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Outside of any conventional wisdom about using such a new compiler, I would refrain from trying to compile glibc with this newer version of gcc, for glibc will not compile properly.

The issues associated with compiling glibc should be fixed with the version 2.3.6 release, whenever that may be.

I started a brief web site that documents some of the issues of using the new compiler, so check it out here.

Subject:Linux 2.6.12-rc3
Linus Torvalds
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:00:21 -0700

Ok,
you know what the subject line means by now, but this release is a bit
different from the usual ones, for obvious reasons. It's the first in a
_long_ time that I've done without using BK, and it's the first one ever
that has been built up completely with "git".

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/ msg04609.html

At least Gentoo apparently. That's how linuxhardware was able to get benchmarks of various linux software on 64-bit AMD and Intel, and compare the speeds of 64 vs 32 bit binaries on both. Presumeably other AMD64 distros shouldn't have a problem.

EMT64 is basically identical to AMD64, by design since they went off of pre-release documentation for AMD64 in order to be compatible (ha! what a historic reversal of roles!). The only differences that exist between EMT64 and AMD64 are almost certainly due to errors/changes in the documentation that Intel used. These differences don't seem to stop OSes for AMD64 from running.

In the digital age you don't have to remember the syntax of each word. My invention LingoX handles this like IntelliSense in Visual Studio. Descrption.

Standard Mind.Forth AGI is a free, Open-Source Artificial General Intelligence for use in the sort of autonomous mobile robots that will one day win the DARPA Grand Challenge and other such contests.

Experimental Mind.Forth is a version of the free artificial robot Mind that may be run in test mode for experimental and developmental purposes. Both versions of the robot AGI Mind display the date they came to life and started thinking -- in a separatoe "grand challenge" for schools, laboratories and computer stores to see who, and how long, can hold the title of hosting the longest-running good-old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI).

One caveat about the DARPA and other Grand Challenges is, given that the human ability to administer the home planet is precarious at best and foolhardy at times, students of mind-design are advised to anticipate such emergencies as the total collapse of human society. If a global pandemic of AIDS or avian influenza virus were to remove normal human leadership from all major countries, stewardship of the world may pass by default to intelligent computer systems. Whether as a student exercise or whether as a real-world DARPA Grand Challenge necessity, programmers with previous experience in real-time process control and who are adding AGI techniques to their set of skills, should consider embedding the following possibilities in whatever AGI they code for autonomous mobile robots.

• Audition
  
  • control of all telephone land-lines.
  • control of all cellular telephone networks.
  • control of transoceanic cables, NRO satellites, etc.

• Vision
  
  • control of earthbound and orbiting telescopes.
  • control of all television broadcasting and cable feeds.
  • immediate access to all 'Net-connected webcams.

• Motorium
  
  • effective control of remote-control robots, drones and ships at sea.
  • control of ATM devices, point-of-sale terminals, elevators, etc.
  • control of hydroelectric and nuclear power generators.
  • nuclear weapon stockpiles of participating nations.

December, 1998:
"I've said it before in public, and I'll stick my neck out again," says Raymond, "Microsoft will no longer be a factor in that market in 18 months."

Someone asked if we had registrar-lock set. It's not clear to me what happened. Our understanding is that we had locks on all of our domains. However, when we looked, locks were off on panix.net and panix.org, which we own but don't normally use. It's not clear how that happened; dotster has yet to contact us with any information about, well, anything at all. They did answer a call this morning; they're apprently in the middle of an ice storm. All I was able to larn from them is that according to the person I talked to, they had no records of any transfer requests on our domain from today back through last October.

all the better to enhance the shock effect of your next frontal assault.
The next attack will be against BSD, not binary linux.
http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@gentoo.org/ msg02991.html

I'm going to quote you out of order here. Appologies in advance:

Thanks for the unexpected air of civility on Slashdot.

it seems to me that you're interpreting what I said to mean that I really do only want the rule to apply when it is to my liking.

Mine was a general posting aimed at those who would change rules for this election while being perfectly happy to accept the outcome of the Bush/Gore election, which was strikingly similar in closeness. You will note that I did not say "you" in my original posting in this thread. Nor did I assume, or mean to imply, that you, personally, would have used a double standard. I don't believe that you would.

If I had to speculate, I'd guess that you support the results of the third recount in Washington, and that fierce political debate in that area has caused you to react to comments about the subject emotionally instead objectively.

I don't know that I would say "support." I am mildly happy that, in a state on the other side of the country, a Democrat was elected Governor.

Since my suggestion would have put your long awaited positive outcome into question you probably assumed without even thinking about it that I was arguing for the other side... But then that's just speculation.

It wasn't "long awaited" to me and, in fact, I was not even aware that there was a too-close-to-call race taking place in Washington State until I heard a news report on the third recount.

What gets my goat is the hypocrisy of the Republicans. In Florida during the Bush/Gore race, they used every dirty trick in the book to stop the recounts. They even had the gall to fly in Republican staffers, posing as concerned locals, to stage a door-kicking, window-banging protest to intimidate Miami-Dade canvassing board into suspending a recount that was underway. See this and this. They accused Democrats of the trying to steal the election. And now, four years later, albeit in a smaller election, suddenly they want each and every vote counted again and again until their candidate wins. They are mounting the types of court challenges that they lambasted the Gore for using. When Gore supporters brought up allegations of voter intimidation of minorities in Florida, later proven to be true, they were called "sore losers." When Democrats complained that Republican party operatives illegally changed 4,700 absentee ballots, Republican officials basically decided to ignore them and no charges were filed. The whole thing showed just what a vicious machine the Republican Party has become and this election shows jusy what hypocrites they really are.

The Winner of the splash screen contest has been announced

Read the announcement from the mailing list archives
here or here

Link to the Winning Splash screen image,
"work in progress..." by Bill Luhtala

Doesn't a CPU emulator also implement the specification of the CPU?

Yes, and so does the native CPU. I wouldn't say that implementing a foo is sufficient to say that it's emulating a foo.

I suppose it comes down to a definition question, but here's the basic rule-of-thumb I might tend to work from (and it's just off the top of my head):

An emulator:

1. Implements a particular interface (whether it's a well-documented interface or not). So an x86 emulator would need to implement the MOV, JMP, etc instructions.
2. Is implemented on another platform. An x86 emulator has to run on a real computer with an OS etc.
3. Takes responsibility for maintaining the complete state of the device it's emulating, insofar as it affects the result. An x86 emulator would need to maintain the registers itself, although not the "virtual" temperature.

Wine meets the first criterion: it implements the Win32 API. It also meets the second. However, it does not meet the third, because it doesn't track much state. It doesn't need to track file descriptors, or TCP/IP connections, etc, because it can leave that to the underlying OS.

Generally, I call something meeting 1, 2, and 3 an emulator. If it meets 1 and 2, I tend to refer to it as a "compatibility layer". Wine is an example. So is the Linux compatibility layer of FreeBSD (which is sometimes informally referred to as the "linuxulator", but this is taken as a fun name rather than a formal description). I'm writing a compatibility layer for a project at work now, to translate $myproj v1 API calls to $myproj v2 for-- you guessed it-- backwards compatibility. But the v2 portion tracks all the state.

I don't generally refer to things as an emulator unless they meet all three. Bochs is an emulator. So are SPIM and WABI. VMware is an interesting case: it emulates most of the hardware, but only a little bit of the CPU; the bulk of the CPU work is done natively.

If you don't consider Nitfol or a JVM as emulators, you may want to add the criterion that the interface they implement must primarily exist in a non-emulating implementation. I probably would include that criterion, but that would mean I'd have to go back and edit this post.

http://www.mail-archive.com/
http://archives.neohapsis.com/
http://readlist.com/
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/

Some of the sites have their own search, and some have a nice readable interface. Take your pick. Though I'm sure hundreds of mailing lists aren't indexed anywhere, perhaps thats what gmail is for ;-)

The Baganda (a tribe) whose native language is Luganda and from who the country name Uganda was coined, are very proud people. To this end there is a Mozilla project that was completed in Luganda. http://www.mail-archive.com/lug@linux.or.ug/msg015 66.html

I wish them success, but doubt there will be any impact in that country called Uganda.

Unfortunately, there isn't a formal roadmap at the moment for gimp 2.4, but you can find a lot of info about what you should expect from gimp 3.0. Look here and search google for more.

What's the problem with text layer tools? Everyone seems very happy with them and you shouldn't expect a change anytime soon...

Supposedly, the GPL applies to static linking and dynamic linking of GPL-covered libraries. One individual has said that proprietary software may be able to legally use GPL-covered libraries via dynamic linking. The idea is that proprietary software could be designed to use a GPL-covered library not included with the software; users would be told to install the library. The software would not contain any code from the library (header files could be redone with clean-room reverse-engineering) and thus would not be a "derivative work."

There is also a discussion about situations involving open-source license compliance. For instance, it mentions a situation where a software package uses a specific library (there are copylefted and non-copylefted versions of the same library.) If the software is not copylefted, can it be designed to look for and use the library when it is run, even if the library is copylefted? What if the copylefted version of the library is recommended over the non-copylefted version?

there doesn't seem to be any way to shift it in bulk to my home computer

There's nothing you as an individual company / organization can really do, for all the reasons you've listed.

However, if there was a concerted effort among ISPs to implement proper filtering of packets, then at least DDoS attacks that used spoofed sources would be impacted. This can't solve all types of attacks, and it requires significant cooperation and motivation because currently there is little incentive to do so. Basically you configure your border routers not to pass packets that you know are invalid -- those with RFC1918 addresses, bogon addresses, and addresses outside of your AS. This is all documented in BCP38.

So basically, tell your boss that to prevent attacks like this you can have him mandate that whatever company you decide to buy connectivity from must implement BCP38. If ISPs have an actual incentive to do this, instead of just a bunch of grey-bearded admins saying it would be a good idea, then perhaps it would be implemented more widely. Essentially, tell him to make his purchasing decisions based on "good network stewardship" and not just lowest price. If more companies did this then as a whole the DDoS landscape would clean up just a little bit.

There was recently a long thread on nanog about this. It's good reading as it shows from the operator side of the fence how the situation is known to be improveable but there's no financial (and thus managerial) reason to do it.

If you do not understand business law, please don't post as if you do.

Do you?

Linky 1
Linky 2
Linky 3 (I love the quote: "The GPL IS a contract. Calling it a license simply describes the type of contract it is. some people get confused and believe licenses are always required when copyright interests are at stake.")

I think the difficulty arises when people read things like this article which state that the GPL is a license because it is not solely enforcable by contract law. This is true. It is enforcable by contract law if the redistributer claims to have accepted the license. Yet the GPL relies on standard copyright law as a backup in case the redistributor claims to have not accepted the contractual requirements of the GPL license.

Now please, run along. For one day, I've been insulted more than enough for knowing what I'm talking about.

Of course, the Freenet routing protocol is a bit iffy right now, but when it works, it's pretty cool.

The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?

The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.

For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?

The US does not count prisoners as unemployed. The US has a huge prison population, and a much higher percentage of its population in prison than other G7 nations.

See e.g. RE: unemployment figures

It is the "xset m A/B C" setting. In this post you can see there is even a better method... just not documented (how rare... programs lacking documentation...). If you mean about the synaptics touchpads, you need special software.

The XFree86 website doesn't really reflect these issues either; if they are still working, nobody cares.

There is still activity on the mailing list

I don't think you understand. That's all that XFixes is! It's an extension containing various "fixes" to the core X functionality. That's it. That's why they seem like little things that aren't related --- because that's precisely what they are.

See this post for more context.

I just bought a Kyocera 7135 because it has recently been made to work with Linux. Though there are still some rough edges with gnome-pilot syncing (with Evolution), I easily got it working with J-Pilot. I like the 7135 because it's a more 'phone like' phone - rather than a PDA with a microphone and antennae :P

The good thing with the Treo is that it's CPU should allow for Vorbis decoding, whereas the 7135 relies on it's built in DSP for the cycles, which only supports MP3.

(http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdo wd.com/msg02554.html

It looks like there are collisions for MD5, MD4, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD

I am in the process of verifying them now, but may not be able to until my lunch break (1pm EST)

"We are glad to announce that we found a collision for SHA-0." - from the article

"it's obvious you have some issues there"

You are apparently fixated on imagining my sexual behavior, as part of your opposition to me. That's an issue that you're spreading across every post. You simultaneously deny secret Microsoft APIs, while minimizing their importance because they've been revealed. All in response to my simple question of whether new Microsoft source code can reveal the existence of secret APIs - hardly a statement that they *will* be found, but a reasonable question.

Now that we've established that *you* are insane, and I am reasonable, how about an example citation of many secret Microsoft APIs, in addition to the one mentioned in this thread, the others in the "Settlement APIs" you yourself brought up?

Can you write a backup domain controller capable of syncing contents with an NT domain controller? Or a replacement primary controller that can sync to a Microsoft backup controller?

Next time you're making your Microsoft apologies, you can add that one to your filthy rants, and keep your self destruction fresh.

• enBoot (English Bootstrap to introduce a few concepts and structures)

• Security (for both robot and human safety and for housekeeping)
  • HCI (Human-Computer Interaction for the operator of an AI)
  • Rejuvenate (for cyborg immortality -- death comes only by misadventure)
  • psiDecay (for the gradual deactivation of concepts over time)
  • Ego (for resurrecting an artificial intelligence when perhaps brain-dead by misadventure)

• Sensorium (audition, taste, smell, etc., including exotic robot senses)
  • Audition (for an AI robot to have a sense of hearing)
  • Listen (necessary for event-driven hearing and for detecting verbal input)
    --- audSTM (auditory Short Term Memory with associative tags for pattern recognition)
    --- --- audRecog (auditory pattern Recognition of heard sounds and phonemes)
  • oldConcept (for the recognition of words already known to the AI)
    --- Parser (for the identification of parts of speech in word-recognition)
    --- --- Instantiate (to create an instance or concept-node on a concept-fiber)
    --- Activate (to reactivate the concepts of words already known by an AI)
    --- --- spreadAct (spreading Activation by association from concept to concept)
  • newConcept (contributes to machine learning of new words and new concepts)
    --- enVocab (English Vocabulary, and potentially any known human language)
    --- Parser (for the identification of parts of speech in word-recognition)
    --- --- Instantiate for creating new concept-nodes or instances of any learned concept

• Emotion (fear, love, hope, etc., so that AI robots and cyborgs may have human-like feelings)

• Think (for the generation of a chain of thought by spreading activation among concepts)
  • Activate (for the reactivation of known concepts in spreading activation)

Yes, and this human dependancy is what makes them unpredictable. As soon as a reliable prediction algorithm is found, the actors (who are aware of the prediction) act on it, falsifying that same prediction.

In the case of traffic, drivers tend to move to an alternative route, which is shown to be less congested, making it more congested in the process. In the case of the stock exchange, people will buy the stocks which are predicted to rise in advance, which makes them rise or fall earlier than predicted. In both cases (traffic and stock market), actors seeking their personal gain have an active interest of "messing up" the prediction. Predicting human-dependant events is inherently difficult, unless the event is of the kind that gives a (perceived) advantage to "going with the flow", such as fashion or US presidential elections. In that case, its easy to predict, because the prediction even helps the event come true (self-fulfilling prophecy)

cars have an almost fixed size (related to the highway)

Can you spell T R U C K?

Weather is more an example of a complex system, than a 'chaotic' one, you just need a lot of information to produce a sensible prediction, but it's not a coin flipping problem (brown movement),

Chaotic is not the same as random. Even a perfectly deterministic system may be chaotic, and thus unpredictable unless initial conditions are perfectly known. In a chaotic system, tiny differences in initial conditions lead to huge differences in final conditions (the "butterfly effect"). As the initial conditions are never perfectly known (measurement errors, finite density of measurement point mesh) a long range prediction is impossible, even if the system obeys deterministic laws.

It's not solid evidence, but the bank was Abbey National and there's an old mailing list archive from November 2000 mentioning it here.

A better source I've Googled up from way back in June 2000 (18 months before this patent) is here. It talks about Abbey planning to open banks containing franchised cafes and internet banking kiosks as well as clearly showing a picture of a children's play area. I think that pretty much covers the washington patnet.

There are some excerpts here from 2000 too, if you scroll down a bit.

Can you give me the URL of your article, I'd be interested to read it - if you need any more links I can do some more digging but I think that BBC article is fairly comprehensive.

Compare this and this, then decide.

I was just browsing through Ken Brown's posts on the license-discuss archive. Along with the basically boring advocacy is a little jocular racist banter:

Here's a link. (Original from Ken is a post up in the thread.)

You know, in my old age I'm finding more and more that the bad guys really are the bad guys.

(I'm frankly dumbstruck that the president of a fake-scholarship firm would commit this type of thing to a mailing list.)

Maybe she is also interested in doing another Brown book? ;)

How does Latin Perl sound to you?

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is one of oldest well-known algorithms. As the better part of Roman culture was ``borrowed'' from the Greeks, it is perhaps fitting that the first ever Perligata program should be as well:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
fac sic
nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
cis.

The use Lingua::Romana::Perligata statement causes the remainder of the program to be translated into the following Perl:

print STDOUT 'maximum:';
my $maxim = <STDIN>;
my (@list) = (2..$maxim);
while ($next = shift @list)
{
print STDOUT $next, "\n";
@list = grep {$_ % $next} @list;
}

Note in the very last Perligata statement (lista sic hoc...da listis) that the use of inflexion distinguishes the @list that is grep'ed (lista) from the @list that is assigned to (listis), even though each is at the "wrong'' end of the statement, compared with the Perl version.

And you too can do this !

Actually, Perligata is more serious than it may seem.

On one level, it uses Latin -- which packs much of the meaning of sentences into word endings rather than word order -- as a case study for a programming language that doesn't enforce a particular mandatory word order on language statements. That is, in English, "boy chases dog" has a much different meaning than "dog chases boy", but in Latin you could write it either way because the inflection on the words controls the meaning. Likewise, in most programming languages, x = y has a different meaning than y = x, but if you had a language that was agnostic about "sentence order" then you could write it either way. Using Latin allowed him to demonstrate this in practice.

Why would anyone care? Well, when Perligata was written, Perl6 was just starting to be considered, and Damian was wondering what core concepts had to be maintained and which were open to revision. Among the assumptions he wanted to consider was word order, and Perligata is a case study in how you can throw it out the window without breaking anything.

Coming down to Earth, this technique could have other applications as well. For example, the techniques used in Perligata could be applied in a source filter to convert VBScript to Perl at run time. There are issues to consider, of course, but it could work, if you wanted it badly enough. To cite a real example, one of the core plans for Perl6 is that it should be able to run existing Perl5 code, and the techniques demonstrated in Perligata will probably be used to make that possible.

Likewise, the object framework for Perl 6 is very flexible, allowing people to hand-roll almost any style of OO programming they are comfortable with. If you pair this with things like the built in Unicode support (and, allegedly, no obstacles to using Unicode symbols directly in Perl6 code for things like variables, functions, overridden operators, etc), there's no reason why people couldn't prepare "localized" versions of Perl6. It'll be interesting to see if this ends up happening, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if

How does Latin Perl sound to you?

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is one of oldest well-known algorithms. As the better part of Roman culture was ``borrowed'' from the Greeks, it is perhaps fitting that the first ever Perligata program should be as well:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
fac sic
nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
cis.

The use Lingua::Romana::Perligata statement causes the remainder of the program to be translated into the following Perl:

print STDOUT 'maximum:';
my $maxim = <STDIN>;
my (@list) = (2..$maxim);
while ($next = shift @list)
{
print STDOUT $next, "\n";
@list = grep {$_ % $next} @list;
}

Note in the very last Perligata statement (lista sic hoc...da listis) that the use of inflexion distinguishes the @list that is grep'ed (lista) from the @list that is assigned to (listis), even though each is at the "wrong'' end of the statement, compared with the Perl version.

And you too can do this !

Actually, Perligata is more serious than it may seem.

On one level, it uses Latin -- which packs much of the meaning of sentences into word endings rather than word order -- as a case study for a programming language that doesn't enforce a particular mandatory word order on language statements. That is, in English, "boy chases dog" has a much different meaning than "dog chases boy", but in Latin you could write it either way because the inflection on the words controls the meaning. Likewise, in most programming languages, x = y has a different meaning than y = x, but if you had a language that was agnostic about "sentence order" then you could write it either way. Using Latin allowed him to demonstrate this in practice.

Why would anyone care? Well, when Perligata was written, Perl6 was just starting to be considered, and Damian was wondering what core concepts had to be maintained and which were open to revision. Among the assumptions he wanted to consider was word order, and Perligata is a case study in how you can throw it out the window without breaking anything.

Coming down to Earth, this technique could have other applications as well. For example, the techniques used in Perligata could be applied in a source filter to convert VBScript to Perl at run time. There are issues to consider, of course, but it could work, if you wanted it badly enough. To cite a real example, one of the core plans for Perl6 is that it should be able to run existing Perl5 code, and the techniques demonstrated in Perligata will probably be used to make that possible.

Likewise, the object framework for Perl 6 is very flexible, allowing people to hand-roll almost any style of OO programming they are comfortable with. If you pair this with things like the built in Unicode support (and, allegedly, no obstacles to using Unicode symbols directly in Perl6 code for things like variables, functions, overridden operators, etc), there's no reason why people couldn't prepare "localized" versions of Perl6. It'll be interesting to see if this ends up happening, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if

Reminds me of the (inaccurate, somewhat apocryphal) story about Perl and programming contests. Turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration.

Reminds me of the (inaccurate, somewhat apocryphal) story about Perl and programming contests. Turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration.

Some useful links to information on ethical and anti-war licensing issues:

Slashdot thread

Open Source Software License discussion list thread

Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement: an example of a license which takes ethical issues in to consideration

Freshmeat thread

Advogato thread

UserLand thread

Yahoo group to discuss open source ethics

Since you don't have any more free slots, why not set up an older machine with a NIC and a few matrox graphics cards (I bet you could fit a GigE card and five triple-head parhelia cards in there.... just need to win the irish lottery now, eh?) and use DMX to distribute your display over 18 (that's your 3 + 15) screens? It'd be a pain scrolling slashdot though ;)

-after all this...

what they need is a new section 'google mailing lists'

You mean like The Mail Archive or MARC?

Or if you like a newsgroup view of mailing lists there is always Gmane

GIMP Mailing List Post

It has dockable windows. This is an announcement for GTK 2.4. I don't know whether GIMP 2.0 will use GTK 2.4.

they were infiltrated by the judge's appointed special master, a lawyer named Alan Balaran, with only minimal social engineering.

I donot know if Real managed to port their COM with XPCOM, but, that would help them leverage the functionality of a component object model for developers to exploit and would have helped them to gain acceptance from the open source community. There were more complaints about the install process and the capturing of the file types rather than the actual streaming technology itself. This is a shame for a technology company trying to provide an alternative for a/v streaming. May be the management needs to rethink its priorities regarding this. And whoever the mailer(s) were, and if they are reading this post - nice to know that there are such honest people who are willing to voice their opinions.

There's a good post detailing the ClamAV vs. Commercial question...

To paraphrase, ClamAV's database is generally at least a few days ahead of sophos and sometimes weeks...

ClamAV was written from the ground-up to do mail scanning, so it should be better than commercial scanners that try to be everything to everyone...

That looks more like a table of maximum resolution/refresh limits for a
range or HW configurations. The only programming information in these
datasheets is usually for the registers in the PCI config space, and that
isn't where the mode programming is done.

--David Dawes

The really interesting bit is that there is a lot of GPL-ed code in XFree.

I take it you mean FreeType which is included under a dual-license of GPL and BSD-like.

Chunks have been copied from the linux kernel, and people like Alan Cox submitted patches

Alan Cox submitted patches are not under the GPL, but he wished to remain compatible with GPL applications (by using the old XFree86 license). The transfer actually has been from XFree86 to the kernel (fbdev).

> "When its controlled by the government, it will be lobbied into a capitalist tool of consumer exploitation. Profit at its best"

Wake up, it's already happened. At the end of one meeting 4 years ago the head trademark lawyer for IBM bragged they'd spend 2 years of their $30M a year Washington lobbying budget to make sure no new top level domains had been created to protect their intellectual property interests. Dave Farber was at that meeting (as was Vint "Darth" Cerf).

Roger Cochetti, then a VP of IBM, helped Ira Magazier pick the "interim" ICANN board in secret - when that was supposed to have been done by the internet community. Cochetti is now an NSI VP and figures prominently behind the scenes of ICANN.

The IFWP effort, started in Becky Burr's (US Department of Commerce who have oversight over ICANN) office at the suggestion of Kathy Kleinman and Mikki Barry and had 3 meetings worldwide - Reston Va, Geneva, Singapore to determins consensus points to use as guidelines to create bylaws and elect a board for the organization that would replace IANA. While this was going on Cochetti and Magaziner were running around in secret getting the likes of Ether Dysan and Mike Roberts on board. Mike Single handedly tanked the IFWP effort (notice he has Farbers ear) and became the first president of ICANN and his organization was the recipeint of the "intellectual infrastructure fund" - the domain tax fund that we all paid into back then, and and .edu. Nice little payoff. Esther was by her own admission clueless about the whole thing and did nothing. It's probably just a concidence she was in IBM commercials at the time.

(" Esther Dyson says that she was approached by Roger Cochetti of IBM and Ira Magaziner in Aspen, Colorado and asked if she would be interested in joining the ICANN Board. The IFWP wrap up was finally completely derailed by ICANN's refusal to participate in the meeting."

ICANN was created to do one thing: make new tlds at a time when it seemed (at least to the US government) the US government had to step in to solve the war between the IAHC camp (who had just been shut down) and the alt root camp (who seemed to be making progress). Magaziner met with us all and created the "white paper" that was going to create 7 new tlds immediatly. Trademark lawyers and the EU freaked and when it was revised as the "green paper" it had punted to "ICANN will create a method to elect a board and a process to create new tlds". Instead they spent 3 years futzing around with the UDRP and other things trademaek laywrs wanted and didn't get round to new tlds till the fall of 2000 and it must have had all of ten minutes thought put into it and was intentinally lame as hell. To this day the new tlds that were picked are still viewed by ICANN as a "feasability study" to deteremine the effect of net stability when adding new tlds. Never mind in that period 100 new cctlds were added almost all of which were commmercial in nature.

Then you have the "Government Advisory Committe" the well named GAC of ICANN. Governments of the world get to meet in secret and "advise" ICANN.

Govrernments and the Tradmark Lobby have already coopted ICANN. It's foolish to worry that the ITU/UN will let this happen if they're in control, it's already happened.

So, don't move control of the internet to ineffective treaty organizations, move it to you