Slashdot Mirror

Sorry for the off topic post, but I feel it to be very crucial for everyone to be informed about recent event regarding EU software patents. There is movement again. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020 387,39185393,00.htm

"[CTO of IBM's xSeries server group Tom Bradicich] acknowledges that there are challenges in producing such a large system -- including building support into Windows and Linux, neither of which are suited for 64-processor systems today"

Looks like someone was up to those challenges, eh? 64-processor support *and* 64-bit support. Awesome news.

ZDNet UK
January 18, 2005, 15:55 GMT

HP has demonstrated Linux running on 64 Itanium2 processors without any loss of efficiency, and says it's seeing growing interest in Linux from financial institutions.

HP on Tuesday demonstrated Linux scaling to 64 processors on its Superdome hardware as it seeks to reassure customers who are increasingly considering the open source operating system for enterprise applications.

Running three different benchmarks on a standard Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel, the Superdome showed linear improvements for kernel compiling, memory bandwidth, and the HPL common supercomputer benchmark.

Operating system scalability is important to companies; without it, throwing more processors at a problem will result in diminishing returns. With OS scalability, doubling the number of processors should double the performance.

On the Superdome, demonstrated at HP's labs in Böblingen, Germany, a kernel compile using a single Itanium2 processor took about 19 minutes (there are about 20,000 files to compile in this job).

Because the compile contained serial jobs, during which one processor intermittently collated the work, performance improved by a factor of 26 when all 64 Itanium2 processors were used. With no serial jobs a performance improvement of 64 would have been expected, said Sebastien Cabaniols, engineering project leader on the project.

In the STREAM benchmark, memory bandwidth rose from 5GB/s with one 'cell' of four processors, to 10GB/s with two cells, and continued to double until all 64 processors -- or all 16 cells -- were switched on to provide 80GB/s of bandwidth.

The HPL benchmark, which is used to measure performance when solving large linear equations, produced similar results, rising from 18 gigaflops with one cell of four processors to 277 gigaflops with all 16 cells, or 64 processors, running.

"This was a standard Linux distribution," said Cabaniols. "The kernel was able to discover the topology of the system and discover the memory in a NUMA pattern."

NUMA, or 'non uniform memory architecture', refers to the cell-like architecture of the Superdome in which the 64 processors and their associated memory are split into 16 cells. In the demo machine half the 256GB of RAM was configured as local memory for the cells, and the other half was configured as pooled memory.

"The 2.6 kernel is NUMA aware," said Cabaniols. Some patching was necessary, he said, but "all patches developed for the BigTux project are going into the mainstream Linux kernel and are included in standard distributions."

Eva Beck, Linux business manager for HP Europe, said that in the past year and a half the company has seen customers using Linux for application servers. "Today it is a complete environment," she said, alluding to the use of Linux across all types of server, from Web servers and email servers to technical applications and now enterprise applications. "One the client side we're seeing a much stronger push too, prompted largely by the public sector installations," she added. "Banks and insurance companies are among those showing more interest in Linux on the desktop now."

It's being reported that thanks to pro-active action from the porn site in question, the problem is under control...

Five years of FUD, but financial success... He is feeling rattled by Linux though, as the recent FUD he's been spreading about patents shows. One imagines this will continue for some time to come, since his style may not be popular, but it's certainly effective.

You can get TV-tuners as USB-dongles, I've seen it, but never tried it. Here's a Googled link: http://shopping.zdnet.co.uk/shopping/video-cards/t v-tuner-cards/0,20000296,20283447p,00.htm

Or you could go for the Asus W1000Na-series of notebooks: http://uk.asus.com/products/notebook/w1series/w100 0na/w1000na_overview.htm

It comes with built-in TV-tuner and remote-control, even sporting a small subwoofer. But according to the forum for W1000N Asus refuses to give out the standards, so it's proprietary and the software really sucks.

But aside from that the W1000N-series is really highly regarded by its owners, as you can read on the fan forum-site: http://www.w1n-forum.net/

It even sports 4.1 sound output, which is good enough if you're not a fanatic.

I'm waiting for Dolby Surround 6.1, and upgraded options on this baby. But if I really have to buy a laptop, I would buy it today. Just make sure you get the a-series for the TV-tuner. It might even be the better option if tomorrows laptops gets hotter and noisier as they get upgraded.

To both you and the grandparent: What does this tell you about Richard Stallman's crusade to destroy the very idea of intellectual property rights [as a first step towards abolishing any notions of private property whatsoever]?

That maybe there's some underlying value in intellectual property? That maybe it takes a lot of time and effort to create intellectual property? That maybe people who go to the effort of creating and distributing intellectual property aren't all that thrilled when a certain rogue element in society steals that intellectual property from them and BitTorrents/KaZaAs it for free? That maybe The Evil One(TM) might have been onto something?

Anyone who still uses older 16-bit programs can forget about running them under 64-bit Windows. However, some 32-bit applications use 16-bit code during installation, which means that these programs cannot be installed.

The algorithm has been hacked - http://whitepapers.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025945,60023455 p-39000579q,00.htm for a paper that gives some details. However, it's still of little use unless the hacker knows the serial number of the token in question and has access to the "secret" token data from the secureID server...

Programmer.no
ZDNet
News.com.com.com.com
Original Opera press release
Changelog

to send out their email, so gmail can't just block an IP address. Apparently, 70% of spam is generated by botnets.

I know I would diversify if I were them. With predictions of new vulnerabilities being exploited within hours it seems like anti-virus software would be a risky business to be in right now. If a major organization got rooted via an exploit that their software didn't protect them from quickly enough they might try to sue Symantec for failing to provide adequate protection. I don't think such a case would be have much merit or be successful, but it would still cost money to defend against it. It might be a very savvy move to have another field to expand into if the market on AV got tight.

The EU Council is accused of 'last-minute manoeuvring'...

First off, what does this statement mean?

"[Linux has] 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis."

So Linux has 985 bugs. Windows has bugs that appear frequently. Ok that doesn't really tell me anything. I tried to dig a bit deeper and came up with: "Coverity has not analysed the source code to Microsoft Windows because the company does not have access to the source code, Hallem said. Apple Computer's Mac OS X has a great deal of proprietary programming, but the core of the operating system is based on BSD, an open-source operating system similar to Linux."

So everything is based on estimates. Now, you know and I know that the Linux kernel has less bugs... but this is a tentative (at best, shoddy at worst) way of presenting that idea.

You forgot Poland...

Europe has a patent problem too, don't just pick on the US!

The U.S. firefoxers are badly lagging behind here: The German local group "Firefox kommt!" had their ad with about 2,400 signatures in Germany's premier economics paper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (FAZ) on the 2nd of December 2004. You can see the ad here (includes various mirrors). The response in the German press was fantastic.
... and firefox-kommt was started after the US campaign. And I really liked the ad ...
Firefox Declares War in Germany
Firefox ad published in Europe
Now, quite a lot of people tried to post this on Slashdot, but for some reason, these stories seem to have been rejected wholesale. I fail to see the reasoning behind this: Being U.S. centered is one thing, trying to supress the first example of an ad that the world has been holding its breath for quite another. It would be nice if the editors forced themselves to give a reason when they rejected postings or at least created a section where people can look at them.
So true.

According to this article in eWeek, Sun thinks Linux has forked and Red Hat made their own version. It's all part of their open source posturing. They don't really want to make Solaris open source because it would just get picked over to improve Linux. They want to get open source advantages while still not giving up control. That's why they came up with their not-so-open source license. But if they're not going to go all the way with open source, it would help if their opponents are not-so-open either. Hence, the bad-mouthing of Red Hat.

Lycos is claiming it was a hoax.

No one feels sorry for the spammers but my guess is there WILL be legit companies getting the SDDoS (Semi DDoS) attack.

More importantly, how about a link in the Slashdot article to the content of the story (Lycos hacked)? All of the links in the submission are to the old news. I had to Google to find out the details of what the original poster was typing about....

Listen, buddy... it's not that we don't trust you (we do! of course we do, why wouldn't we) it's just that.. y'know, all the available sources seem to completely disagree with that statement - unless you count *yourself* as a source, of course.

So, I really would like to apologize on behalf of everybody here in the BSD section if, occasionally, you might be called names like "retard" or "clueless idiot" or "FUD-spreading GNU/troll". Maybe it's because of the academical spirit of the BSD projects that they attract scientific-minded people (duh!..) who tend not to believe in unsupported statements - and even less in statements going against the supported truth.
Besides, I really have to apologize for their complete lack of humour, because you clearly have been doing this for years just to be funny, and not to spread FUD.
On the whole, I hope you can forgive them for their close-mindedness that, I'm sure, is the reason that prevents them from dropping *BSD and switching to GNU/Linux.
Please forgive them, and don't take it personally!

(..I don't need to put an explicative closing tag here, do I!..)

See: this follow up posting under the original article

Name: Chris Gianelloni
Location: USA
Occupation: Gentoo Linux Developer
Comment: Well, what can I say except that quite a bit of the "meat" of this "interview" was ignored. I did make mention that the full-environment LiveCD would be an "experimental" CD available for x86 and amd64 and that it will have a "limited functionality, beta version" of the installer on the CD. At no point did I represent that there would be a 100% completed installer available by February, but now it appears that everyone under the sun thinks that there will be one.

There will not.

Trust me on this one. The Gentoo Installer project is working very hard, but they are not anywhere near completion and definitely will not be so quickly after the winter holidays.

It was the losers they had working with them.

Not quite. Microsoft and EDS operate the system as a joint venture

This group doesn't hate MS as such; it hates bad businesses which harm the IT industry and users. For the last few years that's been Microsoft. Next year it could be Linus Torvalds. Who knows?

Anyhoo, palmOne and PalmSource are far from 'dead', though Microsoft's advertising might give that impression. Palm OS is still the most appropriate operating system for a PDA (sorry Linux), creating a versatile tool that happens to be a computer rather than a computer which happens to have PDA features.

More at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/talkback/?PROCESS=show&ID=2 0020611&AT=39147405-39024180t-30000029c .

Richard Stallman is the man responsible for GNU/Linux? Linux uses a lot of GNU programs in userland, but to call him "the man" responsible for GNU/Linux?

Ok Chuck, I'll walk you through it step by step.

"This means you won't be able to steal music" - you cannot "steal" music. You can only commit copyright violations. Stealing music is impossible, unless you shoplift CDs. And even then, you're stealing the CDs, not the music. The music still exists.

"that artists worked so hard to produce" - you know, I actually know people who play music because they just like to. Odd, no?

"and music companies worked so hard to distribute." - Cost of a music CD, about 10 bucks. Cost of a Hollywood movie on DVD, about 15. But making a movie is orders of magnitude more expensive to make and market. Wanna know why? Here's why. The music industry is uniquely corrupt. And also incompetent. Are you sure you want these goons scanning your hard drive, even if you haven't done anything wrong? What if your name happens to be Usher, too?

"Woe is you!" - and woe is anyone who allows this band of barely legalized criminals into their affairs. Even with something as simple as a click through EULA.

These articles on ZDNet UK: http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39174245,00. htm http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651, 39174217,00.htm say that after Poland has withdrawn it's support for software patents there isn't qualified majority for it any more.

These articles on ZDNet UK: http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39174245,00. htm http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651, 39174217,00.htm say that after Poland has withdrawn it's support for software patents there isn't qualified majority for it any more.

Some Linux friendly companies, such as Novell and especially IBM, have patents on computer-implemented inventions that they could use to retaliate against Microsoft should the need arise.

Of this I am fairly certain. Per my blog, regarding this article.

There is no lack of buzz around patents. This article garnered opinions from some big names in the patent world, like Free Software Foundation counsel Dan Ravicher, law firms Phillips Fox and Baker & McKenzie.

Dan Ravicher of the FSF made this point: "patents pose less of a threat to open-source software than they do to proprietary software". He also states: "There are no patents that choose only to be infringed by open source. Any patent that imposes a threat to open-source software is going to impose a threat to proprietary software."

Well, the first point doesn't flow logically from the second point. Open source and proprietary software are in two different categories, from an evidientiary and a monetary point of view.

Access to source code
As a matter of evidence, violating patents in open source software is evident on its face: you can read the source code. Legible code makes a patent infringement case trivial. Proprietary software may require expensive reverse engineering, to devise how it operates and whether that operation violates the patent. There may be some legal questions regarding your capacity to reverse engineer legally, particularly with oppressive legislation such as the DMCA.

Access to software
Also, in this vein, to determine a violation of proprietary software, you must also have access to it. Proprietary software, particularly custom or enterprise software, may not be readily available to examine. Even if the software is available, it may require an onerous license that prohibits reverse engineering. Open source software is, almost by definition, accessible to anyone for examinition. Having a clause to prevent reverse engineering would be contrary to its object.

Licensing capacity
The lucid nature of open source software means that to obtain a mandatory license for a patent would be prohibitively expensive for two reasons. First, open source software does not have deep pockets or the capacity for a cross licensing agreement. Second, even if either were available, the nature of open source software would wholly undermine the purpose of the patent: an open source implementation of the patent would be available for free, unrestricted use.

A proprietary software company, on the other hand, has the economic means and an economic incentive to obtain a license or cross license, and would presumably do so only for the benefit of the company, and would not threaten the other economic interests of the patent.

Compulsory Licensing
Patent legislation provides for compulsory licensing, I understand, if it is in the public interest. However, even though a proprietary company could enforce this licensing by challenging it at the patent office, currently the cost would be prohibitively expensive to many, if not most, open source software developers. As well, compulsory licensing that undermines the patent, by creating an open source unrestricted implementation, would create contentious arguments about the real public interest. Patents protect the patentor, and as a secondary consideration they may have licensing imposed against the will of the patentor, if it is in the public interest. Their rights would likely trump.

For at least these reasons open source software is in a different situation than proprietary software, and as a result I am not entirely convinced of Mr. Ravichers's assertion, as they are quoted in the linked article.

I'm from Romania,I have a small company, I just discovered on net that Poland turned against software patents in Europe!
http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39174245,00. htm
Great!
In 2007 Romania will be (we hope) part of UE and we don't want US like software patents! noo way...
Thank you Poland!
Microsoft allready have a dangerous influence to our guvernment (what you say about a minister that is very hape to make pictures with Bill Gates or Steve Balmer,pictures that costs us milions - for use in schools and administration when free open source solution exist :( )

Abss
http://www.intrebare.ro/

1. Who WANTS to exercise underwater options? That means that you LOSE money because you suddenly have options that cost WAY more than the market value is and selling those would instantly lose a ton of money.

2. Blocked? Well there is this thing called Vesting....

3. In 2003 Microsoft made an offer to buy back ANY underwater options that were above a certain price

That might not be true. Look what a week of gathering cash did for Firefox!! I bet that if Slashdot posted a "donate money to fight Microsoft in court" fund we'd raise millions of dollars to help fight the lies!

One way to look at it is that lawsuits are an expensive way to make noise. Ballmer has to make noise or else folks will resume paying attention to their work and finding that MS is an obstacle. Or worse, that folks will start checking out other options like OpenOffice.org or OS X or one of the Linux distros. Or, even worse, they'll start to realise that MS stock is a worse investment than Enron:

Mainstream press is starting to figure out that MS-Windows dominance will last only another 2- 4 years and that only because of the enormous marketing and lobbying engine that MS is. To add weight to that, MS blocked its employees from exercising their "underwater" stock options during 2004. That was intended to increase retention, as employees need to remain with Microsoft to receive the payout. Retention would not be an issue unless the company looked to have no future.

Many execs, however haven't been able to empty their portfolios yet and want more delay.

The fact of the matter is that Tivo isn't making that much money, and is losing market share to new competitors, not to mention fighting an uphill battle with networks, ired by the service.

While I'm sure there's something in the TOS that allows them to do this to their subscribers (myself among them, though I'm building an htpc as we speak), the isn't a great way to innovate themselves out of the pit they're in. The home media toolset they have is innovative, as is the website scheduling. Not because they invented it, it was hacked into Tivo long before, but because they chose to expand consumer choice, and the capability of their offering.

My guess is that either they're going to do this with a partial kick-back to networks as pennance for their commercial skip sins OR they're trying to position themselves as advertiser-friendly as a means to demonstrate growth potential.

Further, they could be getting themselves into hot water with advertisers, particularly if they try to be 'smart' about ad placement (Home depot in a home improvement show, especially one sponsored by Lowes). Gator and Netscape both have/are in trouble for this: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,391191 32,00.htm

• ZDnet: Patent opponents claim success
• Infoworld: Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive
• The Inquirer: Poland scuppers EU software patents directive
• EDRI: Poland blocks EU Software Patent directive
• NoSoftwarePatents.com: Polish Cabinet Against Software Patents

See also FFII's Breaking News wiki

The Council of Ministers' first reading text had been scheduled for fast-track approval before the end of the year, probably by Agriculture and Fisheries ministers.

They did it before. Stated in "Helloween" memo, years ago.

They purposely broke Quicktime with a OS update. Not that plugin thing, much before!

Its not a rumor , it was told at court:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,3902039 6,2069820,00.htm

Design flaws in MSIE are costing billions. Given the current state of the economy, those billions are not coming out of fat, nor even meat, but bone. Currently, MSIE is the only web browser that will execute abritrary code on your machine as the result of simply looking at a web page. Similar flaws have been found every few weeks for years. Sadly, MS has been slow about fixing many and cant take weeks or months to even acknowledge a problem, just like it does for its other products. Some cannot be stopped by firewalls or AV software. You'd be a fool to broadcast your bank codes to the world by using MSIE.

Nice to know MS has made security a high priority. Hopefully its next priority will be doing something about it. Get over your blind adoration of Chairman Bill, right now there are products on the market that work they all happen to be non-MS.

The V8 supercars in Australia use a system that includes Wifi and Linux based computers to record car information for use by race officals. See an old story on the setup here.

Mature companies like Microsoft have switched from options (who really thinks their stock will increase enough to make their stock will increase enough to make the options valueable?)

Starting 2005, however, MS employees can resume selling which means they can bail and look for a job elsewhere without losing their options. C'mon. Do you see anyone doing anything other than bailing?

Yes, Ballmer's making all kind of noise, but security and quality problems are starting to cut into MS' bottom line. OpenOffice.org is cutting into the applications profit. Linux is cutting into their server profit and just starting to edge into the desktop arena. Areas like embedded systems have MS listed as a no-show. If litigation and a patent war don't pull things up next year, MS is out of the way for good.

but it is old news, from 10/10/2003:

On the stand of a multimedia-oriented Linux distribution called dyne:bolic, operating system author and maintainer Jaromil -- the moniker he prefers to be known by -- was demonstrating a hacked Xbox that can be used to offload processing tasks from a mixed cluster of PCs and Xboxes.

...advocacy list about Oxford switching from Ingres-based apps to PostgreSQL - right here.

UTILITY PLUG: Here's an open source PostgreSQL query analyzer

WHat? Third party stuff? I call bullshit. Nvidia just didnt want their stuff to be GPL'ed.. Source..(cannot find original MS article)

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020381,210103 7,00.htm

(QUOTE) An OEM is required to sort through a potential legal morass of licensing issues around the GPL if it wants to protect its intellectual property rights. This creates extra costs from both a development and legal perspective. An example of this risk can be taken from nVidia. An nVidia programmer, in the course of developing a driver for one of its products, used a portion of code from a freely available video driver. The developer failed to realise the code was licensed under the GPL and would therefore require nVidia to release the source code for its entire driver. Because nVidia did not want to release the source code to its commercial software, the company incurred substantial costs to develop a new driver that did not contain the GPL code. (/QUOTE)

And there's, like, that lil' company Novell bought some time ago.. What was the name? Mmmm, t'was something like SuSE... I think so, but can't seem to remember very clearly. I think they were into something like Linux... Lenux, Lanux, Lunux? Must have some email about it somewhere...

I can't find the actual response on that site... but there is a copy of it on zdnet.

" Together, Ricis and I.D.L. Technology Group have installed over 1,000 Openexchange servers in 2003 and have performed more than 340 Microsoft Exchange to SUSE LINUX Openexchange migrations, as well as over 150 migrations from other Email server platforms using various SUSE LINUX (Now Novell) approved migration tools.

I've only skimmed through the full report a little bit, and there's already a problem with some of its logic and data. It mentions that Microsoft's web site restarts on an average of only 59 days; yet, this does not necessarily represent the true uptime of their servers, as they are actually proxied and protected by linux servers on the front end [http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,3902 0390,39115920,00.htm]

You may find this interesting.

Would this be the same British Library that was going to archive the whole UK web?

When you see people in places like Venezuela registering "secure-usbank.com," it sorta makes you wonder whether there should be stricter controls over domain registration. People would probably be less likely to trust a domain if it didn't contain the name of their bank in it.

Of course, too much control would hurt people who have legitimate reasons for using a name, such as, perhaps, "usbank-sucks.com" or some other sort of personal-opinion type of thing.

Still, there's a nagging thought in the back of my head that spammers in Venezuela should have a slightly more difficult time getting secure-usbank.com. Maybe US Bank should've taken a cue from Microsoft and more vigorously defended the use of their name online.