I think you meant C*O, as in CTO, CIO, CEO and so on. C for Clueless of course. (-:
And yes, it's true that clubbing together is safer in the short term, but SlashDot has this wonderful AC facility, by means of which SCO employees and contractors can bitch their little hearts out from a friend's internet link and never have to pay the piper. (-: </hint>:-)
how much can we get SCO's IP for after they lose and file chapter 11?
Surely you mean Chapter 7? Chapter 11 is merely, "oh dear, we're in the pooh, someone come and manage us out of it (yeah, right)", Chapter 7 is going down for the last time.
WRT your tagline, "I'm sorry, are the voices in my head disturbing you?" (-:
lessee: atheist, vegetarian, linux user. have i missed anything?
Are you aiming for political correctness, or the opposite? (-:
One thing the SlashCrowd seem to be reasonably even split on is the environmentalist/industrialist tension plane.
Wind is one of the few things cleaner than nukes
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Solar has a large energy investment and the panels, batteries etc are hard to recycle. Oil and coal are environmentally devastating in production as well as use (our largest local (Muja) coal station burns 12 tonnes a year of uranium, to say nothing of releasing radon etc); gas is better but shipping all of those big bombs around the country's just gotta have a sudden, loud environmental impact one day, hopefully not near any serious population. Wave and tidal generators muck around with the local ecosystem something chronic (as does Ocean Geothermal, but if you integrate fish-farms you at least get roughly twice the industry for the same amount of intervention). Nukes are quiet, clean, low-profile and produce small amounts of straightforward-to-manage waste.
If we were allowed to build proper nuclear rockets as well (get Burt Rutan to design them, not NASA), we could fling hundred-tonne loads of waste into the sun (or better still store it in a safe place (orbit/moon etc) for later re-processing) for an extremely low environmental cost. This is a question which has been studied to death, the answers are all to hand.
Stand by for a flock of "-1, Outrageous" mods from people who call themselves "green" but never actually think about the issues. They drive old, cheap, smoky, polluting cars and track dieback through the native forests they claim to protect. Here's a better way of approaching these things.
Once I'd found the real author of the code, I'd notify him, and watch the fun as he tries to sign the NDA. It'd get real entertaining real fast.
Legally interesting...
Since SCO did not disclose that author's name to you, it can't be covered by their NDA - true/false?
How much could you tell the developer about the code you had seen before their NDA bit you? Since SCO did not supply filenames and line numbers to you, their NDA does not cover you giving him file and line - true/false?
Thirdly, and I think, strongest - Fair use rights. SCO cannot make a claim without replicating those parts of the code. The fair use exception applies, allowing them to quote 'reasonable parts' of the Linux code, to illustrate thier claim.
So... in those circumstances (ie, absent an NDA), SCO have no legal comeback at all to you photographing their "evidence" and fair-using it to judge your own exposure to their frivolous litigation?
If so, it would be interesting to tee up another SCO meeting, have someone take the abovementioned shots through a peephole in the ceiling without any NDA-bound people knowing, and use the results in a fair-use fashion to discuss said legal exposure. Light blue touch-paper, retire to a safe distance?
The new information we have is...
on
Settling SCOres
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...that some of SCO's allegations are certainly wrong in detail, and that certain specific code sections (like the scheduler) are under fire.
Now if someone can recall some of the strings that they saw and grep the kernel for them we can probably have a little chapter-and-verse from which to answer some of SCO's whining directly.
We have made progress against this stupidity, even if it's not as rapid or dramatic as you'd hoped. It'll be interesting to see how the threat of a countersuit impacts SCO's shares when the less technical sites pick it up.
He suddenly got more deeply interested in IP soon after buying a drug company that specialises in producing vaccines. Have a look at what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsors: vaccinations and education.
But isn't education philanthropic? I guess that depends on whether the education is directed to enthralling our best and brightest to Microsoft and their software - both students and study venues - or is unencumbered. Guess what? With the exception of court-ordered actions and a sprinkling of cases where the brownie points were more critical than immediate sales points, all of Bill's educational sponsorship is tied to Microsoft software in one way or another. No change there in the last 20 or so years, still the same old over-ridingly desperate egocentricism. (-: Had to laugh, though, at the recipient of one computer centre telling Bill during his inspection tour that the computers in it ran "a variety of software" but omitting to mention that every bit of that variety arrived on RedHat CDs...:-)
I wonder... have I used enough long words to trigger the lameness filters? (-:
It runs on MS-Windows as well - although I imagine it runs with less KIOslaves - does that mean Microsoft will discontinue Exploder for MS-Windows because they can't compete? We can always hope. (-:
The premise sounds like sour grapes to me: "we couldn't cheat and smash that market into the ground, so we're picking up our marbles and leaving in a huff." So there! Phrrrrp!
FWIW, Exploder for Mac is better (faster, more standard, more secure) than Exploder for MS-Windows. Since Safari can beat that, it follows that Konq on MS-Windows should romp it in against Exploder.
It'd be interesting to see what people did with TLDs that matched the city's airport codes. re.lax, smi.lax, whatit.lax... Perth would be a bonanza: whis.per, clas.per, hop.per, chop.per, su.per, usur.per, worship.per, stop.per, whim.per, newspa.per, eavesdrop.per, gatekee.per, cam.per, bloo.per and so on (grep per$/usr/share/dict/words).
First one in months! Then someone had to ruin it by modding it back up again... the account's nett "gain" (smack into that cap again) for today was 4 points. IMESHO, SlashDot should keep true tally but have an "effective" karma cap of 50 + log.e(karma-50). So real 100 == effective 54, 1000 == 57, 10000 == 59. That keeps some sport in it but doesn't give rabble rousers like me any spectacular advantages.
I think one of the big differences with Oz is how isolated it is from the rest of the world.
Not as much as you might think. There are quite a few cables lying around on the ocean floor now, and Southern Cross (for one) isn't anything like close to capacity. Tracing to various places gets me across the water in a variety of different ways.
AFAIK, Telstra themselves only own one major cable (to Singapore); where they make their graft is in standing between the retail consumer and their ISPs, and similarly standing between small ISPs and big bandwidth providers. That latter has changed some in recent days, for example WestNet (second-largest WA ISP) now uses Telstra as their primary uplink by choice, not because the bridge to bandwidth costs too much to set up via anyone else.
My own ISP, ArachNet, is a classic illustration. They use Swiftel as their uplink, and Swiftel in turn use Gblx to get from Oz to the US (LAX via SYD). However, they're forced to do their DSL to me through Telstra's hardware.
Getting a "tunnel reset" through Telstra is pretty much instant. Exact same service through anyone else (who have to ask Telstra to do it) is 1-2days. Try surviving that when it happens 4 hours before a print deadline and customers 3000km away are still trying to ship you stuff to print.
Optus and Request DSL (where they're operating through their own DSLAMs not via Telstra) very, very rarely fail (I have customers with continuous connection times up around a year, some of them have never had an interruption) - there would be hardly any need for this "service" in the first place if Telstra as a company were competent and benign. This is not to disparage the many dedicated and careful Telstra techs out there, but there must be a few rotten apples in that barrel.
Which were not failures of the FOSS per se, but represented usually the success of an incumbent with a strong preference for Windows winning a political victory, and in a few cases the FOSS exposing existing problems and being blamed for those problems.
For an example of the former, consider a client that owed me AUD$3000.00 when they went bankrupt from accumulated incompetence. They had a Linux system replacing a Novell box (and incidentally taking a load off several Windows boxes) at a site with a variety of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 95C, 98, NT4) with a 13GB x 2 RAID1 array and a UPS - and random networking issues which appeared to be in the wires since we replaced everything else and it still went funny every so often.
Aaaanyway, an incumbent manager had achieved "golden boy" status by signing up a contract on the other side of Australia which was a complete shoe-in (my cat could have done it, just tuck agreement and pen under collar, put in pet crate, address and ship) and really liked Windows.
He ran their time clock on his own Win98 machine and refused to acknowledge that this was an idiotic thing to do, even after many times losing most or all of a morning's time records because the machine had crashed before or during the arrival of their workers. He eventually would up shutting the machine down at night and having the BIOS wake it up at 4:30AM, thus cutting his data losses down to oince amonth or so... I'm sure you get the idea.
Mr Golden Boy had arranged to get me kicked out of the place, bills unpaid, on a Monday and that Thursday they had a power failure. Shortly afterwards, one of their staff walked past the server room and noticed a buzzer sounding and a light, so being the helpful little sod that they were, they switched off the offending device - the server's UPS.
When the power came back but not network services, somebody else figured out what had happened, and switched the UPS back on. After ten minutes, still no joy, so they called me in. Not Mr Golden Boy, not the uberManager, they got one of the few remaining staff with a clue, one of three in the place that I cared about, and got her to ring and plead for them. Scum!
I drove half an hour to get to the place, looked at the server and it was mid-fsck (13GB software RAID one, old machine, you get the picture). As I left the server room I met Mr uberManager, who asked what was going on. I told him that the machine had been repairing itself after being interrupted and that it was taking a long time because of the large hard disk capacity, probably twenty minutes to go and it would fix itself. Mr uberManager nodded, turned away, and I turned around - to find Mr Golden Boy looking like Zeus on a bad day, red-angry and fit to apoplexy because their company's server and all of its data were going to be OK! What chance did I or FOSS stand in the face of an attitude like that? Hint: it comes between "9/(" and "-/_" on your keyboard.
For an example of the latter, consider the first round of StarOffice Wars some years ago, where they lawyers in question had sucky/random document structure and had to pay the ferryman anyway when their old Kyocera printer died and the new one had slightly different layout.
In summary, you will get different answers depending on how people percieve your question. I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported.
If I was Bill, and as long as I could forget my other woes, I'd be LMAO even (or especially) if I hadn't had a hand in starting it. My only worry would be how to inject Microsoft's name, with a positive spin on it of course, into this flood of conversation. Start threatening people for not having Xenix licences? Naw, too negative. Give SCO another $X0,000,000.00? Naw, too obvious. I know! We'll pay the Open Group $X0,000,000.00 to certify SFU as being "Unix" - another demonstration of our support for "IP"!
Oz used to have three cattle stations each bigger than Texas. You can fit seven Texases into Western Australia without overlaps, bending, folding or cutting. Japanese tourists still jump into Perth taxis and ask to go (~3000km) to Sydney. Perhaps we could model the local cluster here. Are we done with the state envy yet? (-:
Download caps are normal. My 512/128kb ArachNet DSL account has a 6GB limit per month for AUD$77 a month. Dropping that to 1GB would save me $11 a month, but I routinely suck 3-4GB. Their entry level is 128/64kb + 1GB at @AUD$49.50/month, and a 15GB cap plus fixed IP business account would be $385. Additional traffic cap is $11/GB, excess unplanned traffic is 5.5c/MB (ie $55/GB). Or you have a choice of soft bandwidth limiting (to 56kb) and no excess fees. You are not accounted or charged for traffic after hours (00:00 to 07:00) or though WAIX, the local internet exchange.
Your quota is measured as the maximum of traffic in and out, which is fairly common. Some ISPs ignore traffic from you and only charge for traffic to you.
For comparison, Telstra charge you up to 19c/megabyte (here 12-16c) for the combined sum of all traffic both directions, and iiNet (biggest ISP in West Aus, second would be WestNet) soft-limit all home accounts (limits are 6GB for AUD$79.95 512kb a/c or 0.5GB for AUD$49.95 128kb a/c) and charge 12c/MB on business excess.
ALL DSL goes through Telstra DSLAMs except on a very few busy exchanges Optus and/or Request have their own DSLAMs. This causes no end of problems for competing ISPs because they have to phone up and ask Telstra to do a "tunnel reset" when someone's DSL screws up, which often takes a day or two to execute.
Note in the Telstra DSL plans avobe that their entry level plan is AUD$10/mo more expensive, and a 512kb plan with only 3GB limit (sum of both directions, remember?) and a max of two users - the cheek! - is $18/month more than I pay ArachNet.
Novell owns the patents and most (probably all) of the copyrights. Some part(s) of The SCO Group might own some copyrights and does own distribution rights. Microsoft probably have some rights to Xenix tucked away somewhere for a rainy day. The Open Group owns the name and concept (and - my goodness - hasn't Unix become a valuable property all of a sudden?). IBM have some rights "in perpetuity", Sun and Lindows have leased some rights. It's getting pretty popular...
...and his parents evidently knew what they were doing when they named him. Either that, or he took offence at it and has been working out his anger on the world ever since.
...and gals he's previously worked with. Go and read some of the AC posts from employees of the companies that D'ohl has previously tra^H^H^Hmanaged. Sobering stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, it's true that clubbing together is safer in the short term, but SlashDot has this wonderful AC facility, by means of which SCO employees and contractors can bitch their little hearts out from a friend's internet link and never have to pay the piper. (-: </hint> :-)
Surely you mean Chapter 7? Chapter 11 is merely, "oh dear, we're in the pooh, someone come and manage us out of it (yeah, right)", Chapter 7 is going down for the last time.
WRT your tagline, "I'm sorry, are the voices in my head disturbing you?" (-:
Are you aiming for political correctness, or the opposite? (-:
One thing the SlashCrowd seem to be reasonably even split on is the environmentalist/industrialist tension plane.
Solar has a large energy investment and the panels, batteries etc are hard to recycle. Oil and coal are environmentally devastating in production as well as use (our largest local (Muja) coal station burns 12 tonnes a year of uranium, to say nothing of releasing radon etc); gas is better but shipping all of those big bombs around the country's just gotta have a sudden, loud environmental impact one day, hopefully not near any serious population. Wave and tidal generators muck around with the local ecosystem something chronic (as does Ocean Geothermal, but if you integrate fish-farms you at least get roughly twice the industry for the same amount of intervention). Nukes are quiet, clean, low-profile and produce small amounts of straightforward-to-manage waste.
If we were allowed to build proper nuclear rockets as well (get Burt Rutan to design them, not NASA), we could fling hundred-tonne loads of waste into the sun (or better still store it in a safe place (orbit/moon etc) for later re-processing) for an extremely low environmental cost. This is a question which has been studied to death, the answers are all to hand.
Stand by for a flock of "-1, Outrageous" mods from people who call themselves "green" but never actually think about the issues. They drive old, cheap, smoky, polluting cars and track dieback through the native forests they claim to protect. Here's a better way of approaching these things.
Legally interesting...
Since SCO did not disclose that author's name to you, it can't be covered by their NDA - true/false?
How much could you tell the developer about the code you had seen before their NDA bit you? Since SCO did not supply filenames and line numbers to you, their NDA does not cover you giving him file and line - true/false?
So... in those circumstances (ie, absent an NDA), SCO have no legal comeback at all to you photographing their "evidence" and fair-using it to judge your own exposure to their frivolous litigation?
If so, it would be interesting to tee up another SCO meeting, have someone take the abovementioned shots through a peephole in the ceiling without any NDA-bound people knowing, and use the results in a fair-use fashion to discuss said legal exposure. Light blue touch-paper, retire to a safe distance?
...that some of SCO's allegations are certainly wrong in detail, and that certain specific code sections (like the scheduler) are under fire.
Now if someone can recall some of the strings that they saw and grep the kernel for them we can probably have a little chapter-and-verse from which to answer some of SCO's whining directly.
We have made progress against this stupidity, even if it's not as rapid or dramatic as you'd hoped. It'll be interesting to see how the threat of a countersuit impacts SCO's shares when the less technical sites pick it up.
But isn't education philanthropic? I guess that depends on whether the education is directed to enthralling our best and brightest to Microsoft and their software - both students and study venues - or is unencumbered. Guess what? With the exception of court-ordered actions and a sprinkling of cases where the brownie points were more critical than immediate sales points, all of Bill's educational sponsorship is tied to Microsoft software in one way or another. No change there in the last 20 or so years, still the same old over-ridingly desperate egocentricism. (-: Had to laugh, though, at the recipient of one computer centre telling Bill during his inspection tour that the computers in it ran "a variety of software" but omitting to mention that every bit of that variety arrived on RedHat CDs... :-)
I wonder... have I used enough long words to trigger the lameness filters? (-:
The premise sounds like sour grapes to me: "we couldn't cheat and smash that market into the ground, so we're picking up our marbles and leaving in a huff." So there! Phrrrrp!
FWIW, Exploder for Mac is better (faster, more standard, more secure) than Exploder for MS-Windows. Since Safari can beat that, it follows that Konq on MS-Windows should romp it in against Exploder.
...de-slashed. No link to IS4C yet, that I can find.
I'd like to see how you did it. (-:
It'd be interesting to see what people did with TLDs that matched the city's airport codes. re.lax, smi.lax, whatit.lax... Perth would be a bonanza: whis.per, clas.per, hop.per, chop.per, su.per, usur.per, worship.per, stop.per, whim.per, newspa.per, eavesdrop.per, gatekee.per, cam.per, bloo.per and so on (grep per$ /usr/share/dict/words).
First one in months! Then someone had to ruin it by modding it back up again... the account's nett "gain" (smack into that cap again) for today was 4 points. IMESHO, SlashDot should keep true tally but have an "effective" karma cap of 50 + log.e(karma-50). So real 100 == effective 54, 1000 == 57, 10000 == 59. That keeps some sport in it but doesn't give rabble rousers like me any spectacular advantages.
Can I have my -1, Offtopic now please? (-:
Not as much as you might think. There are quite a few cables lying around on the ocean floor now, and Southern Cross (for one) isn't anything like close to capacity. Tracing to various places gets me across the water in a variety of different ways.
AFAIK, Telstra themselves only own one major cable (to Singapore); where they make their graft is in standing between the retail consumer and their ISPs, and similarly standing between small ISPs and big bandwidth providers. That latter has changed some in recent days, for example WestNet (second-largest WA ISP) now uses Telstra as their primary uplink by choice, not because the bridge to bandwidth costs too much to set up via anyone else.
My own ISP, ArachNet, is a classic illustration. They use Swiftel as their uplink, and Swiftel in turn use Gblx to get from Oz to the US (LAX via SYD). However, they're forced to do their DSL to me through Telstra's hardware.
Getting a "tunnel reset" through Telstra is pretty much instant. Exact same service through anyone else (who have to ask Telstra to do it) is 1-2days. Try surviving that when it happens 4 hours before a print deadline and customers 3000km away are still trying to ship you stuff to print.
Optus and Request DSL (where they're operating through their own DSLAMs not via Telstra) very, very rarely fail (I have customers with continuous connection times up around a year, some of them have never had an interruption) - there would be hardly any need for this "service" in the first place if Telstra as a company were competent and benign. This is not to disparage the many dedicated and careful Telstra techs out there, but there must be a few rotten apples in that barrel.
Which were not failures of the FOSS per se, but represented usually the success of an incumbent with a strong preference for Windows winning a political victory, and in a few cases the FOSS exposing existing problems and being blamed for those problems.
For an example of the former, consider a client that owed me AUD$3000.00 when they went bankrupt from accumulated incompetence. They had a Linux system replacing a Novell box (and incidentally taking a load off several Windows boxes) at a site with a variety of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 95C, 98, NT4) with a 13GB x 2 RAID1 array and a UPS - and random networking issues which appeared to be in the wires since we replaced everything else and it still went funny every so often.
Aaaanyway, an incumbent manager had achieved "golden boy" status by signing up a contract on the other side of Australia which was a complete shoe-in (my cat could have done it, just tuck agreement and pen under collar, put in pet crate, address and ship) and really liked Windows.
He ran their time clock on his own Win98 machine and refused to acknowledge that this was an idiotic thing to do, even after many times losing most or all of a morning's time records because the machine had crashed before or during the arrival of their workers. He eventually would up shutting the machine down at night and having the BIOS wake it up at 4:30AM, thus cutting his data losses down to oince amonth or so... I'm sure you get the idea.
Mr Golden Boy had arranged to get me kicked out of the place, bills unpaid, on a Monday and that Thursday they had a power failure. Shortly afterwards, one of their staff walked past the server room and noticed a buzzer sounding and a light, so being the helpful little sod that they were, they switched off the offending device - the server's UPS.
When the power came back but not network services, somebody else figured out what had happened, and switched the UPS back on. After ten minutes, still no joy, so they called me in. Not Mr Golden Boy, not the uberManager, they got one of the few remaining staff with a clue, one of three in the place that I cared about, and got her to ring and plead for them. Scum!
I drove half an hour to get to the place, looked at the server and it was mid-fsck (13GB software RAID one, old machine, you get the picture). As I left the server room I met Mr uberManager, who asked what was going on. I told him that the machine had been repairing itself after being interrupted and that it was taking a long time because of the large hard disk capacity, probably twenty minutes to go and it would fix itself. Mr uberManager nodded, turned away, and I turned around - to find Mr Golden Boy looking like Zeus on a bad day, red-angry and fit to apoplexy because their company's server and all of its data were going to be OK! What chance did I or FOSS stand in the face of an attitude like that? Hint: it comes between "9/(" and "-/_" on your keyboard.
For an example of the latter, consider the first round of StarOffice Wars some years ago, where they lawyers in question had sucky/random document structure and had to pay the ferryman anyway when their old Kyocera printer died and the new one had slightly different layout.
In summary, you will get different answers depending on how people percieve your question. I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported.
If I was Bill, and as long as I could forget my other woes, I'd be LMAO even (or especially) if I hadn't had a hand in starting it. My only worry would be how to inject Microsoft's name, with a positive spin on it of course, into this flood of conversation. Start threatening people for not having Xenix licences? Naw, too negative. Give SCO another $X0,000,000.00? Naw, too obvious. I know! We'll pay the Open Group $X0,000,000.00 to certify SFU as being "Unix" - another demonstration of our support for "IP"!
Not that it impacts the main point of the post.
Oz used to have three cattle stations each bigger than Texas. You can fit seven Texases into Western Australia without overlaps, bending, folding or cutting. Japanese tourists still jump into Perth taxis and ask to go (~3000km) to Sydney. Perhaps we could model the local cluster here. Are we done with the state envy yet? (-:
Eunuchs? And a harem? Judge's eyes light up...
Your quota is measured as the maximum of traffic in and out, which is fairly common. Some ISPs ignore traffic from you and only charge for traffic to you.
For comparison, Telstra charge you up to 19c/megabyte (here 12-16c) for the combined sum of all traffic both directions, and iiNet (biggest ISP in West Aus, second would be WestNet) soft-limit all home accounts (limits are 6GB for AUD$79.95 512kb a/c or 0.5GB for AUD$49.95 128kb a/c) and charge 12c/MB on business excess.
ALL DSL goes through Telstra DSLAMs except on a very few busy exchanges Optus and/or Request have their own DSLAMs. This causes no end of problems for competing ISPs because they have to phone up and ask Telstra to do a "tunnel reset" when someone's DSL screws up, which often takes a day or two to execute.
Note in the Telstra DSL plans avobe that their entry level plan is AUD$10/mo more expensive, and a 512kb plan with only 3GB limit (sum of both directions, remember?) and a max of two users - the cheek! - is $18/month more than I pay ArachNet.
Novell owns the patents and most (probably all) of the copyrights. Some part(s) of The SCO Group might own some copyrights and does own distribution rights. Microsoft probably have some rights to Xenix tucked away somewhere for a rainy day. The Open Group owns the name and concept (and - my goodness - hasn't Unix become a valuable property all of a sudden?). IBM have some rights "in perpetuity", Sun and Lindows have leased some rights. It's getting pretty popular...
Top Secret, where the Nazi dude picks up the big stamp which reads "Find them and kill them."
...and his parents evidently knew what they were doing when they named him. Either that, or he took offence at it and has been working out his anger on the world ever since.
...and gals he's previously worked with. Go and read some of the AC posts from employees of the companies that D'ohl has previously tra^H^H^Hmanaged. Sobering stuff.