I'll take that over the current versions of NetWare that boot off DOS.
Could we give up on this? Please? Netware uses an MS-DOS type system as a bootloader for good and sufficient reasons (simple, reliable, available everywhere in the world, small, fits on a floppy, provides system monitor functionality to Intel-based systems which historically have not had ROM-based monitors). Hell, a friend of mine once managed to get an entire Portugese Netware installation up and running without knowing a word of that language due to the simplicity of the installation model.
But Netware does not run on MS-DOS. And saying so makes you look a bit ill-informed.
And when the company goes bankrupt and you find the source is not in escrow (or not all of the source is in escrow, or there is third-party IP in the escrowed source, or...):
who are you going to sue?
The escrowee. That's what he is for. If he doesn't subrogate against the supplier's officers as individuals, them too. Although they are probably bankrupt you can still take away their childrens' college fund.
Look, I am in personal agreement with the author's basic point: there are a lot of advantages to open source for software users. But there are solutions to this problem in the propriatary world too, and propriatary methods cannot be condemned under the theory that there are no such methods.
While Steve Baller is trying to outlaw the GPL, Bill Gates is doing the same for Competion in general. After that they will work on a bill to outlaw free speech.
RIAA and MPAA are definately working on outlawing various forms of free speech, so that one is covered. And the so-called "penalty" phase of the Microsoft anti-trust trial would seem to indicate that Microsoft has quite a bit of control over what is and is not considered competition at the Federal level. I realize you meant to be sarcastic, but I am not so sure you achieved your purpose.
A comment on Groklaw (which I cannot find at the moment) made the point that Ballmer is probably talking to Congress: he is angling for a bill outlawing the GPL. Which I agree is a strong possibility.
Now bear in mind this change breaks ad-hoc emails of the "Why don't you ask foo@att.com about that? I met him once and he had some interesting things to say" sort. Your e-mail to foo is not going to be received without prior legwork, which makes it less likely you'll send it in the first place.
As a person who has been using open address/open mailbox e-mail since the late 1970s, that saddens me greatly. But at this point the spammers have essentially destroyed the usefullness of open transmission e-mail. Personally I am just waiting it out, using my real address and hoping it gets better in another year or two. But in my corporate support position, where spam now outnumbers legitimate mail 5:1, I fully understand why a large company would do this.
I have had good experience with Domain Monger, although I only use them for miscellaneous domains. The only time I had a problem with a registration their customer service fixed it within 24 hours from a single e-mail. YMMV
I fix it. Now, granted, we only have ~10 apps ( all critical tho ), and when this has happened, it's been due to other factors that the patch simply brought to light. Usually, a wipe and reload will do the trick, and while this is not pleasant in an organization of this size, it's the cost of bussiness I am afraid
The problem is that very few small- and mid-sized organizations have that level of expertise. And the vendors of the vertical apps such orgs tend to use are not very responsive when it comes to fixing their code to support OS patches. Rock meet hard place.
I run a SUS server for my organization, and it checks for patches nightly. The next day, my servers and workstations are patched.
Serious question: what do you do when (a) the patch breaks {may or may not cause Windows to become unusable} (b) the patch breaks critical applications?
How do you know? What do you do when a Critical Update does in fact break something (as a recent Critical Update broke Citrix)?
What you're demanding from government can be taken to ridicuous degree. Why should citizens have to have an expensive modern computer capable of running OpenOffice to read said documents? What business do you have implying that everybody can afford a computer that runs OpenOffice?
In fact, even in the initial ruling in Veeck vs. City of Austin the court did hold that the municipality was required to provide free access to the text of laws in a manner and format accessible to the voters. Most state constitutions and local government charters codify such requirements and access is most often provided by that subservice facility, the "library".
The government isn't a business. They are your representatives. They are the legislators. They are the executive. They are the police. They are the judges. They are the cleaners. They are the social workers. The government comprises all the people who work for you, the taxpayers.
So any decision the government makes has to consider more than pure dollars and cents. They have an entire country to think about, both now and for the future. One of your representatives has decided that free software has non-tangible but long-term benefits to the country.
Excellent point. The concept of cost/benefit analysis is very different for governments than private organizations. The movement to turn Citizens into consumers has obscured that difference.
I'm not saying I'm an MS-apologist, but shouldn't decisions based on taxpayer money usually be based on cost analysis? A Blanket policy against MS, without allowing for a competitive bidding process or even alternative analysis doesn't seem right.
Large organizations, and particularly large government organizations, typically have approved specification lists that control what is and is not acceptable to purchase. Large propriatary suppliers such as Microsoft lobby very hard (directly and indirectly, as through standards bodies and trade associations) to have these approved specifications written in such as way that only a few (propriatary, commercial) products meet the specs. That way they may have to compete with, say, Lotus, for any given government contract, but they don't have to compete with hundreds of aggressive small providers. And often the top 2 or 3 biggest players don't mind losing the occational contract to one another as that allows the appearance of "competition" to be maintained while still locking out the hungrier competition.
I think all the Mass. government is saying is that in the future they want the standard specifications re-written so as not to prohibit the selection of Open Source products, and to require open standards for various document formats to prevent "Office lock-in". That wouldn't be cheating - just leveling the playing field.
This must be the most confusing article on Slashdot ever.
Before clicking on the links I had absolutely no idea what the poster was talking about - except that it somehow concerned crypto. Let's see:
djb's crypto case
What case?
djb's case is (was) absolutely critical to the concepts of freedom of research and freedom of speech, and it has been going on since 1995. That you don't recognize the case or the person involved is perhaps an indication that you should do some additional research.
hy the hell is this port even open in the first place? And unclosable at that?
I'm about as geeky as they get, and I've never used any RPC-based apps outside of an academic environment. I'm pretty sure the 3 home users in the planet who actually use it can figure out a way around it.
Microsoft Exchange Server uses port 135 for various purposes, so it cannot be blocked internally at Exchange sites. Which makes the advice a bit ironic.
Hmm... Bail out the failed attempt at privatization, huh? The article pointed out this already occured, where investment companies like Citigroup bought out the facilities of "mismanaged, ailing private companies". RTFA, and don't be quick to assume that government intervention is required to correct a failed buisiness venture.
Investor-owned regulated utilities had charters of service from their regulators which explictly required them to take the welfare of their customers and service territories into account in decision making and planning. Enforced stakeholdership, if you will. And these entities were typically limited to 10-15% profit margin.
Now, this system wasn't perfect, there were ways to abuse the profit limit, and there was fat to be cut. But as a citizen and consumer, I have a hard time believing that the big New York banks, which like to see 50-300% profit margins, really have my best interest in mind when they make decisions concerning their utility holdings. And given the evidence of Enron, they don't. There was no one at the utility where I worked who made $1 million/year; that is a laughable salary on Wall Street. Someone pays for those big bonuses and I think I know who that is.
Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.
Maybe in the 1890s. Last time I checked, the various power pool authorities monitored frequency at multiple points throughout their control areas and sent digital pulses to the governers of all interconnected generators simultaneously to maintain frequency.
The ultimate problem is that the grid is emphatically *not* a single machine. It's a loosely (some might say poorly) coordinated collection of independent machines and networks. It's not engineered at the system level, or even at the regional level, but rather at the local level with ad hoc interconnects to create larger systems.
The question being whether that is a problem (weakness) or a strength. Very often when humans take a loosely-coupled system that has grown organically over time and try to replace it with a "well-designed", tightly-coupled, centrally planned and organized system the results are not was expected or intended. Distributed intelligence and independent decision-making often lead to better practical results than the theoritical benefits of centralized planning. And the laws of unintended consequences seem to hit tightly designed systems very hard.
Investor-owned (private), state-regulated, geographically compact and exclusive electric utilities provided stable supplies of electricity to North America at decreasing real cost from 1920 to 1990 (there was a relatively small cost problem from 1978 - 1982, but that was true of most of the US economy). Electricy use (and therefore supply) doubled every 7 years from 1880 through 1960 or thereabouts, and continued to grow pretty fast after that time.
Given that, I think it is incumbent on the deregulators to explain exactly what was "broken" with this system and what their "fix" was intended to accomplish. Yes, there was some fat and inefficiencies in the regulated utility model (I was there in the 80s), and some new incentives were needed to help address those problems. But again, increasing supplies of reliable electricity were being provided at decreasing real cost. Has that been true since the wonders of deregulation took hold?
Of course, one of the real "problems" that electric utility deregulation addressed was that no one involved in the process was earning 200% gross profit margins. I have to wonder if the real "pressure" was not from those who wanted greater efficiency due to competition, but those (such as Enron) who wanted to skim off more cream from an industry that was limited by law to around 12% gross.
Slashdot Mirror
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But Netware does not run on MS-DOS . And saying so makes you look a bit ill-informed.
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Look, I am in personal agreement with the author's basic point: there are a lot of advantages to open source for software users. But there are solutions to this problem in the propriatary world too, and propriatary methods cannot be condemned under the theory that there are no such methods.
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How do you know? What do you do when a Critical Update does in fact break something (as a recent Critical Update broke Citrix)?
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I think all the Mass. government is saying is that in the future they want the standard specifications re-written so as not to prohibit the selection of Open Source products, and to require open standards for various document formats to prevent "Office lock-in". That wouldn't be cheating - just leveling the playing field.
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http://www.ornl.gov/ORNL/BTC/Restructuring/ORNLTM2 00341.pdf
http://certs.lbl.gov/RealTime_K2.html
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Now, this system wasn't perfect, there were ways to abuse the profit limit, and there was fat to be cut. But as a citizen and consumer, I have a hard time believing that the big New York banks, which like to see 50-300% profit margins, really have my best interest in mind when they make decisions concerning their utility holdings. And given the evidence of Enron, they don't. There was no one at the utility where I worked who made $1 million/year; that is a laughable salary on Wall Street. Someone pays for those big bonuses and I think I know who that is.
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Given that, I think it is incumbent on the deregulators to explain exactly what was "broken" with this system and what their "fix" was intended to accomplish. Yes, there was some fat and inefficiencies in the regulated utility model (I was there in the 80s), and some new incentives were needed to help address those problems. But again, increasing supplies of reliable electricity were being provided at decreasing real cost. Has that been true since the wonders of deregulation took hold?
Of course, one of the real "problems" that electric utility deregulation addressed was that no one involved in the process was earning 200% gross profit margins. I have to wonder if the real "pressure" was not from those who wanted greater efficiency due to competition, but those (such as Enron) who wanted to skim off more cream from an industry that was limited by law to around 12% gross.
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