On the other hand, if you're going to sue them, you need to do it before that hot air baloon deflates - otherwise you'll never see a penny. They don't have any actual assets, you know.
The Linux 2.2.x kernel was able to scale to 2-4 processors. With Linux 2.4.x and the 2.5.x development kernel, Linux now scales to 32 and 64 processors through the addition of advanced Symmetrical Multi-Processing (SMP) capabilities taken from UNIX System V and derivative works, in violation of SCO's contract agreements and copyrights.
The derivative works thing here is key. SysV doesn't have SMP worth stealing, none of SCOs crap does. They try to FUD like it did, of course, but it's nonsense, Linux has always been better at SMP than Unixware or OpenServer or whatever they're calling it now.
So clearly what they're planning to actually argue in court is that they own AIX! Not just the SysV code that IBM licensed more for the name than anything else (there's very little SysV in AIX or any other commercial Unix, outside of SCO - the other vendors added plenty, like SMP and NUMA, and rewrote most of what was there to begin with, because it sucked.) Now that's some balls, that really is. IBM is going to so clean their clocks when this gets to court.
He talked a lot about the SMP code in the 2.4 kernel, a lot.
And it's total bullshit. SCO has never had decent SMP code, never, not to this day. Linux had SMP before SCO implemented it, and it's always worked better, even back when it was not so good SCOs was worse. Alleging Linux copied their code for SMP, when Linux has had better SMP code and had it longer than any of the products SCO owns, is utterly ludicrous as it's flat out impossible.
In many cases there can be little choice except to run Windows as administrator. Because far too many Windows apps are written to demand privs they don't actually need. Many Windows programmers appearing to lack any understanding of security.
Very true.
I've done more than my share of windows admining, unfortunately. I can say that if you have the freedom to set the damn things up right and keep anyone from messing with them, the NT based line can be fairly stable. Not nearly as stable as my linux systems, which I have never seen crash except because of hardware failure, but certainly far more stable than 95 for instance.
The thing is, it's just not realistic to expect to do that in most situations, and in the few where it is, there's still no advantage to choosing windows generally. With a few very small exceptions - such as if you have free reign to admin but you're stuck with sub-standard hardware for instance. But generally, if you're using Windows you're using it for software that won't run with proper privileges, and very often you're using it for clients where the users are going to screw it up no matter what.
With any system, of course, safety and useability are sometimes opposing goals and trade-offs have to be made, but it's not very difficult to set up a linux box to be reasonably secure and still usable, whereas anytime you get close to reasonably secure with windows you seem to start breaking things the users need. That's the big problem, IMOP. The crashes can be lived with much easier than the security nightmare.
Actually, if their legacy apps are 3.1 vintage, they don't need to buy VMWare at all - wine handles the older stuff flawlessly and has for many revisions now. Surely their consultants are aware of this?
linux at the bottom of the stack works a lot better in my practical experience, plus it gets you headed in the direction you want to go.
Exactly.
There are good reasons to do it the other way around, on occasion - like when I had to run linux under NT because it was the only way to get the ^%* *#$% messed up network card to work.
But as long as you don't have that sort of issue, it makes much more sense to run the more stable OS as the primary.
The advantage over what they're doing is that everyone would have access to the services yet they wouldn't have to buy a license for infrequent users.
Actually, if I understand what's going on, they aren't buying any new licenses, just continuing to use the ones they've already payed for. Unless you mean for VMWare?
It often makes sense to maintain backward compatibility for a stage or two. If they were just going to run Windows apps they wouldn't need Windows at all. So clearly, if the story is even true, what it means is just that they have some 'legacy' apps they can't immediately replace. No big deal. Run VMware (or Win4Lin, or Wine, depending on the specifics) use Windows and the software for it that they've already payed for, but it gets them off the upgrade treadmill, and looking for *nix-native programs to replace the legacy crap.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense that's making the workplace truly hostile. The sad thing is that the lawmakers buy this bullshit.
What the poster described isn't sexual harrassment. It's called making a few passes. So the old lady thinks he's hot. He should be flattered, and either take her up on her offer, or else say 'thanks but no.' Instead he leads her on and talks behind her back about 'sexual harrassment'.
Although I happen to be using OSX as I write this, and I really do like the system (and I'm not computer illiterate by a long shot) I tend to agree with most of what you say. The same things you talk about in X I miss on my Mac. It is quite annoying in many ways.
But, in my current job, I simply must use SPSS which is only available for Windows or Mac. So that was my choice. Given that choice, Mac is the clear favourite.
As other posters have pointed out, it does have a quite functional command line, and it does have X available to run inside of Aqua. Sadly the latter is slow as a dog, and you can't just ditch the hideous Aqua WM and run everything inside something decent like WindowMaker yet, but hey, look at the alternative.
Write me a fully compatible SPSS clone for linux, and I'll wipe OSX and install Gentoo/PPC in a heartbeat. Until then, I'm just glad I don't have to run XP on my beautiful little laptop.
1: In order for PCI stuff to work with this platform, you need firmware for PPC. Guess what? The multitude of X86 cheap stuff doesnt work on these platforms. You probably pay 3-6 times what you'd normally pay for NICS and GFX cards. Apple does this all the time.
Wrong. I don't know where you got this myth but it is, indeed, a myth. That's your point 3 as well - completely misguided and misinformed.
Then the Beowulf comments, now those are really clueless. Obviously you don't understand what a Beowulf cluster is. It's a protocol for building a distributed supercomputer using multiple linux boxes. You could make a Beowulf cluster with these, if you wanted to, but talking about the performance of a PPC970 versus that of a Beowulf cluster in general is simply nonsense. You're just horribly confused, or trolling.
The power consumption statement definately makes me lean towards trolling. That's marvelously clueless, totally reversing the actual relationships. The PPC lines run very cool compared to Intel and AMDs offerings, but you claim the opposite.
So yes, you definately deserve the modslapping, and another one as well. If you don't know something that's no shame, but if you don't have a clue and start spouting off whatever comes into your head pretending to be an expert, that is shameful indeed.
And if you don't agree, then you still have the right to do everything you're allowed to do by default, just like you are with any software accompanied by a EULA which you did not agree to.
Are you related to the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, by any chance?
No, who's that?
I'm trying to think of a historical example of someone trying to fool people into thinking they were doing something dishonest. No joy so far, but I'm sure someone else will point one out.
That's because all the really good examples were never discovered.;)
This argument loses a lot of steam when you attempt to complete the metaphor. What legitimate purpose did these decoders serve? The argument might better be made using a device which is contextually generally for the Dark Side; a slim jim, electric lockpick, or tumbler breaking tools might be a better choice. The locksmith, the AAA guy, and the police officer have good reasons to have these things.
Bah. I have a very good reason to carry lockpicks. And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm a free man, and it's none of your business.
Well I for one would be happy to pay for advertising-free TV.
But the greed here is incredible. Where do people get this notion that they have a legally enforceable right to make a profit off a bad business model?
DTV has several options as I see them. They can write off the 'pirating' as inevitable and ignore it, concentrating on sucking the honest customers dry. They can change their offerings to compete better with the 'pirate' offers. Or they can use cartooneys to threaten everyone in sight hoping this will somehow make them more money than it costs.
Apparently they're choosing door number 3, which I think is pretty dumb, but not surprising really.
If I were them I'd try something a little more creative. What is the draw to the 'pirate' cards? You get access to whatever channels you want, for a one-time fee, instead of paying out the ass for the super-deluxe top of the line package every month just for the one channel you actually watch, am I right?
Plus there is the element of everyone wanting to feel like they're the smart one, getting the forbidden fruit cheap while the other chumps pay big bucks month after month... I'm sure that's an element.
Now remember, these 'pirates' are paying, they're just paying lump sums instead of recurring fees, and they're paying them to someone else. That's the problem, from DTVs point of view, if they would just look at it clearly.
So, what I would do if I were them, is just start a little subsidiary. Hide the ownership, yo don't have to do anything illegal, just the kind of obfuscation any corporate lawyer or accountant knows how to do, so that it's not obvious. Have this little subsidiary get into the pirate card business. Have your techs working on breaking pirate cards, of course, as they've done all along. But have your techs and your subsidiary work together, so that most of the time when you break the other pirate cards those sold by your subsidiary don't break. Still break them sometimes, of course, so you get a round of upgrade sales, but make sure your own cards get the reputation for being the ones that usually don't break.
Pretty soon, not only are you getting the regular fees from your ordinary subscribers, you also own the pirate decoder market as well. Now remember, they're working in a market where most of the costs are fixed. It costs them the same amount to run that programming whether they have 1 subscriber or one million subscribers. They have the exact same costs whether there are no 'pirates' or 10 or 100 or a million as well. So this extra income is pure gravy.
Actually I posted here for a long time without one. I only registered when they put in the moderation system.
In the case of slashdot, it makes sense to register because it is a community discussion site, and to have productive discussions you simply must have some sort of handle persistence. So registration, while I wasn't necessarily eager to do it, does serve an end important to me.
Registering for the NY times serves only their ends.
Also, there's a fundamental and important difference between the way Slashdot and the NYT treat those without a login. With Slashdot, you still get the content, you just miss out on handle persistence and customised display settings. That's acceptable behaviour. With the NYT, you do NOT get the content, in any form, rather you get redirected to a page that insists you register with them. This is not acceptable behaviour. The NYT needs to make up their mind - do they want to be on the web or not? If people can't read your content by hitting a url, then you're not part of the web.
One of the things I really hate about Slashdot is how they have refused to simply make a policy of not posting these pseudo-links. There's really no excuse. It takes only a few seconds in most cases to find an actual working links. Submissions with non-working links (such as links to the NYT) should be sent to/dev/null.
Because Finland under the EU is not a sovereign nation.
But that's not how it's been sold here, and that's not what the people of Finland agreed to.
If the two senators from Wyoming (for example) don't vote for a law, but all the other US states do, Wyoming doesn't get to opt out.
The idea with the Constitution and Federalism was that Congress would have very limited competency and no authority to intervene except in a few defined areas. Of course we know that federalism was murdered in the US along the way. But when they sold this whole EU idea over here, and to this day, they proclaim loudly that it is not to be a 'United States of Europe' - that the states involved do maintain sovereignty, they just cooperate more. This is the main reason, I suppose, that they've gotten away with setting up such an un-democratic power structure, Brussels isn't supposed to be setting policies for the most part, rather simply establishing frameworks for cooperation and co-development between EU countries.
The farcical level is really sickening sometimes, like when the EU directorates 'recommend' policies like this, the democratic representatives in constituent states sometimes agree and sometimes refuse, but then the refusers are told it doesn't matter they have to follow anyway. It's a scam, and I'm hoping we wake up over here before it's too late.
There are a lot of good aspects to the EU, but the threat of it all going sour looks very real from here.
A robots.txt would stop google from indexing the site altogether. They don't want that to happen. They want a google search to show NYT web pages, but they just want to make sure that when the user tries to view it, they have to register with NYT first. That means that google must still index the page, but not allow access through the cache. Plus, it must direct to a sign-on page rather than the page itself, but that is something that I'm sure the NYT itself could handle, like it think it does now anyway.
I sincerely hope google shows some balls and tells them to f right off.
They can't have it both ways, either they're on the web or they're not. They've been trying for years to subvert things so they can have their cake and eat it too, and they need to get told no by someone they'll listen to.
In the end it doesn't matter whether this or that member state of the EU adopts the law. Three years after the directive is adopted it is justiciable in the European Court of Justice and states which haven't implemented it in domestic law can be taken to court and their domestic courts have to follow the precedent set by the ECJ.
How can this be claimed to be consistent with the ideal of 'democracy' that the eurocrats are always blathering about? An unelected group of beaureacrats draft a 'directive' which the elected representatives of, for instance, Finland reject - and then it's enforced on the Finnish people anyway, against their wishes?
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On the other hand, if you're going to sue them, you need to do it before that hot air baloon deflates - otherwise you'll never see a penny. They don't have any actual assets, you know.
The derivative works thing here is key. SysV doesn't have SMP worth stealing, none of SCOs crap does. They try to FUD like it did, of course, but it's nonsense, Linux has always been better at SMP than Unixware or OpenServer or whatever they're calling it now.
So clearly what they're planning to actually argue in court is that they own AIX! Not just the SysV code that IBM licensed more for the name than anything else (there's very little SysV in AIX or any other commercial Unix, outside of SCO - the other vendors added plenty, like SMP and NUMA, and rewrote most of what was there to begin with, because it sucked.) Now that's some balls, that really is. IBM is going to so clean their clocks when this gets to court.
And it's total bullshit. SCO has never had decent SMP code, never, not to this day. Linux had SMP before SCO implemented it, and it's always worked better, even back when it was not so good SCOs was worse. Alleging Linux copied their code for SMP, when Linux has had better SMP code and had it longer than any of the products SCO owns, is utterly ludicrous as it's flat out impossible.
Very true.
I've done more than my share of windows admining, unfortunately. I can say that if you have the freedom to set the damn things up right and keep anyone from messing with them, the NT based line can be fairly stable. Not nearly as stable as my linux systems, which I have never seen crash except because of hardware failure, but certainly far more stable than 95 for instance.
The thing is, it's just not realistic to expect to do that in most situations, and in the few where it is, there's still no advantage to choosing windows generally. With a few very small exceptions - such as if you have free reign to admin but you're stuck with sub-standard hardware for instance. But generally, if you're using Windows you're using it for software that won't run with proper privileges, and very often you're using it for clients where the users are going to screw it up no matter what.
With any system, of course, safety and useability are sometimes opposing goals and trade-offs have to be made, but it's not very difficult to set up a linux box to be reasonably secure and still usable, whereas anytime you get close to reasonably secure with windows you seem to start breaking things the users need. That's the big problem, IMOP. The crashes can be lived with much easier than the security nightmare.
Hrmm probably so. But then again how big a market do you suppose there is for making a brand new top of the line P4 work just like an old Performa?
Wait a sec, WinXP has sold a lot of copies now that I think about it, you just might be on to something! ;)
Actually, if their legacy apps are 3.1 vintage, they don't need to buy VMWare at all - wine handles the older stuff flawlessly and has for many revisions now. Surely their consultants are aware of this?
Exactly.
There are good reasons to do it the other way around, on occasion - like when I had to run linux under NT because it was the only way to get the ^%* *#$% messed up network card to work.
But as long as you don't have that sort of issue, it makes much more sense to run the more stable OS as the primary.
Actually, if I understand what's going on, they aren't buying any new licenses, just continuing to use the ones they've already payed for. Unless you mean for VMWare?
It often makes sense to maintain backward compatibility for a stage or two. If they were just going to run Windows apps they wouldn't need Windows at all. So clearly, if the story is even true, what it means is just that they have some 'legacy' apps they can't immediately replace. No big deal. Run VMware (or Win4Lin, or Wine, depending on the specifics) use Windows and the software for it that they've already payed for, but it gets them off the upgrade treadmill, and looking for *nix-native programs to replace the legacy crap.
Oh please.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense that's making the workplace truly hostile. The sad thing is that the lawmakers buy this bullshit.
What the poster described isn't sexual harrassment. It's called making a few passes. So the old lady thinks he's hot. He should be flattered, and either take her up on her offer, or else say 'thanks but no.' Instead he leads her on and talks behind her back about 'sexual harrassment'.
If I'm not mistaken that would let me run a WM for X, but Aqua would still be running all the Aqua apps, right?
That sounds like too much of a mess, honestly, I think it would be worse than just living with Aqua.
Although I happen to be using OSX as I write this, and I really do like the system (and I'm not computer illiterate by a long shot) I tend to agree with most of what you say. The same things you talk about in X I miss on my Mac. It is quite annoying in many ways.
But, in my current job, I simply must use SPSS which is only available for Windows or Mac. So that was my choice. Given that choice, Mac is the clear favourite.
As other posters have pointed out, it does have a quite functional command line, and it does have X available to run inside of Aqua. Sadly the latter is slow as a dog, and you can't just ditch the hideous Aqua WM and run everything inside something decent like WindowMaker yet, but hey, look at the alternative.
Write me a fully compatible SPSS clone for linux, and I'll wipe OSX and install Gentoo/PPC in a heartbeat. Until then, I'm just glad I don't have to run XP on my beautiful little laptop.
Wrong. I don't know where you got this myth but it is, indeed, a myth. That's your point 3 as well - completely misguided and misinformed.
Then the Beowulf comments, now those are really clueless. Obviously you don't understand what a Beowulf cluster is. It's a protocol for building a distributed supercomputer using multiple linux boxes. You could make a Beowulf cluster with these, if you wanted to, but talking about the performance of a PPC970 versus that of a Beowulf cluster in general is simply nonsense. You're just horribly confused, or trolling.
The power consumption statement definately makes me lean towards trolling. That's marvelously clueless, totally reversing the actual relationships. The PPC lines run very cool compared to Intel and AMDs offerings, but you claim the opposite.
So yes, you definately deserve the modslapping, and another one as well. If you don't know something that's no shame, but if you don't have a clue and start spouting off whatever comes into your head pretending to be an expert, that is shameful indeed.
And if you don't agree, then you still have the right to do everything you're allowed to do by default, just like you are with any software accompanied by a EULA which you did not agree to.
No, who's that?
That's because all the really good examples were never discovered. ;)
Sounds like kadamelia actually.
Bah. I have a very good reason to carry lockpicks. And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm a free man, and it's none of your business.
Well I for one would be happy to pay for advertising-free TV.
But the greed here is incredible. Where do people get this notion that they have a legally enforceable right to make a profit off a bad business model?
DTV has several options as I see them. They can write off the 'pirating' as inevitable and ignore it, concentrating on sucking the honest customers dry. They can change their offerings to compete better with the 'pirate' offers. Or they can use cartooneys to threaten everyone in sight hoping this will somehow make them more money than it costs.
Apparently they're choosing door number 3, which I think is pretty dumb, but not surprising really.
If I were them I'd try something a little more creative. What is the draw to the 'pirate' cards? You get access to whatever channels you want, for a one-time fee, instead of paying out the ass for the super-deluxe top of the line package every month just for the one channel you actually watch, am I right?
Plus there is the element of everyone wanting to feel like they're the smart one, getting the forbidden fruit cheap while the other chumps pay big bucks month after month... I'm sure that's an element.
Now remember, these 'pirates' are paying, they're just paying lump sums instead of recurring fees, and they're paying them to someone else. That's the problem, from DTVs point of view, if they would just look at it clearly.
So, what I would do if I were them, is just start a little subsidiary. Hide the ownership, yo don't have to do anything illegal, just the kind of obfuscation any corporate lawyer or accountant knows how to do, so that it's not obvious. Have this little subsidiary get into the pirate card business. Have your techs working on breaking pirate cards, of course, as they've done all along. But have your techs and your subsidiary work together, so that most of the time when you break the other pirate cards those sold by your subsidiary don't break. Still break them sometimes, of course, so you get a round of upgrade sales, but make sure your own cards get the reputation for being the ones that usually don't break.
Pretty soon, not only are you getting the regular fees from your ordinary subscribers, you also own the pirate decoder market as well. Now remember, they're working in a market where most of the costs are fixed. It costs them the same amount to run that programming whether they have 1 subscriber or one million subscribers. They have the exact same costs whether there are no 'pirates' or 10 or 100 or a million as well. So this extra income is pure gravy.
Actually I posted here for a long time without one. I only registered when they put in the moderation system.
In the case of slashdot, it makes sense to register because it is a community discussion site, and to have productive discussions you simply must have some sort of handle persistence. So registration, while I wasn't necessarily eager to do it, does serve an end important to me.
Registering for the NY times serves only their ends.
Also, there's a fundamental and important difference between the way Slashdot and the NYT treat those without a login. With Slashdot, you still get the content, you just miss out on handle persistence and customised display settings. That's acceptable behaviour. With the NYT, you do NOT get the content, in any form, rather you get redirected to a page that insists you register with them. This is not acceptable behaviour. The NYT needs to make up their mind - do they want to be on the web or not? If people can't read your content by hitting a url, then you're not part of the web.
One of the things I really hate about Slashdot is how they have refused to simply make a policy of not posting these pseudo-links. There's really no excuse. It takes only a few seconds in most cases to find an actual working links. Submissions with non-working links (such as links to the NYT) should be sent to /dev/null.
But that's not how it's been sold here, and that's not what the people of Finland agreed to.
The idea with the Constitution and Federalism was that Congress would have very limited competency and no authority to intervene except in a few defined areas. Of course we know that federalism was murdered in the US along the way. But when they sold this whole EU idea over here, and to this day, they proclaim loudly that it is not to be a 'United States of Europe' - that the states involved do maintain sovereignty, they just cooperate more. This is the main reason, I suppose, that they've gotten away with setting up such an un-democratic power structure, Brussels isn't supposed to be setting policies for the most part, rather simply establishing frameworks for cooperation and co-development between EU countries.
The farcical level is really sickening sometimes, like when the EU directorates 'recommend' policies like this, the democratic representatives in constituent states sometimes agree and sometimes refuse, but then the refusers are told it doesn't matter they have to follow anyway. It's a scam, and I'm hoping we wake up over here before it's too late.
There are a lot of good aspects to the EU, but the threat of it all going sour looks very real from here.
It's not free. The registration is the payment. And it's a higher price than it's worth.
That's right, and that's a feature not a bug.
I sincerely hope google shows some balls and tells them to f right off.
They can't have it both ways, either they're on the web or they're not. They've been trying for years to subvert things so they can have their cake and eat it too, and they need to get told no by someone they'll listen to.
Better late than never.
How can this be claimed to be consistent with the ideal of 'democracy' that the eurocrats are always blathering about? An unelected group of beaureacrats draft a 'directive' which the elected representatives of, for instance, Finland reject - and then it's enforced on the Finnish people anyway, against their wishes?