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May 28, 2003
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Novell challenges SCO's Linux claims
Novell, the second in the chain of four companies to own rights to the Unix operating system, is challenging the copyright infringement claims that the current owner of those rights, SCO Group, is making against Linux.
In a letter to SCO released Wednesday, Novell asserted that it retains Unix patents and copyrights, demanded that SCO reveal where Unix source code has been copied into Linux, and raised its own threat of legal action to compensate for damage that it says has been done to customers, programmers and companies using Linux.
"To Novell's knowledge, the 1995 agreement governing SCO's purchase of Unix from Novell does not convey to SCO the associated copyrights," Novell Chief Executive Jack Messman said in the letter to SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride. He said that SCO evidently realizes this, because "over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected."
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Computex slated for September
Computex, the Taiwanese tech trade show recently postponed by the SARS outbreak, has been rescheduled for September, organizers said Wednesday.
The show, one of the largest annual tech events, was supposed to take place June 2-6 in Taipei. But the onset in Asia of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, prompted a number of cancellations and travel warnings, in turn leading the show's organizers--the China External Trade Development Board and the Taipei Computer Association--to postpone the show until the second half of the year.
The event is now set for Sept. 22-26 in Taipei.
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John Carmack Speaks Out On Nvidia/Futuremark Fiasco
"Rewriting shaders behind an application's back in a way that changes the output under non-controlled circumstances is absolutely, positively wrong and indefensible.
Rewriting a shader so that it does exactly the same thing, but in a more efficient way, is generally acceptable compiler optimization, but there is a range of defensibility from completely generic instruction scheduling that helps almost everyone, to exact shader comparisons that only help one specific application. Full shader comparisons are morally grungy, but not deeply evil.
The significant issue that clouds current ATI / Nvidia comparisons is fragment shader precision. Nvidia can work at 12 bit integer, 16 bit float, and 32 bit float. ATI works only at 24 bit float. There isn't actually a mode where they can be exactly compared. DX9 and ARB_fragment_program assume 32 bit float operation, and ATI just converts everything to 24 bit. For just about any given set of operations, the Nvidia card operating at 16 bit float will be faster than the ATI, while the Nvidia operating at 32 bit float will be slower. When DOOM runs the NV30 specific fragment shader, it is faster than the ATI, while if they both run the ARB2 shader, the ATI is faster.
When the output goes to a normal 32 bit framebuffer, as all current tests do, it is possible for Nvidia to analyze data flow from textures, constants, and attributes, and change many 32 bit operations to 16 or even 12 bit operations with absolutely no loss of quality or functionality. This is completely acceptable, and will benefit all applications, but will almost certainly induce hard to find bugs in the shader compiler. You can really go overboard with this -- if you wanted every last possible precision savings, you would need to examine texture dimensions and track vertex buffer data ranges for each shader binding. That would be a really poor architectural decision, but benchmark pressure pushes vendors to such lengths if they avoid outright cheating. If really aggressive compiler optimizations are implemented, I hope they include a hint or pragma for "debug mode" that skips all the optimizations."
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Nvidia cries foul as hand caught in cookie jar
Last week, Futuremark, creator of the popular 3DMark-series of graphical benchmarking software, issued a patch for its latest flagship suite 3DMark03 along with a verbal blast aimed firmly at Nvidia. Futuremark basically accused Nvidia of using surreptitious means to artificially inflate its score.
At issue were Nvidia's latest Detonator reference drivers, version 44.03. The tech enthusiast site ExtremeTech had previously brought the issue to light with an article published on 14th May. It concluded that Nvidia was cutting corners in its drivers, essentially making its cards do less work in 3DMark03 to boost its score, and from this Futuremark initiated its own investigation, with the results and 3DMark03 patch published on the 23rd May.
Among Futuremark's findings were:
Several pixel and vertex shader effects in 3DMark03 are discarded by Nvidia's drivers and replaced by its own (more efficient and heavily-optimised for their GPUs) shaders.
Sometimes an instruction by 3DMark03 to clear the back buffer was ignored at the driver level, specifically to increase performance.
Custom clip planes were used to reduce the workload on their GPUs, thereby again artificially inflating the score.
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Office XP - when is a price cut not a price cut?
When is a price cut not a price cut? Microsoft has garnered a certain amount of positive publicity thanks to yesterday's estimated 15 per cent cut on Office XP, and alongside this cut it announced it would be bundling some support services with its volume Software Assurance licensing scheme.
Or should we perhaps call it the hated Software Assurance scheme? Noteworthy, but not noted specifically by Microsoft in its announcements, is the fact that it hasn't changed its volume pricing, has actually stated it has no plans to cut prices this year.
So rewind a tad. Microsoft's new model licensing programmes have caused considerable pain and grumbling in business and government, to the extent that some organisations have even stopped mouthing off about open source and started genuinely looking at it. Microsoft has reacted with a slush fund (which won't work long term because if prices are too high, they're too high, and special discounts offered every upgrade round aren't special discounts, they're price cuts), but underneath the camouflage is hanging tough on the licensing.
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Problematic Windows XP Update Pulled
Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) late Tuesday withdrew a Windows XP software update after thousands of users complained the patch was blocking Internet connectivity.
The Windows XP update, first posted on May 21, was issued to enhance the functionality of the Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) and Internet Protocol security (IPSec) on PCs running Windows XP or Windows 2000.
It was issued to deal with changes to the way IPSec encryption was used by PCs behind firewalls and to better support virtual private network (VPN) clients behind network address translation (NAT) devices. The update also included additional support for stronger IPSec protection by using the 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman algorithm, the company explained
However, about half a million users who applied the fix via the operating system's automatic Windows Update feature complained that it blocked Internet connectivity and Microsoft was forced to yank the update.
It is not the first problematic patch pulled by the software giant. In February, Microsoft withdrew a security fix for Windows NT 4.0 systems because it introduced an error that caused systems to crash.
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SCO Posts Second-Quarter Profit
The SCO Group Inc., in the news for its legal actions over Linux, Wednesday reported a net profit for the second quarter.
The Lindon, Utah-based company, which makes a Unix operating system for the Intel platform, reported a net income of $4.5 million, or 33 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $6.6 million, or 47 cents a share, last year.
Revenue for the quarter ended April 30 increased to $21.4 million from $15.5 million a year ago. The company's operating system brought in $13.1 million in revenue, with the remainder coming from its Unix licensing initiative.
For the third quarter ending July 31, company officials forecast revenue from $19 million to $21 million, with two-thirds from operating system sales and a third from its licensing initiative.
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