...by declining to comment - at least if the intro to the Forbes article is anything like the truth:
"It's kind of hard for us to do that," says Brent Hatch, an attorney with Hatch, James & Dodge in Salt Lake City, "because we don't have it. It was destroyed before it could be given to us."
SCO sued IBM in March 2003, claiming IBM took code from Unix, for which SCO holds some copyrights, and put it into Linux, which is distributed at no cost.
So they took code, put it into a freely available open source operating system - and then destroyed it?
I can't believe this story is being reported accurately, because if it is, SCO are just the most incredibley stupid asshats that ever filed a lawsuit - and given the frivolous lawsuits that we hear about filed in the US in The Rest of the World (nah, it's not really a country, but it might help some people to think of it that way), that is saying a lot.
Forbes reporting this might just be the typical, not-tech-savvy bad reporting that I've come to know and love from mainstream press, but places like this should know better and Just Fucking Ignore It so SCO can continue sliding off the face of the Earth. I don't want to hear any more about this case until some judge finally tells them to shut up and fuck off.
It seems you've already started to vote away your freedoms. If the rest of your country is going to take this lying down, maybe it's time for the rest of you to start taking up the arms that you've so rigoursly been defending the right to own (regardless of the cost in your society) to start taking control of your country back from the religious oligarchy that is currently in charge.
You dragged one President through the mud because he cheated on his wife. Now you've got another one breaking your laws and turning your country into the sort of place that people fifty years ago used to write books about to prove points totalitarianism.
Instead of posting about it on Slashdot, maybe the time has come to start educating your less savvy friends and family that maybe they should stop watching Fox and start engaging their brains to figure out what is best for their country, their family and their friends.
Until you figure out a better way to spend untold billions of dollars and priceless amounts of human life, we, the undersigned, consider ourselves at great personal risk of your policies, attitudes, and actions.
Signed sincerely,
The Rest of the World. (Please consult an atlas for our exact location relative to the United States.)
PS, if you could take money out of politics, you might find - as a completely surprising corollary - you make your country a better place for your citizens.
I'm hoping that after 200 years, humanity will have lost a bit of its obsession with spending vast amounts of money on pretty pieces of rock and will have moved onto doing something worth while.
Totally agree. Cheap knockoffs powered by gigantic marketing budgets are a huge problem for gamers, the vast majority of whom are still not experienced enough to know when to buy a game and when not to. I live in perpetual hope that gamers will start realising at some point that EA games on the PC are released when the release date dictates (ie, when their financial schedule says that the game needs to be on the shelves) and not when it is actually finished - meaning gamers are then dependent on 12 months of patches before the game is really playable (see: Battlefield series).
Once we hit the point where the majority of gamers can actually show some discrimination between good games (and not just 'fun' games, but good-quality software as well) and bad games hopefully we'll see less cheap imitation/branded/licensed schlock, and more actual quality titles that have had some effort put into their concept, design, and execution.
I'd like to see articles just got locked to prevent editing for a couple days when they're in the news. Most of these editing rampages seem to occur when someone is in the press suddenly (like yesterdays mass editing of Zidane's entry after the headbutt incident in the World Cup).
It'd be neat if Wikipedia could somehow scan the news for headlines and if someone starts cropping up repeatedly, just lock the article for a couple days until the hysteria dies down and all the short attention spam idiots have fucked off onto something else.
I think my inbox is too general-purpose for any changes to really affect it much. I get work email, email from friends, email about things I'm interested in, random news, spam, emails from parents and relatives - all of them require different action and different sorting. All of them tend to follow their own evolutionary path throughout my inbox as conversations progess, too.
The Tasking system talked about in the first part of that piece would only be useful for my work email. It basically looks like a way of throwing emails directly into a project management system. Good for work, but emails from mum don't need to be scheduled.
The 'Smart Organisation Structures' just looks like filters. I already do this - email from my managers ends up in its own folder. I don't need to call them 'VIP Platinum'.
The obligatory reference to Larry Niven's classic "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" in which he describes some of the problems involved in a Kryptonian/Human relationship:
People really have to remember, and encourage other people to remember, the modding scene on the PC. Sony and Microsoft are both blowing over this 'pay for content' thing, and now its seeping into the PC scene courtesy of EA with their BF2 booster packs (remember Desert Combat?) and Morrowind with their ridiculous horse skins.
Aside from phishing attempts, which is a legitimate concern (but imo should be addressed by the company that is getting spoofed), what is the big deal about typo squatting?
I enter in a lot of my URLs by hand. I frequently make typos because I was typing them too fast. I see a page that isn't what I was expecting or that is obviously a link farm, I just re-type the URL.
I'm not really sure what your point is - are you saying MPEG-4 isn't a proprietary format? I was under the impression that if you want to develop stuff that reads/writes MPEG-4, you need to get a license from www.mpegla.com to do so.
It is a pity that it is still easier to type 'gnarls barkley +crazy +mp3' into Google to pirate it than it is to actually buy this online - at least in Australia. They're playing it a lot on a local radio station here and I quite like it, and this article finally gave me the artist so I could look it up to buy it.
As always I tried Googling it first to see if it was iTunes - which it was; I got a handly link to the iTunes store, which opens iTunes. I was then politely told that this track is only available in the iTunes store in the UK.
If the labels are ever going to take this Internet thing seriously they're going to have to readjust their way of thinking. They can't rely on their old system of having area-based licenses - it just doesn't make any real sense in the era of digital content.
That's fair enough - but what happens if/when Steam dies? Can I still play my games?
I like being able to occasionally go back to my games catalogue and pull out a game I bought 10 years ago and install it and play it. I'm scared of Steam (and by extension, other DRM systems).
I would aruge that this is more taking advantage of a stupid broken patent system than it is leveraging a monopoly. I'm sure the monopoly helps a little though:)
Sounds like an awesome market for someone with a memory factory - if everyone else has upgraded but there's still millions of 'legacy' systems around you might be the only kid on the block.
I installed Ubuntu this week for the first time (I've tried LiveCDs before but I had a spare PC that needed an OS and Ubuntu was the frontrunner in the absence of Windows licenses). I was disappointed to see that, out of the box, I couldn't play any media (even MPEGs!) but then I remembered that these generally include patented algorithms.
After some Googling, I found a resource on the Ubuntu site that explained how to get it all working. What impressed me though was the fact that it actually pointed out that it might be illegal in my country to use these various software packages and that they're NOT officially supported by Ubuntu for this very reason.
So, Automatix basically sounds like its just a bunch of stuff that, if you install it, puts you at risk of infringing copyright and patents and all sorts of other stuff. If you live in countries that respect patent laws, anyway.
(This is something that people often seem to get confused about - open source does NOT always mean its legal)
Consumers in general appear have no ability to restrain themselves from spending money on something they want. Game developers/publishers have realised this which is why we're seeing more ads in more and more games. Sometimes they're subtle (posters/billboards in racing games) which I don't have a problem with.
I strongly believe that Blizzard could pump World of Warcraft full of ads and it'd have barely any effect on player numbers because everyone is so hopelessly addicted to it. They're locked in to the game and, from what I can tell, there's no competing product that matches it for them to migrate to (yet).
Nb - I don't play MMOs because I don't feel like paying per month to play games. I mostly play FPS games, which I buy once and then can play as long as they're popular. I prefer FPS games that are easily modded because the mod communities often end up making extensions to the game that are superior to the game itself.
I think CDs will stick around for a while in PC games, because it gives publishers the chance to release a "Director's Edition" on DVD with a few tiny extra bells and whistles and charge more money for it.
I'd rather one DVD than five or six CDROMs, but I'm not prepared to pay extra for it. They'd sure earn my respect by putting both in the box.
That makes me feel a bit better. I've almost given up on using my address bar, and my bookmarks. I just find it easier/faster to hit Ctrl-K and type in the one or two words that I need to get Google to take me where I want to go. I always feel guilty about it, like I'm wasting their CPU cycles because I'm too lazy to click stuff:)
There's two things fighting the good fight against the patent system (well, at least as far as I can tell):
1) Open source software. Once an implementation of a proprietary system is out there, the genie is really out of the bottle.
2) The Internet. Means that anything created as a result of 1) can instantly be spread around the globe.
I have personally been battling a small part of the patent system recently. I've been looking for software to help me transcode video in batches. I've looked a huge variety of commercial systems, ranging in price from $50 to $20,000 (YA RLY). None of them really suit my needs.
There are, however, countless open source tools (eg, ffmpeg) that will do what I want, or at the very least allow me to build a system that exactly meets my needs. Unfortunately, it seems that most of these software packages include patented code that they don't have the required licences for (eg, no licensing from the MPEG-LA consortium/cartel/whatever).
Because I need to use this stuff for business purposes, I don't know what my liability is if I'm using software that might technically be illegal in my country. So I'm forced to use second rate commercial software that doesn't do what I want, is awkward and cumbersome, will probably stop getting supported in the immediate future - and that I have to pay for the priviledge of using.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe this story is being reported accurately, because if it is, SCO are just the most incredibley stupid asshats that ever filed a lawsuit - and given the frivolous lawsuits that we hear about filed in the US in The Rest of the World (nah, it's not really a country, but it might help some people to think of it that way), that is saying a lot.
Forbes reporting this might just be the typical, not-tech-savvy bad reporting that I've come to know and love from mainstream press, but places like this should know better and Just Fucking Ignore It so SCO can continue sliding off the face of the Earth. I don't want to hear any more about this case until some judge finally tells them to shut up and fuck off.
Good luck with this stuff. Seriously.
It seems you've already started to vote away your freedoms. If the rest of your country is going to take this lying down, maybe it's time for the rest of you to start taking up the arms that you've so rigoursly been defending the right to own (regardless of the cost in your society) to start taking control of your country back from the religious oligarchy that is currently in charge.
You dragged one President through the mud because he cheated on his wife. Now you've got another one breaking your laws and turning your country into the sort of place that people fifty years ago used to write books about to prove points totalitarianism.
Instead of posting about it on Slashdot, maybe the time has come to start educating your less savvy friends and family that maybe they should stop watching Fox and start engaging their brains to figure out what is best for their country, their family and their friends.
Until you figure out a better way to spend untold billions of dollars and priceless amounts of human life, we, the undersigned, consider ourselves at great personal risk of your policies, attitudes, and actions.
Signed sincerely,
The Rest of the World. (Please consult an atlas for our exact location relative to the United States.)
PS, if you could take money out of politics, you might find - as a completely surprising corollary - you make your country a better place for your citizens.
I'm hoping that after 200 years, humanity will have lost a bit of its obsession with spending vast amounts of money on pretty pieces of rock and will have moved onto doing something worth while.
Google are apparently already on the way to TrustRank. I can't wait to see how this works out.
Totally agree. Cheap knockoffs powered by gigantic marketing budgets are a huge problem for gamers, the vast majority of whom are still not experienced enough to know when to buy a game and when not to. I live in perpetual hope that gamers will start realising at some point that EA games on the PC are released when the release date dictates (ie, when their financial schedule says that the game needs to be on the shelves) and not when it is actually finished - meaning gamers are then dependent on 12 months of patches before the game is really playable (see: Battlefield series).
Once we hit the point where the majority of gamers can actually show some discrimination between good games (and not just 'fun' games, but good-quality software as well) and bad games hopefully we'll see less cheap imitation/branded/licensed schlock, and more actual quality titles that have had some effort put into their concept, design, and execution.
I'd like to see articles just got locked to prevent editing for a couple days when they're in the news. Most of these editing rampages seem to occur when someone is in the press suddenly (like yesterdays mass editing of Zidane's entry after the headbutt incident in the World Cup).
It'd be neat if Wikipedia could somehow scan the news for headlines and if someone starts cropping up repeatedly, just lock the article for a couple days until the hysteria dies down and all the short attention spam idiots have fucked off onto something else.
awesome - but is there an MPG version of the whole 12minute video?
I think my inbox is too general-purpose for any changes to really affect it much. I get work email, email from friends, email about things I'm interested in, random news, spam, emails from parents and relatives - all of them require different action and different sorting. All of them tend to follow their own evolutionary path throughout my inbox as conversations progess, too.
The Tasking system talked about in the first part of that piece would only be useful for my work email. It basically looks like a way of throwing emails directly into a project management system. Good for work, but emails from mum don't need to be scheduled.
The 'Smart Organisation Structures' just looks like filters. I already do this - email from my managers ends up in its own folder. I don't need to call them 'VIP Platinum'.
The obligatory reference to Larry Niven's classic "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" in which he describes some of the problems involved in a Kryptonian/Human relationship:
http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html (first Google link)
It's not the who that is important, it's the number of people involved here. TWO whole people! It is a mass exodus!
People really have to remember, and encourage other people to remember, the modding scene on the PC. Sony and Microsoft are both blowing over this 'pay for content' thing, and now its seeping into the PC scene courtesy of EA with their BF2 booster packs (remember Desert Combat?) and Morrowind with their ridiculous horse skins.
Aside from phishing attempts, which is a legitimate concern (but imo should be addressed by the company that is getting spoofed), what is the big deal about typo squatting?
I enter in a lot of my URLs by hand. I frequently make typos because I was typing them too fast. I see a page that isn't what I was expecting or that is obviously a link farm, I just re-type the URL.
Or I use bookmarks. Or I use Google.
I'm not really sure what your point is - are you saying MPEG-4 isn't a proprietary format? I was under the impression that if you want to develop stuff that reads/writes MPEG-4, you need to get a license from www.mpegla.com to do so.
It is a pity that it is still easier to type 'gnarls barkley +crazy +mp3' into Google to pirate it than it is to actually buy this online - at least in Australia. They're playing it a lot on a local radio station here and I quite like it, and this article finally gave me the artist so I could look it up to buy it.
As always I tried Googling it first to see if it was iTunes - which it was; I got a handly link to the iTunes store, which opens iTunes. I was then politely told that this track is only available in the iTunes store in the UK.
If the labels are ever going to take this Internet thing seriously they're going to have to readjust their way of thinking. They can't rely on their old system of having area-based licenses - it just doesn't make any real sense in the era of digital content.
That's fair enough - but what happens if/when Steam dies? Can I still play my games?
I like being able to occasionally go back to my games catalogue and pull out a game I bought 10 years ago and install it and play it. I'm scared of Steam (and by extension, other DRM systems).
I would aruge that this is more taking advantage of a stupid broken patent system than it is leveraging a monopoly. I'm sure the monopoly helps a little though :)
One tenth of the game for one fifth of the cost!
I think I'll pass on this up and coming trend.
Sounds like an awesome market for someone with a memory factory - if everyone else has upgraded but there's still millions of 'legacy' systems around you might be the only kid on the block.
This is an excellent point.
I installed Ubuntu this week for the first time (I've tried LiveCDs before but I had a spare PC that needed an OS and Ubuntu was the frontrunner in the absence of Windows licenses). I was disappointed to see that, out of the box, I couldn't play any media (even MPEGs!) but then I remembered that these generally include patented algorithms.
After some Googling, I found a resource on the Ubuntu site that explained how to get it all working. What impressed me though was the fact that it actually pointed out that it might be illegal in my country to use these various software packages and that they're NOT officially supported by Ubuntu for this very reason.
So, Automatix basically sounds like its just a bunch of stuff that, if you install it, puts you at risk of infringing copyright and patents and all sorts of other stuff. If you live in countries that respect patent laws, anyway.
(This is something that people often seem to get confused about - open source does NOT always mean its legal)
Wow, that's a depressing statement. I'm assuming you're not condoning the spilling of non-American blood just to get oil though... right?
Consumers in general appear have no ability to restrain themselves from spending money on something they want. Game developers/publishers have realised this which is why we're seeing more ads in more and more games. Sometimes they're subtle (posters/billboards in racing games) which I don't have a problem with.
I strongly believe that Blizzard could pump World of Warcraft full of ads and it'd have barely any effect on player numbers because everyone is so hopelessly addicted to it. They're locked in to the game and, from what I can tell, there's no competing product that matches it for them to migrate to (yet).
Nb - I don't play MMOs because I don't feel like paying per month to play games. I mostly play FPS games, which I buy once and then can play as long as they're popular. I prefer FPS games that are easily modded because the mod communities often end up making extensions to the game that are superior to the game itself.
I think CDs will stick around for a while in PC games, because it gives publishers the chance to release a "Director's Edition" on DVD with a few tiny extra bells and whistles and charge more money for it.
I'd rather one DVD than five or six CDROMs, but I'm not prepared to pay extra for it. They'd sure earn my respect by putting both in the box.
I've always figured ADHD was just a typo for BRAT
That makes me feel a bit better. I've almost given up on using my address bar, and my bookmarks. I just find it easier/faster to hit Ctrl-K and type in the one or two words that I need to get Google to take me where I want to go. I always feel guilty about it, like I'm wasting their CPU cycles because I'm too lazy to click stuff :)
There's two things fighting the good fight against the patent system (well, at least as far as I can tell):
1) Open source software. Once an implementation of a proprietary system is out there, the genie is really out of the bottle.
2) The Internet. Means that anything created as a result of 1) can instantly be spread around the globe.
I have personally been battling a small part of the patent system recently. I've been looking for software to help me transcode video in batches. I've looked a huge variety of commercial systems, ranging in price from $50 to $20,000 (YA RLY). None of them really suit my needs.
There are, however, countless open source tools (eg, ffmpeg) that will do what I want, or at the very least allow me to build a system that exactly meets my needs. Unfortunately, it seems that most of these software packages include patented code that they don't have the required licences for (eg, no licensing from the MPEG-LA consortium/cartel/whatever).
Because I need to use this stuff for business purposes, I don't know what my liability is if I'm using software that might technically be illegal in my country. So I'm forced to use second rate commercial software that doesn't do what I want, is awkward and cumbersome, will probably stop getting supported in the immediate future - and that I have to pay for the priviledge of using.