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I've actually never heard of XAML before, but according to Webopedia, it sounds like the same old crap, once again. :)

I don't think XAML as used in Longhorn (i.e., a declarative presentation language) is the same as Transaction Authority Markup Language. In fact, MS seems to be pulling a Firebird on the XAML guys.

Specifically, lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#secure and possibly also the special purpose distros (mini, floppy, cd, whatever).

Engarde, Immunix, and Openwall are all designed to be secure platforms for server or firewall development.

If you want something small, you might look at LEAF or Coyote or Wolverine. Coyote is free, Wolverine is $30-$120 depending on which license you need.

Personally, I'm using Astaro (free for personal use). It seems to be well designed from a security perspective (everything is chrooted, etc.), but it is not easy to customize the web interface, etc. A 'pluspack' is downloadable which includes gcc, etc, or you can compile on RedHat if you have the right versions of all the libraries.

Specifically, lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#secure and possibly also the special purpose distros (mini, floppy, cd, whatever).

Engarde, Immunix, and Openwall are all designed to be secure platforms for server or firewall development.

If you want something small, you might look at LEAF or Coyote or Wolverine. Coyote is free, Wolverine is $30-$120 depending on which license you need.

Personally, I'm using Astaro (free for personal use). It seems to be well designed from a security perspective (everything is chrooted, etc.), but it is not easy to customize the web interface, etc. A 'pluspack' is downloadable which includes gcc, etc, or you can compile on RedHat if you have the right versions of all the libraries.

Anyone know the theoretical peak of the 2300-node xeon cluster at the Lawrence Livermore lab? I've read elsewhere that it was (to be) a 1920-node cluster with a theoretical peak of 9.2 teraflops.

This article reports that the 2300-noder operates at 7.6 teraflops, but i was wondering what percentage of its theoretical peak that is.

You need to educate yourself. Micro-kernels failed because of messaging overhead, otherwise known as "kernel crossings".

You need to educate YOURself. Old-style microkernels are doing well in the marketplace (e.g. NT), though they tend to perform poorly compared with monolithic kernels because they aren't "micro" enough. New-style microkernels (e.g. QNX, ChorusOS) are also doing well, though a few (e.g. BeOS) failed for business reasons.

What you call "messaging overhead" is, in a modern microkernel, basically just copying data between address spaces. This is no more "overhead" than you would find in a monolithic kernel, where data has to be copied between "user space" and "kernel space" and back again.

Or you may have meant the overhead of context switching. Yes, you're right. Context switching is expensive on an IA-32, because the chip flushes the TLB on every address space switch. This is a flaw in the x86 design, so you might say that monolithic kernels are better suited to Intel IA-32 CPUs, and I'd say you probably had a good case there. In defence of microkernels, though, I should note that a) there are ways around this (e.g. L4's small address space optimisation), and b) monolithic kernels like Linux are hitting this limitation too on 32-bit machines with lots of RAM (see, for example this patch).

As of 2.6.0-test5 or 6, devfs is considered obsolete/deprecated, and AFAIK, will be totally gone from the 2.7 kernel.

The replacement for devfs will be a userspace implementation called udev.

There's an actual paper going around by the guy who came up with an implementation of udev, but I can't think of the URL for it offhand, so here's a little article/discussion on it.

Actually, found the paper. Here's a link to it, in PDF format.

81. IBM is the lawful owner, by assignment, of the entire right, title and interest in United States Patent No. 4,814,746 ("the '746 Patent"), duly and legally issued on March 21, 1989 to Miller et al., entitled "Data Compression Method".

Fucking idiot.

No really, RTFA - it's hilarious. It goes something like this:

------------

NATURE OF THIS ACTION

1. Denies the averments of paragraph 1.

2. Denies the averments of paragraph 2 as they relate to IBM, except refers to the referenced licenses for their contents and states that IBM is without information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments as they relate to any other person or entity.

[...]
16. Denies the averments of paragraph 16, except admits that IBM is transacting business within this state and is contracting to provide goods and services within the state and states that, to the extent they purport to state a legal conclusion, these averments do not require a response.

[...]
170. Denies the averments of paragraph 170.

[...]
GENERAL DENIAL

IBM denies each averment in the complaint that is not specifically admitted herein.

---- page ----

AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSES

First Defense

The complaint fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.

[...]
Tenth Defense

SCO has failed, in whole or in part, to mitigate its alleged damages.

------------

So, bascially, IBM denies everything in SCO's suit except for the fact that they're performing business in that state. (And then you get into the counter-claims, which are also an interesting read, if slightly less funny.)

Ok, so this is a nanokernel. Something similar to Adeos.

http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Oct/10012003/business/9 7397.asp:

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday that he understood the extension is being sought "for the purpose of gaining documents from IBM related to the patents they claim. . . . Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."

From http://lwn.net/Articles/43592/ the patent numbers are:
4,814,746
4,821,211
4,953,209
5,805,785

Go here http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm [uspto.gov]

Type in the patent numbers into uspto.gov form

You will find them all. Immediately. In fact they load up immediately after typing in the number.

Bingo. See the comments from LWN (the comment titled "Money trail from Media Transparency").

CAGW gets money from the same folks ("John M. Olin Foundation" and "The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.".

http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Oct/10012003/business/9 7397.asp:

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said Tuesday that he understood the extension is being sought "for the purpose of gaining documents from IBM related to the patents they claim. . . . Some of the patents aren't even filed with the U.S. Patent Office, as far as we can learn."

From http://lwn.net/Articles/43592/ the patent numbers are:
4,814,746
4,821,211
4,953,209
5,805,785

Go here http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm

Type in the patent numbers into uspto.gov form

You will find them all. Immediately. In fact they load up immediately after typing in the number.

SuSE Linux 9.0 Professional for AMD64 is $119.95. An update version of the software will be available online for $50.

I have yet to understand why today's counterclaim
from IBM about SCO's violation of the GPL is
different than what we already know from
August.

Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:

LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLove .php3

Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

Be under a BSD-ish license, so it could be linked in to commercial and non-commercial products. Be a LIBRARY, not a stand-alone executable, so it can be linked into anything at all.

Those GNU folks are just evil; that's why they would never agree with something like the Vorbis BSD license.

Or it could be that most people don't really understand the need for encryption, are hopelessly confused by key management, and won't use it until it is bundled with their computer and employed by default in their email program.

You might want to start first with Linus.

"I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!"

• Declaratory judgement under the copyright act.
• Declaratory judgement under the trade secrets act.
• False advertising under the Lanham act.
• Deceptive trade practices.
• Unfair competition.
• Tortious interference.
• Trade libel.

Sure they do, notably in the case filed by Redhat

The IBM case is a little more focued around what constitute "Derived Code" so maybe less so there.

That being said the 10'th claim in IBM's response states that SCO is not intitled to any relief since they didn't do anything to mitigate damages. The latter is an affirmative defense, and the fact thay took the time and effort to release press release after press release yet did nothing to mitigate the alledged damages makes it almost impossible for them to win this case

Lastly they have to crawl the first 9 barrieres first.

The first X release, built with support from the company then known as Digital Equipment Corporation, came out of MIT in 1984. By the time X10 was released, the window system was beginning to be widely used outside of MIT, but it was X11 (released on September 15, 1987 - you could order it on nine-track tape)

The prior art is the ability to view and launch programs interactively from a remote server (X can export its' display to your machine while running the app in the server. One of the claims mentioned in the patent application is the ability to run a program remotely and communicate with the client machine. X predates the patent by almost a decade).

Seems to me, more linux/apache boxes out on the net means more targets. IIS holds about 24% and apache is about 64%.

Perhaps you need to go back to your economics textbooks and refresh your memory of what monetized really means. The SCO license contains a number of clauses that make it unsuitable for use as currency.

LWN seems to think much the same thing about SCO property in the linux kernel in the now free issue: LWN-28aug03 (scroll down to "This week's SCO fun").

I thought ERS was contacted by an "associate" of the alleged perpetrator?

He wasn't that specific. He said "SCO/Caldera's site is being hit by a massive denial-of-service attack today. The timing, the scuttlebutt on Slashdot and elsewhere, and the contents of my mailbox all suggest strongly that the DOS attack was triggered by Darl McBride's slanderous interview[2] accusing the community of being IBM's sock puppets, and my response[3] to it."

Did Perens, in fact, say that? I don't remember reading it.

No, not at all. The code is clearly not protected by SysV copyright, it goes back much further, to an ancient public domain version of Unix. He did say it shouldn't have been there to begin with, which is true of course, that file was a hack in the negative sense of the word and had been removed from the tree for being 'too ugly to live' long before anyone knew that this was one of SCOs examples. You can read the full analysis if you want the details.

Darl crossed the line between deceptive and manipulative misuse of quotes to flat out verifiable lying there.

Free software authors need to be very wary about attempting to enforce their copyrights (or trademarks) for PR reasons.

SCO's FUD will in due course be destroyed in court, and the end result will be a public perception that third parties are not able to interfere with users of Free Software. Adding more lawsuits will not necessarily speed up this process and could confuse the public perception.

Meanwhile, it would be a very bad thing if the "FUD Ducks" of the world - MS shills like Rob Enderle - could point to something and say "If the Open Source hackers decide they don't like you, the IP landscape is so complex they can bring all sorts of lawsuits to stop you from using the software you've committed your business to." Any legal action taken against SCO must be tightly targetted against their legal threats, so it is really obvious that they are defending Free Software users and not attacking them. As SCO has produced a much greater weight of press releases than actual legal arguments, that is currently difficult.

Until the day that SCO actually bring law against Linux users, it's best to leave the legal side of things to IBM, who know what they're doing. They are suing SCO for damages for distributing IBM's Linux kernel code contrary to the provisions of the GPL (scan down to "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM").

As a result of SCO's breaches of the GPL, countless developers and users of Linux, including IBM, have suffered and will continue to suffer damages and other irreparable injury. IBM is entitled to an award of damages in an amount to be determined at trial and to an injunction prohibiting SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL.

Anecdotal evidence: I was involved in a proprietary project where we were using a GPL app (ezsetup). As part of creating a Windows CE installer, it links a GPL'd self extractor stub against your application in a single exe. We were uncomfortable with this and offered the author money for a non-GPL binary license, i.e. just a license to use a non-GPL version of the exe, not any rights over the source.

He refused.

More specifically, he couldn't understand our problem. "You're OK to use it under the GPL," he said, clearly puzzled. Well, sure, until he, or his widow, or estate, sold the rights to SCO or Generic EvilCorp or Mattel and they started asking why everyone using it wasn't GPL licensing their "derivative versions". We simply could not make him understand that we'd rather pay him money than dilute our IP portfolio by taking the risk.

The outcome was that we wrote our own app, and ezsetup guy didn't get any reward for his efforts. Perhaps that's unusual, but it gave me a very bad impression of the GPL developers. He put principle over pragmatism, which would be a fine thing if his principle wasn't blinding him to the problems with the license that he was putting so much faith in. Sad.

I tend to organise my mail by who it is from or who I am having the conversation with. If I am having the conversation with several people, I put the email into the folder with the person who started the conversation.

If there is product specific stuff that I want to put in more than one place, I tend to copy it to text or word or whatever format docs and save it into folders.


Now I am entirely dependant on filters to store stuff into the right folder. Usually all that is left in the inbox is spam or new contacts.

There are things for sales or support staff called "contact managers" or "customer resource managers" (CRM), which let you link up documents and mail and even records of phone conversations and reminders in a more intuitive fashion. I've yet to decide which one is best even though I've spent months trying to figure it out. I guess it is too far away from how I work as a programmer (mostly). There are these ones for example: Le Grand
ACT!
Microsoft have one that they got from Great Plains software
And there is one unix based one that I know of in Finland! Nemein Hmm, having trouble getting it to load but it was there last January. Try looking for Nemein.Net Sales just to prove I'm not imagining it review


Anyway I think some of those things are completely over the top but if your email systems are out of control they may help.

So the crazy idea is: why not create a special Linux distro as a gift for the journalist community?

It's called Knoppix. See the article Knoppix : The great linux advocate

How could they NOT sue the distributors of the infamous IP infringing products, while they ARE more than willing to sue users of the same IP infringing products?

The owner of IP can do whatever they want with it. They dont have to sue or go after anyone.

If you have read the SCO Linux license, you will see that it is a binary runtime use license. It does not cover distribution nor does it cover source code. In fact, it says that SCO will not even provide you with a binary! They just want money for you to use it.

Also, out of the kindness of thier hearts, the SCO linux license is a one time deal that covers all updates, patches, etc that SCO will not provide to you.

Of course, there is no support or warantee with the license either.

Apparently this protest (and the physical one) may have had some effect, in that the EU vote has been delayed according to LWN. Let's hope this additional time is beneficial to the anti-patent cause...

Was done in 1998 with the GNU Rope project. Unfortunately this is the last we ever heard of it and after that it was lost in the fog of other vaporware.

Original announcement here, An Advogado discussion of the project here.

Michael

Let's please put this myth to rest. This is the third time this month that I have posted to correct this misimpression.

Lindows used to run everything as root, but current versions of Lindows don't run everything as root anymore. You have the option to add regular users during installation, and the installation encourages you to do so.

Just like in redhat.

Just like in debian.

I'm not advocating Lindows by any means (I don't even like their product), but I do think it is important to get the facts correct.

Well said, but let's put this little myth to rest: Lindows doesn't run everything as root by default anymore.

Too bad he changed his mind over the BSD licensed OGG code.

First, you should consider posting with an account (even one tied to a throwaway e-mail address, if you wish to preserve your anonymity in that way). Slashdot makes it very easy to skip over most anonymously posted articles, such as yours.

Second, I can find no source to substantiate your claim and you have not posted any. On the contrary, I can find information where RMS (which is who I'm guessing "he" refers to) supports the switch of some of the Ogg Vorbis code to a new BSD-like license (this also appears pertinant).

NFT (norda family trust)

own the netblock which SCO uses

NFT Netblock owner

(see above netcraft link.)

according to this article ...

NFT are boycotting SCO products and services..

This is probably what is going on here

After reading about it on LWN earlier today, I tried to imagine this beowulf cluster computing how to build a larger beowulf cluster, or just compute how to improve it's own network. (Notice, they used a four node cluster to computer how to wire the network.)

Mandrake is a product of MandrakeSoft.

UnitedLinux is the parent company of SUSE, the European arm which produces SUSE Linux. There is also the Asian arm, TurboLinux, and the South American/Latin arm, Conectiva. Yep, all these major distributions fall under the same parent company. So you're pretty accurate in asserting that there's only a few big players as far as corporations go.

IANAL, but the guys who wrote IBM's Countersuit most definitely are. (fifth, sixth, and seventh defenses).

Also very interesting is "SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM", where IBM, as a copyright owner of parts of the Lnux kernel, is suing SCO for breach of the GNU General Public License in attempting to collect license fees for it.

There's an abandoned project called SnapFS that worked as an extension of the ext3 filesystem, but it seems long dead. There's more mention of it here as well.

Hmmm...doing some Googling, I found this page that may have a useable download, but it's in alpha form.

It also looks like you can use LVM to create snapshots as well. I'll have to look at that more myself.

I was looking at this website. it makes the point that the code in question if from the "SCO Ancient Unix" which has sense been released under the BSD liscence. I found an interesting, post that makes sense:

(Posted Aug 19, 2003 23:58 UTC (Tue) by Arker) (Post reply)

Call me a paranoid, but it has saved my life at least once.

I won't say there's no worry here. Please someone archive this stuff on your personal machine. And don't tell anyone it's there. Just keep it until it's needed, or this mess is over.

I'd just say I've done that myself, as I've done in past cases (I have an untouched copy of 2.4 source from Caldera for instance,) but it's almost 2am in my timezone and I've done enough for the day. I know there are thousands of geeks who haven't, and I know a lot of us have a little hard drive space to spare. Grab this stuff. If only one of us has it, it means nothing, but if a couple hundred have byte-identical copies with the same time and date and the same story on how it was obtained, we have a legal chain of evidence that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. So please, just in case, do it now. Burn it to a CD or something, along with a description of exactly when and how you obtained it. You'll almost certainly be wasting a CD, but they're cheap, and if it does become an issue, you'll be glad you did.

I'm going to bed now, I leave it up to you.

the wayback machine he refurs to is at http://web.archive.org/web/20010124100000/www.sco. com/offers/ancient001/

Recent versions of Lindows no longer run everything as root.

Well according to the extra LWN link, we can follow some of the malloc code to 1974 (soon will be 30 years old). See this link, where this code was contribued .

Yeah, awesome find. Or maybe he just read the article :).

Caldera, yes, the same Caldera that acquired the server part of Old SCO in August 2000 and renamed itself The SCO Group in 2003, created an IA-64 distribution.

Except that the symbol-font comments being discussed in this thread (about rmfree) are not in Linux. The part that is identical comes from a textbook. And where in your ass did this 890,000 LoC number come from? URL please?

Unless both Linux and SCO legally copied the code from a BSD-licensed version of UNIX(tm). Or unless SCO stole the code from Linux. Until each party shows verifiable changelogs for the relevant sections, it's very much an open question.

Check out the history good overview History

Others agree, they've been chatting about this on Linux weekly news:

see here

The Gentoo People and an AC the previous SCO thread beat me to it. There's a very interesting discussion over at LWN, in which Bruce Perens points out that Caldera has put that code under a free licence.

Bruce Perens pointed out over at lwn.net that Caldera put this particular code under a BSD license in 2000.

If you read the counterclaim of IBM


SIXTH COUNTERCLAIM
Breach of the GNU General Public License ...
76. SCO has taken source code made available by IBM under the GPL, included that code in SCO's Linux products, and distributed significant portions of those products under the GPL. By so doing, SCO accepted the terms of the GPL (pursuant to GPL 5)
.....

77. The GPL prohibits SCO from asserting certain proprietary rights over, or attempting to restrict further distribution of any source code Distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL.
....

79. As a result of SCO's breaches of the GPL, countless developers and users of Linux, including IBM, have suffered and will continue to suffer damages and other irreparable injury. IBM is ntitled to an award of damages in an amount to be determined at trial and to an injunction prohibiting SCO from its continuing and threatened breaches of the GPL.


Hmm, interestiong, you can not ask licensence money for GPL software, but you can sue for irreparable damage, even for software you dont own. isnt this exactly the thing SCO is doing?

Cant they just ask licence money for the linux kernel since the GPL licence was revoked (they did misconduct according to the gpl)