What I'd like to know (because IANAL) is, after SCO lose and go under will Darl be personally liable for the FUD his incredible public pronouncements have (intentionally) caused?
There is obviously a wide difference in scope between the actual confines of the SCO legal (non)case and the immense FUD and wild claims (3 million lines of offending code - anyone?) Darl and his co-directors have been bandying about. Not to mention the threats and blackmail.
A class action to hunt them down after SCO's demise?
I'm getting about 800 spams or more each day at the moment across several e-mail accounts. I'd simply love to be able to read them all but there isn't time. Each one politely requests I visit a webpage. I'd love to help those spammers by doing as they ask and visiting those URLs.
What I need is a program that will visit them for me and carefully store their content in my/dev/null directory for my pleasure. Of course it can be tricky to find them afterwards so my program will probably need to revisit each site two or three times. It could even run as a screensaver when I'm away from my PC!
Maybe the spammers that ask the loudest I would revisit the most times.
Now if a few million other people were so dilligently doing the same I reckon that would soon solve the spam problem.
OK so Walmart is pretty evil in terms of its effect on the community it moves into, it's hard on its suppliers and swingeing to its employees, yet it succeeds everywhere it goes. Whose fault is this?
Not Walmart's I can guarantee you (fault for their own success?) and funnily enough its's not the fault of the ordinary hard pressed consumer for not being altruistic enough to spend 50% more of their money for the same stuff in the local "rip-off" stores.
The fault lies with the "mom and pop" stores in every town that a)rip you off, b) never have what you need - or if they do its a lone faded box thats been on the shelf for years or worse bought and returned, thats an out of date model but they won't tell you that.
Our nearest Walmart is 45 mins drive away in the next town but if you want to buy something that theres even a chance you might have to return or that you want the correct price (ie maybe 10% more that you might see it from an on-line supplier and not like double that which is common in my town) then you make the drive.
When you return a faulty product to Walmart they refund/exchange it pretty swiftly because they have a policy that they adhere to. When you try to do that at your local store you are subject to the vagarities of the owners mood that day and have to brace yourself for an argument.
Walmart is exactly what these often lazy, greedy and complacent local stores need in order to raise their game. They all scream and throw their toys out of the pram but really if they offer excellent service, no-quibble returns, properly and honestly discount/bargain-bin out of date products, and strive for reasonable pricing then things might be different.
Smaller stores have to find a niche - they have the capability to provide excellent service in a way that a monolithic company like Walmart never can, they can make prompt delivery instead of - "next Thursday", they can INNOVATE.
With the government's love of microsoft windows, word.doc formats etc I was under the assumption that they were unaware of the concept of computer security.
I feel relieved when someone like Bond looks at a large 4-digit LED display, the odds are it'll stop when it reaches 00:02, and the bomb will be defused and the world will be saved.
Ever watched (massive pun intended) a bond movie? The timer always stops at 0:07.
SCO *is* wasting a valuable person's time... he had to spend time treating that letter seriously, and if I were him, I'd be keeping a log of all time spent on the SCO issue in the hope that it could be used to sue them in small claims court for expenses after SCO loses in court.
Now lets see.. at $4/hour thats three billion dollars and counting.
Yes you guessed it - I'm keeping a log of all the time I've spent reading SCO stories on/.
I set my wife's computer up with dual boot RedHat9/KDE and Win2000, with grub defaulting to Linux. She's a doctor and needs to access certain Canadian government websites - Health Canada is one example. However due to ignorant web design many pages won't load in Mozilla Firebird or Netscape - instead insisting on IE. Of course she assumes that its the fault of Linux. Hence the Win2k option. She just sees Linux as a hassle and thinks it is inferior to linux.
I think it should be illegal for publicly funded institutions to use closed source software or proprietary/patented standards.
BTW I use windowmaker (gentoo) and think its pretty close to my ideal gui.
A link with the story (where appropriate) for all us sympathisers to make some modest (or not-so-modest) paypal donation towards the fighting fund of minors or grannies being hounded by the RIAA or any brave and principled entity such as CyberKnights in exchange for/. karma.
Then those who REALLY mean what they say get to speak with a louder voice.
I've read so many comments about shorting stock from people who obviously havn't a clue what it means that its not funny.
FYI shorting means to sell stock that you DON'T OWN then borrow it to make delivery and buy it back later to return to the lender (hopefully at a lower price). Stock can also be shorted by the purchase of a put option giving the entitlment (but not obligation) to sell the stock in question at a future date at a price agreed today (you exercise the option only if the actual price on the exercise date is low enough to allow you to simultaneously buy the stock in the market to cover the delivery.
I agree 100%. I am constantly having to fix broken windoze boxes and everytime IE is loaded with hotbar or gator type hijackers. I'm sick of explaining to idiots that the percieved "benefits" of these features have a serious consequense in the background.
Anyone who helps embrace the new trend of RFID tags with lame arguments such as "I don't need to take out my credit card" (PIN numbers anyone?) is IMHO the absolute equivalent of those hotbar/gator downloaders.
You all say you value your freedom yet you'll squeal like the three little pigs when it has finally and irrevocalbly been lost. Can't you see the insidious trend you are supporting?
I used to prefer to CO2 powered cork extractor. You inserted the needle through the cork and released the gas while simultaneously screwing up your face and trying to cover your gonads.
I've heard that the European Union is soon going to pass a new harmonisation order forcing everyone to adopt metric time. For the early adopters out there, it's going to be announced in exactly one month, 7 weeks, 9 days, 42 hours and 88 minutes.
McBride: Our goal is not to blow up Linux. People ask why we don't go after the distributors...'If you have such a strong case, why not shut down Red Hat?' Our belief is that SCO has great opportunity in the future to let Linux keep going, not to put it on its back but for us to get a transaction fee every time it's sold. That's really our goal.
Being so reliant on future litigation revenues, its starting to look to me as thought there might possibly be a connection between Red Hat's recent announcement to stop distributing a free linux in favor of enterprise server distro and the SCO intent to get a fee for each linux install.
McBride seems to be playing it very gently with Red Hat...
This is great except you are missing the point. If people are naive enough to respond to spam they are hardly going to be reading any list of outed spam using companies.
For the average non-reader of slashdot the internet means the web (and email). Although many have heard of Google how many have clicked on that Groups button? Not many.
I know people who subscribe to consumer reports magazines and when I point them to usenet to read the comments and experiences of other consumers (amongst other things) they are amazed. When the hordes discover usenet then the transition away from paper and other traditional learning methods will really start to take off.
So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then installs.
Just three words for you.... Gentoo Linux - Portage
Portage is the package management system included with Gentoo. It searches for, checks all dependancies, fetches and installs packages. The package list is very exhaustive and always bang up to date. Although it is command line it is very very simple to use.
emerge -s // this searches through the portage tree for any ebuild (software package) containing in the name or description and shows installation status and latest available version (-s = search)
emerge -p // this checks dependancies and lists packages that would be automatically installed (-p = pretend)
emerge // gets the package sourcecode from the net - compiles and installs along with all necessary dependancies
This thing rocks. It has until recently been a source only based thing but more and more binary packages are now being included. (The complile times on slow/old hardware can get lengthy).
After using Gentoo you'll never go back to the rpm mess. It's possibly the best Linux installer there is.
"The interface seems to be coming along very well, it looks nice."
Fantastic a Command line!
When oh when will microsoft concentrate on producing an OS that does what an OS should properly do (IO, disk access, file permissions, job control, memory allocation etc etc) before adding all this other fluff?
With all these viruses in the news each week you'd think that would be their main focus.
I wouldn't mind betting 5 cents a song is all the artist currently gets when a 10 track CD is sold for $10 or $15.
At $2 per gig bandwidth cost 200 5 Mb mp3s can be downloaded for breakeven. Therefore probably 15 cents per song would give a marked payrise to the artist and enable the site operator to make a profit. Yes 5 cents per song is too low but too much higher and most people will be put off.
Personally I would never consider paying anything like 79 cents let alone 99 cents for a low quality download. On my hi-fi it would sound awful. I wouldn't tolerate anything below full CD quality if I was paying that much.
At 79 cents per song thats close enough to the purchase price of a CD for a typical 10 track album. And for that you get far better quality that you can play on your home HI-Fi.
For such a cheap method of distribution as on-line downloading I'd have thought 5 cents per song would be more reasonable. I guess it will have to come down to that kind of level to put an end to on-line music piracy which only exists because the music is so overpriced in the first place.
The worst part is that after you show friends the benefits of Mozilla when they come across a site that requires IE they just deduce that Mozilla doesn't work properly - it doesn't occur to them that the website is badly designed and/or they are being manipulated by vested interests.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'd like to know (because IANAL) is, after SCO lose and go under will Darl be personally liable for the FUD his incredible public pronouncements have (intentionally) caused?
There is obviously a wide difference in scope between the actual confines of the SCO legal (non)case and the immense FUD and wild claims (3 million lines of offending code - anyone?) Darl and his co-directors have been bandying about. Not to mention the threats and blackmail.
A class action to hunt them down after SCO's demise?
I'm getting about 800 spams or more each day at the moment across several e-mail accounts. I'd simply love to be able to read them all but there isn't time. Each one politely requests I visit a webpage. I'd love to help those spammers by doing as they ask and visiting those URLs.
/dev/null directory for my pleasure. Of course it can be tricky to find them afterwards so my program will probably need to revisit each site two or three times. It could even run as a screensaver when I'm away from my PC!
What I need is a program that will visit them for me and carefully store their content in my
Maybe the spammers that ask the loudest I would revisit the most times.
Now if a few million other people were so dilligently doing the same I reckon that would soon solve the spam problem.
http://karmic.sourceforge.net
Developers wanted.
In an act of neighbourly admiration the three-fingered Martians are repeatedly saluting the technological prowess of the Earthlings...
OK so Walmart is pretty evil in terms of its effect on the community it moves into, it's hard on its suppliers and swingeing to its employees, yet it succeeds everywhere it goes. Whose fault is this?
Not Walmart's I can guarantee you (fault for their own success?) and funnily enough its's not the fault of the ordinary hard pressed consumer for not being altruistic enough to spend 50% more of their money for the same stuff in the local "rip-off" stores.
The fault lies with the "mom and pop" stores in every town that a)rip you off, b) never have what you need - or if they do its a lone faded box thats been on the shelf for years or worse bought and returned, thats an out of date model but they won't tell you that.
Our nearest Walmart is 45 mins drive away in the next town but if you want to buy something that theres even a chance you might have to return or that you want the correct price (ie maybe 10% more that you might see it from an on-line supplier and not like double that which is common in my town) then you make the drive.
When you return a faulty product to Walmart they refund/exchange it pretty swiftly because they have a policy that they adhere to. When you try to do that at your local store you are subject to the vagarities of the owners mood that day and have to brace yourself for an argument.
Walmart is exactly what these often lazy, greedy and complacent local stores need in order to raise their game. They all scream and throw their toys out of the pram but really if they offer excellent service, no-quibble returns, properly and honestly discount/bargain-bin out of date products, and strive for reasonable pricing then things might be different.
Smaller stores have to find a niche - they have the capability to provide excellent service in a way that a monolithic company like Walmart never can, they can make prompt delivery instead of - "next Thursday", they can INNOVATE.
Thats what I think anyway.
.
With the government's love of microsoft windows, word .doc formats etc I was under the assumption that they were unaware of the concept of computer security.
I feel relieved when someone like Bond looks at a large 4-digit LED display, the odds are it'll stop when it reaches 00:02, and the bomb will be defused and the world will be saved.
Ever watched (massive pun intended) a bond movie? The timer always stops at 0:07.
Amongst those devices that I hope will be on the list of forgotten electronics of the 20's is the internet aware toaster.
Will the virus writers be able to set your house on fire I wonder?
Brings a new legitimacy to the term firewall. I guess without one you're toast?
SCO *is* wasting a valuable person's time... he had to spend time treating that letter seriously, and if I were him, I'd be keeping a log of all time spent on the SCO issue in the hope that it could be used to sue them in small claims court for expenses after SCO loses in court.
/.
Now lets see.. at $4/hour thats three billion dollars and counting.
Yes you guessed it - I'm keeping a log of all the time I've spent reading SCO stories on
I set my wife's computer up with dual boot RedHat9/KDE and Win2000, with grub defaulting to Linux. She's a doctor and needs to access certain Canadian government websites - Health Canada is one example. However due to ignorant web design many pages won't load in Mozilla Firebird or Netscape - instead insisting on IE. Of course she assumes that its the fault of Linux. Hence the Win2k option.
She just sees Linux as a hassle and thinks it is inferior to linux.
I think it should be illegal for publicly funded institutions to use closed source software or proprietary/patented standards.
BTW I use windowmaker (gentoo) and think its pretty close to my ideal gui.
People who ARE tools, now that's a different issue entirely...
Oh come on people, you must stop bringing SCO into every discussion. Sick minds!
I propose a new element to /.
/. karma.
A link with the story (where appropriate) for all us sympathisers to make some modest (or not-so-modest) paypal donation towards the fighting fund of minors or grannies being hounded by the RIAA or any brave and principled entity such as CyberKnights in exchange for
Then those who REALLY mean what they say get to speak with a louder voice.
Short SCO? Do you have any stock in this shit?
I've read so many comments about shorting stock from people who obviously havn't a clue what it means that its not funny.
FYI shorting means to sell stock that you DON'T OWN then borrow it to make delivery and buy it back later to return to the lender (hopefully at a lower price). Stock can also be shorted by the purchase of a put option giving the entitlment (but not obligation) to sell the stock in question at a future date at a price agreed today (you exercise the option only if the actual price on the exercise date is low enough to allow you to simultaneously buy the stock in the market to cover the delivery.
Yeah, but isn't the point that if you enter
microsoft.com
google DOESN'T ask you if you mean
mikerowesoft.com
I agree 100%. I am constantly having to fix broken windoze boxes and everytime IE is loaded with hotbar or gator type hijackers. I'm sick of explaining to idiots that the percieved "benefits" of these features have a serious consequense in the background.
Anyone who helps embrace the new trend of RFID tags with lame arguments such as "I don't need to take out my credit card" (PIN numbers anyone?) is IMHO the absolute equivalent of those hotbar/gator downloaders.
You all say you value your freedom yet you'll squeal like the three little pigs when it has finally and irrevocalbly been lost. Can't you see the insidious trend you are supporting?
I used to prefer to CO2 powered cork extractor. You inserted the needle through the cork and released the gas while simultaneously screwing up your face and trying to cover your gonads.
ALL my wives your honour,
Sorry but that's why I missed the deadline....
I've heard that the European Union is soon going to pass a new harmonisation order forcing everyone to adopt metric time. For the early adopters out there, it's going to be announced in exactly one month, 7 weeks, 9 days, 42 hours and 88 minutes.
McBride: Our goal is not to blow up Linux. People ask why we don't go after the distributors...'If you have such a strong case, why not shut down Red Hat?' Our belief is that SCO has great opportunity in the future to let Linux keep going, not to put it on its back but for us to get a transaction fee every time it's sold. That's really our goal.
...
Being so reliant on future litigation revenues, its starting to look to me as thought there might possibly be a connection between Red Hat's recent announcement to stop distributing a free linux in favor of enterprise server distro and the SCO intent to get a fee for each linux install.
McBride seems to be playing it very gently with Red Hat
This is great except you are missing the point. If people are naive enough to respond to spam they are hardly going to be reading any list of outed spam using companies.
For the average non-reader of slashdot the internet means the web (and email). Although many have heard of Google how many have clicked on that Groups button? Not many.
I know people who subscribe to consumer reports magazines and when I point them to usenet to read the comments and experiences of other consumers (amongst other things) they are amazed. When the hordes discover usenet then the transition away from paper and other traditional learning methods will really start to take off.
So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then installs.
.... Gentoo Linux - Portage
// this searches through the portage tree for any ebuild (software package) containing in the name or description and shows installation status and latest available version (-s = search)
// this checks dependancies and lists packages that would be automatically installed (-p = pretend)
// gets the package sourcecode from the net - compiles and installs along with all necessary dependancies
Just three words for you
Portage is the package management system included with Gentoo. It searches for, checks all dependancies, fetches and installs packages. The package list is very exhaustive and always bang up to date.
Although it is command line it is very very simple to use.
emerge -s
emerge -p
emerge
This thing rocks. It has until recently been a source only based thing but more and more binary packages are now being included. (The complile times on slow/old hardware can get lengthy).
After using Gentoo you'll never go back to the rpm mess. It's possibly the best Linux installer there is.
"The interface seems to be coming along very well, it looks nice."
Fantastic a Command line!
When oh when will microsoft concentrate on producing an OS that does what an OS should properly do (IO, disk access, file permissions, job control, memory allocation etc etc) before adding all this other fluff?
With all these viruses in the news each week you'd think that would be their main focus.
I wouldn't mind betting 5 cents a song is all the artist currently gets when a 10 track CD is sold for $10 or $15.
At $2 per gig bandwidth cost 200 5 Mb mp3s can be downloaded for breakeven. Therefore probably 15 cents per song would give a marked payrise to the artist and enable the site operator to make a profit. Yes 5 cents per song is too low but too much higher and most people will be put off.
Personally I would never consider paying anything like 79 cents let alone 99 cents for a low quality download. On my hi-fi it would sound awful. I wouldn't tolerate anything below full CD quality if I was paying that much.
At 79 cents per song thats close enough to the purchase price of a CD for a typical 10 track album. And for that you get far better quality that you can play on your home HI-Fi.
For such a cheap method of distribution as on-line downloading I'd have thought 5 cents per song would be more reasonable. I guess it will have to come down to that kind of level to put an end to on-line music piracy which only exists because the music is so overpriced in the first place.
The worst part is that after you show friends the benefits of Mozilla when they come across a site that requires IE they just deduce that Mozilla doesn't work properly - it doesn't occur to them that the website is badly designed and/or they are being manipulated by vested interests.