Contrary to the slashbots, I think it's highly unlikely that this market manipulation is SCO, Canopy, Microsoft, Sun or anyone else. It's probably just independant brokers who know a goldrush when they see one. Just like VA Linux, etc.
I definitely understand the tendency to ignore all the paranoid ravings you hear on/., because I do too. That said, there are some legit reasons to give this one consideration. First, Forbes is typically quite the conservative mag, and I doubt they'd even have printed that had it not passed the laugh test to outsiders. Second, this scheme is simliar to what canopy has done before by Canopy. I'm generally skeptical, and I will bank on this being a pump-n-dump or similar scheme by SCO/Canopy. This is their MO.
The Microsoft angle is more farfetched, but not completely implausible. MS paid a *lot* of money for SCO licenses that were somewhere between unnecessary and worthless to MS. Also, lately, SCO has been making strange offers about discounts to people who make the switch to any non-linux system, and saying it in a way that all but screams "Windows."
Bottom line, I'd bet on Canopy running this scam. I'd wait for some more bookkeeping before I listened to the MS angle.
The problem is figuring out whether a system based on survival and greed can be sustained without wreaking havoc around the world. There's no rule that says that survival and greed will make for a comfortable or pleasant world either. When it goes far enough and enough people are pissed off, things get ugly.
Admittedly the western world uses a ton of resources, but it also uses them as cleanly as possible on a per Joule basis. Check out coal fired plants in China sometime. The air pollution in cities like Beijing and Mexico City makes LA look like a dream. And recall what the Soviet system did to East Berlin compared to west, not even considering what it did to the Ukraine.
I would say the "capitalist with controls" western nations are ecologically lighter than the third world in every way except the total amount of greenhouse gas produced.
Capatilism will destroy itself, it can only saturate so far before boom. Thats the day I cannot wait for:D
Malthus beat you to that line, and he's been waiting something like 150 years.
Any system that rewards the most innate human instinct (survival and greed) will always be the most efficient. If that ain't capitalism, I don't know what is.
I live in philadelphia. I would not feel safe without a land line in the house. Two cell phones or not.
If I lived in Philly, I wouldn't feel safe without a howitzer, an M-60, and booby-trapped windows. I'd wear kevlar to bed. I'd crouch-roll on the way to the bathroom.
You misunderstood me. I'm sorry if I was not clear. Any potential code that WAS included in Linux would be removed and rewritten if it were in fact unlawfully added to Linux.
Assuming there's anything in there, right. But by "rewrite" I hope you mean a complete cleanroom implementation, because otherwise it really is illegal. From what I'm told, there's nothing left in 2.5 (and I think 2.4) that was even remotely SCO (even that via old BSD).
I'm also sorry that modding is an issue for you. I participated in the discussion, and that is all I did so please accept my apologies if my opinion including the use of GPL and "vindication" somehow wasn't valid.
Sorry, that was a joke not directed at you - rather at the RMS-head mods. Sorry if that wasn't clear, no offense intended.
SC0 desperately does not want the alleged stolen code to enter the public record because we all know it will be 3.2 seconds before any code is re-written in the kernel even if it's IBM doing the re-write.
No it won't. Dunno where you been, but half the point is that SCO's implementation really sucks. SMP is better in linux already. Probably JFS too. I daresay IBM won't be putting shit in there.
Not to mention they would then be giving SCO grounds for a *legitimate* suit.
There's a reason that SCO's biggest customers are no-names like fast-food restaurants. It's because, ironically, it's their product that isn't ready for operations where a high degree of scalability is required.
But I like how you god modded to +5 for mentioning "GPL" and "vindication" in the same sentence. I'll have to remember that one.
A lot of civil trials do work like this, and I'm not quite sure why this is frontpage worthy.
I think that parallel is the whole point. Most of the lawyers who work in that fashion are the type that advertise during daytime TV ("Have you been injured in an auto accident? On the job? Have you slipped and fallen in a Burger King? Then call XXXXXX. He gets you Justice!"). Not your most reputable lawyers.
Honestly, I used to have more respect for Boies. Law firms are allowed to turn down cases, and now his firm is just like all the other ambulance chasers. When you're working for a client whose net worth is miniscule compared to the extortion they're attempting, you don't find reputable companies.
And all that ignores the blatant pump-n-dump angle - if SCO settles for $1, Boies' firm gets the $50M for FUDding the stock up. Sound legit to you? Doesn't to me.
all they will end up doing is making advertisers rely more on nuiscance ads, like popunder and flash ads(shudder).
Most likely, all will happen is that ads will be dynamically chached locally upon demand and then served through PHP or similar means. That way the ads will have the same domain as the main page. Also, don't name your banners things like "banner" or "ad" so you can fool the keyword search. Shouldn't be hard.
This isn't the first time that a manager has felt himself becoming powerless by being cut out of the loop, and is now reacting badly. Shock horror, "his" teccies can now modify the code freely themselves, he is losing control, it's the ultimate catastrophe.
He's the manager of tech outreach or somesuch. We get all bent out of shape because we see this and assume some well-known prof at Princeton is shitting on open source. But this guy isn't a prof. He's a dipshit who (according to other posts) teaches classes on web portals. Wow. That's impressive.
It also means that corporations like MS probably have their pockets open to him knowing he can use his position to give them free press under the Princeton banner.
So what I'm saying is, this is nobody. Assume this is just some asshat troll who wouldn't get the press he's getting without trading on Princeton's name, a school he does NOT represent as an academic. He hasn't published shit in a peer-reviewed journal as far as I can tell. If anyone else wants to check, his middle initial is J - there are a couple of other "H Strauss"'s at Princeton that are actual Prof's.
In short, ignore the turd.
His argument is an interesting point of view though. It sounds to me
like he's saying microsoft doesn't need perfect code because people
can just install firewalls. What if the code in the firewalls in turn
isn't perfect though? Doesn't that leave us in an insecure position
again? What about the e-mail scanning software? What if it misses a
virus? Shouldn't you have layers of protection, instead of an outer
layer of protection and a soft underbelly?
I'd say two things to him. First, the only completely effective firewall is the one where I unplug my computer. Assuming you leave a port open, that's a possibility for an attack. Second, all a hacker needs is a proper buffer-overflow in a user program that employs that port, and it's fun time. I'm sure Internet Exploder etc wouldn't apply there. No, not at all.
He has a point in that firewalls have to be a large part of the solution. However, the idea that I can write the world's shittiest code and this is OK because I have a firewall is ludicrous.
Naturally, all this assumes you don't buy your firewall software from MS. That would be pretty funny.
Hate to break it to you pal, but 98 is no longer officially supported by MS either. It's a shame, because if ANY OS MS ever made needed constant support, it was that POS.
First, agreed - damn, it sucked. I still run it one one machine for games, and it's a real treat. I hadn't checked for a while, but it appears they have indeed stopped as of a few months ago. Still, that's pretty good - and it's better than suspending support of an OS *months* after it ceases to be the newest OS. That's inexcusable.
Gates: Damnit! Apple stole our idea to no longer support old versions of Operating Systems and force everyone to upgrade! Lawyer #1, isn't that illegal? Let's get a suit together!
As much as I hate to admit it, at least MS supports more than two years' worth of versions. They still support back to 98. This is a very bad move by apple - if your security support in any way makes MS look *good*, you've got problems.
With as much as Macs do cost, great support should be something taken for granted.
And before the flames fly, like they always do, I do not use and cannot stand MScrap.
...that it's piracy that gives them their monopoly. Piracy is equivalent to unintentional price dumping. Ignoring most piracy is the smartest thing MS could do, but they won't. And like you, I sit back and laugh.
I suppose VietNam will be, literally and figuratively, Microsoft's "VietNam.";) God, the irony.
The point of researching these things is to not get caught with your pants down when someone else invents it. Now that this strain of smallpox has been developed, the scientists can determine how to protect against it.
I don't necessarily have a problem with doing the research, but the publishing of it might not be so kosher.
Sounds like a couple of researchers were out to make a name for themselves through Jerry Springer-style shock-value research. Seems a bit unprofessional to me.
How about any licensings that violates or circumvents a persons constitutional rights (US)?
Any contract whose terms are not legal is null. So I think that's already the case.
Note that there is a difference between someone waiving their rights and inalienable rights being violated. In any contract there is give and take - for example, in exchange for payment I give up some specific rights (like working for my employer's competition on the side, for instance). However, I couldn't sign a contract making me a slave. That's not legal.
But if these data were recorded on floppies, and stacked up to the moon n times, how many VWs would it take to carry those floppies to the stack site?
...how many golf balls falling on said stack it would take to knock it over. And if you laid all the bits in the data side by side, I wonder how many times it would go around the earth?
I wonder how many words a motion picture is worth?
Looks like 599, assuming said motion picture is a complete rotting turd. Thanks for gems like this one, MPAA!
Review: 'Gigli' is really, really bad
It's better than 'Swept Away,' for what it's worth.
By Paul Clinton
CNN Reviewer
Saturday, August 2, 2003 Posted: 12:13 AM EDT (0413 GMT)
OK, so "Gigli" is not the worst film in years. That dubious title still goes to "Swept Away," or maybe "Freddy Got Fingered." But "Gigli" is still a huge waste of celluloid.
In Hollywood, it's all about "what have you done lately," and despite such successes as "Scent of a Woman," "Midnight Run" and "Beverly Hills Cop," writer/director/producer Martin Brest has done nothing that can make up for this ill-conceived mess.
If miscasting was a crime, this movie would be proof of a felony. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez fit their characters like a glove -- if the glove in question belonged to O.J. Simpson.
Affleck plays a low-level mob enforcer named Larry Gigli (pronounced like "really") assigned to kidnap a mentally challenged young man, Brian (think Raymond in "Rainman"), played amazingly well by Justin Bartha in his feature film debut. Affleck's real-life lady love, Lopez (they met during the filming of this movie), plays Ricki, another mob enforcer hired to keep an eye on Gigli.
Insult upon insult
It seems Brian's brother is a powerful federal prosecutor who is after a mob boss, played by Al Pacino. The plan is for the prosecutor to drop the charges against the gangster in order to get his brother back safe and sound.
Say what? In what universe?
Of course, Ricki and Larry fight like cats and dogs and hate each other from the get-go -- a sure sign that they'll be under the sheets by the second reel. And they are, despite the fact that Ricki is a lesbian.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Ben Affleck, who already did this in "Chasing Amy," is at it again. He's become "Benny the lesbian changer," the new secret weapon for the religious right. In all fairness, the ending was changed at the last minute after massive negative audience reactions in test screenings. This, however, is only the final insult after a film full of them.
There were obviously many changes made during the making of this cinematic train wreck. The story is all over the place: there is one really strange scene with Christopher Walken playing a cop, and then we never see him again. He's on the cutting room floor.
Wishing he were there too is Pacino, who appears in only one embarrassing scene.
Beyond the cringe
But the award for the most cringe-inducing moment goes to Lopez, for a scene in which she stretches out on the floor in every sexual position known to man while debating the pros and cons of female and male anatomy. I know, it sounds hot on paper, doesn't it?
The bad guy characters become good guys with no motivation, nor any visible cause or effect. None of the scenes seem to be connected to each other in any way; the entire film feels like it was edited on an assembly line, without feeling for rhythm or nuance.
At one point, Ricki's lesbian lover breaks into their "hideout" and tries to commit suicide. After comforting her in the hospital, Ricki runs back and jumps in the sack with the "lesbian changer."
This is a comedy?
Brest showed such great promise in the 1980s with hit after hit, as mentioned above. Then, in 1998, he gave us "Meet Joe Black." Now he's given us "Gigli." He should remember that California is a "three strikes and you're out" state for criminal offenders.
The invention of plumbing was a couple of thousand of years ahead of the industrial revolution. Incidentally, electricity was also known, and most of the advances in the research of electricity was unencumbered by IP rights until Edison.
I was being facetious with the plumbing bit.
Oh, and the internet was developed using US tax payers money, just the way that most early work on computers was done by researchers using public money or working on their own WITHOUT APPLYING FOR PATENTS or otherwise retaining restrictive IP rights.
Yes, and at this time it was completely unavailable to 99.999% of the population because there were no personal computers on which to access it.
Try to guarantee all you want that Intel and Apple wouldn't do years of R&D if their competitors could steal it once they go to market, but the idea is ludicrous.
So ludicrous that I suppose they won't bother patenting their designs next time? Like hell. If they weren't protecting something of value they wouldn't bother
But most major scientific advances have not been protected by patents or copyright.
No, because they're done at Universities, not in the private sector. Science can't be patented anyway. Engineering can, and most major engineering advances ARE patented.
You point to the Polio vaccine, but the "invention" of the vaccine by Salk was often heavily criticized by other researchers as containing nothing new of substance, but being just a result of combining research already in the public domain. And in fact Albert Sabin soon developed a new vaccine that more or less superceded the Salk vaccine.Add to that that the research wasn't done by a private company, but a university and the idea that lack of IP rights would have prevented it gets ridiculous.
Go after the analysis, not just polio - I listed other ailments as well. I imagine you aren't familiar with the pharm industry, but it wouldn't exist without patents. When you invest $1B in a drug, and a generic competitor can then start making it for under a $1M, NO R&D would take place. You MIGHT get cures for the most mass-life-threatening diseases, but the idea that universities could carry on the R&D that is currently done in the private sector is absolutely laughable. I'm a chemist at a top-5 research school, so you're not trumping on this one. Lack of patent protection would KILL the pharm industry.
Bottom line is your arguments don't hold in the abstract, you're trying to fight the forest by cutting each individual tree. To win this argument, all I need is one industry in which R&D is expensive but manufacturing cheap. That's it. Your suggestion that the public sector could shoulder all necessary innovation shows your naivete in the matter - it sure as shit didn't work for the Soviets, and it wouldn't for us either.
Why do I suspect you're more motivated by ideology than actual analysis here?
You clearly don't know that Britain had 100-year patents for a while...
I clearly don't recall having supported the idea of infinite patents. I didn't and don't. Don't play strawman - just because I don't support NO patents doesn't mean I support neverending patents.
History is unambiguous on this question. Terms short enough to fit several consecutive patents into a working lifetime promote progress and innovation. Terms longer than a working lifetime stop innovation in its tracks and serve no useful purpose to society.
I completely agree. I think current patents are maybe a bit too long in certain fields. Note, however, that g'parent is supporting the notion of abolishing patents, and I stand by my original post that this would completely stifle any sort of capital intensive R&D in which barrier to entry in a market is low. This includes, specifically, pharmaceuticals.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely understand the tendency to ignore all the paranoid ravings you hear on /., because I do too. That said, there are some legit reasons to give this one consideration. First, Forbes is typically quite the conservative mag, and I doubt they'd even have printed that had it not passed the laugh test to outsiders. Second, this scheme is simliar to what canopy has done before by Canopy. I'm generally skeptical, and I will bank on this being a pump-n-dump or similar scheme by SCO/Canopy. This is their MO.
The Microsoft angle is more farfetched, but not completely implausible. MS paid a *lot* of money for SCO licenses that were somewhere between unnecessary and worthless to MS. Also, lately, SCO has been making strange offers about discounts to people who make the switch to any non-linux system, and saying it in a way that all but screams "Windows."
Bottom line, I'd bet on Canopy running this scam. I'd wait for some more bookkeeping before I listened to the MS angle.
Admittedly the western world uses a ton of resources, but it also uses them as cleanly as possible on a per Joule basis. Check out coal fired plants in China sometime. The air pollution in cities like Beijing and Mexico City makes LA look like a dream. And recall what the Soviet system did to East Berlin compared to west, not even considering what it did to the Ukraine.
I would say the "capitalist with controls" western nations are ecologically lighter than the third world in every way except the total amount of greenhouse gas produced.
Malthus beat you to that line, and he's been waiting something like 150 years.
Any system that rewards the most innate human instinct (survival and greed) will always be the most efficient. If that ain't capitalism, I don't know what is.
If I lived in Philly, I wouldn't feel safe without a howitzer, an M-60, and booby-trapped windows. I'd wear kevlar to bed. I'd crouch-roll on the way to the bathroom.
But yeah, keeping a land-line is a good start.
..."Open Source" developers bathe at least occasionally.
Just in case anyone was actually fooled by that shitty troll, the router advertises an unrelated product by the manufacturer of the router.
Features of the router belong in a manual. In fact, delivering features of the router to users instead of admins would be useless for such use anyway/
Assuming there's anything in there, right. But by "rewrite" I hope you mean a complete cleanroom implementation, because otherwise it really is illegal. From what I'm told, there's nothing left in 2.5 (and I think 2.4) that was even remotely SCO (even that via old BSD).
I'm also sorry that modding is an issue for you. I participated in the discussion, and that is all I did so please accept my apologies if my opinion including the use of GPL and "vindication" somehow wasn't valid.
Sorry, that was a joke not directed at you - rather at the RMS-head mods. Sorry if that wasn't clear, no offense intended.
No it won't. Dunno where you been, but half the point is that SCO's implementation really sucks. SMP is better in linux already. Probably JFS too. I daresay IBM won't be putting shit in there.
Not to mention they would then be giving SCO grounds for a *legitimate* suit.
There's a reason that SCO's biggest customers are no-names like fast-food restaurants. It's because, ironically, it's their product that isn't ready for operations where a high degree of scalability is required.
But I like how you god modded to +5 for mentioning "GPL" and "vindication" in the same sentence. I'll have to remember that one.
...it's gotta be global warming.
I think that parallel is the whole point. Most of the lawyers who work in that fashion are the type that advertise during daytime TV ("Have you been injured in an auto accident? On the job? Have you slipped and fallen in a Burger King? Then call XXXXXX. He gets you Justice!"). Not your most reputable lawyers.
Honestly, I used to have more respect for Boies. Law firms are allowed to turn down cases, and now his firm is just like all the other ambulance chasers. When you're working for a client whose net worth is miniscule compared to the extortion they're attempting, you don't find reputable companies.
And all that ignores the blatant pump-n-dump angle - if SCO settles for $1, Boies' firm gets the $50M for FUDding the stock up. Sound legit to you? Doesn't to me.
Most likely, all will happen is that ads will be dynamically chached locally upon demand and then served through PHP or similar means. That way the ads will have the same domain as the main page. Also, don't name your banners things like "banner" or "ad" so you can fool the keyword search. Shouldn't be hard.
He's the manager of tech outreach or somesuch. We get all bent out of shape because we see this and assume some well-known prof at Princeton is shitting on open source. But this guy isn't a prof. He's a dipshit who (according to other posts) teaches classes on web portals. Wow. That's impressive.
It also means that corporations like MS probably have their pockets open to him knowing he can use his position to give them free press under the Princeton banner.
So what I'm saying is, this is nobody. Assume this is just some asshat troll who wouldn't get the press he's getting without trading on Princeton's name, a school he does NOT represent as an academic. He hasn't published shit in a peer-reviewed journal as far as I can tell. If anyone else wants to check, his middle initial is J - there are a couple of other "H Strauss"'s at Princeton that are actual Prof's. In short, ignore the turd.
I'd say two things to him. First, the only completely effective firewall is the one where I unplug my computer. Assuming you leave a port open, that's a possibility for an attack. Second, all a hacker needs is a proper buffer-overflow in a user program that employs that port, and it's fun time. I'm sure Internet Exploder etc wouldn't apply there. No, not at all.
He has a point in that firewalls have to be a large part of the solution. However, the idea that I can write the world's shittiest code and this is OK because I have a firewall is ludicrous.
Naturally, all this assumes you don't buy your firewall software from MS. That would be pretty funny.
...the only interested one I can think of with the requisite deep pockets is....IBM. It certainly gives more to any further action by IBM though.
First, agreed - damn, it sucked. I still run it one one machine for games, and it's a real treat. I hadn't checked for a while, but it appears they have indeed stopped as of a few months ago. Still, that's pretty good - and it's better than suspending support of an OS *months* after it ceases to be the newest OS. That's inexcusable.
As much as I hate to admit it, at least MS supports more than two years' worth of versions. They still support back to 98. This is a very bad move by apple - if your security support in any way makes MS look *good*, you've got problems.
With as much as Macs do cost, great support should be something taken for granted.
And before the flames fly, like they always do, I do not use and cannot stand MScrap.
I suppose VietNam will be, literally and figuratively, Microsoft's "VietNam." ;) God, the irony.
I don't necessarily have a problem with doing the research, but the publishing of it might not be so kosher.
Sounds like a couple of researchers were out to make a name for themselves through Jerry Springer-style shock-value research. Seems a bit unprofessional to me.
What? Is that a paleontological term, or just a british one?
Honestly, someone should teach the British to speak English. ;)
Any contract whose terms are not legal is null. So I think that's already the case.
Note that there is a difference between someone waiving their rights and inalienable rights being violated. In any contract there is give and take - for example, in exchange for payment I give up some specific rights (like working for my employer's competition on the side, for instance). However, I couldn't sign a contract making me a slave. That's not legal.
Particularly the demise of the pharm indistry? You seem to have forgotten that bit.
...how many golf balls falling on said stack it would take to knock it over. And if you laid all the bits in the data side by side, I wonder how many times it would go around the earth?
Looks like 599, assuming said motion picture is a complete rotting turd. Thanks for gems like this one, MPAA!
I was being facetious with the plumbing bit.
Oh, and the internet was developed using US tax payers money, just the way that most early work on computers was done by researchers using public money or working on their own WITHOUT APPLYING FOR PATENTS or otherwise retaining restrictive IP rights.
Yes, and at this time it was completely unavailable to 99.999% of the population because there were no personal computers on which to access it.
Try to guarantee all you want that Intel and Apple wouldn't do years of R&D if their competitors could steal it once they go to market, but the idea is ludicrous.
So ludicrous that I suppose they won't bother patenting their designs next time? Like hell. If they weren't protecting something of value they wouldn't bother
But most major scientific advances have not been protected by patents or copyright.
No, because they're done at Universities, not in the private sector. Science can't be patented anyway. Engineering can, and most major engineering advances ARE patented.
You point to the Polio vaccine, but the "invention" of the vaccine by Salk was often heavily criticized by other researchers as containing nothing new of substance, but being just a result of combining research already in the public domain. And in fact Albert Sabin soon developed a new vaccine that more or less superceded the Salk vaccine.Add to that that the research wasn't done by a private company, but a university and the idea that lack of IP rights would have prevented it gets ridiculous.
Go after the analysis, not just polio - I listed other ailments as well. I imagine you aren't familiar with the pharm industry, but it wouldn't exist without patents. When you invest $1B in a drug, and a generic competitor can then start making it for under a $1M, NO R&D would take place. You MIGHT get cures for the most mass-life-threatening diseases, but the idea that universities could carry on the R&D that is currently done in the private sector is absolutely laughable. I'm a chemist at a top-5 research school, so you're not trumping on this one. Lack of patent protection would KILL the pharm industry.
Bottom line is your arguments don't hold in the abstract, you're trying to fight the forest by cutting each individual tree. To win this argument, all I need is one industry in which R&D is expensive but manufacturing cheap. That's it. Your suggestion that the public sector could shoulder all necessary innovation shows your naivete in the matter - it sure as shit didn't work for the Soviets, and it wouldn't for us either.
Why do I suspect you're more motivated by ideology than actual analysis here?
I clearly don't recall having supported the idea of infinite patents. I didn't and don't. Don't play strawman - just because I don't support NO patents doesn't mean I support neverending patents.
History is unambiguous on this question. Terms short enough to fit several consecutive patents into a working lifetime promote progress and innovation. Terms longer than a working lifetime stop innovation in its tracks and serve no useful purpose to society.
I completely agree. I think current patents are maybe a bit too long in certain fields. Note, however, that g'parent is supporting the notion of abolishing patents, and I stand by my original post that this would completely stifle any sort of capital intensive R&D in which barrier to entry in a market is low. This includes, specifically, pharmaceuticals.