Now we all know that Santa Cruz is full of dope smoking hippies. These dope smoking hippies are trying to PRETEND to be good Mormons and pull one over on IBM which, though we're not a Mormon business, we like to dress like Mormon missionaries.
That's been a problem the Macintosh has had for years. Mac files have two forks, one for data and the other for resources (icons, strings, executable code) and a few other pieces of information, most notably the type and creator (application not user) which allows the Finder to launch the right app for a file without skank like extensions.
Anyhow, Mac files get royally screwed up when move to any filesystem that doesn't support all those things (most) so there's a special encoding format that zips them all together called AppleSingle. AppleSingle has all of the meta data and forks in one flat file which can be moved just about anywhere and not lose data. Of course, nothing besides a Mac knows how to look inside of it.
Now that Apple has been taken over by Next:-) and moved to a Unix base a lot of good things have happened, but extensions are now preferred over type and creator and the multi-fork file approach has been superceded by a directory approach with the directoriness being hidden by the new Finder (go to the Terminal on a Mac OS X box and cd into an app).
So, ideally, anyone developing an OS with spiffy meta data stuff would also design a flat file encoding along with a compatibility library that would let apps work with the extra metadata on any OS with, perhaps, degraded performance.
The technology has changed the way that things work but the law has not kept up with it. To start with, we continue to talk about "copyright". Controlling copying of information makes sense when the distribution mechanism is trucks moving bales of paper around. Once you start sending bits around, everything is copied. From the article:
And technically, any time a Web surfer visits a site, that visit could be interpreted as a copyright violation, because the page is temporarily cached in the user's computer memory.
When you have the newspaper delivered to your door, the content basically comes for free (the cost of a newspaper doesn't pay for much more than printing and handling). However, you get to keep the content as long as you like, chop it into bits and what not. Libraries have archives of newspapers going back years and you get to see them for free. What's the right mechanism as we move forward? The "pay per view" model that content providers want to shove down our throats courtesy of the DMCA is not pretty and when it starts to affect the average Joe I suspect it will be booed out of favor pretty quickly. But what is the right mechanism to make sure content providers get paid something and that we, the citizens, get something for our money?
"Sun's complete line of Solaris and Linux products...are covered by Sun's portfolio of Unix licensing agreements. Solaris and Sun Linux represent safe choices for those companies that develop and deploy services based on Unix systems," Sun declared the day SCO filed suit against IBM.
Unless Sun changes the licensing terms of "Sun Linux" it's released as GPL'd code, right? Once ANYONE releases, with SCO's blessing, the "secret sauce" code as GPL it's free for everyone, right? What am I missing here?
You've got a crap tape drive. Does your internet connection do 30MBytes/s? You're also allowed to have more than one tape drive:-). You're also supposed to put more than 1 tape in the car.
Let's assume LTO (Ultrium 2) tape at 30MB/s, 200GB/tape (uncompressed - let's compare apples to apples). We'll use a Chevy Suburban with 3919 liters of interior space, assume 3 tapes to the liter, so about 10,000 tapes, with room for fudge and packing material.
That's 2000 TB or 2 Petabytes in one vehicle.
Since we've bought 10,000 tapes (those things ain't cheap) we may as well have 100 tape drives to read them and write them (200 total, 100 on each end).
At 30MB/s it takes about 2 hours to read or write each tape, so 4 hours per tape or 40,000 drive hours total, or 400 hours total to read/write the tapes. Assuming we stop to go to the bathroom and eat occasionally but no stops for sleeping (2 drivers) we'll average 50 miles/h or 100 hours. (You may drive faster than this but it make my math easy)
Total time=500 hours for 2000TB or about 1.1 GB/s. If we assume only 1 tape drive on each end, it's still 13MB/s. Yah, still not to be underestimated:-). As you can see, the speed of the vehicle and the distance has very little impact when you're moving such a large amount of data.
I think density-wise tapes and disks (bare) are about the same today as a 250 GB IDE drive is about the same size as an LTO tape. Now, if you have your imaginary Beowulf cluster ready to hook all of your IDE drives up, imagine the bandwidth of that!
If you can't follow your process there's something wrong with it. Seriously - it doesn't fit your needs. You should look around for a process that will work for you and give you decent results in the time frames you have to work in. The Extreme Programming methodologies come to mind. I've always found that I can get a Q&D prototype up and running quickly. If I've done my architecture correctly up front and have my APIs set up right I can go back later and upgrade modules on a piece-by-piece basis without having to chuck EVERYTHING. Once you have something working it's a lot easier to get junior engineers to make improvements.
I use the Mail Boxes Etc. in the town I used to live in. We set it all up before we left the States so I'm not sure how to do it if you're outside the country and not planning to make a trip there. If you're planning to make a trip, just check the local Mail Boxes Etc. whereever you're going and see if they'll do it for you.
I live overseas as well (Japan) and it's difficult getting things shipped directly. We have a PO Box in the US and things are forwarded to us. It's a little pricey but it works out well. This page has a list of companies that do package forwarding as a business. I don't use any of them, caveat emptor!
Well, I'd say it's even worse. Filesystems are well separated from the rest of the kernel with a well defined API. They're functionally equivalent to drivers. Were SCO to get this line of reasoning approved by a court every DRIVER written for Unix would be a derivative work of SCO's. You want to talk viral?
The really weird part is SCO trying to claim rights over code THEY DIDN'T WRITE! JFS is original code from IBM - the Linux version is supposedly descended from the OS/2 version of the FS.
The reason the same gang of idiots keep getting work from the government is that they're the only people willing to bid on it. Government procurement is so bizarre that unless you have a team of specialists putting the bid proposal together you have no chance of getting it. Every large company I've worked at had a special "Federal Systems" division whose job it was to deal with that sillines.
Ummm...why is it illegal? It's an unlicensed band. As long as it's within the power limits there's no FCC issue. Of course, if someone manages to slip through some law that makes "interfering with a computer system" illegal...
It's not license strong-arming - the license is very explicit AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT. What rock would you have to have been hiding under to not know that the GPL is an evil, viral, license that forces you to make the GPL'd and modified GPL'd code available (heck, Bill Gates said so!)? Linksys had a choice - BSD is not invisible - and they chose to use the GPL'd stuff again.
Don't blame the GPL for Linksys' failure to comply. No one held a gun to their heads and said "Use Linux". If they wanted proprietary code they could have written their own kernel or bought VxWorks (shudder) or used a BSD derivative. They didn't.
Not quite. The idea would be to have the lanes running at different speed alongside each other (without handrails in between and no gaps) and be able to SWITCH lanes to speed up. This was the system that Heinlein laid out in The Roads Must Roll. The system for accelerating used looks like a clever solution, though. I'm not sure how practical it would be to switch lanes in reality.
So are we going to have everyone strip first and put their clothes through the neutron scatter tomography machine?
There's too many ways around the system, especially if you're willing to die in the process of the bombin or hijacking.
We'd be much better off DEemphasizing security on airlines, taking an ocassional bombing with a shrub and jumping on hijackers in the cabin and beating the bejeezus out of them than with this system which magnifies every terrorist act that occurs on an airplane, making them magnets for terrorists.
The rules are different when you're a monopoly (and Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly in the desktop OS market by a court of law and there is no argument about that anymore, legally speaking)
I don't think there was much in that commentary that was actually relevant. Horn blowing about GNU/Linux - you know, RICHARD, most people building an OS START with the kernel, not the other way around. If Linus hadn't gotten something pulled together the FSF would still be wandering in the wilderness.
One good point
The Free Software Foundation's lawyer, Professor Moglen, believes that SCO gave permission for the community's use of the code that they distributed under the GNU GPL and other free software licenses in their version of GNU/Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, but you've forgotten IBM's ace in the hole:
5) SCO stands for Santa Cruz Operation.
Now we all know that Santa Cruz is full of dope smoking hippies. These dope smoking hippies are trying to PRETEND to be good Mormons and pull one over on IBM which, though we're not a Mormon business, we like to dress like Mormon missionaries.
That's been a problem the Macintosh has had for years. Mac files have two forks, one for data and the other for resources (icons, strings, executable code) and a few other pieces of information, most notably the type and creator (application not user) which allows the Finder to launch the right app for a file without skank like extensions.
Anyhow, Mac files get royally screwed up when move to any filesystem that doesn't support all those things (most) so there's a special encoding format that zips them all together called AppleSingle. AppleSingle has all of the meta data and forks in one flat file which can be moved just about anywhere and not lose data. Of course, nothing besides a Mac knows how to look inside of it.
Now that Apple has been taken over by Next :-) and moved to a Unix base a lot of good things have happened, but extensions are now preferred over type and creator and the multi-fork file approach has been superceded by a directory approach with the directoriness being hidden by the new Finder (go to the Terminal on a Mac OS X box and cd into an app).
So, ideally, anyone developing an OS with spiffy meta data stuff would also design a flat file encoding along with a compatibility library that would let apps work with the extra metadata on any OS with, perhaps, degraded performance.
The technology has changed the way that things work but the law has not kept up with it. To start with, we continue to talk about "copyright". Controlling copying of information makes sense when the distribution mechanism is trucks moving bales of paper around. Once you start sending bits around, everything is copied. From the article:
And technically, any time a Web surfer visits a site, that visit could be interpreted as a copyright violation, because the page is temporarily cached in the user's computer memory.
When you have the newspaper delivered to your door, the content basically comes for free (the cost of a newspaper doesn't pay for much more than printing and handling). However, you get to keep the content as long as you like, chop it into bits and what not. Libraries have archives of newspapers going back years and you get to see them for free. What's the right mechanism as we move forward? The "pay per view" model that content providers want to shove down our throats courtesy of the DMCA is not pretty and when it starts to affect the average Joe I suspect it will be booed out of favor pretty quickly. But what is the right mechanism to make sure content providers get paid something and that we, the citizens, get something for our money?
No sharecropping for me luv! I'll be off to the basement now. See you in about 10 years.
No, I didn't forget any of that. Try reading what I wrote.
From the article:
"Sun's complete line of Solaris and Linux products...are covered by Sun's portfolio of Unix licensing agreements. Solaris and Sun Linux represent safe choices for those companies that develop and deploy services based on Unix systems," Sun declared the day SCO filed suit against IBM.
Unless Sun changes the licensing terms of "Sun Linux" it's released as GPL'd code, right? Once ANYONE releases, with SCO's blessing, the "secret sauce" code as GPL it's free for everyone, right? What am I missing here?
You've got a crap tape drive. Does your internet connection do 30MBytes/s? You're also allowed to have more than one tape drive :-). You're also supposed to put more than 1 tape in the car.
Let's assume LTO (Ultrium 2) tape at 30MB/s, 200GB/tape (uncompressed - let's compare apples to apples). We'll use a Chevy Suburban with 3919 liters of interior space, assume 3 tapes to the liter, so about 10,000 tapes, with room for fudge and packing material.
That's 2000 TB or 2 Petabytes in one vehicle.
Since we've bought 10,000 tapes (those things ain't cheap) we may as well have 100 tape drives to read them and write them (200 total, 100 on each end).
At 30MB/s it takes about 2 hours to read or write each tape, so 4 hours per tape or 40,000 drive hours total, or 400 hours total to read/write the tapes. Assuming we stop to go to the bathroom and eat occasionally but no stops for sleeping (2 drivers) we'll average 50 miles/h or 100 hours. (You may drive faster than this but it make my math easy)
Total time=500 hours for 2000TB or about 1.1 GB/s. If we assume only 1 tape drive on each end, it's still 13MB/s. Yah, still not to be underestimated :-). As you can see, the speed of the vehicle and the distance has very little impact when you're moving such a large amount of data.
I think density-wise tapes and disks (bare) are about the same today as a 250 GB IDE drive is about the same size as an LTO tape. Now, if you have your imaginary Beowulf cluster ready to hook all of your IDE drives up, imagine the bandwidth of that!
If you can't follow your process there's something wrong with it. Seriously - it doesn't fit your needs. You should look around for a process that will work for you and give you decent results in the time frames you have to work in. The Extreme Programming methodologies come to mind. I've always found that I can get a Q&D prototype up and running quickly. If I've done my architecture correctly up front and have my APIs set up right I can go back later and upgrade modules on a piece-by-piece basis without having to chuck EVERYTHING. Once you have something working it's a lot easier to get junior engineers to make improvements.
I use the Mail Boxes Etc. in the town I used to live in. We set it all up before we left the States so I'm not sure how to do it if you're outside the country and not planning to make a trip there. If you're planning to make a trip, just check the local Mail Boxes Etc. whereever you're going and see if they'll do it for you.
I live overseas as well (Japan) and it's difficult getting things shipped directly. We have a PO Box in the US and things are forwarded to us. It's a little pricey but it works out well. This page has a list of companies that do package forwarding as a business. I don't use any of them, caveat emptor!
Well, I'd say it's even worse. Filesystems are well separated from the rest of the kernel with a well defined API. They're functionally equivalent to drivers. Were SCO to get this line of reasoning approved by a court every DRIVER written for Unix would be a derivative work of SCO's. You want to talk viral?
The really weird part is SCO trying to claim rights over code THEY DIDN'T WRITE! JFS is original code from IBM - the Linux version is supposedly descended from the OS/2 version of the FS.
The reason the same gang of idiots keep getting work from the government is that they're the only people willing to bid on it. Government procurement is so bizarre that unless you have a team of specialists putting the bid proposal together you have no chance of getting it. Every large company I've worked at had a special "Federal Systems" division whose job it was to deal with that sillines.
It's called sudden deceleration. Look into it.
The Mercury, Apollo, etc. heatshields were made out of a phenolic epoxy that burned off (ablated) during reentry, not titanium.
I have to get the kids to sleep first!
Ummm...why is it illegal? It's an unlicensed band. As long as it's within the power limits there's no FCC issue. Of course, if someone manages to slip through some law that makes "interfering with a computer system" illegal...
It's not license strong-arming - the license is very explicit AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT. What rock would you have to have been hiding under to not know that the GPL is an evil, viral, license that forces you to make the GPL'd and modified GPL'd code available (heck, Bill Gates said so!)? Linksys had a choice - BSD is not invisible - and they chose to use the GPL'd stuff again.
Don't blame the GPL for Linksys' failure to comply. No one held a gun to their heads and said "Use Linux". If they wanted proprietary code they could have written their own kernel or bought VxWorks (shudder) or used a BSD derivative. They didn't.
Not quite. The idea would be to have the lanes running at different speed alongside each other (without handrails in between and no gaps) and be able to SWITCH lanes to speed up. This was the system that Heinlein laid out in The Roads Must Roll. The system for accelerating used looks like a clever solution, though. I'm not sure how practical it would be to switch lanes in reality.
Well, maybe an asshole AND an idiot.
So are we going to have everyone strip first and put their clothes through the neutron scatter tomography machine?
There's too many ways around the system, especially if you're willing to die in the process of the bombin or hijacking.
We'd be much better off DEemphasizing security on airlines, taking an ocassional bombing with a shrub and jumping on hijackers in the cabin and beating the bejeezus out of them than with this system which magnifies every terrorist act that occurs on an airplane, making them magnets for terrorists.
The rules are different when you're a monopoly (and Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly in the desktop OS market by a court of law and there is no argument about that anymore, legally speaking)
Say "Thank you Larry Wall"
I don't think there was much in that commentary that was actually relevant. Horn blowing about GNU/Linux - you know, RICHARD, most people building an OS START with the kernel, not the other way around. If Linus hadn't gotten something pulled together the FSF would still be wandering in the wilderness.
One good point
The Free Software Foundation's lawyer, Professor Moglen, believes that SCO gave permission for the community's use of the code that they distributed under the GNU GPL and other free software licenses in their version of GNU/Linux.
Your whining is paying off RICHARD (can I call you Dick?) - the article actually references them as GNU/Linux.