It seems it was this on his "elemenstors" fantasy spoof. He posted a joke article and it got deleted. His mistake, and really not any basis for him to complain.
The vulnerabilities listed are all already fixed in mozilla 1.01 and 1.1, except for the potential privacy violation in onUnload (bugzilla). That one's hardly terrible - it's possible to add javascript to your website so that you can tell which url the user went to when he leaves your site. Pretty minor given that a) it just tells the "attacker" which of his links you clicked and b) a lot of sites already achieve the same effect using links to redirect scripts instead of direct links.
This whole thing is really overblown. The issue the register picks on as the most important - the https-http-https redirect warning thing - is actually the least important. They talk about the importance of HTTPS for ecommerce but they don't seem to understand what the real security issues here (Oh my god, a malicious website can confuse me about whether my connection to it is encrypted! Doom! We're all doomed!).
Most of those bugtraq/securityfocus listings are from a list of fixed security bugs that the mozilla people fixed and listed in bugzilla that were posted to bugtraq. It doesn't help anyone improve security if your reward for being open is a scaremongering article that says your product is "riddled with security holes". It's an easy way for The Register to get hits knocking mozilla with most of their work already done for them - by the mozilla developers.
From the serial SCSI faq It will provide universal interconnect with Serial ATA, while offering logical SCSI compatibility... Serial Attached SCSI customers do have the option of using lower cost Serial ATA devices in a native Serial Attached SCSI environment (upwards compatibility is supported).
They're using the same physical layer as Serial ATA and doing SCSI on top. A new computer industry standard does the opposite of gratuitous incompatibility (gratuitous compatibility?) and probably makes things *more* convenient. What a pleasant surprise!
Other factors in the success of Linux seem to be overlooked, as it's fashionable to credit the whole success of Linux on the fact that it's Open Source(tm).
I find it bizarre that many of the posts in this debate, including yours, have assumed that Linus Torvalds's decision to make Linux free software[1] was some sort of marketing gimmmick. Let's be clear: had Linux been closed source it would not exist as a useable option.
Writing an OS isn't that hard. Many universities consider it a suitable final year computer science project. The result is a fun toy to show to your friends. Scaling from that to a useable system is what's hard.
How could Linux succeed had it been closed source?
Linus Torvalds makes a mainstream, useable OS all by himself, in his spare time. Impossible. How does you write drivers for hardware you don't own? And even working full time there just aren't enough hours in the day for a single person to bring Linux to where it is today.
Linus Torvalds decides on a whim to start a company and hires people to help him write and market a commercial UNIX derivative for PCs. Well then, the established UNIX vendors, in particular SCO for UNIX on intel, eat him for breakfast. They already have customers and a product and he doesn't.
As to the other points you raise
(Faster hardware able to run minicomputer OSes) Sure. After the 386 it made sense to write serious operating systems for the PC. And companies did, consider SCO for example (or XENIX, anyone remember that?). But the economics of making a commercial OS are very different to those of a free software project. It doesn't make much sense for a UNIX vendor to go after the PC desktop market: MS have it sewn up nice and tight, there are easier markets elsewhere and no potential for profit in the short term. Linux could only do that because it doesn't (didn't?) need to turn a profit. Similarly a corporate UNIX vendor doesn't need to support all the zillions of wacky PC devices out there - you just tell your customers what hardware to buy. Fine for business, not so great for the home user who bought a Windows box and wants to try something different.
Email became "almost free" which made widespread collaboration efforts possible. But isn't this mainly an advantage for free/open source software?
[1] Obviously, the Open Source marketing campaign didn't exist in those days.
It's important to note that the sunday times is a very unreliable source of information. As well as serialising the Hitler diaries (which isn't quite so bad as they weren't the first or the only ones to be taken in) they've also ran various bizarre campaigns, such as insisting for a long time that AIDS wasn't caused by HIV.
Their computer coverage is particularly bad. Their feature on the Tomlinson spy incident (where a list of MI6 spies was posted on the web) was so silly it was hard to read itwithout cracking up laughing. A friend bought that day's issue just so he could show it to people for amusement value.
What does the fact that an operating system not being open source have to do with the ability to write applications for it?
Because with something like this, you are likely to want to make modifications to the operating system. For the most obvious example, Be's proprietary status will make it difficult to strip out that pretty GUI, which you don't particularly want to be running on every node in your cluster.
I was under the impression that these days network shared memory is generally considered a bad idea for performance reasons (by abstracting away the distinction between local and nonlocal data you abstract away much of your ability to optimise for performance), but there are a number of other kernel modifications the beowulf people have made.
Hmmmm...first a CS degree strictly in video games, now a literature degree strictly in science fiction. Note to self : Throw resumes from UK colleges in trash.
The University of Miami has a course in basket-weaving. Does that make it sensible to throw out Harvard or MIT resumes?
Clue: I have here The (London) Times's 1998 University guide, which includes their attempt to rank the 96 accredited UK universities in order of quality. The University of Glamorgan, who are offering the SF course, is ranked 69th. The University of Teeside, who offer the computer games degree, is ranked 80th.
Both universities are ex-polytechnics (further education technical/vocational colleges). A few years ago the rules were changed to allow polytechnics to register as universities. Some of them have given themselves somewhat grandiose titles ("The University of the West of England"!) or begun offering rather, ah, populist courses to attract more students. There's an excellent satire of this kind of thing ( The University of Bums on Seats) which I see someone has already mentioned here.
The other potential X Windows replacement under development is Berlin. I haven't really looked at it, but it is a real project under active development.
As far as I can tell the Y Windows pages are just design documents. There's no code for download. That and the date of the last news (February 1998) suggests nothing ever came of it, which is a shame as the things they were suggesting (sane colour management and direct video access instead of X protocol requests for local clients) all seem fairly sensible IMO.
Berlin actually looks rather more ambitious, being based on CORBA and a very OO model. Unfortunately X probably won't be replaced anytime soon because of the massive existing base of applications. You can be sure whatever replaces it will still be lumbered with having to be able to do X emulation...
You were worried that lanl.gov was a joke of Rob Malda's and wanted to use whois to check? Good God. Please tell me it was just that you didn't realise that a).gov means US Federal Government and b) you can't just buy one.
If you did know that then what on Earth were you thinking? Were you expecting someone to fraudulently obtain a federal government domain name and record their real name in the registration data?
Anyway, back into being-nice mode: you're using the wrong whois server.
Network Solutions don't manage.gov and.mil domains, so asking their whois server about a.gov domain really isn't going to work. Use whois.nic.gov (or whois.nic.mil for a.mil)
$whois -h whois.nic.gov lanl.gov National Laboratory (LANL-DOM) Mail Stop B294 Los Alamos, NM 87545
Domain Name: LANL.GOV Status: Active
Administrative Contact: Wood, C. Philip (CPW) (505) 667-2598 CPW@LANL.GOV
Please be advised that this whois server only contains information pertaining to the.GOV domain. For information for other domains please use the whois server at RS.INTERNIC.NET.
I think that suggestions of Amiga hardware running Linux are pretty misplaced.
Amiga Linux[1] has existed for many years. It was the first port of Linux to non-x86 hardware, and was done by Amiga people who wanted a better[2] OS.
You talk about the essence of the Amiga coming from it's wonderful multimedia hardware and the people around it, and I agree. My first two computers were Amigas and I loved them. However, time has moved on. After Commodore's bankruptcy the Amiga community has been scattered to the winds, leaving only a tiny hard core, and the hardware and OS that made the Amiga amazing in 1989 are now obsolete.
I don't see any reason why we old Amigans should get excited about this, or even any reason to call the new machine an Amiga: it will be entirely different hardware running an entirely different OS. It will presumably have an Amiga-like GUI but such things are already available[3]. If it runs old Amiga binaries it will in effect be running an Amiga emulator but such things are already available [4]
The Amiga was a wonderful machine in its day but I'm afraid it's time to let it die...
[4] UAE is written in C and runs under many platforms and OSes. Fellow is written in x86 assembler and runs only in MS-DOS but is damn fast. I recommend having a look at one of these. Certainly brought back memories for me
ihatestarwars.com is pretty foolish, but there's a slightly similar thing here which I thought was hysterical. This one is of course tongue-in-cheek - I doubt anyone who could get seriously worked up about the evils of Star Wars would have the wit to argue their case well.
The BBC has run an article on this. Basically they're saying it's very unlikely that the story's true. The Ministry of Defense are also denying it for what that's worth
Interestingly they confirm that the blackmail attempts did happen and are being investigated - but by the Fraud Squad.
Personally I never found it terribly convincing. If it did happen it would probably have to be an inside job, and certainly not the evil-hackers-on-the-internet story that was implied.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems it was this on his "elemenstors" fantasy spoof. He posted a joke article and it got deleted. His mistake, and really not any basis for him to complain.
The vulnerabilities listed are all already fixed in mozilla 1.01 and 1.1, except for the potential privacy violation in onUnload (bugzilla). That one's hardly terrible - it's possible to add javascript to your website so that you can tell which url the user went to when he leaves your site. Pretty minor given that a) it just tells the "attacker" which of his links you clicked and b) a lot of sites already achieve the same effect using links to redirect scripts instead of direct links.
This whole thing is really overblown. The issue the register picks on as the most important - the https-http-https redirect warning thing - is actually the least important. They talk about the importance of HTTPS for ecommerce but they don't seem to understand what the real security issues here (Oh my god, a malicious website can confuse me about whether my connection to it is encrypted! Doom! We're all doomed!).
Most of those bugtraq/securityfocus listings are from a list of fixed security bugs that the mozilla people fixed and listed in bugzilla that were posted to bugtraq. It doesn't help anyone improve security if your reward for being open is a scaremongering article that says your product is "riddled with security holes". It's an easy way for The Register to get hits knocking mozilla with most of their work already done for them - by the mozilla developers.
It will provide universal interconnect with Serial ATA, while offering logical SCSI compatibility
They're using the same physical layer as Serial ATA and doing SCSI on top. A new computer industry standard does the opposite of gratuitous incompatibility (gratuitous compatibility?) and probably makes things *more* convenient. What a pleasant surprise!
And indeed they've taken your suggestion. Donald Becker is on the list.
Other factors in the success of Linux seem to be overlooked, as it's fashionable to credit the whole success of Linux on the fact that it's Open Source(tm).
I find it bizarre that many of the posts in this debate, including yours, have assumed that Linus Torvalds's decision to make Linux free software[1] was some sort of marketing gimmmick. Let's be clear: had Linux been closed source it would not exist as a useable option.
Writing an OS isn't that hard. Many universities consider it a suitable final year computer science project. The result is a fun toy to show to your friends. Scaling from that to a useable system is what's hard.
How could Linux succeed had it been closed source?
Impossible. How does you write drivers for hardware you don't own? And even working full time there just aren't enough hours in the day for a single person to bring Linux to where it is today.
Well then, the established UNIX vendors, in particular SCO for UNIX on intel, eat him for breakfast. They already have customers and a product and he doesn't.
As to the other points you raise
Sure. After the 386 it made sense to write serious operating systems for the PC. And companies did, consider SCO for example (or XENIX, anyone remember that?). But the economics of making a commercial OS are very different to those of a free software project. It doesn't make much sense for a UNIX vendor to go after the PC desktop market: MS have it sewn up nice and tight, there are easier markets elsewhere and no potential for profit in the short term. Linux could only do that because it doesn't (didn't?) need to turn a profit. Similarly a corporate UNIX vendor doesn't need to support all the zillions of wacky PC devices out there - you just tell your customers what hardware to buy. Fine for business, not so great for the home user who bought a Windows box and wants to try something different.
But isn't this mainly an advantage for free/open source software?
[1] Obviously, the Open Source marketing campaign didn't exist in those days.
It's important to note that the sunday times is a very unreliable source of information. As well as serialising the Hitler diaries (which isn't quite so bad as they weren't the first or the only ones to be taken in) they've also ran various bizarre campaigns, such as insisting for a long time that AIDS wasn't caused by HIV.
Their computer coverage is particularly bad. Their feature on the Tomlinson spy incident (where a list of MI6 spies was posted on the web) was so silly it was hard to read itwithout cracking up laughing. A friend bought that day's issue just so he could show it to people for amusement value.
What does the fact that an operating system not being open source have to do with the ability to write applications for it?
Because with something like this, you are likely to want to make modifications to the operating system. For the most obvious example, Be's proprietary status will make it difficult to strip out that pretty GUI, which you don't particularly want to be running on every node in your cluster.
I was under the impression that these days network shared memory is generally considered a bad idea for performance reasons (by abstracting away the distinction between local and nonlocal data you abstract away much of your ability to optimise for performance), but there are a number of other kernel modifications the beowulf people have made.
Hmmmm...first a CS degree strictly in video games, now a literature degree strictly in science fiction. Note to self : Throw resumes from UK colleges in trash.
The University of Miami has a course in basket-weaving. Does that make it sensible to throw out Harvard or MIT resumes?
Clue: I have here The (London) Times's 1998 University guide, which includes their attempt to rank the 96 accredited UK universities in order of quality. The University of Glamorgan, who are offering the SF course, is ranked 69th. The University of Teeside, who offer the computer games degree, is ranked 80th.
Both universities are ex-polytechnics (further education technical/vocational colleges). A few years ago the rules were changed to allow polytechnics to register as universities. Some of them have given themselves somewhat grandiose titles ("The University of the West of England"!) or begun offering rather, ah, populist courses to attract more students. There's an excellent satire of this kind of thing ( The University of Bums on Seats) which I see someone has already mentioned here.
As far as I can tell the Y Windows pages are just design documents. There's no code for download. That and the date of the last news (February 1998) suggests nothing ever came of it, which is a shame as the things they were suggesting (sane colour management and direct video access instead of X protocol requests for local clients) all seem fairly sensible IMO.
Berlin actually looks rather more ambitious, being based on CORBA and a very OO model. Unfortunately X probably won't be replaced anytime soon because of the massive existing base of applications. You can be sure whatever replaces it will still be lumbered with having to be able to do X emulation...
Andrew
If you did know that then what on Earth were you thinking? Were you expecting someone to fraudulently obtain a federal government domain name and record their real name in the registration data?
Anyway, back into being-nice mode: you're using the wrong whois server.
Network Solutions don't manage .gov and .mil domains, so asking their whois server about a .gov domain really isn't going to work. Use whois.nic.gov (or whois.nic.mil for a .mil)
$whois -h whois.nic.gov lanl.gov
.GOV domain. For information for other domains please
National Laboratory (LANL-DOM)
Mail Stop B294
Los Alamos, NM 87545
Domain Name: LANL.GOV
Status: Active
Administrative Contact:
Wood, C. Philip (CPW)
(505) 667-2598
CPW@LANL.GOV
Domain servers in listed order:
NSX.LANL.GOV 204.121.3.1
NSX.LBL.GOV 131.243.64.3
NS2.LANL.GOV 192.16.1.2
Record last updated on 11-Mar-99.
Please be advised that this whois server only contains information
pertaining to the
use the whois server at RS.INTERNIC.NET.
Amiga Linux[1] has existed for many years. It was the first port of Linux to non-x86 hardware, and was done by Amiga people who wanted a better[2] OS.
You talk about the essence of the Amiga coming from it's wonderful multimedia hardware and the people around it, and I agree. My first two computers were Amigas and I loved them. However, time has moved on. After Commodore's bankruptcy the Amiga community has been scattered to the winds, leaving only a tiny hard core, and the hardware and OS that made the Amiga amazing in 1989 are now obsolete.
I don't see any reason why we old Amigans should get excited about this, or even any reason to call the new machine an Amiga: it will be entirely different hardware running an entirely different OS. It will presumably have an Amiga-like GUI but such things are already available[3]. If it runs old Amiga binaries it will in effect be running an Amiga emulator but such things are already available [4]
The Amiga was a wonderful machine in its day but I'm afraid it's time to let it die...
[1] see http://lxr.linux.no/source/arch/ m68k/amiga/?a=m68k and http://www.linux-m68k.org/faq/history.ht ml. Although the amiga version wasn't reintegrated into the linux source 'till 2.0 it did exist as a separate project.
[2] for their definition of better, which is not necessarily yours.
[3] http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiw m.html
[4] UAE is written in C and runs under many platforms and OSes.
Fellow is written in x86 assembler and runs only in MS-DOS but is damn fast.
I recommend having a look at one of these. Certainly brought back memories for me
That site doesn't seems to have added posts after the 3rd yet. The thread is available here.
ihatestarwars.com is pretty foolish, but there's a slightly similar thing here which I thought was hysterical. This one is of course tongue-in-cheek - I doubt anyone who could get seriously worked up about the evils of Star Wars would have the wit to argue their case well.
Interestingly they confirm that the blackmail attempts did happen and are being investigated - but by the Fraud Squad.
Personally I never found it terribly convincing. If it did happen it would probably have to be an inside job, and certainly not the evil-hackers-on-the-internet story that was implied.