"And, I keep mentioning the two other law suits that need to be filed.
"One is a class action law suit by Linux developers to prevent anyone (including SCO) from demanding license fees from Linux customers when no such fees or licenses are required or even permitted under the GPL. That effort is simply an attempt to benefit from the IP work of hundreds or thousands of others. And, it needs to be stopped dead with a declaratory judgment. SCO can sue anyone they want if they have a basis upon which that defendant has violated their IP rights. But, SCO, by their own hand, gave Linux customers all they need. And, the contract or license picked by SCO specifically forbids SCO actions now. It would be the same if IBM just up and decided that they need more revenue this quarter so all AIX customers have to pay an additional amount. After all, AIX is IBM's IP right? And, that is the only basis upon which SCO is demanding money. SCO even demands money from those who are not SCO customers and do not use SCO products. Or, hell, even if they are SCO customers, right? If you are going to say the contract you signed does not apply to you, then SCO customers have to pay what ever money SCO is demanding too, right?
"The other is a class action by Linux customers to preventing anyone (including SCO) from demanding license fees from Linux customers when no such fees or licenses are required or even permitted under the GPL. Note that these two law suits appear to be similar. And, they are. Except the parties in each case are very different. And, the legal basis for the law suit is very different. In the first, the class of Linux developers would be preventing others from being enriched by demanding license fees for the use of a product developed by the plaintiffs (not SCO). In the second, the class of Linux customers would be preventing anyone from demanding additional fees and licenses of them for any reason. What SCO is doing is no different than if Microsoft just decided that all Windows 98 users had to pay additional fees to Microsoft. After all, Microsoft is running short of cash this month. And, besides, the customers are using the IP that Microsoft claims is their own, right? Never mind that the customer never agreed to pay more money just because Microsoft or SCO needed to cover some bills.
"You have to understand that the claim by SCO that they have IP rights has no nexus (or connection) to the charge that additional fees need to be paid. Or that customers can be sued if the products they use have possible IP related problems. All of the IP protection laws provide for remedies that may be assessed against those who are proven to have violated the patent, copyright, trade secret or what have you. They do not extend any right at all to extort money from the customers who use those products. That is the connection or nexus that SCO just ignores in their public extortion campaign."
If their argument is correct, then all of the PC OEMs are in violation of copyright law since they obviously make more than one copy of WindowsXP when they sell computers to end users.
Also, In the bizarro world of SCO, M$ will be able to sue each and every one of those end users as well as the OEMs.
When is this going to stop? It has gone way beyond stupid...
What the community should be doing is trying to find evidence of the deal between SCO and MS. I believe that is where the meat of this fiasco really lies, and if it could be found then MS could get in serious legal trouble too.
Funny you should mention this. This attorney thinks so too: LAMlaw.com
First read this: OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint. Whether or not you like esr, Eric has the facts straight. SCaldera has made many outright lies in their 'complaint' against IBM.
MozillaQuest has been covering this from the very beginning. The timeline you request can be easily determined from their articles.
This patent was filed by Compression Labs. They were members of JPEG from its inception, but were gone by the time I was a member.
My understanding about this, gathered from JPEG members that overlapped with Compression Labs, was that Compression Labs failed to mention that they had filed for a patent that might impact the work of the committee. This was in direct conflict with the rules established by ITU and ISO wrt IP disclosure. They waited until the patent was granted before they informed the committee about it.
Many members at the time felt that Compression Labs had amended their application with information garnered from committee meetings. There was much bad feeling.
Compression Labs announced that they would not attempt to enforce this patent against JPEG applications. They then stopped attending.
This is very similar to RAMBUS's behavior in JEDEC.
Also, the RedHat Install CD's can be booted using 'linux rescue' at the initial boot prompt. You wind up in run level 1 with ramdisks providing root fs from a root image on the CD.
As far as I can tell, the kernel is rather full featured and should be able to mount vfat fs, although I have not tried it. I know I can mount my ATA RAID and get the network up because I have done that.
Once upon a time there was an open source (Free for personal and educational use. Royalty bearing license for commercial use.) web browser called Mosiac. It was developed at NCSA/UIUC, funded by the taxpayers of the USA. It was somewhat better than the open source browser developed by Tim Berners-Lee, et. al. at CERN where Berners-Lee invented http and HTML. A fellow named Marc Andreesen was one of the coders of Mosaic. He left and formed a company named Netscape which then developed the first proprietary web browser called Netscape Navigator.
Some time passed. The Web became very big and important.
In the mean time a company I shall refer to as M$ had been busy leveraging their Intel based microcomputer OS monopoly (an OS called DOS that they practically stole from Seattle MicroSystems) to stifle competition. Much interesting technology came and went, smothered by M$ control of OEM OS contracts. Quarterdeck, Stacker, DrDOS and others saw their cool technology usurped by M$ and all went the way of the dinosaur. M$ spent much time reinventing Internet Protocol, now named M$ Networking, and was set to eradicate TCP/IP, IPX, VINES, and all other network protocols in favor of their own 'Enhanced' LanManager protocols. If they had made this move two years earlier, they may have succeeded. They didn't only because Tim Berners-Lee's little invention known as the WWW had become very World Wide very quickly and it was based on TCP/IP networking over the internet.
BillG then had a dream and invented both the WWW and the internet in 1995, about 5 years after the WWW had been invented by Berners-Lee and about 25 years after the internet had been invented.
Navigator combined with http/HTML constituted a viable threat to M$ desktop market domination (monopoly). It was easily platform independent since it had been designed that way from the ground up. M$ knew it had to do something to prevent Netscape from leveraging their platform independent technology into toppling M$'s desktop monopoly.
M$ quickly released a browser of it's own. It was very bad and they knew they had to have something that was reasonably good very quickly. Otherwise, Netscape's 80% browser market share (and growing) might eat their gravy train.
They then licensed the Mosaic technology from Spyglass Technology. Spyglass had been established as a commercial entity to handle the liscensing of Mosaic for UIUC and NCSA. The license they arrainged invloved paying a precentage royalty on the proceeds of M$'s Mosaic now named Internet Explorer.
I.E. was much better then M$'s first browser attempt, but it still was far Navigator. M$ decided that they would provide I.E. for free and bundle it with everything they sold. Who would bother to download Navigator over a 19.2 kb/s modem connection when I.E. was already on their computer?
This trick had two very useful features from M$'s perspective:
It eroded Netscape's market share and forced them to provide Navigator for free.
x percent of zero is zero. So they didn't have to pay Spyglass anything.
This must have been orgasmic for BillG. He could seriously fuck two companies with one descision.
How is it fair that the government can tell a company what to do with their intellectual property? That sounds like totalitarianism, or communism to me.
See paragraph one above. Who's property is I.E.?
Only under our very contemporary ammoral form of capitalism could something developed using public funds be given to a law breaking corporation to use as a club against competitors.
But the reason they actually tested nukes is because they needed to find out if the theoretical numbers are coorect in the first place right?
~60 years ago there was indeed a need to test in order to verify the that the physical constants used were known correctly and that the mathematical models used for the weapons designs predicted things as anticipated. They got that stuff figured out and verified quite some time ago.
Consider that all thermonuclear weapons contain fissionable material that is constantly undergoing radioactive decay. How long can it sit in a bunker and still be relied on to function as designed?
I for one am very glad that they can use machines such as this to explore possibilities without having to go out and actually detonate one of the damn things.
This would mean that you couldn't get a static IP address on anything less than a much more expensive buisness class DSL line, even if a third party DSL provider really wanted to sell you one.
I am using SNET DSL. SNET is owned by SBC. They have been requiring PPPoE on all new accounts since last fall. They will require PPPoE on all accounts by spring next year. I pay an extra $15/month to have an account with a static IP. I use Roaring Penguin PPPoE on a Linux box (K6-2/500) which also does firewall and NAT for my LAN. The PPPoE connection stays up pretty much all the time. When it drops, it comes back up by itself. I don't have to program the static IP into the PPPoE config. When my pppd connects and authenticates with PAP, they always give the same IP address.
PPPoE probably sux with win9x. I haven't tried it myself, and I would recommend one of the Linksys routers anyway. I suspect that PPPoE with NT or Win2k is probably OK. With Linux, it is fine. The only downside I see is the extra 8 bytes/pkt protocol overhead.
I think that the reason they want PPPoE is the PAP authentication. You don't pay your bill, they shut you down by deactivating your account. I could be wrong, and I am sure someone will correct me if I am, but I beleive that automating account deactivation is easier with a PAP authenticated PPPoE account than with a DHCP account.
Another point. Isn't DHCP authenticated by MAC address? What if I need to swap my NIC card around or use a different machine as my router. Suppose I bring up a FreeBSD box that I want to drop in place of the current LInux router. The username/password with PAP identifies my connection more uniquely than the MAC address of one of my many NIC's.
The clue is "Magic Smoke." A chip that has released its magic smoke no longer functions.
This was a very common problem with high slew-rate operational amplifier (Op Amp) circuits designs that did not have feedback impedance properly tweaked to compensate for parasitic input capacitance. They would oscillate at some undesired high frequency (releative to audio frequencies) and often release their "magic smoke."
I have a Nat Semi LM118 TO-5 (metal can) that has my index fingerprint embossed in the top of the package. It didn't release its "Magic Smoke," but it never worked again. I was very glad I licked my finger first, but I got a minor first degree burn anyway. I think that was the hottest I ever saw a part get without losing its "magic smoke."
Except that Radio air-time is the primary method of advertising a recording. People buy the recordings that they hear on the Radio and like.
Unless things have changed since I was a Radio DJ 25 years ago, Radio stations do not pay for the recordings that they play. The record companies provide them for gratis. They were always marked with "Not for Sale" on labels and jackets to prevent the radio stations from selling records they no longer needed.
Air-time was so important to the record companies that they often paid DJs (usually in the major markets) to play particular records that they wanted to push. This was known as Payola and was outlawed in the early 60s.
Even though there are many more ways to advertise the existence of recordings today than there were when this relationship between record companies and radio stations began, I suspect that radio is still the largest advertising venue for pop music.
I find it very amusing that the RIAA members are now so greedy that they will openly antagonize their largest propaganda (advertising) providers.
There is no doubt in my mind that the real purpose of the DMCA is to inflict pay-per-play for all copyrighted material. I hope that this can be stopped.
It appears that many in congress have forgotten that copyright was intended to be a careful restriction of the first amendment. It is certain that the constitution did not intend to give such sweeping control of copyrighted material to the copyright holders. I doubt that the DMCA can stand up to a constitutional test in the Supreme Court. A comment above notes that no previous copyright law has ever distinguished between 'perfect' or 'imperfect' copies. This notion in the DMCA should be challenged as being irrelevant to copyright law.
...is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
My understanding is that they were bidding a DoD contract that required POSIX compliance, so they began development of the POSIX subsystem. The contract was awarded to SUN, and MS never properly finished the development. No other contract of sufficient monetary value ever came along to justify spending the development bucks to properly finish the POSIX subsystem and so we got what we see today - It certainly looks only about half done to me. They have certainly kept it around in case another bid of that type comes along. I doubt that we will ever see a proper POSIX subsystem unless they are awarded one of those contracts. So far, AFAIK, all of the DoD contracts they have been awarded have waived POSIX compliance.
which makes equipment that can take 10/100 Enet, DS1, DS3, Voice, and Frame Relay and send it out an ATM trunk (anything from DS1 up to OC3, or multiple DS1's using IMA). And these of course talk directly to the Cascade ATM switches.
This merger is probably a good thing for both Lucent and Ascend.
I would trust my life to Linux and just about any commercial unix I have ever dealt with. Also VMS. I have the experience that tells me that these are stable and can be trusted.
I wouldn't keep recipes on RedmondWare.
Of course, you are perhaps refering to patient record confidentiality? That is another issue.
If I'm in the hospital, I'd like some degree of certainty that the staff knows what my lab results are and what meds I'm to get. If they are keeping that info on NT, they had better give me lots of prozac.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that US companies will not be allowed to produce Spyware, We are going to have a Spyware Gap.
Both of your interpretations are equally correct.
I prefer the latter.
This site and GROKLAW are well worth reading.
User - #53145
Machines - #19499, #19500, #130615, #130616
If their argument is correct, then all of the PC OEMs are in violation of copyright law since they obviously make more than one copy of WindowsXP when they sell computers to end users.
Also, In the bizarro world of SCO, M$ will be able to sue each and every one of those end users as well as the OEMs.
When is this going to stop? It has gone way beyond stupid...
Funny you should mention this. This attorney thinks so too: LAMlaw.com
Damn, this post makes my .sig untrue...
IBM assigned the copyrights to all of the code that they have contributed to the Linux kernel to the FSF
Let's hope these folks stay in Bellevue. There seems to be something very bad in the water in Redmond.
First read this: OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint. Whether or not you like esr, Eric has the facts straight. SCaldera has made many outright lies in their 'complaint' against IBM.
MozillaQuest has been covering this from the very beginning. The timeline you request can be easily determined from their articles.
With three words you have achieved the closest thing to a perfect slashdot post I have ever seen - both maximally insightful and funny simultaneously!
Someone with mod points needs to mod this as insightful.
This patent was filed by Compression Labs. They were members of JPEG from its inception, but were gone by the time I was a member.
My understanding about this, gathered from JPEG members that overlapped with Compression Labs, was that Compression Labs failed to mention that they had filed for a patent that might impact the work of the committee. This was in direct conflict with the rules established by ITU and ISO wrt IP disclosure. They waited until the patent was granted before they informed the committee about it.
Many members at the time felt that Compression Labs had amended their application with information garnered from committee meetings. There was much bad feeling.
Compression Labs announced that they would not attempt to enforce this patent against JPEG applications. They then stopped attending.
This is very similar to RAMBUS's behavior in JEDEC.
This is despicable.
As far as I can tell, the kernel is rather full featured and should be able to mount vfat fs, although I have not tried it. I know I can mount my ATA RAID and get the network up because I have done that.
Some time passed. The Web became very big and important.
In the mean time a company I shall refer to as M$ had been busy leveraging their Intel based microcomputer OS monopoly (an OS called DOS that they practically stole from Seattle MicroSystems) to stifle competition. Much interesting technology came and went, smothered by M$ control of OEM OS contracts. Quarterdeck, Stacker, DrDOS and others saw their cool technology usurped by M$ and all went the way of the dinosaur. M$ spent much time reinventing Internet Protocol, now named M$ Networking, and was set to eradicate TCP/IP, IPX, VINES, and all other network protocols in favor of their own 'Enhanced' LanManager protocols. If they had made this move two years earlier, they may have succeeded. They didn't only because Tim Berners-Lee's little invention known as the WWW had become very World Wide very quickly and it was based on TCP/IP networking over the internet.
BillG then had a dream and invented both the WWW and the internet in 1995, about 5 years after the WWW had been invented by Berners-Lee and about 25 years after the internet had been invented.
Navigator combined with http/HTML constituted a viable threat to M$ desktop market domination (monopoly). It was easily platform independent since it had been designed that way from the ground up. M$ knew it had to do something to prevent Netscape from leveraging their platform independent technology into toppling M$'s desktop monopoly.
M$ quickly released a browser of it's own. It was very bad and they knew they had to have something that was reasonably good very quickly. Otherwise, Netscape's 80% browser market share (and growing) might eat their gravy train.
They then licensed the Mosaic technology from Spyglass Technology. Spyglass had been established as a commercial entity to handle the liscensing of Mosaic for UIUC and NCSA. The license they arrainged invloved paying a precentage royalty on the proceeds of M$'s Mosaic now named Internet Explorer.
I.E. was much better then M$'s first browser attempt, but it still was far Navigator. M$ decided that they would provide I.E. for free and bundle it with everything they sold. Who would bother to download Navigator over a 19.2 kb/s modem connection when I.E. was already on their computer?
This trick had two very useful features from M$'s perspective:
- It eroded Netscape's market share and forced them to provide Navigator for free.
- x percent of zero is zero. So they didn't have to pay Spyglass anything.
This must have been orgasmic for BillG. He could seriously fuck two companies with one descision.See paragraph one above. Who's property is I.E.?
Only under our very contemporary ammoral form of capitalism could something developed using public funds be given to a law breaking corporation to use as a club against competitors.
Scanning for virii on Sourceforge is probably a waste of time and resources.
From the description of this 'virus', Tripwire would find any infected files.
What? You're not running Tripwire?
~60 years ago there was indeed a need to test in order to verify the that the physical constants used were known correctly and that the mathematical models used for the weapons designs predicted things as anticipated. They got that stuff figured out and verified quite some time ago.
Consider that all thermonuclear weapons contain fissionable material that is constantly undergoing radioactive decay. How long can it sit in a bunker and still be relied on to function as designed?
I for one am very glad that they can use machines such as this to explore possibilities without having to go out and actually detonate one of the damn things.
Here is the link to cygwin. It is now an annual support contract. This is the GNU Pro toolkit for windows.
I am using SNET DSL. SNET is owned by SBC. They have been requiring PPPoE on all new accounts since last fall. They will require PPPoE on all accounts by spring next year. I pay an extra $15/month to have an account with a static IP. I use Roaring Penguin PPPoE on a Linux box (K6-2/500) which also does firewall and NAT for my LAN. The PPPoE connection stays up pretty much all the time. When it drops, it comes back up by itself. I don't have to program the static IP into the PPPoE config. When my pppd connects and authenticates with PAP, they always give the same IP address.
PPPoE probably sux with win9x. I haven't tried it myself, and I would recommend one of the Linksys routers anyway. I suspect that PPPoE with NT or Win2k is probably OK. With Linux, it is fine. The only downside I see is the extra 8 bytes/pkt protocol overhead.
I think that the reason they want PPPoE is the PAP authentication. You don't pay your bill, they shut you down by deactivating your account. I could be wrong, and I am sure someone will correct me if I am, but I beleive that automating account deactivation is easier with a PAP authenticated PPPoE account than with a DHCP account.
Another point. Isn't DHCP authenticated by MAC address? What if I need to swap my NIC card around or use a different machine as my router. Suppose I bring up a FreeBSD box that I want to drop in place of the current LInux router. The username/password with PAP identifies my connection more uniquely than the MAC address of one of my many NIC's.
I have to agree. Maxwell's equations in point form are the most beautiful mathematical expressions I have ever seen. See here for an example.
-- hgc
This was a very common problem with high slew-rate operational amplifier (Op Amp) circuits designs that did not have feedback impedance properly tweaked to compensate for parasitic input capacitance. They would oscillate at some undesired high frequency (releative to audio frequencies) and often release their "magic smoke."
I have a Nat Semi LM118 TO-5 (metal can) that has my index fingerprint embossed in the top of the package. It didn't release its "Magic Smoke," but it never worked again. I was very glad I licked my finger first, but I got a minor first degree burn anyway. I think that was the hottest I ever saw a part get without losing its "magic smoke."
-- hgc
Unless things have changed since I was a Radio DJ 25 years ago, Radio stations do not pay for the recordings that they play. The record companies provide them for gratis. They were always marked with "Not for Sale" on labels and jackets to prevent the radio stations from selling records they no longer needed.
Air-time was so important to the record companies that they often paid DJs (usually in the major markets) to play particular records that they wanted to push. This was known as Payola and was outlawed in the early 60s.
Even though there are many more ways to advertise the existence of recordings today than there were when this relationship between record companies and radio stations began, I suspect that radio is still the largest advertising venue for pop music.
I find it very amusing that the RIAA members are now so greedy that they will openly antagonize their largest propaganda (advertising) providers.
There is no doubt in my mind that the real purpose of the DMCA is to inflict pay-per-play for all copyrighted material. I hope that this can be stopped.
It appears that many in congress have forgotten that copyright was intended to be a careful restriction of the first amendment. It is certain that the constitution did not intend to give such sweeping control of copyrighted material to the copyright holders. I doubt that the DMCA can stand up to a constitutional test in the Supreme Court. A comment above notes that no previous copyright law has ever distinguished between 'perfect' or 'imperfect' copies. This notion in the DMCA should be challenged as being irrelevant to copyright law.
-- hgc
...is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
My understanding is that they were bidding a DoD contract that required POSIX compliance, so they began development of the POSIX subsystem. The contract was awarded to SUN, and MS never properly finished the development. No other contract of sufficient monetary value ever came along to justify spending the development bucks to properly finish the POSIX subsystem and so we got what we see today - It certainly looks only about half done to me. They have certainly kept it around in case another bid of that type comes along. I doubt that we will ever see a proper POSIX subsystem unless they are awarded one of those contracts. So far, AFAIK, all of the DoD contracts they have been awarded have waived POSIX compliance.
-- hgc
Since UTC is referred to as 'zulu time' by US military and others, I propose that the PMT be referred to as 'Jerry Lewis' time.
Example:
It is now 19:12:00 EDT, 16:12:00 PDT, 23:12:00 Zulu, and 23:21:22 Jerry Lewis.
-- hgc
Thank You! This is beautiful!
-- hgc
which makes equipment that can take 10/100 Enet, DS1, DS3, Voice, and Frame Relay and send it out an ATM trunk (anything from DS1 up to OC3, or multiple DS1's using IMA). And these of course talk directly to the Cascade ATM switches.
This merger is probably a good thing for both Lucent and Ascend.
-- hgc
An abacas? Stone Tablets? Get a clue.
I would trust my life to Linux and just about any commercial unix I have ever dealt with. Also VMS. I have the experience that tells me that these are stable and can be trusted.
I wouldn't keep recipes on RedmondWare.
Of course, you are perhaps refering to patient record confidentiality? That is another issue.
If I'm in the hospital, I'd like some degree of certainty that the staff knows what my lab results are and what meds I'm to get. If they are keeping that info on NT, they had better give me lots of prozac.
-- hgc