Sorry, guys, but this DOES matter. Linux is the POSTERCHILD for OSS and the GPL. If LINUX DOES get dragged into this, and SCO IS sucessful, the general public will most likely view all OSS and GPL software as 'risky', and everyone will be afraid to use it because of that risk of litigation.
Does SCO have a viable position? IANAL, so I have NO idea. But I CAN see what possible outcomes would be, and what affect they could have on our post-dot-com industry.
I'm STILL hoping for a viable alternative to the crappy quality code MS puts out. MAC ain't gonna do it... they're too desktop focused. Linux is currently the strongest contendor. If SCO wins, this could DRAMATICALLY change the face of Linux.
OTOH, I can't imagine WHY you would buy a SUN 1Ghz Sparc w/ 512MB RAM, and a 36GB SCSI disk when you can get a 2.0Ghz celeron w/ 128MB RAM, and a 40GB IDE disk for $299 from Dell. (and no, I did NOT drop a digit).
Want SCSI? $399.
Want more RAM? 512MB ECC memory from Crucial ~$125.
Add 3 NICs? $300 (bad)
So for a conservative $850, I can get a Dell. Let me do the math for you.. I can get 3 Dells for the price of 1 of those $3000 SUNs.
Remember what RAID stands for? Well, you're now looking at the concept of RAIS: Redundant Array of Inexpensive SERVERS.
This may not be about historical UNIX code. This may be about recent development efforts and the sour relationship between IBM and SCO over Itanium UNIX.
What I can see where they might have a beef with IBM in violationg their contract, but what I don't understand is how this allows them to sue anyone who ever used LINUX. SCO has the licensing rights to UNIX. They sued IBM for one b-e-e-l-i-o-n dollars because IBM allegedly violated that contract.
Next, they then sent 1500 letters to people basically telling them "this MIGHT be illegal, so you should get your lawyers to look at it, because if we can get 1500 lawyers to agree with us, it will make a nice precident in court."
But, since there is no CONTRACT with these companies, and IF Novell still owns the IP to UNIX, it seems as though the only people SCO should be able to get damages from are the ones they had contracts with...
"The idea of getting a SCO license had been under consideration prior to the IBM lawsuit...."
It's just a happy coincidence that we decided to do it NOW, before SCO Group folds in December due to lack of funds. If a simple purchase of a "UNIX" license will let two of our competitors duke it out, with one or both of them dropping out of the market because of it, then it's a small price to pay.
Plus, of SCO wins over IBM, then they can go after Redhat, and Suse, and all those other companies that don't hold the MS principles dearly.
Remember, it's the prefixes that tell tele-marketers that they can't call your cell phone... If you can take your wired prefix to your cell phone, then you will loose a valuable tool in combating them...!
The register can really piss me off... They never print the full story.. just the inflamitory parts.
What the guy did wrong was sell the Enigmah chip. That chip was not flashable, and came with the hacked bios INSTALLED.
It's the only chip that isn't flash programmable, and the only chip that came with the bios.
I still don't think it's illegal to sell the mod chips without the BIOS. It's the BIOS software that is illegal, because most of the bios' out there are hacked versions of the original bios.
If you use the open source bios for the xbox to run things like Linux, it should not violate the DCMA.
I hate it when people say that computers are getting 'smarter'. They are *NOT* getting smarter. They are handling more tasks. They are getting FASTER. But, until it can handle things like associative pattern recognition (Ok. I made up that term. Basically, it's the idea that a computer can handle the following logic: It's not shaped like a coffee cup, but I know it's a coffee cup.) or can demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt to a changing environment at even REMOTELY the rate that even the simplest of creatures can... then, I'll consider them 'smart'.
Until then, by personifying computers, you are only FEEDING these types of irrational fears.
There is no HAL today, and probably won't be until we get a computer to recognize the fact that one everything in the universe is black and white. One and Off. The world isn't binary... it's analog.
How much sensitive information could be in less that 46 bytes? Granted, it's a bad programming practice, but seriously, what are the odds that something important like the formula to Willie Wonkas Ever-lasting Gobstopper would be in those padded bytes?
Based on the typical internet usage, I'm guessing they'd get up to 45 bytes of flesh-tone JPEG data, or the words "you to can have up 3 or 4 inches added to yo".
My experience is this: You need to hire two extra geeks just to get it running, It never really works that well, and spending that money of some clustering and a good perl guru would have a more drastic effect on your uptime
I'm not sure that advanced monitoring would benefit two guys and a dozen or two servers...
but, by the time you get to 1000-2000 servers in 3 data centers in 3 countries on three continents... those two guys and a perl book aren't going to be very affective...
Proactive systems monitoring performance in terms of Service Level Agreements, and dynamically shifting resources to meet the dynamically changing needs of the Internet is almost a requirement...
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news. This is an editorial, not an article.
How about talking about Grid computing. Or Organic IT. Developing systems and monitoring capabilities that go beyond telling you things are down, or when they're too busy. They actually add capacity on the fly through virtualization, taking from inactive systems to cover for the active system.
I think Marc once had a vision, but I'm not sure how strong of a visionary he is these days...
To add to the random collection of arbitrary "it doesn't work for me/it works fine for me"...
My windows XP install of moz 1.1, 1.2a, and 1.2b has been incredibly stable. 1.2b had some installation problems, but nothing that a full uninstall and reinstall didn't fix.
So, since we both that dramatically different experiences w/ mozilla on windows.. what do you supposed the odds are that WINDOWS has the variability.. not Mozilla?
As long as Internet Exploder is the ONLY browser to come with that shiney new PC everyones getting, then recommending that people DON'T use it is a total waste of time. People look at the prospect of tying up their modem for a 8-10MB file, and they basically think 'It won't effect me'.
I have enough trouble convincing my Mom and sister to update their AV software weekly, and that's only a few hundred kbytes.
So, how do you stop Word from sending macro viruses when it's running under Wine?
Should Crossover figure out how to support AV software too? If not, how do you protect the normal.dot file from a macro virus under Word? Would it work with the normal.dot file read-only?
The closer we get to having these applications run WITHOUT adequate virus protection is a pretty serious risk, don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
Where are my moderation points when I need them.
-1 Troll.
Sorry, guys, but this DOES matter. Linux is the POSTERCHILD for OSS and the GPL. If LINUX DOES get dragged into this, and SCO IS sucessful, the general public will most likely view all OSS and GPL software as 'risky', and everyone will be afraid to use it because of that risk of litigation.
Does SCO have a viable position? IANAL, so I have NO idea. But I CAN see what possible outcomes would be, and what affect they could have on our post-dot-com industry.
I'm STILL hoping for a viable alternative to the crappy quality code MS puts out. MAC ain't gonna do it... they're too desktop focused. Linux is currently the strongest contendor. If SCO wins, this could DRAMATICALLY change the face of Linux.
OTOH, I can't imagine WHY you would buy a SUN 1Ghz Sparc w/ 512MB RAM, and a 36GB SCSI disk when you can get a 2.0Ghz celeron w/ 128MB RAM, and a 40GB IDE disk for $299 from Dell. (and no, I did NOT drop a digit).
Want SCSI? $399.
Want more RAM? 512MB ECC memory from Crucial ~$125.
Add 3 NICs? $300 (bad)
So for a conservative $850, I can get a Dell. Let me do the math for you.. I can get 3 Dells for the price of 1 of those $3000 SUNs.
Remember what RAID stands for? Well, you're now looking at the concept of RAIS: Redundant Array of Inexpensive SERVERS.
What, AGAIN!?!?
This may not be about historical UNIX code. This may be about recent development efforts and the sour relationship between IBM and SCO over Itanium UNIX.
What I can see where they might have a beef with IBM in violationg their contract, but what I don't understand is how this allows them to sue anyone who ever used LINUX. SCO has the licensing rights to UNIX. They sued IBM for one b-e-e-l-i-o-n dollars because IBM allegedly violated that contract.
Next, they then sent 1500 letters to people basically telling them "this MIGHT be illegal, so you should get your lawyers to look at it, because if we can get 1500 lawyers to agree with us, it will make a nice precident in court."
But, since there is no CONTRACT with these companies, and IF Novell still owns the IP to UNIX, it seems as though the only people SCO should be able to get damages from are the ones they had contracts with...
Or am I missing something?
"The idea of getting a SCO license had been under consideration prior to the IBM lawsuit...."
It's just a happy coincidence that we decided to do it NOW, before SCO Group folds in December due to lack of funds. If a simple purchase of a "UNIX" license will let two of our competitors duke it out, with one or both of them dropping out of the market because of it, then it's a small price to pay.
Plus, of SCO wins over IBM, then they can go after Redhat, and Suse, and all those other companies that don't hold the MS principles dearly.
"The envelope, please."
"And the award for the best open-source hacking tool used in a motion picture goes to nmap, for it's cameo-appearence in Matrix: Reloaded"
"Camera scans the audience where we see tripwire, sitting with his girlfriend ethereal... cuts to ndiff, who is just beaming w/ pride..."
Remember, it's the prefixes that tell tele-marketers that they can't call your cell phone... If you can take your wired prefix to your cell phone, then you will loose a valuable tool in combating them...!
The register can really piss me off... They never print the full story.. just the inflamitory parts.
What the guy did wrong was sell the Enigmah chip. That chip was not flashable, and came with the hacked bios INSTALLED.
It's the only chip that isn't flash programmable, and the only chip that came with the bios.
I still don't think it's illegal to sell the mod chips without the BIOS. It's the BIOS software that is illegal, because most of the bios' out there are hacked versions of the original bios.
If you use the open source bios for the xbox to run things like Linux, it should not violate the DCMA.
IANAL, but
Ok. When you become a lawyer, let me know. Until then, this is an opinion, masquerading as a legal reference.
I hate it when people say that computers are getting 'smarter'. They are *NOT* getting smarter. They are handling more tasks. They are getting FASTER. But, until it can handle things like associative pattern recognition (Ok. I made up that term. Basically, it's the idea that a computer can handle the following logic: It's not shaped like a coffee cup, but I know it's a coffee cup.) or can demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt to a changing environment at even REMOTELY the rate that even the simplest of creatures can... then, I'll consider them 'smart'.
Until then, by personifying computers, you are only FEEDING these types of irrational fears.
There is no HAL today, and probably won't be until we get a computer to recognize the fact that one everything in the universe is black and white. One and Off. The world isn't binary... it's analog.
I'd think it'd have to be a HUGE hole... ESPECIALLY if you can see it from space!
Other than Outlook, I haven't seen an improvement in Office since Office 97, and even THAT was iffy over Office95...
Samba-DS9??!!?? Get real. As any good corporate citizen knows, we all want Samba-Enterprise .
Going up against Harry Potter, and all the other holiday seasons wasn't probably a great idea...
I bet they would have made a better profit if it had been released in January...
It's called a skeleton key. They've been around for a hundred year.
The trick is not giving keys to people who will miss use them.
Think of it as 'root' access for a physical lock?
How much sensitive information could be in less that 46 bytes? Granted, it's a bad programming practice, but seriously, what are the odds that something important like the formula to Willie Wonkas Ever-lasting Gobstopper would be in those padded bytes?
Based on the typical internet usage, I'm guessing they'd get up to 45 bytes of flesh-tone JPEG data, or the words "you to can have up 3 or 4 inches added to yo".
I dunno Taco, are you an AOL user?
My experience is this: You need to hire two extra geeks just to get it running, It never really works that well, and spending that money of some clustering and a good perl guru would have a more drastic effect on your uptime
I'm not sure that advanced monitoring would benefit two guys and a dozen or two servers...
but, by the time you get to 1000-2000 servers in 3 data centers in 3 countries on three continents... those two guys and a perl book aren't going to be very affective...
Proactive systems monitoring performance in terms of Service Level Agreements, and dynamically shifting resources to meet the dynamically changing needs of the Internet is almost a requirement...
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news.
This is an editorial, not an article.
How about talking about Grid computing. Or Organic IT. Developing systems and monitoring capabilities that go beyond telling you things are down, or when they're too busy. They actually add capacity on the fly through virtualization, taking from inactive systems to cover for the active system.
I think Marc once had a vision, but I'm not sure how strong of a visionary he is these days...
To add to the random collection of arbitrary "it doesn't work for me/it works fine for me"...
My windows XP install of moz 1.1, 1.2a, and 1.2b has been incredibly stable. 1.2b had some installation problems, but nothing that a full uninstall and reinstall didn't fix.
So, since we both that dramatically different experiences w/ mozilla on windows.. what do you supposed the odds are that WINDOWS has the variability.. not Mozilla?
As long as Internet Exploder is the ONLY browser to come with that shiney new PC everyones getting, then recommending that people DON'T use it is a total waste of time. People look at the prospect of tying up their modem for a 8-10MB file, and they basically think 'It won't effect me'.
I have enough trouble convincing my Mom and sister to update their AV software weekly, and that's only a few hundred kbytes.
How do these sites GET their news? I figured that the companies themselves 'leaked' a lot of this information..
Individual things here and there are typically reported by the individual.. but where do they get the BIG news from companies like Dell, or Best Buy?
They are giving the DVD for free.
This time, sure. But WHY don't they want us to keep what's on it, especially if it is free?
It has to be a market test to see if it works. And if it does, what will they use it for?
Why is the entertainment industry so hell-bent on NOT giving us entertainment?
You'd think that will the failure of DivX (the Circuit City one), they they would realize that when someone buys something, they expect to keep it...
Even for Video rentals, I wonder if we're SUCH a disposable society that creating this much waste is worth it.
So, how do you stop Word from sending macro viruses when it's running under Wine?
Should Crossover figure out how to support AV software too? If not, how do you protect the normal.dot file from a macro virus under Word? Would it work with the normal.dot file read-only?
The closer we get to having these applications run WITHOUT adequate virus protection is a pretty serious risk, don't you think?