I'm almost ready to say that Open Source is a perfect fit for government work -- it's generally cheaper to procure than commercial software (potentially as expensive in the end if you factor in TCO, but that's besides the point), more likely to support a feature set with stability (commercial software may offer more capabilities overall, but may not fully support your hardware), and permits software development done for the government to also directly benefit the people, something not entirely possible with commercial software.
However, I'm concerned with issues regarding security. We have all heard the old saw regarding closed source vs. open source: 'Security through obscurity doesn't do the job', however this begs the following question: when does handing the enemy a blueprint of the fortress make guarding the castle easier? With Open Source, I'm concerned that not only are hackers being issued a blueprint for an attack, but that they can also build flaws into the system before it is even implemented!
Irregardless of the benefits Open Source can bestow on the government, it brings with it a flaw of extraordinary magnitude. Witness the problems caused when the latest flaw is discovered in BIND or ftpd, or when a trojan is actually placed in the software people use to protect their system (tcpdump)! Maybe the Japanese are just trying to wrangle a better price out of Microsoft, but I think it's possible they don't want to be left unguarded a couple of months whence after picking the cheaper solution.
Open Source is a bargain that offers far more than what you pay for; however, its track record with security is spotty, and who do you sue when things go wrong?
What would those "unnecessary costs" be? (just asking).
Proprietary software. The bulk of the costs with anything supercomputing falls across the non-standardized but more reliable hardware, the service contracts necessary in a mission-critical environment, and the software that runs on the system. Having Linux cuts back on that, although no doubt some software tailored to work in this environment will still be pricier than its counterparts on our x86 hardware because of the smaller customer base and ability to pay.
Having helped set things up, I was offered an opportunity to see the system in action. It's fast, much faster than previous offerings in the line, and apparently enough so (as marketing tells me) it's well worth upgrading aging supercomputers or clusters.
Additionally, it offers unparalleled scalability in the line of Linux supercomputing. This is a system built to grow with a business, although your business better be pretty much grown already to back the check you'd need to fill out to buy it.
My conclusion: it's an excellent largish solution for academia seeking a more stable environment than can be achieved with Beowulf clustering and excellent pricewise solution for businesses seeking to expand without sinking a lot of money into unnecessary costs.
It's nice that you know what Hatch would do if he could. Can you also tell what I am thinking?
( ) <-
I'm no clairvoyant, but I'd guess you're the type to rapidly jump to conclusions with little or no information. I appreciate the link for 2000, but you might want to read Hatch from the record in 2001 (after the elections):
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act updated copyright law for the Internet, while striking a balance necessary to foster technological development and full deployment of the Internet. This law has set the groundwork for entertainment convergence on a single interactive platform where the consumer is king and can set his or her own schedule for news, information, entertainment, communication, and so on.
Well, Madam President, this is just a sampling of what we have achieved together. And it is a prelude to what we can do in the future.
To his credit, Hatch has in the past come out in favor of Napster (per the grandparent's argument that he's not necessarily pro-MPAA/RIAA). My point is that the subjugation of the Internet by those entities is only the latest battle for the ideals of the Internet.
Another war that has been going on periodically is over so-called 'obscenity', which means different things to different people and, when banned, is subject to wildly different interpretations, and it's this one that I'm referring to. I file Senator Hatch under the category "An enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend", because it wasn't that long ago that he was trying to wipe servers off the WWW with legislation. (1, 2)
You might want to change the people you listen to. Not only would the good senator turn the Internet into a fancy interactive Bible (with ads) given half a chance, he also backed most of the crap listed on the site, including the DMCA.
I started on the TRS-80. Microsoft doesn't look so bad from over here. That, and the spirit of competing against an entrenched monolith is a good chunk of what is driving Linux development today (the rest being supported financially by entrenched monoliths.) And I like Linux.
If there truly was no competition, it would suck. But if the playing field was truly even between several handfuls of OS developers we'd be swimming in a sea of incompatibilities. Our current situation may actually be the best possible.
How could this work, though? Well, first of all, TCP/IP has got to go. It doesn't have any authentication or security built in to it, and it's obvious that it's flawed.
I agree. It's a little worrisome that hackers were able to reek havoc by attacking 7 of the 13 servers that make the rest of the Internet work, for example. It seems to me that the first place to clean house would be to make every node in the network responsible for authenticating the packets that pass through it -- no more anonymous DOS attacks!
We need to redesign the Internet and the protocol it uses, not just to increase the address space as is being done in IP2, but to make hacking technically impossible. Then, legislation or no, we will finally all be safe.
Anytime legislation is passed involving the Internet, it usually does more harm than good. I read a bit about the next generation of IP and while it's not going to make hacking impossible it is going to make it infinitely traceable. So this legislation is redundant.
Theoretically, yes, he can be voted out. He is in the House of Representatives (which, along with the Senate, makes up our Legislative branch of government). While the Senate consists of two people from every state (50 states = 100 members), with each set of two people being voted upon by the entire state they represent, the House is made up of varying numbers from each state depending on the population of each state. The state is divided into districts, and each district has one member in the House that it elects.
So, if the people in Berman's district (a relatively tiny spot of California) don't have a problem with him, or the people who run against him aren't fantastic choices, he gets back in. He's been in for twenty years (no term limits on the House or the Senate) and inertia is on his side because of things like voter apathy and lack of knowledge about the issues. Then again, Berman could be a perfectly good representative for his electorate, given the locale.
It would be hypocritical for most people to call you a stupid European, given the fact that only around a third actually bother to vote on average here in the states (and hypocritical for me because I know next to nothing about the European system -- aren't you ruled by a queen or something?:)
Then again, it's not like he's really gonna have to worry about it. His #1 source of funding is TV/Movie/Music related, he's been in office since 1982, and while he's up for reelection he isn't facing any serious competition. How democratic.
I doubt (not to put words in his mouth) that it's a disappointment with the fact that pornography exists on the Internet, but rather that it is probably its most prominent feature. Personally speaking, at the time I started using the Internet I thought and hoped it would be a tool for great minds to communicate; a vessel delivering electronic democratization across the globe; an educational system unrivaled by any we've thus far been able to devise.
You can see why it eats at my soul, then, every time I get an e-mail with a subject like "INCREASE YOUR DICK SIZE 5++ INCHESW! (59482)". And I've only been on the network since 1992. If I was to guess at how a founder of the Internet might feel about the state of affairs today, I'd put my money on depression about its unlikely-to-be-realized potential.
He did sign off on the thing. Is this a case of misrepresenting his interest in the bill after the fact to try to get us to let him off the hook for supporting something this awful or does he regularly support legislation without reading it first?
What are we voting these guys in for, if not to actually support bills in our interest and discard bills that are not? I always thought it was essential to, like, examine the things to do your job. This doesn't sound like a situation where the bill has evolved from something good to something horrible... it's been horrible to begin with, so why did he back it?
There are a number of applications GPG is good for besides cryptography -- I use it to verify Linux kernels from kernel.org, for example -- but I know several people that think that once you figure out how to encrypt mail you're secure. It's probably good to keep in mind that there are a number of other points at which an attacker can read the mail (swapfile, keyboard logger, trojan, net sniffer, tempest, emp, and buffer overflows) even if the application itself is bugfree and Open Source, so remember that this is just supposed to be a component in a system of security.
This is not precisely what you asked for, but you can get there from here if you can't find anything better (it's apples and oranges in certain cases anyway because some laws are state and some federal). The Federal Sentencing Guideline Manual is what's used as a starting point to determine sentences for federal crimes. If you want a rough idea, you can compare offenses listed in Chapter 2 (the higher the offense level, the worse the punishment). Also, Appendix A appears to say which offense in the manual is appropriate by the section of U.S. Code violated. I'm oversimplifying, because there are special circumstances and such that affect the result, but between Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 Part A you can get an idea of how serious they think a crime should be.
It's a pretty neat system, but I'd argue with the results.
You've got to expect rampant piracy because the software has always been fairly unique, moderately expensive, and decent, ala AutoCAD, Windows operating systems, and Macromedia Flash. No doubt there's a lot of people out there who just wanted to dabble with the emulator but not to the point where they would, like, actually pay you for the thing. There are probably a number of those people in the Linux category because there are still a lot of people just dabbling with Linux at this point.
With the increase in computing power and the number of people running Linux on a daily basis on their workstations, I have little doubt that legitimate usage of your product will increase (all other things being equal). It's even an application that can act as a catalyst for the growth of other commercial applications on Linux.
Did you expect Pepper to be successful on Linux? Was it?
I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.
But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.
Wow, that's unfortunate. But I can't say I'm surprised -- the only commercial Linux software that seems to sell are things like 3D rendering and animation software -- packages that cost many thousands of dollars.
I am afraid that will be the future of the entire software industry. Eventually it will only be possible to sell huge software packages with lots of support; all the small apps will be open source in the end.
Is this a bad thing? While I too wouldn't have minded being a full-fledged programmer in time to get rich developing small apps such as file archival software or FOSSIL drivers, there is a great deal of support that comes from having every user of the open-source small apps be a beta tester and potentially a developer.
I think it's less likely that Pepper was too small of an application to sell it in this brave new world than it is that Linux users just didn't hear about it or care. I don't mean this in a bad way - it takes a while for decent advertising to work, but how many people are defecting from Mac to Linux?
That's part of what aggravates me about many commercial developers peddling their wares on Linux... they don't take the situation seriously enough going in and they badmouth the whole situation on the way out. It's still a niche market. There are something like 10% of the users of Windows (similar to Mac numbers, but with fewer workstations/desktops in the mix), and a bounty of applications each of which does about 80% of what one wants and each in a different way, but all without costing a cent. So, in general, commercial products come to us by companies that understand only the needs of Windows users, with less/no support, less stability, and higher price tags.
In his case, it sounds like he was one of the few that was being fairly reasonable about all of the above points, and I would have seriously thought about buying his product, but I've never heard of it. Now that I have, he's pulled out already. Sorry.
The tinier the circuitry gets, as a rule, the more dangerous an unexpected jolt of static electricity will be to it. Granted, a lot more consumer hardware has dissipators built in nowadays, but ICs in particular are at risk and we're using a lot more of them.
I've done a bit of OpenGL programming. I actually link against and run my programs using Mesa, that excellent library that is a 'workalike' but cannot actually be called an OpenGL implementation because they haven't paid to be tested and be able to use the mark.
So, my question is, why can't Sun do the same thing? Java is a registered trademark of theirs, correct? Why can't they hold anyone calling their implementation of Sun's language specification Java to the same standard that true implementations of OpenGL are being held to -- namely, that it will be fully compatible without the nonstandard extensions applied to it such as what has happened with Microsoft's JVM?
It's been a while since I've touched an AS/400 (and my last gig involving them was 99% programming under its System/36 emulator with COBOL), so please take what I say with a grain of salt.
If you uploaded a file to the AS/400 via FTP, I believe that it creates a physical file (PF). A physical file contains records and fields, but I can't remember if the physical file it created had one gigantic record with all the data in it or if it came up with some size for each record like 65000 bytes (anybody know?). If I intended to upload something I was going to use as a database (which I always did, because the 400 made for an expensive fileserver) I'd make sure the data was in a fixed width format before uploading, create the physical file on the AS/400 first (record layout), then upload the file 'over' the physical file. Downloading a physical file gets you the database back in fixed-width format as well, IIRC.
Also interesting is the way the AS/400 (library) filesystem organizes things (disregarding the Integrated File System because I don't want to make this post longer). 'Libraries' function pretty much as directories, except that you can't nest them and there is no root 'library'. So if I was to refer to file 'FIL' I could call it 'FIL' (in which case it would be pulled from my current library) or 'BLASTER/FIL' (library 'BLASTER', file 'FIL').
Physical files on an AS/400 also have things called 'members'. These are somewhat analogous to streams under NTFS (which nobody uses). Any physical file with data in it has at least one member. Members are used to allow you to store multiple sets of records in the same file -- query the first member in the file and you're working with one set of data; query the second member and you're working with another set entirely. I confess that I am not elite enough to come up with an example where I actually defined a physical file with more than one member in it outside of experimentation.
However, I can come up with a real-world example of where they are in common use. Source code on an AS/400 is stored in a special physical file called a 'Source Physical File' (type SRCPF). Let's say that I just wrote a program (TESTPGM) in RPG/400. This program is stored in a source physical file in my library (BLASTER/BLASTER) as a member (TESTPGM). Each record in the member is a line of source code, date the line was created/changed, and a sequence number. Fortunately, if I want to grab a program from this mess using FTP I can do a 'get BLASTER/BLASTER.TESTPGM', and uploading worked similarly.
My guess is that Microsoft would implement this with a little less rigidity. IBM's interpretation probably allows them to optimize things quite well, but does make some standard file operations tricky.
What happened to universal connectivity?
on
eSuds
·
· Score: 1
I kind of feel cheated... I thought by now everything electronic would have had Internet connectivity. It seemed ludicrous at the time when every tech rag was touting it, but given the amount of time we spend on computers hooked to the Internet it'd be nice to be able to have a computer schedule everything in the house (coffeepot on at 7:00am M-F, 9:00am Sat/Sun, alarm clock on five minutes before both) or pop up alerts (the load in the washing machine is finished; switch to dryer, pizza timer just rang, call on line 2, there's someone at the door). Being able to schedule things away from home would be kind of nice too (tell the PVR to record something you heard was going to be on at the office.)
I kind of feel like we've been in a technological slump in general the last few years...
If you had a subscription to TransGaming ever since they announced the plan, wouldn't it have already cost almost as much as buying Windows 95/98/ME/XP Home preinstalled with the computer?
Obviously, using Windows to play Windows games lacks the cool value of using Linux to play Windows games, and it really sucks to want to play a Windows game when you're using Linux to render/compile/download, so there is added utility to having WineX besides just running Windows stuff slowly (533Mhz AMD, so I can't complain)... but until the compatibility hits that critical mass I'm going to hold off.
Not my cup of tea
on
0wnz0red
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This story would probably appeal to the same sort of folks who read Wired religiously but never actually get into the Internet or computers in any meaningful way. I don't mean to knock his work, it's just that it's written more like a blog entry than a novella.
He's probably aiming at writing it in the style of the former for accessibility, but I prefer paragraphs you can sit and think about after having read them for a fuller effect as with Brian Herbert's Dune or Issac Asimov's Foundation (think about what they could have accomplished had they lived to see -- and write about -- the Internet!)
Great to hear it...
on
FreeBSD 4.6
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It looks like they took care of the handful of things that were causing me a lot of problems. Not only that, but I'm rather intrigued by this bit:
Selected network drivers now implement a semi-polling mode, which makes systems much more resilient to attacks and overloads.
A partial defense against IP DoS attacks?
Another thing that looks really cool is that reboot now takes a flag to tell it which kernel to reboot to. Isn't this cool? Granted, most of the time on my Linux system I'm at the console when I do a reboot, so I can just pick it from GRUB, but for remote reboots this could be quite handy. And they've eliminated the deal with the odd legit TCP SYN packet from crashing the box to boot. In a nutshell, it's time to start downloading...
Slashdot Mirror
However, I'm concerned with issues regarding security. We have all heard the old saw regarding closed source vs. open source: 'Security through obscurity doesn't do the job', however this begs the following question: when does handing the enemy a blueprint of the fortress make guarding the castle easier? With Open Source, I'm concerned that not only are hackers being issued a blueprint for an attack, but that they can also build flaws into the system before it is even implemented!
Irregardless of the benefits Open Source can bestow on the government, it brings with it a flaw of extraordinary magnitude. Witness the problems caused when the latest flaw is discovered in BIND or ftpd, or when a trojan is actually placed in the software people use to protect their system (tcpdump)! Maybe the Japanese are just trying to wrangle a better price out of Microsoft, but I think it's possible they don't want to be left unguarded a couple of months whence after picking the cheaper solution.
Open Source is a bargain that offers far more than what you pay for; however, its track record with security is spotty, and who do you sue when things go wrong?
Proprietary software. The bulk of the costs with anything supercomputing falls across the non-standardized but more reliable hardware, the service contracts necessary in a mission-critical environment, and the software that runs on the system. Having Linux cuts back on that, although no doubt some software tailored to work in this environment will still be pricier than its counterparts on our x86 hardware because of the smaller customer base and ability to pay.
Music CDs as well, for at least a year. You can read more from here. Obviously Europe at least buys more than copy protected DVD's and software.
Additionally, it offers unparalleled scalability in the line of Linux supercomputing. This is a system built to grow with a business, although your business better be pretty much grown already to back the check you'd need to fill out to buy it.
My conclusion: it's an excellent largish solution for academia seeking a more stable environment than can be achieved with Beowulf clustering and excellent pricewise solution for businesses seeking to expand without sinking a lot of money into unnecessary costs.
( ) <-
I'm no clairvoyant, but I'd guess you're the type to rapidly jump to conclusions with little or no information. I appreciate the link for 2000, but you might want to read Hatch from the record in 2001 (after the elections):
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act updated copyright law for the Internet, while striking a balance necessary to foster technological development and full deployment of the Internet. This law has set the groundwork for entertainment convergence on a single interactive platform where the consumer is king and can set his or her own schedule for news, information, entertainment, communication, and so on.
Well, Madam President, this is just a sampling of what we have achieved together. And it is a prelude to what we can do in the future.
-- INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY TECHNICAL AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2001
I found this on thomas.loc.gov, however I wasn't comfortable that the URL their search engine provided would would as a link. this works as well.
Another war that has been going on periodically is over so-called 'obscenity', which means different things to different people and, when banned, is subject to wildly different interpretations, and it's this one that I'm referring to. I file Senator Hatch under the category "An enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend", because it wasn't that long ago that he was trying to wipe servers off the WWW with legislation. (1, 2)
You might want to change the people you listen to. Not only would the good senator turn the Internet into a fancy interactive Bible (with ads) given half a chance, he also backed most of the crap listed on the site, including the DMCA.
If there truly was no competition, it would suck. But if the playing field was truly even between several handfuls of OS developers we'd be swimming in a sea of incompatibilities. Our current situation may actually be the best possible.
I agree. It's a little worrisome that hackers were able to reek havoc by attacking 7 of the 13 servers that make the rest of the Internet work, for example. It seems to me that the first place to clean house would be to make every node in the network responsible for authenticating the packets that pass through it -- no more anonymous DOS attacks!
We need to redesign the Internet and the protocol it uses, not just to increase the address space as is being done in IP2, but to make hacking technically impossible. Then, legislation or no, we will finally all be safe.
Anytime legislation is passed involving the Internet, it usually does more harm than good. I read a bit about the next generation of IP and while it's not going to make hacking impossible it is going to make it infinitely traceable. So this legislation is redundant.
So, if the people in Berman's district (a relatively tiny spot of California) don't have a problem with him, or the people who run against him aren't fantastic choices, he gets back in. He's been in for twenty years (no term limits on the House or the Senate) and inertia is on his side because of things like voter apathy and lack of knowledge about the issues. Then again, Berman could be a perfectly good representative for his electorate, given the locale.
It would be hypocritical for most people to call you a stupid European, given the fact that only around a third actually bother to vote on average here in the states (and hypocritical for me because I know next to nothing about the European system -- aren't you ruled by a queen or something? :)
Then again, it's not like he's really gonna have to worry about it. His #1 source of funding is TV/Movie/Music related, he's been in office since 1982, and while he's up for reelection he isn't facing any serious competition. How democratic.
You can see why it eats at my soul, then, every time I get an e-mail with a subject like "INCREASE YOUR DICK SIZE 5++ INCHESW! (59482)". And I've only been on the network since 1992. If I was to guess at how a founder of the Internet might feel about the state of affairs today, I'd put my money on depression about its unlikely-to-be-realized potential.
What are we voting these guys in for, if not to actually support bills in our interest and discard bills that are not? I always thought it was essential to, like, examine the things to do your job. This doesn't sound like a situation where the bill has evolved from something good to something horrible... it's been horrible to begin with, so why did he back it?
There are a number of applications GPG is good for besides cryptography -- I use it to verify Linux kernels from kernel.org, for example -- but I know several people that think that once you figure out how to encrypt mail you're secure. It's probably good to keep in mind that there are a number of other points at which an attacker can read the mail (swapfile, keyboard logger, trojan, net sniffer, tempest, emp, and buffer overflows) even if the application itself is bugfree and Open Source, so remember that this is just supposed to be a component in a system of security.
It's a pretty neat system, but I'd argue with the results.
With the increase in computing power and the number of people running Linux on a daily basis on their workstations, I have little doubt that legitimate usage of your product will increase (all other things being equal). It's even an application that can act as a catalyst for the growth of other commercial applications on Linux.
Is this a bad thing? While I too wouldn't have minded being a full-fledged programmer in time to get rich developing small apps such as file archival software or FOSSIL drivers, there is a great deal of support that comes from having every user of the open-source small apps be a beta tester and potentially a developer.
I think it's less likely that Pepper was too small of an application to sell it in this brave new world than it is that Linux users just didn't hear about it or care. I don't mean this in a bad way - it takes a while for decent advertising to work, but how many people are defecting from Mac to Linux?
That's part of what aggravates me about many commercial developers peddling their wares on Linux... they don't take the situation seriously enough going in and they badmouth the whole situation on the way out. It's still a niche market. There are something like 10% of the users of Windows (similar to Mac numbers, but with fewer workstations/desktops in the mix), and a bounty of applications each of which does about 80% of what one wants and each in a different way, but all without costing a cent. So, in general, commercial products come to us by companies that understand only the needs of Windows users, with less/no support, less stability, and higher price tags.
In his case, it sounds like he was one of the few that was being fairly reasonable about all of the above points, and I would have seriously thought about buying his product, but I've never heard of it. Now that I have, he's pulled out already. Sorry.
The tinier the circuitry gets, as a rule, the more dangerous an unexpected jolt of static electricity will be to it. Granted, a lot more consumer hardware has dissipators built in nowadays, but ICs in particular are at risk and we're using a lot more of them.
So, my question is, why can't Sun do the same thing? Java is a registered trademark of theirs, correct? Why can't they hold anyone calling their implementation of Sun's language specification Java to the same standard that true implementations of OpenGL are being held to -- namely, that it will be fully compatible without the nonstandard extensions applied to it such as what has happened with Microsoft's JVM?
I am the one to be, as you can plainly see, FP
If you uploaded a file to the AS/400 via FTP, I believe that it creates a physical file (PF). A physical file contains records and fields, but I can't remember if the physical file it created had one gigantic record with all the data in it or if it came up with some size for each record like 65000 bytes (anybody know?). If I intended to upload something I was going to use as a database (which I always did, because the 400 made for an expensive fileserver) I'd make sure the data was in a fixed width format before uploading, create the physical file on the AS/400 first (record layout), then upload the file 'over' the physical file. Downloading a physical file gets you the database back in fixed-width format as well, IIRC.
Also interesting is the way the AS/400 (library) filesystem organizes things (disregarding the Integrated File System because I don't want to make this post longer). 'Libraries' function pretty much as directories, except that you can't nest them and there is no root 'library'. So if I was to refer to file 'FIL' I could call it 'FIL' (in which case it would be pulled from my current library) or 'BLASTER/FIL' (library 'BLASTER', file 'FIL').
Physical files on an AS/400 also have things called 'members'. These are somewhat analogous to streams under NTFS (which nobody uses). Any physical file with data in it has at least one member. Members are used to allow you to store multiple sets of records in the same file -- query the first member in the file and you're working with one set of data; query the second member and you're working with another set entirely. I confess that I am not elite enough to come up with an example where I actually defined a physical file with more than one member in it outside of experimentation.
However, I can come up with a real-world example of where they are in common use. Source code on an AS/400 is stored in a special physical file called a 'Source Physical File' (type SRCPF). Let's say that I just wrote a program (TESTPGM) in RPG/400. This program is stored in a source physical file in my library (BLASTER/BLASTER) as a member (TESTPGM). Each record in the member is a line of source code, date the line was created/changed, and a sequence number. Fortunately, if I want to grab a program from this mess using FTP I can do a 'get BLASTER/BLASTER.TESTPGM', and uploading worked similarly.
My guess is that Microsoft would implement this with a little less rigidity. IBM's interpretation probably allows them to optimize things quite well, but does make some standard file operations tricky.
I kind of feel like we've been in a technological slump in general the last few years...
Obviously, using Windows to play Windows games lacks the cool value of using Linux to play Windows games, and it really sucks to want to play a Windows game when you're using Linux to render/compile/download, so there is added utility to having WineX besides just running Windows stuff slowly (533Mhz AMD, so I can't complain)... but until the compatibility hits that critical mass I'm going to hold off.
He's probably aiming at writing it in the style of the former for accessibility, but I prefer paragraphs you can sit and think about after having read them for a fuller effect as with Brian Herbert's Dune or Issac Asimov's Foundation (think about what they could have accomplished had they lived to see -- and write about -- the Internet!)
Selected network drivers now implement a semi-polling mode, which makes systems much more resilient to attacks and overloads.
A partial defense against IP DoS attacks?
Another thing that looks really cool is that reboot now takes a flag to tell it which kernel to reboot to. Isn't this cool? Granted, most of the time on my Linux system I'm at the console when I do a reboot, so I can just pick it from GRUB, but for remote reboots this could be quite handy. And they've eliminated the deal with the odd legit TCP SYN packet from crashing the box to boot. In a nutshell, it's time to start downloading...