Slashdot Mirror

In the first article listed in the post, which you can visit here, the subtitle says it's open-source.

I'm still trying to figure out out how the decision by the three countries is any different than this or this.

Yes, that's priceless: essentially the same software that the U.S. army is buying for $950/computer, Microsoft will sell in Thailand for $36.

in a related article we read the following:

" to challenge the dominance of Microsoft on server computers."

how can MS consider it a threat when their stronghold is the desktop? they only have ~half the server market to start with, and there is no technical reason they should have that much at all.

All this pales in comparison to the greatest search engine evar. Why, you can search all you want for "Linux" and "Apache" on all these other search engines without getting what you want - the answer to all your Linux questions

One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI

Second, in an August presentation at which SCO detailed some of its complaints about Linux code, Sontag described SGI file system software called XFS in a list of "examples of significant infringing derivative works" contributed to versions 2.4 or 2.5 of the heart, or kernel, of Linux.

One of the examples in the presentation linked to by the article, was of course the SGI copyrighted malloc implementation.

ZDNet has a nice article about .Net advantages over Java. By the way, ASP.NET rocks!

What's really interesting is that Microsoft allowed China access to the source code from Windows. Could the Chinese have used this information to aid in attacking Taiwan?

Yeah, jackass, they did get the source code. A more informed person than you did made the comment insightful.

And since Australia is next, if NZ comes under cyberattack, we'll know this guy really was Insightful.

Ms Stock Art , a freelance writer . Remember her from a few months ago when she switched from Mac to Win XP?

See old Slashdot article

Why would OEMs buy something that would piss off their customers? I can see Sony doing it to their VAIOs but would Dell?

See this article on the subject. Dell just said they'd offer NO protection to Linux customers from SCO's lawsuits. Do you think Michael Dell cares one bit for you? All he cares about is being buds with Microsoft and making money.

According to News.com, the reason they scrubbed the iTunes auction was because he violated one of eBay's rules, which states that "eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet", aka the "You can't sell it if it doesn't physically exist" policy. Such as transfer may still be legal, but it looks like eBay isn't the place to do it.

Lovely. This from the same asshat company that sent a threatening letter to the Mozilla Phoenix project because they were under the mistaken impression they own the word "phoenix" and tried to include an adware module in their Award BIOS. Why am I not the least bit surprised?

Send that same letter to every manufacturer of PCs on Earth. Pheonix doesn't sell to you, they sell to them. Pheonix could give a shit if you don't like it. All that matters is that PC makers buy it. Send the letters where they'll matter most.

If those PC makers receive enough letters to make them worry about their bottom line, hopefully they will either 1.) offer PCs without this shit, or 2.) never ever remove the option to disable it.

Gateway already doesn't like all this anti-copy, consumer hostile bullshit. Remember their "Rip, Burn, Respect" ad campaign? So at least one company does remember the concept of making the customer happy.

Only a fool would be short-sighted enough to not to see the danger of using (supporting) Microsoft protocols, especially over the Internet.

In the Halloween Document, a Microsoft strategist wrote:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

Or consider this evidence in the Java case:

> Microsoft's Executive Vice President, Paul Maritz, outlined Microsoft's strategy to win the browser war with Netscape and simultaneously "neutralize Java" by "tying" the "user interface" and "APIs" "back to Windows,"

This quote also shows us how Microsoft operates:

> at this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

And then there's this little gem:

> "Subversion has always been our best tactic," John Ludwig, Microsoft's vice president in charge of Java development, wrote. "It leaves the competition confused, and they don't know what to shoot at anymore."

Perhaps this quote sums it up the best:

> "This is really the core of Microsoft's business," Gartner Research Director Chris LeTocq said. "Microsoft is in business to leverage APIs. That's a key element of the successful market share it has."

If you haven't understood the point, then here it is...

If you continue to accept the ASF format, then you are encouraging websites to use it.

But it's still a protocol that is controlled by Microsoft.

In the future, Microsoft will:

1. Upgrade ASF to an incompatible format.

2. Start enforcing their ownership of ASF by restricting its use to Microsoft platforms (as GIFs started to be enforced).

3. Lock up ASF using Microsoft .Net and DRM protocols.

And the websites that are using ASF will go along blindly. Why? Because no one has been complaining to them about their use of ASF, so they have no reason to avoid Microsoft's "improvements."

And at that point, the content of those websites will become unavailable to you unless you are running Windows XP.

It really annoys me when people fail to protect themselves, and everyone else, because they are too lazy or short-sighted to put up with a little temporary inconvenience. Are you hoping that someone else will do the work of protecting your freedom? Well, don't.

It's up to you. If you want the Internet to remain free, then stop supporting Microsoft protocols.

Exactly. Then they should be required to offer systems with no OS (without having to pay the OEM fees to MS either).

They already do.

See also:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/14/136244 &mode=thread&tid=109.

Where've you been?

Also considering that Sony is a TiVo licensee.

Lowering prices is a good step. But are they audio CDs, or are they silvery copy-restricted discs?

Same here... tested and work with a bunch of z distros.

There's a LOT of out-of-date, incomplete, and just plain wrong data in this thread. Just because Doom won't run on Z as fast as it does on your Athelon doesn't mean that your computer is faster than a mainframe, junior.

Your VM guy sets up your images (they're called guests... they're guests to the *host*, which is vm) with certain amount of disk space and memory. Then, you log into VM (anybody can do this), and start up the linux guests that you want. The dmesg info whizzes by on the VM console just as it would to a monitor on intel, and if you've got your network set up properly (details below), you can telnet/ssh in, and it will work just like a regular linux box.

The name of the game here is virtualization. Say you've got a linux guest that needs more memory. You just log it off (shut it off), type in the command to give it more memory, and re-ipl it (start it up). You can also share disk space between guests, meaning that you can have a chunk of disk space out there containing a common /usr file system, and mount that on all of your guests as a read-only disk. You've just saved yourself tons of disk space and hours of upgrades.

For networking, you've got a few choices. You can either set up a virtual network within the system (google on hipersockets) or attach multiple guests to a single OSA adapter card (basically a network card for z (all varieties of ethernet/ token ring/ atm) and your guests can be plugged right into an off-the-shelf switch.

If you're serious about moving to z, you should call up IBM. They'll show you a bunch of options, including cheaper linux-only. boxes. Don't listen to these chodes saying "IBM only wants your money" or "I wrote a program for z and it sucked". 3D benchmark scores aren't what drives business. These things are built rock solid, and training in VM is usually part of the support contract.

Ask that to the Nazis. Remember kids : a world without SCO would be nice, but a world without SCO nor IBM would be even better.

Wait till this baby or it's siblings come out with more features

iTunes files can be played on up to three authorized Macintosh computers, according to this. I figure if the seller has only one computer, he could conceivably authorize the buyer's Mac to read the file, too.

Someone with iTunes, let me know if that's not how it works. Do you have to pre-authorize the computers with iTMS before you even download it for that to work?

Also, as you can see in the article, if they have older versions of the iTunes software, he could stream it to the buyer, as well.

If France was the largest exporter of movies and music, are you telling me that France would not try to protect that industry? Come on!

If you think the U.S. is the only country that acts in its own self-interest, you are either naive, ignorant or delusional.

France, after all, is the only country I know of that has a government agency dedicated to rewriting the language to prevent "foreign" influences in verbiage. With that kind of proprietary, xenophobic attitude, don't you think that if France had America's entertainment industry, they'd also take steps to protect it?

Perhaps you should examine why they don't have a situation where they "export intellectual property"... perhaps the US's concept of "intellectual property" doesn't exactly sound reasonable to the EU countries? An extreme analogy: would you still defend the US's stance if they were practicing slavery, for example?

Instead of claiming that the US is simply defending it's interests, you might want to consider the fundamental principles that differ between the US and the EU. Here are some examples:

• US dislikes EU privacy
• EU says no to GM foods from the US

In an interview with CNET, SCO's new attorney said:

"The Canopy Group said SCO has got to hire somebody in-house to manage the IBM litigation,", Tibbits said.

Legal action hits SCO Web site

Sounds like a big pierce of the corporate veil to me.

and more proof

If you believe
the study referenced in this article, then the whole issue of copy protecting audio CDs is pretty much dead in the water anyway.

Apple Computer has landed a major customer for its Power Mac G5, with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University confirming Tuesday that it will use 1,100 of the machines as part of a supercomputer cluster now under construction.

Microsoft will buy Vivendi Universal

There's a freeware program called Refresher that you can have load a URL every seven seconds. Someone wrote it for ebay (IE4 based). Oh wait here's a link: Refresher 2.5

Amazon got another yet another patent.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-5070569.html?tag=f d_top

All your webforms are belong to Amazon.

It sounds like what you want is the file system from Windows Longhorn. As I understand it, it will be using SQL Server 2004 (Yukon) for the entire file system. It seems self-evident that using a relational database for all files would result in a single table for files, and a table of attributes, search terms, subjects, etc., so that a file could be found any number of ways.

This is pretty clearly a better system. The only thing that concerns me is that every existing set of programming-language file system tools expects to be working with directory trees, even if they do support different delimiter characters, name length limits, multiple vs. single roots (drive letters vs. '/'), etc. I expect they will include some sort of mapping to a traditional hierarchy, though, as VB will have just as much trouble with the new system as Java will.

News story about it (news.com)

There's not enough capacity on that generator for 1,100 more systems.

Well, I guess you had better find some capacity. C|Net just confirmed this story. If these machines aren't going where you thought they were, what other provisions have to be made? I'm curious to know, and it sounds like you have exposure to the facilities in question.

Wrong! ... Since an office file opener could be used to open your own documents, or documents that others want you to open, there exists a substantial non-infringing use, so the software would not be a circumvention device.

Yes, he is partly wrong, but so are you. It may be true that the circumvention device clauses are satisfied. Unfortunately, we don't have to look far to see how companies and projects that fit that exception are still prosecuted/persecuted and even killed.

This would be a good target for a bunch of SLAPP suits against the developers -- if they chose to implement it. The potential gain for Microsoft and others ("We bankrupted 30 contributers to OpenOffice for DMCA violations. We're sending you a DMCA notice. You wanna be bankrupt next?") far outweighs their potential cost ("We paid $250,000,000 in the cases we lost, but it's just an investment for product lock-in and extra FUD against developers.") .

Just being on the right side of the law does not mean that you will survive a massive legal attack from a multi-billion dollar company. Anti-SLAPP laws are in effect in most states but the DMCA altered the USC, which is the federal law, so those state laws could be carefully avoided.

Examples:

• DeCSS (multiple cases, some still in appeal)
• kazaa (in court and dying)
• napster (dead)
• CopyWrite (alive, after expensive years in court and an expensive appeal)
• Lessig about Fox fair use problems, MyMP3, Napster (in court & private settlements, dead, dead)
• DRM Conference transcrpt (discusses dead & dying, but legal, projects)
• Embedded fonts (alive, but at a big cost and avoidance of court)
• A student's paper with summaries of other cases (United States v. Sklyarov, Lexmark v. Static Control Components , Felton v. Recording Industry Ass'n of America) and several interesting hypothetical physical-world comparisons to the law (locking keys out of your car == loss of ownership of car until you present the Automobile Protection Assocaition with a proper court orders allowing you to jimmy the lock).

The unfortunate fact is that just because it is legal, and even if it is right, both StarOffice (Sun) and the contributors to OpenOffice (including Sun) could both face deadly lawsuits from Microsoft if they attempt compatability.

Strategic lawsuits (gray-area, predatory lawsuits), "death by lawsuit", and even Google's lists of Allegedly Unethical Firms, Corporate Accountability, and corporate criminals show how corporations are attacking and killing projects, even when the projects or public participation are the right and legal thing.

So while you are right that such a project would be legal, you are wrong in your implied statement that it would be a safe thing to do.

frob

figures for 2002 (US)

• US games revenue: $10.3 billion video game hardware & software
• Movie boxoffice: $9.135 billion
• Music sales - all forms: $12.6 billion,

from the article:
Leach said Microsoft will provide a free plug-in for its Internet Explorer Web browser that will let it display rights-protected Office documents.

"We recognize that people are going to want to take advantage of this that don't have Office 2003," he said. "This way, they can see the document in a browser window (and) they can print, copy or forward," as decided by the document creator.

Apple better think of something quickly before Safari disappears faster than you can say Netscape.

It's going to be a long, long while before China stops becoming a poor nation and >20% have mobile phones!

Ah, but if 20% of China has cell phones, that's 20% of ~1,290,000,000 which is roughly the population of the USA. And what % of the US owns Cell Phones? About 50%.

It looks like Motorola is stepping out of Symbian (check this report on CNET), so this emphasis on Linux makes sense. With Symbian, Motorola had to make it a more powerfull OS for the future smart phones, and with Linux it has to reduce the footprint and make a good interface. Both have advantages and trade-offs. But, if the future for smart phones lies in Java, the operating system beneath the VM is not very important.

In my opinion the easiest way to cope with this threat is to make software companies responsible for their products - see article by Declan McCullagh.
Of course this regulation has to be done carefully - we shall deem liable for damages only those companies that require MONEY for that product: for instance when you install free version of RedHat Linux - RedHat (or anybody else) is not responsible for the damage, yet if you pay for this distro - then RedHat _shall_ be responsible - they can simply buy an insurance against such claims. I am sure that the price that Linux companies will pay for such insurance will be smaller than in case of Microsoft.

This article was right on track... we the consumers need this type of protection, though I think this looks like a rough draft and could use some more items. Reminds me of an article I read earier in the week called "End Users Have Rights Too" at Mad Penguin. There was another article also similar to this at News.com. It seems many people are getting tired of crap products pushed by monopolies who don't really give a rats ass about what damage their flaws do to their customers. In the case of Microsoft, this is global in scale...

The more huge outbreaks we see in viruses... may turn into big legal troubles for Microsoft.

One of the ideas behind the SCO suit, as explained on Slashdot (admittedly not always a solid source and IANAL) was that if major damages were awarded against the linux communiy then the rights to the system would be transferred in lieu of dammages, since linux has no financial existence.

If so, that makes the hateful "absolutely no warranty" clause one of the things that makes the GPL practical!

Consider: MegaCorp X puts in linux in a major distribution. Something goes wrong. Linux gets blamed. MegaCorp X says "owned!"

For the paranoia minded, a developer could even be suborned to insert the fatal bug - it's not too far from some of the SCO scenarios.

The Free Software movement needs to think about this one carefully.

I know foxmail has something called a Hotmail "proxy" built into it. Basically, it downloads the hotmail messages via HTTP and throws them in your foxmail mailbox.

American fears are unfounded. Numerous universities like Virginia Tech have trained a generation of American (not foreign) students in building the finest supercomputers. MIT, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Virginia Tech (to name just a few) have launched large-scale research projects staffed by top American graduate students. Their work became the foundation of several generations of multiprocessors.

By contrast, very few (if any) Japanese universities conduct large-scale research projects to build high-performance supercomputers. The Japanese government has tended to avoid funding this kind of research. Worse, there is little collaboration between industry and academia in Japan. Yet, precisely this kind of collaboration is needed for such large-scale projects: e.g. Virginia Tech is enlisting the help of Apple computer.

American companies lead by scientists trained at MIT and CMU could easily design a computer that outperforms the Earth Simulator. These companies simply have chosen to not do so because there is far more profits to be garnered by building commercial supercomputers geared for database transactions. In fact, the highest-performance commercial supercomputers nearly all come from the United States of America (IBM).

The 21st century remains Pax Americana, not Pax Asia. The hordes of immigrants trying to get the hell out of Asia and into the USA underscores this fact.

... from the desk of the reporter

All that crap is probably adware/spyware. Try downloading Ad-Aware and see what it turns up. You will be suprised at what you find...

• Risk of the 'Software Police'
• Timewasting 'licence audits'
• Microsoft business practices
• Paying again every 5 years
• Viruses, worms
• Staff timewasting on Ebay etc
• Overworked, frustrated tech staff

The benefit of replacing expensive RISC processor-based Unix hardware with commodity Intel boxes is one of the biggest factors driving Linux adoption

Linux servers and workstations have rapidly increased their share of the market at the expense of Sun Microsystems. According to "IBM steals server sales from Sun", the sales of Sun servers running Solaris dropped by a whopping 19% from 2nd quarter of 2002 to 2nd quarter of 2003. Yet, the sales of Linux servers increased by a sizeable 40%.

The bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.

... from the desk of the reporter

You're poorly informed. Sun confirmed that they are the first licensee here:

Sun expands Unix deal with SCO

There is nothing in current or past SEC filings which suggests MS or Sun are supporting SCO.

You're also a liar. I've got your SEC filing naming Microsoft right here.

SCO 10-Q

Page 21: "The second license was to Microsoft."

Unlike you, I actually bother to read what SCO reports.

This older slashdot story links to this story at news.com.com.com.com..... .
At the bottom of that article there is some more information.
BTW you dont need to project images Midair to get 3d effects. All you need is to get the left and right eye to see different images and your brain will be confused into thinking its 3d. Just make sure a pixel appears different from LHS and the RHS and problem solved.

Actually, it is already being done in China, on a much larger scale and with a lot more money behind it.
See this CNET article

The part where I get lost is about SCO shooting off "legal cloud over Linux" letters. It's one thing if that refers to "users of IBM's distro". If that refers to users of other distros, the mere mention of The Finn could blow the suit out of the water.

I should probably step back a notch on that statement. It should probably have been "a detailed explanation of the development processes behind Linux proper would negate SCO's FUDmail to corporate clients of Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al."

A decade back, the Santa Cruz Operation was synonymous with one of the attempts to port Unix to the i386. I learned this from a Solaris ad of that point in time, one component thereof reading, "Just say no to SCO." (Back then, the search for profit meant building a better mousetrap.)

I can't help but wonder when somebody's going to use the term "fraud" in this matter, in the context of "fraud upon the court" or "fraud against customers"--dig deep in CNet's article of May 14. Some posts on this topic have already suggested stock fraud.

If I haven't already broken wind on the proverbial lit match, check this out.

The part where I get lost is about SCO shooting off "legal cloud over Linux" letters. It's one thing if that refers to "users of IBM's distro". If that refers to users of other distros, the mere mention of The Finn could blow the suit out of the water.

I should probably step back a notch on that statement. It should probably have been "a detailed explanation of the development processes behind Linux proper would negate SCO's FUDmail to corporate clients of Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al."

A decade back, the Santa Cruz Operation was synonymous with one of the attempts to port Unix to the i386. I learned this from a Solaris ad of that point in time, one component thereof reading, "Just say no to SCO." (Back then, the search for profit meant building a better mousetrap.)

I can't help but wonder when somebody's going to use the term "fraud" in this matter, in the context of "fraud upon the court" or "fraud against customers"--dig deep in CNet's article of May 14. Some posts on this topic have already suggested stock fraud.

If I haven't already broken wind on the proverbial lit match, check this out.

The part where I get lost is about SCO shooting off "legal cloud over Linux" letters. It's one thing if that refers to "users of IBM's distro". If that refers to users of other distros, the mere mention of The Finn could blow the suit out of the water.

I should probably step back a notch on that statement. It should probably have been "a detailed explanation of the development processes behind Linux proper would negate SCO's FUDmail to corporate clients of Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al."

A decade back, the Santa Cruz Operation was synonymous with one of the attempts to port Unix to the i386. I learned this from a Solaris ad of that point in time, one component thereof reading, "Just say no to SCO." (Back then, the search for profit meant building a better mousetrap.)

I can't help but wonder when somebody's going to use the term "fraud" in this matter, in the context of "fraud upon the court" or "fraud against customers"--dig deep in CNet's article of May 14. Some posts on this topic have already suggested stock fraud.

If I haven't already broken wind on the proverbial lit match, check this out.

First, it seems that only two of the 6 flavors of MS-Word 2003 get the XML as touted. Second, the schema is still proprietary. Third, the application uses DRM so earlier versions are not compatible and must buy upgrades. Fourth, the DRM is dependent on MS-Server 2003 with expensive per-seat client licenses.

So, at first glance to use MS-Word 2003's XML format it looks like you need at least one installation of MS-Server 2003 plus client licenses. Then you will need new copies of Office 2003 accross the board. Then to be allowed the privilege of accessing your data, you must keep paying the licensing fees. That allows single point of failure to take down your whole workplace at either of two points: the server or the licensing fees.

Making tools that go around all that would be in violation of copyright/DMCA, the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, a computer crime, at the very least.

So at first glance, it looks safer, more flexible, and less work to go with the Oasis format.