I agree. Once the black hats are attacked, all hell will break loose. A policy of "swift and effective retribution", no doubt.
I can see the day coming when Microsoft intervenes in this debate on behalf of its customers, since we all know whose relatively unsecure products are sure to get caught in the crossfire.
Calcualate what you think is owed, based on 1.5x OT for hrs >40. Say nothing. Calculate interest at 18%/yr as the wages accrue. Your option to do something useful won't materialize until the economy picks up. When that happens and the disgruntled workers start to pack up and ship off, you are looking for a salary that amortizes the back wages over a reasonable time, even though you will say nothing about this to ANY employer.
If properly executed, you not only get paid for the time, your future salary includes payment for the next project when this stunt is pulled.
It is important to avoid trying to solve this problem during the wrong side of the IT cycle. Patience is required.
FYI: The SCO/IBM matter is all about Unix/Linux on x86. Perhaps you can enlighten all of us by explaining which Unix vendor is "...kicking the pants off Linux and Windows" in the x86 market. Which Unix company is growing? Is there one? Surely, all of this "pants kicking" would be fueling measurable growth, right? Last time I checked, the entire IT industry was doing poorly, except for Microsoft's one-shot revenue growth, largely the result of smoke-and-mirrors licensing ploys.
SCO's "pants kicking" x86 Unix product is nothing to cheer about. Is there some other platform where SCO reigns supreme? I must have missed it.
Sun's "pants kicking" x86 Solaris was discontinued, only to be revived later. Are you so naive as to claim that Sun is a major player in the x86 OS market? Are you aware of the Sun buyout rumours? How about Sun's recent not-exactly-pants-kicking financial performance?
Along with other platforms, I have SPARC/Solaris boxes. They work well, reliability is very good, ditto for Sun's customer support. Unfortunately, the price/performance ratio is not so great, and Intel/Linux is certainly on the table as an upgrade option. I'm not exactly thrilled about that, but Linux is as much a threat to Unix as offshore outsourcing is a threat to the average IT worker. It's competition; deal with it.
HPQ is alive in the Unix middle and high-end space. Let's see what happens when Intel & AMD infringe on that space with lowball 64-bit processors, just as they have already pillaged & plundered the 32-bit world. For a long time, Intel's 64-bit efforts were a joke, but one of these days the laughter will stop. Not so long (1 yr?) ago, I predicted that Linux would eventually become OS of choice on Alpha, only to be confronted by a Tru64 Unix fan who insisted that Compaq (yes, Compaq) was committed to supporting Alpha & Tru64 for some vast period of time. Alpha was (almost immediately) sold to Intel, Compaq was bought by HP, and the Tru64 "roadmap" runs out in 2006. Does it matter? To be fair, HPQ has other cards to play in the OS game, and they won't fold completely. But their long-term outlook is no better than Sun's (possibly worse if you consider the combined debt of Digital+Compaq+HP).
It will take a while before commodity CPUs and operating systems threaten the high-end server market. But the threat has already materialized in the low-end, and is coming soon to the midrange market. It's time to wake up and smell the espresso.
I miss my VMS cluster. It had awesome reliability & performance, and some of the features were years ahead of Unix (and decades ahead of Windoze). Unfortunately, cost issues, decentralization, and commodity hardware changed the IT landscape forever. I sometimes wonder if I am keeping up with the latest trends. Have I become so entrenched that I will get blindsided by the next wave of cheaper/faster technology? Every once in a while I see a post that reassures me: I have little to fear from those who never got past Y2K.
Very simple: SCO must die. Their downfall is not so much GPL as it is the overdependence on old technology that is now commoditized. Just how many dollars were they expecting to squeeze out of Unix, anyway?
Would you have sympathy for M$ if their DOS business was threatened by FreeDOS, or would you tell them to grow up and spend a few dollars on R&D?
I find it ironic that SCO/Caldera is the first company to be killed by Linux while simultaneously failing as a Linux company. Good riddance.
I agree, M$ has shown every indication of integrating DRM in the OS with browser and viewer applications. Since they don't control MAC OS and therefore can't mandate DRM at that level, they choose to walk away. Good riddance. I would be more concerned if they kept "embracing & extending" their technology with MAC and Linux versions of IE, WMP, etc. DRM works only if the customer is somehow prevented from opting out. Getting rid of Windoze looks more enticing then ever.
Every once in a while you get managers who think that salaried positions + cellphone = free labor to be exploited
I once had to educate my boss about the realities of being "on call". He seemed to think that my staff would all carry beepers, and I would work out a rotation so that someone would be the primary contact for any given hour. It wasn't so much an "emergency response" capability as it was unpaid 2nd & 3rd shift operations via remote control. Comp. time doesn't work because every little "emergency" creates a coverage hole during regular business hours. I asked, "What do you intend to do when the beepers are simply turned off? Are you going to discipline people for not working hours that were neither scheduled nor paid?" Of course, nobody would put a mandated schedule in writing, and the underlying problem was that we were too thinly staffed.
Ultimately, common sense prevailed. We fixed some salary issues (people got raises, and therefore felt better about the beeper issue). We added an entry-level position to work evenings and Saturday morning. For those times when escalation was truly necessary, the new entry-level people had a list of senior staff with beepers who were quite willing to help.
I agree that selling SCOX (if you have some) is not going to cause much pain. On the other hand, shorting the stock requires no such ownership AND the options market activity is watched by the institutional investors (they use it as a leading indicator for the underlying stock).
You mentioned to ability to use voting power or to lobby their board. How about signing up to speak at their annual shareholders meeting? Now THAT would be fun!
"TigerDirect is paying less for some copies of Microsoft Windows XP than even the largest Microsoft customers like Dell."
Yes, I know about OEM kits. Did YOU know about how Slashdot stories include these things called "links" that refer to news items posted elsewhere?
The interesting part is that XP is now down to $50 retail, quantity one, no pre-qualifying OS required. TigerDirect is obviously paying less than that. My guess is that they are paying at most $40, for nowhere near the quantities that Dell and HP are buying.
Let's assume your $50 OEM price is on target. What is the point of OEM quantity pricing if Joe User can get the same price at quantity one?
I want to see what happens when the large OEMs demand the same pricing. The pressure for M$ to discount had to be really high, especially for them to offer such a deal to TigerDirect knowing full well that larger customers would squawk.
In ancient times, the OEMs were bullied into doing whatever Redmond said, lest they be cast aside from the DOS/Windows herd. The ultimate effect of this little exercise is to show the OEMs how much power they have. Just start talking about Linux, and wait for the discounts. Wait another 6 months and you might see M$ paying the OEMs to pre-install the product.
I had the same problems with packet that you mentioned. I was doing 1200 bps on the 2m band. It was pretty much useless for anything beyond quickie text messages. I heard about people doing 110 bps on shortwave. The ability of shortwave signals to bounce off the ionosphere was much more useful before we had all these communications satellites and global fiber optic networks.
I don't think we will ever see the stability or bandwidth to make shortwave support anything that geeks would consider useful. Ham satellites are a little more promising. If we had a Wifi via Ham satellite, now THAT would be fun.
The should reallocate the UHF spectrum for wireless IP connections to ISPs (or even P2P to your neighborhood WAN). Anything that cuts into the local telco monopoly can't be all bad.
Otherwise, they would just tax the gas and let it go at that. Every other state does it, and the gas tax is relatively easy to administer. Maybe this is some kind of elaborate money grab, possibly supported by the people who sell the gizmos.
I think it's more about measurement and control. The real intent is control the use of vehicles by taxing any "undesirable" activities.
The UK is pretty much the world leader in automotive harrassment, and none of their tactics (including $5/gal. gasoline) have changed driving habits, reduced the appeal of larger cars, or encouraged mass transit.
" Fine, then the SCO-suits would have overtaken RedHat and were suing their customers."
Unfortunately correct. Any combination of patents and GPL risks a catastrophics matter/anti-matter reaction. The safest thing to do with SCO and it's "Intellectual Property" would be to take the entire company and every shred of data they have and launch it towards the sun (the flaming ball of hydrogen, not the SPARC/Unix people).
For once Microsoft was right. For a long time, M$ has claimed that Linux is a bigger threat to proprietary Unix than it is to Windows. While the threat to Windows is far more than M$ originally expected, the proprietry Unix variants are getting clobbered by Linux.
I find it intersting that companies with more to sell than just an OS (Apple,HP,IBM,Sun) are working on peaceful coexistance with Linux, while the pure software players (SCO,M$) are at DEFCON-1.
As soon as tried my first Linux install (remember SLS?) I knew SCO was in trouble. The fact that it took this long for SCO to deploy an exit strategy is a monument to their executive leadership. The fact that they have the stock flying on vapor is interesting, but it would have been a whole lot smarter to do all of this back in 2000 when their stock was >$80/share and the handwriting was on the wall.
On a "portable" computer. It was in the EULA or written on the box (I forgot which). Since the term "portable" was left ambiguous, I deemed anything I can lift as "portable". Given the size & weight of the "luggable" PC's (remember those?), I figure I can be at least as creative as Microsoft.
I was always annoyed that Microsoft quantity discount programs were seldom any better than the quantity-1 approach of buying a retail copy of MS Works just to facilitate the "upgrade" to Office. I need to see a much better deal before I feel good about Microsoft licensing. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before open source invades the desktop.
I honestly think they are setting the stage for their own destruction. The goals of market share retention are on a collision course with extracting maximum revenue from customers who are locked in. Discounting is painful in the short term, so it's more talk than action. However, failure to discount will be fatal in the long run. Therefore the answer is to talk about fixing the licensing issues, while doing as little as possible. The next logical step would be for senior management to quietly start unloading stock. Newsflash: Balmer is doing that already. Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
Funny how there was no talk of $/GB surcharges when spam was the problem! Spam is worse than P2P because the ISP's servers are burdened in addition to the squandered bandwidth, whereas conventional P2P is purely a bandwidth issue. At least P2P involves data that someone actually wants.
I have a tough time feeling sorry for the ISPs on any bandwidth issue. The ISPs sold all kinds of bandwith to the spammers via the pink contract route, then they sold the e-mail addresses of their customers. If they have enough bandwidth to support all this spam, then they have plenty for P2P. It's all just a trial balloon for the next price increase, to be directed at the people most likely to tolerate it. The concept all along was to make Internet pricing more like cell phone contracts -- bewildering complexity, customer lock-in, a plethora of hidden fees and surcharges. Coming soon to a computer near you.
Once I start paying $/GB for bandwidth, rest assured that every single spam will become a request for a refund.
Now that Microsoft has been marketing fragile products for 20+ years, it should be no surprise that we have Comp. Sci. faculty with a tolerant view of instability. Some of them grew up with this stuff. If M$ "state of the art" is really good enough, then maybe software has become so commoditized that we just relegate everything to the H1Bs and let it go at that.
True story: My wife was in the hospital maternity ward. This is a modern US hospital, not some third-world tent. For about 24 hours, they had her connected to all kinds of sensors which were connected to a Dell PC running a data collection/graphing program on what appeared to be Win 2k. The application was a joke. The nurses fumbled and bumbled with it; crashed at least once. Fortunately, the important things went well (it's a boy), but no thanks to our friends in Redmond. Had there been a problem that those sensors were supposed to detect, we would have been screwed. As an expectant father, my primary job (at delivery time) is reassure Mom that all is well. Seeing this Windows app sputtering along made my job a bit tougher. Let's hope things are a little better in the ER or ICU.
Oh, by all means, let SCO try it. But I don't think their strategy is to let the case go to court. I think they want to TALK about litigation to dilute the value of Linux, thus pressuring IBM into coughing up some amount of cash that would be insignificant to IBM but quite useful to SCO. Another possibility is that SCO really wants IBM to buy the company, and this matter is really part of the sales pitch -- "Buy us and we'll shut up."
Win or lose, SCO is toast. The only question remaining is "Can they sell the company and get enough money to deploy the senior managment golden parachutes?"
Slashdot Mirror
If only noninfringing uses of blank media are allowed?
I agree. Once the black hats are attacked, all hell will break loose. A policy of "swift and effective retribution", no doubt.
I can see the day coming when Microsoft intervenes in this debate on behalf of its customers, since we all know whose relatively unsecure products are sure to get caught in the crossfire.
Calcualate what you think is owed, based on 1.5x OT for hrs >40. Say nothing. Calculate interest at 18%/yr as the wages accrue. Your option to do something useful won't materialize until the economy picks up. When that happens and the disgruntled workers start to pack up and ship off, you are looking for a salary that amortizes the back wages over a reasonable time, even though you will say nothing about this to ANY employer.
If properly executed, you not only get paid for the time, your future salary includes payment for the next project when this stunt is pulled.
It is important to avoid trying to solve this problem during the wrong side of the IT cycle. Patience is required.
FYI: The SCO/IBM matter is all about Unix/Linux on x86. Perhaps you can enlighten all of us by explaining which Unix vendor is "...kicking the pants off Linux and Windows" in the x86 market. Which Unix company is growing? Is there one? Surely, all of this "pants kicking" would be fueling measurable growth, right? Last time I checked, the entire IT industry was doing poorly, except for Microsoft's one-shot revenue growth, largely the result of smoke-and-mirrors licensing ploys.
SCO's "pants kicking" x86 Unix product is nothing to cheer about. Is there some other platform where SCO reigns supreme? I must have missed it.
Sun's "pants kicking" x86 Solaris was discontinued, only to be revived later. Are you so naive as to claim that Sun is a major player in the x86 OS market? Are you aware of the Sun buyout rumours? How about Sun's recent not-exactly-pants-kicking financial performance?
Along with other platforms, I have SPARC/Solaris boxes. They work well, reliability is very good, ditto for Sun's customer support. Unfortunately, the price/performance ratio is not so great, and Intel/Linux is certainly on the table as an upgrade option. I'm not exactly thrilled about that, but Linux is as much a threat to Unix as offshore outsourcing is a threat to the average IT worker. It's competition; deal with it.
HPQ is alive in the Unix middle and high-end space. Let's see what happens when Intel & AMD infringe on that space with lowball 64-bit processors, just as they have already pillaged & plundered the 32-bit world. For a long time, Intel's 64-bit efforts were a joke, but one of these days the laughter will stop. Not so long (1 yr?) ago, I predicted that Linux would eventually become OS of choice on Alpha, only to be confronted by a Tru64 Unix fan who insisted that Compaq (yes, Compaq) was committed to supporting Alpha & Tru64 for some vast period of time. Alpha was (almost immediately) sold to Intel, Compaq was bought by HP, and the Tru64 "roadmap" runs out in 2006. Does it matter? To be fair, HPQ has other cards to play in the OS game, and they won't fold completely. But their long-term outlook is no better than Sun's (possibly worse if you consider the combined debt of Digital+Compaq+HP).
It will take a while before commodity CPUs and operating systems threaten the high-end server market. But the threat has already materialized in the low-end, and is coming soon to the midrange market. It's time to wake up and smell the espresso.
I miss my VMS cluster. It had awesome reliability & performance, and some of the features were years ahead of Unix (and decades ahead of Windoze). Unfortunately, cost issues, decentralization, and commodity hardware changed the IT landscape forever. I sometimes wonder if I am keeping up with the latest trends. Have I become so entrenched that I will get blindsided by the next wave of cheaper/faster technology? Every once in a while I see a post that reassures me: I have little to fear from those who never got past Y2K.
Very simple: SCO must die. Their downfall is not so much GPL as it is the overdependence on old technology that is now commoditized. Just how many dollars were they expecting to squeeze out of Unix, anyway?
Would you have sympathy for M$ if their DOS business was threatened by FreeDOS, or would you tell them to grow up and spend a few dollars on R&D?
I find it ironic that SCO/Caldera is the first company to be killed by Linux while simultaneously failing as a Linux company. Good riddance.
I agree, M$ has shown every indication of integrating DRM in the OS with browser and viewer applications. Since they don't control MAC OS and therefore can't mandate DRM at that level, they choose to walk away. Good riddance. I would be more concerned if they kept "embracing & extending" their technology with MAC and Linux versions of IE, WMP, etc. DRM works only if the customer is somehow prevented from opting out. Getting rid of Windoze looks more enticing then ever.
Every once in a while you get managers who think that salaried positions + cellphone = free labor to be exploited
I once had to educate my boss about the realities of being "on call". He seemed to think that my staff would all carry beepers, and I would work out a rotation so that someone would be the primary contact for any given hour. It wasn't so much an "emergency response" capability as it was unpaid 2nd & 3rd shift operations via remote control. Comp. time doesn't work because every little "emergency" creates a coverage hole during regular business hours. I asked, "What do you intend to do when the beepers are simply turned off? Are you going to discipline people for not working hours that were neither scheduled nor paid?" Of course, nobody would put a mandated schedule in writing, and the underlying problem was that we were too thinly staffed.
Ultimately, common sense prevailed. We fixed some salary issues (people got raises, and therefore felt better about the beeper issue). We added an entry-level position to work evenings and Saturday morning. For those times when escalation was truly necessary, the new entry-level people had a list of senior staff with beepers who were quite willing to help.
I agree that selling SCOX (if you have some) is not going to cause much pain. On the other hand, shorting the stock requires no such ownership AND the options market activity is watched by the institutional investors (they use it as a leading indicator for the underlying stock).
You mentioned to ability to use voting power or to lobby their board. How about signing up to speak at their annual shareholders meeting? Now THAT would be fun!
From the Slashdot article:
"It seems that Microsoft is selling XP through TigerDirect for only US$50 to customers who have purchased a Lindows computer."
Do you have some reason to believe that TigerDirect is taking a loss on each copy?
From the article:
"TigerDirect is paying less for some copies of Microsoft Windows XP than even the largest Microsoft customers like Dell."
Yes, I know about OEM kits. Did YOU know about how Slashdot stories include these things called "links" that refer to news items posted elsewhere?
The interesting part is that XP is now down to $50 retail, quantity one, no pre-qualifying OS required. TigerDirect is obviously paying less than that. My guess is that they are paying at most $40, for nowhere near the quantities that Dell and HP are buying.
Let's assume your $50 OEM price is on target. What is the point of OEM quantity pricing if Joe User can get the same price at quantity one?
I want to see what happens when the large OEMs demand the same pricing. The pressure for M$ to discount had to be really high, especially for them to offer such a deal to TigerDirect knowing full well that larger customers would squawk.
In ancient times, the OEMs were bullied into doing whatever Redmond said, lest they be cast aside from the DOS/Windows herd. The ultimate effect of this little exercise is to show the OEMs how much power they have. Just start talking about Linux, and wait for the discounts. Wait another 6 months and you might see M$ paying the OEMs to pre-install the product.
I had the same problems with packet that you mentioned. I was doing 1200 bps on the 2m band. It was pretty much useless for anything beyond quickie text messages. I heard about people doing 110 bps on shortwave. The ability of shortwave signals to bounce off the ionosphere was much more useful before we had all these communications satellites and global fiber optic networks.
I don't think we will ever see the stability or bandwidth to make shortwave support anything that geeks would consider useful. Ham satellites are a little more promising. If we had a Wifi via Ham satellite, now THAT would be fun.
How many "Day Zero" exploits is it going to take before this concept is abandoned?
The should reallocate the UHF spectrum for wireless IP connections to ISPs (or even P2P to your neighborhood WAN). Anything that cuts into the local telco monopoly can't be all bad.
Stock Financial Health Grade change
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I suspect this won't be a "growth stock" for very long.
Otherwise, they would just tax the gas and let it go at that. Every other state does it, and the gas tax is relatively easy to administer. Maybe this is some kind of elaborate money grab, possibly supported by the people who sell the gizmos.
I think it's more about measurement and control. The real intent is control the use of vehicles by taxing any "undesirable" activities.
The UK is pretty much the world leader in automotive harrassment, and none of their tactics (including $5/gal. gasoline) have changed driving habits, reduced the appeal of larger cars, or encouraged mass transit.
The look on driver's face when whacked with insurance surcharges for all of the above: Priceless
" Fine, then the SCO-suits would have overtaken RedHat and were suing their customers."
Unfortunately correct. Any combination of patents and GPL risks a catastrophics matter/anti-matter reaction. The safest thing to do with SCO and it's "Intellectual Property" would be to take the entire company and every shred of data they have and launch it towards the sun (the flaming ball of hydrogen, not the SPARC/Unix people).
For once Microsoft was right. For a long time, M$ has claimed that Linux is a bigger threat to proprietary Unix than it is to Windows. While the threat to Windows is far more than M$ originally expected, the proprietry Unix variants are getting clobbered by Linux.
I find it intersting that companies with more to sell than just an OS (Apple,HP,IBM,Sun) are working on peaceful coexistance with Linux, while the pure software players (SCO,M$) are at DEFCON-1.
As soon as tried my first Linux install (remember SLS?) I knew SCO was in trouble. The fact that it took this long for SCO to deploy an exit strategy is a monument to their executive leadership. The fact that they have the stock flying on vapor is interesting, but it would have been a whole lot smarter to do all of this back in 2000 when their stock was >$80/share and the handwriting was on the wall.
or does the Caldera logo bear a striking resemblence to Mickey Mouse? Go get 'em Disney!
On a "portable" computer. It was in the EULA or written on the box (I forgot which). Since the term "portable" was left ambiguous, I deemed anything I can lift as "portable". Given the size & weight of the "luggable" PC's (remember those?), I figure I can be at least as creative as Microsoft.
I was always annoyed that Microsoft quantity discount programs were seldom any better than the quantity-1 approach of buying a retail copy of MS Works just to facilitate the "upgrade" to Office. I need to see a much better deal before I feel good about Microsoft licensing. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before open source invades the desktop.
I honestly think they are setting the stage for their own destruction. The goals of market share retention are on a collision course with extracting maximum revenue from customers who are locked in. Discounting is painful in the short term, so it's more talk than action. However, failure to discount will be fatal in the long run. Therefore the answer is to talk about fixing the licensing issues, while doing as little as possible. The next logical step would be for senior management to quietly start unloading stock. Newsflash: Balmer is doing that already. Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide.
Funny how there was no talk of $/GB surcharges when spam was the problem! Spam is worse than P2P because the ISP's servers are burdened in addition to the squandered bandwidth, whereas conventional P2P is purely a bandwidth issue. At least P2P involves data that someone actually wants.
I have a tough time feeling sorry for the ISPs on any bandwidth issue. The ISPs sold all kinds of bandwith to the spammers via the pink contract route, then they sold the e-mail addresses of their customers. If they have enough bandwidth to support all this spam, then they have plenty for P2P. It's all just a trial balloon for the next price increase, to be directed at the people most likely to tolerate it. The concept all along was to make Internet pricing more like cell phone contracts -- bewildering complexity, customer lock-in, a plethora of hidden fees and surcharges. Coming soon to a computer near you.
Once I start paying $/GB for bandwidth, rest assured that every single spam will become a request for a refund.
"Unless the application was written by the "boys at Redmond", how could it be their fault? "
After the app crashed, the misbehaviors continued until reboot.
The charge: Failure to cleanly terminate an errant process
The verdict: Guilty
Now that Microsoft has been marketing fragile products for 20+ years, it should be no surprise that we have Comp. Sci. faculty with a tolerant view of instability. Some of them grew up with this stuff. If M$ "state of the art" is really good enough, then maybe software has become so commoditized that we just relegate everything to the H1Bs and let it go at that.
True story: My wife was in the hospital maternity ward. This is a modern US hospital, not some third-world tent. For about 24 hours, they had her connected to all kinds of sensors which were connected to a Dell PC running a data collection/graphing program on what appeared to be Win 2k. The application was a joke. The nurses fumbled and bumbled with it; crashed at least once. Fortunately, the important things went well (it's a boy), but no thanks to our friends in Redmond. Had there been a problem that those sensors were supposed to detect, we would have been screwed. As an expectant father, my primary job (at delivery time) is reassure Mom that all is well. Seeing this Windows app sputtering along made my job a bit tougher. Let's hope things are a little better in the ER or ICU.
Oh, by all means, let SCO try it. But I don't think their strategy is to let the case go to court. I think they want to TALK about litigation to dilute the value of Linux, thus pressuring IBM into coughing up some amount of cash that would be insignificant to IBM but quite useful to SCO. Another possibility is that SCO really wants IBM to buy the company, and this matter is really part of the sales pitch -- "Buy us and we'll shut up."
Win or lose, SCO is toast. The only question remaining is "Can they sell the company and get enough money to deploy the senior managment golden parachutes?"