I suspect that most IT managers will be unaffected or even supportive of the move, as it's likely that a "3 year" licence will cost less (notionally) than a "permanent licence", yet most companies would be upgrading regularly anyway.
What intrigues me is whether they intend to do the same with home users? After all, if you're sold a computer with an OS that "expires" after a certain date, then Microsoft had better make damned sure you're going to be willing to renew your licence which means they'd genuinely have more incentive to compete against other platforms than they do today.
Does Microsoft currently care what Be does? Or QNX? Probably not. After all, they already force the vast majority of people to buy Windows. But in an environment in which Windows has to be bought, rather than is just bundled, the rivals have a way in... --
...I'd rather we just updated open source and free software licences to include an explicit ban on running it in states that have signed up to such draconian legislation.
If the people of Virginia want to be screwed by licences that effectively abolish the entire notion of fair use, then let them be screwed. The rest of us shouldn't be encouraging them. --
"It's bad" if you assume the entire free software and open software communities to be one mass that speaks with one voice and has one opinion. But that's not true. Indeed, there is a chasm between the free and open software proponents all by itself.
As an example BSD has "forked" several times. There are/were commercial, proprietry versions varying from BSDI, SunOS, NeXTStep, etc, open source versions such as Darwin, and free software versions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. There are those who feel that this is a bad thing, because it means that the energies of all those who might be involved in some congealed BSD project are split amongst several.
Others, myself included, would disagree. The forking has resulted in several first class operating systems, each excelling in a particular field and to some extent feeding off each others strengths, to a degree that might not have happened if someone had tried to manage the project centrally.
This isn't to imply that one way or another is bad. In the XEmacs vs GNUEmacs case, the situation is slightly different in that the intention of the XEmacs people was not to fork, and so the system had to be reluctantly maintained. In the BSD example, talented, intelligent, programmers felt that they could do it better, or had different project goals to the other groups.
I don't personally see forking as a bad thing in itself. It may be "inefficient", but it's rarely the case that it happens for no reason, and projects that don't fork are unlikely to attract the programmers that would want to work on the versions forking would result in in the first place.
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...you'd have been able to make a situation where every PC was a "naked" PC as part of the Microsoft antitrust case settlement. Then there wouldn't be a need to break them up, other operating systems would have a fair chance of beating MS at the installed base of APIs game, and PC manufacturers would be forced to produce more standardised equipment rather than making PCs that can only be supported in one operating system configuration.
Instead we have a situation where Microsoft can harass PC manufacturers who don't wish to play its game, and where the vast majority of PC buyers have to pay the Microsoft tax, regardless of whether they want Windows, a user friendly reliable alternative, or an open, reliable, and free speech alternative.
I'm not surprised the above wasn't the settlement. Microsoft is the company that's (found to have) violated antitrust laws, and the solution above would have "punished" "innocent" third parties. But perhaps this illustrates that the law doesn't work in this case. Microsoft can get away with harassing third parties, solutions that would punish it wont necessarily do anything about its monopoly, and solutions that would do something about the monopoly can't be implemented. --
This document is a self-contained specification of the basic protocol
for the Internet electronic mail transport. It consolidates, updates
and clarifies, but doesn't add new or change existing functionality
of the following:
(followed by a list of the existing RFCs.) Indeed, there's a little confusion as to whether it obsoletes 821, as evidenced by the following:
It obsoletes RFC 821, RFC 974, and updates RFC 1123 (replaces the
mail transport materials of RFC 1123). However, RFC 821 specifies
some features that were not in significant use in the Internet by the
mid-1990s and (in appendices) some additional transport models.
Those sections are omitted here in the interest of clarity and
brevity; readers needing them should refer to RFC 821.
So RFC821 still applies, but it's obsolete?
Most confuzzling.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
It's nice to see ACLs finally making their way to Free Unixen and with implementations that cooperate with other OS's (including those that wouldn't return the favour.)
I'm curious to know if there are similar projects being worked on for Linux, and if OpenBSD will eventually pick up the TrustedBSD work? --
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
I assume PCI will be "replaced" in the same way as ISA was "replaced" - ie we'll have motherboards with PCI replacement slots, PCI slots, and ISA slots, rather than just PCI and ISA slots as now;)
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Could someone post (and presumably gain mucho +5 informative moderation points) a quick run down of what makes Mandrake Mandrake, ie strengths, weaknesses, packaging format, level of security, that kind of thing? There's a bunch of people posting that they really like it "because it's great on the desktop" but what makes it special?
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There's a world of difference between being forced to buy food from a particular restaurant if you want to eat, and being forced to buy content from a particular TV station if you want to watch TV. One is a necessity, the other is a luxury.
Nor is it a particularly British phenomenon - if you buy a telecommunications service in the US, you're generally forced to buy services from the local Bell company even if your calls never end up being routed via them - but unlike the BBC example, you don't get to use those services yourself - I'm refering to the Universal Service Fee, which is collected from every telecommunications user and gets spent on services you wont use.
As I said though, it's voluntary. Nobody has to watch TV. And virtually everyone who does watch TV in the UK benefits from the BBC, even if they're one of the two people in the UK who never watch it. --
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There's been a recent stream of worm-style attacks on Linux, some serious, some not, that have made use of the fact that most Linux distributions, RedHat being the most prominant, are rarely secure by default. These are, to some extent, knocking Linux's reputation of being a relatively secure and reliable operating system alongside more questionable systems such as NT.
What plans does RedHat have to at least make the OS secure by default - ie have systems set up by default to not be running externally accessable servers except where users have specifically enabled (which isn't the same thing as installed), to ensure there are no default passwords, and possibly to audit some of the more critical code that makes up the system, on the OpenBSD model?
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No, I'm not. "Them" in the above sentence are the taxpayers of Texas.
I'm saying that the voters, ie the taxpayers, should pay. The voters have voted for these laws. The voters should pay for them. Stop seperating government from voters, voters have a responsibility when they go to the polls. If they elect representatives who want to impose draconian and expensive policies, then the voters must pay for those draconian and expensive policies. They should not expect others, or a minority of them who cannot form a large enough block to kick out the legislation, to pay for these contemptable policies.
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Cost: $50 to $100 million
People in Texas: 18,673,143 (Source: http://txsdc.tamu.edu/tpepp/2000_txpopprj_county.h tml)
Price per Texan: $2.67 (Rounded DOWN)
This is a ridiculous amount of money to ask from each Texan. This price includes children, who would not be able to pay this, so
you'd have to actually charge *more* than $2.67. And this is for software that you most likely would not end up using.
And herein lies the justification. The current proposal is that computer users be forced to pay for something because Texans have elected a majority of halfwits (well, if the measure passes) who believe that censorware should be compulsory.
If Texans believe that censorware is good, and thus should be compulsory, and are willing to pass draconian legislation to force the purchase of it whether they use it themselves or not let them pay for it. Indeed, not merely let them pay for it, but compensate each and every computer user who is forced to get a computer with this crap installed.
The notion that computer users should be punished not just logistically but financially for the views of the majority is outrageous. The majority wants it, the majority should pay for it. And if they don't want to pay for it, they shouldn't elect halfwits like Garcia into office.
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It's an Oranges/Apples (or rather Oranges/Orange pips) thing. xMach is a BSD Lites server based on BSDLite 4.4 running under (CMU) Mach 3.0. Mach is a microkernel providing little usable functionality by itself. It's only when you add Lites, or other servers like GNU's Hurd to it, that it starts to become useful.
I hate to say it, but this is pretty much the first thing you learn about xMach when you're told what it is! You can read up, a little, on this at http://www.xmach.org/. Links to the GNU Hurd can be obtained via http://www.gnu.org/ --
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I didn't get that sense from what I read. He said that WindowMaker is a part of GNUstep, a phrase others are interpretting as meaning it was written with GNUstep. Actually, it doesn't mean that, it's just the official window manager of the GNUstep project.
This means that while the author didn't use the GNUstep API, which arguably would be overkill for a window manager and wouldn't integrate very well, the window manager is designed to look like NeXTStep, understand that GNUStep apps are running under it, manage those GNUStep apps, etc.
OpenStep is both the name of later versions of the NextStep operating system and the API NeXT/Apple developed for the *Step environment, hence another reason for apparent confusion from anyone coming to the subject for the first time.
Essentially, this can be seen in that from 4.0 onwards, NextStep CDs were labelled "OpenStep for Mach". Mach was the underlying kernel, and an implementation of the OpenStep API sat on top of it, with a few BSD, GNU and Unix tools sitting there unacknowledged by the label. You could also get "OpenStep for NT" and even, from Sun, OpenStep for Solaris. But users generally refered to the OpenStep/Mach/BSD/GNU/Unix package as just "OpenStep".
Mac OS X is, as the article says, the latest version of the whole OpenStep/NextStep family. It's mostly a ground up rewrite, with Mach 4 replacing the older version used, a version of BSD Lites based, in turn, on FreeBSD, replacing the kernel servers that were in the NextStep Mach, the BSD/GNU userland from FreeBSD replacing NextStep's command line userland, and with a rebuilt version of the OpenStep API sitting on top of it (together with a bunch of other funky things, such as Java subsystems and other APIs to help at different levels with MacOS 9 migration.)
I felt the article was accurate, just somewhat more interested in advocacy than substance. There was an attempt to show how to install it, but frankly you need rather more than what's described in my opinion. It'll be good when someone puts together a "Linux distro" which bundles the lot together in a NextStep like way. --
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Y'know, I can't help but wonder whether international pressure is going to turn into "direct action" at some point, creating "natural disasters" that appear accidental, but are there to press the point to Presidents, Prime Ministers, etc, that the environment is an important issue.
Let's take an example. We know that global warming is going to effect Europe especially hard if it happens. Nobody knows quite what the effect will be, but one thing experts do seem to agree on is that the Gulf Stream, which provides around 30% of the heat energy to Northern Europe, will be moved by a change in temperatures and a change in the structure and mass of the polar icecaps. It seems more likely than not that the effect would be negative, the stream diverted so that it misses Europe altogether. This would make London as cold as the parts of Canada and Russia, including Moscow, it's lined up with.
How would Britain, and the rest of Europe, send a message to a hypothetical environmentally-clueless President of a country responsible for a massively disproportional share of carbon dioxide production that, for the sake of argument, announced that the greenhouse effect wasn't on his agenda and that he'd make no attempts to cut output? I guess the only way would be to manufacture an "environmental catastrophy" that would effect that country.
Example: Take the eating habits of the country with the environmentally clueless president. It might be a country that eats a lot of beef and regards it almost as its cultural diet, for instance. Suppose an outbreak of some disease were to be engineered within Europe, some disease... that most effects cows? The announcement that the disease exists could occur a few days after the outbreak, after the disease has had time to incubate and be exported to neighbouring countries. There'd be no questions raised about this - no disease is ever detected straight away, so it would appear innocent. The disease ridden cows could initially appear to be a problem in one country, and then after a fortnight or so, guaranteeing that some of the tainted product is exported to the targetted country, it could then be revealed that it had made its way over a border.
The targetted country would choose then to ban the product. But it would be too late! The disease would spread across the targetted country, and ordinary citizens would panic, their most prominant and visible foodstuff the subject of a major environmental catastrophy!
Meanwhile, during all of this fuss, as the President of the pollutor is announcing his policy on carbon dioxide emissions, the countries most likely to be effected can prod the science community to release documents showing how strong the evidence is for global warming.
Could it happen?
Naah. Europe wouldn't have the bulls. I mean balls. Oops. Put my foot in my mouth there!
(Note to moderators, readers, etc: This is humour, albiet with a serious message)
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As for testing sovereignty, I'd say the armed invasion over a decade ago, and subsequent military recapture, where the Germans send diplomats directly to
Sealand to negotiate the release of a private citizen being held as POW, is a stronger test of sovereignty than a Napster server!
Come on now! This is 2001, the age where nations and states are surfing the information superhighway to the future, riding the crest of the info-economy as they fight for their territory in the cyberworld with data-dollars, not the "old economy" way of fighting for statehood with bullets and copyright laws.
So the real question is: Does Sealand have its own ICANN approved TLD like.uk,.ca, or.tv? Surely that is the real 21st century test of whether a country can be considered sovereign!;-)
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If a user has control over their own machine, then they certainly can point their machine at a different DNS server relatively easily, no matter which platform they're running. True, a dedicated DNS server running on their own machine that can keep a list of the latest updates is more of an issue, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be a 'Click OK' installation either. Installing BIND under Unix is pretty close to that if you're using the root servers and aren't planning on running your own domain. And I don't understand why platform dependence is an issue for DNS but not for browser plugins - browser plugins are platform dependent. Extremely so, not only does each version only work under one operating system/processor combination, but they even require a specific browser!
Besides which, how is a domain TLD going to take off if the only access to it is via a browser, and a small set of supported browsers on supported platforms at best? What happens when you want to use telnet, ssh, a decent ftp client, etc?
The browser plugin idea has to be the most clueless idea to get around ICANN I've heard in a long time. It doesn't solve any problems with the minor exception of allowing that handful of people who cannot administer their own machine and aren't stuck behind a firewall to access (for reading) webpages, as long as they're using Netscape or IE, and aren't running some obscure version on an unsupported processor.
There are, what, 2 people in the entire world like that?
The real problems continue. It continues to be difficult to publicise information about how to get to the new TLDs, so people who have the new TLDs can expect not to be reached except by an elite few who know "where to get the plugin" (or what DNS server to point their system at.) And there doesn't appear to be a way of validating a particular TLD and associated registry. Who really owns.biz? There are two outfits who claim to, one of whom has been operating it for years, the other of which was just handed it by ICANN.
I can't see how this proposal can possibly work. --
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''I'm an American, I believe in the American Way,'' he said. ''I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat.''
-- Jim Allchin, inventor of a Microsoft operating system
''Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.''
-- Samuel Johnson, inventor of the dictionary
The OpenSSH project dates back to 1999, just over a year ago. And there are hints in the letter quoted that he has been trying to get Theo and others to deal with the issue for a while, to wit:
Sorry to write this to a developer mailing list. I have already
approached some OpenSSH/OpenBSD core members on this, including Markus
Friedl, Theo de Raadt, and Niels Provos, but they have chosen not to
bring the issue up on the mailing list. I am not aware of any other
forum where I would reach the OpenSSH developers, so I will post this
here.
and
Many of you are (and the initiators of the OpenSSH group certainly
should have been) well aware of the existence of the trademark. Some
of the OpenBSD/OpenSSH developers/sponsors have also received a formal
legal notice about the infringement earlier.
Some comments:
It's clear that the SSH people are making timely attempts to protect their trademarks. If this was 2005 and SSH had never spoken before on the issue, then clearly they'd be risking losing the trademark due to a failure to defend it. It is not 2005, it's 2001, little over a year since the infringment started, and we're seeing the tail end of what appears to have been a longer attempt to enforce the trademark.
It's clear also that the letter is a last resort. SSH say they have already contacted the project leaders, and the project leaders have failed to respond. Prevaricating on the project's part does not mean that SSH are the guilty party.
I'd also like to say that I think it's probably the most reasonable, polite, cease & desist letter I've ever seen posted. It patiently explains the issues, explains where harm is being done, and it proposes one thing the OpenSSH people can do to fix it, namely change the name of the project. To wit:
I would thus like to ask you to change the name OpenSSH to something
else that doesn't infringe the SSH or Secure Shell trademarks,
basically to something that is clearly different and doesn't cause
confusion.
That's all they're asking for!
Much as I detest pointless IP disputes, this one seems reasonable. They present evidence that people are confusing SSH with OpenSSH, to SSH's detriment, and they're asking for a minor change to OpenSSH, namely a change to the project name. No renaming of tools like 'ssh' is mentioned or implied. They've not waited around for years to jump on something, making it clear that they've been trying to enforce the trademark against OpenSSH for a while.
I don't see what the problem is. Theo: Change it. Secure Telnet or something to that effect would be more descriptive anyway. --
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I'm delighted that IBM have put together a driver for previously unsupported hardware, and I really don't want to sound ungrateful, but...
The MWave DSP is used on Thinkpads to provide Soundcard and modem functionality. We can get cheap PCMCIA modems for $30 on eBay. However getting decent sound card support on a MWave laptop isn't as easy - we can use the infamous Linux MWave hack, which gives us fixed rate 22.1kHz 8 bit sound which doesn't work with the majority of sound playing applications out there in my experience and which resets itself and ceases to work if the laptop is ever suspended, or get a PCMCIA Soundblaster card which is usually pricy and, to the best of my knowledge will have exactly the same problem with low sound quality => poor compatability. In short, why concentrate on the largely redundant modem functionality?
I'm glad IBM are supporting the last set of Thinkpads to come with MWave chipsets, but given there are almost certainly many, many, more Thinkpads and Aptivas out there with the older chipsets, is support coming for those machines? I couldn't see anything to suggest so.
I guess it's a matter of priorities, but... I wonder whether enough documentation exists that would allow a reasonable programmer to implement the missing functionality using the IBM driver as a base? --
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So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no
matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.
There are two types of Winmodem, modems that have most of the logic in the "PC space" of the modem, and those that have most of the logic in the "Modem" space of the modem. Usually, the logic is in the "PC space", that's why they're cheap - instead of having an expensive DSP do the work of turning raw PCM into V.32/34/90/22/etc/*, the Pentium does it. This is cheap. It also means that the performance of the PC itself suffers, but adds as small compensation the fact that the data doesn't have to flow from the modem to the PC post-decoding, ie it's ready for the PC to use right away, reducing latency.
In IBM's case, this model is not what's being used. The MWave is a DSP. So the "cheap" argument goes out of the window, except in that IBM recognised that a DSP could be used for multiple applications, and originally the MWave chipset was implemented by them exactly that way. My TP 760XD for instance uses the MWave chipset to provide both modem functionality and 16 bit soundcard support. Latency isn't likely to be a problem as the communications between the DSP and the "PC space" is much tighter than it is with a conventional modem, which usually goes via a real or imagined serial link controlled by a conventional UART chipset. So latency is going to be better than it would be with a real modem, but not as good as it would be with a conventional Winmodem.
Essentially you could say there are three types of modem: Conventional, open, serial modems, which will work with everything at a minor latency tradeoff, Winmodems, which will only work with the operating systems (or rather system, support for non DOS Windows based operating systems is rare, and that includes other Microsoft operating systems such as NT) supported by the manufacturer, and will slow down your computer's performance with a small advantage in the latency stakes, and Other Proprietry Modems, such as the IBM MWave set-up, where you still have the problem that the OS has to be supported by the manufacturer, but neither reduced performance or latency are real issues.
On the face of it, if someone could invent a generic device driver mechanism, or even just force, somehow, manufacturers to produce open source drivers, IBM's approach would probably be quite good. As it is, a year or so after IBM started this project we have a driver that only addresses the modem side of the MWave and only works with the later, less popular, Thinkpads. I'd have rather they worked on the soundcard functionality, a good PCMCIA Modem costs less than $30 on eBay these days. Grumble. --
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Anyone who feels this demonstrates a seedier side to the insurance industry should know that this kind of thing is nothing new. As an example, when the AIDS scare broke in the late eighties, various Insurance companies started to disqualify people from being covered if they'd ever received an AIDS/HIV test.
Note: Read the last sentence twice because I know most of you read it wrong the first time. I didn't write if they'd ever failed an AIDS/HIV test. I mean literally, if someone had gone to the doctor worried about HIV, had a test, been given the all clear, and had subsequently tried to apply for life or health coverage, they'd be turned down.
The reasoning behind this logic? Well, anyone who'd be worried about getting AIDS must be living an at-risk lifestyle.
Oh, for the benefit of the usual trolls who post on how this just proves that, once again, the "socialist" UK has a dreadful human rights record, compared to the free market US could I point out that the type of insurance we're talking about here is pretty much a free market in the UK, regulated no more than it is in the US.
What we're seeing here is the usual self-interest run amok that keeps profits up and prices low at the expense of fundamental freedoms. In this case, at least in Britain people will get health insurance from the state, and can seriously embarrass the government, to the point of risking it being toppled in an election, if a government ever decides to refuse health coverage on the grounds of ill health. It's not perfect, but it does, in this case, guarantee privacy and fairness where it matters.
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Erm, Plan9 isn't actually based around WORM storage. It's just that some capabilities of the whole system are done by
special servers. No need to keep several gigs of mass storage in every workstation, just a central file server. (Or SMP
workstations, just us a cpu server, etc.)
Agreed.
The Amiga-comparison is a little bit shaky, as it never was meant for networks, which is the prime concept of Plan9 ("Build
a Unix out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little Unixes").
Actually, the original Amiga (in this instance, compare with the "Dreamcast" part of the proposal) was intended as a games console, and the basis for AmigaOS, Tripos, (compare with the Inferno/Plan 9 part of the proposal) was originally developed as a network distributed operating system. Which is partially why AmigaOS is so IPC based, with files read by sending packets to handlers that send packets to device drivers which, ok, is all hidden from you because you'd use dos.library anyway to hide the details of what was going on underneath.
Most users never got to saw AmigaOS as a network based operating system because Amiga didn't include any networking hardware until late in the day and left the networking side of the operating system out of AmigaOS.
I'd see the Dreamcast with a kick-arse OS, be it Plan 9 or Inferno, neither of which I've delved into beyond the documentation so can't comment too much on, or AROS, Be, Athena, etc, as being a potentially hot, nice to program, cheap multimedia console. There's no such thing on the market at the moment. It'd be wonderful to see one come out. --
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
I mean, let's face it, if someone could persuade Sega to put it into production again, but with a keyboard, mouse, some sort of storage (hmmm, Plan 9 is based around WORM storage, wonder how much WORM drives are these days? Mind you, a CD-RW might be able to do much the same for less), you'd have a system that would rock.
I'd buy one. --
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
"A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky". Well, maybe they're not so
well paid, but I don't reckon someone working a menial job is going to have less free time than a pro geek.
You'd be surprised. Speaking with people in our data checking department in my company, which employs the largest number of low-paid workers in our business, it's clear that the vast majority have second and sometimes even third jobs. I was at a coffee/bagel place a few months ago and got talking to the waitress. She saw nothing unusual in that she would be working 12 hours that day, and had jobs that kept her working 7 days a week.
I'm not saying everyone on minimum wage works like this. But it's interesting that of those who don't that I personally know, I'd put them as "hackers in another context." Example: The PADI dive instructor I know, who makes minimum wage as a dive store clerk, works relatively "normal" hours, but is clearly in it because the minimal overtime (instructing) is something he loves doing.
I rated the article as being +5 Insightful, not for what it told the rest of the world about hackers, but the comments that ought to have made a few slashdotters who make the usual comments about how anyone on minimum wage can afford to do anything and have time to do anything else and if you don't like a job, well, you can just quit it and find a better one step back and think a bit.
That said, one of the examples, the taxi driver, is maybe off base as well. Majority of taxi drivers I've met also fit into Salon's hacker ethic. Again they're doing a job they like, and do the overtime for the job as well as the money.
We're pretty lucky when it comes down to it. How many dive instructors, taxi drivers, or Slashdot reading computer programmers would swap for a collection of jobs at McDs/bagel houses, data cleaning services, and house cleaning maid services?
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Slashdot Mirror
What intrigues me is whether they intend to do the same with home users? After all, if you're sold a computer with an OS that "expires" after a certain date, then Microsoft had better make damned sure you're going to be willing to renew your licence which means they'd genuinely have more incentive to compete against other platforms than they do today.
Does Microsoft currently care what Be does? Or QNX? Probably not. After all, they already force the vast majority of people to buy Windows. But in an environment in which Windows has to be bought, rather than is just bundled, the rivals have a way in...
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If the people of Virginia want to be screwed by licences that effectively abolish the entire notion of fair use, then let them be screwed. The rest of us shouldn't be encouraging them.
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As an example BSD has "forked" several times. There are/were commercial, proprietry versions varying from BSDI, SunOS, NeXTStep, etc, open source versions such as Darwin, and free software versions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. There are those who feel that this is a bad thing, because it means that the energies of all those who might be involved in some congealed BSD project are split amongst several.
Others, myself included, would disagree. The forking has resulted in several first class operating systems, each excelling in a particular field and to some extent feeding off each others strengths, to a degree that might not have happened if someone had tried to manage the project centrally.
This isn't to imply that one way or another is bad. In the XEmacs vs GNUEmacs case, the situation is slightly different in that the intention of the XEmacs people was not to fork, and so the system had to be reluctantly maintained. In the BSD example, talented, intelligent, programmers felt that they could do it better, or had different project goals to the other groups.
I don't personally see forking as a bad thing in itself. It may be "inefficient", but it's rarely the case that it happens for no reason, and projects that don't fork are unlikely to attract the programmers that would want to work on the versions forking would result in in the first place.
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Instead we have a situation where Microsoft can harass PC manufacturers who don't wish to play its game, and where the vast majority of PC buyers have to pay the Microsoft tax, regardless of whether they want Windows, a user friendly reliable alternative, or an open, reliable, and free speech alternative.
I'm not surprised the above wasn't the settlement. Microsoft is the company that's (found to have) violated antitrust laws, and the solution above would have "punished" "innocent" third parties. But perhaps this illustrates that the law doesn't work in this case. Microsoft can get away with harassing third parties, solutions that would punish it wont necessarily do anything about its monopoly, and solutions that would do something about the monopoly can't be implemented.
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Most confuzzling.
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I'm curious to know if there are similar projects being worked on for Linux, and if OpenBSD will eventually pick up the TrustedBSD work?
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I assume PCI will be "replaced" in the same way as ISA was "replaced" - ie we'll have motherboards with PCI replacement slots, PCI slots, and ISA slots, rather than just PCI and ISA slots as now ;)
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Could someone post (and presumably gain mucho +5 informative moderation points) a quick run down of what makes Mandrake Mandrake, ie strengths, weaknesses, packaging format, level of security, that kind of thing? There's a bunch of people posting that they really like it "because it's great on the desktop" but what makes it special?
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Nor is it a particularly British phenomenon - if you buy a telecommunications service in the US, you're generally forced to buy services from the local Bell company even if your calls never end up being routed via them - but unlike the BBC example, you don't get to use those services yourself - I'm refering to the Universal Service Fee, which is collected from every telecommunications user and gets spent on services you wont use.
As I said though, it's voluntary. Nobody has to watch TV. And virtually everyone who does watch TV in the UK benefits from the BBC, even if they're one of the two people in the UK who never watch it.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
What plans does RedHat have to at least make the OS secure by default - ie have systems set up by default to not be running externally accessable servers except where users have specifically enabled (which isn't the same thing as installed), to ensure there are no default passwords, and possibly to audit some of the more critical code that makes up the system, on the OpenBSD model?
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I'm saying that the voters, ie the taxpayers, should pay. The voters have voted for these laws. The voters should pay for them. Stop seperating government from voters, voters have a responsibility when they go to the polls. If they elect representatives who want to impose draconian and expensive policies, then the voters must pay for those draconian and expensive policies. They should not expect others, or a minority of them who cannot form a large enough block to kick out the legislation, to pay for these contemptable policies.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
If Texans believe that censorware is good, and thus should be compulsory, and are willing to pass draconian legislation to force the purchase of it whether they use it themselves or not let them pay for it. Indeed, not merely let them pay for it, but compensate each and every computer user who is forced to get a computer with this crap installed.
The notion that computer users should be punished not just logistically but financially for the views of the majority is outrageous. The majority wants it, the majority should pay for it. And if they don't want to pay for it, they shouldn't elect halfwits like Garcia into office.
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I hate to say it, but this is pretty much the first thing you learn about xMach when you're told what it is! You can read up, a little, on this at http://www.xmach.org/. Links to the GNU Hurd can be obtained via http://www.gnu.org/
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This means that while the author didn't use the GNUstep API, which arguably would be overkill for a window manager and wouldn't integrate very well, the window manager is designed to look like NeXTStep, understand that GNUStep apps are running under it, manage those GNUStep apps, etc.
OpenStep is both the name of later versions of the NextStep operating system and the API NeXT/Apple developed for the *Step environment, hence another reason for apparent confusion from anyone coming to the subject for the first time.
Essentially, this can be seen in that from 4.0 onwards, NextStep CDs were labelled "OpenStep for Mach". Mach was the underlying kernel, and an implementation of the OpenStep API sat on top of it, with a few BSD, GNU and Unix tools sitting there unacknowledged by the label. You could also get "OpenStep for NT" and even, from Sun, OpenStep for Solaris. But users generally refered to the OpenStep/Mach/BSD/GNU/Unix package as just "OpenStep".
Mac OS X is, as the article says, the latest version of the whole OpenStep/NextStep family. It's mostly a ground up rewrite, with Mach 4 replacing the older version used, a version of BSD Lites based, in turn, on FreeBSD, replacing the kernel servers that were in the NextStep Mach, the BSD/GNU userland from FreeBSD replacing NextStep's command line userland, and with a rebuilt version of the OpenStep API sitting on top of it (together with a bunch of other funky things, such as Java subsystems and other APIs to help at different levels with MacOS 9 migration.)
I felt the article was accurate, just somewhat more interested in advocacy than substance. There was an attempt to show how to install it, but frankly you need rather more than what's described in my opinion. It'll be good when someone puts together a "Linux distro" which bundles the lot together in a NextStep like way.
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Let's take an example. We know that global warming is going to effect Europe especially hard if it happens. Nobody knows quite what the effect will be, but one thing experts do seem to agree on is that the Gulf Stream, which provides around 30% of the heat energy to Northern Europe, will be moved by a change in temperatures and a change in the structure and mass of the polar icecaps. It seems more likely than not that the effect would be negative, the stream diverted so that it misses Europe altogether. This would make London as cold as the parts of Canada and Russia, including Moscow, it's lined up with.
How would Britain, and the rest of Europe, send a message to a hypothetical environmentally-clueless President of a country responsible for a massively disproportional share of carbon dioxide production that, for the sake of argument, announced that the greenhouse effect wasn't on his agenda and that he'd make no attempts to cut output? I guess the only way would be to manufacture an "environmental catastrophy" that would effect that country.
Example: Take the eating habits of the country with the environmentally clueless president. It might be a country that eats a lot of beef and regards it almost as its cultural diet, for instance. Suppose an outbreak of some disease were to be engineered within Europe, some disease... that most effects cows? The announcement that the disease exists could occur a few days after the outbreak, after the disease has had time to incubate and be exported to neighbouring countries. There'd be no questions raised about this - no disease is ever detected straight away, so it would appear innocent. The disease ridden cows could initially appear to be a problem in one country, and then after a fortnight or so, guaranteeing that some of the tainted product is exported to the targetted country, it could then be revealed that it had made its way over a border.
The targetted country would choose then to ban the product. But it would be too late! The disease would spread across the targetted country, and ordinary citizens would panic, their most prominant and visible foodstuff the subject of a major environmental catastrophy!
Meanwhile, during all of this fuss, as the President of the pollutor is announcing his policy on carbon dioxide emissions, the countries most likely to be effected can prod the science community to release documents showing how strong the evidence is for global warming.
Could it happen?
Naah. Europe wouldn't have the bulls. I mean balls. Oops. Put my foot in my mouth there!
(Note to moderators, readers, etc: This is humour, albiet with a serious message)
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So the real question is: Does Sealand have its own ICANN approved TLD like .uk, .ca, or .tv? Surely that is the real 21st century test of whether a country can be considered sovereign! ;-)
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
Besides which, how is a domain TLD going to take off if the only access to it is via a browser, and a small set of supported browsers on supported platforms at best? What happens when you want to use telnet, ssh, a decent ftp client, etc?
The browser plugin idea has to be the most clueless idea to get around ICANN I've heard in a long time. It doesn't solve any problems with the minor exception of allowing that handful of people who cannot administer their own machine and aren't stuck behind a firewall to access (for reading) webpages, as long as they're using Netscape or IE, and aren't running some obscure version on an unsupported processor.
There are, what, 2 people in the entire world like that?
The real problems continue. It continues to be difficult to publicise information about how to get to the new TLDs, so people who have the new TLDs can expect not to be reached except by an elite few who know "where to get the plugin" (or what DNS server to point their system at.) And there doesn't appear to be a way of validating a particular TLD and associated registry. Who really owns .biz? There are two outfits who claim to, one of whom has been operating it for years, the other of which was just handed it by ICANN.
I can't see how this proposal can possibly work.
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-- Jim Allchin, inventor of a Microsoft operating system
''Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.''
-- Samuel Johnson, inventor of the dictionary
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
- It's clear that the SSH people are making timely attempts to protect their trademarks. If this was 2005 and SSH had never spoken before on the issue, then clearly they'd be risking losing the trademark due to a failure to defend it. It is not 2005, it's 2001, little over a year since the infringment started, and we're seeing the tail end of what appears to have been a longer attempt to enforce the trademark.
- It's clear also that the letter is a last resort. SSH say they have already contacted the project leaders, and the project leaders have failed to respond. Prevaricating on the project's part does not mean that SSH are the guilty party.
I'd also like to say that I think it's probably the most reasonable, polite, cease & desist letter I've ever seen posted. It patiently explains the issues, explains where harm is being done, and it proposes one thing the OpenSSH people can do to fix it, namely change the name of the project. To wit: That's all they're asking for!Much as I detest pointless IP disputes, this one seems reasonable. They present evidence that people are confusing SSH with OpenSSH, to SSH's detriment, and they're asking for a minor change to OpenSSH, namely a change to the project name. No renaming of tools like 'ssh' is mentioned or implied. They've not waited around for years to jump on something, making it clear that they've been trying to enforce the trademark against OpenSSH for a while.
I don't see what the problem is. Theo: Change it. Secure Telnet or something to that effect would be more descriptive anyway.
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- The MWave DSP is used on Thinkpads to provide Soundcard and modem functionality. We can get cheap PCMCIA modems for $30 on eBay. However getting decent sound card support on a MWave laptop isn't as easy - we can use the infamous Linux MWave hack, which gives us fixed rate 22.1kHz 8 bit sound which doesn't work with the majority of sound playing applications out there in my experience and which resets itself and ceases to work if the laptop is ever suspended, or get a PCMCIA Soundblaster card which is usually pricy and, to the best of my knowledge will have exactly the same problem with low sound quality => poor compatability. In short, why concentrate on the largely redundant modem functionality?
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I'm glad IBM are supporting the last set of Thinkpads to come with MWave chipsets, but given there are almost certainly many, many, more Thinkpads and Aptivas out there with the older chipsets, is support coming for those machines? I couldn't see anything to suggest so.
I guess it's a matter of priorities, but... I wonder whether enough documentation exists that would allow a reasonable programmer to implement the missing functionality using the IBM driver as a base?--
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
In IBM's case, this model is not what's being used. The MWave is a DSP. So the "cheap" argument goes out of the window, except in that IBM recognised that a DSP could be used for multiple applications, and originally the MWave chipset was implemented by them exactly that way. My TP 760XD for instance uses the MWave chipset to provide both modem functionality and 16 bit soundcard support. Latency isn't likely to be a problem as the communications between the DSP and the "PC space" is much tighter than it is with a conventional modem, which usually goes via a real or imagined serial link controlled by a conventional UART chipset. So latency is going to be better than it would be with a real modem, but not as good as it would be with a conventional Winmodem.
Essentially you could say there are three types of modem: Conventional, open, serial modems, which will work with everything at a minor latency tradeoff, Winmodems, which will only work with the operating systems (or rather system, support for non DOS Windows based operating systems is rare, and that includes other Microsoft operating systems such as NT) supported by the manufacturer, and will slow down your computer's performance with a small advantage in the latency stakes, and Other Proprietry Modems, such as the IBM MWave set-up, where you still have the problem that the OS has to be supported by the manufacturer, but neither reduced performance or latency are real issues.
On the face of it, if someone could invent a generic device driver mechanism, or even just force, somehow, manufacturers to produce open source drivers, IBM's approach would probably be quite good. As it is, a year or so after IBM started this project we have a driver that only addresses the modem side of the MWave and only works with the later, less popular, Thinkpads. I'd have rather they worked on the soundcard functionality, a good PCMCIA Modem costs less than $30 on eBay these days. Grumble.
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Note: Read the last sentence twice because I know most of you read it wrong the first time. I didn't write if they'd ever failed an AIDS/HIV test. I mean literally, if someone had gone to the doctor worried about HIV, had a test, been given the all clear, and had subsequently tried to apply for life or health coverage, they'd be turned down.
The reasoning behind this logic? Well, anyone who'd be worried about getting AIDS must be living an at-risk lifestyle.
Oh, for the benefit of the usual trolls who post on how this just proves that, once again, the "socialist" UK has a dreadful human rights record, compared to the free market US could I point out that the type of insurance we're talking about here is pretty much a free market in the UK, regulated no more than it is in the US.
What we're seeing here is the usual self-interest run amok that keeps profits up and prices low at the expense of fundamental freedoms. In this case, at least in Britain people will get health insurance from the state, and can seriously embarrass the government, to the point of risking it being toppled in an election, if a government ever decides to refuse health coverage on the grounds of ill health. It's not perfect, but it does, in this case, guarantee privacy and fairness where it matters.
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Most users never got to saw AmigaOS as a network based operating system because Amiga didn't include any networking hardware until late in the day and left the networking side of the operating system out of AmigaOS.
I'd see the Dreamcast with a kick-arse OS, be it Plan 9 or Inferno, neither of which I've delved into beyond the documentation so can't comment too much on, or AROS, Be, Athena, etc, as being a potentially hot, nice to program, cheap multimedia console. There's no such thing on the market at the moment. It'd be wonderful to see one come out.
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I'd buy one.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
I'm not saying everyone on minimum wage works like this. But it's interesting that of those who don't that I personally know, I'd put them as "hackers in another context." Example: The PADI dive instructor I know, who makes minimum wage as a dive store clerk, works relatively "normal" hours, but is clearly in it because the minimal overtime (instructing) is something he loves doing.
I rated the article as being +5 Insightful, not for what it told the rest of the world about hackers, but the comments that ought to have made a few slashdotters who make the usual comments about how anyone on minimum wage can afford to do anything and have time to do anything else and if you don't like a job, well, you can just quit it and find a better one step back and think a bit.
That said, one of the examples, the taxi driver, is maybe off base as well. Majority of taxi drivers I've met also fit into Salon's hacker ethic. Again they're doing a job they like, and do the overtime for the job as well as the money.
We're pretty lucky when it comes down to it. How many dive instructors, taxi drivers, or Slashdot reading computer programmers would swap for a collection of jobs at McDs/bagel houses, data cleaning services, and house cleaning maid services?
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"