Torvalds pointed out that basic operating system theory was more or less set by the late 1960s.
“IBM probably owned thousands of really ‘fundamental’ patents,” he explained. ”The fundamental stuff was done about half a century ago and has long, long since lost any patent protection.”
OpenSSH is an integrated subsystem of OpenBSD, which has a market penetration of at least 95%.
The OSX kernel is BSD-based, so by numbers of kernel installs BSD is probably ahead of Linux.
Consider the basic strlcpy() function, which Linux recently adopted... sometimes BSD gifts come in very small packages.
BSD probably dominates the IT industry just as profoundly as Linux, but not in a "monolithic" manner.
Apple will most likely exploit their software patents to shut this down.
Any attempt to host, support, or otherwise monetize this package should take place beyond our shores.
Somebody ought to patent this method of punishment!
Hooray! More life for old systems! And new!
on
CDE Open Sourced
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In its time, CDE was a reasonably fast desktop environment on a 75 MHz processor. CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
CDE also includes a Korn shell ('93 version) that Novell hacked with Motif extensions. Everybody should start bundling that, assuming that the licensing is reasonable. It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
Code density - the same code can often compile to fewer bytes on ARM. The 6502 influenced the ARM instruction set, yeilding many tricks, shortcuts, and optimizations. MIPS is a more "conventional" design, and suffers from (standard) RISC code density bloat.
Power - the original ARM dissipated 0.1 watts; MIPS has had to work to get down that low.
Transistor count - the original ARM had 30,000 transistors, and has not ramped up (as) significantly in core transistor count (disregarding new functional units).
Lack of 64-bit bloat - MIPS was forced to scale to supercomputer range, and swallowed legacy high-performance baggage which impedes embedded suitability. ARM has laser-focused on high-performance for small devices, and is just now introducing 64-bit.
Notice that the duration of each period that you have cited above grows increasingly short. These durations do not appear to be consistent with any obvious mathematical description, but Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns implies that we might very well see benefits from research on Higgs' phenomena within our (natural, non-extended) lifetimes.
I think Microsoft is coming close... very close... to a spontaneous shift towards open-source Win32. The butchery of Windows 8 is certainly moving things right along.
When a major corporate donor emerges, Microsoft's final phase has begun.
Today one of the most significant features of the ARM family is its low power consumption. But that hadn't been an initial goal, according to Furber. “We designed the ARM for an Acorn desktop product, where power isn't of primary importance. But it had to be cheap. Cheap meant it had to go in a plastic package, plastic packages have a fairly high thermal resistance, so we had to bring it in under 1W.”
The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board [we] plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
The 22nm technology is very good, and Intel can use it to "bless" specific ARM market segments and thereby control them.
Intel could feasibly make the fastest and most power-efficient ARM processors with a 22nm foundry, and could craft customer contracts in such a way as to prevent those CPUs from entering devices that compete with the x86 products.
If and when Intel develops an architecture that is competitive to ARM, it would then have established supply relationships into the targeted market segments.
And from an engineering standpoint, ARM could use extra wasted die space on x86 wafers.
Furthermore, in the Android world, who particularly cares about the cpu? Seen any "ARM Inside" logos lately? Intel felt the opposite side of this when they lost xbox to power.
I can't argue with Intel's success, but they make a lot of decisions that don't make financial sense to me.
I should RTFA, but let's just consider a few things...
The nerves that convey the 5 senses to the human brain don't appear to run at very high data rates - the challenge is correct interfacing and data encoding. Granted, we don't appear to have made much progress, but I would guess that within 10 years there will be a variety of solutions to this problem. I can see a redesign of Toxoplasma Gondii, for instance.
Once the 5 senses can be disconnected from the body at will, nutrition can be delivered without any concern for aesthetics. When this happens, we can abandon the "boutique" industries of grain-intensive livestock production, in the same way that we abandoned land-line phones. The actual perceived experience of nourishment will likely have improved aesthetics by the delivery of digital data, while the excesses and inefficiencies of the farming industry will be reduced, then removed.
At this point, we will all most likey have a giant Apple logo stamped on our foreheads. Isn't it wonderful having something pleasant to anticipate?
As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, if Moore's law holds for another 30 years, a machine intelligence a billion times more powerful than all of humanity can emerge. Ambitious projects to emulate more and more complex biological intelligence in silicon are well underway.
What would such a thing need us for?
What is even more disturbing is that the exponential trend identified by Moore can be found in completely unrelated economic figures, energy use figures, patent volume figures, and many more.
Humans seem destined to ride an exponential wave, and not to notice until it's too late.
And all the while, the Fermi paradox waits before us like a dark chasm.
SPICE was originally written in Fortran, if I remember correctly.
In '94, I ran across a public tarfile with the Fortran source, and tweaked "f2c" output which I was able to compile on HP-UX PA-RISC.
I also wrote an X-Windows frontend with Motif. It could pipe the "dot-matrix" output into the xmgr graphics package.
I think that I still have the source code somewhere. Mail me if you want it. http://rhadmin.org/
...and Itanium is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
I'm not sure what sort of Faustian Bargain HP made with Intel over Itanium, but it certainly had nothing to do with quality products or customer service.
IBM destroyed the mainframe clone market. While I don't know much about it, Amdahl and others had machines compatible with the 360 architecture that would run IBM's operating systems. IBM has been successful in even keeping the free Hercules emulator from legally running their OS.
Larry Ellison has never destroyed a major competetor - Sybase and Informix still stand.
Ellison also did not build Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, or Monsanto. Ellison can sleep at night, deservedly so.
Rather than FTP, use rsync.
Protect the data with PAR2.
I use a Calvary SATA cradle with RAID 1 (mirroring) between two identical drives. I bought the USB model for $40; it's fast enough to burn a DVD at full speed.
It does not appear that Java can be reimplemented because of U.S. software patents, but perhaps it could be forked.
As I understand it, Oracle(Sun) holds patents on Java. However, Oracle has placed the OpenJDK under (some version of) the GPL, granting free use of their patents to anyone working in that environment.
Apache chose not to work with the OpenJDK, but reimplemented the Java standard (in a "clean room" manner?) with the Dalvik virtual machine. Thus, the patent protection of the OpenJDK does not apply. IBM also has a JRE, and I assume that they have licensing on the Oracle patents for their implementation. Apache does not.
Google Android uses a portion of the Apache reimplementation, including Dalvik. Oracle would prefer that implementers of Android pay a license fee for Java Mobile Edition (ME). ME licensing for Android is most likely the reason that Apache has been spurned.
Should Android switch from Dalvik to OpenJDK, the problem goes away. This does not seem technically feasible, as Dalvik performs better with embedded (slower) systems. App store entries would also be in trouble without the LGPL.
Some argue that Oracle has a point in preserving Java purity, but, AFAIK, this is about ME licensing.
This population is refreshed with every generation.
Because of this, these behaviors were obviously involved in positive selection over a long period of time.
That positive selection must have involved reproduction.
That reproduction implies that these relationships where not exclusive.
There could be many other factors distorting natural human behavior in modern society - much more chemical exposure (BPA, pthalates, etc.), an unnatural social order (nuclear families, lack of tribal focus), and vastly increased isolation. It's a wonder that we're functional at all.
"The default is not to remove the (original) files because it is common to operate on device files like/dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed."
If you shred the disk device, rather than individual partitions or filesystem entries on the disk device, you will get the swap areas and other relevant metadata. In the above example,/dev/hda1 may be your swap, and/dev/hda2 may be your filesystem. If you shred/dev/hda, both will be overwritten. If you shred only/dev/hda2, the swap will be preserved (which is not what you want). Under no account would you mount/dev/hda2 and shred files within it and expect secure erasure.
The shred manpage has specific warnings about journaling filesystems and other cases where your erasure will not be as secure as you would like.
I had Red Hat on a 1u dual xeon manufactured by IBM. Minimal load, but the box would crash every 6-9 months. I never bothered to figure out why; just rebooted.
While I was migrating to a dual socket, quad core (also by IBM), my subscription died. I learned that someone at corporate HQ had terminated my RHN up2date license (among many others). I admit that I did try to get Red Hat support turned back on, but I couldn't even get their sales staff to send me a quote by my deadline.
Oracle, however, was quite timely and I was able to throw a few RPMS on my new RedHat install and get it patched. The licensing is nebulous, but the system has remained reliable. I have higher tolerance for a bit of downtime, however; ymmv.
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At least, in the opinion of Linux Torvalds.
OpenSSH is an integrated subsystem of OpenBSD, which has a market penetration of at least 95%. The OSX kernel is BSD-based, so by numbers of kernel installs BSD is probably ahead of Linux. Consider the basic strlcpy() function, which Linux recently adopted... sometimes BSD gifts come in very small packages. BSD probably dominates the IT industry just as profoundly as Linux, but not in a "monolithic" manner.
Apple will most likely exploit their software patents to shut this down. Any attempt to host, support, or otherwise monetize this package should take place beyond our shores.
The last I heard, this particular universal vaccine does not work very well when injected. The key is to introduce the antigen(s) below the tongue:
The normal flu vaccines are also available as a nasal aerosol.
Somebody ought to patent this method of punishment!
In its time, CDE was a reasonably fast desktop environment on a 75 MHz processor. CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
CDE also includes a Korn shell ('93 version) that Novell hacked with Motif extensions. Everybody should start bundling that, assuming that the licensing is reasonable. It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
How about you install cygwin, then do this:
cd ~
find . -type f -exec shred {} \;
Hopefully, that gets the "application data" directory and other hidden directories.
If you really want to toast everything, run a Linux live CD and shred the disk device.
Notice that the duration of each period that you have cited above grows increasingly short. These durations do not appear to be consistent with any obvious mathematical description, but Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns implies that we might very well see benefits from research on Higgs' phenomena within our (natural, non-extended) lifetimes.
I think Microsoft is coming close... very close... to a spontaneous shift towards open-source Win32. The butchery of Windows 8 is certainly moving things right along.
When a major corporate donor emerges, Microsoft's final phase has begun.
HP, Dell, Acer, and whoever else they can recruit should pledge $1 million for REACTOS development.
http://reactos.org
Windows 8: enough of this foolishness.
Otherwise, why would IBM be willing to unleash the Nazgul on the Hercules Emualtor?
Here is a rundown of the mainframe legal landscape.
x86 is the fox in the mainframe henhouse, just like it is with RISC. Just today we hear that Windows is the #1 server OS.
Aren't you glad that you aren't trying to sell a MIPS server right now?
See the source.
Today one of the most significant features of the ARM family is its low power consumption. But that hadn't been an initial goal, according to Furber. “We designed the ARM for an Acorn desktop product, where power isn't of primary importance. But it had to be cheap. Cheap meant it had to go in a plastic package, plastic packages have a fairly high thermal resistance, so we had to bring it in under 1W.”
The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board [we] plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
The 22nm technology is very good, and Intel can use it to "bless" specific ARM market segments and thereby control them.
Intel could feasibly make the fastest and most power-efficient ARM processors with a 22nm foundry, and could craft customer contracts in such a way as to prevent those CPUs from entering devices that compete with the x86 products.
If and when Intel develops an architecture that is competitive to ARM, it would then have established supply relationships into the targeted market segments.
And from an engineering standpoint, ARM could use extra wasted die space on x86 wafers.
Furthermore, in the Android world, who particularly cares about the cpu? Seen any "ARM Inside" logos lately? Intel felt the opposite side of this when they lost xbox to power.
I can't argue with Intel's success, but they make a lot of decisions that don't make financial sense to me.
I should RTFA, but let's just consider a few things...
The nerves that convey the 5 senses to the human brain don't appear to run at very high data rates - the challenge is correct interfacing and data encoding. Granted, we don't appear to have made much progress, but I would guess that within 10 years there will be a variety of solutions to this problem. I can see a redesign of Toxoplasma Gondii, for instance.
Once the 5 senses can be disconnected from the body at will, nutrition can be delivered without any concern for aesthetics. When this happens, we can abandon the "boutique" industries of grain-intensive livestock production, in the same way that we abandoned land-line phones. The actual perceived experience of nourishment will likely have improved aesthetics by the delivery of digital data, while the excesses and inefficiencies of the farming industry will be reduced, then removed.
At this point, we will all most likey have a giant Apple logo stamped on our foreheads. Isn't it wonderful having something pleasant to anticipate?
What would such a thing need us for?
What is even more disturbing is that the exponential trend identified by Moore can be found in completely unrelated economic figures, energy use figures, patent volume figures, and many more.
Humans seem destined to ride an exponential wave, and not to notice until it's too late.
And all the while, the Fermi paradox waits before us like a dark chasm.
SPICE was originally written in Fortran, if I remember correctly. In '94, I ran across a public tarfile with the Fortran source, and tweaked "f2c" output which I was able to compile on HP-UX PA-RISC. I also wrote an X-Windows frontend with Motif. It could pipe the "dot-matrix" output into the xmgr graphics package. I think that I still have the source code somewhere. Mail me if you want it. http://rhadmin.org/
...and Itanium is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
I'm not sure what sort of Faustian Bargain HP made with Intel over Itanium, but it certainly had nothing to do with quality products or customer service.
Anyone sane bolted for Linux long ago.
IBM destroyed the mainframe clone market. While I don't know much about it, Amdahl and others had machines compatible with the 360 architecture that would run IBM's operating systems. IBM has been successful in even keeping the free Hercules emulator from legally running their OS.
Larry Ellison has never destroyed a major competetor - Sybase and Informix still stand.
Ellison also did not build Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, or Monsanto. Ellison can sleep at night, deservedly so.
Rather than FTP, use rsync. Protect the data with PAR2. I use a Calvary SATA cradle with RAID 1 (mirroring) between two identical drives. I bought the USB model for $40; it's fast enough to burn a DVD at full speed.
It does not appear that Java can be reimplemented because of U.S. software patents, but perhaps it could be forked.
As I understand it, Oracle(Sun) holds patents on Java. However, Oracle has placed the OpenJDK under (some version of) the GPL, granting free use of their patents to anyone working in that environment.
Apache chose not to work with the OpenJDK, but reimplemented the Java standard (in a "clean room" manner?) with the Dalvik virtual machine. Thus, the patent protection of the OpenJDK does not apply. IBM also has a JRE, and I assume that they have licensing on the Oracle patents for their implementation. Apache does not.
Google Android uses a portion of the Apache reimplementation, including Dalvik. Oracle would prefer that implementers of Android pay a license fee for Java Mobile Edition (ME). ME licensing for Android is most likely the reason that Apache has been spurned.
Should Android switch from Dalvik to OpenJDK, the problem goes away. This does not seem technically feasible, as Dalvik performs better with embedded (slower) systems. App store entries would also be in trouble without the LGPL.
Some argue that Oracle has a point in preserving Java purity, but, AFAIK, this is about ME licensing.
There could be many other factors distorting natural human behavior in modern society - much more chemical exposure (BPA, pthalates, etc.), an unnatural social order (nuclear families, lack of tribal focus), and vastly increased isolation. It's a wonder that we're functional at all.
Metal shower heads are most likely safer due to the Oligodynamic effect.
This is addressed in the shred man page:
"The default is not to remove the (original) files because it is common to operate on device files like /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed."
If you shred the disk device, rather than individual partitions or filesystem entries on the disk device, you will get the swap areas and other relevant metadata. In the above example, /dev/hda1 may be your swap, and /dev/hda2 may be your filesystem. If you shred /dev/hda, both will be overwritten. If you shred only /dev/hda2, the swap will be preserved (which is not what you want). Under no account would you mount /dev/hda2 and shred files within it and expect secure erasure.
The shred manpage has specific warnings about journaling filesystems and other cases where your erasure will not be as secure as you would like.
I had Red Hat on a 1u dual xeon manufactured by IBM. Minimal load, but the box would crash every 6-9 months. I never bothered to figure out why; just rebooted.
While I was migrating to a dual socket, quad core (also by IBM), my subscription died. I learned that someone at corporate HQ had terminated my RHN up2date license (among many others). I admit that I did try to get Red Hat support turned back on, but I couldn't even get their sales staff to send me a quote by my deadline.
Oracle, however, was quite timely and I was able to throw a few RPMS on my new RedHat install and get it patched. The licensing is nebulous, but the system has remained reliable. I have higher tolerance for a bit of downtime, however; ymmv.