You did a partial quote which took his statment out of context then you build a straw man.
The context was irrelevant. The poster accused one party of dishonesty but had not bothered to read the article that showed that the other party happened to be in jail facing criminal theft charges.
Piper may or may not have done some lying
The allegations are rather more serious than merely lying. They involve the theft of $200,000. That is grand larceny.
but it is not the same issue as Microsofts lying and cheating with the goal of market dominance.
Dishonesty is dishonesty is dishonesty. Your attempt to draw a moral distinction between corporate behaviour (bad) and personal theft (irrelevant) simply does not work. The fact that Piper is in jail on theft charges is very relevant when considering the significance of the story. This does not sound to me like the unarguable triumph of Microsoft alternatives on the merits. On the contrary it sounds like the sort of shifty deal that takes place in Enron country.
Very nice straw man
You do not appear to understand what a straw man is. A straw man is falsely attributing an argument to the other side in order to be able to dismiss it with ease. I attributed no arguments to the other side, hence no straw man.
Yes, Piper may be a liar, a cheat, and a thief (we don't even have a plea in the case to which you refer), but not in connection with the city of Houston's bidding process.... In fact, I'm at a loss to explain the newspaper's decision to drag this unrelated scandal into the article. I
How do you know for sure?
People who are liars and cheats who steal $200,000 are rarely liars and cheats on a single isolated occasion. A track record of serving his own interests against the interests of his employers is certainly relevant and has a direct bearing on the subject matter of the article.
We don't know if Piper had an ulterior motive or not. However he would not be the first government employee to take kickbacks in a tender process. The problem is that at this point the guy simply has no credibility. So we can't come to any conclusion as to the reason the city made its decision.
Just because the editors seem to dislike Microsoft (which I would assume) doesn't mean they're being paid,
Hey, we know they are being paid by a Microsoft competitor, VALinux has owned slashdot for years.
The point I am making is that you can argue a case far more effectively if you choose your best points and make only those rather than trying to throw everything against the wall to see what will stick.
A classic example of this was Bob Barr's ridiculous impeachment campaign against Clinton which began before Clinton even took the oath of office. Barr was one of the loonies accusing Clinton of helping Nicaraguan Contras to ship drugs into the US. He also accused Clinton of being involved in the murder of Vince Foster, despite having absolutely no evidence. After six years of antics by the Starrs and Barrs the public were convinced that the scandals were entirely manufactured and willing to disbelieve anything.
This case sounds to me to be the classic example of a story that can easily backfire. The guy who instigated the switch is at the very least a flake, leaving the city in the lurch after pushing the deal through. At worst he is an outright crook.
As for the fact that the AG found 'no evidence' that bribery had played a part in the switch, the fact that the chief instigator is in jail on fraud charges certainly creates a smell.
Microsoft has spent years and years outright lying, cheating, and stealing
Hmm, actually that would be Piper, the guy who initiated the move from Microsoft:
Two days later, Piper announced his resignation to take a higher-paying job as chief technology officer for San Diego County. Council members Parker and Ada Williams, who voted for SimDesk because of Piper's assurances that the city would save money, said in interviews they felt duped when he resigned.
But Piper didn't last long in his new job. Shortly after Piper arrived in San Diego, Tatro alleged that he had rigged the bidding to assure a SimDesk win. That triggered an investigation by Houston's Inspector General, who found the allegations groundless. The county District Attorney, in a separate probe, examined Piper's financial records and stumbled into evidence that Piper may have embezzled $200,000 from his previous employer, Reliant Energy. On Dec. 11, Piper was indicted on felony theft charges and jailed.
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source. Particularly as it appears that Sim desk is actually closed source and that this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story. You don't think that maybe some of the slashdot editors are getting paid by a Microsoft competitor or something?
No. My problem's with the senders, not the messages. What Hotmail should do is send back an email saying "Your message has been rejected because you have not been authorized by this user. If you'd like to request authorization, click here and follow the instructions."
This sounds like a good idea, only there are quite a few inconsiderate sons of bitches (the self important Dan Berstein for example) who abuse this type of scheme sending you a reply notice every single time you send him a message.
Over the past 2 days I got 86 SPAMs and 3 bounce back messages indicating that my email address had been hijacked by a SPAMmer. What this proposal would do is to cause me to receive in addition annother 50+ rejection messages from email I did not send.
Clueless attempts to work arround spam are causing almost as much harm as the spam itself. When the Real Time Blacklists for open relays started lots of people cheered, unfortunately a lot of the blacklist maintainers now use them as a tool for private censorship rather than to list open relays as originally claimed. SPEWS is currently listing all UUNET domains in an attempt to blackmail UUNET into dropping a site the maintainer disapproves of. No recourse, no accountability, no due process, not even an email address for complaints.
What we really need is an authorization infrastructure so that you can tell that a message definitely did not come from me. At present we only have S/MIME which can demonstrate that the message came from me but does not provide proof for the converse.
With an infrastructure of that type in place it would not be necessary to manually process every single entry. For example Hotmail, Yahoo and the other major ISPs all perform rate limiting on the emails that they send out and on account signups, so you can be reasonably sure that mail sent from those accounts is not spam. The spam you get purporting to come from AOL or Hotmail is actually forged.
The Canadian law is a perfectly reasonable one; this isn't another example of Chinese censorship
The real issue is whether the constraints on free speech are for a reasonable purpose and for a limited time. Ensuring a fair trial is considered a reasonable purpose in pretty much the whole of the developed world with the exception of the US. The problem is that the press are pretty much in the pocket of the prosecutors, a court journalist knows that the DA is going to be there much longer than any individual defendant, so better make sure you keep in with your sources.
It is pretty much proven beyond doubt that Ken Starr repeatedly made illegal leaks to the press during his time as 'independent' counsel. If a prosecutor can do that to the President with impunity they can do it to pretty much who they choose.
A much more serious problem is when politicians use national laws to try to suppress stories that embarass them. This is currently the case with the German Chancellor who has obtained an injunction in the German courts to prevent the Mail on Sunday from publishing allegations of adultery with a television reporter. The mail does not have a web site The Guardian has a good piece on this case.
The odd thing in the German case is that the Chancellor is attempting to use the German courts to impose an injunction on a UK newspaper. The reason that it is odd is that if you can't get an injunction under the notoriously plaintif biased British Libel laws then you can't have much of a case. Schroeder appears to be attempting to use the German privacy laws to suppress publication in the UK asserting that the EU is a single jurisdicition. Perhaps so, but in that case the German court would have to apply British law which does not recognise a privacy right.
There are other cases of cross jurisdictional disputes. The UK has long been a favourite destination for libel plaintifs sicne although 'truth is an absolute defense' the rules of the game are rigged so even if you have proof the jury probably won't hear it.
While the net allows people to route arround censorship they can only do so if they know they are getting a censored or filtered world view.
People in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel know that their media is censored and they are pretty good at routing arround it if they are one of the minority who want to know what is really going on. If you buy the story promoted by the Murdoch press and the Republican echo chamber that the only fault of the US media is 'liberal bias' you probably won't go elsewhere to find out what is going on.
That is one reason I like Google news so much, you can compare side by side the US reports of an event with the local reports. You won't find a report of the arms embargo that Britain has imposed against Israel in the US press, but you can find it in the UK and Israeli press. One might think that is kinda an interesting little piece of data.
Not understanding that US based spam houses use foreign servers is INSIGHTFUL
There was quite a bit of this sort of talk at the conference, even more in the hallways. 'Well obviously X, so Y annot possibly work'. Only problem being that almost nobody bothered to quantify X so the point was not too forcefull.
One of the best talks was by a lawyer who has succesfully sued spammers and won several judgements, including one against Ralsky. It does not actually matter if the server is located abroad, if the spam hits the US and you are in the US you have a serious problem if the spam can be traced to you. So much for 'legal methods don't work at all'.
Most of the papers were on various Bayesian filtering type methods. This was largely because the organizer was Paul Graham who wrote the paper 'A plan for Spam' that was about Bayesian techniques. Those of us who had spent time at the AI lab were wandering round saying 'one poisitve outcome the conference might have is reaching agreement that bayesian filtering does not work'. Unfortunately the format meant that none of the papers got a particularly thorough airing.
The biggest problem with content inspection is that the spammers can counter-program to avoid it. That is why the naive keyword filtering schemes no longer work
The best paper on the heuristic filtering was by an MIT undergraduate Michael Salib who seemed to have been the only researcher doing real reasearch. He compared the results from the Bayesian approach with a statistical approach driven using least mean squares. Then he kicked out various features and looked to see if doing so. It turned out that he got the best results by only looking at the headers. This is not too suprising when did you last get a spam with a genuine from address?
So this is a real doozy of a precedent eh? what happens when Gator demands that its spyware be bundled with Windows XP?
Think this is far out? Consider that Realpayer is only marginaly less offensive than Gator, configuring the registry to auto-launch etc. And Real is currently competing with Microsoft.
I don't want more active code. Active code is the root of most security problems. I much preferred the pre-javascript web. What has javascript given us except pop-up ads and sites that disable your navigation buttons?
This has little to do with Microsoft's monopoly status. The complaint is that Microsoft signed a contract with Sun to distribute a Sun-certified JVM and Microsoft broke both the spirit and the letter of this agreement. They are now being forced to comply, and rightfully so
That is not the case. Sun agreed to a settlement of the Java case which allowed Microsoft to cease distribution of Java as one option. Sun cannot as a matter of law reopen the java contract case.
The current case is actually an offshoot of the anti-trust suit. Sun's actual complaint is amazingly constrained since they want to use Jackson's findings of fact to make their case and they have to avoid re-litigating the issues raised in the contract case.
Having read the court documents I don't think Sun has much of a chance once they hit the appelate level. The temporary injunction is pretty far reaching and significantly affects the status quo. The court's rulling is more like an interim punishment than preventing irreperable harm.
The other big problem for Sun is that the appeals court found Jackson to have been biased. While they refused to throw out the findings of fact Microsoft still has the right of appeal. Like don't hold your breath waiting for an outcome here. Sun will be lucky to get anywhere with the case before 2010.
Sun agreed to the settlement of the contract case. It does not seem very likely that the appeals court will be impressed by the desperate need to chabge that agreement now.
Java is dead regardless of the outcome of the case. Sun is merely showing that Java is a completely closed language that only Sun is allowed to change. Sun is only getting a free ride on this in the Linux-media like slashdot.
The french have no word for victory, so we all expect it from them. I still believe a stronger US isolationist policy that kept us out of WWII and no FDR might have made the world a more interesting place.
Hardly, all it would have meant is that the USSR would have occupied the whole of Germany and Austria in addition to the other parts of Eastern Europe. The Germans were defeated by the Russian war machine before the D-Day landings took place.
But the US did not have a choice, Japan and German both declared was on the US. It is like the ridiculous Republican speculation over 9/11, as if any US president would not have invaded Afghanistan in response. There was simply no choice but to go to war, the war was started by the other side.
The difference between Churchill/FDR and the appeasers/isolationists is that Churchill and FDR recognized the situation for what it was in advance of the attack. The appeasers would still have entered the war after - and did, Chamberlin declared war after Germany invaded Poland.
Churchill was also a briliant military tactician. Had the battle of Gallipoli gone the other way WWI would have been won several years earlier. It would have gone the other way but for Kamal Attaturk rallying the Turkish troops, and that despite the incompetent allied officers.
The failure in the Whitehouse on the other hand avoided going to Vietnam by getting daddy to pull strings, went AWOL and has lied about it ever since. And he dares compare himself to Churchill.
Universities mid 1970s through 1980s could not teach unix because of unix licensing bullshit..thus instead fo cs majors knowing the power and security features of unix when coding new OSes did something unsecure and mind numb such as VMS and windows and winNT!
VMS was designed to be B2 secure and was accredited as such. UNIX was not designed to be secure and met its goals.
Practically every security feature of UNIX appeared in VMS first. UNIX never did support rights identifiers or fine grained privilleges. Instead it was always security by recourse to bogus authority 'UNIX is secure so what unix does has to be the secure way to do it'.
UNIX did not even get shaddow passwords until several years after crack appeared even though the vulnerability was well known.
But you probably know all this and you are just trolling.
Security professionals have claimed for ten years that the most secure OSes are those whose cyrpto functions and code are up for open full review and modification
Which security professionals would that be. Bruce Schnier has repeatedly written about his skepticism on this point, the mere opportunity to conduct a review means nothing unless a review gets done. Case in point the US media had the opportunity to search the court records for Bush's criminal record at the last election, they didn't bother to do so however, it was only because someone present at the time remembered that the DUI story made it into the public domain.
To give another example often cited by Jeff Schiller, the Kerberos specs and code were published for ten years before someone discovered a major architectural flaw in the ticket design.
So no, expert review is usefull, publishing the code as open source means nothing.
Completely off topic, but I really wish that was so. When I did History GCSE it was ALL about the flipping industrial revolution and the poor old farmers. International politics barely got a lookin, let alone wars with the French.
Don't worry, after the industrial revolution only war of significance we lost against the perfidious French was the American Revolution. After that things looked up. They lost the battle of the nile, Trafalgar, the peninsular campaign and of course Waterloo. After that they confined their imperial pretensions to the glorious conquest of the Sahara Desert where the locals found that the best tactics were generally to leave the blighters to their own devices until they mostly died of thirst.
After that it was basically the French fought with us in the next couple of campaigns, Crimea and WWI. We will tactfully refrain from mentioning their performance in WWII.
(The US didn't lose land, the US didn't get forced into a treaty, and the US certainly didn't wake up one day and think "lets invade canada." So, they wound up just where they started, with a few less patriots and a few more heros.)
Au contraire, the US was forced into a treaty. The only reason why the US did not lose land was that George Canning, the British foreign secretary believed that while the US was in no position to prevent loss of territory it was in the best interests of the UK to forgo it.
The fact was that the US was not particularly important at the time. Britain was far more interested in maintaining control of India and defeating the French. Far better to come to an agreement with the US that would stick than insist on reparations and end up in an ongoing irridentist struggle.
The success of the 1812 treaty was the principal reason that the US and the UK went into Versailles with a much more concilliatory approach than the French who anexed parts of Germany and generally did everything they could to put Hitler in power.
J. Hutton Pulitzer is one of the most prolific independent Inventors of modern times and of the new millennium. His obvious "Invention and Passion Gene" seems to date back to his Royal German Ancestry as early as 1492
Hey, my ancestry goes back to 1942, on both sides of my family. So for that matter does anyone's the only difference is whether you know who it was or not. 1492 is not all that far back either, my ancestors fought at the battle of Hastings (both sides) in 1066 but there are folk whose pedigrees go back to whatever date you argue for the Yellow Emperor of China.
Of course it is all bollocks since genealogy tends to follow the male line and in practice it is only the female line whose accuracy can be assured. Adultery is not a modern invention, no matter who you are between 5% and 10% of your ancestors were bastards. If the gap between generations is 25 years that makes 20 generations since 1492, meaning that Pulitzer's chance of being legitimately descended from the royal family at no better than 35% with 12% being a more likely value.
speaker/panelist at such prestigious educational institutions as Harvard Business School, Stanford University, The Cato Institute, University of Michigan, University of Texas,
You have got to be pretty desperate if you end up putting the Cato Institute down on your speaking resume. Bit insensitive to put crank tank financed by rich rightwing crackpots to promote partisan views ahead of Michigan and Texas Universities though.
Just because you haven't heard this before or it deflates one of your personal sacred cows doesn't make it flamebait. American history texts in high school are so far off on every other topic
Edison did what every other inventor has done, made improvements on other ideas and combined ideas to create new inventions.
The American high school textbook hagiographies of Edison are easily explained by the role of school boards in choosing text books. Better not have anything in there that might upset a board member, no matter how loony. So don't tell the kids that the war of 1812 was about invading Canada and that the US lost, oh no it was about Britain impressing alleged US citizens and ended in a draw. When it comes to the civil war pretend that the South was unjustly attacked by the North, forget about the fact that the war was started by the South and was all about extending slavery to Texas and the Californias.
Just about every country has ludicrously biased school textbooks. The British ones are pretty hilarious, victory after victory against the French until the loss of Calais appears in a footnote. The German textbooks are reasonably accurate - they were written by the Allied powers.
Edison did some amazing stuff. He also did some pretty nasty and spiteful stuff, like opposing AC current and trashing Tessla to promote his own scheme. Edison invented the electric chair as part of his marketting campaign for DC - the chair used AC.
Google's lawyers would no doybt insist it is an adjective. Becomming a verb is a very bad thing for dillution claims
Google's recent arrival on the dotcom scene proves that the barriers to entry have not increased over time. Disproving yet another strand of looney analyst think. Remember the days when yahoo was worth $gazillions because it would be the 'portal' through which all e-commerce flowed?
Google displaced the other search engines using technology that was hardly unknown at the time. I think the fact altavista and hotbot did not respond indicates they were engaged in Lotus/Visicalc type sleeping on the job. They were in milk the cash cow mode. I suspect google will stay on top at least as long as it remains independent simply because they are like Microsoft, they keep working on the product as if they were number 3 even when they are number 1 by a long way.
The more interesting dynamic is what will happen after Yahoo switches from Google to inktomi which they just bought. I think this forces Google to go after Yahoo on all fronts. Google can copy Yahoo's stock chat site without much difficulty. The hosted web mail will not take much either. They already have dejanews and an interface to the advertisers. Yahoo meanwhile have let their catalog grow really stale, I don't know anyone who uses it these days except as a backup to google.
So question, if you are Ted Turner and the AOL merger of time warner had not gone through. What would you want to buy now, AOL or Google?
command interpreters that allow pipe connections between utilities with only a single keystroke (the "|" symbol)
Actually this is the only one that you state that was actually an innovation. Pipes existed in previous systems but you would pipe the output of one process to a buffer and then read it in the next.
The UNIX implementation of regular expressions in the command interpreter on the other hand is a botched job. It means that the only context in which a command is interpreted is the directory that the command is entered in. This means that you can't have a command that uses wildcard expansion to deal with objects that are not file names without delving into UNIX arcanae.
That is just pathetically wrong. The *only* decent command line systems in existence are (1) Unix command interpreters, and (2) strict copies of Unix command interpreters
That is completely untrue. There were good command line interpreters before UNIX was thought of. ITS, MULTICS and POP all had good command line interpreters. VMS had a very good, well abstracted command line interface. Unlike Unix the command and flag names actually stood for something in VMS, and if you did not like the names of the flags you could edit them at the system level - giving you immediate language portability.
If you want to talk Microsoft CLIs, Microsoft did at one time have a king of CLIs only few people would recognise it as such. Microsoft BASIC on the PET and Apple provided an environment where the command line and the scripting language were the same thing.
Henry Spenser was an arogant dork when he said what he said about UNIX. One could say the same thing with far more justification of the UNIX developers.
Don't mistake failing to agree with you with not understanding UNIX. The systems I have designed and helped design are used today by far more people than UNIX ever will be.
Actually Linux isn't derived from any Unix. That's why some people refuse to call it a "Unix" platform. That's also the reason many of the original Linux developers jumped onto the bandwagon: the legal status of BSD was in question because it was based on AT&T code.
That is why I considered the patent issue rather than the copyright issue. A patent encumberance would affect Linux since it uses the UNIX design. However the UNIX design is now two decades old and very few patents were filled in any case.
It is possible that a copyright claim over the interface design could be made. However the courts have not been at all keen on that type of reasoning. Apple did not get very far against Microsoft.
The worst that could happen here would be that the Linux world would have to develop a new shell. That would be inconvenient but hardly be a great loss.
Have you ever used Multics? Name a feature of UNIX that is not in a previous system.
The principal 'innovation' of UNIX was treating every device without exception as being a part of the file system. As with the other innovation of the SUID there has been much debate since as to whether they are such great ideas.
Structureless file systems existed before UNIX. Here again the argument is somewhat fuzzy, VMS supports all the file types of UNIX and in addition supports ISAM structured files. You can argue whether or not this is a good thing, but you certainly can't get a patent for doing half of what previous systems did.
UNIX is an integration exercise, not an innovation exercise. As such there is very little that is going to be innovative in a patentable sense. The explicit aim was to strip MULTICS back so that it became small enough that it could actually be used as an O/S on the hardware of the day.
AT&T regarded UNIX as a research project and put practically no resources into it until long after it had been adopted by Sun. That is why practically all the commercial UNIX O/S were the BSD variety until the 90s.
UNIX is only one rather small component of Linux. The majority of the code is layered applications such as X-Windows that have no connection to the AT&T code base and not that much to UNIX. X-Windows has always run on other O/S such as VMS.
If you take out the layered applications you are left with the kernel, the shell and mostly a lot of dreck that could be cleaned out without most people noticing. When was the last time you played a UNIX console game?
We'll probably find he's just compiled Phoenix and put his own name in the title bar...
Most likely he has taken an open source browser and added in his own extensions. This is the type of innovation that making the browser open source is meant to support.
As for speeding up browsing by a factor 100% that is pretty easy. We did a lot of work on HTTP-NG and you can speed up downloads a lot just by compressing the headers so that they fit into a single packet. HTML is also very compressible. The biggest mistake we made in the original Web code was not putting a lightweight compression scheme into the code, although it did make it into the specs.
Of course the reason this did not happen was the LZ patent GIF fiasco and the then state of the GNU compression libraries. Even so Microsoft has supported compression in IE for some time.
I am rather more skeptical about the 500% claim. I don't think that there is that much redundancy unless you have completely artificial examples.
If SCO's business model has previously included making money off Linux, it would be an act of either desperation or spite to suddenly demand royalties.
Or they have hired a jerk as IP counsel. There are law firms that will mindlessly extract value from an IP portfolio on your behalf for a cut of the profits.
There are two issues that would appear relevant here. First is whether there might be a question of detrimental reliance. Having failled to enforce the rights now asserted for so long have the rights become unenforceable? While patents are not like trademarks and lack of enforcement does not necessarily lead to loss, there are circumstances where it can.
The more interesting issue is the question of which of the SCO patents have expired and which are enforceable in the first place. There is very little in UNIX that is innovative. Most of the design is simply a stripped down version on MULTICS. While simplifying a system is often the key to commercial success it does not win any patents.
Furthermore Linux and BSD are derrived from the original UNIX of 20, 25 years ago rather than the reworked System 5 version. The system 5 release was the first time AT&T applied singificant development resources to UNIX, up until then they had simply been content to sit and collect their royalty checks.
The problem for the Linux community is that defending a patent suit, even a completely frivolous one will cost in the region of $2 million.
Finaly, we can do without the knee jerk anti-Microsoft reaction to every Linux story. Microsoft has played the patent game defensively.
Worse than that is this group of Americans [reaganlegacy.org] who think that Ronald Reagan's face should be carved into Rushmore along side the other four.
Now, now, they are only proposing to rename the highway leading up to Mt Rushmore.
Of course there should be more political monuments. For a start the ANWAR oil field should be named for Ralph Nader without which it would have never existed (well not for 4 years at least).
The FBI HQ is in desperate need of renaming, Hoover having been a crook. How about Bill Clinton since he spent so much of his Presidency on FBI matters.
The Mall of America would be renamed for Nancy Reagan.
Enron's corporate jet to be renamed the George W Bush since he made so much use of it during the campaign.
The shroud purchased to cover the spirt of Justice in the DoJ to be renamed the John Ashcrof Imperial Buqua.
John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project to be renamed the George Orwell 1984 project.
As likely as that may be, I saw HERE [commodore.ca] that PET stands for Personal Electronic Transactor. (look on the sidebar under "PET PREview")
That was marketesse, yet they did put that in the manual when the second series came out. However Chuck Pedle stated that they named it the Pet after the Pet Rock craze swept the US, they thought it would be cute to have a pet computer.
Incidentally, great choice of story slashcrew a site that is completely devoid of any information whatsoever is posted. Either this thing is being done by a friend of theirs or it is a REALY slow news day and they don't have a girlfriend or anything to spend sunday night with.
Slashdot Mirror
The context was irrelevant. The poster accused one party of dishonesty but had not bothered to read the article that showed that the other party happened to be in jail facing criminal theft charges.
Piper may or may not have done some lying
The allegations are rather more serious than merely lying. They involve the theft of $200,000. That is grand larceny.
but it is not the same issue as Microsofts lying and cheating with the goal of market dominance.
Dishonesty is dishonesty is dishonesty. Your attempt to draw a moral distinction between corporate behaviour (bad) and personal theft (irrelevant) simply does not work. The fact that Piper is in jail on theft charges is very relevant when considering the significance of the story. This does not sound to me like the unarguable triumph of Microsoft alternatives on the merits. On the contrary it sounds like the sort of shifty deal that takes place in Enron country.
Very nice straw man
You do not appear to understand what a straw man is. A straw man is falsely attributing an argument to the other side in order to be able to dismiss it with ease. I attributed no arguments to the other side, hence no straw man.
How do you know for sure?
People who are liars and cheats who steal $200,000 are rarely liars and cheats on a single isolated occasion. A track record of serving his own interests against the interests of his employers is certainly relevant and has a direct bearing on the subject matter of the article.
We don't know if Piper had an ulterior motive or not. However he would not be the first government employee to take kickbacks in a tender process. The problem is that at this point the guy simply has no credibility. So we can't come to any conclusion as to the reason the city made its decision.
Hey, we know they are being paid by a Microsoft competitor, VALinux has owned slashdot for years.
The point I am making is that you can argue a case far more effectively if you choose your best points and make only those rather than trying to throw everything against the wall to see what will stick.
A classic example of this was Bob Barr's ridiculous impeachment campaign against Clinton which began before Clinton even took the oath of office. Barr was one of the loonies accusing Clinton of helping Nicaraguan Contras to ship drugs into the US. He also accused Clinton of being involved in the murder of Vince Foster, despite having absolutely no evidence. After six years of antics by the Starrs and Barrs the public were convinced that the scandals were entirely manufactured and willing to disbelieve anything.
This case sounds to me to be the classic example of a story that can easily backfire. The guy who instigated the switch is at the very least a flake, leaving the city in the lurch after pushing the deal through. At worst he is an outright crook.
As for the fact that the AG found 'no evidence' that bribery had played a part in the switch, the fact that the chief instigator is in jail on fraud charges certainly creates a smell.
Hmm, actually that would be Piper, the guy who initiated the move from Microsoft:
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source. Particularly as it appears that Sim desk is actually closed source and that this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story. You don't think that maybe some of the slashdot editors are getting paid by a Microsoft competitor or something?This sounds like a good idea, only there are quite a few inconsiderate sons of bitches (the self important Dan Berstein for example) who abuse this type of scheme sending you a reply notice every single time you send him a message.
Over the past 2 days I got 86 SPAMs and 3 bounce back messages indicating that my email address had been hijacked by a SPAMmer. What this proposal would do is to cause me to receive in addition annother 50+ rejection messages from email I did not send.
Clueless attempts to work arround spam are causing almost as much harm as the spam itself. When the Real Time Blacklists for open relays started lots of people cheered, unfortunately a lot of the blacklist maintainers now use them as a tool for private censorship rather than to list open relays as originally claimed. SPEWS is currently listing all UUNET domains in an attempt to blackmail UUNET into dropping a site the maintainer disapproves of. No recourse, no accountability, no due process, not even an email address for complaints.
What we really need is an authorization infrastructure so that you can tell that a message definitely did not come from me. At present we only have S/MIME which can demonstrate that the message came from me but does not provide proof for the converse.
With an infrastructure of that type in place it would not be necessary to manually process every single entry. For example Hotmail, Yahoo and the other major ISPs all perform rate limiting on the emails that they send out and on account signups, so you can be reasonably sure that mail sent from those accounts is not spam. The spam you get purporting to come from AOL or Hotmail is actually forged.
The real issue is whether the constraints on free speech are for a reasonable purpose and for a limited time. Ensuring a fair trial is considered a reasonable purpose in pretty much the whole of the developed world with the exception of the US. The problem is that the press are pretty much in the pocket of the prosecutors, a court journalist knows that the DA is going to be there much longer than any individual defendant, so better make sure you keep in with your sources.
It is pretty much proven beyond doubt that Ken Starr repeatedly made illegal leaks to the press during his time as 'independent' counsel. If a prosecutor can do that to the President with impunity they can do it to pretty much who they choose.
A much more serious problem is when politicians use national laws to try to suppress stories that embarass them. This is currently the case with the German Chancellor who has obtained an injunction in the German courts to prevent the Mail on Sunday from publishing allegations of adultery with a television reporter. The mail does not have a web site The Guardian has a good piece on this case.
The odd thing in the German case is that the Chancellor is attempting to use the German courts to impose an injunction on a UK newspaper. The reason that it is odd is that if you can't get an injunction under the notoriously plaintif biased British Libel laws then you can't have much of a case. Schroeder appears to be attempting to use the German privacy laws to suppress publication in the UK asserting that the EU is a single jurisdicition. Perhaps so, but in that case the German court would have to apply British law which does not recognise a privacy right.
There are other cases of cross jurisdictional disputes. The UK has long been a favourite destination for libel plaintifs sicne although 'truth is an absolute defense' the rules of the game are rigged so even if you have proof the jury probably won't hear it.
While the net allows people to route arround censorship they can only do so if they know they are getting a censored or filtered world view. People in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel know that their media is censored and they are pretty good at routing arround it if they are one of the minority who want to know what is really going on. If you buy the story promoted by the Murdoch press and the Republican echo chamber that the only fault of the US media is 'liberal bias' you probably won't go elsewhere to find out what is going on.
That is one reason I like Google news so much, you can compare side by side the US reports of an event with the local reports. You won't find a report of the arms embargo that Britain has imposed against Israel in the US press, but you can find it in the UK and Israeli press. One might think that is kinda an interesting little piece of data.
There was quite a bit of this sort of talk at the conference, even more in the hallways. 'Well obviously X, so Y annot possibly work'. Only problem being that almost nobody bothered to quantify X so the point was not too forcefull.
One of the best talks was by a lawyer who has succesfully sued spammers and won several judgements, including one against Ralsky. It does not actually matter if the server is located abroad, if the spam hits the US and you are in the US you have a serious problem if the spam can be traced to you. So much for 'legal methods don't work at all'.
Most of the papers were on various Bayesian filtering type methods. This was largely because the organizer was Paul Graham who wrote the paper 'A plan for Spam' that was about Bayesian techniques. Those of us who had spent time at the AI lab were wandering round saying 'one poisitve outcome the conference might have is reaching agreement that bayesian filtering does not work'. Unfortunately the format meant that none of the papers got a particularly thorough airing.
The biggest problem with content inspection is that the spammers can counter-program to avoid it. That is why the naive keyword filtering schemes no longer work
The best paper on the heuristic filtering was by an MIT undergraduate Michael Salib who seemed to have been the only researcher doing real reasearch. He compared the results from the Bayesian approach with a statistical approach driven using least mean squares. Then he kicked out various features and looked to see if doing so. It turned out that he got the best results by only looking at the headers. This is not too suprising when did you last get a spam with a genuine from address?
Think this is far out? Consider that Realpayer is only marginaly less offensive than Gator, configuring the registry to auto-launch etc. And Real is currently competing with Microsoft.
I don't want more active code. Active code is the root of most security problems. I much preferred the pre-javascript web. What has javascript given us except pop-up ads and sites that disable your navigation buttons?
That is not the case. Sun agreed to a settlement of the Java case which allowed Microsoft to cease distribution of Java as one option. Sun cannot as a matter of law reopen the java contract case.
The current case is actually an offshoot of the anti-trust suit. Sun's actual complaint is amazingly constrained since they want to use Jackson's findings of fact to make their case and they have to avoid re-litigating the issues raised in the contract case.
Having read the court documents I don't think Sun has much of a chance once they hit the appelate level. The temporary injunction is pretty far reaching and significantly affects the status quo. The court's rulling is more like an interim punishment than preventing irreperable harm.
The other big problem for Sun is that the appeals court found Jackson to have been biased. While they refused to throw out the findings of fact Microsoft still has the right of appeal. Like don't hold your breath waiting for an outcome here. Sun will be lucky to get anywhere with the case before 2010.
Sun agreed to the settlement of the contract case. It does not seem very likely that the appeals court will be impressed by the desperate need to chabge that agreement now.
Java is dead regardless of the outcome of the case. Sun is merely showing that Java is a completely closed language that only Sun is allowed to change. Sun is only getting a free ride on this in the Linux-media like slashdot.
Hardly, all it would have meant is that the USSR would have occupied the whole of Germany and Austria in addition to the other parts of Eastern Europe. The Germans were defeated by the Russian war machine before the D-Day landings took place.
But the US did not have a choice, Japan and German both declared was on the US. It is like the ridiculous Republican speculation over 9/11, as if any US president would not have invaded Afghanistan in response. There was simply no choice but to go to war, the war was started by the other side.
The difference between Churchill/FDR and the appeasers/isolationists is that Churchill and FDR recognized the situation for what it was in advance of the attack. The appeasers would still have entered the war after - and did, Chamberlin declared war after Germany invaded Poland.
Churchill was also a briliant military tactician. Had the battle of Gallipoli gone the other way WWI would have been won several years earlier. It would have gone the other way but for Kamal Attaturk rallying the Turkish troops, and that despite the incompetent allied officers.
The failure in the Whitehouse on the other hand avoided going to Vietnam by getting daddy to pull strings, went AWOL and has lied about it ever since. And he dares compare himself to Churchill.
VMS was designed to be B2 secure and was accredited as such. UNIX was not designed to be secure and met its goals.
Practically every security feature of UNIX appeared in VMS first. UNIX never did support rights identifiers or fine grained privilleges. Instead it was always security by recourse to bogus authority 'UNIX is secure so what unix does has to be the secure way to do it'.
UNIX did not even get shaddow passwords until several years after crack appeared even though the vulnerability was well known.
But you probably know all this and you are just trolling.
Security professionals have claimed for ten years that the most secure OSes are those whose cyrpto functions and code are up for open full review and modification
Which security professionals would that be. Bruce Schnier has repeatedly written about his skepticism on this point, the mere opportunity to conduct a review means nothing unless a review gets done. Case in point the US media had the opportunity to search the court records for Bush's criminal record at the last election, they didn't bother to do so however, it was only because someone present at the time remembered that the DUI story made it into the public domain.
To give another example often cited by Jeff Schiller, the Kerberos specs and code were published for ten years before someone discovered a major architectural flaw in the ticket design.
So no, expert review is usefull, publishing the code as open source means nothing.
Don't worry, after the industrial revolution only war of significance we lost against the perfidious French was the American Revolution. After that things looked up. They lost the battle of the nile, Trafalgar, the peninsular campaign and of course Waterloo. After that they confined their imperial pretensions to the glorious conquest of the Sahara Desert where the locals found that the best tactics were generally to leave the blighters to their own devices until they mostly died of thirst.
After that it was basically the French fought with us in the next couple of campaigns, Crimea and WWI. We will tactfully refrain from mentioning their performance in WWII.
Au contraire, the US was forced into a treaty. The only reason why the US did not lose land was that George Canning, the British foreign secretary believed that while the US was in no position to prevent loss of territory it was in the best interests of the UK to forgo it.
The fact was that the US was not particularly important at the time. Britain was far more interested in maintaining control of India and defeating the French. Far better to come to an agreement with the US that would stick than insist on reparations and end up in an ongoing irridentist struggle.
The success of the 1812 treaty was the principal reason that the US and the UK went into Versailles with a much more concilliatory approach than the French who anexed parts of Germany and generally did everything they could to put Hitler in power.
Hey, my ancestry goes back to 1942, on both sides of my family. So for that matter does anyone's the only difference is whether you know who it was or not. 1492 is not all that far back either, my ancestors fought at the battle of Hastings (both sides) in 1066 but there are folk whose pedigrees go back to whatever date you argue for the Yellow Emperor of China.
Of course it is all bollocks since genealogy tends to follow the male line and in practice it is only the female line whose accuracy can be assured. Adultery is not a modern invention, no matter who you are between 5% and 10% of your ancestors were bastards. If the gap between generations is 25 years that makes 20 generations since 1492, meaning that Pulitzer's chance of being legitimately descended from the royal family at no better than 35% with 12% being a more likely value.
speaker/panelist at such prestigious educational institutions as Harvard Business School, Stanford University, The Cato Institute, University of Michigan, University of Texas,
You have got to be pretty desperate if you end up putting the Cato Institute down on your speaking resume. Bit insensitive to put crank tank financed by rich rightwing crackpots to promote partisan views ahead of Michigan and Texas Universities though.
Edison did what every other inventor has done, made improvements on other ideas and combined ideas to create new inventions.
The American high school textbook hagiographies of Edison are easily explained by the role of school boards in choosing text books. Better not have anything in there that might upset a board member, no matter how loony. So don't tell the kids that the war of 1812 was about invading Canada and that the US lost, oh no it was about Britain impressing alleged US citizens and ended in a draw. When it comes to the civil war pretend that the South was unjustly attacked by the North, forget about the fact that the war was started by the South and was all about extending slavery to Texas and the Californias.
Just about every country has ludicrously biased school textbooks. The British ones are pretty hilarious, victory after victory against the French until the loss of Calais appears in a footnote. The German textbooks are reasonably accurate - they were written by the Allied powers.
Edison did some amazing stuff. He also did some pretty nasty and spiteful stuff, like opposing AC current and trashing Tessla to promote his own scheme. Edison invented the electric chair as part of his marketting campaign for DC - the chair used AC.
Google's recent arrival on the dotcom scene proves that the barriers to entry have not increased over time. Disproving yet another strand of looney analyst think. Remember the days when yahoo was worth $gazillions because it would be the 'portal' through which all e-commerce flowed?
Google displaced the other search engines using technology that was hardly unknown at the time. I think the fact altavista and hotbot did not respond indicates they were engaged in Lotus/Visicalc type sleeping on the job. They were in milk the cash cow mode. I suspect google will stay on top at least as long as it remains independent simply because they are like Microsoft, they keep working on the product as if they were number 3 even when they are number 1 by a long way.
The more interesting dynamic is what will happen after Yahoo switches from Google to inktomi which they just bought. I think this forces Google to go after Yahoo on all fronts. Google can copy Yahoo's stock chat site without much difficulty. The hosted web mail will not take much either. They already have dejanews and an interface to the advertisers. Yahoo meanwhile have let their catalog grow really stale, I don't know anyone who uses it these days except as a backup to google.
So question, if you are Ted Turner and the AOL merger of time warner had not gone through. What would you want to buy now, AOL or Google?
Actually this is the only one that you state that was actually an innovation. Pipes existed in previous systems but you would pipe the output of one process to a buffer and then read it in the next.
The UNIX implementation of regular expressions in the command interpreter on the other hand is a botched job. It means that the only context in which a command is interpreted is the directory that the command is entered in. This means that you can't have a command that uses wildcard expansion to deal with objects that are not file names without delving into UNIX arcanae.
That is just pathetically wrong. The *only* decent command line systems in existence are (1) Unix command interpreters, and (2) strict copies of Unix command interpreters
That is completely untrue. There were good command line interpreters before UNIX was thought of. ITS, MULTICS and POP all had good command line interpreters. VMS had a very good, well abstracted command line interface. Unlike Unix the command and flag names actually stood for something in VMS, and if you did not like the names of the flags you could edit them at the system level - giving you immediate language portability.
If you want to talk Microsoft CLIs, Microsoft did at one time have a king of CLIs only few people would recognise it as such. Microsoft BASIC on the PET and Apple provided an environment where the command line and the scripting language were the same thing.
Henry Spenser was an arogant dork when he said what he said about UNIX. One could say the same thing with far more justification of the UNIX developers.
Don't mistake failing to agree with you with not understanding UNIX. The systems I have designed and helped design are used today by far more people than UNIX ever will be.
That is why I considered the patent issue rather than the copyright issue. A patent encumberance would affect Linux since it uses the UNIX design. However the UNIX design is now two decades old and very few patents were filled in any case.
It is possible that a copyright claim over the interface design could be made. However the courts have not been at all keen on that type of reasoning. Apple did not get very far against Microsoft.
The worst that could happen here would be that the Linux world would have to develop a new shell. That would be inconvenient but hardly be a great loss.
Have you ever used Multics? Name a feature of UNIX that is not in a previous system.
The principal 'innovation' of UNIX was treating every device without exception as being a part of the file system. As with the other innovation of the SUID there has been much debate since as to whether they are such great ideas.
Structureless file systems existed before UNIX. Here again the argument is somewhat fuzzy, VMS supports all the file types of UNIX and in addition supports ISAM structured files. You can argue whether or not this is a good thing, but you certainly can't get a patent for doing half of what previous systems did.
UNIX is an integration exercise, not an innovation exercise. As such there is very little that is going to be innovative in a patentable sense. The explicit aim was to strip MULTICS back so that it became small enough that it could actually be used as an O/S on the hardware of the day.
AT&T regarded UNIX as a research project and put practically no resources into it until long after it had been adopted by Sun. That is why practically all the commercial UNIX O/S were the BSD variety until the 90s.
UNIX is only one rather small component of Linux. The majority of the code is layered applications such as X-Windows that have no connection to the AT&T code base and not that much to UNIX. X-Windows has always run on other O/S such as VMS.
If you take out the layered applications you are left with the kernel, the shell and mostly a lot of dreck that could be cleaned out without most people noticing. When was the last time you played a UNIX console game?
Most likely he has taken an open source browser and added in his own extensions. This is the type of innovation that making the browser open source is meant to support.
As for speeding up browsing by a factor 100% that is pretty easy. We did a lot of work on HTTP-NG and you can speed up downloads a lot just by compressing the headers so that they fit into a single packet. HTML is also very compressible. The biggest mistake we made in the original Web code was not putting a lightweight compression scheme into the code, although it did make it into the specs.
Of course the reason this did not happen was the LZ patent GIF fiasco and the then state of the GNU compression libraries. Even so Microsoft has supported compression in IE for some time.
I am rather more skeptical about the 500% claim. I don't think that there is that much redundancy unless you have completely artificial examples.
Or they have hired a jerk as IP counsel. There are law firms that will mindlessly extract value from an IP portfolio on your behalf for a cut of the profits.
There are two issues that would appear relevant here. First is whether there might be a question of detrimental reliance. Having failled to enforce the rights now asserted for so long have the rights become unenforceable? While patents are not like trademarks and lack of enforcement does not necessarily lead to loss, there are circumstances where it can.
The more interesting issue is the question of which of the SCO patents have expired and which are enforceable in the first place. There is very little in UNIX that is innovative. Most of the design is simply a stripped down version on MULTICS. While simplifying a system is often the key to commercial success it does not win any patents.
Furthermore Linux and BSD are derrived from the original UNIX of 20, 25 years ago rather than the reworked System 5 version. The system 5 release was the first time AT&T applied singificant development resources to UNIX, up until then they had simply been content to sit and collect their royalty checks.
The problem for the Linux community is that defending a patent suit, even a completely frivolous one will cost in the region of $2 million.
Finaly, we can do without the knee jerk anti-Microsoft reaction to every Linux story. Microsoft has played the patent game defensively.
Now, now, they are only proposing to rename the highway leading up to Mt Rushmore.
Of course there should be more political monuments. For a start the ANWAR oil field should be named for Ralph Nader without which it would have never existed (well not for 4 years at least).
The FBI HQ is in desperate need of renaming, Hoover having been a crook. How about Bill Clinton since he spent so much of his Presidency on FBI matters.
The Mall of America would be renamed for Nancy Reagan.
Enron's corporate jet to be renamed the George W Bush since he made so much use of it during the campaign.
The shroud purchased to cover the spirt of Justice in the DoJ to be renamed the John Ashcrof Imperial Buqua.
John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project to be renamed the George Orwell 1984 project.
That was marketesse, yet they did put that in the manual when the second series came out. However Chuck Pedle stated that they named it the Pet after the Pet Rock craze swept the US, they thought it would be cute to have a pet computer.
Incidentally, great choice of story slashcrew a site that is completely devoid of any information whatsoever is posted. Either this thing is being done by a friend of theirs or it is a REALY slow news day and they don't have a girlfriend or anything to spend sunday night with.
Nah, that would be Mt Rush Limbaugh.
You know, just saying "Mount Rush Limbaugh" is enough to make any person of taste feel queasy.
There is a bunch of looney Americans currently planning to carve the face of Alexander the Great onto the hills of Macedonia. Never mind the fact that nobody kniws what he looked like
bit 0 of p is a 1
bit 1023 of p is also a 1
OK that is 2 bits out of 1024, thats 1/512th of the total