Several people have already taken on some aspects of this issue. The EFF indicated interest. Hopefully they will have the guts to follow up that interest with action. 2600 magazine are also mirroring all the DVD material and waiting for first amendmant fireworks.
But then the USA is the country that grew copyright laws 20 years because nice Disney asked and one that allowed home video taping by a single vote in the supreme court... thats how close it came to being the only place you couldnt do home taping....
If you catch a criminal and you look who he emailed around the same time you learn stuff, much like phones. Why did the husband mail his wifes murderers hotmail account a day before etc..
Thats the crime angle. The big one is the tax angle. Uncle Sam's nightmare scenario goes like this.
IBM, Microsoft, GE and other big vendors all use people like Visa. Visa start doing encrypted transactions. Companies start neglecting to mention this kind of fund transfer in their tax returns.
Next stage. A company like Visa creates a private cryptographically managed currency of their own. Everyone opts to use it and hard crypto, the US tax man only sees transactions into US currency space.
Shortly after the USA bankrupted by massive tax revenue basically suffers a total collapse of government power.
Welfare collapses leading to riots. The army cant be paid, healthcare goes totally cash upfront, the education system fails.
Whether a massive loss of Government is good or bad is a complex political question to most people but if you are a politician its easily answered
They don't care what you send, they care when you send and who to. That is why they want to be able to trace encrypted data from its entry point onto the network and out across it. That is why right now they have PC class boxes tapping big dialup ISPs all over the EU and Im sure the US.
In the EU its probably even an offence for the ISP to admit to it. Internet offices and giant web email sites are the dream target of these people, after all if you use hotmail like sites you come to them and they can analyse your email and other email in bulk really easily
See http://www.thinkgeek.com/geekgod for the anti USPTO T shirts. Also take a look at and join the LPF (www.lpf.ai.mit.edu). If enough people join it starts making a difference
Simple answer 2.2: new feature, not going in 2.2ac: Using Wensong Zhangs code because it is rock solid and production hardened. It needs no proprietary tools. Several vendors already ship this code. I also know people building big web setups using it. [www.linuxvirtualserver.org]
2.3.x is up to Linus, actually possibly to Rusty as all of this code area has totally changed to use netfilter.
Im not actually sure what they add. I'd need to dig over their patches. Wensong Zhang however has had this stuff working in Linux for a long time, and indeed for 2.2.x -ac I've gone that path and would do for an official 2.2 except that its a new feature so not eligible for 2.2
I know Wensongs stuff works. I know people doing production work wih it so for 2.2.x thats probably the final and absolute path. For 2.3.x it depends what Linus thinks is better.
This really isnt a problem. Think about it carefully. SGI wrote 4Gig mem patches. They worked but were clunky. SGI ship them, SGI customers are happy. Siemens + SuSE write non clunky 4Gig patches. Everyone will use those and Linus endorsed them. SGI will use them too Im sure.
It hasnt broken anything. In fact one thing Linux gets right other vendors don't is we say "no" to crap code. If you dont do that you codebase turns to crap. Linux does it right, *BSD does it right.
Someone taking my name in vain ? Thats certainly not my quotes
Solaris scales to 64CPUs (partly because of their kickass memory bus on the ultrasparc). We beat them flat low end but believe me, for a lot of things on 8+ cpus it has us hammered. On 32+ cpus Id be willing to bet it wins aginst 2.4 once we have it finshed
I wouldnt buy a Xeon for most things either. A quad Xeon costs the same as a rack of 2U celeron boxes and ethernet switch. 20 celerons versus 4 xeons, 20 celerons with a total of about 8 times the memory bandwidth of the xeon box
I can't speak for the US motor industry (if there is any of it left) but in Europe they've been some of the big names involved in getting open standards for automation in place - fieldbus, map/top (ok they went OSI but we can forgive them a minor transgression - and sadly most of the political side of the EU still thinks that IETF is american only)
It is more important to remind people who are considering using Open Source why they should do so. Companies can weigh up their "intellectual property" against customer demand.
Personally I don't think we will see a totally open source world. It is possible to have valuable secrets worth hiding and selling less product to hide, but I think its time most people realised that web browsers, the OS , libraries , compilers, GUI interfaces and word processors are no longer something where there are clever megasecrets that justify the current behaviour of most companies.
November = Code Freeze. I don't think the ZDnet guy quite understood the different phases of getting to 2.4. I guess I should have drawn him a little map or something
The full guess I gave ZD is - code freeze November, 2.4pre December, 2.4 march or so. I know Linus wants to get things moving rapidly on that. But only Linus (and I doubt even Linus) has a totally clear timetable 8)
As to the other stuff thats mostly pretty accurate. Currently I run building #3 which is mostly contracting for Red Hat. With Red Hat europe in place this no longer makes sense. Lest anyone is worried about that I can assure them that part of the paperwork we are putting in place is something both Red Hat as well as I wanted to be sure we had there - which guarantees appropriate degress of autonomy.
Why do the same people who think plastic surgery is strange and weird go around sawing all the hair off their face. Is the clean shaven myth the greatest piece of marketing brainwashing in western european history? They had to do something when sword making went out I guess.
Some women btw like beards and anyone who thinks that something so trivial is the key to a successful relationship probably has big problems
Various intel leakages have implied there were or as it appears now should have been 133MHz FSB parts. Notably the documentation that escaped on the 0x2A MSR.
I have to admit in the perl case I really don't see the problem. It isn't like perl is a well defined API, there is no formal definition and every time I upgrade perl -something- breaks because of a perl change.
My palmtop is a 486. I care it runs stuff well. It doesn't run E too well, which I don't care about and imlib is awful on it, although better since I bitched at Raster.
The 20 seconds delay on a 486SX caused by imlib poor coding is a 4 second delay on a pentium 166 which for 10 gnome apps starting is a lot of CPU time.
People who write unjustifiably unoptimised code are not good programmers. People who write inconsistent guis are not the greatest gui designers.
There is a lot of E code that is justifiably CPU intensive. It isnt rasters fault shape extension in X11 is heavy nor that transparent window moves while they look beautiful are CPU heavy. Imlib on the other hand I don't like codewise. I use it cos it works. (That being qualification #1 for good software 8)).
Another way to think of it for the more religious warfare inclined - imlib is why KDE is a lot faster than gnome on an 8bit display lower end machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have already taken on some aspects of this issue. The EFF indicated interest. Hopefully they will have the guts to follow up that interest with action. 2600 magazine are also mirroring all the DVD material and waiting for first amendmant fireworks.
But then the USA is the country that grew copyright laws 20 years because nice Disney asked and one that allowed home video taping by a single vote in the supreme court... thats how close it came to being the only place you couldnt do home taping....
Alan
I'm staying put - right here.
Umm I've been working for Red Hat for almost 2
years now 8)
If you catch a criminal and you look who he
emailed around the same time you learn stuff,
much like phones. Why did the husband mail his
wifes murderers hotmail account a day before etc..
Thats the crime angle. The big one is the tax
angle. Uncle Sam's nightmare scenario goes like
this.
IBM, Microsoft, GE and other big vendors all use
people like Visa. Visa start doing encrypted
transactions. Companies start neglecting to
mention this kind of fund transfer in their tax
returns.
Next stage. A company like Visa creates a private
cryptographically managed currency of their own.
Everyone opts to use it and hard crypto, the
US tax man only sees transactions into US
currency space.
Shortly after the USA bankrupted by massive tax
revenue basically suffers a total collapse of
government power.
Welfare collapses leading to riots. The army cant
be paid, healthcare goes totally cash upfront, the
education system fails.
Whether a massive loss of Government is good or
bad is a complex political question to most people
but if you are a politician its easily answered
Alan
They don't care what you send, they care when you
send and who to. That is why they want to be able
to trace encrypted data from its entry point onto
the network and out across it. That is why right
now they have PC class boxes tapping big dialup
ISPs all over the EU and Im sure the US.
In the EU its probably even an offence for the
ISP to admit to it. Internet offices and giant web
email sites are the dream target of these people,
after all if you use hotmail like sites you come
to them and they can analyse your email and other
email in bulk really easily
Alan
See http://www.thinkgeek.com/geekgod for the
anti USPTO T shirts. Also take a look at and join
the LPF (www.lpf.ai.mit.edu). If enough people
join it starts making a difference
Alan
Simple answer
2.2: new feature, not going in
2.2ac: Using Wensong Zhangs code because it is
rock solid and production hardened. It needs no
proprietary tools. Several vendors already ship this code. I also know people building big web setups using it.
[www.linuxvirtualserver.org]
2.3.x is up to Linus, actually possibly to Rusty
as all of this code area has totally changed to
use netfilter.
Alan
Im not actually sure what they add. I'd need to dig over their patches. Wensong Zhang however has had this stuff working in Linux for a long time, and indeed for 2.2.x -ac I've gone that path and would do for an official 2.2 except that its a new feature so not eligible for 2.2
I know Wensongs stuff works. I know people doing production work wih it so for 2.2.x thats probably the final and absolute path. For 2.3.x it depends what Linus thinks is better.
This really isnt a problem. Think about it carefully. SGI wrote 4Gig mem patches. They worked but were clunky. SGI ship them, SGI customers are happy. Siemens + SuSE write non clunky 4Gig patches. Everyone will use those and Linus endorsed them. SGI will use them too Im sure.
It hasnt broken anything. In fact one thing Linux gets right other vendors don't is we say "no" to crap code. If you dont do that you codebase turns to crap. Linux does it right, *BSD does it right.
Dear me. Believing a slashdot poster. Want to buy
a bridge, or some dehydrated water ?
Solaris Ultrasparc SMP is very good.
Thats a real quote from me.
Someone taking my name in vain ? Thats certainly
not my quotes
Solaris scales to 64CPUs (partly because of their
kickass memory bus on the ultrasparc). We beat them flat low end but believe me, for a lot of
things on 8+ cpus it has us hammered. On 32+ cpus
Id be willing to bet it wins aginst 2.4 once we
have it finshed
I wouldnt buy a Xeon for most things either. A
quad Xeon costs the same as a rack of 2U celeron
boxes and ethernet switch. 20 celerons versus 4
xeons, 20 celerons with a total of about 8 times
the memory bandwidth of the xeon box
I can't speak for the US motor industry (if there
is any of it left) but in Europe they've been some of the big names involved in getting open standards for automation in place - fieldbus, map/top (ok they went OSI but we can forgive them a minor transgression - and sadly most of the
political side of the EU still thinks that IETF
is american only)
Totally correct. Thats why they go to Red Hat,
to Linuxcare and want contracts. But they can go
to multiple people for that support.
A large closed source vendor can do what it likes,
so if you think about it they are offering 'good will' support - for a fee.
Notice : pushed by a vendor. They want to lock you
into their higher ram prices, their higher scsi
disk prices.
Who is getting annoyed - you the customer. Its up
to you (or more likely your boss) to spot the problem.
Alan
It is more important to remind people who are considering using Open Source why they should do so. Companies can weigh up their "intellectual property" against customer demand.
Personally I don't think we will see a totally open source world. It is possible to have valuable secrets worth hiding and selling less product to hide, but I think its time most people realised that web browsers, the OS , libraries , compilers, GUI interfaces and word processors are no longer something where there are clever megasecrets that justify the current behaviour of most companies.
Alan
I've put a copy (not as nicely formatted tho) on
http://www.linux.org.uk/FEATURE/risk.html to help
spread the load a bit.
Alan
The full guess I gave ZD is - code freeze November, 2.4pre December, 2.4 march or so. I know Linus wants to get things moving rapidly on that. But only Linus (and I doubt even Linus) has a totally clear timetable 8)
As to the other stuff thats mostly pretty accurate. Currently I run building #3 which is mostly contracting for Red Hat. With Red Hat europe in place this no longer makes sense. Lest anyone is worried about that I can assure them that part of the paperwork we are putting in place is something both Red Hat as well as I wanted to be sure we had there - which guarantees appropriate degress of autonomy.
Hello to everyone I met both at the show.
Alan
I think you should ask the press where they got
that story from, not assume it was ever closed..
Some women btw like beards and anyone who thinks that something so trivial is the key to a successful relationship probably has big problems
PS: yes someone sent me my user name (duh 8))
Alan
If you penalise trolls, please automatically inflict the penalty on all replies to trolls
And if they dropped it completely no doubt you
would have whined even harder ?
Various intel leakages have implied there were or
as it appears now should have been 133MHz FSB
parts. Notably the documentation that escaped on
the 0x2A MSR.
I wonder what the real story is
Alan
I have to admit in the perl case I really don't
see the problem. It isn't like perl is a well
defined API, there is no formal definition and
every time I upgrade perl -something- breaks because of a perl change.
Alan
My palmtop is a 486. I care it runs stuff well. It doesn't run E too well, which I don't care about and imlib is awful on it, although better since I bitched at Raster.
The 20 seconds delay on a 486SX caused by imlib poor coding is a 4 second delay on a pentium 166 which for 10 gnome apps starting is a lot of CPU time.
People who write unjustifiably unoptimised code are not good programmers. People who write inconsistent guis are not the greatest gui designers.
There is a lot of E code that is justifiably CPU intensive. It isnt rasters fault shape extension in X11 is heavy nor that transparent window moves while they look beautiful are CPU heavy. Imlib on the other hand I don't like codewise. I use it cos it works. (That being qualification #1 for good software 8)).
Another way to think of it for the more religious warfare inclined - imlib is why KDE is a lot faster than gnome on an 8bit display lower end machine.
Does it really matter? Red Hat own the parts of the kernel I work on in Red Hat time. It's GPL'd so its kind of irrelevant.
Alan