Finally, Joe Barr writes "I just filed a complaint against The SCO Group with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was easy. I used their online complaint form at:
www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec9570.htm.
The basis for my complaint is that SCO is using false and unsubstantiated claims of IP rights to UNIX and Linux in order to manipulate its stock price and force consumers to purchase SCO licenses.
I believe that "manipulate stock price" would rightly be reported to the SEC. But complaints concerning consumers being "forced to purchase SCO licenses" would, if one believed that such forcing was being done in an illegal manner, best be addressed to the FTC or the Justice Dept.
Even the non-web-literate realize that using Internet-based micropayments will leave a trail of every transaction they conduct stored on the net, waiting to be vacuumed up by marketers, identity thieves, and Total Information Awareness / CAPS II. Doubleplusungood.
Banks control financial transactions in the western economy, and with banks charging $1 - $3 for ATM transactions (and similar outrageous fees for services that were once considered part of the package of using a bank) there is a very strong incentive not to create a micropayment system that yields $0.001 transaction fees.
We would feel sorry for him, if he weren't such a jerk. In fact, we do occasionally find ourselves sympathizing with him, but we soon get over it.
The early Dilberts were quite funny. They started going downhill IMHO when the character of the boss changed. Originally, the boss was a typical boss-guy: sometimes clueless, sometimes wrong or wrong-headed - but not always. From time to time the boss would demonstrate that his employees were not the proto-gods that they believed, but were also fallible human beings subject to stapler misfires.
Then when the drawing of the boss changed from the taller, more jowly look to the shorter, fatter-but-thinner-face guy, that changed. After that the employees were 100% godlike and the bosses 100% clueless.
At that point I found it to be a lot less funny. Because let's face it: a lot of the stupidies of the workplace are caused by the worker bees themselves, not just the evil bosses. And when Dilbert lost the balance that recognized that fact it started to slide (a slide which got worse when Scott Adams was fired from his real technical job).
Bear in mind that the critical systems in an automobile (steering and brakes) are primarily mechanical. There may be some motors involved, but nothing that's particularly vulnerable to RF interference. Even if your consumer electronic devices could cut off the power to the brakes and steering, you could still operate them mechanically.
Have to disagree a bit there. The systems in a modern car depend heavily on electronics (including computer or CPU based control) and electromagnetic sensors. Steering and brakes do have mechanical reversion modes for the moment, but looking at the BMW iDrive one has to wonder how much longer this will be the case.
The primary difference is that the automakers have been dealing with EMI for a long time, since both the ignition systems and the early car radios generated scads of EMI. Particularly since the engine management computer is typically mounted right next to the ignition. So the automakers have invested a lot of money in hardening their systems against EMI.
To be fair, although automakers do have to be concerned about vehicle weight, they don't have the same weight constraints that aircraft manufacturers have. But they did go in very early in the electronics age with an attitude that said, "these systems must work in a harsh EMI environment, how do we accomplish that" rather than an attitude that said "let's tell car owners that they can't use radios in their vehicles".
It only started happening after they switched to a non-freon based foam to make the environmentalists happy.
Yeah, it was all the fault of the granola-eating tree-huggers.
Like it or not, restrictions on CFCs are the law of the land in the United States, as well as the subject of several international treaties that the US has signed and ratified.
If NASA does not agree with these restrictions, it is free to try to get the law rescinded. But unless and until the law is rescinded, it is NASA's legal and engineering responsibility to find a foam that does not require CFC for manufacturing. Period end of story. That NASA failed to do so is still its responsibility regardless of whether or not "environmentalists" were involved.
Ideally, information becomes classified when the benefits of the information being publicly available are less than the dangers of that availability. Here at the university where I work, when I need to get a list of students in my department, I can't just call up and request it.
A few questions:
Who makes that determination?
Who reviews the decisions of the determining body and enforces penalties if the decisions are not in the best interests of the citizens?
Given Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy ("regardless of the reasons for which they are established, the top priorities of bureaucracies are to survive and to grow") who determines what controls are placed on those doing the classifying?
What does the NOS have to do with the type or age of the application in a ditributed network? If it is DOS based, I'm pretty sure Netware is not really running it, since Netware does not understand DOS commands or instructions. Netware 4.x can only execute NLM's.
Many old DOS-based apps run on the Btrieve database (may it rest in hell), or SQLBase (Gupta), both of which were most prevalent as NLMs. A lot of those old apps soldier on today.
I work with Novell stuff ALOT, and I find that Linux zealots (of which I am one) often have no idea what it is Novell brings to the "enterprise".
Agreed. There seems to be a sub-optimal level of understanding in the Linux world concerning enterprise directory and management requirements. I think it is telling that many large enterprises which have gone 98% Microsoft for desktops and servers have retained NDS as their directory management system. It is a tool which is not easily replaced, and implemented well on Linux it could prove a key element in enterprise deployment.
The last time I looked at a Novell System was 4 years ago. But it ran a modified version of MS DOS.
"A lie can run around the world while the truth is tying it's shoelaces".
Please (please?) can we stop with the "Novell runs on MS-DOS" business? Propriatary hardware (Sun, IBM, most minis and workstations) have ROM-based bootstrap loaders and monitors built in so that the machine will boot and can be managed/repaired even if the main OS is dead. This doesn't mean that these systems "run" on the bootstrap loader.
Since about Netware 1.1 Novell software has always run on commodity Intel boxes. Commodity boxes don't have bootstrap loaders or monitors. So Novell uses xx-DOS, which is cheap, simple, fits on a floppy, and understood by most sysadmins worldwide, as their bootstrap loader and monitor. After boot, feel free to do a "REMOVE DOS" command and purge all traces of DOS from memory.
Netware DOES NOT "run on MS-DOS". And if you think it does, I really have to question that "+5 Informative".
Here's a novel idea: Why not actually hold software companies to the promises they make? They promise you a product that suits your needs, make sure you get one. I think this sort of feedback would really bug the heck out the them. And well it should. They've been delivering crap for almost three decades now.
I used to do a lot of midrange ERP evaluations. I was talking to another customer of one product I picked who told me they informed the vendors that presentations and demos would be videotaped, and the videotape would be incorporated by reference into any resulting contract. Only 2 of the 13 vendors who had responded to their RFP were willing to present under those conditions. That tells you something.
Having known people who work for the SSA, I've heard stories of having to deal with processing a legitimate information request for a major figure, such as an actor or member of Congress, and having to explain every aspect of the actions taken the next day, because any processing of data using a flagged number triggers an internal review.
If you try and use that SSN for anything, you'll very quickly be getting a visit from some individuals with their sense of humor surgically removed, and you'll very likely not be seen for a while.
A private organization is of course perfectly free to do this, and probably should. In the case of a government agency, such as the SSA, I would be curious to learn what they consider their constitutional justification is for treating some citizens differently than others. As far as I am aware, the American Revolution was in large part fought over the issues of class-based society, and there is no provision in the Constitution to allow special treatment for government employees (whether a clerk at the post office or the president) nor for "famous people". If the SSA provides this service for anyone, they should provide it for every citizen famous or not.
This basically reinforces my theory that in 10 years we will have a defacto aristocracy in the United States: the 2% of the population with enough power to keep their personal information out of public databases.
A good example of technology which should never have been built. Umpires, WITH their human quirks and weaknesses, are part of the game of baseball. There is no need for a radar system which tells us whether or not the umpire was "right" or "wrong" - his call is by definitioncorrect.
If we are going to replace umpires with radar units, why not replace pitchers with pitching machines? And shortstops with Phalanx anti-missle guns? After all, those are "more accurate" than their human counterparts.
States like California get a huge chunk of their energy from eastern Canadian provinces like Quebec(mainly generated from barely sub-arctic dams). If power can be send from northern Canada to the states, then it seems reasonable to assume that any US location is in range of Nevada.
What used to be called the Western Power Pool (name changed since I think), which is basically North America west of the Rocky Mountains, is 1/3 cycle out of phase with the eastern half of North America. The only way to interchange power between the east and west is via DC (rather than the standard AC) link. While a few DC links have been built, they are nowhere near strong enough to import a "huge" chunk of the west coast's requirements. So I am going to have to doubt your statement a bit.
Hmm, considering we already have a long distance transmission system in this country I don't think it'll be much of a problem.
The practical transmission limit in a network that has reasonable stability and security is around 1600 km. Longer distances would be possible if the network were converted from 345 kV to 765 or 1500 kV, but attempts to build 765 kV transmission systems in the 1970s didn't go very well and most utilities dropped back to 345 kV. It wouldn't be impossible to ship power from Nevada to New England, just difficult and inefficent.
Two, they're stupid enough to expect IBM to cave in on a bluff. And if IBM aply the wrong lawyers to the case (things aren't looking so crash-hot on that front judging by their last filing), SCO's stupidity may actually pay off. Even so, it would have been an unjustifiable gamble if SCO hadn't already been doomed anyway.
Hmmm. David Boies was on the IBM team that faced down the US Government in the IBM anti-trust trial. I would think he would know whether or not IBM would cave in before he would take a case on retainer.
The best possible option IMO is for IBM to buy SCO out, in as hostile a takeover bid as possible, thereby tying up the funding that SCO would otherwise put to use pursuing this IP idiocy.
Organizations like IBM never give in to threats, or to actions that could be construed as extortion. And if you think about it, they cannot: if one small company holding a few patents were able to force Bigco to pay 1 billion dollars, then Bigco would shortly have no money left. This aggressive defensive behaviour sometimes leads big orgs to make bad decisions (particularly in situations involving people rather than things), but that is another story.
The weird thing to me is that if SCO had approached IBM quietly and said: "hey, it looks like we have some IP problems here - why don't you buy us out and resolve those problems" then there is a good chance IBM might have considered it. Shareholders happy, golden parachutes for everyone, IBM looks like a hero to the Linux world: the proverbial win-win compromise. But instead SCO took a confrontational approach knowing that IBM would counterattack. Wonder why.
Novell has been in the networking business under the same name since 1975. Why do so many people in the computer industry have trouble spelling that name correctly? I see this in at least 1/3 of postings that mention Novell.
2. Did it rub off on the guy's glove when he weighs it each year?
3. Is there something else going on?
There was a good article about this in The Atlantic Monthly about 10 years ago. There are a number of theories, but the most accepted one is that when the masses were first made they were polished with a metal polish that contained some sort of volitile compound. That polished was absorbed into the platinum, and has been slowly evaporating ever since.
Then maybe america should move out of the dark ages sometime.
Funny how when the topic is software or food supplies, everyone jumps in with comments about the dangers of monoculture and the value of diversity in supply, but when the topic is the metric system there can be no deviation from the ONE TRUE FAITH.
Personally, having gone through school at a time when the US was considering a change, and having spent some time in Europe, I have no problem with the metric system. It is more convenient from some tasks, particularly in the chem lab.
But there is nothing inherently superior about a measurement system based on powers of 10. For many tasks, such as woodworking, metric measurements are far more difficult to work with than inches and 1/16th. In fact I would argue that the most "natural" base for a measurement system is 12 as it is evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4; whereras base 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. Thirds and fourths are very common divisions of stuff; fifths are not, so a base 12 system is more user-friendly.
That's my 0.02 euro anyway.
sPh
Re:GPL the best bet
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now the general argument around here (And also now from ESR) is that SCO distributed the Linux kernel under the terms of the GPL, and even if they were unaware that their code was contained in the kernel they are constrained by the terms of the GPL. It would seem to me that at best that is going to be a huge legal grey area, and at worst it plays directly into the hands of companies such as Microsoft, who have been saying all along that the GPL can "steal" your IP from under you. That would just prove them dead right, wouldn't it?
Well, to me it would prove that the managers of an organization which released corporate property under a license they did not fully understand were incompetent, and liable to a shareholder/stakeholder suit for breach of fiduciary duty. To the best of my knowledge "we didn't understand" and "we did not realize the implications" are not permissible defenses in commercial contract law. Joe Homeowner can stand in front of the judge and claim that he was taken unfair advantage of by parties with greater knowledge/power, but a commercial entity is presumed capable of understanding its actions.
The GPL is what it is. Call it "viral" if you like, call it "ideological", just don't call it late for dinner. Any organization considering releasing code under the GPL is free to have their legal counsel analyze it. Their legal counsel is free to do some research to determine what the possible implications of the GPL are. If the organization and/or its counsel fail to do their homework, I don't see how that can be interpreted as a failure of the license.
I have visited some city centers that are car-free, but they are surrounded by a vehicle-supported region. Given that turn-of-the-century (1901) city dwellers and transport providers converted from rail and horse to internal combustion engine as fast as they could when the possibility arose, is it really feasible to do this for an entire city?
What happened after the 18 month mark? Did the inefficiency 'stay off'?
You raise some good points, and I don't have all the answers. Heavy manufacturing is still heavy manufacturing, and the global economy sets a limit on absolute profitability. So after the initial gain the acquired companies would plateau. But the parent company also felt that no operation larger than 20-30 million USD turnover could be managed well, so as the acquired companies grew they would be split into multiple units. Thus making it very difficult to track their progress over time or to compare them to monolithic organizations.
On the other hand, I wonder if the drastic changes you describe simply involved correcting the messed-up priorities of organizations, of which the computerization was the symptom, not the cause.
Also a good point, and to a certain extent I agree, but the question is, how did those priorities get messed up? At many organizations I deal with there certainly seems to be in inverse correlation between volume of e-mail and quality of thought. Which is the cause and which the effect?
Kling says that with social software, the interaction is no longer between you and your computer, but between the groups you belong to and networks of computers.... So, is social software hype or reality?
I used to work with a company that did a lot of acquiring of small and mid-sized manufacturing companies. Some of the initial tasks upon acquisition: shut down all e-mail systems. Terminate all large-scale "ERP" or "business management" software and replace with simple inventory and bookkeeping systems. Close all stand-along headquarters locations and move personnel to closest factory. Demolish all walls in office spaces and move desks to central "pen". Move office personnel into open locations in the middle of the factory floor. Prohibit all use of studies, whitepapers, and Powerpoints, and 98% of all memos. In some cases they took out fax machines. Require all personnel to talk to everyone they did business with 4 times per day, either in person or on the phone.
After taking these actions, the typical acquired company would see a doubling of productivity and a tripling of profitability in 18 months.
So I guess I have to say I am a bit skeptical of "social software" in any kind of business setting. Blogs are fun to read in the evening for one's personal enjoyment, but turning the business day into a blogging session doesn't seem to me to have much promise.
Why do people live in places like this when they get hit _every year_ by tornados? I mean, holy crap - what kind of stress must it be to know that, next year, come May, you or someone near you has almost a 100% chance of having their new house flattened... again... next may. Hell, maybe in two months?
First, the odds of actually being hit, much less killed, by a tornado are significantly lower than the chances of dying in a car crash during your expected lifetime.
Second, bad things can happen anywhere on the Earth. Tornados are cool to watch so they get a lot of publicity, but how many people are killed by snowslides every year in Switzerland?
Finally, severe weather can be fun. Standing outside scanning the sky, watching the TV news, checking the radar on the Internet, maybe buying a lightning detector if you are really into it, then running down to the basement at the last minute and huddling around the weather radio... It may not be quite the same as participating in a mass parachute jump from 10,000m, but it has its moments!
TSA Security has never bothered me about it or ever even seemed to notice it. The day some idiot tries to take it away will be the day I miss my flight and he has a long meeting with me and his supervisor.
It will also be the two years you spend wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting behind razor wire at Guantanamo Bay. Seriously dude - there is a time and place to discuss civil liberties: in the security line at the airport is NOT the time or the place. If they ask you questions about your GPS unit, be polite and responsive, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
Banks control financial transactions in the western economy, and with banks charging $1 - $3 for ATM transactions (and similar outrageous fees for services that were once considered part of the package of using a bank) there is a very strong incentive not to create a micropayment system that yields $0.001 transaction fees.
sPh
Then when the drawing of the boss changed from the taller, more jowly look to the shorter, fatter-but-thinner-face guy, that changed. After that the employees were 100% godlike and the bosses 100% clueless.
At that point I found it to be a lot less funny. Because let's face it: a lot of the stupidies of the workplace are caused by the worker bees themselves, not just the evil bosses. And when Dilbert lost the balance that recognized that fact it started to slide (a slide which got worse when Scott Adams was fired from his real technical job).
sPh
The primary difference is that the automakers have been dealing with EMI for a long time, since both the ignition systems and the early car radios generated scads of EMI. Particularly since the engine management computer is typically mounted right next to the ignition. So the automakers have invested a lot of money in hardening their systems against EMI.
To be fair, although automakers do have to be concerned about vehicle weight, they don't have the same weight constraints that aircraft manufacturers have. But they did go in very early in the electronics age with an attitude that said, "these systems must work in a harsh EMI environment, how do we accomplish that" rather than an attitude that said "let's tell car owners that they can't use radios in their vehicles".
sPh
Like it or not, restrictions on CFCs are the law of the land in the United States, as well as the subject of several international treaties that the US has signed and ratified.
If NASA does not agree with these restrictions, it is free to try to get the law rescinded. But unless and until the law is rescinded, it is NASA's legal and engineering responsibility to find a foam that does not require CFC for manufacturing. Period end of story. That NASA failed to do so is still its responsibility regardless of whether or not "environmentalists" were involved.
sPh
- Who makes that determination?
Not "trolling" - just asking.Who reviews the decisions of the determining body and enforces penalties if the decisions are not in the best interests of the citizens?
Given Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy ("regardless of the reasons for which they are established, the top priorities of bureaucracies are to survive and to grow") who determines what controls are placed on those doing the classifying?
sPh
sPh
sPh
Please (please?) can we stop with the "Novell runs on MS-DOS" business? Propriatary hardware (Sun, IBM, most minis and workstations) have ROM-based bootstrap loaders and monitors built in so that the machine will boot and can be managed/repaired even if the main OS is dead. This doesn't mean that these systems "run" on the bootstrap loader.
Since about Netware 1.1 Novell software has always run on commodity Intel boxes. Commodity boxes don't have bootstrap loaders or monitors. So Novell uses xx-DOS, which is cheap, simple, fits on a floppy, and understood by most sysadmins worldwide, as their bootstrap loader and monitor. After boot, feel free to do a "REMOVE DOS" command and purge all traces of DOS from memory.
Netware DOES NOT "run on MS-DOS". And if you think it does, I really have to question that "+5 Informative".
sPh
sPh
This basically reinforces my theory that in 10 years we will have a defacto aristocracy in the United States: the 2% of the population with enough power to keep their personal information out of public databases.
sPh
If we are going to replace umpires with radar units, why not replace pitchers with pitching machines? And shortstops with Phalanx anti-missle guns? After all, those are "more accurate" than their human counterparts.
Sheesh!
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
The weird thing to me is that if SCO had approached IBM quietly and said: "hey, it looks like we have some IP problems here - why don't you buy us out and resolve those problems" then there is a good chance IBM might have considered it. Shareholders happy, golden parachutes for everyone, IBM looks like a hero to the Linux world: the proverbial win-win compromise. But instead SCO took a confrontational approach knowing that IBM would counterattack. Wonder why.
sPh
sPh
sPh
Personally, having gone through school at a time when the US was considering a change, and having spent some time in Europe, I have no problem with the metric system. It is more convenient from some tasks, particularly in the chem lab.
But there is nothing inherently superior about a measurement system based on powers of 10. For many tasks, such as woodworking, metric measurements are far more difficult to work with than inches and 1/16th. In fact I would argue that the most "natural" base for a measurement system is 12 as it is evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4; whereras base 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. Thirds and fourths are very common divisions of stuff; fifths are not, so a base 12 system is more user-friendly.
That's my 0.02 euro anyway.
sPh
The GPL is what it is. Call it "viral" if you like, call it "ideological", just don't call it late for dinner. Any organization considering releasing code under the GPL is free to have their legal counsel analyze it. Their legal counsel is free to do some research to determine what the possible implications of the GPL are. If the organization and/or its counsel fail to do their homework, I don't see how that can be interpreted as a failure of the license.
sPh
sPh
sPh
After taking these actions, the typical acquired company would see a doubling of productivity and a tripling of profitability in 18 months.
So I guess I have to say I am a bit skeptical of "social software" in any kind of business setting. Blogs are fun to read in the evening for one's personal enjoyment, but turning the business day into a blogging session doesn't seem to me to have much promise.
sPh
Second, bad things can happen anywhere on the Earth. Tornados are cool to watch so they get a lot of publicity, but how many people are killed by snowslides every year in Switzerland?
Finally, severe weather can be fun. Standing outside scanning the sky, watching the TV news, checking the radar on the Internet, maybe buying a lightning detector if you are really into it, then running down to the basement at the last minute and huddling around the weather radio... It may not be quite the same as participating in a mass parachute jump from 10,000m, but it has its moments!
sPh
sPh