Their graphical update and secondary xml files which track installed updates makes automated systems management of Helix-gnome systems a complete nightmare. I need scriptable tools. The Helix web page makes no attempt to provide easy access to the.rpm files. They use a secondary database, other than rpm, to track which packages are installed with the helix-updater. They don't document how this all works in plain english. And finally, they plan to use this system to force ads down my throat.
I'm planning a large rollout of Helix at a University, and frankly, I'm not impressed. Where do I find a complete list of updates? Where might I find those rpm files? Where is the helix-updater database located? Why is it separate from rpm? Why do I need yet another package manager???
I want scriptable tools so that I can maintain consistency across a large number of workstations. I don't need a cute GUI updater, and I DON'T want to force my userbase to manage this stuff by hand.
S-100 bus based CPM systems, such as the Altair and IMSAI, were both state of the art and very cheap (for what you got) back in those days. While a used PDP-11/03 with 32KW (64KB) and an RX02 (8" floppy) might be had for $15-20K (but was only single user) one of many S-100 systems at the time, running CPM, could support up to 4 terminals, stunning 128x128x3 color graphics with the Dazzler card, a Z80 which supported up to 64kb of ram, along with another 64kb -- bank switched, and both 8" or 5 1/4" floppy drives, plus a large 5MB Shuggart hard disk for about the same price. Spartan by today's standards, but effective.
The bus was open and actively being developed for, and modular, allowing hobbyists to build a decent small computer for under a thousand dollars, while giving the small business owner the option of adding professional hardware; letter quality daisy wheel printers with envelope feeds, a spreadsheet and word processor named VisiCalc and The Electric Pencil, repectively -- things many business owners realized they could use, even back then.
Many hobby users at the time were trading software (where the famous Gates 'You're stealing my software..." letter came from) in a bazaar like community; growth was exponential and everyone recognized the hardware was good. Plus, there was plenty of platform competition: during the late '70s, the TRS-80, Apple II, Pet 2001, and Atari 400/800 systems gained popularity as well. Then IBM and Micro-Soft wrenched everyone over to their IBM PC through sheer marketing force and monopoly business tactics -- to the detriment of the entire computing industry.
Hey, thanks for the tip. Please don't take my either/or rant personally... now that I look back on my reply I see that you might take offense at this since you didn't mention anything like that in your original post. I was responding to the vast majority of other posters who seem to see computing through polarized lenses. Whatever.
My roommate has a Sony Handycam and a Sony VIAO XG9 laptop (they come with 1394 built in), and MAN -- editing video on his laptop is so cool! I've been looking at the PowerMAC G4's strictly because of this feature. Linux isn't ready for serious film/video editing and MacOS X is looking pretty good. Yeah, I know this isn't anything like professional tools, but I can't afford $20K to start, but I can afford about ~2K. These tools are available now, and they're "good enough" to play with as an amateur.
I recently saw OS X/PR3 on a G3 Powerbook and was amazed at how similar this is to NeXTStep. As a former NeXT slab user (with a previous employer) I can't say enough about how well designed those systems were. If Apple sells an OS and hardware which closely match those old NeXT boxen, I'm ready to buy. Plus, they all (even the new iMacs!) support 1394 and video editing. Wow, a good 'nix, excellent hardware, and video production tools to boot!:-) Apple has come back with a vengence!
No, 1394 supports 100mbit, 200mbit, and 400mbit transfers, not just 200. However, even given 400mbit Ultra2LVD SCSI at a theoretical burst of 160MB/sec will beat the pants off of a serial 400mbit connection. Think about it, that's 40MB/sec without protocol overhead, and it's shared (though so is SCSI). Why do you think most external firewire drives on the market are just IDE disks with a IDE to 1394 interface? It's not because of price.
I'm about ready to buy a new system and recently looked into moving from SCSI to 1394... forget it. I still want 1394 for it's multimedia potential -- yes, those SONY Digital handycams with 1394 look real promising. But fiberchannel, 1394 ain't.
Frankly, why don't people use a two tiered approach with their systems. Folks here always degenerate the argument into an either/or debate. Either Linux or Windows, either GNOME or KDE, either IDE or SCSI; what bullshit. I use SCSI for boot and swap, and IDE for cheap storage. Do I need gigs of mp3's on a fast boot disk? No. Do I want my OS and swap on a set of chained master/slave IDE drives, with all the known contention this involves? No.
Use both to your advantage. You'll love the system speed of SCSI for what really counts, and the savings of IDE for what's a little less important.
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux.
Monterey died with the SCO sale, I suspect. There's been much hype, but I haven't read of anyone seeing a preview release. Oh well! I guess that'svaporware!
Linux will run on Itanium, and 64 bit to boot. Though I bet with a bunch of bugs. For example, Alphalinux is just a mess on SMP EV6 systems. I've seen it crash horribly on 4 CPU ES40s while performing NFS ops; looks like some sort of cross CPU spin lock contention which leads to deadlock. Yuk. But I bet it'll be fine on single CPU Itanium systems. And Linux is ubiquitous, which even at hype Monterey lacked. Plus, I suspect that between 2.4 and 2.6 we'll get the enterprise features we expect from commercial UNIX running properly on Linux; I want: decent NFS support, a functional automounter, pervasive threading throughout common system libraries and applications, a display server which supports antialiasing (actually a better display model would help -- how about "display postscript"?), and a logical volume manager... that would help.
You could probably look forward to NetBSD/OpenBSD porting to Itanium soon after release. And after that expect Sun to chime in with Solaris. But, like Solaris/Intel, I'm sure it will be a pale imitation.:-)
Any program which grabs a network socket and accepts connections from the outside world represents a potential threat from buffer overflows. Fortunately, I'm pretty certain all of these run with the permisstions of the user, so a successful crack would be limited to the user's account. Doesn't make me feel any safer though. It just doesn't make sense that the GNOME team would need open sockets for these services... why not just use a local named pipe down/tmp, for instance (which they do use)?
which operated under tight access regulations as defined in your state tarrifs for telephone service. Go to your local department of public utilities and look up phone company tarrifs, you'll see that they BY LAW cannot regulate what you do with your telephone (and by extension, your DSL connection) after the demark point in your house. Cable companies are NOT subject to these regulations.
Sure you can. But who else (except a few Linux users) cares? With IPSec I can implement either a Transport Mode or Tunnel Mode connection between Linux hosts running FreeS/WAN, OpenBSD/FreeBSD IPSec (don't know about NetBSD), Win2K and NT (using PGPNet), many CISCO (among other vendor) routers, and even MacOS X (I understand). So, it's nice that you can circumvent a stupid ISP policy which prevents protocol 50 between the hosts you use, but the rest of the world has already chosen IPSec as the standard Tunnel(VPN)/Transport Mode IP level encryption standard. This policy will prevent sane IP level encryption for many services beyond just employees logging into work from home.
Hell, with Transport Mode IPSec one could securely telnet to a remote host WITHOUT ANY CLIENT MODIFICATIONS or end user re-training. The same is true for web connections... no more SSL negotiations and key certification nonsense for the web, ssh and config files for secure telnet, some new "secure" protocol for ftp, etc etc etc, all handled with different configurations, incompatible key management protocols, and separate encryption libs... this should all be standardized under the hood at the IP level for the sake of consistency alone; (consistency increases security by reducing unnecessary complexity). @Home just made a colossally stupid blunder here... which will come back to bite them in the ass.
The reasons for restricting VPN traffic and restricting ip-masq are completely different.
ip-masq: They would restrict this if they wanted to sell you more IP numbers.
VPN: They would restrict this if they wanted to charge you BUSINESS rates for telecommuting.
They can't possibly detect ip-masq. They could only detect VPN with a lot of effort.
You're absolutely right that the reason for this is to charge extra for "business" uses of the connection. However, detecting IPSec is a snap. All the need do is enact a filter for protocol 50 in the IP header of any inbound or outbound packet and discard. Bye bye IPSec connection.
This is a terrible precident because long term it prevents the use of ubiquitous point-point Transport Mode IPSec, which is the whole point behind the IPSec standard. Sure, it's neat to make tunnels to work, but in the long term the IPSec community wants to create a mechanism to secure ALL IP traffic. This blows that goal right out of the water.
Also, are they going to start limiting SSH service to my employer? Can I telnet to my employer? Where do they draw the line between "personal use" and "business use"? If my cable modem provider pulls these tricks they'll lose a customer.
Given the choice, you could spend (pulling figures from thin air)$10 million to generate $30 million in sales, or spen $15 million to generate $35 million in sales. It really makes no sense to continue the later course of action. You'd end up with higher margins (what wall street and investors care about) and end up with exactly the same amount of money as if you never even thought about Linux in the first place.
While many (usually larger) companies limit their foresight to the quarterly revenue report, this kind of logic makes sense only if one assumes the desktop market for Linux is saturated and won't grow large enough to sustain reasonable profits over the next four to eight quarters. Of course, no company worth their salt would invest in a break even market unless there was ample reason to assume growth in the near future. Given the dramatic increase in Linux desktop users (significantly more desktop than server installs -- even though the market penetration percentage wise is larger in the server market) knowing the game market has hit break even in a MAJOR milestone.
I've bought five Loki titles, UT, and just recently Terminus (with Linux support); I expect to buy Alpha Centauri and Sim City once they're released (Loki -- please port The Sims!). I don't run Windows, so if you're a game manufacturer and you want my $$$$ you better code for my platform. Yes, I'll gladly pay extra for the same title released months previously for Windows, because this is a seed market and I want my platform to enjoy success; anyway, it's my moeny. Give it two more years and if Loki, Id, et all are still making chump change then maybe it was a bad bet. Right now, they'd be INSANE to cede the Linux market this early on given it's long term potential.
Jeesh, I just went through the trouble to install 4.74; pesky executable jpegs. Boy, this makes me want IE through wine, even though I know ceding the browser market to Microsoft will result in ceding the server market.
Somewhere people are betting over which finishes first: Mozilla 1.0 release, or wine progressing well enough to run IE reliably.
Shit! This is not the sort of gamble any serious Freenix or UNIX user would want to take....
I assumed 8 bit color. If you're assuming 16 bit color, or 65k colors, it's going to eat 1MB of RAM, not 128k (which would be a 2bit or 4 color display).
Gee, and here I thought they put memory on the video cards so you don't need to use system memory.
You thought wrong. Videoram exists to increase bandwidth from the video accelerator chip to framebuffer RAM. One must still allocate system RAM to represent the many things which don't live in framebuffer space. For example: minimized windows, additional desktops, application shared memory, etc etc etc. In addition, since X lives in userspace, it allocates memory to represent the framebuffer as well.
Mr. Gettys is talking about a handheld which has a screen size of a quarter vga device, or about 320x200. While the actual X server and X libraries may fit into ~1MB after squeezing out a little bloat, the X server will still have to allocate memory to represent the display (and any virtual displays). For an 8-bit 320x200 display that comes out to 512k of ram... combine the two and one really consumes about 1.5mb of ram for display; not too shabby since most handhelds today have between 8MB to 16MB of RAM; some ship with even more. Now compare that to your desktop with a 16MB Voodoo 3 card and 4 to 8 virtual screens running at 1280x1024x32 bit and suddenly X looks horribly bloated because the X server has grabbed huge sums of RAM. Well, duh -- what's the X server supposed to do? Think Windows or MacOS could avoid that requirement?
Really, this whole complaint about X being bloated is overblown. We used to call X terribly bloated on Sun 3/50 workstations (back in '87-'88 or so) with 4MB of RAM. Well, we were right. But with modern hardware this is simply a non-issue. You want tiny? Go buy yourself a C-64 and run GEM.
I've been told many times over my life "America: love it or leave it". I'm thinking these days, perhaps I may end up doing both.. A country like the Netherlands, where they've a history of tolerance and freedom and a large percentage of English-fluency, seems like an ideal candidate.. Every time I go back there (Amsterdam, Den Haag) it seems more and more attractive.. Lots of IT jobs, relatively inexpensive housing (compared to NY/SF), great food/culture/people..
I agree. Currently I'm living in Cambridge, MA working for MIT... but the cost of living here is outrageous and even with my hi-tech salary I could never afford to buy a house without moving so far away I'd have a long commute. But I could deal with these things if my local and federal government were in the least accountable to the citizenry. America (and the world) is quickly degenerating toward a pseudo-corporate dictatorship which resembles more fascism (in the original sense of the word) than representative democracy. I don't mind paying taxes if I think the money is well spent, but we've spent the last twenty years cost shifting the tax burden down to the middle class while creating huge tax loopholes for the wealthy and corporate elite. Let's be specific about how the tax burden has been downshifted from the wealthy to the middle class over the last twenty years:
Reduction to overall removal of capital gains taxes. Who does this most benefit?
Corporate tax loopholes inserted as riders in unrelated legislation throughout our tax code. Many American corporations pay NO TAXES AT ALL. Some even get refunds on no taxes paid. Who do you think benefits most from farm subsidies, ADM or the family farmer? Who benefits from state tax codes which give tax credits to attract business only to have the company up and move out when the benefit runs out and the next state ponies up? Who benefits from tax money paid out to sports teams in order to build new stadiums? Not me.
a HUGE military budget spent on mostly useless goods (think SDI, unnecessary ships ordered against NAVY budgetary requests), wars fought for oil tycoons (who might be president). Here's a news story for you... Peru and Columbia have some of the largest oil reserves in the Americas... now why do you think we're fighting a "drug war" down there???
Yes, I consider my tax dollars wasted away, when we could be building new infrastructure, providing medical care for our citizens, and decent free education for our youth. And when my right wing friends goad me with "well why don't you move then if you don't like it here" I'm beginning to think they're right. Maybe Costa Rica would be a better place to live... and Amsterdam certainly has the kind of society I'd prefer to live in (though not the climate)... there ARE better places in which to live than the USA. I think it's time to plan an emigration... and if enough tax paying citizens agree maybe our politicians might finally get the idea that our citizenry is rightly pissed off with paying taxes for no social gain. I want to live in a society not a social darwinist trap designed to prop up the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
These kids never saw a recession
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Selfish Society
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Having (attempted) to work through the '89-'91 recession and having lived as a kid through the '72-'74 and '81-'83 recessions I must assume these kids just aren't prepared for the eventual economic kick in the ass.
Yes, it's true that most young technology savvy kids assume that the now (supposedly) wonderful economy is somehow dependent on their brains and success, but it isn't so. Nor will technology workers be responsible when the next recession hits, these are cyclical effects more dependent on Federal Reserve policy and exchange rates than anything else.
Yes, it's true that computers have increased efficiency for most businesses by automating much office paperwork and accounting away. But these gains in efficiency will go only so far until we hit the next wall of automation. At that point I expect to see GDP growth fall back, and possibly even a recession to hit. We're well due for one soon... GET PREPARED!
And, maybe after going through this and possibly losing your house, a marriage from the stress, or some other setback, you kids might begin to understand that those with hot skills from twenty years back are no more or less intelligent than you. That you've lived young through todays market gains is more a matter of luck than a sign of (social) evolutionary success. And maybe after you've had to care for a dying parent (and seen for yourself how poor Medicare/Medicaid is for our citizens), or stepped into a city school to meet your child's frazzled out teacher because (s)he has a class size of nearly 40 pupils, or walked along one of the many bridges which are literally crumbling from lack of repairs... maybe then you'll realize that these gains are illusion for the vast majority of American citizens.
That your skills are in demand today isn't proof they will be in demand tomorrow. That you're successful today doesn't mean lean times ahead are avoided for certain. That you're healthy today doesn't mean your health will remain (in fact, given enough time it's certain to fade). PREPARE YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY! And consider the many citizens of America who had to grow up with substandard education, poor health care, and dilapidated surroundings; that could be you but for circumstance.
We used to have a reasonable social safety net for those children who, by no fault of their own, grew up poor. After the Republican 80's and Demopublican '90s, we have none of that left. I voted for Clinton in '92 for one reason: National Health Coverage. With the Democrats and Republican platforms mirror images sans abortion, I simply can't vote for either party any longer. For these reasons, this year I'm voting Ralph Nader for President.
On the other hand, one wonders exactly how many of these cards they would actually sell simply due to a full suite of Linux drivers.
Just how big is the hardcore gamer/linuxgeek crossover? Obviously they're the most VOCAL ones on the internet, and so it seems like there's bunches of them. But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc.
I can't speak for any other Linux users, but I'll sure buy the ATI Radeon if it's significantly better than the 3dfx Voodoo 5. I've got a Voodoo 3 right now, and very much wanted to purchase a GeForce 2 until I found out NVIDEA wasn't releasing hardware specs for their product. I'm not going to spend $300+ for closed hardware for which I can't get opensource drivers. Period.
Never mind the ethical dilema of supporting hardware manufacturers who "do the right thing" for us free software proponents, even if it means giving up a few features every now and then. Frankly, I'm not about to shell out that kind of cash to anyone unless I know I'll be able to support the hardware years from now when it becomes outdated. When's the last time you saw a modern driver under Windows for the GD5380, or S3/968? Telling me to buy new hardware is NOT why I run Linux/BSD.
I too will be voting for Nader in this election. I simply can't bring myself to vote for either Bore or Gush, and I'm sick of the collusion between corporate America and our political process. We have a highly corrupt government which appears to have started failing US citizens right after President Eisenhower left office (I personally think FDR and Eisenhower are the two best Presidents of the century).
Speaking as a 32 YO male who lived through the corrupt years of Reagan/Bush, who willingly (and gladly) voted for Clinton, and who has finally lost all hope with our current political process. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton will be reviled as among the worst Presidents our nation ever endured. Yes, worse than Taft.
I can tell you've never had to deal with a large cluster of PC's and UNIX workstations. Yes, NUMAs and other large shared memory SMP systems offer better memory bus bandwidth and low latency compared to clustered systems. And for an organization with a single large threaded application and money to burn this advantage might actually be worth the heavy upfront capital outlay.
Where MPI and batch clusters win is cost/performance not sheer speed and/or low latency. This is especially true for batch systems which run a single process per node and can allocate the entire data set in local RAM. Moving the data to the node over NFS takes time, but if the application is written properly the bulk of time in transforming the data will be taken up by CPU ops, not network transfers. This is how we do it in the Speech group at BBN, with a good 300+ Linux, Sun, and SGI hosts.
yeah, but how much you want to bet that the process responsible for doing the writing would be the first to go. or you'd get a process which hangs, not badly enough for the whole machine to go down, but enough to cause a reboot--too bad multitasking let that backup process do the backing up with a frozen one. oops!
Not necessarily.
Perform the copy CPU register state and RAM image to secondary RAM in hardware as an atomic operation which occers once per clock tick -- if possible, by some subdivision otherwise. From then on copy only deltas between any two states in the rest of secondary RAM like most versioned filesytems. The number of potential versions stored is limited to the size of secondary RAM and the amount of change over time, like any other cache.
It's a pretty cool idea... anyone know if some exotic hardware with these kinds of capabilities has ever been tried?
The FreeVMS project is largely dead. I do not believe that it will be able to produce a free version of VMS.
That's too bad.:-(
VMS is a damn good Operating System and programming environment which the Free Software community should attempt to replicate. Now that several good free UNIX variants have matured it only makes sense to attempt to "save" older technologies like VMS from the dustbin of history. Also, it would help us Free Software enthusiasts move away from dependency on just UNIX like operating environments. Sure, I like UNIX, but there are many advantages to VMS about which a UNIX only geek of today might never learn. VMS is a solid, highly secure OS -- to toss this technology away is plain folly.
Maybe the community should appeal to Compaq to release as much VMS source as possible under the presumption that opening it's source will reduce long term support costs. I can't imagine VMS support will remain profitable for much longer, and this would let those lingering VMS shops out there support themselves. Also, an x86 port of VMS would just rock!:-)
This is true for many of the older Digital technologies as well. I'd really like Compaq to Open the source for older PDP-11 technologies like RT-11, RSX and RSTS -- if only for their historical value. Yes, I know it's all coded in Macro-11... so what.:-)
I'm quite a leftist (I'm what you would call an anarchosyndicalist or anarchosocialist), and I totally dislike all this "save the children" bullshit. The people who spew this shit are really right-wing at heart (even though they don't know it). I'm neutral about the anti-gun stuff (I dislike both sides), but a hate all these attempts to impose censorship (even if it is against porn or nazi sites) to "save the children". This is really a religious right wing agenda. As for Clinton and Gore, they are a bunch of right-wingers in sheep's clothing. Free speech is imperative, and it must be preserved at all costs (even revolution and or civil war).
Left, Right, what difference does it make. These labels exist strictly to divide people along party lines rather than by opinions on policy. In the old Soviet Union a radical Communist would have been called a "Right Winger" while a radical Capitalist would have been a Leftist; here it's reversed. Thus proving that these labels are meaningless.
What counts is not the label assigned but specific policies, which our media do their best to obfuscate at every turn. Given these opinions, what would you call me?
After having grown up with guns I support gun rights; I think its correct to interpret the 4th amendment to presume a "right to bear arms" for all citizens. I would NOT support a registration and tracking system under federal management. However, I DO support federal regulation which would force gun manufacturers to include first gun locks, and then phase in new technologies which would only allow a owner to fire the weapon (and which would keep a record of all firings).
I support the McCain/Fiengold campaign finance reform and consider the notion that money is speech ludicrous. Frankly, I think the federal government should pay out money for candidates' advertising time in proportion to a party's previous election returns. Hell, I would support tossing our dual party system for a radical restructering; say either proportional representation, or a binding "none of the above" option on the ballot.
I support STRONG environmental laws, even to double or tripple our gas and energy taxes. Frankly, the US abuses cheap energy to the detrement of the world over -- we'd better learn to deal with limited energy availability and back serious research into new energy (say Fusion, Wind, Photovoltic, and GeoThermal, or our society is fucked).
I support abolishing the NSA and CIA immediately; on moral reasons alone. Those two organizations have committed heinous crimes the world over; the CIA is primarily responsible for most of the drugs imported in this country. See: Whiteout by Cockburn and St. Clair for a detailed expose on CIA (and pre CIA OSS) drug crimes since WWII. Why do you think we continue this fruitless drug war? Because our policicians didn't learn from Prohibition? DUH... because it funds mercenaries's weapons (manufactuered here in the US I might add), coups placing murderous thugs into political power, et all the world over. Don't want that on a line item in the yearly National budget? Let them import drugs! That's what a secret government does to a democracy... while we maintain one of the largest prison populations in the world.
This is why I support legalizing drugs and prostitution... actually one of the basic tennents of "Libertarianism", though I only support the personal rights end of that philosophy, not the radical "anti-government" side of that populist movement. Personally, when government is open I don't think it's too bad. I'd rather have the government laying roads and bridges than a private corporation... hmmmh, I'd argue that if it's a good or service required by the entire population (education, health care, public infrastructure) then I think the government and public money is the best mechanism whereby to provide the service. We don't need "proprietary" roads, bridges, schools, or health care... in fact our current HMO disaster suggests otherwise. No?
Finally, I strongly support free speech even when I'm abhored by the vileness spewed by some activists... I can't support a racist's arguments, but I must support his right to say such crap. Once (s)he steps over the line and interfere's with another's rights... well, support strong anti violence laws -- even the death penalty for repeat murderers. Nobody should argue that the death penalty is cheaper than life in prison... but to execute a known serial killer certainly makes me feel a little bit safer. Not for punishment, but execution for public safety -- nothing more.
So, where the hell am I? Right winger because I support gun rights and the death penalty, or left winger because I support strong corporate regulation, strong government services for taxpayers, and limited military/intelligence budgetary support?
I think I'm just a radical. I have my own views and I'll vote by them... I'm voting Nader this year.
Dr. Tippett is kind enough to provide us all with a complete transcript of the lies and distortions he told Congress on May 10th during the Science and Technology subcommittee hearings on the Love Bug. Here is his primary web page, and the complete transcript is available as a link right off his page.
Here are some long choice comments backing up my previous post:
Regarding ways to solve the virus problem Harris Miller astonishingly recommended:
If you want a closed system, a closed Internet where every e-mail message first goes to a central place, that someone scrubs it and makes sure there is nothing in there that is not intended for you, or makes sure that it goes through some kind of central processing system and slows the Internet down so that your messages come to you after they've been thoroughly cleaned by some third party, you can do that. You can have that kind of an Internet system.
And it's possible the Internet could be designed that way, and that's a possibility. In which case, you would have no responsibility. You would contract with this third party. And you'd say, "I don't want to get any e-mail messages until you've opened them all and you've looked at them. I realize that that means I'm going to get my e-mail messages a couple of hours later or a couple of days later, but that's the kind of e-mail system I want." You could have that kind of system, if you wanted to pay that price. What the consumers appear to want, whether it's business or individual consumers, is instant e-mail. In fact, they like this instant messaging. They want to be able to communicate the same way over the Internet they can by picking up the telephone or by having face-to-face communication. So they want things instantly, which means, unfortunately, in terms of the Internet, as I said, the openness of it also is its vulnerability, because in that Internet, there are people who are bad guys. There are people who do cyber- stalking. There are people who want to send you messages even if it's not a virus, who may want to prey on you or prey on young children.
IOW: One possible solution he recommends is to create a central authority which manages and could potentially censor ALL email on the Internet. WOW... that goes against EVERYTHING I've ever stood for as a System Administrator responsible for email traffic.
Here's another choice quote:
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE LYNN N. RIVERS (D-MI) asked this telling question to the panelists:
RIVERS: Well, thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to ask a different set of questions, because I sit here and listen to the conversation that's going on and I feel like people are dressing down the bank guards without ever looking into the fact that all the windows were unlocked in the bank building. And I think we should be looking at the fact that this virus attacked a software system that 85 percent of all e-mail handles in this -- that 85 percent of all e-mail is handled on that is essentially vulnerable to this kind of attack, it has been vulnerable to this kind of attack for some time -- it's Microsoft.
My understand is that in 1991, the Internet community set attachment standards. And at the time they recommended that there should not be any program that automatically executes attachments. Microsoft, in a desire to have some exclusivity in a proprietary way, decided to create Outlook with that ability. And in fact, we are dealing with a single software that is vulnerable to this attack, both to Melissa and to the "ILOVEYOU" virus.
And I guess I would like to talk about that. I mean, do we have a widespread problem of vulnerability across all programs and all companies? Or do we in fact have a problem with a single software: the Outlook system. And should we not be addressing our concerns to why Outlook persists in the marketplace with this kind of problem. I'd like to hear from all of you.
So at least one Congresscritter "gets" it, but the responses she received in reply should dismay anyone with a technical background:
RHODES (?): You do have a problem, and its pervasive across the infrastructure. Yes, Microsoft is an easy target because they own the market. But you have an environment where the software industry is delivering for a market.
RIVERS: My understanding, though, is the Java programs were not -- that most of the other programs were not effected by this virus. It was in fact a Microsoft-specific..
(CROSSTALK)
RHODES:... can attack through Java as well. It's not -- it's a matter of distribution based on the application as opposed to Java itself being weak, but they have a thing called the Java development tool kit, and you can establish a thing called the sandbox, and you can set up these boundaries on it. But if you open Eudora, for example, and there's a web address inside there and you move your pointer over it, you can automatically launch to that web address. That's a very pernicious event as well. But that's not due to executable code, it's due to an automatic distribution of your pointer out over the web. So it's across the industry. It just becomes more apparent in the Silicon Forest, up in Redmond, Washington, because they own the market.
So Security problems with Windows/Outlook aren't inherent in to the design of those products, just a funtion of their popularity. Riggghhhhtttt....
Here Dr. Tippett defends the necessety of executable scripts which read the Outlook address book in order to find names of others with which to send email (typical Outlook security hole which he thinks necesssary -- at least until Microsoft changed their security tune I suppose):
WEINER: I mean, I don't think I've ever got a legitimate program that, when executed, goes into my address book, opens it up and starts sending messages to my address book.
TIPPETT: Oh, au contraire, there are many, many companies that automate address book re-forwarding of things as part of their business automation process.
And Finally, they recommend outlawing the hire of "hackers" who at one time have been convicted of malicious "hacking," thus permenantly revoking one's right to pursue employment instead of just fixing the problem client side:
GUTKNECHT: Thank you, Madam Chair.
And once again I attach myself to the comments made by my colleague from New York. I mean, fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. And it seems to me, we have been fooled. And if there is a level of frustration that you're hearing from us today, it's because we've sort of been there before. I mean -- and we count on smart people like you to help solve these problems.
Dr. Tippett, I want to congratulate you for offering at least one suggestion that this committee can seriously look at, and that is some kind of legislation which makes it very clear that trying to write these kinds of viruses is a federal offense. And we ought to be very serious about it, because this is a serious offense. This is not tipping over outhouses out in the back -- you know, the out-parts of our country. I mean, that was clearly, you know -- that happened, and it still happens I suppose in some parts of the country today.
But this is a serious matter. And I want to get to something else that I think we should consider and I want you to consider, and not necessarily right now, but give us some feedback on this. Because my sense is -- and we have this on fairly good authority, it's not official -- but there's at least one federal agency that apparently is out actually recruiting computer hackers. And they're going to build their own little team to try and build a system of former -- or supposedly reformed hackers who are going to help us become more insulated.
We have an expression here at the federal level that no good deed goes unpunished. And that happens all the time -- a tax policy, marriage penalty tax, whatever you call it.
TIPPETT: My wife's favorite statement, too.
GUTKNECHT: Yes, no good deed goes unpunished. But unfortunately, I think there is sort of a growing theory. And maybe I should ask Ms. England, do you have any former hackers on your staff?
ENGLAND: No, we don't. And we basically don't hire those people.
GUTKNECHT: Well, you basically don't, but do they get hired? And I think there is a theory among some of these guys -- guys, I say that generically -- but I think there is a theory among some of them: If I'm smart enough to beat this particular system, or if I can penetrate this particular system, or whatever, that you know, the worst that's going to happen to me is that I'm going to go to jail for a few months, and I'll probably get a six-figure consulting contract from somebody.
TIPPETT: I think that -- and have stated publicly many, many, many times -- ICSA.net believes as a generic thing that hiring hackers is a bad idea for lots of reasons. One, the reason that they are hackers in the first place -- and I mean criminal hackers or malicious hackers, or crackers, to just be clear about this. The reason that they do this in the first place is because they're not thinking straight. And you're basically hiring people who aren't thinking straight, who don't understand the larger ramifications of what they do. Furthermore, people who can break things are not the same people who can fix things.
TIPPETT: And, you know, the fact that I can shoot holes through your car doesn't mean I can make a car that you can't shoot holes through. It doesn't compute. And so it makes no sense at all to me to hire Billy the Kid to make a better bank vault. I mean, that's crazy.
But whatever reason, there's an allure of these people and many of them are good at programming, although, again, many of them have underpinnings of thought processes that you wouldn't want running your IT department. You certainly wouldn't want to give them the keys and passwords to your inner workings.
GUTKNECHT: Well, the real question for all of you, and maybe you want to answer it now, maybe you don't, maybe you can write us a letter or maybe we can talk about this the next time we're together after the next outbreak, but the question is, should we make it illegal for software companies to hire someone who has been convicted of computer hacking? And think about that, maybe you want to answer now, maybe not. But I think we need to think about that.
MILLER: Mr. Gutknecht, I think the question is being asked in too black and white a fashion. I think we'd all agree that hiring people who have perpetrated criminal activity, been investigated and/or convicted, that's a clear no-no and where companies and government should not be hiring them.
But there are a lot of these people in a gray area who are clearly -- do think differently, I would agree with Dr. Tippett, but believe that they have a mission in life, which is to help take on the big corporations and find their vulnerabilities and then turn that information over to those big corporations or over to the anti-virus companies, the companies that, for good reasons, Ms. England doesn't want to -- people Ms. England doesn't want to hire, yet they do because they like to beat the authorities, they like to beat the big companies. They're going to go find that vulnerability somehow or other and then turn that information over.
And that's -- those are people that fall into this, kind of, gray area. Now maybe you wouldn't be comfortable having that person working at the CIA or the National Security Agency or DOD, but maybe that person, in fact, is the person who goes that extra mile to find the extra vulnerability that the DOD officials themselves didn't find, or that the companies themselves didn't find. So I appreciate the fact that we'd like to think that the role is black and white; that there are black hats and white hats and that there's a clear difference, but I think the reality is that there are some people somewhere in the middle. I don't think that they are malicious in the sense that they want to do bad things. They may unintentionally do bad things, which would fall into my category of someone who should be prosecuted, but they have something to contribute to fighting crime.
GUTKNECHT: If I could just paraphrase what you said, there are people who love to do crossword puzzles, and this is the biggest, best crossword puzzle and they just want to prove that they can actually beat that crossword puzzle.
MILLER: That's right.
GUTKNECHT: So they are not necessarily malicious. So there are -- OK, that -- thank you.
MILLER: And I think that in my testimony, I referred to a study done by two professors at George Washington University -- two psychologists who'd done some work for the CIA, and, in fact, people who do these kind of things fall into a lot of different categories. Yes, there are malicious people. As I said before, punish them. Don't let them go with some Twinkie defense.
But there are people who are just antiestablishment, but they're not necessarily trying to create havoc in the congressional offices or bring down a bank. They just want to show that they're smarter than the programmers at Microsoft, or the programmers at Symantec, or the programmers at Oracle, or they're smarter than the DOD experts and they may have something to contribute.
I'm just disgusted by this... if you've read down this far you ought to just go and read the whole thing. Be prepared to puke... this just makes me sick.
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Their graphical update and secondary xml files which track installed updates makes automated systems management of Helix-gnome systems a complete nightmare. I need scriptable tools. The Helix web page makes no attempt to provide easy access to the .rpm files. They use a secondary database, other than rpm, to track which packages are installed with the helix-updater. They don't document how this all works in plain english. And finally, they plan to use this system to force ads down my throat.
I'm planning a large rollout of Helix at a University, and frankly, I'm not impressed. Where do I find a complete list of updates? Where might I find those rpm files? Where is the helix-updater database located? Why is it separate from rpm? Why do I need yet another package manager???
I want scriptable tools so that I can maintain consistency across a large number of workstations. I don't need a cute GUI updater, and I DON'T want to force my userbase to manage this stuff by hand.
The poster got it wrong, that's 480Mbits/sec. To put this is perspective, 1394 firewire tops out at 400Mbits/sec. So this is marginally better.
S-100 bus based CPM systems, such as the Altair and IMSAI, were both state of the art and very cheap (for what you got) back in those days. While a used PDP-11/03 with 32KW (64KB) and an RX02 (8" floppy) might be had for $15-20K (but was only single user) one of many S-100 systems at the time, running CPM, could support up to 4 terminals, stunning 128x128x3 color graphics with the Dazzler card, a Z80 which supported up to 64kb of ram, along with another 64kb -- bank switched, and both 8" or 5 1/4" floppy drives, plus a large 5MB Shuggart hard disk for about the same price. Spartan by today's standards, but effective.
The bus was open and actively being developed for, and modular, allowing hobbyists to build a decent small computer for under a thousand dollars, while giving the small business owner the option of adding professional hardware; letter quality daisy wheel printers with envelope feeds, a spreadsheet and word processor named VisiCalc and The Electric Pencil, repectively -- things many business owners realized they could use, even back then.
Many hobby users at the time were trading software (where the famous Gates 'You're stealing my software..." letter came from) in a bazaar like community; growth was exponential and everyone recognized the hardware was good. Plus, there was plenty of platform competition: during the late '70s, the TRS-80, Apple II, Pet 2001, and Atari 400/800 systems gained popularity as well. Then IBM and Micro-Soft wrenched everyone over to their IBM PC through sheer marketing force and monopoly business tactics -- to the detriment of the entire computing industry.
Aren't you glad you own a PC now?
Hey, thanks for the tip. Please don't take my either/or rant personally... now that I look back on my reply I see that you might take offense at this since you didn't mention anything like that in your original post. I was responding to the vast majority of other posters who seem to see computing through polarized lenses. Whatever.
:-) Apple has come back with a vengence!
My roommate has a Sony Handycam and a Sony VIAO XG9 laptop (they come with 1394 built in), and MAN -- editing video on his laptop is so cool! I've been looking at the PowerMAC G4's strictly because of this feature. Linux isn't ready for serious film/video editing and MacOS X is looking pretty good. Yeah, I know this isn't anything like professional tools, but I can't afford $20K to start, but I can afford about ~2K. These tools are available now, and they're "good enough" to play with as an amateur.
I recently saw OS X/PR3 on a G3 Powerbook and was amazed at how similar this is to NeXTStep. As a former NeXT slab user (with a previous employer) I can't say enough about how well designed those systems were. If Apple sells an OS and hardware which closely match those old NeXT boxen, I'm ready to buy. Plus, they all (even the new iMacs!) support 1394 and video editing. Wow, a good 'nix, excellent hardware, and video production tools to boot!
I'm about ready to buy a new system and recently looked into moving from SCSI to 1394... forget it. I still want 1394 for it's multimedia potential -- yes, those SONY Digital handycams with 1394 look real promising. But fiberchannel, 1394 ain't.
Frankly, why don't people use a two tiered approach with their systems. Folks here always degenerate the argument into an either/or debate. Either Linux or Windows, either GNOME or KDE, either IDE or SCSI; what bullshit. I use SCSI for boot and swap, and IDE for cheap storage. Do I need gigs of mp3's on a fast boot disk? No. Do I want my OS and swap on a set of chained master/slave IDE drives, with all the known contention this involves? No.
Use both to your advantage. You'll love the system speed of SCSI for what really counts, and the savings of IDE for what's a little less important.
By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux.
:-)
Monterey died with the SCO sale, I suspect. There's been much hype, but I haven't read of anyone seeing a preview release. Oh well! I guess that's vaporware!
Linux will run on Itanium, and 64 bit to boot. Though I bet with a bunch of bugs. For example, Alphalinux is just a mess on SMP EV6 systems. I've seen it crash horribly on 4 CPU ES40s while performing NFS ops; looks like some sort of cross CPU spin lock contention which leads to deadlock. Yuk. But I bet it'll be fine on single CPU Itanium systems. And Linux is ubiquitous, which even at hype Monterey lacked. Plus, I suspect that between 2.4 and 2.6 we'll get the enterprise features we expect from commercial UNIX running properly on Linux; I want: decent NFS support, a functional automounter, pervasive threading throughout common system libraries and applications, a display server which supports antialiasing (actually a better display model would help -- how about "display postscript"?), and a logical volume manager... that would help.
You could probably look forward to NetBSD/OpenBSD porting to Itanium soon after release. And after that expect Sun to chime in with Solaris. But, like Solaris/Intel, I'm sure it will be a pale imitation.
Any program which grabs a network socket and accepts connections from the outside world represents a potential threat from buffer overflows. Fortunately, I'm pretty certain all of these run with the permisstions of the user, so a successful crack would be limited to the user's account. Doesn't make me feel any safer though. It just doesn't make sense that the GNOME team would need open sockets for these services... why not just use a local named pipe down /tmp, for instance (which they do use)?
Can a competent GNOME hacker please chime in?
which operated under tight access regulations as defined in your state tarrifs for telephone service. Go to your local department of public utilities and look up phone company tarrifs, you'll see that they BY LAW cannot regulate what you do with your telephone (and by extension, your DSL connection) after the demark point in your house. Cable companies are NOT subject to these regulations.
Sure you can. But who else (except a few Linux users) cares? With IPSec I can implement either a Transport Mode or Tunnel Mode connection between Linux hosts running FreeS/WAN, OpenBSD/FreeBSD IPSec (don't know about NetBSD), Win2K and NT (using PGPNet), many CISCO (among other vendor) routers, and even MacOS X (I understand). So, it's nice that you can circumvent a stupid ISP policy which prevents protocol 50 between the hosts you use, but the rest of the world has already chosen IPSec as the standard Tunnel(VPN)/Transport Mode IP level encryption standard. This policy will prevent sane IP level encryption for many services beyond just employees logging into work from home.
Hell, with Transport Mode IPSec one could securely telnet to a remote host WITHOUT ANY CLIENT MODIFICATIONS or end user re-training. The same is true for web connections... no more SSL negotiations and key certification nonsense for the web, ssh and config files for secure telnet, some new "secure" protocol for ftp, etc etc etc, all handled with different configurations, incompatible key management protocols, and separate encryption libs... this should all be standardized under the hood at the IP level for the sake of consistency alone; (consistency increases security by reducing unnecessary complexity). @Home just made a colossally stupid blunder here... which will come back to bite them in the ass.
This is a terrible precident because long term it prevents the use of ubiquitous point-point Transport Mode IPSec, which is the whole point behind the IPSec standard. Sure, it's neat to make tunnels to work, but in the long term the IPSec community wants to create a mechanism to secure ALL IP traffic. This blows that goal right out of the water.
Also, are they going to start limiting SSH service to my employer? Can I telnet to my employer? Where do they draw the line between "personal use" and "business use"? If my cable modem provider pulls these tricks they'll lose a customer.
I've bought five Loki titles, UT, and just recently Terminus (with Linux support); I expect to buy Alpha Centauri and Sim City once they're released (Loki -- please port The Sims!). I don't run Windows, so if you're a game manufacturer and you want my $$$$ you better code for my platform. Yes, I'll gladly pay extra for the same title released months previously for Windows, because this is a seed market and I want my platform to enjoy success; anyway, it's my moeny. Give it two more years and if Loki, Id, et all are still making chump change then maybe it was a bad bet. Right now, they'd be INSANE to cede the Linux market this early on given it's long term potential.
Jeesh, I just went through the trouble to install 4.74; pesky executable jpegs. Boy, this makes me want IE through wine, even though I know ceding the browser market to Microsoft will result in ceding the server market.
Somewhere people are betting over which finishes first: Mozilla 1.0 release, or wine progressing well enough to run IE reliably.
Shit! This is not the sort of gamble any serious Freenix or UNIX user would want to take....
Forgot to divide by 8 in order to get bytes. You're absolutely right. 320x200x16=1024kbits, or 128kbytes.
320x200x1=64k
320x200x8=512k
320x200x16=1024k
I assumed 8 bit color. If you're assuming 16 bit color, or 65k colors, it's going to eat 1MB of RAM, not 128k (which would be a 2bit or 4 color display).
Mr. Gettys is talking about a handheld which has a screen size of a quarter vga device, or about 320x200. While the actual X server and X libraries may fit into ~1MB after squeezing out a little bloat, the X server will still have to allocate memory to represent the display (and any virtual displays). For an 8-bit 320x200 display that comes out to 512k of ram... combine the two and one really consumes about 1.5mb of ram for display; not too shabby since most handhelds today have between 8MB to 16MB of RAM; some ship with even more. Now compare that to your desktop with a 16MB Voodoo 3 card and 4 to 8 virtual screens running at 1280x1024x32 bit and suddenly X looks horribly bloated because the X server has grabbed huge sums of RAM. Well, duh -- what's the X server supposed to do? Think Windows or MacOS could avoid that requirement?
Really, this whole complaint about X being bloated is overblown. We used to call X terribly bloated on Sun 3/50 workstations (back in '87-'88 or so) with 4MB of RAM. Well, we were right. But with modern hardware this is simply a non-issue. You want tiny? Go buy yourself a C-64 and run GEM.
- Reduction to overall removal of capital gains taxes. Who does this most benefit?
- Corporate tax loopholes inserted as riders in unrelated legislation throughout our tax code. Many American corporations pay NO TAXES AT ALL. Some even get refunds on no taxes paid. Who do you think benefits most from farm subsidies, ADM or the family farmer? Who benefits from state tax codes which give tax credits to attract business only to have the company up and move out when the benefit runs out and the next state ponies up? Who benefits from tax money paid out to sports teams in order to build new stadiums? Not me.
- a HUGE military budget spent on mostly useless goods (think SDI, unnecessary ships ordered against NAVY budgetary requests), wars fought for oil tycoons (who might be president). Here's a news story for you... Peru and Columbia have some of the largest oil reserves in the Americas... now why do you think we're fighting a "drug war" down there???
Yes, I consider my tax dollars wasted away, when we could be building new infrastructure, providing medical care for our citizens, and decent free education for our youth. And when my right wing friends goad me with "well why don't you move then if you don't like it here" I'm beginning to think they're right. Maybe Costa Rica would be a better place to live... and Amsterdam certainly has the kind of society I'd prefer to live in (though not the climate)... there ARE better places in which to live than the USA. I think it's time to plan an emigration... and if enough tax paying citizens agree maybe our politicians might finally get the idea that our citizenry is rightly pissed off with paying taxes for no social gain. I want to live in a society not a social darwinist trap designed to prop up the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.Having (attempted) to work through the '89-'91 recession and having lived as a kid through the '72-'74 and '81-'83 recessions I must assume these kids just aren't prepared for the eventual economic kick in the ass.
Yes, it's true that most young technology savvy kids assume that the now (supposedly) wonderful economy is somehow dependent on their brains and success, but it isn't so. Nor will technology workers be responsible when the next recession hits, these are cyclical effects more dependent on Federal Reserve policy and exchange rates than anything else.
Yes, it's true that computers have increased efficiency for most businesses by automating much office paperwork and accounting away. But these gains in efficiency will go only so far until we hit the next wall of automation. At that point I expect to see GDP growth fall back, and possibly even a recession to hit. We're well due for one soon... GET PREPARED!
And, maybe after going through this and possibly losing your house, a marriage from the stress, or some other setback, you kids might begin to understand that those with hot skills from twenty years back are no more or less intelligent than you. That you've lived young through todays market gains is more a matter of luck than a sign of (social) evolutionary success. And maybe after you've had to care for a dying parent (and seen for yourself how poor Medicare/Medicaid is for our citizens), or stepped into a city school to meet your child's frazzled out teacher because (s)he has a class size of nearly 40 pupils, or walked along one of the many bridges which are literally crumbling from lack of repairs... maybe then you'll realize that these gains are illusion for the vast majority of American citizens.
That your skills are in demand today isn't proof they will be in demand tomorrow. That you're successful today doesn't mean lean times ahead are avoided for certain. That you're healthy today doesn't mean your health will remain (in fact, given enough time it's certain to fade). PREPARE YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY! And consider the many citizens of America who had to grow up with substandard education, poor health care, and dilapidated surroundings; that could be you but for circumstance.
We used to have a reasonable social safety net for those children who, by no fault of their own, grew up poor. After the Republican 80's and Demopublican '90s, we have none of that left. I voted for Clinton in '92 for one reason: National Health Coverage. With the Democrats and Republican platforms mirror images sans abortion, I simply can't vote for either party any longer. For these reasons, this year I'm voting Ralph Nader for President.
Never mind the ethical dilema of supporting hardware manufacturers who "do the right thing" for us free software proponents, even if it means giving up a few features every now and then. Frankly, I'm not about to shell out that kind of cash to anyone unless I know I'll be able to support the hardware years from now when it becomes outdated. When's the last time you saw a modern driver under Windows for the GD5380, or S3/968? Telling me to buy new hardware is NOT why I run Linux/BSD.
I too will be voting for Nader in this election. I simply can't bring myself to vote for either Bore or Gush, and I'm sick of the collusion between corporate America and our political process. We have a highly corrupt government which appears to have started failing US citizens right after President Eisenhower left office (I personally think FDR and Eisenhower are the two best Presidents of the century).
Speaking as a 32 YO male who lived through the corrupt years of Reagan/Bush, who willingly (and gladly) voted for Clinton, and who has finally lost all hope with our current political process. Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton will be reviled as among the worst Presidents our nation ever endured. Yes, worse than Taft.
I can tell you've never had to deal with a large cluster of PC's and UNIX workstations. Yes, NUMAs and other large shared memory SMP systems offer better memory bus bandwidth and low latency compared to clustered systems. And for an organization with a single large threaded application and money to burn this advantage might actually be worth the heavy upfront capital outlay.
Where MPI and batch clusters win is cost/performance not sheer speed and/or low latency. This is especially true for batch systems which run a single process per node and can allocate the entire data set in local RAM. Moving the data to the node over NFS takes time, but if the application is written properly the bulk of time in transforming the data will be taken up by CPU ops, not network transfers. This is how we do it in the Speech group at BBN, with a good 300+ Linux, Sun, and SGI hosts.
ugh, I need sleep -- I've just been trolled.
Perform the copy CPU register state and RAM image to secondary RAM in hardware as an atomic operation which occers once per clock tick -- if possible, by some subdivision otherwise. From then on copy only deltas between any two states in the rest of secondary RAM like most versioned filesytems. The number of potential versions stored is limited to the size of secondary RAM and the amount of change over time, like any other cache.
It's a pretty cool idea... anyone know if some exotic hardware with these kinds of capabilities has ever been tried?
That's too bad.
VMS is a damn good Operating System and programming environment which the Free Software community should attempt to replicate. Now that several good free UNIX variants have matured it only makes sense to attempt to "save" older technologies like VMS from the dustbin of history. Also, it would help us Free Software enthusiasts move away from dependency on just UNIX like operating environments. Sure, I like UNIX, but there are many advantages to VMS about which a UNIX only geek of today might never learn. VMS is a solid, highly secure OS -- to toss this technology away is plain folly.
Maybe the community should appeal to Compaq to release as much VMS source as possible under the presumption that opening it's source will reduce long term support costs. I can't imagine VMS support will remain profitable for much longer, and this would let those lingering VMS shops out there support themselves. Also, an x86 port of VMS would just rock!
This is true for many of the older Digital technologies as well. I'd really like Compaq to Open the source for older PDP-11 technologies like RT-11, RSX and RSTS -- if only for their historical value. Yes, I know it's all coded in Macro-11... so what.
Left, Right, what difference does it make. These labels exist strictly to divide people along party lines rather than by opinions on policy. In the old Soviet Union a radical Communist would have been called a "Right Winger" while a radical Capitalist would have been a Leftist; here it's reversed. Thus proving that these labels are meaningless.
What counts is not the label assigned but specific policies, which our media do their best to obfuscate at every turn. Given these opinions, what would you call me?
So, where the hell am I? Right winger because I support gun rights and the death penalty, or left winger because I support strong corporate regulation, strong government services for taxpayers, and limited military/intelligence budgetary support?
I think I'm just a radical. I have my own views and I'll vote by them... I'm voting Nader this year.
Here are some long choice comments backing up my previous post:
Regarding ways to solve the virus problem Harris Miller astonishingly recommended:
IOW: One possible solution he recommends is to create a central authority which manages and could potentially censor ALL email on the Internet. WOW... that goes against EVERYTHING I've ever stood for as a System Administrator responsible for email traffic.
Here's another choice quote:
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE LYNN N. RIVERS (D-MI) asked this telling question to the panelists: So at least one Congresscritter "gets" it, but the responses she received in reply should dismay anyone with a technical background:
So Security problems with Windows/Outlook aren't inherent in to the design of those products, just a funtion of their popularity. Riggghhhhtttt....
Here Dr. Tippett defends the necessety of executable scripts which read the Outlook address book in order to find names of others with which to send email (typical Outlook security hole which he thinks necesssary -- at least until Microsoft changed their security tune I suppose):
And Finally, they recommend outlawing the hire of "hackers" who at one time have been convicted of malicious "hacking," thus permenantly revoking one's right to pursue employment instead of just fixing the problem client side: I'm just disgusted by this... if you've read down this far you ought to just go and read the whole thing. Be prepared to puke... this just makes me sick.