I will somewhat agree with you on this, at least at smaller companies in Canada. My company was doing a software project for a company in Ottawa, and their CEO happened to also own a web design shop that was working with us on the project. I remember being particularly impressed when my partners and I went out for lunch with the CEO and the tattooed web designer (this guy worked miracles in Flash, I've gotta say, and we ended up having him do all our corporate web design stuff).
Anyway, these two fellows from very different social backgrounds, one essentially being the boss' boss of the other, seemed to feel pretty comfortable kicking back a few bottles of Blue (Labbatt's Blue, the Canadian equivalent of... well, they drink the stuff as often as we drink coke or pepsi down here). Mind you, I often went out with both our CEO and with the people who worked for me, but that was the nature of my job. You'd rarely see my company's CEO out at lunch with our software developers, and if you did, they weren't exactly comfortably chit-chatting and kicking back beers, it always seemed much more strained.
It was always a pleasure to do work with our Canadian customers, and we always had a good time up there. Of course, I have to note that these guys were all making about a third what they'd have been making in the Boston area, when you account for currency differences and so on (then again, the cost of living is certainly lower up there, though it's not THAT much lower). Also, I suspect that big corporate environments in Canada are more uptight than what I saw, and I doubt that a large insurance company in Canada would be so much more laid back than a large insurance company in the US. But maybe I'm wrong.
You may manage people, but so do lots of us around here. That doesn't qualify you for pointy-haired status. The fact that you know your way around the command line and understand the difference between various Linux desktop environments, and can use the acronyms appropriately in sentences implies that you are PHBP, or pointy-haired boss poser.
I've worked with some true PHBs - these people couldn't send an email without help (using Windows and Outlook) and typed with one finger. Their choice of desktop was oak or cherry, not KDE or Gnome.
Yes, there were actually two Office projects at Microsoft back in the day. I gather this was when Office XP was mid-development by the main Office group (this was 2000 or 2001), and the.NET scheme was just getting ramped up. A friend of mine, a very bright comp. sci. major who graduated in '99 had been hired by Microsoft and eventually was assigned to this Office ".NET" group, which was working on the web-i-fied Office project. Apparently within 6 months or so of his assignment to the group, the whole project was trashed for a combination of political and hopefully basic logical issues (who really wants pay-per-play services-style office apps based on the corporate IIS web server? not me).
Anyway, the best thing to come out of this was since this was the second group at MS that my friend was at that got scrapped within 6 months of his arrival, he decided to get the hell out of there. People sometimes think MS succeeds at everything they do. They don't, they are just usually fairly good at cutting their losses on the screwups and milking the successes for all they are worth.
You realize your argument is inconsistent, right? You say on the one hand that nobody respects the law with respect to copyright, and yet if copyright were "repealed", 30% of the economy would vanish overnight. If nobody respects the law now and new legislation wouldn't change anything, how does copyright law protect 30% of the economy, and how would it go away?
Yes, there will always be people copying movies, songs and software. It sucks, especially for small companies just trying to pay the bills (I feel less bad for monopolists and cartels, but that still doesn't make it okay to infringe their copyrights). The DMCA has been remarkably ineffective at preventing this. It has been remarkably effective at squelching free speech and killing off projects to promote interoperability. How long did the Linux platform suffer without proper DVD support no thanks to DMCA threat letters and legal extortion? I think we can safely say the vast majority of people just wanted DVD support to work and be Open Source, and aren't into ripping and pirating movies.
We don't need the DMCA. It fails to respect the balance between consumer rights and media producer rights, it is bad for Open Source and open technologies in general, and it disempowers us all.
That would be the lawyers and Canopy Group (Ralph Yarro et. al.). Certainly not Baystar, they seem to have been duped by SCO, Canopy and their own greed into a big PIPE investment in quite the bowser of a company.
As far as I can tell, Canopy hasn't sold any of their stock. However, they suckered Baystar into putting 50 million in cash into this beast to prop up the value of their stock (Canopy's filings with the SEC indicate they own about 35 million dollars in SCOX, in other words about 40 percent of the company). At this point, Canopy only stands to lose big time if Baystar manages to get their 50 million dollars back. At that point, there's nothing left to prop up the share price, and Canopy bites the big one as the price continues its slide into oblivion.
From the Insider Trades reported with the SEC, you'll see many of the execs had been dumping a reasonable amount every month, though some of that selling stopped when the price started going down (perhaps Darl told them to stop selling, it was starting to look bad). However, several of the directors appear to have exercised and dumped at least half of their options holdings over the last few months. Some of the execs have been doing a bit of selling, but not all. I don't see much evidence from that of anything other than execs and directors trying to get out when the getting was good - most of them didn't make a fortune on their sales, maybe a few hundred grand, and the rest appear to be stock with a bunch of shares that aren't worth a ton any more.
First of all, I don't see much evidence of a meaningful dip today. If you want to talk about meaningful numbers, go click on the 3 month or 6 month chart for SCO. There's been pretty steady selling pressure on this sucker for some time now. I don't really understand how it's slid as slowly as it has, but I guess it's just a reflection of the slow process by which the media's coverage of this case has gone from asserting that SCO's IP was clearly infringed by Linux, to the inclusion of phrases like "SCO claims" and "according to SCO," prior to those claims, and, increasingly, interviews with analysts and industry figures who are pretty willing to join the SCO bashing as they all start to realize that if SCO wins, the whole economy loses, with a massive number of companies relying somewhere in the wings not just on Linux but on lots of pieces of Open Source technology.
With a market cap of around 90 million now, this one has been a real dog for the investors. And this is a company with $65 million in cash in the bank, supposedly - that means the price-to-book ratio is getting mighty low. And their P/E is pushing down towards 20.
For those not familiar with this stuff, that means the premium people were putting on this stock reflecting the possibility of a big (i.e. 5 billion dollar) win against IBM has basically dropped to near-zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole executive team get rotated out soon or something else drastic happen to SCO. The legal battle may drag out for ages, but the market has spoken.
I generally agree with what you are saying. But I think there are lots of niches where the "wait long enough" means "wait forever" for all practical purposes. And there are areas of software that FOSS just hasn't put a candle to commercial software in terms of the perceived value of the product at this point, especially those that involve heavy non-code content creation (like gaming). For most human beings the utility of spending 10, or 50, or 100 dollars now vs. waiting 2 or 3 years for someone to get around to making a particular piece of software and release it as Open Source isn't much of a choice - we want it now.
There are plenty of other goods that depreciate in value rapidly in the market too - it's not just software. Anyway, I agree that as soon as you start talking about "solutions", you've got my full agreement that you are much better off with a solution built on top of popular, widely used Open Source technologies, it'll be supported much longer and generally give you much better bang for the buck (even after you factor in all the other costs of using/maintaining it) than the commercial competition. Stuff like Apache, JBoss, Postgres, MySQL all falls into this category.
I realize you are just trolling since you didn't say anything specific about my ideas, just that they are "old" (the idea that people have a right to earn a living off of software they develop if it is valuable to somebody is "old"?). In any case, I think you missed the point since I _have_ contributed to Open Source projects, in the form of code, documentation, and testing. I am not denying the power of the FOSS meme, just saying that FOSS doesn't provide all the answers all the time, and that sometimes you will find much better products for a particular purpose from commercial shareware developers.
Sorry, those 10 dollar "little utilities" you sniff your nose at are written by shareware authors trying to earn a living making your life easier. Your attitude is part of what's wrong with a certain segment of the Linux community - for many people, openness is just a front for wanting things for free. Sure, lots of nice people have contributed time to writing and improving Open Source software because they are generous, they want to contribute to the common good, or because licenses force them to contribute changes back, and it makes more economical sense to use Open Source than commercial software for a particular project. This is all great, but this doesn't mean the people trying to write useful Palm or Pocket PC or plain old Windows apps for the average joe are bad for not giving away their work - we all have to put bread on the table somehow, and not every piece of software out there is amenable to a free-as-in-beer business model (and for most consumer software products, it's hard to be free-as-in-speech without also being free-as-in-beer - things are different in the world of enterprise software, with large support contracts and TCO analyses).
Personally, I love the Palm platform. My Palm phone is far, far, far more open and far more hackable than any other piece of consumer electronics I own, with the possible exception of Tivo. Palm doesn't give away the source code for the core of their OS. True. But I've never really found anything lacking in what I can do with the SDKs and frameworks they provide for writing Palm apps.
Meanwhile, I guess you'd rather use vi or emacs on your Linux PDA instead of buying a 10 dollar piece of document editing software that a small software company or independent shareware developer bothered to make. And if there aren't any good handheld-scale GUI apps that will be written for your Linux PDA's GUI APIs of choice? You're probably one of those people that will just whine about it instead of writing one yourself ("but I'm not a programmer... whine... it needs to be Open Source... and I'm not going to pay 10 dollars for it, of course").
It's great to see Linux getting used in more consumer electronics devices, and that's cool and all, but really the companies aren't using Linux because it's Free as in speech, they're using it because it's free as in beer. And they are going to write closed source GUI apps for it, like Tivo and others have, because they want to make money, not invite competition.
Dude, the Quiznos rocks the crappy Chinese food in Burlington, don't let anyone say otherwise. Anyway, don't go there anymore since I don't work in Lexington these days. But my memories of the Food Court are fond indeed.
Agreed - like any rebate program, the redemption rates are usually quite low. And those are redemptions on 10,20 or 30 dollar rebates - the return is much more substantial than the effort invested. Though the return from this promotion is high relative to the product cost, they might have had a much higher redemption rate if they were giving away something with a higher perceived value and giving it away less frequently than 1 in 3. Though it's nice to get a 99 cent free item with a 1.29 bottle purchase, there's still the cost of remembering to hold onto the bottle cap, signing up for the service and so on to redeem it - realistically, the costs of this effort may be valued by many people at pretty close to the dollar value of the item itself.
Then, as you pointed out quite accurately, there's the system requirements, bandwidth requirements, computer-experience and application installation experience requirements, and the need to be interested in music (many people don't listen to much music, or are just interested enough to listen to what's on the radio). Frankly, I think a 5% redemption rate should be viewed as a rather decent success of this product. If they thought honestly that they'd get a 30% redemption rate, they were kidding themselves. Personally, I think I would have guessed more like 10% based on my sense of the market.
I also think the promotion would have been much more successful if it targetted regular Pepsi drinkers who drink from cans. The return from cashing in these free songs is much higher if you've collected 10-15 free songs, and I'd say the likelihood of that person getting the songs and going through the effort is much higher than the likelihood of somebody else.
I'll us myself as an example (though I'm a bad one in most ways). I am not a regular Pepsi drinker - I drink Pepsi usually only when there are no other options (i.e. no Diet Coke around). I won an iTunes cap while on the road driving from Boston to New York at a rest stop in Connecticut where they only sold bottles, and only sold Diet Pepsi. I have used iTunes and purchased probably 15 dollars worth of songs from iTunes in the past. I thought it was very cool and great that I had a bottle cap worth a dollar, and I put the bottle somewhere meaning to keep and redeem the free song. Nonetheless, I didn't really give it enough thought to be terribly careful with that bottle, and ended up throwing it out by accident when cleaning my car after the drive. Had I gotten that bottle cap upstairs and dropped it by my computer, I probably would have redeemed it at some point. So even among people interested enough, competent enough, and so on who happen to get a winning bottle cap, the redemption rate is likely to be at best maybe 50%? And that's a pretty small fraction of the population
consistent with archaeological evidence. Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
This is the kind of argument spewed by the same sort of people who say things like "an omnipotent God could have put all those dinosaur bones in the rocks for us to find". This is certainly true - an omnipotent, omniscient God could have tricked us, that tricksy God. The whole world could also be a simulation. Ultimately these sorts of arguments are best left to philosophers - I'll stick with Occam's Razor myself and figure that all that evidence is there because those things actually happened. So can I "prove" that God didn't create the heavens and the earth in a day and just make it look like we have had an expanding universe that has been growing for billions of years, let us observe galactic, stellar and planetary formation processes, and the tons of other evidence that points to the conclusion that we live in an old universe, that life evolved here on earth by some set of mechanisms (admittedly not fully understood yet)? No, I can't prove that to somebody like yourself whose standard of proof is impossible to meet.
I have absolutely no hate for Judeo-Christian beliefs. I just don't feel the need personally to couple the belief in the concept of God, or adherence to historical religious customs of any particular religion with the belief in the literal truth of a book that is (beyond a reasonable doubt) written by men, and several different men at that.
This is just ridiculous. Generally techniques like carbon dating have been shown to be fairly reliable. There are cases where it's produced erroneous results, but certainly not "way off" to the tune of mistaking something that's really 5,000 years old to be 500,000 years old. I'm sorry, but it's fine to be a Christian and believe in the basic "truth" of the bible, but don't try to spread this literalist absurdity around by besmirching any science that disagrees with your religious beliefs.
The "core test" for which theory precisely is flawed? You mean the "theory" that the earth is more than 5,000 years old? There is a heck of a lot more evidence than just carbon dating for that, bud.
Strange, and it said the artist was an Italian teenager too - if this symbol is offensive in most of Europe, I'd imagine an Italian would know that. I have also seen several posts referring to the artist as a teenage girl - however, the name Andrea, in my experience, is a man's name in Italy.
Is this perhaps an intentional use of symbols that would be sexually suggestive? I know that sounds a little far out, but is this some sort of massive troll on OO.o or something? The smiling fish, the "OK" sign... both symbols for female genitalia. I dunno, the whole thing is a bit suspicious if you ask me. The post up at the top of this thread by Slashdot username "Mr. Darl McBride" about his involvement with this contest didn't exactly inspire confidence on my tinfoil-hat protected brain either.
Perhaps high profile projects should think a little bit harder about appropriate ways to get kids involved before they let some random person set up a contest like this to pick a mascot for a very visible part of their project, even if it is "just" the OO.o Schools Project (what happened to appealing to educators and administrators and not just kids?). Maybe the whole thing was all well-intentioned and just a bad idea - the seagull is nice and all, but it looks pretty drug-addled too. Or maybe it was a big, well-planned troll.
Other alternatives include iontophoresis (don't buy the unit, just build one yourself with some aligator clips, a resistor and a bunch of 9V batteries in series).
I'm sorry, did you just recommend I put an alligator clip, a resistor and a bunch of 9V batteries in series with my balls to cure ball sweat? You sir are a disturbed man.
Wow, you are quite the caffeinated fellow, aren't you. Show me a company that's going to pull a product from the market and go rewrite it because it can potentially cause a bluescreen for 1/10th of 1 percent of the market. How do I know when I need to pull my product from the market? The first person who complains that there was a blue screen? How can I possibly attribute it to my software, when it hasn't happened for any of the other 5,000 people who've downloaded and used it?
I know now that DirectX can indeed be buggy - but so can OpenGL. It all depends on the hardware support, which ironically is often better for DirectX than for OpenGL these days. So I guess under your system we would all just whine and complain and never release any software until we all lost our jobs and our livelihoods? Realistically, developing rock-solid 3d graphics applications is EXTREMELY difficult, and doing effective QA for 3D software on a tiny budget is even more difficult - if you'd rather live in a world where none of this kind of content saw the light of day, that's fine, nobody's forcing you to download it or to support the small companies developing it.
I'm sure you're a good programmer, as am I, but I don't think you quite know of what you speak here or you wouldn't be spouting off so strongly.
That's a pretty simplistic understanding of life. Lots of corporations shove contracts down our throats all the time that none of us ever plan on abiding by - I'm 100% certain you've clicked on "I Agree" with many software packages where perhaps you've given a cursory glance to the EULA, or not read it at all. Every sane person does, because in simple cost/benefit analysis you waste lots of time reading and complaining about absurd restrictions, or trying to find alternative products because of some contractual restrictions that are completely unenforceable, and in many cases outright illegal.
This was perhaps my first lesson in the real world after college - I learned it when my company's investors shoved a 2 year non-compete clause down every employee's throat as a condition of them giving our company money. The clause was so broad and outrageous (as these things usually are) that it would be thrown out in 2 seconds in Massachusetts where we worked. But, and this is the key, there is no concept in our legal system of penalizing companies for sticking these sorts of terms in a contract. The worst that happens in the clause gets thrown out of a contract in court. The best that happens is it gets enforced, if there is a particularly ornery, corporate-whorish judge on a case. You can make the same market based argument you are making for random software EULAs or for employment agreements - "a contract is a contract, if you don't like it, go work somewhere else, or go buy software somewhere else".
I reject this argument on a rights basis, namely that I have certain inalienable rights that I can't contractually give away, and this includes the right to personal use of a product I've legally purchased as I see fit, on my computer, in my home. There are plenty of other fundamental rights you can't give away in a contract of adherence, like an EULA, and plenty you can't give away in ANY contract. Why not the right to privacy w.r.t. use of your own legally owned property?
Sure it is. I recently got all kinds of goodies on #asterisk for my Cisco 7960 IP phone and my Asterisk box - config files for *, phone config files, firmware updates and older firmware versions for the Cisco phone that Cisco tries to completely screw you by limiting download to registerd Cisco service contract holders (the latter items may be technically illegal to redistribute, but Cisco makes you wait up to two to three weeks to get a service contract and get access to them and provides no means for online or direct purchase, forcing you to go through a reseller - in short, they just don't want to bother with you, so there's not much of an option besides IRC).
Anyway, I don't remember the last time I used IRC for music or warez. The real question is who the hell uses IRC for music or warez these days?
Re:Read the "Terms Of Service"
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Update on Playfair
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, there's no reason to believe that the person who wrote the software needed to violate this EULA - they didn't necessarily ever buy any music from Apple or agree to the EULA. Whether using such a piece of software that somebody else wrote constitutes violation of this EULA is a less obvious question based on that wording.
In any case, breaking an EULA without redistributing somebody else's copyrighted material is one of those offenses which you won't find much support for on Slashdot. People here generally support the concept of electronic freedom - data you've acquired legally is yours to do what you will with within the bounds of your own home and computer. It's like breaking the speedlimit on your own private racetrack - it may be illegal, but it shouldn't be enforceable. And even here in the grand ole' USA EULAs are of questionable enforceability (mind you, at SourceForge.net, the issue was the unconstitutional legislation we call the DMCA, it had nothing to do with the EULA which SF.net had certainly never agreed to).
Of course, in India, it doesn't matter, since the people distributing Playfair at sandovar.org didn't write it, AND because they lived in India, were almost certainly not iTunes customers. Thus we have no reason to believe they had ever agreed to this EULA in the first place - assuming such EULAs are even recognized under Indian law, which I seriously doubt. In most countries' legal systems, click through screens don't make legitimate contracts.
Most users understand how to operate a car. When something fucks up, the cops usually understand it was user error. I have a small company that sells 20 dollar shareware products online. We get crazy fucking people bitching that a screensaver product we sell has ruined their computers or destroyed Windows or some such nonsense. I also regularly have people who get angry at us and email us repeatedly telling us to stop sending them spam or putting popups on their computer (of course, we don't do either of these things, they are misattributing spyware that came with other products and spam email lists they got on from other companies). Users don't know what the fuck they are doing. Software isn't standardized. This all adds up to a world where the line between user error and software malfunction is very hard to track down sometimes.
Oh and there ARE computers where our 3d graphics products can cause blue screen errors. This is a result of the interaction between Windows, crappy drivers that misreport features, crappy 3d hardware that doesn't comply with spec, and our software. Who the heck do you hold responsible for this? It's all good and well to tell me that my software needs to be responsible, but if I write to the API that MS provides me (DirectX) and the hardware vendors don't provide drivers that comply, whose fault is it now? How do I make the users understand that? How the heck do you think these issues would work themselves out in court?
My point is that a car is a commodity item with a simple and straightforward user interface. The two most critical parts of the UI are "stop" and "go". The whole unit is tested and quality assured as a package by the manufacturer. If you add all kinds of aftermarket dingdongs to it, A) they are usually cosmetic, not functional, B) if they are functional, it's generally your fault if you've fudged it up. Computers are made to have people install software written by hundreds of different manufacturers on them, written to interoperate with often-fuzzy specifications and no central quality control process to make sure they all play nice with each other. And the more hardware-dependent an app is, the more likely there are to be a whole other range of problems with it. So no, it's not reasonable to hold software developers to the same standard as auto manufacturers because the nature of the products are so radically different.
If you want it to just work "as advertised" all the time, it better be a standardized hardware config with a fixed OS version, driver versions, and software installed on it, or you can forget about it.
That's actually not true. There is a lot more carbon mass in ethanol (not to mention different binding strengths that require more efficient proton exchange membranes). Your efficiency per unit mass of an ethanol fuel cell is definitely going to be less than that of a methanol fuel cell. In fact, the nice thing about an ethanol fuel cell is that it's not toxic and ethanol is safe and easy to transport around. While it's true that there might be fewer regulatory hurdles to using methanol in fuel cells, that's definitely not the _only_ reason to use methanol instead of ethanol (remember, the only reason not to just use hydrogen in fuel cells directly is the difficulty and cost of transporting and storing significant quantities of hydrogen - a hydrogen fuel cell will always be much more mass efficient than methanol or ethanol).
We know. Somebody has to post this in EVERY thread on alternative fuels, but it's not relevant. Ethanol from cellulosic biomass bears very little resemblence to corn ethanol production in environmental or economic impact. See my post here or search through my posting history for lots more good information on the subject (I've written humongous posts on this before, but I'm too lazy to look them up now - or start reading here for useful scientific, economic and environmental studies from the DOE.
Every ethanol or alternative fuel story on Slashdot raises these same points. If anybody bothered to read the articles (haha, I must be new around here and all that), it's pretty clear that this article has nothing to do with corn ethanol. The economics of ethanol are almost entirely dependent on the feedstock and lignocellulosic ethanol production with enzymatic hydrolysis relates to traditional corn ethanol production only in that part of the process involves fermentation of sugars to ethanol. The whole issue is the cost of obtaining those sugars - very costly to obtain by growing a costly, energy intensive crop like corn (good for eating, bad for energy) and waste paper or pulp (bad for eating, good for energy).
So don't conflate corn ethanol with cellulose ethanol. They are the same when they go into your car, but they are very different beasts with respect to net environmental impact, cost subsidies, taxation and so on.
Your use of the word "civilian" leaves much to be desired. Do you have any information on how many of the roughly 460 Iraqis killed in Falluja were militia members carrying weapons? I'd be willing to put my money on upwards of 80%, but I'm quite certain you don't have any better quality information than the rest of us do. As soon as you take up arms against the military that just finished conquering your country, you become a guerilla fighter, not a civilian, and you are a legitimate target. And as soon as you start shooting at soldiers from a mosque, home, or other civilian structure, you are more responsible than those who return fire for the deaths of any civilians located therein.
Technology Review is the MIT Alumni magazine. Akamai was founded by MIT professors and alumni, and employs many MIT alums. Technology Review hypes Akamai... hmm, I'll leave you to do the math there.
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Anyway, these two fellows from very different social backgrounds, one essentially being the boss' boss of the other, seemed to feel pretty comfortable kicking back a few bottles of Blue (Labbatt's Blue, the Canadian equivalent of... well, they drink the stuff as often as we drink coke or pepsi down here). Mind you, I often went out with both our CEO and with the people who worked for me, but that was the nature of my job. You'd rarely see my company's CEO out at lunch with our software developers, and if you did, they weren't exactly comfortably chit-chatting and kicking back beers, it always seemed much more strained.
It was always a pleasure to do work with our Canadian customers, and we always had a good time up there. Of course, I have to note that these guys were all making about a third what they'd have been making in the Boston area, when you account for currency differences and so on (then again, the cost of living is certainly lower up there, though it's not THAT much lower). Also, I suspect that big corporate environments in Canada are more uptight than what I saw, and I doubt that a large insurance company in Canada would be so much more laid back than a large insurance company in the US. But maybe I'm wrong.
I've worked with some true PHBs - these people couldn't send an email without help (using Windows and Outlook) and typed with one finger. Their choice of desktop was oak or cherry, not KDE or Gnome.
Anyway, the best thing to come out of this was since this was the second group at MS that my friend was at that got scrapped within 6 months of his arrival, he decided to get the hell out of there. People sometimes think MS succeeds at everything they do. They don't, they are just usually fairly good at cutting their losses on the screwups and milking the successes for all they are worth.
Yes, there will always be people copying movies, songs and software. It sucks, especially for small companies just trying to pay the bills (I feel less bad for monopolists and cartels, but that still doesn't make it okay to infringe their copyrights). The DMCA has been remarkably ineffective at preventing this. It has been remarkably effective at squelching free speech and killing off projects to promote interoperability. How long did the Linux platform suffer without proper DVD support no thanks to DMCA threat letters and legal extortion? I think we can safely say the vast majority of people just wanted DVD support to work and be Open Source, and aren't into ripping and pirating movies.
We don't need the DMCA. It fails to respect the balance between consumer rights and media producer rights, it is bad for Open Source and open technologies in general, and it disempowers us all.
As far as I can tell, Canopy hasn't sold any of their stock. However, they suckered Baystar into putting 50 million in cash into this beast to prop up the value of their stock (Canopy's filings with the SEC indicate they own about 35 million dollars in SCOX, in other words about 40 percent of the company). At this point, Canopy only stands to lose big time if Baystar manages to get their 50 million dollars back. At that point, there's nothing left to prop up the share price, and Canopy bites the big one as the price continues its slide into oblivion.
From the Insider Trades reported with the SEC, you'll see many of the execs had been dumping a reasonable amount every month, though some of that selling stopped when the price started going down (perhaps Darl told them to stop selling, it was starting to look bad). However, several of the directors appear to have exercised and dumped at least half of their options holdings over the last few months. Some of the execs have been doing a bit of selling, but not all. I don't see much evidence from that of anything other than execs and directors trying to get out when the getting was good - most of them didn't make a fortune on their sales, maybe a few hundred grand, and the rest appear to be stock with a bunch of shares that aren't worth a ton any more.
With a market cap of around 90 million now, this one has been a real dog for the investors. And this is a company with $65 million in cash in the bank, supposedly - that means the price-to-book ratio is getting mighty low. And their P/E is pushing down towards 20.
For those not familiar with this stuff, that means the premium people were putting on this stock reflecting the possibility of a big (i.e. 5 billion dollar) win against IBM has basically dropped to near-zero. I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole executive team get rotated out soon or something else drastic happen to SCO. The legal battle may drag out for ages, but the market has spoken.
There are plenty of other goods that depreciate in value rapidly in the market too - it's not just software. Anyway, I agree that as soon as you start talking about "solutions", you've got my full agreement that you are much better off with a solution built on top of popular, widely used Open Source technologies, it'll be supported much longer and generally give you much better bang for the buck (even after you factor in all the other costs of using/maintaining it) than the commercial competition. Stuff like Apache, JBoss, Postgres, MySQL all falls into this category.
I realize you are just trolling since you didn't say anything specific about my ideas, just that they are "old" (the idea that people have a right to earn a living off of software they develop if it is valuable to somebody is "old"?). In any case, I think you missed the point since I _have_ contributed to Open Source projects, in the form of code, documentation, and testing. I am not denying the power of the FOSS meme, just saying that FOSS doesn't provide all the answers all the time, and that sometimes you will find much better products for a particular purpose from commercial shareware developers.
Personally, I love the Palm platform. My Palm phone is far, far, far more open and far more hackable than any other piece of consumer electronics I own, with the possible exception of Tivo. Palm doesn't give away the source code for the core of their OS. True. But I've never really found anything lacking in what I can do with the SDKs and frameworks they provide for writing Palm apps.
Meanwhile, I guess you'd rather use vi or emacs on your Linux PDA instead of buying a 10 dollar piece of document editing software that a small software company or independent shareware developer bothered to make. And if there aren't any good handheld-scale GUI apps that will be written for your Linux PDA's GUI APIs of choice? You're probably one of those people that will just whine about it instead of writing one yourself ("but I'm not a programmer... whine... it needs to be Open Source... and I'm not going to pay 10 dollars for it, of course").
It's great to see Linux getting used in more consumer electronics devices, and that's cool and all, but really the companies aren't using Linux because it's Free as in speech, they're using it because it's free as in beer. And they are going to write closed source GUI apps for it, like Tivo and others have, because they want to make money, not invite competition.
Dude, the Quiznos rocks the crappy Chinese food in Burlington, don't let anyone say otherwise. Anyway, don't go there anymore since I don't work in Lexington these days. But my memories of the Food Court are fond indeed.
Then, as you pointed out quite accurately, there's the system requirements, bandwidth requirements, computer-experience and application installation experience requirements, and the need to be interested in music (many people don't listen to much music, or are just interested enough to listen to what's on the radio). Frankly, I think a 5% redemption rate should be viewed as a rather decent success of this product. If they thought honestly that they'd get a 30% redemption rate, they were kidding themselves. Personally, I think I would have guessed more like 10% based on my sense of the market.
I also think the promotion would have been much more successful if it targetted regular Pepsi drinkers who drink from cans. The return from cashing in these free songs is much higher if you've collected 10-15 free songs, and I'd say the likelihood of that person getting the songs and going through the effort is much higher than the likelihood of somebody else.
I'll us myself as an example (though I'm a bad one in most ways). I am not a regular Pepsi drinker - I drink Pepsi usually only when there are no other options (i.e. no Diet Coke around). I won an iTunes cap while on the road driving from Boston to New York at a rest stop in Connecticut where they only sold bottles, and only sold Diet Pepsi. I have used iTunes and purchased probably 15 dollars worth of songs from iTunes in the past. I thought it was very cool and great that I had a bottle cap worth a dollar, and I put the bottle somewhere meaning to keep and redeem the free song. Nonetheless, I didn't really give it enough thought to be terribly careful with that bottle, and ended up throwing it out by accident when cleaning my car after the drive. Had I gotten that bottle cap upstairs and dropped it by my computer, I probably would have redeemed it at some point. So even among people interested enough, competent enough, and so on who happen to get a winning bottle cap, the redemption rate is likely to be at best maybe 50%? And that's a pretty small fraction of the population
This is the kind of argument spewed by the same sort of people who say things like "an omnipotent God could have put all those dinosaur bones in the rocks for us to find". This is certainly true - an omnipotent, omniscient God could have tricked us, that tricksy God. The whole world could also be a simulation. Ultimately these sorts of arguments are best left to philosophers - I'll stick with Occam's Razor myself and figure that all that evidence is there because those things actually happened. So can I "prove" that God didn't create the heavens and the earth in a day and just make it look like we have had an expanding universe that has been growing for billions of years, let us observe galactic, stellar and planetary formation processes, and the tons of other evidence that points to the conclusion that we live in an old universe, that life evolved here on earth by some set of mechanisms (admittedly not fully understood yet)? No, I can't prove that to somebody like yourself whose standard of proof is impossible to meet.
I have absolutely no hate for Judeo-Christian beliefs. I just don't feel the need personally to couple the belief in the concept of God, or adherence to historical religious customs of any particular religion with the belief in the literal truth of a book that is (beyond a reasonable doubt) written by men, and several different men at that.
The "core test" for which theory precisely is flawed? You mean the "theory" that the earth is more than 5,000 years old? There is a heck of a lot more evidence than just carbon dating for that, bud.
Is this perhaps an intentional use of symbols that would be sexually suggestive? I know that sounds a little far out, but is this some sort of massive troll on OO.o or something? The smiling fish, the "OK" sign... both symbols for female genitalia. I dunno, the whole thing is a bit suspicious if you ask me. The post up at the top of this thread by Slashdot username "Mr. Darl McBride" about his involvement with this contest didn't exactly inspire confidence on my tinfoil-hat protected brain either.
Perhaps high profile projects should think a little bit harder about appropriate ways to get kids involved before they let some random person set up a contest like this to pick a mascot for a very visible part of their project, even if it is "just" the OO.o Schools Project (what happened to appealing to educators and administrators and not just kids?). Maybe the whole thing was all well-intentioned and just a bad idea - the seagull is nice and all, but it looks pretty drug-addled too. Or maybe it was a big, well-planned troll.
I'm sorry, did you just recommend I put an alligator clip, a resistor and a bunch of 9V batteries in series with my balls to cure ball sweat? You sir are a disturbed man.
I know now that DirectX can indeed be buggy - but so can OpenGL. It all depends on the hardware support, which ironically is often better for DirectX than for OpenGL these days. So I guess under your system we would all just whine and complain and never release any software until we all lost our jobs and our livelihoods? Realistically, developing rock-solid 3d graphics applications is EXTREMELY difficult, and doing effective QA for 3D software on a tiny budget is even more difficult - if you'd rather live in a world where none of this kind of content saw the light of day, that's fine, nobody's forcing you to download it or to support the small companies developing it.
I'm sure you're a good programmer, as am I, but I don't think you quite know of what you speak here or you wouldn't be spouting off so strongly.
This was perhaps my first lesson in the real world after college - I learned it when my company's investors shoved a 2 year non-compete clause down every employee's throat as a condition of them giving our company money. The clause was so broad and outrageous (as these things usually are) that it would be thrown out in 2 seconds in Massachusetts where we worked. But, and this is the key, there is no concept in our legal system of penalizing companies for sticking these sorts of terms in a contract. The worst that happens in the clause gets thrown out of a contract in court. The best that happens is it gets enforced, if there is a particularly ornery, corporate-whorish judge on a case. You can make the same market based argument you are making for random software EULAs or for employment agreements - "a contract is a contract, if you don't like it, go work somewhere else, or go buy software somewhere else".
I reject this argument on a rights basis, namely that I have certain inalienable rights that I can't contractually give away, and this includes the right to personal use of a product I've legally purchased as I see fit, on my computer, in my home. There are plenty of other fundamental rights you can't give away in a contract of adherence, like an EULA, and plenty you can't give away in ANY contract. Why not the right to privacy w.r.t. use of your own legally owned property?
Anyway, I don't remember the last time I used IRC for music or warez. The real question is who the hell uses IRC for music or warez these days?
In any case, breaking an EULA without redistributing somebody else's copyrighted material is one of those offenses which you won't find much support for on Slashdot. People here generally support the concept of electronic freedom - data you've acquired legally is yours to do what you will with within the bounds of your own home and computer. It's like breaking the speedlimit on your own private racetrack - it may be illegal, but it shouldn't be enforceable. And even here in the grand ole' USA EULAs are of questionable enforceability (mind you, at SourceForge.net, the issue was the unconstitutional legislation we call the DMCA, it had nothing to do with the EULA which SF.net had certainly never agreed to).
Of course, in India, it doesn't matter, since the people distributing Playfair at sandovar.org didn't write it, AND because they lived in India, were almost certainly not iTunes customers. Thus we have no reason to believe they had ever agreed to this EULA in the first place - assuming such EULAs are even recognized under Indian law, which I seriously doubt. In most countries' legal systems, click through screens don't make legitimate contracts.
Oh and there ARE computers where our 3d graphics products can cause blue screen errors. This is a result of the interaction between Windows, crappy drivers that misreport features, crappy 3d hardware that doesn't comply with spec, and our software. Who the heck do you hold responsible for this? It's all good and well to tell me that my software needs to be responsible, but if I write to the API that MS provides me (DirectX) and the hardware vendors don't provide drivers that comply, whose fault is it now? How do I make the users understand that? How the heck do you think these issues would work themselves out in court?
My point is that a car is a commodity item with a simple and straightforward user interface. The two most critical parts of the UI are "stop" and "go". The whole unit is tested and quality assured as a package by the manufacturer. If you add all kinds of aftermarket dingdongs to it, A) they are usually cosmetic, not functional, B) if they are functional, it's generally your fault if you've fudged it up. Computers are made to have people install software written by hundreds of different manufacturers on them, written to interoperate with often-fuzzy specifications and no central quality control process to make sure they all play nice with each other. And the more hardware-dependent an app is, the more likely there are to be a whole other range of problems with it. So no, it's not reasonable to hold software developers to the same standard as auto manufacturers because the nature of the products are so radically different.
If you want it to just work "as advertised" all the time, it better be a standardized hardware config with a fixed OS version, driver versions, and software installed on it, or you can forget about it.
That's actually not true. There is a lot more carbon mass in ethanol (not to mention different binding strengths that require more efficient proton exchange membranes). Your efficiency per unit mass of an ethanol fuel cell is definitely going to be less than that of a methanol fuel cell. In fact, the nice thing about an ethanol fuel cell is that it's not toxic and ethanol is safe and easy to transport around. While it's true that there might be fewer regulatory hurdles to using methanol in fuel cells, that's definitely not the _only_ reason to use methanol instead of ethanol (remember, the only reason not to just use hydrogen in fuel cells directly is the difficulty and cost of transporting and storing significant quantities of hydrogen - a hydrogen fuel cell will always be much more mass efficient than methanol or ethanol).
We know. Somebody has to post this in EVERY thread on alternative fuels, but it's not relevant. Ethanol from cellulosic biomass bears very little resemblence to corn ethanol production in environmental or economic impact. See my post here or search through my posting history for lots more good information on the subject (I've written humongous posts on this before, but I'm too lazy to look them up now - or start reading here for useful scientific, economic and environmental studies from the DOE.
So don't conflate corn ethanol with cellulose ethanol. They are the same when they go into your car, but they are very different beasts with respect to net environmental impact, cost subsidies, taxation and so on.
Your use of the word "civilian" leaves much to be desired. Do you have any information on how many of the roughly 460 Iraqis killed in Falluja were militia members carrying weapons? I'd be willing to put my money on upwards of 80%, but I'm quite certain you don't have any better quality information than the rest of us do. As soon as you take up arms against the military that just finished conquering your country, you become a guerilla fighter, not a civilian, and you are a legitimate target. And as soon as you start shooting at soldiers from a mosque, home, or other civilian structure, you are more responsible than those who return fire for the deaths of any civilians located therein.
Technology Review is the MIT Alumni magazine. Akamai was founded by MIT professors and alumni, and employs many MIT alums. Technology Review hypes Akamai... hmm, I'll leave you to do the math there.