Indeed, it is only the stock ticker. Anyhow, there is far more interesting news about IT stocks. For example, SCO's stock (SCOX) has almost doubled since it plummeted: SCOX. Who the heck is buying it?
And with what money shall the US consume if it does not manufacture anything to sell for profit? Technology was the last real growth manufacturing field.
On that note, perhaps you or someone else understands enough economics to explain something to me.
The US has a trade deficit with (say) Japan of $80 billion, if I am not mistaken. Now, assuming 1 PC per Japanese citizen (sure, not all have one, but some have more than one), that is over 100 million PCs. Say each PC pays Microsoft $200 (for Windows + Office, plus additional stuff like SharePoint for some of them). That comes out to $20 billion paid to Microsoft, in rough estimate.
Is this $20 billion included in the $80 billion trade deficit? That is, would it be $100 billion without Microsoft?
I ask this, because if this is so, then it might explain why US policymakers seem to let Microsoft so easily off the hook for monopolistic practices - they are offsetting around 20% of the trade deficit right there.
On the other hand, is perhaps this money not arriving to the US, but rather received only by "Microsoft Japan" (I assume there is such a thing)? If so, then from a trade deficit point of view, software sucks: you can pay all your salaries to programmers in the US, then make one copy and move it to Japan, and sell it for $20 billion, all of which stays in Japan and never reaches the original location that produced the code. You can't do this with cars and TVs.
All of this seems odd, I am sure I am missing something. Economists, please explain:)
If you had bothered to check the license of the listed projects you'd see that some of them use GPL or LGPL (the only licenses that slashdotters appear to respect).
Well, no, you often see on Slashdot people defending the BSD license over the GPL.
However, you are correct, CodePlex projects use various licenses, it seems, FWIW.
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The coupon is the copyrighted work; the software that only allows it to be printed once is the technological measure; the circumvention is tricking the software so that it prints multiple copies. Perhaps we should trust the lawyers quoted in TFA, it seems like this might indeed be a DMCA violation.
1) If Intel could produce volume 45nm right now it would - better chips, cheaper to make, higher performance, higher margin on the best ones - why would they hold back?
This has been answered already several times. The issue is that in capitalism the goal is not to produce the best product, but to make the most money. Specifically, they might hold back because
By bringing them out now, they effectively obsolete all of their current offerings, i.e., they lose money. Better to first sell off all their current stock
Driving AMD out of business would set them up for antitrust issues which could be very costly
From what I read in the article, this "Ms-PL" is just a generic copyleft license with built a built in grant of patents and no-warranty clause. Other than the fact that the license was written by Microsoft, I don't see anything possibly controversial about it.
If this was a run-of-the-mill copyleft license, then precisely for that reason it would be controversial, since one of the OSI requirements is that a new license bring something new, or else this is just license proliferation for no reason.
But anyhow it isn't a copyleft-type license. It is more similar to BSD. Perhaps the best summary is that MS-PL is "BSD+incompatibility with GPL". Whether that is good or bad then depends on your perspective.
It is interesting that you mention the GPL, because that is exactly the target of this initiative by Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft isn't opposed to BSD licensed code, because they can use it all they want. They are only opposed to the GPL
That is true historically; it is fast becoming false. When Microsoft was an 100% closed-source shop, it obviously wanted all open-source code to be BSD. So it could use it and give nothing back. But now Microsoft sponsors quite a lot of open-source projects (for example, IronPython is an excellent project, and currently being used by Novell on Mono). So it is now on the other side as well; Microsoft does not want other corporations to use their code and give nothing back. The Ms-CL is somewhat along those lines.
In other words, the 'selfish' perspective is to want everyone else's code to be BSD or such but to release your own as GPL or such (of course the truly selfish perspective is not to release any open-source code, but as we can see even Microsoft is realizing that, for various reasons, open-source is unavoidable).
We are happily running our apps and games on 2003 server or XP. I support and use Linux in the server room, but in the real world with the apps and games all running on Windows, desktops will stay where they are.
People keep saying this is the year for the Linux desktop because of Vista's failures, when most people don't care because XP and 2003 run just fine for them.
And yet, something has changed, even if this (or last year or next year) isn't the 'year of the Linux desktop'. Let me give you an example.
I am currently involved in the preparations for founding a new startup company. Since this is a new company, there isn't a currently-existing base of Windows computers to replace. We are making decisions about what to use without regard for migrating from anywhere. So that is one respect in which 'Windows is good enough to not be replaced' fails - at least for new companies.
Furthermore, when deciding what to use, we see the following. Linux on the server - that is a done deal. No discussion even. Now, what about desktops for the developers writing code for those servers? Well, in the past they would use Windows, since it's a desktop, and to develop for Linux they would use Cygwin, virtualization or (sadly) networking. But nowadays we are very seriously considering giving them Fedora or Ubuntu desktops - why not have them run the same type of OS as the target platform, especially since it can do everything else they need, with Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.? So, you have here a case of success in the server room bleeding over to the desktop (the reverse of Windows' historical battle plan).
What about other desktops, for secretaries, business development, etc.? Well, it isn't my area, so I haven't argued as strongly for Linux there. Perhaps it does make sense to have Windows PCs for them. But even so, because of the Linux desktops for the developers, we will in all likelihood standardize on Firefox and OpenOffice internally, since they can be run everywhere. (We might end up getting a few licenses of MS Office for people that exchange documents with external entities.)
So sure, it isn't the 'year of the Linux desktop'. Maybe it never will be. But it still isn't the same as it was before.
Well actually there is an operating system that competes with Windows, and very successfully: Linux, on servers. I presume you were talking about the desktop, then.
Yes, you may be right that despite BSD and GPL foundations on which to start a rival OS there is no real competition for Windows on the desktop. I still claim, however, that to compete with Windows is far easier today than a decade ago, and I think that Apple's rise in market share, as well as things like Dell offering Ubuntu and Lenovo offering SUSE, indicate this. But that might be wishful thinking on my part.
You are right, I am sorry. I meant to say that TWF and THF are both much better than sword-and-shield. Which of TWF or THF is better than the other is debatable (I tend to think TWF, but I am not sure, as you said, there are convincing calculations saying otherwise).
My point, which I guess I didn't make that clear, was the imagery problem. I imagine most fantasy fighters to use a sword and shield... a minority a two-handed weapon, and an even smaller minority two weapons. But the 3.X rules make it so it is just unplayable to be a sword-and-shield fighter - unless you don't mind losing out to the other fighters all the time. So the whole thing becomes completely surreal, in the sense of not agreeing with my imagination;)
The market isn't closed, but really, there is not a single office suite that seriously competes with MS Office. Any MAJOR company that has tried has BLED money...and lost.
Sure, but times change.
Once, you could have said the same about operating systems. Today, anybody can take a fully-functional BSD kernel as the basis for their OS, free of charge (Apple more or less did that). Even better, they can take a complete Linux distro and have a complete system - if they comply with the licenses, but still, proprietary stuff can be added on top (Linspire do it).
So, entering the operating system market is different these days. You don't need to bleed money on development of millions of lines of code before you see a single dollar in profit; you can get the code for free (or Free).
The same is becoming true for office suites. Anyone can take OpenOffice and add some functionality; the functionality can be in proprietary plugins if that is a concern. And even if they don't want to use all of OpenOffice, they can still take parts of it. Say, import plugins; they can remain GPL while the office suite itself is proprietary. Presto, you can now import.DOC files. In fact, I strongly suspect that OpenOffice code was of use (even if only to be looked at) by the various other office competitors.
I really like the idea of a new D&D version. It's a chance to improve some of the imperfect rules in the last edition. For instance the fact that it's nearly impossible to create a fast moving dexterous fighter that has parity with a burly strength based one.
By far the most annoying flaw with the 3.x rules was two-weapon fighting. There is a tremendous advantage to focusing your fighters on taking the two-weapon cluster of feats, and in all the campaigns I've played that is exactly what happened. Sure, a shield can grant you a few points to AC, but another weapon gives you several attacks. Pit one against the other, the latter will win. Except perhaps at levels 1-5.
Basically the only thing that could make using a shield useful is if the DM gives out shields +5 but only swords +1. Ridiculous.
Good summary. Note, however, that soap doesn't even need to kill germs - soap along with the mechanical action of hand washing is meant to carry germs away with the soap down the drain. This is something that would be extremely difficult to evolve a protection against, and therefore is a very useful strategy.
I mean, I don't really have anything bad to say about Novell. But when they say "Oh, we're not going to sue Linux users for infringing UNIX because we're nice guys" you need to look through the transparent PR and translate that as "because we would lose horribly".
If you read TFA, you will see that Novell do not say they won't sue 'because they are nice guys'. They say they can't because there is no Unix in Linux. They make that very clear in their statement.
So why make the statement at all? Very simple. Say there is a gun held by someone (SCO) in a room full of people; the gun is used in a threatening way. Then the gun is moved to another person's control (Novell). To get everybody to calm down as quickly as possible, the second person shows that the gun isn't loaded anyhow, and then puts it away in some drawer. That is essentially what Novell did: tell people that there is no threat whatsoever, in the most direct way possible. This is necessary because the people in the room, on edge from the previous threats, are still worried by the gun.
No, you are reading it wrong. See other comments for more details; the issue is not whether Linux is used as a bootloader, but how ESX interfaces with it (kernel or userspace), and whether ESX was built to run with Linux or not.
Don't forget: Omit actual details in favor of baseless speculation. [...] This is how you optimize FUD: keep the claims mysterious. SCO kept up this strategy for, what, 4 or 5 years?
I read TFA, and it included quite a lot of specific details, more than I expected, in fact. It may even be the case that it includes all publicly-available data (we don't have the ESX source code, so how exactly it interfaces with the Linux kernel is not entirely clear, but TFA can't be blamed for that).
What details were omitted from TFA, in your opinion?
we should start going after companies (and their CEOs) that break US labor laws abroad.
Of course, what were we thinking... naturally US laws should be enforced everywhere in the world, no other country has the right to determine their own.
If this slashdot post results in that many responses, then obviously this something we'd deem "stuff that matters."
A story consisting of links to pics of Natalie Portman would also get a lot of interest. Does that mean it is appropriate for being posted on Slashdot?
They can sell it just like Red Hat and SUSE do. You sell the source code, and it comes with support. Other people can distribute the source code, but then (1) it lacks the support, and (2) doesn't come directly from the manufacturer, so patches may be late, errors may exist, etc.
Linux and Solaris come from different code bases. Linux is Linux and Solaris is UNIX System V R4.
TFA didn't say otherwise, perhaps you miss the point here.
The point is that Solaris is Unix (not Linux), and it just turned out in court that Novell own Unix. Coincidentally, Novell also happen to own a Linux distro. So, in theory, they might want to assert their rights on Unix to prevent Unixes (Solaris) from competing with Linux (and therefore with Novell's Linux, SUSE).
But, this is just theory. For all we know, Sun has had a license from Novell for years to use whatever portions of Unix code are in Solaris. Or perhaps there is no such code in Solaris at present. We just don't know, DesktopLinux.com was just speculating I guess.
In addition, when he said Microsoft was 'good' at fending off the competition, I thought he was making a subtle understatement joke - because saying Microsoft is 'good' at fending off the competition is about like saying Al Capone was 'good' at running a business.
From what I've been able to tell, OEL is just RHEL with Oracle support instead of RedHat support. Do people actually want this? Why didn't Oracle just work with RedHat/SUSE/etc. rather than fork? Money? Issues with RedHat Inc.?
At first, it was just a rebranding of RHEL, yes. But as time passes, it is becoming interestingly different (for example, I didn't expect this Yast port). You can think about Oracle Linux -- Red Hat Linux as Ubuntu -- Debian, that is, a distro that starts with another as a basis and builds on to that. Nothing new in the FOSS world.
There is one difference, though. Oracle is a Big Corporation; bigger than Google, for example; much bigger than Novell, and much much bigger than Red Hat. To see them offering a Linux product, and various FOSS projects (like their GPLed clustering file system and now Yast) is highly interesting; they are, to put it plainly, the biggest corporation selling a commercial Linux distro. In fact, I believe they are the 2nd-largest operating system vendor (perhaps there is a tie with Apple, though).
Of course, despite Oracle's size, their Linux business is tiny - the market is mostly Red Hat's, and to a lesser degree Novell's. But Oracle, if they take this market seriously, stand to become a significant player. And that isn't a bad thing, so long as they abide by the FOSS licenses they distribute and contribute back - which, it appears, they are in fact doing.
Uhm, the reason they lost is because they picked a fight with players who had billions of dollars, and a very well-established team of expensive lawyers, ready to fight.
They were Germany picking a fight with Russia.
Your historical example is misleading. Sure, Russia ended up crushing Nazi Germany, but it wasn't inevitable by a long shot. If, for example, the German initial push had succeeded just a little more and reached Moscow, it might all have been over. Also, had Hitler had the good sense to follow his general's suggestions later on when things got desperate and retreated to a safer position, who knows what might have happened. There was also some German hope that Japan would open a second front against Russia, and if that had occurred, Russia might well have been divvied up between them (however, Japan was smart enough to know they had more than enough on their hands with the US).
Russia was much larger in terms of population, sure. But Germany had far more motivation, more skilled troops, better technology, better strategists (remember how easily they defeated France), and the element of surprise.
However, your point regarding SCO is fairly accurate; SCO's strategy was near-suicidal if not completely so. But perhaps they never intended to win, as many think.
The safety of products sold is a prime reason to use a retailer and not buy wholesale yourself. Will Amazon or CVS or Wal-Mart sell unsafe products? They add their profit overhead to cover their infrastructure, but also to insure against buying faulty or dangerous products. If a product is deemed dangerous, they'll remove it from the market. If they find a large number of dangerous products from a given source, say China, they may go so far as to test products themselves before releasing them to the market.
Ah, the old 'the free market will ensure products are safe' argument. Of course it will - in the long run. Every big disaster will be followed by a 'correction' by the market, and this will recur again and again. Sure, on average products will be safe - but the fluctuations will be a bitch. It is precisely to avoid fluctuations that we need regulation of product safety.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, it is only the stock ticker. Anyhow, there is far more interesting news about IT stocks. For example, SCO's stock (SCOX) has almost doubled since it plummeted: SCOX. Who the heck is buying it?
The US has a trade deficit with (say) Japan of $80 billion, if I am not mistaken. Now, assuming 1 PC per Japanese citizen (sure, not all have one, but some have more than one), that is over 100 million PCs. Say each PC pays Microsoft $200 (for Windows + Office, plus additional stuff like SharePoint for some of them). That comes out to $20 billion paid to Microsoft, in rough estimate.
Is this $20 billion included in the $80 billion trade deficit? That is, would it be $100 billion without Microsoft?
I ask this, because if this is so, then it might explain why US policymakers seem to let Microsoft so easily off the hook for monopolistic practices - they are offsetting around 20% of the trade deficit right there.
On the other hand, is perhaps this money not arriving to the US, but rather received only by "Microsoft Japan" (I assume there is such a thing)? If so, then from a trade deficit point of view, software sucks: you can pay all your salaries to programmers in the US, then make one copy and move it to Japan, and sell it for $20 billion, all of which stays in Japan and never reaches the original location that produced the code. You can't do this with cars and TVs.
All of this seems odd, I am sure I am missing something. Economists, please explain
However, you are correct, CodePlex projects use various licenses, it seems, FWIW.
God, what an awful law.
But anyhow it isn't a copyleft-type license. It is more similar to BSD. Perhaps the best summary is that MS-PL is "BSD+incompatibility with GPL". Whether that is good or bad then depends on your perspective.
In other words, the 'selfish' perspective is to want everyone else's code to be BSD or such but to release your own as GPL or such (of course the truly selfish perspective is not to release any open-source code, but as we can see even Microsoft is realizing that, for various reasons, open-source is unavoidable).
I am currently involved in the preparations for founding a new startup company. Since this is a new company, there isn't a currently-existing base of Windows computers to replace. We are making decisions about what to use without regard for migrating from anywhere. So that is one respect in which 'Windows is good enough to not be replaced' fails - at least for new companies.
Furthermore, when deciding what to use, we see the following. Linux on the server - that is a done deal. No discussion even. Now, what about desktops for the developers writing code for those servers? Well, in the past they would use Windows, since it's a desktop, and to develop for Linux they would use Cygwin, virtualization or (sadly) networking. But nowadays we are very seriously considering giving them Fedora or Ubuntu desktops - why not have them run the same type of OS as the target platform, especially since it can do everything else they need, with Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.? So, you have here a case of success in the server room bleeding over to the desktop (the reverse of Windows' historical battle plan).
What about other desktops, for secretaries, business development, etc.? Well, it isn't my area, so I haven't argued as strongly for Linux there. Perhaps it does make sense to have Windows PCs for them. But even so, because of the Linux desktops for the developers, we will in all likelihood standardize on Firefox and OpenOffice internally, since they can be run everywhere. (We might end up getting a few licenses of MS Office for people that exchange documents with external entities.)
So sure, it isn't the 'year of the Linux desktop'. Maybe it never will be. But it still isn't the same as it was before.
Well actually there is an operating system that competes with Windows, and very successfully: Linux, on servers. I presume you were talking about the desktop, then.
Yes, you may be right that despite BSD and GPL foundations on which to start a rival OS there is no real competition for Windows on the desktop. I still claim, however, that to compete with Windows is far easier today than a decade ago, and I think that Apple's rise in market share, as well as things like Dell offering Ubuntu and Lenovo offering SUSE, indicate this. But that might be wishful thinking on my part.
You are right, I am sorry. I meant to say that TWF and THF are both much better than sword-and-shield. Which of TWF or THF is better than the other is debatable (I tend to think TWF, but I am not sure, as you said, there are convincing calculations saying otherwise).
;)
My point, which I guess I didn't make that clear, was the imagery problem. I imagine most fantasy fighters to use a sword and shield... a minority a two-handed weapon, and an even smaller minority two weapons. But the 3.X rules make it so it is just unplayable to be a sword-and-shield fighter - unless you don't mind losing out to the other fighters all the time. So the whole thing becomes completely surreal, in the sense of not agreeing with my imagination
Once, you could have said the same about operating systems. Today, anybody can take a fully-functional BSD kernel as the basis for their OS, free of charge (Apple more or less did that). Even better, they can take a complete Linux distro and have a complete system - if they comply with the licenses, but still, proprietary stuff can be added on top (Linspire do it).
So, entering the operating system market is different these days. You don't need to bleed money on development of millions of lines of code before you see a single dollar in profit; you can get the code for free (or Free).
The same is becoming true for office suites. Anyone can take OpenOffice and add some functionality; the functionality can be in proprietary plugins if that is a concern. And even if they don't want to use all of OpenOffice, they can still take parts of it. Say, import plugins; they can remain GPL while the office suite itself is proprietary. Presto, you can now import
Basically the only thing that could make using a shield useful is if the DM gives out shields +5 but only swords +1. Ridiculous.
Good summary. Note, however, that soap doesn't even need to kill germs - soap along with the mechanical action of hand washing is meant to carry germs away with the soap down the drain. This is something that would be extremely difficult to evolve a protection against, and therefore is a very useful strategy.
So why make the statement at all? Very simple. Say there is a gun held by someone (SCO) in a room full of people; the gun is used in a threatening way. Then the gun is moved to another person's control (Novell). To get everybody to calm down as quickly as possible, the second person shows that the gun isn't loaded anyhow, and then puts it away in some drawer. That is essentially what Novell did: tell people that there is no threat whatsoever, in the most direct way possible. This is necessary because the people in the room, on edge from the previous threats, are still worried by the gun.
No, you are reading it wrong. See other comments for more details; the issue is not whether Linux is used as a bootloader, but how ESX interfaces with it (kernel or userspace), and whether ESX was built to run with Linux or not.
What details were omitted from TFA, in your opinion?
Go USA!
You might be right, I don't know the details of Sun's licensing of Unix rights. If you have a good link, I'd be very grateful.
They can sell it just like Red Hat and SUSE do. You sell the source code, and it comes with support. Other people can distribute the source code, but then (1) it lacks the support, and (2) doesn't come directly from the manufacturer, so patches may be late, errors may exist, etc.
The point is that Solaris is Unix (not Linux), and it just turned out in court that Novell own Unix. Coincidentally, Novell also happen to own a Linux distro. So, in theory, they might want to assert their rights on Unix to prevent Unixes (Solaris) from competing with Linux (and therefore with Novell's Linux, SUSE).
But, this is just theory. For all we know, Sun has had a license from Novell for years to use whatever portions of Unix code are in Solaris. Or perhaps there is no such code in Solaris at present. We just don't know, DesktopLinux.com was just speculating I guess.
Yeah, that did read like humor to me as well.
In addition, when he said Microsoft was 'good' at fending off the competition, I thought he was making a subtle understatement joke - because saying Microsoft is 'good' at fending off the competition is about like saying Al Capone was 'good' at running a business.
There is one difference, though. Oracle is a Big Corporation; bigger than Google, for example; much bigger than Novell, and much much bigger than Red Hat. To see them offering a Linux product, and various FOSS projects (like their GPLed clustering file system and now Yast) is highly interesting; they are, to put it plainly, the biggest corporation selling a commercial Linux distro. In fact, I believe they are the 2nd-largest operating system vendor (perhaps there is a tie with Apple, though).
Of course, despite Oracle's size, their Linux business is tiny - the market is mostly Red Hat's, and to a lesser degree Novell's. But Oracle, if they take this market seriously, stand to become a significant player. And that isn't a bad thing, so long as they abide by the FOSS licenses they distribute and contribute back - which, it appears, they are in fact doing.
Russia was much larger in terms of population, sure. But Germany had far more motivation, more skilled troops, better technology, better strategists (remember how easily they defeated France), and the element of surprise.
However, your point regarding SCO is fairly accurate; SCO's strategy was near-suicidal if not completely so. But perhaps they never intended to win, as many think.