Well, considering that you could take a disabled, offline nanotech lab which looks like a pack of cigarettes with you, I still think they could have been better prepared on-planet too.
Not having full nanotech available is like not having a first-aid kit. What if somebody cuts off your head or something? Who knows when you might need an atmospheric fighter production facility? Or some cool new clothes? Or a fricken' FTL tacyhon transceiver?
I'd think to an aristoi, walking around without full nanotech is like walking around in the Artic without any clothes, food, or shelter. If it weren't dangerous, you wouldn't be there, you'd just send a minion. You're going up against other aristoi, and anything could happen.
I understand why WJW wrote things the way he did. It is hard, very hard, to write about nanotech in a plausible way. Which is part of the reason why I haven't fully figured out my own SF novel yet.
OK, well they protagonists knew they were going into a dangerous situation, hence they carried guns.
But where's the powered, self-healing, body armor? Or how about some air cover? They were conduting a raid on a stronghold, riding in on horseback, IIRC. This was after their cover was blown, so there was no need to be subtle.
But walking into a dangerous situation as an unprotected meat bag is insane, given the level of technology available in the novel.
Many authors may try, but few fully appreciate the implications of nanotech, and how things will work in the future.
Of course, the problem with that novel is that while they have full molecular nanotechnology, the main characters walk around as meat bags.
At one point, the good guys get captured after a dose of sleep gas. Sheesh. A T1000 (or a TX, though I haven't seen Rise of the Machines) could have kicked all their asses.
I did enjoy the novel, but most SF these days frustrates me at a certain level.
I don't think you're getting the point. Whey the spammers try to work around the greylisting, that will make them more obvious to other spam detection techniques.
It's not a total solution, but (potentially) another good tool for the toolbox.
If a piece of Governement funded software were to be subject to a restrictive license, such as the GNU GPL, commercial companies would often not see a benefit in entering tinto such an agreement because:
1) There is a limited amount of money that could be made from the original development because of the limited opportunity for further revenue.
2) They may not want to make public and available for free use any of their IPR that is employed in the development.
Feh. If in today's economy you've got someone balking at developing FOSS, then you can just find someone else. There are plenty of software companies who are hungry for work. They're not worried about future profits, because they're trying to stay in business today.
This is just B.S. cooked up by our "betters" in the IT industry to try to keep their pockets lined with taxpayer cash.
The latest SCO argument about export restrictions is full of holes anyway.
There aren't many big, expensive 32-way SMP systems made, much less shipped overseas. That would be easy to watch out for at the borders.
However, if you can get supercomputer class power from a Beowulf cluster of Sony PS2s, that would be much easier to slip under the radar. After all, they're game machines!
David Boies is a pretty sharp guy, but his firm is riding another one down in flames. He's got to get some better clients.
SCO is waaaaaay up a creek this time. They are now basically saying they own anything that ever touched SYSV Unix. I can't believe anyone like IBM, Sun, HP, etc. would sign a contract like that. It sounds more like Microsoft's shared source program.
After a short while, the script kiddies will have new types of VPN software which periodically drop an d re-establish a connection.
Or they'll just tunnel over http or whatever. Sure, it will be slower and more laggy, but they won't care, because they're 133T.
Much better to invest your time in regular network monitoring and IDS. If you know what your systems are supposed to be doing, you'll know when they're doing something else.
Well, I am reluctant these days to put a Linux box out on the Internet, protected only by iptables.
Do yourself a favor, and check OpenBSD's pf if you want to see something much better. It is very powerful and flexible. Configuration files are way smaller too, which makes it easier to verify that they are correct.
Oh yeah, and it uses a configuration file. Which is nice, because I can put in comments. None of the state-saving, can't really edit it stuff.
I need to run Linux for many things, because applications haven't been ported to OpenBSD. But until someone takes on the considerable task of porting pf to Linux, all my Linux boxen will be protected by OpenBSD routers.
So it looks like there may have been some copied code from SVR4 to Linux, but that's so old it could have come via BSD.
And the other stuff like NUMA and RCU started with IBM (or someone IBM bought), and now SCO's claiming ownership of it via Project Monterey.
It has been my experience with IBM that they have been very, very careful about IP issues. Heck, this one guy's GPL project basically got shut down while he was working at IBM because of the lawyers.
If SVR4 code was illegally copied into Linux, I'd expect that would have been done by some ex-employee in his mom's basement. I really wouldn't expect IBM, of all organizations, to step on someone's IP like this. It just isn't their style.
You set up a fake printer port, and redirect that to Ghostscript, convert it to PDF, and prompt for a filename. After you get it all set up, creating a PDF is just like using any printer, and works from any application.
I wish this capability was published a little wider, could have saved us some money at our company...
We were the engineering team for a small dot com type company. We believed the managment wasn't headed in the right direction.
So we started our own company. It has been rough, like it has for any tech company in 2001-2002. But we're still here, and things are now looking better.
If you really respect your mangement, you'll probably work better, and be more productive.
So as long as you can line up some customers, I'd say do it.
More importantly, was the initial complaint filed against IBM prepared by Boies' lawfirm?
The initial version was laughably bad, and has been picked apart by ESR and others. We're talking about a billion dollars here, and no-one hired an outside guru to vet the claims made by SCO?
I haven't seen any other legal work by Boies, but if this is a fair example of their work, I have severely not impressed.
Yeah, well, that's why some qmail people are moving to Courier instead.
I started with qmail, because I liked Maildirs much better than mbox format. But then I needed an IMAP server. And then I needed a webmail server. And then I needed e-mail filtering.
So instead of installing all the pieces separately, I just installed Courier.
While the DJB-style configuration directories are kinda interesting, I perfer Courier's more mainstream configuration files.
Still using DJBDNS though. Small and simple, which is what I like.
Particularly intriguing is the use of chat rooms to engage experts thousands of miles away in helping to solve problems at the troop level in the field.
Sounds like something straight out of Earthweb by Marc Stiegler. Except in the book they were fighting this strange interstellar planetoid bent on Earth's destruction.
The book also reminded me of Max Headroom, where that newsroom director "ran" Edison Carter when he was doing those live-on-the-scene reports.
The stuff you saw with Tank and his brother-in-law in the Matrix had many earlier precedents, young jedi.
Well, the common excuse is that remote workers (with their own Internet access) need to send mail, and want to just configure their mail client to connect to the company's mail server.
Never mind that this is horribly insecure.
Rather than deal with the crap of helping people set up their e-mail clients, or using authentication, or setting up a VPN, I decided to just set up web mail access instead.
More secure (uses SSL). No client configuration. Since all mail folders are stored on the server, they have full access to all their messages wherever they go. Easy.
Makes so much sense I don't know why everyone isn't doing it already.
Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
And that's exactly the problem people like Mr. Terwilliger don't seem to understand.
We don't have an idea of what's actually going on, and that what worries us.
I would be amused (if I wasn't saddened) by the constant retort of these voting machine companies that they need to keep their code closed, because there are lots of trade secrets. How many secrets can there be in just counting some button presses?
SCO may be able to get people on copyright infringement. We won't be able to tell until (or if) SCO shows us the infringing code.
I find it hard to believe they could prevail on the trade secret side of the case, because they were publishing the infringing code themselves.
You know, what's really screwy in this case is that Caldera started with a Linux distro. Then they acquired SCO, and the Unixware codebase. So shouldn't they be suing themselves?
Feh. Lawyers making more work for themselves. Like we haven't seen that before.
Plus, who are those assets valuable to? If by some unimaginable chance SCO technology is woven so deep into the design they do kill Linux the kernel, the world just shifts to BSD. The Hurd goes from a sleepy project with potential to the central focus of a million geeks and lots of companies. Starting from scratch, people use the best ideas of HURD/L4/EROS/etc. and build a real next generation system, with documented non-patented roots in research work.
Hmmm... that's an interesting possibility. Losing the lawsuit could give the FOSS community a kick in the pants to develop a really good next-gen OS. I've been reading about those various efforts, but the going is slow.
Of course, losing the lawsuit will bring all the cockroaches out of the woodwork, and generate an avalance of IP infringement claims. That wouldn't be pleasant.
And SCO with a billion bucks would be an unholy terror.
Their stock price is only going up because of repeated talking that the cheapest way for IBM to get out of the lawsuit is to just buy Caldera/SCO.
Long odds though, they won't get my money.
I also don't think Linux is being harmed much by this. Suppose improperly copied code had made its way into Linux. As soon as that is widely know, the code will be re-written from scratch, everyone will upgrade, and that's it.
Is SCO supposed to bring a class-action lawsuit against everyone who's ever downloaded a distro? I don't think so.
Worst comes to worst, and I'll just switch all my boxen to OpenBSD. Feh, if hardware RAID was better supported, I'd do that now...
Hmph, I guess because there is continual talk of
re-implementing Coda, the codebase must not be too hot.
Every time I want to switch to a better network file system, I read about problems with corrupted files or mysterious crashes and get scared.
Then I come slinking back to NFS, which hasn't done something like that to me in at least 5 years or more. The only real problems I've had are when so-and-so's V3 implementation doesn't want to talk to this other V3 implementation, or read/write sizes. Been rock-solid when it is actually moving bits.
Of course, now that I think about it, NFS has been rock-solid because the fileservers have been rock-solid. If they crash, then everybody's sorry.
Wish I was using a DFS that supported disconnected operation...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Omnilux
As the other posters have pointed out, you still need sufficient density for it to work well.
And then there's the problem of linking together geographical areas.
Debian 3.0 came on 7 CDs. Actually 8 if you include the international version of disc 1.
And then there are the source CDs...
The future is now. Time to start using DVDs. Now if all the business with DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW was sorted out...
Well, considering that you could take a disabled, offline nanotech lab which looks like a pack of cigarettes with you, I still think they could have been better prepared on-planet too.
Not having full nanotech available is like not having a first-aid kit. What if somebody cuts off your head or something? Who knows when you might need an atmospheric fighter production facility? Or some cool new clothes? Or a fricken' FTL tacyhon transceiver?
I'd think to an aristoi, walking around without full nanotech is like walking around in the Artic without any clothes, food, or shelter. If it weren't dangerous, you wouldn't be there, you'd just send a minion. You're going up against other aristoi, and anything could happen.
I understand why WJW wrote things the way he did. It is hard, very hard, to write about nanotech in a plausible way. Which is part of the reason why I haven't fully figured out my own SF novel yet.
As you can see by my 4-digit userid, since about 1998. :-)
OK, well they protagonists knew they were going into a dangerous situation, hence they carried guns.
But where's the powered, self-healing, body armor? Or how about some air cover? They were conduting a raid on a stronghold, riding in on horseback, IIRC. This was after their cover was blown, so there was no need to be subtle.
But walking into a dangerous situation as an unprotected meat bag is insane, given the level of technology available in the novel.
Many authors may try, but few fully appreciate the implications of nanotech, and how things will work in the future.
Of course, the problem with that novel is that while they have full molecular nanotechnology, the main characters walk around as meat bags.
At one point, the good guys get captured after a dose of sleep gas. Sheesh. A T1000 (or a TX, though I haven't seen Rise of the Machines) could have kicked all their asses.
I did enjoy the novel, but most SF these days frustrates me at a certain level.
Heh. Countless? No, not really. There's only been a few authors who've used it.
If you find some that you don't see mentioned on the Ansible page on Wikipedia, then please be sure to add them!
I don't think you're getting the point. Whey the spammers try to work around the greylisting, that will make them more obvious to other spam detection techniques.
It's not a total solution, but (potentially) another good tool for the toolbox.
If a piece of Governement funded software were to be subject to a restrictive license, such as the GNU GPL, commercial companies would often not see a benefit in entering tinto such an agreement because:
1) There is a limited amount of money that could be made from the original development because of the limited opportunity for further revenue.
2) They may not want to make public and available for free use any of their IPR that is employed in the development.
Feh. If in today's economy you've got someone balking at developing FOSS, then you can just find someone else. There are plenty of software companies who are hungry for work. They're not worried about future profits, because they're trying to stay in business today.
This is just B.S. cooked up by our "betters" in the IT industry to try to keep their pockets lined with taxpayer cash.
The latest SCO argument about export restrictions is full of holes anyway.
There aren't many big, expensive 32-way SMP systems made, much less shipped overseas. That would be easy to watch out for at the borders.
However, if you can get supercomputer class power from a Beowulf cluster of Sony PS2s, that would be much easier to slip under the radar. After all, they're game machines!
David Boies is a pretty sharp guy, but his firm is riding another one down in flames. He's got to get some better clients.
Shit, and people talk about the GPL being viral!
SCO is waaaaaay up a creek this time. They are now basically saying they own anything that ever touched SYSV Unix. I can't believe anyone like IBM, Sun, HP, etc. would sign a contract like that. It sounds more like Microsoft's shared source program.
After a short while, the script kiddies will have new types of VPN software which periodically drop an d re-establish a connection.
Or they'll just tunnel over http or whatever. Sure, it will be slower and more laggy, but they won't care, because they're 133T.
Much better to invest your time in regular network monitoring and IDS. If you know what your systems are supposed to be doing, you'll know when they're doing something else.
Well, I am reluctant these days to put a Linux box out on the Internet, protected only by iptables.
Do yourself a favor, and check OpenBSD's pf if you want to see something much better. It is very powerful and flexible. Configuration files are way smaller too, which makes it easier to verify that they are correct.
Oh yeah, and it uses a configuration file. Which is nice, because I can put in comments. None of the state-saving, can't really edit it stuff.
I need to run Linux for many things, because applications haven't been ported to OpenBSD. But until someone takes on the considerable task of porting pf to Linux, all my Linux boxen will be protected by OpenBSD routers.
Good post.
So it looks like there may have been some copied code from SVR4 to Linux, but that's so old it could have come via BSD.
And the other stuff like NUMA and RCU started with IBM (or someone IBM bought), and now SCO's claiming ownership of it via Project Monterey.
It has been my experience with IBM that they have been very, very careful about IP issues. Heck, this one guy's GPL project basically got shut down while he was working at IBM because of the lawyers.
If SVR4 code was illegally copied into Linux, I'd expect that would have been done by some ex-employee in his mom's basement. I really wouldn't expect IBM, of all organizations, to step on someone's IP like this. It just isn't their style.
You can also check the on-line docs for RedMon, at the Ghostscript Home Page.
You set up a fake printer port, and redirect that to Ghostscript, convert it to PDF, and prompt for a filename. After you get it all set up, creating a PDF is just like using any printer, and works from any application.
I wish this capability was published a little wider, could have saved us some money at our company...
We were the engineering team for a small dot com type company. We believed the managment wasn't headed in the right direction.
So we started our own company. It has been rough, like it has for any tech company in 2001-2002. But we're still here, and things are now looking better.
If you really respect your mangement, you'll probably work better, and be more productive.
So as long as you can line up some customers, I'd say do it.
More importantly, was the initial complaint filed against IBM prepared by Boies' lawfirm?
The initial version was laughably bad, and has been picked apart by ESR and others. We're talking about a billion dollars here, and no-one hired an outside guru to vet the claims made by SCO?
I haven't seen any other legal work by Boies, but if this is a fair example of their work, I have severely not impressed.
Yeah, well, that's why some qmail people are moving to Courier instead.
I started with qmail, because I liked Maildirs much better than mbox format. But then I needed an IMAP server. And then I needed a webmail server. And then I needed e-mail filtering.
So instead of installing all the pieces separately, I just installed Courier.
While the DJB-style configuration directories are kinda interesting, I perfer Courier's more mainstream configuration files.
Still using DJBDNS though. Small and simple, which is what I like.
Particularly intriguing is the use of chat rooms to engage experts thousands of miles away in helping to solve problems at the troop level in the field.
Sounds like something straight out of Earthweb by Marc Stiegler. Except in the book they were fighting this strange interstellar planetoid bent on Earth's destruction.
The book also reminded me of Max Headroom, where that newsroom director "ran" Edison Carter when he was doing those live-on-the-scene reports.
The stuff you saw with Tank and his brother-in-law in the Matrix had many earlier precedents, young jedi.
Well, the common excuse is that remote workers (with their own Internet access) need to send mail, and want to just configure their mail client to connect to the company's mail server.
Never mind that this is horribly insecure.
Rather than deal with the crap of helping people set up their e-mail clients, or using authentication, or setting up a VPN, I decided to just set up web mail access instead.
More secure (uses SSL). No client configuration. Since all mail folders are stored on the server, they have full access to all their messages wherever they go. Easy.
Makes so much sense I don't know why everyone isn't doing it already.
Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."
And that's exactly the problem people like Mr. Terwilliger don't seem to understand.
We don't have an idea of what's actually going on, and that what worries us.
I would be amused (if I wasn't saddened) by the constant retort of these voting machine companies that they need to keep their code closed, because there are lots of trade secrets. How many secrets can there be in just counting some button presses?
SCO may be able to get people on copyright infringement. We won't be able to tell until (or if) SCO shows us the infringing code.
I find it hard to believe they could prevail on the trade secret side of the case, because they were publishing the infringing code themselves.
You know, what's really screwy in this case is that Caldera started with a Linux distro. Then they acquired SCO, and the Unixware codebase. So shouldn't they be suing themselves?
Feh. Lawyers making more work for themselves. Like we haven't seen that before.
Plus, who are those assets valuable to? If by some unimaginable chance SCO technology is woven so deep into the design they do kill Linux the kernel, the world just shifts to BSD. The Hurd goes from a sleepy project with potential to the central focus of a million geeks and lots of companies. Starting from scratch, people use the best ideas of HURD/L4/EROS/etc. and build a real next generation system, with documented non-patented roots in research work.
Hmmm... that's an interesting possibility. Losing the lawsuit could give the FOSS community a kick in the pants to develop a really good next-gen OS. I've been reading about those various efforts, but the going is slow.
Of course, losing the lawsuit will bring all the cockroaches out of the woodwork, and generate an avalance of IP infringement claims. That wouldn't be pleasant.
And SCO with a billion bucks would be an unholy terror.
Their stock price is only going up because of repeated talking that the cheapest way for IBM to get out of the lawsuit is to just buy Caldera/SCO.
Long odds though, they won't get my money.
I also don't think Linux is being harmed much by this. Suppose improperly copied code had made its way into Linux. As soon as that is widely know, the code will be re-written from scratch, everyone will upgrade, and that's it.
Is SCO supposed to bring a class-action lawsuit against everyone who's ever downloaded a distro? I don't think so.
Worst comes to worst, and I'll just switch all my boxen to OpenBSD. Feh, if hardware RAID was better supported, I'd do that now...
Hmph, I guess because there is continual talk of re-implementing Coda, the codebase must not be too hot.
Every time I want to switch to a better network file system, I read about problems with corrupted files or mysterious crashes and get scared.
Then I come slinking back to NFS, which hasn't done something like that to me in at least 5 years or more. The only real problems I've had are when so-and-so's V3 implementation doesn't want to talk to this other V3 implementation, or read/write sizes. Been rock-solid when it is actually moving bits.
Of course, now that I think about it, NFS has been rock-solid because the fileservers have been rock-solid. If they crash, then everybody's sorry.
Wish I was using a DFS that supported disconnected operation...