"The new gold is IP," McBride said....SCO soon to become ghost town, after unsuccessfully mining the Linux kernel and not finding one itty bitty nugget.
Right idea, wrong metaphor. Linux is a source of gold, but it's more like The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. As in Aesop's fable, you can feed and care for the goose and a reliable source of gold will come your way. Darl is trying to kill the goose to get at all the eggs at once but, like the fool in the story, he's ending up with nothing. Those who have been looking after the goose (Red Hat, Novell, IBM, et al) have profitted.
Okay, so let me get this straight. Since they can't get people to believe SCO's spin when it's reported via credible news sources, they figure it's going to get a better reception when posted on an admittedly self-serving web site? I know it's standard on Slashdot to assume that the PHBs will accept anything they read, but even a PHB (or at least most of them) would have to know the difference between news and spin when the site's name is Pro-SCO. Somebody would have to be deliberately looking for SCO's spin even to go to this site.
If anyone actually reads this site it's only going to be for the comic relief.
The article argues that the patent system is not broken and that the only problem is the implementation. That's not a consistent argument because the way it's implemented is part of the system. Even his opening example, where an individual programmer comes up with an innovative algorithm and wants to patent it, contradicts the premise. The way the current patent system is written, the ante for playing the patent game (in terms of lawyers and fees) is too high for most individual players or small businesses. Before patenting software can even be considered, the patent system itself needs fixing. There is a good alternate proposal for this on Groklaw.
Okay, suppose he adds three million listeners. I think that's pretty high (certainly higher than anyone else has projected). But using that as a base and assuming that our only cost is Howard's $100 million annual salary (everyone else on the show works for free), let's do the math.
Three million times $12.99 a month is $38,970,000.00. Minus Howard's salary of $8,333,333.33 per month yields a profit of $30,636,666.67 per month. Assuming everything else stays that same it will take you 163.2 months to reach the stock's half-billion dollar jump in market cap.
That's over thirteen and half years until you break even on your investment.
This may be a good thing for Sirius, but it seems to have made the stock market
go stupid. The price of Sirius stock -- already overpriced IMHO -- jumped a
billion dollars on the news. Later it dropped to half a billion. but that's still nuts. The
Motley Fool did an article on it. I don't care for Howard Stern, but even if
you think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, what could he possibly say
on the radio that would increase the value of the company by that much?
So the MPAA will just send a few more "donations" to congress and suddenly a new law magically appears extending the FCC's powers.
Maybe, but that's no reason to make their lives easier. The real value of the suit is in raising the issue outside of the geek community. When have you last heard of "broadcast flag" outside of Slashdot? The average American doesn't even know that his rights are being curtailed. The MPAA et al would rather slip this new regulation in below the radar rather than expose it to public view by having to push it through Congress
Maybe they should send a few major league pitchers up to throw the trash really hard?
Why not? But toward the sun rather than toward earth. The grandparent mentions the orbital velocity. I'd think there would be some point in the station's orbit where a good push -- or maybe some kind of "junk gun" -- would send the stuff falling into the sun.
Exactly what military threat do they envision where they need a bigger "boom" than what they have now? Every current military threat isn't a matter of having insufficient explosive power, but having difficulty ascertaining the target. This stuff may have practical use as a non-military explosive (e.g., asteroid deflection) but the U.S. military already has the necessary force to blow up anything on earth using existing technology.
Why is it that all the conversion kits, and home-built electric cars have terrible range?
Because the major car manufacturer's haven't figured out how to make a commercially viable electric car yet. The closest things to "real" cars were GM's EV1 and Ford's Th!nk. Both were limited experiments which have since ended. Both companies appear to have decided that the market did not have enough critical mass yet. The cars were thought to be too expensive for the mass market. Both companies have withdrawn from the electric market in favor of, IMHO, an impractical vision of hydrogen fuel cells. They'll probably get back into the field if some else does first, but as long as they safely make their money off gas guzzlers, they'll stand pat.
The short-range cars you saw were another attempt at electric vehicles called the "city car". The theory is that you would have more than one car, but one would be cheap with limited speed and/or range, suitable only for driving in the city. There are a few companies that made/make them, including Citicar and the Sparrow. They seem to come and go, always on the verge of making a breakthrough or packing it all in. Conversion kits are also focused on making it cheap, so what you really need for a long-range vehicle (a pricey battery) is left out.
Yeah, I know it's been a long while since you left this post, but I figured I'd respond anyway since this is something of a pet peeve of mine. EV fans seem to always get caught up in the technical details and miss the business issues.
This is just a lame attempt to keep playing the "open source is
dangerous" riff that Microsoft loves so well. The main offensive
(and I mean that in all senses of the word) is, of course, the SCO
case. Fortunately, this course of attack will eventually fall on deaf ears
if no valid case is actually put together. Expect more of this kind of
thing until the mainstream press realizes there is no story here and
decides to move along.
I have half a dozen email addresses. Some can be traced to me, some can't. So all I need to do to "comply" with this silly law is to get a Hotmail address (or, better yet, any foreign web-based email address) and paste it on the site. I don't see anything in the article that says the email address needs to be easily tracked.
It's attached to this story on Groklaw. We've probably slashdotted them again. PJ's either got to get a bigger pipe or start writing less interesting stuff. But as long aas Darl won't shut his big mouth, she's got some of the funniest stuff on the 'Net.
SCO is just digging, I wish they would either strike, or leave us the hell alone. Slander is what it's boiling down to.
What SCO is trying to do is to survive the first round, IBM is looking to take them out early. If the judge finds for IBM, there is no jury trial and SCO is left with only the barest skeleton of a case while still facing IBM's countersuit. SCO is trying desperately to get the case in front of a jury, presumably because they still believe Enderle's analysis which boils down to, "juries are stupid and might do anything." And a random roll of the dice is better for SCO than an assessment by an experienced judge.
Of course, that's assuming that Enderle is right in assuming that SCO will come off as sympathetic. And, even if SCO convinces a jury, that the case would continue to survive the inevitable appeal. SCO probably doesn't expect to win in the end, but even a fleeting victory would give them another spike in their stock price they could exploit for their own ends.
There was a lot of griping when SCO started this dog-and-pony show that IBM's lawyers weren't doing anything, but now it's clear why. After over a year of letting SCO delay and extend the case, they're starting to play hardball. Here is a PDF that includes a couple of filings and an exchange of letters between the lawyers on each side. SCO is asking for more time and IBM just isn't taking it anymore. Loosely translated, they're telling SCO they've had enough time, they've been given all the opportunity they need to gather data and they haven't bothered. Presumably the Nazgul have all the offers to gather data and SCO's responses documented, because when SCO threatens to go to the judge, IBM tells them to go ahead.
The letters are fun reading and provide a good example on how to make opposing counsel look stupid. Both sides have accused the other of dragging their feet. So this time -- when SCO asks for a delay -- IBM says okay, as long as you don't want the delay in order to just ask for another delay. SCO refuses, basically admitting that this is exactly what they planned to do.
I would imagine the zombie network sellers (or really, *renters*) go to great lengths to hide their identities.
The usual method is to follow the money; it's getting payment for a crime that complicates things. Kidnappers almost never succeed not because nabbing people is hard, it's trying to get paid that is the problem.
If you're lucky, the moron will take a check. If not, they still need some kind of payment. If they ask you to mail a certified check, you get an address. If you arrange a meeting, they can be busted then. Exchange a few emails and you get an IP address that can be useful. Every online bank requires a social security number. A truly anonymous financial transaction is not an easy thing to do.
Breaking into someone else's computer without permission is illegal. A zombie network of 20,000 PCs means that someone has compromised 20,000 computers and, apparently, advertising that fact for personal gain. How hard would it be for a cop to shell out the $2000, then arrest spammer? Of course anyone who has read Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown realizes just how clueless law enforcement can be with technical issues, but this one looks like a no brainer:
The perpetrator (a spammer) is almost universally hated.
Well, let's see. It was supposed to land at the Utah Test and Training Range and this map shows the restricted airspace as a rough hexagon, which seems to match NASA's description of the landing area as a "hex marks the spot" (halfway down the page). But if you go to this map (you may need to zoom out three notches and scroll a bit to the east; look for the Dugway Proving Grounds) you'll see that even the easternmost parts of the range are still a good ways off from Lindon. Besides, Lindon is in a pretty well-populated area and a miss could cause a problem.
I propose that the Air Force approach Darl and ask him to participate in a modified mid-air capture program. One that involves Darl out in the middle of the desert with a baseball glove.
but am I to understand that SCO still hasn't ponied up any evidence in the way of source code to show where code was copied?
They tried, but it got shredded by IBM's legal team. Basically, they had one of their own employees say that he thought this and that chunk of code was copied, but he bungled his testimony. He should have first removed the "non-copyrightable elements" -- like everything in the public domain or that's part of an open standard. But he cited both public domain and open standard code as if it was all proprietary.
He also got caught out in something in activity that borders on perjury. Consider this quote:
As Dr. Kernighan [IBM's expert] notes, "Mr. Gupta's conclusions of similarity depend on his selecting isolated lines of code from disparate places and putting them together as if contiguous blocks of code were involved (which they are not) and important differences did not exist (which they do)."
I'm not sure that this stuff hits the non-technical eye as hard as it does an old geek like myself, but to me the critcism is damning. If the judge looks at the exhibits and comes to the same conclusion IBM did, SCO is in serious trouble.
I think the more important Groklaw story is this one. The part I found telling was:
Pacer indicates that the SCO-Novell hearing on Novell's motion to dismiss is
going to be held on September 15 at 2 PM before Judge Kimball . . . That's not only the same
day as the SCO v. IBM hearing on IBM's 10th Counterclaim, it's the same time.
Since the same judge is handling both cases, I can't conceive of a situation where he would
want to claim the Novell suit should not be dismissed and that the IBM counter-claim should
be denied. Continuing the Novell suit would complicate the IBM suit, so trying to handle
them both in the same afternoon would be a potload of work. If, on the other hand, he plans
to grant the Novell dismissal on the grounds that the copyrights were never transferred, it
would allow him to grant IBM's PSJ on the same grounds.
I'm just guessing here, but if I'm right his is very bad for SCO. It would mean that Novell keeps the UNIX copyrights, the IBM case is limited to the Monterey contract and the Red Hat case can proceed with a finding on record that SCO has been blowing smoke about its UNIX IP.
If you don't know what to use the corkscrew for, you are missing a lot in life.
Oh, I know what to use a corkscrew for, but the dinky thing that they stick in jackknives barely qualifies. And if the thing doesn't grab the cork right you've got little bits of it floating around in the wine. If I'm providing a bottle of wine I consider it a moral responsibility to also provide a respectable corkscrew and rely on my compatriots to show similar consideration.
In any case, I generally prefer Scotch and the Scots have shown enough sense to use a big enough cork that it can be extracted without the additional equipment.
I looked around again and think I found an article that explains what's going on here:
"We'll survive a reformat of the hard drive, but where it gets tricky is when people reinstall operating systems on top of each other. It also depends on what OS is being loaded," Absolute's Livingston said.
Specifically, the software will survive a reformat and reinstallation of any Windows 9X operating system. Installing Windows XP or 2000 can create problems, depending on how the system is configured.
Naturally they're being coy about how to remove their product, but I suspect the "depending how the system is configured" refers to the file system.
I'm just guessing here, but I'd think that they're stashing it somewhere that would be left untouched if it's left in FAT format, so the DOS based versions of Windows and FAT configurations of the NT based versions will not remove it. On the other hand, they couldn't find a similar hiding place in NTFS, so an NTFS reformat will kill it.
In USA are you allowed to keep the knife in your 'checked in' baggage?
Yeah, but practically nothing for carry-on. There's even some stuff that's theoretically allowed (like small blunt scissors or nail clippers without a nail file) that poorly trained security folk confiscate.
It looks like the USB Knife is on the same pattern of the executive line, so that's just about a two-inch blade, but most Swiss Army knives have bigger blades; around three or four inches. My old favorite was the Tinker because it had a phillips head screwdriver. (Honestly, did anybody ever use that stupid corkscrew?) But I've since replaced it with a Leatherman because of the pliers. Unfortunately, it looks like the only part of the Leatherman line that has blades of two inches or less are the Squirt, Micra and Mini-tool.
Alas, neither of these will be of any use if the thief simply reformats the
hard drive in order to resell it.
Apparently not true. Ztrace
claims that a reformat
won't remove their program; sounds like they did something back on the boot sector. I did
see a review that suggested reformatting, but their is no indication that the article's author actually tested it.
In any case, a new OS isn't cheap so it's part of the value of the stolen property. I would think a thief would be more likely to try and just "clean up" the machine by removing identifying features rather than wipe the disk.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone actually reads this site it's only going to be for the comic relief.
The article argues that the patent system is not broken and that the only problem is the implementation. That's not a consistent argument because the way it's implemented is part of the system. Even his opening example, where an individual programmer comes up with an innovative algorithm and wants to patent it, contradicts the premise. The way the current patent system is written, the ante for playing the patent game (in terms of lawyers and fees) is too high for most individual players or small businesses. Before patenting software can even be considered, the patent system itself needs fixing. There is a good alternate proposal for this on Groklaw.
Three million times $12.99 a month is $38,970,000.00. Minus Howard's salary of $8,333,333.33 per month yields a profit of $30,636,666.67 per month. Assuming everything else stays that same it will take you 163.2 months to reach the stock's half-billion dollar jump in market cap.
That's over thirteen and half years until you break even on your investment.
This may be a good thing for Sirius, but it seems to have made the stock market go stupid. The price of Sirius stock -- already overpriced IMHO -- jumped a billion dollars on the news. Later it dropped to half a billion. but that's still nuts. The Motley Fool did an article on it. I don't care for Howard Stern, but even if you think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, what could he possibly say on the radio that would increase the value of the company by that much?
Exactly what military threat do they envision where they need a bigger "boom" than what they have now? Every current military threat isn't a matter of having insufficient explosive power, but having difficulty ascertaining the target. This stuff may have practical use as a non-military explosive (e.g., asteroid deflection) but the U.S. military already has the necessary force to blow up anything on earth using existing technology.
The short-range cars you saw were another attempt at electric vehicles called the "city car". The theory is that you would have more than one car, but one would be cheap with limited speed and/or range, suitable only for driving in the city. There are a few companies that made/make them, including Citicar and the Sparrow. They seem to come and go, always on the verge of making a breakthrough or packing it all in. Conversion kits are also focused on making it cheap, so what you really need for a long-range vehicle (a pricey battery) is left out.
Yeah, I know it's been a long while since you left this post, but I figured I'd respond anyway since this is something of a pet peeve of mine. EV fans seem to always get caught up in the technical details and miss the business issues.
This is just a lame attempt to keep playing the "open source is dangerous" riff that Microsoft loves so well. The main offensive (and I mean that in all senses of the word) is, of course, the SCO case. Fortunately, this course of attack will eventually fall on deaf ears if no valid case is actually put together. Expect more of this kind of thing until the mainstream press realizes there is no story here and decides to move along.
Another clueless law from the clueless pols.
Of course, that's assuming that Enderle is right in assuming that SCO will come off as sympathetic. And, even if SCO convinces a jury, that the case would continue to survive the inevitable appeal. SCO probably doesn't expect to win in the end, but even a fleeting victory would give them another spike in their stock price they could exploit for their own ends.
The letters are fun reading and provide a good example on how to make opposing counsel look stupid. Both sides have accused the other of dragging their feet. So this time -- when SCO asks for a delay -- IBM says okay, as long as you don't want the delay in order to just ask for another delay. SCO refuses, basically admitting that this is exactly what they planned to do.
If you're lucky, the moron will take a check. If not, they still need some kind of payment. If they ask you to mail a certified check, you get an address. If you arrange a meeting, they can be busted then. Exchange a few emails and you get an IP address that can be useful. Every online bank requires a social security number. A truly anonymous financial transaction is not an easy thing to do.
- The perpetrator (a spammer) is almost universally hated.
- Spammers do real damage.
- They are doing this damage for a pure profit motive.
- They are operating out in the open, making for an easy arrest.
So why are these bozos still in business?I propose that the Air Force approach Darl and ask him to participate in a modified mid-air capture program. One that involves Darl out in the middle of the desert with a baseball glove.
He also got caught out in something in activity that borders on perjury. Consider this quote:
I'm not sure that this stuff hits the non-technical eye as hard as it does an old geek like myself, but to me the critcism is damning. If the judge looks at the exhibits and comes to the same conclusion IBM did, SCO is in serious trouble.I'm just guessing here, but if I'm right his is very bad for SCO. It would mean that Novell keeps the UNIX copyrights, the IBM case is limited to the Monterey contract and the Red Hat case can proceed with a finding on record that SCO has been blowing smoke about its UNIX IP.
In any case, I generally prefer Scotch and the Scots have shown enough sense to use a big enough cork that it can be extracted without the additional equipment.
I'm just guessing here, but I'd think that they're stashing it somewhere that would be left untouched if it's left in FAT format, so the DOS based versions of Windows and FAT configurations of the NT based versions will not remove it. On the other hand, they couldn't find a similar hiding place in NTFS, so an NTFS reformat will kill it.
It looks like the USB Knife is on the same pattern of the executive line, so that's just about a two-inch blade, but most Swiss Army knives have bigger blades; around three or four inches. My old favorite was the Tinker because it had a phillips head screwdriver. (Honestly, did anybody ever use that stupid corkscrew?) But I've since replaced it with a Leatherman because of the pliers. Unfortunately, it looks like the only part of the Leatherman line that has blades of two inches or less are the Squirt, Micra and Mini-tool.
In any case, a new OS isn't cheap so it's part of the value of the stolen property. I would think a thief would be more likely to try and just "clean up" the machine by removing identifying features rather than wipe the disk.