Mandrake and Debian don't appear in anything SCO has released. Is this just a coincidence or is it intentional?
Maybe there's some sort of signal in that ommision about the location of the claimed infringements that we'll be able to discern in hindsight, when and if SCO ever disclose the details of their claim into the public domain. So far they give the impression of taking great care to keep those details, um, proprietary. Maybe they're thinking of licensing them?
But it seems more plausible that they're deliberately targeting distributions which have made a point of addressing parts of the corporate market which SCO has noticably failed to make inroads into with its own product lines.
Curioser and curioser.... Try as I might, I can't bring myself to believe that SCO's legal team is simply unaware of the existence of Mandrake and Debian. The conspiracy theory is looking increasingly credible, I'm afraid.
I believe the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that a biological organism can know about itself. How did consciousness develop? Mr. Einstein?
Um... to quote the/. lead story...
'The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible,' Albert Einstein once remarked.
Mapping the self-referential references are left as an exercise for the readers.
Re:hey British people - what does "piss off" mean?
on
Warren Ellis Answers
·
· Score: 1
"Go away". Think "fsck off", but the target isn't worth expending the f-word on.
Can be used without offense and even humorously between people who know each other well enough.
I wouldn't be bothered about it - the guy comes across as being "pissed off" (very irritated and annoyed) by the questions, and as reacting with lowgrade throwaway insults.
"There is an interesting article on Advogato on why it is so difficult for Open Source projects to interoperate or support common standards....
This is something of an extrapolation, IMHO. The referenced article described a "sprint" - what we old-timers remember being called a "workshop";) - that brought together people from various OSS projects working in the same general problem field to find out how well they could work together and benefit from each others' knowledge.
Put like that, it's perhaps not too surprising that the workshop was useful. I'm not being sarcastic here: I think the organisers deserve kudos for recognising an area where cooperation was feasible and taking on the responsibility (and associated hassles and risks) of organising the event with fellow interested parties. Acks also to the sponsors for making it possible, and the more such events the better.
Now, if someone could come up with ways for people to communicate productively without meeting personally and without being predisposed to cooperate in the first place... well, I'd suggest you keep quiet unless you want to be nailed to a tree to die of thirst.
The guy reckons he's learnt from the previous bust, and that the market's likely to start moving up in the forseeable future. He may even turn out to be right. His money (assuming he isn't 'pawning the family silver' that others have a call on), his choice. If he's looking at enough data to fill multiple monitors, though, and he's intending to act on it rather than just play at being a broker with a l33t setup, then it sounds as though he's going to be wanting financial data from the exchanges in real time, not delayed by half an hour or so. And realtime feeds tend to cost.
On the one side, this is a 'cute' idea. On the other, these people appear to believe that deploying such a system would be useful.
It seems to me this is targetted at people who are too dumb to maintain a summary index of what they keep on their machine. Not that such people don't exist - I'm a Brit living outside the country and when I visit I could swear that 80% of the population are now in that catagory, and it's been getting steadily worse over the last 20 years. Maybe I'm missing the point of the exercise, but this strikes me as merely yet another example of the 'dumbing down' trend that's become so noticable in the UK over the last decade or so.
... that lets you go after:
...
AND/OR
2: The entity in the US that the spam was sent on behalf of. If they're trying to sell you something, or scam you, even if they didn't send the mail, they're the root cause....
From the nature of the 'products' and 'services' that cause much of the annoyance, I'd hazard a guess that the peddlers involved take as much care to hide their true identity and location as do spammers - indeed, I'm sure that the spammers are perfectly well aware of their prevalent client community's need for discretion and security and are perfectly happy to cooperate in the matter. IOW, it might be just a little difficult to find where that no-prescription Viagra actually came from without an extensive and expensive investigation.
Something tells me that the matter will start getting fixed only when there are enough objections to the content of much of this dreck for the politicians to decide that Something Must Be Done. Then Mssrs Bush and Rumsfeld can start issuing warnings to certain east asian countries to clease giving safe haven to open email relays and other Weapons of Mass Distraction.
I'd started to compose a 'funny' about computers that worked about 8 orders of magnitude slower than the calculator in my mobile phone and mutated to give unreliable results at the end of the guarantee period, then looked at the article.
This isn't (yet?) an attempt to build a bio-computer (although from the article they've apparently already reached the Blinkenlichts level: The result was a population of gently twinkling cells like flashing holiday lights, Elowitz says. "It was very beautiful," he says).
Rather, as far as practical results are concerned, the researchers appear to be taking a cue from electronic logic circuitry, and anticipate ways to use that field's rules to make new and sensitive measurement mechanisms. Again from the article, speculating about what might be possible: "If you spread cells around . . . they will form a fluorescent ring around the [chemical], and the middle of the bull's eye is where the bad guys are," Weiss says. It's an interesting approach for very specific bio-sensors.
I'm not too sure I like the idea of E. coli of all things being manipulated to flash in different colors, but there you go.
So, someone is predicting that coding and tech support vacancies are likely to double over a period of 7 years or so.
To me, this sounds like a reasonable extrapolation of a trend that's been evident for many years: when increased computing power makes it viable to use IT to manipulate information for profit, that's what happens, and firing-up new applications in that context needs coders to build them and tech support to deal with the SNAFUs until each particular new app (and class of app) is well understood[1]. Add in the post dot-com depression in the IT area and it's almost a no-brainer of a prediction - I'd be more worried if the authors hadn't reached that conclusion and had good grounds for scepticism.
(Dr Hu, an old fart who will have thankfully quit the IT business long before 2010.)
I'm not trying to be nasty, but it seems to me that if your parents prefer to check with an online system about your homework assignments rather than with you then that's something that is more worth worrying about than the online system's security. Just a thought.
... This guy didn't rob a liquor store, he didn't point a gun, knife or other weapon at anyone. He didn't threaten anyone....
No, but he did threaten - in no matter how small a way - a business model. Draw your own conclusions about how serious a crime this is now considered to be in the US compared with the counter-examples you gave. After all, a sane society wouldn't use prison as a punishment for a minor offense, with the associated risk of introducing the offender to experience and knowledge that would assist him/ her to progress to more serious crime, would it?
For instance, if you see someone has checked out books on flying planes and September 11th, then they're probably a terrorist (or maybe a pilot)...
It has the potential to be a little bit worse than that. The 'perhaps a pilot' individual and your other examples have a chance of making a quote reasonable unquote case for having an interest in the topic[1]. Someone who is simply curious and without a job- or profession-related 'justification' might - if these sorts of checks become standard practice without adequate and visible oversight - find him/herself considerably inconvenienced.
Karma-reduction advocacy follows.... This isn't a black and white situation. The/. chorus which sings along to the Franklin quote as though it was the final word in the argument is taking the easy way out and is evading addressing the question of what constraints on individual liberty and privacy are more tolerable - however much we regret and detest them - than the increased risks to the wellbeing of ourselves and our friends and family that may result from taking the high absolutist line on these praiseworthy objectives. None of us have perfect information on where the tradeoffs balance out, and I don't have a satisfactory answer, other than to try to push elected representatives into insisting that this sort of authority is only ceded to the executive for a limited time after which it must be specifically reauthorised - after assessment of its effects - for specified reasons, with specified oversight, and sanctions for the abuse of the authority and of information collected under that authority.[2]
I hope I'm being needlessly paranoid about this.
[1]Other than students, who as everyone knows are unwashed, untrustworthy, and uninterested in anything except pirating copyrighted materials, or, when the electricity supply fails, promiscuous and deviant sex.
[2]"A small flock of pigs is silhouetted in the sky above the setting sun."
... somewhat related. The best situation is where the machines stay stable and don't give trouble in the first place. So avoid bleeding-edge products, use the best-engineered hardware you can afford, and run the machines well within their resource and performance limits. Works for Unix-type machines, and it worked for VMS-controlled boxen back when I was still working with them. Admittedly, it's the 'gold-plated' approach, but if the main thing you need to worry about is whether the box is dead or alive then monitoring becomes much easier.
... lastly, notice all the humanoid robots go around with slightly bent knees. whassup with
that?...
The designers are fans of Groucho Marx, perhaps?
Re:are you making this up?
on
Robots!
·
· Score: 1
... AFAIK french is easy to parse...
Academie Francaise -approved prose, perhaps. But understanding what is actually meant is another matter entirely. I worked in Paris for 18 months and picked up pretty easily from where high-school language classes left off, but it still took me ages to realise that "impossible", in French, usually meant "I don't feel like doing this at the moment but I may reconsider if you can make it worth my while."
Microsoft UK Chief Security Officer Stuart Okin said: "We are
working with the University of Leeds because until now Computer
Science graduates in this country were not obtaining adequate
theoretical or practical experience.
For instance, the module will
educate students about buffer over-runs and how to avoid the pitfalls
such as those exposed in the recent Slammer virus outbreak....
(My italics.)
Is it just me, or is this example not glaringly superficial? There really is no excuse these days for the number of buffer-overun bugs that exist - even in an unsafe-by-design language like C[*]. Hopefully this was chosen as an example largely for PR reasons because it's such a well-known problem: I'd certainly expect a Uni-level course to dig far deeper into issues of designing for safe and secure implementation.
The comment about UK Comp Sci graduates not getting adequate theoretical or practical experience is pretty damning, too, if it's accurate. What the fsck have the Uni courses been doing all these years?
[*]No, I'm not trolling. The language is quite low-level and intentionaly includes facilities with which the careless programmer can shoot the world and its pet dog in the foot. It's unfortunate that the language and its followon C++ are being used to implement solutions for which they are not well-suited. Another topic for the proposed course, perhaps;)
Sadly, no. Amount of energy received from any input message is much less than the amount needed to process it. Just as well, really. If it's greater, then you're in the sights of a weapon.
-- Ever wondered why s[cp]ammers write PENIS in big letters?
There are houses in Ireland that have withstood centuries of weather
and worse with little more than a renewed coat of lime every now and again.
And a thatched roof kept in good repair, and a covering of tar at the base of the walls, these two areas being most susceptible to weather damage. I vaguely recall there's a saying about a cob-built cottage needing a good hat and a sturdy set of shoes.
Slashdot Mirror
But it seems more plausible that they're deliberately targeting distributions which have made a point of addressing parts of the corporate market which SCO has noticably failed to make inroads into with its own product lines.
Curioser and curioser.... Try as I might, I can't bring myself to believe that SCO's legal team is simply unaware of the existence of Mandrake and Debian. The conspiracy theory is looking increasingly credible, I'm afraid.
Mapping the self-referential references are left as an exercise for the readers.
...
7154: Prophet!
Can be used without offense and even humorously between people who know each other well enough.
I wouldn't be bothered about it - the guy comes across as being "pissed off" (very irritated and annoyed) by the questions, and as reacting with lowgrade throwaway insults.
Put like that, it's perhaps not too surprising that the workshop was useful. I'm not being sarcastic here: I think the organisers deserve kudos for recognising an area where cooperation was feasible and taking on the responsibility (and associated hassles and risks) of organising the event with fellow interested parties. Acks also to the sponsors for making it possible, and the more such events the better.
Now, if someone could come up with ways for people to communicate productively without meeting personally and without being predisposed to cooperate in the first place... well, I'd suggest you keep quiet unless you want to be nailed to a tree to die of thirst.
The guy reckons he's learnt from the previous bust, and that the market's likely to start moving up in the forseeable future. He may even turn out to be right. His money (assuming he isn't 'pawning the family silver' that others have a call on), his choice. If he's looking at enough data to fill multiple monitors, though, and he's intending to act on it rather than just play at being a broker with a l33t setup, then it sounds as though he's going to be wanting financial data from the exchanges in real time, not delayed by half an hour or so. And realtime feeds tend to cost.
It seems to me this is targetted at people who are too dumb to maintain a summary index of what they keep on their machine. Not that such people don't exist - I'm a Brit living outside the country and when I visit I could swear that 80% of the population are now in that catagory, and it's been getting steadily worse over the last 20 years. Maybe I'm missing the point of the exercise, but this strikes me as merely yet another example of the 'dumbing down' trend that's become so noticable in the UK over the last decade or so.
Something tells me that the matter will start getting fixed only when there are enough objections to the content of much of this dreck for the politicians to decide that Something Must Be Done. Then Mssrs Bush and Rumsfeld can start issuing warnings to certain east asian countries to clease giving safe haven to open email relays and other Weapons of Mass Distraction.
This isn't (yet?) an attempt to build a bio-computer (although from the article they've apparently already reached the Blinkenlichts level: The result was a population of gently twinkling cells like flashing holiday lights, Elowitz says. "It was very beautiful," he says).
Rather, as far as practical results are concerned, the researchers appear to be taking a cue from electronic logic circuitry, and anticipate ways to use that field's rules to make new and sensitive measurement mechanisms. Again from the article, speculating about what might be possible: "If you spread cells around . . . they will form a fluorescent ring around the [chemical], and the middle of the bull's eye is where the bad guys are," Weiss says. It's an interesting approach for very specific bio-sensors.
I'm not too sure I like the idea of E. coli of all things being manipulated to flash in different colors, but there you go.
To me, this sounds like a reasonable extrapolation of a trend that's been evident for many years: when increased computing power makes it viable to use IT to manipulate information for profit, that's what happens, and firing-up new applications in that context needs coders to build them and tech support to deal with the SNAFUs until each particular new app (and class of app) is well understood[1]. Add in the post dot-com depression in the IT area and it's almost a no-brainer of a prediction - I'd be more worried if the authors hadn't reached that conclusion and had good grounds for scepticism.
(Dr Hu, an old fart who will have thankfully quit the IT business long before 2010.)
Insert variant of the 'pry it from my cold dead fingers' cliche.
I'm not trying to be nasty, but it seems to me that if your parents prefer to check with an online system about your homework assignments rather than with you then that's something that is more worth worrying about than the online system's security. Just a thought.
</sarcasm>
(Apologies and acknowledgements to A.C.C.)
Karma-reduction advocacy follows.... This isn't a black and white situation. The /. chorus which sings along to the Franklin quote as though it was the final word in the argument is taking the easy way out and is evading addressing the question of what constraints on individual liberty and privacy are more tolerable - however much we regret and detest them - than the increased risks to the wellbeing of ourselves and our friends and family that may result from taking the high absolutist line on these praiseworthy objectives. None of us have perfect information on where the tradeoffs balance out, and I don't have a satisfactory answer, other than to try to push elected representatives into insisting that this sort of authority is only ceded to the executive for a limited time after which it must be specifically reauthorised - after assessment of its effects - for specified reasons, with specified oversight, and sanctions for the abuse of the authority and of information collected under that authority.[2]
I hope I'm being needlessly paranoid about this.
[1]Other than students, who as everyone knows are unwashed, untrustworthy, and uninterested in anything except pirating copyrighted materials, or, when the electricity supply fails, promiscuous and deviant sex.
[2]"A small flock of pigs is silhouetted in the sky above the setting sun."
that will give time to include the appendices.
... somewhat related. The best situation is where the machines stay stable and don't give trouble in the first place. So avoid bleeding-edge products, use the best-engineered hardware you can afford, and run the machines well within their resource and performance limits. Works for Unix-type machines, and it worked for VMS-controlled boxen back when I was still working with them. Admittedly, it's the 'gold-plated' approach, but if the main thing you need to worry about is whether the box is dead or alive then monitoring becomes much easier.
Nice city, shame about the people.
Is it just me, or is this example not glaringly superficial? There really is no excuse these days for the number of buffer-overun bugs that exist - even in an unsafe-by-design language like C[*]. Hopefully this was chosen as an example largely for PR reasons because it's such a well-known problem: I'd certainly expect a Uni-level course to dig far deeper into issues of designing for safe and secure implementation.
The comment about UK Comp Sci graduates not getting adequate theoretical or practical experience is pretty damning, too, if it's accurate. What the fsck have the Uni courses been doing all these years?
[*]No, I'm not trolling. The language is quite low-level and intentionaly includes facilities with which the careless programmer can shoot the world and its pet dog in the foot. It's unfortunate that the language and its followon C++ are being used to implement solutions for which they are not well-suited. Another topic for the proposed course, perhaps ;)
--
Ever wondered why s[cp]ammers write PENIS in big letters?