Please back this statement up with facts. Cigarette smoking kills about half a million people annually, while according to this PBS "FrontLine" report there were"...too few deaths to meaningfully study the other main hypothesis, that marijuana use would be associated with increased respiratory disease mortality." and "...relatively few adverse clinical health effects from the chronic use of marijuana have been documented in humans."[references available at PBS site] In fact, Marijuana has no known LD 50, that is lethal dose in 50% of cases, not because data on health affects is lacking, but because no report has ever been filed of a death from Marijuana overdose. In fact, the only animal safety studies on Marijuana use ever completed killed vervet monkeys by asphyxiation from carbon dioxide poisoning, not from a drug overdose; showing that THC, while showing high efficacy, is one of the safest drugs known to man. It's safer than aspirin, buddy.
At best, you're slowly turning your brain into mush.
The psychological and brain physiological effects of Marijuana use simply aren't well known in the United States because the FDA has repeatedly refused to allow human studies. They won't even allow studies which purport to give marijuana to test subjects, when they are really only giving a placebo. However, anecdotal evidence from the lack of emergency room visits due to marijuana intoxication, compared to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin overdoses are telling. As the second most popular recreational drug in America, it causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined. Stick that in your pipe and smoke.
Marijuana use is at least as old as alcohol consumption, going back many thousands of years. And it's noted that today a large segment of society smokes pot without anywhere near the same level of ill health affects as alcohol. This is not to say that smoking pot is good for you in general, just that in comparison to alcohol, it's far safer.
I've seen people die because of marijuana. Either indirectly, because they were dumb enough to operate heavy machinery (namely cars and motorcycles) under the influence.
No doubt, anyone operating heavy machinery under the influence of any drug (even many prescribed medications) run risks associated with cognitive impairment. No one should drive a car while taking oxycodone, alcohol, or marijuana. Period.
Or directly, because they had really low blood preassure, and the first joint they tried made their blood preassure drop really low. There were a few people there, all of which, except for me, were stoned. I go "Hey, where's Tracy?" and they all start giggling. "She fell asleep!". Well, she didn't, she fainted and would have died if I haden't made her eat a whole bunch of cofee and salt.
This anecdote doesn't back your statement up. Sorry.
I don't see many folks bringing up hemp as an industrial resource, nor do I see many folks pointing to it's use as a medicine for the terminally ill. I've seen Marijuana work wonders for people dying of AIDS and know one person who swears it's what got him through Chemo-therapy alive. Yet our government continues it's war on citizens as though we can't manage our own bodies and personal lives without government interference. I have no problem with obeying traffic laws which state I must drive sober, but when our government puts good people away for long prison sentences simply because they were trying to live through a terminal illness, we have a serious problem with a political institution way out of touch with it's citizenry.
I support legalizing drugs, and believe that it ought to be up to the individual how he/she decides to live his/her life. Laws and the police should protect citizens from violent crime and fraud, not self abuse and self destruction; that's a job for psychiatrists and clergy.
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money, and will only continue increasing in value as a collectors item. Never mind getting his data off that machine, he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
This experience badly shook me up because before that time I really didn't think such things were worth consideration. Here's what happened:
Along with two other friends we were driving in a van back from a flea market at around 5pm in the evening -- which in September is still broad daylight. This was right after I had moved to Cincinnati, so I was new to the area.
We stopped at a gas station whereby one went in to buy gas and get a drink while the other went to the bathroom. I stepped out to smoke a butt (I was a smoker then), and walked away from the van to look around. The gas station was on the right side of the road, while on the other side just after the road a small grass covered valley dropped down and stretched out to tree covered hills several miles away.
Then I noticed what looked like a silver balloon just hovering maybe a thousand feet over the treetops, its size was about a third of my thumbnail, arms outstretched. At the time I thought it was a balloon, but didn't have anything else to look at while waiting so I paid attention to it. Then it began to slip down, sort of like a pendulum with each swing loosing altitude. I thought that was pretty weird, so while continuing to pay attention I noticed it stop moving outright, and then sort of gyrate like a top spinning in place. There it hovered for a short time, maybe 20 to 30 seconds.
At this point I was thinking that this was the weirdest balloon I'd ever seen, and was trying to figure out what kind of wind pattern might cause this behavior when the damn thing just instantly shot up and over, turned on a dime, and screamed across the sky from my left to my right side as my head panned to follow. Within less than a second it had moved a good 90 degrees of arc across the sky and went behind some nearby trees. And it didn't make a damn sound.
There are a couple of things to note:
Being alone, there's no way I could triangulate in order to determine distance or size of the object. This means that determining it's speed was also impossible.
It happened pretty fast, maybe over 45 seconds or so, which means that while it was happening I didn't have much time to consider what I was watching. In fact, for most of the event I considered this a strange, but prosaic, event. I've never seen anything like it since.
It moved with extreme agility. I've never seen anything in the sky which could just turn on a dime, move and then stop in mid-air immediately, or really behave like what I saw. If I hadn't noticed the extreme turn, I probably would have just continued thinking it was a balloon.
It didn't make a damn sound, even when it booked out of there. I would have expected at least a sonic boom given how quickly it left the area.
There were no other witnesses; I could just be looney. I'd prefer not to believe that explanation, though.
My dad was a private pilot and he used to own an single engine airplane. I took flying lessons as a kid, landed an airplane, and all that -- almost lived in and out of airports as a kid (once we flew from southern California to Tampa Beach Florida in my dad's Cessna when I was seven). Been in helicopter, seen idiots make dangerous mistakes in ultralights and hangliders... there is absolutely no way what I saw could have been anything like a balloon, helicopter, or other prosaic craft.I'm certain of that.
But I still don't know what to make of this. I never saw the occupants, no one else witnessed the event, and I have absolutely no proof. I have trouble with the "alien craft" stuff, but I definitely believe, based on what I saw, that some silver disk shaped craft do exist, and display a performance envelope way beyond any kind of common aerodynamic craft. Beyond that, I simply don't know.
Thank you for your comment. I don't know of a PARC project to build a speech enabled desktop, but I can't imaging Microsoft lacking at least one such lab. Speech is so obviously the next step that MS would have to be completely blind to underfund this kind of research, especially given their large research expenditures.
In the long run, you are right about the pointlessness of duplicating the Windows desktop. In the short term though, people need to be able to transfer their work to a new system and KOffice et al will allow people to make the transition a little easier. It unlocks them from Windows and gives them choices.
I'm not suggesting that KDE, GNOME, or GNUStep are irrelevant or unnecessary, just that alone these desktops won't provide enough new functionality to pull users from Windows; ease of ubiquity being Microsoft's primary advantage.
But they do create a necessary free foundation which was lacking previously -- I never much cared for CDE.
I think that more R&D needs to be done in general. Everything right now seems locked into the monolithic PC/Windows experience. Hardware manufacturers have no margins so most are not willing to explore new territories. The "new" hardware idea of the iMac was mearly an update of the original mac and hardly a trailblazing endevor. Ultimately it is a stupid idea since one of the few things easily reused when a PC is replace is the monitor.
PC hardware needs an update, I agree. Though I think that many of our hardware complaints are really expressions of frustration over what limited functionality current computers present. They're big, clunky, consume large amounts of electricity and thus expel noticeable heat, use moving/spinning parts at high speed, and they're still just single execution unit per cycle "Turing machines." Oh well. UltraSparc desktops really aren't physically that much different from Mac's and PC's. Nor are any other Workstation vendor's good much different beyond CPU, software, and name. The reason we still use clunky desktops now isn't because of dumb hardware manufacturers, but reasonable design given current hardware constraints.
I think we're going to have to continue to work with desktop based solutions for at least another ten years. By then maybe a general radio IP network infrastructure could be in place, along with those smaller and faster CPU advances Moore's law predicts, justifying a general purpose speech enabled PDA in the open market. This won't happen overnight.
So, while developing this technology may take a good decade, we should expect Microsoft to produce some kind broken speech enabled version of desktop Windows as soon as they can; maybe within one or two release cycles. They would be idiots to let Dragon Systems, IBM ViaVoice, and all those other third party speech toolkits to take over the market... when have you ever seen Microsoft do that??? It's already a viable business, Microsoft is there.
The Freenix community has a few advantages: IBM is currently giving out ViaVoice -- for now anyway, we have explosive growth going on with the desktop API -- meaning that change is more readily accepted by the current userbase, and we have several good Common LISP and Scheme interpreters -- with many skilled programmers. Given that GNOME already supports GUILE, updating a Common LISP variant to support the GNOME and GTK API's, along with integrating ViaVoice support, isn't impossible! And it's an important step towards making a usable "expert system" which understands enough to convert simple statements like "Move file1 to directory2" and "find all files containing the word 'foo'" into UNIX commands dynamically.
I think Open Source desktop systems like GNOME and KDE ought to be thinking along these lines now, because if speech is left unnoticed by the Freenix desktop developers, the UNIX community might miss a critical computer science juncture which will leave it behind Windows!
This is basically what Balmer is saying, though I doubt he would cite the originator. What does Microsoft gain by this?
Obviously a more controlled revenue stream, one which is predictable, and one which continues the advance of the Microsoft monopoly. You don't think you'll be running Windows and MS/Office off an X-Terminal, do you? No, it will be some proprietary protocol, encrypted, and damn difficult to reverse engineer (maybe even illegal to reverse engineer!). But the most important to Microsoft must be the controlled and even revenue stream such a system would foster.
Microsoft is truly a house of cards right now. Here's a fascinating quote from last weeks Economist article on Share Options, Pg. 18, Aug 7th-13th, which illustrates this point:
[Regarding overstated profits among high tech firms which hand out share options to their employees as a supposed salary benefit...] For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of
$4.5 Billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in value of outstanding options, is deducted, the first made a loss of $18 Billion, according to Smithers.
Their stock is badly overvalued. They pay their employees poorly, over-work them, illegally hire so many temps that it's turned into a Seattle political scandal, and make up the difference with stock options for their core staff. This suggests that a sell off could be disastrous for the firm and it's employees.... hence it makes sense for Balmer and Gates to both sell off now (which they've been doing) and to look for a new revenue model which can assure higher profits in what will most certainly be a saturated market within ten to fifteen years.
How should Free software and Open Source proponents fight this? We know how Microsoft is going to fight open protocols on the Net... by "de-commoditizing" (what an aberration of a word, clearly Vinod didn't have a dictionary by his side when he wrote Halloween I and II). And we know that they've already set the desktop standard with Win32/Windows. As long as they maintain control of the Office document standard through adding regular incompatibilities to thwart reverse engineers, they keep Windows installed on enough machines to make interopability with other systems a non-issue for the vast majority of users, and they succeed in keeping Win32 closed enough such that it can never be reverse engineered and re-implemented, they will continue to maintain their monopoly.
The Justice Department may will the antitrust case, but by the time it's worked its way through the court systems, I'd argue that Win32 will have long since been rendered obsolete.
This is why I think KDE, GNOME, GNUStep, and the like are a waste of time as far as attempting to take desktop sales away from Microsoft. Free developers may create a good MS-Office replacement like KOffice, or SIAG Office, but it won't ever read MS-Office documents properly just like Corel Office (Even under Windows!), ApplixWare, and StarOffice can't. Nor will a Freenix based desktop ever run exactly the same software (Wine may work well as a porting library, but I'm doubting its long term viability as a Win32 program loader -- MS will just change the underlying core OS enough to make they're new applications incompatible with Wine... it's a never ending game with no winners on the Wine side for this part of their project). Keyboard shortcuts are different, applications are different, they're all incompatible, and the current winner has a stake in maintaining this situation.
So how do Freenix proponents win in this situation? In my opinion we can't win just be re-inventing the desktop wheel around X (or Berlin, for that matter). I think the Open Source community NEEDS a completely new approach, one which gives it the "killer app" advantage over Windows which will draw users not because of political issues over freedom, but because users will plain want said functionality.
The next big revolution in user interface design is speech recognition incorporated directly into the systems interface with the computer. Something like what the Oxygen Project at the MIT media Laboratory is doing, with private funding I may add. (See this months Scientific American for a spread on the Oxygen project, the RAW CPU (a programable FPGA system), and their work with handhelds) I don't see any open source stuff from Oxygen... (does anyone know what their stance on Open Source is, and if they're currently accepting funds from Microsoft? If they are, who do you think will keep that codebase???) If you ask me, this is where Balmer wants to go. Everyone gets a handheld which is connected to the net via a radio/infrared networking, the system accepts speech input which is then passed to a server to interpret and resolve the problem, then passed back to the user in speech/video from the handheld. Such a system could be charged per minute, per query, or any of a number of other methods.
This is what the free software community should be planning to implement. And most of the tools are already available... IBM's Viavoice is a good enough continuous speech recognition system -- though it's not free. It could be used as a module within GNU common lisp, which could then serve as a foundation for a new natural language systems interface based on an "expert system" which understands a simple enough grammer and converts this to UNIX commands, manipulating files, directories, and launching applications. If IBM never releases ViaVoice under an "Open Source" license, the fact that it's a module instead of being tightly integrated into the system means that Freeware developers could rewrite the recognition engine -- maybe with funding from the FSF, a university, or some other organization.
Such a system would have to be tightly integrated with the desktop interface though, like common KDE and GNOME shortcuts, so that applications could know when to take speech input through their STDIN stream (like dictation) and know when you're attempting to give a command to either the application or the general operating system. Given GNOME's reliance on GUILE as it's "glue scripting language" it seems to me a bit closer toward integrating in a functional language with all its desktop applications, and thus being able to integrate natural language processing across the entire API suite. Just a guess though.
I think this is where Freenix ought to go, and if it gets there before Microsoft, they will lose marketshare quickly. They may die a horrible death just because their financial situation is so precarious, but that won't do the Freenix community much good; they'll just file Chapter 11 and restructure -- with their monopoly intact. For the Freenix community to take the desktop we must provide an alternative which is easier to use, not just free.
Of course, I may just be oversimplifying a very complex problem... Please feel free to resolve any problems of ignorance you may have noticed!:-)
I keep hearing this from my gun toting, pick-up truck driving, tax cuts for the rich while we shut down basic government services like primary education (you don't want a school voucher so you can send your kid to a nice, righteous, religious school where they don't teach that unGodly "evolution?"NO! I want a properly funded public school system!) basic health care for our citizens, and low cost housing for the disabled and elderly. Just what the hell am I paying taxes for anyway?
Oh yeah, to pay interest on a debt built up by Republicans during the eighties while they "cut" taxes for the rich so that wealth may "trickle down" to us street rabble; all in the name of creating a "fair" tax system. Right.
So now they're about to eviscerate yet another government agency ("Since when has the government ever done anything right?" Oh yeah? When was the last time you saw a private corporation dig a Panama Canal, design and build a Nuclear bomb, or put a man on the moon? What a bunch of neo-corporate elitist CRAP!) which has on the whole generated more economic benefit for private corporations across the US than any other government agency (publicly funded University research not withstanding); fruits grown from basic research no private corporation could possibly afford given their per-quarter bottom line, short term or bust, thinking (restrictiveness).
So, the point of all this? My right wing tax cutting, pick-up truck with a rack of shotguns and a 30 ought six in the back, dodging bullets and taxes in one stroke, friends -- they often offer as a response to my distaste for how government has been bought off by private corporate interests, thus forcing middle of the road political norms over to what would have been called "right wing extremism" when I was a child -- they say "You don't like America, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE! MOVE!"
Now I think they're right. As citizens we don't stand a chance compared to GE, AT&T, IT&T, Microsoft, or any other huge conglomerates worth more than most third world countries combined. We've lost our country -- it's time to move on. If enough skilled and technically savvy workers just up and emigrated our of the US to other spots, where rent is cheap, taxes at least go somewhere useful (instead of paying interest on the debt and the military budget), and used the net to our advantage -- working anywhere we damn well pleased, the United States might see a noticeable drop in their tax base. And when the congressmen and senators ask, "where did that money go to?" we can answer: "elsewhere"
I'm pretty fed up with my government at this point... I don't think my views will ever be represented in the Legislative or Executive branches, and the Judicial branch is a complete joke given how badly stacked it was in the eighties by Reagan/Bush. If we keep cutting education such that kids can't even learn basic reading and arithmetic skills, while at the same time cutting basic research needed for long term growth, this country's will go down the tubes. If you can't stop it, think ahead and FLEE!
Unlike most, I'm one who believes in investing as much disk to swap as you can afford. 2xRAM is my minimal swap space.
With Linux kernels previous to (I believe) 2.0.36 you must make each swap partition no larger than 128M, though you may have an arbitrary number of swap partitions or files (and yes, Linux can use swap files in the filesystem instead of individual partitions, but at a performance penalty).
Older 2.0.x, 1.2.x, and 1.0.x kernels must use individual 128MB swap partitions or files (actually, I seem to recall that 1.0.x kernels didn't support swap files, only partitions), but don't know if the larger swap partition support is limited to 2.2.x kernels or the later 2.0.36/37 kernels./usr/src/linux/Documentation/Changes in 2.2.10 only states that the 128MB limit is gone, but doesn't list the new physical limit -- I've used up to 1024MB in one swap partition so I know that it can get pretty big. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the limit is 2048MB to conform with the 32 bit file size limit in ext2fs simply for parity with swap files in mkswap.
Now for why I like lots of swap: You don't have to use it, but when you need it you REALLY need it! Your VM space is only as large as core and swap. Yes, I know the kernel can address anywhere within the 4GB boundary, but the total number of usable pages is limited to your physical RAM plus swap space! This is important to consider if you ever want to run lots of processes which sleep until asynchronous I/O events wake them up. If you want to start lots of processes and let them go off to sleep, having plenty of VM space makes sense. The machine will only thrash if there's memory contention among processes in a run state, so it's safe (and desirable) to let sleeping processes page out to swap while the machine uses physical core for running code.
Also: consider the possibility of a small application using huge datasets. I run into this at work all the time. We have clustered machines each with 1/2GB of RAM and 1GB of swap. As long as each process only keeps dirty pages of the dataset in core, one can have multiple program instances crunching through different datasets even though together they're exceeding total physical core. Since these programs are stepping linearly through the data, instead of randomly seeking different pages like in a program doing long jumps, this can actually work well. Memory contention occurs not when you exceed total physical ram, but when running processes request pages that have been flushed to disk!
If you're careful and selective about how you use the extra swap space you can wildly exceed physical core without significant performance loss. Food for thought.
See the traffic shaper pseudo device support in Linux-2.2.x. According to it's documentation it can shape from about 9600 to 256kb per pseudo-device. Documentation lives at: /usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/shaper.t xt
You might also want to look into the Linux Firewalling code if you're going to use it for traffic shaping as well. See:
An Anonymous Coward wrote: People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
An Anonymous Coward wrote: People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it.
He is the proverbial compassionate hacker. He was perfectly happy to just give out the schematics, and found ethical dilemma in building a business which might turn into a serious money maker. This is no different from the likes of rms, Linus, Eric Raymond, Larry Wall, and the now very large number of people out creating such wonderful things as gnome and KDE, GIMP, Python, Apache, and the list just goes on.
Doesn't it just blow your mind that this guy is out teaching high school instead of finding new ways to make himself richer? Don't you wish you could have been lucky enough tp have taken classes from this guy? He does these things because he enjoys the labor, and wants to help others enjoy the success of creating new things! What better lesson would you want your children to learn?
That he made enough money to comfortably live in ease for the rest of his life may be blind luck -- but don't you think he deserves it more than Gates, Jobs, Ellison, and all the other blowhards who probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years?
Don't know about a web page, but there's an active mailing list full of people working to write a free BIOS for most PC like motherboards. You can subscribe to this mailing list by sending the word "subscribe openbios" in the body of a mail message to:
majordomo@wesley.informatik.uni-freiburg.de
This is a worthy project. Please don't subscribe and immediately start asking stupid questions, just sit back and watch the flow. I've never posted a message there because I'm not a BIOS hacker... if you're not a BIOS hacker either, but are curious, you're probably welcome as a lurker. Serious BIOS hackers are probably most welcome contributors. Either way, please respect the users' of this list by helping to keep their S/N ratio down!
I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)
The NetBSD project doesn't state "Of course it runs NetBSD" for nothing. That OS is about the most portable *BSD around, and this is their primary objective (along with "correctness", whatever that means). I'd say NetBSD probably runs on more hardware platforms than Linux, though it's pretty close race.
NetBSD is a great OS. I run it on my Sun 3/80's because nothing else will , reliably anyway. Who wants to run SunOS 4.1.1?:-)
I'd say the primary difference between Linux and the *BSD's is not technical, because they're both pretty damn good, but one of licensing terms. The BSD's allow one to take the source and rework it into a completely commercial project, thus allowing re-distribution without releasing source. This is in stark contrast to Linux, released under the GPL, which requires those who both derive from from a GPL'd source tree AND distribute a new product based on said derivative, must also release the new source tree.
I'm not a licensing zealot, so I think there's a place for both licensing schemes. For example, I suspect the *BSD's would make a better OS than Linux for commercial embedded devices simply because of their licensing terms. However, as an end user who prefers keeping a code base to my OS free and open, I prefer using an OS released under the GPL for my day to day work... so I run Linux on my PC's -- unless I don't have a choice (like with my 3/80's), then I'll run whatever's available. Just a personal preference which says nothing about the quality of the BSD codebase. Those who hack BSD because they prefer the additional freedom of the BSD license have every justification to do so. In fact, the success of BSD in attracting quality developers is in and of itself a validation of their licensing and development model, just as is the success of Linux.
There. That's about as Politically Correct as I can get.:-)
The NetBSD project demo'd NetBSD on the iMac last week at USENIX. They had a booth over in the vendors area where they were showing this spiffy iMac along with an old VaxStation or somesuch -- this iMac probably outperformed that VAX 20:1... hehe.
With a properly configured sendmail-8.8.5 distribution, or above, I'd like to see you back this assertion up with some facts. Go ahead and show me how you'll crack a box with sendmail using a buffer overflow or other similar trick... you're not leaving sendmail in debug mode are you?
Now by properly configured, I mean no configuration files down a path with group writable directories, no stupid scripts run out of the.cf, smrsh configured, and no DON'T_BLAME_SENDMAIL options blatently leaving your machine open to the world. The current release of Sendmail is 8.9.3, I haven't seen a CERT advisory on sendmail for some time, and Eric Allman keeps pumping out new bugfixes.
This doesn't diminish the good work done by the qmail folks. However, if you want UUCP, BITNET relaying, or FIDO-NET support (which is CRITICAL in many third world countries) sendmail is your only option.
Finally, your post is flame bait devoid of relevant information to the IIS security hole. Of course, this reply is also devoid of anything relevant to the IIS security hole found, but I thought it incumbant to reply to your misinformed banter.
This is the best comment of the bunch, I think. Grenamier makes the point that Microsoft could create their own distribution of Linux with a proprietary Win32 kicker. They are in their rights doing this, and if I were MS this is exactly the tactic I would use. How different is this from Corel using Linux as a vector to market their proprietary Corel Office software?
Even though the premise is good, there are some fundamental mistakes of fact which ought to be resolved:
Grenamier (jtruong@idirect.com) Wrote: To me, it looks like Microsoft is creating its own distribution of Linux. For one clue, the title of the job is "Product Manager". No company has Product Managers for products they don't sell. Some of the duties include "product development for the development team" and "technical assistance for the sales force."[Emphases mine]
The position also advertises "high visibility" outside of the company. People who just watch competitors and make reports about them don't normally get much exposure (VinodV didn't get his 15 minutes on purpose). But if Microsoft is selling a "new" product, its Product Manager would be expected to flog it to the press.
So what's Microsoft up to? Scrapping NT for Linux? Of course not, they'd be throwing away all of their leverage. Trying to steal Linux technology for NT? Perhaps, but they wouldn't need to sell a product of their own for that.[emphases mine]
Yes, I agree completely. They wouldn't bother with a project unless they were planning to either make something for sale, or were planning a "grassroots" marketing effort. But they can't "Steal" something out in the open like a GPL'd package, so I don't know what you mean by that.
This is my wild speculation:
Free-sourced software is the Internet happening all over again for Microsoft...everyone in the industry is jumping on the bandwagon and stories about the success of Linux, Apache and Perl are everywhere. Microsoft missed the populization of yet another decades-old "phenomenon" and they've known it since Hallowe'en at the least.[Emphases Mine]
I really like that quote. It well describes the mentality which must be fermenting in MS upper management strategy meetings.
What did Microsoft do about the Internet? Embraced and tried to extend it. Now everything they sell has some Internet features, but they didn't manage to spread Active Server Pages everywhere, and Apache still tromps MS Internet Information Server.
I believe Microsoft will start by bundling Apache like Apple did, all "cleaned-up" with a Windows interface. Perhaps in the next Service Pack and in Windows 2000. Ballmer was saying the other day that Apache was simply better, in fact. They'll make a big deal about Microsoft supporting Open Source, and how they support innovations like that. [Emphases Mine]
This follows well.
Then Microsoft ActiveLinux 3.1 will come out (I thought that was the most probable name and no version number less than 2.2 - 3.1 is good luck for Microsoft.) They'll make it easily installable, perhaps add USB and NTFS support, and then use Active X and IE for UNIX to put a Windows interface on Linux that has some Win32 APIs, the way OS/2 had some Win32 API's with DAX.
No. I've got a couple problems with this. First, USB support is already in active development, as is NTFS support in the kernel... that point is moot. Of course they could always release a binary only driver, but like with VMware, I think they're likely to find kernel developers unwilling to maintain backward compatability to support binary only drivers. As well they should! What this means for Microsoft is that they will never control the momentum of kernel development unless they're willing to attempt a legal attack against the GPL; though that may well be in their interest.
I'd be willing to bet Microsoft keeps that interface closed. They'll argue using a creative interpretation of GPL or LGPL so that they won't have to reveal the source and perhaps any documented Win32 calls that they port over. What they do will probably be in violation of the (L)GPL, but what legal force will be able to challenge them? ESR doesn't have that kind of cash.
OK. More problems of minor ignorance. First of all, if MS were to release a proprietary Win32 widget library, this would be no different from The OpenGroup with their Motif product line, or Troll Tech with their previous QT-1.x product line. In both cases each company has (and had) every legal right to sell a proprietary binary only software package which could not only cost to develop for, but could even cost just to use in runtime licensing fees!
If these guys get to play that game, then certainly Microsoft can. The GPL only covers software which can be thought to derive from a previously GPL'd source base. For example, if I create a source tree completely by scratch the GPL has nothing to say about what kind of license I distribute under. But if I derive an offshoot from a previously GPL'd program, say my own special version of GNU ls, and I distribute this code in binary form for either free or for charge, then I must also offer to distribute source, and I can't prevent the recipient from also distributing either the binary or the source.
Harsh terms if you want to take something someone else wrote, change a line here and there (or not even that if you release under a BSD license), and then call it yours. But a Win32 emulation library, which has already been created for NT, is something wholly authored by Microsoft, and therefore completely their's to distribute under whatever license they choose. They don't even have to sell development libraries to third party developers; meaning they could, if they wanted to, completely monopolize the office software for Linux market given their current monoploy on office software and the immediate demand from the business community should they ever offer such a product. They could even use their old standard tactic of the Interface Shuffle by porting Win32 and MS Office to Linux, and then changing the Win32 layer regularly enough to prevent WINE from ever maintaining compatability.
This is what they mean by embrase and extend.
The LGPL license is another animal, designed to allow developers to offer a library of functions for other developers to include in their code without demanding that said developers using that library release their source upon releasing their software.
MS shops and ISV's won't care about that though. Those dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft groupies, PHBs and non-technical CEOs who've heard so much about Linux can try it without leaving the MS fold or the Windows interface.
And they'll be impressed. Instead of creating a bad distribution to discredit Linux, they'll create a really good one, with all the goodies and easy installation (that you can start from Windows like Caldera, probably). Microsoft users who need hand holding will use it, Windows users who want to get into Linux (but don't want to get their hands dirty) will use it, and ISVs will write to that closed interface, because Microsoft will give them tools to make an easy port that lets Windows program keep Win32 calls for the UI. Microsoft will make ActiveLinux become the path of least-resistance for users and vendors from the Windows world who want to expand into Linux but have no interest in free-source issues.
Microsoft won't do it unless they think it will significantly extend their MS Office monopoly. This is where the serious bucks are for them anyway. If MS ever begins to think Corel's Office for Linux, or StarOffice, might become a serious threat to MS Office marketshare (+15% of the market, say) then this is exactly the tactic I'd expect them to take.
If Microsoft succeeds in keeping the interface closed, and porting Office and BackOffice to their distribution, then it'll mean trouble because other distros won't look very competitive to the new users and the industry press. Microsoft could end up gathering more users than the other distributions, and then I don't know what...Microsoft was never able to get most of the web servers to run on MS-ware, so they didn't succeed there, but what if they managed to amass the biggest share of Linux users? Would it give them enough power to influence Linux's direction? [Emphases Mine]
You can't stop Microsoft from releasing their own commercial and costly Linux distribution with a proprietary Win32/MS Office kicker, they're in their legal rights to do so. This is no different from Apple releasing the core MACH and BSD components from MacOS-X under the APSL while keeping the crown jewels (Carbon and the OpenStep libraries) propritary. But like I said, the Linux core components like it's kernel and basic tools will never be under Microsoft's control unless they can pull a legal victory out of their ass which undermines the GPL. If they pull that stinker off the entire Open Source community is fucked. And it might well be in their interest to attempt this move if they ever think the dollar losses from OS/Office sales to Linux ever exceeds the potential PR disaster from such a move.
But baring such a casastrophic -- and unlikely -- outcome, we should expect that even if Microsoft released the most popular distribution of Linux, with all sorts of proprietary and expensive add ons to run commercial MS software, plenty of people will still just tinker around and maintain their own special Linux flavors. Do you really think Debian would go away? Not even if Caldera, Suse, and RedHat were flattened by the MS steamroller could they stop the Debian project without a Legal or Congressional victory (heh, maybe a bullshit Free Software Tax Act, that might make for good assault legislation against free software and is right up this congresses alley). Just like MS can't prevent end developers from creating a quality stable kernel and giving that away for free, they can't prevent a bunch of developers and end users from collecting a bunch of free software, creating a usable Linux distribution, and giving that away for free.
Just like how Microsoft can't control the kernel source tree, the Debian project is exactly why Microsoft could take over the lion's share of the Linux user market as a vector to generate revenue from a Win32 and MS Office port, yet still not control all the Linux distributions out there. I don't know about you, but I can live without MS Office for Linux. I won't be paying astronomical fees just to run bad software because Frank down the street is too stupid to convert his email to ascii. But hey, that's me.
Looks like Infoworld is collecting e-mail signatures for a petition against this thing. Look at the bottom of this page for details. The address is ucita@infoworld.com.
How Ironic it is that the simnet page linked from the infoworld page in your previous message, provides a NCCUSL list of commissioners, and a sample letter of dissent to mail to said commissioners, but it's only provided in MS Word.doc format. How obnoxious.
I faithfully followed those links in order to send a snail-mail because honestly these people take signed snail-mail much more seriously than email petitions, and I wanted to register my dissent with the strongest force possible. Oh well, one hopes StarOffice will read it... but still, these guys ought to get a clue.
Oh well, even though they're not announcing it, I guess we should assume that IRIX is officially dead. If they're not porting IRIX to Intel, and they're certainly not going to continue developing their MIPS hardware line after spinning MIPS, Inc. off last year, then what's going to happen to that IRIX source tree?
What a shame. IRIX and Solaris are the only serious scalable UNIXen on the market. HP-UX and AIX really only scale up 16 processors, Digital UNIX even less so, while IRIX and Solaris can handle a good 64 processors with a reasonable backplane. This means that if SGI decides to hold close it's dead IRIX technology the community will lose a very good scalable operating system.
Betcha the admins over at world.std.com are frowning over this... A good consolation prize might be freeing the source for XFS. Who thinks SGI might be willing to take such a drastic course of action?
Just get someone at an Iranian University to ftp a Linux distribution from any non-US public FTP server. That way the Iranian citizen/University and government can deal with the issue. Heh, do you really think Iran would extradite an Iranian citizen to the US for downloading publicly available software? (I doubt they even have any kind of extradition agreement with the United States)
With the vector processing of the emotion, with the nuon processor doing the management, and the IEEE1394 iLink, stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva parallel system.
Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters most other methods I've heard of. I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.
This is absolutely right. I've been looking at those things as a possible replacement candidate for the several hundred x86/UltraSPARC/MIPS boxen we use in my employer's machine room. And the PSx2 looks like a very serious machine for heavy low precision floating point work. The next generation StrongARM chips also look very good for this kind of work.
The biggest problem I have in that machine room is the large power requirements x86 draws when multiplied in the hundreds. This is not just about a power bill, but it affects the size of our UPS, air conditioning, and rack requirements as well. Several hundred x86 are cheap compared to a few SGI Origin/Sun E10000 SMP boxen, but those machines are really designed for high I/O, not compute. Anyway, now that we've come to accept the price point distributed x86 systems offer over the supercomputer competition it's time to begin thinking how to drop that price point down even further. If PlayStations do the trick I'm all for it.
Thing is, Sony is going to have to support such a move. We need more than just a PSx2 Linux based SDK... we need an entire Linux distribution ported to the PSx2, plus driver support for all the nifty features like firewire et all included in the box. Sony hasn't mentioned anything like supporting a Linux distribution on this hardware, only that they're providing an SDK under Linux (probably running on x86 with a hardware cartridge dongle to the PSx2). So, Sony would have to open the hardware up before this could be a serious possibility.
If not the PSx2, maybe those crazy guys at www.rebel.com (the new name for Corel Computer) will recognize low power consumption and high integer/floating point compute systems as viable, and begin developing a hardware line specifically to target that market. I tell you, if they released a Netwinder with decent floating point performance, supported at least 512MB of RAM, and sucked roughly the same power the current Netwinders draw (about 15 Watts total) we'd buy hundreds of 'em.
Of course, the same holds for Sony if they opened up the PSx2 and began to target the performance compute market. I just want cheap compute that draws as little power as possible (thus dissipating little heat) and fits in a smaller form factor than a standard AT or ATX case. Is this really too much to ask?
Are you trying to say that the U.S. was onvolved in the use of the internees as slave labor or that they were incinerated in ovens?
And you're suggesting that our nearly complete genocide of the native American peoples doesn't compare to Nazi atrocities? Or our kidnapping and enslavement of huge numbers of Africans and their children, and their children's children for several hundred years isn't also an atrocity (Never mind the Jim Crow laws still legal less than fifty years ago)?
If that's a little too old for you, how about our abysmal record of "training" of foreign military police in the School of the Americas, on US soil, which led to mass slaughter of civilians and native peoples in El Salvador, Hondorus, Nicaragua, East Timor, and countless other places. Hell, The United States propped up and supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a government that killed over 1 million of it's own people. And we actively vetoed a UN Security Counsel Resolution defining the +1 Million dead in Rwanda as "Genocide" in order to avoid the responsibility of taking action as we pulled our "Peace Keeping" troops and embassy staff out of that country.
America cannot be absolved of these crimes simply because it may have helped cause the economic destruction of a totalitarian enemy. Not that I support the Soviet Union or China, just that these wrongs led to a mass slaughter on the same scale, and we shouldn't dismiss that fact.
I think it's pretty clear that violent hazing of students lower on the totem pole of school society is both permitted, supported, and abused by school administrators and faculty in an attempt to maintain order. This simply must stop.
While I'm offended at the flagrantly violent abuses I endured from other students while in high school, I'm outraged that the administrators actually preserved this system of order. As an individual student I simply didn't know it was this pervasive throughout the American school system, nor did I realize to the extend at which public school faculty and administrators regularly use students to impose order upon other students in a caste system; this is reminiscent of the Brown Shirts of Germany -- imposing order through violence against the minority German Jewish population during the 1930's.
And lest you think that I'm taking this too far by drawing parallels with Nazi Germany, allow me to point out that I was assaulted several times by groups as large as six with metal chains on school grounds, and the faculty wouldn't do anything to preserve my safety because they claimed I didn't have any witnesses to back my story up. This is after they called me in to the administrative office and nursing station to find out why I had bruises all over my body, ostensibly in order to determine if my parents had been abusing me. Once they realized that in fact it was other popular students committing these crimes they lost all interest in the matter. So the school system would have called state protective services in an instant if they thought my parents had committed a violent crime against me, but once they realized it was popular students to blame they shut up and told me to go away (they didn't even suggest I should call the police). What assholes.
Damn, I haven't thought about this in years and I find myself getting outright pissed off thinking about it as an adult. We do not accept this behavior in adult life, why should we impose this abuse on our children?
Now I'm 31 and far from school grounds these days, but allow me to suggest to the younger audiences here on Slashdot that if you're experiencing this kind of violent abuse in school: drop out! Just go get your GED and immediately sign up for University or local Community College courses. Once you make it out of high school and start going to college (especially if you avoid those stupid fraternities), you will find that the adults behave civilized or they go to jail. Don't put up with violence, that high school diploma is meaningless compared to a decent degree and post graduate degree; never mind the emotional scaring you will likely avoid. And you don't need that high school diploma to get into college, you simply need to get good marks in a community college, or local state University, to transfer to just about any good private or public undergraduate institution.
I will never allow my children (when I do have children) into a public school because of these experiences.
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People: marijuana kills you.
Please back this statement up with facts. Cigarette smoking kills about half a million people annually, while according to this PBS "FrontLine" report there were "...too few deaths to meaningfully study the other main hypothesis, that marijuana use would be associated with increased respiratory disease mortality." and "...relatively few adverse clinical health effects from the chronic use of marijuana have been documented in humans."[references available at PBS site] In fact, Marijuana has no known LD 50, that is lethal dose in 50% of cases, not because data on health affects is lacking, but because no report has ever been filed of a death from Marijuana overdose. In fact, the only animal safety studies on Marijuana use ever completed killed vervet monkeys by asphyxiation from carbon dioxide poisoning, not from a drug overdose; showing that THC, while showing high efficacy, is one of the safest drugs known to man. It's safer than aspirin, buddy.
At best, you're slowly turning your brain into mush.
The psychological and brain physiological effects of Marijuana use simply aren't well known in the United States because the FDA has repeatedly refused to allow human studies. They won't even allow studies which purport to give marijuana to test subjects, when they are really only giving a placebo. However, anecdotal evidence from the lack of emergency room visits due to marijuana intoxication, compared to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin overdoses are telling. As the second most popular recreational drug in America, it causes fewer emergency room visits than all other drugs combined. Stick that in your pipe and smoke.
Marijuana use is at least as old as alcohol consumption, going back many thousands of years. And it's noted that today a large segment of society smokes pot without anywhere near the same level of ill health affects as alcohol. This is not to say that smoking pot is good for you in general, just that in comparison to alcohol, it's far safer.
I've seen people die because of marijuana. Either indirectly, because they were dumb enough to operate heavy machinery (namely cars and motorcycles) under the influence.
No doubt, anyone operating heavy machinery under the influence of any drug (even many prescribed medications) run risks associated with cognitive impairment. No one should drive a car while taking oxycodone, alcohol, or marijuana. Period.
Or directly, because they had really low blood preassure, and the first joint they tried made their blood preassure drop really low. There were a few people there, all of which, except for me, were stoned. I go "Hey, where's Tracy?" and they all start giggling. "She fell asleep!". Well, she didn't, she fainted and would have died if I haden't made her eat a whole bunch of cofee and salt.
This anecdote doesn't back your statement up. Sorry.
I don't see many folks bringing up hemp as an industrial resource, nor do I see many folks pointing to it's use as a medicine for the terminally ill. I've seen Marijuana work wonders for people dying of AIDS and know one person who swears it's what got him through Chemo-therapy alive. Yet our government continues it's war on citizens as though we can't manage our own bodies and personal lives without government interference. I have no problem with obeying traffic laws which state I must drive sober, but when our government puts good people away for long prison sentences simply because they were trying to live through a terminal illness, we have a serious problem with a political institution way out of touch with it's citizenry.
I support legalizing drugs, and believe that it ought to be up to the individual how he/she decides to live his/her life. Laws and the police should protect citizens from violent crime and fraud, not self abuse and self destruction; that's a job for psychiatrists and clergy.
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money, and will only continue increasing in value as a collectors item. Never mind getting his data off that machine, he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
Sure. I wasn't pumping the gas, nor was I near the pump. Why not?
Along with two other friends we were driving in a van back from a flea market at around 5pm in the evening -- which in September is still broad daylight. This was right after I had moved to Cincinnati, so I was new to the area.
We stopped at a gas station whereby one went in to buy gas and get a drink while the other went to the bathroom. I stepped out to smoke a butt (I was a smoker then), and walked away from the van to look around. The gas station was on the right side of the road, while on the other side just after the road a small grass covered valley dropped down and stretched out to tree covered hills several miles away.
Then I noticed what looked like a silver balloon just hovering maybe a thousand feet over the treetops, its size was about a third of my thumbnail, arms outstretched. At the time I thought it was a balloon, but didn't have anything else to look at while waiting so I paid attention to it. Then it began to slip down, sort of like a pendulum with each swing loosing altitude. I thought that was pretty weird, so while continuing to pay attention I noticed it stop moving outright, and then sort of gyrate like a top spinning in place. There it hovered for a short time, maybe 20 to 30 seconds.
At this point I was thinking that this was the weirdest balloon I'd ever seen, and was trying to figure out what kind of wind pattern might cause this behavior when the damn thing just instantly shot up and over, turned on a dime, and screamed across the sky from my left to my right side as my head panned to follow. Within less than a second it had moved a good 90 degrees of arc across the sky and went behind some nearby trees. And it didn't make a damn sound.
There are a couple of things to note:
My dad was a private pilot and he used to own an single engine airplane. I took flying lessons as a kid, landed an airplane, and all that -- almost lived in and out of airports as a kid (once we flew from southern California to Tampa Beach Florida in my dad's Cessna when I was seven). Been in helicopter, seen idiots make dangerous mistakes in ultralights and hangliders... there is absolutely no way what I saw could have been anything like a balloon, helicopter, or other prosaic craft. I'm certain of that.
But I still don't know what to make of this. I never saw the occupants, no one else witnessed the event, and I have absolutely no proof. I have trouble with the "alien craft" stuff, but I definitely believe, based on what I saw, that some silver disk shaped craft do exist, and display a performance envelope way beyond any kind of common aerodynamic craft. Beyond that, I simply don't know.
But they do create a necessary free foundation which was lacking previously -- I never much cared for CDE.PC hardware needs an update, I agree. Though I think that many of our hardware complaints are really expressions of frustration over what limited functionality current computers present. They're big, clunky, consume large amounts of electricity and thus expel noticeable heat, use moving/spinning parts at high speed, and they're still just single execution unit per cycle "Turing machines." Oh well. UltraSparc desktops really aren't physically that much different from Mac's and PC's. Nor are any other Workstation vendor's good much different beyond CPU, software, and name. The reason we still use clunky desktops now isn't because of dumb hardware manufacturers, but reasonable design given current hardware constraints.
I think we're going to have to continue to work with desktop based solutions for at least another ten years. By then maybe a general radio IP network infrastructure could be in place, along with those smaller and faster CPU advances Moore's law predicts, justifying a general purpose speech enabled PDA in the open market. This won't happen overnight.
So, while developing this technology may take a good decade, we should expect Microsoft to produce some kind broken speech enabled version of desktop Windows as soon as they can; maybe within one or two release cycles. They would be idiots to let Dragon Systems, IBM ViaVoice, and all those other third party speech toolkits to take over the market... when have you ever seen Microsoft do that??? It's already a viable business, Microsoft is there.
The Freenix community has a few advantages: IBM is currently giving out ViaVoice -- for now anyway, we have explosive growth going on with the desktop API -- meaning that change is more readily accepted by the current userbase, and we have several good Common LISP and Scheme interpreters -- with many skilled programmers. Given that GNOME already supports GUILE, updating a Common LISP variant to support the GNOME and GTK API's, along with integrating ViaVoice support, isn't impossible! And it's an important step towards making a usable "expert system" which understands enough to convert simple statements like "Move file1 to directory2" and "find all files containing the word 'foo'" into UNIX commands dynamically.
I think Open Source desktop systems like GNOME and KDE ought to be thinking along these lines now, because if speech is left unnoticed by the Freenix desktop developers, the UNIX community might miss a critical computer science juncture which will leave it behind Windows!
Obviously a more controlled revenue stream, one which is predictable, and one which continues the advance of the Microsoft monopoly. You don't think you'll be running Windows and MS/Office off an X-Terminal, do you? No, it will be some proprietary protocol, encrypted, and damn difficult to reverse engineer (maybe even illegal to reverse engineer!). But the most important to Microsoft must be the controlled and even revenue stream such a system would foster.
Microsoft is truly a house of cards right now. Here's a fascinating quote from last weeks Economist article on Share Options, Pg. 18, Aug 7th-13th, which illustrates this point:
Their stock is badly overvalued. They pay their employees poorly, over-work them, illegally hire so many temps that it's turned into a Seattle political scandal, and make up the difference with stock options for their core staff. This suggests that a sell off could be disastrous for the firm and it's employees.... hence it makes sense for Balmer and Gates to both sell off now (which they've been doing) and to look for a new revenue model which can assure higher profits in what will most certainly be a saturated market within ten to fifteen years.
How should Free software and Open Source proponents fight this? We know how Microsoft is going to fight open protocols on the Net... by "de-commoditizing" (what an aberration of a word, clearly Vinod didn't have a dictionary by his side when he wrote Halloween I and II). And we know that they've already set the desktop standard with Win32/Windows. As long as they maintain control of the Office document standard through adding regular incompatibilities to thwart reverse engineers, they keep Windows installed on enough machines to make interopability with other systems a non-issue for the vast majority of users, and they succeed in keeping Win32 closed enough such that it can never be reverse engineered and re-implemented, they will continue to maintain their monopoly.
The Justice Department may will the antitrust case, but by the time it's worked its way through the court systems, I'd argue that Win32 will have long since been rendered obsolete.
This is why I think KDE, GNOME, GNUStep, and the like are a waste of time as far as attempting to take desktop sales away from Microsoft. Free developers may create a good MS-Office replacement like KOffice, or SIAG Office, but it won't ever read MS-Office documents properly just like Corel Office (Even under Windows!), ApplixWare, and StarOffice can't. Nor will a Freenix based desktop ever run exactly the same software (Wine may work well as a porting library, but I'm doubting its long term viability as a Win32 program loader -- MS will just change the underlying core OS enough to make they're new applications incompatible with Wine... it's a never ending game with no winners on the Wine side for this part of their project). Keyboard shortcuts are different, applications are different, they're all incompatible, and the current winner has a stake in maintaining this situation.
So how do Freenix proponents win in this situation? In my opinion we can't win just be re-inventing the desktop wheel around X (or Berlin, for that matter). I think the Open Source community NEEDS a completely new approach, one which gives it the "killer app" advantage over Windows which will draw users not because of political issues over freedom, but because users will plain want said functionality.
The next big revolution in user interface design is speech recognition incorporated directly into the systems interface with the computer. Something like what the Oxygen Project at the MIT media Laboratory is doing, with private funding I may add. (See this months Scientific American for a spread on the Oxygen project, the RAW CPU (a programable FPGA system), and their work with handhelds) I don't see any open source stuff from Oxygen... (does anyone know what their stance on Open Source is, and if they're currently accepting funds from Microsoft? If they are, who do you think will keep that codebase???) If you ask me, this is where Balmer wants to go. Everyone gets a handheld which is connected to the net via a radio/infrared networking, the system accepts speech input which is then passed to a server to interpret and resolve the problem, then passed back to the user in speech/video from the handheld. Such a system could be charged per minute, per query, or any of a number of other methods.
This is what the free software community should be planning to implement. And most of the tools are already available... IBM's Viavoice is a good enough continuous speech recognition system -- though it's not free. It could be used as a module within GNU common lisp, which could then serve as a foundation for a new natural language systems interface based on an "expert system" which understands a simple enough grammer and converts this to UNIX commands, manipulating files, directories, and launching applications. If IBM never releases ViaVoice under an "Open Source" license, the fact that it's a module instead of being tightly integrated into the system means that Freeware developers could rewrite the recognition engine -- maybe with funding from the FSF, a university, or some other organization.
Such a system would have to be tightly integrated with the desktop interface though, like common KDE and GNOME shortcuts, so that applications could know when to take speech input through their STDIN stream (like dictation) and know when you're attempting to give a command to either the application or the general operating system. Given GNOME's reliance on GUILE as it's "glue scripting language" it seems to me a bit closer toward integrating in a functional language with all its desktop applications, and thus being able to integrate natural language processing across the entire API suite. Just a guess though.
I think this is where Freenix ought to go, and if it gets there before Microsoft, they will lose marketshare quickly. They may die a horrible death just because their financial situation is so precarious, but that won't do the Freenix community much good; they'll just file Chapter 11 and restructure -- with their monopoly intact. For the Freenix community to take the desktop we must provide an alternative which is easier to use, not just free.
Of course, I may just be oversimplifying a very complex problem... Please feel free to resolve any problems of ignorance you may have noticed!
I keep hearing this from my gun toting, pick-up truck driving, tax cuts for the rich while we shut down basic government services like primary education (you don't want a school voucher so you can send your kid to a nice, righteous, religious school where they don't teach that unGodly "evolution?" NO! I want a properly funded public school system!) basic health care for our citizens, and low cost housing for the disabled and elderly. Just what the hell am I paying taxes for anyway?
Oh yeah, to pay interest on a debt built up by Republicans during the eighties while they "cut" taxes for the rich so that wealth may "trickle down" to us street rabble; all in the name of creating a "fair" tax system. Right.
So now they're about to eviscerate yet another government agency ("Since when has the government ever done anything right?" Oh yeah? When was the last time you saw a private corporation dig a Panama Canal, design and build a Nuclear bomb, or put a man on the moon? What a bunch of neo-corporate elitist CRAP! ) which has on the whole generated more economic benefit for private corporations across the US than any other government agency (publicly funded University research not withstanding); fruits grown from basic research no private corporation could possibly afford given their per-quarter bottom line, short term or bust, thinking (restrictiveness).
So, the point of all this? My right wing tax cutting, pick-up truck with a rack of shotguns and a 30 ought six in the back, dodging bullets and taxes in one stroke, friends -- they often offer as a response to my distaste for how government has been bought off by private corporate interests, thus forcing middle of the road political norms over to what would have been called "right wing extremism" when I was a child -- they say "You don't like America, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE! MOVE!"
Now I think they're right. As citizens we don't stand a chance compared to GE, AT&T, IT&T, Microsoft, or any other huge conglomerates worth more than most third world countries combined. We've lost our country -- it's time to move on. If enough skilled and technically savvy workers just up and emigrated our of the US to other spots, where rent is cheap, taxes at least go somewhere useful (instead of paying interest on the debt and the military budget), and used the net to our advantage -- working anywhere we damn well pleased, the United States might see a noticeable drop in their tax base. And when the congressmen and senators ask, "where did that money go to?" we can answer: "elsewhere"
I'm pretty fed up with my government at this point... I don't think my views will ever be represented in the Legislative or Executive branches, and the Judicial branch is a complete joke given how badly stacked it was in the eighties by Reagan/Bush. If we keep cutting education such that kids can't even learn basic reading and arithmetic skills, while at the same time cutting basic research needed for long term growth, this country's will go down the tubes. If you can't stop it, think ahead and FLEE!
Bruce is just an old fart -- he's talking about the pre 1.0 days when the Linux kernel was distributed by punch card, and fit in your hand to boot.
:-^
Unlike most, I'm one who believes in investing as much disk to swap as you can afford. 2xRAM is my minimal swap space.
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/Changes in 2.2.10 only states that the 128MB limit is gone, but doesn't list the new physical limit -- I've used up to 1024MB in one swap partition so I know that it can get pretty big. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the limit is 2048MB to conform with the 32 bit file size limit in ext2fs simply for parity with swap files in mkswap.
With Linux kernels previous to (I believe) 2.0.36 you must make each swap partition no larger than 128M, though you may have an arbitrary number of swap partitions or files (and yes, Linux can use swap files in the filesystem instead of individual partitions, but at a performance penalty).
Older 2.0.x, 1.2.x, and 1.0.x kernels must use individual 128MB swap partitions or files (actually, I seem to recall that 1.0.x kernels didn't support swap files, only partitions), but don't know if the larger swap partition support is limited to 2.2.x kernels or the later 2.0.36/37 kernels.
Now for why I like lots of swap: You don't have to use it, but when you need it you REALLY need it! Your VM space is only as large as core and swap. Yes, I know the kernel can address anywhere within the 4GB boundary, but the total number of usable pages is limited to your physical RAM plus swap space! This is important to consider if you ever want to run lots of processes which sleep until asynchronous I/O events wake them up. If you want to start lots of processes and let them go off to sleep, having plenty of VM space makes sense. The machine will only thrash if there's memory contention among processes in a run state, so it's safe (and desirable) to let sleeping processes page out to swap while the machine uses physical core for running code.
Also: consider the possibility of a small application using huge datasets. I run into this at work all the time. We have clustered machines each with 1/2GB of RAM and 1GB of swap. As long as each process only keeps dirty pages of the dataset in core, one can have multiple program instances crunching through different datasets even though together they're exceeding total physical core. Since these programs are stepping linearly through the data, instead of randomly seeking different pages like in a program doing long jumps, this can actually work well. Memory contention occurs not when you exceed total physical ram, but when running processes request pages that have been flushed to disk!
If you're careful and selective about how you use the extra swap space you can wildly exceed physical core without significant performance loss. Food for thought.
See the traffic shaper pseudo device support in Linux-2.2.x. According to it's documentation it can shape from about 9600 to 256kb per pseudo-device. Documentation lives at:t xt
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/shaper.
You might also want to look into the Linux Firewalling code if you're going to use it for traffic shaping as well. See:
filter and ipmasq.txt in the same directory.
Cheers!
J. Maynard Gelinas
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
Just as Woz says:
I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it.
He is the proverbial compassionate hacker. He was perfectly happy to just give out the schematics, and found ethical dilemma in building a business which might turn into a serious money maker. This is no different from the likes of rms, Linus, Eric Raymond, Larry Wall, and the now very large number of people out creating such wonderful things as gnome and KDE, GIMP, Python, Apache, and the list just goes on.
Doesn't it just blow your mind that this guy is out teaching high school instead of finding new ways to make himself richer? Don't you wish you could have been lucky enough tp have taken classes from this guy? He does these things because he enjoys the labor, and wants to help others enjoy the success of creating new things! What better lesson would you want your children to learn?
That he made enough money to comfortably live in ease for the rest of his life may be blind luck -- but don't you think he deserves it more than Gates, Jobs, Ellison, and all the other blowhards who probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years?
Woz is a man I can respect.
Don't know about a web page, but there's an active mailing list full of people working to write a free BIOS for most PC like motherboards. You can subscribe to this mailing list by sending the word "subscribe openbios" in the body of a mail message to:
majordomo@wesley.informatik.uni-freiburg.de
This is a worthy project. Please don't subscribe and immediately start asking stupid questions, just sit back and watch the flow. I've never posted a message there because I'm not a BIOS hacker... if you're not a BIOS hacker either, but are curious, you're probably welcome as a lurker. Serious BIOS hackers are probably most welcome contributors. Either way, please respect the users' of this list by helping to keep their S/N ratio down!
RK05 - 2.5MB, with double density 5MB
RL02 - 5MB, with double density 10MB
Talk about an electron consumer...
I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)
:-)
:-)
The NetBSD project doesn't state "Of course it runs NetBSD" for nothing. That OS is about the most portable *BSD around, and this is their primary objective (along with "correctness", whatever that means). I'd say NetBSD probably runs on more hardware platforms than Linux, though it's pretty close race.
NetBSD is a great OS. I run it on my Sun 3/80's because nothing else will , reliably anyway. Who wants to run SunOS 4.1.1?
I'd say the primary difference between Linux and the *BSD's is not technical, because they're both pretty damn good, but one of licensing terms. The BSD's allow one to take the source and rework it into a completely commercial project, thus allowing re-distribution without releasing source. This is in stark contrast to Linux, released under the GPL, which requires those who both derive from from a GPL'd source tree AND distribute a new product based on said derivative, must also release the new source tree.
I'm not a licensing zealot, so I think there's a place for both licensing schemes. For example, I suspect the *BSD's would make a better OS than Linux for commercial embedded devices simply because of their licensing terms. However, as an end user who prefers keeping a code base to my OS free and open, I prefer using an OS released under the GPL for my day to day work... so I run Linux on my PC's -- unless I don't have a choice (like with my 3/80's), then I'll run whatever's available. Just a personal preference which says nothing about the quality of the BSD codebase. Those who hack BSD because they prefer the additional freedom of the BSD license have every justification to do so. In fact, the success of BSD in attracting quality developers is in and of itself a validation of their licensing and development model, just as is the success of Linux.
There. That's about as Politically Correct as I can get.
The NetBSD project demo'd NetBSD on the iMac last week at USENIX. They had a booth over in the vendors area where they were showing this spiffy iMac along with an old VaxStation or somesuch -- this iMac probably outperformed that VAX 20:1... hehe.
Nice guys too.
With a properly configured sendmail-8.8.5 distribution, or above, I'd like to see you back this assertion up with some facts. Go ahead and show me how you'll crack a box with sendmail using a buffer overflow or other similar trick... you're not leaving sendmail in debug mode are you?
.cf, smrsh configured, and no DON'T_BLAME_SENDMAIL options blatently leaving your machine open to the world. The current release of Sendmail is 8.9.3, I haven't seen a CERT advisory on sendmail for some time, and Eric Allman keeps pumping out new bugfixes.
Now by properly configured, I mean no configuration files down a path with group writable directories, no stupid scripts run out of the
This doesn't diminish the good work done by the qmail folks. However, if you want UUCP, BITNET relaying, or FIDO-NET support (which is CRITICAL in many third world countries) sendmail is your only option.
Finally, your post is flame bait devoid of relevant information to the IIS security hole. Of course, this reply is also devoid of anything relevant to the IIS security hole found, but I thought it incumbant to reply to your misinformed banter.
Even though the premise is good, there are some fundamental mistakes of fact which ought to be resolved:
Grenamier (jtruong@idirect.com) Wrote:
To me, it looks like Microsoft is creating its own distribution of Linux. For one clue, the title of the job is "Product Manager". No company has Product Managers for products they don't sell. Some of the duties include "product development for the development team" and "technical assistance for the sales force."[Emphases mine]
The position also advertises "high visibility" outside of the company. People who just watch competitors and make reports about them don't normally get much exposure (VinodV didn't get his 15 minutes on purpose). But if Microsoft is selling a "new" product, its Product Manager would be expected to flog it to the press.
So what's Microsoft up to? Scrapping NT for Linux? Of course not, they'd be throwing away all of their leverage. Trying to steal Linux technology for NT? Perhaps, but they wouldn't need to sell a product of their own for that.[emphases mine]
Yes, I agree completely. They wouldn't bother with a project unless they were planning to either make something for sale, or were planning a "grassroots" marketing effort. But they can't "Steal" something out in the open like a GPL'd package, so I don't know what you mean by that.
This is my wild speculation:
Free-sourced software is the Internet happening all over again for Microsoft...everyone in the industry is jumping on the bandwagon and stories about the success of Linux, Apache and Perl are everywhere. Microsoft missed the populization of yet another decades-old "phenomenon" and they've known it since Hallowe'en at the least.[Emphases Mine]
I really like that quote. It well describes the mentality which must be fermenting in MS upper management strategy meetings.
What did Microsoft do about the Internet? Embraced and tried to extend it. Now everything they sell has some Internet features, but they didn't manage to spread Active Server Pages everywhere, and Apache still tromps MS Internet Information Server.
I believe Microsoft will start by bundling Apache like Apple did, all "cleaned-up" with a Windows interface. Perhaps in the next Service Pack and in Windows 2000. Ballmer was saying the other day that Apache was simply better, in fact. They'll make a big deal about Microsoft supporting Open Source, and how they support innovations like that. [Emphases Mine]
This follows well.
Then Microsoft ActiveLinux 3.1 will come out (I thought that was the most probable name and no version number less than 2.2 - 3.1 is good luck for Microsoft.) They'll make it easily installable, perhaps add USB and NTFS support, and then use Active X and IE for UNIX to put a Windows interface on Linux that has some Win32 APIs, the way OS/2 had some Win32 API's with DAX.
No. I've got a couple problems with this. First, USB support is already in active development, as is NTFS support in the kernel... that point is moot. Of course they could always release a binary only driver, but like with VMware, I think they're likely to find kernel developers unwilling to maintain backward compatability to support binary only drivers. As well they should! What this means for Microsoft is that they will never control the momentum of kernel development unless they're willing to attempt a legal attack against the GPL; though that may well be in their interest.
I'd be willing to bet Microsoft keeps that interface closed. They'll argue using a creative interpretation of GPL or LGPL so that they won't have to reveal the source and perhaps any documented Win32 calls that they port over. What they do will probably be in violation of the (L)GPL, but what legal force will be able to challenge them? ESR doesn't have that kind of cash.
OK. More problems of minor ignorance. First of all, if MS were to release a proprietary Win32 widget library, this would be no different from The OpenGroup with their Motif product line, or Troll Tech with their previous QT-1.x product line. In both cases each company has (and had) every legal right to sell a proprietary binary only software package which could not only cost to develop for, but could even cost just to use in runtime licensing fees!
If these guys get to play that game, then certainly Microsoft can. The GPL only covers software which can be thought to derive from a previously GPL'd source base. For example, if I create a source tree completely by scratch the GPL has nothing to say about what kind of license I distribute under. But if I derive an offshoot from a previously GPL'd program, say my own special version of GNU ls, and I distribute this code in binary form for either free or for charge, then I must also offer to distribute source, and I can't prevent the recipient from also distributing either the binary or the source.
Harsh terms if you want to take something someone else wrote, change a line here and there (or not even that if you release under a BSD license), and then call it yours. But a Win32 emulation library, which has already been created for NT, is something wholly authored by Microsoft, and therefore completely their's to distribute under whatever license they choose. They don't even have to sell development libraries to third party developers; meaning they could, if they wanted to, completely monopolize the office software for Linux market given their current monoploy on office software and the immediate demand from the business community should they ever offer such a product. They could even use their old standard tactic of the Interface Shuffle by porting Win32 and MS Office to Linux, and then changing the Win32 layer regularly enough to prevent WINE from ever maintaining compatability.
This is what they mean by embrase and extend.
The LGPL license is another animal, designed to allow developers to offer a library of functions for other developers to include in their code without demanding that said developers using that library release their source upon releasing their software.
MS shops and ISV's won't care about that though. Those dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft groupies, PHBs and non-technical CEOs who've heard so much about Linux can try it without leaving the MS fold or the Windows interface.
And they'll be impressed. Instead of creating a bad distribution to discredit Linux, they'll create a really good one, with all the goodies and easy installation (that you can start from Windows like Caldera, probably). Microsoft users who need hand holding will use it, Windows users who want to get into Linux (but don't want to get their hands dirty) will use it, and ISVs will write to that closed interface, because Microsoft will give them tools to make an easy port that lets Windows program keep Win32 calls for the UI. Microsoft will make ActiveLinux become the path of least-resistance for users and vendors from the Windows world who want to expand into Linux but have no interest in free-source issues.
Microsoft won't do it unless they think it will significantly extend their MS Office monopoly. This is where the serious bucks are for them anyway. If MS ever begins to think Corel's Office for Linux, or StarOffice, might become a serious threat to MS Office marketshare (+15% of the market, say) then this is exactly the tactic I'd expect them to take.
If Microsoft succeeds in keeping the interface closed, and porting Office and BackOffice to their distribution, then it'll mean trouble because other distros won't look very competitive to the new users and the industry press. Microsoft could end up gathering more users than the other distributions, and then I don't know what...Microsoft was never able to get most of the web servers to run on MS-ware, so they didn't succeed there, but what if they managed to amass the biggest share of Linux users? Would it give them enough power to influence Linux's direction? [Emphases Mine]
You can't stop Microsoft from releasing their own commercial and costly Linux distribution with a proprietary Win32/MS Office kicker, they're in their legal rights to do so. This is no different from Apple releasing the core MACH and BSD components from MacOS-X under the APSL while keeping the crown jewels (Carbon and the OpenStep libraries) propritary. But like I said, the Linux core components like it's kernel and basic tools will never be under Microsoft's control unless they can pull a legal victory out of their ass which undermines the GPL. If they pull that stinker off the entire Open Source community is fucked. And it might well be in their interest to attempt this move if they ever think the dollar losses from OS/Office sales to Linux ever exceeds the potential PR disaster from such a move.
But baring such a casastrophic -- and unlikely -- outcome, we should expect that even if Microsoft released the most popular distribution of Linux, with all sorts of proprietary and expensive add ons to run commercial MS software, plenty of people will still just tinker around and maintain their own special Linux flavors. Do you really think Debian would go away? Not even if Caldera, Suse, and RedHat were flattened by the MS steamroller could they stop the Debian project without a Legal or Congressional victory (heh, maybe a bullshit Free Software Tax Act, that might make for good assault legislation against free software and is right up this congresses alley). Just like MS can't prevent end developers from creating a quality stable kernel and giving that away for free, they can't prevent a bunch of developers and end users from collecting a bunch of free software, creating a usable Linux distribution, and giving that away for free.
Just like how Microsoft can't control the kernel source tree, the Debian project is exactly why Microsoft could take over the lion's share of the Linux user market as a vector to generate revenue from a Win32 and MS Office port, yet still not control all the Linux distributions out there. I don't know about you, but I can live without MS Office for Linux. I won't be paying astronomical fees just to run bad software because Frank down the street is too stupid to convert his email to ascii. But hey, that's me.
[snip]
Looks like Infoworld is collecting e-mail signatures for a petition against this thing. Look at the bottom of this page for details. The address is ucita@infoworld.com.
.doc format. How obnoxious.
How Ironic it is that the simnet page linked from the infoworld page in your previous message, provides a NCCUSL list of commissioners, and a sample letter of dissent to mail to said commissioners, but it's only provided in MS Word
I faithfully followed those links in order to send a snail-mail because honestly these people take signed snail-mail much more seriously than email petitions, and I wanted to register my dissent with the strongest force possible. Oh well, one hopes StarOffice will read it... but still, these guys ought to get a clue.
Oh well, even though they're not announcing it, I guess we should assume that IRIX is officially dead. If they're not porting IRIX to Intel, and they're certainly not going to continue developing their MIPS hardware line after spinning MIPS, Inc. off last year, then what's going to happen to that IRIX source tree?
What a shame. IRIX and Solaris are the only serious scalable UNIXen on the market. HP-UX and AIX really only scale up 16 processors, Digital UNIX even less so, while IRIX and Solaris can handle a good 64 processors with a reasonable backplane. This means that if SGI decides to hold close it's dead IRIX technology the community will lose a very good scalable operating system.
Betcha the admins over at world.std.com are frowning over this... A good consolation prize might be freeing the source for XFS. Who thinks SGI might be willing to take such a drastic course of action?
Just get someone at an Iranian University to ftp a Linux distribution from any non-US public FTP server. That way the Iranian citizen/University and government can deal with the issue. Heh, do you really think Iran would extradite an Iranian citizen to the US for downloading publicly available software? (I doubt they even have any kind of extradition agreement with the United States)
With the vector processing of the emotion, with the nuon processor doing the management, and the IEEE1394 iLink, stacking a few PSX2s will make for a helluva parallel system.
Even at $500/box, that sill slaughters most other methods I've heard of. I imagine Becker and NASA will be all over it.
This is absolutely right. I've been looking at those things as a possible replacement candidate for the several hundred x86/UltraSPARC/MIPS boxen we use in my employer's machine room. And the PSx2 looks like a very serious machine for heavy low precision floating point work. The next generation StrongARM chips also look very good for this kind of work.
The biggest problem I have in that machine room is the large power requirements x86 draws when multiplied in the hundreds. This is not just about a power bill, but it affects the size of our UPS, air conditioning, and rack requirements as well. Several hundred x86 are cheap compared to a few SGI Origin/Sun E10000 SMP boxen, but those machines are really designed for high I/O, not compute. Anyway, now that we've come to accept the price point distributed x86 systems offer over the supercomputer competition it's time to begin thinking how to drop that price point down even further. If PlayStations do the trick I'm all for it.
Thing is, Sony is going to have to support such a move. We need more than just a PSx2 Linux based SDK... we need an entire Linux distribution ported to the PSx2, plus driver support for all the nifty features like firewire et all included in the box. Sony hasn't mentioned anything like supporting a Linux distribution on this hardware, only that they're providing an SDK under Linux (probably running on x86 with a hardware cartridge dongle to the PSx2). So, Sony would have to open the hardware up before this could be a serious possibility.
If not the PSx2, maybe those crazy guys at www.rebel.com (the new name for Corel Computer) will recognize low power consumption and high integer/floating point compute systems as viable, and begin developing a hardware line specifically to target that market. I tell you, if they released a Netwinder with decent floating point performance, supported at least 512MB of RAM, and sucked roughly the same power the current Netwinders draw (about 15 Watts total) we'd buy hundreds of 'em.
Of course, the same holds for Sony if they opened up the PSx2 and began to target the performance compute market. I just want cheap compute that draws as little power as possible (thus dissipating little heat) and fits in a smaller form factor than a standard AT or ATX case. Is this really too much to ask?
Are you trying to say that the U.S. was onvolved in the use of the internees as slave labor or that they were incinerated in ovens?
And you're suggesting that our nearly complete genocide of the native American peoples doesn't compare to Nazi atrocities? Or our kidnapping and enslavement of huge numbers of Africans and their children, and their children's children for several hundred years isn't also an atrocity (Never mind the Jim Crow laws still legal less than fifty years ago)?
If that's a little too old for you, how about our abysmal record of "training" of foreign military police in the School of the Americas, on US soil, which led to mass slaughter of civilians and native peoples in El Salvador, Hondorus, Nicaragua, East Timor, and countless other places. Hell, The United States propped up and supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a government that killed over 1 million of it's own people. And we actively vetoed a UN Security Counsel Resolution defining the +1 Million dead in Rwanda as "Genocide" in order to avoid the responsibility of taking action as we pulled our "Peace Keeping" troops and embassy staff out of that country.
America cannot be absolved of these crimes simply because it may have helped cause the economic destruction of a totalitarian enemy. Not that I support the Soviet Union or China, just that these wrongs led to a mass slaughter on the same scale, and we shouldn't dismiss that fact.
I think it's pretty clear that violent hazing of students lower on the totem pole of school society is both permitted, supported, and abused by school administrators and faculty in an attempt to maintain order. This simply must stop.
While I'm offended at the flagrantly violent abuses I endured from other students while in high school, I'm outraged that the administrators actually preserved this system of order. As an individual student I simply didn't know it was this pervasive throughout the American school system, nor did I realize to the extend at which public school faculty and administrators regularly use students to impose order upon other students in a caste system; this is reminiscent of the Brown Shirts of Germany -- imposing order through violence against the minority German Jewish population during the 1930's.
And lest you think that I'm taking this too far by drawing parallels with Nazi Germany, allow me to point out that I was assaulted several times by groups as large as six with metal chains on school grounds, and the faculty wouldn't do anything to preserve my safety because they claimed I didn't have any witnesses to back my story up. This is after they called me in to the administrative office and nursing station to find out why I had bruises all over my body, ostensibly in order to determine if my parents had been abusing me. Once they realized that in fact it was other popular students committing these crimes they lost all interest in the matter. So the school system would have called state protective services in an instant if they thought my parents had committed a violent crime against me, but once they realized it was popular students to blame they shut up and told me to go away (they didn't even suggest I should call the police). What assholes.
Damn, I haven't thought about this in years and I find myself getting outright pissed off thinking about it as an adult. We do not accept this behavior in adult life, why should we impose this abuse on our children?
Now I'm 31 and far from school grounds these days, but allow me to suggest to the younger audiences here on Slashdot that if you're experiencing this kind of violent abuse in school: drop out! Just go get your GED and immediately sign up for University or local Community College courses. Once you make it out of high school and start going to college (especially if you avoid those stupid fraternities), you will find that the adults behave civilized or they go to jail. Don't put up with violence, that high school diploma is meaningless compared to a decent degree and post graduate degree; never mind the emotional scaring you will likely avoid. And you don't need that high school diploma to get into college, you simply need to get good marks in a community college, or local state University, to transfer to just about any good private or public undergraduate institution.
I will never allow my children (when I do have children) into a public school because of these experiences.