Slashdot Mirror

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)

caferace writes "I was fairly impressed with the article on the PC Magazine web site for a good evaluation of the BeOS Release "4". I ran the CD-based demo on my +3 year old Dell and it kicked some serious butt. Check it out! "

Neal Richter sent us this story and says "Netscape may be cutting off Mozilla.org to insulate them from legal accountability for a rouge open source programmer using patented code. "

Several people have written in to tell us that ZD is running a poll about the Top News Maker of 1998. I find it terribly amusing that Jenni of Cam fame is winning. Sure, I dig the Jennicam, but Linus is on the list as well, and for some reason I think Linus was a bit more of a news maker in the last 12 months. So go vote if you like.

Chip Richards writes "PCWeek's John Taschek makes some rather inflammatory claims about Linux scheduling and I/O in his column this week. The words "dog meat" are bandied about. I don't know enough kernel hackery to know if these claims are true, so I'd like to hear from someone who does."

Rob Bos writes " "Windows users know Tucows as one of the virtual places to get Internet software. And now it's planning on adding Linux." "[tucows] doesn't allow ISPs to mirror its site on servers running Windows NT" "If Tucows didn't believe in the profit potential of Linux, it wouldn't bother." "isn't ruling out the other popular flavors of Unix, such as Solaris and FreeBSD, as future additions" " News like this makes being up since 4:30 in the morning a little more passable. A little.

technophile writes "John C. Dvorak has written an opinion piece on PC Magazine's site about why the AOL/Netscape merger is a Bad Thing. Most of his reasons are business concerns, but it's worth a read."

Sean Garagan writes "The PCWeek labs reviewed the latest RedHat offering as a desktop alternative. They had the usual problems of GUI interface and hard to configure sound subsystems. I have to agree on one point though, the RedHat package install interface needs to be cleaned up somehow."

ZDNET is reassuring its readers that Linux and BeOS are not at war. Despite this rather amusing statement, the article isn't too bad although it seems biassed towards BeOS and GUIs Never-the-less there's a lot to learn from BeOS: The Replicant technology sounds good (freeze applications so that they're in the same state at the next reboot) and I'd certainly like my Linux box to boot in 8 seconds.

ZDNET is reassuring its readers that Linux and BeOS are not at war. Despite this rather amusing statement, the article isn't too bad although it seems biassed towards BeOS and GUIs Never-the-less there's a lot to learn from BeOS: The Replicant technology sounds good (freeze applications so that they're in the same state at the next reboot) and I'd certainly like my Linux box to boot in 8 seconds.

Kythe writes "This article in ZDnet reports that a "key" Linux kernel, number 2.2 to be exact, will be delayed. Several erroneous suggestions are carried in the piece, but the one I like best is the implication that current versions don't include SCSI and multiprocessing support. I don't suppose they've printed a correction for their "Linux worm" story yet, either. Oh well. " How can something that never had a release date be delayed? Just your usual FUD. I'm pretty pissed that SMP & SCSI aren't working in previous versions of the Kernel too- I'm kinda wondering how Slashdot (which is Linux, SMP and SCSI) was working without it.

Matthew Kirkwood writes "This amused me. Apparently something at Hotmail has broken and started sending out multiple copies of many messages. "

ZDNET published an article regarding a Worm program who appears to attack IMAP servers with ISP's and others who run Redhat 5.0. Needless to say: People who use Redhat 5.0 - please install patch or upgrade (patch available at redhat FTP site)

According to this story, Novell is considering opening parts of their NDS source code. HNQ:This step is going to compete with Microsoft's Active Directory that should be available when NT 5.0 comes out. The article also mentions that Novell is thinking about investing in Caldera - thats a good news.

Charles Bronson writes "I don't think I'd be caught dead in one, but two start-up companies called Xybernaut and ViA Inc. and entering the wearable computer market. IBM might jump on the wearable PC wagon, releasing the Visionpad (tentative name) based on the Thinkpad 560." Next time I see an article that says 'Geek Chic' I'm gonna vomit. This one still looks like the cost will be prohibitive, but how much longer are we going to have to say that?

DrJolt writes "According to a ZDNet story the Palm IV has been pushed back to next year. " Get all our hopes up and then dash them. Ugh. *grin*.

There is a Review about Pixar's latest movie "A bug's life". The article's author mentions the RenderMan program, as well as a bit of technical info. I really liked the screenshot :)

IBM is porting AFS 3.5 to Linux, in response to requests by 60 unnamed customers including large companies. The Linux version will ship in February, at the same time as the versions for AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Digital Unix and NT.

Well, it's official. AOL is going to purchase Netscape for 4.2 billion dollars. You can read about it in ZDNet. You can also read about it in at C|Net as well. Update: Read Jamie's comments on the merger and make up your own mind.

Charles Bronson writes "A column by Michael Surkan went up on ZDNet today titled "I come not to praise Linux." Basically, it dismisses Linux as not being a serious threat to Microsoft. He makes the typical point, the one repeated over and over in the media, that Linux is too anarchic for big-time users, apparently ignoring the growing number of big-times users using Linux. As well, he dismissed the importance of The Halloween Document as "being grossly exaggerated in its importance. Just like Linux.""

Thomas Charron wrote in about a PC Week article which reveals that Sun is going to open up its licenses, and possibly even make Java Open Source. The issue they have to address is how to avoid Java fragmenting into many different dialects... Hopefully they'll contact the right people to work out their license, rather than producing another Qt-license problem.

alexl writes "The winner of the best of COMDEX award in the "Best Internet Software" class is... Roxen Platform. A less known fact is that the core part of the platform, the Roxen Challenger webserver, is free software, licenced under the GPL. There is even a pointer to it in the official Gnu archive. "

Steev wrote in to tell us that Microsoft's senior vice president for sales to PC manufacturers, Joachim Kempin suggested in December 1997 that Microsoft should charge an annual fee for Windows in a memo sent to Bill Gates. Other companies have been thinking similarly, to move from a one-shot sale industry to a service industry, using the Internet. Instead of buying an app, you'd get an executable for free which would require you to log into an account which provides you with large processing power (further reducing PC cost) while reducing piracy. You get charged by consumption rather than one-time only. However, with apps, you always have the option of moving to another service provider. With an OS, things get a little harder... In related news, Japan's FTC will issue a warning against Microsoft Japan. update! In other related news, Microsoft has at long last done the expected: claimed in court that Linux is a major competitor to Windows...

2 years ago, engineers at HP decided that Merced would be too slow to beat PA-RISC. So HP went off on its own and redesigned the processor to use a different I/O system and bus, but the same instruction set. When Intel heard about this it wanted to be on the act too, although the original contract only covered Merced... But although HP is saving Intel's butt, HP will eventually move to specialising in compiler technology rather than high end silicon, so it is not getting much credit.

IBM will release DB2 for Linux Beta on December 7th. However it will still lack database extenders and data replication. It may or may not include Java stored procedures and Java user-defined functions (time to clamor ;-)). The article also says IBM will announce on December 1st that it is enabling its enterprise file systems sofware for Linux. Anyone know what that might mean? Another filesystem? IBM does appear to understand the role that Linux could play on attacking the desktop. Remains to be seen about HP and Sun. Update! tpepper wrote in to say he believes the big Dec. 1 announcement will be that IBM's ADSM client is becoming available for Linux. An unsupported version has just become available and ADSM is described on this page "

IBM will release DB2 for Linux Beta on December 7th. However it will still lack database extenders and data replication. It may or may not include Java stored procedures and Java user-defined functions (time to clamor ;-)). The article also says IBM will announce on December 1st that it is enabling its enterprise file systems sofware for Linux. Anyone know what that might mean? Another filesystem? IBM does appear to understand the role that Linux could play on attacking the desktop. Remains to be seen about HP and Sun. Update! tpepper wrote in to say he believes the big Dec. 1 announcement will be that IBM's ADSM client is becoming available for Linux. An unsupported version has just become available and ADSM is described on this page "

In an update on a previous article, Compaq is still on-track with its Linux support program. Despite claims that it was previously pressured by Microsoft not to invest in software, Intel is now openly investing in software not only for Windows, but also Solaris, Monterey and Linux: they will be funding Linux initiatives.

John A. Turner writes "Haven't seen anything on /. about how much Linux-related stuff there was at Supercomputing '98 so thought I'd mention it. One of the best things was a panel discussion titled "Clusters, Extreme Linux, and NT". There's a nice summary of the Linux-related events at SC '98 at the Extreme Linux site " Note that reactions to Red Hat's support options announcements included One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering . Has any participant written up a summary we could post? Update Rahul Dave has written a report for us. I operate a beowulf cluster at Univ of Pennsylvania. I went to SC98 to attend the tutorials and see the exhibits, and learn more stuff. It was a good experience. I'll have picures soon(Wednesday). (see http://reno.cis.upenn.edu/~rahul/linuxatsc98.txt)

My cluster is here and here, if you are interested)

Linux at SC98

Beowulf BOF

The BOF had more than 30 people there. Some had to stand.

There was a Beowulf BOF, in which a emotional speech was given by Thomas Sterling, one of the original pioneers, in which he claimed that we have already won the battle as we have forced a change in the mindset of people doing computing today, as to the benefits of open source. He said it is amazing today the interest in Beowulf at SC98, and that now the Supercomputing community can harness the same distributed creative energy thats driven Linux.

The point came up--whats a beowulf? The answer, at 0th level was: COTS technology cluster using Open Source Software for scientific computation. Most Beowulves use commodity interconnects, and have one point of entry, with each branch of a job having a processor to itself. People do use it for databasing(we do) and web serving and so on.

With the advent of SMP's and the cheapness of Intel based machines, bigger installations with multiple departmental users, utilization is important, and job scheduling was one of the talked about topics. Some kind of scheduler will probably be on the next extreme Linux CD, to be burnt around end Feb or so. There was a paper on scaling in Beowulves, concluding that software routing had some scalability problems but a tree of switches provided good scalability at greater cost. They have made available a synthetic load generator.

The most wanted thing is Rollout and System management tools. The idea is to give as much of a single system image notion as useful. Job Migration was pinpointed as being particularly important as a bridge to full-fledged parallel programming. Unfortunately no open-source implementation exists (Job Migration source is not available from Mosix).

If you have Rollout, cluster administration, round robin web serving, etc prepackaged for beowulves, contact me (rdave@central.cis.upenn.edu). Currently all of us use our own rollout and administration mechanism's, and the Extreme Linux CD folks would like to have some offering on the CD so that there is a everything at one place solution.

Robert Hart from Red Hat made the point that the extreme linux CD was thought off by a lot of the press as a high availability clustering solution, and that we need to make it clear that its a scientic computing solution.

Lots of discussion was there about the next edition of the CD, to be based on RedHat 5.2. Someone is planning to provide debs of the add-on software too. Only open-source and non-export-controlled(write your idiotic govt!) software will be on the CD.

There was some discussion on what happened in the "loss of web site" crisis. The upshot of it was consult on your organizations software release policies before releasing. Export reviews will probably happen in the future.

Products

Paralogic was demoing bert

The Legion folks were showing of their object based "metasystem" for authentication, seamless filesystem access, scheduling, etc. Essentially in the words of Greg Lindahl, it allows you to concentrate for example on your plugin scheduler while taking care of the authentication, filesystem transparency, etc, instead of spreading yourself thin and doing a lousy job on all of these which are not your forte. Go and download it if you are interested.

Some company was demoing parallel Linda for Linux.

Objectivity was plugging their databases, LSF their cluster management software, and the portland group their compilers.

Totalview is considering porting their parallel debugger to Linux. Its a nice product. If you want it, holler to them. They are looking for consumers. They were there at the BOF and there was considerable demand.

Other groups

Ameslab had a booth with posters on a new network layer called Bobnet which provides 97MBps on Fast Ethernet ping pong, with lower latencies than TCP IP. They also have a lite version of MPI which provides a large amount of MPI's functionality with way more bandwidth than MPICH. It runs both on TCP and BobNet, which has a VIA compatibility layer.

Legion(see up) Fermilab--posters about their analysis farms.

The High Performance Debugging Forum of the Ptools consortium was interested in gdb's thread support for their parallel debugger. Whats the status of kernel thread debugging on Linux? I believe one has to use SmartGDB for user level thread support. Their reference implementations are going to be on SP-2 and SGI Origin2000. I believe there will be source. They will be using the debugging infrastructure in Nasa's p2d2 debugger which uses dbx and gdb to do the real work.

Clusters

Compaq demonstrated a 4-way alpha Beowulf cluster at their booth, running Xaos. This in itself, I thought was pretty important. They said that there was active consideration on porting the D-Unix compilers to Linux, and that we ought to watch for Fibre-Channel drivers from them.

Dell was trying to convince folks to use NT with Interix--SC98 being a unix-vendor dominated conference. I walked up to them and said that we'd like pre-installed Linux machines. They arent doing that for servers on a per server basis as yet, but I think they want feedback on this issue. So if you use Dell's in any measure, write to them.

Parlalogic and Alta were demonstrating commercial Beowulves. Parlalogic has a nice fortran based parallelizing tool called Bert. Douglas Eadline was there from Paralogic, and they hosted Robert Hart from Red Hat, who made the prediction that robust fail-over(wolfpack style) clustering is a year away.

Real World Computing Partnership(from Japan) had multiple Linux clusters, and were giving away there MPICH-PM and S-CoreD clustering software. Its not redistributible, but source is available. The S-CoreD cluster operating system layer implements monitoring and other such stuff, and provides gang- scheduling using SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals. The cluster uses a Myrinet interconnect, and boasts upto 100MegaByte's per second bandwidth using their Active messages layer(PM).They had a gorgeous 3D loadmeter on their monitors. Very slick booth and stuff.

SPADE is a industry-academia partnership from Brazil making commercial Beowulves. They use myrinet and fast ethernet interfaces, and a PAPERS network(see next para) for synchronization. They are writing weather forecasting software and selling the machines commercially to weather stations. They expect to make some of their tools available open-source. They had a beautiful Java console for their network, involving SNMP, ping, and proprietary monitoring backends.

PAPERS from purdue demonstrated their parallel port low latency interconnect (you can construct one from Radio Shack Parts!). They have a API which does shared memory barrier synchrinization in 1.5microsec as opposed to overhead for a OS lock(4 microsecs). This API is extended to their low latency interconnect. They were using their interconnect for a video-wall--a set of projectors displaying different parts of a image computed in parallel. You could use mice to move little Tux's around on the background image and the positions would be recomputed in parallel with the edge communications over there interconnect. Cool stuff.

Panel

I left before the panel

Other

There was Cray, IBM, Sun, HP, Compaq, Fujitsu and others. The only interesting booth was Tera's. Their machine is $1million a processor, with No cache. Very good parallelizing compilers, and very good programming tools. Since there is no cache, the compilers are very important, as each processor can spawn 128 threads each thread with its own registers and counters. Whilst one is out fetching from memory, the other thread will compute, thus masking \ latency--and thats why each thread needs its own registers. A very interesting architecture.

According to Sm@rt reseller, Softway is considering adding Linux and possibly Solaris interfaces to NT. H: I really don't understand why they are doing this, since it will be SLLOOWWW...(seen on Linux Today)

Iomega will release a new ZIP drive, according to ZDNet. The new drive will costs 199$ and can store 250 MB on a disk. The new drive comes as a direct competitor to Sony's new drive which sotres only 200MB but can read 1.44 Floppies. Iomega says that they're going to sell a six-pack of the new ZIP disks for 100$.

Anonymous Coward writes "Apparently, a company in Austin TX is hiring a significant number of Linux-aware people. They will be announcing a technical support agreement with Red Hat (for RedHat software) at Comdex.Could this be the enterprise support structure that will finally push Linux into mainstream corporate culture? " Can anyone confirm this? Perhaps that is what CMPnet article is refering to. Update PC week is also refering to a Red Hat support announcement. Yes... the logo needs to be updated... Rob?

woot wrote in to send us a new ZDNet article on Win2000 vs Linux. It's a pretty good article all things considered. Good to read.

Andrew Hagen writes "Network Associates, formerly McAfee, developer of PGP, has quietly rejoined the Key Recovery Alliance. Despite withdrawing from the group last December amid pointed concerns over the continued trustworthiness of PGP, NAI apparently rejoined the Key Recovery Alliance (KRA) three months later with their February 1998 acquisition of Trusted Information Systems, a founding member of the KRA. The KRA's major stated goal is creation of "a global infrastructure that supports recovery of encrypted information." NAI has sent me e-mail stating that they might or might not remain in the KRA, that "PGP products will not be affected," and that they have "no interest in enabling key escrow for government access." Network Associates is presently listed on the KRA membership roster. "

Linux World has a report from the Oracle OpenWorld panel. Linus said that he will be focussing on bringing Linux to normal users. Indeed, the competition is not high end Unixes, but Windows. He also mentioned that 2.2 should be out by Christmas. Intel also announced a Linux Community Program. Despite recent speculation, Larry Ellison did not discuss a Linux strategy, but an Oracle vice-president reaffirmed Oracle's commitment to Linux. Moreover, Oracle called upon Sun today to put Java into the Open Source community to accelerate its growth. Note that Netscape's vice president said that the emphasis should not be put on the OS but the apps it runs and the services around it: similar to this idea. Thanks to beg and ensor for their URLs. updated

PDG sent us a link to a zd article where you can read about the new Supercomputer that SGI is announcing. The article is thin on details. Presumably more will be released soon. Update: 11/10 03:45 by CT : SGI has released more information- you can read their little Press Release about BlueMountain- their beast that has taken the top spot on the big list of super computers.

Rob Kaper sent us a link to something you might have missed on Freshmeat. It's a nifty site that is tracking Server uptimes. El wrote in to send us a link to "Penguin Lust" which I found silly enough to post. Josh Baugher sent us a link to the so called Christmas Document that you might find amusing. Quazi sent us a link to a ZDNet IE5 Review that normally wouldn't deserve a glance. But apparently a Slashdot fan was involved. Or just as likely, they wanted some hits and figured that this publicity might send some clicks their way *grin*. iota wrote in to send us a link about Mexico using Linux in schools and saving themselves over a hundred million bucks in the process. Mark Woon sent us a link to a funny BMW ad poking fun of MS. Lastly, worth noting (and based on the submissions box, and my msglog, a lot of you did) Red Hat has updated their website with a cleaner, and frameless design. Joy!

Rob Kaper sent us a link to something you might have missed on Freshmeat. It's a nifty site that is tracking Server uptimes. El wrote in to send us a link to "Penguin Lust" which I found silly enough to post. Josh Baugher sent us a link to the so called Christmas Document that you might find amusing. Quazi sent us a link to a ZDNet IE5 Review that normally wouldn't deserve a glance. But apparently a Slashdot fan was involved. Or just as likely, they wanted some hits and figured that this publicity might send some clicks their way *grin*. iota wrote in to send us a link about Mexico using Linux in schools and saving themselves over a hundred million bucks in the process. Mark Woon sent us a link to a funny BMW ad poking fun of MS. Lastly, worth noting (and based on the submissions box, and my msglog, a lot of you did) Red Hat has updated their website with a cleaner, and frameless design. Joy!

Found in LWN. Apparently, Microsoft has begun its dissection of the open source community. Eric Raymond has been leaked an internal Microsoft memo regarding open source software. Quite the interesting read. Turns out they even mention Slashdot. This could be beneficial to us in another way, as well: it points out, in no uncertain words, our deficiencies. Consider it the master TODO list, guys. Update!(S) Vorx writes "ZDNet just posted an article about the MS Halloween document. They mention ESR and his role in publicizing it. Seems like more attention is being paid to this article now, maybe some PHB's will start to wonder about MS and Fear :)" Update! (S) David Rysdam wrote to tell us: "I wrote to ESR myself and told him about the brouhaha over here at Slashdot over the "Halloween Paper". I explained that many thought it was a hoax perpetrated on or by him, but that I thought even if he was the hoaxster I didn't believe he'd keep up an outright lie. So I asked him straight: "To the best of your knowledge, is this memo what it purports to be: a leaked, internal, MS communication?" He responded: "Absolutely. I believe it is authentic." So I think we can drop the "ESR is lying" hypothesis." Also, Paul Victor Novarese has mirrored the Halloween Document (with ESR's permission).

Clark Shishido writes " MacWeek has rumors on Gateway's plans for AmigaOS 4.0. sounds like the good old days when Amigas could run Mac software faster than a Mac. Also note the irony that it might boot BeOS which is Gasse's Mac-Amiga succesor. Maybe this will knock some sense into Apple that it has to innovate and compete instead of killing clones. I'm not an Amiga head, and I'll probably be editting makefiles for compiling under MacOS X, but I think that it's good that Apple can't be complacent. " Update (S) Apparently this information may not have been completely true, but a practical joke. Oh well.

Ed Finch writes "There's an article on InfoWorld Electric in which Oracle reaffirmed its commitment to Linux at ALS." Interestingly Oracle stated that existing support from Red Had, SUSE and the like betters their own, somewhat casting doubt on previous reports that Oracle was to provide its own support service. (Speculation: perhaps that news came from internal discussions at Oracle. The director of Oracle's Intel Technical Divison, Parikshit Bhaduri seemed pretty open to some idea of Linux support by his company.) Ed continues: "Note the sharp contrast about the eventual support of Baan, PeopleSoft and SAP on Linux between Oracle's statements and HP's "

Glee writes "ZDnet has written a 3 page article about Microsoft vs. the DOJ. It is an interesting commentary, and the SBC's story on the second page is quite amusing. "

JimBobJoe writes "Here is a cutesy little article from an ex-cracker on how to tell if your son or daughter has become a cracker...and what exactly to do about it." When I started with BBSing (11 or so years ago?) any kid who had a modem was instantly assumed to be hacking banks from their basements. At least that has changed.

CMiYC writes " ZDnet has a helpdesk for bugs in software (specifically Windows and Office)... It lists there are like 100 well-known bugs in WinNT alone. I think some of the bugs listed are unbelievable. For a office 98 (on the mac) it says "Wby does my hard drive run constantly as I type." Microsoft reports this will happen if you use True Type fonts that CAME WITH office 98." S: It seems surprising that the media are providing support in this way, given that Microsoft is widely reported as providing corporate support, unlike Linux which is claimed to rely on third-party support. update! In response to recent criticism by slashdot.org, Microsoft will anounce tomorrow free fast 24x7 support for resellers, a practice common in the Linux world. This is only ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek. It looks like they're feeling the heat. Note the support is still only given by "senior support engineers" and not the people who wrote the code.

koden writes in to send us a link to a ZD article where you can read that Intel might be violating an S3 patent by using something or other in its Merced chip. No suits have been filed on it. Really not much info at all, but it is kinda interesting.

gatzke wrote in to send us a link to a PC Magazine Review of Caldera Open Linux 1.3. The article talks about the "Usual Problems" and talks about how Caldera is trying to address them.

Zdnet is reporting a study by Zona Research Inc that shows Netscape's dominance of the corporate market increasing, to lead IE by 60% to 40%. Moreover 84% of IE users in companies must do so due to company policy. This is good news for Netscape, which makes its revenues off server software for companies: more browser recognition and usage decrease the hurdles it faces to sell its server software for which its browser is optimised. However the results are bad for other browsers: for the first time since 1996 all the companies surveyed use either IE or Netscape. Thanks to Linux Today for the link. The initial article contained the statement " Note that corporate users have good T1 connections to the internet, effectively making Netscape easier to choose than it is for home users.". Some readers don't agree with that. I think it all depends on where you live. I have never seen a free CD with Netscape on it -- only IE. And in countries other than the US, downloading a few Megs is prohibitively expensive due to local telephone charges.

It took me some time to write this feature, since it made me laugh a lot... There is a company called Softway Systems Inc. which has ported "Unix to NT"... According to the company "This Unix branding puts us at the same level as HP (NYSE:HWP), Sun (Nasdaq:SUNW) and IBM (NYSE:IBM)," claimed Softway CEO, Doug Miller. Frankly, I must admit, it took me some time to stop laughing at the comparing of HP-UX or Solaris to NT.. Now the question is - how much time it takes NT to crash with this "unix" system on it? I wonder if seg. fault will cause blue screen of death :) The full story is on ZDNET

According to ZDNET Netscape might not include Sun's JVM on it's Mozilla browser which it's beta is coming soon. Since the OJI (Open Java Interface) is already in the browser source code, anybody would be able to point he's web site to use any JVM available (including the crappy MS one's). Do I smell Kaffe implementation? Jikes maybe? :)

denali sent us Berst's latest column. He is doing a cool round-up of some of the new technologies that will be coming out. Spotlighting the round-up is IBM's holographic storage-for those days when the 18 gigger won't cut it. Some of the other inventions coming soon are better searching algorithims, light etched chips and super-small PDAs'. Read more about them over this way.

Although Intel is required by its agreement with the FTC to supply Compaq with Alpha chips, it's not exactly enthusiastic about producing and marketing a competitor to Merced. Instead, Compaq is looking to IBM and Samsung to build its Alpha chips. Indeed, IBM's process technology map appears more impressive than Intel's, while Samsung is aggressively pushing the Alpha to 0.18 micron. Interestingly, AMD has not yet closed its deal to allow it to build clone Alpha processors.