The media loves to use the word hacker to describe what we know as a cracker (or even a script kiddie in some cases). Don't expect them to clear this up. With stuff like DeCSS-vs-MPAA and Napster-vs-RIAA, Big Media now thinks of techie hotshots as 'the enemy' and will continue to do what they can to make us look bad to the mainstream. What better way to do so than to make Joe SixPak think that the smart kid who plays MP3's at home is the same kid who breaks into Pentagon computers and tries to launch nuclear missiles? --
Why don't they just wait another month for the StarOffice source to be released? It's got StarBasic, which is finished and works. Then they only have to clean it up a little, move the visuals to Qt/GTK, add KOM/Bonobo support... project finished a year or two faster. --
The popularity of the TV show 'Survivor' gave me an idea on how to fund the space program:
Put a bunch of astronauts into a big space station filled with lots of TV cameras. Every week, they vote on one astronaut to kick off the station, and blow him/her out the airlock. I guarantee that the TV ratings would be so insanely great that the advertising revenue could fund the space program for years! --
This isn't directly related to RSA, but it got me thinking: now that strong crypto isn't considered a 'munition' anymore, it'd really be a good time to start including the IPSEC hooks for FreeS/WAN in the stock Linux kernel. FreeS/WAN is a great package, and it enables really good VPN's to be done on a shoestring. Unfortunately, it requires a kernel patch. I'd like to see the relevant IPSEC hooks in the stock kernel now. --
Transmeta's design, while not revolutionary (IBM has been doing microcode on their mainframe processors for decades) is something new in the microcomputer space. However, consumers typically don't buy CPU's for their design -- they buy strictly on price/performance. This is why AMD is currently slaughtering Intel at the low end: even though their chips are just imitations of Intel's, their process and scale are set up so that they can deliver large yields at low prices.
Transmeta can win on price/performance if it can get good production yields.
The real test will be on 64-bit, though: when Intel finally releases the Itanium, how fast will Transmeta be able to re-code its magical morpho-chip to the IA-64 instruction set? If they can do it quickly, they'll have a production Itanium-compatible chip on the market with a significantly lower R&D cost, because the hardware part of the chip is already paid for. Intel will have to charge a super-premium for Itanium, because of all the zillions they spent building it. If Transmeta can do a software-only upgrade to the Crusoe to make it Itanium-compatible, they'll be able to sell it at less than half of what Intel will be charging. If they can do that, they've got it made -- and they will indeed be five years ahead of Intel. --
Sadly for them, it's already been very well-established in the courts that interoperability, even if it means reverse-engineering, is fair use.
While I really, really would like this to be unconditionally true, the reality is that this is still a hazy area. For example, DeCSS is a perfect example of 'reverse engineering for interoperability' -- yet the DVD Mafia's corporate lawyers, along with the judges in their pockets, are currently in the process of turning that program into contraband.
This whole situation is quite serious. Microsoft could very well be using it as a test flight for future lawsuits in which they attempt to take down huge portions of major open source projects. While the NTFS thing is, by itself, a tempest in a teapot, we have to pay attention to Microsoft's machinations very carefully. They are a huge company with hundreds of well-paid corporate lawyers, and a strong interest in making the Linux movement fail. It's a chess game: just because a particular move doesn't knock something out immediately, it doesn't mean that the same move won't have a significant effect later on.
Keep your eyes open. Always assume the worst of intentions when Microsoft does anything. --
I'm very pleased that they've changed the default window manager (when running GNOME, anyway) from Enlightenment to Sawfish. I think that a lot of people who thought they hated GNOME, actually just hated Enlightenment.
Sawfish is nice and lean, it makes the GNOME experience snappy and responsive. Thankfully, with Rasterman now off the payroll, Red Hat was able to make this switch, and I think it makes their product that much better. --
The sticky bit keeps a program on swap, but swap is probably still a disk. This was useful in the days when you might have had a swap device that was faster than your primary storage system. Since most installations are either using a single disk, or have disks that all run at the same speed, this doesn't gain much. I'd like to be able to redefine the sticky-bit to tell the kernel "Keep this program resident in memory" -- but I wonder whether that would break anything? --
Unix/Linux does this for you automatically. The disk caching functionality will keep the disk blocks belonging to recently used programs in memory -- so if you have a lot of memory, you'll simply find that once you've typed a few commands, the machine doesn't have to go to disk to fetch them on subsequent runs.
This actually reflects the perfect way of doing this: add optimization, but don't bug the users about it -- it's not their problem. --
Actually, Bill Gates was rich back then. He came from a wealthy family. He just hadn't yet made the transition from just-plain-rich to obscenely rich. --
I'm confused. It looks like some weird version of Netscape -- except there's an "E" where the "N" should be, it has lots of security problems, and it doesn't seem to work on Linux. Is this somebody's idea of a joke? --
WAP is a userland phenomenon. Developers who target WAP vs. HTML vs. whatever, are developing in Perl, PHP, etc. -- this stuff has nothing to do with Linux, it's going to run the same whether they run it on a Linux box or a Solaris box (or even a Windows box, if a portable language is installed on it).
The real issue should be of getting the open source world's portfolio of web service tools to dish out WAP in a friendly and easy-to-configure way -- and getting it done, tested, deployed, and grabbing market share before Microsoft starts raping and pillaging that part of the market. --
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Until Linux becomes a relatively large and homogenous target market, it doesn't make economic sense to support it as a client.
...and until the GNOME vs. KDE war ends, Linux won't become a relatively large and homogenous target market.
No, this is not flamebait. It's a perfect example of why a single framework makes sense. If HP could deliver, for example, a JetDirect Bonobo component, and it always got installed to the same path, and always was activated using the same tools, and that covered 95% of the Linux machines out there, then it would make sense to do, and it would make sense to train their tech support people on.
Use this as an example of why the Linux market is currently fragmented, and needs to have more uniformity in order to gain better support. Sure, any of us Linux geeks can (and do) set up LPR to JetDirect boxes, but the typical tech support customer who needs phone help just to set up a printer, probably doesn't know his/her way around Port 515 too well.
I started doing name-based virtual hosting on my home system in 1996. I only have one IP address, so it was a forced decision. At the time, I had some friends check out the various host names to see what they got. The only ones who had problems were using Mosaic or ancient (1.x) Netscape browsers. Four years later, it's probably safe to assume that almost everyone has Netscape >=3.0 or aIEeee >=4.0 (or else is already having problems much bigger than hitting the wrong NameVirtualHost!).
If you're setting up a NameVirtualHost setup, and you're truly worried about people hitting the wrong site with an older browser, then you set up a bogus "primary" site on your system (primary meaning, the one that you get if the client browser doesn't indicate the name of the host it's looking for) that contains nothing but links to the names of NameVirtualHosts that exist there. For an example of this, you could look at this site which I've linked here by its IP address instead of its name. --
Is "replacing" the Internet a good idea? You can bet that if the Internet is going to be "completely overhauled" then they're going to "correct" the "mistakes" that were made with Internet 1 -- namely, that pesky little de-centralization "bug" that prevents Big Government and Big Business from exercising tight control over the end-user experience. Internet 2 will have wiretapping and censorship hooks installed at every router and gateway. Internet 2 will require a registered, privileged connection if you want to run a server of any type. Internet 2 will have draconian TOS that ensures that all users will be the tame sheep that Big Government and Big Business wants us to be.
Don't moderate this as 'funny' -- I'm dead serious. --
The real problem with all of these DNS issues (not only.com vs.us, but also the trademark problems, overcrowded namespaces, etc.) is that DNS was never designed to be a locator service. It was designed to attach names to hosts that are easier to memorize than dotted-decimal IP addresses. There have been several attempts at real locator services -- some directory-based, some much simpler (such as RealNames and AOL Keywords) but to date, all of these services have been proprietary, and the last thing the Internet as a whole wants to do is create Yet More Lock-In to a single entity.
The IETF needs to get its butt moving, to deliver a true Locator Service specification to the Internet. I believe there is a working group on the case, but to date not much has come out of it.
For what it's worth, I used a.us name for my system for years (a BBS located at uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us) but eventually jumped into a.org instead (address is in my sig) simply because it's easier for people to remember, and to say -- the more abbreviations and punctuation marks that are in a hostname, the more difficult the name becomes to speak when you're telling someone in-person what your e-mail or web address is. --
You have to let both the market and the community sort these issues out by themselves. Flaming doesn't accomplish that goal any sooner. As a KDE-turned-GNOME user, I happen to agree with you, but comments like the above only serve to get people's dander up and stretch the debate out even longer. --
Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.
The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing! --
GNOME seems to pull existing projects into its base
And that's a good thing. Remember, one of the supposed strengths of FreeSoftware/OpenSource is that you don't have to re-invent the wheel. If the GNOME project can take stuff like Gecko and StarOffice and Gnomify/Bonobize them, it proves that this important tenet of source availability is both valid and workable. --
...is that the new driver model for XFree86 v4 is something that works. Hardware manufacturers can now ship one driver, and not worry about which distributions to target (or even Linux vs. BSD issues, because they all use the same driver model). See that? When third parties have a single target, they ship stuff. When faced with fragmentation, they only sometimes ship stuff, and when they do, it's usually only for the most popular marget segment (cf. all the third party software advertised as "For Red Hat Linux"). Way to go, XFree (and Precision Insight, which contributed the module loader). --
This is one of Microsoft's classic plays. When they see something that they think might threaten them, they either make an announcement or "leak" information regarding some great new MS Vaporware that's coming up. The idea is to "freeze" the marketplace, and get customers to avoid buying or adopting the competing technology until MS has its own crappy version in "barely usable" mode.
This is clearly a response to the Gnome Foundation announcements. The future of non-Microsoft desktops suddenly got a whole lot brighter this week. Microsoft must do everything it can to steer people away from this up-and-coming technology. If they can get people to say to themselves "I'll just wait for MS Office to arrive before I try Linux" then they've succeeded.
Still, even if it's true, I can't see how it'd be very good if they're using MainWin (basically the equivalent of WineLib) to do the port. While the entire Gnome Foundation initiative is centering around CORBA and the Bonobo framework, a ported MS Office will still be using a ported DCOM. Furthermore, it'll look and feel like a Windows app, right around the same time that Linux apps are starting to take on a more unified look and feel. It'll only talk to itself. In other words, MS Office will feel as isolationist and foreign in the future standardized Gnome desktop as the current version of StarOffice feels in the current Linux desktop. Who wants that? More importantly, who wants that and at a cost of $500? --
Slashdot Mirror
The media loves to use the word hacker to describe what we know as a cracker (or even a script kiddie in some cases). Don't expect them to clear this up. With stuff like DeCSS-vs-MPAA and Napster-vs-RIAA, Big Media now thinks of techie hotshots as 'the enemy' and will continue to do what they can to make us look bad to the mainstream. What better way to do so than to make Joe SixPak think that the smart kid who plays MP3's at home is the same kid who breaks into Pentagon computers and tries to launch nuclear missiles?
--
Why don't they just wait another month for the StarOffice source to be released? It's got StarBasic, which is finished and works. Then they only have to clean it up a little, move the visuals to Qt/GTK, add KOM/Bonobo support ... project finished a year or two faster.
--
The popularity of the TV show 'Survivor' gave me an idea on how to fund the space program:
Put a bunch of astronauts into a big space station filled with lots of TV cameras. Every week, they vote on one astronaut to kick off the station, and blow him/her out the airlock. I guarantee that the TV ratings would be so insanely great that the advertising revenue could fund the space program for years!
--
This isn't directly related to RSA, but it got me thinking: now that strong crypto isn't considered a 'munition' anymore, it'd really be a good time to start including the IPSEC hooks for FreeS/WAN in the stock Linux kernel. FreeS/WAN is a great package, and it enables really good VPN's to be done on a shoestring. Unfortunately, it requires a kernel patch. I'd like to see the relevant IPSEC hooks in the stock kernel now.
--
Transmeta's design, while not revolutionary (IBM has been doing microcode on their mainframe processors for decades) is something new in the microcomputer space. However, consumers typically don't buy CPU's for their design -- they buy strictly on price/performance. This is why AMD is currently slaughtering Intel at the low end: even though their chips are just imitations of Intel's, their process and scale are set up so that they can deliver large yields at low prices.
Transmeta can win on price/performance if it can get good production yields.
The real test will be on 64-bit, though: when Intel finally releases the Itanium, how fast will Transmeta be able to re-code its magical morpho-chip to the IA-64 instruction set? If they can do it quickly, they'll have a production Itanium-compatible chip on the market with a significantly lower R&D cost, because the hardware part of the chip is already paid for. Intel will have to charge a super-premium for Itanium, because of all the zillions they spent building it. If Transmeta can do a software-only upgrade to the Crusoe to make it Itanium-compatible, they'll be able to sell it at less than half of what Intel will be charging. If they can do that, they've got it made -- and they will indeed be five years ahead of Intel.
--
This whole situation is quite serious. Microsoft could very well be using it as a test flight for future lawsuits in which they attempt to take down huge portions of major open source projects. While the NTFS thing is, by itself, a tempest in a teapot, we have to pay attention to Microsoft's machinations very carefully. They are a huge company with hundreds of well-paid corporate lawyers, and a strong interest in making the Linux movement fail. It's a chess game: just because a particular move doesn't knock something out immediately, it doesn't mean that the same move won't have a significant effect later on.
Keep your eyes open. Always assume the worst of intentions when Microsoft does anything.
--
I'm very pleased that they've changed the default window manager (when running GNOME, anyway) from Enlightenment to Sawfish. I think that a lot of people who thought they hated GNOME, actually just hated Enlightenment.
Sawfish is nice and lean, it makes the GNOME experience snappy and responsive. Thankfully, with Rasterman now off the payroll, Red Hat was able to make this switch, and I think it makes their product that much better.
--
The sticky bit keeps a program on swap, but swap is probably still a disk. This was useful in the days when you might have had a swap device that was faster than your primary storage system. Since most installations are either using a single disk, or have disks that all run at the same speed, this doesn't gain much. I'd like to be able to redefine the sticky-bit to tell the kernel "Keep this program resident in memory" -- but I wonder whether that would break anything?
--
Unix/Linux does this for you automatically. The disk caching functionality will keep the disk blocks belonging to recently used programs in memory -- so if you have a lot of memory, you'll simply find that once you've typed a few commands, the machine doesn't have to go to disk to fetch them on subsequent runs.
This actually reflects the perfect way of doing this: add optimization, but don't bug the users about it -- it's not their problem.
--
Actually, Bill Gates was rich back then. He came from a wealthy family. He just hadn't yet made the transition from just-plain-rich to obscenely rich.
--
I'm confused. It looks like some weird version of Netscape -- except there's an "E" where the "N" should be, it has lots of security problems, and it doesn't seem to work on Linux. Is this somebody's idea of a joke?
--
WAP is a userland phenomenon. Developers who target WAP vs. HTML vs. whatever, are developing in Perl, PHP, etc. -- this stuff has nothing to do with Linux, it's going to run the same whether they run it on a Linux box or a Solaris box (or even a Windows box, if a portable language is installed on it).
The real issue should be of getting the open source world's portfolio of web service tools to dish out WAP in a friendly and easy-to-configure way -- and getting it done, tested, deployed, and grabbing market share before Microsoft starts raping and pillaging that part of the market.
--
C'mon people, we know it won't die. The Network Is The Computer. All that high-powered hardware and nifty Java code will outlive everything else in the universe.
Or do you mean that other Sun? (grin)
--
- Qt is free if you're developing a free app
- To develop a commercial app, you must purchase a commercial Qt license
- KDE uses Qt
Nothing has changed. Nothing. (Unless you count the Debian-esque "GPL + QPL == illegal" rants.)Whatever.
--
--
I started doing name-based virtual hosting on my home system in 1996. I only have one IP address, so it was a forced decision. At the time, I had some friends check out the various host names to see what they got. The only ones who had problems were using Mosaic or ancient (1.x) Netscape browsers. Four years later, it's probably safe to assume that almost everyone has Netscape >=3.0 or aIEeee >=4.0 (or else is already having problems much bigger than hitting the wrong NameVirtualHost!).
If you're setting up a NameVirtualHost setup, and you're truly worried about people hitting the wrong site with an older browser, then you set up a bogus "primary" site on your system (primary meaning, the one that you get if the client browser doesn't indicate the name of the host it's looking for) that contains nothing but links to the names of NameVirtualHosts that exist there. For an example of this, you could look at this site which I've linked here by its IP address instead of its name.
--
Is "replacing" the Internet a good idea? You can bet that if the Internet is going to be "completely overhauled" then they're going to "correct" the "mistakes" that were made with Internet 1 -- namely, that pesky little de-centralization "bug" that prevents Big Government and Big Business from exercising tight control over the end-user experience. Internet 2 will have wiretapping and censorship hooks installed at every router and gateway. Internet 2 will require a registered, privileged connection if you want to run a server of any type. Internet 2 will have draconian TOS that ensures that all users will be the tame sheep that Big Government and Big Business wants us to be.
Don't moderate this as 'funny' -- I'm dead serious.
--
The real problem with all of these DNS issues (not only .com vs .us, but also the trademark problems, overcrowded namespaces, etc.) is that DNS was never designed to be a locator service. It was designed to attach names to hosts that are easier to memorize than dotted-decimal IP addresses. There have been several attempts at real locator services -- some directory-based, some much simpler (such as RealNames and AOL Keywords) but to date, all of these services have been proprietary, and the last thing the Internet as a whole wants to do is create Yet More Lock-In to a single entity.
.us name for my system for years (a BBS located at uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us) but eventually jumped into a .org instead (address is in my sig) simply because it's easier for people to remember, and to say -- the more abbreviations and punctuation marks that are in a hostname, the more difficult the name becomes to speak when you're telling someone in-person what your e-mail or web address is.
The IETF needs to get its butt moving, to deliver a true Locator Service specification to the Internet. I believe there is a working group on the case, but to date not much has come out of it.
For what it's worth, I used a
--
- It remembers to mention that other projects are doing the same thing (kde)
- It mentions that Qt was semi-closed when GNOME started, but has since gone open source
- It even credits GNU as the beginning of the free software movement, not Linux
Details like these are often missed by mainstream media.--
You have to let both the market and the community sort these issues out by themselves. Flaming doesn't accomplish that goal any sooner. As a KDE-turned-GNOME user, I happen to agree with you, but comments like the above only serve to get people's dander up and stretch the debate out even longer.
--
Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.
The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing!
--
Yup, that's true. The popular jab at the time was that OSF really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever."
--
--
...is that the new driver model for XFree86 v4 is something that works. Hardware manufacturers can now ship one driver, and not worry about which distributions to target (or even Linux vs. BSD issues, because they all use the same driver model). See that? When third parties have a single target, they ship stuff. When faced with fragmentation, they only sometimes ship stuff, and when they do, it's usually only for the most popular marget segment (cf. all the third party software advertised as "For Red Hat Linux"). Way to go, XFree (and Precision Insight, which contributed the module loader).
--
This is one of Microsoft's classic plays. When they see something that they think might threaten them, they either make an announcement or "leak" information regarding some great new MS Vaporware that's coming up. The idea is to "freeze" the marketplace, and get customers to avoid buying or adopting the competing technology until MS has its own crappy version in "barely usable" mode.
This is clearly a response to the Gnome Foundation announcements. The future of non-Microsoft desktops suddenly got a whole lot brighter this week. Microsoft must do everything it can to steer people away from this up-and-coming technology. If they can get people to say to themselves "I'll just wait for MS Office to arrive before I try Linux" then they've succeeded.
Still, even if it's true, I can't see how it'd be very good if they're using MainWin (basically the equivalent of WineLib) to do the port. While the entire Gnome Foundation initiative is centering around CORBA and the Bonobo framework, a ported MS Office will still be using a ported DCOM. Furthermore, it'll look and feel like a Windows app, right around the same time that Linux apps are starting to take on a more unified look and feel. It'll only talk to itself. In other words, MS Office will feel as isolationist and foreign in the future standardized Gnome desktop as the current version of StarOffice feels in the current Linux desktop. Who wants that? More importantly, who wants that and at a cost of $500?
--