If there is a DDoS attack the first thing one does is to try to understand what is going on, so that one can work around it. The second thing one does is go to the authorities with a formal complaint.
I'd have expected to see either a brief technical explanation of what the "DDoS" was, rather than a vague accusation against unknown hooligans supposedly in cahoots with PJ, and secondly, this backed up by a formal complaint to the FBI.
Lacking either of these, the accusation is worthless and must be taken as an attempt to lay blame for an attack that has not demonstrably happened at the feet of unknown assailants in order to either divert the discussion from the issue at hand, or to win sympathy, or to imply guilt by association ("cui bono").
None of these are unusual tactics, but neither are they convincing.
Lastly, the sys-con web site was most definitely not under DDoS during the last few days, as many people who visited it - including myself - can attest.
Spreading lies is bad enough. Believing and repeating them is downright stupid.
Some of the ways companies try to avoid complying with the spirit of the GPL, even if they comply with its letter:
1. The "Vogon" strategy... the source code is available on the web site but you have to go down the stairs, look in the bottom shelf of a filing cabinet behind a locked door with a sign "beware of the leopard" on it.
2. The "Proprietary pieces" strategy... the source code is released, oh yes, but with significant pieces missing.
3. The "Under development" strategy... coming soon folks, as soon as we get it ready.
All these are quite hard to sustain.
But what really amazes me is how slow companies like Dish are to understand the benefits that the GPL brings them. They are building on top of commodity software. They have access to hundreds of skilled engineers at little or no cost. These people ask nothing better than to act as a volunteer R&D department, in exchange for appropriate credit and possibly some long term kudos.
But no... instead we get these "compliance" releases, basically useless.
The key is this: if you are selling a device and your software is GPLd, you have created a platform and you can potentially sell 10, 100 times more if you provide a decent product at a reasonable cost.
Not only does it make excellent business sense to re-release improvements to GPL'd software as cleanly and transparently as possibly, but it makes sense to release proprietary software exactly the same way.
1. "Free software terrorists"? You are calling people who write free software "terrorists" because a site got slashdotted?
2. "Stop it"? Where the heck do you get off patronising the readers of this site in this way?
If you wrote your comment seriously then you are both misled (there was no DDoS attack) and silly (using terms like "terrorist").
If you wrote your comment to astro-turf then you should be aware that the readers of this site, while often petty, react rather sharply to people who try to influence them.
You have to, I think, see these things from the point of view of senior management, which is basically along the lines of "who can we screw before they screw us and for how much".
Sun basically survive - or hope to survive - by holding the balance of power between IBM and Microsoft. They use OOo to extract funds from Microsoft. They variously threaten to open Java completely (to threaten Microsoft), and to try to rein it in (to threaten IBM).
In the long run, Sun is dead unless they find a good way to jump onto the Open Source bandwagon. By this I mean finding a way to create a community of open source teams that build essential technology that then sells Sun services. As IBM does. So far, not a lot of this is happening at Sun.
Sun fears Linux, of course, but it still has a chance to open Solaris and get the game going in its favour.
I doubt this deal has anything to do with SCO. But it probably does have something to do with leverage against either IBM or Microsoft. The problem is, I can't make head or tail of the Tarantella web site. What do these people actually make?
What on earth? Yes, this is great for Wine, but the idea that this somehow changes IBM's view of Wine is so naive it's almost hard to believe this hit the front page of Slashdot.
Let's go over this again.
IBM have more legal experience and probably more lawyers than the rest of the IT industry put together. If they don't support Wine it's for reasons other than "fear of lawsuits". Perhaps IBM are betting on Java, and Wine is kind of irrelevant in the Java view of things.
Companies that sue IBM tend to be very short-lived. They are either SCO-style attack dogs, or pure patent claim firms. Any real IT company that sues IBM will find itself in sudden and extremely expensive violation of more patents than they knew possible.
The article's premise is BS. The rest is interesting though.
The irony, which few people appreciate today, but which will become painfully obvious within the next decade, is that there is more money in free software than in the commercial variety.
Dell is putting some cash on the obvious Linux market leader. Personally, I'd put my $100m on Novell.
Oh, and where "is" the money in free software? That's the lovely part. It's not in the software at all, but in the explosion of valuable products and services that it enables. We're only at the start of this process, it's barely visible.
Every time some manufacturer adds globs of memory, be it huge disks, huge memories, fat network pipes... we all go "no-one will ever use that, 640k is enough for anything"...... and 24 months later we're wondering how we ever lived without it.
Somewhere, someone is thinking of a killer application that needs 512MB of video RAM to work.
I just can't, for the life of it, imagine what it could be...
The only way to fund this project is to find a company or group of companies who spend significantly more than $1m per year on commodity graphics technology, and who would be happy to switch to an open standard where they can share the costs and offload R&D work to a wider community.
I'd say, motherboard producers, who today pay royalties for on-board graphics cards.
Forget about asking the "community" to put up the money, it's not going to happen.
- how incredibly secure Longhorn is, compared to Linux (measured by patches released so far)
- how Longhorn is considerably cheaper than Linux
- how Longhorn promotes industry standards (such as MS Office)
- how Longhorn runs in a smaller footprint (if you balance your PC on one corner).
Secure, cheap, standard, efficient! That's the message you're supposed to be spreading.
You can get your check anyhow. Usual address, I take it?
Hah! Microsoft have been astroturfing Slashdot for ages.
It's quite noticeable, but not very effective. There are a number of users who post straight-out pro-Microsoft comments without any hint of irony. Such as "people hack IE only because it is popular", or "Microsoft make excellent software".
Then, there are the astro-moderators, who will mod-down obvious anti-Microsoft comments. These are quite common but usually get hammered out in meta-moderation.
Lastly, there are the trolls who take delight in disrupting the serious ongoing conversations at Slashdot. I'd not be surprised to discover that some of these are sponsored by Microsoft.
Part of the reason Apple can produce such elegant software is that they work on a well-defined hardware platform. When you say "Intel" you presumably also mean "random BIOS, motherboards, controllers, graphics cards, NICs, etc." Hardware support is not the only challenge that slowing down Longhorn, but it's a large part of the problem.
As for the WinXP UI shell on Linux? Why? It's not particularly great. Now, the Mac OS/X UI on Linux... that would be nice.
Living underground has many practical advantages. All-year insulation from heat and cold, no neighbours, no leaking roofs, infinite space for expansion if you care to dig.
But... we're descended from tree-hugging primates, not moles, and living underground is a sure way to go crazy. A home needs sunlight, a view, and fundamentally, people within easy reach.
I'd rather live in a shoddy 1-room appartment than in a hundred room bunker.
Surely if it's not been published on a web site, it's not meant to be accessible and indexed. The hidden 90% is mostly confidential data, private documents, porn, and miscellaneous files. Why would anyone want to crawl this?
It's just thermal printing with another twist. The good news is that there are no ink cartridges to replace. The bad news is that the paper is _really_ expensive.
The standard answer when youths "go bad" is to search for the evil influences that twist their minds. It's bullshit. Young minds do not need violent video games to give them ideas. What they need is decent supporting social contexts to show them the alternatives. Society has to address the "economics of behavior", as one/. comment put it. Mass-production education, absent parents, junk food and junk society... these warp minds. Violent video games? Diversions that keep kids off the street and most likely beneficial insofar as they provide a release mechanism. But... hey, it's easier to blame the victims than address the real causes of social problems.
Unmentioned in the article, but central to Xandros' value is the Xandros File Manager, which was written from scratch by Xandros. It is very good: every useful file association has been pre-configured so that even a newbie can simply click on a file to do something useful. It just works. And, BTW, it includes very simple CD burning. I'm using Xandros, so are more of the PCs in my company, and it is stable, fast, and professional. It's commercial - $40 - but that is really worth paying for software of this quality. Xandros really continues the old Corel tradition of excellent software at a low price. Switching from Xandros to Lindows is painful: Lindows just looks cheap and nasty. And every other distro has the same hurdle: they require technical skill to install. I've seen Xandros installed and used by a person who had never before in his life used a PC, and watched me doing it once. It is that good.
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past. And the past is doomed to failure, simply because the technology curve has progressed to the point where large chunks of the software ecology are essentially free. Microsoft and Oracle unhappily sit right in the middle of this territory. Apple, IBM do not. I wrote about this in an editorial last year.
While it's true that it's hard for Saudi women to get the freedom to work, this has nothing to do with the field.
The main reason why women are rare in the field is because technological subjects are boring to most women, not because of prejudice.
It's an old lie to suggest that male/female participation in different fields is caused by external pressure, discrimination, and social bias. The reason is simply that people choose different fields because they are not blank slates to be molded by whatever pressures society applies.
Saudi geeks are predominately male for the same reason Stateside geeks are.
For the simple reason that the educational establishment is responsible for itself. Children and teenagers do not run schools, they have no real voice, and rarely any power.
I'm not suggesting that young people know what kind of education system they need, but it is obvious that it is incredibly inefficient to teach people by force.
This discussion should be easy to settle, by taking a poll on how many people believe their education was 'optimal'. I've asked this to many of my aquaintances and I get about one positive answer for about four negative ones.
But... if you think a school should be a place of rules and discpline, with metal detectors and security guards, you have the right to send your kids to such a place.
Many (most?) schools treat students like a burden. Educate the brats, get them to behave, beat them into line, do whatever it takes to break them and mould them into proper members of society.
If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. The proper response is to ask "why are students so unmotivated that they don't bother to make an original contribution", not "how can we catch and punish the bastards one more time."
Sadly it's always simpler to turn complex questions into easy "wrong and right" issues.
It's obvious from the Internet that the majority of people can be, in the right circumstances, incredibly creative and original. The challenge is to create these circumstances, not to enforce a dogmatic and broken system of education that students are obviously not interested in.
Cut the damn thing into hand-sized pieces, seal in plastic bags, sell them for $25 a piece and use the proceeds to send Carly to Mars on a one-way mission to sign outsourcing contracts with the Martians.
Damn, my living room museum needs a brick from the Berlin Wall, a chunk of the Biggest Rocket Ever Built, and a single hard-copy SCO share to go along with my original mint-condition 20-diskette pack of IBM's OS/2 (which never flew, either).
No, it's unthinkable! The goal of all space missions are to seek out lifeforms that look remarkably like ourselves, which even speak English (with a strange accent, admittedly) and which may even be genetically intercompatible with our own species.
After all, the human species is so singular, so important, with such a manifest destiny, that it's only to be expected that "life" will always look like us.
I'm just curious. If you saw a rock on Mars that looked like an elephant, would you immediately assume that interplanetary space belonged to trunked beings?
People... so funny sometimes.
Get over it: humanity is nothing special, and we're not even sure that "life" as such is. If we find one little self-reproducing molecule on Mars, even something like a prion or a strand of protein, we will have answered what is already a huge question. It is somewhat sad to turn this into a quest for pyramid-building humanoids.
However, since you asked so nicely, we'lll send a rover to look at the face. Are you volunteering for that one-way mission?
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a DDoS attack the first thing one does is to try to understand what is going on, so that one can work around it. The second thing one does is go to the authorities with a formal complaint.
I'd have expected to see either a brief technical explanation of what the "DDoS" was, rather than a vague accusation against unknown hooligans supposedly in cahoots with PJ, and secondly, this backed up by a formal complaint to the FBI.
Lacking either of these, the accusation is worthless and must be taken as an attempt to lay blame for an attack that has not demonstrably happened at the feet of unknown assailants in order to either divert the discussion from the issue at hand, or to win sympathy, or to imply guilt by association ("cui bono").
None of these are unusual tactics, but neither are they convincing.
Lastly, the sys-con web site was most definitely not under DDoS during the last few days, as many people who visited it - including myself - can attest.
Spreading lies is bad enough. Believing and repeating them is downright stupid.
Some of the ways companies try to avoid complying with the spirit of the GPL, even if they comply with its letter:
1. The "Vogon" strategy... the source code is available on the web site but you have to go down the stairs, look in the bottom shelf of a filing cabinet behind a locked door with a sign "beware of the leopard" on it.
2. The "Proprietary pieces" strategy... the source code is released, oh yes, but with significant pieces missing.
3. The "Under development" strategy... coming soon folks, as soon as we get it ready.
All these are quite hard to sustain.
But what really amazes me is how slow companies like Dish are to understand the benefits that the GPL brings them. They are building on top of commodity software. They have access to hundreds of skilled engineers at little or no cost. These people ask nothing better than to act as a volunteer R&D department, in exchange for appropriate credit and possibly some long term kudos.
But no... instead we get these "compliance" releases, basically useless.
The key is this: if you are selling a device and your software is GPLd, you have created a platform and you can potentially sell 10, 100 times more if you provide a decent product at a reasonable cost.
Not only does it make excellent business sense to re-release improvements to GPL'd software as cleanly and transparently as possibly, but it makes sense to release proprietary software exactly the same way.
1. "Free software terrorists"? You are calling people who write free software "terrorists" because a site got slashdotted?
2. "Stop it"? Where the heck do you get off patronising the readers of this site in this way?
If you wrote your comment seriously then you are both misled (there was no DDoS attack) and silly (using terms like "terrorist").
If you wrote your comment to astro-turf then you should be aware that the readers of this site, while often petty, react rather sharply to people who try to influence them.
And you just made my foe's list. Congratulations.
You have to, I think, see these things from the point of view of senior management, which is basically along the lines of "who can we screw before they screw us and for how much".
Sun basically survive - or hope to survive - by holding the balance of power between IBM and Microsoft. They use OOo to extract funds from Microsoft. They variously threaten to open Java completely (to threaten Microsoft), and to try to rein it in (to threaten IBM).
In the long run, Sun is dead unless they find a good way to jump onto the Open Source bandwagon. By this I mean finding a way to create a community of open source teams that build essential technology that then sells Sun services. As IBM does. So far, not a lot of this is happening at Sun.
Sun fears Linux, of course, but it still has a chance to open Solaris and get the game going in its favour.
I doubt this deal has anything to do with SCO. But it probably does have something to do with leverage against either IBM or Microsoft. The problem is, I can't make head or tail of the Tarantella web site. What do these people actually make?
1. IBM has no lawyers?
2. IBM is scared of Microsoft's lawyers?
What on earth? Yes, this is great for Wine, but the idea that this somehow changes IBM's view of Wine is so naive it's almost hard to believe this hit the front page of Slashdot.
Let's go over this again.
IBM have more legal experience and probably more lawyers than the rest of the IT industry put together. If they don't support Wine it's for reasons other than "fear of lawsuits". Perhaps IBM are betting on Java, and Wine is kind of irrelevant in the Java view of things.
Companies that sue IBM tend to be very short-lived. They are either SCO-style attack dogs, or pure patent claim firms. Any real IT company that sues IBM will find itself in sudden and extremely expensive violation of more patents than they knew possible.
The article's premise is BS. The rest is interesting though.
The lifestyle segment will use iTunes.
The power music consumers will use allofmp3.
What segment are Yahoo selling to exactly, the confused?
The irony, which few people appreciate today, but which will become painfully obvious within the next decade, is that there is more money in free software than in the commercial variety.
Dell is putting some cash on the obvious Linux market leader. Personally, I'd put my $100m on Novell.
Oh, and where "is" the money in free software? That's the lovely part. It's not in the software at all, but in the explosion of valuable products and services that it enables. We're only at the start of this process, it's barely visible.
Every time some manufacturer adds globs of memory, be it huge disks, huge memories, fat network pipes... we all go "no-one will ever use that, 640k is enough for anything"... ... and 24 months later we're wondering how we ever lived without it.
Somewhere, someone is thinking of a killer application that needs 512MB of video RAM to work.
I just can't, for the life of it, imagine what it could be...
The only way to fund this project is to find a company or group of companies who spend significantly more than $1m per year on commodity graphics technology, and who would be happy to switch to an open standard where they can share the costs and offload R&D work to a wider community.
I'd say, motherboard producers, who today pay royalties for on-board graphics cards.
Forget about asking the "community" to put up the money, it's not going to happen.
That gives you away.
Also, you forgot to mention:
- how incredibly secure Longhorn is, compared to Linux (measured by patches released so far)
- how Longhorn is considerably cheaper than Linux
- how Longhorn promotes industry standards (such as MS Office)
- how Longhorn runs in a smaller footprint (if you balance your PC on one corner).
Secure, cheap, standard, efficient! That's the message you're supposed to be spreading.
You can get your check anyhow. Usual address, I take it?
Hah! Microsoft have been astroturfing Slashdot for ages.
It's quite noticeable, but not very effective. There are a number of users who post straight-out pro-Microsoft comments without any hint of irony. Such as "people hack IE only because it is popular", or "Microsoft make excellent software".
Then, there are the astro-moderators, who will mod-down obvious anti-Microsoft comments. These are quite common but usually get hammered out in meta-moderation.
Lastly, there are the trolls who take delight in disrupting the serious ongoing conversations at Slashdot. I'd not be surprised to discover that some of these are sponsored by Microsoft.
Yes, Microsoft reads Slashdot.
Part of the reason Apple can produce such elegant software is that they work on a well-defined hardware platform. When you say "Intel" you presumably also mean "random BIOS, motherboards, controllers, graphics cards, NICs, etc." Hardware support is not the only challenge that slowing down Longhorn, but it's a large part of the problem.
As for the WinXP UI shell on Linux? Why? It's not particularly great. Now, the Mac OS/X UI on Linux... that would be nice.
Living underground has many practical advantages. All-year insulation from heat and cold, no neighbours, no leaking roofs, infinite space for expansion if you care to dig.
But... we're descended from tree-hugging primates, not moles, and living underground is a sure way to go crazy. A home needs sunlight, a view, and fundamentally, people within easy reach.
I'd rather live in a shoddy 1-room appartment than in a hundred room bunker.
Surely if it's not been published on a web site, it's not meant to be accessible and indexed. The hidden 90% is mostly confidential data, private documents, porn, and miscellaneous files. Why would anyone want to crawl this?
It's just thermal printing with another twist. The good news is that there are no ink cartridges to replace. The bad news is that the paper is _really_ expensive.
The standard answer when youths "go bad" is to search for the evil influences that twist their minds. /. comment put it. Mass-production education, absent parents, junk food and junk society... these warp minds. Violent video games? Diversions that keep kids off the street and most likely beneficial insofar as they provide a release mechanism.
It's bullshit. Young minds do not need violent video games to give them ideas. What they need is decent supporting social contexts to show them the alternatives.
Society has to address the "economics of behavior", as one
But... hey, it's easier to blame the victims than address the real causes of social problems.
Unmentioned in the article, but central to Xandros' value is the Xandros File Manager, which was written from scratch by Xandros. It is very good: every useful file association has been pre-configured so that even a newbie can simply click on a file to do something useful. It just works. And, BTW, it includes very simple CD burning. I'm using Xandros, so are more of the PCs in my company, and it is stable, fast, and professional.
It's commercial - $40 - but that is really worth paying for software of this quality. Xandros really continues the old Corel tradition of excellent software at a low price.
Switching from Xandros to Lindows is painful: Lindows just looks cheap and nasty. And every other distro has the same hurdle: they require technical skill to install.
I've seen Xandros installed and used by a person who had never before in his life used a PC, and watched me doing it once. It is that good.
Fair and balanced.
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past. And the past is doomed to failure, simply because the technology curve has progressed to the point where large chunks of the software ecology are essentially free. Microsoft and Oracle unhappily sit right in the middle of this territory. Apple, IBM do not. I wrote about this in an editorial last year.
While it's true that it's hard for Saudi women to get the freedom to work, this has nothing to do with the field.
The main reason why women are rare in the field is because technological subjects are boring to most women, not because of prejudice.
It's an old lie to suggest that male/female participation in different fields is caused by external pressure, discrimination, and social bias. The reason is simply that people choose different fields because they are not blank slates to be molded by whatever pressures society applies.
Saudi geeks are predominately male for the same reason Stateside geeks are.
For the simple reason that the educational establishment is responsible for itself. Children and teenagers do not run schools, they have no real voice, and rarely any power.
I'm not suggesting that young people know what kind of education system they need, but it is obvious that it is incredibly inefficient to teach people by force.
This discussion should be easy to settle, by taking a poll on how many people believe their education was 'optimal'. I've asked this to many of my aquaintances and I get about one positive answer for about four negative ones.
But... if you think a school should be a place of rules and discpline, with metal detectors and security guards, you have the right to send your kids to such a place.
Ten differences between a Saudi geek and a Stateside geek:
1. The Saudi geeks don't have cellars.
2. They browse from right to left.
3. Stateside geeks have longer hacking sessions, not being required to stop for prayers every few hours.
4. Saudi geeks have better weather.
5. Saudi geeks drink tea, while stateside geeks drink coffee.
6. Saudi geeks get more work done, not reading Slashdot as often.
7. Stateside geeks wear sandals, Saudi geeks wear Gucci.
8. Stateside geeks rarely dress in white.
9. Saudi geeks speak at least two languages - Arab and English. Stateside geeks hardly speak at all.
10. Saudi geeks go camel-riding in the weekends. Stateside geeks don't have weekends.
Many (most?) schools treat students like a burden. Educate the brats, get them to behave, beat them into line, do whatever it takes to break them and mould them into proper members of society.
If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. The proper response is to ask "why are students so unmotivated that they don't bother to make an original contribution", not "how can we catch and punish the bastards one more time."
Sadly it's always simpler to turn complex questions into easy "wrong and right" issues.
It's obvious from the Internet that the majority of people can be, in the right circumstances, incredibly creative and original. The challenge is to create these circumstances, not to enforce a dogmatic and broken system of education that students are obviously not interested in.
Cut the damn thing into hand-sized pieces, seal in plastic bags, sell them for $25 a piece and use the proceeds to send Carly to Mars on a one-way mission to sign outsourcing contracts with the Martians.
Damn, my living room museum needs a brick from the Berlin Wall, a chunk of the Biggest Rocket Ever Built, and a single hard-copy SCO share to go along with my original mint-condition 20-diskette pack of IBM's OS/2 (which never flew, either).
Oh, no, that's terrible. There are cures, you know!
And don't flatter yourself, mr. Coward, you were never like me.
No, it's unthinkable! The goal of all space missions are to seek out lifeforms that look remarkably like ourselves, which even speak English (with a strange accent, admittedly) and which may even be genetically intercompatible with our own species.
After all, the human species is so singular, so important, with such a manifest destiny, that it's only to be expected that "life" will always look like us.
I'm just curious. If you saw a rock on Mars that looked like an elephant, would you immediately assume that interplanetary space belonged to trunked beings?
People... so funny sometimes.
Get over it: humanity is nothing special, and we're not even sure that "life" as such is. If we find one little self-reproducing molecule on Mars, even something like a prion or a strand of protein, we will have answered what is already a huge question. It is somewhat sad to turn this into a quest for pyramid-building humanoids.
However, since you asked so nicely, we'lll send a rover to look at the face. Are you volunteering for that one-way mission?