Is the next move going to be for the EU to boycott all network interface cards? How about a boycott of all GUID generation? This is moving towards rediculous. As was said by a previous poster, let the market decide, not the governments.
I've often wondered why every CPU didn't have a software addressable serial number from the very beginning. It would have made the copy protection wars from the '80s a lot less interesting. I'm sure a lot of people are going to flame for me taking this attitude, but it's valid. If a company wants to protect it's property by only allowing it to run on one CPU, then it should be their perogative.
If people don't like, or refuse to use, software that is bound to one CPU, then a vendor will rise up to fill the market nitch. Who knows, maybe Open Source will gain even more appeal in a situation like this.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but I've got to say it anyway. Anyone else out there becoming afraid that Palm is getting too much market share? Last I heard, Palm had somewhere between 65% and 85% of the handheld PDA market.
Granted, I own a Palm, and I love it. However, if 3Com/Palm get such a high market share, where is their incentive to innovate with the platform? The desire to get people to upgrade is one incentive to improve it, but you know the company will run faster with the competition nipping at it's heals.
Remember, this was $672 million in stock. That is not the same as handing over that much in cash. The news wire is acutally reporting it as $674 million. The only reason the dollars are listed is because it looks good in print. What should really be said is that, "RedHat is acquiring Cygnus for a 9.5% ownership stake in the company." The Cygnus owners will be given 9.5% of the company held RedHat stock.
Do you think that RedHat is at least 10 times the size of Cygnus? If you say no, then this was a very good deal.
RedHat has established a history of supporting open source development efforts. Why does everyone just assume it will be different with new acquisitions? They know where their bed is made.
I find the whole thing rather dubious myself. If NAI has no intention of ever marketing the product, then they should just consign it over to the GPL and be done with it. This looks a little too much like they are looking for some free developer time before repackaging the product and distributing it with their own suite of software
If the issue is PGP/NAI wanting to protect their licensed (and money making) encryption library, then they have an easy way around that. Leave it out! Release the rest of the software under the GPL and then the developers out there can just paste in the GPG library to accomplish the same encryption.
I first looked at this software several years ago and loved the concept. My boss liked it as well. The problem at the time was the export restrictions, so it could not be used for communicating with people overseas. Considering that industrial espionage is a signicant player in some emerging markets, there is certainly a demand for such a product out there. Getting this product out of the US and into an open development community could really help many business interests.
Go to the future plans page and look for the list of contributors down at the bottom. Notice who is missing from the list? Of course, it's our old friend NSI. It's rather appalling that the company most dependent on the performance of BIND is one who sees no benefit in helping with it's development.
Don't forget digital wire transmission standards. The US has "T-1" at 1.544Mbps while Europe has "E-1" at 2.048Mbps.
And please don't remind me of GSM. I had GSM through Sprint here in DC area until they decided it wasn't good enough for them and forced everyone to change over to CDMA.
Stranger things have happened. In the Washington, DC & Baltimore area, Sprint deployed a mobile phone network called "Sprint Spectrum". It was supposed to be the eventual nation wide standard. Two years later, Sprint decided to use a different standard when they did the nation wide deployment. All Sprint would give previous subscribers was a $25 discount on the trade-in of their old phone. For those of us who purchased the $199 phone, it was a bit of a rip-off.
Needless to say, a class action lawsuit came out of this. Sprint told people buying the phones that this was the standard for nation wide phones on their network. They changed their mind and stranded people who had made buying decisions on that fact.
Is a situation with DVD-II signicantly different? The manufacturers told us that this was THE standard for DVD. If they roll out a new set of players that are substantially the same as the old ones (except for the encryption method) and don't take care of the previous purchasers, the class action lawyers will be all over it.
Back when my generation was in high school (during the '80s) it was the nerds who were looked down on and often singled out. Our revenge was to go out and control the whole economy while the quarterbacks and cheer leaders were flipping burgers. Now, the people who were the ones in control are asking us for help.
What do you thing will be the current high school generation's outcast's revenge? Do you think they are all going to end up being judges and lawyers? Perhaps they will be setting the precendents that make "super norm" behavior considered suspicious.
Believe it or not, IBM is still putting out DB2 for the OS/2 platform (with a free developer version eval). Of course, that is in addition to versions for NT, half a dozen UNIX variants, and (last but not least) Linux. Information can be found out here. (yes, that's the DB2/Linux link, but you can find it from there)
One of the most frequently mentioned complaints about Sendmail is the setup and maintenance of the "sendmail.conf" file. Some mention was made earlier of a better editor in the Sendmail PRO (the commercial offering) version. Excuse me? You are telling me that nobody has come up with an open source front end for doing the Sendmail configuration? Something along the "make menuconfig" interface for the Linux kernel would be wonderful for turning on and off options, setting hard coded constants, and compiling the finished configuration. Has anyone seen any work along these lines?
A few days ago there was a discussion on "Ask Slashdot" about IPv6 and Linux support. One of the biggest complaint was the lack of IPv6 support in most of the applications that run under Linux. It's nice to see here that some application developers are seeing the value of getting early support for IPv6 integreated into their core product offering. Once you've tackled Sendmail, BIND, Apache, and an FTP server, you have the most important tools for a good IPv6 server offering.
It sure would be nice if someone would put together a site with patched RPM's and SRPMS's for IPv6 support under RedHat. Of course, the same needs to be done for Debian. For the nettools package, it was just a matter of fixing the "spec" file and recompiling it. If a set of patches could be put together and distributed in a RPM or deb file for packages such as inetd, bind, telnet, apache, etc, testing of IPv6 would be a heck of a lot easier.
If you are looking to test a single IPv6 host, consider using FreeNet6 at www.freenet6.net. This site uses an automated web form to request and setup an IPv6 tunnel out to the mbone. The one drawback with this site is that you can't route hosts from behind this address. It is an end station address rather than a subnet. Anyway, it is still a great way to get your feet wet.
The second, http://www.freenet6.net/, is an automated service for getting a tunnel to the 6Bone. This is an end station address (can't be used for a router), but it lets you test the client applications for talking to anywhere on the 6Bone.
An easier way than 6bone for testing client implementations is through Freenet6 (www.freenet6.net). It uses a web form method to get a tunnel assigned that will work with Linux or NT machines. It's only an end of address (you can't use it as the front for a router), but it works great for testing the end user implementation. It allowed me to get IPv6 up and connected on Linux system here.
There are instructions for setting up the Linux IPv6 support at http://www.bieringer. de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html. I've followed it as far as updating my net-tools and traceroute and then hooked up the Freenet6 tunnel. With that, I've been able to FTP out to some IPv6 only sites for testing. Works great!
Part of Microsoft Research's stack is a DLL which allows Internet Explorer (4.0 only) talk to IPv6 websites. I've tried it out, and it worked quite well. Still needs some work, but it will get there.
Also, there is a site called "Freenet6" (www.freenet6.net) which offers free, web setup based IPv6 tunnels for both Linux and NT. It's not a subnet (so you can't use it as a route through a Linux system), but it does allow testing of end user application. I've setup addresses for both a NT and Linux machine and the service works great. Now, I just need a few more applications to play with.
I believe that they charge about $40 for the circuit and another $20 for the service. This puts it somewhat on par with outside offerings if you consider the ADSL line like a second phone line.
From the looks of RawHide, 6.0 will likely have GNOME, KDE, and WindowMaker. Now, they need to either use kdm or modify xdm to allow window manager selection at login time. I've hacked my system here to allow me to select E or KWM from the kdm login screen.
Unfortunately, I can't get into ftp.uk.linux.org to pick up the inevitable pre6ac1 patch. Perhaps kernel.org needs to start mirroring that list of patches as well.
Actually, there already is a project to get USB running on Linux. They already have support for some devices. Sorry, but I wasn't able to dig up the URL.
If you put enough devices in parallel, you can get darn close to 80MB/sec. I setup a system recently with 6 10,000RPM drives in parallel that had a sustained transfer rate of very close to 80MB/sec. Granted, the individual devices won't do much over 20MB/sec but when you run them in parallel with a good controller you can do amazing things.
At the time, I was doing a test of running SCSI Ultra2 head to head against Fibre Channel. It ended up being a very close race which made it quite hard to justify the expense of Fibre Channel.
OK, I admit this is solely from a techno/sci-fi standpoint.
Babylon 5 has stood out as my favorite TV show since it started (excluding the pilot which went over like a lead baloon with me). This show had the most amitious view of the future I've ever seen. Too bad this was it's last year. Let's hope for the best with "Crusade" when it starts in '99.
Deep Impact was horribly overshadowed by Armagedon, but was the clear winner in technical merit. No spinning Russian junk piles in space (that thing made Mir look brand new) or chain gun accessorised moon rovers. It went after the political, social, and personal impacts of such a doomsday event.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the next move going to be for the EU to boycott all network interface cards? How about a boycott of all GUID generation? This is moving towards rediculous. As was said by a previous poster, let the market decide, not the governments.
I've often wondered why every CPU didn't have a software addressable serial number from the very beginning. It would have made the copy protection wars from the '80s a lot less interesting. I'm sure a lot of people are going to flame for me taking this attitude, but it's valid. If a company wants to protect it's property by only allowing it to run on one CPU, then it should be their perogative.
If people don't like, or refuse to use, software that is bound to one CPU, then a vendor will rise up to fill the market nitch. Who knows, maybe Open Source will gain even more appeal in a situation like this.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but I've got to say it anyway. Anyone else out there becoming afraid that Palm is getting too much market share? Last I heard, Palm had somewhere between 65% and 85% of the handheld PDA market.
Granted, I own a Palm, and I love it. However, if 3Com/Palm get such a high market share, where is their incentive to innovate with the platform? The desire to get people to upgrade is one incentive to improve it, but you know the company will run faster with the competition nipping at it's heals.
Remember, this was $672 million in stock. That is not the same as handing over that much in cash. The news wire is acutally reporting it as $674 million. The only reason the dollars are listed is because it looks good in print. What should really be said is that, "RedHat is acquiring Cygnus for a 9.5% ownership stake in the company." The Cygnus owners will be given 9.5% of the company held RedHat stock.
Do you think that RedHat is at least 10 times the size of Cygnus? If you say no, then this was a very good deal.
RedHat has established a history of supporting open source development efforts. Why does everyone just assume it will be different with new acquisitions? They know where their bed is made.
I find the whole thing rather dubious myself. If NAI has no intention of ever marketing the product, then they should just consign it over to the GPL and be done with it. This looks a little too much like they are looking for some free developer time before repackaging the product and distributing it with their own suite of software
If the issue is PGP/NAI wanting to protect their licensed (and money making) encryption library, then they have an easy way around that. Leave it out! Release the rest of the software under the GPL and then the developers out there can just paste in the GPG library to accomplish the same encryption.
I first looked at this software several years ago and loved the concept. My boss liked it as well. The problem at the time was the export restrictions, so it could not be used for communicating with people overseas. Considering that industrial espionage is a signicant player in some emerging markets, there is certainly a demand for such a product out there. Getting this product out of the US and into an open development community could really help many business interests.
Go to the future plans page and look for the list of contributors down at the bottom. Notice who is missing from the list? Of course, it's our old friend NSI. It's rather appalling that the company most dependent on the performance of BIND is one who sees no benefit in helping with it's development.
Don't forget digital wire transmission standards. The US has "T-1" at 1.544Mbps while Europe has "E-1" at 2.048Mbps.
And please don't remind me of GSM. I had GSM through Sprint here in DC area until they decided it wasn't good enough for them and forced everyone to change over to CDMA.
Stranger things have happened. In the Washington, DC & Baltimore area, Sprint deployed a mobile phone network called "Sprint Spectrum". It was supposed to be the eventual nation wide standard. Two years later, Sprint decided to use a different standard when they did the nation wide deployment. All Sprint would give previous subscribers was a $25 discount on the trade-in of their old phone. For those of us who purchased the $199 phone, it was a bit of a rip-off.
Needless to say, a class action lawsuit came out of this. Sprint told people buying the phones that this was the standard for nation wide phones on their network. They changed their mind and stranded people who had made buying decisions on that fact.
Is a situation with DVD-II signicantly different? The manufacturers told us that this was THE standard for DVD. If they roll out a new set of players that are substantially the same as the old ones (except for the encryption method) and don't take care of the previous purchasers, the class action lawyers will be all over it.
Back when my generation was in high school (during the '80s) it was the nerds who were looked down on and often singled out. Our revenge was to go out and control the whole economy while the quarterbacks and cheer leaders were flipping burgers. Now, the people who were the ones in control are asking us for help.
What do you thing will be the current high school generation's outcast's revenge? Do you think they are all going to end up being judges and lawyers? Perhaps they will be setting the precendents that make "super norm" behavior considered suspicious.
Actually, it's "peta" which is then followed by "exa" and then "zetta" and finally "yotta". There is a short breakdown of the meanin of the names at "http://www.ccsf.caltech.edu/~roy /dataquan/ety.html" which tells where the names come from. There is a much larger listing of magnitudes at "http://www.mcs.csuhaywa rd.edu/~malek/Mathlinks/Billion.html".
Believe it or not, IBM is still putting out DB2 for the OS/2 platform (with a free developer version eval). Of course, that is in addition to versions for NT, half a dozen UNIX variants, and (last but not least) Linux. Information can be found out here. (yes, that's the DB2/Linux link, but you can find it from there)
One of the most frequently mentioned complaints about Sendmail is the setup and maintenance of the "sendmail.conf" file. Some mention was made earlier of a better editor in the Sendmail PRO (the commercial offering) version. Excuse me? You are telling me that nobody has come up with an open source front end for doing the Sendmail configuration? Something along the "make menuconfig" interface for the Linux kernel would be wonderful for turning on and off options, setting hard coded constants, and compiling the finished configuration. Has anyone seen any work along these lines?
A few days ago there was a discussion on "Ask Slashdot" about IPv6 and Linux support. One of the biggest complaint was the lack of IPv6 support in most of the applications that run under Linux. It's nice to see here that some application developers are seeing the value of getting early support for IPv6 integreated into their core product offering. Once you've tackled Sendmail, BIND, Apache, and an FTP server, you have the most important tools for a good IPv6 server offering.
It sure would be nice if someone would put together a site with patched RPM's and SRPMS's for IPv6 support under RedHat. Of course, the same needs to be done for Debian. For the nettools package, it was just a matter of fixing the "spec" file and recompiling it. If a set of patches could be put together and distributed in a RPM or deb file for packages such as inetd, bind, telnet, apache, etc, testing of IPv6 would be a heck of a lot easier.
If you are looking to test a single IPv6 host, consider using FreeNet6 at www.freenet6.net. This site uses an automated web form to request and setup an IPv6 tunnel out to the mbone. The one drawback with this site is that you can't route hosts from behind this address. It is an end station address rather than a subnet. Anyway, it is still a great way to get your feet wet.
Let me pass along two links.
The first, http://www.bieringer. de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html, contains detailed instructions for updating a Linux system to IPv6.
The second, http://www.freenet6.net/, is an automated service for getting a tunnel to the 6Bone. This is an end station address (can't be used for a router), but it lets you test the client applications for talking to anywhere on the 6Bone.
--dkm
An easier way than 6bone for testing client implementations is through Freenet6 (www.freenet6.net). It uses a web form method to get a tunnel assigned that will work with Linux or NT machines. It's only an end of address (you can't use it as the front for a router), but it works great for testing the end user implementation. It allowed me to get IPv6 up and connected on Linux system here.
There are instructions for setting up the Linux IPv6 support at http://www.bieringer. de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html. I've followed it as far as updating my net-tools and traceroute and then hooked up the Freenet6 tunnel. With that, I've been able to FTP out to some IPv6 only sites for testing. Works great!
--dkm
Part of Microsoft Research's stack is a DLL which allows Internet Explorer (4.0 only) talk to IPv6 websites. I've tried it out, and it worked quite well. Still needs some work, but it will get there.
Also, there is a site called "Freenet6" (www.freenet6.net) which offers free, web setup based IPv6 tunnels for both Linux and NT. It's not a subnet (so you can't use it as a route through a Linux system), but it does allow testing of end user application. I've setup addresses for both a NT and Linux machine and the service works great. Now, I just need a few more applications to play with.
--dkm
I believe that they charge about $40 for the circuit and another $20 for the service. This puts it somewhat on par with outside offerings if you consider the ADSL line like a second phone line.
From the looks of RawHide, 6.0 will likely have GNOME, KDE, and WindowMaker. Now, they need to either use kdm or modify xdm to allow window manager selection at login time. I've hacked my system here to allow me to select E or KWM from the kdm login screen.
Unfortunately, I can't get into ftp.uk.linux.org to pick up the inevitable pre6ac1 patch. Perhaps kernel.org needs to start mirroring that list of patches as well.
Actually, there already is a project to get USB running on Linux. They already have support for some devices. Sorry, but I wasn't able to dig up the URL.
If you put enough devices in parallel, you can get darn close to 80MB/sec. I setup a system recently with 6 10,000RPM drives in parallel that had a sustained transfer rate of very close to 80MB/sec. Granted, the individual devices won't do much over 20MB/sec but when you run them in parallel with a good controller you can do amazing things.
At the time, I was doing a test of running SCSI Ultra2 head to head against Fibre Channel. It ended up being a very close race which made it quite hard to justify the expense of Fibre Channel.
OK, I admit this is solely from a techno/sci-fi standpoint.
Babylon 5 has stood out as my favorite TV show since it started (excluding the pilot which went over like a lead baloon with me). This show had the most amitious view of the future I've ever seen. Too bad this was it's last year. Let's hope for the best with "Crusade" when it starts in '99.
Deep Impact was horribly overshadowed by Armagedon, but was the clear winner in technical merit. No spinning Russian junk piles in space (that thing made Mir look brand new) or chain gun accessorised moon rovers. It went after the political, social, and personal impacts of such a doomsday event.