Agreed. While our local station does the windows media format, Car Talk and PHC archives are only in realvideo/realaudio formats. Therefore we endure the really painful convoluted obsticle course that is downloading a free unix version of RealPlayer.
It might be a good time to remind that although here on slashdot we know what an operating system is, many people out there still have different notions of it. I think he's more talking about network operating systems (an old 80's term) more then computer operating systems which we more identify as Linux.
Most of what Novell does is rather mature on that level. Much more so then Linux, but probably not as much as he thinks. It has great directory, authentication and network file systems. A good AFS, LDAP, Kerberos run Linux domain is perhaps less of a polished product then Novell, but it is not far behind.
But thats only a part of what a NOS does. Consider Groupwise, ZenWorks and other products inherent to a Novell network and you'll quickly realize that there is nothing near as mature on Linux right now. (note: Ximian just recently put out Enterprise Red Carpet, which I haven't evaluated.)
So while I may agree that I wouldn't have chosen his terms, its still important to understand his use of them before critisizing them
Here is another. Its a scoop engine automotive journal by yours truely. If the link doesn't work its becuase I'm rebuilding my gentoo server at the moment.
I was lucky enough to have worked a few saturdays with an editor of SCC on his project car. He showed me to a few of their cars and said something interesting. They don't own them, they are special liscenced with the auto manufacturers. This is true with their WRX and Sylvia and others. Its one of the ways they get around smog restraints.
I'll have to ask him if this was one of those cars, but it sounds like when the lease expires they are supposed to trash the car. What a way to go...
----------- http://onroad.onlawn.net is down for repairs.
I agree 100%. I figure that the law requires consideration means that the report that is written to decide the real product will include the reasons why and why not to choose OSS solution.
With a sales guy, you can usually find out and relay word back. Here you have public record that you can mine for either injustice or legitimate ways to improve the features and acceptance of OSS.
As I think is your point, genuinly this is a good thing for OSS. It just makes things even, and encourages openness.
----------- OnRoad: JunkYard Wars + SCCA => Banger Racing
Its a tough call. I was very interested in sports as a child, as well as the outdoors computers and cars. Nowadays sports has kind of dropped off the map. Astronomy, creative writing, physics and mechanical engineering have climbed. I've gone back and read Watership Down, and other books that were assigned to me in High School and now I love them.
In school, they couldn't get me to touch a bunch of these subjects but for some reason now that I'm an adult I find them much more fascinating. I'm going back and re-learning calculus for some fluid dynamics equations I used to know, and pounding out my old dynamics problems for kicks.
I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't stick with them when things went hard, but I rekindled a interest in them when I got older. Me and school never really mixed very well.
No, I wasn't talking about a linux specific reason. Just that most of our NFS headaches have come from NFS being unable to scale back during packet storms and such. We've had NFS render stacked switches to a crawl becuase of scaling issues.
Thanks for the update. Sad day for electric vehicles indeed. Fortunately for those that are "le fabricator" there are a lot of good websites on turning your pickup truck or car into an electric vehicle.
My website (mentioned below) is for exploring mods for cars that make them more fuel efficient or make them into electrical vehicles. Okay, I'm not entirely altruistic, there are mods there that make nice polite cars into gas mongering pavement pounders also.
Its a shame I haven't gotten anyone to write an electrical vehicle article for it yet. Unfortunately there isn't as much journalism supporting efficiency mods as there is for performance mods. I've found that theres quite a few people out there more willing to make their car biodiesel or electric then a 10s 1/4 miler.
I used to know a Ford Think! service manager. Before he moved back to Detroit, he told me what was going on.
California was threatening very strict guidelines on the automakers, that they needed to sell a certain percentage of electrical vehicles with their gasoline cars. Hence Think! and the EV1.
But then either the restrictions laxed or something becuase Dodge and Chevy started giving away electric golf carts to anyone that would take them. Ford then followed suit, although the Think! City was really just a glorified golf cart to begin with.
Its sad really owners of the EV1 have offered 22k apiece to GM to keep their cars, to no avail. There are plenty of little outfits that sell electric cars (I'm sure people here mentioned the Corbin Sparrow, et all).
They can't make enough of them. I used to know the president of the local electric car group who had a Corbin. They have belt problems, but overall are very cool.
So its kind of sad that electrical vehicles offered by the big three are not really roadable any more. There is a demand. And every now and again I still see a City, EV1, Sparrow, and golf carts on the road.
----------------- OnRoad: The Collaborative Automotive Engineering Journal
I'm still hoping some day for an Autoduel mmorpg adaptation. It doesn't even have to be 3D to be cool. Anyone know if Lord British or Origion would open up the Autoduel code or even sell it to me really cheap?
I agree 100%. I put the distros on a scale this way...
RYO --- Gentoo --- Debian --- Redhat
Thats from the most "have it your way" on the left to the most "I don't know what my way is" to "my boss wants it his way" on the right. Slackware fits somewhere on there, but its used in so many different ways I couldn't place it in one specific point.
The value added is being able to have it your way, or being able to rest on the rock solid attempts of others. That Linux interoperates so well yet has distros that cater to each crowd is more then commendable.
They are interoperable enough in principle. We do have a Redhat box here at work running a Gentoo kernel for the NFS/TCP patches. I have rpm's running on my Gentoo box. But niether of those were easy.
-------------- OnRoad: It gets you there and back again
Mono, Gnome and Gtk# are a very powerful platform.
I can look into Lindows green tinted windows from my office next door. The company I admin is as much an all Linux shop as you get these days. But still there are events that happen every day that make give me wonder and amazement at how far Linux has come.
I just recently met a VP of a company that makes over 10M revenue a year. I just found out last night that it uses Mono in a crucial role in its production environment. Actually the first company I've heard of at all that uses Mono in a production environment. According to the VP, they'd use Mono exclusively if it had forms support.
This may not be news to you or anyone else, but I never really considered it was being taken that seriously. I find the news rather encouraging. I really don't see a lapse in Gnome or KDE.
Playing to a rather low expectation of the average consumers ability to maintain their cars is not only whats keeping us out the the air, but probably what is keeping us from more efficient engines on the road...
It never ceases to amaze me the ignorance of people so willing to call others dolts and morons.
For the last time, SUVs are not cars. They were started as cost cutting measures to sell trucks to morons
Actually, their history is just as traceable to station wagons as they are to trucks. More recently they are using unit body chassis like cars more then truck frame rail chassis.
They predate safety, emmisions and milage measures. And BTW, the milage and emmisions restrictions more direclty correlated to the SUV popularity then safety.
----------------- OnRoad: Safely reporting the SUV war from the middle of the road.
DoD is only one customer of research, and one of the most agressive and flexible. Look at the Telcom industry, plenty of technology but us as consumers are not flexible enough to use it yet. Its just left to stagnate while we catch up to it. The real story behind your mentioned advancements bears this out.
The US just got big and for a long time the only US car innovations are the cupholder and the SUV.
The cupholder, SUV, and Minivan were innovated a long long time ago. SUV's are just a moniker to Panel Van's, and covered trucks that date back to the very first motorized vehicles. The chief proponent and user of these vehicles were the Military followed distantly by agriculture.
The cupholder, and areas for drinks date back to luxury models of the early 1900's. Probably the only non-military advance on your list. The other might be ABS.
ABS, fuel injection, constant 4WD multiple valves and other improvements do not come from Detroit.
You're not so correct about ABS, the earliest patents were from the US in the 1920's. It was experimented on by US car companies in the 70's but proved to be unreliable for the technolgy at that time. It was after the US lost interest in the technology that Europe went gung-ho on it and technology caught up.
Ford gets the prize for being the first company to embrace RABS (Rear Anti-lock Braking System -- at less than $100 per vehicle for about 80% of the benefit of a four-wheel system, it was a safety bargain). In '87, it appeared on F-series pickups, Broncos, and Bronco II's as standard equipment. Chevy followed with a similar system on its redesigned '88 C-series, and calls it RWAL (Rear Wheel Anti-Lock).
Four wheel drive itself dates back far before Henry Ford. But there were AWD vehicles back in 1929 in the UK, and mod kits for off road all time 4wd vehicles since the first motorized wagons (later called trucks).
Its rather ignorant to call full time 4wd an advancement. Full time 4wd was the first way it was developed. The center differential is the only real advancement needed to make those simplistic 4wd vehicles roadable. These center differentials are no different then the differentials used since 1880. To be able to turn it on and off with locking hubs was the real advancement, and the way of choice for truck buyers until recently. As you may guess the locking hub also pre-dated the big three. Mod kits were available for locking hub 4wd since the very first trucks offered by International, Ford and Chevy.
Fuel injection as we know it came from aircraft engine developments from WW2 and before, and was also a military venture. Its roots date back before Henry Ford made his first car. Even the fuel injection as we know it was developed independantly by the US and UK while Germany developed theirs.
Another is large jets.
Why say large jets at all? The jet engine was not first developed in the US at all.
------------- OnRoad: Where oh where did my M-P-G go...
In the practicle department, we have two technologies we've used for grid computing. I'm going to guess you work on one we've used, Sun Gridware (now opensourced?) used to be Codine. It worked well enough. The interface was pretty easy, but for the users, kicking off programs to run randomly on a grid of machines was not as easy as...
Mosix (or OpenMosix). Now I'm sure theres a hundred good reasons why it doesn't qualify as gridware, but that is how we use it. It was simple to install and monitor also. Hidden enough, the engineers don't even know they are using it. Thats the kind of plug and play every IT manager wants.
The convergence, I agree is going to happen. But honestly today people just haven't become sophisticated enough to expect it yet. Or even want to. Perhaps it won't happen in our lifetime.
------------- OnRoad: Boldly searching for the efficiency our engines deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Bart: Ohh, I wish I programmed an [open source email client.]
Lisa: You did, you named it "Stampy".
Agreed. While our local station does the windows media format, Car Talk and PHC archives are only in realvideo/realaudio formats. Therefore we endure the really painful convoluted obsticle course that is downloading a free unix version of RealPlayer.
Two forces at work here, you tell me which has more sway.
1) Rich people ($$$ Profit)
2) Rich people have the money to mount a legal defence (--- big losses)
My favorite...
Citroen!
It might be a good time to remind that although here on slashdot we know what an operating system is, many people out there still have different notions of it. I think he's more talking about network operating systems (an old 80's term) more then computer operating systems which we more identify as Linux.
Most of what Novell does is rather mature on that level. Much more so then Linux, but probably not as much as he thinks. It has great directory, authentication and network file systems. A good AFS, LDAP, Kerberos run Linux domain is perhaps less of a polished product then Novell, but it is not far behind.
But thats only a part of what a NOS does. Consider Groupwise, ZenWorks and other products inherent to a Novell network and you'll quickly realize that there is nothing near as mature on Linux right now. (note: Ximian just recently put out Enterprise Red Carpet, which I haven't evaluated.)
So while I may agree that I wouldn't have chosen his terms, its still important to understand his use of them before critisizing them
Here is another. Its a scoop engine automotive journal by yours truely. If the link doesn't work its becuase I'm rebuilding my gentoo server at the moment.
I was lucky enough to have worked a few saturdays with an editor of SCC on his project car. He showed me to a few of their cars and said something interesting. They don't own them, they are special liscenced with the auto manufacturers. This is true with their WRX and Sylvia and others. Its one of the ways they get around smog restraints.
I'll have to ask him if this was one of those cars, but it sounds like when the lease expires they are supposed to trash the car. What a way to go...
-----------
http://onroad.onlawn.net is down for repairs.
The rabbit that stood up to Woundward is threatened by a database?
Frith as a computer manufacturer!
----------------
OnRoad: JunkYard ward meets SCCA racing.
The most insightful thing said on slashdot in as many months.
I agree 100%. I figure that the law requires consideration means that the report that is written to decide the real product will include the reasons why and why not to choose OSS solution.
With a sales guy, you can usually find out and relay word back. Here you have public record that you can mine for either injustice or legitimate ways to improve the features and acceptance of OSS.
As I think is your point, genuinly this is a good thing for OSS. It just makes things even, and encourages openness.
-----------
OnRoad: JunkYard Wars + SCCA => Banger Racing
Its a tough call. I was very interested in sports as a child, as well as the outdoors computers and cars. Nowadays sports has kind of dropped off the map. Astronomy, creative writing, physics and mechanical engineering have climbed. I've gone back and read Watership Down, and other books that were assigned to me in High School and now I love them.
In school, they couldn't get me to touch a bunch of these subjects but for some reason now that I'm an adult I find them much more fascinating. I'm going back and re-learning calculus for some fluid dynamics equations I used to know, and pounding out my old dynamics problems for kicks.
I guess what I'm saying is that I didn't stick with them when things went hard, but I rekindled a interest in them when I got older. Me and school never really mixed very well.
--------------
OnRoad: JunkYard Wars meets SCCA racing.
I admit I was ignorant. I thought Pete Townsend had taken up a cause or something.
-----------
OnRoad: Junkyard Wars meets SCCA
No, I wasn't talking about a linux specific reason. Just that most of our NFS headaches have come from NFS being unable to scale back during packet storms and such. We've had NFS render stacked switches to a crawl becuase of scaling issues.
Thanks for the update. Sad day for electric vehicles indeed. Fortunately for those that are "le fabricator" there are a lot of good websites on turning your pickup truck or car into an electric vehicle.
My website (mentioned below) is for exploring mods for cars that make them more fuel efficient or make them into electrical vehicles. Okay, I'm not entirely altruistic, there are mods there that make nice polite cars into gas mongering pavement pounders also.
Its a shame I haven't gotten anyone to write an electrical vehicle article for it yet. Unfortunately there isn't as much journalism supporting efficiency mods as there is for performance mods. I've found that theres quite a few people out there more willing to make their car biodiesel or electric then a 10s 1/4 miler.
-----------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.
I used to know a Ford Think! service manager. Before he moved back to Detroit, he told me what was going on.
California was threatening very strict guidelines on the automakers, that they needed to sell a certain percentage of electrical vehicles with their gasoline cars. Hence Think! and the EV1.
But then either the restrictions laxed or something becuase Dodge and Chevy started giving away electric golf carts to anyone that would take them. Ford then followed suit, although the Think! City was really just a glorified golf cart to begin with.
Its sad really owners of the EV1 have offered 22k apiece to GM to keep their cars, to no avail. There are plenty of little outfits that sell electric cars (I'm sure people here mentioned the Corbin Sparrow, et all).
They can't make enough of them. I used to know the president of the local electric car group who had a Corbin. They have belt problems, but overall are very cool.
So its kind of sad that electrical vehicles offered by the big three are not really roadable any more. There is a demand. And every now and again I still see a City, EV1, Sparrow, and golf carts on the road.
-----------------
OnRoad: The Collaborative Automotive Engineering Journal
I agree. There's one good reason to do it.
They can be ultimately cool and fun.
I'm still hoping some day for an Autoduel mmorpg adaptation. It doesn't even have to be 3D to be cool. Anyone know if Lord British or Origion would open up the Autoduel code or even sell it to me really cheap?
-----------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.
Make that 10MM. Thanks for the info.
I agree 100%. I put the distros on a scale this way...
RYO --- Gentoo --- Debian --- Redhat
Thats from the most "have it your way" on the left to the most "I don't know what my way is" to "my boss wants it his way" on the right. Slackware fits somewhere on there, but its used in so many different ways I couldn't place it in one specific point.
The value added is being able to have it your way, or being able to rest on the rock solid attempts of others. That Linux interoperates so well yet has distros that cater to each crowd is more then commendable.
They are interoperable enough in principle. We do have a Redhat box here at work running a Gentoo kernel for the NFS/TCP patches. I have rpm's running on my Gentoo box. But niether of those were easy.
--------------
OnRoad: It gets you there and back again
I'll see him again this sunday and pass the word along.
By the way, my email is ${my_slashdot_user_name}@${my_slashdot_user_name}
Mono, Gnome and Gtk# are a very powerful platform.
I can look into Lindows green tinted windows from my office next door. The company I admin is as much an all Linux shop as you get these days. But still there are events that happen every day that make give me wonder and amazement at how far Linux has come.
I just recently met a VP of a company that makes over 10M revenue a year. I just found out last night that it uses Mono in a crucial role in its production environment. Actually the first company I've heard of at all that uses Mono in a production environment. According to the VP, they'd use Mono exclusively if it had forms support.
This may not be news to you or anyone else, but I never really considered it was being taken that seriously. I find the news rather encouraging. I really don't see a lapse in Gnome or KDE.
--------------
OnRoad: More power!
Playing to a rather low expectation of the average consumers ability to maintain their cars is not only whats keeping us out the the air, but probably what is keeping us from more efficient engines on the road...
It never ceases to amaze me the ignorance of people so willing to call others dolts and morons.
For the last time, SUVs are not cars. They were started as cost cutting measures to sell trucks to morons
Actually, their history is just as traceable to station wagons as they are to trucks. More recently they are using unit body chassis like cars more then truck frame rail chassis.
They predate safety, emmisions and milage measures. And BTW, the milage and emmisions restrictions more direclty correlated to the SUV popularity then safety.
-----------------
OnRoad: Safely reporting the SUV war from the middle of the road.
DoD is only one customer of research, and one of the most agressive and flexible. Look at the Telcom industry, plenty of technology but us as consumers are not flexible enough to use it yet. Its just left to stagnate while we catch up to it. The real story behind your mentioned advancements bears this out.
The US just got big and for a long time the only US car innovations are the cupholder and the SUV.
The cupholder, SUV, and Minivan were innovated a long long time ago. SUV's are just a moniker to Panel Van's, and covered trucks that date back to the very first motorized vehicles. The chief proponent and user of these vehicles were the Military followed distantly by agriculture.
The cupholder, and areas for drinks date back to luxury models of the early 1900's. Probably the only non-military advance on your list. The other might be ABS.
ABS, fuel injection, constant 4WD multiple valves and other improvements do not come from Detroit.
You're not so correct about ABS, the earliest patents were from the US in the 1920's. It was experimented on by US car companies in the 70's but proved to be unreliable for the technolgy at that time. It was after the US lost interest in the technology that Europe went gung-ho on it and technology caught up.
Even then,
Four wheel drive itself dates back far before Henry Ford. But there were AWD vehicles back in 1929 in the UK, and mod kits for off road all time 4wd vehicles since the first motorized wagons (later called trucks).
Its rather ignorant to call full time 4wd an advancement. Full time 4wd was the first way it was developed. The center differential is the only real advancement needed to make those simplistic 4wd vehicles roadable. These center differentials are no different then the differentials used since 1880. To be able to turn it on and off with locking hubs was the real advancement, and the way of choice for truck buyers until recently. As you may guess the locking hub also pre-dated the big three. Mod kits were available for locking hub 4wd since the very first trucks offered by International, Ford and Chevy.
Fuel injection as we know it came from aircraft engine developments from WW2 and before, and was also a military venture. Its roots date back before Henry Ford made his first car. Even the fuel injection as we know it was developed independantly by the US and UK while Germany developed theirs.
Another is large jets.
Why say large jets at all? The jet engine was not first developed in the US at all.
-------------
OnRoad: Where oh where did my M-P-G go...
In the practicle department, we have two technologies we've used for grid computing. I'm going to guess you work on one we've used, Sun Gridware (now opensourced?) used to be Codine. It worked well enough. The interface was pretty easy, but for the users, kicking off programs to run randomly on a grid of machines was not as easy as...
Mosix (or OpenMosix). Now I'm sure theres a hundred good reasons why it doesn't qualify as gridware, but that is how we use it. It was simple to install and monitor also. Hidden enough, the engineers don't even know they are using it. Thats the kind of plug and play every IT manager wants.
The convergence, I agree is going to happen. But honestly today people just haven't become sophisticated enough to expect it yet. Or even want to. Perhaps it won't happen in our lifetime.
-------------
OnRoad: Boldly searching for the efficiency our engines deserve.
but I can guarantee you that the performance of linux NFS blows chunks.
Most of the performance scaling problems we had were fixed when we moved to NFS over TCP.
------------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.