The very first channel I ever joined was memorable.
Via a primitive browser I was able to determine that Mirc was a pretty popular software app and downloading and installing it was no big deal really.
Incidentally, most x86 people booted into DOS in those days. Windoze was so incredibly slow and crashprone that we tried to avoid running it excpet on momentary occasions when one of the handful of installed apps needed it.
Anyway, I launched my just-installed chat client for the first time and selected a channel, more or less at random as soon as I figured out/list.
There were about 10 or so ppl online, but before I could even say hello, a massive netsplit hit and left me in the channel alone.
I'm afraid in my confusion and inexperience I couldn't help thinking I'd inadvertantly stumbled across a clique of obnoxious snobs:)
I calmed down and stayed with it, and eventually managed a level of comprehension that made it possible to understand what the hell really happened.:)
Netsplits are still with us, unfortunately, and when they hit I'm reminded of that incident occasionally, and chuckle, which is helpful in that context.
Because of recent difficulties maintaining a connection to Dalnet, and because of the (understandable) wish for discretion on the part of Dalnet management, some of the assertions in this posting are unconfirmed and unsupported. This nonwithstanding, the following speculation is offered in the hope of illuminating to the best of my ability to percieve it, what's been really going on:
At about the middle of January this year, Dalnet servers were hit with a wave of massive DDoS attacks, quantified as greater than 1G per second per server with sweepingly damaging results.
There never were that many Dalnet login servers to begin with. The attack wave was successful in disabling all of them, and keeping them out of service entirely for over 7 days.
To complicate matters further, there have been credible reports on ircnews.com, irc-junkie.org and elsewhere of a certain degree of dissention within Dalnet, and the senior sysadmins and management of the companies providing server hosting. I mention this with reluctance, because the problem is bad enough anyway, but it is nevertheless true that the operational list of Dalnet servers available at this moment is quite different from the array online before the attack wave began, and that some of the defections are permanent, including some of the largest hubs.
Dalnet have commented officially on their website newsletter that the volume of DDoS garbage going into their hosts' servers was sufficient to not only knock Dalnet offline, but bad enough to interfere with the hosts' other (revenue earning) internet services.
At present also, login servers are resolving under slightly different names, making joining problematic for large numbers of users still, but as of last week at least, the expectation of a reasonably reliable login is plausible.
Dalnet is probably correct in having determined that their attackers method of acquiring zombies is by the use of worms, trojans.......use your favorite term - by sending files like XXXSallyXXX.GIF.vbs, or whatever, and that these OwN3d systems are the ones being enlisted to carry out DDoS waves.
They note with equal accuracy that a handful of filesharing channels are some of the most crowded on their network, and may be not carefully enough managed, and have hypothecated these as being most likely sources of widespread damage and infection, to several thousand users' systems, to Dalnet, other IRC networks and the internet overall.
The sociology of a filesharing channel is also a factor in this policy change. Where else in the world wide world would a user be so inclined to accept, click on and tinker with a file they acquired five minutes ago from an anonymous stranger with absolutely no verification? Windoze users are requested to NOT post lengthy replies babbling on and on about their firewalls. They're meaningless in this context. The file transferred and was run. Think about it.
All Dalnet have done, is announce they intend to shut down these channels. They had to do something.
Does this mean they're trying to ban filesharing via Dalnet alltogether? No. Even if the IRC protocol permitted this, which it doesn't, their response at server level is thought through and restrained in scope, and respected here accordingly.
Elsewhere on this thread it has been suggested that this decision is motivated by the desire to take away IRC users' freedom. I refute this with the comment that the freedom to unknowingly download a trojan to allow your billyware to be used in DDoS attacks is an unfortunate and unsuitable choice for a cause to defend in the name of liberty.
Just to keep the record straight, for a number of years (at least since 1994 when Warp 3 came out) IBM have posted a listing of OS/2 device drivers which is still being maintained and expanded, and will be for the forseeable future as new hardware continues to come out.
The listing includes OMNI.DRV, which has been around for at least the last 6 years, and supports a large number of Epson printers.
It is fair though to warn anyone contemplating an OS/2 installation for the first time to check hardware compatibility. OTOH, presumably most/. readers have dealt with this problem (caused deliberately by M$) in the course of Linux installations.
I've had a Speakeasy account for almost exactly one year, since @home was trashed.
I specifically requested, and got, static ip + shell, and believe if I were to connect via dialup that httpd would still function. I'm not prepared to diddle with the constant DSL connection running to experiment
The following is pasted from the current TOS page on Speakeasy's website:
Speakeasy believes in the right of the individual to publish information they feel is important to the world via the Internet. Unlike many ISP's, Speakeasy allows customers to run servers (web, mail, etc.) over their Internet connections, use hubs, and share networks in multiple locations.
AFAIK, Speakeasy has (thankfully) never blocked port 80, or intentionally disabled any other function contained in the internet protocol standard.
I would also question the blithe assumption that there are large numbers of Speakeasy customers running IIS and/or unpatched billyware machines. M$ is becoming more and more unpopular with every passing day, and my access.logs don't support the speculation.
NetOp has been around for a while, and used here extensively in the 1990s. Vendor support is notably above average, and there are interoperable DOS and Windoze versions as well.
...Lotus e-mail and calendar software works on Advanced Server...
I guess I have to concede that my suggestion is somewhat offtopic, but this is an opportunity to drop a hint for Lotus/IBM to produce a native Linux Smartsuite.
If this is considered too much effort [meaning too expensive] how about at least releasing an opensource filter for.lwp so those documents could import cleanly into Star/Open Office?
The partnership as announced though is great news, and seems to be going over well and generating a lot of market enthusiasm.
How different is the atmosphere now compared to last February at Linuxworldexpo where Carly Fiorina gave a good and persuasive endorsement of Linux and the HP commitment to the platform.
Her presentation included mention of the fact that HP was in search of capable Linux technicians, and as I have my own small consulting business, had intended to contact her, and you directly with regard to that requirement.
I'm nowhere close to your level of insight into Linux internals, but I've been running various distros and versions exclusively here since 1999, when it was recommended to me by IBM.
Current research includes, but is not limited to, the Linux Corporate Desktop initative. With efforts like these, and the growth of Linux in general, I suppose, allies are important.
HP strongly backing Linux, with you there to give guidance represented an example of that. There's something troubling about the message their new direction (or lack thereof?) sends.
I recognize with appreciation the work you put in at HP and wish you much future success
and someday we may be destined to work together yet.:)
For my setup here I use a cheap $40 CPiA webcam connected to a parallel port. Mcam software, available from freshmeat, gave me an image almost as soon as i had the camera connected, although i did have to take a considerable amount of time reprogramming the image upload functions to work properly.
At a 1 second refresh rate, running the cam does take a notable amount of system resources - circa 90%, but with an Athlon and 128 meg of ram, it's tolerable for occasional use.
Server is local, since my dsl provider, speakeasy.net allows it and I have a static ip.
Any user with a browser that can display a jpeg can see it.
I also have gnomemeeting (also on freshmeat) downloaded, but haven't got it working yet.
Speakfreely, also listed on Freshmeat, is intended to provide crossplatform audio connectivity, and also has good links for the H323 standard. Simultaneous audio and video here not yet implemented at this time.
Also worth noting, because of comments elsewhere on this thread: If I need a shower or haven't got a clean shirt, there is a definite reluctance on my part to turning the damn thing on:)
I'm unusually reticent today to plunge the way I usually do into deep philosophical arguement, although I have given a lot of thought to what would be most fair regarding ownership and accessability of code for our industry, developers, users, and the public interest.
For the moment though, I would like to comment respectfully, if not entirely in agreement, regarding the percentage of projects on Freshmeat stuck at an early alpha stage of development - especially if they've been in that condition for a notable length of time.
I'm looking at the question from the perspective of simply being able to practically obtain working software for a particular purpose where the industry and the economy of the planet on which it's located change rapidly at the forces of all kinds of turbulence.
It's probably a good thing that barriers to entry on Freshmeat or Sourceforge aren't high at all. It really only takes a half an hour or so of wild hacking and the time to write up the mission objective, but before you get too dismissive, remember that absolutely every piece of software once existed in that form. Freshmeat just makes the avoidance of what might be real dumb ideas or implementations more public and transparent. Worth mentioning in comparison is what happened over the last two years or so in the commercial world, where over a trillion dollars was lost in dotcom and related technology ventures based on dumb or unworkable premises. Where is any of that software now?
That's an advantageous thing about opensource stagnation though: The code is still there. Any developer wishing to download it and continue is free to do that, or take part of it and use for a completely different purpose.
.
The world of rigidly enforced intellectual property works quite differently. Once software becomes a commercial product it's in danger of disappearing - regardless of who is using the software, or who needs to use it.
Examples that come quickly to mind are Corel Office 2000 for Linux and BeOS. If you happen to need those you're probably out of luck, unless you manage to find an individual somewhere in a position to offer a copy directly. This may be illegal on a technicality but it hardly seems worth getting excited over if it's a practical impossibility.
Going back to Freshmeat and Sourceforge though, I will end with one observation in support of your comment: The number of dead URLs - especially to.src files. Even without any legalistic constructs or committees from hell deliberately choosing to close ftp sites and delete support newsgroups, a substantial amount of sourcecode and documentation is still lost in the normal and ongoing process of domain changes, ISP mergers or closures, and the degradation and entropy of the internet over time. It's ironic.
In the late 1980s when the original specifications for OS/2 were first laid out, the majority of applications on users' screens were DOS, which was supported. Rather well actually, since IBM managed to get rid of 640K RAM barrier hassles.
Windoze at that point in history was not a factor in the marketplace, but as Win16 software began to make it's way to users' hands in the early 1990s IBM added an integrated Win16 superset in Warp 3.0 Blue Label in 1994, that could be selectively installed or not at the user's whim. IBM contractual arrangements pretty much allowed them to to do as they pleased with Win16.
There was another major design objective in Warp: Authentic execution space for 32bit binaries. This was at least two years before M$ was even close to releasing Win95, which claimed to be a 32bit environment although large chunks of it weren't.
Windoze prevailed, but the reason for that is more to do with lies and rackettering than technology. This is the point in history where formerly helpful engineers began to say things that made no sense when I would call or write with a request for driver support.
OS/2 didn't die of natural causes - It was murdered. The best place to read details of this unfortunate episode in the development of our industry is in the sworn testimony given to the Jackson court by IBM and others.
To me, this is misleading at least, if not an outright lie. This seems to have slipped between the cracks as far as any substantial outcry or objection goes.
Wouldn't it be more practical for the police to deputize a linux sysadmin and have him telnet in?
Why would anyone have to be physically present in the server room? Specific data files in this context are the object of the investigation. Also, having a sworn officer conducting the search seems preferable to having ISP personnel involved.
All Yahoo or any other ISP would have to do would be to create an account with suitable privelages for law enforcement [only] use.
Where does the "more licences them employees, including gardeners/cleaning staff" story fit in?
According to the published stories, it came from the consultants hired by the state to manage the needs assessment. If I were a CA taxpayer I would probably be howling for an investigation regarding that too. Could be nothing more than some ditz blew it with an Excel spreadsheet, but I have a hunch their fees were tied somehow to a percentage of the gross.
What about the donations?.
25 grand is fairly routine for a corporation the size and stature of Oracle, and it wouldn't surprise me if Gov. Davis's opponent got a check for a broadly similar amount. Compare that to the $36M that M$ contributed to the Bush campaign in 2000: That's serious monkey business, and not being investigated at all, but let me drop that since this isn't a partisan political forum.
Why would oracle and its reseller be so easy about giving back the money?
Larry Ellison is CEO of one of the biggest companies in California, and understands these things, and what it means in terms of hideous PR and the enmity of his home state government to cling to an impossibly flawed contract he can't possibly get any money from in the long run. As for the reseller: He wasn't even consulted, I'm sure.
[Did they] look around for people who were willing to offer the same service?
No. They hired Coreleone Olive Oil to look for them, and they're the ones who drafted the contract that started the whole stink in the first place.
With this kind of money it is posible to start a company that does just that based on oss or a db2/oracle/whatever licence
This haunts me. Gimme $50M or even $25M and I like to think I could come up with a pretty slick piece of code. (Opensource) The trouble is, i'm outnumbered by uber-persuasive M$CE hotdogs who could do a convincing job of saying they can and then programming the project into the ground.
Oracle Government Services follow a strategy of vertical systems development for shelf solutions to do things like process and manage motor vehicle records, or summarize environmental sampling results and forward reports to the federal EPA at a time and in a format required by law.
I'm deliberately picking generic examples applicable to any state, since I don't remember it being mentioned in anything I read exactly what the software in question was intended to do.
These packages tend to be astronomically expensive. So would the alternatives from competitors like IBM or other developers active in that market, because their cost is controlled by the time, expense and administrative elaboration involved for the other alternative of an individual state assembling a qualified project team and developing and maintaining a codebase of their own (and getting it right).
It doesn't hold up to think of this as: "CA paying $100M for a copy of MySQL" Even if the database is Oracle Enterprise, it's still one of the smaller components of the overall package. The big numbers come from things like the specialized form and report bundles, installation, training, network construction (even a small state can be expected to have node locations all over the place) and system administration.
Another point regarding this specific contract was that the package line items and license counts were stipulated by a third-party consultancy operating on behalf of the state, which is now the subject of official fact-finding, perhaps with some justification. So far no evidence has emerged that anyone working for Oracle itself knew anything about it until after the purchase was signed off.
As for the downturn: There won't be a Y10K problem for another 9.998 years, and most venture capitalists these days know better than to write blank checks to 3 guys starting poopychute.com for Oracle software to manage the 5 million customers they say they're gonna get on page 72 of their business plan.
Mindset here seems to be that everything happening in the universe has to be somebody's fault.
Not limited to online interaction, the implication seems to be that we (or this guy anyway) live in a society not so much competitive as predatory, where everything said and done is motivated by the need to chalk up another victim. Completely alien to this is the concept that an IRC conversation or any other exchange between two people is innocuous - with no winner or loser, and perhaps no significant meaning at all.
Maybe the dude is right in the context he's thinking of: If he had the (good?) fortune to have his credit card lifted somehow with a major and well funded corporation to blame, and took care to select a jury of credulous nitwits, which is how that game is usually played, he could end up with a large enough $$$$$$ettlement that he could piddle off from journalism and never have to work another day in his life.
With an attitude like that though, wow. No wonder the sonofabitch doesn't like IRC.
IBM haven't withdrawn it, and won't anytime soon. You can buy it directly from their website.
I posted this about an hour ago in response to the same misunderstanding in part of the poll dialog. It's rare where posting the same comment to two separate discussions makes perfect sense.
OS/2 is available in 16 different language sets and actively supported by IBM. Some death.
It's disturbing though, given that these facts aren't hidden, that I seem to be the only one in the world who knows this.
Imagine the expressions on these knuckleheads' faces when they find out they're paying $50k a minute and more to get their message out to an audience of 12, and they're the ones who voted to do it to thmselves. They'll all look at each other, and then quickly look away and down at their shoes. Spinchters will tremble.
Slashdot Mirror
Quote:
Buy some stock, and then wait for it to go up, and then sell it.
If it don't go up: don't buy it.
among other platforms.
Check it out here
Here is another good link if you're sufficiently interested.
I favor the formation of a coalition of the willing to carry out a regime change.
Military force, however, should only be used as a last resort.
The very first channel I ever joined was memorable.
Via a primitive browser I was able to determine that Mirc was a pretty popular software app and downloading and installing it was no big deal really.
Incidentally, most x86 people booted into DOS in those days. Windoze was so incredibly slow and crashprone that we tried to avoid running it excpet on momentary occasions when one of the handful of installed apps needed it.
Anyway, I launched my just-installed chat client for the first time and selected a channel, more or less at random as soon as I figured out
There were about 10 or so ppl online, but before I could even say hello, a massive netsplit hit and left me in the channel alone.
I'm afraid in my confusion and inexperience I couldn't help thinking I'd inadvertantly stumbled across a clique of obnoxious snobs
I calmed down and stayed with it, and eventually managed a level of comprehension that made it possible to understand what the hell really happened.
Netsplits are still with us, unfortunately, and when they hit I'm reminded of that incident occasionally, and chuckle, which is helpful in that context.
Because of recent difficulties maintaining a connection to Dalnet, and because of the (understandable) wish for discretion on the part of Dalnet management, some of the assertions in this posting are unconfirmed and unsupported. This nonwithstanding, the following speculation is offered in the hope of illuminating to the best of my ability to percieve it, what's been really going on:
At about the middle of January this year, Dalnet servers were hit with a wave of massive DDoS attacks, quantified as greater than 1G per second per server with sweepingly damaging results.
There never were that many Dalnet login servers to begin with. The attack wave was successful in disabling all of them, and keeping them out of service entirely for over 7 days.
To complicate matters further, there have been credible reports on ircnews.com, irc-junkie.org and elsewhere of a certain degree of dissention within Dalnet, and the senior sysadmins and management of the companies providing server hosting. I mention this with reluctance, because the problem is bad enough anyway, but it is nevertheless true that the operational list of Dalnet servers available at this moment is quite different from the array online before the attack wave began, and that some of the defections are permanent, including some of the largest hubs.
Dalnet have commented officially on their website newsletter that the volume of DDoS garbage going into their hosts' servers was sufficient to not only knock Dalnet offline, but bad enough to interfere with the hosts' other (revenue earning) internet services.
At present also, login servers are resolving under slightly different names, making joining problematic for large numbers of users still, but as of last week at least, the expectation of a reasonably reliable login is plausible.
Dalnet is probably correct in having determined that their attackers method of acquiring zombies is by the use of worms, trojans.......use your favorite term - by sending files like XXXSallyXXX.GIF.vbs, or whatever, and that these OwN3d systems are the ones being enlisted to carry out DDoS waves.
They note with equal accuracy that a handful of filesharing channels are some of the most crowded on their network, and may be not carefully enough managed, and have hypothecated these as being most likely sources of widespread damage and infection, to several thousand users' systems, to Dalnet, other IRC networks and the internet overall.
The sociology of a filesharing channel is also a factor in this policy change. Where else in the world wide world would a user be so inclined to accept, click on and tinker with a file they acquired five minutes ago from an anonymous stranger with absolutely no verification? Windoze users are requested to NOT post lengthy replies babbling on and on about their firewalls. They're meaningless in this context. The file transferred and was run. Think about it.
All Dalnet have done, is announce they intend to shut down these channels. They had to do something.
Does this mean they're trying to ban filesharing via Dalnet alltogether? No. Even if the IRC protocol permitted this, which it doesn't, their response at server level is thought through and restrained in scope, and respected here accordingly.
Elsewhere on this thread it has been suggested that this decision is motivated by the desire to take away IRC users' freedom. I refute this with the comment that the freedom to unknowingly download a trojan to allow your billyware to be used in DDoS attacks is an unfortunate and unsuitable choice for a cause to defend in the name of liberty.
Just to keep the record straight, for a number of years (at least since 1994 when Warp 3 came out) IBM have posted a listing of OS/2 device drivers which is still being maintained and expanded, and will be for the forseeable future as new hardware continues to come out.
The listing includes OMNI.DRV, which has been around for at least the last 6 years, and supports a large number of Epson printers.
It is fair though to warn anyone contemplating an OS/2 installation for the first time to check hardware compatibility. OTOH, presumably most
In this context, the term refers back to language first used in the charter given to William Penn that the King of England signed off on in 1732.
I believe Massachusetts and Virginia also formally style themselves as commomwealths. There may be others.
I've had a Speakeasy account for almost exactly one year, since @home was trashed.
I specifically requested, and got, static ip + shell, and believe if I were to connect via dialup that httpd would still function. I'm not prepared to diddle with the constant DSL connection running to experiment
The following is pasted from the current TOS page on Speakeasy's website:
Speakeasy believes in the right of the individual to publish information they feel is important to the world via the Internet. Unlike many ISP's, Speakeasy allows customers to run servers (web, mail, etc.) over their Internet connections, use hubs, and share networks in multiple locations.
AFAIK, Speakeasy has (thankfully) never blocked port 80, or intentionally disabled any other function contained in the internet protocol standard.
I would also question the blithe assumption that there are large numbers of Speakeasy customers running IIS and/or unpatched billyware machines. M$ is becoming more and more unpopular with every passing day, and my access.logs don't support the speculation.
The only difference between a command economy controlled from Moscow and a command economy controlled from Fedmond is one of longitude.
Link is here.
NetOp has been around for a while, and used here extensively in the 1990s. Vendor support is notably above average, and there are interoperable DOS and Windoze versions as well.
It isn't cheap though.
From the article:
I guess I have to concede that my suggestion is somewhat offtopic, but this is an opportunity to drop a hint for Lotus/IBM to produce a native Linux Smartsuite.
If this is considered too much effort [meaning too expensive] how about at least releasing an opensource filter for
The partnership as announced though is great news, and seems to be going over well and generating a lot of market enthusiasm.
How different is the atmosphere now compared to last February at Linuxworldexpo where Carly Fiorina gave a good and persuasive endorsement of Linux and the HP commitment to the platform.
Her presentation included mention of the fact that HP was in search of capable Linux technicians, and as I have my own small consulting business, had intended to contact her, and you directly with regard to that requirement.
I'm nowhere close to your level of insight into Linux internals, but I've been running various distros and versions exclusively here since 1999, when it was recommended to me by IBM.
Current research includes, but is not limited to, the Linux Corporate Desktop initative. With efforts like these, and the growth of Linux in general, I suppose, allies are important.
HP strongly backing Linux, with you there to give guidance represented an example of that. There's something troubling about the message their new direction (or lack thereof?) sends.
I recognize with appreciation the work you put in at HP and wish you much future success
and someday we may be destined to work together yet.
I found this a good place to start
For my setup here I use a cheap $40 CPiA webcam connected to a parallel port. Mcam software, available from freshmeat, gave me an image almost as soon as i had the camera connected, although i did have to take a considerable amount of time reprogramming the image upload functions to work properly.
At a 1 second refresh rate, running the cam does take a notable amount of system resources - circa 90%, but with an Athlon and 128 meg of ram, it's tolerable for occasional use.
Server is local, since my dsl provider, speakeasy.net allows it and I have a static ip.
Any user with a browser that can display a jpeg can see it.
I also have gnomemeeting (also on freshmeat) downloaded, but haven't got it working yet.
Speakfreely, also listed on Freshmeat, is intended to provide crossplatform audio connectivity, and also has good links for the H323 standard. Simultaneous audio and video here not yet implemented at this time.
Also worth noting, because of comments elsewhere on this thread: If I need a shower or haven't got a clean shirt, there is a definite reluctance on my part to turning the damn thing on
I'm unusually reticent today to plunge the way I usually do into deep philosophical arguement, although I have given a lot of thought to what would be most fair regarding ownership and accessability of code for our industry, developers, users, and the public interest.
.src files. Even without any legalistic constructs or committees from hell deliberately choosing to close ftp sites and delete support newsgroups, a substantial amount of sourcecode and documentation is still lost in the normal and ongoing process of domain changes, ISP mergers or closures, and the degradation and entropy of the internet over time. It's ironic.
For the moment though, I would like to comment respectfully, if not entirely in agreement, regarding the percentage of projects on Freshmeat stuck at an early alpha stage of development - especially if they've been in that condition for a notable length of time.
I'm looking at the question from the perspective of simply being able to practically obtain working software for a particular purpose where the industry and the economy of the planet on which it's located change rapidly at the forces of all kinds of turbulence.
It's probably a good thing that barriers to entry on Freshmeat or Sourceforge aren't high at all. It really only takes a half an hour or so of wild hacking and the time to write up the mission objective, but before you get too dismissive, remember that absolutely every piece of software once existed in that form. Freshmeat just makes the avoidance of what might be real dumb ideas or implementations more public and transparent. Worth mentioning in comparison is what happened over the last two years or so in the commercial world, where over a trillion dollars was lost in dotcom and related technology ventures based on dumb or unworkable premises. Where is any of that software now?
That's an advantageous thing about opensource stagnation though: The code is still there. Any developer wishing to download it and continue is free to do that, or take part of it and use for a completely different purpose. . The world of rigidly enforced intellectual property works quite differently. Once software becomes a commercial product it's in danger of disappearing - regardless of who is using the software, or who needs to use it.
Examples that come quickly to mind are Corel Office 2000 for Linux and BeOS. If you happen to need those you're probably out of luck, unless you manage to find an individual somewhere in a position to offer a copy directly. This may be illegal on a technicality but it hardly seems worth getting excited over if it's a practical impossibility.
Going back to Freshmeat and Sourceforge though, I will end with one observation in support of your comment: The number of dead URLs - especially to
If I was a fish reading
In the late 1980s when the original specifications for OS/2 were first laid out, the majority of applications on users' screens were DOS, which was supported. Rather well actually, since IBM managed to get rid of 640K RAM barrier hassles.
Windoze at that point in history was not a factor in the marketplace, but as Win16 software began to make it's way to users' hands in the early 1990s IBM added an integrated Win16 superset in Warp 3.0 Blue Label in 1994, that could be selectively installed or not at the user's whim. IBM contractual arrangements pretty much allowed them to to do as they pleased with Win16.
There was another major design objective in Warp: Authentic execution space for 32bit binaries. This was at least two years before M$ was even close to releasing Win95, which claimed to be a 32bit environment although large chunks of it weren't.
Windoze prevailed, but the reason for that is more to do with lies and rackettering than technology. This is the point in history where formerly helpful engineers began to say things that made no sense when I would call or write with a request for driver support.
OS/2 didn't die of natural causes - It was murdered. The best place to read details of this unfortunate episode in the development of our industry is in the sworn testimony given to the Jackson court by IBM and others.
Just don't call it The United Way.
To me, this is misleading at least, if not an outright lie. This seems to have slipped between the cracks as far as any substantial outcry or objection goes.
Wouldn't it be more practical for the police to deputize a linux sysadmin and have him telnet in?
Why would anyone have to be physically present in the server room? Specific data files in this context are the object of the investigation. Also, having a sworn officer conducting the search seems preferable to having ISP personnel involved.
All Yahoo or any other ISP would have to do would be to create an account with suitable privelages for law enforcement [only] use.
Where does the "more licences them employees, including gardeners/cleaning staff" story fit in?
According to the published stories, it came from the consultants hired by the state to manage the needs assessment. If I were a CA taxpayer I would probably be howling for an investigation regarding that too. Could be nothing more than some ditz blew it with an Excel spreadsheet, but I have a hunch their fees were tied somehow to a percentage of the gross.
What about the donations?.
25 grand is fairly routine for a corporation the size and stature of Oracle, and it wouldn't surprise me if Gov. Davis's opponent got a check for a broadly similar amount. Compare that to the $36M that M$ contributed to the Bush campaign in 2000: That's serious monkey business, and not being investigated at all, but let me drop that since this isn't a partisan political forum.
Why would oracle and its reseller be so easy about giving back the money?
Larry Ellison is CEO of one of the biggest companies in California, and understands these things, and what it means in terms of hideous PR and the enmity of his home state government to cling to an impossibly flawed contract he can't possibly get any money from in the long run. As for the reseller: He wasn't even consulted, I'm sure.
[Did they] look around for people who were willing to offer the same service?
No. They hired Coreleone Olive Oil to look for them, and they're the ones who drafted the contract that started the whole stink in the first place.
With this kind of money it is posible to start a company that does just that based on oss or a db2/oracle/whatever licence
This haunts me. Gimme $50M or even $25M and I like to think I could come up with a pretty slick piece of code. (Opensource) The trouble is, i'm outnumbered by uber-persuasive M$CE hotdogs who could do a convincing job of saying they can and then programming the project into the ground.
Oracle Government Services follow a strategy of vertical systems development for shelf solutions to do things like process and manage motor vehicle records, or summarize environmental sampling results and forward reports to the federal EPA at a time and in a format required by law.
I'm deliberately picking generic examples applicable to any state, since I don't remember it being mentioned in anything I read exactly what the software in question was intended to do.
These packages tend to be astronomically expensive. So would the alternatives from competitors like IBM or other developers active in that market, because their cost is controlled by the time, expense and administrative elaboration involved for the other alternative of an individual state assembling a qualified project team and developing and maintaining a codebase of their own (and getting it right).
It doesn't hold up to think of this as: "CA paying $100M for a copy of MySQL" Even if the database is Oracle Enterprise, it's still one of the smaller components of the overall package. The big numbers come from things like the specialized form and report bundles, installation, training, network construction (even a small state can be expected to have node locations all over the place) and system administration.
Another point regarding this specific contract was that the package line items and license counts were stipulated by a third-party consultancy operating on behalf of the state, which is now the subject of official fact-finding, perhaps with some justification. So far no evidence has emerged that anyone working for Oracle itself knew anything about it until after the purchase was signed off.
As for the downturn: There won't be a Y10K problem for another 9.998 years, and most venture capitalists these days know better than to write blank checks to 3 guys starting poopychute.com for Oracle software to manage the 5 million customers they say they're gonna get on page 72 of their business plan.
M$ clicked the "Buy it Now" button but their browser crashed and they hadda reboot.
By the time they got MSN back online the auction had ended.
Mindset here seems to be that everything happening in the universe has to be somebody's fault.
Not limited to online interaction, the implication seems to be that we (or this guy anyway) live in a society not so much competitive as predatory, where everything said and done is motivated by the need to chalk up another victim. Completely alien to this is the concept that an IRC conversation or any other exchange between two people is innocuous - with no winner or loser, and perhaps no significant meaning at all.
Maybe the dude is right in the context he's thinking of: If he had the (good?) fortune to have his credit card lifted somehow with a major and well funded corporation to blame, and took care to select a jury of credulous nitwits, which is how that game is usually played, he could end up with a large enough $$$$$$ettlement that he could piddle off from journalism and never have to work another day in his life.
With an attitude like that though, wow. No wonder the sonofabitch doesn't like IRC.
IBM haven't withdrawn it, and won't anytime soon. You can buy it directly from their website.
I posted this about an hour ago in response to the same misunderstanding in part of the poll dialog. It's rare where posting the same comment to two separate discussions makes perfect sense.
OS/2 is available in 16 different language sets and actively supported by IBM. Some death.
It's disturbing though, given that these facts aren't hidden, that I seem to be the only one in the world who knows this.
Ooooooo - wait!!!!
Imagine the expressions on these knuckleheads' faces when they find out they're paying $50k a minute and more to get their message out to an audience of 12, and they're the ones who voted to do it to thmselves. They'll all look at each other, and then quickly look away and down at their shoes. Spinchters will tremble.