well, to make it more interesting you want to have them create an internal tool that translates c into language X, and then have them translate the linux kernel and GNU tools into X, then make some really spiffy must-have ("now butters toast!") modifications to it (in language X), and then sell it, distributing the modified code in language X.
If I had an infinite amount of money and time this might be on the list of the things I would do just to see what happens.
All Apple would need to do is release a "supported hardware spec" with a shopping list of popular components.
Vendors would(should?) jump at the opportunity to build OS X compatible boxes, provided they lose their fear of MS screwing them over. With the proper hardware selection, people could get a kick-ass Wintel and OS X dual-boot box.
I agree that this is technologically feasible. I wasn't questioning that. What I was doing was questioning whether that is a situation that Apple wants.
That's why I said:
well, thr problem is that it would mean war with commodity hardware producers. Apple is not, like Microsoft, primarily a software company. It is not clear that making OS X run on intel hardware would be a good thing. One reason that things work so well on the Mac is that they have complete control over both the hardware and software pieces. If people suddently quit buying Apple hardware because they could get OS X on cheap, commodity Intel stuff, you would have two problems. One, Apple doesn't get money from hardware. Two, Apple doesn't control the quality of the hardware that OS X has to run on.
Maybe I should have said "releasing a version of OS X that runs on Intel hardware" rather than "making OS X run on Intel hardware". I would not be surprised if they have this sitting in the lab. It's just not clear at all that ti makes business sense for a hardware company to invite competition from the commodity pc world.
I think Apple may actually have a much better idea than coming up with a new computer (although firewire, digital video editor, all-digital flat panel display, new Unix core (so now it can be a first-class server, too--what more is it, exactly, that Dvorak wants), and that is to see a new role that the computer is taking on (the "digital hub") and then refining their machine to do really well in that role.
Then, instead of coming up with this mythical new computer thingy, they could just come out with software components that make it easy to plug your other digital devices in (iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes) and maybe a few cool little digital devices of your own (iPod, i[Newton] ).
There's your "new computer"--it's an imac with a detachable mp3 player, digital camera, digital video camera, and (soon, please!) the Second Coming of the Newton.
The only thing Apple could do that would be more progressive is a full port of OSX to the x86. But that would mean war with Microsoft.
well, thr problem is that it would mean war with commodity hardware producers. Apple is not, like Microsoft, primarily a software company. It is not clear that making OS X run on intel hardware would be a good thing. One reason that things work so well on the Mac is that they have complete control over both the hardware and software pieces. If people suddently quit buying Apple hardware because they could get OS X on cheap, commodity Intel stuff, you would have two problems. One, Apple doesn't get money from hardware. Two, Apple doesn't control the quality of the hardware that OS X has to run on.
The (fairly well substantiated, I think) rumor is that they do, in fact, have a port for x86, but have decided not to release it for something like the above reasons. There might even be early releases out there of Rhapsody that ran on x86, but I don't remember for sure.
Good question, and I certainly don't know the answer (or even if they actually did attempt that, although you would think you would have heard about that).
It would be interesting to see if the degree to which MS claims that the browser and OS are inseparable would give Spyglass grounds for getting a cut of the Windows revenue. I am assuming someone at Spyglass has thought of that (but then, they didn't think of putting in a minimum price, right?:).
Keep in mind, though, that I know none of the details of the Spyglass deal. I know a couple of their employees (or former employees, haven't talked to them in years) and heard about the deal through mutual acquaintances.
MS is pretty good at doing unexpected things with their contracts, so maybe they had some wiggle room on this, but I can only speculate.
ah, but Mosaic was NOT open sourc, although the NCSA version was free to download. If it had been, we would have a totally different world today. A company called Spyglass got the rights from NCSA to the Mosaic code. Spyglass licensed it to Microsoft for (monumentally bad decision) a percentage of the sale price. Had there been a minimum in that contract, IE couldn't have been distributed free, all the Spyglass shareholders would now be retired, and who knows what else--maybe it would have prevented the bundling with the OS and we wouldn't have gotten the antitrust decision.
On the other hand, had Mosaic (probably created with mostly public money) been under an open source license, the hordes of open source hackers would have had the same starting point that MS had when they created explorer.
...to attempt to divert the energy flow from an onslaught of anti-Iowa jokes to a flamewar about which was the first digital computer. (dollars to doughnuts someone will drag something out of Britain).
Of course, the correct response to your post is something like "Well, of course they invented the digital computer there--what else wsaa there to do?".
Eg, if you've recently
run"gcc -g -Wall -O3 -blahblah..." a few commands ago, you can do it again by just typing "!gc" without searching.
It's safer, though more tedious, to do
!gc:p and then, if it spits out what you wanted, do an up-arrow, enter to execute. Sometimes you forget that you did a "make clean" between now and the last time you did "make", for example.
I wish a shell would pick up the vim history completion (or, I wish I knew which shell had already implemented it or how to access it or whatever). I want to be able to do
!scp[up arrow] and have it look back through my history only at the stuff that starts with scp.
Likewise, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Linux", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Linux is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Linux" system?
No, they call it Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, Mandrake Linux, and now SuSE United Linux. They simply tack their name onto the front of Torvalds's trademark
My understanding is that you are suggesting that they drop the "Caldera" or "SuSE" and just call "the" product "United Linux"--is that right? My objection to that idea is that the companies, which do not exist to improve the public's impression of Linux, but to make money for themselves, will lose their brand identity if they drop their name from the product they sell.
In order to make things better for the non-dominant companies, they all got together and agreed to a standard. Presumably you will be able to get a software package that will run on any "Unified Linux" system. That gives big vendors like Oracle one target. If they have to chose between fifteen targets, they will say "Ok, RedHat it is.". If they can say, "Hey, if we also support United Linux, we'll be able to hit all of SuSE, Caldera, ans whoever else's installed base as well", they might decide that's worth doing.
I doubt very much that any of these companies are doing this to try to make the user perceive Linux as being less fragmented. They don't want people to lose track of the idea that if you buy Caldera's distro you get something different than when you buy SuSE. They are very interested in keeping that distinction there, and convincing people that Caldera is better than SuSE. But they also want a single target for a software vendor. They get that with "United Linux". If they don't call it "SuSE United Linux" they lose their brand. If they just call it "SuSE Linux" there is no indication that a package for "SuSE Linux" will also work on "Caldera Linux".
"SuSE United Linux" and "Caldera United Linux" indicate both their crucial similarities and their crucial (at least in the companies' minda) differences.
(Just don't mention "SuSE United GNU/Linux" or you'll get modded down as flamebait (Yes, really!) lol)
They don't have to merge to provide a unified product to the end user. Just bolting "Unified Linux" to the end of their products won't, in the eyes of most, make much difference.
Thats the point I'm making:o)
Think of it like this--you have five companies selling hard drives, and they are all competitors and want to stay that way. They realize that it is in their best interest to come up with a standard so that the end user doesn't have a bewildering array of options that are all incompatible.
So they say "Ok, let's have a standard interface to the drives that we all support so the customer can buy from any one of us without having to worry about lock-in." They don't suddenly decide that their brand names don't matter, they just say, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Burble Drive", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Burble Drive is better."
How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Burble Drive"?
What you are proposing would make sense if the compaanies had merged. They didn't. All they did was agree to a certain level of interoperability. So there are still x distinct distros.
I wouldn't say the free software movement is about inventing anything at all. Inventiveness is surely involved but many piece of free software are
just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That
is hardly inventing a product.
This is true, but one could argue that the GPL is a remarkable invention. It was done by a lone inventor, and it hardly "stood on the shoulders of giants" as the original post implied (he was talking about the software, though). One might say that it stands on the shoulders of the giants who created copyright law--I would say that it's an elegant hack of the system, but, whatever. I think it's a very interesting invention.
Yeah, ok, that's impressive, but we're talkin' Sonny Bono here--you're still going to have to come up with some pretty good stuff to counter that powerful a persona--plus he's practically a martyr, since God killed him in that freak accident as a joke about "life of the author plus X years".
Has Milton Friedman ever had a top ten hit? I didn't think so. Try again, and get us some _real_ names. Get, say Wayne Newton on board, and we'll start paying attention.
there should be a special list of posts called "+6 funny", that are just severely funnier than even the average +5. And this post should be their KING:).
A large part of what has changed about Perl has been due to what (gigantic) numbers of people have wanted to do with it. It is a living language, by design, and living languages change.
Larry's attitude rocks. I think you might be overestimating (a) what he makes on books and (b) how much he cares about how much he makes. I have no idea about (a), but I am pretty sure that (b) is not what you seem to think. Larry is one generous, genuine, and genuinely humble person, as far as I can tell.
not really, right? this was part of the Generations joke?
I dunno, maybe they fixed this in the director's cut, but my memory goes like this--white-knuckle suspense, very cool, very gripping, for a long time. Lots of stuff about the bends, compression, decompression. Then, at the end, as my brother said, they walked out of the room, and the cleaning crew came in and finished the script.
Suddenly the alien/earthlien/whatever (ok, and by the way what the heck was it supposed to be? Can't you even give us ten minutes on that?) saves them, takes them x thousand feet up to the surface in x/10 seconds (remember all the emphasis on decompression, etc that was a CENTRAL THEME of the movie), and they explain the fact that they didn't need to decompress with that monumental line:
"They must have done something to us!"
Indeed.
Alternate ending--the alien takes them up to the surface at that speed, and they explode. The aliens make a "sad smiley" with their water faces and mental note that this species does not auto-decompress.
Slashdot Mirror
well, to make it more interesting you want to have them create an internal tool that translates c into language X, and then have them translate the linux kernel and GNU tools into X, then make some really spiffy must-have ("now butters toast!") modifications to it (in language X), and then sell it, distributing the modified code in language X.
If I had an infinite amount of money and time this might be on the list of the things I would do just to see what happens.
Vendors would(should?) jump at the opportunity to build OS X compatible boxes, provided they lose their fear of MS screwing them over. With the proper hardware selection, people could get a kick-ass Wintel and OS X dual-boot box.
I agree that this is technologically feasible. I wasn't questioning that. What I was doing was questioning whether that is a situation that Apple wants.
That's why I said:
Maybe I should have said "releasing a version of OS X that runs on Intel hardware" rather than "making OS X run on Intel hardware". I would not be surprised if they have this sitting in the lab. It's just not clear at all that ti makes business sense for a hardware company to invite competition from the commodity pc world.
I think Apple may actually have a much better idea than coming up with a new computer (although firewire, digital video editor, all-digital flat panel display, new Unix core (so now it can be a first-class server, too--what more is it, exactly, that Dvorak wants), and that is to see a new role that the computer is taking on (the "digital hub") and then refining their machine to do really well in that role.
Then, instead of coming up with this mythical new computer thingy, they could just come out with software components that make it easy to plug your other digital devices in (iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes) and maybe a few cool little digital devices of your own (iPod, i[Newton] ).
There's your "new computer"--it's an imac with a detachable mp3 player, digital camera, digital video camera, and (soon, please!) the Second Coming of the Newton.
exactly what I was thinking when I read it.
The only thing Apple could do that would be more progressive is a full port of OSX to the x86. But that would mean war with Microsoft.
well, thr problem is that it would mean war with commodity hardware producers. Apple is not, like Microsoft, primarily a software company. It is not clear that making OS X run on intel hardware would be a good thing. One reason that things work so well on the Mac is that they have complete control over both the hardware and software pieces. If people suddently quit buying Apple hardware because they could get OS X on cheap, commodity Intel stuff, you would have two problems. One, Apple doesn't get money from hardware. Two, Apple doesn't control the quality of the hardware that OS X has to run on.
The (fairly well substantiated, I think) rumor is that they do, in fact, have a port for x86, but have decided not to release it for something like the above reasons. There might even be early releases out there of Rhapsody that ran on x86, but I don't remember for sure.
...hit...submit...before...robot...strangles...
This is voyeurism at its worst? Can't an old star take a leace in peace without a bunch of sicko astranomers trying to get a picture?
well, "not unusual", for one thing... :)
Good question, and I certainly don't know the answer (or even if they actually did attempt that, although you would think you would have heard about that).
:).
It would be interesting to see if the degree to which MS claims that the browser and OS are inseparable would give Spyglass grounds for getting a cut of the Windows revenue. I am assuming someone at Spyglass has thought of that (but then, they didn't think of putting in a minimum price, right?
Keep in mind, though, that I know none of the details of the Spyglass deal. I know a couple of their employees (or former employees, haven't talked to them in years) and heard about the deal through mutual acquaintances.
MS is pretty good at doing unexpected things with their contracts, so maybe they had some wiggle room on this, but I can only speculate.
ah, but Mosaic was NOT open sourc, although the NCSA version was free to download. If it had been, we would have a totally different world today. A company called Spyglass got the rights from NCSA to the Mosaic code. Spyglass licensed it to Microsoft for (monumentally bad decision) a percentage of the sale price. Had there been a minimum in that contract, IE couldn't have been distributed free, all the Spyglass shareholders would now be retired, and who knows what else--maybe it would have prevented the bundling with the OS and we wouldn't have gotten the antitrust decision.
On the other hand, had Mosaic (probably created with mostly public money) been under an open source license, the hordes of open source hackers would have had the same starting point that MS had when they created explorer.
Anyway, I think that's how it happened.
I swear, there's some definite potential here...
yeah, especially if you imagine a beowulf cluster of killer bees...
unix with a good UI, right?
...to attempt to divert the energy flow from an onslaught of anti-Iowa jokes to a flamewar about which was the first digital computer. (dollars to doughnuts someone will drag something out of Britain).
Of course, the correct response to your post is something like "Well, of course they invented the digital computer there--what else wsaa there to do?".
Eg, if you've recently ..." a few commands ago, you can do it again by just typing "!gc" without searching.
run"gcc -g -Wall -O3 -blahblah
It's safer, though more tedious, to do
!gc:p
and then, if it spits out what you wanted, do an up-arrow, enter to execute. Sometimes you forget that you did a "make clean" between now and the last time you did "make", for example.
I wish a shell would pick up the vim history completion (or, I wish I knew which shell had already implemented it or how to access it or whatever). I want to be able to do
!scp[up arrow] and have it look back through my history only at the stuff that starts with scp.
Likewise, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Linux", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Linux is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Linux" system?
No, they call it Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, Mandrake Linux, and now SuSE United Linux. They simply tack their name onto the front of Torvalds's trademark
My understanding is that you are suggesting that they drop the "Caldera" or "SuSE" and just call "the" product "United Linux"--is that right? My objection to that idea is that the companies, which do not exist to improve the public's impression of Linux, but to make money for themselves, will lose their brand identity if they drop their name from the product they sell.
In order to make things better for the non-dominant companies, they all got together and agreed to a standard. Presumably you will be able to get a software package that will run on any "Unified Linux" system. That gives big vendors like Oracle one target. If they have to chose between fifteen targets, they will say "Ok, RedHat it is.". If they can say, "Hey, if we also support United Linux, we'll be able to hit all of SuSE, Caldera, ans whoever else's installed base as well", they might decide that's worth doing.
I doubt very much that any of these companies are doing this to try to make the user perceive Linux as being less fragmented. They don't want people to lose track of the idea that if you buy Caldera's distro you get something different than when you buy SuSE. They are very interested in keeping that distinction there, and convincing people that Caldera is better than SuSE. But they also want a single target for a software vendor. They get that with "United Linux". If they don't call it "SuSE United Linux" they lose their brand. If they just call it "SuSE Linux" there is no indication that a package for "SuSE Linux" will also work on "Caldera Linux".
"SuSE United Linux" and "Caldera United Linux" indicate both their crucial similarities and their crucial (at least in the companies' minda) differences.
(Just don't mention "SuSE United GNU/Linux" or you'll get modded down as flamebait (Yes, really!) lol)
They don't have to merge to provide a unified product to the end user. Just bolting "Unified Linux" to the end of their products won't, in the eyes of most, make much difference.
Thats the point I'm making
Think of it like this--you have five companies selling hard drives, and they are all competitors and want to stay that way. They realize that it is in their best interest to come up with a standard so that the end user doesn't have a bewildering array of options that are all incompatible.
So they say "Ok, let's have a standard interface to the drives that we all support so the customer can buy from any one of us without having to worry about lock-in." They don't suddenly decide that their brand names don't matter, they just say, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Burble Drive", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Burble Drive is better."
How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Burble Drive"?
..."UnitedGNU/Linux"?
What you are proposing would make sense if the compaanies had merged. They didn't. All they did was agree to a certain level of interoperability. So there are still x distinct distros.
BANKS. They're called BANKS. You can go to a BANK and get nice, convenient rolls of quarters.
just free implimentations of a non-free product. The GNU manifesto is all about creating Free versions of closed source pieces of software. That
is hardly inventing a product.
This is true, but one could argue that the GPL is a remarkable invention. It was done by a lone inventor, and it hardly "stood on the shoulders of giants" as the original post implied (he was talking about the software, though). One might say that it stands on the shoulders of the giants who created copyright law--I would say that it's an elegant hack of the system, but, whatever. I think it's a very interesting invention.
no links to the pictures????
Yeah, ok, that's impressive, but we're talkin' Sonny Bono here--you're still going to have to come up with some pretty good stuff to counter that powerful a persona--plus he's practically a martyr, since God killed him in that freak accident as a joke about "life of the author plus X years".
Has Milton Friedman ever had a top ten hit? I didn't think so. Try again, and get us some _real_ names. Get, say Wayne Newton on board, and we'll start paying attention.
there should be a special list of posts called "+6 funny", that are just severely funnier than even the average +5. And this post should be their KING :).
well, anyway, at least a well respected citizen.
A large part of what has changed about Perl has been due to what (gigantic) numbers of people have wanted to do with it. It is a living language, by design, and living languages change.
Larry's attitude rocks. I think you might be overestimating (a) what he makes on books and (b) how much he cares about how much he makes. I have no idea about (a), but I am pretty sure that (b) is not what you seem to think. Larry is one generous, genuine, and genuinely humble person, as far as I can tell.
The Abyss????????
not really, right? this was part of the Generations joke?
I dunno, maybe they fixed this in the director's cut, but my memory goes like this--white-knuckle suspense, very cool, very gripping, for a long time. Lots of stuff about the bends, compression, decompression. Then, at the end, as my brother said, they walked out of the room, and the cleaning crew came in and finished the script.
Suddenly the alien/earthlien/whatever (ok, and by the way what the heck was it supposed to be? Can't you even give us ten minutes on that?) saves them, takes them x thousand feet up to the surface in x/10 seconds (remember all the emphasis on decompression, etc that was a CENTRAL THEME of the movie), and they explain the fact that they didn't need to decompress with that monumental line:
"They must have done something to us!"
Indeed.
Alternate ending--the alien takes them up to the surface at that speed, and they explode. The aliens make a "sad smiley" with their water faces and mental note that this species does not auto-decompress.