I was speaking of Mom and Pop, or just above that: Small Business, 5 to 50 users or so.
Of course the quote from me was constructed from sentences snipped from larger paragraphs, but with that explanation, it's not inaccurate: very few of my customers know anything about this crap, and couldn't tell you if they are running SCO, HP, Linux or anything else. They probasbly do know it ain't Windows.
Back in the days of terminals, most of my customers thought they were running something called "Link" or "Wyse":-)
I wouldn't necessarily disagree that there is too much arrogance in the Linux community (I'd argue the point, though) but this isn't an example.
Reviewers are most valuable for people who are at about the same technical level as they are. So (as you seem to say), this untechy reviewer might be just what you need.
But for others, a more technical examination would be more valuable, and my suspicion is that MOST Slashdot readers are more apt to fall onto the techy side of the curve.
I think the explanation of the lack of negatives was right on the money.
We watch movies of murder, and we censor the breast
Well, duh. as should be obvious to everyone who has ever seen one, breasts are very, very dangerous.
Not as bad as penises though. Those things can poke your eye out.
Seriously: the general fear of anything sexual is sick. Not that sex isn't a powerful emotional force that needs respect and careful handling. But I think on balance we'd be far better off with more sex and less violence.
Look, the point is that you can't just easily distribute some simple little thing to unknown recipients.
That doesn't mean Windows is a sucky OS : there are other reasons for that:-)
You CAN write a DOS bat that will work anywhere (maybe a few things you have to avoid if you might have some very old boxes out in your path). But DOS batch files are really limited - hard to call them a scripting language unless you are in a real generous mood.
VBScript is not so awful. I'm no great fan, but it's a reasonable tool and you can do simple tasks fairly efficiently. I'd much rather have even a Bash shell, but it's better than nothing. But there IS a real distribution barrier for simple, non-commercial little thingies.
OK, I'm not serious. But really: too many people use really dumb spreadsheets to do things they SHOULD be doing in a simple script.
The other day I was asked to evaluate a tool someone wanted to sell that required some simple input (size of your disk, a few preferences for file systems) and that would output suggested file system layouts. Nice little helpful thing for some folks. I doubt he could sell it for any price at all, but that wasn't my main objection: the darn thing was a big (BIG) ugly spreadsheet.
I suggested that Perl or VBScript would do this easily, and also suggested that what it probably needed to be is a html form powered by a cgi back end. Heck, ugly and dumb as it would be, they could even get that same spreadsheet to give up its answers to a web page. The response was that they had no one in the organization that could do that and it was too much trouble to learn. Pretty amazing, I think.
I see spreadsheets used as databases all the time, and of course they are usually awful. The programming effort that goes into building and maintaining these monsters has to be tremendous, but it's "too hard" to learn even a simple thing like Perl.
I agree (and I'm rather anti-Windows in general), but the biggest problem with this is the difficulty of distributing WSH scripts to someone else. It's not fun: you really need a professional installer program if you want people to be able to easily use the program you wrote. For many little one-off's, that's a lot more effort than the script was.
scripting is all bourne shell, AWK, and TCL/TK; the utilities are all vintage 70's stuff like more (can't back scroll) rather than less and vi rather than emacs or vim. So what must people who actualy use or admin SCO systems do is install some modern GNU utilities, Perl, and of course GCC.
While SCO has been slow with this stuff, modern versions have had Perl for a while and the latest 5.0.7 has most of what you'd expect a modern Unix system to have. See http://aplawrence.com/Reviews/osr507.html if you care.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, though the "bizarre" characters problem probably could have been solved some other way:
http://www.pcunix.com/SCOFAQ/scotec2.html#oldapps
and http://www.pcunix.com/SCOFAQ/scotec2.html#mapchan
She says she was shown indentical comments. If true, that could be rather damning.
I wish they would at least publish the comments though. It's hard to know what she saw. Some similarity in simple comments could be accidental. But if it's long strings of identical comments..
Most of what I read at Slashdot doesn't seem to care if it's true or not. If IBM really did steal code, doesn't
that mean anything? Or is it OK to steal as long as the people you steal for are happy - is this some Robin Hood thing?
Before you get pissed at me:
Look, I don't like this at all. I think this can do serious damage to both Linux and Unix and that the only people who win here are the immoral scum who run Microsoft. But if it really is theft, the fact that a great big stinking mess follows is not a reason to ignore it.
The fallout from this lawsuit could destroy my business. It could quite literally change my whole life, and not for the better. I have a lot to lose, and the prospects are rather frightening. But that doesn't change morality: if it IS theft, then whatever has to happen has to happen, and if it destroys me, well, that's life, right?
I'm still hoping that this is going to blow over fairly harmlessly. Of course I'm also hoping to win the lottery next week, right?
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding the mechanics of cells or the chemistry of life.
I also take issue with the greater argument (though unrelated to this thread). What does it mean to "understand yourself"? It can't mean that we can't map out major areas of responsibility in our brains, because we've already done that. It can't mean that we can't understand the chemistry that affects the brains operation, because we understand more and more of that every day.
Nor is the mind a "closed system" in this context because we can and do examine all sorts of other minds. We know quite a bit about pyschology (how the complex organ reacts) from that: if Godel's theorem really had any bearing on this we wouldn't know squat about any of that, and quite a few folks would need to find other employment.
So just what is it we supposedly cannot understand?
But back to the chemistry of cells: my personal opinion is that defining "life" is exactly the same as defining "complicated": it's all chemistry and what you call living or not is just a matter of definition. No doubt that opinion will be sneered at, but I bet someday it will be generally accepted as correct.
Again though, if your religious beliefs insist that there's something mysterious here, a "life force" that isn't related to chemistry, then there's nothing more to be said. We'll never understand life because it requires more than chemistry and physics. I don't believe that for a minute, but it's OK if someone else does - as long as that belief isn't used as a reason to prevent the advance of knowledge.
Well, stick around, you'll probably be proved wrong.
Ever since the first glimmerings of scientific thought people having been asserting that such and such is just too complicated and will never be understood.
Life is nothing but sufficiently complex chemistry, and chemistry is nothing but applied physics. Of course if you have religious beliefs that insist otherwise, you probably won't ever believe that, and I'm not a bit interested in trying to convince you. However, I am fully convinced, and already biology and chemistry are getting very chummy at their unions. In its turn, chemistry will yield to physics eventually. At that level, it may be true that we can't fully understand certain interactions - or at least can't predict individual events with perfect accuracy. But that doesn't matter in the larger world, does it? An individual atom may indeed move unexpectedly for reasons we may never be able to grasp, but we still know that if you boil water you mostly get steam. It's reliable, predictable, and understandable. We'll reach the same level with biology, chemistry and physics eventually.
As to the argument that we can't ever understand ourselves, that's a philosophical position I have no patience with. We are quite obviously made of higher level structures that in turn are built from lower level structures. We are learning more and more about the chemistry and the mechanics of cells, and we've haven't needed any "guide" to help us . Again, your religious beliefs may say otherwise and I again have no desire to argue about that.
Nor am I overly interested in arguments that draw on the idea that a program can't prove itself correct. That's all well and good, but a program COULD repair another program that was under assault from bit changing viri.
So: if we know the mechanics of a cell and are capable of repairing or duplicating it, we have all we need for effective immortality (ineffective when exposed to sudden nuclear blasts at close range, of course).
Of course if you think life didn't come from chemistry, if you instead think that gods designed it all, that's your right and I am all in favor of whatever makes you happy. But I do think it's pointless to invoke the God argument in a discussion like this. If you believe in such things, then of course we may never be able to understand life, and there's no point (as far as I am concerned) in discussing whether that God did or did not make it simple enough for us to tinker with. It may be an interesting theological argument, but such things are of no interest to me.
If you leave superior beings out of it, we will understand cellular chemistry. Count on it.
No matter what breaks, it can be repaired. The time, effort and expense may not be justified, but you CAN fix it. Why? Because the technology is completely understood.
We don't understand the technology of cells yet, but we are heading in that direction. Again, barring disruption by our own stupidity or natural disaster, there will come a day when we can "fix" anything biologically wrong because we can fix or replace cellular machinery. It doesn't matter what "comes along" if you really understand the technology: whatever it is, you can fix it.
It's easy to imagine little machines running through your body repairing cellular damage or just replacing defective cells with healthy versions. Your body already has such mechanisms, but someday we will improve on what evolution has provided. Evolution does accomplish wonderful things, but it gets there by blunder: if we understand the mechanics fully, we should be able to do much better. Someday. Probably long after I'm gone, but you never know: sometimes things happen faster than you expect.
Consider that if the ability to do all that perfectly is a thousand years away (probably isn't, but..), all you need to do to be there for it is to survive long enough that the technology pushes you along to the next advancement. In other words, if you can live until the technology could push you to two hundred years, during that next period it might advance yet again and so on.
I really believe that people in their twenties now have a real shot at living "forever" (whatever that means).
Of course there's nothing like superstition, prejudice, ignorance and general stupidity to screw that up.
I've often thought that it won't be too long before all disease can be cured. I doubt I'll live long enough to see it, but I bet my children will.
That of course assumes that the religious right doesn't screw it up, that world conflict doesn't drive us back into the stone age, and that large rocks don't come raining down on us from outer space.
If it does come to pass, it's interesting to think about how societies will change. If I had several hundred years of healthy living to look forward to, there are so many things I'd want to learn..
I would think that human life would become more precious too: longevity might even be a disincentive to war. There would always be deaths from accidents, but population growth would have to be carefully managed.. and so many other effects..
Also ticking off their user base
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For many a year, SCO's technical article database http://www.sco.com/ta has been a decent place to find technical nuggets about things SCOish.
Now, as you can see from that page, it will be retired on June 16th and replaced with a new database. Unfortunately, the new database won't have all the same information available unless you are a reseller partner or have paid for support. There's a thread at comp.unix.sco.misc discussing this, and as you can imagine, even those who would still like to find some reason to feel good about SCO are more than annoyed.
In the interests of total honesty, at the moment at least it is easy and free to become a SCO partner and get full access to the database. But as SCO insiders have specifically said that the purpose of this is to generate more support income for resellers, how long will that last?
Also, if you are battling a problem at 2:00 am and google a link to the ta that would solve your problem, will you enjoy having to sign up as a partner to find out why the stupid thing won't boot? I doubt it. My bet is your next move would be to install Linux right over it..
New Hamphire license plates carry the motto "Live free or die", but not very many of us would even "Live free or be uneasy".
There is a real threat of terrorism, but our reaction to it is completely inappropriate. Every week in the United States alone a thousand people or so die as a result of automobile accidents. Every single week. If we reacted to that like we react to terrorism, we'd have 25 mph speed limits, checkpoints at every intersection, and we'd all be wearing helmets!
I had an installation job this morning in Charlestown, which is part of greater Boston (MA). My wife was worried because Boston was mentioned as a possible target. She wasn't worried about my commute, but the reality is that was and is much more dangerous.
Many of the people I hear fretting and worrying about terrorism are overweight or smokers or both. It's pretty obvious that the statistical risk of their lives being affected by terrorist activity is vanishingly small. Their risk of a heart attack or lung cancer is much higher, yet they won't change their lifestyle. But rampant invasion of privacy and loss of freedom is fine.
Live free or vote Republican:-)
Remember: the Democrats may waste your money, but you can always make more. It's not so easy to make more freedom.
I wonder if SCO knows (or cares) how much damage t
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Disclaimer: I'm a log time SCO reseller/consultant and although I do more and more Linux, a lot of my business is still SCO. Which probably makes me prejudiced.
When Microsoft was under assault by the Justice Dept., they whined that any harsh punishment would have drastic effects on our economy. I think this suit has equally undesirable consequences.
Chances are that this will all blow over with little or nothing changing. Either they'll lose, or they'll win but won't be so greedy as to kill of the golden goose. Let's hope so, anyway.
But suppose they are as rapacious and unprincipled as Microsoft? Suppose they actually have a case, and actually win, and start demanding outrageous royalties and compensation for previous sales?
That could destroy Linux. Destroying Linux makes Microsoft stronger and only hastens SCO's own already progressing downward spiral. No doubt it would affect FreeBSD also because of FUD if nothing else. While it might not directly affect Sun and Apple, making Microsoft stronger doesn't help.
My wife and I talked about this today. Without a strong base of Unix/Linux customers, you can stick a large fork in me. It's been my life for 20 years. I am NOT going to start doing Microsoft crapola now; I'm too old, too tired, and I dislike their stuff too much.
OK, putting me out of business doesn't kill the economy. But how many others will be similarly displaced and disenfranchised?
Can anyone guesstimate what the economic consequences of the Worst Case Scenario might be?
The question is not how many continents there are, but how important they are.
This month's ASAP (attached to Forbes - yes, I hate their politics but I read the mag anyway) posits that the Internet bubble is about to burst, primarily becauase they see the "revolution" following the same path as other technologies have.
Maybe they are right, but I think that their analogies to railroads, telephones and the like don't necessarily model what's happening here. They forecast a great period of consolidation, where all the little RR companies get swept up into the few surviving giants or just get pushed under.
But I'm not sure the Internet has to follow that model at all. Small sites, even teeny-weeny sites, can compete with the giants. Sure there will be failures and shakeouts, and the big dogs will get more and more powerful, but little guys can still come in and carve out a territory for themselves.
I don't think people of the Forbes mindset really comprehend any of this.
it's probably not the network administrators who are to blame either - it's their managers and organization who are often clueless as to what is required and therefore hire the first the best guy who can spell "Windows NT" without making too many mistakes. Being a bit harsh - I know - but these days people are hired on "vendor certificates" (as in MCP and CNE)
Two things that contribute to this: in past years, the manager of a techy group was probably a techy too. Nowadays, the manager is more apt to be an MBA who truly cannot distinguish talent from b.s. Anybody who understands anything about technology is brilliant to them- when you are two feet tall, everybody looks like a giant.
As to certifications, it's CYA. If you hire a seemingly bright person with no degree and no certs and they screw something up, you are a jerk. If you hire somebody with the right degrees and the right certs, it doesn't matter: you did your due diligence and nobody will blame you.
I'm a RealNames customer, BTW. If this was sloppiness and stupidity on their part (rather good bet, probably), I'm twice as mad as I would be if it truly was a clever hack.
The leaked story is patently untrue. This could be a complete hoax based on an old James Bond novel or it could be something else, but it is not a story about greedy hackers. Breaking into a military satellite's "command and control" functionality would involve by necessity confidential information residing with government or contractors. This is a case of stolen intelligence if it is a case at all.
Would a hacker be able to hack his way into a sophisticated military satellite without the aid of inside information of any sort, I doubt it. Even a small organization of hackers working on the various problem would most likely never succeed. If they were to succeed they would have to possess intelligence in excess of that which would be necessary to believe they could publicly blackmail the British Government and get away with it.
If not hackers, then whom to suspect. Foreign intelligence services if in possession of such information would be better served by selling or trading in such matters or keeping quiet until such time as it was in their vital national interest to use the information such as thwarting an important British operation or in an attack on Britain.
The most likely, aside from hoax, perpetrators are Britons and/or Americans interested in destabilizing the British government. MI5 and MI6 like the FBI, NSA, and CIA as well as the respective intelligence agencies of military organizations all posses divisions with the capability of involving themselves in this kind of operation. We still do not know who produced the "Squid gee" tapes which exposed "degraded" Royal behavior.
The Blair administration like the Clinton administration in this country seems to lead a "charmed" existence. What, where, and how that "charm" exists is unclear to the public, and the public does not focus on that "charm". It is quite likely that in some agency their are those with some knowledge of the charm and some who are willing to act.
Example - US And British Forces are now prepared to actively invade Serbia. We have announced plans to bomb that independent country and occupy a portion of its territory on behalf of a minority which wishes to secede and join another state. Exactly the reverse of our stand in Bosnia. What is our position in Turkey or the Congo. Such a position directly in opposition to the Russian (and to a lesser extent Chinese) would seem outlandish on a risk reward basis. What are the Governments doing. Are they deliberately trying to destabilize Russia which will be humiliated or forced to act? Some people may have a better insight into what really is happening than those of us on the outside and perhaps we are seeing a shadow cast by a battle we do not fully understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I was speaking of Mom and Pop, or just above that:
:-)
Small Business, 5 to 50 users or so.
Of course the quote from me was constructed from sentences snipped from larger paragraphs, but with that explanation, it's not inaccurate: very few of my customers know anything about this crap, and couldn't tell you if they are running SCO, HP, Linux or anything else. They probasbly do know it ain't Windows.
Back in the days of terminals, most of my customers thought they were running something called "Link" or "Wyse"
At least not this time.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree that there is too much arrogance in the Linux community (I'd argue the point, though) but this isn't an example.
Reviewers are most valuable for people who are at about the same technical level as they are. So (as you seem to say), this untechy reviewer might be just what you need.
But for others, a more technical examination would be more valuable, and my suspicion is that MOST Slashdot readers are more apt to fall onto the techy side of the curve.
I think the explanation of the lack of negatives was right on the money.
Well, duh. as should be obvious to everyone who has ever seen one, breasts are very, very dangerous.
Not as bad as penises though. Those things can poke your eye out.
Seriously: the general fear of anything sexual is sick. Not that sex isn't a powerful emotional force that needs respect and careful handling. But I think on balance we'd be far better off with more sex and less violence.
Look, the point is that you can't just easily distribute some simple little thing to unknown recipients.
That doesn't mean Windows is a sucky OS : there are other reasons for that :-)
You CAN write a DOS bat that will work anywhere (maybe a few things you have to avoid if you might have some very old boxes out in your path). But DOS batch files are really limited - hard to call them a scripting language unless you are in a real generous mood.
VBScript is not so awful. I'm no great fan, but it's a reasonable tool and you can do simple tasks fairly efficiently. I'd much rather have even a Bash shell, but it's better than nothing. But there IS a real distribution barrier for simple, non-commercial little thingies.
While newer MS systems will have WSH, older systems don't necessarily..
OK, I'm not serious. But really: too many people use really dumb spreadsheets to do things they SHOULD be doing in a simple script.
The other day I was asked to evaluate a tool someone wanted to sell that required some simple input (size of your disk, a few preferences for file systems) and that would output suggested file system layouts. Nice little helpful thing for some folks. I doubt he could sell it for any price at all, but that wasn't my main objection: the darn thing was a big (BIG) ugly spreadsheet.
I suggested that Perl or VBScript would do this easily, and also suggested that what it probably needed to be is a html form powered by a cgi back end. Heck, ugly and dumb as it would be, they could even get that same spreadsheet to give up its answers to a web page. The response was that they had no one in the organization that could do that and it was too much trouble to learn. Pretty amazing, I think.
I see spreadsheets used as databases all the time, and of course they are usually awful. The programming effort that goes into building and maintaining these monsters has to be tremendous, but it's "too hard" to learn even a simple thing like Perl.
I agree (and I'm rather anti-Windows in general), but the biggest problem with this is the difficulty of distributing WSH scripts to someone else. It's not fun: you really need a professional installer program if you want people to be able to easily use the program you wrote. For many little one-off's, that's a lot more effort than the script was.
While SCO has been slow with this stuff, modern versions have had Perl for a while and the latest 5.0.7 has most of what you'd expect a modern Unix system to have. See http://aplawrence.com/Reviews/osr507.html if you care.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, though the "bizarre" characters problem probably could have been solved some other way:
http://www.pcunix.com/SCOFAQ/scotec2.html#oldapps
and http://www.pcunix.com/SCOFAQ/scotec2.html#mapchan
She says she was shown indentical comments. If true, that could be rather damning.
I wish they would at least publish the comments though. It's hard to know what she saw. Some similarity in simple comments could be accidental. But if it's long strings of identical comments..
Most of what I read at Slashdot doesn't seem to care if it's true or not. If IBM really did steal code, doesn't that mean anything? Or is it OK to steal as long as the people you steal for are happy - is this some Robin Hood thing?
Before you get pissed at me:
Look, I don't like this at all. I think this can do serious damage to both Linux and Unix and that the only people who win here are the immoral scum who run Microsoft. But if it really is theft, the fact that a great big stinking mess follows is not a reason to ignore it.
The fallout from this lawsuit could destroy my business. It could quite literally change my whole life, and not for the better. I have a lot to lose, and the prospects are rather frightening. But that doesn't change morality: if it IS theft, then whatever has to happen has to happen, and if it destroys me, well, that's life, right?
I'm still hoping that this is going to blow over fairly harmlessly. Of course I'm also hoping to win the lottery next week, right?
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding the mechanics of cells or the chemistry of life.
I also take issue with the greater argument (though unrelated to this thread). What does it mean to "understand yourself"? It can't mean that we can't map out major areas of responsibility in our brains, because we've already done that. It can't mean that we can't understand the chemistry that affects the brains operation, because we understand more and more of that every day.
Nor is the mind a "closed system" in this context because we can and do examine all sorts of other minds. We know quite a bit about pyschology (how the complex organ reacts) from that: if Godel's theorem really had any bearing on this we wouldn't know squat about any of that, and quite a few folks would need to find other employment.
So just what is it we supposedly cannot understand?
But back to the chemistry of cells: my personal opinion is that defining "life" is exactly the same as defining "complicated": it's all chemistry and what you call living or not is just a matter of definition. No doubt that opinion will be sneered at, but I bet someday it will be generally accepted as correct.
Again though, if your religious beliefs insist that there's something mysterious here, a "life force" that isn't related to chemistry, then there's nothing more to be said. We'll never understand life because it requires more than chemistry and physics. I don't believe that for a minute, but it's OK if someone else does - as long as that belief isn't used as a reason to prevent the advance of knowledge.
Well, stick around, you'll probably be proved wrong.
Ever since the first glimmerings of scientific thought people having been asserting that such and such is just too complicated and will never be understood.
Life is nothing but sufficiently complex chemistry, and chemistry is nothing but applied physics. Of course if you have religious beliefs that insist otherwise, you probably won't ever believe that, and I'm not a bit interested in trying to convince you. However, I am fully convinced, and already biology and chemistry are getting very chummy at their unions. In its turn, chemistry will yield to physics eventually. At that level, it may be true that we can't fully understand certain interactions - or at least can't predict individual events with perfect accuracy. But that doesn't matter in the larger world, does it? An individual atom
may indeed move unexpectedly for reasons we may never be able to grasp, but we still know that if you boil water you mostly get steam. It's reliable, predictable, and understandable. We'll reach the same level with biology, chemistry and physics eventually.
As to the argument that we can't ever understand ourselves, that's a philosophical position I have no patience with. We are quite obviously made of higher level structures that in turn are built from lower level structures. We are learning more and more about the chemistry and the mechanics of cells, and we've haven't needed any "guide" to help us . Again, your religious beliefs may say otherwise and I again have no desire to argue about that.
Nor am I overly interested in arguments that draw on the idea that a program can't prove itself correct. That's all well and good, but a program COULD repair another program that was under assault from bit changing viri.
So: if we know the mechanics of a cell and are capable of repairing or duplicating it, we have all we need for effective immortality (ineffective when exposed to sudden nuclear blasts at close range, of course).
Of course if you think life didn't come from chemistry, if you instead think that gods designed it all, that's your right and I am all in favor of whatever makes you happy. But I do think it's pointless to invoke the God argument in a discussion like this. If you believe in such things, then of course we may never be able to understand life, and there's no point (as far as I am concerned) in discussing whether that God did or did not make it simple enough for us to tinker with. It may be an interesting theological argument, but such things are of no interest to me.
If you leave superior beings out of it, we will understand cellular chemistry. Count on it.
Consider your computer.
No matter what breaks, it can be repaired. The time, effort and expense may not be justified, but you CAN fix it. Why? Because the technology is completely understood.
We don't understand the technology of cells yet, but we are heading in that direction. Again, barring disruption by our own stupidity or natural disaster, there will come a day when we can "fix" anything biologically wrong because we can fix or replace cellular machinery. It doesn't matter what "comes along" if you really understand the technology: whatever it is, you can fix it.
It's easy to imagine little machines running through your body repairing cellular damage or just replacing defective cells with healthy versions. Your body already has such mechanisms, but someday we will improve on what evolution has provided. Evolution does accomplish wonderful things, but it gets there by blunder: if we understand the mechanics fully, we should be able to do much better. Someday. Probably long after I'm gone, but you never know: sometimes things happen faster than you expect.
Consider that if the ability to do all that perfectly is a thousand years away (probably isn't, but..), all you need to do to be there for it is to survive long enough that the technology pushes you along to the next advancement. In other words, if you can live until the technology could push you to two hundred years, during that next period it might advance yet again and so on.
I really believe that people in their twenties now have a real shot at living "forever" (whatever that means).
Of course there's nothing like superstition, prejudice, ignorance and general stupidity to screw that up.
I've often thought that it won't be too long before all disease can be cured. I doubt I'll live long enough to see it, but I bet my children will.
That of course assumes that the religious right doesn't screw it up, that world conflict doesn't drive us back into the stone age, and that large rocks don't come raining down on us from outer space.
If it does come to pass, it's interesting to think about how societies will change. If I had several hundred years of healthy living to look forward to, there are so many things I'd want to learn..
I would think that human life would become more precious too: longevity might even be a disincentive to war. There would always be deaths from accidents, but population growth would have to be carefully managed.. and so many other effects..
Now, as you can see from that page, it will be retired on June 16th and replaced with a new database. Unfortunately, the new database won't have all the same information available unless you are a reseller partner or have paid for support. There's a thread at comp.unix.sco.misc discussing this, and as you can imagine, even those who would still like to find some reason to feel good about SCO are more than annoyed.
In the interests of total honesty, at the moment at least it is easy and free to become a SCO partner and get full access to the database. But as SCO insiders have specifically said that the purpose of this is to generate more support income for resellers, how long will that last?
Also, if you are battling a problem at 2:00 am and google a link to the ta that would solve your problem, will you enjoy having to sign up as a partner to find out why the stupid thing won't boot? I doubt it. My bet is your next move would be to install Linux right over it..
(Yes, I sent this to Eric too):
You probably know about this, but just in case:
The book "Unix Internals- A Practical Approach" by Steve Pate ISBN 020187721X
is based on SCO's Open Server Release 5.
Whether it reveals any trade secrets or not I do not know, but it's probably worth a scan if you didn't already know about it.
New Hamphire license plates carry the motto "Live free or die", but not very many of us would even "Live free or be uneasy".
There is a real threat of terrorism, but our reaction to it is completely inappropriate. Every week in the United States alone a thousand people or so die as a result of automobile accidents. Every single week. If we reacted to that like we react to terrorism, we'd have 25 mph speed limits, checkpoints at every intersection, and we'd all be wearing helmets!
I had an installation job this morning in Charlestown, which is part of greater Boston (MA). My wife was worried because Boston was mentioned as a possible target. She wasn't worried about my commute, but the reality is that was and is much more dangerous.
Many of the people I hear fretting and worrying about terrorism are overweight or smokers or both. It's pretty obvious that the statistical risk of their lives being affected by terrorist activity is vanishingly small. Their risk of a heart attack or lung cancer is much higher, yet they won't change their lifestyle. But rampant invasion of privacy and loss of freedom is fine.
Live free or vote Republican :-)
Remember: the Democrats may waste your money, but you can always make more. It's not so easy to make more freedom.
Disclaimer: I'm a log time SCO reseller/consultant and although I do more and more Linux, a lot of my business is still SCO. Which probably makes me prejudiced.
When Microsoft was under assault by the Justice Dept., they whined that any harsh punishment would have drastic effects on our economy. I think this suit has equally undesirable consequences.
Chances are that this will all blow over with little or nothing changing. Either they'll lose, or they'll win but won't be so greedy as to kill of the golden goose. Let's hope so, anyway.
But suppose they are as rapacious and unprincipled as Microsoft? Suppose they actually have a case, and actually win, and start demanding outrageous royalties and compensation for previous sales?
That could destroy Linux. Destroying Linux makes Microsoft stronger and only hastens SCO's own already progressing downward spiral. No doubt it would affect FreeBSD also because of FUD if nothing else. While it might not directly affect Sun and Apple, making Microsoft stronger doesn't help.
My wife and I talked about this today. Without a strong base of Unix/Linux customers, you can stick a large fork in me. It's been my life for 20 years. I am NOT going to start doing Microsoft crapola now; I'm too old, too tired, and I dislike their stuff too much.
OK, putting me out of business doesn't kill the economy. But how many others will be similarly displaced and disenfranchised?
Can anyone guesstimate what the economic consequences of the Worst Case Scenario might be?
This month's ASAP (attached to Forbes - yes, I hate their politics but I read the mag anyway) posits that the Internet bubble is about to burst, primarily becauase they see the "revolution" following the same path as other technologies have.
Maybe they are right, but I think that their analogies to railroads, telephones and the like don't necessarily model what's happening here. They forecast a great period of consolidation, where all the little RR companies get swept up into the few surviving giants or just get pushed under.
But I'm not sure the Internet has to follow that model at all. Small sites, even teeny-weeny sites, can compete with the giants. Sure there will be failures and shakeouts, and the big dogs will get more and more powerful, but little guys can still come in and carve out a territory for themselves.
I don't think people of the Forbes mindset really comprehend any of this.
Two things that contribute to this: in past years, the manager of a techy group was probably a techy too. Nowadays, the manager is more apt to be an MBA who truly cannot distinguish talent from b.s. Anybody who understands anything about technology is brilliant to them- when you are two feet tall, everybody looks like a giant.
As to certifications, it's CYA. If you hire a seemingly bright person with no degree and no certs and they screw something up, you are a jerk. If you hire somebody with the right degrees and the right certs, it doesn't matter: you did your due diligence and nobody will blame you.
I'm a RealNames customer, BTW. If this was sloppiness and stupidity on their part (rather good bet, probably), I'm twice as mad as I would be if it truly was a clever hack.
I believe the house was owned by the Levy family.
The leaked story is patently untrue. This could be a complete hoax based on an old James Bond novel or it could be something else, but it is not a story about greedy hackers. Breaking into a military satellite's "command and control" functionality would involve by necessity confidential information residing with government or contractors. This is a case of stolen intelligence if it is a case at all.
Would a hacker be able to hack his way into a sophisticated military satellite without the aid of inside information of any sort, I doubt it. Even a small organization of hackers working on the various problem would most likely never succeed. If they were to succeed they would have to possess intelligence in excess of that which would be necessary to believe they could publicly blackmail the British Government and get away with it.
If not hackers, then whom to suspect. Foreign intelligence services if in possession of such information would be better served by selling or trading in such matters or keeping quiet until such time as it was in their vital national interest to use the information such as thwarting an important British operation or in an attack on Britain.
The most likely, aside from hoax, perpetrators are Britons and/or Americans interested in destabilizing the British government. MI5 and MI6 like the FBI, NSA, and CIA as well as the respective intelligence agencies of military organizations all posses divisions with the capability of involving themselves in this kind of operation. We still do not know who produced the "Squid gee" tapes which exposed "degraded" Royal behavior.
The Blair administration like the Clinton administration in this country seems to lead a "charmed" existence. What, where, and how that "charm" exists is unclear to the public, and the public does not focus on that "charm". It is quite likely that in some agency their are those with some knowledge of the charm and some who are willing to act.
Example - US And British Forces are now prepared to actively invade Serbia. We have announced plans to bomb that independent country and occupy a portion of its territory on behalf of a minority which wishes to secede and join another state. Exactly the reverse of our stand in Bosnia. What is our position in Turkey or the Congo. Such a position directly in opposition to the Russian (and to a lesser extent Chinese) would seem outlandish on a risk reward basis. What are the Governments doing. Are they deliberately trying to destabilize Russia which will be humiliated or forced to act? Some people may have a better insight into what really is happening than those of us on the outside and perhaps we are seeing a shadow cast by a battle we do not fully understand.
He does not have to physically ban them; only pronounce them banned. If they wish to sneak back, let them.
This is only a moral argument, nothing more, but it should suffice.
ASL
Ban the bastards from your website until they apologize for their rude behavior.