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What happens if South Africa falls into disfavour with the mighty America and we cease to be able to get software or support, but all our data is tied into MS proprietary formats.

Just cut out the middle man and get support from India.

I'm more interested in what The SCO Group had to say about Novell's letter to them. There seems to be not much talk about it. The last I heard Novell was going to challenge SCO on Unix ownership.

The article is a "nice" introduction for those new to Linux, but I suspect that the author (and most that dabble with Linux) generally know their way around computers. For these people, IT mindshare & performance are important issues, and it probably is no bonus to Linux that much hay has been made that Windows is substantially faster than Linux for many important technical tasks. Microprocessor report editor Peter Glaskowsky was recently quoted as saying a company could get better results using a Dell machine with Microsoft compilers than with a Linux machine and GCC compiler, for example. These are the types of stories & tests that technical users considering trying out open source systems pay attention to, not "nice" pieces that are basically uninformative.

"IN A DRAMATIC demonstration of the power inherent in its latest Realspeak text to speech engine, Scansoft's Jan De Moortel gave a demo of former US President, Bill Clinton, giving an entire contrived speech.

The results were clearly recognisable as Bill Clinton and would have sounded entirely realistic save his pronunciation of Scansoft.

Spookily, De Moortel revealed that the results had been achieved by sampling a mere 15 minutes worth of a genuine Clinton speech downloaded from the Internet. The company now possesses the ability to automatically feed in a new voice - such as Clinton's and the whole process was less than a half day's work."

And so with governmental commands (or commands from someone who wants to get you fired, steal your girlfriend, whatever...) your system will impersonate you just about perfectly:

"Hello, boss. I just wanted to tell you how I hate working on your team. You don't know what you are doing and are such an asshole. But what I really wanted to say is that I've downloaded all our corporate IP onto my own system and if you don't give me a raise, I am going to release it to everyone on the Internet."

"Gee, Cindy. I find you really dull and stupid and I never want to see you again. You've been such a waste of my time."

"Hello, Mr. Hussein. Yes, I will give $100,000 to fund terrorist attacks in the USA."

You can imagine much worse I am sure. Your sensors will confirm that you were in the office and that the communications system (which is VoIP of course) was accessed.

As the line from "In-Formation" says:

"Every day, computers make people easier to use."

A controlling body such as the American political administration would covet very highly the ability to keep an extremely detailed and up-to-the-minute database on whomever they so wished and considering the size of the population in the United States of America today, keeping such close tabs on that amount of people would be a daunting, if not impossible, task. Since the introduction of the IBM compatible personal computer (PC) a few short decades ago, it and its spinoffs (PDA's etc) have become more of a necessity in the daily life for those people who live in a civilized urban or city environment and less of a luxury/novelty/curiosity item as they used to be. Now, loaded onto the vast majority of these computers worldwide is one of Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Here then is the perfect opportunity for said administration - in close collaboration with one of their major campaign sponsors mind you - to keep under close scrutiny millions of Americans with a degree of precision that would have been considered impossible only two decades ago. Microsoft's Palladium software will become all pervasive. It will become mandatory to have it installed on all practically all consumer computing devices which are capable of running an operating system (gaming consoles, PDA's, laptops, watches, mobile phones, home entertainment systems, car stereo systems etc) and furthermore, this trusted (trusted by whom exactly?) operating system will quietly, constantly and discreetly be feeding information into either one, huge database or numerous databases.

Of course, this is all speculation, but we all know how absolute power corrupts and one only has to look at the history of mankind to see that there are few - if any - exceptions to the rule. United States Presidents come and go but the underlying administration/power structure remains and quite frankly, it is probably as Machiavellian as any government can possibly be (although they are unfortunately not alone in this regard) - irrespective of whom is currently occupying the Whitehouse. Once the Uinted States government has declared that all non-TCPA compliant computing devices and untrusted operating systems (i.e. not Palladium) are illegal (using the PATRIOT Act to bolster it of course), then the rest of the civilized world will surely follow. If anyone or any country appears to be intending to "break ranks" as it were, then Microsoft - with the full support of the current U.S. government it seems (as the adage goes; "birds of a feather flock together") - will do its utmost to prevent such a rebellion. For instance, a few months ago, Microsoft managed to arrange to have the US ambassador to Peru petition the Peruvian government on Microsoft's behalf shortly after Peru stated their positive stance with regards to the use of open source software and earlier this week, Craig Mundie from Microsoft met with the Brazilian Minister for Education. That to me alone is a cause for concern. Sure. Banks may do it (although I've never heard of a bank arranging to have their country's Ambassador do their bidding) - but they're banks - not software companies.

As I said before, this is all pure speculation - but nevertheless, after looking at their past track record, I would not put it past them.

Check this Inquirer article out:

here.

Rather bashful of Gates...

And Chipzilla is also re-assuring its customers that its next generation chip, the so-called Prescott, is on track for a Q3 introduction, despite earlier wobbles that suggested it might retreat into Q4. In fact, general availability of the Prescott at speeds of 3.40GHz will fall into the fourth quarter

It's right here: Pentium 4 starts to die, all hail the Pentium 5.

"INTEL HAS RELEASED a 3.20GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor which will likely be the last of its kind until it introduces its "Prescott Pentium 5" design later on this year."

It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts.

Newsflash, kiddo: neither Motorola nor IBM sell a CPU called the "G4". "G4" was a "marchitechture" term coined by Apple in the spirit of Motorola's internal "G3" codename for the PPC750. The chip inside any "PowerMac G4" is some flavor of a Motorola PowerPC 7400, no matter what Apple calls it.

You can pretty much bet the farm that Apple will call every varient of the PPC970 they ship a "PowerPC G5".

1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible.

Ahem. ("1ghz" is probably apple marketing-speak, but it's always been known that the PPC970 will have a stupidly fast FSB -- Intel isn't the only company that can innovate in this field, eh?)

Almost believable, but for the moment Apple are phasing out the use of NVIDIA cards in their machines.

Simply and 100% wrong. Apple has been doing pretty much exactly the same thing for the last three years on this front: providing whichever of the two offered them the best OEM pricing as the default configuration, and offering the other as a build-to-order option. They will continue to do this.

Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0

Here, you may be correct, but there are two issues that may force them to start shipping "USB 2.0" connectors: first, the USB consortium has recently declared that all USB ports are "USB 2.0" (yes, this is weird and stupid), and secondly it's actually getting a bit difficult to source USB controllers that only support the 1.0/1.1 specs.

Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible

FW400 and FW800 use different connectors, and there are not yet many FW800 products on the market. This is called "covering your bets" and "not pissing off your customers". BTW, 1x FW800 and 2x FW400 is also the configuration on the 17" AlBook, so they've already shipped one machine in exactly this "impossible" configuration.

optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking.

No, it sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how many macs are used in audio production? Are you aware that Apple sells their own high-end audio composition program? The only surprise about a PowerMac with optical TOSlink is that they didn't do it years ago.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10061

This is how you can do it.

Running a MD5 hash is quite frankly useless.

Stop arguing the point! The instructions for using MD5 to compare the source code were given yesterday as a way of determining the matching code without violating the NDA. The inquirer article.

The sad thing is that Forbes was the first business mag to put Linus Torvalds on its cover. They really appeared to "get it". Ad revenue wasn't so hard to come by in those blissful dot-com days, though.

Oh well.

Speaking of conspiracies: Is the mainstream IT media in Intel's pocket?

He's talkin about MD5 hashing of small sections, as someone suggested the other day here.

If you actually have the source code, there are other fairly quick ways to find copy & pastes, eg the BWT-based method I implemented in CPD.

That method is pretty fast - it mainly depends on the file scanning time, not the sort we used to find the duplicates (eg using a suffix tree sort instead of quicksort won't gain you much here). However its a bit of a memory hog. I originally wrote the algorithm in perl, though, and it used a lot less - it would probably work on something the size of Linux.

I've come up with a new variation based on rysnc that will be quicker than the original MD5 suggestion, still requires no access to the original source, and sucks a hell of a lot less memory than the BWT method. Its also possible to do incremental checks (extremely quickly) using this method, something we couldn't do before.

There are other interesting techniques based on gzip and the like if this kind of thing interests you.

It looks like Linux developers are already working on support. Also, the Inquirer reports that PCI may kill AGP?

Consider the fact that VDSL is just rolling out in Sweden and that it is quite affordable. Imagine 26 mbits/sec for $40 euros a month. In fact, it's a much better deal than almost anywhere else. Especially Greece, where broadband will run you approximately 850 times as much.

Now what can someone legally do with that bandwidth under the new law? You guessed it. They can watch government-okayed programming channels and view government-okayed content. These are the websites that will have gone through some sort of copyright review and approval process.

With these new laws, the powers that be will have successfully turned the European internet into something resembling interactive television. The existing media lords are of course quite happy with the new laws as their sphere of control has been strengthened. And the existing governments are of course quite happy with the new laws as it gives them even more control over their respective populaces.

It's hard to say how the Swedish populace and the rest of Europe will react to these new laws. Most likely nothing significant will happen beyond a few protests. But as someone pointed out, sooner or later the government will put one too many chains of laws and taxes on the people and the people will start to exhibit some very interesting non-linear behaviors. As history has taught us, there is only one way to take liberties back from an oppressive government.

However, for the time being, we do know one thing for sure. Sweden's rank ranking on the "most corrupt governments list" is going to take a hit. And it's about time -- Sweden is the only country on record for filing criminal charges against a news company for second guessing URL's.

Consider the fact that VDSL is just rolling out in Sweden and that it is quite affordable. Imagine 26 mbits/sec for $40 euros a month. In fact, it's a much better deal than almost anywhere else. Especially Greece, where broadband will run you approximately 850 times as much.

Now what can someone legally do with that bandwidth under the new law? You guessed it. They can watch government-okayed programming channels and view government-okayed content. These are the websites that will have gone through some sort of copyright review and approval process.

With these new laws, the powers that be will have successfully turned the European internet into something resembling interactive television. The existing media lords are of course quite happy with the new laws as their sphere of control has been strengthened. And the existing governments are of course quite happy with the new laws as it gives them even more control over their respective populaces.

It's hard to say how the Swedish populace and the rest of Europe will react to these new laws. Most likely nothing significant will happen beyond a few protests. But as someone pointed out, sooner or later the government will put one too many chains of laws and taxes on the people and the people will start to exhibit some very interesting non-linear behaviors. As history has taught us, there is only one way to take liberties back from an oppressive government.

However, for the time being, we do know one thing for sure. Sweden's rank ranking on the "most corrupt governments list" is going to take a hit. And it's about time -- Sweden is the only country on record for filing criminal charges against a news company for second guessing URL's.

Consider the fact that VDSL is just rolling out in Sweden and that it is quite affordable. Imagine 26 mbits/sec for $40 euros a month. In fact, it's a much better deal than almost anywhere else. Especially Greece, where broadband will run you approximately 850 times as much.

Now what can someone legally do with that bandwidth under the new law? You guessed it. They can watch government-okayed programming channels and view government-okayed content. These are the websites that will have gone through some sort of copyright review and approval process.

With these new laws, the powers that be will have successfully turned the European internet into something resembling interactive television. The existing media lords are of course quite happy with the new laws as their sphere of control has been strengthened. And the existing governments are of course quite happy with the new laws as it gives them even more control over their respective populaces.

It's hard to say how the Swedish populace and the rest of Europe will react to these new laws. Most likely nothing significant will happen beyond a few protests. But as someone pointed out, sooner or later the government will put one too many chains of laws and taxes on the people and the people will start to exhibit some very interesting non-linear behaviors. As history has taught us, there is only one way to take liberties back from an oppressive government.

However, for the time being, we do know one thing for sure. Sweden's rank ranking on the "most corrupt governments list" is going to take a hit. And it's about time -- Sweden is the only country on record for filing criminal charges against a news company for second guessing URL's.

Orrin will have a rude awakening from his corporatist wet dream when the Linux kernel hackers start taking down SCO's computers.

Reporters do not have to check facts. They only have to report the news. In the event that there is no news, they may invent news. Of course, this article on the The Inquirer.net about a coder suing SCO for code/copyright violation is worth a chuckle.

The Revenge Of the Coders. Why doesn't everyone who contributed to the Linux kernel slap a TRO on SCO? I'll do the paperwork and the filing for free....

If you purchase software, and you accept the license (usually by opening the shrinkwrap or the CD case), you are bound to all its terms. The EULA is an agreement between you and the publisher of the software. If you then go and violate the terms of the EULA, then the publisher has the right to terminate the agreement, insist you immediately cease use of the software, and demand you destroy all copies of the unlicensed software. Such is the nature of any license agreement, be it with an end-user or another business. No responsible copyright holder would waive this right in the case of the terms of the license agreement being violated.

Is that so, Darl? Well, how about the GPL license, then? You apparently think you can violate that all you want with impunity. What is your response to this article?

We'd all like to know the answer to these questions, Darl. (If it's really you)

Time for everybody to sue SCO for previous GPL violations! That'll keep their lawyers tied up for awhile.

-j

-renard

SCO has violated the GPL in many of the products it has distributed. Thus, authors of the GPL would be entitled to any of SCO's profits from those products.

I'm also under the impression that the `traditional' linux scheduler (before the rewrite by Ingo Molnar in 2.5) is one of the oldest parts of linux, predating any involvement by IBM or any other large company with access to SCO source. [but this is just my impression from reading the LKML, not based on any research!]

If the new 2.5 scheduler is the point of contention, that might explain SCO's lack of urgency to cease distribution of their Linux. If the Linux stuff they distributed was 2.4, they weren't leaking their trade secret stuff.

It would also also invalidate the uppity kernel developer's counter-complaint, which is over a 2.4 kernel.

Article here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10018 "Linux Coder puts SCO on notice". In short, the coder is annoyed they are distributing his code apparently out of compliance with GPL. My thoughts: This guy needs to get a lawyer and do this properly - i.e. a proper cease and desist, not an email. If we knew who it was, we could contribute to a legal fund to get him going.

From SCO's own site - I am not a lawyer - but it seems to clearly say - IBM appears to own any derivative works they create: http://www.sco.com/scosource/ExhibitC.qxd.pdf

It seems as if SCO has a couple of more problems. First, it seems that they showed someone their evidence without an NDA. Second, they have been given notice by a Linux Kernel Hacker. Its one thing to sue IBM, but it is another to have to defend yourself from claims by hundreds of kernel hackers. Heck, the legal footwork alone will be expensive.

It seems as if SCO has a couple of more problems. First, it seems that they showed someone their evidence without an NDA. Second, they have been given notice by a Linux Kernel Hacker. Its one thing to sue IBM, but it is another to have to defend yourself from claims by hundreds of kernel hackers. Heck, the legal footwork alone will be expensive.

Maybe it won't take years.
Evidence revealed?

Take a look at this article

According to eWEEK's confidential source, SCO's coders "basically re-implemented the Linux kernel with functions available in the Unix kernel to build what is now known as the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP) in SCO Unix."

The evidence for this seems to be sections of exact identical code right down to the variable names and comments. Gee, where have we heard claims like this, recently?

and

IBM likely recoils from the thought of buying out SCO because -- aside from refusing to reward such flimsy blackmail -- it might want to avoid "owning" Unix. It's almost like an Egyptian mummy's curse, it seems.

The author of this article seems to think that anyone who owns a copy of Linux can sue SCO under the same laws that it is trying to employ under IBM. I for one would be more than happy to litigate these cock suckers into oblivion. Does anyone know anything about filing class action law suits?

Ahh the 266*2 was wishful thinking :). You are right about its 133*4, apologies about that.

My understanding is that xeon mp line is for their
4-way based motherboards. The main advantage is they have a meg of cache on them. But the normal processorshave 512k the same as the new p4's I believe.

The xeon mp motherboards are $2k and the processors are about $2k each (pricewatch 1.6ghz/1meg cache i.e made of gold :)

In any case the normal xeon dual systems are actually not that much more than buying a 875pe
motherboard and processor. Btw here is the road map I found on the inquirer. Apparantly the xeon mp's are going up to 2.8ghz/2 megs of cache and the normal xeons are going up to 3.06/1 meg of cache and selling for $700.

Here's the weird part, while it looks like intel skipped 667 fbs for the PIV line, the xeon line will "ramp up" to 667 early next year.

In anycase I'm probably going to build a "normal" xeon/iwill running at ~2.66 which comes out to really not much more than a normal PIV/865/875 series. The selling of 800mhz memory/bus speeds on the PIV line while keeping the xeon line at 533/667 makes no sense to me. I was going to wait until a new set of mbs/chipset came out for the xeons but it doesn't look it will happen.

-bloo

We will sell no WINE before its time either. Hell at the rate they are going, Linux will be running windows programs better than the present release of windows.

I think it is no small exaggeration that the folks at Samba understand CIFS better than the folks in Redmond do. It's only a matter of time before the executables are the same way.

About the only way Longhorn is going to sell big is by doing something completely different. About the only way it can be completely different is by ceasing to support what already exists. If it breaks everything that exists, you cease to have any advangtage over Linux. Indeed, since most Unix apps can be simply recompiled for Linux, you are at a disadvantage.

I think they are going to stretch Longhorn out as far as they can. Let the folks who bought Win2k and XP get a few useful years out of their systems, and then introduce this radically different and wholly incompadible new way of processing. And pray you can keep the customers locked in through licensing inertia.

If I was Bill and Steve, I'd be selling my shares of Microsoft and planning a quiet retirement in the Islands. This plan has NEVER worked. Anyone remember Atari? How about Commadore? Apple is about the only company I can think of that has pulled not one, but two major technological upheavals off successfully. (Depending on your definition of success I suppose.)

The author of the Inquirer article wrote an earlier article three weeks ago about what a jerk Marc Fleury, the head of JBoss, was. There was also an article a few days ago in Open Enterprise trends, about new profit-sharing and stock-purchase plans at JBoss, which might have been either a cause or an effect of dissension there.

Wednesday 04 June 2003, 10:47

THE SUCCESSFUL injunction taken out by LinuxTag last week over SCO's claim that Unixware intellectual property is infringed has led to the shutdown of the German site. The injunction, granted in a German court last week, meant that SCO downed its entire site in case parts of it detailing its claims against Linux would bring it into conflict with the law.

LinuxTag took out the injunction after it had asked SCO to substantiate its allegations that the Linux OS contained portions of Unix code.

You can't see that the SCO site isn't there because it's not there anymore.

well not only do they bribe, they spend money on other intersting things too... like hiring a pornstar for their party!

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9677

It's all so confusing.

Really?

Yup, and what about these here!

Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling

Warp and woof and wefting
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 29 May 2003, 09:55
MAXTOR AND HITACHI don't have factories in China, right?

Well only half right. Yesterday, a Hitachi representative in Europe called us to say reports of problems with high capacity drives couldn't possibly be true "because Hitachi doesn't manufacture drives in China".

One reader pointed out to us that as he was penning his email he was looking at a high end Hitachi drive which bore the clear message "made in China".

I can't find any mention of it on any of the manufacturers, and Seagate has said That there is no recall Maybe my porn stash is safe after all.

Heh - This article on the inquirer specifically debunks the referenced Digitimes article:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704

Enjoy....

~whm

Already /.'ed, but I found some other versions of this story.

Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling
Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say there's no hard drive recalls
Seagate denies Taiwan hard drive recall claims

Already /.'ed, but I found some other versions of this story.

Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling
Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say there's no hard drive recalls
Seagate denies Taiwan hard drive recall claims

Give me a break. There is nothing "leading" about a DRMed PC in a fancy case mod. Oh, wait. That is exactly what Microsoft is redefning "innovation" to mean, isn't it?

Microsoft might be rebranding it Innovation, but i'm rebranding it Terrorism (why not, everything else has been defined as terrorism)

The press release link at Novell in the story appears to have been replaced with a blank page, at least for now. This story at the Inquirer includes a copy of the letter that Novell's CEO sent to SCO's CEO Darl McBride. Good stuff.

That makes no sense to me, but you should know that they have the British Army on their side:

The firm said today that the British Army will adopt SCO's Unix platform, server solutions and services to keep its helicopters trim and ship shape. The project is worth £3.5 million with a rollout finished by the end of next year.