The Register reports that Palm was considering Linux as the foundation of the next-generation PalmOS as recently as last spring.

Linux Audio writes: The Register: “EU calls for open source e-government. A report published by the European Commission is encouraging EU governments to share open source software resources as a way to cut down on e-government costs.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Have big projects lost sight of the ideals that brought about free software in the first place? Timothy R. Butler says in a guest essay on Linux and Main that this may be the cause of the increased distance between developers and users. And he says that a return to those principles might bring the two groups closer together again.”

“Mainland China is the piracy capital of the world. China’s imitation industry feeds not just its own economy, but those of other nations as well; 46 percent of the pirated goods sold in America come from China, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). The Quality Brands Protection Committee (QBPC), an anti-piracy body under the auspices of the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, claims that government statistics show that counterfeits outnumber genuine products in the Chinese market by 2 to 1. Pirated audiovisual materials occupy 95 percent of the market in large cities, and the proportion approaches 100 percent in the rural interior. Stricter laws have stemmed the tide only slightly, because anti-piracy law, like most of Chinese law, is enforced haphazardly at best, and everyone knows it.” Read the rest at Salon.com.

– By Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
On June 17, CERT Advisory CA-2002-17 revealed an Apache Web server chunk handling vulnerability that affected versions 1.2.2 through 1.3.24 and 2.0 through 2.0.36. Before long, Apache maintainers had a fix; versions 1.3.26 and 2.0.39 (and higher) solved the problem. But Microsoft still hasn’t released a FrontPage version that works with the patched versions of Apache, so many Apache servers running FrontPage extensions may still be vulnerable to the exploits Apache maintainers and others rushed so frantically to prevent.
Eric Williams, systems administrator for e-BUILDERS, LLC, a Web hosting firm based in Elsberry, Missouri, says he contacted Microsoft at the end of June, looking for updated FrontPage extensions for Apache that would work with the recently-released versions that eliminated the vulnerability mentioned in the CERT advisory. Eric says, “The guy we talked to didn’t seem to know about the vulnerability, or if he did he didn’t want to admit it, and had no news about any release coming out that would work.”

Other software suppliers Eric deals with were both aware of this vulnerability and responded to it almost immediately. He says, “A few days after the Apache vulnerability was revealed, Red Hat released a patch for it.”

The only hole left for Eric was FrontPage. “I pretty much shut down FrontPage extensions,” he says, while he waited for his Microsoft support rep to find a solution and get back to him with it.

On Thursday, July 4, Eric was still waiting. He says, “My goal was to get a copy of FrontPage running with a copy of Apache that wasn’t exploitable. [That] doesn’t sound very unreasonable does it?”

A search of relevant pages at Microsoft.com turned up no information about the recent Apache vulnerability or any advice about installing FrontPage extensions on Apache versions higher than 1.3.24. Indeed, the only prominent reference we found on Microsoft’s site to running FrontPage server extensions on Apache sent us either to this page cannot be found notice or to an outside vendor’s Web page that says nothing but “Apache 1.3.26 is no [sic] supported. You should use the 1.3.22 patch.”

Eric finally got a call back from his Microsoft tech support rep on the evening of July 6, in the form of a voice mail message about the possibility of an updated version of the FrontPage server extensions that would work with the new, recently secured versions of Apache. NewsForge listened to the message from the Microsoft support rep, who said, “Microsoft is looking into it. We expect a new release eventually, we just don’t know exactly when.”

Chances are, someone besides Microsoft will get FrontPage extensions working with the latest Apache releases before long, and will share their solution with others. Indeed, Eric is working on this himself, not out of love for Microsoft but because, he says, “You work for the customers, and some of them want to use FrontPage.”

At this point, it appears that Microsoft only officially supports FrontPage for Apache version 1.3.19 on Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0. Eric, like many systems administrators, has long since upgraded past those versions of Apache and Red Hat. “How long has 7.2 been out now?” Eric asks rhetorically, and adds, “To the support guy’s credit he went ahead and tried to work with the Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 servers we are running.”

Is it possible that Microsoft is planning to drop support for FrontPage on Linux and Apache altogether? Or is this just an instance of a proprietary software company not releasing updates as rapidly as the Open Source community? We’ll try to get an official statement from Microsoft and update this story as soon as we get an answer, assuming Microsoft’s PR people have one to give.

“The Earth Simulator Project will create a “virtual earth” on a supercomputer to show what the world will look like in the future. This is made possible by a massive increase in processing punch. The Simulator’s nearest rival, IBM’s ASCI White, clocks up a comparatively modest, but nonetheless impressive, 7 teraflops.” More at Wired.com.

thebs writes: “I just hit 3Ware [Homepage] looking for firmware/driver updates and they just announced a new ATA RAID product today. The new series is the 3Ware Escalade 7500 available in 4 (7500-4), 8 (7500-8) [Datasheet] and a new whopping 12 (7500-12) [DataSheet] channel ATA version! [ Small picture of the 12-channel version [Image] ]

It appears EETimes [Homepage] had already published info regarding the upcoming 3Ware Escalade 7500 series [Article] back on June 24th.

Quick Specs:

• 64-bit/33MHz PCI (266MBps)
• 64-bit ASIC (application specific integrated circuit)
• 0 Latency SRAM (static RAM, not synchronous dynamic RAM)
• 4, 8 and 12 channel ATA options (7500-4, 8, 12, respectively)
• Only one drive used per channel (no master/slave issues)
• ATA UltraDMA/133 Speed
• Full Linux support (3Ware-written GPL driver, in stock kernel since 2.2.15)
• Multiple RAID-5 volumes on 7500-12 product
• Also designed for upto 16-port SerialATA (with external PHY chips)

Further Discussion:

• How much memory is on-board?

  I cannot tell the amount of SRAM memory on these cards and 3Ware doesn’t
  market the size each product sports (for reasons that will become obvious in a bit
  to those new to 3Ware’s designs). The existing 6×00/6×10 and 7×00/7×10
  series have 1MB SRAM and the 7×50 series have 2MB SRAM. From the looks
  of it, there are two (2) SRAM ICs on the 7500-4/8, just like the 7×50,
  but four (4) SRAM ICs on the 7500-12. In fact, the 7500-4/8 looks like
  the exact same PCB (printed circuit boards) of the 7450/7850. So I’ll
  assume those are each 1MB, 32-bit SRAM chips on-board, which would equal
  2MB for the 7500-4/8 (just like the 7×50) and 4MB for the new 7500-12.

  Only 2-4MB? You thought most [true hardware] RAID cards had 16MB+,
  right? I mean, the Adaptec 2400A and Promise SuperTrak series sports
  upto 64MB, eh?

• What is SRAM? How does it differ from SDRAM? Advantages/Trade-offs?

  Understand that SRAM = static RAM, not Synchronous Dynamic RAM —
  big difference. SRAM is the logic used in cache memory, not main
  memory like SDRAM/RDRAM. While the burst write performance of SDRAM is
  similar in performance to SRAM, the random access, let alone any read
  operation, performance is almost an order of magnitude faster with
  SRAM. The key is latency. SDRAM is still DRAM. While it has a
  sub-10ns, synchronous burst write timing, it is still a 50ns+ (typically
  70ns+) memory technology for initial access, such as when reading.
  That’s why SRAM is used in cache logic, to overcome the huge latency
  hits when the CPU has to read from DRAM main memory. I won’t go into
  the electrical and design differences between SRAM and DRAM, just know a
  SRAM cell is much bigger than a DRAM cell (hence why you get a lot less
  for even more money).

  This is also why the 3Ware cards use an ASIC (application specific
  integrated circuit) instead of a microcontroller (i960, StrongARM,
  etc…) like the Adaptec 2400A, Promise SuperTrak series and most SCSI
  RAID cards. We’re not using buffered DRAM, but 0 latency SRAM that
  cannot be impeded by overhead and buffering. So it is often directly
  I/O mapped memory for transfers, which the 64-bit ASIC provides without
  delay. Using a microcontroller would negate the performance benefits of
  SRAM, since it cannot act like a simple bus arbitrator like an ASIC
  can. And to make matters worse for competing ATA solutions, the Adaptec
  2400A and Promise SuperTrak use very slow i960 microcontrollers (at
  least versus faster i960 and, even more so, StrongARM chips on typical SCSI RAID
  cards) — especially the SuperTrak. So their microcontrollers are the
  bottlenecks compared to even the 133MBps 32-bit/33MHz PCI bus
  (SuperTraks seem to be “stuck” at ~40MBps).

  The trade-off of the design is, of course, that the 3Ware cannot buffer
  as many RAID-5 XOR operations because of the vastly smaller amount of
  total RAM. So it’s quite likely to stall with a significant number of
  random RAID writes. Many argue, including myself, that most OSes flush
  their disk buffers/cache so writes are as linear and contiguous as they
  can be anyway. So it is debatable how much “worse” 3Ware cards are for
  RAID-5 volumes. It might have been an issue with older models that only
  had 1MB cache, but 2MB in the 7×50 and 7500-4/8 and, assuming I’m
  correct, 4MB in the 7500-12, should be enough to cover the majority of
  applications that incur a massive number of RAID-5 writes.

• More on “True hardware” ATA RAID v. “BIOS-only” ATA RAID

  For more on the differences between ATA RAID options, please see my
  “draft article” (I never finished finalizing it, so ignore the grammar issues) here entited “Dissecting ATA RAID Options” [Article]
  It was originally written for, and but picked up by, CMP’s “Sys Admin” magazine for their July 2002 issue on Storage.

• The future: 3Ware Escalade 7500 w/16-port SerialATA

  The next step in the 7500 series will be SerialATA. According to the
  EETimes article, upto 16 ports will be offered. I can only assume the
  new 3Ware Escalade 7500 has been designed with both legacy, parallel ATA
  and SerialATA in mind. SerialATA was designed so controller logic compatible with legacy, parallel ATA could be used designed, only requiring the addition of an external physical interface chip (PHY) on the board to support SerialATA. The EETimes article confirms this is the plan 3Ware has for the series, with a $100 premium over the legacy ATA version covering the cost of the addition of the PHY chips.

  For more on SerialATA, including design and engineering issues, please
  see my previous PC_Support post entitled “An introduction to SerialATA, the future of commodity storage” [List Post].

“

Anonymous Reader writes: “The continued hoopla over online music has taken another turn in the Federal government. This time the United States Department of Commerce Technology Administration (TA) is holding a public workshop on digital entertainment and rights management (DRM). The information the TA collects will presumably find its way to the various hearings Congress holds as it tries to guage what laws it should impose upon Net music technology. This includes guaging how the voters will feel about any restrictions DRM will potentially bring to the content they read, view, and listen to. Those who cannot attend are urged to email their opinions using the address at the bottom of the article. Deadline for comments is July 11th.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/publiccomm ent.html“

–By Grant Gross –

Hewlett-Packard and Intel will announce with great fanfare the pending release of the Itanium 2 platform today, and you’ll probably be able to read several stories with the two companies saying their new 64-bit architecture is going to breath new life into the Itanium line and kick the competition’s butt. HP is also touting the Itanium 2 as a perfect match for Linux.
Mark Hudson, worldwide marketing manager for HP business critical systems, says the company is getting major interest from financial services and energy services companies and others interested in running Linux on the Itanium 2.

Mike Balma, Linux business strategist for HP, notes that the company partnered with Red Hat in mid-June to speed the port of Red Hat’s Advanced Server Linux product to Itanium 2. HP plans to preload Red Hat on machines it sells as early as this fall, Balma says.

HP is also working with MSC.Linux —
that’s what will be running on a a U.S. Department of Energy supercomputer announced in April — and Debian, which will be available for Itanium 2 when the product starts shipping in August. SuSE (and by extension UnitedLinux) is supposed to be available for Itanium 2 later in the fall. HP is also talking with other distributions.

“This really is a pivotal point in terms of Itanium hitting the curve for performance,” he says, citing an HP theme with this release. “Being able to have some solid distributions on it will mean a lot.”

Balma also says that the Gelato Federation, a coalition of universities researching Linux on Itanium, and he expects to be able to announce more members of the federation in the near future.

Hudson says HP is quite excited about the price performance of the new Itanium, echoing Balma’s comments. “We really think we’re at a point now where Itanium will really start taking off,” Hudson says. “We really think Itanium 2 will be the launching pad for the Itanium architecture.”

HP is planning to release some benchmarks today, comparing Itanium 2 to several architectures, including Sun’s UltraSpark III, IBM’s Power4 and AMD’s Athlon XP. A PowerPoint slide HP was distributing during its preview press tour had an Itanium 2 beating those processors in floating point and integer performance tests, as well as a couple of others, but these were pretty but simple PowerPoint bar graphs, so if you’re interested, you should look for the specific numbers coming out today.

HP is touting Itanium 2 as competition specifically to Sun’s line of high-performance architectures.

Asked if there’s any special advantage to running Linux on Itanium 2, Balma answers: “You know, it’s Linux. It’s pretty much Linux in a 64-bit environment, taking advantage of the parallelisms. HP-UX is taking advantage of that, and Windows is taking advantage of that. The Open Source community loves cool hardware, and they love to innovate on top of it. This platform is not a 64-bit extension — it’s a new architecture, and therefore you can do all sorts of cool programming on top of it.”

Dre writes: “A potential local root exploit affecting all versions of ‘artswrapper’ in KDE, installed suid “root” was posted late Sunday to some of the well-known security websites. A patch was made available almost immediately, and new packages are being built. In the meantime, it is strongly recommended that system administrators unset the setuid bit on artswrapper (e.g., ‘chmod ug-s artswrapper’). Additional information is available on the dot and the KDE 3.0.2 Info Page.”