Many important people are afraid of Linux's development system, or lack of it. OTOH, *BSD is pretty widely accepted anywhere but Linux isn't as much as some would like it to.
I'm sorry, but did you just basically say that Linux wishes it was as widely accepted as BSD?
I think your information is about three years out of date.
Gentlemen, we fought this fight in radio decades ago.
The result? The recording industry lost all their lawsuits to prevent people from playing songs on the air, and got small royalties.
So Napster will end up paying a token fee to the record companies, and just like cassette-taping off the radio helped artists in the past, mp3s will continue to help artists in the future.
It's a win. As long as Napster gets to carry all the music and makes enough profit to stay in business, it's an effing win.
Actually, this may be why ESR has his "Geeks with Guns" bent. "When they come for my router, they'll have to fight for it."
That's part of it. A bigger part is this:
Why does a subset of hackers get this bizarre notion that it's bad if the government tells me what I can do with information, what I can do with encryption, what I can log into when, what I can see in a movie theatre, or what I can send to whom over the net, but it's OK for them to tell me how I can go about exercising my right to keep and bear arms?
Information is far more dangerous than guns, yet some of us will tolerate the restriction of the latter but not of the former.
That is asinine. All of your rights are precious, and just as you wouldn't tolerate me trying to restrict a right that you value, I won't tolerate you trying to restrict a right that I value.
I believe that's more where ESR is coming from.
Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, please.
BTW, why would anybody who doesn't trust the government not to lie, cheat, and steal also trust them not to murder and kidnap? Guns are your protection against the latter, just as information is your protection against the former.
I contend that it's worse if the government kidnaps or murders you than if they lie, cheat, and steal from you, yet some hackers proclaim that they'll never give up the right to protect themselves from government lies, cheating, and theft, but readily give up the right to protect themselves from potential government kidnapping and murder.
Give up that right if you must; but don't try to give it up for *ME* too. Or for Eric.
Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose you're right, if it's that old I'm sure everyone on Earth has read it by now.
A spoiler isn't necessary in perpetuity. I've never seen any credible guide to nettiquette that required a spoiler for any revelation of any plot in any story, no matter how old.
Do I have to put a spoiler to say Romeo and Juliet die? Or even to say that Tony dies and Maria lives?
No. That would just be silly.
It's been 15 years. If you didn't read it yet, nobody cares.
She's threatened other people with lawsuits, and hasn't been able to follow through because not only does she not have a leg to stand on, but the music she uses belongs to Disney, so she's violating a much more strongly-defended copyright.
I highly recommend the above link, BTW. Kill them hamsters.
The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
Fire, the wheel, and the condom are just tools too.
But if you think they didn't have profound affects on society, you're engaging in convenient semantics instead of rational discourse.
You know, it's ironic that I get two responses to this within a 3 minute period:
One stating that I'm a moron for thinking that it's useful to say "we shouldn't ignore it simply because it's dangerous" because people would never think of doing that, and the other quoting a well-known author who claims we shouldn't pursue the technology and agreeing with him.
The post proving it was worth saying beat you by 3 minutes, dumbass. Sorry it took you so long to type that masterpiece.
Bullshit - if weapons were scarce, then even criminals wouldn't use them (since the criminals wouldn't have to worry about being shot, and since they would be damn expensive.)
Then why is gun crime increasing in the UK, and decreasing in the US?
Remember that in Asimov's universe, a bug in the implementation of single robot's Laws resulted in him slowly rendering the entire Earth unfit for human habitation because he thought it was "for their own good."
The fact that he was right in the story matters not a whit in this cautionary tale.
The same care should be exercised in working with nanotechnolgy as with any other potentially dangerous technology.
And, as with every other potentially dangerous technology, that shouldn't prevent us from working with it.
As long as Pocket PC or WinCE or whatever does the job it was intended, do the mechanics and whatnot really matter?
Well, since WinCE has failed twice now, and the biggest response we're seeing to the introduction of "Pocket PC" devices is these stories about running Linux on them, I think we have your answer.
It sickens me that someone with that kind of money to throw away wouldn't do something to help those less fortunate.
The money you spent to buy that computer, and spend every month for your Internet connection, would buy a lot of rice.
The $20 million he's giving to space research (minus the few thousand dollars of fuel that will be spent to send him up in a shuttle that was going up anyway) will buy a lot of science.
Science that will continue to improve our ability to feed the poor, etc., as it has in the past.
Well, you made a lot of declarations but I've seen very few reasons.
Well, I was responding to your unsupported declarations, so I didn't think we were getting down to that level.:-)
Why is Linux an excellent OS for a PDA?
Because it's Open Source and very well understood, making it easy to modify.
Because it's written with portability a strongly-considered factor throughout, making it easy to port.
Because it's already got some support for every important PDA chip, to one degree or another.
Because it is very small and efficient, due to it's modular nature.
Because it's GPLed, meaning you don't have to pay a nickel to use it.
Because there is an active developer community out there that wants it to work well on your product, and will thus help you.
Because there is a large contingent of users out there who will buy your product if it runs Linux, who wouldn't if it used another OS. The reverse is also true, but the Palm has a lock on those folks.
Specifically, why is it better than, say, QNX or Plan 9, or some *BSD, or EPOC?
Who said it was better than any of those, much less all of them? I don't recall speaking to those OSes at all.
I said it was better than WinCE, and I stand by that statement. I did *NOT* say it was the perfect end-all be-all of PDA OSes.
Besides that I'd like to remind you that PDAs have no keyboard. That makes command-line interface not good at all.
I don't know of a single PDA (not counting things like the REX) that doesn't have a keyboard available, and several (such as Psion) have keyboards built in. You need to watch the blanket statements.
The IBM Workpad z50 is but one example of a WinCE PDA with a built-in full-size keyboard.
I understand the difference between OS and GUI, but a pure kernel is not very useful by itself, is it?
It is if you're trying to write a PDA interface. Gotta have an OS under that, and it helps if it's small, robust, and powerful.
Before you can write the interface, you've got to have the OS working. That's what these folks are trying to do, and that's what you're complaining about.
Besides, I personally have uses for it. If I have uses for it, does that not by definition make it useful?
Well, in all due fairness to Corel, I'm sure they're only including this section because of stupid encryption export laws. It's not Corel's fault that such laws exist.
If they did, they're misinterpreting those laws.
Remember, people on work visas use lots of other software that can't be exported, such as 128-bit versions of IE and Netscape, and US versions of Lotus Notes.
There are probably tens of thousands of folks working the US who use SecureID tokens, but are not US citizens.
Hell, some of them are *WRITING* the programs in questions. Last I heard, nobody was getting shut down for this.
Well, that's not what the rest of your post says. The rest of your post says that Linux will be a good PDA OS when people will write proper software for it. That's an argument I can make for any OS...
Either you didn't read my post, you don't know what Linux is, or you're a troll.
Assuming it's one of the first two, I'll clarify it for you:
Linux is an excellent OS for use on PDAs. Linux is an OS, not a GUI.
Your objections are to the major GUIs currently widely used on Linux, and other INTERFACE tools that are not in any way, shape, or form part of the operating system.
The major interfaces currently widely used are not very good PDA interfaces. However, neither is WinCE. So I don't see how using a bad interface under a good OS is a bad idea, when the alternative is using a bad interface over a bad OS.
This document makes a teensy error; it completely ignores the fact that the Linux swap space is not included in the Linux native file system; it has to be allocated on a separate partition with a different file system.
No, it doesn't ignore that; and no, it doesn't have to be on a seperate partition.
If you're not going to read the article, at least do a search for "swap" on it and read those lines.
Here's one for you from the article:
You will notice that I don't have a linux swap partition visible. My linux setup currently uses the OpenBSD swap area.
That's one way. Another is the use of a swap file on the Linux partition (or even on the BSD partition), which Linux can easily do.
How do you classify that as "ignoring" the question of swap space?
The standard WIMP (windows - icons - menus - pointer) GUI is not suitable for handhelds. Windows CE is one of examples of this. Linux doesn't have (yet, at least) ways to deal with touch-sensitive screens, and has no interface to deal with small-screen, no-keyboard PDAs. Ergo, Linux is not a good OS to run on a PDA.
Linux is an excellent OS to run on a PDA. KDE and Gnome are lousy interfaces to run on a PDA.
But so is WinCE's interface, hence Microsoft's third attempt / rebranding effort.
The difference is, we can build new interfaces on top of Linux much easier than we can on top of WinCE.
But even with Gnome/KDE/whatever, you've got the tools to make specific applications very usable, and the freedom to "make do" with other applications you might need without having screw with a laptop.
That's pretty cool.
Just knowing that I can smash together a Python or Perl/Tk app to do whatever, and have it run on something I can carry everywhere I go (like I do with my Palm III, and *NEVER* did with a laptop) kicks ass, regardless of what anybody ELSE might do with it for me.
Once upon a time you could have made the same argument against adding a mouse to your PC; after all, there was hardly any software that used it, so why bother?
Answer: because with enough mice out there, it became worthwhile to write that software, and that software sold mice.
With enough people running Linux on PDAs, software makers (hopefully freedom-loving ones) will begin to write software more geared toward PDA use. Then the Linux PDAs will get more useful, causing more people to write software for them, etc.
Doesn't mean they're for everyone yet, or that they ever will be.
Besides, if one project gets Linux working well on the iPaq, think what they could do with an IBM z50 or equivalent?
Useful size keyboard, hard drive, StrongARM processor; sounds like the perfect laptop for my particular needs, if it ran Linux.
Projects like this make projects like that a little more likely. Maybe Compaq will see this someday and clone IBM's ex-product, or maybe IBM will resurrect it when enough people have shown them there's a market.
IBM would do well to work with the existing project, or at least to establish a good-faith basis for communucation with the developer community already committed to solutions under public license.
The same could be said of Linus and FreeBSD. I think we're all better off with competition, because Open Source competition benefits both projects.
Our choice was very simple; fire him, or leave with him.
Have you never worked for a company large enough that people you will never meet make decisions you are required to live by?
I work for a multi-billion-dollar company with over 100,000 employees; my manager doesn't get to make policy decisions that override the Senior VP in charge of Security.
You fail your background check, Security says "no go", that's the end of story. Not a damn thing *I* can do about it. Especially since I didn't even start here until about 2 months after this happened, *AND* I'm not the manager.
--
Re:Why don't we give this a chance to mirror...
on
Mozilla M16 Released
·
· Score: 4
Every daily for the past 3 weeks, including last night's, has crashed consistently within 10 minutes of running it for me.
I'm on Linux kernel 2.4.0-test1, though; that may or may not have anything to do with it.
It's too bad, because during that 10 minutes it rocks.
We once had a very good employee who had inadvertently closed a checking account while two long-uncashed checks were still extant in his previous state of residence.
When the checks were cashed they both bounced (of course) and since it was two checks equalling a total of more than $50, he was charged with a felony.
Since he could not be located, it was adjudicated in absentia, and he was convicted of a felony he never knew he'd committed.
He had been working for us for weeks when his background check uncovered this, and corporate policy required that he be fired.
He was a damn good employee, who had made a common mistake, and then suffered because of the incompetence of some sherrif's deputy thousands of miles away who couldn't be bothered to do a proper check.
Slashdot Mirror
Many important people are afraid of Linux's development system, or lack of it. OTOH, *BSD is pretty widely accepted anywhere but Linux isn't as much as some would like it to.
I'm sorry, but did you just basically say that Linux wishes it was as widely accepted as BSD?
I think your information is about three years out of date.
--
Gentlemen, we fought this fight in radio decades ago.
The result? The recording industry lost all their lawsuits to prevent people from playing songs on the air, and got small royalties.
So Napster will end up paying a token fee to the record companies, and just like cassette-taping off the radio helped artists in the past, mp3s will continue to help artists in the future.
It's a win. As long as Napster gets to carry all the music and makes enough profit to stay in business, it's an effing win.
--
I wonder what would happen if several thousand people subscribed mediaenforcer@hotmail.com to it's own "when this page is updated email me" service.
Not that I think anyone should actually do this, of course; that would be wrong.
--
Actually, this may be why ESR has his "Geeks with Guns" bent. "When they come for my router, they'll have to fight for it."
That's part of it. A bigger part is this:
Why does a subset of hackers get this bizarre notion that it's bad if the government tells me what I can do with information, what I can do with encryption, what I can log into when, what I can see in a movie theatre, or what I can send to whom over the net, but it's OK for them to tell me how I can go about exercising my right to keep and bear arms?
Information is far more dangerous than guns, yet some of us will tolerate the restriction of the latter but not of the former.
That is asinine. All of your rights are precious, and just as you wouldn't tolerate me trying to restrict a right that you value, I won't tolerate you trying to restrict a right that I value.
I believe that's more where ESR is coming from.
Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, please.
BTW, why would anybody who doesn't trust the government not to lie, cheat, and steal also trust them not to murder and kidnap? Guns are your protection against the latter, just as information is your protection against the former.
I contend that it's worse if the government kidnaps or murders you than if they lie, cheat, and steal from you, yet some hackers proclaim that they'll never give up the right to protect themselves from government lies, cheating, and theft, but readily give up the right to protect themselves from potential government kidnapping and murder.
Give up that right if you must; but don't try to give it up for *ME* too. Or for Eric.
--
Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose you're right, if it's that old I'm sure everyone on Earth has read it by now.
A spoiler isn't necessary in perpetuity. I've never seen any credible guide to nettiquette that required a spoiler for any revelation of any plot in any story, no matter how old.
Do I have to put a spoiler to say Romeo and Juliet die? Or even to say that Tony dies and Maria lives?
No. That would just be silly.
It's been 15 years. If you didn't read it yet, nobody cares.
--
I'm sure you had an excellent reason for not putting spoiler warnings in that posting. I can't wait to hear what it was.
The fact that the book is 15 years old is a pretty good reason.
--
She's threatened other people with lawsuits, and hasn't been able to follow through because not only does she not have a leg to stand on, but the music she uses belongs to Disney, so she's violating a much more strongly-defended copyright.
I highly recommend the above link, BTW. Kill them hamsters.
--
The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
Fire, the wheel, and the condom are just tools too.
But if you think they didn't have profound affects on society, you're engaging in convenient semantics instead of rational discourse.
--
You know, it's ironic that I get two responses to this within a 3 minute period:
One stating that I'm a moron for thinking that it's useful to say "we shouldn't ignore it simply because it's dangerous" because people would never think of doing that, and the other quoting a well-known author who claims we shouldn't pursue the technology and agreeing with him.
The post proving it was worth saying beat you by 3 minutes, dumbass. Sorry it took you so long to type that masterpiece.
--
Bullshit - if weapons were scarce, then even criminals wouldn't use them (since the criminals wouldn't have to worry about being shot, and since they would be damn expensive.)
Then why is gun crime increasing in the UK, and decreasing in the US?
--
Remember that in Asimov's universe, a bug in the implementation of single robot's Laws resulted in him slowly rendering the entire Earth unfit for human habitation because he thought it was "for their own good."
The fact that he was right in the story matters not a whit in this cautionary tale.
The same care should be exercised in working with nanotechnolgy as with any other potentially dangerous technology.
And, as with every other potentially dangerous technology, that shouldn't prevent us from working with it.
--
As long as Pocket PC or WinCE or whatever does the job it was intended, do the mechanics and whatnot really matter?
Well, since WinCE has failed twice now, and the biggest response we're seeing to the introduction of "Pocket PC" devices is these stories about running Linux on them, I think we have your answer.
--
It sickens me that someone with that kind of money to throw away wouldn't do something to help those less fortunate.
The money you spent to buy that computer, and spend every month for your Internet connection, would buy a lot of rice.
The $20 million he's giving to space research (minus the few thousand dollars of fuel that will be spent to send him up in a shuttle that was going up anyway) will buy a lot of science.
Science that will continue to improve our ability to feed the poor, etc., as it has in the past.
--
That space aboard Mir could be occupied by Science, but no, they chose to pimp it out instead.
$20 million buys a lot of science.
--
Here's what you do:
Buy two Dell computers under two different names.
Swap motherboards.
Attempt to reinstall Windows on machine #1 with machine #1's disk.
When it fails, contact Dell technical support and demand a CD that will work.
When it arrives, attempt to reinstall Windows on machine #2 with machine #2's disk.
Repeat until Dell is bankrupt, then purchase their systems at a huge discount.
--
Well, you made a lot of declarations but I've seen very few reasons.
:-)
Well, I was responding to your unsupported declarations, so I didn't think we were getting down to that level.
Why is Linux an excellent OS for a PDA?
Because it's Open Source and very well understood, making it easy to modify.
Because it's written with portability a strongly-considered factor throughout, making it easy to port.
Because it's already got some support for every important PDA chip, to one degree or another.
Because it is very small and efficient, due to it's modular nature.
Because it's GPLed, meaning you don't have to pay a nickel to use it.
Because there is an active developer community out there that wants it to work well on your product, and will thus help you.
Because there is a large contingent of users out there who will buy your product if it runs Linux, who wouldn't if it used another OS. The reverse is also true, but the Palm has a lock on those folks.
Specifically, why is it better than, say, QNX or Plan 9, or some *BSD, or EPOC?
Who said it was better than any of those, much less all of them? I don't recall speaking to those OSes at all.
I said it was better than WinCE, and I stand by that statement. I did *NOT* say it was the perfect end-all be-all of PDA OSes.
Besides that I'd like to remind you that PDAs have no keyboard. That makes command-line interface not good at all.
I don't know of a single PDA (not counting things like the REX) that doesn't have a keyboard available, and several (such as Psion) have keyboards built in. You need to watch the blanket statements.
The IBM Workpad z50 is but one example of a WinCE PDA with a built-in full-size keyboard.
I understand the difference between OS and GUI, but a pure kernel is not very useful by itself, is it?
It is if you're trying to write a PDA interface. Gotta have an OS under that, and it helps if it's small, robust, and powerful.
Before you can write the interface, you've got to have the OS working. That's what these folks are trying to do, and that's what you're complaining about.
Besides, I personally have uses for it. If I have uses for it, does that not by definition make it useful?
--
Well, in all due fairness to Corel, I'm sure they're only including this section because of stupid encryption export laws. It's not Corel's fault that such laws exist.
If they did, they're misinterpreting those laws.
Remember, people on work visas use lots of other software that can't be exported, such as 128-bit versions of IE and Netscape, and US versions of Lotus Notes.
There are probably tens of thousands of folks working the US who use SecureID tokens, but are not US citizens.
Hell, some of them are *WRITING* the programs in questions. Last I heard, nobody was getting shut down for this.
Corel just effed up.
--
Well, that's not what the rest of your post says. The rest of your post says that Linux will be a good PDA OS when people will write proper software for it. That's an argument I can make for any OS...
Either you didn't read my post, you don't know what Linux is, or you're a troll.
Assuming it's one of the first two, I'll clarify it for you:
Linux is an excellent OS for use on PDAs. Linux is an OS, not a GUI.
Your objections are to the major GUIs currently widely used on Linux, and other INTERFACE tools that are not in any way, shape, or form part of the operating system.
The major interfaces currently widely used are not very good PDA interfaces. However, neither is WinCE. So I don't see how using a bad interface under a good OS is a bad idea, when the alternative is using a bad interface over a bad OS.
--
This document makes a teensy error; it completely ignores the fact that the Linux swap space is not included in the Linux native file system; it has to be allocated on a separate partition with a different file system.
No, it doesn't ignore that; and no, it doesn't have to be on a seperate partition.
If you're not going to read the article, at least do a search for "swap" on it and read those lines.
Here's one for you from the article:
You will notice that I don't have a linux swap partition visible. My linux setup currently uses the OpenBSD swap area.
That's one way. Another is the use of a swap file on the Linux partition (or even on the BSD partition), which Linux can easily do.
How do you classify that as "ignoring" the question of swap space?
--
The standard WIMP (windows - icons - menus - pointer) GUI is not suitable for handhelds. Windows CE is one of examples of this. Linux doesn't have (yet, at least) ways to deal with
touch-sensitive screens, and has no interface to deal with small-screen, no-keyboard PDAs. Ergo, Linux is not a good OS to run on a PDA.
Linux is an excellent OS to run on a PDA. KDE and Gnome are lousy interfaces to run on a PDA.
But so is WinCE's interface, hence Microsoft's third attempt / rebranding effort.
The difference is, we can build new interfaces on top of Linux much easier than we can on top of WinCE.
But even with Gnome/KDE/whatever, you've got the tools to make specific applications very usable, and the freedom to "make do" with other applications you might need without having screw with a laptop.
That's pretty cool.
Just knowing that I can smash together a Python or Perl/Tk app to do whatever, and have it run on something I can carry everywhere I go (like I do with my Palm III, and *NEVER* did with a laptop) kicks ass, regardless of what anybody ELSE might do with it for me.
Once upon a time you could have made the same argument against adding a mouse to your PC; after all, there was hardly any software that used it, so why bother?
Answer: because with enough mice out there, it became worthwhile to write that software, and that software sold mice.
With enough people running Linux on PDAs, software makers (hopefully freedom-loving ones) will begin to write software more geared toward PDA use. Then the Linux PDAs will get more useful, causing more people to write software for them, etc.
Doesn't mean they're for everyone yet, or that they ever will be.
Besides, if one project gets Linux working well on the iPaq, think what they could do with an IBM z50 or equivalent?
Useful size keyboard, hard drive, StrongARM processor; sounds like the perfect laptop for my particular needs, if it ran Linux.
Projects like this make projects like that a little more likely. Maybe Compaq will see this someday and clone IBM's ex-product, or maybe IBM will resurrect it when enough people have shown them there's a market.
--
BTW, folks; Silicon Valley has been having rolling 2-hour blackouts (yes, I said black, not brown) for the past couple of days.
--
IBM would do well to work with the existing project, or at least to establish a good-faith basis for communucation with the developer community already committed to solutions under public license.
The same could be said of Linus and FreeBSD. I think we're all better off with competition, because Open Source competition benefits both projects.
--
Our choice was very simple; fire him, or leave with him.
Have you never worked for a company large enough that people you will never meet make decisions you are required to live by?
I work for a multi-billion-dollar company with over 100,000 employees; my manager doesn't get to make policy decisions that override the Senior VP in charge of Security.
You fail your background check, Security says "no go", that's the end of story. Not a damn thing *I* can do about it. Especially since I didn't even start here until about 2 months after this happened, *AND* I'm not the manager.
--
Every daily for the past 3 weeks, including last night's, has crashed consistently within 10 minutes of running it for me.
I'm on Linux kernel 2.4.0-test1, though; that may or may not have anything to do with it.
It's too bad, because during that 10 minutes it rocks.
--
It can be worse than that.
We once had a very good employee who had inadvertently closed a checking account while two long-uncashed checks were still extant in his previous state of residence.
When the checks were cashed they both bounced (of course) and since it was two checks equalling a total of more than $50, he was charged with a felony.
Since he could not be located, it was adjudicated in absentia, and he was convicted of a felony he never knew he'd committed.
He had been working for us for weeks when his background check uncovered this, and corporate policy required that he be fired.
He was a damn good employee, who had made a common mistake, and then suffered because of the incompetence of some sherrif's deputy thousands of miles away who couldn't be bothered to do a proper check.
--