What I understand of this story is that in order to receive a licenced copy of your Microsoft software at the booth, you had to *snitch* your PC dealer!
Of course, once Microsoft knows who the dealer is they sue the shit out of him, so giving away a couple of licences (which cost them next to nothing anyway) is an incredible good deal to Microsoft.
Since the deal was no success I can only conclude that people prefer their relationship with their PC shop better than the relationship with Microsoft!;-)
It's called Big Brother. Couple of people confined in a bunker on a remote location. Last man standing gets $100.000. Cameras everywhere, including "hidden" cameras and webcams (don't bother to click, they use the Windows Media Player, how appropriate).
Somehow people seem to like the show but I don't care. Anyone who is willing to waste 100 days of his life on this crap and sacrifice his/her privacy must be an utterly boring type. And people who watch the program really should get a life theirselves.
A while back, The Register reported that "Samsung shut down Rambus production and shifted to SDRAM production until Intel can come up with a new Camino launch date".
Does it have network drivers this time?
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QNX OS on a floppy
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· Score: 1
With only serial port support and no network drivers, you can't really put it to the test, can you?
I don't know these guys from X/OS. They're probably just honest guys, but who know ?
X/OS is our neighbour in the building. Jos Vos (picture here) is very much respected around here. He has written firewall code such as ipfwadm. This is a very serious guy too: he blasted me a couple of weeks ago because I suggested we "congratulate" Microsoft Netherlands on their benchmark "victory" by offering them a cream cake. He thought it was juvenile, which of course is true, but hey, anything for a good laugh while we keep on coding!
On my turn, I am a bit weary of responding to these SCO claims, especially by citing IDC studies and Y2K reports.
Their Shadow IP Server has been doing this for ages. They are also one of the few who actually follow the RFCs closely. For instance, their NetBIOS Nameserver (or "WINS" server, as Microsoft like to call it) was the only one to provide integrated support both Windows and OS/2 clients, cf. RFC 1001/1002.
It runs on dedicated hardware and it doesn't come cheap, unfortunately...
Let's assume you are going to rent your software from Microsoft. You pay per CPU cycle or second or whatever.
Now, everytime the software crashes or otherwise screws up, Microsoft is not getting paid! Obviously they are not going to like this. So that's why I think Microsoft is not to rent you the software theirselves.
My guess is that Microsoft will licence the software to an ISP (ASP). Business as usual. However, the ISP/ASP is allowed to rent out the software to its customers. So the ISP/ASP carries the risk and Microsoft doesn't.
Now you tell me, is this scheme going to work? Don't forget that the ISP/ASP will have to pay substantially more for this special licence because normally you aren't allowed to rent out software. This is similar to NT Terminalserver being much more expensive than "normal" NT.
MS munchkin: "AOL used buffer overflow exploit!"
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AOL Jilts Open Source
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According to this Infoworld report, a Microsoft "munchkin" mailed Richard Smith of Pharlap software that AOL was using a buffer overflow exploit to detect whether someone was actually using the MSN Messenger to log on.
(In case you don't know, a munchkin is someone who works for a particular company and posts FUD etc. under an alias. This is a known Microsoft tactic, already practiced in the war against OS/2 years ago).
What's ironic that that guy at Microsoft decided to contact Richard Smith of all people, since he is well known for revealing secrets in Microsoft(!) software, such as the Registration Wizard and IDs stamped on Office documents. Bad luck for the Microsoft munchkin because... Richard Smith then discovered that the sender used the Yahoo mail system and had set up the account that day. Apparently, the sender was not aware that Yahoo includes IP addresses, which Smith used to trace the message back to Microsoft.
What does all this show?
Another example of a Microsoft employee who would do anything to help their cause. This has already been pointed out in commentaries on the MS vs DoJ trial: Bill Gates may not have said literally to destroy their competition but certainly his employees understood it as such in their zealotry.
AOL was very desperate in finding a way to detect non-approved clients. With an open protocol this can indeed be very difficult.
If you care about security for you or your users, don't use AIM, ICQ or MSN Messenger. Resist user demand and block 'em at your firewall. They gobble up loads of attention and productivity anyway.
We still have a Ghostscript/Postscript conversion problem. Sometimes documents (Word97 etc.) can't get converted to Postscript. Have to dig into this. Glad to have the source code!
Office97 bastardized the Postscript language. M$ Office97 produces incorrect Postscript in some instances. You obviously found them. Find another program to generate Postscript in Win as M$ doesn't follow the Postscript standards.
I was not precise enough: the Postscript could actually be converted to facsimile (G3 TIFF) on the server but Hylafax's 3 second timeout kicked in immediately so it thought the conversion had failed. It turned out that Hylafax really gets confused timingwise when it had been stopped and started from an "at" job, as we did to have it reread its configuration files. Somehow this "at" job screws up Hylafax alarms/signals/timers.
I'm not a hard-core Unix systems programmer, but again, I'm glad I had the Hylafax source which helped me find the trouble spot! Your point about the MS dialect of Postscript is right though for another thing I mentioned. Cover pages are difficult to create. End-users tend to create their cover pages in Word. The MS Postscript is very difficult to adapt for Hylafax cover pages because you don't know where to put the Hylafax Postscript macro's (From:, To:, Regarding:, etc.).
We ended up export the Word document to HTML and converting it to Postscript under Linux!
I am really glad to see good and affordable commercial fax solutions for Unix/Linux! Open source fax software can be a little bit more difficult to install and use than your average open source software. I guess this is because of the analog component:-).
However, there is also a solution in between. What if you can get support for Hylafax/sendfax/efax etc. from an individual or a company? Then you have the free software, no licencing problems and you don't need to spend that much time (the individual/company does that) in case your time is worth something.
Currently the sourcecode is not available. I have currently no permissions to release it, because I use some code from internal projects.
Seems like a fake reason to me since you could put the internal code in a seperate DLL or whatever. The only source released is for language DLL creation. I suspect the author is working towards a non-free (as in free beer) version, if you ask me.
On the other hand, nothing stops you from using Respond (which comes with source code) because it also supports Hylafax, according to the docs.
Don't cut cost on the modem. There really is crap outthere. We got a Multitech. Multitechs are approved on the Hylafax list, although not this particular model. We used the standard Multitech config entry. Unfortunately, in a few cases the faxes got garbled. When we added standard Class 2 config lines, the problem went away.
With a line speed of 57600 bps, faxes got garbled as well. Dropping to 38400 bps solved the problem. I have no idea why this happened.
Get a recent version of Ghostscript. This is not a problem anymore with current distributions.
We still have a Ghostscript/Postscript conversion problems. Sometimes documents (Word97 etc.) can't get converted to Postscript. Have to dig into this. Glad to have the source code!
We chose to resize incoming faxes which happen to be too big for a page (A4). However, short faxes which are too wide are being "stretched" beyond recognition. Fortunately, with the source, I was able to make a patch for libtiff so that incoming pages are only scaled down, not up.
Fax cover sheets are a chore to create (by non -experts)
Security problems in Hylafax were mentioned but I have no idea what the writer is thinking of. There has been an issue a long time ago, but this one has been fixed.
RedHat could have guessed that most hackers would not be eligible. So why didn't they just *give away* a couple of shares to hackers? No risk for people gambling their student loan.
Still, that leaves the dilemma of picking which hackers would be eligible for the offer. I understand that American project leaders were chosen. But what about non-American hackers? Didn't they contribute to the success of Linux as well? Remember a certain Finnish student called Linus Torvalds?
Deaf people normally don't have much problems using a computer or accessing the Internet. Blind people mostly use speech synthesizers, but what about deaf-blind people? Tactile information such as from braille devices is required.
This mouse would be great for navigating the modern GUI operating systems! And at $99 it isn't too expensive.
I actually do know someone who is deaf-blind. I have contemplated recommending Linux to him because of a couple of reasons. For one, it is free (as in beer). Yes, this is important since normally there is a small market for this kind of hardware and software. In most cases deaf-blind people can only afford this with a government donation, which mostly means that they have to prove it is needed for a job. Another plus of Linux is remote administration. In case of problems, I or somebody else could login to his machine and help him sort out a problem. Unix-like operating systems are actually quite usable, you can do everything from the command line and there are several braille devices supported under Linux.
The downside of Linux in this matter is two-fold: my deaf-blind acquaintance is interested in "mainstream" software, such as a encyclopedia of flowers on CD-ROM (wouldn't you?). So far, Linux is lagging Windows on this kind of software. It's the applications that matter. The other problem is that being deaf-blind, learning a foreign language is extremely difficult. My acquaintance does not understand English well. And Unix is very much oriented towards the English language...
even today, the careful use of ALT tags can make a page more readable for speaking browsers, but almost never actually do so!
Sad but true. With the exception of ads and banners, in which case --remarkably-- the ladies and gentlemen webdesigners don't "forget" to enter ALT tags...
I read a column by someone who works at the University of Zambia. According to her, copper is useless in Africa because of the weather (lightning, floods etc.) and because the locals dig it up and sell the metal.
Technicians traced the main cause of the outage to a problem with the Sun Solaris operating system, which overwrote files and corrupted the Oracle database. The database, Version 7.3.2.2, recognized a data block in an incorrect format, and that caused the main hardware--a Sun E10000 server--to crash. The problem is fixed now.
I am hardly an Oracle (or Sun, for that matter) expert, but I thought Oracle used its own filesystem?
Also, note that Microsoft's view on the matter is nowhere near the actual cause of the problem. It's as if Microsoft was keeping tabs on this Oracle/Sun combo and decided to come forward with their "competative analysis" when the time was right. Looks like they had some "Haloween" documents on Oracle/Sun too...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the American SEC can't have anything to say about non-US stock offered on auction sites?
;-)
Or if they do, what about non-US stock on non-US acution sites?
What I understand of this story is that in order to receive a licenced copy of your Microsoft software at the booth, you had to *snitch* your PC dealer!
;-)
Of course, once Microsoft knows who the dealer is they sue the shit out of him, so giving away a couple of licences (which cost them next to nothing anyway) is an incredible good deal to Microsoft.
Since the deal was no success I can only conclude that people prefer their relationship with their PC shop better than the relationship with Microsoft!
Somehow people seem to like the show but I don't care. Anyone who is willing to waste 100 days of his life on this crap and sacrifice his/her privacy must be an utterly boring type. And people who watch the program really should get a life theirselves.
A while back, The Register reported that "Samsung shut down Rambus production and shifted to SDRAM production until Intel can come up with a new Camino launch date".
With only serial port support and no network drivers, you can't really put it to the test, can you?
See also Bob Metcalfe's column ("Digital Subscriber Lies") in Infoworld this week.
BTW, I have ADSL myself and several of my friends have cable.
Your German is just fine, Bruce :-).
(In case people didn't know: the Mark is also the German currency).
Windows 2000 uses TSIG and Kerberos for update authentication according to Paul Leach, who works for Microsoft.
Is there a difference between authentication for zone transfers and authentication for single IPs?
X/OS is our neighbour in the building. Jos Vos (picture here) is very much respected around here. He has written firewall code such as ipfwadm. This is a very serious guy too: he blasted me a couple of weeks ago because I suggested we "congratulate" Microsoft Netherlands on their benchmark "victory" by offering them a cream cake. He thought it was juvenile, which of course is true, but hey, anything for a good laugh while we keep on coding!
On my turn, I am a bit weary of responding to these SCO claims, especially by citing IDC studies and Y2K reports.
I can't really make out what part of the Earth is depicted here. Damn clouds ;-)
;-)
And those two dots in the background, that can't be stars, can they? I'd think it's space junk. Heck, perhaps it's debris from Mir itself...
ICEs are German bullit trains, so I assume you were in the South?
I thought the weather was especially bad there? Nothing but rain in Stuttgart...
It runs on dedicated hardware and it doesn't come cheap, unfortunately...
Let's assume you are going to rent your software from Microsoft. You pay per CPU cycle or second or whatever.
Now, everytime the software crashes or otherwise screws up, Microsoft is not getting paid! Obviously they are not going to like this. So that's why I think Microsoft is not to rent you the software theirselves.
My guess is that Microsoft will licence the software to an ISP (ASP). Business as usual. However, the ISP/ASP is allowed to rent out the software to its customers. So the ISP/ASP carries the risk and Microsoft doesn't.
Now you tell me, is this scheme going to work? Don't forget that the ISP/ASP will have to pay substantially more for this special licence because normally you aren't allowed to rent out software. This is similar to NT Terminalserver being much more expensive than "normal" NT.
(In case you don't know, a munchkin is someone who works for a particular company and posts FUD etc. under an alias. This is a known Microsoft tactic, already practiced in the war against OS/2 years ago).
And if this Reuters report posted on Usenet is true, Microsoft actually confirms that it was a munchkin of theirs, but they "didn't authorise his smear attempt".
What's ironic that that guy at Microsoft decided to contact Richard Smith of all people, since he is well known for revealing secrets in Microsoft(!) software, such as the Registration Wizard and IDs stamped on Office documents. Bad luck for the Microsoft munchkin because... Richard Smith then discovered that the sender used the Yahoo mail system and had set up the account that day. Apparently, the sender was not aware that Yahoo includes IP addresses, which Smith used to trace the message back to Microsoft.
What does all this show?
And if bad weather hasn't been enough for the Microsoft team, there is also a total eclipse coming up. Oooooh! Bad omen! :-)
I was not precise enough: the Postscript could actually be converted to facsimile (G3 TIFF) on the server but Hylafax's 3 second timeout kicked in immediately so it thought the conversion had failed. It turned out that Hylafax really gets confused timingwise when it had been stopped and started from an "at" job, as we did to have it reread its configuration files. Somehow this "at" job screws up Hylafax alarms/signals/timers.
I'm not a hard-core Unix systems programmer, but again, I'm glad I had the Hylafax source which helped me find the trouble spot! Your point about the MS dialect of Postscript is right though for another thing I mentioned. Cover pages are difficult to create. End-users tend to create their cover pages in Word. The MS Postscript is very difficult to adapt for Hylafax cover pages because you don't know where to put the Hylafax Postscript macro's (From:, To:, Regarding:, etc.).
We ended up export the Word document to HTML and converting it to Postscript under Linux!
You answered your own question, Alan.
I am really glad to see good and affordable commercial fax solutions for Unix/Linux! Open source fax software can be a little bit more difficult to install and use than your average open source software. I guess this is because of the analog component :-).
However, there is also a solution in between. What if you can get support for Hylafax/sendfax/efax etc. from an individual or a company? Then you have the free software, no licencing problems and you don't need to spend that much time (the individual/company does that) in case your time is worth something.
Seems like a fake reason to me since you could put the internal code in a seperate DLL or whatever. The only source released is for language DLL creation. I suspect the author is working towards a non-free (as in free beer) version, if you ask me.
On the other hand, nothing stops you from using Respond (which comes with source code) because it also supports Hylafax, according to the docs.
RedHat could have guessed that most hackers would not be eligible. So why didn't they just *give away* a couple of shares to hackers? No risk for people gambling their student loan.
Still, that leaves the dilemma of picking which hackers would be eligible for the offer. I understand that American project leaders were chosen. But what about non-American hackers? Didn't they contribute to the success of Linux as well? Remember a certain Finnish student called Linus Torvalds?
Deaf people normally don't have much problems using a computer or accessing the Internet. Blind people mostly use speech synthesizers, but what about deaf-blind people? Tactile information such as from braille devices is required.
This mouse would be great for navigating the modern GUI operating systems! And at $99 it isn't too expensive.
I actually do know someone who is deaf-blind. I have contemplated recommending Linux to him because of a couple of reasons. For one, it is free (as in beer). Yes, this is important since normally there is a small market for this kind of hardware and software. In most cases deaf-blind people can only afford this with a government donation, which mostly means that they have to prove it is needed for a job. Another plus of Linux is remote administration. In case of problems, I or somebody else could login to his machine and help him sort out a problem. Unix-like operating systems are actually quite usable, you can do everything from the command line and there are several braille devices supported under Linux.
The downside of Linux in this matter is two-fold: my deaf-blind acquaintance is interested in "mainstream" software, such as a encyclopedia of flowers on CD-ROM (wouldn't you?). So far, Linux is lagging Windows on this kind of software. It's the applications that matter. The other problem is that being deaf-blind, learning a foreign language is extremely difficult. My acquaintance does not understand English well. And Unix is very much oriented towards the English language...
Sad but true. With the exception of ads and banners, in which case --remarkably-- the ladies and gentlemen webdesigners don't "forget" to enter ALT tags...
I read a column by someone who works at the University of Zambia. According to her, copper is useless in Africa because of the weather (lightning, floods etc.) and because the locals dig it up and sell the metal.
I am hardly an Oracle (or Sun, for that matter) expert, but I thought Oracle used its own filesystem?
Also, note that Microsoft's view on the matter is nowhere near the actual cause of the problem. It's as if Microsoft was keeping tabs on this Oracle/Sun combo and decided to come forward with their "competative analysis" when the time was right. Looks like they had some "Haloween" documents on Oracle/Sun too... ;-)