The biggest challenge really lies between the chair and the keyboard. How can the court be sure that the one owning the computer is the culprit? I could just have lend it out to someone. Finding the right computer is also just the beginning in proving someone has committed a crime. Thanks to rampant trojan distribution on Windows computers its very common for a computer to be controllable by third parties, sometimes multiple parties, from remote. While in reality its mostly the owner that downloads nobody can prove it even if they could prove who was the owner of said computer.
Proving who used it is the challenging part where courts up until now have always assumed that the owner is always the user. If thats how it should be there should at least be a law written that states that the owner is always accountable for whatever happens at his computer. Right now the courts dont really grasp this and some people get sentenced while no real proof exists.
The biggest hurdle between Microsoft and open source is the GPL. Because of how the license is written its very hard for Microsoft to embrace and extend any project written in GPL, especially GPLv3. Even if Microsoft somehow should manage to get the lead developers of some high profile projects away enough people exists that would just fork and ignore them completely.
I expect Microsoft to put much effort into trying to get more projects to use for example the BSD or Apache license instead of the GPL. Some people might but i suspect most peope are smart enough to realize all they are after is another chance at doing a Kerberos on other peoples hard work.
What makes Miquel think that he and mono is so special to Microsoft? If you look at Microsofts history everyone who have tried to cooperate has ended up with a knife in their back. The ones who compete with them have been left a smoldering piece of rubbel. The potential risks with mono is enormous since the one who control it is activly out to destroy linux despite its humble marketshare. Imagine if Linux wore to take a lot bigger marketshare? Does anyone think they would not panic and press the SCO-style litigation button?
What good can come out of integrating the most Linux applications with Microsofts patented techs? From Microsofts point of view i can understand i can understand it but for OSS? MS must just love the thought of OSS applications working better on Windows than on Linux and the ability to completely thrashing Gnome any time they feel like it.
If we need a better development enviroment then we should build a better one instead of riding two carts behind Microsoft. If we need dotnet compability thats one thing but building native Linux applications in java or dotnet is just insane.
From what i have seen of dotnet and mono they are (i didnt thought it possible) slower than even java. Why we should build applications on purpouse thats goddog slow is beyond me. Why should we put enormous efforts into making the kernel and hardware faster just to sacrifice it to badly deigned software? I want my system to have lots of power left to do new stuff, not the exact same stuff but slower.
Standardise on one and only one distribution. Dont give a %&& about the others.
Release the application as a virtual appliance for the virtual enviroment of choice. Go have a coffee and scoff at the poor sods who have to build their apps for several versions, languages and servicepacks levels of Windows etc.
From my own experiences the only thing that has been a problem with commercial applications has been those that either outright refuse to install if it isnt "distro X 0.2.3" or those that relies on a specific version of a library instead of just linking it in statically. In all the cases i have banged my head against package management has been the least problem.
Most games for linux seems to run just fine on pretty much any distribution i have thrown them at. Some, like Urban Terror, Firefox or for example Tremolous doesnt even require an install. I have had the same installs of many apps through countless distributions and upgrades without problems. Why this isnt possible for commercial vendors is beyond me. Since size mostly isnt an issue just tossing the libraries needed with the application isnt much of a deal.
While i do agree that some form of standard is good i dont think it should be very big or extensive. The bare minimum to put your own libraries, binaries and config files on and nothing more.
Right now a big drawback of LSB is that it uses rpm while the most widely used distribution uses deb. It would be better to spend that part of LSB time and effort on making settings and files end up in the same places. That way packaging would be easier no matter what package management is used and making packages for many different package management system wouldnt be that much work.
I would also assume that any private scientist who works on something would stay away from the US. Since they readily share any information with "their" own corps you can bet that any big breakthrough will "leak" to your biggest competitors in the US before you can say patent.
"Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons"
Thats the wording that got me. This means the US can take any foreign businessmans computer and turn its contents over to his most fierce competitor without mentioning it and without any wrongdoing being done by the business he represents.
Is it just me or doesnt this kind of makes it pretty risky to do business in the US? Any information the US intelligence gets their hand on can be used in business related areas, now without even a suspicion of any wrongdoings but just because they can.
This sure wont help the US economy thats for sure. If its one thing that can tank an economy its holding stale/inefficient/non innovative business up by artificial means until the bubble bursts.
Until there are actions made by Microsoft that benefits open source in general everything Microsoft does in OSS should be taken with a large dose of skeptisism. Its all PR.
As long as their goal is to obliterate any competition, kill partners any time it gives a benefit and screw their customers over they shouldnt be allowed to be in our community. While we play nice they spend their time trying to come up with new ways of controlling or killing the open source movement.
If there is one place i wont tolerate Microsofts level of Q&A its in my car. In no way or form should anything in a car fail in any way whatsoever. Any glitch, bug or irregularity that dont matter much on a computer can actually kill people in a car. Anything that distracts me from my driving is a real true hazard for my life. I have heard enough stories and seen friends that has Microsofts products in their car to be afraid. If a car has Windows on it i wont buy it, period.
I cant imagine what the car manufacturers are thinking but i suspect they are paid to use Microsofts products. Since there are much better alternatives out there i cant think of any other reason.
While its clearly in its early days i do think it looks promising. If Cuil can eliminate the problems of rampant search "optimizing", unrelated paid for adwords and make it easier for casual users to klick their way towards what they search for i think they can take a chunk out of the search engine userbase.
This is just Microsoft patting the dog on the head and saying "nice doggy" while looking for a large stick to beat it to pulp with the other hand.
They just dont want to be left alone as the only company not doing open source at the same time as they work full throttle in finding ways to rein in and put a leach on the open source monster.
The problem when they tie things to specific software is that it makes innovation and upgrading a hopeless task. Most driver problems in Vista for example regarding printers is because of winprinters, winmodems and such idiocy where writing/porting drivers is next to impossible for anyone other than the hardware manufacturer.
This is as much of a problem to Microsoft as to anyone else but somewhere it looks as if stifling competition is much more important than giving their users a good experience.
They are free to choose what platforms to support but, in this case they choose to have a broken bios with a table specifically for Linux that was broken. In this case it look as if they worked on getting it to not function properly. It really makes you wonder.
The problem is that Foxconn says its ACPI compliant but its not. It also looks as if they botched Linux by pure purpouse. Why on earth would they have a Linux section in the bios when they dont support it? Something is very smelly here thats for sure. I will keep miles away from Foxconn at my departments no matter if my systems are intended for Windows or Linux.
Vista pages very frequently even with 4 Gb ram so i would definitely say its very disk intensive. Couple that with indexing, prefetch and all the other hacks to make up for the performance loss that DRM brings along and you have 24/7 disk activity. I suspect sustained read speads arent an issue but rather spurious writes that happens all the time.
"I was under the impression that MS Research does quite of a lot of "OS research and concept implementations" -- Singularity, anyone?"
Why yes, but nothing in Singularity is new. An abundance of concept OS exists but nobody implements anything from them, not even singularity. Microsoft isnt the least interested. The biggest thing they have implemented in later years is utter worthless copy protection in Vista. It must suck bad to work for Microsoft Research and see absolutely nothing tangible get out of your work.
Old does indeed not mean bad. But there are some issues that seem to be impossible to address without a major change in how OS works. Security, stability, predictability and resource use are nowhere to be seen in the bigger OS implementations today.
Security is an afterthought thats solved by endlessly patch defects in applications. This is something that can be solved in the OS and compiler level to a very high degree, just not with todays methods and tools.
Stability is at pretty flaky and fault tolerance at a bare minimum (i don't count bad hardware into this). One would expect a modern computer to be more stable than a Dos, CP/M or MacOS machine that has 20 years of age.
Predictability is much better in Linux than in Windows. In Linux things mostly work if done right and don't work at all if done wrong and theres rarely a gray area there. Applications is another matter where much work is needed in both the Linux and the Windows world. I should be able to do something and know it will be the same no matter how many times i do it. That means stable API's, stable input/outputs, punishing bad behavior and good fault tolerance.
Resource use is the biggest problem and probably something that affects all of the above. When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development. The time saved is then spent tenfold throughout the applications entire life in fixing all the little errors that went into it because of lack of both knowledge and planning.
I cant agree more. I have always been interested in OS research and concept implementations. Some of those implementations have been mindbogglingly fast, agile and stable and introduced very nice concepts like stateless computing, distributed systems and extremely fault tolerant enviroments for applications. Much of those things arent that hard to implement. Microsoft could have done it but they couldnt care less. To them good enough is whatever their monopoly can ship without being publicly tared and feathered, sometimes even worse like with Vista.
The monopoly effectivly shuts out any comercial players from entering the fray leaving only OS like Linux, BSD and such. MacOS only lives because its artificially tied to Apples hardware. The moment they release it to general PC's they will be shut down wich they know very well.
Linux isnt the right place for disruptive innovation at all because its tightly knit around *NIX, is mature and depends on an enormous amount of third party applications. Its use of an evolving development model prohibits making big changes instead of baby steps.
The biggest hindrance to any development in the computer business is Microsofts monopoly. No sane company even considers doing something that may end up competing with them no matter how much better, safer, faster or cheaper it would be.
I see todays computer world as a very conservative place where nothing really changes that much, its just the buzzwords that change. If you just look at what you can do with the computer things are very stale and not much new happens at all. Whats the real difference between Star OS, Amiga OS or GEOS and a modern OS except massive resource missuse, multitasking and a tcp/ip stack?
They should release an SSD version for Servers and Linux boxes in general and just ignore Vista while waiting. My eeePC runs Ubuntu Linux like a charm with its SSD and with a couple of simple alterations i have minimized disk writes to a bare minimum (log to memory, no indexing, write less often to disk and turn off browser cache etc). I very rarely see the disk light, this on a 512 MB internal mem computer.
Let Microsoft sort the numerous problems with Vista out.
The whole thing has been a farse from start to end. That SCO has been allowed to continue this long without any evidence to back their claims up are insane. At the very least they should have been compelled to show some tangible evidence before the whole fishing expedition begun. The real stink begun when they could go on even after the extremely deep discoveries couldnt show any evidence at all that any code whatsoever came from SCO, not even "their own" code.
Something is just fishy about how the court system has handled all this.
Why yes, torture is only wrong when its done by some banana republic. Done right its the utmost expression of freedom, the american way of life and free speech.
Global warming is just a part of the problem with using fossilized carbon fuels. One of the biggest problems is that it is a finite source of energy. They will run out in a not so distant future.
CO2 gases arent the only problem either. Cancerogenes and heavy metals arent fun in the long run for our children and the animals. However you look at it its about time we seriously look at other energy sources.
I dont think its NIH syndrome. They no doubt tested other solutions before doing their own thing.
Dont forget this code is in widespread use and works very well. Googles server farm aint exactly small and the load they see is probably second to none.
A couple of percents of better efficiency for Google probably means millions in saved costs. Tossing a couple of months on development on something like this is money well spent.
I guess if all you have is SQL everything is a SQL SELECT no matter what you want to achieve.
No, but i find most of the worlds population being greedy pricks. While im no communist i do think there are more important things to our society than money.
If yahoo would sell its search business i seriously doubt it will survive many months. I dont think Carl Icahn will let a single dime from any eventual sale of the search business go anywhere but straight into the stock owners pockets. Just like Google Yahoo cant gather any users without its search business regardless of what services they might have.
If they sell Yahoo it has to be in whole or they will waste the total value of the company for a very small one-time gain.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest challenge really lies between the chair and the keyboard. How can the court be sure that the one owning the computer is the culprit? I could just have lend it out to someone. Finding the right computer is also just the beginning in proving someone has committed a crime. Thanks to rampant trojan distribution on Windows computers its very common for a computer to be controllable by third parties, sometimes multiple parties, from remote. While in reality its mostly the owner that downloads nobody can prove it even if they could prove who was the owner of said computer.
Proving who used it is the challenging part where courts up until now have always assumed that the owner is always the user. If thats how it should be there should at least be a law written that states that the owner is always accountable for whatever happens at his computer. Right now the courts dont really grasp this and some people get sentenced while no real proof exists.
The biggest hurdle between Microsoft and open source is the GPL. Because of how the license is written its very hard for Microsoft to embrace and extend any project written in GPL, especially GPLv3. Even if Microsoft somehow should manage to get the lead developers of some high profile projects away enough people exists that would just fork and ignore them completely.
I expect Microsoft to put much effort into trying to get more projects to use for example the BSD or Apache license instead of the GPL. Some people might but i suspect most peope are smart enough to realize all they are after is another chance at doing a Kerberos on other peoples hard work.
What makes Miquel think that he and mono is so special to Microsoft? If you look at Microsofts history everyone who have tried to cooperate has ended up with a knife in their back. The ones who compete with them have been left a smoldering piece of rubbel. The potential risks with mono is enormous since the one who control it is activly out to destroy linux despite its humble marketshare. Imagine if Linux wore to take a lot bigger marketshare? Does anyone think they would not panic and press the SCO-style litigation button?
What good can come out of integrating the most Linux applications with Microsofts patented techs? From Microsofts point of view i can understand i can understand it but for OSS? MS must just love the thought of OSS applications working better on Windows than on Linux and the ability to completely thrashing Gnome any time they feel like it.
If we need a better development enviroment then we should build a better one instead of riding two carts behind Microsoft. If we need dotnet compability thats one thing but building native Linux applications in java or dotnet is just insane.
From what i have seen of dotnet and mono they are (i didnt thought it possible) slower than even java. Why we should build applications on purpouse thats goddog slow is beyond me. Why should we put enormous efforts into making the kernel and hardware faster just to sacrifice it to badly deigned software? I want my system to have lots of power left to do new stuff, not the exact same stuff but slower.
Standardise on one and only one distribution. Dont give a %&& about the others.
Release the application as a virtual appliance for the virtual enviroment of choice. Go have a coffee and scoff at the poor sods who have to build their apps for several versions, languages and servicepacks levels of Windows etc.
From my own experiences the only thing that has been a problem with commercial applications has been those that either outright refuse to install if it isnt "distro X 0.2.3" or those that relies on a specific version of a library instead of just linking it in statically. In all the cases i have banged my head against package management has been the least problem.
Most games for linux seems to run just fine on pretty much any distribution i have thrown them at. Some, like Urban Terror, Firefox or for example Tremolous doesnt even require an install. I have had the same installs of many apps through countless distributions and upgrades without problems. Why this isnt possible for commercial vendors is beyond me. Since size mostly isnt an issue just tossing the libraries needed with the application isnt much of a deal.
While i do agree that some form of standard is good i dont think it should be very big or extensive. The bare minimum to put your own libraries, binaries and config files on and nothing more.
Right now a big drawback of LSB is that it uses rpm while the most widely used distribution uses deb. It would be better to spend that part of LSB time and effort on making settings and files end up in the same places. That way packaging would be easier no matter what package management is used and making packages for many different package management system wouldnt be that much work.
I would also assume that any private scientist who works on something would stay away from the US. Since they readily share any information with "their" own corps you can bet that any big breakthrough will "leak" to your biggest competitors in the US before you can say patent.
"Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons"
Thats the wording that got me. This means the US can take any foreign businessmans computer and turn its contents over to his most fierce competitor without mentioning it and without any wrongdoing being done by the business he represents.
Is it just me or doesnt this kind of makes it pretty risky to do business in the US? Any information the US intelligence gets their hand on can be used in business related areas, now without even a suspicion of any wrongdoings but just because they can.
This sure wont help the US economy thats for sure. If its one thing that can tank an economy its holding stale/inefficient/non innovative business up by artificial means until the bubble bursts.
Until there are actions made by Microsoft that benefits open source in general everything Microsoft does in OSS should be taken with a large dose of skeptisism. Its all PR.
As long as their goal is to obliterate any competition, kill partners any time it gives a benefit and screw their customers over they shouldnt be allowed to be in our community. While we play nice they spend their time trying to come up with new ways of controlling or killing the open source movement.
If there is one place i wont tolerate Microsofts level of Q&A its in my car. In no way or form should anything in a car fail in any way whatsoever. Any glitch, bug or irregularity that dont matter much on a computer can actually kill people in a car. Anything that distracts me from my driving is a real true hazard for my life. I have heard enough stories and seen friends that has Microsofts products in their car to be afraid. If a car has Windows on it i wont buy it, period.
I cant imagine what the car manufacturers are thinking but i suspect they are paid to use Microsofts products. Since there are much better alternatives out there i cant think of any other reason.
While its clearly in its early days i do think it looks promising. If Cuil can eliminate the problems of rampant search "optimizing", unrelated paid for adwords and make it easier for casual users to klick their way towards what they search for i think they can take a chunk out of the search engine userbase.
This is just Microsoft patting the dog on the head and saying "nice doggy" while looking for a large stick to beat it to pulp with the other hand.
They just dont want to be left alone as the only company not doing open source at the same time as they work full throttle in finding ways to rein in and put a leach on the open source monster.
The problem when they tie things to specific software is that it makes innovation and upgrading a hopeless task. Most driver problems in Vista for example regarding printers is because of winprinters, winmodems and such idiocy where writing/porting drivers is next to impossible for anyone other than the hardware manufacturer.
This is as much of a problem to Microsoft as to anyone else but somewhere it looks as if stifling competition is much more important than giving their users a good experience.
They are free to choose what platforms to support but, in this case they choose to have a broken bios with a table specifically for Linux that was broken. In this case it look as if they worked on getting it to not function properly. It really makes you wonder.
The problem is that Foxconn says its ACPI compliant but its not. It also looks as if they botched Linux by pure purpouse. Why on earth would they have a Linux section in the bios when they dont support it? Something is very smelly here thats for sure. I will keep miles away from Foxconn at my departments no matter if my systems are intended for Windows or Linux.
Vista pages very frequently even with 4 Gb ram so i would definitely say its very disk intensive. Couple that with indexing, prefetch and all the other hacks to make up for the performance loss that DRM brings along and you have 24/7 disk activity. I suspect sustained read speads arent an issue but rather spurious writes that happens all the time.
See this for more info or try it out yourself if you have a Vista machine at hand:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19553/1141/
"I was under the impression that MS Research does quite of a lot of "OS research and concept implementations" -- Singularity, anyone?"
Why yes, but nothing in Singularity is new. An abundance of concept OS exists but nobody implements anything from them, not even singularity. Microsoft isnt the least interested. The biggest thing they have implemented in later years is utter worthless copy protection in Vista. It must suck bad to work for Microsoft Research and see absolutely nothing tangible get out of your work.
Old does indeed not mean bad. But there are some issues that seem to be impossible to address without a major change in how OS works. Security, stability, predictability and resource use are nowhere to be seen in the bigger OS implementations today.
Security is an afterthought thats solved by endlessly patch defects in applications. This is something that can be solved in the OS and compiler level to a very high degree, just not with todays methods and tools.
Stability is at pretty flaky and fault tolerance at a bare minimum (i don't count bad hardware into this). One would expect a modern computer to be more stable than a Dos, CP/M or MacOS machine that has 20 years of age.
Predictability is much better in Linux than in Windows. In Linux things mostly work if done right and don't work at all if done wrong and theres rarely a gray area there. Applications is another matter where much work is needed in both the Linux and the Windows world. I should be able to do something and know it will be the same no matter how many times i do it. That means stable API's, stable input/outputs, punishing bad behavior and good fault tolerance.
Resource use is the biggest problem and probably something that affects all of the above. When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development. The time saved is then spent tenfold throughout the applications entire life in fixing all the little errors that went into it because of lack of both knowledge and planning.
I cant agree more. I have always been interested in OS research and concept implementations. Some of those implementations have been mindbogglingly fast, agile and stable and introduced very nice concepts like stateless computing, distributed systems and extremely fault tolerant enviroments for applications. Much of those things arent that hard to implement. Microsoft could have done it but they couldnt care less. To them good enough is whatever their monopoly can ship without being publicly tared and feathered, sometimes even worse like with Vista.
The monopoly effectivly shuts out any comercial players from entering the fray leaving only OS like Linux, BSD and such. MacOS only lives because its artificially tied to Apples hardware. The moment they release it to general PC's they will be shut down wich they know very well.
Linux isnt the right place for disruptive innovation at all because its tightly knit around *NIX, is mature and depends on an enormous amount of third party applications. Its use of an evolving development model prohibits making big changes instead of baby steps.
The biggest hindrance to any development in the computer business is Microsofts monopoly. No sane company even considers doing something that may end up competing with them no matter how much better, safer, faster or cheaper it would be.
I see todays computer world as a very conservative place where nothing really changes that much, its just the buzzwords that change. If you just look at what you can do with the computer things are very stale and not much new happens at all. Whats the real difference between Star OS, Amiga OS or GEOS and a modern OS except massive resource missuse, multitasking and a tcp/ip stack?
They should release an SSD version for Servers and Linux boxes in general and just ignore Vista while waiting. My eeePC runs Ubuntu Linux like a charm with its SSD and with a couple of simple alterations i have minimized disk writes to a bare minimum (log to memory, no indexing, write less often to disk and turn off browser cache etc). I very rarely see the disk light, this on a 512 MB internal mem computer.
Let Microsoft sort the numerous problems with Vista out.
The whole thing has been a farse from start to end. That SCO has been allowed to continue this long without any evidence to back their claims up are insane. At the very least they should have been compelled to show some tangible evidence before the whole fishing expedition begun. The real stink begun when they could go on even after the extremely deep discoveries couldnt show any evidence at all that any code whatsoever came from SCO, not even "their own" code.
Something is just fishy about how the court system has handled all this.
Why yes, torture is only wrong when its done by some banana republic. Done right its the utmost expression of freedom, the american way of life and free speech.
Global warming is just a part of the problem with using fossilized carbon fuels. One of the biggest problems is that it is a finite source of energy. They will run out in a not so distant future.
CO2 gases arent the only problem either. Cancerogenes and heavy metals arent fun in the long run for our children and the animals. However you look at it its about time we seriously look at other energy sources.
I dont think its NIH syndrome. They no doubt tested other solutions before doing their own thing.
Dont forget this code is in widespread use and works very well. Googles server farm aint exactly small and the load they see is probably second to none.
A couple of percents of better efficiency for Google probably means millions in saved costs. Tossing a couple of months on development on something like this is money well spent.
I guess if all you have is SQL everything is a SQL SELECT no matter what you want to achieve.
No, but i find most of the worlds population being greedy pricks. While im no communist i do think there are more important things to our society than money.
If yahoo would sell its search business i seriously doubt it will survive many months. I dont think Carl Icahn will let a single dime from any eventual sale of the search business go anywhere but straight into the stock owners pockets. Just like Google Yahoo cant gather any users without its search business regardless of what services they might have.
If they sell Yahoo it has to be in whole or they will waste the total value of the company for a very small one-time gain.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead