Last week we also had the case of several high school and college students in Ohio (where else? 8^) throwing tomatoes from a cornfield at passing vehicles. A driver threatened to shoot them if they hit his vehicle with another tomato. Then he drove back by several times, they kept throwing tomatoes, and he eventually fired several shotgun blasts into the field, killing one of the teenagers. (All as heard on the news, at that time the driver had not been found, so everything is "alleged".)
So, who should the dead kid's parents sue?
a) The shooter b) the shooter's car's manufacturer c) the shooter's weapon's manufacturer d) whoever sold the weapon to the shooter e) the surviving tomato chunkers f) everyone in the tomato supply chain g) the owner of the cornfield h) everyone in the corn supply chain i) the highway department z) all of the above
I'm pretty disappointed in slashdot readers lately. I have to wonder if some of you even read the articles. It's getting as bad as alt.newsgroups!
The article was hardly content free. It may not have met *your* needs, but that's another issue altogether. From the perspective of someone running an IT department with 250+ systems (mostly servers), it was a useful intro to a distribution I haven't seriously considered before. Would I like more? Sure. But it was a decent start.
Someone whined it didn't include a kernel version. That person *really* need to learn to read.
"Regardless, I have yet to see a good reason to move from 2000 to XP."
Ditto. In fact, when I bought a surplused laptop from my last employer, and it came with Windows 98 instead of 2K server (which was what we'd been using), I was ecstatic. At least on the laptops, 2K server was much, much slower; I'm told this was at least partly the disk drivers. Since I don't need anything from 2K server at home, I'm sticking with 98. It's fast, small, and does everything I need it to do (run a handful of tools, and a game now and then).
I dunno about regularly missing deadlines, but they certainly have missed them in the past. The biggest fiasco I recall off the top of my head was Chicago-- grossly late, and far less than promised.
"Hardware and licensing", hmmm? They're going to delay for up to a year, then drop to "we have no idea" because of hardware and licensing? I bet the Lutheran churches are all going to rejoin the Catholic churches, too!
Oh, wait. MS must be afraid of SCO! Yeah, that's it...
Just curious (probably too late - is anyone still reading this?)... Are such DoS attacks actually illegal? Have their been court cases? If so, have the majority of the rulings held that this was illegal?
I certainly think it is, and that it should be. But I'm not convinced that the courts in the USA would agree, as a general rule.
I'm not generally a big fan of MS, but this is actually pretty cool. I wish I had a copy of that software to apply to my favorite NGs.
Lots of folks already do this. Some folks do it by hand. Many usenet stalkers, for instance. I'm sure there are other companies doing it, too, though most are probably doing much less sophisticated (but possibly more perturbing) analysis. And anyone who doesn't think many, many government agencies (from most countries) are sifting through usenet data has their head in the sand.
This has always gone on. Once there was DejaNews (now Google) more was inevitable.
If you don't want your public data tracked and analyzed, you'd better not have any public data!
Not hiring an electrician has several major downsides:
there's a good chance you'll die or be hurt
there's a good chance you'll lose all power to the room/floor/building with no warning
there's a good chance of fire
you (or your estate) could be held liable for any bad results
I know what I'm doing with power wiring. I do most of the indoor power work at home when something needs to be done. I've added a branch circuit when I lived where that was allowed.
I will not touch the power wiring at work. The day I can't get an electrician for any work, I'll shut that circuit off, or I'll go elsewhere.
The entire executive team of the Santa Cruz Operation is in protective custody at an undisclosed mental health facility after Al Quaieda terrorists admitted to placing massive doses of LSD in the SCO corporate headquarters drinking water.
I don't see why they are wasting time on a browser. Why not just use firebird? Is there a compelling reason for *another* browser? Sems that time could be better spent elsewhere.
And I was underwhelmed with some of the tools. The best example I've seen so far (/.ing has delivery of all pages with all pics) is the screen resolution selector. I think RedHat's version is much nicer. Again - why reinvent the wheel? If they can't use RH's (did they ask?), do something similar. Or better. But IMO the Gnome version is a step down from RH's.
Yeah, checks are really hard to destroy. Gee, you can't burn them. Or pour acid on them. Or shred them (twice). Or soak them in black paint. Or all of the above, then put htem in the compost heap in the back yard.
I gues syou ned to get an electric fence and some trained attack dogs to guard that attic!
Overall, you raised some good points. I have to take issue with a couple of things, though:
I've not found any books that are mostly printed man pages.
How many UNIX books have you read? I've seen a couple that were literally just man pages, and quite a few that may as well have been. There are hundreds, fi not thousands, of books out there on various OSes that are a complete waste of money. Including books of this sort for *nix.
Nor have I found any circumstances where the man pages don't cover things I need to know.
That's interesting. I've been using *nix for almost 20 years, and I still find gaping holes in man pages, both new and old, in areas I'm concerned about. This has been true of almost every flavor of *nix. I think AIX 3.2 and later were some of the most complete I have seen. Whereas Linux still has some huge holes (although it has plugged others). Nevermind the commands that don't even have man pages...
I wish I could recall which command I tried man on the other day. The syntax shown was something like "command_name options..." The whole thing was maybe 2-3 paragraphs. I tried "-h" or "-?" or "--help" (I forget which worked), and got a list of the options - but no clue as to what they really did. While this isn't super common, it is out there. And no, I don't recall whether this was on Linux or Solaris (the most prevalent ysstems here).
Have a lawyer check with the bankruptcy court. Typically (at least in the USA) this stuff takes forever. A software company without big assets isn't a high priority, so it drags on, and judges know there are all sorts of ways to make money with software and other IP.
I have seen former employees go to a judge and get a license to the source for little or no money up front, so long as they have a plan the judge believes may produce income. Of course this plan includes paying a license fee to the court to help pay off the company debts.
Be aware that you will probably be asked to turn over your copies, esp. if the court can't find copies. If nothing else, though, they may be willing to let you hold on to the main copies so long as you convince the court you will act responsibly.
We go through this at least once a decade. Everyone gets all excited about it, a bunch of companies try to force it on everyone, and eventually it goes away. You cannot force these sorts of things. Forcing someone to meditate or do yoga isn't much different than trying to force them to pray or go to church, synagogue, or another house of worship. Do you want your company trying to make you do that because management thinks it's a good idea?
I know diet is important, but so is exercise. I've been flying a desk for years, and for over half my career, it was 60-100 hours a week at work. Bleah.
I haven't really gotten back into shape, but there are things that have helped me get closer.
1) The best was exercising at lunch. At a couple of jobs, I've worked out one way or another (running and swimming, or gone to the gym). This was the best.
2) A lot of folks here keep their bikes here, and bike at lunch. It's extremely hilly, though, and I need to get in a bit better shape before I go back to biking (haven't biked *seriously* in two decades).
3) For an afternoon break, I play ping pong. Once you get past just returning the ball, it gets aerobic, if you have someone else who's close to your skill level, or can play there. No, I am not kidding. This is also good for your body just in terms of getting you out of the "stare at teh computer" position.
4) If nothing else, I go for a walk several times a week, and run up stairs much of the time. I don't really care if folks laugh about this.
5) One place I worked, several of us formed a co-op and brought in free weights and stuff. (The company ended up buying some equipment, too.) The ideal, of course, is that the company simply adds a weight room, like Vignette did. Of course that was before the dotCOM bust and 9/11...
Speaking of irony, thanks /.
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
The first couple of times I came to this page, there was an ad at the top for Caldera's OpenLinux for $7 or so. I wonder what the hinted at "Linux license" would run that up to? Meanwhile, SCO's own webpages explain that they have suspended sales until certain IP issues are resolved. 8^)
[Also, they can't seem to get their site security certs right.]
Re:These people are nothing less than pirates
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
I have the Holy Grail - the Lions book. I didn't have to sign a license or an NDA or anything else different to buy this book (with complete source code to an early version of Unix[tm]) than I would to buy a Harry Potter book, a Winnie-ther-Pooh book, or a Stevie Ray Vaughn biography. So anything that showed up there, while it may still be copywrit, is certainly not a trade secret!
And yes, "ther" is the correct spelling, as any *real* Pooh fan knows.
Nevermind that their concept is absurd. "Look! It's not the same code! Clearly they coipied our code exactly, but then did things to make it look different!"
Re:SCO's case looks pretty strong
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
People say all sorts of things. I'd like a reliable, informed source to tell me exactly how this AIX/Linux interface works at IBM. I would be amazed if it was sloppily handled.
I contracted at IBM. I gained an incredible respect for IBM in several areas, one of those being their handling of issues like this. They know their stuff, and they make sure employees, contractors, partners, interns, and so on are aware of the rules and the implications.
Austin is the home of AIX. I haven't heard anything here that indicates IBM has lost anything in the IP enforcement arena.
My Dell servers are pretty noisy. My ancient Compaq, while annoying on many levels, is tolerable. The box built by Bantam (was Tinkertronics) on my desk at work is pretty noisy. We could get it quieter, but it would cost another $100 or so, and multiplied by 70-80 at a startup, that's unacceptable.
Now, walk into the computer room, with nearly 200 of those and similar boxes, 20 or so Solaris systems of various makes, a big honking Dell server, two dozen switches, a couple of Apples, a couple of NetApp filer racks, nevermind the two, huge Lieberts to cool the place.
I would love to be able to liquid cool those systems, if only for the noise. But while this method works well for a system or two, I don't think it scales too well.
Too bad. It would save us a fortune on power, too!
He said he used distilled water. He added anti-corrosive. He should be OK. I would think anyone with any experience would have thought of those before getting to that part of the article...
There are several things I miss about VMS, including automatic versioning, delete permissions on files, ACLs (finally showing up outside "DARPA-classed" *nix), the help system, and system vs world privs, and user, group and system (world? I forget) variables.
It has always boggled my mind that the vast majority of [outspoken?] *nix users have nothing good to say about VMS.
While *nix has kept a great deal of the elegance and simplicity of the early days, in many ways it has grown far more complex than VMS. It's well past time that we admit to ourselves there *were* good tings in VMS, and embrace them within our OS of choice.
The majority of folks reading that aren't likely to get it. Why? Because the majority of the "civilized" world are spoiled and lazy. ``Why should I have to wind a radio every so often when I can stick a battery in it and merely press the button to turn it on? I mean, that would almost be, like, like... work!''
I'm not against labor saving devices, batteries, or gadgets for the sake of gadgetry, per se. But I do think we're an incredibly self-indulgent, short-sighted set of folks, as a whole. The consumer mentality that runs the cultures in which so many of us (internet users) live is one of our worst enemies.
Perhaps the Department of Homeland Absurdity can tackle that next. 8^/
Slashdot Mirror
Last week we also had the case of several high school and college students in Ohio (where else? 8^) throwing tomatoes from a cornfield at passing vehicles. A driver threatened to shoot them if they hit his vehicle with another tomato. Then he drove back by several times, they kept throwing tomatoes, and he eventually fired several shotgun blasts into the field, killing one of the teenagers. (All as heard on the news, at that time the driver had not been found, so everything is "alleged".)
So, who should the dead kid's parents sue?
a) The shooter
b) the shooter's car's manufacturer
c) the shooter's weapon's manufacturer
d) whoever sold the weapon to the shooter
e) the surviving tomato chunkers
f) everyone in the tomato supply chain
g) the owner of the cornfield
h) everyone in the corn supply chain
i) the highway department
z) all of the above
The correct answer, of curse, is (z).
I'm pretty disappointed in slashdot readers lately. I have to wonder if some of you even read the articles. It's getting as bad as alt.newsgroups!
The article was hardly content free. It may not have met *your* needs, but that's another issue altogether. From the perspective of someone running an IT department with 250+ systems (mostly servers), it was a useful intro to a distribution I haven't seriously considered before. Would I like more? Sure. But it was a decent start.
Someone whined it didn't include a kernel version. That person *really* need to learn to read.
No, that is simply a place where the MS world models the real world. For most of us, objects do only exist in one place at a time.
If your mileage varies, you need to help that guy needing a warp generator.
Ditto. In fact, when I bought a surplused laptop from my last employer, and it came with Windows 98 instead of 2K server (which was what we'd been using), I was ecstatic. At least on the laptops, 2K server was much, much slower; I'm told this was at least partly the disk drivers. Since I don't need anything from 2K server at home, I'm sticking with 98. It's fast, small, and does everything I need it to do (run a handful of tools, and a game now and then).
"Hardware and licensing", hmmm? They're going to delay for up to a year, then drop to "we have no idea" because of hardware and licensing? I bet the Lutheran churches are all going to rejoin the Catholic churches, too!
Oh, wait. MS must be afraid of SCO! Yeah, that's it...
Just curious (probably too late - is anyone still reading this?)... Are such DoS attacks actually illegal? Have their been court cases? If so, have the majority of the rulings held that this was illegal?
I certainly think it is, and that it should be. But I'm not convinced that the courts in the USA would agree, as a general rule.
Anyone have facts on this?
I'm not generally a big fan of MS, but this is actually pretty cool. I wish I had a copy of that software to apply to my favorite NGs.
Lots of folks already do this. Some folks do it by hand. Many usenet stalkers, for instance. I'm sure there are other companies doing it, too, though most are probably doing much less sophisticated (but possibly more perturbing) analysis. And anyone who doesn't think many, many government agencies (from most countries) are sifting through usenet data has their head in the sand.
This has always gone on. Once there was DejaNews (now Google) more was inevitable.
If you don't want your public data tracked and analyzed, you'd better not have any public data!
- there's a good chance you'll die or be hurt
- there's a good chance you'll lose all power to the room/floor/building with no warning
- there's a good chance of fire
- you (or your estate) could be held liable for any bad results
I know what I'm doing with power wiring. I do most of the indoor power work at home when something needs to be done. I've added a branch circuit when I lived where that was allowed.I will not touch the power wiring at work. The day I can't get an electrician for any work, I'll shut that circuit off, or I'll go elsewhere.
The entire executive team of the Santa Cruz Operation is in protective custody at an undisclosed mental health facility after Al Quaieda terrorists admitted to placing massive doses of LSD in the SCO corporate headquarters drinking water.
Film at 11.
I don't see why they are wasting time on a browser. Why not just use firebird? Is there a compelling reason for *another* browser? Sems that time could be better spent elsewhere.
And I was underwhelmed with some of the tools. The best example I've seen so far (/.ing has delivery of all pages with all pics) is the screen resolution selector. I think RedHat's version is much nicer. Again - why reinvent the wheel? If they can't use RH's (did they ask?), do something similar. Or better. But IMO the Gnome version is a step down from RH's.
Yeah, checks are really hard to destroy. Gee, you can't burn them. Or pour acid on them. Or shred them (twice). Or soak them in black paint. Or all of the above, then put htem in the compost heap in the back yard.
I gues syou ned to get an electric fence and some trained attack dogs to guard that attic!
Actually, I've been told health insurance companies *can* require your SSN, because the IRS tracks all your benefits. Anyone have a cite on this one?
I've not found any books that are mostly printed man pages.
How many UNIX books have you read? I've seen a couple that were literally just man pages, and quite a few that may as well have been. There are hundreds, fi not thousands, of books out there on various OSes that are a complete waste of money. Including books of this sort for *nix.
Nor have I found any circumstances where the man pages don't cover things I need to know.
That's interesting. I've been using *nix for almost 20 years, and I still find gaping holes in man pages, both new and old, in areas I'm concerned about. This has been true of almost every flavor of *nix. I think AIX 3.2 and later were some of the most complete I have seen. Whereas Linux still has some huge holes (although it has plugged others). Nevermind the commands that don't even have man pages...
I wish I could recall which command I tried man on the other day. The syntax shown was something like "command_name options ..." The whole thing was maybe 2-3 paragraphs. I tried "-h" or "-?" or "--help" (I forget which worked), and got a list of the options - but no clue as to what they really did. While this isn't super common, it is out there. And no, I don't recall whether this was on Linux or Solaris (the most prevalent ysstems here).
Have a lawyer check with the bankruptcy court. Typically (at least in the USA) this stuff takes forever. A software company without big assets isn't a high priority, so it drags on, and judges know there are all sorts of ways to make money with software and other IP.
/.
I have seen former employees go to a judge and get a license to the source for little or no money up front, so long as they have a plan the judge believes may produce income. Of course this plan includes paying a license fee to the court to help pay off the company debts.
Be aware that you will probably be asked to turn over your copies, esp. if the court can't find copies. If nothing else, though, they may be willing to let you hold on to the main copies so long as you convince the court you will act responsibly.
IANAL,, and I don't play one on
We go through this at least once a decade. Everyone gets all excited about it, a bunch of companies try to force it on everyone, and eventually it goes away. You cannot force these sorts of things. Forcing someone to meditate or do yoga isn't much different than trying to force them to pray or go to church, synagogue, or another house of worship. Do you want your company trying to make you do that because management thinks it's a good idea?
I thought not.
I know diet is important, but so is exercise. I've been flying a desk for years, and for over half my career, it was 60-100 hours a week at work. Bleah.
I haven't really gotten back into shape, but there are things that have helped me get closer.
1) The best was exercising at lunch. At a couple of jobs, I've worked out one way or another (running and swimming, or gone to the gym). This was the best.
2) A lot of folks here keep their bikes here, and bike at lunch. It's extremely hilly, though, and I need to get in a bit better shape before I go back to biking (haven't biked *seriously* in two decades).
3) For an afternoon break, I play ping pong. Once you get past just returning the ball, it gets aerobic, if you have someone else who's close to your skill level, or can play there. No, I am not kidding. This is also good for your body just in terms of getting you out of the "stare at teh computer" position.
4) If nothing else, I go for a walk several times a week, and run up stairs much of the time. I don't really care if folks laugh about this.
5) One place I worked, several of us formed a co-op and brought in free weights and stuff. (The company ended up buying some equipment, too.) The ideal, of course, is that the company simply adds a weight room, like Vignette did. Of course that was before the dotCOM bust and 9/11...
The first couple of times I came to this page, there was an ad at the top for Caldera's OpenLinux for $7 or so. I wonder what the hinted at "Linux license" would run that up to? Meanwhile, SCO's own webpages explain that they have suspended sales until certain IP issues are resolved. 8^)
[Also, they can't seem to get their site security certs right.]
I have the Holy Grail - the Lions book. I didn't have to sign a license or an NDA or anything else different to buy this book (with complete source code to an early version of Unix[tm]) than I would to buy a Harry Potter book, a Winnie-ther-Pooh book, or a Stevie Ray Vaughn biography. So anything that showed up there, while it may still be copywrit, is certainly not a trade secret!
And yes, "ther" is the correct spelling, as any *real* Pooh fan knows.
Nevermind that their concept is absurd. "Look! It's not the same code! Clearly they coipied our code exactly, but then did things to make it look different!"
People say all sorts of things. I'd like a reliable, informed source to tell me exactly how this AIX/Linux interface works at IBM. I would be amazed if it was sloppily handled.
I contracted at IBM. I gained an incredible respect for IBM in several areas, one of those being their handling of issues like this. They know their stuff, and they make sure employees, contractors, partners, interns, and so on are aware of the rules and the implications.
Austin is the home of AIX. I haven't heard anything here that indicates IBM has lost anything in the IP enforcement arena.
Yeah! Then even *I* could afford to buy SCO and free up UNIX!
Or maybe I'd just sell UNIX licenses for a dollar. 8^)
It depends on the PC[s].
My Dell servers are pretty noisy. My ancient Compaq, while annoying on many levels, is tolerable. The box built by Bantam (was Tinkertronics) on my desk at work is pretty noisy. We could get it quieter, but it would cost another $100 or so, and multiplied by 70-80 at a startup, that's unacceptable.
Now, walk into the computer room, with nearly 200 of those and similar boxes, 20 or so Solaris systems of various makes, a big honking Dell server, two dozen switches, a couple of Apples, a couple of NetApp filer racks, nevermind the two, huge Lieberts to cool the place.
I would love to be able to liquid cool those systems, if only for the noise. But while this method works well for a system or two, I don't think it scales too well.
Too bad. It would save us a fortune on power, too!
He said he used distilled water. He added anti-corrosive. He should be OK. I would think anyone with any experience would have thought of those before getting to that part of the article...
That was my thought on reading that quote.
There are several things I miss about VMS, including automatic versioning, delete permissions on files, ACLs (finally showing up outside "DARPA-classed" *nix), the help system, and system vs world privs, and user, group and system (world? I forget) variables.
It has always boggled my mind that the vast majority of [outspoken?] *nix users have nothing good to say about VMS.
While *nix has kept a great deal of the elegance and simplicity of the early days, in many ways it has grown far more complex than VMS. It's well past time that we admit to ourselves there *were* good tings in VMS, and embrace them within our OS of choice.
The majority of folks reading that aren't likely to get it. Why? Because the majority of the "civilized" world are spoiled and lazy. ``Why should I have to wind a radio every so often when I can stick a battery in it and merely press the button to turn it on? I mean, that would almost be, like, like... work!''
I'm not against labor saving devices, batteries, or gadgets for the sake of gadgetry, per se. But I do think we're an incredibly self-indulgent, short-sighted set of folks, as a whole. The consumer mentality that runs the cultures in which so many of us (internet users) live is one of our worst enemies.
Perhaps the Department of Homeland Absurdity can tackle that next. 8^/