And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side.
I guess people in the US won't be used to this, but its normal practice in many other places - it helps stop frivolous (sp?) lawsuits by people who know they'd lose but want to make a quick buck by getting an out-of-court settlement.
Note that you get 60 days following receipt of written notice to correct any incompliance, which means you can't get rolled on "just like that".
In the case where you're sure you're right, some large company throwing its weight around would have to foot the entire bill and you'd be protected against being rolled on at all.
No - he is in fact right. I don't know about all manufacturers, but certainly IBM drives use the same hardware - the only real difference being the content of a firmware chip (and the cable connector, I guess).
This doesn't mean that all the drive's features would be available for both SCSI and EIDE, and it doesn't stop them charging loads more either.
Lots. Plenty of people aren't even gamers. A lot of people round here that I know prefer Half-Life to Quake. It's about the only remaining reason for keeping a Windows partition; it's also the best game I've played to date and you are missing out on it!! Too bad there's no Linux client.
A friend of mine has a Dell laptop (Inspiron 7500) with the ATI chipset with a 400MHz processor (Celeron, I think). The 3D acceleration is actually slightly slower than the software renderer ! Things like Half-Life demonstrate this. You do get certain texturing benefits when using hardware acceleration, but I prefer the framerate. I don't see any reason why any X server which supports this chipset would be any different. Geometry setup has to be done by the CPU anyhow.
Unfortunately, you won't see much in the way of overkill until you can get a laptop with that new NVidia chipset !:-)
HP's statement that "Linux has not affected its marketshare," is probably true. The people who are likely to want an HP-UX workstation will almost certainly want it to run apps that don't exist for Linux. HP is also one of the world's largest PC vendors (3rd?), selling almost exclusively to other firms; I doubt that the companies that buy HP kit are suddenly going to go elsewhere just to buy Linux - if anything, they'd be inclined to get the Linux workstations from HP. One of the main reasons that companies buy from HP is the hardware support.
HP also said, "Linux specifically plays in the lower end of the market," and I would say that that is true for the most part. I see Linux being used very often for small to mid range servers, but also (especially since KDE/Gnome) as desktop machines.
Note that they mention Linux not being ready for mission critical. This I'd agree with. The implication of HP's statement is that other OSes provided by HP are - but before you shout about how bad HP-UX or NT are, I'd say they actually mean MPE. It's an OS specifically designed for transaction processing; it has a weird (compared to Linux) filesystem, and the shell takes some real getting used to too. HP actually wanted to get rid of it, but there are some very major customers who have been running it happilly for years and want it kept. They use it for very large scale DBs (eg: worldwide booking systems for airline tickets, car hire etc). I'm also told that Oracle runs as much as 20% faster under MPE than HP-UX on the same hardware.
"HP says other inhibitors to Linux's growth include... difficulty in installing and configuring it,..." Well, I've installed HP-UX 9, 10 and 11 (many times), and various Linux distributions (mainly SuSE of late) and there's no difference in difficulty in installation or configuration. Both are equally difficult ! In fact, recovery under Linux is notably easier than with HP-UX - try booting HP-UX into single user mode if you don't know ISL or your disk is partially corrupt. We could tell you stories... I wonder if the person who made the comments had only ever used SLS (from pre-Slackware times, for those of you who weren't around back then). That said, a fair amount of technical knowledge is still necessary for a Linux install (what is/dev/sda1?) - this is a major inhibitor for "the masses" (that, and the fact that they have no clue about unix in general).
All in all, I think the article has some valid points. However, Linux is still being worked on, and I wasn't aware it was claiming to be anything like mission critical, so I think it's unfair to slate it for such things. OTOH, some have been proclaiming Linux as the be-all and end-all of OSes, which isn't true either, and this also a reason for negative backlashes.
What I dislike most is all the politics. At the end of the day, I have a job to get done, and I will use the best tool for the job whether NT, Linux or anything else. I don't want to be yelled at just because someone else doesn't like the philosophy (or licence) of the software I use.
SIGINT's modern era dates to World War II, when the U.S. broke the Japanese military code and learned of plans to invade Midway Island. This intelligence allowed the U.S. to defeat Japan's superior fleet.
Eh ? I thought it was the BSC which did that, and that they were Brits and Canadians - not the US. I don't have the info here right now, but I do recall that they had the direct (and secret) support of FDR and certain members of the Rockerfeller family, but Hoover and the FBI didn't like them one bit, and Congress didn't seem to either. I do know that the FBI at the time claimed certain victories which weren't theirs at all.
I also recall that the BSC told the US military that certain encryption codes were insecure, but could tell how they new that - it would have meant admitting that they had a working Enigma machine. Certain people in the US military didn't want to be told what to do by "a bunch of foreigners" and continued using these codes to inform each other of allied movements, thereby also informing the enemy and causing major casualties. If the US military had found out that the allies really could crack enemy codes, the Nazis would have found out too and would have changed their encryption machines which they had believed to be uncrackable.
Read William Stevenson's biography ("A Man Called Intrepid") for more info. A lot of what's in the book couldn't be published until the BSC archives were opened many years after the war. Some things still are kept under wraps.
I don't expect the NSA to behave any differently. Some time in the future, we'll probably find out that a vast amount of what they did was in our interest, but there are some things they'll never tell.
As in WW2, there are corrupt elements who pass information to "the other side" (whoever that happens to be at the time). If you don't know precisely who you can trust with information you don't trust anyone. In some cases, it really does mean life or death.
The BSC wasn't a paramilitary organisation by any means - they dealt mainly in information. However sometimes certain extreme measures became necessary. Many people like to point out that James Bond type scenarios are far fetched and unrealistic, but don't forget that Ian Flemming (creator of 007) worked for the BSC and that there are a number of things in his stories which are taken from real life. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Did you know that Noel Coward worked for the BSC too ?
I'm sure that the NSA is prepared to go to great lengths to maintain the intergrity of its data, control who has access to it, and protect its data sources. Whether they do so themselves or employ others to do so is a different kettle of fish.
Whether you believe that registering badword.com will actually help, but IMO it's a waste of time.
How many possible permutations are there ? It'd be impossible to get them all.
What about badword.foo.com ? Assuming some "nasty group of people" got themselves a respectable top-level domain name, they could have whatever subdomains they wanted.
The problem is not domain names. It's not words. It's people.
Slashdot Mirror
And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side.
I guess people in the US won't be used to this, but its normal practice in many other places - it helps stop frivolous (sp?) lawsuits by people who know they'd lose but want to make a quick buck by getting an out-of-court settlement.
Note that you get 60 days following receipt of written notice to correct any incompliance, which means you can't get rolled on "just like that".
In the case where you're sure you're right, some large company throwing its weight around would have to foot the entire bill and you'd be protected against being rolled on at all.
-- Steve
No - he is in fact right. I don't know about all manufacturers, but certainly IBM drives use the same hardware - the only real difference being the content of a firmware chip (and the cable connector, I guess).
This doesn't mean that all the drive's features would be available for both SCSI and EIDE, and it doesn't stop them charging loads more either.
-- Steve
Just how many people *don't* run Quake?
Lots. Plenty of people aren't even gamers. A lot of people round here that I know prefer Half-Life to Quake. It's about the only remaining reason for keeping a Windows partition; it's also the best game I've played to date and you are missing out on it!! Too bad there's no Linux client.
On a related note: Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend
A friend of mine has a Dell laptop (Inspiron 7500) with the ATI chipset with a 400MHz processor (Celeron, I think). The 3D acceleration is actually slightly slower than the software renderer ! Things like Half-Life demonstrate this. You do get certain texturing benefits when using hardware acceleration, but I prefer the framerate. I don't see any reason why any X server which supports this chipset would be any different. Geometry setup has to be done by the CPU anyhow.
Unfortunately, you won't see much in the way of overkill until you can get a laptop with that new NVidia chipset ! :-)
-- Steve
I'll address HP's comments a bit:
HP's statement that "Linux has not affected its marketshare," is probably true. The people who are likely to want an HP-UX workstation will almost certainly want it to run apps that don't exist for Linux. HP is also one of the world's largest PC vendors (3rd?), selling almost exclusively to other firms; I doubt that the companies that buy HP kit are suddenly going to go elsewhere just to buy Linux - if anything, they'd be inclined to get the Linux workstations from HP. One of the main reasons that companies buy from HP is the hardware support.
HP also said, "Linux specifically plays in the lower end of the market," and I would say that that is true for the most part. I see Linux being used very often for small to mid range servers, but also (especially since KDE/Gnome) as desktop machines.
Note that they mention Linux not being ready for mission critical. This I'd agree with. The implication of HP's statement is that other OSes provided by HP are - but before you shout about how bad HP-UX or NT are, I'd say they actually mean MPE. It's an OS specifically designed for transaction processing; it has a weird (compared to Linux) filesystem, and the shell takes some real getting used to too. HP actually wanted to get rid of it, but there are some very major customers who have been running it happilly for years and want it kept. They use it for very large scale DBs (eg: worldwide booking systems for airline tickets, car hire etc). I'm also told that Oracle runs as much as 20% faster under MPE than HP-UX on the same hardware.
"HP says other inhibitors to Linux's growth include ... difficulty in installing and configuring it, ..." Well, I've installed HP-UX 9, 10 and 11 (many times), and various Linux distributions (mainly SuSE of late) and there's no difference in difficulty in installation or configuration. Both are equally difficult ! In fact, recovery under Linux is notably easier than with HP-UX - try booting HP-UX into single user mode if you don't know ISL or your disk is partially corrupt. We could tell you stories... I wonder if the person who made the comments had only ever used SLS (from pre-Slackware times, for those of you who weren't around back then). That said, a fair amount of technical knowledge is still necessary for a Linux install (what is /dev/sda1?) - this is a major inhibitor for "the masses" (that, and the fact that they have no clue about unix in general).
All in all, I think the article has some valid points. However, Linux is still being worked on, and I wasn't aware it was claiming to be anything like mission critical, so I think it's unfair to slate it for such things. OTOH, some have been proclaiming Linux as the be-all and end-all of OSes, which isn't true either, and this also a reason for negative backlashes.
What I dislike most is all the politics. At the end of the day, I have a job to get done, and I will use the best tool for the job whether NT, Linux or anything else. I don't want to be yelled at just because someone else doesn't like the philosophy (or licence) of the software I use.
-- Steve
SIGINT's modern era dates to World War II, when the U.S. broke the Japanese military code and learned of plans to invade Midway Island. This intelligence allowed the U.S. to defeat Japan's superior fleet.
Eh ? I thought it was the BSC which did that, and that they were Brits and Canadians - not the US. I don't have the info here right now, but I do recall that they had the direct (and secret) support of FDR and certain members of the Rockerfeller family, but Hoover and the FBI didn't like them one bit, and Congress didn't seem to either. I do know that the FBI at the time claimed certain victories which weren't theirs at all.
I also recall that the BSC told the US military that certain encryption codes were insecure, but could tell how they new that - it would have meant admitting that they had a working Enigma machine. Certain people in the US military didn't want to be told what to do by "a bunch of foreigners" and continued using these codes to inform each other of allied movements, thereby also informing the enemy and causing major casualties. If the US military had found out that the allies really could crack enemy codes, the Nazis would have found out too and would have changed their encryption machines which they had believed to be uncrackable.
Read William Stevenson's biography ("A Man Called Intrepid") for more info. A lot of what's in the book couldn't be published until the BSC archives were opened many years after the war. Some things still are kept under wraps.
I don't expect the NSA to behave any differently. Some time in the future, we'll probably find out that a vast amount of what they did was in our interest, but there are some things they'll never tell.
As in WW2, there are corrupt elements who pass information to "the other side" (whoever that happens to be at the time). If you don't know precisely who you can trust with information you don't trust anyone. In some cases, it really does mean life or death.
The BSC wasn't a paramilitary organisation by any means - they dealt mainly in information. However sometimes certain extreme measures became necessary. Many people like to point out that James Bond type scenarios are far fetched and unrealistic, but don't forget that Ian Flemming (creator of 007) worked for the BSC and that there are a number of things in his stories which are taken from real life. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Did you know that Noel Coward worked for the BSC too ?
I'm sure that the NSA is prepared to go to great lengths to maintain the intergrity of its data, control who has access to it, and protect its data sources. Whether they do so themselves or employ others to do so is a different kettle of fish.
-- Steve
Whether you believe that registering badword.com will actually help, but IMO it's a waste of time.
How many possible permutations are there ? It'd be impossible to get them all.
What about badword.foo.com ? Assuming some "nasty group of people" got themselves a respectable top-level domain name, they could have whatever subdomains they wanted.
The problem is not domain names. It's not words. It's people.
Steve