Sounds like a pretty stupid tax, depending on the details.
The Apple iPOD is NOT a hard disk, blank media, CD-R, etc. It is a consumer electronic device. Do they tax Xbox's because it has a hard disk inside ? What about digital cameras with CF cards that could hold MP3's ? What about my MRI machine in the hospital that has many terabytes of storage ? What about my exabyte tape backup jukebox ?
It is one thing to tax consumer recording media that is likely to be used to store pirated music, although I also strongly object to that notion (I used my CD-R's to store scientific data). It is another to tax any ol' electronic device that some *could* jimmie to use to store pirated music but in fact is designed for another purpose (in the case of the iPOD, to store music that is obtained through legitimate means).
SCO does have one remaining asset of value, the rights to UNIX. Quite what those rights is will likely be significantly reduced as a result of the case, but the value will not reach zero.
So one of the possible outcomes of all this SCO-crap that I would not be happy with is some other company, particularly like MS, end up owning SCO's Unix rights. In reading this infamous Halloween memo, I was worried about this sequence:
This Microsoft deal is the Ante to the poker game...We should get this done and go after several $2-3 Million deals from the expense side of their company. The will help us a lot and if we execute we could exit and Unix componients we have build potentially back to Microsoft or MCS.
Difficult to decipher, with all the typos and what not, but what does ".. we could exit and Unix components... potentially back to Microsoft" mean ? Is part of the understanding that after the SCO dust settles, that MS might end up with Unix ? ugh...
Chandra's great and all but my cynical self first thought upon seeing this NASA PR was: DIVERSION, get the public to forget about Hubble. Remind them that we still have Chandra (of course Chandra is an XRAY telescope, but what's a few angstroms between friends (or to the dumb public)?).
It will be a tremendous shame to lose Hubble. But one can guess that Bush bought NASA off with the: Forget about Hubble and the Space Station (and our commitment to the Russkies), you will get $$B$$ with the Moon/Mars plan/ploy. And I'll get re-election points and more space/military spending.
So, good for Chandra. But we won't forget Hubble...
I thought SCO was claiming *millions* of lines of code copied:
"SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag said there are millions of lines of offending code involved and that it's highly unlikely the matter could be resolved by removing that code."
yet in this letter, Darl is only claiming *thousands*:
"I find this particularly galling because that Linux software contains thousands of lines of my company's proprietary UNIX code..."
Gee, I guess the magnitude of the issue has just be cranked down by 3 orders of magnitude -- the claimed infraction is now just 0.1% of the original claim. Do you think we will see SCO adjusting the $3B claim on IBM down to $3M ?
The biggest missing piece of info that you didn't provide is what you want to use this computer for ?
For general purpose PC computing, a laptop is the obvious way to go. It should be easy to find a decent one that will run with as little as 15-20 watts. You said 1.4Ghz. Again, why ? Re-evaluate exactly what you plan to do with it and why you need 1.4Ghz. You can run MS Office or Linux perfectly well with 300-500Mhz and find such laptops for
Choose a laptop that is easy to feed from multiple power sources, even those that you may cobble together or build yourself. Bigger Toshiba Portege's (7020CT, $250, for example) use a power connector and 15volts that is easy to supply, while smaller Toshiba's use a more difficult to get power connector. Same with IBM Thinkpads (a Thinkpad 600E or 570 are good $200-300 choices). Remember that every additional step of power conversion costs efficiency. So for example,
Solar->12V lead acid->12V inverter->120VAC->laptop AC adaptor->15-16V laptop supply
is much less efficient than
Solar->15V laptop supply
But the original point is that you first have to more clearly identify the computing tasks you want to do. These days you can do quite a lot with a decent PDA whose power requirements are a fraction of that of a laptop. Depending again on your needs, you may wish to consider a WinCE machine. For example, if all you are going to do is writing, working on MS Word or Excel, you can find a full sized WinCE machine for $100-200. It has the power consumption of perhaps 3-5watts instead of 15-20 watts, and still has a decent keyboard and okay display.
Communications is the other question (are you planning to do email ? websurfing ?)
So... need more info on what are the computing tasks before better advice can be given on solutions and power needs...
For example, if you don't need much storage, flash disk is much less power hungry than a hard disk.
If I recall correctly, IBM developed and released a competing and technically better alternative to VFAT as part of OS/2 and the battle between Win95 and OS/2 in the middle 1990's. Both were extensions to DOS FAT to allow long filenames. So... IBM could now release its long filename extension to FAT to the public domain and companies could start using it instead with probably as minimal trauma as could be if MS is going to force everyone to reconsider the usage of VFAT.
How can we convince these stupid money-grubbing lawyers to terrorize some other industry and leave the computer industry alone... perhaps some industry dearer to their hearts...
Say, that 32-foot-class yacht you sold me is actually only 31.2 foot...
Only in the USA... more stupid lawyer antics to get themselves rich while harming both customers and companies...
Yeah, there's the 1000Mb 1Gb issue.. which is trivial and I think most anybody can handle. But the real problem is the filesystem overhead issue, which, of course differs between: 1) filesystems (FAT16, FAT32, ext2, UFS, etc), 2) the SIZE and NUMBER of files (1024 files of size 10kb != 10 files of 1024kb), 3) the blocking factor of the formatting used, 4) the cylinder/sector/track parameters, 5) partitioning loss, etc. Then throw in compression and/or RAID... What judge and jury is going to understand that 10Gb disks can store anywhere from 2Gb to 30Gb of data ?
Are y'all sure that Sun did give SCO $$$ recently ?
I thought the deal was that Sun gave AT&T a big chunk years ago (something like $100m) and I distinctly remember McNealy saying that Sun would never have to pay for anything Unix-oid again, since it bought the "Everything" license. And so, I thought that SCO acknowledged that Sun was all paid up as far as Unix IP, but that was years ago...
I had thought the "other" company was not Sun but someone else who preferred to remain nameless (people speculated HP).
Just curious.... do you have Sprint PCS coverage ?
Because their 2.5G/3G wireless "Vision" service is
pretty equivalent to ISDN speeds (except perhaps in latency) and is $80/mo unlimited and has the convenient of wireless/cell, which means you could travel anywhere in the USA with PCS coverage and still have service.
Since SCO has intimated that Microsoft "may also" have IP issues with SCO as well... issues that their current license does not address...
Indeed every modern OS has IP issues with SCO
apparently...
So, let's see SCO also announce... Windows licenses from SCO... guarantees that SCO won't also sue each and every Windows users.
This certain has to be one of the most creative scams in a while. One does have to give SCO/McBride credit for such a ballsy strategy...
If this is to be a sub-sub laptop, I have to agree with the PPC crowd that Wince is better for this sort of thing than Palm OS.
This things looks pretty much like the HP 360LX and 620LX of several years ago. Maybe a bit lighter and with builtin WiFi. Otherwise, same diff... Those units didn't do all that well because, or rather, they did about as well as any Wince device. Not as well as the venerable, DOS-based HP200LX, and completely over shadowed by the rise of Palm.
The bigger these things get, and the shorter than battery life gets, the better one is with just something like the Libretto, a real sub-mini PC laptop.
This stuff is old, old hat.
I remember doing a high school science fair project with an ionic rocket. It was configured more like a rocket rather than a "floater" but same diff. Used an auto ignition coil to jack up to 20-40kv.
The part that the article doesn't seem to mention but should have is that you make lots of ozone with these things and ozone isn't particularly good for you. I remember "the smell of ozone" in the morning -- it smells like sick-sweet roses.
Anyways, cute, particularly that you can get a job at NASA doing this high school stuff... but far from revelatory...
Microsoft intruduces powerful-new military battle interface
"GI Bob" software to unify army command and control systems
REDMOND, Wash., May 23, 2003 -- American combat military personnel may get upgraded this year following Microsoft's release of a new battle user interface. The new product, Microsoft GI Bob for Windows, is based on the innovative user interface system initially released by Microsoft in 1993 to consumer sectors.
You forgot the GIBob Drag-n-DropDead(TM) "technology". Open up specific mission folder and you get a bunch of target icons on the Battlefield Desktop(TM). Drag your weapon icons on top of the intended targets and Bloowie! Specially designed "Are you sure?" dialog "technology" to prevent friendly fire. Enhanced desktop shredder for those SpecialOps missions that no-one else should know about. PlausibleDeniability operating mode so you can disavow any knowledge of GIBob's actions. Comes with Version 1.0 of Skynet(TM) so multiple GIBob's can communicate with each other over the net to coordinate attacks with a click of a button.
Indeed, I'm surprise they haven't yet claimed that they "might" have IP issues with every C program ever written...
"You see this tree trunk here called Unix -- we own all of that". And every seedling that this tree ever produced, including that whole forest out there of C programs of every size, big and small...
And all those programs and content that was created and built on top of Unix platforms, like all those Pixar and Lucasfilm movies, why we own that too..."
>>>
The reason that linux took off and HURD did not, was not at all due to the incomepence of the programmers, but is an interesting study in software engineering. In all the CS classes I have had they stressed how important is was to design everything first and then code - which is what the HURD team did. Linus's approach was different. He starting with something simple, and then improved it (call this iterative programming, agile programming, whatever - it's the same thing).
Let's not pat Linus on the back too much. The reason that Linus' approach was "successful", in part, is because he, nor RMS/GNU, didn't have to design much of anything. So, here, SCO has a point, hardly the first, as many have previously noted, that Linux/GNU has merely copied, with incremental improvements, an already previous well-proven design that itself has been evolving for more than 30 years.
That's right...
People are constantly confusing the issues and requirements of patents vs copyrights vs trade secrets.
Unix, at least originally by WE/At&T was protected primarily by trade secret. In that case, of course you should not look at the source lest you become contaminated. But copyrighted and patented materials can and, in the case of patents, MUST be available to the public to look at.
It should be obvious then that trade secret protection and patent protection are mutually exclusive. Copyright protection is orthogonal to these issues and deals with the specific EXPRESSION of the ideas, etc and not the ideas themselves.
Me: A great idea, but, that's really not enough... after all, some of these computers cost $200 or less, so just destroying the computer wouldn't be enough of a deterrent... We should arrange it so that the computer catches on fire... which hopefully will burn down the house of those nasty pirate-freeloaders...
Hatch: That's a thought -- it is certainly a logically extension of my idea, but what if the pirate lives in an apartment building... all that collateral damage...
Me: Gee, you'd care about that ? Even your proposal admits all sorts of similar circumstances, like, what if I used my boss's or coworker's computer to pirate stuff, and you'd destroy that computer... or better, if some hacker wrote a simple virus which caused millions of PCs to download copyrighted material, thereby destroying all those computers...
Hatch: Uh, I guess this idea needs a little more work and thought behind it... So I guess requiring Xerox machines to explode if they are used to copy books might have some problems too...
While I agree with some of what you say, the
missing point is that headphones do not recreate
an accurate soundstage -- all the cues from your
pinna are missing. The "soundstage" you get is
in between your ears, not natural at all...
So if the goal is to recreate the full aspects of a
live performance, headphones simply can't...
Headphone also do not reproduce the visceral aspects of sound... the feeling of a bass drum for example, requires more than just perfect response down to 20hz...
Well it depends on which form of Buddhism you are talking about... God is either non-existent or supra-existent. God is either irrelevant and therefore not worth mentioning, or so completely relevant that it is also not worth mentioning. And Buddhist is about making the individual, the self non-existent or irrelevant as well.
While those books were fun to read, they did seem fairly contrived. You can just tell that Farmer woke up one day and say "How can I create a story/world in which Einstein meets Newton, where famous person X meets another famous person Y even though they lived at different times...maybe if we just resurrect everybody...(of course we must somehow exclude dead babies, abortions, etc) and nevermind that given exponential population growth, all the few handful of people that we consider famous would be entirely lost in the trillions and quadrillions of people that will be born in the future..."
The rest of it is a contrivance to make that happen, and includes some fairly generic stuff about souls and wathans and what nots...
For a more expansive view of the physics and religious implications of these simulate all of human existence ideas, read the 1995 book The Physics of Immortality, by Tipler.
Among lots of other things, the idea is that we will all be resurrected at a time close to the end of creation (the universe) in the form of computer simulations.
Lots of pseudo-science to back up these assertions...
My guess is that these lines and blocks of lines will be in the C include header files.
There is bound to be a high degree of similarity, if not outright sameness in the layout of certain data structures and definitions of constants. Things like the definition of the tar or cpio headers, ioctl defines, stdio constants, etc, etc.
What is particularly irksome is that companies, particularly under CONTRACT where the point is not to alienate your partner in contract, nevermind the greater potential customer based, will normally issue cease and desist letters giving you a warning to stop the breach of contract or IP or copyright violations, etc. By SCO launching immediately into a $1B lawsuit, they have clearly shown their motives and agendas to be most impure and unworthy of respect.
Since Linus has had reign over the kernel and SCO has claimed that these infractions are in the kernel, it would be good for Linus to speak up and say if in fact there were pieces of the kernel, including header files, that were copied from somewhere, anywhere, not just SysV, or can Linus say that ALL of the kernel was created de novo without any copying from anywhere ?
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple iPOD is NOT a hard disk, blank media, CD-R, etc. It is a consumer electronic device. Do they tax Xbox's because it has a hard disk inside ? What about digital cameras with CF cards that could hold MP3's ? What about my MRI machine in the hospital that has many terabytes of storage ? What about my exabyte tape backup jukebox ?
It is one thing to tax consumer recording media that is likely to be used to store pirated music, although I also strongly object to that notion (I used my CD-R's to store scientific data). It is another to tax any ol' electronic device that some *could* jimmie to use to store pirated music but in fact is designed for another purpose (in the case of the iPOD, to store music that is obtained through legitimate means).
So one of the possible outcomes of all this SCO-crap that I would not be happy with is some other company, particularly like MS, end up owning SCO's Unix rights. In reading this infamous Halloween memo, I was worried about this sequence:
Difficult to decipher, with all the typos and what not, but what does ".. we could exit and Unix components... potentially back to Microsoft" mean ? Is part of the understanding that after the SCO dust settles, that MS might end up with Unix ? ugh...
It will be a tremendous shame to lose Hubble. But one can guess that Bush bought NASA off with the: Forget about Hubble and the Space Station (and our commitment to the Russkies), you will get $$B$$ with the Moon/Mars plan/ploy. And I'll get re-election points and more space/military spending.
So, good for Chandra. But we won't forget Hubble...
"SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag said there are millions of lines of offending code involved and that it's highly unlikely the matter could be resolved by removing that code."
yet in this letter, Darl is only claiming *thousands*: "I find this particularly galling because that Linux software contains thousands of lines of my company's proprietary UNIX code..."
Gee, I guess the magnitude of the issue has just be cranked down by 3 orders of magnitude -- the claimed infraction is now just 0.1% of the original claim. Do you think we will see SCO adjusting the $3B claim on IBM down to $3M ?
For general purpose PC computing, a laptop is the obvious way to go. It should be easy to find a decent one that will run with as little as 15-20 watts. You said 1.4Ghz. Again, why ? Re-evaluate exactly what you plan to do with it and why you need 1.4Ghz. You can run MS Office or Linux perfectly well with 300-500Mhz and find such laptops for Choose a laptop that is easy to feed from multiple power sources, even those that you may cobble together or build yourself. Bigger Toshiba Portege's (7020CT, $250, for example) use a power connector and 15volts that is easy to supply, while smaller Toshiba's use a more difficult to get power connector. Same with IBM Thinkpads (a Thinkpad 600E or 570 are good $200-300 choices). Remember that every additional step of power conversion costs efficiency. So for example,
Solar->12V lead acid->12V inverter->120VAC->laptop AC adaptor->15-16V laptop supply
is much less efficient than
Solar->15V laptop supply
But the original point is that you first have to more clearly identify the computing tasks you want to do. These days you can do quite a lot with a decent PDA whose power requirements are a fraction of that of a laptop. Depending again on your needs, you may wish to consider a WinCE machine. For example, if all you are going to do is writing, working on MS Word or Excel, you can find a full sized WinCE machine for $100-200. It has the power consumption of perhaps 3-5watts instead of 15-20 watts, and still has a decent keyboard and okay display.
Communications is the other question (are you planning to do email ? websurfing ?)
So... need more info on what are the computing tasks before better advice can be given on solutions and power needs... For example, if you don't need much storage, flash disk is much less power hungry than a hard disk.
If I recall correctly, IBM developed and released a competing and technically better alternative to VFAT as part of OS/2 and the battle between Win95 and OS/2 in the middle 1990's. Both were extensions to DOS FAT to allow long filenames. So... IBM could now release its long filename extension to FAT to the public domain and companies could start using it instead with probably as minimal trauma as could be if MS is going to force everyone to reconsider the usage of VFAT.
How can we convince these stupid money-grubbing lawyers to terrorize some other industry and leave the computer industry alone... perhaps some industry dearer to their hearts...
Say, that 32-foot-class yacht you sold me is actually only 31.2 foot...
Only in the USA... more stupid lawyer antics to get themselves rich while harming both customers and companies... Yeah, there's the 1000Mb 1Gb issue.. which is trivial and I think most anybody can handle. But the real problem is the filesystem overhead issue, which, of course differs between: 1) filesystems (FAT16, FAT32, ext2, UFS, etc), 2) the SIZE and NUMBER of files (1024 files of size 10kb != 10 files of 1024kb), 3) the blocking factor of the formatting used, 4) the cylinder/sector/track parameters, 5) partitioning loss, etc. Then throw in compression and/or RAID... What judge and jury is going to understand that 10Gb disks can store anywhere from 2Gb to 30Gb of data ?
Are y'all sure that Sun did give SCO $$$ recently ? I thought the deal was that Sun gave AT&T a big chunk years ago (something like $100m) and I distinctly remember McNealy saying that Sun would never have to pay for anything Unix-oid again, since it bought the "Everything" license. And so, I thought that SCO acknowledged that Sun was all paid up as far as Unix IP, but that was years ago... I had thought the "other" company was not Sun but someone else who preferred to remain nameless (people speculated HP).
Because their 2.5G/3G wireless "Vision" service is pretty equivalent to ISDN speeds (except perhaps in latency) and is $80/mo unlimited and has the convenient of wireless/cell, which means you could travel anywhere in the USA with PCS coverage and still have service.
Verizon would be similar but more expensive.
So, let's see SCO also announce... Windows licenses from SCO... guarantees that SCO won't also sue each and every Windows users.
This certain has to be one of the most creative scams in a while. One does have to give SCO/McBride credit for such a ballsy strategy...
This things looks pretty much like the HP 360LX and 620LX of several years ago. Maybe a bit lighter and with builtin WiFi. Otherwise, same diff... Those units didn't do all that well because, or rather, they did about as well as any Wince device. Not as well as the venerable, DOS-based HP200LX, and completely over shadowed by the rise of Palm.
The bigger these things get, and the shorter than battery life gets, the better one is with just something like the Libretto, a real sub-mini PC laptop.
The part that the article doesn't seem to mention but should have is that you make lots of ozone with these things and ozone isn't particularly good for you. I remember "the smell of ozone" in the morning -- it smells like sick-sweet roses.
Anyways, cute, particularly that you can get a job at NASA doing this high school stuff... but far from revelatory...
You forgot the GIBob Drag-n-DropDead(TM) "technology". Open up specific mission folder and you get a bunch of target icons on the Battlefield Desktop(TM). Drag your weapon icons on top of the intended targets and Bloowie! Specially designed "Are you sure?" dialog "technology" to prevent friendly fire. Enhanced desktop shredder for those SpecialOps missions that no-one else should know about. PlausibleDeniability operating mode so you can disavow any knowledge of GIBob's actions. Comes with Version 1.0 of Skynet(TM) so multiple GIBob's can communicate with each other over the net to coordinate attacks with a click of a button.
"You see this tree trunk here called Unix -- we own all of that". And every seedling that this tree ever produced, including that whole forest out there of C programs of every size, big and small...
And all those programs and content that was created and built on top of Unix platforms, like all those Pixar and Lucasfilm movies, why we own that too..."
>>> The reason that linux took off and HURD did not, was not at all due to the incomepence of the programmers, but is an interesting study in software engineering. In all the CS classes I have had they stressed how important is was to design everything first and then code - which is what the HURD team did. Linus's approach was different. He starting with something simple, and then improved it (call this iterative programming, agile programming, whatever - it's the same thing). Let's not pat Linus on the back too much. The reason that Linus' approach was "successful", in part, is because he, nor RMS/GNU, didn't have to design much of anything. So, here, SCO has a point, hardly the first, as many have previously noted, that Linux/GNU has merely copied, with incremental improvements, an already previous well-proven design that itself has been evolving for more than 30 years.
That's right... People are constantly confusing the issues and requirements of patents vs copyrights vs trade secrets. Unix, at least originally by WE/At&T was protected primarily by trade secret. In that case, of course you should not look at the source lest you become contaminated. But copyrighted and patented materials can and, in the case of patents, MUST be available to the public to look at. It should be obvious then that trade secret protection and patent protection are mutually exclusive. Copyright protection is orthogonal to these issues and deals with the specific EXPRESSION of the ideas, etc and not the ideas themselves.
Hatch: That's a thought -- it is certainly a logically extension of my idea, but what if the pirate lives in an apartment building... all that collateral damage...
Me: Gee, you'd care about that ? Even your proposal admits all sorts of similar circumstances, like, what if I used my boss's or coworker's computer to pirate stuff, and you'd destroy that computer... or better, if some hacker wrote a simple virus which caused millions of PCs to download copyrighted material, thereby destroying all those computers...
Hatch: Uh, I guess this idea needs a little more work and thought behind it... So I guess requiring Xerox machines to explode if they are used to copy books might have some problems too...
While I agree with some of what you say, the missing point is that headphones do not recreate an accurate soundstage -- all the cues from your pinna are missing. The "soundstage" you get is in between your ears, not natural at all... So if the goal is to recreate the full aspects of a live performance, headphones simply can't... Headphone also do not reproduce the visceral aspects of sound... the feeling of a bass drum for example, requires more than just perfect response down to 20hz...
Well it depends on which form of Buddhism you are talking about... God is either non-existent or supra-existent. God is either irrelevant and therefore not worth mentioning, or so completely relevant that it is also not worth mentioning. And Buddhist is about making the individual, the self non-existent or irrelevant as well.
While those books were fun to read, they did seem fairly contrived. You can just tell that Farmer woke up one day and say "How can I create a story/world in which Einstein meets Newton, where famous person X meets another famous person Y even though they lived at different times...maybe if we just resurrect everybody...(of course we must somehow exclude dead babies, abortions, etc) and nevermind that given exponential population growth, all the few handful of people that we consider famous would be entirely lost in the trillions and quadrillions of people that will be born in the future..." The rest of it is a contrivance to make that happen, and includes some fairly generic stuff about souls and wathans and what nots...
Among lots of other things, the idea is that we will all be resurrected at a time close to the end of creation (the universe) in the form of computer simulations. Lots of pseudo-science to back up these assertions...
What is particularly irksome is that companies, particularly under CONTRACT where the point is not to alienate your partner in contract, nevermind the greater potential customer based, will normally issue cease and desist letters giving you a warning to stop the breach of contract or IP or copyright violations, etc. By SCO launching immediately into a $1B lawsuit, they have clearly shown their motives and agendas to be most impure and unworthy of respect.
Since Linus has had reign over the kernel and SCO has claimed that these infractions are in the kernel, it would be good for Linus to speak up and say if in fact there were pieces of the kernel, including header files, that were copied from somewhere, anywhere, not just SysV, or can Linus say that ALL of the kernel was created de novo without any copying from anywhere ?