Somehow I think that this has more to do with the disappointing results from the Golden Compass movie, which New line was hoping would be a 3-year blockbuster holiday series. It appears that the various religious groups are convincing their members to stay away from it due to the anti-religious message in the books.
I had a wireless netgear card go out on me (after working fine for months). When I called Customer service for a replacement they insisted that the problem was Linux on my laptop and not the faulty card. The India-based representative told me that Linux was not supported. I had him access his own companies website and pointed out that they had Linux drivers available to download, but he still insisted that Linux was not supported.
I finally convinced him that the card was bad after I borrowed an identical card from a friend and it worked fine on my laptop, and my card didn't work on his XP system. But it took 3 calls and plenty of frustrating conversation with someone who didn't quite understand what I was saying.
I can't wait for the day when Linux is more widespread and openly supported by more companies.
I hope HP offers a Linux laptop to US Customers. Trying to buy a laptop is really hit or miss. I tried a Toshiba (Centrino processor) a couple of years ago, but had to return it after a few days because at that time the Kernel support for the Centrino was pretty bad.
I finally resorted to taking a live-Linux CD into the showroom and talking a salesperson into letting me try it on various laptops until I found one that was fairly compatible. Even getting that allowed was a struggle. Luckily, the manager had played around with Linux and knew what Live CD was.
HP had the most compatible laptop at the time, but it's still been a struggle to get certain things to work properly. It's on its last legs now and will be replaced sometime later this year. Hopefully it will be easier to find a Linux compatible laptop this time.
Um, you didn't read his response, did you? The passport check will only take place at border entry ports. There are hundreds of miles of unpatrolled border with Canada and Mexico with a barrier not more sophisticated than a ditch or a barb wire fence.
It seems ludicrious that the government would create more hardships for citizens, while it continues to offer incentives in the form of amnesties for current and future illegal immigrants. With an estimated 20 Million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, politicians are nuts to think that additional cheap labor is needed.
Yeah right. I grew up in the Bellingham, WA area and heard constantly about the potential disaster of one of the volcanos blowing up, or the big earthquake that was expected in the region. Not the relativiely minor one that hit Seattle a few years back.
I feel much safer in Utah with the crappy/rude drivers, forest fires, droughts and potential earthquake. At least we don't have to deal with hurricanes, tsunamis and massive tornados.
There's no point worrying about things you can't control. There really aren't any places free from natural disasters.
After reading the MS blurb, it looks like the e-week article is completely off base. Combs is not a company that "migrated" to Linux and then went back to Windows.
The company they worked with to build their websites years ago choose a Linux-based CGI sytem and hosted and maintained it for them off-site.
When their solution provider/ISP went under, they were forced to either take the project in-house or find another provider.
The point is they migrated away from CGI to a more modern web technology. Because they were pre-disposed to MS/Windows, they choose that solution. However, they could have just as easily stuck with Linux and gone with Java/JSP or possibly PHP as a better altenative to CGI. This is not a recent event either, the ISP in this case went under over two years ago
It would be equivalent to an American who grew up in the sticks without runing water visiting Mexico and seeing a modern bathroom for the first time and deciding to move there because of it, then turning around and ripping on the US because it isn't modern like Mexico.
It's very disturbing that a computer connection is now legally equivalent to being physically present in order to commit a crime.
If I'm logged into my banks computer to review my account while it's being robbed, am I an accessory to the crime?
If I discuss through e-mail religion, politics, etc... with a citizen of another country which is deemed critical or violates some law in China for example, could the fact that my mail server connects to a mail server located in China become equivalent to me actually going to China to speak against the government?
This new precedent combined with the musings of Orrin Hatch make for a pretty scary future.
Combine this with IP spoofing and a whole new dimension to identity theft and it's consequences is born.
On the upside, I know a couple of politicians who could be extradited somewhere, I'm sure they've done something that's illegal in another country.
Because several states now allow illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses using two very insecure forms of Identification: A consular identification card issued by foreign consulate offices, or the ITIN Number supplied by the IRS to people who can't qualify for a social security number.
The consular card is recognized by the FBI as an insecure document. The only reason they are needed is because the recipient entered the U.S. illegaly and does not possess a valid visa, passport or other identification provided through legal channels. There have been cases where people have been arrested carrying multiple copies of this ID, with the same picture and differing names.
The ITIN number can be obtained by calling a 1-800 number and providing a name and address. The IRS does nothing to verify the information given and has stated multiple times that this tax number should ONLY be used for paying taxes. This is not meant to be an Identification number, especially for obtaining a drivers licenses. They sent out a letter this past December to all governors and heads of the driver license division in each state to ask them to stop this practice. Despite this request, states like Utah refused to modify their laws to fix this security problem. This combined with the "motor voter" laws can lead to other problems such as voter fraud.
Because the drivers license is used for many other purposes other than proof that an individual knows the basic driving rules, we either need to go back to only issuing it for people with verified documentation, or creating a national ID that is only given out to citizens. The national ID would be used instead of a drivers license for employment, boarding planes, voting, etc....
Company policy makers are great at coming up with silly policies that are not carefully thought out. (Which is why we can all laugh at Dilbert)
Several years ago I worked for a micro-manager. He required all developers to receive permission from him before any changes could be made to a reporting system. Even if you wanted to correct a spelling error on a report you were required to fill out a request for change form and meet personally with the director for approval.
As soon as this policy was implemented, the efficiency in the department dropped to almost nothing. We all joked that it took longer to fill out the paperwork than it took to actually do the work in the first place.
Things reaced a head during a business trip to Asia. I was working with some consultants who were giving me information on how to format tax reports required for that country. Before we could open up for business, the reports needed to be modified and printed out for approval by various government agencies. Because of the time zone difference, the change management policy really got in the way; yet the director insisted that he still wanted to approve every single change by phone each day.
Since he didn't specify a time to call, I would wait until the end of each work day in Asia and call him before leaving for the day (at 2:00 A.M. his time). Sometimes I would "remember" something I had forgotten to ask permission for and have to call him a second or third time. After about 3 days, I was given blanket permission to make any needed changes to the report for the balance of the trip.
Soon after that, the policy was modified extensively, to allow us to do our jobs. Major releases and new projects were managed by committee, but minor changes were allowed to go through as long as they passed the QC process.
It's about time that ATI released linux drivers for their cards. I tried downloading and installing the drives on my hp laptop, but the driver does not work with the Radeon IGP card.
I guess I'll go back to waiting. At least the nvidia drivers work great on my two desktop linux machines that have GeForce cards.
Yesterday the Utah House of Representatives passed a bill that would require stores to disable any RFID tag at the point of sale to a consumer (unless the consumer specifically requests that they don't).
There was a lot of debate on the issue, but it seems like the legislator who presented the bill has done a lot of research and made a very compelling presentation. I'm not sure how the bill will fare in the Senate here, but the House passed it by a fairly large margin.
There were several lobbyists in town from back east trying to kill this bill, but they obviously failed.
Is a natural gas utility company operating in Utah. I can't believe they would waste money on linux licenses. I would love to know how much they wasted on licensing fees.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but they recently raised everyones rates substantially. For example my bill for January was almost $300, which is triple what a normal winter gas bill would be. They claim it has to do with high demand for natural gas, but I wonder if they are attempting to recoup their linux license fees to SCO as well.
The public utility commission is going to get an earful from me tomorrow!
Sco probably doesn't track when this happens and I'm willing to bet that at least some of the comment or code area matches used to generate the FUD were those that originated in other systems and were placed into Unix.
Hopefully the judge in the IBM case is able to consider this possibility and require SCO to prove that the any code in question was actually an original creation of theirs and not ported from someplace else.
Actually Hatch has a personal conflict of interest in this case. His son is one of the lawyers defending SCO in this matter.
It would be interesting to know if the Senator has any involvement behind the scenes with this case. For example when I called the Utah Attorney Generals' office, I was told that they are not going to look at SCO or their lawsuits at all, even if they go after individual consumers.
Because Hatch, the Attorney General and most of the Canopy/SCO people all go to the same church, it makes me wonder if there is some kind of pro-SCO protection being generated here behind the scenes.
Re:Linux written to compete with SCO?
on
SCO News Roundup
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· Score: 1
It seems like SCO has two ways of making money: Lawsuits and selling their overinflated stock. This is now their business model.
Based on this, it's obvious that Novell is not competing against them. Novell is trying to follow the old-fashioned business model: Produce a product and sell it to people.
Our Network administrator sent this out last week. Apparantely the new Outlook 2003 client is not backwards compatible with older versions of exchanger server.
Attention All Employees:
Until further notice, Outlook 2003, which was just recently released on the market, should not be installed on any company computer system. It must not be used to access your Outlook/Exchange Email accounts. This applies to all companies, all locations, all laptops, and all home PC's used to connect to your company email. This also includes any new PC's or Laptops purchased that have Outlook 2003 pre-installed. If you now have, or in the future aquire, a PC or laptop with Office 2003 installed, please contact the IT department to ensure that Outlook 2003 is removed and a previous version is installed before attempting to access your email account.
If any individual uses Outlook 2003 to access their email account, Outlook Web Access (OWA) will stop functioning for everyone. The subsequent remedy would require Outlook 2003 to be removed, the email account accessed would have to be completely deleted from the server and reinstalled from scratch, and the server would need to have some components re-installed. That is not a very pleasant prospect.
I understand that some individuals are always excited about having the very latest software available. But there are several previous versions that still provide full functionallity and allow you to effectively perform your job functions. In this case installing the "latest and greatest" software has proven to be very detrimental to our systems. While the permanant fix is not yet available, I appreciate your cooperation in preventing these problems by refraining from using Outlook 2003.
I just got off the phone with my State Attorney Generals' office (Utah). They have been receiving a lot of e-mails and calls regarding SCO.
She referred me to a different person who read me a prepared statement that basically said that the issues raised by SCO are Federal copyright issues and the State has no Jurisdiction.
She suggested I contact either my elected officials to complain, or contact the US Attorney for my area. I wasn't able to talk with a live person there, but did leave a message.
I can't believe SCO is allowed to threaten innocent companies without first proving their claims. Based on the code samples seen yesterday, they have only tried to find similar code blocks between their code and Linux. What they haven't done is determine where their code came from, or if it has been released to the public in the past.
When I came back from Lunch yesterday, the network admins wanted to talk to me because they had detected the virus running on my computer and wanted to come remove it.
It turns out they had scanned the entire network identifying any computers running services on port 4444, which led them to believe my system was infected. It turned out to be a Kerberos related service.
I thought it was pretty funny.
This is exactly what sparked my interest in linux 4 years ago. A nasty virus went through the company I worked for, corrupting all windows systems and making my java development environment unusable.
Most of our development team had to spend a few days re-installing windows, the development programs, database, etc... There was one team member who used Linux and he was completely unaffected.
Instead of re-installing windows 2000 on my laptop, I put Linux on it instead. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to rebuild a Java development environment and Oracle test database within Linux.
Over the past couple years, I've gradually phased in Linux at home as well. My kids prefer Linux to Windows now, using it exclusively except when they want to play a game that we can't get to work with Wine or Winex. (Zoo Tycoon or Age of Mythology, both MS games)
I have no regrets at all about making this switch, which is was basically prompted by a virus.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I think that this has more to do with the disappointing results from the Golden Compass movie, which New line was hoping would be a 3-year blockbuster holiday series. It appears that the various religious groups are convincing their members to stay away from it due to the anti-religious message in the books.
I had a wireless netgear card go out on me (after working fine for months). When I called Customer service for a replacement they insisted that the problem was Linux on my laptop and not the faulty card. The India-based representative told me that Linux was not supported. I had him access his own companies website and pointed out that they had Linux drivers available to download, but he still insisted that Linux was not supported. I finally convinced him that the card was bad after I borrowed an identical card from a friend and it worked fine on my laptop, and my card didn't work on his XP system. But it took 3 calls and plenty of frustrating conversation with someone who didn't quite understand what I was saying. I can't wait for the day when Linux is more widespread and openly supported by more companies. I hope HP offers a Linux laptop to US Customers. Trying to buy a laptop is really hit or miss. I tried a Toshiba (Centrino processor) a couple of years ago, but had to return it after a few days because at that time the Kernel support for the Centrino was pretty bad. I finally resorted to taking a live-Linux CD into the showroom and talking a salesperson into letting me try it on various laptops until I found one that was fairly compatible. Even getting that allowed was a struggle. Luckily, the manager had played around with Linux and knew what Live CD was. HP had the most compatible laptop at the time, but it's still been a struggle to get certain things to work properly. It's on its last legs now and will be replaced sometime later this year. Hopefully it will be easier to find a Linux compatible laptop this time.
Um, you didn't read his response, did you? The passport check will only take place at border entry ports. There are hundreds of miles of unpatrolled border with Canada and Mexico with a barrier not more sophisticated than a ditch or a barb wire fence.
It seems ludicrious that the government would create more hardships for citizens, while it continues to offer incentives in the form of amnesties for current and future illegal immigrants. With an estimated 20 Million illegal immigrants currently in the United States, politicians are nuts to think that additional cheap labor is needed.
Yeah right. I grew up in the Bellingham, WA area and heard constantly about the potential disaster of one of the volcanos blowing up, or the big earthquake that was expected in the region. Not the relativiely minor one that hit Seattle a few years back.
I feel much safer in Utah with the crappy/rude drivers, forest fires, droughts and potential earthquake. At least we don't have to deal with hurricanes, tsunamis and massive tornados.
There's no point worrying about things you can't control. There really aren't any places free from natural disasters.
After reading the MS blurb, it looks like the e-week article is completely off base. Combs is not a company that "migrated" to Linux and then went back to Windows.
The company they worked with to build their websites years ago choose a Linux-based CGI sytem and hosted and maintained it for them off-site. When their solution provider/ISP went under, they were forced to either take the project in-house or find another provider.
The point is they migrated away from CGI to a more modern web technology. Because they were pre-disposed to MS/Windows, they choose that solution. However, they could have just as easily stuck with Linux and gone with Java/JSP or possibly PHP as a better altenative to CGI. This is not a recent event either, the ISP in this case went under over two years ago
It would be equivalent to an American who grew up in the sticks without runing water visiting Mexico and seeing a modern bathroom for the first time and deciding to move there because of it, then turning around and ripping on the US because it isn't modern like Mexico.
It's very disturbing that a computer connection is now legally equivalent to being physically present in order to commit a crime.
If I'm logged into my banks computer to review my account while it's being robbed, am I an accessory to the crime?
If I discuss through e-mail religion, politics, etc... with a citizen of another country which is deemed critical or violates some law in China for example, could the fact that my mail server connects to a mail server located in China become equivalent to me actually going to China to speak against the government?
This new precedent combined with the musings of Orrin Hatch make for a pretty scary future.
Combine this with IP spoofing and a whole new dimension to identity theft and it's consequences is born.
On the upside, I know a couple of politicians who could be extradited somewhere, I'm sure they've done something that's illegal in another country.
Because several states now allow illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses using two very insecure forms of Identification: A consular identification card issued by foreign consulate offices, or the ITIN Number supplied by the IRS to people who can't qualify for a social security number.
The consular card is recognized by the FBI as an insecure document. The only reason they are needed is because the recipient entered the U.S. illegaly and does not possess a valid visa, passport or other identification provided through legal channels. There have been cases where people have been arrested carrying multiple copies of this ID, with the same picture and differing names.
The ITIN number can be obtained by calling a 1-800 number and providing a name and address. The IRS does nothing to verify the information given and has stated multiple times that this tax number should ONLY be used for paying taxes. This is not meant to be an Identification number, especially for obtaining a drivers licenses. They sent out a letter this past December to all governors and heads of the driver license division in each state to ask them to stop this practice. Despite this request, states like Utah refused to modify their laws to fix this security problem. This combined with the "motor voter" laws can lead to other problems such as voter fraud.
Because the drivers license is used for many other purposes other than proof that an individual knows the basic driving rules, we either need to go back to only issuing it for people with verified documentation, or creating a national ID that is only given out to citizens. The national ID would be used instead of a drivers license for employment, boarding planes, voting, etc....
Company policy makers are great at coming up with silly policies that are not carefully thought out. (Which is why we can all laugh at Dilbert)
Several years ago I worked for a micro-manager. He required all developers to receive permission from him before any changes could be made to a reporting system. Even if you wanted to correct a spelling error on a report you were required to fill out a request for change form and meet personally with the director for approval.
As soon as this policy was implemented, the efficiency in the department dropped to almost nothing. We all joked that it took longer to fill out the paperwork than it took to actually do the work in the first place.
Things reaced a head during a business trip to Asia. I was working with some consultants who were giving me information on how to format tax reports required for that country. Before we could open up for business, the reports needed to be modified and printed out for approval by various government agencies. Because of the time zone difference, the change management policy really got in the way; yet the director insisted that he still wanted to approve every single change by phone each day.
Since he didn't specify a time to call, I would wait until the end of each work day in Asia and call him before leaving for the day (at 2:00 A.M. his time). Sometimes I would "remember" something I had forgotten to ask permission for and have to call him a second or third time. After about 3 days, I was given blanket permission to make any needed changes to the report for the balance of the trip.
Soon after that, the policy was modified extensively, to allow us to do our jobs. Major releases and new projects were managed by committee, but minor changes were allowed to go through as long as they passed the QC process.
It's about time that ATI released linux drivers for their cards. I tried downloading and installing the drives on my hp laptop, but the driver does not work with the Radeon IGP card.
I guess I'll go back to waiting. At least the nvidia drivers work great on my two desktop linux machines that have GeForce cards.
Yesterday the Utah House of Representatives passed a bill that would require stores to disable any RFID tag at the point of sale to a consumer (unless the consumer specifically requests that they don't). There was a lot of debate on the issue, but it seems like the legislator who presented the bill has done a lot of research and made a very compelling presentation. I'm not sure how the bill will fare in the Senate here, but the House passed it by a fairly large margin. There were several lobbyists in town from back east trying to kill this bill, but they obviously failed.
Is a natural gas utility company operating in Utah. I can't believe they would waste money on linux licenses. I would love to know how much they wasted on licensing fees.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but they recently raised everyones rates substantially. For example my bill for January was almost $300, which is triple what a normal winter gas bill would be. They claim it has to do with high demand for natural gas, but I wonder if they are attempting to recoup their linux license fees to SCO as well.
The public utility commission is going to get an earful from me tomorrow!
Sco probably doesn't track when this happens and I'm willing to bet that at least some of the comment or code area matches used to generate the FUD were those that originated in other systems and were placed into Unix.
Hopefully the judge in the IBM case is able to consider this possibility and require SCO to prove that the any code in question was actually an original creation of theirs and not ported from someplace else.
Actually Hatch has a personal conflict of interest in this case. His son is one of the lawyers defending SCO in this matter.
It would be interesting to know if the Senator has any involvement behind the scenes with this case. For example when I called the Utah Attorney Generals' office, I was told that they are not going to look at SCO or their lawsuits at all, even if they go after individual consumers.
Because Hatch, the Attorney General and most of the Canopy/SCO people all go to the same church, it makes me wonder if there is some kind of pro-SCO protection being generated here behind the scenes.
It seems like SCO has two ways of making money: Lawsuits and selling their overinflated stock. This is now their business model.
Based on this, it's obvious that Novell is not competing against them. Novell is trying to follow the old-fashioned business model: Produce a product and sell it to people.
Our Network administrator sent this out last week. Apparantely the new Outlook 2003 client is not backwards compatible with older versions of exchanger server.
Attention All Employees:
Until further notice, Outlook 2003, which was just recently released on the market, should not be installed on any company computer system. It must not be used to access your Outlook/Exchange Email accounts. This applies to all companies, all locations, all laptops, and all home PC's used to connect to your company email. This also includes any new PC's or Laptops purchased that have Outlook 2003 pre-installed. If you now have, or in the future aquire, a PC or laptop with Office 2003 installed, please contact the IT department to ensure that Outlook 2003 is removed and a previous version is installed before attempting to access your email account.
If any individual uses Outlook 2003 to access their email account, Outlook Web Access (OWA) will stop functioning for everyone. The subsequent remedy would require Outlook 2003 to be removed, the email account accessed would have to be completely deleted from the server and reinstalled from scratch, and the server would need to have some components re-installed. That is not a very pleasant prospect.
I understand that some individuals are always excited about having the very latest software available. But there are several previous versions that still provide full functionallity and allow you to effectively perform your job functions. In this case installing the "latest and greatest" software has proven to be very detrimental to our systems. While the permanant fix is not yet available, I appreciate your cooperation in preventing these problems by refraining from using Outlook 2003.
Thank You.
Network Manager
I just got off the phone with my State Attorney Generals' office (Utah). They have been receiving a lot of e-mails and calls regarding SCO.
She referred me to a different person who read me a prepared statement that basically said that the issues raised by SCO are Federal copyright issues and the State has no Jurisdiction.
She suggested I contact either my elected officials to complain, or contact the US Attorney for my area. I wasn't able to talk with a live person there, but did leave a message.
I can't believe SCO is allowed to threaten innocent companies without first proving their claims. Based on the code samples seen yesterday, they have only tried to find similar code blocks between their code and Linux. What they haven't done is determine where their code came from, or if it has been released to the public in the past.
When I came back from Lunch yesterday, the network admins wanted to talk to me because they had detected the virus running on my computer and wanted to come remove it. It turns out they had scanned the entire network identifying any computers running services on port 4444, which led them to believe my system was infected. It turned out to be a Kerberos related service. I thought it was pretty funny.
This is exactly what sparked my interest in linux 4 years ago. A nasty virus went through the company I worked for, corrupting all windows systems and making my java development environment unusable. Most of our development team had to spend a few days re-installing windows, the development programs, database, etc... There was one team member who used Linux and he was completely unaffected. Instead of re-installing windows 2000 on my laptop, I put Linux on it instead. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to rebuild a Java development environment and Oracle test database within Linux. Over the past couple years, I've gradually phased in Linux at home as well. My kids prefer Linux to Windows now, using it exclusively except when they want to play a game that we can't get to work with Wine or Winex. (Zoo Tycoon or Age of Mythology, both MS games) I have no regrets at all about making this switch, which is was basically prompted by a virus.
I've looked them up at the Utah BBB, but their account is "being modified" so no complaint information is available at the moment.