I don't understand how this is really all that new. I mean, I understand the "slippery slope" argument about third parties modifying one's configuration, but this is HARDLY the first example of it. For instance, when you do one of those "Self-guided installs" for cable or DSL, it usually involves running some program from a CD provided by the cable company or ISP. It checks all your settings, installs the TCP/IP protocol if it wasn't there before, creates and enables the Ethernet connection, turns on DHCP, etc. They also typically add crap to the registry that "brands" Internet Explorer, so that it now says "Internet Explorer - Powered by GiantCableCo" on the title bar, and the animated IE activity logo is replaced by the corporation's logo. This is common even for generic PPP dialup services. They just hand you a program that says "Here, run this self installer." It creates the connection for you, enters the settings in Outlook Express for the email servers, and probably brands your IE.
I view all of those things as equally or more intrusive than simply disabling a service. In fact I think it's worse, as I'm sure many people are bothered by the fact that their IE home page is changed to comcast.net, and that their computer now says "Powered by Time Warner Roadrunner" or whatever. Disabling a service is both useful to the end user and not instrusive, which you can't say of these install programs that brand your browser, change your homepage and email settings, and mess with your TCP/IP stack.
This is just another case of special attention because it's AOL and we happen to dislike them. Everybody's been doing the crap for a long time now, in much more intrusive ways and no one has complained about them "hacking people's computers."
Oh please. I'd say about 50% of all cars on the road have sodium-cooled exhaust valves. There's a hollow core which is filled with sodium because it helps keep the valve cool. And yes, the sodium is in a liquid state as the exhaust valve is very hot. Have you EVER heard of any bad effects of this use of sodium? I bet you didn't even know it was there.
Come on, just because you've heard that sodium is reactive doesn't mean that it's automatically dangerous.
The parent sounds like flamebait but I agree with it all. From your description, you really are in over your head as your name would suggest.
If you want my opinion, you get to get someone on board that's done this before because it sounds like you're spending too much time on the wrong things.
It sounds like this datacenter is going to be critial to your business, such that if it goes down or fails in any way it will really affect your bottom-line. Why, then, are you trying to be he-man and do everything yourself? It sounds like you've realized this by your statement about "Tell the boss we goofed." You know you need help, so forget trying to teach yourself how to do this -- it's WAY too late for that. Get someone on board that knows what they're doing. It couldn't possibly cost more than what would happen if a fire were to break out in this room because of overloaded wiring or an overheated component, for example.
I was referring to that.pdf paper that ESR uses to back up the statement that "OS Unix applications >= proprietary". In the paper, they took a list of common command line and X11 applications (of which I chose xfig, xclock, rxvt, col and uniq as a representative sample) and fed them random inputs. They compared the behaivor of the open-source versions to the Unix vendors' versions, and concluded the the OS versions were less likely to croak on the bad input. That's all. And so from this relatively meaningless test of a bunch of small and minor (some would say irrelevent) applications, he arrives at this generalization that OS Unix applications are usually equal or superior. Who cares whether the open source 'xfig' crashes on random input or not, I don't see how that makes the GIMP equal to or superior to Photoshop, for example.
The submitter of this story linked to the printer-friendly version of the article, which I suppose is a good thing to do in general. There was, however, a small and rather crappy picture that was included in the original version.
From the hour or two that I've spent reading the online version of this book, the overall conclusion that I've come to is that you can bust summarize it as follows: That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Essentially, ESR's view on most aspects of Unix are overflowingly positive, and that every mechanism exists today because it has been evolutionarily tested and has withstood the tests of time. A lot of unix critics will laugh at this explanation, because it's so simplistic that it cannot possibly fail. "Unix does it this way, and that's good. Why else would unix have survived for so long?"
And all of the common complaints are just completely ignored or turned around on their head, as in "that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing!" For example: the fact that some command line tools have an amazingly mind-boggling set of options is a GOOD thing, because it allows for ultimate flexibility. Well, that may be true if you're a long-bearded Unix wizard, but a lot of people AREN'T, nor do they wish to invest the time to become one. To them the fact that command line tools require careful study and consideration before attempting simple tasks is not a feature, it's a bug. It's almost as if he is taunting everyone that is not as able as him. For example, the fact that programs that produce little or no diagnostic/chatty output is to be commended, according to him. In other words, it comes off as "If you don't know how to use a program (because you haven't spent hours reviewing the handy texinfo <shudder> manual), then that's your problem not the program's. When you know what you're doing, anything and everything is possible, and screw you for wanting simplicity and ease of use. Don't clutter MY tools with your ease of use bullshit."
ANother aspect of this is the notion that all GUIs should be front-ends interfaces to some other independent back-end program, that you should build the command-line first and then build a GUI wrapper. Surely this makes sense for some things, but as a general principle? I just don't buy it. I guess I've used too many crappy front-ends that either omit functions (such that they're only available in the command line version) or don't implement functions correctly, such as failing to escape them for the command line... But the worst example of this type of case is where someone writes a wrapper that has almost zero actual usability -- it's essentially a form where you can fill in command line parameters. Sure, it's got a nice text-area for this and a radio button for that, instead of having to remember what "--foo" or "-i" means. But because it completely fails to go further than the "here are some inputs and option settings, now make an output" it is still not nearly as functional and intuitive as GUI applications that were designed from the ground up from some task rather than being simply a front-end to a bunch of command options. A very exaggerated example of what I'm talking about would be drawing a circle in a drawing program. In a native GUI app, you would select the "circle" tool, move over to the canvas, select a position, then drag to size while getting a preview of what it will look like. If this function had been implemented as a front-end to a command line program you would instead have a tick box next to "Draw circle" that you would select, and then you'd have two more little text boxes appear where you would then enter the coordinates for the center and the radius. To preview, you would run the command and then load the file into a viewer to see if it looks right, and repeat as necessary. (Obviously, this is an unrealistic exaggeration. But I wanted to illustrate my point of how not everything can be mapped to "a frontend to a completely seperate back-end using command lines and pipes" that is advocated.)
Another perfect example is the notion that because the X Window System supplies such a loose framework, that any UI widget toolkit can be used. "The user has ultimate control! ANything's possible! Total freedom a
Yeah, it would never fly... If only they could make it as interesting as C-SPAN. They must draw in millions of people out there to tune in to pork sausage subsidy subcommitte debates at 0300 AM, so they have no problem hanging around. Or that Weather channel, I mean who ISN'T glued to the tube for that show "guy holding umbrella in downpour". That show kicks ass, I can't wait for the new season.
And that's exactly my point as well. To be a legitimate sample set, it must be representative of the whole. If you select the sample set such that certain groups are over- or under-represented for the purposes of highlighting some correlation, then it's no longer a valid statistical argument.
It's like me flipping 100 coins, and then selecting two that landed heads-up and one that landed tails and then concluding, "well, two thirds of THESE coins landed heads, therefore I've shown that coin flips tend to land heads-up 66% of the time." And sample size has nothing to do with it, I could flip one million coins, select 300,000 of them that landed heads and 100,000 that landed tails, but that doesn't mean the coin has a 75% chance of landing heads.
Because you made a claim to be able to show some nonsensical correlation, presumably based on finding a single isolated incident that fits your pattern.
The "control" is all about the group of people you select to observe, not that you actually control them in any meaningful way. The goal is to have the sample sets large enough to make significant conclusions, and chosen to be a representative sample of the whole.
In fact, you'd want your observations to be as unobtrusive as possible. That's rather the whole point, that you observe but not influence. Ideally, these subjects wouldn't even know that they were used for a study. This obviously isn't ethical in the "observe for decades" case, but when you have anonymous data with enough information it's possible.
Here's what bugs me about this article: you can still be scientific without resorting to oscilloscopes and frequency analyzers. I'm refering to double-blind listening tests, and eliminating variables to isolate the thing you're testing. I don't care how objective you think you are, you are still human. When you sit down to listen to something critically to evaluate its performance, you necessarily have some preconceived notion of what you are expecting -- it may be subconscious, but it's still there.
From the writing of this article, it reads like all the audiophile rags. Someone sat down with product X, listened to a few hours of their favorite CDs that they are very familiar with, and then proceded to write the article that's filled with all kinds of subjective terms about the "shimmer of the high end." I just can't take that seriously. If, however, he had used his "reference rig" and the ipod in some sort of double-blind A-B test with the same speakers/headphones, and he was still able to make these distinctions that were statistically significant, then I'd be a lot more convinced.
Just because you're not measuring things with a precise meter doesn't mean you have to give up on the scientific mindset completely.
Did you even read the article? Their whole point of all that discussion about the symbol tables and their offsets in memory (etc.) was making the case that it WASN'T a module, and rather that it was statically linked into the core kernel, and hence must be GPL'ed.
In other words: yes, no shit, binary kernel modules are fine. That's not what this is.
And if you wanted one small file that was somewhere deep in that tarball, what would you do? You'd have to decrypt the entire tarball (creating a temp copy on a hard disk, possibly), and then extract the file from the tarball. However, if you had a filesystem that supported encryption natively, then the driver would just read the appropriate sectors that represent the file, decrypt them, and bingo you have your file.
"Just encrypt the tarball" works if you only have a few things to encrypt, or if you don't do it that often... but if you did this a lot I think you would very quickly appreciate encryption built into the filesystem rather than "tacked on" as a regular file.
Dude, go price an actual T1 some time. That's what real bandwidth costs. And I have a hint for you, compared to that your cable/DSL line is CHEAP AS HELL.
If you think 1.5Mb/s for around $40/month is "overpriced" then you are seriously delusional about how much actual bandwidth really costs. The reason it's so cheap from your cable company is precisely because it has so many restrictions and is asymmetric. If you'd rather go without the restrictions, caps, and asymmetry, by all means have a T1 installed and enjoy the benfits of a SLA. But also realize that you will be paying about 8-12 times what you currently are paying for your nice little 1.5Mb/s cable/DSL connection, and for the same download speeds.
I nominate all the sound bites from Warcraft 2, just to get that out of the way.
By the way, has anyone noticed how games.slashdot.org sure likes to link to gamespy? I mean really, almost every day it seems like there's some "top 'n' list of 'foo'" article posted, and slashdot is there and waiting with a link. You'd think there was some kind of affiliate deal going on. It's not like gamespy is some hobby site run by some kid for the heck of it.
$ perl -e 'for $a ('a'..'z') { for $b ('a'..'z') { print "$a$b\n" if(`host ldskasdasdfgjsdlfk.$a$b` =~/has address/); } }' cc cx mp nu ph pw td tk ws
All of the above domains have some sort of wildcard DNS action going. There may be others in addition to the two-letter country code domains also, I don't know.
I thought I'd point this out, because chances are even some people on slashdot don't know this:
Microsoft has never has and never will issue security updates through email.
It's that simple. Anything that you get claiming to be from MS is some kind of fraud, worm, virus, spam, etc. I'm sure most of you around here knew that already, but I saw this asked on some mailing lists (e.g. Dshield) when these emails first started appearing.
Use this opportunity to remind anyone you know that may not be as computer illiterate as you. This worm, in addition to ANYTHING claiming to be updates from MS, are not real.
The phrase "JAP Anon-Proxy" makes no sense. "Where is the Replacement for the Java Anonymous Proxy Anon-Proxy?" really sounds dumb. That's almost as bad as the startup banner of Windows 2000: "Based on NT Technology!" (For those of you that forgot what NT stands for, it means New Technology)
Agreed. They probably establish some sort of grid routing, such that machines that do have ports open will accept the connections from those that don't and somehow forward packets. I'm quite pessimistic about that though, since transmit capability is always small compared to the download channel of most home broadband connections. And unlike Kazaa where throughput is the only thing that matters, here latency is a very big concern, and throughput not so much. I'd think that one of the biggest challenges with this whole routing scheme would be ensuring that packets go to where they need to within a certain timeframe, otherwise it just doesn't sound natural.
Incidentally, Nullsoft's WASTE has a similar feature. Not voip, but rather the fact that only one person in the "group" needs the ability to accept incoming connections. THe traffic supposedly will route its way through the peer group in such a way so that A and B can still communicate directly even if they are both connected only to C (due to NAT of whatever.) Or something like that.
Does it also come with a huge wing on the rear deck and a muffler that would shame a Costco-sized can of Maxwell House? Does it have a huge "Corsair" logo across the windshield?
FFS, this is just a silly gimmick. It's just screaming out "pay more for this! You already paid for all those other stupid LEDs, why not me!"
Okay. I hate SCO. You hate SCO. They're a bunch of bastards and they won't put up or shut up. That's a given.
This article offers nothing new. This story is just an excuse for everyone to rehash the same old "SCO will go down in flames" lines.
Could we possibly just limit the new stories to ACTUAL BREAKING news items that contain new verifiable evidence and/or facts, or at least something substantial? Can we PLEASE just take it for granted that every publication that has anything to do with Linux is going to come out against SCO?
Realistically speaking, if indeed there were infringing parts, we never would have heard of any of this. The whole tone of this article, and the quotes from Raymond, smack of "I've already done the comparison and nothing's there." I think if by some small chance there was something illicit in the Linux tree, Raymond would have notified the maintainer and/or Torvalds and put out a patch to remove it ASAP. Or at least, that what they've constantly stated they would do were this the case.
In other words, I believe them when they say that "If by some chance there were infringing code we'd do everything we could to remove it very quickly." SCO's lawyermongering only really applies to IBM anyway, so that point is rather moot.
I think we all agree that the obvious "duh" answer is that "of course they wouldn't be derivative works." But SCO has proven that it has a knack for just making stuff up or interpreting things funny. However, even based on the letter of the law I don't think this would qualify as a "transformation." That would seem to apply to a case where you shift the representation of the data to a different format but retain its essence, such as copying a DVD to a VHS tape. However, creating MD5 sums does not seem like it would be a transformation in that sense, in that the new work has none of the qualities of the original -- it's not code, it won't compile, it cannot be used to divine any algorithms, methods, etc. In sort it's completely useless, other than for comparing to other source code fragments.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how this is really all that new. I mean, I understand the "slippery slope" argument about third parties modifying one's configuration, but this is HARDLY the first example of it. For instance, when you do one of those "Self-guided installs" for cable or DSL, it usually involves running some program from a CD provided by the cable company or ISP. It checks all your settings, installs the TCP/IP protocol if it wasn't there before, creates and enables the Ethernet connection, turns on DHCP, etc. They also typically add crap to the registry that "brands" Internet Explorer, so that it now says "Internet Explorer - Powered by GiantCableCo" on the title bar, and the animated IE activity logo is replaced by the corporation's logo. This is common even for generic PPP dialup services. They just hand you a program that says "Here, run this self installer." It creates the connection for you, enters the settings in Outlook Express for the email servers, and probably brands your IE.
I view all of those things as equally or more intrusive than simply disabling a service. In fact I think it's worse, as I'm sure many people are bothered by the fact that their IE home page is changed to comcast.net, and that their computer now says "Powered by Time Warner Roadrunner" or whatever. Disabling a service is both useful to the end user and not instrusive, which you can't say of these install programs that brand your browser, change your homepage and email settings, and mess with your TCP/IP stack.
This is just another case of special attention because it's AOL and we happen to dislike them. Everybody's been doing the crap for a long time now, in much more intrusive ways and no one has complained about them "hacking people's computers."
Oh please. I'd say about 50% of all cars on the road have sodium-cooled exhaust valves. There's a hollow core which is filled with sodium because it helps keep the valve cool. And yes, the sodium is in a liquid state as the exhaust valve is very hot. Have you EVER heard of any bad effects of this use of sodium? I bet you didn't even know it was there.
Come on, just because you've heard that sodium is reactive doesn't mean that it's automatically dangerous.
The parent sounds like flamebait but I agree with it all. From your description, you really are in over your head as your name would suggest.
If you want my opinion, you get to get someone on board that's done this before because it sounds like you're spending too much time on the wrong things.
It sounds like this datacenter is going to be critial to your business, such that if it goes down or fails in any way it will really affect your bottom-line. Why, then, are you trying to be he-man and do everything yourself? It sounds like you've realized this by your statement about "Tell the boss we goofed." You know you need help, so forget trying to teach yourself how to do this -- it's WAY too late for that. Get someone on board that knows what they're doing. It couldn't possibly cost more than what would happen if a fire were to break out in this room because of overloaded wiring or an overheated component, for example.
Time to throw in the towel buddy.
I was referring to that .pdf paper that ESR uses to back up the statement that "OS Unix applications >= proprietary". In the paper, they took a list of common command line and X11 applications (of which I chose xfig, xclock, rxvt, col and uniq as a representative sample) and fed them random inputs. They compared the behaivor of the open-source versions to the Unix vendors' versions, and concluded the the OS versions were less likely to croak on the bad input. That's all. And so from this relatively meaningless test of a bunch of small and minor (some would say irrelevent) applications, he arrives at this generalization that OS Unix applications are usually equal or superior. Who cares whether the open source 'xfig' crashes on random input or not, I don't see how that makes the GIMP equal to or superior to Photoshop, for example.
The submitter of this story linked to the printer-friendly version of the article, which I suppose is a good thing to do in general. There was, however, a small and rather crappy picture that was included in the original version.
From the hour or two that I've spent reading the online version of this book, the overall conclusion that I've come to is that you can bust summarize it as follows: That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Essentially, ESR's view on most aspects of Unix are overflowingly positive, and that every mechanism exists today because it has been evolutionarily tested and has withstood the tests of time. A lot of unix critics will laugh at this explanation, because it's so simplistic that it cannot possibly fail. "Unix does it this way, and that's good. Why else would unix have survived for so long?"
And all of the common complaints are just completely ignored or turned around on their head, as in "that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing!" For example: the fact that some command line tools have an amazingly mind-boggling set of options is a GOOD thing, because it allows for ultimate flexibility. Well, that may be true if you're a long-bearded Unix wizard, but a lot of people AREN'T, nor do they wish to invest the time to become one. To them the fact that command line tools require careful study and consideration before attempting simple tasks is not a feature, it's a bug. It's almost as if he is taunting everyone that is not as able as him. For example, the fact that programs that produce little or no diagnostic/chatty output is to be commended, according to him. In other words, it comes off as "If you don't know how to use a program (because you haven't spent hours reviewing the handy texinfo <shudder> manual), then that's your problem not the program's. When you know what you're doing, anything and everything is possible, and screw you for wanting simplicity and ease of use. Don't clutter MY tools with your ease of use bullshit."
ANother aspect of this is the notion that all GUIs should be front-ends interfaces to some other independent back-end program, that you should build the command-line first and then build a GUI wrapper. Surely this makes sense for some things, but as a general principle? I just don't buy it. I guess I've used too many crappy front-ends that either omit functions (such that they're only available in the command line version) or don't implement functions correctly, such as failing to escape them for the command line... But the worst example of this type of case is where someone writes a wrapper that has almost zero actual usability -- it's essentially a form where you can fill in command line parameters. Sure, it's got a nice text-area for this and a radio button for that, instead of having to remember what "--foo" or "-i" means. But because it completely fails to go further than the "here are some inputs and option settings, now make an output" it is still not nearly as functional and intuitive as GUI applications that were designed from the ground up from some task rather than being simply a front-end to a bunch of command options. A very exaggerated example of what I'm talking about would be drawing a circle in a drawing program. In a native GUI app, you would select the "circle" tool, move over to the canvas, select a position, then drag to size while getting a preview of what it will look like. If this function had been implemented as a front-end to a command line program you would instead have a tick box next to "Draw circle" that you would select, and then you'd have two more little text boxes appear where you would then enter the coordinates for the center and the radius. To preview, you would run the command and then load the file into a viewer to see if it looks right, and repeat as necessary. (Obviously, this is an unrealistic exaggeration. But I wanted to illustrate my point of how not everything can be mapped to "a frontend to a completely seperate back-end using command lines and pipes" that is advocated.)
Another perfect example is the notion that because the X Window System supplies such a loose framework, that any UI widget toolkit can be used. "The user has ultimate control! ANything's possible! Total freedom a
Yeah, it would never fly... If only they could make it as interesting as C-SPAN. They must draw in millions of people out there to tune in to pork sausage subsidy subcommitte debates at 0300 AM, so they have no problem hanging around. Or that Weather channel, I mean who ISN'T glued to the tube for that show "guy holding umbrella in downpour". That show kicks ass, I can't wait for the new season.
And that's exactly my point as well. To be a legitimate sample set, it must be representative of the whole. If you select the sample set such that certain groups are over- or under-represented for the purposes of highlighting some correlation, then it's no longer a valid statistical argument.
It's like me flipping 100 coins, and then selecting two that landed heads-up and one that landed tails and then concluding, "well, two thirds of THESE coins landed heads, therefore I've shown that coin flips tend to land heads-up 66% of the time." And sample size has nothing to do with it, I could flip one million coins, select 300,000 of them that landed heads and 100,000 that landed tails, but that doesn't mean the coin has a 75% chance of landing heads.
Because you made a claim to be able to show some nonsensical correlation, presumably based on finding a single isolated incident that fits your pattern.
Any study without proper statistical sampling (which you don't seem to be familiar with) would be laughed at by academic journals.
The "control" is all about the group of people you select to observe, not that you actually control them in any meaningful way. The goal is to have the sample sets large enough to make significant conclusions, and chosen to be a representative sample of the whole.
In fact, you'd want your observations to be as unobtrusive as possible. That's rather the whole point, that you observe but not influence. Ideally, these subjects wouldn't even know that they were used for a study. This obviously isn't ethical in the "observe for decades" case, but when you have anonymous data with enough information it's possible.
Here's what bugs me about this article: you can still be scientific without resorting to oscilloscopes and frequency analyzers. I'm refering to double-blind listening tests, and eliminating variables to isolate the thing you're testing. I don't care how objective you think you are, you are still human. When you sit down to listen to something critically to evaluate its performance, you necessarily have some preconceived notion of what you are expecting -- it may be subconscious, but it's still there.
From the writing of this article, it reads like all the audiophile rags. Someone sat down with product X, listened to a few hours of their favorite CDs that they are very familiar with, and then proceded to write the article that's filled with all kinds of subjective terms about the "shimmer of the high end." I just can't take that seriously. If, however, he had used his "reference rig" and the ipod in some sort of double-blind A-B test with the same speakers/headphones, and he was still able to make these distinctions that were statistically significant, then I'd be a lot more convinced.
Just because you're not measuring things with a precise meter doesn't mean you have to give up on the scientific mindset completely.
Wow, a FAQ last updated nearly five years ago. That's like, what, 25 years in internet-years.
Did you even read the article? Their whole point of all that discussion about the symbol tables and their offsets in memory (etc.) was making the case that it WASN'T a module, and rather that it was statically linked into the core kernel, and hence must be GPL'ed.
In other words: yes, no shit, binary kernel modules are fine. That's not what this is.
And if you wanted one small file that was somewhere deep in that tarball, what would you do? You'd have to decrypt the entire tarball (creating a temp copy on a hard disk, possibly), and then extract the file from the tarball. However, if you had a filesystem that supported encryption natively, then the driver would just read the appropriate sectors that represent the file, decrypt them, and bingo you have your file.
"Just encrypt the tarball" works if you only have a few things to encrypt, or if you don't do it that often... but if you did this a lot I think you would very quickly appreciate encryption built into the filesystem rather than "tacked on" as a regular file.
Dude, go price an actual T1 some time. That's what real bandwidth costs. And I have a hint for you, compared to that your cable/DSL line is CHEAP AS HELL.
If you think 1.5Mb/s for around $40/month is "overpriced" then you are seriously delusional about how much actual bandwidth really costs. The reason it's so cheap from your cable company is precisely because it has so many restrictions and is asymmetric. If you'd rather go without the restrictions, caps, and asymmetry, by all means have a T1 installed and enjoy the benfits of a SLA. But also realize that you will be paying about 8-12 times what you currently are paying for your nice little 1.5Mb/s cable/DSL connection, and for the same download speeds.
I nominate all the sound bites from Warcraft 2, just to get that out of the way.
By the way, has anyone noticed how games.slashdot.org sure likes to link to gamespy? I mean really, almost every day it seems like there's some "top 'n' list of 'foo'" article posted, and slashdot is there and waiting with a link. You'd think there was some kind of affiliate deal going on. It's not like gamespy is some hobby site run by some kid for the heck of it.
$ perl -e 'for $a ('a'..'z') { for $b ('a'..'z') { print "$a$b\n" if(`host ldskasdasdfgjsdlfk.$a$b` =~ /has address/); } }'
cc
cx
mp
nu
ph
pw
td
tk
ws
All of the above domains have some sort of wildcard DNS action going. There may be others in addition to the two-letter country code domains also, I don't know.
I thought I'd point this out, because chances are even some people on slashdot don't know this:
Microsoft has never has and never will issue security updates through email.
It's that simple. Anything that you get claiming to be from MS is some kind of fraud, worm, virus, spam, etc. I'm sure most of you around here knew that already, but I saw this asked on some mailing lists (e.g. Dshield) when these emails first started appearing.
Use this opportunity to remind anyone you know that may not be as computer illiterate as you. This worm, in addition to ANYTHING claiming to be updates from MS, are not real.
The phrase "JAP Anon-Proxy" makes no sense. "Where is the Replacement for the Java Anonymous Proxy Anon-Proxy?" really sounds dumb. That's almost as bad as the startup banner of Windows 2000: "Based on NT Technology!" (For those of you that forgot what NT stands for, it means New Technology)
Agreed. They probably establish some sort of grid routing, such that machines that do have ports open will accept the connections from those that don't and somehow forward packets. I'm quite pessimistic about that though, since transmit capability is always small compared to the download channel of most home broadband connections. And unlike Kazaa where throughput is the only thing that matters, here latency is a very big concern, and throughput not so much. I'd think that one of the biggest challenges with this whole routing scheme would be ensuring that packets go to where they need to within a certain timeframe, otherwise it just doesn't sound natural.
Incidentally, Nullsoft's WASTE has a similar feature. Not voip, but rather the fact that only one person in the "group" needs the ability to accept incoming connections. THe traffic supposedly will route its way through the peer group in such a way so that A and B can still communicate directly even if they are both connected only to C (due to NAT of whatever.) Or something like that.
Does it also come with a huge wing on the rear deck and a muffler that would shame a Costco-sized can of Maxwell House? Does it have a huge "Corsair" logo across the windshield?
FFS, this is just a silly gimmick. It's just screaming out "pay more for this! You already paid for all those other stupid LEDs, why not me!"
Okay. I hate SCO. You hate SCO. They're a bunch of bastards and they won't put up or shut up. That's a given.
This article offers nothing new. This story is just an excuse for everyone to rehash the same old "SCO will go down in flames" lines.
Could we possibly just limit the new stories to ACTUAL BREAKING news items that contain new verifiable evidence and/or facts, or at least something substantial? Can we PLEASE just take it for granted that every publication that has anything to do with Linux is going to come out against SCO?
Realistically speaking, if indeed there were infringing parts, we never would have heard of any of this. The whole tone of this article, and the quotes from Raymond, smack of "I've already done the comparison and nothing's there." I think if by some small chance there was something illicit in the Linux tree, Raymond would have notified the maintainer and/or Torvalds and put out a patch to remove it ASAP. Or at least, that what they've constantly stated they would do were this the case.
In other words, I believe them when they say that "If by some chance there were infringing code we'd do everything we could to remove it very quickly." SCO's lawyermongering only really applies to IBM anyway, so that point is rather moot.
I think we all agree that the obvious "duh" answer is that "of course they wouldn't be derivative works." But SCO has proven that it has a knack for just making stuff up or interpreting things funny. However, even based on the letter of the law I don't think this would qualify as a "transformation." That would seem to apply to a case where you shift the representation of the data to a different format but retain its essence, such as copying a DVD to a VHS tape. However, creating MD5 sums does not seem like it would be a transformation in that sense, in that the new work has none of the qualities of the original -- it's not code, it won't compile, it cannot be used to divine any algorithms, methods, etc. In sort it's completely useless, other than for comparing to other source code fragments.