The only way to discover the truth of the situation is via presenting all of the facts in an open forum. That's how our Court system works. Alas, it's not how the Register works (much as I generally like reading the Registers' articles).
So, thanks for the article, guys. As others have pointed out, P.J. has already put up a response, with her usual discussion forum there.
Being open about things requires getting at the truth. And I think people generally agree that the real truth, presented in Court, will make Linux stronger, not weaker.
I also note this falsehood in the Register article:
"SCO made friendly with Linux as best it could,"
Pure, utter bull. SCO was never, ever a nice company. They pulled EVERY dirty trick in the book that they could. This case is, in fact, the SECOND time they have partnered with Microsoft to bring down a UNIX competitor via the Courts. The first time was a legal threat to a small company called Microport, when Microport publically announced Xenix binary compatibility in stock AT&T UNIX.
Microport, by the way, was the company which provided Richard Stallman's foks with a complete development system for free, just so that he could put gcc on the 386.
Also, there was a quote from Doug Michaels (head of SCO at the time) stating in an interview that SCO would "steal everything it could" from Linux. Michaels later retracted that statement; but it was clear that his original words were what SCO had on its mind.
So noo, SCO never, ever made friendly with Linux. It was always trying to stab Linux in the back at every opportunity it could. To state otherwise is an outright lie, and is to the Registers' general discredit.
While in general I agree with your post, I have to take exception to this statement:
This is not the case for SME (Small Medium Enterprises). These firms are not set up for this type of development
At least on the small end, particularly start-ups, I see a very serious pressure for H1-B's, followed by offshoring. New college grads come in last. There's a LOT of pressure from the Silicon Valley VC community to offshore. So much so, that I'm told that a new startup won't be considered unless they have offshore plans lined up.
The good news is that I haven't seen offshoring work whatsoever (this is across a large spectrum of companies, from startups to Fortune 1000). I see a lot of managers claim it's a success. But when you look closely, it's all hype and no working (or maintainable) deliverables.
One startup wised up to this, after starting an office over in India, and having really dismal failures there. It was only then that they started looking at new college grads. Personally, that's my recommendation; there's just too much value in working on-site to be ignored.
"In 1999 and 2000, according to VentureOne, venture capitalists invested $714 million in 71 open-source companies. Most of those projects collapsed."
Excuse me, but these are heavily biased numbers. Tons of startups collapsed. Heck, IIRC, one set of VC's dumped $600 Million into a company selling dog-food over the internet; and a different group dumped another $600 Million.
At least some of the Open Source companies survived from the general collapse of the dot-com era.
So these stats are very misleading. Fortunately, it seems like VCs are smart enough to recognize that.
The big three Indian outsourcing firms have around an estimated 150,000 people working for them. The current H1-B visa limit is 75,000 (and it's full). So it's pretty clear that what is really desired is a lot of cheap labor, here in the U.S.
Personally, I think Gates' claim is a smokescreen in order to simply "compromise" and "settle" for a significant increase in the H1-B limit.
That's great advice. Fortunately, the ones with the dust problem are in a remote location, so I don't have to usually breath that stuff.
And yes, I do take the machines outside when blowing out the dust. It would be incredibly stupid to blow them out, only to have the dust come right back in. Granted, though, there are people who would never think of this.
The air-purifier is a good idea too. Thanks! I'm going to do that.
My thanks for the responses, especially to joejoejoe and RabidMonkey for the airfilters idea. And also for the velcro idea.
The one concern about the airfilter material is that they usually work using static electricity to trap the particles. I'm a little hesitant to use this so close to computer equipment. The Antec filters are specifically anti-static material. The other nice thing about them is that they are washable, so you don't have to buy a whole new set every three months.
This is why I was looking for the anti-static foam. I may give the airfilters a limited try though, if I can't find any anti-static foam filters.
As far as ForestGrump's suggestion that I'm bordering on paranoid, no, not at all. You should see dust I'm dealing with. The Antec filters get absolutely caked beyond belief if they aren't cleaned frequently. And unprotected boxes get filled with dust after a year. So much so that blowing out the dust with a compressed can of air is a major undertaking.
I've already had one hard disk fail, and it was most likely due to dust. If you don't have to live with this situation, count your blessings.
The odds are that it's good, even given outsourcing. It really depends on how many H1-B visas there are.
One can estimate how many outsourced engineering positions there are by the revenues of the big 3 Outsourcing firms. This was $1.5 Billion last year; so I'd estimate that they have around 150,000 engineers.
The H1-B program is at 75,000 this year. That's about a third of all positions. Or one very significant chunk, with a LOT of pressure to increase it.
The bottom line is that there is tremendous value to working on-site, close to the customer. As long as this doesn't change, and H1-B's are kept down, the future looks good, IMHO.
Increase the H1/L1 visa limits and then the picture will change.
This brings up a related subject, namely, putting a filter in front of the fan to filter out dust. Antec rackmount cases have a great solution, namely a removeable tray in front of the fan. The tray comes with a spongy filter type of material which is anti-static.
I've tried finding a raw source for this material, with no luck. Does anyone know where one might find this?
Basically I'd like to get a large sheet of this, and cut it up appropriately for all of the various fans that I have. I'd really like to reduce the dust in my systems.
If anyone knows of a source for the raw anti-static material in large quantities, I'd appreciate knowing it. Thanks in advance.
That may well be. He did say that the drives were "clearly cooler to the touch" though.
It would be interesting to try and verify this claim, as it may simply be that his case has poor cooling; and sticking in an extra fan may just be moving the air around inside the case better.
I agree. What's especially interesting is that he's claiming two things:
Standard commercial systems only cool by 1-5 C.
He's able to achieve at 10-15 C temperature reduction.
Personally, I'd expect a 5 C drop; the 10-15 C drop is significant and not obvious. So significant that I'm considering doing this myself now. Personally, I find this large of a drop surprising. And yes, I do a lot of hardware hacking and know a good bit about cooling (you DO know what theta is, don't you?).
If one is going to claim that this is obvious, could you please post some references? Personally, I think such a complaint sounds like sour grapes, with all due respect.
Yes, that's true of the core Linux team in the mid-90's. But what SCO is trying to allege is false; namely, it was mostly due to IBM's entrance into the Linux world that got Linux onto Enterprise class hardware.
That's just blatantly false, and can be backed up by hard evidence.
Clearly there were other efforts at the same time, and well before, IBM entered the arena.
Heh. This reminds me of some of the original UNIX code, from the V6/V7 days.
The startup code was all done in DEC assembly (of course), in a file called locore.s (or something like that - it's been years since I've seen it). Either Brian Kernigham or Dennis Ritchie must have written it; I think it was the former.
Utterly obtuse assembly code, unless perhaps you've spent a good deal of time programming in DEC assembly. Then, no doubt, it was quite clear.
Anyway, about halfway down (after about 50 lines or so), was this priceless comment:
"Here's the tricky part"
"If the BK system is so brittle that it cannot protect itself against a hostile client then it should not be hosting any source code."
Indeed. Imagine, if you will, a Linux-hostile group with some technical ability who wanted to disrupt Linux development. Can you think of a single better way to do this than to screw up the BK repository? This would be one heck of a DOS attack, no doubt accompanied by lots of bad publicity against Linux.
This would've been a lot more effective than Microsoft's SCO lawsuit against IBM; and could be done for just a fraction of the money.
I'm sorry, but the "security through obscurity" argument doesn't work here. And if BitKeeper is indeed as fragile as the creator of it claims, a great service has been done in getting the Linux community to move away from BitKeeper.
Let us hope that Linus' new "git" SCM is much better insulated against a hostile attack.
"Unlike IBM, virtually none of these (Linux) software developers and
hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities
for Linux development."
This was back in 2001.
Pardon me, but this is blatent nonsense. SGI had a significant push
to put Linux on the Itanium Processor back in 2001. I don't believe
that it was announced publically then, but it was a significant effort,
and the NUMA stuff resulted from it (among other things). This is definitely Enterprise-class equipment, well beyond the price range for your average "hobbyist". And needless to say, this required Enterprise-class testing. I speak from direct experience, as I was involved with the project.
So this statement alone is blatently false, and here's some more
ammo for PJ to shoot down SCO's claims.
Heck, 64-bit Linux appeared on Sun's 64-bit SPARC machines before SunSoft had completed it's 64-bitization efforts as well. This was back in the Solaris 2.7 timeframe, around 1998, IIRC. Most people would consider the 64-bit SPARCs to be Enterprise level as well.
"You can't simply shut down your propulsion system and drift in the sea lanes three miles off the LA coast."
If they are really talking about 200 miles out to sea (outside of the U.S. Economic Zone), yes, you can indeed shut down and drift as long as you want.
Inside, you can do the same, as long as you're not in a navigation channel. That covers a lot of territory, but then they'd be subject to other U.S. laws, which is what I think they want to avoid.
Heck, off the port of Humbolt on the Northern Californian coast, way out to sea, the ships actually ANCHOR out there, waiting for a spot to dock. It's a pretty odd site when you come up to them in the fog; it looks like a fleet out in the middle of the ocean.
Personally, I had forgotten about Google. UPS has recently changed their website to make it a pain for guys like me. You see, I don't run Javascript and I don't allow cookies by default. UPS's site is hard to negotiate with out this. One has to hunt around several pages to find the tracking site.
The obvious work-around is to bookmark the page; but I use lots of different computers, and this means a bookmark for each one, AFTER I go through this nonsense.
So now I can just go to google.com, and type in the tracking number from there. The heck with ups.com and their lame website.
So thanks for the reminder. It's helped me out already today.
This reminds me of that well-known (mis)quote "What's good for General Motors is good for the country". This was when GM was lobbying to force people to buy cars, rather than fund public transportation.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Corporations are at least as arrogant now as GM was back then; and the Politicians are still ignoring what's in the best interest of the people.
The site which published the original topic's article also has some history on the GM quote, and the results from this arrogance.
The article is here
Steve Mann teaches in Canada, and this conference is in Seattle. So that means he had to cross the US-Canada border. What's clearly missing from this article is Dr. Mann's experience with border crossings, looking like a Cyborg, especially with his special wallet which requires an ID in order to show you his ID.
Personally, I think the latter concept is great. But this really begs the question of why the border crossing experience wasn't newsworthy enough to be printed? One would think that Mann's behaviour ought to get some kind of rise out of the Customs people.
So either Customs didn't do anything, or what they did do wasn't noteworthy enough to be picked up by the Press.
I'm really curious whether Customs has any problem whatsoever with being challenged in their job; as Mann's approach implies he would indeed challenge them. Or did he do so whatsoever (which would seem hypocritical, given his efforts).
So does that mean they are going to change their name to International Business Services? Somehow, I don't think the name of "I.B.S." is going to sell too well.
As much as I'd like to agree with you, please remember that the DMCA came out of a WIPO treaty. When the WIPO treaty got to the U.S., the RIAA "convinced" Congress that additional "legislation was necessary to implement U.S. adherence to the treaty. The result was the DMCA. It is sometimes referred to as the WIPO Treaty Implementing Legislation."
So, in otherwords, the RIAA looks like it has gotten fed up with ISPs, and is redoing their last successful approach to dealing with Copyright Infringement.
The point here is that ISPs may not have a choice about whether or not to adopt this, IF the RIAA/MPAA is as successful with this as they were with the DMCA.
Considering that the majority of Congress is still under the impression that the DMCA is a good law, it would seem that the legalizing this Code of Conduct is a fair bet within the U.S..
Slashdot Mirror
So, thanks for the article, guys. As others have pointed out, P.J. has already put up a response, with her usual discussion forum there.
Being open about things requires getting at the truth. And I think people generally agree that the real truth, presented in Court, will make Linux stronger, not weaker.
I also note this falsehood in the Register article:
"SCO made friendly with Linux as best it could,"
Pure, utter bull. SCO was never, ever a nice company. They pulled EVERY dirty trick in the book that they could. This case is, in fact, the SECOND time they have partnered with Microsoft to bring down a UNIX competitor via the Courts. The first time was a legal threat to a small company called Microport, when Microport publically announced Xenix binary compatibility in stock AT&T UNIX.
Microport, by the way, was the company which provided Richard Stallman's foks with a complete development system for free, just so that he could put gcc on the 386.
Also, there was a quote from Doug Michaels (head of SCO at the time) stating in an interview that SCO would "steal everything it could" from Linux. Michaels later retracted that statement; but it was clear that his original words were what SCO had on its mind.
So noo, SCO never, ever made friendly with Linux. It was always trying to stab Linux in the back at every opportunity it could. To state otherwise is an outright lie, and is to the Registers' general discredit.
This is not the case for SME (Small Medium Enterprises). These firms are not set up for this type of development
At least on the small end, particularly start-ups, I see a very serious pressure for H1-B's, followed by offshoring. New college grads come in last. There's a LOT of pressure from the Silicon Valley VC community to offshore. So much so, that I'm told that a new startup won't be considered unless they have offshore plans lined up.
The good news is that I haven't seen offshoring work whatsoever (this is across a large spectrum of companies, from startups to Fortune 1000). I see a lot of managers claim it's a success. But when you look closely, it's all hype and no working (or maintainable) deliverables.
One startup wised up to this, after starting an office over in India, and having really dismal failures there. It was only then that they started looking at new college grads. Personally, that's my recommendation; there's just too much value in working on-site to be ignored.
"In 1999 and 2000, according to VentureOne, venture capitalists invested $714 million in 71 open-source companies. Most of those projects collapsed."
Excuse me, but these are heavily biased numbers. Tons of startups collapsed. Heck, IIRC, one set of VC's dumped $600 Million into a company selling dog-food over the internet; and a different group dumped another $600 Million.
At least some of the Open Source companies survived from the general collapse of the dot-com era.
So these stats are very misleading. Fortunately, it seems like VCs are smart enough to recognize that.
The big three Indian outsourcing firms have around an estimated 150,000 people working for them. The current H1-B visa limit is 75,000 (and it's full). So it's pretty clear that what is really desired is a lot of cheap labor, here in the U.S.
Personally, I think Gates' claim is a smokescreen in order to simply "compromise" and "settle" for a significant increase in the H1-B limit.
Hopefully other people can benefit by this information too.
That's great advice. Fortunately, the ones with the dust problem are in a remote location, so I don't have to usually breath that stuff. And yes, I do take the machines outside when blowing out the dust. It would be incredibly stupid to blow them out, only to have the dust come right back in. Granted, though, there are people who would never think of this. The air-purifier is a good idea too. Thanks! I'm going to do that.
Here's one.
I don't see how you can seriously have a real review for geeks without including this baby, no disrespect intended towards the folks at Ars.
The one concern about the airfilter material is that they usually work using static electricity to trap the particles. I'm a little hesitant to use this so close to computer equipment. The Antec filters are specifically anti-static material. The other nice thing about them is that they are washable, so you don't have to buy a whole new set every three months.
This is why I was looking for the anti-static foam. I may give the airfilters a limited try though, if I can't find any anti-static foam filters.
As far as ForestGrump's suggestion that I'm bordering on paranoid, no, not at all. You should see dust I'm dealing with. The Antec filters get absolutely caked beyond belief if they aren't cleaned frequently. And unprotected boxes get filled with dust after a year. So much so that blowing out the dust with a compressed can of air is a major undertaking.
I've already had one hard disk fail, and it was most likely due to dust. If you don't have to live with this situation, count your blessings.
One can estimate how many outsourced engineering positions there are by the revenues of the big 3 Outsourcing firms. This was $1.5 Billion last year; so I'd estimate that they have around 150,000 engineers.
The H1-B program is at 75,000 this year. That's about a third of all positions. Or one very significant chunk, with a LOT of pressure to increase it.
The bottom line is that there is tremendous value to working on-site, close to the customer. As long as this doesn't change, and H1-B's are kept down, the future looks good, IMHO.
Increase the H1/L1 visa limits and then the picture will change.
This brings up a related subject, namely, putting a filter in front of the fan to filter out dust. Antec rackmount cases have a great solution, namely a removeable tray in front of the fan. The tray comes with a spongy filter type of material which is anti-static.
I've tried finding a raw source for this material, with no luck. Does anyone know where one might find this?
Basically I'd like to get a large sheet of this, and cut it up appropriately for all of the various fans that I have. I'd really like to reduce the dust in my systems.
If anyone knows of a source for the raw anti-static material in large quantities, I'd appreciate knowing it. Thanks in advance.
It would be interesting to try and verify this claim, as it may simply be that his case has poor cooling; and sticking in an extra fan may just be moving the air around inside the case better.
Standard commercial systems only cool by 1-5 C.
He's able to achieve at 10-15 C temperature reduction.
Personally, I'd expect a 5 C drop; the 10-15 C drop is significant and not obvious. So significant that I'm considering doing this myself now. Personally, I find this large of a drop surprising. And yes, I do a lot of hardware hacking and know a good bit about cooling (you DO know what theta is, don't you?).
If one is going to claim that this is obvious, could you please post some references? Personally, I think such a complaint sounds like sour grapes, with all due respect.
Heh.
You're right; I had forgotten about the Caldera-SCO relationship. Thanks for making that clear!
Yes, that's true of the core Linux team in the mid-90's. But what SCO is trying to allege is false; namely, it was mostly due to IBM's entrance into the Linux world that got Linux onto Enterprise class hardware.
That's just blatantly false, and can be backed up by hard evidence.
Clearly there were other efforts at the same time, and well before, IBM entered the arena.
Heh. This reminds me of some of the original UNIX code, from the V6/V7 days.
The startup code was all done in DEC assembly (of course), in a file called locore.s (or something like that - it's been years since I've seen it). Either Brian Kernigham or Dennis Ritchie must have written it; I think it was the former.
Utterly obtuse assembly code, unless perhaps you've spent a good deal of time programming in DEC assembly. Then, no doubt, it was quite clear.
Anyway, about halfway down (after about 50 lines or so), was this priceless comment:
"Here's the tricky part"
Heh. Thanks guys.
I tried it once. I actually made it half-way across before I got too tired and had to turn around and go back.
Indeed. Imagine, if you will, a Linux-hostile group with some technical ability who wanted to disrupt Linux development. Can you think of a single better way to do this than to screw up the BK repository? This would be one heck of a DOS attack, no doubt accompanied by lots of bad publicity against Linux.
This would've been a lot more effective than Microsoft's SCO lawsuit against IBM; and could be done for just a fraction of the money.
I'm sorry, but the "security through obscurity" argument doesn't work here. And if BitKeeper is indeed as fragile as the creator of it claims, a great service has been done in getting the Linux community to move away from BitKeeper.
Let us hope that Linus' new "git" SCM is much better insulated against a hostile attack.
"Unlike IBM, virtually none of these (Linux) software developers and hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities for Linux development."
This was back in 2001.
Pardon me, but this is blatent nonsense. SGI had a significant push to put Linux on the Itanium Processor back in 2001. I don't believe that it was announced publically then, but it was a significant effort, and the NUMA stuff resulted from it (among other things). This is definitely Enterprise-class equipment, well beyond the price range for your average "hobbyist". And needless to say, this required Enterprise-class testing. I speak from direct experience, as I was involved with the project.
So this statement alone is blatently false, and here's some more ammo for PJ to shoot down SCO's claims.
Heck, 64-bit Linux appeared on Sun's 64-bit SPARC machines before SunSoft had completed it's 64-bitization efforts as well. This was back in the Solaris 2.7 timeframe, around 1998, IIRC. Most people would consider the 64-bit SPARCs to be Enterprise level as well.
"You can't simply shut down your propulsion system and drift in the sea lanes three miles off the LA coast."
If they are really talking about 200 miles out to sea (outside of the U.S. Economic Zone), yes, you can indeed shut down and drift as long as you want.
Inside, you can do the same, as long as you're not in a navigation channel. That covers a lot of territory, but then they'd be subject to other U.S. laws, which is what I think they want to avoid.
Heck, off the port of Humbolt on the Northern Californian coast, way out to sea, the ships actually ANCHOR out there, waiting for a spot to dock. It's a pretty odd site when you come up to them in the fog; it looks like a fleet out in the middle of the ocean.
The obvious work-around is to bookmark the page; but I use lots of different computers, and this means a bookmark for each one, AFTER I go through this nonsense.
So now I can just go to google.com, and type in the tracking number from there. The heck with ups.com and their lame website.
So thanks for the reminder. It's helped me out already today.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Corporations are at least as arrogant now as GM was back then; and the Politicians are still ignoring what's in the best interest of the people.
The site which published the original topic's article also has some history on the GM quote, and the results from this arrogance. The article is here
Steve Mann teaches in Canada, and this conference is in Seattle. So that means he had to cross the US-Canada border. What's clearly missing from this article is Dr. Mann's experience with border crossings, looking like a Cyborg, especially with his special wallet which requires an ID in order to show you his ID.
Personally, I think the latter concept is great. But this really begs the question of why the border crossing experience wasn't newsworthy enough to be printed? One would think that Mann's behaviour ought to get some kind of rise out of the Customs people.
So either Customs didn't do anything, or what they did do wasn't noteworthy enough to be picked up by the Press.
I'm really curious whether Customs has any problem whatsoever with being challenged in their job; as Mann's approach implies he would indeed challenge them. Or did he do so whatsoever (which would seem hypocritical, given his efforts).
What I want to know is whether it's legal to fire back? You know, self-defense and all. :)
5 years ago, it would've been. In our post 9/11 era, it's probably a terrorist act.
So does that mean they are going to change their name to International Business Services? Somehow, I don't think the name of "I.B.S." is going to sell too well.
I can just see the slogan now:
"I.B.S. You B.S.. We all B.S. for I.B.S."
Hmmm.
Re: The Anti-DMCA FAQ
So, in otherwords, the RIAA looks like it has gotten fed up with ISPs, and is redoing their last successful approach to dealing with Copyright Infringement.
The point here is that ISPs may not have a choice about whether or not to adopt this, IF the RIAA/MPAA is as successful with this as they were with the DMCA.
Considering that the majority of Congress is still under the impression that the DMCA is a good law, it would seem that the legalizing this Code of Conduct is a fair bet within the U.S..