Gowator

Iph, two questions.... Are the fanless nvidia's dual screen each? my GF's is fanless but only 1 screen.... 2 what are prices and sales like in Melbourne after xmas :D

The variation is caused by a combination of (in no special order) your unwillingness to edit 2 lines of a file ..... The reported supported modes of your monitor The reported supported modes of your GPU The ability of the driver to detect these modes The fallback order in a specific version of xorg.... "randomly" generated modelines by mandrake tools bad luck! As a general rule .. if you use MCC you will get the most mediocre settings...be that making a file system or configuring graphics... and its also a bit luck dependant... usually the more you spend on a monitor tends to give better EDID info but sometimes that just doesn't mesh with the modelines.... I always type in (or paste) the values direct from the monitor handbook... eg Section "Monitor" Identifier "projector" VendorName "Projector" HorizSync 31.0 - 68.0 VertRefresh 60.0 - 85.0 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "screen1" Device "NVIDIA1" Monitor "projector" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1152x864" EndSubSection EndSection as a minimum.... although its better to actually look up the actual Hsynch and Vrefresh for the resolution your using... thus eliminating chance.... It depends what your interest and motivation is.... think about it like a coffee machine.... I can choose between a kettle and instant coffee or an expresso machine with intergrated coffee roaster and grinder... it all depends how you want your coffee... and how important it is to you.... No such thing exists as the best coffee machine.... it depends what you want ... a hot beverage not totally unlike coffee or a steaming cup of expresso with a thick crema and aroma... If you get home in the middle of winter and your freezing (OK not likely in Cairns) then a cup of instant can be the best coffee you ever had .... However linux is more flexible... you can basically get the super machine .... You can press a button and get a decent cuppa on fully auto mode OR you can buy your own beans and mix and roast them yourself all with the same machine :D The fully auto mode will probably never satisfy a coffee snob like me.... but that doesn't make anyone elses enjoyment of it any less! My personal view is I pay good money for a monitor.... so I want to get the most out of it.... so I eliminate chance... I recently stuck linux on a friends laptop with an intel810i chipset.... for a couple of weeks she was happy having a stretched screen then asked why so I decided to fix it ... I found the exact resolution, modes and DPI and actually fxed it so it looks much sharper and crisper than Windows... which was using the right stuff except the dpi.... I just thought of a better analogy for you :D Fully manual or autofocus/program? Some people take some great accidental pictures using autofocus and fully automatic... perhaps choosing a portrait prog to control the aperture... ?? but they will never take consistently good photo's and never take a great photo unless 1 in 10000 by chance.... If you buy a AF lens with no real manual override or focussing method except guess work... you will take mediocre photo's but they will probably be better than a point n shoot.... if you want consistently good photo's you need fully manual in every possible way.... but if you buy a decent SLR and only ever use it in fully auto you are to a certain extent wasting the camera.... You wouldn't believe the number of people I see with real expensive cameras and a few thousands worth of lens on the front trying to get the thing to point and shoot! Yes the camera and lens got great reviews in pro magazines but it was never intended to be used like that....

Yeah I guess that's market forces..... the only PCI cards seem to be really really expensive... but I guess that is due to ATI/NVIDIA controlling over 90% of the market... I think Im fixating because Ive thrown/given away exactly what I need right now 5x over... I don't need a blisteringly fast PCI-e x16 as my primary card, let alone my second one but lets say for arguament I decide Ill pay for speed and power consumption I don't want/need and find some way to underclock the card low enough for it not to need a fan ... I then it seems need to buyt a 2nd one and underclock that as well.... Does anyone have experience underclocking ? Which cards can be used fanless? When I moved I threw out the PC I need.... ?? either the CPU was toast or the mobo and I couldn't afford the time to work out which ... but I had 5 PCI slots and an AGP.... I could have run 8 monitors off it on $25 cards... if I'd wanted to..(I was running 4). but I threw out the case with 2x PCI cards and all... just ripped out the AGP card ... and this was a $50 or less mobo.... and $30 CPU.(well it was an old CPU so didn't cost me anything)... I doubt I paid more than $30 for the PCI cards with something like 64MB or 128MB on each...... something is going fundamentally weird.... PC's are starting getting more expensive to achive the same stuff.. tyme can't find a 939 X2 Im going to have to throw out my 734 3000+ because its simply not worth upgrading to anything worthwhile.... I remember when you could buy a 486sx25 run a ISA graphics card at 1024x768 and as chips got cheaper just stick in a DX2-66 or DX4-100 and start filling the 8 SIMMS slots starting off with 2... and then incrementally add 1 or 2 PCI cards ... Now it seems completely the opposite (or is it just me getting old) .... I bought in at AMD64 3000+ (pretty near the bottom) when it was new... and I can upgrade to what a 4000+ say 25% increase vs 400% on the sx-25? My GPU needs active cooling and my CPU its own dedicated power... incompatible across differences in chip? I had over 100 graphics card manufactuerers to choose from.... The whole scene seems disposable.... its almost impossible to find a cheap mobo without built in NW/sound etc. I did a quick audit the other day.... in my bits n pieces boxes... (looking for a decent PCI (i.e. 1024x768 at 24 bit) card) I have 3 TV tuners, 4-5 NICS excluding good stuff like 3com 100tx which I threw out because it was ISA... 4-5 athlons from 600-1200, 3 soundblaster pro's countless unusable memory from EDO to ?? all of it essentially trash...

Its hard to say, can a company be evil? For that matter can a regime? I guess Ix can answer that better than me, he usually does on philosophy :D Im not sure what the purpose of MS is but it doesn't seem to be to make money for Bill any more.... since he's giving it all away... indeed I don't think its been about money for a while, certainly not money in a sense of money to buy material goods... This begs the question why ??? I think on a simple level you can say "for kicks" or "its what he does" but I can be pretty sure he's not saving for a yacht or new plane... maybe a small country?? I suspect its something of a power trip.... that he has a psychological need to own what everyone needs... and if they don't need it to make sure they do? Lets face it for 'good' or 'bad' his name will live on rather longer than individuals like Grace Hopper... or in a more pervasive way... In some ways "Windows" has become MS and Bill Gates... No of course not but it does drive a wedge into the project... As I say, MS only have to get it into court. They don't need to win.... they can drag it out for years and unless someone like IBM backs Samba who will pay the fees? As I say, I don't think they need to share code... When I was at school I had a woodwork teacher who gave us all a story... he did metalworking as a hobby and one day designed these fantastic candle sticks... he was really proud until months later he saw the candlesticks he designed in a photo of him in a museum... I think the point of this is he really thought he had designed them... and was 100% convinced but they were something his subconcious had stored... and he reproduced nearly exactly while thinking they were his own design... leastwise I think that's why he chose to share this story... This is what I believe MS is trying to do.... if you were working on (we started on Samba so) ... Samba and were wondering over a tricky bit of code then you just happen to see an oblique reference to it ... in some other code (for instance Exchange code for accessing Windows shares) then how can that not influence you but yet you can't remember exactly the code.... just how it worked ..... its almost like subliminal messages in advertising... the aim being tho get the programmer to make the code more like the MS code... and there are a fairly finite number of ways to do it and Samba provide the "evidence" that this code changed after theprogrammer saw there code for Exchange CIFS integration....OS and CVS become a double edged sword... Do Novell realise this? I think so... are they happy about it? Probably not they did try and release YaST as OS but who would want to use it? In many ways Suse IS YaST ... or look at it this way... what would Suse be without YaST.... ? Basically Slackware with RPM??? Erm many FOSS users also use MS and OS-X ... even 'hardcore' distro users like Gentoo or Debian (by which I mean distro's with social codes/contracts etc.) Debian is fanatical about no closed source... and only marginally OK with non GPL... OS... and yet many Debian and Gentoo users still use Windows.... So if hardcore OS distro's have significant Windows users then Suse has even more.... so in answer if you were using Suse and Windows would you stop using Suse if "Everybody would stop using their software and would start develop from the codebase before the MS deal. " ... I don't think so.... Good point ... but equally Dec Windows did exist in Europe (I was actually chatting a guy the other week about VMS... ) this is a but like Disney's little mermaid.... ask a bunch of kids today who wrote it and 9/10 will say Disney... ask them how it ends and they won't say she dies... Two generations of people make this fact... Hans Christian Andersen... who's he? Windows is like this.... it has become synonymous... and history will record how they invented it with a small footnote to Xerox... MS donates vast sums to propogating this myth... Just yesterday ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4350972.stm Note no Apple II with a GUI ....no xerox or Dec ... indeed it will almost look like Apple copied MS.... This last 15M happened yesterday.... its one of many .... but google for more http://www.msichicago.org/scrapbook/scrapb...ates_visit.html As i am trying to say, they only need spread doubt.... Compay A thinking of Linux head of IT says "will save 15M in 3 years."... "OK.... cool... what are the risks? " "Erm.. we could conceivable get sued.... its not likely but we could...." This 15M.... can you say for usre, Ive been reading some TCO reports... "well that spredicted of course from present licensing fee's and support" "So if someone gets sued...might we have to pay licesne fees too?" "possibly but its unlikely they are more likley to sue the distro like Red Hat" "and this 15M... you need 5M for the rollout so its really only 10M" "yes but thats over 5 yrs.... we break even on year one and a bit...because we need to phase the rollout with 50,000 employees.... " "but in 5 yrs ..then Red hat might not exist, they might loose to MS" "I don't think so" "Can you say for sure" "No as I explained the MS source code is secret so I can't audit it and check that linux doesn't use any and MS won't even say which bits, surely if they had something they would use it?" "Perhaps but why should we take the risk, lets look again in 5 yrs and see if RH is still around"

True bit IBM is in a rather different position.... it owns enough patents that Microsoft is infringing (at least to a point of contention) as a security policy.

The most common reason for this is sometimes a wrong keymap.... Try typing you password as the username and make sure you are typing what you think.... If it is this don't be embarassed... Ive done it more times than I care to remember...

IMHO it can't be worse.... I registered quite a few a long time ago and the feeling you get is you mightest well send them to /dev/null ... AdamW obviously cares and carries some weight so I think Johns approach is way better!

Nope for a analogy look at the IBM bios reverse engineering ... done by AMI, phoenix etc. When AMI first did it they had a complete clean room and another room full of lawyers... Every document passed from anyone who understood IBM bios had to go through lawyers ... and be squeaky clean that is the purpose of the code could be passed but nothing specific about the code itself... Noone who had EVER worked for IBM was allowed on the development team... Samba are presently clean... (one presumes) they can stand up and say nono of the devs has ever seen a line of MS CIFS code... so its a clean re-engineering... I don't think so, I think it means (to them) exactly what Balmer says it means...that as far as they are concerned Opensource has a debt of payments. That is they can say they disclosed code merely for the interoperability with their stategic partner Suse/Novell... Suse cannot use that source as is and still be GPL... so they either re engineer it or non GPL it... either of which is bad for the open source community. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Had Novell not been stung already by MS... they might be worth 10x what they are worth today... Define corrupt? Is political lobbying corrupt? some people say yes, others say no... on the whole those being paid to do it say no... those getting screwed over say yes ... This I can give a simple YES... No, lots of people believe MS is corrupt... but they still use the software! This is where I disagree... MS have been trying to kill linux for a long time... however they lack expertise in dealing with an organisation that cannot be purchased, bribed or threatened. MS have successfully set out to break companies simply because they are competition doing what they do best... bribery, threats and perverting the course of justice... Netscape, Corel, stacker and an endless list of companies have been broken... at a cost much higher to MS than any tangible gain. Take netscape... they spent 10's of millions, possibly billions breaking netscape because it competed with a product they don't even charge for... thus zero tangible benefits EXCEPT ... it prevented competitors... like for instance Sun who bundled netscape with Solaris... for a time it provided IE for Solaris (just like it did with Mac) just long enough for people to get used to it and then it pulled the plug... What they have always lacked in linux is something to attack financially... because they cannot compete technically but they have gone after any commercial companies... Take Lindows.... sounds like Windows .. so they took them to court... but there is something fundamentally wrong here... MS didn't invent windows... I was using Dec Windows before DOS existed... who? Dec an ex mutli-million $ company destroyed by MS... and then this goes back via Apple and Xerox... to the point where calling Windows an MS trademark is laughable... but Dec played no hold poker with the worlds richest company and unsurprisingly lost... And this is fundamental to MS... if they can get you to the table they win... they simply have more money by far and the stakes are too high... so what they do is they slip you 10 million or so as a stay quiet payoff and raise the stakes until your choice is loose everything or take the 10M for a company that was worth 500M... Almost all MS IP cases are actually settled out of court... why? Because they include the sweetner in the bitter medicine... walk away now and we won't see you pennyless and homeless ... continue and we won't stop until you can't afford to rent a sleazy hotel room ...

If you set up root by launching sudo passwd root then root is not in the admin group, iirc, or at least not the default password-requested user. How shall a newcomer to Ubuntu know about it? How is he supposed to know which config files need to be hacked in order to change that so there is a "normal" behaviour? And: How shall he know that he must remove the normal user from the admin group? And why do the GUI tools prefer the user password over the root password, even if both are in the admin group? That is imho highly irritating. My old request is still there: Please ask the user during install if he wants sudo or a traditional root account. It cannot be that hard. E.g. Debian has this option and it is only ONE simple question you have to answer. Come on... porting that over from Debian cannot be that difficult (as Ubuntu is based on Debian). Arctic, my experience from trying to achieve this is that its no longer that simple.... Debian packages are built around a conventional model... but Ubuntu packages are already hacked to work with the Ubuntu sudo model.... I tried to implement this then found that packages edit sudo... themselves and expect it to be there and set up in the Ubuntu way... I don't think this was the intention of Ubuntu... I think its something that has happened... and the solution to a problem that was somehow self created. I think the bottom line is it was something set as an ideal that looked easily achievable and turned out to be a bit more involved than they thought... As a parallel .. I once worked on a remote access project for branch offices from round the world... The guy "selling" the project made a statement that ALL users would have the same desktop .... as if they were in the local office. Now users from the US or UK to France, this worked fine ... for branch offices in Africa with a 6 second latency and 64 kb/s via satellite it could NEVER work... They could run the apps... fine.. what they couldn't do was run the desktop and the apps... This one sticking point was never relinquished ... I spent a lot of time testing and actually built a test rig that introduced latency and BW restrictions... and proved this beyond any doubt but they guy who had stood in front of managers asking for money for the project simply refused to listen... or even read the results. It was all or nothing for him and all simply wasn't possible... This is where I think Ubuntu went wrong... someone said "users will never have to type a root password" and had an idea how to do it... that idea turned out to be flawed because it involved far more work than was thought and involved far more than just a few apps and noone will admit it turned out to be a money pit.

Any user in the admin group can sudo Any user in sudoers can sudo.... and if this says ALL:ALL then any user password-less or not can sudo... this includes user http or others... like mail etc.

So, I suppose your real problem with it is that, you expected it to act like some other distribution, and didn't except it for what it was designed to be like? Pretty much Yes.... Perhaps in some ways that's because I'm a stubborn stick in the mud.... but its also justified in that the most secure is what you know... and what you can get experts to help you with... and also what you can actually discuss pro's and con's with. Now the problem for me is... just like someone posted here ... sudo passwd will set the root password... BUT it doesn't remove the sudo permissions. If you post the question "How do I disable sudo and leave the system still working" on the Ubuntu forums you will get any number of answers showing how to set the root password ... quite a few telling you to go back to Windows but none telling you how to remove sudo from the integration... As mysty demonstrated she just wants to do it the "normal way"... but you are unlikely to find that on the Ubuntu forums and like arctic said even when you do it doesn't behave "normally"... normally being how the developers of sudu intended... This has quite a lot of consequences.... I prefer on the whole to leave package management to the distro tools, be that Debian or Mandriva or Ubuntu but sometimes you can't... for example there is a bug in mysql-admin in several versions and the only way to get round it is downloading from CVS... so I have my own .deb for mysql-admin .. which I made myself... using CVS sources... Now obviously mysql-admin is fairly important security wise... you are accessing mysql as the mysql priv user... but ... when I compile it I compile it in the way the folks at mysql intended and I can be reasonably confident that they have security in mind... their livelihood depends on it... Now if I start hacking mysql-admin to work with the sudo policy in Ubuntu then I will probably reduce the security of the application because I know a lot less about mysql than the devels... (and equally the Ubuntu maintainers know far less than the mysql devels) This in itself is a chain reaction... if I use db based identification then I compromise that... etc. What Im saying is the Ubuntu maintainers and packages know far less about mysql than the mysql devels... and less about sudu than the sudo devels.. etc. and equally the developers for mysql, KDE, Gnome, <insert here> know far more about their application(s) than Ubuntu devs (or Debian ones for that matter) ... and that by having to hack each package they are compromising the security work of the original developers... (and in the case of a commercial company like mysql that is a lot of work and taken very seriously) The more "sensitive" the application the more likely the consequences are ... and the less predictable they will be... and just as importantly the less relevant information on security alerts is... going back to what mysti said... I just want it to work like that... like any other distro... because that is what I am comfortable with but it is also what the developers had in mind... and I think the developers in most cases understand their application much better than I do!

Im not sure that works on Ubuntu... (not saying it doesn't but as arctic just said ) This was basically my starting point for problems... I set out trying to disable this (basically hacking in the proper sense) but it was like chasing ghosts... you follow one thing to the next etc. etc. actually taking my user from sudoers just broke things...

Well #1 we are having the discussion which would never take place on Ubuntu forums ....anyone asking is basically told "you don't understand Linux go back to windows" or "The devs wouldn't do it if it was a risk"I didn't see any of them ended without someone getting banned eventually... after retaliating to being called an idiot... I'm not sure I understand your logic here - are you saying that, because these tools don't cover all possible means of entry, Ubuntu is somehow flawed? SUID is only necessary if the program requires it. Using SUID can actually be insecure, because a cracker could use a program with an SUID bit set to root to gain root access immediately. You're actually better off not setting SUID and instead sudo'ing when you need to run something as root. Nothing really insecure about that. Sorry didn't explain myself fully.... What I meant is after some research I did for a friend (which made me look into the Debian security audit procedure - something I'd kinds taken for granted before) for his presentation .... Lots of security flaws concentrate on say a prog setting a SUID but (which as you say is insecure) so the auditers zoom into that code for instance to check it... in general the security procedure is If prog running as root then <check a long list> else <check a shorter list> The same goes if you follow guidelines for writing secure progs different rules exist if the prog will be run as root or not. This includes many p2p progs for instance... and many simply refuse to start as root... but if you wanna create a user called something else and give it all privs it'll probably run.... In other words the security is only good with "sane options"... and 90% of programs are designed to be run either as a unpriv'd user OR as root... if you wanna force it you probably can but then you are missing the security because you are not running it as it was audited or designed. The huge difference with Ubuntu is that these modifications are system wide ..not one off workarounds. The packages are modified to use the sudo policy... and these rely on other libs... which are then modified to work with the modified app... which then effects other progs running these libs. Ubuntu is always just one step from the user being root... or the user actually being root while the password is cached... You really notice this if you use Ubuntu and try disabling this...as you start hacking the sudo and remove your user lots of unexpected stuff won't work... perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate this is the comment from sudoers Why? because its the sane way.... you must be root to edit sudoers... except ubuntu has no root.... so you need to edit it using sudo visudo except that's not how it was designed! your not meant to be able to sudo su mysql for instance

This answers both really, If your password is cached then they don't need your password.... At some point my sudoers file said ALL:ALL ... whether this was installed that way I don't know or if a package managed it.... My webserver was hacked using Ubuntu and I didn't do too many forensics since I was more concerned in getting a new server running... what I did find is that the account hacked had used a non-login user and this user had switched the password... AFAIK the crackers were relatively harmless .. that is they used my disk for storing their MP3's,.. but what I did do is track the attacks from the apache log...which I saved before wiping the whole disk... I then checked out several of these boxes used to stage the attacks and in each time they were running Ubuntu. So in a way a its partly speculative but based on known cracking methodology but Im fairly confident given time and an ubuntu install I could do it... the sudoers policy makes it much easier but you still need a badly written program but that too is much easier in Ubuntu because many of the packages are hacked especially to work with the sudo policy... and most of the programs (if not all) are originally written to work in a normal *nix environment with a clear root account... having the global sudo policy means much of the normal sanity methodolgy doesn't work finding security flaws.. that is when its security audited (as i debian) it is done so with tools looking to set a SUID bit etc. but Ubuntu bypasses this... Of course the easiest way is to get you to run the program in any distro... its just easier when that program can be run as root by asking for the users own password (if its not cached)

Its scarily insecure.... setting a root password helps because as default there is no root password so a user can change it exactly as above. At least if you set the root password then you need the root password to change it but in the default you don't need any password... This is really my basic prob with Ubuntu... I could put up with the other stuff since every distro has good and bad sides but this part is so fundamentally flawed and embedded into Ubuntu as to make it almost impossible to purge. Its obviously not impossible you can download every package as src and edit it but if your doing that why not just run Debian? but the major problem is the number of win converts who don't see why this is bad and the refusal of the devs to discuss it. Its almost like a single thing that spoils the rest... because Ubuntu has a lot of good stuff... but this makes it a "do not pass go" distro IMHO..

Helmet, I guess many of them are wondering if they can continue working on non-Novell specific Opensource. Balmer has finally managed to make his words come true about the GPL being a cancer ... Any of the devs who release any non Novell OS will be suspect ... because the burden of proof is now on them that they haven't seen any MS code ...one by one they will be forced to sign non disclosure agreements and these will then constitute legal proof they have SEEN the MS code. It doesn't matter so much if they use it... they have to prove they didn't use the ideas in it... and that is much harder to prove legally... Equally since Novell don't have to worry (LOL) then they will include code and any of that code which finds its way into the OS community will spread. The purging of any questionable IP was a big move for the kernel team and its now undone unless kernel.org quarantines Suse fast and removed any suse employees from the dev teams....

I think so but part of the problem is many of the probs seem so fundamental most people will just move on ... you have to be a diehard Mandrivas fan to persist as you did ... and many of us simply have no faith in the Mandriva bug reporting .... I tried years ago and the experience is nothing... you might as well post bug reports to /dev/null SO since your taking a different approach which seems far more likely to succeed perhaps put that in the thread title.. I have a trash 2007 install but I just tried and when it failed just left it... I can't even remember what the prob was so I guess I can go back and retry it...

You can easily enable the root account: sudo passwd root Couldn't be easier, indeed a cleverly crafted web page can change the root password on ubuntu since your browser is running is you and you have root privs in sudoers ... and it doesn't even need your user password...

A bit off-topic but things really are changing, at least here. My ISP is the 2nd biggest in France (and growing very quickly) .. only 3-4 yrs ago your choice was almost nil... and one operator did phones, internet etc. and you even had to pay local calls ... Now there is lots of choice and the offers are amazing.... free worldwide calls (excepting some weird places) and my isp not only uses linux but encourages it... and advertises the fact. Im now paying far less for a 22Mbit/1Mbit line than I was 3 yrs ago for a 512k line ........ €30 a month, for cable TV, FREE phone and network... (The phone line alone was €15 a month on the old contract, even before I used the phone and €40 something for a paltry 1/2 Mbit) I have heard a lot about the CEO of Comcast .. he seems an OK guy ... and does a lot of good stuff in his own time. (See the link in my sig)....

Yes but there are only so many ways you can do something when it relates to interoperabillity... Since we started on Samba ... samba needs CIFS support... so the algorithms have to be within certain parameters... so only so much variation is likely... When I worked in one job I often had to reverse engineer software to fix faults or work out why it wasn't working. The SW Im talking about read files of a known format ... that varied within bounds.(an industry standard)..so sometimes the SW was unable to read a specific format... There are basically only so many ways to do it.... and usually one simplest way.. A good friend of mine works for the vendor btw... and I had quite a few of my own programs which I used to replace parts of the vendors with .. completely written from scratch and reverse engineered ...he had access to the source code and the two were pretty much the same... When your dealing with a standard format the chances of the code being very similar are high... and if Im having probs convincing you guys then think how hard to convince a judge.... (pre-trial) As an example I would bet that khtml and gecko are really very similar... they both render html and though mozilla often does a better job ad bad html this is nit the core part but the html-tidy plug-in...

Yeah love to get hold of one of those.... I'm sure there will be millions for sale on the black market as soon as they are given out. Gee - thanks a laptop can I eat it? does it make clean water? Im betting they will be on sale for half the $100 pretty soon after they are distributed.

dextrer reread what I said... In summary if you have seen one line of code for windows you can NEVER develop for Opensource ..EVER... Because OpenSource is ...open MS only has to find 1-2 lines of code which are close in 1 million lines of code. It then claims you copied them (whether you did or not is irrelevant unless you have a spare 50-100 million dollars floating about you don't really need because MS can afford to take you to court and loose 100 million dollars if it screws linux... and if they loose they will just take it to appeal.... Yes noone knows exactly what the outcome is... the judge will probably know nothing about programming anyway but non of that matters unless you can play poker with Bill Gates and win.... Its impossible for me or you to play poker against Bill Gates you can have 4 aces and he will just raise you 50 billion...and if you don't have 50 billion you loose regardless. This is the court process... MS don't fight court battles on correctness or legality they fight it on no limit poker rules.

probably.... that way different people can buy different parts.... sorts out the XMAS list a lot easier if everyone can choose something in their price range and prevents me getting new socks, slippers jumpers I have to give to charity

/me makes small bump

Maybe you missed this: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=36924 I was aware of the letter.... The point is how will this affect the team.... Will core devs have to leave SAMBA because they get paid by Novell? What will happen to core devels who are exposed as part of their paying job at Suse exposed to MS source code. They can no longer develop for SAMBA because they have seen the MS code... SAMBA can not be clean if they have so at some point these devs will be forced to choose between SAMBA and working for MS/Novell More importantly ... perhaps this is simply a trap.... that Novell might not even think about [insert_tinfoil_hat] Microsoft will leak some of its code into Novell, seemingly something Opensources but with a hidden patent and something very backdoor .. for instance a plug-in for Evolution ... which will *need* 2-3 lines of header in some library. This lib is then tainted... and 100's of other packages might also need that lib ... Or the lib itself might be maintained by someone exposed to MS source code. Thus at some point in the future MS can turn round and claim IP over that library... claiming the developer had access to their source code and it is not a cleanroom lib. Its one thing to work on OS in your spare time or even paid as part of a project ... but its very difficult to say no to an employer who asks you to look at some source code as part of your job with the excuse it taints you for OS development. Let me put it it this way yourt married with 2 kids and a mortgage and work for Novell and get asked to attend a meeting on "Exchange integration" ... all MS have to do it stick up a slide for 10 secs with source code and you can never develop OS again in that area. MS don't even need to let you see it long enough to understand it .. they only need confirmation you saw their source code. They can even flash it up and apologise and say "oops wrong slide" and your screwed... MS lawyer walks in staged at end of meeting and says "I hear there was an accident and we showed some source by mistake... I need everyone to sign non disclosure agreements... What do you do ? How will refusing affect your job with your employer? Are you going to call your wife and ask "sweetheart, how are your career prospects... I just saw some code from MS and if I don't sign an agreement saying I saw it Novell are going to fire me...can we pay the mortgage on your salary. ?" [/insert_tinfoil_hat]