A relative of mine used to repair TVs. Even he one time forgot to discharge the CRT. Melted his wedding ring...
You had better make *damn* sure to discharge it. The way I was taught was to ground the metal tip of a screwdriver, and hold onto the insulated end and let it probe around the coils on the back of the CRT and such. Expect sparks. BIG ones. Before you do anything else, make sure it's well discharged and don't touch anything until then.
Do read that FAQ in parent, but I remember it being (mostly) safe after that, provided it's not plugged in (it's generally NOT a good idea to have it powered at ANY time you have it open, unless you know a hell of a lot more about doing that than I do, and even then it's not exactly safe...)
Also, you have to beware cracking the CRT tube. If it shatters, it will implode, spraying shards of glass everywhere (lovely, huh?). I was usually disassembling them for spare parts when I worked with them, so, after discharging it (and generally letting it sit for a few days, so most of the charge would leak away) we'd remove the CRT, cover it in a plastic bag, and gently tap the thin part on the back with a hammer, until we heard all the air leak into the CRT tube (it's a near vacuum inside, remember, the air leaks IN, not out!).
After that, provided you don't try to power it up, it's generally quite safe. Okay, I forgot--you have to discharge any capacitors, too. Big and small ones. They generate nasty sparks too! But eventually, and consult that FAQ in case I forgot anything, after it's fully discharged and disassembled, the only thing you should have to worry about is burning your fingers with the soldering iron...:]
What do you mean "smart enough to get out of jury duty"?
For example, what I wouldn't pay to be allowed on the jury of SCO vs. IBM (read the docs, they all say "jury trial demanded"). True, true, I would undoubtably be weeded out for having formed an oppinion about the case already...
But there are other important cases out there. Like this one mentioned on SecurityFocus which says that lending one's password may be criminal, not merely civil, if the publisher doesn't want them to have access, even if there would be no crime had the lender performed the access on behalf of the other person...
If you're always sneaking out of jury duty, don't complain if idiots decide the cases:P I'm just glad that there are at least a few of us smart enough to know that it might matter some day who will serve in spite of the crappy pay, etc.
I will agree that they did the right thing here--I don't think that that patent ever should have been granted.
However, I fear that the reexamination was triggered by Microsoft's many lawyers and massive amounts of cash, rather than any sudden desire for the USPTO to be more consumer-oriented...
What was that figure? They've only reexamined 141 out of 4+ million patents? I'd be willing to guess that there are quite a few other patents out there that never should have been granted...
That the rovers that go there will move faster than a few feet per day? (Or can't they do any better with the incredible lag due to the distance between Earth and Mars?)
In the mean time, I must say that I hope, now that I RTFA here, that Larry Wall & co. haven't been appropriating any of SCO's IP. I mean, just look at the following bits of code and judge for yourself if they look like something SCO might have written...;]
# X out any doubleplus ungood words $nextline ~~ s:ei/(@proscribed)/$( 'X' x length $1 )/;
module Ministry::Of::Truth { # Double-plus good contents omitted, RTFA }
Heh, I just had to modify some of that code slightly to bypass the damn lameness filter, because of the junk characters. At least it's an excuse to test my knowledge of Perl 6:]
I don't expect to make much sense of these writings just yet. Sure, they're fun to read, so that I have some idea of all the new things they're doing, but beyond that *shrug*
I intend to buy the new camel book from O'Reilly (just like I did for Perl 5), which will surely help me learn all the new bits (and, quite probably, help me relearn the bits I only thought I knew).
I wonder if they'll do anything new with regular expressions? (I haven't RTFA just yet, and I don't remember anything from the past exegesises just now.) They always were my favorite bit of Perl for some reason...:]
*wonders if they would really try to sue him for "defamation" or some other silly, trumped-up claim*
I can see it now...
"But your honour, we did not play darts to decide who to sue. As you can clearly see, we drew names out of a hat! Thus Xenographic's statement was materially false and defamatory!!!"
That said, if not for the "top 1,000" bit, I'd almost wonder if they intended to sue Slashdot (or Groklaw, for that matter... I mean, PJ has admitted to using Knoppix, which is probably high treason in SCOville...)
However, PJ's email appears to be only at groklaw.com, or so google tells me. You may notice that it's not the easiest thing to find online, and I cannot say that I blame her...
Odd, when I took an obligatory basic Java course, the grading was quite the opposite. They WANTED javadoc, they WANTED good comments, and they WANTED us to make sure the code worked right.
They went so far as to give us a few test cases (and if we didn't pass those test cases, we got a zero).
In fact, most of the grading process was to have their automatic system compare the output of our solution with the reference solution...
That said, the TAs were known to be lazy and I don't think anyone ever actually read our comments. I found this out when my solution differed slightly from what they expected (you had to do something different than they expected to direct the output to a file, namely java SomeProg > output, which was WELL commented...) and they couldn't figure it out... (hell, they didn't understand what that DID when I talked with them...)
So I can believe that you're a TA, but beyond that...
I still have to wonder about any company putting itself in PR like that, however. Last I knew, such companies generally had to agree to such PR.
Though I do suppose that they might have been vulnerable/extorted, in which case I would pity them more...
Perhaps we'll just see how they respond to the undoubtable backlash, since I see notes of a few of their customers here at Slashdot? If they repent or claim they were coerced, help them, otherwise they might appear to be shills...
Indeed, that is exactly why I'm wondering if we'll hear more about that. I must confess that I would be rather eager to see a headline saying "Linus Voids SCO's Linux License"... I can only wonder how SCO would spin that, since they seem to be selling something they do not own...
Not really. Apparently, they don't even run Linux (at least, not any more)! See also the Groklaw story which just went up about this (it's the one about how there's a lot of FUD today).
Microsoft claims here that they considered Linux, but came back to Microsoft products in the end.
My what curious press releases these folks appear in...
You should also see what Groklaw has to say about this, here.
[From Groklaw]
Speaking of Microsoft turning up in the background, SCO's new licensee, an ISP nobody ever heard of, can be found on Microsoft's website, held up as a case study, dated September 2003, of a company that thought they wanted to go to Linux and then switched back:
"EV1Servers.net Leading Hosted Service Provider Deploys Windows-based Hosting Solutions Faster than Linux-based Solutions
"Business managers at EV1 Servers.net knew that there was a demand for a Microsoft Windows-based hosted service offering, but they did not think they could deploy Windows-based servers with the same speed or level of automation that they had achieved in their deployment of their traditional Linux-based systems. Yet with the introduction of the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 2.0, which can take advantage of Automated Deployment Services (ADS)--a powerful new server purposing tool in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition--EV1 Servers.net is finding that it can deploy a Windows-based hosting service in less than half the time it takes to deploy a similarly configured Linux system. And they can do it with much less hands-on involvement than their Linux deployments demand."
So they need a SCO IP license to run Microsoft "solutions"? Or is this another Microsoft solution for SCO? EV1's customers aren't so happy.
Sadly, that last link seems to be slashdotted already via Groklaw. The old "too many connections" PHP error. Heh.
I was apparently a bit late in submitting this article, but I have to wonder, would this action not terminate SCO's license to Linux under Section 4 of the GNU GPL?
Section 4 reads:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Some, no doubt, but for those too young to, I suggest you read my sig (or if you have sigs off, just go to consoleclassix.com:P and you can play all the NES games you want for free online, if there's a cart available).
To be fair, with an insecure path (what? why shouldn't I have . in my path, I hate typing./whatever) part of that can be a problem with Linux.
Of course, you don't usually chmod +x things you don't expect to run... Moreover, there's another problem you didn't mention with windows--where they add all the extra spaces (e.g. "foo.jpg.exe") to do their best to keep you from noticing them. And there are several things like BMPs, what with all those who still have IE5 [like me, who won't USE it...] and a number of other random media players of sorts have had buffer problems of various sorts on all platforms...
But if we really want to do something, I'd say to ignore the PR and BS (redundant, I know...) and work at helping all the major distros be more secure by default, as well as more security hardening features (probably lots to copy from OpenBSD, Bastille is good, SELinux is nifty when properly configured, etc....)
Substance usually wins out over fluff, in the end, after all. That's part of why Linux got where it is today, after all--a few good features early to attract more developers, to write more useful features, etc....
That will only fragment the good code into unusable pieces, far less useful than they could be as a whole.
The proper way to go about this is to bring the Open methodology to the licensing as well as the software. If we can negotiate to work together, we can avoid needless fragmentation and forking, and work together, rather than at cross purposes.
The best thing to do is remain clam, discuss these issues rationally, and work to come to some mutually agreeable understanding here. Not to do so would make no sense...
I think he's talking about the $699 one, but I confess to having not explored that link very far.
I do know that several people have reported calling up SCO and being unable to buy anything, however. I'm not sure if they tried the website too, or what.
That said, I do wonder about the legal angle of it. SCO is rather two-faced, so if the kernel developers try to sue them, they'll probably just try to weasel out of it, and who knows what they'll claim. Whereas if you actually were to buy from them, I'm sure they'd make you indemnify them in all sorts of ways (e.g. various provisions about not being able to sue them even if they don't own what you just licensed, various clauses wherein you agree with their... creative... interpretations of various 'facts'... etc.)
It's not like they're above lying to judges here. Either that or they didn't mean what they said. Or something. All I know is that they constantly seem to contradict themselves publically and will spin the facts in their favor depending on which questions they are being asked...
Take a look at this article from a week or two ago on Groklaw.
PJ compares SCO's worst case scenarios with those of RedHat, IBM & co.
It makes for much more interesting reading than many of the other legal filings I've read... Note how in that article, SCO describes quite a few ways in which its business could fold, compared to rather bland statements that something bad might happen in the off chance SCO ever actually prevailed with some bit of their case.
It's kind of fun to read all the various ways in which SCO might be liquidated, though. I wonder which of them will happen?
I tend to agree. Personally, I would like to have more distros leave most things off by default (and give you some sort of warning/information about how to learn to secure it if you turn it on during installation).
If they want to run anything (including SSH, I'd have to say, since it was recently vulnerable), they should know that it's on and then (hopefully) learn how to maintain it in good working order.
I'm sure there are plenty of other good bits of hardening that could (and probably should) be done. It would be nice if more distros did them.
That said, I'm not particularly impressed by the survey. At most, it proves that running a computer when you have no idea how it works can leave you vulnerable, unless someone has left you with something more secure by default... Duh. But it's still a good idea to help all the distros out there harden things up, so we don't let so many newbies get burnt on their first try.
Slashdot Mirror
A relative of mine used to repair TVs. Even he one time forgot to discharge the CRT. Melted his wedding ring...
... :]
You had better make *damn* sure to discharge it. The way I was taught was to ground the metal tip of a screwdriver, and hold onto the insulated end and let it probe around the coils on the back of the CRT and such. Expect sparks. BIG ones. Before you do anything else, make sure it's well discharged and don't touch anything until then.
Do read that FAQ in parent, but I remember it being (mostly) safe after that, provided it's not plugged in (it's generally NOT a good idea to have it powered at ANY time you have it open, unless you know a hell of a lot more about doing that than I do, and even then it's not exactly safe...)
Also, you have to beware cracking the CRT tube. If it shatters, it will implode, spraying shards of glass everywhere (lovely, huh?). I was usually disassembling them for spare parts when I worked with them, so, after discharging it (and generally letting it sit for a few days, so most of the charge would leak away) we'd remove the CRT, cover it in a plastic bag, and gently tap the thin part on the back with a hammer, until we heard all the air leak into the CRT tube (it's a near vacuum inside, remember, the air leaks IN, not out!).
After that, provided you don't try to power it up, it's generally quite safe. Okay, I forgot--you have to discharge any capacitors, too. Big and small ones. They generate nasty sparks too! But eventually, and consult that FAQ in case I forgot anything, after it's fully discharged and disassembled, the only thing you should have to worry about is burning your fingers with the soldering iron
What do you mean "smart enough to get out of jury duty"?
:P I'm just glad that there are at least a few of us smart enough to know that it might matter some day who will serve in spite of the crappy pay, etc.
For example, what I wouldn't pay to be allowed on the jury of SCO vs. IBM (read the docs, they all say "jury trial demanded"). True, true, I would undoubtably be weeded out for having formed an oppinion about the case already...
But there are other important cases out there. Like this one mentioned on SecurityFocus which says that lending one's password may be criminal, not merely civil, if the publisher doesn't want them to have access, even if there would be no crime had the lender performed the access on behalf of the other person...
If you're always sneaking out of jury duty, don't complain if idiots decide the cases
Well.. are you sure about that?
I will agree that they did the right thing here--I don't think that that patent ever should have been granted.
However, I fear that the reexamination was triggered by Microsoft's many lawyers and massive amounts of cash, rather than any sudden desire for the USPTO to be more consumer-oriented...
What was that figure? They've only reexamined 141 out of 4+ million patents? I'd be willing to guess that there are quite a few other patents out there that never should have been granted...
That the rovers that go there will move faster than a few feet per day? (Or can't they do any better with the incredible lag due to the distance between Earth and Mars?)
At risk of being branded a heretic by both sides, I *think* the text editor command is:
M-x shell RET vi
Ahh, very nice. Thank you :]
;]
:under("="), :lfill('*'), :rfill('0'),
:]
In the mean time, I must say that I hope, now that I RTFA here, that Larry Wall & co. haven't been appropriating any of SCO's IP. I mean, just look at the following bits of code and judge for yourself if they look like something SCO might have written...
print form
'Name Bribe (per dastardry)',
'{[(11)[} {]],]]].[[[} ',
@names,
@bribes;
[...]
# X out any doubleplus ungood words
$nextline ~~ s:ei/(@proscribed)/$( 'X' x length $1 )/;
module Ministry::Of::Truth {
# Double-plus good contents omitted, RTFA
}
Heh, I just had to modify some of that code slightly to bypass the damn lameness filter, because of the junk characters. At least it's an excuse to test my knowledge of Perl 6
I don't expect to make much sense of these writings just yet. Sure, they're fun to read, so that I have some idea of all the new things they're doing, but beyond that *shrug*
:]
I intend to buy the new camel book from O'Reilly (just like I did for Perl 5), which will surely help me learn all the new bits (and, quite probably, help me relearn the bits I only thought I knew).
I wonder if they'll do anything new with regular expressions? (I haven't RTFA just yet, and I don't remember anything from the past exegesises just now.) They always were my favorite bit of Perl for some reason...
Hey now, I submitted this article! ;]
Surely I get some precidence here?
*wonders if they would really try to sue him for "defamation" or some other silly, trumped-up claim*
I can see it now...
"But your honour, we did not play darts to decide who to sue. As you can clearly see, we drew names out of a hat! Thus Xenographic's statement was materially false and defamatory!!!"
That said, if not for the "top 1,000" bit, I'd almost wonder if they intended to sue Slashdot (or Groklaw, for that matter... I mean, PJ has admitted to using Knoppix, which is probably high treason in SCOville...)
Groklaw.com redirects to groklaw.net.
However, PJ's email appears to be only at groklaw.com, or so google tells me. You may notice that it's not the easiest thing to find online, and I cannot say that I blame her...
If you ever read this post, you might want to contact PJ at Groklaw.com (that's her email, too, obviously)
I'm sure that she would be interested at all the inside info you have on how EV1 was made part of these PR campaigns...
Odd, when I took an obligatory basic Java course, the grading was quite the opposite. They WANTED javadoc, they WANTED good comments, and they WANTED us to make sure the code worked right.
They went so far as to give us a few test cases (and if we didn't pass those test cases, we got a zero).
In fact, most of the grading process was to have their automatic system compare the output of our solution with the reference solution...
That said, the TAs were known to be lazy and I don't think anyone ever actually read our comments. I found this out when my solution differed slightly from what they expected (you had to do something different than they expected to direct the output to a file, namely java SomeProg > output, which was WELL commented...) and they couldn't figure it out... (hell, they didn't understand what that DID when I talked with them...)
So I can believe that you're a TA, but beyond that...
Well, here's their network status.
Seems like it's only the forums which are overloaded?
I would assume that SCO has some "no right to refund" clauses in there, as I think others have mentioned.
I do NOT know if there's some way around that clause, should SCO's claims be shown utterly false by a court of law, however.
Not to mention as has been pointed out many times that they are not expected to have anything left after this...
Hmm, you seem to be correct.
I still have to wonder about any company putting itself in PR like that, however. Last I knew, such companies generally had to agree to such PR.
Though I do suppose that they might have been vulnerable/extorted, in which case I would pity them more...
Perhaps we'll just see how they respond to the undoubtable backlash, since I see notes of a few of their customers here at Slashdot? If they repent or claim they were coerced, help them, otherwise they might appear to be shills...
Indeed, that is exactly why I'm wondering if we'll hear more about that. I must confess that I would be rather eager to see a headline saying "Linus Voids SCO's Linux License" ... I can only wonder how SCO would spin that, since they seem to be selling something they do not own ...
Not really. Apparently, they don't even run Linux (at least, not any more)! See also the Groklaw story which just went up about this (it's the one about how there's a lot of FUD today).
Microsoft claims here that they considered Linux, but came back to Microsoft products in the end.
My what curious press releases these folks appear in...
[From Groklaw]
Sadly, that last link seems to be slashdotted already via Groklaw. The old "too many connections" PHP error. Heh.
I was apparently a bit late in submitting this article, but I have to wonder, would this action not terminate SCO's license to Linux under Section 4 of the GNU GPL?
Section 4 reads:
Of course, IANAL.
Some, no doubt, but for those too young to, I suggest you read my sig (or if you have sigs off, just go to consoleclassix.com :P and you can play all the NES games you want for free online, if there's a cart available).
To be fair, with an insecure path (what? why shouldn't I have . in my path, I hate typing ./whatever) part of that can be a problem with Linux.
.exe") to do their best to keep you from noticing them. And there are several things like BMPs, what with all those who still have IE5 [like me, who won't USE it...] and a number of other random media players of sorts have had buffer problems of various sorts on all platforms...
...)
...
Of course, you don't usually chmod +x things you don't expect to run... Moreover, there's another problem you didn't mention with windows--where they add all the extra spaces (e.g. "foo.jpg
But if we really want to do something, I'd say to ignore the PR and BS (redundant, I know...) and work at helping all the major distros be more secure by default, as well as more security hardening features (probably lots to copy from OpenBSD, Bastille is good, SELinux is nifty when properly configured, etc.
Substance usually wins out over fluff, in the end, after all. That's part of why Linux got where it is today, after all--a few good features early to attract more developers, to write more useful features, etc.
I take it you don't know about the reason for the "sosumi" sound on Macs... ;]
I'll let someone more industrious (and who knows the story better than I), explain it should they care to.
This is not the way to form a consensus.
That will only fragment the good code into unusable pieces, far less useful than they could be as a whole.
The proper way to go about this is to bring the Open methodology to the licensing as well as the software. If we can negotiate to work together, we can avoid needless fragmentation and forking, and work together, rather than at cross purposes.
The best thing to do is remain clam, discuss these issues rationally, and work to come to some mutually agreeable understanding here. Not to do so would make no sense...
I think he's talking about the $699 one, but I confess to having not explored that link very far.
... creative ... interpretations of various 'facts' ... etc.)
I do know that several people have reported calling up SCO and being unable to buy anything, however. I'm not sure if they tried the website too, or what.
That said, I do wonder about the legal angle of it. SCO is rather two-faced, so if the kernel developers try to sue them, they'll probably just try to weasel out of it, and who knows what they'll claim. Whereas if you actually were to buy from them, I'm sure they'd make you indemnify them in all sorts of ways (e.g. various provisions about not being able to sue them even if they don't own what you just licensed, various clauses wherein you agree with their
It's not like they're above lying to judges here. Either that or they didn't mean what they said. Or something. All I know is that they constantly seem to contradict themselves publically and will spin the facts in their favor depending on which questions they are being asked...
Take a look at this article from a week or two ago on Groklaw.
PJ compares SCO's worst case scenarios with those of RedHat, IBM & co.
It makes for much more interesting reading than many of the other legal filings I've read... Note how in that article, SCO describes quite a few ways in which its business could fold, compared to rather bland statements that something bad might happen in the off chance SCO ever actually prevailed with some bit of their case.
It's kind of fun to read all the various ways in which SCO might be liquidated, though. I wonder which of them will happen?
I tend to agree. Personally, I would like to have more distros leave most things off by default (and give you some sort of warning/information about how to learn to secure it if you turn it on during installation).
If they want to run anything (including SSH, I'd have to say, since it was recently vulnerable), they should know that it's on and then (hopefully) learn how to maintain it in good working order.
I'm sure there are plenty of other good bits of hardening that could (and probably should) be done. It would be nice if more distros did them.
That said, I'm not particularly impressed by the survey. At most, it proves that running a computer when you have no idea how it works can leave you vulnerable, unless someone has left you with something more secure by default... Duh. But it's still a good idea to help all the distros out there harden things up, so we don't let so many newbies get burnt on their first try.
I don't really know, but Fravia did put up some of +ORC's tutorials here.
Google is your friend.