Prepare for more crazy ramblings from SCO in the immediate future. They will undoubtedly issue a press release claiming this is an admission of wrongdoing by SGI and play up the aspect of the letter that suggest missappropriated code, but of course this is not the message to be taken from the SGI letter.
You can almost write the SCO selective quotation press release yourself:
"SGI has released over a million lines of...System V code...in the Linux kernel."
I asserted that it was a failure of part of a utility service, and isolated to that service.... what part of that is wrong?
National Grid quote ~410 000 customers as having lost power. I agree that is a fairly small fraction of London, and not on the scale of blackouts in other countries.
You just overstated your case a little. True, most of London didn't lose power. It was a local power grid failure confined to a small number of substations. But it was a grid failure.
I have no clue as to what caused the power problems with the underground, and make no claim to.
Well, I suggest you read the report referenced in my previous post. It is much more informative than the press converage, which was I agree, of rather poor quality.
The London Underground blackout has nothing to do with this, it was a failure of part of a utility service, and was contained within that utility.
I don't know where you got that idea from but it's completely wrong. London Underground ran their own power plant for nearly 100 years before they closed it last year and went onto mains power. Bad (or unlucky) call. The report on the power failure is instructive reading on how a combination of circumstances can break what should have been a quadruply redundant system.
It annoyed the hell out of me that even here in London they reported a "London Blackout!" over the top of footage of a brightly lit evening street focusing on an entrance to a tube station (lit) with a flashing emergency sign (powered by electric not hampster power).
Sure, they don't have many feeds into the Tube power supply, so there were areas of London with power but no Underground trains. And once you've decided to evacuate, you can't switch the power back on without electrocuting a few commuters. You have to cold restart by clearing the whole system.
Now, I make all that GPL software and my in-house software freely available, but I can't make the source for that driver from AcmeSoft available, because I don't have it. While technically, I'm in violation of the GPL, but if I've done all I can (short of pressuring AcmeSoft for source (which they won't give me) or ditching Linux altogether), am I really such a bad guy?
No, but you are an idiot if your contract with Acmesoft allows them to provide you with software which you can't legally use, based on work copyrighted by a third party.
You can't get any easier than parsing CSV! Even the most basic languages can do it in a couple of lines.
Yes. And it'll break on stuff with embedded commas. Or maybe it will work with one CSV syntax and not with another (yes, there is more than one CSV syntax). Or get the escaping rules wrong.
Sure, all this could be solved fairly easily. XML just gives you a rock solid specification and a set of widely available libraries. The slight added complexity in parsing does mean that folks tend to use an off the shelf parser, rather than knocking up one that will break at half a dozen edge cases.
Whatever the technical merits (it surely is overhyped), it does have one main advantage: people are talking about interoperability again and writing schemas for their own community. That people are talking is much more important than the syntax they use.
We need an RFC stating that this is not permissable.
And they will follow it because...?
Hopefully because their agreement with ICANN requires compliance with agreed standards. At the moment, Verisign are arguing that because it isn't explicitly forbidden then it must be OK.
That's a reasonable POV, even if most of us disagree; however, introducing it without due notice and consultation was grossly irresponsible.
In England anyone can call themselves an engineer. Anyone that comes out to service any bit of kit, be it ever so humble, gets called an engineer.
Calling yourself a "Chartered Engineer" is different matter, as that would be lying about your professional qualifications. That would be unfair trading, and illegal.
My local bank (Barclay's) have replaced old X Terminals with Dell desktop PCs (P4s!) running Exceed, and I assume they chose this based on price.
It's true that thin clients often seem overpriced for what they are, however, the working lifetime of them tends to be much more than your average PC. Longevity doesn't seem to count for much when buying.
We have a few Exceed PCs used almost entirely as X-terminals but they are running on NT. Since NT is no longer supported, and they don't look like they are worth upgrading, they will probably have to be replaced.
I don't think you're going to back up a few hundred gigs of business data on ~$100 of tapes.
$100 will buy you a 400GB Ultrium cartridge, more or less. So, yes, you will only be spending a few hundred dollars making spare tapes for offsite backup (assuming you already have a drive), unless you are talking about terabytes of data.
As you say though, operational considerations are more important. If you store tapes offsite, that is two places where your confidential data can be stolen from.
Won't pollute the waters? Have you seen the Thames? I doubt it could get much more polluted....
On the contrary, ever stronger environmental controls, not to mention the fact that there is hardly any heavy industry left, mean that the Thames gets purer every year.
> "The Thames is a perfect location to make use
> of this vehicle as it has no speed limit and
> is greatly under-utilised."
Those silly Brits. We have speed limits posted for all bodies of water here in the US.
The BBC is just reporting what the guy selling the car said; it doesn't mean that it is true; it certainly isn't in general. He is a car salesman, after all. Of course, there are speed limits on the Thames.
If people were to find out that there is a free alternative that is nearly as good as MS Office, then there might be some more bites.
What we need to do is infiltrate Microsoft and get them to add some lame anti-piracy measure to their software to stop people using Office at home for free. When OO 1.1 finally goes gold and starts getting reviews and appearing on cover CDs (for mainstream PC magazines) more people will start to take notice.
The injunction in Germany was about SCO making claims about linux but refusing to show any evidence to back those claims up.
The suggestion that customers of rival companies might be held liable if they used Linux seems to me a particularly obnoxious form of unfair competition. However, this isn't really a stupid US laws versus sensible European ones story; it's just that SCO opted to pursue their case in the US.
Anyway, I guess it would be an aggregate opinion, based on what i've read while surfing Slashdot, Fark, SomethingAwful, some public mailing lists for government installations, various smaller sites around the web, and reading NANAE itself.
Personally, I'd give a lot more weight to even an informal poll on NANAE, than a few people grouching off on/. and elsewhere. That does tend to select very heavily for unhappy campers.
To be fair, the subset of mail admins that read NANAE is likely to be more aggressive anti-spam folk than general.
"Switch ISPs." So if a major residential cable modem ISP's mail server gets blacklisted, then how is anybody in any of the towns serviced by that cable company supposed to send e-mail to users of ISPs that use SPEWS?
Don't use your ISP's mail relay; use a webmail service, or an authenticated relay provider. Sure it's not so convenient - you have to go to extra effort to route around the telco monopoly.
But then again, should the US Gov. indicate that it is necessary because suspected terrorists could be using vechiles (aka cars) to plan their next grocery store outing, I'd fully expect it to pass with full approval.
Funny you should say that:
"The study also notes cars driven by terrorist suspects or drug smugglers could be monitored "
Everyone seems to act like the US is the only government that tries to protect its business interests, but all governments do...Look no further than France/Russia's real motives for supporting Iraq all these years
Of course, governments pursue thir own interests, and those of their citizens. Most of the time, that's a reasonable way to act. The annoying thing about the US government, is that it expects everyone else to act to further US interests, and seems surprised and offended when they don't.
Now Microsofts problem was in the implementing of DCOM over TCP/IP and the security they used. Its their own specification, and not subject to proposal and being reviewed as the above mentioned RFC's are.
You're assuming that Microsoft specified and implemented it, and the problem is unique to the Windows platform. This is a common misunderstanding; it's another embrace and extend package.
The DCOM code, particularly the wire protocol, is largely based on OSF/DCE Remote Procedure Calls; and the vulnerability is present in a wide variety of ports of the code (including Linux, and various commercial Unix flavours). This suggests strongly that the bug was present in the original OSF codebase, despite being based on a publically available specification, and maintained by vendors such as Digital, HP, IBM...
However, I still think Microsoft doing this is like Panasonic creating a phone that only accepts calls from other Panasonic phones. It's completely stupid.
Yes, it would be like installing a CDMA network when everyone else uses GSM.
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE.
Two be honest, the biggest problem I have the statement is including SuSE in the list. I'm still working on some (US) vendors to support anything other than just Redhat.
Slashdot Mirror
Prepare for more crazy ramblings from SCO in the immediate future. They will undoubtedly issue a press release claiming this is an admission of wrongdoing by SGI and play up the aspect of the letter that suggest missappropriated code, but of course this is not the message to be taken from the SGI letter.
You can almost write the SCO selective quotation press release yourself:
"SGI has released over a million lines of...System V code...in the Linux kernel."
I asserted that it was a failure of part of a utility service, and isolated to that service.... what part of that is wrong?
National Grid quote ~410 000 customers as having lost power. I agree that is a fairly small fraction of London, and not on the scale of blackouts in other countries.
You just overstated your case a little. True, most of London didn't lose power. It was a local power grid failure confined to a small number of substations. But it was a grid failure.
I have no clue as to what caused the power problems with the underground, and make no claim to.
Well, I suggest you read the report referenced in my previous post. It is much more informative than the press converage, which was I agree, of rather poor quality.
The London Underground blackout has nothing to do with this, it was a failure of part of a utility service, and was contained within that utility.
I don't know where you got that idea from but it's completely wrong. London Underground ran their own power plant for nearly 100 years before they closed it last year and went onto mains power. Bad (or unlucky) call. The report on the power failure is instructive reading on how a combination of circumstances can break what should have been a quadruply redundant system.
It annoyed the hell out of me that even here in London they reported a "London Blackout!" over the top of footage of a brightly lit evening street focusing on an entrance to a tube station (lit) with a flashing emergency sign (powered by electric not hampster power).
Sure, they don't have many feeds into the Tube power supply, so there were areas of London with power but no Underground trains. And once you've decided to evacuate, you can't switch the power back on without electrocuting a few commuters. You have to cold restart by clearing the whole system.
Now, I make all that GPL software and my in-house software freely available, but I can't make the source for that driver from AcmeSoft available, because I don't have it. While technically, I'm in violation of the GPL, but if I've done all I can (short of pressuring AcmeSoft for source (which they won't give me) or ditching Linux altogether), am I really such a bad guy?
No, but you are an idiot if your contract with Acmesoft allows them to provide you with software which you can't legally use, based on work copyrighted by a third party.
Every telephone call you make on a mobile phone, for instance, is logged and traceable back to you.
Mostly. If you care enough about your privacy, you buy a 'drug-dealer phone'. Cash payment, no contract.
Because if you refuse to listen to them they start to mime.
In space, no-one can hear you mime.
XML hasn't been widely adapted yet
True, but would you want to see 'XML the Movie' ?
You can't get any easier than parsing CSV! Even the most basic languages can do it in a couple of lines.
Yes. And it'll break on stuff with embedded commas. Or maybe it will work with one CSV syntax and not with another (yes, there is more than one CSV syntax). Or get the escaping rules wrong.
Sure, all this could be solved fairly easily. XML just gives you a rock solid specification and a set of widely available libraries. The slight added complexity in parsing does mean that folks tend to use an off the shelf parser, rather than knocking up one that will break at half a dozen edge cases.
Whatever the technical merits (it surely is overhyped), it does have one main advantage: people are talking about interoperability again and writing schemas for their own community. That people are talking is much more important than the syntax they use.
JG: If it is business as usual, then a petabyte store needs 1,000 storage admins.
Tell that to the high energy physics community; they use petabyte size stores as local caches.
We need an RFC stating that this is not permissable.
And they will follow it because...?
Hopefully because their agreement with ICANN requires compliance with agreed standards. At the moment, Verisign are arguing that because it isn't explicitly forbidden then it must be OK.
That's a reasonable POV, even if most of us disagree; however, introducing it without due notice and consultation was grossly irresponsible.
In England anyone can call themselves an engineer. Anyone that comes out to service any bit of kit, be it ever so humble, gets called an engineer.
Calling yourself a "Chartered Engineer" is different matter, as that would be lying about your professional qualifications. That would be unfair trading, and illegal.
My local bank (Barclay's) have replaced old X Terminals with Dell desktop PCs (P4s!) running Exceed, and I assume they chose this based on price.
It's true that thin clients often seem overpriced for what they are, however, the working lifetime of them tends to be much more than your average PC. Longevity doesn't seem to count for much when buying.
We have a few Exceed PCs used almost entirely as X-terminals but they are running on NT. Since NT is no longer supported, and they don't look like they are worth upgrading, they will probably have to be replaced.
I don't think you're going to back up a few hundred gigs of business data on ~$100 of tapes.
$100 will buy you a 400GB Ultrium cartridge, more or less. So, yes, you will only be spending a few hundred dollars making spare tapes for offsite backup (assuming you already have a drive), unless you are talking about terabytes of data.
As you say though, operational considerations are more important. If you store tapes offsite, that is two places where your confidential data can be stolen from.
Won't pollute the waters? Have you seen the Thames? I doubt it could get much more polluted....
On the contrary, ever stronger environmental controls, not to mention the fact that there is hardly any heavy industry left, mean that the Thames gets purer every year.
some notes on the Thames
> "The Thames is a perfect location to make use
> of this vehicle as it has no speed limit and
> is greatly under-utilised."
Those silly Brits. We have speed limits posted for all bodies of water here in the US.
The BBC is just reporting what the guy selling the car said; it doesn't mean that it is true; it certainly isn't in general. He is a car salesman, after all. Of course, there are speed limits on the Thames.
If people were to find out that there is a free alternative that is nearly as good as MS Office, then there might be some more bites.
What we need to do is infiltrate Microsoft and get them to add some lame anti-piracy measure to their software to stop people using Office at home for free. When OO 1.1 finally goes gold and starts getting reviews and appearing on cover CDs (for mainstream PC magazines) more people will start to take notice.
The injunction in Germany was about SCO making claims about linux but refusing to show any evidence to back those claims up.
The suggestion that customers of rival companies might be held liable if they used Linux seems to me a particularly obnoxious form of unfair competition. However, this isn't really a stupid US laws versus sensible European ones story; it's just that SCO opted to pursue their case in the US.
Anyway, I guess it would be an aggregate opinion, based on what i've read while surfing Slashdot, Fark, SomethingAwful, some public mailing lists for government installations, various smaller sites around the web, and reading NANAE itself.
/. and elsewhere. That does tend to select very heavily for unhappy campers.
Personally, I'd give a lot more weight to even an informal poll on NANAE, than a few people grouching off on
To be fair, the subset of mail admins that read NANAE is likely to be more aggressive anti-spam folk than general.
Thanks for clarifying though.
From all appearances, those on NANAE are seen as grouchy, stubborn, drunk-with-power, vindictive nerds by most of those outside the list.
And which market research firm carried out the poll for you? Or was it just the voices in your head telling you this?
"Switch ISPs." So if a major residential cable modem ISP's mail server gets blacklisted, then how is anybody in any of the towns serviced by that cable company supposed to send e-mail to users of ISPs that use SPEWS?
Don't use your ISP's mail relay; use a webmail service, or an authenticated relay provider.
Sure it's not so convenient - you have to go to extra effort to route around the telco monopoly.
But then again, should the US Gov. indicate that it is necessary because suspected terrorists could be using vechiles (aka cars) to plan their next grocery store outing, I'd fully expect it to pass with full approval.
Funny you should say that:
"The study also notes cars driven by terrorist suspects or drug smugglers could be monitored "
Everyone seems to act like the US is the only government that tries to protect its business interests, but all governments do...Look no further than France/Russia's real motives for supporting Iraq all these years
Of course, governments pursue thir own interests, and those of their citizens. Most of the time, that's a reasonable way to act. The annoying thing about the US government, is that it expects everyone else to act to further US interests, and seems surprised and offended when they don't.
Now Microsofts problem was in the implementing of DCOM over TCP/IP and the security they used. Its their own specification, and not subject to proposal and being reviewed as the above mentioned RFC's are.
You're assuming that Microsoft specified and implemented it, and the problem is unique to the Windows platform. This is a common misunderstanding; it's another embrace and extend package.
The DCOM code, particularly the wire protocol, is largely based on OSF/DCE Remote Procedure Calls; and the vulnerability is present in a wide variety of ports of the code (including Linux, and various commercial Unix flavours). This suggests strongly that the bug was present in the original OSF codebase, despite being based on a publically available specification, and maintained by vendors such as Digital, HP, IBM...
However, I still think Microsoft doing this is like Panasonic creating a phone that only accepts calls from other Panasonic phones. It's completely stupid.
Yes, it would be like installing a CDMA network when everyone else uses GSM.
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE.
Two be honest, the biggest problem I have the statement is including SuSE in the list. I'm still working on some (US) vendors to support anything other than just Redhat.