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I've seen some truly awful EULAs in my day. So far in this one I don't see anything shockingly bad. (See http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/2006/05/15_a 400.html#a400)

So granted, this software isn't free as in speech, but it's also nothing that makes me too worried about installing on my box.

According to the latest news, Oracle has abandoned Solaris in favor of Linux. Oracle programmers do their development first and foremost on Linux. Then, if there is customer demand, the programmers port their code to Solaris.

According to the latest news, Oracle has abandoned Solaris in favor of Linux. Oracle programmers do their development first and foremost on Linux. Then, if there is customer demand, the programmers port their code to Solaris.

What software invention cost "billions" in R&D. I don't believe there are any.

Forbes says that:

In 2002, IBM spent $4.75 billion on research and development. That's more, in dollars, than Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.

Infoworld says:

IBM filed more patent applications than any other company with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2005 to once again lead the annual ranking put out by the U.S. Department of Commerce office.

The company filed for 2,941 patents in 2005, which is down from 3,248 applications in 2004 but still well ahead of second-ranked Canon, which filed 1,828 applications,

Assuming the figures don't change too much annually, the average cost of an IBM patent is about $1.5M per patent. And IBM is a hardware company. I'm confident if you looked at software patents alone, that figure would be a lot less.

The problem with "facts":

1&2. No, no one "owes" me a job. But how about giving me a chance? I don't get a chance to compete for a job that's now over in India.

3&5. It's not about being "better"; it's NEVER about being "better." As long as bean-counters are running things, it will ALWAYS be about, "Who does it the cheapest?" Never mind that someone has to clean up behind that decision--by that time, the CEO/CIO/CFO has cashed in their stock options and has gone on to another company. Business used to be about taking care of your employees and they'd take care of you. Not anymore. And not surprising when most of today's CEOs never work their way up from the bottom of the company they're heading.

4. Really? So YOU really want to be at the bottom of the heap? Didn't think so. And tell me, if we're all at the bottom, who's going to keep the country going? We won't be able to afford all the niceties that keep this economy alive if we're making $8/hour.

Corporate motives have been shown in report after report regarding H-1Bs, as in the H-1B Swindle story when immigrants are brought over here. The excuse given for both H-1Bs and outsourcing is there aren't enough qualified engineers. When in fact, it's shown that the companies just don't want to pay the going US rate for those engineers and so either hire from overseas or outsouce to an overseas company.

Crap.

Simple. Just ship a valid Windows install DVD with the machine ... as anyone would naturally expect. That would allow anyone to clean his machine off and reinstall from scratch.

But Microshaft doesn't want to do that, does it? Oh, no. It goes to great lengths to make sure the OEMs DON'T ship genuine install disks:

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/05/01/ 000501opfoster.html

So don't give me that crap. I'm not impressed by your lies.

...I don't know why some company doesn't just put up a few Million dollars (or 10s of millions) to buy SCO and put all these stupid legal battles behind us...

In an apparent response to industry rumors that SCO may become the target of a hostile takeover bid, SCO's Board of Directors has implemented a "shareholders rights plan" designed to deter unsolicited takeover attempts, McBride said. "We believe that this will basically keep any outside offers or potential takeovers that are not in the best interest of the shareholders at bay," he said. The plan, which was adopted by the board on Aug. 10, gives SCO's board the right to determine the "fair value" of the company in the event of a takeover attempt, McBride said.

Not true:

"THINK MICROSOFT HAS been scared by the antitrust case? Apparently not scared enough to refrain from ramming a new "medialess" OS policy down the throats of computer manufacturers and their customers. ..."

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/05/01/ 000501opfoster.html

Meaning: we clench our teeth, say a prayer, and hope that the Novell/MS deal doesn't bury us

Since Credit Suisse is a new Novell customer, you'd think that Novell would have tried to sell them their own suppport. What am I missing?

According to Matt Asay over at InfoWorld, this story is incorrect, or at best exaggerated. He says he has it on authority that all the companies mentioned in the story had been using both Suse and Red Hat for some time.

"I can't look at the Novell announcement as being anything other than further good news for ODF [the Open Source document format]. If there are aspects that have negatives (as I realize there are), I see them as temporary holding actions that are not likely to represent permanently defensible positions. The run of the tide is clear, and sand castles never win." - impartial background information from the ConsortiumInfo Standards Blog.

Also Jeremy can be a bit of a firebrand.

As for how long you think a malicious ad doing *anything* on a major network would survive, let's just say "not long".

It doesn't have to be long, that's the trick. This isn't a theoretical problem, it has actually happened multiple times with previous browser based exploits. One ad-based attack is estimated to have zombied over a million machines in the span of hours it was live for. This makes sense - ad networks serve millions of impressions per hour, and it can easily take several hours for them to respond and pull an ad, especially if it goes live in the middle of the night (or worse, the ad is designed to behave itself when loaded into the ad networks IP address range - I believe this has also happened).

See here for more details

::Vista has NOT been made available to the public Ah yes. So - what are you getting when you buy vista now, there: http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/13/HNmscomp usa_1.html More info: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=21919 It is not in wide distribution, but it is out. You an walk intoa CompUsa NOW and get a copy. ::It was made available on MSDN / Windows Connect for EARLY ADOPTERS Bullshit. It was made available. That simple. SOME are early in adopting, but it is the real RTM version. Sure, driver support through third party is crap, but that is not going to change inthe next 30 days. It is the RTM version. The versionsin the shop will be identical to the released images- it just now takes time to get them manufactured and into the distribution. ::If your company runs full fledged SQL Server on desktops, they're morons for multiple reasons. So, I am a moron? Let me get this straight - how else am I supposed to make SQL Server development woork wih reporting services and/or SSIS on my laptop without internet connection? Not all uses of a server product are - for prouduction use. ::And your response to my post showed your idiocy, not mine Let me guess -yyou are american and thus do not value the reality.

Just an FYI, this is the first article of Tom Yager's (author of TFA) I could find that mentioned the SCO fiasco:

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R =printThis&A=http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/arc hives/2003/08/its_going_to_ge.html

He appears to have been against them from the beginning.

One last note: The password list contained several e-mail/log-on account names from popular OS and software vendors. Although we can't be assured that the passwords used on the exploited site were the same as the employee's company password, I'm sure some are matches.

Remember this and learn from it: An exploited Web site that's completely unrelated to your company could still put your company at risk. Remind all employees not to use their company passwords on noncompany Web sites, if at all.

VoIP was banned for quite a long time, only now govt seems to be taking some action! This article[1] says how VoIP is only permissible within a firm's internal corporate network. Because of this Yahoo Messenger for India[2] comes without VoIP support. Although it seems Yahoo is now acquiring license[3] to offer IP Telephony in India.

1.http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NEW/ is_2001_Sept_4/ai_77821205
2.http://in.messenger.yahoo.com/
3.http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/06/HNyaho otelephonyindia_1.html?VOIP

This is only for BPOs who might be using internet telephony without paying taxes to the Govt. FYI - Yahoo has been given the license to offer Internet telephony in India. Read here . They will be partnering with VSNL to route their calls.

Yes, you absolutely did. There are no exploits running around in the wild affecting Macs. You can't cite a single real-world example. Not a single one.

Absolutely correct. None of them are being exploited at all.

And yet nobody's exploiting it, because OS X's security prevents access. Next.

Which should tell you just how "urgent" it was to fix something that wasn't really a problem in the first place.

Lies, lies, and more lies. 100% false in every way imaginable.

Ah, the old "false sense of security" canard, despite the fact THERE IS NOT A SINGLE EXPLOIT RUNNING IN THE WILD THAT IS INTRUDING ON A SINGLE MAC. You can't cite a single one. Go for it.

Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all guesswork. Then again, this is Slashdot..anyways:

Looking back at a previous story, they mention:

Oracle will offer its Linux support customers full indemnification from intellectual property lawsuits, like the ones filed by SCO.

Weren't most of the SCO lawsuits stating that only the Linux kernel contained their IP? Perhaps this is what Oracle had in mind when only offering to cover the kernel for purposes of indemnification.

Either way, I'm not very knowledgeable on the topic, but the linked article came off as kind of nitpicking

Sun lost a patent battle with Kodak over java. Article here. Guessing that for the 92 mill (or an amended agreement and amount) Kodak waived all patent infringement by java users.

Actually, Microsoft does have a history of attacking Linux and the open source community.

Further, their dubious business practices are well known. They have been fined by the US, EU, and South Korea.

See:
Microsoft declares war on free software model
Microsoft takes potshots at (Embedded) Linux
Microsoft launches attack on open source software
Open-source vendors respond to Microsoft 'attack

Read "Red Hat: the mother of all business models": http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/ 2006/01/red_hat_the_mot.html

Anyone one remembers this: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/30/HNsolari sgpl_1.html

Much as I would love to agree with you...

The answer is not in front of me. The link you're looking at is for the last public revision. There's been at least one revision since then that was not released. Apple has also noted that due to security concerns, they have no intention of making any future version of MacOSX or Darwin publicly available. Therein lies the point of contention that I was asking about. Thank you for not being obnoxious.

Oracle has been aggressively recruiting kernel developers out of Novell. Novell has lost three in the last several months, making it hard for Novell to claim any leadership against Red Hat, which is a hard-core innovator on the kernel. Oracle understands that to support a community-based product, it has to be part of that community. This, incidentally, is still the best reason for Red Hat customers to stay with Red Hat for support: Red Hat is doing more to innovate and develop the kernel than anyone else, including Oracle. Source of code matters more than source code in Linux, and Red Hat is the predominant source.

"Maryland's security team then leaked the code to external people and used the incident to claim that Diebold's security is awful..."

There is no actual proof that it happened this way. References to labels and 'documents' don't connect these disks with Maryland. It could have happened anywhere along the chain. It isn't the first time Diebold software has leaked.

"A team led by Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, examined the machines' source code, which a Diebold worker anonymously published on the Internet earlier this year"

"The FTP button gave total access to anonymous users, allowing anyone to download and apparently, upload to the server. The FTP site contained no copyright statement, asked for no user name, put locks on no directories. Visitors from anywhere in the world could simply walk in the front door."

"Last week's revelation by Diebold that its automated teller machines (ATMs) operated by two financial services customers were struck by the W32/Nachi worm"

Furthermore, Oracle provides *full* support for the Linux OS itself when you have a properly licensed copy of Oracle.

This is correct and something that a lot of people don't realize about Oracle. Oracle spends a lot of time working on Linux, contributing code to Linux, and supporting customers on Linux. Yes, they do provide support for the OS and not just the database. They even have a program of certified configurations that they provide to customers for exactly the kind of "runs Oracle perfectly" systems the grandparent is talking about. I wrote about this for InfoWorld earlier this year -- it's pretty interesting.

If I were Larry, I would create a great deal of hype about doing my own Linux distro, to soften up the price of Red Hat in anticpiation of a takeover.

I agree, and this is exactly what I said in April, when this whole rumor started. But there's not much evidence that Larry is really interested in such a take-over. If you look at TFA, they're just dredging up this quote from the Financial Times from back then. There's nothing new from Oracle on this. If anything, Larry has refuted the idea of buying up either Red Hat or Novell, repeatedly. Just a few days after this rumor started, he reiterated to the Financial Times his belief that Red Hat is an unsuitable purchase because "they own nothing." Still, he likes to drop hints and innuendo about things like this from time to time because it creates buzz around his company and that's good for his own stock price. If the little voices are whispering rumors again now, I assume it's just because of the Oracle OpenWorld show that kicks off in San Francisco next week.

To avoid asking something that's already been answered, here's a synopsis of some of his more recent interviews.

In Guy Kawasaki's Blog, he's asked:
1. How do you make money with an Open Source product?
2. What changes in the Open Source community's attitude have you encountered since you decided "to build a company" around MySQL?
3. Do you compete head to head with Oracle or do you have different customers?
4. What's the biggest MySQL DB?
5. What's the weirdest use of MySQL?
6. What's the most "mission critical" use of MySQL?
7. How does a company controls what's happening to its product when the Open Source community is doing the programming and testing?
8. Is Open Source hindering innovation because it's one thing to debug an existing product but it's another to design a new one?
9. Who fixes the most bugs?
10. If MySQL ceased to exist as an organization, would MySQL the product continue?

In InfoWorld, he's asked:
1. Recently, a number of open-source developers have expressed their unhappiness with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the second draft of GPLv3. Are you concerned about a potential forking of the license as some people stick with GPLv2 and others move to GPLv3?
2. How do you decide when MySQL needs to develop new features for the database and when to rely on the open-source community for those innovations?
3. So, is open source then a more forgiving environment than the proprietary software world?
4. What's ahead in 2007 for MySQL?
5. What's the latest news on Falcon, the transactional database engine being developed by database architect Jim Starkey who joined MySQL in February?
6. Is MySQL's current dominance of the open-source database market ever a cause for concern?

In Forbes, he's asked:
1. How is open source software influencing what the bigger tech giants like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft will do in the next year?
2. Do open source firms that sell to large, proprietary software companies risk being dubbed sellouts by the community that's helped them develop their software?
3. How do Oracle's recent open source acquisitions affect MySQL?
4. Is Oracle more of a threat now?
5. What is MySQL's workforce like?
6. MySQL recently took funding from Red Hat, Intel and SAP. What's the strategy here?
7. Is there an IPO for MySQL in the future?

In LXer, he's asked:
1. What are your short and long term goals do you have for the MySQL database system?
2. Realistically where do you think you will pick up quick conversions to enhance your immediate market share from your competitors? Later, how much market share must MySQL commercial versions have to pick up to have long-term viability?
3. If you see your main opportunity is in the replacement of Oracle installations does MySQL match or exceed the forte of Oracle in the transaction per second processing? Are you now aimed at the lower end of the Oracle market installations? What will it take to be really competitive with Oracle at the upper end of the scale?
4. If you see your natural market as the range SQL Server is now aimed at, small medium business and departmental installations, can you match their ease of administration? If not what is the salient argument for such companies to install MySQL over the competition? Since you are primarily aimed at the market willing to pay for your enhancements and support, do you see any advantage in offering a MySQL product that will undercut MySQL server from below?
5. What trade offs have had to be made to make MySQL 5.0 commercial version more feature rich and robust?
6. Where do you see competition arising from for pursuing the paths to th

Seems marketing did get involved in the end;

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/09/HNmsrevo kesmvp_1.html

Microsoft software is just as limited from modifying and extending the kernel as non-Microsoft software, legitimate or not. Furthermore, isn't all this complaining about the 64-bit edition specifically? You know, the 64-bit edition that not a whole lot of people are running anways? A lot of the functionality is present in the x64 Edition of Windows XP, too, is it not?

I have yet to hear a compelling argument with specific examples on why anyone is complaining about this. People have already found ways to attack the Vista kernel? So what you're basically saying is to hell with making it more difficult to exploit the system, keep the current model because... well... I don't really see what the because is. If the keys to the castle were given to anyone, they'd end up leaked just as they end up being leaked when an exploit is discovered and knowledge of it is released into the wild. If the problem is truly so great then Symantec and McAfee can continue doing what they do already -- Fuck up the base system in order to get it to do what they want it to do.

And if it's about double-whammy Security Center notification nonsense as stated in this article at Infoworld, maybe it would be a good idea to just say something like "Hey, Microsoft has this part taken care of, we don't have to bother with it"? I know that I have no issues whatsoever with my AV of choice, Avast!. In any case, it will be very interesting to see what comes of all this in the near future as Vista sees it's adoption. Seems to me like it's going to be largely the same ol same ol, only the methodology will be different.

I find this article to be ironic, because I am seeing an opposite trend now.

Seems that the overseas outsourcing is hit or miss and does not work for everyone. I have seen some companies get amazing results at a much more affordable rate than they would in the US, but I have also seen some companies have so many issues with commuication/language/cultural barriers and oversight that they ended up spending more money.

Here is an article that is a few years old, but is interesting nonetheless:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/24/HNdellsh ifts_1.html

Basically Dell ended up moving some of their tech support back to the US because customers were not happy with the quality of service they received.

In the end, it is up to each business to do their risk assesments and determine what works well for them.

This paper (beware, highly graphic PDF) gives a nice overview of the state of the virtualisation union in July.

Can you provide an example of a Firefox patch that reduced reliability.

And at my business, we use Novell's eDirectory 8.8.1 product running on SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 and Novell Identity Manager to synchronize passwords in real-time (event driven) to Active Directory, other Novell eDirectory systems, Oracle and MS-SQL databases, PeopleSoft and other systems, some in different cities, all secured with SSL connections. Our system holds over 300,000 accounts, with about 60,000 of those being active. I think we expire about 300 passwords a day on average.

A recent Infoworld article ranked it very highly. Novell Identity Manager is very flexible and powerful product and I highly recommend it, especially if you're not a huge fan of Microsoft. Storing passwords in a centralized system is a valid solution as long as your "identity vault", to borrow Novell's term, is properly secured. Personally, I could never feel safe storing all our passwords in Active Directory. Besides all that, I don't have to worry about the critical security patch of the week since it runs on Linux.

Since you make it sound as if India is communications nirvana, I'll introduce a few elements of reality into the picture...

I spent a small amount of time in the US, and surprisingly the tarrif structure and the talk time etc., plans available in India are far better than in the US ... in case of cellular connections countries like India are way ahead of the US/Europe, and very soon 3G deployment will be mainstream

You know, you really shouldn't lump Europe with the US in terms of mobile penetration. According to some very rudimentary looking-up, India's looking at 30% penetration by 2009 (ref), whereas Europe is going to have near-100% penetration by 2007 (ref). Also, the US even with it's "dismal" record in mobiles has a penetration rate of 70% estimated for 2006 (ref).

On top of this you have other indicators, like the percentage of subscribers actually using GPRS (leave 3G aside for the moment because its uptake hasn't been huge anywhere), which is embarassingly low in India -- which is why Airtel has a Rs99/'unlimited' use GPRS plan: they're pretty much begging the market to use the service. This is analogous to their free MMS plan in non-Delhi/Bombay markets for a long time: they pretty much had to give it away because no one wanted to send MMSes at Rs 5 a pop.

Finally, most markets tend to reward staying consumers rather than random prepaid customers who use a cellphone for a few days. I'd say if you were living in the US for a longer time you'd have been pleasantly surprised with some of the offers available, including free night+weekend minutes, and free long-distance to selected numbers.

In broadband access developed nations have lot of lead over developing ones, maybe because to have good connectivity you require undersea cables as most of the servers are in west

While India definitely needs more fiber, it doesn't use what's available well -- I wrote this in 2002 and obviously things have improved since then (cf Anil Ambani's new FALCON cable) but the lighted capacity ratios haven't(check out how much of FALCON is unlighted). The net result-- even now, 256kbps seems to be the median connect speed for residential DSL in India, when even stodgy old UK gives away 2Mbps connections practically for free, and 16/24Mbps services are becoming common. I know telcos keep a certain level of unlighted capability but given India's population and demand, the sheer amount of unlighted fiber is wasteful IMHO.

Also, millions of people in India who've ditched their government-supplied copper-line phones for GSM/CDMA/WLL phones from private companies. This bites broadband growth in the back, because these technologies have a low data trasmission limit, which is shared by all subscribers in a given area.

Realistically, if you want good residential broadband you need decent copper wiring (a concept which MTNL's/BSNL's illiterate field staff don't understand -- which is why most of India's copperline phones cannot carry 8Mbps traffic even though theoretically they could do even more) or decent Ethernet/OFC wiring (and no one's done fiber-to-the-home in India just yet). And technologies like community wifi (and Wimax) are ill-suited to India's dense urban jungles.

Jon Udell did a screencast of it last week, joined by Jim Hugunin (creator of Jython, the Java-based Python).

I believe some newer linksys routers have a synch button you push to add a new device. They call it Secure Easy Setup and that sounds quite useful for customers (never tried that myself): http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/07/25/HNlinksy swlan_1.html

>some banks, when communicating via email, will tell you to log into your account by manually TYPING in an URL in your browser

Except a phisher could do the same and simply ask someone to type in the wrong URL (foobank-visa.com instead of foobank.com, for example). At least it would prevent the obfuscated link problem and force phishers into providing a lead for investigators at a domain registry.

"Use a bookmark" would be better advice because it would require DNS poisoning in order to make the phishing scam work.

SSL was supposed to solve this problem. Maybe if the UI displayed the organization name as well as the URL, and if CAs all checked (as long as there's a single CA in the browser's list of trusted CAs that will issue a cert without checking the organization name then there is no protection).

Then, as Bruce Schneier pointed out, it's dead easy for malware to add a new and crooked CA to the browser's list of trusted CAs. Marketscore does just that to create a proxy that can pass SSL, and they've been accused of being spyware. See also the account from Roger Grimes. If you need to explain this to someone nontechnical, point them to my Security Mentor article about Marketscore.

Check out my new digs at The Enterprise Mac. It's about all things Apple, not just Xserve and Xserve RAID. You'll find a distilled manifesto there in the first post.

And finally, for those like me who can't get their fill of me, I have set up a personal blog on my lab's Xserve G5. As soon as I get my domain registration back, I'll clue you in."

While you may not have to follow local laws, it's general considered respectful to follow them.

And yet, the NY Times is in a nation in which the freedom of the press from censorship is held to be sacrosanct, even when the government finds it inconvenient (the NYTimes unleashed the Pentagon Papers, as well as having started the furor over wiretapping). It's totally unbecoming of them to all of a sudden censor themselves in violation of the First Amendment of the United States, which is the law governing a U.S. newspaper.

You follow the law of the nation you're in, not the law of the nation you're from. And the NYTimes is in the U.S.

That's why Yahoo didn't have to censor Nazi items from its auction site when the French whined about their being available. Guess what, France? Your law doesn't apply here. The French Yahoo site has to follow the law (and it does) but not the U.S. site.

U.S. judge says 'au revoir' to French lawsuit against Yahoo

So UK law can just piss off (as I think the Brits say it).

Interesting link, but it's missing MS' use of "charitable contributions", epsecially in the developing world.

• Democrats attack Gates' "charity"
• Gates gives $100m to fight HIV, $421m to fight Linux
• Virtual Philanthropy
• E-México favors windows over linux

There's more published, especially in local papers, but as you see in the Salon article, it's part of an combination investment/PR campaign and both MS reps and shills come down on any thing other than "Yay Bill!" So questions and/or critique stay low profile and is hard to find.

Also, the mention of tax breaks is a bit of an under statement. MS pays almost nothing: IT giants who don't pay tax part 2: how Microsoft does it. There's a bit of a stink about MS in Europe using foreign tax havens. And, by the way, MS seems to make more money buying and selling its own stock that in does even from sales of MS Windows. Bill hopped off as CEO the same year MS ran an $18,000,000,000 USD loss. Now he's stepped down completely. That could be interpreted to suggest that this summer's massive stock buyback could be an indication of real bad situation in Redmond.

The print version: http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R =printThis&A=/article/06/08/28/35FEservices_1.html

This comes through incompetence - it is too easy to hire outside help, and not setup an exit strategy (you listening, bush and blair?), when you don't understand the problem and won't ask for help. It is easier to get outside help than realise what you will need in the long term, and start hiring people. Oh, but when you need a new secretary, that gets done within the week.

Too many non-IT (and I am sure this happens in other departments) people are put in to manage IT infrastructure, and because they have in the past, feel the need to be making the important decisions. This is what happens.

And hire someone like IBM, and you will never get rid of them.

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R =printThis&A=/article/06/08/28/35FEservices_1.html

In InfoWorld that's where

An Offer They Cannot Refuse

Quote from the same: In an even more stunning reversal, Microsoft has invited the open source community for a sit-down to drink grappa and mangiare some cannoli. You know that scene in mob films where the godfather invites all his rivals for a meeting, excuses himself to go to the loo, and guys with submachine guns show up? My advice to open sourcers: If Ballmer leaves the room, get ready to dive under the table.

Read this: http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/28/09gripe_ 1.html Around the time when VHS and cassette tapes came out, it was ruled that a customer may do what he/she likes with their property. This very same issue was brought up by TV networks who were afraid that VHS tapes would make it easier to fast forward through commercials, and share network programming with friends who weren't paying for it, and with music labels who detested the cassette for the ability to record, and therefore copy music. It was found that copying a cassette was no different than giving a book to a friend, and is thus covered by Fair Use.

I'd just like to point out that InfoWorld covered this story extensively last year.

".....there have been major improvements in the last ~6 months"
Apparently there have been:
http://www.infoworld.com/Sun_Ray/product_80804.htm l?view=1&curNodeId=0

Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.

Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards.

Last time I checked they were about to sell their ide business.

Although I love object pascal, I have been forced to switch to other languages. They build great ide's but delphi 6 was the last really stable and perfoming version. My guess is that borland never recovered the loss of some key developers to Microsoft. (Anders Hejlsberg for example). The .net framework classes are just an improved version of the VCL. Every delphi developper immediately sees the similarities between system.windows.forms and Delphi's VCL.

And even worse: They discontinued kylix, so object pascal currently only runs on windows.
And Visual Studio.Net (along with 3rd party plugins like resharper) has pretty much anything you need for smaller projects (if it has to be windows), so there is no obvious reason to buy an ide from borland. (i count together as a modeling tool )

This is so sad, but true