If the numbers given in the article are right, then RedHat does have a much stronger position in the Linux market share than any other Linux vendor. I don't see evidence of Microsoft practices however. They haven't embraced open standards, modified them and concealed the specifications while at the same time protecting the new specification as intellectual property. They haven't released something for free to crush competition only later to consider charging money for it. They haven't released software which only works on there distribution. What they have done is come up with a relatively easy to use Linux distribution and done so earlier in the game than a lot of the competition. They've done a better job than most on making use of the latest Linux technologies. It's the first point which got them market share and I would wonder how much of that market share has actually payed for RedHat and how much has downloaded it for free (or gone to cheapbytes and picked up an unofficial package) It's a bit of a rolling stone really. Since more people use RedHat chances are that more developers are developing on it and so its more likely that it makes use of the technologies present in a RedHat distribution. This may be unfortunate in terms of squeezing smaller competition out of the running but it seems like its unavoidable. For source distributions the user and developer community is still free to modify the code and make a more distribution agnostic version. It's not RedHat's fault that there are some distribution dependancies, they were in the right place at the right time with the right product. The market share isn't so high that it can't change either. If somebody makes a better deal for the consumer the market share can be moved (ease of installation, reliability, scalability, ease of use, feature set, price, pool of resources including people who can help fix you when you're broke)
If RedHat started developing its own closed source office suite and bundling it with its distribution then it would be infringing on Microsofts practices. I don't see that happening though. The various distributions happen not to be exactly plug and play compatible for software applications. Common sense says that most of it will work best with whoever has the largest market share.
The RedHat training is another point that I don't agree with. RedHat has a distribution. It only makes sense both from a business stand point and a feasibility stand point. RedHat employs a lot more people that know RedHat than know Caldera etc. Caldera has the option of providing training as well, and despite their vocal objection to RedHats training I'd be pretty suprised if they didn't also do distribution specific training.
It would be good if all the distributions had all the same libraries and all the various configuration files in the same place, but then there would only be one distribution with maybe some smaller companies selling CD's of the source and binary trees.
Apple seems willing to address these objections
on
RMS on APSL
·
· Score: 1
The notification clause only becomes a problem if Apple disappears. Right now there's a form that you fill in and submit notice of your notification. Some process at Apple then distributes the notification. If Apple disappears I'm not sure what happens with the copy right. If it still holds you'd have to notify everybody yourself.
I'm not sure about the URL requirement. Is it a one time deal and then Apple provides mirroring or is it a perpetual thing, where you are responsible to provide your modified sources?
I don't think IBM is right, but I do understand how they came up with the statement. Managers understand surveys and rankings, its what they are trained to follow in the forms of trends and polls etc. What is needed to fight this FUD are concrete numbers from sources that management would find reliable.
For instance Dataquest among others routinely publishes rankings of market penetration of various computer manufacturers products in a variety of different markets, or of operating systems into various broad application areas. From this a manager can read these published results and point at a source which states that the penatration of Windows NT into the million+ hit per day web server market is 99 and 44/100 percent or whatever the results say. These results are made from a poll of approximately 10000 companies.
Here's where Linux runs into problems. Linux in general probably isn't even mentioned in the survey questionaires handed out to the various I/S managers who report these things to Dataquest. The sites most likely to be surveyed are also least likely to be polled by the Gartner Group, the people who run Dataquest. Slashdot for instance, while providing a valuable service to a rather large segment of the internet community doesn't register as a blip on their radar. It's just a few guys running a server as a hobby or if they're feeling kind a small business.
Even if linux results were tallied there is a good chance that it would be further sub divided by distribution. So for instance, Red Hat would be a seperate operating system, Debian would be, Slackware would be etc. This might be fixable if these companies referred to themselves as value added distributors of Linux loudly enough that Linux is the product and RedHat, Debian et al become distributors.
To help Linux be visible in polls it would be useful if a non profit company or co-operative were created which the various small businesses who rely on Linux could operate under. All of the information on servers, database size, web hits etc. would then be collated by this pseudo-company and delivered to the various fact finding organizations. Maybe small fees to be member (and to keep the company legally on the up and up) from which the entity can become an official client of one or more of the services.
This seems like fake linux support. Offer it, but at the same time price it unreasonably. Some people will go for it but by and large they won't be troubled by actually supporting it. I'm assuming Dell sells reasonable standard systems (pick a processor, pick some memory, pick a hard drive, pick X the only video card they sell that linux supports and pick a credit card) so I'd also assume that they could have a master hard drive image that they just master/slave copy.
Actually, thats something I've been wondering about as well. Is Windows actually installed when you buy a 'puter from a large vendor like Dell, or is it just a copy of some pristine image? If it is then even if Windows comes pre-installed and you do access it when you turn it on to install linux you still haven't violated the terms of the MS license agreement (you didn't install it, the copy on the machine isn't even the copy covered by the license)
Crypto export laws etc. don't apply to the U.S. military. The Russian computers would probably not be any more secure, regardless of any changes in computer laws no more than >90% of the machines in the US would. In any event I'm pretty sure that Russia doesn't give a rats ass about U.S. encryption laws.
The encryption laws should be changed but not for these reasons.
The only changes which would effect the security of individual computers would be somewhat akin to a propoganda campaign like during WWII. Just change the slogan from "loose lips sink ships" to "loose ports aid terrorist cohorts" or something.
I'm suprised that any foreign attacks on US military computers don't originate from US ISPs. If you're going to go to the trouble of cracking into a Russian machine, why not just extend it and crack into a US machine after that. The more jurisdictions you cross the better. Beauracracies don't like to cooperate with each other.
For that reason I think the whole conclusion is a sham. Most of the attacks from Russia are actually from Russian citizens and they for the most part aren't organized groups, or aren't organized with any particular faction. The cold war is more or less dead and gone to the public, they need a reason to bring it back (buzzword enabled no less) to squeeze more quarters from every dollar of the US citizens.
A university could make a PicoCore derivative or maybe even 32 bit SPARC implementation. It depends on the size of the program. Along the way those busily working graduate students would innovate and contribute to the universities I.P., which in turn contributes to the universities prestige and bottom line (assuming they have a non-brain dead industrial partnership/seeding system)
The larger designs provide valuable insight into the state of the art in various techniques and technologies at the time of the chips design.
This is valuable stuff. The fact that Joe Blow can't make use of it is not the point anymore than the fact that Joe Blow can't actually do anything useful with the source code provided by OpenSource software projects. Most people type download binary code. Some people download source code and type make. Relatively few download the source code and make non-trivial modifications. It takes more than the availibility of a compiler and source code to do so.
OK, its not a video game, but its been annoying me for a few days. In high school in about 1982 I took computer science. The machines we used were Icon's or Ikon's or something. They were a networked system possibly unix based. I _think_ they ran on a 68000 processor. Has anybody heard of them, have any info on them or know of a web page on them?
Look carefully (and subjectively, how rarely that happens) at the performance specifications. The IBM Pacific Blue did 1.2 TeraOps sustained peak running the actual ASCI codes (albeit in their own labs, SGI beat those numbers and did it on site). The SBS HAL-4rW1 did 12.8 TeraOPs doing a sequence of 4 bit additions, or 3.8 TeraOPs on a 16 bit adder.
This means that the memory and I/O subsystems aren't even exercised. Nobody uses a 4 bit addition as a performance spec, not even Intel.
The actual product description is unbelievable as well. The largest Xilinx FPGA's might be capable of being configured to fully emulate a 16 bit microprocessor. I haven't worked with them in a long time but when I worked with the 4000 series I figured I could shoehorn a rudimentary 8 bit processor into the largest devices. (which would mean that a rudimentary 8 bit microprocessor was produced for over one thousand dollars incidently. It's a bit cheaper to buy a PIC from MicroChip)
They said that they reached these performace levels with 280 of the largest Xilinx FPGA's. My take on what they've done is cram as many 4 bit adders onto a single FPGA and replicate it 280 times. They then had them all execute in parallel and pretended that this made up a supercomputer.
Keep in mind that performance on an FPGA isn't stunning. We're talking on the order of 10 nanoseconds to do the 4 bit addition.
So... if they've even designed and built this thing (which I doubt) the specifications are a complete fabrication.
I haven't checked yet, but browse through Xilinx's web site. If they don't mention this wonder of reconfigurable computing then it doesn't exist.
It is high, high enough that I've scrapped plans on buying it and ordered a copy of LinuxPPC instead. The price is less per seat if you're running a large network since it allows an unlimited number of MacOS boxes to boot up from it. I don't know if any legacy machines can be made to net boot or if only Imacs and Blue&White G3's can do it. Either way that isn't the case for me so I can't justify buying it. I only hope that the CD I get from LinuxPPC is worth more than the coaster they sent me last time.
First of all an MP3 relies on the use of lossy compression. What this means is that information is encoded and statistically ranked, anything that is viewed as 'statistically insignificant' during the ripping process is discarded. So when you play it back you hear something that approaches 'almost, but not quite the original'. This isn't necessarily fatal, digital media like CD players do the same thing by quantizing the amplitude or loudness of a signal. In practice I find that MP3's are fine for listening to through cheap headphones at work, or if I had a car player, would be fine in that environment. I don't like the sound quality that comes through my home system however. Everything sounds like a ghetto blaster or annoying bass-o-matic car stereo system.
Anyway, a digital watermark doesn't have to be audible. It could be a 1 bit difference in the amplitude of a signal at certain instances, which would be a 1/65536th difference in volume.
This is pretty similar to steganography, the technique of imposing a piece of information in another piece of information. Like hiding a secret message in an audio stream, or an image etc. Steganography wouldn't work if it was obvious that 'something was amiss' about the audio stream or image.
Any artifacts of the watermarks in DIVX is only proof that the engineers behind that particular implementation are morons and should be retrained as 'custodial engineers'
Read the page some time. The owner of the machine didn't care if people logged in. He purposely left root wide open so that people could explore. He however didn't expect the slashdot effect. Apparently somebody worried about the machine shut it down so that others wouldn't cause harm via root (the somebody was a person who had noticed root was wide open, not the authors) Since the hard drive exists in a flash ROM restore was very simple.
This is pretty cool though, it may not be useful as an industrial strength web server but its still a really impressive hack of available technology. There are a lot of applications where it could be perfectly suited though. Hook up a bank of CCD cameras to one, write some simple code to serve the frames up as a web page and voila, instant security system.
Sony has the rights to defend there intellectual property rights, but Connectix should have the right to come up with an emulation scheme so long as they used a black box approach. This is the same suit that IBM tried when cloning took off against Phoenix technologies (I think it was Phoenix, its been a long long time), Phoenix won since they could prove that they didn't actually reverse engineer it nor use any proprietry IBM information. The basically used two groups of engineers, one with physical access to do operations on a computer with an IBM BIOS, and another that could only communicate with those engineers.
This is obviously a bit different in that a working piece of hardware has been emulated on another piece of hardware but the same principles should apply.
1) Some CPU core (MIPS?) was emulated in hardware, this has been done in the past and I haven't seen any suits brought about because of this. This wouldn't be Sony's fight anyway, it would be up to the owner of the CPU core.
2) A variety of proprietary ASICs were emulated for things like 3D rendering, sound, memory access etc. Sony may have a case here, especially if they can prove that reverse engineering was applied. There may well also be patented algorithms involved.
3) Software was emulated or reproduced as well. This is a touchy issue since if they can prove that any of the code was directly copied from the ROMS then Connectix is very much in trouble. I don't know how much program code is contained in PlayStation hardware v.s. the CD containing the game code, I don't have one of the beasts.
4) Connectix did endeavour to adhere to all the Sony PlayStation CD restrictions, or so it would appear. For instance the machine will only play North American games and doesn't (as far as I know) support reading in CD image files. This is probably good for Connectix, since they can maintain that they haven't harmed Sony's financial position (all or almost all gaming consoles are sold for less than the hardware and licensing costs (things like RAMBUS cost money to use, Sony PlayStation uses this)) since consumers still have to buy or rent PlayStation CD's.
Overall its a bit different than the problems facing MAME. The legal issues there are completely involved with the current license holders for the various games exposure to potential financial harm or watering down of copyright status and so on.
I hope that Connectix makes out OK with this, even if they have to pay some small licensing fee to Sony. A loss here could put a lot of things in jeapordy such as any emulation technologies (Virtual PC, WINE etc.) It's really hard to say since due to the length of time it takes to become a judge very few are technically literate. Also since most come from a fairly similar background (very few people from poor or even lower middle class families ever become a judge) justice isn't always quite as blind as its supposed to be.
I'm an ex-system admin, but I didn't have any training at all at the time. It was just one of the hats I picked up in my research group. It started off with me hacking root in order to fix the machines when a rather important deadline was due and the machines were down for the count. I payed attention to the universities local guru and learned a lot from him by osmosis.
Slashdot Mirror
If the numbers given in the article are right, then RedHat does have a much stronger position in the Linux market share than any other Linux vendor. I don't see evidence of Microsoft practices however. They haven't embraced open standards, modified them and concealed the specifications while at the same time protecting the new specification as intellectual property. They haven't released something for free to crush competition only later to consider charging money for it. They haven't released software which only works on there distribution. What they have done is come up with a relatively easy to use Linux distribution and done so earlier in the game than a lot of the competition. They've done a better job than most on making use of the latest Linux technologies. It's the first point which got them market share and I would wonder how much of that market share has actually payed for RedHat and how much has downloaded it for free (or gone to cheapbytes and picked up an unofficial package) It's a bit of a rolling stone really. Since more people use RedHat chances are that more developers are developing on it and so its more likely that it makes use of the technologies present in a RedHat distribution. This may be unfortunate in terms of squeezing smaller competition out of the running but it seems like its unavoidable. For source distributions the user and developer community is still free to modify the code and make a more distribution agnostic version. It's not RedHat's fault that there are some distribution dependancies, they were in the right place at the right time with the right product. The market share isn't so high that it can't change either. If somebody makes a better deal for the consumer the market share can be moved (ease of installation, reliability, scalability, ease of use, feature set, price, pool of resources including people who can help fix you when you're broke)
If RedHat started developing its own closed source office suite and bundling it with its distribution then it would be infringing on Microsofts practices. I don't see that happening though. The various distributions happen not to be exactly plug and play compatible for software applications. Common sense says that most of it will work best with whoever has the largest market share.
The RedHat training is another point that I don't agree with. RedHat has a distribution. It only makes sense both from a business stand point and a feasibility stand point. RedHat employs a lot more people that know RedHat than know Caldera etc. Caldera has the option of providing training as well, and despite their vocal objection to RedHats training I'd be pretty suprised if they didn't also do distribution specific training.
It would be good if all the distributions had all the same libraries and all the various configuration files in the same place, but then there would only be one distribution with maybe some smaller companies selling CD's of the source and binary trees.
The notification clause only becomes a problem if Apple disappears. Right now there's a form that you fill in and submit notice of your notification. Some process at Apple then distributes the notification. If Apple disappears I'm not sure what happens with the copy right. If it still holds you'd have to notify everybody yourself.
I'm not sure about the URL requirement. Is it a one time deal and then Apple provides mirroring or is it a perpetual thing, where you are responsible to provide your modified sources?
I don't think IBM is right, but I do understand how they came up with the statement. Managers understand surveys and rankings, its what they are trained to follow in the forms of trends and polls etc. What is needed to fight this FUD are concrete numbers from sources that management would find reliable.
For instance Dataquest among others routinely publishes rankings of market penetration of various computer manufacturers products in a variety of different markets, or of operating systems into various broad application areas. From this a manager can read these published results and point at a source which states that the penatration of Windows NT into the million+ hit per day web server market is 99 and 44/100 percent or whatever the results say. These results are made from a poll of approximately 10000 companies.
Here's where Linux runs into problems. Linux in general probably isn't even mentioned in the survey questionaires handed out to the various I/S managers who report these things to Dataquest. The sites most likely to be surveyed are also least likely to be polled by the Gartner Group, the people who run Dataquest. Slashdot for instance, while providing a valuable service to a rather large segment of the internet community doesn't register as a blip on their radar. It's just a few guys running a server as a hobby or if they're feeling kind a small business.
Even if linux results were tallied there is a good chance that it would be further sub divided by distribution. So for instance, Red Hat would be a seperate operating system, Debian would be, Slackware would be etc. This might be fixable if these companies referred to themselves as value added distributors of Linux loudly enough that Linux is the product and RedHat, Debian et al become distributors.
To help Linux be visible in polls it would be useful if a non profit company or co-operative were created which the various small businesses who rely on Linux could operate under. All of the information on servers, database size, web hits etc. would then be collated by this pseudo-company and delivered to the various fact finding organizations. Maybe small fees to be member (and to keep the company legally on the up and up) from which the entity can become an official client of one or more of the services.
This seems like fake linux support. Offer it, but at the same time price it unreasonably. Some people will go for it but by and large they won't be troubled by actually supporting it. I'm assuming Dell sells reasonable standard systems (pick a processor, pick some memory, pick a hard drive, pick X the only video card they sell that linux supports and pick a credit card) so I'd also assume that they could have a master hard drive image that they just master/slave copy.
Actually, thats something I've been wondering about as well. Is Windows actually installed when you buy a 'puter from a large vendor like Dell, or is it just a copy of some pristine image? If it is then even if Windows comes pre-installed and you do access it when you turn it on to install linux you still haven't violated the terms of the MS license agreement (you didn't install it, the copy on the machine isn't even the copy covered by the license)
Crypto export laws etc. don't apply to the U.S. military. The Russian computers would probably not be any more secure, regardless of any changes in computer laws no more than >90% of the machines in the US would. In any event I'm pretty sure that Russia doesn't give a rats ass about U.S. encryption laws.
The encryption laws should be changed but not for these reasons.
The only changes which would effect the security of individual computers would be somewhat akin to a propoganda campaign like during WWII. Just change the slogan from "loose lips sink ships" to "loose ports aid terrorist cohorts" or something.
I'm suprised that any foreign attacks on US military computers don't originate from US ISPs. If you're going to go to the trouble of cracking into a Russian machine, why not just extend it and crack into a US machine after that. The more jurisdictions you cross the better. Beauracracies don't like to cooperate with each other.
For that reason I think the whole conclusion is a sham. Most of the attacks from Russia are actually from Russian citizens and they for the most part aren't organized groups, or aren't organized with any particular faction. The cold war is more or less dead and gone to the public, they need a reason to bring it back (buzzword enabled no less) to squeeze more quarters from every dollar of the US citizens.
A university could make a PicoCore derivative or maybe even 32 bit SPARC implementation. It depends on the size of the program. Along the way those busily working graduate students would innovate and contribute to the universities I.P., which in turn contributes to the universities prestige and bottom line (assuming they have a non-brain dead industrial partnership/seeding system)
The larger designs provide valuable insight into the state of the art in various techniques and technologies at the time of the chips design.
This is valuable stuff. The fact that Joe Blow can't make use of it is not the point anymore than the fact that Joe Blow can't actually do anything useful with the source code provided by OpenSource software projects. Most people type download binary code. Some people download source code and type make. Relatively few download the source code and make non-trivial modifications. It takes more than the availibility of a compiler and source code to do so.
OK, its not a video game, but its been annoying me for a few days. In high school in about 1982 I took computer science. The machines we used were Icon's or Ikon's or something. They were a networked system possibly unix based. I _think_ they ran on a 68000 processor. Has anybody heard of them, have any info on them or know of a web page on them?
Look carefully (and subjectively, how rarely that happens) at the performance specifications. The IBM Pacific Blue did 1.2 TeraOps sustained peak running the actual ASCI codes (albeit in their own labs, SGI beat those numbers and did it on site). The SBS HAL-4rW1 did 12.8 TeraOPs doing a sequence of 4 bit additions, or 3.8 TeraOPs on a 16 bit adder.
This means that the memory and I/O subsystems aren't even exercised. Nobody uses a 4 bit addition as a performance spec, not even Intel.
The actual product description is unbelievable as well. The largest Xilinx FPGA's might be capable of being configured to fully emulate a 16 bit microprocessor. I haven't worked with them in a long time but when I worked with the 4000 series I figured I could shoehorn a rudimentary 8 bit processor into the largest devices. (which would mean that a rudimentary 8 bit microprocessor was produced for over one thousand dollars incidently. It's a bit cheaper to buy a PIC from MicroChip)
They said that they reached these performace levels with 280 of the largest Xilinx FPGA's. My take on what they've done is cram as many 4 bit adders onto a single FPGA and replicate it 280 times. They then had them all execute in parallel and pretended that this made up a supercomputer.
Keep in mind that performance on an FPGA isn't stunning. We're talking on the order of 10 nanoseconds to do the 4 bit addition.
So... if they've even designed and built this thing (which I doubt) the specifications are a complete fabrication.
I haven't checked yet, but browse through Xilinx's web site. If they don't mention this wonder of reconfigurable computing then it doesn't exist.
It is high, high enough that I've scrapped plans on buying it and ordered a copy of LinuxPPC instead. The price is less per seat if you're running a large network since it allows an unlimited number of MacOS boxes to boot up from it. I don't know if any legacy machines can be made to net boot or if only Imacs and Blue&White G3's can do it. Either way that isn't the case for me so I can't justify buying it. I only hope that the CD I get from LinuxPPC is worth more than the coaster they sent me last time.
First of all an MP3 relies on the use of lossy compression. What this means is that information is encoded and statistically ranked, anything that is viewed as 'statistically insignificant' during the ripping process is discarded. So when you play it back you hear something that approaches 'almost, but not quite the original'. This isn't necessarily fatal, digital media like CD players do the same thing by quantizing the amplitude or loudness of a signal. In practice I find that MP3's are fine for listening to through cheap headphones at work, or if I had a car player, would be fine in that environment. I don't like the sound quality that comes through my home system however. Everything sounds like a ghetto blaster or annoying bass-o-matic car stereo system.
Anyway, a digital watermark doesn't have to be audible. It could be a 1 bit difference in the amplitude of a signal at certain instances, which would be a 1/65536th difference in volume.
This is pretty similar to steganography, the technique of imposing a piece of information in another piece of information. Like hiding a secret message in an audio stream, or an image etc. Steganography wouldn't work if it was obvious that 'something was amiss' about the audio stream or image.
Any artifacts of the watermarks in DIVX is only proof that the engineers behind that particular implementation are morons and should be retrained as 'custodial engineers'
Read the page some time. The owner of the machine didn't care if people logged in. He purposely left root wide open so that people could explore. He however didn't expect the slashdot effect. Apparently somebody worried about the machine shut it down so that others wouldn't cause harm via root (the somebody was a person who had noticed root was wide open, not the authors) Since the hard drive exists in a flash ROM restore was very simple.
This is pretty cool though, it may not be useful as an industrial strength web server but its still a really impressive hack of available technology. There are a lot of applications where it could be perfectly suited though. Hook up a bank of CCD cameras to one, write some simple code to serve the frames up as a web page and voila, instant security system.
Sony has the rights to defend there intellectual property rights, but Connectix should have the right to come up with an emulation scheme so long as they used a black box approach. This is the same suit that IBM tried when cloning took off against Phoenix technologies (I think it was Phoenix, its been a long long time), Phoenix won since they could prove that they didn't actually reverse engineer it nor use any proprietry IBM information. The basically used two groups of engineers, one with physical access to do operations on a computer with an IBM BIOS, and another that could only communicate with those engineers.
This is obviously a bit different in that a working piece of hardware has been emulated on another piece of hardware but the same principles should apply.
1) Some CPU core (MIPS?) was emulated in hardware, this has been done in the past and I haven't seen any suits brought about because of this. This wouldn't be Sony's fight anyway, it would be up to the owner of the CPU core.
2) A variety of proprietary ASICs were emulated for things like 3D rendering, sound, memory access etc. Sony may have a case here, especially if they can prove that reverse engineering was applied. There may well also be patented algorithms involved.
3) Software was emulated or reproduced as well. This is a touchy issue since if they can prove that any of the code was directly copied from the ROMS then Connectix is very much in trouble. I don't know how much program code is contained in PlayStation hardware v.s. the CD containing the game code, I don't have one of the beasts.
4) Connectix did endeavour to adhere to all the Sony PlayStation CD restrictions, or so it would appear. For instance the machine will only play North American games and doesn't (as far as I know) support reading in CD image files. This is probably good for Connectix, since they can maintain that they haven't harmed Sony's financial position (all or almost all gaming consoles are sold for less than the hardware and licensing costs (things like RAMBUS cost money to use, Sony PlayStation uses this)) since consumers still have to buy or rent PlayStation CD's.
Overall its a bit different than the problems facing MAME. The legal issues there are completely involved with the current license holders for the various games exposure to potential financial harm or watering down of copyright status and so on.
I hope that Connectix makes out OK with this, even if they have to pay some small licensing fee to Sony. A loss here could put a lot of things in jeapordy such as any emulation technologies (Virtual PC, WINE etc.) It's really hard to say since due to the length of time it takes to become a judge very few are technically literate. Also since most come from a fairly similar background (very few people from poor or even lower middle class families ever become a judge) justice isn't always quite as blind as its supposed to be.
I'm an ex-system admin, but I didn't have any training at all at the time. It was just one of the hats I picked up in my research group. It started off with me hacking root in order to fix the machines when a rather important deadline was due and the machines were down for the count. I payed attention to the universities local guru and learned a lot from him by osmosis.
They said that work on SheepSaver/LinuxPPC would
start in January, so I'd guess there's not too
much progress at the moment.