Cygnus has always been focused on unix hosted FSF software like GCC (mainly their custom regression tested version called GNUPro). Sure they _have_ Windows software but their main revenue stream comes from unix workstation software (AFAIK)...cuz that's what embedded developers in large companies historically use. Their NT support is slow but useful (see my URL above).
I hope they stay good and give some of that technology back to the community.
Have you visited Sourceware recently? The vast majority of Cygnus technology is given back to community...some of it more quickly that others but it all ends in publicly available distributions of gcc, binutils, etc eventually. The only exceptions to this are non-GPL Cygwin users, SourceFoundry and SourceNavigator.
Cygnus is one of those wierdo software companies. One that a) understands Open Source (hell, they largely defined it!) and b) make a genuine profit.
Redhat on the other hand just another Linux/ internet rah rah company which is built on hopes and promises rather than sound business sense.
This is not a good day for Open Source (as opposed to Linux).
Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
This is indeed the case. Both myself and the other MathML developers were able to get right into the guts of the Mozilla layout engine with very little effort. I had some basic frame manipilation code up and running with only a few hours of work. Roger Sidje (head MathML honcho) has managed to single handedly get large amounts of the MAthML spec running with only a couple of thousand lines of code... the basic system is incredibly modular and fairly easy to understand.
Mozilla is an exemplary Open Source project, particularly when it comes to software Engineering quality. The existing team are really helpful *and* ethusiastic (unlike FSF projects for example) when it comes to "outsiders". The systems they have in place for maintaining the schedule(bugzilla), system quality(bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai), etc are some of the best I have seen anywhere at keeping problems in check.
A note on timescales.. somebody said that it had taken 2 years to get to the point we are at right now. I think that that needs to be broken down a bit. The original Raptor(new layout engine) team (circa 5 folk) started in October 97 AFAIK, the Raptor source was released a month after the Classic Mozilla source in April 98...no sizable team was working on the code until October 98 (!!). Essentially Mozilla has been built in a little over 12 months... for a 1.5+ million line (Open or closed source) program that's bloody amazing!
I think that everyone (especially dorks like Jesse Berst) should give the Mozilla team a big hand instead of shooting them down. Hats of to guys like Mike Shaver, Chris Hoffmann, Rick Gessner, Kipp Hickman, etc, etc, etc
We've got all the obvious ones like Orkney, Skye, Arran, etc for the more prestigious machines like file servers.
My little NT machine is Sandray - which I am reliably informed is a small island with a couple of mountains and an abandoned cottage. Ironic?;)
Of course as time goes on we run short on islands. I recently turned an old 486 into a Linux web/database server without any keyboard. It's called Mousa and is marked on the map as being barely habitable....
The system is self regulating too. Everytime we buy a new machine, out comes the Texaco map of Scotland and before we get an IP address we have to find an unused island. I wonder if a time will come when we are forced to tip large numbers of rocks into the sea just to create a name;)
Oh well. I guess there goes my idea for a neat ColdFire technology demo. I was going to use RTEMS rather than uC/Linux and an eval board rather than a NetTel router board.
What's so special about using a ColdFire? They are very cheap, very powerful and very flexible embedded micro-controllers. There is excellent Open Source tool support with TWO operating systems (RTEMS & uC/Linux) and of course a bug free, high performance gcc implementation. Visit the link above for details...
As numerous posters have pointed out, it is quite possible to screen the cookies on your system. However...
It is too difficult for the average web user to use any of the schemes proposed. The browser ought to be able to cleanup cookies, allow them from 'friendly' sites only, etc, etc out of the box.
How can we achieve this? Wander over to http://www.mozilla.org/ and learn a bit about XUL. Code up the dialogs that are required and try submitting them...
The Data Protection Act does entitle us to ask what data companies hold on us. If you stamp your foot (very hard) it is possible to get them...but they can charge a "reasonable" fee for providing the service to cover their costs.
Like you say this doesn't work outside the UK. Sigh.
Of course Safeway or Tesco hold far more data on the average UK citizen than doubleclick has about any individual......
MAC addresses are handed out by the IEEE. They will give you a block of 24 bits of address space for around US$1500.
Like IP addresses there is an area in the address space set aside for private use. It is possible, if not entirely sane, to reconfigure an entire LAN... Don't laugh, I've heard of people doing this! I can't remember the rules off hand though...;)
Modifying MAC addresses is really simple not matter what age of NIC you have. Most NICs store their MAC address in a small lump of EEPROM on older cards this is just plain old PROM.
When a driver starts up it gets the ethernet address from the PROM and loads it into a set of station address registers in the NIC. There is no obligation for the driver to load the address it gets from EEPROM or even for there to be an EEPROM! This feature is regularly exploited by embedded systems with ethernet which store the MAC address in FLASH or some other multi-use NV storage to save money.
What I'm getting at is that it would be really, really easy(if Linux doen't do it already) to allow users to specify a new ethernet MAC address if they felt paranoid. Given the ratio of address space to LAN size you could even produce random MAC addresses at startup if you were paranoid enough.... Of course there are smarter mechanisms for doing this as other posters have pointed out.
If anyone has a burning desire to have a very small amount of official ethernet address space then drop me a line and I'll see what I can do (HW manufacturers only!)
If you can automatically update your RH distribution automatically, have it email you, etc,etc. Why the hell doesn't it do it automatically out of the box?
Why should I have to read bucket loads of documentation, figure out another wierd package and spend ages testing it? Surely that's the whole point of a distribution?
It is unlikely you would need anything other than some software. Things like the Ti-89 I know for certain use the 68EC000 which is the core that is used in the Palm Pilot. There may be one out there already....
Although you'll really need the 8MB to do anything useful I guess. Unless they have done something really strange it uses the 68EZ328 dragonball processor and thus will run uC/Linux without too much effort.
Hopefully I'll have retired by then...and they won't want to wheel old Pascal programmers out it'll only be C programmers (and I'll lie when they ask that question;)
Gotta have something for the kids to lose sleep over!
One minute people are bitching about not enough non-Netscape contributors.... then when a couple start contributing code they bitch about how long it's taking. Sheesh! You guy's are the pits.
The IRC and instant messaging stuff is being written by external to Netscape contributors building on the basic Mozilla foundations. What they are doing does not impact the release schedule in the slightest.
Another thing to note is that I doubt whether you will see either of these things in a Netscape/AOL branded product (i.e. what Netscape make from Mozilla with added crypto, etc). They will want to add their own clients for obvious reasons.
I just wish that folk would get off Mozilla's back for a minute. As a Mozilla contributor myself(MathML) I get sick of seeing people taking side swipes at the project. Either help out or shut up, please!
The systems laid down by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were as smart if not smarter than ENIAC. Except he got there 100 years before everyone else so I guess that excludes him. And of course we should never forget that the first computer programmer was a woman...
For the true story on the first electronic computer (i.e. one that has the same basic building blocks as the one you are sitting in front off) see http://www.computer50.org/
...but they sure are expensive. The price of a G4 based Apple will buy you a pretty loaded PC. I think Ars Technica said a dual PII-600 - maybe a slight exageration there but only just.
For me (and most/. people) Apple's latest system always seem a bit like Nike trainers. Fancy label, fancy price tag but nothing special compared to the £20 clones.
Your situation is something I have heard many times in the last couple of years..
Please have a look at the Open Source RTOSs and tools that are available:
- RTEMS(http://www.oarcorp.com) (my personal favourite) - eCos(http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/) - My Right Boot(http://www.moretonbay.com/coldfire/boot.html) an excellent modular but lightweight bootloader
There are a lot of people who are using these OSes and the GNU tools they predominantly(but not exclusivly) use. Getting *professional* support without NDAs or any other nonsense is easy too...
I don't have a lot of experience of eCos but the RTEMS and GNU developers I've worked with are largely professionals who want to work *together* to provide a rock solid, transparent platform for their application. This leaves more time to actually produce the application rather than debug the damn toolset....!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Try emailing the guy's at Moretonbay who make routers and remote access equipment using embedded Linux.
Better still, save their time and just download it from their website at http://www.moretonbay.com/
Bollocks!
Cygnus has always been focused on unix hosted FSF software like GCC (mainly their custom regression tested version called GNUPro). Sure they _have_ Windows software but their main revenue stream comes from unix workstation software (AFAIK)...cuz that's what embedded developers in large companies historically use. Their NT support is slow but useful (see my URL above).
I hope they stay good and give some of that technology back to the community.
Have you visited Sourceware recently? The vast majority of Cygnus technology is given back to community...some of it more quickly that others but it all ends in publicly available distributions of gcc, binutils, etc eventually. The only exceptions to this are non-GPL Cygwin users, SourceFoundry and SourceNavigator.
Cygnus is one of those wierdo software companies. One that a) understands Open Source (hell, they largely defined it!) and b) make a genuine profit.
Redhat on the other hand just another Linux/ internet rah rah company which is built on hopes and promises rather than sound business sense.
This is not a good day for Open Source (as opposed to Linux).
Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
This is indeed the case. Both myself and the other MathML developers were able to get right into the guts of the Mozilla layout engine with very little effort. I had some basic frame manipilation code up and running with only a few hours of work. Roger Sidje (head MathML honcho) has managed to single handedly get large amounts of the MAthML spec running with only a couple of thousand lines of code... the basic system is incredibly modular and fairly easy to understand.
Mozilla is an exemplary Open Source project, particularly when it comes to software Engineering quality. The existing team are really helpful *and* ethusiastic (unlike FSF projects for example) when it comes to "outsiders". The systems they have in place for maintaining the schedule(bugzilla), system quality(bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai), etc are some of the best I have seen anywhere at keeping problems in check.
A note on timescales.. somebody said that it had taken 2 years to get to the point we are at right now. I think that that needs to be broken down a bit. The original Raptor(new layout engine) team (circa 5 folk) started in October 97 AFAIK, the Raptor source was released a month after the Classic Mozilla source in April 98...no sizable team was working on the code until October 98 (!!). Essentially Mozilla has been built in a little over 12 months... for a 1.5+ million line (Open or closed source) program that's bloody amazing!
I think that everyone (especially dorks like Jesse Berst) should give the Mozilla team a big hand instead of shooting them down. Hats of to guys like Mike Shaver, Chris Hoffmann, Rick Gessner, Kipp Hickman, etc, etc, etc
We've got all the obvious ones like Orkney, Skye, Arran, etc for the more prestigious machines like file servers.
;)
;)
My little NT machine is Sandray - which I am reliably informed is a small island with a couple of mountains and an abandoned cottage. Ironic?
Of course as time goes on we run short on islands. I recently turned an old 486 into a Linux web/database server without any keyboard. It's called Mousa and is marked on the map as being barely habitable....
The system is self regulating too. Everytime we buy a new machine, out comes the Texaco map of Scotland and before we get an IP address we have to find an unused island. I wonder if a time will come when we are forced to tip large numbers of rocks into the sea just to create a name
Oh well. I guess there goes my idea for a neat ColdFire technology demo. I was going to use RTEMS rather than uC/Linux and an eval board rather than a NetTel router board.
What's so special about using a ColdFire? They are very cheap, very powerful and very flexible embedded micro-controllers. There is excellent Open Source tool support with TWO operating systems (RTEMS & uC/Linux) and of course a bug free, high performance gcc implementation. Visit the link above for details...
As numerous posters have pointed out, it is quite possible to screen the cookies on your system. However...
It is too difficult for the average web user to use any of the schemes proposed. The browser ought to be able to cleanup cookies, allow them from 'friendly' sites only, etc, etc out of the box.
How can we achieve this? Wander over to http://www.mozilla.org/ and learn a bit about XUL. Code up the dialogs that are required and try submitting them...
The Data Protection Act does entitle us to ask what data companies hold on us. If you stamp your foot (very hard) it is possible to get them...but they can charge a "reasonable" fee for providing the service to cover their costs.
Like you say this doesn't work outside the UK. Sigh.
Of course Safeway or Tesco hold far more data on the average UK citizen than doubleclick has about any individual......
So *that's* why I had to pay so much....
MAC addresses are handed out by the IEEE. They will give you a block of 24 bits of address space for around US$1500.
;)
Like IP addresses there is an area in the address space set aside for private use. It is possible, if not entirely sane, to reconfigure an entire LAN... Don't laugh, I've heard of people doing this! I can't remember the rules off hand though...
Modifying MAC addresses is really simple not matter what age of NIC you have. Most NICs store their MAC address in a small lump of EEPROM on older cards this is just plain old PROM.
When a driver starts up it gets the ethernet address from the PROM and loads it into a set of station address registers in the NIC. There is no obligation for the driver to load the address it gets from EEPROM or even for there to be an EEPROM! This feature is regularly exploited by embedded systems with ethernet which store the MAC address in FLASH or some other multi-use NV storage to save money.
What I'm getting at is that it would be really, really easy(if Linux doen't do it already) to allow users to specify a new ethernet MAC address if they felt paranoid. Given the ratio of address space to LAN size you could even produce random MAC addresses at startup if you were paranoid enough.... Of course there are smarter mechanisms for doing this as other posters have pointed out.
If anyone has a burning desire to have a very small amount of official ethernet address space then drop me a line and I'll see what I can do (HW manufacturers only!)
If you can automatically update your RH distribution automatically, have it email you, etc,etc. Why the hell doesn't it do it automatically out of the box?
Why should I have to read bucket loads of documentation, figure out another wierd package and spend ages testing it? Surely that's the whole point of a distribution?
Does anyone have a link or some insight as to what failed w.r.t. a Tandy on 9/9/99...
I'm currious especially as my old TRS-80 didn't have a clock to suffer date problems on....
When I had a look at it in 96 it listed Scots as being the biggest "ethnic minority" in the United Kingdom.
;)
I figure this is kind off stretching the definition of "ethnic minority" a bit far even for the CIA
It is unlikely you would need anything other than some software. Things like the Ti-89 I know for certain use the 68EC000 which is the core that is used in the Palm Pilot. There may be one out there already....
Although you'll really need the 8MB to do anything useful I guess. Unless they have done something really strange it uses the 68EZ328 dragonball processor and thus will run uC/Linux without too much effort.
See http://www.uclinux.org for details.
Hopefully I'll have retired by then...and they won't want to wheel old Pascal programmers out it'll only be C programmers (and I'll lie when they ask that question ;)
Gotta have something for the kids to lose sleep over!
Doing that sum with the digits on a digital clock in the small hours is a really good way to get back to sleep apparently...
I wouldn't know.. I'm either working(dumb) or too exhuasted to suffer insomnia.
All I want to say was LAYER tag...... It worked in preview. grrr.
That should have read
Anyone noticed how Slashdots banners disappear with the current build of Mozilla.
Better fix that code Rob... is dead!
One minute people are bitching about not enough non-Netscape contributors.... then when a couple start contributing code they bitch about how long it's taking. Sheesh! You guy's are the pits.
The IRC and instant messaging stuff is being written by external to Netscape contributors building on the basic Mozilla foundations. What they are doing does not impact the release schedule in the slightest.
Another thing to note is that I doubt whether you will see either of these things in a Netscape/AOL branded product (i.e. what Netscape make from Mozilla with added crypto, etc). They will want to add their own clients for obvious reasons.
I just wish that folk would get off Mozilla's back for a minute. As a Mozilla contributor myself(MathML) I get sick of seeing people taking side swipes at the project. Either help out or shut up, please!
The systems laid down by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were as smart if not smarter than ENIAC. Except he got there 100 years before everyone else so I guess that excludes him. And of course we should never forget that the first computer programmer was a woman...
For the true story on the first electronic computer (i.e. one that has the same basic building blocks as the one you are sitting in front off) see http://www.computer50.org/
For games and other time wasting stuff maybe... but for building stuff like linux, mozilla, RTEMS, etc. I doubt it comes close to a dual PIII.
Who cares..it's not like anyone is going to benchmark the thing (properly).
...but they sure are expensive. The price of a G4 based Apple will buy you a pretty loaded PC. I think Ars Technica said a dual PII-600 - maybe a slight exageration there but only just.
/. people) Apple's latest system always seem a bit like Nike trainers. Fancy label, fancy price tag but nothing special compared to the £20 clones.
For me (and most
Long live the "PC" technology steamroller...
Your situation is something I have heard many times in the last couple of years..
) an excellent modular but lightweight bootloader
Please have a look at the Open Source RTOSs and tools that are available:
- RTEMS(http://www.oarcorp.com) (my personal favourite)
- eCos(http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/)
- My Right Boot(http://www.moretonbay.com/coldfire/boot.html
There are a lot of people who are using these OSes and the GNU tools they predominantly(but not exclusivly) use. Getting *professional* support without NDAs or any other nonsense is easy too...
I don't have a lot of experience of eCos but the RTEMS and GNU developers I've worked with are largely professionals who want to work *together* to provide a rock solid, transparent platform for their application. This leaves more time to actually produce the application rather than debug the damn toolset....!!!!