The idea of new protocols being approved by the IETF got me thinking about what other technologies they might consider. It occurred to me that Napster and Gnutella potentially open up considerable possibilities for new application architectures as well, since they essentially provide a nice distributed storage & lookup mechanism that could be used for a variety of purposes besides pirating music.
Has the IETF weighed in on the Napster/Gnutella debate? If so, what do they have to say about the technical merits of those protocols?
The only thing Sun machines have that commodity x86 PCs don't (well, besides the label...) is the 64 bit architechture.
Sun hardware also has online CPU and memory replacement/addition (at least from the E3500 series on up). No Intel X86-based system offers that today. Sun's E10000 also has dynamic partitions, i.e. the ability to run multiple copies of the operating system inside one SMP servers and dynamically change the boundaries between the partitions. No other UNIX system, based on Intel X86 or otherwise, has that capability today.
The 32 bit architecture is limited to only 4 GB of RAM, which is not enough for large-scale DB servers.
True, but all Intel X86 processors from the Pentium Pro on are actually 36-bit processors, allowing them to support up to 64 GB of physical memory. In a 32-but OS, the processes themselves can access no more than 4 GB of memory, but system performance can still be enhanced by enabling faster access to memory using what are essentially large disk caches.
Indeed, this is the second high-visibility Internet skirmish IBM has won against Sun in the last two months (after snatching away the A.Root server in April).
However, I think it is premature to call this a "fundamental" turnaround for the company. IBM's server unit revenues were slipping in the first part of this year after falling by nearly 20% in 1999, putting it under huge amounts of pressure to strenghen its business. Under these conditions, it is likely to do almost anything to win key accounts.
Right now, a win based on Linux with a high-profile Internet customer is a great way to give Sun a black eye, but IBM still has to get a lot better at basic blocking and tackling in the market to sustain its success.
Before it can do that, people need to decide on schemas which explain how to structure a given form of data. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.
Exactly, and with this announcement, Microsoft is doing just that - stepping up to the bar and stating that it will define a broad set of schemas applying to both web services and clients. Microsoft is essentially trying to impose a defacto standard on how XML information will be passed around the web, using the strength of its desktop position as the lever.
Indeed, the user interface part of this announcement is particularly intriguing. As you say: And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars This is exactly what the Microsoft.NET Universal Canvas is all about. It provides an XML compound information architecture that integrates browsing, communications, and document authoring into a single, unified environment that will be optimized to work with all the new XML-based services Microsoft is defining.
Interestingly, Windows itself winds up playing a peripheral role in this scheme. As Microsoft's white paper points out, the Windows OS will be renamed Windows.NET and offered as a service on a subscription basis, just like MSN. Since Windows will no longer technically be a "product", it makes you wonder whether Microsoft developed this architecture in an effort to work around the potential fall-out from the anti-trust ruling.
Microsoft should have known what it was in for as soon as it heard Boies was representing the government. After all, he had successfully fended off the government for IBM during its antitrust trial, so he knew all the moves.
Well, one reason to use Gnutalla would be if it were Open Source, but the last time I checked, the Gnutella development team had not released their source code, saying that they would wait until "a stable 1.0 release was ready". There are plenty of clones around that use the Gnutella protocol, but I am still curious why they have not been called on giving their product the GNU label when they don't actually provide their source code.
As the LVM for Linux page points out, the LVM concept was initially developed by IBM and subsequently adopted by other systems, so this is an area that IBM understands probably better than anyone else (except maybe for third parties such as Veritas). Indeed, LVM was one of the main selling points for IBM's AIX when it first appeared in the early 90's, and helped IBM greatly to make inroads against incumbents Sun and HP.
Even though this technology obviously won't make it into the 2.4 release, it will dramatically strengthen Linux's enterprise capabilities when 2.6 ships, particularly when coupled with the journaling file system in that release. Flexible volume management is taken for granted by most commercial users today, and capable LVM functions in Linux will put its storage capabilities on par with almost every other operating system available.
Note, though, that regardless of the design of the LVM itself, there are some tricky issues that need to be resolved in the implementation with an actual file system. For example, it turns out that growing volumes is fairly straightforward, but shrinking them is much more difficult. The paper mentions that specific support is needed from the underlying file system to enable shrinking, so even with this "gift" from IBM, there is still a lot of work to be done to come up with a useable solution.
From an artist's persective, patronage of the wealthy is better, for the obvious reason that they have more money.
Yes, but the flaw with patronage system is that the artist risks being beholden to the whims of the patron. Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Mozart is nearly shut off because his rival convinces the patron that Mozart's music has "too many notes"? More to the point, I doubt Larry Ellison would fund a artistic project that didn't meet his notoriously particular tastes. How many genuinely talented, pre-20th century artists have we never heard of because they failed to secure the attention of rich patrons and had no commercial channels to expose their work?
The advantage of the open-market system is that if the product is good, it will succeed because the public will pay for it, regardless of what a few influential individuals think.
I can think of two reasons why they will not be cheaper: 1) I believe that leading Windows OEMs such as IBM still have to pay Microsoft a royalty for every desktop and notebook system shipped, regardless of the actual OS installed. Therefore, the system prices will still include the now-infamous "Microsoft tax", even if IBM does not actually ship the Windows software with the systems. 2) If IBM preinstalls a major Linux distribution on the Thinkpads, it may have to pay a per-unit royalty to the supplier of the distribution as part of the OEM agreement, which may or may not be less than what Microsoft charged.
I seem to remember hearing that 40 Gbps was the maximum amount of information that could be processed by the human vision system. If so, this breakthrough represents a key step towards absolute telepresence, no?
whilst making it completely impossible to implement in competiting implementations which implements their propietary protocol extensions
Huh? It looks to me like these conditions just specify what is required to gain access to the specification...I don't see anything that prohibits development competing implementation without Microsoft's consent. This agreement simply allows Microsoft to keep track of who sees the spec, nothing more.
You can speculate on how they use this information, and how they might react in the future when competing implementations do appear, but that has nothing to do with who can or can't implement the extensions themselves.
At least there's no mention of it in the document that I can find. Doing that is pretty hard, and would definitely require major surgery on thr Linux kernel.
* Celebrity guests were Patrick Stewart and the guy who played Peterman on Seinfeld (predictably, there were lots of jokes about "enterprise" and "engage!"). The Peterman guy played a venture capitalist who made a deal with the demonstrator (playing a startup founder) because he was able to show him his business plan on the plane using the IntelliMirror function to replicate his desktop from the server back at the office.
* Lots of focus on plug-and-play, use of the Infra-red port on laptops to transfer files, USB compatibility, and Firewire to transfer files from camcorders. Also focused on DVD capabilities.
* There was a chart with the results of a third-party stress test, which showed that the average uptime for Windows 95 was 2.5 days, NT 4 was 5.4 days, and Windows 2000 was 90 days (and counting...the test machine was still running)
* Gates announced two new TPC-C numbers putting Windows NT/2000 in the #1 and #2 position for transaction processing performance for the first time (the second one, announced today, used a cluster of 12 x 8-way Compaq servers to get over 227,000 tpmC, the highest number previously was IBM with about 150,000 tmpC, at four times the cost of the Windows 2000 system)
* There was a demo of a massive web server cluster running Windows 2000, supposedly capable of handling 1.2 billion hits per day. To prove it, curtains were raised around the auditorium to show that the walls were literally covered with desktop systems, all of which were banging on this cluster.
* The main prop on stage was a giant (i.e. 40' high and wide) laptop. The show closed with the bottom of the laptop lifting up, and underneath was the band Santana, who then broke out playing.
Given his complete ignorance of how Unix-like operating systems work
What does how UNIX works have to do with whether people write viruses to attack it? Have you forgotten that the first viruses/Trojan horses to infect the Internet were hosted by UNIX systems? They attacked UNIX because that's what most of the systems on the Internet ran at that time.
he just assumed that more malicious coders + more popularity = more viruses.
This assumption is supported by the fact that most viruses attack Windows systems today. Why? Because most systems connected to the Internet run Windows.
I took some time explaining that Linux was different because of a) availability of source code
The availability of source code allows a virus writer to find weaknesses that a virus might exploit...period. You can argue that the availability of source code allows more people to look for security holes, but it does not itself prevent exploitation of security holes. On the contrary, existing security holes become vastly easier to exploit when the virus writer can see exactly how the source code works.
b) permissions
Viruses defeat permissions by exploiting weaknesses in system software or application code...that is their function. To cite "permissions" as protection from viruses is like saying that burglaries can't occur because people have locks on their doors.
c) the extreme wariness of the average Linux user of running untrusted binaries.
The whole point is that the definition of the "average Linux user" will change dramatically as Linux becomes more widely used. The average Linux user will no longer be a person who has time to catch and install every security patch that happens to be issued. The average Linux user will be someone who just wants to get their job done without having to learn to be a system administrator.
Our company tried to introduce an option plan that turned out to have so many constraints in the language of its legal agreement that it lost most of its credibility after people had it examined by lawyers. I won't go into the details of the whole story, but here are some of the issues you should watch out for in the option agreement: * Qualified vs. unqualified: many option plans that startups throw together turn out to be "unqualified", which means that there are severe tax implications when you exercise the options. You should make sure that the options are "qualified". * Exercising constraints: exercising the options, i.e. converting the options into stock itself, is the most critical phase of an option plan. Make sure you understand any limitations in your ability to exercise the options. For example, what happens when another publicly-held company buys your company? Can you exercise your options for stock in the acquiring company, or are you forced to exercise them at some much lower price determined by the management of your current company? * Time limits: there may be a fixed period for which the options are valid, after which they turn useless. * Liquidation constraints: does the company reserve the right of first refusal for buying the options back from you? What possibilities are there for liquidating the options before the company goes public or is acquired (which could take much longer than expected)?
Entrepeneurs know that option agreements are a very effective way to get the most out of their employees, but at the same time they need to maximize their flexibility by keeping as much equity as possible in-house, so they will inherently try to protect themselves with various escape hatches. Again, make sure you carefully check out the agreement before you commit to it as part of any employment agreement or compensation plan. It is worth the $100-200 to have a laywer examine the agreement document.
I recently set up RH 6.1 with a 100 Mbps network and did an extensive search beforehand for feedback on configuring 100 Mbps cards with 2.2-based kernels. I scanned as many USENET and on-line discussion forums as I could, and cross-checked mentions against Red Hat's 3-tier HW compatibility list.
The 3c905 card is very popular and seems to work correctly for many users, but is only on RH's Tier 3 list, which means that it is compatible but not supported by Red Hat. Other cards that are higher on RH's list, like cards based on the DEC Tulip chip set are also popular, but have generated wildly uneven reports. It seems that cards based on the original Tulip chip set work perfectly, but that DEC sold off the Tulip technology to another company, which kept the name but promptly broke compability with their implementation. Often there are caveats that the card will only work at 10 Mbps, or require that a newer driver be compiled and installed.
The EtherExpress PRO/100 was the only card which was both on RH's Tier 1 list (which means that RH stands behind its correct operation) and registered no complaints that I could discover in discussions.
Commercially releasing Linux on S/390 "bare metal" would reveal an awful lot of information about IBM's most lucrative proprietary technology, and it is hard to see how that risk would be justified given where Linux stands in the enterprise today.
Testing a VM version of Linux is a no-brainer, and is hardly anything to get excited about. After all, IBM has had Windows NT running on S/390 VM in its labs for years, but never saw any reason to productize it. Further, IBM long sold a version of AIX for S/390, and it was a non-starter, so why would they now start to offer Linux?
the company was already familiar with Linux, having used it for four years for its DNS and some e-mail. Kenwood was satisfied with Linux and did not wish to take the time to get up to speed on a Unix implementation , according to Calvin.
Some bravery...
A Windows machine with similar functionality would probably need to be at least a four-processor system, Calvin said.
It's dubious claims like this that really make you wonder whether Kenwood considered its options realistically. Mr. Calvin has obviously been active in the Linux community for a long time, so the real question here is how he convinced Kenwood's management that using Linux for such a business-critical application would be the right path.
I keep hearing that the FoF can't be overturned because it is not technically a judgement. However, the words and tone used in the FoF sure sounded like a judgement to me. It is almost as if the judge is saying "I have found that you committed a crime, and you can't appeal because it is a *finding*, not a verdict".
Hasn't "due process" been short-circuited here? If the judge was supposed to limit this phase of the process to disclosure to "facts", but is instead shown to have "ruled" by virtue of the way his finding was structured, is there room for appeal based on his overstepping the scope of his responsibility at this stage?
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of new protocols being approved by the IETF got me thinking about what other technologies they might consider. It occurred to me that Napster and Gnutella potentially open up considerable possibilities for new application architectures as well, since they essentially provide a nice distributed storage & lookup mechanism that could be used for a variety of purposes besides pirating music.
Has the IETF weighed in on the Napster/Gnutella debate? If so, what do they have to say about the technical merits of those protocols?
The only thing Sun machines have that commodity x86 PCs don't (well, besides the label...) is the 64 bit architechture.
Sun hardware also has online CPU and memory replacement/addition (at least from the E3500 series on up). No Intel X86-based system offers that today. Sun's E10000 also has dynamic partitions, i.e. the ability to run multiple copies of the operating system inside one SMP servers and dynamically change the boundaries between the partitions. No other UNIX system, based on Intel X86 or otherwise, has that capability today.
The 32 bit architecture is limited to only 4 GB of RAM, which is not enough for large-scale DB servers.
True, but all Intel X86 processors from the Pentium Pro on are actually 36-bit processors, allowing them to support up to 64 GB of physical memory. In a 32-but OS, the processes themselves can access no more than 4 GB of memory, but system performance can still be enhanced by enabling faster access to memory using what are essentially large disk caches.
Indeed, this is the second high-visibility Internet skirmish IBM has won against Sun in the last two months (after snatching away the A.Root server in April).
However, I think it is premature to call this a "fundamental" turnaround for the company. IBM's server unit revenues were slipping in the first part of this year after falling by nearly 20% in 1999, putting it under huge amounts of pressure to strenghen its business. Under these conditions, it is likely to do almost anything to win key accounts.
Right now, a win based on Linux with a high-profile Internet customer is a great way to give Sun a black eye, but IBM still has to get a lot better at basic blocking and tackling in the market to sustain its success.
Before it can do that, people need to decide on schemas which explain how to structure a given form of data. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.
.NET Universal Canvas is all about. It provides an XML compound information architecture that integrates browsing, communications, and document authoring into a single, unified environment that will be optimized to work with all the new XML-based services Microsoft is defining.
.NET and offered as a service on a subscription basis, just like MSN. Since Windows will no longer technically be a "product", it makes you wonder whether Microsoft developed this architecture in an effort to work around the potential fall-out from the anti-trust ruling.
Exactly, and with this announcement, Microsoft is doing just that - stepping up to the bar and stating that it will define a broad set of schemas applying to both web services and clients. Microsoft is essentially trying to impose a defacto standard on how XML information will be passed around the web, using the strength of its desktop position as the lever.
Indeed, the user interface part of this announcement is particularly intriguing. As you say:
And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars
This is exactly what the Microsoft
Interestingly, Windows itself winds up playing a peripheral role in this scheme. As Microsoft's white paper points out, the Windows OS will be renamed Windows
Microsoft should have known what it was in for as soon as it heard Boies was representing the government. After all, he had successfully fended off the government for IBM during its antitrust trial, so he knew all the moves.
Click here for the WozCam
http://wozcam.woz.org/
Well, one reason to use Gnutalla would be if it were Open Source, but the last time I checked, the Gnutella development team had not released their source code, saying that they would wait until "a stable 1.0 release was ready". There are plenty of clones around that use the Gnutella protocol, but I am still curious why they have not been called on giving their product the GNU label when they don't actually provide their source code.
As the LVM for Linux page points out, the LVM concept was initially developed by IBM and subsequently adopted by other systems, so this is an area that IBM understands probably better than anyone else (except maybe for third parties such as Veritas). Indeed, LVM was one of the main selling points for IBM's AIX when it first appeared in the early 90's, and helped IBM greatly to make inroads against incumbents Sun and HP.
Even though this technology obviously won't make it into the 2.4 release, it will dramatically strengthen Linux's enterprise capabilities when 2.6 ships, particularly when coupled with the journaling file system in that release. Flexible volume management is taken for granted by most commercial users today, and capable LVM functions in Linux will put its storage capabilities on par with almost every other operating system available.
Note, though, that regardless of the design of the LVM itself, there are some tricky issues that need to be resolved in the implementation with an actual file system. For example, it turns out that growing volumes is fairly straightforward, but shrinking them is much more difficult. The paper mentions that specific support is needed from the underlying file system to enable shrinking, so even with this "gift" from IBM, there is still a lot of work to be done to come up with a useable solution.
From an artist's persective, patronage of the wealthy is better, for the obvious reason that they have more money.
Yes, but the flaw with patronage system is that the artist risks being beholden to the whims of the patron. Remember the scene in "Amadeus" where Mozart is nearly shut off because his rival convinces the patron that Mozart's music has "too many notes"? More to the point, I doubt Larry Ellison would fund a artistic project that didn't meet his notoriously particular tastes. How many genuinely talented, pre-20th century artists have we never heard of because they failed to secure the attention of rich patrons and had no commercial channels to expose their work?
The advantage of the open-market system is that if the product is good, it will succeed because the public will pay for it, regardless of what a few influential individuals think.
--Loge
I can think of two reasons why they will not be cheaper:
1) I believe that leading Windows OEMs such as IBM still have to pay Microsoft a royalty for every desktop and notebook system shipped, regardless of the actual OS installed. Therefore, the system prices will still include the now-infamous "Microsoft tax", even if IBM does not actually ship the Windows software with the systems.
2) If IBM preinstalls a major Linux distribution on the Thinkpads, it may have to pay a per-unit royalty to the supplier of the distribution as part of the OEM agreement, which may or may not be less than what Microsoft charged.
--Loge
I seem to remember hearing that 40 Gbps was the maximum amount of information that could be processed by the human vision system. If so, this breakthrough represents a key step towards absolute telepresence, no?
whilst making it completely impossible to implement in competiting implementations which implements their propietary protocol extensions
Huh? It looks to me like these conditions just specify what is required to gain access to the specification...I don't see anything that prohibits development competing implementation without Microsoft's consent. This agreement simply allows Microsoft to keep track of who sees the spec, nothing more.
You can speculate on how they use this information, and how they might react in the future when competing implementations do appear, but that has nothing to do with who can or can't implement the extensions themselves.
I, personally, think that they view Linux as a real opportunity to get MS back.
And does "getting MS back" seem like a sound business strategy to you?
At least there's no mention of it in the document that I can find. Doing that is pretty hard, and would definitely require major surgery on thr Linux kernel.
I thought Samba already managed NetBEUI interoperability pretty well. What kind of improvements does this bring to the table?
What Samba really needs is the ability to run as a Primary Domain Controller. Will this contribution help meet that goal?
I was there. Here are a few highlights:
* Celebrity guests were Patrick Stewart and the guy who played Peterman on Seinfeld (predictably, there were lots of jokes about "enterprise" and "engage!"). The Peterman guy played a venture capitalist who made a deal with the demonstrator (playing a startup founder) because he was able to show him his business plan on the plane using the IntelliMirror function to replicate his desktop from the server back at the office.
* Lots of focus on plug-and-play, use of the Infra-red port on laptops to transfer files, USB compatibility, and Firewire to transfer files from camcorders. Also focused on DVD capabilities.
* There was a chart with the results of a third-party stress test, which showed that the average uptime for Windows 95 was 2.5 days, NT 4 was 5.4 days, and Windows 2000 was 90 days (and counting...the test machine was still running)
* Gates announced two new TPC-C numbers putting Windows NT/2000 in the #1 and #2 position for transaction processing performance for the first time (the second one, announced today, used a cluster of 12 x 8-way Compaq servers to get over 227,000 tpmC, the highest number previously was IBM with about 150,000 tmpC, at four times the cost of the Windows 2000 system)
* There was a demo of a massive web server cluster running Windows 2000, supposedly capable of handling 1.2 billion hits per day. To prove it, curtains were raised around the auditorium to show that the walls were literally covered with desktop systems, all of which were banging on this cluster.
* The main prop on stage was a giant (i.e. 40' high and wide) laptop. The show closed with the bottom of the laptop lifting up, and underneath was the band Santana, who then broke out playing.
Just a question, no flame intended. Anyone know?
Given his complete ignorance of how Unix-like operating systems work
What does how UNIX works have to do with whether people write viruses to attack it? Have you forgotten that the first viruses/Trojan horses to infect the Internet were hosted by UNIX systems? They attacked UNIX because that's what most of the systems on the Internet ran at that time.
he just assumed that more malicious coders + more popularity = more viruses.
This assumption is supported by the fact that most viruses attack Windows systems today. Why? Because most systems connected to the Internet run Windows.
I took some time explaining that Linux was different because of a) availability of source code
The availability of source code allows a virus writer to find weaknesses that a virus might exploit...period. You can argue that the availability of source code allows more people to look for security holes, but it does not itself prevent exploitation of security holes. On the contrary, existing security holes become vastly easier to exploit when the virus writer can see exactly how the source code works.
b) permissions
Viruses defeat permissions by exploiting weaknesses in system software or application code...that is their function. To cite "permissions" as protection from viruses is like saying that burglaries can't occur because people have locks on their doors.
c) the extreme wariness of the average Linux user of running untrusted binaries.
The whole point is that the definition of the "average Linux user" will change dramatically as Linux becomes more widely used. The average Linux user will no longer be a person who has time to catch and install every security patch that happens to be issued. The average Linux user will be someone who just wants to get their job done without having to learn to be a system administrator.
Our company tried to introduce an option plan that turned out to have so many constraints in the language of its legal agreement that it lost most of its credibility after people had it examined by lawyers. I won't go into the details of the whole story, but here are some of the issues you should watch out for in the option agreement:
* Qualified vs. unqualified: many option plans that startups throw together turn out to be "unqualified", which means that there are severe tax implications when you exercise the options. You should make sure that the options are "qualified".
* Exercising constraints: exercising the options, i.e. converting the options into stock itself, is the most critical phase of an option plan. Make sure you understand any limitations in your ability to exercise the options. For example, what happens when another publicly-held company buys your company? Can you exercise your options for stock in the acquiring company, or are you forced to exercise them at some much lower price determined by the management of your current company?
* Time limits: there may be a fixed period for which the options are valid, after which they turn useless.
* Liquidation constraints: does the company reserve the right of first refusal for buying the options back from you? What possibilities are there for liquidating the options before the company goes public or is acquired (which could take much longer than expected)?
Entrepeneurs know that option agreements are a very effective way to get the most out of their employees, but at the same time they need to maximize their flexibility by keeping as much equity as possible in-house, so they will inherently try to protect themselves with various escape hatches. Again, make sure you carefully check out the agreement before you commit to it as part of any employment agreement or compensation plan. It is worth the $100-200 to have a laywer examine the agreement document.
I recently set up RH 6.1 with a 100 Mbps network and did an extensive search beforehand for feedback on configuring 100 Mbps cards with 2.2-based kernels. I scanned as many USENET and on-line discussion forums as I could, and cross-checked mentions against Red Hat's 3-tier HW compatibility list.
The 3c905 card is very popular and seems to work correctly for many users, but is only on RH's Tier 3 list, which means that it is compatible but not supported by Red Hat. Other cards that are higher on RH's list, like cards based on the DEC Tulip chip set are also popular, but have generated wildly uneven reports. It seems that cards based on the original Tulip chip set work perfectly, but that DEC sold off the Tulip technology to another company, which kept the name but promptly broke compability with their implementation. Often there are caveats that the card will only work at 10 Mbps, or require that a newer driver be compiled and installed.
The EtherExpress PRO/100 was the only card which was both on RH's Tier 1 list (which means that RH stands behind its correct operation) and registered no complaints that I could discover in discussions.
Commercially releasing Linux on S/390 "bare metal" would reveal an awful lot of information about IBM's most lucrative proprietary technology, and it is hard to see how that risk would be justified given where Linux stands in the enterprise today.
Testing a VM version of Linux is a no-brainer, and is hardly anything to get excited about. After all, IBM has had Windows NT running on S/390 VM in its labs for years, but never saw any reason to productize it. Further, IBM long sold a version of AIX for S/390, and it was a non-starter, so why would they now start to offer Linux?
the company was already familiar with Linux, having used it for four years for its DNS and some e-mail. Kenwood was satisfied with Linux and did not wish to take the time to get up to speed on a Unix implementation , according to Calvin.
Some bravery...
A Windows machine with similar functionality would probably need to be at least a four-processor system, Calvin said.
It's dubious claims like this that really make you wonder whether Kenwood considered its options realistically. Mr. Calvin has obviously been active in the Linux community for a long time, so the real question here is how he convinced Kenwood's management that using Linux for such a business-critical application would be the right path.
I keep hearing that the FoF can't be overturned because it is not technically a judgement. However, the words and tone used in the FoF sure sounded like a judgement to me. It is almost as if the judge is saying "I have found that you committed a crime, and you can't appeal because it is a *finding*, not a verdict".
Hasn't "due process" been short-circuited here? If the judge was supposed to limit this phase of the process to disclosure to "facts", but is instead shown to have "ruled" by virtue of the way his finding was structured, is there room for appeal based on his overstepping the scope of his responsibility at this stage?
IBM