To sum up: 1: SCO bought the copyright to UNIX from AT&T 2: IBM licensed UNIX code from SCO 3: IBM put UNIX code into AIX (that's what they licensed it for) 4: IBM made lots of money selling AIX systems to big companies 5: IBM had another team forking on Linux 6: SCO claims that IBM put UNIX code into Linux (violating the terms of their license) 7: SCO canceled IBM's UNIX license because of the alleged violation of their contract 8: SCO released scary-sounding press releases implying that everyone running AIX would be liable for infringment (hoping to make IBM's customers nervous, so they would put pressure on IBM to settle quickly and out-of-court)
Further speculation: 9: ??? 10: IBM will buy SCO at an inflated price just to shut them up 11: PROFIT!!!! for SCO lawyers and executives
To further condense: It's a publicity stunt, SCO wants a buyout. They're targeting IBM because they IBM has lots of money, whereas no Linux-based companies are making a profit.
Clerk: Sorry, but we keep all of our briefs, filings, dockets and other paperwork in an Oracle database on a big Aix server. Thanks to your licensing shenanigans we're not allowed to use that anymore, so I'm afraid you'll just have to wait while we drag all the old typewriters and filing cabinets up from storage! SCO: You bastards! I'm holding this court liable for damages every minute that our filings are delayed. Clerk: While you're waiting, you should reformat your 40,000 page complaint and 1,100 page briefs from MS word files to typed paped documents. We need those in triplicate, so you might want to send one of your lawyers out for carbon paper.
I give it a six-and-a-half overall. It *sounds* like you know what you're talking about to anyone just skimming the comments, that's good. Relevence to the topic is spot-on. You spell and punctuate too well to be a regular slashdotter, but that takes a careful reader to notice anyway. You lose a few marks for abuse of "scare quotes", but that's no big deal. The signature is what keeps you from trolling with the big boys though; it blows your apparent credibility right out the window. Nice try though.
Try AIM for a while, you'll be surprised how little pr0n spam you get, and how you never get your passwords stolen by Russian script kiddies. It doesn't take up half your memory leaving none for Quake or whatever game you're using ICQ to launch. It doesn't cause random crashes. The interface doesn't look (as much) like it was designed by babboons, either.
I'd like to see AIM die as much as the next guy, but ICQ hasn't been a better system since about 1998.
...and do what with the extra bandwidth? Auction it off to yet another foriegn telecom company? Rename it the "Clear Channel band" and play the same top-40 music station on a coast-to-coast repeater network? Given the FCC's recent penchant for giving too much power to too few megacorporations, I don't think letting them restructure the TV band is a good idea.
Don't you think the burden of proof should be on the people making a positive claim (in this case "violent video games cause more violent behaviour")? Unless there is some very good evidence supporting that claim, I think the govenment is overstepping it's bounds regulating game sales.
Disclaimer: I'm a legal adult, I like playing violent games, and I don't think they make me more violent... Now hand over the fucking Duke Nukem CD, or I'll kill every one of you with my thermonuclear heat-seeking railgun!!!
A few months ago, in a dark warehouse in Brooklyn...
*knock* *knock* *knock* nVidia: Who is it? *Futuremark goons enter stage left* Futuremark: You's late wit you's beta program "membership dues". You know what happens wit da peoples dat don't pay they's dues, right? nVidia: Piss off! We're not paying this year. Futuremark: Dat's a pretty benchmark score you got there. Be a shame is somethin' BAD happened to it... *Futuremark pushes nVidia's benchmark trophy over, shattering it* Futuremark: oops. Looks like ATI is faster dis year. Dat's too bad for you's guys. You sure you don't wants to join da beta? nVidia: You bastards! Get out! Futuremark: Think about it. Da boss wants you on board this year, or bad things happen. *exeunt goons stage left* nVidia: No more "beta membership dues". We're going to beat those Futuremark goons at their own crooked game!
but when Apple switched to the G3/G4 and Steve Jobs didn't allow Be to switch their OS to these new CPUs
Well, that was Be, Inc's flimsy excuse. Linux, *BSD, and a flock of other operating systems have no trouble running on G3/G4 machines, even without help from the "secret information" that Apple wouldn't share with Be. It looks to me more like Be wanted to get out of the PPC market without offending their current users, and Apple made a handy scapegoat.
As a web developer, if I cannot get access to a web browser, I am not going to develop for it. It's just that simple. Even now I only put minimal effort towards supporting IE when I author for the web.
Who is shooting themselves in the foot now? I loathe IE as much as the next/.er, but it does have 90%+ market share, so if my site looks bad in IE, it looks bad to 90% of the people who will see them. That's unacceptable.
The Conspiracy Theory - MS buys out SCO, and puts their legion of lawyers to work harassing everyone who has ever invested a dime in Linux-related businesses. Sine MS's legal budget is larger than the present value of Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. combined, they win by default. Commercial support for Linux disappears overnight, kernel development grinds to a halt, and we all get to go back to using Windows for another 10 years or so, until The Hurd is finished.
1: IBM execs make quiet offer to SCO execs over a game of golf 2: SCO drops lawsuit 3: IBM makes public offer to buy SCO 4: ??? 5: PROFIT! (for SCO execs, everyone else is left with a few pennies and a vague uneasy feeling)
It is therefore the duty of every man and woman in the United States Armed forces to ensure that "the people" have access to every bit as much armament as does the standing army which now turns its vigilant gaze upon the people.
Sounds good! Count me in for $20. How much more do we need to buy a Reagan-class carrier again?
I'm sorry if this upsets some people, but I have to say it.
There are things worth sacrificing human lives for. Liberty is one of them. I know that goes against every value we Americans have developed over the last 50 years, but it's true.
Given the choice between living in a country where I have a chance of being shot, bombed, gassed, anthraxed or otherwise killed by terrorists, or a country where some government agency records my every word and deed and carries people it considers "dangerous" off in the middle of the night to secret trials and secret prisons, I'll take the terrorism. Accepting a little personal risk is the least I can do to respect the memories of people who died to establish a nation of relative freedom.
TIA may put a damper on terrorism, it may not, but either way I think the cure is worse than the disease.
You'll change your tune when you're paying $7/gallon for gas to drive your Escalade 5 miles to the nearest store and 30 miles to work every day...
If you want to live away from commerce and your neighbors, that's fine with me, I just wish my taxes weren't being used to subsidise building miles of unnecessary roads and utility lines for people like you.
If you build neighborhoods correctly, you don't need to rely on any external forces to get you the food you need.
Aye, there's one big source of our dependance on the auto. The U.S. has an *enormous* installed base of poorly-designed neighborhoods. Winding streets with no sidewalks, strict segregation of residential and commercial activities, and sprawling development (single-story houses on 3/4 acre lots. gag!) make it almost a requirement to drive to get any sort of outside input! NEVs are a stopgap solution, what we need in the long term is better urban planning. We need more mixed-use development, more compact residential areas, etc. The guiding principle should be to have everything needed on a daily basis within easy walking (or bicycle) distance from every home.
There is no next-generation space shuttle, and there never will be. Boosting NASA's budget doesn't get senators re-elected, and no private companies are willing to look far enough ahead to see the potential profits in spaceborne industry.
Nobody cares about science or exploration, all that matters anymore is who owns which patch of oil-laden sand in the middle east. NASA has lost both the budget and the backbone for manned spaceflight. We went to the moon almost half a century ago, and now all we can do is putter about in low orbit building overpriced, underperforming space stations. Pathetic.
I suspect a lot of that money is moving on hopes that IBM will buy SCO out to avoid a protracted legal battle. Besides, if Wall street knew anything about technology, we would never have had the tech bubble and tech bust. and the economy wouldn't be in the toilet right now.
Coming soon from id Software, "Where in The Hell is Carmen Sandiego"!
Shouldn't that be "American McGee's 'Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego'", featuring Carmen Sandiego as a demented dominatrix with a harem of perverse petty criminals trying to rob the Prince of Theives blind?
It's not the look, it's the Apple logo. Maybe you should read the article you link to next time...
" "Apple clamped down on these hard -- again, rightfully so. But Apple has never blocked the creation of entirely original themes that did not contain any Apple trademark images. In the past two years since the release of these banned Aqua themes, dozens of original themes have been released by artists without any letters from Apple," Coyle says." -TFA
Look at any themes site. There are hundreds of OSX rip-offs out there, and the only ones that get C&D letters from Apple are the ones that use trademarked logos.
There's no doubt that the GNU tools helped make linux what it is now. So we let Stallman prefix "gnu/" onto the name. Fine. What about all the other contributors? What about the other teams who made huge contributions to linux's usability? The names would become ridiculously long!
Should we run MySQL/PHP/Apache/GNU/Linux on our servers and GNOME/Xfree/GNU/Linux on our desktops? What about the people who prefer KDE/Qt/Xfree/GNU/Linux?
Sorry, that was a trick question, actually New Zealand, the home of our intrepid missile-builder, is an independant nation. US federal law carries no more legal weight there than a fatwah from the Ayatollah Khomeni does in Texas!
Slashdot Mirror
To sum up:
1: SCO bought the copyright to UNIX from AT&T
2: IBM licensed UNIX code from SCO
3: IBM put UNIX code into AIX (that's what they licensed it for)
4: IBM made lots of money selling AIX systems to big companies
5: IBM had another team forking on Linux
6: SCO claims that IBM put UNIX code into Linux (violating the terms of their license)
7: SCO canceled IBM's UNIX license because of the alleged violation of their contract
8: SCO released scary-sounding press releases implying that everyone running AIX would be liable for infringment (hoping to make IBM's customers nervous, so they would put pressure on IBM to settle quickly and out-of-court)
Further speculation:
9: ???
10: IBM will buy SCO at an inflated price just to shut them up
11: PROFIT!!!! for SCO lawyers and executives
To further condense:
It's a publicity stunt, SCO wants a buyout. They're targeting IBM because they IBM has lots of money, whereas no Linux-based companies are making a profit.
Clerk: Sorry, but we keep all of our briefs, filings, dockets and other paperwork in an Oracle database on a big Aix server. Thanks to your licensing shenanigans we're not allowed to use that anymore, so I'm afraid you'll just have to wait while we drag all the old typewriters and filing cabinets up from storage!
SCO: You bastards! I'm holding this court liable for damages every minute that our filings are delayed.
Clerk: While you're waiting, you should reformat your 40,000 page complaint and 1,100 page briefs from MS word files to typed paped documents. We need those in triplicate, so you might want to send one of your lawyers out for carbon paper.
I give it a six-and-a-half overall. It *sounds* like you know what you're talking about to anyone just skimming the comments, that's good. Relevence to the topic is spot-on. You spell and punctuate too well to be a regular slashdotter, but that takes a careful reader to notice anyway. You lose a few marks for abuse of "scare quotes", but that's no big deal. The signature is what keeps you from trolling with the big boys though; it blows your apparent credibility right out the window. Nice try though.
I don't understand all the heat against ICQ...
Try AIM for a while, you'll be surprised how little pr0n spam you get, and how you never get your passwords stolen by Russian script kiddies. It doesn't take up half your memory leaving none for Quake or whatever game you're using ICQ to launch. It doesn't cause random crashes. The interface doesn't look (as much) like it was designed by babboons, either.
I'd like to see AIM die as much as the next guy, but ICQ hasn't been a better system since about 1998.
...and do what with the extra bandwidth? Auction it off to yet another foriegn telecom company? Rename it the "Clear Channel band" and play the same top-40 music station on a coast-to-coast repeater network? Given the FCC's recent penchant for giving too much power to too few megacorporations, I don't think letting them restructure the TV band is a good idea.
Don't you think the burden of proof should be on the people making a positive claim (in this case "violent video games cause more violent behaviour")? Unless there is some very good evidence supporting that claim, I think the govenment is overstepping it's bounds regulating game sales.
Disclaimer: I'm a legal adult, I like playing violent games, and I don't think they make me more violent... Now hand over the fucking Duke Nukem CD, or I'll kill every one of you with my thermonuclear heat-seeking railgun!!!
A few months ago, in a dark warehouse in Brooklyn...
*knock* *knock* *knock*
nVidia: Who is it?
*Futuremark goons enter stage left*
Futuremark: You's late wit you's beta program "membership dues". You know what happens wit da peoples dat don't pay they's dues, right?
nVidia: Piss off! We're not paying this year.
Futuremark: Dat's a pretty benchmark score you got there. Be a shame is somethin' BAD happened to it...
*Futuremark pushes nVidia's benchmark trophy over, shattering it*
Futuremark: oops. Looks like ATI is faster dis year. Dat's too bad for you's guys. You sure you don't wants to join da beta?
nVidia: You bastards! Get out!
Futuremark: Think about it. Da boss wants you on board this year, or bad things happen.
*exeunt goons stage left*
nVidia: No more "beta membership dues". We're going to beat those Futuremark goons at their own crooked game!
but when Apple switched to the G3/G4 and Steve Jobs didn't allow Be to switch their OS to these new CPUs
Well, that was Be, Inc's flimsy excuse. Linux, *BSD, and a flock of other operating systems have no trouble running on G3/G4 machines, even without help from the "secret information" that Apple wouldn't share with Be. It looks to me more like Be wanted to get out of the PPC market without offending their current users, and Apple made a handy scapegoat.
As a web developer, if I cannot get access to a web browser, I am not going to develop for it. It's just that simple. Even now I only put minimal effort towards supporting IE when I author for the web.
/.er, but it does have 90%+ market share, so if my site looks bad in IE, it looks bad to 90% of the people who will see them. That's unacceptable.
Who is shooting themselves in the foot now? I loathe IE as much as the next
The Conspiracy Theory - MS buys out SCO, and puts their legion of lawyers to work harassing everyone who has ever invested a dime in Linux-related businesses. Sine MS's legal budget is larger than the present value of Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. combined, they win by default. Commercial support for Linux disappears overnight, kernel development grinds to a halt, and we all get to go back to using Windows for another 10 years or so, until The Hurd is finished.
1: IBM execs make quiet offer to SCO execs over a game of golf
2: SCO drops lawsuit
3: IBM makes public offer to buy SCO
4: ???
5: PROFIT! (for SCO execs, everyone else is left with a few pennies and a vague uneasy feeling)
What does it do with non-resizable windows like error dialogs, XMMS, etc. Does it pad them with wasted pixels to take up a full 1/4 of the screen?
I shudder to think what a typical Gimp session (10 or 12 small windows, most of them resizing in awkward ways) must look like in this WM...
We could stack several transparent monitors and *finally* have alpha-blending in xfree86!
Kazaa, Napster, Gnutella, etc. aren't stealing *my* music.
Spam is stealing my bandwidth, disc space, and time.
It is therefore the duty of every man and woman in the United States Armed forces to ensure that "the people" have access to every bit as much armament as does the standing army which now turns its vigilant gaze upon the people.
Sounds good! Count me in for $20. How much more do we need to buy a Reagan-class carrier again?
I'm sorry if this upsets some people, but I have to say it.
There are things worth sacrificing human lives for. Liberty is one of them. I know that goes against every value we Americans have developed over the last 50 years, but it's true.
Given the choice between living in a country where I have a chance of being shot, bombed, gassed, anthraxed or otherwise killed by terrorists, or a country where some government agency records my every word and deed and carries people it considers "dangerous" off in the middle of the night to secret trials and secret prisons, I'll take the terrorism. Accepting a little personal risk is the least I can do to respect the memories of people who died to establish a nation of relative freedom.
TIA may put a damper on terrorism, it may not, but either way I think the cure is worse than the disease.
You'll change your tune when you're paying $7/gallon for gas to drive your Escalade 5 miles to the nearest store and 30 miles to work every day...
If you want to live away from commerce and your neighbors, that's fine with me, I just wish my taxes weren't being used to subsidise building miles of unnecessary roads and utility lines for people like you.
If you build neighborhoods correctly, you don't need to rely on any external forces to get you the food you need.
Aye, there's one big source of our dependance on the auto. The U.S. has an *enormous* installed base of poorly-designed neighborhoods. Winding streets with no sidewalks, strict segregation of residential and commercial activities, and sprawling development (single-story houses on 3/4 acre lots. gag!) make it almost a requirement to drive to get any sort of outside input! NEVs are a stopgap solution, what we need in the long term is better urban planning. We need more mixed-use development, more compact residential areas, etc. The guiding principle should be to have everything needed on a daily basis within easy walking (or bicycle) distance from every home.
Note to mods:
My angry pre-coffee ranting is almost never worth a +4: insightful!
There is no next-generation space shuttle, and there never will be. Boosting NASA's budget doesn't get senators re-elected, and no private companies are willing to look far enough ahead to see the potential profits in spaceborne industry.
Nobody cares about science or exploration, all that matters anymore is who owns which patch of oil-laden sand in the middle east. NASA has lost both the budget and the backbone for manned spaceflight. We went to the moon almost half a century ago, and now all we can do is putter about in low orbit building overpriced, underperforming space stations. Pathetic.
The human race will die on this godforsaken rock.
I suspect a lot of that money is moving on hopes that IBM will buy SCO out to avoid a protracted legal battle. Besides, if Wall street knew anything about technology, we would never have had the tech bubble and tech bust. and the economy wouldn't be in the toilet right now.
Coming soon from id Software, "Where in The Hell is Carmen Sandiego"!
Shouldn't that be "American McGee's 'Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego'", featuring Carmen Sandiego as a demented dominatrix with a harem of perverse petty criminals trying to rob the Prince of Theives blind?
It's not the look, it's the Apple logo. Maybe you should read the article you link to next time...
" "Apple clamped down on these hard -- again, rightfully so. But Apple has never blocked the creation of entirely original themes that did not contain any Apple trademark images. In the past two years since the release of these banned Aqua themes, dozens of original themes have been released by artists without any letters from Apple," Coyle says." -TFA
Look at any themes site. There are hundreds of OSX rip-offs out there, and the only ones that get C&D letters from Apple are the ones that use trademarked logos.
There's no doubt that the GNU tools helped make linux what it is now. So we let Stallman prefix "gnu/" onto the name. Fine. What about all the other contributors? What about the other teams who made huge contributions to linux's usability? The names would become ridiculously long!
Should we run MySQL/PHP/Apache/GNU/Linux on our servers and GNOME/Xfree/GNU/Linux on our desktops? What about the people who prefer KDE/Qt/Xfree/GNU/Linux?
What state is New Zealand in?
Bzzzzt! wrong!
Sorry, that was a trick question, actually New Zealand, the home of our intrepid missile-builder, is an independant nation. US federal law carries no more legal weight there than a fatwah from the Ayatollah Khomeni does in Texas!