I have two of these. It's called a "rake". It comes in leaf and rock versions.
I have another one called a "hoe", but for some reason the workouts with the hoe aren't long enough to get good cardio.
Forrester? The intellectual giants who brought forth Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara (The MOGTroll)?
This has to be solid analysis then! They wouldn't just make up meaningless numbers to compare the incomparable. That would be disingenuous, disreputable and intellectually dishonest.
So who paid for this study?
But the open source databases generally lack the features for mission critical applications, trailing behind their proprietary peers in security, uptime, performance and features such as XML support.
Microsoft has lawyers. Lots of them. If they have IP that's infringed and they know it, they have to sue to protect it or they lose it by neglect. If they had something, the money would have gone the other way. So, they haven't got cause for a suit or they'd have to sue.
What Microsoft does have is a fat wad of cash. That is exactly what a company like Novell that backdated Waaay too many stock options needs. The bonus is Novell gets $400M to promise to not sue a company they've got no grudge against.
The sad part for us is that Novell must now and forever be a leper. They've done great deeds in the past. There was great hope for their future. They're trying to fight the FUD now but you can't unring the bell. A shame they had to get weak kneed in the end. It's also sad Ballmer gets to say things like "Gee, that's a nice linux webserver you got there. Be a shame if one of our IP lawyers had to have it admitted as evidence." Makes you wonder if he was shaking down kids for their lunch money in school. I hope Novell's development teams have litte trouble finding honest work before the end.
The upshot is that we've got $400,000,000 worth of proof that Microsoft's got nothin. Nothin, that is, except a metric ton of coupons good for one free SLED install they couldn't unload even as wrappers for free ice cream cones. Can you imagine the sales call? "Yeah, I got this coupon for a Linux install we can sell ya, but after five years if you're still running it we have to sue ya. Oh, and our BSA thugs will be around regularly to make sure you don't exceed your linux quota, k?" They'll have to paper the halls of One Microsoft Way with expired coupons. The companies that adopt Linux under Novell's indemnity will discover that Linux is rock solid, swift and sweet. When they realize Microsoft's always had nuthin, they'll migrate painlessly to a distro that's less tainted. Perhaps this is the dirty trick that convinces them to get all the way out of business with these creeps.
I blame Ransom Love for this whole mess, because he killed Unix. Him and all the chowderheads that think this indemnity nonsense has more value than six inches of used dental floss. It's a bad thing to be mugged at the point of a lawyer. It's cowardly to be blackmailed with lawyers that have nothing.
The really sad part about this story (to me) is that I can't submit the response I originally wrote even as Anonymous.
Let it suffice to say you completely misunderstand both the history and the situation. Novell is the SCO in this remake. The role of weaselling lying lawyer has yet to be cast, but competition for the role is fierce as this starring role gets 100% of Novell's considerable assets and none of its liabilities. The part of Baystar is being played by Wells Fargo. The script has only minor changes. The set is still on location in Utah. Filming will commence concurrently with the final episodes of the original serial drama.
Watching the original was like a slow motion train wreck -- morbidly compelling, but tediously dull at the same time. Hopefully for The Last Remake of FUD Geste they can at least get a Baldwin.
PNRP is Microsoft's attempt to replace DNS with their own P2P naming system under IPV6. It's patented, so of course making stuff compatible with it outside of the Microsoft domain will be illegal, hazardous to your IP, or require a small percentage of your immortal soul.
Shortly after it's common, people are going to discover a number of things:
A node can publish as many names as it wants. Billions of semi-randomly generated names per bot node could be fun.
Frist psot: It sure makes it easier to manage a botnet.
Millions of bots competetively and cooperatively poisoning the namespace will not be helpful.
The implementation will have bugs that cause failures of the service or the whole computer.
The implementation will have vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities will have exploits. Some of the exploits will have patches. Some of the patches will cause failures of the service or the whole computer. Some of the exploits will never be published or patched, so there will be more bots. It's the One Microsoft Way.
Names are not unique -- so the label Natalie-Portman-hot-grits, "My Printer" and "office secret pr0n share" shall occur millions of times.
The whole replacing-DNS thing seems unlikely to work out. Yet another toxic service to turn off, it should set back IPv6 adoption three years or more.
A county public power utility did this in Grant county, Washington. It wasn't economical for the cable or phone company to supply broadband. Much of the place is populated like northern Nevada. See here. The power company funded a plan to use internet-enabled power meters and ran fiberoptic cable to every property they could, defraying the cost by offering broadband Internet. I think it's a full gigabit pipe. The cost is much less than most people pay for DSL or cable broadband.
The meters fell through -- the mfr had some trouble delivering. The customers don't care. It has more than paid for itself.
Big companies are not always stupid. Shortly thereafter they pushed a bill through the state government protecting the citizens of the state from such rogue government entities. Grandfather clauses being what they are, the folks that already had it got to keep their killer broadband.
The county? Was wheat farms and cow country. Now Yahoo and MSN are building huge server farms. The place is a geek magnet. Last time I was there the paper was running articles about how many family ranches had increased in value and taxes 10x or more in a few years, and the poor fixed income retirees were having to cash in and move to less free range digs. You wouldn't believe what a 40 acre homestead on the river goes for in silicon valley.
Two counties and a couple cities were grandfathered in. Gigabit, 100 megabit, 10 megabit, symmetrical. Sound nice? Everybody else has to pay if they can, or wait if they can't.
Yeah, I don't like this particular aspect of market economics.
In return for licensing the use of this valuable software, Microsoft grants you the right to use your computer in certain approved ways, subject to close supervision. These limits are designed to allow you to test drive some of the great features that will be available in their next useful operating system, Windows Server 2007.
In addition to these advanced features, Windows Server 2007 may offer:
Continuously Genuine Maintenance: A continuously open connection to Microsoft will help ensure your licenses are current up to the minute. As secure as only a Windows component can be, you can be certain only information appropriate to this service will travel through this encrypted channel.
IIS Unlimited: The opportunity to pay for web service software by the page served instead of buying a separate server for each ten* simultaneous connections..NET,.COM and.ORG are extra of course. (* The actual ability of the software to support connections in any quantity is not guaranteed. Interactive application services such as AJAX require per-minute billing. Ability to support AJAX applications is not guaranteed.)
Global Digital Media Revocation: The ability to revoke all content you've opened with a Microsoft product simply by allowing your license to expire, or their database to become corrupted, or the licensing software to fail in some way, or upon your request (for a fee). (Incompatible with past, present and future versions. Acceptance of fee is on a best effort basis. Actual revocation is not guaranteed.)
Automated audits: An opportunity to validate the licenses of software from Senior Invested Microsoft Partners (SIMPs), with limited intervention by human auditors (The "Collection Squad") only in the case of findings of special interest.
MacroSoftPay: Licensing via direct withdrawal from your checking or credit card account, with convenient web reporting! (Web reporting requires additional software, with additional restrictions, for additional fee.)
Your choice of eight new desktop backgrounds, and a new desktop theme.
All this and more can be yours for staying with the world's leading software provider! Read all about it here! (Encrypted document. Free registration to download. Third party viewer requires separate licensing. EULA and pricing are available after installation.)
What does it matter, really, if you've been rooted?
The sad fact is that no matter how often you're rooted, as the other post quite clearly pointed out, you're never going to get approval to remove the defective software that allowed it. If knowing creates willful negligence but not knowing doesn't, there's a certain advantage in not looking.
Just watch your netops keep uninstalling the more obvious malware and reimaging your boxes every few years and pretending everything is ok. Nod when they call the AV and the firewall edge box due diligence and don't watch those road warriors connect their notebooks to your localnet. You never get documents with executable content in email from outside your network anyway and if you did the virus scanner would stop it before delivery, wouldn't it?. Nobody on your network would click a suspicious link. These are not the rootkits you're looking for. Repeat after me: "I am so shocked! Gosh those hackers are clever. I hope they go to prison for a long time if they're ever caught using their completely anonymous fault tolerant botnet."
Now go heal some sick people, and never get admitted to your hospital under your own name.
Seriously. Does this beowulf botnet run linux? Are linux hosts being deprived of the global machine endeavor to sell us more v1agra and inform us of opportunities to participate in online gaming? Can we not assist in the provision of "bulletproof hosting"? Does *BSD not deserve to take it's place in the pantheon of truly "highly available, totally reliable, even if netops doesn't want to run them" services? I say if an open source OS can't support these services, what good is it? This is the future of clustering I tell you!
TFA says only this:
Botnets filled--and easily replenished--with compromised Windows have emerged as the key hub for well-organized crime rings around the globe, using stolen bandwidth from drone zombies to make money from nefarious Internet activity, according to security experts tracking the threat.
Statistics from multiple sources justify Evron's pessimism. According to data culled from Microsoft's MSRT (Malicious Software Removal Tool), back-door Trojans and bots represent a "significant and tangible threat to Windows users."
Since the first iteration of the MSRT in January 2005, the tool has removed at least one Trojan from about 3.5 million unique computers. Of the 5.7 million infected Windows machines, about 62 percent was found with a Trojan or bot.
Surely something can be done to get our linux and BSD boxen involved in this noble global effort! Sure, with their limited user base all ten of the OSS servers on these internets would hardly make a splash in the ocean of Windows boxes, but every little bit helps. Something must be done. Somebody start a project or six on Sourceforge and do something about this.
After a suitable discovery of the facts, hearing of the arguments, several appeals and considerable political activism, many years pass. Microsoft finds itself in a climate amenable to a trivial settlement without admission of wrongdoing. For consumers relief is usually in the form of a coupon good for some small discount off further purchases, or in similar discount provided to some third party like schools.
Unfortunately for consumers justice delayed becomes justice denied. The versions of the software in dispute are long since obsolete by the time of settlement. Almost everyone who is harmed receives nothing. The cost is not a deterrent to repeated similar activity. In fact, by the time of the settlement most of the complaining competitors go out of business -- a significant strategic victory. Many believe that this is now part of the company's standard competetive strategy. This belief is supported by the fact that we're discussing it here and now again.
A grand profit is made by all the lawyers involved. This seems to be the actual purpose of the whole process.
>And you don't really want 5000 physicist, bored and with nothing to do?
Actually, yes, that would be good. Otherwise you might discover that the indivisible unit of mass/energy in this universe is the "ficton", with unimaginable consequences.
The 12V thing works. If you're careful about how you buy your printer and LCD monitor you can power your CPU off of one brick PSU. That's fewer cables on your desk and less copper. It's also more efficient since it makes no sense to have separate power supplies for all the devices that connect to your PC: speakers, camera, DVCam, external HDD, network switch, router and so on. It's getting to be a tangle these days and anything that cuts down on the nest of wires is a good thing.
PicoPSU is one example that takes 12V and converts (at 98% efficiency) to everything your PC needs, within its power range. It's the size of an AT power connector. Actually it's built right into the connector. I am not associated with the company that makes these, but I've bought them and they are great.
Empires climb and fall. Fortunes come and go. In this life the only constant is change.
The vast majority of businesses don't long survive the end of their founders' direct participation, and I expect Microsoft is no different. Shortly after Bill Gates loses interest Steve Ballmer will have a stroke trying to sell proprietary software to Venezuela and it will all be over. A series of absurd follies, operational errors and legal decisions will drive the company to receivership. It will be a long sad story with lots of broken dreams and lost jobs and demolished retirement funds.
In the end, companies will still buy their software from somebody and pay somebody to support it and buy new PC's every three years anyway, because that's what they have to do to stay ahead of their competition.
But yes, in the meantime most of them are going to buy Vista and Office and all the back end support stuff and then act shocked when they're pwned, if they discover it at all.
This is one of the least densely populated places in the US, and they get fiber to the premises, 1GBit capable service for about $85/mo.
The internet service is through a choice of regular ISPs, but the physical link is via the public power utility.
Power and bandwidth are so cheap here that the place has become a magnet for server farms. In a place where the rural economy is relatively poor, this has been a huge boost. The opportunity exists for other regions to learn the perils of granting monopolies on infrastructure, but the money interests are pushing the other way. Lobbyists, notably from Comcast and Qwest, got a law passed in the state to prevent government entities from building out information infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two of these. It's called a "rake". It comes in leaf and rock versions. I have another one called a "hoe", but for some reason the workouts with the hoe aren't long enough to get good cardio.
That's incredible!
Forrester? The intellectual giants who brought forth Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara (The MOGTroll)?
This has to be solid analysis then! They wouldn't just make up meaningless numbers to compare the incomparable. That would be disingenuous, disreputable and intellectually dishonest.
So who paid for this study?
Ah, that would be Oracle or Microsoft then.
Microsoft has lawyers. Lots of them. If they have IP that's infringed and they know it, they have to sue to protect it or they lose it by neglect. If they had something, the money would have gone the other way. So, they haven't got cause for a suit or they'd have to sue.
What Microsoft does have is a fat wad of cash. That is exactly what a company like Novell that backdated Waaay too many stock options needs. The bonus is Novell gets $400M to promise to not sue a company they've got no grudge against.
The sad part for us is that Novell must now and forever be a leper. They've done great deeds in the past. There was great hope for their future. They're trying to fight the FUD now but you can't unring the bell. A shame they had to get weak kneed in the end. It's also sad Ballmer gets to say things like "Gee, that's a nice linux webserver you got there. Be a shame if one of our IP lawyers had to have it admitted as evidence." Makes you wonder if he was shaking down kids for their lunch money in school. I hope Novell's development teams have litte trouble finding honest work before the end.
The upshot is that we've got $400,000,000 worth of proof that Microsoft's got nothin. Nothin, that is, except a metric ton of coupons good for one free SLED install they couldn't unload even as wrappers for free ice cream cones. Can you imagine the sales call? "Yeah, I got this coupon for a Linux install we can sell ya, but after five years if you're still running it we have to sue ya. Oh, and our BSA thugs will be around regularly to make sure you don't exceed your linux quota, k?" They'll have to paper the halls of One Microsoft Way with expired coupons. The companies that adopt Linux under Novell's indemnity will discover that Linux is rock solid, swift and sweet. When they realize Microsoft's always had nuthin, they'll migrate painlessly to a distro that's less tainted. Perhaps this is the dirty trick that convinces them to get all the way out of business with these creeps.
I blame Ransom Love for this whole mess, because he killed Unix. Him and all the chowderheads that think this indemnity nonsense has more value than six inches of used dental floss. It's a bad thing to be mugged at the point of a lawyer. It's cowardly to be blackmailed with lawyers that have nothing.
The really sad part about this story (to me) is that I can't submit the response I originally wrote even as Anonymous.
Let it suffice to say you completely misunderstand both the history and the situation. Novell is the SCO in this remake. The role of weaselling lying lawyer has yet to be cast, but competition for the role is fierce as this starring role gets 100% of Novell's considerable assets and none of its liabilities. The part of Baystar is being played by Wells Fargo. The script has only minor changes. The set is still on location in Utah. Filming will commence concurrently with the final episodes of the original serial drama.
Watching the original was like a slow motion train wreck -- morbidly compelling, but tediously dull at the same time. Hopefully for The Last Remake of FUD Geste they can at least get a Baldwin.
That they license "Oops I did it again." - Louis Armstrong
Since most of the times you hear it won't be because you wanted to.
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. -- U.S. Senator Simon Cameron (1862)
PNRP is Microsoft's attempt to replace DNS with their own P2P naming system under IPV6. It's patented, so of course making stuff compatible with it outside of the Microsoft domain will be illegal, hazardous to your IP, or require a small percentage of your immortal soul.
Shortly after it's common, people are going to discover a number of things:
The whole replacing-DNS thing seems unlikely to work out. Yet another toxic service to turn off, it should set back IPv6 adoption three years or more.
A county public power utility did this in Grant county, Washington. It wasn't economical for the cable or phone company to supply broadband. Much of the place is populated like northern Nevada. See here. The power company funded a plan to use internet-enabled power meters and ran fiberoptic cable to every property they could, defraying the cost by offering broadband Internet. I think it's a full gigabit pipe. The cost is much less than most people pay for DSL or cable broadband.
The meters fell through -- the mfr had some trouble delivering. The customers don't care. It has more than paid for itself.
Big companies are not always stupid. Shortly thereafter they pushed a bill through the state government protecting the citizens of the state from such rogue government entities. Grandfather clauses being what they are, the folks that already had it got to keep their killer broadband.
The county? Was wheat farms and cow country. Now Yahoo and MSN are building huge server farms. The place is a geek magnet. Last time I was there the paper was running articles about how many family ranches had increased in value and taxes 10x or more in a few years, and the poor fixed income retirees were having to cash in and move to less free range digs. You wouldn't believe what a 40 acre homestead on the river goes for in silicon valley.
Two counties and a couple cities were grandfathered in. Gigabit, 100 megabit, 10 megabit, symmetrical. Sound nice? Everybody else has to pay if they can, or wait if they can't.
Yeah, I don't like this particular aspect of market economics.
A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language
No, this is not off topic. Friends don't let friends use Visual PHP#.net.
Hilarious!
In return for licensing the use of this valuable software, Microsoft grants you the right to use your computer in certain approved ways, subject to close supervision. These limits are designed to allow you to test drive some of the great features that will be available in their next useful operating system, Windows Server 2007.
In addition to these advanced features, Windows Server 2007 may offer:
All this and more can be yours for staying with the world's leading software provider! Read all about it here! (Encrypted document. Free registration to download. Third party viewer requires separate licensing. EULA and pricing are available after installation.)
How much text do you have to put before the slashdot engine will allow you to post? I don't know.
What does it matter, really, if you've been rooted?
The sad fact is that no matter how often you're rooted, as the other post quite clearly pointed out, you're never going to get approval to remove the defective software that allowed it. If knowing creates willful negligence but not knowing doesn't, there's a certain advantage in not looking.
Just watch your netops keep uninstalling the more obvious malware and reimaging your boxes every few years and pretending everything is ok. Nod when they call the AV and the firewall edge box due diligence and don't watch those road warriors connect their notebooks to your localnet. You never get documents with executable content in email from outside your network anyway and if you did the virus scanner would stop it before delivery, wouldn't it?. Nobody on your network would click a suspicious link. These are not the rootkits you're looking for. Repeat after me: "I am so shocked! Gosh those hackers are clever. I hope they go to prison for a long time if they're ever caught using their completely anonymous fault tolerant botnet."
Now go heal some sick people, and never get admitted to your hospital under your own name.
Seriously. Does this beowulf botnet run linux? Are linux hosts being deprived of the global machine endeavor to sell us more v1agra and inform us of opportunities to participate in online gaming? Can we not assist in the provision of "bulletproof hosting"? Does *BSD not deserve to take it's place in the pantheon of truly "highly available, totally reliable, even if netops doesn't want to run them" services? I say if an open source OS can't support these services, what good is it? This is the future of clustering I tell you!
TFA says only this:
Surely something can be done to get our linux and BSD boxen involved in this noble global effort! Sure, with their limited user base all ten of the OSS servers on these internets would hardly make a splash in the ocean of Windows boxes, but every little bit helps. Something must be done. Somebody start a project or six on Sourceforge and do something about this.
Yes, this is a checkbox in the toolkit, and it's checked by default.
We've already done this several times.
After a suitable discovery of the facts, hearing of the arguments, several appeals and considerable political activism, many years pass. Microsoft finds itself in a climate amenable to a trivial settlement without admission of wrongdoing. For consumers relief is usually in the form of a coupon good for some small discount off further purchases, or in similar discount provided to some third party like schools.
Unfortunately for consumers justice delayed becomes justice denied. The versions of the software in dispute are long since obsolete by the time of settlement. Almost everyone who is harmed receives nothing. The cost is not a deterrent to repeated similar activity. In fact, by the time of the settlement most of the complaining competitors go out of business -- a significant strategic victory. Many believe that this is now part of the company's standard competetive strategy. This belief is supported by the fact that we're discussing it here and now again.
A grand profit is made by all the lawyers involved. This seems to be the actual purpose of the whole process.
You misspelled "foley".
Actually, yes, that would be good. Otherwise you might discover that the indivisible unit of mass/energy in this universe is the "ficton", with unimaginable consequences.
The 12V thing works. If you're careful about how you buy your printer and LCD monitor you can power your CPU off of one brick PSU. That's fewer cables on your desk and less copper. It's also more efficient since it makes no sense to have separate power supplies for all the devices that connect to your PC: speakers, camera, DVCam, external HDD, network switch, router and so on. It's getting to be a tangle these days and anything that cuts down on the nest of wires is a good thing.
PicoPSU is one example that takes 12V and converts (at 98% efficiency) to everything your PC needs, within its power range. It's the size of an AT power connector. Actually it's built right into the connector. I am not associated with the company that makes these, but I've bought them and they are great.
gets you one such product at 60W. They have similar products up to 200W. I have 'em. They work great. They have flavors up to 200W.
http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=2882 3 and http://www.mini-box.com/VIA-NL-10000E-Nano-ITX-Mot herboard and http://gcc.gnu.org/.
Or days of the week ending in "y"
At least you're getting your $%#! directly from the bull.
Empires climb and fall. Fortunes come and go. In this life the only constant is change.
The vast majority of businesses don't long survive the end of their founders' direct participation, and I expect Microsoft is no different. Shortly after Bill Gates loses interest Steve Ballmer will have a stroke trying to sell proprietary software to Venezuela and it will all be over. A series of absurd follies, operational errors and legal decisions will drive the company to receivership. It will be a long sad story with lots of broken dreams and lost jobs and demolished retirement funds.
In the end, companies will still buy their software from somebody and pay somebody to support it and buy new PC's every three years anyway, because that's what they have to do to stay ahead of their competition.
But yes, in the meantime most of them are going to buy Vista and Office and all the back end support stuff and then act shocked when they're pwned, if they discover it at all.
This is one of the least densely populated places in the US, and they get fiber to the premises, 1GBit capable service for about $85/mo.
The internet service is through a choice of regular ISPs, but the physical link is via the public power utility.
Power and bandwidth are so cheap here that the place has become a magnet for server farms. In a place where the rural economy is relatively poor, this has been a huge boost. The opportunity exists for other regions to learn the perils of granting monopolies on infrastructure, but the money interests are pushing the other way. Lobbyists, notably from Comcast and Qwest, got a law passed in the state to prevent government entities from building out information infrastructure.
Wait 20 years.