Somehow I'm a little less than impressed. Not necessarily with the workmanship, mind you, but with the concept design and ultimate implementation.
Someone in the past modified a Color Classic to have a G3 in it, and maintained the look and feel of the original Classic, complete with color 512x384 display. I think that they made some mods to the video display circuitry so it could do 640x480, but the original tube was used. All of the components fit inside of the case.
If they were dead-set on converting that Mac to a PC platform, they could have use a Mini-ITX motherboard and mounted it in the bottom, like the shuttle PCs. They could have also used an undersized power supply like HP, eMachines, and shuttle PCs used, so that it would also fit nicely. They would have had to find someone to design and build the necessary hardware to run the display that was there, or they could have bought a Fujitsu 8" colour monitor that are commonly used at cash register systems. That would have allowed them to keep the monitor inside.
At least they got practice with a Dremel. Hopefully they'll come up with something a little less rough next time.
"If they choose the last option and SCO wins, they can be penalized even more for not paying 'when required.'"
Are you certain about that? Remember, if you have a grievance with a utility company and you file your complaint with both them and with the local regulatory agency, you don't continue to accrue damages against yourself until the situation is resolved through mediation or through court order. Since SCO cannot prove that they own the code, they cannot claim damages. I would speculate that a court would also agree that if somehow it were to freeze over in hell and SCO were to defeat Novell and IBM in court, from the date that SCO proved their case they could start charging punitive damages along with licenses, but not until then.
"They already know this, parts of BSD are in SCO Unix. A trial was already held before SCO owned the rights. BSD won because AT&T and Bell Labs mishandled the copy right."
And if SCO's real property had ended up in Linux by mistake, their divulging, even if only somewhat secretly to Linus Torvalds, would have resulted in that stuff being rewritten along with the other changes going into 2.5/2.6. Instead, SCO sues IBM, threatens Linux users, and starts going around trying to punt the heads off AT&T derived UNIces, like SGI and SUN, even without fully understanding the nature of the legal history and contracts that give them any kind of authority over AT&T's initial creation. Do you think that this sounds like a sane company?
How large and widespread is FreeBSD's legal department? How about NetBSD, OpenBSD, or any other projects that are forked from the original Berkeley-owned-and-maintained version of the OS? How long would these projects maintain their heads above water if SCO decided to actively take them to court? I know that BSD has had time to mature for awhile, and that it has some legal victories in its past, but how long do you think that some of these projects could stand up in court to bloodthirsty lawyers? If SCO had taken on a smaller vendor first, like SGI over IRIX, or over any other vendor who could have possibly licensed AT&T-derived code into BSD License rather than GPL, how well do you think BSD could stand up against that?
IBM is a HUGE company. They are possibly the largest single target that SCO could have taken on, and ironically SCO's choice for a target is a favour to the rest of us. If SCO had been smart and had stopped distributing Linux as soon as they discovered GPL violations, and after a fair waiting period started suing other Linux companies over their continued distribution of incorrectly-applied code, SCO could have done a lot more damage, and worse yet, they might actually have had a legitimate complaint. But to their own demise, they did exactly the wrong things, which were to piss off Big Blue, to continue to deploy that which they themselves said was illegal, to question the very nature of copyright and a license that only grants them permission if they agree to it, and to threaten all users of the product themselves.
"I cant wait to see how long I have to stand in line at the DMV next time."
Well, from my experiences, things got worse when Arizona's MVD left OS/2 with a text interface to go to Windows with a GUI interface for the DMV tellers. Their solution has been to build more DMV offices and hire more workers rather than to get rid of those inefficient PCs and switch to something centralized like a terminal/server model with a well-designed interface.
well, the Kernel is one tree. It isn't particularly forked. It's maintained by one person. Distributions use glibc generally, and the GNU tools for all of the classic utilities. Almost all use the same init structure (Slackware being the weirdo), and other than a few file location differences and package management systems, the Linux distributions have so much in common that it really shouldn't matter to the user at all.
The only reason that I use Debian primarily (and Slackware on a couple of machines) is because of the cost and the availability of updates. Debian's package management system is absolutely beautiful when set up properly. I've used SuSE and RedHat, and while I don't like administering them quite as much as Debian (due to the limitations of RPM), as a user I could care less which distro it is, since almost all precompiled binaries work on all distributions of the same vintage, and all source distributed programs compile without difficulty on the same rough vintage of distribution.
So, with the bulk of the userland tools being the same, the kernels being the same, and the back-end binary support being the same, I'd say that SuSE/Debian/RedHat/Gentoo/Slackware have a lot more in common than FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/BSDI, to the point that the push that Linux has enjoyed has been easy with this commonality, much moreso than BSD, and that the Kernel and GNU tools are primarily responsible for this. One development path for each of these tools.
"BSD is designed. Linux is grown. Perhaps that's the only succinct way to describe it, and possibly the most correct."
I'm wondering what he's smoking. Of course, if he's in Berkeley maybe he's using more LSD than BSD...
If the SCO lawsuit has done anything positive, it has caused a lot of research into the history of UNIX and its derivatives. And based on the continuous ripoffs between Berkeley and AT&T, BSD definitely didn't start out with a plan. Linux hasn't forked into eight or nine individual large projects, and is still spearheaded by its original creator, who ultimately decides what goes where or delegates the decisions. True he takes input from more and more people, and probably has less direct control than he used to, but the core of what is wanted for the next stable series is usually pretty clear once things are played with.
and other than Slackware, all of the distributions seem to be pretty tight too, not just falling completely where things end up.
As they've said repeatedly...
on
BSD For Linux Users
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...Linux isn't UNIX. It's an independent project, despite what SCO thinks.
I wonder how funny it would be to tell SCO that BSD is a direct derivative work from AT&T UNIX...
"On Tuesday, McBride said that lack of indemnification proved that companies knew there was something wrong with Linux. On Wednesday, he said that indemnification programs proved that companies knew there was something wrong with Linux."
Hmmm... I've always assumed that indemnification was something of a warranty of sorts. Basically the company distributing the product stands behind what they've sold to the customer, rather than pansying it out to the user to deal with. They can strongly and confidently make their statements of indemnification because there won't be any need to use it.
Of course, Hyundai has a 100,000 mile warranty on their cars, and a friend of mine's Tiburon has been in the shop about ten times in two years, so it might not apply like a warranty perfectly...
Wow, that's a lot of acronyms. I've seen more on one page, of course, but not in two sentences.
Let me try to break this down...
For your information, there's also a windows Network Filesystem server that International Business Machines uses in its TotalStorage Network Attached Storage line.
It's REALLY, REALLY nice to be able to have a single network attached storage that serves windows and Network Filesystem shares, and interfaces with the International Business MachinesDigital Linear Tape Libraries.
"Are they (MS) allowed to screw everybody just because they are the richest company in the world?"
They are quite far from being the richest company in the world. They simply have a lot of liquid assets, and sit in a position that gets them a lot of attention. GM for a while was considered the largest company in the world, but with oil company mergers (Exxon-Mobile anyone?), car company mergers (DaimlerChrysler, combining Daimler, Mercedes Benz, Chrysler, and Mitsubishi Motors), there are a lot of other large, wealthy companies. Microsoft has a lot of money, but if their customer-base as it stands dries up, they don't have a lot of fixed assets.
"I'm all for the taking down of the major bootleggers, but this is utterly criminal. These people have zero authority to enforce any laws, anywhere. It's a PR blitz that will hopefully backfire."
It's a shame that weapons laws in higher-density cities aren't like those in Arizona, where anyone can carry openly, and people can carry concealed with a fairly easy to acquire permit. I could just see a bunch of thugs in RIAA jackets walking up to a street vendor, start harassing him, only to watch the vendor pull out a couple of 9mm's and blow them all away...
Remember, the burden of proof of copyright violation is supposed to be on the copyright holder, and must be proved before a court of law. A bunch of dudes walking up aren't technically allowed to force anything more than a served subpoena.
Hope they're in a DMZ, because I know of a few remote roots and enough remote locals (combined with local roots) that are younger than 900 days;-)
For the most part, they are. It's a private network. Stuff is chroot jailed, and nothing non-essential is installed.
Oh, and Mac OS 9 servers? I pity you. Deeply. How's your OSX migration strategy look?
Until the lameass software that is in use that requires MacOS 9 as a server is gone or updated, we'll be using MacOS 9 servers. And the company that writes the software has seemingly no intention of bothering to update it.
And, from what I've seen in various offices, that's pretty much the argument. And guess what? Most often, I've heard "Well, let's just put a Linux box in there, and maybe replace it later when we have to."
"Replace is later" often becomes "never" after a few months anyway.
We have some linux boxes as samba servers that have 900+ day uptimes. Pretty good for computers that cost about $800 when new, sit in poorly ventilated custodial closets, and have brooms and mopbuckets sitting on them. By contrast, our MacOS 9.2.2 servers have to be reset monthly, and we haven't even bothered with running Microsoft platforms, due to the unreliability of the OS.
Currently there really isn't much growth in the technical sector, since management has figured out that it can send jobs to countries that pay Bachelors' trained people half of what they make, or less, than in the U.S. Granted, there are new jobs that come up, but there are so many people looking to fill them that unless you're really lucky, you're not going to end up with that nice job with longevity and stability.
I started studying Computer Systems Engineering. After seeing what my code-monkey friends have been going through for the last two or three years, I decided not to go with that. I'm going to go back and finish college in something else. I'm not sure what, just yet, but I'll use my computer knowledge as an asset to help further myself in another career, not as a career in itself. You're either going to do computer service for a living, which can make money, but not a lot and is mindnumbingly boring, or you're going to be feast-or-famine as long as technology remains the commodity that it has shown to be. Learn how to do something else, that knowing computers benefits you in, and keep your skills to help you.
Not only that, but Open Source/Linux tends to state specifically what the problem is, where to see it, and what the exact fix as code is, versus just relying on some international megacorporation to release a binary-only patch that one has to trust doesn't contain any more report-ware or additional bugs.
Even with Linux's problems, I'll take it any day over MS OSes. At least Linux developers are honest about their mistakes.
So, was the Hurd mentioned as the new GNU kernel that Stallman still wants to use? I mean, Linux is supposed to be replaced by the Hurd, any day now...
Shurtis! We got all kinds of barbeque sauce down here! Mesquite, honeybarbeque, spicy jalapeno, so why not bukkake too? Have to go check the store shelves for that one though. Haven't tried it personally...
"Both your cell phone battery and your cordless phone battery are, presumably, removable. Now, maybe Apple made a mistake in not making their battery removable (but it sure makes the unit smaller), but regardless, there is a lot more effort involved in replacing the battery for the iPods."
Not from the appearance that I saw of the inside from that website that had a breakdown of the unit. It looks to me like if they had wanted to, they could have made the hard disk drive easily removable, and the battery along the same lines. Basically each is the size of a PCMCIA card (the hard drive actually is a PCMCIA card), and if they had designed the battery to slide out of the top or somesuch it would still be structurally sound (one advantage of the iPod over competitors), and would still be serviceable. Unfortunately they designed ports to be on the top and on the bottom, which restricted that capability.
I'd personally just like to see better compactflash devices, either hard drives or memory, so that any device can work with enough space. CF is nice and durable, yet small enough to not be a hassle.
We had a relatively expensive section of state highway in the Phoenix area, when the Squaw Peak Parkway carved through a rather expensive part of town. They made the hole in the ground almost straight down with vertical walls. To my knowledge, at the time it was completed it was one of the most expensive sections of freeway ever built, between the costs to condemn and claim right-of-way, the costs to excavate through bedrock down below, and the costs to make this all happen with buildings a few feet from the hole. And this was all state and city funding, as it wasn't an Interstate or a Federal highway.
At this point I'm sure that Central Artery has far, FAR overrun Phoenix's project.
I use a local ISP called FastQ Communications. They do DSL and Dialup. Their attitude is, "You're paying for the bandwidth, use it." Of course, the fact that they have static IPs available cheap and only block Windows NetBIOS and Sun RPC (for security), allow registering of DNS servers, running of services like FTP, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, and delegate reverse resolves if you want to go on top of it makes them rock. Being inexpensive too is a nice perk...
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I'm a little less than impressed. Not necessarily with the workmanship, mind you, but with the concept design and ultimate implementation.
Someone in the past modified a Color Classic to have a G3 in it, and maintained the look and feel of the original Classic, complete with color 512x384 display. I think that they made some mods to the video display circuitry so it could do 640x480, but the original tube was used. All of the components fit inside of the case.
If they were dead-set on converting that Mac to a PC platform, they could have use a Mini-ITX motherboard and mounted it in the bottom, like the shuttle PCs. They could have also used an undersized power supply like HP, eMachines, and shuttle PCs used, so that it would also fit nicely. They would have had to find someone to design and build the necessary hardware to run the display that was there, or they could have bought a Fujitsu 8" colour monitor that are commonly used at cash register systems. That would have allowed them to keep the monitor inside.
At least they got practice with a Dremel. Hopefully they'll come up with something a little less rough next time.
"If they choose the last option and SCO wins, they can be penalized even more for not paying 'when required.'"
Are you certain about that? Remember, if you have a grievance with a utility company and you file your complaint with both them and with the local regulatory agency, you don't continue to accrue damages against yourself until the situation is resolved through mediation or through court order. Since SCO cannot prove that they own the code, they cannot claim damages. I would speculate that a court would also agree that if somehow it were to freeze over in hell and SCO were to defeat Novell and IBM in court, from the date that SCO proved their case they could start charging punitive damages along with licenses, but not until then.
"They already know this, parts of BSD are in SCO Unix. A trial was already held before SCO owned the rights. BSD won because AT&T and Bell Labs mishandled the copy right."
And if SCO's real property had ended up in Linux by mistake, their divulging, even if only somewhat secretly to Linus Torvalds, would have resulted in that stuff being rewritten along with the other changes going into 2.5/2.6. Instead, SCO sues IBM, threatens Linux users, and starts going around trying to punt the heads off AT&T derived UNIces, like SGI and SUN, even without fully understanding the nature of the legal history and contracts that give them any kind of authority over AT&T's initial creation. Do you think that this sounds like a sane company?
How large and widespread is FreeBSD's legal department? How about NetBSD, OpenBSD, or any other projects that are forked from the original Berkeley-owned-and-maintained version of the OS? How long would these projects maintain their heads above water if SCO decided to actively take them to court? I know that BSD has had time to mature for awhile, and that it has some legal victories in its past, but how long do you think that some of these projects could stand up in court to bloodthirsty lawyers? If SCO had taken on a smaller vendor first, like SGI over IRIX, or over any other vendor who could have possibly licensed AT&T-derived code into BSD License rather than GPL, how well do you think BSD could stand up against that?
IBM is a HUGE company. They are possibly the largest single target that SCO could have taken on, and ironically SCO's choice for a target is a favour to the rest of us. If SCO had been smart and had stopped distributing Linux as soon as they discovered GPL violations, and after a fair waiting period started suing other Linux companies over their continued distribution of incorrectly-applied code, SCO could have done a lot more damage, and worse yet, they might actually have had a legitimate complaint. But to their own demise, they did exactly the wrong things, which were to piss off Big Blue, to continue to deploy that which they themselves said was illegal, to question the very nature of copyright and a license that only grants them permission if they agree to it, and to threaten all users of the product themselves.
</rant>
"I cant wait to see how long I have to stand in line at the DMV next time."
Well, from my experiences, things got worse when Arizona's MVD left OS/2 with a text interface to go to Windows with a GUI interface for the DMV tellers. Their solution has been to build more DMV offices and hire more workers rather than to get rid of those inefficient PCs and switch to something centralized like a terminal/server model with a well-designed interface.
well, the Kernel is one tree. It isn't particularly forked. It's maintained by one person. Distributions use glibc generally, and the GNU tools for all of the classic utilities. Almost all use the same init structure (Slackware being the weirdo), and other than a few file location differences and package management systems, the Linux distributions have so much in common that it really shouldn't matter to the user at all.
The only reason that I use Debian primarily (and Slackware on a couple of machines) is because of the cost and the availability of updates. Debian's package management system is absolutely beautiful when set up properly. I've used SuSE and RedHat, and while I don't like administering them quite as much as Debian (due to the limitations of RPM), as a user I could care less which distro it is, since almost all precompiled binaries work on all distributions of the same vintage, and all source distributed programs compile without difficulty on the same rough vintage of distribution.
So, with the bulk of the userland tools being the same, the kernels being the same, and the back-end binary support being the same, I'd say that SuSE/Debian/RedHat/Gentoo/Slackware have a lot more in common than FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/BSDI, to the point that the push that Linux has enjoyed has been easy with this commonality, much moreso than BSD, and that the Kernel and GNU tools are primarily responsible for this. One development path for each of these tools.
"BSD is designed. Linux is grown. Perhaps that's the only succinct way to describe it, and possibly the most correct."
I'm wondering what he's smoking. Of course, if he's in Berkeley maybe he's using more LSD than BSD...
If the SCO lawsuit has done anything positive, it has caused a lot of research into the history of UNIX and its derivatives. And based on the continuous ripoffs between Berkeley and AT&T, BSD definitely didn't start out with a plan. Linux hasn't forked into eight or nine individual large projects, and is still spearheaded by its original creator, who ultimately decides what goes where or delegates the decisions. True he takes input from more and more people, and probably has less direct control than he used to, but the core of what is wanted for the next stable series is usually pretty clear once things are played with.
and other than Slackware, all of the distributions seem to be pretty tight too, not just falling completely where things end up.
...Linux isn't UNIX. It's an independent project, despite what SCO thinks.
I wonder how funny it would be to tell SCO that BSD is a direct derivative work from AT&T UNIX...
four 250GB hard disk drives and a controller in a case for $1200... What will they think of next?
"On Tuesday, McBride said that lack of indemnification proved that companies knew there was something wrong with Linux. On Wednesday, he said that indemnification programs proved that companies knew there was something wrong with Linux."
Hmmm... I've always assumed that indemnification was something of a warranty of sorts. Basically the company distributing the product stands behind what they've sold to the customer, rather than pansying it out to the user to deal with. They can strongly and confidently make their statements of indemnification because there won't be any need to use it.
Of course, Hyundai has a 100,000 mile warranty on their cars, and a friend of mine's Tiburon has been in the shop about ten times in two years, so it might not apply like a warranty perfectly...
Wow, that's a lot of acronyms. I've seen more on one page, of course, but not in two sentences.
Let me try to break this down...
For your information, there's also a windows Network Filesystem server that International Business Machines uses in its TotalStorage Network Attached Storage line.
It's REALLY, REALLY nice to be able to have a single network attached storage that serves windows and Network Filesystem shares, and interfaces with the International Business Machines Digital Linear Tape Libraries.
Okay, I'm done now.
"Are they (MS) allowed to screw everybody just because they are the richest company in the world?"
They are quite far from being the richest company in the world. They simply have a lot of liquid assets, and sit in a position that gets them a lot of attention. GM for a while was considered the largest company in the world, but with oil company mergers (Exxon-Mobile anyone?), car company mergers (DaimlerChrysler, combining Daimler, Mercedes Benz, Chrysler, and Mitsubishi Motors), there are a lot of other large, wealthy companies. Microsoft has a lot of money, but if their customer-base as it stands dries up, they don't have a lot of fixed assets.
Good ol' Joe Arpaio wouldn't bat an eyelash if the dead body of a known thief was collected by the coroner's office though.
"I'm all for the taking down of the major bootleggers, but this is utterly criminal. These people have zero authority to enforce any laws, anywhere. It's a PR blitz that will hopefully backfire."
It's a shame that weapons laws in higher-density cities aren't like those in Arizona, where anyone can carry openly, and people can carry concealed with a fairly easy to acquire permit. I could just see a bunch of thugs in RIAA jackets walking up to a street vendor, start harassing him, only to watch the vendor pull out a couple of 9mm's and blow them all away...
Remember, the burden of proof of copyright violation is supposed to be on the copyright holder, and must be proved before a court of law. A bunch of dudes walking up aren't technically allowed to force anything more than a served subpoena.
Well, it's good to know that not only crackers or script kiddies are good at taking down Verisign's services, that their own staff is good at it too.
So does this explain where the SCO evidence went?
Hope they're in a DMZ, because I know of a few remote roots and enough remote locals (combined with local roots) that are younger than 900 days ;-)
For the most part, they are. It's a private network. Stuff is chroot jailed, and nothing non-essential is installed.
Oh, and Mac OS 9 servers? I pity you. Deeply. How's your OSX migration strategy look?
Until the lameass software that is in use that requires MacOS 9 as a server is gone or updated, we'll be using MacOS 9 servers. And the company that writes the software has seemingly no intention of bothering to update it.
And, from what I've seen in various offices, that's pretty much the argument. And guess what? Most often, I've heard "Well, let's just put a Linux box in there, and maybe replace it later when we have to."
"Replace is later" often becomes "never" after a few months anyway.
We have some linux boxes as samba servers that have 900+ day uptimes. Pretty good for computers that cost about $800 when new, sit in poorly ventilated custodial closets, and have brooms and mopbuckets sitting on them. By contrast, our MacOS 9.2.2 servers have to be reset monthly, and we haven't even bothered with running Microsoft platforms, due to the unreliability of the OS.
Currently there really isn't much growth in the technical sector, since management has figured out that it can send jobs to countries that pay Bachelors' trained people half of what they make, or less, than in the U.S. Granted, there are new jobs that come up, but there are so many people looking to fill them that unless you're really lucky, you're not going to end up with that nice job with longevity and stability.
I started studying Computer Systems Engineering. After seeing what my code-monkey friends have been going through for the last two or three years, I decided not to go with that. I'm going to go back and finish college in something else. I'm not sure what, just yet, but I'll use my computer knowledge as an asset to help further myself in another career, not as a career in itself. You're either going to do computer service for a living, which can make money, but not a lot and is mindnumbingly boring, or you're going to be feast-or-famine as long as technology remains the commodity that it has shown to be. Learn how to do something else, that knowing computers benefits you in, and keep your skills to help you.
Not only that, but Open Source/Linux tends to state specifically what the problem is, where to see it, and what the exact fix as code is, versus just relying on some international megacorporation to release a binary-only patch that one has to trust doesn't contain any more report-ware or additional bugs.
Even with Linux's problems, I'll take it any day over MS OSes. At least Linux developers are honest about their mistakes.
So, was the Hurd mentioned as the new GNU kernel that Stallman still wants to use? I mean, Linux is supposed to be replaced by the Hurd, any day now...
"I didn't know Bukkake was a Texan thing."
Shurtis! We got all kinds of barbeque sauce down here! Mesquite, honeybarbeque, spicy jalapeno, so why not bukkake too? Have to go check the store shelves for that one though. Haven't tried it personally...
We durn got all our culture right down here in Texas! We got more culture than a Petri dish!
"Both your cell phone battery and your cordless phone battery are, presumably, removable. Now, maybe Apple made a mistake in not making their battery removable (but it sure makes the unit smaller), but regardless, there is a lot more effort involved in replacing the battery for the iPods."
Not from the appearance that I saw of the inside from that website that had a breakdown of the unit. It looks to me like if they had wanted to, they could have made the hard disk drive easily removable, and the battery along the same lines. Basically each is the size of a PCMCIA card (the hard drive actually is a PCMCIA card), and if they had designed the battery to slide out of the top or somesuch it would still be structurally sound (one advantage of the iPod over competitors), and would still be serviceable. Unfortunately they designed ports to be on the top and on the bottom, which restricted that capability.
I'd personally just like to see better compactflash devices, either hard drives or memory, so that any device can work with enough space. CF is nice and durable, yet small enough to not be a hassle.
We had a relatively expensive section of state highway in the Phoenix area, when the Squaw Peak Parkway carved through a rather expensive part of town. They made the hole in the ground almost straight down with vertical walls. To my knowledge, at the time it was completed it was one of the most expensive sections of freeway ever built, between the costs to condemn and claim right-of-way, the costs to excavate through bedrock down below, and the costs to make this all happen with buildings a few feet from the hole. And this was all state and city funding, as it wasn't an Interstate or a Federal highway. At this point I'm sure that Central Artery has far, FAR overrun Phoenix's project.
I use a local ISP called FastQ Communications. They do DSL and Dialup. Their attitude is, "You're paying for the bandwidth, use it." Of course, the fact that they have static IPs available cheap and only block Windows NetBIOS and Sun RPC (for security), allow registering of DNS servers, running of services like FTP, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, and delegate reverse resolves if you want to go on top of it makes them rock. Being inexpensive too is a nice perk...