Yes, but you don't have the threat some years down the line of people like the Business Software Alliance popping round, doing a head count on how many licenses you have and then fining you for not having enough.
I actually think that RMS is a great guy, but should not be nominiated to the board of directors for GNOME. GNOME requires someone who can devote a significant amount of time to it, and I believe RMS has his fingers in enough pies already and would be pushed to dedicate the time that GNOME requires.
..I find I have to set up/configure so many systems during my job I find I've picked up the skills on the way.
Anyway in my case I started out as an embedded systems developer after getting my BSc, and often had to administer the systems I was developing on. My great leap forward in admin skills came when Personal Computer World put RH4.1 on the front CD of their magazine and I installed it on one of my home PCs.
As far as being a System Administrator [formal title] is concerned, my impression is that it's a pretty thankless unappreciated task. The advice of others saying "Don't do it" should be regarded seriously! Only if you have an opportunity to become a BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) does the job have its perks.
Whilst the EFF Cracker cost $500,000, they recognised that now the research had been done you could build one for about $50K or so. Also FPGA tech has come a long way since then, so I reckon with a little forethought $10-20K may not be an impossible target, which if you can get a few million out of a bank for the effort is a good investment/ return ratio!
The EFF device was only cracking DES, not 3DES.
Just after EFF cracker came out I wrote a letter to the UK Daily Mail (National newspaper) about the security of credit card trading on the net.
Before you reply about it bear in mind:
a) the letter got edited heavily
b) this was when Euro browsers only had 40/56 bit encryption, and
c) yes the photo isn't of my good side! =-0 ]
Its a precedent for Skylarov, since if a US company performing actions in US cannot be bound by a French court, Skylarov working in USSR cannot be bound by decision of US courts!
Actually being the first mover is not ideal, you actually want to arrive in the market close to the first mover, but with the right design. To verify that this strategy works, I would suggest that Sony are rarely first to market (look at Minidisk) but sell well 'cos everyine recognises that their products are better than many of their rivals.
Even MS is not first to market, but follows where it believes it can make a reasonable competitor.
You have to remember that ARM (and Acorn, its then parent company) have also been through some evry rough times financially and their prospects have looked extremely bleak at times.
So the fact that Transmeta have problems is not terribly surprising.
Anyway I know of at leats one TransMeta employee who'll have little difficulty finding a new job if he is made unemployed. The only difficulty is finding a company who will 'sponsor' some of his time for continuing Linux development. If nothin else fails, maybe he can go on the conference circuit giving 'keynote' speeches for $50K a time!!
Like any public forum Slashdot has a wide range of readers, a large number of whom actually work in the software engineering field [myslef included].
Anyway my personal theory based on blind idealism is that it is extremely difficult to get an estimate for completion right; short term goals are fairly easy to predict, because you have most of the information you require to make those predictions, but longer term estimates are much more of a wild guess. I personally thing its a consequent of chaos theory - a butterfly flutters its wings in Brazil and your software project instantly takes another two years! More seriously small errors in estimating components of a large project can induce large errors in estimating the time and resources needed to complete the whole project.
Linux is right with its "release when ready" motto. Since it is impossible to tell when it will be ready over such a wide range of groups and interests, you have to pick your release moments when they happen, not try and force them to happen.
Can you imagine asking Linus when 2.5 will be ready ? You mean 2.6 (or maybe 3.0) surely - 2.5 will be another development branch. I believe a 2.5 branch is to start Real Soon Now and therefore test releases from that should come every few weeks or so.
Whilst UK cops are generally unarmed, armed police are only a radio call away. In airports and other high security locations police are routinely armed.
Actually it's "stop or we'll beat you over the head with a truncheon and if that doesn't work our armed response unit will come round and shoot you". Nowadays you average UK copper is likely to be wearing Kevlar body armour and truncheons exactly the same in style to US cops.
I'd like to see Microsofts comments, and if they are on point I think a letter of thanks to BillG may be in order:-) Nice to see MS on the same side for a change!
...but the same is equally true of the vast majority fo commercial and closed source programs too. The sad fact is that jobs like reducing the number of warnings from the compiler and testing can be incredibly boring jobs that noone wants to do, so NoOne does it except in the most perfunctory manner.
Its been said that a lot of open source development projects ought to have some form of Audit person or team whose job it is to look at the project code and then when they find problems to go and reeducate the person who wrote the faulty code, preferably teaching him not to do it again [with a large hammer if necessary!]
Afetr thinking about this I decided my gripe is that he's a "bottom up" benchmarker rather than a "top down" benchmarker. I personally like to see comparisons of how good a system is performing a specific task, and if the performance of that task is substantially below or above the run of the mill standard, some follow-up analysis to determine where it makes its gains/losses.
Say what you will about the MindCraft benchmarks, one result of them was a hefty rewrite of the Linux TCP/IP stack for 2.4 'cos this was revealed as a major system bottleneck. I'm not sure that the Bradford benchmarks are going to achieve the same thing, unless he follows up his simplistic benchmarking with better analysis of his results.
If you've read the the other article(s) (how long it takes to perform a memcpy) in this series, it seems he is trying to desparately find holes where he can say "Linux is better".
For the record I have 4 PCs, 1 of which runs Linux permanently, the other 3 being dual boot. Desipite being in favour of Linux, these articles give benchmarking a bad name. Most rounded benchmarks show Linux about equal (with some pluses and minuses) to Windows performance, which for me is good enough, since given you can have Linux for free, why pay for an OS that is only just as good ?
...the parent post may be the RIAAs only long term strategy which would work.
Charging an access tax for Internet access would be the same as adding a copyright tax for blank media, which many countries have implemented.
The real solution is to start backing off on copyright; a 20 year limit would be fine for a start. 95 years or so, as it currently stands for Disney et al is unsupportable except for pork barrel politics.
..you find that the changes are not about encryption, but preventing programs already on your system from doing something they shouldn't do. As the changes offer increased security from the basic kernel, the NSA won't be able to do anything with this that they can't do with your current system.
As the NSA have released the source code for these changes I hardly see any reason why one should not run such a kernel. I may hesitate to run a binary from these guys, but if these changes get incorporated into the mainstream kernel I'll still run Linux.
On another point, maybe it is worthwhile seeing what is required to get an increased security classification for Linux; the FAQ raises some interesting issues in the form of documentation and auditing. Maybe the first could be performed under the auspices of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) and some of the other secure Linux distributors would be interested in coordinating the latter.
If Linux was approved as a secure OS, then takeup by goverments would be much more enthusiastic, and as civil service employment would require at least Linux desktop knowledge, that would lead to a need for it to be taught in schools, which is where hopefully the next generation fo kids won't grow up to by Windows lusers. [bit like a reverse of the fear leads to anger...to the Dark Side argument, isn't it?:-) ]
You can't criticise the Pope - he is infallible!! At least according to Catholic Church doctrine he is. (Actually I don't know if this has been knocked on the head nowadays)
Maybe we should join the NRA - their defense of rights is second to none!
Just simply point out if our rights get clobbered then theirs are likely to be substantially weakened, as laws constitutional changes to prevent joe public doing something may be applied to guns.
The nation of Apache users would like to extend our deepest sympathy to citizens of Microsoft IIS. We deeply feel your pain at the loss of over 5000 of your webservers to suicide attacks by nimda pilots.
Of course the fact that 80% of nimba pilots were resident in your nation at the time of the attacks should be no reason for preventing you blaming foreign hackers and nuking them.....
Wouldn't you be a little disappointed if the Pope, the leader of Catholicism, the man we call the "Holy Father" said "Nuke 'em. Stomp 'em. Kill as many of them as you can?" I would. Even if I felt that way, I'd be disappointed to hear the Pope say that.
Actually lots of Popes in history have uttered almost exactly those words, especially about Islam [Crusades, Protestants, alternative Catholic church, Inquisition etc]; it's only in recent times that religions in general have started to frown on such things.
On second thoughts that's a bad idea; someone's already got the game rights to that already !!
When is someone going to release a Quake/Half Life addon pack with Bin Laden lookalike terrorist enemies ?
Re:Knode and Kmail were better in 2.1.1
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
I liked the sophistication of Kmail. But they store the mail in mbox format. Which is really klunky (notice k) way of storing mails. It lumps everything into one file making it harder to deal from outside mail client. mbox format may be clunky, but not everything is in one file, it does support subdirectories. Anyway, Mozilla/Netscape [amongst others] use the same format, so it hopefully doesn't matter to much which mail client I use to get my mail.
Since so many clients use this format, it's not unreasonable to use it. Since mbox format is basically a (set of) text files, it is possible to use utils like awk, sed and grep to find what you need in the files.
Having said all the above, I do agree that abstraction of the storage format would be a 'Good Thing' - maybe you should propose it to the KDE developers!!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you don't have the threat some years down the line of people like the Business Software Alliance popping round, doing a head count on how many licenses you have and then fining you for not having enough.
I actually think that RMS is a great guy, but should not be nominiated to the board of directors for GNOME. GNOME requires someone who can devote a significant amount of time to it, and I believe RMS has his fingers in enough pies already and would be pushed to dedicate the time that GNOME requires.
..I find I have to set up/configure so many systems during my job I find I've picked up the skills on the way.
Anyway in my case I started out as an embedded systems developer after getting my BSc, and often had to administer the systems I was developing on. My great leap forward in admin skills came when Personal Computer World put RH4.1 on the front CD of their magazine and I installed it on one of my home PCs.
As far as being a System Administrator [formal title] is concerned, my impression is that it's a pretty thankless unappreciated task. The advice of others saying "Don't do it" should be regarded seriously! Only if you have an opportunity to become a BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) does the job have its perks.
Whilst the EFF Cracker cost $500,000, they recognised that now the research had been done you could build one for about $50K or so. Also FPGA tech has come a long way since then, so I reckon with a little forethought $10-20K may not be an impossible target, which if you can get a few million out of a bank for the effort is a good investment/ return ratio!
The EFF device was only cracking DES, not 3DES.
Just after EFF cracker came out I wrote a letter to the UK Daily Mail (National newspaper) about the security of credit card trading on the net.
Before you reply about it bear in mind:
a) the letter got edited heavily
b) this was when Euro browsers only had 40/56 bit encryption, and
c) yes the photo isn't of my good side! =-0 ]
Its a precedent for Skylarov, since if a US company performing actions in US cannot be bound by a French court, Skylarov working in USSR cannot be bound by decision of US courts!
Actually being the first mover is not ideal, you actually want to arrive in the market close to the first mover, but with the right design. To verify that this strategy works, I would suggest that Sony are rarely first to market (look at Minidisk) but sell well 'cos everyine recognises that their products are better than many of their rivals.
Even MS is not first to market, but follows where it believes it can make a reasonable competitor.
You have to remember that ARM (and Acorn, its then parent company) have also been through some evry rough times financially and their prospects have looked extremely bleak at times.
So the fact that Transmeta have problems is not terribly surprising.
Anyway I know of at leats one TransMeta employee who'll have little difficulty finding a new job if he is made unemployed. The only difficulty is finding a company who will 'sponsor' some of his time for continuing Linux development. If nothin else fails, maybe he can go on the conference circuit giving 'keynote' speeches for $50K a time!!
Like any public forum Slashdot has a wide range of readers, a large number of whom actually work in the software engineering field [myslef included].
Anyway my personal theory based on blind idealism is that it is extremely difficult to get an estimate for completion right; short term goals are fairly easy to predict, because you have most of the information you require to make those predictions, but longer term estimates are much more of a wild guess. I personally thing its a consequent of chaos theory - a butterfly flutters its wings in Brazil and your software project instantly takes another two years! More seriously small errors in estimating components of a large project can induce large errors in estimating the time and resources needed to complete the whole project.
Linux is right with its "release when ready" motto. Since it is impossible to tell when it will be ready over such a wide range of groups and interests, you have to pick your release moments when they happen, not try and force them to happen.
Can you imagine asking Linus when 2.5 will be ready ?
You mean 2.6 (or maybe 3.0) surely - 2.5 will be another development branch. I believe a 2.5 branch is to start Real Soon Now and therefore test releases from that should come every few weeks or so.
This is becoming more and more of a myth.
Whilst UK cops are generally unarmed, armed police are only a radio call away. In airports and other high security locations police are routinely armed.
Actually it's "stop or we'll beat you over the head with a truncheon and if that doesn't work our armed response unit will come round and shoot you". Nowadays you average UK copper is likely to be wearing Kevlar body armour and truncheons exactly the same in style to US cops.
I'd like to see Microsofts comments, and if they are on point I think a letter of thanks to BillG may be in order :-) Nice to see MS on the same side for a change!
..this is the high water mark of dubious copyright legilation and that the tide will now recede.
...but the same is equally true of the vast majority fo commercial and closed source programs too. The sad fact is that jobs like reducing the number of warnings from the compiler and testing can be incredibly boring jobs that noone wants to do, so NoOne does it except in the most perfunctory manner.
Its been said that a lot of open source development projects ought to have some form of Audit person or team whose job it is to look at the project code and then when they find problems to go and reeducate the person who wrote the faulty code, preferably teaching him not to do it again [with a large hammer if necessary!]
..for Florida ballots.
It could've made his win even more convincing by dropping voters who didn't vote in the last two elections.
I Want my Net-TV (to paraphrase Sting from a Dire Straights song)
Whoever modded this up didn't read his sig. 2 mistakes in one line deserves -5 Stupid
Sting = lead singer of Police
Dire Straights = Dire Straits, lead singer really Mark Knopfler.
Afetr thinking about this I decided my gripe is that he's a "bottom up" benchmarker rather than a "top down" benchmarker. I personally like to see comparisons of how good a system is performing a specific task, and if the performance of that task is substantially below or above the run of the mill standard, some follow-up analysis to determine where it makes its gains/losses.
Say what you will about the MindCraft benchmarks, one result of them was a hefty rewrite of the Linux TCP/IP stack for 2.4 'cos this was revealed as a major system bottleneck. I'm not sure that the Bradford benchmarks are going to achieve the same thing, unless he follows up his simplistic benchmarking with better analysis of his results.
If you've read the the other article(s) (how long it takes to perform a memcpy) in this series, it seems he is trying to desparately find holes where he can say "Linux is better".
For the record I have 4 PCs, 1 of which runs Linux permanently, the other 3 being dual boot. Desipite being in favour of Linux, these articles give benchmarking a bad name. Most rounded benchmarks show Linux about equal (with some pluses and minuses) to Windows performance, which for me is good enough, since given you can have Linux for free, why pay for an OS that is only just as good ?
...the parent post may be the RIAAs only long term strategy which would work.
Charging an access tax for Internet access would be the same as adding a copyright tax for blank media, which many countries have implemented.
The real solution is to start backing off on copyright; a 20 year limit would be fine for a start. 95 years or so, as it currently stands for Disney et al is unsupportable except for pork barrel politics.
..you find that the changes are not about encryption, but preventing programs already on your system from doing something they shouldn't do. As the changes offer increased security from the basic kernel, the NSA won't be able to do anything with this that they can't do with your current system.
:-) ]
As the NSA have released the source code for these changes I hardly see any reason why one should not run such a kernel. I may hesitate to run a binary from these guys, but if these changes get incorporated into the mainstream kernel I'll still run Linux.
On another point, maybe it is worthwhile seeing what is required to get an increased security classification for Linux; the FAQ raises some interesting issues in the form of documentation and auditing. Maybe the first could be performed under the auspices of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) and some of the other secure Linux distributors would be interested in coordinating the latter.
If Linux was approved as a secure OS, then takeup by goverments would be much more enthusiastic, and as civil service employment would require at least Linux desktop knowledge, that would lead to a need for it to be taught in schools, which is where hopefully the next generation fo kids won't grow up to by Windows lusers. [bit like a reverse of the fear leads to anger...to the Dark Side argument, isn't it?
You can't criticise the Pope - he is infallible!! At least according to Catholic Church doctrine he is. (Actually I don't know if this has been knocked on the head nowadays)
Maybe we should join the NRA - their defense of rights is second to none!
Just simply point out if our rights get clobbered then theirs are likely to be substantially weakened, as laws constitutional changes to prevent joe public doing something may be applied to guns.
The nation of Apache users would like to extend our deepest sympathy to citizens of Microsoft IIS. We deeply feel your pain at the loss of over 5000 of your webservers to suicide attacks by nimda pilots.
Of course the fact that 80% of nimba pilots were resident in your nation at the time of the attacks should be no reason for preventing you blaming foreign hackers and nuking them.....
Wouldn't you be a little disappointed if the Pope, the leader of Catholicism, the man we call the "Holy Father" said "Nuke 'em. Stomp 'em. Kill as many of them as you can?" I would. Even if I felt that way, I'd be disappointed to hear the Pope say that.
Actually lots of Popes in history have uttered almost exactly those words, especially about Islam [Crusades, Protestants, alternative Catholic church, Inquisition etc]; it's only in recent times that religions in general have started to frown on such things.
Why not call it Counterstrike ?
On second thoughts that's a bad idea; someone's already got the game rights to that already !!
When is someone going to release a Quake/Half Life addon pack with Bin Laden lookalike terrorist enemies ?
I liked the sophistication of Kmail. But they store the mail in mbox format. Which is really klunky (notice k) way of storing mails. It lumps everything into one file making it harder to deal from outside mail client.
mbox format may be clunky, but not everything is in one file, it does support subdirectories. Anyway, Mozilla/Netscape [amongst others] use the same format, so it hopefully doesn't matter to much which mail client I use to get my mail.
Since so many clients use this format, it's not unreasonable to use it. Since mbox format is basically a (set of) text files, it is possible to use utils like awk, sed and grep to find what you need in the files.
Having said all the above, I do agree that abstraction of the storage format would be a 'Good Thing' - maybe you should propose it to the KDE developers!!