I recall reading an article about how the broadcasters weren't crazy about moving to HDTV, because if they pushed only DTV, they'd be able to cram something like 5x as many channels over the same bandwidth
Which is actually GOOD, because it would allow most basic cable subscribers to get the same thing for free.
Having 30+ over-the-air channels will be the real killer app of DTV -- nobody cares about watching some crappy sitcom or the local news in high definition. They would still be able to push the bandwidth together into one channel for HD broadcasts of the Super Bowl and other big events.
It's not just marketing strategies -- it's technical strategies.
Apples have traditionally been CRAP enterprise clients -- Piss-poor Java support, zero database support, absolutely no RAD tools, proprietary networking protocols, goofy WWW support, virtually zero software portability, virtually zero interoperability outside of Apple's proprietary scheme-of-the-day.
Now admittedly most of that has changed in the last year with OS X, but it should have started happened 10 years ago, and now it's really too-little, too-fucking-late.
Believe it or not, Macs were once mainstream corporate desktops in many places, and they all got thrown in the dumpster (except for the graphic hole), because Apple's stated policy was to absolutely refuse to make a corporate-friendly product.
The result is that Apple customers have no need for Sun servers and Sun customers have no need for Apple clients.
Like any troll you enounter on the 'net, you shouldn't feed them.
Troll is probably the right word.
The only thing Microsoft has to say on the topic of Open Source is pretty much plagurized from 10 year old GPL vs BSDL Usenet flamewars. (Right down to the "General Public Virus" bit, although they can probably take credit for "Pac-Man".) All of Microsoft's "FUD" is in fact homegrown.
What bothers me about this discussion is that the "OSS" side is wanting to present some sort of unified front, when in fact there's huge divisions within the "community" about licence politics, and many prominent members (RMS, Theo, etc) spend a considerable amount adding fuel to the flamewars.
So, even by simply advocating BSDL, Microsoft has a serious opportunity to troll the OSS's people into spilling their internal divisions in public in a nasty way.
Of course, it could go the other way and end up as a discussion of Microsoft's licences. Which Microsoft probably doesn't want to discuss.
I was going to launch into my extremely well-developed Exchange and Domino bitchlist, but instead I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask a question.
Any truth to the rumor that Exchange was originally beta'd for OS/2 around 1992 or so?
As someone who did both Notes and Exchange work in a previous life, I'd completely disagree. My back of the napkin was that you could support double the number of users on the same hardware with Notes over Exchange, and that was mail+applications, not just mail and discussions. (That was Exch 5.5, however, so I can't comment on Exch 6 or Domino 5/6.)
Notes was certainly designed to be a general-purpose client-server database product, and isn't optimized for mail. I don't think much of Exchange's JET-based engine, however, which for years had an embarassing 16GB limit (I had bigger Domino mailstores on 486-based servers) and corruption bugs which took multiple releases to resolve.
Most of Notes' Admin hostility is due to the fact that it's designed for very large environments (10K+ users and hundreds of servers). It's a very solid product, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone with less than 1000 employees, and dedicated IT types.
D) Hollywood types like Sony and AOL were talking about using settop boxes as a 'convergence' devices to cut Microsoft and and the rest of the Internet community out of the digital entertainment market. Microsoft felt had to get into the consumer electronics market RIGHT NOW.
Microsoft has long memories and remembers what they did to IBM with the (supposedly low-profit) PC. Therefore they never let a competitor introduce a product without their own along side. (The one time they forgot this rule was Netscape, and it hurt badly.) T
Turns out however Sony failed to market the PS2 as anything more than a Playstation and AOLTV died stillborne. If MS determines they aren't interested, don't count on XBox2.
Nescape 4 docs (pretty much the "DOM0" spec): The value of each element in the forms array is , where nameAttribute is the NAME attribute of the form
But that obviously doesn't handle duplicate form names.
W3C HTML DOM1: + Doesn't say what's exactly in the document.forms collection. + Does define interface HTMLCollection.namedItem() as: This method retrieves a Node using a name. It first searches for a Node with a matching id attribute. If it doesn't find one, it then searches for a Node with a matching name attribute
So my guess is that this is a issue of interpretation, with IE erring on the side of W3C DOM1, and Mozilla erring on the side of Netscape4-back-compat
Moz's behavior sorta makes sense with this old-style syntax, but I'd expect it to handle this, since they are so keen on modern standards.
Here's the code in question from MSDN: before: var theform = document.WebUserControl1_Form1; after: var theform = document.forms["WebUserControl1:Form1"];
So there's two different form syntaxes, but that shouldn't be a problem. Is it because they are generating a form name with a colon (:) in it and then expecting it to be escaped out to a underscore (_)?
+ The netrumor is that DEC/Compaq/HP has contractual requirements to maintain OpenVMS for something like 20 years. So it makes sense to keep it on something almost like regular hardware.
+ Minicomputing culture like VMS or HP3000 can be very profitable, but it's also expensive to run. IIRC, Compaq announced a few years back that VMS brought in $3Billion in revenue, which is in the same league as Microsoft Windows. IBM has claimed that their AS/400 division has greater revenues than all of Sun Micro.
However, along with that is an enormous amount of engineering and support. So, they basically need to spend $50 to make a $100. Meanwhile in the PC world, you spend $5 to make $10 -- thus leading to lower overhead costs and headcounts, and that makes wallstreet happy.
The consequence of this is that if they wanted to expand the userbase, they would have to spend $100 to make $200 and that looks even worse from a gross financial perspective.
(The inverse of this is that you can legacy the thing and all of a sudden you're spending $20 to make the same $100 for mucho shortterm profits, until the customers figure out and flee like rats.)
So, they quietly milk the existing base and don't worry about evangalizing. I notice that lots of VMS stuff is still hosted on digital.com, and the product is still littered with trademarks like "DECWindows". I imagine that the userbase is largely intentionally ignorant of all this Compaq/HP and Alpha/Itanium stuff and just lumbers along trusting their computing to VMS like they always have.
Meanwhile, the minicomputer culture withers away not because it's not profitable, but because it doesn't look like Dell's business model. It's a shame when profitable top notch engineering and research gets short shrift from the capitalists.
+ Propreitary hardware: My understanding is that there was some special VAX-type microcode needed on the Alpha systems. But for the most part, customers could easily switch from VMS to Unix (just like the HP3000/9000, where the conversion kit was a new label). But there's no real reason to lock them in because not many users are coming or going.
A VeriSign (or PGP, etc) signature isn't intended to imply "trust", it's there to ensure veracity. That way Xupiter and other scum don't impersonate someone you'd normally trust like MozDev or Macromedia. Mozilla has no protection and is vulnerable to social engineering and DNS spoof attacks.
"Trust" is ultimately a local policy that has to be implemented by the end user. What you are suggesting is something like a "Good Netkeeping Signature of Approval", which is a good idea, but that's not the function of a certificate authority.
I'd rather have a system that doesn't allow things to install unless I explicitly allow them to instead of a system that depends on a faulty assumption that no malicious software will get signed by a signing authority.
IE can implement that policy, so what's the problem?
That's naive, and incompatible with the open source distribution model, Mozilla's plug-in design, and Mozilla's marketing goals. Nor is there any policy at mozdev.org that would let you conclude a package is in any way safe.
In my view the biggest reason that OS/2 never took off is that IBM was extremely frightened of commodity computing. So they tried very hard to cripple OS/2 and protect their midrange servers. If you ever tried to run LAN/Warp Server, it showed.
Microsoft didn't have that problem with NT, and rode the wave of high power x86 stuff to capture the entire bottom of the server market (leaving OS/2 only the oh-so-valuable mainframe comm gateway market).
It's nice to see that they might have actually learned something from OS/2's failure, and this time around are promoting Linux across their entire server range as a commodity glue technology, rather than end to itself.
Admittedly, it's possible these people were prompted and simply don't remember, but if there weren't, then there is a problem with IE's default configuration
My theory? User installs Spyware A, which puts Spyware Co. in their "Trusted Sites" zone. (A spyware remover might not catch this.) At some point later, Spyware B auto-installs because the domain is "Trusted".
I don't see any evidence that IE's default config is faulty -- and end-users or admins can prevent this problem with a couple mouseclicks which is easier and more effective than bitching.
and since most extensions are downloaded from centralized, trusted sources (basically just mozdev)
Security through lack of popularity. Works in the real world against social diseases too. Doesn't mean that the underlying system is not vulnerable.
These things get installed via social engineering, and by not having a signature mechanism makes that easier for the scumballs.
For that matter, this thing is apparently signed by Verisign, which means that IE's package signing system may be a security liability instead of a security benefit.
Oh, I forgot. On/. VeriSign signatures are far less reputable than a popup claiming to from "MozDev", even if mozilla trusts VeriSign as much as IE does. Even a trival change to to force software installation to work over SSL would be better than what they have now.
My only point is that if/when Mozilla advocates reach their goal of making Mozilla a mainstream browser, they are going to be more screwed than the IE users. Many features in Mozilla, such as skins, have an enormous capability for adware evil. (The cynical might suspect that's why AOL built that stuff in in the first place.)
a) you actually have software installation enabled in your preferences
Default is enabled, no? You and/or your sysadmin can disable this behavior in IE too.
c) will prompt you BEFORE it installs the software, giving the web server and the package being installed.
Not only does IE prompt you, it also checks the package's signature, thus making sure you're not being spoofed and verifying exactly who is distributing the plugin. Mozilla makes no veracity checks.
Of course on/., IE always sucks and Mozilla always rules, but in terms of plug-in installation mechanics, the "balance" is very similar, with IE having more control.
Unfortunately, if Mozilla had a larger userbase, it would be just as abused by malicious devs and stupid users. More actually, because you could potentially turn the entire "skin" into a giant spam billboard.
Nobody really answered your question, so I'll take a shot at it -- the primary reason for the BIOS is backwards compatiblilty.
The following OSes are designed to require a classic PC AT-style BIOS, at least for the boot sequence:
DOS Win 9x OS/2 Novell Netware (bootstraps from DOS)
Note that the first 3 are "obsolete" and aren't being updated but are still in very widescale use. I believe it's possible to still order machines with Windows ME.
Anyway, you could make a legacy-free firmware that could boot lightly modified versions of XP or Linux, but that doesn't help the installed base at all. Maybe in 10 years, but not now.
The BIOS is just the tip of the iceburg -- a modern PC is still very much "AT-Compatible" -- and that has radical effect on the hardware design. For example, ATA/IDE has to be continually improved, rather than replaced, because it offers the highest compatibility.
As a secondary problem, even modern OSes like NT/2K/XP and Linux have a bunch of dependancies on BIOSy things like ACPI.
Microsoft already does this, I believe -- the MSVC redistributable libs are licenced for Windows only. Apple takes it a step further and only licences their software on their hardware. At least MS is only limiting distribution rights, not trying to usurp copyright by removing runtime rights.
Note that SCO is doing the decent thing and offering an shrinkwrap licence for this stuff, and will no doubt also include it in Caldera UnitedLinux at no additional cost.
Sources said SCO plans to charge for use of two software "libraries,"... A source said SCO libraries that accompany the SVR4 and OSR5 versions of Unix may be used with UnixWare and OpenServer, respectively, but using them in conjunction with Linux is prohibited by the software's licence.
"There's a little bit of ignorance on the part of some customers," a source familiar with the plan said. But at the same time, the source added, "there are customers using the libraries that know they're not supposed to be using them."
Using the libraries allows programs designed for SCO Unix to be run, unmodified, on Linux machines in conjunction with a package called Linux-ABI. That's a key step for companies moving servers from SCO Unix to Linux with minimum disruption.
For those who don't know, "Linux-ABI" used to be called IBCS -- "Intel Binary Compatibility Standard" -- and you can guess from the name that it was an (old) attempt to standardize the ABI between different x86 Unixes. A long time ago, Linux users needed this to run commercial software like Oracle or WordPerfect.
It sounds like either Linux-ABI steps on SCO patents, or certain customers are shipping SCO libraries to run on top of Linux-ABI (which is outright copyright violation). In either case, this only affects about 0.001% of Linux users.
In short, all 2000 posts eariler were probably a massive over reaction.
Microsoft might not realize it yet, but it's only a matter of time before Windows sourcecode is Open (as in VMS - read only).
Really, what have they got to lose? Windows is already pirated like crazy, and they arguably have a better core system than any of their competitors anyway. Why not counter Linus Hype with a litte Dave Cutler?
They've already run through their shared source program with various universities and no dirty laundry leaked out. Having published source never hurt IBM or DEC. They should do it.
Sorry! The one I sold was for $350 (on eBay), so you obviously aren't the guy. Very similar setup -- original box + packing materials + all disks and manuals.
I thought it might have gone a bit low, but for the most part Osbornes don't seem to get very much money on eBay. Since I picked it up for $20, I was happy.
History has proven the DIVX people to be geniuses before their time -- They correctly predicted that CSS would be broken. They predicted it would be possible to distribute pirate video over the Internet. At the time most slashdotters thought both to be impossible.
They also knew the value of strong-crypto, phone-home authorization, and DRM in the hardware. If they could have hung on, they'd be very popular guys right now in Hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall reading an article about how the broadcasters weren't crazy about moving to HDTV, because if they pushed only DTV, they'd be able to cram something like 5x as many channels over the same bandwidth
Which is actually GOOD, because it would allow most basic cable subscribers to get the same thing for free.
Having 30+ over-the-air channels will be the real killer app of DTV -- nobody cares about watching some crappy sitcom or the local news in high definition. They would still be able to push the bandwidth together into one channel for HD broadcasts of the Super Bowl and other big events.
At least until they turn 25 and they get the trust fund.
It's not just marketing strategies -- it's technical strategies.
Apples have traditionally been CRAP enterprise clients -- Piss-poor Java support, zero database support, absolutely no RAD tools, proprietary networking protocols, goofy WWW support, virtually zero software portability, virtually zero interoperability outside of Apple's proprietary scheme-of-the-day.
Now admittedly most of that has changed in the last year with OS X, but it should have started happened 10 years ago, and now it's really too-little, too-fucking-late.
Believe it or not, Macs were once mainstream corporate desktops in many places, and they all got thrown in the dumpster (except for the graphic hole), because Apple's stated policy was to absolutely refuse to make a corporate-friendly product.
The result is that Apple customers have no need for Sun servers and Sun customers have no need for Apple clients.
Like any troll you enounter on the 'net, you shouldn't feed them.
Troll is probably the right word.
The only thing Microsoft has to say on the topic of Open Source is pretty much plagurized from 10 year old GPL vs BSDL Usenet flamewars. (Right down to the "General Public Virus" bit, although they can probably take credit for "Pac-Man".) All of Microsoft's "FUD" is in fact homegrown.
What bothers me about this discussion is that the "OSS" side is wanting to present some sort of unified front, when in fact there's huge divisions within the "community" about licence politics, and many prominent members (RMS, Theo, etc) spend a considerable amount adding fuel to the flamewars.
So, even by simply advocating BSDL, Microsoft has a serious opportunity to troll the OSS's people into spilling their internal divisions in public in a nasty way.
Of course, it could go the other way and end up as a discussion of Microsoft's licences. Which Microsoft probably doesn't want to discuss.
I was going to launch into my extremely well-developed Exchange and Domino bitchlist, but instead I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask a question.
Any truth to the rumor that Exchange was originally beta'd for OS/2 around 1992 or so?
It does not scale as efficiently
As someone who did both Notes and Exchange work in a previous life, I'd completely disagree. My back of the napkin was that you could support double the number of users on the same hardware with Notes over Exchange, and that was mail+applications, not just mail and discussions. (That was Exch 5.5, however, so I can't comment on Exch 6 or Domino 5/6.)
Notes was certainly designed to be a general-purpose client-server database product, and isn't optimized for mail. I don't think much of Exchange's JET-based engine, however, which for years had an embarassing 16GB limit (I had bigger Domino mailstores on 486-based servers) and corruption bugs which took multiple releases to resolve.
Most of Notes' Admin hostility is due to the fact that it's designed for very large environments (10K+ users and hundreds of servers). It's a very solid product, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone with less than 1000 employees, and dedicated IT types.
I think you missed one:
D) Hollywood types like Sony and AOL were talking about using settop boxes as a 'convergence' devices to cut Microsoft and and the rest of the Internet community out of the digital entertainment market. Microsoft felt had to get into the consumer electronics market RIGHT NOW.
Microsoft has long memories and remembers what they did to IBM with the (supposedly low-profit) PC. Therefore they never let a competitor introduce a product without their own along side. (The one time they forgot this rule was Netscape, and it hurt badly.) T
Turns out however Sony failed to market the PS2 as anything more than a Playstation and AOLTV died stillborne. If MS determines they aren't interested, don't count on XBox2.
Ahh. I just checked a couple references.
Nescape 4 docs (pretty much the "DOM0" spec):
The value of each element in the forms array is , where nameAttribute is the NAME attribute of the form
But that obviously doesn't handle duplicate form names.
W3C HTML DOM1:
+ Doesn't say what's exactly in the document.forms collection.
+ Does define interface HTMLCollection.namedItem() as:
This method retrieves a Node using a name. It first searches for a Node with a matching id attribute. If it doesn't find one, it then searches for a Node with a matching name attribute
So my guess is that this is a issue of interpretation, with IE erring on the side of W3C DOM1, and Mozilla erring on the side of Netscape4-back-compat
Moz's behavior sorta makes sense with this old-style syntax, but I'd expect it to handle this, since they are so keen on modern standards.
(Other than because MS is evil, blahblahblah)
Here's the code in question from MSDN:
before: var theform = document.WebUserControl1_Form1;
after: var theform = document.forms["WebUserControl1:Form1"];
So there's two different form syntaxes, but that shouldn't be a problem. Is it because they are generating a form name with a colon (:) in it and then expecting it to be escaped out to a underscore (_)?
Couple points:
+ The netrumor is that DEC/Compaq/HP has contractual requirements to maintain OpenVMS for something like 20 years. So it makes sense to keep it on something almost like regular hardware.
+ Minicomputing culture like VMS or HP3000 can be very profitable, but it's also expensive to run. IIRC, Compaq announced a few years back that VMS brought in $3Billion in revenue, which is in the same league as Microsoft Windows. IBM has claimed that their AS/400 division has greater revenues than all of Sun Micro.
However, along with that is an enormous amount of engineering and support. So, they basically need to spend $50 to make a $100. Meanwhile in the PC world, you spend $5 to make $10 -- thus leading to lower overhead costs and headcounts, and that makes wallstreet happy.
The consequence of this is that if they wanted to expand the userbase, they would have to spend $100 to make $200 and that looks even worse from a gross financial perspective.
(The inverse of this is that you can legacy the thing and all of a sudden you're spending $20 to make the same $100 for mucho shortterm profits, until the customers figure out and flee like rats.)
So, they quietly milk the existing base and don't worry about evangalizing. I notice that lots of VMS stuff is still hosted on digital.com, and the product is still littered with trademarks like "DECWindows". I imagine that the userbase is largely intentionally ignorant of all this Compaq/HP and Alpha/Itanium stuff and just lumbers along trusting their computing to VMS like they always have.
Meanwhile, the minicomputer culture withers away not because it's not profitable, but because it doesn't look like Dell's business model. It's a shame when profitable top notch engineering and research gets short shrift from the capitalists.
+ Propreitary hardware: My understanding is that there was some special VAX-type microcode needed on the Alpha systems. But for the most part, customers could easily switch from VMS to Unix (just like the HP3000/9000, where the conversion kit was a new label). But there's no real reason to lock them in because not many users are coming or going.
A VeriSign (or PGP, etc) signature isn't intended to imply "trust", it's there to ensure veracity. That way Xupiter and other scum don't impersonate someone you'd normally trust like MozDev or Macromedia. Mozilla has no protection and is vulnerable to social engineering and DNS spoof attacks.
"Trust" is ultimately a local policy that has to be implemented by the end user. What you are suggesting is something like a "Good Netkeeping Signature of Approval", which is a good idea, but that's not the function of a certificate authority.
I'd rather have a system that doesn't allow things to install unless I explicitly allow them to instead of a system that depends on a faulty assumption that no malicious software will get signed by a signing authority.
IE can implement that policy, so what's the problem?
That's naive, and incompatible with the open source distribution model, Mozilla's plug-in design, and Mozilla's marketing goals. Nor is there any policy at mozdev.org that would let you conclude a package is in any way safe.
In my view the biggest reason that OS/2 never took off is that IBM was extremely frightened of commodity computing. So they tried very hard to cripple OS/2 and protect their midrange servers. If you ever tried to run LAN/Warp Server, it showed.
Microsoft didn't have that problem with NT, and rode the wave of high power x86 stuff to capture the entire bottom of the server market (leaving OS/2 only the oh-so-valuable mainframe comm gateway market).
It's nice to see that they might have actually learned something from OS/2's failure, and this time around are promoting Linux across their entire server range as a commodity glue technology, rather than end to itself.
Admittedly, it's possible these people were prompted and simply don't remember, but if there weren't, then there is a problem with IE's default configuration
/. VeriSign signatures are far less reputable than a popup claiming to from "MozDev", even if mozilla trusts VeriSign as much as IE does. Even a trival change to to force software installation to work over SSL would be better than what they have now.
My theory? User installs Spyware A, which puts Spyware Co. in their "Trusted Sites" zone. (A spyware remover might not catch this.) At some point later, Spyware B auto-installs because the domain is "Trusted".
I don't see any evidence that IE's default config is faulty -- and end-users or admins can prevent this problem with a couple mouseclicks which is easier and more effective than bitching.
and since most extensions are downloaded from centralized, trusted sources (basically just mozdev)
Security through lack of popularity. Works in the real world against social diseases too. Doesn't mean that the underlying system is not vulnerable.
These things get installed via social engineering, and by not having a signature mechanism makes that easier for the scumballs.
For that matter, this thing is apparently signed by Verisign, which means that IE's package signing system may be a security liability instead of a security benefit.
Oh, I forgot. On
My only point is that if/when Mozilla advocates reach their goal of making Mozilla a mainstream browser, they are going to be more screwed than the IE users. Many features in Mozilla, such as skins, have an enormous capability for adware evil. (The cynical might suspect that's why AOL built that stuff in in the first place.)
a) you actually have software installation enabled in your preferences
/., IE always sucks and Mozilla always rules, but in terms of plug-in installation mechanics, the "balance" is very similar, with IE having more control.
Default is enabled, no? You and/or your sysadmin can disable this behavior in IE too.
c) will prompt you BEFORE it installs the software, giving the web server and the package being installed.
Not only does IE prompt you, it also checks the package's signature, thus making sure you're not being spoofed and verifying exactly who is distributing the plugin. Mozilla makes no veracity checks.
Of course on
Unfortunately, if Mozilla had a larger userbase, it would be just as abused by malicious devs and stupid users. More actually, because you could potentially turn the entire "skin" into a giant spam billboard.
Godwin's Law was originally an observation: "All Internet debates eventually end with a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis"
I think he's intentionally invoking it as a way of closing the discusion -- saying that he doesn't want you to write him and argue the point.
Nobody really answered your question, so I'll take a shot at it -- the primary reason for the BIOS is backwards compatiblilty.
The following OSes are designed to require a classic PC AT-style BIOS, at least for the boot sequence:
DOS
Win 9x
OS/2
Novell Netware (bootstraps from DOS)
Note that the first 3 are "obsolete" and aren't being updated but are still in very widescale use. I believe it's possible to still order machines with Windows ME.
Anyway, you could make a legacy-free firmware that could boot lightly modified versions of XP or Linux, but that doesn't help the installed base at all. Maybe in 10 years, but not now.
The BIOS is just the tip of the iceburg -- a modern PC is still very much "AT-Compatible" -- and that has radical effect on the hardware design. For example, ATA/IDE has to be continually improved, rather than replaced, because it offers the highest compatibility.
As a secondary problem, even modern OSes like NT/2K/XP and Linux have a bunch of dependancies on BIOSy things like ACPI.
Better yet was the IBM ThinkPad 701 "Butterfly", which was a Pentium machine that actually had good ol' Microsoft ROM BASIC.
Microsoft already does this, I believe -- the MSVC redistributable libs are licenced for Windows only. Apple takes it a step further and only licences their software on their hardware. At least MS is only limiting distribution rights, not trying to usurp copyright by removing runtime rights.
Note that SCO is doing the decent thing and offering an shrinkwrap licence for this stuff, and will no doubt also include it in Caldera UnitedLinux at no additional cost.
Flame on, but read the article.
... A source said SCO libraries that accompany the SVR4 and OSR5 versions of Unix may be used with UnixWare and OpenServer, respectively, but using them in conjunction with Linux is prohibited by the software's licence.
Sources said SCO plans to charge for use of two software "libraries,"
"There's a little bit of ignorance on the part of some customers," a source familiar with the plan said. But at the same time, the source added, "there are customers using the libraries that know they're not supposed to be using them."
Using the libraries allows programs designed for SCO Unix to be run, unmodified, on Linux machines in conjunction with a package called Linux-ABI. That's a key step for companies moving servers from SCO Unix to Linux with minimum disruption.
For those who don't know, "Linux-ABI" used to be called IBCS -- "Intel Binary Compatibility Standard" -- and you can guess from the name that it was an (old) attempt to standardize the ABI between different x86 Unixes. A long time ago, Linux users needed this to run commercial software like Oracle or WordPerfect.
It sounds like either Linux-ABI steps on SCO patents, or certain customers are shipping SCO libraries to run on top of Linux-ABI (which is outright copyright violation). In either case, this only affects about 0.001% of Linux users.
In short, all 2000 posts eariler were probably a massive over reaction.
Microsoft might not realize it yet, but it's only a matter of time before Windows sourcecode is Open (as in VMS - read only).
Really, what have they got to lose? Windows is already pirated like crazy, and they arguably have a better core system than any of their competitors anyway. Why not counter Linus Hype with a litte Dave Cutler?
They've already run through their shared source program with various universities and no dirty laundry leaked out. Having published source never hurt IBM or DEC. They should do it.
Don't forget that Ted Nelson also invented (or advocated) DRM and micropayments.
Sorry! The one I sold was for $350 (on eBay), so you obviously aren't the guy. Very similar setup -- original box + packing materials + all disks and manuals.
I thought it might have gone a bit low, but for the most part Osbornes don't seem to get very much money on eBay. Since I picked it up for $20, I was happy.
Uh, did you buy that Osborne from me?
History has proven the DIVX people to be geniuses before their time -- They correctly predicted that CSS would be broken. They predicted it would be possible to distribute pirate video over the Internet. At the time most slashdotters thought both to be impossible.
They also knew the value of strong-crypto, phone-home authorization, and DRM in the hardware. If they could have hung on, they'd be very popular guys right now in Hollywood.