It seems to me that the Aussies are motivated by questionable reasons.
How many Australian companies hold E-commerce patents ?
Well, this answer is: none.
So, while e-commerce patents are indeed questionable by nature the Austrilian goverment is lead by very different reasons to void them:
They want to give their own Aussie based companies a commercial advantage over US competitors. Australian companies won't have to invest money into the development of innovative, high-tech business model and are protect from paying any patent fees by Australian law. Thus they gain a huge advantage by cutting their e-commerce cost by 20 percent.
I think the Bush goverment should finally remember their responsibilities and instead of providing their business buddies with cheap Iraqi oil, they should make pressure on the Australian goverment to take down these laws which are btw contradicting the WIPO agreement Australia signed itself, too. It's the duty of a goverment to act for the benefit of all citizens and not just their own supporters and conservative think-tank pals.
Savety first !
That should be the motto of aviation. But just to get a minor avantage for getting customers the airlines seems to ignore this important principle. But this could have terrible consequences. The problem with cellphones isn't just EMV. There are a number of simple solution for that ranging from faraday cages to fixed cable connections on the planes. The real problem with enabling cell phones is that you cannot determine the use of a high tech device just by looking at it's X-ray scans. And a modern airplanes like the news ones of Airbus are 100 percent computer controlled. With a sufficiently concealed device a possible abuser could take over some, if not all controls of the airplane. I think I don't need to point out the further consequences.
So for such security issues the FAA should step in and make such schemes illegal. Otherwise the possibilities of abuse might be demonstrated in a very visible way to all of us.
Honestly.
It's well known that IRC is already monitored by the several law enforcing groups for 31337 haxors and warez kiddies.
I always wonder how people can be that stupid. Every service where they can track down your identity is not save for doing such illegal things. Sometimes they won't get you at once because they have much data to process but they will always get you in long term.
It's quite surprising that so much haxors, warez and mp3 traders use IRC. You would first conjecture a priori that they should know at least a little about security. But they are plainly too stupid to grasp even the elementary facts.
I think you fail to realize the fundamental problem there.
The RIAA argues that you have no right to share these songs on P2P networks, which is from a legal point of view 100 percent correct. And they claim that this causes them damages because people downloading wouldn't buy the CDs. With this argumentation you could cause very large damages even with a very small number of file and a suitable big pipe - if the songs are sufficiently popular then you would cause very large "damage" this way. The only problem I see with this argumentation is whether their claim of the damages is correct.
Note that you definitively don't have the right the share song unless you get an o.k. by the copyright holder. "Argueing" that the entertainment industry is "greedy" or "is exploiting the artists" doesn't negate the fact that you commited a crime.
And subpoenas are for securing evidence. The measures here are IHMO ok when you note that evidence on computer systems can be easily forged or deleted. You can't demand that they'll watch their lawsuits die just because some jerks argue that his "IP" was forged etc.
All bigger Telcos are at least partially goverment owned. That means that they won't rip off the goverment because that would make no sense. Thus such rubbish is not bound to happen in Euroland. In some countries e.g. Germany there where even laws to make sure that the same QoS was provide to all customers. Only pressure by the Bush (senior) goverment via GATT killed these very useful regulations. As a result of this we've got much better cellphone coverage than in the US.
Even better, In Europe goverments tend to rip off companies instead. Take e.g. the UMTS auctions in some states. Companies were paying billions just to get the right to use a natural free resource. That way all incorrectly gained profit by exploiting tax legislation holes etc. are directed back to the society. The result:
much better social services and lower poverty rates in the society. The rules from libertarian ideology ideology are not always the solution of everything.
At Napster he was basically a strawman to make this company look "rebel" and "young" instead of the copyright stealing money-donkey for fat, greedy investors that it was.
Such people don't "change sides" or comit "treason". They don't have any morales at all and work basically for any bloke who has money in his pockets. And Fanning thinks that this bloke is the music industry. I wonder, however, if they'll take him. Elephants are said to have good memory and to be unforgiving.
And for this P2P thing: does anyone here really think at the music industry will just lean back and watch their profits flush aways through DSL customer lines ?
Main difference between FreeBSD and other system is not it's very good stability but the professionalism of the user base.
FreeBSD comes from an academic background and has much more high-profile users than any other system.
Even the very stable Linux system is dominated by hobbyists. The default installations of non-*BSD system are usually feature laden and sometimes broken. And note that stability of the kernel is not the only issue. If you fuck your configuration then you are fucked for good. It's a common misconception that a stable kernel leads to a stable system.
So, the pros and PhDs tend to use FreeBSD, not only for the above mentioned issues but also due to the clean design, tight codebase and modern algorithms. Note that e.g. FreeBSD was the first system with O(log(n)^2) swapping. This gives a double advantage: you get a stable system with a high-profile userbase. That's why we will always see FreeBSD on the top.
Magentic disk drives are bad for environment
on
Disk Drives Explained
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The magenic layers contain very large amounts of chrome-oxides and other heavy metals and rare elements. This makes disk drives a huge problem in the disposal of old computers.
Furthermore the rare element production takes often place in very anarchic countries like Kongo or Liberia. Usually warlords and local terrorists use the money from the disk drives rare elements to finance their blood raids and terrorship. That's btw the reason why the US were setting up Kabila in Kongo. This guy was killed, but only because the French were more clever.
So, instead of this old technology which is going to be phased out in 5 years anyway, you should use more modern flash/ram disks and DVDs for data storage, just for moralic reasons.
Think about it: If you refuse to buy bananas or big name brands because of the cruel, inhumane exploitation of the third-world workers, then you should do the same in IT and avoid disk drives.
As for modchips, you can stick a xilinx PLC in between any parallel bus structure (read bunnie's book) and find out exactly what signals are being sent between the northbridge and the processor. Duplicate those signals, and voila!
This wouldn't be possible if MS would as clever as e.g. me. A real secure architecture would use encrypted busses with changing keys.
And your simple replay attack won't work anymore. Note that the XBox is in fact one of the first examples of MS's trusted platform, so it should indeed have such features.
Will AOL become the Microsoft of the internet ?
on
AOL: Amazon Who?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It seems that AOL aquires more and more customers and expands itself to more and more services.
It story seems to me very similar to the history of Mircosoft:a single company with a proprietary, incompatible products steadily increased their market share by aggressive advertisement until they became the dominant monopolist.
Don't be fooled by the fact that AOL is just a service provider. If they control over 70 percent of the internet access of private customers all players in the network business would have to follow their word and do their bidding. They could dominate standards bodies and in fact enforce proprietary standards locked by IP and patents on the whole internet.
This makes me wonder if it's now time for a GPL service provider. By following the principles of the free software movement, they could set up free WIFI access to the internet. This would have the nice side effect that the US goverment won't be able to censor the internet any longer. Furthermore we might get all free broadband access without paying huge fees to greedy companies which do nothing for the community.
...is a two edged sword.
On the one hand cheap and simple access to space would be great advancement for the entire human race.
On the other hand easily build space crafts mean easily build ICBM, too. While the carrying capacity wouldn't be enough for conventional nuclear weapons, it's surely enough for biological, chemical or anti-matter bombs.
So, a success in the X-price might be a step forward to more international terrorism, too.
In the light of the SCO lawsuit Apples engagement for FreeBSD as a basis for their new system come into a totally different view point. We all know that Jobs is a Unix expert mainly due to this economic adventures with Next. So why did he decide to choose FreeBSD ?
The GPL is not the real problem. Apple has released the Darwin source anyway and it's interface framework is not touched by the GPL.
And FreeBSD is today neither more stable nor faster than Linux. In fact with a bigger userbase Apple might have caught much more customers for their new systems when choosing Linux.
So, it seems that there must be a very different point which spoke against Linux.
Indeed FreeBSD is freed and therefore immune to such lawsuits due to the power of the AT&T vs. Berkeley ruling. This doesn't hold for Linux.
The main question is:How the fuck did Jobs know this ages before the SCO suit ?
The only explanation would be that Apple knowing both codebases saw similarities they didn't like and therefore ditched Linux. Note that it is not surprising that didn't make any fuzz about it: they might oblidged by NDA etc. to keep silent and they couldn't provide the code to back such stuff up anyways.
Linux will always have problems on the desktop.
on
Linux on the Desktop
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· Score: -1, Troll
Simple reason: pornography
Most porn sites are very JScript/ActiveX loaded
and mainly optimized for IE 6.
However, on Linux you are stuck with Mozilla which makes problems. Yes, you can get Kazaa & co. to get fresh porn, but this is very difficult for computer illiterate users who just manage to type "www.sex.com" and hit return.
And don't think this has no effect on desktop adaption. International studies have shown that the adaption of internet connections for desktop computers both in business and private environments are highly correlated to the rise of the internet pornography industry. Even AOL did have major trouble as long as they restricted porn access, their success story really began with the fall of these filters.
So, to get real desktop adaption the OSS community must take these problems into their agenda. I would recommend 3 things:
Convince pornography providers to create sites which can be easily viewed with OSS browsers like Mozilla, Konquerer or Lynx.
Add links to OSS viewable sites in the browsers default bookmark files.
Make sure that most age check applets work with OSS browsers.
...some people are smoking cigarettes even if it causes them cancer in the end.
Just because many companies sticking to Linux won't give us any victory over SCO.
We all know that IT managers are often reported to understand both technical and legal issues very little. Many of the might not have realized the true extend of SCO's claims - Linux as a derivative work of AT&T unix belongs to SCO - and the possible implications - if SCO wins they can eliminate all Linux licences.
I doubt that SCO will be successful but a suitably fucked court ruling can surprise us all. You must admit that the missing reliability of the US legal system has reached a point at which the ruling a relatively random and useful as e.g. a court decision in Liberia. The most annoying problem is that in Liberia you can circumvent these issues by either bribing the judge or bringing your collection of AK-74s to the court which is still rather ill advised in the US.
Therefore I would never trust any sensible outcome in the US and with a responsible position in IT I would switch to FreeBSD as soon as possible. Most Linux software runs on FreeBSD anyways, so no real problem there.
...why does nobody stop these ridiculus claims of SCO ?
It can be done as it has been already proven in Germany.
Nobody can make false accusations without giving proof. Any Linux distributer or the EFF or other interest groups can sue them. And if one does this SCO would to have to show the code or STFU.
It also raises the question why IBM doesn't do this.
The only sensible explanation for this strange behavior seems to me that SCO has some (perhaps weak) point and such a countersuit would fail. It seems to me that some of the players in this game have much more knowledge then they admit openly.
My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?
...people do all kinds of stupid things mindlessly like driving drunk, having sex without a condom and catching AIDS or syphilis, living unhealty etc. And this stuff kills them.
So, you shouldn't be surprised that they don't secure their WLANs. You should be surprised that they don't drop dead 'cos they have forgotton to breathe.
It's much easier to get methane from biowaste.
And methane can be used nearly in the same way like hydrogen for electric cells.
In fact, I think the whole stuff is even cheaper and simpler with methane.
The only argument against methane is its mind alterating effects (halluzinations etc), so drug addicts might use it as a substitution for heroine and crack.
I don't really understand this extensive opposition to software patents.
If a company does some real research in computer science then it invests millions of dollars and severals years of time into the development of new technologies. However without a strong system to prevent IP theft, any jerk company can come and steal those technologies. Even worse, the original inventor will go out of business because the thiefs don't have the development expenses, so that they can offer the products much more cheaply. And patents are there to prevent such stuff.
And copyright isn't strong enough for protection in such a case. The thiefs can get the technology by reverse engineering. But they are not copying the code, just the technology. So IP laws won't help and you cannot detect the reverse engineering unless some whistle blowers come out.
Which is rather unlikely.
Many people fear that stuff like Amazon's one-click patent and other trivial patents will come out. But I don't think this is a real problem. Such trivial patents are cause by a fucked legal system. This is a well-known USian problem. But not a European one. Europe centers on the French system where the creation of new laws is dominated by legislation. Europe doesn't center around the UK/USian one where courts directly or indirectly create laws by interpreting the constitution. Remember that the patentability of business methods in the US came primarily from a court ruling. Europe simply doesn't have this problem.
So, I don't see why we shouldn't have software patents here.
I doubt that RedHats decision makes any sense at all. There is a package of reasons why they shouldn't brother in touching Java. Especially with the fucked IT economics these days a major failed investment like useless and obsolete language fork might seriously cripple or even kill a small company. RedHat is gambling with their very lives for gaining nothing. That's contradicting sense at it's best. Perhaps they were inspired by SCO.
Well, much claims but I should back them up a little. Let's look at the problems of a Java port.
Java is already relatively free. SUN's license doesn't compile with the EFF's open source criteria, but that's more a philosophical issue.
It's free enough for the uses of almost all users and that should be enough for everyone. Why spend much effort only to follow the path of the true OSS aposteles ? That might raise your karma but not your balance.
They should take into account the effects of potentially success of SCO attacks on IBM and Linux. While this might be extremely unlikely from a logical point of view, one should always keep in mind that the US legal system is relative fucked in that respect. So really anything can happen including the collapse of space-time. But if SCO is successful with the strange "derivative works" claims then this has effect on all software produced in the US. Especially creating a clean room implementation won't help anymore, it will always be SUN's IP. So RedHat would be working for SUN for free. The only solution would be to outsource to coding to a country without IP laws like Bahamas, Nigeria, Somalia or Tibet.
Why spend any effort on Java at all ?
Java has some good points, but its design is deeply fucked in some aspects. The creators ignored some important ideas of modern software engineering. A major (but not the only one) reason is that thay wanted to create a C++ derivate. But C++ is from an object-orientated perspective utter blasphemy, mainly due to its dreadful ancestor C (well, not many people have a psychotic axe-murderer as an ancestor).
SUN is trying to fix this with introducing generics and other modern stuff. But in my experience fucked designs won't get better with adding features. That's like adding a better engine to a car without wheels.
So why should RH brother with Java. There are much more modern approaches to networked programming than Java. Hey, even MS.NET is more wisely designed that SUN's stuff and from Microsoft we usually won't see the state of art in modern programming.
Everbody who has used a Mac once knows how it annoying it is to have only one mouse button.
Sometimes I wonder why Jobs had such a bad idea, where they assuming that Apple users can't distinguish right from left ?
However, they has fixed it in the new OS version.
And it's a good fix, too.
Instead of forcing users to buy new expensive two-button mice, they just created the second button on the desktop interface. Everytime you want to click the second mouse button you just have to move the mouse pointer over a little button icon and click on it. That's a pretty clever solution. Even better: with this technique you can install an arbitrary number of mouse button on your mouse. That's something MS Windows won't have for the next 10 years. In fact, propably for the next 20 year 'cos Apple is trying to pantent this stuff.
Apple uses already FreeBSD as a basis for it's operating system.
So, why won't they go a step farther and use OSS user interfaces instead of their old proprietary stuff ?
With Gnome and KDE are some great professional UI around and they are coded in modern C++.
And legal threats are no problem there. SCO claimed no ownage with respect to KDE/Gnome or X Windows.
And it's well known that the newest KDE versions have higher performance then the old Apple GUIs.
There might be some little incompatibilities, but this is nothing good coders can't fix.
If there is some leakage then your computer is broken for good.
So, why people don't use other fuilds for cooling like oil etc ?
That would be no rocket science, this is just simple common sense.
Oh, I see, common sense and overclocking...
As I pointed out at stories before...
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1, Insightful
...even if SCO does down crying, this won't solve the problem of the OSS community.
The main problem with OSS is that it's too much orientated on creating similar versions of existing commercial systems. Take Linux and Unix for example.
As long as we stay with this system we will always be volunerable to such bogus claims.
OSS community must start to develop new ideas and insights. Original systems. Not always "we must create that desktop/system/window server/blurb/blobb/globber like bla..."
Nobody can claim you have copied stuff that was never coded before.
There enough skill in the OSS community to do this. We can create the next generation of software and computer systems. We just have to try.
Well, I suppose that this albeit being true will go down to "-1 Troll" in a few seconds. The funny thing is that slashdot is sometimes like the communist dictatorships when it goes to critize OSS. You don't even accept friendly, constructive critics. All slightest derivation from the holy path of pure OSS is considered SATAN MICROSOFT and thus has go to the firey pit of -1 Flamebait at once where is burns for enternity. Well, such a mindset was one of the most important factors which contributed to the downfall of most communist systems in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Australian companies hold E-commerce patents ?
Well, this answer is: none.
So, while e-commerce patents are indeed questionable by nature the Austrilian goverment is lead by very different reasons to void them: They want to give their own Aussie based companies a commercial advantage over US competitors. Australian companies won't have to invest money into the development of innovative, high-tech business model and are protect from paying any patent fees by Australian law. Thus they gain a huge advantage by cutting their e-commerce cost by 20 percent.
I think the Bush goverment should finally remember their responsibilities and instead of providing their business buddies with cheap Iraqi oil, they should make pressure on the Australian goverment to take down these laws which are btw contradicting the WIPO agreement Australia signed itself, too. It's the duty of a goverment to act for the benefit of all citizens and not just their own supporters and conservative think-tank pals.
That should be the motto of aviation. But just to get a minor avantage for getting customers the airlines seems to ignore this important principle. But this could have terrible consequences. The problem with cellphones isn't just EMV. There are a number of simple solution for that ranging from faraday cages to fixed cable connections on the planes. The real problem with enabling cell phones is that you cannot determine the use of a high tech device just by looking at it's X-ray scans. And a modern airplanes like the news ones of Airbus are 100 percent computer controlled. With a sufficiently concealed device a possible abuser could take over some, if not all controls of the airplane. I think I don't need to point out the further consequences.
So for such security issues the FAA should step in and make such schemes illegal. Otherwise the possibilities of abuse might be demonstrated in a very visible way to all of us.
It's well known that IRC is already monitored by the several law enforcing groups for 31337 haxors and warez kiddies.
I always wonder how people can be that stupid. Every service where they can track down your identity is not save for doing such illegal things. Sometimes they won't get you at once because they have much data to process but they will always get you in long term.
It's quite surprising that so much haxors, warez and mp3 traders use IRC. You would first conjecture a priori that they should know at least a little about security. But they are plainly too stupid to grasp even the elementary facts.
The RIAA argues that you have no right to share these songs on P2P networks, which is from a legal point of view 100 percent correct. And they claim that this causes them damages because people downloading wouldn't buy the CDs. With this argumentation you could cause very large damages even with a very small number of file and a suitable big pipe - if the songs are sufficiently popular then you would cause very large "damage" this way. The only problem I see with this argumentation is whether their claim of the damages is correct.
Note that you definitively don't have the right the share song unless you get an o.k. by the copyright holder. "Argueing" that the entertainment industry is "greedy" or "is exploiting the artists" doesn't negate the fact that you commited a crime.
And subpoenas are for securing evidence. The measures here are IHMO ok when you note that evidence on computer systems can be easily forged or deleted. You can't demand that they'll watch their lawsuits die just because some jerks argue that his "IP" was forged etc.
Even better, In Europe goverments tend to rip off companies instead. Take e.g. the UMTS auctions in some states. Companies were paying billions just to get the right to use a natural free resource. That way all incorrectly gained profit by exploiting tax legislation holes etc. are directed back to the society. The result: much better social services and lower poverty rates in the society. The rules from libertarian ideology ideology are not always the solution of everything.
Such people don't "change sides" or comit "treason". They don't have any morales at all and work basically for any bloke who has money in his pockets. And Fanning thinks that this bloke is the music industry. I wonder, however, if they'll take him. Elephants are said to have good memory and to be unforgiving.
And for this P2P thing: does anyone here really think at the music industry will just lean back and watch their profits flush aways through DSL customer lines ?
Main difference between FreeBSD and other system is not it's very good stability but the professionalism of the user base.
FreeBSD comes from an academic background and has much more high-profile users than any other system.
Even the very stable Linux system is dominated by hobbyists. The default installations of non-*BSD system are usually feature laden and sometimes broken. And note that stability of the kernel is not the only issue. If you fuck your configuration then you are fucked for good. It's a common misconception that a stable kernel leads to a stable system.
So, the pros and PhDs tend to use FreeBSD, not only for the above mentioned issues but also due to the clean design, tight codebase and modern algorithms. Note that e.g. FreeBSD was the first system with O(log(n)^2) swapping. This gives a double advantage: you get a stable system with a high-profile userbase. That's why we will always see FreeBSD on the top.
Furthermore the rare element production takes often place in very anarchic countries like Kongo or Liberia. Usually warlords and local terrorists use the money from the disk drives rare elements to finance their blood raids and terrorship.
That's btw the reason why the US were setting up Kabila in Kongo. This guy was killed, but only because the French were more clever.
So, instead of this old technology which is going to be phased out in 5 years anyway, you should use more modern flash/ram disks and DVDs for data storage, just for moralic reasons.
Think about it: If you refuse to buy bananas or big name brands because of the cruel, inhumane exploitation of the third-world workers, then you should do the same in IT and avoid disk drives.
This wouldn't be possible if MS would as clever as e.g. me. A real secure architecture would use encrypted busses with changing keys. And your simple replay attack won't work anymore. Note that the XBox is in fact one of the first examples of MS's trusted platform, so it should indeed have such features.
It story seems to me very similar to the history of Mircosoft:a single company with a proprietary, incompatible products steadily increased their market share by aggressive advertisement until they became the dominant monopolist.
Don't be fooled by the fact that AOL is just a service provider. If they control over 70 percent of the internet access of private customers all players in the network business would have to follow their word and do their bidding. They could dominate standards bodies and in fact enforce proprietary standards locked by IP and patents on the whole internet.
This makes me wonder if it's now time for a GPL service provider. By following the principles of the free software movement, they could set up free WIFI access to the internet. This would have the nice side effect that the US goverment won't be able to censor the internet any longer. Furthermore we might get all free broadband access without paying huge fees to greedy companies which do nothing for the community.
...is a two edged sword.
On the one hand cheap and simple access to space would be great advancement for the entire human race.
On the other hand easily build space crafts mean easily build ICBM, too. While the carrying capacity wouldn't be enough for conventional nuclear weapons, it's surely enough for biological, chemical or anti-matter bombs.
So, a success in the X-price might be a step forward to more international terrorism, too.
In the light of the SCO lawsuit Apples engagement for FreeBSD as a basis for their new system come into a totally different view point.
We all know that Jobs is a Unix expert mainly due to this economic adventures with Next.
So why did he decide to choose FreeBSD ?
The GPL is not the real problem. Apple has released the Darwin source anyway and it's interface framework is not touched by the GPL. And FreeBSD is today neither more stable nor faster than Linux. In fact with a bigger userbase Apple might have caught much more customers for their new systems when choosing Linux.
So, it seems that there must be a very different point which spoke against Linux.
Indeed FreeBSD is freed and therefore immune to such lawsuits due to the power of the AT&T vs. Berkeley ruling. This doesn't hold for Linux.
The main question is:How the fuck did Jobs know this ages before the SCO suit ?
The only explanation would be that Apple knowing both codebases saw similarities they didn't like and therefore ditched Linux. Note that it is not surprising that didn't make any fuzz about it: they might oblidged by NDA etc. to keep silent and they couldn't provide the code to back such stuff up anyways.
Most porn sites are very JScript/ActiveX loaded and mainly optimized for IE 6.
However, on Linux you are stuck with Mozilla which makes problems. Yes, you can get Kazaa & co. to get fresh porn, but this is very difficult for computer illiterate users who just manage to type "www.sex.com" and hit return.
And don't think this has no effect on desktop adaption. International studies have shown that the adaption of internet connections for desktop computers both in business and private environments are highly correlated to the rise of the internet pornography industry. Even AOL did have major trouble as long as they restricted porn access, their success story really began with the fall of these filters.
So, to get real desktop adaption the OSS community must take these problems into their agenda. I would recommend 3 things:
...some people are smoking cigarettes even if it causes them cancer in the end.
Just because many companies sticking to Linux won't give us any victory over SCO.
We all know that IT managers are often reported to understand both technical and legal issues very little. Many of the might not have realized the true extend of SCO's claims - Linux as a derivative work of AT&T unix belongs to SCO - and the possible implications - if SCO wins they can eliminate all Linux licences.
I doubt that SCO will be successful but a suitably fucked court ruling can surprise us all. You must admit that the missing reliability of the US legal system has reached a point at which the ruling a relatively random and useful as e.g. a court decision in Liberia. The most annoying problem is that in Liberia you can circumvent these issues by either bribing the judge or bringing your collection of AK-74s to the court which is still rather ill advised in the US.
Therefore I would never trust any sensible outcome in the US and with a responsible position in IT I would switch to FreeBSD as soon as possible. Most Linux software runs on FreeBSD anyways, so no real problem there.
It can be done as it has been already proven in Germany.
Nobody can make false accusations without giving proof. Any Linux distributer or the EFF or other interest groups can sue them. And if one does this SCO would to have to show the code or STFU.
It also raises the question why IBM doesn't do this.
The only sensible explanation for this strange behavior seems to me that SCO has some (perhaps weak) point and such a countersuit would fail. It seems to me that some of the players in this game have much more knowledge then they admit openly.
My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?
...people do all kinds of stupid things mindlessly like driving drunk, having sex without a condom and catching AIDS or syphilis, living unhealty etc. And this stuff kills them.
So, you shouldn't be surprised that they don't secure their WLANs. You should be surprised that they don't drop dead 'cos they have forgotton to breathe.
All they've got to do is to figure out how to create ploughs, tractors and medical devices of WiFi base staions and cards.
It's much easier to get methane from biowaste. And methane can be used nearly in the same way like hydrogen for electric cells. In fact, I think the whole stuff is even cheaper and simpler with methane.
The only argument against methane is its mind alterating effects (halluzinations etc), so drug addicts might use it as a substitution for heroine and crack.
If a company does some real research in computer science then it invests millions of dollars and severals years of time into the development of new technologies. However without a strong system to prevent IP theft, any jerk company can come and steal those technologies. Even worse, the original inventor will go out of business because the thiefs don't have the development expenses, so that they can offer the products much more cheaply. And patents are there to prevent such stuff.
And copyright isn't strong enough for protection in such a case. The thiefs can get the technology by reverse engineering. But they are not copying the code, just the technology. So IP laws won't help and you cannot detect the reverse engineering unless some whistle blowers come out. Which is rather unlikely.
Many people fear that stuff like Amazon's one-click patent and other trivial patents will come out. But I don't think this is a real problem. Such trivial patents are cause by a fucked legal system. This is a well-known USian problem. But not a European one. Europe centers on the French system where the creation of new laws is dominated by legislation. Europe doesn't center around the UK/USian one where courts directly or indirectly create laws by interpreting the constitution. Remember that the patentability of business methods in the US came primarily from a court ruling. Europe simply doesn't have this problem.
So, I don't see why we shouldn't have software patents here.
Well, much claims but I should back them up a little. Let's look at the problems of a Java port.
Why spend much effort only to follow the path of the true OSS aposteles ?
That might raise your karma but not your balance.
So really anything can happen including the collapse of space-time. But if SCO is successful with the strange "derivative works" claims then this has effect on all software produced in the US. Especially creating a clean room implementation won't help anymore, it will always be SUN's IP.
So RedHat would be working for SUN for free.
The only solution would be to outsource to coding to a country without IP laws like Bahamas, Nigeria, Somalia or Tibet.
Java has some good points, but its design is deeply fucked in some aspects. The creators ignored some important ideas of modern software engineering. A major (but not the only one) reason is that thay wanted to create a C++ derivate. But C++ is from an object-orientated perspective utter blasphemy, mainly due to its dreadful ancestor C (well, not many people have a psychotic axe-murderer as an ancestor).
SUN is trying to fix this with introducing generics and other modern stuff. But in my experience fucked designs won't get better with adding features. That's like adding a better engine to a car without wheels.
So why should RH brother with Java. There are much more modern approaches to networked programming than Java. Hey, even MS
Everbody who has used a Mac once knows how it annoying it is to have only one mouse button.
Sometimes I wonder why Jobs had such a bad idea, where they assuming that Apple users can't distinguish right from left ?
However, they has fixed it in the new OS version.
And it's a good fix, too.
Instead of forcing users to buy new expensive two-button mice, they just created the second button on the desktop interface. Everytime you want to click the second mouse button you just have to move the mouse pointer over a little button icon and click on it. That's a pretty clever solution. Even better: with this technique you can install an arbitrary number of mouse button on your mouse. That's something MS Windows won't have for the next 10 years. In fact, propably for the next 20 year 'cos Apple is trying to pantent this stuff.
Apple uses already FreeBSD as a basis for it's operating system.
So, why won't they go a step farther and use OSS user interfaces instead of their old proprietary stuff ?
With Gnome and KDE are some great professional UI around and they are coded in modern C++.
And legal threats are no problem there. SCO claimed no ownage with respect to KDE/Gnome or X Windows.
And it's well known that the newest KDE versions have higher performance then the old Apple GUIs. There might be some little incompatibilities, but this is nothing good coders can't fix.
If there is some leakage then your computer is broken for good.
So, why people don't use other fuilds for cooling like oil etc ?
That would be no rocket science, this is just simple common sense.
Oh, I see, common sense and overclocking...
The main problem with OSS is that it's too much orientated on creating similar versions of existing commercial systems. Take Linux and Unix for example.
As long as we stay with this system we will always be volunerable to such bogus claims.
OSS community must start to develop new ideas and insights. Original systems. Not always "we must create that desktop/system/window server/blurb/blobb/globber like bla..." Nobody can claim you have copied stuff that was never coded before.
There enough skill in the OSS community to do this. We can create the next generation of software and computer systems. We just have to try.
Well, I suppose that this albeit being true will go down to "-1 Troll" in a few seconds. The funny thing is that slashdot is sometimes like the communist dictatorships when it goes to critize OSS. You don't even accept friendly, constructive critics. All slightest derivation from the holy path of pure OSS is considered SATAN MICROSOFT and thus has go to the firey pit of -1 Flamebait at once where is burns for enternity. Well, such a mindset was one of the most important factors which contributed to the downfall of most communist systems in the world.