Funny, that's almost exactly what I'm planning to do. Send them their miserable $1k, buy however much RHAT is available, then ship it to my preexisting securities account and close the etrade account. The last thing I want to do is deal with etrade -- especially after the trouble it's been trying to get one sodding account open with cash.
Not quite sure if this is the contest I think it is, but I watched the championships one year at UCD, and saw the Linux box controlling Newton Labs' team make mulch of the runner-up, students from a Korean technical institute the name of which escapes me, and their DOS box. Granted the algorithm's more important than the OS, but after watching these robots for over an hour it was especially great to walk over and notice the targeting and scheduling displays running on an X desktop. Grizzled-looking guy sitting in front of it said it ran Linux. Whee.:)
That would be "the right to petition the government for redress of grievances" -- and yes, it's one of those big important things on the short version of the list. Unfortunately, our elected personages view that list as a major inconvenience to their plans, and tend to infringe on it at their whim, and let the Supreme Court decide whether to slap them down for it. A pity.
(wandering offtopic)
Re:and then there were none(IBM toplevel attitude)
on
IBM Buying Mylex
·
· Score: 1
Or another way, "[Big blue] is like a dinosaur kicked in the ass. It takes fifteen years for the experience to reach its brain."
IBM is useful for the OSS community, though; they have tons of money and power of various sorts. They don't maneuver worth a damn, and their response time is pretty poor, but that the OSS people can do -- and do better than most anyone. IBM gets the benefit of our software, which lends our speed to their lumbering power blocs.
Mylex' RAID units have, in my limited experience with them, quite satisfied my expectations, especially for the price. While I don't in general like mergers, if Mylex manages to turn into a wholly-owned company with some degree of autonomy, it will likely avoid getting sucked into IBM's plodding.
Maybe it's just the limited light and high-compression jpegs, but they look, well... stuffed; like grey amiga-shaped teddy bears or something texturally similar.:)
Unless CNET was in a hurry to get some copy out, this isn't much of a report. 25% of server-appliance sales (not servers, not server sales, just preconfigured colorful boxes, e.g. the netwinder). I took more issue with the "traditional server sales" paragraph, such as it was:
"...Linux will account for much less in the traditional server market... 3.4% of traditional server revenue." Well, duh -- Linux servers aren't sold as such, they're sold as blank machines and one installs Linux from elsewhere. Take the 3-5 million servers kicking Linux around out there (assume they represent the same growth rate as between now and DQ's 2003; probably wrong, but skip that for a moment). DataQuest's 450k servers over a $1.9B market share give a server price average of $4222; if this is 3.4% of total revenue, then the total market is $55.83B. Back to the 3-5 million servers (suppose 4); at $4222 each one finds $16.88B, or 30.2%.
All that said, the 4 million could be way off, and server-sales figures are a miserable estimate of relative product performance except where marketroids are concerned.
Masturbation generally eases arm pain, not exacerbates it. Entirely different set of muscles and connective tissues, with a different set of strains, and it enhances lymphatic and vascular flow to your arms (more so in men than women just given the respective anatomical conditions), which can assist in delivery of your body's proteolytic enzymes, which break down the scar tissue which generally causes the pain of RSI.
And for the other commentator, don't just get a g/f; find one who types and has RSI about as badly as you do. Mutual therapy.
Re:Thats not the point
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Without knowing the specific motives or history, the idea was most likely not to provide a strong cipher -- encipherment isn't inherently necessary anyway for this kind of thing.
Or, they wanted to limit the potential for ITAR violations -- so that crackers could avoid breaking export law while busy breaking other ones.
Or, they wanted a deliberately weak cipher so that people would latch on and improve those parts -- maybe write a tight win32 IDEA lib.
Or, they realized that encipherment isn't an especially important part of BO2K anyway, since its emissions can be detected easily enough whether enciphered or not, so casual over-shoulder encryption was adequate.
Or, they wanted their counterparts in the virus/security communities to waste time on the encryption stuff, as the counterparts indeed seem to have done.
It would, in any case, be nice if those whose job it becomes to counter BO2K had taken the opportunity to note why BO2K exists, rather than to inflate their egos in a comical misassumption.
Doesn't sound promising, although the RIAA twits went off on an odd tangent trying to make Rio-like devices writeonly storage. There are already consumer products that can store the same amount of MP3s, that cost a fraction as much, are as easily transportable, fit in a shirt pocket and have very low battery requirements -- they're called "removable media." Sheesh.
FWIW, every one of these home-automation sales sites has had the most horrid and annoying HTML design; bright clashing colors, badly adjusted fonts, animated crap, etc. It looked a lot like most of the rest of the web, so I assume they're establishing themselves well.:)
Rsync is GPLed, and a lot more efficient than rdist for most purposes -- the debian ISO mirror process is one good example.
If you do go with rdist-style distribution, check into sdist, which might (I can't recall with any certainty) have a more liberal license than rdist, and uses SSH.
For the SSH portion, there are troubles. Free implementations of ssh are underway (the ssh1 license allows some levels of commercial use, ssh2's is too restrictive to be commercially useful), but taking their time.
Other reasons for unionization
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 1
(this is all personal-experience anecdote, so skip it if that bores you.)
Hardly any of the geeks in their respective industry -- in which I'm mostly thinking of the computer industry, particularly software -- are union members. Most of us are also inexperienced in labor matters, such as what to do when you're working 50 hr/wk and the boss comes and tells you he needs more overtime.
Few software geeks are accustomed to needing to fight to defend themselves in their labor conditions. We're currently such a valuable commodity that no employer is willing (or dumb enough) to endanger it.
That said, those conditions do make us easy fodder for exploitation when the bosses do abuse us. And it makes it hard to defend the conditions of our labor when we don't know how, and have to figure it all out under pressure.
One story of what happened to a geek shop when the management went bad can be read here. A cautionary tale, maybe.
%/usr/games/number 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 three hundred forty undecillion. two hundred eighty-two decillion. three hundred sixty-six nonillion. nine hundred twenty octillion. nine hundred thirty-eight septillion. four hundred sixty-three sextillion. four hundred sixty-three quintillion. three hundred seventy-four quadrillion. six hundred seven trillion. four hundred thirty-one billion. seven hundred sixty-eight million. two hundred eleven thousand. four hundred fifty-six.
Wouldn't be hard -- if the firmware can be swapped out, an AIBO-style device could just have pluggable AI (okay, not real AI, but some suitable falsification thereof). You could install a penguin brain into your electronic dog, which would then try to waddle around the house, make scrarking noises (what noises DO penguins make, anyway?), favor cold places, and rub itself contentedly against the UNIX machines in the house.
I think there was some cyberpunk-type sci-fi novel that included animals whose personality had been overwritten with that of another animal -- dogs, mostly, being overwritten with other critters (one tried to fly and got killed, I remember).
One other angle -- granted, based on everything else here, plus CNNfn's update, etc., the marketroids were probably mistaken about the extent of Linux' involvement. The toaster product may contain GNU utils in an unmodified state -- no reason not to use them, since POSIX compliance makes it easy to do, and GNU did such a thorough job. All that said, the OSS community in general and the Linux people in particular are on a cusp with commercial adoption, and embedded systems are one of the bigger niches we'd like to delve into. If we give the toaster manufacturer a hard time about violating the GPL before it's confirmed (and that's a long way off, when we can get one and take it apart), we run the risk of scaring off manufacturers, especially since this applies to their most crucial concern -- the GPL.
The GPL is a hard thing for the established corporations to figure out already; extensive/. flammage, whether factually warranted or not, could tip the (currently precarious) balance in adoption against us. Wait 'till the OSS community disassembles them to see if they've modified any GPL code; if so, we can politely request the code, and go through the proper motions.
There was also, IIRC, a similar furor concerning AOL's IRC presence, and the refusal of their administrators to cope with the behavior of their users. Eric Fichtner, then AOL Operations Administrator, more or less laid down AOL's official policy of refusing to provide IRC services in any way other than wholly automated without human monitoring. In that respect, Usenet and IRC have similar properties -- keeping them from getting utterly swamped often proves incompatible with corporate profit maximization tactics.
Probably harsher than could be desired, but at least the voicemail thing was probably just unanticipated load, and likely the mail/web downage also. A consequence, in part, of the amount of attention (and derision) you draw in such a case.
That said, it's entirely possible that those so inclined will attack servers belonging to those who bring offense (the hacker luggage thing of late comes to mind). Perhaps a consequence of public exposure, but not a matter of liability except that between the crasher and crashee.
Recalling previous allegations of "threats," Theos Software's attorney may have been sensationalizing for effect -- to a corporate attorney, the prospect of a boycott or negative publicity is a "threat," whereas it doesn't seem so to most of the rest of us. "Drop this stupid litigation or no one I influence will ever buy your multi-user OS again" is the sort of thing I could entirely condone (and have done, though not on this matter).
The thing I liked about this dispute was that a corporation was held publicly accountable for its behavior, and was defeated on those grounds. That happens far too little in the US, where corporate power pretty much drives things.
(did the os/server environment used by theos-software ever come to light, BTW?)
Another possible interepretation is that they're repeating their usual tactic of preemptive vaporware -- via the rumormill -- announcing a Linux office suite to keep other makers of office software out of the Linux market out of fear of competing against M$. Different OS, same tactic they've employed many times. Whether they actually deliver Office is immaterial in that aspect.
That's not my actual opinion, but a possible one. My actual opinion is that, like any good company with money and resources to burn, they're simply hedging their bets -- Linux without Office that gained a significant desktop market share (as Corel &c are looking into) would be a bigger desktop threat than Linux with Office -- recall how Office allowed M$ to strongarm Apple a few times. They'll have a tough time strongarming the Linux community, but they'd still be in a better position generally, as a precaution should Linux gain a monetarily significant fraction of the desktop market.
Precaution, IOW, being the operative word. They can afford 37 programmers "in case," and they gain preemptive-vapor and potential-foothold benefits merely from the rumor.:)
(still not having decided whether I'd buy it or not, if it made it to the shelves)
/., please; rejection of an injunction motion isn't the same as a decision for or against the suit. Let's not have a repeat of the bickering that followed the MS v. Sun Java compliancy injunction.
One of my favorite bits is how, in the NT server manager, the machine shows up as "NT Server 4.2". I showed that to the author of "NT Server Internals," who suggested that the 4.2 was the result of a failed hash lookup in the registry. Sounded like random RAM sections to me, which wasn't substantiated by the evidence. Anyway, I set the machine description to "My version is bigger than yours."
Congratulations to the Samba team. A great piece of software gets better.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, that's almost exactly what I'm planning to do. Send them their miserable $1k, buy however much RHAT is available, then ship it to my preexisting securities account and close the etrade account. The last thing I want to do is deal with etrade -- especially after the trouble it's been trying to get one sodding account open with cash.
Not quite sure if this is the contest I think it is, but I watched the championships one year at UCD, and saw the Linux box controlling Newton Labs' team make mulch of the runner-up, students from a Korean technical institute the name of which escapes me, and their DOS box. Granted the algorithm's more important than the OS, but after watching these robots for over an hour it was especially great to walk over and notice the targeting and scheduling displays running on an X desktop. Grizzled-looking guy sitting in front of it said it ran Linux. Whee. :)
That would be "the right to petition the government for redress of grievances" -- and yes, it's one of those big important things on the short version of the list. Unfortunately, our elected personages view that list as a major inconvenience to their plans, and tend to infringe on it at their whim, and let the Supreme Court decide whether to slap them down for it. A pity.
(wandering offtopic)
Or another way, "[Big blue] is like a dinosaur kicked in the ass. It takes fifteen years for the experience to reach its brain."
IBM is useful for the OSS community, though; they have tons of money and power of various sorts. They don't maneuver worth a damn, and their response time is pretty poor, but that the OSS people can do -- and do better than most anyone. IBM gets the benefit of our software, which lends our speed to their lumbering power blocs.
Mylex' RAID units have, in my limited experience with them, quite satisfied my expectations, especially for the price. While I don't in general like mergers, if Mylex manages to turn into a wholly-owned company with some degree of autonomy, it will likely avoid getting sucked into IBM's plodding.
Maybe it's just the limited light and high-compression jpegs, but they look, well... stuffed; like grey amiga-shaped teddy bears or something texturally similar. :)
Unless CNET was in a hurry to get some copy out, this isn't much of a report. 25% of server-appliance sales (not servers, not server sales, just preconfigured colorful boxes, e.g. the netwinder). I took more issue with the "traditional server sales" paragraph, such as it was:
"...Linux will account for much less in the traditional server market... 3.4% of traditional server revenue." Well, duh -- Linux servers aren't sold as such, they're sold as blank machines and one installs Linux from elsewhere. Take the 3-5 million servers kicking Linux around out there (assume they represent the same growth rate as between now and DQ's 2003; probably wrong, but skip that for a moment). DataQuest's 450k servers over a $1.9B market share give a server price average of $4222; if this is 3.4% of total revenue, then the total market is $55.83B. Back to the 3-5 million servers (suppose 4); at $4222 each one finds $16.88B, or 30.2%.
All that said, the 4 million could be way off, and server-sales figures are a miserable estimate of relative product performance except where marketroids are concerned.
Masturbation generally eases arm pain, not exacerbates it. Entirely different set of muscles and connective tissues, with a different set of strains, and it enhances lymphatic and vascular flow to your arms (more so in men than women just given the respective anatomical conditions), which can assist in delivery of your body's proteolytic enzymes, which break down the scar tissue which generally causes the pain of RSI.
And for the other commentator, don't just get a g/f; find one who types and has RSI about as badly as you do. Mutual therapy.
Without knowing the specific motives or history, the idea was most likely not to provide a strong cipher -- encipherment isn't inherently necessary anyway for this kind of thing.
Or, they wanted to limit the potential for ITAR violations -- so that crackers could avoid breaking export law while busy breaking other ones.
Or, they wanted a deliberately weak cipher so that people would latch on and improve those parts -- maybe write a tight win32 IDEA lib.
Or, they realized that encipherment isn't an especially important part of BO2K anyway, since its emissions can be detected easily enough whether enciphered or not, so casual over-shoulder encryption was adequate.
Or, they wanted their counterparts in the virus/security communities to waste time on the encryption stuff, as the counterparts indeed seem to have done.
It would, in any case, be nice if those whose job it becomes to counter BO2K had taken the opportunity to note why BO2K exists, rather than to inflate their egos in a comical misassumption.
"MetaTrust security enabled"?
Doesn't sound promising, although the RIAA twits went off on an odd tangent trying to make Rio-like devices writeonly storage. There are already consumer products that can store the same amount of MP3s, that cost a fraction as much, are as easily transportable, fit in a shirt pocket and have very low battery requirements -- they're called "removable media." Sheesh.
(how does one moderate a quickies forum?)FWIW, every one of these home-automation sales sites has had the most horrid and annoying HTML design; bright clashing colors, badly adjusted fonts, animated crap, etc. It looked a lot like most of the rest of the web, so I assume they're establishing themselves well. :)
Rsync is GPLed, and a lot more efficient than rdist for most purposes -- the debian ISO mirror process is one good example.
If you do go with rdist-style distribution, check into sdist, which might (I can't recall with any certainty) have a more liberal license than rdist, and uses SSH.
For the SSH portion, there are troubles. Free implementations of ssh are underway (the ssh1 license allows some levels of commercial use, ssh2's is too restrictive to be commercially useful), but taking their time.
(this is all personal-experience anecdote, so skip it if that bores you.)
Hardly any of the geeks in their respective industry -- in which I'm mostly thinking of the computer industry, particularly software -- are union members. Most of us are also inexperienced in labor matters, such as what to do when you're working 50 hr/wk and the boss comes and tells you he needs more overtime.
Few software geeks are accustomed to needing to fight to defend themselves in their labor conditions. We're currently such a valuable commodity that no employer is willing (or dumb enough) to endanger it.
That said, those conditions do make us easy fodder for exploitation when the bosses do abuse us. And it makes it hard to defend the conditions of our labor when we don't know how, and have to figure it all out under pressure.
One story of what happened to a geek shop when the management went bad can be read here. A cautionary tale, maybe.
% /usr/games/number 340282366920938463463374607431768211456
:)
three hundred forty undecillion.
two hundred eighty-two decillion.
three hundred sixty-six nonillion.
nine hundred twenty octillion.
nine hundred thirty-eight septillion.
four hundred sixty-three sextillion.
four hundred sixty-three quintillion.
three hundred seventy-four quadrillion.
six hundred seven trillion.
four hundred thirty-one billion.
seven hundred sixty-eight million.
two hundred eleven thousand.
four hundred fifty-six.
It sounds like a child's song.
Wouldn't be hard -- if the firmware can be swapped out, an AIBO-style device could just have pluggable AI (okay, not real AI, but some suitable falsification thereof). You could install a penguin brain into your electronic dog, which would then try to waddle around the house, make scrarking noises (what noises DO penguins make, anyway?), favor cold places, and rub itself contentedly against the UNIX machines in the house.
I think there was some cyberpunk-type sci-fi novel that included animals whose personality had been overwritten with that of another animal -- dogs, mostly, being overwritten with other critters (one tried to fly and got killed, I remember).
One other angle -- granted, based on everything else here, plus CNNfn's update, etc., the marketroids were probably mistaken about the extent of Linux' involvement. The toaster product may contain GNU utils in an unmodified state -- no reason not to use them, since POSIX compliance makes it easy to do, and GNU did such a thorough job. All that said, the OSS community in general and the Linux people in particular are on a cusp with commercial adoption, and embedded systems are one of the bigger niches we'd like to delve into. If we give the toaster manufacturer a hard time about violating the GPL before it's confirmed (and that's a long way off, when we can get one and take it apart), we run the risk of scaring off manufacturers, especially since this applies to their most crucial concern -- the GPL.
The GPL is a hard thing for the established corporations to figure out already; extensive /. flammage, whether factually warranted or not, could tip the (currently precarious) balance in adoption against us. Wait 'till the OSS community disassembles them to see if they've modified any GPL code; if so, we can politely request the code, and go through the proper motions.
There was also, IIRC, a similar furor concerning AOL's IRC presence, and the refusal of their administrators to cope with the behavior of their users. Eric Fichtner, then AOL Operations Administrator, more or less laid down AOL's official policy of refusing to provide IRC services in any way other than wholly automated without human monitoring. In that respect, Usenet and IRC have similar properties -- keeping them from getting utterly swamped often proves incompatible with corporate profit maximization tactics.
Congratulations... Obscure Benchmarking unexpectedly wins the day.
Great article title. :)
Shouldn't that be gnomewear?
Probably harsher than could be desired, but at least the voicemail thing was probably just unanticipated load, and likely the mail/web downage also. A consequence, in part, of the amount of attention (and derision) you draw in such a case.
That said, it's entirely possible that those so inclined will attack servers belonging to those who bring offense (the hacker luggage thing of late comes to mind). Perhaps a consequence of public exposure, but not a matter of liability except that between the crasher and crashee.
Recalling previous allegations of "threats," Theos Software's attorney may have been sensationalizing for effect -- to a corporate attorney, the prospect of a boycott or negative publicity is a "threat," whereas it doesn't seem so to most of the rest of us. "Drop this stupid litigation or no one I influence will ever buy your multi-user OS again" is the sort of thing I could entirely condone (and have done, though not on this matter).
The thing I liked about this dispute was that a corporation was held publicly accountable for its behavior, and was defeated on those grounds. That happens far too little in the US, where corporate power pretty much drives things.
(did the os/server environment used by theos-software ever come to light, BTW?)
Another possible interepretation is that they're repeating their usual tactic of preemptive vaporware -- via the rumormill -- announcing a Linux office suite to keep other makers of office software out of the Linux market out of fear of competing against M$. Different OS, same tactic they've employed many times. Whether they actually deliver Office is immaterial in that aspect.
That's not my actual opinion, but a possible one. My actual opinion is that, like any good company with money and resources to burn, they're simply hedging their bets -- Linux without Office that gained a significant desktop market share (as Corel &c are looking into) would be a bigger desktop threat than Linux with Office -- recall how Office allowed M$ to strongarm Apple a few times. They'll have a tough time strongarming the Linux community, but they'd still be in a better position generally, as a precaution should Linux gain a monetarily significant fraction of the desktop market.
Precaution, IOW, being the operative word. They can afford 37 programmers "in case," and they gain preemptive-vapor and potential-foothold benefits merely from the rumor. :)
(still not having decided whether I'd buy it or not, if it made it to the shelves)
/., please; rejection of an injunction motion isn't the same as a decision for or against the suit. Let's not have a repeat of the bickering that followed the MS v. Sun Java compliancy injunction.
With a big addressing space, that could have some nifty potential, RDBMS-wise. Big table join. :)
One of my favorite bits is how, in the NT server manager, the machine shows up as "NT Server 4.2". I showed that to the author of "NT Server Internals," who suggested that the 4.2 was the result of a failed hash lookup in the registry. Sounded like random RAM sections to me, which wasn't substantiated by the evidence. Anyway, I set the machine description to "My version is bigger than yours."
:)
Congratulations to the Samba team. A great piece of software gets better.
(sorry about wordwrap. http://209.54.9.11/)
% dig a www.yahooka.com @209.54.6.21
; > DiG 2.2 > a www.yahooka.com @209.54.6.21
; (1 server found)
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER;; flags: qr aa rd ra; Ques: 1, Ans: 1, Auth: 0, Addit: 0
;; QUESTIONS:
;; www.yahooka.com, type = A, class = IN
;; ANSWERS:
www.yahooka.com. 3600 A 209.54.9.11