Wouldn't Loki still be able to update the Linux version.
Gee, I sure hope so... but it depends on how the deal was structured; we can't just guess about it.
If the win32 port is no longer updated, couldn't this potentially be the killer game app that forces the masses to Linux?
I know you have tongue in cheek here, but to answer seriously: I don't think the numbers on Tribes 2 are high enough to be "the masses". What is interesting is to speculate whether existing Win32 customers might migrate to Linux Tribes. If the Win32 version is no longer maintained, and the Linux version is still maintained, and enough bugs and/or cheats come to light that the existing customers start to really want an update... then, just maybe, something like what you describe might come to pass.
I see two major problems, though.
It is hard to install Linux, and harder still to get 3D working; I can't imagine a truly wide-scale move to Linux until this changes.
Loki has the code, but that's not always enough. When you have really weird difficult bugs, it saves a lot of time to have the people who wrote the code fix those bugs. (By shutting down Dynamix, Sierra is essentially saying "We no longer care if any bugs are found.")
I would love it if, say a year from now, Sierra decided they had milked this particular cow as much as they can, and released the sources to Tribes 2 to let the T2 community support themselves. Given Sierra's history, that seems rather unlikely; it's more likely they would build a big warehouse, fill it with brand-new copies of Tribes 2, and then burn the warehouse down.
Mr. Groth wrote this really long, tedious, steaming pile of words, which all boil down to "net bad, paper good, McCloud sucks". Scott McCloud has some good ideas; not all are practical now, but that is no reason to throw them all out the window and hurl insults at him.
I really enjoy
CRFH.
It's one of my favorites. If there were no Internet comics, I would not be able to read it; it would not exist. The Salon article has a direct quote from the author of CRFH saying just that. Mr. Groth can rant tediously all he wishes, but he won't convince me that a world without CRFH is a better world.
Even if you think micropayments will never happen the way McCloud describes them, McCloud still deserves some credit. He cares about comics, and wants to see them survive and prosper. As he wrote in his book, market forces in the printed-comics world can crush new comics: you can't get sales unless stores stock your comic, stores won't stock your comic if it's not just another X-Men ripoff. With the web, anyone can put up a new comic, and the good ones can grow by word-of-mouth.
One last note: if you think Internet comics are all quick gag-a-day strips, you might want to check out the
Zot graphic novel.
It's very good!
If an integer-based Vorbis codec were available, I think it could easily become an option in a number of products.
Don't worry; in short order, integer-only code will be written. Floating point makes some computations more convenient, but you can always re-write so that floating point is not necessary. That will happen with Ogg Vorbis.
I have only watched one complete episode of Lexx. It was bad. Very bad.
The only scene I liked: the gorgeous chick was having dinner with a guy. She liked him and thought he was good looking, but he was only interested in her because she was holding the key to Lexx. He wanted her to give control of Lexx over to him, since it is such an amazing powerful yada yada whatever.
Guy: Together we can conquer the universe! Whole star systems will tremble before us! Absolute power!
Chick: Can't we just have sex instead?
Not exactly a dog-and-pony show, but I once worked for a company that moved me and a few others to a new facility. The Board of Directors of the company was coming by to inspect the new facility, and the Vice President of Engineering was running around making us clean everything up. (It was his idea to open up this new facility; he wanted it to look good so he would look good.)
Well, the new facility was all cubicles, with no closets designed in... no place to put junk, so we shoved boxes full of junk under desks and in out of the way corners. We were working on a lab, and the VP of Engineering decided that the test leads on the oscilliscope looked untidy, so those were removed and hidden as well.
When that was done, the VP looked around the lab and said "Now, this looks like a productive lab!" Yeah, a scope with no test leads... that's real productive.
I sent this story to Scott Adams. I don't think he ever used it in Dilbert, but he did send me a reply saying he found the story amusing.
My bet is the EFF sues it all the way up to the supreme court, where they do one of two things.
They have a third option: to simply decline to hear the case, and let lower court rulings stand. This is what has happened with all Second Amendment cases for decades: the Supremes, without comment, decline to review the appeal.
But I don't think they would do that for the DMCA; I think they would cheerfully grab the DMCA and rip it up, given a chance, so let's get this to them now.
You have an entertaining style of writing, and there is something to what you say, but you are way overboard.
DOS 1.0 was not "basically stolen". Bill Gates offered a chunk of money, the chunk was accepted. Fair and square. You may think Gates should have said, "By the way, don't accept my offer, take your QDOS to IBM and they will pay you more than I will." I don't think a failure to say that is the same as theft. Was the guy who wrote QDOS (which became MS-DOS 1.0) heartbroken and embittered? I'd say not, given that he went to work for Microsoft, and worked there off and on for years. (The ironic thing is that his stock options from being hired at Microsoft must have made him a millionaire, given how early he was hired.)
DOS 3.0 didn't break anything but TSR programs; I agree it would have been nice if MS had made some sort of TSR API, or at least documented everything the TSR guys needed, but to take a lack of documentation and expand that into a claim that DOS 3.0 broke things is absurd. TSRs were hacks; getting different TSRs from different companies to work without stepping on each other was an adventure. By the time Windows got really useful, TSRs had been sorted out, but they were always hacks.
DOS 4.0 was basically written by IBM. Microsoft had little to do with it, and I remember a lecture I attended when I worked at MS where a DOS engineer talked about ways in which DOS 5.0 would fix the screwed up and broken things of DOS 4.x. DOS 5.0 was a very successful product; it was smaller and more compatible than 4.x, and it had new memory management APIs that people wanted. (HMA and all that.)
DOS isn't done til Lotus won't run? I don't believe that for a second. I worked on Word for DOS, and I never once saw any calls to secret back-door functions in the OS. Microsoft pulled some weird stuff, like that version of Windows that put up a confusing warning message if you ran it on top of DR-DOS, but I never saw any evidence they did anything like add code to break competitors. You can't do something like that without people in the company knowing about it, and it only takes one of those guys blowing the whistle to land the company under a pile of trouble; which never happened. And the Undocumented DOS books reverse-engineered all sorts of stuff from DOS, and they never found any "secret make Lotus break" code.
Windows 95 was in beta forever. I was using it almost a year before it shipped, and it always was very stable for me; they tested it as much as they could before shipping it. You may wish they had waited three years before shipping it; if so you are on drugs. Everyone wanted them to ship it. 32-bit addressing, no more near/far functions, Win32 allowing you to write one app for both Windows 95 and for NT? Everyone was eager for MS to ship that thing. Win95 was a huge success, which means that most of the people who got it were happy with it.
OS/2? When I started out at Microsoft, we all ran OS/2 on our development machines. All the really important desktops were running OS/2. Microsoft really believed OS/2 was the future. Then, after Windows 3.0 shipped, the customers bought huge piles of it; MS realized that the customers wanted Win 3.0, not OS/2. The customers were voting with their dollars, and MS gave the customers what they voted for. I'm amazed IBM wanted OS/2, but IBM did, so MS was able to just walk away from it and not even have to support it; IBM took care of all that. MS never did anything to kill OS/2, unless you count their refusing to license the Win32 API to IBM, which I don't.
Microsoft stuff is far from perfect, yes. But it is also far from the picture you paint.
For all the talk about how Microsoft doesn't innovate, there sure is lack of innovation in the opensource world. I've yet to see it.
Not true, but I can understand why you would say this.
Before free software can innovate beyond the state of the art, it has to achieve the state of the art. In some areas, free software has been state of the art for years: running tasks on a server, for example. Apache is an extremely popular web server, and it has been around about as long as web servers have; the free software world didn't have to play catch-up, Apache hit the ground running. Compare with the desktop environment. Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984, but it was a joke. It became usable in 1990, good around 1992 (Windows 3.1, can't swear to the exact year) and in 1995, a decade after it first appeared, it was refined and polished and ready. GNOME and KDE both have taken less time to get to where they are now, and they will gain polish quickly now.
I agree that the menu editor in GNOME sucks. I'm not sure I agree that the root menu should be as customizable as you wish for; I like being able to find things on strange systems. Debian has a balance I like very much: the main GNOME menus you can edit as you like, but there is a "Debian" menu where everything is always in the same place. So on any strange Debian machine, I can still find a web browser and launch it. (But this is free software, and it is very possible for someone to hack the code to give you what you want.)
I read
Linux Weekly News
every week, and I am constantly reading about cool innovations, many of them in the Linux kernel itself but some in user programs. For example, the Tux web server showed how tight integration inside the kernel could speed web access, and now Microsoft is doing web servers that use the same idea; free software was there first. There are lots of little cool hacks being rolled into the kernel all the time, making it ever faster; just this week in LWN I read about a
simple patch
that improved the virtual memory manager's performance by 12%!
The
Python
language, IMHO, blows the doors off of Visual Basic, and it's free software; and the free editor
vim
is available now with Python compiled in as a macro language. I was excited when I found that one out: my favorite editor, now with a full-powered scripting language! (I guess you had to be there. Or something.)
In short, there are lots of innovations all around us.
In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.
By definition, a "killer app" is something you cannot get anywhere else. When Visicalc first appeared, it sold a ton of Apple II computers: people who worked with numbers would go to computer stores and say "Sell me a Visicalc!" Well, of course they needed an Apple to run it on, so they bought that too. Lotus 1-2-3 was a dramatically more powerful spreadsheet than Visicalc, and had graphing too; in other words, it had valuable features not available anywhere else, so people bought in on the IBM PC platform. Desktop publishing worked on a Mac long before it worked on a PC, and so sold a ton of Macs.
Now, I'm trying to imagine an application that you can write for free operating systems that is not available anywhere else, and will not quickly appear on Windows and the Mac if you do write it. Nothing comes to mind. I don't think there will be any killer app for free operating systems.
The free stuff is going to win, though. My definition of winning, in this context, is that normal people will use free software in such large numbers that it will become impossible for Microsoft or anyone else to lock people in with a proprietary product. I will be happy when Microsoft Word flawlessly imports and exports AbiWord documents, because there are so many AbiWord documents out there that Microsoft simply cannot ignore them. That day is coming.
My wife signed up to test WinXP. We installed it on an expendable computer. This computer was set up to dual-boot between Win98 and Linux, with the GRUB bootloader. WinXP is not re-writing the MBR. Ever since the install GRUB comes up unchanged, Linux still boots, but choosing "windows" in GRUB now boots into XP instead of 98. This is the RC1 version of WinXP (build 2505).
Microsoft is possibly insane enough to put in an MBR wiping "feature" but they are definitely not insane enough to put one in at the very last minute. Therefore I state with some confidence that the release version of XP won't have an MBR wipe either.
(By the way, so far I just hate XP. Most of the changes to the user interface annoy me, and the spare computer--a 450 MHz box with a GeForce 2 and 128MB of RAM--isn't quite fast enough to run XP well.)
But remember that a PDA is a limited environment. Less CPU horsepower, less room inside for extra chips, less electrical power to run chips... if you are going to do some sort of backwards-compatible bus, you will need to do it very efficiently. I'm not saying it is impossible, just that it will be a headache if they try this.
This will be more difficult for Handspring than for Palm. The Springboard is basically a direct connection to the DragonBall's bus, so I can't see how it would be very easy to do a compatible Springboard on an ARM chip. Also, Springboard modules have code on board for the cool plug-and-play, and that code is of course DragonBall code.
So, does Handspring stick with the DragonBall? Or do they try to emulate the Springboard bus using the ARM? Or do they do Springboard 2.0 using the ARM bus? Or can they do a new bus that isn't so tightly coupled to the CPU's bus? (How about making the plug-and-play use some sort of portable bytecode?)
By the way, I hope Handspring will adopt the "universal connector" idea Palm introduced with their latest devices. Having both a serial port and a USB port is a nice thing. Having both of them plus a Springboard would be even better.
This is a risky move, but if Palm does it right it will pay off. They only get one chance.
Apple showed it can be done. Apple really did a great job of smoothly transitioning their users over to the PowerPC.
As long as they are doing this, Palm needs to break out of the 160x160 display trap. I'm sure they are eager to do it. All the current Palm apps, when running under emulation, can have a 160x160 box to run in, but new software can have more room. And, Palm needs to release two different reference designs, with different screen sizes, just to make people get serious about testing their apps with different screen sizes.
I'd be thrilled if they used this as an opportunity to transition from PalmOS to Linux, with the emulator running PalmOS of course. If they did a good job on the SDK, people should be able to recompile PalmOS apps to run under the new Linux. I don't have a feel for how likely this is, but it would give Palm more control over their destiny, and save them paying licensing fees.
They should make sure the new Palm can play DTMF tones through its speaker; people have been crying for this since the first Palm. Look up a phone number, hold the Palm next to the phone, and click on "Dial" and the Palm makes DTMF tones and dials for you. I'd like that.
If they make it rock-solid reliable, and give it really long battery life, this transition could be a very good thing. Oh, and they need to keep making DragonBall Palms for a while: don't make people feel they are being forced at gunpoint to switch.
One thing I wonder about: what is his baseline for speed? What is "fine" for him?
The original Palm devices are 8 MHz. A Visor Deluxe is 16 MHz. A Visor Platinum is 33 MHz. Which of these is "fine" to him?
By the way, Motorola has announced a 66 MHz Dragonball CPU. I'm lusting after some sort of Visor running that fast. I wonder if a 66 MHz Dragonball would be as fast as a 166 MHz ARM?
This news isn't a big deal. PalmOS devices have the PDA market locked down tight, and this won't change that.
As others have noted, users like Palm devices because:
they are easy to use (they just work)
they are reliable (they don't crash)
batteries last for weeks
they are great PDAs
When I say "they are great PDAs" what I mean is that they do the things people want to be able to do with a PDA. Schedule, phone list, to-do list, calculator... all of it works great.
It's true that the CE devices can do a lot of things a Palm cannot do -- run Doom, for example -- but the typical user does not care about most of those things. I have to admit that I would love to be able to play MP3 songs, as a CE box can do, but I don't care about this enough to make it worth the annoyances of CE.
The real trick would be unique credit card numbers for each site
You can do something like this if you have an American Express card.
American Express has a service called
Private Payments
(there is a
FAQ
here). With this service, you can get a special credit card number with a very limited lifespan (number will expire after 30-67 days). You can get as many special credit card numbers as you like; it's free to anyone with an American Express card.
And, check it out--if you get a
Blue
card, which has a Smart Card chip onboard, you can get a
reader
that will let you use the Blue card as a security token! I need to think about that one... Anyway, a serial port reader is free and a USB reader is $25. And Compaq makes a keyboard with a reader built-in, probably intended for use in a POS setup.
The Pentium 4 is still broken. It's not what it could have been, and the Athlon is better. But to quote myself from the top of this thread:
the chips are so fast these days that few people will really notice any difference between a good AMD system and a good Intel system.
You and I seem to agree on what the situation is. The difference is that I hold the Pentium 4 in contempt for being broken, and you seem to think it is a good-enough design. I don't think either of us will convince the other.
steveha
Re:More technical arguments about emulators.com pa
on
Pentium 4 Under Linux
·
· Score: 2
Again, with lack of execution units he's focusing primarily on the weak FPU, and ignores the very fast SSE stuff. With the release of ICL5 which is smart enough to parallelize loops for SSE2 by itself, there's no excuse for that.
I disagree completely. SSE2 is not the solution to all problems, and besides one of his big points was that the Pentium 4 loses on code that ran fast on earlier chips. Code that runs fast on a Pentium Pro runs even faster on a Pentium II, for example, but with the Pentium 4 that is no longer true. But the Athlon runs existing code very quickly. It's just not good enough to say that because SSE2 can run fast, and there exists a compiler that takes advantage of SSE2, that the Pentium 4 isn't broken.
And he didn't so much blast a "lack of execution units" as the lack of ability to keep them all working. The Pentium 4 can only feed RISC micro-ops to 3 execution units in one clock cycle. Also bad, the Pentium 4 can only decode a single x86 instruction per clock, so instructions that aren't already in the trace cache are unduly expensive.
The Intel engineers looked at the pros and cons and decided on the lowest figure for L1 cache. There's no reason why they wouldn't include the extra space if there was a noticable performance delta with it.
The Pentium 4 is huge, which makes it more expensive to produce. I'm sure Intel was trying to shrink the die size a bit when they pared down the trace cache to 8K, and thus keep costs more under control. That's not "no reason".
From the preliminary benchmarks, RDRAM/is/ better than SDRAM now that t he frontsidebus is fast enough for the extra bandwidth to matter.
For certain problems, RDRAM is better. In particular, for cranking through lots of data in a sequential order (e.g. encoding or decoding compressed audio or video!) RDRAM is faster. But for random access to data, DDR SDRAM will crush RDRAM due to much lower latency.
The emulators.com guy is just pissed off because the Pentium 4's core doesn't work as well with emulators than the P6 core did. It's more for multimedia, not for heavy logic programs like emulators are.
This is just another way of saying that the Pentium 4 is broken except for multimedia, which is pretty much what I have been saying all along. The Athlon has all-around good performance, and if you look at price/performance ratios, the Athlon totally wins.
The first thing I thought of when I read the summary: if you used DeCSS to grab the MPEG video from a DVD, you could copy the video to this PC card, and watch the video on your laptop. Without needing a laptop DVD drive!
Of course, that would involve using DeCSS, so the MPAA wouldn't like it. With the DMCA, it would probably be illegal in the United States (although it sounds like "Fair Use" to me).
I'm not going to waste my time explaining everything about the article, but I'll summarize it: Who do you think knows more about how to design a processor: A guy who makes emulators for a living, or Intel?
Wow. I guess I'd better buy lots of RDRAM then, since Intel says it's great. I guess I'd better stop buying Athlons, since Intel says Pentium 4 is better.
The emulators guy explains in detail why the Pentium 4 sucks, with examples, so we don't just have to take his word for it. Could you summarize those examples in one sentence for us too?
Did you know if the L1 cache on the Pentium 4 was increased, the latency also increases? Did you know that the higher latency would hurt performance more than the additional cache?
The Athlon has a much larger cache than the Pentium 4 and it out-performs the Pentium 4 at equivalent clock speeds... and I'm sure you don't want to waste your time explaining how this could be true.
The article talked a bit about how future versions of gcc and the kernel will be working to take better advantage of the Pentium 4. That's sort of nice, but it doesn't really matter because the Pentium 4 is still broken.
The Pentium 4 has several glaring faults that cripple it.
the level 1 cache is way too small
it can only pass the decoded micro-ops to 3 of its internal execution units per clock, so it can only execute 3 micro-ops per clock (compare to the Athlon, with up to 9 micro-ops executed per clock)
instructions that execute very quickly on other Pentium chips now execute slowly (in particular, anything involving bit-shifting)
Unlike the Pentium 4, the Athlon executes exisiting x86 code very quickly. You don't need fancy optimization tricks to get code to run fast on an Athlon; it has no major faults to work around.
A Pentium 4 system, with its expensive high-speed RDRAM, will be very fast for certain uses. And it has the lead in raw clock speed. If Intel can crank the clock speed way up, say to double what AMD can do, it won't matter that the Pentium 4 is broken; it will still be the fastest chip you can get. I predict this will not happen; AMD will continue to make ever-faster Athlon chips, which will remain competitive with anything Intel can make. (And of course if you look at the performance-over-price ratio, the AMD chips totally crush the Intel chips.)
Of course, it must be said that the chips are so fast these days that few people will really notice any difference between a good AMD system and a good Intel system. The AMD may out-benchmark the P4, but if both of them can run Quake 3 nice and fast, few people will actually care about the differences.
The AMD core is primarily x86, where the P3's and P4's are more RISC-like.
This is so wrong. The AMD core breaks up an x86 instruction into RISC-like "micro-ops" or ROPs, and then various RISC-like execution units go to work executing the ROPs. Up to 9 ROPs can be executed at the same time! This is why the Athlon so thoroughly stomps all over the Intel chips at equivalent clock rates--the AMD chips can get more done per clock. This is especially true for floating point, where the Athlon can execute 3 floating point instructions at once.
Full details
here
in the
AnandTech
article. I linked to page 8, the one that has the discussion of how instructions get executed.
This is the reason why Pentiums cost more than AMD's
Total nonsense. Intel chips cost more because Intel charges more. The Pentium 4 is expensive because its die size is freaking huge.
Let's just say I have inside knowledge of Intel products.:-)
You don't seem to know very much about AMD products.
Five years ago, de Icaza chose to use tools for Gnome that were primitive even back then: C, make, autoconf, etc. You don't have to get very advanced to do better than that. C++ was around. GNUStep was around. Modula-3 was around. Eiffel was around. There were several mature, high-level GUI toolkits. Visual C++ was better integrated and easier to set up than GNU Emacs even back then.
And what do all the tools you mentioned have in common? Compatability problems.
GNOME was intended to run on any flavor of *NIX. The plan was that you could write GNOME apps in any language, including C++ or anything else. What language is it that they all have in common? What is the "assembly language" that is common to all *NIX? Just C.
As far as I'm concerned, the Gnome project established its course long ago: they don't lead, they merely follow Microsoft (and something similar can be said for KDE).
Well, let's see. Windows has been around since 1985 or so; it was a joke for the first five years, but it started to work around 1990. GNOME took much less time to become usable, but it had to catch up before it had any chance of leading. Now, the vast majority of people want software that works more-or-less like Windows works; if they make something radically different, people complain.
At least with GNOME, they built in complete control. Want your window decorations to look a certain way? Just get a theme that looks like that. Want launchers on the side of the window? Just put them there. You can customize a GNOME desktop so it looks very little like a Windows desktop, and works differently too. The defaults are what most people want, but if you want something else, you can change them.
And now that GNOME has become usable, it can take the next step and actually start leading. Right now the GNOME interface is decent, but it has odd quirks; when these are smoothed out, GNOME will be easier to use than Windows.
By the way, if you have specific ideas on how GNOME could be improved to be better than Windows (to "lead", as you say), don't be shy about submitting them to the GNOME guys. You won't get what you want if you never ask for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, I sure hope so... but it depends on how the deal was structured; we can't just guess about it.
If the win32 port is no longer updated, couldn't this potentially be the killer game app that forces the masses to Linux?
I know you have tongue in cheek here, but to answer seriously: I don't think the numbers on Tribes 2 are high enough to be "the masses". What is interesting is to speculate whether existing Win32 customers might migrate to Linux Tribes. If the Win32 version is no longer maintained, and the Linux version is still maintained, and enough bugs and/or cheats come to light that the existing customers start to really want an update... then, just maybe, something like what you describe might come to pass.
I see two major problems, though.
It is hard to install Linux, and harder still to get 3D working; I can't imagine a truly wide-scale move to Linux until this changes.
Loki has the code, but that's not always enough. When you have really weird difficult bugs, it saves a lot of time to have the people who wrote the code fix those bugs. (By shutting down Dynamix, Sierra is essentially saying "We no longer care if any bugs are found.")
I would love it if, say a year from now, Sierra decided they had milked this particular cow as much as they can, and released the sources to Tribes 2 to let the T2 community support themselves. Given Sierra's history, that seems rather unlikely; it's more likely they would build a big warehouse, fill it with brand-new copies of Tribes 2, and then burn the warehouse down.
steveha
I really enjoy CRFH. It's one of my favorites. If there were no Internet comics, I would not be able to read it; it would not exist. The Salon article has a direct quote from the author of CRFH saying just that. Mr. Groth can rant tediously all he wishes, but he won't convince me that a world without CRFH is a better world.
Even if you think micropayments will never happen the way McCloud describes them, McCloud still deserves some credit. He cares about comics, and wants to see them survive and prosper. As he wrote in his book, market forces in the printed-comics world can crush new comics: you can't get sales unless stores stock your comic, stores won't stock your comic if it's not just another X-Men ripoff. With the web, anyone can put up a new comic, and the good ones can grow by word-of-mouth.
One last note: if you think Internet comics are all quick gag-a-day strips, you might want to check out the Zot graphic novel. It's very good!
steveha
Don't worry; in short order, integer-only code will be written. Floating point makes some computations more convenient, but you can always re-write so that floating point is not necessary. That will happen with Ogg Vorbis.
steveha
The only scene I liked: the gorgeous chick was having dinner with a guy. She liked him and thought he was good looking, but he was only interested in her because she was holding the key to Lexx. He wanted her to give control of Lexx over to him, since it is such an amazing powerful yada yada whatever.
steveha
Well, the new facility was all cubicles, with no closets designed in... no place to put junk, so we shoved boxes full of junk under desks and in out of the way corners. We were working on a lab, and the VP of Engineering decided that the test leads on the oscilliscope looked untidy, so those were removed and hidden as well.
When that was done, the VP looked around the lab and said "Now, this looks like a productive lab!" Yeah, a scope with no test leads... that's real productive.
I sent this story to Scott Adams. I don't think he ever used it in Dilbert, but he did send me a reply saying he found the story amusing.
steveha
They have a third option: to simply decline to hear the case, and let lower court rulings stand. This is what has happened with all Second Amendment cases for decades: the Supremes, without comment, decline to review the appeal.
But I don't think they would do that for the DMCA; I think they would cheerfully grab the DMCA and rip it up, given a chance, so let's get this to them now.
steveha
DOS 1.0 was not "basically stolen". Bill Gates offered a chunk of money, the chunk was accepted. Fair and square. You may think Gates should have said, "By the way, don't accept my offer, take your QDOS to IBM and they will pay you more than I will." I don't think a failure to say that is the same as theft. Was the guy who wrote QDOS (which became MS-DOS 1.0) heartbroken and embittered? I'd say not, given that he went to work for Microsoft, and worked there off and on for years. (The ironic thing is that his stock options from being hired at Microsoft must have made him a millionaire, given how early he was hired.)
DOS 3.0 didn't break anything but TSR programs; I agree it would have been nice if MS had made some sort of TSR API, or at least documented everything the TSR guys needed, but to take a lack of documentation and expand that into a claim that DOS 3.0 broke things is absurd. TSRs were hacks; getting different TSRs from different companies to work without stepping on each other was an adventure. By the time Windows got really useful, TSRs had been sorted out, but they were always hacks.
DOS 4.0 was basically written by IBM. Microsoft had little to do with it, and I remember a lecture I attended when I worked at MS where a DOS engineer talked about ways in which DOS 5.0 would fix the screwed up and broken things of DOS 4.x. DOS 5.0 was a very successful product; it was smaller and more compatible than 4.x, and it had new memory management APIs that people wanted. (HMA and all that.)
DOS isn't done til Lotus won't run? I don't believe that for a second. I worked on Word for DOS, and I never once saw any calls to secret back-door functions in the OS. Microsoft pulled some weird stuff, like that version of Windows that put up a confusing warning message if you ran it on top of DR-DOS, but I never saw any evidence they did anything like add code to break competitors. You can't do something like that without people in the company knowing about it, and it only takes one of those guys blowing the whistle to land the company under a pile of trouble; which never happened. And the Undocumented DOS books reverse-engineered all sorts of stuff from DOS, and they never found any "secret make Lotus break" code.
Windows 95 was in beta forever. I was using it almost a year before it shipped, and it always was very stable for me; they tested it as much as they could before shipping it. You may wish they had waited three years before shipping it; if so you are on drugs. Everyone wanted them to ship it. 32-bit addressing, no more near/far functions, Win32 allowing you to write one app for both Windows 95 and for NT? Everyone was eager for MS to ship that thing. Win95 was a huge success, which means that most of the people who got it were happy with it.
OS/2? When I started out at Microsoft, we all ran OS/2 on our development machines. All the really important desktops were running OS/2. Microsoft really believed OS/2 was the future. Then, after Windows 3.0 shipped, the customers bought huge piles of it; MS realized that the customers wanted Win 3.0, not OS/2. The customers were voting with their dollars, and MS gave the customers what they voted for. I'm amazed IBM wanted OS/2, but IBM did, so MS was able to just walk away from it and not even have to support it; IBM took care of all that. MS never did anything to kill OS/2, unless you count their refusing to license the Win32 API to IBM, which I don't.
Microsoft stuff is far from perfect, yes. But it is also far from the picture you paint.
steveha
Not true, but I can understand why you would say this.
Before free software can innovate beyond the state of the art, it has to achieve the state of the art. In some areas, free software has been state of the art for years: running tasks on a server, for example. Apache is an extremely popular web server, and it has been around about as long as web servers have; the free software world didn't have to play catch-up, Apache hit the ground running. Compare with the desktop environment. Microsoft introduced Windows in 1984, but it was a joke. It became usable in 1990, good around 1992 (Windows 3.1, can't swear to the exact year) and in 1995, a decade after it first appeared, it was refined and polished and ready. GNOME and KDE both have taken less time to get to where they are now, and they will gain polish quickly now.
I agree that the menu editor in GNOME sucks. I'm not sure I agree that the root menu should be as customizable as you wish for; I like being able to find things on strange systems. Debian has a balance I like very much: the main GNOME menus you can edit as you like, but there is a "Debian" menu where everything is always in the same place. So on any strange Debian machine, I can still find a web browser and launch it. (But this is free software, and it is very possible for someone to hack the code to give you what you want.)
I read Linux Weekly News every week, and I am constantly reading about cool innovations, many of them in the Linux kernel itself but some in user programs. For example, the Tux web server showed how tight integration inside the kernel could speed web access, and now Microsoft is doing web servers that use the same idea; free software was there first. There are lots of little cool hacks being rolled into the kernel all the time, making it ever faster; just this week in LWN I read about a simple patch that improved the virtual memory manager's performance by 12%!
The Python language, IMHO, blows the doors off of Visual Basic, and it's free software; and the free editor vim is available now with Python compiled in as a macro language. I was excited when I found that one out: my favorite editor, now with a full-powered scripting language! (I guess you had to be there. Or something.)
In short, there are lots of innovations all around us.
In fact there has never been a "killer app" for Linux.
By definition, a "killer app" is something you cannot get anywhere else. When Visicalc first appeared, it sold a ton of Apple II computers: people who worked with numbers would go to computer stores and say "Sell me a Visicalc!" Well, of course they needed an Apple to run it on, so they bought that too. Lotus 1-2-3 was a dramatically more powerful spreadsheet than Visicalc, and had graphing too; in other words, it had valuable features not available anywhere else, so people bought in on the IBM PC platform. Desktop publishing worked on a Mac long before it worked on a PC, and so sold a ton of Macs.
Now, I'm trying to imagine an application that you can write for free operating systems that is not available anywhere else, and will not quickly appear on Windows and the Mac if you do write it. Nothing comes to mind. I don't think there will be any killer app for free operating systems.
The free stuff is going to win, though. My definition of winning, in this context, is that normal people will use free software in such large numbers that it will become impossible for Microsoft or anyone else to lock people in with a proprietary product. I will be happy when Microsoft Word flawlessly imports and exports AbiWord documents, because there are so many AbiWord documents out there that Microsoft simply cannot ignore them. That day is coming.
steveha
My wife signed up to test WinXP. We installed it on an expendable computer. This computer was set up to dual-boot between Win98 and Linux, with the GRUB bootloader. WinXP is not re-writing the MBR. Ever since the install GRUB comes up unchanged, Linux still boots, but choosing "windows" in GRUB now boots into XP instead of 98. This is the RC1 version of WinXP (build 2505).
Microsoft is possibly insane enough to put in an MBR wiping "feature" but they are definitely not insane enough to put one in at the very last minute. Therefore I state with some confidence that the release version of XP won't have an MBR wipe either.
(By the way, so far I just hate XP. Most of the changes to the user interface annoy me, and the spare computer--a 450 MHz box with a GeForce 2 and 128MB of RAM--isn't quite fast enough to run XP well.)
steveha
No, it's both. If I leave my front door unlocked, and someone steals my stuff, I am dumb... but that person is still a thief.
steveha
steveha
So, does Handspring stick with the DragonBall? Or do they try to emulate the Springboard bus using the ARM? Or do they do Springboard 2.0 using the ARM bus? Or can they do a new bus that isn't so tightly coupled to the CPU's bus? (How about making the plug-and-play use some sort of portable bytecode?)
By the way, I hope Handspring will adopt the "universal connector" idea Palm introduced with their latest devices. Having both a serial port and a USB port is a nice thing. Having both of them plus a Springboard would be even better.
steveha
Apple showed it can be done. Apple really did a great job of smoothly transitioning their users over to the PowerPC.
As long as they are doing this, Palm needs to break out of the 160x160 display trap. I'm sure they are eager to do it. All the current Palm apps, when running under emulation, can have a 160x160 box to run in, but new software can have more room. And, Palm needs to release two different reference designs, with different screen sizes, just to make people get serious about testing their apps with different screen sizes.
I'd be thrilled if they used this as an opportunity to transition from PalmOS to Linux, with the emulator running PalmOS of course. If they did a good job on the SDK, people should be able to recompile PalmOS apps to run under the new Linux. I don't have a feel for how likely this is, but it would give Palm more control over their destiny, and save them paying licensing fees.
They should make sure the new Palm can play DTMF tones through its speaker; people have been crying for this since the first Palm. Look up a phone number, hold the Palm next to the phone, and click on "Dial" and the Palm makes DTMF tones and dials for you. I'd like that.
If they make it rock-solid reliable, and give it really long battery life, this transition could be a very good thing. Oh, and they need to keep making DragonBall Palms for a while: don't make people feel they are being forced at gunpoint to switch.
steveha
The original Palm devices are 8 MHz. A Visor Deluxe is 16 MHz. A Visor Platinum is 33 MHz. Which of these is "fine" to him?
By the way, Motorola has announced a 66 MHz Dragonball CPU. I'm lusting after some sort of Visor running that fast. I wonder if a 66 MHz Dragonball would be as fast as a 166 MHz ARM?
steveha
As others have noted, users like Palm devices because:
they are easy to use (they just work)
they are reliable (they don't crash)
batteries last for weeks
they are great PDAs
When I say "they are great PDAs" what I mean is that they do the things people want to be able to do with a PDA. Schedule, phone list, to-do list, calculator... all of it works great.
It's true that the CE devices can do a lot of things a Palm cannot do -- run Doom, for example -- but the typical user does not care about most of those things. I have to admit that I would love to be able to play MP3 songs, as a CE box can do, but I don't care about this enough to make it worth the annoyances of CE.
steveha
You can do something like this if you have an American Express card.
American Express has a service called Private Payments (there is a FAQ here). With this service, you can get a special credit card number with a very limited lifespan (number will expire after 30-67 days). You can get as many special credit card numbers as you like; it's free to anyone with an American Express card.
And, check it out--if you get a Blue card, which has a Smart Card chip onboard, you can get a reader that will let you use the Blue card as a security token! I need to think about that one... Anyway, a serial port reader is free and a USB reader is $25. And Compaq makes a keyboard with a reader built-in, probably intended for use in a POS setup.
steveha
the chips are so fast these days that few people will really notice any difference between a good AMD system and a good Intel system.
You and I seem to agree on what the situation is. The difference is that I hold the Pentium 4 in contempt for being broken, and you seem to think it is a good-enough design. I don't think either of us will convince the other.
steveha
I disagree completely. SSE2 is not the solution to all problems, and besides one of his big points was that the Pentium 4 loses on code that ran fast on earlier chips. Code that runs fast on a Pentium Pro runs even faster on a Pentium II, for example, but with the Pentium 4 that is no longer true. But the Athlon runs existing code very quickly. It's just not good enough to say that because SSE2 can run fast, and there exists a compiler that takes advantage of SSE2, that the Pentium 4 isn't broken.
And he didn't so much blast a "lack of execution units" as the lack of ability to keep them all working. The Pentium 4 can only feed RISC micro-ops to 3 execution units in one clock cycle. Also bad, the Pentium 4 can only decode a single x86 instruction per clock, so instructions that aren't already in the trace cache are unduly expensive.
steveha
The Pentium 4 is huge, which makes it more expensive to produce. I'm sure Intel was trying to shrink the die size a bit when they pared down the trace cache to 8K, and thus keep costs more under control. That's not "no reason".
From the preliminary benchmarks, RDRAM /is/ better than SDRAM now that t he frontsidebus is fast enough for the extra bandwidth to matter.
For certain problems, RDRAM is better. In particular, for cranking through lots of data in a sequential order (e.g. encoding or decoding compressed audio or video!) RDRAM is faster. But for random access to data, DDR SDRAM will crush RDRAM due to much lower latency.
The emulators.com guy is just pissed off because the Pentium 4's core doesn't work as well with emulators than the P6 core did. It's more for multimedia, not for heavy logic programs like emulators are.
This is just another way of saying that the Pentium 4 is broken except for multimedia, which is pretty much what I have been saying all along. The Athlon has all-around good performance, and if you look at price/performance ratios, the Athlon totally wins.
steveha
This would be so cool for laptops like the Sony PictureBook.
Of course, that would involve using DeCSS, so the MPAA wouldn't like it. With the DMCA, it would probably be illegal in the United States (although it sounds like "Fair Use" to me).
steveha
Wow. I guess I'd better buy lots of RDRAM then, since Intel says it's great. I guess I'd better stop buying Athlons, since Intel says Pentium 4 is better.
The emulators guy explains in detail why the Pentium 4 sucks, with examples, so we don't just have to take his word for it. Could you summarize those examples in one sentence for us too?
Did you know if the L1 cache on the Pentium 4 was increased, the latency also increases? Did you know that the higher latency would hurt performance more than the additional cache?
The Athlon has a much larger cache than the Pentium 4 and it out-performs the Pentium 4 at equivalent clock speeds... and I'm sure you don't want to waste your time explaining how this could be true.
steveha
Yes, Intel does the very same thing. I should probably have made that clear. I was just refuting the claim that AMD chips do not do this.
The Pentium 4 has several glaring faults that cripple it.
the level 1 cache is way too small
it can only pass the decoded micro-ops to 3 of its internal execution units per clock, so it can only execute 3 micro-ops per clock (compare to the Athlon, with up to 9 micro-ops executed per clock)
instructions that execute very quickly on other Pentium chips now execute slowly (in particular, anything involving bit-shifting)
These faults and more are discussed here.
Unlike the Pentium 4, the Athlon executes exisiting x86 code very quickly. You don't need fancy optimization tricks to get code to run fast on an Athlon; it has no major faults to work around.
A Pentium 4 system, with its expensive high-speed RDRAM, will be very fast for certain uses. And it has the lead in raw clock speed. If Intel can crank the clock speed way up, say to double what AMD can do, it won't matter that the Pentium 4 is broken; it will still be the fastest chip you can get. I predict this will not happen; AMD will continue to make ever-faster Athlon chips, which will remain competitive with anything Intel can make. (And of course if you look at the performance-over-price ratio, the AMD chips totally crush the Intel chips.)
Of course, it must be said that the chips are so fast these days that few people will really notice any difference between a good AMD system and a good Intel system. The AMD may out-benchmark the P4, but if both of them can run Quake 3 nice and fast, few people will actually care about the differences.
steveha
This is so wrong. The AMD core breaks up an x86 instruction into RISC-like "micro-ops" or ROPs, and then various RISC-like execution units go to work executing the ROPs. Up to 9 ROPs can be executed at the same time! This is why the Athlon so thoroughly stomps all over the Intel chips at equivalent clock rates--the AMD chips can get more done per clock. This is especially true for floating point, where the Athlon can execute 3 floating point instructions at once.
Full details here in the AnandTech article. I linked to page 8, the one that has the discussion of how instructions get executed.
This is the reason why Pentiums cost more than AMD's
Total nonsense. Intel chips cost more because Intel charges more. The Pentium 4 is expensive because its die size is freaking huge.
Let's just say I have inside knowledge of Intel products. :-)
You don't seem to know very much about AMD products.
steveha
And what do all the tools you mentioned have in common? Compatability problems.
GNOME was intended to run on any flavor of *NIX. The plan was that you could write GNOME apps in any language, including C++ or anything else. What language is it that they all have in common? What is the "assembly language" that is common to all *NIX? Just C.
As far as I'm concerned, the Gnome project established its course long ago: they don't lead, they merely follow Microsoft (and something similar can be said for KDE).
Well, let's see. Windows has been around since 1985 or so; it was a joke for the first five years, but it started to work around 1990. GNOME took much less time to become usable, but it had to catch up before it had any chance of leading. Now, the vast majority of people want software that works more-or-less like Windows works; if they make something radically different, people complain.
At least with GNOME, they built in complete control. Want your window decorations to look a certain way? Just get a theme that looks like that. Want launchers on the side of the window? Just put them there. You can customize a GNOME desktop so it looks very little like a Windows desktop, and works differently too. The defaults are what most people want, but if you want something else, you can change them.
And now that GNOME has become usable, it can take the next step and actually start leading. Right now the GNOME interface is decent, but it has odd quirks; when these are smoothed out, GNOME will be easier to use than Windows.
By the way, if you have specific ideas on how GNOME could be improved to be better than Windows (to "lead", as you say), don't be shy about submitting them to the GNOME guys. You won't get what you want if you never ask for it.
steveha