They have even released the specs on the THREE-D portions of their latest cards, thus guaranteeing that hardware accelerated OpenGL for Linux for the Matrox cards is just around the corner (with XFree86 4.0). NVidia and 3dfx won't do that, saying that keeping their 3d engine secret gives them a 'competitive advantage'. 3dfx cards work in OpenGL mode under Mesa only because of the proprietary GLIDE libraries, where 3dfx munificently allowed someone under non-disclosure to port GLIDE to Linux (as closed source).
His reviews of the K6-2 and K6-3 were not complimentary, especially slamming the slow floating point units (and noting that a Pentium 233 MMX did floating point faster than a K6-2/333). If he's on the take from AMD, it's a new phenomenon.
Interesting. When I was picking components to use in LHS computers, Tom's site was one of my most valuable resources. I found that the information there was generally pretty close to what I found myself when I evaluated things myself.
Not that anybody noticed, but he died back in June. When I was a kid one of our neighbors had a bunch of his stuff. All I remember is that it was as saccharine as Doris Day and about as filling (sheesh, anybody remember "Que Sera Sera"? If not, count your blessings!).
I suggest buying a copy of Bruce Schneier's book "Applied Cryptography". He also has a web site (http://www.counterpane.com ) which has a lot of information that has trickled up through the ranks since the time that he wrote his book.
You are referring to what are called "side-channel attacks" when you talk about bribing the folks who do the encoding, and you are correct, side-channel attacks are the only effective attack against modern cryptographic techniques. You are referring to what is called a "man in the middle attack" when you set yourself up as the intended recipient of the encoded message, but there are known techniques for dealing with "man in the middle attacks" (read Bruce's book).
A cryptographic algorithm itself does not rely upon obscurity. The data is not obscure, it is effectively randomized. It does rely upon secrecy, in particular, upon the secrecy of the key. But secrecy is a different thing from obscurity -- obscurity is hiding a needle in a haystack in hopes that nobody will find it, while secrecy is carrying the needle around with you in your wallet. The difference is that someone might accidentally stumble over the needle in the haystack, but the needle in your wallet is never going to be stumbled upon by any intruder. Of course, if you leave it sitting on top of your dresser (like most people do with their "secret" keys), it's no longer safe from somebody stealing it! But that's a different issue altogether.
Reality is that there exist encryption algorithms whose output could only be decrypted if a) you have the key, or b) you have the mythical quantum computers. With current technology, using a large key with a modern algorithm like TwoFish is pretty much unbreakable. Even with technology envisionable for the next twenty years it will remain unbreakable.
Public key (asymetrical) encryption is theoretically breakable via mathematical attacks, i.e., that a quantum leap in our knowledge of mathematics could render it worthless. That is because the two keys are mathematically related. There are algorithms available now that are stronger for a given key length than the popular NSA-backed RSA algorithm (see 'eliptical curve technology' for an example), but those simply use a different function to feed the primes into. One reason to use an asymetrical algorithm only to exchange the keys for a symetrical algorithm is that this reduces the amount of text transmitted via the algorithm and thus presumably gives less ability to break it.
In reality, when faced with a 1024-bit key and a modern encryption algorithm, you're not going to decrypt it without the key. But of course there's always side-channel attacks. If you have physical access to one end of the system to be cracked, for example, you can always just "look over the guy's shoulder" as he types in the password unlocking his keychain and reads the decrypted text. This could be via electronic surveillance literally looking over his shoulder, this could be via sneaking a virus into his system that records his keystrokes and records bitstreams coming to and from the hard drive and floppy drive into his encrption program, or it could be via rigging the encryption program itself so that it will EMAIL you the key. Or it could be buying the key from him. In any event, this is by far the most likely way of cracking a secure cryptographic system -- the algorithms themselves are pretty much uncrackable, but key management is always a problem.
And of course the strength of the encryption has nothing to do with the strength of the cryptographic system. For example, one version of MS CHAP encrypted the password and sent it to the server. But -- it did not encrypt a salt that had been sent with the server along with the password. Thus all a bogon had to do was sniff the encrypted password, use it himself, and voila, as far as NT was concerned, the bogon was you.
The Clipper algorithm, called "Skipjack", has now been released and cryptoanalyzed by the public cryptography community. Interestingly, it has been found to have possible exploits at 14 rounds, and has exactly 15 rounds. The question of whether the NSA has unknown technologies capable of breaking it at full strength is unanswerable, but suspicions are that the answer is "yes". But it currently cannot be broken via publically-available means.
Was it Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein who once said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? The point being that to the Neanderthal, an AM Radio would be magic -- a box that speaks! And similarly, any sufficiently advanced alien technology would be, to us, indistinguishable from magic.
Ironic that journalists have the same beliefs as the Neanderthal would if brought to the modern day:-}.
They all get registered with the same central registry (NSI, at the moment). It's just that these guys take care of all the paperwork, billing, etc then pay NSI a small amount of money to cover NSI's cost of maintaining the global 'whois' servers etc.
Still don't know if I'd trust them to be around two years from now when the domain expires and needs to be renewed...
Remember, if they make their own version of the kernel, they still have to release the source. If their version is good, people will fold their changes into the mainstream kernel. If not, who cares?
Thing is, SGI is a hardware company. The OS is a cost item for them in the first place, not a profit center. In that context, Linux makes a lot of sense -- think, a low cost OS that we can customize as we see fit? The thing about NT was that SGI was not allowed to customize it, thus SGI's NT boxes looked just like Compaq's NT boxes looked just like Dell's NT boxes..... SGI could not put their "stamp" on their NT boxes to make them special, and people avoided them in droves.
I think SGI will sell at LEAST as many Linux boxes within the next year as they sold NT boxes last year. Of course, considering the pitifully small number of NT boxes that they sold last year (38,000?), that won't be hard to do.
Linux + Corel = profit. Corel was losing money left and right until they latched onto Linux. Now they've had two straight quarters of profitability, and expect more.
on the heels of the SGI announcement, at least one "name" in the 3D Imaging world decided to hitch their wagon to SGI and Linux.
One thing the SGI announcement does is give Linux instant cachet as a 3D rendering platform. Now all we have to do is get XFree86 4.0 out the door so that the OS matches the hype:-(.
Interesting. Every time I use Word97 under Windows 98, I end up getting a "This program has committed an illegal operation" and end up having to reboot.
I've been an Applix Office user since 1996 (when it was first introduced), and have never had it crash.
Netscape crashes, but it crashes just as hard under Windows. That's why I erased it off my Win98 machine at home, and is why I'll erase it off my Linux/FreeBSD machine at home as soon as KDE 2.0 introduces Java and Javascript into the KDE browser (it's coming!). The KDE browser already kicks rear. It's not going to take much before I can kiss Netscape goodbye!
Having been both an interviewer and an interviewee in the past --
Often, answers to questions will wander off into all sorts of tangents before coming back to the point. Reading a wandering comment is no fun. Thus the need to edit a comment into something short and concise that grabs the reader's attention while being faithful to the general point.
I notice that the MS astro-turfers are out in force this evening, spreading their own brand of joy (not!).
Anyhow: NT *CAN* be remotely administered, but it is (of course) an additional product, and it doesn't work all that well due to the fact that NT wants you to reboot every time you sneeze. ("Your mouse has moved -- please reboot to make this change effective", heheh). Go look up SMS on Microsoft's site. It's a laugh. They are touting features like "capable of installing software onto remote machine" . Gosh, didn't know you needed extra software to do that with Microsoft software (Melissa, anybody?:-). If you want a real blast, go to msdn.microsoft.com and do a search on "SMS". Read the directions for how to install Office 2000 via SMS. Gosh, they figured out how to make their client machines run 'mirror' from a special-duty ftp site then run a script to install any new programs, what will they 'invent' next?!
If "commercial" Linux gets too popular, we'll move on, for sure -- to Debian! After all, the Debian folks have already proven that they're capable of being stubborn and contrary enough to keep the faith of the "early adopters", what with their stubborn insistence upon keeping "dpkg" when everybody else has moved to "rpm", their unwillingness to have a standard system configuration framework a'la "yast" or "linuxconf" or "coas", and their emphasis on making sure that their distribution is "pure" (i.e. untainted by any hint of proprietary software). And you know what? It's working. Debian already has the most reliable distribution, making Red Hat look like Bug Hat, and will swiftly become the refuge of all the hackers who feel that the "commercial" distributions are just too popular. Of course, some folks will also move to the *BSD's. FreeBSD in particular may be popular because a) all the popular Linux commercial software runs on it (so you can be "different" without sacrificing!), b) the "ports" collection is so huge that few people will miss any Linux-specific programs that are being created out there, and c) it has MUCH fewer bugs than the typical commercial Linux distribution these days. Especially in their "C" library -- glibc2 has proven to be a disaster of major proportions, with at least three incompatible versions (2.0.6, Red Hat's "2.0.7", and 2.1) out there, all of which are buggy in various areas, and all of which are HUGE. On the other hand, the FreeBSD kernel just isn't "fun" enough for the hard core hackers. It has too long a history and is too settled. All the neat research stuff, like logging filesystems, the "tree"-based file system, etc., is being done for Linux. Of course, eventually the hard-core WILL move on to something else... but the availability of non-commercial distributions like Debian will delay that for far longer than you may think.
One thing to remember is that the military did a lot of soul-searching after the Vietnam War. Not only did the draftee army perform poorly (it's estimated that less than 1/4th of the U.S. soldiers in any given firefight even fired their weapons!), but the reports of rampant drug use, atrocities such as at My Lai, and rampant fragging of officers who tried to rein in their troops shocked both civilians and those in the chain of command.
Today's military personnel are no angels by any means. The bureaucracy is still stifling, the officers are still stiff-necked and often more concerned about what high-paying consulting jobs they can land after retirement than about what they're supposed to be doing today, and the Marines are still jar-heads, no matter how much better shape the Corps is in today (grin). But I repeat that it's not the military that rattles sabres. Whenever we go on one of these foreign adventures, the Chiefs consistently tell the President that we shouldn't. About the only thing the military CAN be accused of is repeatedly saying that if we're going to go into a fight, then do it, don't just play at it with all of this "gradual escalation" BS. I.e., go in with overwhelming force, kick rear, and get it over with, don't drag things out because that'll just mean more people killed.
The U.S. Military sees its role as protecting freedoms against those who would take it from you. This is indoctrinated into new recruits starting at boot camp, and is built into the military culture on purpose, due to the constant fear of military coup that terrorizes other nations. The hope is that if any general got the bright idea to break out the tanks and march on the White House, the troops would refuse because it's incompatible with their indoctrination.
The GPL is about protecting our software freedoms. As such, it naturally appeals to military recruits who see their own role as being the protection of freedoms.
Yes, U.S. military power has been misused from time to time over the past hundred years. But don't forget that every one of these times, it is because the military was ordered to do so by civilian leaders (which is another area of military indoctrination -- following the orders of the civilian leadership, even when said civilians are total morons).
I realize this is a shock to the youngsters who think that the military is all about being war-mongers. In reality, it is the civilian leaders, not the military, who are the war-mongers. I have never met a single military man who was hankering to go to war. As trained killers they know that war is not about guts and glory, but rather about death and destruction. The words and works of William Tecumseh Sherman are required reading in war colleges. If only our civilian leadership had similar understanding...
Hiya. Does Sam still say he has 40 employees in that little 4 room office suite of his? Folks with glass houses should not throw stones (grin).
Anyhow: I have my own reservations about VA's management, but it's nothing to do with their professionalism and everything to do with where they're coming from (the Apple and Sun "proprietary" worlds rather than from the commodity PC industry). I'm not sure they understand what made Dell so successful (which is not their technology, but, rather, their advanced manufacturing systems, that can get you the machine you want custom-built, tested, and shipped within three days in most cases). But those are my own personal opinions, and are a far cry from the warrantless slander that you just engaged in.
I think if you read a prior posting of mine about the minefields of the personal computing industry and what VA has to do in order to be successful, you'll see that this isn't a matter of "get lots of money from an IPO and you'll be successful." VA is going to need salesmen golfing with CEO's and service teams showing up at customers' sites in order to be successful in the Big Leagues, and you don't put together that sort of organization in an afternoon. Putting together an IPO prior to getting all your ducks in a row is NOT a Good Thing!
Like it or not, folks like Penguin are always going to be small fry. I've been there, remember, albeit on a different coast -- no matter how good your reputation, when the time comes for the big 1,000 computer orders, someone like Penguin is NOT going to get those orders. They're going to get someone who can have field engineers actually come and fix any problems with the machines, they're not going to get machines from some guy with a web site and a 1-800 number. I wish Sam well, and think he is going to make a very good living from what he is doing -- his proximity to the Silicon Valley alone is enough to insure that, even if his machines weren't so solid (and they are, for the most part -- I have my reservations about some of his parts choices, but those are my own personal opinions about the best way rather than any flaw in his hardware). But let's not confuse the small frey with the big leagues that VA is trying for. VA is trying to build themselves into a company that the Fortune 500 is comfortable ordering a thousand computers at a time from. Will they succeed? I don't know. I think there's enough doubt that I wouldn't put any of my own money into a VA Linux IPO. But there's no denying that this is an order of magnitude different from doing onesies and twosies on a custom basis from a walk-up office suite in San Francisco.
Hasn't crashed in months? Haven't been doing much, have you?
Win98 crashes on me generally within minutes of opening up any real application such as Microsoft Office. Last time I had to edit a Word file I was 3/4ths done when I did something that the Office97 authors had not anticipated and Win98 crashed, and had to start over from scratch. Even WordPerfect isn't that stupid, at least WordPerfect saves a backup from time to time so that if the system crashes you can recover at least part of your work.
1) The hardware business is very low-margin compared to the software business. A software sale takes maybe $3 worth of components to ship (assuming you're ordering CD-ROMS, boxes, and manuals 10,000 at a time). The highest margin you'll see on a typical low-end server is 50%, and even that is pushing it in today's highly competitive server market.
2) Price pressures in the hardware business continue to increase, especially on the low-end, where companies such as EBIZ (with their "LinuxStore" subsidiary of their Windows business) have economies of scale that boggle the mind (due to the fact that they can leverage the volume of their Windows business to drive down the cost of their Linux boxes). This will further cut margins.
3) Competition from the "big names" is coming, and they are better organized, have higher volume, and have higher visibility within Fortune 500 companies. SGI, IBM, Dell, all are names that have announced they're going to be selling Linux hardware. Their outside sales people take IT directors out to lunch every day and are on a first name basis with CEO's. Can VA Linux Systems break into this chummy club, or are these folks going to place orders with the guys they golf with every Saturday, rather than with some virtual unknown that they've never heard of (VA Linux has a great name in the Linux community, but do you seriously think the CEO of Dow Chemical knows who VA Linux is? But I bet he knows who IBM is!).
Don't get me wrong, I wish VA well, but they're going to have to do some really nifty moves to pull off what they're trying to do. They could indeed become the "Next Dell", but in order to do so they're going to have to become as standardized and commoditized as Dell (Dell has engineers on staff, but every other computer company with close to their sales has ten times the engineering staff -- Dell mostly relies on slight modifications to stock "reference" designs created by partners such as Intel and Mylex). They're also going to have to spend a LOT more time thinking about supply chain and manufacturing issues. Dell keeps a tight rein on their supply chain and manufacturing and does limited outsourcing in that area (preferring to outsource design work instead). Dell's pride and joy is their "just in time" manufacturing and delivery system which gets you the computer that you want, with the selection of components that you want, shipped generally within three days of placing the order. Attaining that goal requires a manufacturing genius, not a GUI genius.
On the other hand, it IS a "set-aside". It appears that E*Trade is attempting to have as few "Red Hat hackers" as possible buy shares so that their own "fat cat" investors (i.e., those who make more than $x of trades with E*Trade per month) can get in on the early IPO stuff.
Red Hat is probably furiously trying to figure out how to get E*Trade's pie off their face at the moment...
Oh. I got the letter. But currently all I'm invested in is credit card debt from my last two job moves, so no IPO for me even if I were willing to lie on the questionaire:-(.
Slashdot Mirror
They have even released the specs on the THREE-D portions of their latest cards, thus guaranteeing that hardware accelerated OpenGL for Linux for the Matrox cards is just around the corner (with XFree86 4.0). NVidia and 3dfx won't do that, saying that keeping their 3d engine secret gives them a 'competitive advantage'. 3dfx cards work in OpenGL mode under Mesa only because of the proprietary GLIDE libraries, where 3dfx munificently allowed someone under non-disclosure to port GLIDE to Linux (as closed source).
-E
His reviews of the K6-2 and K6-3 were not complimentary, especially slamming the slow floating point units (and noting that a Pentium 233 MMX did floating point faster than a K6-2/333). If he's on the take from AMD, it's a new phenomenon.
_E
Interesting. When I was picking components to use in LHS computers, Tom's site was one of my most valuable resources. I found that the information there was generally pretty close to what I found myself when I evaluated things myself.
-E
Not that anybody noticed, but he died back in June. When I was a kid one of our neighbors had a bunch of his stuff. All I remember is that it was as saccharine as Doris Day and about as filling (sheesh, anybody remember "Que Sera Sera"? If not, count your blessings!).
-E
I suggest buying a copy of Bruce Schneier's book "Applied Cryptography". He also has a web site (http://www.counterpane.com ) which has a lot of information that has trickled up through the ranks since the time that he wrote his book.
You are referring to what are called "side-channel attacks" when you talk about bribing the folks who do the encoding, and you are correct, side-channel attacks are the only effective attack against modern cryptographic techniques. You are referring to what is called a "man in the middle attack" when you set yourself up as the intended recipient of the encoded message, but there are known techniques for dealing with "man in the middle attacks" (read Bruce's book).
A cryptographic algorithm itself does not rely upon obscurity. The data is not obscure, it is effectively randomized. It does rely upon secrecy, in particular, upon the secrecy of the key. But secrecy is a different thing from obscurity -- obscurity is hiding a needle in a haystack in hopes that nobody will find it, while secrecy is carrying the needle around with you in your wallet. The difference is that someone might accidentally stumble over the needle in the haystack, but the needle in your wallet is never going to be stumbled upon by any intruder. Of course, if you leave it sitting on top of your dresser (like most people do with their "secret" keys), it's no longer safe from somebody stealing it! But that's a different issue altogether.
-E
Reality is that there exist encryption algorithms whose output could only be decrypted if a) you have the key, or b) you have the mythical quantum computers. With current technology, using a large key with a modern algorithm like TwoFish is pretty much unbreakable. Even with technology envisionable for the next twenty years it will remain unbreakable.
Public key (asymetrical) encryption is theoretically breakable via mathematical attacks, i.e., that a quantum leap in our knowledge of mathematics could render it worthless. That is because the two keys are mathematically related. There are algorithms available now that are stronger for a given key length than the popular NSA-backed RSA algorithm (see 'eliptical curve technology' for an example), but those simply use a different function to feed the primes into. One reason to use an asymetrical algorithm only to exchange the keys for a symetrical algorithm is that this reduces the amount of text transmitted via the algorithm and thus presumably gives less ability to break it.
In reality, when faced with a 1024-bit key and a modern encryption algorithm, you're not going to decrypt it without the key. But of course there's always side-channel attacks. If you have physical access to one end of the system to be cracked, for example, you can always just "look over the guy's shoulder" as he types in the password unlocking his keychain and reads the decrypted text. This could be via electronic surveillance literally looking over his shoulder, this could be via sneaking a virus into his system that records his keystrokes and records bitstreams coming to and from the hard drive and floppy drive into his encrption program, or it could be via rigging the encryption program itself so that it will EMAIL you the key. Or it could be buying the key from him. In any event, this is by far the most likely way of cracking a secure cryptographic system -- the algorithms themselves are pretty much uncrackable, but key management is always a problem.
And of course the strength of the encryption has nothing to do with the strength of the cryptographic system. For example, one version of MS CHAP encrypted the password and sent it to the server. But -- it did not encrypt a salt that had been sent with the server along with the password. Thus all a bogon had to do was sniff the encrypted password, use it himself, and voila, as far as NT was concerned, the bogon was you.
-E
The Clipper algorithm, called "Skipjack", has now been released and cryptoanalyzed by the public cryptography community. Interestingly, it has been found to have possible exploits at 14 rounds, and has exactly 15 rounds. The question of whether the NSA has unknown technologies capable of breaking it at full strength is unanswerable, but suspicions are that the answer is "yes". But it currently cannot be broken via publically-available means.
-E
Was it Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein who once said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? The point being that to the Neanderthal, an AM Radio would be magic -- a box that speaks! And similarly, any sufficiently advanced alien technology would be, to us, indistinguishable from magic.
:-}.
Ironic that journalists have the same beliefs as the Neanderthal would if brought to the modern day
-E
They all get registered with the same central registry (NSI, at the moment). It's just that these guys take care of all the paperwork, billing, etc then pay NSI a small amount of money to cover NSI's cost of maintaining the global 'whois' servers etc.
Still don't know if I'd trust them to be around two years from now when the domain expires and needs to be renewed...
-E
Of course, they still spit, bite, and otherwise are ornery. Also very useful. Perfect mascot for Perl (grin).
Remember, if they make their own version of the kernel, they still have to release the source. If their version is good, people will fold their changes into the mainstream kernel. If not, who cares?
-E
Thing is, SGI is a hardware company. The OS is a cost item for them in the first place, not a profit center. In that context, Linux makes a lot of sense -- think, a low cost OS that we can customize as we see fit? The thing about NT was that SGI was not allowed to customize it, thus SGI's NT boxes looked just like Compaq's NT boxes looked just like Dell's NT boxes ..... SGI could not put their "stamp" on their NT boxes to make them special, and people avoided them in droves.
I think SGI will sell at LEAST as many Linux boxes within the next year as they sold NT boxes last year. Of course, considering the pitifully small number of NT boxes that they sold last year (38,000?), that won't be hard to do.
-E
Linux + Corel = profit. Corel was losing money left and right until they latched onto Linux. Now they've had two straight quarters of profitability, and expect more.
SGI may be hoping the same happens for them.
-E
on the heels of the SGI announcement, at least one "name" in the 3D Imaging world decided to hitch their wagon to SGI and Linux.
:-(.
One thing the SGI announcement does is give Linux instant cachet as a 3D rendering platform. Now all we have to do is get XFree86 4.0 out the door so that the OS matches the hype
-E
Interesting. Every time I use Word97 under Windows 98, I end up getting a "This program has committed an illegal operation" and end up having to reboot.
I've been an Applix Office user since 1996 (when it was first introduced), and have never had it crash.
Netscape crashes, but it crashes just as hard under Windows. That's why I erased it off my Win98 machine at home, and is why I'll erase it off my Linux/FreeBSD machine at home as soon as KDE 2.0 introduces Java and Javascript into the KDE browser (it's coming!). The KDE browser already kicks rear. It's not going to take much before I can kiss Netscape goodbye!
-E
Having been both an interviewer and an interviewee in the past --
Often, answers to questions will wander off into all sorts of tangents before coming back to the point. Reading a wandering comment is no fun. Thus the need to edit a comment into something short and concise that grabs the reader's attention while being faithful to the general point.
-E
I notice that the MS astro-turfers are out in force this evening, spreading their own brand of joy (not!).
:-). If you want a real blast, go to msdn.microsoft.com and do a search on "SMS". Read the directions for how to install Office 2000 via SMS. Gosh, they figured out how to make their client machines run 'mirror' from a special-duty ftp site then run a script to install any new programs, what will they 'invent' next?!
Anyhow: NT *CAN* be remotely administered, but it is (of course) an additional product, and it doesn't work all that well due to the fact that NT wants you to reboot every time you sneeze. ("Your mouse has moved -- please reboot to make this change effective", heheh). Go look up SMS on Microsoft's site. It's a laugh. They are touting features like "capable of installing software onto remote machine" . Gosh, didn't know you needed extra software to do that with Microsoft software (Melissa, anybody?
-E
If "commercial" Linux gets too popular, we'll move on, for sure -- to Debian! After all, the Debian folks have already proven that they're capable of being stubborn and contrary enough to keep the faith of the "early adopters", what with their stubborn insistence upon keeping "dpkg" when everybody else has moved to "rpm", their unwillingness to have a standard system configuration framework a'la "yast" or "linuxconf" or "coas", and their emphasis on making sure that their distribution is "pure" (i.e. untainted by any hint of proprietary software).
And you know what? It's working. Debian already has the most reliable distribution, making Red Hat look like Bug Hat, and will swiftly become the refuge of all the hackers who feel that the "commercial" distributions are just too popular.
Of course, some folks will also move to the *BSD's. FreeBSD in particular may be popular because a) all the popular Linux commercial software runs on it (so you can be "different" without sacrificing!), b) the "ports" collection is so huge that few people will miss any Linux-specific programs that are being created out there, and c) it has MUCH fewer bugs than the typical commercial Linux distribution these days. Especially in their "C" library -- glibc2 has proven to be a disaster of major proportions, with at least three incompatible versions (2.0.6, Red Hat's "2.0.7", and 2.1) out there, all of which are buggy in various areas, and all of which are HUGE. On the other hand, the FreeBSD kernel just isn't "fun" enough for the hard core hackers. It has too long a history and is too settled. All the neat research stuff, like logging filesystems, the "tree"-based file system, etc., is being done for Linux.
Of course, eventually the hard-core WILL move on to something else... but the availability of non-commercial distributions like Debian will delay that for far longer than you may think.
-E
One thing to remember is that the military did a lot of soul-searching after the Vietnam War. Not only did the draftee army perform poorly (it's estimated that less than 1/4th of the U.S. soldiers in any given firefight even fired their weapons!), but the reports of rampant drug use, atrocities such as at My Lai, and rampant fragging of officers who tried to rein in their troops shocked both civilians and those in the chain of command.
Today's military personnel are no angels by any means. The bureaucracy is still stifling, the officers are still stiff-necked and often more concerned about what high-paying consulting jobs they can land after retirement than about what they're supposed to be doing today, and the Marines are still jar-heads, no matter how much better shape the Corps is in today (grin). But I repeat that it's not the military that rattles sabres. Whenever we go on one of these foreign adventures, the Chiefs consistently tell the President that we shouldn't. About the only thing the military CAN be accused of is repeatedly saying that if we're going to go into a fight, then do it, don't just play at it with all of this "gradual escalation" BS. I.e., go in with overwhelming force, kick rear, and get it over with, don't drag things out because that'll just mean more people killed.
-E
The U.S. Military sees its role as protecting freedoms against those who would take it from you. This is indoctrinated into new recruits starting at boot camp, and is built into the military culture on purpose, due to the constant fear of military coup that terrorizes other nations. The hope is that if any general got the bright idea to break out the tanks and march on the White House, the troops would refuse because it's incompatible with their indoctrination.
The GPL is about protecting our software freedoms. As such, it naturally appeals to military recruits who see their own role as being the protection of freedoms.
Yes, U.S. military power has been misused from time to time over the past hundred years. But don't forget that every one of these times, it is because the military was ordered to do so by civilian leaders (which is another area of military indoctrination -- following the orders of the civilian leadership, even when said civilians are total morons).
I realize this is a shock to the youngsters who think that the military is all about being war-mongers. In reality, it is the civilian leaders, not the military, who are the war-mongers. I have never met a single military man who was hankering to go to war. As trained killers they know that war is not about guts and glory, but rather about death and destruction. The words and works of William Tecumseh Sherman are required reading in war colleges. If only our civilian leadership had similar understanding...
-E
Hiya. Does Sam still say he has 40 employees in that little 4 room office suite of his? Folks with glass houses should not throw stones (grin).
Anyhow: I have my own reservations about VA's management, but it's nothing to do with their professionalism and everything to do with where they're coming from (the Apple and Sun "proprietary" worlds rather than from the commodity PC industry). I'm not sure they understand what made Dell so successful (which is not their technology, but, rather, their advanced manufacturing systems, that can get you the machine you want custom-built, tested, and shipped within three days in most cases). But those are my own personal opinions, and are a far cry from the warrantless slander that you just engaged in.
I think if you read a prior posting of mine about the minefields of the personal computing industry and what VA has to do in order to be successful, you'll see that this isn't a matter of "get lots of money from an IPO and you'll be successful." VA is going to need salesmen golfing with CEO's and service teams showing up at customers' sites in order to be successful in the Big Leagues, and you don't put together that sort of organization in an afternoon. Putting together an IPO prior to getting all your ducks in a row is NOT a Good Thing!
Like it or not, folks like Penguin are always going to be small fry. I've been there, remember, albeit on a different coast -- no matter how good your reputation, when the time comes for the big 1,000 computer orders, someone like Penguin is NOT going to get those orders. They're going to get someone who can have field engineers actually come and fix any problems with the machines, they're not going to get machines from some guy with a web site and a 1-800 number.
I wish Sam well, and think he is going to make a very good living from what he is doing -- his proximity to the Silicon Valley alone is enough to insure that, even if his machines weren't so solid (and they are, for the most part -- I have my reservations about some of his parts choices, but those are my own personal opinions about the best way rather than any flaw in his hardware). But let's not confuse the small frey with the big leagues that VA is trying for. VA is trying to build themselves into a company that the Fortune 500 is comfortable ordering a thousand computers at a time from. Will they succeed? I don't know. I think there's enough doubt that I wouldn't put any of my own money into a VA Linux IPO. But there's no denying that this is an order of magnitude different from doing onesies and twosies on a custom basis from a walk-up office suite in San Francisco.
-E
Hasn't crashed in months? Haven't been doing much, have you?
Win98 crashes on me generally within minutes of opening up any real application such as Microsoft Office. Last time I had to edit a Word file I was 3/4ths done when I did something that the Office97 authors had not anticipated and Win98 crashed, and had to start over from scratch. Even WordPerfect isn't that stupid, at least WordPerfect saves a backup from time to time so that if the system crashes you can recover at least part of your work.
-E
Why I disagree with you:
1) The hardware business is very low-margin compared to the software business. A software sale takes maybe $3 worth of components to ship (assuming you're ordering CD-ROMS, boxes, and manuals 10,000 at a time). The highest margin you'll see on a typical low-end server is 50%, and even that is pushing it in today's highly competitive server market.
2) Price pressures in the hardware business continue to increase, especially on the low-end, where companies such as EBIZ (with their "LinuxStore" subsidiary of their Windows business) have economies of scale that boggle the mind (due to the fact that they can leverage the volume of their Windows business to drive down the cost of their Linux boxes). This will further cut margins.
3) Competition from the "big names" is coming, and they are better organized, have higher volume, and have higher visibility within Fortune 500 companies. SGI, IBM, Dell, all are names that have announced they're going to be selling Linux hardware. Their outside sales people take IT directors out to lunch every day and are on a first name basis with CEO's. Can VA Linux Systems break into this chummy club, or are these folks going to place orders with the guys they golf with every Saturday, rather than with some virtual unknown that they've never heard of (VA Linux has a great name in the Linux community, but do you seriously think the CEO of Dow Chemical knows who VA Linux is? But I bet he knows who IBM is!).
Don't get me wrong, I wish VA well, but they're going to have to do some really nifty moves to pull off what they're trying to do. They could indeed become the "Next Dell", but in order to do so they're going to have to become as standardized and commoditized as Dell (Dell has engineers on staff, but every other computer company with close to their sales has ten times the engineering staff -- Dell mostly relies on slight modifications to stock "reference" designs created by partners such as Intel and Mylex). They're also going to have to spend a LOT more time thinking about supply chain and manufacturing issues. Dell keeps a tight rein on their supply chain and manufacturing and does limited outsourcing in that area (preferring to outsource design work instead). Dell's pride and joy is their "just in time" manufacturing and delivery system which gets you the computer that you want, with the selection of components that you want, shipped generally within three days of placing the order. Attaining that goal requires a manufacturing genius, not a GUI genius.
-E
On the other hand, it IS a "set-aside". It appears that E*Trade is attempting to have as few "Red Hat hackers" as possible buy shares so that their own "fat cat" investors (i.e., those who make more than $x of trades with E*Trade per month) can get in on the early IPO stuff.
:-(.
Red Hat is probably furiously trying to figure out how to get E*Trade's pie off their face at the moment...
Oh. I got the letter. But currently all I'm invested in is credit card debt from my last two job moves, so no IPO for me even if I were willing to lie on the questionaire
-E
Another interesting link is the full two-volume Unix V7 manual, online at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/index.html
I was gratified to find it there, since my old (printed, Bell Labs original) V7 manuals are yellowed and cracking and on the verge of dying.
-E