Firstly, QNX is pronounced Queue-nicks, not Queue-nucks.
Secondly, it was developed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and then spun off into a company.
Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.
Since when does Linux need anything? It works fine for me; all my favorite software runs on it. Therefore I can say that Linux categorically does not need anything, based on my experience.
"It works for me so it doesn't need anything else", I suppose if you have a couple gig of ram you don't NEED virtual memory either, or if you have an x86 processor you don't NEED an alpha or sparc port. Not to mention modules, who needs modules if all your hardware is initialized by the BIOS?
The fact is pretty much every other unix has some type of journaling filesystem where linux simply does not. Linux is mostly used as a server OS and therefore needs server OS features. Journaling isn't "wiz-bang" anymore, it's essential, even for the home user. An fsck on a 30 gig drive will show you that.
METHOD OF TRANSFERING ENERGY BETWEEN COHABITATING ORGANIC GROUPS
ABSTRACT
A method for transfering essential energy between groups of cohabitating organic material consists of an initial energy source whereby through radiation facilitates one group of organic material (primary group) infused with a forrest colored substance to sustain other cohabitating groups of organic materials (secondary group). The secondary group uses an oraface to intake the energy offered by the primay group.
So I'm not the only one getting that impression. It seems to me, too, that he's getting the runaround. "Oh, I'm sorry Hans, but we can't possibly put your filesystem into the kernel until we get this fancy new VM layer finished." Never mind that reiserfs has been working beautifully in the 2.2 kernel for a long time, and probably works as well in 2.4 (I haven't tried it).
I've been using ReiserFS since 2.4.0-test4 or so and it's been working just fine, with test9 it's just amazing.
My impression is Alan is keeping it out of the kernel because they don't want support costs going to the ReiserFS company, but want that all to go to Red Hat for ext3, nevermind that ext3 is such an immature, unusable peice of.. well, nothing really.
I was pretty upset about ReiserFS not getting into the kernel before 2.4.0, Linux absolutely NEEDS a Journaling Filesystem, and ReiserFS works beautifully and is the most mature.
Another reason for the quicker demise of the current movie profit model is that Napster et. al. has taught the current generation of 14-24 year olds (who by 50% of the movie tickets) that copyright is obsolete.
Quit making us pay 8, 9, 10 dollars or more to see a movie and you'll end up with more profit in volume.
I challenge you to name another viable company that brings new ideas to the table as consistently as Apple. You don't even have to like them, but you must admit that they follow the lead of others far less than any company around.
Apple has innovated what exactly? They stole the GUI from Xerox PARC, they stole the mouse, etc. They don't follow anyone elses lead huh? I suppose thats why they use IDE, PCI, AGP, SDRAM, etc, for hardware. I suppose thats why they're using a BSD kernel for their next OS.
So really, what exactly has Apple innovated? Firewire which is going nowhere fast, and the use of pretty shiney moulded translucent plastic to woo the sheep to their side of the fence?
Oh shit. They licenced something from Amazon (the only legal way to currently offer this feature). Let's flush them down the toilet.
A feature you could easily do without, all they had to do was *gasp*, not use it. I'm no one would care about that extra confirmation click. Not to mention they could have tried to get the patent revoked.
It was just an example of the size of 800 million downloads. Still I think it was quite inaccurate. You must also remember, most people on earth dont have and dont care to have internet access, and of those people who would have heard of this womans site? People in north america.
I was thinking about this when I heard on Entertainment Tonight about Guinness crowning the "Most downloaded woman on the internet". And when I heard her astronomical number of 800 million downloads I thought it was incredibly inaccurate. Every man, woman and child in the US would have to download 4 of her pictures. How does Guinness come up with the final numbers? Do they even check the logs themselves? Are thumbnails viewed on a page included in the final numbers?
When I eventually went to her site (I can't even remember her name for gods sakes) she had almost no pictures on it of herself, lots of other girls however, I tried in vain looking for some of her and I was thinking to myself that the numbers were severely inflated.
While this might be an "obnoxious" question I think a standard way of evaluating just how many hits and downloads a site gets needs to be determined, expecially for awards like the Guinness Book.
If I have a one machine that can access the net, I can ping spoof thousands of boxes, (this is still a problem) who in return all reply the ping to hostX. hostX feels the punch of 100's of boxes pinging it, even though those pings all came from one machine. Now imagine 560 machines doing the same.
I'm well aware of smurf attacks, I was just illustrating that 560 machines on "slow" connections coordinated make for a formidable foe. Of course using a smurf attack amplifies that, however I know trinoo doesn't support that kind of attack, I'm not sure about tribes. (assuming the cracker is a typical skript kiddie who wouldn't write his own "tools")
If hackerX can find 560 machines to compromize, he can find thousands of hosts who's routers are not configured to block ping spoofs.
The way ICMP works you will *never* be able to block "ping spoofs", the problem is blocking them on broadcast addresses (1 packet turns into many just by sending it to a broadcast address) which is the whole basis of smurf.
Back when there weren't any IP laws, there was no way of distributing digital copies of music. The Internet makes possible things that we had never even imagined, and there will always be people who will take advantage of these new possibilities.
Oh so IP law is all about DIGITAL? I'm sorry, but IP law has been around a lot longer than the internet, digital computers, etc. Back without IP law there were still ways of copying, sharing, etc. IP law has absolutely nothing to do with whether the medium is digital or not, thats such a crock.
You were missing my point here. I was saying that communism sounded like a great idea at first, you didn't have to worry about money and everyone was equal. However, they didn't factor in laziness, which was why it never worked. In this case, people like you fail to factor in others who will abuse a society which has weak IP laws.
Law will always be exploited, period, there just isn't a way to make a law air-tight in a democratic society. Nor should we try. The object is to find a common ground, make laws that benifit the public and the corporations but ones that infringe on neither. All I've been seeing lately are laws that heavily favor corporations. Copyright should not be perpetual, patents don't expire quickly enough in our society, trademarks are getting to the point of absurdity.
You people don't understand the importance of copyright laws and intellectual property. Most of you would love to live in a world where there were no IP laws, but guess what would happen? No one would want to publish their work online!
This is absolutely, one-hundred percent, wrong! Back before there was IP laws did people not invent things? Write poetry and literature? Perform music? Paint paintings? I really hate it when people say "without IP laws no one would publish anything" as history has shown that this is false. The very thought that one human can own an idea, or that a thought is the same as real estate, is absolutely absurd. Now I don't think we should do away with IP COMPLETELY, but it should be reformed drastically and protections severely minimized. Mattel sueing everyone and their dog over the name Barbie just shows that as it stands IP Law Doesn't Work!
This is similar to the good intentions behind communism, yet in practice it has proven to be a failure.
Again, this is false. One implimentation of communism crumbled so communism could never work, or doesn't work? I don't think so. This is another argumentative pet-peeve of mine. Communism as the Soviet Union practiced it didn't work, but that doesn't mean communism doesn't, or can't work.
The lawsuits may be hard to swallow at first but they are absolutely essential for the growth of the Internet.
No, they are not. They hinder the internet. For as many people you think wouldn't post their work online in the absence of IP law there are 20 companies and individuals who wouldn't post their work online in FEAR OF IP law.
Why do you think many hardware makers don't release specifications? Because Microsoft is bribing them not to? No. Because they are afraid of potential law suits over patents they may have infringed but because of the time and cost involved couldn't or didn't check with the patent office on each and every method they use. Look at 3Dfx getting sued by NVidia over patent infringement. 3Dfx is open with their specs and that is their reward, NVidia isn't and their reward is staying speed king in the 3D accelerator card market. This is what IP law does.
Wow, you really must feel special by trying to put down Canada's millitary. Whatever floats your boat. Just remember that our fighter pilots routinely beat yours in excercises, and your soldiers also routinely train with ours because our personnel are some of the best trained in the world.
We don't have many (much more then 5, rofl) but what we do have is extremely well trained.
As for that ship invasion, we took it back, the dispute was between two companies, not a company and the government. The ship carried millitary equiptment and refused to dock because it was trying to extort MORE money out of the second company, so we just took it.
You wind up with a similar statement, not a contrasting one. Therefore, there is not a much more powerful argument for your position.
Listen, I don't belive in gun control, and I don't belive in censorship, but saying that selling violent video games is more harmful than selling weapons is just plain ludicrous.
If you take one person, who is realatively non-violent and sell him a violent video game, what is he going to do with it? Bludgeon someone to death with the box? The jewel case? However if you sell him a handgun he now has more potential destructive force, whether he uses it or not is irrelevant.
We're talking about potential forces here, someone with a box and a CD in a jewel case has a lower potential destructive force than someone with a weapon. Picking apart the words of one argument does not negate all arguments.
There's a powerful argument to be made that selling violent video games is a lot more dangerous than selling weapons.
And there is a much more powerful argument to the contrary.
Every weapon sold has the possibility of being used.
Every video game sold does not turn people into violent zombies with the goal of blowing up NYC.
Millions upon millions upon MILLIONS of people play violent video games every day, yet crime is dropping. I myself have played violent video games ever since I was, 10... 11? I've never killed anybody, I've never wanted to kill anybody, and I'm 22 now.
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES DO NOT MAKE PEOPLE VIOLENT, the proof is in the umpteen millions of people who play these games and have never turned violent. This video game stigma strikes of the AD&D stigma of the 80s, if you played them you'd go insane, it was a work of the devil, etc. Give me a break.
Give me a break, without Linux do you really think FreeBSD would have garnered the spotlight? I doubt it. FreeBSD still has inferior hardware support, applications support, etc. While it does have one of the best TCP stacks known to man and is very technically advanced, without GNU tools it wouldn't have near as much of the functionality. lcc, rofl, I haven't even heard of it before today, BeOS and MacOS X use modified gcc's for their compilers!
The FSF has had a very significant impact on computing in general, and to dismiss it all by naming two projects which would be basically nowhere without the FSF, and a third which is used by almost nobody, is pretty, well, stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, QNX is pronounced Queue-nicks, not Queue-nucks.
Secondly, it was developed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and then spun off into a company.
Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.
-- iCEBaLM
Since when does Linux need anything? It works fine for me; all my favorite software runs on it. Therefore I can say that Linux categorically does not need anything, based on my experience.
"It works for me so it doesn't need anything else", I suppose if you have a couple gig of ram you don't NEED virtual memory either, or if you have an x86 processor you don't NEED an alpha or sparc port. Not to mention modules, who needs modules if all your hardware is initialized by the BIOS?
The fact is pretty much every other unix has some type of journaling filesystem where linux simply does not. Linux is mostly used as a server OS and therefore needs server OS features. Journaling isn't "wiz-bang" anymore, it's essential, even for the home user. An fsck on a 30 gig drive will show you that.
-- iCEBaLM
METHOD OF TRANSFERING ENERGY BETWEEN COHABITATING ORGANIC GROUPS
ABSTRACT
A method for transfering essential energy between groups of cohabitating organic material consists of an initial energy source whereby through radiation facilitates one group of organic material (primary group) infused with a forrest colored substance to sustain other cohabitating groups of organic materials (secondary group). The secondary group uses an oraface to intake the energy offered by the primay group.
Mother Nature will hear from my lawyers...
-- iCEBaLM
Who is this "Peter" fellow? I think he means Patrick.
-- iCEBaLM
So I'm not the only one getting that impression. It seems to me, too, that he's getting the runaround. "Oh, I'm sorry Hans, but we can't possibly put your filesystem into the kernel until we get this fancy new VM layer finished." Never mind that reiserfs has been working beautifully in the 2.2 kernel for a long time, and probably works as well in 2.4 (I haven't tried it).
I've been using ReiserFS since 2.4.0-test4 or so and it's been working just fine, with test9 it's just amazing.
My impression is Alan is keeping it out of the kernel because they don't want support costs going to the ReiserFS company, but want that all to go to Red Hat for ext3, nevermind that ext3 is such an immature, unusable peice of.. well, nothing really.
I was pretty upset about ReiserFS not getting into the kernel before 2.4.0, Linux absolutely NEEDS a Journaling Filesystem, and ReiserFS works beautifully and is the most mature.
-- iCEBaLM
Another reason for the quicker demise of the current movie profit model is that Napster et. al. has taught the current generation of 14-24 year olds (who by 50% of the movie tickets) that copyright is obsolete.
Quit making us pay 8, 9, 10 dollars or more to see a movie and you'll end up with more profit in volume.
-- iCEBaLM
I challenge you to name another viable company that brings new ideas to the table as consistently as Apple. You don't even have to like them, but you must admit that they follow the lead of others far less than any company around.
Apple has innovated what exactly? They stole the GUI from Xerox PARC, they stole the mouse, etc. They don't follow anyone elses lead huh? I suppose thats why they use IDE, PCI, AGP, SDRAM, etc, for hardware. I suppose thats why they're using a BSD kernel for their next OS.
So really, what exactly has Apple innovated? Firewire which is going nowhere fast, and the use of pretty shiney moulded translucent plastic to woo the sheep to their side of the fence?
Oh shit. They licenced something from Amazon (the only legal way to currently offer this feature). Let's flush them down the toilet.
A feature you could easily do without, all they had to do was *gasp*, not use it. I'm no one would care about that extra confirmation click. Not to mention they could have tried to get the patent revoked.
-- iCEBaLM
It's the same deal as "Ford trucks can only use Ford gasoline"
Or "DVD's can only be played on our players."
-- iCEBaLM
It was just an example of the size of 800 million downloads. Still I think it was quite inaccurate. You must also remember, most people on earth dont have and dont care to have internet access, and of those people who would have heard of this womans site? People in north america.
-- iCEBaLM
I was thinking about this when I heard on Entertainment Tonight about Guinness crowning the "Most downloaded woman on the internet". And when I heard her astronomical number of 800 million downloads I thought it was incredibly inaccurate. Every man, woman and child in the US would have to download 4 of her pictures. How does Guinness come up with the final numbers? Do they even check the logs themselves? Are thumbnails viewed on a page included in the final numbers?
When I eventually went to her site (I can't even remember her name for gods sakes) she had almost no pictures on it of herself, lots of other girls however, I tried in vain looking for some of her and I was thinking to myself that the numbers were severely inflated.
While this might be an "obnoxious" question I think a standard way of evaluating just how many hits and downloads a site gets needs to be determined, expecially for awards like the Guinness Book.
-- iCEBaLM
A full T1 is 1.54 megaBIT per second, which is 192.5 kiloBYTES per second.
-- iCEBaLM
If I have a one machine that can access the net, I can ping spoof thousands of boxes, (this is still a problem) who in return all reply the ping to hostX. hostX feels the punch of 100's of boxes pinging it, even though those pings all came from one machine. Now imagine 560 machines doing the same.
I'm well aware of smurf attacks, I was just illustrating that 560 machines on "slow" connections coordinated make for a formidable foe. Of course using a smurf attack amplifies that, however I know trinoo doesn't support that kind of attack, I'm not sure about tribes. (assuming the cracker is a typical skript kiddie who wouldn't write his own "tools")
If hackerX can find 560 machines to compromize, he can find thousands of hosts who's routers are not configured to block ping spoofs.
The way ICMP works you will *never* be able to block "ping spoofs", the problem is blocking them on broadcast addresses (1 packet turns into many just by sending it to a broadcast address) which is the whole basis of smurf.
-- iCEBaLM
Would 560 computers with cable modems (capped at 128 Kb/sec upstream) be enough for a DDoS? Probably not.
Lets take a bigger look at this...
(128Kb/s == 16KB/s) * 560 == 8960KB/s or 8 megabytes/s
That will take out a T3 or an OC-1 pretty handily.
560 dialup machines with 56k modems would be enough to flood a few dialup connections, or perhaps a cable modem or DSL line.
Again, a closer look (56k's only get 33.6Kb/s up):
(33.6Kb/s == 4KB/s) * 560 == 2240KB/s or 2 megabytes/s.
Enough to take out 10x T1's.
Don't dismiss the power of 560 machines so easily.
-- iCEBaLM
Back when there weren't any IP laws, there was no way of distributing digital copies of music. The Internet makes possible things that we had never even imagined, and there will always be people who will take advantage of these new possibilities.
Oh so IP law is all about DIGITAL? I'm sorry, but IP law has been around a lot longer than the internet, digital computers, etc. Back without IP law there were still ways of copying, sharing, etc. IP law has absolutely nothing to do with whether the medium is digital or not, thats such a crock.
You were missing my point here. I was saying that communism sounded like a great idea at first, you didn't have to worry about money and everyone was equal. However, they didn't factor in laziness, which was why it never worked. In this case, people like you fail to factor in others who will abuse a society which has weak IP laws.
Law will always be exploited, period, there just isn't a way to make a law air-tight in a democratic society. Nor should we try. The object is to find a common ground, make laws that benifit the public and the corporations but ones that infringe on neither. All I've been seeing lately are laws that heavily favor corporations. Copyright should not be perpetual, patents don't expire quickly enough in our society, trademarks are getting to the point of absurdity.
-- iCEBaLM
Er, isn't that supposed to be Kaplan? I can't imagine anybody going to one of this guys sermons..
-- iCEBaLM
You people don't understand the importance of copyright laws and intellectual property. Most of you would love to live in a world where there were no IP laws, but guess what would happen? No one would want to publish their work online!
This is absolutely, one-hundred percent, wrong! Back before there was IP laws did people not invent things? Write poetry and literature? Perform music? Paint paintings? I really hate it when people say "without IP laws no one would publish anything" as history has shown that this is false. The very thought that one human can own an idea, or that a thought is the same as real estate, is absolutely absurd. Now I don't think we should do away with IP COMPLETELY, but it should be reformed drastically and protections severely minimized. Mattel sueing everyone and their dog over the name Barbie just shows that as it stands IP Law Doesn't Work!
This is similar to the good intentions behind communism, yet in practice it has proven to be a failure.
Again, this is false. One implimentation of communism crumbled so communism could never work, or doesn't work? I don't think so. This is another argumentative pet-peeve of mine. Communism as the Soviet Union practiced it didn't work, but that doesn't mean communism doesn't, or can't work.
The lawsuits may be hard to swallow at first but they are absolutely essential for the growth of the Internet.
No, they are not. They hinder the internet. For as many people you think wouldn't post their work online in the absence of IP law there are 20 companies and individuals who wouldn't post their work online in FEAR OF IP law.
Why do you think many hardware makers don't release specifications? Because Microsoft is bribing them not to? No. Because they are afraid of potential law suits over patents they may have infringed but because of the time and cost involved couldn't or didn't check with the patent office on each and every method they use. Look at 3Dfx getting sued by NVidia over patent infringement. 3Dfx is open with their specs and that is their reward, NVidia isn't and their reward is staying speed king in the 3D accelerator card market. This is what IP law does.
-- iCEBaLM
Wow, you really must feel special by trying to put down Canada's millitary. Whatever floats your boat. Just remember that our fighter pilots routinely beat yours in excercises, and your soldiers also routinely train with ours because our personnel are some of the best trained in the world.
We don't have many (much more then 5, rofl) but what we do have is extremely well trained.
As for that ship invasion, we took it back, the dispute was between two companies, not a company and the government. The ship carried millitary equiptment and refused to dock because it was trying to extort MORE money out of the second company, so we just took it.
-- iCEBaLM
s/US/Canada/ and you have a better grasp on things.
Canada has been footing the US's UN dues since the US seems to be refusing to pay them for quite some time...
-- iCEBaLM
You wind up with a similar statement, not a contrasting one. Therefore, there is not a much more powerful argument for your position.
Listen, I don't belive in gun control, and I don't belive in censorship, but saying that selling violent video games is more harmful than selling weapons is just plain ludicrous.
If you take one person, who is realatively non-violent and sell him a violent video game, what is he going to do with it? Bludgeon someone to death with the box? The jewel case? However if you sell him a handgun he now has more potential destructive force, whether he uses it or not is irrelevant.
We're talking about potential forces here, someone with a box and a CD in a jewel case has a lower potential destructive force than someone with a weapon. Picking apart the words of one argument does not negate all arguments.
-- iCEBaLM
There's a powerful argument to be made that selling violent video games is a lot more dangerous than selling weapons.
And there is a much more powerful argument to the contrary.
Every weapon sold has the possibility of being used.
Every video game sold does not turn people into violent zombies with the goal of blowing up NYC.
Millions upon millions upon MILLIONS of people play violent video games every day, yet crime is dropping. I myself have played violent video games ever since I was, 10... 11? I've never killed anybody, I've never wanted to kill anybody, and I'm 22 now.
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES DO NOT MAKE PEOPLE VIOLENT, the proof is in the umpteen millions of people who play these games and have never turned violent. This video game stigma strikes of the AD&D stigma of the 80s, if you played them you'd go insane, it was a work of the devil, etc. Give me a break.
-- iCEBaLM
While this is mostly true, if we really wanted we could do what New Zealand and other countries have done.
Outlaw any and all region code honoring DVD devices, as they do infringe on the GATT (WTO).
It is ILLEGAL to sell a region code honoring DVD device in New Zealand, and it should be the same way in every nation which has signed the UN charter.
-- iCEBaLM
You there, reading this post -- have you done anything about DMCA? If you're a typical Slashdot reader, probably not.
No, because I'm Canadian and the DMCA doesn't apply to me.
-- iCEBaLM
Not so.
If Linux didn't come around, people would have turned their attention to Hurd and started developing it instead.
-- iCEBaLM
No, without competition they'd just make you pay for upgrades and service packs to the same product.
-- iCEBaLM
Give me a break, without Linux do you really think FreeBSD would have garnered the spotlight? I doubt it. FreeBSD still has inferior hardware support, applications support, etc. While it does have one of the best TCP stacks known to man and is very technically advanced, without GNU tools it wouldn't have near as much of the functionality. lcc, rofl, I haven't even heard of it before today, BeOS and MacOS X use modified gcc's for their compilers!
The FSF has had a very significant impact on computing in general, and to dismiss it all by naming two projects which would be basically nowhere without the FSF, and a third which is used by almost nobody, is pretty, well, stupid.
-- iCEBaLM