Slashdot Mirror

iKev writes: "Today's Globe and Mail has an interesting story on China's attempt to restrict Internet content available to its citizens. It seems that The New York Times is on the list of 'politically sensitive' sites, but all other U.S. papers are not. ... Porn, however, is free for all 1.3 billion people to view. Go figure. I wonder what kind of setup they have running this firewall." "Firewall" is the wrong term for blocking political content, but the pun's too good to resist I guess. If anyone has details on the software, please post your comments below or emailme.

Jeb Campbell asks: "Has anyone tried to install on the only hard drive on their system, with that drive hooked up to an ATA/66 Card? I had RH 6.1 on before I switched hard drives and it worked fine, but when I tried to reinstall, my system no longer recognized the card. Anybody done this? I figure I can put another old hard drive in and install, then dump it to the new hard drive, but I don't know if it will recognize the card (www.dr-tech.com) but their ATA/66, card isn't there)." (Read more.)

The trick is to realize that you might have to fiddle with the motherboard/controller BIOS before you get the proper boot order. ATA/66 chains are treated like SCSI chains on some machines, which means you have to explicitly tell it to boot from there before it will. For some cards, you might need to boot from another partition or a floppy, then LOADLIN in to the install image.

Any other suggestions?

NeXuSnine pointed out that CIOs of major companies are starting to fight UCITA. Personally, I like the argument floated by UCITA's supporters: "Large businesses, theoretically, should be able to negotiate contracts with vendors that protect and exclude provisions they don't want." In other words, these UCITA supporters knew small businesses and individuals would get screwed, but they figured big companies wouldn't mind because they write their own rules anyway. Now, even some big businesses are worried UCITA goes too far.

Elik writes, "Since I been seeing two different articles about how *BSD been used for the Internet Gateway products from IBM and Stallion E-Pipe, I figures I toss another item for you to review. I currently work at NetWolves We produce four different types of systems running on Intel Compabitible Platform using FreeBSD as the core Operating System. You can check out the press releases regarding the products. Plus, you also can test drive it as well after you obtain the username and password. I figures this will add another reviews for people who are interested in FreeBSD being used for business applications. " This is going to be the last one of these I run, as product announcements (particularly Internet gateway boxes) aren't really Slashdot's thang (get thee to Freshmeat) unless there's a quirk -- something like "BSD used in heart monitoring system" or similar.

I'm off to Australia for the the LinuxExpo. I leave in 2 hours. This marks the first time I've left this continent (and I really have a hard time considering Canada as leaving the US ;) With my passport, hotel, and everything else taken care of, I'm ready. Now if I was a normal person, I would be concerned with packing clothes, but instead I'm concerned with packing... batteries! I have a VAIO: well known for having the worst battery life on earth.. an hour an a half max. But I've got 22 hours of flight time to do battle with... so I've stolen every spare battery that can be had: my quad, my single, Jeff's quad, Kurt, nate and pater's single. So I have 2 Quad's (4-5 hours each) and 4 singles (an hour and some change each). I figure I've got close to 15 hours of battery time. Thats a whole lot of civilization:ctp. I suppose I could get some work done too.

Nah.

It does disturb me that pound for pound I'm bringing more batteries than laundry. I hope importing Lithium Ion isn't a crime!

Oh, and nobody email me for a week, ok? *grin*

Aatif writes, " According to this story on the Washington Post, President Clinton is softening his stance against Internet taxation. Mr. Clinton said the federal government would not interfere with individual states collecting sales taxes on goods sold over the Internet even though Congress is still under a tax moratorium." From what I've heard, my state (Maryland) and all the others are thinking up ways to tax Internet sales. It's only a matter of time before they figure out how, like it or not.

xneilj writes, "Linuxplanet has an interesting article where a guy decided to install the native Linux on the company mainframe in their lunch hour. Interesting article if you're wondering why anybody would pay seven figures for a box when you can get a high-end pc machine for a fraction of that. Author Scott Courtney reckons if you put Linux on it 'the mainframe of today may in fact be the best damned Web server you ever saw.' "

This story popped in several times in the last couple days and it's pretty slow today so I figure it'll be good for a laugh. Apparently GoHip (no relationship to Goku or Gohan) had some sneaky ActiveX that a lot of people installed. Kinda a scary security situation right there. Makes me glad I don't have any of that OL- I mean CO- I mean ActiveX on this box.

Yes its happening again: Bad hardware karma is sweeping through the geek compound. Lets look at the list from just the last few days

• Nate's gaming machine randomly crashes about every 15 minutes (windows)
• The harddrive in CowboyNeal's machine has gone wonky
• My brand spanking new TiVo has something wrong with it. I have to ship it back and get it replaced.
• My router box's harddrive started freakin out. It stopped booting last night.
• My old laptop crashes randomly (windows)

most of this hardware sits on a UPS. I've always believed that bad hardware karma comes in spurts and I figure I'm stocking up on it.

On the positive side, we got a handful of the Lucent wireless cards... super sweet. 11mbs and wireless. If I could get a box stable for long enough to test the range, I'd be a happy jack.

Allan Carscaddon has contributed a review of Secrets of Software Success: Management Insights from 100 Software Firms Around the World. As the title would indicate, this is book for people who are trying to figure out the best way to get work done in a more corporate environment. Click below if you need to learn more to survive in the corporate world. Secrets of Software Success: Management Insights from 100 Softw author Detlev J. Hoch ; Cyriac R. Roeding ; Gert Purkert ; Sandro K. Lindner pages 256 publisher HBS Press, 2000 rating 7/10 reviewer Allan Carscaddon (allan@carscaddon.com) ISBN 1578511054 summary Study of the software industry and the differences between successful companies and unsuccessful ones. Some interesting insights on the nature of success in the software industry The Scenario

Overall, an enormous number of software firms fail, and, worldwide, estimates are that 84% of software projects fail. Yet, software is clearly one of the top investment themes and is the driver of much of the growth in the U.S. and world economies. Almost all business innovation is tied to software today, making the software industry a very attractive one for investors, managers, and workers.

The authors, who all work at McKinsey & Company in Germany, attempted to describe the differences between successful software companies and unsuccessful ones by surveying and interviewing the management of 100 companies from around the world (U.S., Europe, India, Israel) and comparing the differences between the top 34 performers (based on financial return) and the bottom 34 performers. By analyzing the differences between these companies, the authors derived a set of characteristics needed for success.

Many of the results are unsurprising. For instance, one of the secrets to being a successful software firm is attracting and retaining top talent. Successful software firms tend to be run by charismatic and visionary CEOs. Successful companies have a large web of "Partners" who help to sell the software and derive profit from these sales. They write component-oriented code and use it to make future development faster.

Some of the results are surprising. One of the most surprising to me is how poor the authors found the development procedures to be at many of the failing firms. A number of reasons are advanced for this problem, and the authors have plenty of blame to spread around. One clear message is that in many firms, and all of the unsuccessful ones, the management of software projects is seriously flawed. The authors note that estimates for the time to complete software projects usually vary by a factor of 2.5. Yet, managers are often willing to commit to a timetable that is ambitious (if not impossible) before the project scope and requirements are even determined. Less successful companies commence projects with unrealistic time and budget expectations and then fall prey to pressure from marketing, management, and customers to add features after coding has begun.

Within the successful companies, project risk is minimized by spending more time on the design and requirements stage. At this point, the most successful companies are in almost constant contact with their customers, including customers on the teams that create the initial design and requirements documents. These companies spend much more time in the design stage than unsuccessful firms, but they are much less subject to feature creep after coding has begun. When pressure is put on the teams producing the software, successful firms make marketing and the project teams negotiate directly with one another, often leading to some features being removed if new features must be added.

The authors also focus on marketing as a major difference between successful and unsuccessful firms. Their conclusion is best summed up in the chapter title "Marketing Gods Make Software Kings." They describe many of the common marketing practices of successful firms (although they use kinder terms for FUD, it is one of the primary marketing tactics of successful firms). The other major lessons of this section are how strongly successful firms concentrate on the company brand name, rather than the individual products, and how much successful firms rely on PR, especially making a "celebrity" of the CEO.

What's Bad?

The main "theme" of the book is that managing in the software industry is "Like Riding a Bull," to quote from the title of the first chapter. Although the authors do create a picture of a very dynamic competitive environment in the software industry, I thought that this was a bit silly, and was not really supported by the language or structure of the book.

The book includes a section on professional services firms. Professional services firms do write a lot of code, and are very important to software companies as a part of the web of partners that help to drive sales. However, I thought that the discussion of service firms directly was a bit misplaced. Services firms do act as threats to some software firms and complement others, but there is a very significant difference in business model and approach between a software services firm and a product-oriented software company.

The book relies heavily on a very few sources for quotes and anecdotes to illustrate the points that it makes. It relies especially heavily on quotes from a few European company managers, especially from SAP, while I would have preferred a more balanced mix.

What's Good?

The book is relatively easy to read for a business management book. The textual descriptions are enhanced by excellent explanatory graphics that will be helpful in communicating the main points of the book to the reader and to others. While I wasn't blown away by this book, I was interested in many of the insights that it provides on the structure of the marketplace in which software is sold. The book is long on analyses of market forces, but perhaps a little light on really practical "Secrets," that the title would suggest are contained in it.

The book does have an excellent review of the history of the software industry, from its origins as a portion of the services that were provided along with hardware to an industry of its own. The condensed history of the industry in the appendix will be invaluable to people who are interested in the history of the software industry.

"Secrets" and Open Source software

As I read this book, I was thinking about what it would have learned had it included Open Source software in its search for the secrets of success in the software industry. Because the book project started in 1996, it omitted Red Hat and Cygnus, both of which would have (I believe) met the authors' criteria for successful firms had they done the analysis in 1999.

One of the primary claims of the Open Source, or "Bazaar" development approach is that it is more efficient than the closed, or "Cathedral" approach practiced by all of the companies in the book. So how do Open Source development teams avoid the pitfalls that well-funded companies seem to be unable to avoid?

One of the secrets of the Open Source movement has been its ability to attract and retain top talent. Open Source projects may have a unique and sustainable advantage over software "companies" in this area because the creation of a successful Open Source project necessarily involves significantly experienced developers. In addition, it is unlikely that a project will gain much momentum if the maintainer is seen as unskilled. As a project becomes mature and is widely seen as useful, it will attract additional skilled developers-- some volunteers, and some within for-profit companies built on the open source model.

Open Source projects may also have an advantage over Cathedral projects in that the feature creep issue is typically not an issue. Rather, in the Bazaar model of development, the "customer" who needs a "feature" bears the cost of adding that feature to the code, and then returns the code (hopefully) to the community.

Marketing and building partner webs will be challenges for Open Source projects in the future. Some Open Source projects have been very successful at building a web of partners Apache, for instance, has a number of "partners" promoting it as a product and selling add-on services. Linux, under the various distributions, is beginning to see real progress. Marketing may come from the migration of Open Source to big business, but this will always be a challenge for worthy, but emerging projects

So What's In It For Me?

"Secrets" will be a good read for the person considering a software venture or working in one at any management level. The description of software industry dynamics is a valuable. People who are interested in the software industry may be interested in the book, especially the historical sketches of the industry. However, those most interested in the historical sketch may want to borrow, rather than buy the book.

Table of Contents

1. "It's Like Riding a Bull"
2. A New Business Called "Software"
3. Exceptional Software Leaders Are the Rule
4. Winning the War for Software Talent
5. Software Development: Completing a Mission Impossible
6. Marketing Gods Make Software Kings
7. Professional Software Services: Experts at Marketing Trust
8. Grow Your Partners to Grow Yourself
9. The Landscape of the Future
10. Staying on the Bull

Stephen Cass dropped this into my submissions box last week, and he figured all of you might be interested in this editorial regarding research institutes, corporate interests and how this relationship may develop in the future. He writes, "Freely available software, developed by researchers, is good for science and keeps commercial companies on their toes. In an era of quasi-monopolies, research institutions should encourage it." Intrigued? Read the article below and think about ways in which we can answer this question: What can we do to we keep researchers in the Open Source community and not lose them (and their science) to the Corporate World where their breakthroughs will become another piece of "Intellectual Property"?

The following is an Editorial which appeared in the Jan. 20 issue of Nature Journal. Reprinted here with permission:

In Praise of Open Source Software

"Imagine how the Web might look today had it been invented by Microsoft and made proprietary, rather than at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), where it was made available free. Scientists tinkering with computers to create tools for their research for no profit have underpinned the computer revolution. The bounds of supercomputing are being pushed back by hugely demanding challenges, such as protein folding and the cosmos; many of the pioneers of the Internet are not Internet millionaires, but are still labouring in their laboratories.

The profit motive, and the investments that go with it, are often essential. The scrappy, early 'Mosaic' browser designed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois only took off when some of the scientists who invented it went on to set up Netscape. But the abuse of commercial monopolies is also too evident, with much of the world having been held hostage to the dismal operating system DOS for more than a decade.

This issue -- providing equitable access to all scientists and not just the richest -- is about to become critical as companies rush to build bioinformatic tools for genomics. Tools that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear, it gives new grounds for wariness. Unfortunately, restrictive material-transfer agreements are also becoming the rule even in publicly funded institutions. While academic research centres are an important cradle for industrial development, it is crucial that the not-for-profit motive should be respected when the needs of research communities are best served in this way.

The high cost of some journals has attracted enormous attention over the past few years, whereas the high cost of software and the often exorbitant licence charges have not. Most scientific software is proprietary, and beyond the reach of many poorer parts of the scientific community worldwide. All the more reason to be grateful, therefore, for the continuation of the open spirit in the tradition of Internet pioneers. Witness the group of Californian scientists developing sophisticated 'freeware' for DNA chip technology. The software, which users say compares favourably with costly commercial software, can be downloaded from the Web. Another example: scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam have made freely available a vast suite of plug-and-play tools, 'Cactus', that allows scientists from any discipline to use supercomputers without needing to know advanced computing techniques. A Japanese scientist is giving away E-Cell, a package that simulates basic cell processes. And so on.

The open-source movement has found its apogee in the Linux operating system developed by Linus Benedict Torvalds (see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~torvalds) as a 'hobby' -- which IBM last week decided to put at the core of its hardware plans. Because the code is not proprietary, it is being built on and debugged by an army of amateur developers worldwide, many of them academic scientists.

In short, amateur software developers are playing a key role in keeping systems open. But such activities need to be encouraged and professionalized by academic institutions; plans in France to create a research centre to provide bioinformatic tools for industrial and academic researchers build on the tradition of the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. At a time when Microsoft looks as if it may be broken up (shades of AT&T) into 'Baby Bills', it would be ironic if science, and biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998 England.

It's one of the larger news items of the day, but we've sorta avoided mentioning it here because it is really "just another Denial of Service Attack." But it's the biggest one ever. It took down Ya- 'we serve half a billion pages a day' -hoo. And they were taken down for several hours from a distributed DOS attack. What does this mean? I honestly don't know, but I figure you guys might have some opinions.

Andre Werthmann writes "Now GLHeretic for Linux is released and the release includes the source code, too. GLHeretic for Linux is a port of Kokak's GLHeretic (win32) " I gotta bite the bullet and either get a new video card, or figure out how to accelerate my number 9. All this GL is making me GLous. (rimshot).

Jett writes " Vote.com has an interesting article in their Webmag Fifth Estate about how congressmen have responded to the popularity of e-mail in their daily operations. Quote: 'Of the 440 voting and non-voting House of Representatives members, 22 have no e-mail at all. Even House Speaker Dennis Hastert is wired only halfway -- his office receives e-mail, but does not respond to it. And while all U.S. senators have e-mail, they, like their House counterparts, routinely shun non-constituent mail -- even though they chair committees whose decisions affect the entire country.'"

Anonymous Coward writes "I have a couple of Web servers (running RedHat 5.0) which I'm using to offer free Web hosting on, and I've been giving the users standard accounts, the only exception being that their HOME directory is also set to their HTML directory. This means that telnet is active, as well as ftp, which I didn't consider a problem (that's how I learned, after all), but I was wrong. One of these boxes was hacked, by someone telnetting in and installing a sniffer. We've had to take the box down and scrub it clean, and before I bring it back online, I'd like to know the best way to give users relatively unfettered access to their own files via ftp, while disabling their ability to do anything else, on a box running any brand of Linux." I know we've touched on this aspect of security before in several Slashdot forums, but this question has been asked (and will be asked again) many times. I figure it may as well have its own forum for discussion.

Vito writes "Figures. Mitnick's free, but now a federal court has issued a preliminary injunction against the 2600 website, and its webmasters have been threatened with immediate imprisonment, over the distribution of the DeCSS source code. Time to start that data haven." This is just the latest in the DeCSS fiasco, and it certainly won't be the last. The difference between this and the DVD CCA battle is that these are federal court cases, which is why terms like 'immediate imprisonment' are being tossed around.

James writes "The UK's GCHQ has set a challenge for visitors to their website. They have broken up a secret message and hidden it around their site... if you can figure it out, then they say you could be suited to a job as a spy!" I wonder if you automatically get an Aston Martin and a Walther PPK.

Well we figured it was either Caldera or LinuxCare, but I've seen the Press Release: The latest Linux Company to file for an initial public offering is Caldera Systems. (btw they need to win an award for 'Linux company CEO with name most likely to be confused with an action hero' for Ransom Love) No word on when or shares or anything, but I'm sure all will trickle out in due time. The rumors are raging that Linuxcare is due to file their S1 before the end of the week.

Ego writes "Ever want to have your very own Microsoft Certified Professional Action Figure?" 'Jump into action with Dan, Kim, and Nate your desktop buddies,' the ad says. One can only imagine what Destro and the Baroness would do to these three guys if they couldn't keep the network up.

Anonymous Coward writes "Check out the recent LinuxOne news release. LinuxOne reports a $500,000 software order from Power Source. Its interesting how Power Source seems to be only a recursive add link without any substance. I couldn't quite figure out, beyond self proclamation, how LinuxOne is one of the fastest growing software distributors in the world. Go figure." At least the LinuxOne Web site is a little more fleshed-out than it was when we first saw it. And they're hiring, too. Check it out!