I think the threat here is not to people who work on open source projects on a volunteer basis (Linus, Alan Cox,...), but to people who make a living by applying open source software to solve problems for their clients. Say someone who outfits a doctor's office with hardware and software, and sets up everything in linux.
I do think when you accept money from someone to solve a problem for them, and you do a poor job of it, you should be liable to some degree. Say in the above example, you leave obvious holes that allow a hacker to get into the doctor's system and destroy his records.
What I worry about, however, is that bugs will be counted and not weighed. There is no such thing as a completely debugged system.
In the above example, we might consider that the contractor should set up a comprehensive backup procedure, train the doctor in it, and impress upon the doctor how important it is to follow this procedure. If the doctor drops the ball, and is hacked with no backup to recover from, then the contractor should not be liable for the doctor's lack of following the backup procedure.
I guess what I am saying is that the inherent bugginess of software should be taken into account by contractors and the risks mitigated by means such as backup procedures. What we really need is a greater understanding of the risks of software and more realistic expectations all around than we need people pretending that it is possible to produce bug free software.
My reading of Vinge's essay on the singularity and his book "Marooned in Realtime" was that he considered Intelligence Amplification (IA) a much more likely route to the post-human era than Aritficial Intelligence (AI).
I couldn't agree more. AI requires that we get to the bottom of how intelligence works then do a better job of it than evolution did. Not bloody likely any time soon. IA only requires that we stumble upon enough of the working principles of our brains to enhance them with machines/computers. FAR more likely. We have had some very interesting experiments in recent years decoding the signals a cat's eye sends to its brain, and interfacing neural networks with a lobster's nervous system to control the parts that move food particles along, just to name two.
What progress has been made in AI that can compare with that?
Back in July, I wrote a 3 paragraph SAMBA HOW-TO over on www.rootprompt.org here, shortly after being appalled at the quality of yet another article supposed to show you how to get started with SAMBA.
By the end of it, you can actually do something (gasp!) useful in some circumstances.
Here's the text
Samba how-to articles start off with how to write a configuration file so that your linux box can
export a disk or print share that could be read by a windows client on the same network. I think this is a big
mistake. The first thing you should show someone is the simplest possible command that acutaly makes
something interesting happen. The time to explain the smb.conf file is when the next most interesting,
complex experiment requires it, not before. There are a few very interesting and useful commands you can
type that don't require that smb.conf even exists, let alone that the smbd and nmbd deamons are running.
Without further adieu, here is the simplest command:
smbclient -L server1 -U user%pass
If you type this command into a bash prompt on a linux box, it will attempt to contact the machine with
netbios name 'server1' on your network and get a list of all the disk and print shares it is exporting to the
windows network neighborhood. It will do so using the username 'user' and password 'pass'. If you, as I do,
run linux on your office workstation on a lan with a bunch of machines running windows, this is the first
thing you would want to do.
The next most interesting command looks like this:
smbclient//server1/share1 -U user%pass
This will attempt to connect you to the remote disk or print share 'share1' on the machine with netbios
name 'server1'. If successful, you will be sitting at a command prompt at which you can use commands like
cd, ls, get, and put, mkdir, rmdir, rm,..., provided, of course, the username and password you used allow you
such access to the remote share. If '//server/share1' is a print share, the command 'print file1' will send the
local file 'file1' to the printer. If the printer is a postscript printer, you are in luck as most linux software
prints to postscript files by default. If it is an ink jet printer, then you will need to use ghostscript to
convert the postscript file to a file of the printer's format first, then send that file with smbclient.
Isn't the main thing that lets Microsoft "continue to exist" the fact that people keep buying their products? What more proof do you want that they are a "benefit" to "the people."
O.K. Suppose MS succeeds in monitoring licenses over the internet and moving to a subscription model. Now suppose you are a soccer mom with a new PC that with WinXP pre-installed and you install debian for windows later for whatever reason. Then suppose you grow to like the debian stuff and rely on it.
Now suppose the XP license expires after a year and your computer refuses to let you run anything until you pay a renewal fee. Now suppose your nephew, a linux savvy high school age kid, offers to blow away win XP, install debian linux, and restore your files and debian environment.
Now do you see the logic in this? It is putting constraints on what MS can do with its nefarious licensing plans.
So why promote those freedoms (freedom to use, share, and modify)?
Because it would lead to a world filled with high performance, low cost software, right?
Those freedoms are the right choice because, and only because, they would lead to such a world. So, therefore, they are not the bottom line, but a subtotal on the way, if you will.
I thought the idea was to do something FOR computer users better than propriatery software, not to tear down peopriatery software.
The idea is not to reduce the size of Bill Gate's bank account, but to increase the ability of the great mass of computer users to effectively use software.
If you could hurt Bill Gates at the expense of hurting the average computer user in the process, would you?
He gives an interesting definition of success. He says that if, years down the road, GNOME is widely used, but is used in conjunction with proprietary tools, then it will have only been partly successful. If, on the other hand, it is obselete and forgotten, but users largely are using free software then it will have been successful.
I must admit this is a clever way of looking at it. However, how would he compare these two worlds:
A) propreitary software rules, but it is well within the budget of the average peasant. Hardware is cheap and powerful.
B) free software rules, but hardware is expensive and not as powerful as A.
I'm guessing Stallman would rather live in B than A, which is where he looses his sanity.
The whole point, or bottom line, of freedom is that it works. Free soceities are rich, effective soceities. Libertarians sometimes forget this, thinking that freedom is the bottom line. It isn't, material welfare is.
The same goes for software. Free software is better than propreitary software (as we know those terms today) because it allows more people to partake of greater computing power.
To the extent that propreitary software mutates so as to serve this purpose as well as or better than free software, it looses its "badness" as we should embrace it.
I can't imagine what such a mutation might be, mind you, and until I see such a thing, free software is that way to go.
A fanatic is one who, forgetting his purpose, redoubles his effort.
There were several movies made in the late 80's and early 90's (From Beyond, Reanimator,...) from H.P. Lovecraft's work. "From Beyond" in particular was excellent.
Have you ever thought about working on/in one?
I seem to recall a very funny scene in the Army of Darkness with the Necronomicon, which Neal Stephenson referred to as the inspiration for his naming of his book the "Cryptonomicon". Neal didn't even realize at the time that the Army of Darkness was paying homage to Lovecraft.
My delegate in Virginia knocked on my door one evening and asked me if I had any concerns I would care to share with her. She caught me completely off guard and I wound up saying,"Uh, to be honest, I don't follow state level politics much." She gave me a flyer with her cell phone number and email and said that if I thought of anything, I should feel free to contact her.
I sent her the following email a few weeks later. I haven't heard back.
Ms. Devolites:
You knocked on my door a few weeks ago and met me and
my daughter Melody. I also ran into you at the Oakton
Elementary back to school night yesterday.
When we met at my door, you had asked me what issues I
was concerned about and caught me completely
off-guard. I told you at the time that, in all
honesty, I didn't pay attention to the state
government much.
I have since been thinking about what I should have
asked you about, and what I might have to say about
issues dealt with by the house of delegates that you
might find useful.
I would love to see politicians at all levels carry on
more of a dialog with their constitutents through the
internet, which I think is a greatly underutilised
medium for doing just that.
I visited your campaign website and see that it is
under construction. I have two suggestions for what
you should up there.
The first one is some sort of an on-going log of what
you think the important issues are and what your take
on them is, in some detail. A diary of sorts in which
you give us your take on the issues of the day. Even
if you only wrote a paragraph or so per week, it would
be a vast improvement over what most politicians do to
keep their constitutents informed.
The second one is a forum in which constitutents can
post messages and discuss issues with you and each
other.
I can understand why most politicians haven't done
this. Having an open-ended, detailed discussion via
the web with your constitutents opens you up to much
more criticism than the monthly paragraph or so of one
sided discussion that presently occurs through the
newspapers and broadcast media. On the other hand, it
also opens you up to much more praise and recognition
by your constituents, and would allow you to get to
know your constitutent's concerns to a degree
unprecedented in the past. I think a perfect example
of this is the success Jesse Ventura has had doing
this very thing.
I don't hold out much hope that you will take me up on
my suggestions; I appreciate the risk it would
represent. It completely changes the old, comfortable
rules of how to deal with the media. However, getting
re-elected is never a sure thing and mastering the new
rules could be a powerful way of getting your message
out, if you truly believe that your ideas are a better
match to your constitutents than your opponents.
Good luck in your campaign. It was a pleasure to meet
you and I wish you well.
Damn, I wish I'd seen the original request for questions.
I have been studying up on the R language lately, an open source version of S, the statistical language of John Chambers, and I've noticed that R and python are awfully similar in their basic, and novel, language concepts. The R homepage is at
http://www.gnu.org/software/r/R.html
The omegahat project, at www.omegahat.org, has developed interfaces between R and python, as well as packges to interface between R and Perl, and R and Java.
Anyway, I would have liked to hear Guido's thoughts on R or S and how they compare to python. The correspondence of concepts in the two languages in amazing to me, given how different their origins were.
Thanks for the link. I spent about 20 minutes on it.
I learned more about their operations, but I still can't answer my original question. Again, I just don't know finance-speak well enough.
I would like to know how their revenue stream breaks down and how much money they get for things like customizing/porting the GNU C compiler versus holding someone's hand through installing Red Hat versus remotely administering a small business's Red-Hat based office LAN.
Thanks for the link. I wasn't able to see any kind of breakdown of how they make their money from that link, though.
And I am not very good at deciphering finance speak.
This is the closest thing I could find using your link:
Red Hat solutions combine Red Hat Linux, developer and embedded technologies, training, management services, technical support. We deliver this open source innovation to our customers via an Internet platform called Red Hat Network.
It is interesting that Red Hat's revenues have grown to $100 million from $15 million before the IPO. There was little other information given in the interview, however, about where the bulk of Red Hat's revenue comes from.
The standard explanation has been that Red Hat sells service. It that mainly helping people install Red Hat on their computers for desktop use? Or more complex tech support issues?
It would be nice to see a breakdown on where most of their money is coming from.
Re:queing is implemented in X but...
on
Low-Bandwidth X
·
· Score: 1
Hah! I just looked at their docs (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/howitworks.htm l) and that is exactly how it works.
I quote:
The VNC protocol is a simple protocol for remote access to graphical user interfaces. It is based on theconcept of a remote framebuffer or RFB. In the past we have tended to refer to the VNC protocol as the RFB protocol, so you may have seen this term in other publications. The protocol simply allows a server to update the framebuffer displayed on a viewer. Because it works at the framebuffer level it is potentially applicable to all operating systems, windowing systems and applications. This includes X/Unix, Windows 3.1/95/NT and Macintosh, but might also include PDAs, and indeed any device with some form of communications link. The protocol will operate over any reliable transport such as TCP/IP.
This is truly a "thin-client" protocol: it has been designed to make very few requirements of the viewer. In this way, clients can run on the widest range of hardware, and the task of implementing a client is made as simple as possible.
also:
The display side of the protocol is based around a single graphics primitive: "put a rectangle of pixel data at a given x,y position". This might seem an inefficient way of drawing arbitrary user interface components. But because we have a variety of different encoding schemes for the pixel data, we can select the appropriate scheme for each rectangle we send, and make the most of network bandwidth, client drawing speed and server processing speed.
finally:
A sequence of these rectangles makes a framebuffer update (or simply update). An update represents a change from one valid framebuffer state to another, so in some ways is similar to a frame of video, but itis usually only a small area of the framebuffer that will be affected by a given update. Each rectangle may be encoded using a different scheme. The server can therefore choose the best encoding for the particular screen content being transmitted and the network bandwidth available. The update protocol is demand-driven by the client. That is, an update is only sent by the server in response to an explicit request from the client. This gives the protocol an adaptive quality. The slower the client and the network are, the lower the rate of updates becomes. Each update incorporates all the changes to the 'screen' since the last client request. With a slow client and/or network, transient states of the framebuffer are ignored, resulting in reduced network traffic and less drawing for the client. This also improves the apparent response speed.
Re:queing is implemented in X but...
on
Low-Bandwidth X
·
· Score: 1
Well, one way to lower the back and forth would be to have a program that looked like an XServer to X applications that you ran on the remote PC, which, instead of displaying to a video card, displayed to a frame buffer in memory. Locally, you run a viewer program that connects to the special remote XServer and sends the contents of the frame buffer every so often.
If only the differences between frames are sent, as in video compression, and you have a really good compression algorithm to handle this, and you choose which frames to update wisely, then your performance for remote apps would be much higher in some important cases.
Say I want to run gnuplot on a data file with 10,000 data points in it. That can be a lot of back and forth between gnuplot and X. When the dust settles, however, and the plot is completed, it might not be a lot of compressed pixel info.
My impression, from having used VNC in exactly this scenarion over a 128kbps DSL line, is that this is exactly what VNC is doing with their 'hextile' compression scheme.
They have some way of determining when the screen is changing rapidly (not hard to imagine) and they don't send update info between the server and the viewer as often during such periods.
I haven't read their white-paper or technical docs to really know, but I can't imagine how else they could have brought up a complex gnuplot remotely as fast as I observed it unless it worked they way I just described. It was really amazing.
Publish entire vote on DVD-ROM after election
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I realize some effort would have to go into preventing anyone else from being able to look up your vote. You would need to know an id number that couldn't be tied to you by anyone else, but I think you couldn't beat this for preventing fraud.
You would also need a way for people who do the check and find out their vote was recorded incorrectly to be able to prove that their id number was their own if they wanted to calim their vote was stolen. If enough people claim their vote is stolen, that would constitute evidence that could kick off an investigation.
Even if you couldn't make this work for individual votes, if votes were tallied at the voting station level, people could at least make sure their write-ins and third party votes (which might only amount to 5 or 6 per voting station) did not go uncounted.
Great. Now professors/educators have expensive toys to fiddle with as one more excuse to avoid the hard work of organizing/teaching meaningful courses.
One of the more interesting statistics to come out of the debates and the post-debate discussion is that the wealthiest 1% of Americans account for 34% of the money raised by the income tax.
If you could raise or lower this fraction to any level you wanted to, what would that level be?
Is there any amount of taxing the rich that goes too far, or is all their wealth fair game?
What if popular websites like yahoo were to poll clients as they connect as to which operating system they were using? Then you would not only be counting multiple installations of linux from a single CD, but you would be counting the percentage of the time that people with dual boot systems use linux to surf. And you would see the numbers grow by the day.
I am not talking about an annoying pop-up box requiring user action, but an "operating system query" service that lives at some tcpip port. Such a feature would have to be written and integrated into the major distributions, of course, but would be very easy to do and the major vendors would probably be highly motivated to take such a step. Think about how an accurate count of linux installations could generate a lot of positive press. You could even have the response indicate which distribution you are using, which would motivate the distro vendors even more (the more popular ones anyway;-).
Another way to do it is to use the nmap (see www.insecure.org for details) port scanning tool's OS fingerprinting ability from the server side to tell what OS a client is running. It is hard to imagine yahoo going to the risk/trouble to do that, I admit, although the IDC or some other organization could try to scan portions of the internet using nmap to get sampling counts of the numbers of computers running linux vs windows.
Were you inspired to construct a data haven by Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon or did you arrive at the idea through some other route?
I have sometimes thought that Neal's true purpose in writing the book was to lay out the business and moral case for a data haven so that a royal family sitting on an island nation somewhere would read it and say,"That's what we need to do!"
Good old Katz, trying to define individualism without mentioning the word liberty, as in "individual liberty".
I like some of Katz's stuff, but I find his rant against corporatism very peculiar.
Mind you, I think corporatism is indeed what we have and I don't like it. I'm as anit corporatist as the next guy.
I can only conclude that deep down, he is a crypto-statist.
What is this stuff about people *deserving* a *humane* workplace, and how layoffs are "hard on people"? Layoffs are hard on people when the *economy sucks,* which only begs the question,"Why is it that, the last few years excepted, the economy generally sucks?" Pointing out that layoff are "hard on people" without making some sort of effort to answer the question as to why the economy tends to suck, is just another way of saying the government should pass a law that everyone should have a good job at a good wage.
Why doesn't he write a piece about raising the minimum wage, while he is at it?
Properly decrypted, that is probably exactly what he is doing.
I think the only way the compiler could know it was compiling a login program would be by the name of the program.
So if you suspected such a trojan, you could rename the login.c to myprogram.c, compile it, then rename the executable image to login and do a binary diff between that and the result of a straight compile.
If the compiler is recognizing the login program by some of its symbols (function names defined or called), you would just write a program to scramble the source code function and variable lables, compile, and then use another program to unscramble the symbols.
Ultimately, a compiler that tries to recognize the program it is compiling suffers from the fact that it can't read and understand the code it is compiling to determine what purpose it serves. It can only rely on symbol names which are easily permuted.
Perhaps such symbol permutation tools should be considered a routine part of a distribution's security measures when compiling packages from source?
Slashdot Mirror
the subject says it all.
I think the threat here is not to people who work on open source projects on a volunteer basis (Linus, Alan Cox, ...), but to people who make a living by applying open source software to solve problems for their clients. Say someone who outfits a doctor's office with hardware and software, and sets up everything in linux.
I do think when you accept money from someone to solve a problem for them, and you do a poor job of it, you should be liable to some degree. Say in the above example, you leave obvious holes that allow a hacker to get into the doctor's system and destroy his records.
What I worry about, however, is that bugs will be counted and not weighed. There is no such thing as a completely debugged system.
In the above example, we might consider that the contractor should set up a comprehensive backup procedure, train the doctor in it, and impress upon the doctor how important it is to follow this procedure. If the doctor drops the ball, and is hacked with no backup to recover from, then the contractor should not be liable for the doctor's lack of following the backup procedure.
I guess what I am saying is that the inherent bugginess of software should be taken into account by contractors and the risks mitigated by means such as backup procedures. What we really need is a greater understanding of the risks of software and more realistic expectations all around than we need people pretending that it is possible to produce bug free software.
My reading of Vinge's essay on the singularity and his book "Marooned in Realtime" was that he considered Intelligence Amplification (IA) a much more likely route to the post-human era than Aritficial Intelligence (AI).
I couldn't agree more. AI requires that we get to the bottom of how intelligence works then do a better job of it than evolution did. Not bloody likely any time soon. IA only requires that we stumble upon enough of the working principles of our brains to enhance them with machines/computers. FAR more likely. We have had some very interesting experiments in recent years decoding the signals a cat's eye sends to its brain, and interfacing neural networks with a lobster's nervous system to control the parts that move food particles along, just to name two.
What progress has been made in AI that can compare with that?
By the end of it, you can actually do something (gasp!) useful in some circumstances.
Here's the text
Um, why "the people" allow companies to exist?
Isn't the main thing that lets Microsoft "continue to exist" the fact that people keep buying their products? What more proof do you want that they are a "benefit" to "the people."
O.K. Suppose MS succeeds in monitoring licenses over the internet and moving to a subscription model. Now suppose you are a soccer mom with a new PC that with WinXP pre-installed and you install debian for windows later for whatever reason. Then suppose you grow to like the debian stuff and rely on it.
Now suppose the XP license expires after a year and your computer refuses to let you run anything until you pay a renewal fee. Now suppose your nephew, a linux savvy high school age kid, offers to blow away win XP, install debian linux, and restore your files and debian environment.
Now do you see the logic in this? It is putting constraints on what MS can do with its nefarious licensing plans.
So why promote those freedoms (freedom to use, share, and modify)?
Because it would lead to a world filled with high performance, low cost software, right?
Those freedoms are the right choice because, and only because, they would lead to such a world. So, therefore, they are not the bottom line, but a subtotal on the way, if you will.
Oooo! Good one.
That makes his denial of this obvious fact all the more interesting, does it not?
I thought the idea was to do something FOR computer users better than propriatery software, not to tear down peopriatery software.
The idea is not to reduce the size of Bill Gate's bank account, but to increase the ability of the great mass of computer users to effectively use software.
If you could hurt Bill Gates at the expense of hurting the average computer user in the process, would you?
He gives an interesting definition of success. He says that if, years down the road, GNOME is widely used, but is used in conjunction with proprietary tools, then it will have only been partly successful. If, on the other hand, it is obselete and forgotten, but users largely are using free software then it will have been successful.
I must admit this is a clever way of looking at it. However, how would he compare these two worlds:
A) propreitary software rules, but it is well within the budget of the average peasant. Hardware is cheap and powerful.
B) free software rules, but hardware is expensive and not as powerful as A.
I'm guessing Stallman would rather live in B than A, which is where he looses his sanity.
The whole point, or bottom line, of freedom is that it works. Free soceities are rich, effective soceities. Libertarians sometimes forget this, thinking that freedom is the bottom line. It isn't, material welfare is.
The same goes for software. Free software is better than propreitary software (as we know those terms today) because it allows more people to partake of greater computing power.
To the extent that propreitary software mutates so as to serve this purpose as well as or better than free software, it looses its "badness" as we should embrace it.
I can't imagine what such a mutation might be, mind you, and until I see such a thing, free software is that way to go.
A fanatic is one who, forgetting his purpose, redoubles his effort.
There were several movies made in the late 80's and early 90's (From Beyond, Reanimator, ...) from H.P. Lovecraft's work. "From Beyond" in particular was excellent.
Have you ever thought about working on/in one?
I seem to recall a very funny scene in the Army of Darkness with the Necronomicon, which Neal Stephenson referred to as the inspiration for his naming of his book the "Cryptonomicon". Neal didn't even realize at the time that the Army of Darkness was paying homage to Lovecraft.
My delegate in Virginia knocked on my door one evening and asked me if I had any concerns I would care to share with her. She caught me completely off guard and I wound up saying,"Uh, to be honest, I don't follow state level politics much." She gave me a flyer with her cell phone number and email and said that if I thought of anything, I should feel free to contact her.
I sent her the following email a few weeks later. I haven't heard back.
Ms. Devolites:
You knocked on my door a few weeks ago and met me and
my daughter Melody. I also ran into you at the Oakton
Elementary back to school night yesterday.
When we met at my door, you had asked me what issues I
was concerned about and caught me completely
off-guard. I told you at the time that, in all
honesty, I didn't pay attention to the state
government much.
I have since been thinking about what I should have
asked you about, and what I might have to say about
issues dealt with by the house of delegates that you
might find useful.
I would love to see politicians at all levels carry on
more of a dialog with their constitutents through the
internet, which I think is a greatly underutilised
medium for doing just that.
I visited your campaign website and see that it is
under construction. I have two suggestions for what
you should up there.
The first one is some sort of an on-going log of what
you think the important issues are and what your take
on them is, in some detail. A diary of sorts in which
you give us your take on the issues of the day. Even
if you only wrote a paragraph or so per week, it would
be a vast improvement over what most politicians do to
keep their constitutents informed.
The second one is a forum in which constitutents can
post messages and discuss issues with you and each
other.
I can understand why most politicians haven't done
this. Having an open-ended, detailed discussion via
the web with your constitutents opens you up to much
more criticism than the monthly paragraph or so of one
sided discussion that presently occurs through the
newspapers and broadcast media. On the other hand, it
also opens you up to much more praise and recognition
by your constituents, and would allow you to get to
know your constitutent's concerns to a degree
unprecedented in the past. I think a perfect example
of this is the success Jesse Ventura has had doing
this very thing.
I don't hold out much hope that you will take me up on
my suggestions; I appreciate the risk it would
represent. It completely changes the old, comfortable
rules of how to deal with the media. However, getting
re-elected is never a sure thing and mastering the new
rules could be a powerful way of getting your message
out, if you truly believe that your ideas are a better
match to your constitutents than your opponents.
Good luck in your campaign. It was a pleasure to meet
you and I wish you well.
Damn, I wish I'd seen the original request for questions.
I have been studying up on the R language lately, an open source version of S, the statistical language of John Chambers, and I've noticed that R and python are awfully similar in their basic, and novel, language concepts. The R homepage is at
http://www.gnu.org/software/r/R.html
The omegahat project, at www.omegahat.org, has developed interfaces between R and python, as well as packges to interface between R and Perl, and R and Java.
Anyway, I would have liked to hear Guido's thoughts on R or S and how they compare to python. The correspondence of concepts in the two languages in amazing to me, given how different their origins were.
Thanks for the link. I spent about 20 minutes on it.
I learned more about their operations, but I still can't answer my original question. Again, I just don't know finance-speak well enough.
I would like to know how their revenue stream breaks down and how much money they get for things like customizing/porting the GNU C compiler versus holding someone's hand through installing Red Hat versus remotely administering a small business's Red-Hat based office LAN.
And I am not very good at deciphering finance speak.
This is the closest thing I could find using your link:
Hardly very illuminating.It is interesting that Red Hat's revenues have grown to $100 million from $15 million before the IPO. There was little other information given in the interview, however, about where the bulk of Red Hat's revenue comes from.
The standard explanation has been that Red Hat sells service. It that mainly helping people install Red Hat on their computers for desktop use? Or more complex tech support issues?
It would be nice to see a breakdown on where most of their money is coming from.
I quote:
also:
finally:
Well, one way to lower the back and forth would be to have a program that looked like an XServer to X applications that you ran on the remote PC, which, instead of displaying to a video card, displayed to a frame buffer in memory. Locally, you run a viewer program that connects to the special remote XServer and sends the contents of the frame buffer every so often.
If only the differences between frames are sent, as in video compression, and you have a really good compression algorithm to handle this, and you choose which frames to update wisely, then your performance for remote apps would be much higher in some important cases.
Say I want to run gnuplot on a data file with 10,000 data points in it. That can be a lot of back and forth between gnuplot and X. When the dust settles, however, and the plot is completed, it might not be a lot of compressed pixel info.
My impression, from having used VNC in exactly this scenarion over a 128kbps DSL line, is that this is exactly what VNC is doing with their 'hextile' compression scheme.
They have some way of determining when the screen is changing rapidly (not hard to imagine) and they don't send update info between the server and the viewer as often during such periods.
I haven't read their white-paper or technical docs to really know, but I can't imagine how else they could have brought up a complex gnuplot remotely as fast as I observed it unless it worked they way I just described. It was really amazing.
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I realize some effort would have to go into preventing anyone else from being able to look up your vote. You would need to know an id number that couldn't be tied to you by anyone else, but I think you couldn't beat this for preventing fraud.
You would also need a way for people who do the check and find out their vote was recorded incorrectly to be able to prove that their id number was their own if they wanted to calim their vote was stolen. If enough people claim their vote is stolen, that would constitute evidence that could kick off an investigation.
Even if you couldn't make this work for individual votes, if votes were tallied at the voting station level, people could at least make sure their write-ins and third party votes (which might only amount to 5 or 6 per voting station) did not go uncounted.
Great. Now professors/educators have expensive toys to fiddle with as one more excuse to avoid the hard work of organizing/teaching meaningful courses.
One of the more interesting statistics to come out of the debates and the post-debate discussion is that the wealthiest 1% of Americans account for 34% of the money raised by the income tax.
If you could raise or lower this fraction to any level you wanted to, what would that level be?
Is there any amount of taxing the rich that goes too far, or is all their wealth fair game?
What if popular websites like yahoo were to poll clients as they connect as to which operating system they were using? Then you would not only be counting multiple installations of linux from a single CD, but you would be counting the percentage of the time that people with dual boot systems use linux to surf. And you would see the numbers grow by the day.
;-).
I am not talking about an annoying pop-up box requiring user action, but an "operating system query" service that lives at some tcpip port. Such a feature would have to be written and integrated into the major distributions, of course, but would be very easy to do and the major vendors would probably be highly motivated to take such a step. Think about how an accurate count of linux installations could generate a lot of positive press. You could even have the response indicate which distribution you are using, which would motivate the distro vendors even more (the more popular ones anyway
Another way to do it is to use the nmap (see www.insecure.org for details) port scanning tool's OS fingerprinting ability from the server side to tell what OS a client is running. It is hard to imagine yahoo going to the risk/trouble to do that, I admit, although the IDC or some other organization could try to scan portions of the internet using nmap to get sampling counts of the numbers of computers running linux vs windows.
Were you inspired to construct a data haven by Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon or did you arrive at the idea through some other route?
I have sometimes thought that Neal's true purpose in writing the book was to lay out the business and moral case for a data haven so that a royal family sitting on an island nation somewhere would read it and say,"That's what we need to do!"
Good old Katz, trying to define individualism without mentioning the word liberty, as in "individual liberty".
I like some of Katz's stuff, but I find his rant against corporatism very peculiar.
Mind you, I think corporatism is indeed what we have and I don't like it. I'm as anit corporatist as the next guy.
I can only conclude that deep down, he is a crypto-statist.
What is this stuff about people *deserving* a *humane* workplace, and how layoffs are "hard on people"? Layoffs are hard on people when the *economy sucks,* which only begs the question,"Why is it that, the last few years excepted, the economy generally sucks?" Pointing out that layoff are "hard on people" without making some sort of effort to answer the question as to why the economy tends to suck, is just another way of saying the government should pass a law that everyone should have a good job at a good wage.
Why doesn't he write a piece about raising the minimum wage, while he is at it?
Properly decrypted, that is probably exactly what he is doing.
Chris Marshall
I think the only way the compiler could know it was compiling a login program would be by the name of the program.
So if you suspected such a trojan, you could rename the login.c to myprogram.c, compile it, then rename the executable image to login and do a binary diff between that and the result of a straight compile.
If the compiler is recognizing the login program by some of its symbols (function names defined or called), you would just write a program to scramble the source code function and variable lables, compile, and then use another program to unscramble the symbols.
Ultimately, a compiler that tries to recognize the program it is compiling suffers from the fact that it can't read and understand the code it is compiling to determine what purpose it serves. It can only rely on symbol names which are easily permuted.
Perhaps such symbol permutation tools should be considered a routine part of a distribution's security measures when compiling packages from source?