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I know there has been a lot of positive press, but just forget about it because Linux is a rehash of the old Share-ware concept, plus it [Linux] is Unix, a non-standard, fragmented operating system that no one uses and nobody wants that.

Selling Linux will do no good anyway because the product is too unstable and causes blindness in laboratory tests with Mac users.

Businesses will not buy Linux because there is no one to sue. Ignore the fact that anybody who has tried to sue Microsoft has typically ended up bankrupt, and wishing they had attempted something less risky such as using the money to purchase lotto tickets. End users don't want Linux because it is too hard to use, so it's generally a bad investment.

Besides, everyone who competes with Microsoft fails. Linux is just like the OS/2 thing and we all know where that ended up. Billy crushed it like a bug! He's going to do the same thing to these companies, just you wait. Never mind that under-cutting a free product is impossible. Billy will find a way to pay people to take Windows, and still make money.

Linux has failed to make serious inroads into the corporate marketplace. Just forget those fortune 500 companies that IDC surveyed. Forget that Linux had over 200% growth in 1998. Those International Data Corp. guys can't be trusted because they aren't independent like Mindcraft.Moreover, the system lacks the applications - graphics, word processing capabilities, databases - to compete with Microsoft's personal computer business.

People won't develop these applications anyway, because they will pay too much for the development tools.

Don't believe the stuff you read over at freshmeat.net. There's a lot of false Linux propaganda on that site that you can't trust. Also forget you saw Wordperfect, Star Office, The Gimp, Oracle, Informix, DB2, and a million other productivity and mission critical applications, free or proprietary.

You're obviously a Religious Open Source Cult member if you buy any of that stock. Never mind that I'm probably selling most of my Microsoft stock as we speak, and putting it in mutual funds because keeping it is getting too risky.

If you have comments or suggestions about this article, please feel free to flame^H^H^H^H^Hemail me at HERE.

- greg

I know there has been a lot of positive press, but just forget about it because Linux is a rehash of the old Share-ware concept, plus it [Linux] is Unix, a non-standard, fragmented operating system that no one uses and nobody wants that.

Selling Linux will do no good anyway because the product is too unstable and causes blindness in laboratory tests with Mac users.

Businesses will not buy Linux because there is no one to sue. Ignore the fact that anybody who has tried to sue Microsoft has typically ended up bankrupt, and wishing they had attempted something less risky such as using the money to purchase lotto tickets. End users don't want Linux because it is too hard to use, so it's generally a bad investment.

Besides, everyone who competes with Microsoft fails. Linux is just like the OS/2 thing and we all know where that ended up. Billy crushed it like a bug! He's going to do the same thing to these companies, just you wait. Never mind that under-cutting a free product is impossible. Billy will find a way to pay people to take Windows, and still make money.

Linux has failed to make serious inroads into the corporate marketplace. Just forget those fortune 500 companies that IDC surveyed. Forget that Linux had over 200% growth in 1998. Those International Data Corp. guys can't be trusted because they aren't independent like Mindcraft.Moreover, the system lacks the applications - graphics, word processing capabilities, databases - to compete with Microsoft's personal computer business.

People won't develop these applications anyway, because they will pay too much for the development tools.

Don't believe the stuff you read over at freshmeat.net. There's a lot of false Linux propaganda on that site that you can't trust. Also forget you saw Wordperfect, Star Office, The Gimp, Oracle, Informix, DB2, and a million other productivity and mission critical applications, free or proprietary.

You're obviously a Religious Open Source Cult member if you buy any of that stock. Never mind that I'm probably selling most of my Microsoft stock as we speak, and putting it in mutual funds because keeping it is getting too risky.

If you have comments or suggestions about this article, please feel free to flame^H^H^H^H^Hemail me at HERE.

- greg,

Commerce Department yanks ICANN's chain, backhands NSI

On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page letter [1] to the ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions [2]. Here's the NY Times's coverage [3] of this letter (free registration and cookies required). Commerce Department officials said that ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again extended the deadline [4] for the end of the open domain registration test. The test had already been extended once [5] because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN, and the test registrars. The new target date for wider participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

[1] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/n tiahome/domainname/blileyrsp.htm
[2] http://www.news.com/N ews/Item/Textonly/0,25,38200,00.html?pfv
[3] http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/10ne t.html
[4] http://www.zdnet.co m/zdnn/filters/bursts/0,3422,2295115,00.html
[5] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-07-08.html #s01

TBTF Is required reading for anyone with a clue.

Commerce Department yanks ICANN's chain, backhands NSI

On 9 July the Commerce Department sent a 32-page letter [1] to the ICANN board and the House Commerce Committee, responding to committee chairman Tom Bliley's questions on ICANN's recent actions [2]. Here's the NY Times's coverage [3] of this letter (free registration and cookies required). Commerce Department officials said that ICANN should

hold all meetings in public,

drop a proposed $1-per-domain-name fee until a permanent ICANN board can vote on it, and

draw up binding contracts with domain-name services that would bar ICANN from going beyond their mission.

Commerce did not let NSI entirely off the hook, either. While chastising ICANN for a threat, issued in its Berlin meeting, to cancel NSI's authority to issue domain names, the Commerce letter states baldly that unless NSI signs ICANN's operating agreement, Commerce will in fact terminate that authority. NSI must stop at once claiming the .com, .net. and .org domain-name databases as their intellectual property, Commerce insists.

Congress has now scheduled the investigative hearing promised by Bliley. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will convene "Domain Name System Privatization: Is ICANN Out of Control?" on Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 11:00 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, room 2322.

On 16 July Commerce again extended the deadline [4] for the end of the open domain registration test. The test had already been extended once [5] because of protracted wrangling among NSI, ICANN, and the test registrars. The new target date for wider participation in competitive registration is 6 August.

[1] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/n tiahome/domainname/blileyrsp.htm
[2] http://www.news.com/N ews/Item/Textonly/0,25,38200,00.html?pfv
[3] http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/10ne t.html
[4] http://www.zdnet.co m/zdnn/filters/bursts/0,3422,2295115,00.html
[5] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-07-08.html #s01

TBTF Is required reading for anyone with a clue.

Oracle 8i has been out for about 4 months now. But, it is not selling well. The main focus of 8i is new Internet features. It sports a Java VM, new web-based development tools, supports audio and video, and has a new file system.

Most users upgrading to it don't seem to care about these features. They just want to run a newer, faster version of Oracle.

So, why Linux now? Simple. Linux rules the Internet. With such are large percentage of Linux servers running the web, why not realease this Database to a market which might care? This database and its' new features are supposed to be for the web. Linux is the natural OS to release it for.

Of course, as soon as Linux users start bragging about how great 8i is, Windows users will demand it. Guess what? They already have it. This seems to be a backwards way of releasing it. But, Oracle is just now realizing the potential of Linux.

You can see more information about the sluggish adoption of 8i here.

Here's another article that is somewhat more detailed (and dare I say, more accurate). The president of Lineo already responded (see above), but I think it's important to point out that we're not just targeting settops. We're making an embedded distribution, and an embedded systems development platform. We just happen to have our own application on settops as well.

If you read the C|NET article, you will find that the study refers to the "server appliance" market, not the "server market". This refers to out-of-the-box server "solutions" like the NetWinder.

The article also says that Dataquest predicts Linux-based systems will account for 8.1 percent of the "traditional server" market. I think that's underrating Linux by quite a bit.

Here on News.com

RB

click here
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com

I believe that this is one of the domains turned over to the court pending a suit against Network Associates. Check it out at news.com

- A.P.
--

"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

CNet's News.com is covering this, with a note about "settop boxes." For more details, see http://www.news.com/ News/Item/0,4,0-38973,00.html?st.ne.lh..ni

- coug_

Have y'all seen this: Microsoft juggled books, '96 suit alleged?

What's next for MS? IRS audit, anybody?

Actually the UK is not the first European country to introuduce ADSL.Two or three months ago the Spanish government made a law forcing Telefonica (Our personal phone monopolistic company) to deploy ADSL befor 2001 (if I am not mistaken). This will be a 'low-end' ADSL (like the UK's), with a max. bitrate of 256 Kpbs in the downlink and 128 Kbps in the Uplink, but it's much better that todays modems! Also the prize will be arround 5000 pesetas (32.5 US$)).
What we don't know is how the hell will ISPs be able to serve 256 Kpbps to everybody, nor which prizes will the charge us... It would be really fustrating to have such a bandwidth available and not being able to use it! :-(
Anyway I feel this is a very necessary thing, if we want everybody to have a nice access to the Internet.

You can check a small story about the Spanish ADSL deployment
here

Just to prove that I'm not smoking crack, read this

--TPx

It has been said here that the 600 MHz Athlon should approximately equal the PIII 700 MHz. That says to me that the Athlon is faster. Besides, AMD rocks!!

Good Luck AMD! As another poster noted, AMD may not survive the year. According to this article, it is predicted to announce a $200M loss for the past fiscal quarter (note: consider the source of the article). AMD is getting killed by the the celeron, and the low profit margin of their chips. They really need a winner.

The athlon/K7 changes this, maybe. If the specs are correct, this cpu will be smoking (figuratively, not literally). And, IBM has announced support for the athlon and will be selling aptivas with them. Of course, IBM has not done especially well in the PC market.

I do wonder how worried Intel is over this cpu. The PIII aren't setting the world on fire, and their new coppermine chip is being delayed. I do not have to mention what the status of the merced is. However, Intel like MS has marketing clout and $$ to spend towards this. IIRC, someone wrote that Intel's budget for promoting the PIII was $200M.

Bottom line is that competition is good. Now if only the G4's start showing up.

Don't have time for composition [ sue me ): ]

• Metacalfe wrote a poorly researched article
• I assume the "30 year old" tech referred to is the command line. Certainly, the kernel code is *not* particularly archaic. The NT kernel, on the other hand, does seem to be fairly monolithic. Certain, the user has no opportunity to change it.
• no distinction made between server/desktop market. Is this really fair? NT is *struggling* to be accepted as a serious "enterprise" OS. 23x6 availability indeed.
• linux took nearly all of the 17.4% unix server OS market share last year according to this article
• W2K (the OS with the millennium bug in the name) is non-existent. Window's superior technology is often difficult to see.
  1. More intuitive GUI?
  2. More consistent APIs?
  3. Better tested and secure code?
  4. Better bundled administration tools?
  5. Better vendor support?
  What makes Windows such a clearly "better" OS? Metacalfe gives no specifics.

This article sways neither ardent windows users nor dedicated linux users into the other's camp. Other OS's are ignore, like MacOS X, *BSD and BeOS. It is merely meant to draw luckless slashdotters to Infoworld's site.

It is my belief that Microsoft has already lost their hegemony. We are seeing the company in a bloated, red giant stage. Their death knell has chimed which is why Redmond has implemented "Vision Version 2.0".

Hard disk? Where does it say it has a hard disk

The company will not divulge all of the specifications of the hardware, except to confirm that the iToaster runs on an Intel Pentium class processor, and includes a 2.1GB hard drive.

It's not shown on www.bandivx.com yet, either.

It is now. (They're also playing "Video Killed The Radio Star" in the background to go with the news. :-) ) I heard about the good news from news.com first and then went to check the Fight DIVX page; they had already made a quick hack to their page to note DIVX's demise.

Gateway's been offering a cool "slim" computer like this in Japan for a while already and is getting ready to introduce it in the US. Here's the C|Net News article for more information. Prices will range from $1999 to $2299, which is a little cheaper than the NEC and I think overall, it's probably a better computer coming from Gateway. Personally, I like how they fit the stuff in the side. "Cool" computers come and go and the NEC one doesn't seem to solve too many problems that exist.

My US$.02

I didn't say that the current incarnation of Office 2000 is a thin client application--I said they were working towards this goal. There's plenty of press that proves this, including statements from Mr. Gates himself.

Here's an interesting article that gives some clues on where things are headed. This is not a pretty picture:

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3 7913,00.html

"Umm... I don't think it was caught too soon. This worm has literally been on the CD image since Memorial Day Weekend (when the master was made with the worm)." That is still a better track record then some corp like Microsoft, or other commercial offerings out there. I believe it is far more interesting that the R5 spread the word as quickly as they did where as Microsoft wasn't even going to mention anything about their IIS 5.0 'problem' until they had a fix. Who knows when that will be. I guess in Microsoft time, the period of eight months to a year for a bugfix is just a few days after release for the big M. My favorite bug right now is the Win98 SE Suspend issue (take a gander at Microsoft's Windows bugfix has own bug at News.com). How do you miss something like that?! Or, even better, the problems with Microsoft's Fortran Powerstation before it was sold to Digital. We have a program where I work that the compiled Fortran code was slowly sucking away memory. A call to some dark dank Microsoft dungeon (after getting transfered multiple times to find out the info was deep in one of their newsgroups) was the only way that we could get a bug fix that stopped a terrible memory leak in Fortran. It still is posted where it is not readily available. I guess I could go on and on, but won't.... I think, in the terms of shipping out products with some sort of problem, this is pretty tame.

Bryan R.

Their stock dropped 9.2% after they suffered 21 hours of downtime.

Estimated cost of downtime: $87,000,000 per hour.

Jamie McCarthy

CNet implies that it's Sun, but doesn't come out and say it.

By the way, their IIS is version 3, which very few people are still running. Hard to see why they stick with it.

COURT LIMITS STATE JURISDICTION ON WEB
In a decision with global implications, a three-judge appellate
panel from the California Court of Appeal for the Second District
has ruled that the state of California has no jurisdiction over a
Web site whose hosting servers are located in the state. The
ruling clarifies the issue of jurisdiction in lawsuits involving
Web sites and out-of-state companies. The court's decision
addresses a defamation suit filed by plaintiff Steven Rambam
against the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO). The JDO had
posted information on its Web site claiming that Rambam was a
racist Nazi sympathizer and a potential murderer. In his
lawsuit, Rambam claimed that the JDO's contracts with
California-based Web hosts GeoCities and Xoom.com provided the
state with jurisdiction in the case. The judges disagreed.
"Defendants' conduct of contracting, via computer, with Internet
service providers, which may be California corporations or which
may maintain offices or databases in California, is insufficient
to constitute 'purposeful availment,'" wrote judge Mildred
Lillie. (C|Net 06/09/99)

The C|net article is here. Seems to me that the case law is very unsettled. (Not that I have a clue about law!) Which makes the pending battles over UCI TA legislation all the more important and dangerous.http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/display Story.pl?/features/990531ucita_home.htm

Interesting point, and driven home today when the formerly-clueless-but-now-my-favorite-human-being- on-the-planet Justice Thomas Jackson today brought up that self-same point in the courtroom.
Read it here.

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3 5221,00.html

But it's still very sketchy. It's going to have to happen someday, just like IPv6, namespace is just pitiful right now.

Here's a new link to the settlement story.

btw, Sun's SCSL is aimed more at commercial developers (including Sun's OEMs) and researchers, not so much general members of the public. However, they are releasing quite a bit of stuff under the SCSL - Java, Jini, HotSpot (later this year), their SPARC processors and several other software products. They seems to be SCSL'ing their products in general. They haven't said much about SCSL'ing Solaris recently - the last time it was brought up they said it would be quite hard to do, because of all the liscences.

I suppose there will be inevitable comparisons between Beowulf and Sun's HPC software, and SMP kit. The main hardware difference is bandwidth and latency - Beowulf seems more about combining lots of single CPU (or low CPU count, eg 1-4) boxes in a network, possibly having several hundred of such boxes. Sun's approach to high end computing is to have big SMP boxes (a single Starfire E10000 can take 64 UltraSparcs) with the option of clustering a few of them - currently limited to 4, ie 256 processors. A Starfire has a 6Gbyte/s I/O bus and 15Gbyte/s main memory bus, which is rather better than Ethernet. Sun's approach is more expensive, but it also solves a wider class of problems well. For some things (eg cracking codes, rendering) you don't need much interprocess communication or bandwidth, so it scales well with Beowulf, but for other things (some kinds of database operations, eg OLAP, and data intensive scientific calculations) you really need very high bandwidth and very low latency (close to main memory speeds) which is where Beowulf doesn't do so well. Still, some things don't scale so well, even on a Starfire... Btw, the Starfire is over 2 years old.

Cue Sun's next gen super-computer, codename Serengheti, which has a completely different architecture. It's memory architecture is called Cache Only Memory Architecture (COMA), which seems to have been in development for a long long time at Sun. A single box will take 128 processors, and you'll be able to cluster 8 of them, for a total of 1024 processors. It'll be powered by Sun's UltraSparc-III, which recently reached first silicion, and has b ooted on Solaris. Incidentaly, the UltraSparc-III has hardware support for 1024 processors, and is supposed to be out in volume production by the end of the year. However, Serengheti won't be out until about the 2nd half of 2000.

Well, looks like that suit's settled: "Music software developer PlayMedia Systems has settled its $20 million lawsuit against Nullsoft, just one day after America Online bought the Net music technology firm. PlayMedia had accused Nullsoft of copyright infringement over its AMP code. PlayMedia also had added music news, download, and community site MP3.com to the lawsuit; that action also was settled, PlayMedia said."

Commence speculating about the precise chronology and terms of this settlement in light of yesterday's AOL announcement.

(The link above will probably be dead once news.com gets a real story up.)

Nullsoft and MP3.com are defendants in a lawsuit brought by PlayMedia, alleging copyright infringement in the use of the AMP playback engine, according to CNET. I don't think this lawsuit involves the RIAA.

I agree, but it's just part of open-source development; everything's open, not just the code, not just the feature discussions, but the bickering on the kernel mailing lists, the open letters from three-letter acronyms, and so on. The only thing I'm afraid of is that the media (read clueless zdnet) will start to get a hold of things like this and distort them, or that MS will use them in their FUD campaign. Actually, it happened before, see
Apple's Linux foray prompts squabbles, Internal rift among Linux advocates, and any of a number of other articles that does a poor job of airing our dirty laundry. How should things like this be dealt with?

1. Microsoft can create clean room Java implementations.

   Duh! Can we say Kaffe? Japhar? Can we say "Sun has explicitly stated that this is ok for a very long time, even when HP threatened to do the same thing"?

   So, what exactly is new here? To me, the Judge just said "snow is white, grass is green, and MS can create Java clean room implementations". All three things are facts which have been known for a long time.

2. Microsoft's current products embody Sun's intellectual property.

   Another non-issue. Isn't that what the entire contract was about, the fact that Microsoft was licensing Java technology from Sun? So therefore it obviously follows that Microsoft products have Sun's Java technology in them?

3. Issue of Microsoft violating Sun's "Java" trademark.

   This to me seems also like an extremely straightforward point. Sun only allows certain Java products to officially use the logo and Java trademark; these are ones that pass their compatibility tests at minimum, and most likely ones that are based on their actual intellectual property. Clean room implementations do not a priori fit this category, so they can't officially bear the Java logo or name. (Unless Sun of course decides to explicitly give them this right.)

   So, if Microsoft follows Sun's rules, they can bear the logo and name, if they don't, they can't. This applies regardless of clean room implementation or not.

   This also seems to be another clear-cut issue unaffected by Judge Whyte's rulings (except peripherally, meaning that determining Microsoft violated the contract with Sun also means determining Microsoft violated use of the Java trademark).

The only significant thing here is that Judge Whyte has decided that Microsoft violated the Java license by not passing the compatibility tests. Why the emphasis? Because this is what the trial is about in the first place! (See here.)

This trial was not originally about clean room implementations; it's been known from the beginning that is acceptable. It's only about whether Microsoft had a contractual obligation to comply with the full Java spec and Sun's compatibility tests. From that regard, Judge Whyte's "preliminary rulings" are equivalent to deciding the trial: Microsoft is guilty.
----------

Good post. I have a couple of comments...

Micros~1 understood the developers like nobody else. Linux needs to focus on administrators, not so much end users (IMHO) or _even_ developers.

I think it's possible to strongly argue that one of the reasons Win32 is dominant at the moment is precisely _because_ Microsoft has focused on its developers. By giving them powerful tools, "lowering the bar" with regard to quickly creating professional applications (e.g. VB), and generally "looking after" their developers, Microsoft has managed to win the battle for developer mindshare. Indeed, Microsoft don't hesistate to admit that keeping developers on board is a key part of their strategy.

The key is in administration of networks and web networks.

I agree that simple, accessible (i.e. graphical, as much as I hate to admit it ;) and remotely-available administration tools are a compelling way of administering a network. But the _value_ of a network to a business is governed by more factors than just its administrability. The types of applications and functions the network supports is surely a key component of the network's value. Linux needs to offer compelling features and functions _in addition to_ simple yet powerful administration features before it will be ready to take on Microsoft and win on the server.

Looking back it's obvious how Microsoft managed to gain such a substantial foothold in the medium- to low-end server market: they owned the desktop. If Linux is to compete similarly (I'm not necessarily saying it _should_, but let's say it does), then offering compelling alternatives to Win32 applications on the desktop needs to be a priority. Already substantial impressive work has been done, but there is a ways to go yet...

So I think it is possible to make a strong argument that obtaining and nurturing developer mindshare is just as important as obtaining and nurturing administrator mindshare.

Cheers
Alastair

Yes but they are not giving away the guaranteed I/O rate part of it. At least not according to this link though I can't find any mention of that in the news story or the SGI press release.

I haven't seen what EXT3 promises,

It will add journalling (see the white paper Stephen wrote), and probably extent based block lists and btrees by Ted Ts'o will be in there too.

Linux does need a journaling FS and XFS may be the best bet, but it won't happen quickly unless SGI puts some serious resources behind it.

SGI are employing kernel hackers and you can start to see some of the stuff they are getting up to

Also, just who has the resources to test large production systems (4+ CPUs) on an OS under test? Corporates, that's who. And they'll contribute their code to Open Source, right? Because...?

Hell, we've got MS helping us by looking for performance bottlenecks for us and that is already starting to bear fruit (I can't seem to link to that article right. Check out the article "Re:Thank you Microsoft!" by petchema. You will need Alt-F to find it.)

Personally, I think ext3 will rock. This isn't Stephen's first file system by a long chalk.

may have a price current purists will not like but will have to accept (ie less than Open Source code licenses

We can't succeed by destroying ourselves, and I don't think the Linux community will try. If XFS weren't Open Source then it would fail to gain any market share against ext3. But it will be Open Source, so it's a moot point.

Caldera were suing Microsoft for allegedly trying to kill off DR-DOS. Windows 3.x ran perfectly fine over DR-DOS, as well as over MS-DOS, and this apparently annoyed Microsoft, so Windows 95 has some incompatibilities allegedly deliberately introduced to keep DR-DOS from working (no, despite what Microsoft says, win95 is not a completely independent OS, it's still built on top of DOS).

Links:
old news.com story.
Caldera's take on it (more recent)
A microsoft witness says the company destroyed documents relating to this case.

BTW, all these links are from old slashdot articles (some from September 1998, a few from 1999). Search for "caldera suit" on /. and you'll find some more.

They're going to create a site where programmers can sign up to write open source software at the request of 3rd party firms (such as hardware vendors); developers would then keep the hardware or whatever. See here for the full story. It's called SourceXChange.

Inferno Man

AOL considering Linux device, sources say

Caldera adding Linux to set-top boxes

This one mentions that there was a company in the running for the AOL contract with a Linux-based set-top, but they lost out.

AOL considering Linux device, sources say

Caldera adding Linux to set-top boxes

This one mentions that there was a company in the running for the AOL contract with a Linux-based set-top, but they lost out.

AOL in particular has won a couple of court judgements against spammers who've abused their system. In AOL's case, IIRC, they sued for costs of receiving spam. ( news.com article) In other cases ISPs have sued for the costs of having been used to send spam (e.g. all those e-mails sent to abuse@domain).

It's probably legally dicey to enact some kind of after-the-fact fine system, but that's exactly what small-claims court is for.

The article on CNet specifically says that this "opinion doesn't apply to off-the-shelf products". What I would like to know is why that is. Every executable program is composed of machine language instructions (binary codes), which can be considered a programming language by itself. HOWEVER, even if it's not a programming language, it has a 1-1 translation to Assembly language, which is DEFINITELY a programming language and therefore should be protected by the First Amendment, according to this decision. So why aren't the off-the-shelf products protected by this court ruling as well?

I was reading one of the "related articles" on that story http://www.news.com/ News/Item/0,4,0-23872,00.html?st.ne.ni.rel, and one Judge Gwin says that software is not language like cooking recipes, instructions, and manuals, because the software is "purely functional" and "actually performs the function".

HELLO?! Has he ever seen a floppy disk encrypt anything? No! It takes a COMPUTER to do that!

Software is by definition INSTRUCTIONS for the processor. In fact, the word "instruction" is used throughout computer terminology!

He should be banning the export of computers for being able to encrypt. (Sadly, that's more than just sarcastic: we already do that to a certain extent with supercomputers.)

• While Linux will pose more of a threat in the long-term, currently it's helping Sun. Here's some recent Sun-related links - Sun does well according to
• IDC server survey. Sun's sha re price has risen from $20 to $70 in last 6 months. Sun is now selling the Samba-like NetLink (part of Project Cascade). Interview with Scott McNealy (Sun CEO) at The Register, parts one, two, three and four - "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so I love Linux.". A SunWorld (not part of Sun) article about the "unoperating system" - Oracle (and Sun's) plans for 'thin-server' appliances with a small OS.

Here's the bit about Linux from the article at The Register:

• "Linux is like Windows: it's too fat for the client, for the appliance ...it's not scalable for the server. It's the right way to do the wrong answer, so if you're going to do the wrong answer which is fat clients and thin servers, then at least do it with Linux.

• "Don't send any money to Microsoft for something that's fatter, slower, buggier, doesn't scale as well, and has fewer people working on it.

  "There was an interesting little experiment our CTO [Bill Joy] did. He took the Sony Vaio notebook ... He downloaded Linux, then he went over to Netscape and downloaded the latest version, and then he went over to Star Office, and all of a sudden he had a better, faster, smaller, lower-powered, bug-free, legally free environment ... with more people working on it than the entire state of Washington.

  "Now why in the world would anybody ever write another cheque to Microsoft? I don't know. But why would you do Linux either? That's the wrong answer. Go thin clients, go appliances: that's the right way to go long term. So that's why I call [Linux] the right way to do the wrong answer. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so I love Linux."

Okay, some comments on this. If you include all the GNU/XFree86 as being part of Linux then it becomes pretty damn big. XFree86 is something like 45 million lines of code, last I heard. So 'all' of GNU/Linux is about 60 million, perhaps. Solaris is about 10 million. However, Scott's take on the future is basically the network computer concept. However, the markets he's thinking of are a) corporate, b) embedded consumer systems (TVs, set-top-boxes, intelligent phones etc) and not geeks. So, you have 'big iron' servers in the background giving you extreeme reliability - as reliable as phones, and incidentaly about 20% of Sun's revenue comes from telcos. These manage the 'master records' of your files, data etc. You then have 'simple' local clients that can do their own processing and have access to your 'big iron' servers.

As an example, just recently, Sun announced their 'i-Planet' software, which is very cute - all you need is 'client' computers with Java running on it, and some servers in the background, with both connected to the internet. Now, what you do is from anywhere on these client computers you 'login' to the server, which then sends you some Java programs so that you can securely manage/access your email and other things. Basically, you don't need a 'personal' computer anymore.

Scott's "right way to do wrong answer" is kinda misleading. But you can look at it like this, a) he thinks Linux is 'good' for what it is supposed to do, b) he thinks that (currently) Linux is not a general solution to the various problems that need to be solved in computing - ie it solves a sub-set. Scott's general 'solution' is for big (Sun) servers in the background with 'thin clients' being used the the public/workforce running Java - the hardware/OS doesn't even have to be from Sun.

Is he right? Well, I think that for many situations I think 'thin client' 'network computing' is a good way to do many things, but it's not really for hacker types. How well the implimentation works will depend on the software, which is why NCs didn't take off - the software wasn't ready.

Sorry this isn't very well written...

Huddleston said that domain name was registered before the 1996 installation of the automated registration system. She said the name will be denied when it comes up for renewal.

So just how do they justify refusal to renew a domain that they have ALREADY registered. As the owner of several domains, I don't like the idea that NSI can pull the rug out from under them just because they *don't like them*.

I've been a domain admin for a few years (my InterNIC handle is just TDP... no numbers). I'm really beginning to miss The Good Old Days when politicians didn't even know the Internet existed, spam email was virtually unheard of, and InterNIC was not run by a bunch of assholes.

Thad

IBM joins 1,000 MHZ Club
Here's to:
1GHZ processors
1GB plus RAM configurations (QUIMMS?)
TByte storage
cheap big HD displays
... that I can afford

According to this article on news.com they are going to give away the HotSpot VM.

There's an article about HotSpot at news.com here. They say Sun changed their minds and decided to make it free. (Sun's stuff doesn't seem to be particularly clear...)