Re:except for those little state lawsuits
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 1
Do you think anything will come of these lawsuits, other than the previous slaps on the wrist that MS has gotten?
Re:OSI Papers notwithstanding...
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 2
I mean non-litigated in the sense that, so far, there has been no serious lawsuit yet against Microsoft that would threaten the users themselves, or the very survival of the distributions they use. Microsoft is large enough and has enough legions of lawyers that they could prevent such a thing by sheer mass alone, even if they had infringed 100 patents. Microsoft can and will spin this as "go with the big one", while "little" companies like RedHat and SCO fight amongst themselves. If SCO (Caldera, whatever) had a brain in their head they would join with the Linux vendors to present a "United" front against MS. But they are ultimately looking for shareholder value, so this really makes sense in the short term.
OSI Papers notwithstanding...
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 5, Funny
OSI Papers notwithstanding, all it takes is a tipply judge to cause a lot of headaches for everyone from RedHat to Yellow Dog. In any case, Microsoft wins. Their line...go with the smart, non-litigated choice...Windows XP. Now with Software Assurance!
I can remember when www.whitehouse.gov supported an open relay. It was freaky to send people e-mail from president@whitehouse.gov with www.whitehouse.gov in the headers. www.pentagon.mil and such government agencies as www.usda.gov used to be open too.
Well, since this has generated a bit of controversy and even accusations of my own anti-Microsoftery, I will elaborate on a few of my experiences. And yes, these are all my personal experiences, not something I've picked off of a website. Perhaps I should have said patch, Service Pack, or any software drivel coming from Redmond. My point is that I look upon anything from them with suspicion, and not because I'm any sort of linux zealot.
First of all I'll describe the (original, since upgraded) system. Three Compaq NT4 machines providing proxy, mail, and print serving to a school district of 3000 students/faculty, spread across six buildings through a T1 WAN. Install one or the other "security updates" for NT4. Boy what a wonderful day, the Primary DC won't boot. Solution...restore from backup tapes, and find ways to work around the security problems without installing their update. Later, we upgrade to Win2K Server. Everybody's happy and fine. Install SP1...wow isn't that nice, the Primary DC for the entire district suddenly won't go beyond a blue-screen on boot. Restore from tape, live with SP(null.)
Now I'm in another district with no Windows servers. Three Netware 6.0 machines, and two Linux boxes that are slowly invading their formerly-held territory of proxy, web, print and e-mail. I never said Novell patches weren't crap either, or their operating system. But we won't go into that.
As far as non-server Windows stuff, I have long since turned off any auto-updating in the district or my personal machines, for fear Microsoft will pass something down the line that will screw something up. I will also use the case in point of SP3, which breaks the EULA, of all things. I work for a grocery store chain that also has a pharmacy...they are scared to death of HIPAA and Microsoft's SP3 for Windows 2000. When you see things like Microsoft gaining the ability to change things on your computer, in the litigation-crazy medical industry you start wondering.
My point is that Microsoft patches, SP's, whatever is always like Russian roulette. And half of the chambers are loaded, in my experience.
Jobs and Gates are two immovable objects that are colliding with irresistable force...and these are the results. They just sort of merge together. Apple becomes DRM-loving Microsoft, and Microsoft becomes touchy-feely-hippie-interfaced Apple. No surprise to me.
More than anything, I was trying to extend the analogy to the "freedom" of the press...and its freedom from oversight by entities such as the RIAA/MPAA. Something the postal service shares, which is the inability for others to search it before it is disseminated to the masses.
I can imagine what the RIAA/MPAA would think if we were today debating the freedom of the press. After all, newspapers can be used to STEAL copyrighted works! This must be stopped! It's not the messenger, it's the message. So maybe Napster/Grokster/Morpheus are mostly used for infringing...but they in themselves are not infringing anything. If I make a telephone call to get my gang together to conduct a bank robbery, the law doesn't hold the phone company liable. I know about common-carrier laws, but this is a good comparison. It's the message, not the messenger.
I went to school with a person that was considered a super-intellect type, even though I regularly out-scored him on standard tests. He later went on to such-and-such academy and such-and-such school. He ended up at Microsoft, and is listed in some archaic credits of Internet Explorer 4.0 as a member of "Core." Well, I have searched the internet from one end to the other, and he has never posted anything, anywhere, at least using his real name. I can find his supposed house and address on Mapquest (outside Redmond of course.) Remember he was working for them in 1994-1995 or so, when the Internet was "hot."...and he's never been sighted anywhere on the thing he supposedly helped create. So I almost believe the oil-rig piling story...
Finally something people can "grab ahold of" out of NASA. If they made a bigger deal out of a lot of their other advances and discoveries they would be held in better public esteem. But the public usually only pays attention when something bad happens.
The Children's Internet Protection Act should be called the SurfPatrol Benefit Act. 99% of the "filtering" software is so horribly mis-written and mis-configured that it might as well be a screen full of holes. True internet "protection" takes dilligence and supervision, not the purchase of some sham software. They aren't protecting anything but their own state-of-mind and the software companies that put out this over-priced drivel.
I will agree that some porn sites are engineered to try and bypass such filters...but they are most often geared much more to try and entice search spiders, and thus are loaded with pretty revealing keywords. Lots of sites have gone to graphics-only, though, with little text to trigger keyword-based filters like I use. So the blacklists come in handy. Later versions of Dansguardians may include skin-tone matching for images...which of course generates other problems.
The students here are not given e-mail accounts through the school. The teachers are, though, which, yes, led to our mail server being blanket whitelisted. But the teachers are a lot closer to being responsible than the kids. Anyway, I do a tail -f on the log file on occasion, and check what everybody's doing. For the kids that have Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, those aren't whitelisted, and their e-mails get heavily filtered because of that.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is no substitute for supervision. But in an era where we are getting rid of teachers and my technology budget has been trimmed to almost nil, this is a wonderful solution. Their biggest effect is to make the kids realize that they are being monitored and logged. They don't even try after awhile.
Take a look at Dansguardian. It's a supplement to Squid that allows keyword filtering and weighting. I use it in the district I'm working for and it's wonderful. For all of the people that hate censorship in any way, shape, or form, I agree to a large extent. But then again, as the previous poster said, once the kids figure out that pr0n is available, they will get little real work done.
Words are given weights. "Sex" may be weighted with a 20, for instance. So an article talking about worm reproduction might get through, especially since the word "reproduction" can be assigned a negative weight. But "SEX SEX SEX" might not. I have my limit set at 50...so if the total on the page goes over that, it is blocked. At the same time, DG allows whitelists of sites that may have lots of "questionable" words, but need to be unblocked anyway. I find this last feature useful to un-block webmail sites, where various employees may get otherwise blocked because of inappropriate spam.
I have found all of the "commercial" products to be overpriced and underperforming.
I would agree that the best use of such an ex-airstrip would be something with cars...I would love to have a (legal) drag strip within 100 miles of my house. But the local snobs think that cars are too loud...and the biggest thing...INSURANCE. If some idiot flips his rattletrap turbo Omni GLH at 120 mph and dismembers himself...he's probably going to sue somebody. There is just no way to convince the people in control of these places that liability could be waived by the use of enough papers...
I am not ignorant of the benefits of a multi-platform education nor am I opposed to Macs in education. But for the most part, school boards and teachers want a real-life computer experience. Which means that the vast, overwhelming number of computers in a school should be PC's. As they are in the school district I supervise. There are Macs, but they are few and far between.
Now as for all of the people that called me an "intern" and "full of" various things, how many school districts have YOU been the head computer honcho of? I am in them all day, every day, and I see what problems kids DO have. They DO have problems transitioning between them. They transition to PC's, and end up pushing in the MIDDLE of a PC mouse, rather than the left button as they should. There are many more problems than that. Are they insurmountable? No. But all of my experience says that the majority of their education should be in machines they are going to use in their future lives. Your multi-platform argument could just as easily support the use of Amigas, Commodore 64's, and VAX's. Again...for all of the people that would rather talk trash than have a legitimate debate...I do not hate Macs...but until the majority of the world uses them, they will continue to be in the minority of machines that make up my school district.
Is it just me, or is it silly to only do 6 games, so there was a possibility of a tie? Another game would have been the decision-maker. Then again, the pressure put on Kasparov might have been excessive, since obviously the computer wouldn't have to deal with ANY pressure...just another game.
Pontiac Fieros were plastic-bodied way back in 1984. The problem with plastic car bodies is the fact that they have huge coeffecients of thermal expansion. So when the car gets hot, door gaps and seals tend to distort themselves out of place. Early GM experiments showed that some doors became unclosable, and windows fell from their frames.
Different compounds and intelligent design solved many of the problems, though; the Fiero body never rusts and mine looks great after all these years. Mine does not catch on fire, either, since I have a 420-horsepower V-8 in the back instead of the wheezing 4-banger.
So plastic is certainly not revolutionary, but applying plastic in very thin sheets is certainly interesting.
Is it just me, or has there been really no mention of the Itanium on a "consumer" desktop? It sort of mirrors the "Pentium Pro" situation of numerous years back...it was pitched as a server-and-datacenter processor, but it was years before it became the Pentium II.
On the other hand, AMD's Opteron/Athlon 64 has been touted as a consumer piece from the very start. The consumer and "business" processors have been developed side-by-side, and their release dates are rather close. Is AMD the smarter or the dunce here? Time will tell. I, for one, am putting off any personal computer upgrades until 6 months or so after the A64 comes out.
Most "Hacker" incidents probably aren't going to be about your computer infrastructure completely melting down into a agglutinated mass of 0's and 1's. They are going to be about temporary disruptions and defacings, or perhaps data loss. That is where the insurance companies will always stick it to you. I would agree that insurance for a massive catastrophe would be wise...but even then the insurance companies will hasten to raise your premiums if "you allowed" something of this scale to happen.
I still think this money is best spent on prevention...and perhaps the money you spent on fire insurance would be best spent on a halon fire-suppression system. Sure that doesn't cover earthquakes and rabid raccoons, but I'm sure neither does "h/cracker insurance."
Lots of software packages like AutoCAD are overwhelmingly run on PC's...and use a two-button mouse. Before you get out your flaming napalm, lets have a calm discussion. I'm not trolling, I'm stating my firm beliefs. Thanks for the award, too. But I don't think it's a "weak" argument.
Kids that use Apples in general transition to the PC world and are lost. The one-button thing is just the tip of the iceberg. They have to learn all over again how to use a computer. The Apple interface might be nice and user-friendly, but I used to work in an architectural office...there were no Macs there. Summer-working kids came out of high school and suffered immediate PC-itis because of their limited exposure. I want what's best for the students just as well as the next...and in my view, they need to learn on the same machines they will eventually work on...PC's.
Why does a cooling fan or the absence of it make any difference? Does the fact that one car might be air-cooled or liquid-cooled make any difference?
I've said it before, and I will say it again: Apples are made of the same cheap Taiwanese/Chinese shit that all the other machines in the world are made of. Reliability is psychological now, unless you buy Fujitsu or IBM hard drives.
When kids come out of school not knowing how to use a two-button mouse, there is something wrong.
Anybody that would willingly buy insurance is at least half-nuts. If you DO buy insurance and DO get broken into they will send out swarms of "adjusters" and question how this could have happened, and how lax your security must be. Then they will proceed to up your premiums to make back what they paid you for the "damage." So they will end up getting THEIR money anyway. So my advice would be to take that money you would have spent on insurance, and buy a firewall and a decent admin to run it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think anything will come of these lawsuits, other than the previous slaps on the wrist that MS has gotten?
I mean non-litigated in the sense that, so far, there has been no serious lawsuit yet against Microsoft that would threaten the users themselves, or the very survival of the distributions they use. Microsoft is large enough and has enough legions of lawyers that they could prevent such a thing by sheer mass alone, even if they had infringed 100 patents. Microsoft can and will spin this as "go with the big one", while "little" companies like RedHat and SCO fight amongst themselves. If SCO (Caldera, whatever) had a brain in their head they would join with the Linux vendors to present a "United" front against MS. But they are ultimately looking for shareholder value, so this really makes sense in the short term.
OSI Papers notwithstanding, all it takes is a tipply judge to cause a lot of headaches for everyone from RedHat to Yellow Dog. In any case, Microsoft wins. Their line...go with the smart, non-litigated choice...Windows XP. Now with Software Assurance!
I can remember when www.whitehouse.gov supported an open relay. It was freaky to send people e-mail from president@whitehouse.gov with www.whitehouse.gov in the headers. www.pentagon.mil and such government agencies as www.usda.gov used to be open too.
Well, since this has generated a bit of controversy and even accusations of my own anti-Microsoftery, I will elaborate on a few of my experiences. And yes, these are all my personal experiences, not something I've picked off of a website. Perhaps I should have said patch, Service Pack, or any software drivel coming from Redmond. My point is that I look upon anything from them with suspicion, and not because I'm any sort of linux zealot. First of all I'll describe the (original, since upgraded) system. Three Compaq NT4 machines providing proxy, mail, and print serving to a school district of 3000 students/faculty, spread across six buildings through a T1 WAN. Install one or the other "security updates" for NT4. Boy what a wonderful day, the Primary DC won't boot. Solution...restore from backup tapes, and find ways to work around the security problems without installing their update. Later, we upgrade to Win2K Server. Everybody's happy and fine. Install SP1...wow isn't that nice, the Primary DC for the entire district suddenly won't go beyond a blue-screen on boot. Restore from tape, live with SP(null.) Now I'm in another district with no Windows servers. Three Netware 6.0 machines, and two Linux boxes that are slowly invading their formerly-held territory of proxy, web, print and e-mail. I never said Novell patches weren't crap either, or their operating system. But we won't go into that. As far as non-server Windows stuff, I have long since turned off any auto-updating in the district or my personal machines, for fear Microsoft will pass something down the line that will screw something up. I will also use the case in point of SP3, which breaks the EULA, of all things. I work for a grocery store chain that also has a pharmacy...they are scared to death of HIPAA and Microsoft's SP3 for Windows 2000. When you see things like Microsoft gaining the ability to change things on your computer, in the litigation-crazy medical industry you start wondering. My point is that Microsoft patches, SP's, whatever is always like Russian roulette. And half of the chambers are loaded, in my experience.
I don't trust Microsoft either. More often than not, their "patches" break more than they fix anyway.
Jobs and Gates are two immovable objects that are colliding with irresistable force...and these are the results. They just sort of merge together. Apple becomes DRM-loving Microsoft, and Microsoft becomes touchy-feely-hippie-interfaced Apple. No surprise to me.
It's the only way to beat it into some people's heads you know
More than anything, I was trying to extend the analogy to the "freedom" of the press...and its freedom from oversight by entities such as the RIAA/MPAA. Something the postal service shares, which is the inability for others to search it before it is disseminated to the masses.
I can imagine what the RIAA/MPAA would think if we were today debating the freedom of the press. After all, newspapers can be used to STEAL copyrighted works! This must be stopped! It's not the messenger, it's the message. So maybe Napster/Grokster/Morpheus are mostly used for infringing...but they in themselves are not infringing anything. If I make a telephone call to get my gang together to conduct a bank robbery, the law doesn't hold the phone company liable. I know about common-carrier laws, but this is a good comparison. It's the message, not the messenger.
So now they're bombing the Poles with bunker busters? Who knew THEY were in the axis of evil?
I went to school with a person that was considered a super-intellect type, even though I regularly out-scored him on standard tests. He later went on to such-and-such academy and such-and-such school. He ended up at Microsoft, and is listed in some archaic credits of Internet Explorer 4.0 as a member of "Core." Well, I have searched the internet from one end to the other, and he has never posted anything, anywhere, at least using his real name. I can find his supposed house and address on Mapquest (outside Redmond of course.) Remember he was working for them in 1994-1995 or so, when the Internet was "hot."...and he's never been sighted anywhere on the thing he supposedly helped create. So I almost believe the oil-rig piling story...
Finally something people can "grab ahold of" out of NASA. If they made a bigger deal out of a lot of their other advances and discoveries they would be held in better public esteem. But the public usually only pays attention when something bad happens.
The Children's Internet Protection Act should be called the SurfPatrol Benefit Act. 99% of the "filtering" software is so horribly mis-written and mis-configured that it might as well be a screen full of holes. True internet "protection" takes dilligence and supervision, not the purchase of some sham software. They aren't protecting anything but their own state-of-mind and the software companies that put out this over-priced drivel.
I will agree that some porn sites are engineered to try and bypass such filters...but they are most often geared much more to try and entice search spiders, and thus are loaded with pretty revealing keywords. Lots of sites have gone to graphics-only, though, with little text to trigger keyword-based filters like I use. So the blacklists come in handy. Later versions of Dansguardians may include skin-tone matching for images...which of course generates other problems. The students here are not given e-mail accounts through the school. The teachers are, though, which, yes, led to our mail server being blanket whitelisted. But the teachers are a lot closer to being responsible than the kids. Anyway, I do a tail -f on the log file on occasion, and check what everybody's doing. For the kids that have Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, those aren't whitelisted, and their e-mails get heavily filtered because of that. I wholeheartedly agree that there is no substitute for supervision. But in an era where we are getting rid of teachers and my technology budget has been trimmed to almost nil, this is a wonderful solution. Their biggest effect is to make the kids realize that they are being monitored and logged. They don't even try after awhile.
Take a look at Dansguardian. It's a supplement to Squid that allows keyword filtering and weighting. I use it in the district I'm working for and it's wonderful. For all of the people that hate censorship in any way, shape, or form, I agree to a large extent. But then again, as the previous poster said, once the kids figure out that pr0n is available, they will get little real work done. Words are given weights. "Sex" may be weighted with a 20, for instance. So an article talking about worm reproduction might get through, especially since the word "reproduction" can be assigned a negative weight. But "SEX SEX SEX" might not. I have my limit set at 50...so if the total on the page goes over that, it is blocked. At the same time, DG allows whitelists of sites that may have lots of "questionable" words, but need to be unblocked anyway. I find this last feature useful to un-block webmail sites, where various employees may get otherwise blocked because of inappropriate spam. I have found all of the "commercial" products to be overpriced and underperforming.
I would agree that the best use of such an ex-airstrip would be something with cars...I would love to have a (legal) drag strip within 100 miles of my house. But the local snobs think that cars are too loud...and the biggest thing...INSURANCE. If some idiot flips his rattletrap turbo Omni GLH at 120 mph and dismembers himself...he's probably going to sue somebody. There is just no way to convince the people in control of these places that liability could be waived by the use of enough papers...
I am not ignorant of the benefits of a multi-platform education nor am I opposed to Macs in education. But for the most part, school boards and teachers want a real-life computer experience. Which means that the vast, overwhelming number of computers in a school should be PC's. As they are in the school district I supervise. There are Macs, but they are few and far between. Now as for all of the people that called me an "intern" and "full of" various things, how many school districts have YOU been the head computer honcho of? I am in them all day, every day, and I see what problems kids DO have. They DO have problems transitioning between them. They transition to PC's, and end up pushing in the MIDDLE of a PC mouse, rather than the left button as they should. There are many more problems than that. Are they insurmountable? No. But all of my experience says that the majority of their education should be in machines they are going to use in their future lives. Your multi-platform argument could just as easily support the use of Amigas, Commodore 64's, and VAX's. Again...for all of the people that would rather talk trash than have a legitimate debate...I do not hate Macs...but until the majority of the world uses them, they will continue to be in the minority of machines that make up my school district.
Is it just me, or is it silly to only do 6 games, so there was a possibility of a tie? Another game would have been the decision-maker. Then again, the pressure put on Kasparov might have been excessive, since obviously the computer wouldn't have to deal with ANY pressure...just another game.
Pontiac Fieros were plastic-bodied way back in 1984. The problem with plastic car bodies is the fact that they have huge coeffecients of thermal expansion. So when the car gets hot, door gaps and seals tend to distort themselves out of place. Early GM experiments showed that some doors became unclosable, and windows fell from their frames. Different compounds and intelligent design solved many of the problems, though; the Fiero body never rusts and mine looks great after all these years. Mine does not catch on fire, either, since I have a 420-horsepower V-8 in the back instead of the wheezing 4-banger. So plastic is certainly not revolutionary, but applying plastic in very thin sheets is certainly interesting.
Is it just me, or has there been really no mention of the Itanium on a "consumer" desktop? It sort of mirrors the "Pentium Pro" situation of numerous years back...it was pitched as a server-and-datacenter processor, but it was years before it became the Pentium II. On the other hand, AMD's Opteron/Athlon 64 has been touted as a consumer piece from the very start. The consumer and "business" processors have been developed side-by-side, and their release dates are rather close. Is AMD the smarter or the dunce here? Time will tell. I, for one, am putting off any personal computer upgrades until 6 months or so after the A64 comes out.
Most "Hacker" incidents probably aren't going to be about your computer infrastructure completely melting down into a agglutinated mass of 0's and 1's. They are going to be about temporary disruptions and defacings, or perhaps data loss. That is where the insurance companies will always stick it to you. I would agree that insurance for a massive catastrophe would be wise...but even then the insurance companies will hasten to raise your premiums if "you allowed" something of this scale to happen. I still think this money is best spent on prevention...and perhaps the money you spent on fire insurance would be best spent on a halon fire-suppression system. Sure that doesn't cover earthquakes and rabid raccoons, but I'm sure neither does "h/cracker insurance."
Lots of software packages like AutoCAD are overwhelmingly run on PC's...and use a two-button mouse. Before you get out your flaming napalm, lets have a calm discussion. I'm not trolling, I'm stating my firm beliefs. Thanks for the award, too. But I don't think it's a "weak" argument. Kids that use Apples in general transition to the PC world and are lost. The one-button thing is just the tip of the iceberg. They have to learn all over again how to use a computer. The Apple interface might be nice and user-friendly, but I used to work in an architectural office...there were no Macs there. Summer-working kids came out of high school and suffered immediate PC-itis because of their limited exposure. I want what's best for the students just as well as the next...and in my view, they need to learn on the same machines they will eventually work on...PC's.
Why does a cooling fan or the absence of it make any difference? Does the fact that one car might be air-cooled or liquid-cooled make any difference?
I've said it before, and I will say it again: Apples are made of the same cheap Taiwanese/Chinese shit that all the other machines in the world are made of. Reliability is psychological now, unless you buy Fujitsu or IBM hard drives.
When kids come out of school not knowing how to use a two-button mouse, there is something wrong.
Anybody that would willingly buy insurance is at least half-nuts. If you DO buy insurance and DO get broken into they will send out swarms of "adjusters" and question how this could have happened, and how lax your security must be. Then they will proceed to up your premiums to make back what they paid you for the "damage." So they will end up getting THEIR money anyway. So my advice would be to take that money you would have spent on insurance, and buy a firewall and a decent admin to run it.