Slashdot Mirror

Johan Jonasson writes "Eric S. Raymond takes a look at how the DVD Control Association is trying to obscure the real issues in the whole DeCSS affair. " The next hearing is Jan. 14 - for those who haven't followed the case, check out the story. Thanks to Rik van Riel for pointing out the OpenDVD site. It's a community site designed to explain to people what's going on with the case and another perspective on the DVD industry in relation to consumer rights.

ywwg asks: "Everyone's doing the top ten this-or-that of the Millennium, so why don't we join the fray? Let's choose the top ten geeks of the millennium staying out of the past ten years. I'm thinking of the greats like Gallileo and Newton. What oppressed, nerdy, ignored, and shunned individuals proved everyone wrong? "

petitclv writes "I just noticed that the last slashdot article was posted at 5pm, 'the day before the Y2K bug destroyed the whole world in flames.' So I wanted to know if I was the latest /. reader to be able to read it. Surely I'm not (partly because most of the people are celebrating as I'm writing this), but I just wanted to make a check. Do you think that the Y2K bug already has made a few troubles, but the media just don't want to put an end to your parties?" Well, petitclv, I crawled out of *my* bunker just now and the world still seemed to be going. (More below.)

My trusty Linux box seems to be working. No nuclear-looking glow from Washington DC (20 miles South of me). Guess all that's left to do is drink up the the stock of bourbon whiskey I accumulated "just in case."

No word from Holland, Michigan yet, but I suppose if the Midwest had been nuked or otherwise returned to the stone age, somebody would have submitted it by now, so I guess CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal and the other Geek Compound denizens are okay (aside from possible massive hangovers, but you didn't hear that from me, oh no no no...)

So here we are in Y2K, preparing to face a crisis The Mainstream Media hasn't hardly mentioned: The Wetware Rollover Bug!

Do you have any idea how many people are going to write the wrong date on checks and other documents for (at least) the next month or two?

A frightening thought!

But Happy New Year anyway. ;-)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller
(on behalf of sleeping friends and co-workers everywhere.)

petitclv writes "I just noticed that the last slashdot article was posted at 5pm, 'the day before the Y2K bug destroyed the whole world in flames.' So I wanted to know if I was the latest /. reader to be able to read it. Surely I'm not (partly because most of the people are celebrating as I'm writing this), but I just wanted to make a check. Do you think that the Y2K bug already has made a few troubles, but the media just don't want to put an end to your parties?" Well, petitclv, I crawled out of *my* bunker just now and the world still seemed to be going. (More below.)

My trusty Linux box seems to be working. No nuclear-looking glow from Washington DC (20 miles South of me). Guess all that's left to do is drink up the the stock of bourbon whiskey I accumulated "just in case."

No word from Holland, Michigan yet, but I suppose if the Midwest had been nuked or otherwise returned to the stone age, somebody would have submitted it by now, so I guess CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal and the other Geek Compound denizens are okay (aside from possible massive hangovers, but you didn't hear that from me, oh no no no...)

So here we are in Y2K, preparing to face a crisis The Mainstream Media hasn't hardly mentioned: The Wetware Rollover Bug!

Do you have any idea how many people are going to write the wrong date on checks and other documents for (at least) the next month or two?

A frightening thought!

But Happy New Year anyway. ;-)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller
(on behalf of sleeping friends and co-workers everywhere.)

Greg Miller writes "According to this article , Netscape has received approval to distribute the 128-bit encryption version of Communicator outside the U.S. They've also received limited permission to distribute SuiteSpot servers with strong encryption." [Update: 12/05 03:42 by michael : Slashdot got burned, this article is bogus. See below.]

Update:: We were fooled. Someone posted this on http://www.activewin.com/frames/frmhome.shtml as new news (suckered them!), which apparently misled the slashdot submitter and us. This is an old press release from 1997 talking about exporting software for certain specialized banking purposes. As far as I know, it's still illegal to generally export 128-bit crypto products.

Thanks to the alert posters in the threads below and to alecf who was bright enough to submit it in the stories inbox (which any of the assorted slashdot authors who are online might be reading) for a fast response. Sorry for the "desinformation" (is that a pun?).

CentrX writes "I was surprised that no one has contributed a story about FreeMWare since they started. FreeMWare is "an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems concurently on the same machine." Like VMWare, only free and open-source. They now have a CVS repository and the latest source can be downloaded. I think this project is needed and needs some support from the community. You can also join the mailing list." FreeMWare was mentioned briefly here in April. Looks like it's come a long way since then.

drac writes "Phil Zimmerman has released the source to PGPphone , saying that there is no corporate interest and that he doesn't want to let the project die..." There appears to be only windows and mac source, but perhaps a port could be made. Good secure voice over internet software for Linux would be nice.

MorganGoeller asks: "I have an old Pentium 200 w/128 MB of RAM that just got a new 6.4 GB disk, but doesn't have anything on it. I would like to set the new machine with RH 6.1 for either: a standalone file/network backup/pop/nntp/web server (mostly for internal use); a firewall/proxy server; or both. However, I am an intermediate Linux user and am not sure where to begin." Anyone with somehelpful hints or starting tips? Click below for the details.

"I have a home network consisting of 1 linux box (RH 5.2, too chicken to upgrade as I can't have it go down for an extended period); 1 win 98 box (for my wife to use AOL and MS-Office, don't ask) connected to the internet through a persistent 640K DSL connection through US West. I am concerned that my network may be at risk and would be willing (but not excited) to spend some time securing the system if necessary.

My questions:

1. With DSL and DHCP going through USWest's gateway is my system reasonably secure?
2. What is the difference between a firewall and a proxy server? What is the best one to use considering all network data MUST come through my DSL modem before any processing can be done?
3. Is it a bad idea to put other features (file server, etc.) on a system that is a firewall and/or proxy server?
4. How dificult is it to set up a firewall and/or proxy server? I rather like having the mail/news server on my linux box and don't want to give it up (particularly) but I don't often log in from outside the network ...
5. What kind of configuration would you use for this situation? Keep in mind that my wife needs her Win98 machine for work and I need at least one linux box for me (for email, shell scripting, running Matlab, Maple, g++, PERL, Web Programming, etc.)

Thanks,

Morgan"

bento writes "There is a new snapshot(3.9.16) of XFree86 available. It now supports nVidia, i740, 3dfx Banshee, and the Voodoo3. " You can all wipe the drool of your chins: its gonna be awhile before this morphs into XF86 v4.0, but its cool to see/touch and compile progress. Update: 08/31 10:32 by CT : here are the release notes if you crave more data.

Thanks to martin for pointing us over to a recent story about Cyber Yuga. It's essentially the formation of an online "nation", which some requirements for citizenship, including reading the Constitution and voting on changes to it, as well as some civic responsibility in running the "country". In any case, a very cool idea-will this be the future? What do you folks think?

We've mentioned this once or twice in the past, but I figure its probably worth mentioning it again. Pirates of the Silicon Valley is running this weekend on TNT (sunday at 8pm). Its the story of Gates and Jobs, as played by Noah Wiley and Anthony Michael Hall. I dunno if it'll be any good, but I'll probably watch it. It'll be interesting to see how they take the story (which is actually quite entertaining and interesting) and adapt it for a mainstream audience. Thanks to jbut355 for reminding me.

Chip Stillmore writes "Just read this news.com. Apparently Linux.com is supposed to be going live today. " The page simply says tonight. I've seen what they're doing over there. It isn't at all what I really expected when they announced that they had bought the domain, but it ain't bad. As long as it covers the newbie stuff though, I'm happy. As of 2300 Eastern, it's live!

Dionysus asks: "I have a 3ComImpact IQ connected to my serial port. Right now I'm only using 1 channel. How can I make it use both channels? I looked at isdn4linux, and it seems that one channel is all I can get. I don't have this problem in Win98 nor in OS/2. Please help."

rohirrim was the first to let us know that the hit hot single 2.2.9 has made its debut on the usual FTP sites. So if you're the type that desires a newer stable kernel, get to it.

Colossal writes "As most of you have already read, the Q3test was released for the Mac first, but never fear! I have put up many shots of the test on my page. "

TreeRat writes "Here is a CNN article covering the possible career prospects for IT professionals knowing Unix vs. Linux. It concludes (surprise surprise) that most Linux professionsals are using other forms of Unix at work as their primary OS, but that demand for Linux people should be much higher in the future. "

robin sent us a link to an article that says that Richard Stallman might soon be working in the Gates building at MIT. Bill is donating $20e6 to the CS Labs, and the new building is expected to be named after him. The FSF started in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and RMS still works there. "

Joy! Cleaning out the submissions box: Praxxus sent us a link to an article you'll swear is a joke... a new use for old computers: filling potholes. HerbieTMac wrote in to say that Ice-T has joined the fray by releasing a new MP3 single. sanpitch sent us an interesting article about facial expression recognition. polar_bear` wrote in to say that Linux Mall has an Associates Program just like CD-Now. Or Amazon, speaking of which Sevn gave me the heads up on their entry for Bill "Family Circus" Keane- check out the reader reviews of Daddy's Hat is on Backwards. Trust me. Read it. Someone had to much spare time, and I'm glad they did. [null] hooked us up with the definitive Mr. T vs. site and east sent us an offensive dilbert parody site. gseidman wrote in to tell us about an important translation project underway to decipher the alien language used on Futurama. Assorted Slashdot notes from the world: An anonymous reader linked us to a cute comment on Neal Stephenson's server about the Slashdot effect. suprax noted that Slashdot and Freshmeat have a cameo in the current dead tree edition of PC Computing. adamv sent us a link to an interview with the creator of IMDB where he says he wishes he designed Slashdot. Funny, I wish I had designed IMDB. And Lastly, Jesse Shrieve, my favorite BSD pusher and dedicated Slashdot Server whipping boy noticed that Slashdot is up to 28 on hot100.com. We're neat.

mustard writes " This is an article in USA Today about a technology that uses energy pulses to transmit data. It's fast as the speed of light, cell phones could be as small as a wristwatch, and you could have only 1 tower every 100 miles. It uses new chip technology from IBM, and as an example, they cite that it could support over 2,000 cellphones per block, as opposed to coventional cellular today which is about 400 per block. But it's not limited to that, it can be used for cheap personal radar as well. Well worth a read, fascinating stuff. In a related story, the inventor of the patent is in a dispute with a government funded lab who, according to congress, stole the idea."

tyler (asks) asks: "I asked many people, but nobody had an answer for me, so I figured i'd ask the most knowledgable people on the web: Does anyone know where i can get an assembly development environment for the PowerPC?"

scode sent us the url to an article about The Science of Star Trek. Some cheesy stuff, some interesting stuff- talks about Warp Drives, Holodecks, Phasers, Tricorders, and Transporters.

ldspartan writes "A small company called TelePizza has created a Pizza Vending Machine. Now all we need is one on every street corner. " I believe anything that achieves "Vending Machine" status is essential. We've got candy, cigarettes, mountain dew, even fruit and sandwiches. Pizza rounds it out nicely, but how long before whiskey joins the pack? I'd settle for a beer in a movie theater. I gotta move to amsterdam.

Mikey writes "An InternetNews article about a decision by a Virginia federal court declaring domain names are property" Why is the courts allowed to decide this? Isn't it really Al Gore's job? (rimshot)

Veralden writes "Here is a story about Gates and another MS witness contradicting on how their sales data is recorded. According to Gates, they have sales results in digital form and a witness testified that they have paper sales records. MS denies this, but the article seems to take a more objective view. " Here is the story.

First off, some star wars: kit sent us a link to Star Wars Pez and Bartman sent us a link to a cheesy Redneck Jedi joke page. Next, JoshH sent us a link to a page tracking the Stock of Linux companies. rde sent us proof (albeit somewhat flimsy) that ancient Slashdot readers Lived on Mars (requires registration). d sent us a link to superbad which is at least as bad as you might think. Super too. Finally, Marc Merlin sent us a link to his LWCE Picture Page which includes a peak at the Slashdot Booth. Oh, and if you can see this and are logged in to your Slashdot account, check out this page to beta test some stuff that should be finished by monday.

Stephen Adler wrote a follow up to his article on the Slashdot Effect on the Meta Slashdot Effect. Its the effect of the article about the effect. I found it funny. Cheshire Cat sent us a link to Allcam.com which is a Yahoo-style page devoted solely to web cams. James Morris sent us a link to Linux Australia which has another tux logo. Jeff Hartmann sent us a link to a cute little Ice Penguin from Michigan Technological University's Winter Carnival '99. Surprised someone sobered up long enough to make it. MTU has a great campus though they need something besides snow cows. netweasel sent us a link to an Apple Ad that you will like. Patrik Rådman sent us a "pootified" version of slashdot. Adam Muntner sent us something that we all need: Virtual Crack zzg sent us a link to a bizarre page of cool stuff like ion guns and plasma pens (oh my)

BrianS sent us a link to a USA Today Article on Refund Day. The rumor is that nobody will be getting any money back today.

XBS writes "It seems that Macs are not quite Y2K compliant. They are hardware compliant, but software wise not quite. This is research done by Pedagoguery, which makes a Y2K-testing tool for the Mac. So if you open a file with dates that only contain 2 digits,that does a 'StringToDate' routine currently interprets '89' as 1989. Next year it will interpret '89' as 2089. The rule of thumb from Pedagoguery said. "So, after the year 2000, most Mac applications will work correctly, as long as you don't open any files that contain dates." "

DP writes "Well, it is known known which game they will be porting. Civilization: Call to Power (CIV III, basically), will be fully ported to linux by Loki Software, all utilities and extras included. " How many hours did I lose to the original Civ? Man, this is great news.

XBS writes "David Bowie told a British newspaper Thh Guardian that he is for MP3s. Bowie said, it could change the entire idea of what music is -- and that isn't so bad. Bowie's record label may not approve of his public endorsement of the enemy, but he doesn't seem to care. As he writes, "You don't have to stay with a record company forever. I get bored of those interminable situations." You can read more at Salon- it's a little ways down the page, but its worth quick read if you're into Bowie or MP3s.

wald0 writes "This article highlights Sun's efforts at porting Solaris 7 to the Merced on a simulated prototype known as a "pre-silicon software development environment." An interesting piece on how Intel is opening the doors to other OS developers to create code for their chips. "

zollinger writes "This weeks InfoWorld has a story about how "Handhelds Bring Holiday Headaches." Most of this stuff has been seen here before, but some nice stuff about wearable PC's being the future of PDAs. The last quote in the story says about PDA's: "These things proliferate like a virus." "

Nathan Machula writes "Linux is one of Time magazine's top 10 technology stories of 1998. There's also a menacing picture of Linus! "

L-ViS wrote in to say that SuSE 6.0 has entered beta testing and can be downloaded over at the SuSE FTP Site .

Once again I have some award things that I feal obligated to mention. If you're not interested, skip down, click the link below to read some mussings on Slashdot CDs and a Slashdot Magazine. I really want feedback on this stuff. The main one is Cool Site of the Year which has a Guitar that I want as First Prize, so go vote. You're allowed to vote every day. Nathan Machula wrote in to tell us that we're once again in ZDNet's Top 100 websites. You'll enjoy the new review of the site. Ngeran wrote in to tell us that Slashdot was on NetCenter's What's New page. We're almost a year and a half old, but they gave us a '9' for content. DPI is doing some award thing for the end of the year. Apparently you can vote for Slashdot, I don't think I win a guitar from this one *grin*. Please click the link below and read the rest of this story. It is quite important to the future of Slashdot sorta stuff Allright, the more important stuff. First off, Slashdot CD-ROMs? I don't really know what good it would be, but people constantly email and suggest it. I figure we could put the html from 1998 on it and sell it really cheap, or we hire someone to write a nice little frontend search engine thingee and sell it for a bit more. Is there demand for this? Would you buy it? What is it worth? I don't think I would want it just because it's all online already- but then again, I already have access to that stuff. The major issue is that the older comments are no longer in a database (they are flushed after 30 days when the page is written out for the last time) but a competant perl hacker could easily strip that data back out. A Slashdot Book? People suggest this all the time too- taking the best stories of 1998 and shoving them in a nice hefty book. With a big collection of the best comments for folks to read. We're probably way to late to actually do this for the year end, althought this strikes me as more interesting than the CD. Is it a good idea? Should we consider it for 1999? Regardless, this isn't as cool as... A Slashdot Magazine? This has been suggested time and time again by folks. Essentially, a monthly publication wich selects a dozen or so of the best stories and prints them each with a few dozen comments. Then a section perhaps a few dozen stories worth reprinting. Perhaps an original article or something each month to make it actually have something that you can't get online. I don't really care, I'd rather keep everything online personally. Frankly I don't really even like paper all that much. But maybe it would just be cool to read in the bathroom, unless you have 10-base-T in your bathroom already (I'm so tempted but I have so far resisted despite the fact that there is a hub 10 ft away). Anyway, is this worth whatever the $20 it is to subscribe to a magazine these days? I'd have to hire folks to put it together and I'd have to find someone who actually knows how to publish something like this. The question is, is there a demand for it? Other Random Things Is it worth a Real Audio feed of Slashdot? I mean, eventually we'll have actual bandwidth around here and the machine won't be lagged. Would it be cool to have an audible Slashdot report for stories each day? We could conceivably do Video- I can sit behind a desk and not wear pants. We've also shot around a Slashdot Radio Show where we get a couple of geeks (maybe me and a few Slashdot authors plus random guests) a few times a week, and talk about a few of the more interesting stories off Slashdot for the day. We could take callers or something, I don't know. It might be fun. Conclusion Anyway, all of this is just random mussings. My first mission is to get Slash 0.3 done, get the server stable, find a few more solid, reliable, trustworthy moderators, and hopefully enjoy the holidays for a bit. But any feedback on this stuff is appreciated. Frankly I don't care if we do any of these things or not, but enough people are suggesting these things that I'm curious if its actually worth doing. If it is, it means I have to decide exactly what I want to do so that I can convince rich investors that this won't be like flushing their money directly down the toilet. Anyway, if you have ideas post them here or email me (note that there is no way I'll be able to respond to everyone, but I'll try)

mwarps writes "It appears our favorite software giant is being sued for stealing someone else's product, again... Check it out here. " The company didn't have MS sign an NDA and claims that our favorite monopoly stole their ideas after a meeting. All I know is a billion dollars for mice? Dang.

Kabby writes "I'm surprised it has yet to appear on Slashdot, but... Scientists announced Thursday that they have the first genetic blueprint of a multi-celled animal. Its DNA consists of 97 million chemical unitsand is expected to contain 19,099 genes. CNN has an article that i caught in the NY times this morning. Apparently, we are more closely related to worms than we'd like to be... See for yourself, but I am not convinced yet. " H: Interesting stuff-from what I've heard, the first complete de-coding of a genome. This one is actually cool because of the extent that this particular strand of nematode is used in experiments worldwide.

Anthony writes "I just got an email from Encyclopedia Brittanica Online about the latest addition to their site: toys.eb.com. It basically describes toys from the last 500 yrs. This includes some interesting info. on Pong and, the latest and greatest, Nintendo 64. Pretty neat stuff. "

getafix sent us a link to a decent little article on CBS's Marketwatch page about Netscape's Open Source Adventures. Its another "Look, Open Source is Swell" kind of article from the mainstream. Some Slashdot references too.

getafix writes "www.newhoo.com (was gnuhoo - featured on slashdot) has been bought by netscape. The newhoo folks owned the database, although the contents of the database were submitted by volunteers." Financial terms were not released, but the boys in charge now have offices at Netscape.

A whole bunch of you have written in about multiple monitor (multi-headed) support in Linux. Is it possible? What's involved? Who supports it? These are all interesting questions, and one person made a point of noting that Windows could do it, and couldn't find out how to do it on Linux. There's also a nifty project in the works involving Linux and a "video wall"! Click below for more... Christopher Danz had this nifty project he's working on:

"My name is Christopher Danz and I'm part of a team in Washington State University that is building what we affectionatly refer to as a picture wall. It's bank of nine monitors placed in a three by three grid, each controlled by a corresponding 486 processor. Each "computer" consists of a mother board, CPU, video card, ethernet card, and our own homemade boot card (emmulates the boot disk). These nine computers must then in turn by controlled via the ethernet cards by a tenth computer. We've decided to use linux as the operating system on the tenth computer (as well as the nine slaves). The problem is we're having difficulty finding video controlling functions. Each screen is supposed to have the ability to fade, scroll, etc, as well as work together as a whole. Do you know of any locations on the Web we could look for such programming functions?" taliesen had this question to ask about basic multi-monitor support: "I'm looking into putting together a multiple monitor multiple video card system under Linux. The official word for XFree86 is that none of the current X servers support this. I was wondering if there are any patches or maybe even a commercial X server that would support two or three video cards/monitors. Preferably one AGP and one or two PCI, but all PCI would be better than nothing. Any information would be greatly appreciated."

Frag-A-Muffin asked something similar, but he mentions Xi Graphics' AccelX servers. He also thought that XFree86 did support multi-headed displays, but that you had to have two of the same card to do it.

and Aaron W. was looking for a HOWTO, and couldn't find one on this subject...(any volunteers?)

Will the folks with some answers for these please step forward? (grin!)

Doctor DOS wrote in to send us a link to an article where you can read about some new virus that actually gets embedded into MP3s. It would be great if it was written by the RIAA. Basically, the same concept as the now infamous Word Macro virus, but this time, you can embed it in The Who instead of in your english homework.

frank sent us a link to another souped up car. While this one doesn't have an MP3 player, it is equipped with sonic whistles, paintball guns, rocket launchers and enough wacky toys to impress Macgyver. Or at least to cover him with paint.

Jeff Monks writes "Computer World has a short article about SGI's newest Cray machine - 2,048 processors! I bet it plays a mean Quake... "

Kevin Forge has written in with an interesting piece called Lawyers use WordPerfect. It talks about his view on free software vs. commercial software, and especially commercial software on free Operating Systems. Check it out. The following is a feature written by Slashdot reader Kevin Forge Lawyers use Word Perfect Each time even a rumor of a commercial app being ported to Linux is mentioned we get comments that run the gamut from ; "Let's all go buy this to show our support for the platform" to "We can achieve most everything that prog offers by using these open source tools so why should we trust our important work to this propriatery bloatware ?".

"who wants world domination"?

We constantly hear the argument that Linux will achieve world domination or that a significant percentage of all computers will be run on Linux in a few years. However to achieve either goal Linux must be a viable option for people with real business needs now.

This brings me to the lawyers we all love to hate. I am siting in a Lawyer's office waiting to be paid for fixing Windows 95 on 2 PCs ( again ) when a client walks out having just spelled out the details of her divorce ( loud enough for me to hear ). Before she is in the parking lot the laser starts spiting out the 1st page of a 30 page court document for her case.

How the hell could that be done so fast ?

Simple It was already done. The details that change are few and far between. Things like names, addresses and dates. Once these are entered into fields a macro is run that generates your own customized "I can't live with this bum anymore" court filling.

Don't discount inertia

Now you could say it's easy enough to do this kind of thing with a shell script on a Linux system without the added expense of Word Perfect. However it took these people years to tune operations and learn WP to the point where this became a practical time saving prosedure. To move this operation to existing open source software would mean learning all these tricks again.

How important is the cost of changing ? Well these same lawyers buy new PCs preburdend with MSOffice 97 and promptly upgrade to Corel Perfect Office 8 or even 7 in order that they can keep using the same techniques. Sure those features are available on MSOffice and the learning curve from one Windows app to another is tiny compared to moving to traditional Unix tools. However an even lower cost is simply shelling out a hundred bucks for a CD from Corel.

Where does Linux fit?

Well with WP on Linux the barriers to entry become significantly lower for Lawyers. Simply put, a Penguin preloaded and configured with XDM, KDE, WP8 and Laserjet support has the same learning curve as moving up to a Dell with NT4 or 98 and WP8. With the massive reliability gap taken into consideration they could see Linux as a cost effective solution and another group joins ISPs and tech companies as Linux users.

Where does this leave the open source word processors ?

I see no reason to not continue aggressive development of the better GPLed Word Processors. K/LyX is moving well and there is talk of a serious contender from the Gnome camp. Maxwell, which shines among Linux apps has been GPLed with a flat request to "port it to Gnome and KDE" ( It's Motif based ). One of these will eventually become a challenger to WP across the board. By then Word Perfect will be accustomed to maintaining a quality lead that enables them to survive against a free challenger. In other words those without money or who attend "The church of Emacs" will have good WPs and the rest of us will have slightly better WPs.

Telling people to "accept the open source concept" if they want to use Linux or to "GPL all code that you will release on Linux" is completely pointless. Even RMS knows this which is why he wrote the LGPL.

This applies to the SQL people too.

Right now all but 2 of the large database makers are officially supporting their products on Linux. IBM programmers say a port is running in the lab ( I have no reason to doubt this for even a second ) and Microsoft would prefer to pretend Linux doesn't exist (let's return the favor :). Some months ago I argued that Oracle wouldn't ever port to Linux until they saw it as a "port or die" desision at which point they would start selling the DB for Linux they already have running in the labs. The reality is a little more impressive than the speculation. It seems all these vendors will be giving away products in order to establish market share. Is it just me or do other people think they are trying to get a significant piece of the Linux DB pie before it gets big?

Should we all just run out and buy these programs to show our support?

No. That's just crazy. Let the free market have it's say. There are evaluation versions of the better stuff floating around. If you find it's good enough to keep beyond the evaluation period then fork over the dough. That doesn't mean you need to wait out the full period however, just until you know it's a keeper. We should buy them if they are of some use to us. We should buy them if they are good. It's your money spend it wisely, you now have choices.

Kevin Forge has written in with an interesting piece called Lawyers use WordPerfect. It talks about his view on free software vs. commercial software, and especially commercial software on free Operating Systems. Check it out. The following is a feature written by Slashdot reader Kevin Forge Lawyers use Word Perfect Each time even a rumor of a commercial app being ported to Linux is mentioned we get comments that run the gamut from ; "Let's all go buy this to show our support for the platform" to "We can achieve most everything that prog offers by using these open source tools so why should we trust our important work to this propriatery bloatware ?".

"who wants world domination"?

We constantly hear the argument that Linux will achieve world domination or that a significant percentage of all computers will be run on Linux in a few years. However to achieve either goal Linux must be a viable option for people with real business needs now.

This brings me to the lawyers we all love to hate. I am siting in a Lawyer's office waiting to be paid for fixing Windows 95 on 2 PCs ( again ) when a client walks out having just spelled out the details of her divorce ( loud enough for me to hear ). Before she is in the parking lot the laser starts spiting out the 1st page of a 30 page court document for her case.

How the hell could that be done so fast ?

Simple It was already done. The details that change are few and far between. Things like names, addresses and dates. Once these are entered into fields a macro is run that generates your own customized "I can't live with this bum anymore" court filling.

Don't discount inertia

Now you could say it's easy enough to do this kind of thing with a shell script on a Linux system without the added expense of Word Perfect. However it took these people years to tune operations and learn WP to the point where this became a practical time saving prosedure. To move this operation to existing open source software would mean learning all these tricks again.

How important is the cost of changing ? Well these same lawyers buy new PCs preburdend with MSOffice 97 and promptly upgrade to Corel Perfect Office 8 or even 7 in order that they can keep using the same techniques. Sure those features are available on MSOffice and the learning curve from one Windows app to another is tiny compared to moving to traditional Unix tools. However an even lower cost is simply shelling out a hundred bucks for a CD from Corel.

Where does Linux fit?

Well with WP on Linux the barriers to entry become significantly lower for Lawyers. Simply put, a Penguin preloaded and configured with XDM, KDE, WP8 and Laserjet support has the same learning curve as moving up to a Dell with NT4 or 98 and WP8. With the massive reliability gap taken into consideration they could see Linux as a cost effective solution and another group joins ISPs and tech companies as Linux users.

Where does this leave the open source word processors ?

I see no reason to not continue aggressive development of the better GPLed Word Processors. K/LyX is moving well and there is talk of a serious contender from the Gnome camp. Maxwell, which shines among Linux apps has been GPLed with a flat request to "port it to Gnome and KDE" ( It's Motif based ). One of these will eventually become a challenger to WP across the board. By then Word Perfect will be accustomed to maintaining a quality lead that enables them to survive against a free challenger. In other words those without money or who attend "The church of Emacs" will have good WPs and the rest of us will have slightly better WPs.

Telling people to "accept the open source concept" if they want to use Linux or to "GPL all code that you will release on Linux" is completely pointless. Even RMS knows this which is why he wrote the LGPL.

This applies to the SQL people too.

Right now all but 2 of the large database makers are officially supporting their products on Linux. IBM programmers say a port is running in the lab ( I have no reason to doubt this for even a second ) and Microsoft would prefer to pretend Linux doesn't exist (let's return the favor :). Some months ago I argued that Oracle wouldn't ever port to Linux until they saw it as a "port or die" desision at which point they would start selling the DB for Linux they already have running in the labs. The reality is a little more impressive than the speculation. It seems all these vendors will be giving away products in order to establish market share. Is it just me or do other people think they are trying to get a significant piece of the Linux DB pie before it gets big?

Should we all just run out and buy these programs to show our support?

No. That's just crazy. Let the free market have it's say. There are evaluation versions of the better stuff floating around. If you find it's good enough to keep beyond the evaluation period then fork over the dough. That doesn't mean you need to wait out the full period however, just until you know it's a keeper. We should buy them if they are of some use to us. We should buy them if they are good. It's your money spend it wisely, you now have choices.

Kevin Forge sent us a link to an InfoWorld story where you can read that IBM was fined $8M for selling RS6000 to Russia. How long before beowulf falls victim to the same restrictions? Soon we won't be able to export pentium chips because *gasp* if someone gets a thousand of them and Beowulf, they can build a supercomputer...

Nate writes "Ed Di Cristofaro of HardWire has announced he will extend his hardware testing to Linux along with the usual Windows testing. "It's quickly spreading in popularity and has the potential to fall right behind Windows and into the #2 spot for desktop operating system users." Click below to read on.

Martin Hepworth writes "Looks like SUN are bowing the M$'s 'user-friendly' installation with a deal with Install Shield Software. "

Johan Walles writes "I dunno whether "scoop" is the correct term for this, but anyway: slashdot.org is on tenth place of the site rankings for the "Computers/Internet" category on Sixdegrees link Forty more votes would put Slashdot on third place (before www.linux.org), and 170 votes would put it first (above www.icq.com and www.cnet.com). So if all sixdegrees users reading /. would go "slashdot-effect" the poll, a whole bunch of new readers might very well see the light and come to /. for their daily updates :-)."

James S. Baughn writes "Seeing as how there aren't any good Linux humor sites, I've created Humorix: "All Linux Humor. All Copied Mottos. All the Time."

Exile57 writes "The music industry is trying to end the proliferation of the pirate music scene. Apparently, bootleg CD's are a booming market in other countries. On top of the CD's being pressed illegally, the industry is also a bit miffed at the amount of pirate MP3 sites on the Internet. Here's the story as told by CNN."

Andrew Dalke writes "Python 1.0 was just released It is an implementation of Python (my favorite language :) for the Java virtual machine. With it you get the full power of a very high level dynamic language able to access all of the Java classes, including awt, java beans, swing, jdbc and corba. It includes a binary version of OROMatcher to implement perl5 style regular expressions. I worked with the most recent beta version and didn't come across any bugs. The only problem I had was the startup time, which was about two seconds on my Indigo2 compared to the fraction of a second for the C implementation, but much of that was the JVM starting up. We also needed to sidegrade to Netscape's 4.05 AWT 1.1 Preview release to develop applets. The biggest advantage was the interactive nature of the implementation where I could test new code or examine the behaviour of different Java classes without recompiling. Overall I estimate that it took me about a quarter of the time to implement my project in JPython instead of straight Java. *advocacy on* I can predict people will comment on two things about Python as a language, so let me preemptively address them here: 1) Python isn't as flexible as Perl -- sure, but it is a lot cleaner in general and easier to do OO programming. I rarely notice the lack of the more baroque Perl control features since Python's exception handling and ease of creating helper classes simplify tasks like finalizing resource handling during error conditions. Python's real flexibility is integrating new functionality like Java classes, COM objects or database support in a straight-forward, modular fashion. More to the point of this announcement, you can't get a Perl applet running on top of the JVM. 2) Python uses indentation and newlines for scoping and statement end instead of {} and ; -- most people find it enjoyable once they get used to it (and when using an editor like emacs that understands the language syntax). It is a suprisingly nice feeling to be several blocks in at the end of a function definition and only having to press 'enter' to finish instead of ';enter}enter}enter}' to fulfil the requirements of the parser. *advocacy off* "

Robert Macaulay writes "There is a new CScene up: Issue 5"

jb goode writes "This is a story about KryoTech's thermally accelerated 450MHz Cool K6-2 PC, running the chess program ``Rebel'' from Schroder BV in the Netherlands, defeated world #2 ranked grandmaster Viswanathan (``Vishy'') Anand by a score of 5 to 3. The match consisted of four blitz games, two semi-blitz games, and two tournament games played July 21-23 on the island of Ischia, Italy. Update I don't have a working link to this story apparently. Anyone got one?"

XBS writes " AT&T and British Telecom are set to announce an international joint venture that would give AT&T access to the market in the U.K. and BT similar access in the U.S. " You can read more at MSNBC or News.com