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This question is one that appears to not yet have been raised in the OpenID security discussion. In these times of phishing attacks on OpenID this should bear heavy on the mind.

For more information, this article is a good jumping off point.

The patent was originally filed on November 30, 2003. Can anyone say for sure there was prior art before this date?

Here's an IT Week Review of the Treo 600 dated November 6, 2003.

It sounds like they read the review and worked up a patent for it over the Thanksgiving holiday. :)

How about a new standard for patents - that if a patent is filed when a practitioner of the art would ordinarily know the patent to be invalid, and the patent is not withdrawn between the time of filing and the time of issue, that it's a criminal offense?

This is getting out of hand - not the least of which that it's over 4 years since filing for this patent to issue because the system is all gummed up with bogus patents.

If I wanted to browse the Internet in a mobile fashion I would be much more interested in a Asus Eee PC format that could browse cellular networks, anybody know if it can? They must be thinking of adding something other then wireless...

more power, more traditional format, proper keyboard/mouse, ok its bigger but its much smaller then a real laptop - and you can work on office documents and actually do something approaching tasks on it. now thats a toy I'm really thinking of getting....

http://www.itweek.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/2192000/199-asus-ultra-mobile-uk-soon

The Chairman and CEO of Affinity Media is actually Brock Pierce, a major shareholder of IGE (though the source is possibly not updated) [1]. In the past (at the age of 18) he has been closely linked with the trafficking of minors for use in child pornography [1 and 2], though has been excused from these charges for undisclosed reasons.

My opinion still stands about the company Affinity Media and that they're actually trying to make a good name for themselves, but so long as the CEO and Chairman remains to be Brock Pierce, I don't think I'm comfortable with the recent Wowhead transaction.

SOURCES:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce (Possibly Outdated and/or Biased)
2. http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2120349/dotcom -founders-spanish-jail
3. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1999/11/32 267

Even if it is a free registration, this has been reported in many places, it's not hard to find a subscripton-free report, for example: here

Not to mention that all ended up in romania... Sorry for sarcasm, but do you have *ANY* laws?

yes

Wrong. HD-DVD has already won. The Porn industry recently decided to standardize on it.
Just search google-news for "hd-dvd porn" for some references. Or here's a few for the lazy.

http://www.itweek.co.uk/vnunet/news/2172459/porn-i ndustry-standardises-hd
http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=93648
http://www.ecanadanow.com/business/2007/01/12/porn -industry-says-screw-your-blu-ray-were-using-hd-dv d/

actually they do sometimes catch them.

Have you tried the latest GParted? This article says a new version was released on July 9.

Sun has denied that their move to back Ubuntu is a move against Red Hat, or SuSE. Whether or not that is believable is another question, but thats just what they have said.

This can only be for the good. To have two systems, which will eventually work interoperably, will actually strengthen both systems. Not only that - but they are operated by two different authorities, one military and one civil. With the US system starting to fall apart, something like this is a lifesaver. And to think that it will piss off the hawks... well, we'll call it a bonus.

GPS users must plan for outages
A very thorough discussion of Europe's thinking on this (PDF alert)

My.. that sounds awfully like what SUSE Linux Office Desktop did over 2 years ago.

Do keep up.

"You can take a common word and trademark it for your application" Maybe not... not if the word describes the product, anyway.

Sainsburys (a UK supermarket) will tell you differently.

They've just reported profits of £15m down from £650m. Theyve gone from the number 1 supermarket to 2nd, soon to be 3rd. The reason is a failed IT outsourcing project.

Do you mean these suckers kept their jobs? Jobs besides polishing bulkheads that is. I would rather go with IBM - the stuff is unlikely to fail catastrophically and will be so difficult to maintain that I will never be made redundant.

Name a single Word vulnerability that has been exploited in the last five years.

Oh, fine. I'll be sporting. Make it eight years. That's how long it took to find a wide-open Samba hole.

It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.

It certainly amazes me about the earning potential of a plumber. However, many of these plumbers are doing more than just unblocking sinks and loos as they are also qualified to repair/install electric showers/water heaters.
So they are more of electrical engineers rather than just plunger-plunkers. 40 pounds/hour isn't a bad salary :)

Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was".

The UK market more or less collapsed around August 2001, when various telecom companies decided to layoff staff. I was changing jobs at the time and one HR manager told me that it had become complete chaos with every office being blanketed with a blizzard of CV's. Thousands of graduates were firing off thousands of CV's to hundreds of agencies who were then firing off hundreds of thousands of CV's to every company they had heard from.

Many companies were trying to recruit as many graduates as possible, but were limited by the number of project managers available (there are 40,000 unemployed contractors who would be willing to take up these positions, but the companies just want someone with the highly specialised technical skills relevant to their field who wants to make the permanent change). Instead of advertising for the post of project manager, some companies would advertise for senior software engineers, and then try and convince the hapless individual that their skills were out of date/rusty or had the attitude of "what can you do that graduates can't do?" in order to make them into moving into management. Others would admit that the graduates didn't really understand anything, and they needed someone to work full time training them up.

I don't object to people having the opportunity to go to university, but they should be able to demonstrate the knowledge/motivation/enthusiasm/personality to carry them through. And the number of places available should match the number of positions available (as in accounting/pharmacy). But none of this would have applied 4-5 years ago, when the dot com boom was at its peak.

Would you want to?

So if they can get inside of IBM records they can begin to stitch a winnable case together, while if the "Match code or acquit" theory holds then the case is over. So if they can satisfy the initial requests enough to make the judge open up IBM to their SCO discover, then they can begin to make the case.

What you're describing is known as a "fishing expedition", and is generally frowned upon when bringing a lawsuit. The judge in this case apparently understands this, which is why she decided that SCO has to show all of their cards first before the judge will decide on SCO's Motion to Compel Discovery.

In case you've forgotten, here are some of the questions that SCO must answer before they get a shot at IBM:

INTERROGATORY NO. 1: seeks specific identification of all alleged trade secrets and confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges IBM misappropriated or misused. This information is requested by product, file and line of code.

This means that IBM wants SCO to show show which parts of Linux are deemed to be infringing, "by product, file and line of code". This is "The Code" that followers of the suit have been waiting for since at least March.

INTERROGATORY NO. 2: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 2 seeks further identification of: (a) all persons who have or had rights to the same; (b) the nature and sources of SCO's rights in the same; and (c) efforts to maintain secrecy or confidentiality of the same.

This is IBM saying "For each item you identified in answer to the first question, we want to know who else can claim rights that information, the exact nature of any agreements between that entity and SCO, and what efforts were made on both parts to keep it a secret." (Novell, maybe?)

INTERROGATORY NO. 3: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 3 seeks the identity of all persons to whom the same was disclosed and the details of such disclosure. In particular, this interrogatory seeks: (a) the date of disclosure; (b) the terms of disclosure; (c) the documents relating to disclosure; (d) all places where the trade secret and/or confidential or proprietary information may be found or accessed.

This is IBM saying "For each of the items you identified in answer to the first question, we want to know who all you've shown that information to, when you showed it to them, why you showed it to them, all documentation relating to that disclosure, and any place where that information can be found." Remember, SCO not only charges that SCO's IP got into Linux against their wishes, but that IBM did it. IBM wants to see SCO's evidence that is had to be IBM and couldn't be someone else.

As far as what SCO wants this case to be about, SCO has contradicted itself on so many occasions that it's impossible to say with any certainty what SCO is suing over. We've gone from Darl McBride saying, on several occasions, that there is "line-by-line" copying of UnixWare code into Linux. But somehow we've gotten to the point where they're trying to tell the court that they can't possibly find has been infringed until they get their response from IBM.

So if you will excuse me, I will continue to believe that SCO are stupid scum, because they've not shown any evidence to the contrary.

Jay (=
(I'm not a lawyer either; if you're coming to /. or me for legal advice, you're going to get your money's worth)

Central Authentication/Access Control
This is done with OpenLDAP (unix clients), Samba3 (for Windows clients). Enforcing settings has not been integrated yet (but they could be enforced - at least with KDE - via config files which could be distributed via the package management system). Updates should not be pushed via AD IMHO. apt-get, urpmi, yum etc can do this well enough (only thing is setting this up initially is not automatic).

Also, just an addendum about Samba. It outperforms the corresponding Windows alternative.

IT Week has added further information here, to meet all the calls for more data.

Those interested in the details of IT Week's test can see a graph of our findings here.

" The IT Week Labs tests used Ziff-Davis NetBench file server benchmark with 48 client systems. We selected a low-specification but otherwise modern server for our tests. We used an HP ProLiant BL10 eClass Server fitted with a 900MHz Pentium III chip, a single 40GB ATA hard disk and 512MB of RAM. We did not tune any of the software to improve performance."

There is a scant amount of information on the actual tests performed in this article.

There is a scant amount of information on the actual tests performed in this article.

Now where are the numbers to back it up?

I couldn't see a copy of the article on their website but...

There's a link at the bottom of the article originally posted to this one which mentions those stats.

Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny

Well, if you look at the bottom of the article, it links to this article, which is slightly more descriptive about the test setup. Still no hard numbers though.

There are if you're a corporate: Orange offers flat-rate pricing for businesses, including Orange GPRS Business LAN, which is billed by the size of the pipe from their NOC to yours...

Samba easily outperforms Windows' native SMB implementation: http://www.itweek.co.uk/News/1131114

So there is nothing preventing Wine from beating Windows at it's own game.

Not to answer for him but, here's one for file and printer sharing. There are also a number of TPC benchmarks that show Linux outperforms MS W2K running Oracle on identical platforms.

That said, I'd like to second your point that broad statements like "outperforms" should always be in the context of "at what". It's like me saying "I'm faster than George" ... it just doesn't mean anything when it's out of context like that.

The OTM Vpen, on the other hand, can use ordinary paper: [http://www.otmtech.com/vpen.asp]

This review [IT Week] mentions that the technology has been licensed to Motorola, Siements, Nokia, and Microsoft, and first products will ship and the end of this year...

I look forward to trying it out...

Turns out you can't replace Samba with Microsoft Networking without taking a BIG performance hit... that's right, Samba's implementation of SMB is twice as fast as Microsoft's, according to IT week Of course, all those open-source geeks are doing is copying M$, not providing any "innovation".

I found the other news link for today on the Samba home page even more interesting. Could this be the motivation behind the strange licensing hijinx?