In this article,
SCO Group's case against Linux
SCO CEO Darl McBride says, 'We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code...We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was.'
Unfortunately it's true. I have isolated the exactly matching code that is in the source of both kernels:
int i = 0;
And this snippet of code is obviously an obfuscated section of SCO's codified enterprise business process:
#DEFINE GOOD = 1 #DEFINE OUTLOOK = 0 #DEFINE DEEP_POCKETS = IBM #DEFINE OUTRAGEOUS_SUM = 1000000000
char SKO_revenue; double competitions_revenue
if ((SKO_revenue < competitions_revenue) && (OUTLOOK != GOOD)) { printf("Sue %s for %d dollars",DEEP_POCKETS,OUTRAGEOUS_SUM); }
Notice how the Open Source programmer cleverly changed a variable name to try to hide the true ownership of the algorithm.
This is nothing more than the death throes of a company looking to get bought out.
And if IBM doesn't buy them then they will sell out to Microsoft. Then Microsoft could cause no end of trouble. And after years of legal wrangling which would shore up their crumbling monopoly, allowing them to milk Winconsumers a while longer, they could do what everyone knows they must someday and say, 'Hey, we just happen to have this old Unix/OpenLinux (how ironic) code laying around so we'll put it on the market as Windux Xtreme 2008!' And of course it will contain genuine Unix code and be backwards compatible with everything, etc.
This licensing of code is just a way to fund the SCO lawsuit. But why doesn't Microsoft just go ahead and buy SCO? They don't need it now that they have licensed the code. And it is more advantageous not to. By forcing IBM to buy it they will sour IBM's support for Linux since who is going to pay a billion dollars for something and then release it under GPL? The bean-counters and politics at IBM would try to find a way to recoup the loss.
I based my post on a 60 Minutes story I watched several years back. IIRC they said that the licenses referred to were regulated by the states. Their investigation showed that it was possible for gang members and even convicted felons to obtain. Is a federal firearms license something different which would be required to sell teflon bullets and machine guns?
Because a couple of hundred years ago, before explorers discovered the Great Plains, the settlers used to believe that North America was completely blanketed by thick forests and they had a saying that a squirrel could travel from the East coast to the West coast without ever touching the ground.
I don't know how LanLinkup plans to cross the mostly uninhabited areas with wifi. Are there any cheap consumer devices available that use low power lasers or microwave dishes to make long distance line-of-sight hops?
From
the paper: ...this kind of device can not only target the nuclear bombs but... any kind of living object including human....we sincerely hope that our proposal will motivate and stimulate the revival of the old idea of World Government...
I think Dr. Evil would like to make these guys an employment offer.
And where to build the device?
We first look for a mountain like in fig. 8 whose the surface does not touch many of the straight lines depicted as P1P2, P3P4, Q1Q2 or Q3Q4. We construct two synchrotron A and B which are both revolvable...
I would suggest making two complete backups of all data on all machines. That way if there were a problem then the backups could be used for forensics. Second, monitor any connections to the network from remote access modems or internet connections using an intrusion detection system. Then just relax. If the guy is leaving on good terms then you probably have nothing to worry about.
You may already be doing this but making the job search a full time job means getting out of bed at the same time as you did when you were employed, shaving, being fully dressed and awake by 8am, ready to take phone calls from potential employers or make cold calls to firms in your area who may have openings you can fill. Schedule time with yourself to work on cover letters and resume tweaks and to follow up on ones you've sent out.
The rule of thumb is: Expect the search to take about 1 month for each 10k in salary. I have been trying to find a position as a millionaire playboy for almost ten years so I expect some responses any day now.
It is pretty obvious that Disney has been using formulas for their animated films ever since Eisner took over. They churn them out using a cookie cutter recipe and by the time the kids get sick of the same old story told with different characters and setting, there is a fresh batch of prepubescent consumers to watch the latest version and collect the plastic fun meal toys.
Recipe for typical unoriginal animated crap: Main character introduced. Boy/girl meets girl/boy and falls in love. Evil character introduced. Object of affection is taken away by evil character. Main character rescues love interest and banishes evil. Main character and his/her love live happily ever after.
Then those kids graduate to the next level where the recipe calls for live action adolescent characters with special powers provided either by magic or futuristic electronics. Main character impresses love interest by using powers to save the world. Blah blah blah. Just a slight variation on the above. Action movies for the 18-35 group are just another slight variation. Boy meets girl. Boy saves world. Boy gets girl. Hey maybe I should patent this as a business procedure 'cause working hard sure isn't making me rich.
Some would say that the standoffs at
Ruby Ridge and
Waco were attempts to defend against a
corrupt government. And what was it that McVeigh thought he was doing then? What about the incident at Oglala? I'm not going to take sides or defend any of these actions, I'm just pointing out that they and many other incidents have happened.
But I doubt if guns can help America now anyway. I think our only defense against tryanny is education and voting. We have to educate ourselves and others on these issues, and we have to vote with our ballots and our dollars because our static two-party political system isn't going to allow any real change. The two parties pretend to be at each others throats but they mostly want the same things. The biggest difference lies in who their industry sponsers are.
It's also a fine example to set for other businesses whose livelihood does not depend on milking revenue from the last
2 percent
of works created
up to 120 years before.
If more publishers will take this step to
restore the original intent
and implementation of the Founding Fathers then this can be used as an argument against extending copyright to Life+100 which looks to be the next milestone on the 'Privatize the Public Domain' moebius strip.
Re:cause-effect, but not necessarily racism
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
It does indicate unconscious racism... on the part of the researchers. Just because a "study" was done at Yale doesn't mean it is good Science. Ivy league schools have at least as many nutballs for professors as the less prestigious ones.
Companies that run rich-media ads that ignore user needs can delude themselves into thinking that they're "promoting the brand"; in reality, they're simply being ignored because they don't connect with people's needs.
That may be true for unknown companies but the big dogs that we are already familiar with really are promoting their brand whether we click on the banner or not just by reinforcing their name recognition.
One thing that I didn't see him mention was a standardized GUI help facility with a search feature. It seems that most times I open a help file it is usually either a text file or html which only allows me to find keywords on the particular page I am looking at. xman doesn't count because it is not slick, is not showing text formatting correctly, is not hyperlinked, and man pages are being maintained less and less these days.
Do you realize that if Lindows is even semi-successful then is hit by massive exploits due to not being designed for security that it will give Linux a bad reputation? Secondly since you were sued by Microsoft for using part of the word 'windows' in your name (which of course should never have been granted trademark status) and the other half of the name is based on 'Linux' which is trademarked and is not a generic word, do you think Linus Torvalds might someday try to force you to change the name?
I think you are right. Cliff should not look at security just as putting all eggs in one basket though that is an appropriate metaphor in some situations. But another appropriate metaphor is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And security is too complex to fit into one simple rule of thumb.
For example, having one easily DOS'ed email system such as by ms macro viruses, would beg for a second system which was not vulnerable to the same type of thing. That would be like eggs in a basket. But if the two systems are linked to the same data like a web mail interface into exchange then you are creating two possible routes for a black hat to get to your CEO's mail. And the weakest link breaks the chain. Similar reasoning can be applied to putting multiple firewalls on the edge of your network. Again I can imagine a trade-off between thwarting DOS attacks and increasing the odds of a critical information theft, among other things.
I wonder how this solves the issue of power falling off with the square of the distance.
I couldn't get to the article but I would assume they use a
MASER. So if you conceptualize this as power being transmitted by a LASER then you should understand why interference should not be an issue and that the power does not attenuate according to the inverse square law. As other people have already pointed out though, birds flying into the beam could be killed. It gives new meaning to the phrase 'your goose is cooked'.
I don't mind spending $30 for something truly useful and to encourage commercial development on the OS I need apps for. Since you speak as though you are knowledgeable of both programs let me ask you, can either one handle taxes? I am fed up with having to load ms windows on a machine every year so I can run turbotax. If gnucash and moneydance can't do taxes do you know of any linux programs that can?
1. They don't feel that they have a choice.
2. They feel like it's a hassle.
3. They don't care about the issue.
I just want to add another reason. If you move away from the community where you grew up you may not know where to go to register or even where the polling station is. I missed an election one year because they changed where the polling was taking place. The next year I found the info I needed online but not all counties have a good web presence like mine does.
No most run MS Windows because it came on their computer. But most users are confused by MS Windows, can't fix the inevitable problems that come with MS Windows, and are often told they will have to reload MS Windows from the original cd by tech support when they are forced by necessity to pay the long distance charges or incident charges to call a vendor for help.
DevNull Ogre made a valid point that when people choose to use an open source project on an OS which has so many commercial offerings competing for each and every niche that it is a great compliment to the OSS authors, especially considering how easy it is to copy commercial software. His post was insightful and on topic. Your little Microsoft advertisement was not.
Quit your Linux bashing for a minute and think about it. Why are people asking for Wind32 ports of OSS software? Because they want high quality, innovative software and accessible support regardless of which OS they are running at the moment.
Re:Gene sequencing/splicing
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
True. We'll probably never find DNA that old. But wouldn't it be great to bring back the Dodo bird? All reports said that it tasted delicious. Mmmm Dodo bird.
Re:Gene sequencing/splicing
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
But if they are all damaged that completely then I wouldn't think the researchers would even say that they found DNA, for example from a mammoth. It must retain much of the structure or it would be like saying they found a tree everytime they hit a layer of ash in the sediment.
And yes it would be just like looking for a statistical link between millions of samples with partially damaged structures. But that is what computers are great at. The problem I think is in sequencing the millions of samples. Maybe it wouldn't take that many? But techniques are constantly improving and so is computing power.
Re:Gene sequencing/splicing
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 1
However, a bigger concern might be damage to DNA. DNA, like all biological molecules, suffers a certain degree of degredation over time
But in a chunk of tissue there would be billions or trillions of strands which were originally identical. They would not be damaged in the exact same way. It seems logical to me that if many different samples of these damaged strands were sequenced then statistics could be used to filter out the damaged portions from each individual sample and build a map of the original. Although I have read many times things like, 'the DNA has been broken into tiny pieces, so there is little chance of bringing any of the species back from the dead' I think it is only a matter of time.
And on that note, what would be the ethical implications if in 50 years time we had the opportunity reconstruct the DNA from a Neandertal? They were not our ancestors, but were a super intelligent branch of the ape family that made tools and used fire yet had little culture. Would it be wrong to resurrect one of these creatures and study it and encourage it to reach its full potential? I am guessing that everyone would agree euthanasia and autopsy should be ruled out, but what legal rights would be appropriate?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately it's true. I have isolated the exactly matching code that is in the source of both kernels:
And this snippet of code is obviously an obfuscated section of SCO's codified enterprise business process:
Notice how the Open Source programmer cleverly changed a variable name to try to hide the true ownership of the algorithm.And if IBM doesn't buy them then they will sell out to Microsoft. Then Microsoft could cause no end of trouble. And after years of legal wrangling which would shore up their crumbling monopoly, allowing them to milk Winconsumers a while longer, they could do what everyone knows they must someday and say, 'Hey, we just happen to have this old Unix/OpenLinux (how ironic) code laying around so we'll put it on the market as Windux Xtreme 2008!' And of course it will contain genuine Unix code and be backwards compatible with everything, etc.
This licensing of code is just a way to fund the SCO lawsuit. But why doesn't Microsoft just go ahead and buy SCO? They don't need it now that they have licensed the code. And it is more advantageous not to. By forcing IBM to buy it they will sour IBM's support for Linux since who is going to pay a billion dollars for something and then release it under GPL? The bean-counters and politics at IBM would try to find a way to recoup the loss.
When you buy your games from the bargain bin you get Big League 2004 in 2005 anyway so it kind of evens out.
I based my post on a 60 Minutes story I watched several years back. IIRC they said that the licenses referred to were regulated by the states. Their investigation showed that it was possible for gang members and even convicted felons to obtain. Is a federal firearms license something different which would be required to sell teflon bullets and machine guns?
But what is not available to a registered dealer? Cost of license: ~$30
Because a couple of hundred years ago, before explorers discovered the Great Plains, the settlers used to believe that North America was completely blanketed by thick forests and they had a saying that a squirrel could travel from the East coast to the West coast without ever touching the ground.
I don't know how LanLinkup plans to cross the mostly uninhabited areas with wifi. Are there any cheap consumer devices available that use low power lasers or microwave dishes to make long distance line-of-sight hops?
I think Dr. Evil would like to make these guys an employment offer.
And where to build the device?
We first look for a mountain like in fig. 8 whose the surface does not touch many of the straight lines depicted as P1P2, P3P4, Q1Q2 or Q3Q4. We construct two synchrotron A and B which are both revolvable...
Might I suggest a slightly used extinct volcano with a retractable roof?
Nah just kidding.
I would suggest making two complete backups of all data on all machines. That way if there were a problem then the backups could be used for forensics. Second, monitor any connections to the network from remote access modems or internet connections using an intrusion detection system. Then just relax. If the guy is leaving on good terms then you probably have nothing to worry about.
You may already be doing this but making the job search a full time job means getting out of bed at the same time as you did when you were employed, shaving, being fully dressed and awake by 8am, ready to take phone calls from potential employers or make cold calls to firms in your area who may have openings you can fill. Schedule time with yourself to work on cover letters and resume tweaks and to follow up on ones you've sent out.
The rule of thumb is: Expect the search to take about 1 month for each 10k in salary. I have been trying to find a position as a millionaire playboy for almost ten years so I expect some responses any day now.
It is pretty obvious that Disney has been using formulas for their animated films ever since Eisner took over. They churn them out using a cookie cutter recipe and by the time the kids get sick of the same old story told with different characters and setting, there is a fresh batch of prepubescent consumers to watch the latest version and collect the plastic fun meal toys.
Recipe for typical unoriginal animated crap:
Main character introduced. Boy/girl meets girl/boy and falls in love. Evil character introduced. Object of affection is taken away by evil character. Main character rescues love interest and banishes evil. Main character and his/her love live happily ever after.
Then those kids graduate to the next level where the recipe calls for live action adolescent characters with special powers provided either by magic or futuristic electronics. Main character impresses love interest by using powers to save the world. Blah blah blah. Just a slight variation on the above. Action movies for the 18-35 group are just another slight variation. Boy meets girl. Boy saves world. Boy gets girl. Hey maybe I should patent this as a business procedure 'cause working hard sure isn't making me rich.
But I doubt if guns can help America now anyway. I think our only defense against tryanny is education and voting. We have to educate ourselves and others on these issues, and we have to vote with our ballots and our dollars because our static two-party political system isn't going to allow any real change. The two parties pretend to be at each others throats but they mostly want the same things. The biggest difference lies in who their industry sponsers are.
It's also a fine example to set for other businesses whose livelihood does not depend on milking revenue from the last 2 percent of works created up to 120 years before. If more publishers will take this step to restore the original intent and implementation of the Founding Fathers then this can be used as an argument against extending copyright to Life+100 which looks to be the next milestone on the 'Privatize the Public Domain' moebius strip.
It does indicate unconscious racism... on the part of the researchers. Just because a "study" was done at Yale doesn't mean it is good Science. Ivy league schools have at least as many nutballs for professors as the less prestigious ones.
That may be true for unknown companies but the big dogs that we are already familiar with really are promoting their brand whether we click on the banner or not just by reinforcing their name recognition.
One thing that I didn't see him mention was a standardized GUI help facility with a search feature. It seems that most times I open a help file it is usually either a text file or html which only allows me to find keywords on the particular page I am looking at. xman doesn't count because it is not slick, is not showing text formatting correctly, is not hyperlinked, and man pages are being maintained less and less these days.
Do you realize that if Lindows is even semi-successful then is hit by massive exploits due to not being designed for security that it will give Linux a bad reputation? Secondly since you were sued by Microsoft for using part of the word 'windows' in your name (which of course should never have been granted trademark status) and the other half of the name is based on 'Linux' which is trademarked and is not a generic word, do you think Linus Torvalds might someday try to force you to change the name?
I think you are right. Cliff should not look at security just as putting all eggs in one basket though that is an appropriate metaphor in some situations. But another appropriate metaphor is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And security is too complex to fit into one simple rule of thumb.
For example, having one easily DOS'ed email system such as by ms macro viruses, would beg for a second system which was not vulnerable to the same type of thing. That would be like eggs in a basket. But if the two systems are linked to the same data like a web mail interface into exchange then you are creating two possible routes for a black hat to get to your CEO's mail. And the weakest link breaks the chain. Similar reasoning can be applied to putting multiple firewalls on the edge of your network. Again I can imagine a trade-off between thwarting DOS attacks and increasing the odds of a critical information theft, among other things.
I couldn't get to the article but I would assume they use a MASER. So if you conceptualize this as power being transmitted by a LASER then you should understand why interference should not be an issue and that the power does not attenuate according to the inverse square law. As other people have already pointed out though, birds flying into the beam could be killed. It gives new meaning to the phrase 'your goose is cooked'.
I don't mind spending $30 for something truly useful and to encourage commercial development on the OS I need apps for. Since you speak as though you are knowledgeable of both programs let me ask you, can either one handle taxes? I am fed up with having to load ms windows on a machine every year so I can run turbotax. If gnucash and moneydance can't do taxes do you know of any linux programs that can?
I recommend a career in marketing.
2. They feel like it's a hassle.
3. They don't care about the issue.
I just want to add another reason. If you move away from the community where you grew up you may not know where to go to register or even where the polling station is. I missed an election one year because they changed where the polling was taking place. The next year I found the info I needed online but not all counties have a good web presence like mine does.
DevNull Ogre made a valid point that when people choose to use an open source project on an OS which has so many commercial offerings competing for each and every niche that it is a great compliment to the OSS authors, especially considering how easy it is to copy commercial software. His post was insightful and on topic. Your little Microsoft advertisement was not.
Quit your Linux bashing for a minute and think about it. Why are people asking for Wind32 ports of OSS software? Because they want high quality, innovative software and accessible support regardless of which OS they are running at the moment.
True. We'll probably never find DNA that old. But wouldn't it be great to bring back the Dodo bird? All reports said that it tasted delicious. Mmmm Dodo bird.
But if they are all damaged that completely then I wouldn't think the researchers would even say that they found DNA, for example from a mammoth. It must retain much of the structure or it would be like saying they found a tree everytime they hit a layer of ash in the sediment.
And yes it would be just like looking for a statistical link between millions of samples with partially damaged structures. But that is what computers are great at. The problem I think is in sequencing the millions of samples. Maybe it wouldn't take that many? But techniques are constantly improving and so is computing power.
But in a chunk of tissue there would be billions or trillions of strands which were originally identical. They would not be damaged in the exact same way. It seems logical to me that if many different samples of these damaged strands were sequenced then statistics could be used to filter out the damaged portions from each individual sample and build a map of the original. Although I have read many times things like, 'the DNA has been broken into tiny pieces, so there is little chance of bringing any of the species back from the dead' I think it is only a matter of time.
And on that note, what would be the ethical implications if in 50 years time we had the opportunity reconstruct the DNA from a Neandertal? They were not our ancestors, but were a super intelligent branch of the ape family that made tools and used fire yet had little culture. Would it be wrong to resurrect one of these creatures and study it and encourage it to reach its full potential? I am guessing that everyone would agree euthanasia and autopsy should be ruled out, but what legal rights would be appropriate?