Yeah, Didio's original comment was removed. But this one is just as stupid:
here are two real threats to Microsoft if substantial code has been leaked, according to Yankee Group senior analyst Laura Didio: even worse security for Microsoft applications and bootleg copies of the software being passed around.
Other implications, according to online security experts, are that attackers may be able to more easily craft vulnerabilities and other attacks against Windows 2000 and Windows NT operating systems.
"worse security"; was going to happen anyway, as more and more black hats figure out how to exploit Microsoft's buggy code.
"bootleg copies...being passed around". Well, jeez, could there actually be more bootleg copies than there are already?
As to attackers being able to craft vulnerabilities against the NT/2000/XP series; well they are doing just fine without looking at the code. I'd bet that they (whoever they are) are laughing their asses off at that comment. Could it be - nay! - that perhaps the people who create those viruses in the first place are better programmers than Microsoft can hire even with all their billions?
Didio - it's a wonder to me that she's been able to keep her job. I imagine the outrage in the email has been high.
Especially when the Microsoft contractor involved was doing "Windows to "Unix" ports". - Anyone else find that extremely odd - it wasn't leaked by some student somewhere, or hacked, but somehow, vaguely, came from a Microsoft involved company?
Yup, the spin is on in this one. Whether or not it was intentional, Microsoft will milk it as much as they can.
In fact, it's possible that one of the copies of the cdrom in question couldn't be read by the person who had it and it was disposed of and found by someone digging thru their garbage.
They probably have pretty good security against such an event, but no security is ever perfect. One imagines some junkyard scavenger digging thru piles of trash, finding the CD, thinking "Oh, cool!" and managing to reconstruct the contents of the disk, thereby gaining points with his 133t kazaa buddies.
And you think the entire community, including IBM and other companies that have bet the farm or at least huge sums of money on OSS are just going to roll over and take it?
/puts on tinfoil hat
The timing on this is interesting, is it not? Just as it looks like SCO has finally muffed up in court....this announcement appears. Hardly a week later. So far what I've read of the details (in more articles than just those posted here) sounds pretty confused, and the supposed train of events is a little suspicious, like about how the details of the source of the source code was found in a core dump file. Um....what?
The paranoid part of me smells undercover FUD in action. The logical part of me is going to wait for evidence (if there is ever any real evidence released). Harumph.
/removes tinfoil hat
The above is speculation, but still interesting speculation...
One could also express what you said as people building their art on the experiences gained during their lifetimes.
Even Bach had influences, although one of the wonders of Bach is that he wrapped his music, influences or no, around his own imagination.
Meanwhile the lawyers are raking in the bucks. Sigh. I hope it never gets to the point where any artistic creation (including coding) requires that one spend more time searching and comparing to avoid copyright violations than they do in creating....it stifles creation at the root.
Besides, much of the stuff in Windows is patented, and there's simply no way to re-implment it (different code or no) without violating a patent.
I'd be willing to bet that if the code really was opened to the world, that at least some of those patents could potentially be declared invalid for having prior art.
I've not seen any windows source code, but we all know how Microsoft does business; plus, the closed nature of the code, the NDAs, and the nature of OSS just about guarantees there is at least some prior art in there, and possibly some copyright violations (GPL). Not saying there is, but I wouldn't bet money against it.
By "forums" I meant being able to talk to people outside our college, who had gone thru the same experience. If you hadn't know them, they were essentially outside your contact sphere. Unless someone knew them, and they were willing to talk/mail you, you couldn't benefit from their experience.
We did, however, have our Beer forums:) where we exchanged information at painfully slow bitrates...
We didn't walk uphill thru snowstorms in our bare feet, but sometimes it sure felt that way:)
(note to mods; parent +1 funny for obligatory Ancient Learning Wisdom comment:)))))
Thanks for the laugh, magores:) I like to think I learned something. The more I get to know of the world, however, the dumber I feel:) Yes, it was hard, often. But we were young and easily seduced by pheromonones...
But just to tweak you, I believe the word "forum" had it's originations in Greece back in whatever B.C.:)
Truly anonymous posting is simply not possible anymore (if it ever really was). If someone has enough resources, they *will* eventually track down where you came from.
Which has good implications for finding virus writers, terrorists, etc; but bad implications for truly free speech.
It's not the the truth or non-truth that's screwing things up nowadays, it's the threat of the lawsuit, and the potential of having to spend large amount of one's income and time to defend oneself (especially for students) against allegations wrt to you said truth, or did not.
The courts, the lawyers, they have a lock on our society. That can be evidenced by the informational content of your post (highly accurate).
But I'm preaching to the choir; and
I'm not disagreeing with you, as a matter of fact I agree with you. I just think it's disgusting and I believe that it's being carried to ridiculous extremes; and that this kind of thing will eventually destroy our society. I think it's made major inroads towards that goal already, intended or not.
I also think that this will not change until our current governmental system is changed (by whatever means proves necessary). I don't think it can be dealt with within the rules set down already, anymore, however.
I'll add that when I was in college a quarter century ago, there were many of us who wished that the faculty admin would pay more attention to what the students were saying about their teachers.
I had a calculus teacher who was a drunk and a philanderer (he eventually got fired over allegations of having sex with a student - not proven - but those of us who were there knew what was going on). He'd been tenured for years, and deteriorating in his ability to teach steadily.
What those of us who were in his classes found out after that, was that he'd woefully underprepared us for entry into a 4 year school - which was the mandate for the second year Calculus we'd been taking. When we looked back after it, years later, we realized that he'd been giving us easy stuff, not pushing us hard, so he'd look good to the board, giving high grades. He wasn't grading hard, at all.
He wasn't the only one (although most of the prof's there were damned good); when I got to my 4-year, that kind of crap was even more prevelant there. There were teachers there who would give a 30 minute lecture and rely on their TA's to fill in helping people - because said Prof's were too busy doing lecture circuit - and the TA's were grad students with their own schedules - this was a totally unnnecessary load on them.
I feel that it's a fundamental right for students to have input into review considerations of a teacher/professor. Obviously, there will be input that is from students who don't care and are, in slashdot vernacular, trolls. But that shouldn't invalidate having third party review options that are not associated with the school at all, like these websites. They are necessary, not just wrt to the student teacher trust, but as part of free speech. To have them shut down because one person is angry at them is a violation of all we hold dear in this country (yadda yadda yadda, happening already, and worse, I know all that).
It's all part and parcel of the Political Correctness bullshit that has been sweeping our country up for way too long. We have whole generations of people growing up who are indoctrinated this way.
Anyone who doubts that "rule of law" and easy access to lawyers is destroying this country, perhaps should take a good hard look at what is going on.
and if this professor is so scared of negative reviews, perhaps he should review his arrogance quotient.
Does said professor seriously think that opinions about him don't get discussed between students in private discussions? Does he think he's immune to that? Does he think that his status makes him immune to being judged? Who the fuck does he think he is?
One of the problems in education nowadays is that bad teachers are *not* being reviewed they way they should be. The very fact that he resorted to a lawsuit against this website makes me think that there's probably a lot of truth to what was being said about him. I realize that he's busy ( I hope he is) but the proper response would have been to rebut the accusations against him, to defend himself against them, publicly (he's a public figure, after all).
I'm not putting it very well, but if he has someone critizing him in such a way as to damage his public reputation (if he *really* thinks those accusations are unwarranted) then the recourse is *not* suing the website (could just as well have been a magazine, or newspaper article) but to retaliate against them *publicly* in speech, not against a website that is simply offering another form of free speech.
Excuse me for not being completely coherent but I'm pretty damned mad, mostly because I wish forums like that had been available when I was in college. We had *plenty* of bad professors (mostly tenured).
Political Correctness and the "It's NOT FAIR" whine rears it's ugly head again. I can just imagine what some of my professors would have said about him. It wouldn't have been complimentory, that I can assure you.
What I can assure you of, is that the most common quote among the really good teachers I had, would have been Shakespeare. You know which one.
This one goes into my notes under "Decline and Fall of America".
If SCO can't take the heat, they should never have entered the kitchen and lit the stove. Wah.
I have no friccin sympathy for them, at all. They've been attempting to screw/rip off a lot of people under some shady pretext they call "law".
Why shouldn't I be angry?
Side note: www.sco.com doesn't resolve at all for me, now, and hasn't all day. Did they pull their dns info? WTF?
While it's not strictly true that they invented the PC (Apple probably has a stronger claim there) they certainly mass-produced one of the first really powerful home computers out there.
I owned one of the first 1000 IBM PC's sold in my state, and I was absolutely astounded by it. I had an Apple II+, an few Atari, a couple Commodores and some Z80 stuff, and the IBM PC blew them all away. The machine set me back about $4K (about the cost all of my other machines combined) but within a couple months the others were gathering dust and I was doing all my coding on the IBM.
I learned Pascal, Cobol, beginners C, and macro assembly on that box. It was awesome. It was *fast*:) I wish I still had it. Alas, it's buried in a landfill somewhere in southern MN - you couldn't find inexpensive surge suppressors back then:(
Fond memories. Thanks for generating more now, IBM.
Ran Konstruct overnight last night, and so far (about 4 hours of testing every app I could find) it hasn't crashed. That's refreshing.
It also recognized my original Knoppix install and included the apps in the menus.
I haven't found "juk" in the menus yet.
An additional warning about cdrao (I'm running kernel 2.6.1) - in addition to the "needs ide-scsi" I got a "cdrao needs to be run as root" warning. CDs burn fine, otherwise.
More notes later, I'm going to bed, working the weekend.
*and* Heise stated in the courtroom to the judge some blather about 300 million or 400 million lines of code...
I somehow doubt the judge is all that amused. I'm sure she has evidence in front of her exactly how many lines of code there are, total, in Linux, AIX, and Dynix combined.
A couple great quotes from the Boston.com article referenced there:
Darl:Claiming that IBM's actions have harmed the market for SCO's "legitimate" Unix and cost the company millions, SCO filed a lawsuit against IBM demanding $3 billion in damages.
Oh, so you lost *millions* yet you're suing for *billions*. Uh, ok, whatever, Darl.
"I wasn't brought in to have warm fuzzies with Slashdot," he said.
Oh,Darl...we didn't know you cared. *sniff* I feel so much better now...
So what makes you think it has anything to do with "slashdot linux people"/FUD? if the article poster made a mistake or hadn't quite read deeply enough?
Parent deserves a troll moderation, IMO. At the least a redundant mod, this has been discussed in earlier comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Didio's original comment was removed. But this one is just as stupid:
here are two real threats to Microsoft if substantial code has been leaked, according to Yankee Group senior analyst Laura Didio: even worse security for Microsoft applications and bootleg copies of the software being passed around.
Other implications, according to online security experts, are that attackers may be able to more easily craft vulnerabilities and other attacks against Windows 2000 and Windows NT operating systems.
"worse security"; was going to happen anyway, as more and more black hats figure out how to exploit Microsoft's buggy code.
"bootleg copies...being passed around". Well, jeez, could there actually be more bootleg copies than there are already?
As to attackers being able to craft vulnerabilities against the NT/2000/XP series; well they are doing just fine without looking at the code. I'd bet that they (whoever they are) are laughing their asses off at that comment. Could it be - nay! - that perhaps the people who create those viruses in the first place are better programmers than Microsoft can hire even with all their billions?
Didio - it's a wonder to me that she's been able to keep her job. I imagine the outrage in the email has been high.
The FUD clusterfuck continues. Tune in next week.
SB
Especially when the Microsoft contractor involved was doing "Windows to "Unix" ports". - Anyone else find that extremely odd - it wasn't leaked by some student somewhere, or hacked, but somehow, vaguely, came from a Microsoft involved company?
Yup, the spin is on in this one. Whether or not it was intentional, Microsoft will milk it as much as they can.
SB
That was my second thought, especially given the timing of this.
My first thought was "Why hasn't this already happened?"
SB
In fact, it's possible that one of the copies of the cdrom in question couldn't be read by the person who had it and it was disposed of and found by someone digging thru their garbage.
They probably have pretty good security against such an event, but no security is ever perfect. One imagines some junkyard scavenger digging thru piles of trash, finding the CD, thinking "Oh, cool!" and managing to reconstruct the contents of the disk, thereby gaining points with his 133t kazaa buddies.
Heh.
SB
The timing on this is interesting, is it not? Just as it looks like SCO has finally muffed up in court....this announcement appears. Hardly a week later. So far what I've read of the details (in more articles than just those posted here) sounds pretty confused, and the supposed train of events is a little suspicious, like about how the details of the source of the source code was found in a core dump file. Um....what?
The paranoid part of me smells undercover FUD in action. The logical part of me is going to wait for evidence (if there is ever any real evidence released). Harumph.
The above is speculation, but still interesting speculation...
SB
One could also express what you said as people building their art on the experiences gained during their lifetimes.
Even Bach had influences, although one of the wonders of Bach is that he wrapped his music, influences or no, around his own imagination.
Meanwhile the lawyers are raking in the bucks. Sigh. I hope it never gets to the point where any artistic creation (including coding) requires that one spend more time searching and comparing to avoid copyright violations than they do in creating....it stifles creation at the root.
Oh, wait...damn.
SB
Good points. One comment:
Besides, much of the stuff in Windows is patented, and there's simply no way to re-implment it (different code or no) without violating a patent.
I'd be willing to bet that if the code really was opened to the world, that at least some of those patents could potentially be declared invalid for having prior art.
I've not seen any windows source code, but we all know how Microsoft does business; plus, the closed nature of the code, the NDAs, and the nature of OSS just about guarantees there is at least some prior art in there, and possibly some copyright violations (GPL). Not saying there is, but I wouldn't bet money against it.
In any case it'd be interesting to find out.
SB
Heh.
By "forums" I meant being able to talk to people outside our college, who had gone thru the same experience. If you hadn't know them, they were essentially outside your contact sphere. Unless someone knew them, and they were willing to talk/mail you, you couldn't benefit from their experience.
We did, however, have our Beer forums
We didn't walk uphill thru snowstorms in our bare feet, but sometimes it sure felt that way
(note to mods; parent +1 funny for obligatory Ancient Learning Wisdom comment
Thanks for the laugh, magores
But just to tweak you, I believe the word "forum" had it's originations in Greece back in whatever B.C.
SB
Truly anonymous posting is simply not possible anymore (if it ever really was). If someone has enough resources, they *will* eventually track down where you came from.
Which has good implications for finding virus writers, terrorists, etc; but bad implications for truly free speech.
SB
In a logical society it would.
Ergo....
SB
Yeah.
It's not the the truth or non-truth that's screwing things up nowadays, it's the threat of the lawsuit, and the potential of having to spend large amount of one's income and time to defend oneself (especially for students) against allegations wrt to you said truth, or did not.
The courts, the lawyers, they have a lock on our society. That can be evidenced by the informational content of your post (highly accurate).
But I'm preaching to the choir; and
I'm not disagreeing with you, as a matter of fact I agree with you. I just think it's disgusting and I believe that it's being carried to ridiculous extremes; and that this kind of thing will eventually destroy our society. I think it's made major inroads towards that goal already, intended or not.
I also think that this will not change until our current governmental system is changed (by whatever means proves necessary). I don't think it can be dealt with within the rules set down already, anymore, however.
Well put, Capt'n
SB
Mod parent up more :)
I'll add that when I was in college a quarter century ago, there were many of us who wished that the faculty admin would pay more attention to what the students were saying about their teachers.
I had a calculus teacher who was a drunk and a philanderer (he eventually got fired over allegations of having sex with a student - not proven - but those of us who were there knew what was going on). He'd been tenured for years, and deteriorating in his ability to teach steadily.
What those of us who were in his classes found out after that, was that he'd woefully underprepared us for entry into a 4 year school - which was the mandate for the second year Calculus we'd been taking. When we looked back after it, years later, we realized that he'd been giving us easy stuff, not pushing us hard, so he'd look good to the board, giving high grades. He wasn't grading hard, at all.
He wasn't the only one (although most of the prof's there were damned good); when I got to my 4-year, that kind of crap was even more prevelant there. There were teachers there who would give a 30 minute lecture and rely on their TA's to fill in helping people - because said Prof's were too busy doing lecture circuit - and the TA's were grad students with their own schedules - this was a totally unnnecessary load on them.
I feel that it's a fundamental right for students to have input into review considerations of a teacher/professor. Obviously, there will be input that is from students who don't care and are, in slashdot vernacular, trolls. But that shouldn't invalidate having third party review options that are not associated with the school at all, like these websites. They are necessary, not just wrt to the student teacher trust, but as part of free speech. To have them shut down because one person is angry at them is a violation of all we hold dear in this country (yadda yadda yadda, happening already, and worse, I know all that).
It's all part and parcel of the Political Correctness bullshit that has been sweeping our country up for way too long. We have whole generations of people growing up who are indoctrinated this way.
Anyone who doubts that "rule of law" and easy access to lawyers is destroying this country, perhaps should take a good hard look at what is going on.
Mod me troll, or whatever. I don't give a F.
SB
Yes
and if this professor is so scared of negative reviews, perhaps he should review his arrogance quotient.
Does said professor seriously think that opinions about him don't get discussed between students in private discussions? Does he think he's immune to that? Does he think that his status makes him immune to being judged? Who the fuck does he think he is?
One of the problems in education nowadays is that bad teachers are *not* being reviewed they way they should be. The very fact that he resorted to a lawsuit against this website makes me think that there's probably a lot of truth to what was being said about him. I realize that he's busy ( I hope he is) but the proper response would have been to rebut the accusations against him, to defend himself against them, publicly (he's a public figure, after all).
I'm not putting it very well, but if he has someone critizing him in such a way as to damage his public reputation (if he *really* thinks those accusations are unwarranted) then the recourse is *not* suing the website (could just as well have been a magazine, or newspaper article) but to retaliate against them *publicly* in speech, not against a website that is simply offering another form of free speech.
Excuse me for not being completely coherent but I'm pretty damned mad, mostly because I wish forums like that had been available when I was in college. We had *plenty* of bad professors (mostly tenured).
Political Correctness and the "It's NOT FAIR" whine rears it's ugly head again. I can just imagine what some of my professors would have said about him. It wouldn't have been complimentory, that I can assure you.
What I can assure you of, is that the most common quote among the really good teachers I had, would have been Shakespeare. You know which one.
This one goes into my notes under "Decline and Fall of America".
SB
The sound you just heard is the sound of a cluestick (TM) hitting a SCO(ull).
SB
If SCO can't take the heat, they should never have entered the kitchen and lit the stove. Wah.
I have no friccin sympathy for them, at all. They've been attempting to screw/rip off a lot of people under some shady pretext they call "law".
Why shouldn't I be angry?
Side note: www.sco.com doesn't resolve at all for me, now, and hasn't all day. Did they pull their dns info? WTF?
SB
Nope. Typing it directly into a fresh lynx browser here came up with a "alert: unable to connect to remote host" error.
Hmm.
SB
n/t
This sounds all too eerily similiar to Microsoft's Linux FUD from a few years ago.
SB
While it's not strictly true that they invented the PC (Apple probably has a stronger claim there) they certainly mass-produced one of the first really powerful home computers out there.
:) I wish I still had it. Alas, it's buried in a landfill somewhere in southern MN - you couldn't find inexpensive surge suppressors back then :(
I owned one of the first 1000 IBM PC's sold in my state, and I was absolutely astounded by it. I had an Apple II+, an few Atari, a couple Commodores and some Z80 stuff, and the IBM PC blew them all away. The machine set me back about $4K (about the cost all of my other machines combined) but within a couple months the others were gathering dust and I was doing all my coding on the IBM.
I learned Pascal, Cobol, beginners C, and macro assembly on that box. It was awesome. It was *fast*
Fond memories. Thanks for generating more now, IBM.
SB
4. Prophet???
SB
My own simple and quick review (tired)
Ran Konstruct overnight last night, and so far (about 4 hours of testing every app I could find) it hasn't crashed. That's refreshing.
It also recognized my original Knoppix install and included the apps in the menus.
I haven't found "juk" in the menus yet.
An additional warning about cdrao (I'm running kernel 2.6.1) - in addition to the "needs ide-scsi" I got a "cdrao needs to be run as root" warning. CDs burn fine, otherwise.
More notes later, I'm going to bed, working the weekend.
SB
Ow. My head hurts :)
:)
Thanks. I just wrote assembly on the damned things...circuit design I failed at, miserably.
This is going to haunt my dreams for a week. Thanks a lot
SB
*and* Heise stated in the courtroom to the judge some blather about 300 million or 400 million lines of code...
I somehow doubt the judge is all that amused. I'm sure she has evidence in front of her exactly how many lines of code there are, total, in Linux, AIX, and Dynix combined.
SB
A couple great quotes from the Boston.com article referenced there:
Darl:Claiming that IBM's actions have harmed the market for SCO's "legitimate" Unix and cost the company millions, SCO filed a lawsuit against IBM demanding $3 billion in damages.
Oh, so you lost *millions* yet you're suing for *billions*. Uh, ok, whatever, Darl.
"I wasn't brought in to have warm fuzzies with Slashdot," he said.
Oh,Darl...we didn't know you cared. *sniff* I feel so much better now...
SB
That's true.
So what makes you think it has anything to do with "slashdot linux people"/FUD? if the article poster made a mistake or hadn't quite read deeply enough?
Parent deserves a troll moderation, IMO. At the least a redundant mod, this has been discussed in earlier comments.
Sheesh.
SB