Agreed. I think this is the difference between chlidren and adults. By the time you get somewhere in your twenties, you've probably had a chance to see more death and illness than you want for a lifetime, whether its a family member, friend, friend's parents, etc. My attitude towards life and its value has certainly changed since I was 16.
Don't get me wrong, I still play FPSs (though I was never into most shoot-em-ups), and get lots of aggression out that way. And I think most children know the difference between reality and fantasy. I just think that there's nothing like the real, immediate, in-your-face presence of death to make you very clearly see that taking a life in reality is one of the most awful things imaginable, all Hollywood glamorization aside. Go talk to a WWII veteran sometimes, they learned this lesson on the battlefield. I had to learn it watching my mother go through three operations for cancer, and nine months of chemotherapy, and the pain of a good friend when his mother died from a stroke, and the hollow feeling and haunted memories from a promising young college classmate killed before her time by a speeding car on a rainy road.
Wrong as can be. Customers often do not know what they want because they often want A) logically contradictory features because they haven't thought through the consequences of the features they want or B) "features" that actually represent engineering tradeoffs. For example, time to delivery, quality, and maximum featurization - you can't simply demand all of the above and get it because it's what you "want". Purchasers have to be willing to involve their technical staff in decision making, and to employ technical staff who understand that these tradeoffs exist. Just because the CEO "wants" it doesn't mean it's physically possible or best for their business. If he thinks he "wants" it done in 6 weeks, then he'll get what he asked for, but it will be buggy and shitty.
As for examples of A, I've had customers who "want" features that violate basic laws of information theory. That's certainly not best for their business, since it is provable impossible that their attempts to build such a system will ever work.
Bingo. This company made their money on Linux. Now they've turned their back on it, but to claim that "Linux==communism" is laughable. Yeah, all those communists at IBM who support Linux for "hippie goodness".
This is big time PR spin factor here. Trying to cast this as the valiant American capitalists vs. the communist hippie Linux users, who are apparently all a bunch of smelly Stallman clones.
To repeat (since I might have gotten buried in the middle of my post), I would like to see your definition of "intellectual art".
His definition of "intellectual art" seems to hinge on how much airtime it gets in English departments, and amongst the post-modern-trash literary theorist types. My tastes run somewhat similarly to yours, and I studied physics in college - go figure.
Incidentally, I have a similar work history (CTO of a financial software company for 3 years, now run my own consulting business). I have no piercings or tattoos, mostly by my own choice, but have gone through different phases of dress and appearance. I find that generally, when you are in a customer facing role, it's important to look credible for customers. If you are in the office hanging out with the development team, it's really a matter of management style - how do you want the people you work with (both at a peer level, and your subordinates) to perceive you. The reality is that appearance does influence the way people interact with you. If you have a tongue piercing, people will assume you are not the guy to be talking to about business deals, though you may be that wacky technology guy they keep in the back room.
I see nothing wrong with dyed hair (of a believable color) or a tattoo on the arm or leg - somewhere people won't notice when you don a suit and tie. Bright red or green hair, radical facial tattoos and other body modification are your business, but don't be shocked if it's hard to A) be in a customer facing role, at even the most back-room tech-focused of companies, and B) experience negative reactions from peers, managers or subordinates outside of the technology group at many companies. In short, consider how people who are uptight will react to you (you know, like the HR lady, or your company's controller/CFO) when you need to deal with them. Don't just consider it just in light of where you are today and your immediate job responsibilities, because in this market, you might find yourself looking for another job a year or two down the road.
"The Linux side"... oh, you must mean this Linux side. Yes, I'm sure their lawyers are sitting back and saying "well, we don't really need to sweat this case, because we're in the right, and we know that always leads to victory." Heh. You do realize that "SCO vs. Linux" may be going on in the court of public opinion, but in the justice system, it's "SCO vs. IBM", right?
The problem is this is a lawsuit between SCO and IBM. The Linux community may have an opinion on that suit, but a community can't really bring a suit for somebody verbally defecating on their common favorite product - this isn't Germany, and we don't have strong laws in the US against verbal diarrhea (note that there are now injunctions against SCO in Germany for some of their behavior in this conflict - because the Linux community there DID do something about it). The Linux community can't do much except chest pound since SCO hasn't done much except chest pound, unless a specific commercial organization (like Redhat for example) decides to sue SCO for interfering with their business relationships, defamation, libel, or something else. If I was the CEO of Redhat, I think you'd see that I have a rather big swinging dick, and I'd get my lawyers on these fucks in no time. Of course, IBM still has a hell of a lot more money to litigate this and it makes some sense to let SCO continue to attack those who can well afford an excellent defense (and counter-offense) until SCO moves to actually do anything except blabber their mouth at anybody else.
You bring up the very relevant issue of mutual mistake. As far as I know, it's only been mentioned so far with regard to SCO's GPL obligations and their (as far as I can tell) unilateral mistake in failing to identify their own IP in the Linux codebase prior to accepting and using the GPL to redistribute. As you point out, if IBM (and other UNIX vendors) were distributing derivative works of their individual Unixes under other license terms, it was presumably because they have always thought they had the right to do such under their interpretation of their contract with Novell/SCO for licensing SysV Unix code. Now SCO is claiming that this was a contractual breach by all these vendors - but SCO has known about this for years, and they (as Caldera and later as SCO) were party to contributions to the Linux codebase of features previously known only in some commercial Unixes. So if SCO has any claim to derivative Unix IP rights, they have behaved for years as if they did not believe that to be true, and so have all the other parties to those agreements. Isn't that what the doctrine of mutual mistake is all about? Shouldn't that void any claim SCO now makes to these derivative works?
On the other hand, I agree that SCO has a solid defense against any claims that their distribution under the GPL of Caldera Linux voided their IP claims (under a similar argument of mutual mistake). There seem to be so many contractual mistakes here that it should be exceptionally difficult for a judge to take these claims seriously at all. But their recent claims on derivative works such as JFS and other independent developments made by IBM and others seem likely to go nowhere in a breach of contract suit.
One of Java's biggest strengths is the fact that you can generally pick up and read somebody else's Java code, segment by segment, without having to grok the uber-design of the project. This code readability factor is huge. Another poster mentioned LFSP vs. LFM (languages for smart people vs. languages for the masses) - this division I think is real (though I would trash the loaded descriptors and call them "syntactically powerful languages" vs. "syntactically constrained languages").
Java is clearly a syntactically constrained language. As a programmer seeking to build a powerful library or problem solving toolkit for a complex application domain, this can be annoying. And several others have pointed out that this seems to keep resulting in people creating meta-languages (XML-based or otherwise), code-generators and the like for complex Java projects because they are needed to solve certain kinds of problems in an efficient manner. This is certainly true, and such systems can become rather ungrokable fairly rapidly. However, you can generally isolate such complexity from the hordes of mediocre developers who are there to pound out mediocre, simple code.
With LISP, or even C/C++, the power is there all the time. Programmers will inevitably try to use the tools they learned about in school and _will_ shoot themselves, their development projects, and their managers in the foot. Java creates a hierarchical system of complexity - most Java code is universally readable, and if there is a need to learn special metalanguages (EJB descriptors for example), they are usually highly constrained XML dialects, separated out from the rest of the Java code. Sure, there's an XML parser and code generator that only one guy really understands and can maintain, but if that lets the rest of the development team pound away on their mediocre code in standard, vanilla Java, and edit some simple XML documents, then it makes software development more efficient.
When you are managing mediocre people, you can appreciate the benefits of having them work in a language that prevents them from doing too much damage. Development is more predictable, bugs tend to be more apparent and less insidious, even though it's not always the most powerful or most efficient language for every problem domain. Of course, there are a lot of domains where you'd be crazy to try to use Java. And when you tackle those problems, you need to hire better developers who can handle the power of LFSPs (or at least languages with more foot-shooting power).
And I consider Python to be comparable to Java in terms of readability. It is similarly somewhat syntactically constrained, with relatively few obvious mechanisms to accomplish a task, as opposed to way too many mechanisms to accomplish a task - and I love the forced code indentation as well (it forces consistency of style, another readability barrier). Where Python loses out is its far less comprehensive, standardized or well documented API, though I'm sure Jython has come quite a ways since I last looked at it (Python code + Java API - potentially a very good tool for scripting use in large Java projects). However, for larger software projects involving a large number of modules and many developers, a weakly typed language fails utterly - you need strict enforcement of method contracts and object typing that you get from a strictly typed language. This goes a long way to improving code readability and modularity for larger projects, and lets you catch many simple errors during compilation instead of having to rely on yourself to catch them all, or waiting until runtime to find problems ("oh, of course, I need to pass method foo an Orange object and two strings, not an Orange, a Grape and an integer").
Why should wireless email be a small niche? As best I can tell, it's the most useful application of wireless data capabilities. The problem is still in the UI and portability, as best as I can ascertain (well, and the cost). If there were a better way to navigate emails and send emails from a wireless device that wasn't overly bulky, it wouldn't be so niche. I mean, most modern digital cell phones now will let you set up and check email, it's just an excruciating user experience to try to do much of it (and I want to push a single button and get to my damned Inbox, not have to navigate 4 or 5 levels deep in REMARKABLY slow server-side menus like I have to currently with every TMobile phone out there, not to mention the fact that about 30% of the time, one of those menu loads hangs forcing me to restart the whole process). We don't need 3G networks as much as we need some basic thought put into how people really want to use small wireless devices.
The Sidekick is great, but too bulky for your average Joe. It's too bulky for me too, to be honest, so I just suffer with my otherwise very excellent Samsung S105 cell phone, which nominally lets me monitor incoming emails. The most promising models I've seen are the upcoming SPH-I500 (as in here) and similar phone-form-factor Palm PDAs, which come very close to what I want. Add one of those newfangled laser-keyboard devices, and you've got a winner IMHO. And PLEASE stop sticking cameras on every phone.
You can say it twenty times, it still doesn't make any sense. It's just that it would be logically inconsistent for them to axe future releases of the standalone IE for Windows, as they did a few weeks ago, and still release IE for Mac. Of course, an internally consistent lie is still a lie.
Huh? I find the Java API to be incredibly well documented, and usually very intuitive when you need to learn new parts of it. It's only complex if you are trying to learn it in its entirety, and it's not really complex at all compared to the overwhelming amount of stuff you need to do in many programs that it will do for you.
I challenge you to program in Java for a year or so then go back to C++, Python, or pretty much anything else. It may feel great to stretch your legs out and exercise some syntactic freedom and structural creativity that you can't get with Java, and to avoid some of the wordy, annoying constructs forced in Java, but DAMN do you miss the comprehensive, well-documented API.
I agree with you that methanol (and ethanol as well) are fabulous fuels that we should be focusing more energy on producing in a renewable and economically feasiable manner, because that's a much more realistic goal than a transition to hydrogen fuel. The thing is, you can use methanol as fuel either via direct combustion or using a methanol fuel cell - in either case, you get more efficient results when you rid yourself of the intermediate step - conversion to pure hydrogen. The obsession with hydrogen is just part of the collective self-delusion principle - if we don't see the pollution getting made (it happens at the power plant rather than in the car), then it doesn't matter. And yes, I realize that making power centrally in a large facility is more efficient, but it doesn't come close to making up for the full lifecycle energy costs of hydrogen. And this, children, is why we aren't driving hydrogen cars and won't be unless somebody comes up with a far better mechanism for making hydrogen from one of its plentiful, naturally occurring forms (like water or hydrocarbons).
And that is why the auto and energy industry is pumping money into hydrogen research - it distracts us from real solutions and will keep their very profitable status quo intact.
Agreed, it particularly suspicious that this is supposed SVR4 code, which is most likely BSD-derived code. Some headers that are identical to SVR4 or other code fragments doesn't mean much. However, it's at least possible that copyrighted SVR4 code got mixed in with some Linux kernel driver/add-on/module at some point in time, perhaps by a company like IBM that ported some work from a commercial Unix to Linux. Obviously, the only way to actually figure such a thing out is to look at the code's lineage in both the Linux context (when was it patched in on LKML), and, even easier, does the code also exist in earlier versions of BSD-ish Linux that are Open Source. SCO is still full of shit unless they pony up sufficient information to answer these questions.
It may be "racist" but is it warranted? What we sometimes call stereotyping is a phenomenon described by and studied by psychologists (particularly social psychologists) for many years, by which we form a schema and fit people, objects and events we encounter into a schema. Social psychologists explain this as likely being a survival adaptation of the human race - the ability to generalize about phenomena and individuals is what allows for behaving with rational self-interest in unknown situations. Obviously, race is only one of many factors that people use to categorize other individuals - clearly neither the fact that a group of men is black or that they are wearing baggy pants alone would justify "evasive maneuvers". But if they dress and act in a manner so as to associate themselves with a lifestyle that is violent, it should hardly be shocking if people react with avoidance.
Now, it's entirely possible that the association between baggy pants and a manner of dress with a certain lifestyle might be statistically invalid and based on inaccurate "stereotypes" (a loaded word again). Over the years many people have stubbornly adhered to invalid schemas about certain races, genders, etc. that proved to be the result of social constructs rather than biological reality. The only issue is that sometimes the indirect societal reinforcement of incorrect schemas is a stronger psychological force than people's own direct experiences, making it sometimes difficult to convince people that invalid biases and schemas are correct.
As for Zionism being "racist", I am not sure that I understand what "preferential treatment" means. In many Muslim nations there are laws based on religious beliefs, and laws that apply unequally to members of different religious beliefs or races. America also has laws that treat people of different races differently and gives certain privileges and benefits to "disadvantaged" races. Many European nations have laws that provide certain benefits or recognition for some predominant religions that others don't receive.
A) You expose your own position by referring to Israeli Zionists as "the Jews". That's no different than me referring to Hamas as "the Muslims". In other words, perhaps you should consider your own views before casting around stones like the word "racist".
B) Most Palestinians really aren't fundamentalist Muslims. Just because fundamentalist Muslims elsewhere use the Palestinians as a rallying cry doesn't mean much. Many (if not most) Palestinians are nationalists first, and Muslims second (and not necessarily fundamentalist in their view of their religion).
C) Neither side wants minority power in a secular state. The gap dividing the peoples resulting from years of war and killing is simply too large at this point in time. Thus both sides seem to agree that a two-state solution is preferable right now, and hopefully closer cooperation and friendship will come with time and peace.
D) I think you are grossly lacking in historical knowledge if you think Zionism is a reaction to Palestinian relations. Zionism is a reaction to European anti-semitism over a very long duration of time. Zionism has nothing to do with violent attacks against Palestinians - these are policy issues of Ariel Sharon and the political hawks on the Israeli far right. Israel's parliamentary system is partly to blame (the coalitions that include ultra-conservative elements and the like). Unfortunately, the Palestinian political scene is equally galvenized, and rejects moderate leaders like Mr. Abbas.
E) Racism is a loaded word, and Americans seem to get all hot and bothered whenever we use the word (as do Europeans). Liberals - bah. When you see a group of young black men walking down the street dressed a certain way, you behave in a rational, self-protecting manner by crossing to the other side of the street. Does this mean you are a racist? When you set up checkpoints to prevent suicide bombers from entering your city, does that make you a racist? Something to think on. I will be the first one to say I wish Palestinians and Israelis could work out a way to get along, but I think people like you do a disservice to everybody when you cast the issue in such ridiculous reductionist terms. Not to mention the finger pointing, which is absurd, since you can go back and forth for hours finger pointing and never get anywhere.
Does anybody else remember Alien Nation? I think that was a better series, same director though I believe. However, I was so young when V came out, I only ever saw a few of the episodes in reruns much later, whereas I can actually recall watching Alien Nation. I thought Alien Nation had a solid and interesting plot - well okay, maybe there were problems, but I was young, it was easier for me to suspend disbelief back then.
Because it allows the community to get any of their changes back into the mainline codebase. If there are no changes, then they should be willing to provide the source. If that's the real source, it should be demonstrably equivalent to the binaries on the box. If it's not, then they are probably not releasing their real codebase.
Think of this as a check on honesty of GPL adherents. If you don't make the offer or even admit that there is GPLed code in your product, you are probably doing it for a reason (i.e. you are hiding something). If they really aren't hiding anything, and it was a simple oversight, then why don't they reply to emails about it and just point out that no modifications were made, and stick a source mirror up on their FTP site? The cost is practically nil to them to adhere to the license, assuming they are playing by the rules, so what's the big deal?
Sorry, but that's the point. They are in violation of the license contract if they do not provide a mirror, _or_ provide a written offer to provide the source at copying cost. This isn't picking nits, it's a contract, and they aren't living up to it. The point is if they have nothing to hide, and are using stock GPL code, why not just stick up a mirror of the source on their FTP site? What's the cost of that in bandwidth and disk space? Practically nothing, in exchange for the value they get from using it. And if they don't feel like it, it costs nothing on the margin to print the offer for source as a footnote in a manual. In short, it creates the appearance of deception to avoid these simple obligations under the GPL. So why would they not just live up to them?
No, it's just that in the modern world, it's easier to compile it and download the digital logic into an FPGA than to spend painstaking hours wiring it out of a bunch of 74xx logic gates, adders, and all that crap. That's the great part about FPGAs - no fab facility needed, no soldering required (well, you still need to connect it up to do I/O with the rest of the world).
Does anybody else read this convoluted passage to mean the opposite of what they are claiming? From the news.com.com article (whoever the fuck thought that having something be a.com.com was a good idea should be executed for idiocy):
It was modified to exclude from transfer "all copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the agreement, required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of Unix and UnixWare technologies."
So in other words, the original contract was amended to exclude from transfer all copyrights and trademarks required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to Unix. However, the relevant IP owned by Novell (at some particular date, presumably of the original contract) is exempt from the exclusion. I am not really clear how a judge would rule such language, in and of itself, to mean that Novell intended to transfer all relevant copyrights and trademarks to SCO - it doesn't explicitly say it (just because something is exempt from an exclusion doesn't necessarily mean that it's included, especially if the original contract gives no reason to believe that it would be included).
IANAL, but I think SCO's follow-on requests for Novell to sign clarifying documents would indicate that SCO didn't consider the contract a binding agreement to transfer the IP either, and clearly Novell's statements have indicated that they believed that. If both parties reasonably believe a contract means one thing at the time it was signed, and then one party later claims it meant something else, it's probably open to judicial interpretation of reasonableness. If SCO could show they have reasonably relied on those terms of the contract over the years, they'd have a strong case - but the evidence seems to indicate to me that they have been bluffing on the copyright ownership issue (never mind the myriad other issues), and now they think they've found some convoluted wording to back up their bluff.
Re:Stupid Question - company name?
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A fair question - I've heard it both ways, but I've never actually talked to anybody who worked there or had direct knowledge thereof. The more convincing argument was that it was S-C-O, but then again, "sko unix" rolls off the tongue much easier than "S-C-O unix" does.
If anybody out there in Slashdot land is in on the teleconference it would be nice if you posted the update on what goes on therein for those of us too busy to listen in.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong, I still play FPSs (though I was never into most shoot-em-ups), and get lots of aggression out that way. And I think most children know the difference between reality and fantasy. I just think that there's nothing like the real, immediate, in-your-face presence of death to make you very clearly see that taking a life in reality is one of the most awful things imaginable, all Hollywood glamorization aside. Go talk to a WWII veteran sometimes, they learned this lesson on the battlefield. I had to learn it watching my mother go through three operations for cancer, and nine months of chemotherapy, and the pain of a good friend when his mother died from a stroke, and the hollow feeling and haunted memories from a promising young college classmate killed before her time by a speeding car on a rainy road.
As for examples of A, I've had customers who "want" features that violate basic laws of information theory. That's certainly not best for their business, since it is provable impossible that their attempts to build such a system will ever work.
This is big time PR spin factor here. Trying to cast this as the valiant American capitalists vs. the communist hippie Linux users, who are apparently all a bunch of smelly Stallman clones.
His definition of "intellectual art" seems to hinge on how much airtime it gets in English departments, and amongst the post-modern-trash literary theorist types. My tastes run somewhat similarly to yours, and I studied physics in college - go figure.
I see nothing wrong with dyed hair (of a believable color) or a tattoo on the arm or leg - somewhere people won't notice when you don a suit and tie. Bright red or green hair, radical facial tattoos and other body modification are your business, but don't be shocked if it's hard to A) be in a customer facing role, at even the most back-room tech-focused of companies, and B) experience negative reactions from peers, managers or subordinates outside of the technology group at many companies. In short, consider how people who are uptight will react to you (you know, like the HR lady, or your company's controller/CFO) when you need to deal with them. Don't just consider it just in light of where you are today and your immediate job responsibilities, because in this market, you might find yourself looking for another job a year or two down the road.
The problem is this is a lawsuit between SCO and IBM. The Linux community may have an opinion on that suit, but a community can't really bring a suit for somebody verbally defecating on their common favorite product - this isn't Germany, and we don't have strong laws in the US against verbal diarrhea (note that there are now injunctions against SCO in Germany for some of their behavior in this conflict - because the Linux community there DID do something about it). The Linux community can't do much except chest pound since SCO hasn't done much except chest pound, unless a specific commercial organization (like Redhat for example) decides to sue SCO for interfering with their business relationships, defamation, libel, or something else. If I was the CEO of Redhat, I think you'd see that I have a rather big swinging dick, and I'd get my lawyers on these fucks in no time. Of course, IBM still has a hell of a lot more money to litigate this and it makes some sense to let SCO continue to attack those who can well afford an excellent defense (and counter-offense) until SCO moves to actually do anything except blabber their mouth at anybody else.
On the other hand, I agree that SCO has a solid defense against any claims that their distribution under the GPL of Caldera Linux voided their IP claims (under a similar argument of mutual mistake). There seem to be so many contractual mistakes here that it should be exceptionally difficult for a judge to take these claims seriously at all. But their recent claims on derivative works such as JFS and other independent developments made by IBM and others seem likely to go nowhere in a breach of contract suit.
"Thank you sir, may I have another term?"
Java is clearly a syntactically constrained language. As a programmer seeking to build a powerful library or problem solving toolkit for a complex application domain, this can be annoying. And several others have pointed out that this seems to keep resulting in people creating meta-languages (XML-based or otherwise), code-generators and the like for complex Java projects because they are needed to solve certain kinds of problems in an efficient manner. This is certainly true, and such systems can become rather ungrokable fairly rapidly. However, you can generally isolate such complexity from the hordes of mediocre developers who are there to pound out mediocre, simple code.
With LISP, or even C/C++, the power is there all the time. Programmers will inevitably try to use the tools they learned about in school and _will_ shoot themselves, their development projects, and their managers in the foot. Java creates a hierarchical system of complexity - most Java code is universally readable, and if there is a need to learn special metalanguages (EJB descriptors for example), they are usually highly constrained XML dialects, separated out from the rest of the Java code. Sure, there's an XML parser and code generator that only one guy really understands and can maintain, but if that lets the rest of the development team pound away on their mediocre code in standard, vanilla Java, and edit some simple XML documents, then it makes software development more efficient.
When you are managing mediocre people, you can appreciate the benefits of having them work in a language that prevents them from doing too much damage. Development is more predictable, bugs tend to be more apparent and less insidious, even though it's not always the most powerful or most efficient language for every problem domain. Of course, there are a lot of domains where you'd be crazy to try to use Java. And when you tackle those problems, you need to hire better developers who can handle the power of LFSPs (or at least languages with more foot-shooting power).
And I consider Python to be comparable to Java in terms of readability. It is similarly somewhat syntactically constrained, with relatively few obvious mechanisms to accomplish a task, as opposed to way too many mechanisms to accomplish a task - and I love the forced code indentation as well (it forces consistency of style, another readability barrier). Where Python loses out is its far less comprehensive, standardized or well documented API, though I'm sure Jython has come quite a ways since I last looked at it (Python code + Java API - potentially a very good tool for scripting use in large Java projects). However, for larger software projects involving a large number of modules and many developers, a weakly typed language fails utterly - you need strict enforcement of method contracts and object typing that you get from a strictly typed language. This goes a long way to improving code readability and modularity for larger projects, and lets you catch many simple errors during compilation instead of having to rely on yourself to catch them all, or waiting until runtime to find problems ("oh, of course, I need to pass method foo an Orange object and two strings, not an Orange, a Grape and an integer").
Now if that's not a reacharound, I don't know what is.
The Sidekick is great, but too bulky for your average Joe. It's too bulky for me too, to be honest, so I just suffer with my otherwise very excellent Samsung S105 cell phone, which nominally lets me monitor incoming emails. The most promising models I've seen are the upcoming SPH-I500 (as in here) and similar phone-form-factor Palm PDAs, which come very close to what I want. Add one of those newfangled laser-keyboard devices, and you've got a winner IMHO. And PLEASE stop sticking cameras on every phone.
You can say it twenty times, it still doesn't make any sense. It's just that it would be logically inconsistent for them to axe future releases of the standalone IE for Windows, as they did a few weeks ago, and still release IE for Mac. Of course, an internally consistent lie is still a lie.
I challenge you to program in Java for a year or so then go back to C++, Python, or pretty much anything else. It may feel great to stretch your legs out and exercise some syntactic freedom and structural creativity that you can't get with Java, and to avoid some of the wordy, annoying constructs forced in Java, but DAMN do you miss the comprehensive, well-documented API.
I agree with you that methanol (and ethanol as well) are fabulous fuels that we should be focusing more energy on producing in a renewable and economically feasiable manner, because that's a much more realistic goal than a transition to hydrogen fuel. The thing is, you can use methanol as fuel either via direct combustion or using a methanol fuel cell - in either case, you get more efficient results when you rid yourself of the intermediate step - conversion to pure hydrogen. The obsession with hydrogen is just part of the collective self-delusion principle - if we don't see the pollution getting made (it happens at the power plant rather than in the car), then it doesn't matter. And yes, I realize that making power centrally in a large facility is more efficient, but it doesn't come close to making up for the full lifecycle energy costs of hydrogen. And this, children, is why we aren't driving hydrogen cars and won't be unless somebody comes up with a far better mechanism for making hydrogen from one of its plentiful, naturally occurring forms (like water or hydrocarbons).
And that is why the auto and energy industry is pumping money into hydrogen research - it distracts us from real solutions and will keep their very profitable status quo intact.
Agreed, it particularly suspicious that this is supposed SVR4 code, which is most likely BSD-derived code. Some headers that are identical to SVR4 or other code fragments doesn't mean much. However, it's at least possible that copyrighted SVR4 code got mixed in with some Linux kernel driver/add-on/module at some point in time, perhaps by a company like IBM that ported some work from a commercial Unix to Linux. Obviously, the only way to actually figure such a thing out is to look at the code's lineage in both the Linux context (when was it patched in on LKML), and, even easier, does the code also exist in earlier versions of BSD-ish Linux that are Open Source. SCO is still full of shit unless they pony up sufficient information to answer these questions.
Now, it's entirely possible that the association between baggy pants and a manner of dress with a certain lifestyle might be statistically invalid and based on inaccurate "stereotypes" (a loaded word again). Over the years many people have stubbornly adhered to invalid schemas about certain races, genders, etc. that proved to be the result of social constructs rather than biological reality. The only issue is that sometimes the indirect societal reinforcement of incorrect schemas is a stronger psychological force than people's own direct experiences, making it sometimes difficult to convince people that invalid biases and schemas are correct.
As for Zionism being "racist", I am not sure that I understand what "preferential treatment" means. In many Muslim nations there are laws based on religious beliefs, and laws that apply unequally to members of different religious beliefs or races. America also has laws that treat people of different races differently and gives certain privileges and benefits to "disadvantaged" races. Many European nations have laws that provide certain benefits or recognition for some predominant religions that others don't receive.
A) You expose your own position by referring to Israeli Zionists as "the Jews". That's no different than me referring to Hamas as "the Muslims". In other words, perhaps you should consider your own views before casting around stones like the word "racist".
B) Most Palestinians really aren't fundamentalist Muslims. Just because fundamentalist Muslims elsewhere use the Palestinians as a rallying cry doesn't mean much. Many (if not most) Palestinians are nationalists first, and Muslims second (and not necessarily fundamentalist in their view of their religion).
C) Neither side wants minority power in a secular state. The gap dividing the peoples resulting from years of war and killing is simply too large at this point in time. Thus both sides seem to agree that a two-state solution is preferable right now, and hopefully closer cooperation and friendship will come with time and peace.
D) I think you are grossly lacking in historical knowledge if you think Zionism is a reaction to Palestinian relations. Zionism is a reaction to European anti-semitism over a very long duration of time. Zionism has nothing to do with violent attacks against Palestinians - these are policy issues of Ariel Sharon and the political hawks on the Israeli far right. Israel's parliamentary system is partly to blame (the coalitions that include ultra-conservative elements and the like). Unfortunately, the Palestinian political scene is equally galvenized, and rejects moderate leaders like Mr. Abbas.
E) Racism is a loaded word, and Americans seem to get all hot and bothered whenever we use the word (as do Europeans). Liberals - bah. When you see a group of young black men walking down the street dressed a certain way, you behave in a rational, self-protecting manner by crossing to the other side of the street. Does this mean you are a racist? When you set up checkpoints to prevent suicide bombers from entering your city, does that make you a racist? Something to think on. I will be the first one to say I wish Palestinians and Israelis could work out a way to get along, but I think people like you do a disservice to everybody when you cast the issue in such ridiculous reductionist terms. Not to mention the finger pointing, which is absurd, since you can go back and forth for hours finger pointing and never get anywhere.
Does anybody else remember Alien Nation? I think that was a better series, same director though I believe. However, I was so young when V came out, I only ever saw a few of the episodes in reruns much later, whereas I can actually recall watching Alien Nation. I thought Alien Nation had a solid and interesting plot - well okay, maybe there were problems, but I was young, it was easier for me to suspend disbelief back then.
Think of this as a check on honesty of GPL adherents. If you don't make the offer or even admit that there is GPLed code in your product, you are probably doing it for a reason (i.e. you are hiding something). If they really aren't hiding anything, and it was a simple oversight, then why don't they reply to emails about it and just point out that no modifications were made, and stick a source mirror up on their FTP site? The cost is practically nil to them to adhere to the license, assuming they are playing by the rules, so what's the big deal?
Sorry, but that's the point. They are in violation of the license contract if they do not provide a mirror, _or_ provide a written offer to provide the source at copying cost. This isn't picking nits, it's a contract, and they aren't living up to it. The point is if they have nothing to hide, and are using stock GPL code, why not just stick up a mirror of the source on their FTP site? What's the cost of that in bandwidth and disk space? Practically nothing, in exchange for the value they get from using it. And if they don't feel like it, it costs nothing on the margin to print the offer for source as a footnote in a manual. In short, it creates the appearance of deception to avoid these simple obligations under the GPL. So why would they not just live up to them?
And how many women do you have at home? That's what I thought.
No, it's just that in the modern world, it's easier to compile it and download the digital logic into an FPGA than to spend painstaking hours wiring it out of a bunch of 74xx logic gates, adders, and all that crap. That's the great part about FPGAs - no fab facility needed, no soldering required (well, you still need to connect it up to do I/O with the rest of the world).
It was modified to exclude from transfer "all copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the agreement, required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of Unix and UnixWare technologies."
So in other words, the original contract was amended to exclude from transfer all copyrights and trademarks required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to Unix. However, the relevant IP owned by Novell (at some particular date, presumably of the original contract) is exempt from the exclusion. I am not really clear how a judge would rule such language, in and of itself, to mean that Novell intended to transfer all relevant copyrights and trademarks to SCO - it doesn't explicitly say it (just because something is exempt from an exclusion doesn't necessarily mean that it's included, especially if the original contract gives no reason to believe that it would be included).
IANAL, but I think SCO's follow-on requests for Novell to sign clarifying documents would indicate that SCO didn't consider the contract a binding agreement to transfer the IP either, and clearly Novell's statements have indicated that they believed that. If both parties reasonably believe a contract means one thing at the time it was signed, and then one party later claims it meant something else, it's probably open to judicial interpretation of reasonableness. If SCO could show they have reasonably relied on those terms of the contract over the years, they'd have a strong case - but the evidence seems to indicate to me that they have been bluffing on the copyright ownership issue (never mind the myriad other issues), and now they think they've found some convoluted wording to back up their bluff.
A fair question - I've heard it both ways, but I've never actually talked to anybody who worked there or had direct knowledge thereof. The more convincing argument was that it was S-C-O, but then again, "sko unix" rolls off the tongue much easier than "S-C-O unix" does.
If anybody out there in Slashdot land is in on the teleconference it would be nice if you posted the update on what goes on therein for those of us too busy to listen in.