It really sucks for Microsoft and you and me that IBM didn't whack Compaq for selling PC's with a reverse-engineered (illegal under the DMCA)and probably partially copied BIOS. Of course IBM was in the middle of this messy legal battle over being a monopoly, so they were distracted.
If they had, the hardware would never have been commoditized and Microsoft would never have been criticized for Windows being an excessive portion of the price of a new PC.
Hmmm... so why isn't the CIT group part of this settlement? CIT bought Newcourt Credit Group and Newcourt Credit Group bought AT&T Capital Leasing. That was the actual part of the AT&T devolution that handled the phone leases.
I guess it is true that if you change your name enough, you can fool the lawyers. How many stories on Enron fail to mention Accenture's part of the fiasco? After all, you don't think that Enron built all of those Internet trading systems without consultants and the accompanying conflict of interest.
UUNet/WorldCom Still At It After 5 Years
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Gee... It's been almost 5 years to the day since the UDP of UUNet was cancelled. They are spamhaus' top hosting site for the spam gangs now. They have a history of writing pink sheet contracts with spammers because they can leverage their peering contracts to make outgoing spam profitable for them. Of course they will ignore the community's complaints, like most 800 pound gorilla's do. And they are known to employ their legal team to harrass those who wish to shame them in public.
The best site on the web for looking at voting records and how various special interest groups rate politicians is Project Vote Smart.
They also send out a questionnaire to all candidates which includes questions on tech policy. In fact the policy questions are pointed enough that the political parties were telling their candidates to not cooperate last election with Project Vote Smart. It's easier to waffle on issues when you are as amorphous as pankcake batter.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Microsoft Apologists would have you forget the whole Blue Mountain Arts episode. Where after setting up a competing service to deliver e-greeting cards at MSN, they started creating incompatabilities in MSIE to make use of Blue Mountain's site impossible. Then they instituted mail filters in Outlook Express to allow users to control spam. One of the first sites to be dumped in to the spam filter was the competing Blue Mountain Arts.
Microsoft's Response of course (queue up the Phil Collins) was "There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake."
Those who willfully ignore the abuse of power by the folks in Redmond and the lies to which they stretch to rationalize their behavior are at best sociopaths. Curtly respond to them and dismiss them. They are unable to discern reality, because they refuse to accept what history might teach them. Besides they are probably being paid by a third party PR organization hired by Microsoft.
The interesting thing is that the error message is passed back as
http://www.gateway.gov.uk
This isn't inside a hidden frame because in general iCab gives you all sorts of neat tools to see those icky little in line frames.
But loading the site with IE5.1.1 tech preview for Mac OS X does give in the code:
NOSCRIPT
META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="0; URL=/html/bad_browser.asp"
You are using an unsupported browser. For further information, please click a href="/html/bad_browser.asp"here/a.
/NOSCRIPT
*of course cleaned up without html brackets for slashdot*
So I'm assuming some erstwhile interested party might go find out what actually is programmed in to bad_browser.asp to find the truth about what the detection method really is....
You cannot access the Government Gateway at the moment. This is because you are either using an old version of a browser, or the browser you are using does not have the correct settings. Read this page to find out which browsers are supported and which settings to use.
Supported Browsers
We have made the Government Gateway compatible with as many browsers as possible, on both PCs and Macintoshes. However, because we need to maintain maximum security on this web site, we cannot support older versions of browsers. To use the Government Gateway, you must have:
a PC, with Windows 95 or later, or Windows NT 4.0 or later with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later
OR an Apple Macintosh with Mac OS version 7.5 or later with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.xx or later
a working Internet connection
the 128-bit security add-in, for your version of the browser
Please note that you cannot currently use Netscape 6 to access the Government Gateway, due to issues with the support for digital certificates in this new version.
You can find out which version of the browser version you are currently using, by clicking on Help, then About..., in the menu bar of your browser. The name and version number of your browser is displayed.
Browser Settings
To use the Government Gateway, you must also have the following options enabled in your browser:
Your browser must be set to accept cookies
Java must be enabled
Javascript must be enabled
To check your settings:
Internet Explorer
1. From the menu bar, click on Tools, then Internet Options.
2. In the window that appears, click on the Security tab. Click on the Internet zone and check that the security level is set to Medium
Netscape Navigator
1. From the menu bar, click on Edit, then Preferences.
2. In the window that appears, click on Advanced in the left-hand pane. The settings are displayed.
And that isn't just any old Saturn V for the astropix of the day... that is Apollo 13 waiting to go up. And which cliche should I append... what goes up must come down... or Houston... we have a problem.
Microsoft's DNS actually went down two days in a row. The first day was a router misconfiguration. I remember because a lot of my office was having problems with IE loading its default homepage (msn.com). After checking things out it was pretty clear that even with an ip address from whois for their dns servers that traceroutes died at an MS router. i.e. you could get to the DNS router that was doing the round robin for the DNS servers, so it wasn't being DoSed. Go to this Wired article where Microsoft spokespersons admit that it was a router misconfiguration. And we know that Microsoft's PR people are always putting down Microsoft products and services as being the worst.
After the 23 hours it took Microsoft to figure out it had a bad router config, the skript kitties obviously decided that this poor router had to be rebaptised in a stream of packets, a veritable flood of packets. I don't condone it, but the fact that MS took 23 hours to figure out they had a bad router config causing them a DoS and took another few days to decide that they should outsource their DNS to someone who could provide a distributed and reliable service shows a top heavy beast that could not compete without the monopoly (District Court ruling stands until the Milton Friedman acolytes on the Appeals Court hand down a verdict as a resume addendum to Dubya for selection to the Supreme Court.) power that they possess.
Forget Keating... he got the press and trial but the biggest of the s&l failures was Silverado... with Mr. Neil Bush on the Board. That's the son of GHWBush and bro to Dubya for y'all a little slow on the draw. Course Neil only got a little fine as a result of a civil suit brought against Silverado. No Congressional hearings were held in a case that cost Amercian taxpayers $2 Billion (that's with a B, 2 thousand million for you on the other side of the pond) compared to countless hearings about whether a stain was or was not on a certain dress.
And frankly... the pilfering of loot from suckers by dot com boards and executives does not even come close to what the S&L's sucked out of the economy. Pud can rant about dot bombs til the mad cows come home... but simply put...Lump em all together and ya still don't have $300 Billion (that's with a b, 300 thousand million for you on the other side of the pond) paid by American taxpayers to clean up the mess left by Bush and Keating during Reagan's administration.
And in the end... a fool and his money are soon parted... and the P.T. Barnum's and Fidelity's (go check their financial statements) make out as your money gets fleeced from the sheeple of America. And BMW of America has to create a certified used car program like Lexus of America already does.
Hmmm... I am disappointed that he didn't come up with a good market oriented response. A list of contributors is only marketable at a price if that information is not already free as in free beer because it is free as in public domain. Or it may be a sleight of hand as a campaign contribution, i.e. we could get this information from the gov't, but we wanna give you some money cuz we think we'll get something in return,
or if the buyer thought they might get more useful information from the seller than the information that had been submitted by the seller to the gov't.
This is of course what Sen. McCain campaigned against, but as my high school gov't teacher *who was a fine Republican precinct captain in a Republican State* taught me, a politician's first job is to be reelected.
Of course the most amusing thing about the whole article was the comments Simson quoted from Sen. Richard Bryan. If we took him at his word and accepted that silence should not be acquiescence, then any office seeker must obtain a plurality of the registered voters rather than a plurality of the voting voters. Of course it will be a cold day in hell before any political body enacts minor campaign reform, and satan will retire before politicians will enact legislation that encourages mainstream politicians to encourage voter turnout instead of abstinence.
I could have sworn that a corba-compliant cross-platform compound document architecture was created years ago. Doing a quick search on OpenDoc over at google points to a good overview and documentation and even some code and UI coding guidelines for OS/2 over at IBM. Mind you, reading some of the industry rags it seems that Novell failing to provide a timely bridge between OLE and OpenDoc left Sun and IBM to fold most of the ideas in to the EJB model and try and push java as "the" component model. But Apple actually implemented OpenDoc back in OS8 and I distinctly remember large Apple ISV's (cough, cough - Microsoft) stating in the press that there was no way that their applications (cough, cough - Office) was going to be implemented as a set of OpenDoc editors since there was too much functionality in their products to repackage all of that functionality as components (that would have been individually open to competition). Needless to say that OpenDoc was axed/placed in hibernation by Steve Jobs. But there are still some OpenDoc torch bearers among the Mac zealotry that like the idea of only installing one spell checker and being able to create a compound document that allows the user to select what editing apps to use to manipulate each type of data and having the interoperability at the object level to allow for swapping in and out editing apps on a whim. You like vim, I like emacs. You like a gui, I like a console. The documents won't care and we all can just get along.
Well the grand daddies of mail handling and web browsing have had security bulletins issued and the ports flagged in FreeBSD.
A proper mime binary sent to a vulnerable user 'root' using nmh or exmh will be able to execute arbitrary code. path to virus. Hopefully you never have mail actually sent to the root account. Do you?
Lynx is also vulnerable to different but exploitable holes. I'm sure that root shouldn't be browsing the web, but you'll find a lot of 'seasoned' unix admins who don't have the su religion. Do you always log in to a system as yourself and then su to root?
I've known Simson a long time. And I was around MIT when the first big worm went through the system. Only fools get worms, trojans, and viruses, and it sounds like a lot of Slashdot newbies are overconfident and under vigilant.
I disagree... Convolver, a Photoshop plugin, designed by Kai, has this sort of interface. Kai was always willing to stretch for interfaces to his programs. But the behavioral karma interface in Convolver is just plain infuriating. And Kai didn't repeat the mistake in KPT 3, KPT 5 or KPT 6 (some of the most popular Photoshop plugins).
So as much as I believe in behavioral feedback to help people learn, don't set an interface up to prevent newbies from exploring the nooks and crannies (or as the FBI would state... the crooks and NetNannies) of an operating system without doing their time and completing the tasks that the UI designer thought was the chosen path to "enlightenment".
I think the AT&T break up provides the best anti-example of how to break up a monopoly. The judge put in to place a group of non-competing effective monopolies for local phone service. It was left to Congress to sort out exactly when and what competition would occur in the local and long-distance markets for phone service. Consumers are still suffering from the lack of local competition and the fact that it is re-spawning the vertical Trusts (such as AT&T & MCI providing all services) to thwart horizontal market competition from new market entrants. Rather than dividing Microsoft along divisional lines, it would be better for competition and restoring the "invisible hand of the markets" if Microsoft was split horizontally with 3 or 5 sub-classes inheriting all of the IP of the parent and then beheading Microsoft such that no current executive at Microsoft could have contact with any of the "Baby Bills" and that no contacts were allowed between any of the 3 or 5 for some number of years. If you think that it should be along application lines, read Bill Joy's comments in this month's Linux Magazine about the need to reproduce competition in the Office Suite market to seriously affect the desktop OS market.
Actually the first income tax was levied by the Republicans to fund the Civil War and was ruled unconstitutional.
The second time that the income tax came around was as a constitutional amendment to help fund the war effort for WWI. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which US political party was responsible for needing these funds and in power prior to Woodrow Wilson.
In fact you will find that the opposition to these expenditures was from people like the Quakers and Wobblies, the leading trade union at the time that the government crippled in favor of the right-wing AFL-CIO (check out the history of the French Connection for info on the CIA using the AFL-CIO to provide funds for rigging elections against Socialists in post-Vichy Marseilles and thereby providing a port (Longshoremen's Union) for the profitable trade of heroin which could fund clandestine activities in the ColdWar era Europe and Indochina).
So don't blame the Socialists for the income tax. It was. And with Reagan's Defense Budgets from the 80's... it still is the Republicans that are responsible for the U.S. income tax.
A lot of the memos during Microsoft's anti-trust trial have shown that a lot of Microsoft's day to day operations are micromanaged by your hand. During your deposition, you denied or claimed to have forgotten being involved in the decision making process.
Does the fact that all of your charitable contributions are channelled through your personal foundation rather than being given directly to non-profits demonstrate a fundamental need for control (even to point of subverting your charitable human instincts)?
First, Hugh Loebner is the one that is supplying the $100,000 for the Grand Prize not Dartmouth. Dartmouth is just hosting the contest this year. The link to Hugh's Loebner Prize page has already been posted in one of the other comments, but should be added to the list of related links in the/. box.
Secondly, even if you don't win the $100,000 Grand Prize, Hugh presents $2000 every year to the "most human program". Entries are being accepted until Oct. 31st and there is no entrance fee. So go read the rules and try to win yourself a few thousand dollars.
Well the scsi work and the virtual memory subsystem are things within the 3.x tree that will probably be cross-pollinated in to the other *BSD's code trees. The latest release of NetBSD had a rewrite of the VM subsystem, which I'm pretty sure that Theo will migrate to the OpenBSD tree. And the cam'ified scsi subsystem rocks for those servers that do a lot of disk i/o (props to slackware users for setting file transfer records on ftp.cdrom.com).
Remember... let a thousand flowers bloom. Cross-pollination is a good thing when egos don't collide. When they do... well you have to pray that no institution exists which can crush all of the flowers back in to the ground.
Well when our frame connectivity went out at work, the first thing that we got told (Friday the 6th) was that WorldCom was installing a new router somewhere in the NorthEast US. The routing tables were screwed up and that these propagated out from the new router and that WorldCom couldn't fix it. WorldCom changed their story after Day 5 of this nonsense to blame Lucent's software. I'm not sure if an upgrade to software would in fact create a propagating problem in routing tables for non upgraded routers, but the traceroute times I saw during the last week and packet loss makes me think that the problem was with the routing tables and not just a matter of "network congestion". Personally I'll always tend to believe the first story that I hear from a tech before the story that I hear 5 days later from the Public Relations Office.
NFS and NIS are open standards that have been recreated in free and proprietary versions. But I have no obligation to open up my NFS and NIS servers to anyone else to use. Microsoft has framed the debate over the protocols, but I don't see the hotmail servers allowing me to relay my traffic via their ports. Why not? So should AOL have the right to say who and how customers access their servers? Sure thing.
some of my favorite hacks of the Great Dome are the telephone booth and the greeting for commencement speaker Chancellor Helmut Kohl. They might not have left donuts for the PhysPlant worker who had to take down the phone booth, but at least they had the courtesy to call him on the phone when he got to the top of the dome. Commencement is held in the Great Court just below all those flat roofs and the Great Dome, so the security for a former Head of State was pretty insane. I read about that just as Kohl got up to speak, a radio-controlled banner unfurled from the Dome welcoming Kohl and reminding him that at MIT nothing is impossible. - just another follower of Jack Florey.
How many competing companies sold Disk Operating Systems? At least three. Did all of these different versions of DOS run DOS programs? Yes. In fact Caldera has a finding of fact that quotes Microsoft e-mail on this very point, much to the chagrin of Bill Gates. Was there some sort of consortium set up to administer API's? Not that I know of. Did this competition cost consumers and the economy? Actually that same Caldera finding of fact has an e-mail from Bill Gates mentioning that he would charge an extra US$30 or US$40 per copy of MS-DOS if it were not for DR-DOS.
So if you calculate the extra burden on the economy from every copy of Windows being US$30 to US$40 too expensive, plus the drag on the economy from so many brilliant minds being lured to work for over-inflated stock options rather than working on other potentially more productive software projects, then US$30Billion doesn't sound so bad.
And if competition scares you, GPL the whole mess. There are too many Windows coders for the code base to "stagnate". Perhaps you wouldn't see the inclusion of voice recognition in the OS, but you finally would see prompt bug and security fixes. And any monkey business with previously unpublished APIs and code breaks within published APIs would be fixed. And yes such things do exist. Go find Bret Glass's article from last year where he published code demonstrating that Microsoft never removed, just disabled, the infamous DR-DOS message. Some more of my thoughts on possible solutions to Microsoft v. DoJ.
While John Williams was still struting back up to the rostrum for the encore, the Pops Orchestra started without him. As someone who used to play in the pit, I knew this was the ultimate disrespect to a conductor. Basically telling the audience that the orchestra felt as if the conductor provided nothing to the equation. But if you are looking for a score for a Dudley Do-Right/Snidley Whiplash epic motion picture, John Williams is your guy.
John Williams was simply the worst thing that could have ever happened to the Boston Symphony. Since the musicians in the BSO have to serve in the Boston Pops, they had to deal with John Williams and his musical pablum. In fact I distinctly remember at Williams' last July 4th Pops Concert, the Pops committed mutiny on him for the encore. I hope that Arthur Fiedler is resting much more comfortably in his grave now that the baton is again in capable hands.
Slashdot Mirror
It really sucks for Microsoft and you and me that IBM didn't whack Compaq for selling PC's with a reverse-engineered (illegal under the DMCA)and probably partially copied BIOS. Of course IBM was in the middle of this messy legal battle over being a monopoly, so they were distracted.
If they had, the hardware would never have been commoditized and Microsoft would never have been criticized for Windows being an excessive portion of the price of a new PC.
Hmmm... so why isn't the CIT group part of this settlement? CIT bought Newcourt Credit Group and Newcourt Credit Group bought AT&T Capital Leasing. That was the actual part of the AT&T devolution that handled the phone leases.
I guess it is true that if you change your name enough, you can fool the lawyers. How many stories on Enron fail to mention Accenture's part of the fiasco? After all, you don't think that Enron built all of those Internet trading systems without consultants and the accompanying conflict of interest.
Gee... It's been almost 5 years to the day since the UDP of UUNet was cancelled. They are spamhaus' top hosting site for the spam gangs now. They have a history of writing pink sheet contracts with spammers because they can leverage their peering contracts to make outgoing spam profitable for them. Of course they will ignore the community's complaints, like most 800 pound gorilla's do. And they are known to employ their legal team to harrass those who wish to shame them in public.
The best site on the web for looking at voting records and how various special interest groups rate politicians is Project Vote Smart.
They also send out a questionnaire to all candidates which includes questions on tech policy. In fact the policy questions are pointed enough that the political parties were telling their candidates to not cooperate last election with Project Vote Smart. It's easier to waffle on issues when you are as amorphous as pankcake batter.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Microsoft Apologists would have you forget the whole Blue Mountain Arts episode. Where after setting up a competing service to deliver e-greeting cards at MSN, they started creating incompatabilities in MSIE to make use of Blue Mountain's site impossible. Then they instituted mail filters in Outlook Express to allow users to control spam. One of the first sites to be dumped in to the spam filter was the competing Blue Mountain Arts.
Microsoft's Response of course (queue up the Phil Collins) was "There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake."
Those who willfully ignore the abuse of power by the folks in Redmond and the lies to which they stretch to rationalize their behavior are at best sociopaths. Curtly respond to them and dismiss them. They are unable to discern reality, because they refuse to accept what history might teach them. Besides they are probably being paid by a third party PR organization hired by Microsoft.
The interesting thing is that the error message is passed back as
http://www.gateway.gov.uk
This isn't inside a hidden frame because in general iCab gives you all sorts of neat tools to see those icky little in line frames.
But loading the site with IE5.1.1 tech preview for Mac OS X does give in the code:
NOSCRIPT
META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="0; URL=/html/bad_browser.asp"
You are using an unsupported browser. For further information, please click a href="/html/bad_browser.asp"here/a.
/NOSCRIPT
*of course cleaned up without html brackets for slashdot*
So I'm assuming some erstwhile interested party might go find out what actually is programmed in to bad_browser.asp to find the truth about what the detection method really is....
Unsupported Browser
You cannot access the Government Gateway at the moment. This is because you are either using an old version of a browser, or the browser you are using does not have the correct settings. Read this page to find out which browsers are supported and which settings to use.
Supported Browsers
We have made the Government Gateway compatible with as many browsers as possible, on both PCs and Macintoshes. However, because we need to maintain maximum security on this web site, we cannot support older versions of browsers. To use the Government Gateway, you must have:
a PC, with Windows 95 or later, or Windows NT 4.0 or later with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later
OR an Apple Macintosh with Mac OS version 7.5 or later with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.xx or later
a working Internet connection
the 128-bit security add-in, for your version of the browser
Please note that you cannot currently use Netscape 6 to access the Government Gateway, due to issues with the support for digital certificates in this new version.
You can find out which version of the browser version you are currently using, by clicking on Help, then About..., in the menu bar of your browser. The name and version number of your browser is displayed.
Browser Settings
To use the Government Gateway, you must also have the following options enabled in your browser:
Your browser must be set to accept cookies
Java must be enabled
Javascript must be enabled
To check your settings:
Internet Explorer
1. From the menu bar, click on Tools, then Internet Options.
2. In the window that appears, click on the Security tab. Click on the Internet zone and check that the security level is set to Medium
Netscape Navigator
1. From the menu bar, click on Edit, then Preferences.
2. In the window that appears, click on Advanced in the left-hand pane. The settings are displayed.
And that isn't just any old Saturn V for the astropix of the day... that is Apollo 13 waiting to go up. And which cliche should I append... what goes up must come down... or Houston... we have a problem.
Microsoft's DNS actually went down two days in a row. The first day was a router misconfiguration. I remember because a lot of my office was having problems with IE loading its default homepage (msn.com). After checking things out it was pretty clear that even with an ip address from whois for their dns servers that traceroutes died at an MS router. i.e. you could get to the DNS router that was doing the round robin for the DNS servers, so it wasn't being DoSed. Go to this Wired article where Microsoft spokespersons admit that it was a router misconfiguration. And we know that Microsoft's PR people are always putting down Microsoft products and services as being the worst.
After the 23 hours it took Microsoft to figure out it had a bad router config, the skript kitties obviously decided that this poor router had to be rebaptised in a stream of packets, a veritable flood of packets. I don't condone it, but the fact that MS took 23 hours to figure out they had a bad router config causing them a DoS and took another few days to decide that they should outsource their DNS to someone who could provide a distributed and reliable service shows a top heavy beast that could not compete without the monopoly (District Court ruling stands until the Milton Friedman acolytes on the Appeals Court hand down a verdict as a resume addendum to Dubya for selection to the Supreme Court.) power that they possess.
Forget Keating... he got the press and trial but the biggest of the s&l failures was Silverado... with Mr. Neil Bush on the Board. That's the son of GHWBush and bro to Dubya for y'all a little slow on the draw. Course Neil only got a little fine as a result of a civil suit brought against Silverado. No Congressional hearings were held in a case that cost Amercian taxpayers $2 Billion (that's with a B, 2 thousand million for you on the other side of the pond) compared to countless hearings about whether a stain was or was not on a certain dress.
And frankly... the pilfering of loot from suckers by dot com boards and executives does not even come close to what the S&L's sucked out of the economy. Pud can rant about dot bombs til the mad cows come home... but simply put...Lump em all together and ya still don't have $300 Billion (that's with a b, 300 thousand million for you on the other side of the pond) paid by American taxpayers to clean up the mess left by Bush and Keating during Reagan's administration.
And in the end... a fool and his money are soon parted... and the P.T. Barnum's and Fidelity's (go check their financial statements) make out as your money gets fleeced from the sheeple of America. And BMW of America has to create a certified used car program like Lexus of America already does.
or if the buyer thought they might get more useful information from the seller than the information that had been submitted by the seller to the gov't.
This is of course what Sen. McCain campaigned against, but as my high school gov't teacher *who was a fine Republican precinct captain in a Republican State* taught me, a politician's first job is to be reelected.
Of course the most amusing thing about the whole article was the comments Simson quoted from Sen. Richard Bryan. If we took him at his word and accepted that silence should not be acquiescence, then any office seeker must obtain a plurality of the registered voters rather than a plurality of the voting voters. Of course it will be a cold day in hell before any political body enacts minor campaign reform, and satan will retire before politicians will enact legislation that encourages mainstream politicians to encourage voter turnout instead of abstinence.
I could have sworn that a corba-compliant cross-platform compound document architecture was created years ago. Doing a quick search on OpenDoc over at google points to a good overview and documentation and even some code and UI coding guidelines for OS/2 over at IBM.
Mind you, reading some of the industry rags it seems that Novell failing to provide a timely bridge between OLE and OpenDoc left Sun and IBM to fold most of the ideas in to the EJB model and try and push java as "the" component model. But Apple actually implemented OpenDoc back in OS8 and I distinctly remember large Apple ISV's (cough, cough - Microsoft) stating in the press that there was no way that their applications (cough, cough - Office) was going to be implemented as a set of OpenDoc editors since there was too much functionality in their products to repackage all of that functionality as components (that would have been individually open to competition). Needless to say that OpenDoc was axed/placed in hibernation by Steve Jobs. But there are still some OpenDoc torch bearers among the Mac zealotry that like the idea of only installing one spell checker and being able to create a compound document that allows the user to select what editing apps to use to manipulate each type of data and having the interoperability at the object level to allow for swapping in and out editing apps on a whim. You like vim, I like emacs. You like a gui, I like a console. The documents won't care and we all can just get along.
A proper mime binary sent to a vulnerable user 'root' using nmh or exmh will be able to execute arbitrary code. path to virus. Hopefully you never have mail actually sent to the root account. Do you?
Lynx is also vulnerable to different but exploitable holes. I'm sure that root shouldn't be browsing the web, but you'll find a lot of 'seasoned' unix admins who don't have the su religion. Do you always log in to a system as yourself and then su to root?
I've known Simson a long time. And I was around MIT when the first big worm went through the system. Only fools get worms, trojans, and viruses, and it sounds like a lot of Slashdot newbies are overconfident and under vigilant.
So as much as I believe in behavioral feedback to help people learn, don't set an interface up to prevent newbies from exploring the nooks and crannies (or as the FBI would state... the crooks and NetNannies) of an operating system without doing their time and completing the tasks that the UI designer thought was the chosen path to "enlightenment".
I think the AT&T break up provides the best anti-example of how to break up a monopoly. The judge put in to place a group of non-competing effective monopolies for local phone service. It was left to Congress to sort out exactly when and what competition would occur in the local and long-distance markets for phone service. Consumers are still suffering from the lack of local competition and the fact that it is re-spawning the vertical Trusts (such as AT&T & MCI providing all services) to thwart horizontal market competition from new market entrants.
Rather than dividing Microsoft along divisional lines, it would be better for competition and restoring the "invisible hand of the markets" if Microsoft was split horizontally with 3 or 5 sub-classes inheriting all of the IP of the parent and then beheading Microsoft such that no current executive at Microsoft could have contact with any of the "Baby Bills" and that no contacts were allowed between any of the 3 or 5 for some number of years.
If you think that it should be along application lines, read Bill Joy's comments in this month's Linux Magazine about the need to reproduce competition in the Office Suite market to seriously affect the desktop OS market.
The second time that the income tax came around was as a constitutional amendment to help fund the war effort for WWI. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which US political party was responsible for needing these funds and in power prior to Woodrow Wilson.
In fact you will find that the opposition to these expenditures was from people like the Quakers and Wobblies, the leading trade union at the time that the government crippled in favor of the right-wing AFL-CIO (check out the history of the French Connection for info on the CIA using the AFL-CIO to provide funds for rigging elections against Socialists in post-Vichy Marseilles and thereby providing a port (Longshoremen's Union) for the profitable trade of heroin which could fund clandestine activities in the ColdWar era Europe and Indochina).
So don't blame the Socialists for the income tax. It was. And with Reagan's Defense Budgets from the 80's... it still is the Republicans that are responsible for the U.S. income tax.
A lot of the memos during Microsoft's anti-trust trial have shown that a lot of Microsoft's day to day operations are micromanaged by your hand. During your deposition, you denied or claimed to have forgotten being involved in the decision making process.
Does the fact that all of your charitable contributions are channelled through your personal foundation rather than being given directly to non-profits demonstrate a fundamental need for control (even to point of subverting your charitable human instincts)?
First, Hugh Loebner is the one that is supplying the $100,000 for the Grand Prize not Dartmouth. Dartmouth is just hosting the contest this year. /. box.
The link to Hugh's Loebner Prize page has already been posted in one of the other comments, but should be added to the list of related links in the
Secondly, even if you don't win the $100,000 Grand Prize, Hugh presents $2000 every year to the "most human program". Entries are being accepted until Oct. 31st and there is no entrance fee. So go read the rules and try to win yourself a few thousand dollars.
The latest release of NetBSD had a rewrite of the VM subsystem, which I'm pretty sure that Theo will migrate to the OpenBSD tree.
And the cam'ified scsi subsystem rocks for those servers that do a lot of disk i/o (props to slackware users for setting file transfer records on ftp.cdrom.com).
Remember... let a thousand flowers bloom.
Cross-pollination is a good thing when egos don't collide. When they do... well you have to pray that no institution exists which can crush all of the flowers back in to the ground.
Well when our frame connectivity went out at work, the first thing that we got told (Friday the 6th) was that WorldCom was installing a new router somewhere in the NorthEast US. The routing tables were screwed up and that these propagated out from the new router and that WorldCom couldn't fix it. WorldCom changed their story after Day 5 of this nonsense to blame Lucent's software. I'm not sure if an upgrade to software would in fact create a propagating problem in routing tables for non upgraded routers, but the traceroute times I saw during the last week and packet loss makes me think that the problem was with the routing tables and not just a matter of "network congestion". Personally I'll always tend to believe the first story that I hear from a tech before the story that I hear 5 days later from the Public Relations Office.
NFS and NIS are open standards that have been recreated in free and proprietary versions. But I have no obligation to open up my NFS and NIS servers to anyone else to use. Microsoft has framed the debate over the protocols, but I don't see the hotmail servers allowing me to relay my traffic via their ports. Why not? So should AOL have the right to say who and how customers access their servers? Sure thing.
some of my favorite hacks of the Great Dome are the telephone booth and the greeting for commencement speaker Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
They might not have left donuts for the PhysPlant worker who had to take down the phone booth, but at least they had the courtesy to call him on the phone when he got to the top of the dome.
Commencement is held in the Great Court just below all those flat roofs and the Great Dome, so the security for a former Head of State was pretty insane. I read about that just as Kohl got up to speak, a radio-controlled banner unfurled from the Dome welcoming Kohl and reminding him that at MIT nothing is impossible.
- just another follower of Jack Florey.
Did all of these different versions of DOS run DOS programs? Yes. In fact Caldera has a finding of fact that quotes Microsoft e-mail on this very point, much to the chagrin of Bill Gates.
Was there some sort of consortium set up to administer API's? Not that I know of.
Did this competition cost consumers and the economy? Actually that same Caldera finding of fact has an e-mail from Bill Gates mentioning that he would charge an extra US$30 or US$40 per copy of MS-DOS if it were not for DR-DOS.
So if you calculate the extra burden on the economy from every copy of Windows being US$30 to US$40 too expensive, plus the drag on the economy from so many brilliant minds being lured to work for over-inflated stock options rather than working on other potentially more productive software projects, then US$30Billion doesn't sound so bad.
And if competition scares you, GPL the whole mess. There are too many Windows coders for the code base to "stagnate". Perhaps you wouldn't see the inclusion of voice recognition in the OS, but you finally would see prompt bug and security fixes. And any monkey business with previously unpublished APIs and code breaks within published APIs would be fixed.
And yes such things do exist. Go find Bret Glass's article from last year where he published code demonstrating that Microsoft never removed, just disabled, the infamous DR-DOS message.
Some more of my thoughts on possible solutions to Microsoft v. DoJ.
While John Williams was still struting back up to the rostrum for the encore, the Pops Orchestra started without him. As someone who used to play in the pit, I knew this was the ultimate disrespect to a conductor. Basically telling the audience that the orchestra felt as if the conductor provided nothing to the equation. But if you are looking for a score for a Dudley Do-Right/Snidley Whiplash epic motion picture, John Williams is your guy.
John Williams was simply the worst thing that could have ever happened to the Boston Symphony. Since the musicians in the BSO have to serve in the Boston Pops, they had to deal with John Williams and his musical pablum. In fact I distinctly remember at Williams' last July 4th Pops Concert, the Pops committed mutiny on him for the encore. I hope that Arthur Fiedler is resting much more comfortably in his grave now that the baton is again in capable hands.