As I wrote last week, "Before they can sue Linux users over copyright violations, they have to beat IBM and Novell and Red Hat and Damlier-Chrysler or AutoZone."
If AutoZone wins this motion, anybody else SCO sues can just cite that, and their case will go in the queue after IBM/Novell/Red Hat. At that point, litigation against Linux users from SCO becomes an empty threat. You don't have to pay big legal fees to defend the case; you just have to have a lawyer file a motion citing AutoZone, and the case goes on hold for years, while three Fortune 1000 companies crush SCO in court.
There are some great lines in AutoZone's motion.
"There is no reason for SCO to have been so obtuse in its pleading, unless SCO is intentionally trying to avoid identifying the nature and basis of its purported claims." "Rule 8 does not require the defendants in federal court lititgation to engage in such guessing games." "However, SCO's "hide-the-eight-ball" tactics in the IBM case leave AutoZone with little realistic belief that SCO will voluntarily identify the basis for its claims without this Court's intervention.".
Meanwhile, SCO stock is down to 7.05 today. There was a big runup last Thursday morning, probably due to SCO's stock buyback program. The overall effect is that the price is back to where it was a week ago. SCO is down about 60% since the beginning of the year.
Time is now against SCO. Nobody is going to pay them unless they win all those lawsuits. It looks like they'll run out of money first.
Something to think about: when SCO tanks, somebody will buy the "UNIX intellectual property". Who's likely to do that? Sun? Microsoft? Red Hat?
If you really wanted to virtualize IA-32 properly, the right vehicle would be a Transmeta processor, because it's partially software-defined. With a few mods to the "code morphing" engine, the problems that keep kernel code from being cleanly emulated in user space could be fixed.
VMware does this by painful means, scanning code, using memory protection to catch self-modifying code, and generally doing too much work. With proper CPU support, a virtual machine can work cleanly, as on IBM mainframes.
Transmeta, or somebody who knows how to patch Transmeta's "code morphing" engine, could solve the problem properly.
Of course, all you get from this is the ability to run entire operating systems in virtual machines. You still have to run Windows to run Windows apps in VM.
Emulating the Windows platform for applications is a completely different problem. There's no fundamental technical obstacle; it's just a huge job and may run into intellectual property problems.
This has got to stop. Slashdot is now getting its stories from other blogs, which are regurgitating press releases.
For something intelligent on this topic, see this DARPA/Boeing presentation. DARPA has a number of "smart airfoil" projects. They've tried shape memory alloys. They've tried ferroelectric fluids. They've tried piezoelectric materials. It looks like the first flight test will be a piezoelectric system on the rotor blades of an MD-900 helicopter.
It's not yet clear that it's worth the trouble, but R&D continues.
Re:But MP matters for size!
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, first of all, the camera manufacturers lie about pixel counts. They count R, G, and B as separate pixels. Worse, since they usually use a Bayes layout, sensor cells are grouped in groups of four, with one red, two green, and one blue pixel. So divide by four.
Foveon cameras have one three-color sensor per pixel, but for PR purposes, they, too, count R, G, and B as separate pixels. For example, the Sigma SD-10 mentioned in the article has an imager 2268 x 1512 pixels, but is listed as a "10.8 megapixel" camera. For Foveon units, divide by 3.
Foveon cameras, since the R, G, and B sensors are at the same place, don't generate color artifacts at black/white boundaries. This eliminates one of the main effects that makes "digital" look worse than film. Of course, if you compress to JPEG, you get color artifacts anyway, but that's a JPEG problem, not an imager problem.
This guy is a 24 year old website developer writing PHP scripts, and he's worried about "stress and responsibility"?
Get real. It's not like he's responsible for a big network 24/7, or doing real-time programming for powerful, dangerous machinery, or writing code that will be replicated millions of times and will cause a product recall if it breaks. Or doing a really stressful job, like cop or firefighter or soldier. Or trying to manage a bunch of people who really have to work together well or the whole project fails.
First, the Blocked Persons List is publicly available. Downloadable, even. DOS, Linux, and PDF formats, no less. Is your e-commerce site checking that list? It's supposed to.
Second, most of the entries on that list don't have SSNs, because they're not US persons. Here's the entry mentioned:
BIN AL SHIBH, Ramzi (a.k.a. BINALSHEIDAH,
Ramzi Mohamed Abdullah; BINALSHIBH, Ramzi
Mohammed Abdullah; a.k.a. OMAR, Ramzi
Mohammed Abdellah), Billstedter Hauptstr Apt 14,
22111 Hamburg, Germany; Emil Anderson
Strasse 5, 22073 Hamburg, Germany; Letzte
Heller #109 Hamburg University, 22111 Hamburg,
Germany; Marienstr #54, 21073 Hamburg,
Germany; Schleemer Ring 2, 22117 Hamburg,
Germany; DOB 16 Sep 1973; alt. DOB 1 May
1972; POB Khartoum, Sudan; alt. POB
Hadramawt, Yemen; Passport Nos. A755350
(Saudi Arabia), R85243 (Yemen), 00085243
(Yemen); nationality Yemeni (individual) [SDGT]
BIN MANSOR, Amran (a.k.a. BIN MANSOR, Henry;
a.k.a. BIN MANSOUR, Amran; a.k.a. MANSOR,
Amran); DOB 25 May 1965; POB Malaysia
(individual) [SDGT]
There's no SSN given. Only 33 of the names on the "blocked persons" list have US SSNs listed.
Also note the date of birth. Bin al Shibih is in his 30s, and the applicant was 19.
So this is a credit bureau screwup, not a Government screwup.
Misery, though, is having the same name as someone on the list.
Here's Diebold's ISO 9001:2000 quality certification, issued by
BVQI in October 2000. From what's been published about this election technology fiasco, their certification should be revoked. In any case, their certificate may have expired. They're supposed to be re-audited every three years, but their certificate dates from 2000.
This episode casts some doubts on BVQI's validity as a certification service. Their site has no indication that they've ever revoked a certification. Their pitch to companies has no indication that a company can be refused certification. They don't even seem to pull expired certificates.
The auto industry takes ISO 9000 certification of their suppliers seriously. See these standards. Note all the discussion of "revocation", "probation", "non-compliance", and "re-audit". In that world, quality standards violations lose companies the ability to sell to auto companies.
Now wait a minute. That was supposed to be a big starship, on a par with an aircraft carrier. According to Starship Dimensions, an Imperial Star Destroyer is 1.6 km long. This model is 1/20 scale, so it depicts a ship about 40 meters long. That's roughly the size of a Coast Guard cutter.
It's more like "we're still at the big, clunky prototype stage". Lasers in this power range have been around since the 1980s. It's downsizing them to a usable size that's tough.
Modern soldering practice is incredibly sophisticated. Soldering down a ball grid array surface mount package requires very tight control of the temperature and the physical properties of the solder. The components can only take soldering temperature for a short period.
The trouble with lead free solders is that they all have considerably higher melting points than lead-based solders. The "standard" lead-based solder has a melting point of 183C. The best available lead-free solders have melting points in the 220C range. That's a big jump. All the manufacturing processes have to be reworked. Some components need to be redesigned for higher soldering temperature tolerance. Some components must be repackaged in different plastics. It's not trivial.
Warren Slocum, the Chief Elections Officer for San Mateo County, CA, is so mad about lousy voting systems he's become an activist to put a stop to this.
Slocum is influential, because he's a top election official for a big county.
San Mateo County went to mark-sense machines years ago, and has had very little trouble. The ballot boxes consist of a lid with a scanner locked to a big plastic bin, so every ballot scanned is locked inside the ballot box should a recount be necessary.
At the end of the election, the scanners are plugged into a phone line and transmit results to election HQ. They can be re-read later, and the ballots counted and matched against the scans if necessary, one ballot box at a time.
Other than generating huge amounts of paper, there seem to be few problems with this.
Has anyone else wondered what will happen when it becomes truly simple for EVERYONE to make movies, games, music etc. ?
Mostly, it will suck.
For two decades, places like Artist's Television Access have made that possible. Yet almost all the output is crap. I've sat through a few film festivals of that stuff. It's like listening to garage bands audition for clubs.
One group in SF used to have a gong show for aspiring filmmakers. Bring anything you want to show, and after 2 minutes, they sound a bell. If more people boo than clap, they cut you off and go on to the next one. Most are booed off.
The XML-based format is X3D. X3D is VRML in XML syntax. X3D came along during the dot-com boom, when it was thought that 3D web pages would be cool. The X3D effort killed off VRML, just when everybody was getting enough graphics power that it really worked. (VRML sucked in 1997 unless you had a very exotic computer. Today, VRML works great, but nobody uses it.)
SCOX is down to $7.18 today, another new low for the year. The little runup two weeks ago seems to have come from SCO's announced stock buyback scheme. While that was going on, you'd see some upward movement near the end of each day. That seems to have stopped. Now it's downhill every day.
Me too. I'm getting about a thousand spams a day to the default inbox for four domains.
Filtering is removing about 97% of the spam, but even after filtering, I'm getting more spam than real mail.
Most of the spam seems to be selling prescription drugs. It's clear the Bush Administration doesn't want to do anything about this; there's plenty of authority for stopping illegal sales of prescription drugs on-line. Prescription drugs are traceable, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we mod the original article as +1, Funny?
No, it is a right. It's required by the Americans with Disabilities Act. That's why turning it off for these scammers is so hard.
If AutoZone wins this motion, anybody else SCO sues can just cite that, and their case will go in the queue after IBM/Novell/Red Hat. At that point, litigation against Linux users from SCO becomes an empty threat. You don't have to pay big legal fees to defend the case; you just have to have a lawyer file a motion citing AutoZone, and the case goes on hold for years, while three Fortune 1000 companies crush SCO in court.
There are some great lines in AutoZone's motion. "There is no reason for SCO to have been so obtuse in its pleading, unless SCO is intentionally trying to avoid identifying the nature and basis of its purported claims." "Rule 8 does not require the defendants in federal court lititgation to engage in such guessing games." "However, SCO's "hide-the-eight-ball" tactics in the IBM case leave AutoZone with little realistic belief that SCO will voluntarily identify the basis for its claims without this Court's intervention.".
Meanwhile, SCO stock is down to 7.05 today. There was a big runup last Thursday morning, probably due to SCO's stock buyback program. The overall effect is that the price is back to where it was a week ago. SCO is down about 60% since the beginning of the year.
Time is now against SCO. Nobody is going to pay them unless they win all those lawsuits. It looks like they'll run out of money first.
Something to think about: when SCO tanks, somebody will buy the "UNIX intellectual property". Who's likely to do that? Sun? Microsoft? Red Hat?
Now we need a logo for open-source hardware, so people know what to buy. Preferably one designed by a competent icon designer, like Susan Kare.
Coming soon to those large, ugly chandeliers found in hotel function rooms.
VMware does this by painful means, scanning code, using memory protection to catch self-modifying code, and generally doing too much work. With proper CPU support, a virtual machine can work cleanly, as on IBM mainframes.
Transmeta, or somebody who knows how to patch Transmeta's "code morphing" engine, could solve the problem properly.
Of course, all you get from this is the ability to run entire operating systems in virtual machines. You still have to run Windows to run Windows apps in VM.
Emulating the Windows platform for applications is a completely different problem. There's no fundamental technical obstacle; it's just a huge job and may run into intellectual property problems.
For something intelligent on this topic, see this DARPA/Boeing presentation. DARPA has a number of "smart airfoil" projects. They've tried shape memory alloys. They've tried ferroelectric fluids. They've tried piezoelectric materials. It looks like the first flight test will be a piezoelectric system on the rotor blades of an MD-900 helicopter.
It's not yet clear that it's worth the trouble, but R&D continues.
Foveon cameras have one three-color sensor per pixel, but for PR purposes, they, too, count R, G, and B as separate pixels. For example, the Sigma SD-10 mentioned in the article has an imager 2268 x 1512 pixels, but is listed as a "10.8 megapixel" camera. For Foveon units, divide by 3.
Foveon cameras, since the R, G, and B sensors are at the same place, don't generate color artifacts at black/white boundaries. This eliminates one of the main effects that makes "digital" look worse than film. Of course, if you compress to JPEG, you get color artifacts anyway, but that's a JPEG problem, not an imager problem.
Wedding photographers.
This guy is a 24 year old website developer writing PHP scripts, and he's worried about "stress and responsibility"? Get real. It's not like he's responsible for a big network 24/7, or doing real-time programming for powerful, dangerous machinery, or writing code that will be replicated millions of times and will cause a product recall if it breaks. Or doing a really stressful job, like cop or firefighter or soldier. Or trying to manage a bunch of people who really have to work together well or the whole project fails.
Second, most of the entries on that list don't have SSNs, because they're not US persons. Here's the entry mentioned:
-
BIN AL SHIBH, Ramzi
There's no SSN given. Only 33 of the names on the "blocked persons" list have US SSNs listed. Also note the date of birth. Bin al Shibih is in his 30s, and the applicant was 19.(a.k.a. BINALSHEIDAH, Ramzi Mohamed Abdullah; BINALSHIBH, Ramzi Mohammed Abdullah; a.k.a. OMAR, Ramzi Mohammed Abdellah), Billstedter Hauptstr Apt 14, 22111 Hamburg, Germany; Emil Anderson Strasse 5, 22073 Hamburg, Germany; Letzte Heller #109 Hamburg University, 22111 Hamburg, Germany; Marienstr #54, 21073 Hamburg, Germany; Schleemer Ring 2, 22117 Hamburg, Germany; DOB 16 Sep 1973; alt. DOB 1 May 1972; POB Khartoum, Sudan; alt. POB Hadramawt, Yemen; Passport Nos. A755350 (Saudi Arabia), R85243 (Yemen), 00085243 (Yemen); nationality Yemeni (individual) [SDGT] BIN MANSOR, Amran (a.k.a. BIN MANSOR, Henry; a.k.a. BIN MANSOUR, Amran; a.k.a. MANSOR, Amran); DOB 25 May 1965; POB Malaysia (individual) [SDGT]
So this is a credit bureau screwup, not a Government screwup.
Misery, though, is having the same name as someone on the list.
This episode casts some doubts on BVQI's validity as a certification service. Their site has no indication that they've ever revoked a certification. Their pitch to companies has no indication that a company can be refused certification. They don't even seem to pull expired certificates.
The auto industry takes ISO 9000 certification of their suppliers seriously. See these standards. Note all the discussion of "revocation", "probation", "non-compliance", and "re-audit". In that world, quality standards violations lose companies the ability to sell to auto companies.
He's right. Read what bin Laden has written.
This isn't a model. This is a kid's dollhouse.
It's more like "we're still at the big, clunky prototype stage". Lasers in this power range have been around since the 1980s. It's downsizing them to a usable size that's tough.
Yeah. Because the limitation on elevation is how high you can get before you don't have enough fuel to get down.
The trouble with lead free solders is that they all have considerably higher melting points than lead-based solders. The "standard" lead-based solder has a melting point of 183C. The best available lead-free solders have melting points in the 220C range. That's a big jump. All the manufacturing processes have to be reworked. Some components need to be redesigned for higher soldering temperature tolerance. Some components must be repackaged in different plastics. It's not trivial.
Here's a good summary of the issues.
Tried soldering with it yet? That's not one of the low-temperature alloys.
San Mateo County went to mark-sense machines years ago, and has had very little trouble. The ballot boxes consist of a lid with a scanner locked to a big plastic bin, so every ballot scanned is locked inside the ballot box should a recount be necessary. At the end of the election, the scanners are plugged into a phone line and transmit results to election HQ. They can be re-read later, and the ballots counted and matched against the scans if necessary, one ballot box at a time.
Other than generating huge amounts of paper, there seem to be few problems with this.
Mostly, it will suck.
For two decades, places like Artist's Television Access have made that possible. Yet almost all the output is crap. I've sat through a few film festivals of that stuff. It's like listening to garage bands audition for clubs.
One group in SF used to have a gong show for aspiring filmmakers. Bring anything you want to show, and after 2 minutes, they sound a bell. If more people boo than clap, they cut you off and go on to the next one. Most are booed off.
Animation demo reels are getting better, though.
The XML-based format is X3D. X3D is VRML in XML syntax. X3D came along during the dot-com boom, when it was thought that 3D web pages would be cool. The X3D effort killed off VRML, just when everybody was getting enough graphics power that it really worked. (VRML sucked in 1997 unless you had a very exotic computer. Today, VRML works great, but nobody uses it.)
Down to $6.55 now. SCOX has lost a third of its value in the last week. The market cap just dropped below $100M.
SCOX is down to $7.18 today, another new low for the year. The little runup two weeks ago seems to have come from SCO's announced stock buyback scheme. While that was going on, you'd see some upward movement near the end of each day. That seems to have stopped. Now it's downhill every day.
Filtering is removing about 97% of the spam, but even after filtering, I'm getting more spam than real mail.
Most of the spam seems to be selling prescription drugs. It's clear the Bush Administration doesn't want to do anything about this; there's plenty of authority for stopping illegal sales of prescription drugs on-line. Prescription drugs are traceable, after all.