No, it's not saying that. If it did, I could have understood it.

Seriously, language is a medium of communication, not one of obfuscation. If you cannot use it in a way so it would be understood by your addressee, you fail at using it.

You can modify litigation now? Fuck those lawyers!

It's the usual bait-and-switch, as soon as they have the money, why not take the life as well?

Seriously, it would have been less blatant if you just told Bloomberg that the whole recession hoax was just created to push wages down and that there isn't really a lack of money waiting for investment. Now look what you've done.

Dude, if you wonder why adults can get worked up over stuff made for kids, you've never been to some model train club...

You know all hope is lost when you ask a user to check his grammar and he informs you that she died 5 years ago.

What's odd about it? If I cannot create a backup copy for when the copy I have breaks, I have to spend again to replace it. Either time&money to send for a replacement (hoping that I can get one in the first place, that is) or time&bandwidth (which may be time&money again, depending on your online plan). Unless of course I have to rebuy the content because I do not get a replacement at all.

If I cannot resell my copy, I am directly losing money, i.e. the resale value of the object in question.

And in this case, I may well have to take care of a huge liability, because when my ebook reader gets stolen I somehow have to prove that it wasn't me that distributed the content. Hope that this liability doesn't turn into a costly lawsuit.

Still want to convince me DRM doesn't lower the value of the product to me?

Any action that lowers the accessibility, the usability, the reusability, the convenience of use or its resale value inherently reduces the value of the product for its consumer.

It may not matter to you, but it is a reduction of objective value. If I cannot resell the product to recover some of the investment, I lose the associated cash value. If I cannot resell an object I bought for 50 for, say, 20, the product instantly became 20 more expensive since I cannot recover this by parting with the product. If I have to jump through some DRM hoops to use a product, the convenience of use is lower than with one where I do not have to jump them. Whether and how much this "costs" you depends on whether your time has a cash value. Mine does. I could either spend an hour struggling with your DRM or I could go and work overtime, the earning opportunities of which outmatches the value of your CD by some margin and then some.

What was the problem with unloading Symphony on consulting support based upon LibreOffice? Given that this is a business they want to be rid of, I would expect they would not need to bolt proprietary stuff on to it any longer.

Regarding MariaDB support, I think you're correct that they're treating it as a competitor. This wasn't really the case for MySQL. IBM provided a supported version of MySQL.

IBM is most visible around Apache OpenOffice. What they are doing around MySQL v. MariaDB is tacit support through inaction. They didn't turn to supporting MariaDB or another MySQL version when Oracle de-supported MySQL on IBM platforms. They did something similar during Oracle v. Google - they chose just that time to abandon the Harmony project and commit to Oracle's JDK.

As the now retired CE of a CBS affiliate, my memories of the PDP-11/23 were far less impressive.

CBS bought a few pallets of them, and wrote the control schedule program in pascal that had to be compiled each time it was re booted, for the main network dish, a 7 meter monster from Scientific Atlanta, that was on a turning post Az-Ell mount, used 5 HP Roland jackscrews to move it, very precise and expensive waveguide switches to swap polarities instantly and even had a motor to fine tune the polarity.

The compile requirement was because they could, over the closed caption facility (it has more data that just closed captions) download updated source code to it, and rebuilding it at boot time then installed the new version of the control program.

But it crashed, at first maybe once a week, and the missed satellite switches (no crash alarm so we, unless privy to the schedule) were airing the wrong commercials, pet food in place of toothpaste etc. When the logs showed that we aired the wrong commercial, we of course didn't get paid for that, costing us money.

So we called DEC, who had a couple of recipe followers in the Morgantown WV office and who could usually get around to servicing the maintenance contract in 3 or 4 days. We were precluded from doing anything but reboot it, and the contract said 12 hours, but it was interpreted as 12 business hours, not wall time.

DEC's people replaced everything in that PDP-11 except the frame rail carrying its serial number. Over about 2 years the crashes got worse until it was 4 to 6 times a day.

Our losses got to the point that I asked the guru at CBS if he had a test mule so he could also test hardware the stations sent in as some of it was made in Canada, and customs to ship it back and forth officially didn't have a quarter to call anybody that might give a shit that it was sitting in the border lockup because FEDEX or UPS or us, hadn't crossed a t correctly. 10 grand a day cost to us meant diddly to them. So most of us, who had to send something back for factory repairs, sent it through NYC and CBS, who apparently had the fine art of filling out the many pages of paperwork to get it through customs down pat.

So I called CBS & said this is bull shit, get me a PDP-11 that Just Works(TM). Hugo had DEC move my serial number to his place in NYC, and moved his serial number to us.

His machine did Just Work(TM). The only thing we didn't exchange was the hard drive, a 10 megabyte monster, which because of a paperwork snafu at install time, had a custom satellite location table that because CBS could phone it up, they had helpfully 'fixed'. The second time I called Hugo and got instructions as to how to make that file immutable. The only time I was ever in it as root. Each time was about 2 days putzing to find and mark the locations of all the satellites again because you had to do that sort of thing in off network time. Major PIMA.

But, Hugo then had no test mule as he couldn't even get it to fully boot before it crashed. DEC in NYC was no more help than my local DEC office was, so CBS had no choice but to replace all of them with IBM industrial rated machines, on their nickel at about 10G's a station by the time they'd had much more capable software written. And it, like most IBM stuff, only got rebooted after a power failure from then on.

DEC field engineering, just the phrase running through my mind makes me recall the totally incompetent people they had in their field offices, most doubled as sales force, were hired because they could sell. Totally clueless on a service call, they kept records of course, which is how we finally knew everything but that frame rail (and the outside slip on case) had been changed. But every time they left, saying it should be fixed, the time to crash was cut in half.

Miss DEC? Its like remembering broken bones, I'd druther not.

No Cheers this time, Gene

If it's anything like my cat it will leave something, but believe me, it ain't rainbows...

I've passed wind that was faster than that. Color me unimpressed.

Don't get me wrong, it's nifty to see a four legged robot walk (although it seems to be rather random which foot hits the floor when), but when you announce something incredible and deliver something "ok", expect people to be kinda "meh".

First question: Am I under arrest? If answer is no, then have a nice day.

Your memory of IBM differs from my own.

I can't say I've had that much to do with them. HP, on the other hand, I could rant about for a while...