Give me a break.... talk about a soundbite made for the press. The rate of change of nearly everything, including development environments, etc. is increasing. I'll grant you that there may be something called 'Windows' in 20 years and there may even be something called '.Net' in 20 years... in much the same way that there will probably always be a language called 'FORTRAN', regardless of what they do with it. The only intelligent part of his comment is the implicit fact that Miguel, unlike so many, at least pays attention to "the dark side" and recognizes a good idea when he sees it.
I'll get flamed for it, but I'll say this, too: Open Source software.... Free Software... means platform independence. It doesn't mean Linux. It doesn't mean BSD. It means that I get to choose.
I have a much better story to tell.... At one point last year I got fairly fed up with my service provider, so much so that I contacted Telocity and setup an account with them. They enabled DSL service to my home and shipped me one of their gateway devices. Sound normal? At this point, the story got interesting: I never used the Telocity service. That is, I never connected via their line, never performed that last act that would have really made me a user of their service. In the meantime, I had straightened out my problems with my local provider, so I went back to using their service. Telocity called me, asking about my unused service; I said that I hadn't used it. What did they do? They send me another gateway device. Who am I to argue? A few weeks later I called Telocity and canceled my account. I carefully explained that I had been shipped two of the gateways and asked that they provide me with two RMAs and airbills so that I could ship both of them back. Instead, I was sent one airbill and one RMA. I shipped one getway back; end of story? Not quite. Telocity finallly realized their mistake months later and sent me one of the standard scary letters, explaining that I would owe them the cost of the device and that I had 10 days from the date of the letter to return it - across country. I returned the 2nd gateway, called Telocity on the day they received the returned device to confirm that it was in their possession, and asked about the status of my account. "Oh... we might have billed you... but don't worry, I'll make sure your account is credited if we did."
That was late August, 2000. Would you believe that it took until last month for my account to be straightened out? That I spoke directly to Telocity 4 times, pointing out that my account had been canceled without use? In December they sent me a letter explaining that they could not use the credit card # that I had provided; the card had been renewed and the old information I had given them, including expiration date, was no longer valid. In January, I spoke to an agent on the phone: he said he would take care of the problem. In March, I spoke to another agent and explained the whole problem again: he put me on hold, talked to his supervisor, and then explained that he could see my call history and knew that I had cancelled my account (as far as he knew) on August 21st. By that point I was getting bills... yes, actual monthly bills for a service that I never used and had cancelled over 6 months before. I had to speak to another agent in June, once again asking them to credit my account for the amount they thought I owed. Hopefully in a few days or so I won't be getting another letter from Teloocity.
Is there any wonder they went out of business?
I have a friend who teaches in a local high school. This year one of the math teachers decided to throw out a lot of the older math teaching aids, including a 7 foot slide rule! When my friend heard about it, he immediately thought of me. I've now got my mondo slide rule propped against an upstairs wall, waiting for those really big problems to roll in...
1) Go to the local Circle K/generic convenience store, if possible. Very interesting folks hang out at the local convenience store at night.
2) Blow bubbles and try to blow then down stairwells. Hey, it's harder than it sounds, especially after about 4 flights of stairs.
3) Drink. Drink heavily.
4) All the Monty Python episodes are out on VHS an DVD. Practice the Cheese Shop sketch til perfect.
5) Write official sounding memos and leave them on folks desks.
That's funny.... when I had my support person out to my site, which he is required as part my support contract to do twice a year, he didn't appear to be a pimply faced guy.
Wrong again, troll.
Not true, at all. Look at the list of companies that the distributions are currently handling for support. Look at the list of companies that other support companies such as Linuxcare is handling. These guys are helping IBM, Motorola... BIG companies. Ask them about the retailers that they are supporting NOW.
You are confusing the number of computers with the complexity of support. Retail (in particular) is a much easier problem in many respects than desktop support, in that it tends to be a very controlled environment. Retailers, as a general rule, don't let employees change the machines running in their stores, especially their servers.
Finally, who said anything about a usenet model of support? I pay for Linux support and I have a single named contact; anyway, getting the answer from the net is the support company's problem (should it fall to that, and I sincerely doubt it will), not mine.
Retail is a nice space for support, in general, because it tends to be a replicated site environment (aka branch automation). Like banks and companies with lots of branch offices, these sites tend to be largely the same. This makes support much easier, since you're effectively support one (or a few) configurations of hardware.
Retailers, as a general rule, are cheap^H^H^H^H^H thrifty. That means staying on the same platform for as long as they can get away with it.
The cost savings in using Linux can be applied in several ways:
Better, more reliable hardware
Enterprise support contracts from 3rd parties
Hiring internal support people
Training for your in-house developers/admins, etc.
The latter two can be especially positive. I recommend that companies request training as part of the support agreements, so that they can handle the small stuff internally.
I'll mention that I work for a large (Fortune 500) retailer who has had a support contract for over a year with a Linux distribution company located on the East Coast near several universities known for good basketball, and I've had excellent support from them so far, though, admittedly, we haven't had any real problems so far.
I'll also mention that in past years I have had a bug in a *nix flavor that severely impacted my company's ability to do business - such that there are things that we *really* pay attention to in support contracts, such as explicit problem escalation chains, problem acknowledgement times, etc.
I'm not certain that MBONE is what you really mean here; what I think you really want it a broadcast or multi-cast oriented file tranfer system.
I've actually wrote a broadcast-oriented ftp around 6 or 7 years ago; it's currently used by a Fortune 500 company to xmit large chunks of data to 3000 locations, simultaneously. This is in a satellite WAN environment.
As for multicast: this is something I've been looking into lately. For those interested, a few pointers: Cisco has a few articles RFC draft, which has expired.
For a general discussion of IP Multicast,
check out IPMulticast.com, especially the tech section which discuss reliable multicast protocols.
I should mention that there is a lot of work going into multicast protocols these days, for various reasons, and that, generally, multicast protocols aren't very generally applicable. Some, for instance, are useful for gaming, were the data is time sensitive, but the reliability of data transport doesn't have to be perfect. Data transport is obviously more important for an ftp-like system. Besides the more traditional use of UDP as a protocol base, some folks are implementing their own protocols on top of raw IP.
For a vendor's perspective on a product/implementation, check out Talarian, which has a reliable multicast product. [ You can even get code, if you register ] Note: this relies on the PGM protocol.
Check out Vaccine for an effort to create a multicast distro image distribution tool.
They have not ported the whole Notes Client.
See the Lotus Notes DOLS product for a much more interesting strategy. [ Yes, Windows only.... currently, but ??? ] It is a browser plugin that implements much of the notes client, such that you can replicate Notes databases to your desktop and access them while offline.
Get your Notes Admin to revert the webmail template back to 4.6.4 - which does not use Java Applets to render the webmail interface. As a side benefit, it is much, much faster.
[ Lotus is working on an improved mail template. ]
I'm suprised that no one from RH has replied to this - but mkkickstart under 6.1 had some known issues. I will say that I've successfully used kickstart under 6.2 to load 6.1 on a station and that's a nice way to do an install. I'll also mention that I'm looking at a future install of a slightly larger number of stations - and that I *need* a fairly touchless way to install to some boxes that don't have floppy drives or cd-rom drives. kickstart + bootp/dhcp is pretty darn cool.
You're right, "proving" that we can crack encryption techniques isn't that interesting to a mathematician. I think the real value of the effort was in demonstrating to the folks who don't understand or believe the argument that DES is insufficient for encryption.
"I never understood why distributed.net always wastes their time trying to solve these abstract mathematical problems..." It's not an abstract problem, it's a concrete one. "We already know how difficult and statistically long it will take." And yet we haven't done it. That's why it's useful: granted, genetic algorithms may evolve some interesting results, but we already know that there are uses for OGR's. IMHO, the point isn't how long it will take - the point is that at this point we know how long it will take and we have a tool for the job, a tool of sufficient resources that exceeds the computing power that previously has been thrown at the job. Of course, proving that some encryption standards are insufficient for today's needs is a nice side benefit.
Amazon blew orders for two books. I ordered both of them on December 2nd; both were advertised as being available with 24-48 hour deliver times. Instead, I received an e-mail from Amazon explaining that I should contact them if I didn't receive the packages by December 20th! 18 days later! Guess what - one package was mis-delivered - the other is still MIA. They've shipped another copy of the missing book, which I'll probably see something late next week. So much for Christmas.
Uh, actually I think that some tax software (Turbo Tax?) was among the most purchased software last year in the US. You mean "popular" in the sense of "technically interesting or challenging," I suppose. Tax software may not be glamorous, but it is a surefire way to attract millions of users, at least in the US. There are a couple of posts here by folks who specifically loaded Windows (or Wine, VMWare, etc.) in order to run Tax Software. It is one of those killer categories for US businesses and consultants. I don't know whether there is such a need in other parts of the world, but it would be a major contribution to the cause.
Hhmmm. Perhaps we can the q3/linux community a service and plot download times by ISP and date/time of day? November 21st, 11:00AM CST, TimeWarner RoadRunner in Memphis, TN, USA - 52MB in 2 minutes, 8 seconds.
Interesting concept, Jon. I just got back from Orlando, where I spent a day at EPCOT. The last time I visited anything Disney was some 28 years ago, when I was too young to see past the rides and the carnival atmosphere. EPCOT is disappointing, utimately, for a number of reasons. If you've travelled - and I have visited some of the countries represented in the EPCOT park - you quickly realize that they have reduced each to a sound bite. It is Julian Barnes "England, England" come to life... "England, well, we need a Fish-n-Chips place." Then there is the technology. A monorail still glides across the landscape, but that was there 28 years ago. Modern cities have light rail, etc. Are there no new sucesses here? One of the main buildings advertises "Innovation"; I say "advertises" deliberately, for the minute you walk in you are aware of the corporate slogans and the product labels. Walk through the IBM section, the Xerox section, the Sega section. See Thinkpads. See video games. See Bose Speakers. Listen to the guides tell you how you can buy all of this stuff today! All they need is a car lot to complete the shopping experience. The Millenium village comes off as a place where the countries not willing to sign a big enough check to Disney are herded under the same tent, where they shout out like carnival barkers for your attention. I spoke to several country representatives and each was well-spoken and informed about their countries purpose in being there. But what was Disney's contribution to this? Advertising space? Let's face it, Disney is a country and that country has a service-based economy. It is no longer the technological dreamscape that Walt Disney wished it to be.
Sounds like he is re-working some old material. Beyond the Fringe (circa 1961) had a joke in the Broadway performance in which they said, "Yes, in America they have inherited our two party system. They have the Democratic party, which is roughly equivalent to our Conservative party and they have the Republican party, which is roughly equivalent to our conservative party."
Now wait a second, SCO didn't just enter the Linux World. Slashdot has reported two earlier incidents: SCO joined Linux International (http://slashdot.org/articles/98/12/04/1530208.sht ml) and SCO announced Linux Support (http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/14/1527243.sht ml). One of the posters asks the question: Is SCO discretely trying to wreck Linux? Unlike IBM, SCO isn't that big of a company. I don't think they can afford to have conflicting strategies regarding Linux; that is, that can't count on their Linux support services as a revenue stream while simultaneously bashing Linux. The press releases we have seen from SCO have come at different times; I think they reflect SCO's efforts to formulate strategy, of which their are (broadly) two responses: fight'em or join'em. I think this is further evidence that they've picked the join'em strategy.... that they are counting on picking up business from those folks who have started to realize that NT isn't the holy grail, that Linux is good for SCO's interest.
"18GB Western Digital Expert 7200rpm UDMA 66 hard drive (Linux only supports UDMA33!)"
As I write this from a box with a 18GB Western Digital Expert 7200RPM UDMA 66 hard drive running Linux, nope - that isn't true. In fact, he mentions the existence of a patch. Several ways to run the drive - as a regular old ATA, as a UDMA 33, or a UDMA 66. The patch exist for the 2.2 kernel series. I'm running 2.3.13 - which doesn't need to be patched. In the "for what it's worth" category:
[root@eco jgreer]# hdparm -Tt/dev/hde /dev/hde: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.25 seconds =102.40 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.73 seconds =17.16 MB/sec
Hmmm. First popular media "intellectual comedy." Using the word "popular" may have saved you, here. Certainly "Beyond the Fringe" qualifies, don't you think, as intellectual humor? 1) They predate MP. 2) They are credited with inspiring the rise of satirical humor. 3) They use G.E. Moore as a character in one of their skits; certainly that qualifies as intelluctual for you? Too bad they had too settle for a Broadway show instead of a TV show. Of course, I'm sure it's not like you were expecting a kind of Spanish Inquisition....
Another example - most of the current Lexmark Laser printers (1625, etc.) not only have an IP stack, not only support jet-direct protocol (port 9100), not only support tftp'ing files to the printer, not only support ftp'ing files to the print, but they have built in lpd support - that is, you can establish a remote queue definition pointing directly to the printer (IP = address of printer, queue = raw1). And the 1625 is a fairly low-end printer.
I'm amazed that prior posters haven't mentioned eCos ( http://www.cygnus.com/ecos/ ) as an alternative to this. To quote their page:
Cygnus developed eCos to provide an open, standard infrastructure for embedded developers worldwide. eCos provides a common run-time software environment that can be configured from source code to meet most application-specific requirements. eCos is available as an open source product.
Cygnus delivers eCos from sourceware.cygnus.com as an open source release. Cygnus also delivers eCos as a commercial product backed by Cygnus developer support.
p.s. Just to make it clear, I have no affiliation with Cygnus.
Yes, not only that - but when the added an FPU to the transputer, they wrote the thing in Occam first and essentially proved the design.
Of course, I alway thought that one of the barriers to entry in the US Market was that initially one had to program them in Occam, a language containing parallel processing verbs, etc. [ Occam, as a recall, didn't have dynamic memory allocation, either... best to look around the house and find those Transputer/Occam manuals I squirrelled away. ] Of course, Inmos eventually offered a C compiler, but I suspect it was too late.
Sidenote: I remember meeting Welch at the 3rd Conference on Hypercube Concurrent Computers in 1989; he did a couple of presentations on Occam and Transputers. I wonder what he's up to?
Additional: At the above conference, the "Show Floor" had a number of vendors showing off hardware. One vendor had one of the first PC board add-in cards with 4 Transputers on it. My partner-in-crime and I were checking out the demo - the (now tired) generation of the Mandlebrot set. We had generated the same using an early model of the Intel Hypercube - 10 minutes per run. We dutifully watched the screen fill with the image and then asked the magic question, "So, how long does it take you guys to generate that image?" They looked confused, and then, realizing our question, replied, "We just did." I.e. the image (set) was being generated in about 5 seconds or so.
That was one of only two times I have ever been truly shocked at the speed of a machine, the other being when I first watched a 486/66 boot Unix.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a break.... talk about a soundbite made for the press. The rate of change of nearly everything, including development environments, etc. is increasing. I'll grant you that there may be something called 'Windows' in 20 years and there may even be something called '.Net' in 20 years... in much the same way that there will probably always be a language called 'FORTRAN', regardless of what they do with it. The only intelligent part of his comment is the implicit fact that Miguel, unlike so many, at least pays attention to "the dark side" and recognizes a good idea when he sees it.
I'll get flamed for it, but I'll say this, too: Open Source software.... Free Software... means platform independence. It doesn't mean Linux. It doesn't mean BSD. It means that I get to choose.
I have a much better story to tell.... At one point last year I got fairly fed up with my service provider, so much so that I contacted Telocity and setup an account with them. They enabled DSL service to my home and shipped me one of their gateway devices. Sound normal? At this point, the story got interesting: I never used the Telocity service. That is, I never connected via their line, never performed that last act that would have really made me a user of their service. In the meantime, I had straightened out my problems with my local provider, so I went back to using their service. Telocity called me, asking about my unused service; I said that I hadn't used it. What did they do? They send me another gateway device. Who am I to argue? A few weeks later I called Telocity and canceled my account. I carefully explained that I had been shipped two of the gateways and asked that they provide me with two RMAs and airbills so that I could ship both of them back. Instead, I was sent one airbill and one RMA. I shipped one getway back; end of story? Not quite. Telocity finallly realized their mistake months later and sent me one of the standard scary letters, explaining that I would owe them the cost of the device and that I had 10 days from the date of the letter to return it - across country. I returned the 2nd gateway, called Telocity on the day they received the returned device to confirm that it was in their possession, and asked about the status of my account. "Oh... we might have billed you... but don't worry, I'll make sure your account is credited if we did." That was late August, 2000. Would you believe that it took until last month for my account to be straightened out? That I spoke directly to Telocity 4 times, pointing out that my account had been canceled without use? In December they sent me a letter explaining that they could not use the credit card # that I had provided; the card had been renewed and the old information I had given them, including expiration date, was no longer valid. In January, I spoke to an agent on the phone: he said he would take care of the problem. In March, I spoke to another agent and explained the whole problem again: he put me on hold, talked to his supervisor, and then explained that he could see my call history and knew that I had cancelled my account (as far as he knew) on August 21st. By that point I was getting bills... yes, actual monthly bills for a service that I never used and had cancelled over 6 months before. I had to speak to another agent in June, once again asking them to credit my account for the amount they thought I owed. Hopefully in a few days or so I won't be getting another letter from Teloocity.
Is there any wonder they went out of business?
I have a friend who teaches in a local high school. This year one of the math teachers decided to throw out a lot of the older math teaching aids, including a 7 foot slide rule! When my friend heard about it, he immediately thought of me. I've now got my mondo slide rule propped against an upstairs wall, waiting for those really big problems to roll in...
1) Go to the local Circle K/generic convenience store, if possible. Very interesting folks hang out at the local convenience store at night. 2) Blow bubbles and try to blow then down stairwells. Hey, it's harder than it sounds, especially after about 4 flights of stairs. 3) Drink. Drink heavily. 4) All the Monty Python episodes are out on VHS an DVD. Practice the Cheese Shop sketch til perfect. 5) Write official sounding memos and leave them on folks desks.
That's funny.... when I had my support person out to my site, which he is required as part my support contract to do twice a year, he didn't appear to be a pimply faced guy. Wrong again, troll.
Not true, at all. Look at the list of companies that the distributions are currently handling for support. Look at the list of companies that other support companies such as Linuxcare is handling. These guys are helping IBM, Motorola... BIG companies. Ask them about the retailers that they are supporting NOW.
You are confusing the number of computers with the complexity of support. Retail (in particular) is a much easier problem in many respects than desktop support, in that it tends to be a very controlled environment. Retailers, as a general rule, don't let employees change the machines running in their stores, especially their servers.
Finally, who said anything about a usenet model of support? I pay for Linux support and I have a single named contact; anyway, getting the answer from the net is the support company's problem (should it fall to that, and I sincerely doubt it will), not mine.
- Better, more reliable hardware
- Enterprise support contracts from 3rd parties
- Hiring internal support people
- Training for your in-house developers/admins, etc.
The latter two can be especially positive. I recommend that companies request training as part of the support agreements, so that they can handle the small stuff internally.I'll mention that I work for a large (Fortune 500) retailer who has had a support contract for over a year with a Linux distribution company located on the East Coast near several universities known for good basketball, and I've had excellent support from them so far, though, admittedly, we haven't had any real problems so far.
I'll also mention that in past years I have had a bug in a *nix flavor that severely impacted my company's ability to do business - such that there are things that we *really* pay attention to in support contracts, such as explicit problem escalation chains, problem acknowledgement times, etc.
I've actually wrote a broadcast-oriented ftp around 6 or 7 years ago; it's currently used by a Fortune 500 company to xmit large chunks of data to 3000 locations, simultaneously. This is in a satellite WAN environment.
As for multicast: this is something I've been looking into lately. For those interested, a few pointers: Cisco has a few articles RFC draft, which has expired.
For a general discussion of IP Multicast, check out IPMulticast.com, especially the tech section which discuss reliable multicast protocols.
I should mention that there is a lot of work going into multicast protocols these days, for various reasons, and that, generally, multicast protocols aren't very generally applicable. Some, for instance, are useful for gaming, were the data is time sensitive, but the reliability of data transport doesn't have to be perfect. Data transport is obviously more important for an ftp-like system. Besides the more traditional use of UDP as a protocol base, some folks are implementing their own protocols on top of raw IP.
For a vendor's perspective on a product/implementation, check out Talarian, which has a reliable multicast product. [ You can even get code, if you register ] Note: this relies on the PGM protocol.
Check out Vaccine for an effort to create a multicast distro image distribution tool.
They have not ported the whole Notes Client. See the Lotus Notes DOLS product for a much more interesting strategy. [ Yes, Windows only.... currently, but ??? ] It is a browser plugin that implements much of the notes client, such that you can replicate Notes databases to your desktop and access them while offline.
Get your Notes Admin to revert the webmail template back to 4.6.4 - which does not use Java Applets to render the webmail interface. As a side benefit, it is much, much faster. [ Lotus is working on an improved mail template. ]
I use Notes under Wine. To get around the attachment problem, I mail the mail to my account on my Linux box and read/detach the attachments with Mutt.
I'm suprised that no one from RH has replied to this - but mkkickstart under 6.1 had some known issues. I will say that I've successfully used kickstart under 6.2 to load 6.1 on a station and that's a nice way to do an install. I'll also mention that I'm looking at a future install of a slightly larger number of stations - and that I *need* a fairly touchless way to install to some boxes that don't have floppy drives or cd-rom drives. kickstart + bootp/dhcp is pretty darn cool.
You're right, "proving" that we can crack encryption techniques isn't that interesting to a mathematician. I think the real value of the effort was in demonstrating to the folks who don't understand or believe the argument that DES is insufficient for encryption.
"I never understood why distributed.net always wastes their time trying to solve these abstract mathematical problems..." It's not an abstract problem, it's a concrete one. "We already know how difficult and statistically long it will take." And yet we haven't done it. That's why it's useful: granted, genetic algorithms may evolve some interesting results, but we already know that there are uses for OGR's. IMHO, the point isn't how long it will take - the point is that at this point we know how long it will take and we have a tool for the job, a tool of sufficient resources that exceeds the computing power that previously has been thrown at the job. Of course, proving that some encryption standards are insufficient for today's needs is a nice side benefit.
Amazon blew orders for two books. I ordered both of them on December 2nd; both were advertised as being available with 24-48 hour deliver times. Instead, I received an e-mail from Amazon explaining that I should contact them if I didn't receive the packages by December 20th! 18 days later! Guess what - one package was mis-delivered - the other is still MIA. They've shipped another copy of the missing book, which I'll probably see something late next week. So much for Christmas.
Uh, actually I think that some tax software (Turbo Tax?) was among the most purchased software last year in the US. You mean "popular" in the sense of "technically interesting or challenging," I suppose. Tax software may not be glamorous, but it is a surefire way to attract millions of users, at least in the US. There are a couple of posts here by folks who specifically loaded Windows (or Wine, VMWare, etc.) in order to run Tax Software. It is one of those killer categories for US businesses and consultants. I don't know whether there is such a need in other parts of the world, but it would be a major contribution to the cause.
Hhmmm. Perhaps we can the q3/linux community a service and plot download times by ISP and date/time of day? November 21st, 11:00AM CST, TimeWarner RoadRunner in Memphis, TN, USA - 52MB in 2 minutes, 8 seconds.
Interesting concept, Jon. I just got back from Orlando, where I spent a day at EPCOT. The last time I visited anything Disney was some 28 years ago, when I was too young to see past the rides and the carnival atmosphere. EPCOT is disappointing, utimately, for a number of reasons. If you've travelled - and I have visited some of the countries represented in the EPCOT park - you quickly realize that they have reduced each to a sound bite. It is Julian Barnes "England, England" come to life... "England, well, we need a Fish-n-Chips place." Then there is the technology. A monorail still glides across the landscape, but that was there 28 years ago. Modern cities have light rail, etc. Are there no new sucesses here? One of the main buildings advertises "Innovation"; I say "advertises" deliberately, for the minute you walk in you are aware of the corporate slogans and the product labels. Walk through the IBM section, the Xerox section, the Sega section. See Thinkpads. See video games. See Bose Speakers. Listen to the guides tell you how you can buy all of this stuff today! All they need is a car lot to complete the shopping experience. The Millenium village comes off as a place where the countries not willing to sign a big enough check to Disney are herded under the same tent, where they shout out like carnival barkers for your attention. I spoke to several country representatives and each was well-spoken and informed about their countries purpose in being there. But what was Disney's contribution to this? Advertising space? Let's face it, Disney is a country and that country has a service-based economy. It is no longer the technological dreamscape that Walt Disney wished it to be.
Sounds like he is re-working some old material. Beyond the Fringe (circa 1961) had a joke in the Broadway performance in which they said, "Yes, in America they have inherited our two party system. They have the Democratic party, which is roughly equivalent to our Conservative party and they have the Republican party, which is roughly equivalent to our conservative party."
Now wait a second, SCO didn't just enter the Linux World. Slashdot has reported two earlier incidents: SCO joined Linux International (http://slashdot.org/articles/98/12/04/1530208.sht ml) and SCO announced Linux Support (http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/14/1527243.sht ml). One of the posters asks the question: Is SCO discretely trying to wreck Linux? Unlike IBM, SCO isn't that big of a company. I don't think they can afford to have conflicting strategies regarding Linux; that is, that can't count on their Linux support services as a revenue stream while simultaneously bashing Linux. The press releases we have seen from SCO have come at different times; I think they reflect SCO's efforts to formulate strategy, of which their are (broadly) two responses: fight'em or join'em. I think this is further evidence that they've picked the join'em strategy.... that they are counting on picking up business from those folks who have started to realize that NT isn't the holy grail, that Linux is good for SCO's interest.
As I write this from a box with a 18GB Western Digital Expert 7200RPM UDMA 66 hard drive running Linux, nope - that isn't true. In fact, he mentions the existence of a patch. Several ways to run the drive - as a regular old ATA, as a UDMA 33, or a UDMA 66. The patch exist for the 2.2 kernel series. I'm running 2.3.13 - which doesn't need to be patched. In the "for what it's worth" category:
[root@eco jgreer]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
JimTiming buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.25 seconds =102.40 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.73 seconds =17.16 MB/sec
Hmmm. First popular media "intellectual comedy." Using the word "popular" may have saved you, here. Certainly "Beyond the Fringe" qualifies, don't you think, as intellectual humor? 1) They predate MP. 2) They are credited with inspiring the rise of satirical humor. 3) They use G.E. Moore as a character in one of their skits; certainly that qualifies as intelluctual for you? Too bad they had too settle for a Broadway show instead of a TV show. Of course, I'm sure it's not like you were expecting a kind of Spanish Inquisition....
Another example - most of the current Lexmark Laser printers (1625, etc.) not only have an IP stack, not only support jet-direct protocol (port 9100), not only support tftp'ing files to the printer, not only support ftp'ing files to the print, but they have built in lpd support - that is, you can establish a remote queue definition pointing directly to the printer (IP = address of printer, queue = raw1). And the 1625 is a fairly low-end printer.
Cygnus developed eCos to provide an open, standard infrastructure for embedded developers worldwide. eCos provides a common run-time software environment that can be configured from source code to meet most application-specific requirements. eCos is available as an open source product.
Cygnus delivers eCos from sourceware.cygnus.com as an open source release. Cygnus also delivers eCos as a commercial product backed by Cygnus developer support.
p.s. Just to make it clear, I have no affiliation with Cygnus.
Yes, not only that - but when the added an FPU to the transputer, they wrote the thing in Occam first and essentially proved the design.
Of course, I alway thought that one of the barriers to entry in the US Market was that initially one had to program them in Occam, a language containing parallel processing verbs, etc. [ Occam, as a recall, didn't have dynamic memory allocation, either... best to look around the house and find those Transputer/Occam manuals
I squirrelled away. ] Of course, Inmos eventually offered a C compiler, but I suspect it was too late.
Sidenote:
I remember meeting Welch at the 3rd Conference on Hypercube Concurrent Computers in 1989; he
did a couple of presentations on Occam and Transputers. I wonder what he's up to?
Additional:
At the above conference, the "Show Floor" had a number of vendors showing off hardware. One vendor had one of the first PC board add-in cards with 4 Transputers on it. My partner-in-crime and I were checking out the demo - the (now tired) generation of the Mandlebrot set. We had generated the same using an early model of the Intel Hypercube - 10 minutes per run.
We dutifully watched the screen fill with the image and then asked the magic question, "So, how long does it take you guys to generate that image?" They looked confused, and then, realizing our question, replied, "We just did." I.e. the image (set) was being generated in about 5 seconds or so.
That was one of only two times I have ever been truly shocked at the speed of a machine, the other being when I first watched a 486/66 boot Unix.