> Of course had SCO simply begun all this by publicly saying "hey, these parts of the linux kernel are copied from code we own the copyright to", the linux kernel admins would have just about certainly simply checked out those sections of code and the people who wrote them, and, if there was an apparent infringement, removed and replaced the offending sections.
That's why I think this is almost certainly an attempt at extortion by FUD.
> I'm really really hoping that this fact will not escape the judge at trial.
Surely IBM's lawyers will know how to arrange a hard landing for SCO.
> Star Wars was hot in the '70s, cool in the '80s, retro in the '90s, and turned into a joke by the Phantom Menace. When I first saw that they were setting up a webcam, I thought it was mildly interesting.
You did???
> The pay thing is the final proof I needed though, that the SW franchise has had enough of my attention.
Ah, TPM did that for me. I found it mildly interesting, but not enough to pull me back for more.
> Why do I imagine little, digital Simpsons characters running around making icons at each other, and seeing who gets kicked off the server each episode? =]
> I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.
The atoms in a dog turd sport "an incredible pattern", yet no one claims that dog turds have intelligent creators.
> Actually, it DOES work. $100 for the full suit of Matlab applications, for example, is MUCH less expensive than the $5000 or so you would have to pay to buy a commercial licence.
And of course I've been in a university bookstore and saw Matlab for Linux sporting the sam $100 price tag.
But you seem to be missing the bigger point. This isn't going to expand the desktop for Microsoft, because Microsoft already 0wns the desktop. The same cannot be said for Linux.
> Its nice to see some MS researchers going against the perceived stereotype and being open in their suggestions like this.
Microsoft does hire real CS/IT researchers, and there's no reason to suppose that they're all mini-monopolists waiting to grow up and hold the world ransom for... one million dollars.
Moreover, even if they have "handlers" in Marketing, notice that switching from supercomputers to Beowulf clusters isn't going to hurt Microsoft any, since they aren't playing in the supercomputer market anyway. If the government switches (ehrm, continues switching) to commodity hardware for these things it might make it possible for Microsoft to start bidding on them. Surely there's some profit in those contracts even when commodity hardware and free software is used?
And of course, given sufficient motivation, Microsoft should be able to roll out their own Windows-based distributed computing solution, and try their hand at selling it as "better" than what a Beowulf cluster provides in some way or another.
> I think the first step we'll see in Linux becoming big on the desktop (in a general work area) is overseas governments. Eventually it may spread to the schools of those overseas countries. After that has happened, other countries will follow.
What about all the CS & EE students back home who use it at the university and get used to having a big pile of free, powerful, and stable apps, and demand the same thing on their desktop both at work and at home after they graduate?
> Except that dams aren't "cool" anymore. You can make an exception once in a while for a really well built and executed dam, like the Hoover dam. But for the most part dams are considered representative of an outmoded philosophy that the environment is something that should be "improved". We do still build dams in some cases, but we don't automatically equate their construction with "progress" anymore. (Same for swamps. We used to drain swamps as soon as we came across them- we don't do that anymore.)
For a bit of culture shock, rent How the West was Won (1962) and check out the narrator's voice-over at the end of the film. If the film were only a few years newer you'd have to interpret that part as satire.
The project also has been plagued over the past decade by corruption and discovery of hundreds of cracks in the dam, though the Guangzhou Daily on Sunday quoted officials as saying the cracks, some tens of yards long, were not a danger.
Presumably the same officials who said SARS wasn't a problem?
> There's the proverbial snowball's chance of getting back to business as usual here. When your CEO sends a threatening letter to the majority of the Fortune 2000, you've pretty much destroyed your reputation for customer orientation!
As the owner of a Pa&Ma outfit I once worked for used to put it:
You can shear your sheep once a year, but you can only skin them once.
This is a going-out-of-business move for SCO, regardless of how the courts rule on it.
> If you've learned anything by now, it's not important that Microsoft fix the majority of their security flaws, but that they imply they will.
Yeah, like last year's month-long binge that was supposed to make their products really secure, but hasn't actually had any discernable effect.
And perhaps more to the point, no amount of code cleanup is going to fix the most visible problems, which are based on scripting and automation rather than on exploits of bugs. They need to design for security before they try to program for security.
> A red title bar signifies a "subscriber-only" story.
Isn't that kind of backwards? You'd think the people who pay up would get to see the version that's easy on the eyes, and the deadbeats would have to see the eyewringer version.
Re:Things that I like after 40 years of reading Sc
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
> Jack Vance's _Dying Earth_ is a classic, and his Lyonesse trilogy should be
Agreed. And for space opera his Planet of Adventure tetrology and Demon Princes pentology are hard to beat. (As could be said for almost anything else he ever wrote.)
And BTW, Lyonesse gets less troubling as it goes, and PoA gets much, much, much better as it goes, so if you pick them up and start having second thoughts, hang in there and you won't regret it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Of course had SCO simply begun all this by publicly saying "hey, these parts of the linux kernel are copied from code we own the copyright to", the linux kernel admins would have just about certainly simply checked out those sections of code and the people who wrote them, and, if there was an apparent infringement, removed and replaced the offending sections.
That's why I think this is almost certainly an attempt at extortion by FUD.
> I'm really really hoping that this fact will not escape the judge at trial.
Surely IBM's lawyers will know how to arrange a hard landing for SCO.
Wouldn't it save bandwidth if you reported the companies that aren't suing each other?
"Read The Manky Literature" ?
"Read The Manual, Loser" ?
> Pay to watch them shooting a movie I probably won't bother bringing myself to pay to see? Not bloody likely.
It would be nice to have a poll to find out how many
> Star Wars was hot in the '70s, cool in the '80s, retro in the '90s, and turned into a joke by the Phantom Menace. When I first saw that they were setting up a webcam, I thought it was mildly interesting.
You did???
> The pay thing is the final proof I needed though, that the SW franchise has had enough of my attention.
Ah, TPM did that for me. I found it mildly interesting, but not enough to pull me back for more.
Will there be an action figure for the guy who moves the webcam?
> Why do I imagine little, digital Simpsons characters running around making icons at each other, and seeing who gets kicked off the server each episode? =]
SimSimpsons?
Take one that has lots of pron on the hard drive!
> The reobservations have been done halfway March (which is stated on the page that is linked too), so this is not really *news*.
That's ok, this is not really a news site.
> I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.
The atoms in a dog turd sport "an incredible pattern", yet no one claims that dog turds have intelligent creators.
> And what, may I ask are you going to do with an Alien? Screw it/her? Not bloody likely. This is not Startrek, you know, its Real Life!
And besides, only starship captains score with the alien chicks.
Xenobonking, I think they call it at Starfleet Academy.
> Actually, it DOES work. $100 for the full suit of Matlab applications, for example, is MUCH less expensive than the $5000 or so you would have to pay to buy a commercial licence.
And of course I've been in a university bookstore and saw Matlab for Linux sporting the sam $100 price tag.
But you seem to be missing the bigger point. This isn't going to expand the desktop for Microsoft, because Microsoft already 0wns the desktop. The same cannot be said for Linux.
> Well, a lot oof companies in north america, or even up here in ontario canada use linus for their development.
I knew Transmeta used him, but I didn't realize he got around that much!
> Its nice to see some MS researchers going against the perceived stereotype and being open in their suggestions like this.
Microsoft does hire real CS/IT researchers, and there's no reason to suppose that they're all mini-monopolists waiting to grow up and hold the world ransom for... one million dollars.
Moreover, even if they have "handlers" in Marketing, notice that switching from supercomputers to Beowulf clusters isn't going to hurt Microsoft any, since they aren't playing in the supercomputer market anyway. If the government switches (ehrm, continues switching) to commodity hardware for these things it might make it possible for Microsoft to start bidding on them. Surely there's some profit in those contracts even when commodity hardware and free software is used?
And of course, given sufficient motivation, Microsoft should be able to roll out their own Windows-based distributed computing solution, and try their hand at selling it as "better" than what a Beowulf cluster provides in some way or another.
> I think the first step we'll see in Linux becoming big on the desktop (in a general work area) is overseas governments. Eventually it may spread to the schools of those overseas countries. After that has happened, other countries will follow.
What about all the CS & EE students back home who use it at the university and get used to having a big pile of free, powerful, and stable apps, and demand the same thing on their desktop both at work and at home after they graduate?
> It'd make a good business/school machine, but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like.
> Except that dams aren't "cool" anymore. You can make an exception once in a while for a really well built and executed dam, like the Hoover dam. But for the most part dams are considered representative of an outmoded philosophy that the environment is something that should be "improved". We do still build dams in some cases, but we don't automatically equate their construction with "progress" anymore. (Same for swamps. We used to drain swamps as soon as we came across them- we don't do that anymore.)
For a bit of culture shock, rent How the West was Won (1962) and check out the narrator's voice-over at the end of the film. If the film were only a few years newer you'd have to interpret that part as satire.
This is a going-out-of-business move for SCO, regardless of how the courts rule on it.> There's the proverbial snowball's chance of getting back to business as usual here. When your CEO sends a threatening letter to the majority of the Fortune 2000, you've pretty much destroyed your reputation for customer orientation!
As the owner of a Pa&Ma outfit I once worked for used to put it:
Why would I want a minimalist window manager? Give me one that has an e-mail client and a flight simulator built in!
I think they dropped a word out of the middle of the Linus quote.
> If you've learned anything by now, it's not important that Microsoft fix the majority of their security flaws, but that they imply they will.
Yeah, like last year's month-long binge that was supposed to make their products really secure, but hasn't actually had any discernable effect.
And perhaps more to the point, no amount of code cleanup is going to fix the most visible problems, which are based on scripting and automation rather than on exploits of bugs. They need to design for security before they try to program for security.
> Everyone thinks they are independent thinkers. Someone else is an independent thinker if you agree with him, otherwise he's just being difficult.
You're just being difficult.
> A red title bar signifies a "subscriber-only" story.
Isn't that kind of backwards? You'd think the people who pay up would get to see the version that's easy on the eyes, and the deadbeats would have to see the eyewringer version.
> Jack Vance's _Dying Earth_ is a classic, and his Lyonesse trilogy should be
Agreed. And for space opera his Planet of Adventure tetrology and Demon Princes pentology are hard to beat. (As could be said for almost anything else he ever wrote.)
And BTW, Lyonesse gets less troubling as it goes, and PoA gets much, much, much better as it goes, so if you pick them up and start having second thoughts, hang in there and you won't regret it.