that an entire economy has been built around it which is put at risk, and many people's jobs and livelihoods can be ruined.
Incidentally, I don't know if the solution is to get rid of them entirely. But clearly software patents are broken as they exist right now.
The word "virii" certainly goes back at least to the beginning of the 90s, since it was in wide and common use by '92 or '93 when I got involved in the scene. In fact, I never heard them referred to as "viruses" at all, they were always virii. I'd guess it would have had to originate in the 80 to have become so widely used by that point in time.
Agreed, a lot of good points there, most of it stuff we already know packaged together in a way the SEC will understand. The points about option exercise price are particularly interesting, I thought there might be something fishy there when I looked, but I never looked closely enough to notice this - don't know if this has been previously explored by groklaw or others.
It's going to be an interesting couple of years. How will they react when somebody forks their Open Source offerings and makes them cross-platform? How do you win the hearts and minds of developers who are far more saavy than the population as a whole about the many past transgressions of Microsoft? Hell, most people that develop exclusively for Microsoft platforms realize what scum-suckers Microsoft are (except for those snivelling MS-asskisser types, you know the ones I mean).
Lots of people around here write software for a living, not just as a hobby. Unless you write web software, embedded software or other niche software, it's safe to say that you have to worry about people buying and using the software you write, which means using Windows. No, I'd say the fact that MS buys ads on OSDN indicates they understand the audience on Slashdot fairly well and in fact they want to be associated in these developers minds with the positive aspects of the Open Source community.
Anyway, I am an active Slashdot poster, and I know a fair number of other active Slashdot posters, and as far as I know, relatively few of them can say they exclusively use Linux, FreeBSD, or other Free/Open Source operating systems. I don't know if I would call myself "platform agnostic" - I'm not a zealot, and I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, but when it comes down to it, I need people to buy my software, and ignoring that fact is a fast road to being broke.