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  1. Re:Was This Not Obvious? on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then.

    ...or now, so much...

  2. Re:But according to the SCO graph... on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 1

    ...why haven't they picked on the other 'derivatives' in the diagram?

    One or more of the following reasons:

    The system was specifically licensed (like AIX or Solaris, etc.)
    The system has already been shown clean in court. (BSD)
    The system isn't sufficiently popular as to cause investor interest in SCO, and the users pool isn't large enough to scare up many license fees.
    The system is closed source, so SCO can't grep it.
    The system isn't seen as a huge threat by a number of massive entrenched industry players (read: potential SCO investors)

  3. Re:Can Linux kernel be a derived from a microkerne on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 1

    Doesn't the whole microkernel versus (hugely) monolithic kernel make this whole discussion a moot point?

    Well...not if there were actually code that went from SCO-owned IP that hasn't been declared public-domain or licensed publicly, into minix, and from there to Linux. If that actually happened, this wouldn't be moot.

    Of course, Tanenbaum and Torvalds both assert that neither of those exchanges happened, and I don't see a lot of (read: any) evidence to suggest that they did.

    So, no, this doesn't make it a moot point...it was really, really moot a long damn time ago, and this just doesn't have any additional effect on its fantastical level of mootosity.

  4. Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 1, Informative

    As someone who used 2.2 for quite some time and was quite happy with it I can say without qualification......

    "Shut the fuck up, dickeater. You don't have any idea what the fuck you're talking about, do you?"

    Don't get me wrong, 2.4 was a quantum leap...but Linux (and GNU, right...) was a very useful system long before that. If you'd have used it, you'd know that.

  5. Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 1

    Yes, but by the time Linux arrived POSIX was around and minix had been made more or less compliant.

  6. Re:Linux a derivitive of Minix? on Why Does SCO Focus On A Minix-to-Linux Link? · · Score: 1

    The way I understood it the price of Minix was never attached to a license structure the way you describe. Rather, you had to pay Prentice Hall for the book it came with or for the disks or whatever. They covered their publishing costs and probably made a tiny amount of money on it. But I'm pretty sure you could download it for free also, and in any case if you bought it once you could certainly install it all over the place, edit the code, submit patches to it to newsgroups, or whatever...it wasn't just some seat license.

  7. Re:Odd on How To Avoid Viruses At Windows Install Time? · · Score: 1

    Well, I can't speak for this guy, but I've definitely been hit with some blaster variant within the first 30 seconds I plugged in. It wasn't anything I couldn't handle...that particular time I just changed the clock so it was counting down from 4 hours instead of 60 seconds, and went on about my updates. Had I wanted to bother with it, I also could have just setup a router or firwall instead.

    Anyway, it certainly can and does happen. These guys might be making the problem sound a bit too serious here, but it's still a pain in the ass.

  8. Re:Woohoo, another kernel compile. on Linux Kernel 2.6.7 Released · · Score: 1

    There isn't typically a 'make install' step in the 2.6.x build process. Usually just 'make && make modules_install' and then move your bzImage and System.map to /boot. Oh, and fix up your bootloader.

  9. Re:Argh! Dilemma! on Linux Kernel 2.6.7 Released · · Score: 1

    Yeah. I was just thinking the same thing. My main desktop at work was up for 344 days when we lost power here last month. The worst part is, that's what happened at the start of that time too.

    Of course, before that power outage I'd had only ~50 days uptime...but that was me being a jackass. Keyboard in mouse-hole (I share a keyboard/mouse/monitor, but we're too cheap for KVM's) caused machine to not wake-up...ssh in and everything looks fine....after totally failing to figure it out, I told it to reboot via ssh. When that didn't change anything I eventually pulled my head out.

    But anyway, point is, you have to *really* endure an old kernel if you want uptime worth bragging about. I don't think any 2.6 kernel users are there yet.

  10. Re:Just curious on Linux Kernel 2.6.7 Released · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, I've been running a varietty of production boxen (web, email, mysql, etc.) on 2.6 since about .3 and I have no complaints. I don't see any reason to install a server with 2.4 anymore...the stability is the same as it always was--flawless.

  11. Re:Root servers not decentralized? on Akamai DNS Outage Messes up Net · · Score: 1

    Root servers go down all the time. It's not particularly unusual. There's THIRTEEN of the things. Up to 8 have been down at once with no major effects on the network, IIRC.

    Well, you do not remember correctly. I was there that day, and I can assure you that having 8 root servers down caused a serious ruckus. No, everyone on earth wasn't completely out of service, but there were large swaths of IP that couldn't get resolution or had timeouts, and a whole host of other congestion- and DoS-like issues all over the place.

    That said, your main point was correct; the DNS system does work reasonably well the vast majority of the time, and most of these folks need to quit their bitching.

  12. Re:How long before greed sets in you mean.... on Broadband Usage Up 42% In The U.S. In 2003 · · Score: 1

    Which one of these service providers advertised unlimited service to you anyway? I haven't ever seen a broadband ad claim unlimited service. Not to mention the fact that even if they did, the terms of service and contracts they had would be the authority...your only recourse would be a false-advertising suit, which would never force them to change their services.

  13. Re:How long before greed sets in you mean.... on Broadband Usage Up 42% In The U.S. In 2003 · · Score: 0, Troll

    As soon as enough people have broadband you can be damn sure ISP's will start introducing draconian bandwidth limits.

    "Draconian?" Or just "profitable?" I mean seriously, all you guys who think its your God-given right to burn a full T's worth of bandwidth for $50 a month, and that any company that says different is "Draconian" need to wake up and take a look at some actual bandwidth pricing sometime. These services can't stay cheap with all-you-can-eat pricing...the only reason they have up to now is that all the major players are subsidized by some other business (telco, cable) and care more about market share than profits.

  14. Re:put your money where your mouth is on Linux Filesystems Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    Hey, look, I never said I was a benchmark design expert. I just said this guy obviously wasn't. And there isn't anything wrong with that by itself...it just means you should use a tool designed by someone who is, instead of throwing your own bullshit metrics together by yourself and then having the balls to tell everyone that it's a better method than any of the real benchmarks out there. That was a damn lie, and acting like you can draw real conclusions about real-world performance from these numbers is really, really obtuse.

    I'm not necessarily saying I can make a good filesystem performance comparison. I haven't ever even tried. All I'm saying is that I can tell a bullshit one when I see it. And I just did.

  15. jackass article on Linux Filesystems Benchmarked · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wow...I'm really surprised that I don't see anyone else around here bashing this "benchmarking" as totally ridiculous. Get it together, people! I mean, how does a group of folks that typically pride themselves on shredding the foolish articles that come by miss these beauties:

    1) This guy goes out with the stated goal of evaluating real-world performance...so he starts by throwing out all real benchmarks. Of course, those tools are designed by experts to try to represent real-world performance, but who cares, right? Instead, our jackass throws together a bundle of random operations and times them. No thought is apparent in the choices of the operations, and no discussion is given as to why the choices were made.

    2) The conclusions are drawn by simply adding the times of all the tests together. If you haven't figured out why this is dumb as a rock, let me explain: test #1 took 23-40 seconds, while test #2 took .02-.04 seconds. So, in his conclusion, test #1 was weighted 1000 times as heavily as test #2. I don't know about you all, but I for one don't feel that touching speed is 1000 times as important as finding speed.

    3) Even if he had normalized all the times so that the mean in each test was the same and then added those, he would still be wrong...various tests ought to be weighed differently, because real-world usage doesn't do all of these things the same amount. That said, the weight given to the tests needs to be well thought out and planned, rather than arbitrarily assigned (accidentally) without paying any attention. Interestingly enough, this sort of purposeful weighing of tests is exactly the sort of thing done by the real benchmarking tools that this idiot threw away.

    4) Perhaps this one isn't as important...but this guy can't make a graph to save his life. Half the bar graphs put time on X and the other half put time on Y. Graphs that obviously should be bar graphs are made into dot-line ones. The text is blurry and you can't tell the colors in the key.

    Anyway, I still don't get why everybody around here seems to have missed all this...it was painfully obvious to me when I just took a cursory glance at it.

  16. Re:You can have your iPhoto on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    Then your analogy was flawed in the first place. What I said is not wrong...but it does change things, insofar as a "pure" paraphrase would not produce a work with its own value. However, since this is a new program that does things the old one didn't (plays various files in Linux) it is not analogous to a simple paraphrase.

    And furthermore, if you want to get right down to the nitty-gritty, the analogy is further broken because the authors of this work didn't get to read the other work.

  17. Re:Linux apps that are hopelessly derivative? on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    Wow...either somebody doesn't understand sarcasm, or didn't see the parent...

  18. Re:You can have your iPhoto on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    He didn't violate your copyright so long as he restated the ideas in his own fashion in order to make a new work with its own value.

    Similarly, this is a new program, written in its own fashion, that has its own value (playing various files on Linux).

  19. Re:You can have your iPhoto on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    The song is copyrighted, unless your artist is an idiot. He can't copy it without your permission.

    So is iTunes. Which is to say, you can't copy it without Apple's permission. However, you can go right ahead and make a new program that does the same thing and looks similar. Just like Justin Timberlake can hear your poor artist's song and write a new song that says the same thing and sounds similar.

    Of course, what do these boy bands sing that isn't just a rehash of some trite crap?

  20. Re:You can have your iPhoto on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    Yes. Just like The X Window System. Cloned by MS and Apple, because it was (barely) useable.

    (shut up)

  21. Re:LSongs? on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 1

    First off, "huh?!"

    Secondly, if they *did* pay Xerox (which I hadn't heard before)...what the hell for?!

    After all, the product they were pirating was developed in academia, not at Xerox, and was published under an open-source license.

    Oh, and this bit of "copying" Apple's interface strikes me as about as big a deal as notepad copying xpad. These aren't exactly earth-shattering innovations in design.

  22. Re:Linux apps that are hopelessly derivative? on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yes...definitely. A bunch of developers who give their labor away because they believe in the inherent freedom of software (and knowledge, more or less by extension) should unquestionably patent said work.

    Jackass.

  23. Re:Linux apps that are hopelessly derivative? on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 0

    Parent has a valid point. Why should Linux apps slavishly imitate other UIs?

    Because *all* platforms imitate other UIs. It's not like Apple and/or MS invented this whole point-click desktop metaphor...they stole it from UNIX in the first place. They went "oh, wow, that's a great idea...I think I'll make one."

    The same is true of almost all our current extensible media formats (wma, ogg, etc.) which all take an idea of which quicktime is the earliest example I see. Or our modern wordprocessors, which are all (poor) copies of WordPerfect.

    Some folks say this is a Bad Thing...and they use these examples to argue for things like software patents, which would prevent this. Others (like me) think this is a normal and healthy part of the evolving software world, which is rapidly coming down to pricing/economics that makes sense for a product that costs so little to manufacture.

    Anyway, point is, whichever side of that fence you're on, you can't just sit and bitch that Linux copies everything....so does everybody else.

  24. Payback's a bitch... on LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits! · · Score: 0

    First off, these apps look like they'll make a nice addition to the Linux desktop. I doubt I'll use them much, but I'll be sure to install them on mom's machine when they're ready.

    Secondly, to everybody whining about these being "rip-offs" ...I say screw 'em. After all, they stole X

    ;-P

  25. Jackasses on Intel Ranks Colleges with Best Wireless Access · · Score: 1

    And coming in at number 50, the University of Missouri - Columbus.

    I just wonder where Columbus, MO is, and how the 5th UM campus escaped my knowledge all these years. Because while I've found the wifi service here in Columbia Missouri quite good, I guess we didn't make the list.