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• Quake 3 running on stinking big SGI machines (always fun to watch - but get a network boys!)
  
• Intel stand - big signs saying "Intel supports RedHat, Mandrake, Corel Linux, etc etc" - shouldn't that be the OTHER way around AndyG?!
  
• TurboLinux ice creams and tattoo's - a perpetual supply throughout the day to exhibitors, mucho gratias
  
• The plethora of American accents - maybe not interesting, or even different - a taste of things to come during the Olympics?
  
• IBM? Hello Lou Gerstner?! IBM have a small (3x3 metre) stand in the far corner, not their usual huge whopping glowing bright red 'e-everywhere' - and IBM is fully behind Linux now?
  
• The great guys at the australia.internet.com stand - ok, slightly biased.

LinuxApps.com is not owned by VA. It is a Linux.com partner, much in the same way that LinuxNewbie.org (which is owned by internet.com) is a Linux.com partner.

Be careful with generalizations like this -- according to the Computer Industry Almanac, the real figure for the US population with net access is 43% (http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geogra phics/article/0,1323,5911_234841,0 0.html), so the net is a much more mature market than your figures would suggest. This in turn means that we are much closer to playing for keeps for things like user-annointed standards than we were a couple of years ago.

-clay

Followers of Richard Stallman often condemn software patents as universally bad. But the advent of "RSA Day" shows at least one way in which they may be beneficial. Due to the expiration of the patent, RSA is being tested as never before by the very best experts in the industry, who will be strongly motivated to break it. And if any chinks are found in the armor, they're certain to be publicized and not held as precious secrets, since the cryptographers only stand to gain by revealing their discoveries. This is very good news. If RSA holds up, we can be more sure than ever that it's a strong algorithm. See Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Prime at http://boardwatch.internet.com /mag/99/dec/bwm62.html.

Followers of Richard Stallman often condemn software patents as universally bad. But the advent of "RSA Day" shows at least one way in which they may be beneficial. Due to the expiration of the patent, RSA is being tested as never before by the very best experts in the industry, who will be strongly motivated to break it. And if any chinks are found in the armor, they're certain to be publicized and not held as precious secrets, since the cryptographers only stand to gain by revealing their discoveries. This is very good news. If RSA holds up, we can be more sure than ever that it's a strong algorithm. See Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Prime at http://boardwatch.internet.com /mag/99/dec/bwm62.html.

Genes found in nature: 0 years. If there's one thing that should not be patented at all, it's any mechanism that was around before the inventor was born. ;-)

I agree with you about the rest, though. See my article at http://boardwatch.internet.com /mag/99/dec/bwm62.html, which makes a similar point as it discusses the coming expiration of the RSA patent.

--Brett Glass

I read about that back around the 7th over at BrowserWatch. Three weeks later it shows up here. I guess my take on what would make a good /. story just isn't quite on, or I'd be posting more of this browser stuff. Either that, or I assume someone's already posted anything good I've found...

Very cool. I always thought that VRML was invented by people who assumed a world of fat pipes and weak clients (and supported in that assumption by SGI). Quake was made for the real world of thin pipes and ever more powerful clients. VRML's very broken method of handling Levels of Detail is a great example of that: send all the models in one big file - real bright.

I've been raving about this for a while. Doom and Quake have been the best possible proving ground for system that could be adopted to nearly any situation. If Carmak makes a commercial interactive system that requires one large initial download for the "browser", but has small, easily downloadable enviorments (automatically, so the user is unaware of it even happening) he stands a very good chance of creating the Next Big Thing. Remember, before Jeff Hawkins came up with the Pilot, everyone said that the PDA was dead and that the Newton had buried it. I'm sure one compelling product can undo the years of bad ideas by other people.

John, please consider B-Rep geometry with streamed branching and primarily procedural textures with few bitmaps. And a global "real estate" system, so all of the worlds can link together. This could finally be the successor to the web.

For mmx info check out this

Now, a career later, I find an annoyingly high frequency of supposedly "libertarian" friends and acquaintances ditching their principles when it comes to exactly one man: Bill Gates. These are the same people who have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get me to read Ayn Rand for years. What would Her-Enlightened-Self-Interestedness have thought of Bill Gates and the "principles" of her followers?

There was an article in Boardwatch magazine a few years ago that went into this very nicely. The author compared the situation to a game of musical chairs. People know that there are too many competitors in the industry, and that it can't sustain its current level of investment for too long without having something to show for it. So, everybody's burning money at a prodigious rate in an attempt to gain "mindshare". The goal is simple: be in front when the venture capital stops. It's reached a level of insanity where it's hard for small businesses with sound expansion plans to get venture capital because "they're not agressive enough."

It's kind of like the cold war, in a way. The US "won", not on any ideological or technological superiority, but because we were able to keep spending for longer than the Soviets. The tech industry seems to be emulating that model.

"The important thing about Linux (and Open Source and the Web) is that it shifts the balance of power back to the independent developers, the underfunded experimental coolness-of-the-thing-itself startup-type hackers"


For the time, yes it does bring back that power and the interest in the changing/hacking/creating a new environment that fits your exact needs. However, if one thing has proved evident in everything I have ever experienced, money motivates all too well. My concern is that all the recent hype and corporate adoption of *nix will corrupt what most of the geeks find to be "experimental coolness-of-the-thing-itself". What's to happen when those how have set the standards for these platforms pass on? Just look at what happened to the internet once John Postel left us.


SL33ZE, MCSD
em: joedipshit@hotmail.com

It also mentions that they are 20% of Mecklermedia, which was acquired by Penton Media in Nov. '98. Anyone know anything about those corporations?

The copyright notice at the bottom seems to me (IANAL) to gobble up all rights to posted comments as well, but that may be typical of sites other than Slashdot.

And of course, Microsoft is listed as a major sponsor. But that probably applies to over half the web as well.

I'd like to hear confirmation from LT and their slant on this.

He's a BSD person, which probably explains his anal-retentiveness (the smoking thing was wierd, he was in Las Vegas, right?) and his groovin' 70's hairstyle. Check that guy out! Man, it's incredible what you can do with those banana feather combs!

All I got out of this article is that hackers like to smoke?

There is no hacker ethic?

cDc can't trust themselves?

The self submission (if that was the case) doesn't help either.
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

Internet.com defines Reverse Engineering as: "The process of recreating a design by analyzing a final product", which is what I always thought it was. It does not mean disassembling, decompiling, or tracing. I don't understand how reverse engineering can possible be illegal anywhere that even pretends to maintain freedom of thought.

Now I got this question, what about those companies that buy domain names and then sell them for -a lot of- money ?

A company called "One in a Million" tried this in the UK some years ago, buying up a number of '.co.uk' domain names and attempting to sell them at an inflated price to the companies in question. There was a big court battle between them and a number of large companies, including Virgin and BT. The outcome was fairly predictable, I think. (Wired also has an old news article about it, as does Boardwatch.)

In the USA, the rules are a little murkier, it would seem - as this old Slashdot article shows.

--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.

I found this link out there...

TOP50

And this one:

TOP50

Your comment that "BSD TCP/IP stack has a backing of comercial developers with easy access to quickly evolving standards and 24/7 dedication" is interesting but irrelevant. The original comment, that Linux's TCP/IP stack ought to have been based on BSD's would mean that 5 or 6 years ago it would have been essentially the same and now it would still be different. Where does that get us? Nowhere. What you're essentially saying is that Linux's open development is not as efficient as Berkley's.

Interestingly enough, there aren't any closed TCP/IP standards ... most companies take at least several months to implement them at any rate (unofficial specs) and therefore the Linux community has equal access to this information.

You and I can go and read any TCP/IP information that BSD or anyone else can. I may not be able to read their 'private' discusions, but I'm not terribly worried about that.

Maybe if you didn't make such short, blunt, unthought statements, no one would spend time responding in the same way.

... "have hard time to follow standards and ammendments" ... besides your glaring spelling mistakes in the original, the Linux community is quite well respected for quickly adding public standards to the kernel code.

If you want proof of easy access to TCP/IP information, refer to PCWebopedia's link list for TCP/IP.

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the brain's storage of "knowledge" is not a digital structure, so it cannot be measured in bits.

It most certainly is digital. What did you think neurons were? They store 'bits' of data. As well as working as gates and flow controls. The exact workings may not be exactly bit-wise (ie. it may have a few more settings than either on or off), but the general method is certainly broken down on a level that can be described in a digital manner.

The actual amount of data that would be found within the human mind is still quite controversial. The exact number isn't likely to be nailed down until we can mimic the human memory system on a computer, either via Artificial Neural Network or in an advanced form of biological based storage media. If we could mimic the human brain, we'd not only know the answer to this question, but we'd be able to lick the AI problem, too. Also noted... Better organized thoughts than mine. This has a few previous discussions of how large the brain's storage capacity might be.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

A "cracker" is malicious. Most sites are cracked if they are vandalized. A "hacker" is someone who evokes certain information from a machine or person or thing by guiding the thing/person in the desired direction. Another term is "Social Engineering". If I ask you questions, and I get the desired answers from you, I have hacked your brain. I am a hacker. I am a social engineer.

One definition: "Whereas crackers sole aim is to break into secure systems, hackers are more interested in gaining knowledge about computer systems and possibly using this knowledge for playful pranks."

Another definition: "cracker n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981-82 on Usenet was largely a failure."

And yet another: "hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker."

I hope that makes sense.