In contrast, the President of United States is a cowboy. (No offense, but I could not resist the comparison).
The current President of the United States is not a cowboy. He is an Ivy League-educated businessman (and not an entirely successful one at that). He may pretend to be a cowboy at times, but he is not.
Good point, I forgot the correct spelling. General Hammond always pronounced it "Gould," and that clouded my spelling. Ah, General Hammond, now he was a general everyone respected...
Yes, the US government has been in a secret war with the G'ould for around 8 years now, but the SG-1 team is always around to keep the government honest. Well, at least until General O'Neill and Samantha Carter moved on to other jobs...
Agreed. When Apple announced that it was not only going with x86, but with Intel x86, it was obvious to me why: supply issues. Supply issues were the cause of endless problems between Motorola and Apple. And the same issue cropped up with IBM: even though the PowerPC 970/G5 is a wonderfully powerful processor (and 64-bit to boot), IBM cannot deliver them in the quantities Apple wants. Obviously, the AMD Athlon 64/Opteron technology is the obvious choice for 64-bit computing at this point, but AMD's supply track record is no better than IBM's or Moto's. Apple can't deal with switching to another vendor and continuing to have supply problems again.
While I think it's great MS is serious about providing a better CLI for their OS, Monad does not impress me. Any of the scripting languages on *nix can be turned into a shell if anyone wanted to. In fact, we already have a C SHell, and apparently there's a Perl SHell. Claiming "ours is better because it is not based on 30-year-old technology" is a silly argument MS trots out when they don't have a real reason for you to use the technology they just "invented."
I'm also concerned about the security implications of allowing such a technology into the core of Windows. In MS's hands, MSH could easily become another Windows virus infection vector (and as I recall it has already had security issues).
Actually, it was the other way around. Hot Rod was his original name, and during the fight with Galvatron he touched the Matrix, which turned him into Rodimus Prime. (He then opened the Matrix, which quickly dispatched Unicron.)
Dios mio! Why don't we bring back ARCNET too while we're at it? There's a reason Ethernet and TCP/IP killed off these old network technologies. If DECnet isn't dead, we all ought to pitch in and stomp it back down into the grave...
Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.
That is a wonderful point since, according to the article, 90% of e-mail is spam but 30% of e-mail was sent with domains using Sender ID. That means that up to 20% of e-mail was spam using Sender ID. Yes, that's a drastic reduction, but it is hardly stopping spam. And all the spammers have to do to raise their success rate with Sender ID is deploy Sender ID to their own servers.
Someone's been watching too much Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Some History/Explanation, and My Opinion
on
Palm OS To Run On Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think some Palm OS architecture/history is in order here. Porting Palm OS to Linux will not be a revolutionary step for PalmSource, because Palm OS (at least until version 5 and 6) does not encompass an OS kernel. Palm OS through version 4 ran on the Kadak AMX kernel, and part of the reason it was so limited (no multitasking or threading) was due to license agreements with Kadak. In Palm OS 5, (then) Palm, Inc. ported their OS piece to ARM devices, and started exposing new multithreading APIs available in the kernel (whether the 5.x kernel is AMX or another is unclear to me; Palm has rarely acknowledged it ever used AMX in the first place). In fact, one of the major features of PalmSource's "Protein" APIs is to allow maximum portability of Palm OS applications, regardless of device underpinnings. Ultimately, though it will take a lot of work for PalmSource's programmers, porting Palm OS to run on the Linux kernel should not be terribly hard, because its architecture is designed to be relatively kernel-independent.
Now, for my opinions:
Palm should have based Palm OS 5 (which PalmSource now calls Garnet) on the Linux kernel, and immediately started exposing Linux features through their API layer. The mess that OS 5/Garnet has turned out to be is just sad. And though OS 6 (Cobalt) has some nice screenshots, no Cobalt devices exist, even after it has been available for a year. Palm OS still has neither full multitasking nor a true filesystem. PalmSource's latest stab at a filesystem, NVFS, has caused their only important licensee, PalmOne, no end of embarrassment, and has rendered the Tungsten T5 and Treo 650 almost useless for many consumers. While Palm/Source/One insisted for many years devices like these didn't need advanced features like filesystems and multitasking, in reality they are needed for the applications people want.
And speaking of applications, it is, relatively speaking, difficult to write Palm OS applications. The Windows CE/Mobile (or whatever they're calling it this week) API is a subset of Win32. Writing for QTopia or another Linux-based PDA platform is not unlike writing a normal Linux app. Even writing J2ME apps isn't terribly hard, though the API is limited. Writing Palm OS apps is weird, and confusing. PalmSource has helped a little by making Eclipse their preferred IDE, but Palm apps still work like nothing else, and you can forget porting code between platforms. Thus, there is an advantage to using Linux as the new kernel, since one would hope you would be able to port existing Linux-based code to the new platform, and make calls to it from the Palm OS API layer. This assumes PalmSource doesn't mess things up like they did with NVFS.
Ultimately, however, I believe this move by PalmSource is too little, too late. Had this move been made with OS 5, they could have had something. Now that there are no devices or apps for the current Palm OS version, and the first pieces of Linux won't show up until the next version (OS 7?), I believe device makers and app developers will have lost all interest in the Palm OS platform by the time Palm OS for Linux sees the light of day. Windows Mobile and Symbian will take over the majority of the smartphone market, while a small number of phones and PDAs will use Linux. Meanwhile, the Linux on HP/Dell/etc. PocketPC movement will become stronger, since those devices will be readily available, and there will be a small dedicated core of people to write great software for it (case in point: Opie).
I mentioned this to a friend of mine that works at Acxiom, and he told me if I had read the article completely (RTFAC?), I would have realized this incident happened last year, and the only news is that they want to press charges against the people involved now that the Justice Department has completed the investigation. There have not been any new break-ins, he says, and the company has beefed up security since then.
Wait...I seem to remember another PC operating system that was supposedly vastly superior than the market dominating environment, but one of it's great features was that it could run that environment's apps, right alongside the superior OS's apps. Though obviously, once you had experienced this wonderful new way of working, you'd eventually convert to all new native apps. What was that OS? (think...think...think...)
Oh right. It was OS/2!
Seriously, rarely have OSes succeeded when one of their main benefits was running another OS's software. SCOX and Sun have made various stabs at convincing customers UnixWare and Solaris run Linux apps, and they are still hemoraging marketshare. Though Microsoft's marketing machine is second to none, I still can't believe customers will buy Longhorn as an integration/migration platform. That marketing never worked in the past, why would it work now?
Oh wait, that's right: Microsoft is expecting it to work 4 years from now. OK, then perhaps they believe in 4 years Linux will have made so many inroads they'll have to run Linux apps. Maybe we really are winning after all!
The significance of the National Retail Federation speaking out against SCOX may be deeper than some realize. One of SCO Unix's core markets (if not the only one) was/is retail point of sale systems. In the 1980s and early 90s, SCO Unix (and its Xenix predecessor) was one of the few choices available to run a POS system on affordable PC hardware. If SCO Unix has any market left, it is the members of the NRF, many of whom have large deployments of SCO Unix throughout their store chains. Who even runs SCO Unix anymore? The answer is these people. The companies in the NRF comprise the SCO Unix core market, and if SCOX plans on continuing to sell software to businesses, it needs them.
But now, these companies, the last customers SCOX has, have turned against them. With their previously existing relationship, SCOX could have been in a good position to sell them Linux, but they have ruined that opportunity now. What tiny market SCO Unix had is gone, and any hope SCOX had of continuing to be a software company just went with it.
On the other hand, their litigation isn't going well either. Better say goodbye, folks, because SCOX is not long for this world.
...because they were losing money on it. According to the 10K report they filed with the SEC, Red Hat's revenues from retail boxes had dropped 20% over the past year, and they predicted an even steeper drop for this year. So they decided to shift their focus to their profitable Enterprise Server business, and open up the base distribution to more community involvment.
If you don't mind doing the support yourself (or contracting with 3rd party), the Red Hat standard distro should run everything the Enterprise versions do. Keep in mind, too, that last I checked, Red Hat 9 wasn't certified to run Oracle anyway (in fact, 7.3 is still probably the best choice for that).
While we're at it, let's publicly abandon the Unix trademark (which is likely unenforcable, anyway).
NO. Remember, the UNIX trademark is owned by the Open Group and used by them basically for certification purposes.
SCOX does own the copyrights to the Unix System V codebase (apparently because Novell sold it to them and then forgot about it). Releasing that code to the public domain or under an open or free source license would prove valuable and help to ensure this mess doesn't happen again.
"All students will know someone is watching them, tracking them, and is interested in their success"
Yes, because nothing says "I care" like a Big Brother-style database in the hands of government employees. OTOH, paranoid students on the edge of a killing spree can now take comfort in the fact that, indeed, someone is watching them and keeping tabs on them via computer.
And yes, I know that last statement sounds harsh and unfeeling. Just like Big Brother's database.
OK, yeah maybe "Judgement Day is Inevitable," or maybe Cyberdyne got their mitts on the arm that was left behind in T2. The chip and arm from T1 was destroyed, and the T1000 and 101 was destroyed, but one of the machines in the factory tore off one of the 101 unit's arms. Sure, it was mangled, but hey, the chip Cyberdyne initially found was smashed too...
See, think of your life time as a string, with one end representing your birth, and the other end your death. Put the ends together, and ball up the string, and the days of your life touch each other out of sequence...
with the principals of the earlier deal, many of whom no longer appear to be in power at Novell.
Forget Novell; SCO isn't even the SCO that bought UNIX (or whatever they actually bought). Today's SCO is Caldera that bought pieces of SCO and changed their name to SCO!
SCO's problem here is they have only their word to back up their claim. Novell's press release says:
A simple review of U.S. Patent Office records reveals that Novell owns those patents.
And as for the copyrights:
SCO is not the owner of the UNIX copyrights. Not only would a quick check of U.S. Copyright Office records reveal this fact, but a review of the asset transfer agreement between Novell and SCO confirms it.
So maybe SCO thought they owned UNIX. But Novell has the paperwork to prove they do.
Yes, and according to the press release, THAT's why Novell has become so upset over this. NetWare is practically dead in the market. Novell has finally come up with a (possibly) workable business model based on Linux. And now SCO has decided to try to wreck Linux (with code Novell owns), and ruin Novell's plan. Novell is NOT happy.
After turning this over in my head a bit, I think you're right. SCO can go after IBM for breach of contract, but it would be Novell that would need to begin procedings to remove the code from Linux.
Yes, except that, from their press release, Novell doesn't believe Linux contains SysV code, and challenged SCO to prove it.
The Open Group was assigned the trademark rights to the UNIX(TM) name for purposes of standards compliance (you can't call your OS UNIX(TM) without them). What we've found out today, however, is Novell, not SCO, owns the UNIX System V code and its assocated copyrights and patents.
in court the judge will see SCO's lawyers, all sharp and buttoned down,...and on the other side, will see unwashed, smelly, hairy anti-capitalist hackers
Dude, nobody's lawyers are sharper or more buttoned down than IBM's!
UNIX the commercial product was sold by ATT to SCO (or its precursor). SCO then licensed this source code to IBM for the development of their own products (AIX?).
This is how it goes...
AT&T formed Unix Systems Labs during one of several breakups, assigning all UNIX IP to them. They then sold it to Novell. Novell used the UNIX to create UnixWare, to complement their NetWare OS.
Novell fell on hard times, and sold USL and UnixWare to SCO. SCO finally released a SCO Unix based on SVR4 (SCO OpenServer was stuck on SVR3 I think).
SCO fell on hard times, and decided to exit the Unix business altogether and concentrate on their Tarantella product. Caldera buys USL, the SCO OS business, and the SCO name. What was left of SCO changes its name to Tarantella.
Caldera files papers to "Do Business As" (which is a legal term) The SCO Group, which is fine since they own rights to the SCO name now. However, it does cloud the issue somewhat since people see "SCO" and immediately think the old Santa Cruz Operation people, but those people are happily doing their own thing as Tarantella, minding their own business. The tragedy of this whole mess is it was started by Caldera (d/b/a The SCO Group), a Linux vendor. OTOH, by possibly distributing their proprietary code under the GPL, Caldera might have unwittingly destroyed their case against IBM and the other Linux vendors.
I don't know when IBM licensed Unix, but AIX is old, so I would imagine it was back when AT&T owned it.
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In contrast, the President of United States is a cowboy. (No offense, but I could not resist the comparison).
The current President of the United States is not a cowboy. He is an Ivy League-educated businessman (and not an entirely successful one at that). He may pretend to be a cowboy at times, but he is not.
Good point, I forgot the correct spelling. General Hammond always pronounced it "Gould," and that clouded my spelling. Ah, General Hammond, now he was a general everyone respected...
Yes, the US government has been in a secret war with the G'ould for around 8 years now, but the SG-1 team is always around to keep the government honest. Well, at least until General O'Neill and Samantha Carter moved on to other jobs...
Agreed. When Apple announced that it was not only going with x86, but with Intel x86, it was obvious to me why: supply issues. Supply issues were the cause of endless problems between Motorola and Apple. And the same issue cropped up with IBM: even though the PowerPC 970/G5 is a wonderfully powerful processor (and 64-bit to boot), IBM cannot deliver them in the quantities Apple wants. Obviously, the AMD Athlon 64/Opteron technology is the obvious choice for 64-bit computing at this point, but AMD's supply track record is no better than IBM's or Moto's. Apple can't deal with switching to another vendor and continuing to have supply problems again.
While I think it's great MS is serious about providing a better CLI for their OS, Monad does not impress me. Any of the scripting languages on *nix can be turned into a shell if anyone wanted to. In fact, we already have a C SHell, and apparently there's a Perl SHell. Claiming "ours is better because it is not based on 30-year-old technology" is a silly argument MS trots out when they don't have a real reason for you to use the technology they just "invented."
I'm also concerned about the security implications of allowing such a technology into the core of Windows. In MS's hands, MSH could easily become another Windows virus infection vector (and as I recall it has already had security issues).
Actually, it was the other way around. Hot Rod was his original name, and during the fight with Galvatron he touched the Matrix, which turned him into Rodimus Prime. (He then opened the Matrix, which quickly dispatched Unicron.)
I'm such a geek...
Dios mio! Why don't we bring back ARCNET too while we're at it? There's a reason Ethernet and TCP/IP killed off these old network technologies. If DECnet isn't dead, we all ought to pitch in and stomp it back down into the grave...
Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.
That is a wonderful point since, according to the article, 90% of e-mail is spam but 30% of e-mail was sent with domains using Sender ID. That means that up to 20% of e-mail was spam using Sender ID. Yes, that's a drastic reduction, but it is hardly stopping spam. And all the spammers have to do to raise their success rate with Sender ID is deploy Sender ID to their own servers.
Someone's been watching too much Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
I think some Palm OS architecture/history is in order here. Porting Palm OS to Linux will not be a revolutionary step for PalmSource, because Palm OS (at least until version 5 and 6) does not encompass an OS kernel. Palm OS through version 4 ran on the Kadak AMX kernel, and part of the reason it was so limited (no multitasking or threading) was due to license agreements with Kadak. In Palm OS 5, (then) Palm, Inc. ported their OS piece to ARM devices, and started exposing new multithreading APIs available in the kernel (whether the 5.x kernel is AMX or another is unclear to me; Palm has rarely acknowledged it ever used AMX in the first place). In fact, one of the major features of PalmSource's "Protein" APIs is to allow maximum portability of Palm OS applications, regardless of device underpinnings. Ultimately, though it will take a lot of work for PalmSource's programmers, porting Palm OS to run on the Linux kernel should not be terribly hard, because its architecture is designed to be relatively kernel-independent.
Now, for my opinions:
Palm should have based Palm OS 5 (which PalmSource now calls Garnet) on the Linux kernel, and immediately started exposing Linux features through their API layer. The mess that OS 5/Garnet has turned out to be is just sad. And though OS 6 (Cobalt) has some nice screenshots, no Cobalt devices exist, even after it has been available for a year. Palm OS still has neither full multitasking nor a true filesystem. PalmSource's latest stab at a filesystem, NVFS, has caused their only important licensee, PalmOne, no end of embarrassment, and has rendered the Tungsten T5 and Treo 650 almost useless for many consumers. While Palm/Source/One insisted for many years devices like these didn't need advanced features like filesystems and multitasking, in reality they are needed for the applications people want.
And speaking of applications, it is, relatively speaking, difficult to write Palm OS applications. The Windows CE/Mobile (or whatever they're calling it this week) API is a subset of Win32. Writing for QTopia or another Linux-based PDA platform is not unlike writing a normal Linux app. Even writing J2ME apps isn't terribly hard, though the API is limited. Writing Palm OS apps is weird, and confusing. PalmSource has helped a little by making Eclipse their preferred IDE, but Palm apps still work like nothing else, and you can forget porting code between platforms. Thus, there is an advantage to using Linux as the new kernel, since one would hope you would be able to port existing Linux-based code to the new platform, and make calls to it from the Palm OS API layer. This assumes PalmSource doesn't mess things up like they did with NVFS.
Ultimately, however, I believe this move by PalmSource is too little, too late. Had this move been made with OS 5, they could have had something. Now that there are no devices or apps for the current Palm OS version, and the first pieces of Linux won't show up until the next version (OS 7?), I believe device makers and app developers will have lost all interest in the Palm OS platform by the time Palm OS for Linux sees the light of day. Windows Mobile and Symbian will take over the majority of the smartphone market, while a small number of phones and PDAs will use Linux. Meanwhile, the Linux on HP/Dell/etc. PocketPC movement will become stronger, since those devices will be readily available, and there will be a small dedicated core of people to write great software for it (case in point: Opie).
I mentioned this to a friend of mine that works at Acxiom, and he told me if I had read the article completely (RTFAC?), I would have realized this incident happened last year, and the only news is that they want to press charges against the people involved now that the Justice Department has completed the investigation. There have not been any new break-ins, he says, and the company has beefed up security since then.
Wait...I seem to remember another PC operating system that was supposedly vastly superior than the market dominating environment, but one of it's great features was that it could run that environment's apps, right alongside the superior OS's apps. Though obviously, once you had experienced this wonderful new way of working, you'd eventually convert to all new native apps. What was that OS? (think...think...think...)
Oh right. It was OS/2!
Seriously, rarely have OSes succeeded when one of their main benefits was running another OS's software. SCOX and Sun have made various stabs at convincing customers UnixWare and Solaris run Linux apps, and they are still hemoraging marketshare. Though Microsoft's marketing machine is second to none, I still can't believe customers will buy Longhorn as an integration/migration platform. That marketing never worked in the past, why would it work now?
Oh wait, that's right: Microsoft is expecting it to work 4 years from now. OK, then perhaps they believe in 4 years Linux will have made so many inroads they'll have to run Linux apps. Maybe we really are winning after all!
The significance of the National Retail Federation speaking out against SCOX may be deeper than some realize. One of SCO Unix's core markets (if not the only one) was/is retail point of sale systems. In the 1980s and early 90s, SCO Unix (and its Xenix predecessor) was one of the few choices available to run a POS system on affordable PC hardware. If SCO Unix has any market left, it is the members of the NRF, many of whom have large deployments of SCO Unix throughout their store chains. Who even runs SCO Unix anymore? The answer is these people. The companies in the NRF comprise the SCO Unix core market, and if SCOX plans on continuing to sell software to businesses, it needs them.
But now, these companies, the last customers SCOX has, have turned against them. With their previously existing relationship, SCOX could have been in a good position to sell them Linux, but they have ruined that opportunity now. What tiny market SCO Unix had is gone, and any hope SCOX had of continuing to be a software company just went with it.
On the other hand, their litigation isn't going well either. Better say goodbye, folks, because SCOX is not long for this world.
...because they were losing money on it. According to the 10K report they filed with the SEC, Red Hat's revenues from retail boxes had dropped 20% over the past year, and they predicted an even steeper drop for this year. So they decided to shift their focus to their profitable Enterprise Server business, and open up the base distribution to more community involvment.
If you don't mind doing the support yourself (or contracting with 3rd party), the Red Hat standard distro should run everything the Enterprise versions do. Keep in mind, too, that last I checked, Red Hat 9 wasn't certified to run Oracle anyway (in fact, 7.3 is still probably the best choice for that).
While we're at it, let's publicly abandon the Unix trademark (which is likely unenforcable, anyway).
NO. Remember, the UNIX trademark is owned by the Open Group and used by them basically for certification purposes.
SCOX does own the copyrights to the Unix System V codebase (apparently because Novell sold it to them and then forgot about it). Releasing that code to the public domain or under an open or free source license would prove valuable and help to ensure this mess doesn't happen again.
"All students will know someone is watching them, tracking them, and is interested in their success"
Yes, because nothing says "I care" like a Big Brother-style database in the hands of government employees. OTOH, paranoid students on the edge of a killing spree can now take comfort in the fact that, indeed, someone is watching them and keeping tabs on them via computer.
And yes, I know that last statement sounds harsh and unfeeling. Just like Big Brother's database.
OK, yeah maybe "Judgement Day is Inevitable," or maybe Cyberdyne got their mitts on the arm that was left behind in T2. The chip and arm from T1 was destroyed, and the T1000 and 101 was destroyed, but one of the machines in the factory tore off one of the 101 unit's arms. Sure, it was mangled, but hey, the chip Cyberdyne initially found was smashed too...
See, think of your life time as a string, with one end representing your birth, and the other end your death. Put the ends together, and ball up the string, and the days of your life touch each other out of sequence...
with the principals of the earlier deal, many of whom no longer appear to be in power at Novell.
Forget Novell; SCO isn't even the SCO that bought UNIX (or whatever they actually bought). Today's SCO is Caldera that bought pieces of SCO and changed their name to SCO!
SCO's problem here is they have only their word to back up their claim. Novell's press release says:
A simple review of U.S. Patent Office records reveals that Novell owns those patents.
And as for the copyrights:
SCO is not the owner of the UNIX copyrights. Not only would a quick check of U.S. Copyright Office records reveal this fact, but a review of the asset transfer agreement between Novell and SCO confirms it.
So maybe SCO thought they owned UNIX. But Novell has the paperwork to prove they do.
Yes, and according to the press release, THAT's why Novell has become so upset over this. NetWare is practically dead in the market. Novell has finally come up with a (possibly) workable business model based on Linux. And now SCO has decided to try to wreck Linux (with code Novell owns), and ruin Novell's plan. Novell is NOT happy.
After turning this over in my head a bit, I think you're right. SCO can go after IBM for breach of contract, but it would be Novell that would need to begin procedings to remove the code from Linux.
Yes, except that, from their press release, Novell doesn't believe Linux contains SysV code, and challenged SCO to prove it.
The Open Group was assigned the trademark rights to the UNIX(TM) name for purposes of standards compliance (you can't call your OS UNIX(TM) without them). What we've found out today, however, is Novell, not SCO, owns the UNIX System V code and its assocated copyrights and patents.
in court the judge will see SCO's lawyers, all sharp and buttoned down,...and on the other side, will see unwashed, smelly, hairy anti-capitalist hackers
Dude, nobody's lawyers are sharper or more buttoned down than IBM's!
UNIX the commercial product was sold by ATT to SCO (or its precursor). SCO then licensed this source code to IBM for the development of their own products (AIX?).
This is how it goes...
AT&T formed Unix Systems Labs during one of several breakups, assigning all UNIX IP to them. They then sold it to Novell. Novell used the UNIX to create UnixWare, to complement their NetWare OS.
Novell fell on hard times, and sold USL and UnixWare to SCO. SCO finally released a SCO Unix based on SVR4 (SCO OpenServer was stuck on SVR3 I think).
SCO fell on hard times, and decided to exit the Unix business altogether and concentrate on their Tarantella product. Caldera buys USL, the SCO OS business, and the SCO name. What was left of SCO changes its name to Tarantella.
Caldera files papers to "Do Business As" (which is a legal term) The SCO Group, which is fine since they own rights to the SCO name now. However, it does cloud the issue somewhat since people see "SCO" and immediately think the old Santa Cruz Operation people, but those people are happily doing their own thing as Tarantella, minding their own business. The tragedy of this whole mess is it was started by Caldera (d/b/a The SCO Group), a Linux vendor. OTOH, by possibly distributing their proprietary code under the GPL, Caldera might have unwittingly destroyed their case against IBM and the other Linux vendors.
I don't know when IBM licensed Unix, but AIX is old, so I would imagine it was back when AT&T owned it.