UnixWare is SCO's new version of Linux, which they say they own because some of their code is in there(huh?). Even though this is completly against the GPL, they think they can sell it, at a binary only version, and not get in trouble. I see it as a put everything we got into it, and if we go down, we might as well go down big.
Ok, even though this story is a dupe, and you must have really not been on slashdot in a long time, here we go:
SCO bought all or some of the rights to liscense Unix (this is still being debated). They claim now that some of the code included in Unix System 5 has been stolen and used in the Linux kernel. This code comes down to a few main parts, at least one dealing with memory management. The linux community thinks (and I agree) that they have done nothing wrong because acutally the code was created by a third party, applied to Unix (note, not created FOR Unix), and then applied to Linux; yes, it is nearly the same code, because the same people wrote it, but they did not write it specifically for Unix. So, SCO is suing IBM, who they say put it in the Linux kernel.
How's that? Make sense? Now, just multiply the complexity by n.
This was the plan all along. The reason why the film is coming out at this time is because this is the earliest they could release it. The said that they were doing this because the cliff-hanger at the end of the second movie was so much that they would be killed if they waited the normal amount of time to release the sequel.
GOTO considered joyful On his proto-blog archive, the words and spirit of the late computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra live on, inspiring new generations of geeks.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Rachel Chalmers
July 9, 2003 | considered harmful: adj. [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the ACM," "Goto Statement Considered Harmful," fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars... use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the 'considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).
That entry in Eric Raymond's edition of the Hacker's Dictionary was my first encounter with pioneering computer scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, but thanks to the dedicated work of volunteers at the University of Texas at Austin, it was very far from my last. These volunteers maintain the massive and growing EWD archive. It's a tremendous and erudite proto-blog, the extraordinary record of an exemplary life, and it's one of my favorite places on the Web. A year after his death, a computer scientist who devoted himself to teaching people how to think is still on the podium, delivering gem after gem of insight.
Born in the Netherlands in 1930, Dijkstra was a witty and thoroughly engaging writer in his nonnative English ("I have learned to be very suspicious of ideas I cannot express well in both Dutch and English," he noted, late in life. "As nice as it is to have the union at one's disposal, it is wise to confine oneself to the intersection.")
Over a 40-year period that began in the early 1960s, Dijkstra wrote prolifically on timely and compelling topics: from his experience of the evolution of universities on both sides of the Atlantic from the post-WWII era to the beginning of the 21st century; to meditations on the science and art of teaching; to incredibly rich and detailed accounts of his own intellectual methods (don't miss EWD 666: "A problem solved in my head," which contains the endearing aperçu: "Goldbach's Conjecture -- I had never thought that I would ever use that!")
Like entries in a modern weblog, many of the informal pieces collected in the EWD archive were never published in any traditional sense. Instead they were copied (and later photocopied), numbered sequentially from EWD 0 (sadly lost to history) to EWD 1317 ("From van IJzeren's correspondence to my aunt & uncle," written a few months before his death in August 2002) and circulated from the greedy hands of one computer scientist to another like Eastern European samizdat or fourth-generation copies of the Lions books.
For years I have been dipping into this priceless archive (or at least its English language subset; is there a great Dutch-English translator out there who would do the world the incalculable favor of translating the rest?) and I have yet to scratch the surface of its treasures. But I continue to follow the trail; the archive is redolent of the spoor of Dijkstra's intellectual evolution, the physical evidence of a great mind thinking aloud. A fine, clear light shines through it all, the light of intelligence unmarred by any particular arrogance or egotism -- the set of personal qualities I tend to think of as integrity.
Dijkstra is at his iconoclastic best on, for example, academic hypocrisy:
"Today's mathematical culture suffers from a style of publication, in which the results and the reasoning justifying them are published quite explicitly but in which all the pondering is rigorously suppressed, as if the need to ponder were a vulgar infirmity about which we don't talk in civilized company."
Or the relationship between programming and mathematics:
"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."
Or the truth itself, however unpalatable:
"French science is poisoned by politics."
One particularly apposite piece (EWD 696) is titled "Written in
"Here I'll discuss a few examples of where I think this book really shines...In this section I'll mention a couple potential disappointments."
With all due respect, and I'm not trying to nitpick here, but those really are some of the worst paragraph/section introductions you could possibly use. I know everyone will mod me down for being nitpicky, but I'm just telling you so that you know in the future. It really doesn't say much about your writing quality.
If it's so easy to get this information, how hard would it be for me to create my own police letterhead, a badge number, and have them fax the info to my local Mailboxes, etc.? I mean, say someone rips me off, this would make it soo easy to get them back. Can you say Identity theft?
Now if I wanted to spend several hundred dollars, I?d be able to purchase my very own reprint from a specialty bookseller, but that seemed a little severe for the purpose of cracking a message that, for all I knew, contained the publishing equivalent of "Drink more Ovaltine." I looked into borrowing one from a nearby university?s rare books collection, but one phone call made it quite clear that no self-respecting librarian was going to let my grubby hands anywhere near a 335 year-old book. Desperate, I scoured the Internet looking for online versions of Real Character. It turned up in bits and pieces, but those were invariably converted into plain text?useless if you want to view the original symbols and even worse if you wanted to decode anything.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, it appeared. One site that seemed to have an eerie fascination with Wilkins offered me everything I could have asked for. Not only was the entire book online, but it was in its original form too, scanned and converted into large GIF files. Displayed within the browser?s window, the pages were too small to be legible, but I found that if I downloaded each page individually to my computer (there were more than 600), I could then read the document in its original size.
The Final Push consisted of trying to figure out how Wilkins went about creating this language, requiring a healthy chunk of the book to be actually read. As Mr. Stephenson pointed out, Wilkins was trying to create a universal language, and it was supposedly understandable by anyone as long as you knew how the system worked. He came up with a hierarchal means of classifying words, dividing the English language into roughly forty categories. These categories were then divided into smaller and smaller subsections, until every word would fit somewhere within.
In order to take the message and convert it back into English, I needed something that would give me the roadmap as to which category any particular word belonged. Once I had located this particular chart, I realized this was the key to using his "dictionary," from which I could then look up words. To make things easier, I began with a word I already knew (from the Lord?s Prayer), and reverse-engineered it to better understand the system. From there, it became a pretty straightforward process to do the same with the remainder of the words.
Getting the hang of the language?s subtleties like verb tense, adverbs, etc., was a bit stickier and required some extra reading, but in the end, every word found on the Baroque Cycle site was capable of being identified and translated. There were some liberties taken with words that didn?t exist in 1668, like "fax" or "telephone," but Lisa Gold, the message?s creator?and my greatest aggravation?found a clever way to work around these obstacles.
It turns out that the message was really a set of instructions to anyone who could read it, and the first person to do so would receive a reward for their efforts. For all of you who have waited patiently through all this, you?ll find the complete translation taken from Wilkins?s script below:
Quicksilver will be published in the fourth week of the ninth month in the year of our Lord 2003. If you understand this, send a fax to 1 (212) XXX-XXXX with your name, address, phone number, and email address along with your translation. The first person to accomplish this will receive a signed copy of the book.
See the image below for a literal translation:
[Image was here]
I hope you enjoyed the story, and despite my protestations to the contrary, I really did enjoy the challenge of tackling Wilkins's system of writing. In fact, the whole process was an immense learning experience as well. If you have any additional questions or comments about any of the above, you are more than welcome to email me at todd@substream.com.
This looks like it will become a very good service, especially since number portability starts up in a couple months or so. So, everyone on the Nextel network can switch over to verizon, if they have a better/cheaper service. The downside of DirectConnect, though, is that when you have someone trying to explain something to you over the phone, you have to wait until they get done talking, which could take minutes. I've seen people yell at their phone in agrivation of the person not shutting up (even thought the person on the other side could not hear).
Interestingly...if you go to go to mac's store right now, they put up the G4 specs under the G5 area! This is the exact opposite of a couple days ago. If it's not there anymore, here's proof: http://us.share.geocities.com/richardsonke/G5.bmp. It's on geocities, cause i'm at work and i don't have access to my normal ftp server. Can someone mirror it? Thanks. And NO, this has NOT been photoshopped.
Why is so much put into self-distructing DVDs? It only takes one pass to rip it. Once you rip it, you can read it any amount of times off your hard drive. The only way to stop piracy is a zero-use DVD...once you buy it, it blows up in your car on the way home.
Ah, from the email sent from Trepia when you sign up:
Trepia works by first searching for other Trepia users who are near to you. If it can't find enough nearby people, it will keep on expanding its search to include more people. This way, you'll never have a shortage of interesting people to meet.
So, I guess California and Washington were the closest people to Cincinnati, Ohio. But, lots of people are popping up now as this story goes live.
Yeah, works very well...i'm in Cincinati, OH and it's giving me people in Washington and California. Maybe there's just no one on it except those ten people.
Check out Spybot Search and Destroy. It's the best spyware remover i've ever used. Updates itself often and can lock down your computer against future attacks.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Ok, tell me something. You have a list of a million+ emails and you check them against the list. Let's say 10,000 are removed by the database. Now, which emails are good? Right there you have 10,00 emails that are definitly real. In the same way, you can do a brute force search on it.
The only way to really fix is is to have the email and the addresses sent to the list, and then they are sent immediatly after being checked. As in, the good and bad addresses are never reported, just immediatly checked. The problem there is that you are then using a governemnt SMTP server, so that's even worse. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Sorry.
But there's a problem with that. You can still forge a header with a pgp signed message. Beacuse creating a pgp key is so easy (you can create one for any email address, like yahoo) it wouldn't stop any spammers. All it would force them to do was to sign their mail before they sent it. An added 5ms of computer time.
Until this comes out, PGP is a great way to keep your email private and secure. It also deals with forged headers using email signing. MIT has a great client here
It says that the main processor is a mini-PCI card. Does that mean that it could resonably be put in a computer without the base station? My Dell Inspirion 8200 uses a mini-PCI card for wireless, and if I could possibly find drivers for it, i.e. for use in linux, that would be so cool. Imagine upgrading your laptop to 54 Mbps yourself (with no PCI card sticking out the side).
The idea is, although they may be wrong, that beacuse of the tightness of security at airports now, terrorst would be looking at other targets. No long would people let someone hi-jack their plane, because they know that there is no way down without the hi-jacker dead. The hi-jackers on 9-11 played on the fact that the idea of the US govn't was to try to talk people down, instead of shooting them down, etc. So, no, it would not stop another attack with aircraft, but it could stop an attack on other places, like power plants and dams.
I don't know where everyone is getting these crazy fears that it's 1984 playing out in real life. These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas. We're talking about power plants and dams here. No one that wants their privacy needs to be in these places. I mean, its not like they're going to put one up in the middle of town square. That would defeat the purpose entirely. The picture would change every five seconds, so someone would have to LOOK at it every five seconds, much less find someone on there who might be a terroist.
I agree with the poster that it is so crazy that it might work. The only thing that i doubt is that they're going to pay $10/hour for people to watch this. That's a very good salary, and i wouldn't mind doing it for that much.
Private Company
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"SAIC is now the country's largest privately held infotech company"
This is one company that i certainly hope never IPO's...imagine taking decisions about secret technologies to the stock holders...
Cmdr Taco did not write that. The person who wrote that was the person who sent in the article. They don't change submissions when they get them (as can be seen by the number of spelling mistakes, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
UnixWare is SCO's new version of Linux, which they say they own because some of their code is in there(huh?). Even though this is completly against the GPL, they think they can sell it, at a binary only version, and not get in trouble. I see it as a put everything we got into it, and if we go down, we might as well go down big.
Ok, even though this story is a dupe, and you must have really not been on slashdot in a long time, here we go:
SCO bought all or some of the rights to liscense Unix (this is still being debated). They claim now that some of the code included in Unix System 5 has been stolen and used in the Linux kernel. This code comes down to a few main parts, at least one dealing with memory management. The linux community thinks (and I agree) that they have done nothing wrong because acutally the code was created by a third party, applied to Unix (note, not created FOR Unix), and then applied to Linux; yes, it is nearly the same code, because the same people wrote it, but they did not write it specifically for Unix. So, SCO is suing IBM, who they say put it in the Linux kernel.
How's that? Make sense? Now, just multiply the complexity by n.
This was the plan all along. The reason why the film is coming out at this time is because this is the earliest they could release it. The said that they were doing this because the cliff-hanger at the end of the second movie was so much that they would be killed if they waited the normal amount of time to release the sequel.
GOTO considered joyful
... use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the 'considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).
On his proto-blog archive, the words and spirit of the late computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra live on, inspiring new generations of geeks.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rachel Chalmers
July 9, 2003 | considered harmful: adj. [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the ACM," "Goto Statement Considered Harmful," fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars
That entry in Eric Raymond's edition of the Hacker's Dictionary was my first encounter with pioneering computer scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, but thanks to the dedicated work of volunteers at the University of Texas at Austin, it was very far from my last. These volunteers maintain the massive and growing EWD archive. It's a tremendous and erudite proto-blog, the extraordinary record of an exemplary life, and it's one of my favorite places on the Web. A year after his death, a computer scientist who devoted himself to teaching people how to think is still on the podium, delivering gem after gem of insight.
Born in the Netherlands in 1930, Dijkstra was a witty and thoroughly engaging writer in his nonnative English ("I have learned to be very suspicious of ideas I cannot express well in both Dutch and English," he noted, late in life. "As nice as it is to have the union at one's disposal, it is wise to confine oneself to the intersection.")
Over a 40-year period that began in the early 1960s, Dijkstra wrote prolifically on timely and compelling topics: from his experience of the evolution of universities on both sides of the Atlantic from the post-WWII era to the beginning of the 21st century; to meditations on the science and art of teaching; to incredibly rich and detailed accounts of his own intellectual methods (don't miss EWD 666: "A problem solved in my head," which contains the endearing aperçu: "Goldbach's Conjecture -- I had never thought that I would ever use that!")
Like entries in a modern weblog, many of the informal pieces collected in the EWD archive were never published in any traditional sense. Instead they were copied (and later photocopied), numbered sequentially from EWD 0 (sadly lost to history) to EWD 1317 ("From van IJzeren's correspondence to my aunt & uncle," written a few months before his death in August 2002) and circulated from the greedy hands of one computer scientist to another like Eastern European samizdat or fourth-generation copies of the Lions books.
For years I have been dipping into this priceless archive (or at least its English language subset; is there a great Dutch-English translator out there who would do the world the incalculable favor of translating the rest?) and I have yet to scratch the surface of its treasures. But I continue to follow the trail; the archive is redolent of the spoor of Dijkstra's intellectual evolution, the physical evidence of a great mind thinking aloud. A fine, clear light shines through it all, the light of intelligence unmarred by any particular arrogance or egotism -- the set of personal qualities I tend to think of as integrity.
Dijkstra is at his iconoclastic best on, for example, academic hypocrisy:
"Today's mathematical culture suffers from a style of publication, in which the results and the reasoning justifying them are published quite explicitly but in which all the pondering is rigorously suppressed, as if the need to ponder were a vulgar infirmity about which we don't talk in civilized company."
Or the relationship between programming and mathematics:
"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."
Or the truth itself, however unpalatable:
"French science is poisoned by politics."
One particularly apposite piece (EWD 696) is titled "Written in
If it's so easy to get this information, how hard would it be for me to create my own police letterhead, a badge number, and have them fax the info to my local Mailboxes, etc.? I mean, say someone rips me off, this would make it soo easy to get them back. Can you say Identity theft?
What a coincidence...as I as refreshing to see if this story was live yet, what happened to be the advertisement but a EBay ad.
Anyway, about the story itself, how exactly is it a "privacy policy" if they themselves say thay will not stick by it.
I can't wait to see you sitting on your cow walking down the street surfing the web on your laptop.
You: Come on boy! Giddyup! We're not going anywhere!
Cow: Moooooo!
And try to get your cow past an airport checkpoint! I'll stick with methanol...
(Page 4 - Last Page)
Now if I wanted to spend several hundred dollars, I?d be able to purchase my very own reprint from a specialty bookseller, but that seemed a little severe for the purpose of cracking a message that, for all I knew, contained the publishing equivalent of "Drink more Ovaltine." I looked into borrowing one from a nearby university?s rare books collection, but one phone call made it quite clear that no self-respecting librarian was going to let my grubby hands anywhere near a 335 year-old book. Desperate, I scoured the Internet looking for online versions of Real Character. It turned up in bits and pieces, but those were invariably converted into plain text?useless if you want to view the original symbols and even worse if you wanted to decode anything.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, it appeared. One site that seemed to have an eerie fascination with Wilkins offered me everything I could have asked for. Not only was the entire book online, but it was in its original form too, scanned and converted into large GIF files. Displayed within the browser?s window, the pages were too small to be legible, but I found that if I downloaded each page individually to my computer (there were more than 600), I could then read the document in its original size.
The Final Push consisted of trying to figure out how Wilkins went about creating this language, requiring a healthy chunk of the book to be actually read. As Mr. Stephenson pointed out, Wilkins was trying to create a universal language, and it was supposedly understandable by anyone as long as you knew how the system worked. He came up with a hierarchal means of classifying words, dividing the English language into roughly forty categories. These categories were then divided into smaller and smaller subsections, until every word would fit somewhere within.
In order to take the message and convert it back into English, I needed something that would give me the roadmap as to which category any particular word belonged. Once I had located this particular chart, I realized this was the key to using his "dictionary," from which I could then look up words. To make things easier, I began with a word I already knew (from the Lord?s Prayer), and reverse-engineered it to better understand the system. From there, it became a pretty straightforward process to do the same with the remainder of the words.
Getting the hang of the language?s subtleties like verb tense, adverbs, etc., was a bit stickier and required some extra reading, but in the end, every word found on the Baroque Cycle site was capable of being identified and translated. There were some liberties taken with words that didn?t exist in 1668, like "fax" or "telephone," but Lisa Gold, the message?s creator?and my greatest aggravation?found a clever way to work around these obstacles.
It turns out that the message was really a set of instructions to anyone who could read it, and the first person to do so would receive a reward for their efforts. For all of you who have waited patiently through all this, you?ll find the complete translation taken from Wilkins?s script below:
Quicksilver will be published in the fourth week of the ninth month
in the year of our Lord 2003. If you understand this, send
a fax to 1 (212) XXX-XXXX with your name, address, phone number,
and email address along with your translation. The first person to
accomplish this will receive a signed copy of the book.
See the image below for a literal translation:
[Image was here]
I hope you enjoyed the story, and despite my protestations to the contrary, I really did enjoy the challenge of tackling Wilkins's system of writing. In fact, the whole process was an immense learning experience as well. If you have any additional questions or comments about any of the above, you are more than welcome to email me at todd@substream.com.
Cheers,
- Todd Garrison
June 2003
This looks like it will become a very good service, especially since number portability starts up in a couple months or so. So, everyone on the Nextel network can switch over to verizon, if they have a better/cheaper service. The downside of DirectConnect, though, is that when you have someone trying to explain something to you over the phone, you have to wait until they get done talking, which could take minutes. I've seen people yell at their phone in agrivation of the person not shutting up (even thought the person on the other side could not hear).
Interestingly...if you go to go to mac's store right now, they put up the G4 specs under the G5 area! This is the exact opposite of a couple days ago. If it's not there anymore, here's proof: http://us.share.geocities.com/richardsonke/G5.bmp. It's on geocities, cause i'm at work and i don't have access to my normal ftp server. Can someone mirror it? Thanks. And NO, this has NOT been photoshopped.
Why is so much put into self-distructing DVDs? It only takes one pass to rip it. Once you rip it, you can read it any amount of times off your hard drive. The only way to stop piracy is a zero-use DVD...once you buy it, it blows up in your car on the way home.
Yeah, works very well...i'm in Cincinati, OH and it's giving me people in Washington and California. Maybe there's just no one on it except those ten people.
Check out Spybot Search and Destroy. It's the best spyware remover i've ever used. Updates itself often and can lock down your computer against future attacks.
Ok, tell me something. You have a list of a million+ emails and you check them against the list. Let's say 10,000 are removed by the database. Now, which emails are good? Right there you have 10,00 emails that are definitly real. In the same way, you can do a brute force search on it.
The only way to really fix is is to have the email and the addresses sent to the list, and then they are sent immediatly after being checked. As in, the good and bad addresses are never reported, just immediatly checked. The problem there is that you are then using a governemnt SMTP server, so that's even worse. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Sorry.
Full script here: part one and part two. Even mentions TROGDOR, the BURNINATOR! :-)
But there's a problem with that. You can still forge a header with a pgp signed message. Beacuse creating a pgp key is so easy (you can create one for any email address, like yahoo) it wouldn't stop any spammers. All it would force them to do was to sign their mail before they sent it. An added 5ms of computer time.
Until this comes out, PGP is a great way to keep your email private and secure. It also deals with forged headers using email signing. MIT has a great client here
It says that the main processor is a mini-PCI card. Does that mean that it could resonably be put in a computer without the base station? My Dell Inspirion 8200 uses a mini-PCI card for wireless, and if I could possibly find drivers for it, i.e. for use in linux, that would be so cool. Imagine upgrading your laptop to 54 Mbps yourself (with no PCI card sticking out the side).
The idea is, although they may be wrong, that beacuse of the tightness of security at airports now, terrorst would be looking at other targets. No long would people let someone hi-jack their plane, because they know that there is no way down without the hi-jacker dead. The hi-jackers on 9-11 played on the fact that the idea of the US govn't was to try to talk people down, instead of shooting them down, etc. So, no, it would not stop another attack with aircraft, but it could stop an attack on other places, like power plants and dams.
I don't know where everyone is getting these crazy fears that it's 1984 playing out in real life. These cameras are protecting the private or secure public areas. We're talking about power plants and dams here. No one that wants their privacy needs to be in these places. I mean, its not like they're going to put one up in the middle of town square. That would defeat the purpose entirely. The picture would change every five seconds, so someone would have to LOOK at it every five seconds, much less find someone on there who might be a terroist.
I agree with the poster that it is so crazy that it might work. The only thing that i doubt is that they're going to pay $10/hour for people to watch this. That's a very good salary, and i wouldn't mind doing it for that much.
Cmdr Taco did not write that. The person who wrote that was the person who sent in the article. They don't change submissions when they get them (as can be seen by the number of spelling mistakes, etc.)