Annoying as SCO is, you can understand where they're coming from.
Back in the day, Caldera used to put out a DOS variant. Microsoft pulled the same nasty stunts (deliberately preventing their apps from running on DR-DOS) that they have with Netcape and others. Most of us can sympathize a bit. The problem is that Caldera would up winning a lawsuit, ten years down the line. Suing Microsoft is probably the single most successful move Caldera has ever made.
Not surprisingly, Caldera took to the idea of running a business by suing people over IP like a duck to water. SCO bought em, just so that there's a nice big crowd of IP-related folks with little decent product around, and something like this really had to happen sooner or later.
Now, are SCO's claims ridiculous? Sure. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that they keep McBride talking, as he's doing a terrible job of handling PR. But you can certainly see why they did this.
I was talking with someone from Norway, and they were telling me that companies in the United States are far, far more litigous than companies in Norway. The reason why is not that it's easier to win lawsuits -- it's that United States cases have *insane*, *huge*, *huge* punative rewards granted -- the legal system allows it, and lawyers are free to make emotional appeals. It's the same thing that led to warnings of hot liquid on cup tops and all sorts of other stupid, pointless warnings all over. So it's a pretty good bet to run around suing folks.
The right thing to do, to avoid SCO-like situations coming up, is to make two changes. First, have a more European-style regulation of business. Be very quick to slap business down for anticompetitive actions. If Microsoft had gotten slapped down back in DR-DOS days when they started, they wouldn't have been able to get the whole thing out of control and the huge lawsuit would never have been able to form years down the road. SCO would never have become a nasty IP-wielding monster. Second, reduce punitive damages. A single person does not need a $10M punitive award because a Ford truck broke their leg in a crash to discourage Ford from making unsafe trucks.
Actually, a third good move, unrelated to this whole mess, would be to cap lawyer's fees on class action lawsuits. Otherwise, you simply get scads of class action lawsuits against big companies where the "victim" gets about a dollar, the company wastes lots of money defending itself and then loses a bunch of money, and only the lawyers do well for themselves.
Well it's a picture of one. There's no date on it. At one point, sysadmins used SCO Unixware on their computers. It could be from an archive somewhere.
but it is illogical to say that because someone has different preferences for a distro than yours, that person becomes unqualified to judge operating systems.
For instance, *clearly* Linus Torvalds doesn't know jack about operating systems because he doesn't use a microkernel-based approach.:-)
You know, it really is sad that automake and autoconf (complex, fragile, hard to learn and not particularly consistent) are the standard for ensuring portable makefiles.
GNU make is better quality-wise, but still (IMHO) far more complex than is necessary.
I'd like to point out that if you try to get a driver working in Windows and it doesn't work, any actual support is going to be limited to the traditional "reboot, reinstall, reformat".
Real, always-there, truly competent tech support costs far more than an end user is willing to pay for.
Yeah, running and learning another routing system for Linux was a bit of a pain.
Linux is great.
The routing subsystem's been redone three times in the last three stable releases, the VM subsystem two in the last two, the sound subsystem simply has three different driver architectures coexisting (I'm ignoring OSS/Linux, since it's commercial).
I mean, Linux folks don't let the grass grow under their feet, but *damn*, it can be hard to keep up from an administrative perspective.
I wish you'd tried out checkinstall. It builds packages (deb, rpm, even slack) from ordinary old tarballs. Anybody using Linux with a package-based system should have it installed.
It's not officially obsolete. It's just a lot less relevant than it once was -- it doesn't deal with a networked (I didn't say Internet-connected, just networked) environment, and doesn't address things like asymetric crypto auth that have become more important in a secure environment.
Obsolete standard, MS hasn't had a certified version of Windows for ages, but they still crow about it (probably because of how much damn money they threw into development to make C2).
It's not that surprising for movie makers to cooperate. Yes, if there's one really good movie, it will probably tend to take away from the sales of another movie, but people don't simply substitute one movie for another. If there are two good movies out, people will watch both instead of just choosing one. Good movies that are cheap to make benefits the film industry as a whole.
Earthlink's a national ISP. They have their newsserver at one point, and figure that they can get away with throttling it and eliminating some backbone traffic.
To extrapolate from the baker, you could say if you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, anything less than every edible item in the world delivered on your dinner plate would be ripping you off.
Not really. It isn't an all-you-want buffet, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's physically impossible for a person to exceed a certain size.
What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices?
You know, I'd been saying for years that commercialization was going to kill the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.
I'm a little surprised that it was this soon, though.
The next time Linux is suffering from an RPC bug that allows remote root over amost all existing installations, then I'll agree that OSS desperately needs a review time.
Until that time, OSS is kicking the shit out of commercial software WRT security. I say just let it continue doing so.
If you're intelligent enough to use something other than Windows, one would assume that you're intelligent enough to also be able to install fonts in said environment.
On usenet, questions are answered by folks who typically know the answer rather than the pure drivel and conjecture that we are seeing more on Slashdot....you say as you post to Slashdot...
Slashdot Mirror
But AS/400 is not something we usually learn at CS school.
I hope not. Managing an AS/400 would be an IT job, not a CS one.
Annoying as SCO is, you can understand where they're coming from.
Back in the day, Caldera used to put out a DOS variant. Microsoft pulled the same nasty stunts (deliberately preventing their apps from running on DR-DOS) that they have with Netcape and others. Most of us can sympathize a bit. The problem is that Caldera would up winning a lawsuit, ten years down the line. Suing Microsoft is probably the single most successful move Caldera has ever made.
Not surprisingly, Caldera took to the idea of running a business by suing people over IP like a duck to water. SCO bought em, just so that there's a nice big crowd of IP-related folks with little decent product around, and something like this really had to happen sooner or later.
Now, are SCO's claims ridiculous? Sure. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that they keep McBride talking, as he's doing a terrible job of handling PR. But you can certainly see why they did this.
I was talking with someone from Norway, and they were telling me that companies in the United States are far, far more litigous than companies in Norway. The reason why is not that it's easier to win lawsuits -- it's that United States cases have *insane*, *huge*, *huge* punative rewards granted -- the legal system allows it, and lawyers are free to make emotional appeals. It's the same thing that led to warnings of hot liquid on cup tops and all sorts of other stupid, pointless warnings all over. So it's a pretty good bet to run around suing folks.
The right thing to do, to avoid SCO-like situations coming up, is to make two changes. First, have a more European-style regulation of business. Be very quick to slap business down for anticompetitive actions. If Microsoft had gotten slapped down back in DR-DOS days when they started, they wouldn't have been able to get the whole thing out of control and the huge lawsuit would never have been able to form years down the road. SCO would never have become a nasty IP-wielding monster. Second, reduce punitive damages. A single person does not need a $10M punitive award because a Ford truck broke their leg in a crash to discourage Ford from making unsafe trucks.
Actually, a third good move, unrelated to this whole mess, would be to cap lawyer's fees on class action lawsuits. Otherwise, you simply get scads of class action lawsuits against big companies where the "victim" gets about a dollar, the company wastes lots of money defending itself and then loses a bunch of money, and only the lawyers do well for themselves.
Well it's a picture of one. There's no date on it. At one point, sysadmins used SCO Unixware on their computers. It could be from an archive somewhere.
but it is illogical to say that because someone has different preferences for a distro than yours, that person becomes unqualified to judge operating systems.
:-)
For instance, *clearly* Linus Torvalds doesn't know jack about operating systems because he doesn't use a microkernel-based approach.
Said version of SuSE had an *out-of-box-vulnerable* remote root exploit? This is news to me.
You know, it really is sad that automake and autoconf (complex, fragile, hard to learn and not particularly consistent) are the standard for ensuring portable makefiles.
GNU make is better quality-wise, but still (IMHO) far more complex than is necessary.
I'd like to point out that if you try to get a driver working in Windows and it doesn't work, any actual support is going to be limited to the traditional "reboot, reinstall, reformat".
Real, always-there, truly competent tech support costs far more than an end user is willing to pay for.
Most people out there running Windows see Linux as a free suite of Microsoft software.
Yeah, running and learning another routing system for Linux was a bit of a pain.
Linux is great.
The routing subsystem's been redone three times in the last three stable releases, the VM subsystem two in the last two, the sound subsystem simply has three different driver architectures coexisting (I'm ignoring OSS/Linux, since it's commercial).
I mean, Linux folks don't let the grass grow under their feet, but *damn*, it can be hard to keep up from an administrative perspective.
I wish you'd tried out checkinstall. It builds packages (deb, rpm, even slack) from ordinary old tarballs. Anybody using Linux with a package-based system should have it installed.
It's not officially obsolete. It's just a lot less relevant than it once was -- it doesn't deal with a networked (I didn't say Internet-connected, just networked) environment, and doesn't address things like asymetric crypto auth that have become more important in a secure environment.
Windows does not have security rating, Windows 2000 service pack 3 has a rating.
Windows 2000SP3 has a remote root RPC exploit.
Ah, but no version of Linux is C2 certified! :-)
Obsolete standard, MS hasn't had a certified version of Windows for ages, but they still crow about it (probably because of how much damn money they threw into development to make C2).
It's not that surprising for movie makers to cooperate. Yes, if there's one really good movie, it will probably tend to take away from the sales of another movie, but people don't simply substitute one movie for another. If there are two good movies out, people will watch both instead of just choosing one. Good movies that are cheap to make benefits the film industry as a whole.
Earthlink's a national ISP. They have their newsserver at one point, and figure that they can get away with throttling it and eliminating some backbone traffic.
Most ISPs just suck.
Trust me, you don't have enough neighbors to pay for it.
To extrapolate from the baker, you could say if you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, anything less than every edible item in the world delivered on your dinner plate would be ripping you off.
Not really. It isn't an all-you-want buffet, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's physically impossible for a person to exceed a certain size.
What they're doing here is preventing their customers from operating servers. It's perfectly reasonable that they should want to do this: why should they provide commercial service for consumer prices?
You know, I'd been saying for years that commercialization was going to kill the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet.
I'm a little surprised that it was this soon, though.
The next time Linux is suffering from an RPC bug that allows remote root over amost all existing installations, then I'll agree that OSS desperately needs a review time.
Until that time, OSS is kicking the shit out of commercial software WRT security. I say just let it continue doing so.
If you're intelligent enough to use something other than Windows, one would assume that you're intelligent enough to also be able to install fonts in said environment.
Girlfriends have a low initial price, but a surprisingly high TCO.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Sounds vaguely homoerotic when you think about it, doesn't it?
[shrug] If they allow you to choose, they aren't PC[whatever year]-compliant.
On usenet, questions are answered by folks who typically know the answer rather than the pure drivel and conjecture that we are seeing more on Slashdot. ...you say as you post to Slashdot...
Too highbrow. This is Slashdot.