Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

YAMATMT – Yet Another Microsoft Anti-Trust Monopoly Trial – South Korea

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ABC News are reporting a forthcoming anti-trust trial against Microsoft "alleging it broke fair trade rules by bundling its instant messenger service with its Windows XP operating platform".


Sounds similar to the EU anti-trust trial where MS took advantage of its monopoly on desktop OS’s to extend their reach into media playing software, thereby giving themselves a large captive audience to persuade media companies to go with their format instead of any competitors (such as Real Networks.



Here it’s the fact that every XP box comes with MSN Messenger instead..

The AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement

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Linux Australia has published
the first draft of their position paper on US – Australia “Free” Trade Agreement and Open Source


This talks about some of the possible chilling effects of the AU-US “Free” Trade Agreement, including many interesting things such as the fact it will prevent Australian consumers from buying DVDs from the US by making it illegal to use a region free DVD player, not what I’d call helping free trade.



There is also a warning on the introduction of software patents through this (although they may already be possible under current statutory instruments) including the fact that had Dan Bricklan been able to patent Visicalc in 1979 then any future spreadsheets until 1999 would have been illegal or required a license from Visicalc. Of course, as we’ve seen in lots of other areas, where there is a monopoly it’s not the market that gets to set the price for such things..



Here is a really illuminating, unambiguous warning on all of this from Bill Gates:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.


And one final, rather chilling, warning from the paper.

Note that the US has constitutional protections which limit these laws when they conflict with “freedom of speech”. Australia has no such limits.

How to Help

If this worries you (and believe me, it should), then please write a letter to your elected representatives, in your own words, telling them why you oppose this. Give reasons for why you think this will be a bad thing for Australia.



Sign the online petition. I’m not a big believer in such things, but if you do write to your representatives then sign this and say that you’ve done so.



Read the Linux Australia FTA page and use some of their suggestions to.



Spread the word! Link to stories like these on your sites, write blog entries about it, spread the word. Democracy can only really function when people know what some of the issues are. Research other effects that haven’t been considered yet. Will Apple iPod’s become illegal because you are not currently legally allowed to rip songs from CD’s you own for your personal use ? etc..

Those annoying “you have a virus” spams..

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I’ve just received another of those really annoying virus warning messages telling me that I’ve just sent another virus. Well of course, running only Linux, that’s not possible and sure enough it’s from another Windoze virus that forges the recipient.

This is what I sent in response..

On Friday 09 Apr 2004 5:28 am, you wrote:

> Attention: xxxx@xxxxxx.org

That would be me.

> A virus was found in an Email message you sent.

I think that’s highly unlikely.

> This Email scanner intercepted it and stopped the entire message
> reaching its destination.

Quite possibly.

> The virus was reported to be:
>
> the W32/Netsky.d@MM virus !!!

Strange, that only affects Windows systems as far as I’m aware and forges the sender of the message, like virtually all these days, making these sort of replies a nuisance at best to those who know better, and distressing to those who may not.

The IP address that sent it (from the headers you forwarded) was 144.139.67.224 which is a Telstra IP address, and I am not a Telstra customer.

> Please update your virus scanner

My virus scanner updates itself twice an hour, just to filter out those annoying Windows viruses that don’t affect Linux users such as myself.

> or contact your IT support personnel as soon as possible as you have a virus
> on your system.

I am my IT support personnel, and I don’t have this virus..

SCO can’t count

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In the latest court appearance in the US it’s reported on GrokLaw that SCO have claimed they have identified "300 million lines of Linux code" affected.



OK, so SCO say 300 million lines in the kernel are affected, now how much is that as a percentage ? That’s easy to find out, the kernel sources are publically accessible, so we can count the number of lines and do the math.



Consider the 2.6.2 kernel, the latest at time of writing. It’s easy to work out, we find every file ending in .c or .h (which will be all source code, though a sizeable chunk is likely to be comments), cat it and pass all that through the wordcount program “wc” with the -l option to say only report the number of lines.



So here we go:




$ find linux-2.6.2 -name ‘*.[ch]’ | xargs cat | wc -l

5298593


Oh dear, that looks very strange. Only 5 million lines of text in all the program files (and again, not all of that will be code). Perhaps they were a bit ambitious and counted the lines in all the files ?




$ find linux-2.6.2 -type f | xargs cat | wc -l

6008957


Oops, doesn’t look any better, just one million extra lines! So SCO are out by a factor of 50!



But, if you work it out, there have been 26 release of the 2.2 series kernel, 25 releases of the 2.4 series and 3 releases of the 2.6 kernel which gives us 53 releases total. Now, if we assume that they’re all roughly the same size (which they’re not, they’ve been slowly increasing over time) then that means that there’s probably a total of 300 million lines of code from 2.0.0 through to 2.6.2.



However, I’ve not included the development series of 2.3 and 2.5, so it could be they’re just claiming everything from 2.3 onwards. Or maybe not, given that there were 76 releases in the 2.5 series. Or maybe half the code from 2.0.0 to 2.6.0. The problem here is that nobody knows asides from SCO what they’re talking about, and they won’t tell anyone, even under a court order!

Did Microsoft Give SCO a Loan in the Guise of License Fees ?

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A fellow GrokLaw poster has found this letter filed with the SEC and this discussion on the Yahoo Finance board regarding the implications of what it says.



An
earlier letter filed at the SEC says that their bankers, MK, will charge SCO a 6% fee for any equity investment, and a 1% fee for any “senior debt” investment (apparently a loan, the investor is first in line if they go under).



Then in this letter they say they will charge SCO 6% for Sun’s investment and 1% for Microsoft’s investment.



To me that seems an admission that the MS payment was not straight revenue, but instead “senior debt”, in effect a loan!



Of course, if this is the case, and SCO go under when they loose to IBM, then MS will be the first in line for the pickings (if there’s anything left to pay IBM).

Linux things..

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Virus Emails

It’s come to my attention that some people have received viruses from an address claiming to be Gordon Heydon in the csamuel.org domain – this address does not exist (and never has) and the emails in question were forged by a virus on a Telstra subscribers PC.

Anyway, now that’s out of the way…. I’ve been a bit quiet here recently so just a couple of quick updates on things I’ve been playing with:

Jabber

An Open Source Instant Messaging system. All specified in XML so it’s easily extensible (and programable) plus has the ability to use connectors to interface to legacy IM systems such as MSN and ICQ. This means you only need to sign into your Jabber server and your Jabber server can sign into MSN, etc, on your behalf and act as a proxy, and your contacts think you’re using the legacy system natively.

My Jabber ID is: chris@jabber.org.au – NB: That is NOT an email address!

Scalable PBS (SPBS) and the MAUI Scheduler

SPBS is a queueing system used in clusters to share out and jobs between the compute nodes. I’ve been doing a fair bit of debugging at work with the guys who are maintaining this and they’ve been doing sterling work. Respect guys!

The MAUI scheduler interfaces with SPBS (and OpenPBS) and does clever tricks to work out the most efficient way to execute jobs in the PBS queue(s) based on policies and, most importantly, what the user tells SPBS is the maximum amount of time their job will run for.

NPACI Rocks

NPACI Rocks is a Linux distribution specifically for cluster computing. It’s based on RedHat 7.3 for the IA32 release (and there’s an IA64 version based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 2.1) and includes virtually everything you could want for running a cluster (apart from SPBS mentioned above, they still use the old OpenPBS at the moment).

Very impressed with it so far, especially the automated installation tools and the PXE network boot support for automatic installs. The only issue I’ve had with it has been its use of the autofs automounter, I much prefer permanent mounts and autofs also doesn’t work with our preferred way of partitioning up user areas so that we guarantee they fit on a single DLT.

Mandrake Linux 9.2 has arrived!

…well for MandrakeClub members at least! Grabbed it via BitTorrent (I’m a club member) – my first (and probably only) use of a Peer2Peer application (and legitimate too!).

I’ve been playing around with the pre-releases already and I’m impressed, but I need a bit of time to burn the ISO’s onto CD’s and have a real play with the release versions..

…and that’s about it for now!

Microsoft meets Monty Python

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I originally wrote this to go in an email in response to an email from a friend saying:
"Nothing wrong with office 2000 other than security concerns 😉" but I liked it so much I decided to put it on here. 🙂



In my defence I’ll just say that I’ve had a morning of mind-bending debugging…!















Cardinal Gates:

 Our main weapon is security holes!
Security holes and proprietary formats, are our two main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats and unwanted features are our three main weapons.

Security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features and forced upgrades are our four main… I’ll come in again.


[exits & re-enters]


Cardinal Gates:
Amongst our many weapons are such diverse elements as
security holes, proprietary formats, unwanted features, forced upgrades, vendor lock in and a fanatical devotion to the stock market.



Cardinal Ballmer, the CDROM!

October 17th Melbourne Consultation on United Nations World Summit on the Information Society

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The COIN Internet Research Network (COIN-IRN) at Central Queensland University and the Centre for Community Networking Research (CCNR) at Monash University are being sponsored by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) to coordinate the development of a Civil Society statement to supplement materials developed by the Australian Government for the World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS).

As part of this they are holding a consultation meeting in Melbourne on October 17th which you need to RSVP to the CCNR organiser if you wish to attend.

This process is intended to produce a response to a challenge to guide and inform this process to produce a "clear statement of political will and a concrete plan of action for achieving the goals of the Information Society".

This seems, to me, to be an excellent opportunity to try and promote strategies to permit open and equal access to information and documents through open standards for document formats so that everyone can gain access regardless of what they choose to use to access it, and to guarantee the ability for future generations to also be able to access it.

This is the reason that I support Open Source Victoria’s push for governments to use open document formats.