It looks like Sun is taking the same tack as SGI, including crashing into into the same reef.
What's Sun going to do with all the code still in Solaris to which they don't hold the rights to? Sun paid AT&T a big wad of change many years back so they didn't have to pay per-instance license fees (the fees that date back to the bad old days of UNIX). AFAIK, that fee did NOT buy the IP rights to the code. Even so, there's lots of other code in there which Sun does not own.
So here we go again (Netscape with Mozilla, SGI with XFS and OpenGL). A big company announces they are opening up their source to get brownie points with the OSS community and to get themselves lip service on Wall Street and a stock price goose, only to turn around a few weeks later and say "oh, well, we're not actually going to be able to ship anything close to a complete buildable code set because all these other companies [name them so the OSS community can then misdirect their anger at them] won't release their source code."
About the only major disagreement I have with this article is the issue of security.
IRIX has just about the most suid root programs of any other UNIX around. Time and time again there are vulnerabilities found in some suid root program (usually related to their overengineered GUI). They reportedly hired a person at least a year ago specifically to audit all the code and eliminate buffer overruns. However, new and old buffer overruns are still discovered at a fairly steady rate.
Of course if you use IRIX as a server OS and remove/disable all the desktop setuid stuff as well as turn off all the network services you don't use, then IRIX is almost as secure as the next UNIX. However the point is not to compare one highly-tightened down UNIX against the next highly-tightened down UNIX. The point of rating security of a given OS is how secure is that OS out of the box.
If you make an apples-to-apples comparison of IRIX against some of the OS's specifically designed to be secure (OpenBSD, etc), then IRIX fails utterly.
I never understood why they don't just boost it up to a higher orbit and park it for a decade or so until we can bring it down cheaply.
How much would it cost? To just have it burn up in reentry in a few months seems like a waste.
Alternately instead of boosting it to a higher orbit, adjust its orbit to match the ISS, and rig up a clamp system to dock them together. It would just be a useless appendage for the ISS, but it would be a readily available enclosed space for storage or use for future manufacturing projects or a great attraction for future space tourists that we know are only years away.
--Dave
Re:As a physician, I'm embarrased by the AAP repor
on
Quack!
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· Score: 1
To say that the recommendations are not based on data is simply sticking your head in in the sand.
Also, to all those people who whine about how this is an affront to the Holy First Amendment better check their medication, and by the way read the First Amendement and this report!
The recommendations made by the AAP are just that, and moreover are recommendations made primarily to parents and pediatricians. The only reference anywhere to involving the goverment was to encourage the goverment to expore and fund media education programs and further media research.
These people are not a bunch of Luddites. The American Council of pediatrics doesn't want to ban TV from kids. The simple truth they are professing is that before the age of 2, it is far more important that children have HUMAN CONTACT than spend time in front of the television. Developmentally, these are critical times! If a child does not have enough human contact in these early years they will have developmental problems which CANNOT be solved in later years. What has Slashdot turned into? Is Technology the New Nation? Is anything "anti-Technology" now suddenly anti-American? Has all reason gone the way of technologicalistic dogma? --Dave
Slashdot Mirror
What's Sun going to do with all the code still in Solaris to which they don't hold the rights to? Sun paid AT&T a big wad of change many years back so they didn't have to pay per-instance license fees (the fees that date back to the bad old days of UNIX). AFAIK, that fee did NOT buy the IP rights to the code. Even so, there's lots of other code in there which Sun does not own.
So here we go again (Netscape with Mozilla, SGI with XFS and OpenGL). A big company announces they are opening up their source to get brownie points with the OSS community and to get themselves lip service on Wall Street and a stock price goose, only to turn around a few weeks later and say "oh, well, we're not actually going to be able to ship anything close to a complete buildable code set because all these other companies [name them so the OSS community can then misdirect their anger at them] won't release their source code."
--Dave
IRIX has just about the most suid root programs of any other UNIX around. Time and time again there are vulnerabilities found in some suid root program (usually related to their overengineered GUI). They reportedly hired a person at least a year ago specifically to audit all the code and eliminate buffer overruns. However, new and old buffer overruns are still discovered at a fairly steady rate.
Of course if you use IRIX as a server OS and remove/disable all the desktop setuid stuff as well as turn off all the network services you don't use, then IRIX is almost as secure as the next UNIX. However the point is not to compare one highly-tightened down UNIX against the next highly-tightened down UNIX. The point of rating security of a given OS is how secure is that OS out of the box.
If you make an apples-to-apples comparison of IRIX against some of the OS's specifically designed to be secure (OpenBSD, etc), then IRIX fails utterly.
--Dave
How much would it cost? To just have it burn up in reentry in a few months seems like a waste.
Alternately instead of boosting it to a higher orbit, adjust its orbit to match the ISS, and rig up a clamp system to dock them together. It would just be a useless appendage for the ISS, but it would be a readily available enclosed space for storage or use for future manufacturing projects or a great attraction for future space tourists that we know are only years away.
--Dave
I urge everyone to (gasp) read the policy recommendations for yourselves. As you can see, all their findings are backed by honest-to-goodness reasearch, and common sense.
Also, to all those people who whine about how this is an affront to the Holy First Amendment better check their medication, and by the way read the First Amendement and this report!
The recommendations made by the AAP are just that, and moreover are recommendations made primarily to parents and pediatricians. The only reference anywhere to involving the goverment was to encourage the goverment to expore and fund media education programs and further media research.
--Dave
These people are not a bunch of Luddites. The American Council of pediatrics doesn't want to ban TV from kids. The simple truth they are professing is that before the age of 2, it is far more important that children have HUMAN CONTACT than spend time in front of the television. Developmentally, these are critical times! If a child does not have enough human contact in these early years they will have developmental problems which CANNOT be solved in later years. What has Slashdot turned into? Is Technology the New Nation? Is anything "anti-Technology" now suddenly anti-American? Has all reason gone the way of technologicalistic dogma? --Dave