From here on, I demand that every person pay me $50 for each post they make to Slashdot. For people that refuse, why I'll call you names and point right at you! Point, I say!
Oh boy, this is even better, every person in the world will pay me $50 for each time they flush their toilet! Dissenters, beware, my name calling is very harsh! Harsh, I say!
Because their supposed intellectual property was added during the 2.4 development cycle.
How long ago was 2.2, again? Red Hat 5.0-era? For most users, porting modern things like GNOME 2, etc. to work with an older kernel might be a viable escape route.
What about forking 2.2, taking all the non-SCO stuff from 2.4 and 2.5, and shoe-horning it back into the new fork. Isn't that one beautiful thing about the GPL, that each time you try to squash it, the code pops up in three other places ready to go?
I could be talking out my rear, here, but for most users of Linux, are there any must-have features in SCO's "portfolio"? It just seems that it is impossible to kill Linux, no matter what.
You know, it really is sad that automake and autoconf (complex, fragile, hard to learn and not particularly consistent) are the standard for ensuring portable makefiles.
GNU make is better quality-wise, but still (IMHO) far more complex than is necessary.
One thing that really bugs me about autoconf and similar tools is that they increase the distance between the developer and the build process and add a murky "black box" type layer that is hard to understand and control. It is easy to argue by default that these tools are open source, so the developer should take it upon himself to fix them. However, in addition to learning his preferred programming language, operating system, APIs, etc., he has to learn M4 and the internals of 15000 lines of speghetti-code shell script? Yuck. It simply isn't worth it.
Simple POSIX-compliant makefiles are the best tool I know of so far for configuration management (and POSIX is, what, 15 years old?). With proper abstraction with environment variables, portability shouldn't be a burden, where, at worst, a person needs to edit one file to get everything in place. Editing one straight-forward file is much preferable to watching libtool choke on Solaris time after time after time, IMO. A single configuration file, even if it takes one hour for a user to edit, is a known quantity with easily-isolatable faults. This is much less stressful than wasting a whole weekend wondering why libraries aren't being found or why the build tools are looking for non-existent directories or why simply relocating a library suddenly breaks dozens of hard-coded automatically-generated configuration files strewn all over the system.
One thing that is a consistent burden in Open Source software is the raw complexity of the build tools used. What should be an intuitive set of makefiles and header files is replaced by over ten thousand lines of un-decipherable and un-debuggable shell script (configure scripts and libtool). When they don't work, understanding the failure is often nearly impossible, and, frequently, they only work on GNU/Linux systems (so much for portability!).
Everytime I download and attempt to compile something from the source, I get this nagging feeling that there has to be a better way. However, the short-comings of the build systems used could be just a sign that Open Source software still has quite a bit of growing left, and, perhaps more accurately, open source is lacking in configuration management tools, in general. Configuration management is a very complex issue, I admit, considering that package management, too, is still highly volatile and broken (even commercial UNIX could improve in this regard).
Whatever future tools are invented to deal with these problems, I beg that all developers strive to attack fundamental problems rather than use band-aids. Too often, it seems, a well-intentioned developer creates a general tool that appears to solve a problem, but, fundamentally, it only creates more complexity, a higher learning burden, and, ultimately, more well-intentioned tools designed to deal with the earlier well-intentioned tools.
Somewhere, this cycle of naive optimism regarding fix-all tools needs to stop. If a programmer finds that an aberration like a configure script is needed, for example, I suggest the programmer go back to the source code itself and strip out the cause. The program is probably better for it, and we should be brave enough to say "tough doodie" to people that whine about having to actually improve something.
If we continue to let open source decompose into a mess of broken tools, then it is, clearly, no better than anything Microsoft has produced. And, to be honest, when I see the hard-coded path names in GNOME configure files and libtool files, the first thing that comes to my mind is, "Windows Registry" (I hope that offends a lot of people, because it should).
Use widely-available Windows XP exploits...
on
Workgroup Messaging?
·
· Score: 1
Aren't there well-documented blatant security holes that allow instant popups to be displayed on a Windows desktop?
Or, how about finding accounting software that doesn't suck?
But now I have experience, and I have attained Zen.
No, you are only superficially in a state of Zen. If you look deeper, you will realize that you are in the very common state of having had all idealism crushed and stripped from your body, leaving a cynical shell of a person. I should know...
If you don't know the true motives of your employer, you just might end up looking a little foolish. Sometimes, from a business accounting perspective, it makes sense for the PHBs to do totally counter-intuitive things like hiring junior programmers or forcing people to use shitty computers because of how the balance sheets are categorized or how things are charged to the customer in a contract situation.
You might just insult them, too, by saying, effectively, "Your accounting system is shit. Let me show you how to do your job." Usually, people are adverse to being bossed around, especially when their methods are widely accepted in the industry, regardless of how inane they are. They might turn around and say, "Okay, you measure and account for the labor costs saved by upgrading everyone to a newer computer." Or, worse, if you do it in front of a customer, you just might blow the bosses cover!
I'm sorry, but IBM (the company that has made billions in revenue off GNU/Linux) should be floating the bill.
Well, if Red Hat picks up a few buddies, they might do okay. Imagine a penguin army, where a little Red Hat penguin has beefy 320-pound IBM and Sun penguins marching along him (I do think Sun is ultimately behind Linux, if only because they have no choice). They march to the top of a hill and see the SCO donkey and his rider, the Great Microsoft Satan, in the distance. A battle of apocalyptic scale would ensue, but, suprisingly, it turns out that the Great Satan is clinically paranoid about pengins and their "piercing black eyes" and "evil little feet" (whatever that means). The Great Satan screams like a little girl and accidentally falls off a cliff, and, for no particularly obvious reason, the SCO donkey explodes in a puff and disappears.
Or, more realistically, how about we cross-breed penguins and pirhanas and unleash the hoard on the SCO headquarters?
This reminds me of racism. People confuse what it was intended to do. It was a tool to convience your everyday European it was OK to abuse Africans. It was NOT a tool to convience Africans of their own inferiority.
I think there is another way, also, that the racism analogy can apply to the RIAA.
Pure racism is not a invention of society; rather, it is part of human history going back millions of years. Imagine the Neanderthals vs. the Cromagnons (or which ever group they were up against). Racism, then, was a matter of survival and genetic propogation (i.e., stick to your own kind).
One of the benefits of civilization is that racism becomes unnecessary. It becomes more a matter of the survival of the human race rather than any particular sub-species. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear that humans are not quite civilized, which is evidenced by the existence of primitives like the KKK and Neo-nazi hate groups. I say primitive, because members of groups like these have not transcended their basic animalistic drives.
The RIAA are like the KKK. They are stubborn and blind when faced with their own obselescense and the fate of their primitive business model.
If this keeps up it will eventually be impossible for any business to exist for more than a few years without being sued out of existence by corrupt, opportunistic, money-grabbing lawyers. The minute you make any kind of mistake they pounce, with grossly exaggerated damage figures that aren't even sane, but somehow actually get awarded--especially by jury trials--with an extremely low burden of proof.
This really makes me want to start up a small business!
I've never been exposed to a lawsuit...if the defendant absolutely cannot pay, what happens? What if the awarded amount is something larger than the amount of money the defendant could earn in a lifetime? Do defendants get cast into a pit of living hell over crap like this?
We've made it complex by allowing it to grow in that fashion.
Actually, it wasn't passive ("allowing") but very actively made complex by the lawyers and congresspeople who profit as a result.
It's just like programmers who write undocumented crap claiming it enhances their job security.
Granted, some complexity is necessary. Take an employment contract, for example. However, I never quite understood how law-makers seem to come up with a 1000+ page bills for any issue they face.
"Microsoft Windows 2003 Server: Do more with less"...of other people's products and much more of our own!!! HAHAHA!!! We'll suck you dry!!!
Seriously, the genious of Microsoft's marketing department is amazing. "Do more with less" is brilliant doublespeak, ranking with "Patriot Act" with its cunning alluring name.
I just purchased an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz and specifically chose an Intel 875PBZ board for it's stability and reliabilty.
The P4 system didn't come with ECC or parity-correction on every data bus, it didn't come with vendor-certified hard drive firmware, it didn't come with OS-independent Boot PROM-based diagnostics, it wasn't built like a tank, nor did it come with a remote management card or serial console interface, for example. You would need to shell out for a Xeon, at a minimum, for some of these of features, but only a Sun Fire or IBM RS/6000, for example, would come with all of them.
The lack of these features is why Pentium-based systems are inexpensive. The P4-based system will certainly run well, but it shouldn't be expected to run flawlessly 24x7x52x(some years) to such an extent that a person could bet their business on it.
550 mhz processor, 256 mb SDR memory... That will handle a reasonable amount to be sure, but you can do better (either cheaper or more powerful, sometimes both) with x86 if you don't need the quality.
Given that the admins are payed good money to setup and maintain the servers, getting two V120s for $4000, slapping them in a rack, calling them DNS1 and DNS2, and forgetting about them other than patching is a pretty good deal. The admins can be assured that the systems are well-tested by Sun, there is a known source for replacment parts, and they know without question who to bark at if they break.
why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz?
Because Sun boxes (not the PC-derived ones) are built like tanks? I'm serious, the things weigh more than American children (yes, the ones already working hard on their spare tires).
I'm still using vintage 1997 Sun Ultra workstations (2, 30, 60, and AXi...not the 5 and 10); they are SCSI-based, support 2GB or so of RAM, not-so-bad CPU power, and really pretty graphics output. Give them a good Enterprise-grade hard drive and replace a fan or two every five years, and they will last until the motherboard's last breath. Stick Solaris 8 or 9 on them and they make quite an awesome package (though I sometimes prefer OpenBSD for its cleanliness).
What people find, typically, is that to get a x86 machine built like a Sun, the x86's price starts going up and up, until the differences aren't that stiking. Sure, tin-foil white-box machines are cheap, but they'll last a only two or three years with their crappy drives and fans.
One other thing about Sun (and Apple, too, to be fair), is that their computers come as a package. You can go to SunSolve.com, and see exactly what works with what and what doesn't to avoid getting burned. If you want to upgrade something, it is easy to get part numbers, hardware revisions, and even supported third-party components, so there is much less speculation and guesswork involved. In a setting where time == money, this can be very significant.
You'd want to INCREASE the number of people doing the representation, so they have smaller amounts of people to represent.
I was aiming at the number of issues the federal government takes on. By pushing as much decision making as possible down to the states and local governments, the ratio of representitives to constituents is much more favorable.
Also, there will always be two senators per state in the Congress, which is a very wise design in itself, but it necessitates that these senators take on only the biggest issues of truly national importance. Defending the U.S.A. and its Constitution is unambiguously of national importance. Subsidizing everything from art to school lunches, for example, is not nationally significant and should be left to the discretion of local government.
When a congressperson is faced with the task of representing 600,000 people on issues ranging from cheese handouts to the international space station, is it even possible for this person do their job competently?
Is the federal government simply too big for its britches?
But I don't see anyone complaining that the OSDL certainly has a vested interested here and is hardly to be expected to provide an unbiased report.
You should read the report. It's only a few pages long. You should notice that all the report really says is that SCO hasn't even disclosed enough information for their "targets" to make informed decisions. There really is no room for bias, here, and their argument concerning SCO's own release of Linux under the GPL is pretty damn significant, IMO.
The reason people complain about Gartner or those "think tanks" is that there is no way to understand, fully, who paid for their reports. Often, the company being praised paid for the report. How can anyone trust that? Microsoft really got caught with their pants down on more than one occasion, for example (Windows TCO reports, fraudulent J2EE/.NET benchmarks, etc.).
I've just had a kid. When he starts asking what the HSAS is, what do I tell him? "We're at War, junior. We've always been at War. Terrorists, drug barons, organized criminals, religious extremists, crackers, hackers, commies, arabs, they're all out to get us, and it's important to know just how scared the government wants us to be that we're going to die today."
Nice world he's going to grow up in.
I don't know why this is modded "Funny". Yeah, the world turning into shit is so funny I'm in pain from laughing.
After all, they're giving Microsoft $90 million to run their computers.
My mind choked when I read the headline for this article. A very large US government agency whose role is security buys a shitload of MS software for their own computers and, then, turns around and tells the world, "We run the least secure software known to man."
Their flagrant stupidity (or, more likely, corruption) is baffling. It must be a case of their head not knowing what their ass is doing, or something like that. How else can they not notice Microsoft's enormous shaft ramming them to hell and back? The U.S. government needs to call a spade a spade and get Microsoft out of any office remotely relevant to national security. Even a secretary's computer can have tidbits that melded with other tidbits can provide valuable information to crackers and spies. Complacency and laziness is simply not an excuse, anymore.
This would force all buyers to be more hardnosed about buying all the time so as to avoid getting a rep of paying through the nose for everything.
I still think it is better to keep the salespeople in the dark. Information is the only defensive weapon in negotiating, and it is better that the salesperson is left in a weaker position with only the information explicitly allowed by the customer. It keeps the dealership honest, in that they can't take too many things for granted.
And, given that most people really are gullible and pay through the nose and that having a historical database really will not budge the human bell curve, simply giving the dealership tons of information up-front will just make more people into victims of their own stupidity. There is a reason why those cash loan stores, cell phone stores, bail bond agents, seedy used car lots, etc. grow like weeds in the poor/uneducated neighborhoods--why make it even worse than it already is.
Slashdot Mirror
From here on, I demand that every person pay me $50 for each post they make to Slashdot. For people that refuse, why I'll call you names and point right at you! Point, I say!
Oh boy, this is even better, every person in the world will pay me $50 for each time they flush their toilet! Dissenters, beware, my name calling is very harsh! Harsh, I say!
Because their supposed intellectual property was added during the 2.4 development cycle.
How long ago was 2.2, again? Red Hat 5.0-era? For most users, porting modern things like GNOME 2, etc. to work with an older kernel might be a viable escape route.
What about forking 2.2, taking all the non-SCO stuff from 2.4 and 2.5, and shoe-horning it back into the new fork. Isn't that one beautiful thing about the GPL, that each time you try to squash it, the code pops up in three other places ready to go?
I could be talking out my rear, here, but for most users of Linux, are there any must-have features in SCO's "portfolio"? It just seems that it is impossible to kill Linux, no matter what.
You know, it really is sad that automake and autoconf (complex, fragile, hard to learn and not particularly consistent) are the standard for ensuring portable makefiles.
GNU make is better quality-wise, but still (IMHO) far more complex than is necessary.
One thing that really bugs me about autoconf and similar tools is that they increase the distance between the developer and the build process and add a murky "black box" type layer that is hard to understand and control. It is easy to argue by default that these tools are open source, so the developer should take it upon himself to fix them. However, in addition to learning his preferred programming language, operating system, APIs, etc., he has to learn M4 and the internals of 15000 lines of speghetti-code shell script? Yuck. It simply isn't worth it.
Simple POSIX-compliant makefiles are the best tool I know of so far for configuration management (and POSIX is, what, 15 years old?). With proper abstraction with environment variables, portability shouldn't be a burden, where, at worst, a person needs to edit one file to get everything in place. Editing one straight-forward file is much preferable to watching libtool choke on Solaris time after time after time, IMO. A single configuration file, even if it takes one hour for a user to edit, is a known quantity with easily-isolatable faults. This is much less stressful than wasting a whole weekend wondering why libraries aren't being found or why the build tools are looking for non-existent directories or why simply relocating a library suddenly breaks dozens of hard-coded automatically-generated configuration files strewn all over the system.
Isn't it odd that a "comprehensive security rating" can overlook something as serious as a complete remote compromise?
A Microsoft engineer made a loud noise to distract the certification people during that part of the testing...
...pretty firm hold...
That's putting it lightly, at least for the men...
One thing that is a consistent burden in Open Source software is the raw complexity of the build tools used. What should be an intuitive set of makefiles and header files is replaced by over ten thousand lines of un-decipherable and un-debuggable shell script (configure scripts and libtool). When they don't work, understanding the failure is often nearly impossible, and, frequently, they only work on GNU/Linux systems (so much for portability!).
Everytime I download and attempt to compile something from the source, I get this nagging feeling that there has to be a better way. However, the short-comings of the build systems used could be just a sign that Open Source software still has quite a bit of growing left, and, perhaps more accurately, open source is lacking in configuration management tools, in general. Configuration management is a very complex issue, I admit, considering that package management, too, is still highly volatile and broken (even commercial UNIX could improve in this regard).
Whatever future tools are invented to deal with these problems, I beg that all developers strive to attack fundamental problems rather than use band-aids. Too often, it seems, a well-intentioned developer creates a general tool that appears to solve a problem, but, fundamentally, it only creates more complexity, a higher learning burden, and, ultimately, more well-intentioned tools designed to deal with the earlier well-intentioned tools.
Somewhere, this cycle of naive optimism regarding fix-all tools needs to stop. If a programmer finds that an aberration like a configure script is needed, for example, I suggest the programmer go back to the source code itself and strip out the cause. The program is probably better for it, and we should be brave enough to say "tough doodie" to people that whine about having to actually improve something.
If we continue to let open source decompose into a mess of broken tools, then it is, clearly, no better than anything Microsoft has produced. And, to be honest, when I see the hard-coded path names in GNOME configure files and libtool files, the first thing that comes to my mind is, "Windows Registry" (I hope that offends a lot of people, because it should).
Aren't there well-documented blatant security holes that allow instant popups to be displayed on a Windows desktop?
Or, how about finding accounting software that doesn't suck?
But now I have experience, and I have attained Zen.
No, you are only superficially in a state of Zen. If you look deeper, you will realize that you are in the very common state of having had all idealism crushed and stripped from your body, leaving a cynical shell of a person. I should know...
If you don't know the true motives of your employer, you just might end up looking a little foolish. Sometimes, from a business accounting perspective, it makes sense for the PHBs to do totally counter-intuitive things like hiring junior programmers or forcing people to use shitty computers because of how the balance sheets are categorized or how things are charged to the customer in a contract situation.
You might just insult them, too, by saying, effectively, "Your accounting system is shit. Let me show you how to do your job." Usually, people are adverse to being bossed around, especially when their methods are widely accepted in the industry, regardless of how inane they are. They might turn around and say, "Okay, you measure and account for the labor costs saved by upgrading everyone to a newer computer." Or, worse, if you do it in front of a customer, you just might blow the bosses cover!
I'm sorry, but IBM (the company that has made billions in revenue off GNU/Linux) should be floating the bill.
Well, if Red Hat picks up a few buddies, they might do okay. Imagine a penguin army, where a little Red Hat penguin has beefy 320-pound IBM and Sun penguins marching along him (I do think Sun is ultimately behind Linux, if only because they have no choice). They march to the top of a hill and see the SCO donkey and his rider, the Great Microsoft Satan, in the distance. A battle of apocalyptic scale would ensue, but, suprisingly, it turns out that the Great Satan is clinically paranoid about pengins and their "piercing black eyes" and "evil little feet" (whatever that means). The Great Satan screams like a little girl and accidentally falls off a cliff, and, for no particularly obvious reason, the SCO donkey explodes in a puff and disappears.
Or, more realistically, how about we cross-breed penguins and pirhanas and unleash the hoard on the SCO headquarters?
This reminds me of racism. People confuse what it was intended to do. It was a tool to convience your everyday European it was OK to abuse Africans. It was NOT a tool to convience Africans of their own inferiority.
I think there is another way, also, that the racism analogy can apply to the RIAA.
Pure racism is not a invention of society; rather, it is part of human history going back millions of years. Imagine the Neanderthals vs. the Cromagnons (or which ever group they were up against). Racism, then, was a matter of survival and genetic propogation (i.e., stick to your own kind).
One of the benefits of civilization is that racism becomes unnecessary. It becomes more a matter of the survival of the human race rather than any particular sub-species. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear that humans are not quite civilized, which is evidenced by the existence of primitives like the KKK and Neo-nazi hate groups. I say primitive, because members of groups like these have not transcended their basic animalistic drives.
The RIAA are like the KKK. They are stubborn and blind when faced with their own obselescense and the fate of their primitive business model.
If this keeps up it will eventually be impossible for any business to exist for more than a few years without being sued out of existence by corrupt, opportunistic, money-grabbing lawyers. The minute you make any kind of mistake they pounce, with grossly exaggerated damage figures that aren't even sane, but somehow actually get awarded--especially by jury trials--with an extremely low burden of proof.
This really makes me want to start up a small business!
I've never been exposed to a lawsuit...if the defendant absolutely cannot pay, what happens? What if the awarded amount is something larger than the amount of money the defendant could earn in a lifetime? Do defendants get cast into a pit of living hell over crap like this?
We've made it complex by allowing it to grow in that fashion.
Actually, it wasn't passive ("allowing") but very actively made complex by the lawyers and congresspeople who profit as a result.
It's just like programmers who write undocumented crap claiming it enhances their job security.
Granted, some complexity is necessary. Take an employment contract, for example. However, I never quite understood how law-makers seem to come up with a 1000+ page bills for any issue they face.
"Microsoft Windows 2003 Server: Do more with less" ...of other people's products and much more of our own!!! HAHAHA!!! We'll suck you dry!!!
Seriously, the genious of Microsoft's marketing department is amazing. "Do more with less" is brilliant doublespeak, ranking with "Patriot Act" with its cunning alluring name.
I just purchased an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz and specifically chose an Intel 875PBZ board for it's stability and reliabilty.
The P4 system didn't come with ECC or parity-correction on every data bus, it didn't come with vendor-certified hard drive firmware, it didn't come with OS-independent Boot PROM-based diagnostics, it wasn't built like a tank, nor did it come with a remote management card or serial console interface, for example. You would need to shell out for a Xeon, at a minimum, for some of these of features, but only a Sun Fire or IBM RS/6000, for example, would come with all of them.
The lack of these features is why Pentium-based systems are inexpensive. The P4-based system will certainly run well, but it shouldn't be expected to run flawlessly 24x7x52x(some years) to such an extent that a person could bet their business on it.
550 mhz processor, 256 mb SDR memory... That will handle a reasonable amount to be sure, but you can do better (either cheaper or more powerful, sometimes both) with x86 if you don't need the quality.
Given that the admins are payed good money to setup and maintain the servers, getting two V120s for $4000, slapping them in a rack, calling them DNS1 and DNS2, and forgetting about them other than patching is a pretty good deal. The admins can be assured that the systems are well-tested by Sun, there is a known source for replacment parts, and they know without question who to bark at if they break.
why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz?
Because Sun boxes (not the PC-derived ones) are built like tanks? I'm serious, the things weigh more than American children (yes, the ones already working hard on their spare tires).
I'm still using vintage 1997 Sun Ultra workstations (2, 30, 60, and AXi...not the 5 and 10); they are SCSI-based, support 2GB or so of RAM, not-so-bad CPU power, and really pretty graphics output. Give them a good Enterprise-grade hard drive and replace a fan or two every five years, and they will last until the motherboard's last breath. Stick Solaris 8 or 9 on them and they make quite an awesome package (though I sometimes prefer OpenBSD for its cleanliness).
What people find, typically, is that to get a x86 machine built like a Sun, the x86's price starts going up and up, until the differences aren't that stiking. Sure, tin-foil white-box machines are cheap, but they'll last a only two or three years with their crappy drives and fans.
One other thing about Sun (and Apple, too, to be fair), is that their computers come as a package. You can go to SunSolve.com, and see exactly what works with what and what doesn't to avoid getting burned. If you want to upgrade something, it is easy to get part numbers, hardware revisions, and even supported third-party components, so there is much less speculation and guesswork involved. In a setting where time == money, this can be very significant.
You could live for months on beer alone if you had to.
I would if I could...but I'm married.
Deal with functionality first, and only worry about performance if and when it's a problem.
.NET report that comes out?!?!?
But, then, how can we have flamewars about each J2EE vs.
You'd want to INCREASE the number of people doing the representation, so they have smaller amounts of people to represent.
I was aiming at the number of issues the federal government takes on. By pushing as much decision making as possible down to the states and local governments, the ratio of representitives to constituents is much more favorable.
Also, there will always be two senators per state in the Congress, which is a very wise design in itself, but it necessitates that these senators take on only the biggest issues of truly national importance. Defending the U.S.A. and its Constitution is unambiguously of national importance. Subsidizing everything from art to school lunches, for example, is not nationally significant and should be left to the discretion of local government.
When a congressperson is faced with the task of representing 600,000 people on issues ranging from cheese handouts to the international space station, is it even possible for this person do their job competently?
Is the federal government simply too big for its britches?
But I don't see anyone complaining that the OSDL certainly has a vested interested here and is hardly to be expected to provide an unbiased report.
You should read the report. It's only a few pages long. You should notice that all the report really says is that SCO hasn't even disclosed enough information for their "targets" to make informed decisions. There really is no room for bias, here, and their argument concerning SCO's own release of Linux under the GPL is pretty damn significant, IMO.
The reason people complain about Gartner or those "think tanks" is that there is no way to understand, fully, who paid for their reports. Often, the company being praised paid for the report. How can anyone trust that? Microsoft really got caught with their pants down on more than one occasion, for example (Windows TCO reports, fraudulent J2EE/.NET benchmarks, etc.).
I've just had a kid. When he starts asking what the HSAS is, what do I tell him? "We're at War, junior. We've always been at War. Terrorists, drug barons, organized criminals, religious extremists, crackers, hackers, commies, arabs, they're all out to get us, and it's important to know just how scared the government wants us to be that we're going to die today."
Nice world he's going to grow up in.
I don't know why this is modded "Funny". Yeah, the world turning into shit is so funny I'm in pain from laughing.
After all, they're giving Microsoft $90 million to run their computers.
My mind choked when I read the headline for this article. A very large US government agency whose role is security buys a shitload of MS software for their own computers and, then, turns around and tells the world, "We run the least secure software known to man."
Their flagrant stupidity (or, more likely, corruption) is baffling. It must be a case of their head not knowing what their ass is doing, or something like that. How else can they not notice Microsoft's enormous shaft ramming them to hell and back? The U.S. government needs to call a spade a spade and get Microsoft out of any office remotely relevant to national security. Even a secretary's computer can have tidbits that melded with other tidbits can provide valuable information to crackers and spies. Complacency and laziness is simply not an excuse, anymore.
This would force all buyers to be more hardnosed about buying all the time so as to avoid getting a rep of paying through the nose for everything.
I still think it is better to keep the salespeople in the dark. Information is the only defensive weapon in negotiating, and it is better that the salesperson is left in a weaker position with only the information explicitly allowed by the customer. It keeps the dealership honest, in that they can't take too many things for granted.
And, given that most people really are gullible and pay through the nose and that having a historical database really will not budge the human bell curve, simply giving the dealership tons of information up-front will just make more people into victims of their own stupidity. There is a reason why those cash loan stores, cell phone stores, bail bond agents, seedy used car lots, etc. grow like weeds in the poor/uneducated neighborhoods--why make it even worse than it already is.