While
this wasn't actually a "successful" ditching attempt, IIRC, over half the passengers lived through it. The video link on the site doesn't actually lead to a video of the crash, but I can remember seeing the video on one of those "Real-People-In-Real-Pain" TV shows for which the Fox network is so famous. The Aircraft came to rest roughly 500 metres or so from the beach, and the water was relatively shallow. Several people on the beach waded out and helped the passengers to shore.
After reading the press release (and several of the comments here), it almost looks like Fyodor was trying to do what TrollTech did with the QT libraries a while back: do a dual license scheme.
For TrollTech, if you were developing GPL'ed software, you could use their toolkit, but if you were doing proprietary software, you had to buy some sort of license.
IANALJAP (IANAL, just a programmer), but what would stop Fyodor from doing the same thing? This software is offered under two licenses: the GPL if you are anybody but The SCO Group, or the No License if you are The SCO Group. This way, we don't have to have these long arguments about section 4 or 5 of the GPL, and life is good. I realize that this may be against the spirit of the GPL, but, according to section 2:
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
So, is this legit? Personally, I'd really like to see the SAMBA or GCC folks do something like this (no offense to Fyodor, but losing the rights to distribute SAMBA would hurt SCO a LOT more than losing the rights to distribute NMap.
Common sense strikes again
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Was it just me or did anyone else get to the bottom of that bullet list and feel let down? Here I was expecting some sort of earth-shattering revelation, and all that the list shows are common sense rules. At the risk of sounding elitist, maybe this was epiphany for someone else. Lord knows it would be a revelation in our QA department, where the list consists of exactly one rule:
-Grab a programmer
But still... Someone made money off of that? Heck, look for my new book next week, "Walking to Peoria in 3,976,554 steps", with each step being "Place your rear foot 1.5 feet in front of your front foot."
The SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX) today announced the second major denial of service attack against the SCO corporate webservers in February. "And this time, we have PROOF those pesky Linux users were behind this. The attack originated from some site called Slashdot, a web site well known for their rabid support for using SCO's Unlicensed IP," said McBride. "They just keep clicking on their links with wild abandon," added Sontag. "As though ANY SCO operating system could stand up to this kind of brazen attack."
..and secondly, it is equally easy to download a stock kernel and then apply the patch.
This is true. And, as RJ said in a reply, my Mandrake system was never quite "right" again.
How does that make a distro bad is beyond me.
I'm not saying that Mandrake is a bad distro. I'm saying that it's a distro for those who don't need to do anything with their system that the Mandrake developers haven't forseen. I expect that most end users will be able to configure their machines effectively using a modern Mandrake.
I just found it inflexible to the point of uselessness if you want to configure it in a way for which the developers had not planned.
And as I said earlier, the more modern Mandrake versions may have corrected these problems. I just don't feel like spending a weekend wiping a partition and installing Mandrake to find out whether or not these problems have been corrected.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Mandrake seriously since Mandrake 8.0 (and my memory is a little fuzzy about the versions and dates), so the following complaints may no longer be applicable.
I'd tried to use Mandrake seriously a while back, and found it virtually unusable for many of the same reasons I find Windows unusable. I grew up in (semi-) elder days, and learned to configure my Linux system the old fashioned way: I'd go to my/etc directory, find the config file, and edit it.
Why did I have to hand-edit? Because the network settings editor would not allow me to enter and tweak the settings as I required for my home network.
The last time I tried doing so with an out-of-the-box Mandrake system, I could make the change in the/etc/ directory (assuming I could find the file: they did some screwy things to some of the locations and names of some of the config files, IIRC), but even the files that I could find and change were overwritten by their configuration program. It seems that they were kind enough to store a second copy of the values and would do a blanket update when you started any of their config apps.
That would have been bad enough, but the thing that finally turned me off was being unable to download a patch for a stock kernel and being unable to apply it (it was just after the Zaurus SL-5000D came out, and you needed a patch to get the communications layer working between the OS and the PDA working correctly). If I have to hand hack the patch into place, I don't want to use the distro.
I'm only a simple programmer, folks. I realize that this story has been covered very well both here and on Groklaw. The next question: how do we get our side of the story (there was no DDoS attack, Darl needed to get the incriminating evidence off of the web server) out to the mainstream press? I'd like to think that, with some of the reporters out there starting to wake up, that SOME REPORTER would follow this up and print the story as it actually happened, not just a verbatim copy/paste of SCO's press release.
It would be very amusing to see the reaction of SCO's upper management to having their bluff called.
Actually, I have it on reliable authority that the part in question is in fact referred to as a "Gender Bender" (or at least thats what the decidedly NON politically-correct electronics teacher taught me in High School).
I just knew I shouldn't have gone back to look at Slashdot after drinking that much Glenlivet.
It seems that you've never had experience being on the receiving end of the press. I've had occasion to listen on interviews with family members and see and hear what was actually said to the journalist in question.
After "shredding" what was said in the actual interview and comparing the MD5 sums with the published interview, there was absolutely no, none, zip, zilch commonality.
Although, I'm sure that if ESR's comments were taken COMPLETELY out of context, we'll be hearing from him soon enough.
If the reason behind not wishing to sell singles is that these works were designed as an album, and were not meant to be sold seperately, then would someone pray tell me the reason behind the existance of:
(unfortunately, I was unable to find "Best Of" albums by Linkin Park (most likely either haven't been around long enough or don't have enough decent material to make a "Best Of" album)or Jewel (Personal opinion, but I NEVER, EVER want to hear what one would consider to be the "Best Of" Jewel).
The point remains that virtually every artist I've ever seen has been perfectly willing to put out a "Best Of" album when enough dollars/euros/insert your favorite local currency here are waved under their nose. I've heard one band say no because "Best Of" albums always seem to be the last gasp of a group/artist that has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
You don't want your work broken into singles, fine. Just be honest with yourself (and your listeners) and admit that the reason has absolutely noting to do with art.
You want your ISP, the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and the RIAA Secret Police In The Black Helicopters(TM) to take notice, just set up a Kazaa client on your box and start trading Madonna files. When the wrath of Rosen descends upon you, put your prettiest smile on and claim that it wasn't you, and that you had, in fact, complained to the FBI and to your ISP that some nefarious critters had been hacking their systems. And that you want those evil, EVIL H4X0Rs arrested for putting piracy software on your servers.
Then, sue your ISP for damages for allowing it to happen.
The executives at SCO have made a lot of comments about not being willing to point out the similarities (or "copied sections") in public for fear that the nefarious Linux critters would go and remove them, thereby "wiping their fingerprints off of the gun" or some such.
Personally, I'm a lot more worried about SCO. Think about it: the kernel source tree is well documented and available going back virtually to version 0.01 (the source to 0.01 actually came with a book I purchased a while back: it was of "historical interest"). The point is that a reasonable person can trace the entry of virtually any section of non-trivial kernel code into the kernel.
Well, how hard would it be for SCO to set the date back on their CVS server to, oh, say, mid-1999 or so, grab a bunch of code from a 2.2 kernel, delete all of the copyrights and GPL statements, plug it into their CVS server and reset the date? Bada-bing-bada-boom: instant IP violation. And, unlike the open source world, there is absolutely no way to prove it one way or the other (unless they've got some sort of code escrow, but even then, it would be dicey).
Bottom line, even if they find entire.c files that are word-for-word identical: unless they can take the source tree where that code lives, compile it, and do a bit by bit comparison to prove it is identical to a version released before the equivalent code made it into the Linux kernel tree, they're just blowing smoke and nobody in their right mind is going to believe them.
I don't know who modded this up as insightful, but the moderator should be slapped with a wet fish.
Why do you think that NASA built Endeavor from off-the-shelf parts (mostly) rather than restarting the production lines in Pasedena, CA to build another shuttle from scratch? I would have cost way too much to restart everything (all of the workers had been laid off, the assembly lines mothballed, and such like).
No matter how much you think it would cost to build a shuttle replacement, trying to build more shuttles (especially your new and improved shuttles) would cost far more than development of a shuttle replacement.
And as for expanding the cargo bay... Most frequently, the primary restriction on cargo carried is not size. It's weight. Improvements to the amount of weight the shuttle could carry to low Earth orbit have happened several times (going all the way back to STS-3, when they stopped painting the external tank, thereby saving 600 pounds in paint).
Sorry, bud. You're trying to save money, but all of the items you mentioned are either.
unnecessary.
already done.
nowhere near enough return on investment.
You're missing the point by missing the point.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
There's no reason to send an astronaut into space, at huge expense, to perform experiments that could just as easily be done on an unmanned craft
Define cheap. If you are looking solely at the cost of the launch (launch vehicle, ground infrastructure, payload), yes, you can probably do unmanned cheaper than manned. However, what you don't see is the number of times automated experiments on the shuttle would have failed except for human intervention. Having someone physically there to kick/duct tape something when it needs it saves the cost of having to do everything over again.
Slashdot Mirror
While this wasn't actually a "successful" ditching attempt, IIRC, over half the passengers lived through it. The video link on the site doesn't actually lead to a video of the crash, but I can remember seeing the video on one of those "Real-People-In-Real-Pain" TV shows for which the Fox network is so famous. The Aircraft came to rest roughly 500 metres or so from the beach, and the water was relatively shallow. Several people on the beach waded out and helped the passengers to shore.
Granted, it's not that much fun unless you run it as root, but I'm sure you don't have a standard user account on your box, do you?
For TrollTech, if you were developing GPL'ed software, you could use their toolkit, but if you were doing proprietary software, you had to buy some sort of license.
IANALJAP (IANAL, just a programmer), but what would stop Fyodor from doing the same thing? This software is offered under two licenses: the GPL if you are anybody but The SCO Group, or the No License if you are The SCO Group. This way, we don't have to have these long arguments about section 4 or 5 of the GPL, and life is good. I realize that this may be against the spirit of the GPL, but, according to section 2:
So, is this legit? Personally, I'd really like to see the SAMBA or GCC folks do something like this (no offense to Fyodor, but losing the rights to distribute SAMBA would hurt SCO a LOT more than losing the rights to distribute NMap.
But still... Someone made money off of that? Heck, look for my new book next week, "Walking to Peoria in 3,976,554 steps", with each step being "Place your rear foot 1.5 feet in front of your front foot."
The SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX) today announced the second major denial of service attack against the SCO corporate webservers in February. "And this time, we have PROOF those pesky Linux users were behind this. The attack originated from some site called Slashdot, a web site well known for their rabid support for using SCO's Unlicensed IP," said McBride. "They just keep clicking on their links with wild abandon," added Sontag. "As though ANY SCO operating system could stand up to this kind of brazen attack."
Someone needs to be around to press the any key.
This is true. And, as RJ said in a reply, my Mandrake system was never quite "right" again.
I'm not saying that Mandrake is a bad distro. I'm saying that it's a distro for those who don't need to do anything with their system that the Mandrake developers haven't forseen. I expect that most end users will be able to configure their machines effectively using a modern Mandrake.
I just found it inflexible to the point of uselessness if you want to configure it in a way for which the developers had not planned.
And as I said earlier, the more modern Mandrake versions may have corrected these problems. I just don't feel like spending a weekend wiping a partition and installing Mandrake to find out whether or not these problems have been corrected.
If you love it, more power to you.
I'd tried to use Mandrake seriously a while back, and found it virtually unusable for many of the same reasons I find Windows unusable. I grew up in (semi-) elder days, and learned to configure my Linux system the old fashioned way: I'd go to my /etc directory, find the config file, and edit it.
Why did I have to hand-edit? Because the network settings editor would not allow me to enter and tweak the settings as I required for my home network.
The last time I tried doing so with an out-of-the-box Mandrake system, I could make the change in the /etc/ directory (assuming I could find the file: they did some screwy things to some of the locations and names of some of the config files, IIRC), but even the files that I could find and change were overwritten by their configuration program. It seems that they were kind enough to store a second copy of the values and would do a blanket update when you started any of their config apps.
That would have been bad enough, but the thing that finally turned me off was being unable to download a patch for a stock kernel and being unable to apply it (it was just after the Zaurus SL-5000D came out, and you needed a patch to get the communications layer working between the OS and the PDA working correctly). If I have to hand hack the patch into place, I don't want to use the distro.
Thank God for Slackware.
It would be very amusing to see the reaction of SCO's upper management to having their bluff called.
I just knew I shouldn't have gone back to look at Slashdot after drinking that much Glenlivet.
One is to NEVER, EVER read the article before posting. This is considered cheating and is frowned upon.
Now don't let it happen again.
It seems that you've never had experience being on the receiving end of the press. I've had occasion to listen on interviews with family members and see and hear what was actually said to the journalist in question. After "shredding" what was said in the actual interview and comparing the MD5 sums with the published interview, there was absolutely no, none, zip, zilch commonality. Although, I'm sure that if ESR's comments were taken COMPLETELY out of context, we'll be hearing from him soon enough.
International Superhits by Greenday
The Immaculate Collection by Madonna
The Best of Motorhead[Metal-Is] by Motorhead
(unfortunately, I was unable to find "Best Of" albums by Linkin Park (most likely either haven't been around long enough or don't have enough decent material to make a "Best Of" album)or Jewel (Personal opinion, but I NEVER, EVER want to hear what one would consider to be the "Best Of" Jewel).
The point remains that virtually every artist I've ever seen has been perfectly willing to put out a "Best Of" album when enough dollars/euros/insert your favorite local currency here are waved under their nose. I've heard one band say no because "Best Of" albums always seem to be the last gasp of a group/artist that has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
You don't want your work broken into singles, fine. Just be honest with yourself (and your listeners) and admit that the reason has absolutely noting to do with art.
Then, sue your ISP for damages for allowing it to happen.
In short,
Be victimized in a crack...
Be blown off by the FBI and ISP
Download free music
???
PROFIT!!!
Personally, I'm a lot more worried about SCO. Think about it: the kernel source tree is well documented and available going back virtually to version 0.01 (the source to 0.01 actually came with a book I purchased a while back: it was of "historical interest"). The point is that a reasonable person can trace the entry of virtually any section of non-trivial kernel code into the kernel.
Well, how hard would it be for SCO to set the date back on their CVS server to, oh, say, mid-1999 or so, grab a bunch of code from a 2.2 kernel, delete all of the copyrights and GPL statements, plug it into their CVS server and reset the date? Bada-bing-bada-boom: instant IP violation. And, unlike the open source world, there is absolutely no way to prove it one way or the other (unless they've got some sort of code escrow, but even then, it would be dicey).
Bottom line, even if they find entire .c files that are word-for-word identical: unless they can take the source tree where that code lives, compile it, and do a bit by bit comparison to prove it is identical to a version released before the equivalent code made it into the Linux kernel tree, they're just blowing smoke and nobody in their right mind is going to believe them.
Why do you think that NASA built Endeavor from off-the-shelf parts (mostly) rather than restarting the production lines in Pasedena, CA to build another shuttle from scratch? I would have cost way too much to restart everything (all of the workers had been laid off, the assembly lines mothballed, and such like).
No matter how much you think it would cost to build a shuttle replacement, trying to build more shuttles (especially your new and improved shuttles) would cost far more than development of a shuttle replacement.
And as for expanding the cargo bay... Most frequently, the primary restriction on cargo carried is not size. It's weight. Improvements to the amount of weight the shuttle could carry to low Earth orbit have happened several times (going all the way back to STS-3, when they stopped painting the external tank, thereby saving 600 pounds in paint).
Sorry, bud. You're trying to save money, but all of the items you mentioned are either.
unnecessary.
already done.
nowhere near enough return on investment.