Wired news has an interesting piece about SPAM, the luncheon meat, and spam, the UCE.

The latest Zope Weekly News is out, hosted on LWN.

Not to be outdone by Craig Mundie, Richard Stallman is set to speak at NYU on Tuesday about Free software. Further details are on Slashdot.

O’Reillynet has a guide to IPv6 (Slashdot has a discussion as well). The article builds on your pre-existing IPv4 knowledge to explain the concepts. For those interested in playing with IPv6, download Cisco’s free IPv6 IOS upgrade, Microsoft’s Windows 2000 IPv6 stack, Kame IPv6 for *BSD, and the Usagi project (bringing IPv6 to Linux). There is also an IPv6 how-to for Linux.

Rusty Foster, original instigator (and still head honcho) of OSDN affiliate site Kuro5hin, tried to attend Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference 2001. But, for many reasons, he didn’t make it there, and wrote the following tale instead, which is more about BattleBots than about Apple or Open Source. It’s slightly different from our usual fare, but well worth reading. Think Different

“He and Miguel climbed down into the pit and set their birds down on the
short lines so that they faced each other. They held them by the tails and
waited for Earle to give the signal to let go.

“‘Pit them,’ he ordered.” –Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust

I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably something resembling Nathaniel West‘s dark and ghoulish description of cockfighting in
the California scrub country in “Day of the Locust.” Grown men doing
violence to each other by proxy, this time with homemade animals of
plastic, aluminum, and steel, wielding sharpened pneumatic hammers and
screaming spiked flails.

I was supposed to be writing an article on the Worldwide Apple Developers
Conference. It had all gone wrong from the start, a doomed
cross-current of misconstrued email and eerie legal threats. It was clear
that Fate had no intention of putting me anywhere near the smiley plastic
Applefest in San Jose, but that still didn’t explain what the hell I was
doing in the middle of San Francisco Bay, watching robots fight.

It started innocently enough. Robin Miller asked me if I’d like to buzz
down to San Jose and check out the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference,
an annual shindig where Jobs and co. spread the gospel to all the Apple
faithful, and introduce them to that year’s new crop of APIs or standards
or “experiences” or whatever it is they’re pushing. OSDN was supposed to
be a special guest this year, with the advent of the BSD-based OS X, a new
age of openness and software freedom was purportedly spreading from
Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

This new spirit of freedom was first communicated to me via email
forwarded from some Apple minion, which read, in part, “Keep in mind that
the person attending MUST sign up with the Apple Developer Connection in
order to get the ticket. This means that they will have to go online and
agree to the nondisclosure agreement contained in our terms and conditions
of membership.”

I went to the Developers Connection sign up page, and read the NDA that
such special effort was made to draw my attention to. It said, in standard
vague legalese, that any information about Apple or any of its products
received by a “Registered Developer” may or may not be top-secret, and
that no information was to be repeated to anyone, ever, lest this be the
case. To be fair, they did specifically exempt information about open
source software they might be using.

This didn’t bode well. Suddenly the oft-repeated exhortation to “Think
Different” took on new and ominous notes of command in my mind. I
certainly had no intention of signing a non-disclosure for this. Hell,
Newsforge wasn’t even paying me to do this. I tried to work my way around
it. Robin made a developers account, but the Apple overlords didn’t even
respond to my requests to issue a ticket to “Robin Miller, Assistant
Treleef Woozler for Intergalactic DeOxygenators Inc.” Clearly, I was going
to have to go about this assignment in a somewhat more unorthodox way.

The conference was from Monday through Friday. It was already Thursday,
and I was exactly nowhere. Luckily, I happened to catch a notice in the
paper that BattleBots was being
taped all weekend out on Treasure Island. Something clicked. My
journalistic integrity demanded that I be there. I knew there was a
connection here, but what? Where?

 

“The dwarf had been watching Earle’s lips and he had his bird off first,
but Juju rose straight into the air and sank one spur in the red’s breast.
It went through the feathers into the flesh. The red turned with the gaff
still stuck in him and pecked twice at his opponent’s head.”
–Ibid.

To get to Treasure Island from the Haight, you take a bus all the way
downtown to First and Market. You pass the strip joints and all-night
movie theaters, the hulking Virgin Megastore, the old men, freaks and
junkies playing chess by the Library. The tourists clustered, shivering in
their shorts and tank-tops, in line to ride the cable cars at Powell.

Get off this bus, walk a block down First street to the Trans-Bay bus
terminal, and go upstairs. The trans-bay terminal is one of those creepy
bus stations that seems more like a wharf than a place for land vehicles.
Naked iron girders hold up a translucent roof of corrugated plastic, which
filters the foggy sunlight and makes everyone look green and ill. Sit down
on the bench next to an enormous transsexual smoking Virginia Slims, and
wait.

The bus rattles and clumps halfway over the Bay Bridge, pulling off at the
Treasure Island exit, where suddenly everything goes quiet. The roar of
lower-deck bridge traffic is replaced with chirping birds and shushing
wind through the trees. The feeling of peace and serenity lasts exactly
thirty seconds, because that’s when you pass the first guard post and
realize that Treasure Island is basically one big military base.

BattleBots is a tournament, televised on Comedy Central, in which
individuals and teams build remote controlled fighting vehicles and pit
them against each other in an aluminum and plexiglass ring called the
“BattleBox.” Tickets for the preliminary rounds are ten bucks plus bus
fare. This is clearly not a big money deal. The venue is what appears to
be a small airplane hanger, anomalously placed nowhere near any kind of
airport. The military is always doing that kind of thing. Who knows what
it’s normal use is. We just know it as “Building 180.”

There are no signs at all, and the will-call desk is a folding church
table. The whole experience reeks of a college band-night, right down to
the blue wristbands that designate you a paid ticketholder. It all looked
appropriately seedy and dangerous. I went inside.

Earlier in the week, I had read about the new Apple Store in Tyson’s
Corner VA. As we’ve come to expect from Apple, it’s as sleek an experience
as you’re likely to get anywhere. It’s open and friendly, artsy and cool
and restrained. Customers (I have to forcibly restrain myself from
reflexively calling them “guests”) are encouraged to wander around, play
with the hardware, watch the techies at work at the “Genius Bar.”

Apple has taken to copying Disney’s winning formula of providing fun
through corporate fascism. Beneath the clean perfection of both Disney and
Apple’s corporate images lurk phalanxes of jack-booted lawyers and
handlers, carefully spinning and controlling every bit of information to
present one unified squeaky-clean face. Disney is about Childhood (TM),
and Apple is about Art (R).

I emailed a journalist friend and pointed this out, asked him what he made
of it. While conceding that “Apple will always be a creepy company in
artsy drag,” he also pointed out that artists are always roots-down
freaks, and Steve Jobs is an artist, who’s canvas is the IT industry. So
maybe Apple is run by a “psychotic and paranoid control nazi.” Open source
darling of the week IBM, he said, is “a patent-crazy industrial drone with
whole buildings full of lawyers who can’t wait to end the honeymoon. Just
wait.”

 

“Juju climbed again, cutting and hitting so rapidly that his legs were a
golden blur. The red met him by going back on his tail and hooking upward
like a cat. Juju landed on him again and again. He broke one of the red’s
wings, then practically severed a leg.”
–Ibid.

Sitting on the hard uncomfortable metal bleachers in building 180, I am
reminded of that email. There are no amenities here, unless you count
porta-johns and three dollar hot dogs. There are hardly any ordinary
spectators at all. The bleachers are filled with violence-prone nerds in
robot-related t shirts. Bill Nye isn’t on the scene, and there’s only one
lonely looking cameraman taping the action. These are the preliminary
rounds, the rounds where the cheap, the weak, and the pathetic get stomped
and go back home to Tucson or the Upper Peninsula and get to work on next
year’s bot.

But there’s no feeling of danger, no edge-buzz, like I expected. There are
lots of children here, and no money is changing hands over the outcomes of
the matches. Dangerous drunken thugs are nowhere in sight, and the most
prominent host is decked out in metal arm-guards and gauntlets, and would
almost certainly get hammered to a pulp if he showed up in any
self-respecting biker bar wearing that sci-fi crap.

This is the IBM of sporting events. Dumb and mean-spirited, yes, but
unabashedly nerdy and unvarnished too. If Apple were a sporting event, it
would be a cross between this and the XFL. You’d still have machines
bashing each other with stone-age weapons, but they’d be dressed in sleek
plastic shells and driven by young men in black turtlenecks and
wire-rimmed glasses. Half naked supermodels would strut around the
BattleBox whipping the crowd into a frenzy of drooling fury. “KILL!”
they’d scream, “BASH ITS WHEELS OFF! USE THE SAWBLADE!” At just the right
moment, the laser light show would fire off, inscribing “Think Different”
in the smoke-free air above the crowd.

My recollections from the event are a little hazy, and I wasn’t keeping
notes. The basic format is this: Two robots go into the box, when cued by
a drag-race style christmas tree, they surge across the ring at each other
and attempt to smash, grind, or pierce the other into oblivion. A robot
that can no longer move is declared a knockout, and loses, so many
builders opt for a wedge shape, hoping to sneak under a taller lumbering
opponent and incapacitate it. There is, unfortunately, nothing less
interesting than two wedge-shaped fighting robots blindly ramming into
each other for three minutes. At the end, if there’s no clear winner, some
judges award points, usually to the robot that garnered more crowd
interest.

A few matches stick out in my mind. Like the fight where a robot named
“Count Botula” was so brutally maimed by its opponent, which resembled
Vlad the Impaler’s colander, that by the end of three minutes it only had
one functioning wheel, and its batteries were dragging by wires behind it.
But astoundingly, it was still moving, still trying to clamp down on that
pasta strainer from Hell. Every time it got near enough to, it lost some
more pieces. By the end, three event staff were in the ring picking up
scattered chunks of it. Ordinary people spend hundreds of hours in the
garage and thousands of dollars creating these high-tech platforms which
carry and deploy, essentially, either clubs, spikes, or sawblades.
Attending BattleBots is like watching a Noh drama about the entire
twentieth century.

While I was sitting there, it finally came to me. I had to get into the
conference, and nothing had worked so far. I had to get the story somehow.
I’d just fake it. I’d walk right in and go up to the counter.

“I’m from OSDN,” I’d tell them.

“I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be on the list…”

“What? How’s that? Let me see. Hmm. No, I should be right there between
Forrester and Fowler. Dammit, they told me this was all taken care of!”

“Well, if you’re not on the list…”

“Ok,” I’d say, leaning close, conspiratorially, “I’m not supposed to
tell you this, and you have to swear to secrecy…” I’d break off and
glance around.

“What? What is it?”

“No, no, I’ve already said too much. They might have cameras. Shotgun
mikes, infrared. Forget it.”

“There’s no one around. What is it? You can trust me.”

“Ok. If this gets out, I know who leaked it.” You can always count
on a sense of paranoia when Apple’s involved. Anyone who’s not walking
around like a secret agent is either dumb or really scary. “I’m here on
orders straight from Steve himself. He wants to make sure that all the
developers are getting their proper dose of different thinking. We can’t
afford to lose anyone! Not one! So I’m here to wander around, make sure
everything conforms to the Apple experience.”

“Oh, you’re making this up.”

“Am I? Am I indeed? Well, you can believe that if you want. But
I’m not the only one. I can personally guarantee that you’ve dealt with at
least one of Steve’s other moles, just today. I’ve been watching, and
don’t think he’s not watching either!”

At this point, the keeper of passes would tremble with the knowledge that
Steve’s people are everywhere, all the time. Nothing escapes his steely
eye. Nothing. I would be in like Flynn.

I had had enough of robot fighting. These brutes could go on pounding the
silicon snot out of each other all night, for all I cared. The next day I
was off to San Jose, to fish sleeker waters. To join the sharks.

 

“Once more the red tried to rise with Juju, pushing hard with its
remaining leg, but it only spun crazily. Juju rose, but missed. The red
thrust weakly with its broken bill. Juju went into the air again, and this
time drove a gaff through one of the red’s eyes into its brain. The red
fell over stone dead.”
–Ibid.

San Jose is hot and ugly. The reason there are so many conferences and
trade shows there is because no matter how boring or painful the event is,
going outside where its not air conditioned is unthinkable. San Jose is
the forced-corporate-networking gulag of the United States. Siberia in
reverse.

I crawled down 101, through the evil moribund sprawl of the valley, but I
hardly even saw it. I was going to get into this conference, despite the
lawyers and confusion, and even despite having to go to San Jose to do it.
Traffic crept slowly south, four lanes of winking plastic glacier, and
when my turn to rubberneck finally came, I saw that the holdup was due to
a three-car crash in the northbound lanes. A white pickup had gone into
the cement barrier, and ambulances were on the scene. Looming high above
all was another of the omnipresent Apple billboards… Martin Luther King
Jr. urging us to Think Different. I just hoped no one had been killed.

In San Jose, you can drive for an hour and still be within view of where
you started. It’s like if LA were jammed into a black hole, and compressed
to a tiny, super-dense pinpoint of heat and smog and traffic and bad
manners. Every light was red, and car horns were banshees wailing of my
impending failure.

I never even found the conference, let alone had the chance to crash the
thing. I thought I’d just look for all the convention-goers, but everyone
in San Jose looks like a convention-goer. It’s a kind of hell as imagined
by Tony Robbins. After an hour and a half of this, I admitted defeat,
and fled north on 280, back to the blissful fog of the city.

I don’t know what the real story of the Worldwide Developers conference
was. I never got there. I can’t tell you much about Apple’s plans for open
source, or it’s commitment to software freedom. Apple remains, for me, an
enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an egg-shaped plastic shell the
color of smurf puke. Apple is a fundamentally schizophrenic entity. It is,
by turns, open, paranoid, generous, litigious, artsy, and thuggish. It’s
certainly not the worst company out there, and on bad days, I still think
it might be one of the best.

The San Jose feeling of evil was just starting to dissipate when I got to
Cupertino, where the 280 goes right by Apple HQ. Another giant MLK mural
presides over the freeway, surrounded by the blank stare of turquoise
glass and white columns. Apple was still watching me, and I looked right
back at it, wondering if behind those blank windows there was cunning and
love, or only madness. For better or for worse, looking at Apple is like
peering into the future. Hope, fear, beauty and crazed excess, all wrapped
in a curtain of possibility.

Right then, though, I didn’t care. I flipped it the bird and mashed the
gas pedal.

Rusty Foster, original instigator (and still head honcho) of OSDN affiliate site Kuro5hin, tried to attend Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference 2001. But, for many reasons, he didn’t make it there, and wrote the following tale instead, which is more about BattleBots than about Apple or Open Source. It’s slightly different from our usual fare, but well worth reading. Think Different

“He and Miguel climbed down into the pit and set their birds down on the
short lines so that they faced each other. They held them by the tails and
waited for Earle to give the signal to let go.

“‘Pit them,’ he ordered.” –Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust

I don’t know what I was expecting. Probably something resembling Nathaniel West‘s dark and ghoulish description of cockfighting in
the California scrub country in “Day of the Locust.” Grown men doing
violence to each other by proxy, this time with homemade animals of
plastic, aluminum, and steel, wielding sharpened pneumatic hammers and
screaming spiked flails.

I was supposed to be writing an article on the Worldwide Apple Developers
Conference. It had all gone wrong from the start, a doomed
cross-current of misconstrued email and eerie legal threats. It was clear
that Fate had no intention of putting me anywhere near the smiley plastic
Applefest in San Jose, but that still didn’t explain what the hell I was
doing in the middle of San Francisco Bay, watching robots fight.

It started innocently enough. Robin Miller asked me if I’d like to buzz
down to San Jose and check out the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference,
an annual shindig where Jobs and Co. spread the gospel to all the Apple
faithful, and introduce them to that year’s new crop of APIs or standards
or “experiences” or whatever it is they’re pushing. OSDN was supposed to
be a special guest this year, with the advent of the BSD-based OS X, a new
age of openness and software freedom was purportedly spreading from
Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

This new spirit of freedom was first communicated to me via email
forwarded from some Apple minion, which read, in part, “Keep in mind that
the person attending MUST sign up with the Apple Developer Connection in
order to get the ticket. This means that they will have to go online and
agree to the nondisclosure agreement contained in our terms and conditions
of membership.”

I went to the Developers Connection sign up page, and read the NDA that
such special effort was made to draw my attention to. It said, in standard
vague legalese, that any information about Apple or any of its products
received by a “Registered Developer” may or may not be top-secret, and
that no information was to be repeated to anyone, ever, lest this be the
case. To be fair, they did specifically exempt information about open
source software they might be using.

This didn’t bode well. Suddenly the oft-repeated exhortation to “Think
Different” took on new and ominous notes of command in my mind. I
certainly had no intention of signing a non-disclosure for this. Hell,
NewsForge wasn’t even paying me to do this. I tried to work my way around
it. Robin made a developers account, but the Apple overlords didn’t even
respond to my requests to issue a ticket to “Robin Miller, Assistant
Treleef Woozler for Intergalactic DeOxygenators Inc.” Clearly, I was going
to have to go about this assignment in a somewhat more unorthodox way.

The conference was from Monday through Friday. It was already Thursday,
and I was exactly nowhere. Luckily, I happened to catch a notice in the
paper that BattleBots was being
taped all weekend out on Treasure Island. Something clicked. My
journalistic integrity demanded that I be there. I knew there was a
connection here, but what? Where?

 

“The dwarf had been watching Earle’s lips and he had his bird off first,
but Juju rose straight into the air and sank one spur in the red’s breast.
It went through the feathers into the flesh. The red turned with the gaff
still stuck in him and pecked twice at his opponent’s head.”
–Ibid.

To get to Treasure Island from the Haight, you take a bus all the way
downtown to First and Market. You pass the strip joints and all-night
movie theaters, the hulking Virgin Megastore, the old men, freaks and
junkies playing chess by the Library. The tourists clustered, shivering in
their shorts and tank-tops, in line to ride the cable cars at Powell.

Get off this bus, walk a block down First street to the Trans-Bay bus
terminal, and go upstairs. The trans-bay terminal is one of those creepy
bus stations that seems more like a wharf than a place for land vehicles.
Naked iron girders hold up a translucent roof of corrugated plastic, which
filters the foggy sunlight and makes everyone look green and ill. Sit down
on the bench next to an enormous transsexual smoking Virginia Slims, and
wait.

The bus rattles and clumps halfway over the Bay Bridge, pulling off at the
Treasure Island exit, where suddenly everything goes quiet. The roar of
lower-deck bridge traffic is replaced with chirping birds and shushing
wind through the trees. The feeling of peace and serenity lasts exactly
thirty seconds, because that’s when you pass the first guard post and
realize that Treasure Island is basically one big military base.

BattleBots is a tournament, televised on Comedy Central, in which
individuals and teams build remote controlled fighting vehicles and pit
them against each other in an aluminum and plexiglass ring called the
“BattleBox.” Tickets for the preliminary rounds are ten bucks plus bus
fare. This is clearly not a big money deal. The venue is what appears to
be a small airplane hanger, anomalously placed nowhere near any kind of
airport. The military is always doing that kind of thing. Who knows what
it’s normal use is. We just know it as “Building 180.”

There are no signs at all, and the will-call desk is a folding church
table. The whole experience reeks of a college band-night, right down to
the blue wristbands that designate you a paid ticketholder. It all looked
appropriately seedy and dangerous. I went inside.

Earlier in the week, I had read about the new Apple Store in Tyson’s
Corner, Va. As we’ve come to expect from Apple, it’s as sleek an experience
as you’re likely to get anywhere. It’s open and friendly, artsy and cool
and restrained. Customers (I have to forcibly restrain myself from
reflexively calling them “guests”) are encouraged to wander around, play
with the hardware, watch the techies at work at the “Genius Bar.”

Apple has taken to copying Disney’s winning formula of providing fun
through corporate fascism. Beneath the clean perfection of both Disney and
Apple’s corporate images lurk phalanxes of jack-booted lawyers and
handlers, carefully spinning and controlling every bit of information to
present one unified squeaky-clean face. Disney is about Childhood (TM),
and Apple is about Art (R).

I emailed a journalist friend and pointed this out, asked him what he made
of it. While conceding that “Apple will always be a creepy company in
artsy drag,” he also pointed out that artists are always roots-down
freaks, and Steve Jobs is an artist, whose canvas is the IT industry. So
maybe Apple is run by a “psychotic and paranoid control nazi.” Open source
darling of the week IBM, he said, is “a patent-crazy industrial drone with
whole buildings full of lawyers who can’t wait to end the honeymoon. Just
wait.”

 

“Juju climbed again, cutting and hitting so rapidly that his legs were a
golden blur. The red met him by going back on his tail and hooking upward
like a cat. Juju landed on him again and again. He broke one of the red’s
wings, then practically severed a leg.”
–Ibid.

Sitting on the hard uncomfortable metal bleachers in Building 180, I am
reminded of that email. There are no amenities here, unless you count
porta-johns and three dollar hot dogs. There are hardly any ordinary
spectators at all. The bleachers are filled with violence-prone nerds in
robot-related T-shirts. Bill Nye isn’t on the scene, and there’s only one
lonely looking cameraman taping the action. These are the preliminary
rounds, the rounds where the cheap, the weak, and the pathetic get stomped
and go back home to Tucson or the Upper Peninsula and get to work on next
year’s bot.

But there’s no feeling of danger, no edge-buzz, like I expected. There are
lots of children here, and no money is changing hands over the outcomes of
the matches. Dangerous drunken thugs are nowhere in sight, and the most
prominent host is decked out in metal arm-guards and gauntlets, and would
almost certainly get hammered to a pulp if he showed up in any
self-respecting biker bar wearing that sci-fi crap.

This is the IBM of sporting events. Dumb and mean-spirited, yes, but
unabashedly nerdy and unvarnished, too. If Apple were a sporting event, it
would be a cross between this and the XFL. You’d still have machines
bashing each other with stone-age weapons, but they’d be dressed in sleek
plastic shells and driven by young men in black turtlenecks and
wire-rimmed glasses. Half naked supermodels would strut around the
BattleBox whipping the crowd into a frenzy of drooling fury. “KILL!”
they’d scream, “BASH ITS WHEELS OFF! USE THE SAWBLADE!” At just the right
moment, the laser light show would fire off, inscribing “Think Different”
in the smoke-free air above the crowd.

My recollections from the event are a little hazy, and I wasn’t keeping
notes. The basic format is this: Two robots go into the box, when cued by
a drag-race style christmas tree, they surge across the ring at each other
and attempt to smash, grind, or pierce the other into oblivion. A robot
that can no longer move is declared a knockout, and loses, so many
builders opt for a wedge shape, hoping to sneak under a taller lumbering
opponent and incapacitate it. There is, unfortunately, nothing less
interesting than two wedge-shaped fighting robots blindly ramming into
each other for three minutes. At the end, if there’s no clear winner, some
judges award points, usually to the robot that garnered more crowd
interest.

A few matches stick out in my mind. Like the fight where a robot named
“Count Botula” was so brutally maimed by its opponent, which resembled
Vlad the Impaler’s colander, that by the end of three minutes it only had
one functioning wheel, and its batteries were dragging by wires behind it.
But astoundingly, it was still moving, still trying to clamp down on that
pasta strainer from Hell. Every time it got near enough, it lost some
more pieces. By the end, three event staff were in the ring picking up
scattered chunks of it. Ordinary people spend hundreds of hours in the
garage and thousands of dollars creating these high-tech platforms which
carry and deploy, essentially, either clubs, spikes, or sawblades.
Attending BattleBots is like watching a Noh drama about the entire
twentieth century.

While I was sitting there, it finally came to me. I had to get into the
conference, and nothing had worked so far. I had to get the story somehow.
I’d just fake it. I’d walk right in and go up to the counter.

“I’m from OSDN,” I’d tell them.

“I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be on the list…”

“What? How’s that? Let me see. Hmm. No, I should be right there between
Forrester and Fowler. Dammit, they told me this was all taken care of!”

“Well, if you’re not on the list…”

“Ok,” I’d say, leaning close, conspiratorially, “I’m not supposed to
tell you this, and you have to swear to secrecy…” I’d break off and
glance around.

“What? What is it?”

“No, no, I’ve already said too much. They might have cameras. Shotgun
mikes, infrared. Forget it.”

“There’s no one around. What is it? You can trust me.”

“Ok. If this gets out, I know who leaked it.” You can always count
on a sense of paranoia when Apple’s involved. Anyone who’s not walking
around like a secret agent is either dumb or really scary. “I’m here on
orders straight from Steve himself. He wants to make sure that all the
developers are getting their proper dose of different thinking. We can’t
afford to lose anyone! Not one! So I’m here to wander around, make sure
everything conforms to the Apple experience.”

“Oh, you’re making this up.”

“Am I? Am I indeed? Well, you can believe that if you want. But
I’m not the only one. I can personally guarantee that you’ve dealt with at
least one of Steve’s other moles, just today. I’ve been watching, and
don’t think he’s not watching either!”

At this point, the keeper of passes would tremble with the knowledge that
Steve’s people are everywhere, all the time. Nothing escapes his steely
eye. Nothing. I would be in like Flynn.

I had had enough of robot fighting. These brutes could go on pounding the
silicon snot out of each other all night, for all I cared. The next day I
was off to San Jose, to fish sleeker waters. To join the sharks.

 

“Once more the red tried to rise with Juju, pushing hard with its
remaining leg, but it only spun crazily. Juju rose, but missed. The red
thrust weakly with its broken bill. Juju went into the air again, and this
time drove a gaff through one of the red’s eyes into its brain. The red
fell over stone dead.”
–Ibid.

San Jose is hot and ugly. The reason there are so many conferences and
trade shows there is because no matter how boring or painful the event is,
going outside where its not air conditioned is unthinkable. San Jose is
the forced-corporate-networking gulag of the United States. Siberia in
reverse.

I crawled down 101, through the evil moribund sprawl of the valley, but I
hardly even saw it. I was going to get into this conference, despite the
lawyers and confusion, and even despite having to go to San Jose to do it.
Traffic crept slowly south, four lanes of winking plastic glacier, and
when my turn to rubberneck finally came, I saw that the holdup was due to
a three-car crash in the northbound lanes. A white pickup had gone into
the cement barrier, and ambulances were on the scene. Looming high above
all was another of the omnipresent Apple billboards … Martin Luther King
Jr. urging us to Think Different. I just hoped no one had been killed.

In San Jose, you can drive for an hour and still be within view of where
you started. It’s like if LA were jammed into a black hole, and compressed
to a tiny, super-dense pinpoint of heat and smog and traffic and bad
manners. Every light was red, and car horns were banshees wailing of my
impending failure.

I never even found the conference, let alone had the chance to crash the
thing. I thought I’d just look for all the convention-goers, but everyone
in San Jose looks like a convention-goer. It’s a kind of hell as imagined
by Tony Robbins. After an hour and a half of this, I admitted defeat,
and fled north on 280, back to the blissful fog of the city.

I don’t know what the real story of the Worldwide Developers conference
was. I never got there. I can’t tell you much about Apple’s plans for open
source, or it’s commitment to software freedom. Apple remains, for me, an
enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an egg-shaped plastic shell the
color of smurf puke. Apple is a fundamentally schizophrenic entity. It is,
by turns, open, paranoid, generous, litigious, artsy, and thuggish. It’s
certainly not the worst company out there, and on bad days, I still think
it might be one of the best.

The San Jose feeling of evil was just starting to dissipate when I got to
Cupertino, where the 280 goes right by Apple HQ. Another giant MLK mural
presides over the freeway, surrounded by the blank stare of turquoise
glass and white columns. Apple was still watching me, and I looked right
back at it, wondering if behind those blank windows there was cunning and
love, or only madness. For better or for worse, looking at Apple is like
peering into the future. Hope, fear, beauty and crazed excess, all wrapped
in a curtain of possibility.

Right then, though, I didn’t care. I flipped it the bird and mashed the
gas pedal.

Imhotep writes, “Tribes 2 is finally here! To do the official reviewe we enlisted the help of Woody Hughes, the former Senior Editor of Maximum Linux Magazine. Will he wax poetic on the injustice that is Tribes, or will we actually get to see the gentler and more cuddly side of the Woodman? Read the full review at Maximumlinux.org.“

Jamie Zawinski has detailed his experiences with internet kiosks on his site. Slashdot has additional information and links.

It’s at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Cox writes, “In terms of going through the code audit almost all the sound drivers
still
need fixing to lock against format changes during a read/write. Poll
creating
and starting a buffer as write does and also mmap during write, write
during
an mmap.”

“This is the merge with Linus 2.4.5 tree. Its probably primarily of
interest
to folks who want to review the merge – in paticular on the VM side of
things.”

2.4.5-ac1
o Merge Linus 2.4.5 tree

Summary of changes for Linux 2.4.5-ac versus Linus 2.4.5

o Fix memory leak in wanrouter
o Fix memory leak in wanmain
o Use non atomic memory for linearising NFS buffers as they are
done in task context
o Fix dereference of freed memory in NetROM drivers
o Fix writing to freed memory in ax25_ip
o Support debugging of slab pools
o NinjaSCSI pcmcia scsi driver
o Raw HID device for USB peripheral buttons/controllers
o Updated NTFS
o RAMfs with resource limits
o NMI watchdog available on uniprocessor x86
o Update CMPCI drivers (not yet SMP safe)
o Configurable max_map_count
o Dynamic sysctl key registration
o SE401 USB camera driver
o Updated Zoran ZR3606x driver (replaces buz)
o w9966 parallel port camera driver (partially merged with Linus)
o Include headers in etags
o Don’t delete empty directories on make distclean
o Fix halt/reboot handling on Alcor Alpha
o IDE driver support for Etrax E100
o IDE infrastructure support for IDE using non standard data transfers
o Run ~/bin/installkernel if present
o Support for out of order stores on x86 with this mode (IDT Winchip)
– worth 20% performance on them
o Configure level debugging menu
o Make BUG() default to an oops only – saves 70K
o Power management help for UP-APIC
o Work around 440BX APIC hang (eg the ne2000 SMP hang)
o Run time configurable APM behaviour (interrupts, psr etc)
o Smarter DMI parser – handles multiple use of names
o DMI layer has blacklist tables fixing Dell Inspiron 5000e crashes,
PowerEdge reboot problems , and IBM laptop APM problems
o PNPBios support
o Fix atomicity of IRQ error count
o Handle PCI/ISA boxes that don’t list edge levels but have an ELCR
o Don’t erroneously mangle settings on all VIA bridges – cures the
horrible performance problem in 2.4.5 vanilla with VIA
o Fix bootmem corruption on x86 boot
o Scan and retrieve multipliers for processors (not yet used to handle
the SMP cases where we need to disable tsc use)
o Support machine check on Athlon and Pentium
o Fix SUS violation with signal stacks
o Handle boxes where firmware resets the timer to 18Hz (this should
now not show false positives)
o Better OOPS formatting on x86
o Fix nasty problems with interrupts being disabled for long periods
in frame buffer drivers
o PAE mode alignment assumption fixes
o 32bit UID clean quota
o Fix quota deadlocks
o Fix TLB shootdown races
o Experimental merge of usermode Linux
o Fix memory leaks and othe rproblems with the iphase driver
o IBM AS/400 iSeries virtual drivers
o DAC960 null pointer checks
o CCISS driver leak fixes
o MPT fusion drivers for scsi and networking
o Handle out of memory allocating request queue entries and avoid oops
o Free the initial ramdisk correctly
o Small CD-ROM layer updates
o AGP power management hooks
o First basic applicom driver fixes
o Fix copy_from_user with interrupts off in cyclades driver
o Fix out of memory handling in DRM
o Clean up dsp56K driver
o Update generic serial driver with break support
o Clean up h8 driver namespace
o Fix keymap changing problems in console drivers
o Fix locking in machzwd
o Updated rio serial driver
o A2232 driver
o Fix serial driver mangling of some clone uarts
o Handle xircom serial port setup delay bug
o Updated sx driver for newer generic_serial
o W83877F watchdog driver
o ITE8172 IDE driver support
o Q40/Q60 IDE support
o Fix nodma handling bug in alim15x3
o hpt366 DMA blacklist
o IDE-CD updates
o Updated IDE DMA blacklist
o OOPS catch for sg reuse in IDE driver
o Support formatting of IDE floppies
o Support PIIX4U4 (851EM)
o Enable second port on promise pseudo raid
o Support nodma on pmac
o Support more PCI irq sharing on IDE
o IDE tape updates – DI-50 support,
o Much updated VIA IDE support
o video1394 updated to newer module API
o Support write on the input event driver
o Quieten mouse and keyboard input drivers
o Fix compile problem with pc110pad
o Fix memory leak in isdnppp
o LVM updates
o Fix plan b locking
o Fix saa5249 locking
o Fix stradis locking
o Acenic driver updates
o aironet4500 cleanups, probe tables
o Ariadne updated to newer API
o Don’t limit mtu to 68+ in arlan drivers
o Updated eepro100 driver
o Fix potential crash on downing a bpqether port
o Updated nsc-ircc driver
o Updated toshoboe driver
o Intel Panther LP486e ethernet driver
o Remove erroneous check in eth_change_mtu
o Alternative xircom_cb driver
o Avoid ibm tr being rebuilt each make
o Updated ibm token ring drivers
o Add ‘static’ to bits of ppp code
o Add pci probe table to roadrunner
o Fix memory leak in sk_ge
o sk_g16 updates
o sk_mca updates
o Add tools to generate starfire firmware
o Synclink driver can be compiled in
o Fix possible oops in lapbether
o Fix memory leak in lanmedia driver
o Fix SDLA_X25 warnings
o Fix syncppp negotiation loop bug
o GSC parallel port support
o PCMCIA parallel port support
o Support PnPBIOS probing for PC parallel ports
o Fix leak in PCMCIA bulkmem driver
o Fix leak in PCMCIA ds driver
o Add more cards to the ti list for the yenta pcmcia
o Updated 3ware scsi driver
o NCR 53c700 and 53c700/66 driver core
o Fix pci_enable/resource read order on buslogic
o Updated NCR53c8xx driver
o Updated SYM53c8xx driver
o Fix NCR53c406 warnings
o NCR dual MCA driver
o AIC7xxx pci probe table for hotplug
o Updated aic7xxx_old
o Fix resource leaks in dec esp driver
o Fix printk levels in dmx3191 driver
o Allow per device max sector counts. (2.4 workaround until 2.5 does
this in the block layer per device)
o Support SCSI2/SCSI3 extended LUN numbering
o Limit qlogicisp and qlogicpti to 64 sectors/write
o Fix missing EFAULT return in scsi proc
o Fix locking of scsi_unregister_host
o Fix leaks in scsi_ioctl
o Fix potential lost requests in scsi merges
o Fix leak on write when scsi driver has no proc write op
o Extend the scsi black/whitelist
o Fix locking/eject/rescan on removable scsi disk media
o Updated scsi generic driver
o Updated scsi cdrom driver
o Correct ac97 handling on sparc
o Fix use after kfree in cs4281
o Update ess solo to new PCI style and PM
o Update maestro to new PCI style and PM
o Add docking station support to maestro
o Update sonicvies to new PCI api
o Fix trident locking problems
o Fix buzzing on ymfpci
o Power management for ymfpci
o Fix leak/missized copy on xjack driver
o CDCEther driver
o ACM driver with fixed CLOCAL
o Updated USB audio drivers
o Fix locking/reporting in USB device list
o Allow dsbr100 to take a radio_nr option
o HP5300 series USB scanner driver
o Updated IBM cam driver
o Fix USB inode locking
o Driver for Kawasaki based USB ethernet
o Small ov511 fixes
o Updated USB storage drivers
o Entries for Sony MSC-U01N memory stick, Fujifilm FinePix 1400Zoom,
Casio QV Digial Camera
o USB Ultracam driver
o Fix derefence of freed memory in the USB code
o Generic USB host->host drivers for anchorchip 2270, ipaq, netchip
1080, and Prolific PL-2301/2
o Updated ATI frame buffer drivers
o Updated clgen and control frame buffer drivers
o Updated cyber2000 driver
o Documentation for fbcon driver
o Additional modes for titanium powerbook (1152×768)
o Updated matrxofb drivers
o Support __setup in mdacon
o Radeon console driver
o Handle out of memory on sun3 fb
o Updated tga/vesa fb
o CMS file system (basic R/O)
o JFFS journalling flash file system with compression
o Updated AFFS file system
o Threaded core dumps
o Fix security holes in binfmt_misc
o Allow flushing of low buffers only when we need bounce buffers
o Use brelse in cramfs
o Fix memory leaks in freevxfs
o Updated isofs
o Small lockd updates (experimental)
o Fix nfs alignment funnies
o Report correct SuS errors on some opens
o Add generic_file_open to get 64bit stuff right
o Locking on make_inode_number for procfs
o Report shmem size in shared memory proc field
o Fail lseek outside of allowed range for filesystem
o Fix select race with fdset growth
o Kernel message levels and handle oom on superblock/mount ops
o Updated frame buffer logos
o Prefetch support for AMD Athlon
o Support out of order stores in spinlocks on x86
o m68k bitop compile fixes
o Add truncatepage op to address operations
o shmem filesystem cleanups and updates
o Fix off by one on real time pre-emption in scheduler
o Use prefetches in scheduler and wakeups
o Support GFP_FAIL to avoid highmem deadlocks

From LinuxPR: ” Mission Critical Linux, Inc., a global provider of Linux-based services and solutions for the enterprise, today announced that its high-availability Convolo Cluster software can be obtained through the Redhat.com online marketplace.”