Microsoft can't use those threats? Pretty much all such threats I have seen have been from Free software supporters who don't like projects like Mono or wine.
...
But in reality that is a very small difference, because those threats have always been kind of paranoid.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean people aren't out to get you. And just because you think people are out to get you, doesn't mean you're paranoid.
You're attributing these concerns to some kind of delusion. Yet there is a history of leaked documents and public statements from Microsoft that implies if not outright claims these exact kinds of threats. Paying heed to these threats is certainly not being delusional or paranoid.
I wonder about those companies who paid the SCO license fees to use Linux? Are they free now to sue SCO for the license fees they have paid?
Part of that question is who paid, how much they paid, and under what kind of agreement. Note that SCO Source wasn't exactly a cash cow. A SCO financial statement in 2005 claimed $32,000 from the program. That's not much (not that I'd pass up the opportunity to cash that kind of check for personal use).
Also take in to count dupes like EV1. Their "estimated over $1M" deal actually was $800k. And it included this little gem:
SCO represents and warrants that it has full right and title to grant the rights hereunder to the SCO IP and related materials, and all copyrights, trade secret and other intellectual proprietary rights therein, are and remain the valuable property of SCO and its suppliers. SCO makes no representations or guarantees concerning the outcome of any pending or potential litigation, as outlined above, regarding SCO's claims of violations of its IP or contractual rights in the Operating System. Licensee acknowledges that SCO's claims regarding its IP as it relates to the Operating System are being litigated in one or more cases, with possibly more litigation to follow, and that SCO has not guaranteed that it will ultimately prevail in any of this litigation. Licensee, to avoid any such litigation and to effectuate a productive and prompt resolution of any and all issues relating to use of SCO's IP, desires to obtain this license.
What other details exist in these (few) other deals?
Darl comes home after a day at the office. It's been a rough day. The press has been unkind. Its the kind of day that makes even the cowboy in him question his beliefs. There is only one thing that can be done.
Darl sits in front of a familiar mirror, facing his reflection. "I'm Darl McBride," he begins with a sigh. "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, Linux is dying on the vine!"
I wonder how all those security researchers feel after destroying a legitimate commercial enterprise and affecting a lot of people who weren't spammers. Must have been pretty righteous. Of course, now it looks like they're going to have to play a game of whack-a-mole. What ISP shall die next at the hands of vigilante justice? Will my internet connection go down because someone uses my ISP for spam? If my computer becomes infected with malware, how long before I have 'researchers' digging through my private data? What will the next press release say -- Russian NAPs taken offline by massive DDoS initiated by "researchers" from the United States? How long until this kind of behavior sparks an international incident?
Please feel free to show where in this case the researchers implemented a DDoS or otherwise took matters in their own hands to remove systems' network access. Otherwise, nice try at fear-mongering.
This is all eerily similar in scope, methods, and results to a real world issue; The war on drugs. You see, there's an economic incentive to do this. As long as that incentive remains, all you're doing is changing the face of the problem. Today it's hackers in Sweden. Tomorrow it's script kiddies in Russia. Next week it'll be unemployed programmers in Romania. And how can people justify this kind of behavior in the name of "research"? It's the same kind of attitude that the DEA has -- which is to use ever-increasing levels of force, and to continually lower the standards they have to adhere to in order to "catch more criminals". At some point it de-evolves to the Judge Dredd scenario... People driving around metting out instant 'justice', with no review or appeals process to speak of.
Ahhh. The "War on Drugs." I see where the fear-mongering came from; taking notes.
This so-called "War on Drugs" has little resemblance to this situation. Other than the fact that both of these involve crime. Unless you think this is some sort of cultural war as well?
So let's widen your scope a bit. Crime in general. Usually an economic incentive. Often implementing tactics and strategies that haven't changed for decades, if not centuries (heck... getting closer to apples-to-apples, many con games are over a hundred years old and still employed today... digitally even). Still illegal, still prosecuted. I suppose this is the wrong mind-set? We should just stop? Accept crime?
I don't condone all the horror-story scenarios you're suggesting. I'm no fan of the "War on Drugs" or the DEA. I don't support private DDoS tools or counter-intrusion methodology (Welchia is a nice object lesson). But then... NONE of that has anything to do with this case. But they do make nice boogey-men, don't they?
Look, the solution here is laws not vigilantism... Because the simple truth is no matter how good you are sooner or later you're going to fuck it up. The law ensures that when this happens, there's recourse. A vigilante will just disappear into the night with the words "I'm sorry" on his/her lips.
The problem is that you're confusing this with vigilantism. This wasn't a single vigilante passing judgment and then disappearing in to the night. These were individuals reporting the crime to the upstream host. The upstream host then took that evidence, reviewed it, and acted on it using a very legal mechanism - their contract with the ISP. Law is being upheld.
As opposed to the Obama supporters in my neck of the woods who were calling Palin: "That religious whack-job"?
I'd rather religion didn't enter into politics but there definitely seems to be an arms race.
This is the danger of making religion a political plank. Religion has reared its head occasionally throughout US political history. But you can blame the likes of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition for pushing religion as a political agenda. Once anything becomes a point in politics, you can expect some backlash against it.
Vigilantism would be action like that employed by the Lad Vampire. This was just a bunch of experts asking companies to enforce their TOS.
This was my thought as well. These cases involved a process, review of proof, and action based on that review. If you accept that the TOS for the network providers is a legal document, then this is simply following the law. A vigilante is one who acts outside the law.
I just said that the timing should make us suspicious of who and what is really ordering this prosecution. Especially since Bush crippled the "Justice" Department by using it for selective prosecution of political enemies, and this suit would be perfectly consistent with that.
That's a great "what if" you've brought forward. Now, where's the proof? You're writing with the tone of one who's uncovered some inconvenient facts. But there are no facts. Just guesses.
What you have here is a good story. But what kind of story? At this point, it's a fictional thriller not news.
Mind you - I'm not saying the Bush Administration isn't doing what you're suggesting. It really wouldn't surprise me as I find this Administration to be a greater threat to America than Bin Laden and his ilk. But still, what you're suggesting is pretty extraordinary. And that requires, well, extraordinary proof (as the saying goes).
Quite true. But to claim that the Guinness Book doesn't matter just because some people don't care misses the point. Some people do, and so it's news to them.
I agree. News doesn't have to be earth-shattering to be news. Sometimes trivial things apply.
I know several people who don't play video games, but they do play WoW....
To hear about how some people absolutely demolished the new content is pretty cool. Blizzard spent how much time making this expansion, and then it all got run through in less than 30 hours? That's nuts.
Pssst. If your friends are playing WoW, they're playing a video game. Don't tell them though. It might upset some emotional balance and put them in to shock.
Also - note that WoW is not linear. They did not go the same path as everyone else. They did not do everything that everyone else has done. Blizzard's time spent making the expansion was not wasted on 30hrs of grinding.
That people will take knowledge gained from Beta and apply it to a streamlined race to hit a particular goal isn't all that new. Its kind of interesting. Sure. But this only impacts others trying to participate in the same race. For most people playing, it doesn't mean much beyond the trivial. After all, life itself isn't defined by the Guinness Book of World Records. And chess remains fairly popular despite the long history of chess masters also playing the game.
I predict Northrend will have individual monsters slowly roaming back and forth over small areas of ground. Occasionally there will be a few monsters standing together. Virtually every quest will involve killing X of them. To step things up, you can kill difficult elite monsters while in a group. The combat will be so simple that an 8-line perl script can do it.
Yes, yes. And every computer game can be reduced to punching a few buttons and / or clicking on the mouse in a repetitive fashion. Yet despite this simplification, they have always been fun.
More on this later.
When you try to imagine the game without the graphics, you realize how little gameplay there actually is. It might be feasible to make a nethack-style game that captures every element of WoW gameplay, but that would be a very dull game indeed.
And that's selling the graphics really short. Sure the graphics are a big part of WoW. Blizzard does a really nice job with it. Some people don't care. My group runs around sight-seeing.
I'm not saying that something more wouldn't be great. I miss a lot of UO and various MUDs I've played in the past. Indeed - WoW is much simpler than these environments. And much more restricted. But again - it doesn't mean it's not fun.
So why is it fun? Well - to begin with there's nothing wrong with traditional escort, FedEx, or even kill quests. If they're done right. WoW's quests usually have some reasoning behind it. They work to expand the storyline if that's what you want to get in to (I do). They put you in to the content and give you a reason to interact with your environment. Nothing wrong with it.
But yeah - kill quests alone have limits. This expansion pack is introducing new elements such as vehicles that you get to toy with fairly soon in to the content. There ARE different aspects being rolled in to the quests. My group is still pretty early in to the content and we've gotten to experience some of it already. And we're having fun.
I probably should have said "they didn't wash the probe before launching." Dirty equipment is one thing. Dirty hands apparently is either insulting or racism.
The whole thing makes me chuckle. Subtlety has ruined the joke. I wash my hands of all of it.
Nobody pays much attention to TV commercials anymore, and haven't for some time. Have advertisers markedly decreased their buying of TV commercial time? No, because you don't have to pay attention for it to work.
And yet online advertising is all about click-throughs. Thanks for poisoning the well, Doubleclick.
It is true that hardware certified by MS to be "Vista Ready" that simply has no capability to run the OS lends culpability to them for the current debacle, however, I'm suggesting that said debacle is a result of market and business-to-business forces outside of Microsoft, compelling them to give a "Vista Capable" logo to hardware that shouldn't have it.
Just who ran the "Vista Ready" program? My understanding is that it was Microsoft. And that's where the buck stops. If they certified hardware that they knew would not work, then they are in fact the ones to blame. Period.
Yeah, sure... they were pressured. Everyone wanted to make a buck. Everyone had something to lose (including Microsoft). It's all a crying shame.
But at the end of the day, cut-throat industry that it is, Microsoft certified hardware configurations that they KNEW wouldn't work. And they knew this because they were the ones to write the software in question as well as define the certification and run the certification process.
So I'm curious... which came first? The mod-bombing or the sock-puppets? Did the mod campaign begin after folks got tired of twitters sock-puppet shennanigans? Or did twitter begin said shennanigans to counter being a target of negative mods?
Hmm... the only constant I see there is that the equipment with names that are based on motivational posters are still going.
Novelty poster publisher Despair, Inc. today announced a surprise entry in to the unmanned space probe arena. A spokesperson for the company commented, "NASA pretty much threw down the gauntlet with all those names."
Represenatives for the company went on to say that their first probe had already been named. "It's called Apathy. We've already began production." When pressed for details, the company spokesperson continued to note that "...actual construction of the probe has halted as neither the design team nor the construction crew could be bothered to finish it. Operations has decided that if they can't be given a finished probe, well, there's just no reason to even bother thinking about a launch and have scrubbed any additional work on Apathy." The spokesperson went on to proudly announce that Despair had already achieved their first non-launch to date and are eagerly looking forward to their program's next success.
The US engaged in a number of questionable activities during the Cold War, mostly due to the perceived threat of Communism. It's a bit of a leap to say that the US was the "main international aggressor" though and I find it pretty troubling that you can rationalize aggression by the USSR but condemn it when done by the United States.
Your arguments aren't consistent with each other and it seems to me that you are more interested in condemning the United States than in having an honest dialog about the military history of the 20th century.
It bugs me that whenever, for example, the Middle East is discussed there is a lot of pointing at US action as if the US operated in some kind of vacuum. Soviet involvement tends to be absent from these discussions.
I'm curious as to why. Is this because the US is the last player standing (discounting the remnants of the former Soviet Union)? Is it selective memory driven by a desire to be critical of the US? Some reflection of Putin conservatism? Or something else?
Right now I've heard two versions of the work Apple hired him. One version says the Papermaster will work as head of their iPod/iPhone line (which does not compete directly with IBM's blade server or chip technology). Another version has him head of the new chip design for iPod/iPhones which is more direct competition.
It makes the system require less support because people are more likely to be able to find the solutions to their own problems. Discoverability.
On a related note, one trend I've liked with modern Linux distros is documented config files. Having comments that provide some explanations of options, option examples, and even commented-out options that might be worth considering are a great idea. I believe this goes towards the "discoverability" you've noted.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft can't use those threats? Pretty much all such threats I have seen have been from Free software supporters who don't like projects like Mono or wine.
But in reality that is a very small difference, because those threats have always been kind of paranoid.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean people aren't out to get you. And just because you think people are out to get you, doesn't mean you're paranoid.
You're attributing these concerns to some kind of delusion. Yet there is a history of leaked documents and public statements from Microsoft that implies if not outright claims these exact kinds of threats. Paying heed to these threats is certainly not being delusional or paranoid.
I wonder about those companies who paid the SCO license fees to use Linux? Are they free now to sue SCO for the license fees they have paid?
Part of that question is who paid, how much they paid, and under what kind of agreement. Note that SCO Source wasn't exactly a cash cow. A SCO financial statement in 2005 claimed $32,000 from the program. That's not much (not that I'd pass up the opportunity to cash that kind of check for personal use).
Also take in to count dupes like EV1. Their "estimated over $1M" deal actually was $800k. And it included this little gem:
What other details exist in these (few) other deals?
Darl comes home after a day at the office. It's been a rough day. The press has been unkind. Its the kind of day that makes even the cowboy in him question his beliefs. There is only one thing that can be done.
Darl sits in front of a familiar mirror, facing his reflection. "I'm Darl McBride," he begins with a sigh. "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, Linux is dying on the vine!"
It's nice sometimes to help people cowboy up.
soon mod will be modded
I wonder how all those security researchers feel after destroying a legitimate commercial enterprise and affecting a lot of people who weren't spammers. Must have been pretty righteous. Of course, now it looks like they're going to have to play a game of whack-a-mole. What ISP shall die next at the hands of vigilante justice? Will my internet connection go down because someone uses my ISP for spam? If my computer becomes infected with malware, how long before I have 'researchers' digging through my private data? What will the next press release say -- Russian NAPs taken offline by massive DDoS initiated by "researchers" from the United States? How long until this kind of behavior sparks an international incident?
Please feel free to show where in this case the researchers implemented a DDoS or otherwise took matters in their own hands to remove systems' network access. Otherwise, nice try at fear-mongering.
This is all eerily similar in scope, methods, and results to a real world issue; The war on drugs. You see, there's an economic incentive to do this. As long as that incentive remains, all you're doing is changing the face of the problem. Today it's hackers in Sweden. Tomorrow it's script kiddies in Russia. Next week it'll be unemployed programmers in Romania. And how can people justify this kind of behavior in the name of "research"? It's the same kind of attitude that the DEA has -- which is to use ever-increasing levels of force, and to continually lower the standards they have to adhere to in order to "catch more criminals". At some point it de-evolves to the Judge Dredd scenario... People driving around metting out instant 'justice', with no review or appeals process to speak of.
Ahhh. The "War on Drugs." I see where the fear-mongering came from; taking notes.
This so-called "War on Drugs" has little resemblance to this situation. Other than the fact that both of these involve crime. Unless you think this is some sort of cultural war as well?
So let's widen your scope a bit. Crime in general. Usually an economic incentive. Often implementing tactics and strategies that haven't changed for decades, if not centuries (heck... getting closer to apples-to-apples, many con games are over a hundred years old and still employed today... digitally even). Still illegal, still prosecuted. I suppose this is the wrong mind-set? We should just stop? Accept crime?
I don't condone all the horror-story scenarios you're suggesting. I'm no fan of the "War on Drugs" or the DEA. I don't support private DDoS tools or counter-intrusion methodology (Welchia is a nice object lesson). But then... NONE of that has anything to do with this case. But they do make nice boogey-men, don't they?
Look, the solution here is laws not vigilantism... Because the simple truth is no matter how good you are sooner or later you're going to fuck it up. The law ensures that when this happens, there's recourse. A vigilante will just disappear into the night with the words "I'm sorry" on his/her lips.
The problem is that you're confusing this with vigilantism. This wasn't a single vigilante passing judgment and then disappearing in to the night. These were individuals reporting the crime to the upstream host. The upstream host then took that evidence, reviewed it, and acted on it using a very legal mechanism - their contract with the ISP. Law is being upheld.
As opposed to the Obama supporters in my neck of the woods who were calling Palin: "That religious whack-job"?
I'd rather religion didn't enter into politics but there definitely seems to be an arms race.
This is the danger of making religion a political plank. Religion has reared its head occasionally throughout US political history. But you can blame the likes of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition for pushing religion as a political agenda. Once anything becomes a point in politics, you can expect some backlash against it.
Vigilantism would be action like that employed by the Lad Vampire. This was just a bunch of experts asking companies to enforce their TOS.
This was my thought as well. These cases involved a process, review of proof, and action based on that review. If you accept that the TOS for the network providers is a legal document, then this is simply following the law. A vigilante is one who acts outside the law.
I just said that the timing should make us suspicious of who and what is really ordering this prosecution. Especially since Bush crippled the "Justice" Department by using it for selective prosecution of political enemies, and this suit would be perfectly consistent with that.
That's a great "what if" you've brought forward. Now, where's the proof? You're writing with the tone of one who's uncovered some inconvenient facts. But there are no facts. Just guesses.
What you have here is a good story. But what kind of story? At this point, it's a fictional thriller not news.
Mind you - I'm not saying the Bush Administration isn't doing what you're suggesting. It really wouldn't surprise me as I find this Administration to be a greater threat to America than Bin Laden and his ilk. But still, what you're suggesting is pretty extraordinary. And that requires, well, extraordinary proof (as the saying goes).
Quite true. But to claim that the Guinness Book doesn't matter just because some people don't care misses the point. Some people do, and so it's news to them.
I agree. News doesn't have to be earth-shattering to be news. Sometimes trivial things apply.
Disclaimer: I used to play WoW.
I know several people who don't play video games, but they do play WoW. ...
To hear about how some people absolutely demolished the new content is pretty cool. Blizzard spent how much time making this expansion, and then it all got run through in less than 30 hours? That's nuts.
Pssst. If your friends are playing WoW, they're playing a video game. Don't tell them though. It might upset some emotional balance and put them in to shock.
Also - note that WoW is not linear. They did not go the same path as everyone else. They did not do everything that everyone else has done. Blizzard's time spent making the expansion was not wasted on 30hrs of grinding.
That people will take knowledge gained from Beta and apply it to a streamlined race to hit a particular goal isn't all that new. Its kind of interesting. Sure. But this only impacts others trying to participate in the same race. For most people playing, it doesn't mean much beyond the trivial. After all, life itself isn't defined by the Guinness Book of World Records. And chess remains fairly popular despite the long history of chess masters also playing the game.
I predict Northrend will have individual monsters slowly roaming back and forth over small areas of ground. Occasionally there will be a few monsters standing together. Virtually every quest will involve killing X of them. To step things up, you can kill difficult elite monsters while in a group. The combat will be so simple that an 8-line perl script can do it.
Yes, yes. And every computer game can be reduced to punching a few buttons and / or clicking on the mouse in a repetitive fashion. Yet despite this simplification, they have always been fun.
More on this later.
And that's selling the graphics really short. Sure the graphics are a big part of WoW. Blizzard does a really nice job with it. Some people don't care. My group runs around sight-seeing.
I'm not saying that something more wouldn't be great. I miss a lot of UO and various MUDs I've played in the past. Indeed - WoW is much simpler than these environments. And much more restricted. But again - it doesn't mean it's not fun.
So why is it fun? Well - to begin with there's nothing wrong with traditional escort, FedEx, or even kill quests. If they're done right. WoW's quests usually have some reasoning behind it. They work to expand the storyline if that's what you want to get in to (I do). They put you in to the content and give you a reason to interact with your environment. Nothing wrong with it.
But yeah - kill quests alone have limits. This expansion pack is introducing new elements such as vehicles that you get to toy with fairly soon in to the content. There ARE different aspects being rolled in to the quests. My group is still pretty early in to the content and we've gotten to experience some of it already. And we're having fun.
I probably should have said "they didn't wash the probe before launching." Dirty equipment is one thing. Dirty hands apparently is either insulting or racism.
The whole thing makes me chuckle. Subtlety has ruined the joke. I wash my hands of all of it.
Nobody pays much attention to TV commercials anymore, and haven't for some time. Have advertisers markedly decreased their buying of TV commercial time? No, because you don't have to pay attention for it to work.
And yet online advertising is all about click-throughs. Thanks for poisoning the well, Doubleclick.
Read more carefully. India might have a population of 1.15 billion, but the probe itself does not.
They didn't wash their hands when building the probe.
It is true that hardware certified by MS to be "Vista Ready" that simply has no capability to run the OS lends culpability to them for the current debacle, however, I'm suggesting that said debacle is a result of market and business-to-business forces outside of Microsoft, compelling them to give a "Vista Capable" logo to hardware that shouldn't have it.
Just who ran the "Vista Ready" program? My understanding is that it was Microsoft. And that's where the buck stops. If they certified hardware that they knew would not work, then they are in fact the ones to blame. Period.
Yeah, sure... they were pressured. Everyone wanted to make a buck. Everyone had something to lose (including Microsoft). It's all a crying shame.
But at the end of the day, cut-throat industry that it is, Microsoft certified hardware configurations that they KNEW wouldn't work. And they knew this because they were the ones to write the software in question as well as define the certification and run the certification process.
So I'm curious... which came first? The mod-bombing or the sock-puppets? Did the mod campaign begin after folks got tired of twitters sock-puppet shennanigans? Or did twitter begin said shennanigans to counter being a target of negative mods?
Hmm.. 3 days.. Well, that is 72 hours. Can make quite a few movies to cover 72 hours.
An epic fantasy shot in the style of 24. I do not know if I should be horrified or intrigued.
... I'd expect this kind of BS from Sharp and LG but not from Chunghwa Picture Tubes.
It's almost to be expected. After the success of "Tubthumping", they were desperate for another avenue. Sadly, they had nowhere to go but down.
Hmm... the only constant I see there is that the equipment with names that are based on motivational posters are still going.
Novelty poster publisher Despair, Inc. today announced a surprise entry in to the unmanned space probe arena. A spokesperson for the company commented, "NASA pretty much threw down the gauntlet with all those names."
Represenatives for the company went on to say that their first probe had already been named. "It's called Apathy. We've already began production." When pressed for details, the company spokesperson continued to note that "...actual construction of the probe has halted as neither the design team nor the construction crew could be bothered to finish it. Operations has decided that if they can't be given a finished probe, well, there's just no reason to even bother thinking about a launch and have scrubbed any additional work on Apathy." The spokesperson went on to proudly announce that Despair had already achieved their first non-launch to date and are eagerly looking forward to their program's next success.
The US engaged in a number of questionable activities during the Cold War, mostly due to the perceived threat of Communism. It's a bit of a leap to say that the US was the "main international aggressor" though and I find it pretty troubling that you can rationalize aggression by the USSR but condemn it when done by the United States.
Your arguments aren't consistent with each other and it seems to me that you are more interested in condemning the United States than in having an honest dialog about the military history of the 20th century.
It bugs me that whenever, for example, the Middle East is discussed there is a lot of pointing at US action as if the US operated in some kind of vacuum. Soviet involvement tends to be absent from these discussions.
I'm curious as to why. Is this because the US is the last player standing (discounting the remnants of the former Soviet Union)? Is it selective memory driven by a desire to be critical of the US? Some reflection of Putin conservatism? Or something else?
Right now I've heard two versions of the work Apple hired him. One version says the Papermaster will work as head of their iPod/iPhone line (which does not compete directly with IBM's blade server or chip technology). Another version has him head of the new chip design for iPod/iPhones which is more direct competition.
You might be interested in Cringley's take on all this.
Unless, of course, the person is helpless and can't speak for herself.
See Terry Schiavo.
Either you really are anguished over this incident or you're trolling. In either case, my point has been proven.
Being stressed, bashed, scarred, and abused is part of life.
Death is also a part of life. Yet we try to avoid it when possible and take a dim view on anyone forcing it on to others.
It makes the system require less support because people are more likely to be able to find the solutions to their own problems. Discoverability.
On a related note, one trend I've liked with modern Linux distros is documented config files. Having comments that provide some explanations of options, option examples, and even commented-out options that might be worth considering are a great idea. I believe this goes towards the "discoverability" you've noted.