The most useful observation about microkernels is that the commercial ones work fine, but the academic ones are lousy.
QNX and IBM's VM are the most successful microkernel systems, with tens of thousands of installations and a user base generally happy with their performance.
From the academic world, we have Minix, Mach, EROS, L4, and the Hurd. None of which are very successful. (MacOS X is not based on the microkernel version of Mach; it's based on an earlier version which is basically BSD.)
It's worth reading Jorrit Herder's Minix 3 thesis. This is the guy who wrote the thing. He basically took Minix 2, yanked out all the drivers, and kept adding system calls until they could work outside the kernel. The result is on the ugly side, compared to QNX and VM. He really hasn't thought through the problems of doing device drivers in user space. The supported devices are archaic, like Centronics printers and TTY ports. In particular, no modern I/O (USB, FireWire, etc.) seems to be supported. Those are the ones where a microkernel fits well, because you have a channel driver, which talks to host hardware directly, and device drivers, which need very few privileges. But Minix isn't there yet. Actually, you'd be better off starting with the modern peripherals,
especially since the OHCI and UHCI interfaces are well standardized.
They also force you to think hard about how startup and shutdown should work, since you have to handle hot plugging. The design works out much better if you treat hot-plugging as the normal case and fixed peripherals as a special case of hot-plugging.
I've written FireWire and USB device drivers for QNX. I've also written UNIX drivers. So I do know what I'm talking about here. It's really much easier under QNX in user space,
and the architecture is far cleaner.
The key to microkernel design is getting scheduling and interprocess communication absolutely right. Get scheduling order, scheduling/messaging interaction, scheduling/cache interaction, or interrupt lockout time wrong, and your microkernel will be useless.
None of this shows at the API level, yet it's crucial. It's almost impossible to fix this later. It's not clear from the Minix documention how well messaging was done, or how it interacts with scheduling.
Sadly, security seems to have been neglected. Minix 3 still has "root". It doesn't have the security functions of NSA Secure Linux, and it doesn't have an approach to messaging which deals well with security.
Retrofitting security is tough and usually fails, Look at the mess in Windows. NT/2000/XP actually have a decent security system, but it's not used, because Windows 3.x/95/98/ME didn't have it, and XP had to be "compatible".
As a longtime programmer, I've had no interest in tabletop role-playing games.
At one point in my life, I belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism. I was serious enough about it to own and ride a 2000 pound black Percheron warhorse. Gorgeous animal. Now that's the way to do role-playing games. Tabletop RPGs are for wimps.
Read the article. The point Gates is making is that the era of physical media distribution may be coming to an end. All that retail shelf space is becoming unnecessary.
Blockbuster was saying that in their SEC filings back in 2001. It's a huge concern for them, because it's their entire business. They're worried, especially since their first big move into online distribution involved Enron and was a debacle.
Though physical shopping can be eliminated, it may not be. We don't really need malls any more. Is there anything you can buy in a mall you can't buy on the Internet right now? Cheaper? Yet people still go to malls. Even young people go to malls. In suburbia, where else is there to go?
The social aspects of shopping may keep physical media sales alive long beyond the absolute necessity for it.
But the "physical media" might not actually contain the movie or song. Look at the ringtone business. You can buy "ringtone cards" at many retail outlets, but they contain no sound - they're just a value card that's redeemed through the phone network. Napster sells value cards for their system at retail. The future of movie retailing might look like that.
From NANOG,
it looks like Level 3 went down completely, including their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions.
That's a consistent failure, unlike that spat with Cogent last month where they denied transport yet sent out bogus routing info indicating they'd take traffic. With BGP down, there's no question that their customers and peers knew they were down.
So everybody with an alternate path around Level 3 should have routed around them properly. And yet, they weren't routed around. That's a concern.
If you went down because of this outage, your provider is totally dependent on Level 3, which is not good. This is a useful warning - if you went down, and your operation is important enough that it needs to stay up, you need to look very hard at your provider's upstream connectivity.
Better hosting services have connections to several Tier I providers, just in case something like this happens.
Go to the E-Ink products page. Note that the page date is 2002. They say "E Ink is currently working with set makers and strategic partners to commercialize high resolution display products including reader devices with eBook or PDA functionality and other mobile communication devices." Which is what they've been saying since 2002.
So where are the products?
Worse, all E-ink really offers is an "e-Ink front layer" for someone else's LCD. That's not "digital paper", it's just a reflective display technology that's as bulky as other reflective display technologies. And the other guys have been shipping product for years.
E-Ink's latest press release indicates desperation. They're pre-announcing something they hope to display as a prototype at a trade show next year.
You can't keep doing that sort of thing year after year.
The original article is a terrible article on an important subject. Microsoft is known to be doing things to prevent computer manufacturers from preloading Linux. This has been a major issue in several antitrust cases. But the author doesn't cite the cases, or quote from the Microsoft preload agreements that have surfaced.
I'm not going to go into the history of the Microsoft antitrust cases, but you can't discuss this issue intelligently without looking at them.
The FCC Part 15 regulations made widespread use of home electronics possible. Back in the late 1970s, it was observed that a Radio Shack TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak would, if operated in the same room, crash each other. And many computers wiped out broadcast TV reception.
That's been fixed, by requiring type approval for everything that emits RF. If it weren't for the regulations on incidental emissions, rooms full of computers just wouldn't work.
The FCC isn't that active in cracking down on annoying emitters, but they do try. This went out on August 24th:
"The Federal Communications Commission has been made aware that an electronic transformer manufactured by W.A.C. Lighting Company, model number EN-12PX-AR, located in a lighting circuit at your residence, is causing harmful radio interference to the AM Radio Broadcast Band as well as to a licensee in the Amateur Radio Service."
People tend to forget that a switching power supply is a high-powered RF generator. If it weren't for strict emissions regulations and type approval, the frequencies below a few megahertz would be full of power supply hash and not much else.
The laptop with Robson also opened Adobe Reader in 0.4 seconds, while the other notebook required 5.4 seconds.
This isn't a load time problem. It's a load crap problem.
"Loading and verifying WebBuy.api" (does anyone ever use WebBuy, Adobe's DRM system for PDF documents?)
"Checking for updates" (Adobe might have changed the format of PDF again.)
Loading ad content for toolbar. (Sigh.)
And then all the crap that's being downloaded has to be scanned for viruses.
It's all that junk that's the problem.
Of course, OpenOffice isn't all that great on launch time either. And no, loading it at boot time isn't the answer.
The CAN-SPAM act is weak, but it's turning out to be more effective than anticipated. If spam is CAN-SPAM compliant, with the sender and subject properly identified, most spam filters will block it easily. This has resulted in the death of "legitimate" e-mail marketing.
Non-compliant spam now requires felonies. Multiple felonies. Not just CAN-SPAM violations, but forgery, viruses, theft of service, money laundering, and other clear crimes. Those are things that law enforcement understands.
Remember, there aren't that many spammers. ROKSO says that 200 spammers are responsible for 80% of spam. That's not very many from a law enforcement perspective.
Not really. The Pixar/Disney deal ended in 2004. One last Pixar film, "Cars", will be distributed by Disney, and then Pixar is free of Disney.
The original concept of the deal was that Disney would provide the story expertise and character design. Pixar would do the rendering.
It didn't work out that way. Pixar turned out to be far more original then Disney. It's clearly time for Pixar to dump Disney.
Disney is mostly a distributor at this point; their good stuff, like "Valiant" and "Narnia", isn't created by Disney but comes from third-party distribution deals. Most of Disney's own new content is rehashes of their earlier stuff ("Cinderella" on DVD, "Pirates of the Carribean II", "Tarzan Special Edition", "Herbie, Fully Loaded".) Big ideas are in short supply in Burbank.
Gaming Open Market offered commodity trading in multiple game currencies. They even had charts for commodity trading. But they had some trouble with the game vendors, and cut back on the currencies traded until they only had Second Life currency. Then they closed down.
But they had the right idea.
We need it made clear in law that private currencies are property and thus tradeable. You should be able to trade cell phone minutes, airline tickets, and anything else of value.
The case survived a motion to dismiss, that's all. But the judge indicated that he thought the plaintiff had a legitimate case.
The defendant, DirectRevenue, is going to have a tough time at trial. go here for videos of their drive-by installations and other data about their products. "All told, in my testing the single press of the "Yes" button caused the creation of 1,274 registry keys, 2,175 registry entries, 56 folders, and 711 files. PacerD also added two new web browser toolbars, and six advertisement icons on my Windows desktop." That's going to look like "trespass" and "exceeds authorized access" to a judge.
Unfortunately, some versions of CuteFTP contain the Aureate adware client. Aureate is an entry point for attacks.
"It is able to secretly download and cause Windows to execute any arbitrary program into the unsuspecting user's computer"....
""phones home" every single time you use your web browser"... "can, at their whim, accept and download any file into your system named "update-dll.exe" and then arrange for Windows to run this unknown program"... "is trivial to "redirect" so that instead of phoning home to one of Aureate's servers, it connects to any other arbitrary server on the Internet."... "They will always be responsible for sneaking 22 million copies of buggy and frightfully insecure spyware into the world's Windows PCs."
Later versions of CuteFTP supposedly don't contain Aureate. Supposedly. You may or may not believe them. Better to not use CuteFTP, any other Globalscape product, any Aureate/Radiate product, or any product that ever contained Aureate. Here's a old list of programs known to contain Aureate.
Aureate changed its name to Radiate. In 2001, they settled a class action over privacy issues.
Radiate tried again with "Go!Zilla". Some versions of Go!Zilla have adware and/or spyware. The current makers of GoZilla claim "The current Go!Zilla software contains no advertising. There are several older, out-of-date versions of Go!Zilla which contain advertising from 3rd parties." But then they say "Go!Zilla will make certain partner software programs available to you during the Go!Zilla trial version's installation. These products are not necessary to the function of Go!Zilla, and you may decide if wish to install them. Make sure you read the installation prompts carefully to insure you get the best installation for you. Each partner program has its own privacy policy, and Go!Zilla is careful to screen partners for product quality and responsible privacy policies."
Or, in other words, "we're going to load up your machine with adware if you're not very, very careful during the install."
Aureate/Radiate appears to be defunct. Unclear whether they went bankrupt, were acquired, or are on the lam.
AdAware can be helpful if your system is infected with Aureate/Radiate, although it may not find attacks downloaded via the security holes.
Note the line "To date, the engineers have been using silicon switching elements to control the device. The objective now is to use a printing process to manufacture the entire display, including the appropriate control electronics, from conductive and semiconducting plastics." The idea of making semiconductor arrays in a printing press has been around for years, but nobody has done it successfullyin production. Siemens hasn't done it either. They're still making the substrate for this in a wafer fab, and it's a big chip. So this is still an expensive technology. It might get cheap, but we've heard that claim before about "e-paper" type technologies.
The "printing semiconductors" idea has been applied to solar cells. There are plenty of announcements of breakthroughs in this area, but somehow, nobody actually seems to be shipping product.
So this requires another breakthrough, and in an area where there have been few successes. It's not here yet.
Yes, M3G has a file loader and a scene graph mode. The M3G file loader is a bit too powerful, because it can load general Java objects, so it has virus potential.
Scene graph systems are somewhat out of favor in the game developer community. They're not powerful enough to be a game engine, and they're overkill for a 3D drawing engine. There have been many scene graph systems, SGI's Inventor being the first big success. They're nice for simple little games, but they usually scale up badly. For the small screen, they might work for low-end games.
Here's an example of the problem with scene graph systems.
M3G has no collision detection. If you add collision detection, you'll need a separate set of data structures, organized for collision detection. Then you have to keep those in sync with M3G's scene graph. It's usually easier to have only one representation of the scene and draw in non-retained mode.
It's one of those things where the extremes are more useful than the middle. A full game engine, with collisions, physics, and triggers is useful. A non-retained mode 3D graphics API is useful. Most of the stops in the middle are not too useful.
This isn't Sun's badly designed Java3D, which is now abandonware. It's just a wrapper for a subset of OpenGL embedded devices. That's reasonable enough. It helps to keep OpenGL alive. Microsoft would like to force everyone to use Direct-X.
The base embedded subset of OpenGL leaves out display lists, any geometry more complicated than a triangle, and all the new programmable shader stuff. It's basically what an SGI machine had twenty years ago.
This may or may not be useful for cell phones, but it will be useful for things like car navigation systems and other embedded devices.
SpecialHam, the spammer forum, usually is full of ads for botnets. But not today. There are far fewer ads for "proxies" today. And there are notes like "hey, watch yourself"
and worries about "spamhaus honeypots".
So there's been some effect. The spammers are becoming afraid. Not very afraid. Yet. But afraid. It's becoming hard to spam without committing multiple felonies. Those felonies are leading to a few arrests and jail sentences. Not many, but enough to scare off many spammers. The remaining spammers look more and more like traditional crooks.
There's plenty of stuff on SpecialHam for law enforcement to go after. "Special Hurricane Katrina Promotions". "Offshore bank accounts for sale". Anyone active against spam should be looking there.
This is an even bigger problem in Japan, which is rich enough to afford young people idle for years.
The lack of social contact and prolonged solitude has a profound effect on the mentality of the hikikomori, who gradually lose their social skills and the necessary social references and mores of the outside world. Anguished about their isolation and acutely self aware of their problem, they immerse themselves into the fantasy worlds of manga, television or computer games, which in turn becomes their only frame of reference. As time passes, the hikikomori, lacking interpersonal stimulus, developmentally stagnates into routine behaviors of sleeping all day and staying up all night only to sneak out into the kitchen for food when the family is asleep. Eventually, hikikomori may abandon their diversions of books and TV and simply stare into space for hours at a time. -- Wikipedia, "hikikomori"
Slashdot Mirror
QNX and IBM's VM are the most successful microkernel systems, with tens of thousands of installations and a user base generally happy with their performance.
From the academic world, we have Minix, Mach, EROS, L4, and the Hurd. None of which are very successful. (MacOS X is not based on the microkernel version of Mach; it's based on an earlier version which is basically BSD.)
It's worth reading Jorrit Herder's Minix 3 thesis. This is the guy who wrote the thing. He basically took Minix 2, yanked out all the drivers, and kept adding system calls until they could work outside the kernel. The result is on the ugly side, compared to QNX and VM. He really hasn't thought through the problems of doing device drivers in user space. The supported devices are archaic, like Centronics printers and TTY ports. In particular, no modern I/O (USB, FireWire, etc.) seems to be supported. Those are the ones where a microkernel fits well, because you have a channel driver, which talks to host hardware directly, and device drivers, which need very few privileges. But Minix isn't there yet. Actually, you'd be better off starting with the modern peripherals, especially since the OHCI and UHCI interfaces are well standardized. They also force you to think hard about how startup and shutdown should work, since you have to handle hot plugging. The design works out much better if you treat hot-plugging as the normal case and fixed peripherals as a special case of hot-plugging.
I've written FireWire and USB device drivers for QNX. I've also written UNIX drivers. So I do know what I'm talking about here. It's really much easier under QNX in user space, and the architecture is far cleaner.
The key to microkernel design is getting scheduling and interprocess communication absolutely right. Get scheduling order, scheduling/messaging interaction, scheduling/cache interaction, or interrupt lockout time wrong, and your microkernel will be useless. None of this shows at the API level, yet it's crucial. It's almost impossible to fix this later. It's not clear from the Minix documention how well messaging was done, or how it interacts with scheduling.
Sadly, security seems to have been neglected. Minix 3 still has "root". It doesn't have the security functions of NSA Secure Linux, and it doesn't have an approach to messaging which deals well with security. Retrofitting security is tough and usually fails, Look at the mess in Windows. NT/2000/XP actually have a decent security system, but it's not used, because Windows 3.x/95/98/ME didn't have it, and XP had to be "compatible".
It's a beginning. But probably too late.
All these approaches are in active use.
At one point in my life, I belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism. I was serious enough about it to own and ride a 2000 pound black Percheron warhorse. Gorgeous animal. Now that's the way to do role-playing games. Tabletop RPGs are for wimps.
Though physical shopping can be eliminated, it may not be. We don't really need malls any more. Is there anything you can buy in a mall you can't buy on the Internet right now? Cheaper? Yet people still go to malls. Even young people go to malls. In suburbia, where else is there to go? The social aspects of shopping may keep physical media sales alive long beyond the absolute necessity for it.
But the "physical media" might not actually contain the movie or song. Look at the ringtone business. You can buy "ringtone cards" at many retail outlets, but they contain no sound - they're just a value card that's redeemed through the phone network. Napster sells value cards for their system at retail. The future of movie retailing might look like that.
That's an article by a software vendor, not an in-house IT operation. Very different situation.
So everybody with an alternate path around Level 3 should have routed around them properly. And yet, they weren't routed around. That's a concern.
If you went down because of this outage, your provider is totally dependent on Level 3, which is not good. This is a useful warning - if you went down, and your operation is important enough that it needs to stay up, you need to look very hard at your provider's upstream connectivity. Better hosting services have connections to several Tier I providers, just in case something like this happens.
Worse, all E-ink really offers is an "e-Ink front layer" for someone else's LCD. That's not "digital paper", it's just a reflective display technology that's as bulky as other reflective display technologies. And the other guys have been shipping product for years.
E-Ink's latest press release indicates desperation. They're pre-announcing something they hope to display as a prototype at a trade show next year. You can't keep doing that sort of thing year after year.
www.un.int, of course.
I'm not going to go into the history of the Microsoft antitrust cases, but you can't discuss this issue intelligently without looking at them.
The FCC isn't that active in cracking down on annoying emitters, but they do try. This went out on August 24th:
"The Federal Communications Commission has been made aware that an electronic transformer manufactured by W.A.C. Lighting Company, model number EN-12PX-AR, located in a lighting circuit at your residence, is causing harmful radio interference to the AM Radio Broadcast Band as well as to a licensee in the Amateur Radio Service."
People tend to forget that a switching power supply is a high-powered RF generator. If it weren't for strict emissions regulations and type approval, the frequencies below a few megahertz would be full of power supply hash and not much else.
Do we have a cite for this? It sounds bogus. Moglen is smarter than that.
This isn't a load time problem. It's a load crap problem.
"Loading and verifying WebBuy.api" (does anyone ever use WebBuy, Adobe's DRM system for PDF documents?)
"Checking for updates" (Adobe might have changed the format of PDF again.)
Loading ad content for toolbar. (Sigh.)
And then all the crap that's being downloaded has to be scanned for viruses. It's all that junk that's the problem.
Of course, OpenOffice isn't all that great on launch time either. And no, loading it at boot time isn't the answer.
Non-compliant spam now requires felonies. Multiple felonies. Not just CAN-SPAM violations, but forgery, viruses, theft of service, money laundering, and other clear crimes. Those are things that law enforcement understands.
Remember, there aren't that many spammers. ROKSO says that 200 spammers are responsible for 80% of spam. That's not very many from a law enforcement perspective.
MessageLabs says that spam peaked last year. At peak, 60% of all E-mail was spam. It's down below 50% now. However, it doesn't seem to have decreased since Ralsky was taken down last month.
Not really. The Pixar/Disney deal ended in 2004. One last Pixar film, "Cars", will be distributed by Disney, and then Pixar is free of Disney.
The original concept of the deal was that Disney would provide the story expertise and character design. Pixar would do the rendering. It didn't work out that way. Pixar turned out to be far more original then Disney. It's clearly time for Pixar to dump Disney.
Disney is mostly a distributor at this point; their good stuff, like "Valiant" and "Narnia", isn't created by Disney but comes from third-party distribution deals. Most of Disney's own new content is rehashes of their earlier stuff ("Cinderella" on DVD, "Pirates of the Carribean II", "Tarzan Special Edition", "Herbie, Fully Loaded".) Big ideas are in short supply in Burbank.
But they had the right idea.
We need it made clear in law that private currencies are property and thus tradeable. You should be able to trade cell phone minutes, airline tickets, and anything else of value.
The case survived a motion to dismiss, that's all. But the judge indicated that he thought the plaintiff had a legitimate case.
The defendant, DirectRevenue, is going to have a tough time at trial. go here for videos of their drive-by installations and other data about their products. "All told, in my testing the single press of the "Yes" button caused the creation of 1,274 registry keys, 2,175 registry entries, 56 folders, and 711 files. PacerD also added two new web browser toolbars, and six advertisement icons on my Windows desktop." That's going to look like "trespass" and "exceeds authorized access" to a judge.
Later versions of CuteFTP supposedly don't contain Aureate. Supposedly. You may or may not believe them. Better to not use CuteFTP, any other Globalscape product, any Aureate/Radiate product, or any product that ever contained Aureate. Here's a old list of programs known to contain Aureate.
Aureate changed its name to Radiate. In 2001, they settled a class action over privacy issues.
Radiate tried again with "Go!Zilla". Some versions of Go!Zilla have adware and/or spyware. The current makers of GoZilla claim "The current Go!Zilla software contains no advertising. There are several older, out-of-date versions of Go!Zilla which contain advertising from 3rd parties." But then they say "Go!Zilla will make certain partner software programs available to you during the Go!Zilla trial version's installation. These products are not necessary to the function of Go!Zilla, and you may decide if wish to install them. Make sure you read the installation prompts carefully to insure you get the best installation for you. Each partner program has its own privacy policy, and Go!Zilla is careful to screen partners for product quality and responsible privacy policies."
Or, in other words, "we're going to load up your machine with adware if you're not very, very careful during the install."
Aureate/Radiate appears to be defunct. Unclear whether they went bankrupt, were acquired, or are on the lam.
AdAware can be helpful if your system is infected with Aureate/Radiate, although it may not find attacks downloaded via the security holes.
For more details about Aureate, Radiate, and CuteFTP, click here (long .pdf).
Note the line "To date, the engineers have been using silicon switching elements to control the device. The objective now is to use a printing process to manufacture the entire display, including the appropriate control electronics, from conductive and semiconducting plastics." The idea of making semiconductor arrays in a printing press has been around for years, but nobody has done it successfullyin production. Siemens hasn't done it either. They're still making the substrate for this in a wafer fab, and it's a big chip. So this is still an expensive technology. It might get cheap, but we've heard that claim before about "e-paper" type technologies.
The "printing semiconductors" idea has been applied to solar cells. There are plenty of announcements of breakthroughs in this area, but somehow, nobody actually seems to be shipping product.
So this requires another breakthrough, and in an area where there have been few successes. It's not here yet.
While the M3G file format doesn't contain code, the M3G loader in JSR 184 will load any serialized class that descends from Object3D. Exploits, here we come!
Everquest, the screenshots.
We have a long way to go.
Scene graph systems are somewhat out of favor in the game developer community. They're not powerful enough to be a game engine, and they're overkill for a 3D drawing engine. There have been many scene graph systems, SGI's Inventor being the first big success. They're nice for simple little games, but they usually scale up badly. For the small screen, they might work for low-end games.
Here's an example of the problem with scene graph systems. M3G has no collision detection. If you add collision detection, you'll need a separate set of data structures, organized for collision detection. Then you have to keep those in sync with M3G's scene graph. It's usually easier to have only one representation of the scene and draw in non-retained mode.
It's one of those things where the extremes are more useful than the middle. A full game engine, with collisions, physics, and triggers is useful. A non-retained mode 3D graphics API is useful. Most of the stops in the middle are not too useful.
Still, maybe for the small screen...
Earth to Slashdot editors - learn to tell a press release from a story.
The base embedded subset of OpenGL leaves out display lists, any geometry more complicated than a triangle, and all the new programmable shader stuff. It's basically what an SGI machine had twenty years ago.
This may or may not be useful for cell phones, but it will be useful for things like car navigation systems and other embedded devices.
So there's been some effect. The spammers are becoming afraid. Not very afraid. Yet. But afraid. It's becoming hard to spam without committing multiple felonies. Those felonies are leading to a few arrests and jail sentences. Not many, but enough to scare off many spammers. The remaining spammers look more and more like traditional crooks.
There's plenty of stuff on SpecialHam for law enforcement to go after. "Special Hurricane Katrina Promotions". "Offshore bank accounts for sale". Anyone active against spam should be looking there.
The lack of social contact and prolonged solitude has a profound effect on the mentality of the hikikomori, who gradually lose their social skills and the necessary social references and mores of the outside world. Anguished about their isolation and acutely self aware of their problem, they immerse themselves into the fantasy worlds of manga, television or computer games, which in turn becomes their only frame of reference. As time passes, the hikikomori, lacking interpersonal stimulus, developmentally stagnates into routine behaviors of sleeping all day and staying up all night only to sneak out into the kitchen for food when the family is asleep. Eventually, hikikomori may abandon their diversions of books and TV and simply stare into space for hours at a time. -- Wikipedia, "hikikomori"
It's such a big problem in Japan that the birth rate has dropped substantially.