Hope nobody gave a patent to him, since we've had a doorbell like this in my house for some time now.
You ring my apartment from the entrance and my mobile rings and I can talk to whoever is outside, and I can also unlock the door for them remotely from my phone. Much appreciated by friends who show up early and otherwise would have had to wait outside until I got back home.
Call me crazy, but as far as I can tell, we're a month away from the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The bulk of the current population of the earth was born into a world where man had walked on the moon.
And NASA is asking for (another) $35B and a couple years to develop a rocket that can launch humans into space, never mind to the moon? Seriously?
I'm all for space exploration (and exploitation), and I even partake in the probably misguided notion that there is real value in having humans go into space, even though for the most part, it makes more rational sense to have robotic probes go in our place.
But even I have to question the sanity of pouring billions and billions of dollars into an organization so fscked up that they have to reinvent technology they provably had over forty years ago, and who keep losing people and equipment because they refuse to listen to their own engineers.
I grew up admiring NASA and the astronauts, and with a burning desire to be one myself, or at the very least work there, but today I wouldn't buy a used car from the current crop of hacks running the place.
It should be noted that although they call themselves the Pirate party, the focus of the party is on questions of privacy and integrity. Issues where voters have been repeatedly ignored and even betrayed by the established parties.
While one of the laws recently shoved down voter's throats, despite promises to the contrary, have been aimed towards curbing piracy, the real outrage has been against the privacy and integrity issues with this and other recently passed laws regarding interception of domestic communications etc. (Well, that, and giving corporations the ability to petition courts to perform searches that, under similar conditions, would not be granted even to the police.)
I don't understand what the uproar is all about? OK, I see that EA has backed away from this one, but you all have to understand that EA, like any company, has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the profit for their owners.
Given that newly released games go for $50-$70, and then drop a bit, it only makes business sense for EA to alienate their customers to the point they pirate instead of buy, since that allows EA to instead get $750 and up for their games when they take their non-customers to court (or a bit less in settlements).
And best of all, they can do this without squandering their money on advertisements or, indeed, development of good, bug-free games. They'd be fools to pass up on this bonanza.
The game companies in the UK have clearly already caught on to this one: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/31/0029211, and are raking in $800 just for sending out the letters, never mind the $26000 they got from the guy who got nailed in court.
While possibly the most visible effect, landing on a page full of ads when you wanted www.cnn.com is the least of your problems.
Remember, this is DNS, so this will affect not only your web browser, but all your Internet applications.
So, guess what happens if you try to send a mail to friend@gmail.cm? Yup, it also gets the Cameroon treatment:
$ telnet gmail.cm smtp Trying 72.51.27.58... Connected to gmail.cm (72.51.27.58). Escape character is '^]'. 220 blackhole.gdei.com
Even though the server currently will bounce your mail with a 550 Domain does not exist, they now have your email address and, with a quick typo-fix, that of your friend.
It's kind of hard to take an author seriously who writes
"Besides being portable, Unix happened to be the best operating system invented to date. Its kernel, its unified file/IO system, its security model, and its "shell" were all major advances. Unix quickly pushed aside almost all other operating systems."
That's a laugh! UNIX certainly stole a bunch of good ideas from MULTICS, and did invent a few, but "the best operating system invented to date"? That's just ludicrous.
If AT&T had sat on it, UNIX would have gone nowhere. They key innovation of UNIX was not technical, quite the opposite. What made UNIX what it was (and is) was "open source". AT&T Labs made the UNIX source code available with few restrictions to universities and researchers, and this is what made UNIX great.
Anyone who has seen early UNIX versions will agree that it was, in all honesty, a fairly mediocre operating system. Then again, the very first Linux versions released were, again in all honesty, not much to write home about either.
Since then UNIX (and Linux) has improved immensely on the technical side, but even today, UNIX/Linux is reinventing features of operating systems of the 1970s and '80s.
It seems someone at Microsoft has sat down and thought long and hard about this. I'm certainly not one of MS bigger fans, but I think they pretty much got this one right.
Naturally, they don't like the fact that they can't take something under the GPL and integrate into their own products, like they have with BSD-licensed code. And, on some level, they have a very good point about products of research that are released under the GPL. The only value they have to any company working on a closed-source product is as an example, while a BSD-style license would have allowed them to take the existing code and adapt it.
In this aspect, the GPL actually harms interoperability and if the purpose was to give the research results a wide impact, releasing them under the GPL would be counterproductive.
I live under no illusions that all software will one day be open source, and perhaps it would be a good thing for people to think an extra time about the consequences of their choice of license.
For standalone programs, the GPL makes a lot of sense, but perhaps BSD-style licenses are more appropriate for prototypes and example implementations. Perhaps also the operating systems themselves, but that's a harder call.
The current model for wiring is all wrong.
on
DSL Amidst Phone Wars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In my mind, this is all an anachronism - you have cable-TV, phone and electric wiring going out to every household in pretty much all of the civilized world these days. Is it just me, or doesn't this strike you as being two companies in the wire business too many?
In many places in the world, you can today choose your provider of electrons to power your gadgets, but you typically have a lot less options when it comes to wires that provide a little more structure to the very same electrons (beyond the 50/60 Hz).
It would seem to me that in the future, we'll see a local "wiring company" that pretty much only provides the wires (electric and data), while power generation, cable-TV, telephony, Internet will all be provided by separate companies. (I hope the last three will actually be rolled into one service, but never mind that.)
I'm personally just waiting for the cell phone providers to wake up and realize that if they were to drop their outrageous charges for air time in the cells covering people's homes (call it the "home area"), then a lot of people would completely give up on the concept of land line phones and opt for just having personal mobile phones.
It would kill the market for cordless phones, though.;-)
So far, it seems that Philips has been on the side of consumers when it comes to copy-protection on CDs. The big question now is what effect their acquisition will have on their stance.
More specifically, was their earlier stance just posturing until they could lay their hands on some "good" technology of their own, or will they continue to defend the CD standard?
Now, I don't expect Philips to be in the game to befriend the consumers, so it might just be that they want to keep others from doing too much with the CD format before they (and Sony and their other usual bedfellows) can launch their New and Improved(tm) digital media with a DRM system of their own, to secure future income and sew up the market...
Oh well, I pretty much decided to give up on buying music after BMG's announcement the other week. If they're so intent on actively trying to make it hard for me to use the music I pay for, I might as well just save me the money and trouble.
I'm pretty sure forecasts are possible. Geologists can already today measure the increasing pressure in a fault that eventually produces a quake. The technology described in this article only gives them a more comprehensive tool to do this.
However, we need to keep in mind that these processes operate on geological time scales. When you start seeing pressure in a fault, and no slippage, you pretty much know there will be a quake "soon". However, our society need predictions accurate to the day, and I doubt we'll see better accuracy than month, year or decade.
There are, apparently, signs of an impending quake that operate on shorter (week or month) time scales, but there are enough false positives (or rather, again the time scale is such that they seem to be false positives on the human time scale), that these warnings will not be taken seriously enough.
Geological evidence suggests that the Californian peninsula eventually will be an island outside Seattle (not sinking in the sea as some SF suggests). We can pretty much assume it won't walk there, so if you live around the fault, you pretty much know what's going to happen, just not exactly when.
Myself, I was in the SF-area for the first time in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake. I have never returned - I can take a hint.
OK, so they screwed up. They're not the first, and it would surprise me if they were the last. At least we haven't had any major virus targetting online gamers. Yet. (I'm sure the anti-virus makers have some cooking in their skunkworks-labs, to unleash on us once the artifical panic from the JPEG virus blows over.)
Part of the problem is of course the MS monoculture. Those of us wishing for a wider deployment of Linux (including me) may come to regret that wish, since it will inevitably lead to Linux virii. They will have a harder time of infecting the whole machine, but no doubt some clever cyber-{terrorist,vandal,take-your-pick} will come up with one that does exactly that, sooner or later.
And as sure as flies home in on shit, MS will take that as an opportunity to tout Palladium and denounce Linux.
Anyway, the big question is not really how to avoid having software distributions infected, but rather how to encapsulate software. On UNIX and Windows alike, any software you run, will run with the full privilegies of the user (at best) or root (at worst).
It would seem to me that one interesting future development for Linux (or one of the BSDs, perhaps?) would be to find a non-intrusive way of encapsulating software packages, even at run-time. Let them define what they need access to, and then have an installer grant them rights only to those parts of the system.
Most software really only needs write access to their own directory, plus perhaps/tmp. Why give them blanket access to everything? Software that manipulates random files could communicate via a system call/trusted library that would combine a file-browser and grant one-shot access outside of the applications "playground" for the specific file-name/directory chosen by the user.
Ok, so someone hacks you Playstation. That's bad, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as the article will have you belive. Remember, people, these are consoles. You turn them off when you're not playing. You reset them when you swap games. And although the Xbox has a harddisk, I'm not sure if you could actually store something on it that would have any effect on the machine after a reset and a swapped game.
While it may or may not be hard to hack the console in the first place, it should be pretty difficult to keep the box hacked. It's like if you re-installed your PC everytime you want to run a new program.
The window of opportunity for exploiting the machine for DDoS attacks, as stepping stone etc only exists for as long as the gamers current gaming session. With enough boxes out there, that could still add up, of course.
The cheating/disrupting games angle is much more benign - this is something the gamers will notice, and thus force the game companies/console manufacturers to fix, or they risk losing their sales, and as we all know, wallet beats paper, rock AND scissors.
Calling that little PDF hand waving is being too generous, it's fraud. Notice the little bar graph about "disc piracy" and how CD-Rs are fuelling the growth of piracy?
Well, take another look, this time at the cute pie graphs. You'll notice that while CD-R piracy increased from 165 million copies in 2000 to 450 million copies in 2001, cassette piracy dropped from 1.2 billion to 900 billion.
Out with the trusty HP calculator: 450 - 165 = 285, and then 1200 - 900 = 300. Oooh, look at that: 285 < 300. Cassette piracy dropped more than CD-R piracy increased.
Lets add in the pressed CDs: 500 million in 2001, 475 million in 2000. That would mean an increase of 25 million. So, takin all formats into account, we have an increase of 10 million. A whopping 0.5% increase from 2000!
Gee, wonder why they didn't include cassette piracy in that bar graph, huh? Would have spoiled their party.
Now, if my sources are correct, the annual growth of the population of the world is somewhere around 1.3% annually, which is more than 0.5%. I guess this means that piracy per person, at least where physical copies are involved, dropped.
But of course, the goal is to levy tax on CD-Rs as "compensation" to the music publishers, so why look at the facts?
Well, gee, it's the *faculty* of mathematics and natural science, and anyone who cared enough to actually look things up, for example the org. chart at http://www.su.se/english/organization/nscience.htm l, will find that besides the Math and Physics departments,the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science is also part of this faculty... (Although this particular department is a cooperation with KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology), which conferred a honorary PhD to RMS some years ago...)
He could also have been made a honorary doctor at the faculty of social sciences, where you'll find the department of computer and system science, but that would still not have made him a doctor of, say, sociology, just because the department of sociology happens to be part of that faculty and resemble part of the name of the faculty...
As for the question if he deserves a honorary PhD: Well, it seems that the criteria for handing out honorary PhDs in Sweden and the US are different. As has been pointed out in previous posts, most universities in Sweden are state owned (although most research in CS and related fields is actually financed by grants from industry), and I suspect you'd have to put up a serious stack of bills (as in several hundred million US dollars) before you'd even be considered for a honorary PhD based on monetary contributions alone, and if you did, well that kind of money DOES go a long way to promote research, and would be comparable to the donation a guy called Alfred Nobel made to promote science some time ago...
As for Linus contribution to CS? Well, it seems that wherever I travel in the world, people at CS departments are using Linux as one of their primary vehicles for experimentation, and guess what -- I am too. And not only that, it is a platform for which we can exchange our results with little or no hassle. A major contribution indeed.
Now, you can argue about *BSD distributions giving the same benefits, and you can argue that Linus has only written a small part of Linux, but I'm certainly thankful for his contribution.
Does it qualify for a "real" PhD? No, it probably doesn't, and he's not getting one. Has his work helped others do interesting work? Well he has certainly helped *me* get the platform to do the work that hopefully will end up giving *me* a PhD. I'd say that qualifies as a contribution. And I'm sure that if you keep looking, you'll find other contributions, again perhaps not the type that would land you a "real" PhD, but perhaps appropriate for a honorary PhD.
It is a judgement call, and my guess is that if Linus had been 20 or 30 years older, a lot fewer people would argue that he doesn't deserve it. But if he receives it on merits along, the fact that he's still a fairly young guy shouldn't prevent him from getting it, right?
Sure, the Stockholm University are surely hoping for some PR for doing this. Why shouldn't they? They certainly don't avoid the good PR their *other* honorary PhDs will give them, and again, why should they?
Swedish universities usually think long and hard about who to nominate for honoarary PhDs, and since this nomination has survived long enough to actually become official, I'm pretty sure they have a fairly solid motivation. Also, this is a fairly large (34000 students -- http://www.su.se/english/facts95.html) university which lots of research, and I suspect they, like my own university, are pretty careful about their reputation, both nationally and internationally.
So no, I don't think this is *just* a publicity stunt...
Slashdot Mirror
Hope nobody gave a patent to him, since we've had a doorbell like this in my house for some time now.
You ring my apartment from the entrance and my mobile rings and I can talk to whoever is outside, and I can also unlock the door for them remotely from my phone. Much appreciated by friends who show up early and otherwise would have had to wait outside until I got back home.
I got myself a place 5 minutes by Segway from work, and then bought a Segway.
Hell, you'd have to pay me extra to telecommute!
Call me crazy, but as far as I can tell, we're a month away from the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The bulk of the current population of the earth was born into a world where man had walked on the moon.
And NASA is asking for (another) $35B and a couple years to develop a rocket that can launch humans into space, never mind to the moon? Seriously?
I'm all for space exploration (and exploitation), and I even partake in the probably misguided notion that there is real value in having humans go into space, even though for the most part, it makes more rational sense to have robotic probes go in our place.
But even I have to question the sanity of pouring billions and billions of dollars into an organization so fscked up that they have to reinvent technology they provably had over forty years ago, and who keep losing people and equipment because they refuse to listen to their own engineers.
I grew up admiring NASA and the astronauts, and with a burning desire to be one myself, or at the very least work there, but today I wouldn't buy a used car from the current crop of hacks running the place.
It should be noted that although they call themselves the Pirate party, the focus of the party is on questions of privacy and integrity. Issues where voters have been repeatedly ignored and even betrayed by the established parties.
While one of the laws recently shoved down voter's throats, despite promises to the contrary, have been aimed towards curbing piracy, the real outrage has been against the privacy and integrity issues with this and other recently passed laws regarding interception of domestic communications etc. (Well, that, and giving corporations the ability to petition courts to perform searches that, under similar conditions, would not be granted even to the police.)
I don't understand what the uproar is all about? OK, I see that EA has backed away from this one, but you all have to understand that EA, like any company, has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the profit for their owners.
Given that newly released games go for $50-$70, and then drop a bit, it only makes business sense for EA to alienate their customers to the point they pirate instead of buy, since that allows EA to instead get $750 and up for their games when they take their non-customers to court (or a bit less in settlements).
And best of all, they can do this without squandering their money on advertisements or, indeed, development of good, bug-free games. They'd be fools to pass up on this bonanza.
The game companies in the UK have clearly already caught on to this one: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/31/0029211, and are raking in $800 just for sending out the letters, never mind the $26000 they got from the guy who got nailed in court.
Remember, this is DNS, so this will affect not only your web browser, but all your Internet applications.
So, guess what happens if you try to send a mail to friend@gmail.cm? Yup, it also gets the Cameroon treatment:Even though the server currently will bounce your mail with a 550 Domain does not exist, they now have your email address and, with a quick typo-fix, that of your friend.
Hey! Guess what country is next door to Cameroon? Yup, Nigeria. Now, who in Nigeria might want a fresh source of email addresses...?
And who is to say they bounce all mails? Or will continue to?
"Besides being portable, Unix happened to be the best operating system invented to date. Its kernel, its unified file/IO system, its security model, and its "shell" were all major advances. Unix quickly pushed aside almost all other operating systems."
That's a laugh! UNIX certainly stole a bunch of good ideas from MULTICS, and did invent a few, but "the best operating system invented to date"? That's just ludicrous.
If AT&T had sat on it, UNIX would have gone nowhere. They key innovation of UNIX was not technical, quite the opposite. What made UNIX what it was (and is) was "open source". AT&T Labs made the UNIX source code available with few restrictions to universities and researchers, and this is what made UNIX great.
Anyone who has seen early UNIX versions will agree that it was, in all honesty, a fairly mediocre operating system. Then again, the very first Linux versions released were, again in all honesty, not much to write home about either.
Since then UNIX (and Linux) has improved immensely on the technical side, but even today, UNIX/Linux is reinventing features of operating systems of the 1970s and '80s.
Wharton is the UPenn business school.
It seems someone at Microsoft has sat down and thought long and hard about this. I'm certainly not one of MS bigger fans, but I think they pretty much got this one right.
Naturally, they don't like the fact that they can't take something under the GPL and integrate into their own products, like they have with BSD-licensed code. And, on some level, they have a very good point about products of research that are released under the GPL. The only value they have to any company working on a closed-source product is as an example, while a BSD-style license would have allowed them to take the existing code and adapt it.
In this aspect, the GPL actually harms interoperability and if the purpose was to give the research results a wide impact, releasing them under the GPL would be counterproductive.
I live under no illusions that all software will one day be open source, and perhaps it would be a good thing for people to think an extra time about the consequences of their choice of license.
For standalone programs, the GPL makes a lot of sense, but perhaps BSD-style licenses are more appropriate for prototypes and example implementations. Perhaps also the operating systems themselves, but that's a harder call.
In my mind, this is all an anachronism - you have cable-TV, phone and electric wiring going out to every household in pretty much all of the civilized world these days. Is it just me, or doesn't this strike you as being two companies in the wire business too many?
;-)
In many places in the world, you can today choose your provider of electrons to power your gadgets, but you typically have a lot less options when it comes to wires that provide a little more structure to the very same electrons (beyond the 50/60 Hz).
It would seem to me that in the future, we'll see a local "wiring company" that pretty much only provides the wires (electric and data), while power generation, cable-TV, telephony, Internet will all be provided by separate companies. (I hope the last three will actually be rolled into one service, but never mind that.)
I'm personally just waiting for the cell phone providers to wake up and realize that if they were to drop their outrageous charges for air time in the cells covering people's homes (call it the "home area"), then a lot of people would completely give up on the concept of land line phones and opt for just having personal mobile phones.
It would kill the market for cordless phones, though.
So far, it seems that Philips has been on the side of consumers when it comes to copy-protection on CDs. The big question now is what effect their acquisition will have on their stance.
More specifically, was their earlier stance just posturing until they could lay their hands on some "good" technology of their own, or will they continue to defend the CD standard?
Now, I don't expect Philips to be in the game to befriend the consumers, so it might just be that they want to keep others from doing too much with the CD format before they (and Sony and their other usual bedfellows) can launch their New and Improved(tm) digital media with a DRM system of their own, to secure future income and sew up the market...
Oh well, I pretty much decided to give up on buying music after BMG's announcement the other week. If they're so intent on actively trying to make it hard for me to use the music I pay for, I might as well just save me the money and trouble.
I'm pretty sure forecasts are possible. Geologists can already today measure the increasing pressure in a fault that eventually produces a quake. The technology described in this article only gives them a more comprehensive tool to do this.
However, we need to keep in mind that these processes operate on geological time scales. When you start seeing pressure in a fault, and no slippage, you pretty much know there will be a quake "soon". However, our society need predictions accurate to the day, and I doubt we'll see better accuracy than month, year or decade.
There are, apparently, signs of an impending quake that operate on shorter (week or month) time scales, but there are enough false positives (or rather, again the time scale is such that they seem to be false positives on the human time scale), that these warnings will not be taken seriously enough.
Geological evidence suggests that the Californian peninsula eventually will be an island outside Seattle (not sinking in the sea as some SF suggests). We can pretty much assume it won't walk there, so if you live around the fault, you pretty much know what's going to happen, just not exactly when.
Myself, I was in the SF-area for the first time in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake. I have never returned - I can take a hint.
OK, so they screwed up. They're not the first, and it would surprise me if they were the last. At least we haven't had any major virus targetting online gamers. Yet. (I'm sure the anti-virus makers have some cooking in their skunkworks-labs, to unleash on us once the artifical panic from the JPEG virus blows over.)
/tmp. Why give them blanket access to everything? Software that manipulates random files could communicate via a system call/trusted library that would combine a file-browser and grant one-shot access outside of the applications "playground" for the specific file-name/directory chosen by the user.
Part of the problem is of course the MS monoculture. Those of us wishing for a wider deployment of Linux (including me) may come to regret that wish, since it will inevitably lead to Linux virii. They will have a harder time of infecting the whole machine, but no doubt some clever cyber-{terrorist,vandal,take-your-pick} will come up with one that does exactly that, sooner or later.
And as sure as flies home in on shit, MS will take that as an opportunity to tout Palladium and denounce Linux.
Anyway, the big question is not really how to avoid having software distributions infected, but rather how to encapsulate software. On UNIX and Windows alike, any software you run, will run with the full privilegies of the user (at best) or root (at worst).
It would seem to me that one interesting future development for Linux (or one of the BSDs, perhaps?) would be to find a non-intrusive way of encapsulating software packages, even at run-time. Let them define what they need access to, and then have an installer grant them rights only to those parts of the system.
Most software really only needs write access to their own directory, plus perhaps
Oh well...
Ok, so someone hacks you Playstation. That's bad, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as the article will have you belive. Remember, people, these are consoles. You turn them off when you're not playing. You reset them when you swap games. And although the Xbox has a harddisk, I'm not sure if you could actually store something on it that would have any effect on the machine after a reset and a swapped game.
While it may or may not be hard to hack the console in the first place, it should be pretty difficult to keep the box hacked. It's like if you re-installed your PC everytime you want to run a new program.
The window of opportunity for exploiting the machine for DDoS attacks, as stepping stone etc only exists for as long as the gamers current gaming session. With enough boxes out there, that could still add up, of course.
The cheating/disrupting games angle is much more benign - this is something the gamers will notice, and thus force the game companies/console manufacturers to fix, or they risk losing their sales, and as we all know, wallet beats paper, rock AND scissors.
Calling that little PDF hand waving is being too generous, it's fraud. Notice the little bar graph about "disc piracy" and how CD-Rs are fuelling the growth of piracy?
Well, take another look, this time at the cute pie graphs. You'll notice that while CD-R piracy increased from 165 million copies in 2000 to 450 million copies in 2001, cassette piracy dropped from 1.2 billion to 900 billion.
Out with the trusty HP calculator: 450 - 165 = 285, and then 1200 - 900 = 300. Oooh, look at that: 285 < 300. Cassette piracy dropped more than CD-R piracy increased.
Lets add in the pressed CDs: 500 million in 2001, 475 million in 2000. That would mean an increase of 25 million. So, takin all formats into account, we have an increase of 10 million. A whopping 0.5% increase from 2000!
Gee, wonder why they didn't include cassette piracy in that bar graph, huh? Would have spoiled their party.
Now, if my sources are correct, the annual growth of the population of the world is somewhere around 1.3% annually, which is more than 0.5%. I guess this means that piracy per person, at least where physical copies are involved, dropped.
But of course, the goal is to levy tax on CD-Rs as "compensation" to the music publishers, so why look at the facts?
Well, gee, it's the *faculty* of mathematics and natural science, and anyone who cared enough to actually look things up, for example the org. chart at http://www.su.se/english/organization/nscience.htm l, will find that besides the Math and Physics departments,the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science is also part of this faculty... (Although this particular department is a cooperation with KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology), which conferred a honorary PhD to RMS some years ago...)
He could also have been made a honorary doctor at the faculty of social sciences, where you'll find the department of computer and system science, but that would still not have made him a doctor of, say, sociology, just because the department of sociology happens to be part of that faculty and resemble part of the name of the faculty...
As for the question if he deserves a honorary PhD: Well, it seems that the criteria for handing out honorary PhDs in Sweden and the US are different. As has been pointed out in previous posts, most universities in Sweden are state owned (although most research in CS and related fields is actually financed by grants from industry), and I suspect you'd have to put up a serious stack of bills (as in several hundred million US dollars) before you'd even be considered for a honorary PhD based on monetary contributions alone, and if you did, well that kind of money DOES go a long way to promote research, and would be comparable to the donation a guy called Alfred Nobel made to promote science some time ago...
As for Linus contribution to CS? Well, it seems that wherever I travel in the world, people at CS departments are using Linux as one of their primary vehicles for experimentation, and guess what -- I am too. And not only that, it is a platform for which we can exchange our results with little or no hassle. A major contribution indeed.
Now, you can argue about *BSD distributions giving the same benefits, and you can argue that Linus has only written a small part of Linux, but I'm certainly thankful for his contribution.
Does it qualify for a "real" PhD? No, it probably doesn't, and he's not getting one. Has his work helped others do interesting work? Well he has certainly helped *me* get the platform to do the work that hopefully will end up giving *me* a PhD. I'd say that qualifies as a contribution. And I'm sure that if you keep looking, you'll find other contributions, again perhaps not the type that would land you a "real" PhD, but perhaps appropriate for a honorary PhD.
It is a judgement call, and my guess is that if Linus had been 20 or 30 years older, a lot fewer people would argue that he doesn't deserve it. But if he receives it on merits along, the fact that he's still a fairly young guy shouldn't prevent him from getting it, right?
Sure, the Stockholm University are surely hoping for some PR for doing this. Why shouldn't they? They certainly don't avoid the good PR their *other* honorary PhDs will give them, and again, why should they?
Swedish universities usually think long and hard about who to nominate for honoarary PhDs, and since this nomination has survived long enough to actually become official, I'm pretty sure they have a fairly solid motivation. Also, this is a fairly large (34000 students -- http://www.su.se/english/facts95.html) university which lots of research, and I suspect they, like my own university, are pretty careful about their reputation, both nationally and internationally.
So no, I don't think this is *just* a publicity stunt...