Have you any clue as to how many years more advanced than Linux Solaris is at the high end?
I'd like to hear the specifics. Linux is making great strides on support of truly large machines; will Solaris have any edge on Linux in, say, two years?
Compare Linux 2.6 with the original Linux 0.01, and consider how far it came. Now consider how much farther 2.8 would need to come to match or surpass Solaris; not nearly as far. And Linux has huge momentum now.
So, let's see: Linux is already the best choice for low-end servers (workgroup print server, etc.), for small servers (single or dual processor PC hardware), for parallel clusters (imagine a Beowulf...), and for mainframes (big iron from IBM).
You could argue that Solaris is better in some way for small servers, but Linux is already stable and reliable enough that any benefits of Solaris here would be wiped out by the vendor lockin and much greater costs.
Parallel clusters don't just include a Beowulf, they also include having several computers act like one very reliable computer. See the Linux-HA project.
If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper (not already a Sun shop) and you wanted servers to run a business, I think Linux is already to the point where it would be a better choice than Solaris.
Sun has three things going for it: it makes very good hardware, it offers very good support, and Solaris currently rules on computers with many CPUs. But other companies make very good hardware that runs Linux (and you can even cluster cheap hardware with Linux-HA), you can get good support for Linux (e.g. from IBM), and Linux will catch up on many-CPU hardware.
My understanding is that the Patent Office guidelines say that they shouldn't issue a patent if the idea is obvious to one "schooled in the art". (If it's obvious even to a layman, that's even worse.)
It patents differentiating between different lengths of time holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
Kind of like the digital watch I had in 1979? Or the bike computer I had ten years ago?
I really don't understand how they got that patent. It flunks both the prior art and "obvious" requirements.
It will be even more interesting when all of Gnome is implemented with Mono.
When will that be? References, please?
The GNOME project is not Miguel de Icaza, and Miguel isn't the GNOME project, and there are no current plans to junk the C code base and replace it with Mono.
Miguel thinks there is so much prior art that Microsoft cannot shut down Mono. At worst MS can wall off the.NET compatible libraries, and Miguel doesn't really care about those.
Maybe I'm the only one who finds it ironic that a desktop environment founded because the KDE license wasn't free enough is falling over themselves to implement Microsoft technology.
GNOME isn't Miguel, etc. And Mono is a free implementation of some Microsoft ideas.
If you are right, and Miguel is wrong, then yes Mono is a huge mistake. Obviously Miguel doesn't agree with you.
Given that Miguel can point to prior art dating back to the UCSD P-System and maybe older, it's not clear to me that you are right and he's wrong. Microsoft could sue, of course, but it's not clear to me that they would win.
I hope ESR didn't mean to say that Linus lifted actual code from Minix. But it is absolutely true that Linus used Minux as a "scaffolding".
Linux is now self-hosting: you can use a Linux system to edit Linux sources and compile them. Before Linux was self-hosting, Linus used a Minix host. I don't think the original 0.1 kernel was self-hosting yet.
I certainly wouldn't list Eliphany's ability to bounce back from a crash as it's number one feature. That seems rather pessimistic.
Not just a crash, any interruption. For example, I can boot my PC into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, and when I boot back into Linux, Epiphany puts back all my open web sites. I like it.
And that's Epiphany's number one feature that Firefox doesn't currently have. There are many features of Epiphany I like, but most of them Firefox matches.
You're also complaining about the speed of Firefox 0.8?
Um, no. I said I mostly like Epiphany, but its biggest problem is sucky performance. I also use Firefox and I don't see the same problems. Ideally I want everything to happen instantly, and Firefox isn't instant-fast, but it doesn't make me wait for over three seconds with the CPU at 100%. That's Epiphany. And I hope someone fixes that.
I mostly like Epiphany. It's well integrated with GNOME, and mostly it Just Works. After a crash or sudden shutdown, when you run it again it brings back all the pages you had open, which is great.
It's biggest problem for me is sucky performance. If I hit Ctrl+N to open a new window, my CPU usage goes to 100% and stays there for 3 seconds or so. And I dread saving a bookmark; CPU goes 100% for 4 seconds or so. I suspect there is some sort of N-squared behavior in the bookmark management or something like that, and if I get time I might build a debug version of Epiphany and run a profiler against it.
If they could somehow merge the Epiphany and Firefox projects, that might be interesting. If Epiphany could run some of the plugins from Firefox, I'd be very happy. But I wonder if the two projects are too diverse, and it might be more work than it's worth at this point.
We've seen too many patents where everybody already does X, and the patent is to "do X on the Internet".
Or the recent patent on burning a CD of a concert, the same night as the concert and selling it after the concert. There's prior art on making music CDs -- but I guess you can patent making CDs in a specific situation.
Now double-clicking isn't patented, but double-clicking the hardware buttons on a PDA is patented.
So we can just patent anything if we specify a narrow domain and apply it there?
I suggest we patent double-clicking with a mouse... on an application with a "metal" skin that looks like a PDA. (Meh. Maybe Microsoft's patent would already cover this one!)
How about patenting the idea of recording a DVD of your vacation... while on vacation.
How about patenting the idea of an SQL database... on a PDA.
How about patenting video conferencing... on a PDA.
It's stupid, but the pattern suggests this might be possible. Start filing your applications now!
Why would SCO ever have to drop their suits? It looks like Darl's brother is their main lawyer anyway. SCO could downsize to just Darl and his brother, living in a cardboard box behind the courthouse, and they could still keep fighting the lawsuits.
It's IBM's fault, really. Specifically, whoever at IBM designed the BIOS of the very first IBM PC. Maybe "designed" is too generous a word.
The BIOS was supposed to abstract the hardware for you. You were never to access hardware directly, but always go through the BIOS. That way, if hardware changed, the BIOS could change too and you wouldn't have to change your code. But the BIOS wasn't good enough, and people began to ignore it and write their own code.
The BIOS had a function that could move the cursor around, and it even had a function that could draw a single character on the screen. Amazingly, the BIOS had no function that could do both at once, and no function to draw a string. BIOS calls were slow on a 4.77 MHz 8088, and you needed to make two for each letter of a string to draw the string to the screen using the BIOS. Absolutely no one was willing to live with this. So everyone wrote code to just copy the string into the display buffer of the video card.
Alas, you couldn't ask the BIOS for the address of the display buffer. So everyone just asked the BIOS what kind of video card (MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA, etc.) and then hard-coded in the appropriate address. When IBM was laying out the address space, they put the text buffer for a color video card at 640K, little dreaming that huge amounts of software would then hard-code that address, making it impossible ever to change it. (The original PC was available with 16K of memory, so no one was really worrying about apps too big for 640K at that time anyway.)
If only IBM had designed the BIOS with a function that would give you the address of the video card, and everyone had used that instead of hard-coding the address. Then when 640K became a problem, they could have just released new video cards that parked the buffer higher in memory, and all the software would still work.
Bill Gates never made the infamous "640K... enough for anyone" comment. Not only have I never seen it documented anywhere, but he was asked about it and replied that he never said that.
He didn't see the Internet coming -- he thought MSN should be like CompuServe, because that was the top info service (before the Internet became big). And I remember some wild comments he made about the truly amazing, throbbing power of the 286 chip. So he's not an amazing guru with awesome predictive powers. But people keep beating him up about this bogus quote, and I'm tired of it.
The other side of that is that it's only seven minutes long, has no real voices, and took him three years to make it.
So what? That's not three years of full-time work, and machines have gotten faster since then, and in any event the world is richer by one really fun 7-minute movie. I'd rather watch KB2 than any of the stilted Hollywood formula films, even if they have special effects that cost millions.
KB2 is odd and quirky. Would Hollywood have made a movie like that? Probably not. But once it proved successful, Hollywood would make more movies just like it.
Basically, Hollywood wants to make money, and they are careful to try to do things the same way all the time. If you are spending 100 million dollars on a movie, you don't dare do anything too weird. When movies cost less, the creators of the movies have more freedom to do what they want. That doesn't guarantee a good movie but at least it means you don't only get more of the same.
Shrek2 just shattered all kinds of records [...] And there are no real actors.
You do still need voice actors. With an animated feature, a really good voice actor can really add to the experience.
And you still need to make the character models move in realistic ways. So you need motion capture actors, or else truly skilled "puppeteers" to animate the models.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Take a look at Killer Bean 2: The Party by Jeff Lew. One guy made this, using his computer at his home. I think it's really cool that people can just make movies now with only a tiny budget.
People have been saying that even if the studio didn't care about the security issues, there are bandwidth issues that would keep this from really working. There are a few quotes in the article that confirm this: all the rendering machines make a sort of denial-of-service attack on their NFS servers, for example. And the article talks about their VPN, which they call the ILM Conduit; it sends everything double-encrypted with Blowfish. They really are worried about security.
The coolest thing, to me, is that ILM has rolled out Linux all the way across their organization; people run Linux on their desktop computers. When people go home at night, their computers get added to the render farm!
There is a free software version of DDR, written in Python. It used to be called PyDDR but now it's called PyDance.
You can play it with a real dance pad, or just play it with your keyboard. I suspect you will not lose much weight if you play it with your keyboard, however.
What battery technologies are you talking about, here?
I'm not an expert in the field, but I was surprised at a claim of environmental impact equal to 20 AA alkalines/year for a car. I wondered "if it's that nifty why aren't we doing it now?" but if I understand what you wrote, such a car would cost $60,000 every four years for batteries, which answers that.
What are the 50-year polymer batteries you are talking about? Can you provide any web sites where I can read about them?
How much do the batteries cost? How long can you use them before you need to replace them? Will there be an environmental impact from suddenly making, using up, and discarding large batteries in great quantities?
You seem to have interpreted his quote completely backwards.
"...you don't want to be in a fair fight." What he's saying is that normally, US soldiers have the deck stacked in their favor, by their superior equipment, training, and tactics. He wants the fight as unfair as possible, favoring the US. He wants every US soldier alive and unharmed, while all US objectives get carried out.
He's saying that the US advantages get cacneled out in urban combat, making the fight more fair, and he doesn't want it more fair. I'm with him on this.
Note that when he said "fair fight" he was using short, to-the-point language. He could have said something like "urban operations drastically reduce the traditional advantages of the US military's superior equipment... [blah blah blah]". Instead he made his point with a pithy phrase. "...you don't want to be in a fair fight."
He wasn't talking at all about the guerilla tactics of the guys attacking our soldiers. You brought that up.
And you are the one who mentioned "sporting". He doesn't want a "sporting" fight, he wants all US troops alive and unharmed. Sporting might be to only attack 20 enemies with 20 of your own troops, and your troops don't get better equipment. It's silly on the face of it. War isn't about being sporting.
I read a funny SF short story, where they made a little robot butterfly, and had it flap its wings just so. In accordance with chaos theory, they were now able to control the weather.
My first sentence was: "The Spy Hunter console video game has a movie-like plot." Console game, not arcade game.
The joke was about the arcade game; the planned movie is based on the console game. I know this was a joke, but I thought it raised an interesting point, and that not everyone on Slashdot would know that the console game actually has a plot.
Palm makes several PDAs with built-in Bluetooth. And you can put a charging cradle near your home entertainment center. Graffiti, the writing recognition system, would work well enough for things like setting up a show to record.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you any clue as to how many years more advanced than Linux Solaris is at the high end?
I'd like to hear the specifics. Linux is making great strides on support of truly large machines; will Solaris have any edge on Linux in, say, two years?
Compare Linux 2.6 with the original Linux 0.01, and consider how far it came. Now consider how much farther 2.8 would need to come to match or surpass Solaris; not nearly as far. And Linux has huge momentum now.
So, let's see: Linux is already the best choice for low-end servers (workgroup print server, etc.), for small servers (single or dual processor PC hardware), for parallel clusters (imagine a Beowulf...), and for mainframes (big iron from IBM).
You could argue that Solaris is better in some way for small servers, but Linux is already stable and reliable enough that any benefits of Solaris here would be wiped out by the vendor lockin and much greater costs.
Parallel clusters don't just include a Beowulf, they also include having several computers act like one very reliable computer. See the Linux-HA project.
If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper (not already a Sun shop) and you wanted servers to run a business, I think Linux is already to the point where it would be a better choice than Solaris.
Sun has three things going for it: it makes very good hardware, it offers very good support, and Solaris currently rules on computers with many CPUs. But other companies make very good hardware that runs Linux (and you can even cluster cheap hardware with Linux-HA), you can get good support for Linux (e.g. from IBM), and Linux will catch up on many-CPU hardware.
steveha
My understanding is that the Patent Office guidelines say that they shouldn't issue a patent if the idea is obvious to one "schooled in the art". (If it's obvious even to a layman, that's even worse.)
1 71/Intellectual%20property.htm
http://veghome.ucdavis.edu/classes/winter2004/bit
steveha
It patents differentiating between different lengths of time
holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or
application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons
on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
Kind of like the digital watch I had in 1979? Or the bike computer I had ten years ago?
I really don't understand how they got that patent. It flunks both the prior art and "obvious" requirements.
steveha
It will be even more interesting when all of Gnome is implemented with Mono.
.NET compatible libraries, and Miguel doesn't really care about those.
When will that be? References, please?
The GNOME project is not Miguel de Icaza, and Miguel isn't the GNOME project, and there are no current plans to junk the C code base and replace it with Mono.
Miguel thinks there is so much prior art that Microsoft cannot shut down Mono. At worst MS can wall off the
Maybe I'm the only one who finds it ironic that a desktop environment founded because the KDE license wasn't free enough is falling over themselves to implement Microsoft technology.
GNOME isn't Miguel, etc. And Mono is a free implementation of some Microsoft ideas.
If you are right, and Miguel is wrong, then yes Mono is a huge mistake. Obviously Miguel doesn't agree with you.
Given that Miguel can point to prior art dating back to the UCSD P-System and maybe older, it's not clear to me that you are right and he's wrong. Microsoft could sue, of course, but it's not clear to me that they would win.
See also the FAQ:
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents
steveha
Their accomplishments are not found. Heh.
steveha
I hope ESR didn't mean to say that Linus lifted actual code from Minix. But it is absolutely true that Linus used Minux as a "scaffolding".
Linux is now self-hosting: you can use a Linux system to edit Linux sources and compile them. Before Linux was self-hosting, Linus used a Minix host. I don't think the original 0.1 kernel was self-hosting yet.
steveha
I certainly wouldn't list Eliphany's ability to bounce back from a crash as it's number one feature. That seems rather pessimistic.
Not just a crash, any interruption. For example, I can boot my PC into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, and when I boot back into Linux, Epiphany puts back all my open web sites. I like it.
And that's Epiphany's number one feature that Firefox doesn't currently have. There are many features of Epiphany I like, but most of them Firefox matches.
You're also complaining about the speed of Firefox 0.8?
Um, no. I said I mostly like Epiphany, but its biggest problem is sucky performance. I also use Firefox and I don't see the same problems. Ideally I want everything to happen instantly, and Firefox isn't instant-fast, but it doesn't make me wait for over three seconds with the CPU at 100%. That's Epiphany. And I hope someone fixes that.
steveha
I mostly like Epiphany. It's well integrated with GNOME, and mostly it Just Works. After a crash or sudden shutdown, when you run it again it brings back all the pages you had open, which is great.
It's biggest problem for me is sucky performance. If I hit Ctrl+N to open a new window, my CPU usage goes to 100% and stays there for 3 seconds or so. And I dread saving a bookmark; CPU goes 100% for 4 seconds or so. I suspect there is some sort of N-squared behavior in the bookmark management or something like that, and if I get time I might build a debug version of Epiphany and run a profiler against it.
If they could somehow merge the Epiphany and Firefox projects, that might be interesting. If Epiphany could run some of the plugins from Firefox, I'd be very happy. But I wonder if the two projects are too diverse, and it might be more work than it's worth at this point.
steveha
We've seen too many patents where everybody already does X, and the patent is to "do X on the Internet".
Or the recent patent on burning a CD of a concert, the same night as the concert and selling it after the concert. There's prior art on making music CDs -- but I guess you can patent making CDs in a specific situation.
Now double-clicking isn't patented, but double-clicking the hardware buttons on a PDA is patented.
So we can just patent anything if we specify a narrow domain and apply it there?
I suggest we patent double-clicking with a mouse... on an application with a "metal" skin that looks like a PDA. (Meh. Maybe Microsoft's patent would already cover this one!)
How about patenting the idea of recording a DVD of your vacation... while on vacation.
How about patenting the idea of an SQL database... on a PDA.
How about patenting video conferencing... on a PDA.
It's stupid, but the pattern suggests this might be possible. Start filing your applications now!
steveha
Why would SCO ever have to drop their suits? It looks like Darl's brother is their main lawyer anyway. SCO could downsize to just Darl and his brother, living in a cardboard box behind the courthouse, and they could still keep fighting the lawsuits.
steveha
Wrong URL. Correct is:
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/
steveha
Yeah, well *someone* clearly made that decision
It's IBM's fault, really. Specifically, whoever at IBM designed the BIOS of the very first IBM PC. Maybe "designed" is too generous a word.
The BIOS was supposed to abstract the hardware for you. You were never to access hardware directly, but always go through the BIOS. That way, if hardware changed, the BIOS could change too and you wouldn't have to change your code. But the BIOS wasn't good enough, and people began to ignore it and write their own code.
The BIOS had a function that could move the cursor around, and it even had a function that could draw a single character on the screen. Amazingly, the BIOS had no function that could do both at once, and no function to draw a string. BIOS calls were slow on a 4.77 MHz 8088, and you needed to make two for each letter of a string to draw the string to the screen using the BIOS. Absolutely no one was willing to live with this. So everyone wrote code to just copy the string into the display buffer of the video card.
Alas, you couldn't ask the BIOS for the address of the display buffer. So everyone just asked the BIOS what kind of video card (MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA, etc.) and then hard-coded in the appropriate address. When IBM was laying out the address space, they put the text buffer for a color video card at 640K, little dreaming that huge amounts of software would then hard-code that address, making it impossible ever to change it. (The original PC was available with 16K of memory, so no one was really worrying about apps too big for 640K at that time anyway.)
If only IBM had designed the BIOS with a function that would give you the address of the video card, and everyone had used that instead of hard-coding the address. Then when 640K became a problem, they could have just released new video cards that parked the buffer higher in memory, and all the software would still work.
steveha
Bill Gates never made the infamous "640K... enough for anyone" comment. Not only have I never seen it documented anywhere, but he was asked about it and replied that he never said that.
He didn't see the Internet coming -- he thought MSN should be like CompuServe, because that was the top info service (before the Internet became big). And I remember some wild comments he made about the truly amazing, throbbing power of the 286 chip. So he's not an amazing guru with awesome predictive powers. But people keep beating him up about this bogus quote, and I'm tired of it.
steveha
The other side of that is that it's only seven minutes long, has no real voices, and took him three years to make it.
So what? That's not three years of full-time work, and machines have gotten faster since then, and in any event the world is richer by one really fun 7-minute movie. I'd rather watch KB2 than any of the stilted Hollywood formula films, even if they have special effects that cost millions.
KB2 is odd and quirky. Would Hollywood have made a movie like that? Probably not. But once it proved successful, Hollywood would make more movies just like it.
Basically, Hollywood wants to make money, and they are careful to try to do things the same way all the time. If you are spending 100 million dollars on a movie, you don't dare do anything too weird. When movies cost less, the creators of the movies have more freedom to do what they want. That doesn't guarantee a good movie but at least it means you don't only get more of the same.
steveha
Shrek2 just shattered all kinds of records [...] And there are no real actors.
You do still need voice actors. With an animated feature, a really good voice actor can really add to the experience.
And you still need to make the character models move in realistic ways. So you need motion capture actors, or else truly skilled "puppeteers" to animate the models.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Take a look at Killer Bean 2: The Party by Jeff Lew. One guy made this, using his computer at his home. I think it's really cool that people can just make movies now with only a tiny budget.
steveha
There is a great article about how ILM does their rendering. It was a cover story in Linux Journal magazine.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6783
People have been saying that even if the studio didn't care about the security issues, there are bandwidth issues that would keep this from really working. There are a few quotes in the article that confirm this: all the rendering machines make a sort of denial-of-service attack on their NFS servers, for example. And the article talks about their VPN, which they call the ILM Conduit; it sends everything double-encrypted with Blowfish. They really are worried about security.
The coolest thing, to me, is that ILM has rolled out Linux all the way across their organization; people run Linux on their desktop computers. When people go home at night, their computers get added to the render farm!
steveha
There is a free software version of DDR, written in Python. It used to be called PyDDR but now it's called PyDance.
You can play it with a real dance pad, or just play it with your keyboard. I suspect you will not lose much weight if you play it with your keyboard, however.
http://icculus.org/pyddr/
steveha
What battery technologies are you talking about, here?
I'm not an expert in the field, but I was surprised at a claim of environmental impact equal to 20 AA alkalines/year for a car. I wondered "if it's that nifty why aren't we doing it now?" but if I understand what you wrote, such a car would cost $60,000 every four years for batteries, which answers that.
What are the 50-year polymer batteries you are talking about? Can you provide any web sites where I can read about them?
steveha
How much do the batteries cost? How long can you use them before you need to replace them? Will there be an environmental impact from suddenly making, using up, and discarding large batteries in great quantities?
I don't think a battery car is a panacea.
steveha
I wonder if there's any possibility for motion-charging batteries to succeed as a power source for soldiers.
There just isn't enough power there to be useful. You can get enough power for a watch, but not enough to run, say, a GPS.
The military is looking at fuel cells and such, because they need lots of energy for the various pieces of equipment now and in the future.
steveha
You seem to have interpreted his quote completely backwards.
"...you don't want to be in a fair fight." What he's saying is that normally, US soldiers have the deck stacked in their favor, by their superior equipment, training, and tactics. He wants the fight as unfair as possible, favoring the US. He wants every US soldier alive and unharmed, while all US objectives get carried out.
He's saying that the US advantages get cacneled out in urban combat, making the fight more fair, and he doesn't want it more fair. I'm with him on this.
Note that when he said "fair fight" he was using short, to-the-point language. He could have said something like "urban operations drastically reduce the traditional advantages of the US military's superior equipment... [blah blah blah]". Instead he made his point with a pithy phrase. "...you don't want to be in a fair fight."
He wasn't talking at all about the guerilla tactics of the guys attacking our soldiers. You brought that up.
And you are the one who mentioned "sporting". He doesn't want a "sporting" fight, he wants all US troops alive and unharmed. Sporting might be to only attack 20 enemies with 20 of your own troops, and your troops don't get better equipment. It's silly on the face of it. War isn't about being sporting.
steveha
I read a funny SF short story, where they made a little robot butterfly, and had it flap its wings just so. In accordance with chaos theory, they were now able to control the weather.
I believe the story was written by Laurence Janifer.
steveha
It's just you.
steveha
My first sentence was: "The Spy Hunter console video game has a movie-like plot." Console game, not arcade game.
The joke was about the arcade game; the planned movie is based on the console game. I know this was a joke, but I thought it raised an interesting point, and that not everyone on Slashdot would know that the console game actually has a plot.
steveha
Palm makes several PDAs with built-in Bluetooth. And you can put a charging cradle near your home entertainment center. Graffiti, the writing recognition system, would work well enough for things like setting up a show to record.
steveha