And explain why I have thought of something that none of the experts have and what makes me an expert.
10 to 1, there is a huge hole in the idea.
Then I'd try to get some peer review. There are a lot of people around to do this, they will sign NDAs to do it. (Skipjack and the RCx algorithms proved that)
Then if it is still standing, I'd get a patent to buy time to figure out what to do with it.
It does install OpenSSH by default and there have been several remote root exploits through it. As recently as July and August script kiddies were kncoking over OpenBSD boxes through openssh 3.3 and putting up webservers on them so they could get them on defacement websites.
It's the OpenBSD group that actually puts OpenSSH together. It's all semantics. Turn off all services, OpenBSD is good (read, unplug it from the network) start turning them on and it falls over like just about everything else.
It's OpenPGP compatible. There are a fair number of businesses that have PGP. I've been using it daily with someone that is using PGP 7.1 for a couple months now.
There are plugins for Outlook on windows too, it works great.
Re:I think many posters here are missing the point
on
RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 1
They know exactly how insecure RC5-64 is.
I don't think they do. distributed.net brute forced it. If that's the measure of strength then when go through the excercise of distributed.net? You can do some simple math in a few minutes and calculate "how strong" the cipher is.
If anything, distributed.net undermines the cash prizes. Instead of cryptographers putting effort in to cryptanalyzing RC5 for a cash prize a bunch of people with spare cycles (gamers, script kiddies, etc) did what everybody knew was possible; throw enough cycles at it and you can brute force it. As far as I know, nobody has broken RC5-64, just like nobody has ever broken DES; brute force? Yeah, you need bigger key spaces than 56 or 64bits but broken it? Not quite.
There still isn't a method to arbitrarily decrypt RC5 encrypted messages or a way that it quicker than brute force to break them and I'm betting fewer people are even looking at it now because the cash insentive is gone.
*laugh* Ballmer only seems to see things in terms of money. It should be painfully obvious that Linux didn't start off "bankrupt", it started off free, which is hardly the same thing.
That's nothing. Where's the DOJ when he says stuff like that? Essentially admitting that they aren't happy with a competitor so much as existing.
I've worked with a handful of game developers and consoles as they are
satisfy them because they can do as much as they want or they can buy
stuff from people if they don't want to build a 3D engine or
whatever. There is a certain level of egomania and a lot of them want
to do it all if they can. It's part of the competition of it all.
With typical consoles you can program the bare metal all the way if
you want to or you can buy libraries from different vendors and
publishers and build off of their work. You've got choice. It's not
a directX only world. The result is that GTA3 runs on a PS2 with
32MBytes of RAM and a few hundred K of flash and the PC version takes
a 128MB of RAM, 500MB of drive space and a video card with as much
memory are the whole PS2 has. If you don't believe me, checkout how
many games have been developed for Xbox vs. PS2, MS is forcing people
you use their libraries and playform and the results: far more
development on the other platform.
Secondly, even with Direct this and that, the PC platform is a
diverse and difficult platform for that stuff to be developed on. As
a consumer I hate checking labels to see if I have this quarter's
Nvidia chip so I can play some new game, only to buy it all and then
need to upgrade a bunch of crap on the systme before windows will play
it. Essentially, I've built 2 woprkstation machines, my work machine
and then my game machine because I can't afford to break compilers and
such by upgrading something just to play a game. Essentially you're
just building a really expensive console.
I'm a geek with a bunch of computers around the house and I've been
driven from the gaming market almost, I don't have the time to keep
on top of it all, so I bought a PS2 about 18 months ago and I've had
a blast. Nothing quite like going to the game store picking out any
game that interests you and knowing that it will work without
downloading new drivers or buying a new video chip or anything.
They're generally good games too, I wish I had a mouse and a keyboard
but those problems will be solved. No worries, just buy it and play
it. The next round will have digital TV support and then the issue
will be even less.
I don't really see that as a problem. When you take a step back there are a lot of libre software developers that love grinding out what I often see as the gritty parts. It's the integration that slows us down for a while but we usually seem to figure that part out. The only reason that is slow is because we wait for a community chosen
solution before we jump on something. Read: NG Posix Threads vs the New effort by Ullrich.
Honestly, aside from legal tricks that they may pull. It looks like there are still some powerful players in the media world that will keep us from being locked out, that's been my bigger fear. I think the biggest thing now is adapting people to longer cycles. Free software is done when it's done. There isn't a lot of marketing groups picking dates and then forcing people to work 18 hours a day for 6 months to hit it, it just takes time and the pace is still astonishing.
That and keeping ourselves honest, the community has
become large enough that there tends to be more rhetoric, a noisey
non-productive contingent and more myth. It's a bit more easy to make
us look divided right now, it's more easy to find detractors, and if
you listen it's a lot more easy to find myth waiting to be shattered
and if you remember the mindcraft episode that kind of knocked the
collective wind out of our chests becuase something that was assumed
to be true wasn't and the competition was "better." With a larger
community is a little bit more difficult to be realistic; while the
dozen or so projects I follow closely (including the kernel) tend to
be in extremely good hands and have a great deal of realism in their
entire process. I see it as something that will affect the less
technical community more often. Look at the MySQL article the other
day where is was "dissed" by IBM and MS; I didn't even see any
negativity in the article and tons of people responded defending
MySQL. That will continue, there are a fair number of free software
myths right now that may or may not be true. Things regarding
scaleability, security (OpenBSD's supposed security comes to mind,
I've seen a few OpenSSH holes over the last couple years that affect
OpenBSD as much as anything, they are root exploits, and it's never
had an independant audit; nothing against OpenBSD it's just a good
example of saying something enough times that people start to believe
it) and then reliability (moreso as you see free software aimed at the
enterprise, IBM has been making some very seriously reliable systems
for decades)
I could see De Niro doing a really good Feynman. Feynman was brilliant above and beyond the call of duty, had a fascinating life and was kind of quirky. I could see De Niro doing him pretty well, with that New York accent.
That's a bummer, I had aspirations of doing some mods to my segway and putting it on a halfpipe to do some tricks, maybe get in to the x-games or something.
The problem isn't Intel. If anything, I'd bet they'd love to drop the
BIOS too. Do you have any idea how hard it is to boot strap a PC from
bare metal? There are tons of legacy tricks and almost secrets, it's
an amazing excercise to go through; if you don't have one already,
I'm not sure where you can even go and buy a high quality 16bit
x86 assembler any more.
The problem is windows and microsoft. They can't boot without a
BIOS. DOS, you know? Can Linux? It's pretty damn easy to boot Linux without one,
pretty much put a kernel in memory and jump to the start of it. (No
shit, it's about that easy) MS simply has never put a lot of effort in to
getting away from the BIOS, they control the PCHEC specs, they can if
they want.
More importantly, you can spend some change on a
BIOS, last x86 embedded project I worked on we used a LinuxBIOS type
BIOS because it was going to be $4 to $12 a unit to buy one off the
shelf, plus something like $30k to $50k up front for their developers
docs. When you buy a new PC a BIOS can be an expensive part.
I kind of suspect that MS likes it this way becuase it's all defined.
The rules of engagement are pretty simple. There are only a dozen or
so BIOS vendors. They work off of DOS, that's the benchmark for the
most part. There are 2 bigger vendors who own the majority of the
market. They all race to support new hardware and make DOS run on
it. You take a step back and the only people that helps at all is
MS. Nobody else needs DOS that much. You change the architecture and
who knows who get's powerful, maybe somebody that's not friendly to
MS. Expect it to become more of an issue as DRM becomes more
central to home computers.
ESR got himself booed off the stage by trying to undermine the process. His solution was technically superior in ways, it didn't do what Linus and others wanted and he was playing politics and games trying to get it in to the kernel. When that was exposed it was done. Technically superior or not, the games undermine everything, it's a very open process and they like peer review and things done in the open. Bottom line, not too many people aren't replacable and any work you do can probably be done by somebody else, they don't need politicians. There were a few times when Linus made it very clear what he wanted changed and ESR simply didn't fix it, it was as if he didn't even hear it; look at the threads in the kernel archive. I don't know what ESR's motivation was but he made it look a little corrupt.
Further, people are working on the configuartion language but there are bigger problems to be solved, everyone knows it and still the efforts don't fully address them. Like how do you know the configuation options used on the kernel you are running? There is no reason to change just for the sake of change and compilation speed isn't a huge issue, my dual amd compiles kernels so fast I don't care if I cut the speed in half. Plus, when you're hacking you usually work on a module or two and don't rebuild the whole thing.
The process is good, they don't take crap. The VM system and the IDE system are other prime examples. Al Viro is kind of mean to people but everyone else makes it pretty clear what needs to be done, why things aren't accpeted, even Al has expectations that he makes clear. There are expectations for robustness, it's more important than performance. Hans Reiser has had issues with that, he can't explain the robustness or answers concerns but he can point to benchmarks; clue: they don't give a shit if it's not robust.
There have been a handful of people who just don't cut it. Believe me, they can be replaced. It sucks, it'll be a dark day when Alan Cox or Dave Miller quit, if they ever do but they also know the rules, they play by them and they have their own forks if they don't agree. If Linus or someone else don't like your code, it doesn't get in, fork and show that they are wrong or make it better. This isn't bullying or anything like that, it's not that they are elitests, they have real expectations that aren't meet some times. Are some people and some parts of the kernel more equal than others? Of course, we're all human.
I take exception to the suggestion that the kernel team is throwing out great stuff for non technical reasons. They aren't they throw it out because it doesn't do what it is supposed to, people are trying to get it in for non-technical reasons with non-technical means or because it's not robust. It's not easy to write a VM or IDE system, there are a ton of expectations, it's a hard job, there are working solutions already that you have to do better than.
The media producers will always need non-DRM hardware so the hardware will have to be available.
I've been around long enough to know that it's cheaper to build optional DRM and one piece of hardware rather than DRM hardware and non-DRM hardware. As long as that's the case then you can mod stuff. It might be illegal to do but you can. And depending on how that price things, what are you going to buy? The DVD burner that burns DVDs or the one the burns data only DVDs? I'll pay an extra $50 for the first one.
Generally I think this is just a bunch of talk right now, there is too much demand. People can lobby and people can fight about it, just like they did during the prohibition, and they lost in the end. Pandora's box got opened up.
I also think that those who are really really smart will be the ones that find the next ways to add value to media. Put concert tickets in with CDs, put nifty books and artwork in with DVDs, etc.. Make cameras that can far exceed HDTV so going to digital theaters is worth the money, even if people can bootleg 1080i copies of movies.
I just don't see how it can work.
Re:Breaking interoperability... again???
on
GCC 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Have you read the C++ spec?
Try putting "using namespace std;" at the top of your code.
I actually saw one of the early cuts of the PowerPC OS/2 on top of Mach/IBM microkernel...
The sadest thing about it all to me isn't the fact that it never really happened so much as the wonderful lesson to learn that only a handful of people really get to have.
PM was designed with shared memory in mind, Mach doesn't really support shared memory. Next thing you know you have a PM port that runs slower than snails. There was a team of people assigned to that problem and they never came up with a suitable solution other than rewrite. OS/2 died officially in the minds of IBM's strategists at that point, back in the early 1990's. It was both political as well as technical and that's when things got bitter; some people thought that they weren't trying hard enough to port it, the OS/2 fanatics. On the other side a tremendous amount of OS/2 was written in IA32 assembly...
It was a text book design lesson with a healthy dose of business politics. Look at how Linus Torvalds runs Linux, it's all vanilla, nothing terribly exotic in the mix and it runs on just about every platform that shows up. It's not as quick out of the gate on some of them but it quickly get's tuned that way, using standard and non-exotic features of the hardware. RS/6000 has reverse pagetable support if you want it, but Linux doesn't use it, why? because it's the only hardware that does it practically. It's all different hardware but it all follows the same standards at the end of the day. When your code relies on the bare metal like that it will die, even when you're big blue, unless the bare metal is bare metal everywhere.
Your guess is as good as any, I would have guessed that VA would have done a lot of things by now to make more money form Slashdot and to reduce the expense.
I hate this. I really like LWN, it's new, it's not rumors and geek stuff, it's news about technical things in the world of Linux. I hate to see it go down.
I've been kicking this idea around some, a narrow pipe is cheap, why couldn't there be a syndication for web sites? If you had 100 sites hosting the same LWN content and could some how make sure that they were pretty well distributed then the cost of LWN becomes much cheaper. I'm thinking like FIDO net style in a way. Presuming that bandwidth and servers is their number one cost other than full time staff. I'm starting to think the next cool thing beyond the weblog is the syndicated web magazine, it could have editors, all that stuff and then they put it on line, rsync it to all the syndication sites. Then all you need is some way to pay the staff, the syndication sites could pay subscription fees, in exchange they get some control over an amount of content space. If you can get enough syndication sites then it's pretty cheap to become, right? Or if they don't have a staff providing content then it could be free to syndicate. It has to work because big corporations do it, we just need to scale it to hobby size.
I've been wondering about this a lot lately. I've worked at a number of places, been a fully paid regular type employee at IBM for about 5 years, a medium sized company for 2 years and a startup for about a year now. I've seen how things work at those companies and a number of their partners. I've seen a number of sleezy people in business but I've also seen my fair share of honest people and I can't imagine that there weren't whistle blowers.
All things being equal, and they are usually pretty fair. You have AAnderson cooking books at a number of places. Most of those places get audits by KPNG, Price Waterhouse, and others. Likewise you have AAnderson doing the audits at places those other firms account for. How can other accounting firms compete with a company that cooks the books with out also doing so? They audit their work and they should know because they have clients of their own and should have a good feeling for the state of the economy. I've been really amped on the stock market a long time, I've made some buck in it, lost some, for the most part done really well but I don't know how you can trust anybody now.
I can't believe that it's sleezy business becuase if it was just sleezy business then someone more sleezy would rat them out for blackmail or political reasons. Or someone honest would say something. I can't believe that top notch accounting firms would lie for each other and I don't see how they can compete against one firm that is turning losing companies in to profitable ones. Then I see W's response (twice the stay at the federal country club) plus all the politicians are benefitting from it in the first place.
The only thing that makes any sense to me is that lot's of companies are doing crooked accounting, everybody knows it and that's why there aren't any whistle blowers and that a couple more slow quarters than they are expecting is all it could take to wipe out a 100 year old company because they hide the losses and run out of hiding places.
I'm rambling a little but I look on the smaller scale and there have been a handful of the new small linux companies that have burned out in fireball and then people showed up at work with padlocks on the doors, and people were shocked.. The things that happend at Loki are the same types of things happening at WorldCom or Qwest, just on a smaller scale. The telcos are also pretty much a fail proof business if you're not expecting endless radical growth, you will have endless customers and cash flow, it's not a really risky business to run a long distance high speed network, people need that service. Has business come to this?
Aren't we really just getting to a stable place where we have good tools and a good platform for building the desktop and lot's of desktop apps?
Seriously. And we've got a few apps that are in pretty good placing, Koffice, open office, mozilla they are all coming in to their own. I can understand Raster's sentiments, he's been in the trenches fighting it out for a long time, I think it's just now starting to get to the interesting point when some of that vision can realistically be put together. There is a huge difference between a desktop on a developers desk and a desktop you can give to the masses and a lot of that difference isn't going to always be technical stuff or flashy graphics and themes. He built a lot of the foundation, now we build on top of it. It takes time.
The export to non-US citizens has been regulated but you've been able to legally use any crypto you want in the US, and you've been legally able to ship it to foreign offices of your US company.
Vesta is newly GPLed, has something like 10 years of work in it and comes from DecPaq. Look's somewhat promising but hard to use, sounds like it takes over your build process
The best thing I've ever used, hands down, is CMVC at IBM. It does 2 things which I think are critical: it integrates with the bug tracking system and it easily supports multiple releases concurrently (as in to check code in you need a "bug" that is accepted and that bug can be associated with multiple releases and can't be closed until you roll the fixes in to all the associated releases)
I've used CVS and Bugzilla for about 3 to 4 years now (bugzilla less, maybe 2.5 years) and CVS is great when you use it right and you do what it does. It seems like about half of the developers out there don't want to do that initially though. I think it starts to get very complex when you're supporting multiple releases (very common in a business, less so in opensource) also because you can make changes check code in and it will pretty much do it or it gives you some crazy error message that most people don't understand. Really CVS solves the file aspect of the problem and that's about it. It also has some implementation bugs, it needs a temporary space the size of the repository; suppose you build a release binary that's 100MB (not at all uncommon) and check it in because you release it and you've got 500MB of source code; after 3 or 4 releases you need a GB of space to do just about anything with the tree. Say you're shipping a CD image, you know with a JDK and a bunch of docs and stuff, release 3 betas and a release and you're possibly in the 2 to 3 GB range. Twice in business settings we've had to do major work on the CVS repository because our hardware was no longer large enough to support it. These are more extreme uses but they are common in a business that is trying to implement some good software engineering practices, much easier to get away in open source.
CVS isn't the most condusive to being used in a business setting where you want to have *Everything* in a tree. It simply starts to get slow and hard to use when the trees get big. Also the best way to use it is in the clearcase mode where everybody is doing everything on a branch and just the nomenclature of that sounds bad to most engineers in business, they don't like to branch and merge. Also, it has been my experience that until the team size get's to be in the 20s or so and the project is simply too big, every engineer should do a full build at least once a day, the whole branching parts of it methodoloy seems to encourage spot builds; no real reason it just seems that way from experience, doing a full checkout seems to take too long for some people or something. Also, simply doing updates isn't the best idea either because it seems like CVS becomes confused on some client platforms (**cough** windows) and after doing that for a week or so the sandbox isn't exactly like tip.
From what I've read, it sounds like subversion starts to fix the file level problems CVS has. That's huge. The next step is to couple the issue/bug tracking system to the actual file level version control system.
Patents aren't evil by nature. PKWare owns patents that cover the way the inflate/deflate alogrithms work. PKWare also put them in the public domain. Or the RTLinux patent. He wasn't served with papers or told to stop doing what he is doing. IPFilter isn't exactly an unknown piece of code either. I'd assume it's not a problem. Companies don't want to test patents like those becuase they lose all the marbles when they don't win in court.
Slashdot Mirror
10 to 1, there is a huge hole in the idea.
Then I'd try to get some peer review. There are a lot of people around to do this, they will sign NDAs to do it. (Skipjack and the RCx algorithms proved that)
Then if it is still standing, I'd get a patent to buy time to figure out what to do with it.
Anyone know where I can get that reboot code he was talking about? I've got some ideas about hooking that in to my portsentry...
Isn't it simulataneous multi threading?
It's the OpenBSD group that actually puts OpenSSH together. It's all semantics. Turn off all services, OpenBSD is good (read, unplug it from the network) start turning them on and it falls over like just about everything else.
There are plugins for Outlook on windows too, it works great.
I don't think they do. distributed.net brute forced it. If that's the measure of strength then when go through the excercise of distributed.net? You can do some simple math in a few minutes and calculate "how strong" the cipher is.
If anything, distributed.net undermines the cash prizes. Instead of cryptographers putting effort in to cryptanalyzing RC5 for a cash prize a bunch of people with spare cycles (gamers, script kiddies, etc) did what everybody knew was possible; throw enough cycles at it and you can brute force it. As far as I know, nobody has broken RC5-64, just like nobody has ever broken DES; brute force? Yeah, you need bigger key spaces than 56 or 64bits but broken it? Not quite.
There still isn't a method to arbitrarily decrypt RC5 encrypted messages or a way that it quicker than brute force to break them and I'm betting fewer people are even looking at it now because the cash insentive is gone.
That's nothing. Where's the DOJ when he says stuff like that? Essentially admitting that they aren't happy with a competitor so much as existing.
Secondly, even with Direct this and that, the PC platform is a diverse and difficult platform for that stuff to be developed on. As a consumer I hate checking labels to see if I have this quarter's Nvidia chip so I can play some new game, only to buy it all and then need to upgrade a bunch of crap on the systme before windows will play it. Essentially, I've built 2 woprkstation machines, my work machine and then my game machine because I can't afford to break compilers and such by upgrading something just to play a game. Essentially you're just building a really expensive console.
I'm a geek with a bunch of computers around the house and I've been driven from the gaming market almost, I don't have the time to keep on top of it all, so I bought a PS2 about 18 months ago and I've had a blast. Nothing quite like going to the game store picking out any game that interests you and knowing that it will work without downloading new drivers or buying a new video chip or anything. They're generally good games too, I wish I had a mouse and a keyboard but those problems will be solved. No worries, just buy it and play it. The next round will have digital TV support and then the issue will be even less.
Honestly, aside from legal tricks that they may pull. It looks like there are still some powerful players in the media world that will keep us from being locked out, that's been my bigger fear. I think the biggest thing now is adapting people to longer cycles. Free software is done when it's done. There isn't a lot of marketing groups picking dates and then forcing people to work 18 hours a day for 6 months to hit it, it just takes time and the pace is still astonishing.
That and keeping ourselves honest, the community has become large enough that there tends to be more rhetoric, a noisey non-productive contingent and more myth. It's a bit more easy to make us look divided right now, it's more easy to find detractors, and if you listen it's a lot more easy to find myth waiting to be shattered and if you remember the mindcraft episode that kind of knocked the collective wind out of our chests becuase something that was assumed to be true wasn't and the competition was "better." With a larger community is a little bit more difficult to be realistic; while the dozen or so projects I follow closely (including the kernel) tend to be in extremely good hands and have a great deal of realism in their entire process. I see it as something that will affect the less technical community more often. Look at the MySQL article the other day where is was "dissed" by IBM and MS; I didn't even see any negativity in the article and tons of people responded defending MySQL. That will continue, there are a fair number of free software myths right now that may or may not be true. Things regarding scaleability, security (OpenBSD's supposed security comes to mind, I've seen a few OpenSSH holes over the last couple years that affect OpenBSD as much as anything, they are root exploits, and it's never had an independant audit; nothing against OpenBSD it's just a good example of saying something enough times that people start to believe it) and then reliability (moreso as you see free software aimed at the enterprise, IBM has been making some very seriously reliable systems for decades)
Mix and mash ciphers are immune to quantum cryptograpy. AES, DES, just about all symmetric block ciphers will not be any easier to break with it.
I could see De Niro doing a really good Feynman. Feynman was brilliant above and beyond the call of duty, had a fascinating life and was kind of quirky. I could see De Niro doing him pretty well, with that New York accent.
That's a bummer, I had aspirations of doing some mods to my segway and putting it on a halfpipe to do some tricks, maybe get in to the x-games or something.
The problem is windows and microsoft. They can't boot without a BIOS. DOS, you know? Can Linux? It's pretty damn easy to boot Linux without one, pretty much put a kernel in memory and jump to the start of it. (No shit, it's about that easy) MS simply has never put a lot of effort in to getting away from the BIOS, they control the PCHEC specs, they can if they want.
More importantly, you can spend some change on a BIOS, last x86 embedded project I worked on we used a LinuxBIOS type BIOS because it was going to be $4 to $12 a unit to buy one off the shelf, plus something like $30k to $50k up front for their developers docs. When you buy a new PC a BIOS can be an expensive part.
I kind of suspect that MS likes it this way becuase it's all defined. The rules of engagement are pretty simple. There are only a dozen or so BIOS vendors. They work off of DOS, that's the benchmark for the most part. There are 2 bigger vendors who own the majority of the market. They all race to support new hardware and make DOS run on it. You take a step back and the only people that helps at all is MS. Nobody else needs DOS that much. You change the architecture and who knows who get's powerful, maybe somebody that's not friendly to MS. Expect it to become more of an issue as DRM becomes more central to home computers.
Further, people are working on the configuartion language but there are bigger problems to be solved, everyone knows it and still the efforts don't fully address them. Like how do you know the configuation options used on the kernel you are running? There is no reason to change just for the sake of change and compilation speed isn't a huge issue, my dual amd compiles kernels so fast I don't care if I cut the speed in half. Plus, when you're hacking you usually work on a module or two and don't rebuild the whole thing.
The process is good, they don't take crap. The VM system and the IDE system are other prime examples. Al Viro is kind of mean to people but everyone else makes it pretty clear what needs to be done, why things aren't accpeted, even Al has expectations that he makes clear. There are expectations for robustness, it's more important than performance. Hans Reiser has had issues with that, he can't explain the robustness or answers concerns but he can point to benchmarks; clue: they don't give a shit if it's not robust.
There have been a handful of people who just don't cut it. Believe me, they can be replaced. It sucks, it'll be a dark day when Alan Cox or Dave Miller quit, if they ever do but they also know the rules, they play by them and they have their own forks if they don't agree. If Linus or someone else don't like your code, it doesn't get in, fork and show that they are wrong or make it better. This isn't bullying or anything like that, it's not that they are elitests, they have real expectations that aren't meet some times. Are some people and some parts of the kernel more equal than others? Of course, we're all human.
I take exception to the suggestion that the kernel team is throwing out great stuff for non technical reasons. They aren't they throw it out because it doesn't do what it is supposed to, people are trying to get it in for non-technical reasons with non-technical means or because it's not robust. It's not easy to write a VM or IDE system, there are a ton of expectations, it's a hard job, there are working solutions already that you have to do better than.
I've been around long enough to know that it's cheaper to build optional DRM and one piece of hardware rather than DRM hardware and non-DRM hardware. As long as that's the case then you can mod stuff. It might be illegal to do but you can. And depending on how that price things, what are you going to buy? The DVD burner that burns DVDs or the one the burns data only DVDs? I'll pay an extra $50 for the first one.
Generally I think this is just a bunch of talk right now, there is too much demand. People can lobby and people can fight about it, just like they did during the prohibition, and they lost in the end. Pandora's box got opened up.
I also think that those who are really really smart will be the ones that find the next ways to add value to media. Put concert tickets in with CDs, put nifty books and artwork in with DVDs, etc.. Make cameras that can far exceed HDTV so going to digital theaters is worth the money, even if people can bootleg 1080i copies of movies.
I just don't see how it can work.
Try putting "using namespace std;" at the top of your code.
POWER is a superset of PowerPC. There 12 instructions in POWER that aren't in PowerPC. PowerPC now also has Altivec
The sadest thing about it all to me isn't the fact that it never really happened so much as the wonderful lesson to learn that only a handful of people really get to have.
PM was designed with shared memory in mind, Mach doesn't really support shared memory. Next thing you know you have a PM port that runs slower than snails. There was a team of people assigned to that problem and they never came up with a suitable solution other than rewrite. OS/2 died officially in the minds of IBM's strategists at that point, back in the early 1990's. It was both political as well as technical and that's when things got bitter; some people thought that they weren't trying hard enough to port it, the OS/2 fanatics. On the other side a tremendous amount of OS/2 was written in IA32 assembly...
It was a text book design lesson with a healthy dose of business politics. Look at how Linus Torvalds runs Linux, it's all vanilla, nothing terribly exotic in the mix and it runs on just about every platform that shows up. It's not as quick out of the gate on some of them but it quickly get's tuned that way, using standard and non-exotic features of the hardware. RS/6000 has reverse pagetable support if you want it, but Linux doesn't use it, why? because it's the only hardware that does it practically. It's all different hardware but it all follows the same standards at the end of the day. When your code relies on the bare metal like that it will die, even when you're big blue, unless the bare metal is bare metal everywhere.
They can't support Solaris 9 on Intel, an existing product for the most part, let alone branch out in to MacOS land
Basically, when I run out of toilet paper I have been wiping my ass with Sun stock certifcates as of late...
I hate this. I really like LWN, it's new, it's not rumors and geek stuff, it's news about technical things in the world of Linux. I hate to see it go down.
I've been kicking this idea around some, a narrow pipe is cheap, why couldn't there be a syndication for web sites? If you had 100 sites hosting the same LWN content and could some how make sure that they were pretty well distributed then the cost of LWN becomes much cheaper. I'm thinking like FIDO net style in a way. Presuming that bandwidth and servers is their number one cost other than full time staff. I'm starting to think the next cool thing beyond the weblog is the syndicated web magazine, it could have editors, all that stuff and then they put it on line, rsync it to all the syndication sites. Then all you need is some way to pay the staff, the syndication sites could pay subscription fees, in exchange they get some control over an amount of content space. If you can get enough syndication sites then it's pretty cheap to become, right? Or if they don't have a staff providing content then it could be free to syndicate. It has to work because big corporations do it, we just need to scale it to hobby size.
I've been wondering about this a lot lately. I've worked at a number of places, been a fully paid regular type employee at IBM for about 5 years, a medium sized company for 2 years and a startup for about a year now. I've seen how things work at those companies and a number of their partners. I've seen a number of sleezy people in business but I've also seen my fair share of honest people and I can't imagine that there weren't whistle blowers.
All things being equal, and they are usually pretty fair. You have AAnderson cooking books at a number of places. Most of those places get audits by KPNG, Price Waterhouse, and others. Likewise you have AAnderson doing the audits at places those other firms account for. How can other accounting firms compete with a company that cooks the books with out also doing so? They audit their work and they should know because they have clients of their own and should have a good feeling for the state of the economy. I've been really amped on the stock market a long time, I've made some buck in it, lost some, for the most part done really well but I don't know how you can trust anybody now.
I can't believe that it's sleezy business becuase if it was just sleezy business then someone more sleezy would rat them out for blackmail or political reasons. Or someone honest would say something. I can't believe that top notch accounting firms would lie for each other and I don't see how they can compete against one firm that is turning losing companies in to profitable ones. Then I see W's response (twice the stay at the federal country club) plus all the politicians are benefitting from it in the first place.
The only thing that makes any sense to me is that lot's of companies are doing crooked accounting, everybody knows it and that's why there aren't any whistle blowers and that a couple more slow quarters than they are expecting is all it could take to wipe out a 100 year old company because they hide the losses and run out of hiding places.
I'm rambling a little but I look on the smaller scale and there have been a handful of the new small linux companies that have burned out in fireball and then people showed up at work with padlocks on the doors, and people were shocked.. The things that happend at Loki are the same types of things happening at WorldCom or Qwest, just on a smaller scale. The telcos are also pretty much a fail proof business if you're not expecting endless radical growth, you will have endless customers and cash flow, it's not a really risky business to run a long distance high speed network, people need that service. Has business come to this?
Seriously. And we've got a few apps that are in pretty good placing, Koffice, open office, mozilla they are all coming in to their own. I can understand Raster's sentiments, he's been in the trenches fighting it out for a long time, I think it's just now starting to get to the interesting point when some of that vision can realistically be put together. There is a huge difference between a desktop on a developers desk and a desktop you can give to the masses and a lot of that difference isn't going to always be technical stuff or flashy graphics and themes. He built a lot of the foundation, now we build on top of it. It takes time.
The export to non-US citizens has been regulated but you've been able to legally use any crypto you want in the US, and you've been legally able to ship it to foreign offices of your US company.
I don't expect that to change.
The best thing I've ever used, hands down, is CMVC at IBM. It does 2 things which I think are critical: it integrates with the bug tracking system and it easily supports multiple releases concurrently (as in to check code in you need a "bug" that is accepted and that bug can be associated with multiple releases and can't be closed until you roll the fixes in to all the associated releases)
I've used CVS and Bugzilla for about 3 to 4 years now (bugzilla less, maybe 2.5 years) and CVS is great when you use it right and you do what it does. It seems like about half of the developers out there don't want to do that initially though. I think it starts to get very complex when you're supporting multiple releases (very common in a business, less so in opensource) also because you can make changes check code in and it will pretty much do it or it gives you some crazy error message that most people don't understand. Really CVS solves the file aspect of the problem and that's about it. It also has some implementation bugs, it needs a temporary space the size of the repository; suppose you build a release binary that's 100MB (not at all uncommon) and check it in because you release it and you've got 500MB of source code; after 3 or 4 releases you need a GB of space to do just about anything with the tree. Say you're shipping a CD image, you know with a JDK and a bunch of docs and stuff, release 3 betas and a release and you're possibly in the 2 to 3 GB range. Twice in business settings we've had to do major work on the CVS repository because our hardware was no longer large enough to support it. These are more extreme uses but they are common in a business that is trying to implement some good software engineering practices, much easier to get away in open source.
CVS isn't the most condusive to being used in a business setting where you want to have *Everything* in a tree. It simply starts to get slow and hard to use when the trees get big. Also the best way to use it is in the clearcase mode where everybody is doing everything on a branch and just the nomenclature of that sounds bad to most engineers in business, they don't like to branch and merge. Also, it has been my experience that until the team size get's to be in the 20s or so and the project is simply too big, every engineer should do a full build at least once a day, the whole branching parts of it methodoloy seems to encourage spot builds; no real reason it just seems that way from experience, doing a full checkout seems to take too long for some people or something. Also, simply doing updates isn't the best idea either because it seems like CVS becomes confused on some client platforms (**cough** windows) and after doing that for a week or so the sandbox isn't exactly like tip.
From what I've read, it sounds like subversion starts to fix the file level problems CVS has. That's huge. The next step is to couple the issue/bug tracking system to the actual file level version control system.
Patents aren't evil by nature. PKWare owns patents that cover the way the inflate/deflate alogrithms work. PKWare also put them in the public domain. Or the RTLinux patent. He wasn't served with papers or told to stop doing what he is doing. IPFilter isn't exactly an unknown piece of code either. I'd assume it's not a problem. Companies don't want to test patents like those becuase they lose all the marbles when they don't win in court.