Do SCO really think people will pay this? Or do they have a 'long term strategy plan'?
I wish the world was perfect enough that this made sense to me. Unfortunately both of your points (while ideal) are wrong. People will pay for this (they already are!) and this is just another phase of their strategy plan they have been milking all year.
Last I heard, their court date was in 2005. The way I figure it, they have until then to pull this stuff left and right (as they have been). Whatever the company doesn't rake in through "license sales," the execs rake in through insider trading. It's a nasty game, but it's big business. And they are making this long-term, I don't figure it'll stop the day they go to court.
It's really just tragically ironic how SCO is acting out everything the OS ideals are against while claiming they are entitled to licenses on it.
In general, I'd say that if a method to create energy can't sustain its own requirements to produce energy it isn't worth building.
As far as storing water and pressure to take as a "battery," I don't know that there is any reason to do this either. Let's face it, water is heavy. High pressure containers are heavy. And if the energy to make and pressurize these necessities are coming from the same place as recharging my NiMH's except with less efficiency, guess which one I will go with?
With the pressure required, I see situations like saving rainfall off houses as being a disaster as even 30cm of water will be more or less be stagnant as there will need to be 30cm stored between collection periods (rain) so that the system gets moving again when rain does fall. It sounds worse than, say, those houses with solar panels on the roof. The great outdoors is not a sterile place, and such containers will quickly fill up with algae, mosquitoes, and everything else.
All that said, I have to wonder if there are some possible applications. I believe many power plants now are dumping a lot of water and running them through cooling systems. Maybe they could be air cooled as they run through the generator. I'm trying to be optimistic, but honestly even this seems like a longshot as the amount of power from the water expulsion from a power plant is probably negligible compared to the output of the conventional means of the plant itself.
Sure this is a cool thing scientifically, but I don't see it as so much replacing the Forever Flashlight's Faraday approach.
1. Release excellent mother-of-them-all P2P software under guise of legitimate software
2. Once everyone has it, delete all pirated files
3. Profit!
I half wish they'd actually do that - maybe it would incite a full boycott. Though I am happy with the understanding that their sales are declining already.
Telemarketers have had the DB since Aug 1, at which point the "first wave" ended and the telemarketers had 1 month to scrub their call list. In a week, they were supposed to have their lists cleared out to stop calling the numbers they already have and ready for the next update of people who signed up this month.
Not to mention that someone only need pull their sleeve over their finger if they're really that paranoid.
MDB? Are these people serious? They think Access has a chance of holding this number of records? I bet a single machine would be crawling by the end of a day.
And if they're going to export to a more suitable db anyway, why not just stick postgres or mysql on there to start? They need only be configured once, same as Access.
Not to mention the incredible drop in required hardware resources, which times all the voting machines to be used is tax money much better spent.
It seems to me that these voting systems should be given to a bidder, and then whatever system they consider can be scrutinized. Faster, cheaper, better, safer...
I agree - the huge advantage of OS is being reviewed by people like Gutmann in addition to others learning from him. If the community takes the stance that they'll take a shot at something and when it's found to be in inadequate to let whoever found it fix it, then we're worse off than closed source because our developers will never learn.
Personally, I think his review is invaluable, and if anybody who read it didn't learn something, maybe they should have been working on the solutions or at least have made the same post at an earlier date.
OTOH, I don't want to say it's the sole responsibility of the original authors to pick up the slack - that levels the playing field between OS and closed to a large extent.
His advice plays well out well in my head. Anyone polishing their crypto skills? You've got some very good guidance right now on some important projects. Run with it.
Commisions like this are set up to take care of certain areas that need regulation with an expertise not expected of someone whose expertise is supposed to be in fair laws.
Case in point: Cybersecurity. Probably most of the congressmen in office are only familiar with Windows. They may be perfectly competent in use of email and web browsing, as well as other things that vary person to person, but would you trust the body as a whole to regulate electronic security on the level of national secrets? If anything, I question whether they can get the right experts in the right place so that anything can be done with it at all. But if it were up to Senator Lob B. Me to have a say in what companies' safeguards are put on IRS data or nuclear launch codes for that matter, the entire planet should be shaking in their boots.
I'm not sure I agree with this idea. Because nobody seems to trust SCO's claims to begin with, I think they could play dirty pool with this too. All they have to do is put a hush-hush stop on checkins/outs to their developers, stick the linux kernel code in their CVS, and let any third party who wants to compare the supposed SCO code with the linux kernel code.
After they have "proven" their code is identical using a third party, they stick their own code back in the CVS, and are up and running with the code that was never stolen in the first place. Since the third party doesn't see the code, nobody's the wiser. At least until a court date - but then the linux community is face-deep in egg with injunctions out the wazoo until some court date in 2005. Even there, we can only hope that the real code is examined and their claims are falsified in another 18 months. Until then, we'd be begging for the days of our troubles being limited to removal of RPC and SoBig worms off every friend/family member's computer we have.
While I wish things were as simple as this, I don't know of any way for their claims to be verified other than a peer review by qualified *nix programmers, who as of now have to sign their career away with an NDA.
the geeks boycott and everyone else goes about their merry way.
I'm so broke, I am currently boycotting all domestic and imported products except food and gasoline to get to work.
Sure it's not organized, and I'm not really sure what the sacrifices of my boycotts are really changing, but hey...I'm broke. Sometimes the weight of circumstances outweigh potential ideals.
Right now they have to assume that a word document is unaltered upon receipt from a client. Now, with DRM, they can guarantee it. They also need to control distribution of documents and readability.
I fail to see where a simple "Protect worksheet with password" fails to meet this need.
On the other hand, re-implementation in a way that's not interoperable hints a different strategy to me.
The idea that this is purely a monopolistic tactic is worth review by more people than the/. crew. They can choke off other office suites with a version that forces their established customers to upgrade in one move.
I also notice that this announcement comes around the time they are kicking 3rd party clients off their IM network.
These moves doubtlessly show a fear of third party solutions, and if you doubt me check their "risk list." Last I knew, Linux was 2nd only to economic factors.
Defense: Check mouse movements
Offense: Record and playback
Defense: Check for exact replica
Offense: Add slight differences
Defense: Check slight differences for consistency with original behavior
Offense: Analyze movement to make differences consistent with recorded macro
This sort of thing goes on and on - reminds me of using a sharpie to circumvent the null data track on copyrighted CD's.
The bottomline is that there is no real security. Even the number of bits in encryption has to be bumped as processors speed up to try to keep them from being crackable in a timely manner. Suppose encrypted credit card transcactions are being logged by someone, with only the last 3 months being kept on file. If there's a huge breakthrough with a diamond superconductor processor, the attacker can assume that most of the credit cards logged in the last few months haven't expired, crack them fairly quickly (even at a day per card), and go on a shopping spree.
The only way to never be behind in an arms race is to never start one, unfortunately this means no steps can be taken for security.
Perhaps a better answer is to start with a system already a few steps ahead of the "offense" from the word go, discouraging attempts to circumvent it. Of course this tends to be costly to develop and (with computers) processor intensive to use.
If you discuss software patents with someone, make sure you wipe out that picture. 99% of all patents are owned by the greedy corporations, not by the lone inventors.
Important point! Now how do we fix that? Or at least prevent it from perpetuating?
I agree with much of what you say, but I think it's framed in a context that is far from universal.
For instance, suppose I (a nobody in terms of power/resources) invent something that is truly revolutionary, but have no resources to produce or market the idea. Without a patent, I have no protection. If I take the product or process to a producer, I am at their ethical mercy. They may simply tell me to hit the road and sell it to an established major player in the industry, who can use it to squelch out competition.
OTOH, if my invention has a degree of legal protection, I am gauranteed being able to make a buck (in the sense of feeding my growing family, not have a bigger ice sculpture at my next dinner party). This legal protection actually provides an incentive to innovation and development by people who are not major players - or even monopolies - encouraging competition and progress at the same time.
I'll give you that the system has faults, but to say patents themselves are an extreme offense to humankind, that might be taking the idea a bit far.
WolfPack prototypes will be put to the test with in the next 18 months, the DoD said.
Wonderful news for those of us living in the US.
Maybe I am being paranoid, I mean, the US government does need probably cause to eavesdrop on its citizens (mod -1 paranoid)...wait, Patriot act....I guess we are going to be the test subjects! (mod +1 paranoid)
If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of congress?
This is essentially what we are doing now. The contractor's ID, the store number, etc are written on a report that is signed and faxed. Form recognition/ICR software dumps it into a postgres db and our web server generates pages off that. The system works great 90% of the time, but unfortunately it's very difficult to get that last 10% to fax in their reports right-side up, re-send them if they jam, or just send them at all.
90% might seem good for most applications, but when you've got say a 15% margin and lose 10% of that, it's suddenly worth the risk of losing a cheap PDA now and then.
So if I can not get what I want, then I would settle for what is possible (and probable).
Precisely! Only it's not as bad a choice as you make it out to be - a small number of systems can be more easily corrected and the problem controlled much easier. Instead of 25 AS/400's pumping out unbelievable amounts of spam, we have a thousand Windows machines needing individual correction potentially sending just as much...and those are just the ones found at the time of the article's writing.
Even if systems with high bandwidth and power were proportionately vulnerable, I'd personally go with MS where I'd be so well established by the time even the first 1000 were identified that the distributed network would have a life of its own.
Maybe they didn't come out and say Windows for legal reasons. But get real, Macs and variants of Unix are not affected? If you were going to write this and you write it for those two, and you obviously want it on a lot of machines, what platform would you hack?
Not to mention the obviousness of using such a widespread and vulnerable platform. I think this is what everyone's getting at.
And to think of how many NT4 machines are out there with a root RPC vulnerability that MS refuses to fix. If someone's running NT4, I don't know how likely it is they are going to apply anti-virus patches. I think MS leaves footprints of vulnerabilities for this sort of problem for years after releasing products, regardless of actions others take to try to help.
Whether this is technically nanotechnology or not, I still find it very interesting. I always wondered how alchemists continued to find work after without ever making gold.
I suppose we still do the same thing current day - people are ever searching for perpetual motion machines and researching anti-gravity. Every time someone puts together a device the layman can't figure out, funding pours in and our modern alchemists continue employment in various potentially unsolvable problems.
Myself, I prefer Feymann's approach: considering how likely you are to solve a problem as well as how valuable the solution is (not to mention how many others could solve the problem).
AFAIK, IBM is part of a shrinking number of US companies doing high budget R&D in the computing arena. The American economy has benefitted incredibly from the tech boom (yes, we had tha crash, different issue).
Without companies like IBM, other countries will do to us in the computing world what they've done to us in the automobile industry. How soon do you want to hear that American computers are crap, and everyone buys them from Japan instead. Is this already happening?
I think most people would agree that ADHD is overdiagnosed. I've recently been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, commonly misdiagnosed as ADHD (among other things).
Asperger's is also known as geek syndrome, I'm surprised I don't see a lot of other people mentioning it. I have some PRN's I take when I get too worked up about something and I get by just fine.
Common characteristics are thinking extremely logically, social awkwardness, eccentric hobbies, clumsiness, lots of other stuff too. Not everyone exhibits all the symptoms. Most psychologists seem to overlook it unless they're working with an extreme case or a child.
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I wish the world was perfect enough that this made sense to me. Unfortunately both of your points (while ideal) are wrong. People will pay for this (they already are!) and this is just another phase of their strategy plan they have been milking all year.
Last I heard, their court date was in 2005. The way I figure it, they have until then to pull this stuff left and right (as they have been). Whatever the company doesn't rake in through "license sales," the execs rake in through insider trading. It's a nasty game, but it's big business. And they are making this long-term, I don't figure it'll stop the day they go to court.
It's really just tragically ironic how SCO is acting out everything the OS ideals are against while claiming they are entitled to licenses on it.
As far as storing water and pressure to take as a "battery," I don't know that there is any reason to do this either. Let's face it, water is heavy. High pressure containers are heavy. And if the energy to make and pressurize these necessities are coming from the same place as recharging my NiMH's except with less efficiency, guess which one I will go with?
With the pressure required, I see situations like saving rainfall off houses as being a disaster as even 30cm of water will be more or less be stagnant as there will need to be 30cm stored between collection periods (rain) so that the system gets moving again when rain does fall. It sounds worse than, say, those houses with solar panels on the roof. The great outdoors is not a sterile place, and such containers will quickly fill up with algae, mosquitoes, and everything else.
All that said, I have to wonder if there are some possible applications. I believe many power plants now are dumping a lot of water and running them through cooling systems. Maybe they could be air cooled as they run through the generator. I'm trying to be optimistic, but honestly even this seems like a longshot as the amount of power from the water expulsion from a power plant is probably negligible compared to the output of the conventional means of the plant itself.
Sure this is a cool thing scientifically, but I don't see it as so much replacing the Forever Flashlight's Faraday approach.
2. Once everyone has it, delete all pirated files
3. Profit!
I half wish they'd actually do that - maybe it would incite a full boycott. Though I am happy with the understanding that their sales are declining already.
Telemarketers have had the DB since Aug 1, at which point the "first wave" ended and the telemarketers had 1 month to scrub their call list. In a week, they were supposed to have their lists cleared out to stop calling the numbers they already have and ready for the next update of people who signed up this month.
(yes, I am joking)
MDB? Are these people serious? They think Access has a chance of holding this number of records? I bet a single machine would be crawling by the end of a day.
And if they're going to export to a more suitable db anyway, why not just stick postgres or mysql on there to start? They need only be configured once, same as Access.
Not to mention the incredible drop in required hardware resources, which times all the voting machines to be used is tax money much better spent.
It seems to me that these voting systems should be given to a bidder, and then whatever system they consider can be scrutinized. Faster, cheaper, better, safer...
Personally, I think his review is invaluable, and if anybody who read it didn't learn something, maybe they should have been working on the solutions or at least have made the same post at an earlier date.
OTOH, I don't want to say it's the sole responsibility of the original authors to pick up the slack - that levels the playing field between OS and closed to a large extent.
His advice plays well out well in my head. Anyone polishing their crypto skills? You've got some very good guidance right now on some important projects. Run with it.
Case in point: Cybersecurity. Probably most of the congressmen in office are only familiar with Windows. They may be perfectly competent in use of email and web browsing, as well as other things that vary person to person, but would you trust the body as a whole to regulate electronic security on the level of national secrets? If anything, I question whether they can get the right experts in the right place so that anything can be done with it at all. But if it were up to Senator Lob B. Me to have a say in what companies' safeguards are put on IRS data or nuclear launch codes for that matter, the entire planet should be shaking in their boots.
Frankly, I can't believe Mandrake thought of this before MS. Goes to show the innovation of the open-source community in a weird way.
After they have "proven" their code is identical using a third party, they stick their own code back in the CVS, and are up and running with the code that was never stolen in the first place. Since the third party doesn't see the code, nobody's the wiser. At least until a court date - but then the linux community is face-deep in egg with injunctions out the wazoo until some court date in 2005. Even there, we can only hope that the real code is examined and their claims are falsified in another 18 months. Until then, we'd be begging for the days of our troubles being limited to removal of RPC and SoBig worms off every friend/family member's computer we have.
While I wish things were as simple as this, I don't know of any way for their claims to be verified other than a peer review by qualified *nix programmers, who as of now have to sign their career away with an NDA.
I'm so broke, I am currently boycotting all domestic and imported products except food and gasoline to get to work.
Sure it's not organized, and I'm not really sure what the sacrifices of my boycotts are really changing, but hey...I'm broke. Sometimes the weight of circumstances outweigh potential ideals.
I fail to see where a simple "Protect worksheet with password" fails to meet this need.
On the other hand, re-implementation in a way that's not interoperable hints a different strategy to me.
The idea that this is purely a monopolistic tactic is worth review by more people than the /. crew. They can choke off other office suites with a version that forces their established customers to upgrade in one move.
I also notice that this announcement comes around the time they are kicking 3rd party clients off their IM network.
These moves doubtlessly show a fear of third party solutions, and if you doubt me check their "risk list." Last I knew, Linux was 2nd only to economic factors.
Offense: Record and playback
Defense: Check for exact replica
Offense: Add slight differences
Defense: Check slight differences for consistency with original behavior
Offense: Analyze movement to make differences consistent with recorded macro
This sort of thing goes on and on - reminds me of using a sharpie to circumvent the null data track on copyrighted CD's.
The bottomline is that there is no real security. Even the number of bits in encryption has to be bumped as processors speed up to try to keep them from being crackable in a timely manner. Suppose encrypted credit card transcactions are being logged by someone, with only the last 3 months being kept on file. If there's a huge breakthrough with a diamond superconductor processor, the attacker can assume that most of the credit cards logged in the last few months haven't expired, crack them fairly quickly (even at a day per card), and go on a shopping spree.
The only way to never be behind in an arms race is to never start one, unfortunately this means no steps can be taken for security.
Perhaps a better answer is to start with a system already a few steps ahead of the "offense" from the word go, discouraging attempts to circumvent it. Of course this tends to be costly to develop and (with computers) processor intensive to use.
...and finally, Bush declares war on the cluster.
Important point! Now how do we fix that? Or at least prevent it from perpetuating?
a large corporation has a patent on "a method for conveying the intention for an action to occur on a graphical display" (ie. clicking your mouse)
"To choose an option in this software, simply depress the appropriate mouse button with your toe."
;)
For instance, suppose I (a nobody in terms of power/resources) invent something that is truly revolutionary, but have no resources to produce or market the idea. Without a patent, I have no protection. If I take the product or process to a producer, I am at their ethical mercy. They may simply tell me to hit the road and sell it to an established major player in the industry, who can use it to squelch out competition.
OTOH, if my invention has a degree of legal protection, I am gauranteed being able to make a buck (in the sense of feeding my growing family, not have a bigger ice sculpture at my next dinner party). This legal protection actually provides an incentive to innovation and development by people who are not major players - or even monopolies - encouraging competition and progress at the same time.
I'll give you that the system has faults, but to say patents themselves are an extreme offense to humankind, that might be taking the idea a bit far.
Wonderful news for those of us living in the US.
Maybe I am being paranoid, I mean, the US government does need probably cause to eavesdrop on its citizens (mod -1 paranoid)...wait, Patriot act....I guess we are going to be the test subjects! (mod +1 paranoid)
If pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of congress?
90% might seem good for most applications, but when you've got say a 15% margin and lose 10% of that, it's suddenly worth the risk of losing a cheap PDA now and then.
Precisely! Only it's not as bad a choice as you make it out to be - a small number of systems can be more easily corrected and the problem controlled much easier. Instead of 25 AS/400's pumping out unbelievable amounts of spam, we have a thousand Windows machines needing individual correction potentially sending just as much...and those are just the ones found at the time of the article's writing.
Even if systems with high bandwidth and power were proportionately vulnerable, I'd personally go with MS where I'd be so well established by the time even the first 1000 were identified that the distributed network would have a life of its own.
Not to mention the obviousness of using such a widespread and vulnerable platform. I think this is what everyone's getting at.
And to think of how many NT4 machines are out there with a root RPC vulnerability that MS refuses to fix. If someone's running NT4, I don't know how likely it is they are going to apply anti-virus patches. I think MS leaves footprints of vulnerabilities for this sort of problem for years after releasing products, regardless of actions others take to try to help.
I suppose we still do the same thing current day - people are ever searching for perpetual motion machines and researching anti-gravity. Every time someone puts together a device the layman can't figure out, funding pours in and our modern alchemists continue employment in various potentially unsolvable problems.
Myself, I prefer Feymann's approach: considering how likely you are to solve a problem as well as how valuable the solution is (not to mention how many others could solve the problem).
Without companies like IBM, other countries will do to us in the computing world what they've done to us in the automobile industry. How soon do you want to hear that American computers are crap, and everyone buys them from Japan instead. Is this already happening?
Asperger's is also known as geek syndrome, I'm surprised I don't see a lot of other people mentioning it. I have some PRN's I take when I get too worked up about something and I get by just fine.
Common characteristics are thinking extremely logically, social awkwardness, eccentric hobbies, clumsiness, lots of other stuff too. Not everyone exhibits all the symptoms. Most psychologists seem to overlook it unless they're working with an extreme case or a child.