Slashdot Mirror

my bad

Oh wait, here's the quote for you:

But AIX is one of the most popular versions of Unix. Research firm Gartner Dataquest estimated that AIX held a 21 percent share of the Unix server market in the first quarter of 2003, putting it second only to Sun Microsystems Inc., whose own version of Unix, called Solaris, leads the industry with a 50 percent share.

Note Gartner is mentioned in both this article and the Sun press release. Marketing tripe with nothing to back it up is one thing, hard numbers from a third party is another.

This link works.

seeking up to $50 billion in damages

This has to be a typo, otherwise they have lost it alltogether :)

at the boston globe they say SCO are now seeking up to $50 billion damages... whats next, a trillion trillion dollars? a bazillion dollars? Fucktards. I can't work out if IBM will respond or not, until this all comes to court. They look like they might just wait it out, and let SCO run out of hot air.

No, but I can prove conclusively that if they are aliens, they're not advanced aliens.

Yeah, I imagine advanced alience would remember to turn on the Segway before trying to ride it!

It sounds like this virtual airline will be running out of cash very soon.

I case you didn't notice, a 727-200 went missing in Africa recently. It didn't crash, it just disappeared.

List price on a used 727 is about $410,000. So for almost 10x as much money, they guy could have had a real one but I don't think it would fit in his garage.

Questions Swirl Around WMD Charges

US said to twist its data on Iraq

Some analysts doubt US theory of Iraqi germ trailers: NYT

Intelligence Historian Says CIA 'Buckled' on Iraq

Ex-official: Bush administration distorted intel on Iraq arms

A specific advantage is in the near-future military.
We joke about it, but combat is becoming more and more like video games. For 40 years, pilots have targeted radar blips with electronic weapons, although they needed tough physical conditioning to withstand the aircraft's thrust.

Now, with remotely operated Predator drones and similar UAVs, a "warfighter" can grab a joystick in his cubicle and go hunt some Al Quaeda.

See a quote from LtCmdr Shilling (a developer of the Army Game) to this effect in an AP story.

It's going to take a breakthrough on the order of Newton to make Software Engineering as reliable a discipline as Civil Engineering.

The reliablity of today's Civil Engineering comes not from deep theoretical understanding ala Newton- it's really just the same "build, crash, repeat" method those Freemasons have been using for 1000 years.

Now that we've had centuries of experience at building similar kinds of structures, most of the kinks have been worked out. Those rare CivEng projects that break new ground still have a high risk of unexpected failures. (A 4000% cost overrun is a failure)

Civil Engineering still uses empirical testing to decide if a new technique is reliable, as does "Software Engineering". You just notice it more in SE because that field has more opportunities for innovation and much, much fewer penalties when an experiment fails.

JUnit is a step in the right direction, but there's still a long way to go.

JUnit is a step down a curving road to a dead-end. It won't take us to an ultimate solution (but it will provide benefit in the near-term future). That's because it's not a system to help formally prove code is correct (which some unpopular languages support to small degrees)- instead, Unit Testing is just a way to automate "build, crash, repeat" empirical testing.

Article here.

Related?

Apparently the RIGHT coast and the LEFT coast do pretty much the same thing.

Congressional analysts see budget deficit exceeding $300 billion

The Republicans long ago stopped being the small government party. They are just the different flavor large government party now.

I recently heard about the Iraq playing cards that were distributed, and checked Ebay to see if people had 'em out of morbid curiousity. What I found is that many people were selling "electronic copies" of the cards .. a PDF showing all of the cards together. I just looked, and there are still a few people selling 'em, but mostly they sell the "real" cards now. Here's the interesting thing.. I found a link (not there anymore, but here's a similar one)that claimed in the tag line 'Free, no scam!' and I looked. Turns out the PDF everyone is selling is downloaded from a link to the military website that displayed it. It is freely available for download and being sold. Nasty capitalists, we are =)

The important thing to note is this: In a situation like the one the author is in on ebay, you can pull a reverse warner*. Just flood ebay with similar items, listing them as free, and linking them to download the original document, explaining that anyone selling this (like that person) is frauding you, and here is the same thing for free. That might help deter the snake.

-sgilti-

Pulling a Warner
To flood file sharing services with fake copies of your song, lowering the chances of successful infringements.

the Reverse Warner
Combatting the selling of free materials by flooding the same forum with your free materials.

That would be cool if I coined a phase. =)

Not for much longer, if you believe Cloneaid's 2 employees and the Raelians Cult: "Boisselier said the group's next endeavor is to construct the ''Babytron,'' an artificial womb."Suckers Lining Up For The "New Religion" Reading the article, I am amazed that people still put superstition over science.

DNA based encryption with software developed

"They were not in reality closing their eyes to the copyright infringement going on there - they bragged about it," Grosfeld says. "My lawyer thought it was insane."

The ratio will vary from paper to paper, but I think that consistently you can assume that advertisements are paying for the bulk of the cost for any media.

In some arrangements, advertisement is high enough that the cost for the product is actually free -- radio is free, broadcast television is free, basic cable channels are "free", etc. In other cases, the audience pays for some or all of the cost that goes into production -- subscription fees for newspapers & magazines, the additional cost of premium cable channels, etc. In still others, the publication takes little or not commercial sponsorship, and the audience has to bear the cost explicitly -- think "Consumer Reports", public broadcasting, and technical publications like scientific journals (aren't "Science" & "Nature" each in the ballpark of $1000/year?).

If you look at things in terms of "following the money", then most media are not there to deliver a product (information, entertainment) to the audience, but to sell that audience to their sponsored advertisers. The only [partial] exception I can think of is public broadcasting, where the audience is the sponsor, and is begged for money several times a year. But really, that's not an exception -- that's just making the dynamic that's always there more visible to the general public.

This dynamic sheds a lot of light on the advertiser/subscriber ratio that goes into the costs of any media, including newspapers. The idea is that a non-paying audience is worth some value N, but a paying audience must be more valuable, because the act of paying a subscription fee demonstrates that they actively want this product. That's why, of the three biggest newspapers here in Boston, the Globe & Herald are both fifty cents per day, but the Phoenix has experimented for the past few years with not charging anything for a copy. This has probably increased their readership while impacting their income; if they can sell that larger audience to their advertisers, then maybe they come out ahead anyway -- I don't know. But for the other two papers, I'm sure that both (and every other fee-charging paper in the country/world) are using their paid subscription population as a bargaining chip with advertisers.

So putting all this together, web publications are just another point on the spectrum. Since very few sites have managed to do well with a subscription model (WSJ.com and Salon being maybe the most prominent attempts), most are leaning towards the advertising end of the spectrum -- just like radio, TV, and the "Boston Phoenix". This is a model that has been used for many decades now, so it's not like the web is just starting to "catch up" with traditional newspapers. Indeed, since most newspapers have seen steadily declining readership for the past 15 years or so, its not necessarily that the web is learning the newspaper world's tricks, but that one is coming up while the other is coming down. Maybe.

More optimistically, I prefer to think that the web is starting to mature & hit its stride, and certain areas are beginning to become self-sufficient & even profitable. Not all, obviously, but we're moving beyond nonsense like Pets.com :-)

(Note that, even though I happen to work for a newspaper's site, I don't speak for my employer. Moreover, I'm not giving away anything that I didn't learn in media studies 101 in college -- the economics of mass media is a well studied & analyzed subject. Just to be clear about that

Actually cross burning is illegal. The US Surpreme Court just upheld a state's ban on it. Court rules cross burning can be crime.

~ remember that some countries really *do* have brutal regimes.

You have some real warped sense of 'self defense.' Or maybe you can provide some evidence of when and where the US was attacked.

The UN has authority in this situation, not the bush administration.

The bush administration has lied about aluminum tubes supposedly acquired for enriching uranium, "the war will take weeks, not months", Iraq was actively trying to acquire uranium, the "coallition of convenience" is made up of nations who support the bush administration's invasion, 35 countries are providing "critical support" in the coallition of convenience, the "coallition of convenience" is larger than the 1991 gulf war, 8000 soldiers of the 51st division surrendered, Umm Qasr was taken on Sunday, er... no, Monday... no, make that Tuesday.9 times Umm Qasr was "taken."
I could go on and on and on, but I know I'm probably just wasting my time.

Since this thread started, you've consistently said, "show me proof" while making outlandish claims about bombs strapped to buildings and misfiring SAM launcers. Since this thread began, you haven't provided a whit of evidence to support your position. Since this thread began, I've consistently provided links. So unless you want to start posting evidence to support your claims, don't bother asking for it anymore.

Oh, and since you didn't manage to watch the news, let me catch you up on current events:

The bush administration bombed a crowded marketplace.

Too bad the Syrians and Iranians weren't clandestinely smuggling these phones in to be used by the Iraqi military along with the night vision goggles and anti-tank weapons. It would have made the coalition's job of ferreting these guys out of civilian neighborhoods a tad bit easier.

In fact, the article from the New Scientist needs to be completed by reading this press release from the American Chemical Society. You also can read this article from Boston.com to get more information.

Oooh, completely wild speculation brought on by your question. Interestingly, there's at least one story in a major US newspaper about how fractured the administration's case is.

(I want to emphasize, at the outset and several times below that I make no assertions here, pure flight of fancy).

Saddam is the skeleton in the current administration's closet. Details about his rise to power, the way he armed Iraq before attacking Iran, where such nuclear knowledge as the nation possesses really comes from, stuff like that. Explosive (excuse me) stuff. Members of the administration have had dealings with him in the past, and he knows where the bodies are buried, and who signed the contracts (or made the handshake deals with) whom. If that information ever got out, it would be war crimes tribunals for lots of them. Nobody -- and with good reason -- would believe it if Saddam made these assertions, but still, you can never be sure. If he's dead, though, he can't make them. And any papers he might leave behind can be dismissed as forgeries.

OK, not entirely pure, although I want to reemphasize that I do not believe it. But the fact is that Halliburton had deals in Iraq through the 90's (that is, Halliburton whose CEO was Richard Cheney), that a former (at the time) Secretary of Defense went to Iraq to normalize relations the day after the US State Department announced there was evidence that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iran.

Ahh, but that doesn't explain Blair's support (he's not even willing to back the "al Qaeda" link!). And it's not like the links establish anything solid anyhow.

We hear about 100mpg gas cars. Or the 50mpg hybrid cars. What about the 50mpg VW TDI cars you can buy right now that don't use any fancy new technology? Or the 235mpg VW prototype (page 32) diesel?

Diesel is easier to manufacture than gas (lower emissions from processing plant, lower costs for consumers) so it is clearly the better fuel. Maybe with this stupid war we'll see more diesel vehicles sold.

Check out that last article. We need to to focus on Diesel which can help us here and now instead of hydrogen/solar power which are decades off.

[Al Gore] isn't particularly well educated by any standards.

Holy shit, someone mod this troll down.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Gore was the one who flunked out of college while Bush was the one with an MBA from Harvard)

If by "flunked out of college" you meant "graduated cum laude from Harvard (1969), then from Vanderbilt Divinity School (1972), then from Vanderbilt Law School (1976)," you're absolutely right.

Guess again. There's no fscking way that someone with Cs and Ds all over his undergrad transcript graduated cum laude, unless Harvard has a much lower standard than every other university. While he did muddle his way through Harvard, he quit both divinity school and law school before obtaining his degrees in those programs. Dubya, OTOH, has his Harvard MBA.

so, here are some others for your reading enjoyment:

MSN Money Article

Boston Globe Article

BizReport Article

On an offtopic note, the new strong bad email is also slashdotted. Anybody got a link for me?

About $25 million.

So, only a few minutes of income for Microsoft.

Actually, the army *wanted* him gone with the coup attempt in 2002 after Chavez's supporters opened fire on anti-Chavez protestors. He was removed from power, which the US governement applauded because he is a right bastard. However, after a day or two, elements in the army restored him to power. At which point, he spent the next year purging the military of those he felt were disloyal to him. He's disarming opposition police forces. Now he's rounding up and murdering political enemies, truck bombing countries who criticize him, and cozying up to other dictators.

Plenty of damning evidence against Chavez, these links are just the first I found while searching.

Running diverse software on the roots is probably a Good Thing, but security through obscurity isn't

Man this is such a false meme, where did it get started? Obscurity by itself is questionable security, but as a component of a multi-layered security strategy it's perfectly reasonable.

• Security by obscurity is your world-readable /etc/passwd file, with the password data either hashed (obscured) or moved to the shadow file (also obscured). (And if your shadow password file isn't world readable, that's just more obscurity.)

• Security by obscurity is the fact that most people don't have the names & addresses of the personnel running the US military's nuclear weapons systems so that these people can't be blackmailed. Maybe these people can be trusted not to betray their country under torture and such, but keeping their identities non-public -- an obscurity measure -- is important too.

• Security by obscurity is Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" (*cough* Greenbrier Resort, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia)

• Security by obscurity is restricting access to your company's co-location facility, so that untrusted people can't get physical access to your equipment.

In short, in a broad sense, "security by obscurity" is a lot of good ideas, when you think about it. Any of these ideas can be an Achilles heel, but the solution there is not to cut off the heel altogether, but to wear sensible shoes when going out in the wilderness :)

To get back to the original topic, obscurity is a perfectly good tactic for the people running these DNS servers as part of their overall strategy for protecting the system. It's perfectly reasonable for certain aspects of their systems, processes, etc to be kept on a need to know basis. Sure, there is a benefit to keeping software source open as a security measure, though the benefit of doing that is debatable (and no, I'm not going to be the one to debate it -- I agree that it's generally a good idea but can understand some of the objections). But in this case, where the software is a black box to the outside world, and it's explicitly *not* meant for general DNS use (it's meant for authoritative servers only!) I don't see any particular harm in keeping their doors locked down pretty well.

Not that they're doing that in the first place. As another reply noted, you yourself write that both the betas & release will be available under a BSD style license :-)

But moreover, your objections are I think misplaced -- as are most of the people that blindly parrot the "obscurity is bad" meme. Think about what you're saying -- it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

At the same time, many are finding that in many cases they don't need MS-Windows any more even on the desktop. OS X and even some of the major Linux distributions are turning out to be more efficient and cost effective choices for some on the desktop. StarOffice and OpenOffice have made such advances that unless one really likes the security problems and incompatible file formats of MS-Office there's no reason not to migrate.

Hi
Today's (2/23/2003) Boston Globe has a good article on the front page of the "Arts and Entertainment" section: Five years from now ...

It's a speculative view of the near future with (a fundamentally different) RIAA, or no RIAA at all. It fails to mention that the time and money spent by RIAA collective was an utter waste, and perhaps is a big reason for their demise, but nonetheless is an interresting perspective of what's to come.

The Boston Globe reports Five years from now you'll see virtually no CD stores

The Boston Globe reports Five years from now you'll see virtually no CD stores

None of your "facts" have a citation. They certainly do not come from the settlement agreement, is that some sort of cut'n'paste from a pro-bush website? They sure do have a history of providing boilerplate for the converted to use as their own.

Furthermore, the settlement agreement is just that, a settlement. They wouldn't still be claiming discrimination in settlement, they'd be in court. As for why they aren't in court, as someone who has been to court and settled in a number of cases, there are all kinds of reasons unrelated to the truth of the matter than can make a settlement the "better" choice. In this case it easy to assume that getting the policy reversed was considered a reasonable trade-off given the intertia and costs to win out right in court. Or turn it around - why did Jeb 'n' co settle if they did nothing wrong?

There's a bit of a fallacy in your argument, dear sir. Let me explain:

Take, for example, the new federal law that all foreign nationals from certian countries be required to register with the government: several news artivles about how this process has revealed that many people have been detained. Not a problem... except they're being detained without the right to a lawyer; habeus corpus has been suspended for them (they do not know what evidence and what crimes they are being charged with -- something out of Kafka's "The Trial", I believe); and currently reporters can't find out who's being held, why they're being held, or even how many are being held.

This extension of the PATRIOT Act makes these things legal. Which means they could charge you, and not only could we not know why, or if, you are on trial -- you wouldn't even be able to get a lawyer.

Next, let me admit, you're right, I haven't had any civil liberties restricted directly that I know of. Let me stress that last point: you talk of wiretapping. I wouldn't know if someone was tapping my lines, because with the PATRIOT Act, if I was labeled a terrorist, it wouldn't be private or public knowledge; it would be completely unknown, as the request would go to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Again, I reference this Real Audio file from This American Life, it gives the details. This court meets in secret; it's documents are not published and not for review. So not only would you not know if you were being wiretapped; no one would.

Finally, if I had been hauled off to jail out of the blue, I probably wouldn't have access to a computer to check on Slashdot, and be able to read and/or post to your question; jails of this sort tend not to let people have access to computers.

I'm not worried that they're coming for me today; I'm worried that if, in the future, I expouse beliefs that are opposed to what the government believes, I will become labeled a "terrorist", and will have my rights unilaterally suspended. What happens to my neighbor this week can happen to me next week -- so I want what's fair for *everyone*.

Because the government works with Mafia Dons...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A213 40-2003Feb3.html
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A167 19-2003Feb2.html
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/035/oped/Rebuild ing_the_dream_of_space_exploration+.shtml
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/17 63385
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/68231. htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-564534 ,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/opinion/03ALDR.h tml
http://www.msnbc.com/news/867640.asp?0cv=KB10
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Artic les/000/000/002/204pkfxj.asp
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030210/sctone. html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A134 74-2003Feb2.html
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/ 5086944.htm
http://www2.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/bev02 022003.htm

Your response is orthogonal to my point (which is that the mere fact that a few people died shouldn't squelch discussion of the best programs to invest money in), but if you read the link a bit you'd see that healthcare disasters don't only happen in Africa. (It's only one of the 4 continents that are illustrated to have problems)

In fact, Russia is one of the nations profiled. To maintain national pride at being a "superpower", Russia continues to waste money on manned spaceflights (primarily in support of the ISS). If those were cancelled (as some of them will likely be, in today's wake), then funds would be freed, some of which will make it directly into their healthcare system.

I couldn't believe they would pre-emptively publish this, and thought the above must be a joke, but google news remembers it was there, and also found a place where it is still up: http://www.boston.com/dailynews/032/nation/Columbi a_streaks_toward_Florid:.shtml we know not to trust the media, but this is crazy

People die everyday. We generally ignore this fact and continue on- why should today be any different, just because the victims were famous and driving a $100,000,000 bus?

20,000 people are dead, and the dollars spent on this shuttle trip could've saved them.

Sickening?

The Israeli, Col. Ilian Ramon, was on the 1981 Iraqi Reactor Attack too.

Seen here amongst other places.

When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

Click on the links. You will find many people agree with me.

They already won the name fight. [techtv.com]

That article refers to a ruling on Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction. The case is still in court. This more recent article says that a ruling could come "any day now".

...fire hot.

This headline cracks me up.

If I were you, I'd start checking my credit report.

Even the media wants to spin it that way with misleading headlines like "Pakistani leader hints he was ready to use nuclear arms" when he never actually said such a thing (but it's to be ASSUMED of BOTH sides anyway).

I don't fault any nation for being, or wanting to become a member of the Big-Nuclear-Dick Club, since M.A.D. is actually better for keeping world peace by forcing diplomacy (with WW2 being the demo), and nobody gets to treat your country like a 3rd-class afterthought anymore.

(On a related note: If Bush Jr decides to punish Iraq even when they find no evidence of BigDick weapons, I really hope Saddam is smart enough to BLUFF with "nukes hidden in big cities" to thwart our invasion and oil seizure. How "un-american" of me eh?)

--

A quick Google search turned these up:

From the Boston Globe: One Year Gap in Bush's National Guard Duty

From the Dallas Morning News (reprinted in the Washington Post): Records of Bush's Alabama Military Duty Cannot Be Found

A guy then used the Freedom of Information Act to get the actual reports detailing Bush's "issues" with reporting for duty: You Can't Just Walk Away

CNN reported Bush's denial (Bush Dismisses Report He Skipped Air National Guard Service), but it's notable what a weak denial it was: "Asked about his Air National Guard attendance record, Bush told reporters it was 'spotty attendance but I did the duty necessary... I did the time that was required in the Guard.' " Not the kind of ringing denial you'd expect if there wasn't at least an element of truth to the story.

Unsurprisingly, the media didn't press him on the issue back during the campaign, and they're certainly not likely to now. But as far as I can see the questions are still open, and the "Bush was AWOL" side seems to have more facts and evidence at their disposal than does the "no he wasn't" side.

The FSF doesn't actually hire many programmers, as they have been so successful in recruiting volunteers. I found this quote interesting from the Kapor article /. just posted:

"Compare Kapor's effort, for example, to the Free Software Foundation, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that led the design of the free GNU operating system. The foundation, which now expends more energy fighting legal battles in defense of free software than creating it, has an annual operating budget of about $625,000, compared to $2 million to $2.5 million for OSAF."

I am very surprised that they do so much with so little. With a $625K operating budget, even small donations can be a big help. But if "all" you want to contribute is your programming talent, that is still a generous gift!