You have an extremely simplistic view of a company's responsibility to its shareholders.
A CEO has a responsibility to increase shareholder value. That does not translate into a requirement to sue anyone who can be sued.
In fact, if enforcing the patent loses more revenue in lost sales due to annoyed customers than it gains in royalties or competitive advantage, the shareholders could just as reasonably sue Amazon because it tried to enforce the patent.
Furthermore (IANAL), a company is not required to prosecute all violations of a patent, unlike a trademark. Refusing to prosecute a specific infringement does not prevent Amazon from prosecuting later infringements.
When I was a kid I restricted my Leco buildign to weapons of mass destruction. Battleships, spaceships with big guns, even a model nuclear missile silo.
However, I think the combination of a lego machine gun and a lego town with lots of lego people could be quite a bit of fun...
ESR states that if Quake has been an open source project it would not have any security problems. That's a load of bunk, to put it mildly.
Sometimes the design criteria for a program make one trade off between multiple desireable traits. In the case of Quake (and other latency-sentitive online games) a critical design point is that the games have as little percieved latency as possible. So the clients are expected to do some processing beyond what the actual user is allowed to see.
Sometimes, in the real world, no perfect solution is available. So you have to weigh your options and make the best decision you can.
Fun though they may be, Beowulf clusters do not work for for many interesting classes of problems. The inter-processor communications are just too slow.
That aside, it *is* ludicrous to ban export of system which are basically commodity items. If Joe User can go to mom and pop's PC emporium and purchase a machine which is export controlled, how does the government expect to actually enforce the rule?
I saw it Friday night, and went camping the next day 8-). Actually, as my fellow hiker observed, nobody is ever going to mistake the Olympic mountains (in Washington) for Maryland - for one thing, if you run screaming through these woods in the dark (or in the light) you're going to fall down the side of a mountain and die. And you're not going to catch me out in the woods with people I don't know well enough to trust.
That said, I think the movie creeped me out more than scared me - my heart wasn't pounding but I was definitely uneasy, and for several days. I suspect the people who really enjoyed the movie did so because they allowed their imaginations to go with the flow so to speak. Like most 'horror' movies, those who don't suspend disbelief in a big way don't get much out of it.
Mind you, there are major holes if you treat this as a 'real' movie. If the character were real, they were so stupid that they practially deserved to die. But that can be said of most horror movies. The point is, you willfully ignore those holes. If you want to see people being smart, go watch the discovery channel or something. I was there to see people die horribly 8-). Besides, people are stupid in real life, too.
I especially enjoyed two scenes:
1) When Heather is examining the bundle of sticks containing gristly bits. The hyperventilation was right on - I wonder how many people felt their breathing speeding up in sympathy. Although I thought sure she was going to pass out 8-).
2) The last 5 minutes of the film had a particularly sureal, nightmarish quality to them, with the ending so abrupt that is left me in mild shock.
Open standards benefit everyone. Closed standards benefit the owner of the closed standard if they have a majority of the market share. In this case Microsoft is on the opposite side of the issue from usual.
I've known a lot of sysadmins (as well as being one myself), and most of the ones I know don't have to work severely extended hours over long periods of time unless one of the following conditions exist:
1) You're working for a tiny company that cannot afford a real IS staff. This is usually the case for those poor idiots who are on call 24x7x365. Any real IS shop has an on-call rotation that lets people get some time.
Just *think* before you take the kind of job with that sort of requirement. You cannot take vacation if you are on call all the time. You'll just end up physically ill and mentally infirm.
2) You get off on the power. A lot of sysadmins seem to whine and whine about the time they spend, but they LOVE the power. Spending insane amounts of time on the system makes them feel important. Users paging them at all hours makes them feel needed. Frankly, it is rather sick (including myself in that category 8-) ).
3) You're not very good at your job. The successful sysadmin should not be bothered much at all after hours (barring the usual unforseen problems). If you're getting chewed up by failures you need to find the underlying cause. If you're getting chewed up by user demands it is time to either hire more staff or cut back on the users' expectations.
The job market for system and network admins is so hot you shouldn't be having to put up with the insane conditions many people describe unless you want to. Everyone has their war stories, but doing it day in day out is an indication that it is time to move on.
Having run Linux for many years, and other commercial UNIXes for many years, I just don't see that there is a big enough difference between most of them to justify calling oneself a "Linux specialist" or a "Solaris specialist", or so on.
Anyone sufficiently familiar with 2-3 UNIXes and/or Linux should have no problem dealing with the rest. When Linux really starts cropping up in the job market in a big way, I think most UNIX admin/programmers will make the jump without even thinking about it.
Remember, similarity to UNIX is a design feature of Linux.
Well Rowan, although I think your point about conflict resolution is well-taken, the vast body of your essay was pretty much incoherent.
Yes, the current state of computers sucks. Yes, most of us can imagine something better. That must have been really chewing you up for it to come out in a nice long rant like that.
I agree with you, but don't expect that to solve the problem. It takes a lot of time and attention to maintain a secure system, and even if someone cares they may not be willing/able to spend the time.
Hey, if you have the testicular fortitude to tout your writings in a forum like/. then you had better be prepared to take your lumps like an adult.
Submitting ones own paper with a 'glowing' review that does not make it clear one is the author is a smidge over the top IMHO.
- Ken
Overall good, but unclear on Mainframes
on
Philosophies of IT
·
· Score: 1
I think the paper is pretty darn good, _except_ that the author does not appear to understand the distinction between large UNIX "minicomputer" systems and mainframes, not recognize that the cultures surrounding the systems are different.
For instance, in the section "Software Engineering: The Death of the Programmer" he states "Contrast this with the mainframer's GUI, X Windows". Working at a shop where all the major software still runs on a set of mainframes under MVS, TSO, CICS, and their ilk, I can tell you for sure that the mainframer's "GUI" is a 3270 terminal emulator 8-). This, and other mistakes, lead me to believe that the author wouldn't know "Big Iron" if it was dropped on him.
The difference between mainframes and UNIX-based minicomputers is vast, as is the difference between the cultures of the two systems. The true "mainframer" culture is basically exists in the corporate world, and does not have a large academic component. The UNIX-based minicomputer culture is highly academic (although that has been changing due to the free micro-based UNIX implementations).
- Ken
RMS has written a good critique
on
RMS on APSL
·
· Score: 1
I don't usually agree with RMS, but I think in this case he has raised good issues. Hopefully Apple will consider his and Bruce Perens' comments carefully.
I'm a little disappointed in ESR. I would have expected a much more critical reading of the license - legal language must be very precise, and the mere fact that RMS/Perens and ESR disagree on the meaning of the termination clause indicates that it needs to be rewritten. I also like RMS' suggestion of allowing 3rd party challenges to alleged patent violations.
I am not really concerned with the 'practical' aspects - RMS' position in the GPL is so extreme that few companies will ever be willing to write compatible licenses. It is a good point that Apple is not giving away the 'crown jewels' here - all the stuff that makes Apple special is still proprietary.
And a note to the Rah-Rah crowd on both sides. Apple is not your friend, nor your enemy. They are out to make a buck just like every other corporation, and if some subset of the Free Software/Open Source world think that their license is not okay, then it is neither disrespectful nor unreasonable to call Apple on it.
This is not a 'giveaway' from Apple to the masses. They believe they stand to gain from this license. The question is, are the rights and responsibilities laid out in the license equitable for both developers and Apple?
Actually, I think the Gartner report is pretty darn good. I don't see anywhere they are far off base.
Keep in mind that 'serious' support is more than just announcing that you will support a product, it means committing a sizeable amount of resources to that support. Since companies are still feeling out the Linux market, it makes sense that they will not yet make the full-scale commitment that more conservative users would like to see.
Gartner basically says "If you have the in-house talent, go for it. If you don't, hold back until things are a little more stable". Always good advice.
1) Intel hardware has become quite powerful, but remains cheaper on average than custom hardware from Sun, HP, SGI, and others. So Intel hardware (regardless of the OS) is going to win on a cost basis in general. It is worth noting that recent offerings from Sun and SGI may help fix this.
2) Once you have the Intel hardware, it is not too difficult to see why buyers might want to be able to run the same productivity software as the rest of the company (or why the buyers' IS folks might want them to). Microsoft Office is the 'standard' at many companies, and although there are alternatives to be had, they all have their price in minor incompatibilities.
First, the change was easy enough to detect - the distribution is signed by Venema's PGP key. If a person downloading the source bothered to check the signature it would have been immediately obvious that something was screwy.
Second, it *was* detected and corrected very rapidly.
1) Intel can write software which will be able to tell for sure what MHz a chip is supposed to be running at. This will allow them to easily detect chips relabelled by vendors. This is IMHO a good thing, because while a hobbyist might want to overclock his or her chip, he or she doesn't want to pay a 400 MHz price for a chip rated at 350 MHz.
2) Software licenses can be locked to specific machines. This is commonplace on systems like Suns where each machine has a unique hardware-accessible ID (in the NVRAM in Sun's case). In the future, expect Microsoft's license manager to work a lot more like flexlm.
Slashdot Mirror
You have an extremely simplistic view of a company's responsibility to its shareholders.
A CEO has a responsibility to increase shareholder value. That does not translate into a requirement to sue anyone who can be sued.
In fact, if enforcing the patent loses more revenue in lost sales due to annoyed customers than it gains in royalties or competitive advantage, the shareholders could just as reasonably sue Amazon because it tried to enforce the patent.
Furthermore (IANAL), a company is not required to prosecute all violations of a patent, unlike a trademark. Refusing to prosecute a specific infringement does not prevent Amazon from prosecuting later infringements.
Ha! Wimp!
When I was a kid I restricted my Leco buildign to weapons of mass destruction. Battleships, spaceships with big guns, even a model nuclear missile silo.
However, I think the combination of a lego machine gun and a lego town with lots of lego people could be quite a bit of fun...
Open source is not a solution to everything.
ESR states that if Quake has been an open source project it would not have any security problems. That's a load of bunk, to put it mildly.
Sometimes the design criteria for a program make one trade off between multiple desireable traits. In the case of Quake (and other latency-sentitive online games) a critical design point is that the games have as little percieved latency as possible. So the clients are expected to do some processing beyond what the actual user is allowed to see.
Sometimes, in the real world, no perfect solution is available. So you have to weigh your options and make the best decision you can.
I read this a few months ago - I found to be highly enjoyable.
Fun though they may be, Beowulf clusters do not work for for many interesting classes of problems. The inter-processor communications are just too slow.
That aside, it *is* ludicrous to ban export of system which are basically commodity items. If Joe User can go to mom and pop's PC emporium and purchase a machine which is export controlled, how does the government expect to actually enforce the rule?
Chalk one up for government stupidity.
- Ken
I saw it Friday night, and went camping the next day 8-). Actually, as my fellow hiker observed, nobody is ever going to mistake the Olympic mountains (in Washington) for Maryland - for one thing, if you run screaming through these woods in the dark (or in the light) you're going to fall down the side of a mountain and die. And you're not going to catch me out in the woods with people I don't know well enough to trust.
That said, I think the movie creeped me out more than scared me - my heart wasn't pounding but I was definitely uneasy, and for several days. I suspect the people who really enjoyed the movie did so because they allowed their imaginations to go with the flow so to speak. Like most 'horror' movies, those who don't suspend disbelief in a big way don't get much out of it.
Mind you, there are major holes if you treat this as a 'real' movie. If the character were real, they were so stupid that they practially deserved to die. But that can be said of most horror movies. The point is, you willfully ignore those holes. If you want to see people being smart, go watch the discovery channel or something. I was there to see people die horribly 8-). Besides, people are stupid in real life, too.
I especially enjoyed two scenes:
1) When Heather is examining the bundle of sticks containing gristly bits. The hyperventilation was right on - I wonder how many people felt their breathing speeding up in sympathy. Although I thought sure she was going to pass out 8-).
2) The last 5 minutes of the film had a particularly sureal, nightmarish quality to them, with the ending so abrupt that is left me in mild shock.
- Ken
This just goes to show what we already knew:
Open standards benefit everyone. Closed standards benefit the owner of the closed standard if they have a majority of the market share. In this case Microsoft is on the opposite side of the issue from usual.
- Ken
I've known a lot of sysadmins (as well as being one myself), and most of the ones I know don't have to work severely extended hours over long periods of time unless one of the following conditions exist:
1) You're working for a tiny company that cannot afford a real IS staff. This is usually the case for those poor idiots who are on call 24x7x365. Any real IS shop has an on-call rotation that lets people get some time.
Just *think* before you take the kind of job with that sort of requirement. You cannot take vacation if you are on call all the time. You'll just end up physically ill and mentally infirm.
2) You get off on the power. A lot of sysadmins seem to whine and whine about the time they spend, but they LOVE the power. Spending insane amounts of time on the system makes them feel important. Users paging them at all hours makes them feel needed. Frankly, it is rather sick (including myself in that category 8-) ).
3) You're not very good at your job. The successful sysadmin should not be bothered much at all after hours (barring the usual unforseen problems). If you're getting chewed up by failures you need to find the underlying cause. If you're getting chewed up by user demands it is time to either hire more staff or cut back on the users' expectations.
The job market for system and network admins is so hot you shouldn't be having to put up with the insane conditions many people describe unless you want to. Everyone has their war stories, but doing it day in day out is an indication that it is time to move on.
- Ken
Duh...
Visible light and radio waves are both electromagnetic radiation. They both travel at the speed of light.
- Ken
Having run Linux for many years, and other commercial UNIXes for many years, I just don't see that there is a big enough difference between most of them to justify calling oneself a "Linux specialist" or a "Solaris specialist", or so on.
Anyone sufficiently familiar with 2-3 UNIXes and/or Linux should have no problem dealing with the rest. When Linux really starts cropping up in the job market in a big way, I think most UNIX admin/programmers will make the jump without even thinking about it.
Remember, similarity to UNIX is a design feature of Linux.
- Ken
Well Rowan, although I think your point about conflict resolution is well-taken, the vast body of your essay was pretty much incoherent.
/.?
Yes, the current state of computers sucks. Yes, most of us can imagine something better. That must have been really chewing you up for it to come out in a nice long rant like that.
But _why_ did this end up as an article on
- Ken
I agree with you, but don't expect that to solve the problem. It takes a lot of time and attention to maintain a secure system, and even if someone cares they may not be willing/able to spend the time.
- Ken
Hey, if you have the testicular fortitude to tout your writings in a forum like /. then you had better be prepared to take your lumps like an adult.
Submitting ones own paper with a 'glowing' review that does not make it clear one is the author is a smidge over the top IMHO.
- Ken
I think the paper is pretty darn good, _except_ that the author does not appear to understand the distinction between large UNIX "minicomputer" systems and mainframes, not recognize that the cultures surrounding the systems are different.
For instance, in the section "Software Engineering: The Death of the Programmer" he states "Contrast this with the mainframer's GUI, X Windows". Working at a shop where all the major software still runs on a set of mainframes under MVS, TSO, CICS, and their ilk, I can tell you for sure that the mainframer's "GUI" is a 3270 terminal emulator 8-). This, and other mistakes, lead me to believe that the author wouldn't know "Big Iron" if it was dropped on him.
The difference between mainframes and UNIX-based minicomputers is vast, as is the difference between the cultures of the two systems. The true "mainframer" culture is basically exists in the corporate world, and does not have a large academic component. The UNIX-based minicomputer culture is highly academic (although that has been changing due to the free micro-based UNIX implementations).
- Ken
I don't usually agree with RMS, but I think in this case he has raised good issues. Hopefully Apple will consider his and Bruce Perens' comments carefully.
I'm a little disappointed in ESR. I would have expected a much more critical reading of the license - legal language must be very precise, and the mere fact that RMS/Perens and ESR disagree on the meaning of the termination clause indicates that it needs to be rewritten. I also like RMS' suggestion of allowing 3rd party challenges to alleged patent violations.
I am not really concerned with the 'practical' aspects - RMS' position in the GPL is so extreme that few companies will ever be willing to write compatible licenses. It is a good point that Apple is not giving away the 'crown jewels' here - all the stuff that makes Apple special is still proprietary.
And a note to the Rah-Rah crowd on both sides. Apple is not your friend, nor your enemy. They are out to make a buck just like every other corporation, and if some subset of the Free Software/Open Source world think that their license is not okay, then it is neither disrespectful nor unreasonable to call Apple on it.
This is not a 'giveaway' from Apple to the masses. They believe they stand to gain from this license. The question is, are the rights and responsibilities laid out in the license equitable for both developers and Apple?
- Ken
Actually, I think the Gartner report is pretty darn good. I don't see anywhere they are far off base.
Keep in mind that 'serious' support is more than just announcing that you will support a product, it means committing a sizeable amount of resources to that support. Since companies are still feeling out the Linux market, it makes sense that they will not yet make the full-scale commitment that more conservative users would like to see.
Gartner basically says "If you have the in-house talent, go for it. If you don't, hold back until things are a little more stable". Always good advice.
- Ken
This is not all that suprising, for two reasons:
1) Intel hardware has become quite powerful, but remains cheaper on average than custom hardware from Sun, HP, SGI, and others. So Intel hardware (regardless of the OS) is going to win on a cost basis in general. It is worth noting that recent offerings from Sun and SGI may help fix this.
2) Once you have the Intel hardware, it is not too difficult to see why buyers might want to be able to run the same productivity software as the rest of the company (or why the buyers' IS folks might want them to). Microsoft Office is the 'standard' at many companies, and although there are alternatives to be had, they all have their price in minor incompatibilities.
That is absurd.
- Ken
First, the change was easy enough to detect - the distribution is signed by Venema's PGP key. If a person downloading the source bothered to check the signature it would have been immediately obvious that something was screwy.
Second, it *was* detected and corrected very rapidly.
All in all, a success story.
- Ken
Unique processor IDs give us two things:
1) Intel can write software which will be able to tell for sure what MHz a chip is supposed to be running at. This will allow them to easily detect chips relabelled by vendors. This is IMHO a good thing, because while a hobbyist might want to overclock his or her chip, he or she doesn't want to pay a 400 MHz price for a chip rated at 350 MHz.
2) Software licenses can be locked to specific machines. This is commonplace on systems like Suns where each machine has a unique hardware-accessible ID (in the NVRAM in Sun's case). In the future, expect Microsoft's license manager to work a lot more like flexlm.
- Ken