Damn straight, my genes are copyright by a major drug company, anyone trying to copy them will have to get permission from them. And its hell to get permission for "derivitive works".
Bit hard on your girlfriend if she forgets her... Oh.
Oh, no, we're on Slashdot, aren't we? Scrub that about the girlfriend.
Yo!, moron, hate to burst your bubble, but that indeed is the AT&T malloc routine, written by dmr while at Bell Labs, so it is copyright AT&T, but since Caldera (now SCO) owns those copyrights it is their IP. Caldera did release all 32V and before versions of UNIX source under a BSD-Style license, so a properly attributed version of that source would have been fine in Linux, but since the Copyright information was removed, it is not legal to be in the Linux source.
Be very sure you've read the source code for the GETVEC routine in BCPL before you make that claim. GETVEC is of course more sophisticated than malloc in that it can shuffle the heap, which malloc can't, so malloc is at best a copy of part of GETVEC; but a partial copy is still a copy.
Mind you I'm not saying Dennis Ritchie copied direct from GETVEC. He may have copied from someone else who copied from GETVEC, or both he and Martin Richards copied from something else I don't know about.
But just because the code in Linux looks like the code Dennis Ritchie wrote doesn't make it Dennis Ritchie's code, it only makes it another decendent of the code Dennis Ritchie was copying.
You are a liar (if in nothing else) in deliberately misquoting Bruce Perens' analysis of the memory allocation routines which SGI contributed to Linux. Bruce Perens clearly did not say (as you claim he did) that we had allowed '...Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel' (my emphasis). He nowhere agreed that this was System V code.
You are a fraud in that you you claim that these routines are your company's property. They are not property, and they are not yours. They aren't yours, they weren't SGI's, they weren't AT&T's. You cannot inherit from others that which they do not own.
Algorithms for allocating memory have been developed over a period of over half a century by software developers studying and improving on one another's code. No implementation of these algorithms exists in isolation; none is fresh hewn from virgin intellectual territory. Improvements are incremental and have largely developed in an open and collegiate environment. Linux may, indeed, have learned some things from UNIX[tm]; but UNIX in its turn got the algorithms from MULTICS, TRIPOS, CPL and others lost even further in the mists of time. You cannot simply stop this process at an arbitrary point and say 'now this is property'. It is not property, it's a commons, a commons tilled and tended by many hands, to bring it to the state it is today.
And so, Sir, lastly, I say you are a thief. You are a thief in that you seek to enclose commons, to deprive the community of the rightful fruits of its labours over many decades, to make property what is not, never was, and never could be property. To steal our work and sell it back to us.
What this does in the long run is force programmers to choose nonstandard ports for their services, and/or pass inappropriate traffic through well known ports (kind of like SOAP and XML-RPC going through port 80).
I've never before written a 'mod the parent up' post... But this one is (in my opinion) SO insightful.
We're already seeing this in corporate firewalls, it is in fact the primary driver not just behind SOAP but behind the whole 'Web Services' concept. The administrators of the corporate firewall seek to keep the corporation safe, and they do this by blocking types of traffic which are potentially unsafe. So business units which don't understand the security implications employ half trained code monkeys to hijack a 'safe' protocol (HTTP and/or HTTPS) and overload it to implement a less secure alternative to Sun's long reviled RPC.
This is a bad thing for (at least) two reasons:
Web Services and SOAP are supposed to be 'easy' and consequently are being implemented by people with little depth of experience and little defensive programming knowledge. In consequence all the security errors which were made in the early days of the Internet are being repeated.
Overloading one port means very much more complex (and very much more processor hungry) tests have to be implemented at the firewall to distinguish between 'safe' and 'unsafe' transactions. Even assuming this can be done reliably, it imposes a huge bottleneck between the corporation and the public Internet.
We're already, as I say, seeing this in the corporate sphere. Blocking ports at the ISP will only push the bad boys into the Web services space, at which point for ordinary users the whole internet will become unusable.
WordPerfect for Linux used Wine. It was slow, buggy and behaved like a Windows application.
This isn't so. It wasn't the Windows version of WordPerfect which got ported to Linux, it was the SCO UNIX version (no, not them, the other SCO). It was a perfectly normal X11 application which was perfectly stable. I still have a copy on the shelf. I personally thought it was a horrible wordprocessor and didn't use it much, but it was not a ported Windows application and did not use Wine (which, as far as I can recall, didn't exist in those days).
f the patent covers "mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object" then does OLE also infringe?
Is there really no prior art?
It's a long time since I used it, and in a LISP environment, of course, there's really nos such concept as a plugin, but there was analogous functionality in NoteCards.
"There are a number of different node types (over forty), supporting various media. Authors may use LISP commands to customize or create entirely new node types."
I would have thought a NoteCards node type was highly analogous to a mime type, and the 'LISP command' was highly analogous to a plugin.
Funny, Mail.app caught all but 3 of my 309 spam messages yesterday.
Yeah, yeah. And SpamAssassin has filtered out 562 spams for me since yesterday... at an average of 100K each or 50 megabytes in total. That's 50 megabytes of my upstream bandwidth that I've paid for.
This is not a solution. At best it's hiding the problem from us so we don't deal with it. A staggering proportion of the backbone bandwidth of the Internet is being eaten up by UCE, worms and other malware traffic.
What if the next version uses something more flexible... like a Google search on some particular string? Spend a few months sprinkling links to the download on servers around the world, with pages containing some unique string (call it "foo123"). When the next virus activates, it does a Google search for "foo123 [google.com]", and downloads its replacement. As fast as hosts are removed, more can be created and indexed.
OK, let's see how you would do it...
The payload of the original virus would be a encrypted peer-to-peer daemon somewhat like Freenet, except that it would only allow uploads signed with a particular digital signature. The client would of course have to include the public key of that signature, but not the private key.
Once infected a machine would open a listening port and attempt to connect to machines chosen randomly but with a bias to its local class C (as with CodeRed).
Once contact has been established the machines would exchange IPs so that each could recontact the other. Each machine would continue to probe for peers until it had found a certain number - say twenty - and then it would remain quiescent, just listening. Periodically (say weekly) it would handshake again with its known peers, and if any failed to handshake twice successively it would seek others until it had again reached quota.
Once the virus was widespread the author would send a signed file to one infected machine. The name of the file would be a unique string (for simplicity of exposition say a serial number, although any systematically unique string would do) so the first file the virus author injected might be 0001, the next 0002 and so on. The machine would accept the file as genuine because it could decrypt it with its local copy of the public key, and would pass it on unchanged to all the other infected nodes it knew about. If a machine had already received 0001 and was offered 0001 by a peer it would refuse it to save time and network congestion - not to be nice to other users, but because if the thing blocked up network bandwidth completely, it wouldn't be able to do it's own dirty work.
The signed files could contain
a list of targets and a date/time. When the action date/time in the file was reached, the virus would mount a DDoS attack on the hosts listed in that file for twenty four hours and then delete the file.
the URL of a file to load and then spam out in the same way the virus itself originally spread. Because this file doesn't have to be put up before the virus is launched it could be put up on any defaced site anywhere and need not be tracable back to the author.
a hotfix patch to the virus itself, which would immediately be installed and run.
This would be incredibly difficult to defend against because
in DDoS mode the hosts to be attacked wouldn't be known until the attack file began to propagate - and it could propagate very, very fast indeed, since the peer-to-peer network has connected itself in advance.
It would be impossible to introduce 'white' payloads into the network because only the author would have the necessary private key.
Because of the upgrade facility, as defences against the virus became available the author could inject into the network 'hot fixes' which would work around these defences.
Because the author could inject new signed files into any infected node, it would be very difficult to track down where they were being injected.
Furthermore, the network could be used to launch several sequential attacks, which would not even need to have been planned at the time the virus was written. The author could, in effect, sell use of a flexible, massively distributed mass-UCE/DDoS attack engine to the highest bidder...
Hang on, hang on... just wait until I get a patent on that idea!
Why is everyone surprised? The only means of data storage that has been tested to last 100+ years is to write it out to paper. For extremely critical stuff, it's typically printed in a small font on acid-free paper, then stored in a climate-controlled vault.
The coffee at McDonald's in the United States was 185 degrees.
It was 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
You do the math
<sighs/><fx action="bashes forehead repeatedly on the desk"/>
Which is 85 degrees celcius. The coffee I'm drinking right now is 92 degrees celcius. If someone offered me coffee at 85 I'd complain because it wasn't hot enough.
Do they teach you anything at all in American schools?
The woman who spilled the coffee on her lap didn't get minor blistering, she got third degree burns: charring of the skin on her thighs and crotch. She required skin grafts to repair the damage.
Then she's lying. Coffee can't do that. No aqueus suspension can do that. So either (i) it wasn't coffee that she spilled or (ii) she didn't get charring. You cannot make coffee hot enough to do that (except on the surface of Jupiter or inside a pressure vessel): the basic nature of the universe won't let you. Don't be silly
Simon, not yet fully awake, pissed off with stupid americans, and drinking a cup of coffee made with boiling water - the hottest physically possible - as he types.
The coffee cup story has been thrown around so much that few people have heard the facts as they really happened. The McDonalds coffee was not only hot, it was scalding, and capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle. Worse yet, the paper cup it was in was capable of easily collapsing and spilling the contents. Because of its insanely high temperature, the coffee was a real danger.
Do they teach physics in US schools?
Water boils at 100 degrees celcius. Above 100 cegrees celcius, it isn't water, it's steam. So it can't be held in a coffee cup of any kind. What was in the macdonalds coffee cup was water containing a suspension of coffee grounds and a very small amount of disolved material. It is simply impossible that, on the surface of the earth exposed to the atmosphere, it could have been above 100 degrees celcius.
Personally I find coffee near 100 degrees celcius unpleasant to drink, and it can cause minor blistering of the lining of my mouth. But there's no way it can cause 'instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle'. Furthermore, black coffee is routinely served at or near 100 degrees celcius - everywhere. The case was frivolous. So is SCO's.
For those of you who could care less about the article and want your daily SCO bashing, here's the thing:
It was a pretty good angle that the lawyer was making, and the interviewer was asking tough questions, the same ones
we all have. The main thrust is that he's betting on the fact that Copyright law trumps whatever provisions are in the
GPL, so IBM's GPL defense doesn't hold water; and also that just because Caldera released kernel source under that license does
not mean that the whole codebase (not just what was republished) should also be GPL'd.
If you think that post was either long or thoughtful, think again.
The thing about Mark Heise's interview is that every single thing he said was quite simply untrue - and demonstrably untrue. It was, essentially, a tissue of lies - at least, all of it that made any grammatical sense at all was.
Firstly, Mark claims that SCO (then Caldera) didn't distribute the Linux kernel under the GPL (at least I think that's what he says, the sentence doesn't actually parse as English). Well, sorry Mark, I have a boxed set here of Caldera Linux and it says clearly that it is distributed under the GPL. Then he says there aren't any SCO copyright notices in the kernel. Well, sorry again, Mark, but there are. Just do cd/usr/src/linux; grep -ri caldera * and you'll find them.
Behind this is a claim that there is SCO source in the kernel which SCO didn't put there themselves. Well, that's a lie too (note: not a 'mistake', not a 'misunderstanding', a lie - a deliberate, intentional and fraudulent untruth). The code which SCO has shown as proof has all been shown to have been legally used. The larger corpus of material which they claim was never theirs in the first place - NUMA and RCU are both well understood concepts in computer science, and have been applied in many different operating systems, but it's a historical fact that they do not exist and never have in SCO's System V. SCO cannot claim to own what they didn't write and never had. Similarly, IBM's journalling file system - the one ported to Linux - was part of OS/2. It isn't SCO's and never was.
Copyright law is pretty much irrelevent here. Except for a few small portions which were legally donated by SCO and are properly acknowledged, SCO don't own any of the copyright. They never did own any of the copyright. So even if copyright law did 'trump' the GPL, it would be irrelevent, because it wasn't ever SCO's copyright in the first place.
The difference between SCO and other companies that have put their copyrighted material into the GPL is SCO didn't do it.
Uhhhmmm... It isn't fair to make fun of people with learning difficulties, I know; but -- they pay this guy to work as a lawyer? He can't even construct a sentence!
And then further down he says:
You're not going to see that when you go into Linux. You're not going to see "copyright, The SCO Group."
Well, no you're not, but only because the SCO Group is just a new name for Caldera. You'd forgotten these ones, had you, Mark?
Documentation/networking/tlan.txt:(C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
drivers/net/tlan.c: * (C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
drivers/net/tlan.h: * (C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
net/ipx/af_ipx.c: * Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc. <greg@caldera.com>
net/ipx/af_ipx.c: KERN_INFO "IPX Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.\n" \
You know what would be really interesting (editors, bloggers, are you listening)? It would be really interesting to hear what Marcus Meissner <Marcus.Meissner@caldera.de> and Greg Page <greg@caldera.com> think about all this.
If Linux is to succeed on the desktop, then third parties must be allowed to write closed-source applications for Linux.
In whose interest is it for Linux to 'succeed' on the desktop? It may be in the corporate interest of companies like IBM, RedHat and SuSE, but it isn't in our interest. When Linux becomes just another mainstream operating system it will no longer suit us, and we'll all have to find something else (HURD, perhaps, or xBSD - I'm just starting an experimental HURD install).
But no, my vote is that we do nothing whatever to encourage mainstream adoption of Linux. It is not in our interest.
Get Adobe and Macromedia to port to Linux and I think you'll see a major increase in usage.
The question is, "Is that really the goal?"
Good question
Do you want lots of users or lots of contributors?
We want as many as possible cluefull users who also contribute. We don't want a lot of clueless users who freeride.
Do you want to be the virus target by virtue of numbers?
So long as our userbase is overwhelmingly clueful we won't be a virus target no matter how many of us there are, because such a high proportion of Linux machines will be sufficiently well secured that viruses won't spread.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Linux has a niche in an ecosystem of operating systems. It's a geek niche. It has to be a geek niche, because only the geeks can build it. If the geeks drift away, there will be no-one left to maintain it and it will suffer from bit-rot and die. If Linux gets pushed too much in the Joe Average direction, it will no longer offer the things that geeks want and will no longer have a geek cachet and the geeks will drift away to something that has. Linux thrives because it is a minority OS with a cachet. Mainstream it and it dies.
They're saying that the jump from 2.2 to 2.6 an "Improbable Linux Development Path". For me, a non-kernel hacker, can someone explain why this particular point isn't true? Or do you have to pull from many examples in order to prove otherwise?
Because Alan Cox is, frankly, rather brighter than Darl McBride. Yes, I know, as others have posted, IBM and others have contributed to Linux' multi-processing code. But it worked extremely well before they did - I know, I was running a dual processor Pentium Pro with dual RAID5 arrays in late 1996 or early 1997, and that was running on Alan Cox's SMP patch to the 2.2 kernel (might even have been a 2.0 kernel).
The problem is that most of us aren't going to accept that free-as-in-RMS software is a good thing if it can't produce better products than the current commercial (or other, free-as-in-beer) offerings.
OK, in that case you're quite simply wrong and haven't thought about the issue long enough.
Think again about voting machines issue. How do you know when you use a voting machine that your vote is actually recorded at all? How do you know it's recorded for the candidate or party you intended? Conversely, how do you know that, at the end of the day, the voting machine doesn't simply print out a series of random numbers, or numbers influenced by bribes paid to the voting machine manufacturers?
You don't. And you can't, unless the voting machine software can be openly and publicly examined and audited, and the public can verify that it is the code which has been publicly audited which is actually running on the machines.
The capitalist ideal is about an open marketplace in which anyone can build a better mousetrap and compete to earn their place in the sun. But proprietary software with closed file formats isn't like that; it's inherently anti-competitive, monopolistic. If all your customers and suppliers use Acme Wordprocessor, and send emails formatted in the proprietary Acme format, then you have to buy Acme software just to participate in the market at all. If someone else comes along with BrandX software, you aren't going to buy it even if its better, because you've already had to buy the Acme stuff. And if the BrandX people manage to write a parser for the Acme format so that their software can read the files, the Acme people will subtly change the format at their next release.
Free software does not destroy capitalism. Rather, it makes an open market in software possible. Conversely, proprietary software does not protect capitalism; it protects monopolies and destroys the market. To call RMS a 'communist' is radically wide of the mark.
So what I'm saying is that the issue with free software is not about quality. It's about the basic guarantees of a free and liberal society. Utility and efficiency are not the only measures of good; in the end, freedom is more important.
Its not even necessarily about power... its about things like the cult of personality, fame for intellectual achievement, lasting legacies, those sorts of things. Piles are money are only good as long as you value "things", and RMS has made it pretty clear with his software communism ideals that he has no value for things...
I believe you're misunderstanding him completely. I think Stallman places an exceedingly high value on software; it's because he sees software as very important and very valuable to society that he is so determined that it should be free. It matters desparately to him.
There's no doubt that Stallman is a difficult person to have around the place, and I'm sure I'd hate to share an office with him. But the older I get and the more I think about what I'm doing the more convinced I am that he's right about most things. In a software mediated future access to and control over software will be essential to active participation in society. Consider the voting machines issue. Without open, free, publicly auditable software on voting machines, how can the process of democracy in an electronic age be trusted?
I've always considered the GPL to be a very imprtant document, and I've recently switched from using the BSD license for most of my work to using the GPL. I agree that Stallman is an extremist. But we need extremists and without him we would not have the opportunity to discuss differing purities of free software - because there would be no free softare at all, and we would all of us be microserfs.
That's why I have test accounts on all of the major free e-mail providers, so I can see what the students will get when we send them messages. I'm noticing a fair chunk of our students using free providers instead of the university's mail servers because the accounts will be around after they graduate.
Is your institution (and hundreds of others) not missing a golden marketing opportunity here? If you offered your alumni email addresses for life, that would be very cheap for the University to provide and would be a means of
binding your ex-students closer to your institution
getting your institution's name seen
having easier access to your alumni for fund-raising purposes
For better known institutions at any rate, there would be a considerable cachet to having an email address like joe.bloggs@classof03.yourcollege.edu
I wouldn't just download something like that, I would support the company with my $, right?
You really don't understand the concept of Open Source, do you? Why should you 'support' RedHat (or SuSE or Mandrake - or SCOX) for Linus' work? He doesn't work for any of those companies and never has. Nor have most of the people who have written contributions to the Linux kernel. Yes, I know Alan Cox does...
The value that RedHat and SuSE and Mandrake add is not in creating a kernel. It's in creating a distribution - a bundle of software which has been tested to work together, with installation and administration tools to make it easy to use. So sure, if you use RedHat's (or SuSE's or Mandrake's or...) distribution feel free to support them with your dollar. But the kernel? Buy your local kernel developer a beer.
Slashdot Mirror
Bit hard on your girlfriend if she forgets her... Oh.
Oh, no, we're on Slashdot, aren't we? Scrub that about the girlfriend.
Be very sure you've read the source code for the GETVEC routine in BCPL before you make that claim. GETVEC is of course more sophisticated than malloc in that it can shuffle the heap, which malloc can't, so malloc is at best a copy of part of GETVEC; but a partial copy is still a copy.
Mind you I'm not saying Dennis Ritchie copied direct from GETVEC. He may have copied from someone else who copied from GETVEC, or both he and Martin Richards copied from something else I don't know about.
But just because the code in Linux looks like the code Dennis Ritchie wrote doesn't make it Dennis Ritchie's code, it only makes it another decendent of the code Dennis Ritchie was copying.
You are a liar, a fraud, and a thief.
You are a liar (if in nothing else) in deliberately misquoting Bruce Perens' analysis of the memory allocation routines which SGI contributed to Linux. Bruce Perens clearly did not say (as you claim he did) that we had allowed '...Unix System V code that "didn't belong in Linux" to end up in the Linux kernel' (my emphasis). He nowhere agreed that this was System V code.
You are a fraud in that you you claim that these routines are your company's property. They are not property, and they are not yours. They aren't yours, they weren't SGI's, they weren't AT&T's. You cannot inherit from others that which they do not own.
Algorithms for allocating memory have been developed over a period of over half a century by software developers studying and improving on one another's code. No implementation of these algorithms exists in isolation; none is fresh hewn from virgin intellectual territory. Improvements are incremental and have largely developed in an open and collegiate environment. Linux may, indeed, have learned some things from UNIX[tm]; but UNIX in its turn got the algorithms from MULTICS, TRIPOS, CPL and others lost even further in the mists of time. You cannot simply stop this process at an arbitrary point and say 'now this is property'. It is not property, it's a commons, a commons tilled and tended by many hands, to bring it to the state it is today.
And so, Sir, lastly, I say you are a thief. You are a thief in that you seek to enclose commons, to deprive the community of the rightful fruits of its labours over many decades, to make property what is not, never was, and never could be property. To steal our work and sell it back to us.
Sincerely
Simon Brooke
I've never before written a 'mod the parent up' post... But this one is (in my opinion) SO insightful.
We're already seeing this in corporate firewalls, it is in fact the primary driver not just behind SOAP but behind the whole 'Web Services' concept. The administrators of the corporate firewall seek to keep the corporation safe, and they do this by blocking types of traffic which are potentially unsafe. So business units which don't understand the security implications employ half trained code monkeys to hijack a 'safe' protocol (HTTP and/or HTTPS) and overload it to implement a less secure alternative to Sun's long reviled RPC.
This is a bad thing for (at least) two reasons:
We're already, as I say, seeing this in the corporate sphere. Blocking ports at the ISP will only push the bad boys into the Web services space, at which point for ordinary users the whole internet will become unusable.
This is not a sensible suggestion.
This isn't so. It wasn't the Windows version of WordPerfect which got ported to Linux, it was the SCO UNIX version (no, not them, the other SCO). It was a perfectly normal X11 application which was perfectly stable. I still have a copy on the shelf. I personally thought it was a horrible wordprocessor and didn't use it much, but it was not a ported Windows application and did not use Wine (which, as far as I can recall, didn't exist in those days).
It's a long time since I used it, and in a LISP environment, of course, there's really nos such concept as a plugin, but there was analogous functionality in NoteCards.
I would have thought a NoteCards node type was highly analogous to a mime type, and the 'LISP command' was highly analogous to a plugin.
Yeah, yeah. And SpamAssassin has filtered out 562 spams for me since yesterday... at an average of 100K each or 50 megabytes in total. That's 50 megabytes of my upstream bandwidth that I've paid for.
This is not a solution. At best it's hiding the problem from us so we don't deal with it. A staggering proportion of the backbone bandwidth of the Internet is being eaten up by UCE, worms and other malware traffic.
We have to do better than this and an authenticated replacement for SMTP has to be one of the places to start.
OK, let's see how you would do it...
The payload of the original virus would be a encrypted peer-to-peer daemon somewhat like Freenet, except that it would only allow uploads signed with a particular digital signature. The client would of course have to include the public key of that signature, but not the private key.
Once infected a machine would open a listening port and attempt to connect to machines chosen randomly but with a bias to its local class C (as with CodeRed). Once contact has been established the machines would exchange IPs so that each could recontact the other. Each machine would continue to probe for peers until it had found a certain number - say twenty - and then it would remain quiescent, just listening. Periodically (say weekly) it would handshake again with its known peers, and if any failed to handshake twice successively it would seek others until it had again reached quota.
Once the virus was widespread the author would send a signed file to one infected machine. The name of the file would be a unique string (for simplicity of exposition say a serial number, although any systematically unique string would do) so the first file the virus author injected might be 0001, the next 0002 and so on. The machine would accept the file as genuine because it could decrypt it with its local copy of the public key, and would pass it on unchanged to all the other infected nodes it knew about. If a machine had already received 0001 and was offered 0001 by a peer it would refuse it to save time and network congestion - not to be nice to other users, but because if the thing blocked up network bandwidth completely, it wouldn't be able to do it's own dirty work.
The signed files could contain
This would be incredibly difficult to defend against because
Furthermore, the network could be used to launch several sequential attacks, which would not even need to have been planned at the time the virus was written. The author could, in effect, sell use of a flexible, massively distributed mass-UCE/DDoS attack engine to the highest bidder...
Hang on, hang on... just wait until I get a patent on that idea!
Carving it into rock works, too.
<sighs/><fx action="bashes forehead repeatedly on the desk"/>
Which is 85 degrees celcius. The coffee I'm drinking right now is 92 degrees celcius. If someone offered me coffee at 85 I'd complain because it wasn't hot enough.
Do they teach you anything at all in American schools?
Then she's lying. Coffee can't do that. No aqueus suspension can do that. So either (i) it wasn't coffee that she spilled or (ii) she didn't get charring. You cannot make coffee hot enough to do that (except on the surface of Jupiter or inside a pressure vessel): the basic nature of the universe won't let you. Don't be silly
Simon, not yet fully awake, pissed off with stupid americans, and drinking a cup of coffee made with boiling water - the hottest physically possible - as he types.
Do they teach physics in US schools?
Water boils at 100 degrees celcius. Above 100 cegrees celcius, it isn't water, it's steam. So it can't be held in a coffee cup of any kind. What was in the macdonalds coffee cup was water containing a suspension of coffee grounds and a very small amount of disolved material. It is simply impossible that, on the surface of the earth exposed to the atmosphere, it could have been above 100 degrees celcius.
Personally I find coffee near 100 degrees celcius unpleasant to drink, and it can cause minor blistering of the lining of my mouth. But there's no way it can cause 'instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle'. Furthermore, black coffee is routinely served at or near 100 degrees celcius - everywhere. The case was frivolous. So is SCO's.
If you think that post was either long or thoughtful, think again.
The thing about Mark Heise's interview is that every single thing he said was quite simply untrue - and demonstrably untrue. It was, essentially, a tissue of lies - at least, all of it that made any grammatical sense at all was.
Firstly, Mark claims that SCO (then Caldera) didn't distribute the Linux kernel under the GPL (at least I think that's what he says, the sentence doesn't actually parse as English). Well, sorry Mark, I have a boxed set here of Caldera Linux and it says clearly that it is distributed under the GPL. Then he says there aren't any SCO copyright notices in the kernel. Well, sorry again, Mark, but there are. Just do cd /usr/src/linux; grep -ri caldera * and you'll find them.
Behind this is a claim that there is SCO source in the kernel which SCO didn't put there themselves. Well, that's a lie too (note: not a 'mistake', not a 'misunderstanding', a lie - a deliberate, intentional and fraudulent untruth). The code which SCO has shown as proof has all been shown to have been legally used. The larger corpus of material which they claim was never theirs in the first place - NUMA and RCU are both well understood concepts in computer science, and have been applied in many different operating systems, but it's a historical fact that they do not exist and never have in SCO's System V. SCO cannot claim to own what they didn't write and never had. Similarly, IBM's journalling file system - the one ported to Linux - was part of OS/2. It isn't SCO's and never was.
Copyright law is pretty much irrelevent here. Except for a few small portions which were legally donated by SCO and are properly acknowledged, SCO don't own any of the copyright. They never did own any of the copyright. So even if copyright law did 'trump' the GPL, it would be irrelevent, because it wasn't ever SCO's copyright in the first place.
It's a lie
Quote:
Uhhhmmm... It isn't fair to make fun of people with learning difficulties, I know; but -- they pay this guy to work as a lawyer? He can't even construct a sentence!
And then further down he says:
Well, no you're not, but only because the SCO Group is just a new name for Caldera. You'd forgotten these ones, had you, Mark?
Documentation/networking/tlan.txt:(C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
drivers/net/tlan.c: * (C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
drivers/net/tlan.h: * (C) 1997-1998 Caldera, Inc.
net/ipx/af_ipx.c: * Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc. <greg@caldera.com>
net/ipx/af_ipx.c: KERN_INFO "IPX Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.\n" \
You know what would be really interesting (editors, bloggers, are you listening)? It would be really interesting to hear what Marcus Meissner <Marcus.Meissner@caldera.de> and Greg Page <greg@caldera.com> think about all this.
In whose interest is it for Linux to 'succeed' on the desktop? It may be in the corporate interest of companies like IBM, RedHat and SuSE, but it isn't in our interest. When Linux becomes just another mainstream operating system it will no longer suit us, and we'll all have to find something else (HURD, perhaps, or xBSD - I'm just starting an experimental HURD install).
But no, my vote is that we do nothing whatever to encourage mainstream adoption of Linux. It is not in our interest.
Good question
We want as many as possible cluefull users who also contribute. We don't want a lot of clueless users who freeride.
So long as our userbase is overwhelmingly clueful we won't be a virus target no matter how many of us there are, because such a high proportion of Linux machines will be sufficiently well secured that viruses won't spread.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Linux has a niche in an ecosystem of operating systems. It's a geek niche. It has to be a geek niche, because only the geeks can build it. If the geeks drift away, there will be no-one left to maintain it and it will suffer from bit-rot and die. If Linux gets pushed too much in the Joe Average direction, it will no longer offer the things that geeks want and will no longer have a geek cachet and the geeks will drift away to something that has. Linux thrives because it is a minority OS with a cachet. Mainstream it and it dies.
Because Alan Cox is, frankly, rather brighter than Darl McBride. Yes, I know, as others have posted, IBM and others have contributed to Linux' multi-processing code. But it worked extremely well before they did - I know, I was running a dual processor Pentium Pro with dual RAID5 arrays in late 1996 or early 1997, and that was running on Alan Cox's SMP patch to the 2.2 kernel (might even have been a 2.0 kernel).
61.5 days uptime isn't something to brag about, it's a medical condition.
OK, in that case you're quite simply wrong and haven't thought about the issue long enough.
Think again about voting machines issue. How do you know when you use a voting machine that your vote is actually recorded at all? How do you know it's recorded for the candidate or party you intended? Conversely, how do you know that, at the end of the day, the voting machine doesn't simply print out a series of random numbers, or numbers influenced by bribes paid to the voting machine manufacturers?
You don't. And you can't, unless the voting machine software can be openly and publicly examined and audited, and the public can verify that it is the code which has been publicly audited which is actually running on the machines.
The capitalist ideal is about an open marketplace in which anyone can build a better mousetrap and compete to earn their place in the sun. But proprietary software with closed file formats isn't like that; it's inherently anti-competitive, monopolistic. If all your customers and suppliers use Acme Wordprocessor, and send emails formatted in the proprietary Acme format, then you have to buy Acme software just to participate in the market at all. If someone else comes along with BrandX software, you aren't going to buy it even if its better, because you've already had to buy the Acme stuff. And if the BrandX people manage to write a parser for the Acme format so that their software can read the files, the Acme people will subtly change the format at their next release.
Free software does not destroy capitalism. Rather, it makes an open market in software possible. Conversely, proprietary software does not protect capitalism; it protects monopolies and destroys the market. To call RMS a 'communist' is radically wide of the mark.
So what I'm saying is that the issue with free software is not about quality. It's about the basic guarantees of a free and liberal society. Utility and efficiency are not the only measures of good; in the end, freedom is more important.
I believe you're misunderstanding him completely. I think Stallman places an exceedingly high value on software; it's because he sees software as very important and very valuable to society that he is so determined that it should be free. It matters desparately to him.
There's no doubt that Stallman is a difficult person to have around the place, and I'm sure I'd hate to share an office with him. But the older I get and the more I think about what I'm doing the more convinced I am that he's right about most things. In a software mediated future access to and control over software will be essential to active participation in society. Consider the voting machines issue. Without open, free, publicly auditable software on voting machines, how can the process of democracy in an electronic age be trusted?
I've always considered the GPL to be a very imprtant document, and I've recently switched from using the BSD license for most of my work to using the GPL. I agree that Stallman is an extremist. But we need extremists and without him we would not have the opportunity to discuss differing purities of free software - because there would be no free softare at all, and we would all of us be microserfs.
In short, you owe Stallman a beer (and so do I)
Is your institution (and hundreds of others) not missing a golden marketing opportunity here? If you offered your alumni email addresses for life, that would be very cheap for the University to provide and would be a means of
For better known institutions at any rate, there would be a considerable cachet to having an email address like joe.bloggs@classof03.yourcollege.edu
It's broke. HTH
That's an optometrist, actually...
You really don't understand the concept of Open Source, do you? Why should you 'support' RedHat (or SuSE or Mandrake - or SCOX) for Linus' work? He doesn't work for any of those companies and never has. Nor have most of the people who have written contributions to the Linux kernel. Yes, I know Alan Cox does...
The value that RedHat and SuSE and Mandrake add is not in creating a kernel. It's in creating a distribution - a bundle of software which has been tested to work together, with installation and administration tools to make it easy to use. So sure, if you use RedHat's (or SuSE's or Mandrake's or...) distribution feel free to support them with your dollar. But the kernel? Buy your local kernel developer a beer.
It isn't more free. It provides greater guarantees of continued freedom.