...is "What IP did Microsoft acquire in this deal?" If they've acquired the UNIX copyrights, we could very well see the zombie corpse of SCO rise from the grave to terrorize the world again.
No, but your chances of being able to afford it would've been significantly less. Good for you that you were motivated to bust your butt to get in. But for every Ivy League student, there are a hundred other students who are just as smart who are attending other schools because they couldn't afford the tuition.
What I object to is the implication (as embodied in the post I responded to) that Ivy Leaguers are somehow automatically better than everyone else.
Even if your interpretation is correct, it is still a rather bizarre thing to say to someone she got caught stealing from. It is just one more piece of evidence that the editor just doesn't "get it". And while I'd be inclined to excuse some random Joe Sixpack for thinking that putting something on the web automatically releases it into the public domain, this woman works in the industry. It boggles the mind that anyone who works in publishing could be so ignorant of such a basic aspect of copyright.
Burying a one paragraph mea culpa in the middle of a rambling, whiny, self-serving "I'm taking my ball and going home" rant doesn't count as an apology in my book. Nor do I buy the story that she was just having a bad day when she touched off the original shit-storm, as the same arrogant attitude is still there. "I think I did a nice job for you"? I couldn't believe it when I read that; apparently she still thinks the original author should be grateful that her work was plagarized? W...T...F?!??
You've completely missed my point. It should be possible to secure the Internet's routing protocols without infringing on anyone's freedoms. Furthermore, the lack of encryption on things like standard HTTP and e-mail traffic actually makes it easier for your electronic communications to be spied on.
The point isn't that it was routed through China per se; the point is that it is so easy to hijack the traffic of a large portion of the 'net. As has already been pointed out, anything sensitive should be encrypted anyway.
They were designed years ago, for an environment where it was actually somewhat sensible for everyone to trust everyone else. Major routing screwups like this, DNS cache poisoning exploits, the type of attack demonstrated by FireSheep, and even plain ol' spam are all possible largely because the underlying protocols are not secure.
Fake AV has been around for a long time. My father fell for one of those "your system is infected" ads 5+ years ago, and I had to spend an afternoon cleaning out the crapware he bought and installed when he clicked through. Fortunately all he was out was the $40 or so for the "product"; we scanned his system with some real AV and anti-malware/spyware products to remove all the junk that piggybacked its way in, and nothing more ever came of it.
I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools
Once the school reports someone, they're implicitly making an accusation that illegal activity has already occurred. I don't think it is up to the police to decide at that point; it is a matter for the courts.
Yes, but the last build (3.2.1) is still available for download. So if someone is waiting for LibreOffice to come out of beta, and doesn't mind being stuck back at 3.2.1 (which isn't really all that old yet), Go-oo is still a viable option.
More like a different universe, really. Chips like the PIC18F line (from Microchip) are still widely used. These are 8-bit processors, running at a few 10s of MHz (at most).
I currently work in the military avionics field; a 1 GHz Celeron is still pretty bleeding edge. A big part of the issue is heat -- fans are problematic, especially in harsh environments. You need something with low enough power dissipation that can be sealed inside a box and passively cooled.
While I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is clearly a "CYA" move on Fedora's part, I don't see why it is such a big deal. Ubuntu/Debian don't appear to have this tool in their repositories, and I'm pretty sure SuSE doesn't either, so it's not like Fedora is bucking a consensus. If there's enough demand for it, RPM Fusion will probably pick it up.
Furthermore, if the person responsible for your network vulnerability testing doesn't have the basic skills to install it from the upstream sources, is this really the caliber of person you want to trust with your network security?
Umm... so the solution to Oracle being a bully is for Open Source to become... not open? Do that, and Oracle wins. It is like all the security measures and curtailments on personal liberty which were implemented (and continue to be implemented) post-9/11 -- if your enemy manages to get you to violate your own core principles, then they have scored a major victory.
While Sun may not have had a stellar track record (e.g. their alleged mismanagement of OpenOffice.org), at least they were not trying to actively sabotage things.
I think LibreOffice has a reasonably clear path forward independent of OpenOffice.org/Oracle, but I am still concerned for the future of MySQL and VirtualBox. At least MySQL has the MariaDB fork (and maybe we'd all be better off migrating to PostgreSQL anyhow). I am not aware of an active VirtualBox development community outside of Oracle though; they're probably at risk if Oracle decides to shake things up.
Linux with a virtualbox install of a Windows OS would probably work great for all the Windows specific stuff, and would easier to maintain over the long haul.
That is in fact exactly how I've had my office desktop set up for over a year now. Linux (Ubuntu LTS) as my primary OS, and Windows in a VirtualBox VM for those occasions where MS is required (Outlook, Visio, the occasional Word/Excel document that doesn't import cleanly into OpenOffice, and some IE-specific Intranet crap). I'm quite happy with this arrangement.
I did briefly try using Evolution as a replacement e-mail client, but if anything it is even flakier than Outlook... especially when using it with an Exchange server. (If I didn't need to talk to the corporate Exchange server I'd probably just run Thunderbird.)
Most business users don't want bleeding edge functionality. They want something stable that they don't need to upgrade in 12 months just because patch support has already ended. Not only is this a PITA from a system administration point of view; users are going to find it annoying as well.
Fedora is a fine distro. But quite frankly, there are better choices for corporate use.
Strawberry is better than chocolate, if your customers are allergic to chocolate!
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...is "What IP did Microsoft acquire in this deal?" If they've acquired the UNIX copyrights, we could very well see the zombie corpse of SCO rise from the grave to terrorize the world again.
Agreed -- they are one of the best. (My previous post was not meant as a knock against Caltech; in fact quite the opposite!)
...and Caltech isn't considered "Ivy League".
No, but your chances of being able to afford it would've been significantly less. Good for you that you were motivated to bust your butt to get in. But for every Ivy League student, there are a hundred other students who are just as smart who are attending other schools because they couldn't afford the tuition.
What I object to is the implication (as embodied in the post I responded to) that Ivy Leaguers are somehow automatically better than everyone else.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
In other exciting news -- the sun came up again this morning, and the economy still sucks.
Even if your interpretation is correct, it is still a rather bizarre thing to say to someone she got caught stealing from. It is just one more piece of evidence that the editor just doesn't "get it". And while I'd be inclined to excuse some random Joe Sixpack for thinking that putting something on the web automatically releases it into the public domain, this woman works in the industry. It boggles the mind that anyone who works in publishing could be so ignorant of such a basic aspect of copyright.
Burying a one paragraph mea culpa in the middle of a rambling, whiny, self-serving "I'm taking my ball and going home" rant doesn't count as an apology in my book. Nor do I buy the story that she was just having a bad day when she touched off the original shit-storm, as the same arrogant attitude is still there. "I think I did a nice job for you"? I couldn't believe it when I read that; apparently she still thinks the original author should be grateful that her work was plagarized? W...T...F?!??
You've completely missed my point. It should be possible to secure the Internet's routing protocols without infringing on anyone's freedoms. Furthermore, the lack of encryption on things like standard HTTP and e-mail traffic actually makes it easier for your electronic communications to be spied on.
The point isn't that it was routed through China per se; the point is that it is so easy to hijack the traffic of a large portion of the 'net. As has already been pointed out, anything sensitive should be encrypted anyway.
They were designed years ago, for an environment where it was actually somewhat sensible for everyone to trust everyone else. Major routing screwups like this, DNS cache poisoning exploits, the type of attack demonstrated by FireSheep, and even plain ol' spam are all possible largely because the underlying protocols are not secure.
Amusingly, I think one of the passwords he didn't manage to crack was the empty string.
Indeed. The last line in the input file is the hash of the null string!
Fake AV has been around for a long time. My father fell for one of those "your system is infected" ads 5+ years ago, and I had to spend an afternoon cleaning out the crapware he bought and installed when he clicked through. Fortunately all he was out was the $40 or so for the "product"; we scanned his system with some real AV and anti-malware/spyware products to remove all the junk that piggybacked its way in, and nothing more ever came of it.
Will this school ban Linux because... well... hackers sometimes use it! To do illegal stuff!!!!
I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools
Once the school reports someone, they're implicitly making an accusation that illegal activity has already occurred. I don't think it is up to the police to decide at that point; it is a matter for the courts.
Yes, but the last build (3.2.1) is still available for download. So if someone is waiting for LibreOffice to come out of beta, and doesn't mind being stuck back at 3.2.1 (which isn't really all that old yet), Go-oo is still a viable option.
Yeah, I'm a little worried about the future of VirtualBox. AFAIK there isn't a viable fork yet (the VirtualBox equivalent of Go-oo).
Or if you don't mind running a slightly older version, just run the Go-OO one directly.
More like a different universe, really. Chips like the PIC18F line (from Microchip) are still widely used. These are 8-bit processors, running at a few 10s of MHz (at most).
I currently work in the military avionics field; a 1 GHz Celeron is still pretty bleeding edge. A big part of the issue is heat -- fans are problematic, especially in harsh environments. You need something with low enough power dissipation that can be sealed inside a box and passively cooled.
I don't see it in the Debian/Ubuntu repos either.
While I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is clearly a "CYA" move on Fedora's part, I don't see why it is such a big deal. Ubuntu/Debian don't appear to have this tool in their repositories, and I'm pretty sure SuSE doesn't either, so it's not like Fedora is bucking a consensus. If there's enough demand for it, RPM Fusion will probably pick it up.
Furthermore, if the person responsible for your network vulnerability testing doesn't have the basic skills to install it from the upstream sources, is this really the caliber of person you want to trust with your network security?
Umm... so the solution to Oracle being a bully is for Open Source to become... not open? Do that, and Oracle wins. It is like all the security measures and curtailments on personal liberty which were implemented (and continue to be implemented) post-9/11 -- if your enemy manages to get you to violate your own core principles, then they have scored a major victory.
While Sun may not have had a stellar track record (e.g. their alleged mismanagement of OpenOffice.org), at least they were not trying to actively sabotage things.
I think LibreOffice has a reasonably clear path forward independent of OpenOffice.org/Oracle, but I am still concerned for the future of MySQL and VirtualBox. At least MySQL has the MariaDB fork (and maybe we'd all be better off migrating to PostgreSQL anyhow). I am not aware of an active VirtualBox development community outside of Oracle though; they're probably at risk if Oracle decides to shake things up.
Linux with a virtualbox install of a Windows OS would probably work great for all the Windows specific stuff, and would easier to maintain over the long haul.
That is in fact exactly how I've had my office desktop set up for over a year now. Linux (Ubuntu LTS) as my primary OS, and Windows in a VirtualBox VM for those occasions where MS is required (Outlook, Visio, the occasional Word/Excel document that doesn't import cleanly into OpenOffice, and some IE-specific Intranet crap). I'm quite happy with this arrangement.
I did briefly try using Evolution as a replacement e-mail client, but if anything it is even flakier than Outlook... especially when using it with an Exchange server. (If I didn't need to talk to the corporate Exchange server I'd probably just run Thunderbird.)
Most business users don't want bleeding edge functionality. They want something stable that they don't need to upgrade in 12 months just because patch support has already ended. Not only is this a PITA from a system administration point of view; users are going to find it annoying as well.
Fedora is a fine distro. But quite frankly, there are better choices for corporate use.
Strawberry is better than chocolate, if your customers are allergic to chocolate!