So we shouldn't study the matter because you haven't seen a "rational explanation"?
Shouldn't investigating be the first step? Which is what it sounds like they're doing. Do you have a problem with that? Or did I miss something? It's hard to confirm anything if all you do is ignore matter and pretend it doesn't exist.
I thought most people had realized by now that signing packages is far from being a useful security feature, unless you have some way of revoking the signature on a package-by-package basis. What you want is a signature on the repo (preferably with an expiry date, so a malicious mirror can't just keep a vulnerable repo state around forever).
A package signature protects against trojans, but gives false credibility to official packages with vulnerabilities. A hostile mirror (possibly using a MITM attack) can simply keep a vulnerable package around indefinitely. A repo signature means that the vulnerable version of the package is tied to every other package in the repo, and the only way to keep the package around is to not update any packages, which is a whole lot more obvious than not updating just one package. See Attacks on Package Managers for details.
Basically, a repo signature offers all the security of a package signature and then some. If you want any sort of package security, you need repo signatures, and if you have repo signatures, package signatures offer no extra benefit.
True, except that McBride was little more than a hired hand brought in by the real players to be the public face of the lawsuit. Although it's murky because of the corporate veil, the real villain of the piece appears to be a fellow named Ralph Yarro, former member of the Canopy Group, which used to own Caldera/The SCO Group. Yarro was reportedly responsible for bringing McBride in to replace Ransom Love, and when Canopy eventually dumped Yarro, he (Yarro) basically got SCO (now called TSG) as a going-away present.
It never will be.
Yes it will be. TSG is currently in chapter 11 (restructuring). They can't actually close up shop (chapter 7) without resolving the outstanding cases. And they have deliberately set things up so that their restructuring is now dependent on winning the cases (particularly the IBM case). So there are only two paths forward for SCO/TSG, and both involve resolving their lawsuits, especially the IBM one.
Why do companies shoot themselves in their feet? I don't know, but companies do it all the time. Oracle has always been remarkably short-sighted and unable to see the bigger picture.
On the other hand, the fact that there is a an officially GPL'd version of official Java out there may well mean that in the long term, Java will be fine. Oracle can kill off their own branch, but Java in some form is probably going to continue, because it's too entrenched. There are some big players on the sidelines (e.g. IBM) with a lot invested in Java who aren't going to sit idly by and let Oracle destroy it when Sun made it easy to go another route. OpenJDK may have a few shortcomings at the moment, but that could easily change if some bigger players got more serious about it.
It's still too early to tell how this is all going to play out, but the death of Java seems like one of the least likely outcomes.
It seems a waste to drop 5 tonnes if we don't know if it's going to be feasible to send people there to use it. Checking out how people react to this sort of isolation and limited environment is the logical first step.
Bear in mind, though, that except in geology papers, regolith and soil are synonyms.
You mean: aside from places where the term regolith appears, regolith and soil are synonyms. That means the same as what you said, but is less misleading.:)
All the stuff you mentioned played out exactly how it was supposed to. There are no accidents in politics.
Wow, you have amazing faith in the intelligence of politicians! In my experience, most politicians are short-sighted imbeciles with little or no ability to engage in long-term planning, and pretty much everything that happens in politics, good or bad, seems to be mostly by accident. Maybe in your part of the world, politicians are superhuman creatures who can carefully plan out elaborate schemes that play out flawlessly, but somehow, I find this hard to believe. As far as I know, aliens have not actually taken over any countries in the world, which means that politicians the world over are human, and thus, not very smart.
It's their business to mess up however they wish. You may think you're doing them a favor by distributing their software, but as the copyright holders, that choice is theirs, not yours. Some companies (e.g. Microsoft) do, basically, wink at piracy for this exact reason.
If non-profit piracy were not prosecutable, then the GPL would lose all weight. People could make proprietary derivations with their own "secret sauce" added, in order to lock in customers, without any fear of reprisal, as long as they didn't charge for the GPL'd bits. I cannot endorse such a scheme.
Depends on both the relative prices of the drives and the price of the power to drive them. I suspect you're probably right, but I'd want to crunch the numbers before making a definite decision.
Then you can install Oracle's Java (there is no "Sun Java" any more) yourself. Oracle no longer allows Canonical to distribute updates, and the last version that Canonical was allowed to distribute has security bugs. Canonical won't prevent you from installing any flavor of Java (or any other piece of software) by yourself, but they're not going to stick you with an insecure, buggy package that has no upgrade path, and they're out of other options. If you want to bitch, bitch at Oracle for their boneheaded move.
BTW, OpenJDK has been improving by leaps and bounds. Unless you tried your project w/in the last few months, you might be surprised. For that matter, this move by Oracle is going to affect more companies than Canonical. (Singling out Canonical for the slashdot article's focus was pretty silly). RH, SUSE and Debian are either dropping or have already dropped Oracle Java as well. They have to--the license requires it. Thus, OpenJDK is going to be getting a lot more attention from those companies/organizations and from Enterprise users who depend on those companies' products. If it doesn't support your product now, it may well within a surprisingly short amount of time.
Heck, I probably don't want to see you wearing clothes, but I don't think that justifies asking you not to go outside at all, ever. (Even though, since you're posting on slashdot, chances are high that you won't.):)
Heh, of course, as the page you link to points out, he avoided capitals and periods in his poetry*--not in the spelling of his name, which he generally wrote as "E. E. Cummings". The "e e cummings" version was invented by one of his publishers.
* Actually, he didn't so much avoid them as make unusual and non-standard use of them.
Yeah, I already corrected myself in a sibling post. They did get it wrong (of course), but not as wrong as I initially thought.
Since you ask, though, the link I used was my LJ bookmark. Slashdot's habit of posting links to ill-informed third-party bloggers who want the hits, rather than directly to the source of the information, has trained me to avoid using their links if I can easily find the relevant information another way--like, though a bookmark or Google. For once, that tripped me up, but it's gotten me the real story so many times that I have no plans to change this habit.
Yeah, my initial reaction was like a lot of other people's: this is a bad plan. But even before seeing your post, I realized that there's some positive potential there as well. Something as simple as leaning over to change your radio station is a mild distraction, and forces you to take your eyes off the road. Trying to dial through your music lists is far more so. With decent voice recognition, you could simply ask the car to play you a particular song or band. With the "listen to me" button on the steering wheel, your distraction would be very minimal.
I'm less than impressed by the systems I've actually seen so far, but you're right that the potential is there for something that could actually be useful and beneficial. Of course, what we'll actually get is an improved targeted ad-delivery system for your car. When it senses that you need an oil change, it won't just tell you that--it'll use GPS and AdSense to try to tell you where to go.:)
Whoops, ignore the above. Gnome (no version specified) won Best Desktop Environment, but Gnome3 won Product of the Year.
Note that neither of these is, specifically, the "Readers Choice Award", though. Those are just two of the many Readers Choice Awards from LJ. So I was right about slashdot getting it wrong; I was just wrong about what they got wrong. *sigh*
I know, I know, it's hardly news when slashdot gets something wrong. Nevertheless, it can be worth pointing out what they got wrong, and in this case, what they got wrong was the "3". Gnome won; the version wasn't specified. From TFA:
"Due to the timing of the GNOME 3 release, it's hard to tell if the victory is because of version 3 or in spite of it.
Personally, I'm waiting to judge Gnome3 till they release a working version. Same as I did with KDE4.:)
Not how "first to file" works. The rules about prior art is unchanged. The only thing that changed was what happens if two people file for the same patent, and both of them claimed to have been working on it secretly for a long time! Rules about prior art, obviousness, etc., are completely unaffected. Anything published counts as prior art, just like it always did.
I almost agree with you, except that the keyboards I use are mostly under my control, while the number pads I use are not. Remember, it's not just phones that have 123 at the top. It's also ATMs and point-of-sale card readers.
Patent inspectors are morons is unaffected by the change to first-to-file, so why even mention it? Except to get people to waste time by pointing out that it has no effect on this. If you were going for a very subtle troll--you succeeded!
I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.
I think that's exactly what they think they'll accomplish. Nuclear power simply has bad PR.
Me, I've been hoping for more work on solar power satellites ever since I read Gerard O'Neill's book a couple of decades ago. (Note that part of what killed government interest in O'Neill's plans back in the '80s was the declining cost of energy!) But I agree that no one solution looks likely to meet our needs.
In addition to all that, YMD is an international standard, which means it going to be accepted and recognized by any software designed for an international market.
I'm not the OP, but neither my mom nor my sister built their careers on sticking their tits out, so it wouldn't be appropriate in their cases, but is entirely appropriate in this case. Not only is it something she can go back to (my mom and my sister would have had to start in order to be able to go back to it), but its the only thing she's shown any real skill at. Even Pam Anderson makes a better pretense of having acting skills.
This is just one case. There's still several other cases to be resolved: SCO v IBM, Red Hat v SCO, SCO v Autozone (or Daimler/Chrysler), and, of course, the upcoming SCO v Boies, et al, where SCO sues their own lawyers for not winning these unwinnable cases.:)
I'm also hoping to see SCO v Microsoft, where SCO sues Microsoft for not providing sufficient funds to slow the growth of Linux as agreed, and Microsoft countersues because SCO didn't achieve the success they promised with the initial round of funding.
Slashdot Mirror
So we shouldn't study the matter because you haven't seen a "rational explanation"?
Shouldn't investigating be the first step? Which is what it sounds like they're doing. Do you have a problem with that? Or did I miss something? It's hard to confirm anything if all you do is ignore matter and pretend it doesn't exist.
I thought most people had realized by now that signing packages is far from being a useful security feature, unless you have some way of revoking the signature on a package-by-package basis. What you want is a signature on the repo (preferably with an expiry date, so a malicious mirror can't just keep a vulnerable repo state around forever).
A package signature protects against trojans, but gives false credibility to official packages with vulnerabilities. A hostile mirror (possibly using a MITM attack) can simply keep a vulnerable package around indefinitely. A repo signature means that the vulnerable version of the package is tied to every other package in the repo, and the only way to keep the package around is to not update any packages, which is a whole lot more obvious than not updating just one package. See Attacks on Package Managers for details.
Basically, a repo signature offers all the security of a package signature and then some. If you want any sort of package security, you need repo signatures, and if you have repo signatures, package signatures offer no extra benefit.
The SCO case (Darl McBride) was not setteled.
True, except that McBride was little more than a hired hand brought in by the real players to be the public face of the lawsuit. Although it's murky because of the corporate veil, the real villain of the piece appears to be a fellow named Ralph Yarro, former member of the Canopy Group, which used to own Caldera/The SCO Group. Yarro was reportedly responsible for bringing McBride in to replace Ransom Love, and when Canopy eventually dumped Yarro, he (Yarro) basically got SCO (now called TSG) as a going-away present.
It never will be.
Yes it will be. TSG is currently in chapter 11 (restructuring). They can't actually close up shop (chapter 7) without resolving the outstanding cases. And they have deliberately set things up so that their restructuring is now dependent on winning the cases (particularly the IBM case). So there are only two paths forward for SCO/TSG, and both involve resolving their lawsuits, especially the IBM one.
Why do companies shoot themselves in their feet? I don't know, but companies do it all the time. Oracle has always been remarkably short-sighted and unable to see the bigger picture.
On the other hand, the fact that there is a an officially GPL'd version of official Java out there may well mean that in the long term, Java will be fine. Oracle can kill off their own branch, but Java in some form is probably going to continue, because it's too entrenched. There are some big players on the sidelines (e.g. IBM) with a lot invested in Java who aren't going to sit idly by and let Oracle destroy it when Sun made it easy to go another route. OpenJDK may have a few shortcomings at the moment, but that could easily change if some bigger players got more serious about it.
It's still too early to tell how this is all going to play out, but the death of Java seems like one of the least likely outcomes.
It seems a waste to drop 5 tonnes if we don't know if it's going to be feasible to send people there to use it. Checking out how people react to this sort of isolation and limited environment is the logical first step.
Bear in mind, though, that except in geology papers, regolith and soil are synonyms.
You mean: aside from places where the term regolith appears, regolith and soil are synonyms. That means the same as what you said, but is less misleading. :)
Paying $100+ for Windows seems like even more of a ripoff when I've got to buy it again every 2 years.
Yup, that's why I'm still running Win95 OSR2. :)
(Seriously, that is the most recent version of Windows I own, though I don't actually use it very often.)
All the stuff you mentioned played out exactly how it was supposed to. There are no accidents in politics.
Wow, you have amazing faith in the intelligence of politicians! In my experience, most politicians are short-sighted imbeciles with little or no ability to engage in long-term planning, and pretty much everything that happens in politics, good or bad, seems to be mostly by accident. Maybe in your part of the world, politicians are superhuman creatures who can carefully plan out elaborate schemes that play out flawlessly, but somehow, I find this hard to believe. As far as I know, aliens have not actually taken over any countries in the world, which means that politicians the world over are human, and thus, not very smart.
It's their business to mess up however they wish. You may think you're doing them a favor by distributing their software, but as the copyright holders, that choice is theirs, not yours. Some companies (e.g. Microsoft) do, basically, wink at piracy for this exact reason.
If non-profit piracy were not prosecutable, then the GPL would lose all weight. People could make proprietary derivations with their own "secret sauce" added, in order to lock in customers, without any fear of reprisal, as long as they didn't charge for the GPL'd bits. I cannot endorse such a scheme.
Depends on both the relative prices of the drives and the price of the power to drive them. I suspect you're probably right, but I'd want to crunch the numbers before making a definite decision.
Then you can install Oracle's Java (there is no "Sun Java" any more) yourself. Oracle no longer allows Canonical to distribute updates, and the last version that Canonical was allowed to distribute has security bugs. Canonical won't prevent you from installing any flavor of Java (or any other piece of software) by yourself, but they're not going to stick you with an insecure, buggy package that has no upgrade path, and they're out of other options. If you want to bitch, bitch at Oracle for their boneheaded move.
BTW, OpenJDK has been improving by leaps and bounds. Unless you tried your project w/in the last few months, you might be surprised. For that matter, this move by Oracle is going to affect more companies than Canonical. (Singling out Canonical for the slashdot article's focus was pretty silly). RH, SUSE and Debian are either dropping or have already dropped Oracle Java as well. They have to--the license requires it. Thus, OpenJDK is going to be getting a lot more attention from those companies/organizations and from Enterprise users who depend on those companies' products. If it doesn't support your product now, it may well within a surprisingly short amount of time.
Heck, I probably don't want to see you wearing clothes, but I don't think that justifies asking you not to go outside at all, ever. (Even though, since you're posting on slashdot, chances are high that you won't.) :)
Heh, of course, as the page you link to points out, he avoided capitals and periods in his poetry*--not in the spelling of his name, which he generally wrote as "E. E. Cummings". The "e e cummings" version was invented by one of his publishers.
* Actually, he didn't so much avoid them as make unusual and non-standard use of them.
Yeah, I already corrected myself in a sibling post. They did get it wrong (of course), but not as wrong as I initially thought.
Since you ask, though, the link I used was my LJ bookmark. Slashdot's habit of posting links to ill-informed third-party bloggers who want the hits, rather than directly to the source of the information, has trained me to avoid using their links if I can easily find the relevant information another way--like, though a bookmark or Google. For once, that tripped me up, but it's gotten me the real story so many times that I have no plans to change this habit.
Yeah, my initial reaction was like a lot of other people's: this is a bad plan. But even before seeing your post, I realized that there's some positive potential there as well. Something as simple as leaning over to change your radio station is a mild distraction, and forces you to take your eyes off the road. Trying to dial through your music lists is far more so. With decent voice recognition, you could simply ask the car to play you a particular song or band. With the "listen to me" button on the steering wheel, your distraction would be very minimal.
I'm less than impressed by the systems I've actually seen so far, but you're right that the potential is there for something that could actually be useful and beneficial. Of course, what we'll actually get is an improved targeted ad-delivery system for your car. When it senses that you need an oil change, it won't just tell you that--it'll use GPS and AdSense to try to tell you where to go. :)
Whoops, ignore the above. Gnome (no version specified) won Best Desktop Environment, but Gnome3 won Product of the Year.
Note that neither of these is, specifically, the "Readers Choice Award", though. Those are just two of the many Readers Choice Awards from LJ. So I was right about slashdot getting it wrong; I was just wrong about what they got wrong. *sigh*
I know, I know, it's hardly news when slashdot gets something wrong. Nevertheless, it can be worth pointing out what they got wrong, and in this case, what they got wrong was the "3". Gnome won; the version wasn't specified. From TFA:
"Due to the timing of the GNOME 3 release, it's hard to tell if the victory is because of version 3 or in spite of it.
Personally, I'm waiting to judge Gnome3 till they release a working version. Same as I did with KDE4. :)
Not how "first to file" works. The rules about prior art is unchanged. The only thing that changed was what happens if two people file for the same patent, and both of them claimed to have been working on it secretly for a long time! Rules about prior art, obviousness, etc., are completely unaffected. Anything published counts as prior art, just like it always did.
Being as everything important that I use has the 7-8-9 on top, with the exception of the phone
Really? You never use ATMs? Point-of-sale card readers? Doors with keypad locks? I suspect you're in a fairly small minority if that's the case.
I agree that the complaint seems overblown, but some of the dismissive responses seem equally so.
I almost agree with you, except that the keyboards I use are mostly under my control, while the number pads I use are not. Remember, it's not just phones that have 123 at the top. It's also ATMs and point-of-sale card readers.
Patent inspectors are morons is unaffected by the change to first-to-file, so why even mention it? Except to get people to waste time by pointing out that it has no effect on this. If you were going for a very subtle troll--you succeeded!
I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.
I think that's exactly what they think they'll accomplish. Nuclear power simply has bad PR.
Me, I've been hoping for more work on solar power satellites ever since I read Gerard O'Neill's book a couple of decades ago. (Note that part of what killed government interest in O'Neill's plans back in the '80s was the declining cost of energy!) But I agree that no one solution looks likely to meet our needs.
In addition to all that, YMD is an international standard, which means it going to be accepted and recognized by any software designed for an international market.
I'm not the OP, but neither my mom nor my sister built their careers on sticking their tits out, so it wouldn't be appropriate in their cases, but is entirely appropriate in this case. Not only is it something she can go back to (my mom and my sister would have had to start in order to be able to go back to it), but its the only thing she's shown any real skill at. Even Pam Anderson makes a better pretense of having acting skills.
This is just one case. There's still several other cases to be resolved: SCO v IBM, Red Hat v SCO, SCO v Autozone (or Daimler/Chrysler), and, of course, the upcoming SCO v Boies, et al, where SCO sues their own lawyers for not winning these unwinnable cases. :)
I'm also hoping to see SCO v Microsoft, where SCO sues Microsoft for not providing sufficient funds to slow the growth of Linux as agreed, and Microsoft countersues because SCO didn't achieve the success they promised with the initial round of funding.