Other reports indicate that it was a one-time, flat rate, enterprise-wide fee in the neighborhood of a million dollars.
What makes me feel especially warm inside is envisioning the bargaining session. Once they get a nibble, software salesmen are your bitches. The poor dude who negotiated the price with Marsh is gonna have trouble sitting down for a long, long time.
Reports indicate it was a one-time flat rate deal. That right there tells you the software vendor was desperate to make the sale. Imagine you're in charge of SCO sales (talk about the job from hell), and you actually get a nibble from a potential customer with 15,000 servers. You'll cut your price to make the sale.
My guess is that it was no more than $5/ existing server, probably much less, and EV1 figures to benefit enough from the publicity to more than cover it (they're about to open a new data center, umm... Wednesday, what a coincidence). They're pretty sharp business people, from what I've seen.
I'd be inclined to be a little upset, too... except that I don't run EV1 (though I do admin a few servers there), and so it's really none of my business. But I was wondering how long it would take for SCO to go after those kinds of people, since they're obvious sources of cash.
It sucks to see them feed the beast, but it may have been the smartest thing for them to do. They're an agressive company, growing like hell, and the last thing they need is to be the point defendent in something like this. So I understand the temptation to just pay it off and get it behind you.
I imagine SCO will next turn to smaller hosts, who will in turn make their own decisions.
What would be really nice is to have the darned courts get on with it, and actually decide something in this case. Most folks think SCO will go down in a ball of flames, but until that's determined, their claims are so wide-ranging that nobody can afford to take even a small chance. Until the courts start to give some indication of where they stand, this stuff will continue.
Hmmm... as I look more closely, he really did seem to target kids, at least in part. Plus, he's from Hollywood, FL, where porn is the #2 industry after valet parking.
If his scam had really revolved around intentionally misleading children to porn sites, I doubt he could have made much money at it. What's he gonna do, get rich off their lunch money? Besides, they show each other their stuff for that.
It sounds like a typical prosecutor's embellishment. Not to defend the guy, it's just that what a prosecutor says after a conviction isn't subject to rules of evidence or rebuttal, and they like to puff their accomplishments. So, when both kids and adults made typos and got sent to the front door of a porn site, it was transformed into "targeting pornography at children" through the miracle of politics.
I'm not sure whether it's patent abuse by MS, or simply defensive patenting to avoid becoming a target. If nothing else, by filing for the patent first, they get themselves a little protection from subsequent patent claims.
The problem is in the patent system... once the system is in place, however flawed, you can't blame people for trying to get the most out of it, because they're competing with other people who are trying to make the most of it. Shaking our fists at MS will no good, it just means that somebody else will benefit from a flawed system. But the consumer loses either way.
Yeah, I see some actual hope that something like this would be effective. Perhaps if the servers simply exchanged certs, for example. Requiring a cert to run a mail server is NOT a heavy burden, and you could always accept unsigned messages if you wanted to. It raises some tech issues, and current SSL certs wouldn't work exactly. But a system of verifying the sending server and tying it to an identifiable individual or company would help a lot. Even the barrier of having it cost $50 or so to get a server cert would be enough to stop a lot of spammers.
Even better, such a solution is implemented at the server level, it's transparent to users, and it's backwards compatible (you could still configure your server to accept unsigned mail, or just filter it more aggressively), making gradual implementation a possibility. So there's a good chance it could catch on if major ISP's were to adopt it.
I confess to not having thought through all the details, but something along these lines is probably going to be the answer. Makes a lot more sense than any of the "pay per message" proposals, that's just Libertarians Gone Wild.
The UN was NEVER a "controlling body." It's not constituted as a government, it's chartered as a forum for every nation to speak their piece. And that's a good reason to exist. But that's all it is. There are no constitutional protections, for example, to insure fairness of representation, succession, responsibility or accountability. You can't get kicked out of the UN, no matter how bad a sleazeball you are.
Imagine if Hitler had a seat in Congress, and neither and Congress nor his "constituents" could do anything about it except shake their fists. That's the UN.
It's a good and useful forum, but it is completely without authority beyond that which member nations voluntarily cede to it.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing, it's becoming really difficult to find editorial reviews through Google. All you get is shopping pages, link farms, and somewhere buried in the first couple of pages will be epinions.com, and that's about it. You almost never find a real editorial article on a product.
Kodak is a film company that made a few cameras, usually to promote film sales. Sure, some of them were high-quality, but the've been AWOL from the professional camera market for over 40 years. They made only one 35mm SLR, for only a couple of years. So it shouldn't surprise anybody that they're having trouble competing the likes of Nikon, Olympus, Minolta, and Canon.
>> Kodak failed to take digital photography seriously, or at least failed to find a way to successfully transform
I have to figure they took it seriously; I just realized my first three digital cameras were all Kodaks, it was 1999 before Nikon had anything to match 'em. And my dad is still using my 1998 Kodak D260.
But... Kodak was never a camera company, and one of the amazing phenomena is that the digicam market is dominated by film camera makers, not by technology companies or by film companies. Sony and HP have established a foothold, but only through enormous effort. Fuji has made some progress, but it's hardly comparable to their share of film sales. Other than that, it's Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta.
What killed Kodak was that they had never sold high-quality film cameras, I guess. They led the way in Digital SLR's with their early Canon-partnered products, but when Canon pulled out, it left them pretty high and dry.
Anyway, anybody who thinks that Kodak was a lumbering giant who "just didn't get it," is just reciting lame cliches. They really were one of the early leaders in digital.
Of course, that's the excuse politicians used to sell it... and I'm sure that initially it helped push wires out into the woods. In the 1920's.
But nowadays... why should people in the cities subsidize phone service in the boonies? There are lots of nice things about the boonies that you don't get in the city. Sure, absent a "universal serice" requirement, your local telco might not serve certain neighborhoods. But that's not a problem, as long as others are free to serve those neighborhoods. But they're not.
It's funny, we get so used to the monopoly system that we almost forget it's there, and the "universal service" argument relies on the assumption of a monopoly.
In any event, I've had my cell phone ring in Death Valley and in the middle of the Everglades, places where you can't even get wired service and where cell service exists without the "benefit" of regulation. On weekends, I'm more bothered that I can't find enough places where it won't ring.
Well, there's still only one company allowed to run copper wire to your house and connect it to the telephone network. They can sell multiple applications on top of it, but that last mile is still ridiculously overpriced and incredibly backward technologically. Nearly every other area of technology has dropped tenfold in price and increased tenfold in performance over recent decades. But the local loop hasn't improved in price vs. performance at all.
Why gripe about a reduction in the number of wireless providers, when the last mile of copper is still a legal monopoly?
Every wonder why wireless phone service is becoming cheaper than wired? Ever wonder why your wired service is a few decades behind in technology?
Ever wonder why you can get a broadband cell phone set up immediately, but you often have to wait a month for DSL installation?
Say what you want about the wireless market, it will soon offer better services at cheaper prices than wire. And the difference isn't technology, it's regulation.... it's the legislated monopoly that claims to protect consumers. But nowadays, poor folks who talk a lot are using wireless phones, because it's cheaper.
Sheesh, this place is like having parents, you ask for some advice about a shiny new toy, and all you get is a stern, "you don't want one of those... you want an etch-a-sketch."
Anyway.... I sprung for the overpriced Toshiba Portege M200. I don't use the tablet functionality very much, but there are situations when it's perfect... watching sports on the couch while you keep the live stats handy, operating the GPS in the car, and other vital geek functions. Overall performance is as good as I've ever had in a laptop, battery life is reasonable, better than a standard laptop.
Mostly, I use it as a small laptop; my old one was a monster, and I found it just stayed at home most of the time. This is my fourth Toshiba; I'm not sure they're as good as they once were, but the M200 is pretty well executed for what it is. The most notewrothy feature is the UXWGVA screen or whatever it is; 1450x1100 resolution or some such allows room for plenty of windows to be open.
Also appealing is the cheaper Fujitsu 3010, and Acer has a nice Centrino-powered model, as well.
Centrino systems are definitely the way to go if you want power, they're far more energy-efficient than P4's or AMD's. Transmeta might have better battery life, at the expense of speed. The P-III solutions seem pretty underwhelming, though the old Toshiba Portege 3500's are currently getting closed out; refurbs seem to go for $1200-$1400.
I think that's how They Might Be Giants got off the ground... they started out just the two of them and a cassette recorder, and it enabled them to do a lot of gigs that a full band couldn't. They'd just throw their stuff on the train and go play down in Philly or Baltimore, then take the train back to NY the same night; full bands with drums, amps, and stuff just couldn't play gigs outside the city. At a time when most NY bands were looking for that one score that would persuade the music industry to push them into the public eye, TMBG were able to quietly built an actual following.
The support issue for Open Source Software is usually the easiest one to put people at ease on, especially with the Internet as a resource.
Simply explain that others have probably had the same problem before. So a Google search will quickly turn up a page where somebody else has asked the same question you have, and where a helpful person has suggested they go do a Google search before asking such stupid questions.
When the big gorillas have patent fights, they just sign cross-licensing agreements, effectively forming a cartel. This is actually a case of the little guy suing the big guy, which seems to be more the norm for ridiculous patents like this one.
What strikes me on this one is that it was filed in 1995, and the filing specifically mentions CD-ROMs and Wintel PC's. How could this have escaped notice until now? It's not as if it was hiding in some dusty filing cabinet for years, it was filed by the same company that currently holds it, while Windows 95 was in beta!
I dunno, maybe the USPTO is right, maybe this stuff isn't so obvious. Even the people who filed the damned patent couldn't figure it out.
I never found a popup blocker for IE that was free and that worked as well as Fire*'s. It's amazing how little free stuff gets written for Windows, everybody who cranks out a VB program in a weekend thinks he should charge $15-$20 for it. And until IE actually has built-in popup blocking that works effectively, then Firefox is the clear winner on that score.
But beyond that, Firefox really is an landmark release. It's a combination of a lot of little things that it does better than IE, and it's the first Mozilla version I could say that about. It really is faster than IE, something that many have claimed but few have achieved. This is the first version that I haven't closed after a few hours... really close to becoming my default browser. A very nice piece of work.
Re:Not only cost, but what about security?
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 1
I doubt it's actually a disaster in the making, but it sure will be intertesting when the implications dawn on people. Seems like all you'd have to do is say something like, "Gee, now terrorists can access the Internet anonymously right from the boarding gate," and politicians would start a mad rush to put an end to it. Or, if you want to bring the full force of the law into play, you spread the word that it's an easy way to share music files without getting caught.
It might remain free to use, but I doubt it will remain anonymous.
On the other hand, maybe it's simply a ploy so the authorities can monitor travelers more easily.
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In a better world, AutoZone would be in trouble over the cheesy car trinkets they sell, not for using Linux.
Other reports indicate that it was a one-time, flat rate, enterprise-wide fee in the neighborhood of a million dollars.
What makes me feel especially warm inside is envisioning the bargaining session. Once they get a nibble, software salesmen are your bitches. The poor dude who negotiated the price with Marsh is gonna have trouble sitting down for a long, long time.
Reports indicate it was a one-time flat rate deal. That right there tells you the software vendor was desperate to make the sale. Imagine you're in charge of SCO sales (talk about the job from hell), and you actually get a nibble from a potential customer with 15,000 servers. You'll cut your price to make the sale.
My guess is that it was no more than $5/ existing server, probably much less, and EV1 figures to benefit enough from the publicity to more than cover it (they're about to open a new data center, umm... Wednesday, what a coincidence). They're pretty sharp business people, from what I've seen.
Testifying is easy. Trying to offer an IPO with a huge lawsuit on your books is hard.
I'd be inclined to be a little upset, too... except that I don't run EV1 (though I do admin a few servers there), and so it's really none of my business. But I was wondering how long it would take for SCO to go after those kinds of people, since they're obvious sources of cash.
It sucks to see them feed the beast, but it may have been the smartest thing for them to do. They're an agressive company, growing like hell, and the last thing they need is to be the point defendent in something like this. So I understand the temptation to just pay it off and get it behind you.
I imagine SCO will next turn to smaller hosts, who will in turn make their own decisions.
What would be really nice is to have the darned courts get on with it, and actually decide something in this case. Most folks think SCO will go down in a ball of flames, but until that's determined, their claims are so wide-ranging that nobody can afford to take even a small chance. Until the courts start to give some indication of where they stand, this stuff will continue.
Hmmm... as I look more closely, he really did seem to target kids, at least in part. Plus, he's from Hollywood, FL, where porn is the #2 industry after valet parking.
If his scam had really revolved around intentionally misleading children to porn sites, I doubt he could have made much money at it. What's he gonna do, get rich off their lunch money? Besides, they show each other their stuff for that.
It sounds like a typical prosecutor's embellishment. Not to defend the guy, it's just that what a prosecutor says after a conviction isn't subject to rules of evidence or rebuttal, and they like to puff their accomplishments. So, when both kids and adults made typos and got sent to the front door of a porn site, it was transformed into "targeting pornography at children" through the miracle of politics.
Let's just replace DNS with something similar and tell Verisign they can't play.
I'm not sure whether it's patent abuse by MS, or simply defensive patenting to avoid becoming a target. If nothing else, by filing for the patent first, they get themselves a little protection from subsequent patent claims.
The problem is in the patent system... once the system is in place, however flawed, you can't blame people for trying to get the most out of it, because they're competing with other people who are trying to make the most of it. Shaking our fists at MS will no good, it just means that somebody else will benefit from a flawed system. But the consumer loses either way.
Yeah, I see some actual hope that something like this would be effective. Perhaps if the servers simply exchanged certs, for example. Requiring a cert to run a mail server is NOT a heavy burden, and you could always accept unsigned messages if you wanted to. It raises some tech issues, and current SSL certs wouldn't work exactly. But a system of verifying the sending server and tying it to an identifiable individual or company would help a lot. Even the barrier of having it cost $50 or so to get a server cert would be enough to stop a lot of spammers.
Even better, such a solution is implemented at the server level, it's transparent to users, and it's backwards compatible (you could still configure your server to accept unsigned mail, or just filter it more aggressively), making gradual implementation a possibility. So there's a good chance it could catch on if major ISP's were to adopt it.
I confess to not having thought through all the details, but something along these lines is probably going to be the answer. Makes a lot more sense than any of the "pay per message" proposals, that's just Libertarians Gone Wild.
The UN was NEVER a "controlling body." It's not constituted as a government, it's chartered as a forum for every nation to speak their piece. And that's a good reason to exist. But that's all it is. There are no constitutional protections, for example, to insure fairness of representation, succession, responsibility or accountability. You can't get kicked out of the UN, no matter how bad a sleazeball you are.
Imagine if Hitler had a seat in Congress, and neither and Congress nor his "constituents" could do anything about it except shake their fists. That's the UN.
It's a good and useful forum, but it is completely without authority beyond that which member nations voluntarily cede to it.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing, it's becoming really difficult to find editorial reviews through Google. All you get is shopping pages, link farms, and somewhere buried in the first couple of pages will be epinions.com, and that's about it. You almost never find a real editorial article on a product.
Kodak is a film company that made a few cameras, usually to promote film sales. Sure, some of them were high-quality, but the've been AWOL from the professional camera market for over 40 years. They made only one 35mm SLR, for only a couple of years. So it shouldn't surprise anybody that they're having trouble competing the likes of Nikon, Olympus, Minolta, and Canon.
>> Kodak failed to take digital photography seriously, or at least failed to find a way to successfully transform
I have to figure they took it seriously; I just realized my first three digital cameras were all Kodaks, it was 1999 before Nikon had anything to match 'em. And my dad is still using my 1998 Kodak D260.
But... Kodak was never a camera company, and one of the amazing phenomena is that the digicam market is dominated by film camera makers, not by technology companies or by film companies. Sony and HP have established a foothold, but only through enormous effort. Fuji has made some progress, but it's hardly comparable to their share of film sales. Other than that, it's Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta.
What killed Kodak was that they had never sold high-quality film cameras, I guess. They led the way in Digital SLR's with their early Canon-partnered products, but when Canon pulled out, it left them pretty high and dry.
Anyway, anybody who thinks that Kodak was a lumbering giant who "just didn't get it," is just reciting lame cliches. They really were one of the early leaders in digital.
Of course, that's the excuse politicians used to sell it... and I'm sure that initially it helped push wires out into the woods. In the 1920's.
But nowadays... why should people in the cities subsidize phone service in the boonies? There are lots of nice things about the boonies that you don't get in the city. Sure, absent a "universal serice" requirement, your local telco might not serve certain neighborhoods. But that's not a problem, as long as others are free to serve those neighborhoods. But they're not.
It's funny, we get so used to the monopoly system that we almost forget it's there, and the "universal service" argument relies on the assumption of a monopoly.
In any event, I've had my cell phone ring in Death Valley and in the middle of the Everglades, places where you can't even get wired service and where cell service exists without the "benefit" of regulation. On weekends, I'm more bothered that I can't find enough places where it won't ring.
Well, there's still only one company allowed to run copper wire to your house and connect it to the telephone network. They can sell multiple applications on top of it, but that last mile is still ridiculously overpriced and incredibly backward technologically. Nearly every other area of technology has dropped tenfold in price and increased tenfold in performance over recent decades. But the local loop hasn't improved in price vs. performance at all.
Well, if it's so expensive, then why do we need to lock out potential competitors?
Why gripe about a reduction in the number of wireless providers, when the last mile of copper is still a legal monopoly?
Every wonder why wireless phone service is becoming cheaper than wired? Ever wonder why your wired service is a few decades behind in technology?
Ever wonder why you can get a broadband cell phone set up immediately, but you often have to wait a month for DSL installation?
Say what you want about the wireless market, it will soon offer better services at cheaper prices than wire. And the difference isn't technology, it's regulation.... it's the legislated monopoly that claims to protect consumers. But nowadays, poor folks who talk a lot are using wireless phones, because it's cheaper.
Sheesh, this place is like having parents, you ask for some advice about a shiny new toy, and all you get is a stern, "you don't want one of those... you want an etch-a-sketch."
Anyway.... I sprung for the overpriced Toshiba Portege M200. I don't use the tablet functionality very much, but there are situations when it's perfect... watching sports on the couch while you keep the live stats handy, operating the GPS in the car, and other vital geek functions. Overall performance is as good as I've ever had in a laptop, battery life is reasonable, better than a standard laptop.
Mostly, I use it as a small laptop; my old one was a monster, and I found it just stayed at home most of the time. This is my fourth Toshiba; I'm not sure they're as good as they once were, but the M200 is pretty well executed for what it is. The most notewrothy feature is the UXWGVA screen or whatever it is; 1450x1100 resolution or some such allows room for plenty of windows to be open.
Also appealing is the cheaper Fujitsu 3010, and Acer has a nice Centrino-powered model, as well.
Centrino systems are definitely the way to go if you want power, they're far more energy-efficient than P4's or AMD's. Transmeta might have better battery life, at the expense of speed. The P-III solutions seem pretty underwhelming, though the old Toshiba Portege 3500's are currently getting closed out; refurbs seem to go for $1200-$1400.
>> replace the entire orchestra with a CD player
I think that's how They Might Be Giants got off the ground... they started out just the two of them and a cassette recorder, and it enabled them to do a lot of gigs that a full band couldn't. They'd just throw their stuff on the train and go play down in Philly or Baltimore, then take the train back to NY the same night; full bands with drums, amps, and stuff just couldn't play gigs outside the city. At a time when most NY bands were looking for that one score that would persuade the music industry to push them into the public eye, TMBG were able to quietly built an actual following.
Sure, it's only 15% of the code... but the only missing component is Internet Explorer.
The support issue for Open Source Software is usually the easiest one to put people at ease on, especially with the Internet as a resource.
Simply explain that others have probably had the same problem before. So a Google search will quickly turn up a page where somebody else has asked the same question you have, and where a helpful person has suggested they go do a Google search before asking such stupid questions.
When the big gorillas have patent fights, they just sign cross-licensing agreements, effectively forming a cartel. This is actually a case of the little guy suing the big guy, which seems to be more the norm for ridiculous patents like this one.
What strikes me on this one is that it was filed in 1995, and the filing specifically mentions CD-ROMs and Wintel PC's. How could this have escaped notice until now? It's not as if it was hiding in some dusty filing cabinet for years, it was filed by the same company that currently holds it, while Windows 95 was in beta!
I dunno, maybe the USPTO is right, maybe this stuff isn't so obvious. Even the people who filed the damned patent couldn't figure it out.
I never found a popup blocker for IE that was free and that worked as well as Fire*'s. It's amazing how little free stuff gets written for Windows, everybody who cranks out a VB program in a weekend thinks he should charge $15-$20 for it. And until IE actually has built-in popup blocking that works effectively, then Firefox is the clear winner on that score.
But beyond that, Firefox really is an landmark release. It's a combination of a lot of little things that it does better than IE, and it's the first Mozilla version I could say that about. It really is faster than IE, something that many have claimed but few have achieved. This is the first version that I haven't closed after a few hours... really close to becoming my default browser. A very nice piece of work.
I doubt it's actually a disaster in the making, but it sure will be intertesting when the implications dawn on people. Seems like all you'd have to do is say something like, "Gee, now terrorists can access the Internet anonymously right from the boarding gate," and politicians would start a mad rush to put an end to it. Or, if you want to bring the full force of the law into play, you spread the word that it's an easy way to share music files without getting caught.
It might remain free to use, but I doubt it will remain anonymous.
On the other hand, maybe it's simply a ploy so the authorities can monitor travelers more easily.