Heh. The irony is, these new protection schemes don't break old players.
They break new ones.
Newer DVD/CD players are built off computer CD-ROM transports and optics -- they're more prevalent, cheaper, and do a better job than the old audio CD-only ones.
Of course, these copyright scheme are designed to specifically not work with CD-ROMs. So, odds are, your brand new CD is less likely to work with your brand new CD player than it is to work with your 10 or 20 year old CD player.
And you've completely ignored that you can't do things you're legally allowed to - like copy it to a medium that's more suitable for your listening such as an MP3 (I have ripped all of my legally owned CDs to MP3 for use on my TiVo).
Oh, and guess what -- rights of the creator of the art? What rights. They have none. They don't own the copyright - the studios do. And while they do get paid, it's essentially indentured servitude for all but the most successful bands. And they still don't own the art they created.
Is there risk? Yes. There could very well have been code leaked from SCO or some other source that should not be in the kernel or any one of a couple hundred other projects.
But it's impossible to gauge that risk at this moment. SCO has not publicly stated what parts are infringing, and nobody else has come to the table claiming any such violation. Besides which, SCO has not pressed any copyright claim to date -- only trade secret ones. If the trade secret claims are found to be true (which, quite frankly, I don't believe based on the fact that Linux had the features apriori of IBM's involvement) then the code will have to be removed. If SCO ever presses copyright claims then they will have to divulge the infringing parts publicly.
What's the risk? That some of the code will have to change. That's what the judge will order, at least as far as the Linux community is concerned. SCO can't press for damages - I already covered that. They can hit IBM up for damages wrt trade secret infringement, but that doesn't involve the Linux community.
And yes, that IS the extent of it. Period. Go back and look at the UC/BSD/UnixWare settlement -- the BSD folks had to change some code as part of the ruling. It took a few months, and then everything was kosher. This is how IP suits are handled, and that's all there is to it. If SCO was found to be infringing on the GPL, the judge wouldn't order SCO to divulge all their IP -- instead SCO would have to eliminate the use of GPL code in their codebase.
And, frankly, this is nothing new. Business as usual. Do you think that closed source code magically insulates you from these issues? It doesn't. There's upsides and downsides to closed source in this arena as well, but I bet you'll find more cases of closed source code being in violation of IP laws than of open source being so (largely because there's a lot more closed source code out there with a much, much longer history).
The reason the discussion is so one-sided is because the case is preposterous. There may be some truth to SCO's claims, but it's a tiny nugget compared with the mountain of bull. And if so, the nugget will eventually be found and dealt with.
We know well the weaknesses in SCO's claims, but what are the strengths?
That's the issue... thus far there haven't been any strengths found. The lawsuit is rotten at the core -- the original statement was that IBM leaked SCO trade secrets regarding a number of enterprise level features to Linux. The problem is, each and every one of those features existed in Linux prior to IBM's involvement. It's very hard to have a strong house when your foundation is rotten.
Has anyone, besides SCO, looked at the Linux code and tried to determine what might have come from SCO, and what might have come from a common predecessor?
No, because it's an impossibility to do that. SCO is now claiming hundreds of thousands of lines... you can probably look at the whole of Linux and say "well, yeah, the idea for that came from XYZZY", but that's irrelevant - you can't copyright an idea.
How can the FUD be countered?
It's difficult to do so if done right. But thus far SCO hasn't been getting many people buying into their FUD. Infoworld, eWeek, CNet, etc. are all casting aspersions on SCO's claims - none are saying that you should shy away from Linux. The only analysts that are saying that are ones that were already in SCO's (or MS's) pockets... and if your management listens to them then you weren't ever going to go to Linux in the first place.
If SCO wins, what can be done? What will the consequences be?
Violating code will have to be removed. That's it. That's all that SCO can do -- even in the case of copyright violation (which they're STILL not claiming), all they can do is request cessation of further infringement. They dropped the ball on this one when they didn't properly register the transfer of copyright from Novell -- without that filing you cannot sue for damages or any other monetary amounts -- only for cessation. US law is very, very clear on this.
IBM will act in its own interests, of course, and not in the interests of the Linux community; what should we expect from them?
Expect nothing but that they'll do what you say - act in their own best interests. But SCO has acted stupidly here too -- they're trying to back a grizzly bear into a corner. What the hell are they expecting? Statements like revoking AIX's license, that AIX customers are now in violation, claiming IP that belongs to IBM (RCU), etc. are doing nothing but insuring that IBM will go to court to protect their most valuable assets - their customer base and their IP. SCO isn't just backing the grizzly into a corner, it's getting between a mother and its cubs. If they don't change their tune fast they're going to be very unhappy with the outcome.
How time-consuming would it be to replace all SCO code (if it does exist)? Should it be done now, with all the code they claim regardless of merit, to preempt their case?
Again, that's impossible to judge. SCO hasn't stated what's allegedly in violation. You can't replace that which you don't know. To even speculate on this is to do nothing but further SCO's FUD.
Is including controlled technologies in Linux the equivalent of violating US export laws? That could have implications far beyond SCO's suit.
SMP isn't a controlled technology. In fact, the only software that is controlled is crypto. All of that work is done outside of US borders and is not subject to US export laws, period. Additionally, SCO kickstarted the SMP development in Linux itself by donating an SMP capable motherboard to Alan Cox (who is a citizen of England, also not under US export restrictions). They're the ones who would be liable in such a case, not IBM.
Export restrictions are predominantly for hardware, not software (with the exception of crypto mentioned above). SCO is barking up the wrong tree here.
They may seem like critical issues, but the reality is that there's still no basis in reality for most of them. The ones that might be an issue (copyright or trade secret infringement) have no backing behind them yet -- and until SCO puts forth actual documentation regarding it it's not a critical issue. It's just FUD.
The point isn't that they "own" the code... it's a question of who's responsible for the development and introduction of that code to Linux.
SCO (Caldera) is claiming that IBM is responsible. And while IBM has certainly aided the development of SMP, if you look back at the history of SMP in Linux it turns out that one company can be pointed at for the initial development and introduction... Caldera!
I can't wait until a judge gets ahold of this case. It's going to be funny watching SCO's lawyers trip all over themselves to try and stop the judge from ruling that SCO is the actual violator of the laws that they're claiming everyone else is violating. Honestly, it seems that the law firm SCO has retained is calling the shots -- and doing so without adequate background checking. It's a very dangerous and stupid thing to do -- every statement is admissable in court, and it's going to hurt them. It is exactly these kind of statements that lead to the BSD ruling. And right now it's looking like the entirety of Unix (that SCO owns) is going to lose its IP rights as well.
There's that little issue of budget... otherwise we'd be replacing our development boxes with Linux boxen right now (keeping the archaic dev box around for pre-QA testing only).
The point is, however, that this may not be the proper license. If this license doesn't allow sub-licensing, then it is not the license which IBM utilizes for AIX. And, regardless, SCO is utterly full of shit when they claim that AIX customers may be held liable - that's just pure and utter crap -- the customers have a license derived directly from SCO. SCO would have to suspend it from each and every one of those customers, individually, and would have to give some proof of those individual customers violating the terms of the license. Frankly, SCO is screaming for a lawsuit on illegal restraint of trade here... probably because if they get sued by IBM or by one of IBM's customers then they're in a much better legal position as the defendant.
Beyond that, it's still not clear that IBM even violated this license... or rather, that SCO didn't violate it in claiming that IBM violated it. Depends on what information SCO submitted, in writing, to IBM. If they didn't detail the exact violation -- and their court briefing sure as hell isn't adequate -- then they're in violation of the license and cannot suspend IBM's license over this. It's exactly this kind of thing that got UnixWare in trouble with UC and BSD. If you don't play by the rules in IP, you risk losing the IP completely - it's the trade off for the monopoly power granted by copyright, patent, et. al. (and, yes, I know this is allegedly trade secret stuff, but SCO's gonna have one hell of a hard time making that stick against IBM -- I mean, come on... IBM was doing "enterprise features" before Unix even existed).
We want off AIX. We want off it badly. But the morons here bought the production boxes BEFORE writing any specs, employing any programming staff, etc... and then they leased QA and development hardware and proceeded to give the slowest box of the entire lot to development.
And we can't get rid of them now, especially since the QA/dev hardware is so absurdly cheap (something like $60/mo for 4 machines).
We'd be considerably more productive under Linux -- a P2-200 compiles the codebase about 2x as fast as the PPC603e we have for dev -- and we'd actually have a debugger that doesn't core upon asking it to do anything (the linker doesn't play nicely with C++, and the linker is so different from the rest of the known universe there are no OSS replacements that we've found).
Sorry... just had to cry some more about how pathetic AIX is... we keep hoping that we'll get some budget for a few Linux servers to do development on, but so far no joy.
Let me know... AIX's init torments me. Their linker causes grevious harm to all who are exposed to it, and should be considered a WMD. The C++ compiler/library still doesn't implement the STL properly and fully, while combining up with the evil linker to render debuggers useless - including the massacre of gdb.
They actually paid someone to rewrite all the man pages to ensure that any useful information was expunged.
The more I use it, the more I wonder if IBM isn't adopting Linux out of a desperate desire to have an OS that doesn't just outright suck.
Honestly... if AIX is a shining example of SCO IP, then let SCO have it. The rest of the world is better off without.
it does seem i'm the only person who has a segway that reads slashot and is willing to post (and get all sorts of nasty comments and insults). have at it
Probably because your posts are one-dimensional. You have (apparantly) never posted on anything that wasn't Segway related.
And you expect people to not think you're a shill?
What USB support is lacking? These computers are meant to be useable for Joe Average computer user.
Well, from the article:
"But Lindows has drawbacks, notably poor support for USB peripherals such as digital cameras and scanners."
Which cameras and scanners? Dunno. Didn't say. But I think we all know that Linux still isn't up to the level of Windows when it comes to this -- some manufacturers simply aren't releasing drivers or developer info on interfacing with their devices, and that leaves Linux in limbo.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that Joe Average computer user wants to be able to do, and do without ANY issues. More importantly, the user is right -- there is no reason they should have issues with this kind of thing.
I dunno why I'm astounded that people didn't read the article, but come on... it's shorter than some of these posts (like this one). And the last sentence reads "But if your computing tasks are limited to light work and you can get by without tech support, one of these PCs can do the job nicely in a home or small office." -- hardly a damning of the computers in question, not even a backhanded compliment. The submitter made a bigger deal of the shortcomings than the Washington Post did.
Does it automatically find a server to install from and begin the installation or is human intervention required?
Haven't played with it much... I believe it looks for a DHCP server and then goes from there. IIRC, there are some BIOS configuration parameters to play with (at least on NForce2 boards - server class systems should have at least this capability, if not more).
Details? Application name, version of Solaris?
Georgia Tech; 1993-199?; Solaris 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 (guess where Sun developed a lot of the semaphore and other kernel patches...). I graduated before it was fixed, but AFAIK Sun was never able to satisfy the original purchase requirement of a single system for campus wide general use for email, news, development, and other needs, serving ~400-600 users at once. When the system reached ~200 users it would proceed to spend 80% of the CPU time in overhead, switching between different users and processes. I no longer recall the iron involved, but the $2M server that was supposed to do the job was eventually augmented by a half dozen $1M servers to reduce the load. This was replacing a much older system that was able to handle ~400 users with reasonable capability (a bit slow... but it was speedier than the Sun box).
I like Sun... I cut my teeth on them, learned Unix on them, and used them quite happily afterwards, but they're still overpriced and underpowered compared to x86 systems nowadays. Compared to their "enterprise class" competition (IBM, HP, etc) I'll take a Sun, but I'm much more likely to suggest a horde of x86 systems with redundant failover. It's cheaper, it's equally stable, and while maintainence is relatively expensive (in human time) comparatively, it's a helluva lot cheaper than buying the hardware and then paying the maint. contracts from Sun, IBM, etc. in the first place.
Interesting, so if a DIMM fails I can swap it without a reboot? What about one of the two I/O cards on the system? Can I fail over I/O to the other card?
As long as the hardware supports it, yes. Sure, that hardware is going to cost you $10k per server. Which is still cheaper than the $100k+ that Sun, et. al. will charge you for equivalent hardware and support on it.
To do that on an x86 system you have to purchase an add on piece of hardware. So you can either spend more money for the add on hardware or more time physically at the server.
So what? I suspect that "add-on piece of hardware" doesn't cost several thousand dollars. Oh, BTW, you do know that most modern PCs can boot via ethernet purely off their BIOS, and do little things like remote installation, etc. that way.
Have fun explaining to management when your "commodity" x86 hardware crashes and you lose revenue.
Commodity is such an interesting term. I can buy a server class PC, which has most of the hardware that Sun or IBM touts as being special, and get it at a fraction of the price (thing single digit percentiles). Crashes? Whatever... quit thinking Packard Bell and equivalent shit. I've known PC systems that handled heavy loads with years of uptime.
When was the last time you had an application on a Sun box and the bottleneck was the CPU?
Well, I can name quite a few times, but it wasn't really the CPU's fault. It was due Solaris's absolutely miserable task switching and absurdly high overhead. When your eight way system is spending 80% of its time in overhead, that's an OS issue. It got better, but last I heard Sun still hadn't fixed it.
That said, when was the last time you had an application on an x86 box that was CPU bottlenecked? It tends to be I/O bottlenecks - disks are slow, and networks are slower. Certainly the PCI bus on a PC is wimpy, but realistically it's not an issue for most systems.
I am aware that Dell supports many hot swappable components, but does Linux?
The current administraton has little interest in pursuing MS. The DOJ is headed by the Attourney General, who is a political appointee of the president. You do something that pisses off the administration -- such as being overly aggressive toward a large employer in a down economy -- you're going to find yourself being one of the people looking for work. And whatever casework you did will be quietly filed until such a time as it can be shredded.
Not that this would be much different under a Democrat administration (what, you don't remember people complaining about the DOJ pursuing MS under Clinton/Reno because they are such a big employer? Go read some older news coverage...) -- the fact is, prosecuting large employers (corporations) when there's relatively high unemployment, particularly in the sector the company is involved in, is a bad political move. The company will complain to the media, and your political opponents, regardless of color or stripe, will jump on it and harp about how you're destroying the economy.
Anyone have a list of the protocols under discussion? The article refers to there being 133 protocols in the package, and there are claims (refuted by MS) that some of them are in the public domain (by which I suspect they mistakenly include open source solutions like Samba).
So, what protocols are they? I'm certain that a large number haven't been externally engineered, but I'd be willing to bet that quite a few have, or that they originate from public protocols that MS has since modified.
declare bankruptcy. wipe out your debt. no one will give you a credit card ever again (for the next 7 yrs anyway) which is a GOOD THING.
Clueless. First off, bankruptcies stay on your credit report for 10 years, not 7. You can get credit during that time period, but it'll be at 2-3x the rate, and the only credit card you're likely to get are secured ones (most of the companies that played around in the high risk credit sector have gone poof or turned into debt collectors).
Second, you don't get to keep everything... and you sure as hell don't get out of Federal student loans. There's an entire bevy of Federal laws that supercede any state bankruptcy law regarding student loans, and they're quite nasty. If you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, then there are monetary limits on what you get to keep, and usually very low ones. Anything above that limit is sold at auction. If you own a home worth $75k and the state limit is $50k then the house is sold at auction, you receive $50k and the bank receives the remainder (usually much less than $25k). You're still out of a house though. If you file Chapter 13 then you can keep the house, but you're also going to keep making payments on it, at least for the term of the bankruptcy (up to 5 years).
Frankly, I doubt he has much debt other than the student loans (which were cosigned by his parents, and having them declare bankruptcy as well starts getting really absurd).
Other than that, I very much agree with #0 and 2-7. But he's not going to get out of debt easily... especially not with Federal student loans.
Sorry, you're not getting my sympathy - you're getting some pity, but more for your parents than for you.
Hint - your parents don't want you living at home. They'd much rather you get out and get your own life.
There are thousands of computer jobs available in the US. Yeah, maybe you live somewhere where there aren't many right now, so freaking move. Don't have gas? Well, might I suggest that you cut out the online games, use some of the money you're spending on MMORPGs to get gas money, and vacate? Spend the time you're wasting on/. actually doing work - I'm sure you could find a second job. You have a job, right? Again. Move.
You're an awesome programmer? Nothing you've said has proven it. In fact, you merely claim to have designed things that other people implemented. Sorry, doesn't make the grade - I've interviewed a ton of people who claim to be "awesome developers", have high knowledge about various languages, designed tons of stuff, yadda yadda yadda, and yet they utterly and completely fail our interview questions. All of which are technical, ranging from absurdly simple to needing to know the intracacies of the language (no, you don't have to get those, but you have to at least have a clue -- these "great" coders didn't).
Is this harsh? Damn straight. Sounds like someone needs to slap you upside the head and kick your ass into reality, because you don't get it yet.
I knew a similar loser in EQ... a pathetic dweeb that couldn't do anything with his life and just skimmed off his parents. And, as it turned out, his friends. Hopefully you're at least not doing that, but whining about how society has "wronged" you is bullshit. Welcome to the American Dream -- it is not society's burdon to make sure you succeed, it's yours.
As others have said, IBM is taking it quite seriously... and they're acting very wisely in their role of defendant. They're saying nothing, except to refute SCO's claims. IBM's lawyers know that every single press release on this case is admissable in court. So is every statement made by a corporate executive.
SCO has been bursting at the seams to talk about the case... to some extent it's their role as the aggrieved party to do so, especially to garner media attention. But they're also making mistakes and claiming rights they don't have (such as owning "UNIX", having patents on the codebase, and claiming copyrights to the codebase which may be unenforceable). You can bet that IBM's lawyers will drag every single misstep into court to weaken SCO's case.
If you're raking it in, put that money into mutual funds.
You're going to put emergency fund money into a mutual fund?
That's far more stupid than having the money sitting under a mattress.
Your examples don't hold up. An emergency fund is not for 10 years from now -- it's for right NOW. The entire point is that you cannot be sure when you will need the money, so it must be reasonably accessible and you must be assured that it will not decrease in value. You cannot make that second assurance with mutual funds. What if you'd invested your emergency fund in 1999? Well, you'd be rather screwed now if you needed it, with values down anywhere from 10-50%.
Want to invest the money? Fine. Put it in a money market fund and then dribble it into short term CD's (3-6 month, 12 month only if you can get a reasonable rotation going between 4-6 CDs, and enough money in the MM to make it until the next CD matures).
And touching retirement money in 401k's, IRAs (ROTH or otherwise), etc. is about the stupidiest thing you can do, period. It's a wonderful way to screw yourself forever, especially since you wind up with roughly $.55 on the dollar after taxes and penalties.
Oh, and BTW, you're commiting fraud if you touch that line of credit once you're laid off. Substantial change in your financial condition, and the line of credit would be revoked if the bank knew about it. Not informing the bank is a violation of the contract in and of itself. Sure, you can do it, and you can probably get away with it, but woe unto you if you don't.
As I said, I've been unemployed before. It's looking like my wife is going to be unemployed shortly since her company has axed her entire division. But we have enough liquid assets and enough money in other forms that it's not an issue. Plus we can live on my salary alone if need be (oh, and she's making more than I do right now).
Take2 has done marketing for DNF already though, based on statements from 3DRealms and DNF's availability. Any corporation also has to project revenues, and major releases like DNF are certainly going to figure into those revenues.
Take2 was forced to write off $5.5M because DNF is still nowhere, and they couldn't even show anything at E3 (and I'd bet a good bit of the writeoff is due to that). A statement from Take2's CEO that they just "hope to have something" is a bit harsh, but you write off $5.5M and tell me you don't get pissy.
George's response to this was completely out of line, and frankly shows far more about 3DRealm's lack of professionality than anything else to date -- including the 5 year+ development cycle.
Yes, but there's still a huge difference -- there are still people occasionally asking about TF2, but Valve doesn't respond. They went off and essentially sequestered themselves and didn't put forth any commentary until showing HL2 at E3.
3DRealms, on the other hand, keeps trumpting about DNF, and how it'll be done when it's done, and it'll be what the fans wanted, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile they're either writing an engine from scratch (making it their 3rd or 4th, depending on how you count) or using an engine that's hopelessly outdated now (Unreal -- not even UT2k3 or U2).
DNF doesn't interest me much... if it ever does come out it's probably going to have a Daikatana effect going on. But I didn't care for HL much either, and I'm very much looking forward to HL2 now, so who knows.
. Plus the Acrobat reader does NOT deal well when used as a browser plug-in - it hangs very often on every machine I've tried it on over the last several years.
Shrug... I've never had a problem with Acrobat under IE. I have, however, had issues with it under Firebird, and rather often. This is on the same machine too, so it's not a hardware thing.
Not that I'm about to go back to IE at this point... I never had a problem with popups (I used Proxomitron), but I generally prefer Firebird/Mozilla at this point.
PC manufacturer who installed OO and charged a small fee (which would still be much less expensive than office suites by Corel, MS, etc)
Really? Have you seen those contracts? How do you know that it's not already a small fee?
Last I heard, licensing of Corel's Office Suite (which includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and some presentation and address book software, neither of which people have heard of) was something on the order of $12 per machine. How much more nominal can you get? Especially since they get the corporate fuzzy of having a company they can fall back on, sue, etc. as needed -- which isn't there for OO.org (but is for StarOffice -- which has much higher licensing fees).
I think licensing of Office is something in the $50-100 range... it's nowhere near what you pay for it in stores. Just like XP is far less than what it is in stores.
Meanwhile, people have at least heard of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro - but StarOffice? OpenOffice.org? I use OO.org myself, but it's far from wide acceptance. And it's unlikely to get there when low cost alternatives exist with better name recognition (regardless of functionality).
I'm not so sure that the lack of a BASIC-type language on Windows is such an issue... it's not like BASIC was all that good to start with.
Frankly, it's somewhat easier to learn the basics of programming now because there are far more languages that are easy to code in and they're far more accessible than they used to be. I started out (more or less) on a Northstar system... hell if I know what CPU it had, but it ran CP/M or another even more primative OS (don't know what it was, but I had a separate disk to boot up the BASIC interpreter, which could store to floppy as well... but it wasn't CP/M).
No, you're not going to leap directly into graphical programming. But you can download perl, python, scheme, or other similar languages that are pretty easy to learn and easy to toy with. They're also extensible so you can start doing graphical programming once you've gotten far enough along.
This is a lot better than having to go out and buy Turbo Pascal to have a decent language to code in and learn from, which is what I had to do (back on an XT clone).
Yeah, you have to know about it first, and there's a slightly higher barrier since you have to go out and download it rather than stumbling across it. But let's be honest - what are the odds of stumbling across it nowadays? We're not talking about 160K floppy disk with a few dozen files at most, but a 20-100GB HD with hundreds of directories and thousands of files. And it's not like you're going to magically stumble upon it in a manual... manual? What manual? That's funny just to think about (which is how I stumbled across BASIC on that Northstar system).
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Heh. The irony is, these new protection schemes don't break old players.
They break new ones.
Newer DVD/CD players are built off computer CD-ROM transports and optics -- they're more prevalent, cheaper, and do a better job than the old audio CD-only ones.
Of course, these copyright scheme are designed to specifically not work with CD-ROMs. So, odds are, your brand new CD is less likely to work with your brand new CD player than it is to work with your 10 or 20 year old CD player.
And you've completely ignored that you can't do things you're legally allowed to - like copy it to a medium that's more suitable for your listening such as an MP3 (I have ripped all of my legally owned CDs to MP3 for use on my TiVo).
Oh, and guess what -- rights of the creator of the art? What rights. They have none. They don't own the copyright - the studios do. And while they do get paid, it's essentially indentured servitude for all but the most successful bands. And they still don't own the art they created.
If you actually believe that tripe, then I suggest you read "Cloak of Anarchy" by Larry Niven. And yes, it's posted with permission from Mr. Niven.
Anarchy isn't freedom, and that's what you're advocating. That or total isolation from all other human beings. Take your pick.
Is there risk? Yes. There could very well have been code leaked from SCO or some other source that should not be in the kernel or any one of a couple hundred other projects.
But it's impossible to gauge that risk at this moment. SCO has not publicly stated what parts are infringing, and nobody else has come to the table claiming any such violation. Besides which, SCO has not pressed any copyright claim to date -- only trade secret ones. If the trade secret claims are found to be true (which, quite frankly, I don't believe based on the fact that Linux had the features apriori of IBM's involvement) then the code will have to be removed. If SCO ever presses copyright claims then they will have to divulge the infringing parts publicly.
What's the risk? That some of the code will have to change. That's what the judge will order, at least as far as the Linux community is concerned. SCO can't press for damages - I already covered that. They can hit IBM up for damages wrt trade secret infringement, but that doesn't involve the Linux community.
And yes, that IS the extent of it. Period. Go back and look at the UC/BSD/UnixWare settlement -- the BSD folks had to change some code as part of the ruling. It took a few months, and then everything was kosher. This is how IP suits are handled, and that's all there is to it. If SCO was found to be infringing on the GPL, the judge wouldn't order SCO to divulge all their IP -- instead SCO would have to eliminate the use of GPL code in their codebase.
And, frankly, this is nothing new. Business as usual. Do you think that closed source code magically insulates you from these issues? It doesn't. There's upsides and downsides to closed source in this arena as well, but I bet you'll find more cases of closed source code being in violation of IP laws than of open source being so (largely because there's a lot more closed source code out there with a much, much longer history).
The reason the discussion is so one-sided is because the case is preposterous. There may be some truth to SCO's claims, but it's a tiny nugget compared with the mountain of bull. And if so, the nugget will eventually be found and dealt with.
We know well the weaknesses in SCO's claims, but what are the strengths?
That's the issue... thus far there haven't been any strengths found. The lawsuit is rotten at the core -- the original statement was that IBM leaked SCO trade secrets regarding a number of enterprise level features to Linux. The problem is, each and every one of those features existed in Linux prior to IBM's involvement. It's very hard to have a strong house when your foundation is rotten.
Has anyone, besides SCO, looked at the Linux code and tried to determine what might have come from SCO, and what might have come from a common predecessor?
No, because it's an impossibility to do that. SCO is now claiming hundreds of thousands of lines... you can probably look at the whole of Linux and say "well, yeah, the idea for that came from XYZZY", but that's irrelevant - you can't copyright an idea.
How can the FUD be countered?
It's difficult to do so if done right. But thus far SCO hasn't been getting many people buying into their FUD. Infoworld, eWeek, CNet, etc. are all casting aspersions on SCO's claims - none are saying that you should shy away from Linux. The only analysts that are saying that are ones that were already in SCO's (or MS's) pockets... and if your management listens to them then you weren't ever going to go to Linux in the first place.
If SCO wins, what can be done? What will the consequences be?
Violating code will have to be removed. That's it. That's all that SCO can do -- even in the case of copyright violation (which they're STILL not claiming), all they can do is request cessation of further infringement. They dropped the ball on this one when they didn't properly register the transfer of copyright from Novell -- without that filing you cannot sue for damages or any other monetary amounts -- only for cessation. US law is very, very clear on this.
IBM will act in its own interests, of course, and not in the interests of the Linux community; what should we expect from them?
Expect nothing but that they'll do what you say - act in their own best interests. But SCO has acted stupidly here too -- they're trying to back a grizzly bear into a corner. What the hell are they expecting? Statements like revoking AIX's license, that AIX customers are now in violation, claiming IP that belongs to IBM (RCU), etc. are doing nothing but insuring that IBM will go to court to protect their most valuable assets - their customer base and their IP. SCO isn't just backing the grizzly into a corner, it's getting between a mother and its cubs. If they don't change their tune fast they're going to be very unhappy with the outcome.
How time-consuming would it be to replace all SCO code (if it does exist)? Should it be done now, with all the code they claim regardless of merit, to preempt their case?
Again, that's impossible to judge. SCO hasn't stated what's allegedly in violation. You can't replace that which you don't know. To even speculate on this is to do nothing but further SCO's FUD.
Is including controlled technologies in Linux the equivalent of violating US export laws? That could have implications far beyond SCO's suit.
SMP isn't a controlled technology. In fact, the only software that is controlled is crypto. All of that work is done outside of US borders and is not subject to US export laws, period. Additionally, SCO kickstarted the SMP development in Linux itself by donating an SMP capable motherboard to Alan Cox (who is a citizen of England, also not under US export restrictions). They're the ones who would be liable in such a case, not IBM.
Export restrictions are predominantly for hardware, not software (with the exception of crypto mentioned above). SCO is barking up the wrong tree here.
They may seem like critical issues, but the reality is that there's still no basis in reality for most of them. The ones that might be an issue (copyright or trade secret infringement) have no backing behind them yet -- and until SCO puts forth actual documentation regarding it it's not a critical issue. It's just FUD.
No, no, no... you're missing the point.
The point isn't that they "own" the code... it's a question of who's responsible for the development and introduction of that code to Linux.
SCO (Caldera) is claiming that IBM is responsible. And while IBM has certainly aided the development of SMP, if you look back at the history of SMP in Linux it turns out that one company can be pointed at for the initial development and introduction... Caldera!
I can't wait until a judge gets ahold of this case. It's going to be funny watching SCO's lawyers trip all over themselves to try and stop the judge from ruling that SCO is the actual violator of the laws that they're claiming everyone else is violating. Honestly, it seems that the law firm SCO has retained is calling the shots -- and doing so without adequate background checking. It's a very dangerous and stupid thing to do -- every statement is admissable in court, and it's going to hurt them. It is exactly these kind of statements that lead to the BSD ruling. And right now it's looking like the entirety of Unix (that SCO owns) is going to lose its IP rights as well.
There's that little issue of budget... otherwise we'd be replacing our development boxes with Linux boxen right now (keeping the archaic dev box around for pre-QA testing only).
The point is, however, that this may not be the proper license. If this license doesn't allow sub-licensing, then it is not the license which IBM utilizes for AIX. And, regardless, SCO is utterly full of shit when they claim that AIX customers may be held liable - that's just pure and utter crap -- the customers have a license derived directly from SCO. SCO would have to suspend it from each and every one of those customers, individually, and would have to give some proof of those individual customers violating the terms of the license. Frankly, SCO is screaming for a lawsuit on illegal restraint of trade here... probably because if they get sued by IBM or by one of IBM's customers then they're in a much better legal position as the defendant.
Beyond that, it's still not clear that IBM even violated this license... or rather, that SCO didn't violate it in claiming that IBM violated it. Depends on what information SCO submitted, in writing, to IBM. If they didn't detail the exact violation -- and their court briefing sure as hell isn't adequate -- then they're in violation of the license and cannot suspend IBM's license over this. It's exactly this kind of thing that got UnixWare in trouble with UC and BSD. If you don't play by the rules in IP, you risk losing the IP completely - it's the trade off for the monopoly power granted by copyright, patent, et. al. (and, yes, I know this is allegedly trade secret stuff, but SCO's gonna have one hell of a hard time making that stick against IBM -- I mean, come on... IBM was doing "enterprise features" before Unix even existed).
*cry*
Damn you! Damn you to hell!
We want off AIX. We want off it badly. But the morons here bought the production boxes BEFORE writing any specs, employing any programming staff, etc... and then they leased QA and development hardware and proceeded to give the slowest box of the entire lot to development.
And we can't get rid of them now, especially since the QA/dev hardware is so absurdly cheap (something like $60/mo for 4 machines).
We'd be considerably more productive under Linux -- a P2-200 compiles the codebase about 2x as fast as the PPC603e we have for dev -- and we'd actually have a debugger that doesn't core upon asking it to do anything (the linker doesn't play nicely with C++, and the linker is so different from the rest of the known universe there are no OSS replacements that we've found).
Sorry... just had to cry some more about how pathetic AIX is... we keep hoping that we'll get some budget for a few Linux servers to do development on, but so far no joy.
Let me know... AIX's init torments me. Their linker causes grevious harm to all who are exposed to it, and should be considered a WMD. The C++ compiler/library still doesn't implement the STL properly and fully, while combining up with the evil linker to render debuggers useless - including the massacre of gdb.
They actually paid someone to rewrite all the man pages to ensure that any useful information was expunged.
The more I use it, the more I wonder if IBM isn't adopting Linux out of a desperate desire to have an OS that doesn't just outright suck.
Honestly... if AIX is a shining example of SCO IP, then let SCO have it. The rest of the world is better off without.
it does seem i'm the only person who has a segway that reads slashot and is willing to post (and get all sorts of nasty comments and insults). have at it
Probably because your posts are one-dimensional. You have (apparantly) never posted on anything that wasn't Segway related.
And you expect people to not think you're a shill?
What USB support is lacking? These computers are meant to be useable for Joe Average computer user.
Well, from the article:
"But Lindows has drawbacks, notably poor support for USB peripherals such as digital cameras and scanners."
Which cameras and scanners? Dunno. Didn't say. But I think we all know that Linux still isn't up to the level of Windows when it comes to this -- some manufacturers simply aren't releasing drivers or developer info on interfacing with their devices, and that leaves Linux in limbo.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that Joe Average computer user wants to be able to do, and do without ANY issues. More importantly, the user is right -- there is no reason they should have issues with this kind of thing.
I dunno why I'm astounded that people didn't read the article, but come on... it's shorter than some of these posts (like this one). And the last sentence reads "But if your computing tasks are limited to light work and you can get by without tech support, one of these PCs can do the job nicely in a home or small office." -- hardly a damning of the computers in question, not even a backhanded compliment. The submitter made a bigger deal of the shortcomings than the Washington Post did.
Does it automatically find a server to install from and begin the installation or is human intervention required?
Haven't played with it much... I believe it looks for a DHCP server and then goes from there. IIRC, there are some BIOS configuration parameters to play with (at least on NForce2 boards - server class systems should have at least this capability, if not more).
Details? Application name, version of Solaris?
Georgia Tech; 1993-199?; Solaris 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 (guess where Sun developed a lot of the semaphore and other kernel patches...). I graduated before it was fixed, but AFAIK Sun was never able to satisfy the original purchase requirement of a single system for campus wide general use for email, news, development, and other needs, serving ~400-600 users at once. When the system reached ~200 users it would proceed to spend 80% of the CPU time in overhead, switching between different users and processes. I no longer recall the iron involved, but the $2M server that was supposed to do the job was eventually augmented by a half dozen $1M servers to reduce the load. This was replacing a much older system that was able to handle ~400 users with reasonable capability (a bit slow... but it was speedier than the Sun box).
I like Sun... I cut my teeth on them, learned Unix on them, and used them quite happily afterwards, but they're still overpriced and underpowered compared to x86 systems nowadays. Compared to their "enterprise class" competition (IBM, HP, etc) I'll take a Sun, but I'm much more likely to suggest a horde of x86 systems with redundant failover. It's cheaper, it's equally stable, and while maintainence is relatively expensive (in human time) comparatively, it's a helluva lot cheaper than buying the hardware and then paying the maint. contracts from Sun, IBM, etc. in the first place.
Interesting, so if a DIMM fails I can swap it without a reboot? What about one of the two I/O cards on the system? Can I fail over I/O to the other card?
As long as the hardware supports it, yes. Sure, that hardware is going to cost you $10k per server. Which is still cheaper than the $100k+ that Sun, et. al. will charge you for equivalent hardware and support on it.
To do that on an x86 system you have to purchase an add on piece of hardware. So you can either spend more money for the add on hardware or more time physically at the server.
So what? I suspect that "add-on piece of hardware" doesn't cost several thousand dollars. Oh, BTW, you do know that most modern PCs can boot via ethernet purely off their BIOS, and do little things like remote installation, etc. that way.
Have fun explaining to management when your "commodity" x86 hardware crashes and you lose revenue.
Commodity is such an interesting term. I can buy a server class PC, which has most of the hardware that Sun or IBM touts as being special, and get it at a fraction of the price (thing single digit percentiles). Crashes? Whatever... quit thinking Packard Bell and equivalent shit. I've known PC systems that handled heavy loads with years of uptime.
When was the last time you had an application on a Sun box and the bottleneck was the CPU?
Well, I can name quite a few times, but it wasn't really the CPU's fault. It was due Solaris's absolutely miserable task switching and absurdly high overhead. When your eight way system is spending 80% of its time in overhead, that's an OS issue. It got better, but last I heard Sun still hadn't fixed it.
That said, when was the last time you had an application on an x86 box that was CPU bottlenecked? It tends to be I/O bottlenecks - disks are slow, and networks are slower. Certainly the PCI bus on a PC is wimpy, but realistically it's not an issue for most systems.
I am aware that Dell supports many hot swappable components, but does Linux?
Yes.
Politics.
The current administraton has little interest in pursuing MS. The DOJ is headed by the Attourney General, who is a political appointee of the president. You do something that pisses off the administration -- such as being overly aggressive toward a large employer in a down economy -- you're going to find yourself being one of the people looking for work. And whatever casework you did will be quietly filed until such a time as it can be shredded.
Not that this would be much different under a Democrat administration (what, you don't remember people complaining about the DOJ pursuing MS under Clinton/Reno because they are such a big employer? Go read some older news coverage...) -- the fact is, prosecuting large employers (corporations) when there's relatively high unemployment, particularly in the sector the company is involved in, is a bad political move. The company will complain to the media, and your political opponents, regardless of color or stripe, will jump on it and harp about how you're destroying the economy.
Anyone have a list of the protocols under discussion? The article refers to there being 133 protocols in the package, and there are claims (refuted by MS) that some of them are in the public domain (by which I suspect they mistakenly include open source solutions like Samba).
So, what protocols are they? I'm certain that a large number haven't been externally engineered, but I'd be willing to bet that quite a few have, or that they originate from public protocols that MS has since modified.
declare bankruptcy. wipe out your debt. no one will give you a credit card ever again (for the next 7 yrs anyway) which is a GOOD THING.
Clueless. First off, bankruptcies stay on your credit report for 10 years, not 7. You can get credit during that time period, but it'll be at 2-3x the rate, and the only credit card you're likely to get are secured ones (most of the companies that played around in the high risk credit sector have gone poof or turned into debt collectors).
Second, you don't get to keep everything... and you sure as hell don't get out of Federal student loans. There's an entire bevy of Federal laws that supercede any state bankruptcy law regarding student loans, and they're quite nasty. If you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, then there are monetary limits on what you get to keep, and usually very low ones. Anything above that limit is sold at auction. If you own a home worth $75k and the state limit is $50k then the house is sold at auction, you receive $50k and the bank receives the remainder (usually much less than $25k). You're still out of a house though. If you file Chapter 13 then you can keep the house, but you're also going to keep making payments on it, at least for the term of the bankruptcy (up to 5 years).
Frankly, I doubt he has much debt other than the student loans (which were cosigned by his parents, and having them declare bankruptcy as well starts getting really absurd).
Other than that, I very much agree with #0 and 2-7. But he's not going to get out of debt easily... especially not with Federal student loans.
What a load of crap.
/. actually doing work - I'm sure you could find a second job. You have a job, right? Again. Move.
Sorry, you're not getting my sympathy - you're getting some pity, but more for your parents than for you.
Hint - your parents don't want you living at home. They'd much rather you get out and get your own life.
There are thousands of computer jobs available in the US. Yeah, maybe you live somewhere where there aren't many right now, so freaking move. Don't have gas? Well, might I suggest that you cut out the online games, use some of the money you're spending on MMORPGs to get gas money, and vacate? Spend the time you're wasting on
You're an awesome programmer? Nothing you've said has proven it. In fact, you merely claim to have designed things that other people implemented. Sorry, doesn't make the grade - I've interviewed a ton of people who claim to be "awesome developers", have high knowledge about various languages, designed tons of stuff, yadda yadda yadda, and yet they utterly and completely fail our interview questions. All of which are technical, ranging from absurdly simple to needing to know the intracacies of the language (no, you don't have to get those, but you have to at least have a clue -- these "great" coders didn't).
Is this harsh? Damn straight. Sounds like someone needs to slap you upside the head and kick your ass into reality, because you don't get it yet.
I knew a similar loser in EQ... a pathetic dweeb that couldn't do anything with his life and just skimmed off his parents. And, as it turned out, his friends. Hopefully you're at least not doing that, but whining about how society has "wronged" you is bullshit. Welcome to the American Dream -- it is not society's burdon to make sure you succeed, it's yours.
Somehow I suspect it doesn't impress girls in the "virtual" world either.
As others have said, IBM is taking it quite seriously... and they're acting very wisely in their role of defendant. They're saying nothing, except to refute SCO's claims. IBM's lawyers know that every single press release on this case is admissable in court. So is every statement made by a corporate executive.
SCO has been bursting at the seams to talk about the case... to some extent it's their role as the aggrieved party to do so, especially to garner media attention. But they're also making mistakes and claiming rights they don't have (such as owning "UNIX", having patents on the codebase, and claiming copyrights to the codebase which may be unenforceable). You can bet that IBM's lawyers will drag every single misstep into court to weaken SCO's case.
If you're raking it in, put that money into mutual funds.
You're going to put emergency fund money into a mutual fund?
That's far more stupid than having the money sitting under a mattress.
Your examples don't hold up. An emergency fund is not for 10 years from now -- it's for right NOW. The entire point is that you cannot be sure when you will need the money, so it must be reasonably accessible and you must be assured that it will not decrease in value. You cannot make that second assurance with mutual funds. What if you'd invested your emergency fund in 1999? Well, you'd be rather screwed now if you needed it, with values down anywhere from 10-50%.
Want to invest the money? Fine. Put it in a money market fund and then dribble it into short term CD's (3-6 month, 12 month only if you can get a reasonable rotation going between 4-6 CDs, and enough money in the MM to make it until the next CD matures).
And touching retirement money in 401k's, IRAs (ROTH or otherwise), etc. is about the stupidiest thing you can do, period. It's a wonderful way to screw yourself forever, especially since you wind up with roughly $.55 on the dollar after taxes and penalties.
Oh, and BTW, you're commiting fraud if you touch that line of credit once you're laid off. Substantial change in your financial condition, and the line of credit would be revoked if the bank knew about it. Not informing the bank is a violation of the contract in and of itself. Sure, you can do it, and you can probably get away with it, but woe unto you if you don't.
As I said, I've been unemployed before. It's looking like my wife is going to be unemployed shortly since her company has axed her entire division. But we have enough liquid assets and enough money in other forms that it's not an issue. Plus we can live on my salary alone if need be (oh, and she's making more than I do right now).
Take2 has done marketing for DNF already though, based on statements from 3DRealms and DNF's availability. Any corporation also has to project revenues, and major releases like DNF are certainly going to figure into those revenues.
Take2 was forced to write off $5.5M because DNF is still nowhere, and they couldn't even show anything at E3 (and I'd bet a good bit of the writeoff is due to that). A statement from Take2's CEO that they just "hope to have something" is a bit harsh, but you write off $5.5M and tell me you don't get pissy.
George's response to this was completely out of line, and frankly shows far more about 3DRealm's lack of professionality than anything else to date -- including the 5 year+ development cycle.
Yes, but there's still a huge difference -- there are still people occasionally asking about TF2, but Valve doesn't respond. They went off and essentially sequestered themselves and didn't put forth any commentary until showing HL2 at E3.
3DRealms, on the other hand, keeps trumpting about DNF, and how it'll be done when it's done, and it'll be what the fans wanted, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile they're either writing an engine from scratch (making it their 3rd or 4th, depending on how you count) or using an engine that's hopelessly outdated now (Unreal -- not even UT2k3 or U2).
DNF doesn't interest me much... if it ever does come out it's probably going to have a Daikatana effect going on. But I didn't care for HL much either, and I'm very much looking forward to HL2 now, so who knows.
. Plus the Acrobat reader does NOT deal well when used as a browser plug-in - it hangs very often on every machine I've tried it on over the last several years.
Shrug... I've never had a problem with Acrobat under IE. I have, however, had issues with it under Firebird, and rather often. This is on the same machine too, so it's not a hardware thing.
Not that I'm about to go back to IE at this point... I never had a problem with popups (I used Proxomitron), but I generally prefer Firebird/Mozilla at this point.
PC manufacturer who installed OO and charged a small fee (which would still be much less expensive than office suites by Corel, MS, etc)
Really? Have you seen those contracts? How do you know that it's not already a small fee?
Last I heard, licensing of Corel's Office Suite (which includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and some presentation and address book software, neither of which people have heard of) was something on the order of $12 per machine. How much more nominal can you get? Especially since they get the corporate fuzzy of having a company they can fall back on, sue, etc. as needed -- which isn't there for OO.org (but is for StarOffice -- which has much higher licensing fees).
I think licensing of Office is something in the $50-100 range... it's nowhere near what you pay for it in stores. Just like XP is far less than what it is in stores.
Meanwhile, people have at least heard of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro - but StarOffice? OpenOffice.org? I use OO.org myself, but it's far from wide acceptance. And it's unlikely to get there when low cost alternatives exist with better name recognition (regardless of functionality).
I'm not so sure that the lack of a BASIC-type language on Windows is such an issue... it's not like BASIC was all that good to start with.
Frankly, it's somewhat easier to learn the basics of programming now because there are far more languages that are easy to code in and they're far more accessible than they used to be. I started out (more or less) on a Northstar system... hell if I know what CPU it had, but it ran CP/M or another even more primative OS (don't know what it was, but I had a separate disk to boot up the BASIC interpreter, which could store to floppy as well... but it wasn't CP/M).
No, you're not going to leap directly into graphical programming. But you can download perl, python, scheme, or other similar languages that are pretty easy to learn and easy to toy with. They're also extensible so you can start doing graphical programming once you've gotten far enough along.
This is a lot better than having to go out and buy Turbo Pascal to have a decent language to code in and learn from, which is what I had to do (back on an XT clone).
Yeah, you have to know about it first, and there's a slightly higher barrier since you have to go out and download it rather than stumbling across it. But let's be honest - what are the odds of stumbling across it nowadays? We're not talking about 160K floppy disk with a few dozen files at most, but a 20-100GB HD with hundreds of directories and thousands of files. And it's not like you're going to magically stumble upon it in a manual... manual? What manual? That's funny just to think about (which is how I stumbled across BASIC on that Northstar system).