I downloaded the Linux source from SCO just yesterday at ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/updates/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Serv er/CSSA-2003-020.0/SRPMS
(their server did not respond a minute ago when I checked to see if it was still there). Wouldn't the fact that they are strongly implying that it is not OK for others to distribute Linux in it current form make their distribution illegal since they lose their right to distribute it when attempting to add conditions to the GPL?
Could somebody who has contributed to the Linux kernel explicitly revoke SCO's license to redistribute it and then counter-sue to get them to stop? It would seem that SCO has lost their right to distribute the kernel by attempting to add restrictions on top of the GPL (which the GPL forbids) and that as a result somebody who owns part of the kernel could enforce a revokation of their ability to use the GPL'ed code. Wouldn't it be great if all the kernel contributors did this at once? SCO would quickly be drowning in countersuits. (Maybe we could even see the headline In Soviet Russia, Linus sues SCO!)
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how realistic of an approach this would be.
The current DR DOS website isn't SCO's. When Lineo, the embedded systems spinoff from Caldera that was given ownership of DR DOS, collapsed, its CEO reformed a new company called DeviceLogics, and they purchased DR DOS from the Canopy Group.
Yes, that is true, and I mentioned it in the addendum to my original post. However, the web pages in question were removed quite awhile before the purchase, so there was likely another reason for their removal.
I keep seeing this "Microsoft may be behind this!" thread throughout discussion of SCO, and it's worth pointing out, in bold capitals, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS.
Yes, I agree. I definitely think people should look for evidence rather than jumping to conclusions, especially when there is no evidence at this point. Just because Microsoft has masked some devious actions in the past by hiding behind the identity of others, doesn't mean that's what's going on here.
Alright, it looks like DR Dos was sold on November 18, 2002, which might explain why drdos.com doesn't currently have those documents (if the current owners didn't want to host things with a negative tone), but the docs did disappear way before the sale. I noticed they were gone in March 2002 (and they had probably been gone for a long time already) and the Wayback Machine's last listing for that one particular page is April 2001, so they were definitely taken down before the sale.
Continuing on a slightly more serious note, the only entity that is greatly served by slowing Linux's adoptation into the business world is, indeed, Microsoft. Are there any financial ties between Microsoft and SCO? I find it hard to believe that SCO is self-destructing just for the hell of it. I have not much trouble imagining Microsoft going through the ol' FUD routine.
That this is Microsoft's handiwork does seem a little far fetched as this seems incredibly evil, even for Microsoft, but maybe this hypothesis is worth researching. I do find it interesting that some of the documents which used to be on Caldera's DR Dos website and which were very damning towards Microsoft are no longer there. Thankfully, we have the Wayback Machine to show us the excellent write-up of Microsoft's vaporware practices which used to be on the DR Dos website. Going to the original URL has yeilded a 404 for awhile now. Why were this paper and the associated pages removed? Did the URLs just change? Is there presently anything on the DR Dos website that speaks ill of Microsoft? I actually haven't looked into these things yet, but perhaps somebody should. To go from a website that has very scathing information against Microsoft to one that has none overnight would be a bit odd.
I do hope that Microsoft is not behind this at all because it would be nice to see SCO run out of cash trying to fight this (and that's one problem they wouldn't need to worry about if they were a Microsoft puppet). It does seem like an unlikely conspiracy theory to me, but who knows.
I have to admit that axiom 3 treads into deep water for me, but I can tell you that the point of the excercise is that you don't know Chinese. Once you learn Chinese from the handbook as you suggest, you become a native Chinese speaker, which sort of defeats the thought experiment.
But you don't know Chinese when entering the room. All you have is the rulebook and the I/O with people on the outside. So are you agreeing that you would indeed be made to understand Chinese if the rulebook were sufficiently complex? This only defeats the thought experiment in that if you disallow rulebooks above a certain complexity then the reasoning becomes circular - you would be saying that the person inside the room doesn't understand Chinese because he isn't allowed to be given the appropriate rule set necessary to understand Chinese.
1) Computer programs are formal (syntactic)
2) Human minds have mental content (semantics)
3) Syntax by itself is neither consitutive nor sufficient for semantics
So you're argument to get around the Chinese Room argument violates axiom 3.
I see no reason why #3 is necessarily true. Sure, syntax of the language is probably insufficient to provide for semantics, but I fail to see how that rules out syntax at a much lower level providing the rules which semantics sit on top of with language sitting on top of that. Consider this: what if the rulebook inside of the Chinese room were "How to Speak and Write Chinese"? If the person inside the room read and learned this book to accomplish the process of converting input into output, would you still say that he didn't understand Chinese? Is the book still not merely a set of instructions (albeit, much more complicated instructions)?
Re:What about my AIBO?
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AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In my undertanding of the arguments of the Chinese Room (and I side with Ned Block more than John(?) Searle), it is that there is a difference between a system that only knows how to manipulate rules and symbols (like say any machine that we can build) and a system that has an innate attachment of meaning to the symbols that are being manipulated.
What if this perceived ability to "understand" the meaning of symbols is just a higher level manifestation of a lower level set of rules for manipulating the rules for manipulating symbols? This can be done repeatedly so that you have rules for maniupalting rules for manipulating rules (and so on) for manipulating symbols. You said yourself that we have no idea how human intellegence works, so how can you know that it's not a set of rule manipulation levels stacked high enough that when we observe the top level it appears to have an "understanding" of the level immediately beneath it? At the core, it would still all just be rules, though, so how is it that you can say that people actually understand things when it could just be rules manipulating other rules? How can you show that a native Chinese speaker does indeed "understand" Chinese and isn't just using a Chinese rulebook that is dynamically generated by a language rulebook that is dynamically generated by a I/O rulebook that is dynamically generated by a systems maintenance rulebook?
You're making the same leap of faith that most people make (and I now think is incorrect): The human (or Dog) mind is a biological computer therefore an IBM with the right software is also a mind in the same sense.
No, I never said that. I was arguing in the other direction - if an AIBO can't think because it is merely doing what it has been programmed to do, then how can a real dog think since it is also only doing what it is programmed to do? I was not saying that the AIBO was indeed thinking, I was saying that the same logic which is used to show that an AIBO can't think can also be used to show that a real dog (or human) can't think. Like the Chinese Room, we all convert inputs into outputs based on our chemical rulebooks, so how can you say that anything really thinks then?
Re:What about my AIBO?
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AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It was still pretty much explicitly programmed to do those things. It's not really bored, it was just programmed to act bored, etc. Even the image recognition is a testament to the intelligence of the programmers, but not really to the AIBO itself.
How do you distinguish between something that just acts bored and something with really is bored? An argument could be made that when a real dog seems bored it is merely acting that way because it is programmed (via its instincts) to act bored. How is that different from the AIBO, apart from the fact that some people know exactly how an AIBO works? A real dog is merely a chemical computer anyway, so in essence, the emotions that you perceive in it are programmed as well, we just don't have the documented source code to work with.
The day after it's deployed, every legitimate mailing list on the planet will get challenges from all the Earthlink subscribers...
I was worried there for a second and thought I might have to ditch my Earthlink account, but from the article:
The challenge-response system will be optional and free for EarthLink subscribers, Anderson said.
I'm planning to opt-out myself since I could see this discouraging people from sending me email. I have to think of the fact that whenever I'm surfing the web and come across a page that requires registration, I usually don't bother and just move along to something else. I would be inclined do the same with email if it becomes a hassle to communicate with new people. I don't want to miss out on email because of this and SpamAssassin has effectively eliminated the spam problem for me, so I'll probably pass. However, I do think challenge-response is a good idea and could work well for others.
I wouldn't think Matrix would stoop that low, except for the current commercial tie-ins, that are making me suspicious.
You won't like this then: in The Matrix: Reloaded we find out that Neo is so much more powerful than everybody else in the matrix because in the real world he is actually the Energizer Bunny.
Hey, that's a great application: if I had a 3D wireframe interface for my fridge I *could* see what was in the back behind the other 3 bags of romaine.
Or you could wrap all your food in plastic wrap that works like this. It shouldn't be too much of a leap to project a wirefram on top of that material.
I installed Zabbix on some boxes recently with good results. It monitors the health of your boxes as well as the health of numerous programs running on those boxes and it will email you whenever certain conditions (which you define) change. It focuses more on making sure all programs are running properly and tracking system resources, so it may not be as security oriented as it sounds like you want, but it isn't too hard to add monitoring of new things, so you could probably add triggers for what you consider suspicious without a whole lot of trouble.
cannot be blocked
cannot be marked as "junk mail"
cannot be forwarded ( say to "abuse" at hotmail.com)
does not specify how i can stop recieving it
This might be considered cheating, but you could use something like Gotmail to download the messages to a regular email client and then set up filters within that client. If you wanted to still read your email from the web, Gotmail can also forward to another email address, so you could have it forward to a Yahoo account. That's admittedly convoluted and probably not as good of a solution as just using Yahoo or your own domain.
The market has been "boycotting" SCO and it's crap for years, not like there needs to be a special effort.
I think that the boycotts being referred to are of the Canopy Group and not just SCO. See this reply to Bruce's comment for a nice list of companies under the Canopy Group. Unfortunately, TrollTech is in that list.
The only benefits I've seen of pagination is that it increases the number of ad viewings (because each page in a pagination can have a new ad). But that only benefits the site, not the user. IS there a user benefit to pagination?
There are other benefits. One benefit is that it can save you quite a bit of bandwidth if your content is large or your number of visitors is large. When I first shifted one of my websites from a co-located box to a hosting service the hosting provider pointed out to me that my site was eating up a lot more bandwidth than what I had expected. My content wasn't all that large in size, but I was getting a high number of visitors per day, which drove the total bandwidth up. Even though my content was maybe 25K in size, I ended up saving an enormous amount of bandwidth by redesigning the main page to be 10K and shifting the bulk of the content onto separate pages which have now grown much larger than the original 25K.
Again, bandwidth savings of that magnitude are of benefit primarily to the site, but pagination does potentially have a side effect which benfits readers as well - it can make the content clearer and easier to comprehend if the pagination is prefaced with a summary guide to all the pages. I know when I read a large web page, I am a lot more likely to read the whole thing if there is a summary up front that gives me an indication that I will find the content interesting. If there is no summary, I might skim the content to see if it's interesting, but I imagine this is less accurate than if the author were to summarize up front why I should care about the content. If the content is paginated with a TOC and intro, the author is generally forced to do this summary, so pagination does benefit readers in that respect in much the same way that intros and TOCs can help you decide whether or not you want to read a particular book.
We had a developer who was coding on a Dell Latitude w/ Dell's huge (and expandable) C/Dock-II... the dock started smoking one day during his coding session. I just happened to be walking by and quickly unplugged it from the wall. Apparently a small capacitor inside the dock exploded and got all over everything, causing it to smoke.
Heh heh... and that's not the only thing from dell caught smoking.
Give me a break. Your acting like windows users should be living with a constant fear that Microsoft "agents" will suddenly appear at their front door to give them a beating.
Actually, that's not too far from the truth. It happened in Virginia Beach and is happening more and more frequently elsewhere.
Someone needs to start a list of companies Microsoft has screwed over. It needs to be the first site that comes up when someone googles for "Microsoft Business Partner"
Here's my list of examples of Microsoft's predatory practices which is somewhat what you're asking for (Spyglass is on there). It's not complete because keeping it complete would be a full time job in and of itself, but I do try to add to it over time with high impact examples. If there is a more complete list of their predatory practices out there, let me know and I'll probably link to it (as for the other person who posted a link to the list of companies Microsoft has bought, I've already linked to that under the "lack of innovation" section as I felt it fit better in that section).
Right here. Be sure to install the ChatZilla component (which runs on top of IRC).
As for what it is, IRC does sound an awful lot like this "innovative" new Microsoft product, except that it's been around for much, much longer (I remember using it a whole decade ago, and it's probably older than that).
This risk -- the authors contend -- is the reason many web development projects fail in one way or another. The client's objective is to obtain maximum value, the developer's to incur the least cost possible without getting sued.
That's a very pessimistic view of things. I know my objective is never to just squeek by with enough output to not get sued. My objective is usually to do a superior job and make the client happy so that I get repeat business and/or referrals. If the client has unrealistic expectations (which would lead to unfairly high time costs on my part), then I'm content to do work which at least I know is high quality and I don't lower the bar to to doing just a subsistence level of work. I really doubt that I'm alone on this. I would think most contract developers like the idea of repeat business and are hopefully clueful enough to realize that sub-par work does not encourage repeat business.
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Could somebody who has contributed to the Linux kernel explicitly revoke SCO's license to redistribute it and then counter-sue to get them to stop? It would seem that SCO has lost their right to distribute the kernel by attempting to add restrictions on top of the GPL (which the GPL forbids) and that as a result somebody who owns part of the kernel could enforce a revokation of their ability to use the GPL'ed code. Wouldn't it be great if all the kernel contributors did this at once? SCO would quickly be drowning in countersuits. (Maybe we could even see the headline In Soviet Russia, Linus sues SCO!)
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how realistic of an approach this would be.
Alright, it looks like DR Dos was sold on November 18, 2002, which might explain why drdos.com doesn't currently have those documents (if the current owners didn't want to host things with a negative tone), but the docs did disappear way before the sale. I noticed they were gone in March 2002 (and they had probably been gone for a long time already) and the Wayback Machine's last listing for that one particular page is April 2001, so they were definitely taken down before the sale.
I do hope that Microsoft is not behind this at all because it would be nice to see SCO run out of cash trying to fight this (and that's one problem they wouldn't need to worry about if they were a Microsoft puppet). It does seem like an unlikely conspiracy theory to me, but who knows.
I installed Zabbix on some boxes recently with good results. It monitors the health of your boxes as well as the health of numerous programs running on those boxes and it will email you whenever certain conditions (which you define) change. It focuses more on making sure all programs are running properly and tracking system resources, so it may not be as security oriented as it sounds like you want, but it isn't too hard to add monitoring of new things, so you could probably add triggers for what you consider suspicious without a whole lot of trouble.
For further reading,
Molecules With Silly Names
is amusing too.
Again, bandwidth savings of that magnitude are of benefit primarily to the site, but pagination does potentially have a side effect which benfits readers as well - it can make the content clearer and easier to comprehend if the pagination is prefaced with a summary guide to all the pages. I know when I read a large web page, I am a lot more likely to read the whole thing if there is a summary up front that gives me an indication that I will find the content interesting. If there is no summary, I might skim the content to see if it's interesting, but I imagine this is less accurate than if the author were to summarize up front why I should care about the content. If the content is paginated with a TOC and intro, the author is generally forced to do this summary, so pagination does benefit readers in that respect in much the same way that intros and TOCs can help you decide whether or not you want to read a particular book.
This does not bode well for the new character being introduced in The Return of the King who is also digitally generated.
As for what it is, IRC does sound an awful lot like this "innovative" new Microsoft product, except that it's been around for much, much longer (I remember using it a whole decade ago, and it's probably older than that).