If you take that line of logic as a given, there are several companies which have valid unix licences. Conversion to any one of these would not be *that* difficult. People do still use VMS but that would be a crazy way to go - you would be incurring major conversion costs to end up in a proprietary niche system. VMS is also sold for systems an order of magnitude larger than anything SCO have ever even thought of handling, and people migrate *from* VMS to unix systems to save money. Microsoft would be an alternative, but an expensive one - even though they try and make the migration path less painful.
My conversion plan would involve buying HP equipment and then either moving to HP Unix or taking advantage of that HP offer with respect to SCO and running linux.
If you don't take that line of logic as given, buy HP hardware and migrate to Linux:-)
That could be one of the reasons perl made it. The papers I remember were too convoluted/obscure to even use as a way of getting to sleep. Another problem was: those papers which were readable, frequently did not have much sensible to say. We still read (and believed) them because they were papers passed down from The Mount, and comprehensible.
Back around the time I graduated, I used to try and read some of those papers. The language they were written in was rather hard to decipher, communications skills were not very prominent;-)
I have since checked the installation in question and the user rights are set way too high. I hardly touch windows nowadays and made the usual mistake of trusting someone competent.
Pres. Clinton made a poor decision to have an affair when he thought no one was watching. Then, when he was in a crisis -pressure of the Ken Starr investigation - he tried to lie his way out of it. Those actions show more about his true character than all his years of political life!
You are missing a sense of proportion.
No matter what or who we are talking about, that statement of yours is ridiculous.
Your mother would only have the same level of problem if she ran everything as root. I know someone who had XP Professional at home and ran everything there as 'Administrator' or something with the same rights. I was asked to come around and help when the system was already toast. They had no concept of different users for different tasks.
They also have the cash to pursue security problems, their problem appears to be design flaws that can only be 'corrected around'.
An obvious example is integrating their Web Browser into their OS to screw Netscape, a political decision taken by his Billship. Bugs in IE lead to the equivalent of root exploits, bugs in Mozilla mean that one user account can be compromised.
Another political decision has been to install software to offer all kinds of services, basically to keep third party vendors out. This software defaults to being active. What was that database port vulnerability again? Another consequence of this is that a virus/worm writer has reliable idea as to what components will be running/active.
They have the cash for PR *and* fixes, but political decisions have led to a situation where this does not help. Having said that, if as many computers ran Linux as the various Win versions, we would also be seeing more problems that at present - they just would not be as serious.
Yes, I followed the link so I know what he does, aber er koennte immer noch mit dem Erwin verwandt sein (he could still be related to Erwin). It would not surprise me at all if a company like IBM employed close relatives of their local 'Ministerpraesident' in positions like that.
Yes, I know what 'Teufel' means, my homepage's domain should have made that clear.
The Hollerith tabulators were not used in concentration camps, they were used to keep track of prospective victims (Jews, Gypsies ..) so that their transport to the camps could be organised - something I consider worse. All this is over 60 years back though, the current IBM does not have a lot to do with those misdeeds.
Your second link is a lot more relevant to the story. Is Fritz Teufel related to Erwin Teufel? Erwin Teufel is the head of the ruling party in Baden-Wuerttemberg - the state where IBM is located in Germany.
That is how campaign financing works. Corporations finance politicians' campaigns, corporations get to write the laws.
Having said that, SCO's abuse of the legal system is of a completely different order to IBM's (attempted?) abuse of the Patents system here. SCO are committing the corporate equivalent of a suicide bombing.
Inflating SCO's stock price is only an option if IBM could be coerced into buying the company. Once IBM publicly rejected that option, the chances of anyone else buying them at an inflated price dropped to near zero.
Novell wanted a Linux company, but they went for one with some serious market share who were also cheaper.
It would be a bad option for Microsoft - then everyone would take it as read that they were behind the whole thing from the word go, something that may well be true anyway.
Unless SCO's price drops through the floor (and once it starts falling, it will probably go all the way) then no-one sane will bite.
The current mob thought that the US could either rule or ignore the UN, and fell on their faces. The US will always be 'welcomed back into the fold'. As to the future, let's look at the past (for as long as I can remember back to), just considering foreign policy.
The Nixon/Kissinger Admin did serious damage in Cambodia, Chile and most of the rest of S America. I am not sure if Marcos in the Philippines was not from back then as well. The US seemed to prefer dealing with client dictatorships. That caused a lot of resentment.
Ford/Kissinger, I thought at the time that it was an improvement and Ford was certainly less devious. I was pretty young then and may well be wrong about the improvement - Kissinger was still there.
Carter: meant well. He did improve relationships with some countries, but his idea of sending Mohammed Ali as a representative to Africa had the reverse effect there.
Reagan: the worst. The prince of darkness. Every time I thought things could not get worse, they did. Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the UN?
Bush: 4 years of Bush undid an incredible amount of damage. There was that discussion as to whether he had been 'in the loop' during the previous 8 years, well - he may have been there but they cannot have listened to him. By the end of those 4 years, Reagan's time was a fading nightmare. Bush also made some errors - we all do - but the intent was so obviously there.
Clinton: It's the economy, stupid and it certainly was not foreign policy because there was none. It took Clinton years to get going, but when he did it was ok. Reagan was a faded nightmare.
Bush: his name is Bush, it should be Reagan.
When the first Bush replaced Reagan, it only took a few months before it was obvious to the world that things had changed. A new administration will have the same effect, although each region has it's own priorities:
Western Europe + Japan want Kyoto and a reliable partner. They also want the US to lead an economic recovery to get everyone out of the current mess.
The Arab world wants the US to reign Israel in and to stop financing the Israeli actions against the Palestinians
Israel wants the reverse
Osama bin Laden wants the US to nuke itself.
Those regions that get what they want will forgive the current excesses in short order, although many Chileans still hold Pinochet against the US 20 years later - that revolution was initiated and organised by the US. I simply do not know how things look in other victims of US foreign policy.
Sorry - that statement of yours was a bit ambiguous and I did not interpret it as I now see it was meant. No wonder it did not make sense!
Speaking as a non-American, I think that the Iraq war made the Bush cabal, the Tony Blair cabal and several others look stupid. A large number of people - also in both of those countries - saw through the propaganda at the time and do not look 'stupid' at all now. It would never cross my mind to indicate that all Americans are now looking stupid because of something a few people in the White House organised, although those who agreed with them certainly have a head start in those stakes;-) Even then, calling all of the followers 'stupid' is simply wrong, a lot will fall under 'misinformed' and many of them will hopefully have since learned to trust certain sources of information less - a lesson we all have (had) to learn.
I take my.sig seriously:-), all information sources are incomplete and probably biased.
This is a genuine question coming up: Did you identify with decisions made by the Clinton Administration (or other previous ones) in the same way?
I am English. I agree with some decisions made by British governments, but passionately disagree with others - irrespective of which party is behind them. No government has an automatic right to my approval (not that they care much), how could they? - changes in government often lead to changes in policies, that is supposed to be the point of having elections.
Opposition politicians normally disagree with the government of the day, that is also normal. Are you indicating that to disagree with your government of the day is 'unamerican'? That it what it sounds like.
Give me a fucking break. Where is Saddam? Is he in Iraq? Is he in Syria? Is he dead? Or did he never exist in the first place? Your point is?
To make us look stupid. Saddam escapes, takes the weapons with him, waits a few years for the U.S. to be condemned by the international community, then returns. and It's questioning like that which brought this war about in the first place. Are you serious, or are you trying to be modded up as 'funny'? This war came about because a bunch of idealogues in Washington DC decided that it would be a cool idea to send a load of GIs to the Gulf and finish what Dubya's dad started. Nothing that Saddam did (short of resigning, and Noriega's precedent showed that resigning would not help him) was going to prevent that war. I remember the German foreign minister telling Powell that:
Saddam was an extremely unpleasant man
the evidence for WMDs was simply implausible
getting rid of him would be a very bad idea
What he said was self evident then and has subsequently proved to be completely accurate. I am not surprised that Iraq is proving to be ungovernable, even though the degree of resistance (shooting that Chinook down this morning) has surprised me.
When you say To make us look stupid, you are identifying yourself with that crew in the White House. That is your choice.
aha - you are talking in terms of smuggling a pistol or two over the border and making sure you get checked by the friendly border guard and not someone else on his shift, or by someone on another shift.
I thought we were talking something large scale like missiles. So, what would be the point of smuggling something like that into Syria? What is the use of having WMDs if you are not going to use them?
After the 11th of September, Al Qaida and - for backing them - the Taliban, had to go. The administration forged a coalition which did the job, something Clinton should have done earlier.
What happened next was a mess - the new Afghan government has been more or less abandoned - but the initial job was done well.
That was my 'one good thing'. It is all I can come up with.
As a non-american, I simply do not care that much about his peccadiloes.
The Republicans spent years hounding Clinton, and all they came up with was some dirt involving a couple of women, although I will agree that the Paula Jones case stank. What is the name of that Supreme Court judge? The one that ran under 'Long Dong Silver'. That stank just as much and also at the personal level, but was simply ignored.
Now look at what Nixon/Kissinger got up to in Cambodia and Chile. Look at Reagan in Nicaragua and Lebanon. Reagan backing terrorists in Angola and Mozambique. Reagan backing murderous governments in El Salvador and Guatemala (although he did pull the plug on Marcos). Look at the mess Bush has got the US into in Iraq.
All of those people lied about what they were doing or why they were doing it, Reagan was the 'Teflon president' because nothing stuck to him, but how many members of his administration were indicted?
The father of the current president did a pretty good job in a lot of ways, although some of his appointments (Long Dong Silver, the VP) basically showed his contempt for the offices they were filling. Clinton also did a pretty good job, initially just at home and then in his foreign policy as well.
There was a report I read a couple of days ago, that there was a group in the Pentagon (but under the VP) whose job was to push the President into war against Iraq, telling whatever lies were needed to push him into action. Was this report genuine? Is this public knowledge or was some reporter being creative? If the president really was manipulated in this way, then some members of this administration should be given a fair trial, taken out and shot.
Syria and Iraq had not been friends in recent years, don't forget that Syria was part of the coalition against Iraq back in the first US Iraq conflict. I don't know how far back this antipathy goes, but at least back to the 70's.
Remember the 'Foundation' series? This sounds like it came straight out of there. Minature Atomic Reactors. Of course Asimov assumed that 'Atomic' was the brave new future and was envisaging reactors the size of a walnut.
Factor this in to the TCO comparisons of Windows and Linux. Companies are being hit by these worms as well.
Of course the Microsoft lobby will make sure that it never happens, and if it did then a group of virus writers would convene in a well hidden room in Redmond . . .
I built the machine I am writing this on around 18 months ago. After a few months it became totally unstable (after a software upgrade to SuSE 8.0, I think). Now it runs SuSE 8.2 with absolutely no hardware changes and has not died on me for months. Other people had no problems with that level. The driver for the Realtek 8139 that came with the early 2.4 kernels used to kill the machine I first ran it on. Kill it stone dead, I had to hit reset to restart. The machine is dual-boot and worked fine under Win95. That problem was fixed in a kernel that came out in late 2001 (?) and that nic has always worked just fine in this machine since I built it, as did the old 3com card I replaced it with in the older machine..
Linux is not impervious to quality problems. No OS is.
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If you take that line of logic as a given, there are several companies which have valid unix licences. Conversion to any one of these would not be *that* difficult.
:-)
People do still use VMS but that would be a crazy way to go - you would be incurring major conversion costs to end up in a proprietary niche system. VMS is also sold for systems an order of magnitude larger than anything SCO have ever even thought of handling, and people migrate *from* VMS to unix systems to save money.
Microsoft would be an alternative, but an expensive one - even though they try and make the migration path less painful.
My conversion plan would involve buying HP equipment and then either moving to HP Unix or taking advantage of that HP offer with respect to SCO and running linux.
If you don't take that line of logic as given, buy HP hardware and migrate to Linux
I think this guy is the original. This particular one dates back to early 2001.
That could be one of the reasons perl made it. The papers I remember were too convoluted/obscure to even use as a way of getting to sleep.
Another problem was: those papers which were readable, frequently did not have much sensible to say. We still read (and believed) them because they were papers passed down from The Mount, and comprehensible.
Where they are very valuable is in establishing 'prior art'.
Back around the time I graduated, I used to try and read some of those papers. The language they were written in was rather hard to decipher, communications skills were not very prominent ;-)
Damn - you are so obviously right.
I have since checked the installation in question and the user rights are set way too high. I hardly touch windows nowadays and made the usual mistake of trusting someone competent.
Pres. Clinton made a poor decision to have an affair when he thought no one was watching. Then, when he was in a crisis -pressure of the Ken Starr investigation - he tried to lie his way out of it. Those actions show more about his true character than all his years of political life!
You are missing a sense of proportion.
No matter what or who we are talking about, that statement of yours is ridiculous.
Your mother would only have the same level of problem if she ran everything as root. I know someone who had XP Professional at home and ran everything there as 'Administrator' or something with the same rights. I was asked to come around and help when the system was already toast. They had no concept of different users for different tasks.
They also have the cash to pursue security problems, their problem appears to be design flaws that can only be 'corrected around'.
An obvious example is integrating their Web Browser into their OS to screw Netscape, a political decision taken by his Billship. Bugs in IE lead to the equivalent of root exploits, bugs in Mozilla mean that one user account can be compromised.
Another political decision has been to install software to offer all kinds of services, basically to keep third party vendors out. This software defaults to being active. What was that database port vulnerability again? Another consequence of this is that a virus/worm writer has reliable idea as to what components will be running/active.
They have the cash for PR *and* fixes, but political decisions have led to a situation where this does not help. Having said that, if as many computers ran Linux as the various Win versions, we would also be seeing more problems that at present - they just would not be as serious.
Yes, I followed the link so I know what he does, aber er koennte immer noch mit dem Erwin verwandt sein (he could still be related to Erwin). It would not surprise me at all if a company like IBM employed close relatives of their local 'Ministerpraesident' in positions like that.
Yes, I know what 'Teufel' means, my homepage's domain should have made that clear.
The Hollerith tabulators were not used in concentration camps, they were used to keep track of prospective victims (Jews, Gypsies . .) so that their transport to the camps could be organised - something I consider worse. All this is over 60 years back though, the current IBM does not have a lot to do with those misdeeds.
Your second link is a lot more relevant to the story. Is Fritz Teufel related to Erwin Teufel? Erwin Teufel is the head of the ruling party in Baden-Wuerttemberg - the state where IBM is located in Germany.
That is how campaign financing works. Corporations finance politicians' campaigns, corporations get to write the laws.
Having said that, SCO's abuse of the legal system is of a completely different order to IBM's (attempted?) abuse of the Patents system here. SCO are committing the corporate equivalent of a suicide bombing.
- Novell wanted a Linux company, but they went for one with some serious market share who were also cheaper.
- It would be a bad option for Microsoft - then everyone would take it as read that they were behind the whole thing from the word go, something that may well be true anyway.
Unless SCO's price drops through the floor (and once it starts falling, it will probably go all the way) then no-one sane will bite.The current mob thought that the US could either rule or ignore the UN, and fell on their faces. The US will always be 'welcomed back into the fold'. As to the future, let's look at the past (for as long as I can remember back to), just considering foreign policy.
- The Nixon/Kissinger Admin did serious damage in Cambodia, Chile and most of the rest of S America. I am not sure if Marcos in the Philippines was not from back then as well. The US seemed to prefer dealing with client dictatorships. That caused a lot of resentment.
- Ford/Kissinger, I thought at the time that it was an improvement and Ford was certainly less devious. I was pretty young then and may well be wrong about the improvement - Kissinger was still there.
- Carter: meant well. He did improve relationships with some countries, but his idea of sending Mohammed Ali as a representative to Africa had the reverse effect there.
- Reagan: the worst. The prince of darkness. Every time I thought things could not get worse, they did. Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the UN?
- Bush: 4 years of Bush undid an incredible amount of damage. There was that discussion as to whether he had been 'in the loop' during the previous 8 years, well - he may have been there but they cannot have listened to him. By the end of those 4 years, Reagan's time was a fading nightmare. Bush also made some errors - we all do - but the intent was so obviously there.
- Clinton: It's the economy, stupid and it certainly was not foreign policy because there was none. It took Clinton years to get going, but when he did it was ok. Reagan was a faded nightmare.
- Bush: his name is Bush, it should be Reagan.
When the first Bush replaced Reagan, it only took a few months before it was obvious to the world that things had changed. A new administration will have the same effect, although each region has it's own priorities:- Western Europe + Japan want Kyoto and a reliable partner. They also want the US to lead an economic recovery to get everyone out of the current mess.
- The Arab world wants the US to reign Israel in and to stop financing the Israeli actions against the Palestinians
- Israel wants the reverse
- Osama bin Laden wants the US to nuke itself.
Those regions that get what they want will forgive the current excesses in short order, although many Chileans still hold Pinochet against the US 20 years later - that revolution was initiated and organised by the US. I simply do not know how things look in other victims of US foreign policy.Sorry - that statement of yours was a bit ambiguous and I did not interpret it as I now see it was meant. No wonder it did not make sense!
;-) Even then, calling all of the followers 'stupid' is simply wrong, a lot will fall under 'misinformed' and many of them will hopefully have since learned to trust certain sources of information less - a lesson we all have (had) to learn.
.sig seriously :-), all information sources are incomplete and probably biased.
Speaking as a non-American, I think that the Iraq war made the Bush cabal, the Tony Blair cabal and several others look stupid. A large number of people - also in both of those countries - saw through the propaganda at the time and do not look 'stupid' at all now.
It would never cross my mind to indicate that all Americans are now looking stupid because of something a few people in the White House organised, although those who agreed with them certainly have a head start in those stakes
I take my
This is a genuine question coming up:
Did you identify with decisions made by the Clinton Administration (or other previous ones) in the same way?
I am English. I agree with some decisions made by British governments, but passionately disagree with others - irrespective of which party is behind them. No government has an automatic right to my approval (not that they care much), how could they? - changes in government often lead to changes in policies, that is supposed to be the point of having elections.
Opposition politicians normally disagree with the government of the day, that is also normal. Are you indicating that to disagree with your government of the day is 'unamerican'? That it what it sounds like.
Your point is?
To make us look stupid. Saddam escapes, takes the weapons with him, waits a few years for the U.S. to be condemned by the international community, then returns.
and
It's questioning like that which brought this war about in the first place.
Are you serious, or are you trying to be modded up as 'funny'? This war came about because a bunch of idealogues in Washington DC decided that it would be a cool idea to send a load of GIs to the Gulf and finish what Dubya's dad started. Nothing that Saddam did (short of resigning, and Noriega's precedent showed that resigning would not help him) was going to prevent that war. I remember the German foreign minister telling Powell that:
- Saddam was an extremely unpleasant man
- the evidence for WMDs was simply implausible
- getting rid of him would be a very bad idea
What he said was self evident then and has subsequently proved to be completely accurate. I am not surprised that Iraq is proving to be ungovernable, even though the degree of resistance (shooting that Chinook down this morning) has surprised me.When you say To make us look stupid, you are identifying yourself with that crew in the White House. That is your choice.
aha - you are talking in terms of smuggling a pistol or two over the border and making sure you get checked by the friendly border guard and not someone else on his shift, or by someone on another shift.
I thought we were talking something large scale like missiles. So, what would be the point of smuggling something like that into Syria? What is the use of having WMDs if you are not going to use them?
OK, I'll stick my neck out.
After the 11th of September, Al Qaida and - for backing them - the Taliban, had to go. The administration forged a coalition which did the job, something Clinton should have done earlier.
What happened next was a mess - the new Afghan government has been more or less abandoned - but the initial job was done well.
That was my 'one good thing'. It is all I can come up with.
As a non-american, I simply do not care that much about his peccadiloes.
The Republicans spent years hounding Clinton, and all they came up with was some dirt involving a couple of women, although I will agree that the Paula Jones case stank. What is the name of that Supreme Court judge? The one that ran under 'Long Dong Silver'. That stank just as much and also at the personal level, but was simply ignored.
Now look at what Nixon/Kissinger got up to in Cambodia and Chile.
Look at Reagan in Nicaragua and Lebanon. Reagan backing terrorists in Angola and Mozambique. Reagan backing murderous governments in El Salvador and Guatemala (although he did pull the plug on Marcos).
Look at the mess Bush has got the US into in Iraq.
All of those people lied about what they were doing or why they were doing it, Reagan was the 'Teflon president' because nothing stuck to him, but how many members of his administration were indicted?
The father of the current president did a pretty good job in a lot of ways, although some of his appointments (Long Dong Silver, the VP) basically showed his contempt for the offices they were filling. Clinton also did a pretty good job, initially just at home and then in his foreign policy as well.
There was a report I read a couple of days ago, that there was a group in the Pentagon (but under the VP) whose job was to push the President into war against Iraq, telling whatever lies were needed to push him into action. Was this report genuine? Is this public knowledge or was some reporter being creative? If the president really was manipulated in this way, then some members of this administration should be given a fair trial, taken out and shot.
Syria and Iraq had not been friends in recent years, don't forget that Syria was part of the coalition against Iraq back in the first US Iraq conflict. I don't know how far back this antipathy goes, but at least back to the 70's.
Ahh, I forgot that aspect:
Isaac Asimov, an American Icon who may even have been to Bangor, Maine . . .
Remember the 'Foundation' series? This sounds like it came straight out of there. Minature Atomic Reactors. Of course Asimov assumed that 'Atomic' was the brave new future and was envisaging reactors the size of a walnut.
Factor this in to the TCO comparisons of Windows and Linux. Companies are being hit by these worms as well.
Of course the Microsoft lobby will make sure that it never happens, and if it did then a group of virus writers would convene in a well hidden room in Redmond . . .
I built the machine I am writing this on around 18 months ago. After a few months it became totally unstable (after a software upgrade to SuSE 8.0, I think). Now it runs SuSE 8.2 with absolutely no hardware changes and has not died on me for months.
Other people had no problems with that level.
The driver for the Realtek 8139 that came with the early 2.4 kernels used to kill the machine I first ran it on. Kill it stone dead, I had to hit reset to restart. The machine is dual-boot and worked fine under Win95. That problem was fixed in a kernel that came out in late 2001 (?) and that nic has always worked just fine in this machine since I built it, as did the old 3com card I replaced it with in the older machine..
Linux is not impervious to quality problems. No OS is.