Has anyone noticed that if you check NetCraft for microsoft.com, it says that they are running IIS on Linux?
I noticed the same. Probably they're running with a customized IIS that sends out bogus host information, in an attempt to keep hackers out for their NT boxes.
OR maybe they're relly running on Linux/Apache, and sends out bogus IIS information, since it would be too embarassing if the press knew that MS can't trust their own products, a year after they pompously declared that security was priority number 1.
The public relations strategy of LindowsOS seems to be to play to the general/Windows trade press and to ignore the Linux press. Given that their target audience is found among Windows users rather than those already using Linux, that may be not a bad plan. So maybe my query to Schwarzman went unanswered because of that reticence. Or maybe they just didn't want to say anything that might give OpenLindows more ink. That would make sense too.
I would imagine the silence might be more of a legal nature. I imagine lindows have trademarked lindows, so their PR guy might not have a statement untill their lawyers have figured out how to deal with openLindows.
I am not a technical writer, but in my experience, the technical writers are consistently the funniest and most diverse group in the company, and they often have some artistic hobby, and some are writing a novel on their spare time. Novelists are technical writers while they wait for publication. Stand up comedians tend to work in call centers.
I encourage any Linux users, MIS managers, development managers, CTOs, and CEOs with a fair amount of IT budget, and that have previously bought reports from the Yankee Group to voice their concerns to Yankee's sales department over DiDio's lack of professionalism and competense, as well as the extrememe bias in the SCO case. Since the issues of this case is obvously not her field of expertise, it must be of some concerns that she is willing to issue conclusive and sweeping statements using only one source of information, namely the SCO insiders.
You can no longer can have faith in the Yankee Group's quality control and that this casts a great shadow of doubt over all their research reports. You can no longer trust their research when making decisions about IT investemts and industry trends, and you regret that you can no longer maintain a business relationship with the Yankee group.
Boies representing the plaintiff, SCO, is optimistic about the upcoming lawsuit against SCO, the defendant. Counsel for the defendant is Boies.
SCO claims that SCO illegaly distributed copies of the linux kernel which contained SCO trade secrets.
Boies, counsel for the defendant, was upbeat, pointing to the fact that counsel for the plaintiff had a string of high profile cases, including a balls to the wall case in Florida, where his girlfriend's lawn mowing company received unlimited legal resources, but after years of wasting Florida's court resources was told to go fly a kite. Despite the high profile cases, he had a lousy succes rate.
Amongst the most recent gaffes, was the fact that the (on) crack legal team who had worked on the case the last 6 months, never found out that the copyrights for SysVr4 had not been registered by the company, even after executives had been playing up the media with wild and far flung copyright claims.
When Boies was confronted with the embarassing fact, he said "I take the fifth, do you think we'll be on TV? Hooray!".
It sounds to me that the method they used to analyse the code has more in common with Kabalism, than with software engineering.
After all, there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and coders will often use very predictable names to when coding the same task. In a recent ZDiInterview Darl McBride said that they had "rocket scientists" looking at this. Did you see any "rocket scientists" on the premises?
A mail flood is exactly what works. For example, in most consumer fraud cases, aciopn is taken only when the perpetrator has hit some critical volume. (Probably the breaking point is when the agency must spend more time processing the incoming complaints than to investigate)
Note that the target audience for these complaints are people with background in governmetnt, finance, law, law enforcement.
Probably they have spent an average of less than 30 seconds on a UNIX system in their lifetime. Only 0.002% of them have heard about awk,grep,sed,vi.
It is not immediately obvious to them that Boies/SCOX/McBride is running an extortion scheme. For the uninformed bystander, it looks like a small company is suing a large company for theft of their IP and conteract breach.
A mail flood, of an informative nature (not cut n paste) is just the right medicine. Even if the mails are mostly filed and ignored, it prompts the case handlers to read up on the issues.
Microsoft will sue Peru so many times for petty things like... I doubt it. These things would take too long. MS want their money now.
I find it more likely that the U.S government will file complaints to WTO and similar bodies, and if they don't get their way, the US gov will punish Peru with tariffs, untill they find a loophole that allows Microsoft to cash in.
Parralell to this, Microsoft will try bribing legislators to throw the law out.
Only the losers buy systems at DELL, Compaq, IBM, HP or whatever the brands are.
You can still get a nice complete system, with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB of memory 40 GB disk, with sound and video, for less than $400, if you take your time looking for the best prices.
Moore's law is still in full effect. A few years back, my ideal system would cost $2000, and my "Good enough" system would cost a little over $1000. Those prices seemed to stay constant over the years.
Now, a "Good enough" system can be had for $200, and the "I'll never need another" system can be had for $700.
After getting maximum reward for a brilliant article, I got modded down a notch to 49. It's taken me several months of shameless karma-whoring to get back up to 50.
When VCs tell a company they're not burning fast enough, they want you to hire more people, and expand the business faster. A really stupid manager thinks that it literally means to burn up more dollar bills.
From the article, I say Harris is the kind of guy that's doing the latter. Letting time run out, and having paychecks bounce, is utterly irresponsible, and grossly immature. If the investors let people like that run a 100-person company, they deserve to lose their money, and Harris deserves to be in hall of shame.
Chum, this is America. The reason you think it is too cheap to be real, is that you are used to being overcharged.
The US cell phone providers are raking in hand over fist. It's still an immature market, and they lag several years behind in technology. They are behaving exactly the same way as the major long distance providers, trying to achieve monopoly using any trick in the book. Funny thing, they ARE the same companies. I tell ya, if Sprint or ATT tried to sell their service plans in any European country, without dropping prices 50% or more, they'd be laughed out of town.
He took it out for about one hour in "Speaker For the Dead" while having a talk with the married munks. Jane being a fast thinker, 50000 years passed for her before being plugged back in, so she got a bit bored.
Wonder if there is any connection between "Red Dwarf"'s computer persona and Jane.
It is NOT raqueteering, but is inviolation of antitrust laws.
It's the exclusivity that makes this dangerous. If Microsoft OWNED the HW manufacturer, they could chose to only sell MS products.
It's like the relationship between pub and brewery. If the brewery owns the pub, they can chose to sell whatever they like, for example Bud and nothing else.
Id Bud tried to enter into exclusive relationships with a pub they don't own, I am pretty sure FTC would slap them so bad their heads would spin. Which makes it REALLY dubious that MS has been treated with kid gloves so long.
It appears to me that the legislators, the executive branch, and the court system are afraid to act because they don't understand the technology. Beer they would understand, but software is way over their heads.
First, it's not that the gov't is cracking encryption of bank systems so they can steal money.
And why ever not? You really think the men in black don't need money, or that all activities will be disclosed to congress committees?
Sometimes they need a huge pile of money for a project they know that congress would kill if they knew about it. The most recent example would be the Iran-Contras scandal.
I bet many a money launderer has seen his booty disappear like a puff of smoke. The proceedings allow the spooks to run operations that show up on no budgets.
Right now the spooks are too busy working on everything that can be labeled terrorism, but when Bush or the press has had enough of wars, the spooks can go back to playing God with the banana republics. And for that they need money. Weapons trade turned out to be a risky business, so I bet the most likely source for secret funding now must be stealing from the criminals.
I saw the same. I have 2 godaddy domains, and I used to have one with domainshop.
The domainshop domain was $15 a year or so. Imagine my disappointment when they were bought out by verisign. Now they wanted me to renew at $30 or so. Monhs before it expired, I started getting weekly email reminders to renew in addition to frequent snail mails. They must have spent at least $30 on paper and postage to get my business. If they'd dropped prices to a decent level, they;d have a profit and not a loss on me.
Instead of paying through my nose to transfer the domain to another registrar, I am going to let the 3 month period go by and just register the same domain with godaddy. I am not going to give Verisign as much as a penny during my life time.
Aggressive, expensive, and annoying. Hope they'll pop up on FC one of these days
Re:i replied to spam once
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yeah, I can do that for hours, but when they never answer I get bored. Those tin cans are such sensitive crybabies.
Right. As long as the user has control ofer those options.
However, most authentication are outside the user's control. Online banking, Web sites, you name it.
It's like saying blind people can use ascii to get around on the web. Except that most sites do not have text-only versions anymore. Add Flash to the mix, and I think I've made my point.
Cause the netscape messaging server is of poor quality, too. I should know, as my company used it for a while, and had to ditch it.
Netscape did OK in the very beginning, but as the company grew, and the number of employees grew, quality went down the drain. Imagine being outcompeted by MS on quality, lame indeed.
Not sure if the messaging server belongs to Sun or AOL though. As far as I remember, AOL took over teh web presence, and the browser tech, but Sun took over the server side stuff, which now sells under the name iPlanet.
Good point. Coders should unite forces, and periodically ask for permission. Companies hate having their legal departments wasting time on long contracts. Remember, for every lease contract, warranty, sale, employers have to spend expensive legal counsel hours. I've seen large purchases being cancelled because the vendor presented a 14 page lease contract, and it would take the customer 2 weeks to get it past their lawyers. The firm did not have the time to wait, so the deal went to a company presenting a 2 page contract.
If it turns out that their unreasonable employment contracts causes significant increase in lawyer cost, there is a chance that more reasonble boilerplate contracts will emerge. Because companies don't make up these contracts to be evil, they do it because they think it'll make them money.
Article 6 (bis)
(1) Independently of the author's copyright, and even after
transfer of the said copyright, the author shall have the right
to claim authorship of the work, as well as the right to object
to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of the said
work which would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation.
So, they can take away your copyright, but they can't do with it as they please. And if these grim goons follow through with their threath, leave them this paragraph as a parting gift. Maybe they find out that the easiest way out is to give the code back to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone noticed that if you check NetCraft for microsoft.com, it says that they are running IIS on Linux?
I noticed the same. Probably they're running with a customized IIS that sends out bogus host information, in an attempt to keep hackers out for their NT boxes.
OR maybe they're relly running on Linux/Apache, and sends out bogus IIS information, since it would be too embarassing if the press knew that MS can't trust their own products, a year after they pompously declared that security was priority number 1.
The public relations strategy of LindowsOS seems to be to play to the general/Windows trade press and to ignore the Linux press. Given that their target audience is found among Windows users rather than those already using Linux, that may be not a bad plan. So maybe my query to Schwarzman went unanswered because of that reticence. Or maybe they just didn't want to say anything that might give OpenLindows more ink. That would make sense too.
I would imagine the silence might be more of a legal nature. I imagine lindows have trademarked lindows, so their PR guy might not have a statement untill their lawyers have figured out how to deal with openLindows.
technical writers aren't very funny
I am not a technical writer, but in my experience, the technical writers are consistently the funniest and most diverse group in the company, and they often have some artistic hobby, and some are writing a novel on their spare time. Novelists are technical writers while they wait for publication. Stand up comedians tend to work in call centers.
When they apply the same methods as they used for comparing UNIX and linux on their mailfeed, all mail to SCO will end up in /dev/null.
All they have to do is rewrite their existing "linixblaster" program...
My guess is that their mailserver will be set up with the following filter:(At a different terminal:) (clicketyclicketyclick)I encourage any Linux users, MIS managers, development managers, CTOs, and CEOs with a fair amount of IT budget, and that have previously bought reports from the Yankee Group to voice their concerns to Yankee's sales department over DiDio's lack of professionalism and competense, as well as the extrememe bias in the SCO case. Since the issues of this case is obvously not her field of expertise, it must be of some concerns that she is willing to issue conclusive and sweeping statements using only one source of information, namely the SCO insiders.
You can no longer can have faith in the Yankee Group's quality control and that this casts a great shadow of doubt over all their research reports. You can no longer trust their research when making decisions about IT investemts and industry trends, and you regret that you can no longer maintain a business relationship with the Yankee group.
Boies representing the plaintiff, SCO, is optimistic about the upcoming lawsuit against SCO, the defendant. Counsel for the defendant is Boies.
SCO claims that SCO illegaly distributed copies of the linux kernel which contained SCO trade secrets.
Boies, counsel for the defendant, was upbeat, pointing to the fact that counsel for the plaintiff had a string of high profile cases, including a balls to the wall case in Florida, where his girlfriend's lawn mowing company received unlimited legal resources, but after years of wasting Florida's court resources was told to go fly a kite. Despite the high profile cases, he had a lousy succes rate.
Amongst the most recent gaffes, was the fact that the (on) crack legal team who had worked on the case the last 6 months, never found out that the copyrights for SysVr4 had not been registered by the company, even after executives had been playing up the media with wild and far flung copyright claims.
When Boies was confronted with the embarassing fact, he said "I take the fifth, do you think we'll be on TV? Hooray!".
It sounds to me that the method they used to analyse the code has more in common with Kabalism, than with software engineering.
After all, there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and coders will often use very predictable names to when coding the same task. In a recent ZDiInterview Darl McBride said that they had "rocket scientists" looking at this. Did you see any "rocket scientists" on the premises?
Garcia,
A mail flood is exactly what works. For example, in most consumer fraud cases, aciopn is taken only when the perpetrator has hit some critical volume. (Probably the breaking point is when the agency must spend more time processing the incoming complaints than to investigate)
Note that the target audience for these complaints are people with background in governmetnt, finance, law, law enforcement.
Probably they have spent an average of less than 30 seconds on a UNIX system in their lifetime. Only 0.002% of them have heard about awk,grep,sed,vi.
It is not immediately obvious to them that Boies/SCOX/McBride is running an extortion scheme. For the uninformed bystander, it looks like a small company is suing a large company for theft of their IP and conteract breach.
A mail flood, of an informative nature (not cut n paste) is just the right medicine. Even if the mails are mostly filed and ignored, it prompts the case handlers to read up on the issues.
I doubt it. These things would take too long. MS want their money now.
I find it more likely that the U.S government will file complaints to WTO and similar bodies, and if they don't get their way, the US gov will punish Peru with tariffs, untill they find a loophole that allows Microsoft to cash in.
Parralell to this, Microsoft will try bribing legislators to throw the law out.
Only the losers buy systems at DELL, Compaq, IBM, HP or whatever the brands are.
You can still get a nice complete system, with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB of memory 40 GB disk, with sound and video, for less than $400, if you take your time looking for the best prices.
Moore's law is still in full effect. A few years back, my ideal system would cost $2000, and my "Good enough" system would cost a little over $1000. Those prices seemed to stay constant over the years.
Now, a "Good enough" system can be had for $200, and the "I'll never need another" system can be had for $700.
I'm not worried.
We all feel the pain.
After getting maximum reward for a brilliant article, I got modded down a notch to 49. It's taken me several months of shameless karma-whoring to get back up to 50.
When VCs tell a company they're not burning fast enough, they want you to hire more people, and expand the business faster. A really stupid manager thinks that it literally means to burn up more dollar bills.
From the article, I say Harris is the kind of guy that's doing the latter. Letting time run out, and having paychecks bounce, is utterly irresponsible, and grossly immature. If the investors let people like that run a 100-person company, they deserve to lose their money, and Harris deserves to be in hall of shame.
No excuses accepted.
Chum, this is America. The reason you think it is too cheap to be real, is that you are used to being overcharged.
The US cell phone providers are raking in hand over fist. It's still an immature market, and they lag several years behind in technology. They are behaving exactly the same way as the major long distance providers, trying to achieve monopoly using any trick in the book. Funny thing, they ARE the same companies. I tell ya, if Sprint or ATT tried to sell their service plans in any European country, without dropping prices 50% or more, they'd be laughed out of town.
He took it out for about one hour in "Speaker For the Dead" while having a talk with the married munks. Jane being a fast thinker, 50000 years passed for her before being plugged back in, so she got a bit bored.
Wonder if there is any connection between "Red Dwarf"'s computer persona and Jane.
It is NOT raqueteering, but is inviolation of antitrust laws.
It's the exclusivity that makes this dangerous. If Microsoft OWNED the HW manufacturer, they could chose to only sell MS products.
It's like the relationship between pub and brewery. If the brewery owns the pub, they can chose to sell whatever they like, for example Bud and nothing else.
Id Bud tried to enter into exclusive relationships with a pub they don't own, I am pretty sure FTC would slap them so bad their heads would spin. Which makes it REALLY dubious that MS has been treated with kid gloves so long.
It appears to me that the legislators, the executive branch, and the court system are afraid to act because they don't understand the technology. Beer they would understand, but software is way over their heads.
First, it's not that the gov't is cracking encryption of bank systems so they can steal money.
And why ever not? You really think the men in black don't need money, or that all activities will be disclosed to congress committees?
Sometimes they need a huge pile of money for a project they know that congress would kill if they knew about it. The most recent example would be the Iran-Contras scandal.
I bet many a money launderer has seen his booty disappear like a puff of smoke. The proceedings allow the spooks to run operations that show up on no budgets.
Right now the spooks are too busy working on everything that can be labeled terrorism, but when Bush or the press has had enough of wars, the spooks can go back to playing God with the banana republics. And for that they need money. Weapons trade turned out to be a risky business, so I bet the most likely source for secret funding now must be stealing from the criminals.
I saw the same. I have 2 godaddy domains,
and I used to have one with domainshop.
The domainshop domain was $15 a year or so. Imagine my disappointment when they were bought out by verisign. Now they wanted me to renew at $30 or so. Monhs before it expired, I started getting weekly email reminders to renew in addition to frequent snail mails. They must have spent at least $30 on paper and postage to get my business. If they'd dropped prices to a decent level, they;d have a profit and not a loss on me.
Instead of paying through my nose to transfer the domain to another registrar, I am going to let the 3 month period go by and just register the same domain with godaddy. I am not going to give Verisign as much as a penny during my life time.
Aggressive, expensive, and annoying. Hope they'll pop up on FC one of these days
Yeah, I can do that for hours, but when they never answer I get bored. Those tin cans are such sensitive crybabies.
I write messages to their webmasters instead,
F rikkinT highCream.IfYoureAWebmasterForTheseFraudsISuggestY ouGetYourselfArealJobYouDespcicableMoron
hoping that it'll show up in their error logs. They're probably never read, but it's nice to vent.
Something like:
http://spammer.com/index.html.IDontWantAny
Right. As long as the user has control ofer those options.
However, most authentication are outside the user's control. Online banking, Web sites, you name it.
It's like saying blind people can use ascii to get around on the web. Except that most sites do not have text-only versions anymore. Add Flash to the mix, and I think I've made my point.
Aeasy answers make for easy rebuttals.
And how are blind people going to log in?
This must be president Bush's idea.
Cause the netscape messaging server is of poor quality, too. I should know, as my company used it for a while, and had to ditch it.
Netscape did OK in the very beginning, but as the company grew, and the number of employees grew, quality went down the drain. Imagine being outcompeted by MS on quality, lame indeed.
Not sure if the messaging server belongs to Sun or AOL though. As far as I remember, AOL took over teh web presence, and the browser tech, but Sun took over the server side stuff, which now sells under the name iPlanet.
Good point. Coders should unite forces, and periodically ask for permission. Companies hate having their legal departments wasting time on long contracts. Remember, for every lease contract, warranty, sale, employers have to spend expensive legal counsel hours. I've seen large purchases being cancelled because the vendor presented a 14 page lease contract, and it would take the customer 2 weeks to get it past their lawyers. The firm did not have the time to wait, so the deal went to a company presenting a 2 page contract.
If it turns out that their unreasonable employment contracts causes significant increase in lawyer cost, there is a chance that more reasonble boilerplate contracts will emerge. Because companies don't make up these contracts to be evil, they do it because they think it'll make them money.
For example, the Bern convention states:
Article 6 (bis)
(1) Independently of the author's copyright, and even after
transfer of the said copyright, the author shall have the right
to claim authorship of the work, as well as the right to object
to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of the said
work which would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation.
So, they can take away your copyright, but they can't do with it as they please. And if these grim goons follow through with their threath, leave them this paragraph as a parting gift. Maybe they find out that the easiest way out is to give the code back to the community.
Sounds like what was lacking with this book was having reading tests with the target audience, especially given the title of the book.
One would expect a survuval guide to spend a fair amount of time on trouble shooting at different levels.
You guys should contact the author and volunteer as reviewers for the second edition or something.