From Wired.com: “One of the difficulties of holding a conference devoted to a certain ethic — for example, the
open-source ethic — is that after a little while it begins to feel like every speaker is preaching to the choir.

The people attending the O’Reilly Open Source Convention going on here this week think that open software is
the way to engineer the future. For the most part, the speakers are telling them they’re right. What’s the point
of all this manufactured glee, one wonders?”

An anonymous reader sent us this link at BusinessWeek: “When Henri Poole took the helm at MandrakeSoft, he became the latest American to learn just how easy it is to ruffle Old World feathers.”

“This guide gives detailed, step-by-step instructions on the process for securing your Apache Server with a VeriSign Secure Server ID to enable SSL.” More at VeriSign.com.

Some alpha fixes, cleanups, and updates.

Linux 2.4.7-ac1
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:20:14 +0100 (BST)
From: Alan Cox 
To:   editors@newsforge.com


ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                         http://www.bzimage.org

2.4.7-ac1
o        Alpha fixes and updates                                 (Jay Estabrook)
         - ioremap fixes for AGP on Alpha
         - pci_iommu support for AGP on Alpha
         - AGP arch support code for Alpha UP1x00
         - Fix instruction fault bug with old Jensen/UDB
          PALcode
o        Further alpha pci iommu cleanups/fixes          (Ivan Kokshaysky)
o        Fix DAC960 for completion change                (Jens Axboe)
o        Fix data corruption on ide tape while reading   (Pete Zaitcev)
         near EOF
o        Switch up_and_exit to complete_and_exit                 (David Woodhouse)
o        Fix crash on scsi request alloc failure in sd   (Rasmus Andersen)
o        Handle scsi register failure in ultrastor       (Rasmus Andersen)
o        Clean up ioremap as u32 stuff in ibmtr          (me)
o        Fix max_sector cleanup in paride                (Andrea Arcangeli)
o        
o        Bring IDE floppy up to date with maintainer     (Gunther Mayer)
o        Remove escaped junk from Makefiles              (Christoph Hellwig)
o        Fix cs46xx checks on ioctl calls                (Simon Horman)
o        Update cpqfc driver                             (Charles White)
o        NTFS fixes                      (Anton Altaparmakov, Rasmus Andersen)
o        Further FATfs updates                           (OGAWA Hirofumi)
o        S/390 network driver updates                    (Ulrich Weigand + )
o        Core S/390 changes to get it building again     (Martin Schwidefsky)
o        Fix S/390 tree asm blocks to compile with their         (       and
         newest gcc set
o        Update S/390 documentation                      (other IBM folks)
o        Update S/390 tape driver                        (       "       )
o        Update S/390 console driver                     (       "       )
o        Don't do net hotplug during booting             (       "       )
o        Remove tools stuff from S/390 tree              (       "       )
o        Update S/390 irq/softirq handling               (       "       )
o        Add shared kerne support for S/390 VM           (       "       )
o        Update cpqarray driver                          (Charles White)
o        Add missing barrier() calls in serial drivers   (me)
o        Fix menuconfig return code on small screen      (Herbert Xu)
o        Small UML fixups                                (Jeff Dike)
o        Add COW support to UML block driver             (Jeff Dike)
o        USB network driver updates/fixes                (David Brownell)
o        PnP parsing bug fix                             (Andrey Panin)
o        Fix UFS checking of NULL error cases            (Andreas Dilger)
o        Further shmem bits                              (Christoph Rohland)
o        Update the mmap changes to handle OSF emulation         (Maciej Rozycki)
o        Fix failed register handling in g_NCR5380       (Rasmus Andersen)
o        Correct errors in devices.txt examples          (Andreas Dilger)
o        Synclink driver update                          (Paul Fulghum)
o        Fix scc region requests for latches             (Rob Turk)
o        Fix FB_ACTIVATE_NOW/VBL handling on aty128fb    (Andreas Hundt)
o        Correct CRTC_OFFSET_CNTL on aty128fb            (Andreas Hundt)
o        Add Devfs support to rio500                     (Gregory Norris
                                                         Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o        3c59x driver updates                            (Andrew Morton,
                                                         Donald Becker)
o        Fix ircomm handling with some mobile phones     (Andrea Arcangeli,
                                                         Dag Brattli)
o        Clean up resource handling in ibmtr driver      (Rasmus Andersen)
o        Handle out of memory for device alloc in gdth   (Rasmus Andersen)
o        Fix mixer leak in sb driver                     (Mike Galbraith)
o        Make printk use vsnprintf                       (Andrew Morton)
o        Fix bug in atm_do_connect_dev (bogus EINVALs)   (Germán González)
o        Add Sony DSC-575 to unusual devices usb list    (Denis Benoit)
o        Add gemtek pci radio card driver                (Vladimir Shebordaev)

2.4.6-ac5
o        Fix VIA workaround (I merged the wrong diff)    (me)
o        Small NTFS update                               (Anton Altaparmakov)
o        Add io memory emulation to user mode Linux      (Greg Lonnon)
o        Futher uml management console updates           (Jeff Dike)
o        Update uml defconfig, clean up casts,signals    (Jeff Dike, 
         suser to capable                                James Stevenson)
o        Fix midi via72cxxx 'bad devc' crash             (Adrian Cox)
o        Add snprintf/vsnprintf to the kernel            (Crutcher Dunnavant)
         | Lots of places want tweaking to use snprintf now
         | notably the isdn code with its own snprintf

o        Don't go off the end of the ROM looking for SBF         (me)
o        Fix warning in mce code                                 (Mikael Pettersson)

“…the most successful American enterprises are those that are dedicated to
research. Only a commitment to research can keep a company competitive and
innovative in this competitive and fast-moving marketplace. Sadly, a few
companies such as AOL Time Warner have spent millions in lobbying and
litigation and relatively little on research and development. Microsoft in contrast
spent nearly $4.0 billion on R&D in the last year alone to stay competitive and
innovative. The result is a number of new products that provide new innovations
to consumers – and thus competitive challenges to AOL. Rather than asking the
government to stop a competitor’s product from reaching the marketplace, should
AOL Time Warner not be expected to focus on research and development?” More at Microsoft.com.

LogError writes: “Apart from firewalls, which aim at protecting internal networks against attacks from the internet, web servers are the second important field requiring a high degree of security. This article shows how this can be done on a Linux system within just 45 minutes. Of course, the same can also be done on other operating systems. Below is an example based on the SuSE Linux 6.4 distributions.”

BBC: “It is 2300 in a dimly lit room above a dumpling shop in
an old Shanghai side street.

The rattle of the electric fan mixes with the clatter of
keyboards. This is one of China’s many internet bars.

Seventeen-year-old Ar
Ying has been here for
hours playing computer
games and smoking, while
his friend flirts with someone
called “Lovely Girl” in an
internet chat room.”

The Register: “‘Delivery outside of Japan is not available.’ Not a terribly warm welcome for prospective clients. Given the tone of the
pitch in fact, one would assume that the company has zero plans to
migrate the Linux Kit to the USA or anywhere else for that matter.
However, lurking toward the bottom of that page is an eerie blue link that
reads, “Please click here to register your interest in a US release of Linux
for PlayStation 2″.

If you click the link, you are presented with a form, which demands your
email address, your interest in the system and any brief additional
comments you may have. It all looks like a bit of an amateur effort, not a
patch on our beloved SCEEs wonderful PS2 registration form, which
asks for your first born in the small print.”

Wired: “At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, coders are rejoicing over hearing a lot of what they want to hear — but woe to any voices of dissent that might take the stage.”

ComputerNewsDaily: ” No wonder Compaq Computer Corp. wants to focus
on services.

The Houston-based computer maker’s hardware sales – from
high-end servers that run stock exchanges to desktop PCs – are
melting under the heat of a full-scale industry price war.

The company did, however, offer tepid hope that demand was
beginning to improve in the United States, although the slump is
spreading to regions such as Latin America.”