Slashdot Mirror

Here is a short list of things AT&T has done in recent memory: limits on "unlimited" use, cancellation of service for criticizing the company, and colluding with the RIAA & MPAA to spy on their internet customers, colluding with the NSA to illegally spy on U.S. citizens.

If the above list reflects how badly they treat they customers, before you get upset at the people working there you should probably consider that AT&T is not treating its workers well. I'm guessing it's not a good place to work and I'm assuming the workers were probably wrong until I found out the truth of the matter.

According to this article on the modular datacenter it seems like they started doing better after they changed their name. Guess even a big company needs to worry about SEO? :)

The coolest (literally I guess) was where the put 50 of these in an abandoned mine in Japan. The mine had a constant, low temperature which would reduce cooling costs.

They mention 4 other customers in that article which is over a year old. There are probably more.

The nice thing is that you can also get Sun remote monitoring of the boxes. So if they detect a fault, they can alert a local non claustrophobic service provider to swap out a drive or whatever. Though your IT staff might miss having a NASA like command and control center.

These may seem far fetched to you, but they are possibilities that become unpossibilities one you start switching devices to non-ubiquitous filesystem. So, here's the bigger question: why close those doors?

Its best to avoid making assumptions as to what someone else may find far fetched, I in no way disagree with the value of interoperabilty. The only reason linux and TomTom use FAT is for interoperability not because Microsoft has some amazing "IP" and everyone wants FAT. However, you do bring up an important point, the bigger question, why close those doors? Considering the threat to all the hardware manufacturers affected by the interoperability issues you highlight it seems its time to dump the dead weight baggage of Microsoft's FAT patent lunacy and bring an open format to ubiquity.

April 16, 2008 ELC: Trends in embedded Linux

Usage of Linux in embedded development projects crossed a threshold this year, with more than 50% of the 812 respondents saying that they are currently using it. Usage of Linux has been growing year over year, but didn't cross the halfway mark until 2008. More than 61% believed their company would be using Linux within the next two years.

December 04 2003 Microsoft to Charge for FAT File System

January 11, 2006 Microsoft's FAT Patent Upheld

January 13, 2006 FAT Patent Means Hardware Dollars For Microsoft

February 20, 2007 Ballmer repeats threats against Linux

February 25, 2009 Microsoft sues TomTom over Linux and other patent claims

Hardware manufacturers are caught in a catch 22, decouple from the Microsoft monopoly and risk losing market as I assume you are suggesting or remain fully engaged in the Microsoft monopoly and have your margins, market, and product plans somewhat dictated by Microsoft.

As someone who has worked in the brutally competitive hardware industry for many years I can see that its time for hardware manufacturers to show some back bone and beat down the fat and lazy leech that Microsoft has become.

you could always use a system where you dont need norton.

I know, because Macs and Linux NEVER can get malware; they are perfect like that. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601946

Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.

"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim"

Microsoft Settles Anti-Trust Charges with Be

Microsoft Corp. and Be Inc. Reach Agreement to Settle Litigation

BeOS

FWIW, I don't take this as a troll, but anecdotal. If you've held the same position twice, then you're not in a strong position to speak outside of that experience.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/2244391
http://www.cio.com.au/article/68397/munich_government_chooses_linux_over_microsoft
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7008
http://linuxscorecard.blogspot.com/2007/09/this-blog-will-spring-back-to-life.html

Although I'm not citing "privately-owned" businesses, and I'm not sure how many of those there are that are multi-billion dollar concerns, I am suggesting that there are those with more than 10+ years experience making the Linux over Windows call - and leaving it as a exercise to uncover more.

As for number of attack vectors being wider for FOSS than Windows - please, try beer, it's better than the Kool-Aide - really.

I can give you 5000:

http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3797906/Microsoft+Misses+Earnings+First+Layoffs+Ahead.htm

There's a culture of dishonesty and rationalization that's taken hold, and it's gonna drag us all down.

What went wrong was the CAN-SPAM act was never designed to prevent spam, instead it brought in provisos that actually forbid end-users from suing the spammers and also provided safe harbor for ISPs and 'online marketers', er spammers ...

One measure against spam was putting an `ADV' keyword in the subject of the email, but this was argued against by Bill Gates who instead argued for setting up 'safe harbor' that would absolve online marketers from getting sued ...

THIS is what will truely switch people fast, when I can multi-tag files on my OS or programs are smart enough to do it for you.

A file extension is not enough 'tagging' for a type of data now, it's a poor identifier and not helpful overall, I want to see machines much easier to find files I want, when I want and store them easily and convieniently with a fast, intuitive UI to access the data quickly.

A reasonable request.

http://nepomuk.kde.org/
http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3688606

Which has already been granted.

KDE4 rocks, and it beats Vista pointless for speed.

Note the comment from
Steve Conway from IDC

Steve Conway, senior analyst with IDC for high performance computing issues, said this problem has been around for a while, and multi-core is only exacerbating it. "x86 processors were never designed for HPC," he told InternetNews.com. "Those processors were not designed to communicate with each other at a high speed. With these big systems, you have to move data over large territories.

exactly all you need to do is include things about how linux is a $25 billion dollar industry for a start http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/10/linux-ecosystem-worth-25-billi.html .

Point out how widely used it is in universities, how much it's used in the industry

Oh and your average unix admin earns about $80000 a year http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_IT10000152.html

Because that dinosaur has apparently patented advert placement in search results .. http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3387211

http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3679026

Yes, you're right. The second link is missing. Actually so is the first. The only link provided is to the Seattle Times coverage, whereas the excerpts appear to be from http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/10791_3785611_1

So we can deduce that almost nobody even tried to RTFA. No surprise there.

Then it became Firefox, and Debian didn't like that and called it IceWeasel.

No, Debian was forced to rename it due to their stance on trademarks.

The Firefox logo is trademarked, so Debian doesn't consider it to be Free and will not include it as part of its distribution. Mozilla claims that using the Firefox name without the official branding is a trademark violation.

Furthermore, Mozilla claims that if Debian runs any patches to the version of Firefox included with Debian distros, it has to run them by Mozilla first for approval.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3634591

Right now, eBay is the auction place. Sellers want to sell on eBay because that's where all the buyers are. Buyers want to buy on eBay because that's where all the sellers are.

At some point, both buyers and sellers could get sufficiently upset with eBay as to take their business elsewhere. Are we there yet?

And if we are, what is the most likely competitor?

http://online-auction-sites.toptenreviews.com/

One more thought: if the current situation is close to the tipping point, then all it would take is one single disturbance to cause a mass exodus from eBay to the new site. For example, if Google were to buy one of eBay's top competitors, and publicly announce Google Auctions, and announce that they would charge less in fees and allow checks and postal money orders... eBay could lose everything in the blink of an eye.

Remember how fast Xfree86 was dumped in favor of X.org? Dissatisfaction with the Xfree86 project was already high, and then they announced one more petty annoying license change, and *boom*, they were done. I wonder if this could happen with eBay.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3338031

steveha

Then why are mega corporations pushing to raise the cap on H1B Visa IT limits if they "love" us US Citizen IT Workers?

I've been out of work since 2002, and many other IT workers I know have moved on to non-IT work as all companies in our area are hiring are foreign IT workers via H1B Visas. I have been turned down for thousands of IT jobs because I am not a foreigner that is willing to work for minimum wage or almost minimum wage via a H1B IT Visa. I'd have a much better chance if I renounce my US citizenship and apply for citizenship in an Asian nation and then apply for an H1B Visa application and then I'd have a 100% chance of being hired as an IT worker in the USA. Of course it would be for a fraction of what I would be paid as a US citizen, but most of us have been out of work for so long, we start to get desperate. :)

considering 90% of the world's computer users use Windows based systems

You know what's amazing? Every one of Microsoft's competitors runs on Windows too! Wow! Isn't that cool? I bet you had no idea! </sarcasm>

mostly of the stable & solid nature based on the Windows NT-based family (2000/XP/Server2003/VISTA/Server 2008

See, now I know you're astroturfing. That right there is a bit of market-speak designed by someone who knows the psychology of advertising. Very cute using apparent typos to make yourself look like "one of the guys". But riddle me this: Who makes a different class of typo with each Operating System listed? Shouldn't the typos be consistent? And who makes so many typos when listing OSes, only to spell out "Windows NT-based family" rather than using the more succinct "WinNT family"?

So, Mr. AC. You haven't been posing as dead people lately, have you? Maybe if you took the time to make a good browser you wouldn't need the astroturf campaign.

And just to prove my point that there's no real issue with Mozilla's "EULA that isn't much of an EULA" they've now come out and said that EULA is a bad term and isn't really what it is because it doesn't add additional restrictions.

This BSOD was set up on purpose - it was a part of the decoration. See http://blog.internetnews.com/apatrizio/2008/09/the-fail-er-joke-is-on-the-web.html

Yeah, you really want to avoid those ISS certified parts - their laptops are so 'high-tech', they run Windows and get Windows spyware which steals passwords

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3768196/Password+Stealing+Worm+Catches+NASA+Napping.htm

I'll just bet some astronaut has gone and used the same password for his WoW account as the station's computer.

Sometimes the 'user mindset' gets silly. I often find our users think they're so important to the company that they're justified in doing ANYTHING, including surfing for porn in open cubicles during business hours at world headquarters with tour groups walking past. Or, more frightening, to cover up their ignorance or to short-cut understanding... blah, blah, blah.

Sure, there are roadblock powertrippers out there in the IT security field, just as there are in pretty much any security field (CIA, cops, mall security, etc.) On the other hand, there are legitimate risks out there that do have real-world bottom-line consequences. No one thinks that viruses are a big deal until you've got an entire factory floor idled because the controller's infected. No one thinks that they'll be hacked and make the news for it, but they do (Caterpillar, TJX, even security company Guidance Software, to name a few).

What gets me down about my job (yes, I'm in IT security) is not the adversarial nature of it. What really gets me is that absolutely NO ONE really wants security implemented until AFTER the company makes the Wall Street Journal for being hacked. Who gets fired on that day? Often times, it's the security people, despite the fact that they'd been trying to implement countermeasures that would have at least reduced the damage from the attack. Until your company makes the WSJ, security is overhead, a liability, a roadblock. Afterwards, they're the ones who let the barbarians through the gates, regardless of how many times the board denied funding security projects.

I used to be jazzed about IT security, but 10+ years of being told that nothing overrides the business need, and that I'm nothing but a roadblock has ground me down to the point where I'm just punching the clock and trying to figure out what career path to do next.

And to all you whiny, lazy, good-for-nothing assholes who can't remember their precious password: Can you remember where your car keys are? Your Social Security Number? Your birthdate? Your wife's birthdate? The phone number to the restaurant that delivers your dinner? The name of the girl you had a crush on in 4th grade? People remember all sorts of things when they want to, and when it's important to them. Now, think about this... if your company makes the WSJ because you set your password to Ripken09, who are they going to fire? Yeah, you're right: they'll can the poor security schmuck that's dedicated his career to compensating for stupid pukes like you, but you'll probably keep your job since there really wasn't much that could be done about the hacker anyway.

I guess there's the problem in a nutshell. The only people who care enough about security to do something about it are those who stand a chance of losing something when security fails. The vast majority of the time, the only people at risk are the security guys.

Holy crap, I just re-read that. Never realized how bitter and vindictive I've become. I got to get me a new job!

This is just like their tabbed browsing patent. M$ Business model: find an unpatented feature in an open source browser. Implement it in IE, then patent it. Sue the pants of the people who dared infringe on it.

whoops i meant here.

Cryptography is not magic.

While I don't expect the AC to read this, it lays out why we are not going to see DNSSEC for some time. http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3758566/Is+DNSSEC+the+Answer+to+Internet+Security.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSSEC is also suprisingly good with a lot of easy to read information, and includes why the current DNSSEC specs may open up more security risks.

example1 >Note that someone could deliberately or inadvertently cause a degradation of service by sending large number of queries for uncached RRs, for example, traversing the NSEC RR chain for a large TLD.

example2>DNSSEC forces the exposure of information that by normal DNS best practice is kept private. NSEC3 drafted in march 2008 may correct this.

Also, most people don't realize that DNSSEC is not an end-to-end security mechanism. It only protects DNS data between an authoritative name server and a caching name server. Currently no operating system resolver libraries that I know of verify that the caching server is providing legitimate results to DNSSEC protected domains. Until your OS or applications provide DNSSEC support, running your own DNSSEC enabled cache is the only way to currently protect your dnssec queries from being forged.

Yup, Weave is going to be taking off soon. You can find out a lot more about it here:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/06/weave-status-update/

And I talked with Sean Michael Kerner about it for a while, and he posted the video of that chat here:

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/06/mozilla-weave-gears-up-for-new.html

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/8_131041

Bell South tests internet access over fiber.

in 1999.

At&T have laid fiber. Verizon has FIOS all over the place in the southeast

http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios?typ=s

You are wrong.

It's a shame that it took a European company like Opera Software to force European Regulators to stop the Microsoft's take over of the Web.

That is of course standards-compliant to the current version of Internet Explorer and not a Browser by any other name .. :)

"Microsoft is .. letting Web site developers signal to IE how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages"

How about writing web pages to a generic standard, something like W3C

... these are the same idiots that thought that a beta of windows vista was the single largest software download: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/windows-vista-for-guinness-world.html

show of hands: who downloaded a linux dvd iso larger than 3.5 gigabytes before vista beta was released? ... and apparently there is no "world record" to break anyway: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/05/mozillas-latest-firefox-launch.html

and, are they not going to consider the millions of copies of, say, internet explorer 7, downloaded the first day it was forced through as an automatic update? or how many downloads of itunes are there in a day when apple _requires_ an update?

"the real reason they are exposing source is so that developers of products that compete with MS products like Word or Excel aren't at a competitive disadvantage that could result in expensive lawsuits"

Microsoft was scared of 'Open Source' a long time before the EU ruling. And it's 'shared source' but only under the Microsoft platform.

"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"

"Microsoft today announced a partnership with open source solution vendor SpikeSource to eventually certify all of SpikeSource's SpikeIgnited solutions on the Microsoft Windows platform"

"what Microsoft really wants is to prevent defections--customers replacing some of their software with open-source alternatives"

...and MacOS is the only commercial OS that has never had a zero day exploit in the wild

Wow... I cannot believe you said that out loud.

Juniper's Linux IPS Hits 10Gb/sec

No, it didn't.

Having recently seen Sun buy MySQL, this looks a lot like a "me too"-move.

"Astor [Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB] added that the discussions with IBM pre-dated the $1 billion acquisition of MySQL by Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) earlier this year."

        -- http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3736336

Microsoft's REAL error was actually retaining these email messages instead of following their "do-not-save-e-mail directive" and "30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule", like they did to thwart previous lawsuits.

Last Friday, the company released Vista SP1 for download by both individuals and companies who previously beta tested the service pack. This week, the company went further. "At the end of this week we will be making the English version of Windows Vista SP1 available to volume licensing customers ... Other languages will follow soon ... [and] later this month, SP1 will be available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers," Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management, said in a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog today. The primary hold up for broadly releasing SP1 has been minor glitches involving device driver installation, basically requiring that some device drivers will need to be reinstalled after installing SP1. Volume Buyers to Get Vista SP1 Early [February 11]

That's nothing. Microsoft Wins Patent for Scroll Mouse.

In 1965, U.S. corporate taxes amounted to 4% of gross domestic product, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development which includes local, state, and federal income and capital-gains taxes in its calculation. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 2.5%.

House approves $30 billion in corporate tax breaks

Article promoting it on MSN.com without mentioning MSFT :
A corporate tax break that could benefit you

Microsoft Reduces Irish Corporate Tax Liability To Less Than 10%

WTO rules against US corporate tax breaks

The EU was set to implement retaliatory tariffs

Senate Approves Tech Corporate Tax Break

Ms use share options to reduce their tax bill by $5.5 billion

Microsft & Cisco pay $0 Federal Income Tax

Quite a bit of it comes from Google every time you use the integrated Google search bar.

This idea was actually around before the integrated circuit.
We got ICs because Jack Kilby invented the Integrated Circuit in response to a requirement to create modular electronics.
See here or here

The article did not seem to give any data on false positives. A story here has Coverity claiming a 10% false positive rate. But there is no independent confirmation. It would also be interesting to know how hard it is to prove a false positive vs. how hard to fix a true positive. In other words, it it worth Coverity's time to further reduce the false positive rate.

This one has been talked about for a while. Didn't Yahoo shoot this idea down pretty quickly last year? What has changed to make it any more likely? The only reasons I can think of for this to occur are

1. MS would get the advantage of a search engine on par with Google.
2. MS would also get the advertising revenue that Yahoo brings in.
3. Yahoo could gain access to MS Office Live, allowing them to compete with Google in online document creation and collaboration.

IDC sells reports with comments like the following for thousands of dollars:

"Despite the dominance of the Windows platform, Linux adoption continues to grow in the region in both the COE and server operating environment (SOE) spaces," says Antony Lee, market analyst, Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.

...

"On the desktop side, IDC sees Linux share more than doubling, from 3% today to 6% in 2007, while Windows loses a bit of ground."

So, people who scientifically design and implement surveys reported that GNU/Linux was the size of Mac on the desktop a few years ago and it is still growing rapidly.

see this excerpt. That was from 2005. If the share was 3% then and growing rapidly, how can the NetApps share of less than 1% possibly be true unless NetApps' universe is unrepresentative? That was before Dell and ASUS jumped in.

So. There are no signs of GNU/Linux on the desktop slowing down any time soon and Chinese Linux Market

We know there are millions of GNU/Linux desktops there, because Sun made a deal to supply millions of them. see Sun story (2003)

Turbolinux is also in China in a big way. "According to the International Data Corp. (IDC), Turbolinux's market share in servers in China was 62 percent in 2004. On the desktop, it holds a 25 percent share. "

see http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170700943 (2005)

GNU/Linux is huge in China, a country several times the population of the USA with a huge growth in GDP. Hundreds of millions there will be first time computer buyers within a few years and they are not locked-in to M$

Numbers are not too much different in the BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China). There, governments are activly promoting GNU/Linux by using it themselves, putting it into schools or insisting on open file formats.

"Sun executives were meeting with Brazilian government executives and were told in no uncertain terms that the government would not consider any technology that wasn't open source. " see www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3697166

So Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused Sun to open Java.

BRIC is 2.65 thousand million people. see http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000177.html Many are poor but rapidly industrializing and hungry for IT. Are they going to want a bloated OS or a lean, mean, computing machine? Do not be misled by NetApps. Unless their clients are audited and deemed to be representative of the world somehow, they must be considered way off base.

China is huge. If you look at http://google.com/trends and enter linux,windows you will see that other OS has a steady lead over time with Google. Now, zero in on China. Interesting, eh? Now, zero in on Beijing. Whoops! Where did the lead go? Beijing is a huge city and the seat of government. Stories about that other OS taking over there are overstated, even at $3 a licence.

Anyone remember Liquid Motion, Microsoft's last attempt at a Flash killer? 1998 press release. History repeating indeed.

>What's the return for a Linux developer?

Linux developers work for money, just like apple and windows developers.

I thought the Mandrake to Mandriva change was the combination of the words "Mandrake" and "Connectiva" after the two merged. In fact, lots of references to "Mandrake" are still found within the distribution. I guess I'd never heard about this lawsuit, but I found information quickly with a Google search after reading your post. It seems I was right about how the name came about, but that they changed at all was indeed prompted by the suit.

Internet News has the story from 2005 and the info is in Wikipedia's Mandriva article.

I also keep seeing references to an appeal, but never the results for it or any information about it continuing either. I'm wondering if Mandriva dropped the appeal after changing names. It might be silly to change back anyway, with all the disruption a name change can cause.

Thanks for your informative post. I'm a long-time Mandrake/Mandriva user and I didn't know this. I was just flipping through my collection of Linux distros the other night and I have 7.0, 8.0-8.2, 9.0-9.1, 10.0-10.1, 2006 Community, and 2008 One CD RC2. My 8.0 is even PowerPack retail box. I also use some other distros from time to time, but Mandriva seems to have the most consistent hardware detection across all the odd stuff on which I've tried installing Linux. It's a shame I missed this tidbit about the company behind the distro until now.

This story is 5 days old.

IBM has always been patent-crazy, but the company is one of the most benevolent when it comes to enforcing them. In fact, Big Blue has a tendency to patent things simply to release them later to the larger public.
 
In that sense, IBM sometimes acquires simple patents to prevent other entities from filing them and using them out of the bounds of common sense and reason. The practice fits with part one of their business strategies: to be forerunners and stewards of technology. They could spend those millions of dollars on advertising campaigns, or guiding technological progress--which will earn them respectful nods of approval generations from now.
 
IBM realizes that they're not just building a company, but a legacy, and understand their power and importance of their work. Sometimes its better to help everyone progress, and they know it. For that, I see them as one of the Good Guys.

Someone already did this to counter the Blaster worm. See Welchia. The problem with this one though is that it was flooding networks with ICMP pings, causing more network outages than the Blaster worm it was designed to fight.

NextWave declared bankruptcy after defaulting on $4.7 billion due on spectrum wireless licenses awarded to the company by the FCC in 1996. The FCC revoked NextWave's spectrum rights, arguing that the company had paid only a fraction of what it promised, and re-auctioned the rights to companies including Verizon and VoiceStream. NextWave sued, however, contending that U.S. bankruptcy laws protected the company from the FCC license revocation. The dispute reached the Supreme Court in January 2003, with the court ruling that the FCC had improperly seized more than 200 wireless licenses from NextWave. The FCC was forced to refund the $16 billion in proceeds from the sale of NextWave's licenses.