I don't understand why the gTLD's have this ridiculous requirement to have your personal data in the whois entry. It's simply not necessary at all.
The.uk ccTLD, for example, works like this:
Every domain registered has only 4 things associated with it in the WHOIS entry (there can be more but these 4 are the only required fields):
Name (who it is registered to)
IPSTAG (more on this in a bit)
Date of registration
Nameservers
And that's it. Now, what's the IPSTAG? Well, it's a tag for the entity (ISP/Domain Registrar usually) that controls the domain. Only fully checked and paid-up members of the NIC, Nominet, have an IPSTAG. When you register a domain, the company that you register through registers the domain with their IPSTAG. If you wish to transfer a domain to another host/ISP, you ask the existing IPSTAG holder to either transfer the IPSTAG for that domain to another IPSTAG holder, or simply change the nameservers. It is the task of the current IPSTAG holder to verify that you are who you say you are.
If there is a legal problem and someone wants to take your site/domain down, well - they contact the IPSTAG holder or the operators of the nameservers (usually these are the same people but they don't have to be). The IPSTAG holder or nameserver operators then get in touch with you, or take their own initiative in sorting the problem out - i.e. disable DNS for that domain if all other avenues fail. (under the UK Data Protection Act they cannot give your personal details out to a third party, there are severe penalties for them if they do). Of course, as with any site, an interested party could simply do a whois query on the hosted site's IP address, which will give them the owner of the netblock, who will surely be able to track down the host's owner.
The system is fully automated too - via the Automaton. The Automaton accepts email commands to change entries in the WHOIS database, but only from IPSTAG holders who have signed their email with their PGP key (every IPSTAG holder has one).
If you have a dispute about the way your IPSTAG holder has treated you, you may take your complaint to Nominet, where it will get dealt with by the Nominet committee, made up of representatives of the longest-serving IPSTAG holders (most of these are people like you and me - sysadmins and hostmasters). There are strict rules about what an IPSTAG holder may or may not do to customers and what they may or may not charge for certain services (for instance, IPSTAG holder transfer must be free), and breaking those rules is dealt with severely - usually by loss of the IPSTAG and sometimes disbarment from holding an IPSTAG in the future. Not pleasant.
Note that more information about you is stored by Nominet, but only for sending you crappy certificates. It never appears on the WHOIS entry, and under UK law cannot be given out to third parties without your permission. Billing is handled by the IPSTAG holder.
Advantages to this system:
No personal details other than your name appear on your domain's WHOIS entry
The system is completely automated
It is still easy to track down operators of sites hosting illegal material, or at least the people in charge of the DNS or netblock on which the host is located (and who are at least partially responsible for the site legally, although this is a grey area under UK law)
As a domain owner, you only have to deal with your ISP/Domain Registrar except in exceptional circumstances.
Readers of a UK bent might be interested in the latest upgrade to JANET, the Joint Academics Network. This is the primary backbone supplier to (all?) Universities and (some) Further Education Colleges in the UK.
SuperJANET4 currently has a 2.5Gbps SDH optical backbone, rising to 20Gbps in 2002 using DWDM. At various points across the contry are JANET Connection Points (JCPs) to which Metroplitan Area Networks (MANs) are connected: these MANs then supply the universities with bandwidth. These MANs are being upgraded in concert with JANET - the London MAN, as an example, is moving to a 2.5Gbps backbone, with 100Mbps feeds to individual universities.
QoS was a key factor in designing the network and thus the routers chosen (Cisco 12016s and 12008s) support Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) (see RFC 2702 for why this is good for QoS) amongst other QoS features.
JANET's link to the rest of the internet is being upgraded too, with 2.5Gbps of external bandwidth and 622Mbps transatlantic bandwidth - to Internet2.
In the past, the UK academic community has been on the ball with internetworking - from the invention of packet-switched data networks (1967) and the first ARPAnet node outside the US at University College London (1974) to one of the earliest and largest (and still very large) deployments of web caching with Squid (the JANET webcache). Not to mention that the web was invented by a British academic... (although he was working in Switzerland at the time... does that count?:p )
If only our commercial managers were as bright... then we wouldn't have The Great British Broadband Farce.
Hmmm, now can I steal 802.11 wireless from my local university? I'm sure they'd never notice now:)
It has been commented by some people that Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars, was a subtle ploy which forced the Soviet Union to respond in kind in order to attempt to keep the balance of power. Yet technically it was half-baked (there's lots of evidence now that many of the most spectacular SDI demonstrations were faked) and essentially unnecessary to keep the peace. However, the pursuit of such a difficult goal put enormous financial strain on the poorer Soviet military and may well have accelerated the breakup of the Soviet Union.
I know this sounds a little outlandish, but is it possible that Microsoft is trying the same basic ploy on the Open Source movement and its allies? That is, to develop a set of (unnecessary, expensive) unproven technologies, hype them like mad and position them in such a way (as this amazing magic bullet that will solve all sorts of computing problems and negate some of Open Source's advantages) that the Open Source movement feels that it must respond in kind, sucking development resources from much more relevant technologies that are more likely to have an impact on Microsoft, such as a desktop environment that is the equal to or better than Windows?
There are all sorts of eerie parallels. The direct comparison of the GPL to communism and calling it 'anti-American'. The FUD about Linux 'spreading like a cancer' or the GPL's 'viral nature' (compare with the stance the US Government had during the Cold War about the spread of communism, especially in SE Asia). FUD about the GPL taking away your right to make money or to keep any proprietary code (private property) that you own. The fact that Microsoft is much, much richer than the Open Source community and friends, and can afford to spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that might never take off and could easily be quietly ditched a few years down the line.
I once read somewhere that Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' was one of the most widely-read and respected books inside Microsoft. Combine that with a little modern history and it starts looking less unlikely. I can easily imagine a paranoid, Cold War-style mindset in Microsoft's management.
If Microsoft has learnt from history, then so should the Open Source movement.
You do have a point. However, you must remember that GNOME's primary competitor is not Microsoft but KDE. If GNOME 2.0 takes too long to come out and KDE pulls too far ahead technically in the meantime, then distros that use GNOME by default will switch and existing developers will move away from the platform. At that point, it's game over for Ximian. Few people want to use a platform that's not developed much any more - whether it has its own.NET-style framework or not.
It's simply bad management practise to take on large additional responsibilities when the core of your project is suffering through what is already a major rewrite and upgrade (welcome to the second-system effect), especially when you have a nimble and competent competitor that has already undergone the painful second-system transition and is ready to eat your lunch at the earliest possible opportunity.
At the same time, nobody is really sure what the impact of.NET-style frameworks will be. The nearest existing framework is Java, which has been around for a long time now, and how much Java-related code do you see on a typical desktop? Not a lot. It could be that Mono will simply integrate Java throughout existing GNOME technologies. This would greatly please Sun (GNOME Foundation member). However, Kaffe, the only near-complete Open Source JDK, currently lacks some of the more recent features of Java that would probably be required to make Mono work, and its JVM is not the hottest in the world. So, if this is the idea behind Mono, it's possible it could make GNOME require a non-free JDK. I don't want to think about that too much after the pasting KDE used to get for requiring the then non-GPL Qt.
I'm just concerned that Ximian haven't really thought through the consequences of their actions: in doing this they are following a high-risk strategy: putting together a technology of dubious benefit, diverting resources from the development of their flagship project at a crucial point in its life, and all so that they can achieve marketing parity in this area with Microsoft and, perhaps, attract a few developers.
GNOME's medium to long-term future is looking a bit shaky right now. The 1.4 release was good, but it has problems - Nautilus, for instance, is still big, slow and clunky (although very beautiful), whilst the old file manager, GMC, is somewhat lacking in features. The GNOME 2.0 release seems to get further and further distant by the day, rather than closer. Meanwhile, Ximian's packages of GNOME 1.4 slowly fester (I switched back to the Debian packages as they seem to be kept more up-to-date).
Rather than trying to take on this herculean task of making an open-source take on.NET, a set of completely unproven (in the real world) technologies that are very similar to (but of course incompatible with) existing technologies available such as Java, CORBA and XMLRPC, shouldn't Ximian be trying to get GNOME moving again? GNOME 2.0 is vital to Ximian, yet they seem happy to let its development stay in its current rut. If huge items like this keep getting added to the GNOME feature checklist, GNOME 2.0 will never happen.:(
Please Ximian, no-one has any idea how.NET will be received in the real world, and lots of us think it's completely irrelevant to Open Source. We'd much rather you made GNOME 2.0 happen next year rather than the year after that. It's far more important. Or do you want KDE to become the only viable desktop choice?
A HUGE part of what all Unix is today is directly traced to BSD work. Work from Linux so far, hasn't shown really up anywhere else.
Yes that's right, that's why a Linux emulation layer is a key feature in all of the Free Software *BSD's and a rapidly increasing number of commercial Unices. AIX is putting its future on having Linux emulation.
I'm not saying the Linux kernel or glibc is technically more advanced - it is superior in some areas to the BSD's and inferior in others. However, given the importance of Linux-led software (who employs the most important hackers on KDE and GNOME for example?) you can hardly say that no work from Linux has been used elsewhere, or that it isn't innovative.
Ports depends on someone figuring out how to compile various packages on new systems - no centralized point of authority (or, more importantly, blame). Furthermore, there's no equivalent of a device-independent language for writing new applications.
Are the moderators on crack today or is this your troll account that you then mod up from your normal account when you have mod points?
Don't be ridiculous. The centralized point of authority for the BSD ports system is the BSD ports team. In exactly the same way as the Debian developers (and bug-tracking system) are your first port of call for problems with Debian-packaged software. Of course you can't really sue them if something terrible happens, but you can't sue Microsoft either - check out your EULA.
As for there being no device-independent language for use with the ports system, what do you think Java is? Or, for that matter - Perl and the Bourne Shell, which are almost universal throughout the Unix world? Sure, Perl is interpreted (although it doesn't have to be) but even as an interepreted language it shifts very quickly. Don't forget things like the GTK+/Perl bindings too, so don't argue you can't write user-friendly GUI apps with it - you can.
What would be an interesting project though is a JIT compiler for Perl - it has everything going for it otherwise as another, Open Source alternative to C#, including huge ease of use advantages.
Thats not a criticism of Mozilla, or an insult to their browser (which I use but find to be slow on my K62-350) but it is rather an observation about OSS in general - even the big projects have speed and "agility" issues. MS big as they shifted gears mighty quick when you really look at it.
Indeed - I can't deny that Microsoft can turn on a dime when it wants to. However, if open-source projects have an agility problem (and I don't agree with you on that one either - take WebDAV as an example: WebDAV was toted by Microsoft as a significant part of their strategy for integrating the web into the desktop, and indeed Microsoft was one of the major forces behind it... yet Apache still supported it before IIS did) then it is because open-source projects never need to turn on a dime.
Think about it: open-source developers are much more closely related to their users than a Microsoft developer could ever be. Most of them are developing software for their own use, and the side-effect that they can give away their software to other people is just a bonus. Even if they're not doing it just for their own use, the mailing-list and bug-reporting culture that open-source fosters brings the developers much more closely in contact with their end-users than a Microsoftie could ever hope to be. Also, in most open-source projects there's no manager dictating strategy from above. The upshot of this is that a sane open-source project should never get too far from what its users want, now and in the near future, so there's absolutely no reason for an open-source project to suddenly make a sharp change in strategy.
This is also precisely why I don't think the whole polishing-up of XPCOM and its turning into a proper application platform will ever happen: because as a user of open-source software, I couldn't give a monkeys about.NET and the model that it uses. Why should I bother switching to a network-based applications platform when the apps I have that run locally are just fine? I'm not paying for the application software that I use, it's freely available, so the subscription model that.NET offers is meaningless. Sure, if.NET was available for Linux, I might get to use the latest and greatest MS Office, but frankly, the open-source alternative isn't so bad these days, what with KOffice maturing nicely and OpenOffice available and being ported to GNOME. Are there any significant other advantages to.NET from an end-user point of view? I'm not sure there are. There are huge disadvantages too - I have a sucky network connection, and what if I want to use software when I'm not connected at all? I feel much safer entrusting my personal details to my own machine than to someone else as well.
Frankly,.NET is meaningless to me and to open-source in general. Microsoft can't force it on me like they can in the Windows world because they don't control the platform. It's not significantly attractive to me, because in using it I'd have to pay money to do stuff that I can do using local applications for free, and without a company I'm not sure I trust, possibly in a different country, holding my data for me.
So okay, thats the list. Good list. But here is the point: these are projects, that for most part (a) opened after completetion, or (b) didnt use the OSS development model. For example, X-Windows was released in reference form, but it was developed as a community project initially. Same witg PGP, Kerberos, Perl, Python (maybe, not sure on that one), Mosix. I am not sure about most of the other ones, I'd have to look into them more.
Aaaah, ok, I see. Your complaint then is not with open-source but with the Bazaar development model vs. the Cathedral development model. Open-source software is generally developed in one of two ways: the 'Bazaar' model, where the project is improved little-by-little by many different developers, usually over the internet, and tends to gradually evolve - the Linux kernel is a good example, and the 'Cathedral' model, where one developer (or a closely-knit group of developers, usually with a clear leader) design and construct the software in relative obscurity, and only then release the software. X is a good example of this model, although XFree86 is moving towards a more Bazaar-like development model.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages: the Bazaar model tends to keep software simple, modular and develops quickly as long as the originator of the project can interest other developers. This is simply due to the nature of the development process - large, unwieldy monolithic bits of software are not very appealing to potential developers. Because the development process here favours simple, modular software, the engineering tends to be superior. However, it can be difficult to implement new ideas because they must be implemented to the satisfaction and understanding of a large group of developers who almost all would like to keep the software... yes, simple and modular.
The Cathedral model, on the other hand, favours large, complex bits of software for exactly the same reasons. Because the developer only has themselves, or a small number of developers who know the project inside and out to please, it is much easier to architect a new system or implement a new idea. However, because the developers are comfortable with the project's complexity and there are few people looking at and commenting on the source code, it is easy for the project to become large, bloated and unreliable.
In the open-source world, both the Bazaar and the Cathedral models can happily coexist, and do, to the overall advantage of the community as a whole. Note that some of the most innovative open-source projects are indeed developed Cathedral-style, but that the most reliably-engineered software tends to be developed Bazaar-style. In the closed-source world, only the Cathedral model really works - that is just the nature of proprietary development, that you cannot have thousands of developers making tiny changes all the time. Hence, the reputation of proprietary software for being laden with new (and often pointless) features whilst suffering from a lack of reliability.
Don't get the two things mixed up. Not all open-source software is developed Bazaar-style, and if you do have a valid complaint (I'm still not convinced that you do) then it is with that development style rather than with open-source software itself. If you're still not convinced, read Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'. His take is that the Bazaar development model is superior for all sorts of other reasons too - but perhaps (in your view) coming up with new ideas isn't one of them. Still, like I said, there's a place for both models in the open-source world.
Would you imagine it to be plausible to be able to pull together and effictively use the OSS community in a way to create a substantially large software-platform AND deliver it for free AND deliver it based on standards (in true OSS fashion, of course) AND deliver it in a timely manner AND use it to stave of a.NET barrage by MS? I simply can't imagine it.
Why bother when such infrastructure already exists?
It's called XPCOM and is probably the primary reason why Mozilla has been so slow at getting a decent web browser out the door. Rather than simply develop a web-browser and associated tools, the Mozilla project took it upon themselves to develop an entire web-applications platform as well. Using a combination of Java, XUL (merely an XML schema), ECMAScript and the XPCOM objects, it's entirely possible to write entire office suites for Mozilla that can run straight off the web. Now, doesn't that sound rather familiar to the idea behind.NET?
I dont mean to bust anyone's ballon, but when was last time you saw an OSS project (other than the actual kernel) start from scratch, create a spec, follow it, implement it in a timely manner, and deliver a quality-end product?
Jabber
Perl
Python
Ruby
apt
Kerberos
ReiserFS
ssh (has always been available open-source either originally through 'official' ssh 1.x and now OpenSSH)
HTTP and HTML (the CERN server and Tim Berners-Lee's original web browser, through to Apache and Konqueror)
Mosix (more innovative than Beowulf, which, whilst cool, had been done before with other systems)
RCS, then CVS
X (X's reference implementation has always been open-source apart from a short period of insanity by the Open Group a few years ago)
UNIX (which has a traceable open-source lineage all the way back to the beginning through to the various BSD's now)
SLIP, leading later to PPP
Freenet (granted, Freenet hasn't yet found massive popularity... but it will, just give it time. massive infrastructure like Freenet takes time to implement, no matter what development model you're using)
Rasmol (you may never heard of it, but if you're a chemist you certainly will have)
vic and related multicast networking/videoconferencing tools
CDDB (protocol and original open-source server software developed as part of the xmcd project)
nmap
XaoS (show me another real-time fractal zoomer:)
That's just off the top off my head, and stuff that is unarguably innovative and ahead of (either time-wise or functionality-wise) anything the proprietary software world has come up with. If you take a slightly broader view of innovation or Open Source, then you can include things like:
Ogg Vorbis (innovative if you think WMA is innovative)
PGP (source code has always been available, although not under an OSI-approved license, and suffered from patent problems)
bzip2 (innovative and very effective algorithm, even if file compression isn't exactly new)
So don't give us that crap about open-source software not being innovative - it simply isn't true.
PC's: Bah, who needs 'em when you have cell phones? (Okay, that's an overstatement, but not as much as you might think.)
I'd have thought any of the Sony Vaio range would amply demonstrate that the Japanese excel at making PC's too... just that they like them small, light, portable and stylish. Notice a trend here regarding how the Japanese like their electronics?
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it make more sense (perhaps with "Internet 2" or any of these other projects) to create infallible network protocols/tools that can't be used for malaciousness? Or is this logically impossible?
It's not a logical impossibility. Practically, however, it is impossible - IP only works because it is a nice lightweight, easily-routed network protocol. If one were to extend IP or redesign it to try and prevent any misuse, you would almost certainly find it became too heavyweight for it to work successfully at the global level. Not to mention that someone would eventually find some minor chink in its armour and start exploiting that instead...
However, there's all sorts of things that one can do to make the IP world a safer place. Number one, and probably the best example, would be for all network admins (and router manufacturers) to turn on source route verification by default at their border routers at the very least. What this does is get the router to verify that the source address of a packet headed to an external destination is in fact inside the netblock that the router 'owns' before forwarding it to the next hop. If every network admin would do this, then packets with a spoofed source address would never get any further than their nearest border router, and the internet as a whole would be an awful lot safer. This isn't a new idea and the capability to do it is probably in every router made in the last 5 years at least. Certainly any modern Linux kernel can do it. However, some manufacturers of both router hardware and software routing solutions still insist on keeping it set off by default, and combined with clueless network admins who don't know to switch it on, the problem remains.
The problem is thus not one of inadequate technology (although IPv6 addresses some security concerns too) but rather one of education...
This is ridiculous. Take a look at this very short and very incomplete list of the Free Software that Japanese programmers have written or contributed to - it's nothing to be sneezed at:
debian: Atsushi Kamoshida, Takao Kawamura, Takuo Kitame (have you seen how much Takuo is responsible for in Debian? if you use GTK+, Nautilus, Evolution, Mozilla or indeed pretty much anything GTK+/GNOME-related you're using his packages and their accompanying patches/fixes), Atsuhito Kohda, Sekido Koichi, Tomohiro Kubota, Shugo Maeda, Keita Maehara, Kikutani Makoto, Goto Masanori, Teruyuki Morimura, Ishikawa Mutsumi, Hayao Nakahara, Takashi Okamoto, Shuichi Oono, Susumu Osawa, Taketoshi Sano, Akira Tagoh, Nokubi Takatsugu, Yasuhiro Take, Uno Takeshi, Masato Taruishi, Junichi Uekawa, Fumitoshi Ukai, Akira Yamada, Yoshiaki Yanagihara, Araki Yasuhiro, Taku Yasui
ruby: Do I even need to bother listing the names in the ruby credits? ruby, the most innovative and OOP-pure of the modern scripting languages, is almost entirely of Japanese origin - the who's who file is here.
And this is just a very short and very incomplete list that I knocked up in a few minutes.
Sorry, I don't buy this article at all. Granted, the PC has never taken off in Japan in quite the same way it has elsewhere in the world, but that's the price of having an already extremely wired and hi-tech population, something of a distrust of western domination of any one market (why do you think Linux is such a huge hit over there, with the now famous retail sales figures showing TurboLinux outselling Windows?), and also the debacle that is the Japanese PC98 specification. So, yes, perhaps given its size and technological level, Japan is not as well represented in the PC software world as it could be, but to suggest from that that Japanese programmers are no good is outrageous and smacks of the American cultural arrogance that the rest of the world is sick to the back teeth of. Note also the implication that because the Japanese shy away from Microsoft software, that this makes them somehow backward. Very disturbing that this is the prevailing view of a major media outlet such as The Economist.
Oh, and as for mainframes being out of date - tell that to IBM and all its customers using z390's to consolidate servers, and whose reliability and I/O performance wipe the floor with anything the PC industry could come up with now or in the next 15 years.
Alas, the developers of GSM chose almost the worst frequency they could have, and then chose to blame the US for the incompatibility. Hrmph.
Perhaps if the American government and the major American telcos had actually consulted with and helped create the global standard way back in the late 80's rather than adopting the attitude that
nothing created in cooperation by a committee could possibly work well technically or be marketable, and
a home-grown solution over which they have total control must be better, and
allowing multiple standards to compete would be better because eventually the strongest system would win anyway, due to free-market forces
then your wish might have come true and GSM might truly be the global standard.
This is somewhat off-topic, but the comparison between the US mobile telephony market and the market in the rest of the world (and particularly Europe) is one of my favourite examples of why a free market is not always advantageous - the imposition of the GSM standard upon the fledgling European mobile phone companies has been a license for them to print money, at the same time as achieving massive customer satisfaction, whilst the freer, no-government-imposed-standard US market has floundered.
Well I'll agree to disagree about the user interface - I can't stand the Nokia interface personally, but horses for courses. As for tiny, you might be interested in the Motorola v50 then, which is about the same size and weight (79g IIRC) as an 8210 but with a clamshell design so it fits your face better when it's flipped open (expands to twice the size:)
Oh, and it's tri-band:p
I think the US get better pricing deals though - around $50 a month for 1500mins of calls I heard from some services.
This would be true if it weren't for the other thing that cripples the US mobile telephony market - this ridiculous idea that you pay (or use up your free airtime) to receive calls! So, all the US airtime packages seem attractive... until you realise that you're actually not getting to use all those airtime minutes to make calls yourself.
In contrast, because of the call-originator-pays system that the rest of the world uses, pre-pay packages are viable and attractive. Having bought a phone (in the UK the cheapest pre-pay packages are now around 70 UKP or about $100 US) the user pays nothing ever again, as long as they only receive calls and SMS's. If the user wishes to make calls or send an SMS they buy in advance airtime cards from practically any shop, or via plastic over the phone. Of course, you don't get any free minutes, but calls are not necessarily expensive either with this system - the best on offer is I think 2p (about 3 cents) a minute off-peak (7pm-7am weekdays and all day weekends) and 10p (about 14 cents) a minute at peak time (all other times). SMS's are charged at a flat rate of 10p each. You can now even do international roaming with pre-pay phones.
If you want to understand why mobile phones have taken off in Europe in such a huge way compared with the US, then this is one of the major pieces of the puzzle. Before pre-pay packages became available in late 1998, around 20% of UK adults had a mobile phone and growth was slow (a few percent a year). Everything else was the same it is now - GSM was the standard and there was around 98% coverage of the UK population. Fast forward 3 years after the introduction of pre-pay packages and the market penetration is now 75% and growth is finally levelling off after a totally explosive period - the market has nearly become saturated. Pretty much everyone who wants a mobile phone has one.
What I find most interesting is that SMS was only a minor feature of GSM phones before pre-pay became available - people used it, but not very widely. Initially, mobile phone networks priced the call costs of pre-pay phones very high to offset the fact that they were not getting a monthly service fee. Thus, SMS suddenly became all-important as a way for pre-pay users to save money. Now pre-pay call charges are much more reasonable, but SMS is now ubiquitous.
I just wish Nokia would get their act together and make a triband GSM900/1800/1900 phone.
Why not just buy a Motorola? I'm pretty much ecstatic with my now-rather-bashed-up Timeport 250, it does everything that I require of it and plenty more (functionally it's approximately equivalent to a Nokia 6210, slightly larger, but slightly lighter) and it's tri-band (does GSM900/1800/1900). In the UK it's going for the same price as the 6210 (between free and about 60UKP depending on which contract/network you get it on).
Re:A couple possible technical differences
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DVD-Audio on PC's?
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· Score: 3
I find it unfortunate most people my age (around 21) think Mp3 and CD are as good as it gets, and having "theater-quality" sound is left to the theaters and a few insane audiophiles.
This is all very well (and I agree with you that digital audio does get better than CD) but the key thing to remember is that unless you have thousands of dollars worth of other audio equipment and much time invested in making your listening environment acoustically pleasing, the enhanced quality that DVD-Audio and SACD bring is pointless. The wonderfully crisp high-end and reduction in quantization noise gets completely buried in class-A transistor amp mush and funky reverberation modes of the listening room. Thus, until cheap (sub-$1k) audio hardware gets significantly better and your average Joe becomes interested in acoustically reshaping his living room, DVD-Audio and SACD will stay as obscure audiophile formats.
This is to say nothing of the fact that most recording studio equipment is nowhere near the quality required for recording these new formats properly - in a typical studio the best digital audio recorders they have are 20-bit, 48kHz ADATs...
The reason CD succeeded tape and vinyl is because your typical guy could hear the difference, with amplifiers and speakers that they already owned. In the early days of CD very few recordings were done digitally, but a recording done on quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape still sounds an awful lot better mastered onto CD than it does on cassette tape. SACD and DVD-Audio require both better audio hardware than the average guy has and better recording equipment than the average studio has to even begin to notice the difference.
The multi-channels are good though, and if DVD-Audio especially is ever going to make it mainstream, then it should be that which the marketers focus on rather than the quality aspects.
Actually TUX can do dynamic content itself via CGI - either standard CGI which is run in userspace and does not benefit significantly from TUX's speed, or as a CGI written to use the new TUX syscalls (a la ISAPI/NSAPI I guess), which does benefit a great deal. TUX does have the ability to transparently pass requests it cannot handle (e.g. pages that use mod_perl, mod_php) up to another webserver that can, but it's not necessary to do this to serve dynamic content.
My guess is that the dynamic content in the TUX 2 benchmarks was produced using CGIs that were written specifically for TUX (it makes sense if you're trying to achieve the highest benchmark figures right?) and thus a static content-only test would make little difference to the scores.
Perhaps you were thinking of the venerable khttpd that has been in the kernel since early 2.2 days? That was the early testbed for in-kernel webserving for Linux and TUX is based on many of the same ideas although little code is shared. khttpd does indeed suffer from not being able to serve dynamic content itself, and this was one of the reasons why TUX was created.
SSL is not merely about encryption of data in transit, it's also a cryptographically secure method of authentication. Imagine that each and every PS2 DVD-ROM is pressed with a unique SSL certificate. Now, when playing online games the game server can require that all client PS2's authenticate themselves with this certificate. If the same certificate is used more than once at the same time then all connections using this certificate are kicked from the server and probably banned. The advantage of doing this with SSL as opposed to just serial numbers is that it has been tried and tested in the field and shown to be secure cryptographically, and the data is encrypted in transit so replay attacks are useless.
It doesn't prevent copying per se but it makes playing online with a copied game all but impossible. Given how much of a part of modern gaming is concerned with playing online, this is a major deterrent to copying.
Note that attrition.org do have an OS pie chart, which show 59% of the servers are NT and 24% is Linux.
That's a pie chart not showing overall OS/Webserver marketshare during that time period (Aug 99 - May 01) but rather the share of all the defacements attributable to each OS - so 59% of all the defacements between Aug 99 and May 01 were on NT servers (which here means NT and Windows 2000 combined), and 24% of all the defacements were on Linux servers.
This only goes to prove the point further.
Tell me - did you not have any coffee this morning or do you find it difficult to understand graphs and statistics?
No, I believe you are wrong. If Windows systems are targeted more often, then that in itself is a security problem, is it not? If you had 2 different platforms that were of 'equal security' but one was targeted much more frequently than the other, which would you choose?
In the security game, it pays to be able to keep your head low and out of trouble, no matter how tough you are.
Those graphs are very misleading, because they lump NT4 in with Windows 2000. It is widely known that NT4 had serious issues, which isn't surprising, since it was designed prior to the real internet explosion -- IIS was originally an add-on.
That's a ridiculous argument. Regardless of what it was originally designed for, Microsoft ended up selling NT4 as an Internet server OS. If, as you readily admit, it had serious issues, then why were they promoting it as a premium Internet-capable OS in the first place? Further, when the server technology changes again in the future (and believe me, it will), how can you possibly trust Microsoft to get it right given the mess they made of transitioning NT4 to the Internet and webserving?
Second, I should point out that Linux, and indeed every other Unix and Unix-alike, was designed before the 'real internet explosion' too. Indeed, if you trace back the lineage of 'proper' Unix, it was around when the internet was just being born, and many years before the arrival of TCP/IP, let alone HTTP. A webserver is still an add-on for most Unices and yet they seem to be able to cope quite adequately and securely with it.
Third, all the other OS stats combine current and previous versions of the OS together. Given that Windows 2000 is merely NT5, why should it get any different treatment?
Finally, go have a look at Attrition's website defacement stats for May 2001 so far (although Attrition are no longer mirroring defaced websites, they are still compiling statistics on defacements). Here NT and Windows 2000 are treated separately. You will notice that although NT is by far the most defaced, Windows 2000 comes second with some 29.55% of all defacings (all this information correct at time of writing). This compares to a total of 8.99% of all defacings for combined versions of Linux. This is a quite remarkable achievement for Windows 2000, to achieve this in just 18 months since its release - over 3 times the defacement rate of Linux. Well done Redmond!
Oh yes, for those of you who need a reality check about market share in the webserver market, this is the latest Netcraft survey. Sadly, the statistics by OS are not available without paying Netcraft (come on, we know it's the SSL survey that you make money from, please give us some hard OS information for non-SSL sites). However, it would be conservative to assume that approximately 60% of all Apache sites run Linux, and that figure still gives Linux twice the market share of NT and Windows 2000 combined. If we make another very conservative assumption, that Windows 2000 is half of that combined Microsoft figure (the following figures get worse for Windows 2000 the lower that share is), then we get this rather amazing figure:
Taking even very conservative estimates, a Windows 2000 webserver is currently at least 12 times more likely to be defaced than a Linux webserver.
Konqueror provides almost exactly such a facility, allowing you to disable the Javascript window.open() method whilst otherwise retaining full Javascript functionality. Say bye-bye to annoying popup-windows... for good!
As I remember, such a feature was proposed for Mozilla some time ago too, but the idea was rejected by the Netscape engineers building Mozilla's Javascript support on the basis that it was a poor idea commercially. Indeed, Netscape's own homepage frequently uses window popups.
I think from this and other examples (not least Konqueror's other advanced Java, Javascript and cookie management) one could make a strong case that non-commercially-developed Free Software is superior from a user's point of view, as the user dictates to the software what to do rather than a commercial organisation dictating what the software should do. The conflicts of interest that plague other software just aren't there.
I find it remarkable that such a wonderful yet tiny and easily-implemented feature can be missing from every other major browser. Ask yourself why this is.
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I don't understand why the gTLD's have this ridiculous requirement to have your personal data in the whois entry. It's simply not necessary at all.
The .uk ccTLD, for example, works like this:
Every domain registered has only 4 things associated with it in the WHOIS entry (there can be more but these 4 are the only required fields):
And that's it. Now, what's the IPSTAG? Well, it's a tag for the entity (ISP/Domain Registrar usually) that controls the domain. Only fully checked and paid-up members of the NIC, Nominet, have an IPSTAG. When you register a domain, the company that you register through registers the domain with their IPSTAG. If you wish to transfer a domain to another host/ISP, you ask the existing IPSTAG holder to either transfer the IPSTAG for that domain to another IPSTAG holder, or simply change the nameservers. It is the task of the current IPSTAG holder to verify that you are who you say you are.
If there is a legal problem and someone wants to take your site/domain down, well - they contact the IPSTAG holder or the operators of the nameservers (usually these are the same people but they don't have to be). The IPSTAG holder or nameserver operators then get in touch with you, or take their own initiative in sorting the problem out - i.e. disable DNS for that domain if all other avenues fail. (under the UK Data Protection Act they cannot give your personal details out to a third party, there are severe penalties for them if they do). Of course, as with any site, an interested party could simply do a whois query on the hosted site's IP address, which will give them the owner of the netblock, who will surely be able to track down the host's owner.
The system is fully automated too - via the Automaton. The Automaton accepts email commands to change entries in the WHOIS database, but only from IPSTAG holders who have signed their email with their PGP key (every IPSTAG holder has one).
If you have a dispute about the way your IPSTAG holder has treated you, you may take your complaint to Nominet, where it will get dealt with by the Nominet committee, made up of representatives of the longest-serving IPSTAG holders (most of these are people like you and me - sysadmins and hostmasters). There are strict rules about what an IPSTAG holder may or may not do to customers and what they may or may not charge for certain services (for instance, IPSTAG holder transfer must be free), and breaking those rules is dealt with severely - usually by loss of the IPSTAG and sometimes disbarment from holding an IPSTAG in the future. Not pleasant.
Note that more information about you is stored by Nominet, but only for sending you crappy certificates. It never appears on the WHOIS entry, and under UK law cannot be given out to third parties without your permission. Billing is handled by the IPSTAG holder.
Advantages to this system:
Disadvantages:
Readers of a UK bent might be interested in the latest upgrade to JANET, the Joint Academics Network. This is the primary backbone supplier to (all?) Universities and (some) Further Education Colleges in the UK.
SuperJANET4 currently has a 2.5Gbps SDH optical backbone, rising to 20Gbps in 2002 using DWDM. At various points across the contry are JANET Connection Points (JCPs) to which Metroplitan Area Networks (MANs) are connected: these MANs then supply the universities with bandwidth. These MANs are being upgraded in concert with JANET - the London MAN, as an example, is moving to a 2.5Gbps backbone, with 100Mbps feeds to individual universities.
QoS was a key factor in designing the network and thus the routers chosen (Cisco 12016s and 12008s) support Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) (see RFC 2702 for why this is good for QoS) amongst other QoS features.
JANET's link to the rest of the internet is being upgraded too, with 2.5Gbps of external bandwidth and 622Mbps transatlantic bandwidth - to Internet2.
In the past, the UK academic community has been on the ball with internetworking - from the invention of packet-switched data networks (1967) and the first ARPAnet node outside the US at University College London (1974) to one of the earliest and largest (and still very large) deployments of web caching with Squid (the JANET webcache). Not to mention that the web was invented by a British academic... (although he was working in Switzerland at the time... does that count? :p )
If only our commercial managers were as bright... then we wouldn't have The Great British Broadband Farce. :)
Hmmm, now can I steal 802.11 wireless from my local university? I'm sure they'd never notice now
It has been commented by some people that Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars, was a subtle ploy which forced the Soviet Union to respond in kind in order to attempt to keep the balance of power. Yet technically it was half-baked (there's lots of evidence now that many of the most spectacular SDI demonstrations were faked) and essentially unnecessary to keep the peace. However, the pursuit of such a difficult goal put enormous financial strain on the poorer Soviet military and may well have accelerated the breakup of the Soviet Union.
I know this sounds a little outlandish, but is it possible that Microsoft is trying the same basic ploy on the Open Source movement and its allies? That is, to develop a set of (unnecessary, expensive) unproven technologies, hype them like mad and position them in such a way (as this amazing magic bullet that will solve all sorts of computing problems and negate some of Open Source's advantages) that the Open Source movement feels that it must respond in kind, sucking development resources from much more relevant technologies that are more likely to have an impact on Microsoft, such as a desktop environment that is the equal to or better than Windows?
There are all sorts of eerie parallels. The direct comparison of the GPL to communism and calling it 'anti-American'. The FUD about Linux 'spreading like a cancer' or the GPL's 'viral nature' (compare with the stance the US Government had during the Cold War about the spread of communism, especially in SE Asia). FUD about the GPL taking away your right to make money or to keep any proprietary code (private property) that you own. The fact that Microsoft is much, much richer than the Open Source community and friends, and can afford to spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that might never take off and could easily be quietly ditched a few years down the line.
I once read somewhere that Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' was one of the most widely-read and respected books inside Microsoft. Combine that with a little modern history and it starts looking less unlikely. I can easily imagine a paranoid, Cold War-style mindset in Microsoft's management.
If Microsoft has learnt from history, then so should the Open Source movement.
You do have a point. However, you must remember that GNOME's primary competitor is not Microsoft but KDE. If GNOME 2.0 takes too long to come out and KDE pulls too far ahead technically in the meantime, then distros that use GNOME by default will switch and existing developers will move away from the platform. At that point, it's game over for Ximian. Few people want to use a platform that's not developed much any more - whether it has its own .NET-style framework or not.
It's simply bad management practise to take on large additional responsibilities when the core of your project is suffering through what is already a major rewrite and upgrade (welcome to the second-system effect), especially when you have a nimble and competent competitor that has already undergone the painful second-system transition and is ready to eat your lunch at the earliest possible opportunity.
At the same time, nobody is really sure what the impact of .NET-style frameworks will be. The nearest existing framework is Java, which has been around for a long time now, and how much Java-related code do you see on a typical desktop? Not a lot. It could be that Mono will simply integrate Java throughout existing GNOME technologies. This would greatly please Sun (GNOME Foundation member). However, Kaffe, the only near-complete Open Source JDK, currently lacks some of the more recent features of Java that would probably be required to make Mono work, and its JVM is not the hottest in the world. So, if this is the idea behind Mono, it's possible it could make GNOME require a non-free JDK. I don't want to think about that too much after the pasting KDE used to get for requiring the then non-GPL Qt.
I'm just concerned that Ximian haven't really thought through the consequences of their actions: in doing this they are following a high-risk strategy: putting together a technology of dubious benefit, diverting resources from the development of their flagship project at a crucial point in its life, and all so that they can achieve marketing parity in this area with Microsoft and, perhaps, attract a few developers.
Doesn't seem worth it to me.
GNOME's medium to long-term future is looking a bit shaky right now. The 1.4 release was good, but it has problems - Nautilus, for instance, is still big, slow and clunky (although very beautiful), whilst the old file manager, GMC, is somewhat lacking in features. The GNOME 2.0 release seems to get further and further distant by the day, rather than closer. Meanwhile, Ximian's packages of GNOME 1.4 slowly fester (I switched back to the Debian packages as they seem to be kept more up-to-date).
Rather than trying to take on this herculean task of making an open-source take on .NET, a set of completely unproven (in the real world) technologies that are very similar to (but of course incompatible with) existing technologies available such as Java, CORBA and XMLRPC, shouldn't Ximian be trying to get GNOME moving again? GNOME 2.0 is vital to Ximian, yet they seem happy to let its development stay in its current rut. If huge items like this keep getting added to the GNOME feature checklist, GNOME 2.0 will never happen. :(
Please Ximian, no-one has any idea how .NET will be received in the real world, and lots of us think it's completely irrelevant to Open Source. We'd much rather you made GNOME 2.0 happen next year rather than the year after that. It's far more important. Or do you want KDE to become the only viable desktop choice?
A HUGE part of what all Unix is today is directly traced to BSD work. Work from Linux so far, hasn't shown really up anywhere else.
Yes that's right, that's why a Linux emulation layer is a key feature in all of the Free Software *BSD's and a rapidly increasing number of commercial Unices. AIX is putting its future on having Linux emulation.
I'm not saying the Linux kernel or glibc is technically more advanced - it is superior in some areas to the BSD's and inferior in others. However, given the importance of Linux-led software (who employs the most important hackers on KDE and GNOME for example?) you can hardly say that no work from Linux has been used elsewhere, or that it isn't innovative.
Ports depends on someone figuring out how to compile various packages on new systems - no centralized point of authority (or, more importantly, blame). Furthermore, there's no equivalent of a device-independent language for writing new applications.
Are the moderators on crack today or is this your troll account that you then mod up from your normal account when you have mod points?
Don't be ridiculous. The centralized point of authority for the BSD ports system is the BSD ports team. In exactly the same way as the Debian developers (and bug-tracking system) are your first port of call for problems with Debian-packaged software. Of course you can't really sue them if something terrible happens, but you can't sue Microsoft either - check out your EULA.
As for there being no device-independent language for use with the ports system, what do you think Java is? Or, for that matter - Perl and the Bourne Shell, which are almost universal throughout the Unix world? Sure, Perl is interpreted (although it doesn't have to be) but even as an interepreted language it shifts very quickly. Don't forget things like the GTK+/Perl bindings too, so don't argue you can't write user-friendly GUI apps with it - you can.
What would be an interesting project though is a JIT compiler for Perl - it has everything going for it otherwise as another, Open Source alternative to C#, including huge ease of use advantages.
Thats not a criticism of Mozilla, or an insult to their browser (which I use but find to be slow on my K62-350) but it is rather an observation about OSS in general - even the big projects have speed and "agility" issues. MS big as they shifted gears mighty quick when you really look at it.
Indeed - I can't deny that Microsoft can turn on a dime when it wants to. However, if open-source projects have an agility problem (and I don't agree with you on that one either - take WebDAV as an example: WebDAV was toted by Microsoft as a significant part of their strategy for integrating the web into the desktop, and indeed Microsoft was one of the major forces behind it... yet Apache still supported it before IIS did) then it is because open-source projects never need to turn on a dime.
Think about it: open-source developers are much more closely related to their users than a Microsoft developer could ever be. Most of them are developing software for their own use, and the side-effect that they can give away their software to other people is just a bonus. Even if they're not doing it just for their own use, the mailing-list and bug-reporting culture that open-source fosters brings the developers much more closely in contact with their end-users than a Microsoftie could ever hope to be. Also, in most open-source projects there's no manager dictating strategy from above. The upshot of this is that a sane open-source project should never get too far from what its users want, now and in the near future, so there's absolutely no reason for an open-source project to suddenly make a sharp change in strategy.
This is also precisely why I don't think the whole polishing-up of XPCOM and its turning into a proper application platform will ever happen: because as a user of open-source software, I couldn't give a monkeys about .NET and the model that it uses. Why should I bother switching to a network-based applications platform when the apps I have that run locally are just fine? I'm not paying for the application software that I use, it's freely available, so the subscription model that .NET offers is meaningless. Sure, if .NET was available for Linux, I might get to use the latest and greatest MS Office, but frankly, the open-source alternative isn't so bad these days, what with KOffice maturing nicely and OpenOffice available and being ported to GNOME. Are there any significant other advantages to .NET from an end-user point of view? I'm not sure there are. There are huge disadvantages too - I have a sucky network connection, and what if I want to use software when I'm not connected at all? I feel much safer entrusting my personal details to my own machine than to someone else as well.
Frankly, .NET is meaningless to me and to open-source in general. Microsoft can't force it on me like they can in the Windows world because they don't control the platform. It's not significantly attractive to me, because in using it I'd have to pay money to do stuff that I can do using local applications for free, and without a company I'm not sure I trust, possibly in a different country, holding my data for me.
Tell me again why I should be bothered about .NET?
So okay, thats the list. Good list. But here is the point: these are projects, that for most part (a) opened after completetion, or (b) didnt use the OSS development model. For example, X-Windows was released in reference form, but it was developed as a community project initially. Same witg PGP, Kerberos, Perl, Python (maybe, not sure on that one), Mosix. I am not sure about most of the other ones, I'd have to look into them more.
Aaaah, ok, I see. Your complaint then is not with open-source but with the Bazaar development model vs. the Cathedral development model. Open-source software is generally developed in one of two ways: the 'Bazaar' model, where the project is improved little-by-little by many different developers, usually over the internet, and tends to gradually evolve - the Linux kernel is a good example, and the 'Cathedral' model, where one developer (or a closely-knit group of developers, usually with a clear leader) design and construct the software in relative obscurity, and only then release the software. X is a good example of this model, although XFree86 is moving towards a more Bazaar-like development model.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages:
the Bazaar model tends to keep software simple, modular and develops quickly as long as the originator of the project can interest other developers. This is simply due to the nature of the development process - large, unwieldy monolithic bits of software are not very appealing to potential developers. Because the development process here favours simple, modular software, the engineering tends to be superior. However, it can be difficult to implement new ideas because they must be implemented to the satisfaction and understanding of a large group of developers who almost all would like to keep the software... yes, simple and modular.
The Cathedral model, on the other hand, favours large, complex bits of software for exactly the same reasons. Because the developer only has themselves, or a small number of developers who know the project inside and out to please, it is much easier to architect a new system or implement a new idea. However, because the developers are comfortable with the project's complexity and there are few people looking at and commenting on the source code, it is easy for the project to become large, bloated and unreliable.
In the open-source world, both the Bazaar and the Cathedral models can happily coexist, and do, to the overall advantage of the community as a whole. Note that some of the most innovative open-source projects are indeed developed Cathedral-style, but that the most reliably-engineered software tends to be developed Bazaar-style. In the closed-source world, only the Cathedral model really works - that is just the nature of proprietary development, that you cannot have thousands of developers making tiny changes all the time. Hence, the reputation of proprietary software for being laden with new (and often pointless) features whilst suffering from a lack of reliability.
Don't get the two things mixed up. Not all open-source software is developed Bazaar-style, and if you do have a valid complaint (I'm still not convinced that you do) then it is with that development style rather than with open-source software itself. If you're still not convinced, read Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'. His take is that the Bazaar development model is superior for all sorts of other reasons too - but perhaps (in your view) coming up with new ideas isn't one of them. Still, like I said, there's a place for both models in the open-source world.
Would you imagine it to be plausible to be able to pull together and effictively use the OSS community in a way to create a substantially large software-platform AND deliver it for free AND deliver it based on standards (in true OSS fashion, of course) AND deliver it in a timely manner AND use it to stave of a .NET barrage by MS? I simply can't imagine it.
Why bother when such infrastructure already exists?
It's called XPCOM and is probably the primary reason why Mozilla has been so slow at getting a decent web browser out the door. Rather than simply develop a web-browser and associated tools, the Mozilla project took it upon themselves to develop an entire web-applications platform as well. Using a combination of Java, XUL (merely an XML schema), ECMAScript and the XPCOM objects, it's entirely possible to write entire office suites for Mozilla that can run straight off the web. Now, doesn't that sound rather familiar to the idea behind .NET?
I dont mean to bust anyone's ballon, but when was last time you saw an OSS project (other than the actual kernel) start from scratch, create a spec, follow it, implement it in a timely manner, and deliver a quality-end product?
That's just off the top off my head, and stuff that is unarguably innovative and ahead of (either time-wise or functionality-wise) anything the proprietary software world has come up with. If you take a slightly broader view of innovation or Open Source, then you can include things like:
So don't give us that crap about open-source software not being innovative - it simply isn't true.
PC's: Bah, who needs 'em when you have cell phones? (Okay, that's an overstatement, but not as much as you might think.)
I'd have thought any of the Sony Vaio range would amply demonstrate that the Japanese excel at making PC's too... just that they like them small, light, portable and stylish. Notice a trend here regarding how the Japanese like their electronics?
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it make more sense (perhaps with "Internet 2" or any of these other projects) to create infallible network protocols/tools that can't be used for malaciousness? Or is this logically impossible?
It's not a logical impossibility. Practically, however, it is impossible - IP only works because it is a nice lightweight, easily-routed network protocol. If one were to extend IP or redesign it to try and prevent any misuse, you would almost certainly find it became too heavyweight for it to work successfully at the global level. Not to mention that someone would eventually find some minor chink in its armour and start exploiting that instead...
However, there's all sorts of things that one can do to make the IP world a safer place. Number one, and probably the best example, would be for all network admins (and router manufacturers) to turn on source route verification by default at their border routers at the very least. What this does is get the router to verify that the source address of a packet headed to an external destination is in fact inside the netblock that the router 'owns' before forwarding it to the next hop. If every network admin would do this, then packets with a spoofed source address would never get any further than their nearest border router, and the internet as a whole would be an awful lot safer. This isn't a new idea and the capability to do it is probably in every router made in the last 5 years at least. Certainly any modern Linux kernel can do it. However, some manufacturers of both router hardware and software routing solutions still insist on keeping it set off by default, and combined with clueless network admins who don't know to switch it on, the problem remains.
The problem is thus not one of inadequate technology (although IPv6 addresses some security concerns too) but rather one of education...
This is ridiculous. Take a look at this very short and very incomplete list of the Free Software that Japanese programmers have written or contributed to - it's nothing to be sneezed at:
And this is just a very short and very incomplete list that I knocked up in a few minutes.
Sorry, I don't buy this article at all. Granted, the PC has never taken off in Japan in quite the same way it has elsewhere in the world, but that's the price of having an already extremely wired and hi-tech population, something of a distrust of western domination of any one market (why do you think Linux is such a huge hit over there, with the now famous retail sales figures showing TurboLinux outselling Windows?), and also the debacle that is the Japanese PC98 specification. So, yes, perhaps given its size and technological level, Japan is not as well represented in the PC software world as it could be, but to suggest from that that Japanese programmers are no good is outrageous and smacks of the American cultural arrogance that the rest of the world is sick to the back teeth of. Note also the implication that because the Japanese shy away from Microsoft software, that this makes them somehow backward. Very disturbing that this is the prevailing view of a major media outlet such as The Economist.
Oh, and as for mainframes being out of date - tell that to IBM and all its customers using z390's to consolidate servers, and whose reliability and I/O performance wipe the floor with anything the PC industry could come up with now or in the next 15 years.
Alas, the developers of GSM chose almost the worst frequency they could have, and then chose to blame the US for the incompatibility. Hrmph.
Perhaps if the American government and the major American telcos had actually consulted with and helped create the global standard way back in the late 80's rather than adopting the attitude that
- nothing created in cooperation by a committee could possibly work well technically or be marketable, and
- a home-grown solution over which they have total control must be better, and
- allowing multiple standards to compete would be better because eventually the strongest system would win anyway, due to free-market forces
then your wish might have come true and GSM might truly be the global standard.This is somewhat off-topic, but the comparison between the US mobile telephony market and the market in the rest of the world (and particularly Europe) is one of my favourite examples of why a free market is not always advantageous - the imposition of the GSM standard upon the fledgling European mobile phone companies has been a license for them to print money, at the same time as achieving massive customer satisfaction, whilst the freer, no-government-imposed-standard US market has floundered.
Well I'll agree to disagree about the user interface - I can't stand the Nokia interface personally, but horses for courses. As for tiny, you might be interested in the Motorola v50 then, which is about the same size and weight (79g IIRC) as an 8210 but with a clamshell design so it fits your face better when it's flipped open (expands to twice the size :)
Oh, and it's tri-band :p
I think the US get better pricing deals though - around $50 a month for 1500mins of calls I heard from some services.
This would be true if it weren't for the other thing that cripples the US mobile telephony market - this ridiculous idea that you pay (or use up your free airtime) to receive calls! So, all the US airtime packages seem attractive... until you realise that you're actually not getting to use all those airtime minutes to make calls yourself.
In contrast, because of the call-originator-pays system that the rest of the world uses, pre-pay packages are viable and attractive. Having bought a phone (in the UK the cheapest pre-pay packages are now around 70 UKP or about $100 US) the user pays nothing ever again, as long as they only receive calls and SMS's. If the user wishes to make calls or send an SMS they buy in advance airtime cards from practically any shop, or via plastic over the phone. Of course, you don't get any free minutes, but calls are not necessarily expensive either with this system - the best on offer is I think 2p (about 3 cents) a minute off-peak (7pm-7am weekdays and all day weekends) and 10p (about 14 cents) a minute at peak time (all other times). SMS's are charged at a flat rate of 10p each. You can now even do international roaming with pre-pay phones.
If you want to understand why mobile phones have taken off in Europe in such a huge way compared with the US, then this is one of the major pieces of the puzzle. Before pre-pay packages became available in late 1998, around 20% of UK adults had a mobile phone and growth was slow (a few percent a year). Everything else was the same it is now - GSM was the standard and there was around 98% coverage of the UK population. Fast forward 3 years after the introduction of pre-pay packages and the market penetration is now 75% and growth is finally levelling off after a totally explosive period - the market has nearly become saturated. Pretty much everyone who wants a mobile phone has one.
What I find most interesting is that SMS was only a minor feature of GSM phones before pre-pay became available - people used it, but not very widely. Initially, mobile phone networks priced the call costs of pre-pay phones very high to offset the fact that they were not getting a monthly service fee. Thus, SMS suddenly became all-important as a way for pre-pay users to save money. Now pre-pay call charges are much more reasonable, but SMS is now ubiquitous.
I just wish Nokia would get their act together and make a triband GSM900/1800/1900 phone.
Why not just buy a Motorola? I'm pretty much ecstatic with my now-rather-bashed-up Timeport 250, it does everything that I require of it and plenty more (functionally it's approximately equivalent to a Nokia 6210, slightly larger, but slightly lighter) and it's tri-band (does GSM900/1800/1900). In the UK it's going for the same price as the 6210 (between free and about 60UKP depending on which contract/network you get it on).
I find it unfortunate most people my age (around 21) think Mp3 and CD are as good as it gets, and having "theater-quality" sound is left to the theaters and a few insane audiophiles.
This is all very well (and I agree with you that digital audio does get better than CD) but the key thing to remember is that unless you have thousands of dollars worth of other audio equipment and much time invested in making your listening environment acoustically pleasing, the enhanced quality that DVD-Audio and SACD bring is pointless. The wonderfully crisp high-end and reduction in quantization noise gets completely buried in class-A transistor amp mush and funky reverberation modes of the listening room. Thus, until cheap (sub-$1k) audio hardware gets significantly better and your average Joe becomes interested in acoustically reshaping his living room, DVD-Audio and SACD will stay as obscure audiophile formats.
This is to say nothing of the fact that most recording studio equipment is nowhere near the quality required for recording these new formats properly - in a typical studio the best digital audio recorders they have are 20-bit, 48kHz ADATs...
The reason CD succeeded tape and vinyl is because your typical guy could hear the difference, with amplifiers and speakers that they already owned. In the early days of CD very few recordings were done digitally, but a recording done on quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape still sounds an awful lot better mastered onto CD than it does on cassette tape. SACD and DVD-Audio require both better audio hardware than the average guy has and better recording equipment than the average studio has to even begin to notice the difference.
The multi-channels are good though, and if DVD-Audio especially is ever going to make it mainstream, then it should be that which the marketers focus on rather than the quality aspects.
Actually TUX can do dynamic content itself via CGI - either standard CGI which is run in userspace and does not benefit significantly from TUX's speed, or as a CGI written to use the new TUX syscalls (a la ISAPI/NSAPI I guess), which does benefit a great deal. TUX does have the ability to transparently pass requests it cannot handle (e.g. pages that use mod_perl, mod_php) up to another webserver that can, but it's not necessary to do this to serve dynamic content.
Read the TUX 2 manual here and you'll see that this is true.
My guess is that the dynamic content in the TUX 2 benchmarks was produced using CGIs that were written specifically for TUX (it makes sense if you're trying to achieve the highest benchmark figures right?) and thus a static content-only test would make little difference to the scores.
Perhaps you were thinking of the venerable khttpd that has been in the kernel since early 2.2 days? That was the early testbed for in-kernel webserving for Linux and TUX is based on many of the same ideas although little code is shared. khttpd does indeed suffer from not being able to serve dynamic content itself, and this was one of the reasons why TUX was created.
SSL is not merely about encryption of data in transit, it's also a cryptographically secure method of authentication. Imagine that each and every PS2 DVD-ROM is pressed with a unique SSL certificate. Now, when playing online games the game server can require that all client PS2's authenticate themselves with this certificate. If the same certificate is used more than once at the same time then all connections using this certificate are kicked from the server and probably banned. The advantage of doing this with SSL as opposed to just serial numbers is that it has been tried and tested in the field and shown to be secure cryptographically, and the data is encrypted in transit so replay attacks are useless.
It doesn't prevent copying per se but it makes playing online with a copied game all but impossible. Given how much of a part of modern gaming is concerned with playing online, this is a major deterrent to copying.
Note that attrition.org do have an OS pie chart, which show 59% of the servers are NT and 24% is Linux.
That's a pie chart not showing overall OS/Webserver marketshare during that time period (Aug 99 - May 01) but rather the share of all the defacements attributable to each OS - so 59% of all the defacements between Aug 99 and May 01 were on NT servers (which here means NT and Windows 2000 combined), and 24% of all the defacements were on Linux servers.
This only goes to prove the point further.
Tell me - did you not have any coffee this morning or do you find it difficult to understand graphs and statistics?
No, I believe you are wrong. If Windows systems are targeted more often, then that in itself is a security problem, is it not? If you had 2 different platforms that were of 'equal security' but one was targeted much more frequently than the other, which would you choose?
In the security game, it pays to be able to keep your head low and out of trouble, no matter how tough you are.
Those graphs are very misleading, because they lump NT4 in with Windows 2000. It is widely known that NT4 had serious issues, which isn't surprising, since it was designed prior to the real internet explosion -- IIS was originally an add-on.
That's a ridiculous argument. Regardless of what it was originally designed for, Microsoft ended up selling NT4 as an Internet server OS. If, as you readily admit, it had serious issues, then why were they promoting it as a premium Internet-capable OS in the first place? Further, when the server technology changes again in the future (and believe me, it will), how can you possibly trust Microsoft to get it right given the mess they made of transitioning NT4 to the Internet and webserving?
Second, I should point out that Linux, and indeed every other Unix and Unix-alike, was designed before the 'real internet explosion' too. Indeed, if you trace back the lineage of 'proper' Unix, it was around when the internet was just being born, and many years before the arrival of TCP/IP, let alone HTTP. A webserver is still an add-on for most Unices and yet they seem to be able to cope quite adequately and securely with it.
Third, all the other OS stats combine current and previous versions of the OS together. Given that Windows 2000 is merely NT5, why should it get any different treatment?
Finally, go have a look at Attrition's website defacement stats for May 2001 so far (although Attrition are no longer mirroring defaced websites, they are still compiling statistics on defacements). Here NT and Windows 2000 are treated separately. You will notice that although NT is by far the most defaced, Windows 2000 comes second with some 29.55% of all defacings (all this information correct at time of writing). This compares to a total of 8.99% of all defacings for combined versions of Linux. This is a quite remarkable achievement for Windows 2000, to achieve this in just 18 months since its release - over 3 times the defacement rate of Linux. Well done Redmond!
Oh yes, for those of you who need a reality check about market share in the webserver market, this is the latest Netcraft survey. Sadly, the statistics by OS are not available without paying Netcraft (come on, we know it's the SSL survey that you make money from, please give us some hard OS information for non-SSL sites). However, it would be conservative to assume that approximately 60% of all Apache sites run Linux, and that figure still gives Linux twice the market share of NT and Windows 2000 combined. If we make another very conservative assumption, that Windows 2000 is half of that combined Microsoft figure (the following figures get worse for Windows 2000 the lower that share is), then we get this rather amazing figure:
Taking even very conservative estimates, a Windows 2000 webserver is currently at least 12 times more likely to be defaced than a Linux webserver.
I think that says it all.
Konqueror provides almost exactly such a facility, allowing you to disable the Javascript window.open() method whilst otherwise retaining full Javascript functionality. Say bye-bye to annoying popup-windows... for good!
As I remember, such a feature was proposed for Mozilla some time ago too, but the idea was rejected by the Netscape engineers building Mozilla's Javascript support on the basis that it was a poor idea commercially. Indeed, Netscape's own homepage frequently uses window popups.
I think from this and other examples (not least Konqueror's other advanced Java, Javascript and cookie management) one could make a strong case that non-commercially-developed Free Software is superior from a user's point of view, as the user dictates to the software what to do rather than a commercial organisation dictating what the software should do. The conflicts of interest that plague other software just aren't there.
I find it remarkable that such a wonderful yet tiny and easily-implemented feature can be missing from every other major browser. Ask yourself why this is.