What are you worried about? If 2.3 looks totally different from 2.1 and 1.3 we must be in good shape! 1.3 was plagued by the release-a-day syndrome (remember the YAGWRs, yet another greased weasel releases?) and 2.1 just bit off more than it should chew in a release. It seems to me that in 2.3 we have a nice set of new features and best of all, we get to see them in a reasonable amount of time.
Legally, this may translate to an admittance of guilt on Nintendo's part. Then, they will be open for attack from users who have had more serious problems (carpal tunnel syndrome, addiction, insomnia, etc.) with any of their products. Even if these lawsuits all fail, the legal fees could get racked up quickly.
I can speak for qmail with a little larger number of users. I have qmail running for a small ISP with 3000+ accounts. The same machine is handling authentication, file serving, POP, etc.
The machine is bored and its a low-end PC. You could build it for $1500 today. We push 15000+ messages a day.
We switched from sendmail/qpopper to qmail. I got tired of administrating sendmail, not having real virtual email account support, watching qpopper slam my disk by copying the user's mail file everytime they popped, etc, etc. sendmail just has too much baggage and isn't elegantly designed in the first place.
qmail is built very modular, tiny programs to handle every stop of the MTA process. This makes it more secure, setuid'ing whenever it can, reducing the amount of code that ever sees root permissions. Also, it is very easy to extend. I have qmail-pop authenticating from a SQL database, just by replacing the the checkpassword program.
After using it, Maildir support is a must. In a Maildir, each message is a file. It sounds like a waste of inodes, and it is, but the performance benefits are incredible. Now when a user POPs, they don't have to lock their mailbox, and only touch the messages that they want. Before qmail, qpopper was causing my server (then running 1000 users) to write 4 GB/sec on my little 4 GB drive. In addition, my secondary mail server can deliver into the same mailboxes without locking, etc.
I will give you that qmail can be a pain to administer by hand since its configuration is kind of distributed, with.qmail files in user's homedirs, redirecting their mail, etc. But I built a management system on top of it. This is where qmail really sings for us. We can change damn near anything just by twiddling some files, no restart, rebuilding config files, etc.
And the best part, in my opinion, I have been using qmail for 1 year and I'm still using the same version. It does what it does and is rock solid stable and secure.
I agree that this all optical in that there is no light to electron conversion, but my question is: How is the inkjet like bubble put in the optical channel? Are they using electrical signals there? Even if they are, they are still better off than Nortel, et. al., since they are now using on electrical signal per packet instead of per bit. This still doesn't make complete sense to me... Oh for a technical description instead of PR.
So, as an embedded systems developer and in your perfect world, I should get a RedHat CD and some binaries/code from Motorola, throw them together, shake vigorously, cram them into flash, then boot? Uh huh. Sounds like pain to me. In fact, I'm sure some nice person would come along, do it, and post the results so that everyone else doesn't have to go through the pain. Whoops, thats a distro!
A beauty of Linux is that tens, hundreds, even thousands of distros can pop up, giving me all the choices I want. If I want a workstation with X/GNOME and some nice Office apps, I install one distro. If I want a server, optimized for IP performance, I install another. If I'm building a smart toaster, I get another. Someone else does the work and shares it.
In addition, unlimited distros means that we can more easily try out new stuff, not just new versions of gcc or glibc. They might try different install, package management, library management, personalities, etc. One might even come up with an alternative to X-windows, this would never happen if we were all using the same distros that had to maintain backwards compatibility. The best survive and go on, its evolution, baby. You build the better distro by allowing mutations to pop up and letting the population decide which is best. BTW, best may mean one that follows the LSB best, etc.
The alternative is to be limited to only a handful of versions and we all bitch how they don't meet our needs and how we wished we could do it ourselves. You might as well go back to Windows.
IRQs are not a problem. Each PCI card you add takes one IRQ, a "limitation" of PCI. You can find cards with as many as 8 IDE channels. I think you start worrying about PCI bus bandwidth at that point, especially if you are competing with 100baseT net cards, etc.
Linux supports 8 IDE channels. I'm not sure where the limitation is at this point, never needed more than 8.
1. So? We have plenty of CPU available. Usually we are waiting on I/O. If you are worried, go SMP. You are still getting away cheap.
2. UDMA33 bursts to 33.3, but sustains 16.6. UDMA66 bursts to 66.6, but sustains 33.3.
3. So add more channels. You have 2 on board, add 2 more for under $50. Now you ahve a 4-way RAID-5. If you want a hot spare, make it a slave. When you replace the dead drive, move the spare to be a master. No one in their right mind puts 15 hard drives on a SCSI channel. Drives can do an easy 15 MB/s, usually 20 MB/s+. U2W SCSI is stuck at 80 MB/s. Also, for redundancy, you always use multiple channels, so you can't be taken out by a cable.
You are touting conventional wisdom. I'm giving you an interesting alternative for the dollar-impaired. I will not argue that SCSI is a better way to go, given a sufficient budget. I'm not used to such circumstances.
If you are putting together highly available servers, perhaps for heavy DB serving, and have money, I might agree with you.
But if you are putting together load balanced servers, such as mail, web, authentication, etc. then software RAID, even with cheapo IDE drives, kicks serious ass. Normally, you can't justify serious RAID for these boxes, but cheap software RAID/IDE means that you can add some redundancy and have an easier day. Also, if you are load balancing, you can afford the reboot to replace a drive.
At an ISP, this is the world I live in. I don't have big DB servers, but an army of smallish servers. I also have no money and no time to rebuild a server every time a drive dies. This is the best of both worlds to me...
I have gone to the dark side and started running the 0.90 software RAID on *gasp* IDE drives in *double gasp* production servers. I don't see myself going back soon.
If you have an unlimited budget, then hardware RAID with SCSI disks is great. I might still argue with you about if hardware or software RAID is faster. But if you live in the rest of the world, where money matters, you can't beat IDE drivers for price/performance, especially with the 7200's with 2MB caches available now. Going IDE means I can have a spare in the box and possibly one on the shelf. In short, my boxes are more reliable and just as fast for the same money.
The only downside I can note with IDE is that I have to turn the box off to replace a drive. Get some $15 shuttles and the box is down for all of 3 minutes. These Promise controllers allow Hot-Swap IDE RAID-1, I believe.
The overhead is pretty minimal. I do RAID-5, and even with the extra CPU needed for IDE controllers, I still don't see much CPU usage (sorry, I don't have hard numbers... can't find my Bonnies). Actually, on the ATA33 controllers that I'm using, it seemed the bottle neck was the controller bandwidth. On a 3 way RAID-5, I always pulled roughly 25MB/sec, regardless of CPU, block sizes, etc. After thinking about it, it made sense; with RAID-5 reads, I'm reading from 2 drives at a time, and ATA33 can sustain only 16.6/bus. After OS overhead, seeks, etc. 12.5/bus ain't bad.
Linux does have pretty good HW RAID support. Mylex, DPT, and ICP-Vortex come to mind. All well supported. And you can always go with an external RAID chassis solution, where the external box does the RAID and just connect a SCSI channel to it. Since it looks like any other SCSI disk, it is OS independent. This is perhaps the simplest approach, but can also be expensive.
How about an email message?/proc/mdstat contains the status of the array, write a script and cron it. If you want an LED, attach an LED to the serial port and have the script write there.
So, Cray was torn apart by SGI and Sun. Sun jerks over their portion and comes up with the Enterprise 10000. SGI flounders a while with their chunk and ends up only holding a name to sell.
While I'm glad SGI is embracing Linux, in light of what they did to Cray, do we want the Linux name associated with this company? I would be happier if Sun truly supported Linux (instead of just paying lip service, community source... gack).
In SGI's defense, $100 million is a pretty good price for a trademark and a domain name.
QoS is easy to implement for upstream, but difficult for downstream. In short, you must work with your ISP to get it done and load down their equipment. Most ISPs aren't going to be friendly to that, and will likely charge you more. It is easier to just block ports.
For downstream, QoS on your router doesn't mean anything because the traffic has already choked down your pipe before you would make the "what is more important" decision. Therefore, the ISP has to do QoS and prioritize packets before sending them to you.
In a perfect world, QoS would solve everything, but I don't think you will find too many ISPs and backbone providers willing to implement it. Perhaps that perfect world will exist in the future, but not today.
Probably because damn near all the secure sites out there talk RSA. They can implement SSL all they like and even include other encryption methods into Mozilla, but without RSA they might as well not bother.
I think you may find two distinct camps in the open source world: The socialist-like view that we should all help each other and give our source away for free. The other camp are the capitalist pigs that see good business sense in open source.
The first camp I don't understand, the second, which I subscribe to, has a lot of profit potential. In short, I see the US, definitely, and the world, maybe (I live in the states, not sure about you foreigners.:-) ) as having more and more of a service based economy. Open source fits quite nicely in that type of economy. Software is viewed simply as a means to provide the services. Service based companies do not want to develop software to sell, they just want to use it. Therefore, if they need something that isn't available, whether open source or commercial, they can start development and release it as open source. Others that are in the same boat can improve upon it, fix bugs, etc. The new features and bug fixes are available to the original company. In short, they put forth a small effort and got larger rewards.
Again, it all hinges on whether you are in the software business. If you aren't and don't want to be, open source makes a lot of sense. If you are it still might make sense. You open source the framework and add commercial features. The framework will be more solid and will also serve to expand your user base, making it more likely that you will be able to sell your add-ons.
Finally, if software is your only business, such as Microsoft, Corel, and Transmeta (yeah they make chips, but that part is easy, the software on the chip is the cool part), then open sourcing would not be a smart move.
Agreed. Linux has replaced Windows for me on the server and the desktop. I'm quite happy. I have found everything I need in the Linux world (except for Starcraft!...). What the hell do I care what everyone else uses?
The only time I feel compelled to get into these arguments is with a boss that thinks Redmond is synonymous with Mt. Olympus. I don't usually work at places like that long.
I won't argue that they definitely have a niche product here, but I can think of a few reasons to buy one:
You have tons of old LPs that haven't been released on CD.
You are really damned rich and what the difference between $13,000 and $200 doesn't seem that much to you.
And in a more lucrative vein, buy one of these and start a media transfer service. People bring their old LPs to you, you give them bright shiny Audio CDs. I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are here, but I think media transfer is OK for your own use, especially if the new media format is not available. This is similar to MP3s; makeing an MP3 is not illegal (although the RIAA would like to make it so), it is distributing it that is illegal. (Note, I'm in the US, don't know what other countries are like.)
Nevertheless, this is very cool, old meets new. And I wouldn't be surprised to see vinyl revatalized a bit (only a bit). The high cost of these is probably because they don't expect to sell many. They have to recoup their dev. costs.
In the Linux kernel source (2.2.12), I found "XXX" 1,561 times out of approximately 2,000,000 lines of code.
Now, Win2k supposedly has 35,000,000 lines of code, or 17.5 times what is in the linux kernel. Therefore, to compare, 1,561 * 17.5 = 27,318.
Looks like the kernel source is right in line with Win2k as far as BugBug or XXX comments go.
In addition, as a coder, I do liberally sprinkle with XXX. Everytime I hit something that I realize I could do better or stub something out for now, I XXX. The code will work and be considered bug free (depending on the stub), but there remain XXX's to remind myself that I wanted to do something better there. In other words, a lot of my XXX's are for rainy days when I have time to improve code instead of just chugging to the next deadline.
Imagine that I'm Joe ISP. How the hell do I protect myself from this? Asking everyone on the net to do their job and filter spoofed packets ain't a reasonable answer. It is simply not enforcable, not on an international scale.
Stopping a server-level DoS attack (e.g. grinding my servers into the ground with dynamic pages, DB lookups, etc) should be possible; identify the source(s) and block at the firewall for example. The catch is identifying the sources, but it is at least possible.
But if it is a network-level DoS attack, in other words, too much is being forced down my pipe, I don't have much of an option but call up my provider and beg them to filter. I can't see this as a reasonable solution. Providers aren't going to be happy adding filter rules to their routers every time a customer gets nailed. It is too much overhead on their routers and on their administrative staff.
So what is a long term solution to this problem? This is only going to become a bigger and bigger problem as the common user's pipe gets bigger and bigger.
Imagine: an email-spread trojan horse, set to pound the hell out of www.bigguy.com at a certain time a month from now. Let it spread to a couple thousand unspecting newbies (wow, cool, look at the fireworks!, lets send that to tom, dick and harry)... Insert your distributed DoS attack method here.
Rob didn't say it, Cyberkidd did (notice the quotes...), and emmett posted it. Rob may have some responsibility because he started Slashdot up and coded a lot of the code behind it, but lets not get too crazy.
The "jab" at Microsoft was supposed to be funny. You are supposed to say, "Ha ha, like their using Microsoft on a super computer!" It's a joke!
Oh and yes, I'm sure Rob knows that there are bigger computers out there than PCs.
What I find most amazing about this article has nothing to do with the Linux scheduler nor Java.
The amazing part is that in the process of porting a product to Linux, IBM has taken the time to formally look into how to make it faster. This isn't earth shattering, but what they did after that is: they presented an open solution, on top of that, a patch!
It would have been much easer for them to have simply complained that the scheduler was too slow and possibly not port Java (or quit dev.) until the "Linux community" fixed it. IBM's approach shows that they (or at least those that wrote this paper) consider themselves part of the "Linux community" and are willing to work within it.
Which proves faster than light travel is possible
on
Happy Birthday, HAL!
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· Score: 1
I think the movie was made in the future and sent into the past.
According to Stephen Hawking, faster than light travel implies time travel is possible, but since we haven't seen visitors from the future then faster than light travel must not be possible.
Behold the proof! In the future, IBM must have discovered time travel and patented it, thus keeping everyone else from it for the short term. In the mean time, they go back in time and lobby for patents to become eternal.
To pay for the lobbying, they bring cool stuff from the future and sell it. Of course, they can't make big waves, so they put a little at a time into a little operating system called Linux. They set this up with 2001 and got Clarke and Kubrick to write it by implanting it into their cranniums (with future technology of course).
So, sit back and relax. In a year or a couple months, we will have a HAL running on Linux, thanks to IBM (of the future).
Just get your own key for the pod bay doors.
So, you see time travel is possible, its just that IBM owns the patent.
I was thinking last night about what Time-Warner owns and now AOL will own. Please correct/add to this list; this is just the stuff that I have regular contact with.
Turner
TNT - Turner Network Television
Babylon 5
Lois and Clark
Kung Fu: The Legend Continues
CHiPs
TCM - Turner Classic Movies
TBS - Turner Broadcast Station
Cartoon Network
CNN
Headline News
CNNFI
CNNSI
HBO
The Sopranos
Sex in the City
Oz
Time Magazine
Warner Bros.
Plenty of movies
Plenty of albums
Bugs Bunnie, Taz, Willie Coyote, RoadRunner, Sylvester, Tweetie (this one really bums me out)
While this sucks, it doesn't change the base problem: we are at the mercy of the media to report the truth. This has always been the case. A reporter can write and cut all they want to make the story sound as they please. The studio can further enhance and cut to fit their agenda. They can also choose which stories to run.
Every reporter is biased; they are only human. A good reporter keeps the bias out of the report as much as possible, but they may not file a report for a story they don't think is important, may report with an unintended tone of voice that projects their opinion upon the listener, etc.
Editors have the same bias problems; in addition, they are under pressure to keep viewer's interest so that advertising can be sold. Therefore, they have a tendency to report shocking or glamorous stories that keep people glued, but may not be representative of what is really going on in the world.
In the end we have to simply trust them or not trust them. Everyone has certain news sources that they trust and others that they don't trust.
Hopefully people will always want a trustworthy news source and there will always be an entreprenour willing to fill the niche.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you worried about? If 2.3 looks totally different from 2.1 and 1.3 we must be in good shape! 1.3 was plagued by the release-a-day syndrome (remember the YAGWRs, yet another greased weasel releases?) and 2.1 just bit off more than it should chew in a release. It seems to me that in 2.3 we have a nice set of new features and best of all, we get to see them in a reasonable amount of time.
Kudos to the kernel developers.
Can we say "Class Action Law Suit"?
Legally, this may translate to an admittance of guilt on Nintendo's part. Then, they will be open for attack from users who have had more serious problems (carpal tunnel syndrome, addiction, insomnia, etc.) with any of their products. Even if these lawsuits all fail, the legal fees could get racked up quickly.
I can speak for qmail with a little larger number of users. I have qmail running for a small ISP with 3000+ accounts. The same machine is handling authentication, file serving, POP, etc.
The machine is bored and its a low-end PC. You could build it for $1500 today. We push 15000+ messages a day.
We switched from sendmail/qpopper to qmail. I got tired of administrating sendmail, not having real virtual email account support, watching qpopper slam my disk by copying the user's mail file everytime they popped, etc, etc. sendmail just has too much baggage and isn't elegantly designed in the first place.
qmail is built very modular, tiny programs to handle every stop of the MTA process. This makes it more secure, setuid'ing whenever it can, reducing the amount of code that ever sees root permissions. Also, it is very easy to extend. I have qmail-pop authenticating from a SQL database, just by replacing the the checkpassword program.
After using it, Maildir support is a must. In a Maildir, each message is a file. It sounds like a waste of inodes, and it is, but the performance benefits are incredible. Now when a user POPs, they don't have to lock their mailbox, and only touch the messages that they want. Before qmail, qpopper was causing my server (then running 1000 users) to write 4 GB/sec on my little 4 GB drive. In addition, my secondary mail server can deliver into the same mailboxes without locking, etc.
I will give you that qmail can be a pain to administer by hand since its configuration is kind of distributed, with .qmail files in user's homedirs, redirecting their mail, etc. But I built a management system on top of it. This is where qmail really sings for us. We can change damn near anything just by twiddling some files, no restart, rebuilding config files, etc.
And the best part, in my opinion, I have been using qmail for 1 year and I'm still using the same version. It does what it does and is rock solid stable and secure.
How's that for a testimonial?
I agree that this all optical in that there is no light to electron conversion, but my question is: How is the inkjet like bubble put in the optical channel? Are they using electrical signals there? Even if they are, they are still better off than Nortel, et. al., since they are now using on electrical signal per packet instead of per bit. This still doesn't make complete sense to me... Oh for a technical description instead of PR.
So, as an embedded systems developer and in your perfect world, I should get a RedHat CD and some binaries/code from Motorola, throw them together, shake vigorously, cram them into flash, then boot? Uh huh. Sounds like pain to me. In fact, I'm sure some nice person would come along, do it, and post the results so that everyone else doesn't have to go through the pain. Whoops, thats a distro!
A beauty of Linux is that tens, hundreds, even thousands of distros can pop up, giving me all the choices I want. If I want a workstation with X/GNOME and some nice Office apps, I install one distro. If I want a server, optimized for IP performance, I install another. If I'm building a smart toaster, I get another. Someone else does the work and shares it.
In addition, unlimited distros means that we can more easily try out new stuff, not just new versions of gcc or glibc. They might try different install, package management, library management, personalities, etc. One might even come up with an alternative to X-windows, this would never happen if we were all using the same distros that had to maintain backwards compatibility. The best survive and go on, its evolution, baby. You build the better distro by allowing mutations to pop up and letting the population decide which is best. BTW, best may mean one that follows the LSB best, etc.
The alternative is to be limited to only a handful of versions and we all bitch how they don't meet our needs and how we wished we could do it ourselves. You might as well go back to Windows.
IRQs are not a problem. Each PCI card you add takes one IRQ, a "limitation" of PCI. You can find cards with as many as 8 IDE channels. I think you start worrying about PCI bus bandwidth at that point, especially if you are competing with 100baseT net cards, etc.
Linux supports 8 IDE channels. I'm not sure where the limitation is at this point, never needed more than 8.
1. So? We have plenty of CPU available. Usually we are waiting on I/O. If you are worried, go SMP. You are still getting away cheap.
2. UDMA33 bursts to 33.3, but sustains 16.6. UDMA66 bursts to 66.6, but sustains 33.3.
3. So add more channels. You have 2 on board, add 2 more for under $50. Now you ahve a 4-way RAID-5. If you want a hot spare, make it a slave. When you replace the dead drive, move the spare to be a master. No one in their right mind puts 15 hard drives on a SCSI channel. Drives can do an easy 15 MB/s, usually 20 MB/s+. U2W SCSI is stuck at 80 MB/s. Also, for redundancy, you always use multiple channels, so you can't be taken out by a cable.
You are touting conventional wisdom. I'm giving you an interesting alternative for the dollar-impaired. I will not argue that SCSI is a better way to go, given a sufficient budget. I'm not used to such circumstances.
Can a real RAID guru post them?
I'm not a real RAID guru, but I play one at work.
If you are putting together highly available servers, perhaps for heavy DB serving, and have money, I might agree with you.
But if you are putting together load balanced servers, such as mail, web, authentication, etc. then software RAID, even with cheapo IDE drives, kicks serious ass. Normally, you can't justify serious RAID for these boxes, but cheap software RAID/IDE means that you can add some redundancy and have an easier day. Also, if you are load balancing, you can afford the reboot to replace a drive.
At an ISP, this is the world I live in. I don't have big DB servers, but an army of smallish servers. I also have no money and no time to rebuild a server every time a drive dies. This is the best of both worlds to me...
I have gone to the dark side and started running the 0.90 software RAID on *gasp* IDE drives in *double gasp* production servers. I don't see myself going back soon.
If you have an unlimited budget, then hardware RAID with SCSI disks is great. I might still argue with you about if hardware or software RAID is faster. But if you live in the rest of the world, where money matters, you can't beat IDE drivers for price/performance, especially with the 7200's with 2MB caches available now. Going IDE means I can have a spare in the box and possibly one on the shelf. In short, my boxes are more reliable and just as fast for the same money.
The only downside I can note with IDE is that I have to turn the box off to replace a drive. Get some $15 shuttles and the box is down for all of 3 minutes. These Promise controllers allow Hot-Swap IDE RAID-1, I believe.
The overhead is pretty minimal. I do RAID-5, and even with the extra CPU needed for IDE controllers, I still don't see much CPU usage (sorry, I don't have hard numbers... can't find my Bonnies). Actually, on the ATA33 controllers that I'm using, it seemed the bottle neck was the controller bandwidth. On a 3 way RAID-5, I always pulled roughly 25MB/sec, regardless of CPU, block sizes, etc. After thinking about it, it made sense; with RAID-5 reads, I'm reading from 2 drives at a time, and ATA33 can sustain only 16.6/bus. After OS overhead, seeks, etc. 12.5/bus ain't bad.
Linux does have pretty good HW RAID support. Mylex, DPT, and ICP-Vortex come to mind. All well supported. And you can always go with an external RAID chassis solution, where the external box does the RAID and just connect a SCSI channel to it. Since it looks like any other SCSI disk, it is OS independent. This is perhaps the simplest approach, but can also be expensive.
Enough rambling... off to some starcraft.
How about an email message? /proc/mdstat contains the status of the array, write a script and cron it. If you want an LED, attach an LED to the serial port and have the script write there.
So, Cray was torn apart by SGI and Sun. Sun jerks over their portion and comes up with the Enterprise 10000. SGI flounders a while with their chunk and ends up only holding a name to sell.
While I'm glad SGI is embracing Linux, in light of what they did to Cray, do we want the Linux name associated with this company? I would be happier if Sun truly supported Linux (instead of just paying lip service, community source... gack).
In SGI's defense, $100 million is a pretty good price for a trademark and a domain name.
QoS is easy to implement for upstream, but difficult for downstream. In short, you must work with your ISP to get it done and load down their equipment. Most ISPs aren't going to be friendly to that, and will likely charge you more. It is easier to just block ports.
For downstream, QoS on your router doesn't mean anything because the traffic has already choked down your pipe before you would make the "what is more important" decision. Therefore, the ISP has to do QoS and prioritize packets before sending them to you.
In a perfect world, QoS would solve everything, but I don't think you will find too many ISPs and backbone providers willing to implement it. Perhaps that perfect world will exist in the future, but not today.
Probably because damn near all the secure sites out there talk RSA. They can implement SSL all they like and even include other encryption methods into Mozilla, but without RSA they might as well not bother.
I think you may find two distinct camps in the open source world: The socialist-like view that we should all help each other and give our source away for free. The other camp are the capitalist pigs that see good business sense in open source.
The first camp I don't understand, the second, which I subscribe to, has a lot of profit potential. In short, I see the US, definitely, and the world, maybe (I live in the states, not sure about you foreigners. :-) ) as having more and more of a service based economy. Open source fits quite nicely in that type of economy. Software is viewed simply as a means to provide the services. Service based companies do not want to develop software to sell, they just want to use it. Therefore, if they need something that isn't available, whether open source or commercial, they can start development and release it as open source. Others that are in the same boat can improve upon it, fix bugs, etc. The new features and bug fixes are available to the original company. In short, they put forth a small effort and got larger rewards.
Again, it all hinges on whether you are in the software business. If you aren't and don't want to be, open source makes a lot of sense. If you are it still might make sense. You open source the framework and add commercial features. The framework will be more solid and will also serve to expand your user base, making it more likely that you will be able to sell your add-ons.
Finally, if software is your only business, such as Microsoft, Corel, and Transmeta (yeah they make chips, but that part is easy, the software on the chip is the cool part), then open sourcing would not be a smart move.
Agreed. Linux has replaced Windows for me on the server and the desktop. I'm quite happy. I have found everything I need in the Linux world (except for Starcraft!...). What the hell do I care what everyone else uses?
The only time I feel compelled to get into these arguments is with a boss that thinks Redmond is synonymous with Mt. Olympus. I don't usually work at places like that long.
I won't argue that they definitely have a niche product here, but I can think of a few reasons to buy one:
Nevertheless, this is very cool, old meets new. And I wouldn't be surprised to see vinyl revatalized a bit (only a bit). The high cost of these is probably because they don't expect to sell many. They have to recoup their dev. costs.
In the Linux kernel source (2.2.12), I found "XXX" 1,561 times out of approximately 2,000,000 lines of code.
Now, Win2k supposedly has 35,000,000 lines of code, or 17.5 times what is in the linux kernel. Therefore, to compare, 1,561 * 17.5 = 27,318.
Looks like the kernel source is right in line with Win2k as far as BugBug or XXX comments go.
In addition, as a coder, I do liberally sprinkle with XXX. Everytime I hit something that I realize I could do better or stub something out for now, I XXX. The code will work and be considered bug free (depending on the stub), but there remain XXX's to remind myself that I wanted to do something better there. In other words, a lot of my XXX's are for rainy days when I have time to improve code instead of just chugging to the next deadline.
Imagine that I'm Joe ISP. How the hell do I protect myself from this? Asking everyone on the net to do their job and filter spoofed packets ain't a reasonable answer. It is simply not enforcable, not on an international scale.
Stopping a server-level DoS attack (e.g. grinding my servers into the ground with dynamic pages, DB lookups, etc) should be possible; identify the source(s) and block at the firewall for example. The catch is identifying the sources, but it is at least possible.
But if it is a network-level DoS attack, in other words, too much is being forced down my pipe, I don't have much of an option but call up my provider and beg them to filter. I can't see this as a reasonable solution. Providers aren't going to be happy adding filter rules to their routers every time a customer gets nailed. It is too much overhead on their routers and on their administrative staff.
So what is a long term solution to this problem? This is only going to become a bigger and bigger problem as the common user's pipe gets bigger and bigger.
Imagine: an email-spread trojan horse, set to pound the hell out of www.bigguy.com at a certain time a month from now. Let it spread to a couple thousand unspecting newbies (wow, cool, look at the fireworks!, lets send that to tom, dick and harry)... Insert your distributed DoS attack method here.
Wow, its just as corny as the movie. Man and I thought that was just Hollywood going out of their way to make fun of the quaint PA residents.
I don't know why I'm bothering but:
So is it 1.1.0 or 1.0.0 that was just released? Guessing 1.0.0.
What I find most amazing about this article has nothing to do with the Linux scheduler nor Java.
The amazing part is that in the process of porting a product to Linux, IBM has taken the time to formally look into how to make it faster. This isn't earth shattering, but what they did after that is: they presented an open solution, on top of that, a patch!
It would have been much easer for them to have simply complained that the scheduler was too slow and possibly not port Java (or quit dev.) until the "Linux community" fixed it. IBM's approach shows that they (or at least those that wrote this paper) consider themselves part of the "Linux community" and are willing to work within it.
I think the movie was made in the future and sent into the past.
According to Stephen Hawking, faster than light travel implies time travel is possible, but since we haven't seen visitors from the future then faster than light travel must not be possible.
Behold the proof! In the future, IBM must have discovered time travel and patented it, thus keeping everyone else from it for the short term. In the mean time, they go back in time and lobby for patents to become eternal.
To pay for the lobbying, they bring cool stuff from the future and sell it. Of course, they can't make big waves, so they put a little at a time into a little operating system called Linux. They set this up with 2001 and got Clarke and Kubrick to write it by implanting it into their cranniums (with future technology of course).
So, sit back and relax. In a year or a couple months, we will have a HAL running on Linux, thanks to IBM (of the future).
Just get your own key for the pod bay doors.
So, you see time travel is possible, its just that IBM owns the patent.
medication?
I was thinking last night about what Time-Warner owns and now AOL will own. Please correct/add to this list; this is just the stuff that I have regular contact with.
HBO
Time Magazine
Warner Bros.
RoadRunner Cable service
While this sucks, it doesn't change the base problem: we are at the mercy of the media to report the truth. This has always been the case. A reporter can write and cut all they want to make the story sound as they please. The studio can further enhance and cut to fit their agenda. They can also choose which stories to run.
Every reporter is biased; they are only human. A good reporter keeps the bias out of the report as much as possible, but they may not file a report for a story they don't think is important, may report with an unintended tone of voice that projects their opinion upon the listener, etc.
Editors have the same bias problems; in addition, they are under pressure to keep viewer's interest so that advertising can be sold. Therefore, they have a tendency to report shocking or glamorous stories that keep people glued, but may not be representative of what is really going on in the world.
In the end we have to simply trust them or not trust them. Everyone has certain news sources that they trust and others that they don't trust.
Hopefully people will always want a trustworthy news source and there will always be an entreprenour willing to fill the niche.