I've never ever used their Linux distro, but the one huge point in their favour is the large amount of work they have put into the WINE project, which gives them a large, fat plus in my book.
They recently merged their CVS trees with the wine developers as well, and credit them in all of their Linux ports, which is extremely cool...
Due to tight project schedules, the Corel WINE team has been working pretty much in isolation for the last few months. With the graphics release behind us, we're looking forward to working more closely with the WINE community. We're really excited about some of the recent WINE developments (like address space separation) and want to help WINE move towards a 1.0 release. We will soon be actively working on merging our WINE changes back to the WineHQ public WINE source tree. We also hope to contribute where we can towards the 1.0 WINE release. Again our thanks go to all of the WINE developers. The credits page for our applications list all of the WINE authors. Without WINE we would not have been able to port these applications to Linux in such a short period of time. It's also a testament to the maturity of WINE (and Linux) that these highly complex applications run with full functionality and good performance.
The FreeBSD ports tree is a one of the best package systems Ive ever seen... it has ports for every server under the sun, including qmail and postfix, as well as a lot of DJB's other tools like dnscache and so on. And if you're so inclined, exim/postfix as well:)
The OpenBSD dudes made a wise choice and picked the FreeBSD system as their base, and they have a rapidly growing collection as well. Although I'm not familiar with it, NetBSD seems to have something similar as well.
If only we could see this under Linux now, without all the RPM crap:( The number of times I've run into stupid cross-dependencies, and corrupt RPM dbs goes on and on...
Well, to be honest, its your fault for using BIND!
BIND is notoriously insecure, so you should always run it in a chrooted environment if you are going to use it.
Also, investigate alternative, and far superior servers for services you want to run.
Instead of BIND, look at Dan Bernstein's DNSCache package, which is lightweight, stable and uncrackable. In fact, he offers a monetary reward to the first person who can find a security hole in it.
Similarly, replace sendmail with either qmail, exim, or postfix and get a superior, more intuitive feature set, and better peace of mind security wise.
Also, look at a more secure OS than Linux, for example OpenBSD which has not had a remote security hole in its default installation for over two years now.
Two fairly minor things - it's written in C++, and the rest of our suite is in C, so integration is a bit of a pain, and also since ours is a 3D application, our set has more of an emphasis on graphics handles.
That, and the fact that it's kinda cool to give it a shot ourselves:-)
Hmm, although looking at the website, it looks remarkably good... thanks for the pointer, I hadnt really looked at it seriously before, but it looks very interesting.
I'm currently working on porting a large, formerly commercial 3D application suite to be cross-platform (and GPLing it in the process). When it was initially written, it was a Win32 only program, and had a very good, stable interface in that platform.
What we are now working on is a cross-platform library that will have an XML representation of an interface, and will bind to the native widget sets on whatever platform it is run on.
For example, under Linux/GNOME it will use GTK, and under Windows it will make the native Win32 calls. We feel this is almost always better than the normal method of porting a widget set across platforms, which projects such as Mozilla are doing. Advantages:
Very fast since the native widget sets are almost always highly optimised
High integrated since the users already have their widget sets customised to what they want
More stable if properly done, since you dont have to deal with debugging your own widget sets (assuming there is a decent native implementation of course)
More future proof if the native widget sets have a clean API, and if the OS is upgraded (ie windows 95->98) then you have a higher chance of your widgets surviving unscathed
The major con is that you have to deal with the lowest common denominator of common widgets, although an option we are investigating is simply implementing the extra widgets natively (eg a dll under win32), which isnt a lot of trouble.
We have set a release date of around the end of august of this to be released, but the plan is for the UI code to be a completely separate library, so if anyone is interested, drop me a mail and Ill put you in touch with the head developer dude (Dominic Ludlam) for that aspect of the project.
Why does Slashdot link directly to the main kernel.org server, and circumvent the absolutely massive set of mirrors that they have setup around the world to save bandwidth and time for everyone?
Destination unreachable can be used to confuse some routers... check on bugtraq archives for more info (dynamic routing?)
ICMP is generally a bad idea, as it is not necessary for core services to run, and can be used to sniff system settings out.. if you dont need it, why enable it?
Dont forget that OpenSSH is also bundled as part of the forthcoming OpenBSD 2.7, which is due to be released on the 15th June.
I just installed OpenBSD-current for the first time from anoncvs to test it out, as part of a migration from Linux to OpenBSD, and it utterly rocks so far! The huge difference is just the fact that it is secure out of the box, and comes with a wealth of audit scripts that scan the box every day and mail you with automated changelogs and security alerts. I can easily believe their claim that they have not had any remote exploits for over 2 years.
Big kudos to the OpenSSH and OpenBSD teams.. I always had the impression of OpenBSD as lacking in features and friendliness compared to the other *nices, but after using Linux as a stepping stone to learn my way around, I cant wait to really sink my teeth into OpenBSD 2.7!
PS: No affiliation to openbsd myself; I visited the webpage for the first time 3 days ago:D
The key point with transferring tapes or other analogue mediums is that they suffer from degradation when copied. So you COULD lend it to your friends, but after about five friends have passed it on the quality would have degraded so badly that it isn't worth it.
The music industry came close to facing the MP3 problem with the Minidisc format, since that is digital. They staved it off temporarily by slapping the "no minidisc to minidisc" copying rule on, which prevented easy transfer. That, and the fact that the Minidisc media itself it relatively expensive.
MP3s are unique in that they can be transferred ridiculously easily, and suffer no loss in quality when going through the transfer to different people. The music industry is quite justified in their fear of this new format I think.
MudOS is still alive and well:) Come check out Elephant MUD if you want...
and you're right, LPC roolz over java, although we're currently working on a project to write an LPC -> java bytecode compiler, so we can have an LPC Java server, which would be pretty cool.
No matter what license code comes under, as long as all of the source code is available (even if it's look but don't touch), problems like this will be prevented by simple code auditing and peer review.
And that's why I'd never trust a piece of Microsoft server software over Apache or Qmail for example. A lot of Microsoft software is relatively stable now (my win2k install hasnt needed rebooting in a month), but so closed and opaque that there's no way whatsoever to audit or confirm that a million backdoors aren't present. One has been found, how many others?!
Out of interest, how much of Mozilla's development was funded by Netscape? I know a large number of the core team works for Netscape... did many external programmers join the team afterwards, or did the center remain largly NS?
I'm sure they've already received enough user feedback to realize that most users are like yourself -- they'd rather sacrifice some nice features to have a faster, more stable browser.
Yeah... at the moment, the default browser is pretty bloated... I dont _want_ a mail client, a news reader, Instant Messenger, blah blah in my browser.
Of course, the ultimately cool thing about Mozilla is the component model which means that we can write our own lightweight browser just using Gecko and ignoring all the other crap; I wonder if platform specific ones will spring up after release; would be cool.
Until the article writer actually uses the skins option (which isn't available in PR1),
Skins support is available in PR1, but is a bit flaky. I got it to work with the Sullivan skin from Chromezone with the usual command line :
netscp6.exe -chrome chrome://sullivan/content/
Doesn't work perfectly (menu options are messed), but at least it gives a more pleasant view than the ridiculously ugly default Mozilla skin (doesn't Netscape have a single decent graphic designer in the entire company?)
Regarding the suck article, I agree to some extent about not having to use skins. In this case though, I think that performance has suffered as a result of implementing that support; XUL has quite a large runtime overhead. Afaik, NS6PR1 doesn't have a lot of debugging code in it, so we won't see any tremendous speed increases on final release. I'd trade the skins support for a small, fast, stable browser any day.
Personally, my team and I are currently working on a cross-platform XML representation that uses NATIVE widget sets with platform-specific code. My ideal crossplatform app is one which renders in the native window manager (win32, gtk, qt, whatever), and not a cross-ported effort. Just looking at a GTK-win32 app gives me the shivers; it just looks so out of place.
Hey, this site doesn't seem to have that much new stuff... the place with the cool FFIX interviews and previews for ages has been Final Fantasy Online which has some wicked Q&A's with the creators and dudes behind the FF series. Japanese slant to it, of course.
Oh, and they got walkthroughs, not that I needed them:-)
As far as I know, Cygnus is still free, and you can access the original web pages, and cvs trees as normal at the old homepage of http://sourceware.cygnus.com.
Cygnus used to charge previously for the product as well; if you want nice manuals and stuff then you pay, which makes perfect sense.
To quote directly from the Cygnus webpage itself:
How does Red Hat's acquisition of Cygnus affect this site? For now, very little. We thought about "conducting a process of re-engineering and re-branding with the aim of integrating our free software community outreach programs into our corporate objectives". But then we said "naah, let's just continue to have a great site to develop free software and work on making it even better".
In particular, we plan to be careful about changing the host name sourceware.cygnus.com or anything else which may require you to update your habits, CVS/Root files, etc. The name will have to change but before we go changing things around we'd kind of like to at least have a plausible guess about what we are going to change them to:-). We don't want you to have to switch over twice.
Not really, in my opinion... the Ground Data Systems for the MVACS module of the Polar Lander were intricately tied in with the telemetry of the lander itself, and needed to be attached to a testbed to be of any real use.
So, unless NASA makes a testbed available, or a pretty damn good simulation of one, there's not a great deal of use in open sourcing anything.
Also, I remember hearing once that there's no actual security on the probes, apart from the difficulty in transmitting all the way to Mars... so, do we really want all the protocols opened ?:)
Instead of all the manpower it would take to monitor the comments from people, it would be much more advantageous to hire one or two kick ass programmers to marshall and audit the code instead.
I recommend you scope out the WebReference site for a lot of information on XML.
In particular, the XML Expert, as he's known, has posted a number of interesting articles, and if you start from the bottom, you should be well aware of what the fuss is by the time you finish reading!
I find it hard to believe that you completely missed one of the core elements of JPL's Culture. Maybe they put you off in a trailer somewhere, where you were unable to interact with a sufficient cross-section of the people there to grok this.
Simply because we were all working offsite at UCLA, at the new building constructed especially for the task (sharing with a tokomak too, which was cool), and this was where ops was being run from.
We got pretty much as far away from the JPL atmosphere as possible; almost everyone that worked at UCLA commented on what an excellent location it was for a mission; right in the middle of LA, with food, hotels, etc nearby; much more fun for people than being stuck in Pasadena in the middle of the mountains. Good for team morale anyway.
I hate the inconsistency of this. Far better to give NASA a fixed budget of sufficient funds to tackle all of their projects and let you folks handle how its spent. This is supposed to be about science, not political maneuvering to gain sufficient funds to complete projects - and then getting the funds too late to be of use.
Welcome to Earth:/ Most academics I know spend about half their time running around trying to get funding for their projects.
It would seem to always be the case when there's no "clear" profit to be made... all NASA achieves in gain terms is some abstract "enhancement of human knowledge"... where's the profit?? Stupid, but true imho, similar to a university environment, same political bickering.
I still hold to my view that commercial space travel is the only way forward for serious space exploration. Slap a couple more Pizza Hut logos out there, and you'll have a lot more focus as serious commercial money hits the fan, and a lot more accountability takes place.
Of course, it wouldnt work for science missions, but it would be a nice complement to "solidify" what the science missions have already achieved.
I have never in the past, and would not expect to in the future, work with a nicer, more commited bunch of people than the MPL crew. Such a sad ending, that took a while to get to grips with...
The only minor upside was that we didnt actually have to work on 31/12/99, as we would have had to if the probe had landed:)
Now you have a rocket that passes the test. You believe that it will do it's job. It is here that I would disagree with the article - I cannot believe that anyone would, in effect, knowingly allow a defective rocket on the Mars PE., which is certainly what is seems to imply. I can see how culture and bureaucracy could conspire to allow it to happen unwittingly.
Great analysis, completely agree. Interactions between elements in NASA are more complex than average too; matrix management promotes a lot of dizzy focus and inability to spot who the hell is clearly responsible for what.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait for our release of OpenFX :-) More details soon ...
They recently merged their CVS trees with the wine developers as well, and credit them in all of their Linux ports, which is extremely cool...
The FreeBSD ports tree is a one of the best package systems Ive ever seen ... it has ports for every server under the sun, including qmail and postfix, as well as a lot of DJB's other tools like dnscache and so on. And if you're so inclined, exim/postfix as well :)
:( The number of times I've run into stupid cross-dependencies, and corrupt RPM dbs goes on and on ...
The OpenBSD dudes made a wise choice and picked the FreeBSD system as their base, and they have a rapidly growing collection as well. Although I'm not familiar with it, NetBSD seems to have something similar as well.
If only we could see this under Linux now, without all the RPM crap
Well, to be honest, its your fault for using BIND!
BIND is notoriously insecure, so you should always run it in a chrooted environment if you are going to use it.
Also, investigate alternative, and far superior servers for services you want to run.
Instead of BIND, look at Dan Bernstein's DNSCache package, which is lightweight, stable and uncrackable. In fact, he offers a monetary reward to the first person who can find a security hole in it.
Similarly, replace sendmail with either qmail, exim, or postfix and get a superior, more intuitive feature set, and better peace of mind security wise.
Also, look at a more secure OS than Linux, for example OpenBSD which has not had a remote security hole in its default installation for over two years now.
Two fairly minor things - it's written in C++, and the rest of our suite is in C, so integration is a bit of a pain, and also since ours is a 3D application, our set has more of an emphasis on graphics handles.
:-)
... thanks for the pointer, I hadnt really looked at it seriously before, but it looks very interesting.
That, and the fact that it's kinda cool to give it a shot ourselves
Hmm, although looking at the website, it looks remarkably good
What we are now working on is a cross-platform library that will have an XML representation of an interface, and will bind to the native widget sets on whatever platform it is run on.
For example, under Linux/GNOME it will use GTK, and under Windows it will make the native Win32 calls. We feel this is almost always better than the normal method of porting a widget set across platforms, which projects such as Mozilla are doing. Advantages:
- Very fast since the native widget sets are almost always highly optimised
- High integrated since the users already have their widget sets customised to what they want
- More stable if properly done, since you dont have to deal with debugging your own widget sets (assuming there is a decent native implementation of course)
- More future proof if the native widget sets have a clean API, and if the OS is upgraded (ie windows 95->98) then you have a higher chance of your widgets surviving unscathed
The major con is that you have to deal with the lowest common denominator of common widgets, although an option we are investigating is simply implementing the extra widgets natively (eg a dll under win32), which isnt a lot of trouble.We have set a release date of around the end of august of this to be released, but the plan is for the UI code to be a completely separate library, so if anyone is interested, drop me a mail and Ill put you in touch with the head developer dude (Dominic Ludlam) for that aspect of the project.
Ill second that ... one week to go for 2.7 :)
Why does Slashdot link directly to the main kernel.org server, and circumvent the absolutely massive set of mirrors that they have setup around the world to save bandwidth and time for everyone?
...
...
Go to http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/ and get the new kernel from there
Hrm, a multiplexor like the CPAN one would be quite cool for kernel.org as well
Destination unreachable can be used to confuse some routers ... check on bugtraq archives for more info (dynamic routing?)
.. if you dont need it, why enable it?
ICMP is generally a bad idea, as it is not necessary for core services to run, and can be used to sniff system settings out
--
Anil Madhavapeddy, http://recoil.org
Dont forget that OpenSSH is also bundled as part of the forthcoming OpenBSD 2.7, which is due to be released on the 15th June.
.. I always had the impression of OpenBSD as lacking in features and friendliness compared to the other *nices, but after using Linux as a stepping stone to learn my way around, I cant wait to really sink my teeth into OpenBSD 2.7!
:D
I just installed OpenBSD-current for the first time from anoncvs to test it out, as part of a migration from Linux to OpenBSD, and it utterly rocks so far! The huge difference is just the fact that it is secure out of the box, and comes with a wealth of audit scripts that scan the box every day and mail you with automated changelogs and security alerts. I can easily believe their claim that they have not had any remote exploits for over 2 years.
Big kudos to the OpenSSH and OpenBSD teams
PS: No affiliation to openbsd myself; I visited the webpage for the first time 3 days ago
--
Anil Madhavapeddy, anil@recoil.org
That doesn't really work out.
The key point with transferring tapes or other analogue mediums is that they suffer from degradation when copied. So you COULD lend it to your friends, but after about five friends have passed it on the quality would have degraded so badly that it isn't worth it.
The music industry came close to facing the MP3 problem with the Minidisc format, since that is digital. They staved it off temporarily by slapping the "no minidisc to minidisc" copying rule on, which prevented easy transfer. That, and the fact that the Minidisc media itself it relatively expensive.
MP3s are unique in that they can be transferred ridiculously easily, and suffer no loss in quality when going through the transfer to different people. The music industry is quite justified in their fear of this new format I think.
--
Anil Madhavapeddy
MudOS is still alive and well :) Come check out Elephant MUD if you want ...
and you're right, LPC roolz over java, although we're currently working on a project to write an LPC -> java bytecode compiler, so we can have an LPC Java server, which would be pretty cool.
www.elephant.org
or
telnet elephant.org
--
No matter what license code comes under, as long as all of the source code is available (even if it's look but don't touch), problems like this will be prevented by simple code auditing and peer review.
And that's why I'd never trust a piece of Microsoft server software over Apache or Qmail for example. A lot of Microsoft software is relatively stable now (my win2k install hasnt needed rebooting in a month), but so closed and opaque that there's no way whatsoever to audit or confirm that a million backdoors aren't present. One has been found, how many others?!
Haha! Amusing, and rings scarily true :/
... did many external programmers join the team afterwards, or did the center remain largly NS?
Out of interest, how much of Mozilla's development was funded by Netscape? I know a large number of the core team works for Netscape
I'm sure they've already received enough user feedback to realize that most users are like yourself -- they'd rather sacrifice some nice features to have a faster, more stable browser.
... at the moment, the default browser is pretty bloated ... I dont _want_ a mail client, a news reader, Instant Messenger, blah blah in my browser.
Yeah
Of course, the ultimately cool thing about Mozilla is the component model which means that we can write our own lightweight browser just using Gecko and ignoring all the other crap; I wonder if platform specific ones will spring up after release; would be cool.
Until the article writer actually uses the skins option (which isn't available in PR1),
Skins support is available in PR1, but is a bit flaky. I got it to work with the Sullivan skin from Chromezone with the usual command line :
netscp6.exe -chrome chrome://sullivan/content/
Doesn't work perfectly (menu options are messed), but at least it gives a more pleasant view than the ridiculously ugly default Mozilla skin (doesn't Netscape have a single decent graphic designer in the entire company?)
Regarding the suck article, I agree to some extent about not having to use skins. In this case though, I think that performance has suffered as a result of implementing that support; XUL has quite a large runtime overhead. Afaik, NS6PR1 doesn't have a lot of debugging code in it, so we won't see any tremendous speed increases on final release. I'd trade the skins support for a small, fast, stable browser any day.
Personally, my team and I are currently working on a cross-platform XML representation that uses NATIVE widget sets with platform-specific code. My ideal crossplatform app is one which renders in the native window manager (win32, gtk, qt, whatever), and not a cross-ported effort. Just looking at a GTK-win32 app gives me the shivers; it just looks so out of place.
Hey, this site doesn't seem to have that much new stuff ... the place with the cool FFIX interviews and previews for ages has been Final Fantasy Online which has some wicked Q&A's with the creators and dudes behind the FF series. Japanese slant to it, of course.
:-)
Oh, and they got walkthroughs, not that I needed them
As far as I know, Cygnus is still free, and you can access the original web pages, and cvs trees as normal at the old homepage of http://sourceware.cygnus.com.
:-). We don't want you to have to switch over twice.
Cygnus used to charge previously for the product as well; if you want nice manuals and stuff then you pay, which makes perfect sense.
To quote directly from the Cygnus webpage itself:
How does Red Hat's acquisition of Cygnus affect this site?
For now, very little. We thought about "conducting a process of re-engineering and re-branding with the aim of integrating our free software community outreach programs into our corporate objectives". But then we said "naah, let's just continue to have a great site to develop free software and work on making it even better".
In particular, we plan to be careful about changing the host name sourceware.cygnus.com or anything else which may require you to update your habits, CVS/Root files, etc. The name will have to change but before we go changing things around we'd kind of like to at least have a plausible guess about what we are going to change them to
Incidentally, you may also want to check out AT&T's UWIN, at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwi n/ as well; very cool, does much the same thing.
HTH.
Anil
Not really, in my opinion ... the Ground Data Systems for the MVACS module of the Polar Lander were intricately tied in with the telemetry of the lander itself, and needed to be attached to a testbed to be of any real use.
... so, do we really want all the protocols opened ? :)
So, unless NASA makes a testbed available, or a pretty damn good simulation of one, there's not a great deal of use in open sourcing anything.
Also, I remember hearing once that there's no actual security on the probes, apart from the difficulty in transmitting all the way to Mars
Instead of all the manpower it would take to monitor the comments from people, it would be much more advantageous to hire one or two kick ass programmers to marshall and audit the code instead.
I recommend you scope out the WebReference site for a lot of information on XML.
In particular, the XML Expert, as he's known, has posted a number of interesting articles, and if you start from the bottom, you should be well aware of what the fuss is by the time you finish reading!
I find it hard to believe that you completely missed one of the core elements of JPL's Culture. Maybe they put you off in a trailer somewhere, where you were unable to interact with a sufficient cross-section of the people there to grok this.
Simply because we were all working offsite at UCLA, at the new building constructed especially for the task (sharing with a tokomak too, which was cool), and this was where ops was being run from.
We got pretty much as far away from the JPL atmosphere as possible; almost everyone that worked at UCLA commented on what an excellent location it was for a mission; right in the middle of LA, with food, hotels, etc nearby; much more fun for people than being stuck in Pasadena in the middle of the mountains. Good for team morale anyway.
I hate the inconsistency of this. Far better to give NASA a fixed budget of sufficient funds to tackle all of their projects and let you folks handle how its spent. This is supposed to be about science, not political maneuvering to gain sufficient funds to complete projects - and then getting the funds too late to be of use.
:/ Most academics I know spend about half their time running around trying to get funding for their projects.
... all NASA achieves in gain terms is some abstract "enhancement of human knowledge" ... where's the profit?? Stupid, but true imho, similar to a university environment, same political bickering.
Welcome to Earth
It would seem to always be the case when there's no "clear" profit to be made
I still hold to my view that commercial space travel is the only way forward for serious space exploration. Slap a couple more Pizza Hut logos out there, and you'll have a lot more focus as serious commercial money hits the fan, and a lot more accountability takes place.
Of course, it wouldnt work for science missions, but it would be a nice complement to "solidify" what the science missions have already achieved.
I must admit we had some issues with Lockheed Martin.
...
Could Boeing do a better job? Hope so
Anyway, we all know who screwed up the Climate Orbiter units conversion, and it wasn't JPL *coughlockheedcough*
I have never in the past, and would not expect to in the future, work with a nicer, more commited bunch of people than the MPL crew. Such a sad ending, that took a while to get to grips with...
:)
The only minor upside was that we didnt actually have to work on 31/12/99, as we would have had to if the probe had landed
Your father was Rich Cook btw?
Now you have a rocket that passes the test. You believe that it will do it's job. It is here that I would disagree with the article - I cannot believe that anyone would, in effect, knowingly allow a defective rocket on the Mars PE., which is certainly what is seems to imply. I can see how culture and bureaucracy could conspire to allow it to happen unwittingly.
Great analysis, completely agree. Interactions between elements in NASA are more complex than average too; matrix management promotes a lot of dizzy focus and inability to spot who the hell is clearly responsible for what.