These guys are doomed simply because it doesn't really cost Visa/MasterCard/etc that much to process a transaction. They charge it because they can get away with it.
As soon as any scheme like this becomes even remotely successful, the credit card companies will change their pricing models and steal the market.
They're not dead yet. Agreed they've got some work to do, but they've turned bad situations in the past.
Personally, I think they should get seriously into the server appliance business. They bought Cobalt, but they don't seem to want to do anything interesting with the company. Those little boxes were really handy and breeze to administer.
They might well have picked the right time for Linux desktops too. Imagine a shrink-wrapped workgroup including a nice Sun box with Cobalt admin tools and a bunch of easy-to-administer Linux desktops. Great for school labs or company call-centeres.
The PowerPC is exactly the opposite, as anyone who has sat down at a recent G4 can tell you -- these things scream.
This is an embedded version. It shares design elements with your G4 processor, but it's not nearly the same thing.
Linux is specifically architectured for the server market
Nope, it was designed for Linus Torvald's desktop '386 - a machine that was considerably less powerful than this device. Since then a lot of work has gone into scaling it both up and down.
Wow. That's really strange. I always considered powerful scripting languages as a major advantage that Unix/Linux had over Windows.
But you seem to want to script desktop applications - which I suppose is fair enough. Not my cup of tea, but OpenOffice seems to be working on polishing their API.
I must confess, though, that the idea that somebody would really want to script large desktop apps in VB is really foreign to me. I sometimes see users who have done strange, evil things with VB scripts, and it always makes me cringe. Can you give an example of an application for this?
But why do you have several phone numbers? When I'm sitting at my desk, all calls should go to my desk phone. When I get up, they should all be routed to my cell. There's only one 'me', so there should only need to be one number.
Also, the only reason I really need a separate fax line is because the receiving end isn't smart enough to route the call to my fax machine. That could be fixed quite easily (and has been by a number of vendors). So that eliminates the fax number (and who uses faxes anymore anyway?).
In fact, I shouldn't need a phone number at all. I should be able to use my e-mail address as a unique identifier that gets routed to wherever I happen to be.
If were're talking about Africa as a whole (rather than just SA, which this story is about) then I'd say Africa is _much_ worse off than China.
Africa still has a fair number of extremely corrupt governments and civil unrest. Chinese peasants are poor, but they don't have to worry about thugs coming through their villages and spraying the buildings with gunfire like in the Congo.
Lots of reason to hope, of course. Good government in Ghana. South Africa is making progress. But I think China and India are much more likely to become world leaders in the next 50 years.
Sorry, but I must ask even though this is off-topic...
Leaving the moral argument aside (Yes, there is a moral argument against homosexuality--not that I believe it per-se, but I can concieve of it and I'm an amataeur)
I don't think I've ever heard a rational argument that homosexuality is immoral. Those who believe that seem to resort to religion or an appeal to "nature". Even if you don't agree with it, I'd be very interested in hearing moral argument you're thinking of.
A small nit - most bananas eaten in the world don't come from a single species, it's the bananas exported to the West that come from a single species. That's still important, since that's were the money is.
But I think this is interesting because some of the tastiest bananas I've eaten aren't exported. They aren't suitable for various reasons, including thin skins that don't deal well with being shipped around the world. If they could introduce some of those yummie genes into export bananas it would be great.
I believe that companies in the U.S. (and to varying degrees elsewhere) have most of the rights of human beings. I think there are even people who consider that a 'feature', not a bug in the legal system.
Anyway, for the purposes of copyright, the author can be a company.
The lost first chapter to the book....
on
The Art of Deception
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Register ran a review, along with the original first chapter of the book (which was cut by the editors).
The first chapter is (or rather, was) a short bio and history of the Mitnik case. Interesting to read Kevin's side in his own words.
There would be a demand for the drugs regardless of whether or not there is a patent system. So at least some drugs would be developed.
The question really is, what proportion of drugs would never find funding without the patent system. Then you weigh that against different alternatives to funding the research.
In the case of drugs the obvious funder would be government. After all, everybody benefits from new drugs (or should benefit - patents make that difficult), it makes sense for the cost to be spread out.
Before you make the argument that governments don't have the money for that kind of research, remember that in many countries - most western countries I think - health care is heavily subsidized. So the government would save money on cheaper drugs.
I have actually been involved in patent filings - that's part of why my impression of the patent system is so poor.
In the cases I was involved with, the "inventions" were side effects of product development that would have happened anyway. In fact, the patent filing was an afterthought. No research was done specifically for the patent.
Your arguments seem to focus on the benefits for the individual. I have no doubt that people who get lots of patents have the potential to benefit from them. But it doesn't follow that patents are better for society.
Companies still need to sell products, and in a competitive environment that means there will still be research and innovation. What I'm saying is that I haven't seen any evidence, or even a plausible argument, that there is significantly more research because of the patent system than there would be otherwise.
Patents are a good thing, when they aren't abused or issued improperly.
I've seen this asserted many times, but never heard any evidence. Why do you think patents are a good thing?
Certainly there's a theoretical argument that patents encourage research, but research happened without patents as well. And even if you can show that patents do lead to more research, you have to show that this gain outweighs the cost of patents to society - we know that there are economic costs to monopolies. Are the theoretical benefits of patents so great that they outweigh the demonstrated costs of monopolies?
Then, even if you can show that patents are a good thing in some areas, you need to show that they're generally good, not only for mechanical engineering, but also for chemistry, biology, medicine, computer software, and any other field to which you wish to apply them.
Truth is, I've never heard any such arguement made. People who favour patents always act as if it's obvious that they must be a good thing.
Hmmm. Yeah, I have to agree with you about the linked the FSF document. But I don't see how the FSF's interpretation, as presented in the document, matches the license.
It's different if you wrote the code - that part from the FSF document makes sense. And I think that will burn SCO - there's bound to be some code in Linux that they (as Caldera) wrote, so they've licensed that code under GPL. Surely they can't place additional restrictions on their license now.
But the bit about not being to redistribute code because somebody might make a patent claim against the recipient doesn't make any sense to me. But of course, I'm not a lawyer.
Ok... if I squint and read the passage over repeatedly, I think I understand what you're getting at, but I still don't agree with your interpretation.
You're reading this as saying that I must take responsibility for all those who might receive the application as a result of my passing it on (the "indirectly" part) and if any of those people are in any way prohibited from exercising all the rights granted by the GPL, then I can't redistribute the software.
I think you're placing too much importance on the word "indirectly". It could be interpreted in a few ways, and your interpretration is pretty broad. In any case, the "indirectly" part is also only part of the example, so we have to back to the original sentence to see what this is an example of.
The original sentence says that I cannot place any additional (outside the GPL) restrictions the software when I redistribute it. If I'm compelled to place additional restrictions on the software, then I can't redistribute it at all.
Note that the main clause doesn't deal with outside restrictions placed on recipient that aren't placed also placed on me. It's about what happens if a court tells me I'm not allowed to distribute under the terms of the GPL.
Read in the context of the first sentence, the more likely interpretation of the example is: if the court tells me I'm allowed to give away the software, but I have to impose additional conditions on people who don't receive the software directly from me (those who receive the software "indirectly") then I'm not allowed to distribute the software at all.
While the GPL in general requires that the code can be arbitrarily modified, that's not the language of this particular clause. You're reading something in that just isn't there. This clause simply says "royalty free".
The rogue nation idea is hypothetical, and certainly you'd never get a court in a non-rogue nation to take the rogue nation's law into account.
If the employee can't contribute to the project, that's fine, he can still redistribute. That satisfies section 7.
It seems to me you've constructed a straw man that doesn't accurately reflect what the GPL says.
The license for Linux (GPL) prohibits you from distributing Linux if the recipient can't redistribute it.
In other words, I can only give you a copy of Linux if you can redistribute it freely (as in Freedom and Beer). If you can't redistribute it freely, then I can't give it to you.
It might actually be an advantage that the games aren't well known.
Fanatical gamers will buy the blockbuster games soon after they come out. If they're Linux users they'll keep a Windows partition around and play on that. By the time the Linux port comes around (if ever) they already have the Windows version and aren't likely to buy another copy. That's what sunk Loki.
These games, on the other hand, might be pretty good and will likely get some publicity in Linux circles. Linux users who play games probably don't have the Windows versions yet.
Who knows if it will work out, but I think they've got a better chance than Loki.
I'm not sure what Chinese laws you're referring to, but there's nothing wrong with a heavy punishment for willfully violating the law, provided you follow due process.
Remember that this isn't a crime of passion, it's a calculated attempt to steal on a large scale. The correct solution is to increase the punishment until it's no longer worth it for the thief.
Seriously, you have no clue what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with GPLing the standard (if that were even possible).
It's about allowing the standard to be implemented using GPL'd software. That's it. Nothing about limiting non-GPL implementations.
Note that most (all?) common web protocols can and are implemented in both GPL'd and commercial software. These guys are just trying to make sure that this continues to be true.
As a system integrator it's almost impossible to work with. It encourages free-form text databases. Nice for users, crap for programmers.
It really sucks because it's easy to use and integrates some nice features automatically. Why does this suck? Because users end up putting valuable company information in there, not realizing that they've locked up the info in a format that's useless to the rest of the company.
For example, it's really hard getting sales people to keep corporate contact information up-to-date once they've started keeping their contact info in Notes. It's easy for them, they can replicate to their desktop and access the info while they're on the road. It's free form, so they can add comments. Great for sales-people. Sucks for billing when the client has moved and the sales guy who knows about it can't be bothered to update the "real" client database.
Sorry for the rant, but Notes has cost me a lot of hassle over the years. Truly an awful product.
In fact IBM was one of the ones I had changed. I was working as a contracter, and of course IBM is huge - policies may vary. It was four or five years ago.
I've successfully gotten NCAs changed couple of times. The standard ones seem to require you to leave the industry for six months if you ever leave the company. I'd never sign one of those.
Imagine the problems you would have with a non-compete from, for example, IBM. They compete in virtually every segment of the computer industry, so there's no way you could find work without competing with them in some way.
Whenever I've raised the issue I've always managed to get some wording inserted that limits the scope. I did pull the "I'll just ignore this thing" act once too - worked ok.
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These guys are doomed simply because it doesn't really cost Visa/MasterCard/etc that much to process a transaction. They charge it because they can get away with it.
As soon as any scheme like this becomes even remotely successful, the credit card companies will change their pricing models and steal the market.
Exactly. Simple little boxes that cost almost nothing in admin overhead. If you want complicated then go for a full-blown server.
It's a niche thing.
They're not dead yet. Agreed they've got some work to do, but they've turned bad situations in the past.
Personally, I think they should get seriously into the server appliance business. They bought Cobalt, but they don't seem to want to do anything interesting with the company. Those little boxes were really handy and breeze to administer.
They might well have picked the right time for Linux desktops too. Imagine a shrink-wrapped workgroup including a nice Sun box with Cobalt admin tools and a bunch of easy-to-administer Linux desktops. Great for school labs or company call-centeres.
This is an embedded version. It shares design elements with your G4 processor, but it's not nearly the same thing.
Nope, it was designed for Linus Torvald's desktop '386 - a machine that was considerably less powerful than this device. Since then a lot of work has gone into scaling it both up and down.
Wow. That's really strange. I always considered powerful scripting languages as a major advantage that Unix/Linux had over Windows.
But you seem to want to script desktop applications - which I suppose is fair enough. Not my cup of tea, but OpenOffice seems to be working on polishing their API.
I must confess, though, that the idea that somebody would really want to script large desktop apps in VB is really foreign to me. I sometimes see users who have done strange, evil things with VB scripts, and it always makes me cringe. Can you give an example of an application for this?
But why do you have several phone numbers? When I'm sitting at my desk, all calls should go to my desk phone. When I get up, they should all be routed to my cell. There's only one 'me', so there should only need to be one number.
Also, the only reason I really need a separate fax line is because the receiving end isn't smart enough to route the call to my fax machine. That could be fixed quite easily (and has been by a number of vendors). So that eliminates the fax number (and who uses faxes anymore anyway?).
In fact, I shouldn't need a phone number at all. I should be able to use my e-mail address as a unique identifier that gets routed to wherever I happen to be.
If were're talking about Africa as a whole (rather than just SA, which this story is about) then I'd say Africa is _much_ worse off than China.
Africa still has a fair number of extremely corrupt governments and civil unrest. Chinese peasants are poor, but they don't have to worry about thugs coming through their villages and spraying the buildings with gunfire like in the Congo.
Lots of reason to hope, of course. Good government in Ghana. South Africa is making progress. But I think China and India are much more likely to become world leaders in the next 50 years.
Sorry, but I must ask even though this is off-topic...
I don't think I've ever heard a rational argument that homosexuality is immoral. Those who believe that seem to resort to religion or an appeal to "nature". Even if you don't agree with it, I'd be very interested in hearing moral argument you're thinking of.
A small nit - most bananas eaten in the world don't come from a single species, it's the bananas exported to the West that come from a single species. That's still important, since that's were the money is.
But I think this is interesting because some of the tastiest bananas I've eaten aren't exported. They aren't suitable for various reasons, including thin skins that don't deal well with being shipped around the world. If they could introduce some of those yummie genes into export bananas it would be great.
I'm niether a lawyer or American, but...
I believe that companies in the U.S. (and to varying degrees elsewhere) have most of the rights of human beings. I think there are even people who consider that a 'feature', not a bug in the legal system.
Anyway, for the purposes of copyright, the author can be a company.
The Register ran a review, along with the original first chapter of the book (which was cut by the editors).
The first chapter is (or rather, was) a short bio and history of the Mitnik case. Interesting to read Kevin's side in his own words.
The lost chapter
There would be a demand for the drugs regardless of whether or not there is a patent system. So at least some drugs would be developed.
The question really is, what proportion of drugs would never find funding without the patent system. Then you weigh that against different alternatives to funding the research.
In the case of drugs the obvious funder would be government. After all, everybody benefits from new drugs (or should benefit - patents make that difficult), it makes sense for the cost to be spread out.
Before you make the argument that governments don't have the money for that kind of research, remember that in many countries - most western countries I think - health care is heavily subsidized. So the government would save money on cheaper drugs.
I have actually been involved in patent filings - that's part of why my impression of the patent system is so poor.
In the cases I was involved with, the "inventions" were side effects of product development that would have happened anyway. In fact, the patent filing was an afterthought. No research was done specifically for the patent.
Your arguments seem to focus on the benefits for the individual. I have no doubt that people who get lots of patents have the potential to benefit from them. But it doesn't follow that patents are better for society.
Companies still need to sell products, and in a competitive environment that means there will still be research and innovation. What I'm saying is that I haven't seen any evidence, or even a plausible argument, that there is significantly more research because of the patent system than there would be otherwise.
I've seen this asserted many times, but never heard any evidence. Why do you think patents are a good thing?
Certainly there's a theoretical argument that patents encourage research, but research happened without patents as well. And even if you can show that patents do lead to more research, you have to show that this gain outweighs the cost of patents to society - we know that there are economic costs to monopolies. Are the theoretical benefits of patents so great that they outweigh the demonstrated costs of monopolies?
Then, even if you can show that patents are a good thing in some areas, you need to show that they're generally good, not only for mechanical engineering, but also for chemistry, biology, medicine, computer software, and any other field to which you wish to apply them.
Truth is, I've never heard any such arguement made. People who favour patents always act as if it's obvious that they must be a good thing.
Hmmm. Yeah, I have to agree with you about the linked the FSF document. But I don't see how the FSF's interpretation, as presented in the document, matches the license.
It's different if you wrote the code - that part from the FSF document makes sense. And I think that will burn SCO - there's bound to be some code in Linux that they (as Caldera) wrote, so they've licensed that code under GPL. Surely they can't place additional restrictions on their license now.
But the bit about not being to redistribute code because somebody might make a patent claim against the recipient doesn't make any sense to me. But of course, I'm not a lawyer.
Ok... if I squint and read the passage over repeatedly, I think I understand what you're getting at, but I still don't agree with your interpretation.
You're reading this as saying that I must take responsibility for all those who might receive the application as a result of my passing it on (the "indirectly" part) and if any of those people are in any way prohibited from exercising all the rights granted by the GPL, then I can't redistribute the software.
I think you're placing too much importance on the word "indirectly". It could be interpreted in a few ways, and your interpretration is pretty broad. In any case, the "indirectly" part is also only part of the example, so we have to back to the original sentence to see what this is an example of.
The original sentence says that I cannot place any additional (outside the GPL) restrictions the software when I redistribute it. If I'm compelled to place additional restrictions on the software, then I can't redistribute it at all.
Note that the main clause doesn't deal with outside restrictions placed on recipient that aren't placed also placed on me. It's about what happens if a court tells me I'm not allowed to distribute under the terms of the GPL.
Read in the context of the first sentence, the more likely interpretation of the example is: if the court tells me I'm allowed to give away the software, but I have to impose additional conditions on people who don't receive the software directly from me (those who receive the software "indirectly") then I'm not allowed to distribute the software at all.
While the GPL in general requires that the code can be arbitrarily modified, that's not the language of this particular clause. You're reading something in that just isn't there. This clause simply says "royalty free".
The rogue nation idea is hypothetical, and certainly you'd never get a court in a non-rogue nation to take the rogue nation's law into account.
If the employee can't contribute to the project, that's fine, he can still redistribute. That satisfies section 7.
It seems to me you've constructed a straw man that doesn't accurately reflect what the GPL says.
The license for Linux (GPL) prohibits you from distributing Linux if the recipient can't redistribute it.
In other words, I can only give you a copy of Linux if you can redistribute it freely (as in Freedom and Beer). If you can't redistribute it freely, then I can't give it to you.
It might actually be an advantage that the games aren't well known.
Fanatical gamers will buy the blockbuster games soon after they come out. If they're Linux users they'll keep a Windows partition around and play on that. By the time the Linux port comes around (if ever) they already have the Windows version and aren't likely to buy another copy. That's what sunk Loki.
These games, on the other hand, might be pretty good and will likely get some publicity in Linux circles. Linux users who play games probably don't have the Windows versions yet.
Who knows if it will work out, but I think they've got a better chance than Loki.
I seem to recall something about Sony adding a BASIC interpreter to their console so that they could call it a computer.
Might just be in the UK though.
I'm not sure what Chinese laws you're referring to, but there's nothing wrong with a heavy punishment for willfully violating the law, provided you follow due process.
Remember that this isn't a crime of passion, it's a calculated attempt to steal on a large scale. The correct solution is to increase the punishment until it's no longer worth it for the thief.
Seriously, you have no clue what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with GPLing the standard (if that were even possible).
It's about allowing the standard to be implemented using GPL'd software. That's it. Nothing about limiting non-GPL implementations.
Note that most (all?) common web protocols can and are implemented in both GPL'd and commercial software. These guys are just trying to make sure that this continues to be true.
Where, oh where to begin...
As a system integrator it's almost impossible to work with. It encourages free-form text databases. Nice for users, crap for programmers.
It really sucks because it's easy to use and integrates some nice features automatically. Why does this suck? Because users end up putting valuable company information in there, not realizing that they've locked up the info in a format that's useless to the rest of the company.
For example, it's really hard getting sales people to keep corporate contact information up-to-date once they've started keeping their contact info in Notes. It's easy for them, they can replicate to their desktop and access the info while they're on the road. It's free form, so they can add comments. Great for sales-people. Sucks for billing when the client has moved and the sales guy who knows about it can't be bothered to update the "real" client database.
Sorry for the rant, but Notes has cost me a lot of hassle over the years. Truly an awful product.
In fact IBM was one of the ones I had changed. I was working as a contracter, and of course IBM is huge - policies may vary. It was four or five years ago.
I've successfully gotten NCAs changed couple of times. The standard ones seem to require you to leave the industry for six months if you ever leave the company. I'd never sign one of those.
Imagine the problems you would have with a non-compete from, for example, IBM. They compete in virtually every segment of the computer industry, so there's no way you could find work without competing with them in some way.
Whenever I've raised the issue I've always managed to get some wording inserted that limits the scope. I did pull the "I'll just ignore this thing" act once too - worked ok.