If you sign an employment agreement, you'd better stick to it.
In particular, you shouldn't publish a paper without running it by corporate communications first. You especially shouldn't publish a paper that might be critical of a partner or customer without doing this. You know why? Exactly. You get fired. For violating your employment agreement. If you don't agree with the things that you signed, you shouldn't have signed them. Hell, even if you have permission to publish the paper, you might want to think twice about publishing a paper which is critical of a rather large customer.
When I worked at AOL, I tried to get some of the execs to realize that some of the employees could be a powerful force in the technical community to raise the image of the company. Just the ability to explain some of the things that weren't confidential, correct some of the misconceptions. It wouldn't be a magical transformation, but it would be an effort. And actually joining the community would be a big step. Peer review and PR oversight could both be used to help make sure that more incorrect information didn't go out, or that the wrong things didn't go out.
Noone wanted to talk about it. My assumption is that noone I got to wanted to rock the boat, and noone responsible trusted the employees. It's too bad really. But even with something like that in place, this type of paper would never pass muster. Not through a peer review, and not through PR. You just don't criticize a large customer. Especially a customer with as much money as Microsoft.
I appreciate the response. I'm still not sure how a domain ends up in the gTLDs with no nameservers registered, as I was always under the impression it was a requisite part of the record. However, I've also never tried to have a domain registered with no nameservers, so I really couldn't say with absolutel certainty.
Obviously, you've got some references here that show otherwise. I thank you once again for clarifying all that for me, and passing along the references.
You've completely confused me here. First off, are we talking about dorkslayers.com or dorkslayer.com?
dorkslayers.com certainly does have NS records in the gTLD root servers. They are [ABC].NS.JOKER.COM. Lookups for anything in the dorkslayers.com domain do not return the SiteFinder IP address. dorkslayer.com also has NS records. They are [ABCD].NS.DORKSLAYER.COM. Now I don't care if those nameservers don't actually have zonefiles for dorkslayer[s].com, they are the authoritative nameservers for the domain, and are listed in the gTLD servers as such.
I dare say that there is not a single registered domain that does not have an NS record of some sort in the gTLD root servers (excluding domains that have been registered since the last root server update). Even if it's a placeholder NS record, it's there. I challenge anyone to show me a domain (in COM/NET) that breaks this rule.
It's also worth noting that there is no wildcard entry returned for any lookup within a registered domain. So, for example, dorkslayer.com is registered. If you do a lookup on {randomjunk}.dorkslayer.com, you will not get the SiteFinder IP address as a response. In fact, for that domain it seems you get 127.0.0.2, which is consistent with a DNSBL.
So please clarify exactly what point you're trying to make.
Now that I can't tell you. Some moderators are just morons. I mean, granted, it was a decent explanation as to why a moderator might pick one comment over another (at least to me). But it's completely off-topic for this article (as is this post).
This doesn't make any sense. The letter, which publically available, was not targeted towards the general public. It was targeted towards ICANN, and ICANN knows exactly what was meant, which is that other TLD registries have implemented wildcard entries.
ICANN has never cared what the general public thinks. Everyone knows this, including VeriSign. So why do you think that VeriSign would try and influence ICANN's decisions by addressing the general public in a letter which was privately sent to ICANN (which ICANN then made public)?
Not really. You posted anonymously, I didn't. Nothing against you (since I have no idea who you are, obviously), but I set very little stock by anything posted without a name. I understand that there are reasons to post anonymously, such as to not bring down the wrath of an employer. However, there's still the concept of if you won't even sign your name to what you've said, how much can it be worth? Additionally, a lot of moderators take the tact of never moderating AC posts up. And you also started your post with a personal insult, which a lot of people automatically view as flamebait.
Either way, the important thing is that someone got modded up to point out how wrong that guy was. And that he got modded down.
If your domain registration site is using a DNS lookup to check if a domain is registered, it is a very poor domain registration site. There is no guarantee that if a domain is registered, there are nameserver records for it anywhere except the gTLD root nameservers.
Registrars should be using the SRS system provided by VeriSign Naming and Directory Services to check if a domain is registered. This is the same system that they use to register domains with the registry (run by VNDS). This system can and does provide a definite yes or no as to whether a domain may be registered.
Love VeriSign or hate it, but get your facts straight.
The lawsuit said the center sent three letters to Kallan from October 2000 to October 2002, asking for acknowledgment of Online's ownership of the Dewey trademarks, but the hotel owner didn't respond.
While I agree the hotel should pay the back licensing fees, I think this lawsuit is a little excessive. But given that they said letters were sent, it's probably just to get the hotel's attention. The OCLC even says at the bottom of the article that they're looking to settle, and they don't want the hotel to go out of business. They just want a licensing agreement.
I've been to the Library Hotel. It's a really nice place. Yes, the books play an integral part in the ambiance of the hotel. But the use of the Dewey Decimal System is hardly the biggest thing they've got going for them, or the most important. They could easily drop the DDC classifications of the floors and rooms and the hotel would lose nothing by it.
Yeah, I got an email earlier today about that. I don't mind the fee so much since they're dropping their rates.
By the way, I too had problems getting my service switched over. Specifically, it was problems with their upstream (and Verizon) getting the transfer done. They ended up crediting me with 2 months of free service on both of my accounts while this was going on. I didn't have to fight with them, I just had to ask.
Yeah, their support can be a little slow. But for the most part it's not bad. They're pushing a new business into the mainstream, effectively. So I'm cutting them a little slack. Their fax line service, however, leaves a lot to be desired. We have nothing but problems with it, at this point.
Let's see. 10% is the "average" return that most people work with when dealing with things like mutual funds and most basic medium-risk investments. Yeah, I know you can't count on it, and the economy's been sucking lately. But you can still find decent investments. This doesn't really count real estate or anything like that. Additionally, people with a bit of money have access to investments that the rest of us who aren't millionaires don't. Such as hedge funds.
So you're telling me that in the last year, these billionaires only managed to get a 10% return? I mean, even if we're talking about someone owning a lot of real estate, that still appreciates in value over time (generally). Let's say that only half their value is actually invested in things that would appreciate (stock/fund/real estate/other investments, for example), which is really conservative. That's still only a 20% return. Sounds pretty poor to me.
Where the hell did you get that moronic idea? VeriSign has never agreed to run the registry as a non-profit. In fact, the COM/NET registry is one of VeriSign's big stable revenue streams.
The only thing that VeriSign has to do with regards to the registry is to keep the business and technical operations separate from the registrar (Network Solutions). That means that NSI folks can't go to the registry offices, unless all the other registrars are invited as well. And the registry has to take lots of steps to make sure that there is never a conflict of interests. Something, I might add, which they have, in fact, done an excellent job of. Regardless of this wildcard DNS entry.
Network Solutions "bought" InterNIC way back when. VeriSign bought Network Solutions. Now Network Solutions sells domains as a registrar, and VeriSign (VeriSign Naming and Directory Services, specifically) is the registry. Every registrar, including Network Solutions, pays VNDS $6 per year per domain. VNDS doesn't pay anyone anything.
If you read the article (which it seems the submitter didn't even do), you'll see that Microsoft says that applying DRM to a file will be an exception, not the default behavior. This means that the OpenOffice team will be able to figure out the Office 2003 file formats without DRM features, and open and manipulate those files just fine.
The only files that they won't be able to work with will be files that someone has chosen to apply DRM to. And from the document creator's point of view, this is a good thing. The ability to open the file in another app that was not beholden to Microsoft's DRM server would render the DRM completely useless. And DRM itself is not a bad thing. If you think so, perhaps you should execute "chmod -R 777/" as root as quickly as possible.
The first interesting thing will be to see where MS goes from here. Will Office 2004 have DRM as a default? If so, that would make interoperability a great deal more difficult. But more interesting is how the open source community will respond. DRM on documents is an important feature. If I'm putting out a document, it might be useful for me to be able to specify who can view it, who can edit it, and so on, without having to resort to filesystem ACLs. Sure, it's not absolute security on the document, but it's another layer. So it might be a good thing to consider to have some sort of open source DRM alternative for OpenOffice.
No, this wasn't just auto-renewal. I cancelled within the first month because of the massive downtime and lack of support, so I was supposed to get that month back (by their guarantee). It took me 2 months (during which they did not charge me) to get that refunded back, and the only way I did it was by disputing the charge with my card company.
The week after they refunded it, they charged 2 months' service to my card. It could only have been to "recoup" the money that the credit card company "took" from them. I started talking to them about that, and the next month they charged my card AGAIN. I had to change the number on my card. I had to dispute it with the card company again. After a couple more months, I finally got my money back again. And I'm sure that if I hadn't changed my card number, they would have continued to charge me again.
And this doesn't even cover the support issues and downtime. Just the fraudulent billing.
CI Host is a lousy company. I had nothing but trouble with them when I was hosting there. They continued to charge me after I cancelled my account, they refused to issue refunds in a timely manner. I very nearly took them to court over it. CI Host has spammers as customers. I told them about a few that were causing problems for me, and they never did anything about them. Doesnt' surprise me, because their customer support is poor, bordering on non-existant.
AOL is going to turn around and clean them out in court, and I'm going to thoroughly enjoy it. All they have to do is point to a few CI Host customers that spam, and that CI Host has been notified of several times, and it will either be a wash (in which case, AOL wins because they can stand the legal fees better than CI Host), or AOL will be able to counter-sue without a problem and make CI Host feel the hurt. Either way, I say yay AOL, which is something that I don't often say.
Read the goddamn summary, if nothing else. They announced their product concept the day before the blackout. They got their contract the day of (big surprise there).
Just when you thought the masses couldn't get any dumber, along comes someone like you.
So it would seem that regardless of whether or not Linksys used the original source packages without modification, they need to release their modified GCC based on the evidence that it was used alone, given that it appears to contain optimizations specifically for the chipset in the Linksys AP.
OK, so Linksys used a modified gcc to compile some of the GPL'd software on their AP. As noted, unless they put the modified gcc binaries on their AP as well, they don't have to distribute the source. But this raises an interesting point.
Say I create a modified compiler that recognizes some piece of code, or tag and replaces it with an "improved" piece of code. For example, it recognizes the code for a particular driver, like the tg3 driver in the Linux kernel, for one example, and inserts optimized compiled code in place of the actual code in the output binary, where this optimized code is actually a completely new driver, derived from the original GPL driver.
Now technically, I haven't broken the GPL if I distribute the output binary in a product but don't distribute the source for the optimized driver. The optimizations are present in gcc, not the source code, and I'm not distributing gcc. The changes in the output binary are just the way that the compiler I used "interprets" the code that was compiled. It does, of course, break the spirit of the GPL. Is there a way to address this, or is it a giant glaring loophole in the GNU Public License?
The article is lacking fact-checking. For example, it states that by the late 90s, the business affairs unit was working out of CC4. Creative Center 4 wasn't even finished until summer of 2000.
So take it for what it's worth. I think the Sunday Post runs about $1.50.
So, Michael. If David is incorrect, why did this even get posted. It's not news. It's not anything. It's just someone misreading a document and getting all up in arms about what he misread.
Once again, Slashdot shows us it has no filters. "News to Noone. Stuff that falters."
It's really dependant on the needs of your organization. If you need to know that you have a "go-to" company for support, or if you need to know that the hardware you're buying is specifically certified for the OS that you're installing, you should go with the RedHat Enterprise Linux line. If you can support it in-house, don't care about either making patches yourself, or upgrading the OS ever 18 months or so, and can generally hack it on your own, go with the consumer version.
RHEL adds clustering, but you can do that with other packages. All of the kernel updates that are in RHEL are available from kernel.org, either in a later 2.4 kernel or in the 2.5 series. Outside of that, I don't think there's much else.
We just decided to go with RHEL. But we have the aforementioned support issues. Management needs the warm fuzzies, and we have a lot of existing RedHat knowledge that can be leverages (thus making a move to an alternate distro a bad idea). Plus it's nice to know that when I, as an infrastructure person, need an answer to a question that I can't quite figure out, I can just call our RedHat rep and make them to the legwork. Sure, that might not be worth the license fees, but together with the support issues, it's what we need.
So why is it that I only recognize one or two of the names of these "core developers"? And the ones that I do recognize, only barely. They don't seem to be the people that I know are involved with the core development and operations of JBoss and the JBoss Group.
In fact, it sounds like they're just being antagonistic, and using/. to get some publicity. I don't understand why it's not possible for both CDN and JBoss Group to thrive and serve the community. But they seem to think that they can only exist by killing the other "fork", if that's even what it is. Competition is good for the industry, even open source. But CDN looks like they're just trying to cast JBoss Group in a bad light (disparaging their stats).
Oh, and as I remember it, it wasn't just their call to terminate their contracts with JBoss Group for providing support. JBoss Group was non-renewing the contracts anyways, because they had decided that it was a better idea for them to be the support company themselves. They didn't terminate the contracts immediately when they started their own support offerings, but they did make the decision to not have any new consultants, and to start thinning out the ones they did have.
One book in a month of nothing to do? Maybe one book a week, if you're slow!
Anyways, Cryptonomicon was a good read, if a little lengthy. In fact, anything by Stephenson that you haven't read (Zodiac and Diamond Age were great). Just ignore the complaints about endings and enjoy the rest of the story.
Asimov's Foundation series is a great choice as well. Not so much with the hacker angle (well, hacking of a different kind, surely) but very interesting.
If you want to go military geek sci-fi, David Weber's Honor Harrington series is excellent. You can get the first book, On Basilisk Station from the Baen Free Library. And if you buy the most recent book, War of Honor, in hardcover, you get a CD that has all the books in the series on it. Or you can just download the CD somewhere online.
Just a few suggestions. I have a ton of other things on my reading list, but that's a start.
Slashdot Mirror
If you sign an employment agreement, you'd better stick to it.
In particular, you shouldn't publish a paper without running it by corporate communications first. You especially shouldn't publish a paper that might be critical of a partner or customer without doing this. You know why? Exactly. You get fired. For violating your employment agreement. If you don't agree with the things that you signed, you shouldn't have signed them. Hell, even if you have permission to publish the paper, you might want to think twice about publishing a paper which is critical of a rather large customer.
When I worked at AOL, I tried to get some of the execs to realize that some of the employees could be a powerful force in the technical community to raise the image of the company. Just the ability to explain some of the things that weren't confidential, correct some of the misconceptions. It wouldn't be a magical transformation, but it would be an effort. And actually joining the community would be a big step. Peer review and PR oversight could both be used to help make sure that more incorrect information didn't go out, or that the wrong things didn't go out.
Noone wanted to talk about it. My assumption is that noone I got to wanted to rock the boat, and noone responsible trusted the employees. It's too bad really. But even with something like that in place, this type of paper would never pass muster. Not through a peer review, and not through PR. You just don't criticize a large customer. Especially a customer with as much money as Microsoft.
-Todd
I appreciate the response. I'm still not sure how a domain ends up in the gTLDs with no nameservers registered, as I was always under the impression it was a requisite part of the record. However, I've also never tried to have a domain registered with no nameservers, so I really couldn't say with absolutel certainty.
Obviously, you've got some references here that show otherwise. I thank you once again for clarifying all that for me, and passing along the references.
-Todd
You've completely confused me here. First off, are we talking about dorkslayers.com or dorkslayer.com?
dorkslayers.com certainly does have NS records in the gTLD root servers. They are [ABC].NS.JOKER.COM. Lookups for anything in the dorkslayers.com domain do not return the SiteFinder IP address. dorkslayer.com also has NS records. They are [ABCD].NS.DORKSLAYER.COM. Now I don't care if those nameservers don't actually have zonefiles for dorkslayer[s].com, they are the authoritative nameservers for the domain, and are listed in the gTLD servers as such.
I dare say that there is not a single registered domain that does not have an NS record of some sort in the gTLD root servers (excluding domains that have been registered since the last root server update). Even if it's a placeholder NS record, it's there. I challenge anyone to show me a domain (in COM/NET) that breaks this rule.
It's also worth noting that there is no wildcard entry returned for any lookup within a registered domain. So, for example, dorkslayer.com is registered. If you do a lookup on {randomjunk}.dorkslayer.com, you will not get the SiteFinder IP address as a response. In fact, for that domain it seems you get 127.0.0.2, which is consistent with a DNSBL.
So please clarify exactly what point you're trying to make.
-Todd
Now that I can't tell you. Some moderators are just morons. I mean, granted, it was a decent explanation as to why a moderator might pick one comment over another (at least to me). But it's completely off-topic for this article (as is this post).
-Todd
This doesn't make any sense. The letter, which publically available, was not targeted towards the general public. It was targeted towards ICANN, and ICANN knows exactly what was meant, which is that other TLD registries have implemented wildcard entries.
ICANN has never cared what the general public thinks. Everyone knows this, including VeriSign. So why do you think that VeriSign would try and influence ICANN's decisions by addressing the general public in a letter which was privately sent to ICANN (which ICANN then made public)?
-Todd
Not really. You posted anonymously, I didn't. Nothing against you (since I have no idea who you are, obviously), but I set very little stock by anything posted without a name. I understand that there are reasons to post anonymously, such as to not bring down the wrath of an employer. However, there's still the concept of if you won't even sign your name to what you've said, how much can it be worth? Additionally, a lot of moderators take the tact of never moderating AC posts up. And you also started your post with a personal insult, which a lot of people automatically view as flamebait.
Either way, the important thing is that someone got modded up to point out how wrong that guy was. And that he got modded down.
-Todd
If your domain registration site is using a DNS lookup to check if a domain is registered, it is a very poor domain registration site. There is no guarantee that if a domain is registered, there are nameserver records for it anywhere except the gTLD root nameservers.
Registrars should be using the SRS system provided by VeriSign Naming and Directory Services to check if a domain is registered. This is the same system that they use to register domains with the registry (run by VNDS). This system can and does provide a definite yes or no as to whether a domain may be registered.
Love VeriSign or hate it, but get your facts straight.
Read the article first, please.
The lawsuit said the center sent three letters to Kallan from October 2000 to October 2002, asking for acknowledgment of Online's ownership of the Dewey trademarks, but the hotel owner didn't respond.
While I agree the hotel should pay the back licensing fees, I think this lawsuit is a little excessive. But given that they said letters were sent, it's probably just to get the hotel's attention. The OCLC even says at the bottom of the article that they're looking to settle, and they don't want the hotel to go out of business. They just want a licensing agreement.
I've been to the Library Hotel. It's a really nice place. Yes, the books play an integral part in the ambiance of the hotel. But the use of the Dewey Decimal System is hardly the biggest thing they've got going for them, or the most important. They could easily drop the DDC classifications of the floors and rooms and the hotel would lose nothing by it.
-Todd
Yeah, I got an email earlier today about that. I don't mind the fee so much since they're dropping their rates.
By the way, I too had problems getting my service switched over. Specifically, it was problems with their upstream (and Verizon) getting the transfer done. They ended up crediting me with 2 months of free service on both of my accounts while this was going on. I didn't have to fight with them, I just had to ask.
Yeah, their support can be a little slow. But for the most part it's not bad. They're pushing a new business into the mainstream, effectively. So I'm cutting them a little slack. Their fax line service, however, leaves a lot to be desired. We have nothing but problems with it, at this point.
-Todd
Let's see. 10% is the "average" return that most people work with when dealing with things like mutual funds and most basic medium-risk investments. Yeah, I know you can't count on it, and the economy's been sucking lately. But you can still find decent investments. This doesn't really count real estate or anything like that. Additionally, people with a bit of money have access to investments that the rest of us who aren't millionaires don't. Such as hedge funds.
So you're telling me that in the last year, these billionaires only managed to get a 10% return? I mean, even if we're talking about someone owning a lot of real estate, that still appreciates in value over time (generally). Let's say that only half their value is actually invested in things that would appreciate (stock/fund/real estate/other investments, for example), which is really conservative. That's still only a 20% return. Sounds pretty poor to me.
-Todd
Where the hell did you get that moronic idea? VeriSign has never agreed to run the registry as a non-profit. In fact, the COM/NET registry is one of VeriSign's big stable revenue streams.
The only thing that VeriSign has to do with regards to the registry is to keep the business and technical operations separate from the registrar (Network Solutions). That means that NSI folks can't go to the registry offices, unless all the other registrars are invited as well. And the registry has to take lots of steps to make sure that there is never a conflict of interests. Something, I might add, which they have, in fact, done an excellent job of. Regardless of this wildcard DNS entry.
-Todd
VeriSign *is* InterNIC.
Network Solutions "bought" InterNIC way back when. VeriSign bought Network Solutions. Now Network Solutions sells domains as a registrar, and VeriSign (VeriSign Naming and Directory Services, specifically) is the registry. Every registrar, including Network Solutions, pays VNDS $6 per year per domain. VNDS doesn't pay anyone anything.
It's VNDS that is doing the wildcard entry.
-Todd
If you read the article (which it seems the submitter didn't even do), you'll see that Microsoft says that applying DRM to a file will be an exception, not the default behavior. This means that the OpenOffice team will be able to figure out the Office 2003 file formats without DRM features, and open and manipulate those files just fine.
The only files that they won't be able to work with will be files that someone has chosen to apply DRM to. And from the document creator's point of view, this is a good thing. The ability to open the file in another app that was not beholden to Microsoft's DRM server would render the DRM completely useless. And DRM itself is not a bad thing. If you think so, perhaps you should execute "chmod -R 777
The first interesting thing will be to see where MS goes from here. Will Office 2004 have DRM as a default? If so, that would make interoperability a great deal more difficult. But more interesting is how the open source community will respond. DRM on documents is an important feature. If I'm putting out a document, it might be useful for me to be able to specify who can view it, who can edit it, and so on, without having to resort to filesystem ACLs. Sure, it's not absolute security on the document, but it's another layer. So it might be a good thing to consider to have some sort of open source DRM alternative for OpenOffice.
-Todd
No, this wasn't just auto-renewal. I cancelled within the first month because of the massive downtime and lack of support, so I was supposed to get that month back (by their guarantee). It took me 2 months (during which they did not charge me) to get that refunded back, and the only way I did it was by disputing the charge with my card company.
The week after they refunded it, they charged 2 months' service to my card. It could only have been to "recoup" the money that the credit card company "took" from them. I started talking to them about that, and the next month they charged my card AGAIN. I had to change the number on my card. I had to dispute it with the card company again. After a couple more months, I finally got my money back again. And I'm sure that if I hadn't changed my card number, they would have continued to charge me again.
And this doesn't even cover the support issues and downtime. Just the fraudulent billing.
-Todd
And I'm going to enjoy watching.
CI Host is a lousy company. I had nothing but trouble with them when I was hosting there. They continued to charge me after I cancelled my account, they refused to issue refunds in a timely manner. I very nearly took them to court over it. CI Host has spammers as customers. I told them about a few that were causing problems for me, and they never did anything about them. Doesnt' surprise me, because their customer support is poor, bordering on non-existant.
AOL is going to turn around and clean them out in court, and I'm going to thoroughly enjoy it. All they have to do is point to a few CI Host customers that spam, and that CI Host has been notified of several times, and it will either be a wash (in which case, AOL wins because they can stand the legal fees better than CI Host), or AOL will be able to counter-sue without a problem and make CI Host feel the hurt. Either way, I say yay AOL, which is something that I don't often say.
-Todd
Read the goddamn summary, if nothing else. They announced their product concept the day before the blackout. They got their contract the day of (big surprise there).
Just when you thought the masses couldn't get any dumber, along comes someone like you.
-Todd
Excellent point. Thank you.
So it would seem that regardless of whether or not Linksys used the original source packages without modification, they need to release their modified GCC based on the evidence that it was used alone, given that it appears to contain optimizations specifically for the chipset in the Linksys AP.
-Todd
OK, so Linksys used a modified gcc to compile some of the GPL'd software on their AP. As noted, unless they put the modified gcc binaries on their AP as well, they don't have to distribute the source. But this raises an interesting point.
Say I create a modified compiler that recognizes some piece of code, or tag and replaces it with an "improved" piece of code. For example, it recognizes the code for a particular driver, like the tg3 driver in the Linux kernel, for one example, and inserts optimized compiled code in place of the actual code in the output binary, where this optimized code is actually a completely new driver, derived from the original GPL driver.
Now technically, I haven't broken the GPL if I distribute the output binary in a product but don't distribute the source for the optimized driver. The optimizations are present in gcc, not the source code, and I'm not distributing gcc. The changes in the output binary are just the way that the compiler I used "interprets" the code that was compiled. It does, of course, break the spirit of the GPL. Is there a way to address this, or is it a giant glaring loophole in the GNU Public License?
-Todd
All this means to the conspiracy theorists is that the military cleaned up the documents before they declassified them.
-Todd
The article is lacking fact-checking. For example, it states that by the late 90s, the business affairs unit was working out of CC4. Creative Center 4 wasn't even finished until summer of 2000.
So take it for what it's worth. I think the Sunday Post runs about $1.50.
-Todd
So, Michael. If David is incorrect, why did this even get posted. It's not news. It's not anything. It's just someone misreading a document and getting all up in arms about what he misread.
Once again, Slashdot shows us it has no filters. "News to Noone. Stuff that falters."
-Todd
It's really dependant on the needs of your organization. If you need to know that you have a "go-to" company for support, or if you need to know that the hardware you're buying is specifically certified for the OS that you're installing, you should go with the RedHat Enterprise Linux line. If you can support it in-house, don't care about either making patches yourself, or upgrading the OS ever 18 months or so, and can generally hack it on your own, go with the consumer version.
RHEL adds clustering, but you can do that with other packages. All of the kernel updates that are in RHEL are available from kernel.org, either in a later 2.4 kernel or in the 2.5 series. Outside of that, I don't think there's much else.
We just decided to go with RHEL. But we have the aforementioned support issues. Management needs the warm fuzzies, and we have a lot of existing RedHat knowledge that can be leverages (thus making a move to an alternate distro a bad idea). Plus it's nice to know that when I, as an infrastructure person, need an answer to a question that I can't quite figure out, I can just call our RedHat rep and make them to the legwork. Sure, that might not be worth the license fees, but together with the support issues, it's what we need.
-Todd
So why is it that I only recognize one or two of the names of these "core developers"? And the ones that I do recognize, only barely. They don't seem to be the people that I know are involved with the core development and operations of JBoss and the JBoss Group.
/. to get some publicity. I don't understand why it's not possible for both CDN and JBoss Group to thrive and serve the community. But they seem to think that they can only exist by killing the other "fork", if that's even what it is. Competition is good for the industry, even open source. But CDN looks like they're just trying to cast JBoss Group in a bad light (disparaging their stats).
In fact, it sounds like they're just being antagonistic, and using
Oh, and as I remember it, it wasn't just their call to terminate their contracts with JBoss Group for providing support. JBoss Group was non-renewing the contracts anyways, because they had decided that it was a better idea for them to be the support company themselves. They didn't terminate the contracts immediately when they started their own support offerings, but they did make the decision to not have any new consultants, and to start thinning out the ones they did have.
-Todd
One book in a month of nothing to do? Maybe one book a week, if you're slow!
Anyways, Cryptonomicon was a good read, if a little lengthy. In fact, anything by Stephenson that you haven't read (Zodiac and Diamond Age were great). Just ignore the complaints about endings and enjoy the rest of the story.
Asimov's Foundation series is a great choice as well. Not so much with the hacker angle (well, hacking of a different kind, surely) but very interesting.
If you want to go military geek sci-fi, David Weber's Honor Harrington series is excellent. You can get the first book, On Basilisk Station from the Baen Free Library. And if you buy the most recent book, War of Honor, in hardcover, you get a CD that has all the books in the series on it. Or you can just download the CD somewhere online.
Just a few suggestions. I have a ton of other things on my reading list, but that's a start.
-Todd
Definitely a part of 2.0
t ml
Here's a link to the press release for Netscape 2.0: http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease82.h
-Todd