Sounds well and good, but I can think of at least two questions: has anyone in the linux community looked into making use of this and, if not, why not?
Real processors (SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha) have had this same feature for years, and OpenBSD uses it as the basis for the W^X feature, which ensures that no page in a program's memory space will be both writeable and executable.
So if you consider OpenBSD to be part of the "Linux community", then the answer is yes.
Whereas legacy systems such as Unix are finding it harder to support newer hardware features such as the NX codes in the latest AMD and Intel chips
Uh, what?
As far as I know, the so-called "NX codes" are just the ability for the MMU to mark a page of memory as non-executable.
Real architectures, such as SPARC, Alpha, and PA-RISC, have had this feature for a long time. It's used in Solaris for the non-executable stack feature, and it's the basis for OpenBSD's W^X feature.
So Intel, AMD, and Microsoft are just catching up to features which platforms you dismiss as "legacy systems" have had for years.
You ought to keep a space AC adapter, I think. I can remember having at least two of them fail, and it isn't too much fun trying to expand a few hours of battery life into several days of usage while waiting for a replacement to arrive.
With regards to MUDs, I can heartily recommend LambdaMOO. It has a very simple object-oriented programming language, and unlike many MUDs, it's all interpreted, so you can program new stuff live with the server running. The server also automatically parses player commands with English-like syntax (direct objects, prepositions, and indirect objects) and passes them to the verbs (functions).
The downside compared to MUDs is that LambdaMOO is designed primarily as an educational/social environment, so any RPG functionality will have to be coded from scratch, although there are some ready-made RPG systems available on the web.
Something else to consider is shareware RPGs that allow user-designed scenarios. Blades of Exile, written by Jeff Vogel and available for Mac and Windows is a classic 2D tile-based RPG with a very simple graphical editor that allows you to create new scenarios. The author is also working on a sequel, which will use a newer isometric engine and feature a C-like scripting language for greater flexibility. Ambrosia Software publishes Escape Velocity, a 2D space trading game with a modular plug-in system that allows users to expand or modify the game universe or build a total conversion from scratch. These games were originally written for the Mac, where plug-ins are made very easily using ResEdit; the third game has recently been ported to Windows, and I'm not sure how plug-ins are made on the PC.
At any rate, this all depends on whether the kid in question is more interested in the technical challenge of programming a game and getting it to work, or in the design of challenging battles, puzzles, or whatever. I imagine someone who wanted to experiment with different level designs, enemies, weapons, and how they balance would get discouraged pretty quickly if they had to first spend days writing and debugging the basic engine behind it, and vice versa.
Try here for instructions on how to use TrueType fonts in Solaris. It's basically the same as using any other font: throw them in a directly, make a 'fonts.dir', then xset +fp.
Anti-aliasing isn't in Xsun yet to my knowledge, though. They added Xrender support in one of the HW updates to Solaris 9 (4/03, maybe? I forget), but anti-aliasing for Xft isn't there yet, as they say vaguely here.
You can always use XFree86 on Solaris, though I've never tried it.
Sun doesn't. Clueless people who only look at the name do.
But they sure shot themselves in the foot by trying to capitalize on the Java brand and so opening their inaccurately named product up to "Java is slow" FUD.
Remember, this isn't some brand new "Java OS", it's Linux. There's a wealth of software available for Linux. If they do push the Java Desktop to consumers, they'll need to come up some way, like Lindows has, to make customers aware of all the free (and Free) software out there and make it easily available through a download service.
As for people buying Windows software, I wonder how much of a problem that would really be. Most non-tech people who have Macs know enough not to buy Windows software, but there we have a clear difference in hardware, not just a different OS running on the same class of machine.
Would people with a Lintel box think they have a "PC" and can run Windows software? Who knows. It probably will depend on how the computers are branded and sold.
I really think Sun ought to fire their whole marketing department. "Java Enterprise System" and "Java Desktop System" are not only inaccurate, but they INVITE this kind of FUD. Remember how many "Why is it in Java? Java is so SLOW!" comments there were on Slashdot when the product was initially announced?
They also have a bad habit of renaming products for no good reason, sometimes multiple times. SunOS->Solaris (with SunOS 4.x rectroactively renamed to Solaris 1.x), Sun4/x->SPARCstation x, Sun WorkShop->Forte->Sun ONE Studio, iPlanet->Sun ONE, and so forth.
Remember that Sun doesn't sell the hardware that the Java Desktop System runs on (that was originally going to be part of Mad Hatter, but they probably decided not to try to compete with Dell and the like at building bargain basement hardware).
A Sun Fire 15K starts at $800k, while the Java Desktop System licenses are $100 per desktop.
It'll take a lot of Linux sales to outweight their high-end hardware in revenue, and I don't see them selling Linux on an E15k anytime soon.
That sounds pretty comparable to Best Buy's treatment of Apple computers during the periods when they sold them. You'd get a whole row of Wintel boxes blaring out their demo movies, and at the very end a single Performa, either turned off or sitting at the desktop with all the files renamed to something like "skljrklhjahlkj" or "fuck shit hehe lol:):)".
I bet they could leverage their innovative toner technology to make the MP3 player stay charged for only 23 seconds when you use a third party battery. (Or was that just Lexmark?)
Or degrade the bitrate to 17 bps for songs not purchased through their music store.
Remind anyone of any other Internet businesses around five years ago?
I wonder how long it will take for this bubble to burst, and who, if anyone, will be the last man standing.
I imagine, though, that each company isn't hoping so much for a short-term cash cow as a chance to eliminate the competition and gain a Microsoft-style stranglehold on the market. Then they'd be in a position to extort money from artists who want their music sold and electronics companies who want to make DRM-compatible MP3 players.
How would this be any safer than allowing an email client to, for instance, download a "web bug" image embedded in a spam message's HTML content? If the filters simply follow whatever links are in the message, and the spammers include a link with a unique tracking ID (don't they already do this sometimes?), you'd be telling them your email address was "live" just as surely as if you sent them an unsubscribe request.
Re:BAH! 286 is all you need.
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As far as I know, the UltraSPARC made its debut in 1995, while the first 64-bit Alpha from DEC was announced in 1992. 64-bit MIPS and PA-RISC chips were probably sometime between those two dates. See here.
The article points out many problems with the traditional voting system, but few of them would be eliminated by the adoption of electronic voting machines. No matter what sort of device is used to record the votes, corrupt officials can still disenfranchise or intimidate voters, poll workers can still be ignorant, and so on.
Just because the current system is broken doesn't mean it's okay to go ahead and adopt one that will introduce even more vulnerabilities. Setting up roadblocks is one thing, arbitrarily altering votes remotely with no audit trail is another.
I don't think it's necessarily impossible for a sufficiently secure electronic voting machine to be built, but the Diebold system sure ain't it; such a dangerously insecure system deservers nothing less than the stiff opposition Garfinkel pokes fun at.
Don't use an ISP that is "broken". AOL has little to recommend it.
Well, for one thing, AOL has been "broken" in many ways for many years, and yet they still have an enormous and loyal user base. So does Windows, for that matter.
The problem is that for the average AOL user, who to put it bluntly is probably both too stupid to figure this out on their own and too lazy to read LiveJournal's explanation, it will appear just as likely that LiveJournal is "broken", not AOL. They will squeal "OMG WTF IT DONT WORK!!!!!1!!!11!!!:-(" and leap into the open arms of AOL's competing service. Whether or not AOL planned it this way is irrelevant.
This is how the fragile and complex interoperability between pieces of computer software, which is opaque to most users, can subvert the workings of the free marketplace; if company A sabotages their product so that it won't work with company B's product, it is easy for customers to be fooled into blaming company B.
Microsoft did this with their implementation of Java, and probably many other times. I doubt if this is some deliberate strategy on AOL's part, but the result will probably be the same regardless.
I realize you're probably not entirely serious, but this is definitely the wrong attitude. The flood of virus warnings and bounces caused by Sobig, not to mention all the machines knocked off the Internet by Blaster, shows that a horde of hopelessly insecure machines on the Internet are dangerous to everyone, including those of us with some common sense about security. If one acknowledges that spam costs time and money to deal with, then Sobig is damaging even people who have gone completely uninfected - the virus messages and bounces are every bit as annoying and numerous as spam, albeit easier to filter.
At any rate, although it would be nice to see businesses move away from Windows after this or the next MS "trustworthy computing" fiasco, I doubt it will happen. In my experience, anyway, the MCSE types will probably be more likely to shell out big bucks for a mail filter on their Exchange server (you know, the ones generating all the "YOUR MESSAGE CONTAINS A VIRUS" warnings sent to addresses that Sobig spoofed) than to switch from Windows or even patch it more often. One can always hope, though...
Anyway, even if everyone switched to real OSes, most of them have their share of security problems, too. These types of virus epidemics will probably still be a danger until either the majority of people get a clue about security, or until the majority of OS vendors get a clue about designing systems that are secure by default so the users don't have to work quite as hard to make and keep them safe.
Maybe what we really need is an OS that supports an easy-to-configure "sandbox" for each app to run in. That way if you are worried about Application X sending out network packets on the sly, you can just tell the OS to disallow network connections from that app.
OpenBSD ships with systrace, which does exactly what you describe. Systrace is also available for NetBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Of course, with the exception of Mac OS X, these aren't really platforms where you have to worry so much about software phoning home to the vendor or other forms of spyware. On Windows you can always use ZoneAlarm, though.
Solaris 9 is only free on single CPU machines for educational, development, or evaluation purposes. The SPARC version is a free download, the x86 version can be downloaded for $20 or so. This was the last time I looked at their page, anyway.
You'd probably be better off switching to *BSD from Linux, unless you use a lot of Java stuff, for example.
At any rate, the reviewer also said the book was for end users, not sysadmins. There are tons of books available on administering Solaris; my advice, though, would be just to download a copy of it for evaluation purposes, install it on a spare machine, and experiment with creating setups similar to your production servers, referring to the online documentation for guidance when necessary. This probably would be more effective than reading a book and wouldn't take much more time, but of course YMMV.
As a comparison of different Unix platforms, this article is pretty much a joke. He seems to be comparing the vendors' marketing materials instead of their actual products.
For example, he concludes that Red Hat has poor security not because of its record of security holes and useless, vulnerable services enabled by default, but because he couldn't find a list of security features or a security policy on their website. Impressive.
All he has to say about OpenBSD is that it "takes a cryptographic approach to security" and "is rumored to be the most secure OS on the market". Even though he claims to be "looking at Unix operating systems sold as they are", he doesn't mention how OpenBSD has only a minimal number of services enabled by default, unlike Solaris and Linux where one's first task in securing a system is to disabled the many useless, possibly exploitable daemons the vendor has enabled in the default install. He also doesn't mention the many steps that have been taken of late to make OpenBSD more resistant to stack smashing attacks.
He concludes that "Solaris is one of the most secure choices you can make" apparently only because he was impressed by Sun's website. Although I'm a big fan of Sun and Solaris, I would certainly be inclined to disagree here. In my experience, Solaris is comparable to Linux in terms of security; it's not secure by default like OpenBSD, but it can be made fairly secure with a bit of work (turning off services, enabling the non-executable stack, possibly using roles or auditing, etc).
So, although I'm as eager to slam SCO as the next guy, I'm somewhat skeptical of this article's criticisms, seeing as they seem to be based entirely on SCO's website and product literature. Without any personal experience with any of their systems, I'm not going to take this guy's word for it.
I'm unsure how Apple is supposed to have violated the Open Group's trademark here. Their marketing only ever describes Mac OS X as "based on Unix" or "Unix-like". It never explicitly says "Mac OS X is UNIX", which I'd always thought was what you'd need to do to violate the Unix trademark. The BSDs and Linux are marketed as "Unix-like" all the time; the default motd on my OpenBSD machines tells me it's "the proactively secure Unix-like operating system" every time I log in. You don't see the Open Group suing them.
I wonder, though, how hard it would be for Apple to just get OS X certified by the Open Group. However much work it might take to get Mac OS X to comply with UNIX 03, and certify it, I doubt it would be that much more than their legal costs will be to both defend themselves and sue the Open Group back. And it would definitely be a good thing if Mac OS X were to comply more closely with industry standards and be certified as a genuine Unix system.
All the anti-Sun FUD that keeps getting posted to Slashdot reminds me of the anti-Apple FUD that was all over the media a few years ago.
Speculation about IBM or HP buying Sun now is probably just as groundless as speculation about Sony or Disney (or Sun) buying Apple five years ago. Yeah, they're not doing as well as they used to, but the whole industry isn't, either.
I think Sun's main problem right now is the same problem that Apple has right now: getting hardware that customers will perceive as being equal or superior to x86 in price/performance. It looks like SPARC will get there eventually, but not soon enough; I imagine they'd either have to use Opteron/Hammer on their low-end machines, or somehow make very inexpensive 1-4 processor workstations and servers to leverage SPARC's scalability (it is, after all, the Scalable Processor ARChitecture) and Solaris's superior SMP support.
I'll admit that I have many reasons to Want To Believe that Sun will still be a strong presence in the industry when I graduate from college, but I do seriously think that rumor's of Sun's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.
Slashdot Mirror
IANACPUExpert, but my understanding is that x86 has had a distinction between code and data pages since at least the 80386.
Neither am I, but I believe that the old feature in the 386 only allows you to mark very large segments of memory non-executable.
SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha, and presumably the new x86 chips with "NX" allow you to do this to individual pages.
I'm surprised *BSD (particularly) FreeBSD hasn't.
OpenBSD does. They call it W^X. It was enabled on the sparc, sparc64, hppa, and alpha ports in 3.3 and on the i386 and macppc ports in 3.4.
Sounds well and good, but I can think of at least two questions: has anyone in the linux community looked into making use of this and, if not, why not?
Real processors (SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha) have had this same feature for years, and OpenBSD uses it as the basis for the W^X feature, which ensures that no page in a program's memory space will be both writeable and executable.
So if you consider OpenBSD to be part of the "Linux community", then the answer is yes.
Whereas legacy systems such as Unix are finding it harder to support newer hardware features such as the NX codes in the latest AMD and Intel chips
Uh, what?
As far as I know, the so-called "NX codes" are just the ability for the MMU to mark a page of memory as non-executable.
Real architectures, such as SPARC, Alpha, and PA-RISC, have had this feature for a long time. It's used in Solaris for the non-executable stack feature, and it's the basis for OpenBSD's W^X feature.
So Intel, AMD, and Microsoft are just catching up to features which platforms you dismiss as "legacy systems" have had for years.
You ought to keep a space AC adapter, I think. I can remember having at least two of them fail, and it isn't too much fun trying to expand a few hours of battery life into several days of usage while waiting for a replacement to arrive.
The specs of the machine were in his first article.
It's the 333 MHz processor with the 2 MB cache. (The same one that's in the U10 I'm using right now, by the way).
With regards to MUDs, I can heartily recommend LambdaMOO. It has a very simple object-oriented programming language, and unlike many MUDs, it's all interpreted, so you can program new stuff live with the server running. The server also automatically parses player commands with English-like syntax (direct objects, prepositions, and indirect objects) and passes them to the verbs (functions).
The downside compared to MUDs is that LambdaMOO is designed primarily as an educational/social environment, so any RPG functionality will have to be coded from scratch, although there are some ready-made RPG systems available on the web.
Something else to consider is shareware RPGs that allow user-designed scenarios. Blades of Exile, written by Jeff Vogel and available for Mac and Windows is a classic 2D tile-based RPG with a very simple graphical editor that allows you to create new scenarios. The author is also working on a sequel, which will use a newer isometric engine and feature a C-like scripting language for greater flexibility. Ambrosia Software publishes Escape Velocity, a 2D space trading game with a modular plug-in system that allows users to expand or modify the game universe or build a total conversion from scratch. These games were originally written for the Mac, where plug-ins are made very easily using ResEdit; the third game has recently been ported to Windows, and I'm not sure how plug-ins are made on the PC.
At any rate, this all depends on whether the kid in question is more interested in the technical challenge of programming a game and getting it to work, or in the design of challenging battles, puzzles, or whatever. I imagine someone who wanted to experiment with different level designs, enemies, weapons, and how they balance would get discouraged pretty quickly if they had to first spend days writing and debugging the basic engine behind it, and vice versa.
Try here for instructions on how to use TrueType fonts in Solaris. It's basically the same as using any other font: throw them in a directly, make a 'fonts.dir', then xset +fp .
Anti-aliasing isn't in Xsun yet to my knowledge, though. They added Xrender support in one of the HW updates to Solaris 9 (4/03, maybe? I forget), but anti-aliasing for Xft isn't there yet, as they say vaguely here.
You can always use XFree86 on Solaris, though I've never tried it.
Sun doesn't. Clueless people who only look at the name do.
But they sure shot themselves in the foot by trying to capitalize on the Java brand and so opening their inaccurately named product up to "Java is slow" FUD.
Remember, this isn't some brand new "Java OS", it's Linux. There's a wealth of software available for Linux. If they do push the Java Desktop to consumers, they'll need to come up some way, like Lindows has, to make customers aware of all the free (and Free) software out there and make it easily available through a download service.
As for people buying Windows software, I wonder how much of a problem that would really be. Most non-tech people who have Macs know enough not to buy Windows software, but there we have a clear difference in hardware, not just a different OS running on the same class of machine.
Would people with a Lintel box think they have a "PC" and can run Windows software? Who knows. It probably will depend on how the computers are branded and sold.
I really think Sun ought to fire their whole marketing department. "Java Enterprise System" and "Java Desktop System" are not only inaccurate, but they INVITE this kind of FUD. Remember how many "Why is it in Java? Java is so SLOW!" comments there were on Slashdot when the product was initially announced?
They also have a bad habit of renaming products for no good reason, sometimes multiple times. SunOS->Solaris (with SunOS 4.x rectroactively renamed to Solaris 1.x), Sun4/x->SPARCstation x, Sun WorkShop->Forte->Sun ONE Studio, iPlanet->Sun ONE, and so forth.
Remember that Sun doesn't sell the hardware that the Java Desktop System runs on (that was originally going to be part of Mad Hatter, but they probably decided not to try to compete with Dell and the like at building bargain basement hardware).
A Sun Fire 15K starts at $800k, while the Java Desktop System licenses are $100 per desktop.
It'll take a lot of Linux sales to outweight their high-end hardware in revenue, and I don't see them selling Linux on an E15k anytime soon.
That sounds pretty comparable to Best Buy's treatment of Apple computers during the periods when they sold them. You'd get a whole row of Wintel boxes blaring out their demo movies, and at the very end a single Performa, either turned off or sitting at the desktop with all the files renamed to something like "skljrklhjahlkj" or "fuck shit hehe lol :) :)".
I bet they could leverage their innovative toner technology to make the MP3 player stay charged for only 23 seconds when you use a third party battery.
(Or was that just Lexmark?)
Or degrade the bitrate to 17 bps for songs not purchased through their music store.
Remind anyone of any other Internet businesses around five years ago?
I wonder how long it will take for this bubble to burst, and who, if anyone, will be the last man standing.
I imagine, though, that each company isn't hoping so much for a short-term cash cow as a chance to eliminate the competition and gain a Microsoft-style stranglehold on the market. Then they'd be in a position to extort money from artists who want their music sold and electronics companies who want to make DRM-compatible MP3 players.
How would this be any safer than allowing an email client to, for instance, download a "web bug" image embedded in a spam message's HTML content? If the filters simply follow whatever links are in the message, and the spammers include a link with a unique tracking ID (don't they already do this sometimes?), you'd be telling them your email address was "live" just as surely as if you sent them an unsubscribe request.
As far as I know, the UltraSPARC made its debut in 1995, while the first 64-bit Alpha from DEC was announced in 1992. 64-bit MIPS and PA-RISC chips were probably sometime between those two dates. See here.
The article points out many problems with the traditional voting system, but few of them would be eliminated by the adoption of electronic voting machines. No matter what sort of device is used to record the votes, corrupt officials can still disenfranchise or intimidate voters, poll workers can still be ignorant, and so on.
Just because the current system is broken doesn't mean it's okay to go ahead and adopt one that will introduce even more vulnerabilities. Setting up roadblocks is one thing, arbitrarily altering votes remotely with no audit trail is another.
I don't think it's necessarily impossible for a sufficiently secure electronic voting machine to be built, but the Diebold system sure ain't it; such a dangerously insecure system deservers nothing less than the stiff opposition Garfinkel pokes fun at.
Well, for one thing, AOL has been "broken" in many ways for many years, and yet they still have an enormous and loyal user base. So does Windows, for that matter.
The problem is that for the average AOL user, who to put it bluntly is probably both too stupid to figure this out on their own and too lazy to read LiveJournal's explanation, it will appear just as likely that LiveJournal is "broken", not AOL. They will squeal "OMG WTF IT DONT WORK!!!!!1!!!11!!!
This is how the fragile and complex interoperability between pieces of computer software, which is opaque to most users, can subvert the workings of the free marketplace; if company A sabotages their product so that it won't work with company B's product, it is easy for customers to be fooled into blaming company B.
Microsoft did this with their implementation of Java, and probably many other times. I doubt if this is some deliberate strategy on AOL's part, but the result will probably be the same regardless.
I realize you're probably not entirely serious, but this is definitely the wrong attitude. The flood of virus warnings and bounces caused by Sobig, not to mention all the machines knocked off the Internet by Blaster, shows that a horde of hopelessly insecure machines on the Internet are dangerous to everyone, including those of us with some common sense about security. If one acknowledges that spam costs time and money to deal with, then Sobig is damaging even people who have gone completely uninfected - the virus messages and bounces are every bit as annoying and numerous as spam, albeit easier to filter.
At any rate, although it would be nice to see businesses move away from Windows after this or the next MS "trustworthy computing" fiasco, I doubt it will happen. In my experience, anyway, the MCSE types will probably be more likely to shell out big bucks for a mail filter on their Exchange server (you know, the ones generating all the "YOUR MESSAGE CONTAINS A VIRUS" warnings sent to addresses that Sobig spoofed) than to switch from Windows or even patch it more often. One can always hope, though...
Anyway, even if everyone switched to real OSes, most of them have their share of security problems, too. These types of virus epidemics will probably still be a danger until either the majority of people get a clue about security, or until the majority of OS vendors get a clue about designing systems that are secure by default so the users don't have to work quite as hard to make and keep them safe.
Maybe what we really need is an OS that supports an easy-to-configure "sandbox" for each app to run in. That way if you are worried about Application X sending out network packets on the sly, you can just tell the OS to disallow network connections from that app.
OpenBSD ships with systrace, which does exactly what you describe. Systrace is also available for NetBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Of course, with the exception of Mac OS X, these aren't really platforms where you have to worry so much about software phoning home to the vendor or other forms of spyware. On Windows you can always use ZoneAlarm, though.
Solaris 9 is only free on single CPU machines for educational, development, or evaluation purposes. The SPARC version is a free download, the x86 version can be downloaded for $20 or so. This was the last time I looked at their page, anyway.
You'd probably be better off switching to *BSD from Linux, unless you use a lot of Java stuff, for example.
At any rate, the reviewer also said the book was for end users, not sysadmins. There are tons of books available on administering Solaris; my advice, though, would be just to download a copy of it for evaluation purposes, install it on a spare machine, and experiment with creating setups similar to your production servers, referring to the online documentation for guidance when necessary. This probably would be more effective than reading a book and wouldn't take much more time, but of course YMMV.
As a comparison of different Unix platforms, this article is pretty much a joke. He seems to be comparing the vendors' marketing materials instead of their actual products.
For example, he concludes that Red Hat has poor security not because of its record of security holes and useless, vulnerable services enabled by default, but because he couldn't find a list of security features or a security policy on their website. Impressive.
All he has to say about OpenBSD is that it "takes a cryptographic approach to security" and "is rumored to be the most secure OS on the market". Even though he claims to be "looking at Unix operating systems sold as they are", he doesn't mention how OpenBSD has only a minimal number of services enabled by default, unlike Solaris and Linux where one's first task in securing a system is to disabled the many useless, possibly exploitable daemons the vendor has enabled in the default install. He also doesn't mention the many steps that have been taken of late to make OpenBSD more resistant to stack smashing attacks.
He concludes that "Solaris is one of the most secure choices you can make" apparently only because he was impressed by Sun's website. Although I'm a big fan of Sun and Solaris, I would certainly be inclined to disagree here. In my experience, Solaris is comparable to Linux in terms of security; it's not secure by default like OpenBSD, but it can be made fairly secure with a bit of work (turning off services, enabling the non-executable stack, possibly using roles or auditing, etc).
So, although I'm as eager to slam SCO as the next guy, I'm somewhat skeptical of this article's criticisms, seeing as they seem to be based entirely on SCO's website and product literature. Without any personal experience with any of their systems, I'm not going to take this guy's word for it.
I'm unsure how Apple is supposed to have violated the Open Group's trademark here. Their marketing only ever describes Mac OS X as "based on Unix" or "Unix-like". It never explicitly says "Mac OS X is UNIX", which I'd always thought was what you'd need to do to violate the Unix trademark. The BSDs and Linux are marketed as "Unix-like" all the time; the default motd on my OpenBSD machines tells me it's "the proactively secure Unix-like operating system" every time I log in. You don't see the Open Group suing them.
I wonder, though, how hard it would be for Apple to just get OS X certified by the Open Group. However much work it might take to get Mac OS X to comply with UNIX 03, and certify it, I doubt it would be that much more than their legal costs will be to both defend themselves and sue the Open Group back. And it would definitely be a good thing if Mac OS X were to comply more closely with industry standards and be certified as a genuine Unix system.
You mean like Ross Perot in 1992, or Ralph Nader in 2000?
All the anti-Sun FUD that keeps getting posted to Slashdot reminds me of the anti-Apple FUD that was all over the media a few years ago.
Speculation about IBM or HP buying Sun now is probably just as groundless as speculation about Sony or Disney (or Sun) buying Apple five years ago. Yeah, they're not doing as well as they used to, but the whole industry isn't, either.
I think Sun's main problem right now is the same problem that Apple has right now: getting hardware that customers will perceive as being equal or superior to x86 in price/performance. It looks like SPARC will get there eventually, but not soon enough; I imagine they'd either have to use Opteron/Hammer on their low-end machines, or somehow make very inexpensive 1-4 processor workstations and servers to leverage SPARC's scalability (it is, after all, the Scalable Processor ARChitecture) and Solaris's superior SMP support.
I'll admit that I have many reasons to Want To Believe that Sun will still be a strong presence in the industry when I graduate from college, but I do seriously think that rumor's of Sun's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.