Linux-Advocacy Digest #355, Volume #26 Wed, 3 May 00 18:13:10 EDT
Contents:
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (Ben Walker)
Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ? (JoeX1029)
Who is "S"?? (JoeX1029)
Re: Applix 5.0 it's getting better! (Mig Mig)
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (Stephen Bodnar)
Re: Who is "S"?? (Mig Mig)
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (Ben Walker)
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (JEDIDIAH)
Re: What else is hidden in MS code??? ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: QB 4.5 in Win 2000 ("ROW Software")
Re: Are we equal? (Bob Hauck)
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (Leslie Mikesell)
Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation' (Mathias Grimmberger)
Re: Are we equal? (abraxas)
Re: Linux NFS is buggy (abraxas)
Re: Are we equal? (JEDIDIAH)
Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation' ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation' (abraxas)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ben Walker)
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: 3 May 2000 13:26:54 -0600
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Full Name <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>We have an Ultra 10 running Solaris 2.7 with a SCSI DAT Drive. We NFS
>mount the users' files on a second Ultra, a Sparc 10, an old HP UNIX
>box and an old SCO Intel box so they may be tar'd to tape.
>
>About a month ago we introduced a Linux box (Mandrake 7.x) into the
>equation. What a mistake! The backup stops at random locations
>within the NFS mounted Linux file system. At first we thought the
>tape drive was faulty and dragged a Sun technician out to replace it.
>But the problems still recurred.
>
>We spent a good fortnight getting NFS on the Linux box to work in the
>first place. Now we find it's buggy.
>
>The irony of this is that we are now looking at using a cron job to
>use Samba to backup the users' files onto the NT box sitting on my
>desk. We are hoping that Samba (unlike NFS) works reliably on Linux.
>
I have experienced similar problems in the past with the Linux NFS client.
I have only seen this with directories with a few thousand files in them,
however. We support many users who run simulations, and can generate this
many files in a single run. (Yes, there are probably better ways to
save data, but I don't tell my users how to write their code). Anyway,
user home directoies are on an IRIX box. When I try to tar them up via
NFS to the 8 mm tape drive on a Linux box, the NFS just hangs, consuming
most of the CPU and memory. If I run an ls -lR locally, sometimes the deadlock
will be broken for some reason. I suspect there is some memory leak or
file desriptor leak somewhere. Also, decreasing the read buffer from 8192
to 2048 seems to fix this.
If I do the same operations on another SGI box that has the same directory
NFS mounted, I have no problems. Both are mounting the disk with NFS version
2.
I first noticed this in 2.0 kernels. I hoped that the 2.2 kernels would fix
this, but it is the same. What I ended up doing was just running the tar
on the SGI box using the tape drive on the Linux box as a remote tape drive
through rmt, and bypassing NFS, or reducing the read buffer size, with a
slight performance loss.
I have never noticed anything on the server side, however, except the
slowness of the pre 2.2 userland NFS server.
>At this stage we are all quite fed up with this pile of crap you
>people seem to think is God's gift to the IT industry.
>
>No wonder they give the thing away.
>
I love Linux and have been using it for 4 years. NFS does seem to be a little
shaky, but having very large directories is atypical. Otherwise, NFS works
fine. I can work around these problems. Linux isn't perfect, but it's
still 100 times better than Windoze and even other UNIX flavors (IRIX, Solaris,
etc). I have fast, reliable, very configurable server machines, without the
bloated, BSOD prone, insanely overpriced NT server.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JoeX1029)
Subject: Re: Help ... ... P l e a s e ?
Date: 03 May 2000 20:02:02 GMT
I don't think you should have formatted the partition ( i never do). Did you
run scan disk and Defrag both before and after?? Corel isn't the best choice
as it's new and has bugs that need to be worked out (I've had a lot of people
say it was buggy). Also, if you want I can send you RedHat 5.1 (or 5.2) that
always has worked perfect for me with a Win and Linux partitioned hd. RedHat
has always worked great for me and has been quite easy to setup. Hope you get
it working.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JoeX1029)
Subject: Who is "S"??
Date: 03 May 2000 20:09:32 GMT
Who is this person "S" (in a RE to the Linux whore post someone said "it must
be S again" Who is S??
------------------------------
From: Mig Mig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Applix 5.0 it's getting better!
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 22:25:14 +0200
Matthias Warkus wrote:
> It was the Tue, 2 May 2000 21:59:33 +0200...
> > Probably KDE at the moment has less than 1/3 of the developers of Gnome..
>
> Very improbable, considering they had about four times as much as
> GNOME in mid-1999.
Are you sure of this. I read somewhere last autumn that there were about
200 Gnome vs around 50-60 KDE developers working on the core libraries.
The volume of posts in the gnome and kde lists also indicate that there are
more developers (or rather more posters) working on Gnome.
Dont get me wrong.. i prefer KDE over Gnome anyday for stability and
"artistic" reasons and use KDE daily :-)
> > that could and will probably change very quick once Kylix is out.
>
> Is Kylix KDE-specific? Eeeek...! Evil.
Nah.. but it will use Qt as the /(one of ?) toolkit.
------------------------------
From: Stephen Bodnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 12:34:55 -0800
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Full
Name) wrote:
> We have an Ultra 10 running Solaris 2.7 with a SCSI DAT Drive. We NFS
> mount the users' files on a second Ultra, a Sparc 10, an old HP UNIX
> box and an old SCO Intel box so they may be tar'd to tape.
Yikes, using tar to backup a network - pretty inefficient!
> About a month ago we introduced a Linux box (Mandrake 7.x) into the
> equation. What a mistake! The backup stops at random locations
> within the NFS mounted Linux file system. At first we thought the
> tape drive was faulty and dragged a Sun technician out to replace it.
> But the problems still recurred.
---- 8> (rant deleted) -----------------
After having done admin on a similar network, I have lots
of comments / thoughts -
1) Why not use the linux box to back up all the others? Then
you don't have to use the (admittedly) buggy linux nfs server. I
had a dedicated backup machine on our network running BRU
Enterprise in SuSE 5.3, over NFS. This was really good
security wise, because I could lock up the backup server
as it had all the NFS mounts as ROOT (has to, otherwise
can't backup system directories) - very successful implementation
2) forget about trying to backup NT or windows boxes through
Samba - you can't backup the registry that way, and that's the
most important part to backup! Also, file permissions get
pretty much hosed. The data will come over intact though.
3) What kind of DDS dat? I had so many problems with them
on Sun's that I gave up after an incredibly large number
of man-hours keeping the silly things alive. I think I replaced
about 1 per year over 5 years under our Sun service contract.
You need to run at least one pass of a cleaning tape after
every new tape run through the drive. Also, do you have the
shared memory variable set high enough
to allow buffering for network burps and farts?
Stephen
------------------------------
From: Mig Mig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Who is "S"??
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 22:37:04 +0200
JoeX1029 wrote:
> Who is this person "S" (in a RE to the Linux whore post someone said "it must
> be S again" Who is S??
"S" is childish kid with a pro Micros~1 attitude
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ben Walker)
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: 3 May 2000 14:34:15 -0600
In article <8epo5k$u9$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>
>That you are using tar to make backups shows that you don't have a
>clue about proper backup procedures. So don't come here to
>pretend you have half an idea because you don't.
Tar is fine for backups, quick and simple. I have my own homegrown backup
scripts that do full and various different level incremental backups and
use tar to write to tape. I generate log files and can generate an
approximate index file which I can use to quickly locate a file with mt
that I need to restore. We have a tape jukebox which I use a a generic
SCSI changer driver to control. We have 4 servers with almost 300 GB of
disk space. After a modest amount of effort to write the scripts, backups
run every night flawlessly out of cron. I have looked at amanda and bru,
and have been unimpressed. I can do everything I need with a few scripts
that use tar.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JEDIDIAH)
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 20:47:54 GMT
On Wed, 03 May 2000 12:34:55 -0800, Stephen Bodnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Full
>Name) wrote:
[deletia]
Besides, DAT's are relatively failure prone as media goes.
>3) What kind of DDS dat? I had so many problems with them
>on Sun's that I gave up after an incredibly large number
>of man-hours keeping the silly things alive. I think I replaced
>about 1 per year over 5 years under our Sun service contract.
>You need to run at least one pass of a cleaning tape after
>every new tape run through the drive. Also, do you have the
>shared memory variable set high enough
>to allow buffering for network burps and farts?
...sounds unecessarily time consuming.
--
|||
/ | \
Need sane PPP docs? Try penguin.lvcm.com.
------------------------------
From: "Erik Funkenbusch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: What else is hidden in MS code???
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 16:20:07 -0500
Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:8epmmf$rs8$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy Erik Funkenbusch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Andres Soolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > news:8ei4mj$9t0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> >> No, it is not untrue. If reverse engineering violates license, it
> >> violates the copyright since the copyright only gives users the
> >> permission to use the product by the license. Of course, wherever
> [...]
> > A copyright does not give you permission to use a product. It prohibits
> > non-copyright holders from copying a product.
> Actually, a copyright prohibits non-copyright holders from copying the
> product except as allowed in the license. I have understood so far
> that violating the license contract makes one's use of the product
> illegal since he/she hasn't received a copy of the product on the
> conditions listed in the license. The obvious exception is license
> conditions that are against the law themselves. Well, I might be wrong
> on this--IANAL.
We're talking about reverse engineering a legitimately recieved copy,
purchased from the author. The EULA might prohibit reverse engineering, but
that's a liscense issue, and not a copyright issue.
In fact, one man... Andrew Schulman even published a book with disassembled
and commented Windows source code. (Unauthorized Windows 95) Matt Petrek
did the same thing in Windows 95 System Programming Secrets.
> >> AFAIR, Rex didn't say Excel 95 needs Direct3D but a 3D subsystem. And
> >> that it indeed requires. (I was quite surprised if I discovered it
> [...]
>
> > What are you talking about? What 3D package did you "discover"? And
how
> > did you know it was such?
> It wasn't a package. It was a set of DLL-s that came along with the
> Microsoft Office.
>
> > Direct3D was bought by Microsoft from a 3rd party in 1996 and wasn't
made
> > available to the public until 1997.
> I believe these specific dll's had nothing to do with Direct3D.
> I can't recall which dll's they actually were, sorry. All I remember
> is they had `3D' in their descriptions and I guess in their filenames
> too, but I'm not very sure about the latter.
You're probably talking about ctrl3d.dll, which was Microsofts first version
of 3D buttons and dialogs, which has absolutely nothing to do with 3D image
representation. It's just common dialogs which render differently.
> >> I might give you quite a good (in the sense of checkability) proof
> >> of a backdoor planted in MS-DOS (and PC-DOS) to make DR-DOS look bad
> >> if you're interested. Just mail me for details.
>
> > First, we're not talking about back doors here. Second, what you are
> > talking about is not a back door. Third, it was only in one beta
version of
> > Windows 3.1, never a production product or a widely distributed product.
> No, I'm talking about a back door in MS-DOS and PC-DOS, not the famous
> MSW warning message. Check it: take intersvr.exe from any mentioned
> MS-DOS version, unpack it (well, they used two different executable
> compressors on some tools--the best I can guess is they did it just
> to avoid such easy checks since generally two different compressors
> applied sequentially don't give better compression rate than any of
> them alone--; you might need to download some executable decompressors
> (should be freely (gratis, not open source) available on the Web) if
> you can't do it under debugger) and look for the string `DR-DOS' near
> the end of the result. If you don't mind a little bit of dissassembly,
> look deeper into the code. And intersvr is not the only tool that
> checks against DR-DOS. I've had that exploding and virtually erasing
> a hard disk contents. The actual OS was Caldera OpenDOS, but since
> it's a descendant of DR-DOS it identifies itself frequently as DR-DOS.
All applications that ship with a version of DOS check to make sure they're
running on the same version of DOS they were built for. This include
command.com, and many others. There are a few exceptions, I think fdisk and
format and xcopy will work with most versions of DOS, but many of them
depend on internal structures of DOS which can change from version to
version, thus they check version numbers. If Microsoft wanted to mess up
DR-DOS, they wouldn't have had to specifically check for it, they'd only
have to check that they weren't running on MS-DOS.
> > Fourth, that doesn't back up anything that Rex has said.
> Yes, that specific example doesn't. However, it is a provable example
> of an early Microsoft backdoor, so it refutes your claim that nobody
> ever proves Microsoft backdoors.
You've proved nothing, only made vague claims without backing it up.
> >> > For instance, the claims of MS embedding a GUID in order to violate
your
> >> > privacy are grossly exagerated. The GUID was there as a way to
uniquely
> >> > identify documents for indexing, but it was later discovered that
since
> [...]
>
> >> How do YOU know what's the intended purpose and what's not?
>
> > Because *EVERYONE* was using GUID's for unique ID's at the time.
> There's nothing wrong with the idea of globally unique identifiers.
> The problem is how they are generated and which data they contain.
> Many applications use big random numbers to generate guid's.
> Microsoft didn't. Why?
GUID's were not created by Microsoft, they were created by the Open Software
Foundation for DCE RPC. GUID's are simply microsofts implementation of
UUID's.
> > My company
> > was, other companies that I did work for was. It was a common useage,
and
> > nobody stopped to consider the privacy issues. Yes, it's possible it
was
> > intended to violate privacy, but Occam's razor would say otherwise.
> I'd guess in that case Occam doesn't help. It isn't any simpler to
> use MAC address to generate guid's than the hard disk serial number, for
> example. I'd say even the contrary: many more machines running MSO
> have hard disks than network cards, so even if the ms-guid designer
> picked up the first thing he/she came to, it probably wouldn't be the
> MAC address. Then again, tracking a specific computer down is much
> easier by its MAC address than by its harddisk serial number.
Hard disk serial numbers are not guaranteed to be unique. Two hard disks
can exist with the same ID. It's unlikely, but it can happen. And since
components that use them can be shipped all over the world, the odds of a
clash are even higher. Random numbers are not guaranteed to be unique
either. It's possible for two systems to generate the exact same random
number. Again, not likely, but possible. MAC addresses are guaranteed by
the IEEE to be unique.
> >> > Microsoft
> >> > also quickly moved to solve the problem once it was identified.
> >> No, once it was published widely.
> > Which was pretty shortly after it was identified.
> That raises another interesting question: are there any known problems
> that Microsoft have fixed after identifying but before publication?
Most service packs have dozens of not hundreds of fixes, most of which were
identified without publication.
------------------------------
From: "ROW Software" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.lang.basic,alt.destroy.microsoft
Subject: Re: QB 4.5 in Win 2000
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 16:20:29 -0500
=====BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE=====
Hash: SHA1
Or you can just screw M$ Office altogether and download StarOffice
for Linux and Linux, which is what I did.
Regards,
Kurt Weber
"Arclight" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> On 03 May 2000 10:56:02 -0600, Craig Kelley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
> >[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Arclight) writes:
> >
> >> On Tue, 2 May 2000 18:26:50 -0700, "Bob May"
> >> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>
> >> >Go buy a new copy of Word for Windows 1.0.
> >> >Go buy a new copy of Visual Basic 2.0
> >> >YOU CAN'T!!!!! All you can buy is the newer versions of the
> >> >programs which also cost a lot more than the earlier versions.
> >>
> >> So? what's wrong with that?
> >
> >We run Office97.
> >
> >How do we buy new copies for the new machines (which aren't just
> >replacing the old ones).
>
> You can still buy Office 97 from lots of places.
>
> >Either we all have to upgrade to Office2000, or the new machines
> >go without...
>
> or you could just look in the computer press for somewhere that
> sells Office 97.
>
> TTFN
> Arclight
>
> Web Site:
http://www.daniel-davies.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bob Hauck)
Crossposted-To:
alt.conspiracy,alt.conspiracy.area51,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,talk.politics
Subject: Re: Are we equal?
Reply-To: hauck[at]codem{dot}com
Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 21:22:23 GMT
On Wed, 03 May 2000 18:19:22 GMT, JEDIDIAH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Calling it a gunboat while perhaps pedantically corrrect
> is still rather disingenuous. There are crew served small
> arms with more potency then what that Cutter carries.
I suspect that it is a lot easier to call a 76mm cannon a "peashooter" and
deride it's lack of "potency" from your living room on dry land than when
it is pointed at your small boat out on the open ocean.
--
-| Bob Hauck
-| Codem Systems, Inc.
-| http://www.codem.com/
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: 3 May 2000 16:37:04 -0500
In article <8eq2g7$4lb$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Ben Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>That you are using tar to make backups shows that you don't have a
>>clue about proper backup procedures. So don't come here to
>>pretend you have half an idea because you don't.
>
>Tar is fine for backups, quick and simple.
GNUtar is OK on platforms that have small device numbers.
Stock tar on many platforms will not handle devices or other
special files. GNUtar doesn't handle large device numbers as
used on at least freebsd.
>I have my own homegrown backup
>scripts that do full and various different level incremental backups and
>use tar to write to tape. I generate log files and can generate an
>approximate index file which I can use to quickly locate a file with mt
>that I need to restore. We have a tape jukebox which I use a a generic
>SCSI changer driver to control. We have 4 servers with almost 300 GB of
>disk space. After a modest amount of effort to write the scripts, backups
>run every night flawlessly out of cron. I have looked at amanda and bru,
>and have been unimpressed. I can do everything I need with a few scripts
>that use tar.
The problem that amanda solves better than other things I've seen is
how to automatically balance the full and incremental runs over
the cycles and number of tapes you use such that within each
cycle you have at least one full backup and every run gets at least
an incremental of every filesystem. It will keep this adjusted,
allowing for expected compression ratios and sizes of incrementals
as your filesystems and usage patterns change over time. Beyond
that, it basically acts as a wrapper for tar or dump with indexing,
email notification, etc.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
From: Mathias Grimmberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation'
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 21:24:28 GMT
Jen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I'm growing weary of this "where is the Microsoft innovation" crap.
So, a hard and fast question: Where is the MS innovation?
> Where is the "innovation" is an operating system that has it's roots
> in the 1960s (Linux). But, OH!, it has new GUIs that can actually
> present a common look and feel among applications and do such wondrous
> things as drag-n-drop! And to top it off, it only has a tiny fraction
> of the applications and hardware support that that "non-innovative" OS
> has! Wow.
Hmm, nobody has claimed that Linux was the latest and greatest
innovation AFAIK. In fact that it is build on the principles of Unix
(which have been proven to actually work over a long time :-) is one of
the big selling points of it.
What do you get from MS? An ever changing flood of buzzwords: yesterday
the word was "rich": rich user experiences, rich content, rich
everything. Today the word seems to be "great": great products, great
features, great everything. It is actually quite funny if you watch it
over some period of time. It doesn't mean anything (technically
speaking) of course. And it will be some other word tomorrow too.
Now MS seems to have announced it's intention to include biometrics into
the Windows API and all sorts of journalists get excited about it.
Hmm, guess what, the company I worked for back in 1997 (or was it 1996?)
had a demo of biometric access control for WinNT back then. Yes, our own
GINA DLL doing biometrics. Since MS did such a great job (not!) of
documenting the API we could not do a genuine logon (with the published
API you *must* have a cleartext password to do a user logon), we could
only unlock the screen lock. Other companies had such demos too (which
AFAIK where basically a fake though). We could have easily done a
complete version of that for any Unix had our management wanted one.
So, MS is innovating, leading the industry, whatever, ... once again? I
don't think so...
MGri
--
Mathias Grimmberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Eat flaming death, evil Micro$oft mongrels!
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (abraxas)
Crossposted-To:
alt.conspiracy,alt.conspiracy.area51,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,talk.politics
Subject: Re: Are we equal?
Date: 3 May 2000 21:45:58 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy Bob Hauck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 03 May 2000 18:19:22 GMT, JEDIDIAH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Calling it a gunboat while perhaps pedantically corrrect
>> is still rather disingenuous. There are crew served small
>> arms with more potency then what that Cutter carries.
> I suspect that it is a lot easier to call a 76mm cannon a "peashooter" and
> deride it's lack of "potency" from your living room on dry land than when
> it is pointed at your small boat out on the open ocean.
Exactly. Not only never having been to cuba, I suspect jedidiah has also
never served in the navy nor been in the coast guard.
But im sure hes got some kind of family member who has, so his opinion in the
matter is entirely valid. :)
=====yttrx
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (abraxas)
Subject: Re: Linux NFS is buggy
Date: 3 May 2000 21:47:47 GMT
Leslie Mikesell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In article <8epbk6$1q4b$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> abraxas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> At this stage we are all quite fed up with this pile of crap you
>>> people seem to think is God's gift to the IT industry.
>>
>>You're not implementing it correctly. Linux is a fine workstation OS, and
>>not very good for most other things.
> Errr, beg your pardon? There's nothing wrong with it as a web
> server, samba server, email server and so on.
That depends directly on the load on the machine itself. It is a widely
accepted fact that linux does not handle high network loads as well as
most other unices.
=====yttrx
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JEDIDIAH)
Crossposted-To:
alt.conspiracy,alt.conspiracy.area51,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,talk.politics
Subject: Re: Are we equal?
Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 21:49:32 GMT
On Wed, 03 May 2000 21:22:23 GMT, Bob Hauck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Wed, 03 May 2000 18:19:22 GMT, JEDIDIAH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Calling it a gunboat while perhaps pedantically corrrect
>> is still rather disingenuous. There are crew served small
>> arms with more potency then what that Cutter carries.
>
>I suspect that it is a lot easier to call a 76mm cannon a "peashooter" and
>deride it's lack of "potency" from your living room on dry land than when
>it is pointed at your small boat out on the open ocean.
What makes you think that you would ever get close enough to that
peashooter to worry about being intimidated by it if the vessel's
intent were to do you harm?
--
|||
/ | \
Need sane PPP docs? Try penguin.lvcm.com.
------------------------------
From: "Erik Funkenbusch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation'
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 17:05:00 -0500
Mathias Grimmberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Jen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > I'm growing weary of this "where is the Microsoft innovation" crap.
>
> So, a hard and fast question: Where is the MS innovation?
Have you looked at Microsofts 1,227 Patents? By definition, a patent is an
innovation is it not?
> Hmm, nobody has claimed that Linux was the latest and greatest
> innovation AFAIK. In fact that it is build on the principles of Unix
> (which have been proven to actually work over a long time :-) is one of
> the big selling points of it.
And where are the Linux patents?
> Now MS seems to have announced it's intention to include biometrics into
> the Windows API and all sorts of journalists get excited about it.
Which OS has biometrics built in?
> Hmm, guess what, the company I worked for back in 1997 (or was it 1996?)
> had a demo of biometric access control for WinNT back then. Yes, our own
> GINA DLL doing biometrics. Since MS did such a great job (not!) of
> documenting the API we could not do a genuine logon (with the published
> API you *must* have a cleartext password to do a user logon), we could
> only unlock the screen lock. Other companies had such demos too (which
> AFAIK where basically a fake though). We could have easily done a
> complete version of that for any Unix had our management wanted one.
Biometrics support is more than just logins. And Biometrics include a host
of technologies including fingerprint, voiceprint, retinal, image
recognition (such as face paterning), etc..
> So, MS is innovating, leading the industry, whatever, ... once again? I
> don't think so...
A standardized Biometrics API is certainly new. Today, if you want to write
Biometric aware applications, you need to write to someone's API. And
that's different for each product.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (abraxas)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.lang.java.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dvorak calls Microsoft on 'innovation'
Date: 3 May 2000 22:09:00 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy Erik Funkenbusch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mathias Grimmberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> Jen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> > I'm growing weary of this "where is the Microsoft innovation" crap.
>>
>> So, a hard and fast question: Where is the MS innovation?
> Have you looked at Microsofts 1,227 Patents? By definition, a patent is an
> innovation is it not?
NO.
Apparantly you dont know too much about the way patents work. Anyone can
patent anything that is not yet patented, whether they INVENTED it or not.
Very often its a very malicious battle of timing and legal representation.
=====yttrx
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