The only reason we even talk about the GPL today is because a man by the name of Linus Torvalds made the decision to release Linux under that license. If he had not, GNU would be irrelevant. Without that kernel there would be no OS, there would be no distribution that was nearly entirely based off of GNU pieces. Without that kernel no further work would have proceeded on GNU projects. Without the popularity given to GNU from that kernel, RMS would now be a small footnote on a web page somewhere.
Most likely, the HURD would have been ready in 1994 or 1995; a lot of people who worked on Linux in the early 1990s would have worked on the HURD instead.
Minor pedantic point: His second last name is Núñez, not Nuñez.
More important point: I am glad he wrote the letter; I can now explain to all my friends in México why Linux is important by having them read the original Spanish version of his letter.
sorry about the second posting; I just learned that Slashdot's posting code doesn't like &s
Before I discovered the internet and the software libre there, computing was plain simply not interesting to me. I felt that software had become corporate, and that all software was only coming out of large corporations. It was a world of computing where indivual programmers could not make any kind of meaningful contribution. Computers were essentially fancy typewriters. This is the end result of a world using entirely proprietary software.
If RMS had not started the GNU project in the 1980s, that is how things may have stayed. It was getting on the interent, and seeing that there was a large corpus of software out there for which the source code was available which made computing interesting for me again.
I can tell you this much: Linux would not have been possible in 1991 if RMS had not laid the foundation for GNU/Linux in the 1980s. Maybe BSD would have taken Linux's place; however BSD may not have bothered fighting AT&T for the rights to their source code if RMS vision for software libre did not exist at that time.
Without RMS, Linux would be at least five years behind where it is now. Remember that before flaming him.
The change from libre software to proprietary software in the 1970s started slowly; when RMS sees Linux becoming proprietary in little ways, I can see why he is concerned.
Before I discovered the internet and the software libre there, computing was plain simply not interesting to me. I felt that software had become corporate, and that all software was only coming out of large corporations. It was a world of computing where indivual programmers could not make any kind of meaningful contribution. Computers were essentially fancy typewriters. This is the end result of a world using entirely proprietary software.
If RMS had not started the GNU project in the 1980s, that is how things may have stayed. It was getting on the interent, and seeing that there was a large corpus of software out there for which the source code was available which made computing interesting for me again.
I can tell you this much: Linux would not have been possible in 1991 if RMS had not laid the foundation for GNU/Linux in the 1980s. Maybe BSD would have taken Linux's place; however BSD may not have bothered fighting AT when RMS sees Linux becoming proprietary in little ways, I can see why he is concerned.
Could you please help me get MaraDNS to be as stable on Solaris as it is on Linux then?
As an aside, why is it that Solaris advocates have this big need to hide their identities? Most Linux advocates here have a link to their home page so I can actually get a chance to know the person I am debating. What is it that Solaris people have to hide?
OK, you want a Solaris-vs-Linux pissing contest. Fine. All I ask is that you put your money where your mouth is.
Download my DNS server, MaraDNS. Compile and run it on Solaris. Fins the problems that MaraDNS has on Solaris and fix them. I have ported or seen my application ported to various OSes, including FreeBSD (it's in their ports tree), MacOS/X, and Windows (with cygwin). The only port that was less than trivial was the Solaris port.
It took me about a day to get it to compile; then it wouldn't run at all. Running truss revealed that any network application needs/dev/udp and/dev/tcp in the chroot() environment; any multithreaded application needs/dev/zero in the chroot() jail. Things no other OS I ported MaraDNS to needed.
Even after getting it to run, it would crash when doing even a very simple strees test that the Linux (and MacOS, and FreeBSD, and Windows) version can run without problem.
This was on Solaris 7 (x86).
If you want to impress me with how great Solaris is, I would deeply appreciate any help you could provide making this application as stable on Solaris as it is on all of the free *NIXes.
Then, and only then, would I feel that Solaris was a useable OS with a helpful community; right now I see Solaris as a buggy OS with an arrogant community that I don't want to be around.
Thanks for the reply; the reason why I go to the trouble of looking people up (looking at their web page, etc.) when a see a flame war starting is because it is important for me to remember that I am engaging in a flame war with a person. While it is not the same of having a discussion with someone face to face, making the effort to know the person makes the discussion in question a lot more real.
I was under the impression that you were a winvocate [1]; possibly a Sun employee who still feels that Windows is what belongs on the desktop. Glad to see that I was wrong.
- Sam
[1] A "winvocate" is a Windows user who tries out Linux, decides it is too hard to learn how to use, and then goes to Linux discussion boards to flame Linux.
Linux is far less relevant than you desire it to be.
I think Linux is far more relevent than you desire it to be.
Obviously, this is a discussion of how you feel about Linux compared to how I feel. I agree: Linux is not perfect (my current Linux annoyance: poor Unicode support).
Since you are who has use Unix nonstop for four years, I am at a loss to understand why you feel doing things on Unix is "the hard way" compared to doing things on Windows. Certain specialized tasks, such as doing taxes (which is best done with proprietary software), yes, Windows is easier. However, while the Unix way is hard to learn, it is extremely powerful and flexible once learned. I personally think you spent too much time playing Netrek and not enough time learning sh/awk/perl/etc. In which case, yeah, Windows would be easier.
Now, Steve, I would be the first person to tell you that the Slashdot Linux "advocates" are little more than pathetic whiners; I do not think that they contribute anything productive to Linux. It would be good for the Linux community if those users became Amish and never popped up on the internet again.
You are obviously a talented programmer, and could make great contributions to libre software. Since you enjoy porting software from *nix to Windows, you may enjoy making a Windows port of Gnumeric. The people who have done the Win32 port of the GIMP (and GTK) have already done a lot of the hard work. Another way you could help is by helping the AbiWord devlopers make Win32 builds of AbiWord; they do not always have someone who can do it right away after a new AbiWord source tarball is released; and there are issues the Win32 version of AbiWord has which the Linux version doesn't have
I think these would do a lot more to help free software than sitting around on Slashdot trying to convince a bunch of lusers who think they are elite because they can install Linux the folly of their ways. They won't be convinced anyway, they are just itching to get in a flame war.
In principle, I agree with you. As a practical matter, I understand why companies are loath to do that; binary Linux drivers is only the first small step in the right direction.
But not on the desktop; you have a consistant pattern of posting articles complaining about things you do not like about the current state of affairs on the Linux desktop.
As for your previous complaints: If you don't like a desktop with both KDE and GNOME applications, start coding applications in KDE which GNOME has and KDE doesn't, or vice versa. Oh, I forgot, this io Slashdot, home to people who love to whine and are too pathetic to actually do anything to help things.
to think that a video *chipset* manufacturer even sees laptop returns due to Linux is absurd
You're speculating. I'm speculating. The fact of the matter is this: At one point, NeoMagic was the be all and end all of laptop video chipsets; within two years, NeoMagic completely left the Laptop chipset marketplace. I am sure a number of factors contributed to this; I am also sure that the lack of Linux support (until it was too late) was one of them.
it hasn't got clout like you try to attribute to it
It has enough clout that all major video chipsets have Linux support; either through having open specs so that libre software developers can develop drivers for them; or through binary-only drivers developed by the chipset maker for Linux.
It is good to see that, when a major new video card comes out, Linux support for the card is a given. Just four years ago, the prominent manufactor of video chips for Laptops, Neomagic, had a veryhostile policy towards Linux users, which results in problems to this day.
Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux. In fact, NeoMagic's support web page srill prominently discusses Linux drivers.
Not so long ago open source types were busy condemning Netscape to hell until they released NS for linux.
I am a bit confused by this. Netscape has always been available for Linux. I can find evidence
of Netscpae being available for linux in early 1995 (when people were still using things like "term" and TIA to get a TCP/IP connection to the internet), not too long after Netscape itself was released.
It is interesting how different computer programs reflect the thinking and attitudes of various people. DNS, and how it is implemented, reflects the needs of bureaucrats using bureaucracy to minimize the amount of work they have to do, while maximizing the amount of power they perceive to have.
There are a lot of things in the DNS protocol that are downright ugly, such as the useless idea of "zones", the allowing of NS referrals without glue records, and the CNAME record. These only make sense when we look at the needs of those that designed DNS. The protocol is designed to make it as difficult as possible to manage DNS records (so that the bureaucrats can feel cozy that they know how to manage zones better than the average system administrator). The fact that MX and NS records point to names instead of IPs reflects the fact that the average DNS bureaucrat was too lazy to run their zone files through a sed script when making changes. The fact that out-of-bailiwick NS records (records without glue) is allowed reflects both the average DNS bureaucrat is too lazy to supply the IP for an out-of-bailiwick record, and that a DNS bureaucrat likes having well defined boundaries of authoritity.
The top down hierarchical structure of DNS also reflects the fact that the bureaucrat likes well-defined authority. The discomfort BIND developers with alternate root servers reflects the bureaucrat's desperate need to cling on to the power that they perceive having.
It comes to no surprise to me that ICANN does not want things like democratic elections; their job is to do things as slowly as possible (doing things any faster would actually take work) while getting as much control and sucking as much money out of the system as possible.
Now, at this point, all I am doing is defining the problem; I do have some ideas bouncing around my head as to what a solution should be; however those ideas still use the top-down hierarchical structure that DNS has. It would be better if there was a way to have the DNS resolution structure be based on rough consensus instead of via a top-down structure; perhaps something that allows indivual DNS servers to send "votes" on who should control a given top-level-domain; if a given set of servers for a given top-level domain get enough "votes", they control the TLD in question.
Then again, a community-controlled system needs protections to not become the diastar that IRC has become; where 14-year old kids struggle to control the channel so they can be a jerk by kicking and banning people at random.
Not to mention that having the Mac become a dominant player in the market would not be a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination.
Actually, if the Mac won in the 1980s, instead of the PC, we would be a lot worse off today. PC hardware was an open specification; the equivalent Macintoshes cost a lot more money. I don't find the idea of $10,000 desktop computers very appealing; a possible reality today if the Mac had won.
In addition, Linux support for the Macintosh came much later than Linux support for the PC, mainly because the low-level hardware specifications for the Macs were a well guarded secret for a long time. I do not think it is too much of a stretch that Linux would not have happened if the Macintosh had won.
Microsoft is an important step in the right direction compared to how things could have been. The hardware specifications are open; it is only the software that is closed and proprietary.
Linux, of course, is the next step: Keep both the hardware and the operating system open. I really wish the technology which became the open software standard was a little more cutting edge than 30-year-old UNIX; but it is far better than not having any open software standard at all.
I am pretty sure that this [cybercafe access to the internet] must be the case in most developing economies
Confirmed: When I was in México, it was the same deal. Computers rare at home (people still buy and use typewriters there); an internet cyber cafe on just about every street corner.
I know India has about a dozen different alphabets; this is just one reason I strongly advocate the internet infastructure to handle people using non-roman typefaces.
My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet with regard to support for internationalized characters in domain names. The problem is this: Domain names traditionally only had English language letters [A-Za-z] and the '-' symbol as part of domain names. (The '.' character signifies a delimiter in domain name labels; it isn't there in the DNS packet sent over the wire.)
The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.
Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.
International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.
The reason yahoo is on spam lists isn't unknown--it's obvious. Insane amounts of spam comes from yahoo addresses and has no signs of slowing. The obvious solution for you is get an address from a more responsible provider.
Because of the way SMTP works, this is not the case at all. Here is how it works: When a SMTP connection is made to send an email, the person sending the email can put any old email address as the return address. In addition, many ISP have set up spam filters which require the return address of a piece of mail to come from a domain that resolves. This encourages spammers to put in a forged return address, such as name@yahoo.com.
The other advantage of name@yahoo.com style email addresses is that the email address is more likely to look legitimate to many users of the internet.
However, these emails are not coming from yahoo.com; usually the Yahoo address in question points to a Yahoo address that does not exist. What the spammers do is this:
Send a forged email which has a false yahoo.com return address.
Find an open relay somewhere on the internet to spew the email in question.
Send off the email to zillions of netizens.
Laugh as Yahoo instead of the spammer responsible for the spam gets the majority of the complaints.
As a matter of fact, Yahoo has a system which stops people from automatically getting new Yahoo email addresses.
Now, as it turns out, SpamAssassin is smart enough to see whether a return email address with yahoo.com in it is forged; one needs to look at the "received:" headers to determine where the email really came from.
In conclusion: Yahoo is not in any way, shape, or form responsible for spam which has a yahoo.com return address on it; perhaps spammers should start spewing out large quantities of email with your domain as the return address on it so you know what it is like to be falsely accused of being a spam haven.
Now, if only DNS had an "outgoing MX exchange" record which made this kind of filtering easier.
This is not the first time that the people running a free ISP have, well, less than perfect morals. I know that one of the first free ISPs, back when free ISPs existed on the premise of "Pay us $60 once; have this ad banner up all the time, and get free internet for life", wan run by dishonest people.
While this ISP was not as much of a sham as the ISP the articule links to, they had an executive with access to the company's purse strings. This person outright stole money from the company's bank account for personal use; we are talking about millions of dollars here. Finally, when the company went bankrupt one or two years later, this crook fled the country, and, as far as I know, is living in the Carribian.
Similar to how Enron did things; get a lot of investment money; start a company, hire employees and pay off congressmen to give the company an air of legitimacy; then take as much money from the company bank account as one can get away with. Do this until the company dies and the executives are living in the bahamas.
That, oh honorable one, is why there be dragons for thee. Thou can be protected from the inniquity of pop-ups by placing this dragon to guardeth thy computer.
(0.9.8 has all sort of Javascript options; can you say "goodbye popups"?)
I'd like to thank everyone that wrote follow-ups to my posting; I have learned a lot of useful information.
One of these days I will make my application use capset(); considering that Linux is now the leading UNIX out there, I think other unices will end up copying this functionality. I knew that Linux had become the king of the hill when SUN decided to wholeheartably embrace Linux; SUN has always been the last to embrace a given technology.
One of the most common security problems is buffer overflows; the way I worked around this was to write a special string library where the strings had meta data; including the maxiumum length a given string could have.
One of the problems with secure programming is the inertia in the computer industry; most of the operating systems in widespread use today (The *nix clones and DOS derivitives, these days) we developed in a time when security did not matter; *nix has a crude root-or-not security model and MS-DOS has no conception of security at all.
Personally, I think the solution is a model which has a real security model, such as EROS. The "audit the code so that it is perfect code without bugs" approach to security does not always work, even with OpenBSD.
You will need a lot of a priori knowledge to edit the file. You must know all the relevant primitives.
No, the configuration program itself does not need to know anything about the data each program uses. Just as web browsers do not understand the significance of data in form fields, our configuration program will not need to know anything about the actual significance of data in the configuration file.
How on earth will you lay out the filesystem for this?
Simple. Have a directory,/etc/conf/meta, and put all configuration data there. In fact, we don't even need a meta configuration file if each file in this directory has a summary field, we just go through/etc/conf/meta by hand and load up all the summary fields.
You also destroy backwards compatability
First of all, this is not true; programs can accept files from both legacy formats and from the new XML format in the transition period, or we can write programs which read in the legacy file using the legacy parser and output the same data in XML format.
That said, expressions like this ("You also destroy backwards compatibility") are expression I have heard over and over again, especially in the world of UNIX users.
This is a sentiment which I have seen time and time again, and a sentiment that makes Microsoft (or whoever else belives in proprietary OSes) thrive in the server space.
I have seen this same sentiment with people who complain that Red Hat is horrible because they use xinetd, which, heaven forbid, uses a different file format than/etc/inetd.conf.
This is the same sentiment that the people who make the DNS standards have, dragging their feet and not accepting any DNS extension which has non-ascii characters, forcing Yahoo! to have the host name "espanol.greetings.yahoo.com" instead of "español.greetings.yahoo.com". (Se puede decir que estas personas necesitan un nuevo ano porque ellas no pueden aceptar que esto es un nuevo año).
This is the same argument used by people who do not like CML2 (ESR's proposed kernel configuration utility) because it uses Python; they want everything to be done with shell scripts and the C programming language, and can not see the limitations that those languages have.
This is the same sentiment that makes it so I have to go a step backwards in terms of technological advancment to email UNIX-using people than mailing my friends, since many UNIX-using people are still using mail systems from the early 90s before HTML mail existed.
It is this fear of change which holds back
free software, or, if you prefer, software libre. The computing industry, more than any other industry, is an industry that is undergoing constant change. Anyone who can not see this is going to be left behind.
And judging by the number of failed/failing open source companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?
Let's pretend we are in 1983. Someone may write the following:
And judging by the number of failed/failing video game companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?
For people not familiar with the history of video games, Atari was really big between 1980 and 1982. Then, in 1983, something happened: Too many video game companies were out there, and companies, in the false expectation of the market continuing its exponential growth, were spending more money than they were making. A familiar story to anyone who watched the.com madness.
Just like the.coms in 2001, the video game industry in 1983 had a big crash, resulting in an economic slump in the tech industry.
However, the Favicon NES came out in 1983/1984, and, with Super Mario Brothers, was able to make video games sucessful again. By 1987, the video game industry was thriving again, but this time with more reasonable expectations.
While a number of open source companies are no more (hello, Eazel), a large number of open-source companies are still alive and thriving (RedHat, in particular, is incredibly sucessful).
People thought video games were a dying fad in 1984, like the Rubic's cube and Espirt clothing. People think open source is a dying fad in 2002, like N'Sync and that special effect moving the perspecive while the action is frozen. Just as video games are alive and well today, open source will be alive and well in 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely, the HURD would have been ready in 1994 or 1995; a lot of people who worked on Linux in the early 1990s would have worked on the HURD instead.
- Sam
http://www.samiam.org/typing.spanish.characters.ht ml
- Sam
More important point: I am glad he wrote the letter; I can now explain to all my friends in México why Linux is important by having them read the original Spanish version of his letter.
- Sam
Before I discovered the internet and the software libre there, computing was plain simply not interesting to me. I felt that software had become corporate, and that all software was only coming out of large corporations. It was a world of computing where indivual programmers could not make any kind of meaningful contribution. Computers were essentially fancy typewriters. This is the end result of a world using entirely proprietary software.
If RMS had not started the GNU project in the 1980s, that is how things may have stayed. It was getting on the interent, and seeing that there was a large corpus of software out there for which the source code was available which made computing interesting for me again.
I can tell you this much: Linux would not have been possible in 1991 if RMS had not laid the foundation for GNU/Linux in the 1980s. Maybe BSD would have taken Linux's place; however BSD may not have bothered fighting AT&T for the rights to their source code if RMS vision for software libre did not exist at that time.
Without RMS, Linux would be at least five years behind where it is now. Remember that before flaming him.
The change from libre software to proprietary software in the 1970s started slowly; when RMS sees Linux becoming proprietary in little ways, I can see why he is concerned.
- Sam
If RMS had not started the GNU project in the 1980s, that is how things may have stayed. It was getting on the interent, and seeing that there was a large corpus of software out there for which the source code was available which made computing interesting for me again.
I can tell you this much: Linux would not have been possible in 1991 if RMS had not laid the foundation for GNU/Linux in the 1980s. Maybe BSD would have taken Linux's place; however BSD may not have bothered fighting AT when RMS sees Linux becoming proprietary in little ways, I can see why he is concerned.
- Sam
As an aside, why is it that Solaris advocates have this big need to hide their identities? Most Linux advocates here have a link to their home page so I can actually get a chance to know the person I am debating. What is it that Solaris people have to hide?
- Sam
Download my DNS server, MaraDNS. Compile and run it on Solaris. Fins the problems that MaraDNS has on Solaris and fix them. I have ported or seen my application ported to various OSes, including FreeBSD (it's in their ports tree), MacOS/X, and Windows (with cygwin). The only port that was less than trivial was the Solaris port.
It took me about a day to get it to compile; then it wouldn't run at all. Running truss revealed that any network application needs /dev/udp and /dev/tcp in the chroot() environment; any multithreaded application needs /dev/zero in the chroot() jail. Things no other OS I ported MaraDNS to needed.
Even after getting it to run, it would crash when doing even a very simple strees test that the Linux (and MacOS, and FreeBSD, and Windows) version can run without problem.
This was on Solaris 7 (x86).
If you want to impress me with how great Solaris is, I would deeply appreciate any help you could provide making this application as stable on Solaris as it is on all of the free *NIXes.
Then, and only then, would I feel that Solaris was a useable OS with a helpful community; right now I see Solaris as a buggy OS with an arrogant community that I don't want to be around.
Thank you.
- Sam
I was under the impression that you were a winvocate [1]; possibly a Sun employee who still feels that Windows is what belongs on the desktop. Glad to see that I was wrong.
- Sam
[1] A "winvocate" is a Windows user who tries out Linux, decides it is too hard to learn how to use, and then goes to Linux discussion boards to flame Linux.
I think Linux is far more relevent than you desire it to be.
Obviously, this is a discussion of how you feel about Linux compared to how I feel. I agree: Linux is not perfect (my current Linux annoyance: poor Unicode support).
Since you are who has use Unix nonstop for four years, I am at a loss to understand why you feel doing things on Unix is "the hard way" compared to doing things on Windows. Certain specialized tasks, such as doing taxes (which is best done with proprietary software), yes, Windows is easier. However, while the Unix way is hard to learn, it is extremely powerful and flexible once learned. I personally think you spent too much time playing Netrek and not enough time learning sh/awk/perl/etc. In which case, yeah, Windows would be easier.
Now, Steve, I would be the first person to tell you that the Slashdot Linux "advocates" are little more than pathetic whiners; I do not think that they contribute anything productive to Linux. It would be good for the Linux community if those users became Amish and never popped up on the internet again.
You are obviously a talented programmer, and could make great contributions to libre software. Since you enjoy porting software from *nix to Windows, you may enjoy making a Windows port of Gnumeric. The people who have done the Win32 port of the GIMP (and GTK) have already done a lot of the hard work. Another way you could help is by helping the AbiWord devlopers make Win32 builds of AbiWord; they do not always have someone who can do it right away after a new AbiWord source tarball is released; and there are issues the Win32 version of AbiWord has which the Linux version doesn't have
I think these would do a lot more to help free software than sitting around on Slashdot trying to convince a bunch of lusers who think they are elite because they can install Linux the folly of their ways. They won't be convinced anyway, they are just itching to get in a flame war.
- Sam
World domination happens one step at a time.
- Sam
But not on the desktop; you have a consistant pattern of posting articles complaining about things you do not like about the current state of affairs on the Linux desktop.
As for your previous complaints: If you don't like a desktop with both KDE and GNOME applications, start coding applications in KDE which GNOME has and KDE doesn't, or vice versa. Oh, I forgot, this io Slashdot, home to people who love to whine and are too pathetic to actually do anything to help things.
to think that a video *chipset* manufacturer even sees laptop returns due to Linux is absurd
You're speculating. I'm speculating. The fact of the matter is this: At one point, NeoMagic was the be all and end all of laptop video chipsets; within two years, NeoMagic completely left the Laptop chipset marketplace. I am sure a number of factors contributed to this; I am also sure that the lack of Linux support (until it was too late) was one of them.
it hasn't got clout like you try to attribute to it
It has enough clout that all major video chipsets have Linux support; either through having open specs so that libre software developers can develop drivers for them; or through binary-only drivers developed by the chipset maker for Linux.
- Sam
Neomagic, however, eventually learned the folly of having an anti-Linux policy, and were forced to leave the Laptop chipset market altogether; I am sure that the various laptop makers did not appreciate all of the returns from people who wanted to use Linux. In fact, NeoMagic's support web page srill prominently discusses Linux drivers.
- Sam
Who knows, maybe it will engourage people who own land on other confluences to put web cams there.
- Sam
- Sam
There are a lot of things in the DNS protocol that are downright ugly, such as the useless idea of "zones", the allowing of NS referrals without glue records, and the CNAME record. These only make sense when we look at the needs of those that designed DNS. The protocol is designed to make it as difficult as possible to manage DNS records (so that the bureaucrats can feel cozy that they know how to manage zones better than the average system administrator). The fact that MX and NS records point to names instead of IPs reflects the fact that the average DNS bureaucrat was too lazy to run their zone files through a sed script when making changes. The fact that out-of-bailiwick NS records (records without glue) is allowed reflects both the average DNS bureaucrat is too lazy to supply the IP for an out-of-bailiwick record, and that a DNS bureaucrat likes having well defined boundaries of authoritity.
The top down hierarchical structure of DNS also reflects the fact that the bureaucrat likes well-defined authority. The discomfort BIND developers with alternate root servers reflects the bureaucrat's desperate need to cling on to the power that they perceive having.
The fact that some DNS bureaucrats have really silly requirements for someone to have a domain in their bureau shows the kind of power grabs DNS bureaucrats enjoy having.
It comes to no surprise to me that ICANN does not want things like democratic elections; their job is to do things as slowly as possible (doing things any faster would actually take work) while getting as much control and sucking as much money out of the system as possible.
Now, at this point, all I am doing is defining the problem; I do have some ideas bouncing around my head as to what a solution should be; however those ideas still use the top-down hierarchical structure that DNS has. It would be better if there was a way to have the DNS resolution structure be based on rough consensus instead of via a top-down structure; perhaps something that allows indivual DNS servers to send "votes" on who should control a given top-level-domain; if a given set of servers for a given top-level domain get enough "votes", they control the TLD in question.
Then again, a community-controlled system needs protections to not become the diastar that IRC has become; where 14-year old kids struggle to control the channel so they can be a jerk by kicking and banning people at random.
- Sam
Actually, if the Mac won in the 1980s, instead of the PC, we would be a lot worse off today. PC hardware was an open specification; the equivalent Macintoshes cost a lot more money. I don't find the idea of $10,000 desktop computers very appealing; a possible reality today if the Mac had won.
In addition, Linux support for the Macintosh came much later than Linux support for the PC, mainly because the low-level hardware specifications for the Macs were a well guarded secret for a long time. I do not think it is too much of a stretch that Linux would not have happened if the Macintosh had won.
Microsoft is an important step in the right direction compared to how things could have been. The hardware specifications are open; it is only the software that is closed and proprietary.
Linux, of course, is the next step: Keep both the hardware and the operating system open. I really wish the technology which became the open software standard was a little more cutting edge than 30-year-old UNIX; but it is far better than not having any open software standard at all.
- Sam - Sam
Confirmed: When I was in México, it was the same deal. Computers rare at home (people still buy and use typewriters there); an internet cyber cafe on just about every street corner.
I know India has about a dozen different alphabets; this is just one reason I strongly advocate the internet infastructure to handle people using non-roman typefaces.
- Sam
The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.
Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.
International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.
- Sam
The other advantage of name@yahoo.com style email addresses is that the email address is more likely to look legitimate to many users of the internet.
However, these emails are not coming from yahoo.com; usually the Yahoo address in question points to a Yahoo address that does not exist. What the spammers do is this:
- Send a forged email which has a false yahoo.com return address.
- Find an open relay somewhere on the internet to spew the email in question.
- Send off the email to zillions of netizens.
- Laugh as Yahoo instead of the spammer responsible for the spam gets the majority of the complaints.
As a matter of fact, Yahoo has a system which stops people from automatically getting new Yahoo email addresses.Now, as it turns out, SpamAssassin is smart enough to see whether a return email address with yahoo.com in it is forged; one needs to look at the "received:" headers to determine where the email really came from.
In conclusion: Yahoo is not in any way, shape, or form responsible for spam which has a yahoo.com return address on it; perhaps spammers should start spewing out large quantities of email with your domain as the return address on it so you know what it is like to be falsely accused of being a spam haven.
Now, if only DNS had an "outgoing MX exchange" record which made this kind of filtering easier.
- Sam
While this ISP was not as much of a sham as the ISP the articule links to, they had an executive with access to the company's purse strings. This person outright stole money from the company's bank account for personal use; we are talking about millions of dollars here. Finally, when the company went bankrupt one or two years later, this crook fled the country, and, as far as I know, is living in the Carribian.
Similar to how Enron did things; get a lot of investment money; start a company, hire employees and pay off congressmen to give the company an air of legitimacy; then take as much money from the company bank account as one can get away with. Do this until the company dies and the executives are living in the bahamas.
- Sam
(0.9.8 has all sort of Javascript options; can you say "goodbye popups"?)
- Sam
One of these days I will make my application use capset(); considering that Linux is now the leading UNIX out there, I think other unices will end up copying this functionality. I knew that Linux had become the king of the hill when SUN decided to wholeheartably embrace Linux; SUN has always been the last to embrace a given technology.
- Sam
One of the problems with secure programming is the inertia in the computer industry; most of the operating systems in widespread use today (The *nix clones and DOS derivitives, these days) we developed in a time when security did not matter; *nix has a crude root-or-not security model and MS-DOS has no conception of security at all.
Personally, I think the solution is a model which has a real security model, such as EROS. The "audit the code so that it is perfect code without bugs" approach to security does not always work, even with OpenBSD.
- Sam
No, the configuration program itself does not need to know anything about the data each program uses. Just as web browsers do not understand the significance of data in form fields, our configuration program will not need to know anything about the actual significance of data in the configuration file.
How on earth will you lay out the filesystem for this?
Simple. Have a directory, /etc/conf/meta, and put all configuration data there. In fact, we don't even need a meta configuration file if each file in this directory has a summary field, we just go through /etc/conf/meta by hand and load up all the summary fields.
You also destroy backwards compatability
First of all, this is not true; programs can accept files from both legacy formats and from the new XML format in the transition period, or we can write programs which read in the legacy file using the legacy parser and output the same data in XML format.
That said, expressions like this ("You also destroy backwards compatibility") are expression I have heard over and over again, especially in the world of UNIX users.
This is a sentiment which I have seen time and time again, and a sentiment that makes Microsoft (or whoever else belives in proprietary OSes) thrive in the server space.
I have seen this same sentiment with people who complain that Red Hat is horrible because they use xinetd, which, heaven forbid, uses a different file format than /etc/inetd.conf.
This is the same sentiment that the people who make the DNS standards have, dragging their feet and not accepting any DNS extension which has non-ascii characters, forcing Yahoo! to have the host name "espanol.greetings.yahoo.com" instead of "español.greetings.yahoo.com". (Se puede decir que estas personas necesitan un nuevo ano porque ellas no pueden aceptar que esto es un nuevo año).
This is the same argument used by people who do not like CML2 (ESR's proposed kernel configuration utility) because it uses Python; they want everything to be done with shell scripts and the C programming language, and can not see the limitations that those languages have.
This is the same sentiment that makes it so I have to go a step backwards in terms of technological advancment to email UNIX-using people than mailing my friends, since many UNIX-using people are still using mail systems from the early 90s before HTML mail existed.
It is this fear of change which holds back free software, or, if you prefer, software libre. The computing industry, more than any other industry, is an industry that is undergoing constant change. Anyone who can not see this is going to be left behind.
- Sam
Let's pretend we are in 1983. Someone may write the following:
And judging by the number of failed/failing video game companies out there right now, why should there be any expectation for success in that field?
For people not familiar with the history of video games, Atari was really big between 1980 and 1982. Then, in 1983, something happened: Too many video game companies were out there, and companies, in the false expectation of the market continuing its exponential growth, were spending more money than they were making. A familiar story to anyone who watched the .com madness.
Just like the .coms in 2001, the video game industry in 1983 had a big crash, resulting in an economic slump in the tech industry.
However, the Favicon NES came out in 1983/1984, and, with Super Mario Brothers, was able to make video games sucessful again. By 1987, the video game industry was thriving again, but this time with more reasonable expectations.
While a number of open source companies are no more (hello, Eazel), a large number of open-source companies are still alive and thriving (RedHat, in particular, is incredibly sucessful).
People thought video games were a dying fad in 1984, like the Rubic's cube and Espirt clothing. People think open source is a dying fad in 2002, like N'Sync and that special effect moving the perspecive while the action is frozen. Just as video games are alive and well today, open source will be alive and well in 20 years.
- Sam