Minefield is just the code-name for the trunk. You see, during development new stuff is submitted to the main branch - the trunk. This is where big changes like a new javascript engine or big changes to the html rendering engine happens.
You can download Minefield today to take a look at what is currently on the main trunk. But this code is often under heavy development and has not gone through all the testing/fixing that an official release gets. That's why they call it Minefield, it can and will blow up now and then.
When the current trunk has all the features one wants for the next version of FFox, they do a branch. They then do stability / security fixes etc on this branch (but no big new features). From his branch you then get the FFox betas/release-candidates and then eventually the shiny new FFox 4 (or 3.5 or whatever they'll call it).
Say you have 100 phones talking to a cell tower. You need some way to multiplex, otherwise one would just have a mess with the phones talking in each other's mouths.
GSM (and related technologies like edge/gprs, and some other cellphone systems) chose time multiplexing. That is, each phone gets a set of time-slots where it can transmit and all other phones keep silent.
So the signal from your phone will look like short bursts with silence in between. For GSM that's ~200 bursts per second, which translates to badly shielded loudspeakers picking up a ~200Hz buzzing sound.
Other cell systems (like umts/hsdpa) use different multiplexing/carrier/encoding, so don't exhibit this problem (or at least, don't exhibit this problem to the same degree that GSM does).
Did the Jobsian distortion field make you forget that the 3G iPhone is a multi-mode GSM/EDGE/GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA phone?
The issue is mainly with GSM/EDGE/GPRS, due to it using TDMA for handling multiple access (each single handset gets about 200 timeslots per second, meaning that if you put a handset close to an unshielded speaker or similar you get a ~200Hz buzz signal induced when it is transmitting).
Set your phone to 3G-only mode, and the buzzing will be a lot less noticeable.
The entire Ubuntu installation, configuration, and applying all updates takes less then 1/2 hr (no, I'm not exaggerating, try it) and is finished while Windows XP is still formatting the disk.
To be sort of fair to MS, if you start out with an original (non-SP2) ancient XP install CD then the process of doing all the updates is analogous to installing a Ubuntu Warty Warthog and doing dist-upgrades to Ibex.
If you are going to do many similar installs on machines with fairly similar hardware, you can build a custom install image that includes all the win* updates / drivers / 3rd party software unattend installs, etc. If you are doing one-offs on lots of different hardware then, yeah, I feel your pain; I did quite a bit of that in the Win9x era, and the amount of manual steps one is required to do is silly.
It's not as simple as rewriting the source or destination in a packet
Neither is ipv4 PAT/SNAT/whatever-you-call-it. While simple address rewrite is sufficient for some protocols, other things break in interesting ways unless you do special handling on a protocol by protocol basis (FTP being the obvious example).
Anyway, one is going to have to move to ipv6 some time and I don't really see how ipv4/ipv6 translators would cause much more pain than ipv4 PAT does today.
We have the same kind of problems with ipv4 Internet and ipv4 clients sitting behind pat/napt/snat/masquerade.
Just like the current net where ipv4 services out there have to take into account ipv4 clients sitting behind pat, the early ipv6 net will have to take into account ipv4 clients sitting behind 6to4 translators.
However, when the cloud is finally moved over to ipv6 the clients will start to move over too and we will finally have a fully ipv6 net.
As far as I can find, the relevant RFCs (2131) say that DHCP servers "should" honour the broadcast flag, but it does not say "must".
So it seems MS is in the wrong here. Since it is not a requirement for the DHCP server to support the broadcast flag, the client should fall back to not using the flag if it receives no reply.
"Almost arbitrarily" is not my experience with wireless data, you hit a limit based on number of available frequencies (how many independent/non-interfering channels there are) and how close you can place sectors that use the same frequency band.
For mobile wireless, there is also the issue of seamless handoff between sectors/stations.
WiMAX is a lot better than old 802.11 (the.11 MAC layer was really only designed to handle home wireless networks), but I'd need some hard numbers if you want to convince me that 802.16 can scale "almost arbitrarily".
This is why Linux has these things called modules. You can compile them, then plug them into a running kernel (and this is the astonishing part) without needing to reboot
That works fine for pretty much any driver in somewhat recent version of Win*, too. MS fixed most of those issues with Win2K.
The reason some driver installs in Windows ask for a reboot is because they tend to include a lot of unneeded crudware (printer tray icon, background services etc).
Hell, you can even get these modules precompiled for your kernel - just like Windows
Erm.. Only if your distribution include those drivers, or if 3rd party vendors provide precompiled drivers for the specific linux kernel that you are using. A driver compiled against kernel version x.y is not guaranteed to work with kernel x.z, nor is it guaranteed to work with kernel x.y that is built with different config (ex. PAE and SMP).
Sorry, but on the point of ease of providing 3rd party drivers Windows has Linux beat. On the other hand, Linux drivers tend to be more generic (a driver for "etherchip 34x2" will typically work for all network cards that use that chip while a windows driver downloaded from Notgear more often than not won't work with a Loonksys network card even if the cards use the same chip).
On the time ting, there is also often the case that time is often a more scarce commodity than money is. If one simply isn't into computers, it just makes sense to stay with what one already is familiar with even if it means having to buy slightly more expensive hardware and paying the microsoft tax; it is exactly the same as paying the car shop tax instead of learning how to fix the transmission myself.
On 4, it would help at least some if the netbook vendors picked a better distro. Just switched my aspire one to hardy netbook remix, and loving it. But doing something like that, with all the tweaks and command line mojo required to get the hardware running fine is way beyond what one can reasonably expect from the average buyer of a netbook.
Agreed on the need for distro-neutral software packaging. LSB has to get to the state where most distros support a sensible baseline that makes it fairly straight forward to package software in a distribution neutral format. Then people could go to mozilla.com, download firefox-3.lsb, double-click and install.
world peace, a perpetual motion device and a pony?
Yeah, that's more like it.
Look, you and I and most of the people on/. would find the incentives you listed above sufficient. But that is mostly because we are already quite familiar and comfortable with computers and using different interfaces.
However, for someone who has a life doing something entirely different as their work and hobby thinks of computers as tools. If they are currently familiar and comfortable with how things work in Windows and know how to use win apps, you need to overcome the friction that a switch would cause. While Linux has gotten better over the years (and something like Ubuntu Hardy would be a slam-dunk win over something like win3.11) there is still the fact that they would need to relearn how to use the computer just to do the same things that they do today.
Fr example, for someone in a decently high paying job and time comittments to family and social activities the cost isn't a big deal. Their time is more valuable to them than the money they might save.
No, but you'll be able to get away with changing only the motherboard, not the entire computer.
Yup, I definitely see Aunt Tilley wielding a screwdriver heads down in the PC cabinet swapping the mobo. Or editing modules.conf and wget;tar -zxvf;configure;make;make install to get the wifi driver working. Saving 500$ a year will make her want to take the time to learn how to do that. [/sarcasm]
I really wish some sensible judge would take a long hard look at that particular situation. Most jurisdictions give the owner of a copy of a piece of software the right to make whatever temporary copies he needs (i.e., installing to disk, loading to ram) to make use of the program.
So if I have legally acquired a CD with software, I should not need to agree to some EULA to get the right to install and run it - the law already gives me that right.
The software makers' argument is that they are just licensing the right to use instead of selling copies, but that arguments seems rather silly and obviously counter to the intent of the law.
There is an interesting, and as far as I'm aware still open, question of whether some legal systems actually have a provision for permanently and irrevocably contributing works that fall under copyright to the public domain.
Donating to the public domain was a gray area in copyright law last time I looked into it. From what I remember, the main problem stems from a Berne copyright treaty that makes it difficult if not impossible for the author to abandon the "ideal"/moral rights to his work. The US only pays lip service to this treaty, so it should not cause problems for public domain dedication in the US of A. Creative Commons and Lessig looked into this, afair. A google might show up something on the topic from them. Anyway, the CC Public Domain dedication license has a note to the effect that it isn't necessarily valid outside the US.
Similar concerns apply to open source licences.
Depends on the particular license. GPL requires consideration, so I don't see what the particular problem might be there. Same, afaik, with other foss licenses that require some sort of reprosity in return for giving others the right to modify/redistribute.
Fair enough. I like that the intent of F/OSS is protected. I dislike when F/OSS it essentially taken "secret" and away from the public.
If ever there was a way to "steal" intellectual property, the BSD license enables and allows it.
Depends on the goal for the software. If you put something out there and want to enforce that anyone doing changes to it gives back to the commons then GPL is the way (or potentially LGPL if you are fine with other software linking to your library but want any changes to the library back to the commons).
If you want to provide a reference implementation usable by anyone, BSD makes more sense. Say f.ex. if you want to promoting some standard because your business model depends on this standard being adopted by as many as possible, releasing a reference implementation as BSD can be a smart move. The early BSD TCP/IP stack is one example of this, which enabled many operating systems to get a reasonably mature ip stack up and running in fairly short order.
Kinda depends on the definition. Some of the technorati won't consider something bricked until it is literally physically broken and beyond repair. Some include situations that requires hardware intervention (e.g., desoldering and swapping a SMT-mounted ROM), or specialized tools with limited availability (e.g., special reflash equipment only available to the manufacturer of the device) to fix it.
From what I can gather from a quick skim of lkml, it is a bit uncertain as to how bricked these cards are - that is, if the fw is broken to the point where it can be reflashed over the pci bus or not. And the fw is corrupted in different ways, so some might be recoverable and some might not without special equipment.
Until Intel comes out with a working reflash tool, I suppose the cards can be considered as being in a brickedness superposition since it is not yet clear if they are fixable or not.
On the other hand, members of the iCrowd seems to think that "bricked" = "loss of some functionality".
The truth is that atom gives you 100% of the functionality you need 99% of the time.
Truth.
I was slightly dubious at first, mostly due to benchmarks and marketing casting doubt on the atom's suitability for more than mid/umpc/subnetbook use but my experience with the aspire one a110l is similar. Most tasks you would want to use a *nix laptop for run at perfectly adequate speed on the atom; the performance takes a dive if you start hitting the ssd or swap hard, but that's more an issue of enough RAM and disk io speed and has nothing to do with the atom.
I'm in the process of setting it up as a part-time myth frontend too so it can do double duty as media center and portable lappy. So far it looks perfectly capable of dealing with SD content streaming from my backend as long as I watch what background processes are running at the same time.
Asus Eee PC (at least the 901, the first Atom processor model) has a "rotatable screen," at least in the software sense. Hit Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow and it goes into portrait mode. Hit Ctrl-Alt-DownArrow and it will even flip upside-down.
As far as I know, that should be possible for every display provided that the X driver for the gfx card has proper xrandr support.
I actually just discovered this myself a couple days ago while playing around with my new aspire one. "xrandr -o normal/left/right/inverted". Bind a hotkey to the command(s) and screen flipping should be just a keypress away.
One would need some way to flip the meaning of the touchpad/arrow keys too to make it really useful, so if someone knows of any magic xorg trick to achieve that at the same time I'd be very grateful.
If Windows worm writers want to do hardware bricking evil, there isn't exactly a lack of potential targets already out there. It is not impossible to write a program to trash firmware on many video cards, HDs, DVD drives and the like. But you do tend to have to try to be evil in these cases, not just get an address wrong.
The difference in this particular situation is that the e1000e fw got trashed by accident as opposed to by a program specifically written to do so.
Most windows malware these days are not written to do damage to hardware. They are written to send spam, sniff out passwords, do DDoS and the like so it is in the interest of the malware writer to keep the actions of the software below the user's radar instead of breaking their computers.
Slashdot Mirror
They will replace the current FFox with what is in Minefield - when it is ready.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap
Minefield is just the code-name for the trunk. You see, during development new stuff is submitted to the main branch - the trunk. This is where big changes like a new javascript engine or big changes to the html rendering engine happens.
You can download Minefield today to take a look at what is currently on the main trunk. But this code is often under heavy development and has not gone through all the testing/fixing that an official release gets. That's why they call it Minefield, it can and will blow up now and then.
When the current trunk has all the features one wants for the next version of FFox, they do a branch. They then do stability / security fixes etc on this branch (but no big new features). From his branch you then get the FFox betas/release-candidates and then eventually the shiny new FFox 4 (or 3.5 or whatever they'll call it).
3G doesn't use TDMA.
Say you have 100 phones talking to a cell tower. You need some way to multiplex, otherwise one would just have a mess with the phones talking in each other's mouths.
GSM (and related technologies like edge/gprs, and some other cellphone systems) chose time multiplexing. That is, each phone gets a set of time-slots where it can transmit and all other phones keep silent.
So the signal from your phone will look like short bursts with silence in between. For GSM that's ~200 bursts per second, which translates to badly shielded loudspeakers picking up a ~200Hz buzzing sound.
Other cell systems (like umts/hsdpa) use different multiplexing/carrier/encoding, so don't exhibit this problem (or at least, don't exhibit this problem to the same degree that GSM does).
But the 3G iPhone is also spread spectrum
Did the Jobsian distortion field make you forget that the 3G iPhone is a multi-mode GSM/EDGE/GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA phone?
The issue is mainly with GSM/EDGE/GPRS, due to it using TDMA for handling multiple access (each single handset gets about 200 timeslots per second, meaning that if you put a handset close to an unshielded speaker or similar you get a ~200Hz buzz signal induced when it is transmitting).
Set your phone to 3G-only mode, and the buzzing will be a lot less noticeable.
which creates EM pulses.
You mean, like, radio-waves? Who'd a thunk!
The buzzing is an artefact of the multiplexing system used (TDMA).
It is a product of the "any article with iPhone in the title will get many hits" effect. Makes no difference whether the article is positive or not.
The entire Ubuntu installation, configuration, and applying all updates takes less then 1/2 hr (no, I'm not exaggerating, try it) and is finished while Windows XP is still formatting the disk.
To be sort of fair to MS, if you start out with an original (non-SP2) ancient XP install CD then the process of doing all the updates is analogous to installing a Ubuntu Warty Warthog and doing dist-upgrades to Ibex.
If you are going to do many similar installs on machines with fairly similar hardware, you can build a custom install image that includes all the win* updates / drivers / 3rd party software unattend installs, etc. If you are doing one-offs on lots of different hardware then, yeah, I feel your pain; I did quite a bit of that in the Win9x era, and the amount of manual steps one is required to do is silly.
and the other drive was bought at the same time
Sequential serial numbers too, to be *really* safe, right? ;-p
"get off my lawn"
"Get off my LAN!", surely?
It's not as simple as rewriting the source or destination in a packet
Neither is ipv4 PAT/SNAT/whatever-you-call-it. While simple address rewrite is sufficient for some protocols, other things break in interesting ways unless you do special handling on a protocol by protocol basis (FTP being the obvious example).
Anyway, one is going to have to move to ipv6 some time and I don't really see how ipv4/ipv6 translators would cause much more pain than ipv4 PAT does today.
We have the same kind of problems with ipv4 Internet and ipv4 clients sitting behind pat/napt/snat/masquerade.
Just like the current net where ipv4 services out there have to take into account ipv4 clients sitting behind pat, the early ipv6 net will have to take into account ipv4 clients sitting behind 6to4 translators.
However, when the cloud is finally moved over to ipv6 the clients will start to move over too and we will finally have a fully ipv6 net.
As far as I can find, the relevant RFCs (2131) say that DHCP servers "should" honour the broadcast flag, but it does not say "must".
So it seems MS is in the wrong here. Since it is not a requirement for the DHCP server to support the broadcast flag, the client should fall back to not using the flag if it receives no reply.
..only with cheap home routers that fall over and die if you stare hard at them. Most work fine if you can get replacement firmware for them though.
"Almost arbitrarily" is not my experience with wireless data, you hit a limit based on number of available frequencies (how many independent/non-interfering channels there are) and how close you can place sectors that use the same frequency band.
For mobile wireless, there is also the issue of seamless handoff between sectors/stations.
WiMAX is a lot better than old 802.11 (the .11 MAC layer was really only designed to handle home wireless networks), but I'd need some hard numbers if you want to convince me that 802.16 can scale "almost arbitrarily".
The size of the last mile pipe is meaningless as long as it is not the bottleneck. That is assuming facts not in evidence.
This is why Linux has these things called modules. You can compile them, then plug them into a running kernel (and this is the astonishing part) without needing to reboot
That works fine for pretty much any driver in somewhat recent version of Win*, too. MS fixed most of those issues with Win2K.
The reason some driver installs in Windows ask for a reboot is because they tend to include a lot of unneeded crudware (printer tray icon, background services etc).
Hell, you can even get these modules precompiled for your kernel - just like Windows
Erm.. Only if your distribution include those drivers, or if 3rd party vendors provide precompiled drivers for the specific linux kernel that you are using. A driver compiled against kernel version x.y is not guaranteed to work with kernel x.z, nor is it guaranteed to work with kernel x.y that is built with different config (ex. PAE and SMP).
Sorry, but on the point of ease of providing 3rd party drivers Windows has Linux beat. On the other hand, Linux drivers tend to be more generic (a driver for "etherchip 34x2" will typically work for all network cards that use that chip while a windows driver downloaded from Notgear more often than not won't work with a Loonksys network card even if the cards use the same chip).
I couldn't have put it better myself.
On the time ting, there is also often the case that time is often a more scarce commodity than money is. If one simply isn't into computers, it just makes sense to stay with what one already is familiar with even if it means having to buy slightly more expensive hardware and paying the microsoft tax; it is exactly the same as paying the car shop tax instead of learning how to fix the transmission myself.
Agree on 1-3.
On 4, it would help at least some if the netbook vendors picked a better distro. Just switched my aspire one to hardy netbook remix, and loving it. But doing something like that, with all the tweaks and command line mojo required to get the hardware running fine is way beyond what one can reasonably expect from the average buyer of a netbook.
Agreed on the need for distro-neutral software packaging. LSB has to get to the state where most distros support a sensible baseline that makes it fairly straight forward to package software in a distribution neutral format. Then people could go to mozilla.com, download firefox-3.lsb, double-click and install.
world peace, a perpetual motion device and a pony?
Yeah, that's more like it.
Look, you and I and most of the people on /. would find the incentives you listed above sufficient. But that is mostly because we are already quite familiar and comfortable with computers and using different interfaces.
However, for someone who has a life doing something entirely different as their work and hobby thinks of computers as tools. If they are currently familiar and comfortable with how things work in Windows and know how to use win apps, you need to overcome the friction that a switch would cause. While Linux has gotten better over the years (and something like Ubuntu Hardy would be a slam-dunk win over something like win3.11) there is still the fact that they would need to relearn how to use the computer just to do the same things that they do today.
Fr example, for someone in a decently high paying job and time comittments to family and social activities the cost isn't a big deal. Their time is more valuable to them than the money they might save.
No, but you'll be able to get away with changing only the motherboard, not the entire computer.
Yup, I definitely see Aunt Tilley wielding a screwdriver heads down in the PC cabinet swapping the mobo. Or editing modules.conf and wget;tar -zxvf;configure;make;make install to get the wifi driver working. Saving 500$ a year will make her want to take the time to learn how to do that. [/sarcasm]
EULA to use it yourself
I really wish some sensible judge would take a long hard look at that particular situation. Most jurisdictions give the owner of a copy of a piece of software the right to make whatever temporary copies he needs (i.e., installing to disk, loading to ram) to make use of the program.
So if I have legally acquired a CD with software, I should not need to agree to some EULA to get the right to install and run it - the law already gives me that right.
The software makers' argument is that they are just licensing the right to use instead of selling copies, but that arguments seems rather silly and obviously counter to the intent of the law.
There is an interesting, and as far as I'm aware still open, question of whether some legal systems actually have a provision for permanently and irrevocably contributing works that fall under copyright to the public domain.
Donating to the public domain was a gray area in copyright law last time I looked into it. From what I remember, the main problem stems from a Berne copyright treaty that makes it difficult if not impossible for the author to abandon the "ideal"/moral rights to his work. The US only pays lip service to this treaty, so it should not cause problems for public domain dedication in the US of A. Creative Commons and Lessig looked into this, afair. A google might show up something on the topic from them. Anyway, the CC Public Domain dedication license has a note to the effect that it isn't necessarily valid outside the US.
Similar concerns apply to open source licences.
Depends on the particular license. GPL requires consideration, so I don't see what the particular problem might be there. Same, afaik, with other foss licenses that require some sort of reprosity in return for giving others the right to modify/redistribute.
Fair enough. I like that the intent of F/OSS is protected. I dislike when F/OSS it essentially taken "secret" and away from the public.
If ever there was a way to "steal" intellectual property, the BSD license enables and allows it.
Depends on the goal for the software. If you put something out there and want to enforce that anyone doing changes to it gives back to the commons then GPL is the way (or potentially LGPL if you are fine with other software linking to your library but want any changes to the library back to the commons).
If you want to provide a reference implementation usable by anyone, BSD makes more sense. Say f.ex. if you want to promoting some standard because your business model depends on this standard being adopted by as many as possible, releasing a reference implementation as BSD can be a smart move. The early BSD TCP/IP stack is one example of this, which enabled many operating systems to get a reasonably mature ip stack up and running in fairly short order.
What, really "bricked" or just needing a reflash?
Kinda depends on the definition. Some of the technorati won't consider something bricked until it is literally physically broken and beyond repair. Some include situations that requires hardware intervention (e.g., desoldering and swapping a SMT-mounted ROM), or specialized tools with limited availability (e.g., special reflash equipment only available to the manufacturer of the device) to fix it.
From what I can gather from a quick skim of lkml, it is a bit uncertain as to how bricked these cards are - that is, if the fw is broken to the point where it can be reflashed over the pci bus or not. And the fw is corrupted in different ways, so some might be recoverable and some might not without special equipment.
Until Intel comes out with a working reflash tool, I suppose the cards can be considered as being in a brickedness superposition since it is not yet clear if they are fixable or not.
On the other hand, members of the iCrowd seems to think that "bricked" = "loss of some functionality".
The truth is that atom gives you 100% of the functionality you need 99% of the time.
Truth.
I was slightly dubious at first, mostly due to benchmarks and marketing casting doubt on the atom's suitability for more than mid/umpc/subnetbook use but my experience with the aspire one a110l is similar. Most tasks you would want to use a *nix laptop for run at perfectly adequate speed on the atom; the performance takes a dive if you start hitting the ssd or swap hard, but that's more an issue of enough RAM and disk io speed and has nothing to do with the atom.
I'm in the process of setting it up as a part-time myth frontend too so it can do double duty as media center and portable lappy. So far it looks perfectly capable of dealing with SD content streaming from my backend as long as I watch what background processes are running at the same time.
Asus Eee PC (at least the 901, the first Atom processor model) has a "rotatable screen," at least in the software sense. Hit Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow and it goes into portrait mode. Hit Ctrl-Alt-DownArrow and it will even flip upside-down.
As far as I know, that should be possible for every display provided that the X driver for the gfx card has proper xrandr support.
I actually just discovered this myself a couple days ago while playing around with my new aspire one. "xrandr -o normal/left/right/inverted". Bind a hotkey to the command(s) and screen flipping should be just a keypress away.
One would need some way to flip the meaning of the touchpad /arrow keys too to make it really useful, so if someone knows of any magic xorg trick to achieve that at the same time I'd be very grateful.
If Windows worm writers want to do hardware bricking evil, there isn't exactly a lack of potential targets already out there. It is not impossible to write a program to trash firmware on many video cards, HDs, DVD drives and the like. But you do tend to have to try to be evil in these cases, not just get an
address wrong.
The difference in this particular situation is that the e1000e fw got trashed by accident as opposed to by a program specifically written to do so.
Most windows malware these days are not written to do damage to hardware. They are written to send spam, sniff out passwords, do DDoS and the like so it is in the interest of the malware writer to keep the actions of the software below the user's radar instead of breaking their computers.