Actually, you do need to replace "co css-auth" with "login" the first time (you might have to type return or "anonymous" for the password). Then run the command as given, and you can replace the "co css-auth" with "update -dP" later on to update the sources.
I had intended my comments for people who were already familiar with anon-cvs and thus what I wrote would be enough.
No, not really. Putting "sendmail" in the kernel would be about as bad as putting "apache" in the kernel. On the other hand, adding very simple SMTP capabilities (as an optional module, of course) to the kernel might speed up sendmail quite a bit.
The goal of khttpd was to get around certain performance bottlenecks at very high throughput that apache simply could not solve in user space. The result is a kernel module that apache can optionally use to speed up certain types of static content generation.
Is speed a bad thing?
My concern was that if every application is treated this way (as X has been, as video is, etc) we begin to turn the kernel into swiss cheese. But, I think cool heads are prevailing so far.
Re:Is this really an area that needs filling?
on
IceWM 1.0.0 released
·
· Score: 2
Corel Linux already allows you to change your resolution through the GUI. It's not perfect yet, but it's 1.0....
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.on.openprojects.net:/cvs/li vid -z3 co css-auth
That's the command to download from the anonymous CVS repository.
Now of course, the code is out, this is just the mechanical yapping of lawyers. What would really make sense is for these industry organizations to come forth and admit that there's no holding DVD back, and open up the doors. They could release open source DVD code and their sales would rise slightly (as opposed to the doom that they predict). How can I know this? Bacause the pirates already have the code so we know pirating will not be increased.
And the DVD organizations would not slack off on prosecuting pirates just because there's an open source reader. Do book companies fail to sell because I could photo-copy the book and sell it? Of course not (books fail to sell because no one reads, but that's a separate issue).
As I mentioned in a recent article thread, the Linux kernel is braving new waters in several areas which UNIX has traditionally shunned in the kernel (graphics support, http server, game support for network management, etc). These features raise the eyebrows of many people, but is this the way you see operating system design moving in the future? Are we so bound by the dreaded user-mode context switch that we have to plow every service as deep into the kernel as it will go?
Mind you, I'm all for the khttpd idea as a single example, but it seems like the beginning of a trend that will end up making the original Linux kernel look like a wristwatch driver, and leave a lot of low-end users in a bind....
The article contends that Linux is not as sophisticated as BSD. While I agree that certain features of BSD might be more advanced (e.g. from a brief chat with one of the NetBSD folks, the UVM sounds cool), Linux is braving uncharted water in a number of previously shunned areas (I was stunned to find, for example, that I can choose to enable a kernel-based static http server in my Linux kernel as of 2.3.x). This willingness to break with UNIX tradition is what sets Linux apart, and frankly is the reason that many of us like it.
I also like BSD (I was a huge fan of 4.2, back when Ultrix was 4.2 with the serial numbers filed off). BSD has a tradition of stability and innovation that is hard to match, and look forward to a world where BSD and Linux are equal participants in the operating system development community. But can we stop pretending that one OS is "better" than another, and focus on which OS is right for a given task/environment?
Ok, so you see that I've wasted a black move on 4....a5.
Can that move be used to re-position the rook so that this works? I was thinking earlier that the solution had to begin with 1. e4 h5 2. Qxh5 Rxh5, with white's bishop providing the checkmate, but I just don't see how that works, even if black's rook moves to the center....
Sit down and calmly discuss it with your representative, with the PTO, with the judge... but the best way to convince an individual is probably to scream incoherently, to threaten, undermine, backstab and be otherwise civilly disobedient. Your reaction will need to be way out of proportion to change their equation.
I guess you and I just have different histories. I've spoken with a good number of executives and lawyers who understand that patents are a PR minefield, and they would rather find ways to use them that do not hurt the company's image. The problem is that in most cases a) they don't know how to go about that and b) they don't have anyone around who is willing to take the time to tell them.
In most cases, open sourcing a patent (that is to say, allowing open source developers to use it freely) would be a tremendous benefit to a company. They get to have the state of the art crystalize around their technology, and if they swing it right they also get a lot of free publicity. A backhanded example of this can be seen in PGP. RSA got a lot of negative press over their reaction to PGP, but in the long run the fact that PGP was out there helped people to understand why public key cryptography was important and secure. If they had pushed PGP on initially, they could probably have been even more successful, faster.
One of the things that we as a community misunderstand often is that these are not evil Snidelies, twisting their waxed-mushaches and cackling. Most IP lawyers are convinced that they are doing the right thing for a company. They are not at all aware of the damage that they are doing to the industry, and get very boggled when an engineer who is supposed to be working FOR a company does not want to HELP that company.
One of the most valuable things that engineers can do is talk to these lawyers in a calm, reasonable way and explain that the future of the software that created the Internet hinges on the assumption that the current patent mania will be stopped by a popular pressure on the USPTO. Change must come or too many of the inovations that the Open Source community NEEDS to impliment will be closed to us by software patents.
You must make it clear that they are not helping your company by acquiring patents that push the envelope of the USPTO's charter. They are, in fact introducing potential public-relations nightmares (like Amazon is now dealing with, and Unisys has been dealing with for years).
Also, encourage your company to create a "free for open source" licensing strategy for their patents. This will not help the GPL world, as the GPL forbids using patent-restricted processes, but the MIT/X and BSD licenses have no such restrictions and could benifit widely from such licensing. It would also help the company in question, as they could require the source to be commented in such a way as to indicate the owner of the patent, and anyone wanting to create a closed implimentation would know who to go to for a license.
A friend of mine is, as far as I can tell, the first person to have ever written a CGI program (Common Gateway Interface, not Computer Graphics Images) in pure FORTRAN. He's an astronomer (who reads Slashdot and may follow up with details), and used it for some very cool plots of the sky....
Though a lot of people here may not "get" why FORTRAN is still important, you can get a idea by looking at "modern" toolkits such as the Perl Data Language (PDL module) which has a stunningly huge mathematical library that is ALL written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN was (is?) THE language for scientific analysis, so there's a ton of powerful math libraries that you can buy or get free for it. When you need to do something hideously complex, you don't want to have to start from scratch, writing all of the libraries to, say, do high-level matrix manipulation.
"In Linux terminology superblock means the" partition is active.
Huh? In UNIX terminology "superblock" means roughly the same thing as "FAT" on a DOS filesystem (e.g. the place you write central filesystem metadata). You'd think they could use some of those Linux savy people they've been hiring to to a tech eval of these documents.
Woefully, CNN is just using a bit of razzle-dazzle by touching on a hot topic (domain name disputes) to get people to read an otherwise off-putting technical article. They do their integrity a disservice, here. However, there's also a lesson to be learned by the RTMarks of the world: Before you perform an act online terrorism, think about the light that your act will be framed in. Will you help your cause or harm it?
The net result is that now a lot of people think etoy is some cyber-squatting (what an unfortunate term) semi-terrorist bunch of geeks. Many will never even know that it had anything to do with art.
21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?
I have a lot of respect for Mozilla, but I have to say: isn't it about time to fork the code-based into several smaller projects?
It would be nice, for example, if the mail handler were a separate program so that any mailer could (ab)use the same API in order to replace Mozilla's default. Or, is this already possible with the plug-in API?
I see a lot of "why not invest in qmail or postfix" comments, and I have to admit that at first I thought the same way. However, if you think of this from a support standpoint, Red Hat users are currently running Sendmail, and Red Hat needs to support it. This annoncement is just a nice way of saying, "There are a number of problems or shortcomings that will cost us a lot to support, and we just want them fixed." That's my take.
Mozilla is pretty much the same way. They want to stop getting support calls about how netscape crashes all the time, so they put money into Mozilla, which is already on their map for upcoming versions.
This is not a change in policy, just a PR wrapper around customer support R&D....
The article makes a very minor mistake. They imply that the speed advantage has something to do with clock-rate, and of course, it has nothing to do with that. Other than that, it's a good article, though I'm not sure that the Intel stock price had anything to do with this development DIRECTLY.
I was looking over the info on the attempt to integrate FreeBSD's kernel, and was shocked to find that the people doing it were using BSD libc! Since glibc was designed with a certian amount of portability in mind, why not port glibc to FreeBSD's kernel? This would seem to be to make the overall port MUCH easier, as the rest of the debian code should be far simpler to port to a different kernel platform, but the same libc....
Give me a leaner, meaner system without theming anyday!
But, the complexity is in the widget set functionality, not in the theming! GNOME (can't speak to KDE much) bloats when you use a huge theme that involves lots of pixmaps, but you could use a minimalist theme that takes memory and speed into account, and get a much faster desktop.
When you see a cool, glitzy desktop with chrome edging to everything and starscape backgrounds in all of the windows, yes that's going to be a pig, but that's the user's choice, as well it should be.
I actually want more theming. I want to be able to chuck whole gobs of functionality out of the widget set, because I'm never going to want it. This is a hard problem, but one that I think would make theming much more powerful.
All of this seems quite grim. So, why have I never lost anything. I've certainly had power-related crashes, but only once have I lost anything, and since I cannot see how the MASSIVE damage, in that case, was due to anything but a disk-scribble, I'm a little shocked by the gloom-and-doom comments.
It kind of sounds like a theory-vs-practice thing, especially since both OSes can be configured to do things the way the other does by default.
The "Linux is nice as a desktop, but not as a reliable server" comments are particularly shocking, given how many Linux-based servers are out there (I've got a few, and have managed more in the past). You would think that, for example, lost mail would be noticed if it were happening to all those sites that run Linux/Sendmail out there.
Anyone have any theories as to why the gap exists?
any piece of software on your machine can generate a 128 bit Unique number
Well, a piece of software can certainly generate a 128 bit number. Uniqueness, on the other hand, is tricky. Most software that wants to do this (e.g. mailers, news clients, etc) will generate a pseudo-unique string/number by catenating lots of non-unique information, thus reducing the likelyhood of a collision. There is no standard way that everyone does this, and most software has no need to. One excellent example is Web browsers. The only time that, say, Netscape generates a pseudo-unique ID is when it wants to send mail or news. If the P3 becomes common, though, won't people like Netscape and Microsoft be tempted to offer Web site developers a "standard" way to identify customers? This is the concern. Not that having an ID causes your heart to explode in your chest, but that software companies, having an easy way to identify you, will. This sort of behavior has many precidents, so it's not very hard to believe that it would happen. MS and Prodigy are two classic offenders, but there were many others that were not so well publicized. Once this sort of tracking becomes common, anyone snooping on the traffic (oh look, it comes back to the NSA) would be able to start identifying the source of a session, even though dynamic IP addresses and moving a laptop around might mask every other way of identifying the user.... Now, what you have to ask yourself is if this will only be used for "good". Will the organizations that read your mail avoid using it for business advantage, military knowledge (if you think that's impossible from unclassified communications, ask around about what the collage project was), etc? This is all already possible, but the unique ID, coupled with some unfortunate tendancies in the software industry will make it that much easier, and this is, apparently, not where the EU wants to go today.
I disagree. The goal of the Intel processor ID is to create a standard way of getting a unique ID across all PCs. BIOS ids are not reliably unique, as I recall, and not always accessed the same way. Hard drives may have unique IDs, may not, and they are hard to get. Ethernet cards have unique IDs, but not everyone has an ethernet card (e.g. dialup users and people who do not have a network connection at all, but sneaker-net documents from their computer), plus ethernet IDs can be changed from software.
What Intel is doing is moving access to unique fingerprinting into the realm of trivial. They are going to make it easy and consistent for software manufacturers to uniquely identify the users of software and the creators of documents. Besides all of the awful problems that arise from this (e.g. copy protection that breaks when you upgrade your processor) sort of crutch, there are already some very real-world abuses of such things in software. We do not need another ID, and what the EU is concerned about (US intellegence agencies weakening EU privacy) is a very serious concern, not to be taken lightly.
One good thing is that with the advent of the Athalon (which I understand to have no such ID) there IS a choice for high-powered PC computing.
[European countries pay] lip service to free trade, but are unwilling to let their people make decisions for themselves?
This is not a matter of free trade. If a device has privacy-fouling features which were inserted by the intellegence organizations of a foreign government, you probably don't want your country standardizing on its use no matter how popular it might be. This is truely a matter of national security. I don't know anything about the Intel/NSA/FBI connection, but if there were one, I would applaud the EU taking these steps. It's sort of scary just how hard our (US) government works to quash any shred of patriotism that we citizens might have once felt.
The "all the speed... of [ext2fs]... all the safety of UFS" comment makes me wonder. Why is ext2fs considered unsafe? I've only lost an ext2fs once, and that was a hardware problem (hard power-off caused a nice long disk-scribble). The recovery was fun to watch though;-) This is one time I was thanking the heavens for the -y option to fsck!
Seriously, though, what's the deal? Is this just "my OS' filesystem is more stable than your OS' filesystem," or is there a serious concern that I should be on the lookout for?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you do need to replace "co css-auth" with "login" the first time (you might have to type return or "anonymous" for the password). Then run the command as given, and you can replace the "co css-auth" with "update -dP" later on to update the sources.
I had intended my comments for people who were already familiar with anon-cvs and thus what I wrote would be enough.
No, not really. Putting "sendmail" in the kernel would be about as bad as putting "apache" in the kernel. On the other hand, adding very simple SMTP capabilities (as an optional module, of course) to the kernel might speed up sendmail quite a bit.
The goal of khttpd was to get around certain performance bottlenecks at very high throughput that apache simply could not solve in user space. The result is a kernel module that apache can optionally use to speed up certain types of static content generation.
Is speed a bad thing?
My concern was that if every application is treated this way (as X has been, as video is, etc) we begin to turn the kernel into swiss cheese. But, I think cool heads are prevailing so far.
Corel Linux already allows you to change your resolution through the GUI. It's not perfect yet, but it's 1.0....
cvs -d
That's the command to download from the anonymous CVS repository.
Now of course, the code is out, this is just the mechanical yapping of lawyers. What would really make sense is for these industry organizations to come forth and admit that there's no holding DVD back, and open up the doors. They could release open source DVD code and their sales would rise slightly (as opposed to the doom that they predict). How can I know this? Bacause the pirates already have the code so we know pirating will not be increased.
And the DVD organizations would not slack off on prosecuting pirates just because there's an open source reader. Do book companies fail to sell because I could photo-copy the book and sell it? Of course not (books fail to sell because no one reads, but that's a separate issue).
Will they ever learn?
As I mentioned in a recent article thread, the Linux kernel is braving new waters in several areas which UNIX has traditionally shunned in the kernel (graphics support, http server, game support for network management, etc). These features raise the eyebrows of many people, but is this the way you see operating system design moving in the future? Are we so bound by the dreaded user-mode context switch that we have to plow every service as deep into the kernel as it will go?
Mind you, I'm all for the khttpd idea as a single example, but it seems like the beginning of a trend that will end up making the original Linux kernel look like a wristwatch driver, and leave a lot of low-end users in a bind....
Thoughts?
The article contends that Linux is not as sophisticated as BSD. While I agree that certain features of BSD might be more advanced (e.g. from a brief chat with one of the NetBSD folks, the UVM sounds cool), Linux is braving uncharted water in a number of previously shunned areas (I was stunned to find, for example, that I can choose to enable a kernel-based static http server in my Linux kernel as of 2.3.x). This willingness to break with UNIX tradition is what sets Linux apart, and frankly is the reason that many of us like it.
I also like BSD (I was a huge fan of 4.2, back when Ultrix was 4.2 with the serial numbers filed off). BSD has a tradition of stability and innovation that is hard to match, and look forward to a world where BSD and Linux are equal participants in the operating system development community. But can we stop pretending that one OS is "better" than another, and focus on which OS is right for a given task/environment?
1. e4 f5 2. Ne2 g5 3. Nf4 h5 4. Ng6 a5 5. Qxh5 a4 6. Nxh8#
...a5.
Ok, so you see that I've wasted a black move on 4.
Can that move be used to re-position the rook so that this works? I was thinking earlier that the solution had to begin with 1. e4 h5 2. Qxh5 Rxh5, with white's bishop providing the checkmate, but I just don't see how that works, even if black's rook moves to the center....
Hope this helps.
Yes, it seems that I missed the crucial bit about the knight. I'll have to work on this one....
I assume we are talking about Scholar's Mate, which is very similar to Fool's Mate. The two are described on this page in some detail.
The answer, from that page, is "1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Bc5 3.Qh5 Nf6 4.Qxf7#"
I guess you and I just have different histories. I've spoken with a good number of executives and lawyers who understand that patents are a PR minefield, and they would rather find ways to use them that do not hurt the company's image. The problem is that in most cases a) they don't know how to go about that and b) they don't have anyone around who is willing to take the time to tell them.
In most cases, open sourcing a patent (that is to say, allowing open source developers to use it freely) would be a tremendous benefit to a company. They get to have the state of the art crystalize around their technology, and if they swing it right they also get a lot of free publicity. A backhanded example of this can be seen in PGP. RSA got a lot of negative press over their reaction to PGP, but in the long run the fact that PGP was out there helped people to understand why public key cryptography was important and secure. If they had pushed PGP on initially, they could probably have been even more successful, faster.
One of the things that we as a community misunderstand often is that these are not evil Snidelies, twisting their waxed-mushaches and cackling. Most IP lawyers are convinced that they are doing the right thing for a company. They are not at all aware of the damage that they are doing to the industry, and get very boggled when an engineer who is supposed to be working FOR a company does not want to HELP that company.
One of the most valuable things that engineers can do is talk to these lawyers in a calm, reasonable way and explain that the future of the software that created the Internet hinges on the assumption that the current patent mania will be stopped by a popular pressure on the USPTO. Change must come or too many of the inovations that the Open Source community NEEDS to impliment will be closed to us by software patents.
You must make it clear that they are not helping your company by acquiring patents that push the envelope of the USPTO's charter. They are, in fact introducing potential public-relations nightmares (like Amazon is now dealing with, and Unisys has been dealing with for years).
Also, encourage your company to create a "free for open source" licensing strategy for their patents. This will not help the GPL world, as the GPL forbids using patent-restricted processes, but the MIT/X and BSD licenses have no such restrictions and could benifit widely from such licensing. It would also help the company in question, as they could require the source to be commented in such a way as to indicate the owner of the patent, and anyone wanting to create a closed implimentation would know who to go to for a license.
A friend of mine is, as far as I can tell, the first person to have ever written a CGI program (Common Gateway Interface, not Computer Graphics Images) in pure FORTRAN. He's an astronomer (who reads Slashdot and may follow up with details), and used it for some very cool plots of the sky....
;-)
Though a lot of people here may not "get" why FORTRAN is still important, you can get a idea by looking at "modern" toolkits such as the Perl Data Language (PDL module) which has a stunningly huge mathematical library that is ALL written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN was (is?) THE language for scientific analysis, so there's a ton of powerful math libraries that you can buy or get free for it. When you need to do something hideously complex, you don't want to have to start from scratch, writing all of the libraries to, say, do high-level matrix manipulation.
See, Java HASN'T taken over the world
"In Linux terminology superblock means the" partition is active.
Huh? In UNIX terminology "superblock" means roughly the same thing as "FAT" on a DOS filesystem (e.g. the place you write central filesystem metadata). You'd think they could use some of those Linux savy people they've been hiring to to a tech eval of these documents.
Woefully, CNN is just using a bit of razzle-dazzle by touching on a hot topic (domain name disputes) to get people to read an otherwise off-putting technical article. They do their integrity a disservice, here. However, there's also a lesson to be learned by the RTMarks of the world: Before you perform an act online terrorism, think about the light that your act will be framed in. Will you help your cause or harm it?
The net result is that now a lot of people think etoy is some cyber-squatting (what an unfortunate term) semi-terrorist bunch of geeks. Many will never even know that it had anything to do with art.
21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?
I have a lot of respect for Mozilla, but I have to say: isn't it about time to fork the code-based into several smaller projects?
It would be nice, for example, if the mail handler were a separate program so that any mailer could (ab)use the same API in order to replace Mozilla's default. Or, is this already possible with the plug-in API?
I see a lot of "why not invest in qmail or postfix" comments, and I have to admit that at first I thought the same way. However, if you think of this from a support standpoint, Red Hat users are currently running Sendmail, and Red Hat needs to support it. This annoncement is just a nice way of saying, "There are a number of problems or shortcomings that will cost us a lot to support, and we just want them fixed." That's my take.
Mozilla is pretty much the same way. They want to stop getting support calls about how netscape crashes all the time, so they put money into Mozilla, which is already on their map for upcoming versions.
This is not a change in policy, just a PR wrapper around customer support R&D....
The article makes a very minor mistake. They imply that the speed advantage has something to do with clock-rate, and of course, it has nothing to do with that. Other than that, it's a good article, though I'm not sure that the Intel stock price had anything to do with this development DIRECTLY.
I was looking over the info on the attempt to integrate FreeBSD's kernel, and was shocked to find that the people doing it were using BSD libc! Since glibc was designed with a certian amount of portability in mind, why not port glibc to FreeBSD's kernel? This would seem to be to make the overall port MUCH easier, as the rest of the debian code should be far simpler to port to a different kernel platform, but the same libc....
Give me a leaner, meaner system without theming anyday!
But, the complexity is in the widget set functionality, not in the theming! GNOME (can't speak to KDE much) bloats when you use a huge theme that involves lots of pixmaps, but you could use a minimalist theme that takes memory and speed into account, and get a much faster desktop.
When you see a cool, glitzy desktop with chrome edging to everything and starscape backgrounds in all of the windows, yes that's going to be a pig, but that's the user's choice, as well it should be.
I actually want more theming. I want to be able to chuck whole gobs of functionality out of the widget set, because I'm never going to want it. This is a hard problem, but one that I think would make theming much more powerful.
All of this seems quite grim. So, why have I never lost anything. I've certainly had power-related crashes, but only once have I lost anything, and since I cannot see how the MASSIVE damage, in that case, was due to anything but a disk-scribble, I'm a little shocked by the gloom-and-doom comments.
It kind of sounds like a theory-vs-practice thing, especially since both OSes can be configured to do things the way the other does by default.
The "Linux is nice as a desktop, but not as a reliable server" comments are particularly shocking, given how many Linux-based servers are out there (I've got a few, and have managed more in the past). You would think that, for example, lost mail would be noticed if it were happening to all those sites that run Linux/Sendmail out there.
Anyone have any theories as to why the gap exists?
Well, a piece of software can certainly generate a 128 bit number. Uniqueness, on the other hand, is tricky. Most software that wants to do this (e.g. mailers, news clients, etc) will generate a pseudo-unique string/number by catenating lots of non-unique information, thus reducing the likelyhood of a collision. There is no standard way that everyone does this, and most software has no need to. One excellent example is Web browsers. The only time that, say, Netscape generates a pseudo-unique ID is when it wants to send mail or news. If the P3 becomes common, though, won't people like Netscape and Microsoft be tempted to offer Web site developers a "standard" way to identify customers? This is the concern. Not that having an ID causes your heart to explode in your chest, but that software companies, having an easy way to identify you, will. This sort of behavior has many precidents, so it's not very hard to believe that it would happen. MS and Prodigy are two classic offenders, but there were many others that were not so well publicized. Once this sort of tracking becomes common, anyone snooping on the traffic (oh look, it comes back to the NSA) would be able to start identifying the source of a session, even though dynamic IP addresses and moving a laptop around might mask every other way of identifying the user.... Now, what you have to ask yourself is if this will only be used for "good". Will the organizations that read your mail avoid using it for business advantage, military knowledge (if you think that's impossible from unclassified communications, ask around about what the collage project was), etc? This is all already possible, but the unique ID, coupled with some unfortunate tendancies in the software industry will make it that much easier, and this is, apparently, not where the EU wants to go today.
I disagree. The goal of the Intel processor ID is to create a standard way of getting a unique ID across all PCs. BIOS ids are not reliably unique, as I recall, and not always accessed the same way. Hard drives may have unique IDs, may not, and they are hard to get. Ethernet cards have unique IDs, but not everyone has an ethernet card (e.g. dialup users and people who do not have a network connection at all, but sneaker-net documents from their computer), plus ethernet IDs can be changed from software.
What Intel is doing is moving access to unique fingerprinting into the realm of trivial. They are going to make it easy and consistent for software manufacturers to uniquely identify the users of software and the creators of documents. Besides all of the awful problems that arise from this (e.g. copy protection that breaks when you upgrade your processor) sort of crutch, there are already some very real-world abuses of such things in software. We do not need another ID, and what the EU is concerned about (US intellegence agencies weakening EU privacy) is a very serious concern, not to be taken lightly.
One good thing is that with the advent of the Athalon (which I understand to have no such ID) there IS a choice for high-powered PC computing.
[European countries pay] lip service to free trade, but are unwilling to let their people make decisions for themselves?
This is not a matter of free trade. If a device has privacy-fouling features which were inserted by the intellegence organizations of a foreign government, you probably don't want your country standardizing on its use no matter how popular it might be. This is truely a matter of national security. I don't know anything about the Intel/NSA/FBI connection, but if there were one, I would applaud the EU taking these steps. It's sort of scary just how hard our (US) government works to quash any shred of patriotism that we citizens might have once felt.
1999 does appear to be prime, given:
perl -le 'for($i=int(sqrt(1999));$i>1;$i--) {print $i if int(1999/$i) == 1999/$i}'
prints nothing, thus 1999 has no factors in the range of 2..int(sqrt(1999))
The "all the speed ... of [ext2fs] ... all the safety of UFS" comment makes me wonder. Why is ext2fs considered unsafe? I've only lost an ext2fs once, and that was a hardware problem (hard power-off caused a nice long disk-scribble). The recovery was fun to watch though ;-) This is one time I was thanking the heavens for the -y option to fsck!
Seriously, though, what's the deal? Is this just "my OS' filesystem is more stable than your OS' filesystem," or is there a serious concern that I should be on the lookout for?