Instead of merely reading a message about troop movements, imagine inserting messages that say, directs the troops over here, their supplies over there, and the armor support to yet somewhere else. And that's just for starters. Consider cracking into an air defense network, or a country's central banking computers, or their power grid control systems, or...
Opinions differ on the best way to set up Unix/Linux partitions. About the only generally agreed on rule of thumb I've seen is to make swap about twice your RAM size -- although I can remember back when we used to use 3X RAM size or 60 MB, whichever was bigger.
Beyond that, it varies all over the place from putting everything else on a single partition to splitting out nearly everything else to their own partitions. It depends what you're using it for -- on my web server I've got/var on its own partition for the logs and / and everything else (relatively static) on another, but on my development system/var is on the same partition as / but/home is separate to simplify backups. There's also a big VFAT partition for the Java programs in development to access them from either Linux or Windows (dual boot).
That Lnx4win is also on the Mandrake 6.0 disc that got included in every one of the 100,000 copies of the new "Maximum Linux" magazine. I haven't tried it because I don't have the space on my Windows machine (a laptop) and all the others are already running Linux.
Unfortunately (as with a few other CDs included with magazines I've seen lately) it's rather short on details on getting started (although the magazine does have a coupleo of pages on installing Mandrake once you've got your HD partitioned).
A browser is a natural extension of an operating system, for the simple fact it is such a useful tool.
Spoken like a true Microsoft drone. That's the silliest thing I've ever heard, as it was when MS first tried to use that argument. Sure, that's why there's a big chunk of the Linux kernel devoted to "browser" (not). If "useful tool" was the criterion for what goes in an OS, why doesn't MS bundle Word and Excel in there too?
If a manufacturer wants to, say, put all his help pages into HTML, how can he do it? He can't, unless there is a standard browser built into the operating system.
Utter nonsense. Coding standard HTML doesn't require the presence of a browser. Even reading HTML help pages doesn't require a full browser, just an HTML-to-(possibly formatted)text routine. If MS had merely included a library of routines to interpret HTML rather than a full up internet browser, they might have a case. They didn't, and they don't.
A lot of folks seem to be confusing the term "monopoly" with "owning 100% of the market", and so see alternatives like the free unices, BeOS, etc as proof that MS doesn't have a monopoly.
Sorry, but that's not the legal definition. Even if it were, when this all went to trial Microsoft certainly had a monopoly on OS preloads on x86 PCs -- that monopoly which they illegally used to leverage the success of their IE browser at the expense of Netscape, in clear violation of a consent decree Microsoft signed when several on-line service providers sued over the MSN icon on the original Windows 95 desktop.
(These things are never as simple as the press makes them out -- remember the audience the press is writing for.)
Actually you can get something called a design patent on the shape of a drawing (well, depending on the drawing and what you're using it for).
Design patents don't cover "inventions" as such, but are more like copyrights. I don't know for sure, but Apple's suit against eMachines over their lookalike of the iMac could be based on a design patent.
Invention patents were supposed to require both newness (as in "no prior art") but also non-obviousness, as in "not obvious to someone skilled in the art"). The problem with most software patents isn't necessarily newness (although in some cases it seems patents have been issued for the non-new), but very much from obviousness. Most folks "skilled in the art" (ie experienced programmers) would come up with the same obvious solutions to a given problem as are getting patents these days.
If you're a little guy, or a student, you probably can't afford to get the thing patented in the first place. Have you looked at the fees lately?
There was a time, not that long ago, when no software patents were issued because they were considered in the same class as mathematical formulae or laws of nature, and unpatentable. The (long since released to the public domain and expired) famous Bell Labs patent on the SUID bit in Unix was famous in no small part because it was an exception to the "no software patents" rule, and if you look at the application it carefully describes how the feature could be implemented as a hardware device.
Software patents now are doing more harm than good: time for them to be flushed.
Sun didn't kill "Wabi for Linux", they killed Wabi, period. And why not -- it was a proprietary Win 3.x platform in a world where the open Win32 WINE existed.
I'm amazed at people worried about Sun. If Linux and friends can defeat Microsoft, do you really think Sun is going to be a problem?
(Free clue: No commercial company wants to "further Linux for Linux' sake". Even Red Hat acknowledges that they want to make the pie bigger so that their piece gets bigger too. Commercial companies further Linux (or not) for perceived benefit to them, not for the benefit of the Linux community (although the two may well be parallel -- it's called 'enlightened self-interest').
Uh, Sun isn't interested in home PCs, so what makes sense on those is irrelevant to Sun. Sun sells to businesses, and there the model does make sense. (Not always, but enough of a market that Microsoft is nervous about it.) And that market is much bigger than the home PC market.
(In the future, perhaps, as broadband access to the net (cable, DSL, etc) increases, we may see more of an interest by Sun in the home market -- likely a lot of current non-PC owners would be interested in something like this that'll give them their email, their network-served office apps, and yes their networked games. WebTV just doesn't cut it. Remember that most potential home users have neither the inclination nor skill to manage a PC, they'd rather pay somebody else to do it - and if they can do that via a network, so much the better (no need to bring the PC down to CompUSA or wherever to have the latest software loaded up on it)).
Don't make the mistake of judging the mass market by your personal preferences. After all, look at the success of Microsoft and AOL.
First telnetting into port 80 on both secure{nt,linux}.hackpcweek.com shows they're running identical server software. Then I try telnetting into the SMTP port and at both IPs I get "421 stopper.hackpcweek.com is not accepting new connections. Please try later". (Emphasis added).
What an effing waste of time. I think only thing this "challenge" will prove is that nobody bothered.
They're not "distributing" it, they're making it available to beta testers who will be working for them to test it. No distribution, no foul of the GPL. Now, if they were letting into the beta any wannabe, or charging money (like Microsoft's so-called beta tests), then there'd be a real complaint.
A few idiots were squawking about this when the beta program was first announced, and they were just as wrong then.
It's a beta test, and although Microsoft has warped that term to mean "early public access for suckers who'll pay us money", it has long been traditional that beta testers are, in effect, working for the company developing the software and that beta copies remain the property of the developer just as they would if all the testers were working inside as full time employees (hence the legal paperwork in the first place).
Since this is a beta, and not a public release, for the purposes of the GPL it can be considered "internal only" and not a public distribution, and thus the GPL does not apply. The licenses explicitly calls this a pre-release, so the product has not been released yet.
(For a similar case, consider the NDA'd development of the 64-bit Merced Linux port.)
Now, if Corel doesn't change the licensing when it distributes an actual product, then folks have a legitimate complaint. Meanwhile, anyone who signs that contract and violates it by posting the pre-release distro is as guilty of piracy as any warez kiddie.
(And no, I'm not and never have been a Corel employee or stockholder.)
The buy of Visio just gave them IntelliCAD, a pretty comprehensive clone of AutoCAD. (Were I AutoDesk, I'd be nervous. I suppose AutoDesk could try to revive its Unix version, but they can kiss goodbye to kilobuck-per-seat licensing).
Most folks are commenting on the obvious connection with Visio's eponymous diagramming package, which does make a nice (for MS) addition to their Office suite, a partial countermove to Sun's making StarOffice gratis. (Does StarOffice include anything Visio-like?)
However, on a second front, Visio also owns a CAD software package (IntelliCAD?) that is fully AutoCAD compatible, right down to running AutoLisp macros, reading/writing the latest DXF files, etc. (The history goes back a bit - SoftDesk originally wrote the ACAD clone so AutoDesk bought them out, but DOJ required them to spin off the ACAD-like software (anti-monopoly move) which they sold to an obscure Australian company that Visio later bought. Confused yet?)
In addition to an add-on for Office, and ensuring that Visio never gets ported to Linux, MS now owns a package that can (and will, count on it) compete with AutoCAD. (Not that AutoCAD, at a thousand dollars or so per seat, couldn't use some competition - but it already had that without MS buying the Visio company.) It also ensures that IntelliCAD (am I getting the right package name?) is never ported to Linux.
This is a very clever strategic move for Microsoft, equivalent to capturing a couple of key pieces in shogi (unlike chess, in shogi you can place captured pieces on the board as your own).
So, what open/free CAD packages are in development out there? And what visio-like diagramming packages? Time to get coding....
Of course light has (photons have) mass. Just not rest mass. Mass and energy are equivalent, right? (E=mc^2). Light has energy, right? (hv, where h=Planck's constant, v=greek letter nu, frequency).
Therefor light has mass.
(At rest, though (well, photons don't rest, but..) the frequency goes to zero, thus so does the mass.)
SLiRP works over X.25 packet nets (eg Tymnet), which are still in wide use. Does PPP? (I dunno).
I've routinely used this to access the 'net -- local dialup to Tymnet or equivalent, X.25 connection to my "ISP" (not its primary role, but it offers a SLiRP connection) across the country, and then IP from there.
There are two approaches to writing, say, an office app in Java: just rewrite the whole thing and have all of that run in the JVM on the client machine (which may be unplugged from the net at that point), or write it such that most of the crunching takes place on the server and the client side is just a smart user interface (something like the X Windows model but at a higher level).
Corel (AFAIK) tried the former, and at a stage when the Java language and JVM technology was in its infancy (no JIT, etc). It bombed. I don't know that Sun is taking the latter approach, but if they want to sell servers that's the way I'd bet. That could be very workable indeed. (I've done apps like this, where the core logic, data storage, etc took place on a Unix server but the GUI ran on an NT workstation. It's a very workable model.) Since Sun is talking about having this stuff run in e.g. Java-enable cell phones, the later is almost certainly the model they're using.
Yep. If true (about open sourcing StarOffice), this is a clear second front on the assault on MS's market share. "Cutting off their air supply", to quote Microsoft from a different context.
Linux is depriving MS of sales on the OS front, and a free office suite would do the same on that front. StarOffice already runs on Windows and (IIRC) on Macintosh as well as Linux, providing obvious migration paths. (At least one Windows user I know of has switched to StarOffice just so it'll be easier if/when he later switches to Linux.)
It could have some of this effect even without being GPL'd if it's, say, 'free beer' software or almost open source, but the effect will be much bigger with a real open license. Meanwhile Sun can bundle it with Solaris or as a Java client and make its money on that side. (It needs to justify the cost of buying StarOffice to its stockholders somehow.)
Interesting that the most active stock on the market this morning was Applix, up $7 or so, on the strength of its Applixware for Linux. Corel is also up. The market obviously recognizes some potential there. Microsoft can't be happy about this. (Wonder if it'll prompt an "Office for Linux"? Smart move would be to develop that in-house but hold it until Windows and Office sales are really starting to hurt.)
(BTW, Bill has enough invested in other things that he's unlikely to ever be a pauper even if MS stock went to zero. And he could always get a job as a programmer, if there's any market for Basic)
Re:"Office.. i think i can hear someone....."
on
911 Calls Linux
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· Score: 2
> when was the last time you had a kernel panic in Linux
Well, not a kernel panic, but daily (or more) spontaneous reboots for no obvious reason.
At least, not obvious until I looked at little closer at the machine (under my desk) and noticed the power cord not fully inserted, so that it would power glitch when I'd bump my leg against it. (Yes, it would re-boot when I booted it:-)
Well, there was a Windows 286 (I still have the box around somewhere), but perhaps you typo'd that for Windows 386. And I'm not sure whether Win95B wasn't just another name for Win95 OSR2. (OBTW, there's also a Win 95C, which added some USB support to Win 95B). Then there are all the beta versions floating around. (I ran W95 beta for about six months after W95 was released, I couln't be bothered doing the upgrade, and besides I was usually booting to Linux instead.)
Then of course there is (or I should say, was) Win NT for Alpha, Win NT for MIPS, Win NT for PowerPC,...
Slashdot Mirror
Apply a little imagination.
...
Instead of merely reading a message about troop movements, imagine inserting messages that say, directs the troops over here, their supplies over there, and the armor support to yet somewhere else. And that's just for starters. Consider cracking into an air defense network, or a country's central banking computers, or their power grid control systems, or
Opinions differ on the best way to set up Unix/Linux partitions. About the only generally agreed on rule of thumb I've seen is to make swap about twice your RAM size -- although I can remember back when we used to use 3X RAM size or 60 MB, whichever was bigger.
/var on its own partition for the logs and / and everything else (relatively static) on another, but on my development system /var is on the same partition as / but /home is separate to simplify backups. There's also a big VFAT partition for the Java programs in development to access them from either Linux or Windows (dual boot).
Beyond that, it varies all over the place from putting everything else on a single partition to splitting out nearly everything else to their own partitions. It depends what you're using it for -- on my web server I've got
That Lnx4win is also on the Mandrake 6.0 disc that got included in every one of the 100,000 copies of the new "Maximum Linux" magazine. I haven't tried it because I don't have the space on my Windows machine (a laptop) and all the others are already running Linux.
Unfortunately (as with a few other CDs included with magazines I've seen lately) it's rather short on details on getting started (although the magazine does have a coupleo of pages on installing Mandrake once you've got your HD partitioned).
A browser is a natural extension of an operating system, for the simple fact it is such a useful tool.
Spoken like a true Microsoft drone. That's the silliest thing I've ever heard, as it was when MS first tried to use that argument. Sure, that's why there's a big chunk of the Linux kernel devoted to "browser" (not). If "useful tool" was the criterion for what goes in an OS, why doesn't MS bundle Word and Excel in there too?
If a manufacturer wants to, say, put all his help pages into HTML, how can he do it? He can't, unless there is a standard browser built into the operating system.
Utter nonsense. Coding standard HTML doesn't require the presence of a browser. Even reading HTML help pages doesn't require a full browser, just an HTML-to-(possibly formatted)text routine. If MS had merely included a library of routines to interpret HTML rather than a full up internet browser, they might have a case. They didn't, and they don't.
A lot of folks seem to be confusing the term "monopoly" with "owning 100% of the market", and so see alternatives like the free unices, BeOS, etc as proof that MS doesn't have a monopoly.
Sorry, but that's not the legal definition. Even if it were, when this all went to trial Microsoft certainly had a monopoly on OS preloads on x86 PCs -- that monopoly which they illegally used to leverage the success of their IE browser at the expense of Netscape, in clear violation of a consent decree Microsoft signed when several on-line service providers sued over the MSN icon on the original Windows 95 desktop.
(These things are never as simple as the press makes them out -- remember the audience the press is writing for.)
Actually you can get something called a design patent on the shape of a drawing (well, depending on the drawing and what you're using it for).
Design patents don't cover "inventions" as such, but are more like copyrights. I don't know for sure, but Apple's suit against eMachines over their lookalike of the iMac could be based on a design patent.
Invention patents were supposed to require both newness (as in "no prior art") but also non-obviousness, as in "not obvious to someone skilled in the art"). The problem with most software patents isn't necessarily newness (although in some cases it seems patents have been issued for the non-new), but very much from obviousness. Most folks "skilled in the art" (ie experienced programmers) would come up with the same obvious solutions to a given problem as are getting patents these days.
If you're a little guy, or a student, you probably can't afford to get the thing patented in the first place. Have you looked at the fees lately?
There was a time, not that long ago, when no software patents were issued because they were considered in the same class as mathematical formulae or laws of nature, and unpatentable. The (long since released to the public domain and expired) famous Bell Labs patent on the SUID bit in Unix was famous in no small part because it was an exception to the "no software patents" rule, and if you look at the application it carefully describes how the feature could be implemented as a hardware device.
Software patents now are doing more harm than good: time for them to be flushed.
Sun didn't kill "Wabi for Linux", they killed Wabi, period. And why not -- it was a proprietary Win 3.x platform in a world where the open Win32 WINE existed.
I'm amazed at people worried about Sun. If Linux and friends can defeat Microsoft, do you really think Sun is going to be a problem?
(Free clue: No commercial company wants to "further Linux for Linux' sake". Even Red Hat acknowledges that they want to make the pie bigger so that their piece gets bigger too. Commercial companies further Linux (or not) for perceived benefit to them, not for the benefit of the Linux community (although the two may well be parallel -- it's called 'enlightened self-interest').
Uh, Sun isn't interested in home PCs, so what makes sense on those is irrelevant to Sun. Sun sells to businesses, and there the model does make sense. (Not always, but enough of a market that Microsoft is nervous about it.)
And that market is much bigger than the home PC market.
(In the future, perhaps, as broadband access to the net (cable, DSL, etc) increases, we may see more of an interest by Sun in the home market -- likely a lot of current non-PC owners would be interested in something like this that'll give them their email, their network-served office apps, and yes their networked games. WebTV just doesn't cut it. Remember that most potential home users have neither the inclination nor skill to manage a PC, they'd rather pay somebody else to do it - and if they can do that via a network, so much the better (no need to bring the PC down to CompUSA or wherever to have the latest software loaded up on it)).
Don't make the mistake of judging the mass market by your personal preferences. After all, look at the success of Microsoft and AOL.
Re: "Man didn't really land on the moon...NASA programmers simply produced a simulation on a Un*x system."
.sig, but of course you know the first couple of landings pre-date Unix.
Cute
First telnetting into port 80 on both secure{nt,linux}.hackpcweek.com shows they're running identical server software. Then I try telnetting into the SMTP port and at both IPs I get "421 stopper.hackpcweek.com is not accepting new connections. Please try later". (Emphasis added).
What an effing waste of time. I think only thing this "challenge" will prove is that nobody bothered.
They're not "distributing" it, they're making it available to beta testers who will be working for them to test it. No distribution, no foul of the GPL. Now, if they were letting into the beta any wannabe, or charging money (like Microsoft's so-called beta tests), then there'd be a real complaint.
A few idiots were squawking about this when the beta program was first announced, and they were just as wrong then.
It's a beta test, and although Microsoft has warped that term to mean "early public access for suckers who'll pay us money", it has long been traditional that beta testers are, in effect, working for the company developing the software and that beta copies remain the property of the developer just as they would if all the testers were working inside as full time employees (hence the legal paperwork in the first place).
Since this is a beta, and not a public release, for the purposes of the GPL it can be considered "internal only" and not a public distribution, and thus the GPL does not apply. The licenses explicitly calls this a pre-release, so the product has not been released yet.
(For a similar case, consider the NDA'd development of the 64-bit Merced Linux port.)
Now, if Corel doesn't change the licensing when it distributes an actual product, then folks have a legitimate complaint. Meanwhile, anyone who signs that contract and violates it by posting the pre-release distro is as guilty of piracy as any warez kiddie.
(And no, I'm not and never have been a Corel employee or stockholder.)
> CAD/CAM
The buy of Visio just gave them IntelliCAD, a pretty comprehensive clone of AutoCAD. (Were I AutoDesk, I'd be nervous. I suppose AutoDesk could try to revive its Unix version, but they can kiss goodbye to kilobuck-per-seat licensing).
Most folks are commenting on the obvious connection with Visio's eponymous diagramming package, which does make a nice (for MS) addition to their Office suite, a partial countermove to Sun's making StarOffice gratis. (Does StarOffice include anything Visio-like?)
However, on a second front, Visio also owns a CAD software package (IntelliCAD?) that is fully AutoCAD compatible, right down to running AutoLisp macros, reading/writing the latest DXF files, etc.
(The history goes back a bit - SoftDesk originally wrote the ACAD clone so AutoDesk bought them out, but DOJ required them to spin off the ACAD-like software (anti-monopoly move) which they sold to an obscure Australian company that Visio later bought. Confused yet?)
In addition to an add-on for Office, and ensuring that Visio never gets ported to Linux, MS now owns a package that can (and will, count on it) compete with AutoCAD. (Not that AutoCAD, at a thousand dollars or so per seat, couldn't use some competition - but it already had that without MS buying the Visio company.) It also ensures that IntelliCAD (am I getting the right package name?) is never ported to Linux.
This is a very clever strategic move for Microsoft, equivalent to capturing a couple of key pieces in shogi (unlike chess, in shogi you can place captured pieces on the board as your own).
So, what open/free CAD packages are in development out there? And what visio-like diagramming packages? Time to get coding....
Hey, doesn't Red Hat have about enough money to buy SGI now?
(Joke. It's only on paper.)
Of course light has (photons have) mass. Just not rest mass. Mass and energy are equivalent, right? (E=mc^2). Light has energy, right? (hv, where h=Planck's constant, v=greek letter nu, frequency).
Therefor light has mass.
(At rest, though (well, photons don't rest, but..) the frequency goes to zero, thus so does the mass.)
We're a life form. Colonization of available habitats is what life forms do. All life forms (or else they go extinct). Biological imperative.
Our adaptability and technology just makes more habitats available to us.
SLiRP works over X.25 packet nets (eg Tymnet), which are still in wide use. Does PPP? (I dunno).
I've routinely used this to access the 'net -- local dialup to Tymnet or equivalent, X.25 connection to my "ISP" (not its primary role, but it offers a SLiRP connection) across the country, and then IP from there.
Still some life in the old software yet, I think.
Short for "perquisite".
:-)
Of course, you yanks have a way of bastardizing the spelling of words, so it may well be "perk" in the US, but that's not where Alan is, is it?
(And the piece of paper you sign authorizing the back to give somebody your money is a cheque. A check is a pattern of alternate colo[u]r squares.)
There are two approaches to writing, say, an office app in Java: just rewrite the whole thing and have all of that run in the JVM on the client machine (which may be unplugged from the net at that point), or write it such that most of the crunching takes place on the server and the client side is just a smart user interface (something like the X Windows model but at a higher level).
Corel (AFAIK) tried the former, and at a stage when the Java language and JVM technology was in its infancy (no JIT, etc). It bombed. I don't know that Sun is taking the latter approach, but if they want to sell servers that's the way I'd bet. That could be very workable indeed. (I've done apps like this, where the core logic, data storage, etc took place on a Unix server but the GUI ran on an NT workstation. It's a very workable model.)
Since Sun is talking about having this stuff run in e.g. Java-enable cell phones, the later is almost certainly the model they're using.
C:\WINDOWS>strings ftp.exe|grep Regents
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS>
Proof enough?
(Anyone with dual-boot machine can check it themselves by mounting the Windows partition and doing the strings thing from Linux.)
Yep. If true (about open sourcing StarOffice), this is a clear second front on the assault on MS's market share. "Cutting off their air supply", to quote Microsoft from a different context.
Linux is depriving MS of sales on the OS front, and a free office suite would do the same on that front. StarOffice already runs on Windows and (IIRC) on Macintosh as well as Linux, providing obvious migration paths. (At least one Windows user I know of has switched to StarOffice just so it'll be easier if/when he later switches to Linux.)
It could have some of this effect even without being GPL'd if it's, say, 'free beer' software or almost open source, but the effect will be much bigger with a real open license. Meanwhile Sun can bundle it with Solaris or as a Java client and make its money on that side. (It needs to justify the cost of buying StarOffice to its stockholders somehow.)
Interesting that the most active stock on the market this morning was Applix, up $7 or so, on the strength of its Applixware for Linux. Corel is also up. The market obviously recognizes some potential there. Microsoft can't be happy about this. (Wonder if it'll prompt an "Office for Linux"? Smart move would be to develop that in-house but hold it until Windows and Office sales are really starting to hurt.)
(BTW, Bill has enough invested in other things that he's unlikely to ever be a pauper even if MS stock went to zero. And he could always get a job as a programmer, if there's any market for Basic)
> when was the last time you had a kernel panic in Linux
:-)
Well, not a kernel panic, but daily (or more) spontaneous reboots for no obvious reason.
At least, not obvious until I looked at little closer at the machine (under my desk) and noticed the power cord not fully inserted, so that it would power glitch when I'd bump my leg against it. (Yes, it would re-boot when I booted it
Well, there was a Windows 286 (I still have the box around somewhere), but perhaps you typo'd that for Windows 386. And I'm not sure whether Win95B wasn't just another name for Win95 OSR2. (OBTW, there's also a Win 95C, which added some USB support to Win 95B).
...
Then there are all the beta versions floating around. (I ran W95 beta for about six months after W95 was released, I couln't be bothered doing the upgrade, and besides I was usually booting to Linux instead.)
Then of course there is (or I should say, was) Win NT for Alpha, Win NT for MIPS, Win NT for PowerPC,