Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Bankruptcy, SUVdiving, Singalongs
Not like that un-American GPL. agentZ writes "The first Microsoft government customer to buy access to the Windows source code is Russia according to this CNet story. Interesting to note FAPSI, one of their intelligence agencies, authorized the purchase. Perhaps they're looking for vulnerabilities in the U.S. Government's dependence on Microsoft?"
The difference between Chapter 11 and The End. prostoalex writes "In regards to a recent heated discussion on whether tech companies can make it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, XO Communications, the telecom company of the dot-com era, seems to be doing quite well after filing Chapter 11. The article on Internet.com also mentions another company, Covad Communications, picking up customers and more business after filing for Chapter 11."
There's hope in PCI Land. Regarding the Slashdot post of a few days ago about the PCI-SIG ("The End of the Free PCI Device List"), PCI-SIG Chairman Tony Pierce writes
"YourVote.com Supporters:Thank you for making us aware of your concerns regarding Jim Boemler's online Vendor and Device Lists for the PCI technology.
There has been a misunderstanding between PCI-SIG and Jim - PCI-SIG officers are currently working with Jim to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. We respect Jim Boemler's work and are committed to support the PCI specification efforts industry-wide. We are confident that we will come to an amicable resolution.
We are pleased to see the strong industry support for PCI technologies and value your response to the issues. We understand this site has been a very valuable tool and are working together to find a solution to make sure that the tool is available to the public in some way.
Thank you for your support over the years. We will be sure to keep you informed as we come to resolution in this situation."
This lowers Finland on my list of vacation spots. E-Tray writes "It seems that Finnish equivalents of American RIAA, Teosto, which represents songwriters and publishers, and Gramex, which represents music producers and artists, want to force Finnish day nurseries to pay royalties every time nursery staff sings along with kids. Previously Teosto enforced a law that taxi drivers have to pay royalties if they play music while a customer is in the backseat."
Would still rather see a statement signed in blood. Error27 writes "Earlier this week, Slashdot linked to a Maureen O'Gara article that claimed SCO was probably going to try charge Linux users $96 per CPU. More than one person thought SCO's denial was, "Awfully ambiguous". Hopefully this article clears up any doubts. Essentially, SCO will continue to charge IBM but not RedHat or SCO's UnitedLinux partners."
Perhaps I can volunteer my dad's Suburbans? Finally, joe jennings writes
"A few months ago you ran a story about the cars my team and I skydived with and crashed into the desert. This is a bit of an update.Next month, we're going to blow up my Nissan Pathfinder. Its twisted remains will be welded to a steel beam and planted on a plot of land in the mojave desert. We're starting "suv ranch," a tribute to gas guzzlers, a dying trend (we hope).
I intend to thoroughly document the project and will post images and quicktime videos on gaspig.com."
Ummm.... last time I checked you still couldn't export crypto outside the U.S. - won't this kinda kill the purchase ??? Sorry I couldn't add more but am already running late
"Essentially, SCO will continue to charge IBM but not RedHat or SCO's UnitedLinux partners."
Isn't that called being discriminatory? Charging different people different amounts for the same thing? (Actually The entire Linux pricing issue skirts legality, but that's a different topic)
Besides, their "word" on that convinces who? If/when Linux actually does take off on the desktop, and Red Hat starts raking in the billions, SCO will just stick to their word then? "United Linux" vs Red Hat? You don't think this won't heat up in the future?
When monkeys fly out of my...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
umm, isn't the recreational use of airplanes- which use a lot of gas and pollute a lot more than the worse suv's- including to dump suv's out of them, a lot worse than the suv's themselves?
Well as much as I liked seeing skydiving vehicles in the odd James Bonf Flick and all I don't see this as an good way to protest SUV's.
1. You need to gas the planes to get the cars up into the wild blue yonder. MORE POLLUTION.
2. Crashing theme into the desert. I am sure that this does wonders for the native wildlife and natural look of the desert. Just cause it is empty space doesn't mean we have to throw trashed cars into it. Even if you remove all the hydrocarbons and glass, it's still junk.
3. Then blowing up a Nissan Pathfinder. Hmmm, releasing smoke and debris and further polluting the enviroment. Could have recycled the metal into something else.
I am all about making a statement about SUV's and pollution. But you doing things like driving a small car, riding a bike, using the bus. But spending money, resources, and then further polluting the air with a Jack Ass like stunt. Just don't make much sense to me.
Put0
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Bloomberg says it's just a chance to LOOK at the code (by visiting Redmond perhaps or having them visit you?) But News.com reports that MS will let governments BUILD their own custom versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves). Which is it? There's a big difference there.
And also is it access to ALL the source code, or just the security-related bits?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Within a couple of years, non-democratic governments will have a copy of the source code of Windows, and some governments, that have been cooperating with local companies to do industrial espionage, will also have it.
The old argument that Linux is less secure because evil hackers can see the source code now also applies to Windows. Except that the good guys can't see the Windows source code. I wonder what they're hiding.
Lars Dybdahl.
You know, there are some valid reasons for owning a small SUV, like the Pathfinder, or a Ford Explorer.
I carry a family, go camping, and occasionally pull a trailer with my Explorer. I guarantee you that I can't do some of these things in a Geo Metro.
What good is 45 mpg if you have to make four round trips to get your stuff there, that you can do in one with an Explorer?
XO doing well - Well of course they are doing well - they have been going nuts signing up major spamhausen, and protecting the ones they already have. Easy to make more money when you are able to charge 3X the going rate to insure your spammer customers don't have to suffer the pain of disconnection.
PCI spec - Translation - "BOY OH BOY did we step in it! Jeez who'd'a thunk that this would piss so many people off! OK, we are making nice now, stop flaming our servers!"
Finnish Nannys Question - if they sing a song for which copyright has expired, do they have to pay? "All right kids, from the top: There's a nice wee lass, her name's Mary Mack..."
SCO charges IBM, not RH or others... OK, so screwing some people is OK, so long as it isn't me?!?! It would be funny if IBM bought SCO and then freed the IP...
Crashing cars into the desert So, we are going to protest wastefulness by wasting vehicles.... ???
www.eFax.com are spammers
They do it because the US legal system makes them. Look up "due dilligence" in regards to copyright. If you don't strictly enforce your copyrights and trademarks you can lose them. If a company knows that you're violating their IP rights and turns a blind eye then they may not be able to legally stop anyone else from using that IP in the future. This is to prevent a company from allowing a term to come into widespread use only to later start suing people who they've been implicitly allowing to use the term for damages.
Damnit I AM acting my age. I'm 15 in hex!
This is absolutely ridiculous and non-enforcable. It even screams for civil disobedience, if something like this gets passed. Nobody will take the law serious anymore, if too many crazy laws are made. Even people I know who don't know anything about mp3s and P-t-P software, are becoming more and more pissed off at things like copyright protection and excessive prices for music that tends to get worse (cfr. bland, faceless, uninspired, synthethical pre-fab pop 'sensations' that are pushed and hyped everywhere these days).
It also goes to show (again) that many people involved in the music business are in it rather for the love of money than the love of music.
(Which is -in a horrible way- understandable when you make and sell 'artists' as 'products').
In spring of 99 there were a few programmers from Russia hanging out at Novell, looking through code to make sure that there weren't any "back doors" in the code that could potentially give the US government access to Russian servers. I was told this was a requirement before they would buy certain Novell software. I would think that previously they would have imposed similar requirements on Microsoft as well.
This friend of a friend from church was telling us what a great guy he was helping the hungry, poor, and homeless in distant lands, and his most recent project was organizing relief for Bosnia. While he was saying all this, my (then girlfriend, now wife) pointed at her plate and indicated she couldn't finish the other half of her hot dog. I already had 2 brats, but I was still a little bit hungry and I scarfed up that half a hot dog.
Anyway, this grossed by friend out, which I thought was funny in light of all what he was saying. I mean part of helping the hungry is like not throwing out food?
On the other hand, eating off someone's plate in public is traditionally a way of signalling that one is in a somewhat intimate relationship. My friend was both a geek-like person and a perhaps somewhat sexually-repressed Catholic-like person, and perhaps this was too much, but maybe what you eat off your girlfriend's plate are fries and not a half-eaten hot dog. But parents routinely eat half-eaten food left behind by children so I don't know what the big deal was about the hot dog, but I thought Mr. Helping the Hungry was making too much fuss.
I know some fairly well-placed programmers who have worked on XP and Win2k, and even they didn't have access to the complete source code the way governments will.
So we should ask ourselves what Microsoft gains from an unofficial general release of their code. I think there's a lot of speculation that can be done here, and it becomes very paranoid very quickly. In the reasonable realm, I think two things are possible:
1) Microsoft cries "uncle" when their source is plastered all over the net. They start lawyers and a few bots looking through thousands of lines of GPLed code looking for similarities. They then sue the writers of the code for stealing MS code and using it in GPL software (which would be very, very clearly against the law).
2) They use the illicitly released code as an experiment. They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally, and nobody wants to be sued (for an essentially legitimate reason) by a company with billions and billions in the bank. So they see how often code like it shows up. How much people mimic their code. How people try to stretch the limits of the law to use some of MS's techniques. Or if people are simply uninterested. Letting it be released illegally seems to be a great way to test the waters for a legal release of protected source code, Apple-style.
3) The third possibility is that Microsoft knows that their code will be stolen, but that doesn't scare them quite as much as the prospect of losing tens of thousands of government computers to OSS.
For our sake, I hope that it's 2 or 3...
~Shylock0
Comments and questions welcome. Flames ignored.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
You can keep me from teaching and singing songs to people by cutting my throat. Failing that, stay the fuck out of my way.
Music is an Art form, not a business. It comes from and belongs to the people. Your greed is one step less than that of the money-changers that Christ threw out of the temple. I am not alone. Our numbers are growing. Enjoy your yachts and cocaine now, because we have you in our sights and mark my words, we will take you down.
c-hack.com |
There's something to be said for "big cars" just being cooler than small ones.
I was given a car for my 16th birthday because I commute to school 54 miles/day round trip. My parents were tired of driving me there and didn't want me to take the bus, so it was worth $15,000 to get rid of that responsibility.
I was told I could pick any car I wanted from what was available used...Choices ranging from civics, mustangs, escourts, kias, some light pickups and smaller SUVs.
I opted for the Honda Civic sedan. It gets 22/29 MPG; about double what most SUVs get and about 1.4 what my friend's mustang gets. I spend $25/week on gas and I'm good to go; my best friend probably spends $30-40.
I would *much* prefer something like a Dodge Durango to the Civic. It's bigger, it sits higher above ground so I feel more "in control", it has a bigger engine, and it's got a decent stock sound system. And it's *not* one of the gas guzzlers (although it's not anything like my civic.)
Big cars are just nicer for people to have...you can fit more friends, more stuff, stretch your legs, have more room with a girl, whatever it is you're doing, you have more room for it.
Economy cars cost less; bigger cars cost more. It's a tradeoff.