What is really needed is legislation that protects an end user's basic rights before an EULA is even drawn up - a law that states clearly that an EULA cannot revoke the very basic privileges available to all consumers (somehow software seems exempt, as vendors are able to drastically limit rights in coniving ways, such as hiding the EULA within the shrink wrap. Such under-handed techniques are not allowed in the sale of most other products).
This type of thing (what is mentioned in the article) would work, but only if a vast majority of consumers decided to join such a group. I say we find a way to protect the rights of everyone.
You have to love it when law and politics gets their claws into the ever-shady business of white hat hacking. These types of cases hit the news every once in a while. I suppose that such risks are part of the game, but what would I know? Up until last month I thought that hacking was a lot like flying through a wire-frame cityscape.
I once worked with a terrific cracker (he ended up doing time for hacking into NASA owned systems at the University of Florida - in fact, I believe that he is still incarcerated). He really knew his shit, especially when it came to invisibly manipulating Cisco equipment and covering his tracks in Unix/Linux/BSD logs. He was also somewhat of a coder. He was kind of scary in a way. It was funny to see how much the entire operation of the IT department changed once we found out how good we really was, and how much the manager started reviewing technology laws. He was on our side, our white hat, and still everyone was immensely wary of him.
Even though he effortlessly secured three large networks and found glaring problems with our state-wide backbone, he was canned out of fear. He was later found guilty of causing damages to the network after his termination, at the same time he was busted for the NASA fiasco (the FBI had been watching his movements for some time). In hindsight, I can say that our cautious approach towards him was warranted, even though it caused him obvious grief when he was employed with us.
Hell, he will be making twice my salary at McAfee or something when he gets out of prison anyways, why am I feeling bad for him?
Getting an engineer to come and help? A few Pringles cans would have been a heck of a lot cheaper. Geez, those Microsoft guys, always reinventing the wheel.
Well, throughout school (grade 1 to graduation) cursive was always discouraged. Frankly, it just looks like sloppy print, even when people with remarkable hand writing put the pen to paper. Your average person can barely draw a stick figure, and caligraphy is completely foreign. How well do you think their cursive hand writing will be?
So fancy hand writing is a lost art, big deal. All you need is print anyways. Leave cursive up to the artsy folks and hand writing hobbyists. *Handwriting is dying.
Imagine a CLIC cluster of these running a Linux-powered wi-fi access point that is used by an Apache web server that is hosting a site advocating the legal fight against SCO and the RIAA/MPAA which shares files using an open source P2P client developed at MIT or Berkely and has an Nvidia graphics card with special drivers that make increase performance under the goatse benchmark test application!
Did you embark on this project in hopes of making a profitable business? It certainly seems that way, considering that you went looking for sponsorship and even planned pay-per-incident support, showing that you were prepared to work the whole "support revenue" angle.
Now you just need to hire someone to desire a modern, more "commercially pleasing" website. =)
Verizon keeps complaining about the costs associated with this (getting themselves able to handle portable numbers with celluar phones). So, why don't they just do what every other corporation does to save money: hire half-assed tech support and software developers in foreign nations, and blame the poor state of the economy (which never hurts them, since their alarmingly high revenue stream comes from the unregulated Baby Bell status) to cut employee benefits here stateside? What's the big deal? It's a proven cost-saving method for corporations.
Excuse me, why are you telling me that Hell is hot? Why should I care?
If the UT2003 development community is as intellectual as their gaming community is, then this competition should turn out some truly compelling work. Code comments such as "// y0 dis hack here fukc u awp phag - ((COK))". Team disputes over a certain code submission or design alteration will be settled "1 on 1 in dm61a bi0tch". The Epic Games team, before walking into an audience filled with eager designers awaiting the announcement of the winners, peek their heads in and ask "FF?".
I plan on making a Slashdot mod based off of Slashdot Reloaded. All of the agent Smiths will be rendered in ASCII.
Most companies don't value tech support. Therefore, they could care less if the person trying to tell you why your hosted database is on the fritz speaks English or not. All the while, near useless management people will continue to promote themselves and make more money, while the intellectuals that built the businesses have to go look for slave-wage work in another state.
Darn, and I was planning on using this year's tax return to fund my own Indian-based software company for a year. That could have paid for like, what, 8 Indian developers?
Oh well. I can always fall back on that SCOX stock.....oh wait.....
Is he trying to prevent the media giants from preventing the sale of used DVDs, or is this current law? Because hell, I buy and trade used DVDs all the time at a legit shop: If you are ever in the Hampton Roads area (Virginia: Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Hampton, etc) stop by Xtreme Media on Diamond Springs Road in Virginia Beach. These guys sell used game systems (including the Atari 2600), old and very hard to find games for deceased systems, and a ton of Star Wars stuff, RPGs, CDs, and DVDs at amazingly low prices. They trade at very good rates - about 150% what a pawn shop would.
No, I am not a co-owner or anything, I just have never seen a store like this before, and the owner is truly righteous. They deserve all the praise they get (they are wildly popular amongst cubicle workers in the area).
Yes mister Ryanr, I have a question that demands your expertise. How do I perform what is commonly refferred to as "teh haxX0r" on the internet? And is the art of "haxX0ring" related to "hacking" in any way? I am routinely laughed out of IRC chat rooms because I am not "l33t", as they put it.
Your phone has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down
Don't forget their new NCP move to Linux
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Netware NDS (and NCP in general- Netware Core Protocol) will be sold as a service(s) to run on Linux. They also are fostering major support with Netware 7 (the kernel will be Linux based):
http://www.redhat.com/partners/press_partner_novel l.html
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0414novlinux.htm l
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,590629,00.asp
All this talk?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 3, Funny
All this talk about this technology known as SCO. It seems cool, hell, it has to be with all this Slashdot coverage. But does it run Linux?
SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It makes me take pause when I witness a company that appearently has no
ammo keep entering into so many skirmishes against esteemed
and battle proven foes. It almost makes me question the analysts that keep stating
that SCO's claims lack bite.
Would the team at SCO really keep pushing a lie, even though they know that by
doing so they will face unspeakable countersuits after the trial(s)? I think that SCO
is cleverly hiding an ace-in-the-hole, and it's going to hurt Linux and IBM badly.
This is unprecedented: no company would ever commit suicide so blatantly and openly.
I fear the worst is yet to come.
HAHA, yea right. Had ya going there, didn't I? SCOX stocks plummet
some more.......
Things like this (or at least stark criticism from investors) concerning IBM's accounting practices pop up about every couple of years. IBM always responds by releasing more information, making the requested changes, and working with their investors and/or the government to show them "see, we didn't do anything wrong."
In other words, IBM is known to play by the rules and treat investors fairly. If they were ever guilty of anything, it would be that about 6 years ago they didn't disclose as much information as they should have to investors. That's much different now.
Our service contract was with Vantive, not PeopleSoft. Our lawyers dropped the ball because they didn't plan ahead and leave room in the contract for a scenario of another company buying them out. This is an issue with closed source.
If the software was GPL, it wouldn't matter how the contract was structured, because our programmers could have fixed the code. Instead, 2 million bucks was spent.
And PeopleSoft is not liable or accountable, because all they did was gain ownership of the closed code. The agreement of assurance was specifically with Vantive. We didnt' buy the patented works itself (which wasn't an option, and People Soft refused to sell Vantive after-the-fact).
As a side note, PeopleSoft 8 is laughable. I could design a better tool using PHP-Nuke (I actually hacked up a solution that was based on PHP-nuke for real simple CRM fucntions to show that it could be done - it was ignored, of course).
Great tool for the job: High speed color scanner
Couple this baby with some freely avaiable software to make PDFs, like PixUtil from Pixel Translations (the ISIS standard), and you have a winner.
A service contract with Microsoft doesn't usually include accountability. That is a stance that Microsft usually takes very strongly: "we are not accountable" - it's "as is". "Prove that it is our fault". Besides, major Linux vendors offer the same exact type of contract that you are talking about, because that is one of their core areas of specialization: support and services, not licenses and upgrades. It's a moot point for a number of reasons, really, but a good one to bring up in this topic nonetheless.
True, the core Linux maintainers could die or quit at any time. So could a software company drop a given application or operating system. For example, my company used a CRM called Vantive that was vastly superior in terms of ease of use and custimozation compared to PeopleSoft 8. We have in-house programmers that are very adept at coding for it. But PeopleSoft bought Vantive and dis-continued it. A few bugs sprang up that required access to certain source code that we didn't have. The answer? Pay 2 million (absolutely no exagueration) for People Soft 8 and go through the process of buying better servers and changing the structure of your Oracle databases "if you need future support for a PeopleSoft CRM". And yes, we had a service contract.
But the beauty of open source insures that others will pick up where they left off. It happens with alomst every popular and useful open source project whose lead developers quit. In the case of Linux, you would have people from companies like Redhat, Suse, and IBM ready to take the lead. The costs of such a change of "power" is rarely passed on to the consumer. Also, the really good analysts do,/i> factor in the cost of hiring contractors to specialize your code.
I live in a military town, and hence know a lot of folks that work in the local military bases (from actual military personel to contractors to just plain non-affiliated civilians). I have heard many such stories.
My favorate involves moving a set of offices (used by Naval training personel, my friend is an officer and IT worker in said office) from Windows 98 and 2000 to Redhat. Yes, it is happening in a few places withing the military. Anyways, the IT staff there has been utilizing Linux and BSD for years, and decided to write up a report to outline it's effectiveness and security so that they could obtain approval to use it for all of the desktops under their control. Needless to say, they got approval with the usual stipulations (such as: some workstations demand Windows for certain software that only runs on Win32, and emulation is not an option). But, the military wanted them to also keep on hand a collection of spare Windows 2000 workstations "just in case", because "Linux is not yet proven" - that was their honest answer (why they needed entire workstations and not just a collection of "ready to go" Ghost images was a point of laughter in itself). The total: 50 workstations for a network of 200 systems. The cost of paying for those workstations and then keeping them on hand, and then paying for the Win2k clients and licenses for the next year was nearly triple the cost of moving the existing workstations over to Redhat 7.x (which was the newest RH release at the time) and hiring outside training for whatever training they might need (which didn't involve a move to Open or Star Office, because they were planning on running Microsoft Office anyways).
One of the people that "approved" the move was father-in-law for a local Microsoft sales person. Sure the plan got "approval" due to it's merits, but the contigency plan effectively killed the move.
Well, the possible use of any commodity that may be used by the government
(especially by the military) is always pitched in a structured and
lengthy write-up that examines all aspects of the commodity and it's probable
uses.
Oh wait, everything but the use of Microsoft products that is. It seems like
that gets instant approval without the need for any justification.
"Microsoft released Windows XP? OK, upgrade, forget about the costs and
everything else that such an upgrade demands - just do it - across the board. Office XP you say? OK, allocate $10,000,000 for the software, we'll worry about paying for the licenses later."
Everyone knows that the benefits of using open source products far exceeds
any benefits that can be reaped by paying a whole bunch of money for closed
source products and their associated licenses (which are arguably always more
extensive and restrictive then open source license schemes). Sure, paying $50,000,000 to upgrade your old NT servers to 2000 and your 98 desktops to either Windows 2000 or XP has it's benefits over spending $30,000,000 on Redhat and Star Office and the training. A bunch of sales people always say that such a move (upgrading Windows servers and clients and Office) has it's benefits. I just don't seem to see them. Maybe I'm too progressive, I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
This type of thing (what is mentioned in the article) would work, but only if a vast majority of consumers decided to join such a group. I say we find a way to protect the rights of everyone.
I once worked with a terrific cracker (he ended up doing time for hacking into NASA owned systems at the University of Florida - in fact, I believe that he is still incarcerated). He really knew his shit, especially when it came to invisibly manipulating Cisco equipment and covering his tracks in Unix/Linux/BSD logs. He was also somewhat of a coder. He was kind of scary in a way. It was funny to see how much the entire operation of the IT department changed once we found out how good we really was, and how much the manager started reviewing technology laws. He was on our side, our white hat, and still everyone was immensely wary of him.
Even though he effortlessly secured three large networks and found glaring problems with our state-wide backbone, he was canned out of fear. He was later found guilty of causing damages to the network after his termination, at the same time he was busted for the NASA fiasco (the FBI had been watching his movements for some time). In hindsight, I can say that our cautious approach towards him was warranted, even though it caused him obvious grief when he was employed with us.
Hell, he will be making twice my salary at McAfee or something when he gets out of prison anyways, why am I feeling bad for him?
Getting an engineer to come and help? A few Pringles cans would have been a heck of a lot cheaper. Geez, those Microsoft guys, always reinventing the wheel.
So fancy hand writing is a lost art, big deal. All you need is print anyways. Leave cursive up to the artsy folks and hand writing hobbyists. *Handwriting is dying.
Imagine a CLIC cluster of these running a Linux-powered wi-fi access point that is used by an Apache web server that is hosting a site advocating the legal fight against SCO and the RIAA/MPAA which shares files using an open source P2P client developed at MIT or Berkely and has an Nvidia graphics card with special drivers that make increase performance under the goatse benchmark test application!
Now you just need to hire someone to desire a modern, more "commercially pleasing" website. =)
That image about sums it up.
Excuse me, why are you telling me that Hell is hot? Why should I care?
PS: fist post fools
Because you could make a cool game with the licensed engine and make a ton of money.
I plan on making a Slashdot mod based off of Slashdot Reloaded. All of the agent Smiths will be rendered in ASCII.
Don't you love corporations?
Oh well. I can always fall back on that SCOX stock.....oh wait.....
No, I am not a co-owner or anything, I just have never seen a store like this before, and the owner is truly righteous. They deserve all the praise they get (they are wildly popular amongst cubicle workers in the area).
(all the porn that will be lost in those defunct datacenters)
We must establish a plan of action, and organize to save the porn.
Thank you.
Your phone has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down
Netware NDS (and NCP in general- Netware Core Protocol) will be sold as a service(s) to run on Linux. They also are fostering major support with Netware 7 (the kernel will be Linux based): http://www.redhat.com/partners/press_partner_novel l.html
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0414novlinux.htm l
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,590629,00.asp
All this talk about this technology known as SCO. It seems cool, hell, it has to be with all this Slashdot coverage. But does it run Linux?
Would the team at SCO really keep pushing a lie, even though they know that by doing so they will face unspeakable countersuits after the trial(s)? I think that SCO is cleverly hiding an ace-in-the-hole, and it's going to hurt Linux and IBM badly. This is unprecedented: no company would ever commit suicide so blatantly and openly. I fear the worst is yet to come.
HAHA, yea right. Had ya going there, didn't I? SCOX stocks plummet some more.......
PS: fist post fools
In other words, IBM is known to play by the rules and treat investors fairly. If they were ever guilty of anything, it would be that about 6 years ago they didn't disclose as much information as they should have to investors. That's much different now.
If the software was GPL, it wouldn't matter how the contract was structured, because our programmers could have fixed the code. Instead, 2 million bucks was spent.
And PeopleSoft is not liable or accountable, because all they did was gain ownership of the closed code. The agreement of assurance was specifically with Vantive. We didnt' buy the patented works itself (which wasn't an option, and People Soft refused to sell Vantive after-the-fact).
As a side note, PeopleSoft 8 is laughable. I could design a better tool using PHP-Nuke (I actually hacked up a solution that was based on PHP-nuke for real simple CRM fucntions to show that it could be done - it was ignored, of course).
Great tool for the job: High speed color scanner Couple this baby with some freely avaiable software to make PDFs, like PixUtil from Pixel Translations (the ISIS standard), and you have a winner.
True, the core Linux maintainers could die or quit at any time. So could a software company drop a given application or operating system. For example, my company used a CRM called Vantive that was vastly superior in terms of ease of use and custimozation compared to PeopleSoft 8. We have in-house programmers that are very adept at coding for it. But PeopleSoft bought Vantive and dis-continued it. A few bugs sprang up that required access to certain source code that we didn't have. The answer? Pay 2 million (absolutely no exagueration) for People Soft 8 and go through the process of buying better servers and changing the structure of your Oracle databases "if you need future support for a PeopleSoft CRM". And yes, we had a service contract.
But the beauty of open source insures that others will pick up where they left off. It happens with alomst every popular and useful open source project whose lead developers quit. In the case of Linux, you would have people from companies like Redhat, Suse, and IBM ready to take the lead. The costs of such a change of "power" is rarely passed on to the consumer. Also, the really good analysts do,/i> factor in the cost of hiring contractors to specialize your code.
My favorate involves moving a set of offices (used by Naval training personel, my friend is an officer and IT worker in said office) from Windows 98 and 2000 to Redhat. Yes, it is happening in a few places withing the military. Anyways, the IT staff there has been utilizing Linux and BSD for years, and decided to write up a report to outline it's effectiveness and security so that they could obtain approval to use it for all of the desktops under their control. Needless to say, they got approval with the usual stipulations (such as: some workstations demand Windows for certain software that only runs on Win32, and emulation is not an option). But, the military wanted them to also keep on hand a collection of spare Windows 2000 workstations "just in case", because "Linux is not yet proven" - that was their honest answer (why they needed entire workstations and not just a collection of "ready to go" Ghost images was a point of laughter in itself). The total: 50 workstations for a network of 200 systems. The cost of paying for those workstations and then keeping them on hand, and then paying for the Win2k clients and licenses for the next year was nearly triple the cost of moving the existing workstations over to Redhat 7.x (which was the newest RH release at the time) and hiring outside training for whatever training they might need (which didn't involve a move to Open or Star Office, because they were planning on running Microsoft Office anyways).
One of the people that "approved" the move was father-in-law for a local Microsoft sales person. Sure the plan got "approval" due to it's merits, but the contigency plan effectively killed the move.
Oh wait, everything but the use of Microsoft products that is. It seems like that gets instant approval without the need for any justification. "Microsoft released Windows XP? OK, upgrade, forget about the costs and everything else that such an upgrade demands - just do it - across the board. Office XP you say? OK, allocate $10,000,000 for the software, we'll worry about paying for the licenses later."
Everyone knows that the benefits of using open source products far exceeds any benefits that can be reaped by paying a whole bunch of money for closed source products and their associated licenses (which are arguably always more extensive and restrictive then open source license schemes). Sure, paying $50,000,000 to upgrade your old NT servers to 2000 and your 98 desktops to either Windows 2000 or XP has it's benefits over spending $30,000,000 on Redhat and Star Office and the training. A bunch of sales people always say that such a move (upgrading Windows servers and clients and Office) has it's benefits. I just don't seem to see them. Maybe I'm too progressive, I don't know.
PS: didn't get it...this time