It is obvious to me that the current interest in linux has nothing to do with some buzzword like 'Open Source'. It has everything to do with the work that has been done by linux's developers over the past years, and a boost from Microsoft's overbearing attitude towards the industry.
Honestly, I think free enterprise can write better software. It's easy to underestimate the power of the dark si..uhh profit motive. To me, it remains to be seen whether corporations can really develop 'free software' for a profit.
Evangelism and marketing have nothing to do with the current success of linux.
PS: In fact, I would say the most important turning point in the mainstream attention focussing on linux was last year when Linus spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group... When a surprise showing of 500+ people turned out... people (mainstream media) took notice. Kudo's to Sam Ockman for that effort, for better or worse. After that, the windows 98 protest (kudos Chris Dibona I think)... things just steam rolled from there... Wow, feel like I was at woodstock or something.:-)
Rather they should bill the event as a PR stunt for the respective companies.... which is what it was... like it or not. Actually, my table was fine, except for the fact that I & other people RSVP'd early, showed up early.. and still were not allowed to sit at tables under 6... something that is distinctly not a LUG-type activity. Note, this is just a precursor of travesties of abuse to come.
You are putting words in my mouth. I did not say VA is not active in the community, or is in some way taking advantage of the community as a whole. I said this "balug meeting/fundraiser" was a farce.... a sharade put on by VA and linuxcare.
Now, if they had claimed that it was a fundraising event for debian coordinated by VA and Linuxcare that was intended to raise the awareness of all three, I would've gone, listened to it.. and been happy... but disguising it as a balug meeting.... geez.. the guy almost even forgot to mention it was balug while he was thanking people.
So no, nobody owes VA an apology. I just hope they realize what they're doing.
A PR stunt... as in, exclusive seating arrangements, advanced calls for press to enter first... extensive public acknowledgement for a fairly modest contribution.... overall, it just smacked of a PR stunt, rather than a fundraising event. Several people at my table (out in the back, since I definitely wasn't important enough to rate having a table #1-6 seat) somewhat agreed.
Every other phrase uttered before and after was some 'thanks linuxcare... thanks VA'.. as though there really was no balug at all. I'm just saying it's a bit hypocritical... particularly when the guy thanking linuxcare is one of their founders, am I right? Maybe I'm just an idiot eh?:-)
Re:If something like this became widespread?
on
The Factoid
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· Score: 1
This goes back to the Lucky's-club-card debacle. While really they are probably not interested in 'you' as an individual, but rather in what people 'like you' do in general. It enables them to focus their advertising... effectively filtering what you see, so you will probably only see things that will appeal to you (as defined by your profile). This is a different type of Big Brother attitude. They're not really in it to micromanage your life for you, but rather to max-out your value to them as a consumer. It's all about money in the end, nothing too new.
The government, on the other hand.. may end up using this information for much more nefarious deeds: Prosecutor: And on 4/4/94, did you not buy batteries and a box of bleach from the grocery store.. Me: Umm.. I dunno.. Prosecutor: And did you also not unknowingly purchase products such as those which could be potentially mixed into explosives? Me: Uhh... excuse me while I move to another planet.
Don't ask me why... ask them why they have to make a media presentation of it.. why do they treat press and key corporate figures differently from others? Why is it that at balug (A linux users group meeting) they had specially reserved seating for their important press friends?
Yeah, if they were putting forward $1m, *that* would be press and noteworthy.... but it's hardly something in which balug should be involved.. well, except for the fact that all the people who run all the lug are now corporate stooges:-)
My point was, that it was *not* a donation. It was a publicity stunt. I don't care how much they donate.. they made a media circus about it to raise their profile.
I think HP is one of the best examples of a technology company ever. Over half a century of success, a lot of growth, a lot of satisfied customers... what more can you ask for?
I'm guessing here that you are talking about a specific issue within HP.. not the company as a whole.
Wow.. they must be really struggling to contain costs. With *only* $25M, they donated a whopping $7k to debian at the balug event. That's easily 1/3,000 of this single round of add-on financing. How generous.. *garf*
$ for $, I think VAResearch and Linuxcare's "fund raising" event at balug was the best marketing money they've ever spent.
I guess I'm just tired of seeing predominantly PR out of some of these linux companies. "We're donating to linux developers.. see... see... see... wait.. press comes in first.. here.. take our pictures.. and our t-shirts."
In my *personal* *opinion*, it was nothing more than a publicity stunt/elbow rubbing session for the corporate linux people.. ie, "Please don't sit in table #6 and below.. those are for the press and to facilitate us to get ourselves quoted and referenced in more news articles." - Not a real quote, a paraphrase.
*puke*... think I'm gonna go back to slack..
btw: why don't these guys IPO?? So other people can get a share... I'm guessing they want to placate other companies in the silicon valley so they're not thought of as a threat and summarily trounced upon.. but I'm not sure..
This is a known property of using the GPL for your software. You are not guarrantied that if someone uses it, they will necessarily pay you money for it. Certainly if they want you to write more software of a style they want, they had better be prepared to front some cash...
On the good side, MacMillan is not the only company who can do this.. if their prices provide a good profit margin, someone will undercut them as well... All this will be grossly unsupported.. but hey...:-) amazonlinux.com:-)
If he can't manage to separate out a few nuts from the reasonable people.. that's his problem. If he uses that as a basis for his article, he's accurately portraying that there *are* nuts out there who attack people who say bad things about linux. This is one of the inherint features/bugs of linux/open source... it should be portrayed accurately... after all, we're not afraid of the truth....:-)
SQL server was lifted from Sybase... it's likely pretty good technology.. and for online transaction processing, it's pretty fast. Oracle won't publish TPC-C benchmarks on NT... because SQL server it optimized to kick butt at TPC-C. That's why Larry Ellison's NT challenge was only targetted at TPC-D.. which is decision support stuff, not oltp. Clustering SQL server probably won't hurt it's performance.. because the way they do clustering.. there's just failover... so how much can it hurt anyways?:-) Note, Sybase isn't doing so well these days.. that's what you get for selling out to the dark side..:-) I'll *bet* that in most implementations, the U5 isn't even connected to a network... it's just a console... why risk that kind of problem... I wouldn't... It's not like you need to use it remotely every day.. That crap about the controller is just FUD worthy of MS..
I'm seeing this story everywhere. If the systems at your bank go down, and all the ATMs are out of service for 6 or 12 hours.. nobody even really notices... and those are considered "mission critical applications."
What I think we might be seeing here.. is the creation of an even *higher* category of important systems. Some sort of world-stopping problems that result from a downed server/cluster. Maybe the PHBs will start talking about ultra-critical systems.. or some buzzword like that.
Previously, a system goes down..and you can expect to catch hell from everybody in your company, and maybe even a few outsiders... but now.. you catch hell from CNN and the likes..:-)
1) I do not believe the Ultra 5 is a single point of failure.. I believe that if the Ultra 5 goes down, you basically don't have console access to the machine. Yes, it's bad to lose your console.. but you just pull another Ultra 5 into it's place are yer happy again. Your UE10K will run just fine.. (I'm about 90% confident on this, though I haven't actually run an E10K without the console-thingy). Note, Sun's clustering also 'requires' a U5 as a controller.. but if you don't have it.. the clustering still runs just fine..:-)
2) I'm not sure whether they intended High Availability in the design of the E10K.. I'm pretty sure they primarily targetted maximum performance and reliability... which is not the same as HA..
3) MS' wolfpack is a simple failover product. I believe there are apps for x86 *nix failover as well.
6) very much agreed. If it was a hardware error that caused the problem, then it's their lack of foresight which has put them in this position.
Though there are new oil wells being tapped fairly continuously, this is nothing compared to the growth of network bandwidth availability. For example, the price to have a T-1 speed connection drops significantly every year. Heck, what used to be $2K/mo is now a $40/mo cable modem.... semi-dedicated, but the same thing goes for larger providers. The price of bandwidth should fall every year, by a large amount. I'm not sure this kind of 'market' abstraction will work here. Is everybody going to just check the index and see how much bandwidth is down today? Because realistically, it should never go up. It's like disk space... sure, we always need more of it.. but if we were selling it on a market, we'd have to change units from KB->MB->GB->TB and on up every couple years. That doesn't seem like a proper market to me. I'm sure gas experienced an amazing growth, but I think that's nothing compared to what's in store for us...
Bandwidth supply is increasing at a rather brisk rate. Unlike gas, and most other commodities, you can't just store it up and put it on the market at a later date. I think their drawing of analogies are kind of suspicious. I don't think bandwidth really qualifies as a commodity. This whole idea is pretty scary. brian
I kind of agree with you. The article added no new concepts, nor did express known concepts from a novel perspective. Stupid may be too extreme of a word, but I agree there was little that was presented which was of interest.
Re:Guys , IT DOES MATTER how long your message is
on
RSA slightly broken
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· Score: 1
I don't see how having a large plaintext will make your symmetric key more vulnerable.. yeah.. encrypting a 56 bit symmetric key with a 4000+ bit RSA key doesn't give you any more security than a 56 bit symmetric key you agreed to in person.
Having a large text gives them more to look at... but I don't think it makes decryption faster... maybe there's something with that differential cryptanalysis. Besides.. you could switch symmetric keys every once in a while if neccessary.
I'd really like to play something that's more in the spirit of the old MUDs and MUSHes... but with a nice GUI front end... anybody seen one around? ie, not subscription based.. etc..
Re:Factoring technology (check out RSA's website)
on
RSA slightly broken
·
· Score: 2
They explain at rsa.com that (as another mentioned here already) the secret key for regular encyption is the only thing encrypted by public key, so you don't have to worry about how big your message is. The rsa FAQ is pretty interesting
Precisely.. can't do with one thumb, what can only be done with 8-10 fingers..
I think they'd be a lot more successfull with a glove that emulates a keyboard... so you can type on the walls, or whatnot and the glove just picks up with key yer typing.. :wq!
Katz's experimenting is over
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
I believe you have avoided the actual point. There is nothing to this article other than 'teenage violence is dropping, and educators are clueless to respond to media hype'.
This doesn't really merit the time it took me to read the article. It is also a statement which 99% of us have certainly already considered. Personally, I think slashdot should stick to linking to other people's news, rather than posting editorials.
Good point, but one might also wonder why we should bother responding at all. Are we supposed to respond to every bit of FUD that comes out of Redmond?
IMHO, the justice case has shot their credibility more than anything we could say about them.
I hope people realize this piece to be the FUD that it is... and if people don't realize it.. then they will just be that much further behind in the revolution that is linux.
Slashdot Mirror
It is obvious to me that the current interest in linux has nothing to do with some buzzword like 'Open Source'. It has everything to do with the work that has been done by linux's developers over the past years, and a boost from Microsoft's overbearing attitude towards the industry.
:-)
Honestly, I think free enterprise can write better software. It's easy to underestimate the power of the dark si..uhh profit motive. To me, it remains to be seen whether corporations can really develop 'free software' for a profit.
Evangelism and marketing have nothing to do with the current success of linux.
PS:
In fact, I would say the most important turning point in the mainstream attention focussing on linux was last year when Linus spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group... When a surprise showing of 500+ people turned out... people (mainstream media) took notice. Kudo's to Sam Ockman for that effort, for better or worse.
After that, the windows 98 protest (kudos Chris Dibona I think)... things just steam rolled from there...
Wow, feel like I was at woodstock or something.
Rather they should bill the event as a PR stunt for the respective companies.... which is what it was... like it or not.
Actually, my table was fine, except for the fact that I & other people RSVP'd early, showed up early.. and still were not allowed to sit at tables under 6... something that is distinctly not a LUG-type activity.
Note, this is just a precursor of travesties of abuse to come.
You are putting words in my mouth.
I did not say VA is not active in the community, or is in some way taking advantage of the community as a whole.
I said this "balug meeting/fundraiser" was a farce.... a sharade put on by VA and linuxcare.
Now, if they had claimed that it was a fundraising event for debian coordinated by VA and Linuxcare that was intended to raise the awareness of all three, I would've gone, listened to it.. and been happy... but disguising it as a balug meeting.... geez.. the guy almost even forgot to mention it was balug while he was thanking people.
So no, nobody owes VA an apology. I just hope they realize what they're doing.
A PR stunt... as in, exclusive seating arrangements, advanced calls for press to enter first... extensive public acknowledgement for a fairly modest contribution.... overall, it just smacked of a PR stunt, rather than a fundraising event. Several people at my table (out in the back, since I definitely wasn't important enough to rate having a table #1-6 seat) somewhat agreed.
:-)
Every other phrase uttered before and after was some 'thanks linuxcare... thanks VA'.. as though there really was no balug at all. I'm just saying it's a bit hypocritical... particularly when the guy thanking linuxcare is one of their founders, am I right? Maybe I'm just an idiot eh?
This goes back to the Lucky's-club-card debacle. While really they are probably not interested in 'you' as an individual, but rather in what people 'like you' do in general. It enables them to focus their advertising... effectively filtering what you see, so you will probably only see things that will appeal to you (as defined by your profile).
This is a different type of Big Brother attitude. They're not really in it to micromanage your life for you, but rather to max-out your value to them as a consumer. It's all about money in the end, nothing too new.
The government, on the other hand.. may end up using this information for much more nefarious deeds:
Prosecutor: And on 4/4/94, did you not buy batteries and a box of bleach from the grocery store..
Me: Umm.. I dunno..
Prosecutor: And did you also not unknowingly purchase products such as those which could be potentially mixed into explosives?
Me: Uhh... excuse me while I move to another planet.
Don't ask me why... ask them why they have to make a media presentation of it.. why do they treat press and key corporate figures differently from others? Why is it that at balug (A linux users group meeting) they had specially reserved seating for their important press friends?
:-)
Yeah, if they were putting forward $1m, *that* would be press and noteworthy.... but it's hardly something in which balug should be involved.. well, except for the fact that all the people who run all the lug are now corporate stooges
My point was, that it was *not* a donation. It was a publicity stunt. I don't care how much they donate.. they made a media circus about it to raise their profile.
I think HP is one of the best examples of a technology company ever. Over half a century of success, a lot of growth, a lot of satisfied customers... what more can you ask for?
I'm guessing here that you are talking about a specific issue within HP.. not the company as a whole.
Wow.. they must be really struggling to contain costs. With *only* $25M, they donated a whopping $7k to debian at the balug event. That's easily 1/3,000 of this single round of add-on financing. How generous.. *garf*
... see... see... wait.. press comes in first.. here.. take our pictures.. and our t-shirts."
$ for $, I think VAResearch and Linuxcare's "fund raising" event at balug was the best marketing money they've ever spent.
I guess I'm just tired of seeing predominantly PR out of some of these linux companies. "We're donating to linux developers.. see
In my *personal* *opinion*, it was nothing more than a publicity stunt/elbow rubbing session for the corporate linux people.. ie, "Please don't sit in table #6 and below.. those are for the press and to facilitate us to get ourselves quoted and referenced in more news articles." - Not a real quote, a paraphrase.
*puke*... think I'm gonna go back to slack..
btw: why don't these guys IPO?? So other people can get a share... I'm guessing they want to placate other companies in the silicon valley so they're not thought of as a threat and summarily trounced upon.. but I'm not sure..
This is a known property of using the GPL for your software. You are not guarrantied that if someone uses it, they will necessarily pay you money for it. Certainly if they want you to write more software of a style they want, they had better be prepared to front some cash...
:-) :-)
On the good side, MacMillan is not the only company who can do this.. if their prices provide a good profit margin, someone will undercut them as well... All this will be grossly unsupported.. but hey...
amazonlinux.com
If he can't manage to separate out a few nuts from the reasonable people.. that's his problem. If he uses that as a basis for his article, he's accurately portraying that there *are* nuts out there who attack people who say bad things about linux. This is one of the inherint features/bugs of linux/open source... it should be portrayed accurately... after all, we're not afraid of the truth.... :-)
Maybe investors think crashes are indicative of the market growing faster than their technical planners expected....
SQL server was lifted from Sybase... it's likely pretty good technology.. and for online transaction processing, it's pretty fast. Oracle won't publish TPC-C benchmarks on NT... because SQL server it optimized to kick butt at TPC-C. That's why Larry Ellison's NT challenge was only targetted at TPC-D.. which is decision support stuff, not oltp. :-) :-)
Clustering SQL server probably won't hurt it's performance.. because the way they do clustering.. there's just failover... so how much can it hurt anyways?
Note, Sybase isn't doing so well these days.. that's what you get for selling out to the dark side..
I'll *bet* that in most implementations, the U5 isn't even connected to a network... it's just a console... why risk that kind of problem... I wouldn't... It's not like you need to use it remotely every day.. That crap about the controller is just FUD worthy of MS..
I'm seeing this story everywhere. If the systems at your bank go down, and all the ATMs are out of service for 6 or 12 hours.. nobody even really notices... and those are considered "mission critical applications."
:-)
What I think we might be seeing here.. is the creation of an even *higher* category of important systems. Some sort of world-stopping problems that result from a downed server/cluster. Maybe the PHBs will start talking about ultra-critical systems.. or some buzzword like that.
Previously, a system goes down..and you can expect to catch hell from everybody in your company, and maybe even a few outsiders... but now.. you catch hell from CNN and the likes..
1) I do not believe the Ultra 5 is a single point of failure.. I believe that if the Ultra 5 goes down, you basically don't have console access to the machine. Yes, it's bad to lose your console.. but you just pull another Ultra 5 into it's place are yer happy again. Your UE10K will run just fine.. (I'm about 90% confident on this, though I haven't actually run an E10K without the console-thingy). Note, Sun's clustering also 'requires' a U5 as a controller.. but if you don't have it.. the clustering still runs just fine.. :-)
2) I'm not sure whether they intended High Availability in the design of the E10K.. I'm pretty sure they primarily targetted maximum performance and reliability... which is not the same as HA..
3) MS' wolfpack is a simple failover product. I believe there are apps for x86 *nix failover as well.
6) very much agreed. If it was a hardware error that caused the problem, then it's their lack of foresight which has put them in this position.
Though there are new oil wells being tapped fairly continuously, this is nothing compared to the growth of network bandwidth availability.
For example, the price to have a T-1 speed connection drops significantly every year. Heck, what used to be $2K/mo is now a $40/mo cable modem.... semi-dedicated, but the same thing goes for larger providers. The price of bandwidth should fall every year, by a large amount.
I'm not sure this kind of 'market' abstraction will work here. Is everybody going to just check the index and see how much bandwidth is down today? Because realistically, it should never go up. It's like disk space... sure, we always need more of it.. but if we were selling it on a market, we'd have to change units from KB->MB->GB->TB and on up every couple years.
That doesn't seem like a proper market to me. I'm sure gas experienced an amazing growth, but I think that's nothing compared to what's in store for us...
Bandwidth supply is increasing at a rather brisk rate. Unlike gas, and most other commodities, you can't just store it up and put it on the market at a later date. I think their drawing of analogies are kind of suspicious.
I don't think bandwidth really qualifies as a commodity. This whole idea is pretty scary.
brian
I kind of agree with you. The article added no new concepts, nor did express known concepts from a novel perspective. Stupid may be too extreme of a word, but I agree there was little that was presented which was of interest.
I don't see how having a large plaintext will make your symmetric key more vulnerable.. yeah.. encrypting a 56 bit symmetric key with a 4000+ bit RSA key doesn't give you any more security than a 56 bit symmetric key you agreed to in person.
Having a large text gives them more to look at... but I don't think it makes decryption faster... maybe there's something with that differential cryptanalysis.
Besides.. you could switch symmetric keys every once in a while if neccessary.
I'd really like to play something that's more in the spirit of the old MUDs and MUSHes... but with a nice GUI front end... anybody seen one around?
ie, not subscription based.. etc..
You rock, I dig this quote! :-)
They explain at rsa.com that (as another mentioned here already) the secret key for regular encyption is the only thing encrypted by public key, so you don't have to worry about how big your message is.
The rsa FAQ is pretty interesting
Precisely.. can't do with one thumb, what can only be done with 8-10 fingers..
I think they'd be a lot more successfull with a glove that emulates a keyboard... so you can type on the walls, or whatnot and the glove just picks up with key yer typing..
:wq!
I believe you have avoided the actual point. There is nothing to this article other than 'teenage violence is dropping, and educators are clueless to respond to media hype'.
This doesn't really merit the time it took me to read the article. It is also a statement which 99% of us have certainly already considered. Personally, I think slashdot should stick to linking to other people's news, rather than posting editorials.
Brian Chrisman
Good point, but one might also wonder why we should bother responding at all. Are we supposed to respond to every bit of FUD that comes out of Redmond?
IMHO, the justice case has shot their credibility more than anything we could say about them.
I hope people realize this piece to be the FUD that it is... and if people don't realize it.. then they will just be that much further behind in the revolution that is linux.