[put on tinfoil helmet + watch out for black helicopters]
Microsoft has proved a willingness to sponsor "3rd party" actions - I'm sure you all remember the astroturf campaign trying to demonstrate "grassroots" support for Microsoft.
Some (many?) would also point out the ongoing lawsuit by SCO with an unannounced licensing fee basically happened after funding by Microsoft via the payment of a licence fee (of an as-yet-undisclosed amount... possibly huge?) to SCO.
So, the question is - are any of these recurring lawsuits popping up here and there against Microsoft, being funded by Microsoft? If these plaintiffs go to trial and are then ground to dust by Microsoft's lawyers, then there'd be legal precedents that MS can use in the future if they are ever faced by people who are, how shall we say, more interested in winning.
In the context of the current thread, this lawsuit could establish that "patching is the responsibility of the plaintiff", and MS can in the future go around and say "look, you should have patched, it's not our problem" - which would then not only have the force of logic behind it, but also legal precedent ("so-and-so court has said so before").
Quite frankly the code names for the chips are all much better than the actual release names. "Katmai" and "Mendocino" are pretty cool-sounding (well to me anyways; "Deschutes" is a bit hard though).
And does anyone remember, right after the transition to "Pentium", how everyone was calling the different generations of chips? The original Pentium was the "P5", to distinguish between the prior 486 and the Pentium Pro ("P6"), on which all the Pentium II etc. offshoots were based (i.e. PII was "based on the P6 architecture") etc. But now what do we call the Pentium-V?
If we call it "Pee Five" then do we mean P5 or P-V? P-III and P-4 there's not all that much confusion...
(I also hate the way Apple has named their machines. There are, what, six seperate classes of machines all called the "PowerMac G4"? It's kinda sad to have to distinguish which model you have by checking things like "uh, do your drive bay doors look reflective, i.e. "Mirror-like"?).
Looks like Dell is also joining Apple in the consumer products category
I'm not sure you can say Dell is joining Apple in the category... for Apple users - ever since his "Apple should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders" comment, Dell is "The Enemy".
I think various Apple user groups probably hold meetings where they burn Micheal Dell in effigy.
It's a pretty fucked up world we're living in where there's even a need for a "Mass Fatality" identification system.
All those people cracking jokes need to sit down and think a bit about it. If there was any topic that warranted serious discussion/comments, this is it.
There are several good posts about the programming issues etc., but why are so many mods wasting their mod points modding up so called "funny" posts?
well, that's precisely why they can open up their mouths to talk about this topic.
considering how Intel has made a push in the past to support linux, it's quite obvious Barrett isn't talking. No, what's happening is that it's Ballmer talking through Barrett because otherwise Ballmer tells his engineers to knife Itanium in the back and support AMD64 exclusively.
When that's what you're facing, you bloody well say anything they tell you to say.
Hence, when the phone rings, you pick it up, and you hear "Go to China! Tell them they'll get locked out!!!", what you do is, you go to China and you tell them they'll get locked out.
Whether China goes Win32 or *nix, Intel can sell them chips, so they don't mind too much pushing this. It's not like Intel's being told to promote the AMD64 instruction set, now THAT would be an interesting thing to see.
that if you're Unix-savvy enough to need to SSH to your OSX box then maybe you're Unix-savvy enough to install the patch by yourself
The problem however is, what if you DIY an update in a way that eventually conflicts with something Apple wants to do later? (I'm thinking of the problems early XFree86-on-MacOSX adopters had merging their X11 with Apple's official release).
Further example... the current version of OpenSSH on MacOS X is ~3.4p1, which IIRC is the first to implement privsep, in addition to dealing with some bug that I can't remember now (and is irrelevant for current purposes). There was a delay before Apple released their 3.4p1 update as well. For those people who were thinking of DIY updating, they'd have to worry about "how is Apple going to implement the privsep ssh user account eventually? Is the home going to be/var/empty or somewhere else? etc. etc."
It's a heck of a hassle (and quite frankly, it shouldn't take them this long to release a fix, or even a statement "we don't need a fix". Practically EVERYONE out there has already got a OpenSSH3.7.1 release out already).
Erm. I'm confused. Sorry, but is this the correct way to interpret the exploit? My reading of it is that what this means is that via overloading various buffers etc. the attacker can end up with root login, not that a remote-root-enabled sshd can in some circumstances allow access without knowing the password.
Maybe have a layer of lead between the cockpit and the rest of the plane?
weren't they talking about reinforcing the cockpit against forced entry etc. as well? the right solution could kill two birds with one stone, as it were
you can't buy if the owner doesn't want to sell... if Cringely is right (or rather, if Eolas is serious re: what they said to Cringely) - then MS has very few options available. Perhaps the stated willingness to strip out the functionality (unless it's posturing), is a sign of this - they tried to buy and failed.
I guess we may well find out if the statement "every man has his price" is true. If Eolas sells in the end....
.... pardon my ignorance, but isn't this what metamoderation is supposed to be about? So is it that not enough people are metamoderating, or is it that the metamoderators all agree (in which case what you've got is the "tyranny of the majorit" in which case, well, there's not much you can do about it?)
I'm not sure this kind of thing can still be carried-on today, because of licensing changes - I assume these companies have MSDOS licences that allow transfer from one PC to another (as their hardware dies), and are therefore not at risk of BSA guys kicking their doors in. (Or are these companies just carrying on blithely unaware that the money they handed over for the OS doesn't actually mean they "own" it?).
But now that the industry has gotten more "sophisticated", with all those OEM licences PCs come with saying that the OS cannot be transferred to another PC, and with new OS licences not being available once they are end-of-lifed (NT4Workstation just "died" this year, no?), this kind of thing, "keep using it because it works", is no longer a long-term sustainable available option.
Michael Dell, who built an empire selling computers based on other companies' innovations, argued Monday that the future in the technology market belongs to players who embrace industry standards, not proprietary systems.
The 38-year-old chief executive of Dell Inc. also strongly suggested that one of his company's top Silicon Valley rivals, Sun Microsystems, may never get back on its feet because it's stuck in a business model that no longer works. "I think there are parts of the industry that will never recover, and the reason is that their business is fundamentally based on things that people aren't going to buy very much of anymore," Dell told The Chronicle after his keynote speech at OracleWorld, Oracle's annual user conference in San Francisco.
"They're waiting for (demand for proprietary systems) to come back," he added. "Sorry, it ain't going to happen."
Larry Singer, Sun's senior vice president for global market strategies, disputed Dell's view of the Santa Clara company and the trends in the technology industry.
"When Michael Dell gets up there and says those who don't follow industry standards won't make it, it's a bit disingenuous," he said in a phone interview.
"Innovation still matters. Market standards come from new innovations and new technologies."
Like other major companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the Texas firm sells computers, servers and other hardware based on widely used technologies developed by such companies as Intel and Microsoft.
On the other hand, Sun, which was once recognized as the top provider of corporate computing, has been a major industry player by offering products based mainly on its proprietary systems.
Asked if he believed that the struggling Sun would never recover, Dell, who typically shies away from comments on competitors, answered: "I sort of said that, but I didn't say that.
"But if you look at their peak revenues and where they are now, it's a pretty big difference, right?" he added. "And if you look at what people are buying now and what they were buying then, it's a big difference."
Singer defended Sun's strategy and performance.
"For Michael Dell, his definition of a market standard is the company that's selling the most today, and that's a pretty easy standard to pick," Singer said. Citing the rapid expansion of Sun's Java technology, particularly in mobile computing, he added, "The definition of what a standard is is beginning to change."
Dell's remarks underscored the debate over the role of innovation and research and development in the tech industry as top players, such as Dell, Sun and HP, maneuver for advantage in the anticipated rise in corporate spending on technology.
Dell Inc. became a tech behemoth by selling directly to consumers and keeping its spending on research and development down.
But rivals like HP and Sun have portrayed the Texas firm as a technological lightweight that grew on the backs of other companies' hard work in research and development.
Dell Inc. has made inroads in the low-end server market, defined as systems under $100,000 each.
But its critics scoff at the company's bid to move up the corporate technology market, arguing that only companies that invest in innovation can afford to compete in the mid-range and higher-end corporate markets.
Sun lost $2.38 billion in its fiscal year that ended in June, compared with a loss of $587 million the previous year. But the company has remained a respected technology innovator, particularly in the high-end market.
"The companies that will survive will be those that innovate technologies," and that means spending on research and development, Singer said.
But Dell has been unfazed by such criticism. In the interview, he reaffirmed his belief that hefty R&D budgets can be overrated and don't necessarily lead to hi
I started out thinking Emacs was great, but eventually, like (all?) other people who do any sysadmin work at all, when you really need an editor on a machine that's pretty much completely f@#$ed up ("what?! ls doesn't work?!?"), about the only thing you can count on being there/working is vi, not emacs.
The more I had to use it, the more familiar with it I was, and the more I got comfortable with it, until... now I can barely remember how to use Emacs. This is the true "advantage" vi has and will always continue to have over Emacs - it'll live in places Emacs can't.
I'm almost tempted to analogize with how, well, DOS machines swept the computing universe and basically shunted MacOS machines into the small niche they have existed in ever since....
... if he's left and has no immediate plans - "taking time to consider his next move" - it sounds to me very much like there were (are?) some very major disagreements between him and McNealy and that he was driven to leave (not necessarily in the sense of "get out!", but "there's no point if I stay if you won't listen"), which (at least to me) does NOT bode well for Sun's future.
I think we also need to think in terms of scale/distances. Just because you're faster than sound doesn't make you faster than light or electricity/communications. When you're a country as big as the Soviet Union/Russia for example, presumably if your border posts start reporting hearnig sonic booms, all the major airbases smack in the middle of the country will have some warning they wouldn't have had otherwise and would be in a heightened state of alert just as your plane approaches?
I agree. The whole story is misleading. True, the ISP was only down for 72 hours, but their clients who relied on their ISP for data-backup as well as uptime, are probably still down, many with no hope of recovery.
Sounds almost like the story was a pre-emptive PR exercise intended to counter the eventual angry-customer "what do you mean you had no offiste backups?!" complaints being published?
Hopefully some bright men in the EU parliament will consider the laws passed in the USA before they blindly try to copy them into laws applying in European countries
You might be making the assumption that EU parliamentarians aren't in the firing line of lobbyists and corporate moneymen.
At least some of the decisions made in the US were with an eye to the "security industry". There's money to be made in the EU too, and it's unlikely they'll have failed to notice. Laws passed which end up giving those in authority more power, and which grant money to "industry", are likely to be popular to those signing off on the decisions, no matter what their nationality... .
from the numbers published over the last few quarters, it really looks like HP is losing the PC war with Dell (well, basically everybody is losing). Is HP pushing this because they're desperate enough to try anything (including risk a MS reprisal)?
I mean, nobody's under any illusions when it comes to whether or not MS plays hardball, right? You get the feeling this is one of those ventures where they hope to sell "many, but not so many as to trigger MS unhappiness"... between a rock and a hard place indeed.
Actually what I was trying to allude to was (as per the other poster's reference to Cringely's article about missing MS documents in their lawsuit with Burst.com) was that this is yet another reason/excuse MS (or any other person) may throw up when documents are missing, and are in fact "better" excuses than "oh we don't have them"? "yes you are right we have them but for XXX reasons they're not accessible etc."?
It makes hiding relevant documents/information easier, and not all lawyers are ethical enough to compel their clients to reveal ALL documents (esp. those that would win the case for their opponents).
Slashdot Mirror
[put on tinfoil helmet + watch out for black helicopters]
.
Microsoft has proved a willingness to sponsor "3rd party" actions - I'm sure you all remember the astroturf campaign trying to demonstrate "grassroots" support for Microsoft.
Some (many?) would also point out the ongoing lawsuit by SCO with an unannounced licensing fee basically happened after funding by Microsoft via the payment of a licence fee (of an as-yet-undisclosed amount... possibly huge?) to SCO.
So, the question is - are any of these recurring lawsuits popping up here and there against Microsoft, being funded by Microsoft? If these plaintiffs go to trial and are then ground to dust by Microsoft's lawyers, then there'd be legal precedents that MS can use in the future if they are ever faced by people who are, how shall we say, more interested in winning.
In the context of the current thread, this lawsuit could establish that "patching is the responsibility of the plaintiff", and MS can in the future go around and say "look, you should have patched, it's not our problem" - which would then not only have the force of logic behind it, but also legal precedent ("so-and-so court has said so before").
[/remove tinfoil helmet]
OK, nothing to see here, move along...
Quite frankly the code names for the chips are all much better than the actual release names. "Katmai" and "Mendocino" are pretty cool-sounding (well to me anyways; "Deschutes" is a bit hard though).
And does anyone remember, right after the transition to "Pentium", how everyone was calling the different generations of chips? The original Pentium was the "P5", to distinguish between the prior 486 and the Pentium Pro ("P6"), on which all the Pentium II etc. offshoots were based (i.e. PII was "based on the P6 architecture") etc. But now what do we call the Pentium-V?
If we call it "Pee Five" then do we mean P5 or P-V? P-III and P-4 there's not all that much confusion...
(I also hate the way Apple has named their machines. There are, what, six seperate classes of machines all called the "PowerMac G4"? It's kinda sad to have to distinguish which model you have by checking things like "uh, do your drive bay doors look reflective, i.e. "Mirror-like"?).
What's wrong with good old model numbers?
I get the feeling there may be a problem with packet loss (pigeons getting squished every now and then... erryugh)!
Looks like Dell is also joining Apple in the consumer products category
I'm not sure you can say Dell is joining Apple in the category
I think various Apple user groups probably hold meetings where they burn Micheal Dell in effigy.
It's a pretty fucked up world we're living in where there's even a need for a "Mass Fatality" identification system.
All those people cracking jokes need to sit down and think a bit about it. If there was any topic that warranted serious discussion/comments, this is it.
There are several good posts about the programming issues etc., but why are so many mods wasting their mod points modding up so called "funny" posts?
well, that's precisely why they can open up their mouths to talk about this topic.
considering how Intel has made a push in the past to support linux, it's quite obvious Barrett isn't talking. No, what's happening is that it's Ballmer talking through Barrett because otherwise Ballmer tells his engineers to knife Itanium in the back and support AMD64 exclusively.
When that's what you're facing, you bloody well say anything they tell you to say.
Hence, when the phone rings, you pick it up, and you hear "Go to China! Tell them they'll get locked out!!!", what you do is, you go to China and you tell them they'll get locked out.
Whether China goes Win32 or *nix, Intel can sell them chips, so they don't mind too much pushing this. It's not like Intel's being told to promote the AMD64 instruction set, now THAT would be an interesting thing to see.
Almost 60% of US citizens are of Germanic ancestry
... almost like a civil war... .
Is this actually true?
That makes WWII
that if you're Unix-savvy enough to need to SSH to your OSX box then maybe you're Unix-savvy enough to install the patch by yourself
/var/empty or somewhere else? etc. etc."
The problem however is, what if you DIY an update in a way that eventually conflicts with something Apple wants to do later? (I'm thinking of the problems early XFree86-on-MacOSX adopters had merging their X11 with Apple's official release).
Further example... the current version of OpenSSH on MacOS X is ~3.4p1, which IIRC is the first to implement privsep, in addition to dealing with some bug that I can't remember now (and is irrelevant for current purposes). There was a delay before Apple released their 3.4p1 update as well. For those people who were thinking of DIY updating, they'd have to worry about "how is Apple going to implement the privsep ssh user account eventually? Is the home going to be
It's a heck of a hassle (and quite frankly, it shouldn't take them this long to release a fix, or even a statement "we don't need a fix". Practically EVERYONE out there has already got a OpenSSH3.7.1 release out already).
Erm. I'm confused. Sorry, but is this the correct way to interpret the exploit? My reading of it is that what this means is that via overloading various buffers etc. the attacker can end up with root login, not that a remote-root-enabled sshd can in some circumstances allow access without knowing the password.
Maybe have a layer of lead between the cockpit and the rest of the plane?
weren't they talking about reinforcing the cockpit against forced entry etc. as well? the right solution could kill two birds with one stone, as it were
you can't buy if the owner doesn't want to sell... if Cringely is right (or rather, if Eolas is serious re: what they said to Cringely) - then MS has very few options available. Perhaps the stated willingness to strip out the functionality (unless it's posturing), is a sign of this - they tried to buy and failed.
.
I guess we may well find out if the statement "every man has his price" is true. If Eolas sells in the end...
could still build underwater cities (Man! Afaik we were promised them anyway by 2000) on Europas Oceans
I dunno - the black obelisks told us that all the planets except Europa was ours. I wouldn't want to piss off the obelisks.
.... pardon my ignorance, but isn't this what metamoderation is supposed to be about? So is it that not enough people are metamoderating, or is it that the metamoderators all agree (in which case what you've got is the "tyranny of the majorit" in which case, well, there's not much you can do about it?)
how many companies still use MSDOS
I'm not sure this kind of thing can still be carried-on today, because of licensing changes - I assume these companies have MSDOS licences that allow transfer from one PC to another (as their hardware dies), and are therefore not at risk of BSA guys kicking their doors in. (Or are these companies just carrying on blithely unaware that the money they handed over for the OS doesn't actually mean they "own" it?).
But now that the industry has gotten more "sophisticated", with all those OEM licences PCs come with saying that the OS cannot be transferred to another PC, and with new OS licences not being available once they are end-of-lifed (NT4Workstation just "died" this year, no?), this kind of thing, "keep using it because it works", is no longer a long-term sustainable available option.
Article from SFGate:
Michael Dell, who built an empire selling computers based on other companies' innovations, argued Monday that the future in the technology market belongs to players who embrace industry standards, not proprietary systems.
The 38-year-old chief executive of Dell Inc. also strongly suggested that one of his company's top Silicon Valley rivals, Sun Microsystems, may never get back on its feet because it's stuck in a business model that no longer works.
"I think there are parts of the industry that will never recover, and the reason is that their business is fundamentally based on things that people aren't going to buy very much of anymore," Dell told The Chronicle after his keynote speech at OracleWorld, Oracle's annual user conference in San Francisco.
"They're waiting for (demand for proprietary systems) to come back," he added. "Sorry, it ain't going to happen."
Larry Singer, Sun's senior vice president for global market strategies, disputed Dell's view of the Santa Clara company and the trends in the technology industry.
"When Michael Dell gets up there and says those who don't follow industry standards won't make it, it's a bit disingenuous," he said in a phone interview.
"Innovation still matters. Market standards come from new innovations and new technologies."
Like other major companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the Texas firm sells computers, servers and other hardware based on widely used technologies developed by such companies as Intel and Microsoft.
On the other hand, Sun, which was once recognized as the top provider of corporate computing, has been a major industry player by offering products based mainly on its proprietary systems.
Asked if he believed that the struggling Sun would never recover, Dell, who typically shies away from comments on competitors, answered: "I sort of said that, but I didn't say that.
"But if you look at their peak revenues and where they are now, it's a pretty big difference, right?" he added. "And if you look at what people are buying now and what they were buying then, it's a big difference."
Singer defended Sun's strategy and performance.
"For Michael Dell, his definition of a market standard is the company that's selling the most today, and that's a pretty easy standard to pick," Singer said. Citing the rapid expansion of Sun's Java technology, particularly in mobile computing, he added, "The definition of what a standard is is beginning to change."
Dell's remarks underscored the debate over the role of innovation and research and development in the tech industry as top players, such as Dell, Sun and HP, maneuver for advantage in the anticipated rise in corporate spending on technology.
Dell Inc. became a tech behemoth by selling directly to consumers and keeping its spending on research and development down.
But rivals like HP and Sun have portrayed the Texas firm as a technological lightweight that grew on the backs of other companies' hard work in research and development.
Dell Inc. has made inroads in the low-end server market, defined as systems under $100,000 each.
But its critics scoff at the company's bid to move up the corporate technology market, arguing that only companies that invest in innovation can afford to compete in the mid-range and higher-end corporate markets.
Sun lost $2.38 billion in its fiscal year that ended in June, compared with a loss of $587 million the previous year. But the company has remained a respected technology innovator, particularly in the high-end market.
"The companies that will survive will be those that innovate technologies," and that means spending on research and development, Singer said.
But Dell has been unfazed by such criticism. In the interview, he reaffirmed his belief that hefty R&D budgets can be overrated and don't necessarily lead to hi
I started out thinking Emacs was great, but eventually, like (all?) other people who do any sysadmin work at all, when you really need an editor on a machine that's pretty much completely f@#$ed up ("what?! ls doesn't work?!?"), about the only thing you can count on being there/working is vi, not emacs.
.
The more I had to use it, the more familiar with it I was, and the more I got comfortable with it, until... now I can barely remember how to use Emacs. This is the true "advantage" vi has and will always continue to have over Emacs - it'll live in places Emacs can't.
I'm almost tempted to analogize with how, well, DOS machines swept the computing universe and basically shunted MacOS machines into the small niche they have existed in ever since...
... if he's left and has no immediate plans - "taking time to consider his next move" - it sounds to me very much like there were (are?) some very major disagreements between him and McNealy and that he was driven to leave (not necessarily in the sense of "get out!", but "there's no point if I stay if you won't listen"), which (at least to me) does NOT bode well for Sun's future.
I was planning to replicate a Sopwith Tripe down to the last detail, but now realize that the "cuteness" of that would wear off.
:-)
yeah, you ought to, like, replicate something like an F-16... or, maybe, if your backyard is large enough, how about replicating the USS Nimitz?
I think we also need to think in terms of scale/distances. Just because you're faster than sound doesn't make you faster than light or electricity/communications. When you're a country as big as the Soviet Union/Russia for example, presumably if your border posts start reporting hearnig sonic booms, all the major airbases smack in the middle of the country will have some warning they wouldn't have had otherwise and would be in a heightened state of alert just as your plane approaches?
I agree. The whole story is misleading. True, the ISP was only down for 72 hours, but their clients who relied on their ISP for data-backup as well as uptime, are probably still down, many with no hope of recovery.
Sounds almost like the story was a pre-emptive PR exercise intended to counter the eventual angry-customer "what do you mean you had no offiste backups?!" complaints being published?
that the FBI has filed charges against him
If the FBI has the resources to throw into this kind of thing, then it must mean they've got the whole terrorism thing solved.
Hopefully some bright men in the EU parliament will consider the laws passed in the USA before they blindly try to copy them into laws applying in European countries
You might be making the assumption that EU parliamentarians aren't in the firing line of lobbyists and corporate moneymen.
At least some of the decisions made in the US were with an eye to the "security industry". There's money to be made in the EU too, and it's unlikely they'll have failed to notice. Laws passed which end up giving those in authority more power, and which grant money to "industry", are likely to be popular to those signing off on the decisions, no matter what their nationality... .
does anyone have a summary of the info on the page etc.? What's the story about etc.?
from the numbers published over the last few quarters, it really looks like HP is losing the PC war with Dell (well, basically everybody is losing). Is HP pushing this because they're desperate enough to try anything (including risk a MS reprisal)?
I mean, nobody's under any illusions when it comes to whether or not MS plays hardball, right? You get the feeling this is one of those ventures where they hope to sell "many, but not so many as to trigger MS unhappiness"... between a rock and a hard place indeed.
Actually what I was trying to allude to was (as per the other poster's reference to Cringely's article about missing MS documents in their lawsuit with Burst.com) was that this is yet another reason/excuse MS (or any other person) may throw up when documents are missing, and are in fact "better" excuses than "oh we don't have them"? "yes you are right we have them but for XXX reasons they're not accessible etc."?
It makes hiding relevant documents/information easier, and not all lawyers are ethical enough to compel their clients to reveal ALL documents (esp. those that would win the case for their opponents).