It falls under "interstate commerce". (US Constitution: Article I, sec. 8)
For example, I am currently writing this post in one state, which will appear on a server in another state, & in response to a post written in a third state, & this post will be read be people in other states or outside the U.S.
To make all of this possible, it has to be carried over fiber or copper cables that are maintained as the result of people making money -- which is clearly the meaning of the word ``commerce".
The fact that the Feds are enabling schools & libraries on a local level connect to the Internet is no more germane than the fact most purchases take place on a local level: they are still effected by Federal regulations in some manner.
And although the Feds have extended this subsidy, it does not pre-empt state or local jurisdictions from providing their own subsidies or regulations.
> I sure as hell would like to have some of what Darl seems to be smoking;-)
You sure? * First hit, you want to sue a major corporation based on slender -- if any -- evidence. * Second hit, you anger every computer enthusiast, demand that they pay you money, & guarrantee your company loses customers & you effective end your career as a suit. * Third hit, you manage to piss off even the corporate sharks who are using you as a cat's-paw. * Fourth hit -- I don't know what's next. Claim the Mormon church is run by Satan? Sell your children to a laboratory in a Third-World country as experimental subjects? Publically state that Martians have stolen your underwear & replaced them with identical copies that make you want to watch Gigli nonstop for five days?
Based on the keynote speech that Enderle gave at SCO Forum last month ("I actually am Bill Gates Love slave"), MacBride introduced him to his dealer.
I'd figure you're safer messing with ketamine or PCP than what MacBride is abusing.
> Hell, plenty of Americans dont even know that the State of Washington has nothing to do with Washington > in the District of Columbia.
The fact that they were named after the same person doesn't count? (Who he was is left as an excercise for the reader.)
Geoff
Maybe his Problem is not DSL . . .
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just out of curiousity, have you had a therapist talk with this kid? I ask this because it sounds as if the kid could be clinically depressed.
The fact he's your stepson & lives half of the time with his dad suggests that he's gone thru some serious trauma: he's seen his family break up & getting bounced back & forth could be undercutting his sense of a home & security. This would make a case of depression understandable.
Then consider your following paragraph:
> He doesn't even mention cars or driving and to the best of my knowledge doesn't know what a girl is (and I check his > browser cache when he leaves so we're not even talking about hitting the porn here). He doesn't read, he doesn't listen > to music, and he doesn't even want to go outside much less actually do something that might require sweating. > Friends? Hell if I know.
Lack of interest in things like cars, sex, any activities or friends are all textbook indicators of depression. And doctors have only admitted in the last 5 years or so that children _can_ suffer from depression.
When he's not around sometime, use Google to find some webpages on depression, & compare a couple of the tests against his behavior. If they suggest he might have depression, get him some medical help: depression is a disease. And once he starts coping with it, & starts to show an interest in those things, he will be glad for the help.
On the other hand, if you have had him examined by a medical professional, & he's not depressed --just lazy -- then it's well within your rights to talk to his mother about sending him to a military boarding school.;-)
> I have seen Bill & Melinda at a local restaurant
then you wrote:
> I have no idea what any of his kids look like - or what Melinda looks like
So just how did you know that it was Billg & his wife, & not just another ``business associate"? I assume you have some idea what Melinda looks like.
And now for something different . ..
The part about keeping the names of Billg's children private is (to quote the man himself) random & stupid. It took me all of 10 minutes & two Google queries to find the names of his 2 daughters & one son -- who isn't named William.
If someone wanted to do harm to his kids, keeping their names out of the limelight would hardly slow their efforts down. IMHO, it would be far more useful to keep the details of their schooling (or pre-schooling) confidential, have a bodyguard or 2 chaffeur them from appointments when mom & dad are busy, &c.
But then pissing off a man with more money than dozens of nations by endangering his kids may not be the wisest thing to do: one could run, but there's not very many places to hide where one could enjoy the payoff. (Fancy spending the rest of your life in some shithole like North Korea?)
And his confusion of the ``libre" & ``gratis" senses of free results in his missing a rather important point.
The area where having access to the source code is most important is the enterprise software area, where bugs or defects are frequently found & getting them fixed is crucial -- yet too often the company selling the software won't fix your critical bug because it doesn't think it is important enough to pull a developer away from adding a new feature. All too often an experienced sysadmin wishes she/he had access to the source code so that it could be fixed -- either by the systadmin or by a contractor.
On the other hand, the only bugs or defects the average end user cares about are those concerning the interface; if they can't figure out how to make it work, then it's broken. They can work around all of the other defects -- e.g., if the computer crashes a lot (due to either the OS or the application), they will just try to remember to backup their work more often. An end user sees no use in this case for the source code; they want the interface to be intuitive, or failing that someone to show them how to make the software work.
Proprietary software will continue to win over free software on the desktop as long as the population numbers favor it: that is, a satisfactory number of users test a satisfactory number of implimentations or code paths & report their results back to a satisfactory number of developers. It's another example of the genetic algorhythm of development, & once this gap in population numbers is closed, I expect that the complaints that Linux (or whatever Stallman insists on calling it) will no longer be said to be ``not good enough."
This is something I've pondered. Although I admit IANAL, I figure what'll happen is the following:
*First, the Bankrupcy Trustee files a petition to put all of these lawsuits on hold, & has one of the Trustee's own lawyers review what cards SCO actually is holding in their hand. In other words, is there any point to actually continuing with the case?
*Based on that, the Trustee will attempt either to sell the intellectual property connnected with these lawsuits to another party, or settle. The Trustee's interests is not whether Linus, IBM or J. Random Hacker stole SCO IP, it's to convert all of SCO's assets into as much cash as quick as reasonably possible & pay off its debtors.
(Yeah, I know RMS & other luminaries hold there's no such thing as "intellectual property", & for the most part I agree with them. But what I mean by this term here is the appropriate legal phrase or concept that allows the bankrupcy Trustee to convert this lawsuit into an asset, so he can then sell it. If that can't be done -- for example, I doubt "flimsy excuse to harass corporations with expensive lawsuits" can be converted into an asset -- then Trustee goes to the settlement option.)
*Selling IP connected to one or more of these lawsuits to another party (say Microsoft) means the lawsuit goes on in some form. It's anyone's guess whether there actually is believeable grounds for a lawsuit at this point, or we're in for several more years of legal harassment of Linux.
*Settling this whole mess out of court is where it gets interesting. Unlike before, at this point it is to IBM's, Red Hat's, & everyone else's benefit to pay out some money: the whole point is that now everyone wants this circus to end. The Trustee wants to limit the amount of the possible claim IBM will have for patent infringement; the folks on the other side want to give their corporate lawyers other work; & the other side can impose various conditions on the SCO executive team & perhaps even Boies that might not otherwise be possible -- e.g., if Boies wants all of the moneys SCO owes him & avoid standing line for pennies on the dollar, IBM could make him promises neither he nor anyone else at his firm will ever take part in another lawsuit against them.
Of course, we'll never know exactly what happened: the terms of the settlement will most likely be sealed so MacBride doesn't have to admit just how badly he lost in this little escapade -- although the fact his next job requires that he ask people if they want "fries with that" would be a big clue.
> I'd like to see some with the MediaWiki admins and developers.
That would depend on the admin: some (how shall I put it?) are more thoughtful than others. Two good candidates would be Angela & Anthere, who not only have been regular contributors for a while, but were recently elected to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.
I read the article, & have to quibble with one of your points:
> 1) A monolithic kernel
It used to be a point of pride by all of the Windows fan-boys that their OS had a microkernel architecture, whereas Linux had an obsolete monolithic kernel. However, in recent years this point seems to have been forgotten or ignored: I'm not sure if it's because most of the microkernel aspects of the kernel has been removed, or because the whole microkernel vs. monolithic kernel controversy is over for everyone except the true believers in both camps.
Otherwise, the only thing you missed in not reading the article is how in one part the writer is talking about the kernel, then in the next part starts talking about a userland application -- the GUI. But then, from how the folks in Redmond like to weld applications into the OS, I expect that if they could release Windows, IE, Office & Minesweeper as one, single, binary executable, they would. They apparently haven't heard of the concept of ``modular programming".
> Here's what you need to do.. Engineer a joke e-mail which convinces your friends that they must give you a blow job and > forward the e-mail, otherwise something terrible will happen.
No one would fall for that trick! If there was the slightest possibility that could work, thousands of lonely & desperate guys would be forwarding thousands of copies to friends, strangers, names picked randomly from usenet & web pages, & it would end up becoming over half of all of the email traffic . ..
Wait a sec. I just described spam as we know it, didn't I?
> Running a Linux server requires more than point/clicking your way around.
First time I read this, I thought you had written ``Running a Linux server requires more than politicing your way around." Still made sense though: every use of Windows in the datacenter seems to be due to business politics, rather than a careful analysis.
> I'm not a blogger, and I don't read any blogs. I don't understand how the blog thing works.
Simple. It's like/., only without the lead article & link, & instead of each poster responding to what another writes, it just the same writer posting over & over.
If you don't understand why people read other people's blogs, then ask yourself this: why am I reading this very post? Same answer for blogs.
But I have no idea if bloggers try to troll or get into flamewars with themselves.
> Linus is actually moving to Beaverton, a largish edge city that borders Portland on the West.
Wrong. According to a knowledgeable person who does IT support for the local schools (hi Eric!), he registered his kids in the Riverview school district. You may have heard about it because they run Linux there -- the head IT guy there is one of the names behind the K-12 Linux project. They also host the PLUG monthly Linux clinics (I wonder if we can get him to show up at one.)
And Riverview school district is located in an unincorporated part of Multnomah county between Portland & Lake Oswego -- quite a few miles from Beaverton. I figure that from this location he'll be able to avoid travelling 26 when he needs to be in the office. (And having driven the highways in the Bay Area & in LA, in years past 26 was worse than either: it combines traffic as heavy as a freeway in either of those places with a large number of drivers who either have no skill coping with traffic this heavy/pissed at all of the new arrivals. However, now that there's fewer people commuting, it's gotten much better.)
My primary workstation at home runs Linux. However, to keep peace in the familiy, I got my wife a laptop running Windows (98SE to be precise; don't laugh, it does everything she needs, & I installed Eudora so to avoid Outlook & all of its problems, a step that prevented her from virus infections countless times).
So last week while playing one of the online games at Yahoo, she is bombarded by countless pop-up ads. While she is a competent user, she knows this is beyond her & asked for my help. So I sat down & started digging thru the guts of Windows.
Now keep in mind that for the last several years, I have dealt almost exclusively with Linux, Solaris & other flavors of UNIX; I was drawing from my memory of Window 3.1 (& a hazy idea of the Windows Registry) for what to look for. And after 2 hours of hunting, I killed a couple of the easier bits of malware, but it wasn't until a colleague told me about Ad aware & Spybot that we truly started to make a difference.
The moral of my story? Unless you're willing to live in a Windows-free world, its defects will still make your life miserable; & ignorance of Windows is not strength.
> If anyone else has methods of dealing with this nonsense, I'd love to hear it.
I work part-time for a mail/telephone/internet catalog company, & handling the orders that came in by mail (which still accounts for about 10-15% of total sales last Xmas season) was an eye-opener about fraud. However, most of the possible cases stick out like a sore thumb. Typical clues:
*The addresses for where the catalog was delivered, the address on the check, & where the person wants to ship the order don't match. Bonus clue when the address the catalog was delivered is thoroughly scribbled out, as if to hide where the catalog was originally sent. *Potential customer pays with one of those starter checks you get when you open an account. *Customer orders stuff that can be easily fenced: usually this means electronics, but jewelry falls into this catagory too. (My employer doensn't sell jewelry.) *Addition skills a first-grader would be embarassed over. (I had one chucklehead who rounded up on all of the prices -- $19.00 became $20.00, $27.50 became $30.00 -- & added an extra $20 on top of that, apparently because he still didn't have a firm grasp on this form of higher mathematics. I passed it to someone to research, & only later realised what was going on.) *Potential customer has got to have it overnight. (Sheesh, if you need it that soon, why didn't you give us a call & use a credit card?)
Since it's always possible that an honest, real customer can do some, many, or all of these things, any suspicious order was passed to a senior employee who'd compare the names on the order against our database of customers to see if they'd tried this before, & a list of known fraud artists (retailers share this information), & then call to verify funds. If it passed all of these tests, then the order would be entered into the system to be filled.
(One item that shocked the **** outta me was that a fair percentage of people had their Social Security Number printed on their checks. For the few who don't know, the SSN is the skeleton key to an US citizen's credit history.)
Most of these methods are detailed in the original article, but it's amazing that a small amount of skepticism will block a large number of the scams. Based on that, I'd say that if a veteran TTY operator thinks a call is fraud, they're probably right.
> Anyway, for a more serious response, is it really a completely separate ecosystem?
It's arguable. No organic material has entered or left this underground resevoir apparently for 2500 years, so if any organisms are living in it, these organisms had to support each other in a stable relationship -- or they'd have all died by now.
This is like one of those terrariums described in my old high school biology textbook: put a snail & a plant into a glass container, seal the container, & see how long this ecosystem survives. The plant will provide oxygen for the snail, the snail CO2 for the plant -- at least until the snail eats the entire plant.
This experiment, of course, will come to an end much faster if the sealed environment isn't kept in light: energy must enter any ecosystem from somewhere, & in the case of Lake Vida I wonder if geothermal energy would enter this environment -- in the Martian equivalents -- in sufficient amounts to make it viable for life.
> Without Windows, x86 would be the busted platform that it really is.
I think you give too much credit to Microsoft. It was IBM that created the x86 platform, created from a second-tier chip from Intel (they were working on a better CPU, IIRC the i960), an O/S created as a quick port of CP/M, & a proprietary BIOS. None of the items were more than barely acceptible; yet it took over the PC market.
Why? The accepted wisdom at the time was that when IBM created a microcomputer for the masses, it would define the standard. So when IBM did, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, the proprietary BIOS was soon reverse-engineered, & IBM lost its grasp on the market. Microsoft has repeatedly shown it would do whatever it took to be number one in the industry -- even if it was not ethical or legal.
Had the stars not been right (to borrow a phrase from H.P. Lovecraft), & Digital Research had gotten the contract from IBM to supply the O/S, I doubt DR could have been as driven & tenacious to be the same presence Microsoft is now. Maybe without Microsoft, we'd all today be using Macs, or Amigas, or UNIX-like systems; maybe we'd be using something created by one of those many companies that Microsoft bought up years ago, & the Slashdot question would be something like "What would the world be like without Nathan Myhrvold's company?" But I suspect that we'd be complaining about software that was completely different from the existing Windows/Office/IE/Outlook environment -- yet with the same number of flaws & frustrations. And that there was a Open Source/Free Software alternative available. The community that was responsible for creating BSD, Linux & the other pieces of the pie came into being independantly of the actions of Microsoft. This community was just a bunch of guys who felt creating an Operating System was more fun than having a life, & their efforts took on an increased importance with the Internet.
There are insightful 2 phrases this article uses: ``know what" & ``know how". In the case of technology journalism, this is very important.
A good journalist not only knows her/his subject, but also knows the people who know. As much as we make fun of the vast majority of tech news sources, they do filter out some of the rampant B.S. that every tech company releases (for example, the better business technology journalists have acknowledged for months that SCO's run a stock scam). This fits the ``know what" phrase.
However anybody anywhere with a competent grasp of English can rewrite press releases -- this fits the ``know how phrase." I don't expect writers in a foreign timezone from the US or Europe to take the time to interview people for an article with a same-day deadline, so that's exactly what they will end up doing -- undoubtedly to their frustration.
Having said that, I more than expect that there are competent technology journalists in India. And there is new & innovative technology being developed there, too. (One problem they are solving is making the native alphabets work on computers -- from what I've read, this often involves more than simply making the characters run right to left.) However, builder.com's bright idea is not going to tap into this strength. As a result, a new technological development in India will still take as long for it to be known in the West.
As a result, the quality of news they carry will fall -- to the harm of both the Western & Indian audiences.
I was working at another third-party support center that supported Netscape, back in 1995-6. At one point we had a rash of calls about whether Netscape could be used with AOL. Since I knew something about AOL, I quickly wrote out a HOWTO about this issue & sent it out as email, which ended with a lame joke that the compatibility of the UNIX versions of Netscape with AOL was not known.
A few months later, after I had left said employer & I had to look up some information on the Netscape support website, I found my exact same email, with only a few copy changes -- but with the same lame joke -- under someone's name. Said joke survived several rewrites of the technical note, & for all I know may still be on what's left of the Netscape website.
> So, um, aren't public companies meant to be less efficient than private ones?
(I'm assuming that by "public companies" you mean companies owned by the government.)
No, that's just one of those stories corporations keep telling to keep ownership of businesses like utilities in private hands. You can run any public business well, or run it poorly; it all depends on the management, just as in the private sector.
The folks defending private ownership like to raise the threat that any government-owned business doesn't need to watch it's bottom line, because they can always get a bail-out from raising taxes. What they appear to forget to mention is that any major business of enough impact to the local or national economy can always get the same deal by twisting the right arms. Sometimes management can get direct or indirect subsidies for their company even if they aren't in danger of going out of business; they just have to start hinting that they are likely to move operations elsewhere.
> > HR has to keep all resumes on file for $FOO years (I forget the number) > > Does anyone know what the point of this rule is?
It's required by the laws against discrimination (or so I'm told; sometimes HR people don't understand the reasons any better than the rest of us). That way, when a given company is sued for discriminating against $MINORITY, they can pull out all of their applications for the last year to show that they didn't actually discriminate, but no one belonging to $MINORITY was qualified.
Not that anyone has stated their race, religion, or national origin on a Resume in years. (I dropped the year I graduated from college years ago to avoid discrimination based on age, so that's not even a given.)
> How about a non-christian writing about christ , bible ?
Well, I have been quietly working on a number of the articles on Wiki dealing with the Bible, Christianity, Christ, etc. & I don't belong to any church. (My religious beliefs are probably heretical.) See the article on the brother of Jesus Christ -- James the Just -- to see an example of my work.
Most of what I do is to re-check references, & summarize what I read in the original text & in the secondary literature. Sometimes I wonder if the secondary literature talks about the same Bible I just read.
> or a non muslim writing about koran ? Can they be un-biased ?
Most of what people in the West read about Islam is written by non-Muslims. I haven't tried to crack that nut yet.
> Subjective means dependent on the observer. Objective means not dependent on the observer. In order for something to be > objectively true, *every* observer that experienced it would have to experience it the same way.
So if I were to stick my hand into a fire, & experience pain, would the experience be subjective or objective?
Pain is subjective. If I say I feel pain, you cannot prove or disprove my claim. But if you were to repeat my experience, you would experience the same result -- & by your definition the experience would then be classified as objective.
BTW, Wittgenstein uses the fact we have an understandable word ``pain" to prove we can talk about aesthetics in a rational & objective (whatever that word means) manner.
Slashdot Mirror
It falls under "interstate commerce". (US Constitution: Article I, sec. 8)
For example, I am currently writing this post in one state, which will appear on a server in another state, & in response to a post written in a third state, & this post will be read be people in other states or outside the U.S.
To make all of this possible, it has to be carried over fiber or copper cables that are maintained as the result of people making money -- which is clearly the meaning of the word ``commerce".
The fact that the Feds are enabling schools & libraries on a local level connect to the Internet is no more germane than the fact most purchases take place on a local level: they are still effected by Federal regulations in some manner.
And although the Feds have extended this subsidy, it does not pre-empt state or local jurisdictions from providing their own subsidies or regulations.
Geoff
> I sure as hell would like to have some of what Darl seems to be smoking ;-)
You sure?
* First hit, you want to sue a major corporation based on slender -- if any -- evidence.
* Second hit, you anger every computer enthusiast, demand that they pay you money, & guarrantee your company loses customers & you effective end your career as a suit.
* Third hit, you manage to piss off even the corporate sharks who are using you as a cat's-paw.
* Fourth hit -- I don't know what's next. Claim the Mormon church is run by Satan? Sell your children to a laboratory in a Third-World country as experimental subjects? Publically state that Martians have stolen your underwear & replaced them with identical copies that make you want to watch Gigli nonstop for five days?
Based on the keynote speech that Enderle gave at SCO Forum last month ("I actually am Bill Gates Love slave"), MacBride introduced him to his dealer.
I'd figure you're safer messing with ketamine or PCP than what MacBride is abusing.
Geoff
> Hell, plenty of Americans dont even know that the State of Washington has nothing to do with Washington
> in the District of Columbia.
The fact that they were named after the same person doesn't count? (Who he was is left as an excercise for the reader.)
Geoff
Just out of curiousity, have you had a therapist talk with this kid? I ask this because it sounds as if the kid could be clinically depressed.
;-)
The fact he's your stepson & lives half of the time with his dad suggests that he's gone thru some serious trauma: he's seen his family break up & getting bounced back & forth could be undercutting his sense of a home & security. This would make a case of depression understandable.
Then consider your following paragraph:
> He doesn't even mention cars or driving and to the best of my knowledge doesn't know what a girl is (and I check his
> browser cache when he leaves so we're not even talking about hitting the porn here). He doesn't read, he doesn't listen
> to music, and he doesn't even want to go outside much less actually do something that might require sweating.
> Friends? Hell if I know.
Lack of interest in things like cars, sex, any activities or friends are all textbook indicators of depression. And doctors have only admitted in the last 5 years or so that children _can_ suffer from depression.
When he's not around sometime, use Google to find some webpages on depression, & compare a couple of the tests against his behavior. If they suggest he might have depression, get him some medical help: depression is a disease. And once he starts coping with it, & starts to show an interest in those things, he will be glad for the help.
On the other hand, if you have had him examined by a medical professional, & he's not depressed --just lazy -- then it's well within your rights to talk to his mother about sending him to a military boarding school.
Geoff
You first wrote:
.
> I have seen Bill & Melinda at a local restaurant
then you wrote:
> I have no idea what any of his kids look like - or what Melinda looks like
So just how did you know that it was Billg & his wife, & not just another ``business associate"? I assume you have some idea what Melinda looks like.
And now for something different . .
The part about keeping the names of Billg's children private is (to quote the man himself) random & stupid. It took me all of 10 minutes & two Google queries to find the names of his 2 daughters & one son -- who isn't named William.
If someone wanted to do harm to his kids, keeping their names out of the limelight would hardly slow their efforts down. IMHO, it would be far more useful to keep the details of their schooling (or pre-schooling) confidential, have a bodyguard or 2 chaffeur them from appointments when mom & dad are busy, &c.
But then pissing off a man with more money than dozens of nations by endangering his kids may not be the wisest thing to do: one could run, but there's not very many places to hide where one could enjoy the payoff. (Fancy spending the rest of your life in some shithole like North Korea?)
Geoff
And his confusion of the ``libre" & ``gratis" senses of free results in his missing a rather important point.
The area where having access to the source code is most important is the enterprise software area, where bugs or defects are frequently found & getting them fixed is crucial -- yet too often the company selling the software won't fix your critical bug because it doesn't think it is important enough to pull a developer away from adding a new feature. All too often an experienced sysadmin wishes she/he had access to the source code so that it could be fixed -- either by the systadmin or by a contractor.
On the other hand, the only bugs or defects the average end user cares about are those concerning the interface; if they can't figure out how to make it work, then it's broken. They can work around all of the other defects -- e.g., if the computer crashes a lot (due to either the OS or the application), they will just try to remember to backup their work more often. An end user sees no use in this case for the source code; they want the interface to be intuitive, or failing that someone to show them how to make the software work.
Proprietary software will continue to win over free software on the desktop as long as the population numbers favor it: that is, a satisfactory number of users test a satisfactory number of implimentations or code paths & report their results back to a satisfactory number of developers. It's another example of the genetic algorhythm of development, & once this gap in population numbers is closed, I expect that the complaints that Linux (or whatever Stallman insists on calling it) will no longer be said to be ``not good enough."
Geoff
This is something I've pondered. Although I admit IANAL, I figure what'll happen is the following:
*First, the Bankrupcy Trustee files a petition to put all of these lawsuits on hold, & has one of the Trustee's own lawyers review what cards SCO actually is holding in their hand. In other words, is there any point to actually continuing with the case?
*Based on that, the Trustee will attempt either to sell the intellectual property connnected with these lawsuits to another party, or settle. The Trustee's interests is not whether Linus, IBM or J. Random Hacker stole SCO IP, it's to convert all of SCO's assets into as much cash as quick as reasonably possible & pay off its debtors.
(Yeah, I know RMS & other luminaries hold there's no such thing as "intellectual property", & for the most part I agree with them. But what I mean by this term here is the appropriate legal phrase or concept that allows the bankrupcy Trustee to convert this lawsuit into an asset, so he can then sell it. If that can't be done -- for example, I doubt "flimsy excuse to harass corporations with expensive lawsuits" can be converted into an asset -- then Trustee goes to the settlement option.)
*Selling IP connected to one or more of these lawsuits to another party (say Microsoft) means the lawsuit goes on in some form. It's anyone's guess whether there actually is believeable grounds for a lawsuit at this point, or we're in for several more years of legal harassment of Linux.
*Settling this whole mess out of court is where it gets interesting. Unlike before, at this point it is to IBM's, Red Hat's, & everyone else's benefit to pay out some money: the whole point is that now everyone wants this circus to end. The Trustee wants to limit the amount of the possible claim IBM will have for patent infringement; the folks on the other side want to give their corporate lawyers other work; & the other side can impose various conditions on the SCO executive team & perhaps even Boies that might not otherwise be possible -- e.g., if Boies wants all of the moneys SCO owes him & avoid standing line for pennies on the dollar, IBM could make him promises neither he nor anyone else at his firm will ever take part in another lawsuit against them.
Of course, we'll never know exactly what happened: the terms of the settlement will most likely be sealed so MacBride doesn't have to admit just how badly he lost in this little escapade -- although the fact his next job requires that he ask people if they want "fries with that" would be a big clue.
Geoff
> Today, people are amazed to see anything application whose .exe file is less than that.
Wadya mean? I've got this executable that came with my copy of Win XP right here that's *way* smaller than 640K: ftp.exe weighs in at only 40KB.
Or do you mean any application Microsoft wrote?
Geoff
> I'd like to see some with the MediaWiki admins and developers.
That would depend on the admin: some (how shall I put it?) are more thoughtful than others. Two good candidates would be Angela & Anthere, who not only have been regular contributors for a while, but were recently elected to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.
Geoff
I read the article, & have to quibble with one of your points:
> 1) A monolithic kernel
It used to be a point of pride by all of the Windows fan-boys that their OS had a microkernel architecture, whereas Linux had an obsolete monolithic kernel. However, in recent years this point seems to have been forgotten or ignored: I'm not sure if it's because most of the microkernel aspects of the kernel has been removed, or because the whole microkernel vs. monolithic kernel controversy is over for everyone except the true believers in both camps.
Otherwise, the only thing you missed in not reading the article is how in one part the writer is talking about the kernel, then in the next part starts talking about a userland application -- the GUI. But then, from how the folks in Redmond like to weld applications into the OS, I expect that if they could release Windows, IE, Office & Minesweeper as one, single, binary executable, they would. They apparently haven't heard of the concept of ``modular programming".
Geoff
> Here's what you need to do.. Engineer a joke e-mail which convinces your friends that they must give you a blow job and
.
> forward the e-mail, otherwise something terrible will happen.
No one would fall for that trick! If there was the slightest possibility that could work, thousands of lonely & desperate guys would be forwarding thousands of copies to friends, strangers, names picked randomly from usenet & web pages, & it would end up becoming over half of all of the email traffic . .
Wait a sec. I just described spam as we know it, didn't I?
Geoff
> Running a Linux server requires more than point/clicking your way around.
First time I read this, I thought you had written ``Running a Linux server requires more than politicing your way around." Still made sense though: every use of Windows in the datacenter seems to be due to business politics, rather than a careful analysis.
Geoff
> I'm not a blogger, and I don't read any blogs. I don't understand how the blog thing works.
/., only without the lead article & link, & instead of each poster responding to what another writes, it just the same writer posting over & over.
Simple. It's like
If you don't understand why people read other people's blogs, then ask yourself this: why am I reading this very post? Same answer for blogs.
But I have no idea if bloggers try to troll or get into flamewars with themselves.
Geoff
> Linus is actually moving to Beaverton, a largish edge city that borders Portland on the West.
Wrong. According to a knowledgeable person who does IT support for the local schools (hi Eric!), he registered his kids in the Riverview school district. You may have heard about it because they run Linux there -- the head IT guy there is one of the names behind the K-12 Linux project. They also host the PLUG monthly Linux clinics (I wonder if we can get him to show up at one.)
And Riverview school district is located in an unincorporated part of Multnomah county between Portland & Lake Oswego -- quite a few miles from Beaverton. I figure that from this location he'll be able to avoid travelling 26 when he needs to be in the office. (And having driven the highways in the Bay Area & in LA, in years past 26 was worse than either: it combines traffic as heavy as a freeway in either of those places with a large number of drivers who either have no skill coping with traffic this heavy/pissed at all of the new arrivals. However, now that there's fewer people commuting, it's gotten much better.)
Geoff
My primary workstation at home runs Linux. However, to keep peace in the familiy, I got my wife a laptop running Windows (98SE to be precise; don't laugh, it does everything she needs, & I installed Eudora so to avoid Outlook & all of its problems, a step that prevented her from virus infections countless times).
So last week while playing one of the online games at Yahoo, she is bombarded by countless pop-up ads. While she is a competent user, she knows this is beyond her & asked for my help. So I sat down & started digging thru the guts of Windows.
Now keep in mind that for the last several years, I have dealt almost exclusively with Linux, Solaris & other flavors of UNIX; I was drawing from my memory of Window 3.1 (& a hazy idea of the Windows Registry) for what to look for. And after 2 hours of hunting, I killed a couple of the easier bits of malware, but it wasn't until a colleague told me about Ad aware & Spybot that we truly started to make a difference.
The moral of my story? Unless you're willing to live in a Windows-free world, its defects will still make your life miserable; & ignorance of Windows is not strength.
Geoff
> If anyone else has methods of dealing with this nonsense, I'd love to hear it.
I work part-time for a mail/telephone/internet catalog company, & handling the orders that came in by mail (which still accounts for about 10-15% of total sales last Xmas season) was an eye-opener about fraud. However, most of the possible cases stick out like a sore thumb. Typical clues:
*The addresses for where the catalog was delivered, the address on the check, & where the person wants to ship the order don't match. Bonus clue when the address the catalog was delivered is thoroughly scribbled out, as if to hide where the catalog was originally sent.
*Potential customer pays with one of those starter checks you get when you open an account.
*Customer orders stuff that can be easily fenced: usually this means electronics, but jewelry falls into this catagory too. (My employer doensn't sell jewelry.)
*Addition skills a first-grader would be embarassed over. (I had one chucklehead who rounded up on all of the prices -- $19.00 became $20.00, $27.50 became $30.00 -- & added an extra $20 on top of that, apparently because he still didn't have a firm grasp on this form of higher mathematics. I passed it to someone to research, & only later realised what was going on.)
*Potential customer has got to have it overnight. (Sheesh, if you need it that soon, why didn't you give us a call & use a credit card?)
Since it's always possible that an honest, real customer can do some, many, or all of these things, any suspicious order was passed to a senior employee who'd compare the names on the order against our database of customers to see if they'd tried this before, & a list of known fraud artists (retailers share this information), & then call to verify funds. If it passed all of these tests, then the order would be entered into the system to be filled.
(One item that shocked the **** outta me was that a fair percentage of people had their Social Security Number printed on their checks. For the few who don't know, the SSN is the skeleton key to an US citizen's credit history.)
Most of these methods are detailed in the original article, but it's amazing that a small amount of skepticism will block a large number of the scams. Based on that, I'd say that if a veteran TTY operator thinks a call is fraud, they're probably right.
Geoff
> Anyway, for a more serious response, is it really a completely separate ecosystem?
It's arguable. No organic material has entered or left this underground resevoir apparently for 2500 years, so if any organisms are living in it, these organisms had to support each other in a stable relationship -- or they'd have all died by now.
This is like one of those terrariums described in my old high school biology textbook: put a snail & a plant into a glass container, seal the container, & see how long this ecosystem survives. The plant will provide oxygen for the snail, the snail CO2 for the plant -- at least until the snail eats the entire plant.
This experiment, of course, will come to an end much faster if the sealed environment isn't kept in light: energy must enter any ecosystem from somewhere, & in the case of Lake Vida I wonder if geothermal energy would enter this environment -- in the Martian equivalents -- in sufficient amounts to make it viable for life.
Geoff
> Without Windows, x86 would be the busted platform that it really is.
I think you give too much credit to Microsoft. It was IBM that created the x86 platform, created from a second-tier chip from Intel (they were working on a better CPU, IIRC the i960), an O/S created as a quick port of CP/M, & a proprietary BIOS. None of the items were more than barely acceptible; yet it took over the PC market.
Why? The accepted wisdom at the time was that when IBM created a microcomputer for the masses, it would define the standard. So when IBM did, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, the proprietary BIOS was soon reverse-engineered, & IBM lost its grasp on the market. Microsoft has repeatedly shown it would do whatever it took to be number one in the industry -- even if it was not ethical or legal.
Had the stars not been right (to borrow a phrase from H.P. Lovecraft), & Digital Research had gotten the contract from IBM to supply the O/S, I doubt DR could have been as driven & tenacious to be the same presence Microsoft is now. Maybe without Microsoft, we'd all today be using Macs, or Amigas, or UNIX-like systems; maybe we'd be using something created by one of those many companies that Microsoft bought up years ago, & the Slashdot question would be something like "What would the world be like without Nathan Myhrvold's company?" But I suspect that we'd be complaining about software that was completely different from the existing Windows/Office/IE/Outlook environment -- yet with the same number of flaws & frustrations. And that there was a Open Source/Free Software alternative available. The community that was responsible for creating BSD, Linux & the other pieces of the pie came into being independantly of the actions of Microsoft. This community was just a bunch of guys who felt creating an Operating System was more fun than having a life, & their efforts took on an increased importance with the Internet.
Geoff
There are insightful 2 phrases this article uses: ``know what" & ``know how". In the case of technology journalism, this is very important.
A good journalist not only knows her/his subject, but also knows the people who know. As much as we make fun of the vast majority of tech news sources, they do filter out some of the rampant B.S. that every tech company releases (for example, the better business technology journalists have acknowledged for months that SCO's run a stock scam). This fits the ``know what" phrase.
However anybody anywhere with a competent grasp of English can rewrite press releases -- this fits the ``know how phrase." I don't expect writers in a foreign timezone from the US or Europe to take the time to interview people for an article with a same-day deadline, so that's exactly what they will end up doing -- undoubtedly to their frustration.
Having said that, I more than expect that there are competent technology journalists in India. And there is new & innovative technology being developed there, too. (One problem they are solving is making the native alphabets work on computers -- from what I've read, this often involves more than simply making the characters run right to left.) However, builder.com's bright idea is not going to tap into this strength. As a result, a new technological development in India will still take as long for it to be known in the West.
As a result, the quality of news they carry will fall -- to the harm of both the Western & Indian audiences.
Geoff
I was working at another third-party support center that supported Netscape, back in 1995-6. At one point we had a rash of calls about whether Netscape could be used with AOL. Since I knew something about AOL, I quickly wrote out a HOWTO about this issue & sent it out as email, which ended with a lame joke that the compatibility of the UNIX versions of Netscape with AOL was not known.
A few months later, after I had left said employer & I had to look up some information on the Netscape support website, I found my exact same email, with only a few copy changes -- but with the same lame joke -- under someone's name. Said joke survived several rewrites of the technical note, & for all I know may still be on what's left of the Netscape website.
Geoff
> So, um, aren't public companies meant to be less efficient than private ones?
(I'm assuming that by "public companies" you mean companies owned by the government.)
No, that's just one of those stories corporations keep telling to keep ownership of businesses like utilities in private hands. You can run any public business well, or run it poorly; it all depends on the management, just as in the private sector.
The folks defending private ownership like to raise the threat that any government-owned business doesn't need to watch it's bottom line, because they can always get a bail-out from raising taxes. What they appear to forget to mention is that any major business of enough impact to the local or national economy can always get the same deal by twisting the right arms. Sometimes management can get direct or indirect subsidies for their company even if they aren't in danger of going out of business; they just have to start hinting that they are likely to move operations elsewhere.
Geoff
> > HR has to keep all resumes on file for $FOO years (I forget the number)
>
> Does anyone know what the point of this rule is?
It's required by the laws against discrimination (or so I'm told; sometimes HR people don't understand the reasons any better than the rest of us). That way, when a given company is sued for discriminating against $MINORITY, they can pull out all of their applications for the last year to show that they didn't actually discriminate, but no one belonging to $MINORITY was qualified.
Not that anyone has stated their race, religion, or national origin on a Resume in years. (I dropped the year I graduated from college years ago to avoid discrimination based on age, so that's not even a given.)
Geoff
> 5 1/4" floppies
I thought Apple pioneered the use of 3-1/2 inch floppies. I guess this proves I'm not an expert on that hardware.
Geoff
> How about a non-christian writing about christ , bible ?
Well, I have been quietly working on a number of the articles on Wiki dealing with the Bible, Christianity, Christ, etc. & I don't belong to any church. (My religious beliefs are probably heretical.) See the article on the brother of Jesus Christ -- James the Just -- to see an example of my work.
Most of what I do is to re-check references, & summarize what I read in the original text & in the secondary literature. Sometimes I wonder if the secondary literature talks about the same Bible I just read.
> or a non muslim writing about koran ? Can they be un-biased ?
Most of what people in the West read about Islam is written by non-Muslims. I haven't tried to crack that nut yet.
Geoff
> Subjective means dependent on the observer. Objective means not dependent on the observer. In order for something to be
> objectively true, *every* observer that experienced it would have to experience it the same way.
So if I were to stick my hand into a fire, & experience pain, would the experience be subjective or objective?
Pain is subjective. If I say I feel pain, you cannot prove or disprove my claim. But if you were to repeat my experience, you would experience the same result -- & by your definition the experience would then be classified as objective.
BTW, Wittgenstein uses the fact we have an understandable word ``pain" to prove we can talk about aesthetics in a rational & objective (whatever that word means) manner.
Geoff