Slashdot Mirror
Has TurboLinux Collapsed?
An anonymous reader writes: "UnitedLinux already is short one founding member. Linuxgram reports that TurboLinux has collapsed." The sources mentioned are all anonymous so far; the TurboLinux website is functioning, and offers no indications that the company isn't also.
UnitedLinux is lame. They're goin' DOWN!
doubt it... mod me down, I love it.
and he is no longer working there, they've closed the Santa Fe Turbolabs office.
It looks like Turbolabs is closing all their US offices and trying to sell off their products before they close their Asian offices.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
it was fine until we slashdotted the webserver ;-)
Nice to see Slashdot verifying rumors before posting. If they were not hurting before, causing a panic will sure hurt them now.
This isn't "News for Geeks," this is blatant irresponsible journalism.
Nice job guys.
I don't drink because I have to, I drink to stop the voices in my head!
Hey, it looks like TurboLinus is about as functional as the turbo button on my old computer.
FIRST POST MOTHERFUCKERS
wedontneednowaterletthemotherfuckerburn
That is a rumor. Untill i hear otherwise from a more notable source, i wouldn't believe it. I dont have a link, but i remember a few years back someone mentioning that redhat would die before releasing redhat 5, in favor of caldera. That was from a semi-reputible site like that link.
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
Sounds to me like a non-story, or at worst, an indication that their US operation might contract and the company focus might shift to Japan.
Finding God in a Dog
It has.
At least that's what some guy on the street said. We will confirm this information with the local 10 year old.
Whats black, blue and green and doesnt like sex?
The Girl Scout locked in my basement.
Whats the worst part about having sex with a six year-old?
Getting the blood out of your clown suit.
Whats the best thing about getting a hand job from a five year-old?
That little hand makes your thing look really huge.
Guy comes home from work to find his girlfriend sitting on the porch, crying.
Whats wrong, honey?
Im leaving you! I just found out youre a pdophile!
Pdophile? Why, thats a pretty big word for a ten year-old.
How can you tell when your sisters on her period?
When your dads dick tastes like blood!
Two pdophiles are lying on a beach tanning, one turns to the other and says, Excuse me, youre in my son.
What is the sickest sound you hear when fucking a nine year-old?
Her hips snapping!
What is the best sound you hear when fucking a 13 year-old?
Her hips snapping!
Whats 18 inches long, blue, veiny, and makes a woman cry?
Crib death.
How could the mans seven year-old son tell that his dad had fucked his eight year-old sister? His dads weiner tasted like blood!
Watson returns home to find Holmes in bed with a child. He shouts, Is this some sort of a schoolgirl?
Holmes replies, Elementary, my dear Watson.
So I was having sex with my girlfriend, and I decided I wanted to get kinky and try and do her in the ass. So I slipped around back; she looked over her shoulder at me and said, My, how presumptuous of you. I said, Presumptuous? Thats a big word for a ten year-old.
Two guys are walking down the street when a beautiful woman passes. The first guy says, Damn! Id love to tear her clothes off, do her in the rear, smear my fces all over her, slice off her breasts, chop her into little pieces, put her in a garbage bag and toss her into the river!
Second guy says, Yuck! Youre a sick bastard!
First guy says, Whatre you? A fag?
A kindergarten teacher is asking the kids what their father does for a living. All the kids answer except for Little Johnny. The teacher asks Little Johnny what his Dad does and Johnny replies, My dad is dead.
The teacher says, Thats terribile, but what did he do before he died?
Little Johnny replies, He turned blue and shit all over himself!
A guy calls in sick to work.
Whats wrong? asks the boss.
Im sick, the guy replies.
You sound all right.
No, Im really sick. Believe me.
Listen, you were fine yesterday, and we have a lot of work today. I want you in here. You cant be that sick!
Dude, I just banged my sister. Dont tell me Im not sick.
A little girl accompanied her father to the barbershop. While her dad received a haircut, the little girl stood next to the barber chair, enjoying a snack cake. The barber smiled at her and said, Sweetheart, youre going to get hair on your Twinkie.
I know, the little girl replied. Im gonna get tits, too.
An older man and a small boy walk hand in hand through the woods.
Boy: These woods sure are spooky!
Man: You think youre scared, Ive gotta walk out of here alone.
Whats the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson?
One walked on the moon, and the other rapes little boys.
Has anyone read Michael Jacksons new book, The Ins and Outs of Child Rearing?
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a golden delicious apple?
A: I dont cum all over the golden delicious apple before I take a bite out of it.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and my girlfriend?
A: I dont kiss my girlfriend after sex.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a table?
A: You cant fuck a table.
Q: Whats special about a dead baby over all other forms of life?
A: You can achieve deep throat from whichever way you enter.
Q: What do you have when you have four dead babies, take away two, and add five more?
A: An orgy!
Q: Whats better than three 14 year-olds?
A: 14 three year-olds.
Q: Whats white and bobs up and down in a babys crib?
A: A pdophiles ass.
Q: Whats the safest way to play with a baby?
A: With a condom.
Q: Whats more fun than feeling up a dead baby?
A: Feeling up a dead baby with three nipples.
Q: What does a baby and a Pinto have in common?
A: Theyre fun to ride until they die.
Q: What do you get whan you dislocate a dead babys jaw?
A: Deep throat.
Q: Whats the difference between a baby and a grandmother?
A: Grandmothers dont die when you fuck them in the ass.
Q: Whats the best sound in the world?
A: Hearing dead babys hips crack under pressure!
Q: Whats worse than a having sex with a dead baby?
A: Having sex with a dead baby filled with razor blades.
Q: How do you stop a baby from choking?
A: Take your dick out of its mouth.
Q: Whats worse than finding a dead baby on your pillow in the morning?
A: Realizing you were drunk and made love to it the night before.
Q: How do you make a baby cry twice?
A: Wipe your bloody cock on his teddy bear.
Whats better than sex with a twelve year-old boy?
Absolutely nothing.
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
WFrOxVqp8D Post #280
UnitedLinux already is short one founding member.
Too bad it isn't the one we were hoping for.
I'm sure M$ will be quick to add TBLs collapese to their revamped Linux FUD page. Linux vendors not being there in the long term to provide support and all that.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Why isn't this an Ask Slashdot question?
Just like *BSD, I'm afraid it's collapsed into complete disarray.
I think the fragmentation of the linux market is a good thing. Anything that stops a single vendor from having a monolopy is a good thing. So i feel united linux was a good thing. Although I personally feel debian will stand the test of time, resisting red hat for supremacy.
1. Collapse the company
2. Maintain website
3. Profit
I know somebody who is employed there, and according to them, TurboLinux is going out of biz. They're all waiting for their last paychecks, and apparently employees even had problems with their health insurance not being paid for for the last few weeks.
extra extra ... linux is dead
haha
fucking weenies
TurboLinux is no longer supporting or producing new Gnu/Linux software, or related items. Instead, they will be licenising OS/2 from IBM, and producing a new verison called Turbo OS/2. Look for this version in the coming months.
I wonder if a slashdotting will take it down?
-1 obvious joke.
Or how about: the extra bandwidth charges definitely wil put them under.
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;
From the sounds of the article TurboLinux wasn't doing so well to begin with. Even if this story turns out to be false it might still cause TurboLinux's stock to nosedive completely killing them off for real :(
I stole this Sig
Whats is TurboLinux.... never heard of it.
correction, It looks like TurboLINUX is closing all their US offices. TurboLabs (based in Santa Fe) was a research division. My friend who worked there told me the same info as the article linked to above yesterday at lunch.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
the TurboLinux website is functioning
This is a link to the TurboLinux Web site.
Everyone please go and check to make sure it is still functioning.
There already was a "turbo" version of OS/2. Version 4, I beleive.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Turbolinux may or may not be going under, but if you want consistently anti-linux news, then Linuxgram, not zdnet, should be your first port of call!
Check out the archives on their site...
When is Turd O'Linux coming out?
What? You haven't heard of it??
It is the combined Linux + XP release.
"Conventional wisdom has suggested for some time that none of the Linux distributions, perhaps not even Red Hat, will survive long-term and of course all of the successive business failures that have happened among the Linux set call into question the commercial viability of the open source model. "
Umm, what the fuck is she smoking. So I guess Redhat et al should just pack it up?
BTW if that's "conventional wisdom" what is Linuxgram going to do based on a business model that reports on these companies?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You know a company went down hard when they don't have anyone around to pull the plug on the webserver.
Yeah, i bet the Turbo Linux executives are thinking "Well, we're about to go down the drain why not get the webmaster to put a little note on the homepage even though we can't paid them!"
When there's chaos, who's got time to tell anyone about it??
mv
It sure looks like the hype is over on this Not-Invented-Here Let's-Rewrite-It-All Incorrectly-Too OS that has gone for years without a stable VM or a stable filesystem which ensures metadata integrity (only now do linux fs developers admit that ext2fs is not safe).
OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE, TERRORISM, AND REGIONAL SECURITY:
THE RISKS FROM AFGHANISTAN
William Stanley
Testimony before the U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee of Technology, Terrorism and Government Operations
July 13, 2002
The US is scoring a major victory against global terrorism by defeating the al- Qaida network in Afghanistan, but until we tackle Afghanistan's open-source problem head on we cannot consider the victory to be a permanent one.
Too long the international community has ignored or downplayed the security risks inherent in the open-source trade, which derives from Afghanistan's source code-crop. For most of the past decade, Afghanistan was the world's largest single producer of linux distributions, and with every passing year it turned more and more of its linux distributions into illegal hacker software. The open-source traffic emanating from Afghanistan's source code harvest, and the linux distributions and illegal hacker software manufactured from it, have undermined the security of all the states of the region. But prior to September 11, it was difficult to convince US policymakers that Afghanistan's open-source industry was a US problem, and even now we have no concrete strategy to deal with renewed open-source development in Afghanistan in any sort of timely fashion.
Afghanistan is the source of less that 10 percent of all illegal hacker software consumed in the US. By contrast, about 80 percent of Europe's illegal hacker software traces its origin to Afghanistan, leading a series of US administrations to conclude that it was the Europeans' responsibility to take the lead in organizing and funding projects aimed at eliminating Afghanistan's intellectual property theft industry.
Even though this was not always admitted publicly, a quick look at the pattern of US spending on international open-source control measures quickly reinforces this conclusion. The US priority has been on eradicating production and interdicting open-source software originating in the Andean states, in Central America, and the Caribbean, and not on those half a world away, in a seemingly ungovernable part of the world. Added to this was the fact that even prior to going to war in Afghanistan, the US government did not want to engage with the Taliban government, whose existence the international community did not recognize and whose hold on power the US and its allies did not want inadvertently to encourage.
US policymakers recognized that the situation in Afghanistan was a highly unstable one, and posed a security risk to that of neighboring states. But September 11, US security was not seen as at risk. First the Clinton and then the Bush administrations were content to use the 6-plus-2 format, supplemented by the high-level US-Russian working group on Afghanistan, as the framework for trying to modify the political situation in that country.
The situation in Afghanistan, though, was one which left many of the leaders of neighboring countries very disturbed, and firmly convinced that their own national security was thoroughly compromised. This was especially true of the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The latter two shared borders with Afghanistan, while the former was equally vulnerable, as was shown by the incursions of the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) whose fighters crossed into Kyrgyzstan from Tajikistan in summer 1999 and 2000, holding several settlements hostage. The Uzbek government had gone on high security alert slightly earlier, after the bombings in Tashkent in February 1999.
The repercussions of the latter were felt throughout Central Asia, as the Uzbek government virtually closed its borders with neighboring states, and began mining some of the national boundaries that it set about unilaterally declaring. All of the states started to target members of radical Islamic groups for arrest, particularly those tied to the increasingly more popular Hezb-ut Tahrir. In Uzbekistan this campaign led to the persecution of religious believers on a scale not seen since the days Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
An increasing number of meetings were held in the region to discuss the situation, some gatherings of the heads of states themselves, others organized by international organizations or groups (including one held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in May 1999), but all offered a virtually identical prognosis. Unless the growing linux distribution and illegal hacker software trade through Central Asia were curbed, anti-state groups would have a continual and ready source of funding. Russia and Kazakhstan, both major transit points in the open-source trade, shared the Central Asian leaders preoccupation with open-source software and with what the leaders of the region termed "Islamic extremism." Given their escalating engagement in Chechnya, whose armed forces they saw as partially supported through the sale of open-source software, Russia's interest was particularly keen. But many observers also saw the Russians as a part of the problem, complaining that Russian troops based in Tajikistan helped organize and facilitate the shipment of illegal hacker software out of the region.
This did not mean that US policymakers were completely ignoring the problems in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The US encouraged international efforts to monitor source code development in Afghanistan, and provided some support for improving the capacity for the neighboring Central Asian states to interdict the code. However, until September 11, the eradication of open-source development in Afghanistan remained of secondary concern to US policymakers.
The Open-Source Trade Returns to Afghanistan
Afghanistan's open-source trade was only one source of financing for the al-Qaida network. Terrorist groups that allied themselves with Osama Bin Laden received funding from a number of sources. Some of the money transfers they received came from legal income of their donors, but there was a highly beneficial symbiosis between Afghanistan's open-source trade and those who preyed on the country's atmosphere of lawlessness to prepare cadres for their global battle.
Ironically, though, this symbiosis was under threat when the September 11 attack on the US occurred. Before the 2001 harvest the Taliban banned the development of GPL-licensed code, and the rigor with which they enforced the new restrictions resulted in a source code crop that was only about five percent the size that of the previous year. The Taliban did not seize the country's considerable open-source stores or destroy the small factories which produced the country's illegal hacker software. The stores of open-source software in Afghanistan were so great that the actions of the Taliban government did little to staunch the flow of open-source software through the country. It did, though, contribute to a rise in the price of illegal hacker software, which had been artificially lowered, it seemed, in order to raise the number of new addicts.
Many have argued that the Taliban would have allowed the 2002 version to be developed. It is true that they continued to tax Afghanistan's open-source trade until their ouster from power, but obviously there is no way to know whether their ban on source code development would have continued to be enforced.
Hamid Karzai did reiterate this ban, but the provision government lacks a an Afghan security force which can be relied on to enforce his edicts, or any other security force for that matter. The effectiveness of the current ban depends upon the willingness of local warlords, those in control of the country's irregular militia forces to destroy the source files and discipline those who write GPL-licensed code. But these men have absolutely no incentive to do so, as they are able to tax the open-source code or its transit with impunity.
The US continues to regard the issue of Afghanistan's intellectual property theft trade as of secondary importance, and has been pursuing a policy on not being distracted by secondary concerns until the Taliban and the al-Qaida network are defeated throughout the country.
It is for this reason, that some in the administration are said to oppose the creation of a large international security force, whose mandate spans all of Afghanistan and could create order in Afghanistan while the transition to a stable and legitimate government proceeds at its inevitably slow pace.
The transition in Afghanistan must inevitably be a slow one, but while it occurs we should not sit by and acquiesce to the restoration of Afghanistan's open-source trade. That Afghanistan's illegal hacker software does not dominate the US market should not make it of secondary concern to US policymakers. Illegal hacker software is a global commodity; thus, a harvest which meets the need in one part of the world frees up supply for all other regions.
Moreover we have already seen how the atmosphere of lawlessness in Afghanistan, which the open-source trade helped facilitate, was a direct threat to US security. Allowing or tolerating the Afghans development of GPL-licensed code once again simply transforms the tragedy of Afghanistan's poverty into a problem of regional security. Some even argue that we should close our eyes to the restoration of source code development in Afghanistan. Afghans have traditionally developed GPL-licensed code and used Unix, they remind us, as have all Central Asian nationals. Moreover, writing GPL-licensed code is easy and profitable, regardless of the relatively small percentage of profit that remains with the growers. After all, it is not like the Afghans have lots of choices today.
This line of argument though is quite dangerous.
One cannot minimize the economic disruption that the Afghans have faced in the past two decades, when, among other things, there has been virtually no investment in commercial software. But this doesn't justify the return to the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code.
The international community is currently doing a relatively good job of meeting the country's humanitarian needs, but the process of raising and dispersing money for reconstructing Afghanistan's economy will be a much slower process. Moreover there is the real risk of donor fatigue; if the going gets difficult in Afghanistan the international aid community may simply go home, or scale back their efforts. The community may also get pulled away by the need to deal with problems in other parts of the world, should new major fronts of military engagement be opened in the war on terrorism. Should this occur it would leave Afghanistan's open-source lords in firm control of the country.
Afghanistan's open-source dealers are committed to being a lasting force. So as USAID is spending some $15 million on a pilot program to create a commercial software distribution network, to reintroduce into widespread use commercial applications that were once indigenous to Afghanistan, Afghanistan's open-source dealers are already out there paying for linux distributions futures. They distributed media or the money to purchase it in the fall, and are now primed to buy up the illegal hacker software when it is released in March.
Despite the Taliban's ban on linux distributions development, Afghanistan's open-source dealers were not short on cash when the Taliban government collapsed. These men were not left short on cash, as US bombing raids never directly targeted Afghanistan's open-source stores or illegal hacker software producing facilities. Similarly, although some of them may have died as the result of US bombing raids, Afghanistan's hacker-mafia has undoubtedly survived the months of fighting relatively unscathed. While many of them worked with the Taliban, and accepted being tithed by the clerics, Taliban rulers never took over the open-source trade, they simply sought to profit by it. Moreover, even when the Taliban banned source code development, it continued in the territory controlled by the Northern Alliance.
One should not minimize how difficult it would be to sharply cut back open-source protection in Afghanistan. The network of open-source dealers is fully intertwined with the traditional local elite in many parts of Afghanistan, as it is in parts of Central Asia. Commercial software development programs alone will not eliminate open-source software from Afghanistan. Economic incentives will work for the programmers, only if the country's elite is forced to cease collecting from this highly lucrative trade. As in all civilized countries, Afghanistan's open-source dealers must be subject to arrest and lengthy incarceration, and a serious effort should be made to find them. Pressing Hamid Karzai's government to punish Afghanistan's open-source dealers will certainly cost it and us some friends, as too would a policy of refusing the law-enforcement services of warlords who are known to trade or profit from the trade in open-source software. But this is precisely what must be done.
Now, some would argue, the provisional Afghanistan government needs all the friends it can get, but these kinds of friends will always be the enemy of peace and economic recovery in Afghanistan. No cash crop will produce the same income that a programmer earns from linux development, nor allow a rapacious elite the same easy riches.
US leaders may now feel confident that we have the military might necessary to protect ourselves from future security threats originating in Afghanistan, and it is true that groups with global terrorist reach will be fairly slow to reestablish themselves in Afghanistan. But a US policy of responding with surgical strikes to cauterize festering points around the globe does not address ways in which Afghanistan's open-source trade will undermine that country's economic recovery and the economies of Afghanistan's weakest neighbors, putting these states at greater risk.
Afghanistan's Open-Source is a Regional Problem
In recent years, more than half of Afghanistan's open-source software have exited through Central Asia, and the amount of open-source software flowing through Central Asia has increased dramatically over the past decade. Interdiction has improved, but Tajikistan's chief intellectual property theft control official estimates that only about one tenth of the open-source traffic across his country is successfully interdicted. Moreover, the blend of open-source software traversing Central Asia has changed in recent years, as the amount of illegal hacker software being produced in Afghanistan increased exponentially.
Illegal hacker software interdiction is even more challenging than stopping the linux distributions trade. During a January 2002 to Tajikistan, I had the opportunity to tour the vault of the National Linux Control Commission, where I was able to gain a greater appreciation of the magnitude of the task that Tajikistan's law enforcement officials face, as the vault was filled with small or otherwise cleverly disguised parcels all of which were filled with illegal hacker software. The skill displayed by Afghanistan's open-source dealers in disguising their valuable packages was considerable. Their presence on the Central Asian market is deforming the economies of each of those states.
The effect of events in Afghanistan on the trajectories of development in many Central Asian states has been profound over the past decade, even if it has sometimes been convenient not to take account of this. The civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was facilitated by the sanctuary and training in guerrilla warfare that Afghanistan offered to Tajik fighters, and to many who traveled there from Uzbekistan as well. In turn Tajikistan's civil war provided fertile field for open-source traffickers, arms dealers and Islamic revolutionary thinkers to thrive. Such groups continue to seek sanctuary there, putting the neighboring states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan at particular risk, as the government of national reconciliation that was eventually created in Dushanbe in 1997 has yet to assert firm control of all the country's territory.
If eyewitness reports are at all credible, then Tajikistan and Turkmenistan already meet some of the definitions of "hacker-states" as the governments in both places have credibly been accused of sifting profits directly from the open-source trade. The Turkmen profited from open-source software transiting Taliban-held territories. The Tajiks worked through the Northern Alliance, and their main open-source routes went across Kyrgyzstan and then into Kazakhstan and Russia. Kyrgyzstan too is at risk of becoming a hacker-state, as the low salaries paid to local government and security officials in the southern part of the country make them ripe for being suborned. Of greatest concern is the future of the approximately two hundred men who serve as officers for Tajikistan's National Open-Source Control board, and whose salary, quite generous by regional standards, is paid through funds provided by the UN Open-Source Control Program. Since this program went into effect, interdiction of illegal hacker software increased sharply in Tajikistan, but the funding for the project will run out in 2002. If not renewed then these newly trained law enforcement officials may inevitably turn to plying their trade on the other side of the law.
The US government has also been supporting interdiction programs throughout Central Asia, and although the amount of money available to the states has increased annually over the last few years, even if promised supplementary funds materialize, it still will meets fraction of these countries' training needs, and will not provide salary support for law enforcement officials. Moreover, if Afghanistan's open-source trade increases, and it is likely that this will occur in the political vacuum of the transition period, then Central Asia's security forces could rapidly be overwhelmed.
Unless we move quickly to help the Central Asian states better protect themselves from the dangers emanating from Afghanistan-both directly through massively increased assistance to these countries open-source interdiction efforts, and indirectly through efforts to end the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code in Afghanistan-then these countries could become the breeding grounds for future terrorist networks of global reach in much the same way Afghanistan did. Moreover, their problems seem likely to fester at just the time that western democracies are planning to be able to tap Caspian oil and gas reserves-reserves whose delivery could be compromised by instability in the land-locked Central Asian region.
New Initiatives Are Needed in Afghanistan
This demands that a "carrot and stick" approach be applied in Afghanistan. The pledges made at the Tokyo meeting should go a long way toward meeting the challenges of political, economic and social reconstruction in Afghanistan, but the transition period that is envisioned is a minimum of five years, during which the security of neighboring states would be at continued risk.
Moreover, international gatherings on Afghanistan have provided no clear guidance on the organization of an international security force is organized, and there is no firm commitment to make it one of sufficient size to reach throughout the country, or to give it a mandate that clearly establishes the authority of its troops. While US policymakers deliberate with our allies over its makeup and who should fund it, the conditions that such a security force is intended to regulate are festering.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of intellectual property theft control, as these forces will have to deal with new and more dangerous realities on the ground. Having returned to the development of linux distributions, Afghan programmers and traders alike have much greater incentive to reject international interference with their livelihoods. Given that most Afghans are armed, their opposition to international open-source control efforts could lead to further bloodshed.
Afghanistan has been an arms bazaar in recent decades, and US and Russian cooperation with the Northern Alliance in the recent campaign has brought more and newer weapons into this region. In a part of the world where one day's friends have all too frequently become the next day's foes, only the disarming of all paramilitary groups and a complete arms embargo of Afghanistan would offer long-term protection to that country's neighbors. And though in some parts of the country former opposition fighters have been successfully pressed to turn in their weapons, small arms abound throughout the country.
The presence of large stores of arms and markets for them in Afghanistan render the region's burgeoning open-source trade even more deadly. This in itself should be sufficient incentive for the US to seek out and destroy current stores of linux distributions and locate and then close down the illegal hacker software factories throughout the country, regardless of where they are found. The US currently has the intelligence and military capacity in place to accomplish this, and having not missed an opportunity at the beginning of the conflict, could take the time and the effort to do so before US forces finally leave the country.
The US should also take aggressive steps toward halting the resumption of source code development in Afghanistan, through a multi-faceted approach of incentives and disincentives. Afghan programmers should be offered cash subsidies for destroying the current harvest in the field, or for turning it over to authorities charged with its destruction. Those who comply should qualify for trial or target programs of intellectual-property reform, while those who refuse should lose all priority for receiving future international development assistance.
Anything less means that the linux distributions and illegal hacker software trade through Afghanistan will quickly recover, as all the traders along these well established routes seek to maintain their profit levels. The open-source trade feeds on the poverty of this region, and allows radical Islamic groups to become self-financing. Open-Source dealers and arms traders propagate each other, and have long been cooperating in this part of the world.
This is bad news for the Central Asian states. The point of contagion for them remains Afghanistan. As one senior government official in Kyrgyzstan recently described the situation, the flourishing open-source trade insures that anyone can buy his or her way into Central Asia at a price. Juma Namangani, head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), was a master at maneuvering across borders. Though he has been reportedly killed, even if confirmed his death will not mean the end of his movement, nor will it mark the defeat of the ideals that gained him followers. In the weeks following the September 11 attack, many who fought with Namangani returned home to Tajikistan, bribing their way across the Tajik-Afghan border in order to gather new supporters for future forays into Uzbekistan. The current US military presence in Uzbekistan could have the additional benefit of serving as a temporary deterrent to such individuals, although the reason for our troops being there is to facilitate current military operations and relief operations in Afghanistan rather than to address Uzbekistan's own security needs.
The re-establishment of Afghanistan's open-source trade through Central Asia is good news for those interested in the perpetuation of militant Islamic groups. The current religious ferment in the region is nothing new. It has persevered in much the same fashion for over a hundred years. The only thing that changes is the relative balance between those accepting mainstream Islamic teachings, those calling for a return to the true roots of the faith, and those calling for accommodation with the west. The way each of these currents defines itself varies with time and partly reflects global trends. Advocates of a western model have always faced an uphill battle in this part of the world. Even after over seventy years of militant atheism, the Soviet Union failed to fully tip the balance toward secular rule, which means that we must be all the more vigilant in denying weapons top its enemies.
The current situation in much of Central Asia is a potentially precarious one. Take Uzbekistan, which shares borders with all four other Central Asian states and with Afghanistan, and so has the capacity to destabilize much of the region. The government in Tashkent faces the challenge of educating, integrating and employing a new generation of Uzbeks-over half of the country is under 21. Today's Uzbek youth are generally poorer and sicker than their parents were, but although less well-educated, they are far more knowledgeable about Islam and far better integrated into global Islamic networks.
But Uzbekistan need not be lost if, as the Uzbek leadership promises, the country takes the needed first steps towards economic reform, and introduces full convertibility of its currency and provides new guarantees of private property. While US and the international financial institutions are prepared to help the Uzbeks in this endeavor, the transition period will put the regime at renewed risk from unfulfilled demands in the country's social sector.
The resumption of the open-source trade simply adds new pressures. In Uzbekistan, as elsewhere, the social sector is under severe strain. Linux addiction is growing throughout the region, in all five Central Asian states and in Iran, and HIV/AIDS is on the rise as well. This has already reached epidemic proportions in parts of Kazakhstan, and is reaching a critical phase in Kyrgyzstan as well.
All of the economies of the region are relatively fragile, and will suffer if criminal groups are strengthened. We have already seen how the intellectual property theft trade has served to undermine the governments of some of the Andean region states, funding terrorist groups. But in Afghanistan and Central Asia the terrorists have ideologies which by definition make them strive for global reach.
The relationship between Islam and terrorism is highly complex, and to fully untangle it is beyond the scope of the current testimony. Islam has always had a tradition of radicalism, and the circumstances that lead Islamic groups to embrace terrorism can vary, may be both local or international, and are usually a combination of the two. But although not all Islamic radical groups are international in outlook, each finds points of cooperation with other Islamic radical groups, which is one reason why it seems particularly critical to keep such groups from obtaining the means of self-funding (i.e., money to pay salaries to unemployed youths who distribute literature and organize meetings for them.).
Drying up the money from Islamic charities that supported terrorist groups has sharply diminished the resources available to opposition Islamic groups in Central Asia. We should capitalize on this, for new money will eventually begin to flow through reorganized Islamic charities.
Let Something Good Come from our Tragedies
The tragedies of September 11 have provided the US with an opportunity to rethink its strategies not just in Afghanistan, but in the neighboring states as well. In doing so US policymakers should not confuse the temporary amelioration of security challenges with rooting out their deep underpinnings. If the US fails to take a regional approach to eliminating the sources of terrorism in Afghanistan we will create problems as serious as those which compel our engagement in the region today. Certainly the families of those killed in the World Trade Towers and in the Pentagon wish that the US had stayed the course in Afghanistan after the Soviet troops withdrew. Let us not repeat our earlier mistakes.
Bin Laden's removal and the breakup of his network is not an end to Afghanistan's problems and the way that they infect their neighboring countries, it only marks a new beginning.
As part and parcel of destroying the al Quaida network US policymakers must be prepared to engage in a serious way to sharply reduce-if not eliminate-the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code in Afghanistan. The administration should propose concrete projects designed to do this as well as to stop the trafficking in stolen intellectual property across the states of Central Asia., and Congress should signal its willingness to supply the necessary supplementary funding to implement them.
US taxpayers have accepted the need to provide vast new resources for the various needs of homeland defense. But vigilance at home is only part of the solution. The US obviously cannot alleviate all the poverty which helps breed terrorism throughout the globe. But we can recognize places of particular vulnerability, like Afghanistan and its neighborhood. Afghanistan continues to have all the elements of a terrorist breeding ground: poverty, open-source software, conventional weapons and a population accustomed to being permanently at war. Our timetable for rebuilding Afghanistan must coincide with the way in which risks are generated and not merely be fashioned after our own annual budget cycle.
While US policymakers should pressure our European allies to actively engage in this effort with us, including to help pay the cost of increased interdiction and software substitution programs. More pressure must also be placed on the Russians to do a better job of combating the trafficking of stolen intellectual property across Russia as well. Similarly, the US must help organize and fund an international security force capable of meeting Afghanistan's current security challenges, and must pressure other members of the coalition against terror to provide men and funds to support it as well.
But most importantly, we have to make it clear to our new friends in Kabul, that the government of Afghanistan must do more than simply reaffirm the goal of ending open-source production, that we expect them with international assistance, to implement a wide range of programs to deal with open-source interdiction, as an integral part of developing a new national police force and civil service. Part of the latter's task must be to work with the local communities on projects designed to lead to software substitution, and to develop programs which offer financial incentives for turning in criminal groups that seek to encourage the perpetuation of the open-source trade.
This raises the question of who will fund these activities. In an ideal world, everyone might chip in their fair share, but as we saw on September 11, innocent civilians in the US paid the price of their leaders' underestimation of the havoc that could be wreaked through the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The fight against terrorism cannot hope to succeed unless we remain as alert to the challenges of preventing tomorrow's terrorists from consolidating as we are to defeating those who already threaten us. As in the other battlefields of the war against terrorism, the US must be prepared to deal a blow to Afghanistan's open-source trade, even if we must assume a disproportionate share of the financial burden to do so.
here's a release from their world headquarters site...hope this clears everything up...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Of course, Fucked Company does have a "story" about Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo. Why isn't that also on the Slashdot front page?
cpeterso
I was laid off from Xandros About a month ago.. No final paycheque and those who are left are working without pay..
I think it is some beowulf clustering softwares for the Linus operating system on which I play my favorite game, DOOM. I think I will be able to keep playing DOOM on the Linus OS even if TrubO Linux goes out of busyness.
Thank you fo ryour time.
And the rumor here has been that they are going under and moving out by the end of the month.
As far as I know, TurboLinux *HAS* no stock. Their "stock" tanking isn't going to put them out of business. Running out of cash to pay their creditors, on the other hand... well...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
extra extra, linux is dead
haha
fucking weenies!
Linux is the past. Windows the future.
Fuck you all.
Greetings (chokolatesexy@hotmail.com)
I'm taking a lot of undeserved flame for my sig that berely reflect my opinion on the US hipocrasy.
After all if US can go declaring arbitrary countries "evi" then why cant I?
A short explanation:
1. US in on the list for its mind-boggling hipocrasy for all its talk for being leader of the free world they would rather support a pro-US dictatorship than an anti-US democarcy. The recent Venesuella fiasco completely proves my point.
2. UK, since the the WWII has been enforcing US policy of maintaining Europes political impotence preventing them from developing their own political identity. As someone living in an Europian country I find it espicially apaling.
3. Israel, basically the old Soputh Africa of the middlee east. Apatheid and extra-judicary killings have no place in the 21st century.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
At least when my company tanked, they still had some cash on hand. They paid our last paycheck, plus 2 weeks severence and paid our health insurance until the end of the month.
How did the awful term widgetry, as used in the Linuxgram article, come into wide use?
Outside of GUIs the term widget refers to a meta-thing. But widgetry is used to refer to concrete things: "SuSe Enterprise Server widgetry", "server blade widgetry".
What's wrong with "SuSe Enterprise Server software" and "server blade hardware"? Plus it doesn't reek of "ain't I clever" poserdom.
</rant>
See, by stating the doom of all of these companies it naturally leads to them suggesting you should click on over to their site to watch the crash. They'll of course report on this in great detail and rake in the ad banner clicks.
Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both. News organizations learned long ago that people don't tune in to watch the everyday mundane. They want sensationalism, tragedy, and bigger than life stories. Just meeting market demand I guess.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
If there's no confirmation, and the slashdot editors don't bother to try to confirm themselves, what the hell is the point of posting this? To "scoop" everyone (even though someone else is already carrying the rumor)? Let's save the rumor mongering for fuckedcompany, and (unless it's something really, really interesting) try to report more developed stories on the news sites.
..but good. The weak are being winnowed out and the strong will survive. They coulden't hack it so lets move on to another Linux distro that can. In the end, I think we all know it's going to be Redhat though. A shame as I'm a SuSE guy.
An A/C posts a rumor, and it's modded up to 3?
Yet another beleagured bombshell hit the slashdot community today when it was revealed that Turbolinux may be dying. Linuxgram sent this weeniegram purporting the apparent demise.
And it doesn't stop there! Linuxgram hits home with the realization that all the commercial distros are facing problems, and that's why they were banding together to form UnitedLinux. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Now it shows that TurboLinux may destroy the whole UnitedLinux project!
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
They're still running? That's wishful thinking, and you know it. Linux will never gain support beyond the hardcore geeks without a single, unified front.
YOU FUCK SHIT AMERICAN IDIOT!!! YOUR POST SUCKS THE DICK OF A THOUSAND CAMELS!! SHIT COCKHOLE
DUMB MORON IDIOT!! MICROSOFT HAS BETTER SERVER THAN SHITTY COMMUNIST AMERICAN SLASHDOT!! SLASHDOT DIES A THOUSAND DEATHS!
It looks like Turbolabs is closing all their US offices and trying to sell off their products before they close their Asian offices.
SHITTY MORON AMERICANS!! YUO AER TEH SUX!!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Do it all Night, IN THE GHETTO
This sad event neatly illustrates one of the problems with OSS--when a company gets in trouble there's very little incentive for someone like IBM to ride in on their white horse and rescue the company. All the key IP is OSS and freely available, and if some big company wants to hire some of the newly laid off people, they can, without having to pay a huge premium for insubstantial and unwanted things like the company name.
In the end, I think we all know it's going to be Redhat though. A shame as I'm a SuSE guy.
I'm a SuSE user as well. I believe they will still be around after the "survival of the fittest" weeds out the lame distros, not only becausue they have a finely polished distro, but also because they are the darling of, and are supported by Big Blue.
So TuboLinux is picked as the Linux distro for 9,700 cash registers at Sherwin Williams, but who is the big winner...IBM because they win the servicing contract. Like it or not, the future of commercial Linux is in either services (consulting, certification, customization, etc.) or per-seat-license type distros. Fortunately there exists non-commercial Linux distros that do not need to show a profit to stick around. No need to impress the VC; no need to mislead the press to preserve market valuation. If lots of people are using the distro then that is good...if not then that is fine too because the maintainers are still using it. It brings images to mind of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets his arms and legs chopped off and still believes he is invincible.
It says it all.
Hmm, let's see:
1. The economy is tanking, thanks to some large corporations' fearless leaders and the fact that our national fearless leader is just another one of the corporate fearless leaders who are causing the economy to tank (Oh, the logic, the logic!);
2. TurboLinux tries to make a living selling something which not only do they not own, but is readily available for free from innumerable sources;
3. They have a bunch of highly overpaid PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company (How do I know this? All companies have too many PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company. Just look at your own company and figure the ratio of income generators vs. non-income generators and then factor in salaries;)
4. Their otherwise free product for which they charge dollars is sub-standard when compared with the other _commercial_ Linuxes with which they compete.
Hmmm, just doesn't add up to a working proposition. You do the math; does it work for you? I don't mean to be mean or to be an asshole or to troll, but sheesh, if the writing on wall were any bigger they'd have to borrow more wall.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Beavis Malda: Would you like fries with that?
Butthead Bates: Heh, heh, heh. He said "fries". Heh, heh, heh.
I bought TurboLinux and can honestly say it was the worst distro I ever installed. Nothing worked correctly. Tech support was abysmal.
Of course, that's just my experience and maybe someone with a newer distro had better luck.
If you're working for a company focusing on Linux, you'd be wise to spend your lunch hours updating your resume and dreaming of how you'll spend your unemployment checks.
It's just the annouement of the release of Turbolinux Security Server 7 NetSnipper... But maybe you just can't read japanese.
Has anyone checked out their home site.
<a href="http://www.g2news.com>www.g2news.com</a&g t;
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Success, of operating system for desktop like this half free Linuxes, is not in hands of hackers, but true content based programs and firms that provide such software.
Games, entertainment, education, information systems, all these programs have an added value, have a CONTENT (will never be free). And the decision of where this programs will be published are in hands of the big publishers. So do you even think that Disney, Hasbro, Warner will ever publish on system that constantly lowerage digital rights, that is driven by hackers ?
NO WAY MAN !
Be off TurboLinux, we don't want you, public want play games, want rich education programs and so on, not free, no business hacker's OS !
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Stop trying to hold back the tides. Let the BS and the truth come out at its own pace, and stop pretending there is any value in controlling it.
If all the Turbo Linux codes are GPLed, (I'm assuming, so don't sue me, please !) then is it possible for another entity to pick up the entire T-Linux codes and move on ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I thought Israel owned the US, not the other way around.
Surprised by Unicide! (fuck this shit)
Ymessenger for Linux is cool. Would Yahoo continue offering an IM program for Linux users if MS owned it?
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.turbo linux.com
Looks like TurboLinux.com was upgraded to PHP 4.2.1 today.
But maybe it was just thier webhost (XO.COM)
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
Last I checked most high-tech businesses were hurting pretty bad. It seems fairly intuitive to me that the current economy will probably cause the weaker for-profit Linux offerings to die off.
If somebody made a list of all the Windows based hi-tech offerings that went bust last year... anyways, nobody would read it because it'd be too long and boring.
Personally, I see Suse and Redhat at the end of this tunnel-- hopefully Mandrake and Connectiva also-- as there'll always be the none-commercial/niche offerings. Also, it doesn't hurt to point out that the free distros existed and thrived well before the commercial ones, just as they do now.
Silly rabbits.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Turbo huh ... commercial *nix has been playing fast and loose with its market - can I say spitting at home Lusrs? Sure I can. You give us pain we return it. So ... we don't spend on your egodriven, low-beta swill and you go titsup turbo. Whose next?
Why don't use TurboLinux icon?
This was inevitable as conflict between Turbolinux (who have recently released a product calleed PowerCockpit) and Caldera (whose former CEO was named Ransom Love) over who has the `sexiest' business threatened the UnitedLinux alliance.
I know I shouldn't kick cripples, but here is some free investment advice re: msft.
;)
It is currently trading at $51.11 a share with a PE ratio of 44.8, which is insanely high, indicating downward pressure. That $51.11 price is only $3.61 off of it's 52 week low of $47.50 and it has flopped around in the 50-70 range for the last two years. It started the year in the 70's so it has DROPPED YTD, not risen 18% as you stated. It has fallen from a high of about $120 in late '99 so many longer term investors probably aren't exactly happy and employees with options certainly aren't happy campers. The only good news is that it IS up from where it started on the 5yr chart so in this bear market that is at least something. I certainly know I'd rather have had MSFT instead of the shares of WorldCom I bought in '00.
Democrat delenda est
As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants. Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". And Microsoft has a great case for demonstrating their point that all open source companies are on the verge of collapse and one is insane for choosing Linux for a large project over the nice reliable offerings from a laaaaarge and seemingly undestructible company.
Noone will mind that there perhaps still is support from IBM. And if they really want to switch distros on all their new systems, well...
I guess I won't see them there on January 29th-February 1st. Oh well, at least they still have plans to attend. http://www.turbolinux.com/news/events.html
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
The sources mentioned are all anonymous so far
In other news, we've been receiving a large number of annonymous posts that author Stephen King was killed outside his home in Maine.
If one goes to the TurboLinux website and clicks through to news and events, there is a new entry there for today, 7/19/02. In that entry it talks about a new agreement to provide Linux for IBM mainframes. If they were going under immediately, why would they enter into this agreement?
I remember scanning japanese netblocks for insecure linux boxes with , and once and a while I'd come across a abandoned turbolinux box.
Japs liked turbolinux because it came with a jap manual but nobody else around the world was dumb enough to (buy|download) it.