Yes, and no. The code to detect the OS wasn't a simple check of the DOS version as Microsoft could've easily done, and a notification that bug reports about Windows 3.1 when running on DR-DOS may not be looked at. Instead there were several fairly well documented things Microsoft intentionally added to Windows to make installing and using the beta of Windows 3.1 more difficult on DR-DOS.
Honestly, if Microsoft had warned the user during install that DR-DOS may be incompatible with Windows 3.1, and that Microsoft cannot guarentee that non official versions of DOS will function properly, they would've likely had fewer problems. Instead they chose to be sneaky, and do meaningless checks on XMS driver versions, call undocumented int 21h calls to check for even more undocumented data structures, and then pop up errors that imply there's something seriously wrong with your system. Microsoft has no obligation to support DR-DOS, but this went further than that, to actually trying to sabotage DR-DOS.
Yeah, I'm sure Darl has a much better understanding of the issues. Lets look at another perspective instead, shall we? When Darl took over, SCO was sinking fast. They needed income, and they needed it soon. Linux was never a moneymaker for SCO/Caldera, but they did have some of these old contracts over SVR4 source code with some pretty big names. As Darl so eloquently put it, "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with." Maybe, just maybe they could rattle some sabres and see what money floats their way to shut them up.
There was code in the beta versions of Windows 3.1 that showed a non-fatal error message when you tried to start it. It was removed before the commerical release, but it was an artificial MS-DOS compatibility test, and the only real purpose was to promote FUD about DR-DOS. It gave beta test users the impression that DR-DOS may be incompatible with Windows 3.1, nothing more.
You know the really disgusting part of that is Boies lawfirm would get to win twice. As part of this lawsuit, they get a lot of shares in SCO, and would become SCO shareholders, and would be within their rights to be part of a shareholders lawsuit. I guess it's true... When you make lawsuits your business, the only people who win are the lawyers.
It's worse than that. McBridge expects the Linux kernel developers to act as SCO's unpaid employees, producing a product that SCO can demand a cut from everytime someone downloads it.
McBride: Our goal is not to blow up Linux. People ask why we don't go after the distributors...'If you have such a strong case, why not shut down Red Hat?' Our belief is that SCO has great opportunity in the future to let Linux keep going, not to put it on its back but for us to get a transaction fee every time it's sold. That's really our goal.
His vision of SCO getting a cut of every linux sale is unfortunately for him, unworkable. It would require the licence on the kernel to be changed from the GPL to something else, and that would require the consent of every single Linux developer that ever contributed a line of code. Besides the fact that would be a terribly difficult task, there's also some who have died over the years, and getting the permission from the estate of the deceased could be impossible. There's also the fact that some people have "disappeared", and have little or no contact information available. And I'm betting that none of them would consent to a license that gives SCO control.
This little tidbit is also interesting from the article that is linked:
McBride: [...] The core business, we think that's bottomed out and there's upside now with new products coming. We haven't had a new product in our OpenServer base in years and years.
Look at it from SCO's perspective, SCO OpenServer costs a lot to maintain, and adding features and drivers is expensive. The customer base is dwindling, so why not become a lawsuit company, and seize control over Linux?
He also brags a lot about how he's improved shareholder value and this and that. However, what good is shareholder "value" when the company is not sustainable? Sure the shareholders are richer right now, but unless SCO becomes a sustainable company, they're really just burning shareholder cash.
Of course everyone knows the real reason they can understand them is because of the babelfish. Claiming that everyone learned that language is just silly in comparison!
Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant idea.... until someone gets joe-jobbed. How would you like to be the poor shmuck that has his website promoted in spam because you promoted this idea of screwing over the spammers in this automated mannor?
Credit card being ripped off is only the tip of the iceburg. What you think you're buying, and what they actually intend to send you can be completely different things. And in the case that it isn't, the company you were dealing with is likely to be a fly-by-night, vanishing without a trace before you can try to do something about it. Are you sure you're getting Viagra, or are you getting acetylsalicylic acid tablets (aspirin) instead? As the saying goes, "If it looks too good to possibly be true, it probably is."
Add to the fact that these days a fair amount of spam is going through backdoored computers, and that there's evidence that spammers and the latest generation of e-mail worm writers are on pretty friendly terms with each other, and you've got a crowd of people you absolutely should not trust. These people don't want you to know where they're coming from, so that should give you a clue as to how reputable they are.
E-mail spam is really little more than telephone scammers with new technology. Admittedly, trying to educate people to avoid phone scams hasn't worked too well. Spam is evil won't work as a message, but the message that spam tend to be sent out by scammers and con men should.
However, they do not fear Flying Pigs with 102366 hits. The #1 hit:
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It seems odd that someone who wrote a paper on an anti-spam technique in March 1998, would go on to patent an anti-anti-spam technique that wouldn't defeat the technique he discussed months ago. It's entirely possible that AT&T intends to use this to put spam software makers out of business, or at least make spams easier to detect.
Most of the people who could be educated aren't the ones that end up putting most of the e-mail out there. These people often only send out a single mailing and then get quickly educated as the complaints, DoS attacks, and ISP services terminations arrive. No, most of the big spammers don't care that it's inconvenient. I've been getting 50 worm.swen.a e-mails per day, and I'm pretty sure every virus and worm writer out there knows it's wrong to make these things.
Personally, I agree with the other people who've replied. Educating the people to not respond to spam (or con artists in general) would be a more worthy cause. Far too many people get taken by both internet, and the more traditional phone scams. The fact that for many people, their brains shut down when they get within 10 feet of a computer has made internet scams pretty bad.
I haven't seen any distro that does CD burning very easily though, so the problem isn't localized to debian by any means.
The Linux 2.6 kernel should take care of this problem nicely. On 2.6, instead of having to tell cdrecord where your burner is by host,lun,id, you can tell it where it is by device (/dev/hdc). Discovering which/dev/hd? devices are CD drives is also easier thanks to sysfs. I believe Joerg Schilling still insists that every device should be SCSI, even when it's not, but it doesn't matter. No more ide-scsi mess, no more stupid kernel arguments to exclude a particular IDE device from the ide-cd driver, and no more cloned devices because SCSI LUN support is on. From now on, all CD-RW drives can be accessed via the device node that rightly belongs to it.
Uhg. Okay, there are CEOs that do their job well, and get fair pay from the board, and there are CEOs that are CEOs that do a piss poor job, are awarded huge retention bonuses by the board during very bad years for the company. Small or medium sized businesses, typically have the first type of executives that are making the decisions. Typically, these people have been with the company for a long time, and genuinely care about the welfare of the company. Very large businesses, on the other hand, have been plagued by the superstar CEOs who tend to get replaced every few years, and take home loads of company money and stock options, and then get a huge severance bonus when they leave.
Slashdotters tend to say Microsoft or SCO is evil, too. Does that mean they think all Microsoft or SCO employees are evil? Not usually (there are some who are completely irrational). Just because common knowledge on Slashdot is that CEOs are overpaid, doesn't mean ALL CEOs are overpaid. Is your CEO taking home $33.4 million dollars per year? That was the median compensation for CEOs of America's 100 largest corporations in 2002. Or perhaps he's taking home more like $300,000 to $500,000/yr, or maybe even $1,000,000/yr.
When a CEO takes home more money in a severance package after being 'fired' by the board of directors than you could ever hope to earn with an average salary of $60,000/yr over a 45 year career, it's not hard to believe that they were overpaid.
French was more of a nightmare than Calculus. At least I could understand, read and write calculus. The only french I remember is from cereal boxes ("gratuit prix")
As Microsoft has become more and more an Intel only company they have made their situation worse rather than better. At some point if Microsoft and Intel don't merge I think it will be Intel that survives the partnership and not Microsoft.
I believe that this.NET and the MSIL compiler built into MS's.NET framework. Intel's IA64 archetecture gives them an opportunity they've never had before.
Think of it this way... MSIL can be compiled to run on just about any CPU archetecture, which will effectively give them independance from Intel for everything but the Windows kernel. Microsoft gets to hedge their bets, without having to choose a side in the Intel IA64 versus AMD x86-64 debate. In this case, the only part of the system that needs to be CPU specific is the drivers, kernel and MSIL JIT compiler. Everything else could be done in MSIL, and either compiled at install time, or at runtime. At the same time, it means they can distribute a single executable for all three archectures (i386+, IA64, and x86-64).
I suspect this will be the start of Microsoft trying their best to play AMD and Intel off each other to wield considerable influcence over both of them. Intel's on-again, off-again affair with Linux has been partly because Intel wants to lessen their dependance on Microsoft, but also has to depend on Microsoft for a port of Windows to their IA64 chips.
Re:Remotely vs. locally exploitable
on
Security FUD On Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Chances are, they'll use raw number of published vulnerability reports. Say Windows 2000 versus Red Hat Linux 7.2. There would be a number of errors with this approach, such as the fact that nearly every distribution ships many different MTAs, FTP servers, etc, and they are generally mutually exclusive. Installing Sendmail and Postfix and QMail is probably technically possible, but highly unlikely, and usually completely impossible with official packages. There's also the fact that pretty much EVERY exploitable vulnerability gets a security advisory written up for it, unlike Windows, where Microsoft can slip a fix into the next service pack, and no one will ever really know about it. How many segfault bugs does Microsoft fix in their products that could be remotely exploitable if someone dig deep enough? I know I've seen advisories come out after someone dug up that a bugfix in an open source program actually fixed an exploitable hole.
The problem is, there's really no proof that either development process is better than the other. You can either accept the baseless claims from either side, or accept flaws conclusions from the public data that compares apples to oranges.
Unless you have all those already, it still isn't cheaper. Most wireless access points sell for MORE than a wireless equipped home router. If you mean a HostAP capable USB wireless card, then it still doesn't get any cheaper. I've seen routers sold for $19.95CAD after MIR, or $29.95CAD for wireless. Non-sale prices seem to be $100CAD, and $70CAD respectively.
I know how to set up a Linux router, and until they became so cheap, I used to run a 486 as my personal NAT router. Today, however, even using the old parts I've collected over time, a Linux router still can't compete price-wise with a store bought model.
I thought the DMCA and it's copycats in other countries were actually because of UN/WIPO treaties to "harmonize" and strengthen IP protections world-wide. At least, that's what the Canadian government officials were saying when they gave Industry Canada a mandate to come up with a similar law for Canada to use. "We have to implement this law, we signed this international treaty saying so!" So much for elected representation....
Hmmm... $220 for a router that I'd have to spend hours squeezing an OS into and configuring from scratch, or $60 for a home router that include 802.11b, and most of the basic settings preconfigured for me. Gosh, that's a difficult choice. Configuring things from scratch is fun and all, but it's not really $160 worth of fun, especially when I'd likely end up with a product with fewer functions than I have right now.
At least the JBoss lawyers pointed out three files that they claim were copied from the outset, AND they're willing to let ASF just remove any copied code. SCO did neither. You could only view SCO's copied code via NDA, and removing the code wasn't an option. Only much later, they decided to show a (fairly bogus) sample at the conference. I have yet to see a dozen press releases from JBoss claiming that ASF is destroying their business, and that ASF is unamerican, and trying to subvery copyright law.
Of course, here in Manitoba, we get to see absolutely nothing. The annual winter overcast has begun, and we won't be able to see the sky until sometime in March. Wheeee!
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, if Microsoft had warned the user during install that DR-DOS may be incompatible with Windows 3.1, and that Microsoft cannot guarentee that non official versions of DOS will function properly, they would've likely had fewer problems. Instead they chose to be sneaky, and do meaningless checks on XMS driver versions, call undocumented int 21h calls to check for even more undocumented data structures, and then pop up errors that imply there's something seriously wrong with your system. Microsoft has no obligation to support DR-DOS, but this went further than that, to actually trying to sabotage DR-DOS.
"Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim." [August 28, 2002]
"This case is not about the debate about the relative merits of the proprietary versus open-source software models. This case is also not about IBM's right to develop and promote open-source software, so long as they do that without SCO's proprietary information." [March 7 2003]
"There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." [April 24 2003] (for fun, contrast to motion to dismiss court filings in Red Hat v. SCO Group, particularily where it claims there is no "actual controversy", and Red Hat has no reason to fear a lawsuit from SCO... Well, at least not until they finish with IBM)
Yeah, I'm sure Darl has a much better understanding of the issues. Lets look at another perspective instead, shall we? When Darl took over, SCO was sinking fast. They needed income, and they needed it soon. Linux was never a moneymaker for SCO/Caldera, but they did have some of these old contracts over SVR4 source code with some pretty big names. As Darl so eloquently put it, "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with." Maybe, just maybe they could rattle some sabres and see what money floats their way to shut them up.
There was code in the beta versions of Windows 3.1 that showed a non-fatal error message when you tried to start it. It was removed before the commerical release, but it was an artificial MS-DOS compatibility test, and the only real purpose was to promote FUD about DR-DOS. It gave beta test users the impression that DR-DOS may be incompatible with Windows 3.1, nothing more.
You know the really disgusting part of that is Boies lawfirm would get to win twice. As part of this lawsuit, they get a lot of shares in SCO, and would become SCO shareholders, and would be within their rights to be part of a shareholders lawsuit. I guess it's true... When you make lawsuits your business, the only people who win are the lawyers.
This little tidbit is also interesting from the article that is linked:
Look at it from SCO's perspective, SCO OpenServer costs a lot to maintain, and adding features and drivers is expensive. The customer base is dwindling, so why not become a lawsuit company, and seize control over Linux?He also brags a lot about how he's improved shareholder value and this and that. However, what good is shareholder "value" when the company is not sustainable? Sure the shareholders are richer right now, but unless SCO becomes a sustainable company, they're really just burning shareholder cash.
Of course everyone knows the real reason they can understand them is because of the babelfish. Claiming that everyone learned that language is just silly in comparison!
Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant idea.... until someone gets joe-jobbed. How would you like to be the poor shmuck that has his website promoted in spam because you promoted this idea of screwing over the spammers in this automated mannor?
Add to the fact that these days a fair amount of spam is going through backdoored computers, and that there's evidence that spammers and the latest generation of e-mail worm writers are on pretty friendly terms with each other, and you've got a crowd of people you absolutely should not trust. These people don't want you to know where they're coming from, so that should give you a clue as to how reputable they are.
E-mail spam is really little more than telephone scammers with new technology. Admittedly, trying to educate people to avoid phone scams hasn't worked too well. Spam is evil won't work as a message, but the message that spam tend to be sent out by scammers and con men should.
Just because something hurts business (or profits, rather), doesn't mean it should be illegal.
Flying Pigs on eBay
Find flying pig items at low prices. With over 5 million items for sale every day, you'll find all kinds of unique things on ebay - the world's online marketplace.
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It seems odd that someone who wrote a paper on an anti-spam technique in March 1998, would go on to patent an anti-anti-spam technique that wouldn't defeat the technique he discussed months ago. It's entirely possible that AT&T intends to use this to put spam software makers out of business, or at least make spams easier to detect.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/112,998, filed on Dec. 18, 1998.
That said, I'm sure you could still find prior art in spam software dating back to the end of 1998.
Personally, I agree with the other people who've replied. Educating the people to not respond to spam (or con artists in general) would be a more worthy cause. Far too many people get taken by both internet, and the more traditional phone scams. The fact that for many people, their brains shut down when they get within 10 feet of a computer has made internet scams pretty bad.
Slashdotters tend to say Microsoft or SCO is evil, too. Does that mean they think all Microsoft or SCO employees are evil? Not usually (there are some who are completely irrational). Just because common knowledge on Slashdot is that CEOs are overpaid, doesn't mean ALL CEOs are overpaid. Is your CEO taking home $33.4 million dollars per year? That was the median compensation for CEOs of America's 100 largest corporations in 2002. Or perhaps he's taking home more like $300,000 to $500,000/yr, or maybe even $1,000,000/yr.
When a CEO takes home more money in a severance package after being 'fired' by the board of directors than you could ever hope to earn with an average salary of $60,000/yr over a 45 year career, it's not hard to believe that they were overpaid.
French was more of a nightmare than Calculus. At least I could understand, read and write calculus. The only french I remember is from cereal boxes ("gratuit prix")
Think of it this way... MSIL can be compiled to run on just about any CPU archetecture, which will effectively give them independance from Intel for everything but the Windows kernel. Microsoft gets to hedge their bets, without having to choose a side in the Intel IA64 versus AMD x86-64 debate. In this case, the only part of the system that needs to be CPU specific is the drivers, kernel and MSIL JIT compiler. Everything else could be done in MSIL, and either compiled at install time, or at runtime. At the same time, it means they can distribute a single executable for all three archectures (i386+, IA64, and x86-64).
I suspect this will be the start of Microsoft trying their best to play AMD and Intel off each other to wield considerable influcence over both of them. Intel's on-again, off-again affair with Linux has been partly because Intel wants to lessen their dependance on Microsoft, but also has to depend on Microsoft for a port of Windows to their IA64 chips.
The problem is, there's really no proof that either development process is better than the other. You can either accept the baseless claims from either side, or accept flaws conclusions from the public data that compares apples to oranges.
Haven't seen any Microsoft commercials recently, huh? "Do More With Less." Hint: They're not talking about licensing fees, or even number of servers.
I know how to set up a Linux router, and until they became so cheap, I used to run a 486 as my personal NAT router. Today, however, even using the old parts I've collected over time, a Linux router still can't compete price-wise with a store bought model.
I thought the DMCA and it's copycats in other countries were actually because of UN/WIPO treaties to "harmonize" and strengthen IP protections world-wide. At least, that's what the Canadian government officials were saying when they gave Industry Canada a mandate to come up with a similar law for Canada to use. "We have to implement this law, we signed this international treaty saying so!" So much for elected representation....
Hmmm... $220 for a router that I'd have to spend hours squeezing an OS into and configuring from scratch, or $60 for a home router that include 802.11b, and most of the basic settings preconfigured for me. Gosh, that's a difficult choice. Configuring things from scratch is fun and all, but it's not really $160 worth of fun, especially when I'd likely end up with a product with fewer functions than I have right now.
At least the JBoss lawyers pointed out three files that they claim were copied from the outset, AND they're willing to let ASF just remove any copied code. SCO did neither. You could only view SCO's copied code via NDA, and removing the code wasn't an option. Only much later, they decided to show a (fairly bogus) sample at the conference. I have yet to see a dozen press releases from JBoss claiming that ASF is destroying their business, and that ASF is unamerican, and trying to subvery copyright law.
"Pimping your favorite site on Slashdot by posing as a serious discussion"
Or is Slashdot doing "product placement" now?
Of course, here in Manitoba, we get to see absolutely nothing. The annual winter overcast has begun, and we won't be able to see the sky until sometime in March. Wheeee!