Ok the following post is kinda off topic... but I beg to differ with the above post I've personally fitted RH5.1 onto a 486SX25 with 8mb of RAM and about 100Mb of disk space - not tiny I grant you but still not massive and that was a fully functioning system not a stripped down print server or firewall.
I've got a copy of LEM for use on my laptop which only has a 300 Mb drive (as I rember the base LEM distro is under 20Mb) and needs to win 95 partition. Why bother? well because occasionally I need to do wierd network stuff and a small linux setup is fantastic for that.
Finally I have a one floppy installation of linux - can't remember the distro name but its linked somewhere off the LEM pages. This disk is our last resort recovery tool in the office - with it I can boot any PC and mount the hard disk and get network access... ie I can ftp important documents off the harddisk and then see if the installation is savable.
Its got vfat and ntfs drivers included so I can try it with either our NT servers a standard 9x system. I'd recomend all sys-admins to have a look at these micro linux distros as they have the potential to save huge ammounts of hassle.
It might be that mainstream distros are moving away from base hardware... but thats very different from not being able to use the linux on those machines. You just got to dig a little you'll be amazed at whats out there.
as I understand it a clean room implementation is one which matches the specification of the origninal but does not use the original in any way. Therefore the developers can not even have seen the original Java code (and perhaps not even a derivative of the original Java code). This also rules out anything like disassebling a compiled version of the JVM and rebuilding from that. This was how the old i386 clones where produced - two teams one of which took the chips apart and derived their specifications and another who implemented a solution to the specifications that they where handed. In this way it doesn't really matter if you happen to use exactly the same code as the original if you can show that you developed it independantly. as usual my grammer probably ain't up to much but I think the contents there. Tom
Hmmm, I think they have a personal use license (certainly I got a copy free through the mail a couple of weeks ago).
Check out their site I guess.
On a related note this is exactly how I'm treating Oracle and my linux partition at home... I've had to do some moderatly serious PL/SQL development in the past and with a personal Oracle 8 installation I could now work from home if I needed to again.
This might be a slight infringment of the license terms as it is commercial use, but I think there was an exception for purely development work and anyway I _could_ use a fully licensed copy plus my personal installation will never be seen by a customer.
All in all I don't really think Oracle would mind the way I'm using it.
1) Gnome/KDE require a working XServer and for you to setup your monitor properly.
2) Gnome/KDE do not provide compatability with windows apps (wine _might_ in the near future... so don't quote that at me).
3) The point is not that they need to write an window manager, but they might want to... remember if they control the desktop they control the apps and the average user.
what I was trying to say was that I can see the a use for a MS window manager that could run the apps AND I can see the marketing spin/straglehold that this sort of port could provide.
Reading a few of the other comments in this thread I just had a thought. Don't MS use IE as their active Desktop, and several people have suggested that IE would require a port of the Win32 interface.
Well could a Linux version of IE be a MS built window manager?
It is afterall the desktop users that MS is really concerned about... suppose you didn't need that/nasty/ X-Server/window manager combination but instead you could run a linux OS with IE5 sat directly on top (using something like an SVGA library) giving you your desktop.
For people who understand X its wonderful and versatile as hell... but its also very complex and has plenty of security issues associated with it. Is that really what a simple end user wants?
Just imagine for a moment a box which ran the Linux kernal and a most of a normal distro and thus was remote adminable - but provided an end user with a windows interface and the same apps as they currently use.
I'd guess that each user would require their own registry or something - nasty as this might sound to some I can see the appeal.
The end user gets a familure box and doesn't need to learn anything new and the admins get remote access and proper file permissions.
I stand corrected... I was aware that the design was intended to reduce computational complexity during en/decryption - but I thought it was fized on using DES.
Well as I remember from my Crypto Course at uni your PGP stuff will NEVER be safe. As far as I know PGP is a DES encrypted message (40 significant bits in the key) with a randomly chosen key.
The random key is then included in the header of the message encrypted under the Public/Private keypair.
This means: 1) If you can break DES by brute force (not that hard) then it does not matter what size of public/private key you use.
2) If you can predict the key that the algorithim will 'randomly' choose then you can break an implementation of PGP in constant time.
As with all crypto you got to know whats under the hood before you can make any real judgement about a system.
One of the nicest suggestions from my crypto course was to compress (just with something like gzip) all messages as this reduces the occurance of patterns which attackers search for.
I don't know if gzip leave some form of exactly formatted header block on a file but if not then this could dramatically increase the security of your mail. If it does then it would dramatically decrease the security because an attacker would know exactly what they where looking for.
Finally bear in mind that for information to be considered 'secure' it has to cost more to break the encryption than the information itself is worth.
So if all you want is relativly good privacy on your personal emails then yes PGP will be fine - to my knowlage it still requires a significant ammount of effort for a non goverment body to break DES (who knows about GCHQ/NSA/etc) - if nobody _needs_ to know whats in your mail then you do not need to make it really secure.
I'd never heard of linux perf either tho... if the only effect of this site is to bring all the tuning repositries into the light then thats not a bad thing[tm] Tom
I just wonder if Linux is the right OS to be used in a portable machine... it seems very file access intensive (I admit I do not know if this is the OS's fault of the apps fault).
But surely in a mobile system you want power efficiency above all else (given your required level of functionality). Linux may be free - it may be cool - I will probably even put in on my laptop sometime soon. But to my knowlage Linux is not battery friendly.
just some thoughts
Tom
Open source documentation anyone?
on
Can Linux Do it?
·
· Score: 1
Just out of interest are there any sites trying to build online searchable help for linux.
I guess a good model might be along the lines of slashdot - a main howto with a discussion group associated with it.
Provided that comments could be scored (perhaps by allowing votes to be submitted) newbies could then be presented with the main howto and then a sequence of inteligent comments on them.
These howto's could then be examined on a semi-regular basis by any trusted site admin and the best comments worked into the main body.
Would probably turn into a very heavy load server (its primary feature being searches) but its disk usage would probably be quite modest (not more than several Gigs even including posts - after all I am only expecting plain text - on second thoughts some diagrams would be good but I would imagine that these would only be localy stored if they where part of the Howto so I would expect space usage to grow slowly and be quite controlable).
I don't see any reason why documentation can not be treated the same as code - I hate the idea of writting an entire manual - but reworking a paragraph thats not very helpful is entirely different.
Better still compressed versions of the sites Howtos (and perhaps the 10 best associated articals) could be mirrored in distributions. I do incidently mean mirror the site - if you are going to ship a web server you might as well make use of that fact:)
Is there currently a project like this?
anyone know where we could get the server space for it?
Perhaps some of the big companies would like to provide a home for this?
Anyone interested in moderating - could this become an offshoot of slashdot (I'd guess not but it don't hurt to ask).
>Conclusion: M$ will make new breakthroughs on > streaming over low-speed dialuptype connections > (watch out, RealAudio), but for high quality > audio, MP3 is safe for the time being.
That implies a large installed user base - with a MS decoder as thier *default* - that means a proliferation of recordings in this format - that means people with more bandwidth getting the decoder so that they can access the content - that means another MS controlled standard.
IMHO the point of this artical was that OSS interfers with the functioning of the market which strikes at the core of belifes of any economist (such as my girlfriend).
Its an interesting point and has been discussed before on/. (a thread on gift cultures vs markets I think). Basically the culture in place needs to allocate resources in an efficient manner in order to resolve the problems which are being faced - in a market economy that allocation is driven by demand. In a gift culture that allocation is via a totally different mechanism.
I think therefore that it is probably safe to say that OSS solves fewer consumer problems than commercial software.
But conversely OSS probably address more technical issues (although perhaps not as rigorously) than commercial software... this is entirely because the development is driven by the desire of 'geeks' (I hate that phrase) to be involved in new technologies.
Essentially if all software becomes open source then all software is valueless, thus removing _commercial_ incentives to produce new/better things.
I would disagree with the articals assertion that OSS leads to fragmented versions and incompatabilities between software - in the commercial world there is a commercial advantage in being compatible with the market leader... there is not nesciarily an advantage in being compatible with the _best_ standard.
I belive that OSS is much more of an academic enviroment where sharing information creates robust solutions. But much like an academic enviroment once the fundementals of a problem have been solved many people loose interest, not all people but many.
The main thrust of the artical was therefore an assesment of the _long term_ impact of OSS on the consumer. They may have talked in terms of revenue and companies but for any market economy that boils down to consumer desires.
And I think they have a point - it would change the nature of the industry forever. IT would cease to be an industry centered around artifacts and would become an entirely service based industry (sysadmins and and technical consultants).
Compulsary OSS would severly curtail the desire of any company to build new software. If all your revinue come from support and anyone can support your software then you do not have a stable buisness. This is not something which makes people with a buisness training happy.
The other issue that the artical failed to address was that the DoJ trial is about the operation of the free market. One of the witnesses (I forget who) testified that MS had a monopoly because they where able to price software differently for different suppliers - this was economic evidance that the free market was not working.
Perhaps what we should be looking at is how to force the free market to behave correctly within IT with OSS existing only as a component of that movement. Perhaps what is needed is a generic industry oversight body which can force all companies to produce software with a defined interface - by the arguments within the artical we should be fostering competion.
I'm sure that we can all agree that the most important thing is to produce tools that people want at a reasonable cost. That is the base premise of a free market - and so perhaps we ought to support the real message of the artical which was that to much OSS could genuinly damage the software industry in 10 years.
I wasn't suggesting that they cache the table - mearly the results... so while the query might need to access 1Tb of data if it only reuturns 64Mb of data the caching issue ain't so tough.
That said there has already been one response that lays out the terms of the challenge more clearly... which takes this sort of bahaviour into account.
There have also been some comments that MS is likely to only scrape through this challenge - I don't belive their marketing is that stupid.
I would expect them to show a very slim margin between themselves and Oracle - probably with them coming out on top. Quite how they will do this I do not know but they would not put themselves in this position if they did not think that they could walk out on top.
hmmm, just a thought does this test say what the preconditions are? If SQL server is vaugely sensible it will act like oracle and cache query results....
can anyone guess what would happen if M$ where to run the test query 10 mins before anybody comes through the door - and then runs it again having done nothing in the meantime.
I think that the thing about opensource that I like most is that its impossible to say that Opensource or freeware projects will/will not ever be something.
The simple fact is that because its open there is room for people to mould it to whatever they want - I have yet to contribute to any OS project but that has mainly been due to the lack of a machine at home (and more reacently time).
Saying that OS software will never be user friendly is not in my opinion a valid statement... what I am waiting to see is the graphic desginers of the world join in... people who enjoy making usable cool interfaces.
I had a long discussion with the graphic designer in our office a month or so ago... we both choose our professions because we wanted to be magicians...
The difference is I wanted to make things happen, affect forces, move things, blow things up, etc... he wanted to be a stage magician and produce the gasps from the audiance.
Opensource will never become a viable solution for the general domestic user as long as it is purely devleoped by coders... my hope is that sometime soon it will attract some magicians who specialise in the glamour which the home user wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok the following post is kinda off topic... but I beg to differ with the above post I've personally fitted RH5.1 onto a 486SX25 with 8mb of RAM and about 100Mb of disk space - not tiny I grant you but still not massive and that was a fully functioning system not a stripped down print server or firewall.
I've got a copy of LEM for use on my laptop which only has a 300 Mb drive (as I rember the base LEM distro is under 20Mb) and needs to win 95 partition. Why bother? well because occasionally I need to do wierd network stuff and a small linux setup is fantastic for that.
Finally I have a one floppy installation of linux - can't remember the distro name but its linked somewhere off the LEM pages. This disk is our last resort recovery tool in the office - with it I can boot any PC and mount the hard disk and get network access... ie I can ftp important documents off the harddisk and then see if the installation is savable.
Its got vfat and ntfs drivers included so I can try it with either our NT servers a standard 9x system. I'd recomend all sys-admins to have a look at these micro linux distros as they have the potential to save huge ammounts of hassle.
It might be that mainstream distros are moving away from base hardware... but thats very different from not being able to use the linux on those machines. You just got to dig a little you'll be amazed at whats out there.
Tom
Appologies for the above formatting, I only just got round to changing my default format to text from HTML.
Tom
as I understand it a clean room implementation is one which matches the specification of the origninal but does not use the original in any way. Therefore the developers can not even have seen the original Java code (and perhaps not even a derivative of the original Java code). This also rules out anything like disassebling a compiled version of the JVM and rebuilding from that. This was how the old i386 clones where produced - two teams one of which took the chips apart and derived their specifications and another who implemented a solution to the specifications that they where handed. In this way it doesn't really matter if you happen to use exactly the same code as the original if you can show that you developed it independantly. as usual my grammer probably ain't up to much but I think the contents there. Tom
Hmmm, I think they have a personal use license (certainly I got a copy free through the mail a couple of weeks ago).
Check out their site I guess.
On a related note this is exactly how I'm treating Oracle and my linux partition at home... I've had to do some moderatly serious PL/SQL development in the past and with a personal Oracle 8 installation I could now work from home if I needed to again.
This might be a slight infringment of the license terms as it is commercial use, but I think there was an exception for purely development work and anyway I _could_ use a fully licensed copy plus my personal installation will never be seen by a customer.
All in all I don't really think Oracle would mind the way I'm using it.
Tom
1) Gnome/KDE require a working XServer and for you to setup your monitor properly.
2) Gnome/KDE do not provide compatability with windows apps (wine _might_ in the near future... so don't quote that at me).
3) The point is not that they need to write an window manager, but they might want to... remember if they control the desktop they control the apps and the average user.
what I was trying to say was that I can see the a use for a MS window manager that could run the apps AND I can see the marketing spin/straglehold that this sort of port could provide.
Tom
Reading a few of the other comments in this thread I just had a thought. Don't MS use IE as their active Desktop, and several people have suggested that IE would require a port of the Win32 interface.
/nasty/ X-Server/window manager combination but instead you could run a linux OS with IE5 sat directly on top (using something like an SVGA library) giving you your desktop.
Well could a Linux version of IE be a MS built window manager?
It is afterall the desktop users that MS is really concerned about... suppose you didn't need that
For people who understand X its wonderful and versatile as hell... but its also very complex and has plenty of security issues associated with it. Is that really what a simple end user wants?
Just imagine for a moment a box which ran the Linux kernal and a most of a normal distro and thus was remote adminable - but provided an end user with a windows interface and the same apps as they currently use.
I'd guess that each user would require their own registry or something - nasty as this might sound to some I can see the appeal.
The end user gets a familure box and doesn't need to learn anything new and the admins get remote access and proper file permissions.
like I said, just an idea
Tom
I stand corrected... I was aware that the design was intended to reduce computational complexity during en/decryption - but I thought it was fized on using DES.
ho hum... learn something new everyday
Well as I remember from my Crypto Course at uni your PGP stuff will NEVER be safe. As far as I know PGP is a DES encrypted message (40 significant bits in the key) with a randomly chosen key.
The random key is then included in the header of the message encrypted under the Public/Private keypair.
This means:
1) If you can break DES by brute force (not that hard) then it does not matter what size of public/private key you use.
2) If you can predict the key that the algorithim will 'randomly' choose then you can break an implementation of PGP in constant time.
As with all crypto you got to know whats under the hood before you can make any real judgement about a system.
One of the nicest suggestions from my crypto course was to compress (just with something like gzip) all messages as this reduces the occurance of patterns which attackers search for.
I don't know if gzip leave some form of exactly formatted header block on a file but if not then this could dramatically increase the security of your mail. If it does then it would dramatically decrease the security because an attacker would know exactly what they where looking for.
Finally bear in mind that for information to be considered 'secure' it has to cost more to break the encryption than the information itself is worth.
So if all you want is relativly good privacy on your personal emails then yes PGP will be fine - to my knowlage it still requires a significant ammount of effort for a non goverment body to break DES (who knows about GCHQ/NSA/etc) - if nobody _needs_ to know whats in your mail then you do not need to make it really secure.
Just some thoughts
Tom
I'd never heard of linux perf either tho... if the only effect of this site is to bring all the tuning repositries into the light then thats not a bad thing[tm] Tom
I just wonder if Linux is the right OS to be used in a portable machine... it seems very file access intensive (I admit I do not know if this is the OS's fault of the apps fault).
But surely in a mobile system you want power efficiency above all else (given your required level of functionality). Linux may be free - it may be cool - I will probably even put in on my laptop sometime soon. But to my knowlage Linux is not battery friendly.
just some thoughts
Tom
Just out of interest are there any sites trying to build online searchable help for linux.
I guess a good model might be along the lines of slashdot - a main howto with a discussion group associated with it.
Provided that comments could be scored (perhaps by allowing votes to be submitted) newbies could then be presented with the main howto and then a sequence of inteligent comments on them.
These howto's could then be examined on a semi-regular basis by any trusted site admin and the best comments worked into the main body.
Would probably turn into a very heavy load server (its primary feature being searches) but its disk usage would probably be quite modest (not more than several Gigs even including posts - after all I am only expecting plain text - on second thoughts some diagrams would be good but I would imagine that these would only be localy stored if they where part of the Howto so I would expect space usage to grow slowly and be quite controlable).
I don't see any reason why documentation can not be treated the same as code - I hate the idea of writting an entire manual - but reworking a paragraph thats not very helpful is entirely different.
Better still compressed versions of the sites Howtos (and perhaps the 10 best associated articals) could be mirrored in distributions. I do incidently mean mirror the site - if you are going to ship a web server you might as well make use of that fact
Is there currently a project like this?
anyone know where we could get the server space for it?
Perhaps some of the big companies would like to provide a home for this?
Anyone interested in moderating - could this become an offshoot of slashdot (I'd guess not but it don't hurt to ask).
just some thoughts
Tom
>Conclusion: M$ will make new breakthroughs on
> streaming over low-speed dialuptype connections
> (watch out, RealAudio), but for high quality
> audio, MP3 is safe for the time being.
That implies a large installed user base - with a MS decoder as thier *default* - that means a proliferation of recordings in this format - that means people with more bandwidth getting the decoder so that they can access the content - that means another MS controlled standard.
the artical actually says that the charge that one of the new companies will have to pay for 'administration' will be in the range 2-15.
:)
I guess that this puts the price a consumer will pay as something like 10-30, a lot cheaper but not less than a pizza
IMHO the point of this artical was that OSS interfers with the functioning of the market which strikes at the core of belifes of any economist (such as my girlfriend).
/. (a thread on gift cultures vs markets I think). Basically the culture in place needs to allocate resources in an efficient manner in order to resolve the problems which are being faced - in a market economy that allocation is driven by demand. In a gift culture that allocation is via a totally different mechanism.
Its an interesting point and has been discussed before on
I think therefore that it is probably safe to say that OSS solves fewer consumer problems than commercial software.
But conversely OSS probably address more technical issues (although perhaps not as rigorously) than commercial software... this is entirely because the development is driven by the desire of 'geeks' (I hate that phrase) to be involved in new technologies.
Essentially if all software becomes open source then all software is valueless, thus removing _commercial_ incentives to produce new/better things.
I would disagree with the articals assertion that OSS leads to fragmented versions and incompatabilities between software - in the commercial world there is a commercial advantage in being compatible with the market leader... there is not nesciarily an advantage in being compatible with the _best_ standard.
I belive that OSS is much more of an academic enviroment where sharing information creates robust solutions. But much like an academic enviroment once the fundementals of a problem have been solved many people loose interest, not all people but many.
The main thrust of the artical was therefore an assesment of the _long term_ impact of OSS on the consumer. They may have talked in terms of revenue and companies but for any market economy that boils down to consumer desires.
And I think they have a point - it would change the nature of the industry forever. IT would cease to be an industry centered around artifacts and would become an entirely service based industry (sysadmins and and technical consultants).
Compulsary OSS would severly curtail the desire of any company to build new software. If all your revinue come from support and anyone can support your software then you do not have a stable buisness. This is not something which makes people with a buisness training happy.
The other issue that the artical failed to address was that the DoJ trial is about the operation of the free market. One of the witnesses (I forget who) testified that MS had a monopoly because they where able to price software differently for different suppliers - this was economic evidance that the free market was not working.
Perhaps what we should be looking at is how to force the free market to behave correctly within IT with OSS existing only as a component of that movement. Perhaps what is needed is a generic industry oversight body which can force all companies to produce software with a defined interface - by the arguments within the artical we should be fostering competion.
I'm sure that we can all agree that the most important thing is to produce tools that people want at a reasonable cost. That is the base premise of a free market - and so perhaps we ought to support the real message of the artical which was that to much OSS could genuinly damage the software industry in 10 years.
I'm gonna get flamed for this - but feel free
Tom
hehe - interesting reading this in the UK - our April fools ended about 5 hours ago :) still nice idea Tom
I wasn't suggesting that they cache the table - mearly the results... so while the query might need to access 1Tb of data if it only reuturns 64Mb of data the caching issue ain't so tough.
That said there has already been one response that lays out the terms of the challenge more clearly... which takes this sort of bahaviour into account.
There have also been some comments that MS is likely to only scrape through this challenge - I don't belive their marketing is that stupid.
I would expect them to show a very slim margin between themselves and Oracle - probably with them coming out on top. Quite how they will do this I do not know but they would not put themselves in this position if they did not think that they could walk out on top.
hmmm, just a thought does this test say what the preconditions are? If SQL server is vaugely sensible it will act like oracle and cache query results....
can anyone guess what would happen if M$ where to run the test query 10 mins before anybody comes through the door - and then runs it again having done nothing in the meantime.
maybe I'm a cynic, but....
Tom
I think that the thing about opensource that I like most is that its impossible to say that Opensource or freeware projects will/will not ever be something.
The simple fact is that because its open there is room for people to mould it to whatever they want - I have yet to contribute to any OS project but that has mainly been due to the lack of a machine at home (and more reacently time).
Saying that OS software will never be user friendly is not in my opinion a valid statement... what I am waiting to see is the graphic desginers of the world join in... people who enjoy making usable cool interfaces.
I had a long discussion with the graphic designer in our office a month or so ago... we both choose our professions because we wanted to be magicians...
The difference is I wanted to make things happen, affect forces, move things, blow things up, etc...
he wanted to be a stage magician and produce the gasps from the audiance.
Opensource will never become a viable solution for the general domestic user as long as it is purely devleoped by coders... my hope is that sometime soon it will attract some magicians who specialise in the glamour which the home user wants.
Tom
I've been wondering if a company that sold support for Linux could then use its staff to contribute to the opensource movement.
For the company its people get good expert level skills in the applications that they are supporting... the rest of the world gets the software.
I have to admit I don't think this idea would fly commercially - but its an interesting idea.
Tom