Slashdot Mirror

the complaint and some exhibits ( A B C D E can be found on SCO web site

Flame them. I just did. It's very theraputic.

Give Ransom a piece of your mind. Click here to go the SCO/ Caldera feedback page.

Give Ransom a piece of your mind. Click here to go the SCO/ Caldera feedback page.

Everybody, go to this link and let them know how you feel:

http://www.sco.com/company/feedback/

There have been several comments that the BSA claim to represent the copyright owners is false because OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA. I wanted to point out that while it is true that the OpenOffice.org is not a member of the BSA and has probably never asked the BSA to represent them, they also still are not the owners of OpenOffice. Rather, anyone that contributes to OpenOffice is required to sign a Joint Copyright Assignment (JCA) which assigns the Copyright to Sun Microsystems. While this might seems like a simple symatics, you should also take not that the JCA does not require that future version be provided under the GPL or even under the SCSL. I raised this issue over two years ago and was told that the JCA would be changed to assign copyright to OpenOffice when they became a legal entity. Since then nothing has changed. While Sun MicroSystems has had a history of avoiding membership in the BSA, they still may change their minds.

On a side note, Santa Cruz Operations (or formally Caldera Systems) *IS* a member of the BSA and therefore indirectly (or directly) contributing to issuing these false positives with strong threatening legal language against Free Software works. As already pointed out the "apology" was not in regards to the claim of infringement being false but rather the apology was in regards to the fact it did not figure out "which property was infringed." Anotherwords, the SCO sponsered group still claims there is a copyright infringement but no longer that they represent the owner. At the same time, the notifiction clearly shows that the site is distributing the source code, thus complying with the terms of the GPL (one of the two licenses which can be used for distribution of OpenOffice). Anyone that does buy products from SCO may wish to let them know that their membership in the BSA helps contribute to activities of threats of legal action against the distribution of Free Software and probably will have a chilling effect on the adopting of Free Software based products if it continues.

Yes, too bad there aren't bigger names doing something with open source.

The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

Excellent point. Anybody who actually read the article (and it's been up on News.com's website for a couple of days now) knows that IBM's AIX folks are surprised to hear that AIX's days are apparently numbered.

Basically, the article quotes one guy from IBM as saying that he foresees the day when Linux will replace AIX in IBM's lineup. The odds are that he's right simply because it costs so much to develop a Unix and keep it current, and IBM wants to be able to have you scale up from a low-end Intel box to a Z-series mainframe with any stop in between and take your software with you. Linux is the one OS that runs on all of IBM's hardware.

But that said, it'll be awhile and the AIX guys won't go quietly. They'll probably have some kind of AIX-compatibility libraries that they'll license to their customers the way SCO is planning to do with their libraries. IBM may also port their AIX management tools to Linux and license those separately, as well. Who knows what the future will hold, but it's likely that Linux will simply absorb AIX's capabilities in IBM's product lineup at some point. This means that even if AIX goes away, it won't really go away--it'll just change shape.

One last point. As someone pointed out in the article, "IBM has never decommissioned an operating system, and they're not about to start now."

The GPL utility source code for Services for UNIX 3.0 contains the base utilities diff, sdiff, bc, dc, cpio, gzip, gunzip, gawk, patch, csplit, nl, strings, rpm, and SDK utilities/libraries ld.so, gcc, gdb, g++, g77, gasp, objcopy, ld, as, ar, nm, size, strip, ci, co, diff3 rcs, rlog, and ident.

Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart

Does it seem accurate? (aside from the interesting Copyright on the bottom: "Copyright © 1887-2003, Eric Levenez." ,,,uh, 1887?)

SCO Unix IP

ROFL

What do you want to do today Pinky?

Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.

I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.

A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue ... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.

Actually, there are patents open on *nix: the famous example is patent no. 4,135,240, the setuid patent (this link may work), filed 1973, granted 1979.

I don't know if there were any post-assignation grants of ownership to the patent, or if Lucent (nee Bell Labs) still owns it.

A press release from SCO states that Boies, Schiller and Flexner has been retained in an advisory capacity, which isn't unusual when a company is trying to determine an IP strategy. We often forget that lawyers are often used for things other than suing people (such as, uh, determining under what statutes one may sue, who one may sue, contracts to enforce terms over which one may sue ... I'm not helping my case here, am I?). The press release (and this story) indicates that the UnixWare and OpenServer libraries are affected. Unfortunately, their "Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart" is one of the least useful displays possible, since it appears simply to be the "History of UNIX" chart with some colored lines added. Hopefully, a full clarification by SCO will be forthcoming.

Join the SCOx program now and start taking advantage of the Xtreme Rewards Option:

1. Join the SCOx partner program.
2. Become authorized to sell SCOx products and services.
3. Begin selling SCOx products and services. Reach your revenue objectives.
4. Sell your SCOx business to SCO.
5. Have a great time with your money!

SCO has a press release about this on thier site, mostly the same info in the article, but worth a read to see their "spin" on it.

SCO Establishes SCOsource to License Unix Intellectual Property

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

So far, there have been no links to SCO themselves, just news sites. SCO may not be fully aware how closely they are being watched in this matter. Some people have probably visited SCO's site looking for more information but, this would only show a spike in their web traffic as directly entered URLs do not show a referrer. I suggest that we link on over to SCO and let them see where we are coming from and that SCO needs to act expiditiously on this matter with a crystal clear statement about SCO's position. In other words, Go Go Slasdotting. Here

Until I hear that this is false, I'm boycotting SCO.

If it was Meditel System 5 (later acquired by Torex) then it was probably migrated to SCO Unix quite some time ago.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

#9. Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the
productivity of Linux users.

I have friends who were once tremendously productive
programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the
endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so
you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a
window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily
seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots,
dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on
the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and
Anonymous Cowards. Can there be any doubt that this website is
anything other than a nefarious ploy to destroy Linux by
undermining the productivity of its developers? And is there
any organization that would like to destroy Linux more than
Microsoft? (Well, maybe the Santa
Cruz Operation...) Is it any coincidence that just as the
Feds were working out Microsoft's sentence, Microsoft sued
Slashdot, resulting in a firestorm of geek ire that totally
overshadowed the monopoly ruling?

#8. Screaming 14-year-old boys attempting to prove to
each other that they are more 3133t than j00.

Need I say more?

#7. Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means
lousy technical opinions.

Before the Internet, a certain breed of deconstructionists
had a lot of fun telling everybody that "privileging of dominant
paradigms" was wrecking the world. The Internet has taught us
that privileging certain views is absolutely crucial to avoid
drowning in the ravings of idiots. On Slashdot, many articles
discuss technical issues---but comments are refereed by popular
vote, and even though the populace of Slashdot readers knows
somewhat more than your average set of people off the street,
they still tend to promote (as in "moderate up") a lot of
technical nonsense. Reading Slashdot can therefore often be
worse than useless, especially to young and budding programmers:
it can give you exactly the wrong idea about the
technical issues it raises.

The pre-Internet publishing world had magazines, newspapers, and
journals with editors. Respectable publications hired
qualified editors. Those qualified editors were educated
enough to make intelligent decisions about the quality of
content. The Slashdot model removes the editors and substitutes
popular vote, and the result (unfortunately) is that the quality
level becomes incredibly inconsistent. It was an interesting
experiment; it didn't work, not for Slashdot (though it might
work in some other population of users). Too bad. Now, it's
time to quit.

#6. Community myth that Linux is technically superior to
any other operating system in the known
universe.

People who do operating
systems research, of course, think this is a joke. Dissent
from this view in Slashdot, however, and you'd better be wearing
your asbestos fatigues.

#5. Butt-ugly visual design.

Of course, this one's a matter of taste. However, in my
analysis, the visual elements of the Slashdot site are basically
hopelessly confused and wrong. From the cryptic links in the
left margin, to the drop-shadowed graphics (hello, digital
design cliche circa 1994?), to the offensively lousy color
scheme (let's use circuit board green, because it's "News for
Nerds", right?) I can't find much to like about the design of
Slashdot.

#4. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
any and all articles that vaguely criticize Linux in any
way.

Blowhards (like the flock of irresponsible columnists over
at the Windows-boosterism rag InfoWorld) have had tons of
fun taking advantage of this tendency to drive hits to their
site. On any given day, Slashdot readers are treated to another
link to another column by another self-proclaimed pundit
declaring that Linux is (pick one) unreliable, not scalable, not
user-friendly, doomed, piracy-inducing, foul-smelling, or
un-American. And irony was that the editors of Slashdot are
falling right into the pundits' trap: inciting the Slashdot
community is the one surefire way to drive up your hit count and
hence your revenue from ad banners. Did the Slashdot editors
ever wise up? Not that I ever saw. Given how tiresome the
endless pro-Linux jihad had become by the time I quit, I have
very little desire to go back and find out whether that's
changed.

#3. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
bogus pseudoscience articles by crackpots.

At the time I quit, the editors were posting links to
theories of alternate consciousness, unified theories of the
universe made up by people in their garages, and the like at a
rate of two or three a week. And the number was only
increasing. If I want to read articles that promote totally
bogus pseudoscience, I'll open up the Village
Voice. We don't need another webzine filling that
role.

#2. Editorial/comment system pretends to be democratic
but in reality most content remains firmly in the iron clasp of
the editors.

The above problems with editorial could be solved if stories
could be moderated as well as comments, or if editors paid
attention to negative feedback about the posting of certain
articles. However, the editorial staff, while pretending to be
ideology-free selectors of any "interesting" content, in fact
exert tremendous power over the content of the site, because
they are the only ones who can select top-level links. They
have furthermore demonstrated, for all the reasons above, that
they cannot use this power wisely.

In fact, if you think about it, the links on Slashdot are easily
an order of magnitude less interesting, on average, than those
of Suck, Hotwired, or FEED---all of which are run by
smart editors with good taste (and two of which are dead---thus
proving that only the good die young). If you've read any of
these webzines, you'll probably agree. Rob and Hemos simply
don't compare, as editors, to Stephen Johnson or Joey
Anuff.

So, really, it's time to ask yourself: why should I read
Slashdot? Because it targets my demographic? That's a silly
reason. So why not quit today?

#1. Two words: Jon Katz.

Every community has its resident gasbag. The difference
between Slashdot and other communities is that they have the
means to kick their village idiot off his soapbox, but they lack
the will. If Jon Katz is not the single worst writer for any
webzine, anywhere on the planet, alive today, then I am a
penguin. His writing manages to be endlessly meandering and
verbose, and simultaneously utterly content-free.

Notice, by the way, that I have not said a word about his
technical acumen. It's not necessary to. Katz (who, like all
opportunists, likes to paint himself as an innocent victim
whenever he's criticized) makes a big deal about how there are
"technical snobs" in the Linux user population who blast him for
not being a technical genius. To tell the truth, Katz's
inability to install even recent Linux distributions (which are
arguably as easy to install as MacOS or Windows) on a
run-of-the-mill x86 PC does testify to his general cluelessness.
However, Katz is not a programmer or sysadmin; he's a writer.
He must stand or fall based on the quality of his writing. And
his writing is totally the pits. He would never have gotten
published anywhere but Slashdot; even WIRED, cheerleaders of all
things "digital" and "decentralized", finally got tired of his
babbling and let him go. The cheesiest, most blatantly
pandering "Hookers Who Read Proust" article on Salon.com displays more literary
skill than the finest Katz screed ever to see the light of
day.

To make things worse, Katz is also a shameless opportunist who
regularly uses Slashdot to promote his books. And the Slashdot
admins go right along with it. You can't criticize someone for
their taste in friends, but you can criticize them for
continuing in a relentless and blind nepotism that destroys the
quality of the site.

No single factor wase more pivotal in driving me away from
Slashdot than Jon Katz. Even when I registered for an account
and filtered Katz out, still he made it into news items not
labeled Jon Katz---presumably to promote sales of his book.
What other webzine displays such a blatant disrespect for its
readers?

But then again, Katz's pandering, one-note "Ich bin ein Geek"
spiel may be exactly what the Slashdot audience
deserves.

Simply put, it's time to quit Slashdot, once and for
all.

#9. Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the
productivity of Linux users.

I have friends who were once tremendously productive
programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the
endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so
you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a
window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily
seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots,
dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on
the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and
Anonymous Cowards. Can there be any doubt that this website is
anything other than a nefarious ploy to destroy Linux by
undermining the productivity of its developers? And is there
any organization that would like to destroy Linux more than
Microsoft? (Well, maybe the Santa
Cruz Operation...) Is it any coincidence that just as the
Feds were working out Microsoft's sentence, Microsoft sued
Slashdot, resulting in a firestorm of geek ire that totally
overshadowed the monopoly ruling?

#8. Screaming 14-year-old boys attempting to prove to
each other that they are more 3133t than j00.

Need I say more?

#7. Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means
lousy technical opinions.

Before the Internet, a certain breed of deconstructionists
had a lot of fun telling everybody that "privileging of dominant
paradigms" was wrecking the world. The Internet has taught us
that privileging certain views is absolutely crucial to avoid
drowning in the ravings of idiots. On Slashdot, many articles
discuss technical issues---but comments are refereed by popular
vote, and even though the populace of Slashdot readers knows
somewhat more than your average set of people off the street,
they still tend to promote (as in "moderate up") a lot of
technical nonsense. Reading Slashdot can therefore often be
worse than useless, especially to young and budding programmers:
it can give you exactly the wrong idea about the
technical issues it raises.

The pre-Internet publishing world had magazines, newspapers, and
journals with editors. Respectable publications hired
qualified editors. Those qualified editors were educated
enough to make intelligent decisions about the quality of
content. The Slashdot model removes the editors and substitutes
popular vote, and the result (unfortunately) is that the quality
level becomes incredibly inconsistent. It was an interesting
experiment; it didn't work, not for Slashdot (though it might
work in some other population of users). Too bad. Now, it's
time to quit.

#6. Community myth that Linux is technically superior to
any other operating system in the known
universe.

People who do operating
systems research, of course, think this is a joke. Dissent
from this view in Slashdot, however, and you'd better be wearing
your asbestos fatigues.

#5. Butt-ugly visual design.

Of course, this one's a matter of taste. However, in my
analysis, the visual elements of the Slashdot site are basically
hopelessly confused and wrong. From the cryptic links in the
left margin, to the drop-shadowed graphics (hello, digital
design cliche circa 1994?), to the offensively lousy color
scheme (let's use circuit board green, because it's "News for
Nerds", right?) I can't find much to like about the design of
Slashdot.

#4. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
any and all articles that vaguely criticize Linux in any
way.

Blowhards (like the flock of irresponsible columnists over
at the Windows-boosterism rag InfoWorld) have had tons of
fun taking advantage of this tendency to drive hits to their
site. On any given day, Slashdot readers are treated to another
link to another column by another self-proclaimed pundit
declaring that Linux is (pick one) unreliable, not scalable, not
user-friendly, doomed, piracy-inducing, foul-smelling, or
un-American. And irony was that the editors of Slashdot are
falling right into the pundits' trap: inciting the Slashdot
community is the one surefire way to drive up your hit count and
hence your revenue from ad banners. Did the Slashdot editors
ever wise up? Not that I ever saw. Given how tiresome the
endless pro-Linux jihad had become by the time I quit, I have
very little desire to go back and find out whether that's
changed.

#3. Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to
bogus pseudoscience articles by crackpots.

At the time I quit, the editors were posting links to
theories of alternate consciousness, unified theories of the
universe made up by people in their garages, and the like at a
rate of two or three a week. And the number was only
increasing. If I want to read articles that promote totally
bogus pseudoscience, I'll open up the Village
Voice. We don't need another webzine filling that
role.

#2. Editorial/comment system pretends to be democratic
but in reality most content remains firmly in the iron clasp of
the editors.

The above problems with editorial could be solved if stories
could be moderated as well as comments, or if editors paid
attention to negative feedback about the posting of certain
articles. However, the editorial staff, while pretending to be
ideology-free selectors of any "interesting" content, in fact
exert tremendous power over the content of the site, because
they are the only ones who can select top-level links. They
have furthermore demonstrated, for all the reasons above, that
they cannot use this power wisely.

In fact, if you think about it, the links on Slashdot are easily
an order of magnitude less interesting, on average, than those
of Suck, Hotwired, or FEED---all of which are run by
smart editors with good taste (and two of which are dead---thus
proving that only the good die young). If you've read any of
these webzines, you'll probably agree. Rob and Hemos simply
don't compare, as editors, to Stephen Johnson or Joey
Anuff.

So, really, it's time to ask yourself: why should I read
Slashdot? Because it targets my demographic? That's a silly
reason. So why not quit today?

#1. Two words: Jon Katz.

Every community has its resident gasbag. The difference
between Slashdot and other communities is that they have the
means to kick their village idiot off his soapbox, but they lack
the will. If Jon Katz is not the single worst writer for any
webzine, anywhere on the planet, alive today, then I am a
penguin. His writing manages to be endlessly meandering and
verbose, and simultaneously utterly content-free.

Notice, by the way, that I have not said a word about his
technical acumen. It's not necessary to. Katz (who, like all
opportunists, likes to paint himself as an innocent victim
whenever he's criticized) makes a big deal about how there are
"technical snobs" in the Linux user population who blast him for
not being a technical genius. To tell the truth, Katz's
inability to install even recent Linux distributions (which are
arguably as easy to install as MacOS or Windows) on a
run-of-the-mill x86 PC does testify to his general cluelessness.
However, Katz is not a programmer or sysadmin; he's a writer.
He must stand or fall based on the quality of his writing. And
his writing is totally the pits. He would never have gotten
published anywhere but Slashdot; even WIRED, cheerleaders of all
things "digital" and "decentralized", finally got tired of his
babbling and let him go. The cheesiest, most blatantly
pandering "Hookers Who Read Proust" article on Salon.com displays more literary
skill than the finest Katz screed ever to see the light of
day.

To make things worse, Katz is also a shameless opportunist who
regularly uses Slashdot to promote his books. And the Slashdot
admins go right along with it. You can't criticize someone for
their taste in friends, but you can criticize them for
continuing in a relentless and blind nepotism that destroys the
quality of the site.

No single factor wase more pivotal in driving me away from
Slashdot than Jon Katz. Even when I registered for an account
and filtered Katz out, still he made it into news items not
labeled Jon Katz---presumably to promote sales of his book.
What other webzine displays such a blatant disrespect for its
readers?

But then again, Katz's pandering, one-note "Ich bin ein Geek"
spiel may be exactly what the Slashdot audience
deserves.

Simply put, it's time to quit Slashdot, once and for
all.

"Of all the unixen I have played with AIX is one of the worst."

So I take it you've never used the flaming pile of shit known as SCO?

The Linux version of WordPerfect appears to be an end of line product. The Windows versions have been updated while the Linux version has not, and the product is not for sale in Corel's online store. In any case, it is commercial, not open source.

I had a hard time finding out exactly what application software was being used based on the article and its supporting materials. However, when I saw references to Citrix and Windows terminal server, I could see that this was not the free-software, Microsoft-free paradise one would expect from the glowing summary here. As you've confirmed, the users are actually running Microsoft Office and other commercial software in a remote mode. I apologize for getting the Windows software in use wrong, but I think my main point still stands. Even if regular users are able to get by with KDE as a desktop shell these days -- and I don't doubt it -- when it comes to the applications they need to do their work, they're still dependent on commercial software, and on Microsoft.

Tim

I wouldn't ask for a break up if we could enforce a 'chinese wall' between their operations:

• An operating system that includes minimal OS functionality and a CD of optional software (think SCO skunkware
• Consumer applications, including Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, etc.
• Server applications, including IIS, Proxy, etc.

Unfortunately, Microsoft would argue for years about what each constituted and would never do it They swore in the early 1990's that they didn't include undocumented functionality in Windows specifically for their Office products (but did -- See "Undocumented Windows").

I think it was during the 90s that Locus was bought by Platinum. A few years later, Computer Associates bought Platinum, but the SSI technology was sold to Tandem. It was around this time that the port began to UnixWare 2.1.

After Compaq bought Tandem, the SSI code was brought up to UnixWare 7.1 and released as NonStop Clusters for Unixware 7.1.0 in late '99. SCO sold it under their name and Compaq hoped to make money from increased sales of servers. Compaq retained ownership of the NSC code, of course.

It was around this time that I joined the development team. We went through a few more iterations on UnixWare, merging with the UW 7.1.1 code base, adding support for TCP/IP interconnects as an alternative to ServerNet, and fixing bugs.

Early in the year 2000, Bruce (my boss) decided that we should port NSC to Linux. Later that year, he and some other managers decided that we should also open-source the technology.

Now here we are halfway through 2001. We've cleaned up alot of the code (more important for open-source than proprietary), adapted much of it to the implementation of Linux, and just released a major piece (Cluster Infrastructure). Hopefully, an initial release of the full SSI code will be ready soon.

BTW, the article says that we're releasing the SSI code under Yet Another Open-Source Licence. There was some miscommunication here. We're releasing it under the plain vanilla GPL version 2.

Brian Watson
Linux Kernel Developer
SSI Clustering Laboratory
Compaq Computer

Quite easy actually. I've been doing a lot of ncurses programming lately. You can do some amazinly elaborate things with it if your a good programmer. A good technique really pays. If you start running into situations where you're brute-forcing it, I advise that you back off and do a little work on a good "framework" for your app(that's one minus about ncurses, there's very little "flamework").

Some key points about ncurses:

o It's very fast - Text mode applications are great for productivity. Their GUI counterparts always turn out to be slower for some reason.
o Menus and Forms - The menu and form libraries are standard on UNIXes. You can fairly easily create fields for data entry that have built in validation routines ...etc.
o Tables - Well, not exactly, but a clever way to make a very snappy table is to just use a menu. In text mode you can't tell the differnce. Ncurses menu-tables are more than what the Java 1.1 AWT library provides
o Well established - Curses programming has been around for a long time. The characteristics of many terminal types has been worked out(by ESR) and abstracted into the terminfo database. Its quite portable.
o Works Anywhere - You can run it over telnet, ssh, or just dump bulky X alltogether and run on the Linux console.

Here's some links:

Ncurses Intro by Eric S. Raymond and Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
Linux Journal Artical by ESR
Fujitsu ETI Programmers Guide
SCO ETI Programming

I really wish people would concentrate more ncurses programs. They're just damn efficient. Anyone who uses mutt and slrn and such knows what I'm talking about. If you're really clever, you'll librarify whatever it is that your working on so you can hook on a GUI version later after you've tweeked the behavior of the app without wasting a lot of clock-cycles on graphics programming.

• Miva/HTMLScript
• ASP or Apache ASP
• TCL
• C#
• ect....

That's lxrun, by the way. Dunno why it ate the link.

There is one, Caldera, a corporation merging with SCO has provided OpenLinux for years, as for SCo they are known for their OpenServer and UnixWare products.

No, Linus is not upset about it. He has a trademark on Linux, not OpenLinux or RedHat Linux or even Yellow Dog Linux, and has treated it as such.

When I interviewed for a programmer position at Microport Systems (then the vendor of SystemV/AT, Unix for the 286), I was asked by company president Chuck Hickey what was the best way to implement strcpy.

Well, even though I had been a manager (really a team leader) of a bunch of student programmers who wrote a Common LISP interpreter on the 8086 running DOS, it had been a few months and, well, I forgot.

Ol Chuck said "this is the kind of question that separates the men from the boys" and then he let me know I wasn't one of the men.

So I got tech support.

At least it was unix system administration tech support, and I got to learn a lot of stuff while I was there, and the engineers were friendly and helpful.

But there was some crazy shit like advertising new version numbers to match The Santa Cruz Operation's Xenix version number so we could compete (shades of Slackware anyone?) and then not telling the techs, so we all told the customers for a while that it must be a printing error, there was no such version.

And then there was the full page ad that said we'd have Berkeley Job Control in some upcoming version, and the customers all started calling and saying "Control-Z doesn't work, where's the job control?" and I'd ask the engineers, and the engineers said we had no intention of ever getting job control. When I told this to our marketing guy, he just said "Oh, OK", and took it out of the future ads.

What really killed me was the guy who staked his whole company on the FORTRAN compiler in our product. We had one, but it was buggy. After he'd delivered product to customers, it turned out it wasn't working right. Engineering kept promising they'd build a new one from source. But they were busy and never got around to it. So finally this guy told me he didn't hold it against me personally, but he was going out of business because he'd chosen to use Microport for his solution.

Well, I quit and went back to school again. But I was never very happy with school and eventually I got a programming and sysadmin job, a pretty low-level one where I'd take a whole month to write a 300 line image processing program. But I struggled, and eventually I did better for myself.

Now I have my own incorporated consulting business. Have a look at my resume too and scroll all the way down to where you see Microport and then look at all the stuff above it.

If you're working on tech support there's a few things I want you to do:

While you're with the company, use every opportunity you can to learn new skills, knowledge of new technologies, applications and operating systems.

On nights and weekends, study programming languages, or at least study system and network administration.

If you're going to do tech support for a while, then job-hop. You'll pick up a wide variety of skills at your different employers, even if it all has to be tech support.

And most of all, don't stay in tech support. It's a miserable existence. But it can be a good start on a much better career.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.

SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.

If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.

For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.

The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.

SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.

If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.

For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.

Monty

So will EVERYone please stand up and tell me where they can (or could) get Unix for FREE?

Here. You're welcome.

XmNenableThinThickness: use smaller shadows to make the 3-D effects "flatter"
XmNenableEtchedInMenu: reverse menu shadow effects
XmNenableToggleVisual: use 'checkboxes' for toggles instead of reversing shadows.

To get the complete list, you need to have a 2.0 Motif manual. Unfortunately, most info out there is only for 1.2 as that's what is most prevalent.

Motif 2.x documentation is sometimes difficult to find in print, but there are some good sources online. Read the docs. Motif is impossible to use without full, accurate docs on all the resource settings.

You can put this in your .Xdefaults file to make all Motif 2.x apps look similar to CDE:

*enableBtn1Transfer: true
*enableButtonTab: true
*enableDefaultButton: true
*defaultButtonEmphasis: XmINTERNAL_HIGHLIGHT
*enableDragIcon: true
*enableEtchedInMenu: true
*enableMenuInCascade: true
*enableMultiKeyBindings: true
*enableThinThickness: true
*enableToggleColor: true
*enableToggleVisual: true

Trusted Solaris

HP Virtual Vault Based on HP-UX CMW

SCO CMW

Of course all of these are CMW products which meet a slightly different set of criteria...

11. What are the CMWREQs and the CMWEC?

The criteria used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to rate a product as a Compartmented Mode Workstation (CMW) was the Compartmented Mode Workstation Evaluation Criteria (CMWEC), which superseded the CMW Requirements (CMWREQs) in 1991. This criteria defined a minimum level of assurance equivalent to the B1 level of the TCSEC (see TCSEC Criteria Concepts FAQ, Questions 9-11). It also defines a minimum set of functionality and usability features outside the scope of the TCSEC (e.g. a graphical user interface via a window system was required along with the capability to cut and paste between windows). Neither set of requirements are currently to evaluate products although products that are designed to have these features may be evaluated with the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (CCITSE).

The Health Department of Western Australia has built a custom system for their Rural hospitals called HCARe (bizzare caps on purpose) that they run on SCO OpenServer and which is probably Linux compatible. I'm uncertain if they decided to build it themselves because they were unable to find a suitable OpenSource program or simply because of politics, however the system has the advantage of being able to be rebuilt on demand according to indivdual needs. The metro hospitals use commercial systems such as Oracle that have been bought 'off the shelf' and then customised. As for your Linux web server, have a look at E-Smith Linux , it's so easy to setup and administrate it's criminal. :) Hope this helps, SeaWolf

I mean, if I install MS Excel I have to click on a licensing agreement that puts certain restrictions on my use of the software, etc etc. Amongst other things doesn't such a user agreement usually state that only one person can use the software at a time, or that it can only be installed on 1 machine?

I went to their Tarantella demo page and made a useless little excel spreadsheet that adds two numbers together. I saved it on their system using their software. Therefore I have just used a copy of Excel which I (AFAIK) do not have the legal right to use - unless they have some special deal in the works with MS.

The software ran rather slowly, but then I am on a cable modem - if I was directly on a highpowered internal corporate network connection it would probably work just fine.

SCO, err Tarantella has a new product called, surprisingly enough, tarantella. It's basically a web app that allows different platforms to run applications through it.

There is a demo here

It's pretty cool, but it's dirt slow.

They've got it set up so you can run Word or Powerpoint, a few unix apps, etc. all on your web browser.

IS

The Unix (TM) brand name

A nice, tree hugging logo

Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"

I had the benefit of an employer who sent me to a half-dozen of the SCO authorized courses. Luckily, I went during the off-season for that particular training center and had several classes to myself as well as a very sharp and flexible instructor who completely customized the content to me when I was the only student. (I've been, literally, to hundreds of courses in my day. The instructor that I had, Peter Lauda, was one of the best I've ever experienced. Just an incredibly knowledgeable guy with a talent for helping folks understand. He'd probably be too casual a guy for many folks, but I found him spot-on. And anyway, even if he'd been lousy, his knowledge of where to go in the evening to watch the Harleys go by and get a drink would have been enough to make him memorable. :) That excellent experience provided a great foundation.

That being said, I also learned a great deal from things I did on my own. First, I ordered both OpenServer Release 5 and Unixware from SCO for minimal cost from this page. Then I installed both several times on machines at home, making lots of mistakes and learning from every one of them. Eventually, I got boxes talking to each other at the house. During all this time, I used the manuals that came with the software and SCO's extensive online support.

Frankly, I think I could have done my job just from what I learned online and at home, but the classroom experience sure made it easier.

I had the benefit of an employer who sent me to a half-dozen of the SCO authorized courses. Luckily, I went during the off-season for that particular training center and had several classes to myself as well as a very sharp and flexible instructor who completely customized the content to me when I was the only student. (I've been, literally, to hundreds of courses in my day. The instructor that I had, Peter Lauda, was one of the best I've ever experienced. Just an incredibly knowledgeable guy with a talent for helping folks understand. He'd probably be too casual a guy for many folks, but I found him spot-on. And anyway, even if he'd been lousy, his knowledge of where to go in the evening to watch the Harleys go by and get a drink would have been enough to make him memorable. :) That excellent experience provided a great foundation.

That being said, I also learned a great deal from things I did on my own. First, I ordered both OpenServer Release 5 and Unixware from SCO for minimal cost from this page. Then I installed both several times on machines at home, making lots of mistakes and learning from every one of them. Eventually, I got boxes talking to each other at the house. During all this time, I used the manuals that came with the software and SCO's extensive online support.

Frankly, I think I could have done my job just from what I learned online and at home, but the classroom experience sure made it easier.

FreeBSD contains no original unix code

Well, of course not. No current UNIX(TM) contains original Unix code. It was PDP-7 assembly code, after all. No current Unix can contain code from anything earlier than Seventh Edition without it having been significantly rewritten, since the C language changed substantially between V6 and V7. Original code is not the point; the point is the continuous line of descent from {V6,V7,32V} through {2,4}BSD to 4.4BSD to the current free BSDs.

and is not certified as UNIX by the Open group

Who cares what the suits say? By their criteria, no real (i.e. Bell Labs Research) Unix would qualify as such.

Current free BSDs' kernel sources contain some AT&T copyright notices, by the way. If you really, really care how much code hasn't changed much since (say) Seventh Edition, you can now get the latter from SCO for free.

Yes, IKIHBT, and yes, IAHAND, thank you. HTH.

Version 2 was expected sometime soon so imagine how perplexed us tech support engineers were when the customers started calling us and asking us about the upcoming version 3.5.

We told the customers there must be some mistake because we were only just about to release version 2.

The calls got so frequent that finally we asked a customer where they'd heard about this 3.5 (not sure if that was the exact number but that's approximately correct). He'd seen it in our full-page magazine ad in a major Unix magazine.

I asked our ad guy what that version number was. He told me that they'd decided to go with version 3.5 because the Santa Cruz Operation was on version 3.4.

Of course we were all pretty pissed off, not just that the company was being dishonest but that they didn't tell the people who took the phone calls - those of us on tech support - and the customers must have thought it was hilarious when the ads kept appearing even though they'd heard it straight from the company that they were misinformed!

And, BTW, look at the reason why Slackware jumped from version 4 to 7