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theGEEK writes "An internet 'watchdog' discovered that Deja News is actually logging their users e-mail traffic." Is this related to the recent thing about them tracking every click through redirector scripts? Personally I'm not threatened, but I'm not a privacy nut either. What do you think?

The one and only Eric S. Raymond has submitted his response to the Mind Craft report that we've talked about a bit here lately. This is a good wrap-up type piece which nicely summarizes the flaws with the testing (which range "yeah maybe" to "you gotta be kidding!"). Anyone who thought the tests had any validity should read this. The followingw as written by Slashdot reader, Jargon File Maintainer, Fetchmail Author, Open Source Evangelist, Eric S. Raymond The Mindcraft fiasco

Microsoft's latest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactic may be backfiring.

A 21 April ITWeb story reported results by a benchmarking shop called Mindcraft that supposedly showed NT to be faster than Linux at SMB and Web service. The story also claimed that technical support for tuning the Linux system had been impossible to find.

Previous independent benchmarks (such as "Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX") have found Linux and other Unixes to be dramatically faster and more efficient than NT, and independent observers (beginning with a celebrated InfoWorld article in 1998) have lauded the Linux community's responsiveness to support problems. Linux fans smelled a rat somewhere (uttering responses typfied by "Mindcraft Reality Check"), and amidst the ensuing storm of protest some interesting facts came to light.

1. The benchmark had been paid for by Microsoft. The Mindcraft press release failed to mention this fact.
2. Mindcraft did in fact get a useful answer to its request for help tuning the Linux system. But they did not answer the request for more information, neither did they follow the tuning suggestions given Also, they forged the reply email address to conceal themselves -- the connection was made after the fact by a Usenetter who noticed that the unusual machine configuration described in the request exactly matched that of the test system in the Mindcraft results.
3. Red Hat, the Linux distributor Mindcraft says it asked for help, reports that it got one phone call from them on the installation-help line, which isn't supposed to answer post-installation questions about things like advanced server tuning. Evidently Mindcraft's efforts to get help tuning the system were feeble -- at best incompetent, at worst cynical gestures.
4. An entertainingly-written article by the head of the development team for Samba (one of the key pieces of Linux software involved in the benchmark) described how Mindcraft could have done a better job of tuning. The article revealed that one of Mindcraft's Samba tweaks had the effect of slowing their Linux down quite drastically.
5. Another Usenet article independently pointed out that Mindcraft had deliberately chosen a logging format that imposed a lot of overhead on Apache (the web sever used for the Linux tests).

So far, so sordid -- a fairly standard tale of Microsoft paying to get exactly the FUD it wants from a nominally independent third party. But the story took a strange turn today (22 Mar) when Microsoft spokesperson Ian Hatton effectively admitted [8] that the test had been rigged! "A very highly-tuned NT server" Mr. Hatton said "was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".

He then attempted to spin the whole episode around by complaining that Microsoft and its PR company had received "malicious and obscene" email from Linux fans and slamming this supposed "unprofessionalism". One wonders if Hatton believes it would be "unprofessional" to address strong language to a burglar caught in the act of nipping the family silver.

In any case, Microsoft's underhanded tactics seem (as with its clumsy "astroturf" campaign against the DOJ lawsuit) likely to come back to haunt it. The trade press had largely greeted the Mindcraft results with yawns and skepticism even before Hatton's admission. And it's hard to see how Microsoft will be able to credibly quote anti-Linux benchmarks in the future after this fiasco.

The one and only Eric S. Raymond has submitted his response to the Mind Craft report that we've talked about a bit here lately. This is a good wrap-up type piece which nicely summarizes the flaws with the testing (which range "yeah maybe" to "you gotta be kidding!"). Anyone who thought the tests had any validity should read this. The followingw as written by Slashdot reader, Jargon File Maintainer, Fetchmail Author, Open Source Evangelist, Eric S. Raymond The Mindcraft fiasco

Microsoft's latest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactic may be backfiring.

A 21 April ITWeb story reported results by a benchmarking shop called Mindcraft that supposedly showed NT to be faster than Linux at SMB and Web service. The story also claimed that technical support for tuning the Linux system had been impossible to find.

Previous independent benchmarks (such as "Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX") have found Linux and other Unixes to be dramatically faster and more efficient than NT, and independent observers (beginning with a celebrated InfoWorld article in 1998) have lauded the Linux community's responsiveness to support problems. Linux fans smelled a rat somewhere (uttering responses typfied by "Mindcraft Reality Check"), and amidst the ensuing storm of protest some interesting facts came to light.

1. The benchmark had been paid for by Microsoft. The Mindcraft press release failed to mention this fact.
2. Mindcraft did in fact get a useful answer to its request for help tuning the Linux system. But they did not answer the request for more information, neither did they follow the tuning suggestions given Also, they forged the reply email address to conceal themselves -- the connection was made after the fact by a Usenetter who noticed that the unusual machine configuration described in the request exactly matched that of the test system in the Mindcraft results.
3. Red Hat, the Linux distributor Mindcraft says it asked for help, reports that it got one phone call from them on the installation-help line, which isn't supposed to answer post-installation questions about things like advanced server tuning. Evidently Mindcraft's efforts to get help tuning the system were feeble -- at best incompetent, at worst cynical gestures.
4. An entertainingly-written article by the head of the development team for Samba (one of the key pieces of Linux software involved in the benchmark) described how Mindcraft could have done a better job of tuning. The article revealed that one of Mindcraft's Samba tweaks had the effect of slowing their Linux down quite drastically.
5. Another Usenet article independently pointed out that Mindcraft had deliberately chosen a logging format that imposed a lot of overhead on Apache (the web sever used for the Linux tests).

So far, so sordid -- a fairly standard tale of Microsoft paying to get exactly the FUD it wants from a nominally independent third party. But the story took a strange turn today (22 Mar) when Microsoft spokesperson Ian Hatton effectively admitted [8] that the test had been rigged! "A very highly-tuned NT server" Mr. Hatton said "was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".

He then attempted to spin the whole episode around by complaining that Microsoft and its PR company had received "malicious and obscene" email from Linux fans and slamming this supposed "unprofessionalism". One wonders if Hatton believes it would be "unprofessional" to address strong language to a burglar caught in the act of nipping the family silver.

In any case, Microsoft's underhanded tactics seem (as with its clumsy "astroturf" campaign against the DOJ lawsuit) likely to come back to haunt it. The trade press had largely greeted the Mindcraft results with yawns and skepticism even before Hatton's admission. And it's hard to see how Microsoft will be able to credibly quote anti-Linux benchmarks in the future after this fiasco.

Many people are submitting The Obvious article about Jon Katz not belonging on Slashdot. I guess I'm glad that in the end its up to me. Personally, I think most of his articles are good. xach sent us a deja news bit that goes much further. I agree with most of the stuff in these articles, but I also think most of Katz's articles are worth reading, but when he mentions his book, I press the back button. You can too.

Wingz and Wingz-Professional are the latest new tools to be brought to Linux. They appear to be spreadsheet applications with scripting capabilities which allow one to make HyperSheet applications which run on Linux, Windows and MacOS. It will be available at no cost on Linux, and other apps are to be ported. Link courtesy of Linux Today. update: changed title from "New advanced spreadsheet at zero-cost for Linux", since it's not new to other platforms.

update: Apparently it's not new..., so I changed the title again. Thanks to the AC who posted this. Is the professional version new then?

David Braben of Frontier, the co-author of Elite, the author of Elite 2 and Zarch (later renamed Virus on the Atari and Amiga), wants to know whether people would buy a Linux port of his new game V2000. Given that Elite and Zarch were great games (with the emphasis on Games), I expect V2000 to be good fun. Link courtesy of freshmeat.

mrproper sent us a link to a User Friendly noting that a strip this week featured those Penguin Caffeinated Peppermints that nearly killed me at ALS. Judah wrote in to say that the November issue of the LinuxGazette is now online. Ignacio wrote in to note that the XFree86 3.3.3 will be out this month, and the XF86_SVGA server will support the Matrox Gx00 video cards. Sixl6 wrote in to send us a link to an entertaining catalog oof christmas presents for, well, crazy people. I'm disturbed that this exists. Pleased, but disturbed. Tim Doran wrote in and sent us a link to a moderately humorous usenet post that takes a humorous pot shot at MS with a linux joke. Dave Whitinger wrote in (along with everyone else on earth) to note that Slink has now frozen really for sure definitely (note:I spelled it right!) this time. Debian 2.1 should be ready soon. Lastly, I'm just gonna throw a link out to Taco Hell, where I've posted a bunch of pictures of the old Geek House, as well as goofy pictures of my room mates (including myself and Hemos).

Gavin Peters wrote to tell us about a free CPU to be released soon. It runs at 9MHz and is programmed into a $10 FPGA. Gavin reminds us that "A FPGA is a "Field Programmable Gate Array" - a matrix of gates that you can configure _through software_ - to do essentially anything. You can make an ASIC, a custom microprocessor, and/or memory. All reprogrammable many times a second.".

Over 30 of you wrote in to tell us that Jon Postel, died of complications after heart surgery at the age of 55. For those who don't know who Postel, he's the DNS admin (as head of the IANA), controlling the root name server setup and being a guiding force in the current government domain name wrangling. He was the voice of reason against many of the government's less-than-intelligent proposals for restructuring DNS. He was also editor of most of the 2500 RFCs. His PhD thesis adviser and his friend Vint Cerf sum up the feelings of the Internet community in this DejaNews post. The New York Times' obituary is here. You can also find an interview with Jon Postel from July. His homepage is simple and to the point.

I'd like to thank Idcmp, Claude Johnson, and Jeff Garzik whose material was used to compile this report.

Our favorite company has been having difficulties remembering what they innovated (ever) lately. So much so, that on the one hand they claim Linux is a competitor (built by a single individual...) and on the other don't see Linux as a threat because no company owns it. (This last statement was not made by Microsoft itself, but probably reflects what they believe. However, even if Linux were to dominate the PC market, they would still be a dominant force: webTV and Dreamcast are two very effective means of dominating the market of those who would like to access the internet (and want to play games) while not having the money to buy a complete PC. WinCE targets both the above and many PDAs, while Embedded NT will attack markets such as hospital equipment (adding new meaning to the phrase "Oh my God!") and network routers. True, Linux ports may be attempted to some of these platforms, but if they cannot run the games, who will use them?) Now we need only wait until Monday for the fun and games to begin. However students at the Auburn University have already started to have their fun. Read on below. shaldannon writes "Mark showed up a Microsoft recruiting agent tonight in front of an audience of 200+. The Auburn University chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery hosted a meeting for its membership at which Microsoft recruiters spoke on the subject of 'why Microsoft is the place to work.'

Mark, an easy-going guy who also runs the Linux Support Services site, showed up in his green penguin shirt. As the meeting progressed, the recruiter, named Colleen, asked eight volunteers to come forward to help her demonstrate the composition and duties of a Microsoft product team.

I nudged Mark, and we both headed to the front to participate. A half dozen Linux users in the room began to nudge each other and grin when they saw Mark's shirt, which has a quote by the great Linus on the back. The recruiter asked for someone with vision to step forward, to represent the "Project Leader." Mark was the natural choice--because his vision is Linux--but she was totally oblivious to this.

The meeting progressed, with the recruiter going through the various positions in a software team while some of the Linux users in the back (John, in particular) passed notes around explaining the irony of the situation to the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, she asked where we thought Microsoft got ideas for its products. From on stage, behind her, Mark piped up with "from other companies!" She turned and observed, "Someone in here is a smartass," not realizing that Mark was flaunting the greatest challenge to Microsoft, right on his chest--the happy penguin."

Thanks also to Cowering In Fear, ColonelPanic, and Dan Kegel for some of the material used here.

Electric is a VLSI design tool with a long history, and it just went open-source. For the latest version, go here It supports VHDL, which should be of interest to the Freedom CPU project since they've decided to use VHDL (why not Verilog?). Unfortunately it does not support Verilog as of yet. Verilog is used in many CPU companies as many designers find it a more natural language in which to express state-machines.

Per Lewau writes "I find it amazing that the free software award award hasn't been mentioned here yet. This message was posted to gnu.announce quite a while ago. It's not mentioned on the GNU home page yet, so lets hope it's not another hoax. "

Andrew Mobbs sent us a link to an interesting note posted on usenet by someone from Sandia labs. The post is about a Beowulf Cluster being built out there, and the specs will make you giggle like a school girl. 400 nodes. All Alpha. It's all good. Methinks a linux system might score a bit higher in next years super computer list...

Florian Cramer writes "Pacific HiTech yesterday announced a PowerPC release of its TurboLinux Distribution. The highlight: It comes with both the Mach-based MkLinux kernel and the monolithic (faster) LinuxPPC kernel. PowerMac owners will be happy to hear that, finally, there's a Linux distribution for their machines which is neither outdated (such as the current official MkLinux CD), nor hard to obtain (such as the LinuxPPC CD). Also, the choice between both Kernels IMHO is an idea that should be adopted by such forthcoming Linux/PPC distributions as Debian. "

Matthew Tippett let us in on a very interesting item to disect: Computer Associates is porting Ingres II, their RDBMS program, to Linux. Wow. CA is one of the bigger players in the enterprise market, and perhaps even more interesting, are very close to Microsoft. I hope some IS managers take note! Check out the announcement at DejaNews, or find it on comp.os.linux.announce.

Pete Bevin writes "Brendan Eich has proposed a schedule for getting Mozilla to the point where it's stable enough to release:

• Bug fixing and stabilisation until end of June;
• Coordinated featurism in July and August;
• Track and fix inter-module bugs during September;
• Release a stable version some time during October.

"

Andy Tai writes "RMS has written an article explaining how the GPL is applied in programs using plug-ins like Photoshop or the GIMP. His article can be found here " Apparently it is illegal to write a GPLd plug-in to a non GPLd program if they link in the same code (or am I really misunderstanding this?). Update Andy wrote back saying that Gimp plug-ins etc don't count 'cut they are seperate executables. If someone has a few examples of what plug-ins would theoretically apply here, send them my way.

Matthew Gray writes "RMS posted to gnu.misc.discuss pointing out that Be's use of some GPL'd code (GNU termcap and the Linux 3c509 driver, specifically) is in violation of the GPL. Of course, it's been pointed out if the copyright holders don't pursue it, nothing may happen. See news:199805100124.TAA12962@wijiji.santafe.edu (It isn't in dejanews yet) "

Chris Hall writes "The usenet spam war is hotting up this Friday (according to Chris Lewes's post to usenet, available from DejaNews or a local NNTP server)." The guys doing all the work keeping usenet clean are getting annoyed with the lack of assistance that they are getting from the rest of the net. Read the articles and see how you can help.

fredric wrote in to tell us about this article where you can read that the Palm Pilot has orbited the earth aboard the Mir.

This Article has quotes from Deja News founder Steve Madere on Linux. He speaks the truth:It's faster, less bloated, and x86 hardware is cheaper. That's the priceless combination that keeps us coming back for more. Thanks to Jorge Forte for sending this one our way.

Andy Tai wrote in to tell us that the first major notable person to come out against the term "Open Source Software" is RMS. Read more here. He says that OSS may get businesses, but the concept is more clearly expressed through the term "Free". He's correct, but I'll take a little bit of ambiguity if it means more market share for Linux, Netscape, and other Open Source products.

Redherring has a historical review of the markets that Microsoft tried to dominate... but failed. Unix and NetWare outnumber NT by 5 to 1, MSN did not become the dominant Internet provider, WebTV is somewhat of a flop, and Java (the other technology NASA actually uses) is extremely popular despite Microsoft's disparaging it. Meanwhile Alex St John proud architect of that abomination DirectX, explains why Microsoft chose it as API... The article in the print edition says: "What happens when folks such as ATI and nVidia, who never manage to make a working driver -- even when they are supplied with a DDK, sample code, and a testing procedure -- take it upon themselves to make up their own OGL drivers? BOOM! That's what." Perhaps it's got something to do with the whole driver running at ring 0? I wonder why those clever folks at the GGI-project decided to put the least stuff possible in kernel mode... perhaps security? Ah, yes, I forgot, they did not implement the first idea that gelled in their station-wagons. The article goes on to state that "The day Microsoft encounters a major competitor whose strength arises from the community of game developers is the day game developers will get Microsoft's full, undivided attention.": divide and conquer!

Finally, when confronted with a new threat, the best strategy to keep your sheep^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers is to frighten them. Somehow I'm not losing any sleep about security issues that others might add...

Roberto Alsina wrote in to say "Dejanews, which you probably know is probably the largest linux-based web site, is now beta testing a new interface to its newsreading software, that lets it work in a more "normal" fashion (remembers what you read, etc.) It can be tested at DejaNews.com and its called "My DejaNews". It's quite cool for all those with bad newsfeeds."