And so now, it becomes clear that SCO may never provide the required evidence to prove that they are indeed correct.
Unfortunately the court dismissed the case because the complaint failed to plead special damages. This is something that can probably be rectified quite easily.
It would have been much better if the case had been dismissed because Novell clearly had a legitimate reason to believe that its statements were likely to be true and therefore could not have been made with malice.
Some of the other reasoning in the judgement looks very bad for SCO though, in particular the court appears to have all but said that the contract ammendment did not transfer the copyrights as a matter of law.
One thing is sure, this one will not go to a jury, there are no facts in dispute, it is a purely legal interpretation of a contract and copyright law.
Pointless protest.. what he is really saying is "im too stupid to read a contract and now i feel victimized." This happens all the time here, as we tend to breed morons on a regular basis, and we really only have two major providers, Vodafone, and the loval version of telecom.
"too stupid"
Ah so if someone trusts what company advertises they must be stupid?
This type of thinking is very bad business. Don't just take my word for it, take Barnum's autobiography. Barnum admitted having indulged in 'flim flam', false advertising etc. when he started out. But after a while he discovered that repeat business was more valuable. Flim flam is bad business.
The cost of SMS messaging is a few cents per message. If prices in NZ are more than this its a regulatory failure.
Yes, when companies are dishonest they get bitch-slapped with regulations. And in countries like NZ where you don't have Tom DeLay selling legislation wholesale the regulations stick.
It all fits. Desperate to fill pages Cmdr Taco dispatches hack to Belgium to create bogus Linus smear story that can be relied upon to fill pages for months.
The sad fact about this story is that in the political arena it often works. Remember all those smear stories about John McCain being 'angry', those were planted by Karl Rove. Rove is currently trying the same scheme using a GOP operative from the Nixon era to smear Kerry, claiming to have 'served on the same boat' as Kerry, which he did, but long after Kerry and his crew had been reassigned. Even so said operative is considered an 'expert' on Kerry's leadership by the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and other far right hack rags (Faux News, Washington Times).
Brown is right in one respect. A teenager could not have written Linux by himself in a few months. But that is not what anyone who knows the history of Linux says happened. Several hundred people made substantial contributions to Linux over a period of ten years.
The Linux that Linus uploaded to an FTP site bears very little relationship to modern Linux. About all that could be said for it was that it booted (sorta) and it ran for a while (sorta). It is not at all surprising that Linus could produce a program that could serve as the starting point for a collaborative effort.
Even if Ken Brown was right and all Linus had done was to create a bootable version of MINIX that does not make him a plagarist. The MINIX legacy has always been acknowledged but MINIX was a program printed in a book and would have stayed that way if a Linus had not come along.
UNIX is not a particularly complex operating system. Compared to the kernels of MULTICS or VMS, UNIX is a simple hack job, originally written on some very klunky hardware by a couple of guys in a skunkworks project. The idea that this could be duplicated a few decades later by a student using modern programming tools is not at all surprising.
One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...
However, when I bought a new laptop with 802.11g wireless built-in (not from Linksys) I started having all sorts of problems trying to get the new laptop connected. I have to use the default Windows XP configuration tool (which sucks, IMO) and even when I do get connected with WEP enabled, the speed is horrible. And I'm of much higher technical aptitude than those mentioned in the article.
I have a similar issue with my CISCO Aeronet card in my thinkpad, only there the problaem is getting a connection. The complete turkeys at CISCO decided not to show the SSIDs being broadcast in the neighborhood. They also seem to have some issue with spaces, capilatlization or something that means that for whatever reason the SSID does not work when I type it in. My Lucent cards work fine, but not the one built into the laptop.
I might have a chance of debugging this under XP, at least the lossage from CISCO would not stop me seeing what is being broadcast - only reason they can be doing that is to give people the illusion of security.
The big problem with WEP is that it started trying to solve the wrong problem. Privacy is not the issue, authentication is. If you do a good job on authentication privacy is trivial. Instead they started with Wired Equivalent Privacy and goofed from square one.
Security by analogy is a real bad move. The big security problem with wireless is that you no longer need to be in the building to access the network.
Entering pins and passwords is just bogus. It is a stupid, stupid way to configure, particularly when every stupid key is the stupid same.
What should happen is that the card should have a private key built in during manufacture and it should have a certificate binding that key to the serial number of the box. Then when you plug the thing in it pings the gateway which tells user 'XYZ trying to connect'.
This could have been made really easy for the home user. Instead this type of setup is considered premium, something only security concious enterprises would need, something that justifies boosting the price by $1500 or so.
Try finding a WiFi gateway that works well as a bridge without endless tweakage. Even the ones that are marketed as bridges often don't work.
There is no reason that all of this should not just work. Instead the products are dumbed down for consumers and in the process broken.
What sort of speed lens do you think Ansel Adams used?
When I was at university a friend used to make really high end 'audiophile' stereo gear. The basic approach was to take an off the shelf Philips CD player or TEAC Tape drive, dismantle it and install it in a prettier box. That was all.
In the process the price went up from #250 to #2500. The guys making the boxes knew that there was no way they could ever hope to compete with the R&D depts of the big manufacturers. But they could make a good living from selling 'design statements' to the gullible.
Sure a newspaper sports photographer can make real use of a very high speed lens. And there are real customers for those really long Nikor lenses. But that is not what you need to start in the business. Very few people get to start as sports photographers, you have to start doing the less glamorous assignments.
If the demand for the ultra fast lenses was all that great they would not cost a quarter as much. The number of profrssionals doing portrait and wedding photography is much much bigger than the number of newspaper photographers of any type.
Oh and you can also be sure that every one of the guys wh buys one of those $5000+ lenses has a $800 or less equivalent. The fast lenses don't just cost a lot, they weigh a lot.
The only problem with the UN?: The fact that the world's richest country refuses to pay the money it owes and has treaty obligations to hand-over to fund the UN.
Actually most of the money has already been paid.
Although folk are moderating this point as flamebait, it is very relevant. There is a lot of complaining in the US about the UN from people who resent any check on US power. The most extreeme version of this being the black helicopter crowd who believe the UN is bent on world domination.
In practice the type of issue that gets decided at the UN is the very mundane detailed sort of issue like how telephone numbers are assigned. These can be critical issues, but very rarely.
The events in Iraq show what happens when the people who resent checks on US power get to just do what they want without restraint. After ignoring and insulting the UN, Bush is now clinging to the hope it can save the situation in Iraq before November.
At this point the 'check on US power' issue is dead. It will be twenty years at a minimum before any US President is going to start another unilateral adventure. By that time the world will be very different.
Personally, I don't really want to see the Internet become an issue that gets rolled into trade negotiations. The Europeans don't want to see ICANN folded into under the wings of the ITU. But they are fed up with the ways things are being run at ICANN, and holding up funding is just a temporary tactic designed to try and bring about some change at ICANN.
Why not the UN? Do you have a major problem with the way that telephone numbers or satelite orbitals are allocated?
The UN already decides whether a 'country' TLD should be created. The RFC deliberately ceedes that decision to the ISO country code committee. That is how Palestine has a country code.
Very little would change if ICANN disappeared entirely. The IANA function is the sort of thing that could and should have been done using a database with a web interface. There really is not that much to assigning code points. OSI and Web services both have much better schemes (OIDs, URIs).
The country codes would be managed in pretty much the same way as they are today by the same people. There would be no new non country TLDs but none of the new ones have been remotely successful. The holdup on services like the domain name waitlist would end but that will happen anyway.
About all that would change is that the ICANN staff would not get paid and the farce of the ICANN conferences in obscure parts of the world would end.
About the only thing that would change is that as an international treaty organization the ITU could not be sued.
ICANN does actually have a point about the root servers. Only four of them survived the DDoS attack. Of the nine that went under some were pretty respectable. Others are worse than useless. The Internet depends on these servers, there is no excuse not to operate them at telco level reliability.
The ITU is going to absorb ICANN in the end. It is just a matter of time.
I dont know about your claim to have invented the Internet (Is that you, Al??), but i have to say, as a American, without the US the internet would not exist today, so we have a right to own and control some part of it.You guys should be more grateful, for this and other things.
And we Brits invented electricity, the steam engine, television and radio. So we should have the right to control them.
Your claims are actually way off. The Internet protocols were developed in the US, but if the Web had appeared later than it did it would probably have used the OSI stack which was largely the result of work in the UK.
Sure there are technical differences between TCP/IP and OSI, TCP/IP might even have some advantages. But to claim that there would be no computer networking without the US is simply untrue.
Most coutries grow out of this type of weenie size measurement. We grew out of it, you should try it too. Your type of thinking is the reason you guys are currently up to your ass in the Iraq quagmire, that and the fact that your incompetent "President" got taken by a ride by Iranian intelligence. If you were not such suckers for the weenie size rhetoric you would never have elected him in the first place. But then again of course you never did.
The only significant new cost in ICANN's budget is littigation.
There would be no real problem with ICANN if there was a rational process for appointing it. The problem here is that a constitution designed for a benevolent dictator is now in the hands of a group of people with the outlook of a US CEO.
This is the sort of thing that happened at the New York Stock Exchange.
The test for both these introductory courses would consist of five relatively simple essay questions requiring a, maximum, 5 sentence answer, out of a standard pool of, oh, say, 25 questions at most and all the previous tests and correct answers were archived and retrievable at the faculty student union.
Oh, I remember the days I was doing the engineering math course at Southampton. This was a similar set up, the exam had been unchanged for 15 years. Only with a couple of differences. One difference was that the exam was open notes, you could take in any crib sheet you liked provided it was in your own handwriting. The other difference was that being a math test you could get full marks for 5 questions but you could get credit for up to 8. If you answered all 12 they took your best 8 answers.
Given that math had two exams and counted for double all the other second year courses your mark in that gave about 8% of your final degree, all on its own. It actually counted for more than any of the final exams.
Having realized this in about week 2 of the first term I produced a set of notes that described how to answer all the questions on the exam, indexed by question number. With these it was a trivial matter to answer more than enough questions to guarantee 100%. On one exam I answered all the questions except for an integration I did not have a crib for in the first hour and spent the next two hours working on the integration. On the second I was done in two hours.
I never worked out why more people had not done likewise. Spending a week in the library at the start of the first term meant I could pretty much do what I liked for the rest of the year.
ESR probably got the copy because of his past counter-productive behavoir. A selling point to someone not familar to the situation might be "hey, look, that loony-leftist ESR doesn't approve of this book. It must be good."
It has to be SCO behind all this. There are not many people who could benefit and Microsoft is far too competent to tollerate a sloppy hack job.
Only other party who could be behind it would be Sun using what the intel world now calls the Chalabai gambit. If you are a weak power (like Iran) you get your two major opponents to attack each other using disinformation.
Of course that type of gambit kinda depends on your target being gullible and incompetent. That kinda falls appart when there are large numbers of people who have to be gullible and incompetent. Even more so when they are talking to each other and can pick appart the claims.
If the Slashdot editors had posted the stories on the WMD claims we now know to have been manufactured by Iranian intelligence we might have had a shot at getting the press to treat them more skeptically and that in turn might have saved the lives of 800 coalition troops, about 10,000 Iraqis and the US treasury about $300 billion plus whatever it takes to get us out of there before Iraq becomes an Iranian dominated theocracy.
Like pulling appart the SCO lies is fun for all, but in the final analysis those are pretty trivial stakes.
I'm not trying to make a hero out of AST, but he has been one of the most influential person in computer science. Not only has he contributed in terms of his creative input, but his bigger contribution is in teaching. His book on Computer Networks inspired me to write one myself.
I don't get why Linus supporters feel the need to dump on Tanenbaum. His books are very well received in academia and are widely used as teaching texts. He certainly understands operating system and network design.
I don't remember Andy discovering anything of extraordinary note, but then again maybe one out of fifty academics manages that even in the top schools. Most academics do nothing more than write tedious articles on minutiae that have no relevance to anything other than tenure committees. Andy's books prove that he can at least see the big picture - something many hyperspecialized academics are incapable of. I had an argument with a person like that last week over a technical issue in a spec. As he started to explain that the effects of a proposed correction could not be predicted I suddenly realized that this subject was a couple of milimeters outside his field of expertise and he actually had no thinking skills at all.
Telling a 20 year old kid writing an O/S that he might want to look at the latest research rather than rehash an obsolete design does not sound like an unreasonable thing for an experienced prof to do. I think the people objecting here are more caught up in church of Linux religious bigottry than sense.
It's sad that the world's coming to all these patents but if Apple doesn't patent this some other company might
Some history here - Apple spent years suing anyone who copied the same GUI interface they stole from Xerox. If you are upset that there is no alternative to Windows blame apple. They killed GEM with a malicious and totaly unwarranted lawsuit.
Early on the FSF used to picket Apple over this.
Apple gets a free ride in the open source community despite being by far the most aggressive enforcer of bogus patents amongst the major computer companies.
But to go after Bush Sr. shows that you are simply hitting a bunch of republicans. Poppa Bush was handed an irresponsible deficit that was on its way up. By the end of his 4 years,
Hold it right there. You might be interested to know that George Bush Snr was actually a member of the Reagan administration. In fact he was even the Vice President!
Blaming the previous admin for problems when it was the other party is one thing. Blaming your own party is a different matter.
NASA probably did not get into this mess overnight, the issues in the report probably go back to Clinton, Bush Mk I and possibly even Reagan. But the administration has had three and a half years to turn the situation arround.
If you remember the original bill of goods that the Bush 2000 campaign sold the country it was 'OK George is a boob, but what
really matters is the people he arround him and they will all be
grown ups'.
Of course the editors of slashdot only get bothered when the story is NASA. But the mismanagement at NASA is only par for the course for this administration. They can't plan a war - which would not be such a big problem if they were not so keen to start them. The treasury team is fired for telling us that the war would cost money. The environment secretary resigns in disgust when she finds that environment policy is set by campaign contributors and VP Cheney in this administration.
Oh yes, and since 9/11 we have had six directors of counter-terrorism. Richard Clarke was merely the first to resign from the post in disgust, since then there has been a series of resignations for the same reason.
the Cuckoo's Egg project released the first egg in June 10, 2000, but the idea for that egg must have been thought of long before that.
Notice that the article does not tell the month, should it be July 2000, then the patent is false.
In the US a patent inventor can claim the date of 'invention' to be a year before filing. So to definitely bust the patent you have to have prior art from 1999.
Oh and applicants are not even required to give the purported date of invention when they file. Yep, the USPTO is a racket.
Fortunately the patent is probably not half as broad as is being claimed. The invention is probably a particular way of introducing fake files.
Between the P2P companies who are the main vectors for spyware, the users who blindly claim that stealling is not stealling and the RIAA I don't know which group I am more disgusted at.
Oh yeah, those utter moorons in Iraq who ordered the use of the techniques taught in R21 "resistance to interrogation" on prisoners. They are the ones that disgust me, and all their appologists.
Given that the mood in Washington is fairly anti-gay rights, what makes you think that one was 'accidental'
Who cares? Compared to the fact that the draft board is making plans to draft geeks the blacklisting of certain keywords in govt. computer systems seems a rather trivial issue.
How much more relevant the Slashdot editors choices of blacklisted keywords and the SEC fine of Gates are to the average geek reading slashdot! It will be so good to know when you get sent out to Baghdad to fight for Halliburton, that there are people back in the US fighting for the right of middle ranking civil servants to visit gay web sites during working hours.
If news of the plannning were not enough Rumsfeld has denied that the administration thinks that extending the draft is desirable or necessary. If you have been following the real news sites with stuff that matters you will know that Rumsfeld also said that there was no need for more troops in Iraq only a week before they were sent.
Uhh, the fine isn't what is important. What is important is the fact that he (or his advisors) made this mistake in the first place.
I doubt that Gates will pay, it will probably be whatever merchant bank was advising him here that screwed up.
Interesting that Gates gets fined for the same violation that "President" Bush commited repeatedly at Harken without any problems.
The Bush violation being somewhat more eggregious because he was selling stock while knowing that the company was cooking its books Enron style and would soon be forced to restate its earnings.
Perhaps if Gates had been in Skull and Bones he would have received the same treatment.
You are correct. The concorde used two times more fuel than a 747 and only could hold a little more than 100 people. The market for $10,000 one way tickets is small. The fact that the plane produced a sonic boom had nothing to do with it's failure.
The concorde was a major money maker for BA, less so for Air France. The fuel costs were expensive but not unprofitably so. A standard 747 holds 300 people, most in cattle class. All seats on Concorde are first class.
The reason the plane failed economically was part due to the oil price shock hitting when Concorde entered service. A much bigger factor was Boeing lobbying to have Concorde banned from the main US airports, a piece of protectionism the US govt. went along with.
The Concorde consoirtium had the last laugh, these days it is known as Airbus and the Economist thinks it likely that Boeing will be out of the civil aviation business entirely in ten years time. In response to the US protectionism the EU underwrote development of Airbus. Boeing tried to respond with the idiotic 'fly by wire is dangerous FUD' and the rest is la historie. Boeing's current survival strategy is renting some very overpriced fuel tankers to the pentagon that meet far fewer of the original criteria set than the Airbus bid and cost about twice as much. But don't call that protectionism, its free enterprise.
Err Benedict Arnold decided to join the US revolution, decided that the revolutionaries were going to lose and that the sooner the war was over the better so returned to supporting the crown. Sounds a reasonable decision to me.
Marc Andressen a 'Benedict Arnold' of open source? Err when exactly did Marc do anything in the open source movement. The NCSA Mosaic program was always license restricted to educational use only. Netscape was set up to exploit the web as a commercial enterprise.
Same with the rest of the guys mentioned. Very few ever promoted open source as the religion currently held by some on slashdot.
It seems somewhat odd for folk who are trying to reduce the cost of software to zero to start complaining about offshore programming.
Come to that it is pretty rich for IT workers whose entire business is helping companies displace workers in blue collar jobs to start complaining about the same thing happening to them.
The lie here is the VA-Linux propaganda that claims "Either, consumers have found the claims process too confusing, time-consuming and discouraging to keep them from making a claim or they are waiting till the last minute to file(like taxes)."
Either? VA-Linux fails to point out the most likely reason people have not filed - they don't intend to.
VA-Linux really should try to ratchet down their attacks against their competitor here, at least Fox News admits that it is a propaganda outlet for the GOP.
Can we take this result as a sign that 96% of Microsoft users in California have no complaints about Microsoft's actions?
I think folk need to take not of the fact that Microsoft is not merely submitting their scheme to the IETF group, they are working with the group and are very likely to accept the end product. This means that instead of us having six different RMX style proposals we will hopefully have one.
As for the cost of certificates, it really depends on what you are doing. If you are an enterprise of any real size or an ISP you are already spending hundreds of $ per month talking your way off various blocklists, and talking to other people who have wrongly ended up on your blocklist, or spammers trying it on...
There will still be a need for a certificate with CallerID or SPF, VeriSign are currently calling it an 'accreditation'.
Presumably they intend to make money out of this somehow. But then as they say in the Godfather 'none of us here are communists'. whatever happens the result is going to be a whole heck of a lot cheaper than the 'postage stamp' schemes some have been talking about. It is unlikely that any of those could be implemented without the cybercash patents - and guess who owns those?
What kind of sense is that? More like, if you're a shitty programmer, you'll end up without a job."
Unless of course you apply at Microsoft's security department...
Probably the hardest gig to get in the industry at this point - unless you are in the elite security architects world with a heavyweight reputation. Over the past few years they have been hiring the best out of AT&T Research, the remains of DEC, various IETF groups. I get called by their headhunters every few months but I have ten years experience in the field and I have written several well known specs.
The problem Microsoft face is similar to the cobol dusty decks problem. Its not the quality of the people working there now that has the biggest impact on overal security quality, its the people who worked there ten or fifteen years ago.
It is the same story for Linux. At the moment security is largely seen in terms of 'absence of known holes'. The main advantage Linux has here is less code means less bugs (often). But don't expect that to be the final word. We are moving to a world where positive security features like PKI built deep into the O/S are going to be needed. Microsoft is not completely there yet, but watch out when they are.
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Unfortunately the court dismissed the case because the complaint failed to plead special damages. This is something that can probably be rectified quite easily.
It would have been much better if the case had been dismissed because Novell clearly had a legitimate reason to believe that its statements were likely to be true and therefore could not have been made with malice.
Some of the other reasoning in the judgement looks very bad for SCO though, in particular the court appears to have all but said that the contract ammendment did not transfer the copyrights as a matter of law.
One thing is sure, this one will not go to a jury, there are no facts in dispute, it is a purely legal interpretation of a contract and copyright law.
Oh dear, I am writing this on my original IBM System 360 by punching the holes in the paper tape by hand. Does that mean that I win?
If you are surfing the Web with anything less than a 6GHz Pentium 6 with 8 Trilobites of Memory you are beneath contempt.
Claims for nostalgia points ane utterly pathetic unless you are using a machine manufactured before the Napoleonic war.
And no operating system snobbery claims are credible unless they involve Open Genera running on a Multics Host.
"too stupid"
Ah so if someone trusts what company advertises they must be stupid?
This type of thinking is very bad business. Don't just take my word for it, take Barnum's autobiography. Barnum admitted having indulged in 'flim flam', false advertising etc. when he started out. But after a while he discovered that repeat business was more valuable. Flim flam is bad business.
The cost of SMS messaging is a few cents per message. If prices in NZ are more than this its a regulatory failure.
Yes, when companies are dishonest they get bitch-slapped with regulations. And in countries like NZ where you don't have Tom DeLay selling legislation wholesale the regulations stick.
The sad fact about this story is that in the political arena it often works. Remember all those smear stories about John McCain being 'angry', those were planted by Karl Rove. Rove is currently trying the same scheme using a GOP operative from the Nixon era to smear Kerry, claiming to have 'served on the same boat' as Kerry, which he did, but long after Kerry and his crew had been reassigned. Even so said operative is considered an 'expert' on Kerry's leadership by the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and other far right hack rags (Faux News, Washington Times).
Brown is right in one respect. A teenager could not have written Linux by himself in a few months. But that is not what anyone who knows the history of Linux says happened. Several hundred people made substantial contributions to Linux over a period of ten years.
The Linux that Linus uploaded to an FTP site bears very little relationship to modern Linux. About all that could be said for it was that it booted (sorta) and it ran for a while (sorta). It is not at all surprising that Linus could produce a program that could serve as the starting point for a collaborative effort.
Even if Ken Brown was right and all Linus had done was to create a bootable version of MINIX that does not make him a plagarist. The MINIX legacy has always been acknowledged but MINIX was a program printed in a book and would have stayed that way if a Linus had not come along.
UNIX is not a particularly complex operating system. Compared to the kernels of MULTICS or VMS, UNIX is a simple hack job, originally written on some very klunky hardware by a couple of guys in a skunkworks project. The idea that this could be duplicated a few decades later by a student using modern programming tools is not at all surprising.
One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...
I have a similar issue with my CISCO Aeronet card in my thinkpad, only there the problaem is getting a connection. The complete turkeys at CISCO decided not to show the SSIDs being broadcast in the neighborhood. They also seem to have some issue with spaces, capilatlization or something that means that for whatever reason the SSID does not work when I type it in. My Lucent cards work fine, but not the one built into the laptop.
I might have a chance of debugging this under XP, at least the lossage from CISCO would not stop me seeing what is being broadcast - only reason they can be doing that is to give people the illusion of security.
The big problem with WEP is that it started trying to solve the wrong problem. Privacy is not the issue, authentication is. If you do a good job on authentication privacy is trivial. Instead they started with Wired Equivalent Privacy and goofed from square one.
Security by analogy is a real bad move. The big security problem with wireless is that you no longer need to be in the building to access the network.
Entering pins and passwords is just bogus. It is a stupid, stupid way to configure, particularly when every stupid key is the stupid same.
What should happen is that the card should have a private key built in during manufacture and it should have a certificate binding that key to the serial number of the box. Then when you plug the thing in it pings the gateway which tells user 'XYZ trying to connect'.
This could have been made really easy for the home user. Instead this type of setup is considered premium, something only security concious enterprises would need, something that justifies boosting the price by $1500 or so.
Try finding a WiFi gateway that works well as a bridge without endless tweakage. Even the ones that are marketed as bridges often don't work.
There is no reason that all of this should not just work. Instead the products are dumbed down for consumers and in the process broken.
Historians of the Bush "Presidency" are divided between the incompetent fool theory and the incompetent liar theory.
We also invented sarcasm.
The British claim to have 'invented' those ideas is at least as good as the claim that the US invented computer networking.
What sort of speed lens do you think Ansel Adams used?
When I was at university a friend used to make really high end 'audiophile' stereo gear. The basic approach was to take an off the shelf Philips CD player or TEAC Tape drive, dismantle it and install it in a prettier box. That was all.
In the process the price went up from #250 to #2500. The guys making the boxes knew that there was no way they could ever hope to compete with the R&D depts of the big manufacturers. But they could make a good living from selling 'design statements' to the gullible.
Sure a newspaper sports photographer can make real use of a very high speed lens. And there are real customers for those really long Nikor lenses. But that is not what you need to start in the business. Very few people get to start as sports photographers, you have to start doing the less glamorous assignments.
If the demand for the ultra fast lenses was all that great they would not cost a quarter as much. The number of profrssionals doing portrait and wedding photography is much much bigger than the number of newspaper photographers of any type.
Oh and you can also be sure that every one of the guys wh buys one of those $5000+ lenses has a $800 or less equivalent. The fast lenses don't just cost a lot, they weigh a lot.
Actually most of the money has already been paid.
Although folk are moderating this point as flamebait, it is very relevant. There is a lot of complaining in the US about the UN from people who resent any check on US power. The most extreeme version of this being the black helicopter crowd who believe the UN is bent on world domination.
In practice the type of issue that gets decided at the UN is the very mundane detailed sort of issue like how telephone numbers are assigned. These can be critical issues, but very rarely.
The events in Iraq show what happens when the people who resent checks on US power get to just do what they want without restraint. After ignoring and insulting the UN, Bush is now clinging to the hope it can save the situation in Iraq before November.
At this point the 'check on US power' issue is dead. It will be twenty years at a minimum before any US President is going to start another unilateral adventure. By that time the world will be very different.
Why not the UN? Do you have a major problem with the way that telephone numbers or satelite orbitals are allocated?
The UN already decides whether a 'country' TLD should be created. The RFC deliberately ceedes that decision to the ISO country code committee. That is how Palestine has a country code.
Very little would change if ICANN disappeared entirely. The IANA function is the sort of thing that could and should have been done using a database with a web interface. There really is not that much to assigning code points. OSI and Web services both have much better schemes (OIDs, URIs).
The country codes would be managed in pretty much the same way as they are today by the same people. There would be no new non country TLDs but none of the new ones have been remotely successful. The holdup on services like the domain name waitlist would end but that will happen anyway.
About all that would change is that the ICANN staff would not get paid and the farce of the ICANN conferences in obscure parts of the world would end.
About the only thing that would change is that as an international treaty organization the ITU could not be sued.
ICANN does actually have a point about the root servers. Only four of them survived the DDoS attack. Of the nine that went under some were pretty respectable. Others are worse than useless. The Internet depends on these servers, there is no excuse not to operate them at telco level reliability.
The ITU is going to absorb ICANN in the end. It is just a matter of time.
And we Brits invented electricity, the steam engine, television and radio. So we should have the right to control them.
Your claims are actually way off. The Internet protocols were developed in the US, but if the Web had appeared later than it did it would probably have used the OSI stack which was largely the result of work in the UK.
Sure there are technical differences between TCP/IP and OSI, TCP/IP might even have some advantages. But to claim that there would be no computer networking without the US is simply untrue.
Most coutries grow out of this type of weenie size measurement. We grew out of it, you should try it too. Your type of thinking is the reason you guys are currently up to your ass in the Iraq quagmire, that and the fact that your incompetent "President" got taken by a ride by Iranian intelligence. If you were not such suckers for the weenie size rhetoric you would never have elected him in the first place. But then again of course you never did.
There would be no real problem with ICANN if there was a rational process for appointing it. The problem here is that a constitution designed for a benevolent dictator is now in the hands of a group of people with the outlook of a US CEO.
This is the sort of thing that happened at the New York Stock Exchange.
Oh, I remember the days I was doing the engineering math course at Southampton. This was a similar set up, the exam had been unchanged for 15 years. Only with a couple of differences. One difference was that the exam was open notes, you could take in any crib sheet you liked provided it was in your own handwriting. The other difference was that being a math test you could get full marks for 5 questions but you could get credit for up to 8. If you answered all 12 they took your best 8 answers.
Given that math had two exams and counted for double all the other second year courses your mark in that gave about 8% of your final degree, all on its own. It actually counted for more than any of the final exams.
Having realized this in about week 2 of the first term I produced a set of notes that described how to answer all the questions on the exam, indexed by question number. With these it was a trivial matter to answer more than enough questions to guarantee 100%. On one exam I answered all the questions except for an integration I did not have a crib for in the first hour and spent the next two hours working on the integration. On the second I was done in two hours.
I never worked out why more people had not done likewise. Spending a week in the library at the start of the first term meant I could pretty much do what I liked for the rest of the year.
It has to be SCO behind all this. There are not many people who could benefit and Microsoft is far too competent to tollerate a sloppy hack job.
Only other party who could be behind it would be Sun using what the intel world now calls the Chalabai gambit. If you are a weak power (like Iran) you get your two major opponents to attack each other using disinformation.
Of course that type of gambit kinda depends on your target being gullible and incompetent. That kinda falls appart when there are large numbers of people who have to be gullible and incompetent. Even more so when they are talking to each other and can pick appart the claims.
If the Slashdot editors had posted the stories on the WMD claims we now know to have been manufactured by Iranian intelligence we might have had a shot at getting the press to treat them more skeptically and that in turn might have saved the lives of 800 coalition troops, about 10,000 Iraqis and the US treasury about $300 billion plus whatever it takes to get us out of there before Iraq becomes an Iranian dominated theocracy.
Like pulling appart the SCO lies is fun for all, but in the final analysis those are pretty trivial stakes.
I don't get why Linus supporters feel the need to dump on Tanenbaum. His books are very well received in academia and are widely used as teaching texts. He certainly understands operating system and network design.
I don't remember Andy discovering anything of extraordinary note, but then again maybe one out of fifty academics manages that even in the top schools. Most academics do nothing more than write tedious articles on minutiae that have no relevance to anything other than tenure committees. Andy's books prove that he can at least see the big picture - something many hyperspecialized academics are incapable of. I had an argument with a person like that last week over a technical issue in a spec. As he started to explain that the effects of a proposed correction could not be predicted I suddenly realized that this subject was a couple of milimeters outside his field of expertise and he actually had no thinking skills at all.
Telling a 20 year old kid writing an O/S that he might want to look at the latest research rather than rehash an obsolete design does not sound like an unreasonable thing for an experienced prof to do. I think the people objecting here are more caught up in church of Linux religious bigottry than sense.
Some history here - Apple spent years suing anyone who copied the same GUI interface they stole from Xerox. If you are upset that there is no alternative to Windows blame apple. They killed GEM with a malicious and totaly unwarranted lawsuit.
Early on the FSF used to picket Apple over this.
Apple gets a free ride in the open source community despite being by far the most aggressive enforcer of bogus patents amongst the major computer companies.
Hold it right there. You might be interested to know that George Bush Snr was actually a member of the Reagan administration. In fact he was even the Vice President!
Blaming the previous admin for problems when it was the other party is one thing. Blaming your own party is a different matter.
NASA probably did not get into this mess overnight, the issues in the report probably go back to Clinton, Bush Mk I and possibly even Reagan. But the administration has had three and a half years to turn the situation arround.
If you remember the original bill of goods that the Bush 2000 campaign sold the country it was 'OK George is a boob, but what really matters is the people he arround him and they will all be grown ups'.
Of course the editors of slashdot only get bothered when the story is NASA. But the mismanagement at NASA is only par for the course for this administration. They can't plan a war - which would not be such a big problem if they were not so keen to start them. The treasury team is fired for telling us that the war would cost money. The environment secretary resigns in disgust when she finds that environment policy is set by campaign contributors and VP Cheney in this administration.
Oh yes, and since 9/11 we have had six directors of counter-terrorism. Richard Clarke was merely the first to resign from the post in disgust, since then there has been a series of resignations for the same reason.
In the US a patent inventor can claim the date of 'invention' to be a year before filing. So to definitely bust the patent you have to have prior art from 1999.
Oh and applicants are not even required to give the purported date of invention when they file. Yep, the USPTO is a racket.
Fortunately the patent is probably not half as broad as is being claimed. The invention is probably a particular way of introducing fake files.
Between the P2P companies who are the main vectors for spyware, the users who blindly claim that stealling is not stealling and the RIAA I don't know which group I am more disgusted at.
Oh yeah, those utter moorons in Iraq who ordered the use of the techniques taught in R21 "resistance to interrogation" on prisoners. They are the ones that disgust me, and all their appologists.
Who cares? Compared to the fact that the draft board is making plans to draft geeks the blacklisting of certain keywords in govt. computer systems seems a rather trivial issue.
"In line with today's needs, the Selective Service System's structure, programs and activities should be re-engineered toward maintaining a national inventory of American men and, for the first time, women, ages 18 through 34, with an added focus on identifying individuals with critical skills,"
How much more relevant the Slashdot editors choices of blacklisted keywords and the SEC fine of Gates are to the average geek reading slashdot! It will be so good to know when you get sent out to Baghdad to fight for Halliburton, that there are people back in the US fighting for the right of middle ranking civil servants to visit gay web sites during working hours.
If news of the plannning were not enough Rumsfeld has denied that the administration thinks that extending the draft is desirable or necessary. If you have been following the real news sites with stuff that matters you will know that Rumsfeld also said that there was no need for more troops in Iraq only a week before they were sent.
I doubt that Gates will pay, it will probably be whatever merchant bank was advising him here that screwed up.
Interesting that Gates gets fined for the same violation that "President" Bush commited repeatedly at Harken without any problems.
The Bush violation being somewhat more eggregious because he was selling stock while knowing that the company was cooking its books Enron style and would soon be forced to restate its earnings.
Perhaps if Gates had been in Skull and Bones he would have received the same treatment.
The concorde was a major money maker for BA, less so for Air France. The fuel costs were expensive but not unprofitably so. A standard 747 holds 300 people, most in cattle class. All seats on Concorde are first class.
The reason the plane failed economically was part due to the oil price shock hitting when Concorde entered service. A much bigger factor was Boeing lobbying to have Concorde banned from the main US airports, a piece of protectionism the US govt. went along with.
The Concorde consoirtium had the last laugh, these days it is known as Airbus and the Economist thinks it likely that Boeing will be out of the civil aviation business entirely in ten years time. In response to the US protectionism the EU underwrote development of Airbus. Boeing tried to respond with the idiotic 'fly by wire is dangerous FUD' and the rest is la historie. Boeing's current survival strategy is renting some very overpriced fuel tankers to the pentagon that meet far fewer of the original criteria set than the Airbus bid and cost about twice as much. But don't call that protectionism, its free enterprise.
Marc Andressen a 'Benedict Arnold' of open source? Err when exactly did Marc do anything in the open source movement. The NCSA Mosaic program was always license restricted to educational use only. Netscape was set up to exploit the web as a commercial enterprise.
Same with the rest of the guys mentioned. Very few ever promoted open source as the religion currently held by some on slashdot.
It seems somewhat odd for folk who are trying to reduce the cost of software to zero to start complaining about offshore programming.
Come to that it is pretty rich for IT workers whose entire business is helping companies displace workers in blue collar jobs to start complaining about the same thing happening to them.
Either? VA-Linux fails to point out the most likely reason people have not filed - they don't intend to.
VA-Linux really should try to ratchet down their attacks against their competitor here, at least Fox News admits that it is a propaganda outlet for the GOP.
Can we take this result as a sign that 96% of Microsoft users in California have no complaints about Microsoft's actions?
As for the cost of certificates, it really depends on what you are doing. If you are an enterprise of any real size or an ISP you are already spending hundreds of $ per month talking your way off various blocklists, and talking to other people who have wrongly ended up on your blocklist, or spammers trying it on...
There will still be a need for a certificate with CallerID or SPF, VeriSign are currently calling it an 'accreditation'.
Presumably they intend to make money out of this somehow. But then as they say in the Godfather 'none of us here are communists'. whatever happens the result is going to be a whole heck of a lot cheaper than the 'postage stamp' schemes some have been talking about. It is unlikely that any of those could be implemented without the cybercash patents - and guess who owns those?
Probably the hardest gig to get in the industry at this point - unless you are in the elite security architects world with a heavyweight reputation. Over the past few years they have been hiring the best out of AT&T Research, the remains of DEC, various IETF groups. I get called by their headhunters every few months but I have ten years experience in the field and I have written several well known specs.
The problem Microsoft face is similar to the cobol dusty decks problem. Its not the quality of the people working there now that has the biggest impact on overal security quality, its the people who worked there ten or fifteen years ago.
It is the same story for Linux. At the moment security is largely seen in terms of 'absence of known holes'. The main advantage Linux has here is less code means less bugs (often). But don't expect that to be the final word. We are moving to a world where positive security features like PKI built deep into the O/S are going to be needed. Microsoft is not completely there yet, but watch out when they are.