The latest atomic clock that NIST is currently building will have a frequency uncertainty of 1 x 10^(-15). Since this is many orders of magnitude more precise than necessary to detect the need for a leap second, I highly doubt this is a problem with the many atomic clocks around the world.
I got this value from the web site for the Time and Frequency division of NIST.
Why should I care what RMS likes or dislikes? I'm not saying this to be mean, since I think RMS is a very smart and dedicated guy. But I hope most people can form an opinion about a software project without needing to defer to RMS.
Do you build a version of Linux without a TCP stack for those end-users that don't need the network? Or remove every device driver from the kernel that is not used by each machine?
Honestly, the network transparency of X is almost never the source of any slowness or bottlenecks. It's almost always the quality of the video card driver you are using (many of which are pretty bad). I'm using a developmental snapshot of the next XFree86 release and got a substantial speedup on several of my machines due to improved drivers.
Given how much computers have changed since X was released, it is amazing they've kept this level of backward compatibility. As the Unix desktop matures, this will become more important than ever. Contrary to what vendors want you to believe, it's not necessary to upgrade everything every 6 months.
Editors are a very personal choice. Rarely is the choice made on which is "best". Familiarity is much more important when it comes to productivity with an editor. I'm sure there are tons of people perfectly happy with their choice of Nedit using the Motif widgets. Live and let live, etc.
This is a very interesting article. The thing that I found most interesting is that it demonstrates that the open source community is now in the driver's seat with respect to X development. That's a real change from the old days when the X consortium wouldn't give the XFree86 group the time of day.
I know alot of people are down on the XFree86 group these days, but it looks like they single handedly destroyed the old X consortium.
If all goes according to plan, the founders of Google will become instant billionaires. They would be stupid to sell to Microsoft (or anyone else). It must be nice to have that problem.
It's sad, but I agree with John Walker's analysis. The Internet is slowly turning into another channel of your TV set. And since 99.9% of the population doesn't care, I don't see anything changing this trend. Unfortunately, this will make true peer-to-peer services very difficult.
And he's right about powerful forces at work here. The government, major content providers, and software vendors want you to be a consumer. As long as there is a clear separation between client and services, it makes it easier to control. If they don't like something, they just shut down the central service, and it's gone. That's much more difficult in a true peer-to-peer environment.
Although governments will mention many reasons for using Linux or *BSD, I think one of the primary drivers will be security. I'm not talking about security in terms of viruses or trojans, but about national security.
Let's face it. Most governments don't trust each other as far as they can throw the Statue of Liberty. Even allied countries spy upon each other. So, you know it must scare the hell out of most countries to get a large part of their critical computer infrastructure from a company in foreign country. Especially when they can't even see the source code. I know that if Microsoft was located in Europe that the US government would worry about this. I have no idea whether anyone has ever tampered with Windows code for spying. But you know the paranoid security agencies in most countries will worry about this. And nothing that Microsoft can say will stop them from worrying about this. Even if Microsoft gave them the source code and they built their own Windows code, the compiler could be altered to secretly add malicious code. One of the Turing award lectures (I think it was Ken Thompson) talked about such bugging of compilers.
Of course, using a free operation system will bring other benefits. And from a public relations standpoint, those are the reasons they will admit publically. But let's face it. A lot of this comes down to national security concerns. Even if the various governments don't admit it.
I worked at a large web hosting company for many years, so I've dealt with these issues before. Here are my predications.
First, ISP's and web hosting companies are going to increasingly block ports. You can complain all you want about this, but it will definitely happen. 99.9% of the customers only care about SMTP, HTTP, FTP, SSH, TELNET, POP3, and IMAP. I may be missing a couple, but you get the idea. On a percentage basis, there is so little demand for the other ports that I suspect most of the larger ISP's already block a good deal of ports. They are just playing the odds. The only way you will be able to avoid this blocking is by co-locating a machine (which is what I will probably do). Even then, you may have to shop around.
Second, an increasing number of applications will just tunnel through another port. We already see this trend by companies (like www.no-ip.com) that sell the ability to reflect email back into port 25 from another port. This is useful if your ISP blocks outbound port 25 (both AOL and Earthlink do this). This leads to my third predication.
In the future, all traffic will be port 80. I'm being partly facetious with this predication. But it may not be as far-fetched as it seems at first glance.
Re:things slowly moving on, but still it's a monol
on
Xr Renamed to Cairo
·
· Score: 1
Switching to GPL would solve nothing. The problem is not people hoarding code, but lack of good developers. That has nothing to do with which license it uses. It is more important that the various X11 forks use the same license so that they can freely share code (in both directions).
That trend has changed a great deal in the last couple years. It is now very common for Universities to have "post-tenure reviews". Most of the tenured professors that I know hate it (obviously). But it has created a large amount of pressure for professors to stay active after tenure.
This is just a variation on the desire for states to tax the Internet. As more of our daily commerce and communication are conducted over the Internet, I suspect the desire of the states to tax and regulate it, will grow from a whisper to an unstoppable roar. Frankly, I'm surprised the federal government has held off the states this long. Regulation and taxation of the Internet will be a messy, bureaucratic turf fight for many years to come. Let's just hope they don't destroy it in the process.
Software companies can (and do) put lots of silly things in software licenses. Many of them may not hold up in court.
And yes, it may seem silly for someone to sue over losing virtual items in a game. But big game companies are big business. When they start taking peoples money, they assume a certain level of responsibility to their customers that cannot be "disclaimed away". I don't know whether this guy will win. But, it should cause game companies to take better care of their customer's data.
I wasn't implying that Microsoft created the idea. ACL's are not the only situation where Micrsoft has forged ahead when there is no simple solution (while the Unix developers are left behind arguing about the "right" solution). As a matter of fact, there is probably lot of things the Unix community could learn by taking a second look at the details of VMS, OS/360, and other "old" technology. In particular, I've always thought we had a lot more to learn from the mainframe world.
Let's face it. We've all known that the classical Unix security model (uid/gid) was not fine-grained enough for modern usage. But the problem has always been that the alternatives were complicated. That is the standard argument against ACL's. The reality is that this is a messy problem that doesn't have any elegant solutions. If there was a simple solution, someone would have found it by now. So, the best thing to do is to implement the current solution (ACL's) and make it work as smoothly as possible.
I'm definitely not a Microsoft fan. But one quality of Microsoft that I admire is that they are not afraid to move forward in situations where there are no clean solutions. By contrast, the Unix community often gets bogged down in such situation and is unable to make progress for long periods of time. I realize this is somewhat unfair, since Microsoft developers get paid to do this grunt work. But if Linux/*BSD wants to compete directly with Microsft (as many advocates claim), it must do the same.
When I was in grad school (for mathematics), I took a course on probability. On the first day, the Prof gave an assigment for half the class to create a list of 100 random numbers using dice (actually one die). The other half of the class was to create the same list (numbers between 1 and 6), but without using any dice. The Prof then put all the pages in a pile, and was able to perfectly separate the pile based on which method was used to create the page with only a quick glance at each page.
We later learned that he was able to separate them by looking at runs of numbers. For a list of 100 uniformly distributed numbers (between 1 and 6), there is a very high probability (90% or greater) that there will be a consecutive run where the same number occurs 5 or 6 times in a row. But the people that manually created their list will almost never add such a run, because it doesn't seem "random" enough.
What is really "random" is a very hard question that has occupied many brilliant people over the last century.
At my previous job, we were involved in several case studies that were paid for by Microsoft. They were called REJ reports (Rapid Economic Justification). Anyone who takes such reports at face value is a moron. Would anyone really expect Microsoft to fund a study that says their technology is inferior? I don't believe such reports really fool anyone. In my experience, they are primarily used by people who have already made up their minds, but need some technical "justification" for the executives.
But in this regard, I can't really blame Microsoft. Every big technical company has "white papers" and such on their web site that tell why their stuff is so much better than everyone elses. It's marketing material. So what? Everyone does it. It's just that Microsoft is damn good at it.
The linux community should not complain about how good Microsoft is at marketing, and just get better themselves!
At this point, the operational experience we have with Bayesian filters is only a few months. I believe as we get more experience with Bayesian filters, these type of issues will be pretty easy to fix.
One thing to remember is although Bayesian filters are pretty new to the anti-spam battle, Bayesian classification has been an active area of research for a long time. Many of these issues have been encountered and fixed in many other research projects using Bayesian classification. The problem is that much of the published work is highly mathematical. So, it will take some time for people with the necessary mathematical background to dig out the techniques we need. But, it will happen.
I believe the next version of Mozilla mail client (actually Mozilla Thunderbird) will sanitize the html of messages that are classified as junk. That will prevent such address verification schemes from working. If you remove the junk classification from a message, the html will start working again.
Over time, hopefully this will reduce the number of spam messages you get, since the spammers will have no verification that is was a real email address.
The reality is that these lawsuits are a necessary step along the way. With so much money involved, we all knew this day would come. You didn't expect companies that are losing sales to Linux to throw up their hands and say "Oh well"? If I was in their shoes, I would put up a fight as well. So, the author of the article is right. The quicker this is begun and over with, the Linux can take it to the next level. Besides, there is no such thing as bad publicity
The odd thing is that I didn't expect the lawsuit to come from SCO. I would have expected Microsoft (conspiracy theories aside) or maybe Sun. Also, I expected the initial lawsuits to be about patents and not copyrights. I actually think there are more lawsuits in the future for Linux. Since patents are more broadly defined, future lawsuits about patents could be even more dangerous than the SCO suit.
Most service providers that have anti-spam software will allow you to turn it off.
But I think the real advance will come when service providers give individualized Bayesian filter to each customer. That way, each customer can decide what is spam to them. Of course, that's a lot of data to keep track of when you have a lot of customers. But I think it is doable. The downside is that during the training process, the customer would need to use a web based client rather than your IMAP/POP client in order to mark messages as spam. But once they are satisfied with the training, they could use their regular mail client.
And when a customer is happy with their filter setup and "turn it on" so that the system will delete spam directed at them, the inbound mail server could do the spam check in real time and refuse to accept such spam. I know it sounds like a lot of processing, but I think it's possible.
Although I'm sure that is part of it, that is definitely not the whole story. I believe it is more the case that given the limited technology of the time, more design time was given to good game play and balance. Nowadays, a game can make tons of money with flashy graphics and terrible gameplay. I don't about you, but I've got plenty such games gathering dust on my shelves.
Of course, a game can have both. But it's not easy. The fanatical devotion that it requires to build such a game is usually not possible in a big company.
Creating a long running massively multiple game is next to impossible. One of the main problems is that it is difficult to design a game that will handle both the casual player as well as the hard core game (many of which essentially live online).
Every new game states in their FAQ that they are designing the game with the casual player in mind. But every time this is tried, it is a disaster. The hard core gamer quickly exhausts the content of the game and moves on. That is a problem, since the hard core gamers are a very profitable crowd to have as customers (frequently with multiple accounts).
Also, complaints from hard core gamers need to be taken with a grain of salt. They will bitch about the level grinding, but really enjoy it (in a weird, twisted way). My friends and I would complain every day about the latest problem with EQ. But we would then run home and grind the night away. If it wasn't challenging, we would have lost interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I got this value from the web site for the Time and Frequency division of NIST.
Why should I care what RMS likes or dislikes? I'm not saying this to be mean, since I think RMS is a very smart and dedicated guy. But I hope most people can form an opinion about a software project without needing to defer to RMS.
Do you build a version of Linux without a TCP stack for those end-users that don't need the network? Or remove every device driver from the kernel that is not used by each machine?
Honestly, the network transparency of X is almost never the source of any slowness or bottlenecks. It's almost always the quality of the video card driver you are using (many of which are pretty bad). I'm using a developmental snapshot of the next XFree86 release and got a substantial speedup on several of my machines due to improved drivers.
Given how much computers have changed since X was released, it is amazing they've kept this level of backward compatibility. As the Unix desktop matures, this will become more important than ever. Contrary to what vendors want you to believe, it's not necessary to upgrade everything every 6 months.
Editors are a very personal choice. Rarely is the choice made on which is "best". Familiarity is much more important when it comes to productivity with an editor. I'm sure there are tons of people perfectly happy with their choice of Nedit using the Motif widgets. Live and let live, etc.
This is a very interesting article. The thing that I found most interesting is that it demonstrates that the open source community is now in the driver's seat with respect to X development. That's a real change from the old days when the X consortium wouldn't give the XFree86 group the time of day.
I know alot of people are down on the XFree86 group these days, but it looks like they single handedly destroyed the old X consortium.
If all goes according to plan, the founders of Google will become instant billionaires. They would be stupid to sell to Microsoft (or anyone else). It must be nice to have that problem.
If Feynman was slow, the rest of us are moving backwards.
It's sad, but I agree with John Walker's analysis. The Internet is slowly turning into another channel of your TV set. And since 99.9% of the population doesn't care, I don't see anything changing this trend. Unfortunately, this will make true peer-to-peer services very difficult.
And he's right about powerful forces at work here. The government, major content providers, and software vendors want you to be a consumer. As long as there is a clear separation between client and services, it makes it easier to control. If they don't like something, they just shut down the central service, and it's gone. That's much more difficult in a true peer-to-peer environment.
Although governments will mention many reasons for using Linux or *BSD, I think one of the primary drivers will be security. I'm not talking about security in terms of viruses or trojans, but about national security.
Let's face it. Most governments don't trust each other as far as they can throw the Statue of Liberty. Even allied countries spy upon each other. So, you know it must scare the hell out of most countries to get a large part of their critical computer infrastructure from a company in foreign country. Especially when they can't even see the source code. I know that if Microsoft was located in Europe that the US government would worry about this. I have no idea whether anyone has ever tampered with Windows code for spying. But you know the paranoid security agencies in most countries will worry about this. And nothing that Microsoft can say will stop them from worrying about this. Even if Microsoft gave them the source code and they built their own Windows code, the compiler could be altered to secretly add malicious code. One of the Turing award lectures (I think it was Ken Thompson) talked about such bugging of compilers.
Of course, using a free operation system will bring other benefits. And from a public relations standpoint, those are the reasons they will admit publically. But let's face it. A lot of this comes down to national security concerns. Even if the various governments don't admit it.
I worked at a large web hosting company for many years, so I've dealt with these issues before. Here are my predications.
First, ISP's and web hosting companies are going to increasingly block ports. You can complain all you want about this, but it will definitely happen. 99.9% of the customers only care about SMTP, HTTP, FTP, SSH, TELNET, POP3, and IMAP. I may be missing a couple, but you get the idea. On a percentage basis, there is so little demand for the other ports that I suspect most of the larger ISP's already block a good deal of ports. They are just playing the odds. The only way you will be able to avoid this blocking is by co-locating a machine (which is what I will probably do). Even then, you may have to shop around.
Second, an increasing number of applications will just tunnel through another port. We already see this trend by companies (like www.no-ip.com) that sell the ability to reflect email back into port 25 from another port. This is useful if your ISP blocks outbound port 25 (both AOL and Earthlink do this). This leads to my third predication.
In the future, all traffic will be port 80. I'm being partly facetious with this predication. But it may not be as far-fetched as it seems at first glance.
Switching to GPL would solve nothing. The problem is not people hoarding code, but lack of good developers. That has nothing to do with which license it uses. It is more important that the various X11 forks use the same license so that they can freely share code (in both directions).
That trend has changed a great deal in the last couple years. It is now very common for Universities to have "post-tenure reviews". Most of the tenured professors that I know hate it (obviously). But it has created a large amount of pressure for professors to stay active after tenure.
This is just a variation on the desire for states to tax the Internet. As more of our daily commerce and communication are conducted over the Internet, I suspect the desire of the states to tax and regulate it, will grow from a whisper to an unstoppable roar. Frankly, I'm surprised the federal government has held off the states this long. Regulation and taxation of the Internet will be a messy, bureaucratic turf fight for many years to come. Let's just hope they don't destroy it in the process.
Software companies can (and do) put lots of silly things in software licenses. Many of them may not hold up in court.
And yes, it may seem silly for someone to sue over losing virtual items in a game. But big game companies are big business. When they start taking peoples money, they assume a certain level of responsibility to their customers that cannot be "disclaimed away". I don't know whether this guy will win. But, it should cause game companies to take better care of their customer's data.
I wasn't implying that Microsoft created the idea. ACL's are not the only situation where Micrsoft has forged ahead when there is no simple solution (while the Unix developers are left behind arguing about the "right" solution). As a matter of fact, there is probably lot of things the Unix community could learn by taking a second look at the details of VMS, OS/360, and other "old" technology. In particular, I've always thought we had a lot more to learn from the mainframe world.
Let's face it. We've all known that the classical Unix security model (uid/gid) was not fine-grained enough for modern usage. But the problem has always been that the alternatives were complicated. That is the standard argument against ACL's. The reality is that this is a messy problem that doesn't have any elegant solutions. If there was a simple solution, someone would have found it by now. So, the best thing to do is to implement the current solution (ACL's) and make it work as smoothly as possible.
I'm definitely not a Microsoft fan. But one quality of Microsoft that I admire is that they are not afraid to move forward in situations where there are no clean solutions. By contrast, the Unix community often gets bogged down in such situation and is unable to make progress for long periods of time. I realize this is somewhat unfair, since Microsoft developers get paid to do this grunt work. But if Linux/*BSD wants to compete directly with Microsft (as many advocates claim), it must do the same.
When I was in grad school (for mathematics), I took a course on probability. On the first day, the Prof gave an assigment for half the class to create a list of 100 random numbers using dice (actually one die). The other half of the class was to create the same list (numbers between 1 and 6), but without using any dice. The Prof then put all the pages in a pile, and was able to perfectly separate the pile based on which method was used to create the page with only a quick glance at each page.
We later learned that he was able to separate them by looking at runs of numbers. For a list of 100 uniformly distributed numbers (between 1 and 6), there is a very high probability (90% or greater) that there will be a consecutive run where the same number occurs 5 or 6 times in a row. But the people that manually created their list will almost never add such a run, because it doesn't seem "random" enough.
What is really "random" is a very hard question that has occupied many brilliant people over the last century.
At my previous job, we were involved in several case studies that were paid for by Microsoft. They were called REJ reports (Rapid Economic Justification). Anyone who takes such reports at face value is a moron. Would anyone really expect Microsoft to fund a study that says their technology is inferior? I don't believe such reports really fool anyone. In my experience, they are primarily used by people who have already made up their minds, but need some technical "justification" for the executives.
But in this regard, I can't really blame Microsoft. Every big technical company has "white papers" and such on their web site that tell why their stuff is so much better than everyone elses. It's marketing material. So what? Everyone does it. It's just that Microsoft is damn good at it.
The linux community should not complain about how good Microsoft is at marketing, and just get better themselves!
At this point, the operational experience we have with Bayesian filters is only a few months. I believe as we get more experience with Bayesian filters, these type of issues will be pretty easy to fix.
One thing to remember is although Bayesian filters are pretty new to the anti-spam battle, Bayesian classification has been an active area of research for a long time. Many of these issues have been encountered and fixed in many other research projects using Bayesian classification. The problem is that much of the published work is highly mathematical. So, it will take some time for people with the necessary mathematical background to dig out the techniques we need. But, it will happen.
I believe the next version of Mozilla mail client (actually Mozilla Thunderbird) will sanitize the html of messages that are classified as junk. That will prevent such address verification schemes from working. If you remove the junk classification from a message, the html will start working again.
Over time, hopefully this will reduce the number of spam messages you get, since the spammers will have no verification that is was a real email address.
The reality is that these lawsuits are a necessary step along the way. With so much money involved, we all knew this day would come. You didn't expect companies that are losing sales to Linux to throw up their hands and say "Oh well"? If I was in their shoes, I would put up a fight as well. So, the author of the article is right. The quicker this is begun and over with, the Linux can take it to the next level. Besides, there is no such thing as bad publicity
The odd thing is that I didn't expect the lawsuit to come from SCO. I would have expected Microsoft (conspiracy theories aside) or maybe Sun. Also, I expected the initial lawsuits to be about patents and not copyrights. I actually think there are more lawsuits in the future for Linux. Since patents are more broadly defined, future lawsuits about patents could be even more dangerous than the SCO suit.
Most service providers that have anti-spam software will allow you to turn it off.
But I think the real advance will come when service providers give individualized Bayesian filter to each customer. That way, each customer can decide what is spam to them. Of course, that's a lot of data to keep track of when you have a lot of customers. But I think it is doable. The downside is that during the training process, the customer would need to use a web based client rather than your IMAP/POP client in order to mark messages as spam. But once they are satisfied with the training, they could use their regular mail client.
And when a customer is happy with their filter setup and "turn it on" so that the system will delete spam directed at them, the inbound mail server could do the spam check in real time and refuse to accept such spam. I know it sounds like a lot of processing, but I think it's possible.
Although I'm sure that is part of it, that is definitely not the whole story. I believe it is more the case that given the limited technology of the time, more design time was given to good game play and balance. Nowadays, a game can make tons of money with flashy graphics and terrible gameplay. I don't about you, but I've got plenty such games gathering dust on my shelves.
Of course, a game can have both. But it's not easy. The fanatical devotion that it requires to build such a game is usually not possible in a big company.
Creating a long running massively multiple game is next to impossible. One of the main problems is that it is difficult to design a game that will handle both the casual player as well as the hard core game (many of which essentially live online).
Every new game states in their FAQ that they are designing the game with the casual player in mind. But every time this is tried, it is a disaster. The hard core gamer quickly exhausts the content of the game and moves on. That is a problem, since the hard core gamers are a very profitable crowd to have as customers (frequently with multiple accounts).
Also, complaints from hard core gamers need to be taken with a grain of salt. They will bitch about the level grinding, but really enjoy it (in a weird, twisted way). My friends and I would complain every day about the latest problem with EQ. But we would then run home and grind the night away. If it wasn't challenging, we would have lost interest.