arguing about issues in court that have pretty much been steamrolled by technology
Yes, this accord is very much reminscent of the earlier settlement where for US$750 million AOL agreed to abandon its Netscape action against Microsoft.
AOL needed the cash bad and Netscape had been already practically steamrolled over by Internet Explorer (with the interesting sidenote of giving Apple $150M to pick IE).
If this trend continues, whoever buys up the failing corpse of RealNetworks will be in for some cash from MS in a year or so...
I've tried to clean up my top level home directory so that there's only a screenfull of concise subdirectories listed, then everything goes into those.
Problem is, some of those subdirectories become chock full at the next level. I have a directory called "tmp/src" that includes about every imagined release of some interesting application tarball ever made.
Then, documents can hide way down in some particular project directory.
Instead of a static view of my files and work, I'd like VFolders that could be generated a lot like Google Searches, including criterion such as file type, time last accessed, keywords in the document.
I remember reading once of some crazy guy that used CVS for his home directory, but I think CVS is too clunky. But he had gem of an idea: time travel - "I want to see my desktop from 8 months ago".
And, yes, while a graphical tree is really nice, I'd like to be able to navigate through any tree using pure text-based tools, terminals if I desired.
Maybe then I could make my own "/usr/bin" sane instead of what my sysadmin thinks is a good idea.
Try to come up with more and more clever scripts for finding where changes need to be made rather than doing it by rote brute force.
Not only does it make better use of your brain and avoid boredom, but until you get to the last 1% of changes, it is the more efficient thing to do. Then, at the very end, cave-in and make 10 changes by hand to get the overall beast to work.
There is nothing more mind-numbing than doing repetitious work that a machine could be doing. It's kind of like moving rocks, only worse, because you can't disengage your attention from the task as much as you can when moving rocks.
I appreciate the look inside. I was honestly curious and not just deliberately trolling.
I work on a Linux box all the time and use to use Sun workstations until a few years ago, but all the managers above work on Windows boxes. And, when vendors come in from the outside world, it usually means Powerpoint on Windows.
Someday I hope to make a strong case for managers being able to move to Linux boxes, too. But until I can demonstrate that other real life managers can really live without MS, the case is much harder to make. From a practical standpoint, Mac OS X is an even easier case to make than Linux because of Word, etc. being available on that platform. But even with that there are enough bad anecdotes about interoperability between Macs and Windows that I guessed it was still going to be a while before a strong case could be made.
A while back Sun threw down a gauntlet challenging IBM to use Sun's Java Desktop for its internal Linux desktop deployment, here.
And, Jon Schwartz indicated that Sun was undergoing an internal migration to this desktop this summer.
So, how's it really going?
I'd expect some of the technology worker bees and programmers not to have much difficulty moving to something like this, but how about further up Sun's management hierachy that lives and breathes things like Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations?
Is Jon Schwartz running the Java Desktop 24/7, including on the road or does he have to cheat by using VMWare or borrowing his secretaries Windows box?
The scary thing about nuclear annihilation probabilities is that they are imprecise, subject to great fluctuation and uncertainties of all kinds, including people that think in weird ways that are very difficult to understand.
After several previous generations have sweated bullets watching the clock tick finally we've reached more than half a century since a nuclear weapon has been used aggressively.
So people begin to think "2 nukes, in 50 years, over the entire world." Odds can't be too bad. It's almost as unlikely as getting hit by a comet or winning the lottery!
But it's like playing poker for years and one night getting your bluff called, being presented with a straight flush and going home with nothing. It's hard to comfort yourself with the thought that straight flushes basically "never happen" for all practical purposes...
And with more players entering the game every year, the odds of getting taken to the cleaners increase.
Say 5 nuclear powers for 30 years = 150 stable power users. Now, say 15 nuclear powers for 20 years = 300 stable power years.
I'd like to see some investment in rail like we saw investment in roads 50 years ago:
very high speed (banked high radius curves in remote areas, otherwise very level, camera-monitored, fenced, robotic pickup for debris, temperature sensors and design for thermal expansion and contraction)
completely automated scheduling system
light weight (forget trying to support hundreds of tons of coal at 100 kph)
probably electric
A system like this would bring out heavy political lobbying from the trucking industry, which enjoys the subsidies of road-building.
But it just doesn't make sense to keep putting people in the cabs of trucks to move stuff quickly from point A to point B.
The key focus is making smaller lot, time-critical freight and passenger delivery cheaper and more commonplace.
If you look at the ratio of the vehicle weight to the passenger weight or freight rate, the current rail system is overdesigned because it has to simultaneously move tons of coal, grain, etc. Let the old rail system continue to move that stuff with all the constraints required for such heavy strong vehicles. But build a new system that takes advantage of new technology.
I want to be able to click-order groceries and have them delivered to within 100 meters of my house within an hour. I shouldn't need to climb into a gas guzzling 2 ton SUV to drive my 80 kg self and return with 5 kg of groceries and accept only what's available 2 miles down at the convenience store. I should be able to get fresh fish from 100 km away.
We have all the ingredients (except maybe right of ways) to do this much more efficiently than we do right now.
Stupid, yes, from the standpoint of maintainable code, efficient use of computer resources, best algorithms, etc. Absolutely stupid.
However, Stupid Application Development, however SAD, is often very useful in getting answers right now for people without a clue about intelligent application development, i.e., most of the people sitting in front of computers these days.
I think the best you can do under these circumstances is to have the underlying tools be more modular with interchangeable components and in layers of libraries. That way, when Joe Stupid's off-the-cuff application outgrows its context, John Intelligent can refit a new engine under the hood without Joe Stupid being any the wiser. I know Excel is not designed that way, but it ought to be, so Stupid and Intelligent Application Development can all work together for the best.
We have held off on adopting Linux...it is simply unreasonable to assume that SCO's case is completely baseless.
I'm sure it's not completely baseless. But, the premise of a flat world isn't completely baseless, either. What I've seen from SCO to prove their point has been rather sketchy. You are entitled to your own opinion and to make business decisions accordingly. And, yes, it would be a shame if cogent, pro-SCO analysis were artificially suppressed. Perhaps you could point out some of those posts.
But here's something to think about for the future.
If your company loses money by delaying a Linux migration primarily because of the SCO suit, you might want to collect together evidence leading to that decision.
Should it ever some to light that the SCO suit were frivilous and possibly motivated by some third party that stood to gain by deliberately supporting a frivilous suit, then your company and others might stand to make up some of the lost revenue for being deliberately misled as part of a broader conspiracy that might not be legal.
If you're an internal counsel for your company, pursuing redress might provide you with plenty of work.
If cost is an issue, then build your own is probably the way to go. There are some interesting projects out there like MythTV that look pretty impressive.
With an Internet connection and some scripts I think you can download programming schedules that make the home-brew devices as useful as a TiVo. Believe me, having reliable scheduling information and automating the recording is useful. It was bliss moving from stacks of tapes, pre-recorded with 10 minute slop intervals on the end, poor quality, to the TiVo.
I paid US$250 about 3 years ago for the service and invested more money in bigger harddrives, time in upgrading, to get my TiVo adequately useful for me. I didn't mind throwing the money to TiVo at the time for the lifetime service; I don't think they were making huge amounts on the hardware sales and they did a pretty nice job with the software.
we really don't watch much TV, simply because TV has been replaced by the Internet
We don't watch much live TV, simply because TV has been replaced by agonizingly long stretches of shrill inane advertisements with interruptions of what passes for programming.
Everything we do watch comes off the TiVo, and still it takes 75 channels to find worthwhile content.
It's occurred to me, too, that the government/corporate system of the United States and of China are a lot closer in practice than people might think.
Yes, in China you get these weird laws where "slander of the state" and "revealing state secrets" put people in jail for expressing dissent.
But, in the US, if you criticize a business, eg, make disparaging comments about the healthiness of eating beef or provide a web link to a DeCSS site, you can get slammed with heavy legal action.
In China, the government powers have become corrupt as they hand out valuable contracts to cronies and have tolerated cheating bosses not paying their workers.
In the US, the government powers have become corrupt as they accept money from special interests to craft legislation favorable to those interests. Substantial growth in non-unionized workforce has meant stagnation in wage growth for blue collar workers in the US.
Government policies are not far apart between the US and China; corporate influence will tend to drive them even closer together.
When did communism ever look great on chalkboards?
During the design phase, before it was actually implemented, communism sounded great. Utopia here we come! Not that it hasn't suffered from lack of trying. Kind of like Death March programming projects.
To be fair, capitalism, also great looking on the chalkboard, grows warts over time. And much for the same reasons as communism does; the actual implementation involves Real People that care zero about other people. It's hard to program around that.
surprise you that about 10% or so of the population likes living in a repressive regime.
I remember being surprised finding out just how many citizens of the former Soviet Union admired Stalin as a leader, and still do.
This, despite how many of his own people he killed off in purges and sending them off in waves to fight the Germans on the eastern front.
There will always be deceivable people, but I think flying in the face of truth like this is a deeper deception, like the Stockholm Syndrome on a large scale, where hostages sometimes sympathize with their captors despite being exploited by them.
editors should at least try to maintain some semblance of objectivity in the headlines. Otherwise they risk becoming a partisan
You mean like the objectivity of AM talk radio that floods the airwaves?
I do like to see opposing viewpoints presented intelligently.
For/. or for the right-wing talk radio shows, you notice that if intelligent expressions of opposing viewpoints get modded down or call-screened out, that the overall quality of the experience is diminished.
It's pretty boring if all you hear is the "party line", no matter which party it happens to be.
Due to the fact that its free, everyone can run the latest version. Since it runs on a variety of platforms, you are not locked into a single vendor of OS or hardware.
All great arguments.
But most users fall into the "think locally, act globally" category.
Like, damn, I received this memo and have to add stuff to it and forward it on to other members of the department.
The rut in thinking is so deep and well-worn that it's easy to fall into because local and short term costs are still optimized by falling into this rut, even though global and long term costs are optimized a different way.
And, what's frustrating is that higher level decision in our IT department, shoveling obscene amounts of money for enterprise level licenses for Microsoft software, are typically in the same rut.
I use OO.o for quick, read-only operations on my Linux box when I don't have to pass on an MS Word document.
Small businesses, individuals, schools, undeveloped nations are great for OO.o, the rest of us are weighed down by the existing MS-centric infrastructure.
Good to hear that Big Brother is alive and well in our schools. This kind of thing just makes me sick.
Exactly.
The worse thing is what the policy teaches. Too many short-sighted administrators and members of the general public think "Now I'll teach something that they'll learn and do." "Now, I'll go do something else entirely, but I'm not teaching now, so it's OK."
Guess what? Kids learn everything, including the bad behavior.
When you and I are all old enough to be in nursing homes and the people running the world think it's normal to install 24/7 monitoring on everything people do and say, and feed us drugs to get us into a mood that is more cost-effective for them to handle, then we'll know where they've learned the lesson and that we've taught them well.
Slashdot Mirror
arguing about issues in court that have pretty much been steamrolled by technology
Yes, this accord is very much reminscent of the earlier settlement where for US$750 million AOL agreed to abandon its Netscape action against Microsoft.
AOL needed the cash bad and Netscape had been already practically steamrolled over by Internet Explorer (with the interesting sidenote of giving Apple $150M to pick IE).
If this trend continues, whoever buys up the failing corpse of RealNetworks will be in for some cash from MS in a year or so...
Great!
Let's go for it, just as soon as the levels of trustworthiness and responsibility become equal to the level of power.
I'm bad at filing stuff in any sort of systematic
Me, too.
I've tried to clean up my top level home directory so that there's only a screenfull of concise subdirectories listed, then everything goes into those.
Problem is, some of those subdirectories become chock full at the next level. I have a directory called "tmp/src" that includes about every imagined release of some interesting application tarball ever made.
Then, documents can hide way down in some particular project directory.
Instead of a static view of my files and work, I'd like VFolders that could be generated a lot like Google Searches, including criterion such as file type, time last accessed, keywords in the document.
I remember reading once of some crazy guy that used CVS for his home directory, but I think CVS is too clunky. But he had gem of an idea: time travel - "I want to see my desktop from 8 months ago".
And, yes, while a graphical tree is really nice, I'd like to be able to navigate through any tree using pure text-based tools, terminals if I desired.
Maybe then I could make my own "/usr/bin" sane instead of what my sysadmin thinks is a good idea.
Try to come up with more and more clever scripts for finding where changes need to be made rather than doing it by rote brute force.
Not only does it make better use of your brain and avoid boredom, but until you get to the last 1% of changes, it is the more efficient thing to do. Then, at the very end, cave-in and make 10 changes by hand to get the overall beast to work.
There is nothing more mind-numbing than doing repetitious work that a machine could be doing. It's kind of like moving rocks, only worse, because you can't disengage your attention from the task as much as you can when moving rocks.
I appreciate the look inside. I was honestly curious and not just deliberately trolling.
I work on a Linux box all the time and use to use Sun workstations until a few years ago, but all the managers above work on Windows boxes. And, when vendors come in from the outside world, it usually means Powerpoint on Windows.
Someday I hope to make a strong case for managers being able to move to Linux boxes, too. But until I can demonstrate that other real life managers can really live without MS, the case is much harder to make. From a practical standpoint, Mac OS X is an even easier case to make than Linux because of Word, etc. being available on that platform. But even with that there are enough bad anecdotes about interoperability between Macs and Windows that I guessed it was still going to be a while before a strong case could be made.
And, Jon Schwartz indicated that Sun was undergoing an internal migration to this desktop this summer.
So, how's it really going?
I'd expect some of the technology worker bees and programmers not to have much difficulty moving to something like this, but how about further up Sun's management hierachy that lives and breathes things like Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations?
Is Jon Schwartz running the Java Desktop 24/7, including on the road or does he have to cheat by using VMWare or borrowing his secretaries Windows box?
Improbability?
Damn straight.
The scary thing about nuclear annihilation probabilities is that they are imprecise, subject to great fluctuation and uncertainties of all kinds, including people that think in weird ways that are very difficult to understand.
After several previous generations have sweated bullets watching the clock tick finally we've reached more than half a century since a nuclear weapon has been used aggressively.
So people begin to think "2 nukes, in 50 years, over the entire world." Odds can't be too bad. It's almost as unlikely as getting hit by a comet or winning the lottery!
But it's like playing poker for years and one night getting your bluff called, being presented with a straight flush and going home with nothing. It's hard to comfort yourself with the thought that straight flushes basically "never happen" for all practical purposes...
And with more players entering the game every year, the odds of getting taken to the cleaners increase.
Say 5 nuclear powers for 30 years = 150 stable power users. Now, say 15 nuclear powers for 20 years = 300 stable power years.
What were those odds again?
Absolutely.
I'd like to see some investment in rail like we saw investment in roads 50 years ago:
- very high speed (banked high radius curves in remote areas, otherwise very level, camera-monitored, fenced, robotic pickup for debris, temperature sensors and design for thermal expansion and contraction)
- completely automated scheduling system
- light weight (forget trying to support hundreds of tons of coal at 100 kph)
- probably electric
A system like this would bring out heavy political lobbying from the trucking industry, which enjoys the subsidies of road-building.But it just doesn't make sense to keep putting people in the cabs of trucks to move stuff quickly from point A to point B.
The key focus is making smaller lot, time-critical freight and passenger delivery cheaper and more commonplace.
If you look at the ratio of the vehicle weight to the passenger weight or freight rate, the current rail system is overdesigned because it has to simultaneously move tons of coal, grain, etc. Let the old rail system continue to move that stuff with all the constraints required for such heavy strong vehicles. But build a new system that takes advantage of new technology.
I want to be able to click-order groceries and have them delivered to within 100 meters of my house within an hour. I shouldn't need to climb into a gas guzzling 2 ton SUV to drive my 80 kg self and return with 5 kg of groceries and accept only what's available 2 miles down at the convenience store. I should be able to get fresh fish from 100 km away.
We have all the ingredients (except maybe right of ways) to do this much more efficiently than we do right now.
but stupid application development.
Stupid, yes, from the standpoint of maintainable code, efficient use of computer resources, best algorithms, etc. Absolutely stupid.
However, Stupid Application Development, however SAD, is often very useful in getting answers right now for people without a clue about intelligent application development, i.e., most of the people sitting in front of computers these days.
I think the best you can do under these circumstances is to have the underlying tools be more modular with interchangeable components and in layers of libraries. That way, when Joe Stupid's off-the-cuff application outgrows its context, John Intelligent can refit a new engine under the hood without Joe Stupid being any the wiser. I know Excel is not designed that way, but it ought to be, so Stupid and Intelligent Application Development can all work together for the best.
We have held off on adopting Linux...it is simply unreasonable to assume that SCO's case is completely baseless.
I'm sure it's not completely baseless. But, the premise of a flat world isn't completely baseless, either. What I've seen from SCO to prove their point has been rather sketchy. You are entitled to your own opinion and to make business decisions accordingly. And, yes, it would be a shame if cogent, pro-SCO analysis were artificially suppressed. Perhaps you could point out some of those posts.
But here's something to think about for the future.
If your company loses money by delaying a Linux migration primarily because of the SCO suit, you might want to collect together evidence leading to that decision.
Should it ever some to light that the SCO suit were frivilous and possibly motivated by some third party that stood to gain by deliberately supporting a frivilous suit, then your company and others might stand to make up some of the lost revenue for being deliberately misled as part of a broader conspiracy that might not be legal.
If you're an internal counsel for your company, pursuing redress might provide you with plenty of work.
you could setup your own gentoo sync server and distribute custom copies of various packages exactly to your specs and compiling details.
I'm very interested in this possibility.
Suppose I have source for a weird, in-house application like foo that's not part of the standard public gentoo portage tree.
Can I setup a sync server to provide foo to my internal LAN of gentoo machines?
If cost is an issue, then build your own is probably the way to go. There are some interesting projects out there like MythTV that look pretty impressive.
With an Internet connection and some scripts I think you can download programming schedules that make the home-brew devices as useful as a TiVo. Believe me, having reliable scheduling information and automating the recording is useful. It was bliss moving from stacks of tapes, pre-recorded with 10 minute slop intervals on the end, poor quality, to the TiVo.
I paid US$250 about 3 years ago for the service and invested more money in bigger harddrives, time in upgrading, to get my TiVo adequately useful for me. I didn't mind throwing the money to TiVo at the time for the lifetime service; I don't think they were making huge amounts on the hardware sales and they did a pretty nice job with the software.
we really don't watch much TV, simply because TV has been replaced by the Internet
We don't watch much live TV, simply because TV has been replaced by agonizingly long stretches of shrill inane advertisements with interruptions of what passes for programming.
Everything we do watch comes off the TiVo, and still it takes 75 channels to find worthwhile content.
but the forced ranking system encourages us to instead stomp on each other,
No matter how well they appear to cover their tracks, stompers get a reputation and no one trusts what they say. Including bosses.
the gap is closing from the US side,
It's occurred to me, too, that the government/corporate system of the United States and of China are a lot closer in practice than people might think.
Yes, in China you get these weird laws where "slander of the state" and "revealing state secrets" put people in jail for expressing dissent.
But, in the US, if you criticize a business, eg, make disparaging comments about the healthiness of eating beef or provide a web link to a DeCSS site, you can get slammed with heavy legal action.
In China, the government powers have become corrupt as they hand out valuable contracts to cronies and have tolerated cheating bosses not paying their workers.
In the US, the government powers have become corrupt as they accept money from special interests to craft legislation favorable to those interests. Substantial growth in non-unionized workforce has meant stagnation in wage growth for blue collar workers in the US.
Government policies are not far apart between the US and China; corporate influence will tend to drive them even closer together.
When did communism ever look great on chalkboards?
During the design phase, before it was actually implemented, communism sounded great. Utopia here we come! Not that it hasn't suffered from lack of trying. Kind of like Death March programming projects.
To be fair, capitalism, also great looking on the chalkboard, grows warts over time. And much for the same reasons as communism does; the actual implementation involves Real People that care zero about other people. It's hard to program around that.
surprise you that about 10% or so of the population likes living in a repressive regime.
I remember being surprised finding out just how many citizens of the former Soviet Union admired Stalin as a leader, and still do.
This, despite how many of his own people he killed off in purges and sending them off in waves to fight the Germans on the eastern front.
There will always be deceivable people, but I think flying in the face of truth like this is a deeper deception, like the Stockholm Syndrome on a large scale, where hostages sometimes sympathize with their captors despite being exploited by them.
editors should at least try to maintain some semblance of objectivity in the headlines. Otherwise they risk becoming a partisan
You mean like the objectivity of AM talk radio that floods the airwaves?
I do like to see opposing viewpoints presented intelligently.
For /. or for the right-wing talk radio shows, you notice that if intelligent expressions of opposing viewpoints get modded down or call-screened out, that the overall quality of the experience is diminished.
It's pretty boring if all you hear is the "party line", no matter which party it happens to be.
Due to the fact that its free, everyone can run the latest version. Since it runs on a variety of platforms, you are not locked into a single vendor of OS or hardware.
All great arguments.
But most users fall into the "think locally, act globally" category.
Like, damn, I received this memo and have to add stuff to it and forward it on to other members of the department.
The rut in thinking is so deep and well-worn that it's easy to fall into because local and short term costs are still optimized by falling into this rut, even though global and long term costs are optimized a different way.
And, what's frustrating is that higher level decision in our IT department, shoveling obscene amounts of money for enterprise level licenses for Microsoft software, are typically in the same rut.
I use OO.o for quick, read-only operations on my Linux box when I don't have to pass on an MS Word document.
Small businesses, individuals, schools, undeveloped nations are great for OO.o, the rest of us are weighed down by the existing MS-centric infrastructure.
founded on the principal of forbidding the owner of a machine to know his own key.
For a long time I've railed on soapboxes to people about computer security, bringing up issues like "How do you know where that dialog box came from?"
You have to know the circumstances under which you can trust your machine, and that's been an ambiguous area.
Not any more. In the future, you won't be able to trust your machine.
Haven't had the pleasure yet.
How about if I bring my laptop? Is there WiFi?
I clicked 'No'.
Ah, you thought you meant 'No', but the install wizard thought you meant "More".
There ought to be laws to protect innocent users from raping installers.
Good to hear that Big Brother is alive and well in our schools. This kind of thing just makes me sick.
Exactly.
The worse thing is what the policy teaches. Too many short-sighted administrators and members of the general public think "Now I'll teach something that they'll learn and do." "Now, I'll go do something else entirely, but I'm not teaching now, so it's OK."
Guess what? Kids learn everything, including the bad behavior.
When you and I are all old enough to be in nursing homes and the people running the world think it's normal to install 24/7 monitoring on everything people do and say, and feed us drugs to get us into a mood that is more cost-effective for them to handle, then we'll know where they've learned the lesson and that we've taught them well.
IBM, the original scary tech monopoly, showed us the benefit of standards (abliet mostly hardware standards).
Maybe for computers.
I would have thought it was AT&T.
There was a great line in some movie that came out a few decades back, something like
Something is definitely wrong here.
A politician wants to learn about new technology and its implications so that intelligent policies can be put in place?
Excuse while I watch that pig fly by....