AFAIK Stephen Tweedie (Red Hat) has fixed the VM/VFS to deal with 64-bit files (even on 32-bit platforms). He now is at Linux Kongress, maybe we will hear more about this once he's back. So you do not have to wait for XFS to get 64-bit files. On a related note, Stephen Tweedie has also released his journalled-ext2fs (called ext3fs), the patch can be downloaded from here. Linux kernel development has really accelerated in the last couple of months...
The reason why the DOJ doesnt just prove past conduct is simple - the Shermann Act is about protecting _future_ competition, so the plaintiff has to show that substantial harm is done to the marketplace _as we speak_, otherwise the court will not grant any effective remedies. There are no US laws that protect companies against _past_ (Shermann-type, federal) antitrust violations, unfortunately. To be frank, if US (federal) antitrust laws were just a little bit weaker, they would be nonexistent. No wonder it has only been tried 3 times in 70 years previously, and actually executed only once.
The full text of the DOJ filing can be seen here, the Microsoft filing can be seen here. At first glance the DOJ filing is a well-constructed set of arguments based on the evidence presented during the trial, the Microsoft one is full of anti-government rhetoric and outright contradictions. YMMV though.
The advantages for bigger shops to switch to Linux is simply too huge to be ignored. Even if they have promotional agreements with Microsoft which buys them license discounts up to 60%, NT is still way too expensive - both the license and maintainance. The artificial Microsoft application barrier has now been destroyed by Linux in the server and NOS market, and now it's time for Linux to wash NT out of the landscape.
If the army ever wants to do things like execute CGI's at an acceptable speed they sooner or later have to implement some secure environment to maintain their webspace. Moving towards more obscure (no flames please, they could have used eg. Apple's OS X) architectures is simply not a solution. These guys are supposed to protect our freedom and they cannot even protect a webserver?
Not necesserily dubious I think. With commodity FPGAs on the horizon I can pretty well imagine Linux hackers sometimes diving into the CPU's architecture to make a few things fit better here and there... I agree that CPU design needs huge resources - just like OS design;)
It's a nutty idea anyway to transfer a MHZ range signal through an unshielded power line. The power grid is designed to deal with 50/60Hz frequencies only... Btw., the technology itself has been known for some time - the serbian army was rumored to run parts of it's military network (air defense in particular) through it's (highly redundant) powergrid. Thats partly the reason why the US used carbon bombs to disable the power grid for a few hours. Obviously a military network is not nearly as bandwidth-hungry as millions of households browsing/.;)
1) 'Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft;' - maybe, but most people have only access to code they develop, in fact only a handful of people have 'full' access. Even fewer people have access to the keys themselves. The Caldera antitrust suit brought up some very interesting Microsoft-internal documents that have relevance now: a dozen DOS engineers were reassigned to work on making DrDOS 'as incompatible as humanly possible'. 'Normal' DOS engineers did not even know about this team, the team's real duty was only known to the vice president (Brad Chase in this case). And DOS only had a couple of tenthousand lines of code - with NT's millions lines of code it's not at all hard to 'hide' activity and shield off even top developers from 'the realities of RL'. 2) 'It's called "NSAKEY" for some dumb reason' - yeah, and the symbol name got stipped off from _all previous shipped Windows releases_ (a couple dozen ones, not including localized versions), while $KEY was not stipped? You got to be kidding. $NSAKEY within a crypto module means only one thing. 3) 'There are just too many smarter things they can do to the unsuspecting masses.' - face it, the Microsoft monopoly is valuable to the signal interception community in this regard: it's everywhere. You will not find a single piece of software more widely installed. 4) What was the deal Microsoft cut with the NSA which (uniquely amongst OS vendors) enables them to ship a Crypto API. Crypto-enabling APIs are explicitly forbidden by US export controls, even if they do not ship strong crypto. What was the 'deal' with the NSA?
I've recently tried out Loki's latest Myth II demo , and it's one of the best games ever written for Linux. I was amazed and shocked, but the best thing about this game is not the game itself, but the fact how smooth and playable it is under Linux/XFree86. I never thought that such level of control and performance was possible in X. Myth II grabs the whole screen intelligently and goes into full screen mode without any flicker. Mouse movement cannot not move you out of focus, only exit brings you back to 'normal X'. Still the game has the performance of native SVGALib apps. I wish Loki good luck - both in their Open Source, and game-porting projects. They really have proved that Linux can be an excellent gaming platform.
If available moderator points are not visible to the moderator then what keeps people moderating? Moderating is 'responsible work' in a certain way, and if it can be 'lost work' then the perceived value of moderating decreases. Everybody will just randomly moderate because there is no control over wether a moderation actually makes difference. I think this introduces unnecessery uncertainity and the resulting noise will just degrade the quality of moderation itself - we dont want that, do we?
There are open-source ways to develop Windows as well - check out WineLib. Still nobody says Windows is open-source. Java is not open-source either. The 'Java' name is trademarked and the primary driving force behind Java (ie. Sun) has no intentions to make Java open-source.
With a couple of straight lies: 'And Microsoft's Edwards says that Linux lacks many advanced capabilities, such as the ability to run on computers with multiple processor chips.' Linux runs on 4 different SMP platforms: Intel, Alpha, Sparc and PowerPC. On Sparc64 Linux has been demonstrated to boot/run with 64 CPUs. NT runs on one SMP platform (Intel). The biggest SMP box NT ever ran on is 12 CPUs. Draw your own conclusions about SMP capabilities and hardware/vendor independence.
Intel holds many patents related to the physical and signal layout of Pentium-* processor pins. Also they hold many patents in the 'APIC' area - this is why AMD cannot simply clone Intel's SMP design. Check out
this APIC patent for example, it's the APIC protocol itself that is patented. Yet another case where the US patent system prevents competition and causes inflated prices. (just check out how much a Xeon CPU costs - ridiculous.)
Intel holds many patents related to the physical and signal layout of Pentium-* processor pins. Also they hold many patents in the 'APIC' area - this is why AMD cannot simply clone Intel's SMP design. Check out
this APIC patent for example, it's the APIC protocol itself is patented. Yet another case where the US patent system prevents competition and causes inflated prices. (just check out how much a Xeon CPU costs - ridiculous.)
M2 could have an automatic component as well, additionally to the manual part. If a moderator moderated down an article that finally ended up having 'Score +5, Insightful', then the moderator definitely did something wrong and should lose some karma. (and if karma is below a treshold then lose the ability to moderate as well) Maybe this 'automatic conflict-detection system' could select the 10 M2 articles that go to the M2 moderator? "Good decisions" (eg. moderating up an article from 0 to 1 that finally ends up being +5, Insightful) should increase a moderator's karma.
What about a "[X] Today I'm dead serious" checkbox in our User Preferences to exclude Funny articles? Sure this filters out one of the best parts of/., but hey you can already filter out Linux and Microsoft articles as well.
The real reason of the restructuring is to fight a possible breakup in the 'remedy' phase of the trial, and -of course-, during appeal. If you take a look at the new structure, one thing is obvious almost at first sight: it's a 'horizontal' cut. Each and every new division has 'parts of the Windows franchise'. There are no divisions called 'Windows client' or 'Windows server'. This is engineered to make it much harder to split up Microsoft based on antitrust violations done by former, 'vertical' divisions. The DOJ has to 'unmangle' this new structure before suggesting remedies, this is both tough and slow. But for Linux the more imporant aspect of the new structure is that it creates confusion and slowdown within Microsoft as well.
sorry, i ment 'scale' in terms of 'capability to handle _largescale information_ in a useful way'. sure you can shuffle 1 million messages a day technically, but the goal is to shuffle 1 million messages and preserve/select/highligh useful information, and filter noise.
NNTP has severe limitations which makes it hard to limit noise. It simply does not scale and is quite insecure. We all hope (at least i do:) that Slashdot's 'filter protocol' will become the next NNTP... If this Slashdot experiment succeeds then we'll see a _much_ more improved Internet. To me Slashdot is already several orders more efficient than NNTP.
excerpt from MS vs. DOJ trial transcripts 1999.01.14.pm, Dean SCHMALENSEE, economist, top Microsoft witness, makes the following sworn statement on record (quoted transcript in capital letters): BOIES quotes Gates: 'POPULAR NEWCOMERS SUCH AS LINUX POSE NO THREAT TO WINDOWS. LIKE A LOT OF PRODUCTS THAT ARE FREE, YOU GET A LOYAL FOLLOWING EVEN THOUGH IT'S SMALL. I HAVE NEVER HAD A CUSTOMER MENTION LINUX TO ME,' Then BOIES asks SCHMALENSEE: 'IS [this] CONSISTENT WITH YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE INDUSTRY?' answer: 'YES'. Uhm, gonna be interesting for him to explain recent Microsoft actions... (he is being called back for rebuttal)
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK Stephen Tweedie (Red Hat) has fixed the VM/VFS to deal with 64-bit files (even on 32-bit platforms). He now is at Linux Kongress, maybe we will hear more about this once he's back. So you do not have to wait for XFS to get 64-bit files. On a related note, Stephen Tweedie has also released his journalled-ext2fs (called ext3fs), the patch can be downloaded from here. Linux kernel development has really accelerated in the last couple of months ...
Just in case anyone wants to check out the Shermann Act, prosecuted by the DOJ, it can be read here.
The reason why the DOJ doesnt just prove past conduct is simple - the Shermann Act is about protecting _future_ competition, so the plaintiff has to show that substantial harm is done to the marketplace _as we speak_, otherwise the court will not grant any effective remedies. There are no US laws that protect companies against _past_ (Shermann-type, federal) antitrust violations, unfortunately. To be frank, if US (federal) antitrust laws were just a little bit weaker, they would be nonexistent. No wonder it has only been tried 3 times in 70 years previously, and actually executed only once.
The full text of the DOJ filing can be seen here, the Microsoft filing can be seen here.
At first glance the DOJ filing is a well-constructed set of arguments based on the evidence presented during the trial, the Microsoft one is full of anti-government rhetoric and outright contradictions. YMMV though.
The advantages for bigger shops to switch to Linux is simply too huge to be ignored. Even if they have promotional agreements with Microsoft which buys them license discounts up to 60%, NT is still way too expensive - both the license and maintainance. The artificial Microsoft application barrier has now been destroyed by Linux in the server and NOS market, and now it's time for Linux to wash NT out of the landscape.
They have 60m to spend on the porn^H^H^H^H Starr report, and they have no money for the only space station humanity has left?
If the army ever wants to do things like execute CGI's at an acceptable speed they sooner or later have to implement some secure environment to maintain their webspace. Moving towards more obscure (no flames please, they could have used eg. Apple's OS X) architectures is simply not a solution. These guys are supposed to protect our freedom and they cannot even protect a webserver?
Not necesserily dubious I think. With commodity FPGAs on the horizon I can pretty well imagine Linux hackers sometimes diving into the CPU's architecture to make a few things fit better here and there ... I agree that CPU design needs huge resources - just like OS design ;)
Combining Donald Knuth's MMIX, the Freedom CPU Project and Linux might transfer us into true Cyberspace.
It's a nutty idea anyway to transfer a MHZ range signal through an unshielded power line. The power grid is designed to deal with 50/60Hz frequencies only ... Btw., the technology itself has been known for some time - the serbian army was rumored to run parts of it's military network (air defense in particular) through it's (highly redundant) powergrid. Thats partly the reason why the US used carbon bombs to disable the power grid for a few hours. Obviously a military network is not nearly as bandwidth-hungry as millions of households browsing /. ;)
1) 'Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft;' - maybe, but most people have only access to code they develop, in fact only a handful of people have 'full' access. Even fewer people have access to the keys themselves. The Caldera antitrust suit brought up some very interesting Microsoft-internal documents that have relevance now: a dozen DOS engineers were reassigned to work on making DrDOS 'as incompatible as humanly possible'. 'Normal' DOS engineers did not even know about this team, the team's real duty was only known to the vice president (Brad Chase in this case). And DOS only had a couple of tenthousand lines of code - with NT's millions lines of code it's not at all hard to 'hide' activity and shield off even top developers from 'the realities of RL'.
2) 'It's called "NSAKEY" for some dumb reason' - yeah, and the symbol name got stipped off from _all previous shipped Windows releases_ (a couple dozen ones, not including localized versions), while $KEY was not stipped? You got to be kidding. $NSAKEY within a crypto module means only one thing.
3) 'There are just too many smarter things they can do to the unsuspecting masses.' - face it, the Microsoft monopoly is valuable to the signal interception community in this regard: it's everywhere. You will not find a single piece of software more widely installed.
4) What was the deal Microsoft cut with the NSA which (uniquely amongst OS vendors) enables them to ship a Crypto API. Crypto-enabling APIs are explicitly forbidden by US export controls, even if they do not ship strong crypto. What was the 'deal' with the NSA?
I've recently tried out Loki's latest Myth II demo , and it's one of the best games ever written for Linux. I was amazed and shocked, but the best thing about this game is not the game itself, but the fact how smooth and playable it is under Linux/XFree86. I never thought that such level of control and performance was possible in X. Myth II grabs the whole screen intelligently and goes into full screen mode without any flicker. Mouse movement cannot not move you out of focus, only exit brings you back to 'normal X'. Still the game has the performance of native SVGALib apps. I wish Loki good luck - both in their Open Source, and game-porting projects. They really have proved that Linux can be an excellent gaming platform.
If available moderator points are not visible to the moderator then what keeps people moderating? Moderating is 'responsible work' in a certain way, and if it can be 'lost work' then the perceived value of moderating decreases. Everybody will just randomly moderate because there is no control over wether a moderation actually makes difference. I think this introduces unnecessery uncertainity and the resulting noise will just degrade the quality of moderation itself - we dont want that, do we?
Well, it runs the Symbian OS right now. The only remaining technical issue to be solved is to, uhm, replace 'Sym' with 'De'.
There are open-source ways to develop Windows as well - check out WineLib. Still nobody says Windows is open-source. Java is not open-source either. The 'Java' name is trademarked and the primary driving force behind Java (ie. Sun) has no intentions to make Java open-source.
With a couple of straight lies: 'And Microsoft's Edwards says that Linux lacks many advanced
capabilities, such as the ability to run on computers with multiple
processor chips.' Linux runs on 4 different SMP platforms: Intel, Alpha, Sparc and PowerPC. On Sparc64 Linux has been demonstrated to boot/run with 64 CPUs. NT runs on one SMP platform (Intel). The biggest SMP box NT ever ran on is 12 CPUs. Draw your own conclusions about SMP capabilities and hardware/vendor independence.
While Java is closed-source and tightly controlled by Sun, Linux is GPL and everybody is free to enhance it. 'nuff said.
this APIC patent for example, it's the APIC protocol itself that is patented. Yet another case where the US patent system prevents competition and causes inflated prices. (just check out how much a Xeon CPU costs - ridiculous.)
this APIC patent for example, it's the APIC protocol itself is patented. Yet another case where the US patent system prevents competition and causes inflated prices. (just check out how much a Xeon CPU costs - ridiculous.)
M2 could have an automatic component as well, additionally to the manual part. If a moderator moderated down an article that finally ended up having 'Score +5, Insightful', then the moderator definitely did something wrong and should lose some karma. (and if karma is below a treshold then lose the ability to moderate as well) Maybe this 'automatic conflict-detection system' could select the 10 M2 articles that go to the M2 moderator? "Good decisions" (eg. moderating up an article from 0 to 1 that finally ends up being +5, Insightful) should increase a moderator's karma.
What about a "[X] Today I'm dead serious" checkbox in our User Preferences to exclude Funny articles? Sure this filters out one of the best parts of /., but hey you can already filter out Linux and Microsoft articles as well.
The real reason of the restructuring is to fight a possible breakup in the 'remedy' phase of the trial, and -of course-, during appeal. If you take a look at the new structure, one thing is obvious almost at first sight: it's a 'horizontal' cut. Each and every new division has 'parts of the Windows franchise'. There are no divisions called 'Windows client' or 'Windows server'. This is engineered to make it much harder to split up Microsoft based on antitrust violations done by former, 'vertical' divisions. The DOJ has to 'unmangle' this new structure before suggesting remedies, this is both tough and slow. But for Linux the more imporant aspect of the new structure is that it creates confusion and slowdown within Microsoft as well.
sorry, i ment 'scale' in terms of 'capability
to handle _largescale information_ in a useful way'.
sure you can shuffle 1 million messages a day
technically, but the goal is to shuffle 1 million
messages and preserve/select/highligh useful
information, and filter noise.
NNTP has severe limitations which makes it hard to limit noise. It simply does not scale and is quite insecure. We all hope (at least i do :) that Slashdot's 'filter protocol' will become the next NNTP ... If this Slashdot experiment succeeds then we'll see a _much_ more improved Internet. To me Slashdot is already several orders more efficient than NNTP.
excerpt from MS vs. DOJ trial transcripts 1999.01.14.pm, Dean SCHMALENSEE, economist, top Microsoft witness, makes the following sworn statement on record (quoted transcript in capital letters): BOIES quotes Gates: 'POPULAR NEWCOMERS SUCH AS LINUX POSE NO THREAT TO WINDOWS. LIKE A LOT OF PRODUCTS THAT ARE FREE, YOU GET A LOYAL FOLLOWING EVEN THOUGH IT'S SMALL. I HAVE NEVER HAD A CUSTOMER MENTION LINUX TO ME,' Then BOIES asks SCHMALENSEE: 'IS [this] CONSISTENT WITH YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE INDUSTRY?' answer: 'YES'. Uhm, gonna be interesting for him to explain recent Microsoft actions ... (he is being called back for rebuttal)