" they're really giving the GPL some shark's teeth." The GPL always had those teeth - the shark just never had reason to show its pearly whites before.
Directly behind the GPL, as the fall-back defensive position fore the code, is the same USC-17 that SCO has been waving to scare people with. If SCO wants to do something about the copyright infringement they claim has happened, all they have to do is file a suit against the infringers in a federal court, citing USC-17 as the law that has been broken. We're waiting, with teeth freshly brushed and flossed and gleaming.
Glad we could help you finally achieve your lifelong dream.
Now... was this arranged by one of those wish-granting for terminallly ill persons foundations, or did you just sign the usual contract in blood. Old Scratch is ready to collect the usual payment.
Yeah, but that doesn't make headlines, attract viewers, OR scare the general public.
We used to take calculators into quarantine areas by sealing them in a plastic bag and discarding the bag along with our protective gear when we left. I could put my phone in a zip-lock, punch through it with the headset connector, and have most of the system inside protective gear. My headset has a "push to answer" doodad, so I don't have to even find the phone.
And the desk phones in the nurses stations are CESSPOOLS!
"While I welcome anything that lets our customers use the internet effectively, [they] filled an entire 18 gig partition full of web server logs (causing the server to crash on a weekend) and choked an email server with 40k some messages that could not be delivered, and they failed to properly brief the hosting customers about what would happen to their log analysis software when faced with 99% traffic from a small set of IPs. These things caused down-time, lost productivity and a damaged reputation."... "checking for the domain names on the TLD servers once per second, downloading various files from the site once per second, and sending email to themselves once per second."
I assume your TOS allows you to take any measures necessary to preserve the normal activities. Tell ALL your customers what you just told us. If I were your customer who had signed up for this "service", I would understand why they were firewalled. If I had NOT signed up for the service, I would be annoyed if you allowed this amazingly RUDE external company to crash servers and fill email spools that I was paying for.
A "Cease and Desist" letter, telling them that their product's abnormal actvity is interfering with your core business services, causing you support porblems, and is indistinguishable from a spammer crossed with a DDOS, should follow. I'd add a bill for the cost of supporting their malfunctioning: your customers may have agreed that the monitoring service was not responsible for anything, but you certainly did not.
Movie studios ship videos all over the planet to any media outlet that has a reviewer on staff... and the fastest way for the mailroom guy to impress his girlfriend is to have a private showing of the latest flicks.
In the DVD production process, there would be multiple copies of the movie, at the subtitling studio, at the dubbing studio, at the scene selection encoding studio, and at the assembly point where all the extra stuff meets up with the dubbing and subtitling.
Software for this exists, and is used for tracing origin of old manuscripts. A variant is used to detect plagiarism.
To run it, you load your known dated texts into the system, and start running the unknown... it comes back with matches of a size set by the user, arranged by date, usually oldest first. YOU can set the similarity requirements, and have it ignore white spaces, etc.
To run this on Linux and SCO, I would first run current Linux against all older "legal" external sources such as BSD, to identify code based on them. Yes, it might have been lifted straight from SCO, but if it has a possible legal source let's assume it is legal. Any unique sections remaining would be run against SCO's dated code, looking for matches where the Linux code was submitted AFTER the SCO code was written. This assumes they manage their code well enough to do this, and it might be necessary to take a third party's archive copy of the code to get a known date to work with. Some of this code would probably be the code they are suing IBM about - that's between them and IBM, and until that suit is settled, it's Linux code.
Then I would do the same with the SCO code, running it as the "unknown" against the known public examples, including the Linux source with its dates, looking
Last step: manually check all the matches for proper attribution of its ancestry... this could be very embarrassing to many people.
I was getting 200+ warnings a day that I had sent infected email, then came a wave of "we couldn't deliver your the virus-infected mail" warnings from the bad emails wiht my address forged into the headers... then my ISP started filtering all virus bounces and the problem was over for me.
The ISP, OTHO, uses a lot of CPU cycles filtering.
"ISTR there are some laws that say something to the effect of "using a blacklist in your hiring procedures is illegal"."
Yes, but only based on things like union affiliation. If I had come straight from a stint working with the sooper sekret info of a proven litigious company, it would be hard for me to find a job with their competitors until I had "cooled off" a bit by taking some work in a neutral company.
I use flatbed scanners for anything that is flat or nearly flat: chips, circuit boards, plates. The depth of field of most scanner optics is 1/2 inch or more, and high-resolution scanners can get so close to a chip that you can see the mold overflow where the legs join the body.
1. place item flat on glass
2. cover with opaque backing (white, black, grey, or even a picture if you want a fast background
3. test scan, and crop and color correct and muck about with image size using the scanner's preview software
4. scan to a TIF and finish photoediting (with the GIMP, of course)
If you have the cover at a slight slant, and with just enough clearance that you are not touching tiny items, you can get dropshadows behind them with no photoediting needed.
" If Infrasound can be produced by normal speakers/woofers, it could be used to add a significant chill factor in horror movies."
IIRC, subsonic frequencies also induce nausea and vomiting in a non-trivial percentage of the population. In a movie theatre seating 600 people, how many of them to you want to risk affecting?
This is a good idea to preced desctop migration shove. First they have to get the name in front of Joe Sixpack-per-game, then they can start teaching what it can do for Joe, his wife, the kids and the granny.
Good point. The last small business I worked for had off-site backups of all "critical" customer and corporate information.
It was hardly sophisticated, as it just backed up changed files to a server across town every couple of hours, but it's good neough that if the offices burn they can still work.
I was playing minute-person at a "disaster recovery" meeting (the first one) where high-level suits were figuring out what to do in case of a disaster at their multi-state bank. Their core assumptions were initially as follows:
They would all survive whatever it was. (I was looking out the window, and seeing jetliners coming in for a landing... a few feet too low and the meeting would have been over).
All critical equipment would survive in repairable condition.
Public services would not be affected over a wide area or for a long time.
Critical personnel would be available as needed, as would the transportation to get them there.
The disaster plan only needed to be distributed to managers, who would instruct people what to do to recover.
That was on a Monday. The next Monday was the Northridge quake.
One critical person woke up with his armoir on top of him, and a 40-foot chasm between him and the freeway.
One of their buildings was so badly damaged that they were banned from entering... and there was mission-critical info on those desktop PCs. Had it not been a holiday, the casualty toll would have been horrendous.
The building with their backups was on the same power grid as the one with no power and the generators could only power the computers, not the AC they also needed.
None of the buildings had food or water for the staff who had to sleep over, nor did they have working toilets or even cots to nap on.
One of the local competitors was back in business Tuesday morning, because their disaster plan worked. They rolled up the trailers, swapped some cables and were going again.
They came into the next meeting a couple of weeks after the quake with a whole new perspective on disaster planning and training:
Anyone who survives knows what the disaster plan is and copies of it are all over the place.
Critical equipment is redundant and "offsite" backups are out of the quake zone.
They have generators and fuel enough to last a couple of weeks for the critical equipment and it's support, survival supplies for the critical staff. This is rotated regularly to keep it form going stale.
"an extraordinary number of workers were employed in the older facilities as the computer industry grew with breathtaking speed to become one of the dominant forces in American life in the last half of the 20th century."
At that time, the long-term dangers of those chemicals were not appreciated. However, can they clearly pin it on the IBM process lines? How about the Reynold's plant, auto body shops, plating factories, and the rest fo the crap that was being dumped into the Silicon Valley air, dirt and water?
" Does right of first sale apply to other data "property?" For instance, could I sell my copy of an OS (*coughWinXPcough*) that came with hardware I purchased? Or have I simply bought a non-transferable license?"
A recent ruling said YES. Adobe lost to some "unbundlers" who bought software at clearance and were selling it. The court said the resellers had handed over cash, and were charged sales task on it.. it looked like a purchase, acted like a purchase, and nowhere on the receipt was the words "lease" or license".
It's called the "Doctrine of first Sale", and it has a Supreme Court decision from the early 1900s, and basically says the original seller has no say about what the buyer does with a legally acquired copy (aside from being able to prohibit copying it). Especially, they can't keep you from reselling it.
IBM Subpoenas Canopy and Yarro Filed: 08/28/03
Entered: 08/29/03
Return of service executed
Docket Text: Return of service executed re: Subpoena served on Canopy Group c/o Ralph Yanno on 8/26/03
If they can prove that SCO was not an independent corporation, it's all over for Big Brother and his holding company. This is not discovery - that would have been against SCO.
"Serious tech writers don't use Office anyway"... yes, we might, especially if the documents have to be produced and maintained by non-tech writers later.
I make sure I build very vanilla documents in these cases. And I usually manage to get the GIMP and OO installed as "my tools", and it's getting easier to get them to spread from the inoculation site to the rest of the company.
"I think Star Office and Open Office might actually beat MS Office * in that scoring methodology."
I haven't used Office2003, but based on a sampling of documents in Office 97 through Office 2000... you are soooooo right. OO and StarOffice have no more compatibility problems with the various word versions than the various M$word versions do with each other.
Ask any tech writer about the great table fiasco between Office 95 (Word 6) and '97... formatting went south. Or the subtle differences in the way fonts, styles and margins are handled between 97 and 2000... so that ordinary files suddenly morph into wierd things.
"Most of the problems are with word document are with imbedded graphics. Sometimes they show up in funny places. Sometimes not at all."
If they don't show up at all, the author made a link to the graphic, didn't actually embed it. It's still on their hard drive. If they show up in funny places, they left it as a "floating" embedded graphic, and the spacing shifted enough (change of fonts, margins, etc) to make it move.
To nail a graphic into place in any word processor, don't link it, and make sure the "Float over text" box is unchecked. That tells the software to treat the picture like a character, so it stays with the text before and after it, can be centered, and can have spacing applied to it.
The worst graphics of all are the ones drawn in Word, because they fall apart id edited. I delete them and redo them in a real graphics package (OO Draw, usually, export as WMF, import into Word).
Slashdot Mirror
Directly behind the GPL, as the fall-back defensive position fore the code, is the same USC-17 that SCO has been waving to scare people with. If SCO wants to do something about the copyright infringement they claim has happened, all they have to do is file a suit against the infringers in a federal court, citing USC-17 as the law that has been broken. We're waiting, with teeth freshly brushed and flossed and gleaming.
Now ... was this arranged by one of those wish-granting for terminallly ill persons foundations, or did you just sign the usual contract in blood. Old Scratch is ready to collect the usual payment.
We used to take calculators into quarantine areas by sealing them in a plastic bag and discarding the bag along with our protective gear when we left. I could put my phone in a zip-lock, punch through it with the headset connector, and have most of the system inside protective gear. My headset has a "push to answer" doodad, so I don't have to even find the phone.
And the desk phones in the nurses stations are CESSPOOLS!
I assume your TOS allows you to take any measures necessary to preserve the normal activities. Tell ALL your customers what you just told us. If I were your customer who had signed up for this "service", I would understand why they were firewalled. If I had NOT signed up for the service, I would be annoyed if you allowed this amazingly RUDE external company to crash servers and fill email spools that I was paying for.
A "Cease and Desist" letter, telling them that their product's abnormal actvity is interfering with your core business services, causing you support porblems, and is indistinguishable from a spammer crossed with a DDOS, should follow. I'd add a bill for the cost of supporting their malfunctioning: your customers may have agreed that the monitoring service was not responsible for anything, but you certainly did not.
In the DVD production process, there would be multiple copies of the movie, at the subtitling studio, at the dubbing studio, at the scene selection encoding studio, and at the assembly point where all the extra stuff meets up with the dubbing and subtitling.
To run it, you load your known dated texts into the system, and start running the unknown ... it comes back with matches of a size set by the user, arranged by date, usually oldest first. YOU can set the similarity requirements, and have it ignore white spaces, etc.
To run this on Linux and SCO, I would first run current Linux against all older "legal" external sources such as BSD, to identify code based on them. Yes, it might have been lifted straight from SCO, but if it has a possible legal source let's assume it is legal. Any unique sections remaining would be run against SCO's dated code, looking for matches where the Linux code was submitted AFTER the SCO code was written. This assumes they manage their code well enough to do this, and it might be necessary to take a third party's archive copy of the code to get a known date to work with. Some of this code would probably be the code they are suing IBM about - that's between them and IBM, and until that suit is settled, it's Linux code.
Then I would do the same with the SCO code, running it as the "unknown" against the known public examples, including the Linux source with its dates, looking
Last step: manually check all the matches for proper attribution of its ancestry ... this could be very embarrassing to many people.
The ISP, OTHO, uses a lot of CPU cycles filtering.
Yes, but only based on things like union affiliation. If I had come straight from a stint working with the sooper sekret info of a proven litigious company, it would be hard for me to find a job with their competitors until I had "cooled off" a bit by taking some work in a neutral company.
bate = to suspend
bated breath = holding one's breath in anticipation
baited breath = you've been eating anchovy pizza again
1. place item flat on glass
2. cover with opaque backing (white, black, grey, or even a picture if you want a fast background
3. test scan, and crop and color correct and muck about with image size using the scanner's preview software
4. scan to a TIF and finish photoediting (with the GIMP, of course)
If you have the cover at a slight slant, and with just enough clearance that you are not touching tiny items, you can get dropshadows behind them with no photoediting needed.
IIRC, subsonic frequencies also induce nausea and vomiting in a non-trivial percentage of the population. In a movie theatre seating 600 people, how many of them to you want to risk affecting?
Interesting bacteria.
Microsoft has no "peers" ... it systematically kills them off before they can become a threat, and now wants protection.
This is a good idea to preced desctop migration shove. First they have to get the name in front of Joe Sixpack-per-game, then they can start teaching what it can do for Joe, his wife, the kids and the granny.
It was hardly sophisticated, as it just backed up changed files to a server across town every couple of hours, but it's good neough that if the offices burn they can still work.
That was on a Monday. The next Monday was the Northridge quake.
They came into the next meeting a couple of weeks after the quake with a whole new perspective on disaster planning and training:
At that time, the long-term dangers of those chemicals were not appreciated. However, can they clearly pin it on the IBM process lines? How about the Reynold's plant, auto body shops, plating factories, and the rest fo the crap that was being dumped into the Silicon Valley air, dirt and water?
A recent ruling said YES. Adobe lost to some "unbundlers" who bought software at clearance and were selling it. The court said the resellers had handed over cash, and were charged sales task on it .. it looked like a purchase, acted like a purchase, and nowhere on the receipt was the words "lease" or license".
It's called the "Doctrine of first Sale", and it has a Supreme Court decision from the early 1900s, and basically says the original seller has no say about what the buyer does with a legally acquired copy (aside from being able to prohibit copying it). Especially, they can't keep you from reselling it.
I apologize - I didn't copy the attribution, although I normally do.
SCO's 10Q is due Sep 15.
SCO's reply to IBM is due Sep 25.
This could be an interesting month.
Filed: 08/28/03
Entered: 08/29/03
Return of service executed
Docket Text: Return of service executed re: Subpoena served on Canopy Group c/o Ralph Yanno on 8/26/03
If they can prove that SCO was not an independent corporation, it's all over for Big Brother and his holding company. This is not discovery - that would have been against SCO.
I make sure I build very vanilla documents in these cases. And I usually manage to get the GIMP and OO installed as "my tools", and it's getting easier to get them to spread from the inoculation site to the rest of the company.
I haven't used Office2003, but based on a sampling of documents in Office 97 through Office 2000 ... you are soooooo right. OO and StarOffice have no more compatibility problems with the various word versions than the various M$word versions do with each other.
Ask any tech writer about the great table fiasco between Office 95 (Word 6) and '97 ... formatting went south. Or the subtle differences in the way fonts, styles and margins are handled between 97 and 2000 ... so that ordinary files suddenly morph into wierd things.
If they don't show up at all, the author made a link to the graphic, didn't actually embed it. It's still on their hard drive. If they show up in funny places, they left it as a "floating" embedded graphic, and the spacing shifted enough (change of fonts, margins, etc) to make it move.
To nail a graphic into place in any word processor, don't link it, and make sure the "Float over text" box is unchecked. That tells the software to treat the picture like a character, so it stays with the text before and after it, can be centered, and can have spacing applied to it.
The worst graphics of all are the ones drawn in Word, because they fall apart id edited. I delete them and redo them in a real graphics package (OO Draw, usually, export as WMF, import into Word).