How is Linux supposed to catch on and put a dent in the MS monopoly when the major vendors won't sell Linux boxes and force you to buy a Windows OEM license regardless?
The x86 machine is a commodity item with heavy competition and razor thin margins. The answer to the question is based on two variables:
The cost of splitting the assembly line (Windows to the right, Linux to the left).
The increased profit -- both increased business and decreased licensing fees -- generated by the split.
If #1 is greater than #2, they won't do it. So far, that seems to be the conclusion they've come to. Some smaller shops, working with smaller economies of scale, don't come to the same conclusion. Part of that is probably due to their licensing fees being higher, so eliminating them is more attractive.
What about the good discounts that IBM employees get for their family and friends...I'd really hate to have to pay retail for a thinkpad.
Well, speaking as an IBM employee, we were told that we'd get the same discounts that Lenovo offers its employees. How those discounts compare to IBM's historical discounts remain to be seen, but the announcement stated a continuation of 15-35% discounts. IBM has equipped its mobile employees with Thinkpads, so it makes sense that they would want to keep that consistent.
IBM employees can also provide friends and family with a URL and serial number so they can get the same discounts. If you have a buddy who works for Big Blue you might ask them if you could use their serial number. But don't expect them to post them on the Internet; a single employee code can only buy 25 units per year.
Thinkpads still aren't cheap. I've had friends who were undecided who went with a Thinkpad when they had the discount. I've also had friends who decided the things were still too expensive. It depends on what you need.
How do people deal with MAPS and other RBL services who will not cooperate or be reasonable?
The real question is, how do you know if an RBL is useful? One that overblocks is as much -- if not more -- of a pain in the hiney as one that underblocks. Who keeps statistics on things like RBL reliability and responsiveness? If the answer is "nobody" then it isn't too surprising that these services are poorly run.
Some of the posts are saying that the CEO doesn't need to understand the technical details. Others complain that their line managers are a problem because they don't understand those details. Both are true.
A manager needs to understand the technical details if they need to deal with them on a day-to-day basis. Line managers need to understand the basics if they are going to be able to work with those they manage. Higher up in the company, understanding technical details becomes less important. If your CEO is spending time trying to decide the pros and cons of Oracle versus MS SQL Server, you've got a big problem.
Have any of these morons even seen a fuel-efficient car? They get better mileage largely because they're a lot smaller and lighter than the fuel sucking urban assault vehicles some folks drive. As a result, they also do a lot less damage to the roads.
Big trucks do disproportionately more damage to the roads than cars. Think about it; what's more likely to crack pavement or rattle a bridge? A 1588 pound Fortwo or a 7+ ton Bad Boy?
There are many companies that are fucked, and where taking this advice would be a serious CLM.
That's one way to look at it. While you make a good point, I would argue that the real CLM would be working for these people at all. If you're working for a company or a division where telling management lies is a good idea, get out as fast as possible. It might seem for a time like the rules don't apply, but they nearly always kick in sooner or later and you don't want to be caught in the wreckage when it happens.
If you want to kill your management career quickly all you need to do is tell your managers that everything is fine when it isn't. A manager would rather know early what the problems are. If you're handling it, say so, but don't pretend issues don't exist. You need your superiors on your side because the real problem might not even be on your level to resolve.
My dad was a CIO and he was always brutally blunt on this one point. He told his people that if he knew of a problem he could rearrange schedules, allocate resources and they could work to resolve the problem. And he would defend your efforts to the best of his abilities. Lie to him and he swore he'd hang you out to dry.
Why are so many people getting so bent about the idealized standard of femininity? The men in these games are no more realistic. Look at Duke Nukem. Or the characters from Mortal Kombat. Is the male physique any less well-developed than the female? Why the surprise that fantasy characters are given fantasy proportions?
If I want to play an overweight computer programmer, I'm not going to buy a game to do it.
When Dad got into computers, they were uncommon enough that it didn't automatically earn you the "nerd" title. He was an accountant who went back into college to pick up what he could about computers. Not that there was much there. In his first assignments "programming" meant moving the wires. He used to reminisce about how they got a new product that was so intuitive it was almost like talking to the computer. It was Assembler.
He was among the first to show up to meetings with a computer running Visicalc. One of the execs would always want to quibble about some number, so Dad changed the number and recalculated. The execs would then be so fascinated by the computer, they'd forget what the meeting was about. They'd spend the rest of the meeting having him change some number or another just to see what it would do to the figures. After which they'd sign off on nearly anything he asked for.
Eventually, he came to be the exec; CIO, to be precise. Not that he could ever have been a PHB; he knew too much about what was involved. (Besides, he had no hair.) I remember working in my summer job and a couple of guys -- obviously angry -- were talking about me with raised voices. I wondered what I had done to tick them off. It took a bit for me to realize they weren't talking about me. They were mad at Dad for not buying one of those new color lasers that had just come out. (They couldn't cost-justify the thing, and Dad was still an accountant.)
Not that Dad always kept up. One night I found him in the kitchen with a bowl filled with little scraps of paper with numbers on them. Turns out he just needed to generate "x" random numbers between one and "y" with no repeats. I rolled my eyes, went downstairs and banged out a BASIC program on the DEC Rainbow. Next day he took the code printout into work and made some poor shmuck code the same thing onto the mainframe so he could do it at work. Another time, I remember trying to talk through a code problem and he suggested that I dump core memory. I spent the next half-hour trying to explain interactive debuggers.
It's not surprising I wound up working in computers. Looking back I realize that Dad was a piece of history, one of the guys who made business communications work with acoustic couplers and 300-baud modems. Who put together the Information Age with punch cards, bits of wire and hexadecimal arithmetic.
Operation Fastlink officials seized 200 computers, 30 of which were alleged to have been used as storage and distribution servers containing thousands of copyrighted works, including newly released movies and music. The Justice Department estimated that the seized copyright material alone was worth $50 million.
So if only 30 of them were servers distributing copyrighted material, what were the other 170 machines for? Why did they take five times as many machines as those actually being used for illegal activity? This smells of the kind of clueless crap documented in The Hacker Crackdown where the prosecution was to earn political brownie points rather than to actually protect society.
I'm pretty rigid when it comes to ethical stuff, but where is the ethical dilemma in this? Unless you're taking trade secrets from a competitor or claiming that the new code is your own, there is no moral conflict involved. Sure, you're using someone else's work, but isn't that what code reuse is all about? It sounds more like Best Practices than an ethical problem.
Arguably, it might have been more polically aware to ask permission before using the code, but I'd say the more serious problem is that the leader of the spinoff doesn't appear to fully understand the concept of the GPL. Anybody can take a project and expand on it. That code can, in turn, be added to any other project. It's all about sharing and showing your stuff, so someone using your code should be taken as a compliment, not theft.
Maybe you could try and talk to him and ask why this is a problem; perhaps it's a matter that can be settled. In any case I wouldn't borrow any more of their code until the matter is cleared up since that would only escalate the feud.
Settle? No. The Nazgul have scented blood and look only for the best place to drive their poisoned blades into the prey. IBM has already spent too much money and time on this; better to make an example of SCO and leave the mouldering corpse on the ramparts as a warning to others.
The best SCO can hope for at this point is a negotiated surrender. Concede that there is no SCO IP in Linux and drop the lawsuit. Also, agree that IBM can use any of the IP from the Monterey project on Power platforms. Find a scapegoat to draw and quarter and send the remains to the SEC for display. In return, IBM might agree to drop the countersuit and allow what is left of SCO to stagger away.
Bruised and bleeding, it might even survive the raft of shareholder lawsuits which are sure to follow.
It looks like the "cap" just means that $31 mil will be the most Boies & co. can charge when this fiasco is finished.
IIRC, the cap is the most Boies & Co. can charge through 1995. After that -- if SCO still exists -- it's open season again. Since Boies got the money up front, he can keep it even if SCO goes under. IMHO, the more "lucrative terms" for a SCO win were just a smokescreen so everyone could pretend the lawyers had confidence in winning the case. Actually, the lawyers just wanted guaranteed payment.
And what gives them the bright idea that they can eliminate "dark alleys" on the net any more than dark alleys can be eliminated in real space? And even if every dark alley were well lit, that doesn't mean that they're being effectively watched. The sheer volume of information being exchanged precludes effective review of that data.
It would make a lot more sense to focus on effectively handling the data available than simply adding to the flood of data already at hand.
According to this article in eWeek, Sun thinks Linux has forked and Red Hat made their own version. It's all part of their open source posturing. They don't really want to make Solaris open source because it would just get picked over to improve Linux. They want to get open source advantages while still not giving up control. That's why they came up with their not-so-open source license. But if they're not going to go all the way with open source, it would help if their opponents are not-so-open either. Hence, the bad-mouthing of Red Hat.
This is called "grandstanding". It has nothing to do with public rights, but with O'Gara's trying to sell more of her LinuxGram at $195 a pop.
Linuxgram part of G2News and claims to "broken most of the key stories in Linux since it was started several years ago." Her version of "news" includes stuff like this tidbit where she breathlessly reports that some guy -- shown two pieces of code with no background or research (and under a non-disclosure agreement no reputable journalist would sign) -- declares them to be the same. That and numerous similar examples show that her "inside information" is obvious; she's sucking up to SCO by spinning the story their way. In return, they give her "inside information" -- which amounts to trivia like this; who they hired for a lawyer or how much they plan to charge for SCOSource -- so she can claim an exclusive story. This isn't journalism, it's pandering.
Kind of reminds me of the old Daily Show slogan, "When news breaks, we fix it." Except for O'Gara it's more like, "When no news breaks, we invent some."
my tax dollars hard at work and yet i'm not able to see what's going on?
Your tax dollars are hard at work in a civil suit? Okay, so we're paying the judge to listen to this side show, but I don't think you're thinking this through.
If I wanted to make your confidential material public, all I'd need to do is launch a spurious lawsuit and then have a journalist ask for it. Then it's all public knowledge. Courts seal stuff for a reason, and part of the stuff at issue in this case is IBM's proprietary software.
Do your "tax dollars" entitle you to peruse IBM's source code? And do IBM's tax dollars entitle them to peruse yours?
Remember the old Isuzu commercials? The spokesman would come out and make some outrageous claim ("Zero to sixty in one second."), but the caption underneath would say, "He's lying." Keep that little caption in mind whenever SCO issues a press release.
Most of the time in the past when SCO announced that someone had "bought" a Linux license it turned out to be a deception. The most common ploy was to tack a Linux license onto a court settlement or a purchase of a Unixware license. The article quotes only SCO sources and the customers are not named, so don't expect this time to be different. Wait a few days and see if any customer names come up, then see what the customers have to say.
I'd guess they'll say something like, "Linux license? What Linux license?"
I'm glad Ballmer has been so proactive in helping China figure out what to do with
software patents. It looks like
Europe is leaning toward at least minimizing -- if not eliminating -- software
patents. When China turns its attention to the subject, Ballmer's little speech
should give them some food for thought on which direction they should go.
Keep
in mind that China is a Communist country and any concept of intellectual property
is relatively novel.
Rather than trying to tax mileage directly, why not make a separate sales tax rate for automotive parts and supplies? Even hybrids need lubricants, tires and spare parts. And cars which are used more will require more of these things. Since there would still be taxes on gasoline, it would still be cheaper to drive a more efficient car.
I'm pretty sure there are international treaties banning any country from claiming extraterrestrial land for their country.
Sorta. You're probably thinking about the Lunar Treaty. While that treaty only prohibits the actions of states, I doubt that a private industry would be able to claim moon land with any authority. Still, Article 9 specifically grants the authority to build moon bases provided "that they do not impede the free access to all areas of the moon by personnel, vehicles and equipment of other States Parties conducting activities on the moon."
Sure, you can build your luxury hotel, but you're never going to be able to keep out the riff-raff.
Along with its usual alarmist dreck, the Guardian seems to have inadvertantly included a piece of actual information.
Plans for a 'thin constellation of three to six spacecraft' in orbit, which would target enemy missiles as they took off or landed, are planned, according to Hitchens.
The bit about "targeting enemy missiles as they take off" is interesting because that first stage -- the "boost phase" -- is when the missiles are burning the most fuel and are most visible. This article covers some of the issues involved. Locating enemy missiles in boost phase is probably the best bet for intercepting them. Note too that the source only refers to "targeting" the missiles, not shooting them down.
Unfortunately the dimwittedness that permeates the article kicks in again before they even finish the sentence. Why on God's green earth would anyone "target enemy missiles as they . . . landed"?
Well, if you're going to watch Dubya's speeches I strongly suggest you brush up on your English-to-Dubya translation. Try following this link to test your luck with his Spelling Be. It will embetter your chances of figuring out what he's talking about.
That a candidate on the campaign trail says he is willing to "study" or "review" an unpopular law is as non-news as a political statement can be. It doesn't commit to any principles or even suggest any action. There isn't anything to call him on here after the election; he only promised to think about it. All it means is that his handlers couldn't come up with a good sound bite on this one.
Another alternate energy source that has been proposed by a UNH study is to grow oily algae to make biodiesel. Part of that system proposes pumping carbon dioxide from industry through the algae to promote growth. An article in Wired magazine suggests that hybrid electric/diesel cars will result in far more fuel efficiency than the current round of hybrids. Finally, one more study suggests that plug-in bybrids (hybrids which can run solely on batteries, but which have gas engines that kick in when necessary) can cut the US consumption of fuel in half.
I think this paints a complete picture of the future of transportation: a plug-in diesel/electric hybrid running on biodiesel. The batteries are charged from zero-polution electric plants which feed the carbon dioxide to algae farms which create the oil for biodiesel. The car runs most of the day on the electricity, but switches to diesel when the battery gets low. IMHO this is a far more realistic scenario than the fuel-cell which is getting a good deal more political attention than it deserves at thsi stage.
Slashdot Mirror
- The cost of splitting the assembly line (Windows to the right, Linux to the left).
- The increased profit -- both increased business and decreased licensing fees -- generated by the split.
If #1 is greater than #2, they won't do it. So far, that seems to be the conclusion they've come to. Some smaller shops, working with smaller economies of scale, don't come to the same conclusion. Part of that is probably due to their licensing fees being higher, so eliminating them is more attractive.IBM employees can also provide friends and family with a URL and serial number so they can get the same discounts. If you have a buddy who works for Big Blue you might ask them if you could use their serial number. But don't expect them to post them on the Internet; a single employee code can only buy 25 units per year.
Thinkpads still aren't cheap. I've had friends who were undecided who went with a Thinkpad when they had the discount. I've also had friends who decided the things were still too expensive. It depends on what you need.
A manager needs to understand the technical details if they need to deal with them on a day-to-day basis. Line managers need to understand the basics if they are going to be able to work with those they manage. Higher up in the company, understanding technical details becomes less important. If your CEO is spending time trying to decide the pros and cons of Oracle versus MS SQL Server, you've got a big problem.
Big trucks do disproportionately more damage to the roads than cars. Think about it; what's more likely to crack pavement or rattle a bridge? A 1588 pound Fortwo or a 7+ ton Bad Boy?
And they want to tax based on mileage?
My dad was a CIO and he was always brutally blunt on this one point. He told his people that if he knew of a problem he could rearrange schedules, allocate resources and they could work to resolve the problem. And he would defend your efforts to the best of his abilities. Lie to him and he swore he'd hang you out to dry.
If I want to play an overweight computer programmer, I'm not going to buy a game to do it.
He was among the first to show up to meetings with a computer running Visicalc. One of the execs would always want to quibble about some number, so Dad changed the number and recalculated. The execs would then be so fascinated by the computer, they'd forget what the meeting was about. They'd spend the rest of the meeting having him change some number or another just to see what it would do to the figures. After which they'd sign off on nearly anything he asked for.
Eventually, he came to be the exec; CIO, to be precise. Not that he could ever have been a PHB; he knew too much about what was involved. (Besides, he had no hair.) I remember working in my summer job and a couple of guys -- obviously angry -- were talking about me with raised voices. I wondered what I had done to tick them off. It took a bit for me to realize they weren't talking about me. They were mad at Dad for not buying one of those new color lasers that had just come out. (They couldn't cost-justify the thing, and Dad was still an accountant.)
Not that Dad always kept up. One night I found him in the kitchen with a bowl filled with little scraps of paper with numbers on them. Turns out he just needed to generate "x" random numbers between one and "y" with no repeats. I rolled my eyes, went downstairs and banged out a BASIC program on the DEC Rainbow. Next day he took the code printout into work and made some poor shmuck code the same thing onto the mainframe so he could do it at work. Another time, I remember trying to talk through a code problem and he suggested that I dump core memory. I spent the next half-hour trying to explain interactive debuggers.
It's not surprising I wound up working in computers. Looking back I realize that Dad was a piece of history, one of the guys who made business communications work with acoustic couplers and 300-baud modems. Who put together the Information Age with punch cards, bits of wire and hexadecimal arithmetic.
Damn, I miss him.
Arguably, it might have been more polically aware to ask permission before using the code, but I'd say the more serious problem is that the leader of the spinoff doesn't appear to fully understand the concept of the GPL. Anybody can take a project and expand on it. That code can, in turn, be added to any other project. It's all about sharing and showing your stuff, so someone using your code should be taken as a compliment, not theft.
Maybe you could try and talk to him and ask why this is a problem; perhaps it's a matter that can be settled. In any case I wouldn't borrow any more of their code until the matter is cleared up since that would only escalate the feud.
The best SCO can hope for at this point is a negotiated surrender. Concede that there is no SCO IP in Linux and drop the lawsuit. Also, agree that IBM can use any of the IP from the Monterey project on Power platforms. Find a scapegoat to draw and quarter and send the remains to the SEC for display. In return, IBM might agree to drop the countersuit and allow what is left of SCO to stagger away.
Bruised and bleeding, it might even survive the raft of shareholder lawsuits which are sure to follow.
It would make a lot more sense to focus on effectively handling the data available than simply adding to the flood of data already at hand.
According to this article in eWeek, Sun thinks Linux has forked and Red Hat made their own version. It's all part of their open source posturing. They don't really want to make Solaris open source because it would just get picked over to improve Linux. They want to get open source advantages while still not giving up control. That's why they came up with their not-so-open source license. But if they're not going to go all the way with open source, it would help if their opponents are not-so-open either. Hence, the bad-mouthing of Red Hat.
Linuxgram part of G2News and claims to "broken most of the key stories in Linux since it was started several years ago." Her version of "news" includes stuff like this tidbit where she breathlessly reports that some guy -- shown two pieces of code with no background or research (and under a non-disclosure agreement no reputable journalist would sign) -- declares them to be the same. That and numerous similar examples show that her "inside information" is obvious; she's sucking up to SCO by spinning the story their way. In return, they give her "inside information" -- which amounts to trivia like this; who they hired for a lawyer or how much they plan to charge for SCOSource -- so she can claim an exclusive story. This isn't journalism, it's pandering.
Kind of reminds me of the old Daily Show slogan, "When news breaks, we fix it."
Except for O'Gara it's more like, "When no news breaks, we invent some."
If I wanted to make your confidential material public, all I'd need to do is launch a spurious lawsuit and then have a journalist ask for it. Then it's all public knowledge. Courts seal stuff for a reason, and part of the stuff at issue in this case is IBM's proprietary software.
Do your "tax dollars" entitle you to peruse IBM's source code? And do IBM's tax dollars entitle them to peruse yours?
Most of the time in the past when SCO announced that someone had "bought" a Linux license it turned out to be a deception. The most common ploy was to tack a Linux license onto a court settlement or a purchase of a Unixware license. The article quotes only SCO sources and the customers are not named, so don't expect this time to be different. Wait a few days and see if any customer names come up, then see what the customers have to say.
I'd guess they'll say something like, "Linux license? What Linux license?"
Keep in mind that China is a Communist country and any concept of intellectual property is relatively novel.
Rather than trying to tax mileage directly, why not make a separate sales tax rate for automotive parts and supplies? Even hybrids need lubricants, tires and spare parts. And cars which are used more will require more of these things. Since there would still be taxes on gasoline, it would still be cheaper to drive a more efficient car.
Sure, you can build your luxury hotel, but you're never going to be able to keep out the riff-raff.
Unfortunately the dimwittedness that permeates the article kicks in again before they even finish the sentence. Why on God's green earth would anyone "target enemy missiles as they . . . landed"?
Move along. Nothing to see here.
I think this paints a complete picture of the future of transportation: a plug-in diesel/electric hybrid running on biodiesel. The batteries are charged from zero-polution electric plants which feed the carbon dioxide to algae farms which create the oil for biodiesel. The car runs most of the day on the electricity, but switches to diesel when the battery gets low. IMHO this is a far more realistic scenario than the fuel-cell which is getting a good deal more political attention than it deserves at thsi stage.