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Nick Petreley, open-source commentator, founding editor of LinuxWorld.com, and all-'round great guy, was recently laid off by Caldera. Coincidence???

Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie

Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?

Our crack interviewing team cornerned Parns in his home, where he was conspicuously not combing through the text of Mundie's remarks, just as he had not been in attendance at NYU's Stern School of Business on May 3 to hear Mundie speak. What justified this weird behavior?

"I really think there are enough rebuttals already, " said Parns. "I mean, have you even read all those things? "

Eric S. Raymond, whose two preemptive rebuttals sparked the craze, was pessimistic about the chances for a Parns rebuttal in the future. "Obviously, we can't force him to write a rebuttal to Mundie's wrong-headed remarks about open source," said Raymond. "However, it's possible that my new paper, 'How I Rebutted Craig Mundie's Wrong-Headed Remarks About Open Source In Copious Detail--And How You Can Too' will give him some ideas. In fact, there's sort of a little form rebuttal in Appendix C which he can sign his name to and get it linked from Linux Today."

"As a full-time programmer, my day is pretty busy," said Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Software Foundation, whose anti-Mundie remarks were picked up by Infoworld. "Yet even I managed to stop by Mundie's speech and make a few remarks to the press. I don't think this Parns is even trying. I mean, even Steve Ballmer published a 3000-word Mundie rebuttal. Sic transit gloria Mundie, I guess."

Even Parns' neighbors have begun to notice this gap in the open source ranks. "The way he helped me with my Red Hat install, I was sure he was some sort of hot-shot free software advocate," said Millie Leman, a local dominatrix and mother of two. "But I haven't heard one word from him about this Mundie thing. It makes a person wonder."

"Look, it's spring, my son's about to graduate from junior high, I'm trying to get KCron to 1.0," said Parns, shooing this reporter out his front door. "Just leave me alone."

Will Parns rebut? Already, rebuttals with his name on them have begun showing up, though he denies authorship. Watch for the rebuttal signed with Parns' Gnu Privacy Guard key, and keep reading Segfault.org for complete coverage of every Mundie rebuttal ever written.

Tomorrow: An in-depth look at the rebuttal that Mark Billings of London saved to ~mark/mundie.txt, but never showed to anybody.

(This 'story' was first shown at Segfault.org here, and was written by Leonard Richardson)

Online sales only grew
Television and radio, and much of print media failed because they followed the advertising model.

The United States will never work as a country because it gave away much of its land free to early settlers.

The Soviet Union triumphed because it applied a unified, coherent model of process and organization across its broad domain.

The automobile never caught on as a technology because multiple vendors expanded on its open engineering platform in incompatible ways, while the horse, built on a standard plan, was flexibly sized from pony to draft horse for every scale of use.

I had one of these (PB 5300, well known as the Exploding PowerBook due to Li-Ion batteries that caught fire) - mine didn't explode, but it did squeal like mad when it was charging the battery. I am now much happier with my G3!

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/04/25/ 010425hntreaty.xml?p=br&s=7

http://www.idg.net/ic_521511_1794_9-10000.html

More stories on this subject at Infoworld:

Under RIAA pressure, academic does not present paper

SDMI attempts to quash researcher's findings

More stories on this subject at Infoworld:

Under RIAA pressure, academic does not present paper

SDMI attempts to quash researcher's findings

More stories on this subject at Infoworld:

Under RIAA pressure, academic does not present paper

SDMI attempts to quash researcher's findings

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No, not like having a dorm room in college.

College dorm rooms are connected to large LANs which get their bandwidth the old-fashioned way (via routers connected to T1s and T3s which speak frame-relay or ATM).

What's being proposed here is using Ethernet signalling to carry your traffic from the phone company's CO to your house over plain old CAT3 copper, instead of using one of the DSL variants.

The concept of using Ethernet to carry signal down the last mile is not exactly new. Nortel Networks came up with a technology called Etherloop three years ago. Bob Metcalfe wrote about it extensively in his InfoWorld column back then. Nortel wound up spinning off a startup called Elastic Networks to develop and market the product.

Etherloop's biggest feature is that it automatically compensates for crosstalk in binder groups by treating them as Ethernet collision domains, although it doesn't actually incur collisions as normal half-duplex Ethernet does.

I mean, you're either doing NET with microsoft or not doing it at all!

Not necessarily. Check here.

This gets announced the day before Microsoft's Hailstorm announcment, where Microsoft starts letting out some details to show why AOL better get their act together. Combine that with the fact that MSN Messenger now has more users than AIM, and it sounds like AOL's begging for free help from the open source community to save them from Microsoft and Hailstorm.

Cheers,

Linkage to the article here.

• encrypted traffic is easy to detect and
• ppl tend to forget about temp files which can contain an unencrypted copy.

this program is more paranoid than me [which is a healthy sign]. my fave feature is that it does clean out your windoze 9X or NT swap files.

if you work with information which is sensitive enough to require encryption then erasing [using multiple passes and re-writes to erase] your temp files is essential to guard against your HDD being compromised.

the issue of authenticating the recieptant wasn't dealt with in this article but a link to this story - http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ca/xml/01/03/12/ 010312camentor.xml called USPS delivers a digital, signature-certified mail system dealt with how the US Postal Service is dealing with identity authentication when sending email to a US Federal Govt address.

Personally, i'd be happy if the NZ IRD [Inland Revenue Department] issued me with a personal digital ID. my employer issuing a second for work email would also be great.

Put snidely, if you're serious about this, you're on crack.

You purchase a software program, at a store or on the Internet, and begin to install. Almost immediately you are confronted with a dialog box saying you have to agree to a long, dense legal document in order to proceed. Having better things to do with your life, you don't bother reading it and instead just click "OK" to continue the installation. After you're done, you discover the product doesn't work for whatever reason. Too bad, the software publisher tells you, by clicking "OK" you signed away any rights you might have to return the product.

In essence, this is what UCITA is all about. From the early days of personal computers, many packaged software products have come with "shrinkwrap" licenses - a set of terms written by the software publisher that usually disclaim all responsibility for delivering a functioning product other than perhaps warranting the delivery media be defect free for 30 days. As the purchaser is only able to read the license after the product is purchased and the package opened (hence the name shrinkwrap), the customer has theoretically given up all rights to demand a return or repair by the time he or she actually begins using the product.

In practice, however, it's not been that simple. Courts have historically frowned on such "contracts of adhesion" - non-negotiable terms presented post sale. Instead, they have often chosen to disregard shrinkwrap licenses totally or in part and apply other legal principles from common law, copyright law or laws regarding the sale of goods to disputes involving software products. As a result, there is a great deal of uncertainty about just what laws do apply to software transactions. And with the emergence of e-commerce, open source software and business-to-business Internet transactions, the need for more certainty in the laws governing a variety of software-based transactions has become even more critical.

What is now called UCITA was originally conceived for the entirely laudable purpose of clarifying the rules in this murky area of the law. UCITA is not federal law -- it is a proposed uniform law for each state to consider enacting. While the name has changed more than once (for many years it was known as Article 2B and was intended to become part of the Uniform Commercial Code), the project of drafting the law has been in the works for a decade under the auspices of the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), a body of 300-plus commissioners appointed by their respective states.

From InfoWorld's Gripe Line a couple weeks ago:

"Texas figures to be an extremely interesting battleground. Signatories of an open letter to the Texas legislature requesting that UCITA not be introduced in the state this year included Boeing, Conoco, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed, and Phillips Petroleum. With that kind of opposing lineup, particularly one featuring the petroleum industry, you might think UCITA would have no chance in Texas. But it was introduced anyway. A pro-UCITA letter signed by Compaq, Dell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments gives you some idea of how the battle lines are drawn."

So it's basically software companies (and the hardware companies that are co-dependent) vs. the rest of the corporate world.

InfoWorld used to have something called InfoQuote that let you ask for quotes on PC equipment and so on. I couldn't find it today - their website gets more user-hostile every time I visit.

.. Well kinda open sourcing CE, read on in this article on InfoWorld

TastesLikeFriedHerringFlavoredChicken

.. Well kinda open sourcing CE, read on in this article on InfoWorld

TastesLikeFriedHerringFlavoredChicken

The Windows Embedded Strategic Silicon Alliance (WESSA), which will be officially unveiled Tuesday at a Microsoft developer conference in Las Vegas, allows member companies access to the source code of Windows CE 3.0.

The 10 charter members of WESSA are ARM, Alchemy Semiconductor, Cirrus Logic, Hitachi, Intel, MIPS Technologies, National Semiconductor, NEC, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Don't know much about these big beasts, but the Cray supercluster being described here outweighs something like an IBM S/390 running Linux by a factor of?

Choose your scale: ips, ops, ability to compress a 2 1/2 hour DVD to MPEG4 format, etc.

Serious question.
----------------------------------

Why don't they do something like patent pollution? Then they could sew all the polluters on the planet for patent infringement. And make a mint on the licensing fees

I swear, every time I start to relax about MS, they go and do something to wind me all over again
[/rant]

Standard Disclosure: IANAL

Excellent tutorial on non-disclosures here, and here

Non-disclosures are different from noncompetes:

Excellent discussions on noncompetes here

Special Note: In some states, including California, noncompete agreements generally can't be enforced against employees. The problem is that because noncompete agreements come in so many shapes and sizes, and because you've got very conflicting societal interests, the courts tend to analyze these things on a case-by-case basis, which means predictability is very low.

There is also this interesting site:

www.breakyournoncompete.com

which has an agreement on the front end.

I am sure there are others out there as well.

The page linked to here on slashdot is actually just an IDG frame with an ad on it and another frame that goes through ad.doubleclick.net at this address:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;1511675;4485524;j?ht tp://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/01/12/01 0112hnwriting.xml?p=br&s=5 .

To go there without viewing the IDG banner and without generating clickthrough $$$ for IDG, go HERE.

This article is actually an infoworld.com article.

--------

The page linked to here on slashdot is actually just an IDG frame with an ad on it and another frame that goes through ad.doubleclick.net at this address:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;1511675;4485524;j?ht tp://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/01/12/01 0112hnwriting.xml?p=br&s=5 .

To go there without viewing the IDG banner and without generating clickthrough $$$ for IDG, go HERE.

This article is actually an infoworld.com article.

--------

Didn't log in the first time I posted this. A 1999 article by Bob Metcalfe. Check out the opening line:

INVENTOR DEAN KAMEN insists his IBOT is not a wheelchair. Nobody pushes you around in an IBOT. You wear it, like Kamen wears his helicopters.

He's also been spanked at:
here
here
here and here .

He's also been spanked at:
here
here
here and here .

Office? This is before MS Office. Try the early 1990s (see the end of the article).

Or is that just a dirty rumor?

DT
--

Unfortunately, I can't find a link for Dr. Hankopf's paper, but it primarily focused on the necessity of some centralized control of mains electrical power, if a technological society is to flourish. Hankopf claims that free power is merely

'mythopoetical libertarianism,' which imposes upon a newly-classless society the semiotics of a sadly posttextual paradigm. But an abundance of narratives concerning the economy, and subsequent stasis, of cultural society may be found. A Marxist approach will destroy the semiotics of a technology culture and, ultimately, cause its collapse.

There is no need to dissect Hankopf's bias -- as a card-carrying Objectivist, she clearly feels that corporations with a profit motive will provide the best foundation for a modern society. However, she raises some interesting points, especially in light of the Oracle debacle.

Infoworld has reported that the fcc has declined to force 10 digit dialing

Obligatory link: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/29/ 001129hnbestbuy.xml?p=br&s=1

InfoWorld had an interesting article on the success of using easy to hack systems to trap and analyze hacker attacks

Another article entitled Honey pot networks can gather evidence for catching and prosecuting hackers. is also on InfoWorld

The site these articles are based off of is located here. There are a lot of interesting whitepapers and other materials including the scan of the month to enthrall the slashdot crowds

InfoWorld had an interesting article on the success of using easy to hack systems to trap and analyze hacker attacks

Another article entitled Honey pot networks can gather evidence for catching and prosecuting hackers. is also on InfoWorld

The site these articles are based off of is located here. There are a lot of interesting whitepapers and other materials including the scan of the month to enthrall the slashdot crowds

Info world and

all net devices

Uses transmetta processor , is basically a web pad.

An article HEREInfoworld details a 10-Terabyte Optical Disc. The inventor of the disc says that it may become commercially available in a year (it was stated in oct).

An important part of this disc is that it is very stable -- instability occurs only after 5,000 years.

Metcalfe predicted collapse and 1 year later ate his column.

Metcalfe predicted collapse and 1 year later ate his column.

Since then, four years have passed, and the amount of capacity and computing power on the net is orders of magnitude more. ISPs that used to run at 45Mbps now run at 5Gbps and more - a hundredfold increase in capacity (and at least 10x more if you count the increase in the number of national backbones). Meanwhile, political news is still mainly statistics, photos, and the occasional video clip - and nobody has shown that there's been a huge increase in interest in politics via the web. So this time the election-driven traffic is very unlikely to have an impact at all.

Since then, four years have passed, and the amount of capacity and computing power on the net is orders of magnitude more. ISPs that used to run at 45Mbps now run at 5Gbps and more - a hundredfold increase in capacity (and at least 10x more if you count the increase in the number of national backbones). Meanwhile, political news is still mainly statistics, photos, and the occasional video clip - and nobody has shown that there's been a huge increase in interest in politics via the web. So this time the election-driven traffic is very unlikely to have an impact at all.

already happened.

Here: htt p:/ /www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/31/001031 hnscams.xml?1101weic

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If you combine UCITA -- and its ability to enforce such things as shrinkwrap terms prohibiting product criticism and reverse engineering -- with the DMCA, what will we have? I fear it could be a form of censorship that will make the most despotic governments exceedingly envious.

Good article. Send it to your legislator.

This place has really gone downhill recently.

Maybe you don't remember the old slashdot. Let me remind you. It looked something like this:

Contributed by CmdrTaco
on Wednesday October 21, [1997] @10:10
from the movin-on-up dept.
ascott@pacbell.net
sent me a link to This article.
It's another excellent example of the kind of
amazingly cool press that Linux is getting from
the media. We're approaching critical mass
people. I'm still waiting for that PC Magazine
cover story though.

Maybe you don't remember what slashdot used to be. Let me remind you. It looked something like this :

Contributed by CmdrTaco
on Wednesday January 07, [1998] @02:50AM
from the preaching-the-truth dept.
Another cameo appearance of Linux in a mainstream mag comes to us from
Amos Shapira. He sent in an article at inforworld about NT 5.0's hefty system requirements, and how Linux will
"beat the living daylights out of it" on a system with less than 64 megs of RAM. Flattery
like that is just the kinda publicity we like to hear.

Slashdot has always posted little stories glorifying Linux, because THAT'S WHAT ROB LIKES!!! In the old days, if it mentioned Linux, then the story RAN and we (ACs) liked it that way. With stories like these, Rob is being truer to his roots than a thousand napster/cuecat stories could ever be.

It's his damn site, and you're being ungrateful.

</KarmaWhore>

--

Gartner seems to say that the future could be very similar to Orwell's description of the year 1984 in his novel with the same name. Check out this pervasive Internet connectivity.

"Let's have a Class War Again...."

Well, as a friend of mine says, "in the end, politics is always about spite and class envy".

Did anyone notice the Oct. 9, 2000, Infoworld poll of IT execs as to who would be better on various high-tech issues? The only one Bush wins is support for UCITA, in that Gore was perceived as being more likely to support UCITA. Couldn't find the poll on the Infoworld web site, but it's page 12 of the print issue.

So what the hell is this? An RIAA-approved ID3 tag?

Corby

From Microsoft's page:

3. Point out the benefits of a legally licensed, preinstalled operating system. Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software.

Okay, now hold up a minute here. I recall a whole bunch of articles just a few months ago about how Microsoft was No Longer allowing major OEM's to ship Windows CD-ROMs[*] anymore. This was, as I recall, to help stop piracy.

First OEM's are no longer allowed to ship Windows CD's, and now this is one of the benefits customers get when they buy a computer with a pre-installed Microsoft Operating System?

Someone help me out here, I'm feeling confused. It doesn't quite make sense, there, does it? Is that not something of a contradiction? Perhaps I'm just not able to completely understand Microsoft's double talk, but this misinformation annoys me.

[*] InfoWorld Article 1, Article 2, Slashdot Editorial

--
Toph