Believe it or not, but this has been done. Well, not fact of paying that kind of cash for it, but the puzzling.
It happened at European bank several years ago (could well be several tens of years, I don't recall exactly). Someone accidently shredded a lot of important documents and the bank management had no other option but to call up literally everybody available to them, gather these people around the stack of paper sniplets, and let them puzzle away. Amazingly, they did manage to recover without computer aid.
Unfortunately, I can't find an on-line reference (any more).
I must say I never understood that nonsense. Before they know it, they'll be preparing to release Solaris 13, errrm 2.13, errmm SunOs 5.13... and end up thinking: "Well, 13 is an unlucky number. And besides, it feels 'big'. As if our product is an old hat that needs to be upgraded a lot to be usable. Why don't we rename it Apollo 2.0?" (And then HP sue them for using that name.)
Yes, if you remove it, you're fine. But that holds for all distributions.
I do not think SCO will claim that you or anybody else is covering someone's tracks. If there really is illegal code in there, SCO already has and can trace enough kernel copies to not depend on the code having been removed. Contrary to polular/. belief, they're not entirely stupid and know that too. They do want to maximise media attention, the amount damages they claim to have suffered, and any future royalties, though. That's why the offending code has to stay in there and THAT is why they don't reveal their so-called evidence.
Jim Stallings, the general manager of IBM Corp.'s Linux business recently stated: "I believe I am correct in saying there are no violations on any intellectual property issues [with Unix and SCO Group] and we will continue to support our Linux customers. It will be business as usual." Frankly IMO, given the quality of IBM's legal team, SCO don't stand a chance.
What I'm missing most in this entire mess, is IBM making a series of strong high profile statements that make very clear that (according to them) SCO doesn't stand a chance in court and why this is so. So far, SCO is getting all the publicity (with the one exception of Novell's claim), which is BAD. Repeat after me: "If I repeat my claim/lie often enough, it will become true/truth." SCO is, day after day, hitting the press with claims that are really damaging Linux business and its reputation in decision making circles, irrespective of whether they are true. The/. crowd is no counterweigth to that! And neither is a "business as usual" attitude by IBM.
Seriously though, I doubt I'm even using their stupid code, plus my distro of choice isn't commercial.
The fact that your distro is not comercial is uttely irrelevant. The offending source code more than likely is sitting in Linus' kernel, of which you are using a (compiled) copy. The fact that you did not pay for it does not change the fact that - assuming that SCO is right, obviously - either you or the originator of your distro should have paid for it.
Whether you use it on your particular machine also is irreleavnt. What matters is that it's there, sitting on your disk, "waiting to be used" without the "proper" royalties having been paid.
Second, Linus most of the time ignores code which does not come from his trusted lieutnants. They, too, do proper attribution.
Unfortunately not always. I once (years ago) submitted a (tiny) patch to Alan Cox. He achnowledged it and merged it into his AC kernels, but when it got into Linus' kernel, the attribution read: Alan. Personally, I don't care at all about that, but it does show that the logs are not 100% reliable.
The fact that the northern part of Europe is rising and the southern part is sinking (for a rather broad definition of southern: Holland is sinking too), has been known for a long time. I was told in highschool (think before 1983) that this is due do the northern part having been pushed downwards during ice age(s) due to the massive weight ot the ice. When the ice last retreated, the current tilting movement was initiated.
One problem that I experience every day of the week and twice on Mondays is that most EE students have no clue at all what they will be doing after graduation. If you ask them why they opted for EE over CE, they tell you they wanted to deal with real life electronics and definitely not spend their career in front of a computer screen.
But when real life hits them, they end up... in front of a computer screen doing "high level" stuff with Matlab, C++, and all that for 10 hours a day. Hell, some of them even try to implement really complex stuff such as a C++ parser without having any relevant background training or without questioning their outlook even once. Basically, they have no clue what software engineering is all about and tend to make a royal mess of it.
I myself am a CE working for a well known EE research institute. I've been there for nearly 14 years now and over time the situation I describe above has only gotten worse. EE is interesting (so much so that that was what I wanted to study until about 3 months before I had to make the final decision), but it no longer is where the real work gets done. The really low-level stuff is done by chemists and fysicists. The high-level stuff is done by EEs and CEs, but has little to do with EE anymore. The middle layer (i.e. traditional EE) is done automatically.
Thirdly, just because you're too intellectually lazy to think up names for your coins, doesn't mean we have to be. We even have nicknames for our banknotes (a 20USD note is a "Jackson").
Maybe, but at least make dimes that somewhere say "10 cents" on them instead of just "one dime"!
The current situation is utterly silly to anyone visiting the US. A dime has the same colour as a 5 cents piece, but is physically smaller. No where does it say how much is't worth in real life. So my first guess was 2 cents. No wait, that can't be right because then it would probably have the same colour as a 1 cent piece... So what the hell is this thing... It took me two days to finally figure it out...
Ah, but that sales tax thing would be easy to fix: either abolish the tax, or make it mandatory to include it in the price listed on the tag.
If you're a european traveling in the US, there is nothing worse than having to permanently calculate that stupid sales tax in your head.
Re:reverse checking on senders address
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
But what about joe jobs? I've been the victim of a few of those so far and can assure you that the very last thing I want to happen is for spammers to make that their default practice just in order to circumvent tools like honeymail.
They are usually allowed once the plane reaches a certain altitude.
Not on board any plane I have recently been on (quite a few, that is).
All electronic equipment (e.g. also laptops) is banned during take off and landing. Anything with an antenna is unconditionally banned during the entire flight.
Your generalisation consists of deviding the world into just two groups of people: law abiding citizens of unspecified intelligence, and criminals with no brain at all. The real world is a lot less simple. There really are people who commit crimes (note that I do not use the catch-all word "criminals"!) and who actually calculate their risks, BOTH of getting caught AND of what the consequences might be if they do.
Note that things like speeding on the highway are crimes too. I personally know people whose decision how by much to exceed the speed limit depends on the consequences in case they get caught: will they have to pay a small fine or a big one, or will they even loose their license.
That is a gross generalisation. If it were true, we could have murder punishable by a 1$ fine or, alternatively, stealing a sandwich punishable by death.
Of course they do not expect to see the money. But the sum they're asking for is utterly ridiculous and doing their cause more harm than good (OK, most people around here will like that, but...). They really should be asking for an amount they can still reasonably claim to have lost through his actions, multiplied by some reasonable "scare factor". What exactly is reasonable depends on the details of the case (the larger the damage, teh smaller the scare factor needs to be), but their current claim definitely isn't.
If I risk going to jail for 1 year in case I do something illegal, I'm rather likely to listen and think about my actions in advance. If I risk being sentenced to 10 years, I will think a bit harder. If it's 100 years, even more. But if my choices are either 10000 years or 10000000 years, I don't give a damn about the difference. There's a great quote from (IIRC) Once Upon a Time in the West, where Frank (Henry Fonda) says "When you've killed five, it's easy to make it six."
Yes, it is true. I'm just 2 hops away from one of the 9/11 pilots. And not just about any pilot, but Mohamed Atta. Yes, that is right: I'm 2 hops from the coordinator of the entire attack. And thus just 3 from Bin Laden, but in that respect George Dubya still beats me, since he is said to be just 2 hops away from Ossama (through the latter's father).
It wasn't true at the time of the attack, but I've since met someone who knew Atta personally from his time in Hamburg. I guess, the boys in Brussels should revoke my Nato Secret security clearance on the spot...:-)
Science, by it's formal definition, isn't at all creative, but mearly seeks to document the world as it really is. I don't see any room there for creativity. BD
Huh? So tell me, was Einstein a scientist? Or did he "merely" create entire branches of science??
Science may be about documenting the world, but if you really believe that that is all there is to it, you are making a CRUCIAL mistake: you are confusing our models of the world and how it works with the real thing. Scientists CREATE models. They want them to closely describe their observations, but it is them that create the models. Every now and then an Einstein comes along and creates a totally new model, "out of the blue", that yields a more accurate description. But it's still only a model. One of many alternative ones, some more elegant than others and some requiring more creativity to be invented/discovered.
PS: I'm an M.Sc. (In Computerscience, actually, active both in scientific research and as a programmer.)
I'm not crying (my desktop is Linux at home and Linux at work). All I'm doing is mentioning a fact that contradicts a claim made by the previous poster.
It may look the same when it runs, but getting it to run "on all systems" is hurdle No. 1. There is no Flash player for HP-UX, to name just one such case.
I didn't see anything about the difference in numbers determining for how long a particular release was supported. In fact, I'm pretty sure that RH8.0 will be supported for 12 months - like they said it would be.
For a commercial developer the issue is not how long a version will be supported, but how many subtly incompatible versions there are out there in the user's server room or on his/her desk. From my own experience: we provide a product that works fine on RedHat 7 (hell, it even still works on RedHat 6, talk about long time support). Just recently, we found out that it fails on RedHat 8 because of a g++ compiler version mismatch (for which a work around exists, but that's not the issue, the issue is that our soft doesn't run out of the box which is a serious nuissance to both our customers and us). OK, says me, lets get a RedHat 8 machine for testing, so as to make sure that we have that case covered in our next release (in May). This new machine is not even up and running yet, and there we have RedHat 9.
And I didn't even mention yet that just to support RedHat 7 and 8 (we'll be dropping 6 at last), we will have to make TWO distributions. The early release of 9 might well increase that to three, who knows...
The good thing about that, is that it it is excellent material to make governments wake up about the sillyness of the patent system as-is. Maybe they will at last understand that things need to be changed.
Note that I don't care if the government's motivation for changes would purely be financial. In the end, the only thing that really matters is that no more of these extremely silly patents are granted.
I don't "prefer" to hang around phones. I prefer other things in life that more or less automatically make me be near a phone when needed. Note the "when needed" bit.
Slashdot Mirror
And you would mindlessly have done exactly what SCO wanted you to do: inflate their stock.
Oh come one, give the guy some chance of success. Or, at least in his imagination.
Believe it or not, but this has been done. Well, not fact of paying that kind of cash for it, but the puzzling.
It happened at European bank several years ago (could well be several tens of years, I don't recall exactly). Someone accidently shredded a lot of important documents and the bank management had no other option but to call up literally everybody available to them, gather these people around the stack of paper sniplets, and let them puzzle away. Amazingly, they did manage to recover without computer aid.
Unfortunately, I can't find an on-line reference (any more).
And when you do uname -a on a Solaris 2.8, errmmm 8, box you get:
SunOS sunrise 5.8 Generic_108528-21 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
I must say I never understood that nonsense. Before they know it, they'll be preparing to release Solaris 13, errrm 2.13, errmm SunOs 5.13... and end up thinking: "Well, 13 is an unlucky number. And besides, it feels 'big'. As if our product is an old hat that needs to be upgraded a lot to be usable. Why don't we rename it Apollo 2.0?" (And then HP sue them for using that name.)
www.redhat.com
Yes, if you remove it, you're fine. But that holds for all distributions.
/. belief, they're not entirely stupid and know that too. They do want to maximise media attention, the amount damages they claim to have suffered, and any future royalties, though. That's why the offending code has to stay in there and THAT is why they don't reveal their so-called evidence.
I do not think SCO will claim that you or anybody else is covering someone's tracks. If there really is illegal code in there, SCO already has and can trace enough kernel copies to not depend on the code having been removed. Contrary to polular
Jim Stallings, the general manager of IBM Corp.'s Linux business recently stated: "I believe I am correct in saying there are no violations on any intellectual property issues [with Unix and SCO Group] and we will continue to support our Linux customers. It will be business as usual." Frankly IMO, given the quality of IBM's legal team, SCO don't stand a chance.
/. crowd is no counterweigth to that! And neither is a "business as usual" attitude by IBM.
What I'm missing most in this entire mess, is IBM making a series of strong high profile statements that make very clear that (according to them) SCO doesn't stand a chance in court and why this is so. So far, SCO is getting all the publicity (with the one exception of Novell's claim), which is BAD. Repeat after me: "If I repeat my claim/lie often enough, it will become true/truth." SCO is, day after day, hitting the press with claims that are really damaging Linux business and its reputation in decision making circles, irrespective of whether they are true. The
Seriously though, I doubt I'm even using their stupid code, plus my distro of choice isn't commercial.
The fact that your distro is not comercial is uttely irrelevant. The offending source code more than likely is sitting in Linus' kernel, of which you are using a (compiled) copy. The fact that you did not pay for it does not change the fact that - assuming that SCO is right, obviously - either you or the originator of your distro should have paid for it.
Whether you use it on your particular machine also is irreleavnt. What matters is that it's there, sitting on your disk, "waiting to be used" without the "proper" royalties having been paid.
Second, Linus most of the time ignores code which does not come from his trusted lieutnants. They, too, do proper attribution.
Unfortunately not always. I once (years ago) submitted a (tiny) patch to Alan Cox. He achnowledged it and merged it into his AC kernels, but when it got into Linus' kernel, the attribution read: Alan. Personally, I don't care at all about that, but it does show that the logs are not 100% reliable.
The fact that the northern part of Europe is rising and the southern part is sinking (for a rather broad definition of southern: Holland is sinking too), has been known for a long time. I was told in highschool (think before 1983) that this is due do the northern part having been pushed downwards during ice age(s) due to the massive weight ot the ice. When the ice last retreated, the current tilting movement was initiated.
One problem that I experience every day of the week and twice on Mondays is that most EE students have no clue at all what they will be doing after graduation. If you ask them why they opted for EE over CE, they tell you they wanted to deal with real life electronics and definitely not spend their career in front of a computer screen.
... in front of a computer screen doing "high level" stuff with Matlab, C++, and all that for 10 hours a day. Hell, some of them even try to implement really complex stuff such as a C++ parser without having any relevant background training or without questioning their outlook even once. Basically, they have no clue what software engineering is all about and tend to make a royal mess of it.
But when real life hits them, they end up
I myself am a CE working for a well known EE research institute. I've been there for nearly 14 years now and over time the situation I describe above has only gotten worse. EE is interesting (so much so that that was what I wanted to study until about 3 months before I had to make the final decision), but it no longer is where the real work gets done. The really low-level stuff is done by chemists and fysicists. The high-level stuff is done by EEs and CEs, but has little to do with EE anymore. The middle layer (i.e. traditional EE) is done automatically.
Thirdly, just because you're too intellectually lazy to think up names for your coins, doesn't mean we have to be. We even have nicknames for our banknotes (a 20USD note is a "Jackson").
Maybe, but at least make dimes that somewhere say "10 cents" on them instead of just "one dime"!
The current situation is utterly silly to anyone visiting the US. A dime has the same colour as a 5 cents piece, but is physically smaller. No where does it say how much is't worth in real life. So my first guess was 2 cents. No wait, that can't be right because then it would probably have the same colour as a 1 cent piece... So what the hell is this thing... It took me two days to finally figure it out...
Ah, but that sales tax thing would be easy to fix: either abolish the tax, or make it mandatory to include it in the price listed on the tag.
If you're a european traveling in the US, there is nothing worse than having to permanently calculate that stupid sales tax in your head.
But what about joe jobs? I've been the victim of a few of those so far and can assure you that the very last thing I want to happen is for spammers to make that their default practice just in order to circumvent tools like honeymail.
They are usually allowed once the plane reaches a certain altitude.
Not on board any plane I have recently been on (quite a few, that is).
All electronic equipment (e.g. also laptops) is banned during take off and landing. Anything with an antenna is unconditionally banned during the entire flight.
Your generalisation consists of deviding the world into just two groups of people: law abiding citizens of unspecified intelligence, and criminals with no brain at all. The real world is a lot less simple. There really are people who commit crimes (note that I do not use the catch-all word "criminals"!) and who actually calculate their risks, BOTH of getting caught AND of what the consequences might be if they do.
Note that things like speeding on the highway are crimes too. I personally know people whose decision how by much to exceed the speed limit depends on the consequences in case they get caught: will they have to pay a small fine or a big one, or will they even loose their license.
That is a gross generalisation. If it were true, we could have murder punishable by a 1$ fine or, alternatively, stealing a sandwich punishable by death.
Of course they do not expect to see the money. But the sum they're asking for is utterly ridiculous and doing their cause more harm than good (OK, most people around here will like that, but...). They really should be asking for an amount they can still reasonably claim to have lost through his actions, multiplied by some reasonable "scare factor". What exactly is reasonable depends on the details of the case (the larger the damage, teh smaller the scare factor needs to be), but their current claim definitely isn't.
If I risk going to jail for 1 year in case I do something illegal, I'm rather likely to listen and think about my actions in advance. If I risk being sentenced to 10 years, I will think a bit harder. If it's 100 years, even more. But if my choices are either 10000 years or 10000000 years, I don't give a damn about the difference. There's a great quote from (IIRC) Once Upon a Time in the West, where Frank (Henry Fonda) says "When you've killed five, it's easy to make it six."
Yes, it is true. I'm just 2 hops away from one of the 9/11 pilots. And not just about any pilot, but Mohamed Atta. Yes, that is right: I'm 2 hops from the coordinator of the entire attack. And thus just 3 from Bin Laden, but in that respect George Dubya still beats me, since he is said to be just 2 hops away from Ossama (through the latter's father).
:-)
It wasn't true at the time of the attack, but I've since met someone who knew Atta personally from his time in Hamburg. I guess, the boys in Brussels should revoke my Nato Secret security clearance on the spot...
Science, by it's formal definition, isn't at all creative, but mearly seeks to document the world as it really is. I don't see any room there for creativity. BD
Huh? So tell me, was Einstein a scientist? Or did he "merely" create entire branches of science??
Science may be about documenting the world, but if you really believe that that is all there is to it, you are making a CRUCIAL mistake: you are confusing our models of the world and how it works with the real thing. Scientists CREATE models. They want them to closely describe their observations, but it is them that create the models. Every now and then an Einstein comes along and creates a totally new model, "out of the blue", that yields a more accurate description. But it's still only a model. One of many alternative ones, some more elegant than others and some requiring more creativity to be invented/discovered.
PS: I'm an M.Sc. (In Computerscience, actually, active both in scientific research and as a programmer.)
I'm not crying (my desktop is Linux at home and Linux at work). All I'm doing is mentioning a fact that contradicts a claim made by the previous poster.
It may look the same when it runs, but getting it to run "on all systems" is hurdle No. 1. There is no Flash player for HP-UX, to name just one such case.
I didn't see anything about the difference in numbers determining for how long a particular release was supported. In fact, I'm pretty sure that RH8.0 will be supported for 12 months - like they said it would be.
For a commercial developer the issue is not how long a version will be supported, but how many subtly incompatible versions there are out there in the user's server room or on his/her desk. From my own experience: we provide a product that works fine on RedHat 7 (hell, it even still works on RedHat 6, talk about long time support). Just recently, we found out that it fails on RedHat 8 because of a g++ compiler version mismatch (for which a work around exists, but that's not the issue, the issue is that our soft doesn't run out of the box which is a serious nuissance to both our customers and us). OK, says me, lets get a RedHat 8 machine for testing, so as to make sure that we have that case covered in our next release (in May). This new machine is not even up and running yet, and there we have RedHat 9.
And I didn't even mention yet that just to support RedHat 7 and 8 (we'll be dropping 6 at last), we will have to make TWO distributions. The early release of 9 might well increase that to three, who knows...
The good thing about that, is that it it is excellent material to make governments wake up about the sillyness of the patent system as-is. Maybe they will at last understand that things need to be changed.
Note that I don't care if the government's motivation for changes would purely be financial. In the end, the only thing that really matters is that no more of these extremely silly patents are granted.
I don't "prefer" to hang around phones. I prefer other things in life that more or less automatically make me be near a phone when needed. Note the "when needed" bit.