Re:Everybody take a breather
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
So you're trying to insinuate that if a company is of enough benefit (read: profitability) to the community (read: the chosen few), they can get away with murder if need be?
Having stock *is* a risk game. If Investors chicken out and the share price falls, wtf do you blame the government for it? The profit you and many others made with MS stock was paid for by the zillions of users, OEMs, ISVs, IAPs and who cares else. So please don't bark up the wrong tree - you better go holler in Wall Street.
Re busineesses depending on MS: If they were dumb enough to rely on one partner/supplier, right so, that's their own fault. (Sorry for the employees, they are the stakeholders.)
If you like playing capitalism, please stick to the rules. If you don't like them, leave the game.
I have no reason to doubt the honest and serious motives of the crew over at Workspot, inc. However, whenever I see some 'desktop over the web' or 'backup over the web' or 'write-your-bestseller-over-the-web' ad, my hairs stand straight up. When I hear that an ISP had to disclose his user DB to *** because of transmission of copyrighted material or that some would-be McCarthy in Elbonia (sorry, Dilbert) demands access to user's home directories, I definitely have mixed feelings about storing anything vaguely personal on some server somewhere in the Wild West Web. Call me paranoid if you like (yes I do ssl transactions), but who guarantees you that you won't get sued over some 'foo.doc' where you wrote that B.C. or J.K. or R.M. or L.T. or C.T. was an idiot/nerd/redneck/sex maniac/DUIer... (properties and characters do not necessarily match here, and surely not in the featured sequence)
No Problem. Take it easy, wet your lips and whistle. Then just head into the direction of the nanobeeps. As technology advances, the beeps will be replaced by nanomelodies stored in mp3 format somewhere on a spare/service track. Caution: Don't whistle during church service or in a movie theatre. That would definitely waste your karma... Ah, for the hearing-impaired, there's a nanoflashing version. Currently, only those with sausage fingers are out of luck: pliers mandatory.
I am a faithful Slackware user since the 3.1(?) days where I needed a distribution that ran on MicroChannel PCs. I've tried/looked into just about any distribution just to return home to Slackware. (Hey, what a slogan: "If you've grown up with Linux, Slackware is like coming home") Thanks for offering that cozy environment.
Now: As every big or would-be-big or not-so-big company is hopping onto the Linux train, I see them saying "we're supporting RedHat, SuSE, TurboLinux, FooBarLinux, YouNameItLinux...." but I always miss my favourite name tag here. When I go to my customers they are first a bit reluctant to install Slackware (until after they've seen it) because they consider it nerd stuff while I point out it's the non-no-brainer Linux - I think you get the point.
Do you have plans to push Slackware via Power without the Pounds or Ninja (vs. Sumo wrestlers) Distribution into the "Major Distributions League", or do you rather prefer it staying the "insider's choice" ?
We use NetBEUI on a 'backbone' (Built-In 100BaseTX ports while the 'user side' is on Token Ring) to back up some ten servers via ArcServe (no affiliations whatsoever, and besides, A*S* sucks). This was the fastest possible solution (at a given cost frame) without disturbing the productive LAN. Sure, we could've used TCP/IP, but this would have meant bigger administrative work (setting up Addresses and keeping a book about the used ones) and slower throughput. So, if you don't need a routable protocol in a 10..20 machines environment and don't mind about some broadcasts(*), NetBEUI is still a valid and viable choice.
*) And besides, even TCP/IP will heavily broadcast if no Name Server is around, and even if it is, it still has to do ARP broadcasts when the target's MAC address cannot be found in the cache.
Cool! So instead of solving the problems downtown, you head for the suburbs (no pun intended heree) While others may call this 'evolutionary', I call that 'inability to evolve', 'inabilty to cope with self-made problems'.
Don't get me wrong: I am amazed at what we can do and where we can go, if not stopped by our own ignorance. The sad thing is, it still seems more rewarding to search for new landfills|oil sources|solutions-for-problems-yet-to-invented (tick all that apply) than to fix what we've broken in the first place.
This is not against NASA or ESA or whoever. But we might be better off to save the breathing air for our children than to build the evacuation spacecraft for the day we choke at our own dirt.
That sounds a lot like 'the book of creation', rewritten by Henry Ford. God|Nature on the assembly line... That contradicts the 'evolutionary' law
Now if they find a cure against, say, hair loss, for genetically identical monkeys|guinea pigs|penguins|rats|geeks (pick your favourite), how much will that result be able to projected against a zillion of genetically different humanoids?
The 'human health' business is a lot like the 'computer tools' business - they offer solutions for problems we wouldn't have it the first place without them. (Rememver Bhopal? Seveso? Nuclear tests everywhere? Viruses and Bacteriae resisting antibiotica?)
Don't get me wrong: I am glad there's stuff like aspirine and gin (and tonic) and the like. OTOH, as medicine improves, people get older and lose their minds (Alzheimer, CJD) over poisoned beef instead of having a heart attack some months earlier. (I know I'll talk differently when I'm 80) Anyhow: Cui bono? I'm still waiting for some 'proof of concept'...
My old C*q perfectly rolled over (sit down! give paw! play dead! roll over! brave dawg!), but when I sntpeed to our timeserver and adjusted the hardware clock (via util-linux clock 1.6) I got a date/time not set error at the next boot.
Sure enough, the bios sez 01-01-2100. So I assume my PC is not Y2K1 compliant.:-(
Apart from that I heaven't heard of any problems. I even did some online banking (pay my bills) w/o a hitch. Okay, the streets seem a bit duller than on other saturdays, the eyes are a bit redder and the heads by some degrees more tilted towards one or the other side.
So, IT industry, the Y2K Goldrush/hype/hoax is over. Now concentrate on IPV6 and your fridge not getting that beer for with the tacos because the system ran out of IP addresses.
What could panick the world more: no money on the teller or no beer in the refrigerator? Whoaaah!
(This, of course, applies only to Zurich, Switzerland)
There is one way to make "prior art": get your ideas/algorithms/whatever published in a (scientific?) magazine. Once done, keep your author's complimentary copy and wait till day x.
Is there a central repository (apart from the library of congress, maybe) that files and stores such pubs?
Being 'public' is a strong advantage of open source software: as everything (okay, most of it) is heavily documented there's practically no way for some idea hijacker to make big $$$ in no time.
So, document your source code! Publish your ideas and findings! Be a "prior artist"!
I reckon if MS and the like (Amazon, IBM, eToys, you name 'em) employed as many programmers or beta-testers as they employ lawyers, we had fine products what worked without crashing, and no silly fights over ideas someone else might have had eons ago but was too stupid to patent-protect them. After all, collaboration and teamwork is what brings us forward, not selfishness and paranoia.
There is a way of stopping companies acting up like A. or M$ or (you name them). Ideas, algorigthms and the like cannot be patented when they have been published in an (sci pub) article earlier. If I come and write about a new crypto algorithm, all the details and the 'fundamentally new' idea behind it automatically belong to the scientific community. When I can prove I published the cmdrtaco algorithm back in 1998, no company can come an claim to have invented it in 1999. So, dig out your old DrDobbs, Byte and SciAm issues and look for articles describing that cookie technique. If all fails, credit goes to the Grimm Bros. for Hansel and Gretel (hence the name 'cookie') or even Homer (the Greek (no! not Geek!), not the Simpsonian) for the Minotaur story (was it really Homer? Was it the Minotaur?, Nah, it was the ariadne thread. Ooh, my memory...)
So next time you produce a wet fart, think of what I'm saying here and go patent it. Someone else might do the same [obvious] thing later... I hold a patent # 08-15 that describes driving forward as a new and practical way of moving human bodies and other organic and even non-organic tissue or matter. Don't even think of it - I also own the patent 1800F...ME2 describing a device that rotates on what it is standing on any given moment around an axis so that whatever it was standing on before can be re-used (free of charge) a later time, ie as soon as this you-know-what has completed a 360 degree turn around said axis. (phhh - how would a non-natively-english speaking person describe a wheel w/o employing that specific word?) Maybe, if you talk in enough riddles, you could fool a patent of nearly everything out of the patent office. Fortunately, U.S. patents are not necessarily valid in other countries. Go and patent 'their' stuff elsewhere...
Note that in certain countries, W3D is on the index of {youth endangering | violent | featuring nazi emblems | pick one } publications.
While not all may agree I think the Linux community (or are they already downgraded to 'consumers'?) deserve better than yet-another-splatter-and-slaughter game. (That's why 3D/Apogee had to bring out a 'softened' version) I remember having spent countless hours with Cmdr Keen (now I spend my evenings at Cmdr Taco's), Cosmo or Monster Bash (just to name a few). Not that they were definitely non-violent but at least you didn't kill 'real' people.
I'm waiting for an 'Apogee The Works' CD for Linux...
Unless I missed that, I believe one of the top nominees should be the countless and nameless contributors (MS might call them beta-testers) which not seldom put that extra whipped cream on top of the cake. Thank you all for your continuous and generous efforts!
Maybe we'll face a 'grave of the unknown [not only]GNU contributor' someday...
Is it pure coincidence that the dumber the post, the more anonymous the appender?
If you anonymous flamebaiters don't have the guts to publicly stand with your opinions then you better keep off here. Go waste someone else's bandwidth.
BTW: Linux needs companies who believe so much in Linux that they consider it worthwile to develop commercial software. And we need customers who are willing to pay for it. Often enough I hear them say: "when it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything."
Perhaps. But testing takes time & money. It will probably run fine on the other distributions, but IBM didn't want to spend the resorces to test it on any others.
Hey! I volunteer to test the domina under Slackware! Just drop me a note...:-)
Re all these distributions with different libc/glibc's - er, ain't the domina coming as source to compile-it-yourselves? BTW: how's the current state of the GNUotes project?
That depends on how you build the 'head'. Cheaper adapters simply use a normal tape head. As both of them are convex, the induction is not quite ideal: )( Better systems use a head that snug fits what's in the drive, like (( rather than )(. Anyone out there with a Rio player and a cassette adaptor volunteering to try that?
Exactly. Only that 'my' cassette tape has no 3.5mm plug for an external player but has the complete mp3 player inside the cartridge. (Okay, where do I put the batteries in? Good Question. Darn.)
Eighty hours sounds good - far better than the 6x cd changer in your trunk under a pile of suitcases. When comes the first compact-cassette-sized player that can be inserted in your car stereo?
(I herewith claim ownership of the idea of cc-sized mp3 players for automobile use...)
First I thouhght Internet phone calls steal bandwidth from more important 'conversations'. Now come the big movies... how many times will they interrupt that six-minute-show with commercials? For whose benefit?
I doubt the average surfer bothers about trademarks on his wild west web journey.
For example, I am looking for a product called FoobarToTheMax made by Whizzo Inc. I then enter www.whizzo.com in my browser. Bummer, not found. Okay, let's try www.whizzoinc.com. Voilà, the page loads. But what's that? I am stranded on the Whizzo Furniture home page. But someone there was kind enough to put a link to www.whizzo.co.uk on that page followed by the words "In case you were looking for Whizzo Inc, Maker of the famous FoobarToTheMax(tm) product, klick this link." One click later I'm there. (Needless to say that also Whizzo.co.uk has a link back to whizzoinc.com for the chair- and tablewise impaired).
That's what I call cooperative networking. Did either of these companies have a problem with their 'sister' in a different market segment? Nah. On the contrary, I now know them both and think of them as gentle, cooperative and sensible netizens.
Wouldn't this same trademark 'war' also apply to phone numbers? Would the operator picking up the blower at 1-800-2whizzo sue me or whizzo.co.uk for dialling the wrong number? No, usually they are friendly and explain what probably went wrong.
So, marketeers of the world, unite. Recognize other people's efforts and struggles and invest your excess money in making your products better than feeding it to brainless trademark lawyers. Instead, have others with a similar name put a link to your page on theirs and offer them the same favour.
I am, of course, in no way conveying that a company has no vital interest or right to protect its products. But our alphabet has about 25 letters (depending on where you live) and sometimes unintentional homonyms can happen. But a company that trademarks a letter 'Q' (and maybe even 'q' or 'cue' or 'queue') makes itself a fool and cannot be taken seriously.
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Having stock *is* a risk game. If Investors chicken out and the share price falls, wtf do you blame the government for it? The profit you and many others made with MS stock was paid for by the zillions of users, OEMs, ISVs, IAPs and who cares else. So please don't bark up the wrong tree - you better go holler in Wall Street.
Re busineesses depending on MS: If they were dumb enough to rely on one partner/supplier, right so, that's their own fault. (Sorry for the employees, they are the stakeholders.)
If you like playing capitalism, please stick to the rules. If you don't like them, leave the game.
Is this limited to the U.S. (ie can't you be 'had' when you operate from abroad) ?
I have no reason to doubt the honest and serious motives of the crew over at Workspot, inc.
However, whenever I see some 'desktop over the web' or 'backup over the web' or 'write-your-bestseller-over-the-web' ad, my hairs stand straight up. When I hear that an ISP had to disclose his user DB to *** because of transmission of copyrighted material or that some would-be McCarthy in Elbonia (sorry, Dilbert) demands access to user's home directories, I definitely have mixed feelings about storing anything vaguely personal on some server somewhere in the Wild West Web.
Call me paranoid if you like (yes I do ssl transactions), but who guarantees you that you won't get sued over some 'foo.doc' where you wrote that B.C. or J.K. or R.M. or L.T. or C.T. was an idiot/nerd/redneck/sex maniac/DUIer... (properties and characters do not necessarily match here, and surely not in the featured sequence)
As technology advances, the beeps will be replaced by nanomelodies stored in mp3 format somewhere on a spare/service track.
Caution: Don't whistle during church service or in a movie theatre. That would definitely waste your karma...
Ah, for the hearing-impaired, there's a nanoflashing version. Currently, only those with sausage fingers are out of luck: pliers mandatory.
Now: As every big or would-be-big or not-so-big company is hopping onto the Linux train, I see them saying "we're supporting RedHat, SuSE, TurboLinux, FooBarLinux, YouNameItLinux...." but I always miss my favourite name tag here. When I go to my customers they are first a bit reluctant to install Slackware (until after they've seen it) because they consider it nerd stuff while I point out it's the non-no-brainer Linux - I think you get the point.
Do you have plans to push Slackware via Power without the Pounds or Ninja (vs. Sumo wrestlers) Distribution into the "Major Distributions League", or do you rather prefer it staying the "insider's choice" ?
Sure, we could've used TCP/IP, but this would have meant bigger administrative work (setting up Addresses and keeping a book about the used ones) and slower throughput.
So, if you don't need a routable protocol in a 10..20 machines environment and don't mind about some broadcasts(*), NetBEUI is still a valid and viable choice.
*) And besides, even TCP/IP will heavily broadcast if no Name Server is around, and even if it is, it still has to do ARP broadcasts when the target's MAC address cannot be found in the cache.
Don't get me wrong: I am amazed at what we can do and where we can go, if not stopped by our own ignorance. The sad thing is, it still seems more rewarding to search for new landfills|oil sources|solutions-for-problems-yet-to-invented (tick all that apply) than to fix what we've broken in the first place.
This is not against NASA or ESA or whoever. But we might be better off to save the breathing air for our children than to build the evacuation spacecraft for the day we choke at our own dirt.
Now if they find a cure against, say, hair loss, for genetically identical monkeys|guinea pigs|penguins|rats|geeks (pick your favourite), how much will that result be able to projected against a zillion of genetically different humanoids?
The 'human health' business is a lot like the 'computer tools' business - they offer solutions for problems we wouldn't have it the first place without them. (Rememver Bhopal? Seveso? Nuclear tests everywhere? Viruses and Bacteriae resisting antibiotica?)
Don't get me wrong: I am glad there's stuff like aspirine and gin (and tonic) and the like. OTOH, as medicine improves, people get older and lose their minds (Alzheimer, CJD) over poisoned beef instead of having a heart attack some months earlier. (I know I'll talk differently when I'm 80) Anyhow: Cui bono? I'm still waiting for some 'proof of concept'...
Sure enough, the bios sez 01-01-2100. :-(
So I assume my PC is not Y2K1 compliant.
Apart from that I heaven't heard of any problems. I even did some online banking (pay my bills) w/o a hitch. Okay, the streets seem a bit duller than on other saturdays, the eyes are a bit redder and the heads by some degrees more tilted towards one or the other side.
So, IT industry, the Y2K Goldrush/hype/hoax is over. Now concentrate on IPV6 and your fridge not getting that beer for with the tacos because the system ran out of IP addresses.
What could panick the world more: no money on the teller or no beer in the refrigerator? Whoaaah!
(This, of course, applies only to Zurich, Switzerland)
Is there a central repository (apart from the library of congress, maybe) that files and stores such pubs?
Being 'public' is a strong advantage of open source software: as everything (okay, most of it) is heavily documented there's practically no way for some idea hijacker to make big $$$ in no time.
So, document your source code! Publish your ideas and findings! Be a "prior artist"!
After all, collaboration and teamwork is what brings us forward, not selfishness and paranoia.
There is a way of stopping companies acting up like A. or M$ or (you name them). Ideas, algorigthms and the like cannot be patented when they have been published in an (sci pub) article earlier. If I come and write about a new crypto algorithm, all the details and the 'fundamentally new' idea behind it automatically belong to the scientific community. When I can prove I published the cmdrtaco algorithm back in 1998, no company can come an claim to have invented it in 1999. So, dig out your old DrDobbs, Byte and SciAm issues and look for articles describing that cookie technique. If all fails, credit goes to the Grimm Bros. for Hansel and Gretel (hence the name 'cookie') or even Homer (the Greek (no! not Geek!), not the Simpsonian) for the Minotaur story (was it really Homer? Was it the Minotaur?, Nah, it was the ariadne thread. Ooh, my memory...)
McCarthy strikes back, but this time from a different angle, hehe.
So next time you produce a wet fart, think of what I'm saying here and go patent it. Someone else might do the same [obvious] thing later...
I hold a patent # 08-15 that describes driving forward as a new and practical way of moving human bodies and other organic and even non-organic tissue or matter.
Don't even think of it - I also own the patent 1800F...ME2 describing a device that rotates on what it is standing on any given moment around an axis so that whatever it was standing on before can be re-used (free of charge) a later time, ie as soon as this you-know-what has completed a 360 degree turn around said axis. (phhh - how would a non-natively-english speaking person describe a wheel w/o employing that specific word?)
Maybe, if you talk in enough riddles, you could fool a patent of nearly everything out of the patent office. Fortunately, U.S. patents are not necessarily valid in other countries. Go and patent 'their' stuff elsewhere...
While not all may agree I think the Linux community (or are they already downgraded to 'consumers'?) deserve better than yet-another-splatter-and-slaughter game. (That's why 3D/Apogee had to bring out a 'softened' version)
I remember having spent countless hours with Cmdr Keen (now I spend my evenings at Cmdr Taco's), Cosmo or Monster Bash (just to name a few). Not that they were definitely non-violent but at least you didn't kill 'real' people.
I'm waiting for an 'Apogee The Works' CD for Linux...
Thank you all for your continuous and generous efforts!
Maybe we'll face a 'grave of the unknown [not only]GNU contributor' someday...
If you anonymous flamebaiters don't have the guts to publicly stand with your opinions then you better keep off here.
Go waste someone else's bandwidth.
BTW: Linux needs companies who believe so much in Linux that they consider it worthwile to develop commercial software. And we need customers who are willing to pay for it. Often enough I hear them say: "when it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything."
Re all these distributions with different libc/glibc's - er, ain't the domina coming as source to compile-it-yourselves? BTW: how's the current state of the GNUotes project?
Better systems use a head that snug fits what's in the drive, like (( rather than )(.
Anyone out there with a Rio player and a cassette adaptor volunteering to try that?
- the sound gets louder
- the tone gets higher
- the player gets broken
And what about Rewind? Then, the Autoreverse thing is still in the works. (Now I have to flip the player in order to hear the other 40+ hours...)(FP?)
(I herewith claim ownership of the idea of cc-sized mp3 players for automobile use...)
For example, I am looking for a product called FoobarToTheMax made by Whizzo Inc. I then enter www.whizzo.com in my browser. Bummer, not found. Okay, let's try www.whizzoinc.com. Voilà, the page loads. But what's that? I am stranded on the Whizzo Furniture home page. But someone there was kind enough to put a link to www.whizzo.co.uk on that page followed by the words "In case you were looking for Whizzo Inc, Maker of the famous FoobarToTheMax(tm) product, klick this link." One click later I'm there. (Needless to say that also Whizzo.co.uk has a link back to whizzoinc.com for the chair- and tablewise impaired).
That's what I call cooperative networking. Did either of these companies have a problem with their 'sister' in a different market segment? Nah. On the contrary, I now know them both and think of them as gentle, cooperative and sensible netizens.
Wouldn't this same trademark 'war' also apply to phone numbers? Would the operator picking up the blower at 1-800-2whizzo sue me or whizzo.co.uk for dialling the wrong number? No, usually they are friendly and explain what probably went wrong.
So, marketeers of the world, unite. Recognize other people's efforts and struggles and invest your excess money in making your products better than feeding it to brainless trademark lawyers. Instead, have others with a similar name put a link to your page on theirs and offer them the same favour.
I am, of course, in no way conveying that a company has no vital interest or right to protect its products. But our alphabet has about 25 letters (depending on where you live) and sometimes unintentional homonyms can happen. But a company that trademarks a letter 'Q' (and maybe even 'q' or 'cue' or 'queue') makes itself a fool and cannot be taken seriously.