"Same as sudo."
No it isn't. YOUR privileges are not elevated, you just assume the mantle of a higher privileged other user, along with their documents, locations and so on. Runas does not preserve the user's profile and ownership of created objects.
A better solution is SudoWin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sudowin/) which acts as a true Sudo for Windows.
Mac
As someone who enthusiastically posted on Groklaw in the early days I can identify with your feelings.
Several times I voiced minor doubts about some viewpoint or introduced another aspect and was stunned by PJ's rapid and savage responses. As a research scientist (MD) and long-term open-source advocate I was somewhat unprepared for being called a gull and a troll and threatened with banning unless I toed the line.
Eventually of course I was and even now (though I stopped posting regularly years ago) any remarks that I make are expunged within hours or less.
As a factual record and investigative journalism Groklaw is superb and a brilliant example of the power of disparate people gathered together for a common purpose over the internet. As a document of opinion and argument it is fatally flawed by its doctrinaire censorship of even mildly dissenting voices.
"Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
Depends how you define productivity. If it means the ability to publish then yes. If you mean the ability to produce useful and/or interesting work then no.
The vast majority of published articles are literature reviews, rehashes of previous papers, boring but easy research about things that are already well documented, or statistical juggling with dubious data from equally dubious research. Perhaps one in a thousand is both good, true, original and honest. The rest are just badly written dross.
Peer review counts for very little. A small inner circle publish (or at least have their name appended to) 90% of papers in any one discipline and they act as peer reviewers for themselves on a "You scratch my back I'll scratch yours" basis.
The "Publish or perish" mentality has completely debased and largely destroyed good science. Tenure depends on quantity of publications not quality and so vast reams of garbage are generated every month making it really difficult to find the needle in the haystack of irrelevant tripe.
Sinclair BASIC on a Spectrum (with AD/DA converter) looked after a laser doppler flowmeter in the lab for over a year. I wrote the control, recording and display software in a mix of BASIC and M/C for the bits BASIC couldn't do. Modular. commented, structured and effectively object-oriented and full of input-verification and sanity checks. Very stable. Some of the neatest code I ever wrote:(
The lab chief was ashamed of Sinclair and BASIC and ordered a bespoke solution that was diabolical - unstable as hell and full of bugs. I graduated about that time and dunno what happened in the end.
Much as Dvorak irritates me, he's dead right about the OLPC in Africa.
They'll sit in a leaking warehouse for months until someone bribes the customs to release 'em. By then half of them will have been chewed by rats, just disappeared or been ruined by damp.
Then they'll be distributed to whichever village headmen espouse the ruling party and pay enough "contributions". They'll then sit in the headman's hut and be gradually doled out as "dashes" to people who pay sufficient tribute to him. They'll then be proudly shown (still closed) to friends over the palm-wine and folks will wax eloquent about the powers of the modern world. Aish!
They'll never reach more than a dozen kids and all but two of those will toy with them for a bit, watching the strange letter shapes on the screen, before they get bored and trade 'em for a dead cat or use them as a frisbee.
The remaining two will actually start discovering something before their OLPCs are taken away by dad (you're supposed to be herding goats!) or trodden and broken or stolen.
What Africa needs is a philosophy that regards learning (and I don't mean the Koran or the Bible) as a GOOD THING and local teachers who can teach reading, w'riting and 'rithmetic, an end to patronage, nepotism and tribalism and a climate in which learning is actually perceived as an end in itself instead of the gateway to pots of money and an early retirement with a new wife.
What Africa doesn't need is more handouts from feelgood Western nations, who immediately recoup their "investment" by selling the natives vast amounts of useless military hardware to bluster their neighbours with (actually they do pretty well with clubs and machetes).
What Africa needs is a whole new ethos. And that ain't going to happen soon.
Small-shot, not cannonballs!
Shot-towers were once not that uncommon to see.
Given the mass of a cannonball, temperature when molten and a normal environment, you'd need a very tall shot tower to cast cannonballs!
Now I suppose some slashdotter will promptly work out just how high a cannonball shot tower would have to be....(I'm too lazy).
The Cutter
I do a LOT of image manipulation and Paint Shop Pro 6 (came out in '00 or '01 I think) works very well - layers, adjustment layers, masks, blends, blahblah, the whole bit.
The interface is easy and (more or less) intuitive.
I love the GIMP (and Photoshop, got both) but neither are as easy to use and GIMP is still quite hard, even tho I'm used to it.
PhotoShop is NOT the be-all and end-all of interfaces, so GIMP should look around a bit. Paint.NET is actually pretty feeble, but the interface is good and quick to use.
But of course OSS just has to get away from 2000/XP style interfaces because they are designed by the devil. Instead of looking and learning free software goes off on a geek tangent and produces interfaces only a dweeb would love.
You're not the only one in the world by any means. I also believe that GPL2 is "good enough" - the "dangers" that GPL3 protects us from are not worth the increased complexity and the fragmentation of the GPL codebase. I really don't see "tivoisation" as being either a major crime or a significant danger to free software.
GPL4 will be an even more convoluted expression of RMS socio-political views, some of which I share but many of which I don't.
Personally I (and quite a few other people) actually LIKE the U3 system.
I use mostly Linux at home, but work in a MS environment. It's neat to be able to carry my apps and data around and the U3 system looks and feels polished (I agree about the pseudo CD drive, but it doesn't bother me).
In comparison the Portable Apps Suite is clunky and slow with a very so-so interface.
So MS is going to kill a neat little system and stuff in some terrible space-hogging DRM-ridden pig that I wouldn't dream of using...
Embrace and extend, embrace and extend...obviously there'll be no more U3 enabled apps.
"I feel Linux to be perfectly ready. It is the consumers who have lots of catching up to do."
Yep. Adding a Samba user in the KDE control fails silently - this was known to be broken in 2005 and is still broken - doesn't look like anyone is interested.
Sure, _I_ can add one in an eyeblink at the command line with smbpasswd or pdbedit, no big deal, but there's still careless crap like this all over the various Linux desktops and it's a showstopper for Joe Average-would-be-Linux-user.
I use Linux (and contribute) for pretty much everything now except for a few games but lets have a bit less of that "consumers will have to catch up" BS - it's Linux that has to catch up if it wants to gain real credibility on the desktop.
For a start, the technique of using a temporary shunt for vascular injuries has been around for years, so it's not new at all. There's really nothing for the FDA to "fast-track" so that's just puffery.
I've been treating catastrophically injured limbs (including many gunshots and blast injuries) in Africa for 21 years; literally thousands of limbs and I've done my share of amputations.
Traumatically amputated limbs are almost never suitable for revascularisation so we can forget that. Most limbs are amputated not for just for vascular problems, but because of various combinations of extensive skin loss, extensive muscle loss, extensive bone loss, vascular compromise and/or nerve loss.
I can't recall more than a couple of limbs where rapid interim revascularisation would have led to a salvageable limb and eventual salvage of a more functional limb. "Critical need" my ass.
So this is just more bullshit to try and make the troops and the public feel better about a bullshit war.
"..Linux desktop market share remains stuck below 5%, which is too low to garner support from hardware vendors in some critical areas like graphics and wireless hardware..."
I happen to agree with ESR much of the time, but he's wrong here. We _have_ got support from hardware vendors in critical areas like graphics. nVidia and ATI (and even Matrox, after much grumbling) _have_ released Linux drivers.
The problem is that because they're in binary form, a very vocal subset of Linux users don't want 'em, in fact they SPIT on them and the companies that release them.
While I understand the philosophical (and to some extent practical) objections, the fact is that they're NOT going to release open drivers until Linux use becomes very much more widespread. And Linux won't become more widespread if we're going to insist that people use the dysfunctional open drivers available.
Perhaps the temporary answer is "semi-closed" drivers, developed by proprietary hardware companies in collaboration with respected OSS businesses like Red Hat or Canonical?
For Linux to make significant inroads we just have to come up with some creative and broadly acceptable compromises with the hardware industry as it is now, not as we would like it to be, or Linux will always remain a fringe solution.
[Wacom "assist" the community in writing Linux drivers, but the drivers are fairly simple and Wacom have essentially no rivals]
Long time ago. The department bought this thing for monitoring free-tissue transfers and then discovered that someone would have to watch a wildly twitching needle all night long which didn't help. I found am A/D converter for my Sinclair Spectrum, built an interface box with a couple of op-amps and range switches and wrote the monitoring software in a mixture of Z80A assembler and Sinclair Basic. I didn't know a thing about programming when I started, let alone about OOP but the end result was fully commented, was full of neat traps for errors and out of bounds conditions, was self adjusting and very modular. Screen output was graphical and it even had a teaching routine. Best of all, it eventually worked flawlessly and saved quite a few flaps.
Even today, the code still looks clean and elegant and the box worked better than it's modern commercial equivalent.
"It's possible that they will document 2003 software, which they have worked over and are about to replaced entirely."
I think it's very likely that this is _exactly_ what they have done. Vista will use subtly different APIs and the documentation will be essentially worthless.
This will eventuallly dawn on the EU and MS will then say, "But that isn't what you asked for!"
The EU will then re-request, there'll be more hearings, more appeals, more incomplete documenation, a further EU insistence on better documenation, more delays while MS "struggles" to fulfil the EU's "unjustified demands" and omigosh, it's 2012 now....
"..*nix geeks don't want to solve them; they want to continue to lazily assume that everybody is a Linux expert so that they can say that the usability failures in their software are the user's fault."
No, *nix geeks don't want to solve these problems because they're not interesting problems to solve at a technical level - they involve interacting with boring meatspace perceptions and reactions that are unpredictable and illogical. I've done this sort of stuff and it's incredibly tedious and finicky. It means getting the kids and Mr Schenck from next door over and doing it all over and over again until you are quite sure that the most drooling moron will be able to do x, y or z.
Actually it's akin to an AI problem - you have to divine what the user wants to do and then do it for them and yet make a minimum of wrong assumptions. It's quite difficult, which is why M$ has whole labs full of people who just do that. I quite enjoy it, in small doses, but working through an entire distro is a seriously major undertaking that just doesn't appeal to the sort of people who write FOSS software. It's scratching someone else's itch.
Yo spineboy! Yeah, I'm a reconstructive plastic surgeon by trade, so I do a lot of superficial & deep tumour excisions and recons. I concur with your amended protocol. Have to say that I often don't do histology on typical small subcutaneous lesions and rarely follow them up for long. But then I'm not in the USA!
Also agree that gen. surgeons have a lower index of suspicion than we do, but the main reason why I don't like 'em is 'cos they leave such ghastly scars!
SCO knew that IBM wouldn't buy them out - if they had wanted a buyout they wouldn't have talked to IBM like that - the "bluff IBM into buying them out" is a canard and a yet another layer of disguise for this ludicrous suit.
This was never intended to be won. It was never even remotely winnable. But that was never the point.
The entire exercise was devised and intended to slow down commercial uptake of Linux and in that it has succeeded reasonably well. That's enough for M***s***, the originators and funders of this scheme.
Groklaw is fun, but it's really hot air - IBM were perfectly capable of fighting this in it's own and winning, while SCO knew perfectly well was what would happen eventually.
Probably no-one at SCO, least of all Darl, knows all the details of how this was planned and funded - there must be so many cutouts that probably only a handful of people at M***s*** know all the details.
Repeat, this has been a very clever and successful conspiracy to sow FUD about Linux use in businesses and slow down adoption.
The folks who are going to crow outside the courtroom when SCO is eventually trashed have missed the point.
The two dialogues from User Account Protection that Thurrott illustrates are pretty extraordinary. It's hard to believe that MS could have produced anything so shabby. They look like examples from the Interface Hall of Shame!
First of all - "File access denied" - you havent been denied access, you been denied the right to delete the file (or so it seems), THEN it says "You don't currently have permission to delete this file" - Okay, but THEN it says "CONTINUE" and allows you to delete it, but only through ANOTHER dialogue!
I mean that's bizarre! COMPLETELY against any principles of interface design that I was taught.
The second/next dialogue in the series - http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_01.jpg - is even more bizarre. "Windows needs your permission to use this program" "File operation". WTF? I mean, that is REALLY confusing, and again COMPLETELY against good principles of IU design!
I though all this stuff about MS getting in a tangle was just exaggeration, but now I seriously think they must be. Wow!
Slashdot Mirror
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Cardinal Richelieu
"Same as sudo." No it isn't. YOUR privileges are not elevated, you just assume the mantle of a higher privileged other user, along with their documents, locations and so on. Runas does not preserve the user's profile and ownership of created objects. A better solution is SudoWin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sudowin/) which acts as a true Sudo for Windows. Mac
As someone who enthusiastically posted on Groklaw in the early days I can identify with your feelings.
Several times I voiced minor doubts about some viewpoint or introduced another aspect and was stunned by PJ's rapid and savage responses. As a research scientist (MD) and long-term open-source advocate I was somewhat unprepared for being called a gull and a troll and threatened with banning unless I toed the line.
Eventually of course I was and even now (though I stopped posting regularly years ago) any remarks that I make are expunged within hours or less.
As a factual record and investigative journalism Groklaw is superb and a brilliant example of the power of disparate people gathered together for a common purpose over the internet. As a document of opinion and argument it is fatally flawed by its doctrinaire censorship of even mildly dissenting voices.
A pity.
Suddenly deciding to turn Groklaw into a mausoleum seems very un-Pj-ish.
After all, there's still a long way to go in the saga and an awful lot of dirt
still to be uncovered.
I reckon someone put the frighteners on her - kidnapped her favourite cat or
threatened to shoot her granny if she didn't tone it down.
The shutoff was too brusque and the "return" too humble.
I smell a rat.
Mac
"Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
Depends how you define productivity. If it means the ability to publish then yes. If you mean the ability to produce useful and/or interesting work then no.
The vast majority of published articles are literature reviews, rehashes of previous papers, boring but easy research about things that are already well documented, or statistical juggling with dubious data from equally dubious research. Perhaps one in a thousand is both good, true, original and honest. The rest are just badly written dross.
Peer review counts for very little. A small inner circle publish (or at least have their name appended to) 90% of papers in any one discipline and they act as peer reviewers for themselves on a "You scratch my back I'll scratch yours" basis.
The "Publish or perish" mentality has completely debased and largely destroyed good science. Tenure depends on quantity of publications not quality and so vast reams of garbage are generated every month making it really difficult to find the needle in the haystack of irrelevant tripe.
The Cutter
Sinclair BASIC on a Spectrum (with AD/DA converter) looked after a laser doppler flowmeter in the lab for over a year. I wrote the control, recording and display software in a mix of BASIC and M/C for the bits BASIC couldn't do. Modular. commented, structured and effectively object-oriented and full of input-verification and sanity checks. Very stable. Some of the neatest code I ever wrote :(
The lab chief was ashamed of Sinclair and BASIC and ordered a bespoke solution that was diabolical - unstable as hell and full of bugs. I graduated about that time and dunno what happened in the end.
Much as Dvorak irritates me, he's dead right about the OLPC in Africa.
They'll sit in a leaking warehouse for months until someone bribes the customs to release 'em. By then half of them will have been chewed by rats, just disappeared or been ruined by damp.
Then they'll be distributed to whichever village headmen espouse the ruling party and pay enough "contributions". They'll then sit in the headman's hut and be gradually doled out as "dashes" to people who pay sufficient tribute to him. They'll then be proudly shown (still closed) to friends over the palm-wine and folks will wax eloquent about the powers of the modern world. Aish!
They'll never reach more than a dozen kids and all but two of those will toy with them for a bit, watching the strange letter shapes on the screen, before they get bored and trade 'em for a dead cat or use them as a frisbee.
The remaining two will actually start discovering something before their OLPCs are taken away by dad (you're supposed to be herding goats!) or trodden and broken or stolen.
What Africa needs is a philosophy that regards learning (and I don't mean the Koran or the Bible) as a GOOD THING and local teachers who can teach reading, w'riting and 'rithmetic, an end to patronage, nepotism and tribalism and a climate in which learning is actually perceived as an end in itself instead of the gateway to pots of money and an early retirement with a new wife.
What Africa doesn't need is more handouts from feelgood Western nations, who immediately recoup their "investment" by selling the natives vast amounts of useless military hardware to bluster their neighbours with (actually they do pretty well with clubs and machetes).
What Africa needs is a whole new ethos. And that ain't going to happen soon.
And yes, I'm an African.
Cardinal Richelieu said, "Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him."
As true now as it was then.
"GPL2 isn't fundamentally broken. That's why the GPL 3 is a mistake."
Amen, brother.
Small-shot, not cannonballs! Shot-towers were once not that uncommon to see. Given the mass of a cannonball, temperature when molten and a normal environment, you'd need a very tall shot tower to cast cannonballs! Now I suppose some slashdotter will promptly work out just how high a cannonball shot tower would have to be....(I'm too lazy). The Cutter
I do a LOT of image manipulation and Paint Shop Pro 6 (came out in '00 or '01 I think) works very well - layers, adjustment layers, masks, blends, blahblah, the whole bit.
The interface is easy and (more or less) intuitive.
I love the GIMP (and Photoshop, got both) but neither are as easy to use and GIMP is still quite hard, even tho I'm used to it.
PhotoShop is NOT the be-all and end-all of interfaces, so GIMP should look around a bit. Paint.NET is actually pretty feeble, but the interface is good and quick to use.
But of course OSS just has to get away from 2000/XP style interfaces because they are designed by the devil. Instead of looking and learning free software goes off on a geek tangent and produces interfaces only a dweeb would love.
Arrrggggghhhh!
You're not the only one in the world by any means. I also believe that GPL2 is "good enough" - the "dangers" that GPL3 protects us from are not worth the increased complexity and the fragmentation of the GPL codebase. I really don't see "tivoisation" as being either a major crime or a significant danger to free software.
GPL4 will be an even more convoluted expression of RMS socio-political views, some of which I share but many of which I don't.
Personally I (and quite a few other people) actually LIKE the U3 system.
I use mostly Linux at home, but work in a MS environment. It's neat to be able to carry my apps and data around and the U3 system looks and feels polished (I agree about the pseudo CD drive, but it doesn't bother me).
In comparison the Portable Apps Suite is clunky and slow with a very so-so interface.
So MS is going to kill a neat little system and stuff in some terrible space-hogging DRM-ridden pig that I wouldn't dream of using...
Embrace and extend, embrace and extend...obviously there'll be no more U3 enabled apps.
Really fucking irritating!
The Cutter
"I feel Linux to be perfectly ready. It is the consumers who have lots of catching up to do."
Yep. Adding a Samba user in the KDE control fails silently - this was known to be broken in 2005 and is still broken - doesn't look like anyone is interested.
Sure, _I_ can add one in an eyeblink at the command line with smbpasswd or pdbedit, no big deal, but there's still careless crap like this all over the various Linux desktops and it's a showstopper for Joe Average-would-be-Linux-user.
I use Linux (and contribute) for pretty much everything now except for a few games but lets have a bit less of that "consumers will have to catch up" BS - it's Linux that has to catch up if it wants to gain real credibility on the desktop.
This is a lot of excitement about very little.
For a start, the technique of using a temporary shunt for vascular injuries has been around for years, so it's not new at all. There's really nothing for the FDA to "fast-track" so that's just puffery.
I've been treating catastrophically injured limbs (including many gunshots and blast injuries) in Africa for 21 years; literally thousands of limbs and I've done my share of amputations.
Traumatically amputated limbs are almost never suitable for revascularisation so we can forget that. Most limbs are amputated not for just for vascular problems, but because of various combinations of extensive skin loss, extensive muscle loss, extensive bone loss, vascular compromise and/or nerve loss.
I can't recall more than a couple of limbs where rapid interim revascularisation would have led to a salvageable limb and eventual salvage of a more functional limb. "Critical need" my ass.
So this is just more bullshit to try and make the troops and the public feel better about a bullshit war.
The Cutterman
"..Linux desktop market share remains stuck below 5%, which is too low to garner support from hardware vendors in some critical areas like graphics and wireless hardware..."
I happen to agree with ESR much of the time, but he's wrong here. We _have_ got support from hardware vendors in critical areas like graphics. nVidia and ATI (and even Matrox, after much grumbling) _have_ released Linux drivers.
The problem is that because they're in binary form, a very vocal subset of Linux users don't want 'em, in fact they SPIT on them and the companies that release them.
While I understand the philosophical (and to some extent practical) objections, the fact is that they're NOT going to release open drivers until Linux use becomes very much more widespread. And Linux won't become more widespread if we're going to insist that people use the dysfunctional open drivers available.
Perhaps the temporary answer is "semi-closed" drivers, developed by proprietary hardware companies in collaboration with respected OSS businesses like Red Hat or Canonical?
For Linux to make significant inroads we just have to come up with some creative and broadly acceptable compromises with the hardware industry as it is now, not as we would like it to be, or Linux will always remain a fringe solution.
[Wacom "assist" the community in writing Linux drivers, but the drivers are fairly simple and Wacom have essentially no rivals]
Long time ago. The department bought this thing for monitoring free-tissue transfers and then discovered that someone would have to watch a wildly twitching needle all night long which didn't help. I found am A/D converter for my Sinclair Spectrum, built an interface box with a couple of op-amps and range switches and wrote the monitoring software in a mixture of Z80A assembler and Sinclair Basic. I didn't know a thing about programming when I started, let alone about OOP but the end result was fully commented, was full of neat traps for errors and out of bounds conditions, was self adjusting and very modular. Screen output was graphical and it even had a teaching routine. Best of all, it eventually worked flawlessly and saved quite a few flaps.
Even today, the code still looks clean and elegant and the box worked better than it's modern commercial equivalent.
I sorta remember something about taking the beam out of your own eye before you start extracting the mote from someone elses.
MS - Global Policeman (except of itself.....)
"It's possible that they will document 2003 software, which they have worked over and are about to replaced entirely."
I think it's very likely that this is _exactly_ what they have done. Vista will use subtly different APIs and the documentation will be essentially worthless.
This will eventuallly dawn on the EU and MS will then say, "But that isn't what you asked for!"
The EU will then re-request, there'll be more hearings, more appeals, more incomplete documenation, a further EU insistence on better documenation, more delays while MS "struggles" to fulfil the EU's "unjustified demands" and omigosh, it's 2012 now....
Rinse, wash, repeat...
"..*nix geeks don't want to solve them; they want to continue to lazily assume that everybody is a Linux expert so that they can say that the usability failures in their software are the user's fault."
No, *nix geeks don't want to solve these problems because they're not interesting problems to solve at a technical level - they involve interacting with boring meatspace perceptions and reactions that are unpredictable and illogical. I've done this sort of stuff and it's incredibly tedious and finicky. It means getting the kids and Mr Schenck from next door over and doing it all over and over again until you are quite sure that the most drooling moron will be able to do x, y or z.
Actually it's akin to an AI problem - you have to divine what the user wants to do and then do it for them and yet make a minimum of wrong assumptions. It's quite difficult, which is why M$ has whole labs full of people who just do that. I quite enjoy it, in small doses, but working through an entire distro is a seriously major undertaking that just doesn't appeal to the sort of people who write FOSS software. It's scratching someone else's itch.
Yo spineboy! Yeah, I'm a reconstructive plastic surgeon by trade, so I do a lot of superficial & deep tumour excisions and recons. I concur with your amended protocol. Have to say that I often don't do histology on typical small subcutaneous lesions and rarely follow them up for long. But then I'm not in the USA!
Also agree that gen. surgeons have a lower index of suspicion than we do, but the main reason why I don't like 'em is 'cos they leave such ghastly scars!
A lipoma is benign, however they can undergo malignant transformation - just like any tissue in the body."
,the bad ones tend to be firmer and look funny on MRI."
True
"Generally the small (5 cm and deep to the fascia ( a gristly layer over the muscle) tend to malignantly transform and should be excised."
False. Malignant transformation even of deep lipomas is rare.
"If something is deep to the skin - i.e. a lipoma, it should be removed by a surgeon (general, or orthopaedic) that specialises in oncology."
Balls, any competent surgeon should be able to remove a lipoma and there no need to be an oncological specialist.
"The only real way to determine if they are benign is to examine it pathologically."
True.
"Generally the benign ones tend to be soft,
You're doing MRIs for clinical lipomas now? No wonder the Medical Aids are so expensive!
The Cutterman
C'mon guys!
SCO knew that IBM wouldn't buy them out - if they had wanted a buyout they wouldn't have talked to IBM like that - the "bluff IBM into buying them out" is a canard and a yet another layer of disguise for this ludicrous suit.
This was never intended to be won. It was never even remotely winnable. But that was never the point.
The entire exercise was devised and intended to slow down commercial uptake of Linux and in that it has succeeded reasonably well. That's enough for M***s***, the originators and funders of this scheme.
Groklaw is fun, but it's really hot air - IBM were perfectly capable of fighting this in it's own and winning, while SCO knew perfectly well was what would happen eventually.
Probably no-one at SCO, least of all Darl, knows all the details of how this was planned and funded - there must be so many cutouts that probably only a handful of people at M***s*** know all the details.
Repeat, this has been a very clever and successful conspiracy to sow FUD about Linux use in businesses and slow down adoption.
The folks who are going to crow outside the courtroom when SCO is eventually trashed have missed the point.
The two dialogues from User Account Protection that Thurrott illustrates are pretty extraordinary. It's hard to believe that MS could have produced anything so shabby. They look like examples from the Interface Hall of Shame!
5 342_rev5_00.jpg is really contradictory and confusing.
5 342_rev5_01.jpg - is even more bizarre. "Windows needs your permission to use this program" "File operation". WTF? I mean, that is REALLY confusing, and again COMPLETELY against good principles of IU design!
The first one - http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_
First of all - "File access denied" - you havent been denied access, you been denied the right to delete the file (or so it seems), THEN it says "You don't currently have permission to delete this file" - Okay, but THEN it says "CONTINUE" and allows you to delete it, but only through ANOTHER dialogue!
I mean that's bizarre! COMPLETELY against any principles of interface design that I was taught.
The second/next dialogue in the series - http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_
I though all this stuff about MS getting in a tangle was just exaggeration, but now I seriously think they must be. Wow!
Cutterman
"The government HAS a copy of the source code...."
Supposedly. They've got a copy of something.
But I wonder whether it compiles?
It's probably not real, just Lorem Ipsum.