Probably a company like IBM has a thorough system
in place. But then again, MS wouldn't be crazy
enough to sue someone that big over a few licenses
(especially when they can pay SCO to make
trouble for them).
But how many small businesses are going to be that
efficient? Especially when the guy who runs the
systems is probably someone doing it part time
along with his other duties, who may have been
handed the job by the last guy who left, without
a significant training period (after all, Windows
is so easy to run, right?). A lot of small
research labs (e.g., under one professor at a
university) are run like this, usually by student
volunteers.
And the point is, Microsoft accuses you of theft
without any proof whatsoever. They have
no way of tracking where that version came from,
to know, for instance, if it was copied from some
other disk). They have no witnesses to testify
that they saw you make the copy illegally (unless
they can find the guy you laid off last week and
he has a grudge). But "innocent until proven
guilty" means nothing. It's more like, "we have
more lawyers than you and can grind you into the
dust whenever we choose, so wouldn't you rather
have a site license and end all these worries?"
The fact is, it does encourage people to make up phony claims
Just desserts.
Microsoft has made a habit of making phony claims
against people for years. What do you think
happens if their hired goons, the BSA, pull an
audit on your company and your sysadmin can't
produce all the requisite documentation to "prove"
they had a "right" to use the software on every
single machine found? Will Microsoft's henchmen
say, "oh well, I'm sure you bought them all
properly; we understand it's a pain to keep all
this paperwork for things that cost just a
hundred dollars"? Yeah, right.
The only bad thing about false claims is that if
the total claims exceed the settlement limit,
then the people with real claims will get smaller
amounts, if I understand the settlement correctly.
If they can keep delaying this until after the end of the year, they wouldn't have to report it on this quarters accounting forms.
Only to have it as a charge on next quarter's
earnings report? What would they gain from that?
I know modern execs have an extreme short-term
outlook, but that would really be extreme.
Unless some guy is getting ready to retire and his
retirement bonus is based on this year's stock
performance.
There are videos running around the net showing a guy's 750iL hunting for gears on the highway, closing+opening the trunk incessantly, ejecting the key from the keyslot(making it impossible to start the car!), changing radio stations on its own...
You wouldn't happen to have links to this, would you?
When he asked for funding from the National Science Foundation three years later to further explore countermeasures, the agency rebuffed him.
A typical problem with getting research funded
(or published) is that the gatekeepers, the people
who decide what gets funded/published, often
choose what is worthy based on their own
research interests. One generally has to have
established a track record to become a gatekeeper,
which means that new ideas are often shut out,
while researchers pursue what they think are the
current "fashions."
James Gleick (author of Chaos) tells how he
was warned by professors that he'd ruin his career
wasting his time with this "chaos" nonsense.
(Fortunately, he ignored them.)
IANALSIHAC (...since I have a conscience), but it's
usually possible to charge execs directly
(preventing them from hiding behind the skirts of
the corporation) only when they knowing commit
crimes, such as polluters who deliberately dump
something in direct violation of the law.
Execs have been successfully sued
for bleeding a company dry (e.g., granting
themselves huge bonuses while the company is
clearly going bankrupt). Such conduct is
illegal, though hard to prove except when it is
egregiously obvious. Usually it's the ripped-off
investors who sue. There have been cases of
investors successfully going after the personal
assets of execs when it can be showed that they
did something specifically illegal, such as
making false statements to investors.
I suspect, though, that a clear case may be harder
to make this time. Hopefully, the best that will
happen is that lots of screwed investors will
realize they were duped by their "advisors," and
will take their business elsewhere.
Suing for libel would be difficult in any case,
as it's hard to sue for libel in general
(at least in the US).
You will notice some grammar errors, but they are SCO's, not Ralle's.
I would've expected that, having driven away all
the respectable engineers, SCO would be full of
management dweebs who only knew about how to
present themselves. But it seems these bozos
even slept through English comp classes. Or maybe
their spending so much of their money on lawyers
that they can't afford competent secretaries.
maybe its because Apache is seriously outdated technology that still uses unbuffered pointers and old static calls to libraries?
Care to explain just how those would contribute to
poor performance? (Those usually lead to
better performance, due to lower overheads,
albeit at the cost of program flexibility. Though
I don't know if that would apply to Apache in
particular.)
Stop trying to use 70's technology for problems in the 21st century
it make no sense to measure market share by simply counting web hosts. If all the high-traffic web sites on the Internet are running IIS while the numerically greater but less popular remainder are running Apache, can you meaningfully say that Apache has a higher 'market share'?
Didn't Netcraft themselves cover this topic last year? IIRC, some pro-MS group made the same
argument, that you should only count the big guys.
They looked at the Fortune N (I forget what N was)
and found that lo and behold, IIS came out on top.
Then Netcraft came back with another study, where
they ranked companies not by their Fortune ranking
(i.e., total revenue), which would tend to favor
MS as that's the "safe" choice for big companies.
Instead, they ranked companies by how much
revenue they made on the Net (so companies
like Amazon would rank much higher), and found
that by that measure, Apache was again on top.
So why not just do what we do here in Canada: make the ballot as simple as possible, just mark an X by your candidate. All that's on the ballot is a list of names and a box by each one.
In Quebec's separation referendum in 1995, a
corrupt election official ordered ballot counters
in certain districts to use extremely strict
standards in reading ballots. If the mark in the
circle did not correspond exactly to one
of the approved shapes, the vote was counted as
"spoiled," even if it was clearly a mark in one
circle and there was nothing anywhere else on the
sheet. In one case, observers at the counting
complained that a check mark (one of the approved
shapes) was drawn wrong; the left stroke was as
long as the right stroke, so it looked more like
a V than a "proper" check mark.
All the districts where this occurred were those
where it could be predicted (from demographics)
that an overwhelming percentage of the voters
(80-90%) would vote against the referendum.
In some districts, the "spoiled" vote count was
12% (vs. a historical average of 1%).
The refendum lost, but only by a
margin even smaller than the number of votes
undercounted in those districts.
The Quebec government, run by a party that
favored the referendum, proceded to "investigate"
(whitewash) the incident, and exconerated
everyone involved. They were more interested in
harassing some students in Ontario for
driving out to an anti-referendum rally.
The way it works now, they're jamming the fliers into your pocket, whether you want them or not, to the point that your pockets explode when you get home. Every time you try to cover your pockets, they find another way to jam another flier into your pants.
The funny thing is, that actually happened to me
once. My wife and I flew into Chongqing, one of
the larger cities in China. As we walked out of
the airport to get a cab, we were besieged by
swarms of people trying to shove fliers,
coupons and business cards (mostly for hotels and
restaurants) into our clothing, bags, and luggage
pockets. I was circling my wife and shouting at
them in what little Chinese I knew to go away.
My (Chinese) wife was throwing the cards back at
them.
The funny thing is, I don't think anyone was
trying to pick our pockets, though they would've
had a good opportunity in that situation. (We
checked everything thoroughly once we got to our
hotel.) I kind of wish I had a videotape of this
as it would make an amusing story about
entrepreneurship gone wild. The strange
thing is, this only happened to us in this one
city, not in any of the other cities we visited.
He didn't talk about Windows XP. Why can't you just address the issues he presented on open source software alone, without dragging Windows into the picture?
Because it's useful for putting into context the
issue of speed on old hardware. If you bash Linux
because it's too slow, show us a non-Linux system
that runs faster on the same platform. Actually,
you can install stripped-down versions of Linux
without all the bloat (remember that RH != Linux)
but RH is aiming for the common case.
(Perhaps
installers should measure some hardware parameters
like clock speed and make suggestions based on
what it finds, e.g., "your CPU is under A MHz and
you have less than B MB of memory, so application
C will probably be slow -- do you want to install
this?" There are some general recommendations
like how much memory X needs, but that's it.)
BTW, I'm typing this on a 400 MHz machine (bought
in 1999) running Debian/Woody. While I expect
things like opening large files to be inherently
slow under any OS, the KDE desktop is reasonably
fast. My wife has Windows 98 (not XP,
but 98, which came out a year before this machine)
on another partition for the occasional app that
requires it, and boy, is it S-L-O-W. Just
bringing up the START menu takes about 3 seconds
(vs. less than a quarter second for the K menu in
KDE.) Booting into 98 is a good way to remind us
why we use Linux.
You can't buy a IBM Thinkpad unless it comes with Windows. That 'old "Microsoft tax"
I bought a Thinkpad for a relative in China, who
wanted a Thinkpad because of IBM's reputation.
(I had to agree with her; I've never had any
problem with them hardware-wise, unlike many other
laptops.) I tried to get one without Windows,
not because she's a Linux user but because
she would
naturally prefer a Chinese-language version of
Windows and the sellers in the US only sell
English-language editions.
The IBM ordering website had a bewildering
list of models, all of which were very specific
as to CPU speed and other features. (For example,
two machines with different CPU speeds but
identical in every other respect.) There
were about 20-30 models
with minor differences between them. It was a lot
like the way cars were sold before standard
options packages. So much for the excuse
that vendors don't want to sell preconfigured
Linux systems because they only want a few models
to simplify manufacturing and inventory.
simple.
I called IBM's ordering department and asked if I
could get one with Linux pre-installed. The
saleswoman said no. I asked why they have so many
models with trivial differences between them but
they offer no choice of OS.
"Oh, but we do have choice. You can have
Windows 2000 or Windows XP." ("We have both kinds
[of music]: Country and Western" -- The
Blues Brothers.) And no, I couldn't get a
Chinese version either.
Next I asked if I could get one without an OS.
"No." "Why not?" "Because Microsoft won't let
us."
Now, to be fair, her info could've been out of
date. Maybe she couldn't thing of anything else
to say, Or maybe that's what they told her to
say. But if she's telling the truth, wasn't the
anti-trust settlement supposed to put an end to
this?
The end result was that M$ gets paid for 2 copies
of Windows on one computer. (Well, my relative
was paying for it, so that's her choice. I
would've gone to a Linux laptop vendor, though I
don't know if any of them are as reliable.)
... or run it on a CPU emulator. Or just run
lots of crap in the background. The emulator would
probably be best, especially if you could freeze it.
Reminds me of a computer column I read in a
newspaper about 10 years ago, where the writer
talked about a friend who always got higher scores
on DOS games than he. Then he learned his friend's
secret: he played the games under Windows (3.1)
rather than directly under DOS.
They do that here in Montreal.. only they do it in picture form in case you can't read.
No, it's in case you can't read French (or
what passes for it in Quebec). So they can attract
American tourists without running afoul of Quebec's
infamous language laws. Quebec: the only place
where you can advertise a nudie bar by encircling
the door with neon tubing in the shape of labia,
but not a sign that says "Nude Dancers."
(OK, they changed somewhat, so now you can have
English signs, so long as they're only half as
big as the French.)
Slashdot Mirror
But how many small businesses are going to be that efficient? Especially when the guy who runs the systems is probably someone doing it part time along with his other duties, who may have been handed the job by the last guy who left, without a significant training period (after all, Windows is so easy to run, right?). A lot of small research labs (e.g., under one professor at a university) are run like this, usually by student volunteers.
And the point is, Microsoft accuses you of theft without any proof whatsoever. They have no way of tracking where that version came from, to know, for instance, if it was copied from some other disk). They have no witnesses to testify that they saw you make the copy illegally (unless they can find the guy you laid off last week and he has a grudge). But "innocent until proven guilty" means nothing. It's more like, "we have more lawyers than you and can grind you into the dust whenever we choose, so wouldn't you rather have a site license and end all these worries?"
Just desserts. Microsoft has made a habit of making phony claims against people for years. What do you think happens if their hired goons, the BSA, pull an audit on your company and your sysadmin can't produce all the requisite documentation to "prove" they had a "right" to use the software on every single machine found? Will Microsoft's henchmen say, "oh well, I'm sure you bought them all properly; we understand it's a pain to keep all this paperwork for things that cost just a hundred dollars"? Yeah, right.
The only bad thing about false claims is that if the total claims exceed the settlement limit, then the people with real claims will get smaller amounts, if I understand the settlement correctly.
Only to have it as a charge on next quarter's earnings report? What would they gain from that? I know modern execs have an extreme short-term outlook, but that would really be extreme. Unless some guy is getting ready to retire and his retirement bonus is based on this year's stock performance.
And even if the art was lame, you could still use the cover for sifting the seeds out of your pot.
Mostly having to do with all the spam I get
promising I can "add 3 inches."
So you decide to watch a movie after spending almost 4 hours taking a dump?
Instead of buying DVDs, you should buy some laxatives or Metamusil or something.
You wouldn't happen to have links to this, would you?
Don't crack users tend to be way too thin due to undereating?
When he asked for funding from the National Science Foundation three years later to further explore countermeasures, the agency rebuffed him.
A typical problem with getting research funded (or published) is that the gatekeepers, the people who decide what gets funded/published, often choose what is worthy based on their own research interests. One generally has to have established a track record to become a gatekeeper, which means that new ideas are often shut out, while researchers pursue what they think are the current "fashions."
James Gleick (author of Chaos) tells how he was warned by professors that he'd ruin his career wasting his time with this "chaos" nonsense. (Fortunately, he ignored them.)
Execs have been successfully sued for bleeding a company dry (e.g., granting themselves huge bonuses while the company is clearly going bankrupt). Such conduct is illegal, though hard to prove except when it is egregiously obvious. Usually it's the ripped-off investors who sue. There have been cases of investors successfully going after the personal assets of execs when it can be showed that they did something specifically illegal, such as making false statements to investors.
I suspect, though, that a clear case may be harder to make this time. Hopefully, the best that will happen is that lots of screwed investors will realize they were duped by their "advisors," and will take their business elsewhere.
Suing for libel would be difficult in any case, as it's hard to sue for libel in general (at least in the US).
I meant "they're spending." (See what a mad
rush for karma can do?)
You will notice some grammar errors, but they are SCO's, not Ralle's.
I would've expected that, having driven away all the respectable engineers, SCO would be full of management dweebs who only knew about how to present themselves. But it seems these bozos even slept through English comp classes. Or maybe their spending so much of their money on lawyers that they can't afford competent secretaries.
Lay off - I was calling his bluff.
Care to explain just how those would contribute to poor performance? (Those usually lead to better performance, due to lower overheads, albeit at the cost of program flexibility. Though I don't know if that would apply to Apache in particular.)
Stop trying to use 70's technology for problems in the 21st century
Like NT4 (derived from VAX VMS)?
Like maybe because they know how to set up their machines properly?
If your machine takes 20 minutes to copy a file, there's a serious configuration problem which is deeper than Apache.
Didn't Netcraft themselves cover this topic last year? IIRC, some pro-MS group made the same argument, that you should only count the big guys. They looked at the Fortune N (I forget what N was) and found that lo and behold, IIS came out on top.
Then Netcraft came back with another study, where they ranked companies not by their Fortune ranking (i.e., total revenue), which would tend to favor MS as that's the "safe" choice for big companies. Instead, they ranked companies by how much revenue they made on the Net (so companies like Amazon would rank much higher), and found that by that measure, Apache was again on top.
In Quebec's separation referendum in 1995, a corrupt election official ordered ballot counters in certain districts to use extremely strict standards in reading ballots. If the mark in the circle did not correspond exactly to one of the approved shapes, the vote was counted as "spoiled," even if it was clearly a mark in one circle and there was nothing anywhere else on the sheet. In one case, observers at the counting complained that a check mark (one of the approved shapes) was drawn wrong; the left stroke was as long as the right stroke, so it looked more like a V than a "proper" check mark.
All the districts where this occurred were those where it could be predicted (from demographics) that an overwhelming percentage of the voters (80-90%) would vote against the referendum. In some districts, the "spoiled" vote count was 12% (vs. a historical average of 1%).
The refendum lost, but only by a margin even smaller than the number of votes undercounted in those districts. The Quebec government, run by a party that favored the referendum, proceded to "investigate" (whitewash) the incident, and exconerated everyone involved. They were more interested in harassing some students in Ontario for driving out to an anti-referendum rally.
The funny thing is, that actually happened to me once. My wife and I flew into Chongqing, one of the larger cities in China. As we walked out of the airport to get a cab, we were besieged by swarms of people trying to shove fliers, coupons and business cards (mostly for hotels and restaurants) into our clothing, bags, and luggage pockets. I was circling my wife and shouting at them in what little Chinese I knew to go away. My (Chinese) wife was throwing the cards back at them.
The funny thing is, I don't think anyone was trying to pick our pockets, though they would've had a good opportunity in that situation. (We checked everything thoroughly once we got to our hotel.) I kind of wish I had a videotape of this as it would make an amusing story about entrepreneurship gone wild. The strange thing is, this only happened to us in this one city, not in any of the other cities we visited.
...that they want to prevent any spammer from
using the same techniques by threatening to sue
them for patent infringement?
Because it's useful for putting into context the issue of speed on old hardware. If you bash Linux because it's too slow, show us a non-Linux system that runs faster on the same platform. Actually, you can install stripped-down versions of Linux without all the bloat (remember that RH != Linux) but RH is aiming for the common case.
(Perhaps installers should measure some hardware parameters like clock speed and make suggestions based on what it finds, e.g., "your CPU is under A MHz and you have less than B MB of memory, so application C will probably be slow -- do you want to install this?" There are some general recommendations like how much memory X needs, but that's it.)
BTW, I'm typing this on a 400 MHz machine (bought in 1999) running Debian/Woody. While I expect things like opening large files to be inherently slow under any OS, the KDE desktop is reasonably fast. My wife has Windows 98 (not XP, but 98, which came out a year before this machine) on another partition for the occasional app that requires it, and boy, is it S-L-O-W. Just bringing up the START menu takes about 3 seconds (vs. less than a quarter second for the K menu in KDE.) Booting into 98 is a good way to remind us why we use Linux.
I bought a Thinkpad for a relative in China, who wanted a Thinkpad because of IBM's reputation. (I had to agree with her; I've never had any problem with them hardware-wise, unlike many other laptops.) I tried to get one without Windows, not because she's a Linux user but because she would naturally prefer a Chinese-language version of Windows and the sellers in the US only sell English-language editions.
The IBM ordering website had a bewildering list of models, all of which were very specific as to CPU speed and other features. (For example, two machines with different CPU speeds but identical in every other respect.) There were about 20-30 models with minor differences between them. It was a lot like the way cars were sold before standard options packages. So much for the excuse that vendors don't want to sell preconfigured Linux systems because they only want a few models to simplify manufacturing and inventory. simple.
I called IBM's ordering department and asked if I could get one with Linux pre-installed. The saleswoman said no. I asked why they have so many models with trivial differences between them but they offer no choice of OS.
"Oh, but we do have choice. You can have Windows 2000 or Windows XP." ("We have both kinds [of music]: Country and Western" -- The Blues Brothers.) And no, I couldn't get a Chinese version either.
Next I asked if I could get one without an OS. "No." "Why not?" "Because Microsoft won't let us."
Now, to be fair, her info could've been out of date. Maybe she couldn't thing of anything else to say, Or maybe that's what they told her to say. But if she's telling the truth, wasn't the anti-trust settlement supposed to put an end to this?
The end result was that M$ gets paid for 2 copies of Windows on one computer. (Well, my relative was paying for it, so that's her choice. I would've gone to a Linux laptop vendor, though I don't know if any of them are as reliable.)
Note the references on the Snopes page, which are years earlier.
I first heard about it in a Boston Globe article in 1987. Boston Globe
"Time for another upgrade/mass-migration!"
... or run it on a CPU emulator. Or just run lots of crap in the background. The emulator would probably be best, especially if you could freeze it.
Reminds me of a computer column I read in a newspaper about 10 years ago, where the writer talked about a friend who always got higher scores on DOS games than he. Then he learned his friend's secret: he played the games under Windows (3.1) rather than directly under DOS.
No, it's in case you can't read French (or what passes for it in Quebec). So they can attract American tourists without running afoul of Quebec's infamous language laws. Quebec: the only place where you can advertise a nudie bar by encircling the door with neon tubing in the shape of labia, but not a sign that says "Nude Dancers."
(OK, they changed somewhat, so now you can have English signs, so long as they're only half as big as the French.)