Slashdot Mirror

Tacito writes "After arresting the author of Sasser, the German police claims having caught the author of Phatbot. To read the corresponding articles on Yahoo! News or Heise (use babelfish)." jm.one adds a link to an "awesome Google translation" of the Heise article.

Veidit writes: "The Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory seems to have a cool project named "Mercury". They are integrating an IPAQ running Linux with many diffrent types of wireless alternatives like 802.11b, Bluetooth, GSM, CDMA via PCMCIA. The linux version seems to be the one that Handhelds.org has. " We also had an e-mail from Dan Sparks who writes: " The free Compaq TestDrive Program has added two new features allowing iPAQ handheld development online. In the Test Drive Program, we have four DEC Sharks (DNARD) SA-110 based network computers running Linux allowing development on Linux based StrongArm systems. In addition, Alpha2Arm cross-compiler tool chain has been added to every single one of our Alpha Linux machines, including our Brickwall Beowulf cluster. This means that you can compile programs for your iPAQ handheld on our blazingly fast Alpha computers. The Toolchain includes support for C and C++, and is available on all the Alpha-based Linux distributions we have, including RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, TurboLinux, Kondara Linux, and Debian GNU/Linux."

Godfather writes: "According to the heise-people the 600-MHz-TM5600 performs somewhere in between a Pentium III-400 and a Pentium III-600. It seems to be amazingly fast in memory access. The article is in German so you have to try the fish." A better translation would be appreciated, too, since Babelfish still leaves certain things murky. And if you've heard enough about the upcoming Picturebook, Timothy Brown writes: "Fujitsu is releasing (in early November) the Loox-T laptop, with a 500Mhz Crusoe chip. It's only available in Japan, but Dynamism, a company which sells Japan stuff to purchasers in the U.S., is accepting preorders." Here's that link.

This is Slashback. Read it before it's wrong again. Find out more about Mandrake's new honcho, the neurons firing in the American legal system's brains on Napster, Yet Another Cool GPLization, and Larry's new toy.

View the meal from which the soundbite was extracted! Jim Tyre writes: "When Slashdot reported on the preliminary injunction against Napster, and then on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' stay of that injunction, a missing piece was the actual ruling by the lower court, since it was an oral ruling from the bench, and a transcript had not yet been made available. C|Net now has the transcript here, and it makes for good reading for those interested in what the court's thinking was, not just the result."

On second thought, I'd rather not dance. Andreas writes: "As reported by the Heise Newsticker The German company CMG, which threatened to sue over the use of their registered name SAMBA, has stepped down from their plans. Nice to see at least some kind of clueness."

The article is in German, but the fish renders it quite intelligible.

If you want a kiss from CmdrTaco, you must be this big ... ClubNation writes: "Empeg have released their MP3 car player download software under the GPL. Before now you could only get an i386 binary for Linux, but now the source should build on pretty much anything with GCC or another good Posix C++ compiler with STL. I've heard on the empeg BBS that it builds out of the box on PPC and someone's working on a native Mac version.

You can get the code from their Web site or from their Geek Site which is also pretty cool and has a photo of CmdrTaco and Hemos in the photo album!"

And even though companies like Aiwa and Kenwood are selling MP3 head-units, the Empeg has one of the coolest industrial designs I've seen in anything for a long time. When I am a bazillionaire, I will put the Mark XXII in my Escort;)

So, in layman's terms, what might these projects be? Robert McMillan writes: "Linux Magazine has an interview with the brand new CEO of MandrakeSoft, Henri Poole. In it, he says that Tucows has apologized to his company about the Penguin Payola controversy. Poole also hints at some new open source projects that MandrakeSoft will be sponsoring in the next year and talks about what former CEO Jacques Le Marois will be doing now."

And now it's time for a mini, mini, mini review: invisik writes: "I got my NIC (New Internet Computer) yesterday. It's definitely a Linux box, running Netscape Navigator (browser only) 4.73, in 800x600 (can't change it). Connects easily to their ISP, your ISP, or your ethernet connection (DHCP or static IP). Has some utilities to make life easier, telnet, ssh, citrix, vnc, IRC clients. Also some games, solitaire, etc, etc. Speed is good, it doesn't really have much running on it to bog it down, though. And there's a little red light that flashed when it seen network activity--pretty cool. Not too bad for $199 if you really need some decent connectivity to your office (ssh/citrix/telnet) which I'd guess most other Internet terminal-type devices lack ..."

Compaq released a document (it's in PDF format) that states that their Alpha is better then IA-64 (Intel next generation Itanium Processor). The document compares Alpha (and future generations of Alpha) against the IA-64 (I hate this "Itanium" name - where do they get these names anyway?). Certainly worth a read. What do you think, folks?

[Xorian] writes "There's a new portable mp3 device called the Personal Jukebox. Apparently, this is the result of a research effort from Compaq's Systems Reserach Center (one of the two Compaq research groups that developed the Itsy). The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music (it's got a a 4.8 GByte hard disk) and have 10 hours of battery life yet fit in your jacket pocket. No word on pricing yet though. "

Anonymous Coward writes "For those of you out there with Alpha hardware, it seems that Compaq is now offering its Tru64 UNIX to 'technology enthusiasts' for a mere $99." A heavily restricted (VERY non-GPL) license is attached to the deal, but it looks like it would be a nice combination toy and "teach yourself commercial UNIX at home" tool.

Anonymous Coward writes "For those of you out there with Alpha hardware, it seems that Compaq is now offering its Tru64 UNIX to 'technology enthusiasts' for a mere $99." A heavily restricted (VERY non-GPL) license is attached to the deal, but it looks like it would be a nice combination toy and "teach yourself commercial UNIX at home" tool.

meni writes "The Linux Counter Project now has over 120,000 Linux users listed worldwide. And with their brand new AlphaServer machine, they're ready to get slashdotted. If you haven't registered yet, please go over there and do." Okay, I just tested it out. W-a-y faster than it was in the past. I'm registered, and you should be, too.

Compaq has announced a public beta test for Linux Alpha C compiler (along with fortran). Press release (thanks to Linux PR) is available here, and here is the link for the software. It's good to see Compaq developing compilers and other applications for Linux. Keep up the good work, compaq!

Zen Master Nate writes "You are probably familiar with the BabelFish translation page, where you can enter a phrase and have it translated to or from several languages. Quickly. Inaccurately. This page automatically feeds the results back into the machine, resulting in exponentially erroneous translations. " I've been feeding it quotes from American Pie, Star Wars and Seinfeld. I should get out more.

wopr writes "It's just a rumor, but c't is reporting that the PIII 600 will be released cheaper than AMD's K7 600. The article is in german, but the babelfish can take care of it. "

that guy writes "TIME Digital has a story about the Factoid, a next-generation "minimal PDA" being developed by Compaq. You carry it everywhere, and it remembers every fact you encounter. " I think that thing, along with the Itsy, is really realy cool. I'd even be willing to submit myself to beta testing! Anyone care to speculate on what could happen if something like this ever became somewhat widespread?

Charlie Engasser wrote in to tell us about 216 gigabytes hard drives over at Seagate. Uses "Optically Assisted Winchester" (OAW), which "augments traditional magnetic read/write techniques with a laser to allow positioning so precise that it can store over 100,000 tracks across one inch of drive surface". I guess it just means in a few years we'll be able to do with video what we do today with sound. From this page.

Armin writes "Microsoft's Steve Ballmer praised the Apache Webserver in a key note this weekend in Austria. Article is in German, use babelfish."

Gracchus writes "SuSE has announced they will release the Euro edition of ver. 6.1, with the expected inclusion of the Linux kernel 2.2.3, XFree86 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1 and GNOME 1.0, on April 12th, with the North American version scheduled for May release. This page is in German, but you non-Deutschlanders can get yer translations at Babelfish . Watch "permissions" get translated to "Permian eating ions"! Can I get fries with that? "

jdesbonnet writes "Java 2 SDK preview is available". There is a bzipped file on his site, but I did not download it. edgy writes "According to LinuxHQ, Toshiba has relented and has released specifications for IrDA so that Toshiba laptops can use their built-in infrared ports." 3fer writes " The site interactive.linuxjournal.com is now open. Anybody who subscribes to LJ can now search all previous issues via the site. " It's really worth a visit. Tramm Hudson writes "After quite a long time, Digital (now Compaq) has released fast math libraries for Linux. Many people have been using DU's (now Tru-64) compilers to take advantage of the faster routines, but this runs afoul of the rather restrictive licensing on the output of the compiler. The hope is that this signals a possible first step towards releasing the DU compilers for Linux. Possibly one of the most discussed topics on comp.os.linux.alpha is the lack of high performance compilers for Alpha Linux. There is so much computational horsepower in these chips, but egcs just isn't harnessing it... " Finally ASUGeek writes "Reuters has retracted the satellite crack story." Update: 03/05 05:55 by S : Now AntiOnline says Reuters did not retract the story, and NASA's records indicate the satellite drifted by an abnormally high amount. Thanks to Kythe.

David Dula writes "Compaq has put something up official about alpha hardware for linux with prices and everything. No compaq software support yet but there is hardware support offered. "

nelsonrn writes "Two university groups are working on designs for tiny Linux boxen reminiscent of the Compaq Itsy: UNSW's Pocket Linux Embedded Box (PLEB), an Intel/ARM SA-1100 based box, and Ryerson's uClinux simm, a 1" tall Motorola/68K Dragonball-based Linux box on a simm. Both have serial ports and LCD interfaces, but the PLEB has IR and the uClinux simm has Ethernet. Both ports are booting on their respective development platforms. Coincidentally, both projects are currently laying out their boards in preparation for a run of prototypes." Update: 01/31 10:39 by S : In related news, Tarcus posted this ARM multiprocessing set of PCI cards manufactured by Chalice Technology which make for a cheap Beowulf cluster.

Linux Magazin has a rather interesting article written by BASF researchers about the use of Linux as a research tool. It's nicely detailed, going into the software and hardware problems they encountered, their choice of compiler, and a performance comparison of 10 PCs with a parallel SGI box. They are happy with Linux and are looking forward to 2.2's 4-way and 8-way CPU support. The only problem with this article is that Babelfish chokes on it quite quickly.

AFUL, the french Free Software user group, held a half day conference touting the benefits of free software to a government panel in the French Prime-Minister's building. The government panel (MTIC) is responsible for introducing new technologies to different ministries. A french customs official described the easy introduction to their intranet of a Linux web server which has shown itself to be very reliable. Another presentation discussed the commercial need to force customers into an update cycle. It compared Windows 3.11's reliability to that of women's stockings which are designed to break quickly. The french city of Lille's computer department also enjoyed Linux' ease of use, scalability and efficiency on older hardware. Finally, Bernard Lang's presentation did not pull its punches. He discussed the dangers for the French economy of relying on foreign black-box software: proprietary software reduces local employment, tends to concentrate power monopolistically, while free software increases local employment (since most software jobs are in the service industry), guarantees originality, competition, conformity to open standards, and a free choice of service provider. The website referred to is the French Prime Minister's Governmental website, so we can be hopeful things will start happening. Links courtesy of Nouvelles Neuves Linux, and Translation services available from Babelfish.

Liberation is reporting that the French Finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Khan, wants to allow anybody in France to use strong encryption. The official french assizes journal states that this liberalisation of France's currently very strict law should occur in the next few days. Until 1996 one had to ask permission to use any form of encryption, or pay a 6000-500000 FF fine with 2-6 months of prison if found out. Currently encryption that the french authorities can break is legal, but this is not secure enough to encourage e-commerce. (translation)

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

mgrennan writes "Compaq's development of the Itsy continues! The Western Research Lab (WRL) of Compaq is not only continuing their development of Itsy (a Linux Palm Top) they have even included links and source code on their site so you can build your own. It would apear Itsy started life as an SA-1100 prototype for the ARM processor. With this board and the code from WRL you can do the same. The groups latest added gismo to Itsy is Rock 'n' Scroll, a user input method for Itsy that is based on tilting and gesturing with the Itsy in the user's hand. As the user tilts it from this neutral position on either or both axes, the display is scrolled. The tilt direction sets the scroll direction and the magnitude of the tilt sets the scroll speed. Small motions due to hand tremor and noise in the environment are filtered out so that scrolling is smooth and the user can easily stop scrolling. " Somebody build me one while they're at it *grin*.

KPN Telecom has bought Xs4all, the belgo-dutch internet access provider which accepted to host many sites other ISPs refused. The founders of Xs4all are now millionaires, but I hope the content of their site will be unaffected, as KPN claims. C'T's Telepolis does not seem so sure about this.

When I put out my call for Geek Christmas Gift ideas, I had no idea what I was in for. But after the storm of email that followed was washed away, I was left with a list of toys that any geek would be excited to give or get this year for whatever holiday it is you celebrate this time of year. Hit the link below and read the list if you're curious. Random Stuff There were a few things that were suggested, that, well, I bet Santa won't come through for them. Hemos asks for Nanites. Thats all he wants. Nanites. Somebody smack him. Nima Negahban says "I would like the beowolf cluster avalon for christmas, dont worry about it fitting it under the tree. " david yates wrote in and simply said "Half naked Princess Leia ,as Jabba's prisoner, action figure." I'm sure his mother is proud. He can have the Action Figure, I want 1976 Carrie Fisher. Games Everyone and their brother wrote in to say that Nintendo 64's and Playstations are great. And the game of choice is definitely Zelda 64. I second that motion. I suggested it to my dad as a Christmas Present. Terrible idea- now I gotta wait until xmas to find out if he got it, and if he *didn't* I gotta buy in on Dec 26. Hard as hell to find. Folks suggested other things like the original Kings Quest or Leisure Suit Larry. Prince of Persia. Commander Keen. Ultima. All those games that aren't around any more, but with their original packaging. Finding a 5.25" drive to play them with might be a tad tricky tho. Clothing It's a well known fact that its better to be clothed at least part of the time. And no self respecting geek should be without a vast array of appropriately political t-shirts to pad out your closet full of suits, jackets, and ties (cough). Daniel suggested checking out the Free BSD Mall for BSD clothing. Jonathan Moore suggested the ever popular KMFMS t-shirts for your local microsoft hater. If thats a bit to exotic for you, how about the classic that Doug Boettcher sent us: the Hack Naked shirt. Since we're mentioning all these t-shirts, we ought to mention that CopyLeft has several shirts including my Don't Fear the Penguins ones, and Slashdot ones too. Software Several folks wrote in to say that they were buying Linux CDs from any of the various places that sell them, and giving them away to the needy. I tend towards Linux Central, and in addition to them Cheap Bytes OpenBsd.org and The Linux Mall were all suggested as places where you can buy the stuff we like. Hardware By far the largest catagory for gift ideas was of course Hardware:The Gift that Costs to much. Of course, anyone would want a a Palm III- it's hard to think of a better stocking stuffer. And besides, they're practically money in the bank now that you can use them to collect automobiles of the rich and famous. But if you've already got a Pilot, James A. Hillyerd suggests a GoType keyboard as the perfect accessory. If the pilot isn't your bag, but you want to read on the road, Mahlen Morris suggested A Rocket E-Book which is basically a tablet computer that is designed to replace books You can get them here. And apparently they have some sort of deal with Barnes & Nobles so you can get content to read on it. They're pretty sweet looking- someday we'll have a wireless version with net access, then we can forget paper. But for now, this'll do.

Have trouble remembering passwords? Digital Persona sells sweet hardware that that you can use to do finger print identification. Suggested by Andrew Lepisto. The pdQ was suggested by Adam D. McKenna. Its a cel phone with an integrated Pilot. Another fairly common suggestion for geek gifts was cel service from your local provider, and a cel modem for the laptop equipped gift getter. Sean McPherson suggested a Kodak DC210+ digital camera. Saves big bucks on film, and is supposed to be supported by SANE. I'm actually planning on getting a Digital Camera before the upcoming string of conferences, and I'll probably look at this one (unless Santa already has one in his bag for me, although at $400 a pop, I highly doubt it) Steven McDonald suggests that we look at DVD RAM Drives as a new huge backup device for storing your MP3s and Porn. Oh, and legit data too.

Mike Miller sent us several suggestions including the Happy Hacking Keyboard. I played with one at ALS- they're not bad. Just as cool are the new Color Gamesboys. I suppose tetris wouldn't be vastly improved by color, but its still pretty sweet. For those with a hugeass budget, How about your very own Alpha Cluster? Obviously Jakob is a lot more hopeful for Saint Nick than I am this year *grin*. How about a vt320 Terminal? Daniel Morrison suggested it, and I think it sounds pretty cool. I had a terminal attached to one of my Linux boxes for awhile. I Let it tail log files and stuff. Kinda fun for reading documentation and stuff too. Can't afford a Multi-Head X-Server, video card, and spare monitor anyway. Plus you can run them into another room and check your email from your kitchen/dining room/bathroom.

Matthew J. Allen sent us a pricey one, but its oh so sweet: Remember those Huge Flat LCD Screens from SGI? I sure do. I wake up after erotic dreams about them. (SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE:Hey SGI: Give Rob one of those things for banner ads. You've got a spare one just sitting around, right?). Matthew also suggested an Iomega Clik Drive if you're on a more reasonable budget. Those things do look pretty sweet. Do cables piss you off? How about the gift of a tangle free workspace? Scott Donovan sent us a link to Cordless Mice and Keyboards from Logitech that will free you up for spinning on your swivel chair really fast until you fall over from getting dizzy instead of getting tangled up in your keyboard cable.

Toys By far the single most suggested toy of all was the Lego Mindstorms. The robotic legos are quite possibly the coolest toy in the history of toys. They aren't cheap, but they are oh so sweet. Else you could consider X-Files Action Figures suggested by E. Waugh. Home Entertainment and Audio Gear The Panasonic Portable DVD Theater was sent in by Joel Telling. Its a tiny portable DVD player obviously designed to make me froth at the mouth like a rabid dog. Several folks wrote in to suggest something I would like, but I wouldn't want to froth on. The Empeg Car CD Player. We've mentioned this before, and although they won't be ready for christmas, they are pretty amazing. 2.1 gigs of MP3s in a car stereo. They need a 9 gig version mounted in a home stereo component too.

Jon Jones (is that a real name? *grin*) wrote in to send a link to ADB I/O which you can use to automate your home for the ultimate in comfort and/or laziness. For the true audio junkie, how about the THX Speakers sent in by Chad R. Henry. Sure, they cost more than my car, but I bet they sound amazing. If you're on a more modest budget Cambridge SoundWorks has some slightly more reasonably priced speakers that I'm told sound awesome. Andrew Hobgood suggests checking out Panasonic SJ-MJ70 MiniDisc Player (portable). Pretty sweet if you aren't willing to chance it on the Diamond Rio (which was also one of the most common suggestions). Frankly any geek should be excited to get either. Rob Sheehy pointed out that Philips has 42 inch widescreen flat TVs that you could hang on your wall if you happen to be rich and wanna watch letterbox movies. This one has a VGA input too.

Random Terry A. Braun suggests that geeks need to get into making our own beer. Sounds like a great idea to me, although I tend to screw up toast. But if you're man enough to try it, you can get Your Own Grain Mill. Alan Mathews wrote in to suggest a A dilbert M&M dispensor McPhee's has some strange stuff, including a Punching Nun suggested by Glen Lipka Tom Berger suggested A VI Command Set Mug STriker RedWolf sent us a link to a chocolate bar shaped like a Pentuim II Chip.

Jason Grundy suggests the $6 card game Kill Dr. Lucky and a Card both from the aptly titled Cheapass.com. Rob Pelkey sent in a pair of gift ideas that are a world apart. The first is An Authentic Moon Rock and the second is a Jesse Ventura T-Shirt or Bumper Sticker. One is probably worth a little more than the other. The concept kitchen has this wierd Finger Stylus Thingee that you can use instead of a pen for some pen machines. Kinda wacky. Sent to us by Wyatt Earp.

Justin Higgins suggests that geeks should all own a copy of the Star Wars Radio Drama. Sure, it costs almost a hundred bucks, but at 15 CDs, it balances out to almost be a bargain. They ought to package it on 1 CD full of MP3s, throw a copy of the script on the disc and sell it for $20. I'd never heard of the Leatherman Wave before, but several folks emailed me to say they are cool. And then I noticed that they were actually advertising here. Shows how much attention I pay to who advertises on my own site I guess. But still several people raved about them, claiming that they're ideal for mucking around inside computer cases with. And Traci Earl sent a link to a site that makes nice Leather Cases for them.

Do you think stuffed animals are stupid? Well how about a Stuffed Plush Space Shuttle? Dave Brunberg sent us that gem. Stirling Westrup sent in a link to something called the Hoberman Sphere which basically is a crazily designed sphere thingee that expands from 9.5" to 30". Crazy looking. If you're looking for something caffienated that you can put in your mouth, several folks reminded us about caffienated penguin mints.

Wrap Up Well this was fun guys. Spending hours looking at crazy things that I can't afford has convinced me to take up cracking banks as an evening hobby. But what is quite obvious is that 1998 is a good year to be a geek. And maybe in 1999 Hemos can have his nanites. Nah.

And lastly, with all the commercial hub bub that tends to go on during this season, don't forget the true meaning of Christmas: Ham.

An Anonymous Coward writes "According to an interview published in SAPMAG, a linux version of SAP R/3 exists. It has been developed in the spare time of some of the SAP R/3 developers. SAP is providing R/3 for Linux to interested clients without support. Check babelfish for a translation. " No support, but this is still cool. One more step towards total world domination.

The German Linux Organisation Linux Verband is reporting on recent Linux successes: 20 percent of Siemens PC-workstation customers are now buying with Linux pre-installed. The leader of Mercedes' car-electronics prototype development team reports he is very satisfied with the 30 Siemens workstations purchased so far, and that they are buying 10 more. In the previous 7 years they had run Windows workstations, which required constant supervision from a dedicated employee. Moreover the German Police in Stuttgart are using Linux as a server because of its high reliability. On the french side of things, a new Slashdot derivative is up and running. They are still under construction and will be posting article-sources soon. Links courtesy of LWD and LT. Translations can be provided by Babelfish".

This week's chronicle from Silicon Valley by Jean-Louis Gassée (CEO of Be Inc, and a Linux user) is rather interesting. He points out that Apple's testimony is unexpectedly strong evidence in favour of the DOJ, even though it relates to events occuring back in the 1980s (see below). Jean-Louis points out that the foundations of Microsoft's domination of PCs and Macs had been layed even before the Mac came out in 1984. Apparently the DOJ is so sure it will win it has started probing Silicon Valley experts as to what remedies would be effective. Dividing Microsoft up into pieces has apparently been discounted since Microsoft could effectively continue building apps into its OS by hiring more people to the OS division. The favorite contender is to force Microsoft to licence the Windows source code to three of its competitors. To me, this is ineffective: Microsoft could convincingly claim that its three competitors did not write the code and do not understand it as well (so you should rely on Microsoft for support) and make sure this is true by sending the final builds to the competition as late as possible. My sysadmin and I had a discussion which resulted in an alternative remedy: Win32 and the Windows kernels should be GPL'd with Microsoft losing all its rights as original copyright holder. This would prevent Microsoft from integrating other stuff into the kernel because they'd lose any unfair competitive advantage (think proprietary APIs) by doing so. If you'd like to support this idea, write to Joel Klein! As usual, Babelfish is your friend. Explanation of the GPL idea: If it's GPL'd Microsoft won't integrate apps into the OS since this would require them to release source-code (and thus an advantage). It would prevent Microsoft from having broken/extended protocols which prevent Windows from being used with other OS's (eg the Sun TCP/IP stack allegations). It would also not allow Microsoft to break other people's apps (eg: Quicktime and Realaudio's allegations.) Finally, it would create real competition in the OS market since others could duplicate the Windows API, warts and all. I added this paragraph since many comments reveal I should have explained the consequences of the idea better.

Since Jean-Louis worked at Apple, he can detail from personal experience what Microsoft's relation with Apple was. In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs feared a lack of apps for the Mac before it was even released. Bill Gates made a deal: he would make the apps, and Steve would license the GUI to Microsoft. The license would last until 1985 or 86 and Microsoft would ensure apps came out on the Mac first. The Mac came out late, while Microsoft demoed its first versions of Windows. In 1985, Gates threatened to suspend Mac App development unless his license was renewed: Jean-Louis knows because he was there. John Sculley (Steve had left) consulted his staff who, unanimously, begged him to send Bill back to rainy Seattle. Sculley dined with Gates and Bill Neukom (vice-president of Microsoft's legal wing), gave in and signed a lame contract that the 1988 court-case could not anull. The article goes on with other interesting revelations (why MacBasic was cancelled, why Apple did not make its own Postscript interpreter, etc.)

Liberation, one of the major french newspapers published two articles on Linux today. The first discusses Linux as a threat to Microsoft and contains a quote from Bernard Dufau, president of IBM France: Nous pensons que Linux représente à terme une menace pour Windows (We believe that Linux is a threat to Windows). It also reveals that France Telecom's portal Voila uses Linux (nice Tux logo at the bottom). The second article reveals that AFUL's agreement with the French ministry of Education is similar to the one Microsoft signed with them when Bill Gates was in Paris. Apparently, headmasters and schools boards of directors would often frustrate teachers efforts to introduce Linux into their schools because while other software providers had signed agreements with the French State, Linux had not. As usual, try babelfish if you can't read french.

Jerry Adlersfluegel writes "These guys have come up with a business card sized CD-ROM that can hold 18 megs of anything. It works in a standard drive. Not very cheap, though." That's pretty spiffy. If anyone happens to be using these, send one my way, I'd love to check it out. Maybe now the businessman "Ritual Card Exchange" has a point again. Naaah.

Greg writes "Digital's website has a brief announcement that Peter Bannon, one of the Alpha engineers, will be presenting a seminar at Microprocessor Forum on the EV7 or Alpha 21364 which is rumored to be out sometime around or shortly after Merced. This announcement is a little unusual for Digital considering that the 21264 or EV6 won't ship until later this year."

THotze writes "After visiting Digital's recently Compaq-ized web page, I noticed the word 'Apache' VAGUELY written in one of the graphics. I click, and it got me here. It seems that shipping with Free Software's becoming a trend. Nice to know that they haven't brainwashed EVERY DEC employee with MS-ism yet." Ed Free Internet software ?= Free Software.

iX has found a bug in NT's boot loader which prevents NT from being loaded from the second 2 Gig partition. This occurs after NT tells you you've successfully installed it, and reboots. Apparently Microsoft wants NT to only be installed on the first partition. Babelfish is here.

iX is approximately the German equivalent of the Unix Review and is from the same publishing house as C'T (the only good general computer tech-mag left that I know of). iX is now carrying an initiation to Gtk showing Gtk's increasing acceptance as an alternative to Motif. Babelfish chokes only halfway down the article. The article appears to claim that GTK signals were inspired from Qt. Is this true?

Cyrrin has written in with a killer update from Siggraph 98. He's got notes about everything from Alpha to Antz, as well as a ton of juicy nuggets from the Linux 3D SIG. Click immediately below and read this if you're at all into graphics! The Following was written by Slashdot Reader Cyrrin

The pace has really picked up since the Exhibition booths opened on Tuesday. Pixar, one of the most popular booths in the center, was graciously handing out free copies of "Geri's Game" (the Academy Award winning short) which included the trailer for the very promising "A Bug's Life".

And speaking of bugs, keep an eye out for "Antz", and "Prince of Egypt" from Dreamworks and P.D.I.. Prince of Egypt boasts twice as much computer rendering as Titanic... and it looks great!

Digital expects the 1GHz 21264 chip to be released next summer, or alternatively, as their banner reads, "1 Gigahertz by 2000". Meanwhile, their 600Mhz 21264 workstation chews through anything you can toss at it. And Sun, while advertising their 3-D workstations as price/performance competitive to SGIs, has split their marketing pitch 50/50 to include plugs for Java.

CMU has a booth where they've been demonstrating a high-level 3-D web authoring system, called Alice . And the Lego Corporation has been showing off their microprocessor-imbedded, programmable robotics packages. Man, I wish I had this stuff to play with when I was younger! Okay, the Linux3D SIG. Brian Paul (author and maintainer of the Mesa package) opened the discussion with news that Mesa 3.0 release is due out in the next few weeks. Among other things, it will include the OpenGL 1.2 API, a revised GLX extension, and a few new texture functions.

Darryl Strauss (maintainer of the Linux Glide port) announced that version 3 of the Glide 3 drivers will be available soon and will access more of the Voodoo 2's capabilities. He also said that he has begun work on the soon-to-be-released-and-blow-everything-else-out-of-the-water Banshee card, a 2-D/3-D combo card scheduled for Q3 release.

Also, it would appear that the Obsidian 2 from Quantum 3-D is running in Linux under the Glide drivers... and the people from Quantum didn't even know it. Finally, Darryl said that there is now a Glide library for Alpha Linux that will be available very soon.

Next up was Metrolink, announcing their latest X server release, which includes the OpenGL extensions for use with Permedia, GLint, and more chips. Basically, it appears that hardware vendore are becoming more interested in supporting Linux, but only feel secure with NDAs with commercial companies like Metrolink. Metrolink stated that they feel that the XFree86 and Mesa can cooexist with commercial servers and extensions and that there will continue to be a demand for each, depending on the situation.

The important thing is... requests for Linux support are having an effect, and companies that are traditionally Windows-only are turning their heads.

Three more companies had reps there to answer questions. Precision Insight had a short blurb about their interest in Linux, and said that they fully support direct hardware rendering, instead of incurring overhead by going through the X server.

3DFX gave a little presentation on the new Banshee (which can have up to 16MB video memory not including texture memory, up to 1920x1440 resolution, and blazing 2D and 3D performance). They also said that they'd really like to hear back from Linux developers about what people are doing with the Glide-based software. You can mail them at devprogram@3dfx.com if you have a nifty application that you want to tell them about.

Finally, SGI came to the front of the room, and was immediately inundated with questions about Farenheit and the future of Open GL. Farenheit is a spec that is being "published" by SGI and Microsoft and is a hybrid of Direct3D and OpenGL, and will allow for faster 3D on Windows systems. Unfortunately, that leaves the Linux community out of the game. This is even more true with the SceneGraph API that is being developed concurrently, and when finished, will be completely owned by Microsoft. HPUX, IRIX, and a couple others will be supported, but a port to any other systems will require a license from Microsoft.

SGI did make sure to stress though, that for cross-platform 3D apps, there is not substitute for pure OpenGL, and that they, in no way, will discontinue support or develeopment of the OpenGL that we all know and love.

One more thing. It was suggested at the meeting that there is an engineer for a "company that is VERY well known in 3D modeling and animation" who has ported their complete software package to Linux. No names were mentioned, just the suggestion that we "harass them all politely" until we can convince them that a commercial release of the product would be a viable business move.

My opinion? I'd have to place my bets on Softimage. They already have their product on NT and IRIX. So go and evangelize... just remember... it's just a guess.

Chris Tyler has written an excellent piece examining the recent Gartner Group article we mentioned yesterday, and discussing what Linux needs to do in order to achieve Linus' vision of Total World Domination. It's an excellent piece worth your time. Competing: Pushing Our Products Towards Total World Domination Chris Tyler, Global Proximity Corporation, June 4, 1998

I recently read a Gartner Group report on free operating system software which was mentioned on Slashdot. It was interesting reading, and although I bristled at some of the assumptions and conclusions, it contained a number of valid points.

Many of us recognize the value of the free/open source model and would prefer to see it become a prominent model for software development and distribution. Our reasons vary widely, but among other things, it's simply more pleasant to work with open source products-- if I have to administer a system, I'd rather administer one that works well and that I can fix myself if something breaks.

So let's take some ownership here. We have the license to the source code, the rights to distribute the software, we've contributed code and documentation and tech support. Let's call open source operating systems "our products" and view the open source community as an entity that is in competition with the proprietary OS vendors.

If we want the open source model to prevail outside of its existing domain (mentioned in the report as "academia, application development, Web servers"-- that is, technical areas and the Internet), and assuming that the paper is valid, then we need to address the issues present in the paper. Here I am primarily addressing the Linux space, because it appears to be the free OS with the largest installed base, but the comments could be applied to our other OS products as well.

Most of the issues raised stem from this paragraph:

"Unix systems at free or minimal charge will lack the performance tuning, scalability and hardware platform support to make them suitable for large commercial applications through 2002 (0.9 probability)."

This statement surprised me in part. Linux appears to be a leader in scalability (from Itsy to Beowolf), has solid hardware support ( in many cases, least as strong as NT), and matches or outperforms other operating systems without tuning (e.g., SAMBA serving).

Looking closer at the report's arguments, though, is revealing. The authors suggest that Linux is weak in the areas of:

1. driver support (for newer or proprietary devices, this is undisputable true);
2. SMP beyond 4-way support (this is debatable);
3. NUMA support (none);
4. distributed systems and network management (e.g., OpenView, TME, Unicenter);
5. applications development;
6. performance tuning for high levels of scalability (">500 concurre OLTP users").

Items (a) and (e), driver and application development, are somewhat beyond the control of the development community, especially if these are taken to mean proprietary hardware driver support and proprietary commercial package application support.

However, to paraphrase a line from the movie Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come"-- if we take care of the other issues, the commercial vendors will add support. We have a couple of vendors porting their products to our OS's now, and this will snowball-- as commercial applications appear, more of our systems will appear in commercial settings, and more vendors will recognize the expanding market. All of the major DBMS vendors have said that they have at least an experimental Linux port in-house; it's just a matter of breaking the dam for the commercial-software-on-free-OS market to explode.

(Please realize: I'm not advocating proprietary vs. open source applications here, just recognizing that there is room in the world for both... but let's at least get them to work together on systems based on open source).

There are a number of things that we can do to address the other issues. Putting SMP and NUMA support aside for the moment (Linus is working hard on the SMP implementation and I think that it's moving well), we should concentrate on items (d) and (f).

Distributed Systems and Network Management: Our products are weak in this area. We don't plug into UniCenter (or TME or OpenView or anything else) and those systems can't be consoled on Linux. We can approach this problem in one of two ways: (i) we can write a network / distributed systems management tool; or (ii) we can write UniCenter plug-ins. I think that we should pursue both.

What if we offered to write the UniCenter plug-ins for CA in return for having them port the UniCenter console to Linux? Would they go for it? We won't know until we ask.

High Levels of Scalability: What a wretched phrase! Let's try "Scalabili ty to Very Large systems". If we can create Beowolf/Extreme Linux systems running into the gigaflops, surely we can come up with some amazing tpC figures.

Novell's UnixWare (back when it was Novell's and not SCO's) captured the attention of many IS managers when Oracle and Novell demonstrated record-breaking tpC and $/tpC figures. We should be able to do the same. There are some pieces we need to put together to make this fly:

• raw partition support for DBs would be good (these were used in the UW benchmarks);
• a commercial DBMS would be good (hey, Informix, here's your chance), or we can tweak PostgreSQL and friends into the stratosphere; and
• we'll need a hardware supplier, because the benchmarks should be on a standard system configuration (could be a mainstream vendor like Compaq or a Linux HW vendor like Paralogic).

  Conclusion: Our products in general and Linux in particular have got what it will take to beat the Gartner Group's predictions. However, we need to get our collective act together to push the envelope a bit in certain directions and then to prove to the world that open source OS's are competitive.

  David Cutler, director of Windows NT development at Microsoft (and architect of both VMS and NT) used to say somewhat rudely to his NT development team: "If you break the build, your ass is grass, and I'm the lawnmower."

  In a bigger sense, open source is a ride-'em mower being driven by a penguin, a gnu, and a little red guy wearing sneakers. Let's start the engine...

crash williams wrote in to tell us that The Itsy Website has recieved an update. There actually is information now that will cause you to desire this device in ways that your mother would consider unholy. Pictures and more detailed specs will show you more information about what could very possibly be the coolest platform ever to run Linux. Now they just gotta start mass producing them.

Farrell McGovern wrote in to tell us about Electric Monk. Basically, it is/was a nice search engine that took natural language as input, and searched AltaVista. Well, recently it seems that AltaVista started rejecting their referrals. I'm at odds with this- anyone ever look at AltaVista.Com? It It's not The Real AltaVista, but rather a front end that someone else was selling ad space on. Ages ago it used to be barely noticable that it wasn't the real thing, and I found that bordering on offensive, but Electric Monk really one upped the original interface. What do you guys think?

Despite the uproar we already created, Digital is being less than honest about the OS on which Titanic was rendered. It would appear either to be Digital Unix or the combination of NT and Digital Unix. Linux sure ain't mentioned anywhere. Time for more polite letters?

Despite the uproar we already created, Digital is being less than honest about the OS on which Titanic was rendered. It would appear either to be Digital Unix or the combination of NT and Digital Unix. Linux sure ain't mentioned anywhere. Time for more polite letters?

Bart Blanquart sent us a report from CeBIT. He says "I just got back from CeBIT and thought I'd share these things:

Digital didn't think it would be nice/necessary/neat to have a Linux-box on their display (but they did like to show off with Titanic-was-rendered-on-Alpha-stuff). Linux International had a booth there which got quite some attention, but S.u.S.E. got lots more (I don't know what they had in their booth - it was always too crowded to get near it) Besides L.I. and S.u.S.E. there where some other Linux-vendors (or vendors of Linux-based products) present, so the penguins seemed to be omni-present".

cleric wrote in with a link to Quash over at Digital. This is a site try to answer FAQs and stuff about all the hub bub over who owns what during the flurry of purchases in the last few months.

Intel will be using the StrongARM design for handheld devices, and other low cost appliances. This is the first time Intel has used a non in-house design and architecture: it is a licensee of ARM , which keeps control of the direction of the chip. Hopefully this will boost rather than diminish ARM's chances of survival. StrongARM may now replace i960 as RISC chip for the I2O spec. While being good news for Corel, it may prove problematic for x86 vendors hoping to build x86's for the information appliance market.

I love the internet. Check out this page sent to us by Joey Hess. Basically it does a search of AltaVista for various OS's, and the word 'sucks' or 'rules'. Then it displays the totals. What a crazy idea, of course since this method shows Linux's obvious superiority, I support this method 100% *grin*.

Simon Janes wrote in with a very interesting editorial for us to read. This marks the first time that someone besides me has had an Editorial posted on Slashdot, but this piece is so worth reading that I just had to post it. Simon writes about the hardware and software industry, and specifically Sun. His conclusions are "out there" but each time I read this thing, I think he's more and more right. Pay attention guys because this is a big one. Everything after this point is written by Simon Janes.

After reading The Washington Post today (" Sun's Lonely Battle", 8 Feb 1998 H1, H15), it struck home to me that Sun needs to be given hope against Microsoft and we all need some kind of hope for a good machine architecture in return. First look at what has happened to other processor architectures in the last 12 months:

Alpha Compaq has stated nothing about what it plans to do with Digital's Alpha making everyone wildly speculate about what is is going to do with it. Some do not like how Compaq has made its hardware very Windows specific or hard to administer at the bare-metal level (no BIOS? you mean I need a floppy disk with Compaq tools? how INCONVENIENT!)

PowerPC Motorola is retargetting PowerPC towards embedded applications because of Apple's monopolistic intents. Personally, I think Steve Jobs has a deeper plan of revenge against Apple, and is running it into the ground under the guise of being a saviour. Motorola was *just* about to come out with a line of G3 based PC's and Apple ruined it. I can imagine a lot of people at PowerComputing are so agry with Steve Jobs, that they would surely create an instant medical condition if they met Steve on sight. Motorola ate a $100M loss because of it-- which was really immature (the "we won't play your game anymore" game), Motorola & IBM should have sued the collective pants off of Apple for turning over the PowerPC apple-cart (the "we won't play your game anymore" game played the CORRECT way).

Intel Intel's offerings are increasingly getting proprietary, and proprietary means expensive. When and if the Merced processor based on IA-64 comes out, it will require a massive compiler re-engineering on the hands of the Free Software Foundation/Cygnus/LDC. On top of that Intel is targetting the Merced for "mainframes". Once you append the word mainframe to a computer, the price of that computer multiplys by several hundred percent. AMD and Cyrix are working hard to present alternatives to Intel, but in a market dominated by Intel and Microsoft, I fear that they will have limited sucess in this arena.

StrongARM A majority of the StrongARM design team have left their posts rather than work for Intel, who apparently now owns the rights to StrongARM. Granted, the StrongARM isn't your super-duper high performance server-class type of microprocessor, but I felt that it would have made for an excellent base for laptop computers.

MIPS MIPS machines sit there in the background. Acer at one time had a MIPS machine you could buy, but that disappeared into the chasm of Wintel. Cobalt Microservers is a start-up who could potentially turn MIPS around. Silicon Graphics is constantly in trouble with shareholder lawsuits so therefore has a cloud over its future.

Where is the hope then? I feel that it is with Sun. The SPARC and UltraSPARC have not had this kind of mayhem perpetuated on them. They are open specifications of which many other companies have implemented and sell-- however Sun is the largest, and most recognizable of them. Much of the hardware Sun has produced is still usable today so except for volume, Sun hardware has a similar history to that of Intel-based hardware (starting from the 386).

Sun needs help for this lonely fight, and it has one excellent place to turn to for it: The Linux Developer Community. Sun needs to follow the two-step method of world domination:

1. Officially support the Linux developer community (LDC) to support all grades of Sun hardware, from the low end (which are already pretty well supported) to the higher end (which are hard for the LDC to support because of lack of access and documentation. Sun needs to recognize that even though its Solaris is good, people love to have choices when it comes to what they run on their hardware. Sun, when it takes this first step, which Digital has already taken, must follow it with the step Digital has not taken--
2. Recognize and promote Linux as an alternative operating system for workstations and servers and ship it as a preinstalled option. I followed a banner advertisement yesterday from Wired news to Digital's little press story on the Titanic being rendered on Alpha hardware. Linux was not even mentioned ONCE in this press statement from Digital. This is not support of Linux on Digital's part, this is a cover-up. (If you go to Digital's Sucess Stories site to find customers who use Digital hardware, you will not even find Linux listed as an operating system option. Another coincidence?) When and if Sun takes the first step of supporting the LDC, it must also follow with the second step-- Promoting of the alternatives as well.

Sun is fighting a lonely battle indeed, but the Linux Developer Cavalry is there, waiting in the woods for Sun's call. Sun, are you listening? Victory is two years away, shine in the next millenium.

Ok, now I'm (Rob) back with a few closing remarks. I think that RedHat has proven that you can take the Linux OS, treat the Linux Community good (RPM, RHAD) and produce a quality product that you can sell. Sun is in a similiar position- they control the hardware, but if they were to openly support and port to Linux, they could take advantage of the amazing power of the Linux Community. Then Sun could concentrate on the 'value added' stuff that makes their platform special. Sure, it means ditching Solaris, but it allows Sun to focus programmers on stuff that isn't already being done better, elsewhere. I'm sure a handful of specialists devoted to Sparc/Linux would produce an amazingly optimized Linux Kernel. This would produce the fastest possible Linux platform, and it woudl make the rapidly growing Linux Population buy Sun hardware instead of Digital.

It wouldn't be easy, but I suspect it could be done. What do you guys think?

Simon Janes wrote in with a very interesting editorial for us to read. This marks the first time that someone besides me has had an Editorial posted on Slashdot, but this piece is so worth reading that I just had to post it. Simon writes about the hardware and software industry, and specifically Sun. His conclusions are "out there" but each time I read this thing, I think he's more and more right. Pay attention guys because this is a big one. Everything after this point is written by Simon Janes.

After reading The Washington Post today (" Sun's Lonely Battle", 8 Feb 1998 H1, H15), it struck home to me that Sun needs to be given hope against Microsoft and we all need some kind of hope for a good machine architecture in return. First look at what has happened to other processor architectures in the last 12 months:

Alpha Compaq has stated nothing about what it plans to do with Digital's Alpha making everyone wildly speculate about what is is going to do with it. Some do not like how Compaq has made its hardware very Windows specific or hard to administer at the bare-metal level (no BIOS? you mean I need a floppy disk with Compaq tools? how INCONVENIENT!)

PowerPC Motorola is retargetting PowerPC towards embedded applications because of Apple's monopolistic intents. Personally, I think Steve Jobs has a deeper plan of revenge against Apple, and is running it into the ground under the guise of being a saviour. Motorola was *just* about to come out with a line of G3 based PC's and Apple ruined it. I can imagine a lot of people at PowerComputing are so agry with Steve Jobs, that they would surely create an instant medical condition if they met Steve on sight. Motorola ate a $100M loss because of it-- which was really immature (the "we won't play your game anymore" game), Motorola & IBM should have sued the collective pants off of Apple for turning over the PowerPC apple-cart (the "we won't play your game anymore" game played the CORRECT way).

Intel Intel's offerings are increasingly getting proprietary, and proprietary means expensive. When and if the Merced processor based on IA-64 comes out, it will require a massive compiler re-engineering on the hands of the Free Software Foundation/Cygnus/LDC. On top of that Intel is targetting the Merced for "mainframes". Once you append the word mainframe to a computer, the price of that computer multiplys by several hundred percent. AMD and Cyrix are working hard to present alternatives to Intel, but in a market dominated by Intel and Microsoft, I fear that they will have limited sucess in this arena.

StrongARM A majority of the StrongARM design team have left their posts rather than work for Intel, who apparently now owns the rights to StrongARM. Granted, the StrongARM isn't your super-duper high performance server-class type of microprocessor, but I felt that it would have made for an excellent base for laptop computers.

MIPS MIPS machines sit there in the background. Acer at one time had a MIPS machine you could buy, but that disappeared into the chasm of Wintel. Cobalt Microservers is a start-up who could potentially turn MIPS around. Silicon Graphics is constantly in trouble with shareholder lawsuits so therefore has a cloud over its future.

Where is the hope then? I feel that it is with Sun. The SPARC and UltraSPARC have not had this kind of mayhem perpetuated on them. They are open specifications of which many other companies have implemented and sell-- however Sun is the largest, and most recognizable of them. Much of the hardware Sun has produced is still usable today so except for volume, Sun hardware has a similar history to that of Intel-based hardware (starting from the 386).

Sun needs help for this lonely fight, and it has one excellent place to turn to for it: The Linux Developer Community. Sun needs to follow the two-step method of world domination:

1. Officially support the Linux developer community (LDC) to support all grades of Sun hardware, from the low end (which are already pretty well supported) to the higher end (which are hard for the LDC to support because of lack of access and documentation. Sun needs to recognize that even though its Solaris is good, people love to have choices when it comes to what they run on their hardware. Sun, when it takes this first step, which Digital has already taken, must follow it with the step Digital has not taken--
2. Recognize and promote Linux as an alternative operating system for workstations and servers and ship it as a preinstalled option. I followed a banner advertisement yesterday from Wired news to Digital's little press story on the Titanic being rendered on Alpha hardware. Linux was not even mentioned ONCE in this press statement from Digital. This is not support of Linux on Digital's part, this is a cover-up. (If you go to Digital's Sucess Stories site to find customers who use Digital hardware, you will not even find Linux listed as an operating system option. Another coincidence?) When and if Sun takes the first step of supporting the LDC, it must also follow with the second step-- Promoting of the alternatives as well.

Sun is fighting a lonely battle indeed, but the Linux Developer Cavalry is there, waiting in the woods for Sun's call. Sun, are you listening? Victory is two years away, shine in the next millenium.

Ok, now I'm (Rob) back with a few closing remarks. I think that RedHat has proven that you can take the Linux OS, treat the Linux Community good (RPM, RHAD) and produce a quality product that you can sell. Sun is in a similiar position- they control the hardware, but if they were to openly support and port to Linux, they could take advantage of the amazing power of the Linux Community. Then Sun could concentrate on the 'value added' stuff that makes their platform special. Sure, it means ditching Solaris, but it allows Sun to focus programmers on stuff that isn't already being done better, elsewhere. I'm sure a handful of specialists devoted to Sparc/Linux would produce an amazingly optimized Linux Kernel. This would produce the fastest possible Linux platform, and it woudl make the rapidly growing Linux Population buy Sun hardware instead of Digital.

It wouldn't be easy, but I suspect it could be done. What do you guys think?

Digital shows its true nature, and why it was bought by Compaq. Follow this link and you'll discover that Titanic was rendered using Windows NT. Rather strange given Linux-Journal's article written by Digital Domain themselves. Seems to me that Digital needs many politely worded corrections. Notice that Digital's article is targeted at newbies and is part of their (Microsoft Based) Web Port

Digital shows its true nature, and why it was bought by Compaq. Follow this link and you'll discover that Titanic was rendered using Windows NT. Rather strange given Linux-Journal's article written by Digital Domain themselves. Seems to me that Digital needs many politely worded corrections. Notice that Digital's article is targeted at newbies and is part of their (Microsoft Based) Web Port