Slashdot Mirror

I beg to differ. You've got a lot of balls to come in and accuse me of prejudgment when you're the one who's prejudging me. In fact I've been accused (not by you obviously) of being too trusting of Microsoft on this very issue. See this thread. Anticipating the possibility of future problems absolutely does not involve prejudgment of any kind. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking through the possible scenarios. It's a lot worse to be blindsided by the unexpected at the last minute.

"Did you know git came about because an accomplished open source person dared to try and reverse engineer the protocol from the proprietary source control Linus was using, and Linus shit all over him for it?"

You're about as clueless as a person can be, aren't you? Larry McVoy, Bitkeeper's proprietary developer withdrew free use of the product after he claimed that Andrew Tridgell had reverse-engineered the BitKeeper protocols. Linus didn't "shit all over" anyone. He simply did what a great Open Source developer does, and developed something better for free.

"Did you know that Linus refused to support a kernel debugger because he doesn't like them?"

Linus wasn't opposed to a kernel debugger. He was opposed to one that wasn't small and clean: From LWN

"Another feature that is notable not for its size, but because people have tried to get me to merge it for some long is kgdb support. Which really turned out pretty small and clean, once people started putting their effort into making it so."

People with big ego's don't concede that a feature turned out small and clean and then merge it. They refuse to do so because they have argued against it, and so they say: "how dare anyone question me!!!!

"There are other examples that I'd have to dig up "

If you ever dig up a legitimate one let me know ... ROTFLMAO.

A desktop Linux client is probably not going to happen until dm-verity gets in to mainline.

See this post, and then the LWN writeup for details.

A desktop Linux client is probably not going to happen until dm-verity gets in to mainline.

See this post, and then the LWN writeup for details.

Since a European Union antitrust ruling, Microsoft has been co-operating with the Samba team by providing them documentation. This is a news article from 2008: http://lwn.net/Articles/262891/ Sure, it's only because they have been forced to, so Microsoft may not get any points for being nice; but my understanding is that the Samba guys have been pleasantly surprised by the working relationship they now have with their opposite numbers at MS.

Please. Sony is part and parcel of all the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits against people violating their copyright. Yet one of their public representatives is concerned about someone enforcing the terms of the GPL and seeks a way to "protect" people from them.

While I think Tim will probably continue to give his personal support the ToyBox project (note: Sony has *not* given its support to ToyBox -- that was reported incorrectly), it was clear that much of Tim's worries about Conservancy's enforcement efforts were based on rumors spread by a few people and those rumors weren't accurate.
http://lwn.net/Articles/483016/

They wanted an alternative not because it was superior but because it would allow for a legal dodge to avoid licensing compliance.

Do you object to bionic as well? In any case here's the reasoning behind the project, no real problem with that.

You're not the only one asking that question.

People have been noticing the lack of security and bug fixes for a while.

More directly towards your question, this thread raised what some people called a sh*tstorm when Caitlyn Martin wrote about rebasing off another distro because a slackware.com contributor wrote about the problems being due to an old server and finances.

Realistically, who wouldn't be worried after a year of semi-somnolence, long outages (in a distro that people use as a server because of its' bsd-like reputation... oh the irony), and a reply like that?

Ultimately, the original question - the lack of any activity for months at a time - hasn't been properly addressed. It's worse than the Mandriva situation - Mandriva continues to have timely bug fixes and security updates - on an almost daily basis - and their web site is always pretty responsive.

If there were only a few linux distros out there, maybe slack could make a come-back - but there are ~1,000 distros, many with much larger user bases, much more activity, that are far better supported. Unfortunately, in view of that, it's irresponsible to recommend slackware to anyone looking for a Linux distro, either for their own use, business, or as a base to build a spin-off, unless they're ready to assume the burden of maintaining and improving it going forward.

Maybe he ate some infected toe jam. But the big question is: Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.

Make that 'the ambulence and the hospital computers were running free software, or more recently, libre software. Remember, he specifically refuses to be associated w/ open source, and is all about people getting certain rights, regardless of whether they're capable of doing anything w/ it. By which, I'm talking about the vast majority of things. But to answer your question, yeah, he's indeed a hypocrite, b'cos not only does he want 'non-free' systems to be avoided at all costs - he wants them to actually be shut down by government fiat.

Note that this is also the same man who wrote on his blog:

"[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness." - May 2003

In other words, he thinks that children & animals are capable of approving sex acts? But I believe this, having read his wacko blog, which even the Greenies and Communists would cringe reading. But not NAMBLA or any of the Islamic groups now taking over the 'Arab Spring' countries.

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." - June 2006

RMS fans hate when these get mentioned, and they'll often call them lies without clicking on the links and seeing that they come directly from Stallman's online blog. Stallman is a kook, and he needs to be called out as one. This conference he fell ill at was about the "dangers of a digital society." He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him. Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).

How does this 'emailing a daemon' work? One still needs an internet connection to be able to do that. And one means to say that after everything else that's been tossed into Emacs, it can't contain a simple text based browser like elinks? His computer - a Lemote Yeedong - based on a Loongson CPU - has everything he considers sacred - a free BIOS, one great libre distro 'GNewSense' (since ones like Debian, Red Hat are not really free), and Emacs - what else could he need? Now, he should be admitted into a hospital whose computers have only that configuration, so that even the MRI machines and other computerized equipment are hooked on to only free, sorry libre, computers.

Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software?

What about you? Let's say a bunch of evil communists take over the United States (or your own country), and place all hospitals and roads under their dominion. It would still be relatively easy for you to avoid working at an hospital, or avoid working on the roads, because supposedly, there would still be other types of jobs available, but what would you do if you still wanted to walk outside on the streets, or needed to get treated in an emergency? Would you really place your very life or the very life of your family below the priority of your ideals? I doubt that.

And regarding his personal political views, you do not need to like the guy to appreciate some of what he has done. Case in point, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.

He's an anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him.

As your link references, he sees this as a time-management strategy that works for him. He says nothing about suggesting others to do the same. And yes, some people do some pretty weird things to avoid getting distracted by the Internet, but in his case, since he's actually been a very productive software developer, compared to the overwhelming majority of developers which I've run across, he may be someone worth emulating when it comes to getting things done and avoiding distractions.

Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).

RMS is respected by some Techies, yes, for some of his software contributions, and yes, some of his more extreme software licensing views are even respected by some Techies as well, but "worship" is a bit of an hyperbole here.

In any case, I hope he's alright.

Maybe he ate some infected toe jam. But the big question is: Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.

Note that this is also the same man who wrote on his blog:

"[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness." - May 2003

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." - June 2006

RMS fans hate when these get mentioned, and they'll often call them lies without clicking on the links and seeing that they come directly from Stallman's online blog. Stallman is a kook, and he needs to be called out as one. This conference he fell ill at was about the "dangers of a digital society." He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him. Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).

Network Cards & PCI Cards Firmware: No protection or detection of rootkits / malware, & AMD CPU issue

# Designing and implementing malicious hardware

"Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.

We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speciïc attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such flexible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more ïexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest."

https://db.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/

# Attacking network cards

"I've reached my goal of writing a totally transparent firewall bypass engine for those firewalls which are PC-based: you simply overwrite the firmware in both NICs and then perform PCI-to-PCI transfers between the two cards for suitably formatted IP packets (modern NICs have IP "offload engines" in hardware and therefore can trigger on incoming and outgoing packets). The resulting "Jedi Packet Trick" (sorry, couldn't resist) fools, amongst others, CheckPoint FW-1, Linux-based Strongwall, etc. This is of course obvious as none of them check PCI-to-PCI transfers. "

https://lwn.net/Articles/284162/
http://www.links.org/?p=330

# 'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs
# Password-protected feature goes beyond x86

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/15/amd_secret_debugger/

# Super-secret debug capabilities of AMD processors !

http://www.woodmann.com/collaborative/knowledge/index.php/Super-secret_debug_capabilities_of_AMD_processors_!

# Hidden Debug Mode Found In AMD Processors

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/047243/Hidden-Debug-Mode-Found-In-AMD-Processors

# A microcode reliability update is available that improves the reliability of systems that use Intel processors

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936357

# Google: attacking network cards malware, PCI rootkit, PCI rootkits, rootkit firmware, etc.

Network Cards & PCI Cards Firmware: No protection or detection of rootkits / malware, & AMD CPU issue

# Designing and implementing malicious hardware

"Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.

We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speciïc attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such ïexible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more ïexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest."

https://db.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/

# Attacking network cards

"I've reached my goal of writing a totally transparent firewall bypass engine for those firewalls which are PC-based: you simply overwrite the firmware in both NICs and then perform PCI-to-PCI transfers between the two cards for suitably formatted IP packets (modern NICs have IP "offload engines" in hardware and therefore can trigger on incoming and outgoing packets). The resulting "Jedi Packet Trick" (sorry, couldn't resist) fools, amongst others, CheckPoint FW-1, Linux-based Strongwall, etc. This is of course obvious as none of them check PCI-to-PCI transfers. "

https://lwn.net/Articles/284162/
http://www.links.org/?p=330

# 'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs
# Password-protected feature goes beyond x86

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/15/amd_secret_debugger/

# Super-secret debug capabilities of AMD processors !

http://www.woodmann.com/collaborative/knowledge/index.php/Super-secret_debug_capabilities_of_AMD_processors_!

# Hidden Debug Mode Found In AMD Processors

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/047243/Hidden-Debug-Mode-Found-In-AMD-Processors

# A microcode reliability update is available that improves the reliability of systems that use Intel processors

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936357

# Google: attacking network cards malware, PCI rootkit, PCI rootkits, rootkit firmware, etc.

They gratuitously change the API's whenver they feel like BECAUSE people like nVidia exploit their work without sharing manuals (for the hardware customers /pay/ for). It's meant to DISCOURAGE closed-blob driver bullshit.

http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/lt-binary.html

K. Y. Srinivasan topped the list of changeset contributors with a massive set of cleanups to the Microsoft HV driver in the staging tree; it's impressive to see how much cleanup less than 15,000 lines of code can require.

It appears that Microsoft's contribution needed a lot of cleaning up to bring it up to scratch.

Perhaps an honest mistake, the link is broken. Second, evidence has shown SATA are more reliable than commercial/enterprise grade drive. Only buy those if you don't like your money, or there is some clear advantage. That supposed advantage is not reliability, unless there is there is some sort of rapid replacement mechanism coming with the drive. Although replacement isn't reliability in my book.

http://lwn.net/Articles/237924/

Watching a directory tree or mount point is possible with the new fanotify API. You define a mark -- from the looks of it, basically a pattern against which events are matched.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/fanotify-howto-recursive-mark-directory-changes-918231/
https://lwn.net/Articles/360955/
https://lwn.net/Articles/339253/

This wasn't possible with inotify for an arbitrarily large number of files -- anyone who tried will remember inotify has to recursively scan and registers all files first.

gimme_filesystem_changes_since_i_last_checked() isn't done because that would require the kernel to keep a list that may grow arbitrarily.

Watching a directory tree or mount point is possible with the new fanotify API. You define a mark -- from the looks of it, basically a pattern against which events are matched.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/fanotify-howto-recursive-mark-directory-changes-918231/
https://lwn.net/Articles/360955/
https://lwn.net/Articles/339253/

This wasn't possible with inotify for an arbitrarily large number of files -- anyone who tried will remember inotify has to recursively scan and registers all files first.

gimme_filesystem_changes_since_i_last_checked() isn't done because that would require the kernel to keep a list that may grow arbitrarily.

No, it doesn't. Distributions are evaluating it right now and it is failing big time. Even Xcode developers are pissed off that Apple dropped gcc. That shit ain't fully baked, and imbeciles like you who recite Apple propaganda without thought need to pull your heads out of your asses.

Another intriguing scenario is running Linux on both architectures (ARM and DSP) simultaneously, using shared memory to communicate between them.

So far, its kernel supports neither SMP nor an MMU, which means it is restricted to running Clibc instead of glibc, and it has a very limited set of applications that can be supported as long as it is missing the MMU.

The lwn post is here: https://lwn.net/Articles/472984/

There is a lot of things they're leaving out for the time being.

Yeah, there was a lot of confusion when the change happened. I think the support issues with Snow Leopard were due to the whole sandboxing thing Apple announced with the App Store, but I'm not entirely sure on that since I don't touch OS X all that often.

I do agree with the basic argument and think it entirely disingenous when a company or group pulls that kind of thing. A good example, although old, is the case of Sveasoft and the GPL. That whole situation wound up getting pretty bad as the owner started attempting to wring money from the software by putting kill switches in the firmware and blocking customers who released the GPL source code. Even worse in that case was that the owner didn't actually own all the copyrights for the software they were controlling.

Clang has been able to compile modified versions of the kernel for about 18 months. Here is a summary of the work at the here time which describes what worked and what didn't. You can track the remaining issues for compilation here. So while it's not officially supported, clang is able to produce working kernels. This suggests that it is a matter of time, code maturity and will rather than some fundamental problem. Biggest issues appear to relate to some missing register support and 16-bit x86 assembly. Most gcc extensions are actually supported for compatibility reasons but some are not.The FreeBSD kernel and userland can also be built with Clang.

This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note

This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob â" that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? Itâ(TM)s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.

Me? Iâ(TM)ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it.

Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.

Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.

Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.

The DFBSD Goals page is now empty. Hmm.

I seem to recall that at one point the goal was an OS that ran as a single OS image across multiple machines. Memory, processes, storage, etc. was unified into a single OS image. Is that still a DFBSD goal?

Someone's apparently working on an open-source input method for stenotype (Plover):

http://lwn.net/Articles/475408/

Intel was the top contributor to Linux 3.0 (by lines) (source)

IBM is in there, too at #8

Google pushed the Linux kernel and WebKit into an uncountable number of handhelds

Apple deploys Webkit, too, on a smaller number of handhelds

Amazon deploys Android, too (just without Market support), and they use Linux in their cloud offerings.

If you hate Microsoft, give in to your anger and join Oracle (there are a lot of angry JCP and OpenSolaris fans but hey, they made that Linux list, too!)

Remember those handhelds that run the Linux kernel and/or WebKit?

• Broadcom
• Atheros (are they are part of Qualcomm now? You can check out Qualcomm, part of "Qualdroid")
• Marvell

all made the top Linux contributor list, too.

I'll assume that other posters will cover the Red Hat and Novell bases.

Actually handling multitouch gestures in a special way is up to the window manager, DE, and applications.

Not so much.

See for example this, where a spec for X multitouch gestures is described. This is not something WMs can effectively support without help from X. A couple of years later, support lands as a result. Yes, it's up to the WM or whatever to interpret the events, but X needed updating to give them enough information.

Actually handling multitouch gestures in a special way is up to the window manager, DE, and applications.

Not so much.

See for example this, where a spec for X multitouch gestures is described. This is not something WMs can effectively support without help from X. A couple of years later, support lands as a result. Yes, it's up to the WM or whatever to interpret the events, but X needed updating to give them enough information.

Looks like your skimming didn't profit you much as you missed the entire point. The main point is this quote from Matthew Garrett: "People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license." Sony DOES want to use GPL code in its proprietary products, it just doesn't want to use GPL code from people who actively enforce the license.

The thing is, being aware of a (L)GPL violation doesn't give you the legal standing to bring a case against the violator; you have to be the copyright holder. Some (L)GPL projects assign their copyright to the FSF, and the FSF takes care of the legal work from there. But a lot of the most important projects-- for instance, the Linux kernel- have no copyright assignment, and individual coders generally avoid getting involved in the legalities.

Just about the only** legal work being done for (L)GPL enforcement on non-FSF software is done by the Software Freedom Conservancy on behalf of the Busybox developers esp. Erik Andersen. This is a problem, and since they're the only ones involved in enforcement they use a controversial kind of leverage to try to make a bigger difference. When somebody's violated the GPL e.g. by distributing Linux-based router firmware without releasing source, the SFC's legal team tells them their violation of Busybox's GPL license has terminated their ability to use Busybox as per GPLv2 section 4 (the GPL "death penalty"). They can't distribute their Busybox-containing firmware any more -- even if they start shipping source for Busybox in compliance with the GPL -- until they have the copyright holders' permission. The SFC won't give this permission until they comply with the licenses of all the open-source packages included in the firmware-- most importantly, the Linux kernel.

So basically the Busybox guys have been the only reason a lot of people have complied with the kernel's GPL license. The rewrite of Busybox is basically being done so the SFC can't take corporations to task for their failure to comply with the GPL license of other packages.

If a few significant contributors to the kernel banded together, got common legal representation, and had their lawyers contact people about GPL compliance, this would be a lot less of an issue. But they don't.

**I should also mention the folks behind gpl-violation.org, but they are only active in European courts and have not AFAIK done much recently.

on my machine, one debian testing amd64

1 tab - http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/01/1840252/firefox-10-released
  Chrome Virtual: 1223MB RSS: 59MB
  Firefox Virtual: 783MB RSS: 174MB

2 tabs + http://slashdot.org/
Chrome
1223+463+868=2554MB 64+62+9=135MB
Firefox
802MB 185MB

3 tabs + http://www.lwn.net/
Chrome:
1235+472+868=2575MB 66+65+9=140MB
Firefox:
803MB 182MB

4tabs + http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/02/028249/darpa-works-on-virtual-reality-contact-lenses
Chrome:
1235+473+868=2576MB 66+67+9=142MB
Firefox:
812MB 189MB

on this totally random test, chrome is good for machines with lots of swap and only one page... you add more pages and you need more virtual memory... so better have some swap so you can start other apps also

firefox is heavier to just one page, but adding tabs it doesnt increase much and used a lot less virtual memory...

You better get switching then, IPv6 NAT an exact duplicate of the IPv4 support in linux has been added

Personally I don't see why you should want to put everything behind a single address, everything on one machine would make you look like a more promising target. But I will like having the transparent proxy support. That way I'm on MORE machines and "they" attack the wrong one.

Where did they say that? What I read in all the excerpts was that the competing OS needed to built according to the rules that Intel defined when they defined UEFI secure boot.

That's not "impossible" - According to this, it should be possible. And this says it should take about a week's worth of work for any distro to support it.

That's FAR from "impossible".

'Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree.' Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for its devices since its release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/12/21/1633235/project-to-mainline-android-kernel-changes-formed

Toward the end of November, the core Android code was returned to the staging tree, from which it had been removed at the end of 2009. Since the code's return to staging, changes have been going in and the code has caught up to its state in the Android tree. The code has now reached a point where, as summarized by Greg Kroah-Hartman on December 16:

http://lwn.net/Articles/472984/

Now almost two years later, a new effort that seems to have the backing of the Linux Foundation is aiming to bring Android back to the mainline. The project is officially titled the 'Android Mainlining Project' and was announced at the end of 2011 by Tim Bird Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation and Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment.

http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/android-set-to-return-to-the-linux-mainline.-will-it-succeed.html

http://linuxpr.com/releases/2749.html is an indication that the people pulling the strings through Linux SARL are actually Suse......

No shit, Sherlock.

Y2K called and would like its press release back, please.

In Windows, I would require that it backs up and restores both the long and the short name of files, if short name support is enabled for the file system (default in Windows).

All backups including both the correct LFN and the correct SFN would have to be processed exclusively on a Windows machine because Microsoft charges a significant sum for a patent license for proper long file name support. I remember reading an article in LWN about how Linux works around the exact claim wording in the VFAT patent: each file in a folder on a FAT file system has a unique value in the short filename field, but none of them is a valid MS-DOS short filename.

There are offline de-duplication patches for BTRFS. Nobody has taken them further, though.

While de-dupe is not listed as a future BTRFS feature, there is a good debate on the merit of online vs. offline deduplication.

It is a feature much like RAID 0. You are sacrificing reliability for some other performance metric, in this case storage space. You only need 1 block of corruption to destroy n blocks of files for duplication factor of n on those files.

In practice I find dedupe is great for backup storage. However, I'll take bigger disks on production volumes anyday. (Even then you are reduping to your offsite media, right?)

Linus is a great guy and all but he's not a lawyer and there's 5000-20000 contributors with standing to sue if he relicences without their consent and you can be sure many of those rights would be bought up by SCO-like companies. In any case the lead maintainers are all against it, so they haven't made any serious effort to see if it's even feasible. Most likely you'd need to strip it back down to the core and bring systems back online very, very slowly ripping out all code of people that can't be reached or won't relicence. Even if you found some legal theory in some jurisdiction that'd let you do it any other way, it'd be a copyright infringement and legally toxic in the rest of the world.

For fucks sake - this is getting ridiculous. Just how many sock puppet accounts do you have?

Anyway, to drag my comment back on topic, you (plural) are misrepresenting Stallman's POV, perhaps out of ignorance, but more likely to troll. As a prime example:

Stallman absolutely is paranoid about everything. He doesn't use web browsers, for crying out loud,

You make it sound like Stallman doesn't use browsers out of paranoia, but Stallman himself says:

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

The whole article is a complete non sequitar. Free software wouldn't prevent Obama from signing an indefinite detention bill, nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs. There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.

Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia" should be legal, including possession of child pornography. He doesn't visit web sites--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public.

Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.

A broken clock can be right some of the time. Claiming Stallman was right all along is like claiming the paranoid street preacher predicting natural disasters as God's judgement was right all along after a hurricane hits. He may have predicted something that ended up occurring, but that doesn't mean his approach to solving the issue nor his philosophy are in the same bucket.

The author of this piece, Thom Holwerda at OSNews, is becoming known over there as a pandering, flamebait author in the vein of Dvorak. His essays come off as if they're specifically designed to get posted on Slashdot. Because of that, I suspect there will be more submissions from him in the future, unfortunately.

That's the point. The Windows development model means that most drivers are "third party" in the sense that the driver must be installed separately to the operating system, and third party driver developers aren't held to the same standard that Microsoft (or the developers of any Windows-bundled driver) are. This happens less in the Linux world because most drivers are bundled with the kernel and reviewed more thoroughly before being committed.
 
Both operating systems are still vulnerable to dodgy drivers regardless due to the fact that they run them in kernel mode, and these sorts of things will keep happening until user-space drivers become commonplace.

Wakelocks were already disliked in 2009: http://lwn.net/Articles/318611/

More specifically windows requires non-overlapping kernel and user address spaces. So does a regular linux kernel.

There were patches for linux ( http://lwn.net/Articles/39283/ ) that implemented a "4G/4G" system with independent user and kernel address spaces but afaict interest in them was largely lost as most newer systems became x64 capable . I doubt anything similar exists for windows.

In February 1998, well before even the first prototype IA-64 chips were available, a skunkworks team at HP, with some assistance from Intel, began the work toward porting Linux to IA-64. By October 1998,around the same time that IBM, Old SCO and Sequent had finished negotiations, HP had completed the build toolchain. By January 1999, the Linux kernel was booting on an IA-64 processor simulator, months before the actual Itanium processor was available. In March 1999, at Intel, Linux was booting on the actual Intel Itanium processor.

The SCO Group (then Caldera) which had purchased the rights to sell copies of the old Unix from Novell, sued IBM because the freely available Linux competed the SCO Groups old Unix offering.

So Oracle has become the next SCO Group, quick somebody tell PJ!

Except we can be pretty sure that, at least in the case of GNOME3 and Unity both, the design decisions were arbitrary and based upon no consequential user studies or HCI science at all. e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/429575/

On the contrary, Canonical has cheerfully asked the users about each of their UI changes, starting with the ridiculous "move the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the other side of the window" change, all the way up to "see how people react to Unity in 11.04"... They just completely ignore the feedback they get from the users, and ram the changes down our throats anyway.

Ironically enough, Windows Vista/7 doing exactly the same thing was what caused a mass migration to Ubuntu in the first place - it was more familiar to previous users of Windows than the new Windows was.

"#pragma once" is broken.

Garrett was also in large part responsible for fixing a running problem with booting on UEFI systems, particularly notebooks. (That wasn't the only patch that needed to be written, but it did provide the foundation. It's also one of the funniest developer commentaries for a patch I've ever seen.) I've seen his name attached to Linux development for a while, but it's only recently that I've come to understand just how much of the deep internal architecture he understands and has helped to fix.

Zones are somewhat lacking. They don't even support live migration. OpenVZ has been able to do this for years using network, pid, etc. namespaces, most of which have been merged into the Linux kernel now: http://lwn.net/Articles/256389/ . But Sun/Oracle are dragging their feet on this.

Old story.

http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ - Linux booted in 5 seconds to usable desktop. Back in 2008.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/01/13/2248207/embedded-linux-1-second-cold-boot-to-qt - boot to QT in 1 second.

After the huge troubles of CentOS bringing out version 6 and other turbulence, I would completely forget about CentOS and go for Scientific Linux. Scientific Linux has proved to keep up much better with RHEL than CentOS in recent times.

After the huge troubles of CentOS bringing out version 6 and other turbulence, I would completely forget about CentOS and go for Scientific Linux. Scientific Linux has proved to keep up much better with RHEL than CentOS in recent times.