As some of you have pointed out, yep, that's 1.5GHz. *blush*
This was with FreeBSD-STABLE; I'm now using -CURRENT, for which buildworld/installworld takes considerably longer.
Also, (some may consider this cheating), I usually skipped the kernel config unless something important had changed. The kernel config might add 5-10 minutes (again, longer now with -CURRENT).
Setup details (hardware): The 1.5GHz chip is an Athlon XP1800+. The FreeBSD slice is on a RAID0 array consisting of two IBM 40GB ATA100 drives (shared with Win2K; Gentoo and Win98 share a 20GB IBM ATA66 HD). 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM. Nice stuff for when I built it, but solidly middle-class today, I think.
Setup details (software): Softupdates enabled on root. Tagged queueing at that time on the IBM drives, no longer an option now. No ramdisk; I tried it, and build times were within seconds of what they were without it, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. And definitely no -jx; as others have reported, that slowed things down for me. Make.conf set (with gcc 2.95 at the time) for i686, no games and no profiled libraries. I mounted the non-root non-swap partitions (for me,/var and/usr) -noatime. Because of the 512MB RAM, I could also leave swap turned off if I chose. I dropped to single user most times, but occasionally didn't bother - I don't remember this making a significant difference to build times. That's pretty much it.
On a motion for summary judgment, evidence (though not as extensive as at a trial) may be presented and evaluated. A motion to dismiss evaluates no evidence. It simply considers everything the plaintiff says to be true and then determines under those assumptions if the plaintiff could possibly prevail.
If the plaintiff could not possibly prevail even if everything it alleges is true, then that *does* amount to the legal theory underpinning the case being wrong. (Simple - if you're right on all the facts but you still can't win, what did you get wrong? The law.)
SCO has asked the judge to rule on their Motion to Dismiss first, which is fair, and is almost certainly what will happen. The Motion to Dismiss says that even if everything Red Hat says is true, it still doesn't amount to an infringement of Red Hat's legal rights. So the judge has to rule on whether Red Hat's case will amount to anything *even if they prove everything they say* before giving Red Hat a chance to get that proof through discovery.
My commute is one hour each way, so it's Morning Edition on the way to work, then a mix of sports talk and All Things Considered on the way home.
Once at home, yep, it's the Net, with Google playing a big role. No TV news, no newspapers. That's really no significant change from before the Net, though. I might watch the Newshour on PBS once every two weeks instead of once a week; never have read a newspaper for anything except the comics and sports.
Re:Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along...
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The basic point is this: SCO filing a motion to dismiss, particularly in a declaratory judgment action, was to be expected, and it won't be news if the motion fails, since the vast majority do fail. (See my reply in the "Consequences" thread.)
BTW: Back when I lived in the litigation world (9-10 yrs ago), filing a motion for sanctions under Federal Rule 11 or a state equivalent in response to a Motion to Dismiss would have been considered an act of Significant Nastiness (which is saying something when you're talking about lawyers) not entered into lightly, and unlikely to succeed. Have standards changed that much since then? Have you seen sanctions imposed under Rule 11 involving a Motion to Dismiss?
Legally speaking, nah, that's not what failure of a motion to dismiss means.
A motion to dismiss says that *without considering any evidence*, and *taking everything you say as true*, you haven't managed to show anything wrong. Or in plain English, "Yeah, even if you're right, so what?"
So all that the failure of this motion to dismiss would mean is that Red Hat's lawyers know how to start a lawsuit, which presumably they do.
Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along...
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 5, Informative
IAAL, and a motion to dismiss is something that is filed in nearly every lawsuit on the off chance that it will actually work and you can avoid having your client pay the expenses of litigation.
Leaving out any comment about the legal judgment involved in SCO filing the original lawsuit, if SCO's lawyers *hadn't* recommended filing this motion to dismiss Red Hat's suit, it would have constituted malpractice.
Years ago I worked for a company to whom UPS had outsourced their accounts receivable. When I called one particular guy, he said he hadn't paid because UPS hadn't delivered the package on time. The "package" was the guy's bike - he was entered in the Ironman Triathlon and couldn't compete that year!
A couple of years later, I forgot my shirts on a business trip to Canada, so I asked my girlfriend to overnight them. 2 weeks later UPS finally delivered them, along with a bill for almost $200 Cdn. duty for 'importing' my own shirts!
Darl McBride: "Our friends at the Nasdaq told us that with the recent blackout in the North East[ern United States], SCO's servers had "popped right back up," he said.
Guess that's in contrast to all the other servers that needed electricity, eh?
Ah, didn't know SBE doesn't include PowerPoint. OK, so he saved $200-$300+.:)
Nope, he doesn't need to use Excel and PowerPoint a lot at home - almost exclusively to view files others send, not to produce output of his own. That's why I proposed OpenOffice. I've done Excel and PowerPoint charts and tables using OpenOffice, so yep, I know its capabilities are limited in that regard. OTOH, I think there are lots of folks in my brother-in-law's shoes, i.e., they just need to read occasional Office files. So why spend a fortune to do so?
My brother-in-law is the CFO of a Fortune 500 corp. He bought a Dell computer a couple of months ago, and wanted Word, Excel and PowerPoint on it so he could work from home on weekends. Through a mix-up, Dell didn't include or charge for MS Office Small Biz Edition, which would have raised the price $150. He was about to call Dell and ask them to send the software. I told him not to and downloaded OpenOffice for free. Saved him $150. The CFO was impressed.:-)
So why can't someone willing to provide support for OpenOffice contract with Dell, for example, and in those dropdown menus where you configure your computer you'd see MS Office for $150 and up, and OpenOffice (with MS Office compatibility noted) for $10 or $20. I think they'd sell a few copies.
IAAL, but despite the fact that I've worked on copyright and patent litigations, I'm no expert. With that disclaimer, a couple of words about what little I do know:
1. SCO's suit, at least so far, isn't a copyright case, it's a contract breach claim against IBM.
2. In a contract suit there is a doctrine called "mitigation of damages," which says you can't get damages from the other party for harm you could reasonably have avoided. I'd take this to mean that SCO can't get damages for any use of its code that occurred after the point where IBM could have stopped using it if it had been notified by SCO.
3. Like everyone else, I'm very puzzled by SCO's failure to specify the offending code, and its lame excuses for that failure. OTOH, David Boies is a *very* good attorney, and if this is as lame a case as SCO's management is making it appear, I can't understand why he's still representing them. So the upshot is, as someone said in a response above, we'll just have to stay tuned (for a couple of years? arrgghh) and wait for this thing to play out.
Goes to show what happens when efficient marketing (radio play, etc.) successfully segments the target population. We'll market 50 Cent to these guys over here, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears to this segment, roll out another Stones tour for the old folks....
And after all this segmentation succeeds, there's no one who can achieve the mass relevance of the Beatles, or even the mass popularity of Michael Jackson. Of course massive talent would help.
How ironic that businesses should start to question the sources of *open source* software while ignoring the same potential problem in *closed source* software.
For an example of how much more difficult closed sourcing makes verification, look no further than the case at hand. If SCO's source was equally as open as the Linux source they're complaining about so loud and long, we'd all have been able to verify the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of their allegations almost as soon as they were made.
I*A*AL, and Perry Mason-style 'trial by surprise' wasn't allowed in civil cases even back when Perry Mason was doing it on TV every week. There is a pre-trial process called 'discovery' for the specific purpose of discovering what the other side's proof is. You get to take the out-of-court testimony of witnesses from the other side (including experts) and look at all the documents they consider relevant to their case. There's also a neat thing called 'requests for admission,' where you ask the other side 'Is Relevant Fact Z true?' If they say no and you prove at trial the answer's yes, they have to reimburse you the money you spent proving it. So no, SCO won't be able to spring anything on IBM suddenly at trial.
Besides the proceedings in the lawsuit itself, there's this: I am not a copyright/patent expert, but I believe it's traditional before suing for violations to notify the alleged offending party of what the violation is to give them a chance to stop. After all, if you've been singing someone else's song or *have code sitting in an open source kernel* that belongs to someone else, it's out there in front of God and everybody and it's too late to deny any past violations.
If the violations are hurting SCO, then it mystifies me why they won't tell anyone how to stop them - they can still get damages for the violations that already took place, and they can't get reimbursed anyway for any future damages they could have prevented by simple notification.
It's right up there on a par with 'You can't trust open source stuff not to be plagiarized.' And the way you can tell that a *closed source* app hasn't been plagiarized would be...?
"I'm betting they want the offending code to keep getting used so that they can prosecute the use."
Trouble is, you have a legal obligation to mitigate damages, or in English: You don't get reimbursed in a court of law for harm you could have prevented.
Revealing the code won't do anything to cure any harm to SCO that has already taken place due to the allegedly misappropriation, and SCO can get damages for that if they can prove the improper use of their intellectual property.
So - no damages for future avoidable harm *whether or not SCO reveals the code*. Think about that. It means the reason they're giving for failing to identify the code publicly is a lie. Like CmdrTaco says, the more you hear about this case, the less sense it makes.
In fact there is some chance of determining whether open source code has been plagiarized, while of course there is no way to find this out with closed source code. So open source offers a better opportunity to protect one's business.
I live near Kutztown, PA, a university community of about 4000 people which is running a muni fiber network to downtown homes and businesses and planning to bill users for it along with water, sewer, etc.
I called and asked the local govt folks if they would consider putting Wi-Fi broadcast antennas on top of the local "mountain" (big hill, really - couple hundred feet high) to reach outlying areas. I already have a DirecTV dish - one more wouldn't be a problem
The fellow I spoke to said they'd really love to do something like that, but Verizon and other private broadband providers were heavily lobbying state government and threatening lawsuits as it was; they needed to tread very lightly just now and couldn't risk expanding the planned service area, which would be seen as a provocation by the private providers.
Regarding availability of networks and local channels on DTV - I've been a DirecTV subscriber for a few years now. Local channels (all networks and independents) have been available here for about 2 years, IIRC. This is about 65 miles from a major urban area, though it is a rural location - nearest neighbor's a dairy farm, and neither cable nor DSL come out this way. Before the local channels were available, there were national network feeds for ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS.
Regarding ownership of one of the major players (no, not Fox:) - current owner of Hughes is General Motors (GM) rather than General Electric (GE).
Slashdot Mirror
As some of you have pointed out, yep, that's 1.5GHz. *blush*
This was with FreeBSD-STABLE; I'm now using -CURRENT, for which buildworld/installworld takes considerably longer.
Also, (some may consider this cheating), I usually skipped the kernel config unless something important had changed. The kernel config might add 5-10 minutes (again, longer now with -CURRENT).
Setup details (hardware): The 1.5GHz chip is an Athlon XP1800+. The FreeBSD slice is on a RAID0 array consisting of two IBM 40GB ATA100 drives (shared with Win2K; Gentoo and Win98 share a 20GB IBM ATA66 HD). 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM. Nice stuff for when I built it, but solidly middle-class today, I think.
Setup details (software): Softupdates enabled on root. Tagged queueing at that time on the IBM drives, no longer an option now. No ramdisk; I tried it, and build times were within seconds of what they were without it, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. And definitely no -jx; as others have reported, that slowed things down for me. Make.conf set (with gcc 2.95 at the time) for i686, no games and no profiled libraries. I mounted the non-root non-swap partitions (for me, /var and /usr) -noatime. Because of the 512MB RAM, I could also leave swap turned off if I chose. I dropped to single user most times, but occasionally didn't bother - I don't remember this making a significant difference to build times. That's pretty much it.
I've recompiled and reinstalled the *entire OS* in 20 minutes. (1.5MHz machine.)
Sure there isn't something you're doing wrong?
On a motion for summary judgment, evidence (though not as extensive as at a trial) may be presented and evaluated. A motion to dismiss evaluates no evidence. It simply considers everything the plaintiff says to be true and then determines under those assumptions if the plaintiff could possibly prevail.
If the plaintiff could not possibly prevail even if everything it alleges is true, then that *does* amount to the legal theory underpinning the case being wrong. (Simple - if you're right on all the facts but you still can't win, what did you get wrong? The law.)
SCO has asked the judge to rule on their Motion to Dismiss first, which is fair, and is almost certainly what will happen. The Motion to Dismiss says that even if everything Red Hat says is true, it still doesn't amount to an infringement of Red Hat's legal rights. So the judge has to rule on whether Red Hat's case will amount to anything *even if they prove everything they say* before giving Red Hat a chance to get that proof through discovery.
Umm - because it costs $270 less than the competing product, Counsel?
Jud Fink, Esquimo
My commute is one hour each way, so it's Morning Edition on the way to work, then a mix of sports talk and All Things Considered on the way home.
Once at home, yep, it's the Net, with Google playing a big role. No TV news, no newspapers. That's really no significant change from before the Net, though. I might watch the Newshour on PBS once every two weeks instead of once a week; never have read a newspaper for anything except the comics and sports.
The basic point is this: SCO filing a motion to dismiss, particularly in a declaratory judgment action, was to be expected, and it won't be news if the motion fails, since the vast majority do fail. (See my reply in the "Consequences" thread.)
BTW: Back when I lived in the litigation world (9-10 yrs ago), filing a motion for sanctions under Federal Rule 11 or a state equivalent in response to a Motion to Dismiss would have been considered an act of Significant Nastiness (which is saying something when you're talking about lawyers) not entered into lightly, and unlikely to succeed. Have standards changed that much since then? Have you seen sanctions imposed under Rule 11 involving a Motion to Dismiss?
Legally speaking, nah, that's not what failure of a motion to dismiss means.
A motion to dismiss says that *without considering any evidence*, and *taking everything you say as true*, you haven't managed to show anything wrong. Or in plain English, "Yeah, even if you're right, so what?"
So all that the failure of this motion to dismiss would mean is that Red Hat's lawyers know how to start a lawsuit, which presumably they do.
IAAL, and a motion to dismiss is something that is filed in nearly every lawsuit on the off chance that it will actually work and you can avoid having your client pay the expenses of litigation.
Leaving out any comment about the legal judgment involved in SCO filing the original lawsuit, if SCO's lawyers *hadn't* recommended filing this motion to dismiss Red Hat's suit, it would have constituted malpractice.
Yep, I didn't pay it in the first place. Presenting me with the erroneous bill just topped off the whole fiasco.
Fed Ex, yeah. UPS?
Years ago I worked for a company to whom UPS had outsourced their accounts receivable. When I called one particular guy, he said he hadn't paid because UPS hadn't delivered the package on time. The "package" was the guy's bike - he was entered in the Ironman Triathlon and couldn't compete that year!
A couple of years later, I forgot my shirts on a business trip to Canada, so I asked my girlfriend to overnight them. 2 weeks later UPS finally delivered them, along with a bill for almost $200 Cdn. duty for 'importing' my own shirts!
Darl McBride: "Our friends at the Nasdaq told us that with the recent blackout in the North East[ern United States], SCO's servers had "popped right back up," he said.
Guess that's in contrast to all the other servers that needed electricity, eh?
Ah, didn't know SBE doesn't include PowerPoint. OK, so he saved $200-$300+. :)
Nope, he doesn't need to use Excel and PowerPoint a lot at home - almost exclusively to view files others send, not to produce output of his own. That's why I proposed OpenOffice. I've done Excel and PowerPoint charts and tables using OpenOffice, so yep, I know its capabilities are limited in that regard. OTOH, I think there are lots of folks in my brother-in-law's shoes, i.e., they just need to read occasional Office files. So why spend a fortune to do so?
My brother-in-law is the CFO of a Fortune 500 corp. He bought a Dell computer a couple of months ago, and wanted Word, Excel and PowerPoint on it so he could work from home on weekends. Through a mix-up, Dell didn't include or charge for MS Office Small Biz Edition, which would have raised the price $150. He was about to call Dell and ask them to send the software. I told him not to and downloaded OpenOffice for free. Saved him $150. The CFO was impressed. :-)
So why can't someone willing to provide support for OpenOffice contract with Dell, for example, and in those dropdown menus where you configure your computer you'd see MS Office for $150 and up, and OpenOffice (with MS Office compatibility noted) for $10 or $20. I think they'd sell a few copies.
IAAL, but despite the fact that I've worked on copyright and patent litigations, I'm no expert. With that disclaimer, a couple of words about what little I do know:
1. SCO's suit, at least so far, isn't a copyright case, it's a contract breach claim against IBM.
2. In a contract suit there is a doctrine called "mitigation of damages," which says you can't get damages from the other party for harm you could reasonably have avoided. I'd take this to mean that SCO can't get damages for any use of its code that occurred after the point where IBM could have stopped using it if it had been notified by SCO.
3. Like everyone else, I'm very puzzled by SCO's failure to specify the offending code, and its lame excuses for that failure. OTOH, David Boies is a *very* good attorney, and if this is as lame a case as SCO's management is making it appear, I can't understand why he's still representing them. So the upshot is, as someone said in a response above, we'll just have to stay tuned (for a couple of years? arrgghh) and wait for this thing to play out.
Goes to show what happens when efficient marketing (radio play, etc.) successfully segments the target population. We'll market 50 Cent to these guys over here, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears to this segment, roll out another Stones tour for the old folks.... And after all this segmentation succeeds, there's no one who can achieve the mass relevance of the Beatles, or even the mass popularity of Michael Jackson. Of course massive talent would help.
How ironic that businesses should start to question the sources of *open source* software while ignoring the same potential problem in *closed source* software.
For an example of how much more difficult closed sourcing makes verification, look no further than the case at hand. If SCO's source was equally as open as the Linux source they're complaining about so loud and long, we'd all have been able to verify the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of their allegations almost as soon as they were made.
I*A*AL, and Perry Mason-style 'trial by surprise' wasn't allowed in civil cases even back when Perry Mason was doing it on TV every week. There is a pre-trial process called 'discovery' for the specific purpose of discovering what the other side's proof is. You get to take the out-of-court testimony of witnesses from the other side (including experts) and look at all the documents they consider relevant to their case. There's also a neat thing called 'requests for admission,' where you ask the other side 'Is Relevant Fact Z true?' If they say no and you prove at trial the answer's yes, they have to reimburse you the money you spent proving it. So no, SCO won't be able to spring anything on IBM suddenly at trial.
Besides the proceedings in the lawsuit itself, there's this: I am not a copyright/patent expert, but I believe it's traditional before suing for violations to notify the alleged offending party of what the violation is to give them a chance to stop. After all, if you've been singing someone else's song or *have code sitting in an open source kernel* that belongs to someone else, it's out there in front of God and everybody and it's too late to deny any past violations.
If the violations are hurting SCO, then it mystifies me why they won't tell anyone how to stop them - they can still get damages for the violations that already took place, and they can't get reimbursed anyway for any future damages they could have prevented by simple notification.
It's right up there on a par with 'You can't trust open source stuff not to be plagiarized.' And the way you can tell that a *closed source* app hasn't been plagiarized would be...?
"I'm betting they want the offending code to keep getting used so that they can prosecute the use."
Trouble is, you have a legal obligation to mitigate damages, or in English: You don't get reimbursed in a court of law for harm you could have prevented.
Revealing the code won't do anything to cure any harm to SCO that has already taken place due to the allegedly misappropriation, and SCO can get damages for that if they can prove the improper use of their intellectual property.
So - no damages for future avoidable harm *whether or not SCO reveals the code*. Think about that. It means the reason they're giving for failing to identify the code publicly is a lie. Like CmdrTaco says, the more you hear about this case, the less sense it makes.
In fact there is some chance of determining whether open source code has been plagiarized, while of course there is no way to find this out with closed source code. So open source offers a better opportunity to protect one's business.
I live near Kutztown, PA, a university community of about 4000 people which is running a muni fiber network to downtown homes and businesses and planning to bill users for it along with water, sewer, etc. I called and asked the local govt folks if they would consider putting Wi-Fi broadcast antennas on top of the local "mountain" (big hill, really - couple hundred feet high) to reach outlying areas. I already have a DirecTV dish - one more wouldn't be a problem The fellow I spoke to said they'd really love to do something like that, but Verizon and other private broadband providers were heavily lobbying state government and threatening lawsuits as it was; they needed to tread very lightly just now and couldn't risk expanding the planned service area, which would be seen as a provocation by the private providers.
Why not 802.11(a, b, g, your-favorite-letter-here) broadcast to customer premise equipment ("CPE," e.g., mini-dishes a la DirecTV)?
Regarding availability of networks and local channels on DTV - I've been a DirecTV subscriber for a few years now. Local channels (all networks and independents) have been available here for about 2 years, IIRC. This is about 65 miles from a major urban area, though it is a rural location - nearest neighbor's a dairy farm, and neither cable nor DSL come out this way. Before the local channels were available, there were national network feeds for ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS. Regarding ownership of one of the major players (no, not Fox:) - current owner of Hughes is General Motors (GM) rather than General Electric (GE).