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GUI

Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD 75

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."
The Courts

Submission + - Lawsuit says Google's Sale of Keywords is Illegal 1

Hugh Pickens writes: "Google encourages advertisers to purchase other companies' trademarks as targeted search terms and they're expanding the practice into 190 countries so when Audrey Spangenberg typed the name of her small software company, into Google and saw the ads of competitors that had paid Google to display their marketing messages whenever someone searched for FirePond, a registered trademark, she was furious. This week her company filed a class-action suit against Google in federal court in Texas, saying that Google had infringed on her company's trademark and challenged Google's policies on behalf of all trademark owners in the state. Legal experts said it was the first class-action suit against Google over the issue. Google's acceptance of such competitive uses of trademarks has irked many other companies, including the likes of American Airlines and Geico, which have filed suits against Google and settled them. Many brand owners say the practice abuses their brands, confuses customers and increases their cost of doing business. "I know of several companies spending millions of dollars a year in payments to Google to make sure that their company is the very first sponsored link" on searches for their own names, said Terrence Ross, a partner at Gibson Dunn, who represented American Airlines in its suit against Google. "It certainly smacks of a protection racket.""
Government

Submission + - Obama's Stem Cell Guidelines Threaten Research (wired.com)

Death Metal writes: "Under the Obama administration's proposed rules for funding embryonic stem cell research, hundreds of existing cell lines could be ineligible, even those that qualified under President Bush.

The guidelines were written by the National Institutes of Health and are currently in draft form and expected to be finalized in July. But in their current state, they restrict funding to stem cell lines produced according to new rules that are only now being established. Few existing cell lines will meet those requirements.

"The so-called Presidential lines aren't suitable for actual medical application," said Patrick Taylor, deputy counsel at Children's Hospital Boston, who criticized the NIH guidelines in a paper published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell. "But we're talking about many, many more lines. The new lines were created with extensive ethical oversight. They're at stake here.""

Unix

Submission + - NetBSD 5.0 released

kl76 writes: The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided.

Comment Re:Deal with the Devil (Score 5, Informative) 447

Nice try, troll.

To answer your "questions", no and no.

Panix has been deeply involved in efforts to promote and protect Internet security since, I'd wager, long before you even had access to the Internet at all. I should know -- within two months of my first coming to work at Panix in 1993 the majority of my work was shifted from normal system administration to security.

The very first NY Times article (possibly the first national newspaper article at all) on the subject of Internet security featured Panix' heroic efforts to publicize and mitigate a series of network sniffer attacks that had been previously kept under wraps, and compromised the security of thousands of Internet users (at a time when the total population of the Internet was only a few tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands). Panix played a key role in the emergence of full-disclosure security lists by refusing to sit still while vendors and CERT (don't get me wrong. CERT is good. They just weren't then) conspired to cover up known vulnerabilities for years at a time. And so forth.

To this day, security remains a major focus at Panix. It has to -- they're the oldest, most prominent, and one of the largest (if not the largest) shell ISPs still out there, and their users won't tolerate system outages caused by security failures, or security failures that compromise those users' own security. In general, if you find Unix timesharing systems the size of Panix, they're at universities; and look at those folks' security records. Panix, on the other hand, is worlds better.

To respond to your other happy fun mudslinging, Panix has not and does not tolerate "online crimes" by its users, whether your invented "user" Kevin Mitnick or anyone else. Never did, doesn't now; security is important to Panix; it is essential to their business; and so is the health of the Internet itself.

Depending how you count, Panix is the second or third oldest consumer ISP in the world. Panix has been around long enough to remember the times when if they had a security incident, a significant fraction of the Internet shuddered (e.g. when we were offline for two days for security reasons in 1994, traffic on Usenet as a whole fell considerably). It would be hard to find any business on the Internet more fundamentally concerned that its own security problems not impact others than Panix has been, and is.

Which, of course, is quite a different attitude than that exemplified by some other businesses mentioned in this thread.

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