I'd imagine that the UFO-spotting people could have some fun with this. In particular if there is another message-hacking incident like the
one in North Carolina
a few weeks ago. Then
somebody's base surely would be advertised as being belong to somebody
else....
Still, despite the obvious comical aspects, I'd hate to see this sort of thing come into being, and I expect
these people
to agree with me on that.
Back in the day, there was this "permuted index" which appeared in the back of each of the volumes of the Reference manuals, in the paper version at least.
I've got some old hp-ux ones here that are like that, and to some extent the information in them still applies for the most part; the difference tends to be that the same utilities under Linux have more parameters and options, but at least these books point in the right direction.
Then again, even then there is the underlying assumption that you know what you are doing. Like knowing why you'd want to access the terminfo database or whatever...
That just goes to show that he doesn't understand the GPL or even the motivations behind it.
Consider some of the arguments seen so far:
1. IBM has put together something useful in AIX. That must be something belonging to SCO there, they couldn't have done it otherwise?
2. Autozone has ported their code from one variety of UNIX to another, and that process went rather smoothly. That couldn't have happened unless they used SCO IP. After all, this is the only stuff that works isn't it?
3. Groklaw must have been sponsored by IBM, nobody would be doing the kind of work one sees there for free?
4. The GPL is completely bogus. Noone ever does anything for free, There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and so forth...
Basically, in the SCO worldview, there is no room for competence, unpaid or otherwise. It is as if the adage is "Do not explain by competence what may adequately be explained by conspiracy".
I've seen this argument here, and it might be a similar observation that underlies the complaints of IBM as well; that IBM, like Autozone, has done something smart or useful and could not have done it without SCOs "presscioussss" according to SCO. Basically Darl and cronies appear to expect everyone else to be as conspiratorial or incompetent they are as themselves.
It is like a twisted variation on the
"do not explain by conspiracy what may be adequately explained by incompetence" -- which in the SCO worldview has become
"do not explain by competence what may be adequately explained by conspiracy"
It is a sorry state of affairs if whenever
someone does something efficiently, that by itself raises suspicions? That's close to libelous, even. It does however seem to be something to look for in the other actions as well.
The problem isn't just the interference from the lines in the vicinity, which might be without power. There will still be interference coming from areas further away that still have power and BPL intact, since the HF frequencies in question are quite long-range.
Back at a school where I went, they had motor-driven blinds in some of the classrooms. The idea was good; rather than having to raise and lower curtains manually, there was two pushbuttons, one would start them going up and the other would start them going down.
When you pressed both at the same time, there was a fuse that blew somewhere. Basically a quick DoS-ing of any lecture that would depend on a slide-show in a dark room...
On the machine here (Red Hat Linux 9.0) the command dir here actually prints a list of files as one might expect.
A little further examination reveals that this is the same as ls -C -b and so indeed you may find your files using dir. By the way, wasn't dir the command for listing files on VAX VMS back in the day as well?
Either way, while it does what a user might expect, this does absolutely nothing to inform the user about the different commands in the shell, as the parent post notes. In one way, this is the way things are supposed to work; the user is presumably wanting and expecting to list files and not read a tutorial at that point -- there is no real way for the machine and OS of knowing. Except that maybe a better replacement for dir would have been something like:
#!/bin/sh
echo To list files you may use the ls command. echo For more information on this, type man ls. echo Or type ls now to see the names of the files
which at least would point the new user in the right direction without getting in the way of the experienced ones.
Here I have the book "DCE/RPC over SMB" by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, (ISBN 1-57870-150-3) and in the preface to the Appendix A, which contains GPL source code for Samba, there is this stern warning:
Please read the [GPL] carefully before proceeding. If you do not agree to or do not understand the terms of the GPL then please do not read or use any of the Source Code in this chapter.
If you are working for a commercial organization, it is recommended that you consult your legal department with respect to the GPL, as they are likely to advise that you should tear out these pages and burn them.
So basically, this "tainting" problem can be equally bad in either direction.
So now we have some vast number of Windows machines of different vintages being hijacked and spreading this shite all over.
Now, I recall, the other day Bill Gates wowed to kill spam and worms, and now this? Looks like he has his work cut out for him there....
This has gotta be the Nth time I've seen reports that a worm has put an executable file into an area of the system that really should have been off-limits to anything not really needing to go there. So what does an E-mail program have to do of meaningful work in the OS code directories? Beats me...
I can offer a hint to Mr. Gates: Rework Windows so that it not only does not require Administrator rights to operate normally, but actually disallows certain operations when being Administrator as well. Such as running browser or e-mail programs.
Make sure no ordinary users can run processes that can write anything at all into the areas not set aside for that user, and the common temporary files area. I suspect there has to be some redesign, but I cannot see how this nonsense can be stopped otherwise.
Isn't this the poem called "The Raven"? Where the bird talking is a raven, not a crow. ("Quoth the Raven, Nevermore"). Even though both are birds of the Corvidae family...
Evidently it has been a while, but according to
The Register there has been a dispute with an Australian maker of synthetic pillows and duvets. One of their products is also called "Microsoft".
The providence and pedigree of all code in the Linux system is known. Moreover, anyone and everyone can look at this code, and it is known to be unencumbered by patents. If anything, this recent SCO debacle has caused the maintainers to take a further look at the code.
The profit of GNU-licensed software does not come in the sales of the software itself but the sales of hardware and services.
The production of software may look like a losing venture, since the production costs of any software is not negligible. But once made, once that cost is sunk, as is the case of Linux, the reproduction costs are near zero, and the absence of anyone charging license fees for it makes it very popular for everyone who has machinery or services to sell. It is not a standard economic model but it appears to work well, as evidenced by companies like IBM and Red Hat.
I bought this in 1986, along with an XT-clone machine. It uses a Hercules compatible card, and I did lots of work on this machine back in the day. Being amber, I found it quite pleasant to use.
Machine and screen both work still, I use them mostly for burning 68HC05s and PROMS since these attachments do not work properly on faster hardware. Only had to replace the hard disk (Seagate 225) once. And the battery is no longer working, so date and time need to be set on startup.
I am still not sure if that exonerates the NetBSD logo however. The analogy of american soldiers == devils is not likely to be one which is desirable to propagate.
The single cute "cartoon devil"
(whose name may or may not be Chuck) that we see here on slashdot as the section logo for BSD, and which is really meant to be a visualization of a daemon, is not what's under consideration here. As a symbol for BSD, it is about as well-known and effective as Tux is for Linux.
I can list a few likely reasons for changing this, off the top of my head:
One thing is that devils is a somewhat religious device, not found in all religions.
Then there is the aesthetics of this. The logo is just kinda ugly. These guys are not all that different in appearance from some football hooligans... and after all, there is a strong element of marketing here, whether we like it or not. Would you want to buy an operating systems from these guys?
Political correctness or accusations of same, marketing and aestetics aside, I would say it is just as much that the design of the monitors is becoming dated, since many of us now have relatively skinny LCDs, not fat CRT-based ones. If nothing else, the logo is becoming tecnically dated.
All these could, individually, be considered warrants for change.
As far as I know, they still cannot make this kind of claims in Germany. And good luck to them (they're gonna need it!) if they really try something more substantial than their current FUD propagation anywhere else around here.
Unless and until they can prove in a court of law that they really have these rights they claim, they cannot expect to be paid. On the contrary, they can expect to be investigated for fraud, an perhaps subject to criminal charges of extortion...
And trying to dodge the GPL does not count. Either the GPL is valid and must be obeyed, or it is invalid which makes everyone distributing Linux and other GPL'd software into copyright infringers. This latter seems somewhat less than likely...
This is cool. The geek-factor on this is very high! And having worked on some projects where they kept giving away all sorts of neat items (laser pointer, watch, various T-shirts...) I can see how this fits in well with the project. Though unless you are working with something happening on Mars, it might be a little less than practical, but as we know, that hasn't stopped anyone before.
Now, with the Mars day being slightly longer than the Earth day and there are watches to match this, how do they reckon the days there? Here on Earth there is the system of Julian Days, which serves well for Earth-bound day-counting and marking dates of interesting events. This, like the UTC clock, seems to be very Earth-centric.
So are anyone contemplating a Martian calendar, or some kind of linear numbering of Mars Days, so there will be a logical date for when the various Rovers and others have landed, and other interesting events?
For all I know, such a calendar may already exist, but all I have seen of it has been various science-fiction books.
From what I have seen, girls have no problems putting together plain LEGO pieces to make whatever houses or vehicles or other more fantasic structures they like. Even techical-oriented things like train sets are well received and considered great fun.
I had been working on some fairly complicated analysis code, on a UNIX (hp-ux) machine, and wanted to make a new directory with a copy of the thus-far best version, so as to be able to continue with some experiment on it.
It must be noted that I had previously been used to the MS-DOS command-line, and got into the bad habit of copying files without specifying where to. This makes them go into the current directory on MS-DOS so no problem.
But now I was on Unix. And so I make a sibling directory, and go into this directory and issue the command:
% cp../mandir/ndss.* % ls %
but where the hey are the files? ah! yes, I'd forgotten to say where to put them... try again:
% cp../mandir/ndss.*. % ls ndss.c ndss.h %
Ok, now I got the ndss.c and ndss.h files. But... why doesn't this seem to compile? Hmm... but the previous one did? So I check... Nope!
Whats happened here?! I take a look at the files, my ndss.c looks ok and ndss.h looks... eh? wasn't this ndss.c that I just looked at? What's going on here?
Realization dawns. My ndss.h is lost and I got four copies of ndss.c. So, OK, I can recreate that knowing the function names and stuff from the C file... but damn if I ever issue a copy statement without specifying where to anymore!
Another fun tech mistake: Put the cache memory chips in a 486-era box backwards. These are 28-pin narrow DIP format, (61256s) and work one way and fail spectacularly the other way, but they fit either way.
As was pretty obvious to many even by the time of the first trial, it is not against the law to break open safeguards protecting letters to oneself, which is what it is about in the relevant paragraph of the Penal Code. Jon J was charged with breaking the more modern update of this particular piece of law, which states that you may not break safeguards protecting code you have no rights to access. The judgement was that Jon did have rights to access the contents of the DVD he had bought, and thus he was not in violation of doing so.
Note that this cannot be construed as a general licence to crack any kind of encryption. If the DVDs had not been his to legally watch, he could have been found in violation.
The question of copyright infringement must have weighed heavy on the Okokrim prosecutor, but they could not charge him with that, much as you cannot charge someone fabricating a crowbar for breaking and entering.
You raise some good points. If it were the norm that computers would be serviced regularly, say every 3 to 6 months, most things would have been a lot nicer, even given today's state of the art. And I have had the questionable pleasure of observing and fixing friends' computers that contained more worms than a litter of puppies...
Perhaps there is a market niche here for "computer mechanics"... but unless this job can pay enough obviously nobody will do it.
The computer-car analogy isn't perfect, though there are plenty of similarities. While both started out as fairly expensive and complicated pieces of equipment, the relative price of computers are going down whereas cars remain expensive. I am comparing fairly ancient cars to modern computers, recent cars compared to computers have
different scope for DIY and different main failure modes, so expecting modern cars and future computers to be as similar as ancient cars and present-day computers I would not find realistic. They may have started out similarly but I don't think they will move in the same direction.
That is not to say that there are no lessons to be learned from 100 years or so of automobile history, for example that certain designs are found superior (in terms of safety, reliability, performance and so on) than others, and the "best" designs are allowed to prevail. A similar evolution in the face of a hostile environment will have to take place for computers as everyman's appliances. And I think that the "appliance" model is closer to the long-term goal than the "automobile" model.
Like all kinds of equipment, computers are subject to hardware failures, and the mode of failure tends to be
more like what one sees in an appliance like a fridge or a TV set, that is, failure is rather sudden and catastrophic.
There is a difference here of course, that if your fridge dies, you still have access to the food inside, whereas if a hard disk dies, whatever was on it is most likely lost as well. And fridges are not subject to attacks or takeovers from crackers... so the appliance model isn't perfect either. Still, it does suggest a sensible direction forward -- the care and feeding of today's computers is made unnecessary complicated by such nonsense as EULAs, popup advertisements and general obscuration of operation. Case in point: the error message appearing when the anti-virus software needed renewal not even hinting that this was the reason. Some kind of standardized, publically known interface for diagnostics (this particular lesson learned from automobiles) would be the best way of handling this: when something goes wrong or stops working properly, enough information is generated from the event so that most anyone could be able to figure out what needs to be done. A standard code of "subscription is expired" would have been suitable in this case. Say one were to extend and standardize on the POSIX error-numbers or some such, whatever it is should not depend strongly on the actual operating system underneath.
There are some other important differences that preclude computers ever being as easily handled as appliances like fridges or tape-recorders, for example that while computers are are generally programmable, whereas a fridge or a tape-recorder are single-purpose and once sold and installed they do not need "updates" to their internal structures; in stark contrast to a computer where the software within may require changes for continued operation.
There are also some fairly obvious physical reasons why mechanical equipment like cars have to be serviced regularly, as they are subject to wear and tear, but there are no obvious physical reasons why a running computer should have to degrade in performance with normal use. I think our expectations have become too low in what we expect here. Like you say about limping along with a less than healthy computer OS. People do it and they bitch and moan about it...yet they don't seem to demand a stop to much of the nonsense.
So while we will have to require bugfixes and updates to computers, these should be made easier to perform so that the "power-user" can concentrate on getting his job done, like his automotive equivalent, the taxi driver.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, despite the obvious comical aspects, I'd hate to see this sort of thing come into being, and I expect these people to agree with me on that.
--
(with thanks to subgeek)
I've got some old hp-ux ones here that are like that, and to some extent the information in them still applies for the most part; the difference tends to be that the same utilities under Linux have more parameters and options, but at least these books point in the right direction.
Then again, even then there is the underlying assumption that you know what you are doing. Like knowing why you'd want to access the terminfo database or whatever...
Consider some of the arguments seen so far:
1. IBM has put together something useful in AIX. That must be something belonging to SCO there, they couldn't have done it otherwise?
2. Autozone has ported their code from one variety of UNIX to another, and that process went rather smoothly. That couldn't have happened unless they used SCO IP. After all, this is the only stuff that works isn't it?
3. Groklaw must have been sponsored by IBM, nobody would be doing the kind of work one sees there for free?
4. The GPL is completely bogus. Noone ever does anything for free, There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and so forth...
Basically, in the SCO worldview, there is no room for competence, unpaid or otherwise. It is as if the adage is "Do not explain by competence what may adequately be explained by conspiracy".
It is like a twisted variation on the "do not explain by conspiracy what may be adequately explained by incompetence" -- which in the SCO worldview has become "do not explain by competence what may be adequately explained by conspiracy"
It is a sorry state of affairs if whenever someone does something efficiently, that by itself raises suspicions? That's close to libelous, even. It does however seem to be something to look for in the other actions as well.
73 de LB6ED
Although this one is made to Europeian standard, I am sure it would not be that hard to make a similar one for the US.
Actually, the closest equivalent to a black hole is the /dev/null -- everything sent there can never reappear.
Back at a school where I went, they had motor-driven blinds in some of the classrooms. The idea was good; rather than having to raise and lower curtains manually, there was two pushbuttons, one would start them going up and the other would start them going down.
When you pressed both at the same time, there was a fuse that blew somewhere. Basically a quick DoS-ing of any lecture that would depend on a slide-show in a dark room...
After this latest stunt, they've made them pretty much unsellable. What company in their right mind would want to buy this madhouse lot?
A little further examination reveals that this is the same as ls -C -b and so indeed you may find your files using dir. By the way, wasn't dir the command for listing files on VAX VMS back in the day as well?
Either way, while it does what a user might expect, this does absolutely nothing to inform the user about the different commands in the shell, as the parent post notes. In one way, this is the way things are supposed to work; the user is presumably wanting and expecting to list files and not read a tutorial at that point -- there is no real way for the machine and OS of knowing. Except that maybe a better replacement for dir would have been something like:
which at least would point the new user in the right direction without getting in the way of the experienced ones.Here I have the book "DCE/RPC over SMB" by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, (ISBN 1-57870-150-3) and in the preface to the Appendix A, which contains GPL source code for Samba, there is this stern warning:
So basically, this "tainting" problem can be equally bad in either direction.
sounds like these could apply to unix-family systems also, what with plausible commands such as:
cc -o MyDoom MyDoom.c
cc -o MyQuake MyQuake.c
Time to rein in the compilers? Somebody's gotta work hard to make the FORTRAN variant MyDoom.f
Now, I recall, the other day Bill Gates wowed to kill spam and worms, and now this? Looks like he has his work cut out for him there....
This has gotta be the Nth time I've seen reports that a worm has put an executable file into an area of the system that really should have been off-limits to anything not really needing to go there. So what does an E-mail program have to do of meaningful work in the OS code directories? Beats me...
I can offer a hint to Mr. Gates: Rework Windows so that it not only does not require Administrator rights to operate normally, but actually disallows certain operations when being Administrator as well. Such as running browser or e-mail programs.
Make sure no ordinary users can run processes that can write anything at all into the areas not set aside for that user, and the common temporary files area. I suspect there has to be some redesign, but I cannot see how this nonsense can be stopped otherwise.
Isn't this the poem called "The Raven"? Where the bird talking is a raven, not a crow. ("Quoth the Raven, Nevermore"). Even though both are birds of the Corvidae family...
Evidently it has been a while, but according to The Register there has been a dispute with an Australian maker of synthetic pillows and duvets. One of their products is also called "Microsoft".
The profit of GNU-licensed software does not come in the sales of the software itself but the sales of hardware and services.
The production of software may look like a losing venture, since the production costs of any software is not negligible. But once made, once that cost is sunk, as is the case of Linux, the reproduction costs are near zero, and the absence of anyone charging license fees for it makes it very popular for everyone who has machinery or services to sell. It is not a standard economic model but it appears to work well, as evidenced by companies like IBM and Red Hat.
Machine and screen both work still, I use them mostly for burning 68HC05s and PROMS since these attachments do not work properly on faster hardware. Only had to replace the hard disk (Seagate 225) once. And the battery is no longer working, so date and time need to be set on startup.
I am still not sure if that exonerates the NetBSD logo however. The analogy of american soldiers == devils is not likely to be one which is desirable to propagate.
(OT) Cool .sig :)
However, these angry troll/devil hybrids in sneakers trampling over what appears to be a lot of desktop computer hardware however, is evidently what is found in need of an update.
I can list a few likely reasons for changing this, off the top of my head:
One thing is that devils is a somewhat religious device, not found in all religions.
Then there is the aesthetics of this. The logo is just kinda ugly. These guys are not all that different in appearance from some football hooligans... and after all, there is a strong element of marketing here, whether we like it or not. Would you want to buy an operating systems from these guys?
Political correctness or accusations of same, marketing and aestetics aside, I would say it is just as much that the design of the monitors is becoming dated, since many of us now have relatively skinny LCDs, not fat CRT-based ones. If nothing else, the logo is becoming tecnically dated.
All these could, individually, be considered warrants for change.
Unless and until they can prove in a court of law that they really have these rights they claim, they cannot expect to be paid. On the contrary, they can expect to be investigated for fraud, an perhaps subject to criminal charges of extortion...
And trying to dodge the GPL does not count. Either the GPL is valid and must be obeyed, or it is invalid which makes everyone distributing Linux and other GPL'd software into copyright infringers. This latter seems somewhat less than likely...
Now, with the Mars day being slightly longer than the Earth day and there are watches to match this, how do they reckon the days there? Here on Earth there is the system of Julian Days, which serves well for Earth-bound day-counting and marking dates of interesting events. This, like the UTC clock, seems to be very Earth-centric.
So are anyone contemplating a Martian calendar, or some kind of linear numbering of Mars Days, so there will be a logical date for when the various Rovers and others have landed, and other interesting events?
For all I know, such a calendar may already exist, but all I have seen of it has been various science-fiction books.
So I would not be worried about this at all.
It must be noted that I had previously been used to the MS-DOS command-line, and got into the bad habit of copying files without specifying where to. This makes them go into the current directory on MS-DOS so no problem.
But now I was on Unix. And so I make a sibling directory, and go into this directory and issue the command:
but where the hey are the files? ah! yes, I'd forgotten to say where to put them... try again:Ok, now I got the ndss.c and ndss.h files. But... why doesn't this seem to compile? Hmm... but the previous one did? So I check... Nope!Whats happened here?! I take a look at the files, my ndss.c looks ok and ndss.h looks ... eh? wasn't this ndss.c that I just looked at? What's going on here?
Realization dawns. My ndss.h is lost and I got four copies of ndss.c. So, OK, I can recreate that knowing the function names and stuff from the C file... but damn if I ever issue a copy statement without specifying where to anymore!
Another fun tech mistake: Put the cache memory chips in a 486-era box backwards. These are 28-pin narrow DIP format, (61256s) and work one way and fail spectacularly the other way, but they fit either way.
Note that this cannot be construed as a general licence to crack any kind of encryption. If the DVDs had not been his to legally watch, he could have been found in violation.
The question of copyright infringement must have weighed heavy on the Okokrim prosecutor, but they could not charge him with that, much as you cannot charge someone fabricating a crowbar for breaking and entering.
Perhaps there is a market niche here for "computer mechanics"... but unless this job can pay enough obviously nobody will do it.
The computer-car analogy isn't perfect, though there are plenty of similarities. While both started out as fairly expensive and complicated pieces of equipment, the relative price of computers are going down whereas cars remain expensive. I am comparing fairly ancient cars to modern computers, recent cars compared to computers have different scope for DIY and different main failure modes, so expecting modern cars and future computers to be as similar as ancient cars and present-day computers I would not find realistic. They may have started out similarly but I don't think they will move in the same direction.
That is not to say that there are no lessons to be learned from 100 years or so of automobile history, for example that certain designs are found superior (in terms of safety, reliability, performance and so on) than others, and the "best" designs are allowed to prevail. A similar evolution in the face of a hostile environment will have to take place for computers as everyman's appliances. And I think that the "appliance" model is closer to the long-term goal than the "automobile" model.
Like all kinds of equipment, computers are subject to hardware failures, and the mode of failure tends to be more like what one sees in an appliance like a fridge or a TV set, that is, failure is rather sudden and catastrophic.
There is a difference here of course, that if your fridge dies, you still have access to the food inside, whereas if a hard disk dies, whatever was on it is most likely lost as well. And fridges are not subject to attacks or takeovers from crackers... so the appliance model isn't perfect either. Still, it does suggest a sensible direction forward -- the care and feeding of today's computers is made unnecessary complicated by such nonsense as EULAs, popup advertisements and general obscuration of operation. Case in point: the error message appearing when the anti-virus software needed renewal not even hinting that this was the reason. Some kind of standardized, publically known interface for diagnostics (this particular lesson learned from automobiles) would be the best way of handling this: when something goes wrong or stops working properly, enough information is generated from the event so that most anyone could be able to figure out what needs to be done. A standard code of "subscription is expired" would have been suitable in this case. Say one were to extend and standardize on the POSIX error-numbers or some such, whatever it is should not depend strongly on the actual operating system underneath.
There are some other important differences that preclude computers ever being as easily handled as appliances like fridges or tape-recorders, for example that while computers are are generally programmable, whereas a fridge or a tape-recorder are single-purpose and once sold and installed they do not need "updates" to their internal structures; in stark contrast to a computer where the software within may require changes for continued operation.
There are also some fairly obvious physical reasons why mechanical equipment like cars have to be serviced regularly, as they are subject to wear and tear, but there are no obvious physical reasons why a running computer should have to degrade in performance with normal use. I think our expectations have become too low in what we expect here. Like you say about limping along with a less than healthy computer OS. People do it and they bitch and moan about it...yet they don't seem to demand a stop to much of the nonsense.
So while we will have to require bugfixes and updates to computers, these should be made easier to perform so that the "power-user" can concentrate on getting his job done, like his automotive equivalent, the taxi driver.