IP QoS and more particularly CoS (class of service, most standard version being DiffServ) is coming - it's just requires policy-based management tools to make it much easier to set up.
SNA over (say) the DLSW protocol over IP with CoS is quite a good combination - you give low latency to the important traffic, particularly the network control stuff, using DiffServ priorities (using the TOS byte in the IP header).
However, most IP CoS products don't let you prioritise between different SNA traffic - e.g. printing and transactions get the same priority - so it's not quite there yet, though Cisco routers at least do let you do this.
Making the modem go faster is by far the biggest win, but I'm a QoS person so I'll address that issue.
Making routers actually pay attention to QoS bits, and defining specific queuing behavior for them.
This is happening, largely as a result of an IETF standards effort called DiffServ, which is defining building blocks from which the network behaviour required by a particular application can be provided, even in the presence of network congestion. Most routers today can interpret 8 priority levels (IP Precedence) of which 6 are user accessible - unfortunately they are not set up to do this because it is a configuration nightmare. The good news is that my company and others are going to take out the configuration hassle and make it easy for ISPs to configure their routers for DiffServ (we make network management software to configure this).
Most twitch games will want priority queuing, or at the least some guaranteed access to bandwidth for critical packets. Unfortunately this is exactly what Voice over IP (VoIP) requires, which is probably much more lucrative for the ISPs since it can be charged by the minute... Dedicated gaming networks may well be able to set priorities that make sense for gamers, though.
A "realtime" packet should never be added to a queue if there is another one from the same connection that is already in the queue. Multiple queuings just add latency that can't be controlled at the application level. Jump-to-head-of-queue would sure be nice, but that's probably too much to ask for in the name of "games".
This is like many multimedia applications, e.g. VoIP and videoconferencing, where if a packet is delayed it is no use so it might as well be dropped. One approach to this is for the application to become adaptive (or maybe the IP stack or linmodem code, given some hints from the application), i.e. to not send packets so frequently in times of congestion. At least then the offered load to the network is reduced, which is important in the non-DiffServ case.
The other approach is to use DiffServ to implement a low latency service, in which every suitably marked packet goes right to the top priority queue. Through careful limiting of what traffic gets into the network with that packet marking, the idea is that the top priority queue is almost always empty so low latency packets go right through every router with minimal queuing delay.
It's worth noting that if the queuing is working properly, the 2nd packet should never run into the first packet anyway, so it's probably easier just to throw DiffServ at the problem. This also avoids the need to keep track of things on a per-flow basis - when there are 1000s of real-time sessions going through a larger router, you really don't want to have to keep track of sessions (aka flows in QoS speak).
The Linux host sending the packets could implement the 'dump earlier packet' behaviour in its queuing mechanisms, but it would have to be per-flow, and the same arguments apply - it's better to reduce host, modem and router latency so that the packets go right through and have no chance to bump into earlier packets.
If you're interested, the Linux-DiffServ project is based on the 2.2 kernel - they've done a pretty flexible and complete implementation. More general links on QoS including DiffServ can be found here, under the Links button.
DiffServ technology is coming, and in fact exists in basic form in every Cisco router. The big issue for gaming is getting ISPs to implement DiffServ, and to charge for it in a sensible way so it's accessible to gamers.
Quite a few research and production-quality versions of Linux have addressed the issue of hard real time and more importantly QoS-oriented soft real time CPU scheduling. This is normally intended for multimedia but should also help a lot with games by guaranteeing a certain amount of CPU every N milliseconds. See Linux-SRT at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dmi1000/linux-srt/index.h tml - this has links at the bottom to QLinux, which has similar features but also covers disk and network scheduling (i.e. packet queuing). Also linked are RTLinux, which in 3.0 I think may have something similar, and KURT, another RT Linux.
One very encouraging thing about the two university projects is that they are doing cutting edge research on Linux rather than inventing a unique operating system - while the latter is sometimes necessary, Linux is often as good a testbed as any, and it makes it much easier to turn the research into open source that is of product quality.
The Internet was rather well designed if you take account of the fact that it was initially intended only to share data and provide remote access between academic institutions, and not many of them at that. Now it has grown beyond all imagining, yet it still works using essentially the same protocols - a mark of good design IMO.
As for I-2, it will be IPv6 based, but contrary to popular opinion IPv6 is not automagically faster or better than IPv4 - while v6 has many nice features such as autoconfiguration, auto-addressing, large address space, etc, there are very few features designed to make things go faster. All the technologies listed below apply equally to IPv6 and IPv4:
- MPLS - Multiprotocol Label Switching - allows administrator fine tuning of the routes taken across the network, e.g. to balance loads over the whole network, can also be used for VPNs and QoS.
- DiffServ - Differentiated Services - lets you assign a priority level to every packet (e.g. gold, silver, basic) and make gold packets get some guaranteed bandwidth or lower latency, hop by hop. Easy to deploy, does not give cast iron QoS guarantees.
- IntServ and RSVP - Integrated Services and Resource Reservation Protocol - lets applications request a certain QoS (bandwidth, latency, etc.) end to end across a network. Harder to deploy across a network, and has scalability problems, but these are gradually being addressed and it does give end to end guarantees.
There is one neat feature in IPv6 that supports RSVP - it's called the Flow Label, and is basically a number that is assigned to all packets in a given 'flow' (e.g. a video session). By assigning this number, RSVP routers after the first one in the path can go somewhat faster since they only need to look at one field rather than checking src/dest IP addresses/ports.
Windows 2000 includes many QoS features, particularly RSVP/IntServ and DiffServ, but not IPv6. RSVP is available for Linux, IPv6 is available in early form, and the Linux-DiffServ project is one of the most advanced implementations of DiffServ that is publicly available.
For more information on QoS, see http://www.qosforum.com/docs/glossary/glossary.htm - this has useful links at the end. For IPv6, see http://www.ipv6.org/.
Of course, the ability to send traffic over big fat optical pipes is available to v4 and v6. However, the cost of ASICs probably dictates that gigabit/terabit routers may only support IPv4 for some time, until v6 becomes more widely deployed. However, I-2 may well be using early versions of v6 gigabit routers.
Opera 3.61 on Windows has basically all these features - as per industry convention, 'alpha' means that not all features are in there yet. The only features in your list not in 3.61 are SDI, proper font handling (whatever that means, it does support font face tags) and TIFF support (I don't think many pages use TIFF so I'm not sure if this is a problem - PNG is better as a lossless format IMO).
So basically you are saying 'this alpha is indeed an alpha'. Very useful - come back when it is beta...
Yes, S/390s are very cool - I used to be sysadmin for a UNIX on Amdahl (IBM mainframe clone). It was so fast at I/O that grepping a big file (producing no output) was instantaneous - I thought the grep command wasn't working but it was just going blindingly fast, on a mid-1980s vintage mainframe at that...
As for Linux on VAX, see http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~atp/linux-vax/ - there is a port in progress, though right now NetBSD seems a better choice for everday use.
At around $39, Opera was much cheaper to buy than a hardware upgrade for my mother's 486SX with 8 MB RAM, which she used until early this year. Without Opera, the web was effectively unusable on this hardware.
Mozilla may well win in the longer term, but my experience with Opera on Windows has been very good.
Haven't yet tried the Linux version but the Windows version does have frames, redirects, etc - I'm surprised they've released such an incomplete version since it sounds more like an alpha than a beta.
Opera was, perhaps unfortunately, never designed to be cross-platform as far as I can tell (which is one reason it has a small memory+disk footprint).
For someone running Linux on a low memory 486 or Pentium, Opera may still be the better choice. Since a lot of Linux boxes appear to be 'recycled', there may actually be a good market for Opera here.
For Europeans who want to donate to the legal fund: according to Roger Malina of the Leonardo Association, you can send a Eurocheque in French Francs to
Association Leonardo, 8 Rue emile Dunois, 92100 Boulogne sur Seine, France
This will avoid money being wasted in exchanging money into US dollars then into francs.
Trademarks are specific to particular types of trade, e.g. if you have a trademark for Leonardo scissors it does not conflict with a trademark for Leonardo journals.
That's the reason why this lawsuit is completely baseless - there is no possibility of confusion in the mind of a consumer between Leonardo journals and Leonardo Finance.
At least some installers make it fairly easy *if you have the monitor model number* - for example, Red Hat 6.0's text installer autoprobed and found the correct video card (G200), then I told it the memory fitted and exact monitor model number. Result: 1280 x 1024 at 32 bitplanes - could have chosen a higher resolution if I'd wanted it.
This doesn't help people who have unusual hardware, of course, but putting PNP monitor support into XFree86 might help in those cases too.
Having to specify vertical and horizontal sync numbers is a sign that the installer isn't doing enough (or perhaps can't, due to non-PNP monitor).
I don't want to diminish the great achievements of the many people porting Linux to such diverse platforms - however, Unix is also monolithic and was ported to a vast variety of minicomputers, mainframes, workstations and PCs. In fact, this continues with PDAs and other esoteric platforms - see www.netbsd.org (NetBSD is the BSD variant that focuses on portability).
In the 1980s I used to be a sysadmin for Amdahl's Unix on IBM mainframes - it would be good to see Linux moving into the same domain.
One interesting approach might be install-time compilation of Java bytecodes into machine code (as done by TowerJ on Linux and elsewhere), providing very good performance and a *single binary standard* for applications. Combining Linux and compiled Java could provide good enough performance for Linux on a range of architectures, even for companies that need to ship binary application software.
Just think, you could download a single binary and run it on anything from a PDA to a mainframe, without the JVM or application having to deal with OS incompatibilities.
In other words, there could be two very high volume software markets (at least for binary applications) - Windows on x86 and maybe IA-64, and Linux+Java on any architecture.
Unfortunately, unless a really good JVM with install-time compilation gets open sourced, it's more likely the Linux market will turn into 'Linux on Intel plus a few other architectures'.
If someone did a driver abstraction layer that was open source, it could well look like the various layers that are out there - however, an open source layer would at least have the potential to become part of the Linux kernel, and hence would avoid bloat from N different layers for different vendors' binary drivers.
Having said that, having the source tends to encourage people to port drivers rather than just use a binary layer, so it's not clear that an open source driver abstraction layer would ever happen.
Since Linux is evolving quite rapidly at the kernel level it makes sense to have open source drivers so that it's easier for J. Random Hacker to make driver fixes when the kernel breaks tham.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm particularly interested in how you're planning on supporting DVD-Video players given the various legal+encryption issues. But I guess you don't want to pre-announce products any more than the rest of us:)
Moderators, please moderate up Jake's post as it will help make things clearer.
You can read or search the OpenBSD mailing lists via deja.com - see http://www.deja.com/query_profile.xp?QRY=openbsd &ST=IF&DBS=2
for a list of OpenBSD-related mailing lists that have been gatewayed into news. I'd guess the gatewaying is 2-way so you should be able to post to these newsgroups and have it pop up on the mailing lists.
If you're actively using OpenBSD you probably want to be on the mailing lists directly, details at http://www.openbsd.org
If you used it for more than 5 minutes you'd discover it's fast, low in memory use, has a great way of disabling GIF/JPG downloads with a single click (ideal for slow websites or modem links), and also makes it easy to disable stupid web author formatting that makes sites illegible, again with a single click.
It's as fast as IE5, and much better for slow links. Well worth paying for IMO.
There is already a fairly common term for this - donationware. Makes sense to me and is fairly obvious. You can of course call something 'open source donationware' if it is in fact open source.
Just like charities that give you badges when you put money in the collection tin, some donationware efforts could produce stickers/badges/certificates, as you suggest. Definitely a good thing to let people pay for if they want to.
It would be cool if there was a website that let you get a customised image of the certificate/sticker, with your name on it, that you could then put on your website or print in colour perhaps.
For an example of a lobbying organisation that has already done this, see my home page at http://www.bigfoot.com/~rdonkin/ - the image with the rather cheesy picture of a politician was generated because I said I would educate my local MP about the need for freely available encryption on behalf of Stand (http://www.stand.org.uk/).
That's 2MB executable in debug mode, as the interview said - when compiled for release and stripped of symbols it may well come down a bit. Pretty impressive considering the size of IE and Netscape.
It would be useful to have a 'break standards' button, so that people are aware when a site breaks standards (and maybe make it easy to send a polite email to the webmaster to complain about it), but can still kick down to at least view the page somehow. That would let Opera push for standards while also letting people get work done. My work PC is a laptop with a mere 96MB of RAM, and starting two browsers slows it right down...
I use Opera 3.60 as my main browser on Windows, and I quite frequently have to switch to Netscape for some sites, typically those that use Javascript or Java. It rarely crashes, but it quite often doesn't display a page very well.
I agree it's important to push webmasters towards better standards compliance, but not at the expense of users, some of whom will get fed up and just use Netscape. I can't really recommend Opera to non-technical friends and family because of its limited support for non-standard sites.
As for IE and Netscape being broken in different ways, that's nasty - but why not have a 'try IE variant first then Netscape' or vice versa as an option for the 'break standards' button.
Short interviews leave more time for coding, which is A Good Thing:)
As for standards support - Opera the company is so standards oriented it becomes a pain - they have consistently refused to put into Opera 3.x any features that would violate standards, even if they'd let commonly-used pages be viewed in a legible form (i.e. IE and Netscape brokenness is out). I personally found this a pain in the neck as it meant I couldn't use Opera as my only browser, which messed up my bookmarking on Windows - however, it does mean they have some degree of commitment to this.
Currently IE5 I think supports HTML 4.0 more closely than Opera 3.x, but they are working on Opera 4.0 which will be more standards compliant still.
They also employ Hakon Wium Lie ('howcome') as their CTO - he was a key author of the CSS spec for the W3C. There's a press release about this on their News link.
I'm not sure jBASE qualifies as ERP, a term referring to software covering a whole range of business processes and usually requiring some business process re-engineering in order to implement it. ERP vendors include SAP, Baan, J.D. Edwards, etc.
Having said that, it's still an impressive win for Linux.
One problem with *pasman type programs is that the unencrypted data may be left behind in the swap file, or even in the filesystem's free list. I'm not sure how well Linux deals with this sort of thing, but in any case it's better than writing them down somewhere accessible.
One advantage of the Pilot is that it has no swap space and is a bit harder to hack than a Linux box, so that's what I use.
I agree, corporate desktops and servers should be running stable versions of Linux and the apps, not alpha/beta's. This rules out USB, XFS, Koffice, etc - however as another poster pointed out, lack of USB is not a huge problem, as most large companies run NT 4.0 desktops, and NT doesn't support USB at all.
I'd like to see the Linux community compare Linux 2.3 and bleeding edge kernel stuff to Windows 2000, and Linux 2.2 and stable apps to NT 4.0.
This has already been done to some extent - Definite Linux is a Red Hat 6 derivative that includes crypto, while there are a number of secure Linux distro initiatives that will eventually come out with more robust and secure versions of Linux. There is also at least one security auditing project for Linux.
However, unless someone takes a snapshot of Linux and then spends a long time auditing it, I can't see that Linux will end up as well audited as OpenBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
IP QoS and more particularly CoS (class of service, most standard version being DiffServ) is coming - it's just requires policy-based management tools to make it much easier to set up.
SNA over (say) the DLSW protocol over IP with CoS is quite a good combination - you give low latency to the important traffic, particularly the network control stuff, using DiffServ priorities (using the TOS byte in the IP header).
However, most IP CoS products don't let you prioritise between different SNA traffic - e.g. printing and transactions get the same priority - so it's not quite there yet, though Cisco routers at least do let you do this.
Making routers actually pay attention to QoS bits, and defining specific queuing behavior for them.
This is happening, largely as a result of an IETF standards effort called DiffServ, which is defining building blocks from which the network behaviour required by a particular application can be provided, even in the presence of network congestion. Most routers today can interpret 8 priority levels (IP Precedence) of which 6 are user accessible - unfortunately they are not set up to do this because it is a configuration nightmare. The good news is that my company and others are going to take out the configuration hassle and make it easy for ISPs to configure their routers for DiffServ (we make network management software to configure this).
Most twitch games will want priority queuing, or at the least some guaranteed access to bandwidth for critical packets. Unfortunately this is exactly what Voice over IP (VoIP) requires, which is probably much more lucrative for the ISPs since it can be charged by the minute... Dedicated gaming networks may well be able to set priorities that make sense for gamers, though.
A "realtime" packet should never be added to a queue if there is another one from the same connection that is already in the queue. Multiple queuings just add latency that can't be controlled at the application level. Jump-to-head-of-queue would sure be nice, but that's probably too much to ask for in the name of "games".
This is like many multimedia applications, e.g. VoIP and videoconferencing, where if a packet is delayed it is no use so it might as well be dropped. One approach to this is for the application to become adaptive (or maybe the IP stack or linmodem code, given some hints from the application), i.e. to not send packets so frequently in times of congestion. At least then the offered load to the network is reduced, which is important in the non-DiffServ case.
The other approach is to use DiffServ to implement a low latency service, in which every suitably marked packet goes right to the top priority queue. Through careful limiting of what traffic gets into the network with that packet marking, the idea is that the top priority queue is almost always empty so low latency packets go right through every router with minimal queuing delay.
It's worth noting that if the queuing is working properly, the 2nd packet should never run into the first packet anyway, so it's probably easier just to throw DiffServ at the problem. This also avoids the need to keep track of things on a per-flow basis - when there are 1000s of real-time sessions going through a larger router, you really don't want to have to keep track of sessions (aka flows in QoS speak).
The Linux host sending the packets could implement the 'dump earlier packet' behaviour in its queuing mechanisms, but it would have to be per-flow, and the same arguments apply - it's better to reduce host, modem and router latency so that the packets go right through and have no chance to bump into earlier packets.
If you're interested, the Linux-DiffServ project is based on the 2.2 kernel - they've done a pretty flexible and complete implementation. More general links on QoS including DiffServ can be found here, under the Links button.
DiffServ technology is coming, and in fact exists in basic form in every Cisco router. The big issue for gaming is getting ISPs to implement DiffServ, and to charge for it in a sensible way so it's accessible to gamers.
Quite a few research and production-quality versions of Linux have addressed the issue of hard real time and more importantly QoS-oriented soft real time CPU scheduling. This is normally intended for multimedia but should also help a lot with games by guaranteeing a certain amount of CPU every N milliseconds. See Linux-SRT at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dmi1000/linux-srt/index.h tml - this has links at the bottom to QLinux, which has similar features but also covers disk and network scheduling (i.e. packet queuing). Also linked are RTLinux, which in 3.0 I think may have something similar, and KURT, another RT Linux.
One very encouraging thing about the two university projects is that they are doing cutting edge research on Linux rather than inventing a unique operating system - while the latter is sometimes necessary, Linux is often as good a testbed as any, and it makes it much easier to turn the research into open source that is of product quality.
The Internet was rather well designed if you take account of the fact that it was initially intended only to share data and provide remote access between academic institutions, and not many of them at that. Now it has grown beyond all imagining, yet it still works using essentially the same protocols - a mark of good design IMO.
m - this has useful links at the end. For IPv6, see http://www.ipv6.org/.
As for I-2, it will be IPv6 based, but contrary to popular opinion IPv6 is not automagically faster or better than IPv4 - while v6 has many nice features such as autoconfiguration, auto-addressing, large address space, etc, there are very few features designed to make things go faster. All the technologies listed below apply equally to IPv6 and IPv4:
- MPLS - Multiprotocol Label Switching - allows administrator fine tuning of the routes taken across the network, e.g. to balance loads over the whole network, can also be used for VPNs and QoS.
- DiffServ - Differentiated Services - lets you assign a priority level to every packet (e.g. gold, silver, basic) and make gold packets get some guaranteed bandwidth or lower latency, hop by hop. Easy to deploy, does not give cast iron QoS guarantees.
- IntServ and RSVP - Integrated Services and Resource Reservation Protocol - lets applications request a certain QoS (bandwidth, latency, etc.) end to end across a network. Harder to deploy across a network, and has scalability problems, but these are gradually being addressed and it does give end to end guarantees.
There is one neat feature in IPv6 that supports RSVP - it's called the Flow Label, and is basically a number that is assigned to all packets in a given 'flow' (e.g. a video session). By assigning this number, RSVP routers after the first one in the path can go somewhat faster since they only need to look at one field rather than checking src/dest IP addresses/ports.
Windows 2000 includes many QoS features, particularly RSVP/IntServ and DiffServ, but not IPv6. RSVP is available for Linux, IPv6 is available in early form, and the Linux-DiffServ project is one of the most advanced implementations of DiffServ that is publicly available.
For more information on QoS, see http://www.qosforum.com/docs/glossary/glossary.ht
Of course, the ability to send traffic over big fat optical pipes is available to v4 and v6. However, the cost of ASICs probably dictates that gigabit/terabit routers may only support IPv4 for some time, until v6 becomes more widely deployed. However, I-2 may well be using early versions of v6 gigabit routers.
Opera 3.61 on Windows has basically all these features - as per industry convention, 'alpha' means that not all features are in there yet. The only features in your list not in 3.61 are SDI, proper font handling (whatever that means, it does support font face tags) and TIFF support (I don't think many pages use TIFF so I'm not sure if this is a problem - PNG is better as a lossless format IMO).
So basically you are saying 'this alpha is indeed an alpha'. Very useful - come back when it is beta...
Of course, somebody is hoping to port Linux to the AS/400 - see http://users.snip.net/~gbooker/as400.htm for details.
Given that the AS/400 has such an unusual architecture, it seems like a very difficult port, far more so than the S/390, but you never know...
Yes, S/390s are very cool - I used to be sysadmin for a UNIX on Amdahl (IBM mainframe clone). It was so fast at I/O that grepping a big file (producing no output) was instantaneous - I thought the grep command wasn't working but it was just going blindingly fast, on a mid-1980s vintage mainframe at that...
As for Linux on VAX, see http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~atp/linux-vax/ - there is a port in progress, though right now NetBSD seems a better choice for everday use.
At around $39, Opera was much cheaper to buy than a hardware upgrade for my mother's 486SX with 8 MB RAM, which she used until early this year. Without Opera, the web was effectively unusable on this hardware.
Mozilla may well win in the longer term, but my experience with Opera on Windows has been very good.
Haven't yet tried the Linux version but the Windows version does have frames, redirects, etc - I'm surprised they've released such an incomplete version since it sounds more like an alpha than a beta.
Opera was, perhaps unfortunately, never designed to be cross-platform as far as I can tell (which is one reason it has a small memory+disk footprint).
For someone running Linux on a low memory 486 or Pentium, Opera may still be the better choice. Since a lot of Linux boxes appear to be 'recycled', there may actually be a good market for Opera here.
For Europeans who want to donate to the legal fund: according to Roger Malina of the Leonardo Association, you can send a Eurocheque in French Francs to
Association Leonardo,
8 Rue emile Dunois,
92100 Boulogne sur Seine,
France
This will avoid money being wasted in exchanging money into US dollars then into francs.
Trademarks are specific to particular types of trade, e.g. if you have a trademark for Leonardo scissors it does not conflict with a trademark for Leonardo journals.
That's the reason why this lawsuit is completely baseless - there is no possibility of confusion in the mind of a consumer between Leonardo journals and Leonardo Finance.
At least some installers make it fairly easy *if you have the monitor model number* - for example, Red Hat 6.0's text installer autoprobed and found the correct video card (G200), then I told it the memory fitted and exact monitor model number. Result: 1280 x 1024 at 32 bitplanes - could have chosen a higher resolution if I'd wanted it.
This doesn't help people who have unusual hardware, of course, but putting PNP monitor support into XFree86 might help in those cases too.
Having to specify vertical and horizontal sync numbers is a sign that the installer isn't doing enough (or perhaps can't, due to non-PNP monitor).
I don't want to diminish the great achievements of the many people porting Linux to such diverse platforms - however, Unix is also monolithic and was ported to a vast variety of minicomputers, mainframes, workstations and PCs. In fact, this continues with PDAs and other esoteric platforms - see www.netbsd.org (NetBSD is the BSD variant that focuses on portability).
In the 1980s I used to be a sysadmin for Amdahl's Unix on IBM mainframes - it would be good to see Linux moving into the same domain.
One interesting approach might be install-time compilation of Java bytecodes into machine code (as done by TowerJ on Linux and elsewhere), providing very good performance and a *single binary standard* for applications. Combining Linux and compiled Java could provide good enough performance for Linux on a range of architectures, even for companies that need to ship binary application software.
Just think, you could download a single binary and run it on anything from a PDA to a mainframe, without the JVM or application having to deal with OS incompatibilities.
In other words, there could be two very high volume software markets (at least for binary applications) - Windows on x86 and maybe IA-64, and Linux+Java on any architecture.
Unfortunately, unless a really good JVM with install-time compilation gets open sourced, it's more likely the Linux market will turn into 'Linux on Intel plus a few other architectures'.
If someone did a driver abstraction layer that was open source, it could well look like the various layers that are out there - however, an open source layer would at least have the potential to become part of the Linux kernel, and hence would avoid bloat from N different layers for different vendors' binary drivers.
Having said that, having the source tends to encourage people to port drivers rather than just use a binary layer, so it's not clear that an open source driver abstraction layer would ever happen.
Since Linux is evolving quite rapidly at the kernel level it makes sense to have open source drivers so that it's easier for J. Random Hacker to make driver fixes when the kernel breaks tham.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm particularly interested in how you're planning on supporting DVD-Video players given the various legal+encryption issues. But I guess you don't want to pre-announce products any more than the rest of us :)
Moderators, please moderate up Jake's post as it will help make things clearer.
You can read or search the OpenBSD mailing lists via deja.com - seed &ST=IF&DBS=2
http://www.deja.com/query_profile.xp?QRY=openbs
for a list of OpenBSD-related mailing lists that have been gatewayed into news. I'd guess the gatewaying is 2-way so you should be able to post to these newsgroups and have it pop up on the mailing lists.
If you're actively using OpenBSD you probably want to be on the mailing lists directly, details at http://www.openbsd.org
If you used it for more than 5 minutes you'd discover it's fast, low in memory use, has a great way of disabling GIF/JPG downloads with a single click (ideal for slow websites or modem links), and also makes it easy to disable stupid web author formatting that makes sites illegible, again with a single click.
It's as fast as IE5, and much better for slow links. Well worth paying for IMO.
There is already a fairly common term for this - donationware. Makes sense to me and is fairly obvious. You can of course call something 'open source donationware' if it is in fact open source.
Just like charities that give you badges when you put money in the collection tin, some donationware efforts could produce stickers/badges/certificates, as you suggest. Definitely a good thing to let people pay for if they want to.
It would be cool if there was a website that let you get a customised image of the certificate/sticker, with your name on it, that you could then put on your website or print in colour perhaps.
For an example of a lobbying organisation that has already done this, see my home page at http://www.bigfoot.com/~rdonkin/ - the image with the rather cheesy picture of a politician was generated because I said I would educate my local MP about the need for freely available encryption on behalf of Stand (http://www.stand.org.uk/).
That's 2MB executable in debug mode, as the interview said - when compiled for release and stripped of symbols it may well come down a bit. Pretty impressive considering the size of IE and Netscape.
It would be useful to have a 'break standards' button, so that people are aware when a site breaks standards (and maybe make it easy to send a polite email to the webmaster to complain about it), but can still kick down to at least view the page somehow. That would let Opera push for standards while also letting people get work done. My work PC is a laptop with a mere 96MB of RAM, and starting two browsers slows it right down...
I use Opera 3.60 as my main browser on Windows, and I quite frequently have to switch to Netscape for some sites, typically those that use Javascript or Java. It rarely crashes, but it quite often doesn't display a page very well.
I agree it's important to push webmasters towards better standards compliance, but not at the expense of users, some of whom will get fed up and just use Netscape. I can't really recommend Opera to non-technical friends and family because of its limited support for non-standard sites.
As for IE and Netscape being broken in different ways, that's nasty - but why not have a 'try IE variant first then Netscape' or vice versa as an option for the 'break standards' button.
Short interviews leave more time for coding, which is A Good Thing :)
As for standards support - Opera the company is so standards oriented it becomes a pain - they have consistently refused to put into Opera 3.x any features that would violate standards, even if they'd let commonly-used pages be viewed in a legible form (i.e. IE and Netscape brokenness is out). I personally found this a pain in the neck as it meant I couldn't use Opera as my only browser, which messed up my bookmarking on Windows - however, it does mean they have some degree of commitment to this.
Currently IE5 I think supports HTML 4.0 more closely than Opera 3.x, but they are working on Opera 4.0 which will be more standards compliant still.
They also employ Hakon Wium Lie ('howcome') as their CTO - he was a key author of the CSS spec for the W3C. There's a press release about this on their News link.
I'm not sure jBASE qualifies as ERP, a term referring to software covering a whole range of business processes and usually requiring some business process re-engineering in order to implement it. ERP vendors include SAP, Baan, J.D. Edwards, etc.
Having said that, it's still an impressive win for Linux.
One problem with *pasman type programs is that the unencrypted data may be left behind in the swap file, or even in the filesystem's free list. I'm not sure how well Linux deals with this sort of thing, but in any case it's better than writing them down somewhere accessible.
One advantage of the Pilot is that it has no swap space and is a bit harder to hack than a Linux box, so that's what I use.
I agree, corporate desktops and servers should be running stable versions of Linux and the apps, not alpha/beta's. This rules out USB, XFS, Koffice, etc - however as another poster pointed out, lack of USB is not a huge problem, as most large companies run NT 4.0 desktops, and NT doesn't support USB at all.
I'd like to see the Linux community compare Linux 2.3 and bleeding edge kernel stuff to Windows 2000, and Linux 2.2 and stable apps to NT 4.0.
Sounds like you're confused - Fore Systems make layer 2 switches but they don't make hubs.
This has already been done to some extent - Definite Linux is a Red Hat 6 derivative that includes crypto, while there are a number of secure Linux distro initiatives that will eventually come out with more robust and secure versions of Linux. There is also at least one security auditing project for Linux.
However, unless someone takes a snapshot of Linux and then spends a long time auditing it, I can't see that Linux will end up as well audited as OpenBSD.