Didn't those Russian hackers get ahold of some of their "highest" value data, namely the entire source tree for one of their operating system versions?
Sure, already hacked is 100% probability of being hacked. Yep, someone in Russia got their XP source. Then M$ sold the former KGB and Communist China the whole package, despite having sworn in the anti-trust suit that such a thing constituted a national security risk. I'm not sure what they think they are gaurding, but it's true that there is a high probability that their boxes will be owned, like 1::1.
What you and I might see as a misserable admision of failure, M$ would like to push as "Bussiness as Normal". "You can't stop the hackers" they will tell you with their hands in the air as if it's impossible to keep sensitive information to yourself. This is nonsense.
There are many ways to do this including decoy data made from hashing the real data and keeping sensitive data off externally connected networks. The most important thing is to make sure there are no weak links in your chain. Real security involves understanding assets, training personel and proper network architecture.
Something as easy to own an impossible to verify, like Microsoft junk, has no place in a secure environment. Even a machine used as a decoy can be owned and used against you in ways you did not expect. If Microsoft themselves can't make it work, no one can.
Twitter: anyone can run an md5 sum on a voting machine
matchlight: This is not true. The system would not be public accessible even if the code was open source.
Ah, but election officials can and they can invite anyone they need. This is a vast improvement over their current unverifiable faith in Dibold.
Call me ignorant and dishonest, but I'm just looking at the facts of consumer usage to date.
Why should I call you names? Did you say that people should use closed source junk or did you simply not that many people do? I looks like you said that closed source software was economically viable and therfore not obsolete becuse many people use it. There's a world of difference between that and saying that's the way things should be. Time will prove that current market share is no proof against technicall inferiority.
Whether or not the public has access to the source does not necessarily assure the product is:... is tamper proof, given that the code is eventually compiled and there's nothing keeping a person from altering the code before compile.
Not true. The same code compiled on the same platform with the same compiler has the same output. If all of these things are free, anyone can run an md5 sum on a voting machine and see is anything has been tampered. While you can verify closed source binaries the same way, you don't know what was in it to begin with. Closed source demands faith. Open source provides trust.
As for your problem with bugs, you should imagine that the bugs on the open platform will be fixed faster than on a closed platform. It's a simple matter of resources. No single company has the resources to compete against free software. This has been verified again and again in practice. The closed source model is obsolete and it's proponents are either ignorant or dishonest..
i won't comment on whether that is appropriate or not, but it is certainly something to keep in mind if you were to feel like 'borrowing' some bandwidth from others via their wireless network.
Does this not, conversly, make it impossible to willingly and freely share your badwith with the world? That sucks. If everyone had wireless and shared it the world would be much nicer.
Toronto is a damn good place to wardrive. I've gone wardriving through TO suburbs (with someone else at the wheel of course) and there was rarely a time within a 60 minute period or so that I was *not* within range of a WiFi AP with no security.
Could it be that PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE THEIR BANDWITH?!!! Golly, from reading old media garbage you would think that everyone was afraid to do something nice for their neighbors. A place where everyone had their wireless up and wanted to share would be a very nice place to be. A place where everyone is paranoid about what perverts might do with their network connection, rather than what that same pervert driving down their street might do to their children, is obviously filled with idiots and bad attitude.
"No Security", my ass. "Security" and peace of mind come from running software that's not easy to crack. With setups like that, you can trust your neighbors and open up the floodgates of communications that are possible but not alowed. Mail servers, web servers, file servers, all the good stuff of information sharing. Sure, some people will abuse it, but those people already abuse your wired network with far greater ease than war driving. Theives and perverts also make use of the phone system and mail.
Driving the wrong way up a one way street, no pants, whacking off to kiddie porn? This guy was asking for it!
Sure he was asking for it, but notice that "communications theft" did not enter into your description. Driving the wrong way down a one way street is dangerous and he might have hurt someone nice. I'm not sure if it was him fooking with his computer or his other tool that had him driving the wrong way, but obviously he was not up to the task. Fooling with kiddie porn is also nasty because it feeds and encourages the sexual exploitation of children. Sharing someone else's bandwidth? That's not a crime at all.
"Theft of communications" laws are anti-social and unhealthy. In a reasonable society, you could go anywhere you wanted and always be connected to the network. That can only be accomplished if everyone decides to share what they have. Some people don't want to live in a reasonable society, because they have become comfortable charging everyone per minute for communications. Stories like this, assoiciating bandwith sharing with perverts and crackers is their way of raising irrational fears that will keep people from sharing what they have and afraid to share what others give freely. Observe the article:
It's also a way they can invade someone else's computer, which could have serious ramifications for unsuspecting wireless Internet subscribers,.
"That means people can use, access and get into your computer, your files and your Internet signal, and if anything illegal was done it would come back to your computer," said Det.-Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police child exploitation section.
The levels of ignorance reflected beggar description. It's much easier for crackers to get at and use your computer through normal land based internet services. A bedrock priciple of criminal justice is that people who don't do things are not guilty. I am not to blame for what other people manage to do with my computers. Most obviously, people with perverts driving around their neighborhoods have much larger problems than what that pervert might do with their computer.
I'm glad the police caught this pervert, but I'd like them to stay the hell away from my computer systems. Catching perverts driving the wrong way down the street is good police work. It's even good that they can throw this extra crime at the loser. The law, however, is stupid, anti-social, evil and needs to be repealed.
Of course, the circle has to be completely filled in. But the again, if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
Counting the votes is relatively fast. We usually know within 2 hours of the polls closing who has won.
Why do we even NEED an electronic system?
Sounds like a scantron system to me. A machine is counting your votes already. A machine might also be adding the county results up for you too.
The software needs to be open if not free. Paper reciepts are a great first step, but the system can still be manipulated within paper counting accuracy. For the sytem to be an improvement, it should do better and it can. Open software can be verified for the soundness of it's methods and rigourously tested by interested parties. The results of that kind of testing would be secure and accurate voting that's really better than paper.
Closed source junk, on the other hand, is imposible to test and verify. Windoze based machines are a great example of how bad it can get. No one knows what goes on in DLL hell, no amount of testing can find all the flaws and backdoors and the inability to copy the software makes third party tesing limited if not imposible.
Still, California is to be commended for taking this step. Closed source machines with a paper trail can only be manipulated so far. It's unlikely that upsets there will be fradulent. I can forgive them for needing a year to get it set up and working. They might be bright enough to not use the mystery vote machines before they are fixed with a paper trail. Let's hope they and Dibold take the next step and use software that people can realy trust.
yep, they are on the case.
on
iPod-Jacked
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· Score: 1
Now that it has been demonstrated that you can share music with this device, I'm sure they will call it a republication and try to charge fees to the owners.
Do those little gadgets come with a way to actually trade music?
A friend of mine ran deliveries for mobster types in college. It was contracts (the paper kind) and banking/financial crap for the most part.
The "mob" definition comes from what? The small fraction of papers to break people's faces before murdering them? Drug sales? Shaking down 12 and 15 year old girls? - oops! sorry for the RIAA reference, the "mob" would never sink so low.
First off, any kind of press is good press. Secondly, the SCO lawsuit forces the media to understand the issues regarding GNU/Linux and free software, so perhaps this will lead to more widespread understanding and support.
is nice, but misses a few things.
The media is being forced to learn about free software because it's dramatic news on it's own. What could be a bigger story than a revolutionary development model that turns everything "experts" ever said about software on it's head and works much better than most people now use? If the only things you learn about free software come from Wintel rags, you are going to have a very warped and negative view. Lies and insults are not good press. Disinformation is bad, it wastes time to learn and even more to unlearn. You are better off not listening to any of it, especially those nuts at SCO.
Worse, the report recomends a "low profile". What PHB is not going to read that as proof that something is wrong with free software? "Do this, but don't tell anyone", what kind of bullshit is that?
I thought that it would be hard to place the blame based on the report, but I was wrong. Page 25 of the report has a description that has M$ all over it. While they don't mention Microsoft by name, I can only imagine that the failure was on dinky NT terminals in the control room and elswhere in the company:
Starting around 14:14 EDT, FE's control room operators lost the alarm function that provided audible and visual indications when a significant piece of equipment changed from an acceptable to problematic condition. Shortly thereafter, the EMS system lost a number of it's remote control consoles. Next it lost the primary server computer that was hosting the alarm functions and then the backup server such that all functions that were being supported on thes servers were stopped at 14:54 EDT.... FE's system operators remaind unaware... [and used] outdated system condition information they did have to discount information from others...
Note also that they lost their state estimator due to poor data feeds and formats - a direct result of using M$ "standards".
I imagine that the Blaster worm worked it's way onto the network, disabled all terminals and made the poor little GE system puke. The data was available in digital form, page 29:
...the operators can potentially continue to use the EMS... via repetitive, continuous manuall scanning of numerous data status points located within the multitude of idividual diplays available... it would be difficult for the operator to identifiy quickly the most relavant of the many screens available.
They kept getting good data, even at their teminals, but the alarm program was broken.
.."stalled" while processing an alarm event, such that the process began to run in a manner that failed to complete the processing of that alarm or produce any other valid output. In the mean time, new inputs - system conditions data that needed to be reviewd for possible alarms - built up in and then overflowed the process input buffers."
It only gets uglier from there. Remote data terminals failing, datalinks down, all sorts of Microsoft induced problems. It's very easy, even without seeing the name to know who to blame. Only Microsoft could perpetuate such a widespread and massive failure.
Only people who have seen that control room know for sure what system failed. As the linked pdf mentions, the system seems to be Unix, but it's heavily mired in M$ and other junk. Page 5 mentions ODBC. The part that failed was an alarm function and could have been running on an NT box through cygwin or something. I've seen people insist on haveing EVERYTHING work on their silly Windoze box and all of the power plant databases I know of have some dinky windoze client. Don't expect to find out anytime soon. If someone was dumb enough to move everything to windoze, expect them to cover ass and leave the exact platform undefined and digging throught the report may not yeild anything.
My wife's impression, from reading a CNN blurb, was that the "root cause was poor tree trimming". Oh boy.
What you say is true, but it's worth mentioning that there are real social harms tied to non-Free that Microsoft is a great example of. The first and most obvious social harm is the intentional waste that users are subject to. When a vendor decides to change file formats in order to drive sales of a new version, they force their users to convert their files mostly to own the same thing they thought they already owned. Less obvious intentional waste comes from the inability of users to fix their problems. RMS cites a closed printer driver and his inability to fix it as his first brush with non-Free pain. The least obvious but most harful effect of non-Free is it's bad attitude. Non Free software vendors promote knowledge hoarding. A society where everyone, doctors, lawyers, engineers, you name it, acted like that would be highly inefficient and unpleasant to live in.
we must also remember that during the late 90's and the early 00's thousands upon thousands of tech jobs just sprung up out of thin air. Any fool with a business plan penciled out on a napkin could get millions in VC.
I'm tired of hearing this. The market consolidation of the last ten years is real and it's being driven by nasty anti-competitive companies. IT escaped this because it's a relatively new and competitive field. Competition was intentionaly created in the telco industry. That both of these idustries added wealth and jobs to the country was natural, expected and good. Both of these industries are being crushed by the same forces that have wrecked steel, automotive and defense related industries. The contraction is real and harful and paridoxially it feeds itself. As the world of M$ software collapses on it's own greed, the biggest fish, Microsoft, ATT, BellSouth, etc, get fatter for a while. As they harm their competition with bogus laws and vendor extortion, they slow the progressive forces that were obsoleting them and creating new jobs and wealth that fed further improvements. It won't last. The greater the potential proffit, the greater the number of entrants will be. Monopolies, unless legally enforced, are unstable. Legally enforced monopolies lead to political instability. You can't fool all the people all the time.
It took hudreds of years to get a toe hold on America. People moving here faced overwhelming odds. English endentured servants moving to New England had up to 75% mortality rates before they bought their freedom. Others did worse, whole setlements were lost and some places were just nasty. My home town of New Orleans suffered mosquito plauges that killed tens of thousands of people all the way up into the 1920s.
how are we supposed to create a trade triangle with Mars and the asteroid belt? NOBODY LIVES THERE! With whom are we going to trade? This is not TraderWars.
Ever heard of a little place called America? Once upon a time it was a dangerous and comparitively sparcly populated place. Whole settlements were wiped out and caualty rates in the North East remaind about 75% for hundreds of years. Those that survived did well. There were rousources worth going for and eventually it became a place people from all around the world would like to be.
One Red Dwarf predicted furtue is that terraforming makes paradises of other planets and Earth is abandoned by all but a few million people who are too stupid or stuborn to go.
But MS also has a worldwide army of volunteer and hobbyist developers, building tools and solutions with MS products. Some good, some not so good.
Fewer and fewer people do M$ stuff as a hobby anymore. It's expensive and second rate. You can get more done with free software today and will be able to for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, forget about trying to make money at it. The cost of polishing things up will eat you alive.
MS also has many, many manufacturers tripping all over themselves building and testing hardware drivers for their products.
It's more like they are looking for every way out from under Microsoft's nasty domination. They also have to pay through the nose for SDKs and still have no idea if M$ will grant them the favor of letting their hardware run. The testers are the people unfortunate enough to buy M$. I've seen Microsoft's Updater load up an old driver version that caused an Intel Winmodem to hang up sporadically. If M$ won't listen to Intel, who will they listen to?
Microsoft promised everyone that they would make more money if they kept things closed and followd the M$ monster. It turns out that only Microsoft can make money with Microsoft. Anyone who makes anything worth while faces extortion and then direct competition from the origninator of the scheme. It serves them right, after all the intent was to screw the user.
CRN: When you talk to your VARs, partners, integrators... what are they saying?
McBride: It's a range. Those who are directly selling SCO Unix products, are cheering us on...
Stop the presses, someone sold SCO Unix last year?!
McBride:.... Those who have drifted over to the Linux camp are confused.
Indeed, I can't figure out what those idiots at SCO are up to.
McBride: My first reaction was we needed to create a counterbalance [to the vocal open sourcers]. We're on the side of the silent majority...
Eh? Let's see, for ages we've all had to listen to and counter his company's Microsoft funded bullshit, press releases and amazing old media broadsides. He's been saying all sorts of stuff designed to stirr doubt deep in the hearts of PHB and it's been reported by every WinTel rag on earth, but he reagards himself as "silent". Somehow people who have to reassure their bosses not to give in to SCO's extortion of end users is somehow "vocal"? The free software's statements are all reactions to this turkey. If some people get angry, it's because of the volume of ignorant and wrong nonsense this man has been able to generate - you need to buy a $700 license for every Linux box you own because IBM put "secret" SCO code into the kernel that SCO published openly under the GPL but refuses to specify. It's madening and hardly "right".
More McBitch: This is about our IP!... IBM is the master of creating an illusion that they're being attacked by this big brutal bully SCO when they're the ones attacking us. They're the ones doing all the behind-the-scenes work.
Oh sure, Dayrl, and I'm Steve Barkto. IBM must be running the Free Software Society. Tell me all about it. The whole world of knowledgable computing says you are full of it. What do you produce? Some poor woman who's BA was in French who had to sign a massively restrictive NDA to look at publically published and GPL'd code next to snippets of your ancient Unix? Give me a break. Put up or shut up and quit threatening the world and maybe, just maybe people will think your extortion and stock fraud days are behind you.
We early on looked at GPL-related issues and felt it was an Achilles heel for IBM but we didn't open them up initially. We didn't want to confuse a clear-cut contract issue [with IBM] with the untested GPL and other issues. But when IBM dragged GPL onto the table, our lawyers started sharpening their steak knives. 'Ok, if that's what you want to talk about , we'll talk about it.'
Oh yeah, you were forced to call the GPL a cancer, but you hated it all along. Bzzzt! Your case of trade secret violation got blown out of the water because your company published said traid secrets openly and under the GPL. You can't fall back to copyright violations, because you can't really find any infringing code. So, you are left with this crack house attack on the GPL.
If you take IBM out of the equation, Linux would not be growing up, it would not be SMP-enabled, it would not be multi processing, scaling up to hundreds of servers. It is IBM that is enabling that.
There he goes again, taking credit for stuff that his crappy Unix can't do.
VARBusiness: Are customers changing their Linux purchasing pattern since SCO sent out warning letters?
McBride: A research report came out saying 80 percent of users had not slowed down. Our take on that is 20 percent have. So one out of five.
Thanks Dayrl, that will come in handy when you get sued for the damages all your BS has done. I'd love to see Red Hat pin the end of their retail distro on you and strip off some of those $20,000,000 Microsoft has funded you with.
If you look at the GPL, it couldn't be more clear, they either have to pull [the offending code] or shut down the distribution. The things we're laying claim to are things you can't pull out very easily....it's very difficult to yank this stuff out.
Right. Everyone is begging for the proof and the code they can shut this idiot up by rewriting that supposed code. It's not there.
OK, I hate everything this idiot says -5 flamebait article.
Taking stock in the company you are representing as payment? Is it just me, or does that seem wrong?
It makes you look less like an impartial third party. Lawyers are supposed to be independent proffesionals and no reasonable lawyer would take a case that is morally or legaly unsound. Lawyers who take bogus cases ruin their reputations and their chances of getting more work. Taking a case like this for compensation that most people could retire on if the case wins makes them look like whores and that will effect those who judge the case.
At the very least, by owning such a large part of the company, they become the company. The old saying is, "A man who represents himself has a fool for a client." This will always be so.
Partial quotes waste my time, here's what it really says. It does indeed contain what you said and a nasty little article about delcaring your work before you go to work for the company.
Still, I think your interpretation is overboard. Just saying that Apple is a software company, therefore all employee software is owned does not cut it for me. Care to point to some case law that makes things as obvious as you say they are?
It's good to have this little talk periodically. You can line out sections of any contract you don't like and leave it up to the company to ammend it. The decision to work or not to work for people who think they own you is a personal one, but you owe it to yourself to see what kind of a company you are dealing with. If they refuse to ammend your contract, they are rigid and you might not be happy there.
Revolt. Free software gives us the power to refuse because you can earn a living with it without the help of a company that's way too powerful for comfort.
there are pictures of sections of Jupiter with greater detail, this just happens to be the global picture with the finest detail. Also, the pictures have been somewhat manipulated and it could be argued that this is a computer generated image, using photographed textures. It's all in the article. pffffftt.
Well, farts in your face too. I enjoyed the pictures and did not mind the editor speculating about the size of Pennsylvania. Care to link to any of those nicer pictures or tell us where they came from?
What's even more amusing is that China is willing to pay Sun anything, let alone $50,000,000, when they could just do to it what they do to Windoze. I hate Communist governements, but I like how Bill Gates is going to shit a brick.
It's like that magical combination of AOL and Time-Warner all over again. Errr, not it's not, it's more like M$ TV, the xbox, tablet PCs and many other M$ flops.
M$ has even less going for it than AOL did. That merger between a huge new media company and an old one failed. The old one keeps it's content locked up regardless of it's own new best interest. Time Warner STILL only squezes it's content out through the tightest of bungholes at $1.00/pop-tune. Apple makes no money from the music itself. Do you think that the same big dumb music companies will let M$ screw them around or have any of the money? Sooner or later, music companies are going to realize DRM is a huge boondogle and M$ will be hosed away. Kerfloop - there goes another billion or two of M$'s big fat bankroll.
Oh well, back to ripping the old LPs to ogg. Between my old music and new free music services, I don't need iTunes and other DRM gimped junk. Go get you some new music:
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, already hacked is 100% probability of being hacked. Yep, someone in Russia got their XP source. Then M$ sold the former KGB and Communist China the whole package, despite having sworn in the anti-trust suit that such a thing constituted a national security risk. I'm not sure what they think they are gaurding, but it's true that there is a high probability that their boxes will be owned, like 1::1.
What you and I might see as a misserable admision of failure, M$ would like to push as "Bussiness as Normal". "You can't stop the hackers" they will tell you with their hands in the air as if it's impossible to keep sensitive information to yourself. This is nonsense.
There are many ways to do this including decoy data made from hashing the real data and keeping sensitive data off externally connected networks. The most important thing is to make sure there are no weak links in your chain. Real security involves understanding assets, training personel and proper network architecture.
Something as easy to own an impossible to verify, like Microsoft junk, has no place in a secure environment. Even a machine used as a decoy can be owned and used against you in ways you did not expect. If Microsoft themselves can't make it work, no one can.
matchlight: This is not true. The system would not be public accessible even if the code was open source.
Ah, but election officials can and they can invite anyone they need. This is a vast improvement over their current unverifiable faith in Dibold.
Call me ignorant and dishonest, but I'm just looking at the facts of consumer usage to date.
Why should I call you names? Did you say that people should use closed source junk or did you simply not that many people do? I looks like you said that closed source software was economically viable and therfore not obsolete becuse many people use it. There's a world of difference between that and saying that's the way things should be. Time will prove that current market share is no proof against technicall inferiority.
Not true. The same code compiled on the same platform with the same compiler has the same output. If all of these things are free, anyone can run an md5 sum on a voting machine and see is anything has been tampered. While you can verify closed source binaries the same way, you don't know what was in it to begin with. Closed source demands faith. Open source provides trust.
As for your problem with bugs, you should imagine that the bugs on the open platform will be fixed faster than on a closed platform. It's a simple matter of resources. No single company has the resources to compete against free software. This has been verified again and again in practice. The closed source model is obsolete and it's proponents are either ignorant or dishonest..
Does this not, conversly, make it impossible to willingly and freely share your badwith with the world? That sucks. If everyone had wireless and shared it the world would be much nicer.
Could it be that PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE THEIR BANDWITH?!!! Golly, from reading old media garbage you would think that everyone was afraid to do something nice for their neighbors. A place where everyone had their wireless up and wanted to share would be a very nice place to be. A place where everyone is paranoid about what perverts might do with their network connection, rather than what that same pervert driving down their street might do to their children, is obviously filled with idiots and bad attitude.
"No Security", my ass. "Security" and peace of mind come from running software that's not easy to crack. With setups like that, you can trust your neighbors and open up the floodgates of communications that are possible but not alowed. Mail servers, web servers, file servers, all the good stuff of information sharing. Sure, some people will abuse it, but those people already abuse your wired network with far greater ease than war driving. Theives and perverts also make use of the phone system and mail.
Sure he was asking for it, but notice that "communications theft" did not enter into your description. Driving the wrong way down a one way street is dangerous and he might have hurt someone nice. I'm not sure if it was him fooking with his computer or his other tool that had him driving the wrong way, but obviously he was not up to the task. Fooling with kiddie porn is also nasty because it feeds and encourages the sexual exploitation of children. Sharing someone else's bandwidth? That's not a crime at all.
"Theft of communications" laws are anti-social and unhealthy. In a reasonable society, you could go anywhere you wanted and always be connected to the network. That can only be accomplished if everyone decides to share what they have. Some people don't want to live in a reasonable society, because they have become comfortable charging everyone per minute for communications. Stories like this, assoiciating bandwith sharing with perverts and crackers is their way of raising irrational fears that will keep people from sharing what they have and afraid to share what others give freely. Observe the article:
It's also a way they can invade someone else's computer, which could have serious ramifications for unsuspecting wireless Internet subscribers,. "That means people can use, access and get into your computer, your files and your Internet signal, and if anything illegal was done it would come back to your computer," said Det.-Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police child exploitation section.
The levels of ignorance reflected beggar description. It's much easier for crackers to get at and use your computer through normal land based internet services. A bedrock priciple of criminal justice is that people who don't do things are not guilty. I am not to blame for what other people manage to do with my computers. Most obviously, people with perverts driving around their neighborhoods have much larger problems than what that pervert might do with their computer.
I'm glad the police caught this pervert, but I'd like them to stay the hell away from my computer systems. Catching perverts driving the wrong way down the street is good police work. It's even good that they can throw this extra crime at the loser. The law, however, is stupid, anti-social, evil and needs to be repealed.
Sounds like a scantron system to me. A machine is counting your votes already. A machine might also be adding the county results up for you too.
Closed source junk, on the other hand, is imposible to test and verify. Windoze based machines are a great example of how bad it can get. No one knows what goes on in DLL hell, no amount of testing can find all the flaws and backdoors and the inability to copy the software makes third party tesing limited if not imposible.
Still, California is to be commended for taking this step. Closed source machines with a paper trail can only be manipulated so far. It's unlikely that upsets there will be fradulent. I can forgive them for needing a year to get it set up and working. They might be bright enough to not use the mystery vote machines before they are fixed with a paper trail. Let's hope they and Dibold take the next step and use software that people can realy trust.
Do those little gadgets come with a way to actually trade music?
The "mob" definition comes from what? The small fraction of papers to break people's faces before murdering them? Drug sales? Shaking down 12 and 15 year old girls? - oops! sorry for the RIAA reference, the "mob" would never sink so low.
First off, any kind of press is good press. Secondly, the SCO lawsuit forces the media to understand the issues regarding GNU/Linux and free software, so perhaps this will lead to more widespread understanding and support.
is nice, but misses a few things.
The media is being forced to learn about free software because it's dramatic news on it's own. What could be a bigger story than a revolutionary development model that turns everything "experts" ever said about software on it's head and works much better than most people now use? If the only things you learn about free software come from Wintel rags, you are going to have a very warped and negative view. Lies and insults are not good press. Disinformation is bad, it wastes time to learn and even more to unlearn. You are better off not listening to any of it, especially those nuts at SCO.
Worse, the report recomends a "low profile". What PHB is not going to read that as proof that something is wrong with free software? "Do this, but don't tell anyone", what kind of bullshit is that?
Next the dummies will recomend Windoze migration.
Starting around 14:14 EDT, FE's control room operators lost the alarm function that provided audible and visual indications when a significant piece of equipment changed from an acceptable to problematic condition. Shortly thereafter, the EMS system lost a number of it's remote control consoles. Next it lost the primary server computer that was hosting the alarm functions and then the backup server such that all functions that were being supported on thes servers were stopped at 14:54 EDT. ... FE's system operators remaind unaware ... [and used] outdated system condition information they did have to discount information from others ...
Note also that they lost their state estimator due to poor data feeds and formats - a direct result of using M$ "standards".
I imagine that the Blaster worm worked it's way onto the network, disabled all terminals and made the poor little GE system puke. The data was available in digital form, page 29:
They kept getting good data, even at their teminals, but the alarm program was broken.
It only gets uglier from there. Remote data terminals failing, datalinks down, all sorts of Microsoft induced problems. It's very easy, even without seeing the name to know who to blame. Only Microsoft could perpetuate such a widespread and massive failure.
My wife's impression, from reading a CNN blurb, was that the "root cause was poor tree trimming". Oh boy.
What you say is true, but it's worth mentioning that there are real social harms tied to non-Free that Microsoft is a great example of. The first and most obvious social harm is the intentional waste that users are subject to. When a vendor decides to change file formats in order to drive sales of a new version, they force their users to convert their files mostly to own the same thing they thought they already owned. Less obvious intentional waste comes from the inability of users to fix their problems. RMS cites a closed printer driver and his inability to fix it as his first brush with non-Free pain. The least obvious but most harful effect of non-Free is it's bad attitude. Non Free software vendors promote knowledge hoarding. A society where everyone, doctors, lawyers, engineers, you name it, acted like that would be highly inefficient and unpleasant to live in.
I'm tired of hearing this. The market consolidation of the last ten years is real and it's being driven by nasty anti-competitive companies. IT escaped this because it's a relatively new and competitive field. Competition was intentionaly created in the telco industry. That both of these idustries added wealth and jobs to the country was natural, expected and good. Both of these industries are being crushed by the same forces that have wrecked steel, automotive and defense related industries. The contraction is real and harful and paridoxially it feeds itself. As the world of M$ software collapses on it's own greed, the biggest fish, Microsoft, ATT, BellSouth, etc, get fatter for a while. As they harm their competition with bogus laws and vendor extortion, they slow the progressive forces that were obsoleting them and creating new jobs and wealth that fed further improvements. It won't last. The greater the potential proffit, the greater the number of entrants will be. Monopolies, unless legally enforced, are unstable. Legally enforced monopolies lead to political instability. You can't fool all the people all the time.
Where life is possible it will flourish.
Ever heard of a little place called America? Once upon a time it was a dangerous and comparitively sparcly populated place. Whole settlements were wiped out and caualty rates in the North East remaind about 75% for hundreds of years. Those that survived did well. There were rousources worth going for and eventually it became a place people from all around the world would like to be.
One Red Dwarf predicted furtue is that terraforming makes paradises of other planets and Earth is abandoned by all but a few million people who are too stupid or stuborn to go.
Fewer and fewer people do M$ stuff as a hobby anymore. It's expensive and second rate. You can get more done with free software today and will be able to for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, forget about trying to make money at it. The cost of polishing things up will eat you alive.
MS also has many, many manufacturers tripping all over themselves building and testing hardware drivers for their products.
It's more like they are looking for every way out from under Microsoft's nasty domination. They also have to pay through the nose for SDKs and still have no idea if M$ will grant them the favor of letting their hardware run. The testers are the people unfortunate enough to buy M$. I've seen Microsoft's Updater load up an old driver version that caused an Intel Winmodem to hang up sporadically. If M$ won't listen to Intel, who will they listen to?
Microsoft promised everyone that they would make more money if they kept things closed and followd the M$ monster. It turns out that only Microsoft can make money with Microsoft. Anyone who makes anything worth while faces extortion and then direct competition from the origninator of the scheme. It serves them right, after all the intent was to screw the user.
McBride: It's a range. Those who are directly selling SCO Unix products, are cheering us on ...
Stop the presses, someone sold SCO Unix last year?!
McBride: .... Those who have drifted over to the Linux camp are confused.
Indeed, I can't figure out what those idiots at SCO are up to.
McBride: My first reaction was we needed to create a counterbalance [to the vocal open sourcers]. We're on the side of the silent majority...
Eh? Let's see, for ages we've all had to listen to and counter his company's Microsoft funded bullshit, press releases and amazing old media broadsides. He's been saying all sorts of stuff designed to stirr doubt deep in the hearts of PHB and it's been reported by every WinTel rag on earth, but he reagards himself as "silent". Somehow people who have to reassure their bosses not to give in to SCO's extortion of end users is somehow "vocal"? The free software's statements are all reactions to this turkey. If some people get angry, it's because of the volume of ignorant and wrong nonsense this man has been able to generate - you need to buy a $700 license for every Linux box you own because IBM put "secret" SCO code into the kernel that SCO published openly under the GPL but refuses to specify. It's madening and hardly "right".
More McBitch: This is about our IP! ... IBM is the master of creating an illusion that they're being attacked by this big brutal bully SCO when they're the ones attacking us. They're the ones doing all the behind-the-scenes work.
Oh sure, Dayrl, and I'm Steve Barkto. IBM must be running the Free Software Society. Tell me all about it. The whole world of knowledgable computing says you are full of it. What do you produce? Some poor woman who's BA was in French who had to sign a massively restrictive NDA to look at publically published and GPL'd code next to snippets of your ancient Unix? Give me a break. Put up or shut up and quit threatening the world and maybe, just maybe people will think your extortion and stock fraud days are behind you.
We early on looked at GPL-related issues and felt it was an Achilles heel for IBM but we didn't open them up initially. We didn't want to confuse a clear-cut contract issue [with IBM] with the untested GPL and other issues. But when IBM dragged GPL onto the table, our lawyers started sharpening their steak knives. 'Ok, if that's what you want to talk about , we'll talk about it.'
Oh yeah, you were forced to call the GPL a cancer, but you hated it all along. Bzzzt! Your case of trade secret violation got blown out of the water because your company published said traid secrets openly and under the GPL. You can't fall back to copyright violations, because you can't really find any infringing code. So, you are left with this crack house attack on the GPL.
If you take IBM out of the equation, Linux would not be growing up, it would not be SMP-enabled, it would not be multi processing, scaling up to hundreds of servers. It is IBM that is enabling that.
There he goes again, taking credit for stuff that his crappy Unix can't do.
VARBusiness: Are customers changing their Linux purchasing pattern since SCO sent out warning letters?
McBride: A research report came out saying 80 percent of users had not slowed down. Our take on that is 20 percent have. So one out of five.
Thanks Dayrl, that will come in handy when you get sued for the damages all your BS has done. I'd love to see Red Hat pin the end of their retail distro on you and strip off some of those $20,000,000 Microsoft has funded you with.
If you look at the GPL, it couldn't be more clear, they either have to pull [the offending code] or shut down the distribution. The things we're laying claim to are things you can't pull out very easily....it's very difficult to yank this stuff out.
Right. Everyone is begging for the proof and the code they can shut this idiot up by rewriting that supposed code. It's not there.
OK, I hate everything this idiot says -5 flamebait article.
When you've pissed off all your friends, spent all your money and still can't get enough of your drug, "everyone is out to get you."
It's true Daryl, EVERYONE'S OUT TO GET YOU MOTHER FUCKER!
It makes you look less like an impartial third party. Lawyers are supposed to be independent proffesionals and no reasonable lawyer would take a case that is morally or legaly unsound. Lawyers who take bogus cases ruin their reputations and their chances of getting more work. Taking a case like this for compensation that most people could retire on if the case wins makes them look like whores and that will effect those who judge the case.
At the very least, by owning such a large part of the company, they become the company. The old saying is, "A man who represents himself has a fool for a client." This will always be so.
Still, I think your interpretation is overboard. Just saying that Apple is a software company, therefore all employee software is owned does not cut it for me. Care to point to some case law that makes things as obvious as you say they are?
It's good to have this little talk periodically. You can line out sections of any contract you don't like and leave it up to the company to ammend it. The decision to work or not to work for people who think they own you is a personal one, but you owe it to yourself to see what kind of a company you are dealing with. If they refuse to ammend your contract, they are rigid and you might not be happy there.
Revolt. Free software gives us the power to refuse because you can earn a living with it without the help of a company that's way too powerful for comfort.
there are pictures of sections of Jupiter with greater detail, this just happens to be the global picture with the finest detail. Also, the pictures have been somewhat manipulated and it could be argued that this is a computer generated image, using photographed textures. It's all in the article. pffffftt.
Well, farts in your face too. I enjoyed the pictures and did not mind the editor speculating about the size of Pennsylvania. Care to link to any of those nicer pictures or tell us where they came from?
M$ has even less going for it than AOL did. That merger between a huge new media company and an old one failed. The old one keeps it's content locked up regardless of it's own new best interest. Time Warner STILL only squezes it's content out through the tightest of bungholes at $1.00/pop-tune. Apple makes no money from the music itself. Do you think that the same big dumb music companies will let M$ screw them around or have any of the money? Sooner or later, music companies are going to realize DRM is a huge boondogle and M$ will be hosed away. Kerfloop - there goes another billion or two of M$'s big fat bankroll.
Oh well, back to ripping the old LPs to ogg. Between my old music and new free music services, I don't need iTunes and other DRM gimped junk. Go get you some new music:
Then go spend the money you saved on a live concert or on an ablum by people who get paid by their publisher.