The issue with the Qt license was that it is incompatible with the GPL, but was being used to adapt GPLd applications to the KDE desktop. This violated the terms of licensing of the GPLd software in question. I believe you've misstated the objection -- it wasn't against Qt-GPL but against Qt-QPL.
While the LGPL allows use in proprietary software, it is also compatible with the GPL.
The issue was license compliance, not status, per se. If people start making a general practice of flauting the terms of the GPL, there's a problem.
Microsoft has, and has exercised, its power to make offers too good to refuse. Often in the sense of financing or otherwise sweetening the pot for IT adoption. There have been a number of spectacular defections from companies which had been particularly close to Microsoft but switched sides, notably SGI's former CEO (Rick Belluzo) and our good friend Doug Miller, of Interix (now "Unix Services for Windows NT", a Microsoft product.
With US$30 billion in cash on hand (today's Yahoo profile -- and up from $17b a year ago), Microsoft is in a very real position to literally buy business. One of the weak points of free software is that it doesn't come with the inherent, tangible, partnering deals that have traditionally lubricated major software and IT projects.
This has definitely changed with the very active involvement of IBM, but there are few other major hardware and software vendors, and particularly systems integrators and Big insert declining single-digit number here accounting firms who are playing this game yet. Financing new projects is a major part of IT, and it's a game Microsoft is positioned to play, well, and with high stakes, for years to come.
The direct benefit for the university is the income it can derive from alumni donations and through its marketing efforts. If the university abuses its resource to the point that alums desert it, they've managed it poorly.
If the service is implemented as a forwarder (common with other systems, such as the ACM/IEEE email systems), users are free to apply their own spam blocks to the service.
I'd expect the best option to be posting a periodic (monthly/quarterly) newsletter to recipients, selling sponsorship spots in this medium.
I graduated from University of California, Davis in the early 1990s, and had been using email for some five years up to that point. It was clear then that email was a preferred mode of communications, and it's only become more so.
I've been long stunned at the absolute lack of clue universities have had in not picking this up as a standard service. They already run services for thousands (or tens of thousands) of students, faculty, staff, and associated personnel. Keeping mail services open for alums wouldn't be much of an additional load, and, as a channel for communications and alumni donations, it should pay for itself many times over. Exceedingly short-sighted IMO.
I discovered and played with this some time back. Got a really nice screenshot of Earth transiting Jupiter (do the geometry -- it's a hard shot to get IRL). Pretty cool.
ssystem is neat in that you can scoot around to different PoVs, but the navigation is a bit tricky -- acceleration and decelleration, but no space anchor you can just throw out to stop you, or easy means of going to a particular location (unless it's near a major body).
Another cool tool if you're into the exploring stuff is xaos. Especially the random-dot stereograms. Mandlebrot never looked so good.
I use a script found at Freshmeat, ricochet, to generate abuse reports to the spammers ISP, netblock provider, and other upstream relays listed in headers. This is hotkeyed to 'S' in mutt, making disposal trivial.
Seperately, I report all relay/origin IPs to the ORBS open relay list. There is an email submission system for such use, I've got a command line utility to report a list of IPs, and a shell script to extract them (need to integrate this a bit more closely, gotta round tuit?).
The combined tools take a few seconds a day to report messages -- most of which are filtered to a spam folder via procmail rules.
I only get a few spam messages per day despite wide Usenet, mailing list, and website distribution of my email address -- and all of them are reported. OK, so my Slashdot email's obscured, that's one of the few.
Tree isn't current model
on
CPRM Lecture
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· Score: 2
The keyspace currently is a matrix. The tree model was proposed as a means for addressing several concerns, incluing enlarging the keyspace, discouraging certain attacks, and minimizing storage requirements for holding the keyspace. The tree is designed such that a minscule subset (several hundred?) keys would actually describe (and allow to be derived) all keys in the tree.
I hit Kuro5hin a lot (hell, I designed the moderation system), though I agree with you on story content -- K5 got grabbed by a bunch of HS/College PoliSci types. I think it's getting a bit better than it had been for a while, but the article focus is way off. Submission system needs a lot of work.
There's a community that gelled over at the old InfoWorld Electric forums (mostly under Nick Petreley's columns) which now hangs at IWETHEY. The group's getting a little long in the tooth, but still is good for a read on stuff. Looking for a new home though -- EZBoard's forum SW basically stinks.
I do a lot of email -- mostly Debian lists, a few discussions of other topics. Many forums seem to be quieting down though as people ride out the downturn. Definitely interesting times.
Count 'em up. I think I got about 196 listed at LWN's distro page a month or two back. But, as you point out, there's a handful of major ones (Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, Turbo), a few HW-specific ones (Yellow Dog, ARM), and a whole slew of special-purpose ones, as well as smaller dists.
I tend to think of these as tailored applications of Linux rather than fragmentation of the core distro.
This was previously mentioned at Slashdot in a prior OpenMail story. This Summit Strategies, March 20, 1997 page may be of interest as well:
Windows NT Server-based Solutions for the Enterprise: HP will promote Microsoft Exchange Server as the strategic NT messaging, solution--and discontinue development of OpenMail for NT. HP will also provide consulting services for Exchange migration and integration.
Looks as if MSFT may have exploited HP in the past to fend off competition in the enterprise communications market.
My own read of the current action: Bruce is quite possibly right, there is too much third-party baggage in OpenMail for it to be a successesful free software play. However, opening up core APIs to the free software movement, particularly for projects such as OpenFlock or Evolution could be very helpful. Still, I've got to say that Don Marti's analysis smells strongly of truth.
A hand to the ALITech folks for picking up a good line of hardware and running with it.
After hemming and hawing and drooling over Jim's Obsidian 30 for about six months, I picked up an Amethyst 20U before trekking down under. OK, so I wiped the default RH install and slathered a real distro (Debian Potato/testing) on it.
The box has been a champ. With docking station, it's virtually a second desktop. Sans, it's a thin, light, powerhouse. Battery life is good (close on the 3:20 advertised), screen rocks, keyboard feel is great (packed a Happy Hacker keyboard, hardly used it). Onboard networking is very nice to have. Still need to try out the FIR, and I've had trouble getting PCMCIA up and running, but that's after wiping what TuxTops had given me. Power management works, though it helps to go to standby from console. Had to throw together a presentation -- plug video out to the pojector, hit the <FN><CRT/LCD> switch, and voila. Coulda saved myself a lot of worrying on that one...;-)
One nit -- the screen tends to rub against the touchpad and mouse keys in the closed position, I've found it helps to keep a sheet of letter-sized paper inside the case when closed for travelling. Otherwise, very happy.
Yes, the pricing is comperable to (or slightly better than) Compaq and Dell boxes, and better than IBM. Yes, there are cheaper boxes out there, but they tend to do less or have less coverage. And, yes, if you're familiar with Linux, it's a perfectly acceptable portable OS. My alternative bet would likely be something based on Symbian for instant-on and ready-to-fly systems. Windows? A joke.
You know, it's really tough sometimes to figure out who to cheer for (yes, that's a parody, but with not a little basis in reality).
On a more serious note, isn't the phrase "bake-off" sufficiently descriptive that it may contradict guidelines on what is and isn't trademarkable? As the OSI found with their failed attempt to secure the "Open Source" trademark?
I believe I may have seen something like this at MSNBC, a site which is notoriously hard to browse for users who've disabled cookies and blocked common ad sites such as Doubleclick. Recently I noticed that news URLs were being redirected through Doubleclick, apparently with an advertising payload attached (though this wasn't visible to me).
The article speaks of an acceptance of advertisements on TV and radio by many. Speak for yourself -- I find broadcast media ads intrusive to the extreme, listening exclusively to NPR at home, and tolerating commercial radio only in short stretches while driving with my fingers dancing over the pre-sets. The analog another poster made to Bradbury's 451 is apt -- I find ubiquitous advertising to be annoying and offensive in the extreme -- I am not a 24/7/365 marketing opportunity, thakyouverymuch, and will take my business away from venues in which I'm treated as such (Safeway, you listening?).
I've also had several unpleasent AT&T experiences, but this one's kind of fun.
First, my local carrier has my long-distance service locked down. Can't be changed without a written authorization on my part. Contact your local phone company for info.
ATT has been running a promotional offer in which they enclose a check for $40 and request you sign the back, which is a contract to switch carriers. I cross out the contract, write "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY, NOT A CONTRACT" on the check, and deposit it. Twice this summer. Makes up for 7 minutes of hotel bills that ran me $50 last winter.
A check is a check is a check is a check. A rebate is a rebate. These were not rebates. ATT called one time to request a service change, I told them politely to engage in an act of self-indulgence.
I'm not recommending the tactic, but it worked for me.
Users of mutt can retaliate in kind by sending GPG signed messages. Not only do both message and signature appear as MIME attachments (by default), but quoting will throw a bunch of spurious '=', '=20', and similar characters into the bytestream.
Almost as annoying as getting broken MS shit...but actually useful (you've authenticated yourself as one clueful mofo assh*le), and, believe it or not, fully MIME compliant -- it's the mailer's own damned fault it can't read straight text.
You can even quote me in responding to those who use inferior mail clients and ask why they your mail is arriving as attachments:
I don't know. I don't care.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
K5 is an equal opportunity website
on
Kuro5hin Returns
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· Score: 2
There is no ToS conspiracy. K5 is laboring under several hundred Apache processes talking to several hundred MySQL requests. It's slow. It has been responding a bit in the past few minutes. It's been performing at peak rated load (about 6 hits/second) for most for the past hour and a half. There's just a lot of requests coming through.
And your link just finished loading as I've been typing this post.
Just a thanks to Slashdot, particularly Jeff "Hemos" Bates for non-stop gavel-to-gavel coverage of the K5 saga, VA for the server, VHosting.com for the coloc, the Scoop crew for code, Intes for sundry details, and Rusty for not throwing in the towel. Couldn'a done i' w'chout ye.
I'd actually like to see guidelines coming out of the insurance industry. Sears, in your example, would be liable, but would have liability coverage through their business insurer if they'd taken appropriate risk-mitigation steps. OTOH, if the credit slips are in an unsecured area and free for the taking, the insurance company would refuse coverage. There's a whole field of risk management concerned with both financial and physical business risks.
From what I remember from personal issues with cc companies, it is fairly easy to dispute charges.
So you'd think. In my case, the company was Chase Manhattan, and it took over nine months to resolve a $200+ disputed charge which appeared on my acount after I'd closed it. The charge wasn't posted to me for over a year, following a resubmission by the merchant. I immediately notified Chase by phone and mail that I wasn't responsible for the charges (to a Florida hotel -- I live in California and have never been to Florida). The charges (and interest, and late charges) continued to appear on my statement. Repeated requests for copies of the actual charge slips failed to produce anything.
It was ultimately the threat of legal action, including criminal charges for fraud, misrepresentation, and malfeasance, and libel (credit history), if the dispute wasn't resolved within 30 days, which got the charges cleared from my account -- nine months after they'd initially appeared, seventeen months after they'd been made, a year and a half after I'd closed the account.
Yes, I got the dispute resolved, the dollar value was low, but it was a complete PITA.
In five years, OSS will have changed the commercial SW and IT industries beyond all recognition.
In five years, the commercial SW and IT industries will have changed OSS beyond all recognition.
If you read the Microsoft NT C2 Configuration article closely, with comprehension, you'll find that it speaks of NT 4.0 being evaluated, but never certified, as being C2 compliant. This was addressed in this BugTraq post. Believe you me, if NT 4.0 had been certified, Microsoft would be singing it to the heavens. But they don't want you to know that. You'll also note that "The C2 Administrator's and User's Security Guide" is itself a MS Windows executable (http://www.microsoft.c om/technet/security/exe/C2SecGuide.exe), hardly the most secure and safe way to transmit data around the Internet. Anyone got an open-standards version of this document?
They also don't want you to know about the man they killed after he first got WinNT 3.51 C2 certified, then told Microsoft that it would not be possible to get C2 certification for WinNT 4.0. Ed Curry, military man, NSA-certified technician, and a former independent contractor for Microsoft first had his business, health, and ultimately life destroyed. I knew Ed only from online encounters in Nick Petreley's InfoWorld forums, but the man was a friend, willing and capable of sharing fascinating information. Ed Curry died in December of 1999 of a stress-induced stroke. He is survived by a wife and young daughter.
The topic of an OpenBSD bootable business card (or simply a small CD-ROM installation) was raised on misc@openbsd.org recently. I believe there's an interest in the project, and one correspondant was going to contact one of the people who'd helped put together the LinuxCare BBC (a pimp-ass Linux-on-a-CD distro that's with me always). Sorry, forget names, but check the past couple of weeks of archives.
My suggestion was that such a distro would be a great admin/rescue/demo tool, particularly if it allowed someone to set up a firewall with the system. One plus of OpenBSD is its union mount method, which allows mouting nonwritable media ass if they were a writable filesystem (I've heard that this may be a feature of the 2.4 Linux kernel as well). This allows for both the security of having nonvolatile media, and the flexibility of a mutable fileystem. Pretty cool.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
The issue with the Qt license was that it is incompatible with the GPL, but was being used to adapt GPLd applications to the KDE desktop. This violated the terms of licensing of the GPLd software in question. I believe you've misstated the objection -- it wasn't against Qt-GPL but against Qt-QPL.
While the LGPL allows use in proprietary software, it is also compatible with the GPL.
The issue was license compliance, not status, per se. If people start making a general practice of flauting the terms of the GPL, there's a problem.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Microsoft has, and has exercised, its power to make offers too good to refuse. Often in the sense of financing or otherwise sweetening the pot for IT adoption. There have been a number of spectacular defections from companies which had been particularly close to Microsoft but switched sides, notably SGI's former CEO (Rick Belluzo) and our good friend Doug Miller, of Interix (now "Unix Services for Windows NT", a Microsoft product.
With US$30 billion in cash on hand (today's Yahoo profile -- and up from $17b a year ago), Microsoft is in a very real position to literally buy business. One of the weak points of free software is that it doesn't come with the inherent, tangible, partnering deals that have traditionally lubricated major software and IT projects.
This has definitely changed with the very active involvement of IBM, but there are few other major hardware and software vendors, and particularly systems integrators and Big insert declining single-digit number here accounting firms who are playing this game yet. Financing new projects is a major part of IT, and it's a game Microsoft is positioned to play, well, and with high stakes, for years to come.
Yes, you should fear marketing.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
The direct benefit for the university is the income it can derive from alumni donations and through its marketing efforts. If the university abuses its resource to the point that alums desert it, they've managed it poorly.
If the service is implemented as a forwarder (common with other systems, such as the ACM/IEEE email systems), users are free to apply their own spam blocks to the service.
I'd expect the best option to be posting a periodic (monthly/quarterly) newsletter to recipients, selling sponsorship spots in this medium.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I graduated from University of California, Davis in the early 1990s, and had been using email for some five years up to that point. It was clear then that email was a preferred mode of communications, and it's only become more so.
I've been long stunned at the absolute lack of clue universities have had in not picking this up as a standard service. They already run services for thousands (or tens of thousands) of students, faculty, staff, and associated personnel. Keeping mail services open for alums wouldn't be much of an additional load, and, as a channel for communications and alumni donations, it should pay for itself many times over. Exceedingly short-sighted IMO.
And, no the Cal Aggie Alumni Association still lacks clue.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I discovered and played with this some time back. Got a really nice screenshot of Earth transiting Jupiter (do the geometry -- it's a hard shot to get IRL). Pretty cool.
ssystem is neat in that you can scoot around to different PoVs, but the navigation is a bit tricky -- acceleration and decelleration, but no space anchor you can just throw out to stop you, or easy means of going to a particular location (unless it's near a major body).
Another cool tool if you're into the exploring stuff is xaos. Especially the random-dot stereograms. Mandlebrot never looked so good.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I use a script found at Freshmeat, ricochet, to generate abuse reports to the spammers ISP, netblock provider, and other upstream relays listed in headers. This is hotkeyed to 'S' in mutt, making disposal trivial.
Seperately, I report all relay/origin IPs to the ORBS open relay list. There is an email submission system for such use, I've got a command line utility to report a list of IPs, and a shell script to extract them (need to integrate this a bit more closely, gotta round tuit?).
The combined tools take a few seconds a day to report messages -- most of which are filtered to a spam folder via procmail rules.
I only get a few spam messages per day despite wide Usenet, mailing list, and website distribution of my email address -- and all of them are reported. OK, so my Slashdot email's obscured, that's one of the few.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
This it, perchance?
30 seconds with Google.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
The keyspace currently is a matrix. The tree model was proposed as a means for addressing several concerns, incluing enlarging the keyspace, discouraging certain attacks, and minimizing storage requirements for holding the keyspace. The tree is designed such that a minscule subset (several hundred?) keys would actually describe (and allow to be derived) all keys in the tree.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I hit Kuro5hin a lot (hell, I designed the moderation system), though I agree with you on story content -- K5 got grabbed by a bunch of HS/College PoliSci types. I think it's getting a bit better than it had been for a while, but the article focus is way off. Submission system needs a lot of work.
There's a community that gelled over at the old InfoWorld Electric forums (mostly under Nick Petreley's columns) which now hangs at IWETHEY. The group's getting a little long in the tooth, but still is good for a read on stuff. Looking for a new home though -- EZBoard's forum SW basically stinks.
I do a lot of email -- mostly Debian lists, a few discussions of other topics. Many forums seem to be quieting down though as people ride out the downturn. Definitely interesting times.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Count 'em up. I think I got about 196 listed at LWN's distro page a month or two back. But, as you point out, there's a handful of major ones (Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, Turbo), a few HW-specific ones (Yellow Dog, ARM), and a whole slew of special-purpose ones, as well as smaller dists.
I tend to think of these as tailored applications of Linux rather than fragmentation of the core distro.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
This was previously mentioned at Slashdot in a prior OpenMail story. This Summit Strategies, March 20, 1997 page may be of interest as well:
Looks as if MSFT may have exploited HP in the past to fend off competition in the enterprise communications market.
My own read of the current action: Bruce is quite possibly right, there is too much third-party baggage in OpenMail for it to be a successesful free software play. However, opening up core APIs to the free software movement, particularly for projects such as OpenFlock or Evolution could be very helpful. Still, I've got to say that Don Marti's analysis smells strongly of truth.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
A hand to the ALITech folks for picking up a good line of hardware and running with it.
After hemming and hawing and drooling over Jim's Obsidian 30 for about six months, I picked up an Amethyst 20U before trekking down under. OK, so I wiped the default RH install and slathered a real distro (Debian Potato/testing) on it.
The box has been a champ. With docking station, it's virtually a second desktop. Sans, it's a thin, light, powerhouse. Battery life is good (close on the 3:20 advertised), screen rocks, keyboard feel is great (packed a Happy Hacker keyboard, hardly used it). Onboard networking is very nice to have. Still need to try out the FIR, and I've had trouble getting PCMCIA up and running, but that's after wiping what TuxTops had given me. Power management works, though it helps to go to standby from console. Had to throw together a presentation -- plug video out to the pojector, hit the <FN><CRT/LCD> switch, and voila. Coulda saved myself a lot of worrying on that one... ;-)
One nit -- the screen tends to rub against the touchpad and mouse keys in the closed position, I've found it helps to keep a sheet of letter-sized paper inside the case when closed for travelling. Otherwise, very happy.
Yes, the pricing is comperable to (or slightly better than) Compaq and Dell boxes, and better than IBM. Yes, there are cheaper boxes out there, but they tend to do less or have less coverage. And, yes, if you're familiar with Linux, it's a perfectly acceptable portable OS. My alternative bet would likely be something based on Symbian for instant-on and ready-to-fly systems. Windows? A joke.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
You know, it's really tough sometimes to figure out who to cheer for (yes, that's a parody, but with not a little basis in reality).
On a more serious note, isn't the phrase "bake-off" sufficiently descriptive that it may contradict guidelines on what is and isn't trademarkable? As the OSI found with their failed attempt to secure the "Open Source" trademark?
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I believe I may have seen something like this at MSNBC, a site which is notoriously hard to browse for users who've disabled cookies and blocked common ad sites such as Doubleclick. Recently I noticed that news URLs were being redirected through Doubleclick, apparently with an advertising payload attached (though this wasn't visible to me).
The article speaks of an acceptance of advertisements on TV and radio by many. Speak for yourself -- I find broadcast media ads intrusive to the extreme, listening exclusively to NPR at home, and tolerating commercial radio only in short stretches while driving with my fingers dancing over the pre-sets. The analog another poster made to Bradbury's 451 is apt -- I find ubiquitous advertising to be annoying and offensive in the extreme -- I am not a 24/7/365 marketing opportunity, thakyouverymuch, and will take my business away from venues in which I'm treated as such (Safeway, you listening?).
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I've also had several unpleasent AT&T experiences, but this one's kind of fun.
First, my local carrier has my long-distance service locked down. Can't be changed without a written authorization on my part. Contact your local phone company for info.
ATT has been running a promotional offer in which they enclose a check for $40 and request you sign the back, which is a contract to switch carriers. I cross out the contract, write "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY, NOT A CONTRACT" on the check, and deposit it. Twice this summer. Makes up for 7 minutes of hotel bills that ran me $50 last winter.
A check is a check is a check is a check. A rebate is a rebate. These were not rebates. ATT called one time to request a service change, I told them politely to engage in an act of self-indulgence.
I'm not recommending the tactic, but it worked for me.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Users of mutt can retaliate in kind by sending GPG signed messages. Not only do both message and signature appear as MIME attachments (by default), but quoting will throw a bunch of spurious '=', '=20', and similar characters into the bytestream.
Almost as annoying as getting broken MS shit...but actually useful (you've authenticated yourself as one clueful mofo assh*le), and, believe it or not, fully MIME compliant -- it's the mailer's own damned fault it can't read straight text.
You can even quote me in responding to those who use inferior mail clients and ask why they your mail is arriving as attachments:
I don't know. I don't care.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
There is no ToS conspiracy. K5 is laboring under several hundred Apache processes talking to several hundred MySQL requests. It's slow. It has been responding a bit in the past few minutes. It's been performing at peak rated load (about 6 hits/second) for most for the past hour and a half. There's just a lot of requests coming through.
And your link just finished loading as I've been typing this post.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Just a thanks to Slashdot, particularly Jeff "Hemos" Bates for non-stop gavel-to-gavel coverage of the K5 saga, VA for the server, VHosting.com for the coloc, the Scoop crew for code, Intes for sundry details, and Rusty for not throwing in the towel. Couldn'a done i' w'chout ye.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
I'd actually like to see guidelines coming out of the insurance industry. Sears, in your example, would be liable, but would have liability coverage through their business insurer if they'd taken appropriate risk-mitigation steps. OTOH, if the credit slips are in an unsecured area and free for the taking, the insurance company would refuse coverage. There's a whole field of risk management concerned with both financial and physical business risks.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
From what I remember from personal issues with cc companies, it is fairly easy to dispute charges.
So you'd think. In my case, the company was Chase Manhattan, and it took over nine months to resolve a $200+ disputed charge which appeared on my acount after I'd closed it. The charge wasn't posted to me for over a year, following a resubmission by the merchant. I immediately notified Chase by phone and mail that I wasn't responsible for the charges (to a Florida hotel -- I live in California and have never been to Florida). The charges (and interest, and late charges) continued to appear on my statement. Repeated requests for copies of the actual charge slips failed to produce anything.
It was ultimately the threat of legal action, including criminal charges for fraud, misrepresentation, and malfeasance, and libel (credit history), if the dispute wasn't resolved within 30 days, which got the charges cleared from my account -- nine months after they'd initially appeared, seventeen months after they'd been made, a year and a half after I'd closed the account.
Yes, I got the dispute resolved, the dollar value was low, but it was a complete PITA.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Shameless self-promotion:
My pithy closing quote on this subject:
In five years, OSS will have changed the commercial SW and IT industries beyond all recognition.
In five years, the commercial SW and IT industries will have changed OSS beyond all recognition.
InfoWorld Electric Forums, September 4, 1998.
After this summer's LWE, I'd say the second half of that comment is largely true.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
If you read the Microsoft NT C2 Configuration article closely, with comprehension, you'll find that it speaks of NT 4.0 being evaluated, but never certified, as being C2 compliant. This was addressed in this BugTraq post. Believe you me, if NT 4.0 had been certified, Microsoft would be singing it to the heavens. But they don't want you to know that. You'll also note that "The C2 Administrator's and User's Security Guide" is itself a MS Windows executable (http://www.microsoft.c om/technet/security/exe/C2SecGuide.exe), hardly the most secure and safe way to transmit data around the Internet. Anyone got an open-standards version of this document?
They also don't want you to know about the man they killed after he first got WinNT 3.51 C2 certified, then told Microsoft that it would not be possible to get C2 certification for WinNT 4.0. Ed Curry, military man, NSA-certified technician, and a former independent contractor for Microsoft first had his business, health, and ultimately life destroyed. I knew Ed only from online encounters in Nick Petreley's InfoWorld forums, but the man was a friend, willing and capable of sharing fascinating information. Ed Curry died in December of 1999 of a stress-induced stroke. He is survived by a wife and young daughter.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
The topic of an OpenBSD bootable business card (or simply a small CD-ROM installation) was raised on misc@openbsd.org recently. I believe there's an interest in the project, and one correspondant was going to contact one of the people who'd helped put together the LinuxCare BBC (a pimp-ass Linux-on-a-CD distro that's with me always). Sorry, forget names, but check the past couple of weeks of archives.
My suggestion was that such a distro would be a great admin/rescue/demo tool, particularly if it allowed someone to set up a firewall with the system. One plus of OpenBSD is its union mount method, which allows mouting nonwritable media ass if they were a writable filesystem (I've heard that this may be a feature of the 2.4 Linux kernel as well). This allows for both the security of having nonvolatile media, and the flexibility of a mutable fileystem. Pretty cool.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?