I am of the quaint and old fashioned (and very unpopular on Slashdot) opinion that the law should apply equally to all. Even for people you don't like. What is legal for Apple and Sun should be legal for Microsoft.
Anti-trust legislation was created for a reason, you know. If a market becomes completely monopolized you get inflated prices, bad products and services, etc. I'd like to see some reasons why you think curtailing a monopoly's ability to stop any competitors from entering the market is a bad idea... For capitalism to work the government needs to ensure the possibility of competition, right?
Go take a look at the BSD lawsuit papers (various links posted around the net). The judge's opinion where he denied the preliminary injunction against BSDI is really quite remarkable.
I went out to look for the ruling and found a link here.
I especially liked this part, after the ruling on the preliminary injunction (which was denied):
After reviewing the affidavits of Plaintiff's and Defendants, experts, a great deal of incertainty remains as to what trade secrets Net2 might contain. One fact does seem clear: the header files, filenames, and function names used by Defendants are not trade secrets. Defendants could have printed these off of any of the thousands of unrestricted copies of Plaintiff's binary object code. (Kashtan Aff. at 9-11.) Moreover, the nonfunctional elements of the code, such as comments, cannot be trade secrets because these elements are minimal and confer no competitive advantage on Defendants. The copied elements that contain instructions, such as BREAD and CPIO, might perhaps be trade secrets, but Defendants' experts have argued persuasively that these instructions are either in the public domain or otherwise exempt. As Defendants have repeatedly emphasized, much of 32V seems to be publicly available.
If the SCO case does largely depend on actual code reviews then they'll have to make their case... The experts will inevitably track down and inspect every line of code and see if could have come from the public domain, the programmer or IBM.
Then they'll need to show that IBM did in fact contribute that code and that this infringed the license.
In any case the judge in the BSD places great value on the expert opinions in determining that variable names, structure members, etc need to match header file declarations and that header files themselves are a public interface that is not subject to the same rules as the operational code.
How much code was actually copied and from where isn't really clear to the judge: he calls it an arguments over facts, presumably to go on and on until the facts are known fully and only matters of law remain:
Finally, Plaintiff argues that Defendants have copied 32V in writing the instructions and organizing the logical structure of Net2. Defendants counter that even if Plaintiff does retain trade secrets in Unix, Defendants carefully plucked these secrets out of Net2 and BSD/386. This argument is an argument over facts, and Plaintiff and Defendants have joined it with their experts. At the present state of the record, it seems that the side who gets in the last word wins.
He goes on to say this about BSDI's code having a similar structure to the V32 from Unix System Laboratories (USL), and USL's assertion that the structure similarities could be a violation of the license:
A further consideration is that 32V's overall organization may not even be protectable in the first place. Berkeley's license to use 32V protects 32V derivatives only to the extent that they contain certain proprietary information. If Berkeley excises the proprietary information (as it attempted to do with Net2), Berkeley is free to distribute derivatives without restriction.
So it really boils down to:
1) What are the facts? Unless there was deliberate copying and SCO can point at source lines that were copied and can't be explained by IBM as being in the public domain, there is no problem. Especially if IBM made a diligent effort to remove infringing code. This may take a while and IIRC, the actual trial doesn't begin untill these arguments over facts are resolved.
2) What exactly is in IBM's Unix license? Does it have clauses that limit IBM's ability to make their own code public under the GPL? I guess this will cause a lot of bickering but it will probably be easier to reduce this discussion to arguments of law.
3) The part about GPL not being legal will not even make it to trial unless it's substantiated.
That puts us where we were before, but that's the SCO story for ya:).
If you're using the latest Mac then you are using open source software anyway, and I guess you're not using it because you think it's worse than Windows?
If that's correct then the basic premise of Microsoft is wrong... The point being that open source projects can - and often do - outperform their closed competitors in most every way. You're right that out-of-the-box, they are not as user friendly - yet. But you can have Apple or Suse package them nicely.
Mind you, the same goes for furniture: you can buy the wood yourself, put it together and make furniture. But it won't be as user friendly as a furniture building packet that you can buy at Ikea's. People who don't want to bother with all this can just buy the same Ikea furniture already put together. And you'll have people who just want nice furniture, no matter what the cost or the supplier and they'll go to the nearest retail shop. That's what happens to commodities: easy to get, lots of choice.
Here you can see a job for open source: people want choice. But of course Microsoft doesn't want software to become a commodity, it'll destroy their market monopoly.
Well to be fair X has had a whole load of interesting features added to it the last few years. The automated config file creator has saved me a great deal of work setting up X on different boxes, it was probably the most important (and least known or announced) usability feature in X in the last years. The VNC extensions are also a big step in the good direction.
What X does lack from a sysadmin point of view is decent compile-time configurability (too many #defines buried in too many places in or outside the config/cf tree).
Having 3 distinct font implementations doesn't help either. It's also far to easy to shoot yourself in the foot (disabling render breaks xft), etc.
And let's not forget management issues such as who gets access to what, who maintains what, finding people willing (and capable) of doing regression testing for bug fixes/enhancements, etc. I think it would be very nice if Xfree got some more financial backing from an important player (read: IBM) so a couple of people could work on those issues full-time.
X is a great project, but of course it could be improved even further. Some people think a reimplementation is needed, but perhaps it's not and a good spring cleaning will do the trick. But the trick is still how to do that with mastodont code like X.
Call me stupid, but why don't you just filter on your mailserver or DMZ box? Or are you using those provided to you by your ISP?
You seem to have fixed spam for your own setup, but your company isn't doing the same for everyone. Sounds like a bad idea - good IT logic would be to make the setup work for everyone, and reduce spam and increase productivity for everyone.
All you need is a Linux/BSD/Win server and some spam blocker. Shouldn't be too hard to do really.
Well to be fair it didn't exactly work with window managers that didn't know anything about shaped windows. It didn't cause the WM to not work, but it pretty much caused the managed windows not to be shaped
Note that the wm would still work perfectly when not using the feature - so backward compatibility was provided.
Note also that you are talking about the specific *implementation* deficits in several window managers. Those may point to unclear protocol specifications or to bad code. Frankly, I suspect the latter. Code can be very broken if it makes assumptions about its input parameters without checking them first.
It is still hard to imagine a scheme where that sort of extention broke nothing though.
Agreed, but the worst outcome is that you can't use the new feature until your favourite applications work out-of-the-box with the feature enabled. The biggest problem will be finding the #define to (un)comment or set:).
This reminds me of a software project I once worked on as a consultant. The client demanded all sorts of things, including what language the application should be written in, and how it should be written.
I knew it wouldn't work and I told them why. But that didn't seem to matter all that much. They ended up with spaghetti code - there was no other way to do it. A year or two later they called me and asked if there was any possibility of doing something useful with the code. I replied - truthfully - that it should really be written from scratch but decently, and that I hadn't been able to do it right in the circumstances.
Business politics often wreck great business projects. I'm certain that most IT people really do need more training in social interaction, allowing them to push through their ideas with management more efficiently.
Maybe there's an even better approach. It looks like the protection hinges on installing software on your computer that will cause ripping to produce a bad quality file.
Now - who gave them the right to install software on your computer? You bought an Audio CD. Putting it in your computer doesn't mean you give permission for software to be installed on it, does it?
Isn't writing viruses and malware like this a felony?
Kinda makes you wonder... If Linux does one day take over as the prodominent OS on most computer devices, we'll get just as sick of its advertizing as we are of Microsofts now. Microsoft used to be cool...
Traffic shaping is OK for low bandwith WAN connections, to make sure everyone gets an equal share of the little that is available. But the problem of the bandwith consumption is only secondary. You've got infectious agents on your network, man. They need to be quarantained until they've been removed.
Even if you did want to use traffic shaping to allow at least slow access to the network for everyone, it would probably just either crash your routers or slow them to a crawl during an outbreak.
Never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Hanlon's Razor actually goes like this: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Read more here. Strange, I always thought this was a quote of Oscar Wilde.
I find it funny when the RIAA get's blasted for trying to protect the copyright if their members, when the GPL hinges on the enforcibility of copyright.
It does seem to be contradictory but both are a question of freedom: the freedom to share things with your friends. A good record, a good software program. The freedom to play a CD in your pre-2001 CD player. I don't mind paying for things as long as the seller doesn't deprive me of my rights as a consumer or a human being. I try to exercise my rights by not buying that copy-protected CD that my sister-in-law asked for her birth day - but it's still annoying.
Face it: the internet is probably the most important medium ever invented - and many more such changes are on the way. For a brief time only can those who stand in the way of change cause stagnation in society. We the people are the steam roller.
Working on OSS while a great thing is not going to bring them the same potential monitary gains as working for a big name software company.
I think you underestimate the power of the Open Side. Though I have a nice degree and make good money, for any future employment I will primarily refer to my work on open source projects as proof that I am as qualified as I claim to be. Open source work like this - done in the public eye and peer reviewed - has become the best kind of resume and the best way to a good job.
As the economy picks up I'm sure my department will be hiring new system administrators and programmers. If you get two candidates with similar skills, one who worked at Microsoft and one who is maintainer of some Linux kernel driver, who would you hire?
Including testing, debugging and jerking off (hey, he's 16 right?), a typical software engineer will write 10-20 lines of actual code a day. Mind you that's including the analysis phase and excluding empty lines which are there for readability.
I've always been proud that when looking back on my own projects I had something like 20-30 lines a day. On really good days you can write hundreds of lines but sometimes you have to throw everything out again because it's crap.
I hope this guy isn't for real, he'll be burnt out by the time he's 30.
Whats to stop the attacker from placing his own md5 sums on the ftp with the trojaned tarball?
The tarball exists on the ftp.freebsd.org site, but the MD5 sum exists in the Gentoo Portage tree. It would only have been a problem if the Gentoo OpenSSH maintainer were to have used the trojaned version and put its MD5 hash in the Gentoo tree (thereby signing it as "ok").
Everything would have seemed to be normal in this case... But still the chances of anything going wrong are slim compared to binary distributions or proprietary software.
Anyone would be able to sign programs they write themselves, that is not the issue.
The issue is that in "trusted" mode, programs which have been signed by someone else can write data to your system which you can not decrypt without that programs permission. The program could ask a server on the internet for permission to decrypt data. Think of the possible abuses!
This is the real Palladium threat - suddenly with the DMCA in place it's a fellony to try and read your encrypted data stored on your harddisk. Anytime you want to access sealed data legitimately, the software can take any decision it wants on allowing you do do that or not. It can contact Paramount's server and check if you've already seen that Star Trek movie more than twice. You have? Time to cough up more money.
The problem is not that Microsoft will be able to control its own signing authority but that other entities will use it, requiring the use of Microsoft's latest Windows OS along the way. Want to file your taxes? You'll need IRS(tm) for Windows. Want to watch Star Trek 14? Need to download Movie@Home for Windows from Paramount.
Circumvent the Microsoft Tax and you go to prison for life. Nice.
The problem is that Linux programmers don't stop to think about whether the shell they use e.g. during installation or with wrappers, is actually present on the system.
Being a solaris admin I regularly have to edit shell scripts to put the right path for bash in (/opt/local/bin/bash).
Software programmers should make their code more portable. In other words, fix configure to look for bash in the path and use that at the top of installation/wrapper scripts. In normal circumstances making the fixes isn't that much work, but you can see that it becomes much more of a problem when compiling something as humungous as Gnome because you can't automate the compiles/installs.
Re:CIS is different in a few ways
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CS vs CIS
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I'm not too sure about this. In times of trouble you should trim in your head count, but I can assure you there are people with a higher degree than me who would get cut before me.
It depends more on your value to the company than on degrees. I work in a multinational company, we have people of many different countries and scholastic backgrounds. The value of each of these people's degrees is nearly impossible to put a figure on (of course this could be very different in a small, local company which has a good knowledge of the college you went to).
Don't get sidetracked by all this, just study what you want to study. Chances are what you end up doing is completely unrelated to what classes you took at college or uni. You could major in English and end up writing assembly video drivers, who knows. I've seen English majors do great things with C, and I've seen CS people who couldn't code hello world if their life depended on it.
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it:).
All in all the Sun HW is some of the best in the business
This was true for the Sparc line of machines, but from personal experience I can assure you that the Ultra workstation product line is pretty crappy:
the NIC is substandard (haven't seen a single Ultra 5 that can do 100MBit over a 90m CAT 5 cable)
the PGX24 video card isn't much better
the power supplies die easily when power spikes occur - HP Vectra PCs connected to the same grid continue to work fine. If the power supply isn't broken, you have to remove the power cable for 10 seconds and plug it back in before the machine wants to boot again
Even the server product line is kinda weird:
The E450 has 3 power supplies but only 1 power chord (!). What do you mean, highly available?
The L280 6-tape DLT robot needs to have its drive replaced about every 2 months, not an impressive life span for a $10,000 server-class product
The A1000 hardware RAID box can be connected to 2 separate machines, but if the total length of the SCSI cables is over 1.2m the SCSI controller cuts the bus speed in half. This means you can't service one of the machines if it breaks without disconnecting the SCSI cables. This of course removes termination from the bus so the other machine is off-line too (sigh)
Sun needs to get their act together, they are behaving more and more like box pushers.
OTOH, the release of the source code would be a great step forward. Instead of waiting forever for Sun to fix a bug, we can send them the diff:).
Not really. The white paper for EIGRP is on the Cisco website. Any competitor can implement it, it's just that they have chosen not to. Remember that in networking you need interoperability, most players in this market publish their protocols.
By the way, there is no real replacement for EIGRP, true, but that's not Cisco's fault, just the inability (or unwillingness) of competitors to develop or even accept a better routing protocol.
...but me thinks that if it is illegal to threaten the Pres, it's probably illegal to urge the over throw of the government.
Threatening someone is not the same as voicing your opinion. Any government that throws people in jail for saying the government should be overthrown, problably will be overthrown.
Convicted felons are not allowed to run for federal office or vote in federal races. Local governments can do what ever they want. (Would you actually elect a convicted felon?)
And you think this is right? When the felon has done his prison time he should be integrated into society as a full member. The penal system is there to punish people, but also to reintegrate them successfully into society after the punishment has been carried out.
If you lock the felon out of normal society, how can society expect the felon to behave like a good member of society?
And yes, I would vote for a convicted felon if I believed in them, and yes it would depend on the crime they had committed and the circumstances around it.
In fact, in my country a man was elected to parliament while he was still in prison. It's also not illegal to escape from prison, provided you do not harm anyone or anything, and return your prison clothes and other prison owned items to their owners.
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Dude, that's just another security through obscurity thing. Doesn't work...
I am of the quaint and old fashioned (and very unpopular on Slashdot) opinion that the law should apply equally to all. Even for people you don't like. What is legal for Apple and Sun should be legal for Microsoft.
Anti-trust legislation was created for a reason, you know. If a market becomes completely monopolized you get inflated prices, bad products and services, etc. I'd like to see some reasons why you think curtailing a monopoly's ability to stop any competitors from entering the market is a bad idea... For capitalism to work the government needs to ensure the possibility of competition, right?
I went out to look for the ruling and found a link here.
I especially liked this part, after the ruling on the preliminary injunction (which was denied):
If the SCO case does largely depend on actual code reviews then they'll have to make their case... The experts will inevitably track down and inspect every line of code and see if could have come from the public domain, the programmer or IBM.
Then they'll need to show that IBM did in fact contribute that code and that this infringed the license.
In any case the judge in the BSD places great value on the expert opinions in determining that variable names, structure members, etc need to match header file declarations and that header files themselves are a public interface that is not subject to the same rules as the operational code.
How much code was actually copied and from where isn't really clear to the judge: he calls it an arguments over facts, presumably to go on and on until the facts are known fully and only matters of law remain:
He goes on to say this about BSDI's code having a similar structure to the V32 from Unix System Laboratories (USL), and USL's assertion that the structure similarities could be a violation of the license:
So it really boils down to:
1) What are the facts? Unless there was deliberate copying and SCO can point at source lines that were copied and can't be explained by IBM as being in the public domain, there is no problem. Especially if IBM made a diligent effort to remove infringing code. This may take a while and IIRC, the actual trial doesn't begin untill these arguments over facts are resolved.
2) What exactly is in IBM's Unix license? Does it have clauses that limit IBM's ability to make their own code public under the GPL? I guess this will cause a lot of bickering but it will probably be easier to reduce this discussion to arguments of law.
3) The part about GPL not being legal will not even make it to trial unless it's substantiated.
That puts us where we were before, but that's the SCO story for ya
Yes, that is interesting. Can you give some examples of that?
If you're using the latest Mac then you are using open source software anyway, and I guess you're not using it because you think it's worse than Windows?
If that's correct then the basic premise of Microsoft is wrong... The point being that open source projects can - and often do - outperform their closed competitors in most every way. You're right that out-of-the-box, they are not as user friendly - yet. But you can have Apple or Suse package them nicely.
Mind you, the same goes for furniture: you can buy the wood yourself, put it together and make furniture. But it won't be as user friendly as a furniture building packet that you can buy at Ikea's. People who don't want to bother with all this can just buy the same Ikea furniture already put together. And you'll have people who just want nice furniture, no matter what the cost or the supplier and they'll go to the nearest retail shop. That's what happens to commodities: easy to get, lots of choice.
Here you can see a job for open source: people want choice. But of course Microsoft doesn't want software to become a commodity, it'll destroy their market monopoly.
Well to be fair X has had a whole load of interesting features added to it the last few years. The automated config file creator has saved me a great deal of work setting up X on different boxes, it was probably the most important (and least known or announced) usability feature in X in the last years. The VNC extensions are also a big step in the good direction.
What X does lack from a sysadmin point of view is decent compile-time configurability (too many #defines buried in too many places in or outside the config/cf tree).
Having 3 distinct font implementations doesn't help either. It's also far to easy to shoot yourself in the foot (disabling render breaks xft), etc.
And let's not forget management issues such as who gets access to what, who maintains what, finding people willing (and capable) of doing regression testing for bug fixes/enhancements, etc. I think it would be very nice if Xfree got some more financial backing from an important player (read: IBM) so a couple of people could work on those issues full-time.
X is a great project, but of course it could be improved even further. Some people think a reimplementation is needed, but perhaps it's not and a good spring cleaning will do the trick. But the trick is still how to do that with mastodont code like X.
Call me stupid, but why don't you just filter on your mailserver or DMZ box? Or are you using those provided to you by your ISP?
You seem to have fixed spam for your own setup, but your company isn't doing the same for everyone. Sounds like a bad idea - good IT logic would be to make the setup work for everyone, and reduce spam and increase productivity for everyone.
All you need is a Linux/BSD/Win server and some spam blocker. Shouldn't be too hard to do really.
Well to be fair it didn't exactly work with window managers that didn't know anything about shaped windows. It didn't cause the WM to not work, but it pretty much caused the managed windows not to be shaped
:).
Note that the wm would still work perfectly when not using the feature - so backward compatibility was provided.
Note also that you are talking about the specific *implementation* deficits in several window managers. Those may point to unclear protocol specifications or to bad code. Frankly, I suspect the latter. Code can be very broken if it makes assumptions about its input parameters without checking them first.
It is still hard to imagine a scheme where that sort of extention broke nothing though.
Agreed, but the worst outcome is that you can't use the new feature until your favourite applications work out-of-the-box with the feature enabled. The biggest problem will be finding the #define to (un)comment or set
This reminds me of a software project I once worked on as a consultant. The client demanded all sorts of things, including what language the application should be written in, and how it should be written.
I knew it wouldn't work and I told them why. But that didn't seem to matter all that much. They ended up with spaghetti code - there was no other way to do it. A year or two later they called me and asked if there was any possibility of doing something useful with the code. I replied - truthfully - that it should really be written from scratch but decently, and that I hadn't been able to do it right in the circumstances.
Business politics often wreck great business projects. I'm certain that most IT people really do need more training in social interaction, allowing them to push through their ideas with management more efficiently.
Maybe there's an even better approach. It looks like the protection hinges on installing software on your computer that will cause ripping to produce a bad quality file.
Now - who gave them the right to install software on your computer? You bought an Audio CD. Putting it in your computer doesn't mean you give permission for software to be installed on it, does it?
Isn't writing viruses and malware like this a felony?
Kinda makes you wonder... If Linux does one day take over as the prodominent OS on most computer devices, we'll get just as sick of its advertizing as we are of Microsofts now. Microsoft used to be cool...
Traffic shaping is OK for low bandwith WAN connections, to make sure everyone gets an equal share of the little that is available. But the problem of the bandwith consumption is only secondary. You've got infectious agents on your network, man. They need to be quarantained until they've been removed.
Even if you did want to use traffic shaping to allow at least slow access to the network for everyone, it would probably just either crash your routers or slow them to a crawl during an outbreak.
Solve the issue, not the symptom.
Never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Hanlon's Razor actually goes like this: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Read more here. Strange, I always thought this was a quote of Oscar Wilde.
It does seem to be contradictory but both are a question of freedom: the freedom to share things with your friends. A good record, a good software program. The freedom to play a CD in your pre-2001 CD player. I don't mind paying for things as long as the seller doesn't deprive me of my rights as a consumer or a human being. I try to exercise my rights by not buying that copy-protected CD that my sister-in-law asked for her birth day - but it's still annoying.
Face it: the internet is probably the most important medium ever invented - and many more such changes are on the way. For a brief time only can those who stand in the way of change cause stagnation in society. We the people are the steam roller.
I think you underestimate the power of the Open Side. Though I have a nice degree and make good money, for any future employment I will primarily refer to my work on open source projects as proof that I am as qualified as I claim to be. Open source work like this - done in the public eye and peer reviewed - has become the best kind of resume and the best way to a good job.
As the economy picks up I'm sure my department will be hiring new system administrators and programmers. If you get two candidates with similar skills, one who worked at Microsoft and one who is maintainer of some Linux kernel driver, who would you hire?
I've always been proud that when looking back on my own projects I had something like 20-30 lines a day. On really good days you can write hundreds of lines but sometimes you have to throw everything out again because it's crap.
I hope this guy isn't for real, he'll be burnt out by the time he's 30.
The tarball exists on the ftp.freebsd.org site, but the MD5 sum exists in the Gentoo Portage tree. It would only have been a problem if the Gentoo OpenSSH maintainer were to have used the trojaned version and put its MD5 hash in the Gentoo tree (thereby signing it as "ok").
Everything would have seemed to be normal in this case... But still the chances of anything going wrong are slim compared to binary distributions or proprietary software.
Anyone would be able to sign programs they write themselves, that is not the issue.
The issue is that in "trusted" mode, programs which have been signed by someone else can write data to your system which you can not decrypt without that programs permission. The program could ask a server on the internet for permission to decrypt data. Think of the possible abuses!
This is the real Palladium threat - suddenly with the DMCA in place it's a fellony to try and read your encrypted data stored on your harddisk. Anytime you want to access sealed data legitimately, the software can take any decision it wants on allowing you do do that or not. It can contact Paramount's server and check if you've already seen that Star Trek movie more than twice. You have? Time to cough up more money.
The problem is not that Microsoft will be able to control its own signing authority but that other entities will use it, requiring the use of Microsoft's latest Windows OS along the way. Want to file your taxes? You'll need IRS(tm) for Windows. Want to watch Star Trek 14? Need to download Movie@Home for Windows from Paramount.
Circumvent the Microsoft Tax and you go to prison for life. Nice.
The article doesn't mention Gentoo/Linux is now available also on Sparc, PPC and a MIPS port is also underway.
The problem is that Linux programmers don't stop to think about whether the shell they use e.g. during installation or with wrappers, is actually present on the system.
Being a solaris admin I regularly have to edit shell scripts to put the right path for bash in (/opt/local/bin/bash).
Software programmers should make their code more portable. In other words, fix configure to look for bash in the path and use that at the top of installation/wrapper scripts. In normal circumstances making the fixes isn't that much work, but you can see that it becomes much more of a problem when compiling something as humungous as Gnome because you can't automate the compiles/installs.
It depends more on your value to the company than on degrees. I work in a multinational company, we have people of many different countries and scholastic backgrounds. The value of each of these people's degrees is nearly impossible to put a figure on (of course this could be very different in a small, local company which has a good knowledge of the college you went to).
Don't get sidetracked by all this, just study what you want to study. Chances are what you end up doing is completely unrelated to what classes you took at college or uni. You could major in English and end up writing assembly video drivers, who knows. I've seen English majors do great things with C, and I've seen CS people who couldn't code hello world if their life depended on it.
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it :).
This was true for the Sparc line of machines, but from personal experience I can assure you that the Ultra workstation product line is pretty crappy:
Even the server product line is kinda weird:
Sun needs to get their act together, they are behaving more and more like box pushers.
OTOH, the release of the source code would be a great step forward. Instead of waiting forever for Sun to fix a bug, we can send them the diff :).
Not really. The white paper for EIGRP is on the Cisco website. Any competitor can implement it, it's just that they have chosen not to. Remember that in networking you need interoperability, most players in this market publish their protocols.
By the way, there is no real replacement for EIGRP, true, but that's not Cisco's fault, just the inability (or unwillingness) of competitors to develop or even accept a better routing protocol.
Threatening someone is not the same as voicing your opinion. Any government that throws people in jail for saying the government should be overthrown, problably will be overthrown.
And you think this is right? When the felon has done his prison time he should be integrated into society as a full member. The penal system is there to punish people, but also to reintegrate them successfully into society after the punishment has been carried out.
If you lock the felon out of normal society, how can society expect the felon to behave like a good member of society?
And yes, I would vote for a convicted felon if I believed in them, and yes it would depend on the crime they had committed and the circumstances around it.
In fact, in my country a man was elected to parliament while he was still in prison. It's also not illegal to escape from prison, provided you do not harm anyone or anything, and return your prison clothes and other prison owned items to their owners.