And they're tremendously impacting users that would ordinarily go to Linux by not offering _any_ of their products for Linux.
You make it sound as if making a Windows product available for Linux is a matter of taking a tarball of the source over to a Linux box and running make. Well, it isn't. The technical reason there's no Office for Linux suite is that it simply can't be done without either stabilizing the Win32 API long enough to develop a good compatiblity library or ending up with two completely separate code bases for the same product. Neither is desirable for Microsoft because the former would stifle their God-given right to (Ahem!) innovate and the latter would simply be a big mess.
Microsoft likes to brag about the low average age of its software staff (the figure I heard was around 25). That explains why their products are of low technical quality: they're being built by people without the experience to know better. Before you reach for the flamethrower, I'm not saying that younger people aren't any good at doing software, because there are plenty that are. I'm saying that a horde of inexperienced people developing software without the leadership of people who've been there, done that and got the tee shirt is a bad thing. Rick Downes did an interesting analysis of Microsoft's RegClean app in the RISKS-FORUM digests Volume 35 and Volume 37. The long and the short of it is that he found tons of unnecessary left-overs in the program that go a long way to prove that someone smart at Microsoft built an app template and people are boilerplating apps from it without taking the time to understand what they were doing.
Lest anyone think this scores more points for the open source movement, it happens on this side of the fence, too. The difference is that others have the opportunity to find these problems and correct them.
Text is easy to manipulate and most config files and start-up scripts are text.... LILO. Somebody who can install a hacked version of LILO can do some damage. And the LILO config is easy enough to edit. See my previous point.... Trusted binaries can be compromised in useful ways, as described by Ken Thompson in Reflections on Trusting Trust.
All three of these make the assumption that the things being attacked are writable by the user doing the attacking. If that's the case, then whatever's doing the attacking would already have to be the super user or a similar special account (daemon, bin, etc). If not, the only damage the average user will be able to do is to himself.
One of the things that I notice about Linux is that there is some overlap between these lists. It seems to point to the idea of tamper-evident packaging.
That's also true of Unix in general and is a very strong argument for digital signatures on source and binary distributions.
Some firewalls (Gauntlet comes to mind, but there are probably others) do on-the-fly tamper checking by including software to digest system files and compare them against a list on read-only media. Changing the system files requires generating a new checksum disk, which in turn reqires physical access to the machine.
I developed the software that kept track of the calls and scheduled the direction finding activities on that project, so I guess I can tell you a few things about it.
The 1994 pilot was an analog-only system that used an array of eight antennas feeding eight digital receivers, which in turn fed a whole load of DSP hardware. Once the receiver was tuned, the DSP would do a load of math on the incoming signals and use the phase differences to determine where they were coming from. There were also algorithms to weed out multipath, leaving a single, strong signal to be used in taking a bearing. The goal of the first test was to keep an eye on the DC Beltway from I-270 to Alexandria. To do this, we co-located the DF equipment at eight cell sites around the Beltway. The MTSO (mobile telephone switching office) would give us a feed of calls entering and leaving the cells we covered (each DF site could cover many cells, and some overlapped). Three or four sites were scheduled to get a bearing on the call, and if the phone was located in our area of interest, it was tracked periodically until it left. The resulting location, direction and speed information was then fed back to a Traffic Information Center where a map of the Beltway displayed relative speeds for each segment.
Nothing was actually done with information about the phone itself, but there was a great deal of interest in using a similar system for enhanced 911 services. The project was eventually sold off to Grayson Wireless, who turned it into this product. There's a description of how it works here. It's kind of cool to see that a lot of the concepts we built into the prototype seven years ago are still around.
RealSpeak is at least partially based on a product called TruVoice, which was developed and bought from another telephony products company called Centigram. I've heard better speech engines (like AT&T's, which they unfortunately don't license), but the place where TruVoice and RealSpeak really shine are in their TTS engine, which understands things like numbers and abbreviations and how they're used. Try synthesizing "I went to visit Dr. Smith, my 2nd physician, on Smith Dr. at 12:30" and you'll see what I mean.
TruVoice is available for Unix, but unfortunately RealSpeak isn't. I don't know if this has something to do with their relationship with Microsoft. I'd sure like to have a single-user license that I could spit things into.
Come back in 20 years time and you'll see a vastly more computer literate society, with the Internet just another media. Where's the place for AOL?
I don't think you're going to see anything even close. I got into computing 21 years ago, when computers were much harder to use than they are now. Back then I figured that in 20 years we'd have a vastly more computer literate society. While there are certainly many times more of us geeky folks who like to make our machines do neat tricks, we're a much smaller percentage of the computer-using community than we were 20 years ago. It used to be that if you understood how the machine worked and could write programs for it, you were considered computer-literate. Now that term means you can do such excruciatingly complex things as navigate an install wizard.
What really scares the hell out of me is that when I'm too old to care, there will be critical software written by a generation of people who grew up on the idea that bloated, unreliable software is the norm. Maybe I'm being an alarmist, but I really don't want a piece of medical equipment to GPF while I'm hooked up to it.
Second, this really great quote from Richard Buetow, the Director of Corporate Quality at Motorola:
"With ISO 9000 you can still have terrible processes and products. You can certify a manufacturer that makes life jackets from concrete, as long as those jackets are made according to the documented procedures and the company provides the next of kin with instructions on how to complain about defects."
I came in on the big wave of no-coders in the early '90s and within a year had upgraded to Advanced.
The fact is that wireless communication has become a commodity item, and as a result some of the reason people take up amateur radio in the first place has disappeared. Why after all, would someone engage in something that requires expensive equipment and a special license when they can go out to the local electronics store and pick up a pair of FRS radios for under $150? Or suffer through static crashes and the ins and outs of HF propogation when they can grab a cell phone and dial any phone on the face of the planet?
As wireless services become more prevalent, fewer people will have an interest in rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. The state of the radio art is no longer being advanced in amateurs' workshops, it's happening in the labs at Motorola and Qualcomm. While it used to be true that many EEs were also hams, I think the current working conditions many of us suffer through make us less inclined to do things similar to what we do at work during our off time. Amateurs are, after all, by definition people who do something for the love of it. Why do something if it's neither necessary or fun?
I still do it because people don't tend to want to talk to you if you pick up your cell phone and dial a number at random. Having a yak with people I know on the way to work in the morning makes the commute go by faster. And even though I know this message will be read by people around the world, I'm still tickled to be able to talk to someone halfway around the world with no wires.
Fewer interested parties means fewer participants, and it's sad to have to predict that the hobby will probably have dwindled to almost nothing in 20 more years. Compounding the problem is the fact that in this country, amateur radio is the classic nerdy hobby, even more so now that computers are commonplace and using the internet has become the hip thing to do. Several years ago I was having a chat with someone in Europe about this topic. It seems that in his country (and I forget which it is), people who take up the hobby are regarded as people who are doing something useful with their spare time and not sitting down at the bar quaffing beer and watching soccer.
VHS profited by being open, any company could make VHS w/o paying this hefty fee, and the standard was open to all. Not so with DVD...
Not so with VHS, either. VHS was developed by JVC in reponse to Sony's refusal to license the Beta format in an effort to keep the home video market to itself. Like Beta, there is a set of specifications that a manufacturer must license from JVC and meet before selling VCRs bearing the VHS mark.
VHS is so ubiquitous because unlike Sony, JVC understood that inexpensive licensing on a large scale was the key to making the format the success that it is. It's for that reason the (technically superior) Beta format is now used exclusively by the broadcast and video production industries.
Would it be feasible perhaps to get a hack on a few routers running some gateway or backbone, and count the number of actually sent HTTP headers from each server? This statistics would be much more accurate; it would actually show how much data is moved around the net and how many total user requests are served by each of the servers.
If done on a large enough scale, you'd get much more accurate figures. But I'd bet good money that it won't happen.
Firstly: You'd have to monitor a lot of the edge routers (i.e., those closest to the customer) at a lot of ISPs. Many routers (most notably Cisco, who has a product called NetFlow) can be configured to monitor and report on traffic, but AFAIK can't pick off seleced packages and deliver the contents somewhere else. Even doing the basic traffic information puts a heavy load on the CPU, and ISPs aren't going to burn cycles on an ongoing web survey when those cycles can be used to produce revenue.
Secondly: Most corporate customers of most ISPs would probably consider the number of queries being made to their servers proprietary information and wouldn't want it released in discrete or aggregate form. I'm sure B&N would love to know how many hits www.amazon.com takes in the average day.
Thirdly: If something like that were to happen, half the population of Slashdot would be screaming "Echelon" at the top of their lungs.:-)
It just really disturbs me in general when sites pick formats that are only truly compatible with Windows. With so many excellent cross platform options available, I just don't see why big companies pick these closed formats.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when you use something proprietary, you get to form a "strategic partnership" with the proprietor. Then you both get to do press releases and for some silly reason your stock price goes up a buck or two.
Today's web pages are so full of animations of anykind. What are there goals anyway: sale things on the web or inform people. You can't go on those sites without being invade by publicity. I think this is sad.
Don't consider yourself being invaded, consider it a very fair exchange: A couple of seconds' worth of your attention in exchange for a service. You may find it sad, but if it weren't for advertising, the amount of good information available on the web absolutely free would be miniscule compared to what it is. And that would be truly sad, because the Internet wouldn't have seen the phenomenal acceptance and growth it's been through in the last decade. (I won't even go into the huge positive economic impact.)
This happened with the print media centuries ago, radio 80 years ago and television 50 years ago. There are bills to be paid for providing content at a bargain price (sometimes free) to a large audience, and your choices are to charge for it, take on advertisers or go bankrupt and close your doors. Radio and TV stations have the same monthly operating expenses whether they've got ten thousand or ten million people tuned in at a given instant. More listeners/viewers means higher ad rates and therefore revenue at very little (if any) extra expense. Once you pass the break-even point, every additional person means a profit, and that's why you're in business to begin with.
Print media and web sites are a different story because they have increased costs to bear as more prople use them. Magazines have to print and deliver more copies; web sites have to add bandwidth and server capacity. Call a national ISP sometime and ask them what a full T3 costs. Multiply that figure by 4 or 5 and you've got what a Yahoo! or MapQuest is paying for Internet access alone. Then add the cost of racks of servers and the facilities and staff to run them and provide the content. It adds up very quickly.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if an oft-used site like MapQuest dropped their advertising started charging for their services, there'd be something about it here on Slashdot and 500 replies about how terrible it is. (And it would be pretty terrible. I remember the bad old days of the mid 1980s when you had to pay an online service a pretty hefty fee to look at airline schedules.)
In terms of the Fox site, it's not about providing information, it's about getting more viewers for their shows. You visit Fox.com, see a banner for their new show When Slashdotters Attack, decide it's worth watching and plop down on the sofa to watch it. That's one more set of eyeballs seeing the national ads, and a few cents more Fox can charge their advertisers for 30 seconds of air time. The advertisers get the exposure they want, and in exchange you get 22 minutes of entertainment absolutely free.
If it were just about providing information, Fox would have a single, static home page listing their programs and what they're about. Web sites are like electronic brochures, and you can bet that the boring ones get passed over. Fox is a TV network, and the TV business lives on glitz. They want to be able to give visitors to their web site the same glitzy experience they'd get if parked in front of the tube watching channel 5. Their web designers chose a good vehicle for it that unfortunately excluded Unix users. But they've promised to rectify the problem, and that's a step in the right direction.
Texas Instruments has dominated the market for digital signal processor chips for years. It looks like this is about to change big-time.
I wouldn't put money on that. DSPC's product line covers only one segment of the DSP market: CDMA and TDMA wireless products. Qualcomm wrote the book on CDMA and has its own line of chipsets to handle the protocol which sells very well. And AFAIK, the TDMA market isn't anywhere near that of CDMA.
The people who design DSP-based products select chips for their systems based on things they can measure. Texas Instruments has a huge head start with the TMS320Cx0 line in terms of available development tools and the excellent track record of its deployed units. Once you've got a library of software for one DSP, switching to another requires almost as much effort as rewriting it, so even if Intel was going into the general-purpose DSP business, you're not going to see engineers switching on trendy whims.
I wouldn't start screaming "monopoly" or "antitrust violation," either. Aside from the x86 line, the only other processors Intel makes are the i960, StrongARM (under license) and MCS microcontrollers. None of those come anywhere near being suitable for high-performance DSP applications, nor are any of them leaders in their segment. Somebody at Intel may be realizing that the x86 cash cow may eventually stop giving milk and that if the intend to survive beyond the PC era, they're going to have to diversify.
Texas Instruments is the Intel of the DSP industry, except that they make a better product and don't throw their weight around. (Funny how the companies that make better products and are on top of their markets don't have to resort to intimidation to beat their competition.) I've done work on the i960 and TMS320Cx0, and where the former was a bug-ridden disaster from square one, the latter was a joy to work with. (It might sound like I'm comparing apples and oranges here because the i960 isn't a DSP chip, but both are processors and one showed much better design than the other.) If Intel wants to compete in the DSP arena, they've got a lot of self-improvement and catching up to do.
And to make this a complete slashdot post: All of these chips would be lousy in Beowulf clusters.:-)
Neither UUNet nor PSINet are owned by a single ISP, they merely rent out POP space to others.
UUNET was bought by MFS in 1996, and MFS was bought by WorldCom in a year later. That makes them a wholly-owned subsidiary of WorldCom. PSI is still more or less independent, although they cut a deal for some of IXC's fiber in exchange for a 20% stake.
Both providers have reseller programs, but AFAIK neither rents space in their PoPs to other ISPs.
...Hard to Configure: Sendmail was designed and built in an era when the extra code to make for user-friendly configuration by '90s standards would have chewed up more resources than it was worth. Heck, 18 years ago the fact that you were able to configure the program using a file instead of recompiling it was user-friendly. (Or at least administrator-friendly.) Sendmail remains difficult for novices to configure because it's a very powerful, flexible program. If you want to do something meaningful with it, you've got to develop a solid knowledge of how things work or you're going to fall flat on your face. These days I consider that a feature in that it keeps people who really shouldn't be fooling around with MTAs from doing it. That may sound like an elitist attitude, but if the Visual BASIC set were able to field Sendmail configurations for their companies, they'd be the first ones crying foul and filing lawsuits when they shot themselves in the feet.
...Back Doors: Yes, Rob Morris got his worm in through a bug in Sendmail, but he did so a decade ago when people who used the Internet were a bit more trustworthy on the whole than they are today. That one incident prety well started the trend toward making sure programs didn't have any bugs that could be exploited and turned into a security problem. Sendmail itself has no designed-in "back doors," although I figure that like most other software, the odd security-related bug will pop up from time to tome and be promptly squashed. One of the reasons Sendmail is so secure and stable is that it's had plenty of time to mature. That same bit of code that reads the configuration files you're complaining about has been exercised millions of times at thousands of sites, and by God it works! Sendmail is indeed flexible enough to be configured in an insecure way, but not doing so is part of knowing what you're doing. If you're dumb enough to configure/bin/sh as a mailer, well, c'est la vie.
Whatever the case, though, Allman and his friends at Sendmail, Inc. are doing exactly what companies who use the open source model should be doing: they're adding some real value, not just repackaging it. Besides, after all the hard work he's done on Sendmail, I'd say he deserves to make a buck on it.
Remote collaboration among host computer running host program and remote computers each running application program ... This looks like a general patent on client-server computing. Considering that this patent is dated April 2, 1997 (Granted July 13, 1999), Isn't there a lot of prior art?
It looks more like a more specific patent on a system to allow an application being run on one system to be seen and operated by one or more remote systems. There's a ton of prior art on that.
From 1988 to 1990, I did university research that led to software the does just this. The first system replicated full-screen dumb terminal sessions. The second, called XTV, did it for any X11 application. We published the following paper on it:
XTV: A Framework for Sharing X Window Clients in Remote Synchronous Collaboration Proceedings of IEEE TriComm '91, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pp. 159-167, April 1991.
Similar projects had previously been done elsewhere, but ours was the first that didn't require a special X server or client libraries.
I'm not sure how NCR thinks Netscape infringed on this patent, but I'm sure some judge will get to hear their lawyer's explanation. This ought to be interesting.
Where universities are concerned, I think it's fairly safe to say that the Slashdot demographic is probably more representative of Computer Science departments than anywhere else (administrative, non-CS, non-engineering and non-science departments). The "anywhere elses" spend a lot of their computer time writing papers, doing spreadsheets and keeping small, simple databases to support their research. Computers in those settings are a means to some other end and not the end in and of itself. Most universities have full-blown Computing Services departments that make sure the basic services (printing, email, file serving, etc.) work. After all, how many arts and letters departments are able to staff an Associate Professor who can double as a system administrator?
Computer Science departments, where a bunch of the industry's good minds come from, are a different story. Computing isn't just the means, it's also the end. There are far too many people at far too many universities doing far too much research that requires the use of operating system sources. (And by that I mean kernel source, not the sources for ls and grep.) Any CS department worth its salt will have at least one project like this going on at a time, and you can bet your bits they won't agree to using something for which there's no source license available.
When I was in college (mid-to-late '80s), we had source licenses for 4.{1,2,3}BSD for our VAXen and Suns and SVR3 for our AT&T 3Bx machines. I can think of a half-dozen or so research projects that went on during my four-year stay that were directly OS-related. One in particular involved attaching multiple Ethernet interfaces to a host and bonding them into one big, fast interface. Today that's no big deal -- I can slap a Quad Fast Ethernet card in a Sun, load up the software and (thoretically) get a 400 Mbit/sec hose for my trouble. But this was over a decade ago, when your choices for Ethernet were "thick" or "thin," there were still less than 10,000 hosts on the Internet and the sophisticated routing protocols that would do effective load balancing over multiple links were still a few years away. It was damned cool stuff for 1987.
The fact is that operating systems are excellent proving grounds for things in a number of CS research areas. It's very convenient to take a functioning system and transplant or graft a piece that proves a new concept. The Ethernet project I mentioned above and many others like it would never have made it off the ground had the researchers been required to develop enough software from scratch to make the thing run.
I have my own theory about why you'll never see Microsoft completely take over any decent CS department. Based on the bloat and overall quality of its past and current product lines, I envision the sources to be large, generally ugly, difficult to work with and even harder to compile without sacrificing a couple of small farm animals. Just for the sake of argument, let's say that Bill Gates is replaced by an alien who decrees that from now on the sources for Windows will be licensed just like the sources of BSD were -- free to academic institutions. Three things will happen:
Despite NDAs, word will get around academia about what a mess Windows is internaly
The sheer unwieldiness of the code won't make Windows a first choice for research projects
Students with half a brain who are exposed to the code will probably not want to rely on it once they reach the commercial world
See, you 'allegedly' pour a bunch of money, 'hire' a bunch of famous programmers, and nobody does anything. Tell nobody anything, bake at 375 degrees of buzz, and sell it to someone else for a huge, huge number.
Naah. It's been done. I'm a longtime stockholder of heyidiot.com and have become a very wealthy man.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound as if making a Windows product available for Linux is a matter of taking a tarball of the source over to a Linux box and running make. Well, it isn't. The technical reason there's no Office for Linux suite is that it simply can't be done without either stabilizing the Win32 API long enough to develop a good compatiblity library or ending up with two completely separate code bases for the same product. Neither is desirable for Microsoft because the former would stifle their God-given right to (Ahem!) innovate and the latter would simply be a big mess.
Microsoft likes to brag about the low average age of its software staff (the figure I heard was around 25). That explains why their products are of low technical quality: they're being built by people without the experience to know better. Before you reach for the flamethrower, I'm not saying that younger people aren't any good at doing software, because there are plenty that are. I'm saying that a horde of inexperienced people developing software without the leadership of people who've been there, done that and got the tee shirt is a bad thing. Rick Downes did an interesting analysis of Microsoft's RegClean app in the RISKS-FORUM digests Volume 35 and Volume 37. The long and the short of it is that he found tons of unnecessary left-overs in the program that go a long way to prove that someone smart at Microsoft built an app template and people are boilerplating apps from it without taking the time to understand what they were doing.
Lest anyone think this scores more points for the open source movement, it happens on this side of the fence, too. The difference is that others have the opportunity to find these problems and correct them.
All three of these make the assumption that the things being attacked are writable by the user doing the attacking. If that's the case, then whatever's doing the attacking would already have to be the super user or a similar special account (daemon, bin, etc). If not, the only damage the average user will be able to do is to himself.
One of the things that I notice about Linux is that there is some overlap between these lists. It seems to point to the idea of tamper-evident packaging.
That's also true of Unix in general and is a very strong argument for digital signatures on source and binary distributions.
Some firewalls (Gauntlet comes to mind, but there are probably others) do on-the-fly tamper checking by including software to digest system files and compare them against a list on read-only media. Changing the system files requires generating a new checksum disk, which in turn reqires physical access to the machine.
The 1994 pilot was an analog-only system that used an array of eight antennas feeding eight digital receivers, which in turn fed a whole load of DSP hardware. Once the receiver was tuned, the DSP would do a load of math on the incoming signals and use the phase differences to determine where they were coming from. There were also algorithms to weed out multipath, leaving a single, strong signal to be used in taking a bearing. The goal of the first test was to keep an eye on the DC Beltway from I-270 to Alexandria. To do this, we co-located the DF equipment at eight cell sites around the Beltway. The MTSO (mobile telephone switching office) would give us a feed of calls entering and leaving the cells we covered (each DF site could cover many cells, and some overlapped). Three or four sites were scheduled to get a bearing on the call, and if the phone was located in our area of interest, it was tracked periodically until it left. The resulting location, direction and speed information was then fed back to a Traffic Information Center where a map of the Beltway displayed relative speeds for each segment.
Nothing was actually done with information about the phone itself, but there was a great deal of interest in using a similar system for enhanced 911 services. The project was eventually sold off to Grayson Wireless, who turned it into this product. There's a description of how it works here. It's kind of cool to see that a lot of the concepts we built into the prototype seven years ago are still around.
TruVoice is available for Unix, but unfortunately RealSpeak isn't. I don't know if this has something to do with their relationship with Microsoft. I'd sure like to have a single-user license that I could spit things into.
I don't think you're going to see anything even close. I got into computing 21 years ago, when computers were much harder to use than they are now. Back then I figured that in 20 years we'd have a vastly more computer literate society. While there are certainly many times more of us geeky folks who like to make our machines do neat tricks, we're a much smaller percentage of the computer-using community than we were 20 years ago. It used to be that if you understood how the machine worked and could write programs for it, you were considered computer-literate. Now that term means you can do such excruciatingly complex things as navigate an install wizard.
What really scares the hell out of me is that when I'm too old to care, there will be critical software written by a generation of people who grew up on the idea that bloated, unreliable software is the norm. Maybe I'm being an alarmist, but I really don't want a piece of medical equipment to GPF while I'm hooked up to it.
Second, this really great quote from Richard Buetow, the Director of Corporate Quality at Motorola:
The fact is that wireless communication has become a commodity item, and as a result some of the reason people take up amateur radio in the first place has disappeared. Why after all, would someone engage in something that requires expensive equipment and a special license when they can go out to the local electronics store and pick up a pair of FRS radios for under $150? Or suffer through static crashes and the ins and outs of HF propogation when they can grab a cell phone and dial any phone on the face of the planet?
As wireless services become more prevalent, fewer people will have an interest in rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. The state of the radio art is no longer being advanced in amateurs' workshops, it's happening in the labs at Motorola and Qualcomm. While it used to be true that many EEs were also hams, I think the current working conditions many of us suffer through make us less inclined to do things similar to what we do at work during our off time. Amateurs are, after all, by definition people who do something for the love of it. Why do something if it's neither necessary or fun?
I still do it because people don't tend to want to talk to you if you pick up your cell phone and dial a number at random. Having a yak with people I know on the way to work in the morning makes the commute go by faster. And even though I know this message will be read by people around the world, I'm still tickled to be able to talk to someone halfway around the world with no wires.
Fewer interested parties means fewer participants, and it's sad to have to predict that the hobby will probably have dwindled to almost nothing in 20 more years. Compounding the problem is the fact that in this country, amateur radio is the classic nerdy hobby, even more so now that computers are commonplace and using the internet has become the hip thing to do. Several years ago I was having a chat with someone in Europe about this topic. It seems that in his country (and I forget which it is), people who take up the hobby are regarded as people who are doing something useful with their spare time and not sitting down at the bar quaffing beer and watching soccer.
Not so with VHS, either. VHS was developed by JVC in reponse to Sony's refusal to license the Beta format in an effort to keep the home video market to itself. Like Beta, there is a set of specifications that a manufacturer must license from JVC and meet before selling VCRs bearing the VHS mark.
VHS is so ubiquitous because unlike Sony, JVC understood that inexpensive licensing on a large scale was the key to making the format the success that it is. It's for that reason the (technically superior) Beta format is now used exclusively by the broadcast and video production industries.
If done on a large enough scale, you'd get much more accurate figures. But I'd bet good money that it won't happen.
Firstly: You'd have to monitor a lot of the edge routers (i.e., those closest to the customer) at a lot of ISPs. Many routers (most notably Cisco, who has a product called NetFlow) can be configured to monitor and report on traffic, but AFAIK can't pick off seleced packages and deliver the contents somewhere else. Even doing the basic traffic information puts a heavy load on the CPU, and ISPs aren't going to burn cycles on an ongoing web survey when those cycles can be used to produce revenue.
Secondly: Most corporate customers of most ISPs would probably consider the number of queries being made to their servers proprietary information and wouldn't want it released in discrete or aggregate form. I'm sure B&N would love to know how many hits www.amazon.com takes in the average day.
Thirdly: If something like that were to happen, half the population of Slashdot would be screaming "Echelon" at the top of their lungs. :-)
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when you use something proprietary, you get to form a "strategic partnership" with the proprietor. Then you both get to do press releases and for some silly reason your stock price goes up a buck or two.
Naw. That couldn't be it.
Don't consider yourself being invaded, consider it a very fair exchange: A couple of seconds' worth of your attention in exchange for a service. You may find it sad, but if it weren't for advertising, the amount of good information available on the web absolutely free would be miniscule compared to what it is. And that would be truly sad, because the Internet wouldn't have seen the phenomenal acceptance and growth it's been through in the last decade. (I won't even go into the huge positive economic impact.)
This happened with the print media centuries ago, radio 80 years ago and television 50 years ago. There are bills to be paid for providing content at a bargain price (sometimes free) to a large audience, and your choices are to charge for it, take on advertisers or go bankrupt and close your doors. Radio and TV stations have the same monthly operating expenses whether they've got ten thousand or ten million people tuned in at a given instant. More listeners/viewers means higher ad rates and therefore revenue at very little (if any) extra expense. Once you pass the break-even point, every additional person means a profit, and that's why you're in business to begin with.
Print media and web sites are a different story because they have increased costs to bear as more prople use them. Magazines have to print and deliver more copies; web sites have to add bandwidth and server capacity. Call a national ISP sometime and ask them what a full T3 costs. Multiply that figure by 4 or 5 and you've got what a Yahoo! or MapQuest is paying for Internet access alone. Then add the cost of racks of servers and the facilities and staff to run them and provide the content. It adds up very quickly.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if an oft-used site like MapQuest dropped their advertising started charging for their services, there'd be something about it here on Slashdot and 500 replies about how terrible it is. (And it would be pretty terrible. I remember the bad old days of the mid 1980s when you had to pay an online service a pretty hefty fee to look at airline schedules.)
In terms of the Fox site, it's not about providing information, it's about getting more viewers for their shows. You visit Fox.com, see a banner for their new show When Slashdotters Attack, decide it's worth watching and plop down on the sofa to watch it. That's one more set of eyeballs seeing the national ads, and a few cents more Fox can charge their advertisers for 30 seconds of air time. The advertisers get the exposure they want, and in exchange you get 22 minutes of entertainment absolutely free.
If it were just about providing information, Fox would have a single, static home page listing their programs and what they're about. Web sites are like electronic brochures, and you can bet that the boring ones get passed over. Fox is a TV network, and the TV business lives on glitz. They want to be able to give visitors to their web site the same glitzy experience they'd get if parked in front of the tube watching channel 5. Their web designers chose a good vehicle for it that unfortunately excluded Unix users. But they've promised to rectify the problem, and that's a step in the right direction.
...when Subaru was going to introduce the "Rectum."
...Is that it's a slight bastardization of the Japanese word for "horse."
Fortunately, Sun trademarked the OpenWindows name about twelve years ago.
I wouldn't put money on that. DSPC's product line covers only one segment of the DSP market: CDMA and TDMA wireless products. Qualcomm wrote the book on CDMA and has its own line of chipsets to handle the protocol which sells very well. And AFAIK, the TDMA market isn't anywhere near that of CDMA.
The people who design DSP-based products select chips for their systems based on things they can measure. Texas Instruments has a huge head start with the TMS320Cx0 line in terms of available development tools and the excellent track record of its deployed units. Once you've got a library of software for one DSP, switching to another requires almost as much effort as rewriting it, so even if Intel was going into the general-purpose DSP business, you're not going to see engineers switching on trendy whims.
I wouldn't start screaming "monopoly" or "antitrust violation," either. Aside from the x86 line, the only other processors Intel makes are the i960, StrongARM (under license) and MCS microcontrollers. None of those come anywhere near being suitable for high-performance DSP applications, nor are any of them leaders in their segment. Somebody at Intel may be realizing that the x86 cash cow may eventually stop giving milk and that if the intend to survive beyond the PC era, they're going to have to diversify.
Texas Instruments is the Intel of the DSP industry, except that they make a better product and don't throw their weight around. (Funny how the companies that make better products and are on top of their markets don't have to resort to intimidation to beat their competition.) I've done work on the i960 and TMS320Cx0, and where the former was a bug-ridden disaster from square one, the latter was a joy to work with. (It might sound like I'm comparing apples and oranges here because the i960 isn't a DSP chip, but both are processors and one showed much better design than the other.) If Intel wants to compete in the DSP arena, they've got a lot of self-improvement and catching up to do.
And to make this a complete slashdot post: All of these chips would be lousy in Beowulf clusters. :-)
RFC 1178 has some good things to say on the topic, too.
What if the Don Henley who owns the domain is older than Don Henley the musician?
UUNET was bought by MFS in 1996, and MFS was bought by WorldCom in a year later. That makes them a wholly-owned subsidiary of WorldCom. PSI is still more or less independent, although they cut a deal for some of IXC's fiber in exchange for a 20% stake.
Both providers have reseller programs, but AFAIK neither rents space in their PoPs to other ISPs.
'Nuff said.
Whatever the case, though, Allman and his friends at Sendmail, Inc. are doing exactly what companies who use the open source model should be doing: they're adding some real value, not just repackaging it. Besides, after all the hard work he's done on Sendmail, I'd say he deserves to make a buck on it.
...
This looks like a general patent on client-server computing. Considering that this patent is dated April 2, 1997 (Granted July 13, 1999), Isn't there a lot of prior art?
It looks more like a more specific patent on a system to allow an application being run on one system to be seen and operated by one or more remote systems. There's a ton of prior art on that.
From 1988 to 1990, I did university research that led to software the does just this. The first system replicated full-screen dumb terminal sessions. The second, called XTV , did it for any X11 application. We published the following paper on it:
XTV: A Framework for Sharing X Window Clients in Remote Synchronous Collaboration
Proceedings of IEEE TriComm '91, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pp. 159-167, April 1991.
Similar projects had previously been done elsewhere, but ours was the first that didn't require a special X server or client libraries.
I'm not sure how NCR thinks Netscape infringed on this patent, but I'm sure some judge will get to hear their lawyer's explanation. This ought to be interesting.
Computer Science departments, where a bunch of the industry's good minds come from, are a different story. Computing isn't just the means, it's also the end. There are far too many people at far too many universities doing far too much research that requires the use of operating system sources. (And by that I mean kernel source, not the sources for ls and grep.) Any CS department worth its salt will have at least one project like this going on at a time, and you can bet your bits they won't agree to using something for which there's no source license available.
When I was in college (mid-to-late '80s), we had source licenses for 4.{1,2,3}BSD for our VAXen and Suns and SVR3 for our AT&T 3Bx machines. I can think of a half-dozen or so research projects that went on during my four-year stay that were directly OS-related. One in particular involved attaching multiple Ethernet interfaces to a host and bonding them into one big, fast interface. Today that's no big deal -- I can slap a Quad Fast Ethernet card in a Sun, load up the software and (thoretically) get a 400 Mbit/sec hose for my trouble. But this was over a decade ago, when your choices for Ethernet were "thick" or "thin," there were still less than 10,000 hosts on the Internet and the sophisticated routing protocols that would do effective load balancing over multiple links were still a few years away. It was damned cool stuff for 1987.
The fact is that operating systems are excellent proving grounds for things in a number of CS research areas. It's very convenient to take a functioning system and transplant or graft a piece that proves a new concept. The Ethernet project I mentioned above and many others like it would never have made it off the ground had the researchers been required to develop enough software from scratch to make the thing run.
I have my own theory about why you'll never see Microsoft completely take over any decent CS department. Based on the bloat and overall quality of its past and current product lines, I envision the sources to be large, generally ugly, difficult to work with and even harder to compile without sacrificing a couple of small farm animals. Just for the sake of argument, let's say that Bill Gates is replaced by an alien who decrees that from now on the sources for Windows will be licensed just like the sources of BSD were -- free to academic institutions. Three things will happen:
My 2000 millicents' worth...
Where ever did you get the silly idea that NSI was a large company?
Naah. It's been done. I'm a longtime stockholder of heyidiot.com and have become a very wealthy man.