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Who's their hosting provider again? What's that company? What was that story?

Oh yeah, I remember now

"LinuxWorld: Linux on desktop soon - Torvalds ...
Linux may be primarily server-bound now, but it soon will be much easier to use on the desktop, and even in handhelds, says its inventor.

Speaking before the largest Linux gathering ever, Linus Torvalds predicted future versions of Linux will compete on both high-end systems and smaller devices - and become a major player on desktop computers.

"It means that in a few years we'll be the biggest OS on the whole planet, and I like that,"

True, although the $3 or $4 billion profit per quarter and 80+% profit margins in the Office and Windows sections (with the current donations, "super deals" to the OEMs, academic versions, etc., mind!) sure do.

Then there's the issue of Enron-style accounting. In 1998, Microsoft ran an $18 billion loss. Sure 1998 was a while ago, but it was also when the IT sector was gravy. Since then sales of new Intel boxes have plummeted and MS-Windows sales depend largely on OEMs. Now the prices for MS-Office are plummeting to near free-market prices. Microsoft depends on MS-Windows and MS-Office as it's only two cash cows and both look to be drying up.

I say again that there is no guarantee that there's enough money in the bank to keep MS operating through the end of the year.

The campus agreement you describe for StarOffice sounds interesting. I'd think more universities would be interested in it as a long term investment in electronic publishing as there are plans for it and OpenOffice.org to support the upcoming OASIS XML-based format. That'd increase the likelihood of parsable term papers, theses, and dissertations.

How about this?
Use one of these and one of these to create a filtering E-Mail server in this form-factor(1).

If people insist on running Windows? I insist on making money off them.

(1) Get them one of these or these to store additional E-Mail(2).

(2) Hell. Add LDAP so the worm will have a bigger addressbook to work through. Backups will be easy though.

How about this?
Use one of these and one of these to create a filtering E-Mail server in this form-factor(1).

If people insist on running Windows? I insist on making money off them.

(1) Get them one of these or these to store additional E-Mail(2).

(2) Hell. Add LDAP so the worm will have a bigger addressbook to work through. Backups will be easy though.

There are some unlucky people who practiced due dilligence and thought they were patched, but were not.

Windows Update had (and still has) a flaw in that it checks registry keys to determine if you have patches installed, rather than the files themselves. Sometimes the registry key is inserted but some or all of the actual patch files are not, for one reason or another. This happened to many people on July 17th, and they were probably really surprised when they got hit by the MS Blaster worm.

One particularly noteworthy victim of this flaw is the US army.

By the way, the holes in the sides won't help there, sparky. Only the case on the end would derive any benefit. I'd actually worry, though, about the case on the end overheating due to improper airflow since it's just open. I'd be slipping a manila folder in there and taping it into the inside of the case, unless I got uppity enough to use a metal plate and rivet it in. (unlikely.) Most of the time PCs have room for a fan in the bottom front area, where full-length cards would reach if you had one (almost no one does any more.) Then the air will flow upwards through the case and out through the power supply, if the fan blows the proper direction anyway. (If it doesn't when you get it, well, I've turned quite a few of them around.) It makes NO sense to have your power supply heat up the air and blow it into the computer, just like it makes no sense for the water in a car to flow through the heads last, even though that is precisely the way most engines do it. (It was a big deal when the corvettes got an engine with "reverse flow cooling" for example.)

Ms. Bowman:
Yes, copyright law governs, but Mark Heise's interpretation of copyright law is one that would not pass muster in a beginning journalism copyright course, and would get well-buttered dinner rolls hurled at him if he presented it in an after-dinner speech in front of any professional writers' organization.

USC 17 106 Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4-6 deleted because they only deal with visual arts)

If the owner of the copyrighted code wants to authorize, via the Gnu Public Licence or the Lesser Gnu Public Licence, or a license of the owner's own devising, unlimited reproduction and distribution and modification into derivative works, they can do it. USC 17 106 says they have the EXCLUSIVE rights to do so. And when licensing one's work, one can place restrictions in the license if one wishes. The GPL has a "poison pill" restriction in it: if you violate the GPL, the GPL ceases to apply, and your permission to copy and distribute and modify also ceases, making you immediately in violation of USC 17 106, and immediately infringing upon the copyright of the author or authors of the work.

As for the USC 17 301 that Heise cites, claiming that it pre-empts the GPL, I sincerely hope he did not say what your article said he said: The section he cited has nothing at all to do with the author's absolute right to authorize use of the author's work:

301 Preemption with respect to other laws
(a) On and after January 1, 1978, all legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified by section 106 in works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression and come within the subject matter of copyright as specified by sections 102 and 103, whether created before or after that date and whether published or unpublished, are governed exclusively by this title. Thereafter, no person is entitled to any such right or equivalent right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any State.

... that does not affect the GPL at all. It does prevent the states from writing their own copyright laws, and nullifies any such laws they might have had before January 1, 1978. Heise fails to grasp that the GPL is not a law, it is a "license" in the legal sense of the word, and it does not conflict with USC 17 in any way. It is merely a widely used way to grant rights which a copyright holder is authorized to grant by USC 17 106.

eWEEK asked:

SCO and its lawyers also say that even if that were a workable solution, they would still want damages for the illegal use of their code in Linux until the "fix" was implemented. They say Unix code has been in Linux since 2001 and that vendors and end users have been profiting from this since then, and they want to be compensated for that. Who, they ask, would compensate them under this scenario.

Better yet: How about a class action suit against Canopy Group? They have made millions during the course of this scam while threatening busnesses and everyone's freedom. People of the World v. Canopy Group sounds nice. They should pay for our anguish with a multiple of the profit they made by these actions.

Or 6 (million) other reasons:

1. 14 aug
2. 13 aug
3. 12 Aug
4. 11 Aug
5. 8 Aug
6. 7 Aug

"Microsoft has backed down on plans to abandon development on its email client, because 'the situation has changed'" Outcry forces reprieve for Outlook Express

"I have owned 3 ATI video cards in my life, and never again will I do that."

RMS singing the Free software song can be found at the link at the bottom.

It is available in .au, .mp3, and .ogg! Scroll down a fifth of the way to find it, or it is the fifth item in the list. There are lots of other songs there too. Some are even pretty good!
Songs

If you use windows you probally have the blaster virus.

Check your task mangager for something called "msblast.exe"

If you have it go here

... and this was also discussed in an earlier Slashdot post:
Sweden to outlaw peer-to-peer file swapping
(however, it seems like there are still confusion about what the law exactly means, since this article seem to be in conflict with the first)

I'm afraid our front line troops mostly do run Windows. This is one of the few military applications where Microsoft wouldn't have an almost automatic lock: almost nobody uses NT as a high-performance computing platform.

These worries aside, it will be good to see solid tools like Netware and NDS/eDirectory rise.

Well, it might.

Sun is using gnome 2.0. Solraris, UNIX for dummies! Before you instantly mod me trollbait, try using gnome to see how dumb it is compared to kde, windows and Mac OS X. You can't even change the colour scheme without HAVING TO EDIT TEXT FILES! While kde and windows give you a nice clicky pointy gui, NOT TO MENTION THE LACK OF CMYK support in the GIMP.

Just this week, Microsoft publicized the fact that they fixed that problem, by providing you indemnity in the event that such a thing happens.

And how much indemnity are they willing to provide? According to ZDNet:

"If it is determined that Microsoft infringed a third party's intellectual property, the new contract states that Microsoft will procure a licence so its customers can continue to use the infringing product, replace the existing product, modify the code so it no longer infringes, or refund that portion of the licence."

In other words, if Microsoft chooses to "refund that portion of the license" then you're in exactly the same position you would be in in the worst case scenario with free software: you've paid $0 for a program that you can no longer legally use.

In the second worst case scenario with free software (proprietary code may have made it into a free software product, but the proprietary copyright holder isn't hiding which code they claim in order to extort money a la SCO) then you'll probably be provided with options 2, 3, AND 4 from the free software community: you'll be able to choose an equivalent product (like FreeBSD), to continue using the existing product after it's maintainers remove or replace any infringing code (What, you think Linus and Alan Cox are going to give up and become novelists if it turns out there really were illegal contributions to Linux? No; anything improper will be replaced in no time.), AND to do both without paying any license fees.

So are there some advantages to Microsoft's offer that ZDNet didn't mention, or is this just PR?

Start-of-day calisthenics

Singing the company song

Dressing up as your favorite animals

See lazy zdnet press release regurgitation

Anyone else noticed this Vultus company is a Canopy funded company too? They hang out in one of SCO's buildings. Check their website especially this picture!

Question: Who owns/funds ZDnet & the like?

Like in 2000?

For Microsoft, It's "Inactive TV" (businessweek)

And 2002?


Microsoft likely to miss key test on interactive TV(and they did)(zdnet)

This story needs to be put in context with recent developments and crowing about Windows being chosen over Linux. The biggest story out of this surprising admission is that analysts and large organizations are starting to recognize the value proposition of Linux and Open Source, as described in the rejected post below. The most telling comment is in the quotation in boldface, which lends support to Mitch Kapor's predictions.

Microsoft Ranks Linux its Number Two Threat

While most media are focusing on Microsoft's growing sales and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 replacing Linux servers based on the June 2003 Netcraft survey, (also at SMH, but disputed by the Register) there's a more interesting story to Microsoft's latest earnings report and conference call. Speaking about the top five risks for Microsoft, CFO John Connors said, ''The general economic environment is risk and driver number one. Linux and non-commercial software is risk number two.'' The recent Munich win for Linux is partly credited for making Microsoft take Linux and OS software seriously. Said one analyst about future threats, ''People are underestimating Linux on the desktop. They're going to be surprised at how quickly Linux's threat will be an issue on the desktop.''

http://www.isro.org/programmes.htm>
http://www.isro.org/mileston.htm
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2132831,00. html
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/param.asp

Let's see some proof of this, no personal anecdotes, please. One example that proves you wrong would be those thousands of people who have requested Microsoft translate their software into Welsh, but Microsoft refused. According to your dimwitted theory, Microsoft would do it for free, but Microsoft hasn't. Luckily, with all open source software, they can do it themselves. Munich clearly made the right choice.

They show all the characteristics: digging through their old stack of patents and finding violations

Yup... they already sued Dell for Motherboard Design Infringement, which was appearently baseless, but they settled out of court and got some dough from Dell anyway. Seems like a familiar practice to anyone? *cough* SCO *cough*

Look at how many dedicated gaming devices Sony and Nintendo have sold compared to Microsofts try-and-do-everything Box.

Sony I will give you, but I don't think this strategy is actually working for Nintendo too well. Nintendo will win Japan, granted, but Europe, Australia, and America are probably lost at this point. Too bad that the Japanese (non-cellphone) game market is shrinking so much, too.

And if you really think the Xbox has only 2-3 worthwhile games, I am really curious what kind of games you play. Project Gotham, DOA3, Amped, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Shenmue II, JSRF, etc. are all pretty cool, and not available for PC or other systems (at least in the US in the case of Shenmue II). Likewise, how can you defend the GC's smaller library, which also has less variety?

By all means, enjoy any console you like, but it seems stupid to complain about how terrible a console is that many people seriously do enjoy, with sales numbers to prove it.

And what does the Xbox try and do that Sony hasn't tried with the PS2 (which is dominating)?

s'already been done
Windows on Linux on X-Box

Remember that the "you" in this case was Ransom Love, who led the pre-SCO Caldera. Nobody who's at SCO now seems to have any conception of the history Caldera had with Linux. It's not clear they have much conception of the history the original SCO had with Unix, for that matter.

To the person who answered this with "And you believed this?" I'd probably say, "Sure, I believe Love meant what he said." Unfortunately, while corporations may be legal persons, they very often are legal persons with no long-term memory. (As someone pointed out, Darl McBride has claimed that SCO owns C++; while I have to give the man points for ambition, I don't think he has the faintest clue about Unix and Linux history.)

Nope.
They play the law like a cheap violin. Using it however it best serves their purpose.

If they want an idea, they steal it.
If you have worked for them, you can't have ideas of your own. See this as an example.

The dividends just makes sure there's a little lube for the shareholders left with the leftovers ...

Sadly this is not funny, it's true. There's the new Copyright Directive in the European Union and the USA is ''exporting'' the DMCA to other countries like Singapore.

So, either way, users wishing to have tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, and improved security will find it in the cross-platform browsers Mozilla and Opera.

For those of you that missed it, the comic is in reference to this article.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://linuxtoday.com/high_performance/20010208009 06PSCDHE"

http://www.practical-tech.com/infrastructure/i0331 2003.htm

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b06122003.h tm

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=43186, 00.asp

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2093314,00. html

http://linuxtoday.com/high_performance/20010208009 06PSCDHE"

http://www.practical-tech.com/infrastructure/i0331 2003.htm

http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b06122003.h tm

http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=43186, 00.asp

So much for the "Linux commercial support not being available" argument.

Not neccessarily. SCO's claim, which has some merit, is that neither they nor the buyers of their Linux distro knew that these "trade secrets" were part of the deal, and therefore the license is nullified by the "doctrine of mutual mistake".

According to our pal Bill, Hooper's full of it.

Sadly, I have to believe the guy *without* billions of dollars, meetings with congresswhores, and an overwhelming desire to fund R&D, market, and monopolize Big Brother.

Big Brother Bill, thanks, but we can do without your help.

doesn't it though?

well not according to Bill
.

=)

since when does HE get to make such claims?

This is like the president of a sweatshop saying that all the employees have high moral.

Corel shareholders fight suspicious takeover deal

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx to merge their technologies into the project codenamed Deepwhite. Great idea but with somewhat misguided execution.

In 2002 Corel managed to strike a few high-profile albeit limited OEM preload deals with the likes of Dell, HP and Sony. While Corel received little in terms of revenue from those deals, even that limited success must have come as a shock for Microsoft. "How dare those ingrate nobodies invade our holy turf!" could have been the likely reaction at Redmond. With the anti-trust spotlight under a friendly operator it was time for the final strike, and how better add insult to injury than by not just taking Corel out but actually keeping the corpse within the family!

In December 2002 the Paul Allen financed Vector Group, managed by a fo

I should say one very big reason to run Linux: Eric S. Raymond said it best with his arguement against OS X's core, Darwin, when it first came out.

License problems don't seem like a big deal for an operating system someone else is working on but it will always bother me that they took FreeBSD and made it not-exactly-free. I just can't see the strategy behind that, especially now with OS X's popularity.

Also, "closed-source so those that know better" just doesn't fly with me and most people here at slashdot. Open Source projects are generally quite good at removing excess code. You mentioned Quicktime? I just can't see Apple's music format of choice, AAC, as going anywhere outside of apple with IT'S moronic license. Ogg Vorbis does very well completely open source.

Slate ponders projections that Linux PCs will pass Apple in desktop market share next year.

That's what the article is about. Not which is better. Not which has better software.

How about some figures.

Wednesday 30th April 2003
"Apple's worldwide market share is about a paltry 2 percent, according to IDC."

Friday, September 06, 2002
"According to Gartner Dataquest, Apple's worldwide market share was 2.5 percent last year[2001]"

Is it difficult to believe that Linux will achieve >2% penetration into the worldwide desktop market by next year?

Considering that Wal-Mart is selling Linux PC's for $199 and it is the OS of choice in developing countries trying to run a modern desktop OS on legacy hardware it does not seem to be that much of a stretch.

Especially when one considers this

Tuesday 17th June 2003

(emphasis mine)

SCO has made no secret in recent months that it hired high-profile attorney David Boies to spearhead its case against IBM, but the company's legal representation in Utah courts is also noteworthy. The company retained Brent O. Hatch and Mark F. James of the law firm Hatch, James & Dodge. Hatch is the son of Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a representative for SCO confirmed Monday.

SB

ft
eetuk
ZDNET
e-insite

The real issue that's going to be litigated here is to what extent SCO can claim damages from another company if the infringement is tiny. The very best thing that SCO can muster, in this case, is that they've identified a subroutine or two that seem to be close or identifical to something they claim is their own code.

They're claming much more than that now - in a recent interview their CEO is now claiming the following:
"We're not talking about just lines of code; we're talking about entire programs. We're talking about hundred of thousands of lines of code...We're talking about line-by-line code copying. That includes not just the function but the exact, word-for-word lines of code. And the developer comments are exactly, 100 percent the same."

If the infringement constitutes 1/1000 of their code, then it is only reasonable that they pay 1/1000 of their profits from that code

That's not how it works. If SCO can show that Linux is taking sales away from UNIX as a result of the infringement, the Linux vendors would be responsible for the value of the lost sales. It's a lot like Napster, where they weren't making any money from their software but were still responsible for the record companies' lost revenues. In any case, in a recent interview, the CEO of SCO claims "...we're talking about entire programs. We're talking about hundred of thousands of lines of code". Obviously they have yet to back up those claims, but they have no obligation to do so until they're in court.

The problem is that these software packages that we intentionally disable keep mysteriously reenabling themselves. Oddly enough this seems to happen after I install a product created by MS or an update created by MS or

DRM would die on it's own in a free market, but as it is now it is an inactive part of WinXP and an active part of subsequent versions. Sure some individuals can keep trying to turn it off, but Windows XP SP1 gives Redmond root privileges on your computer and they can keep turning back on. A perfect method for locking out competitors and locking customers in.

There are just too many good, cost-effective, secure, time saving alternatives, even on the desktop, to spend time/money on MS-Windows. Even government agencies, traditionally slow-moving beasts, are starting to see that this just another dot-com -- full of false claims. Even the management can see it's a dead company and have been bailing under the smoke screen of a multi-hundred million dollar marketing campaign.

Au contraire mon ami! (Well, that's the extent of my french!)

I would argue that the continuing publicity over the last five (ten?) years showing how linux can be ported to just about everything has been important in both bringing 'geeks' into the development fold ("Hey, I want to try that", "Hey, if it's that easy, maybe I should check out Linux for this project", "Dang, somebody got linux running on my HW - no more for us!!".

It's also kept an increasing drumbeat in the business/trade press, so the suits keep hearing how "Linux works, and it's free." Reducing risk and cost are two of the most important motivations for management. So this publicity in the trade press, and even the mass media, and Linux shows up with positive impressions everywhere. So management has been subjected to this re-education continuously for years, and it's really begun to tell. Like just this week at The Register, this article shows how, with baby steps, public entities are beginning to embark on major switchovers. These would not ever have happened if the publicity of continuing success, first for the experimenters, then the innovators, now for the leading edge of the main markets.

I myself was in this position in 1995 when I was building a small ISP facility. At the time I had been using Suns. I considered using Linux and offered that as a solution as well, but said I had no experience with Linux and couldn't be as confident of the results - all true at that time. In retrospect a Linux solution would probably have been at least as good, though there were some site specifics that complicated life a bit (like a Thomas Conrad LAN)

As for practice, each of these ports has the potential of improving Linux' robustness, code portability (duh!!), and tests unanticipated paths through the code, possibly tickling hidden bugs. Thus, for example, IBM's porting efforts to their hardware has provided much valuable input into the kernel. This is true of every port, no matter how trivial.

In addition, each port will almost inevitably dramatically improve the skills of those participating in the port, increasing the pool of Linux gurus, who will be increasingly needed & valued as the Linux marketspace grows.

The only potential disadvantage I can see is the possibility of complicating the kernel development space. It's hard to make one kernel that runs everywhere well - like making a cross between a Pitts Special (aerobatic biplane) and an F-111 Stealth Fighter. But even this is really an advantage. It may help/force kernel designers to distinguish between 'essential physics' (flight dynamics) and details of implementation (fabric vs. composite) [Actually both are fly-by-wire, just one uses steel cable, the other uses copper :-) ] The result as time goes on could well be a kernel that more and more closely resembles a kind of theoretical maximum of optimal distribution of tasks.

Of course, this is an excellent example of how the open source/free model excels. Without going into details, much like neural nets and micro-evolutionary biology this development process can be much faster at continuously approaching an optimal design at any given state of 'evolution', without knowing the actual state.