This is about a secret number. This number is, well, a number. You can't own a number. No number is a secret unto itself. That they use it as the key for their cryptography, that's the secret they want to keep private. Unfortunately for them, the number was available to anyone with a disk, a drive, and the right software. Someone was bound to tell. They tried to un-share the secret by squelching the mention of the number, not the association with their cryptography. That's censorship.
It's a popular topic here for a number of reasons, including:
"Wishing it away" will not erase the fact that true DRM is not possible -- a fact that is abundantly obvious to everyone except the *IAA. Even the geeks who are milking them with tales of bulletproof DRM and golden keys understand this and insist on being paid cash up front.
It's an opporunity to bash lawyers - the only professionals that produce nothing, create nothing, serve noone, and gets a third of everything they touch. For the most part even lawyers despise lawyers.
Laughing at the failures of incompetent executives is a popular sport around here. We laugh because we dare not cry. Read Dilbert and in time you'll come to understand.
There's a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.
Frankly I think this whole protect-the-media-empire-profits mode the government has gotten into lately is treason against the people and the Republic. It's an example of legislation for hire. It's an erosion of civil rights to protect the unearned profits on Steamboat Willie. It is vile. But that's just my opinion.
Why should they be afraid? Because given 30 years and more money than the GNP of Texas they can't come up with a better OS than a finnish nerd's geek vanity project, or a better language than c++. They should be afraid because the future is Open.
Yeah, we should be able to open a _window_, like a desktop on the desktop switcher that lets us log into a screen session as administrator, and perform all of our Admin GUI voodoo in it without having to log out and in and re-authenticate everything a bazillion times; without worrying about doing admin-style ubergoofs while mangling our WP macros.
Oh, wait. That's been done a thousand times, like Xnest. Never mind.
Oh, yeah. We need a mode where evil programs can't do too much bad stuff, even if they don't set the evil bit, even if they have innocuously named executables. Something where access to the core of the operating system configuration is prohibited. Not like an administrator, but like, you know, a regular user. I propose we call this a "user account".
I'd also like a way to set up a test computer, but not a real one, where I can install an operating system and add programs and test the programs to see if they're evil. Not a real machine, that can mess up my network, though, but a sort of emulated machine. I suggest we call this a "virtual machine". Somebody should get started on that one right away. With all the bad software out on the internets it's only a matter of time before something awful happens.
I'd also like some kind of operating system that doesn't have so much festering crap floating around to kill it on the internets. Something that has this stuff included. Maybe something that was built from the ground up with security and stability in mind. It would help if it didn't cost a lot of money, too. Anybody got some ideas here on this one? I know it's a lot to ask.
As soon as it's an option, I'm buying one. I'll probably buy several for personal use this year. You should too.
If my preferred vendor doesn't get on this train they've lost my business. It's about giving the customer what they want. It's about freedom, not price. Now I've got to go download Feisty and get used to it so it'll be familiar when my Dell comes.
Peak power usage is in the daytime, but it's been noted that a lot of power is needed at night too. Solar panels don't work at night.
For that you need the Lunar power panels. Unfortunately those only work at night half the time. They yield even less power per acre unless they're installed on the moon directly, and then cabling becomes an issue.
It's important that we consider carefully the effects of [issue]. With my carefully worded statement I assure you that I'm on your side on [issue], no matter what it is.
You have to consider that [the business interests opposed] have a great deal of money and are willing to fund my reelection so I can work on this urgent issue for you. Remember that their great business is what provides [jobs to thousands of impoverished Pakistani factory workers/drugs for washed up one hit wonders/hope for world peace/progress on global warming].
I believe it's important to consider [issue] in the light of both [voters, businesses] like yourself and [prev. alternate]. I'm sure I can count on your support.
My staff enjoys sending out these boilerplates and hope you will invite them to send you one on every topic you desire, so you can compare them to each other and gauge our sincerity. If you would like to donate $5,000 or more to my election campaign, I would love for you to attend a dinner in my honor where you can hear me state my nebulous position and have some terrible chicken.
That extra three years XP became more entrenched each day. Every time somebody installed a new printer or upgraded their wireless or beat their way through a software install, the compatibility bar for vista got higher. Every time someone new installed XP, the breakthrough point for widespread adoption of Vista got higher too. Each time XP gained share the leverage of having everyone on the same plan became more apparent as the pool of people you could exchange files with grew. Every time somebody bit their lip and bought a hugely expensive new program in the faint hope it would install and run correctly and be compatible with their extant setup and not be lame, the cost of upgrading to vista grew higher again. Even the negatives of some of these things forewarned people that change can be very bad and unnecessary change can be dumb when things go horribly wrong as they sometimes do over the simplest things.
XP isn't perfect and it doesn't have to be. XP works reliably enough for most people to do what they want to do most of the time. They've grown comfortable with their XP setups and invested heavily in padding their XP nests. To abandon that for a whole new Vista that doesn't have any of their expensive software or work with their expensive peripherals or just won't do what they've done each day for years or isn't quite interoperable with their friends' just isn't going to fly unless there is a compelling reason. A new desktop theme is not compelling enough for most people. For that level of sacrifice people want real change.
This is what it's like when you're the little guy and you ink the big deal with Dell. Dell gets all your production at less than cost and the channel you built your business on gets too little to sustain their ecosystem so they abandon you. As soon as Dell realizes they're your only friend, they want you to pay them to take your product. It's like working with Wal-Mart, except Bill Gates gets a commission on every sale.
They probably can't extricate themselves from the Dell deal. Apparently too many ATI engineers also just remembered their stock options vested a while ago. Intel seems to remember again that their job is to invent stuff that people will want, not sell people stuff Intel wants to invent. Basically AMD is screwed.
If they lose $600 million on $1.2 billion in revenue, then $2 billion in revenue should net them a loss of $1 billion. "Losing money on every sale, trying to make it up in volume."
What they need is a shortcut past 65 and 40nm directly to 32. Where's John Titor when you need him?
Not so long ago, AMD was wiping the floor with Intel and gained significant market share. That alone suggests that Intel does not have exploitable control of the market.
It might suggest that. It might suggest they expended too much juice trying to float the Itanic, leaving so little for innovation in the 2-8 processor server space and desktops that AMD caught up and earned some props. Whichever, AMD is about to pull a Cyrix if they don't find the magic shortcut to 32nm without going through the intermediate steps.
The law does not prohibit monopoply. The law prohibits the abuse of monopoly to stifle competition. Intel is going to have to take great care to avoid the appearance of abuse of monopoly. The best way (and the one I expect, hurrah!) is to continue to innovate at such breakneck speed that poor little AMD just can't keep up. I hope they leave AMD enough share to limp along behind them. It might be hard to justify huge R&D budgets to the stockholders when you're completely alone in the field, and we'd go back to no progress at all in short order.
I'll take a 8 core 16W notebook cpu as soon as I can get it. Please include the chipset with eSATA and external PCIe V2.0 x32. If they must call it Centrino, please save the pc-card slot for an add-on wireless card because even my 12 yr old knows Centrino is the ancient Aramaic word for "sucky wireless." Maybe a new notebook chipset brandname? Is it too late to call the new double-the-pins socket the "T2"? That would be cute.
The stock is right at where it ended the year in 1999. A great many other tech companies from that era are no more, or are trading at pennies on the dollar. Since 2000 AMD has handed Intel their hat time and again. Ruiz is doing great work.
That said, his engineers had better pull a rabbit out of their hat. Today he's getting stomped by a very angry Chipzilla, and Chipzilla looks like the type that holds a grudge for a looong time.
You don't count it like that. SCO was about keeping linux from gaining too much share before Vista was released. It worked.
Novell is about keeping linux from taking the fore until Vista is replaced with something that works. It's working so far - some large customers are taking the bait. Probably in a year they'll set the hook. Sooner maybe if the mainstream press picks up on the "Vista is Windows ME 2.0" meme, which seems to be gaining buzz. Hopefully a few more OEMs will join the "XP available for all" train in fear of losing share to Dell. It's just one short step from there to "Vista? What vista?" That will accelerate their schedule with Novell and hopefully limit their catch to outfits where they have highly placed insiders. Right about then the people on Software Assurance should be joining a class.
Yes, it would be nice to have that much money personally, but you can't say it's wasted. They're getting their money's worth, and Baystar's too. They usually do because they leverage their power, and for this sort of thing power is better than money.
Tor Braham doesn't just explain. He provides drafts to show what was proposed and the copyright transfer was proposed by Old SCO, rejected by Novell and explicitly excluded... SCO's witnesses "recall" what may have been intended. This guy knows and provides documents to prove it.
The Microsoft + Novell deal is just SCO + EV1 servers all over again. The schemers are running out of creativity. Both deals are more smoke than fire. Neither is meaningful because their secret nature precludes people from making rational decisions about them. How do you put a value on the products of either SCO or Novell, when they've entered agreements that prohibit them from disclosing who owns what? Is the point of this to allow both of them to sell you the same thing, twice? When your marketing approach is "Sign this contract or we'll sue you out of business whether our claims have merit or not," people have to start wondering what makes you morally superior to a mugger and whether being in an enduring relationship with you is preferable to going directly to court or cheaper than settling you with a different kind of "contract.". Eventually these people are going to try this with the entirely wrong victim and it won't take the courts to sort the matter out.
The declaration of Novell's outside attorney that did the deal, Tor Braham reads like death to SCO's claims. Basically he was there, wrote the draft that got signed. He signed it himself. He kept drafts of what the Old SCO asked for and the edits where they were struck, and explains why very clearly: SCO just didn't have the cash, Novell wasn't interested in selling the Unix copyrights, Novell needed to protect its interests in case of an OldSCO bankruptcy.
It's interesting that just 1/2 hr before the close of market two days ago somebody unloaded 466,000 shares of SCOX, just over 2% of the company. As of December 31, 2006 yahoo lists only
seven companies and two insiders with that much of a stake. I wonder who....
Waterworld. Gigli.
I could go on but I won't. I am not boycotting movies -- I've just lost interest.
More than that. My interest was dragged to death in a hundred expensive plush seats.
The highest point in Florida according to this page is Britton Hill, at 345 Ft. According to this page the highest city is 500 feet. The average elevation of the entire state is 100 feet.
The Herbert Hoover Dike was built in the 1930s to hold back water draining from lands within the watershed. The dike was built in accordance with the accepted engineering standards of the day. Today we have an improved understanding of how the materials with which the dike was built react to changing environmental conditions and water levels. Accepted construction standards for today are more stringent than those of 70 years ago.
Recent analysis shows that if water levels in Lake Okeechobee fluctuate to very high and/or very low levels, the integrity of the dike may be compromised. Integrity is reduced as water seeps under the earthen sides of the dam.
Today the lake is at 10.166 Feet above NGVD29. Historically, the elevation of this fourth largest lake inside the US has been as little as 10 feet above NGVD29 (mean sea level as measured in 1929). Review the part above about "very low levels" again.
Okeechobee is said to have been formed out of the ocean about 6,000 years ago when the waters receded.
... and into the ocean it will go again when the waters return. On June 2, predicted high tide is two feet above NGVD29 at Port Boca Grande in Charlotte Harbor. Add up to 15 feet of storm surge:
The greatest potential for loss of life related to a hurricane is from the storm surge, which historically has claimed nine of ten victims.
Storm surge is simply water that is pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds swirling around the storm. This advancing surge combines with the normal tides to create the hurricane storm tide, which can increase the mean water level 15 feet or more.
Now do the math. Even if your "one foot in the next 50 years" is accurate, one foot is very significant when high tide and storm surge is already enough to put a 150 mile wide swath of your home state under seven feet of seawater. The numbers I've been reading are not one foot. I'm hearing a meter or two. At that rate one good hurricane could remove the part of southern florida that survives from the mainland entirely. None of this considers an Atlantic Tsunami, which has happened and is predicted to happen again and would just wash right over central florida barely slowing down.
If you're reading this from south Florida, you should consider carefully your choice to stay where you are.
Ok fine. Don't go to Canada. Also, don't come here. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Mad cows and killer bees. Very bad.
But for your own sake get out of low lying areas like San Diego and Florida.
Canada is also a happening place. And they take in almost anybody. And I believe and they have a homesteading program where you can get your own large tract of land for free or nearly free. If I weren't already an American, I'd go for it even if I had to steal, jump fences, work aboard a cargo ship, swim and take assumed names along the way.
People forget that never in the history of Man has the climate not been changing. We survivors are the ones that went from where conditions were not survivable to where they were better. The ones who stayed behind are history. (Note to people in southern Florida: if your children can't breathe seawater, now would be a good time to find some land that won't be under water when they're grown.)
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There's nothing hypocritical about this.
This is about a secret number. This number is, well, a number. You can't own a number. No number is a secret unto itself. That they use it as the key for their cryptography, that's the secret they want to keep private. Unfortunately for them, the number was available to anyone with a disk, a drive, and the right software. Someone was bound to tell. They tried to un-share the secret by squelching the mention of the number, not the association with their cryptography. That's censorship.
It's a popular topic here for a number of reasons, including:
There's a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.
Frankly I think this whole protect-the-media-empire-profits mode the government has gotten into lately is treason against the people and the Republic. It's an example of legislation for hire. It's an erosion of civil rights to protect the unearned profits on Steamboat Willie. It is vile. But that's just my opinion.
Why should they be afraid? Because given 30 years and more money than the GNP of Texas they can't come up with a better OS than a finnish nerd's geek vanity project, or a better language than c++. They should be afraid because the future is Open.
Yeah, we should be able to open a _window_, like a desktop on the desktop switcher that lets us log into a screen session as administrator, and perform all of our Admin GUI voodoo in it without having to log out and in and re-authenticate everything a bazillion times; without worrying about doing admin-style ubergoofs while mangling our WP macros.
Oh, wait. That's been done a thousand times, like Xnest. Never mind.
Oh, yeah. We need a mode where evil programs can't do too much bad stuff, even if they don't set the evil bit, even if they have innocuously named executables. Something where access to the core of the operating system configuration is prohibited. Not like an administrator, but like, you know, a regular user. I propose we call this a "user account".
I'd also like a way to set up a test computer, but not a real one, where I can install an operating system and add programs and test the programs to see if they're evil. Not a real machine, that can mess up my network, though, but a sort of emulated machine. I suggest we call this a "virtual machine". Somebody should get started on that one right away. With all the bad software out on the internets it's only a matter of time before something awful happens.
I'd also like some kind of operating system that doesn't have so much festering crap floating around to kill it on the internets. Something that has this stuff included. Maybe something that was built from the ground up with security and stability in mind. It would help if it didn't cost a lot of money, too. Anybody got some ideas here on this one? I know it's a lot to ask.
As soon as it's an option, I'm buying one. I'll probably buy several for personal use this year. You should too.
If my preferred vendor doesn't get on this train they've lost my business. It's about giving the customer what they want. It's about freedom, not price. Now I've got to go download Feisty and get used to it so it'll be familiar when my Dell comes.
For that you need the Lunar power panels. Unfortunately those only work at night half the time. They yield even less power per acre unless they're installed on the moon directly, and then cabling becomes an issue.
It's important that we consider carefully the effects of [issue]. With my carefully worded statement I assure you that I'm on your side on [issue], no matter what it is.
You have to consider that [the business interests opposed] have a great deal of money and are willing to fund my reelection so I can work on this urgent issue for you. Remember that their great business is what provides [jobs to thousands of impoverished Pakistani factory workers/drugs for washed up one hit wonders/hope for world peace/progress on global warming].
I believe it's important to consider [issue] in the light of both [voters, businesses] like yourself and [prev. alternate]. I'm sure I can count on your support.
My staff enjoys sending out these boilerplates and hope you will invite them to send you one on every topic you desire, so you can compare them to each other and gauge our sincerity. If you would like to donate $5,000 or more to my election campaign, I would love for you to attend a dinner in my honor where you can hear me state my nebulous position and have some terrible chicken.
That extra three years XP became more entrenched each day. Every time somebody installed a new printer or upgraded their wireless or beat their way through a software install, the compatibility bar for vista got higher. Every time someone new installed XP, the breakthrough point for widespread adoption of Vista got higher too. Each time XP gained share the leverage of having everyone on the same plan became more apparent as the pool of people you could exchange files with grew. Every time somebody bit their lip and bought a hugely expensive new program in the faint hope it would install and run correctly and be compatible with their extant setup and not be lame, the cost of upgrading to vista grew higher again. Even the negatives of some of these things forewarned people that change can be very bad and unnecessary change can be dumb when things go horribly wrong as they sometimes do over the simplest things.
XP isn't perfect and it doesn't have to be. XP works reliably enough for most people to do what they want to do most of the time. They've grown comfortable with their XP setups and invested heavily in padding their XP nests. To abandon that for a whole new Vista that doesn't have any of their expensive software or work with their expensive peripherals or just won't do what they've done each day for years or isn't quite interoperable with their friends' just isn't going to fly unless there is a compelling reason. A new desktop theme is not compelling enough for most people. For that level of sacrifice people want real change.
This is what it's like when you're the little guy and you ink the big deal with Dell. Dell gets all your production at less than cost and the channel you built your business on gets too little to sustain their ecosystem so they abandon you. As soon as Dell realizes they're your only friend, they want you to pay them to take your product. It's like working with Wal-Mart, except Bill Gates gets a commission on every sale.
They probably can't extricate themselves from the Dell deal. Apparently too many ATI engineers also just remembered their stock options vested a while ago. Intel seems to remember again that their job is to invent stuff that people will want, not sell people stuff Intel wants to invent. Basically AMD is screwed.
If they lose $600 million on $1.2 billion in revenue, then $2 billion in revenue should net them a loss of $1 billion. "Losing money on every sale, trying to make it up in volume."
What they need is a shortcut past 65 and 40nm directly to 32. Where's John Titor when you need him?
It might suggest that. It might suggest they expended too much juice trying to float the Itanic, leaving so little for innovation in the 2-8 processor server space and desktops that AMD caught up and earned some props. Whichever, AMD is about to pull a Cyrix if they don't find the magic shortcut to 32nm without going through the intermediate steps.
The law does not prohibit monopoply. The law prohibits the abuse of monopoly to stifle competition. Intel is going to have to take great care to avoid the appearance of abuse of monopoly. The best way (and the one I expect, hurrah!) is to continue to innovate at such breakneck speed that poor little AMD just can't keep up. I hope they leave AMD enough share to limp along behind them. It might be hard to justify huge R&D budgets to the stockholders when you're completely alone in the field, and we'd go back to no progress at all in short order.
I'll take a 8 core 16W notebook cpu as soon as I can get it. Please include the chipset with eSATA and external PCIe V2.0 x32. If they must call it Centrino, please save the pc-card slot for an add-on wireless card because even my 12 yr old knows Centrino is the ancient Aramaic word for "sucky wireless." Maybe a new notebook chipset brandname? Is it too late to call the new double-the-pins socket the "T2"? That would be cute.
The stock is right at where it ended the year in 1999. A great many other tech companies from that era are no more, or are trading at pennies on the dollar. Since 2000 AMD has handed Intel their hat time and again. Ruiz is doing great work.
That said, his engineers had better pull a rabbit out of their hat. Today he's getting stomped by a very angry Chipzilla, and Chipzilla looks like the type that holds a grudge for a looong time.
You don't count it like that. SCO was about keeping linux from gaining too much share before Vista was released. It worked.
Novell is about keeping linux from taking the fore until Vista is replaced with something that works. It's working so far - some large customers are taking the bait. Probably in a year they'll set the hook. Sooner maybe if the mainstream press picks up on the "Vista is Windows ME 2.0" meme, which seems to be gaining buzz. Hopefully a few more OEMs will join the "XP available for all" train in fear of losing share to Dell. It's just one short step from there to "Vista? What vista?" That will accelerate their schedule with Novell and hopefully limit their catch to outfits where they have highly placed insiders. Right about then the people on Software Assurance should be joining a class.
Yes, it would be nice to have that much money personally, but you can't say it's wasted. They're getting their money's worth, and Baystar's too. They usually do because they leverage their power, and for this sort of thing power is better than money.
Tor Braham doesn't just explain. He provides drafts to show what was proposed and the copyright transfer was proposed by Old SCO, rejected by Novell and explicitly excluded... SCO's witnesses "recall" what may have been intended. This guy knows and provides documents to prove it.
Today's The Inquirer MOTD is nice:
The show isn't over until it's over, but it seems like it's getting close.
Subsequent events show how wise Novell was to protect their interest in this way. The trail of successors-in-interest has grown long.
I believe Novell will be found to own the corpse of Unix, which in no way diminishes the fact that Unix is still dead.
The Microsoft + Novell deal is just SCO + EV1 servers all over again. The schemers are running out of creativity. Both deals are more smoke than fire. Neither is meaningful because their secret nature precludes people from making rational decisions about them. How do you put a value on the products of either SCO or Novell, when they've entered agreements that prohibit them from disclosing who owns what? Is the point of this to allow both of them to sell you the same thing, twice? When your marketing approach is "Sign this contract or we'll sue you out of business whether our claims have merit or not," people have to start wondering what makes you morally superior to a mugger and whether being in an enduring relationship with you is preferable to going directly to court or cheaper than settling you with a different kind of "contract.". Eventually these people are going to try this with the entirely wrong victim and it won't take the courts to sort the matter out.
The declaration of Novell's outside attorney that did the deal, Tor Braham reads like death to SCO's claims. Basically he was there, wrote the draft that got signed. He signed it himself. He kept drafts of what the Old SCO asked for and the edits where they were struck, and explains why very clearly: SCO just didn't have the cash, Novell wasn't interested in selling the Unix copyrights, Novell needed to protect its interests in case of an OldSCO bankruptcy.
It's interesting that just 1/2 hr before the close of market two days ago somebody unloaded 466,000 shares of SCOX, just over 2% of the company. As of December 31, 2006 yahoo lists only seven companies and two insiders with that much of a stake. I wonder who....
Sure, to be a success in the market it needs some of the stuff you write about.
But success or not if it looks like the picture I'll buy several. Especially if it can command USB peripherals.
Neither does Microsoft. They're pretty sure it involves patches, though.
Judging from the posts here I imagine replacing Exchange is more of a chew your arm off escape than a found a better girl kind of choice.
Waterworld. Gigli. I could go on but I won't. I am not boycotting movies -- I've just lost interest. More than that. My interest was dragged to death in a hundred expensive plush seats.
The highest point in Florida according to this page is Britton Hill, at 345 Ft. According to this page the highest city is 500 feet. The average elevation of the entire state is 100 feet.
From the Army Corps of Engineers: hot topic
Today the lake is at 10.166 Feet above NGVD29. Historically, the elevation of this fourth largest lake inside the US has been as little as 10 feet above NGVD29 (mean sea level as measured in 1929). Review the part above about "very low levels" again.
From Wikipedia:
Now do the math. Even if your "one foot in the next 50 years" is accurate, one foot is very significant when high tide and storm surge is already enough to put a 150 mile wide swath of your home state under seven feet of seawater. The numbers I've been reading are not one foot. I'm hearing a meter or two. At that rate one good hurricane could remove the part of southern florida that survives from the mainland entirely. None of this considers an Atlantic Tsunami, which has happened and is predicted to happen again and would just wash right over central florida barely slowing down.
If you're reading this from south Florida, you should consider carefully your choice to stay where you are.
Ok fine. Don't go to Canada. Also, don't come here. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Mad cows and killer bees. Very bad. But for your own sake get out of low lying areas like San Diego and Florida.
Steve, leave the slashdot editors alone. If you need to blow off steam, go throw a chair or something.
Canada is also a happening place. And they take in almost anybody. And I believe and they have a homesteading program where you can get your own large tract of land for free or nearly free. If I weren't already an American, I'd go for it even if I had to steal, jump fences, work aboard a cargo ship, swim and take assumed names along the way.
People forget that never in the history of Man has the climate not been changing. We survivors are the ones that went from where conditions were not survivable to where they were better. The ones who stayed behind are history. (Note to people in southern Florida: if your children can't breathe seawater, now would be a good time to find some land that won't be under water when they're grown.)
Remember, those electrons are 100% recycled, and none of them were harmed in the lighting of those pixels.
ie isn't a virus development tool. It's just an installer.
erm, ok, maybe not. Anybody whose job it is to track such things who thinks this is news, well, they're not doing their homework.
The exploit ecosystem has evolved an organism that appears to be self-aware.
If only there were an environment that was safe from such evil organisms, where they could not thrive...
1. Backup your client's XP
2. Install Vista
3. Let the client use Vista for as long as they can stand it.
4. Restore XP from backup
5. Profit!!!