I guess you have no memory of REAGAN ACTUALLY SAYING THAT DURING IRAN-CONTRA.
Honestly, would it hurt to have a passing familiarity with the subject before bitching and moaning about "political flamebait"?
I recall that incident perfectly well, thank you. Reagan was clearly lying and making an ass of himself. Again, I'm not complaining because I love Reagan.
I'm "bitching and moaning," as you put it, because Michael either a.) just couldn't restrain himself from throwing a political jab into the story subhead or b.) thought a joke about Reagan's very well publicized descent into Alzheimer's-induced dementia would be oh so funny. Yayyyy michael.
Either way, my original point stands - I think the whole story was only posted as political flamebait, with Michael clearly stoking the fire. I don't care if you like Reagan or hate him, I just don't want any more of this junk on Slashdot.
Yes I know I can put Michael Sims' stories in my killfile, but he does post actual news stories as well, so I don't want to block those out. All I'm asking for is Taco, Hemos or somebody there to just tell Michael to cut the blatant flamebait shit out. If he wants to troll, do it in the comments section, not the story. The last time I checked, political flamebait was not Slashdot's mission.
USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow
Posted by michael on Friday July 11, @11:20AM
from the no-memory-of-those-events dept.
Jebus. I know that most of the Slashdot audience probably agrees politically with Michael, but it's pretty clear to me that this whole goddamn story is just an excuse for people to make snide jokes about Ronald Reagan. I don't care whether you like Reagan or not (I didn't particularly), but when did Slashdot get into the business of just posting Republican-baiting stories?
If I wanted political nastiness, I'd go to a political site. I DON'T. I want actual news for nerds and stuff that matters, not Michael Sims making jokes about Reagan's Alzheimer's. HA HA MICHAEL YUO = TEH FUNNEYMAN!!!!!
Go ahead, mod me down. But I hope somebody else stands up and asks the Slashdot editors to get Michael to cut this political flamebait crap. Republican, Democrat, I don't care, I just don't want to hear it anymore.
Why should we be giving authors incentives to create works in the first place?
Surely you're joking.
The whole "why copyright exists" argument could (and should, for many Slashdotters who don't live in the real world) fill a book, not a post on a RIAA thread. So I won't belittle the depth of reasons for the concept by giving an overly abridged recounting of them.
Let's just put it this way: giving people protective rights over their creative output (words, music, art, whatever) enables them to profit from those works. (Don't try that tired Slashdot "but musicians should only give concerts" crap with me. I'm talking about all creative works here, and authors won't work to do public readings, and painters aren't going to get paid by painting for an audience.)
Why is profiting from their work important? Because it allows them to be professional artists. And professionals can refine and improve their craft, creating superior works of art/music/literature/poetry/whatever that people (at least those who don't hang out on Slashdot) are willing to pay to enjoy.
Don't give me that "all artists should starve and work in their free time" bunk. The books/music/etc. that most people (maybe not you, but most people) enjoy was professionally created by someone who profited from their work and hence was able to do it full-time. Would James Joyce have been able to write "Ulysses" while holding down his part-time job at the pub? Would Miles Davis have been able to create "Kind of Blue" recording in his bedroom after working in a kitchen or a warehouse? I don't think the Who could have all taken time off from their jobs to meet up in the studio long enough to write and record "Quadrophenia." And Andy Warhol would have quit art in a nanosecond if he couldn't sell his art (yes, I know that's an interesting example). Yes, plenty of people create great works in their spare time if they have a job like "college professor" that gives them gobs of free time... but that's not most people.
The point is that you have to give artists (in the broader sense) the incentive/ability to control their works so they can profit on it, so they have the freedom to pursue their art professionally. If you think a world full of part-timers will produce works as enjoyable as those of the current system, I think you are seriously underestimating how hard it is to make good art, and how important it is to allow someone to pursue their craft full-time through profiting from controlling the copying and distribution of their own works.
No offense, but anyone who thinks it was a mistake or leak doesn't understand marketing.
No offense, Michael, but you pretty clearly don't understand marketing. There's no way this was intentional.
Why? Let's assume you have a big event coming up, with one big piece of news everyone is waiting for (in this case, G5s) and lots of other, smaller items that you want to talk about (Panther, whatever other goodies they have hidden). Remember, that big piece of news is the lure to get everyone watching the rest of the show.
So why on Earth would you spill the beans beforehand on your big item, so that some people would have gotten the info they wanted and will now not tune in to see the rest of it?
It's also media suicide! If the mainstream press reports today "Apple is announcing G5s," then they won't have the same level of "big news" to report on Monday, and reports of all the other stuff Apple desperately wants people to know about (like the goodies of Panther and their carefully-worded spin on the advantages of 64-bit-ness) won't get the same headline "punch" because the big cat's out of the bag. And Apple is a past master at manipulating the press, so they would never consciously make that kind of mistake.
Lastly, if they were going to deliberately leak it, why would they leak only specs (which geeks care about) and not something like a spec-free marketing piece written about the G5 which would get people quoting their words on its goodness, but still keep prospective buyers tuned in for the details? Again, not a smart move.
In sum, this was pretty clearly an actual goof by a (newly unemployed) Apple web tech. I trust the Slashdot staff to know their s**t about a variety of things... but oh dear God is marketing NOT one of them.
No offense intended to anyone... I just see these Ogg letters all the time and I think they're hilarious.;-)
Dear TiVo -
I would gladly offer to buy your service if you included Ogg Vorbis support. (As you know, Ogg Vorbis is currently used by upwards of several people, many of whom are doing so on an operating system you don't support with your software right now. So I think you can see your economic imperative here.)
Notice that I did not say that I would actually buy your service if you spent the time to include Ogg Vorbis support. Much like the letters I keep sending to Apple about the iPod, if you did support Ogg then send you a letter saying I would gladly buy your service if you made your software open-source. Assuming you somehow did that, my next letter would assure you that I would buy it if it used open hardware. This series of letters would continue until finally I offered to gladly buy your service if you gave it to me for free and sent a supermodel to my house to deliver it.
My fellow technologists who don't like to pay for anything are eagerly awaiting your efforts to satisfy our statistically insignificant needs. So please don't ignore this potentially incredibly unlucrative market and give us Ogg support today!
RMS is actually the paragon of why Free Software, despite its best attempts, will never excel without the input of the "marketing" types that GNU-ites go out of their way to denigrate.
I say this as a open-source advocate whose day job is as a marketing/PR professional, so I have at least a fair idea of what I'm talking about.
GNU, to use the previous analogy, was a group that saw a great (but commercially restricted) house nearby (AT&T UNIX). They started to build two houses - one from the roof down (the GNU tools) and another (GNU HURD) from the ground up. While the top-down project went well, the ground-up project suffered from typical GNU committee-think and organizational "analysis paralysis," as it is typically called in management study texts.
Seeing another ground-up house being built (Linux), they generously added their housetop onto this new foundation. But, despite the fact that - given enough time - the new house would have built its own top, they then looked at the success of the new house and claimed half (or MORE than half) ownership.
Casting this presumptuousness aside, let's look at what GNU would gain if people did actually start calling Linux "GNU/Linux." From a marketing perspective, they would now have their acronym in front of a larger audience - so they could do what? Maybe users would give the same amount of cash they gave for every free Linux download (none) to GNU? Maybe industry media would choose to ask RMS about Linux's new enterprise capabilities instead of Linus or Alan Cox? What good would this do, aside from giving RMS a platform to talk (often irrelevantly) about his (if admirable) "extremist" software agenda when what users really wanted to know about was whether the next Linux kernel would have (insert important feature to them)?
While as a marketing person I understand the value of brand recognition, I still don't understand the practical value of alienating many Linux users through the forced insistence of a GNU name, when the end goal is... what exactly again?
Speaking as a (oh-so-hated-by-Slashdoteers) marketing professional, I have to question whether GNU's active disdain for marketing types is really getting it anywhere, when if they actually embraced a marketer somewhere in their cabal, they might have produced a less extremist spokesman than RMS and actually advanced their cause. An actual competent marketer might have advised them to drop the "GNU/Everything" crap and take a more cooperative approach with all the Linux (and even BSD [including Apple] distributions) to promote their general ideas as the expense of controversial personalities like RMS.
But maybe promoting RMS is what GNU is all about... I don't know, but if they broadened their camp to include marketing-types, GNOME wouldn't have such an awful user interface and the GNU program would be getting somewhere in the mainstream/technical press...
It all started when an idiot went and spent a fortune the buy "the UNIX trademark" from bell labs. Then another idiot spent a huge amount of money to buy "the UNIX trademark" from the first idiot (who was now mutated to "smart guy")....
No no no no no no. Everyone repeat after me: "trademark != copyright."
The trademark to UNIX is owned by the Open Group. What SCO owns is the source code to the "original" AT&T UNIX (and its SVR4 descendants). All Unixes which are based on SVR4 or otherwise use code from the "original" UNIX implementation owe royalties to SCO. This includes Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, et. al.... basically every Unixish system out there except the *BSDs (which started out using AT&T code but deliberately excised all of it and reimplemented those functions with their own code) or Linux (which never was based on AT&T to begin with).
After POSIX, the "UNIX concepts" were made public, and implementing them is certainly cheeper than carring around some rusty code from 1970.
POSIX, AFAIK, didn't make anything part of the public domain. It was just a specification for what elements an OS should contain so that it would be easy to port software between compliant operating systems... if parts of POSIX were patented, then just including them in a spec didn't remove the patent holders' rights.
Ideally, slashdot sort of things should be paid for by taxpayers, grants from the government. Turning this into a business model does not appeal to me.
NO, "Slashdot sort of things" SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOX BY TAXPAYERS OR THE GOVERNMENT. Good God, does anyone here understand a free market economy?
Is your argument that Linux-centric websites should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or is it websites you like that should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or just websites in general should all be paid for by taxpayers? (I'm also assuming here you aren't a taxpayer, or at least not one paying significant amounts of tax, or you wouldn't be suggesting that.) Or - and I'm going out on a limb here - maybe you just want everything for free like so many other Slashdotters who will pay $400 for a video card but warez all their commercial software or music.
Honestly, I find the sense of entitlement that so many Slashdot readers have to be unbelievable. Whaaah, whaaah. "But the readers really do all the work here by posting comments, we shouldn't have to pay for it!" Boo hoo hoo. Evidently, Slashdot brings something to the mix here, or you wouldn't be visiting. And if something provides a valuable service to you - whether that is collating information, providing a place for people to comment on things, or just bandwidth - then it is providing value to you. Slashdot has plenty of problems, but the fact that it has been free forever doesn't mean you should take it for granted or not be prepared to pay for it if you choose to.
Slashdot is a business, or at least is part of a business! If "Turning this into a business model does not appeal to [you]," then go start your own free Slashdot somewhere else! Let me know how it goes.
In the above, Mr. Mitnick asserts that Mr. Markoff libeled him extensively and caused him no end of personal distress, excessive legal punishment, and so on and so forth. That may very well all be true.
But if it is true, why hasn't Mr. Mitnick sued Mr. Markoff, the New York Times, his book publishers et. al. for libel? That's what libel law is there for... if these things are true, then they should be exposed in a court of law, the truth would be revealed for all to see, and Mr. Mitnick should receive some very hefty compensatory damages. Mr. Mitnick would win big if even a tenth of what he describes above is true, since he would have qualified at the time under libel statutes as a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure," so the threshold of showing libelousness would be quite low.
So why isn't he suing Mr. Markoff? Don't say it's because he doesn't have the money, because plenty of lawyers will work on a contingency basis, especially for something as high-profile and (if the above is true) lucrative as this. If Mr. Mitnick can back up what he's saying here, why isn't this all coming out in a court of law? And don't say "Markoff should have to prove he's right, not Mitnick," because if Mr. Mitnick sues for libel Mr. Markoff will have to do just that (produce his notes, documents, etc. to verify where he received all his information), but he doesn't have to do this if Mr. Mitnick doesn't sue.
I don't know Mr. Markoff or Mr. Mitnick, and I have no idea what the real truth is here. But for some reason the fact that Mr. Mitnick talks at great length about all these abuses but is not willing to test them in court seems indicative of something to me...
According to Yahoo Finance, SCOX has a market cap of 16.4M. Can't the FSF try to buy them and then release the IP to the community?
Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily work that way. Market capitalization (cap) is what it would cost at present values to purchase every share of the company that is publicly traded. In a perfect world, you would just buy up all those shares at that price. You then own the company, call for a new election of board members, vote your shares (your vote's weight = your percentage of ownership) for new board members who then order the CEO to change what he's doing or get fired.
However, there are a couple of snags to that plan. One is that once people know that you're trying to buy up the whole thing, they start demanding more money for their shares because they know you want them badly. That's why takeover attempts are always launched quoting a price higher than current market value.
More important is that the # of shares on publicly traded markets doesn't necessarily equal the number of shares in the company. A company can make some small minority of the company's total shares (say, 25% publicly traded) in their IPO and keep the rest in the hands of private investors (or owned by the company itself). So if this is the case, you can buy up every public share of the company, but you still don't control it. You'd have to examine the company's SEC filings to get the answer, but I'm guessing only a minority of SCO's shares are public.
It seems to me that this is an opportunity for us open-source geeks to put our money where our mouths are.
I think we open-source geeks are, in general, badly in need of a few "gut-checks" to see if we are willing to put our money where our Slashdot flames are.;-) Sadly, this doesn't appear to be a good opportunity.
The only real way I can see this fighting piracy is if they want to go back to cartridge based systems, but why not just make the products good enough that people will actually buy them.
I'm not sure, but is the implication here is that people only pirate games if they aren't good enough to buy? I can maybe see that if you're arguing a "try before you buy" attitude, but it's pretty clear that the people most interested in pirating games are going to do it regardless of how good it is... in fact, I'd say a great game is more likely to be pirated by your average 15-year-old k3wl w4r3z d00d than a subpar game.
Hypocrisy disclaimer: I download MP3s and will generally not buy an album unless there are at least two (for bargain CDs) or three (full-priced discs) songs on a CD by that band I like. I would, however, gladly pay for those songs if they were available singly in a DRM-free format. I don't know if there is an appropriate analog in the video game world ("I didn't pay $50 for the full game, but I'd pay $10 for just the first three levels if that was available(?)")
Either way, I don't think it's fair to say, "I liked your game... but not enough to pay for it. The reason I am pirating your games instead of paying you is because I wish it was better, so it's YOUR fault." That sort of reasoning is akin to blaming women for assaults because they were being "too provocative" or some s**t like that... that train of thought is just wrong.
anyone remeber a series of games for the 2600 all with world at the end of the title ? 'waterworld, fireworld, earthworld' etc? i had these as a kid and loved them.. i remeber them as being mostly puzzles of some kind.. can someone help me out with the name of these?
They were part of Atari's "SwordQuest" challenge. The idea was to hide Easter Eggs in the four games that gave you hints towards winning a $25k "treasure." It was (at least initially) a great marketing gimmick, and each game came with a mini DC comic furthering the plot. Alas, despite all the excitement, the games sucked rather hard, as they were purposely inscrutable (like the Atari 2600 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game) and sales of the last couple games in the series were dismal.
It takes ignorance to run a mac, it really does... they are (as compared to a PC): 1.) Expensive 2.) Perform poorer @ most things 3.) Not upgradable 4.) Software is becoming more and more limited..
I can't believe I'm responding to such an incredibly blatant troll. Oh, well, here's the answers to your questions anyway: 1.) Yes, Macs are more expensive. If you buy your computers based on price alone, don't get one. 2.) Their CPUs are currently slower than x86 CPUs, also. That has absolutely jack to do with being "better" at "most things" (my poor slow G4 probably burns DVDs at 1.15x the rate your PC does... big deal). 3.) Pure crap, what is "unexpandable" about PCI and AGP slots, SDRAM, FireWire/USB/Bluetooth and CPU upgrade cards? Where are you getting your "information?" 4.) The software is actually becoming less and less limited. MacOS X runs basically everything Linux does... plus lots of real-world apps that Linux doesn't, like Office, Photoshop, games, etc. Of course Macs have less software available than Windows... but I seem to be doing fine without Bonzi Buddy and Deer Hunter 3, thank you.
i fail to see the reason to be running a mac? Am i alone here?
Evidently you are. Seriously, if you don't see the advantage in running a version of Unix with a REAL usable interface and major commercial application support, then don't worry about it, they're not for you. But the rest of us are doing just fine with ours.
...I'm definitely going to take advantage of F !=ma. I'm going to give my car a good shove tomorrow morning and ride it all the way to work.
I just hope that we don't spin out of orbit while F != G(m1m2)/d2. I guess, though, that if we start to spin out of orbit, somebody on the far side of the planet can just give it a shove and we'll be back in place.
Unfortunately, I've already noticed my CPU getting hotter. And I stood on this really tall guy's shoulders but I couldn't see very far...
I am not an expert but surely these servers connect to the net through some sort of router/hub whatever. The servers are made to handle a lot of traffic but what about the connecting hardware. If the routers were attacked directly wouldn't the DDOS attack still be succesful without touching or alerting the dns servers themselves.
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work like that. The routers we're talking about here (I imagine that most of the root servers are on 100BT or Gigabit Ethernet LANs which then plug into one or more DS-3s [45 Mbps] or more likely OC-3s [155 Mbps]) are designed to be able to handle many, many times more traffic than the servers are. Your average Cisco 7xxx or 12xxx router is built to handle far more traffic than any given server might see. Think about it... you generally have many servers being serviced by one router, not the other way around. Additionally, each root server is most likely connected to multiple routers (say, they're hosted at an ISP with three DS-3s to different providers and each DS-3 is plugged into a different Cisco 7500).
Also I doubt that the routers are setup to recognize any kind of attack as they are just relays between the net and the server. Possibly the attack could go on for quite some time before any one realized what was going on.
Actually, it's the other way around. Most good routers are designed to have the ability (if you enable it) to look inside of the packets that pass through them and filter out "bad" ones based on various criteria. Thus, routers are actually perfectly suited to stopping attacks like this, while servers are expected to burn their CPU cycles doing other things (yes, servers can do this sort of filtering, but they generally have something more important to do). The only real problem is that it's often very difficult to tell the "good" packets from the "bad." After all, how do you distinguish automatically between a distributed flood of HTTP malicious requests and a Slashdotting? You get the idea.
The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software.
Riiiiight. Don't you *really* mean, "there isn't a thing that I do that can't be done?" You seem like a smart person... you can't really be ignorant enough to think that there's a free software solution right now for everything?
As an example (the esoteric and tiny niche market of "desktop publishing"), let's take the graphic designers I support and replace their regular coffee with GNU/Folger's Crystals:
DESIGNERS: Hey, where's Photoshop?
ME: You have something better now, called the Gimp. It's Free.
DESIGNER #1: That's great. Why can't I work on this image with a embedded CMYK color profile? Professional printers require CMYK separations.
DESIGNER #2: And why don't I have pro-level color correction and matching across the entire system?
DESIGNER #3: And where are my multiple master fonts, or fonts with professional ligatures and weighting?
ME: But you don't understand, you don't need those things! Your software is Free now! You can look at the source code!
DESIGNERS: Oooh. (they look at it for a minute) So what? Is that, like, weird poetry? Their punctuation is all wrong.
ME: So you can modify it if you want to do all those things!
DESIGNERS: So how do we do that?
ME: You just need to learn C++ and programming with a GUI toolkit, plus a few other things.
DESIGNERS: I thought the idea was that people pay us to design things because we're good at that, and we pay other people to make software that does the things we need, because they're good at that?
ME: (sigh) What, do you people just not get it?
Look, I love free software and I am a great proponent of it where it is suitable... but claiming free software is suitable everywhere is just as wrong as claiming that MS software is suitable everywhere.
The company I work for, Spacenet, is the second-largest business satellite ISP out there. We serve *business* customers who have large and small multiple (5-5000+) locations (retailers, food service, energy, financial, services, etc.).
If you have a *business* meeting these criteria and are looking for satellite connectivity that supports Macs, send e-mail to me and I can push for Mac compatibility if there is significant demand.
Don't just say there is no corporate satellite ISP support for Macs and do nothing about it... if you can genuinely justify large multi-site Mac satellite network support, I can help make it happen.
As a BSD guru-turned-Mac-guru myself, I would love to help this but I do need the numbers to prove it. Right now, we have almost zero requests for this, but an influx of REAL potential customers asking for this could make it happen. I would really, really like to make this available, but I can't do it by telling our MS-oriented development guys to do it without visible justification.
This isn't some random spam for business, this is a real request from a company's senior marketing staff to help build demand and make this happen. In your e-mail, please describe your multi-site business and its needs, and I can use this info to get Mac support for Spacenet's services.
everyeone knows taht MACs haev no games excpet for loesrs like Mist!!! and open sores games are only for Lunix and they dont work becuase yuo download them and they are just a bunch of fiels for only in WordPad and say things like "maek install" that does not make any sense!!!!!
if these MAC open sorse games are liek LUnix games then MAC users cannot compiel them in WordPad either!!! all real h4x0rs no taht teh only real gaems are for Windoews or XBOX becuase they haev teh COUNTERSTRIEK and taht game w/golfing with SLUTS!!!!! and teh volleyball gaem with otyhyer SLUTS!!!! taht is whey nobody uses MAC or Lunix excpet f4gots!!!!! and MAC cannot even use teh real Interweb except AOL!!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!
</JEFFK!!! MODE>
Seriously, the lack of "Mac games" is true to some extent but is in reality seriously overestimated. While Macs clearly lack the breadth of games available for the PC, there are plenty of top-notch Mac games available, from The Sims to Civ 3 to Warcraft 3 to Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds to Max Payne to Medal of Honor, etc. etc.
As to the poster's question, the unfortunate answer is "no, a game ported to Mac will probably use the Carbon API (a revised version of the old MacOS 1-9 API with the old memory/threading junk and Mac-only 3D API thrown out and new interface stuff thrown in) so it can run on non-MacOS X systems." Almost no commercial games are written to the MacOS X Unix APIs or to the OS X-only "Cocoa" API (which requires Objective-C or Java).
As a result - contrary to all those similar posts saying "Hey, MS Office is available for MacOS X - now it can be easily ported to *NIX," the real story is that games ported to Mac are largely Mac-specific because they're using a Mac-only API. And - pardon the rant here - the Mac-only Carbon API will be dominant until all those Mac luddites out there who are clinging to MacOS
The bottom line is that while MacOS X is a great step forward for *NIX marketshare on the desktop, don't expect it to translate into a step forward for *NIX games despite the fairly robust current Mac game market.
P.S. - If any moderators just read the first two paragraphs of my post and mod it down as flamebait, TEHY ARE TEH SUX0RS AND I WILL RAELGUN THEM!!!!
Just curious, has anyone heard of any attempts by services such as these to buy copyrights from artists and challenge the RIAA as a legitimate (competing, rather than RIAA-owned) distributor on legally even ground?
It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work like that. I'm sure that artists may be amenable to the idea, but major artists simply aren't going to be able to do that. For albums released by major labels (smaller labels as well, IIRC), the artist/songwriter owns the song, but NOT the actual recording of it that appeared on the album. So all those tracks that came off an album are owned by the publisher, not the artist - and there's a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get them to sell that (or license it, either - they can't even agree on fairly doing that between themselves for their lame online music services, let alone fairly licensing it to some young startup whippersnappers).
"Okay," you say, "so the artists don't own the actual recordings (that particular performance that's on the album)... so why don't they re-record it (since they own the song itself) and sell or license that to someone else?" Unfortunately, most major artists are under contract to large record labels - so if they record a new version, their label gets first dibs. That also includes "official" live recordings, too. BTW, live bootlegs, even if the band turns a blind eye to their existence, are theoretically just as illegal as pirated album tracks, since the label the band is under contract to should get a chance to make money off the band is going to release it (and the band to get some royalties from it).
Lastly, don't blame the bands for making these "deals with the devil" - yes, it handcuffs them to have the rights to their next X albums' worth of songs locked into a big nasty music label - but when you're struggling to make it, the offer of financing to make albums, distribution networks to get you on the radio and in Tower Records is nothing to sneeze at. They're just trying to make it when they sign these deals - nobody else right now can offer them the same things that the major labels can.
Maybe the real hope lies in bands that use the big labels to get popular, then after their contracts expire use the 'net intelligently to reach their fans. But unless rock stars start reading Slashdot daily (or someone can convince them that there's a really solid plan for not losing their fiscal shorts in the effort), we may be waiting a while.
Gilat is a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal, e.g. small satellite dish) hardware manufacturer that owned a large chunk of Starband. However, even though they retain a smaller stake in it, they recently wrote off all of their investment in the company, saying they didn't expect to get any of it back.
Echostar is the company behind Dish Network, and they had bought into Starband (majority ownership?) and planned to use it for their own residential satellite Internet service. Recently, though, Echostar decided it wanted to buy ("merge with") satellite biggie Hughes Electronics (operator of DirecTV).
Knowing that Echostar would face some regulatory hurdles over the consolidation, Echostar dropped Starband (claiming something or other was wrong with it) and then complained to the regulatory overseers that rural folks wouldn't be able to get Internet access unless their merger with Hughes was approved. I think I heard that Echostar recently took its reps off Starband's board, since they didn't seem to be too welcome anymore.
At no time, I think, were Gilat and Echostar really "partners" - they just both owned parts of Starband.
Some people have posted asking about how they're going to pay for keeping their network up, but that most likely isn't an issue, since you don't have to be *out* of money to file for bankruptcy. What they're trying to do by declaring bankruptcy is buy some time to find additional buyers. I'm not sure whether the rules in the EU are the same, but here's how it works in the US:
In the US, the two most common bankruptcy options are to file under Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 of the US bankruptcy code. Chapter 7 filings are what you do when you realize you've irrevocably screwed the pooch, and there's just no way you are ever going to make it. Ch. 7 means you've cashed your check, game over - your assets will be liquidated (sold) to scrounge up whatever cash possible for the companies you owe money to. Everybody goes home, then the earth is sown with salt under your company headquarters.
Chapter 11, however - this is what I presume they're using the European equivalent of - means you think you can turn things around, but you can't do it just yet or you can't do it because your existing debts are too big. You can declare a Ch. 11 bankruptcy when you've still got lots of cash - that's to keep things up and running while you work out a plan to pay back your existing debts.
There's a good side and a bad side for companies filing Ch. 11 - the good side is you get to keep on going, and you don't have to pay back any debts you ran up before you filed! Most of the time, courts will rule that the companies that provide you with critical services (like power, fiber, leases, etc.) can't shut you off during your bankruptcy, even though you've just (potentially) stiffed them for zillions of dollars. This is likely what KPN is doing.
The down side is that you no longer control your company - the courts do. And they pay lots of attention to what your creditors (those folks you stiffed) ask for. Your job is to come up with a plan to pay those creditors back over time for a reasonable amount (anywhere from 10% to 80% of your orginal debt, most likely). If your creditors don't like the plan, or think that they'd get more money back by shutting you down and liquidating assets than allowing you to live and try to pay them back, they can get the courts to probably shut you down. Also, don't forget that your credit is now hosed.
So... I wouldn't worry about KPN's lights going off anytime soon. They probably filed the EU equivalent of Ch. 11 while they had plenty of cash in the bank to keep it running while they look for someone to buy their assets (probably the only chance they have of satisfying their creditors).
On the Solaris 9 order page, Sun explains its seemingly incongruous licensing fees:
"Note: User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed."
Sun's desktop and server/enterprise systems are built very differently. The number of CPUs (or even their MHz) on a system has little to do with their performance when considered alongside bus clocking, bandwidth, RAM, etc.
As such, it appears that they're making a good-faith effort to correlate a system's performance class (and hence what type of customer probably bought it) with what they're charging for the OS upgrade. Associated with the above idea is probably their built-in support costs (e.g., a large company using Solaris on a mission-critical system will probably have greater support demands than an individual user on a desktop machine).
If you're using Solaris rather than Linux or *BSD, chances are that you're doing so in a business environment where 24x7 commercial support and Solaris' other goodies are important. Unless you're a hacker who bought a $100 SPARC 2 box off eBay to tinker with Solaris, you probably purchased it because of its commercially-supported reliability and other kinky features like CPU and HD hot-swappability etc. on high-end systems.
FWIW, I think Sun's licensing terms here are a rather good attempt at equating commercial use and mission criticality with licensing fees. So, here's the question: (GPL/BSD aside), can anyone think of a better (specific!) scheme for equating the need [and presumably consequent ability to pay for it] of large corporations to pay big OS upgrade license fees and letting individual/small business users pay smaller OS license fees?
Apple Lists Supported Cards for Quartz Extreme
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For everyone wondering whether their video card will be able to use the hardware-accelerated Quartz, I quote from Apple's website (at the bottom of the page):
"Supported cards: nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance."
Also note that they say 32 MB of RAM is recommended but theoretically not required. So I don't think this is quite as much of a debacle as some posters have made it out to be. Besides, Quartz should be improved and faster in 10.2 whether you're using hardware acceleration or not; you just won't get the max performance if it isn't hardware-accelerated.
No offense intended, but the answer is NO. (see below.)
Or what if Sun were to release and maintain free Solaris for Itanium as well as x86? Would that be the kiss of death for HP-UX and AIX 5L? Why do they hesitate?
Solaris is a SVR4-based Unix, unlike Linux or *BSD. The original AT&T code still present is used under license and it is not Sun's prerogative to release this under the GPL.
What is the possibility of Sun convincing Apple to integrate large portions of Solaris into Mac OS X? Would they be willing to give it away to Apple? Why haven't they done so to build up market share?
The possibility is absolutely zero. Apple chose BSD and the Mach microkernel because that's what Steve [Jobs] and Avie [Tevanian] decided was the best possible solution back when they were at NeXT, and that's what NeXTStep/OpenStep were built on. MacOS X is built on OpenStep. It would probably take just as long to replace the Mach/BSD foundations of OS X with an SVR4-based kernel as it would to port Aqua/Cocoa/etc. to Solaris. Apple uses what it uses for a reason, and the hypothetical availability of Solaris wouldn't make it a better choice just because it's available.
I am a Sun stockholder. I would like to see Sun publicly considering these actions. I want to see some bombast from Steve and Bill. If Sun, Apple, and possibly AOL collaberate on an x86-os, they will kill Microsoft.
No, they won't. If you put Sun and Apple (and AOL's) customers together and get them ALL to switch overnight, then you still don't have more than 15-20% of the market of x86 PCs out there running Windows. As soon as they do that, THEN come up with interoperable replacements for the Office (sorry, StarOffice doesn't cut it), Exchange, Access/MS SQL and other software that business users depend on, THEN they can come up with some way to get everyone to port their DirectX-based games that the home market depends on. Pretty simple.;)
MAEs not as important as they once were
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The Root of All E-Mail
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· Score: 3, Informative
Once upon a time, the MAE NAPs were certainly a big choke point. A few years ago, you could have blown up two nondescript buildings across the street from each other in Tyson's Corner, VA (MAE-East 1 and 2) and a tall building on Market Street in San Jose (MAE West) and pretty much taken down the Internet.
However, that's not so much the case today. The fact is that most traffic (in the US at least) goes between the Big Three (UUNET/WorldCom, Sprint and Cable & Wireless), or at least it could go because most networks have an upstream multihomed connection to one or more of the big three. And those guys have plenty of private interconnections, some of which are outside of the NAPs.
Networks have also shifted away from the old MAE model (FDDI connections into these huge mother-f***er DEC gigaswitches housed in the MAE buildings) and towards ATM-based NAPs, where you just get a virtual circuit in a "cloud" in the area. The weakness of the FDDI-gigaswitches model that caused people to move away from them was not the security aspect, but rather that they were a huge pain to upgrade and became a huge sinkhole for packet loss when they were overburdened (e.g., MAE-East in late 1997).
Of course, the MAEs still are important - there's a hell of a lot of fiber running through there, and taking it out would require everyone to route around it, causing a HUGE temporary disruption - but they're not the tremendous choke point/security risk that they once were.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you have no memory of REAGAN ACTUALLY SAYING THAT DURING IRAN-CONTRA.
Honestly, would it hurt to have a passing familiarity with the subject before bitching and moaning about "political flamebait"?
I recall that incident perfectly well, thank you. Reagan was clearly lying and making an ass of himself. Again, I'm not complaining because I love Reagan.
I'm "bitching and moaning," as you put it, because Michael either a.) just couldn't restrain himself from throwing a political jab into the story subhead or b.) thought a joke about Reagan's very well publicized descent into Alzheimer's-induced dementia would be oh so funny. Yayyyy michael.
Either way, my original point stands - I think the whole story was only posted as political flamebait, with Michael clearly stoking the fire. I don't care if you like Reagan or hate him, I just don't want any more of this junk on Slashdot.
Yes I know I can put Michael Sims' stories in my killfile, but he does post actual news stories as well, so I don't want to block those out. All I'm asking for is Taco, Hemos or somebody there to just tell Michael to cut the blatant flamebait shit out. If he wants to troll, do it in the comments section, not the story. The last time I checked, political flamebait was not Slashdot's mission.
USS Ronald Reagan Commissioning Tomorrow
Posted by michael on Friday July 11, @11:20AM
from the no-memory-of-those-events dept.
Jebus. I know that most of the Slashdot audience probably agrees politically with Michael, but it's pretty clear to me that this whole goddamn story is just an excuse for people to make snide jokes about Ronald Reagan. I don't care whether you like Reagan or not (I didn't particularly), but when did Slashdot get into the business of just posting Republican-baiting stories?
If I wanted political nastiness, I'd go to a political site. I DON'T. I want actual news for nerds and stuff that matters, not Michael Sims making jokes about Reagan's Alzheimer's. HA HA MICHAEL YUO = TEH FUNNEYMAN!!!!!
Go ahead, mod me down. But I hope somebody else stands up and asks the Slashdot editors to get Michael to cut this political flamebait crap. Republican, Democrat, I don't care, I just don't want to hear it anymore.
Why should we be giving authors incentives to create works in the first place?
Surely you're joking.
The whole "why copyright exists" argument could (and should, for many Slashdotters who don't live in the real world) fill a book, not a post on a RIAA thread. So I won't belittle the depth of reasons for the concept by giving an overly abridged recounting of them.
Let's just put it this way: giving people protective rights over their creative output (words, music, art, whatever) enables them to profit from those works. (Don't try that tired Slashdot "but musicians should only give concerts" crap with me. I'm talking about all creative works here, and authors won't work to do public readings, and painters aren't going to get paid by painting for an audience.)
Why is profiting from their work important? Because it allows them to be professional artists. And professionals can refine and improve their craft, creating superior works of art/music/literature/poetry/whatever that people (at least those who don't hang out on Slashdot) are willing to pay to enjoy.
Don't give me that "all artists should starve and work in their free time" bunk. The books/music/etc. that most people (maybe not you, but most people) enjoy was professionally created by someone who profited from their work and hence was able to do it full-time. Would James Joyce have been able to write "Ulysses" while holding down his part-time job at the pub? Would Miles Davis have been able to create "Kind of Blue" recording in his bedroom after working in a kitchen or a warehouse? I don't think the Who could have all taken time off from their jobs to meet up in the studio long enough to write and record "Quadrophenia." And Andy Warhol would have quit art in a nanosecond if he couldn't sell his art (yes, I know that's an interesting example). Yes, plenty of people create great works in their spare time if they have a job like "college professor" that gives them gobs of free time ... but that's not most people.
The point is that you have to give artists (in the broader sense) the incentive/ability to control their works so they can profit on it, so they have the freedom to pursue their art professionally. If you think a world full of part-timers will produce works as enjoyable as those of the current system, I think you are seriously underestimating how hard it is to make good art, and how important it is to allow someone to pursue their craft full-time through profiting from controlling the copying and distribution of their own works.
No offense, but anyone who thinks it was a mistake or leak doesn't understand marketing.
No offense, Michael, but you pretty clearly don't understand marketing. There's no way this was intentional.
Why? Let's assume you have a big event coming up, with one big piece of news everyone is waiting for (in this case, G5s) and lots of other, smaller items that you want to talk about (Panther, whatever other goodies they have hidden). Remember, that big piece of news is the lure to get everyone watching the rest of the show.
So why on Earth would you spill the beans beforehand on your big item, so that some people would have gotten the info they wanted and will now not tune in to see the rest of it?
It's also media suicide! If the mainstream press reports today "Apple is announcing G5s," then they won't have the same level of "big news" to report on Monday, and reports of all the other stuff Apple desperately wants people to know about (like the goodies of Panther and their carefully-worded spin on the advantages of 64-bit-ness) won't get the same headline "punch" because the big cat's out of the bag. And Apple is a past master at manipulating the press, so they would never consciously make that kind of mistake.
Lastly, if they were going to deliberately leak it, why would they leak only specs (which geeks care about) and not something like a spec-free marketing piece written about the G5 which would get people quoting their words on its goodness, but still keep prospective buyers tuned in for the details? Again, not a smart move.
In sum, this was pretty clearly an actual goof by a (newly unemployed) Apple web tech. I trust the Slashdot staff to know their s**t about a variety of things ... but oh dear God is marketing NOT one of them.
No offense intended to anyone ... I just see these Ogg letters all the time and I think they're hilarious. ;-)
Dear TiVo -
I would gladly offer to buy your service if you included Ogg Vorbis support. (As you know, Ogg Vorbis is currently used by upwards of several people, many of whom are doing so on an operating system you don't support with your software right now. So I think you can see your economic imperative here.)
Notice that I did not say that I would actually buy your service if you spent the time to include Ogg Vorbis support. Much like the letters I keep sending to Apple about the iPod, if you did support Ogg then send you a letter saying I would gladly buy your service if you made your software open-source. Assuming you somehow did that, my next letter would assure you that I would buy it if it used open hardware. This series of letters would continue until finally I offered to gladly buy your service if you gave it to me for free and sent a supermodel to my house to deliver it.
My fellow technologists who don't like to pay for anything are eagerly awaiting your efforts to satisfy our statistically insignificant needs. So please don't ignore this potentially incredibly unlucrative market and give us Ogg support today!
RMS is actually the paragon of why Free Software, despite its best attempts, will never excel without the input of the "marketing" types that GNU-ites go out of their way to denigrate.
I say this as a open-source advocate whose day job is as a marketing/PR professional, so I have at least a fair idea of what I'm talking about.
GNU, to use the previous analogy, was a group that saw a great (but commercially restricted) house nearby (AT&T UNIX). They started to build two houses - one from the roof down (the GNU tools) and another (GNU HURD) from the ground up. While the top-down project went well, the ground-up project suffered from typical GNU committee-think and organizational "analysis paralysis," as it is typically called in management study texts.
Seeing another ground-up house being built (Linux), they generously added their housetop onto this new foundation. But, despite the fact that - given enough time - the new house would have built its own top, they then looked at the success of the new house and claimed half (or MORE than half) ownership.
Casting this presumptuousness aside, let's look at what GNU would gain if people did actually start calling Linux "GNU/Linux." From a marketing perspective, they would now have their acronym in front of a larger audience - so they could do what? Maybe users would give the same amount of cash they gave for every free Linux download (none) to GNU? Maybe industry media would choose to ask RMS about Linux's new enterprise capabilities instead of Linus or Alan Cox? What good would this do, aside from giving RMS a platform to talk (often irrelevantly) about his (if admirable) "extremist" software agenda when what users really wanted to know about was whether the next Linux kernel would have (insert important feature to them)?
While as a marketing person I understand the value of brand recognition, I still don't understand the practical value of alienating many Linux users through the forced insistence of a GNU name, when the end goal isSpeaking as a (oh-so-hated-by-Slashdoteers) marketing professional, I have to question whether GNU's active disdain for marketing types is really getting it anywhere, when if they actually embraced a marketer somewhere in their cabal, they might have produced a less extremist spokesman than RMS and actually advanced their cause. An actual competent marketer might have advised them to drop the "GNU/Everything" crap and take a more cooperative approach with all the Linux (and even BSD [including Apple] distributions) to promote their general ideas as the expense of controversial personalities like RMS.
But maybe promoting RMS is what GNU is all about ... I don't know, but if they broadened their camp to include marketing-types, GNOME wouldn't have such an awful user interface and the GNU program would be getting somewhere in the mainstream/technical press...
It all started when an idiot went and spent a fortune the buy "the UNIX trademark" from bell labs. Then another idiot spent a huge amount of money to buy "the UNIX trademark" from the first idiot (who was now mutated to "smart guy")....
No no no no no no. Everyone repeat after me: "trademark != copyright."
The trademark to UNIX is owned by the Open Group. What SCO owns is the source code to the "original" AT&T UNIX (and its SVR4 descendants). All Unixes which are based on SVR4 or otherwise use code from the "original" UNIX implementation owe royalties to SCO. This includes Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, et. al. ... basically every Unixish system out there except the *BSDs (which started out using AT&T code but deliberately excised all of it and reimplemented those functions with their own code) or Linux (which never was based on AT&T to begin with).
After POSIX, the "UNIX concepts" were made public, and implementing them is certainly cheeper than carring around some rusty code from 1970.
POSIX, AFAIK, didn't make anything part of the public domain. It was just a specification for what elements an OS should contain so that it would be easy to port software between compliant operating systems ... if parts of POSIX were patented, then just including them in a spec didn't remove the patent holders' rights.
Ideally, slashdot sort of things should be paid for by taxpayers, grants from the government. Turning this into a business model does not appeal to me.
NO, "Slashdot sort of things" SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOX BY TAXPAYERS OR THE GOVERNMENT. Good God, does anyone here understand a free market economy?
Is your argument that Linux-centric websites should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or is it websites you like that should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or just websites in general should all be paid for by taxpayers? (I'm also assuming here you aren't a taxpayer, or at least not one paying significant amounts of tax, or you wouldn't be suggesting that.) Or - and I'm going out on a limb here - maybe you just want everything for free like so many other Slashdotters who will pay $400 for a video card but warez all their commercial software or music.
Honestly, I find the sense of entitlement that so many Slashdot readers have to be unbelievable. Whaaah, whaaah. "But the readers really do all the work here by posting comments, we shouldn't have to pay for it!" Boo hoo hoo. Evidently, Slashdot brings something to the mix here, or you wouldn't be visiting. And if something provides a valuable service to you - whether that is collating information, providing a place for people to comment on things, or just bandwidth - then it is providing value to you. Slashdot has plenty of problems, but the fact that it has been free forever doesn't mean you should take it for granted or not be prepared to pay for it if you choose to.
Slashdot is a business, or at least is part of a business! If "Turning this into a business model does not appeal to [you]," then go start your own free Slashdot somewhere else! Let me know how it goes.
In the above, Mr. Mitnick asserts that Mr. Markoff libeled him extensively and caused him no end of personal distress, excessive legal punishment, and so on and so forth. That may very well all be true.
But if it is true, why hasn't Mr. Mitnick sued Mr. Markoff, the New York Times, his book publishers et. al. for libel? That's what libel law is there for ... if these things are true, then they should be exposed in a court of law, the truth would be revealed for all to see, and Mr. Mitnick should receive some very hefty compensatory damages. Mr. Mitnick would win big if even a tenth of what he describes above is true, since he would have qualified at the time under libel statutes as a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure," so the threshold of showing libelousness would be quite low.
So why isn't he suing Mr. Markoff? Don't say it's because he doesn't have the money, because plenty of lawyers will work on a contingency basis, especially for something as high-profile and (if the above is true) lucrative as this. If Mr. Mitnick can back up what he's saying here, why isn't this all coming out in a court of law? And don't say "Markoff should have to prove he's right, not Mitnick," because if Mr. Mitnick sues for libel Mr. Markoff will have to do just that (produce his notes, documents, etc. to verify where he received all his information), but he doesn't have to do this if Mr. Mitnick doesn't sue.
I don't know Mr. Markoff or Mr. Mitnick, and I have no idea what the real truth is here. But for some reason the fact that Mr. Mitnick talks at great length about all these abuses but is not willing to test them in court seems indicative of something to me...
According to Yahoo Finance, SCOX has a market cap of 16.4M. Can't the FSF try to buy them and then release the IP to the community?
Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily work that way. Market capitalization (cap) is what it would cost at present values to purchase every share of the company that is publicly traded. In a perfect world, you would just buy up all those shares at that price. You then own the company, call for a new election of board members, vote your shares (your vote's weight = your percentage of ownership) for new board members who then order the CEO to change what he's doing or get fired.
However, there are a couple of snags to that plan. One is that once people know that you're trying to buy up the whole thing, they start demanding more money for their shares because they know you want them badly. That's why takeover attempts are always launched quoting a price higher than current market value.
More important is that the # of shares on publicly traded markets doesn't necessarily equal the number of shares in the company. A company can make some small minority of the company's total shares (say, 25% publicly traded) in their IPO and keep the rest in the hands of private investors (or owned by the company itself). So if this is the case, you can buy up every public share of the company, but you still don't control it. You'd have to examine the company's SEC filings to get the answer, but I'm guessing only a minority of SCO's shares are public.
It seems to me that this is an opportunity for us open-source geeks to put our money where our mouths are.
I think we open-source geeks are, in general, badly in need of a few "gut-checks" to see if we are willing to put our money where our Slashdot flames are. ;-) Sadly, this doesn't appear to be a good opportunity.
The only real way I can see this fighting piracy is if they want to go back to cartridge based systems, but why not just make the products good enough that people will actually buy them.
I'm not sure, but is the implication here is that people only pirate games if they aren't good enough to buy? I can maybe see that if you're arguing a "try before you buy" attitude, but it's pretty clear that the people most interested in pirating games are going to do it regardless of how good it is ... in fact, I'd say a great game is more likely to be pirated by your average 15-year-old k3wl w4r3z d00d than a subpar game.
Hypocrisy disclaimer: I download MP3s and will generally not buy an album unless there are at least two (for bargain CDs) or three (full-priced discs) songs on a CD by that band I like. I would, however, gladly pay for those songs if they were available singly in a DRM-free format. I don't know if there is an appropriate analog in the video game world ("I didn't pay $50 for the full game, but I'd pay $10 for just the first three levels if that was available(?)")
Either way, I don't think it's fair to say, "I liked your game ... but not enough to pay for it. The reason I am pirating your games instead of paying you is because I wish it was better, so it's YOUR fault." That sort of reasoning is akin to blaming women for assaults because they were being "too provocative" or some s**t like that ... that train of thought is just wrong.
anyone remeber a series of games for the 2600 all with world at the end of the title ? 'waterworld, fireworld, earthworld' etc? i had these as a kid and loved them.. i remeber them as being mostly puzzles of some kind.. can someone help me out with the name of these?
They were part of Atari's "SwordQuest" challenge. The idea was to hide Easter Eggs in the four games that gave you hints towards winning a $25k "treasure." It was (at least initially) a great marketing gimmick, and each game came with a mini DC comic furthering the plot. Alas, despite all the excitement, the games sucked rather hard, as they were purposely inscrutable (like the Atari 2600 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game) and sales of the last couple games in the series were dismal.
It takes ignorance to run a mac, it really does... they are (as compared to a PC): 1.) Expensive 2.) Perform poorer @ most things 3.) Not upgradable 4.) Software is becoming more and more limited ..
I can't believe I'm responding to such an incredibly blatant troll. Oh, well, here's the answers to your questions anyway: 1.) Yes, Macs are more expensive. If you buy your computers based on price alone, don't get one. 2.) Their CPUs are currently slower than x86 CPUs, also. That has absolutely jack to do with being "better" at "most things" (my poor slow G4 probably burns DVDs at 1.15x the rate your PC does ... big deal). 3.) Pure crap, what is "unexpandable" about PCI and AGP slots, SDRAM, FireWire/USB/Bluetooth and CPU upgrade cards? Where are you getting your "information?" 4.) The software is actually becoming less and less limited. MacOS X runs basically everything Linux does ... plus lots of real-world apps that Linux doesn't, like Office, Photoshop, games, etc. Of course Macs have less software available than Windows ... but I seem to be doing fine without Bonzi Buddy and Deer Hunter 3, thank you.
i fail to see the reason to be running a mac? Am i alone here?
Evidently you are. Seriously, if you don't see the advantage in running a version of Unix with a REAL usable interface and major commercial application support, then don't worry about it, they're not for you. But the rest of us are doing just fine with ours.
...I'm definitely going to take advantage of F !=ma. I'm going to give my car a good shove tomorrow morning and ride it all the way to work.
I just hope that we don't spin out of orbit while F != G(m1m2)/d2. I guess, though, that if we start to spin out of orbit, somebody on the far side of the planet can just give it a shove and we'll be back in place.
Unfortunately, I've already noticed my CPU getting hotter. And I stood on this really tall guy's shoulders but I couldn't see very far...
I am not an expert but surely these servers connect to the net through some sort of router/hub whatever. The servers are made to handle a lot of traffic but what about the connecting hardware. If the routers were attacked directly wouldn't the DDOS attack still be succesful without touching or alerting the dns servers themselves.
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work like that. The routers we're talking about here (I imagine that most of the root servers are on 100BT or Gigabit Ethernet LANs which then plug into one or more DS-3s [45 Mbps] or more likely OC-3s [155 Mbps]) are designed to be able to handle many, many times more traffic than the servers are. Your average Cisco 7xxx or 12xxx router is built to handle far more traffic than any given server might see. Think about it ... you generally have many servers being serviced by one router, not the other way around. Additionally, each root server is most likely connected to multiple routers (say, they're hosted at an ISP with three DS-3s to different providers and each DS-3 is plugged into a different Cisco 7500).
Also I doubt that the routers are setup to recognize any kind of attack as they are just relays between the net and the server. Possibly the attack could go on for quite some time before any one realized what was going on.
Actually, it's the other way around. Most good routers are designed to have the ability (if you enable it) to look inside of the packets that pass through them and filter out "bad" ones based on various criteria. Thus, routers are actually perfectly suited to stopping attacks like this, while servers are expected to burn their CPU cycles doing other things (yes, servers can do this sort of filtering, but they generally have something more important to do). The only real problem is that it's often very difficult to tell the "good" packets from the "bad." After all, how do you distinguish automatically between a distributed flood of HTTP malicious requests and a Slashdotting? You get the idea.
The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software.
Riiiiight. Don't you *really* mean, "there isn't a thing that I do that can't be done?" You seem like a smart person ... you can't really be ignorant enough to think that there's a free software solution right now for everything?
As an example (the esoteric and tiny niche market of "desktop publishing"), let's take the graphic designers I support and replace their regular coffee with GNU/Folger's Crystals:
DESIGNERS: Hey, where's Photoshop?
ME: You have something better now, called the Gimp. It's Free.
DESIGNER #1: That's great. Why can't I work on this image with a embedded CMYK color profile? Professional printers require CMYK separations.
DESIGNER #2: And why don't I have pro-level color correction and matching across the entire system?
DESIGNER #3: And where are my multiple master fonts, or fonts with professional ligatures and weighting?
ME: But you don't understand, you don't need those things! Your software is Free now! You can look at the source code!
DESIGNERS: Oooh. (they look at it for a minute) So what? Is that, like, weird poetry? Their punctuation is all wrong.
ME: So you can modify it if you want to do all those things!
DESIGNERS: So how do we do that?
ME: You just need to learn C++ and programming with a GUI toolkit, plus a few other things.
DESIGNERS: I thought the idea was that people pay us to design things because we're good at that, and we pay other people to make software that does the things we need, because they're good at that?
ME: (sigh) What, do you people just not get it?
Look, I love free software and I am a great proponent of it where it is suitable ... but claiming free software is suitable everywhere is just as wrong as claiming that MS software is suitable everywhere.
The company I work for, Spacenet, is the second-largest business satellite ISP out there. We serve *business* customers who have large and small multiple (5-5000+) locations (retailers, food service, energy, financial, services, etc.).
If you have a *business* meeting these criteria and are looking for satellite connectivity that supports Macs, send e-mail to me and I can push for Mac compatibility if there is significant demand.
Don't just say there is no corporate satellite ISP support for Macs and do nothing about it ... if you can genuinely justify large multi-site Mac satellite network support, I can help make it happen.
As a BSD guru-turned-Mac-guru myself, I would love to help this but I do need the numbers to prove it. Right now, we have almost zero requests for this, but an influx of REAL potential customers asking for this could make it happen. I would really, really like to make this available, but I can't do it by telling our MS-oriented development guys to do it without visible justification.
This isn't some random spam for business, this is a real request from a company's senior marketing staff to help build demand and make this happen. In your e-mail, please describe your multi-site business and its needs, and I can use this info to get Mac support for Spacenet's services.
everyeone knows taht MACs haev no games excpet for loesrs like Mist!!! and open sores games are only for Lunix and they dont work becuase yuo download them and they are just a bunch of fiels for only in WordPad and say things like "maek install" that does not make any sense!!!!!
if these MAC open sorse games are liek LUnix games then MAC users cannot compiel them in WordPad either!!! all real h4x0rs no taht teh only real gaems are for Windoews or XBOX becuase they haev teh COUNTERSTRIEK and taht game w/golfing with SLUTS!!!!! and teh volleyball gaem with otyhyer SLUTS!!!! taht is whey nobody uses MAC or Lunix excpet f4gots!!!!! and MAC cannot even use teh real Interweb except AOL!!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!
</JEFFK!!! MODE>
Seriously, the lack of "Mac games" is true to some extent but is in reality seriously overestimated. While Macs clearly lack the breadth of games available for the PC, there are plenty of top-notch Mac games available, from The Sims to Civ 3 to Warcraft 3 to Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds to Max Payne to Medal of Honor, etc. etc.
As to the poster's question, the unfortunate answer is "no, a game ported to Mac will probably use the Carbon API (a revised version of the old MacOS 1-9 API with the old memory/threading junk and Mac-only 3D API thrown out and new interface stuff thrown in) so it can run on non-MacOS X systems." Almost no commercial games are written to the MacOS X Unix APIs or to the OS X-only "Cocoa" API (which requires Objective-C or Java).
As a result - contrary to all those similar posts saying "Hey, MS Office is available for MacOS X - now it can be easily ported to *NIX," the real story is that games ported to Mac are largely Mac-specific because they're using a Mac-only API. And - pardon the rant here - the Mac-only Carbon API will be dominant until all those Mac luddites out there who are clinging to MacOS
The bottom line is that while MacOS X is a great step forward for *NIX marketshare on the desktop, don't expect it to translate into a step forward for *NIX games despite the fairly robust current Mac game market.
P.S. - If any moderators just read the first two paragraphs of my post and mod it down as flamebait, TEHY ARE TEH SUX0RS AND I WILL RAELGUN THEM!!!!
Just curious, has anyone heard of any attempts by services such as these to buy copyrights from artists and challenge the RIAA as a legitimate (competing, rather than RIAA-owned) distributor on legally even ground?
It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work like that. I'm sure that artists may be amenable to the idea, but major artists simply aren't going to be able to do that. For albums released by major labels (smaller labels as well, IIRC), the artist/songwriter owns the song, but NOT the actual recording of it that appeared on the album. So all those tracks that came off an album are owned by the publisher, not the artist - and there's a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get them to sell that (or license it, either - they can't even agree on fairly doing that between themselves for their lame online music services, let alone fairly licensing it to some young startup whippersnappers).
"Okay," you say, "so the artists don't own the actual recordings (that particular performance that's on the album) ... so why don't they re-record it (since they own the song itself) and sell or license that to someone else?" Unfortunately, most major artists are under contract to large record labels - so if they record a new version, their label gets first dibs. That also includes "official" live recordings, too. BTW, live bootlegs, even if the band turns a blind eye to their existence, are theoretically just as illegal as pirated album tracks, since the label the band is under contract to should get a chance to make money off the band is going to release it (and the band to get some royalties from it).
Lastly, don't blame the bands for making these "deals with the devil" - yes, it handcuffs them to have the rights to their next X albums' worth of songs locked into a big nasty music label - but when you're struggling to make it, the offer of financing to make albums, distribution networks to get you on the radio and in Tower Records is nothing to sneeze at. They're just trying to make it when they sign these deals - nobody else right now can offer them the same things that the major labels can.
Maybe the real hope lies in bands that use the big labels to get popular, then after their contracts expire use the 'net intelligently to reach their fans. But unless rock stars start reading Slashdot daily (or someone can convince them that there's a really solid plan for not losing their fiscal shorts in the effort), we may be waiting a while.
Gilat is a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal, e.g. small satellite dish) hardware manufacturer that owned a large chunk of Starband. However, even though they retain a smaller stake in it, they recently wrote off all of their investment in the company, saying they didn't expect to get any of it back.
Echostar is the company behind Dish Network, and they had bought into Starband (majority ownership?) and planned to use it for their own residential satellite Internet service. Recently, though, Echostar decided it wanted to buy ("merge with") satellite biggie Hughes Electronics (operator of DirecTV).
Knowing that Echostar would face some regulatory hurdles over the consolidation, Echostar dropped Starband (claiming something or other was wrong with it) and then complained to the regulatory overseers that rural folks wouldn't be able to get Internet access unless their merger with Hughes was approved. I think I heard that Echostar recently took its reps off Starband's board, since they didn't seem to be too welcome anymore.
At no time, I think, were Gilat and Echostar really "partners" - they just both owned parts of Starband.
Some people have posted asking about how they're going to pay for keeping their network up, but that most likely isn't an issue, since you don't have to be *out* of money to file for bankruptcy. What they're trying to do by declaring bankruptcy is buy some time to find additional buyers. I'm not sure whether the rules in the EU are the same, but here's how it works in the US:
In the US, the two most common bankruptcy options are to file under Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 of the US bankruptcy code. Chapter 7 filings are what you do when you realize you've irrevocably screwed the pooch, and there's just no way you are ever going to make it. Ch. 7 means you've cashed your check, game over - your assets will be liquidated (sold) to scrounge up whatever cash possible for the companies you owe money to. Everybody goes home, then the earth is sown with salt under your company headquarters.
Chapter 11, however - this is what I presume they're using the European equivalent of - means you think you can turn things around, but you can't do it just yet or you can't do it because your existing debts are too big. You can declare a Ch. 11 bankruptcy when you've still got lots of cash - that's to keep things up and running while you work out a plan to pay back your existing debts.
There's a good side and a bad side for companies filing Ch. 11 - the good side is you get to keep on going, and you don't have to pay back any debts you ran up before you filed! Most of the time, courts will rule that the companies that provide you with critical services (like power, fiber, leases, etc.) can't shut you off during your bankruptcy, even though you've just (potentially) stiffed them for zillions of dollars. This is likely what KPN is doing.
The down side is that you no longer control your company - the courts do. And they pay lots of attention to what your creditors (those folks you stiffed) ask for. Your job is to come up with a plan to pay those creditors back over time for a reasonable amount (anywhere from 10% to 80% of your orginal debt, most likely). If your creditors don't like the plan, or think that they'd get more money back by shutting you down and liquidating assets than allowing you to live and try to pay them back, they can get the courts to probably shut you down. Also, don't forget that your credit is now hosed.
So ... I wouldn't worry about KPN's lights going off anytime soon. They probably filed the EU equivalent of Ch. 11 while they had plenty of cash in the bank to keep it running while they look for someone to buy their assets (probably the only chance they have of satisfying their creditors).
On the Solaris 9 order page, Sun explains its seemingly incongruous licensing fees:
"Note: User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed."
Sun's desktop and server/enterprise systems are built very differently. The number of CPUs (or even their MHz) on a system has little to do with their performance when considered alongside bus clocking, bandwidth, RAM, etc.
As such, it appears that they're making a good-faith effort to correlate a system's performance class (and hence what type of customer probably bought it) with what they're charging for the OS upgrade. Associated with the above idea is probably their built-in support costs (e.g., a large company using Solaris on a mission-critical system will probably have greater support demands than an individual user on a desktop machine).
If you're using Solaris rather than Linux or *BSD, chances are that you're doing so in a business environment where 24x7 commercial support and Solaris' other goodies are important. Unless you're a hacker who bought a $100 SPARC 2 box off eBay to tinker with Solaris, you probably purchased it because of its commercially-supported reliability and other kinky features like CPU and HD hot-swappability etc. on high-end systems.
FWIW, I think Sun's licensing terms here are a rather good attempt at equating commercial use and mission criticality with licensing fees. So, here's the question: (GPL/BSD aside), can anyone think of a better (specific!) scheme for equating the need [and presumably consequent ability to pay for it] of large corporations to pay big OS upgrade license fees and letting individual/small business users pay smaller OS license fees?
For everyone wondering whether their video card will be able to use the hardware-accelerated Quartz, I quote from Apple's website (at the bottom of the page):
"Supported cards: nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance."
Also note that they say 32 MB of RAM is recommended but theoretically not required. So I don't think this is quite as much of a debacle as some posters have made it out to be. Besides, Quartz should be improved and faster in 10.2 whether you're using hardware acceleration or not; you just won't get the max performance if it isn't hardware-accelerated.
Would this make Linux irrelevant instantaneously?
;)
No offense intended, but the answer is NO. (see below.)
Or what if Sun were to release and maintain free Solaris for Itanium as well as x86? Would that be the kiss of death for HP-UX and AIX 5L? Why do they hesitate?
Solaris is a SVR4-based Unix, unlike Linux or *BSD. The original AT&T code still present is used under license and it is not Sun's prerogative to release this under the GPL.
What is the possibility of Sun convincing Apple to integrate large portions of Solaris into Mac OS X? Would they be willing to give it away to Apple? Why haven't they done so to build up market share?
The possibility is absolutely zero. Apple chose BSD and the Mach microkernel because that's what Steve [Jobs] and Avie [Tevanian] decided was the best possible solution back when they were at NeXT, and that's what NeXTStep/OpenStep were built on. MacOS X is built on OpenStep. It would probably take just as long to replace the Mach/BSD foundations of OS X with an SVR4-based kernel as it would to port Aqua/Cocoa/etc. to Solaris. Apple uses what it uses for a reason, and the hypothetical availability of Solaris wouldn't make it a better choice just because it's available.
I am a Sun stockholder. I would like to see Sun publicly considering these actions. I want to see some bombast from Steve and Bill. If Sun, Apple, and possibly AOL collaberate on an x86-os, they will kill Microsoft.
No, they won't. If you put Sun and Apple (and AOL's) customers together and get them ALL to switch overnight, then you still don't have more than 15-20% of the market of x86 PCs out there running Windows. As soon as they do that, THEN come up with interoperable replacements for the Office (sorry, StarOffice doesn't cut it), Exchange, Access/MS SQL and other software that business users depend on, THEN they can come up with some way to get everyone to port their DirectX-based games that the home market depends on. Pretty simple.
Once upon a time, the MAE NAPs were certainly a big choke point. A few years ago, you could have blown up two nondescript buildings across the street from each other in Tyson's Corner, VA (MAE-East 1 and 2) and a tall building on Market Street in San Jose (MAE West) and pretty much taken down the Internet.
However, that's not so much the case today. The fact is that most traffic (in the US at least) goes between the Big Three (UUNET/WorldCom, Sprint and Cable & Wireless), or at least it could go because most networks have an upstream multihomed connection to one or more of the big three. And those guys have plenty of private interconnections, some of which are outside of the NAPs.
Networks have also shifted away from the old MAE model (FDDI connections into these huge mother-f***er DEC gigaswitches housed in the MAE buildings) and towards ATM-based NAPs, where you just get a virtual circuit in a "cloud" in the area. The weakness of the FDDI-gigaswitches model that caused people to move away from them was not the security aspect, but rather that they were a huge pain to upgrade and became a huge sinkhole for packet loss when they were overburdened (e.g., MAE-East in late 1997).
Of course, the MAEs still are important - there's a hell of a lot of fiber running through there, and taking it out would require everyone to route around it, causing a HUGE temporary disruption - but they're not the tremendous choke point/security risk that they once were.