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User: scsirob

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Comments · 738

  1. No, just that you need to stop three cars on 42-Volt Autos · · Score: 0, Redundant

    You can always stop three cars, wire their 12V batteries in series, and presto! 42V!

  2. Re:As an occasional airline passenger on Research: Mobile Phones Disrupt Aircraft · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You are right of course, but this is why the danger exists. Many aircraft have been certified with way-back technology, and it doesn't pay to re-certify these airliners with hot, new goodies that are designed to live in peace with mobile phones and other wireless toys.

    Avionics system designs are very conservative, it's all designed to work forever. Latest-and-greatest simply doesn't fit their books. With the track record of modern software, I don't think we should be sorry for that..

    Besides the danger to the aircraft, the mobile networks are also not designed to handle mobile phones moving between cells at 500mph and 'visible' to every cell in a 100 mile radius.

  3. Re:And lastly.. on SCO Shows 80 Lines of Evidence? · · Score: 1

    Would a section of 80 lines fall under the rules of quoting from original work??

  4. Re:subjective world views and causal myopia on BSA Creates Piracy Statistics · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It's about as accurate as claiming that every car can kill someone in an accident, so we are all using illegal murder weapons.

    In fact, we should all pay an extra 10% when we buy a car as 'possible killer charge', just like the bogus charges we have to pay for VHS tapes and recordable CD's and DVD's...

  5. Re:So let me get this straight... on SCO SCO SCO! · · Score: 1

    You are absolutely right, you beat me to submitting a similar comment. You'd need to have the CVS trees side-by-side to find which feature was created when, and at what time it showed up in the Linux tree.

    Although I can see that the NDA might be necessary, I doubt any one person will be able to remember any of the other source code they'd look at, and be able to type that verbatim into the Linux kernel from memory.

    NDA's are great to protect ideas, concepts etc, but are unneeded to protect 100,000+ lines of source code.

  6. Re:Cringely is missing something... on Today's SCO News · · Score: 1

    Better yet... IBM will tell SCO they can stick their license where the Sun don't shine (pun intended..)

    They then turn around to Novell, the *rightful owners of Unix*, and pay them double for an ever-lasting Unix license.

  7. Re:true on P2P Bandwidth Hogging the Net · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As long as your customers pay for their bandwidth, it's theirs to decide if this is 'wasted' on P2P, porn, webhosting or whatever. They pay you to supply bandwidth. They don't pay you to tell them how to use it.

  8. SPAM is on it's return! on P2P Bandwidth Hogging the Net · · Score: 1

    I mean, last week it was 60% spam, now it's 60% P2P. Guess that means Spam is finally on it's return and soon we've had the last of it...

  9. ..FUD.. on SCO Drops Linux, Says Current Vendors May Be Liable · · Score: 1

    SCO starts to sound like Microsoft, but then without the backing of billions of $$$.. This letter is clear FUD. What on earth does SCO think it will accomplish with all this?!?

  10. Re:"Putting" the vuln in? on Microsoft Sued for Defective Software · · Score: 1

    There's no excuse to send software into the field that's so shoddy that patches need to be applied almost on a daily base.

    I think there's a lot larger group of people who could sue MS, namely the decision makers at many companies who have been mislead by MS Return-On-Investment calculations. The figures presented to them never included the man-hours and downtime resulting from having to keep up with the patch du-jour.

  11. Re:It's not slashdotted. on The Interplanetary Internet · · Score: 1

    ..Except for /. subscribers, they get there an hour early.

  12. Re:Slashdotted Already.... on Libranet 2.8 Released · · Score: 2, Informative

    Site worked fine for me. Kernel 2.4.20, XFree 4.3, KDE 3.1, Gnome 2.2.1 and all the other goodies that every other distro throws in. Have not seen anything that makes this a compelling distribution to buy.

  13. Re:Wine vs. VPC on Catching up with Wine · · Score: 1

    .. And pay the MS Tax after all? Don't think so..

  14. Re:I cant wait! on Microsoft: We Make Hackers Obsolete · · Score: 1

    I'm sorry, but bringing technical folkes in the marketing loop will not work... Knowledgable people and marketing are mutually exclusive. They simple cancel eachother out.

  15. The software vendor should pay back retail price on California EULA Lawsuit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it's only fair to have the software vendor (MS, Norton) refund full retail price. The retailer has done it's job in selling the software. He's entitled to the margin he makes on that sale.

    By having the software vendor pay back full retail price, it will make them think twice before they hide restrictive EULA's in the box.

    They must put the EULA on the outside for everyone to read. If it's too restrictive, the software won't sell and the retailer will stop stocking the software. This will help getting software vendors to write EULA's that actually make sense and we can actually agree to.

  16. Re:Games could be the answer on Why Users Hate IT Products and Developers · · Score: 1

    Amen! I've been in a similar position. I write diagnostics tools for hardware. Getting people to use it is hard, but getting people to like it is *very* hard. Unless you let the people tell you how they expect and want thinks to work.

    When I did my first user interface for the tools, I handed prototypes to my wife and my mother-in-law. They knew squat about the hardware they had in front of them, but just by observing what they tried to test it, I ended up with an interface that is still in use today, 8 years after first starting the design. The tool is provided to our customers for free, and I have yet to receive a request for UI change. Too bad it's DOS based, so it's dying of age now..

  17. Re:exabyte vxa-2? on Large IDE Drives as Long-Term Archival Media? · · Score: 1

    I've worked with both VXA-1 and VXA-2 and it's proven itself very reliable.

    IDE disk may be a convenient medium for protection against hardware failure. I would prefer using firewire or USB-2 myself, as it's real plug-and-play. IDE PNP are usually poor cludges, hopefully serial ATA will fix this. Also, IDE disks are vulnerable to virus attacks while they are attached, tapes are a lot less susceptible.

    For off-site storage and archival, tape (and especially VXA-2) is an absolute winner.

  18. The infrastructure should discourage spam on One Answer To Spam: Sell Your Interruption Time · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It would probably be easiest if all SMTP connect requests would be delayed for 1 second by each Internet core router. That means individual mails get delayed by about 30 seconds max before delivery starts. Even with large companies this shouldn't become a problem.

    However, a mass spammer would simply see his/her mails queue up at his end, which takes away the effect of reaching millions with the click of a button.

  19. Re:Broadcasting an IP Address on Class Action Filed Against Bonzi Software · · Score: 1

    Yup. The 'weird filter' is labelled 'port 80'. Issue fixed.

  20. Re:Good idea on Class Action Filed Against Bonzi Software · · Score: 1

    "the creativeness required to think up faking an error screen to get users to click on it (think reaction vs. action) is genius"

    So let's see... If the doctor sends you a fake report stating you have cancer, just to sell placebo drugs, you think is genius... I slowly start to understand why spammers claim their tactics work..

  21. Re:The difficulty is hubris on Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It's a lot more difficult than just copying. If I handed you a CD-ROM with WordPerfect 4.2 files, you would have little problems getting the information on screen. If that same disc also had Wordstar 1.0 files, things would be a lot harder already. Now what about a couple of files with Tandy TRS-80 Scripsit format?!?

    Besides just the data, any preservation system needs to consider interpretation as much as the data itself. ASCII sounds like a common format today, but so did EBCDIC thirty years ago. Anyone have a 7-track tape reader handy these days?!?

    If we really want to store digital data and make sure it will be information for generations to come, we'll have to think looong and hard, and take nothing for granted.

  22. Re:Screw the digital money... on Where is My Digital Cash? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How about one of these ?

  23. Larry McArthur?!? on SGI Introduces World's Densest Server · · Score: 1

    Check out the picture of the machine on SGI's web site. When hovering the mouse over the small picture of the cabinet, it shows "Picture of Larry McArthur". He's looking a lot better these days..

  24. Re:Misleading title on Operating Systems Are Irrelevant · · Score: 1

    Yup... And resistance is futile...

  25. Re:Yikes. on Microsoft: You Need Permission to Sell Our Software · · Score: 1
    If Microsoft goes through with this, they shoot their own business model in the foot. This is how:

    Their entire pitch against Linux is Total Cost of Ownership. As soon as they enforce the non-transferrability (is that a proper word??) of the license, they reduce the value of the license from an investment to an out-of-pocket expense. Companies can not put in on the books as value, as it's not sellable. This will create major rethinking for corporate buyers if they should spend the money..