Given that SCO slaps their copyright header on every damn thing they ship, these 'hundreds of copyrighted files' may very well be the terminfo source files and/etc/termcap. Doesn't ESR maintain this stuff? If so, they are literally taking what he and many others have created, putting their copyright notice on it, and claiming that it is theirs. I wouldn't think that they would claim the skunkworks (GNU utils for SCO) as theirs, but with this bunch you never know.
Yep. I have a set of RedHat 7.2 for the s390 CDs and I just followed the install documentation for putting it on a real mainframe. I can compile and test code on it and move the binaries to a real production machine if I so desired. It's a little slow (11 MIPS), but that probably has more to due with the hardware that I have it running on.
there was an article on/. a couple years ago about how GM is building identical plants in several locations around the world in order to take advantage of just in time manufacturing as well as being able to have industrial engineers from one plant to fill in and share knowledge with those at the other plants (apparently the other factories are unique). A part of it was the workers would be working in teams and their roles and what they would actually be doing would change during the week or day. The laws and employment taxes are greater in Germany, but (according to the article) the unions are more flexible and allow the plants to be more efficient. The article stated that these plants would not be feasible in the US due to UAW work rules.
I know a guy that's a trucker that sometimes delivers parts to some auto plants. He's said that on several occasions where he will pull up to the loading dock and have to wait 30 minutes or more for someone to show up and start unloaded it, but there are fork lift operators hanging around doing nothing:
"Hey guys, can we get started? I got to pick up another load across town in an hour."
"nope...ain't my bay, you got to wait until those guys get back"
"When's that?"
"20 minutes"
"What?! what if I move the truck over to this bay?:
"No man..we only unload stuff from supplier XYZ. You're carrying stuff from company ABC."
"It's just boxes on pallets and this is the same !@#@#$ing dock"
"Sorry...ain't my job."
....so he finds a supervisor and asks if he can get them to do it...
"No, it's not really their job, so I can't make them do it."
"but you're their supervisor!"
"yeah, but I still can't make them do it..union rules."
"what if I get a hand truck and you show me where to put it on the dock so I can start unloading it?"
"No, that's against the rules. you'll just have to wait."
....and they wonder why manufacturing jobs are leaving.
Re:Why won't the big automakers do this?
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
and since his plant is going to be unionized (one of the conditions for getting funding from the California pension fund), his plans for building a super flexible custom car with huge profit margins are going to be like an egg hitting a brick wall. GM is already doing this sort of crap, but in other countries like Germany because of the UAW work rules.
Sounds more like he will be selling a 'kit car' with all the aftermarket goodies that people like to use to dress up their cars. The article makes no mention of who will be making the powertrain. I'm sure the other carmakers will also try to lean on these suppliers (they are already their biggest customers) to jack up his prices or have that company pay for the R&D and then cherry pick from the successful products.
(I also found it odd/annoying that this story about the 'dell of carmakers' was plastered with ads for the real Dell. Is this a story about BTO or a fluff piece used to mention Dell as many times as possible.) The Linux/MS.Net aspect was interest. They won't consider Unix "because it's 20 year old technology", but the same proven methods and tools is what makes up linux. Maybe they hired a buzzword-only-CTO.
Re:LinuxBIOS in flight computers
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the cost of one of these things, they are certainly not going to trade safety and reliability. Military systems are designed to have redundant systems because they will be deployed in harsher conditions than civilian aircraft.
When you will have to enter an university, the advisors can access now all of your 15 past years.
If it takes you 15 years to get through elementary and high school (K-12), you will probably have bigger problems trying to get into a university.
In reality, they aren't doing this for the kids. It's being done to keep the amount of Govt funding flowing into the school. They don't care if the kids learn anything, all that matters is that they show up so the school district can say they have X number of students.
Why bother creating a bunch of boxed sets that are obsolete the day they hit the shelves and probably won't be sold? Just create a small number for the trade shows, LUGs, & online sales after the release has been finalized. This number would be based on prior online sales & other give aways and after those run out, the new ones would be made on an on-demand type basis. This should save them money and not have to require a sales people to deal with the retail chains.
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have a FM transmitter in order to listen to my mp3 player on my car's audio system. It works ok, but it also transmits electrical noise from the car, so there is always a low volume, but high pitched tone being mixed in with the music. It's not too bad if the car is idling, but it gets louder as the engine's rpm increases, so it gets annoying after a while.
when I was in college, there were all these attractive, intelligent women going into promising careers.
Lucky you. The college I went to had 3 guys for every woman and most of the women looked like fat, ugly guys. You know it's bad when there were more average to hot looking women in your high school class of 36 kids (small rural school) than the incoming freshman class of 400-500 people at college.
He's been harping on the "you can't sell GPL software" point for years even though it's not true. Linux people may also take issue with the quote that it was based on Minix. He's about as much of a pro-BSD, anti-Linux, anti-GPL person as you can get. Notice while he said that many systems are dependent on BSD code, he neglects also note that BSD relies on some GNU code as well.
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it.
But that's what they want to do with this guy's project is the former. The compilation and processin he's been doing over the past 5 years is what they don't want distributed, not the source information that's already public domain. The analogy still fits because like the rootkits & other scripts, the project described in the article drastically reduces the skill & time needed to find vulnerabilities. this sort of thing would be great for those whose job it is to secure these locations. personally, I think there would be more people wanting to get at a tool & data collection like this for mischievious purposes than those who would use it for positive reasons. the-kick-me-here dept is so appropriate.
the feds would be in charge of coordinating it and providing the data as needed to the local officials that need it as well as working on the major sites. my guess is that local municipalities probably already have some of this information (and were probably the source of it), so access to the entire thing is not needed. allowing a local emergency management offical access to data that is pertinant to their area of responsibility is one thing. publishing a nice big picture view with easy to use drill down to the details so that any tom, dick or harry can use it for any purpose, is irresponsible. it would be like distributing a nice gui that can launch the latest & greatest exploits against a wide number of services for script kiddies to use.
Your address is probably in some public domain data repository, but you don't want to put it in your/. sig line, now do you?
they want it classified so they can systematically go through the information that has been collected and come up with strategies for securing those installations. it takes a lot of time to do all of this. it isn't like a server where a security hole is published, the authors create a patch in a few hours, and the service is restarted after the patch is installed. it could take months or even years for these vunerabilities to be secured. why publish all of this in a nice neat little package that could put the lives of your fellow citizens in danger? sure, the information may be publically available, but it took 5 years of work to piece all of this together. they certainly knew that it was sensitive information, otherwise, they wouldn't be destroying hard drives, shredding trash, etc. publishing it would be irresponsible.
it's probably not the first time someone's PhD work was classified. the last thing this guy should be worrying about is his degree. he has made himself a nice big target.
The rest of us wull stay employed producing something useful and realistic, rather than attempting some naive Herculian reimplementation of a massively multiplatform collection of hacks.
Depending on the point of view, you could be describing gcc, a linux distribution, netscape, or WINE. The fact that GCC is nasty doesn't offend me. The reason I brought up the other projects is because they are examples of someone 'wasting their free time' on a reimplementation of an existing technology or a new tool that does a lot of the same things existing ones can already do. Since the original poster's group at the university think the existing gcc is a joke, then they must have created something that's superior and if they can release it, why not do so?
Then release the better, uncrufty code and give it some competition. It either becomes the new standard or helps the maintainers of the existing one make theirs better. Either way, the quality of what is available for developers to use is improved. I'm glad other programmers don't see their contributions to linux, bsd, or open source software don't see it a waste of their time.
i work with the compilers group at my university and the running joke is how shoddy gcc is.
I guess the next question is: why isn't anyone one in your compilers group doing anything to correct that problem? Or libc? If you think the existing code is crap, then release your superior alternative and become an open source diety.
Re:Trying to run XWindows with only 128MB of ram
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Running X with only 128MB of RAM isn't the problem. I have machines that have run linux & X for years with much less memory than that. X isn't the problem. It's most likely KDE. I had it on a PII-450 w/ 128M and KDE was very slow. It was like being on a 486 again. Firing up Mozilla on a P-166 w/64M of ram was more responsive.
Unfortunately, the default environment for these machines is KDE. I'm not sure if the 1GHz Via chip & the rest of the system can compensate for the lack of memory and still provide a responsive machine.
If you were to get a new Xeon system with your choice of linux/freebsd and compile a benchmark yourself, that's probably the results you would see compared to a G5 unless you shelled out the extra cash for the Intel compiler. Who's to say that Intel isn't cheating by tuning its compiler to take shortcuts on the SPEC benchmarks? It's not like compiler writers haven't been doing that since people started using standardized benchmark programs.
The real test is always to pick the app that needs the most performance, try it out on both platforms and pick the one that you can afford that does the best.
I figured that dvd burning was supported since there was something about it on the cdrecord webpage. I was just wondering why Dell wasn't including it as an option for their linux machine.
Not to mention that to get to the $700 ballpark, you have to get the absolute minimum in everything. Which means no 73G hard drives. Unfortunately, aftermarket processors and memory have been known to do nasty things to warranties, so it would be probably better to just build it yourself. But that's not what most buyers do. They point & click at the vendor's website to add the options they want or just go to a store and lug home a box. At any rate, it should be interesting to see what the G5 versions of the Xserve machines come in at since they would be the real competition to the PowerEdge machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that SCO slaps their copyright header on every damn thing they ship, these 'hundreds of copyrighted files' may very well be the terminfo source files and /etc/termcap. Doesn't ESR maintain this stuff? If so, they are literally taking what he and many others have created, putting their copyright notice on it, and claiming that it is theirs. I wouldn't think that they would claim the skunkworks (GNU utils for SCO) as theirs, but with this bunch you never know.
Yep. I have a set of RedHat 7.2 for the s390 CDs and I just followed the install documentation for putting it on a real mainframe. I can compile and test code on it and move the binaries to a real production machine if I so desired. It's a little slow (11 MIPS), but that probably has more to due with the hardware that I have it running on.
who cares as long as they do the work and not sit around with their thumb up their ass saying "it's not my job"
Microsoft(TM), we combine your email and newsgroup program into one.
Emacs Gnus has been doing this for years, however I've never accidentally posted email to a newsgroup.
I know a guy that's a trucker that sometimes delivers parts to some auto plants. He's said that on several occasions where he will pull up to the loading dock and have to wait 30 minutes or more for someone to show up and start unloaded it, but there are fork lift operators hanging around doing nothing:
"Hey guys, can we get started? I got to pick up another load across town in an hour."
"nope...ain't my bay, you got to wait until those guys get back"
"When's that?"
"20 minutes"
"What?! what if I move the truck over to this bay?:
"No man..we only unload stuff from supplier XYZ. You're carrying stuff from company ABC."
"It's just boxes on pallets and this is the same !@#@#$ing dock"
"Sorry...ain't my job."
....so he finds a supervisor and asks if he can get them to do it...
"No, it's not really their job, so I can't make them do it."
"but you're their supervisor!"
"yeah, but I still can't make them do it..union rules."
"what if I get a hand truck and you show me where to put it on the dock so I can start unloading it?"
"No, that's against the rules. you'll just have to wait."
....and they wonder why manufacturing jobs are leaving.
and since his plant is going to be unionized (one of the conditions for getting funding from the California pension fund), his plans for building a super flexible custom car with huge profit margins are going to be like an egg hitting a brick wall. GM is already doing this sort of crap, but in other countries like Germany because of the UAW work rules.
Sounds more like he will be selling a 'kit car' with all the aftermarket goodies that people like to use to dress up their cars. The article makes no mention of who will be making the powertrain. I'm sure the other carmakers will also try to lean on these suppliers (they are already their biggest customers) to jack up his prices or have that company pay for the R&D and then cherry pick from the successful products.
(I also found it odd/annoying that this story about the 'dell of carmakers' was plastered with ads for the real Dell. Is this a story about BTO or a fluff piece used to mention Dell as many times as possible.) The Linux/MS.Net aspect was interest. They won't consider Unix "because it's 20 year old technology", but the same proven methods and tools is what makes up linux. Maybe they hired a buzzword-only-CTO.
Given the cost of one of these things, they are certainly not going to trade safety and reliability. Military systems are designed to have redundant systems because they will be deployed in harsher conditions than civilian aircraft.
Of course it will be popular with those people. They will have to do less work and it will be used to keep money..er..I mean students in school.
When you will have to enter an university, the advisors can access now all of your 15 past years.
If it takes you 15 years to get through elementary and high school (K-12), you will probably have bigger problems trying to get into a university.
In reality, they aren't doing this for the kids. It's being done to keep the amount of Govt funding flowing into the school. They don't care if the kids learn anything, all that matters is that they show up so the school district can say they have X number of students.
Why bother creating a bunch of boxed sets that are obsolete the day they hit the shelves and probably won't be sold? Just create a small number for the trade shows, LUGs, & online sales after the release has been finalized. This number would be based on prior online sales & other give aways and after those run out, the new ones would be made on an on-demand type basis. This should save them money and not have to require a sales people to deal with the retail chains.
I have a FM transmitter in order to listen to my mp3 player on my car's audio system. It works ok, but it also transmits electrical noise from the car, so there is always a low volume, but high pitched tone being mixed in with the music. It's not too bad if the car is idling, but it gets louder as the engine's rpm increases, so it gets annoying after a while.
when I was in college, there were all these attractive, intelligent women going into promising careers.
Lucky you. The college I went to had 3 guys for every woman and most of the women looked like fat, ugly guys. You know it's bad when there were more average to hot looking women in your high school class of 36 kids (small rural school) than the incoming freshman class of 400-500 people at college.
Any unmarried man over the age of 25 is a menace to society -- Attributed to Brigham Young.
He's been harping on the "you can't sell GPL software" point for years even though it's not true. Linux people may also take issue with the quote that it was based on Minix. He's about as much of a pro-BSD, anti-Linux, anti-GPL person as you can get. Notice while he said that many systems are dependent on BSD code, he neglects also note that BSD relies on some GNU code as well.
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it.
But that's what they want to do with this guy's project is the former. The compilation and processin he's been doing over the past 5 years is what they don't want distributed, not the source information that's already public domain. The analogy still fits because like the rootkits & other scripts, the project described in the article drastically reduces the skill & time needed to find vulnerabilities. this sort of thing would be great for those whose job it is to secure these locations. personally, I think there would be more people wanting to get at a tool & data collection like this for mischievious purposes than those who would use it for positive reasons. the-kick-me-here dept is so appropriate.
the feds would be in charge of coordinating it and providing the data as needed to the local officials that need it as well as working on the major sites. my guess is that local municipalities probably already have some of this information (and were probably the source of it), so access to the entire thing is not needed. allowing a local emergency management offical access to data that is pertinant to their area of responsibility is one thing. publishing a nice big picture view with easy to use drill down to the details so that any tom, dick or harry can use it for any purpose, is irresponsible. it would be like distributing a nice gui that can launch the latest & greatest exploits against a wide number of services for script kiddies to use.
Your address is probably in some public domain data repository, but you don't want to put it in your /. sig line, now do you?
sounds like they took a prototype that sort of worked and decided to put it into production. what a surprise!
they want it classified so they can systematically go through the information that has been collected and come up with strategies for securing those installations. it takes a lot of time to do all of this. it isn't like a server where a security hole is published, the authors create a patch in a few hours, and the service is restarted after the patch is installed. it could take months or even years for these vunerabilities to be secured. why publish all of this in a nice neat little package that could put the lives of your fellow citizens in danger? sure, the information may be publically available, but it took 5 years of work to piece all of this together. they certainly knew that it was sensitive information, otherwise, they wouldn't be destroying hard drives, shredding trash, etc. publishing it would be irresponsible.
it's probably not the first time someone's PhD work was classified. the last thing this guy should be worrying about is his degree. he has made himself a nice big target.
The rest of us wull stay employed producing something useful and realistic, rather than attempting some naive Herculian reimplementation of a massively multiplatform collection of hacks.
Depending on the point of view, you could be describing gcc, a linux distribution, netscape, or WINE. The fact that GCC is nasty doesn't offend me. The reason I brought up the other projects is because they are examples of someone 'wasting their free time' on a reimplementation of an existing technology or a new tool that does a lot of the same things existing ones can already do. Since the original poster's group at the university think the existing gcc is a joke, then they must have created something that's superior and if they can release it, why not do so?
Then release the better, uncrufty code and give it some competition. It either becomes the new standard or helps the maintainers of the existing one make theirs better. Either way, the quality of what is available for developers to use is improved. I'm glad other programmers don't see their contributions to linux, bsd, or open source software don't see it a waste of their time.
i work with the compilers group at my university and the running joke is how shoddy gcc is .
I guess the next question is: why isn't anyone one in your compilers group doing anything to correct that problem? Or libc? If you think the existing code is crap, then release your superior alternative and become an open source diety.
Running X with only 128MB of RAM isn't the problem. I have machines that have run linux & X for years with much less memory than that. X isn't the problem. It's most likely KDE. I had it on a PII-450 w/ 128M and KDE was very slow. It was like being on a 486 again. Firing up Mozilla on a P-166 w/64M of ram was more responsive.
Unfortunately, the default environment for these machines is KDE. I'm not sure if the 1GHz Via chip & the rest of the system can compensate for the lack of memory and still provide a responsive machine.
If you were to get a new Xeon system with your choice of linux/freebsd and compile a benchmark yourself, that's probably the results you would see compared to a G5 unless you shelled out the extra cash for the Intel compiler. Who's to say that Intel isn't cheating by tuning its compiler to take shortcuts on the SPEC benchmarks? It's not like compiler writers haven't been doing that since people started using standardized benchmark programs.
The real test is always to pick the app that needs the most performance, try it out on both platforms and pick the one that you can afford that does the best.
I figured that dvd burning was supported since there was something about it on the cdrecord webpage. I was just wondering why Dell wasn't including it as an option for their linux machine.
Not to mention that to get to the $700 ballpark, you have to get the absolute minimum in everything. Which means no 73G hard drives. Unfortunately, aftermarket processors and memory have been known to do nasty things to warranties, so it would be probably better to just build it yourself. But that's not what most buyers do. They point & click at the vendor's website to add the options they want or just go to a store and lug home a box. At any rate, it should be interesting to see what the G5 versions of the Xserve machines come in at since they would be the real competition to the PowerEdge machines.