I think the plan might have been to attack with lawsuits and let IBM buy them out rather than fight the lawsuit.
Getting bought out would have effectively stopped the lawsuit and would have been the cheaper way to go. It would have still left huge legal questionmarks that would have then been exploited by Microsoft in every press release from now until Doomsday*.
I think this was the plan, but it broke when IBM et al decided to fight the case rather than go for the cheap and easy buyout option. This is why most of the SCO backers seem to be cutting and running - a buyout would have been great for everyone except the GPL licensees. SCO backers would make a ton of cash off buyout rumours, and Microsoft would have created a large FUD factor that it could use for domination. Now we are starting to see SCO becoming really desperate for some substance to save itself.
Fighting it strengthens the open source community and is definetly the better way to go.
----- * Doomsday will most likely be caused by either a BSOD, or an inadvertant installation of Java to control a nuclear facility.
Lets see: o the FCC regulates profanity. o Bush essentially tries to recreate the house unamerican activities committee under another name. o The US falls out with Russia (and the rest of the world). o Being gay is slowly being becoming a crime
Well, lets all go down to the soda fountain and hit a drive in movie afterwards why don't we.
Well, woop-de-fucking-do. This isn't the 1950's any more; face up to the fact.
Just run the country properly and stop futzing around with stupid things that have no bearing on the quality of life of all those people that are living below the poverty line, to all those people who no longer have health care, to all those people to don't have jobs, to all the people that had to take a job after retirement because the CEO needed a bigger mansion in Hawaii and raided thier pensions.
Hey republicans! The 1950's are over face it. If it was Ronald Reagan would still be making B-Movies and outing his friends.
Perl can do everything that bash can, but when I can pipe 3 or 4 commands together to strip a configuration line out of one file, parse a second file and add the updated line back into the configuration, bash makes it much simpler for me.
I know somewhere in the depths of CPAN there probably is a module that does it for me, but I just couldn't be bothered looking.
I consider it a hack because it took me 5 minutes to write and test. It was simple and elegant, and not too hard to understand, and worked really quickly.
It was one of these areas where perl wasn't the best tool for the job.
I prefer have the shorter and simpler solution because I've usually got a queue of stuff to do, so if I can do it in 5 minutes with 4 lines, I'd take that and get my work backlog down.
I tend to agree. My boss is a perl nut. If its a system admin script, he wants it in perl.
Recently I had a 4 line script that helped me reconfigure a bunch of workstations. He wanted in redone in perl, so a 4 line hack became a 50 line perl script.
I worked a place that ended up that way. When I started it was a good place work, open plan offices, good coffee, management that mostly left us alone.
It was all guys, and this was good also. We could swear, most guys could smoke, and being Ireland, we all drank heavily. We talked about drinking and what were were going to drink. One guy even had a map posted beside his desk of the most optimal pubs for doing a pub crawl of central Dublin.
One time head office sent a guy over from the US to train people in the next generation of tools. They gave him a desk in our area.
He lasted exactly 10 minutes after having listened to Mark swearing after dealing with a really obnoxious customer, watching Sean and Adrian discussing a compilcated multi-horse bet that they were going to place at lunch time, and me swearing in several languages because the government had changed the tax structure and I had about 3 weeks to decipher all the crap and get it implimented single handed.
Turned out the guy was a mormon.
After a while, management started getting worse, wages were going anywhere, so I left, followed by a bunch of other guys. As a guy would leave the lecherous manager that ran the office would hire a girl (qualities seemed to be based on cuteness and the possibility of that manager getting off with her).
Eventually everyone from the original crew had left except Adrian who was on a management track, and liked the place because it was close to the bookies.
One day Adrian phoned me at work and said "I was just sitting here reading the Racing Post, and I looked up and all the girls were crowded around a desk talking about some dress someone was wearing, and I feel so lonely here now...."
Still it's highly stupid of a company who calls themselves as a "leader in digital content enhancement and security technology for optical media with its MediaMax CD-3 suite of products." not to consider this, or the fact that anyone not running Windows will be able to safely copy the CD.
I know Microsoft have a monopoly, but it's not that wide spread just yet.
*sigh* Yet another example of a company trying to cover up stupid security by invoking the DMCA.
Several years ago I was comissioned to write code to allow a Dongle lock to work with a CD that a publisher was releasing.
The code wasn't allowed out of the door until all debug, backdoor and bugs had been beaten out of it. And even then it was audited by two seperate programmers before it was sent to the client.
Something like "Press Shift, and bypass it" would have gotten me fired.
You can inspect the code all you want if it's been cleaned first.
As a proof for my thesis I wrote a patch for a compiler that added a backdoor to code at compile time. The source was always clean, but the code was compromised.
If I were the Chinese I'd ask for the rights to compile the code, not just review the source.
This is why I trust open source more that object code. I can inspect the code then compile it and be fairly sure that as long as I trust my compiler I can have a good system
Find out who the liquidators were, and offer them a price for the source code. Usually the creditors are happy enough to get any money at all, and an agreement can be reached.
On the other hand, if the creditors think that the source code is something that they want or can sell for a large profit then it will be harder for you to reach an agreement without costing you a lot of money.
If the source has already been sold them you will have to contact the current owner.
Run windows update and apply all critical patches.
Download the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser, and run it. You'll find that it finds lots of "critical" patches not yet applied.
In some cases these patches suddenly appear on Windows Update. Many have to be manually downloaded and fixed.
Re:Hilarious!
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You have to remember that the house of lords is populated by people who do not have to be elected and can and do serve a lifetime tenure there. Many of the lords are way past retirement.
Think of it this way: Image the Senate populated by people who are all about the age of Strom Thurmond.
Some, despite thier advanced age are very knowlegeable of thier topic. Some are becoming increasingly bewildered in thier old age.
but not at Microsoft though. Didn't feel like selling my soul.
As a contractor you tend to expect to receive lesser treatment that regular staff. Some firms are better than others about this.
Contractors tend to be pretty much the same as regular staff expect you don't get stock options and you don't get any training. You tend to expect to be let go asap if the firms tanking.
At one place I was working on a project where all the regular staff ended up having to go and spend 3 days training on the hardware we were to be using. As a contractor I was expected to know it. I did my usual learning curve on the hardware and knew it good enough to do the job in a couple of days, and was ahead of regular staff by about a day.
I really don't care that I didn't get trained. I was charging way above the market rate anyway. The firm I was contracting with picked up my medical benefits fron day one.
As a contractor you have to realise that accountants see you as expendable labour and thats all well and good. If you are contracting from a firm, you need to pick you firm well, so places have no benefits and basically just act as a middle man between you and a firm. Other places have a lot of benefits and they do make life a lot better.
Make a check list of things you think are important to you and ask the contracing firm if they provide those things and then decide if its worth it.
I grew up in Northern Ireland. In 1971 the UK governement decided that it could defeat terrorist by using internment. What happened was that the goverment identified who they thought would be likely IRA terrorists. There was no actual evidence involved, just people that the government didn't like. Snatch squads were sent out and people were taken and imprisoned without trial.
This is no different to what the US goverment is doing now.
The one thing that came out of internment in Northern Ireland was that it actually promoted support for the very terrorist organisation it was designed to crush.
Microsoft wants people to stop using NT 4, so by refusing to apply security fixes they can tell customers "you need to upgrade to fix this" and thus keep revenue coming in.
My parents house is a 19th century farmhouse in Ireland. The walls are unshaped stone (just the faces are finished)and mortar. They are three feet, (yes 1 meter) thick. There is a 3 feet thick dividing wall in the center of the house running between the back wall and the front wall.
The roof beams are old ships masts and a lot of the other timbers were ships timbers.
The foundation is on bedrock.
It's survived a gas cooker explosion (which took out 2 windows and the kitchen cabinets, but the floors and the walls never moved), several huge storms over the last century and a lot of floods.
Building houses that way today does cost a fortune. For a start you can't get good timber anymore - most timber is kiln dried and doesn't seem to age as well as the timber that was stored for 20 or 30 years to dry naturally.
It's also hard to find a builder who knows the principle of dry stone building. Most older Irish homes were built in the same style as drystone walls, except that mortar was also used.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw an Intel pro 100/s network card - it has encryption on it.
On the card was a big sticker warning about export restrictions etc etc.
The chip that actually was doing the encryption that resulted in the sticker: Made in Japan.
So we are importing hardware we then can't export.
Thats politics
Thats Microsoft Word's spell checker for you...
I think the plan might have been to attack with lawsuits and let IBM buy them out rather than fight the lawsuit.
Getting bought out would have effectively stopped the lawsuit and would have been the cheaper way to go. It would have still left huge legal questionmarks that would have then been exploited by Microsoft in every press release from now until Doomsday*.
I think this was the plan, but it broke when IBM et al decided to fight the case rather than go for the cheap and easy buyout option. This is why most of the SCO backers seem to be cutting and running - a buyout would have been great for everyone except the GPL licensees. SCO backers would make a ton of cash off buyout rumours, and Microsoft would have created a large FUD factor that it could use for domination. Now we are starting to see SCO becoming really desperate for some substance to save itself.
Fighting it strengthens the open source community and is definetly the better way to go.
-----
* Doomsday will most likely be caused by either a BSOD, or an inadvertant installation of Java to control a nuclear facility.
Lets see:
o the FCC regulates profanity.
o Bush essentially tries to recreate the house unamerican activities committee under another name. o The US falls out with Russia (and the rest of the world).
o Being gay is slowly being becoming a crime
Well, lets all go down to the soda fountain and hit a drive in movie afterwards why don't we.
Well, woop-de-fucking-do. This isn't the 1950's any more; face up to the fact.
Just run the country properly and stop futzing around with stupid things that have no bearing on the quality of life of all those people that are living below the poverty line, to all those people who no longer have health care, to all those people to don't have jobs, to all the people that had to take a job after retirement because the CEO needed a bigger mansion in Hawaii and raided thier pensions.
Hey republicans! The 1950's are over face it. If it was Ronald Reagan would still be making B-Movies and outing his friends.
I think this is how noise cancelling headphone do it - they just feed the external noise back into the earpieces after inverting it.
Perl can do everything that bash can, but when I can pipe 3 or 4 commands together to strip a configuration line out of one file, parse a second file and add the updated line back into the configuration, bash makes it much simpler for me.
I know somewhere in the depths of CPAN there probably is a module that does it for me, but I just couldn't be bothered looking.
It was simple in bash, awkward in perl.
I consider it a hack because it took me 5 minutes to write and test. It was simple and elegant, and not too hard to understand, and worked really quickly.
It was one of these areas where perl wasn't the best tool for the job.
I prefer have the shorter and simpler solution because I've usually got a queue of stuff to do, so if I can do it in 5 minutes with 4 lines, I'd take that and get my work backlog down.
He hates me using perl as a wrapper for bash scripts :)
I tend to agree. My boss is a perl nut. If its a system admin script, he wants it in perl.
Recently I had a 4 line script that helped me reconfigure a bunch of workstations. He wanted in redone in perl, so a 4 line hack became a 50 line perl script.
I worked a place that ended up that way. When I started it was a good place work, open plan offices, good coffee, management that mostly left us alone.
It was all guys, and this was good also. We could swear, most guys could smoke, and being Ireland, we all drank heavily. We talked about drinking and what were were going to drink. One guy even had a map posted beside his desk of the most optimal pubs for doing a pub crawl of central Dublin.
One time head office sent a guy over from the US to train people in the next generation of tools. They gave him a desk in our area.
He lasted exactly 10 minutes after having listened to Mark swearing after dealing with a really obnoxious customer, watching Sean and Adrian discussing a compilcated multi-horse bet that they were going to place at lunch time, and me swearing in several languages because the government had changed the tax structure and I had about 3 weeks to decipher all the crap and get it implimented single handed.
Turned out the guy was a mormon.
After a while, management started getting worse, wages were going anywhere, so I left, followed by a bunch of other guys. As a guy would leave the lecherous manager that ran the office would hire a girl (qualities seemed to be based on cuteness and the possibility of that manager getting off with her).
Eventually everyone from the original crew had left except Adrian who was on a management track, and liked the place because it was close to the bookies.
One day Adrian phoned me at work and said "I was just sitting here reading the Racing Post, and I looked up and all the girls were crowded around a desk talking about some dress someone was wearing, and I feel so lonely here now...."
First they ignore us
Then they despise us
Then they ridicule us
Then they become us...
Actually it wasn't the photo that got him fired but the fact that he mentioned where he worked...
You're right about that though.
Still it's highly stupid of a company who calls themselves as a "leader in digital content enhancement and security technology for optical media with its MediaMax CD-3 suite of products." not to consider this, or the fact that anyone not running Windows will be able to safely copy the CD.
I know Microsoft have a monopoly, but it's not that wide spread just yet.
Actually this dates back to dos days. It was the standard key for most Quarterdeck programs (QEMM etc) to stop them loading at boot up.
There were a bunch of programs that ran from config.sys that would check for this actually.
*sigh* Yet another example of a company trying to cover up stupid security by invoking the DMCA.
Several years ago I was comissioned to write code to allow a Dongle lock to work with a CD that a publisher was releasing.
The code wasn't allowed out of the door until all debug, backdoor and bugs had been beaten out of it. And even then it was audited by two seperate programmers before it was sent to the client.
Something like "Press Shift, and bypass it" would have gotten me fired.
You can inspect the code all you want if it's been cleaned first.
As a proof for my thesis I wrote a patch for a compiler that added a backdoor to code at compile time. The source was always clean, but the code was compromised.
If I were the Chinese I'd ask for the rights to compile the code, not just review the source.
This is why I trust open source more that object code. I can inspect the code then compile it and be fairly sure that as long as I trust my compiler I can have a good system
Find out who the liquidators were, and offer them a price for the source code. Usually the creditors are happy enough to get any money at all, and an agreement can be reached.
On the other hand, if the creditors think that the source code is something that they want or can sell for a large profit then it will be harder for you to reach an agreement without costing you a lot of money.
If the source has already been sold them you will have to contact the current owner.
It reminds me a bit on The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin
Now theres the original dysfunctional show - check it out if you can.
For those who have never seen it, it's somewhere between Dilbert with a touch of BOFH and "The Office"
Run windows update and apply all critical patches.
Download the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser, and run it. You'll find that it finds lots of "critical" patches not yet applied.
In some cases these patches suddenly appear on Windows Update. Many have to be manually downloaded and fixed.
You have to remember that the house of lords is populated by people who do not have to be elected and can and do serve a lifetime tenure there. Many of the lords are way past retirement.
Think of it this way: Image the Senate populated by people who are all about the age of Strom Thurmond.
Some, despite thier advanced age are very knowlegeable of thier topic. Some are becoming increasingly bewildered in thier old age.
but not at Microsoft though. Didn't feel like selling my soul.
As a contractor you tend to expect to receive lesser treatment that regular staff. Some firms are better than others about this.
Contractors tend to be pretty much the same as regular staff expect you don't get stock options and you don't get any training. You tend to expect to be let go asap if the firms tanking.
At one place I was working on a project where all the regular staff ended up having to go and spend 3 days training on the hardware we were to be using. As a contractor I was expected to know it. I did my usual learning curve on the hardware and knew it good enough to do the job in a couple of days, and was ahead of regular staff by about a day.
I really don't care that I didn't get trained. I was charging way above the market rate anyway. The firm I was contracting with picked up my medical benefits fron day one.
As a contractor you have to realise that accountants see you as expendable labour and thats all well and good. If you are contracting from a firm, you need to pick you firm well, so places have no benefits and basically just act as a middle man between you and a firm. Other places have a lot of benefits and they do make life a lot better.
Make a check list of things you think are important to you and ask the contracing firm if they provide those things and then decide if its worth it.
I grew up in Northern Ireland. In 1971 the UK governement decided that it could defeat terrorist by using internment. What happened was that the goverment identified who they thought would be likely IRA terrorists. There was no actual evidence involved, just people that the government didn't like. Snatch squads were sent out and people were taken and imprisoned without trial.
This is no different to what the US goverment is doing now.
The one thing that came out of internment in Northern Ireland was that it actually promoted support for the very terrorist organisation it was designed to crush.
They use things like this to force customers to upgrade.
They did something similar with Windows 95 to force EDS (a huge customer) to upgrade.
Microsoft wants people to stop using NT 4, so by refusing to apply security fixes they can tell customers "you need to upgrade to fix this" and thus keep revenue coming in.
My parents house is a 19th century farmhouse in Ireland. The walls are unshaped stone (just the faces are finished)and mortar. They are three feet, (yes 1 meter) thick. There is a 3 feet thick dividing wall in the center of the house running between the back wall and the front wall.
The roof beams are old ships masts and a lot of the other timbers were ships timbers.
The foundation is on bedrock.
It's survived a gas cooker explosion (which took out 2 windows and the kitchen cabinets, but the floors and the walls never moved), several huge storms over the last century and a lot of floods.
Building houses that way today does cost a fortune. For a start you can't get good timber anymore - most timber is kiln dried and doesn't seem to age as well as the timber that was stored for 20 or 30 years to dry naturally.
It's also hard to find a builder who knows the principle of dry stone building. Most older Irish homes were built in the same style as drystone walls, except that mortar was also used.
Actually it's perfectly legal to sell radar detectors, but in some states it's illegal to use them.
US law has a wierd way of dealing with things like this - they don't ban the sale of the item, but they make it illegal to use it