Month: August 2003

More on the liberal-conservative biases of newspapers from Slate’s Chatterbox.

Tomorrow afternoon I head “home” to San Francisco for the weekend.

And here we have, in a nutshell, why SCO has NO intention of making public the purported Linux IP violations. The key sentence is the following:

What is still unclear is the exact scope of SCO’s intellectual property violation claims. “Once we know what the problem is, the Linux community will rally and develop new software that gets around the problem,” says one Linux programmer.

It becomes quite difficult to convince any individual or company to pay licenses if, once making your allegations public, the developer community develops its way around your claims. No doubt SCO realizes this and has been playing up the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt) while providing no factual information whatsoever. My only hope is that, should the IBM – SCO and SCO – Redhat lawsuits proceed to trial, SCO fails in what are likely to be attempts to restrict access to its evidence regarding the violations. No doubt they will argue that they will suffer “irreparable harm” if the evidence is made public.

A quick lowdown on the pricing strategy: A server with a single CPU would incur licence costs of $US699, a two-CPU server $US1149, a four-CPU server $US2499 and an eight-processor box $US4499. An additional single processor beyond this would cost $US749. Embedded devices cost $32 per device.

There’s something almost… erotic about the sight of a swollen river after an afternoon rainstorm.

An editorial from the Washington Post just shows that liberals need to learn to sling mud better or be left behind in shaping public opinion.

The liberal papers criticized the Clinton administration 30 percent of the time, while the conservative papers slapped around the Bush administration just 7 percent of the time.

One more set of numbers: The liberal papers criticized Bush 67 percent of the time; the conservative papers criticized Clinton 89 percent of the time

Driving to work the past few weeks has left me wondering if I might be suffering from a mild for of Post-Traumatic Stress from my accident in November. Whenever I change lanes, make left turns, or otherwise am involved in heavy traffic moving at high speeds (such as Route 22 around the 287 interchange at 8:30 each morning), I have flash visions of gruesome car wrecks. It’s not enough to get me agitated, but it makes for an unpleasant start to the morning.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is finally open. During my previous three trips, I’d made repeated attempts to visit the museum only to be rebuffed by the remodeling efforts. The first time, I’d read it in the Second Edition Lonely Planet (LP), when it was still in Golden Gate Park. Sadly, it was gone from there, as I found out the day Austin and I attempted to visit it. My second trip, I’d swung by to see if it was opened (August 2002). It was supposed to have celebrated its opening in January 2003, but I still wasn’t able to get in in February. Now, though, it looks like I’ll finally have my chance.

It appears there’s some movement on the North Korea issue finally. Which makes me happy, since I’m aiming to try to get to the DMZ and I’d prefer it to not be too hostile. Speaking of which, the most recent episode of the Amazing Race took the teams up to the DMZ. I was quite pleased.

My project, the EUA Seat Statistics site, is finally fully up and cleaned up. There are still a few minor fixes to make, but the site is fully functional now. Unfortunately, the downside is that my changes of an upgrade don’t look good for my flight to San Francisco Thursday.

I read a profile about Northwest’s increasing outsourcing of their aircraft maintenance to overseas corporations. The best line of the article comes at the end, by a quote from the wife of the individual used as the focus of the article.

“We’ve been through the mill before with corporate America. People wonder why there is no employee loyalty. There is no loyalty to employees.”

Given the increasing use of layoffs as a “cost containment” mechanism with no regard for the effect that this has on individuals, combined with an increasing tendancy to be more than willing to send work offshore, corporations should wholly expect that, should the job market improve markedley, they will be left in the lurch by employees. In fact, I hope this happens again and I look forward to enjoying it when it does, as it is “just desserts” in my opinion. If, as seems clear by many large corporations, you’re willing to treat your employees by dirt merely to satisfy the profit gods on Wall Street, it is my fondest hope that your clients, your customers, and your employees reward you in kind.

In one sense, it’s funny I say this, because my ambitions are high, and some part of me would love one day to be a CEO. Yet if I ever made it to upper management, I would do my damndest to show people the respect they deserve. Profits aren’t everything.

I do worry, though, because thankfully I work for a company that believes in its mission AND its employees, and so far has resisted the labor cuts used by so many others. Yet the screws definitely feel as though they’re tightening again in many ways. And with Zocor moving closer to a patent expiration…