Don't get me started on government intervention, or initially well-meant licensing legislation. It'll be your worst nightmare, you'll remember the days of BillG and Windows fondly, if the governments ever get serious about that kind of control
If the government starts regulating software and those who write it, it will be because of "BillG and Windows", and believe me, they won't be remembered fondly -- indeed, they will likely profit from government-mandated *trusted computing*.
Most of the worm/virus issues exist b/c of code written in c rather than in a safer high level oop language where you don't get buffer overflows, sloppy use of pointers, etc.
Yeah, Ada (the safe language) worked so well, and that's why it's in such widespread use. Please don't try to turn poor programming practices (or Microsoft's API) into a language holy war. It seems the biggest problem is really trojans that don't need buffer overflows or other trick exploits -- a little VB script in an email is enough.
Most of the problems with worms/viruses, etc, are due to sloppy sysadmin practices. Of course, with better code sysadmins could be lazy, but that isn't necessarily the goal.
Well, which is it that's causing "most" of the problems, C or sysadmins? Even the best sysadmin can't do a thing about new trojans in email if the company insists on using a Microsoft email client.
The real reason that "most of the worm/virus issues exist" is the lack of forethought and a real product-security policy in Redmond. Unfortunately, the lack of responsibility at Microsoft is likely to result in regulation for all of us because most of our so-called lawmakers are unable or unwilling to distinguish between Microsoft and software in general.
He is, of course, talking about the Book of Genesis, which describes the advent of the holy System V UNIX and the holy UNIX Development Methods that were used in some detail. It then relates how dominion of the UNIX was given to the Prophet McBride and the tribe of SCO. It is all restricted IP, so I'm not surprised that you haven't read it.:)
I would also like to bring up the sodomy laws that were rather recently put down as unconstitutional. So, it took a couple of gay men actually getting ARRESTED for having gay sex in their gay home, for the laws to get fixed!
So you're saying that when the law finally catches a software company with a big EULA cornholing a software user, the activity will be legalized by the SCOTUS? I don't think that's what we want.:)
On the other hand, SGI without IRIX is like a car without seats; the car is still there, but where do you sit?
Are you sure? SGI doesn't seem to be putting much effort into IRIX lately. They aren't responding to change requests, and Oracle has dropped support for IRIX. It's only rumors, but I've heard talk of SGI moving to Linux at some point in the future.
If the attempt to public domain the whole of SCO fails, and the do win their lawsuit or get some sort of footing to start enforcing their claims on the end users, then the stock price will skyrocket. The SCO stock could then be sold, and the profits used to pay the licensing fees.
You don't really believe that people who have enjoyed the free and libre and customizable OS that is Linux (GNU/Linux, whatever) would really pay license fees for a binary to SCO, do you? If SCO won, I would go back to 2.2 or start praying for the Hurd to come home. I know, you just had a weak moment.:)
I hope they catch the people doing the DoS attack [probably as they brag how cool the attack is over some l33t IRC channelz] and beat their heads into the ground.
Sure, script kiddies deserve whatever knocks they get, but has anyone really shown these are DDoS attacks? What if they are just good, old-fashioned slashdottings? Slashdot often carries two SCO stories a day, and even if the main article doesn't have a link to SCO, one of the links or comments will. I know, I click on them (several times) just to let them know I'm still thinking of them.:)
SCO maybe "evil" but you gotta think before you act!
SCO has threatened to sue me unless I fork over hundreds of dollars without providing any evidence to back up their claims. I agree, scripted DDoS is a Very Bad Thing, but I don't feel guilty at all about sucking up their bandwidth by viewing their web pages with the reload button. They asked for my attention, and they got it.
The example in this thread were CS professors. Computer Science professors who want to get rich can do things that are much easier than writing textbooks. For example, leaving academia.
No doubt. However, I had a CS prof in a master's course who wrote several texts while a professor and then went to work for the company that published his textbooks. Then he went back to teaching and requiring people to buy his books. Careful you don't cut yourself with Occam's razor, while I continue to have faith in human nature.
I surely dont miss makefiles, gdb, etc. . .
You can still compile from a makefile on the command line with a million and one/switches, if you really want to. . .
IMO, Visual Studio's MSFT's best product by far. I'd love to see something equivalent come out for OSS, it'd draw in a ton of developers like me who have a desire to contribute and love to code, but just dont see why they should spend their spare time being annoyed with trivial shit.
Mod that up +Interesting. Apparently one man's freedom to control the accurate compilation of their code is another's trivial sh*t. To each his own, but I think drag-and-drool programmers (who can't code without a mouse and the overlord's permission) are not yet needed by OSS. We're still learning, so please bear with us.
MS will get the 150K + interest back when the University has to upgrade x1000 pc and servers every 2 years.
You would think University professors would think a bit more about the big picture.....
Never mind I take that back, having known a few, I can see how this might work......
Agreed, but this has already been happening for years, so why is it suddenly news on Slashdot? Six or seven years ago, my old alma mater switched the networks and course material to mostly Microsoft-specific. *Unix* became a single 300-level class with a lab. In the so-called computer labs, the MS machines had to be completely restored with each login because of the constant viruses, but they called it progress. (And I love your sig -- ain't it the truth!)
Gee, for some reason, profs who write textbooks tend to think that their textbook is the best on the subject.
Imagine that!
Gee, imagine that professors who write textbooks and get royalties might have an ulterior motive in requiring the text for their classes. Nah, nevermind -- I was just being cynical, it couldn't happen in real life.
You mean to tell me there's something in this for me when I pick textbooks for my CS classes? All along I've been trying to choose the textbooks that I felt covered the material the best. . .
Okay, you seem to be one of the good guys. One of my old CS profs (one who looked for relevant material that was affordable) told me he had to jump (and high) to get the campus book store to carry his choices. In one class he taught, he offered handouts for the first week until students could find a source for the cheap paperback textbook that the campus bookstore wouldn't carry. I still have that book, and it's far more useful than the texts I *rented* from the campus bookstore.
... and here I was hoping that threatening them with barratry was like threatening them with some form of medieval torture like garroting or bastinado.
Considering SCO's allies, I think defenestration would be more appropriate.
I wish Slashdot would run a Slashdot semi-interview with sCO. Everybody submit questions as usual, we mod them as usual, we send them to Darl McBride as usual.
I like the idea, although I'd change your first question to read:
You announced that you are shipping Samba 3.0, which is GPL licensed software. Do you accept the GPL as a valid license for Samba? If not, how does distributing copyrighted code without permission fit in with SCO's views on IP?
. . . using the same new math he used to determine that there were over a million lines of copied code in the Linux kernel.
No, no. That's a common misconception. SCO is not claiming that all million plus lines are copied. The million plus lines are *infringing*. Only 80 lines (consisting of comments) are "copied", but infringement is like an STD. When one function calls the infringing function, it also becomes infringing. The newly infringing function calls two more functions, and well, you get the idea. With all the functioning going on in the kernel, it's an instant epidemic of infringement. So, hopefully, you can now see why the kernel cannot be cleansed and we must all pay dearly for functioning with the SCO code. IBM had nothing to do with this comment -- the devil made me do it.:)
Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt.
I can't recall Mandrake ever begging their users for donations. They have been very honest about their recent financial plight. They do encourage satisfied users to join the Mandrake Club, and for the membership fee, you get access to reduced rates on commercial programs, additional download access, special RPMs, and a user name. Hey, people subscribe to Slashdot for less.:) And Mandrake did go bankrupt. The last I checked, they were about ready to leave bankruptcy protection and resume normal operations.
Mandrake's problem had nothing to do with their Linux operation -- that has beeen profitable all along. The problem came during the dot.bomb bubble when IT companies were supposed to generate triple-digit stock price increases from thin air. Mandrake got saddled with a new "world-class" management (think McBride and Sontag) that got them involved in worthless deals. The difference is that when the Mandrake people saw what was happening, they axed their new leaders. Hopefully it was a suitably bloody thing carried out by programmers with staplers and followed by a BBQ pork dinner (with staple removers), but I'll never know. At any rate, they have been paying off tons of debt they were obligated to by their former (short-term) management. Their Linux operation seems sound and their management now far wiser.
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
There are some small companies like HP that also offer Mandrake.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me started on government intervention, or initially well-meant licensing legislation. It'll be your worst nightmare, you'll remember the days of BillG and Windows fondly, if the governments ever get serious about that kind of control
If the government starts regulating software and those who write it, it will be because of "BillG and Windows", and believe me, they won't be remembered fondly -- indeed, they will likely profit from government-mandated *trusted computing*.
Most of the worm/virus issues exist b/c of code written in c rather than in a safer high level oop language where you don't get buffer overflows, sloppy use of pointers, etc.
Yeah, Ada (the safe language) worked so well, and that's why it's in such widespread use. Please don't try to turn poor programming practices (or Microsoft's API) into a language holy war. It seems the biggest problem is really trojans that don't need buffer overflows or other trick exploits -- a little VB script in an email is enough.
Most of the problems with worms/viruses, etc, are due to sloppy sysadmin practices. Of course, with better code sysadmins could be lazy, but that isn't necessarily the goal.
Well, which is it that's causing "most" of the problems, C or sysadmins? Even the best sysadmin can't do a thing about new trojans in email if the company insists on using a Microsoft email client. The real reason that "most of the worm/virus issues exist" is the lack of forethought and a real product-security policy in Redmond. Unfortunately, the lack of responsibility at Microsoft is likely to result in regulation for all of us because most of our so-called lawmakers are unable or unwilling to distinguish between Microsoft and software in general.
Well, they give all managers lobotomies. How else would they be able to stand going to meetings for 7 hours a day.
That could also explain some of the decisions that come out of those meetings.
What "secrets" are you talking about?
He is, of course, talking about the Book of Genesis, which describes the advent of the holy System V UNIX and the holy UNIX Development Methods that were used in some detail. It then relates how dominion of the UNIX was given to the Prophet McBride and the tribe of SCO. It is all restricted IP, so I'm not surprised that you haven't read it. :)
I would also like to bring up the sodomy laws that were rather recently put down as unconstitutional. So, it took a couple of gay men actually getting ARRESTED for having gay sex in their gay home, for the laws to get fixed!
So you're saying that when the law finally catches a software company with a big EULA cornholing a software user, the activity will be legalized by the SCOTUS? I don't think that's what we want. :)
On the other hand, SGI without IRIX is like a car without seats; the car is still there, but where do you sit?
Are you sure? SGI doesn't seem to be putting much effort into IRIX lately. They aren't responding to change requests, and Oracle has dropped support for IRIX. It's only rumors, but I've heard talk of SGI moving to Linux at some point in the future.
SCO might be threatening to sue you, but it seems to me they've already got you wasting your time.
And we're both reading SCO stories on Slashdot and posting comments about same, and you're talking about someone wasting time? :)
If the attempt to public domain the whole of SCO fails, and the do win their lawsuit or get some sort of footing to start enforcing their claims on the end users, then the stock price will skyrocket. The SCO stock could then be sold, and the profits used to pay the licensing fees.
You don't really believe that people who have enjoyed the free and libre and customizable OS that is Linux (GNU/Linux, whatever) would really pay license fees for a binary to SCO, do you? If SCO won, I would go back to 2.2 or start praying for the Hurd to come home. I know, you just had a weak moment. :)
I hope they catch the people doing the DoS attack [probably as they brag how cool the attack is over some l33t IRC channelz] and beat their heads into the ground.
Sure, script kiddies deserve whatever knocks they get, but has anyone really shown these are DDoS attacks? What if they are just good, old-fashioned slashdottings? Slashdot often carries two SCO stories a day, and even if the main article doesn't have a link to SCO, one of the links or comments will. I know, I click on them (several times) just to let them know I'm still thinking of them. :)
SCO maybe "evil" but you gotta think before you act!
SCO has threatened to sue me unless I fork over hundreds of dollars without providing any evidence to back up their claims. I agree, scripted DDoS is a Very Bad Thing, but I don't feel guilty at all about sucking up their bandwidth by viewing their web pages with the reload button. They asked for my attention, and they got it.
That's exactly what I was telling Timothy Leary when I spoke to him the other day, and he agreed completely.
I would like to know what warrants a RC release story on the front of Slashdot.
There is no SCO news today, and Slashdot is trying to provoke some crazy press release about Linux RCs from the Stolen Code Organization.
The example in this thread were CS professors. Computer Science professors who want to get rich can do things that are much easier than writing textbooks. For example, leaving academia.
No doubt. However, I had a CS prof in a master's course who wrote several texts while a professor and then went to work for the company that published his textbooks. Then he went back to teaching and requiring people to buy his books. Careful you don't cut yourself with Occam's razor, while I continue to have faith in human nature.
I surely dont miss makefiles, gdb, etc. . . You can still compile from a makefile on the command line with a million and one /switches, if you really want to. . .
IMO, Visual Studio's MSFT's best product by far. I'd love to see something equivalent come out for OSS, it'd draw in a ton of developers like me who have a desire to contribute and love to code, but just dont see why they should spend their spare time being annoyed with trivial shit.
Mod that up +Interesting. Apparently one man's freedom to control the accurate compilation of their code is another's trivial sh*t. To each his own, but I think drag-and-drool programmers (who can't code without a mouse and the overlord's permission) are not yet needed by OSS. We're still learning, so please bear with us.
If your choices are "use J++ for the Java courses" or double tuition for Comp Sci students, I say go with J++.
Okay, and Java would be more expensive because it's free (as in free beer, which all students will be able to evaluate correctly)?
MS will get the 150K + interest back when the University has to upgrade x1000 pc and servers every 2 years. .....
You would think University professors would think a bit more about the big picture
Never mind I take that back, having known a few, I can see how this might work......
Agreed, but this has already been happening for years, so why is it suddenly news on Slashdot? Six or seven years ago, my old alma mater switched the networks and course material to mostly Microsoft-specific. *Unix* became a single 300-level class with a lab. In the so-called computer labs, the MS machines had to be completely restored with each login because of the constant viruses, but they called it progress. (And I love your sig -- ain't it the truth!)
Gee, for some reason, profs who write textbooks tend to think that their textbook is the best on the subject.
Imagine that!
Gee, imagine that professors who write textbooks and get royalties might have an ulterior motive in requiring the text for their classes. Nah, nevermind -- I was just being cynical, it couldn't happen in real life.
You mean to tell me there's something in this for me when I pick textbooks for my CS classes? All along I've been trying to choose the textbooks that I felt covered the material the best. . .
Okay, you seem to be one of the good guys. One of my old CS profs (one who looked for relevant material that was affordable) told me he had to jump (and high) to get the campus book store to carry his choices. In one class he taught, he offered handouts for the first week until students could find a source for the cheap paperback textbook that the campus bookstore wouldn't carry. I still have that book, and it's far more useful than the texts I *rented* from the campus bookstore.
How many of those books were written by faculty members?
If memory serves, most of my text books were written by faculty members somewhere. Just a thought.
Considering SCO's allies, I think defenestration would be more appropriate.
I wish Slashdot would run a Slashdot semi-interview with sCO. Everybody submit questions as usual, we mod them as usual, we send them to Darl McBride as usual.
I like the idea, although I'd change your first question to read:
You announced that you are shipping Samba 3.0, which is GPL licensed software. Do you accept the GPL as a valid license for Samba? If not, how does distributing copyrighted code without permission fit in with SCO's views on IP?
. . . using the same new math he used to determine that there were over a million lines of copied code in the Linux kernel.
No, no. That's a common misconception. SCO is not claiming that all million plus lines are copied. The million plus lines are *infringing*. Only 80 lines (consisting of comments) are "copied", but infringement is like an STD. When one function calls the infringing function, it also becomes infringing. The newly infringing function calls two more functions, and well, you get the idea. With all the functioning going on in the kernel, it's an instant epidemic of infringement. So, hopefully, you can now see why the kernel cannot be cleansed and we must all pay dearly for functioning with the SCO code. IBM had nothing to do with this comment -- the devil made me do it. :)
If I posted link to nine-month-old news, I'd do it as an AC, too. How about something a little more recent?
"pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor" does not necessarily equal server, does it?
Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt.
I can't recall Mandrake ever begging their users for donations. They have been very honest about their recent financial plight. They do encourage satisfied users to join the Mandrake Club, and for the membership fee, you get access to reduced rates on commercial programs, additional download access, special RPMs, and a user name. Hey, people subscribe to Slashdot for less. :) And Mandrake did go bankrupt. The last I checked, they were about ready to leave bankruptcy protection and resume normal operations.
Mandrake's problem had nothing to do with their Linux operation -- that has beeen profitable all along. The problem came during the dot.bomb bubble when IT companies were supposed to generate triple-digit stock price increases from thin air. Mandrake got saddled with a new "world-class" management (think McBride and Sontag) that got them involved in worthless deals. The difference is that when the Mandrake people saw what was happening, they axed their new leaders. Hopefully it was a suitably bloody thing carried out by programmers with staplers and followed by a BBQ pork dinner (with staple removers), but I'll never know. At any rate, they have been paying off tons of debt they were obligated to by their former (short-term) management. Their Linux operation seems sound and their management now far wiser.
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
There are some small companies like HP that also offer Mandrake.