Even if they don't sell it in Europe you will still be able to buy it here. Even before the Intarwebs people bought things using the phone. And mail, mail could work.
The argument that vendors of Vista-based software and tools could suffer seems to make a bit more sense. But it doesn't seem like an economic disaster-in-the-making. I doubt the EU economy is comprised of a large enough percentage of those businesses that it will be a significant hit to them. Maybe this just means that the companies that sell software, including Vista, if it were being marketed elsewhere in the world, would be at a competitive disadvantage? Surely not the whole Union?!
They haven't gotten anywhere so far, so what makes them thing they'll achieve something now?
When Darl took over as CEO it was estimated that the company would be bankrupt within 7 months. Since then they have received $60 million in PIPE funding. They did have to pay back $13 million to Baystar, but that's still a pretty good payday for making a bunch of claims that so far haven't been substantiated.
I have a GSM-capable phone but it uses CDMA here in the US. Every so often it does check in with the local cell tower and I hear it on my speakers (even if the computer is shut off because I have externally powered speakers).
I have found that if I turn the phone so that the face plate is parallel to the speaker wires, thus turning the antenna perpendicular to the wires, the buzz minimizes dramatically. However I have an internal antenna (Nokia). I haven't played with an external antenna phone in order to see what might work in terms of reducing buzz from one of those.
Actually the Chinese are using IPv6 in quite a few places already. We aren't because od CIDRing and keeping machines behind firewalls and routers which allow you to use addresses that aren't used/routable on the Internet (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x to 172.32.x.x and 192.168.x.x)
Bicyclists will finally be able to travel at speeds which don't hold up drivers. And it has the benefit of instantly killing these two-wheeled nuisances when the tires blow out.
There are TONS of cycling-idiots out there that are going to eventually get themselves or other hurt or killed. I see them on the road too and they are literally asking for trouble. However...
Bicyclists can already travel at speeds that don't hold up drivers. Fully faired tandems have been able to hit 55 mph or more since the 80's. Recent competitions on a closed one mile course have produced speeds around 65 mph for a single rider. The current record in the flying start mile is over 78 mph with two aboard. The price of fuel isn't high enough for these to become common conveyances yet.
After 30 years of cycling I find that drivers only feel free to threaten or hit cyclists because they won't sustain an immediate injury or inconvenience by doing so and then simply driving away. They may get caught and sent to jail but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to a large number of them. If being held up was such a problem why don't they slam into buses and garbage trucks going no faster than bicycles? You guessed it, they can't bully those vehicles and operators. I can't tell you how many times I have been told that my life has less value than their convenience. My brother talked to a local bicycle cop who says that drivers never try to bully him because he always carries his pistol with him.
When homicide becomes good driving these folks won't be idiots who can't control their vehicles and their tempers, they will be respected professionals. Until then they are simply murderous commuters who can't think in a non-criminal mode behind the wheel.
Technological superiority may or may not be included in this product. It's real advantage is that it comes with artificial shortages built into the distribution process in order to create more consumer anxiety and higher levels of desire to acquire one.
This is M$ ; marketing is their forte, everything else is just a product feature that can be marketed. What I'm waiting for is the first virus, trojan or rootkit for this platform.
You think every time groklaw mentions Forbes, Forbes smeared someone?
Do you? The Original Poster never said that. Why not look at Lyons' articles and see if he did smear someone or not?
I just don't get what you're trying to say here.
That's correct, you don't. Go back and try looking at it again and seeing if you get it this time. Here's a hint. Don't substitute your thoughts for those of the Original Poster. Just look at what is actually there and maybe do some research.
The first part seemed more like a mistake than a personal attack too, not that Forbes has never personally attacked someone, just not in this case.
What do you call a mistake that is published in a national magazine? "Not an attack in this case"? What do you call something that is obviously incorrect and should never have been stated in public? An innocent slip? What if it's a pattern and not a rare event?
Clue: Read a bit of what Daniel Lyons has written. Then read a bit of what people have to say about what he wrote. The chasm between the two will be obvious. Yes, even to you.
"And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!"
I can't get back to the article at "The Age" now, I'm getting a registration page and I'm not interested in registering so that I can copy and paste the pertinent quote. YMMV. They *might* be slashdotted.
But in the article he states that he has his W2k3 server set up to autopatch now that he has taken the RedHat server down. One of his complaints was that he couldn't automate updates on the RedHat box because they needed to compare the version of the patches with the compatible versions listed on the SAP website and it was too labor intensive. In my experience Unix (yes, I know we're discussing Linux here) has always been that way and so is any mission-critical application or OS. Or hardware for that matter. Use the wrong solution, get the wrong result.
Labor intensive repetitive tasks are the perfect place to implement scripted operations. He may need to train or hire someone to write a script to do this, but before that can happen he has to understand that it's what he needs in order to save himself time, money and man-hours. It's a conceptual gap which he may not be able to bridge.
As I posted elsewhere in response to the article, TRW is running SAP-based ERP on Dell servers and it's running fine and saving them bundles.
Restarting Linux a lot? I vote for a hardware issue, possibly a defect or problematical software support for the hardware involved, assuming you can determine which piece or pieces of hardware it might be. On the other hand I have had stability problems with the New Mandrake(s) and SuSE 9.1 but not with Slackware 9.1. Others don't seem to have these problems so I don't see it as being either Linux or distro related. I see it as being me or my box of frequently randomized cheapo or donated components.
So in the interests of keeping yourself sick, and to that degree bringing yourself that much closer to dying, you are going to persist in inserting yourself into these discussions. Hmmmmm.
I will refrain from admiring your efforts until they bear more fruit, for instance your disappearance from contact with that which you detest.
Until then you are simply hating it when you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer and amount to nothing more than a rehash of a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch from the increasingly dim past.
As revenge goes this is priceless. What I first thought of was call blocking. It could turn out to be somewhat labor-intensive since you would have to use the keypad to dial *70 or whatever the code is right after one of the junk faxes came in. It also requires that you pay the monthly fee for caller ID/blocking. And getting rid of the fax machine is also a good idea. Combining all 3 seems like a win-win-win solution.
I haven't actually done it but I have been told that you can simply append code, in the case I heard of a SCSI BIOS, to your existing BIOS code image when you flash it to add functionality.
This leaves unanswered certain questions such as: "How do you activate it?", "Why would I install something like that if I hadn't debugged it thoroughly myself or acquired it from a source I trusted?"
OK, I went back to the article and found the ---->code listing-----!!
I STILL haven't looked at it long enough to decipher what the error is. It says somethng about elevating privilege level by writing over an unprotected virtual memory area in a certain way. I promise not to post again on this topic until after I have tried to reason through the fixed code.
It might just as well be that the mistake made by the originator of the bug or insecurity was hard to spot because it made sense, at least on the surface, to those trying to follow the program logic to analyze it for problems. It certainly wasn't likely to be a syntax error or the compiler would have caught it, so it seems [to me] like it must be a procedural mistake in the program logic or a storage/retrieval error.
I haven't taken time to look at the fix and the original code to see what is broken and how to write it one-notch-better-for-now. Do you have a pointer to the patch or is it still too early to find it?
>The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive.
Bad analogy. MS makes and sells their software. This isn't IBM evaluating an IBM software product, i.e. AIX, OS/2, etc., it's a third party product running on their hardware. Positive result doesn't mean IBM sells more hardware or more of their own software, it only shows that they have an offering that you may want to consider among other offerings of hardware with [or even without] a third party OS to meet your needs.
>If the test results showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
Only negative results are reliable because no one would fake that? Then why would we ever believe anyone who posts positive results? The "nothing positive is worthwhile" attitude is inherently self-defeating, non-productive and relies on blinding oneself to anything that may be good. Forget to take your meds? And how do you compare all the positive results that are posted with all the negative results that DON'T get posted. There's your real baseline. Comparing all the secret/non-existent data to the public stuff. It's just impossible to do. By your logic that would make it infallible.
>Since the test affirms their business model, no matter how documented it is, it should be suspect.
More of the "don't believe the people who have experience, skill and knowledge based on day-to-day operations ; they must be lying because they are more informed than we are" drivel. Documentation of success must be ignored because it proves the point of those who are successful and invalidates my defective criticism of them. This proves that you feel bad, not that they are doing something bad.
>Many of the test results depend on the computer systems meeting expectations of the people testing it, particularly in overload cases.
You know of businesses that buy computer systems that they don't expect to meet performance goals that they need to reach? And those unreal-world testing scenarios have more value than using appropriate hardware and software? It's not normally done that way here on planet Earth. Organizations work to succeed, not to fail and then point to someone else as being the responsible party.
>Take C/C++ and Java.
I would only take them if I thought they were of some use in the scenario I was going to apply them to. If they don't meet my expectations then I need to stop banging my head against my defective expectations and move on to something more appropriate. If they work, then I have failed because they meet my expectations? Backwards thinking again.
>I would like an evaluation from somewhere in-between, not someone whose years of experience allow them to gloss over what might be problems for another person.
Only trust results by those less qualified to evaluate the system or product because their lack of skill proves that they can't be trying to fool you? This isn't skepticism, it is negativism. Anyone can look at proof and say "How do I know you're not fooling me?" The question means that you don't trust yourself to see what is in front of you, not bad intent by the presenter.
I can see that you haven't really been following this very closely or you wouldn't be offering this sort of speculation as worthy of consideration.
SCO has gone to great pains and lengths to present everything BUT the agreements they have that allow IBM to develop, own and distribute works that they create that do not contain SysV source code and were not created using the man pages as a reference. As if by not offering them to the court the evidence of them already presented by IBM would somehow magically go away or become irrelevant. By claiming that Novell is violating a non-compete agreement by merging with SuSE , which is also pure B[lake] S[towell] as you will be able to see if you look at the SysV sale documents, they are simply attempting to push Novell's stock down in order to keep them out of the legal battle since that kind of work requires lots of $. By announcing that they are doing so well in their legal efforts that they plan on suing a major Linux user within 90 days when they are at the same time trying to get further delays in the RedHat discovery process by saying that two court cases are impeding their process of discovery and are burdensome to the legal system as well, they are attempting to stall further, not release info that could damage their IBM case and make it look like they have something to back up the lies they told stock analysts and outside investors to get the $60 million they have raised recently. The same lies that they say they can't produce in response to IBM and RedHat's motions to compel discovery.
Forget even suggesting that SCO has a contract case with IBM. They have nothing. Their entire strategy is based on delay, distraction and non-responsive production during the discovery process. Their latest round of pseudo-prestidigitation misdirection is to have hired a patent attorney in order to claim that they need more time in order to respond to IBM's counterclaims regarding patents. First, the counterclaim cannot delay their production of information in the discovery process of their contract suit against IBM. Second, they hired an attorney that "may have", one of their constant by-words in this ongoing cotton-candy-as-nutritional-supplement farce, a conflict of interest since he or the firm that he works for potentially represented IBM now or in the past on a patent issue. How did they hire an attorney to represent them against IBM without this coming up in the discussion? This is to keep from having to do oral arguments this Friday which could turn out to be so damaging that they may be exposed beyond any possible recovery no matter what volume of misleading combinations of unrelated statements they string together and spew out to imply things not actually in existence.
Obviously I can't sum up here by using the phrase "in short" because brevity and directness of any type would be the immediate death of this shameful incident. Please mirror Groklaw to save them from the Slashdot effect while at the same time pulling back the curtain from the Wizard's control room so that all of Oz (us) can get a better look at what is going on. (My excuse is that I'm on dialup.)
I realize that I have been fierce, harsh and interminable. Please don't take this as a personal attack on you. It's just 'cause I'm so furious with them. The SCOmbaGs!
>"Do we have potential issues with Red Hat, SuSE and other commercial Linux distributors--yes, we might," Sontag said, adding that chances for negotiating with such companies appear to be slim.
Does the above sentence actually mean ANYTHING AT ALL? What does "yes, we might have potential issues" mean? That it's possible that it's possible that there is one or more issues? Do 2 maybes make an actuality the same way that 3 lefts make a right? One of the comments I have seen about their suit against IBM is that several of the statements in their pleading actually allege nothing at all. This seems to be in keeping with that theme.
Why are the chances of negotiating with Linux distributors slim? Because no one can see any reason to negotiate with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if they don't sell it in Europe you will still be able to buy it here. Even before the Intarwebs people bought things using the phone. And mail, mail could work.
The argument that vendors of Vista-based software and tools could suffer seems to make a bit more sense. But it doesn't seem like an economic disaster-in-the-making. I doubt the EU economy is comprised of a large enough percentage of those businesses that it will be a significant hit to them. Maybe this just means that the companies that sell software, including Vista, if it were being marketed elsewhere in the world, would be at a competitive disadvantage? Surely not the whole Union?!
They haven't gotten anywhere so far, so what makes them thing they'll achieve something now?
When Darl took over as CEO it was estimated that the company would be bankrupt within 7 months. Since then they have received $60 million in PIPE funding. They did have to pay back $13 million to Baystar, but that's still a pretty good payday for making a bunch of claims that so far haven't been substantiated.
I have a GSM-capable phone but it uses CDMA here in the US. Every so often it does check in with the local cell tower and I hear it on my speakers (even if the computer is shut off because I have externally powered speakers).
I have found that if I turn the phone so that the face plate is parallel to the speaker wires, thus turning the antenna perpendicular to the wires, the buzz minimizes dramatically. However I have an internal antenna (Nokia). I haven't played with an external antenna phone in order to see what might work in terms of reducing buzz from one of those.
Actually the Chinese are using IPv6 in quite a few places already. We aren't because od CIDRing and keeping machines behind firewalls and routers which allow you to use addresses that aren't used/routable on the Internet (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x to 172.32.x.x and 192.168.x.x)
Bicyclists will finally be able to travel at speeds which don't hold up drivers. And it has the benefit of instantly killing these two-wheeled nuisances when the tires blow out.
...
There are TONS of cycling-idiots out there that are going to eventually get themselves or other hurt or killed. I see them on the road too and they are literally asking for trouble. However
Bicyclists can already travel at speeds that don't hold up drivers. Fully faired tandems have been able to hit 55 mph or more since the 80's. Recent competitions on a closed one mile course have produced speeds around 65 mph for a single rider. The current record in the flying start mile is over 78 mph with two aboard. The price of fuel isn't high enough for these to become common conveyances yet.
After 30 years of cycling I find that drivers only feel free to threaten or hit cyclists because they won't sustain an immediate injury or inconvenience by doing so and then simply driving away. They may get caught and sent to jail but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to a large number of them. If being held up was such a problem why don't they slam into buses and garbage trucks going no faster than bicycles? You guessed it, they can't bully those vehicles and operators. I can't tell you how many times I have been told that my life has less value than their convenience. My brother talked to a local bicycle cop who says that drivers never try to bully him because he always carries his pistol with him.
When homicide becomes good driving these folks won't be idiots who can't control their vehicles and their tempers, they will be respected professionals. Until then they are simply murderous commuters who can't think in a non-criminal mode behind the wheel.
Technological superiority may or may not be included in this product. It's real advantage is that it comes with artificial shortages built into the distribution process in order to create more consumer anxiety and higher levels of desire to acquire one.
This is M$ ; marketing is their forte, everything else is just a product feature that can be marketed. What I'm waiting for is the first virus, trojan or rootkit for this platform.
http://www.byliner.com/writer/?id=6690
You think every time groklaw mentions Forbes, Forbes smeared someone?
Do you? The Original Poster never said that. Why not look at Lyons' articles and see if he did smear someone or not?
I just don't get what you're trying to say here.
That's correct, you don't. Go back and try looking at it again and seeing if you get it this time. Here's a hint. Don't substitute your thoughts for those of the Original Poster. Just look at what is actually there and maybe do some research.
The first part seemed more like a mistake than a personal attack too, not that Forbes has never personally attacked someone, just not in this case.
What do you call a mistake that is published in a national magazine? "Not an attack in this case"? What do you call something that is obviously incorrect and should never have been stated in public? An innocent slip? What if it's a pattern and not a rare event?
Clue: Read a bit of what Daniel Lyons has written. Then read a bit of what people have to say about what he wrote. The chasm between the two will be obvious. Yes, even to you.
You missed "To bad" which means in the direction of or inclined toward. As opposed to "too bad" meaning quite a bit or more than needed.
You will not be demoted this time but your dessert ration will be cut in half for this oversight.
"And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!"
l ?articleID=171201387/
I can't get back to the article at "The Age" now, I'm getting a registration page and I'm not interested in registering so that I can copy and paste the pertinent quote. YMMV. They *might* be slashdotted.
But in the article he states that he has his W2k3 server set up to autopatch now that he has taken the RedHat server down. One of his complaints was that he couldn't automate updates on the RedHat box because they needed to compare the version of the patches with the compatible versions listed on the SAP website and it was too labor intensive. In my experience Unix (yes, I know we're discussing Linux here) has always been that way and so is any mission-critical application or OS. Or hardware for that matter. Use the wrong solution, get the wrong result.
Labor intensive repetitive tasks are the perfect place to implement scripted operations. He may need to train or hire someone to write a script to do this, but before that can happen he has to understand that it's what he needs in order to save himself time, money and man-hours. It's a conceptual gap which he may not be able to bridge.
As I posted elsewhere in response to the article, TRW is running SAP-based ERP on Dell servers and it's running fine and saving them bundles.
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtm
On their website Dell offers SuSE and RedHat. No mention in the article of which one TRW uses.
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=171201387
Why can't this [relaitvely] little company in Oz make it work? Might it have soemthing to do with not running the diagnostic requested by RedHat Aus.?
I notice that he is still using Linux for lots of other stuff where it works just fine and isn't too difficult or too expensive to use.
Restarting Linux a lot? I vote for a hardware issue, possibly a defect or problematical software support for the hardware involved, assuming you can determine which piece or pieces of hardware it might be. On the other hand I have had stability problems with the New Mandrake(s) and SuSE 9.1 but not with Slackware 9.1. Others don't seem to have these problems so I don't see it as being either Linux or distro related. I see it as being me or my box of frequently randomized cheapo or donated components.
So in the interests of keeping yourself sick, and to that degree bringing yourself that much closer to dying, you are going to persist in inserting yourself into these discussions. Hmmmmm. I will refrain from admiring your efforts until they bear more fruit, for instance your disappearance from contact with that which you detest. Until then you are simply hating it when you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer and amount to nothing more than a rehash of a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch from the increasingly dim past.
A closed loop of black paper!%#@%$((
As revenge goes this is priceless. What I first thought of was call blocking. It could turn out to be somewhat labor-intensive since you would have to use the keypad to dial *70 or whatever the code is right after one of the junk faxes came in. It also requires that you pay the monthly fee for caller ID/blocking. And getting rid of the fax machine is also a good idea. Combining all 3 seems like a win-win-win solution.
I haven't actually done it but I have been told that you can simply append code, in the case I heard of a SCSI BIOS, to your existing BIOS code image when you flash it to add functionality.
This leaves unanswered certain questions such as: "How do you activate it?", "Why would I install something like that if I hadn't debugged it thoroughly myself or acquired it from a source I trusted?"
OK, I went back to the article and found the ---->code listing-----!!
I STILL haven't looked at it long enough to decipher what the error is. It says somethng about elevating privilege level by writing over an unprotected virtual memory area in a certain way. I promise not to post again on this topic until after I have tried to reason through the fixed code.
And prob'ly not after that either! Doh!
It might just as well be that the mistake made by the originator of the bug or insecurity was hard to spot because it made sense, at least on the surface, to those trying to follow the program logic to analyze it for problems. It certainly wasn't likely to be a syntax error or the compiler would have caught it, so it seems [to me] like it must be a procedural mistake in the program logic or a storage/retrieval error.
I haven't taken time to look at the fix and the original code to see what is broken and how to write it one-notch-better-for-now. Do you have a pointer to the patch or is it still too early to find it?
Per one of the posts above there are about 40 baht to $1. That comes out to about $37.50 if you buy the retail version at 1500 baht.
>The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive.
Bad analogy. MS makes and sells their software. This isn't IBM evaluating an IBM software product, i.e. AIX, OS/2, etc., it's a third party product running on their hardware. Positive result doesn't mean IBM sells more hardware or more of their own software, it only shows that they have an offering that you may want to consider among other offerings of hardware with [or even without] a third party OS to meet your needs.
>If the test results showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
Only negative results are reliable because no one would fake that? Then why would we ever believe anyone who posts positive results? The "nothing positive is worthwhile" attitude is inherently self-defeating, non-productive and relies on blinding oneself to anything that may be good. Forget to take your meds? And how do you compare all the positive results that are posted with all the negative results that DON'T get posted. There's your real baseline. Comparing all the secret/non-existent data to the public stuff. It's just impossible to do. By your logic that would make it infallible.
>Since the test affirms their business model, no matter how documented it is, it should be suspect.
More of the "don't believe the people who have experience, skill and knowledge based on day-to-day operations ; they must be lying because they are more informed than we are" drivel. Documentation of success must be ignored because it proves the point of those who are successful and invalidates my defective criticism of them. This proves that you feel bad, not that they are doing something bad.
>Many of the test results depend on the computer systems meeting expectations of the people testing it, particularly in overload cases.
You know of businesses that buy computer systems that they don't expect to meet performance goals that they need to reach? And those unreal-world testing scenarios have more value than using appropriate hardware and software? It's not normally done that way here on planet Earth. Organizations work to succeed, not to fail and then point to someone else as being the responsible party.
>Take C/C++ and Java.
I would only take them if I thought they were of some use in the scenario I was going to apply them to. If they don't meet my expectations then I need to stop banging my head against my defective expectations and move on to something more appropriate. If they work, then I have failed because they meet my expectations? Backwards thinking again.
>I would like an evaluation from somewhere in-between, not someone whose years of experience allow them to gloss over what might be problems for another person.
Only trust results by those less qualified to evaluate the system or product because their lack of skill proves that they can't be trying to fool you? This isn't skepticism, it is negativism. Anyone can look at proof and say "How do I know you're not fooling me?" The question means that you don't trust yourself to see what is in front of you, not bad intent by the presenter.
I can see that you haven't really been following this very closely or you wouldn't be offering this sort of speculation as worthy of consideration.
SCO has gone to great pains and lengths to present everything BUT the agreements they have that allow IBM to develop, own and distribute works that they create that do not contain SysV source code and were not created using the man pages as a reference. As if by not offering them to the court the evidence of them already presented by IBM would somehow magically go away or become irrelevant. By claiming that Novell is violating a non-compete agreement by merging with SuSE , which is also pure B[lake] S[towell] as you will be able to see if you look at the SysV sale documents, they are simply attempting to push Novell's stock down in order to keep them out of the legal battle since that kind of work requires lots of $. By announcing that they are doing so well in their legal efforts that they plan on suing a major Linux user within 90 days when they are at the same time trying to get further delays in the RedHat discovery process by saying that two court cases are impeding their process of discovery and are burdensome to the legal system as well, they are attempting to stall further, not release info that could damage their IBM case and make it look like they have something to back up the lies they told stock analysts and outside investors to get the $60 million they have raised recently. The same lies that they say they can't produce in response to IBM and RedHat's motions to compel discovery.
Forget even suggesting that SCO has a contract case with IBM. They have nothing. Their entire strategy is based on delay, distraction and non-responsive production during the discovery process. Their latest round of pseudo-prestidigitation misdirection is to have hired a patent attorney in order to claim that they need more time in order to respond to IBM's counterclaims regarding patents. First, the counterclaim cannot delay their production of information in the discovery process of their contract suit against IBM. Second, they hired an attorney that "may have", one of their constant by-words in this ongoing cotton-candy-as-nutritional-supplement farce, a conflict of interest since he or the firm that he works for potentially represented IBM now or in the past on a patent issue. How did they hire an attorney to represent them against IBM without this coming up in the discussion? This is to keep from having to do oral arguments this Friday which could turn out to be so damaging that they may be exposed beyond any possible recovery no matter what volume of misleading combinations of unrelated statements they string together and spew out to imply things not actually in existence.
Obviously I can't sum up here by using the phrase "in short" because brevity and directness of any type would be the immediate death of this shameful incident. Please mirror Groklaw to save them from the Slashdot effect while at the same time pulling back the curtain from the Wizard's control room so that all of Oz (us) can get a better look at what is going on. (My excuse is that I'm on dialup.)
I realize that I have been fierce, harsh and interminable. Please don't take this as a personal attack on you. It's just 'cause I'm so furious with them. The SCOmbaGs!
>"Do we have potential issues with Red Hat, SuSE and other commercial Linux distributors--yes, we might," Sontag said, adding that chances for negotiating with such companies appear to be slim.
Does the above sentence actually mean ANYTHING AT ALL? What does "yes, we might have potential issues" mean? That it's possible that it's possible that there is one or more issues? Do 2 maybes make an actuality the same way that 3 lefts make a right? One of the comments I have seen about their suit against IBM is that several of the statements in their pleading actually allege nothing at all. This seems to be in keeping with that theme.
Why are the chances of negotiating with Linux distributors slim? Because no one can see any reason to negotiate with them.