both debian and redhat have their advantages. I run both redhat 9 and debian unstable at home and am highly satisfied with each of them.
<aol>me too!</aol> Choice is one of the greatest things OSS has given us. I love to embrace it.
personally, I have abandoned up2date/RHN in favor of apt-rpm.
I also use apt (or increasinly yum - which is the same kind of thing for those who haven't come across it). RedHat's base distro plus stuff from Fedora and the like and I'm set. It's worth pointing out that yum will be included in the next RedHat release (not sure about apt), with hooks into it from up2date!
they're different distributions with different purposes & I'd say each is the best in its class. kudos for a great 2nd quarter!
Seconded (to all of the above). There are [different] things I love and hate about each of RedHat and Debian, but they both do excellent jobs. I hope they both continue to be successful and improve.
In direct funds to other projects, I've no idea. They have given money to various projects though.
AFAIK, RH does not have much more than a dozen full-time people working on GPLed Linux stuff.
Well I can definitely think of around that many offhand. They're all pretty high profile too. Alan Cox (nuf said), Havoc Pennington (GNOME, freedesktop.org), Ingo Molnar (responsible for the new sceduler and pre-emptive kernel work), Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla), Jeff Law (GCC), Dave Jones (more kernel stuff), Rik van Riel (kernel VM work). All these people are high respected and have done a huge amount of good for OSS. I stopped there because I need to go and get some lunch, but I could have gone on. These are just names people on Slashdot will recognise immediately. There are many developers RedHat employ who work on embedded stuff, internationalisation work, etc, etc. Check out some of their mailing lists.
RedHat have also contributed by doing stuff like this. OK, that's their own PR, but google and you can find other stuff (help at LUGs, etc). They've helped out with legal stuff on some projects. They've defended Linux's name (hello SCO).
RH just commits a symbolic amount of ressources back to the community;
Rubbish. See the stuff above. They are a significant factor in pushing Linux forward. They continually suprise me (them being commercial does sometimes make me sceptical!) in the stuff they do solely for the community. I actually think that most of it ends up helping them out (even if it's just because people think better of them and so help them out in return). They continue to try and open their processes to the community (see their plans for the base distro.
the most of their R&D is in proprietary stuff.
Care to back up that statement?
The single company that makes the most value out of Linux is IBM.
Here I could possibly agree with you. IBM probably do have more people developing Linux related products or software (I know one of them too). I bet you more of those are proprietary than RedHat's though (as a proportion). No doubt IBM have done a great deal for Linux - but so have RedHat. Who's been the most important? I honestly couldn't say. Could Linux go on without either or both of them? Yes. Would it have acheived the same succes without either or both? Yes.
A final point I would like to make is that one thing RedHat have done very successfully (which is why they're now publishing these profits) is they've got the name and value of Linux out there. For this alone, we should appreciate them.
Is the source code for Red Hat's installers available?
Their installer is called anaconda and like all other packages in the distribution a source RPM is available (eg: pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS/ of your local redhat ftp mirror).
How about their build and dependency system/database?
Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the scripts they have to build the binary files they distribute, I don't think so. However, they will all be using Free tools. It's definitely feasible to create your own version of RedHat (if kickstart is not what you want to do). They even split the copyrighted images/text with trademarks out into files you can easily replace.
Dependency system - again, not sure what you mean unless you're referring to RPM which is absolutely Free (and used by many other people).
Most of this has been said already, but I'll repeat it to add my vote. However, I'll start with one biggie I've not seen elsewhere:
Toward the end of your course start to think about what you're doing afterwards (so this is probably off-topic as I certainly do not think you should be thinking about this in your first year - quite the opposite! But I do recommend you keep it in mind. Maybe you think you know what you want to do. I would advise you that it's very possible that can change. This may be as a result of changing priorities, changes in your character (college/uni is all about growth in your character, and if you're a typical geek this hopefully means change for the good - tho be proud of the good parts of geekdom!). It may be that your experience of your chosen subject (likely science I guess) doesn't match your expectations. Don't feel bad if you end up changing courses.
The main reason I bring this is up is to recommend that you think about your job and career before you leave and enter the big wide world with nasty amounts of debt (something getting worse here in the UK). Keep in mind that lots of tech companies will target your college so keep an eye out and stay informed during your time there. Something to think about as you progress. Don't leave it til you're panicing about finals.
In all you do, be informed. Sex, drugs, new social groups and events, course decisions, whatever. Ask other people for their experience - this is a very good first step!:) Ask different sources, a lot of things you may have to deal with for the first time are in my opinion a matter of choice based on what is important to you. You can only listen to what others say, weight that up against your ideals and morals, and make a decision for yourself.
As others have said, play fun but play safe. Carry a condom, even if it doesn't look like you're going to need it. If the miracle happens you do not want to be stuck without one. (This goes for girls too - don't rely on guys.) When you're out doing whatever (which is probably a lot - and more extreme than you're used to - in your first year) make sure there're people there to look out for you. Ideally ones you can trust.
Build good friendships! Some of my best mates are from uni. People there will hopefully be well educated - you will have important discussions with them. That's part of the age you are and the atmosphere of uni/college.
When it comes to the crunch - work hard. Especially for your finals. This is something I regret - I could have and should have got a better grade. For me the difference won't make much differnce long term but it is something I would change if I could. However, you do not need to go to every lecture, work every day, etc. Party like the rest of them. But if you get yourself into a bad situation where you know inside you need to work then do it! Then go and get horribly drunk afterwards.:) Again, work is not the most important thing long term from uni/college, but it is a reason for being there. So for the important occasions, bother with it - otherwise it's just an annoying distraction and do what you need to. Of course if you really enjoy your course or find it easy then great! But it's quite possible one of other of those things will not be true at times.
You will probably be more free than ever before, and quite possibly than you ever be again (real jobs suck)! Take full advantage of this. I can't stress it enough. If you have an opportunity to go and do some random trip - take it! Party hard (but safe) - there're things we do and experiment with in these years we don't or can't do later in life. I'm not saying you should go try every drug out there, but if you're considering that or other things now is the time. Drugs are a bad example, but an easy one... I mean other stuff too. You'll probably know what this is relevent to in your own life.
Another thing people have already said: live in dorms/uni owned buildings - it is so worth it. Often cheaper (don't know about in the US), but the social contact is like nothing else. Get into different societies. Test yourself with new things you wouldn't normally do. Sign up for loads of stuff in freshers week - you can always ditch stuff later.
I could go on but that'll do. Good luck and enjoy yourself!
They didn't mention...
shred -u [filename] ...in the article.
Really?
Several Linux file cleansing utilities exist. All but one can only be used to wipe files, rather than empty disk space. GNU shred (by Colin Plumb), ... As reported in shred man page "shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place". If this condition is not met, no secure deletion will be performed (with no error message!). ...
The important fact to note is that when empty space is wiped, slack space for all files remains intact. If file is wiped (at least using current version of GNU shred), the associated slack space is NOT wiped with it!
Mentioned, and also reasons given why it may not be as good as you think.
Besides, if you try and overwrite your free space by dd'ing from/dev/zero, won't the outfile top out at 2 gigs on ext2?
No. 2Gb is the maximum filesize on 32bit architectures - nothing to do with ext2. This limit can be got around anyway I believe. Besides, in this case you could just keep creating files until the partition was filled.
That's the trouble with encryption, and security in general. It takes
effort to be secure.
Absolutely. There are two huge problems. Firstly, it's easy to use things like PGP and set things up so that it's easily crackable. That requires knowledge (at all levels, from something as simple like making sure your private keys are only accessable by you, to the code using decent random generators).
Secondly, you have to care about being secure all the time. One lapse and you're wide open. This is an even bigger sticking point for the masses. Just the other day I was ranting about certain programs (I won't go into which ones here), and for each one of my main reasons for not using them was security or privacy concerns. The person I was trying to convince noticed that and basically asked why that was a big deal. This kind of took me by suprise, and so I did a quick poll of other reasonably computer literate friends (they would all know about PGP for example). Sure enough, most of them do not care if files on their computer can be read, so long as damage isn't done to the PC, etc, etc. I don't understand it, but it appears people are like that.
One random thought is that really email could do with a big overhaul. SMTP, email format, all kinds of aspects. Building encryption and authentication into that from the start would make things a hell of a lot cleaner and help make the above problems less of an issue. But sadly I think I'm dreaming that that will happen any time soon.
Just because they don't sell it, doesn't mean they don't make money on it. The browser is used as a tool to divert users to their services such as Expedia, MSN, Carpoint, and so on, which in turn can make money for the company.
Indeed, IE is a very useful thing for them for getting people onto MSN/Hotmail/etc.
Now before you flame MS, Real, Netscape and AOL all do the same thing - the product is free, but one has to do quite a great deal of cleanup after the installation.
Yes other companies are bad too. Real is a very good example - I spend ages turning off the notification, auto-updates, usage tracking, news/etc headlines, and other options after I'm silly enough to install it. Netscape (as in the browser/communicator suite) isn't anywhere near as bad though - about par for most applications (no I *don't* want that extra crap program, no I *don't* want icons on my desktop, etc). These things are normally easily disabled whilst doing a custom install and not having to fiddle afterwards. Although I have to admit I've not used it recently, so perhaps AOL's integration has got worse. Personally I do spend some time with whatever browser configuring things such as home page, display preferences, cookie settings, etc, but those are my likes and not nasty extras forced upon me. IE I probably spend least time on, but only because there're fewer options.
At least in case of IE, all I have to clean out are the favorites it creates, in Media and Links. Not that bad.
Not quite. You need to update it to the latest version to be secure against a large number of security holes allowing access to your filesystem. After the update it often likes to ask you about setting up mail accounts and sends you off to MSN whether you want to or not. Then there are the things you've mentioned. But you don't go far enough. You should disable the user tracking stuff too (hint: Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Enable Profile Assistant - use the ? tool to see exact what that does - nice eh). Disabling various things that tie in with IE is also a good idea (see recent security alert about unique identifier in windows media player that can be accessed via IE). Microsoft's integration is not a good thing. Finally I'll repeat my comment about availability of options - there're things I would like to change about IE but I can't (IE 6 and WMP tie-ins in particular). I'm more happy installing Real player/similar and spending some time to know that I've disabled all the "dodgy" stuff than I am using IE with the number of security alerts that appear for it.
Re:Linux Ports != Linux Games
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with most of your points, and what I've seen of OS X looks as fantastic as you say. I could do with a portable computer (mainly as something that takes up very little space in my bedroom) - I sold my old laptop earlier last year - but sadly I can't justify the cost right now. If I could, I'd buy one of Apple's offerings.
Where I disagree though, is that RedHat should do what you suggest. Whilst they are definitely the company in the best position to do so, it's not currently worth their while. IMO some of the other distros make better choices for people coming from windows who want nice looking graphical desktops which are easy to configure their system from. RedHat is keeping up, but it's not advancing on that. The reason for this is because RedHat needs to be profitable, and sales to desktop users aren't currently going to make that happen. Their profit comes from being good for business who will buy their support and advanced packages (remember RedHat doesn't just produce a Linux distribution). Whilst that's the case, they will continue to focus on providing what their paying customers (other companies) need.
Having said that, I would like to see what you suggest happen, and I think it would be a good thing. I just don't think RedHat are going to do it anytime soon. As the Linux desktop market becomes more viable then perhaps we'll see a shift towards this behaviour. I could see closer relationships with more hardware vendors being a logical start (rather than making desktops nicer).
The thing is though, as he says in the overview, these "nothing special" things save time. Sure, they're not necessary, and we live with C's little oddities without problem at the moment. But, if we don't have to worry about those then we can be more productive, and hopefully less coding mistakes are made.
It looks nice enough in my opinion (main thing I'm sceptical about is the documentation in HTML thing). Whether it'll turn out to be successful who knows - let's see.
Write a decent compatibility library, or tweak SDL for your own uses. Port to that.
This is a truely excellent idea. Another mod point for the parent of this please.:) There's one extra thing I think they'd need to become truely sucessful: being able to work with companies as games are being developed. Then they can consult on using SDL, making sure the game is easy to port, and most importantly: we can have more or less simultaneous releases on all platforms! Yes Loki do a grand job, but when they're releasing titles ages after the Windows originals it really sucks.
I'd like to agree with the people who have commented on how much Loki have done for Linux - even if things now take a turn for the worse we should be grateful. There're times when companies turn out good software much quicker than people working in their own time. And yes I'm taking about all the things they've OSd here (SDL, the mpeg stuff, etc), not the games themselves.
Finally, if you want to do something to help then there're three things to do: 1) put some money in Loki's bank account by buying some of their games, 2) hassle games companies to produce Linux versions of their games so that there's work for the Loki developers, and hopefully the company as a whole (in a situation like I described above), 3) go write more decent OS software to make GNU/Linux better and so attract more users.
Time to get drivers up to speed.
Linux: 0 min (had all my stuff)
Win2k: 25 min (nvidia, creative)
Time to get Quake3 running
Linux: 5 hours (still doesn't work right)
Win2k: 10 min
Are these two linked perhaps? I'm guessing you have a NVidia graphics card. The XFree `nv` driver does not support OpenGL. You need to download the binary `nvidia` drivers from NVidia themselves.
[RedHat] And even if it's not the most secure or stable Linux, it blows NT/2000 out of the water in security and stability.
I'd disagree with that. Linux tends to be as secure as the versions of the daemons you have running on it. Having done lots of installs of different distributions, if you ask to install a service it will be installed and run. I do RedHat installs and have only what I want running, I know people who do Debian installs and end up with things like discard, daytime, samba, etc running and not realising it. Does this mean Debian is less secure than RedHat? Of course not - it just means I know what things to select (or not) and how to check what's been installed and what's running... and my friend doesn't.
I suspect that part of RedHat's reputation comes from the fact that it's very easy to select an "install everything" option whcih does result in lots of unecessary services running. As you say yourself, it's one of the most popular distros - it's also one of the most well known. Hence you get lots of newbies who choose RedHat as their first choice and end up doing just that because they don't know any better. Recent versions of RedHat combat this in two ways. Firstly, there's up2date which is nice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, during the install you can setup a firewall.
All that aside, the real answer is not that one distribution is better than another, it's that new people to Linux should RTFM. The same is true with most OSes, programs, etc. There are a large number of people who have very little clue, and some of them try to use Linux when they really shouldn't.
I like the greater maturity of the 6.2 distro over RH 7.1
If it's for someone new to Linux, and it's for a desktop machine then I'd definitely recommend 7.1 over 6.2. Or 7.2 when that's out (a beta of it was released a little while ago). The 7 series has the features I noted above, much more recent versions of software (nice for playing around and getting a better idea of how good things are), better hardware support (2.4 kernel, XFree 4).
Re:notoriously buggy?
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Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
[snip lots of very valid problems in NS 4.x]
some of these gripes also carry over to Mozilla (eg integrated HTML editor)
To be fair, there is a reason for this. A lot of the code used for the editor is also used for text dialogues like the one I'm writing this comment in - in the browser itself, and in the mail/news client. Hence you can't compile them without the Composer part. If you don't like it, don't use it - but remember it's not bloat, you are using the functions it provides.
It is insane to continue shipping Linux distros as presently formulated. No disrespect to projects like Bastille, but ordinary users shouldn't have to do this stuff. Would someone (RedHat are you listening...) like to ship a hardened Linux. I'll buy it.
You've obviously not tried RedHat 7.1 then (I forget if it was in 7.0 or not). Very slick installer, and on the way it asks you what kind of firewall you want "secure, medium, none", and has an option for specifying rules by hand if you know what you're doing. Exactly what you want.:)
Of course, that's not the only thing that needs doing, and RedHat has come under fire in the past about services running by default etc. IME they take this very seriously and continue to improve all the time. Part of the problem is newbies who get RedHat, cos that's what they've heard of, do a full install (which yes, does install everything - including all those daemons), don't bother keeping up to date with patches (which is now very easy to do with RedHat's up2date agent), and then get rooted. Hopefully with the way things are going this won't be so much of a problem.
the problem is "my home page" could match "my home page" or it could match "my dog peed on a newspaper page outside our home".
Um, no it won't - the search suggestion given does exactly what you requested. If your you search for john doe it will return pages that contain the words john and doe in them. If you search for "john doe" it will return pages that contain that phase in itself. Google has search tips pages explaining how to structure your searches. The one on refining your search covers the above.
what use is a SMP box for gaming when there are no SMP games? i know, i know, Quake3Arena runs SMP, but only under WinNT/2K, iirc.
Well, seeing as Win9x doesn't support SMP for anything that's not too surprising. The real problem with SMP support in Quake3 is that it relies on the graphics card drivers having SMP support. Most don't - NVidia are supposed to, but I've heard it's buggy
That doesn't mean a SMP box is useless as a gaming machine though. I bought an ABit BP6 (dual socket 370 motherboard - stuck two celeron 333s in it and overclocked them to 550). Mainly because it was an excellent deal at the time. People have said to me before "there's no point you having a SMP box for a desktop/gaming machine". From my experience of using that machine I disagree. It was generally a lot more responsive than single CPU systems, and when I had a very CPU intensive task like a game running I could happily switch to another task and actually use my machine! Nowadays you can buy 1.5GHz chips which are so much more powerful than my dual celerons, but at the time it rocked. Now it makes an excellent desktop machine for things other than the latest games, or a great little server.
You miss my point. I am not all angry about anything or moaning or anything. I am saying a direct OSS imitation of.NET is unlikely because the very nature of Bazzar-style development and the OSS community are at odds with the.NET approach and what is required to make it happen technically.
Sorry, I did let myself get offtopic and forget we are supposed to be talking about this with respect to.NET - you were refered to other projects. You're right that OS development is typically disorganised (for lack of a better word) - but that's by no means the rule. I don't see why an OS implementation of.NET can't be successful (ignoring any silly tactics MS get up to). Whether this one will be or not we have yet to see... we don't know anything about it yet. Your point does need to be raised though... just because I think it can work, doesn't mean it'll be done in the right manner. If they're serious then they need to think long and hard about it.
<offtopic>
Your examples about simple projects are indeed good - by simple I mean relatively minor. A new window manager is neato, but its hardly on the scale of the Java program at Sun or the.NET program at MSFT.
The kernel? PostgreSQL? XFree86? Maybe not the same scale (depending how you look at it), but very important. In terms of programming languages, do we want Sun/Microsoft to be the steerers rather than develop something and submit it as a proper standard? Like, oh... C or C++ (GCC, glibc - quite useful those).
Since Mozilla has started, MS has redesigned IE from the ground up *twice* and develivered both versions to the desktop. The IE5 has been used for months, and the IE6 core is available as a "preview download" and ships with Windows XP in the fall.
Totally rewritten twice? I hadn't heard that - I'll take your word for it. Any idea why exactly they did that? IE 5.0 has also been around a couple of years now, not months. I tried the 6.0 preview - the only new thing I noticed it do was constantly piss me off when I tried to download movie files and it wanted to integrate them into my browser (and the "don't ask me again" option didn't work).
Yes, IE's renderer is good, it's faster running (in terms of GUI) and uses less memory than Mozilla. Yes also, they totally smashed Netscape and fair play to them on producing a better product. Since then I can't say I'm impressed. Mozilla has features I use everyday for browsing that IE doesn't have, and people working on huge numbers of new ideas. From IE 5.0 to 6.0 I've got tighter integration with Windows Media Player which I don't want, possibly Smart Tags which I won't go into, and a huge number of security fixes. MS won the browser war, Netscape sucked, but Mozilla seems to be developing a hell of a lot better than IE is.
Mozilla comes to mind, but its not done, nor is it timely, nor is it new or started from scratch.
Yep, it's not done (though I've been using it as my primary browser for ages now, as have my family who're non-techies), but I'd like to take you up on the other points. Mozilla is started from scratch. Netscape 5 started with the Netscape 4 codebase. They decided it was too rubbish and wrote Netscape 6/Mozilla from the ground up. Several core components have also been rewritten at various milestones, with performance improvements each time (and it's a credit to them that they can do this). What do you mean by new? OK, a browser (or rather an internet suite which is what Mozilla really is) isn't an innovative idea. They do have some innovative ideas on that theme though. There're loads of small features that I use in Mozilla and find incredibly useful that I don't get elsewhere.
Timely? OK, it's been a while in development, but it's a big project. They've never said "we shall be releasing 1.0 on this date" (Netscape have, but we're talking about open source projects here). If you look at their roadmap - when does it say 1.0 will be out? "When it's ready." You might chastise them for not fixing a date, but you can't say they're not timely when they haven't broken any promises.
Lets face it, with few exceptions, OSS and its development model is good at imitating existing stuff, that usually was developed commerically.
I disagree. I've seen far more (to my mind) innovative ideas in OS software than I have in programs commercial programs (with the notable exception of games). One example I put to you is the huge variety of window managers available. Yes, yes, some of them have things similar to Windows's taskbar, but not all. I've always liked Enlightenment, and its stated aim of becoming a desktop shell. I think they're doing something new there. If you read the documentation for Evas it's pretty damn interesting stuff. Saying OS projects can't be innovative is rubbish.
Bottom line: commerical software or paid-OSS has the advantage of a focus team of creative individuals working towards a common goal.
This is true. If you've got a paid up team that's working on something full time then you're going to get a good product sooner. That doesn't mean that OS projects can't be innovative or deliver on time. You make the distinction here where you didn't before... OS projects can be done by paid developers - it's not the OS part that's the "problem". It's more to do with the fact that OS coders are working in their own time for their own goals. We get the benefit from this - thank them, don't moan.
It is missing two important things:
* A standard package format (RPM or DEB)
Mmm, kind of - the important thing is that the same versions of files are installed in the same places... how they got there isn't so important. However, I agree - people distributing software for Linux don't want to have to package up binaries in several formats. Hence the frequent complaints from Debian users that $COMPANY has used RPM. This is certainly something I'd like to see addressed.
* A standard desktop framework (KDE or GNOME)[snip]
* Icons and menu items are automatically added to the desktop
Argh. Standard framework - yes. Plain choice of KDE/GNOME - no. There is a reason some people use different window managers - they like the different feels of them. Personally I use Enligtenment, and I like the idea behind E17 of being a desktop shell - not trying to be a big collection of packages like KDE/GNOME. However, just because it's valid for several to exist, it doesn't mean they should be devoid of standards - far from it.
Let me take the example above... icons on desktops (presumably shortcuts that launch applications). I really hate icons on my desktop - I use menus or launch apps instead. However, whichever camp you're in, the data is the same! So what we should be using is a standard way of storing this data, which your WM can turn into menus or desktop icons as your prefer. It's so stupid that KDE and GNOME create their own menus. I then have my various internet related apps split across the two menus - why!!. It's little things like this that need to be improved. Along with standard ways for apps to interact (drag and drop for example - yes I know people are working on this one).
That said, I look forward to the LSB being taken up and progressing to address these issues.
I read the article earlier on from the article on the Register. Very interesting I thought. DDoS attacks are more widespread than a lot of people would imagine and people do need to take them seriously. With regard to the Win2000 and WinXP versions of windows implementing the sockets standard: yes it is a good idea for them to do it. Poeple sticking to [good] standards is the right thing to do.
Just by having a broken version of sockets isn't going to stop people trojaning systems and using them in DDoS attacks. Other systems get cracked and used in DDoS attacks. A friend of mine had his box attacked for no apparent reason. The attack caused 30x the amount of traffic as the rest of the university (where he works) was using (their pipe is around 655mbit, recently upgraded from 34mbit - the old one got totally saturated by recent DDoS attacks that I know of). All the source IPs were spoofed, they've no idea who did it. Whilst his machine can be totally firewalled to the outside world, if this were done to an important machine it would be a real problem. People do have the ability to carry out spoofed attacks right now. If MS leave their sockets implemenation broken then sure it'll get worse, isn't the way to fix it.
So what is? Well obviously generally improving system security and the level of clue of the average user so that there aren't so many compromised hosts for these people to do what they like with will help. An important fight against the spoofed IPs issue though is making sure networks have firewalls and their routers are checking source IP addresses. ISPs shouldn't allow packets to leave their dialup networks if that packet does not claim to be coming from one of their IP addresses. It's been commented on before when the DDoS topic comes up - if everyone were doing this DDoS would be a lot more easy to tackle. --
I would like to see an Open Source console, one which can be cloned, much like the IBM PC could be cloned. This would lead to a vital market. It does not so much matter bout the software side of things - a games console does not really need an OS, the games can hit the metal.
Have you seen Indrema? Check out their Developer Network (looks like it's got much more interesting information than the main site). The L600 is due this year apparently so I'd expect more about this in the upcoming months.
Presumably the paying users are going to get some kind of service such as access to all new releases from the affiliated labels, and/or a guaranteed MP3 quality level.
However, with MP3 being what it is (no built in copy protection) how do they plan to stop people on the paying service from freely distributing these records to all the leechers on the free service (or other Napster type places)? I guess they could do some kind of CRC check or look at the id3 tags, but that's easy to get around. If they discontinue the free service, people will distribute to another network.
The music industry does not like MP3, they've been trying to find an alternative they can control. I don't understand why the labels have agreed to this move (by signing deals with Napster rather than sueing them) when it blatently doesn't give them control. Perhaps the people doing the agreeing aren't very informed.
I've been on QuakeNet IRC for a few years now and I can certainly say it's a proper community. Others have mentioned IRC however, so I'd like to concentrate on something tied to that community which is Barrysworld. Barrysworld is a UK based gaming service provider which has been the heart of UK online gaming for a few years now. They started off being run by a few people in their part-time and recently got proper funding and became a company.
Whilst I'd like to go on and on about them, it's late so I won't. However, I would like to draw your attention to recent happenings at Barrysworld. Basically, their second round of funding is due, and the backers have decided to pull out. Unless someone steps in before a week on Monday (Feb 5th), Barrysworld will close forever. Read the announcement and official press release.
This came as a huge shock to all of us who are part of that community. I think there was a future for Barrysworld as a company and it's a real shame that investors are too scared with all the recent.com failings to make that happen. People have worked very hard indeed to run Barrysworld and they've got to where they are by respecting their community and vice versa. When the news hit IRC noone could believe it. People are truely upset. Take a look at some of the comments on their forums.
The Register has a good article, and the BBC has one too.
It means more than the loss of a few game servers, a nice gaming dialup, and a website... Barrysworld also host the main UK servers for QuakeNet which is going to cause big problems when they go down (although I've been told there are plans to relocate those). Barryworld was the centre of the UK Quake3 scene without a doubt. No one else is in a position to take that on. The excellent leagues they ran will be no more. The community is broken. We're upset. If you've got a few million quid to spare, you know where to send it.
Therefore having a higher tarrif for higher priority traffic probably is the way to go. (Some scheme like a free number of packets per month might work too...)
This got me thinking... currently you pay for your phoneline, and some form of internet access. As the latter becomes more common place it may seem more natural to merge to two (and as has been pointed out elsewhere the telcos who provide the former are often envolved with the latter).
So, say you roll everything into the internet - what happens to people who only have modems whilst others are enjoying decent broad band access? Well, how about you have two "forms" of access. One could be some kind of line for specific tasks (here I'm thinking voice calls, possibly videoconferencing style things too - it could extend to streamed video and other things I can't think of at 3:40am). The other line you'd use for reading SlashDot, playing Quake3, downloading , and everything else - like you do with which form of internet access you currently have.
Don't know if I've explained that well, and I've certainly not thought about it much, but thought I'd toss it up in the air. Would need to be carefully worked out, but something like this would bring specific services (the ones I've mentioned above) to all home owners in a nice easy package without the need (necessarily) for a computer, and would allow ISPs/telcos to route/limit things like VoIP. Of course your "normal" internet access should be able to do those things too (righty so, the internet being open 'n' all), but this extra service could provide a fixed quality for a lower price (maybe - would need a lot of thinking through to see if it was feasible).
The NT/2K/Whistler product line will never be a standalone complete end-user system solution until MS provides the ability to create a bootable DOS floppy from within this product line. Just about every BIOS flashing utility (not just system BIOS, but peripheral card BIOSes and possibly even some CDRW device firmware) requires booting to a DOS prompt in order to run the flashing utility.
Indeed, this is a very good point. I wonder if this will prompt hardware manufacturers to produce a Linux flashing program. You could have a basic GNU/Linux system on a floppy with the flashing program. An image could be available for download from the manufacturers' website,ftp, etc. You would then rawrite/dd this to a floppy, boot off it, and point it to where the new BIOS is that you've downloaded to your harddrive.
The main problem I see with this is Linux support for NTFS - not much use if you can't read the partition with the BIOS image on. OK, NTFS read support is there (though does it work on Win2k/Whistler?) but hardware manufacturers can't rely on a method that may stop working if MS change NTFS again.
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<aol>me too!</aol> Choice is one of the greatest things OSS has given us. I love to embrace it.
I also use apt (or increasinly yum - which is the same kind of thing for those who haven't come across it). RedHat's base distro plus stuff from Fedora and the like and I'm set. It's worth pointing out that yum will be included in the next RedHat release (not sure about apt), with hooks into it from up2date!
Seconded (to all of the above). There are [different] things I love and hate about each of RedHat and Debian, but they both do excellent jobs. I hope they both continue to be successful and improve.
In direct funds to other projects, I've no idea. They have given money to various projects though.
Well I can definitely think of around that many offhand. They're all pretty high profile too. Alan Cox (nuf said), Havoc Pennington (GNOME, freedesktop.org), Ingo Molnar (responsible for the new sceduler and pre-emptive kernel work), Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla), Jeff Law (GCC), Dave Jones (more kernel stuff), Rik van Riel (kernel VM work). All these people are high respected and have done a huge amount of good for OSS. I stopped there because I need to go and get some lunch, but I could have gone on. These are just names people on Slashdot will recognise immediately. There are many developers RedHat employ who work on embedded stuff, internationalisation work, etc, etc. Check out some of their mailing lists.
RedHat have also contributed by doing stuff like this. OK, that's their own PR, but google and you can find other stuff (help at LUGs, etc). They've helped out with legal stuff on some projects. They've defended Linux's name (hello SCO).
Rubbish. See the stuff above. They are a significant factor in pushing Linux forward. They continually suprise me (them being commercial does sometimes make me sceptical!) in the stuff they do solely for the community. I actually think that most of it ends up helping them out (even if it's just because people think better of them and so help them out in return). They continue to try and open their processes to the community (see their plans for the base distro.
Care to back up that statement?
Here I could possibly agree with you. IBM probably do have more people developing Linux related products or software (I know one of them too). I bet you more of those are proprietary than RedHat's though (as a proportion). No doubt IBM have done a great deal for Linux - but so have RedHat. Who's been the most important? I honestly couldn't say. Could Linux go on without either or both of them? Yes. Would it have acheived the same succes without either or both? Yes.
A final point I would like to make is that one thing RedHat have done very successfully (which is why they're now publishing these profits) is they've got the name and value of Linux out there. For this alone, we should appreciate them.
Their installer is called anaconda and like all other packages in the distribution a source RPM is available (eg: pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS/ of your local redhat ftp mirror).
Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the scripts they have to build the binary files they distribute, I don't think so. However, they will all be using Free tools. It's definitely feasible to create your own version of RedHat (if kickstart is not what you want to do). They even split the copyrighted images/text with trademarks out into files you can easily replace.
Dependency system - again, not sure what you mean unless you're referring to RPM which is absolutely Free (and used by many other people).
It's worth pointing out that they are trying to open up their development process to the community. This will be a slow process but they are definitely trying to do the right thing.
Most of this has been said already, but I'll repeat it to add my vote. However, I'll start with one biggie I've not seen elsewhere:
Toward the end of your course start to think about what you're doing afterwards (so this is probably off-topic as I certainly do not think you should be thinking about this in your first year - quite the opposite! But I do recommend you keep it in mind. Maybe you think you know what you want to do. I would advise you that it's very possible that can change. This may be as a result of changing priorities, changes in your character (college/uni is all about growth in your character, and if you're a typical geek this hopefully means change for the good - tho be proud of the good parts of geekdom!). It may be that your experience of your chosen subject (likely science I guess) doesn't match your expectations. Don't feel bad if you end up changing courses.
The main reason I bring this is up is to recommend that you think about your job and career before you leave and enter the big wide world with nasty amounts of debt (something getting worse here in the UK). Keep in mind that lots of tech companies will target your college so keep an eye out and stay informed during your time there. Something to think about as you progress. Don't leave it til you're panicing about finals.
In all you do, be informed. Sex, drugs, new social groups and events, course decisions, whatever. Ask other people for their experience - this is a very good first step! :) Ask different sources, a lot of things you may have to deal with for the first time are in my opinion a matter of choice based on what is important to you. You can only listen to what others say, weight that up against your ideals and morals, and make a decision for yourself.
As others have said, play fun but play safe. Carry a condom, even if it doesn't look like you're going to need it. If the miracle happens you do not want to be stuck without one. (This goes for girls too - don't rely on guys.) When you're out doing whatever (which is probably a lot - and more extreme than you're used to - in your first year) make sure there're people there to look out for you. Ideally ones you can trust.
Build good friendships! Some of my best mates are from uni. People there will hopefully be well educated - you will have important discussions with them. That's part of the age you are and the atmosphere of uni/college.
When it comes to the crunch - work hard. Especially for your finals. This is something I regret - I could have and should have got a better grade. For me the difference won't make much differnce long term but it is something I would change if I could. However, you do not need to go to every lecture, work every day, etc. Party like the rest of them. But if you get yourself into a bad situation where you know inside you need to work then do it! Then go and get horribly drunk afterwards. :) Again, work is not the most important thing long term from uni/college, but it is a reason for being there. So for the important occasions, bother with it - otherwise it's just an annoying distraction and do what you need to. Of course if you really enjoy your course or find it easy then great! But it's quite possible one of other of those things will not be true at times.
You will probably be more free than ever before, and quite possibly than you ever be again (real jobs suck)! Take full advantage of this. I can't stress it enough. If you have an opportunity to go and do some random trip - take it! Party hard (but safe) - there're things we do and experiment with in these years we don't or can't do later in life. I'm not saying you should go try every drug out there, but if you're considering that or other things now is the time. Drugs are a bad example, but an easy one... I mean other stuff too. You'll probably know what this is relevent to in your own life.
Another thing people have already said: live in dorms/uni owned buildings - it is so worth it. Often cheaper (don't know about in the US), but the social contact is like nothing else. Get into different societies. Test yourself with new things you wouldn't normally do. Sign up for loads of stuff in freshers week - you can always ditch stuff later.
I could go on but that'll do. Good luck and enjoy yourself!
Really?
Mentioned, and also reasons given why it may not be as good as you think.
No. 2Gb is the maximum filesize on 32bit architectures - nothing to do with ext2. This limit can be got around anyway I believe. Besides, in this case you could just keep creating files until the partition was filled.
Absolutely. There are two huge problems. Firstly, it's easy to use things like PGP and set things up so that it's easily crackable. That requires knowledge (at all levels, from something as simple like making sure your private keys are only accessable by you, to the code using decent random generators).
Secondly, you have to care about being secure all the time. One lapse and you're wide open. This is an even bigger sticking point for the masses. Just the other day I was ranting about certain programs (I won't go into which ones here), and for each one of my main reasons for not using them was security or privacy concerns. The person I was trying to convince noticed that and basically asked why that was a big deal. This kind of took me by suprise, and so I did a quick poll of other reasonably computer literate friends (they would all know about PGP for example). Sure enough, most of them do not care if files on their computer can be read, so long as damage isn't done to the PC, etc, etc. I don't understand it, but it appears people are like that.
One random thought is that really email could do with a big overhaul. SMTP, email format, all kinds of aspects. Building encryption and authentication into that from the start would make things a hell of a lot cleaner and help make the above problems less of an issue. But sadly I think I'm dreaming that that will happen any time soon.
Indeed, IE is a very useful thing for them for getting people onto MSN/Hotmail/etc.
Yes other companies are bad too. Real is a very good example - I spend ages turning off the notification, auto-updates, usage tracking, news/etc headlines, and other options after I'm silly enough to install it. Netscape (as in the browser/communicator suite) isn't anywhere near as bad though - about par for most applications (no I *don't* want that extra crap program, no I *don't* want icons on my desktop, etc). These things are normally easily disabled whilst doing a custom install and not having to fiddle afterwards. Although I have to admit I've not used it recently, so perhaps AOL's integration has got worse. Personally I do spend some time with whatever browser configuring things such as home page, display preferences, cookie settings, etc, but those are my likes and not nasty extras forced upon me. IE I probably spend least time on, but only because there're fewer options.
Not quite. You need to update it to the latest version to be secure against a large number of security holes allowing access to your filesystem. After the update it often likes to ask you about setting up mail accounts and sends you off to MSN whether you want to or not. Then there are the things you've mentioned. But you don't go far enough. You should disable the user tracking stuff too (hint: Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Enable Profile Assistant - use the ? tool to see exact what that does - nice eh). Disabling various things that tie in with IE is also a good idea (see recent security alert about unique identifier in windows media player that can be accessed via IE). Microsoft's integration is not a good thing. Finally I'll repeat my comment about availability of options - there're things I would like to change about IE but I can't (IE 6 and WMP tie-ins in particular). I'm more happy installing Real player/similar and spending some time to know that I've disabled all the "dodgy" stuff than I am using IE with the number of security alerts that appear for it.
I agree with most of your points, and what I've seen of OS X looks as fantastic as you say. I could do with a portable computer (mainly as something that takes up very little space in my bedroom) - I sold my old laptop earlier last year - but sadly I can't justify the cost right now. If I could, I'd buy one of Apple's offerings.
Where I disagree though, is that RedHat should do what you suggest. Whilst they are definitely the company in the best position to do so, it's not currently worth their while. IMO some of the other distros make better choices for people coming from windows who want nice looking graphical desktops which are easy to configure their system from. RedHat is keeping up, but it's not advancing on that. The reason for this is because RedHat needs to be profitable, and sales to desktop users aren't currently going to make that happen. Their profit comes from being good for business who will buy their support and advanced packages (remember RedHat doesn't just produce a Linux distribution). Whilst that's the case, they will continue to focus on providing what their paying customers (other companies) need.
Having said that, I would like to see what you suggest happen, and I think it would be a good thing. I just don't think RedHat are going to do it anytime soon. As the Linux desktop market becomes more viable then perhaps we'll see a shift towards this behaviour. I could see closer relationships with more hardware vendors being a logical start (rather than making desktops nicer).
The thing is though, as he says in the overview, these "nothing special" things save time. Sure, they're not necessary, and we live with C's little oddities without problem at the moment. But, if we don't have to worry about those then we can be more productive, and hopefully less coding mistakes are made.
It looks nice enough in my opinion (main thing I'm sceptical about is the documentation in HTML thing). Whether it'll turn out to be successful who knows - let's see.
This is a truely excellent idea. Another mod point for the parent of this please. :) There's one extra thing I think they'd need to become truely sucessful: being able to work with companies as games are being developed. Then they can consult on using SDL, making sure the game is easy to port, and most importantly: we can have more or less simultaneous releases on all platforms! Yes Loki do a grand job, but when they're releasing titles ages after the Windows originals it really sucks.
I'd like to agree with the people who have commented on how much Loki have done for Linux - even if things now take a turn for the worse we should be grateful. There're times when companies turn out good software much quicker than people working in their own time. And yes I'm taking about all the things they've OSd here (SDL, the mpeg stuff, etc), not the games themselves.
Finally, if you want to do something to help then there're three things to do: 1) put some money in Loki's bank account by buying some of their games, 2) hassle games companies to produce Linux versions of their games so that there's work for the Loki developers, and hopefully the company as a whole (in a situation like I described above), 3) go write more decent OS software to make GNU/Linux better and so attract more users.
Are these two linked perhaps? I'm guessing you have a NVidia graphics card. The XFree `nv` driver does not support OpenGL. You need to download the binary `nvidia` drivers from NVidia themselves.
I'd disagree with that. Linux tends to be as secure as the versions of the daemons you have running on it. Having done lots of installs of different distributions, if you ask to install a service it will be installed and run. I do RedHat installs and have only what I want running, I know people who do Debian installs and end up with things like discard, daytime, samba, etc running and not realising it. Does this mean Debian is less secure than RedHat? Of course not - it just means I know what things to select (or not) and how to check what's been installed and what's running... and my friend doesn't.
I suspect that part of RedHat's reputation comes from the fact that it's very easy to select an "install everything" option whcih does result in lots of unecessary services running. As you say yourself, it's one of the most popular distros - it's also one of the most well known. Hence you get lots of newbies who choose RedHat as their first choice and end up doing just that because they don't know any better. Recent versions of RedHat combat this in two ways. Firstly, there's up2date which is nice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, during the install you can setup a firewall.
All that aside, the real answer is not that one distribution is better than another, it's that new people to Linux should RTFM. The same is true with most OSes, programs, etc. There are a large number of people who have very little clue, and some of them try to use Linux when they really shouldn't.
If it's for someone new to Linux, and it's for a desktop machine then I'd definitely recommend 7.1 over 6.2. Or 7.2 when that's out (a beta of it was released a little while ago). The 7 series has the features I noted above, much more recent versions of software (nice for playing around and getting a better idea of how good things are), better hardware support (2.4 kernel, XFree 4).
To be fair, there is a reason for this. A lot of the code used for the editor is also used for text dialogues like the one I'm writing this comment in - in the browser itself, and in the mail/news client. Hence you can't compile them without the Composer part. If you don't like it, don't use it - but remember it's not bloat, you are using the functions it provides.
You've obviously not tried RedHat 7.1 then (I forget if it was in 7.0 or not). Very slick installer, and on the way it asks you what kind of firewall you want "secure, medium, none", and has an option for specifying rules by hand if you know what you're doing. Exactly what you want. :)
Of course, that's not the only thing that needs doing, and RedHat has come under fire in the past about services running by default etc. IME they take this very seriously and continue to improve all the time. Part of the problem is newbies who get RedHat, cos that's what they've heard of, do a full install (which yes, does install everything - including all those daemons), don't bother keeping up to date with patches (which is now very easy to do with RedHat's up2date agent), and then get rooted. Hopefully with the way things are going this won't be so much of a problem.
Um, no it won't - the search suggestion given does exactly what you requested. If your you search for john doe it will return pages that contain the words john and doe in them. If you search for "john doe" it will return pages that contain that phase in itself. Google has search tips pages explaining how to structure your searches. The one on refining your search covers the above.
HTH
Well, seeing as Win9x doesn't support SMP for anything that's not too surprising. The real problem with SMP support in Quake3 is that it relies on the graphics card drivers having SMP support. Most don't - NVidia are supposed to, but I've heard it's buggy
That doesn't mean a SMP box is useless as a gaming machine though. I bought an ABit BP6 (dual socket 370 motherboard - stuck two celeron 333s in it and overclocked them to 550). Mainly because it was an excellent deal at the time. People have said to me before "there's no point you having a SMP box for a desktop/gaming machine". From my experience of using that machine I disagree. It was generally a lot more responsive than single CPU systems, and when I had a very CPU intensive task like a game running I could happily switch to another task and actually use my machine! Nowadays you can buy 1.5GHz chips which are so much more powerful than my dual celerons, but at the time it rocked. Now it makes an excellent desktop machine for things other than the latest games, or a great little server.
Sorry, I did let myself get offtopic and forget we are supposed to be talking about this with respect to .NET - you were refered to other projects. You're right that OS development is typically disorganised (for lack of a better word) - but that's by no means the rule. I don't see why an OS implementation of .NET can't be successful (ignoring any silly tactics MS get up to). Whether this one will be or not we have yet to see... we don't know anything about it yet. Your point does need to be raised though... just because I think it can work, doesn't mean it'll be done in the right manner. If they're serious then they need to think long and hard about it.
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The kernel? PostgreSQL? XFree86? Maybe not the same scale (depending how you look at it), but very important. In terms of programming languages, do we want Sun/Microsoft to be the steerers rather than develop something and submit it as a proper standard? Like, oh... C or C++ (GCC, glibc - quite useful those).
Totally rewritten twice? I hadn't heard that - I'll take your word for it. Any idea why exactly they did that? IE 5.0 has also been around a couple of years now, not months. I tried the 6.0 preview - the only new thing I noticed it do was constantly piss me off when I tried to download movie files and it wanted to integrate them into my browser (and the "don't ask me again" option didn't work).
Yes, IE's renderer is good, it's faster running (in terms of GUI) and uses less memory than Mozilla. Yes also, they totally smashed Netscape and fair play to them on producing a better product. Since then I can't say I'm impressed. Mozilla has features I use everyday for browsing that IE doesn't have, and people working on huge numbers of new ideas. From IE 5.0 to 6.0 I've got tighter integration with Windows Media Player which I don't want, possibly Smart Tags which I won't go into, and a huge number of security fixes. MS won the browser war, Netscape sucked, but Mozilla seems to be developing a hell of a lot better than IE is.
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Yep, it's not done (though I've been using it as my primary browser for ages now, as have my family who're non-techies), but I'd like to take you up on the other points. Mozilla is started from scratch. Netscape 5 started with the Netscape 4 codebase. They decided it was too rubbish and wrote Netscape 6/Mozilla from the ground up. Several core components have also been rewritten at various milestones, with performance improvements each time (and it's a credit to them that they can do this). What do you mean by new? OK, a browser (or rather an internet suite which is what Mozilla really is) isn't an innovative idea. They do have some innovative ideas on that theme though. There're loads of small features that I use in Mozilla and find incredibly useful that I don't get elsewhere.
Timely? OK, it's been a while in development, but it's a big project. They've never said "we shall be releasing 1.0 on this date" (Netscape have, but we're talking about open source projects here). If you look at their roadmap - when does it say 1.0 will be out? "When it's ready." You might chastise them for not fixing a date, but you can't say they're not timely when they haven't broken any promises.
I disagree. I've seen far more (to my mind) innovative ideas in OS software than I have in programs commercial programs (with the notable exception of games). One example I put to you is the huge variety of window managers available. Yes, yes, some of them have things similar to Windows's taskbar, but not all. I've always liked Enlightenment, and its stated aim of becoming a desktop shell. I think they're doing something new there. If you read the documentation for Evas it's pretty damn interesting stuff. Saying OS projects can't be innovative is rubbish.
This is true. If you've got a paid up team that's working on something full time then you're going to get a good product sooner. That doesn't mean that OS projects can't be innovative or deliver on time. You make the distinction here where you didn't before... OS projects can be done by paid developers - it's not the OS part that's the "problem". It's more to do with the fact that OS coders are working in their own time for their own goals. We get the benefit from this - thank them, don't moan.
Mmm, kind of - the important thing is that the same versions of files are installed in the same places... how they got there isn't so important. However, I agree - people distributing software for Linux don't want to have to package up binaries in several formats. Hence the frequent complaints from Debian users that $COMPANY has used RPM. This is certainly something I'd like to see addressed.
Argh. Standard framework - yes. Plain choice of KDE/GNOME - no. There is a reason some people use different window managers - they like the different feels of them. Personally I use Enligtenment, and I like the idea behind E17 of being a desktop shell - not trying to be a big collection of packages like KDE/GNOME. However, just because it's valid for several to exist, it doesn't mean they should be devoid of standards - far from it.
Let me take the example above... icons on desktops (presumably shortcuts that launch applications). I really hate icons on my desktop - I use menus or launch apps instead. However, whichever camp you're in, the data is the same! So what we should be using is a standard way of storing this data, which your WM can turn into menus or desktop icons as your prefer. It's so stupid that KDE and GNOME create their own menus. I then have my various internet related apps split across the two menus - why!!. It's little things like this that need to be improved. Along with standard ways for apps to interact (drag and drop for example - yes I know people are working on this one).
That said, I look forward to the LSB being taken up and progressing to address these issues.
I read the article earlier on from the article on the Register. Very interesting I thought. DDoS attacks are more widespread than a lot of people would imagine and people do need to take them seriously. With regard to the Win2000 and WinXP versions of windows implementing the sockets standard: yes it is a good idea for them to do it. Poeple sticking to [good] standards is the right thing to do.
Just by having a broken version of sockets isn't going to stop people trojaning systems and using them in DDoS attacks. Other systems get cracked and used in DDoS attacks. A friend of mine had his box attacked for no apparent reason. The attack caused 30x the amount of traffic as the rest of the university (where he works) was using (their pipe is around 655mbit, recently upgraded from 34mbit - the old one got totally saturated by recent DDoS attacks that I know of). All the source IPs were spoofed, they've no idea who did it. Whilst his machine can be totally firewalled to the outside world, if this were done to an important machine it would be a real problem. People do have the ability to carry out spoofed attacks right now. If MS leave their sockets implemenation broken then sure it'll get worse, isn't the way to fix it.
So what is? Well obviously generally improving system security and the level of clue of the average user so that there aren't so many compromised hosts for these people to do what they like with will help. An important fight against the spoofed IPs issue though is making sure networks have firewalls and their routers are checking source IP addresses. ISPs shouldn't allow packets to leave their dialup networks if that packet does not claim to be coming from one of their IP addresses. It's been commented on before when the DDoS topic comes up - if everyone were doing this DDoS would be a lot more easy to tackle.
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Have you seen Indrema? Check out their Developer Network (looks like it's got much more interesting information than the main site). The L600 is due this year apparently so I'd expect more about this in the upcoming months.
It has been mentioned on SlashDot a bit before too of course.
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Presumably the paying users are going to get some kind of service such as access to all new releases from the affiliated labels, and/or a guaranteed MP3 quality level.
However, with MP3 being what it is (no built in copy protection) how do they plan to stop people on the paying service from freely distributing these records to all the leechers on the free service (or other Napster type places)? I guess they could do some kind of CRC check or look at the id3 tags, but that's easy to get around. If they discontinue the free service, people will distribute to another network.
The music industry does not like MP3, they've been trying to find an alternative they can control. I don't understand why the labels have agreed to this move (by signing deals with Napster rather than sueing them) when it blatently doesn't give them control. Perhaps the people doing the agreeing aren't very informed.
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I've been on QuakeNet IRC for a few years now and I can certainly say it's a proper community. Others have mentioned IRC however, so I'd like to concentrate on something tied to that community which is Barrysworld. Barrysworld is a UK based gaming service provider which has been the heart of UK online gaming for a few years now. They started off being run by a few people in their part-time and recently got proper funding and became a company.
Whilst I'd like to go on and on about them, it's late so I won't. However, I would like to draw your attention to recent happenings at Barrysworld. Basically, their second round of funding is due, and the backers have decided to pull out. Unless someone steps in before a week on Monday (Feb 5th), Barrysworld will close forever. Read the announcement and official press release.
This came as a huge shock to all of us who are part of that community. I think there was a future for Barrysworld as a company and it's a real shame that investors are too scared with all the recent .com failings to make that happen. People have worked very hard indeed to run Barrysworld and they've got to where they are by respecting their community and vice versa. When the news hit IRC noone could believe it. People are truely upset. Take a look at some of the comments on their forums.
The Register has a good article, and the BBC has one too.
It means more than the loss of a few game servers, a nice gaming dialup, and a website... Barrysworld also host the main UK servers for QuakeNet which is going to cause big problems when they go down (although I've been told there are plans to relocate those). Barryworld was the centre of the UK Quake3 scene without a doubt. No one else is in a position to take that on. The excellent leagues they ran will be no more. The community is broken. We're upset. If you've got a few million quid to spare, you know where to send it.
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This got me thinking... currently you pay for your phoneline, and some form of internet access. As the latter becomes more common place it may seem more natural to merge to two (and as has been pointed out elsewhere the telcos who provide the former are often envolved with the latter).
So, say you roll everything into the internet - what happens to people who only have modems whilst others are enjoying decent broad band access? Well, how about you have two "forms" of access. One could be some kind of line for specific tasks (here I'm thinking voice calls, possibly videoconferencing style things too - it could extend to streamed video and other things I can't think of at 3:40am). The other line you'd use for reading SlashDot, playing Quake3, downloading , and everything else - like you do with which form of internet access you currently have.
Don't know if I've explained that well, and I've certainly not thought about it much, but thought I'd toss it up in the air. Would need to be carefully worked out, but something like this would bring specific services (the ones I've mentioned above) to all home owners in a nice easy package without the need (necessarily) for a computer, and would allow ISPs/telcos to route/limit things like VoIP. Of course your "normal" internet access should be able to do those things too (righty so, the internet being open 'n' all), but this extra service could provide a fixed quality for a lower price (maybe - would need a lot of thinking through to see if it was feasible).
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Indeed, this is a very good point. I wonder if this will prompt hardware manufacturers to produce a Linux flashing program. You could have a basic GNU/Linux system on a floppy with the flashing program. An image could be available for download from the manufacturers' website,ftp, etc. You would then rawrite/dd this to a floppy, boot off it, and point it to where the new BIOS is that you've downloaded to your harddrive.
The main problem I see with this is Linux support for NTFS - not much use if you can't read the partition with the BIOS image on. OK, NTFS read support is there (though does it work on Win2k/Whistler?) but hardware manufacturers can't rely on a method that may stop working if MS change NTFS again.
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