I take any statement from McBride with a grain of salt.
That said and assuming his statement is mostly true (and if it isn't, then he is misleading shareholders) this makes me worry about the case some more. Taking on IBM's legal department will not be cheap and one has to wonder if maybe Boies knows something we don't.
So it's true and that's troubling or Mcbride is blowing more smoke. Probably a combination of both, but troubling nonetheless.
It would be nice if someone pinned down SCO on just what the contingency agreement entails.
It's very unlikely that Boies' law firm is taking this case on a contingency basis. That kind of business arrangement tends to be for individual tort. There wouldn't be any sense in taking a case like this on a contingency basis, since a good outcome for the client may be somthing very different than a paid settlement. How would Boies collect on a buyout, to take one example?
Corporate law is practiced on a pay-as-you-go basis.
On that basis, SCO does not have enough money in the bank to have this stretch out indefinitely.
That may be one reason IBM is letting this stretch out. McBride's bluster is costing his firm mucho dollars.
If someone (not me) wanted to be really sneaky, they would buy a share of SCO (that's the cheap part) and then hire a good lawyer (EXPENSIVE, let's say high 5 figures to start) and initiate a lawsuit against McBride and SCO and the board of directors for some corporate executivemal feasance against shareholders (hence the need to own a share of SCO). Then you too can have fun with the "discovery process" and go over SCO with a "fine-toothed comb"!
Think of the fun of delivering a subpoena to Lindon, Utah. Think of the excitement of getting to have YOUR VERY OWN SHYSTER get his meaty hooks on SCO corporate documents. HIRE YOUR FRIENDS as expert witnesses that must look over the SCO proprietary source without signing an NDA. You don't need an NDA, because you've got your very own legal shark swimming his way up SCO backside.
Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Maybe Commander Taco would do it if all those VA Linux stock certificates weren't only useful as toilet paper and he wasn't a FORMER dot.com millionaire.
I just wish someone would fight back legally at SCO. They are fucking with Linux and a case can be made that they are doing so wrongly and maliciously. Won't somebody please take the fuckers to court?
Do you really trust IBM to look out for your interests? They're not into Linux for the goodness of it.
I've tried Knoppix, but I get this weird phenomena where the monitor image "throbs". The screen image size throbs , expanding and contracting slightly, like a beating heart.
I am not adept enough to fix it, and I'm running an onboard ATI rage 128 on a Sony monitor, so my configuration is pretty standard.
I'm impressed that KNOPPIX works at all, but I'm a little concerned it's gonna hurt my monitor. And let's face it, noone can really explore a setup when the monitor image throbs in and out.
What the hell is this kind of post supposed to serve? The Linux crowd would not be best served by strong-arm mafia tactics or psychopathic stalking.
Hit the bastard where it hurts. Sue him. Remember, that even a baseless lawsuit takes time and energy and money to be dismissed.
Find a lawyer and think of an excuse to sue him. Hire a private detective to look into his private life. Look into his business dealings. Find out where he is dirty.
Then use the address in the link to serve him his court papers.
Don't break the law, use it to your advantage.
It's just too bad that nobody reading this (nor the writer neither) will follow through with this.
Or you can always do a Larry Flynt to his Jerry Falwell and post your artistic efforts on the web.
I guess this is sort of like the New York branch post offices not delivering mail from Florida, because that's where a lot of junk mail originates from.
I have a fairly nasty conspiracy theory on why AOL and Comcast are cooperating on this. By shutting out the innovative do-it-yourselfers on the Internet from their network, they squelch potential competition from their "value-added" services.
The next step might be to block web servers that don't originate from big corporate server farms. After all, who knows what could be on those independent things but kiddy porn and terrorist training instructions?
The irony is that the great mass of obtrusive commercialism on the Internet originates on the corporate, big-player side. AOL was the innovator in turning the WWW into a virtual shopping mall.
You would like to think, however that this will backfire on them, as customers look to alternatives to their increasingly sanitized pseudo-Internet network.
And how does one fool their IP filters anyway? It makes one want to "spam" everyone of AOL's customers with a protected-from-legal-prohibition-because-it-is-not -commercial-speech protest email.
Any advice for hildproofing for a couple in a small (700 sq. ft.) 3 room(+kitchen and bath) NYC (well, Astoria, Queens) apartment. What I'm, particularly worried about is all the wires for the 4 computers (and 5 monitors).
Also any suggestions on how a solitary ex-bachelor can keep his sanity? This is what worries me the most. Sometimes I just don't like people around : (
Then there's the space issue. Like I said, it's a smallish apartment (though not by NYC standards).
And does anyone else get bouts of super-nervousness between the thoughts of amazement and joy?
And finally (heh) where are good places for advice beyond slashdot (sheesh!).
So if the true core of mandrake's distro is completely open-source, then they may be best off going bankrupt, and reemerging under a different name.
I don't think Linux will suffer a black eye from their financial failure. Bankruptcy is too common an occurence in the computer industry to be truly shocking anymore.
And the open-source nature of the software will show that bankruptcy does not strand customers of open-source. As long as the software is open, it can and will continue to be maintained by those who need it.
I feel for Mandrake, but they tried to make a quick buck and failed. I don't disparage that, but fortunately, with open-source, their financial mistakes don't have to impact their technological success.
Shouldn't it not matter if they go out of business or not?
I thought the whole point of open-source is that buyers were not tied to any one particular company for proprietary software.
So how much of Mandrake's disto is proprietary and when are they planning to release it as open source so it isn't tied to their poorly-managed company?
Just my 2, but if they really deserved your money, they'd be totally open-source and it really wouldn't matter whether they stay in business or not. If a lot of their worthwhileness is tied to proprietary software, then it's best to let them die so that their proprietary software doesn't proliferate.
Conceded, they should have registered it before it expired.
But they didn't and that is human error and it happens. A better system would allow for this human error without such undesireable consequences, namely that existing links from other sites would now be useless.
And it is also undesireable that this predatory secondary market of cybersquatting comes into existance. Cybersquatting is highly detrimental to the integrity of the domain name system, by taking out of potential usage a lot of otherwise useful domain names.
The domain name system has been hijacked by quick money schemes to the detriment of its real mission: to facilitate the meaningful exchange of information over the Internet.
I'm amazed at the law of the jungle mentality that is prevalent in this discussion.
Domain names are meant to direct people to the appropriate and meaningful sites. When the system works so that something else happens, the sytem has to be held to task for this failure and reformed. Having a school newspaper's former url, against the will of that school, redirected to a porn site is not in keeping with this principle.
I realize that rules must be followed, but in this case the rules have bad, unintended consequences.
Domain name squatters really are scum of the earth.
Their business model is based on taking something that someone else has added value to and taking possession of said good (in this case, the domain name) and essentially holding it for ransom.
If one can get a wholesale rate for domain names, then it only costs about $1-$2/year per domain name. At that rate, squatting can be lucrative. Even if only 1% of sites get sold back at an average of $200, the squatter can make money. Remember that domain names used to cost $70/year, so paying a $200 ransom is not completely unreasonable.
There needs to be a systematic change in ICANN to strongly discourage this kind of squatting. Squatting provides no good, and in fact does a great deal of harm, by diluting the purpose of domain names, to direct people to the appropriate IP address.
A lot of once useful, or potentially useful domain names go wasted because of this secondary market.
One group that does profit great, though indirectly, from domain squatting are the legitimate registrars. Domain squatters help maintains a gold rush mentality that leads to preemptive and excessive domain name buying.
While the admin at the school screwed up by letting the domain name lapse, the system is also at fault for promoting such predatory
I'm not sure what the proper solution should be.
I am wary of anything as simplistic as requiring a domain name be used, as domain names can be parked for legitimate reasons, and the consideration is too subjective.
One idea is to charge a prohibitively high "tax" on domain name sales over a certain amount. This tax would then subsidize the arbitration process.
I suppose that this problem is one that must be faced by any secondary market. Ticket sales and scalping come to mind. Maybe the right idea is just to make resale of domain names above a certain mark-up totally illegal and void.
While primary-market sellers must treat any possible domain name as a common good that buyers can purchase from anyone, and thus shop around for price, secondary-market resellers have an effective monopoly power over any name they possess.
Another problem for any solution restricting reselling of names, is that work-arounds may come-up. A reseller may only "rent", rather than sell a site, and thus escape the restricions on selling.
I'm not sure of the answer, but this definitely is a problem that should be addressed. Perhaps some bright light reading this can come up with an answer.
Then they can suggest it to ICANN at their next meeting, which I believe is in the Marianas Trench.
Reading that farewell brought to mind the first Star Trek movie, the one where a Voyager probe is recovered by an alien robot society and comes back to earth.
When Slashdot had the, "Which was the best Star Trek movie?" poll up recently, I thought they should have the put that first movie up for consideration. While it had it's failings, at least it didn't degenerate into the Space Westerns of the rest of the series.
With all the attention given to technical details of physic and engineering, with DS1, it was also human love and curiousity that ultimately drove it as much as its ion drive.
As the article itself states, optical fiber can be laid out with excess capacity rather cheaply,"usually with two or more companies each stringing dozens of strands of fiber within the same piece of conduit...."
The big cost in laying fiber is not in the optical fiber itself, but in digging the ditch to put it in and in lighting up the fiber at its end. $570 million was spent laying the fiber, $265 million was spent lighting up just 5% of that.
Businesses went broke because they were overly optimistic in all that fiber being lit up quickly, not because they sunk too much money installing the fiber in the first place.
In a few years or decades, as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, that backbone netwrok of fiber will get lit up.
It's fair enough to blame the local providers, paricularly the incumbent phone-service providers, for being slow in rolling out broadband. But it also should be noted that these companies still need to make money and have been slow in rolling out broadband because it is a service that requires an expensive initial investment to provision and the technology has only recently started to approach the maturity to be provided inexpensively to the end user.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm a bit confused (nothing new).
If Boies is their lawyer in this matter, and he's on contingency, what other legal fees do they have to worry about?
I take any statement from McBride with a grain of salt.
That said and assuming his statement is mostly true (and if it isn't, then he is misleading shareholders) this makes me worry about the case some more. Taking on IBM's legal department will not be cheap and one has to wonder if maybe Boies knows something we don't.
So it's true and that's troubling or Mcbride is blowing more smoke. Probably a combination of both, but troubling nonetheless.
It would be nice if someone pinned down SCO on just what the contingency agreement entails.
It's very unlikely that Boies' law firm is taking this case on a contingency basis. That kind of business arrangement tends to be for individual tort. There wouldn't be any sense in taking a case like this on a contingency basis, since a good outcome for the client may be somthing very different than a paid settlement. How would Boies collect on a buyout, to take one example?
Corporate law is practiced on a pay-as-you-go basis.
On that basis, SCO does not have enough money in the bank to have this stretch out indefinitely.
That may be one reason IBM is letting this stretch out. McBride's bluster is costing his firm mucho dollars.
If someone (not me) wanted to be really sneaky, they would buy a share of SCO (that's the cheap part) and then hire a good lawyer (EXPENSIVE, let's say high 5 figures to start) and initiate a lawsuit against McBride and SCO and the board of directors for some corporate executivemal feasance against shareholders (hence the need to own a share of SCO). Then you too can have fun with the "discovery process" and go over SCO with a "fine-toothed comb"!
Think of the fun of delivering a subpoena to Lindon, Utah. Think of the excitement of getting to have YOUR VERY OWN SHYSTER get his meaty hooks on SCO corporate documents. HIRE YOUR FRIENDS as expert witnesses that must look over the SCO proprietary source without signing an NDA. You don't need an NDA, because you've got your very own legal shark swimming his way up SCO backside.
Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Maybe Commander Taco would do it if all those VA Linux stock certificates weren't only useful as toilet paper and he wasn't a FORMER dot.com millionaire.
I just wish someone would fight back legally at SCO. They are fucking with Linux and a case can be made that they are doing so wrongly and maliciously. Won't somebody please take the fuckers to court?
Do you really trust IBM to look out for your interests? They're not into Linux for the goodness of it.
Yes, my monitor throbs under knoppix. I would just prefer if it didn't.
And I wish that I could think of a better word to describe the behaviour, but I can't : )
I've tried Knoppix, but I get this weird phenomena where the monitor image "throbs". The screen image size throbs , expanding and contracting slightly, like a beating heart.
I am not adept enough to fix it, and I'm running an onboard ATI rage 128 on a Sony monitor, so my configuration is pretty standard.
I'm impressed that KNOPPIX works at all, but I'm a little concerned it's gonna hurt my monitor. And let's face it, noone can really explore a setup when the monitor image throbs in and out.
How would that annoy him? Would the LUG affectuate some sort of proximity Vulcan mind meld that would show him the error of his ways?
What the hell is this kind of post supposed to serve?
The Linux crowd would not be best served by strong-arm mafia tactics or psychopathic stalking.
Hit the bastard where it hurts. Sue him. Remember, that even a baseless lawsuit takes time and energy and money to be dismissed.
Find a lawyer and think of an excuse to sue him. Hire a private detective to look into his private life. Look into his business dealings. Find out where he is dirty.
Then use the address in the link to serve him his court papers.
Don't break the law, use it to your advantage.
It's just too bad that nobody reading this (nor the writer neither) will follow through with this.
Or you can always do a Larry Flynt to his Jerry Falwell and post your artistic efforts on the web.
Here's another link for the Top Gun SSH:
n ss h.shtml
http://www.freewarepalm.com/communication/topgu
But it seems that the down load link there is dead as well.
Try freewarepalm.com, which is generally a good place for free (beer) software.
I found this link through it:
http://netpage.em.com.br/mmand/ptelnet.htm
It's a terminal emulator and not really an ssh client but maybe it will help.
I am now convinced that I have never had a truly original thought.
I posted, almost verbatim, the same joke 16 minutes after this post.
I was composing some further comments to my post, so I never saw this joke beforing posting my own (I swear!).
Jeez, what's the point?
I guess this is sort of like the New York branch post offices not delivering mail from Florida, because that's where a lot of junk mail originates from.
t -commercial-speech protest email.
I have a fairly nasty conspiracy theory on why AOL and Comcast are cooperating on this. By shutting out the innovative do-it-yourselfers on the Internet from their network, they squelch potential competition from their "value-added" services.
The next step might be to block web servers that don't originate from big corporate server farms. After all, who knows what could be on those independent things but kiddy porn and terrorist training instructions?
The irony is that the great mass of obtrusive commercialism on the Internet originates on the corporate, big-player side. AOL was the innovator in turning the WWW into a virtual shopping mall.
You would like to think, however that this will backfire on them, as customers look to alternatives to their increasingly sanitized pseudo-Internet network.
And how does one fool their IP filters anyway? It makes one want to "spam" everyone of AOL's customers with a protected-from-legal-prohibition-because-it-is-no
Any advice for hildproofing for a couple in a small (700 sq. ft.) 3 room(+kitchen and bath) NYC (well, Astoria, Queens) apartment. What I'm, particularly worried about is all the wires for the 4 computers (and 5 monitors).
Also any suggestions on how a solitary ex-bachelor can keep his sanity? This is what worries me the most. Sometimes I just don't like people around : (
Then there's the space issue. Like I said, it's a smallish apartment (though not by NYC standards).
And does anyone else get bouts of super-nervousness between the thoughts of amazement and joy?
And finally (heh) where are good places for advice beyond slashdot (sheesh!).
fag
How much does it cost to subscribe and is there anyway for hobbyists like myself to tkae it for a test-drive without paying money?
From what I can tell, they're just selling copies of RH's regular releases, which are already freely available for download.
They do not seem to be selling any RH ES or AS versions.
But does RH have any licensing requirements attached to their Enterprise editions?
What I'm getting at is how they restrict the user from using, examining, changing, and redistributing the software.
Anyone have any knowledge, or experience in this regard?
If it's just a matter of graphics, I'm surprised someone hasn't already done it.
RH enterprise without support or proprietary graphics. Doesn't sound so bad if you are on a budget
Are Red Hat Enterprise Edition versions protected by any licensing requirements?
What parts are not open-source?
What's to stop someone from just posting ISO images online?
I'm just a little fuzzy on what's being paid for.
Thanks in advance for the answers
Another drag on Mandrake was they lost a copyright infringement lawsuit by the owners of the old "Mandrake the Magician" comic strip.
So not only did they have to pay a seetlement, but they also had legal costs, which can be expensive.
So if the true core of mandrake's distro is completely open-source, then they may be best off going bankrupt, and reemerging under a different name.
I don't think Linux will suffer a black eye from their financial failure. Bankruptcy is too common an occurence in the computer industry to be truly shocking anymore.
And the open-source nature of the software will show that bankruptcy does not strand customers of open-source. As long as the software is open, it can and will continue to be maintained by those who need it.
I feel for Mandrake, but they tried to make a quick buck and failed. I don't disparage that, but fortunately, with open-source, their financial mistakes don't have to impact their technological success.
Shouldn't it not matter if they go out of business or not?
I thought the whole point of open-source is that buyers were not tied to any one particular company for proprietary software.
So how much of Mandrake's disto is proprietary and when are they planning to release it as open source so it isn't tied to their poorly-managed company?
Just my 2, but if they really deserved your money, they'd be totally open-source and it really wouldn't matter whether they stay in business or not. If a lot of their worthwhileness is tied to proprietary software, then it's best to let them die so that their proprietary software doesn't proliferate.
Conceded, they should have registered it before it expired.
But they didn't and that is human error and it happens. A better system would allow for this human error without such undesireable consequences, namely that existing links from other sites would now be useless.
And it is also undesireable that this predatory secondary market of cybersquatting comes into existance. Cybersquatting is highly detrimental to the integrity of the domain name system, by taking out of potential usage a lot of otherwise useful domain names.
The domain name system has been hijacked by quick money schemes to the detriment of its real mission: to facilitate the meaningful exchange of information over the Internet.
I'm amazed at the law of the jungle mentality that is prevalent in this discussion.
Domain names are meant to direct people to the appropriate and meaningful sites. When the system works so that something else happens, the sytem has to be held to task for this failure and reformed. Having a school newspaper's former url, against the will of that school, redirected to a porn site is not in keeping with this principle.
I realize that rules must be followed, but in this case the rules have bad, unintended consequences.
Domain name squatters really are scum of the earth.
Their business model is based on taking something that someone else has added value to and taking possession of said good (in this case, the domain name) and essentially holding it for ransom.
If one can get a wholesale rate for domain names, then it only costs about $1-$2/year per domain name. At that rate, squatting can be lucrative. Even if only 1% of sites get sold back at an average of $200, the squatter can make money. Remember that domain names used to cost $70/year, so paying a $200 ransom is not completely unreasonable.
There needs to be a systematic change in ICANN to strongly discourage this kind of squatting. Squatting provides no good, and in fact does a great deal of harm, by diluting the purpose of domain names, to direct people to the appropriate IP address.
A lot of once useful, or potentially useful domain names go wasted because of this secondary market.
One group that does profit great, though indirectly, from domain squatting are the legitimate registrars. Domain squatters help maintains a gold rush mentality that leads to preemptive and excessive domain name buying.
While the admin at the school screwed up by letting the domain name lapse, the system is also at fault for promoting such predatory
I'm not sure what the proper solution should be.
I am wary of anything as simplistic as requiring a domain name be used, as domain names can be parked for legitimate reasons, and the consideration is too subjective.
One idea is to charge a prohibitively high "tax" on domain name sales over a certain amount. This tax would then subsidize the arbitration process.
I suppose that this problem is one that must be faced by any secondary market. Ticket sales and scalping come to mind. Maybe the right idea is just to make resale of domain names above a certain mark-up totally illegal and void.
While primary-market sellers must treat any possible domain name as a common good that buyers can purchase from anyone, and thus shop around for price, secondary-market resellers have an effective monopoly power over any name they possess.
Another problem for any solution restricting reselling of names, is that work-arounds may come-up. A reseller may only "rent", rather than sell a site, and thus escape the restricions on selling.
I'm not sure of the answer, but this definitely is a problem that should be addressed. Perhaps some bright light reading this can come up with an answer.
Then they can suggest it to ICANN at their next meeting, which I believe is in the Marianas Trench.
Better yet, post it here on slashdot.
Reading that farewell brought to mind the first Star Trek movie, the one where a Voyager probe is recovered by an alien robot society and comes back to earth.
When Slashdot had the, "Which was the best Star Trek movie?" poll up recently, I thought they should have the put that first movie up for consideration. While it had it's failings, at least it didn't degenerate into the Space Westerns of the rest of the series.
With all the attention given to technical details of physic and engineering, with DS1, it was also human love and curiousity that ultimately drove it as much as its ion drive.
As the article itself states, optical fiber can be laid out with excess capacity rather cheaply,"usually with two or more companies each stringing dozens of strands of fiber within the same piece of conduit...."
The big cost in laying fiber is not in the optical fiber itself, but in digging the ditch to put it in and in lighting up the fiber at its end. $570 million was spent laying the fiber, $265 million was spent lighting up just 5% of that.
Businesses went broke because they were overly optimistic in all that fiber being lit up quickly, not because they sunk too much money installing the fiber in the first place.
In a few years or decades, as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, that backbone netwrok of fiber will get lit up.
It's fair enough to blame the local providers, paricularly the incumbent phone-service providers, for being slow in rolling out broadband. But it also should be noted that these companies still need to make money and have been slow in rolling out broadband because it is a service that requires an expensive initial investment to provision and the technology has only recently started to approach the maturity to be provided inexpensively to the end user.