This is late, but the big reason is to enable NT administrators to run NT programs on Server 2003. The name of the game, of course, is to migrate NT users to Server 2003. Which, shall we say, is not doing great guns.
> Any serious author/researcher is going to have other books about the subject at hand, making it trivial to copy from them.
Right. You've got it, but the key word is serious. With the Web and effective search engines, anyone can, and does, look for material on the subject of the day and with one copy and paste, they're done.
As for finding the stuff, there's no easy way to run a diff against any given article for plagiarized materials. Now, as ever, the only way plagiarism gets spotted is when the author, or someone else who really knows a subject well, goes "Wait, that's sound way too familar!" And, does the needed spadework. That digging is easier now, but spotting the text stealing in the first place is as hard as ever.
> Open, no compensation publishing on the web is not covered.
All dear, someone who's never been in the business. Many, probably most, book contracts say that essentially all practical rights belong to them.
Frankly, one reason why I almost never write books and stick to magazines and newspapers is not only do they pay better, but at least in that side of the biz, you know up front that your rights are bought and sold.
Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.
Looking down the road, I think the only hope for open clients are open IM servers, probably, IMHO, based on Jabber.
Alas, no. For all the reasons other folks cite. Personally, I love that book and I give copies to people who don't normally read SF or fantasy to introduce them to both Gaimen and Pratchett.
Not really. Paul Allen bought into a CNet project in 1994 which would become TechTV. He never owned, to the best of my knowledge, any of CNet or Ziff Davis proper. He later got out of TechTV, which I understand still stumbles around somewhere in the cable channels of dust.
They will just use zdnet.com as just another link to the cnet.com home page, but, for now, they seem to think that there's still some value in the ZDNet brand.
CNet does lose money and has been doing so for years. But, it's never been competiton for Prodigy, CI$, etc. It's always been a pure news play. The others are online services and what happened to them is they kept believeing in the old online service model even as the Internet was throwing dirt on their graces. AOL, OTOH, embraced the Internet as fast as they could, which is why, comparatively speaking, it's ended up doing the best of all the old online services.
*BEEP* Sorry, completely wrong. CNet is a public company with no connection to Ziff Davis. Ziff Davis has never owned any of it. CNet did buy ZDNet from Ziff Davis and has been busy killing if off ever since.
Steven *Who's worked and freelanced for both Ziff Davis and CNet over the years.
SCO claim that's the 'stolen' code is in 2.4 and above. SCO says what was swiped from Unix System V was NUMA and SMP and other enterprise level stuff.
Of course, this begs the question as to why they're also charging desktop and embedded Linux customers since they're are darn few desktop Linux setups with NUMA, SMP not to mention that the idea of an embedded SMP Linux system with NUMA is rather mind-boggling.
And letting SCO continue to tell Red Hat's customers that their product contained stolen code and for business end users to use Linux legally they'd have to spend a few hundred to a few thousand bucks per license is a good thing how?
On top of that, the IBM case is expected to drag out until 2005 at a minimum if there's no settlement.
Red Hat had no choice but to sue. The only real surprise is that it took so long for one of the major Linux distributors to make this legally expensive, but totally necessary move.
Yes, Microsoft is working on building their own Google killing search engine. They've already started some work on it with two new spider projects: PageTurner and MSNBot and they've been playing with a Google-like interface for their existing search engine.
Why? Because Overture, in the process of being bought by Yahoo and Google are finally showing that you can make money with online ads after all with content-targeting. This is a technique by which if you search for "axes" you'll find "sponsored-links," aka ads, for hatchets, axes and so on on both the search results page and on some of the pages resulting from that search. Microsoft, of course, wants those bucks too.
Expect to see this new, 'improved' MSN Search engine as the Internet Explorer default in new machines this fall and winter. Besides the usual sarcastic comments about MS inability to produce good products on a deadline, I've seen a bit of their project and I can safely tell you that the new MSN Search won't be any challenge to Google anytime soon. But, then, technically speaking, neither was IE to Netscape, Windows to Unix, you get the idea.
The short version is that 3G delivers poor real-world data performance and is extremely expensive to deploy. Wi-Fi, of course, doesn't have much range. So it is that many phone companies are now looking into deploying Wi-Fi. The real answer, and carriers and handset vendors are moving in this direction this isn't just analysts, will be dual Wi-Fi/Cellular devices.
> IANAL, but as far as I can tell SCO is suing IBM, not Linus, and the issue of whether Linus is cavalier about patents has precisely nothing to do with the actual lawsuit.
That's right. So far.
SCO is 'trying' this case in the court of public opinion. More specifically, they're trying to convince CIOs and CTOs to drop Linux and AIX. If sucessful, so I believe their logic goes, that will pressure IBM, and then other companies, to either buy them out or pay them off.
The merits of the case don't matter. It's all about creating FUD and then trying to take advantage of it in business.
If they think that suing Linus will help them do that, they will. At this point, I'm sorry to say, that I expect they will eventually sue Linus.
Again, it's not that they'd think they win this point in court. As many of/. writers have already pointed out, there are many solid, good legal reasons why developers shouldn't pretend to be IP lawyers. But, if by suing Linus, they can make many more business buyers doubt that Linux is a safe bet, they'll do it. After all, it's not like they haven't completely burned their bridges with the Linux community already!
Yes, there are many Mormons in Utah so many of them who are technically inclined work for Utah tech. companies. That said, I've known many of them for more than a decade at WordPerfect, Novell, Caldera/SCO and dozens of other companies and they're no more inclined to blindly obey a CEO than a Roman Catholic is to obey his CEO because he's been taught that the Pope in infalliable.
For example, I know for a fact that many current and former Caldera/SCO employees *hate* what their company is doing. Why don't you hear more from them? Because they have mortgages to pay, childern to feed and they don't want to lose their jobs and/or find themselves sued left, right and sideways. In short, they're people like everyone else trying to get by as best they can.
$599 is the real price but that's for a five desktop license with a year of support.
It's not meant, or priced, for single users. It's a pure business desktop play.
Steven
C&W Leaving US Been Coming for quite some time
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The signs were theee in the fall of last year. I wrote about it, and why hosting businesses tend to fall part, earlier this year.
http://www.practical-tech.com/network/n04172003. ht m
Long story short, stupid business plans and lousy management equals failure. C&W's US business had both in spades. The real question, from where I sit, is will C&W continue to survive in the UK? That was unthinkable only a few years ago, but they've made so many bad moves recently and bleed out so much capital you really have to wonder.
> So in other words, he's going to let people examine their "evidence", and allow them to come to their "own conclusions", but prevent them from disclosing any proof to the public of the validity of their conclusions
Exactly. Is anyone left wondering why we're (in my case technology journalists) not lining up to sign the NDA?
> Without publicity, they'll wither and die more quickly, so why don't we choke off their oxygen feed by ignoring them?
You think they're miserable? They could sell tomorrow. You should talk to the people who sold SCO Linux and the users who bought it. They're stuck with it.
They feel that they've been hung out to twist in the wind. And what is SCO giving them? According to the press confernece on Friday, they're being given the 'choice' to switch over to OpenServer (ancient Unix) or UnixWare (never a popular Unix), neither of which, now anyway, have any Linux support so they have to say good-bye to all their applications.
> Without publicity, they'll wither and die more quickly, so why don't we choke off their oxygen feed by ignoring them?
No, if you ignore a problem, it only festers and grows. The more light that is shown on any problem, the more likely it is that it will be solved. Come to think of it, it's kind of like open source!
Canopy owns large chunks of both SCO _and_ Novell. Betcha they're pleased as all punch about this now.
For more on SCO, Novell and Unix IP see: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/repor ts/481 8/1/
Steven
Rating: Outdated
on
802.11 Security
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Now, mind you I like this book too, but it's already out of date. Wi-Fi changes too fast to be captured in a book. For example, WEP has never worked that well even when you try to make the most of it (http://www.80211-planet.com/tutorials/article.php/2106281), but as of a few days ago, WPA (http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article.php/2198 151) finally became available. That said, I still wouldn't write a book about it. Why not? Because by the time a book got into print, WPA, which is only a stopgap, will be replaced by 802.11i. If you want to secure your WiFi network, a book, even this one, is only a start, you really need to keep your nose to the Web sites specialized in WiFi like Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News (http://wifinetnews.com/) and 802.11 Planet.
It's not like Microsoft developers will have much choice in the matter. The new Visual Studio is bult around.NET, the title gives it away: "Visual Studio.NET 2003."
But, what does that really mean? Good question, Microsoft is backing off from calling everything.NET because they overused it to the point that the term became essentially meaningless. With the newest VS, it boils down to you can use the.NET Framework (think object-oriented, component-based API), try mixing code from different lanaguages with CLI, and run C#. Oh, and it makes easier to use the still betaish ActiveX.
Does any of that make sense for a game programmer? Maybe, but since performance is everything to gamers, I suspect it will be a while before we'll see such games. Learning how to exploit.NET Framework means wrapping your mind around what, for many programmers will be a new way of developing programs. Simply knowing objects by way of C++ won't cut it. Because of that aspect, I don't see that using old languages via CLI will help that much to get killer performance. And, as for C#, I've never liked it that nuch, and while I know lots of folks who will argue over its functionality, especially over Java, and vice-versa, I seldom hear anyone comparing it performance numbers to those of C or C++.
Bottom line, yes, it will get used because for some developers VS.NET will be the only tools they have for Microsoft OSs. But, will it lend itself to producing killer games? Maybe someday, but I don't see it happening for another couple of years myself. For now, were I a game programmer, I'd be sticking to C and C++.
Slashdot Mirror
This is late, but the big reason is to enable NT administrators to run NT programs on Server 2003. The name of the game, of course, is to migrate NT users to Server 2003. Which, shall we say, is not doing great guns.
Steven
> Any serious author/researcher is going to have other books about the subject at hand, making it trivial to copy from them.
Right. You've got it, but the key word is serious. With the Web and effective search engines, anyone can, and does, look for material on the subject of the day and with one copy and paste, they're done.
As for finding the stuff, there's no easy way to run a diff against any given article for plagiarized materials. Now, as ever, the only way plagiarism gets spotted is when the author, or someone else who really knows a subject well, goes "Wait, that's sound way too familar!" And, does the needed spadework. That digging is easier now, but spotting the text stealing in the first place is as hard as ever.
Steven
> Open, no compensation publishing on the web is not covered.
All dear, someone who's never been in the business. Many, probably most, book contracts say that essentially all practical rights belong to them.
Frankly, one reason why I almost never write books and stick to magazines and newspapers is not only do they pay better, but at least in that side of the biz, you know up front that your rights are bought and sold.
Steven
Please! Writers of non-fiction never have lucative careers (darn it!) and our fame is, shall we say, small.
Plagiarism is always a problem. Amazon, like the Web and Google before it, makes it easier to steal rather than harder.
Steven
> no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form.
Gosh, look at it first. You can indeed browse books' pages just as if you had it on your lap and not just your laptop.
Amazon says there's a limit to the number of pages you can do this with, but they give no details and I haven't found a limit yet.
Steven
Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.
Looking down the road, I think the only hope for open clients are open IM servers, probably, IMHO, based on Jabber.
Steven
Alas, no. For all the reasons other folks cite. Personally, I love that book and I give copies to people who don't normally read SF or fantasy to introduce them to both Gaimen and Pratchett.
Steven
Not really. Paul Allen bought into a CNet project in 1994 which would become TechTV. He never owned, to the best of my knowledge, any of CNet or Ziff Davis proper. He later got out of TechTV, which I understand still stumbles around somewhere in the cable channels of dust.
Steven
They will just use zdnet.com as just another link to the cnet.com home page, but, for now, they seem to think that there's still some value in the ZDNet brand.
I don't think so!
Steven
CNet does lose money and has been doing so for years. But, it's never been competiton for Prodigy, CI$, etc. It's always been a pure news play. The others are online services and what happened to them is they kept believeing in the old online service model even as the Internet was throwing dirt on their graces. AOL, OTOH, embraced the Internet as fast as they could, which is why, comparatively speaking, it's ended up doing the best of all the old online services.
Steven
*BEEP* Sorry, completely wrong. CNet is a public company with no connection to Ziff Davis. Ziff Davis has never owned any of it. CNet did buy ZDNet from Ziff Davis and has been busy killing if off ever since.
Steven
*Who's worked and freelanced for both Ziff Davis and CNet over the years.
SCO claim that's the 'stolen' code is in 2.4 and above. SCO says what was swiped from Unix System V was NUMA and SMP and other enterprise level stuff.
Of course, this begs the question as to why they're also charging desktop and embedded Linux customers since they're are darn few desktop Linux setups with NUMA, SMP not to mention that the idea of an embedded SMP Linux system with NUMA is rather mind-boggling.
Steven
And letting SCO continue to tell Red Hat's customers that their product contained stolen code and for business end users to use Linux legally they'd have to spend a few hundred to a few thousand bucks per license is a good thing how?
On top of that, the IBM case is expected to drag out until 2005 at a minimum if there's no settlement.
Red Hat had no choice but to sue. The only real surprise is that it took so long for one of the major Linux distributors to make this legally expensive, but totally necessary move.
Steven
Yes, Microsoft is working on building their own Google killing search engine. They've already started some work on it with two new spider projects: PageTurner and MSNBot and they've been playing with a Google-like interface for their existing search engine.
Why? Because Overture, in the process of being bought by Yahoo and Google are finally showing that you can make money with online ads after all with content-targeting. This is a technique by which if you search for "axes" you'll find "sponsored-links," aka ads, for hatchets, axes and so on on both the search results page and on some of the pages resulting from that search. Microsoft, of course, wants those bucks too.
Expect to see this new, 'improved' MSN Search engine as the Internet Explorer default in new machines this fall and winter. Besides the usual sarcastic comments about MS inability to produce good products on a deadline, I've seen a bit of their project and I can safely tell you that the new MSN Search won't be any challenge to Google anytime soon. But, then, technically speaking, neither was IE to Netscape, Windows to Unix, you get the idea.
Steven
I don't think so!
l e.php/22 25411
See:
http://www.80211-planet.com/columns/artic
for where I'm coming from.
The short version is that 3G delivers poor real-world data performance and is extremely expensive to deploy. Wi-Fi, of course, doesn't have much range. So it is that many phone companies are now looking into deploying Wi-Fi. The real answer, and carriers and handset vendors are moving in this direction this isn't just analysts, will be dual Wi-Fi/Cellular devices.
Steven
> IANAL, but as far as I can tell SCO is suing IBM, not Linus, and the issue of whether Linus is cavalier about patents has precisely nothing to do with the actual lawsuit.
/. writers have already pointed out, there are many solid, good legal reasons why developers shouldn't pretend to be IP lawyers. But, if by suing Linus, they can make many more business buyers doubt that Linux is a safe bet, they'll do it. After all, it's not like they haven't completely burned their bridges with the Linux community already!
That's right. So far.
SCO is 'trying' this case in the court of public opinion. More specifically, they're trying to convince CIOs and CTOs to drop Linux and AIX. If sucessful, so I believe their logic goes, that will pressure IBM, and then other companies, to either buy them out or pay them off.
The merits of the case don't matter. It's all about creating FUD and then trying to take advantage of it in business.
If they think that suing Linus will help them do that, they will. At this point, I'm sorry to say, that I expect they will eventually sue Linus.
Again, it's not that they'd think they win this point in court. As many of
Steven
Yes, there are many Mormons in Utah so many of them who are technically inclined work for Utah tech. companies. That said, I've known many of them for more than a decade at WordPerfect, Novell, Caldera/SCO and dozens of other companies and they're no more inclined to blindly obey a CEO than a Roman Catholic is to obey his CEO because he's been taught that the Pope in infalliable.
For example, I know for a fact that many current and former Caldera/SCO employees *hate* what their company is doing. Why don't you hear more from them? Because they have mortgages to pay, childern to feed and they don't want to lose their jobs and/or find themselves sued left, right and sideways. In short, they're people like everyone else trying to get by as best they can.
Steven
$599 is the real price but that's for a five desktop license with a year of support.
It's not meant, or priced, for single users. It's a pure business desktop play.
Steven
The signs were theee in the fall of last year. I wrote about it, and why hosting businesses tend to fall part, earlier this year.
. ht m
http://www.practical-tech.com/network/n04172003
Long story short, stupid business plans and lousy management equals failure. C&W's US business had both in spades. The real question, from where I sit, is will C&W continue to survive in the UK? That was unthinkable only a few years ago, but they've made so many bad moves recently and bleed out so much capital you really have to wonder.
Steven
> So in other words, he's going to let people examine their "evidence", and allow them to come to their "own conclusions", but prevent them from disclosing any proof to the public of the validity of their conclusions
Exactly. Is anyone left wondering why we're (in my case technology journalists) not lining up to sign the NDA?
Steven
> Without publicity, they'll wither and die more quickly, so why don't we choke off their oxygen feed by ignoring them?
You think they're miserable? They could sell tomorrow. You should talk to the people who sold SCO Linux and the users who bought it. They're stuck with it.
They feel that they've been hung out to twist in the wind. And what is SCO giving them? According to the press confernece on Friday, they're being given the 'choice' to switch over to OpenServer (ancient Unix) or UnixWare (never a popular Unix), neither of which, now anyway, have any Linux support so they have to say good-bye to all their applications.
Yuck.
Steven
> Without publicity, they'll wither and die more quickly, so why don't we choke off their oxygen feed by ignoring them?
No, if you ignore a problem, it only festers and grows. The more light that is shown on any problem, the more likely it is that it will be solved. Come to think of it, it's kind of like open source!
Steven
Canopy owns large chunks of both SCO _and_ Novell.
r ts/481 8/1/
Betcha they're pleased as all punch about this now.
For more on SCO, Novell and Unix IP see:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/repo
Steven
Now, mind you I like this book too, but it's already out of date. Wi-Fi changes too fast to be captured in a book. For example, WEP has never worked that well even when you try to make the most of it (http://www.80211-planet.com/tutorials/article.php /2106281), but as of a few days ago, WPA (http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article.php/2198 151) finally became available. That said, I still wouldn't write a book about it. Why not? Because by the time a book got into print, WPA, which is only a stopgap, will be replaced by 802.11i. If you want to secure your WiFi network, a book, even this one, is only a start, you really need to keep your nose to the Web sites specialized in WiFi like Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News (http://wifinetnews.com/) and 802.11 Planet.
Steven
It's not like Microsoft developers will have much choice in the matter. The new Visual Studio is bult around .NET, the title gives it away: "Visual Studio .NET 2003."
.NET because they overused it to the point that the term became essentially meaningless. With the newest VS, it boils down to you can use the .NET Framework (think object-oriented, component-based API), try mixing code from different lanaguages with CLI, and run C#. Oh, and it makes easier to use the still betaish ActiveX.
.NET Framework means wrapping your mind around what, for many programmers will be a new way of developing programs. Simply knowing objects by way of C++ won't cut it. Because of that aspect, I don't see that using old languages via CLI will help that much to get killer performance. And, as for C#, I've never liked it that nuch, and while I know lots of folks who will argue over its functionality, especially over Java, and vice-versa, I seldom hear anyone comparing it performance numbers to those of C or C++.
.NET will be the only tools they have for Microsoft OSs. But, will it lend itself to producing killer games? Maybe someday, but I don't see it happening for another couple of years myself. For now, were I a game programmer, I'd be sticking to C and C++.
But, what does that really mean? Good question, Microsoft is backing off from calling everything
Does any of that make sense for a game programmer? Maybe, but since performance is everything to gamers, I suspect it will be a while before we'll see such games. Learning how to exploit
Bottom line, yes, it will get used because for some developers VS
Steven