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Slashback: NIC, Dastar, Defects
Was it ahead of its time or vice versa? BreadMan writes "After limping along for years, the New Internet Computer (NIC) company finally went under. Founded by Larry Ellison, NIC sold a diskless workstation running Linux targeted at home users that wanted internet access. From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform if you can get one on the cheap."
Way to GNU! xarium writes "Seems that in response to pressure from the FSF OpenTV has released the source code to all of its compilers. You can download the full package here (~18meg)."
Because a hard drive should not be a rhythm section.
Dynamoo writes "As previously noted in Slashdot, Fujitsu MPG3xx series hard drives have been failing in huge numbers. The U.S. law firm, Shepherd Finkelman Miller & Shah is currently conducting a class action against Fujitsu and HP for knowingly distributing faulty drives. According the this article in The Register, Gateway has now been lined up as a defendant.
The fault appears to impact MPG3102AT, MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT units manufactured in early 2001. If you have one of these, then it has probably failed already, if not you should replace it asap. If you're a customer of HP/Compaq you can visit the HP Hard Disk Drive Replacement Program site.
We had about 40 of these things fitted to Compaq DeskPro EXDs, and I can assure you the failure rate is pushing 100%."
In the public domain, no one knows you're a dog.
smiff writes "United Press International reports on Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. Reversing lower court rulings, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Dastar did not violate the origin-of-work provision of the Lanham act. Dastar had taken public domain video, made some modifications, and sold it as its own product. Twentieth Century Fox sued claiming they should have been given credit for the video. According to Antonin Scalia, Dastar would have violated the Lanham Act if it had simply repacked the material and sold it as its own. But since Dastar made some minor changes, the Lanham Act doesn't apply.
While Dastar has been cleared under the Lanham Act, the Supreme Court sent the case back for a rehearing. The Fox video entered the public domain in 1977, but the book it was based on is still protected by copyright."
... or get off the pot. Brazilian Joe writes "The LinuxTag folks, as you may know, are responsible for a restraining order against SCO's claims in Germany. As a result, SCO has shut down its Germany web site. Story here."
Wonder how this will turn out. My guess is the law firm will get some money, HP and Fujitsu will lose some money, but consumers will get almost nothing.
There have been a number of class action laws-uits I've noticed of late where the members of the class get little or nothing. Cases in point
-Best Buy gets sued by people who didn't understand the terms of it's extended warrenty. Best Buy settles, gives coupons for more crap at best buy to the members of the class.
-Salton (maker of the george forman grill) gets sued for price fixing. Settles. Money gets paid to health charities, consumers who theoretically lost money due to overcharges get nothing
There are a ton of similar cases.
I have blog like everyone else
I just took a look at www.sco.de, and it loads just fine for me. I don't read German, but it seems to be in German. Is this a diversionary tactic by SCO?
--Quentin
I got a NIC of one of my friends, he used to work with NetZero and they provided internet for the systems. It is a great little box for almost anything, and you can drop in a laptop hard drive in seconds. It is a good box for messing with, boots anything from the win2k install disks to knoppix perfectly, there is no unusual hardware in these things.
If you need a little terminal, get one, just add peripherals and network. I have 2 NCD Xterms on my netowork and an old 386 that has a boot rom(no moving parts in the system, quite silent) so adding another item to the boot on the network was nothing(PXE netowrk boot built into the unit) and it "just works". I have way too much running here as it is, so this unit does nothing other then random computations... I'm thinking of dropping a custom Mosix setup onto my systems in the near future(ah using my slow laptop, just run the program and it should deal with resources... I'll have fun setting that up)
These things(my version - older) have a 233Mhz processor, 64Megs ram, 4meg flashdisk, 10/100 network, 56k softmodem(drivers work), sound, usb and joystick, cdrom drive. Works great.
Anyway, enjoy!
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
I haven't downloaded that 18 MB zip file but the blurb on the download html page makes it sound like the zip contains binaries only. There is an accompanying offer to distribute source code on physical media for the cost of copying, saying you need to send contact and billing info to somewhere, and that the offer is valid for 3 years, language taken direct from the GPL. Basically they are being in-your-face about doing the absolute minimum that they can to conform to the letter of the GPL.
Given that OpenTV was previously in breach of the GPL and therefore had had its rights terminated, that they're now distributing the GPL'd stuff indicates that they came to an agreement with the FSF and the the FSF restored their rights. Personally I think FSF should have leaned on them a little harder and insisted on online source distribution before agreeing to restore rights, but that's just me. I do hope someone gets the source distribution and puts it up for download somewhere.
If you're using one of the computers mentioned, and are running Linux, then you won't be able to run the software download they require to be eligable. Thus, here is the message returned by the software on one of the affected machines:
Please contact HP at the following:
United States: 1-800-575-3756
They more than likely have signed a contract to use the trademark, and you need a good reason to break a contract.
Good reason as in the other side violated the agreement, not as in "we think they're a bunch of bastards now."
News.com.com.com has an article up dissecting the contract between Novell and SCO that assigned some right over UNIX to SCO. It seems to be a pretty "murky" agreement as one of the lawyers describes it, but it does show that Novell retains the rights to all the UNIX patents and copyrights.
Sailing over the event horizon
The IBM drives didn't fail quite as much as those Fujitsu drives. I actually have 5 75GXPs of different sizes in active use, and none of them have failed. So 0 out of 5 failed at my place.
I said this two weeks ago and all I got was modded down :(
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Actually, it given a normal distribution, 34 samples will give you a better than 95% certainty on the mean and standard deviation. So 40 units is sufficent for this purpose.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I have bookmarked.... SCO
Curiouser and Curiouser
Stake
WMD
Anthrax
SCO admits that linux kernel implementations are different from their Unix implementations, on their own website. One of the most interesting questions on their FAQ is this:
What is the difference between the Open UNIX 8 and Linux kernels?
Both operating system kernels have the Linux system call interface. We have added the Linux kernel functions into the Open UNIX 8 kernel. The implementation of the system calls inside the UNIX kernel is different from the Linux kernel implementation. In some cases, the UNIX implementation provides better scalability, reliability, and performance than the Linux kernel.
My reading of the Dastar decision was not that Dastar evaded the Latham act by making modifications to the original work, but rather that the point-of-origin provisions of the Latham act cannot apply to origin of creation for patentable or copyrightable ideas and expressions.
Dastar was accused of "reverse-passing-off", or selling a product made by someone else as their own, as if a Coke distributor filled Coke bottles with Pepsi and sold it as Coke. Under traditional interpretation of the Latham act (which was accepted by the Court) this is as prohibited as "passing-off", or selling their product with someone elses trade-mark on it. Both are misrepresenting the "point of origin" of the product.
The court ruled that the "point of origin" provisions of the Latham Act could not be construed to apply to the authorship of a copyrightable work.
Scalia pointed out the double-edged result of a contrary result: If Dastar had simply repackaged and resold Fox's tape series without modification, Fox could have sued them for "passing off", but if they relabelled it and didn't credit Fox, Fox did sue for "reverse-pasing-off".
Passing off someone else's copyrightable work as your own is "plagiarism", and covered by copyright. Scalia also asserted that allowing the Latham act to protect against plagiarism would, in effect, allow the Latham Act to effect a perpetual copyright, which is forbidden to it.
Fox lost the original copyright when it didn't renew it; they make no claims otherwise. Therefore, the Court rules, Fox has no claim against plagierism.
All Supreme Court cases, if the lower court is overturned, are remanded to the lower court "for further proceedings consistant with this opinion". This is boilerplate. The Supreme Court doesn't make the final decision on the case, they just answer narrowly tailored questions of law -- upon which the case usually hangs.
The kicker with this case is that it is unknown if the copyright on the original book is still valid. The copyright was renewed as a "work for hire", but the original author took tax advantages for the book as if he hadn't been hired to write it. Dastar may still be on the hook for these videos.
A friend of mine was one of the first 7 (or so) employees at NIC. Beautiful office in Ghirardelli Square in SF. I'd never get any work done there.
In any case, some months ago he quit because Larry basically gave up on NIC and put it in the hands of investors or someone like that. The employees were given the shaft, and the company was (even more) mismanaged from that point on. He quit as a protest.
Seems like it could have been a great company with a great product if it had been given just a little more attention/funding, and if the management hadn't been so inept. I hope someone gets it right some day.
The NIC was a neat idea in concept, but when I had played with one, I soon realized the hardware was complete schitt. We did manage to successfully mess with the ISO image, and even got into correspondence with some of the developers about it. They seemed pretty cool, and helped us out in hacking the image.
Oh well. That's the way it goes.
Aside from finally making it to FC.com, I'm going to miss working at NIC. Remove the political BS that went on, the core tech group was very capable. And for that matter, for many years, coding was done at Oracle, not Ghiradelli. So the beautiful office wasn't the problem....you get the point. =] Send my regards to your friend tux...tell him that aj says hi.
Yes, OpenTV powers many of the set top boxes for cable TV systems and satellite DBS.
My DishNetwork receiver has OpenTV on it, and I can't find a use for any of the services they offer, epecially at the additional charges associated with some of the stuff.
1. Instant weather: Uh... I have The Weather Channel, plus the internet
2. Games. The games you can play on a set-top box with an infrared remote made for a TV set are LAME. They charge like $5/month for the games service. A ripoff.
3. Customer support. You can choose from like 20 "FAQs" and have the answer displayed on-screen for you. In the time it takes to get through the menus, load the support application, and download the information from the satellite, I could have gotten the answer from the web site.
4. Other things so insignificant I can't even recall them.
Each of these "features" is of course accompanied by advertising. For instance, the weather service used to take up about 100% of the screen to display the information requested. Now that same information is squished in to less than 25% of the screen. The remaining parts are divinded up in to two banner ads for upcoming movies on pay-per-view and other products.
It MAY be that the channel/program guide is coded as part of OpenTV, but it doens't seem so. The parts marked as being OpentV applications are quite distinct from the rest of the interface.
Personally I wish Dish Network would stop wasting the time and resourses developing these pointless applications and give me something useful like a SEARCH feature for the program guide.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people