The Ethernet LAN came originally from Xerox who in turn based this on the University of Hawaii's work on Aloha. The full commercial realisation of the Ethernet only came about after a joint project between Xerox, Intel and Digital Equipment. Token Ring, I believe was IBM and came out of something called the Cambridge Ring.
All of this came somewhat after packet switching, which had grown out of a better way to efficiently to use the bandwidth of fixed links as well as offerring redundancy.
In Uzbekistan, they have a securities depository system running under Informix. The system holds accounts for approx 750,000 shareholders and about a hundred market participants and 50 concurrent users.
The system started off using HP and HP-UX for the servers, but after rising maintenance costs, they moved from HP-UX to Linux (Mandrake distribution, I believe) and switched to using standard PCs, thus saving a fortune in maintainance costs.
The client software uses Win95 (unfortunately) but these are only used to access the server. The apps there ere written in Delphi. Use of Linux though gave the project considerable savings over other solutions, unfortunately Informix was not cheap.
The work of switching the server from HP-UX to Linux was trival (it was also Informix there). I would have liked to get away from Informix too because of the license costs, but regrettably that would have been too much work at the time.
This may not sound like a killer app, but this is where the share ownership is recorded for a county of around 24 million people, so it is definitely an important system.
I would have thought that the main problem was the dialer. Surprisingly they are propagating outside the Pr0n world and I had a regular web-site give me a pop-up promising me faster access to (non-Pr0n) movie trailers and attempting to d/l a little application to help.
What about Mono? What about the way the language has been submitted to ECMA together with the VM specs and the API?
It may come from Microsoft, but much of the team behind it are Borland and just because MS is behind it isn't a kiss of death. Personally, I stopped getting religious about languages afer Algol was shoved down my throat at Uni. They all have their pluses and minuses. Java is under the thumb of Sun whereas MS want to get C# adopted by a standard's body. For me, that is a big plus.
A free C# compiler is in development now. It can't bootstrap itself yet, but it is getting there, however it is being built on Linux and should be out soonish. MS don't support the effort, of course but if they make a language public, it will get adopted. Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of Mono doesn't seem to worry about MS.
Someone should have a word in HP's ear. Their new networked printers use Samba and embedded Linux (so Bruce Perens was saying at Linuxworld).
The important thing is that MS don't even make printers but HP do and make them in a conveniant form that goes straight on the wire. To talk as an IP printer is easy, but what about being a domain recognised printing service for MS Win2K?
The end result is that you have a product that depends upon Samba, and I'm sure there are many others (think dedicated fileservers for MS networks as against NFS).
Samba is important and if the settlement doesn't work in a way that really allows inetroperability then the industry is taking a major backward step (in the long run, probably even hurting MS users more).
Maybe a development fork would be too much at the moment. How about embedding functionality into even releases and bug-fixes into odd.
This has worked well for manufacturers and could certainly help the kernel's meander towards maturity here. In particular it would mean that we always use the odd-numbered release where we want stability.
A shuttle launch costs in the region of $100mil, this is far too expensive. However, the Russians can launch for $10mil which means that the entire three man flight costs less than the shuttle does per person.
Swift was a brilliant satirist, but he needs a little context to understand his jokes (which, no doubt where hillarious for those who lived in the 18th Century).
I hate to say it, but you are probably right, the books will last as long as the cult does (but not a minute longer). Perhaps people will start to become more skeptical and it will be more difficult for such cults to survive - we can but hope!!!!!!!
1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems,...
IANAL, but this seems to be explicitly protecting MS against circumvention. If I want to talk to a PDC/BDC, I still have to go through the right song-and-dance act so having the protocol shouldn't help me. SAMBA should be able to get the necessary information. OTOH, SAMBA's business plan (Open Source) sucks as far as MSFT is concerned so without very good lawyers to argue each disclosure, it will be very difficult to prove anything.
The way things are working at the moment, AC can be picked up as he arrives at any US airport by the FBI if he chose to talk about the holes in Linux.
Many companies revert to a "Mumble, Mumble" approach about the details of security holes and they try to quietly fix them. With Linux, we can all get to contribute to the kernel so we all need to know the dirt about problems and why they occurred.
This isn't just politics, this is very practical, do we want AC to join Dimitry, waiting to find out whether or not he will be prosecuted? Do we want Linux conferences in the US?
RH were pushing a journalling file system, because they needed one urgently for their high-end solutions to be competitive. After that, it was just down to the fight as to which was lowest risk to deploy, again RH look at the support costs.
You can look at ext3 and regard as a hack on ext2, which means a lot less new code to check. XFS and JFS were were tested, but in other people's kernels. Reiser was already there but there were some open issues (which I know ill be resolved, but that again is a lot of code), so I respect AC's decision to use ext3 and RH's support for it.
My issue is not so much with AC's patches but with RH's choice of kernel, even then they had to move versions inside a week. In the end, it is non-trivial to take a new stock kernel and to patch it to a level where it is compatible with the 2.4.9-7 that they currently ship. That is, it isn't currently either a pure AC kernel or one from the main-tree.
Try the latest RH 7.2 kernel, it is 2.9-7 or thereabouts with a lot of extra stuff in and much from ac. It is certainly an interesting mixture, but with ext3, it is going to be very interesting how to keep up with later kernels (I was running vanilla 2.4.12 before on top of RH 7.1).
The most popular application by far in Western Europe where GSM has really taken off is SMS.
The users are mostly kids with limited phone budgets who want to maximize their telephone use. SMS is ridiculously cheap, it uses essentially one frame to transfer a message. It is incredibly profitable for the telephone company, and unlike a telephone call, you can send and receive SMS messages anywhere.
So in my understanding, you are saying that the board must use the die temperature signal to save the chip, whereas the P4 has this integrated on chip. It takes the die temp and then skips clocks while it is too hot. As the chip cools, clocks are allowed through. The end result is a nice slowdown of performance, but actually no crash!
If this is a feature that needs MB support, it should be explitly advertised as such and then we may see fully XP supporting boards.
A mod to software in itself belongs to whoever developed the mod. Modifications occur all the time and IP is granted for it and it can be distributed.
The problem is that you have to have the original to modify. This guy not only distributed the original+modification, which is dodgy under conventional copyright law, but he also distributed the tools for patching, which is dodgy under the DMCA.
In fact the second approch of distributing patches plus patching tools would still be allowed in the EU. This is where the DMCA sucks big time!!!
Benny Hill does better on export than Monty P. It is almost cartoon humour, easy to translate and does not require much intelligence to watch.
If you don't understand the humour, maybe you don't get it. A lot of jokes require cultural context to understand. The Brits get a lot of US material news/soaps etc thrust onto them so it is easier for us to understand US references.
When I get software from one company, I can be fairly confident that it will work together. When I buy OSS software, the developers may follow standards to a varying level.
This makes it easy to hack things together with VBScript which would be very difficult to do in another scripting language with open software.
However, MS independance of open standards costs. If you don't update everything at the same time, it is very unlikely that anything will interoperate well. However businesses do love integration and interoperability.
The gotcha is when you have to work with something that really needs open standards, for example if you have a mixed Unix and MS Windows shop then you will find that the MS stuff will work quite happily with itself, but not with anything else. Star Office couldn't give a monkey's do-dah whether the file was created usingt the Windows version or the Linux version.
Although the author of the above comment doesn't spell it out, he is making the very reasonable point that MS follow their own standards rather than adhere to open standards, by preference.
What this means that it is difficult to be part MS, part OSS, particularly away from the developer and in the office. Most bits of MS Office integrate well, they can be scripted and they feed into an enterprise messaging and schedule repository.
Hey, with OSS, we really miss the music on hold and the waiting for the brainless idiot who works in first-line tech support.
To be fair, by the time you get escalated to third-level support, I have dealt with some excellent people, but this takes time.
The OSS mailing-list seems to be better and the response time seems to be equivalent to having a support contract with a heavy and reaching the level of somone who actually knows something.
BTW, exactly what do you do to your computer that could detach the heatsink? Most heatsinks (unless you buy quality) can be a pain in the butt to detach even when you want to detach them.
In a word, moving house. Usually a heatsink doesn't shift if the clips are on properly, but sometimes they look like they are, but they aren't. The better motherboards carry mounting holes, but in any case my worry is more about the larger heatsinks these things use (heavier).
I am very encouraged though by your report that fan death will not cause rapid death of processor.
This lets traders value financial products faster so they can decide whether to act or not on a price.
OTOH, if the traders bothered to get their option pricing models written in a decent computer language rather than VBA, then yes, maybe they could run on a 256MHz P2.
Unfortunately, the banks are firing a lot of their IT staff because, frankly, throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper than writing the stuff properly.
A couple of the 1800's would be real nice here on a Tyan Thunder board, however, doesn't AMD have a record of potential heat death vulnerability? I believe that article was even mentioned here, but I can't dig out the link.
Tom's Hardware notes that the AMDs can cook really fast and beyond the ability of the motherboard sensor to flag. I guess these have on-die sensors but these were noted as being fairly ropey as well.
Intel's P4 seemed to do quite well out of the test
as the clock slows automatically as the die temperature increases (in effect the processor ignores the clocks until the temperature goes reasonable). This means that it will even run without a heatsink (but very slowly).
I just get very nervous about having high-end silicon that is vulnerable to a SPOF. It a heatsink detaches or the processor fan fails - blam. If the chassis fan fails, at least there is some chance of a shutdown, but those processor heatsinks make me uncomfortable. Yes, I know I can buy quality, but MTBF is just that, a fan can still fail early.
So I wait for AMD to get a bit more serious about thermal protection and stick with using cheaper processors as thermal fuses.
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All of this came somewhat after packet switching, which had grown out of a better way to efficiently to use the bandwidth of fixed links as well as offerring redundancy.
The system started off using HP and HP-UX for the servers, but after rising maintenance costs, they moved from HP-UX to Linux (Mandrake distribution, I believe) and switched to using standard PCs, thus saving a fortune in maintainance costs.
The client software uses Win95 (unfortunately) but these are only used to access the server. The apps there ere written in Delphi. Use of Linux though gave the project considerable savings over other solutions, unfortunately Informix was not cheap.
The work of switching the server from HP-UX to Linux was trival (it was also Informix there). I would have liked to get away from Informix too because of the license costs, but regrettably that would have been too much work at the time.
This may not sound like a killer app, but this is where the share ownership is recorded for a county of around 24 million people, so it is definitely an important system.
The application was developed in St. Petersburg, Russia by the St. Petersburg Currency Exchange and funded by a loan from the World Bank. My own company managed the project.
This is definitely fraud too.
This is quite important because some of our subscribers have no web access or sit behind a firewall (Hello Goldman-Sachs) that blocks access to Yahoo.
It may come from Microsoft, but much of the team behind it are Borland and just because MS is behind it isn't a kiss of death. Personally, I stopped getting religious about languages afer Algol was shoved down my throat at Uni. They all have their pluses and minuses. Java is under the thumb of Sun whereas MS want to get C# adopted by a standard's body. For me, that is a big plus.
A free C# compiler is in development now. It can't bootstrap itself yet, but it is getting there, however it is being built on Linux and should be out soonish. MS don't support the effort, of course but if they make a language public, it will get adopted. Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of Mono doesn't seem to worry about MS.
The important thing is that MS don't even make printers but HP do and make them in a conveniant form that goes straight on the wire. To talk as an IP printer is easy, but what about being a domain recognised printing service for MS Win2K?
The end result is that you have a product that depends upon Samba, and I'm sure there are many others (think dedicated fileservers for MS networks as against NFS).
Samba is important and if the settlement doesn't work in a way that really allows inetroperability then the industry is taking a major backward step (in the long run, probably even hurting MS users more).
This has worked well for manufacturers and could certainly help the kernel's meander towards maturity here. In particular it would mean that we always use the odd-numbered release where we want stability.
A shuttle launch costs in the region of $100mil, this is far too expensive. However, the Russians can launch for $10mil which means that the entire three man flight costs less than the shuttle does per person.
Swift was a brilliant satirist, but he needs a little context to understand his jokes (which, no doubt where hillarious for those who lived in the 18th Century).
I hate to say it, but you are probably right, the books will last as long as the cult does (but not a minute longer). Perhaps people will start to become more skeptical and it will be more difficult for such cults to survive - we can but hope!!!!!!!
1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, ...
IANAL, but this seems to be explicitly protecting MS against circumvention. If I want to talk to a PDC/BDC, I still have to go through the right song-and-dance act so having the protocol shouldn't help me. SAMBA should be able to get the necessary information. OTOH, SAMBA's business plan (Open Source) sucks as far as MSFT is concerned so without very good lawyers to argue each disclosure, it will be very difficult to prove anything.
Microsoft, the best law that money can buy!
Many companies revert to a "Mumble, Mumble" approach about the details of security holes and they try to quietly fix them. With Linux, we can all get to contribute to the kernel so we all need to know the dirt about problems and why they occurred.
This isn't just politics, this is very practical, do we want AC to join Dimitry, waiting to find out whether or not he will be prosecuted? Do we want Linux conferences in the US?
You can look at ext3 and regard as a hack on ext2, which means a lot less new code to check. XFS and JFS were were tested, but in other people's kernels. Reiser was already there but there were some open issues (which I know ill be resolved, but that again is a lot of code), so I respect AC's decision to use ext3 and RH's support for it.
My issue is not so much with AC's patches but with RH's choice of kernel, even then they had to move versions inside a week. In the end, it is non-trivial to take a new stock kernel and to patch it to a level where it is compatible with the 2.4.9-7 that they currently ship. That is, it isn't currently either a pure AC kernel or one from the main-tree.
Try the latest RH 7.2 kernel, it is 2.9-7 or thereabouts with a lot of extra stuff in and much from ac. It is certainly an interesting mixture, but with ext3, it is going to be very interesting how to keep up with later kernels (I was running vanilla 2.4.12 before on top of RH 7.1).
The users are mostly kids with limited phone budgets who want to maximize their telephone use. SMS is ridiculously cheap, it uses essentially one frame to transfer a message. It is incredibly profitable for the telephone company, and unlike a telephone call, you can send and receive SMS messages anywhere.
If this is a feature that needs MB support, it should be explitly advertised as such and then we may see fully XP supporting boards.
The problem is that you have to have the original to modify. This guy not only distributed the original+modification, which is dodgy under conventional copyright law, but he also distributed the tools for patching, which is dodgy under the DMCA.
In fact the second approch of distributing patches plus patching tools would still be allowed in the EU. This is where the DMCA sucks big time!!!
If you don't understand the humour, maybe you don't get it. A lot of jokes require cultural context to understand. The Brits get a lot of US material news/soaps etc thrust onto them so it is easier for us to understand US references.
This makes it easy to hack things together with VBScript which would be very difficult to do in another scripting language with open software.
However, MS independance of open standards costs. If you don't update everything at the same time, it is very unlikely that anything will interoperate well. However businesses do love integration and interoperability.
The gotcha is when you have to work with something that really needs open standards, for example if you have a mixed Unix and MS Windows shop then you will find that the MS stuff will work quite happily with itself, but not with anything else. Star Office couldn't give a monkey's do-dah whether the file was created usingt the Windows version or the Linux version.
What this means that it is difficult to be part MS, part OSS, particularly away from the developer and in the office. Most bits of MS Office integrate well, they can be scripted and they feed into an enterprise messaging and schedule repository.
To be fair, by the time you get escalated to third-level support, I have dealt with some excellent people, but this takes time.
The OSS mailing-list seems to be better and the response time seems to be equivalent to having a support contract with a heavy and reaching the level of somone who actually knows something.
In a word, moving house. Usually a heatsink doesn't shift if the clips are on properly, but sometimes they look like they are, but they aren't. The better motherboards carry mounting holes, but in any case my worry is more about the larger heatsinks these things use (heavier).
I am very encouraged though by your report that fan death will not cause rapid death of processor.
OTOH, if the traders bothered to get their option pricing models written in a decent computer language rather than VBA, then yes, maybe they could run on a 256MHz P2.
Unfortunately, the banks are firing a lot of their IT staff because, frankly, throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper than writing the stuff properly.
Don't you need something like this to work out what shower curtains do?
Tom's Hardware notes that the AMDs can cook really fast and beyond the ability of the motherboard sensor to flag. I guess these have on-die sensors but these were noted as being fairly ropey as well.
Intel's P4 seemed to do quite well out of the test as the clock slows automatically as the die temperature increases (in effect the processor ignores the clocks until the temperature goes reasonable). This means that it will even run without a heatsink (but very slowly).
I just get very nervous about having high-end silicon that is vulnerable to a SPOF. It a heatsink detaches or the processor fan fails - blam. If the chassis fan fails, at least there is some chance of a shutdown, but those processor heatsinks make me uncomfortable. Yes, I know I can buy quality, but MTBF is just that, a fan can still fail early.
So I wait for AMD to get a bit more serious about thermal protection and stick with using cheaper processors as thermal fuses.