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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."
... thankfully, I have an IBM Death^H^H^H^H^HDeskStar :-/
purchased 8/02 dead 10/02
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
Well, SCO is still not out of cash... aparantly. So, for them to stop, they need to run out first. Since they have to pay for bandwidth... I guess using a little wouldn't hurt.
/dev/null them if you don't want to use disk space, but still want to download them...
z ip
So, got bandwidth? Mad at SCO? Want to learn more about their products and/or hear them talk? Last time they pulled the file when slashdot wanted to know how to administrate their Linux server. This time...
Download a 36.6mb ZIP from the SCO Authorized Eduaction Partner program from here
(for all you non-English speakers)
a 12.9mb Italian OpenLinux manual pdf from here
a 10mb Unixware administration pdf from here
a 7.9mb mp3 of a Caldera confrence call (May 2002) from here
a 4.2mb mp3 of a SCO confrence call from here
a 4.5mb vector image of the Caldera logo from here
OR
a 6.8mb SCO education Linux courseware pdf from here
***If you want to get these interesting files easier, you can also launch an unspecified number of wget processes. You can even -O
36.6mb: (removing the space in 'zip')
wget sco.com/images/pdf/education/SCO_AEP_posterfiles.
12.9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/edesktop/edesktop_24_it.pdf
10mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/aep/UW7NET~1.PDF
7.9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/06032002.mp3
4.2mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/q2.mp3
5.4mb:
wget http://www.sco.de/images/pdf/12-11-01.mp3
9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/aep/OS5NET~1.PDF
4mb:
wget sco.de/images/pdf/unixware/946000000b.pdf
And, if you need their entire website for offline viewing... not wanting to waste bandwidth downloading things multiple times:
wget -r -l0 http://www.sco.com/
I think it would be more effective to try to get the UnixGroup to file a restraining order banning SCO from the use of the "Unix" trademark. That would _really_ hit SCO where it hurts... imagine having to rewrite all of their code and promotional material to elimate the word "Unix"!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Larry Ellison has been preaching for nearly a decade that the PC is on the verge of death, and that it would soon be replaced by a number of small devices tailor made for certain tasks.
The NIC was part of this push... why use an expensive, power hungry computer system to accomplish what can be done with a much simpler system tailor made to the task?
Unfortunately, the flaw of this ideology is that resource consolidation that is provided by a computer is perhaps one of its biggest advantages. Not only does it let you browse the web, it lets you watch movies, listen to music, watch TV, play games, etc.
I don't see the PC losing out to single purpose devices any time in the near future.
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!
Q:We are constantly losing PCs and PC parts to thieves. The NIC is physically smaller. Do they make a more attractive target for thieves?
A:You shouldn't be losing any. The NIC will not function as a standalone computer so if a machine is stolen, the thief will soon discover that there is no market for the machine.
Uhhhm, no market? Well to me it feels like they are dooming their own device right there and then from the start...
From the NIC Hardware FAQ page:
"...there is no market for the machine."
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
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
But as a computer it is fairly bad. The video is the worst offender - it uses shared RAM, and there are streaks all over the screen if some serious computations are performed (I tried to run distributed.net on it and gave up.)
The box is also abysmally slow, so much that it is basically unusable. As a browser... sure, it might just work - but who needs just a browser?
In any case, the box works for me as a player just fine, and I am glad that I have it. But it is also good that I found the right use for the thing... otherwise it would have been a total write-off. Don't buy one unless you know how you can use it.
Yeah, that is some pretty poor wording. Maybe something like: "the thief will soon discover that the machine has no black market resale value."
:-)
Of course, they also contradict themselves by saying "you won't lose any, because it can't work by itself"-- think about this. If some crackheads break into your offices, they're gonna grab as many of these things as they can carry. I doubt one of them will go, "Hey, wait, these are NETWORK computers!" And once the crackheads find out the things don't work, they'll end up in a dumpster, a rvier, or some muddy vacant lot.
Of course, who's to say these things didn't come with window stickers that say "Computers will not work if removed from premises."?
Bottom line, if a computer gets stolen, whether it works or not once it's off your premises, it's probably gone forever. The only plus side is that since it's a network computer, your valuable data won't be taken out the door unless the crackheads make off with your server as well.
~Philly
...only without the hassle of learning how to use a trojan...
You should always use protection.
Feel free to do some research before crying foul play.
Source code is provided in that 18 meg zip file.
They ALSO will send you a CDROM with the source for a small fee.
Could someone set up a bittorrent for those?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
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.
From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform
:)
It was more fun to hack the platform itself. For those not in the know, the NIC basically ran a highly customized Linux distro (seemed to have parts of RedHat, Debian, and others from what I could tell), all wrapped with a minimal window manager (enlightenment iirc), and Netscape as your entire front end. The whole thing booted off CD-ROM, and came with a 4mb flash drive to store configuration changes, bookmarks, etc. A nice handy web/email/irc box for grandma, or public access kiosks, or what have you. Oh, and before anyone asks, a stock Knoppix distro refused to run on it - at least when I tried it.
Now, the interesting part were some of the apps you could launch from it - telnet, and several other xterm-wrapped applications. Pretty powerful machine, all things considered - but there is NO command shell option. So of course, let's get one:
As I said, the distro it comes with is highly custom, a LOT of standard binaries aren't even on the CD, and it's been stripped to the essentials. But of course, we have our good friend Bash, just not direcly reachable. Easiest way I found was to escape out of a telnet session. Now, when you run its telnet client, you have a pop-up window asking you the hostname and port. This gets passed direcly to the telnet binary and ran. The designers actually went to the trouble to block the space bar being hit within this window (tricky devils! I'm sure some of you see where I'm going here), so we'll just use some copy & paste to have -e passed along with the hostname. This gives us an escape character within the telnet application itself, which (ta-da!) gives us a nice shell.
The fun part was trying to get some power. You're running as a pretty unprivledged user here, but hey! No shadowing of passwords! In any event, I got lazy and Googled a bit. No word of a lie, the root password on every last NIC that I've touched is (hard-coded on the CD, of course) "4getit". Clever, no?
Moral of the story: good thing these boxes never took off as public terminals. Takes about 30 seconds from boot to get root, and yes, the 4mb flash drive is just large enough for fun things like NetCat
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
You know, I've thought for a while now that if you could come up with a simple, sealed box that could browse the web, read email, play audio and video, keep track of appointments and todos, and maybe do simple spreadsheets, word processing, and sell it to first-time consumers, you'd make a fortune. Imagine a ~1Ghz CPU with onboard video and sound, a modem and NIC, and a couple of USB ports, nailed up tight like the original Macintosh. It's not upgradeable, and you can't play games on it, but that's okay, because it costs 500 bucks and your market doesn't care about games. They take it home, plug in the monitor and keyboard, turn it on and go. They can't really install anything, so they don't have to worry about viruses or spyware. It doesn't run Outlook or IE, so they're pretty safe online.
It wouldn't be for everyone, but my dad would want one, and so would a whole lot of other people who didn't ever want to hassle with their computer. If you think about it, this is the direction that handhelds and cell phones are going, but who really wants to use a 2 inch screen for that? If the price was low enough, and the design was cool enough, it could be a hit.
Of course, now I've mentioned it on Slashdot, so there goes another business opportunity. Oh well, back to thinking up cool new porn site themes.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Oracle8 - A Beginner's Guide by Abbey and Corey (1997) contains the following about NICs:
OT, but still amusing:
And finally, we have a section title that's about as far from the truth as you can get:
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
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.
In the article found at news.com, McBride is quoted.
Sounds as if SCO got the corporate equivalent of a EULA.
The most interesting line from it:
Maybe the same way you buy software and not be allowed to sell it again?Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.