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Hmmm, according to the LWN that you linked to, aa patches have the best performance.

For those that don't know aa stands for Andrea Archelangi who one of the very importent kernel hackers. It was a large part of his effort that stabalized the 2.2 VM. Although it is debated on which VM is better, over 90% of the benchmarks I've seen have pointed to AA being the better choice.

AC even mentioned that the AA-VM was the right way to go, just too wild of a change for a stable kernel series. There is too much conspiracy theory going on that AC is hijacking the kernel for RedHat, or that the RedHat crew has a not-invented-here phobia for not including the better VM.
Now on to a more editorial comment.

There seems to be quite a war on this right now, but I think it will settle down in about 6 months or so like the ReiserFS wars have. I also think that we'll see a new order established in the stabalizing of kernels.

I have no political say, but I expect that Linus will run a kernel that will be considered the "experimental, quicker evolving" kernel where things change violently. AC and others job will may to pull out pieces to salvage a semblance of stability, essentialy forking the stable branches from Linus's more exotic cutting edge kernel.

This seems to be how things run in any case when there is a developmental kernel, and they run pretty well. The question that may be asked is "Does Linus need to slow down his effort to stabalize at all?" Its arguably true that the answer is "yes", but only to a degree that suits his own needs for order in his life-long persuit of the sexy kernel.

Linus himself mentioned that AC does a better job of it, maybe its time to give him the whole forking-a-stable-kernel job.

If you're going to run 2.4.12, I suggest adding the latest Alan Cox patch to it, as well as Rik van Riel's "hogstop" and "eatcache" patches.
First, start with the base 2.4.12 kernel: (Use a patch to save Kernel.org's bandwidth, if you have a recent 2.4 kernel lying around.)
2.4.12
Next, patch it up to 2.4.12-ac3:
2.4.12-ac3
Finally, apply these two patches to 2.4.12-ac3 to yield 2.4.12-ac3+hogstop+eatcache
Hogstop+Eatcache

This is currently the ultimate in Linux VM performance.

1. He isn't a company.
2. He has made a joint statement that "patents as they stand now are a real problem".
3. Are you sure? What does it actually claim? The USPTO search page says no inventor named Torvalds has filed for a patent in the last 211 years. Are you thinking of his trademark (very different both legally and ethically)?

Happy New Year: It's 1984

With technical people, the argument should be towards the ineffectiveness of the USA bill

CRYPTO-GRAM special issue

And in general

EFF alerts

ACLU site

lwn.net is a good site, it would be sad to see them go... As opposed to sites such as /. they actually produce original content themselves.

Just like the majority of you readers, I am not a kernel developer. But I like to know what I'm running. My conclusion is that if you want a stable kernel, ignore Linus' tree and use the Alan Cox tree. To say it blunt, 2.4.10+ really is 2.5, and you should only run it if you are prepared for some weird behaviour.
Now am I a troll? Hope not. I did get my info out of Kernel Traffic, which I've been reading for months. It is a very good, understandable and clear compression of all important things that happen on the linux kernel mailinglist. If you use Slashdot as your only information portal about the kernel, you are *braindead*.
Ok, now my point - it is the VM subsystem. By now you should know that 2.4.x, until recently 2.4.10, used the VM code by Rik van Riel. That code has taken some time to develop, but you definitely can't blame Rik as the cause for all 2.4 stability problems, as well as the eternal delay of 2.5. But according to the l-k list, Linus himself made several errors in including Rik's patches, which indeed caused 2.4.7 and up to be unstable! Ok, now stop and think about this. Linus has an enormous responsibility. He didn't realize where the fault was, but he did perceive that the stable kernels were NOT stable. He knew that Andrea Arcangeli was still working on his own VM (that work improved Rik's VM too in 2.3. Not having a monopoly really does improve invention!) Then Linus made the big step: even in a *stable* series, he took over Andrea's VM and threw out Rik's one. This is really an important decision, and I applaud it!
The only thing Linus should not have done, is labeling this thing 2.4.10. It really is 2.5. For the big public, that kernel was definitely everything but a stable kernel. Luckily a lot of problems have been solved since (2.4.11 is a hell of a lot better than 2.4.10), and I consider Andrea Arcangeli really a good coder, but actually I trust Alan Cox most. He commented that Linus' recent kernels trashed several boxes of his overnight. Alan really sees the -ac tree as the stable one currently. I run 2.4.9-ac18 too, with the kernel preemption patch as mentioned earlier, on a p2-233 with quite some load, and it doesn't show any strange behaviour. (The kernel preemption patch doesn't do really much here: I still get skips when I record an mp3 from my soundcard and switch desktops in the meantime. But I should not expect wonders :))
One last thing: Rik van Riel's VM has improved *too*. Alan Cox catches up with his patches very speedily. No more big bugs; Rik even added some optimizations in 2.4.9-ac16. I can't see that of course, but overall the system is a lot more responsive than 2.4.3-pre6, my last kernel before this one.
So my advice: use the ac-series of the kernel. Linus has made some wise decisions. I think he should start 2.5 and leave 2.4 to Alan, before people go sulking about 2.4.10 versus the always-stable reputation of the Linux kernel.

Fixed link

Government research has always been *nix oriented. I am in radar meteorology and most of our specialized software runs only on *nix machines. Linux clusters are becoming very popular, and are appearing everywhere in the atmospheric science community. Check out one of the bigger clusters.

I would expect that if any benchmarks came out favoring Windows, and if they were reported here

Benchmarks did come out favoring Windows. They were indeed loudly shot down with criticisms of the testing protocol, and with criticisms of the (Microsoft-funded, in this case) bias of the testing agency. And yes, both those criticisms were just as valid: e.g. not very.

The testing protocol, just as in this case, deliberately chose an aspect of performance that didn't have much practical meaning (load balancing between many 100MB NICs rather than using one GB card; using pipes on Windows instead of sockets/COM).

The testing agency, just as in this case, was horribly biased.

So what was the difference? Well, first of all, the biases were a lot more real before. People pointed out hand-tuning that was applied to NT and not Linux, hardware choices that seemed to deliberately use the least supported options, and misconfigurations of the Linux software. Do you have any similar things to point out here, other than "Everybody knows you shouldn't use pipes on Windows"?

The second difference? Even after those biases were taken into account, there was still aspects in which Linux's performance could be improved, and so it was, gradually over the next 18 months, until it now beats Windows in the same configurations. Do you think that the converse will be true, and Windows 2003 will have blazing performance in all forms of IPC? Would you like to bet money?

Sheesh... just read the security section of Linux Weekly News every thursday and you're more than safe.

That's right: marketshare doesn't matter. And here, I'm taking "marketshare" to mean either (a) the number of servers sold or (b) the number of servers running.

The reason why marketshare doesn't matter: every server connected to a TCP/IP network is "touching" every other server connected to that network. Marketshare has no bearing on which servers can possibly infect which other servers in a population, only connectivity does. Essentially, the "population" of unix servers on the internet all "touch" one another, just like the population of all IIS servers "touch" one another.

That said, it hasn't really been a banner year for Linux/Unix/BSD worms. We've seen adore, l1on, cheese, ramen, sadmind/IIS, lpdw0rm, and x.c. Absolutely none of these worms ripped through the Linux/Unix/Solaris/BSD population. This is indisputable. The question is why does one population have resistance, while the other doesn't? I think the answer is diversity on four levels:

• CPU architecture. Sure, Linux/Unix/etc boxes are far and away x86-based, but having a sprinkling of SPARC, Alpha, Mips and PPC probably makes a difference - no single shellcode or exploit covers all architectures.
• OS architecture. Instruction-level calling sequences probably prevent a "universal" shellcode from working on all OSes that a given CPU architecture runs.
• Web server variety. Sure, Apache dominates, but WN, iPlanet and thttpd have a presence.
• Userland software variety. A huge variety of email clients that don't share a common scripting language or address book format keeps NIMDA and SirCam like things from happening.

The "security standards" mentioned are to be developed in the future; one can, without too much trouble, imagine that these standards to not specify "source available so that the security systems can be changed." [errors in original]

Good imagination, guys, especially given that the consensus in the security community is that open systems are more secure rather than less. This bizarre, paranoid speculation is as much FUD as anything that Microsoft has promulgated.

Tim

Just a few weeks ago I used to think that it was important to figure out how to get Linux to compete with Microsoft, so that Microsoft's dominance might be broken, so that those of us who use Linux wouldn't be stuck with people sending us things in proprietary Microsoft formats, and telling us to boot into Windows to configure this or that piece of hardware. I would have thought that strategic questions of what sort of office aps free software developers were working on was very important.

And they are important. But that's not the primary call to arms any more. The issue is no longer whether Linux can compete with Microsoft. The issue is how long those of us in the USA will still be able to legally use Linux at all. The front has changed. It's not dominance; it's survival.

See the article on slashdot a few days back about the SSSCA. See this week's Linux Weekly News (September 13). There's a law out there about to be proposed which would make it illegal for those of us in the USA to continue to use Linux (at least connected to the internet) or any other free software as we know it.

To heck with the Microsoft monopoloy. It's a terrible thing, but at least we can use Linux now. We have to make sure we don't lose that. This is the call to arms that every Linux, BSD, Perl, Apache, or other free software has to heed. Write your congressmen. Write your senators. Don't sit back and let apathy win the day, as it did three years ago with the DMCA. We have to fight this fight, and we have to fight it now, or soon we won't have the luxury of debating what sort of office software will be best to strategically position Linux.

-Rob

UNIX sucks... even Miguel de Icaza admitted himself. Then again there are exceptions (Free/Open BSD) ;-)

corporations don't like Linux... better off they hire a bunch of temp programmers... write their own UNIX distribution... and then let them go... plain and simple... every UNIX distribution is like... that's why UNIX sucks! I'll be honest and give *BSD credit... i run FreeBSD 4.3 on my 400, and I love that dam box... how the fuck is *BSD dying anyway? maybe *nix is dieing, but my friend *BSD will live...

Repeatedly Yours,

GaylordFucker

P.S. *linux and /. is dieing

From an interview with Bruce Momjian last year:

So for example, one of the first things we decided was that no more than a few of the core developers could be hired by one company. We clearly stated this to Great Bridge. We did not want a case where they basically just came in and hired everybody, because people outside the group would say "Well, who are we working for now? Is this an open source project, or is this just Great Bridge working on Postgres?" So it was a very deliberate thing to say that only a few people would be involved with Great Bridge.

...

We have three core developers hired by Great Bridge.

According to this article, the integrated desktop and probably the start button will be gone in version 6.0.
quote

OpenOffice, and its predecessor StarOffice, are integrated office packages and include a word processor, web browser, and spreadsheet tools. In fact, StarOffice 5.2 contained just about everything a desktop user could need, including an integrated desktop. But with the adoption of desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE, future releases of StarOffice and OpenOffice will no longer carry the integrated desktop.

end quote

The above quote is from the following source:

LWN.net

and so does Unix
face it you Unix freaks... Unix is dead... built on the same old code... closed source mostly... proprietary... i don't see any point of "innovation" from here on in... maybe Unix is the cancer... the only acception being FreeBSD... thank you

Shoutouts:
cyborg_monkey
RagingIdiot
buttfucker2000
mackga
TroLLaXoR
SpanishInquisition
Vlad

No Shouts to:
CmdrTaco
goatse.cx
Paul Buffet
and last, but certainly not least, RMS (I need a shower)

Dirk used to work at Deutsche Bank where he was head of Unix Strategy. You can see a short biography of him at the main SuSe site.

He was heavily involved in the XFree86 project, which SuSE have supported for a number of years, in addition to their support for KDE, OpenLDAP etc.. There is an interview with him at Changelog.

I think he will be missed at SuSE but they employ over 220 people worldwide and support many more development effors, while making a profit, so don't write them off on the basis of this announcement.

I am currently running SuSE 7.2 on both my PC and Laptop. It is the best distribution I have used to date and the Support for XFree86 and KDE2.x is useful and appreciated.
One interesting observation concerns a recent install I did on my IBM X21 Laptop, when SuSE was installed from DVD it installed completely in under an hour and correctly recognised network card and video Driver. Installing Windows 2000 on the other partition failed to recognise network or video card, it took 5 hours of downloads to fix this. Power management also works a treat on the laptop by defaut, credit and thanks to SuSE for this, and good luck for the future.

Unfortunatly I don't have a link to post, but I read about this on LWN (like a month or so ago) that they were already running (mostly) Linux in the back-end of the shop. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...

1. The code was formally released to the public.
   
2. It's the first time it's called "Linux".
   
3. Oct 5th is my birthday as well :P.
   

Actually, Opera can do anti-aliased text too. There is a screenshot floating around somewhere too, but i can't find a link at the moment.
As a sidenote, there's a new "technology preview" version of Opera for Linux out now.

According to last week's LWN Kernel page, a good number of Gnome applications show similar behavior. I hope this really does work for Mozilla, i haven't changed over yet because it tends to be slow on my old computer here...

I believe strongly that all published software should be Free Software.

It's exactly this sort of intolerance of other licenses and needs that has made me less and less supportive of the FSF and the GPL as time goes on. At least the BSD crowd acknowledges that users' needs differ and doesn't try to impose (and yes, "impose" is> the correct word) its worldview on all software universally. It's interesting that his very first words are so revealing of the FSF philosophy on this point.

BTW, I encourage you to thank the GNU project by reminding people that the system so often called "Linux" is actually the GNU system with Linux as its kernel

No, it's not. This is true for most distributions, but many of us prefer real Unix-flavored (usually derived from BSD) versions of the utilities for good reasons: 1) they're more compatible, and work as expected, 2) they are free from ridiculous GNU-isms like the hideous "--" options, and 3) they are also sometimes considerably more stable. I'm getting a little tired of the GNU/FSF folks trying to take all the credit for Linux. It's a crock, and they know it - there is not a single piece of GNU software that is completely essential to Linux - it would be a pain to replace it all (especially the compilers and thier ilk), but it *could* be done. Linux is Linux, GNU is a set of mediocre Unix utility ripoffs.

Let people know the threat that software patents have for small software businesses and Free Software.

This is just a flat-out lie. I know patents aren't popular here because so many in the community have learned from the FSF to hate them. The reality is that patents of *any* kind are a huge factor in levelling the playing field with the "big corporations" Kuhn so likes to demonize. A world without patents simply guarantees that companies like Microsoft will have total domination. (I do think that patents in fast-moving technology areas should have a much shorter term, say five years, but eliminating patents is NOT the answer - see my letter to LWN last year on this subject for a full explanation.)

Sometimes, people get confused and think that Emacs really is a religion. It's not a religion, even if it is a way of life for some of us. ;)

I'm not really sure he's joking here, despite the smiley... :-)

I also should mention that it was only a partial victory for freedom in January 2001 when Apple released APSL 1.2. They
came much closer to a Free Software license than the APSL 1.0, but they fell short by continuing to require that "deployed"
versions in an organization be published. Thus, they still restrict the important freedom of private modifications.

An alternative view held by many would be that Apple has explicitly preserved the freedom of private modifications. In reality, the APSL is less restrictive and more free than the GPL in this regard.

Recently, I changed my mode of dress to be a bit more traditional, and I cut my long hair. I did this in part because my fiancee wanted me to, but also in part because I realize that non-hackers are sometimes threatened by the "typical hacker style."

This is very interesting to those of us that have long held that despite their protestations to the contrary, the free software movement is indeed inextricably tied to a communist worldview. RMS and others routinely deny this even though it's the only logical conclusion one can reach upon reading and thoughtful consideration of their positions on the issues. The fact that they are more aggressively pursuing subversive tactics should come as a sharp warning to those that are "a bit uncomfortable" with GPL/FSF/GNU.

was also published on lwn.net, and linked to on the front page. I think it somewhat disingenuous to cite only the criticism and not the response, when they are given equal play by your sources. Could it be that once you read eEye's response the discussion pretty much evaporates? I think they did a good job of answering the criticism (as does LWN's editor). In short, eEye didn't aid and/or abet anyone. All of the info required to write Code Red was already available, and it was a slight modification that turned a previous worm into Code Red.

AFAIK, both Titanic and Shrek were rendered on Linux. (They were using Alphas in Digital Domain and Intels at PDI to do it.)

Furthermore, PDI is using Linux *on the desktop* since early 2001.

From LWN on HP's focus on the digital content creation market,
A ZDNet article (originally from the Wall Street Journal) about ILM and Pixar's migrations to Linux. Apparently Pixar were in the middle of a migration from an SGI setup to WinNT when they decided Linux was a better choice.

Virtual memory performance in 2.4.x is still widely considered to be poor; it is, perhaps, the single largest outstanding problem with the 2.4 series

actually php is quite unsafe if not used properly (even in comparison to asp sometimes) A Study In Scarlet. Exploiting Common Vulnerabilities in PHP Applications. And I can assure you that java doens't have these holes ;)

Just be glad that Yodaiken holds the patent and not Micro$oft. Then you'd have no way to use the software at all.

I'm not sure you know Victor's intentions, so let me fill you in a little ...

The RTLinux project on which Victor's patent is based was first implemented by Michael Barbanov as his master's thesis. Did we ever hear about Michael again? No, he's back in Russia and the patent doesn't even have his name on it. Why isn't Michael leading the project anymore ... why do we only hear about Victor now? ... go figure.

This is an open-source project in the purest of open-source traditions, right? Wrong. All RTLinux's code is copyrighted by FSMLabs and if you came to contribute it is likely that they would integrate your code without proper attribution and it has happened in the past, including code taken from the kernel. Why? Because they need to be able to sell RTLinux's source code in closed-form and they can only do this if all of the code belongs to FSMLabs. Yes (if you didn't know about this) you can purchase the RTLinux source code in closed-form if you'd like. Yes, this is legal, but is it in the spirit of open-source, that's highly debatable?

Victor first claimed that his patent was defensive, to protect himself against the evil empires who'd want to opress the OSS community. Yet, he later denied that he ever claimed that the patent was defensive. When pointed to previous RTLinux mailing list archives about his original statement, he didn't reply, but said archives have mysteriously become unavailable. Try accessing the January 2000 RTLinux mailing archives. Although all other archives are available, that one isn't. If it ever becomes available again, look at the January 27 posting by Victor, a copy of which can be found at LWN

What this community needs to realize is that Victor is not who he claims to be. He is after the money, open-source is really a secondary worry.

I much prefer Linux Weekly New's Daily Page for finding out what's going on in the linux world and their weekly summaries for commentary.

If I want to hear what people are saying about a story, Slashdot is much more useful.

I still check LinuxToday every other day or so to see what stories fell through the cracks at LWN.

I have been running Linux since November or December of 1991. I've seen just about every distro that's ever been out starting with HJ Lu's boot/root floppies. Why myst people waste so much time an effors on distro bashing? It's Linux! That's all that matters. I have tried all of the "big 7" (see LWN's Distro page) from their early releases to date. When it comes down to what counts there is no significent difference between them! They all work and work well. They will do the job that needs to be done if you have a resonably compitent SysAdmin to run them. Just like any other *NIX. I've also used Free/Net/OpenBSD and Solaris any they also work. If all the energy that is currentlly used to rant about Distros/OS/Licenses was put towards constructive things the world would be saying "Micro-WHO?" right now.

I know no one is going to actually listen to me. But I'll keep tilting at windmills till I can't ride any more.

"its not lame anti ms rhetoric"
Is this supposed to suggest that other MS articles that are posted to /. *ARE* "lame anti ms rhetoric"?

It sounds to me like it means: "This is not the same punditry you've seen before bemoaning MS being the holder of all keys, it is a technical discussion of the protocol/service".

There was no mention of other Slashdot stories. I think it's assumed that Slashdot readers also consult various other sources of news and information (being that most of the stories are from reader submissions and all)

/. isn't exactly renowned for it's editing, but this seems to be a new low.

The post also has nothing to do with the article, we're given very little info.

Slashdot has never been about the editing. It's about geeks swapping info/opinions/war stories/etc about the news of the day.

If you want good editing, visit Linux Weekly News at http://www.lwn.net/. Or if you want to bash other people's editing, you can do that, and have the power to rate the story itself down, so it won't get posted, over at Kuro5hin - http://www.kuro5hin.org/

Not true, but I can understand why you would say this.

Before free software can innovate beyond the state of the art, it has to achieve the state of the art. In some areas, free software has been state of the art for years: running tasks on a server, for example. Apache is an extremely popular web server, and it has been around about as long as web servers have; the free software world didn't have to play catch-up, Apache hit the ground running. Compare with the desktop environment. Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984, but it was a joke. It became usable in 1990, good around 1992 (Windows 3.1, can't swear to the exact year) and in 1995, a decade after it first appeared, it was refined and polished and ready. GNOME and KDE both have taken less time to get to where they are now, and they will gain polish quickly now.

I agree that the menu editor in GNOME sucks. I'm not sure I agree that the root menu should be as customizable as you wish for; I like being able to find things on strange systems. Debian has a balance I like very much: the main GNOME menus you can edit as you like, but there is a "Debian" menu where everything is always in the same place. So on any strange Debian machine, I can still find a web browser and launch it. (But this is free software, and it is very possible for someone to hack the code to give you what you want.)

I read Linux Weekly News every week, and I am constantly reading about cool innovations, many of them in the Linux kernel itself but some in user programs. For example, the Tux web server showed how tight integration inside the kernel could speed web access, and now Microsoft is doing web servers that use the same idea; free software was there first. There are lots of little cool hacks being rolled into the kernel all the time, making it ever faster; just this week in LWN I read about a simple patch that improved the virtual memory manager's performance by 12%!

The Python language, IMHO, blows the doors off of Visual Basic, and it's free software; and the free editor vim is available now with Python compiled in as a macro language. I was excited when I found that one out: my favorite editor, now with a full-powered scripting language! (I guess you had to be there. Or something.)

In short, there are lots of innovations all around us.

In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.

By definition, a "killer app" is something you cannot get anywhere else. When Visicalc first appeared, it sold a ton of Apple II computers: people who worked with numbers would go to computer stores and say "Sell me a Visicalc!" Well, of course they needed an Apple to run it on, so they bought that too. Lotus 1-2-3 was a dramatically more powerful spreadsheet than Visicalc, and had graphing too; in other words, it had valuable features not available anywhere else, so people bought in on the IBM PC platform. Desktop publishing worked on a Mac long before it worked on a PC, and so sold a ton of Macs.

Now, I'm trying to imagine an application that you can write for free operating systems that is not available anywhere else, and will not quickly appear on Windows and the Mac if you do write it. Nothing comes to mind. I don't think there will be any killer app for free operating systems.

The free stuff is going to win, though. My definition of winning, in this context, is that normal people will use free software in such large numbers that it will become impossible for Microsoft or anyone else to lock people in with a proprietary product. I will be happy when Microsoft Word flawlessly imports and exports AbiWord documents, because there are so many AbiWord documents out there that Microsoft simply cannot ignore them. That day is coming.

steveha

Not true, but I can understand why you would say this.

Before free software can innovate beyond the state of the art, it has to achieve the state of the art. In some areas, free software has been state of the art for years: running tasks on a server, for example. Apache is an extremely popular web server, and it has been around about as long as web servers have; the free software world didn't have to play catch-up, Apache hit the ground running. Compare with the desktop environment. Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984, but it was a joke. It became usable in 1990, good around 1992 (Windows 3.1, can't swear to the exact year) and in 1995, a decade after it first appeared, it was refined and polished and ready. GNOME and KDE both have taken less time to get to where they are now, and they will gain polish quickly now.

I agree that the menu editor in GNOME sucks. I'm not sure I agree that the root menu should be as customizable as you wish for; I like being able to find things on strange systems. Debian has a balance I like very much: the main GNOME menus you can edit as you like, but there is a "Debian" menu where everything is always in the same place. So on any strange Debian machine, I can still find a web browser and launch it. (But this is free software, and it is very possible for someone to hack the code to give you what you want.)

I read Linux Weekly News every week, and I am constantly reading about cool innovations, many of them in the Linux kernel itself but some in user programs. For example, the Tux web server showed how tight integration inside the kernel could speed web access, and now Microsoft is doing web servers that use the same idea; free software was there first. There are lots of little cool hacks being rolled into the kernel all the time, making it ever faster; just this week in LWN I read about a simple patch that improved the virtual memory manager's performance by 12%!

The Python language, IMHO, blows the doors off of Visual Basic, and it's free software; and the free editor vim is available now with Python compiled in as a macro language. I was excited when I found that one out: my favorite editor, now with a full-powered scripting language! (I guess you had to be there. Or something.)

In short, there are lots of innovations all around us.

In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.

By definition, a "killer app" is something you cannot get anywhere else. When Visicalc first appeared, it sold a ton of Apple II computers: people who worked with numbers would go to computer stores and say "Sell me a Visicalc!" Well, of course they needed an Apple to run it on, so they bought that too. Lotus 1-2-3 was a dramatically more powerful spreadsheet than Visicalc, and had graphing too; in other words, it had valuable features not available anywhere else, so people bought in on the IBM PC platform. Desktop publishing worked on a Mac long before it worked on a PC, and so sold a ton of Macs.

Now, I'm trying to imagine an application that you can write for free operating systems that is not available anywhere else, and will not quickly appear on Windows and the Mac if you do write it. Nothing comes to mind. I don't think there will be any killer app for free operating systems.

The free stuff is going to win, though. My definition of winning, in this context, is that normal people will use free software in such large numbers that it will become impossible for Microsoft or anyone else to lock people in with a proprietary product. I will be happy when Microsoft Word flawlessly imports and exports AbiWord documents, because there are so many AbiWord documents out there that Microsoft simply cannot ignore them. That day is coming.

steveha

It's quite a relief that they are actually publishing it for free online, since I bought the first edition a little while back, before realizing that, duh, it'll be totally useless because I'll have to figure out how to update a 2.0.x driver to 2.4.x, since 2.0.x probably won't support my computer even if I did want to use it.

Anyway, kudos to Tim, and kudos to the author. I might have to fork over the green for a first to second edition "upgrade" (20% off, I believe) if this really turns out to be a useful book.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

In general, is it not possible that GPL'd 'reference implementations' could simply be referred to rather than embraced and extended by those who have license issues?

Great reporting, guys.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

Great reporting, guys.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

All I want to know is wheather or not the VM is stable. From what I understand it has been the source of instability and deadlock. I know Linus, Rik van Riel, Andrea Arcangeli, and others have been hunting for the source of the reported problems and did find some potentialially serious bugs but it's been difficult to reproduce the problem which as the programmers here know greatly complicates finding a fix. I'm getting some of this from the last paragraph of the Kernel page at lwn.net and there's an intersting thread in the lk mailing list here: Re: VM in 2.4.7-pre hurts.... Anyone have any insight into this particular problem? And I wonder if Linus will drop the issue and turn his attention to the imminent 2.5. I think that would be a mistake.

Fortunately, there is some Free competition for this part of their scheme as well. The DotGNU project, announced last week (LWN article here), aims to develop a completely independent project with similar aims to .NET, with two important differences. One, it is Free Software, and thus cannot be used to lock people into proprietary solutions. Secondly, it actually is addressing the problem of security and privacy.
IMHO, if they can raise enough interest (and funds) this is the horse to back. With the current mainstream business interest in Free Software (and OSS), and growing dissatisfaction with MS, perhaps this could be (FS|OSS)'s 'killer app'.

quote: The FDL does preserve the "viral" nature of the GPL in a couple of ways.

GPL

quote: Tom Christiansen has noted the GPL could be called "viral".

is

quote: The way it does this is by insisting that the code and anything
derived from it is also released with the GPL licence. In some senses
it is 'viral' in nature and it is this that is central to many
people's objections.

Also, it's worth noting that the word 'derived' is a little too vague.
Does a library linked to a GPL'd program need to be GPL'd also? Does
a program running on a free operating system need to be GPL'd?

There's no clear, obvious answer for either of these with the current
version of the GPL. The new version (3) is intended to fix some of
these shortcomings, but it's viral nature will remain.

a

quote: Despite the meaning "virus" normally connotes, the viral aspect of the GNU General Public License -- known formally as "copyleft" -- is a tremendous benefit to free software developers and the community they support.

viral

quote: And the licence is "viral", preventing the combination of copyleft and proprietary code.

license!!!!!

quote: This is the 'viral clause' of GPL -- it compels anyone releasing software that incorporates copylefted code to use the GPL in their new release. The Free Software Foundation says: "you must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program [any program covered by this license] or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this license."16

Reminds me of a condo where a friend of mine lives. She bought a unit at a dirt cheap price of $45K. Then shortly thereafter the building was advised to triple the asking price on their units because people mistakenly thought they must be substandard offerings. Sure enough, demand went up after the price hike.

You mean an ASCII version of Tux like this? I believe it's done using kernel source for the text. There are numerous RPMs for it found by searching on Google, including this list. If you're in to alternative Tux logos, look here, referenced by the earlier Slashdot article. Not sure about the more general "images into Tux" software, though.

It has been called an "Open Source alternative to .NET", although it is by no means a clone. Rather, it focuses on extending existing UNIX features and programs to the Internet, where they haven't been before.

Perhaps we don't need a clone, just as Linux is not a clone of Windows. And it's a good thing it is not.

Here are some articles and mentions of Piper:

On Slashdot

Linux Software Encyclopedia

Linux Weekly News

Gnome Gnotices (It's interesting to note that the article first posted there referred to Piper as an alternative to .Net. The moderator later changed that. Paranoid minds, such as mine, wonder about this and the future intentions of GNOME with respect to .Net.)

O'Reilly P2P website

SunWorld Online

And some other online magazines/forums:

Infolets

Tecnologia

Hispa MP3

--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

AFAIK the IBM "Next Generation POSIX Threads" (NGPT) is mainly a more conforming implementation of POSIX Threads than the older Linux Threads.. It's still based on "kernel threads" (i.e. clone()'d processes), but I assume the reference to M:N threading means that it can map a number of user level threads onto a different number of kernel threads in the same way Solaris maps user threads onto OS Light Weight Processes (LWPs).

There's an interesting update to the clone() man page that indicates some of the recent clone() enhancements that were added to allow full POSIX thread implementation:

http://lwn.net/2001/0628/a/man-clone.php3

And not necessarily altogether bad, either, IMO.

First, readers of LWN.net/daily will probably have read the response to RMS by Ransom Love regarding Caldera's relative Linux contriubutions. From the article:

"To bring it to the point: The only way to make Linux a successful business is to cash in. This is the other side of the medal. In the future, all Linux applications will have a price tag."

I don't necessarily agree with him, but it certainly clarifies his viewpoint.

Also, from another standpoint, per seat licenses make some sense. I don't know if it is illegal to install CLWS3.1 on a computer without a license, but you sure wouldn't be able to get any support from Caldera for it. They're just charging per machine to pay for the eventual support they expect to provide.

Probably won't do much for their general standing in the overall Linux community. But I've never used Caldera (strictly Debian for me, I'm an apt addict :) and most PHB's are certainly not members of the Linux community anyway.

LWN had a feature on tax software on Linux a little while ago. There are a few projects out there.

---

How many active distros are there for Linux right now? 14? Really? Raise of hands for Mandrake/Red Hat/Slackware/Debian/Suse? Did I miss anyone? (probably did and that will just serve to destroy my argument...).

There's more than 14. Check out LWN's Linux Distributions page for more info. Amongst those that you missed: Yellow Dog Linux, TurboLinux, Progeny, the Linux Router Project, etc...

How about your television shows? How many *major* stations are there? Certainly not 14...

Does cable count? What about satellite? How about radio stations? FM and AM?

As the goals of a large group of people come closer together, the group merges, pools resources, and strives to better the achievement of the common goal.

Which is what? To become a monopoly and lock out the industry?

How many active distros are there for Linux right now? 14? Really? Raise of hands for Mandrake/Red Hat/Slackware/Debian/Suse? Did I miss anyone? (probably did and that will just serve to destroy my argument...).

There's more than 14. Check out LWN's Linux Distributions page for more info. Amongst those that you missed: Yellow Dog Linux, TurboLinux, Progeny, the Linux Router Project, etc...

How about your television shows? How many *major* stations are there? Certainly not 14...

Does cable count? What about satellite? How about radio stations? FM and AM?

As the goals of a large group of people come closer together, the group merges, pools resources, and strives to better the achievement of the common goal.

Which is what? To become a monopoly and lock out the industry?