If I wanted to write that kind of JanglyCaps'd verbiage I'd just use Windows. If you are making a pretty and tasteful GUI, why spoil it by making the code ugly?
You haven't looked at many open source projects, have you? There are a wide variety of notation styles to be seen, of which this is not even an extreme example. Too bad about the hungarian variables, but oh well. Such things are only superficial.
When you join a project, you use whatever coding style the leaders have decreed and get on with it.
- maintaining "hot sites," or duplicates of key elements of the IT infrastructure, so if the main infrastructure is compromised, users can quickly switch to backup systems.
Sounds like a way to sell licenses. Ok, since we can't make our product stable, buy 2 copies and hope one works.
And since the user can quickly switch to the backup system it must be online, in other words chances are the worm will get there first.
I saw the same thing. It kind of takes some of the shock value out of the Slashdot story.
And you didn't read the note re the article being changed after posting to refer to port 135 instead of port 80. It kind of takes some of the credibility value out of the Slashdot poster.
S Korea may just be using this as a threat to get MS to negotiate on price and/or features. Until recently, govts (and large companies) haven't really had much of a credible alternative to Windows, so they haven't been able to use their incredible scale as purchasing and negotiating power. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS and S Korea come to a deal in six months time...
Oh I don't doubt that MS will discount heavily over the coming months, but if you have any knowledge of Korea at all, you know that there are two prime motivators: efficiency and freedom, especially the latter. Yes, Koreans are a freedom-loving people. Open source gives them the tools they need to be independent in software, and not only that, it gives them the tools to build a new software industry.
Just watch what comes out of korea in the next few years, prepare to be amazed.
So they are in violation. Who the fawk is actually going to DO anything other then sign statements and generally complain. WE NEED SOMEONE TO TAKE THEM TO COURT!
Last resort. The bottom line is: we love LinkSys and they love us. It's more like a domestic argument than a prize fight.
So now the perspective of someone who doesn't know the details of either case (Which probably makes up a large share of bosses who would have to sign off on any adoptions of GPL software) will look at GPL software, and see that using it gets you sued from the outside and the inside.
No, they will think "wow, Linux must be valuable".
What's the big deal anyway? The thing uses proprietary hardware, so in order to reproduce it, you'd also have to have the masks to make the chips anyways. So they stand to lose nothing by not publishing the source.
It's not just that, it's the price point. Linksys makes so many of these things and sells them at such a low price that as a manufacturer, even with all the specs in front of you it's not an attractive target. That's what I call a fine business model: compete on pure engineering and manufacturing efficiency.
You should be grateful that a company releases any specs for their device if it does not contain GPL based code.
You're fairly far off base. As far as I know, LinkSys hasn't released any low-level specs for these routers at all. What is at issue is purely the GPLed code they've used to shorten their development cycle. That would include any patches to the kernel source, and in some cases, module code as well, depending on how it is linked to the static kernel.
post a rant on slashdot. It's well known that the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, SCO, etc. read weblogs to find out what uninformed 12 year olds think of them, and change business practices accordingly.
You may think that's funny but the fact is, a lot of mainstream net media do troll through these articles, at least looking for a consensus on the general mood, and sometimes finding an interesting lead or two no doubt.
Try this: google "slashdot site:www.usatoday.com"
Admittedly, the qualify of the posts often leaves much to be desired in terms of factual content, however you will generally see challenges to posts that are blantantly wrong.
"HP's Graham Smith says: "Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered." But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material"
Sorry, Daniel:) As Linux's network driver maintainer and author of a Serial ATA stack which goes through the Linux kernel SCSI layer... as well as being someone who reviewed ATA-over-ethernet...
I can say that ethernet hardware and the Linux SCSI stack does not handle retranmits that are needed at the ethernet layer. HP's Graham Smith is precisely correct. As some other slashdotters pointed out, the HyperSCSI code includes logic to handle retransmits and failures -- as it must.
Um, actually, I was too quick to admit an error. Note, I talked about error checking, you talked about retransmission. Too much smoka-dopa today I guess:-)
"HP's Graham Smith says: "Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered." But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material"
I can say that ethernet hardware and the Linux SCSI stack does not handle retranmits that are needed at the ethernet layer. HP's Graham Smith is precisely correct. As some other slashdotters pointed out, the HyperSCSI code includes logic to handle retransmits and failures -- as it must.
No, he's still wrong. He claimed that HyperSCSIS "has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered", whereas you yourself pointed out it's handled in the HyperSCSI layer. I erred slightly in placing the retransmit in the wrong place, good catch. Purely a thinko, since I was looking straight at the HyperSCSI docs when I wrote it.
"Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered."
But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material, or should have at least read the introductory material. Perhaps the takeaway here is, managers should not be allowed to comment on technical material, or if they do, they should solicit advice from a practicing engineer first.
Smith also dumps on HyperSCSI's scalability, but as far as I can see, it scales exactly as well as any LAN, and for storage that's not bad at all. Besides, being 100% open source, implementing a repeater sitting on a routing box is entirely practical.
As far as Andre's comments go, the article should have disclosed that he peddles an iSCSI stack for a living. More power to him, I'm not criticizing his colorful comments or business scheme, just the journalist's failure to take note of this.
Now, my own opinion: I haven't tried HyperSCSI yet. I have it installed here and by rights I should have given it a thorough workout by now, but mea culpa. So little time, so much to do. Well I'll change that today.
From what I know so far: I like the idea of trimming away unnecessary layers. It's the kind of thing we do in Linux all the time. I like the fact that the whole stack is GPL. It doesn't bother me that disk drives themselves don't support the protocol and are unlikely to in the near future, because you have to put the disks in a box anyway, and that might as well be a Linux box presenting a HyperSCSI interface.
Personally, I think that HyperSCSI is going somewhere. So is iSCSI for that matter: the two protocols serve distinctly different target markets. iSCSI is where the money is because hardware vendors support it. HyperSCSI is where the joy of hacking is because it performs better and it's GPL. The thing is, they both present the same interface to the OS (SCSI) so they are interchangable. It's not an either/or situation at all.
You need to pay careful attention to any technique that increases performance without increasing cost.
I would not want MS destroyed, period. That would end up being a total utter disaster for the world.
You're on crack. It would be the best thing that ever happened to accelerate the progress of personal computer software, with spinoff benefits to commerce, security and quality of life.
Microsoft is now and always has been, a net loss for society.
Talk about blowing it out both ends. You can read their ethical and guiding principles as well.
Yes, this one in particular:
Neither solicit nor accept financial or other valuable consideration, directly or indirectly, from outside agents in connection with the work for which we are responsible
It's not flamebait people, it's actualy how I feel. Other nice/.'s have been attempting to help me solve the problem instead of modding me out of existence
It seems that any Slashdot article containing the words "Microsoft" or "Windows" triggers a script somewhere deep in the Redmond campus that calls out the volunteer MS astroturfer fire brigade. Outraged Slashdotters quickly respond, and in the end this mainly achieves the unintended effect of boosting Slashdot traffic.
I do fully realize that I am running a risk at home, and with the latest round of viruses, I am tempted to get a virus checker going on the old home PCs, just to be on the safe side. Like most people I'm a firm believer in it can't happen to me.
You are probably already trojaned, and being used as a mail relay;-)
This is a massive success, due to a level of lobbying unprecedented at this stage of a technical European measure.
That is my tentative conclusion as well. I have to research the details a lot more, but from my perspective, but this could possibly result in a Europe-only release of my Tux2 filesystem work.
There are _tons_ of software patents in the EU. It's just that their status have been rather undetermined, and filing for such a patent - while possible - has been a sort of a gamble, as nobody has known the future of their enforceability. Now, thanks to this directive, we do know.
any patent granted for such a method would not monopolise the algorithm itself or its use in contexts not foreseen in the patent
So far example, just write "used in an Operating System or Application program" and you have covered pretty much all contexts. What the heck, make a list of every possible specific context: database, spreadsheet, multimedia, engineering, whatever. Patent examiners have a history of being highly uncritical of obvious workarounds, letting a three page list of possible application context slip through would just be par for the course.
A computer-implemented invention shall not be regarded as making a technical contribution merely because it involves the use of a computer, network or other programmable apparatus. Accordingly, inventions involving computer programs which implement business, mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effects beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the computer, network or other programmable apparatus in which it is run shall not be patentable.
These are weasel words that can easily be circumvented by an appropriate definition of "technical effects". For example, this rather pointedly leaves "the user" out of the list of physical interactions. So any "technical effect" on the user, such as saving mouse clicks by using cookies when shopping online, for example, can be patented.
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to write that kind of JanglyCaps'd verbiage I'd just use Windows. If you are making a pretty and tasteful GUI, why spoil it by making the code ugly?
You haven't looked at many open source projects, have you? There are a wide variety of notation styles to be seen, of which this is not even an extreme example. Too bad about the hungarian variables, but oh well. Such things are only superficial.
When you join a project, you use whatever coding style the leaders have decreed and get on with it.
- maintaining "hot sites," or duplicates of key elements of the IT infrastructure, so if the main infrastructure is compromised, users can quickly switch to backup systems.
Sounds like a way to sell licenses. Ok, since we can't make our product stable, buy 2 copies and hope one works.
And since the user can quickly switch to the backup system it must be online, in other words chances are the worm will get there first.
I saw the same thing. It kind of takes some of the shock value out of the Slashdot story.
And you didn't read the note re the article being changed after posting to refer to port 135 instead of port 80. It kind of takes some of the credibility value out of the Slashdot poster.
its a poor craftsman who blames his tools
The poor craftsman always blames his tools.
The master craftsman blames his tools only when he is right.
S Korea may just be using this as a threat to get MS to negotiate on price and/or features. Until recently, govts (and large companies) haven't really had much of a credible alternative to Windows, so they haven't been able to use their incredible scale as purchasing and negotiating power. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS and S Korea come to a deal in six months time...
Oh I don't doubt that MS will discount heavily over the coming months, but if you have any knowledge of Korea at all, you know that there are two prime motivators: efficiency and freedom, especially the latter. Yes, Koreans are a freedom-loving people. Open source gives them the tools they need to be independent in software, and not only that, it gives them the tools to build a new software industry.
Just watch what comes out of korea in the next few years, prepare to be amazed.
Too bad - I'd love to hang up such an (otherwise ignored) invoice here in my office.
The real reason for wanting an invoice should be that you want to press charges for commercial fraud, or possibly join a class action.
So they are in violation. Who the fawk is actually going to DO anything other then sign statements and generally complain. WE NEED SOMEONE TO TAKE THEM TO COURT!
Last resort. The bottom line is: we love LinkSys and they love us. It's more like a domestic argument than a prize fight.
So now the perspective of someone who doesn't know the details of either case (Which probably makes up a large share of bosses who would have to sign off on any adoptions of GPL software) will look at GPL software, and see that using it gets you sued from the outside and the inside.
No, they will think "wow, Linux must be valuable".
What's the big deal anyway? The thing uses proprietary hardware, so in order to reproduce it, you'd also have to have the masks to make the chips anyways. So they stand to lose nothing by not publishing the source.
It's not just that, it's the price point. Linksys makes so many of these things and sells them at such a low price that as a manufacturer, even with all the specs in front of you it's not an attractive target. That's what I call a fine business model: compete on pure engineering and manufacturing efficiency.
You should be grateful that a company releases any specs for their device if it does not contain GPL based code.
You're fairly far off base. As far as I know, LinkSys hasn't released any low-level specs for these routers at all. What is at issue is purely the GPLed code they've used to shorten their development cycle. That would include any patches to the kernel source, and in some cases, module code as well, depending on how it is linked to the static kernel.
post a rant on slashdot. It's well known that the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, SCO, etc. read weblogs to find out what uninformed 12 year olds think of them, and change business practices accordingly.
You may think that's funny but the fact is, a lot of mainstream net media do troll through these articles, at least looking for a consensus on the general mood, and sometimes finding an interesting lead or two no doubt.
Try this: google "slashdot site:www.usatoday.com"
Admittedly, the qualify of the posts often leaves much to be desired in terms of factual content, however you will generally see challenges to posts that are blantantly wrong.
"HP's Graham Smith says: "Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered." But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material"
:) As Linux's network driver maintainer and author of a Serial ATA stack which goes through the Linux kernel SCSI layer... as well as being someone who reviewed ATA-over-ethernet ...
:-)
Sorry, Daniel
I can say that ethernet hardware and the Linux SCSI stack does not handle retranmits that are needed at the ethernet layer. HP's Graham Smith is precisely correct. As some other slashdotters pointed out, the HyperSCSI code includes logic to handle retransmits and failures -- as it must.
Um, actually, I was too quick to admit an error. Note, I talked about error checking, you talked about retransmission. Too much smoka-dopa today I guess
Have a nice day.
"HP's Graham Smith says: "Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered." But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material"
I can say that ethernet hardware and the Linux SCSI stack does not handle retranmits that are needed at the ethernet layer. HP's Graham Smith is precisely correct. As some other slashdotters pointed out, the HyperSCSI code includes logic to handle retransmits and failures -- as it must.
No, he's still wrong. He claimed that HyperSCSIS "has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered", whereas you yourself pointed out it's handled in the HyperSCSI layer. I erred slightly in placing the retransmit in the wrong place, good catch. Purely a thinko, since I was looking straight at the HyperSCSI docs when I wrote it.
HP's Graham Smith says:
"Without TCP/IP, it has no real error-recovery mechanism or guarantee that packets get delivered."
But that is wrong. There is error checking in the ethernet hardware and in the SCSI stack. It seems Smith needs to review the basic material, or should have at least read the introductory material. Perhaps the takeaway here is, managers should not be allowed to comment on technical material, or if they do, they should solicit advice from a practicing engineer first.
Smith also dumps on HyperSCSI's scalability, but as far as I can see, it scales exactly as well as any LAN, and for storage that's not bad at all. Besides, being 100% open source, implementing a repeater sitting on a routing box is entirely practical.
As far as Andre's comments go, the article should have disclosed that he peddles an iSCSI stack for a living. More power to him, I'm not criticizing his colorful comments or business scheme, just the journalist's failure to take note of this.
Now, my own opinion: I haven't tried HyperSCSI yet. I have it installed here and by rights I should have given it a thorough workout by now, but mea culpa. So little time, so much to do. Well I'll change that today.
From what I know so far: I like the idea of trimming away unnecessary layers. It's the kind of thing we do in Linux all the time. I like the fact that the whole stack is GPL. It doesn't bother me that disk drives themselves don't support the protocol and are unlikely to in the near future, because you have to put the disks in a box anyway, and that might as well be a Linux box presenting a HyperSCSI interface.
Personally, I think that HyperSCSI is going somewhere. So is iSCSI for that matter: the two protocols serve distinctly different target markets. iSCSI is where the money is because hardware vendors support it. HyperSCSI is where the joy of hacking is because it performs better and it's GPL. The thing is, they both present the same interface to the OS (SCSI) so they are interchangable. It's not an either/or situation at all.
You need to pay careful attention to any technique that increases performance without increasing cost.
I would not want MS destroyed, period. That would end up being a total utter disaster for the world.
You're on crack. It would be the best thing that ever happened to accelerate the progress of personal computer software, with spinoff benefits to commerce, security and quality of life.
Microsoft is now and always has been, a net loss for society.
Yes, this one in particular:
It's not flamebait people, it's actualy how I feel. Other nice /.'s have been attempting to help me solve the problem instead of modding me out of existence
It seems that any Slashdot article containing the words "Microsoft" or "Windows" triggers a script somewhere deep in the Redmond campus that calls out the volunteer MS astroturfer fire brigade. Outraged Slashdotters quickly respond, and in the end this mainly achieves the unintended effect of boosting Slashdot traffic.
You have to open the attachment.
No, you're wrong. This worm can use a two-year-old bug that lets the executable run whether or not you open the attachment
I do fully realize that I am running a risk at home, and with the latest round of viruses, I am tempted to get a virus checker going on the old home PCs, just to be on the safe side. Like most people I'm a firm believer in it can't happen to me.
;-)
You are probably already trojaned, and being used as a mail relay
Gee, since I've never been infected by a virus or worm, and I've been using Windows since forever
Amazing, you are the only one.
This is a massive success, due to a level of lobbying unprecedented at this stage of a technical European measure.
That is my tentative conclusion as well. I have to research the details a lot more, but from my perspective, but this could possibly result in a Europe-only release of my Tux2 filesystem work.
There are _tons_ of software patents in the EU. It's just that their status have been rather undetermined, and filing for such a patent - while possible - has been a sort of a gamble, as nobody has known the future of their enforceability. Now, thanks to this directive, we do know.
What do we know, are they enforceable or not?
any patent granted for such a method would not monopolise the algorithm itself or its use in contexts not foreseen in the patent
So far example, just write "used in an Operating System or Application program" and you have covered pretty much all contexts. What the heck, make a list of every possible specific context: database, spreadsheet, multimedia, engineering, whatever. Patent examiners have a history of being highly uncritical of obvious workarounds, letting a three page list of possible application context slip through would just be par for the course.
A computer-implemented invention shall not be regarded as making a technical contribution merely because it involves the use of a computer, network or other programmable apparatus. Accordingly, inventions involving computer programs which implement business, mathematical or other methods and do not produce any technical effects beyond the normal physical interactions between a program and the computer, network or other programmable apparatus in which it is run shall not be patentable.
These are weasel words that can easily be circumvented by an appropriate definition of "technical effects". For example, this rather pointedly leaves "the user" out of the list of physical interactions. So any "technical effect" on the user, such as saving mouse clicks by using cookies when shopping online, for example, can be patented.
It is essential to monitor the impact of the patentability of computer-implemented inventions on small and medium-sized undertakings.
That was there before as I recall, and it means bugger all. What promise does it make that you can quantify?