So will they do it? You're right in that there is little evidence so far. Given the constant slating they receive in this area, there is certainly a motive to improve it. But given the apparent lifetime of legacy code in Windows, it's not going to show significant results any time soon in that arena. I would suspect it would be more evident in "new" products such as.NET, etc.
How many times do you have to get burned before you become shy of the fire?
What Bill should do is contract Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. He has to be one of the lord high masters of code cleanup in the whole world. Pay boffo bucks, send a Gulfstream to get him and give him some Bill face time.
Recently it seems not a day goes by on slashdot without a few Microsoft stories. This supposedly linux, open-source focused site seems awfully preoccupied with Microsoft for some reason, and it's not good.
Sure it's good, it keeps us entertained, never mind pumping up Slashdot revenues. Besides, there is no shortage of Linux people that ignore Microsoft completely. It all balances out.
...that's why Microsoft would be best off, for their long-term interests, with a team of software engineers who would redesign the Windows codebase from scratch.
They already tried that, it's called "NT". Things got better for a while, then the application mafia got their fingers in and it degenerated back to the current mess.
So they could start that process over again, and be finished in 5 years, just in time to see their stock make the final dive into the subbasements. Or they could learn from Apple once again, and switch to BSD, it's free:-)
The OSS model of peer review on a large scale is the sole reason for such reliable security.
Right. At Microsoft, the code cleaning group will succumb to the temptation to make structural changes, the development groups will take issue with that, open war will errupt, and the whole flaming mess will spiral down to hell.
Nobody gives a rat's ass about 750 million dollars -- pocket change to Gates and Co.
You're quite wrong about that. It's a big, fat ouch, amounting to 2% of cash on hand. That was that lawsuit, there are more coming down the pipe. Plus MS's profit margins are eroding rapidly, if indeed, they even still exist. The stock has no support, so they can't play option games any more. Linux's march into their core businesses is proceeding exponentially. This was not a good day for Microsoft.
SOAP is very light weight considering its alternatives. In-so-far as you can serialize objects to W3C Schema primitive types, you can avoid the difficulties of complex marshaling one incurs with other distribute service mechanisms (the stubs/skeletons of CORBA, etc.). The W3C Schema types are a quick and easy standard that are independent of choice of language, operating system, environment, etc.
Two of the main tenants underlying SOAP are broken:
* Size does not matter
* Efficiency does not matter
Earth to SOAP advocates: both of those things matter a great deal. Sure, there may be even more clumsy alternatives out there, but SOAP still ranks very high on the clumsy scale.
I think the GPL license will hinder its use in other applications as well. LGPL or BSD license would have been a much better selection.
That sounds remarkably like whining to me. If you don't like the GPL aspect of it, then learn from it and write your own.
And please explain to me exactly how the GPL limits your use of this software? Maybe it doesn't let you steal it and make a commercial product out of it, while not contributing back your changes?
"Actually, anybody with a licensed copy of SCO's source can diff it against Linux and report the similarities. That's a rather big vulnerability in SCO's little game, don't you think? Especially if the copying turns out to be in the other direction?"
AOL Time Warner (IIRC, owners of the second biggest recording company, not to mention one of the major recording studios) owns Nullsoft, which releases a program that the RIAA and MPAA will undoubtedly call a tool whose sole purpose is to illicitly distribute copyrighted works....
That was a joke right? And the moderators who marked it "interesting" and "insightful" really meant to mark it "funny", they just hit the wrong button, right?
In fact what we have here is a first cut at a secure distributed network presence system, something that would allow you to run an icq-like network between people you trust without being spied on by a central server. There are many reasons why one would want this: maybe *you* just want to trade copyrighted files, but *I* want to communicate securely and efficiently with my associates.
As for why AOL lets Nullsoft do things like this, I suppose the choice is either to let them work on what they want to or lose the talent. What Nullsoft is doing is the best thing for the net, and so is the best thing for AOL in the end.
"There is no evidence, there isn't even the sligtest hint of evidence and SCO voided anything by releasing Linux under the GPL themselves anyway."
How do you know this? SCO doesn't have to show you anything - all the offending code has to be shown to IBM right now. And because of NDA's and the like (whatever is stipulated in their contract) they may never have to show you any of it.
Actually, anybody with a licensed copy of SCO's source can diff it against Linux and report the similarities. That's a rather big vulnerability in SCO's little game, don't you think? Especially if the copying turns out to be in the other direction?
Unfortunately, this lack of IPv6 adoption is due to Microsoft.
Actually, it's more due to the monumentally stupid design decision of not making IPv4 addresses a strict subset of IPv6 addresses, with the result that you have to have tunnels etc to communicate between an IPv6 host or client and an IPv4 host or client.
simply putting ADV: in the subject line would aliviate all of these problems. Don't want spam? Have your mail server drop anything with ADV. With IMAP all you need to d/l is the subject lines anyway.
First, it should be a real header, not a hack to the subject line (or perhaps as well as a hack to the subject line). Second, it doesn't fully solve the bandwidth-theft problem. Many people don't have the option of using IMAP, and besides, have you every tried IMAP? It sucks for performance.
There really isn't any beneficial changes here. People's gripes were largely with prices and restrictive measures that were associated with the new scheme, not what kind of "assurances" they were recieving ("assurances" that they thought they were already getting for free with older Microsoft products and that they usually get for free with other venodrs' software products: real support, limited training, and manufacturer accountability).
It's a little-known fact that the "assurance" in "Software Assurance[tm]" refers to assuring that Microsoft's current high profit level continues, rather than anything a customer might want.
Between this, and all of the charity software donations that they're making, they're basically changing thier public perception, while maintaining their draconian licensing terms.
I agree that's what they're trying to do, but I don't agree it's working. Once burned, twice shy. Even the most clueless PHB can understand "costs more, does less".
When I travel abroad, I send e-mail with my own home e-mail address as the sender through the foreign ISP's SMTP server (and collect mail with POP3 from my home ISP as usual). This has several advantages such as not needing another e-mail account and still being able to post to mailing lists. This plan will lump that in with "fraud" and make it impossible. With whitelisting on private e-mail becoming more and more common, this will be even more of an issue.
On the contrary, this might even make things work better, if it's handled properly. Assuming you run your own SMTP server on your laptop (as I do - it's easy with Linux), it will vouch that your emails are authorized to be sent from your domain. Oh, and you would have to own your own domain, which costs about $20/year. Then it comes down to whether your domain is "responsible" or not. That is, anybody who wants to send spam and take responsibility for the legal consequences should be able to.
But it's not clear to me how one would distinguish a responsible domain from an irresponsible one.
You know, I wouldn't mind receiving advertisements in email if:
1. They were about things I gave a damn about 2. They were marked (like ADV:) for easy filtering
What bothers me about spam are the violations of those two.
That's just you. For many people, the mere volume of unwanted traffic is a major problem. Consider somebody in a third world country[1] on a slow dial-up connection for which they have to pay enormous amounts of money in local terms. Or somebody who has to use webmail, with an awful inefficient interface, because they can't afford a regular ISP.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct link is http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030528/law059_1.html
"Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with." -- SCO
Microsoft has already been doing this for the past five years. You just have not been paying attention. .NET/CLR is the new Microsoft OS.
Ooh, that's going to fix the IIS security holes for sure. Tee hee.
My question: what are they going to do for an OS? Are you saying they're getting out of that market?
So will they do it? You're right in that there is little evidence so far. Given the constant slating they receive in this area, there is certainly a motive to improve it. But given the apparent lifetime of legacy code in Windows, it's not going to show significant results any time soon in that arena. I would suspect it would be more evident in "new" products such as .NET, etc.
How many times do you have to get burned before you become shy of the fire?
What Bill should do is contract Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. He has to be one of the lord high masters of code cleanup in the whole world. Pay boffo bucks, send a Gulfstream to get him and give him some Bill face time.
Knowing Theo, he'd tell billg to get stuffed.
Recently it seems not a day goes by on slashdot without a few Microsoft stories. This supposedly linux, open-source focused site seems awfully preoccupied with Microsoft for some reason, and it's not good.
Sure it's good, it keeps us entertained, never mind pumping up Slashdot revenues. Besides, there is no shortage of Linux people that ignore Microsoft completely. It all balances out.
...that's why Microsoft would be best off, for their long-term interests, with a team of software engineers who would redesign the Windows codebase from scratch.
:-)
They already tried that, it's called "NT". Things got better for a while, then the application mafia got their fingers in and it degenerated back to the current mess.
So they could start that process over again, and be finished in 5 years, just in time to see their stock make the final dive into the subbasements. Or they could learn from Apple once again, and switch to BSD, it's free
The OSS model of peer review on a large scale is the sole reason for such reliable security.
Right. At Microsoft, the code cleaning group will succumb to the temptation to make structural changes, the development groups will take issue with that, open war will errupt, and the whole flaming mess will spiral down to hell.
India's not a poor country, it's just a really, really corrupt one.
Read what you wrote, but substitute "America" for "India".
When you guys get that sorted even reasonably well, we'll be willing to listen to criticism from you.
Sadly, yours is an all-to-typical attitude. Do I need to point out that the argument is fallacious?
Nobody gives a rat's ass about 750 million dollars -- pocket change to Gates and Co.
You're quite wrong about that. It's a big, fat ouch, amounting to 2% of cash on hand. That was that lawsuit, there are more coming down the pipe. Plus MS's profit margins are eroding rapidly, if indeed, they even still exist. The stock has no support, so they can't play option games any more. Linux's march into their core businesses is proceeding exponentially. This was not a good day for Microsoft.
SOAP is very light weight considering its alternatives. In-so-far as you can serialize objects to W3C Schema primitive types, you can avoid the difficulties of complex marshaling one incurs with other distribute service mechanisms (the stubs/skeletons of CORBA, etc.). The W3C Schema types are a quick and easy standard that are independent of choice of language, operating system, environment, etc.
Two of the main tenants underlying SOAP are broken:
* Size does not matter
* Efficiency does not matter
Earth to SOAP advocates: both of those things matter a great deal. Sure, there may be even more clumsy alternatives out there, but SOAP still ranks very high on the clumsy scale.
I think the GPL license will hinder its use in other applications as well. LGPL or BSD license would have been a much better selection.
That sounds remarkably like whining to me. If you don't like the GPL aspect of it, then learn from it and write your own.
And please explain to me exactly how the GPL limits your use of this software? Maybe it doesn't let you steal it and make a commercial product out of it, while not contributing back your changes?
"Actually, anybody with a licensed copy of SCO's source can diff it against Linux and report the similarities. That's a rather big vulnerability in SCO's little game, don't you think? Especially if the copying turns out to be in the other direction?"
Then why hasn't anyone done this yet?
How do you know nobody has?
AOL Time Warner (IIRC, owners of the second biggest recording company, not to mention one of the major recording studios) owns Nullsoft, which releases a program that the RIAA and MPAA will undoubtedly call a tool whose sole purpose is to illicitly distribute copyrighted works....
That was a joke right? And the moderators who marked it "interesting" and "insightful" really meant to mark it "funny", they just hit the wrong button, right?
In fact what we have here is a first cut at a secure distributed network presence system, something that would allow you to run an icq-like network between people you trust without being spied on by a central server. There are many reasons why one would want this: maybe *you* just want to trade copyrighted files, but *I* want to communicate securely and efficiently with my associates.
As for why AOL lets Nullsoft do things like this, I suppose the choice is either to let them work on what they want to or lose the talent. What Nullsoft is doing is the best thing for the net, and so is the best thing for AOL in the end.
"There is no evidence, there isn't even the sligtest hint of evidence and SCO voided anything by releasing Linux under the GPL themselves anyway."
How do you know this? SCO doesn't have to show you anything - all the offending code has to be shown to IBM right now. And because of NDA's and the like (whatever is stipulated in their contract) they may never have to show you any of it.
Actually, anybody with a licensed copy of SCO's source can diff it against Linux and report the similarities. That's a rather big vulnerability in SCO's little game, don't you think? Especially if the copying turns out to be in the other direction?
Unfortunately, this lack of IPv6 adoption is due to Microsoft.
Actually, it's more due to the monumentally stupid design decision of not making IPv4 addresses a strict subset of IPv6 addresses, with the result that you have to have tunnels etc to communicate between an IPv6 host or client and an IPv4 host or client.
They just said that SCO has the UNIX copyrights!!!
(Premonition of law suit...)
Funny, I had the same thought.
Yea, and the Forbes URL does not work any more. Maybe they pulled the article. Odd! In the article, they denied Novell's claim.
The article is there, however, Forbes seems not to have written up the original story about Novell, only SCO's rebuttal. I do have to ask myself why.
By the way, SCO is pronounced as one syllable, "sko", with a long "o". Hence SCO X is pronounced "sko-ex"...
I pronounce it "SCOX", ryhmes with "cocks".
Read it here
simply putting ADV: in the subject line would aliviate all of these problems. Don't want spam? Have your mail server drop anything with ADV. With IMAP all you need to d/l is the subject lines anyway.
First, it should be a real header, not a hack to the subject line (or perhaps as well as a hack to the subject line). Second, it doesn't fully solve the bandwidth-theft problem. Many people don't have the option of using IMAP, and besides, have you every tried IMAP? It sucks for performance.
There really isn't any beneficial changes here. People's gripes were largely with prices and restrictive measures that were associated with the new scheme, not what kind of "assurances" they were recieving ("assurances" that they thought they were already getting for free with older Microsoft products and that they usually get for free with other venodrs' software products: real support, limited training, and manufacturer accountability).
It's a little-known fact that the "assurance" in "Software Assurance[tm]" refers to assuring that Microsoft's current high profit level continues, rather than anything a customer might want.
Between this, and all of the charity software donations that they're making, they're basically changing thier public perception, while maintaining their draconian licensing terms.
I agree that's what they're trying to do, but I don't agree it's working. Once burned, twice shy. Even the most clueless PHB can understand "costs more, does less".
When I travel abroad, I send e-mail with my own home e-mail address as the sender through the foreign ISP's SMTP server (and collect mail with POP3 from my home ISP as usual). This has several advantages such as not needing another e-mail account and still being able to post to mailing lists. This plan will lump that in with "fraud" and make it impossible. With whitelisting on private e-mail becoming more and more common, this will be even more of an issue.
On the contrary, this might even make things work better, if it's handled properly. Assuming you run your own SMTP server on your laptop (as I do - it's easy with Linux), it will vouch that your emails are authorized to be sent from your domain. Oh, and you would have to own your own domain, which costs about $20/year. Then it comes down to whether your domain is "responsible" or not. That is, anybody who wants to send spam and take responsibility for the legal consequences should be able to.
But it's not clear to me how one would distinguish a responsible domain from an irresponsible one.
You know, I wouldn't mind receiving advertisements in email if:
1. They were about things I gave a damn about
2. They were marked (like ADV:) for easy filtering
What bothers me about spam are the violations of those two.
That's just you. For many people, the mere volume of unwanted traffic is a major problem. Consider somebody in a third world country[1] on a slow dial-up connection for which they have to pay enormous amounts of money in local terms. Or somebody who has to use webmail, with an awful inefficient interface, because they can't afford a regular ISP.
[1] Or Germany, until recently!