It's kinda like blowing off your leg to kill the mosquito - and everyone else's leg in the process.
Seriously, SCO would be pariah, shunned by the entire corporate software world if they invalidated most EULA clauses. Oh, but the freedom. It's like putting on a fresh pair of well-broken-in underwear. We could use just every piece of software as we chose, as long as we respected the copyright provisions.
I'm almost not sure which would be better - GPL holding up in court, or throwing out most EULA provisions.
My hope is that as a result of SCO's effort to invalidate the GPL, if they somehow manage to succeed, they will simultaneously invalidate the majority of draconian EULA provisions.
The good thing to note is that AMD's improved performance is through good engineering, on a new platform offering semi-native 32-bit support. They have TONS of room to grow with this new architecture.
Intel threw money at the problem probably in response to SERIOUS marketing pressure. Although Intel may have taken the cake in these benchmarks, AMD's processor prices can drop quite a bit - it's relatively inexpensive to continue to build on an already introduced and profitable chipset. Intel, though - the costs on this performance improvement are all hardware. Production costs increase greatly when you add that much extra on-chip cache.
nVidia is rewriting the ENTIRE shader engine with dynamic re-ordering for the 50 series drivers. I'm not sure you understand - this is NOT a trivial task. The shader problem has been that you either optimize for ATi's shaders, or you optimize for nVidia's. The 50 series drivers with the dynamic re-ordering is supposed to help alleviate this - the driver will optimize at run time what the developers may not have done at compile time.
The 50 series drivers were incomplete during HL2 development. The driver samples that nVidia was providing to Valve were milestone drivers - incomplete featurewise, but each completed feature was "complete" (written to specs and considered stable). The fact that fog was not rendering is likely not a speed hack, but an as-yet incomplete (as in not even started in that driver release) feature.
Trust is a hard thing to earn, and easy to lose. I'm withholding judgement until nVidia's promised 50 series drivers come out.
Well, to use SCO-ish tactics, and breed panic and doubt at SCO, you get a large number of companies to offer a grace period where ex-SCO employees may be hirable at normal salaries, and after that they suffer a $600 a year pay cut per linux license on your premisis.
Actually, that occurred after SCO sued the administrators of www.permits.gov because it was being hosted on a linux box. Since they were going to have to pay a licensing fee anyway, they took the SCO option of "upgrading" to OpenUnix
I think some economics could answer that question. SCO can't ask a really high price for licensing right now. No one would buy it. Before they prove their case, low license fees.
After they would have proven it, though... They can milk that cow for all its worth until no one would buy or use linux. Then they get the multimillion dollar prize from Microsoft. Cash. To the execs.
Hmmm... You're right. That's a new one for me. Named "e" in HONOR of Euler, but it is NOT Euler's constant. Typing "Euler's Constant" into google gives a Google Calculator result of "Euler's constant = 0.577215665"
you are correct. I overlooked the last digit, being a zero, as I was doing the conversion on my fingers. So they're all very close, and on the real numberline, you get the greatest efficiency a "e".
The reason for doing work in trinary computing is that it is closest to the theoretically optimal computing base. The reasoning was something like this:
Representations of numbers in a particular base have two defining characteristics - the number of values that can occupy a digit (m), and the number of digits it takes to represent that value (n).
(Here's where the theory takes a leap, at least to me) The most efficient base (or simplest) base for performing computations is the one at which the m*n product is minimized. As an example, we'll take THE ANSWER, 42(base10). THE ANSWER in base 16 has a result of 16*2=32 THE ANSWER in base 10 has a result of 10*2=20 THE ANSWER in base 8 has a result of 8*2=16
Here are the interesting cases, though: THE ANSWER in base 2 has a result of 2*6=12 THE ANSWER in base 3 has a result of 3*3=9 THE ANSWER in base 4 has a result of 4*3=12
IIRC, according to the article I was reading, the most effective base is actually "e" (euler's constant).
maybe ATI's drivers ARE better on linux. I don't know - I haven't gotten them working yet. Not a criticism of the drivers, just that there's an extreme shortage of documentation on the internet about how to install them. Of course, there are a number of options, Gatos, ATI, the DRI driver that ships with the kernel. I've only tried ATI's and the kernel DRI driver and not had much success.
I'll be a little less wary of ATI cards when people stop saying that the drivers have been getting better over the past few years and start saying "they're great!" I don't mean person - I mean people.
In all fairness, I've been hearing it more and more "works great for me! no problems!" (windows-side, of course)
My statement, though, was referring to the software developer aspect. The API's change very little from year to year. The hardware that implements the API does.
And that I should find a more recent statement to cite, well, Carmack doesn't make a habit of shouting praises about the hardware he develops for. Seriously - just TRY and find a statement from ANY respected developer about the quality of nVidia's or ATI's API.
My impression from the Anandtech review is that the visual quality of the FX 5900 vs. ATI's 9800 were quite comparable, and at times, indistinguishable.
*shrug*
ATI is going to have a hard time in the developer market --- "According to Carmack, nVidia is among the best in the business at writing drivers. He went on to explain that whenever he runs into a driver-related bug with nVidia, he assumes the problem is with his own code. With ATI or other card manufacturers, he assumes the problem is with the driver. Extremely high praise for the driver engineers at nVidia." [cited from http://www.dallasnews.com/, a review of QuakeCon 2002]
The only reason I'm still buying nVidia is because it's setup under linux is very well documented, whereas I've had a bugger of a time getting a Radeon 9000 Pro to run accelerated on linux. And I've not found anything terribly useful when asking google.
For his kids' sakes I sure hope he is. he oughtta be around for AT LEAST another 10 years.
Ten years from now, Microsoft is going to be aggressively marketing their Windows API for *nixes, and making cash off IP and Patent licensing to corporate solutions providers working in Linux.
Twenty years from now, we're going to see Microsoft pulling a SCO and trying to squeeze a few extra cents on their shares so Bill Gates can have enough money to retire on, claiming that Linus Jr. allowed Microsoft IP into the Linux kernel. The claims will be obfuscated, just like the example code on the OpenOffice.org Impress slides showing the "stolen code".
Thirty years from now, Bill Gates will be remembered fondly as the person who first brought computers to the common man, back when computers were"young" and still crashed. And back when 64GB of RAM should have been enough for anybody.
Fourty years from now, rumors will be going around, and inevitably, said rumors getting forwarded by everyone's mother and best-friend's sister, about how Bill Gates's brain has been preserved and there's a $4 billion cash account willed to the team that can successfully transplant his brain into a genetically cloned and grown body. And Linus Torvalds's name will be in every 1st grade computer textbook along with Babbage, Turing, Von Neumann, and that Apple guy whose computers still hold onto 6% of the desktop computer market.
Here's what you do: You get a hold of news media and use them as a megaphone for asking SCO if they accept the terms of the GPL license, or if they would like samba to offer another, for pay, license under which they may use but never alter samba code.
If they agree to the GPL license, they are effectively giving it credibility and undermining their own legal claims. If they decline the GPL license, they either don't use samba, or they pay the licensing fee (ONE BILLION DOLLARS!) and, well, the samba team steals from the thieves and gives to the poor.
I don't care about the specific technology. All I really want is a screen that: a) is thin and light enough to be hung on the wall. Picture+Frame thickness is fine with me. One that you put on your wall like a poster, well, even better. b) is bright and ZERO ghosting. c) is designed to be both a monitor and a TV. Picture in Picture for the one you're not currently using would be a major bonus. d) reasonably priced. Before LCD's really hit the market how much did a nice Sony 21" CRT go for? $1400? Now they cost half that. Do you really think CRT production processes got that much cheaper over 7 years?
Well, uploading music to filesharing networks was and still is illegal. I think the thing most people are taking issue with here is that the **AA's want ANOTHER law to make it even worse (What are you in for? Pedophilia. And you? I murdered my wife and all 12 of her lovers. What about you? I uploaded a couple metallica songs on the internet.).
Most people generally respect the laws. We speed a little when we're in a hurry and we think we can get away with it. We make a break across the street during a break in the traffic even though there's a crosswalk 20 feet away. And we trade music and movies on the internet. For the most part, people don't feel bad because they wouldn't buy it anyway - it costs too much. Many times, people try it out and they like it a lot, so they pay special care just to buy it.
So, under modern legislative thinking, it's wrong to share copyrighted material. Why do people do it anyway? What drives such a huge percentage of America to do something wrong and illegal?
Market forces. The distribution channels for music have been getting cheaper and cheaper. CD's cost a ton less to produce than tapes, so why hasn't music gotten cheaper? National distribution methods have gotten more efficient, so why haven't CD's gotten cheaper? And those questions just address what was happening in the 1990s. Right around 2000, the internet was clearly demonstrated to be a popular, easy, and incredibly cheap distribution channel. The longer the distributors resist the market forces, the worse the problem will get. The harder the push, the harder the market will push back. Laws can only hold back market forces for so long.
I don't doubt apple's music service will be successful, because it answers what the market was trying to create. Apple will distribute for indies, it will sell to anyone, and it will sell cheap. Unfortunately, there are a few minor technology hangups (file formats, OS support), but those will be resolved, whether by Apple or by someone else.
A lot of people are very credulous that there might be a linux user base for AOL. I, on the other hand, believe that there are opportunities for lucrative (i.e. profitable) deals with Lindows and the like.
In regards to the Linux community arguing for one and against the other, there are some differences. Other no-sunset clause licenses were shot down in court - there was a precedent. It had lost previously in court. The GPL, as far as I know, has never been central to a court case for its legality to be tested. And I think, in all honesty, that the GPL has never seriously been tested because people on both sides fear testing the GPL - one side because they're afraid it will win, and the other side because they're afraid it might lose.
In reference to the SCO case, the Linux community is arguing for one and against the other, but that's not really so selfish, because in essence, SCO is doing the same thing to their favor.
Don't forget that IBM has DeepFritz playing for it.
If SCO is playing a gambit just to get bought out, its a dangerous one. All it takes is a clear court win for IBM to make the whole SCO thing look like a sad day in history when a little kid threw a temper tantrum. After all, Microsoft lost two antitrust suits in 10 years, and they came away from both with public opinion saying "yeah, what they did was wrong, but not THAT wrong." Linux, I think is just as capable (although I can say nothing to the likelihood) of walking away from this with a nearly untarnished image, that will only improve with time.
And finally, a disclaimer: I'm just playing counterpoint to your arguments, my own views are more middle-of-the-road.
Slashdot Mirror
What was the athlon64 fiasco? I must've blinked.
It's kinda like blowing off your leg to kill the mosquito - and everyone else's leg in the process.
Seriously, SCO would be pariah, shunned by the entire corporate software world if they invalidated most EULA clauses. Oh, but the freedom. It's like putting on a fresh pair of well-broken-in underwear. We could use just every piece of software as we chose, as long as we respected the copyright provisions.
I'm almost not sure which would be better - GPL holding up in court, or throwing out most EULA provisions.
My hope is that as a result of SCO's effort to invalidate the GPL, if they somehow manage to succeed, they will simultaneously invalidate the majority of draconian EULA provisions.
The FLOSSPULLERS recently withdrew their BRIKNIT from this year's HoseCon. The resulting void has opened a gaping rip in the Plesk market.
I'm a fairly frequent poster on slashdot. But then, I've been a slashdotter since LONG before I ever came to BYU (look at my ID#)
The good thing to note is that AMD's improved performance is through good engineering, on a new platform offering semi-native 32-bit support. They have TONS of room to grow with this new architecture.
Intel threw money at the problem probably in response to SERIOUS marketing pressure. Although Intel may have taken the cake in these benchmarks, AMD's processor prices can drop quite a bit - it's relatively inexpensive to continue to build on an already introduced and profitable chipset. Intel, though - the costs on this performance improvement are all hardware. Production costs increase greatly when you add that much extra on-chip cache.
Is that SUCKR as in P. T. Barnum kind of sucker? Or the leech kind? Or does it matter?
nVidia is rewriting the ENTIRE shader engine with dynamic re-ordering for the 50 series drivers. I'm not sure you understand - this is NOT a trivial task. The shader problem has been that you either optimize for ATi's shaders, or you optimize for nVidia's. The 50 series drivers with the dynamic re-ordering is supposed to help alleviate this - the driver will optimize at run time what the developers may not have done at compile time.
The 50 series drivers were incomplete during HL2 development. The driver samples that nVidia was providing to Valve were milestone drivers - incomplete featurewise, but each completed feature was "complete" (written to specs and considered stable). The fact that fog was not rendering is likely not a speed hack, but an as-yet incomplete (as in not even started in that driver release) feature.
Trust is a hard thing to earn, and easy to lose. I'm withholding judgement until nVidia's promised 50 series drivers come out.
Well, to use SCO-ish tactics, and breed panic and doubt at SCO, you get a large number of companies to offer a grace period where ex-SCO employees may be hirable at normal salaries, and after that they suffer a $600 a year pay cut per linux license on your premisis.
Actually, that occurred after SCO sued the administrators of www.permits.gov because it was being hosted on a linux box. Since they were going to have to pay a licensing fee anyway, they took the SCO option of "upgrading" to OpenUnix
"All your free install base are belong to us"
I think some economics could answer that question. SCO can't ask a really high price for licensing right now. No one would buy it. Before they prove their case, low license fees.
After they would have proven it, though... They can milk that cow for all its worth until no one would buy or use linux. Then they get the multimillion dollar prize from Microsoft. Cash. To the execs.
Can you even GET a building permit for a condemned building?
Hmmm... You're right. That's a new one for me. Named "e" in HONOR of Euler, but it is NOT Euler's constant. Typing "Euler's Constant" into google gives a Google Calculator result of "Euler's constant = 0.577215665"
You learn something new every day
you are correct. I overlooked the last digit, being a zero, as I was doing the conversion on my fingers. So they're all very close, and on the real numberline, you get the greatest efficiency a "e".
The reason for doing work in trinary computing is that it is closest to the theoretically optimal computing base. The reasoning was something like this:
Representations of numbers in a particular base have two defining characteristics - the number of values that can occupy a digit (m), and the number of digits it takes to represent that value (n).
(Here's where the theory takes a leap, at least to me) The most efficient base (or simplest) base for performing computations is the one at which the m*n product is minimized. As an example, we'll take THE ANSWER, 42(base10).
THE ANSWER in base 16 has a result of 16*2=32
THE ANSWER in base 10 has a result of 10*2=20
THE ANSWER in base 8 has a result of 8*2=16
Here are the interesting cases, though:
THE ANSWER in base 2 has a result of 2*6=12
THE ANSWER in base 3 has a result of 3*3=9
THE ANSWER in base 4 has a result of 4*3=12
IIRC, according to the article I was reading, the most effective base is actually "e" (euler's constant).
maybe ATI's drivers ARE better on linux. I don't know - I haven't gotten them working yet. Not a criticism of the drivers, just that there's an extreme shortage of documentation on the internet about how to install them. Of course, there are a number of options, Gatos, ATI, the DRI driver that ships with the kernel. I've only tried ATI's and the kernel DRI driver and not had much success.
I'll be a little less wary of ATI cards when people stop saying that the drivers have been getting better over the past few years and start saying "they're great!" I don't mean person - I mean people.
In all fairness, I've been hearing it more and more "works great for me! no problems!" (windows-side, of course)
My statement, though, was referring to the software developer aspect. The API's change very little from year to year. The hardware that implements the API does.
And that I should find a more recent statement to cite, well, Carmack doesn't make a habit of shouting praises about the hardware he develops for. Seriously - just TRY and find a statement from ANY respected developer about the quality of nVidia's or ATI's API.
My impression from the Anandtech review is that the visual quality of the FX 5900 vs. ATI's 9800 were quite comparable, and at times, indistinguishable.
*shrug*
ATI is going to have a hard time in the developer market ---
"According to Carmack, nVidia is among the best in the business at writing drivers. He went on to explain that whenever he runs into a driver-related bug with nVidia, he assumes the problem is with his own code. With ATI or other card manufacturers, he assumes the problem is with the driver. Extremely high praise for the driver engineers at nVidia."
[cited from http://www.dallasnews.com/, a review of QuakeCon 2002]
The only reason I'm still buying nVidia is because it's setup under linux is very well documented, whereas I've had a bugger of a time getting a Radeon 9000 Pro to run accelerated on linux. And I've not found anything terribly useful when asking google.
For his kids' sakes I sure hope he is. he oughtta be around for AT LEAST another 10 years.
Ten years from now, Microsoft is going to be aggressively marketing their Windows API for *nixes, and making cash off IP and Patent licensing to corporate solutions providers working in Linux.
Twenty years from now, we're going to see Microsoft pulling a SCO and trying to squeeze a few extra cents on their shares so Bill Gates can have enough money to retire on, claiming that Linus Jr. allowed Microsoft IP into the Linux kernel. The claims will be obfuscated, just like the example code on the OpenOffice.org Impress slides showing the "stolen code".
Thirty years from now, Bill Gates will be remembered fondly as the person who first brought computers to the common man, back when computers were"young" and still crashed. And back when 64GB of RAM should have been enough for anybody.
Fourty years from now, rumors will be going around, and inevitably, said rumors getting forwarded by everyone's mother and best-friend's sister, about how Bill Gates's brain has been preserved and there's a $4 billion cash account willed to the team that can successfully transplant his brain into a genetically cloned and grown body. And Linus Torvalds's name will be in every 1st grade computer textbook along with Babbage, Turing, Von Neumann, and that Apple guy whose computers still hold onto 6% of the desktop computer market.
Here's what you do: You get a hold of news media and use them as a megaphone for asking SCO if they accept the terms of the GPL license, or if they would like samba to offer another, for pay, license under which they may use but never alter samba code.
If they agree to the GPL license, they are effectively giving it credibility and undermining their own legal claims. If they decline the GPL license, they either don't use samba, or they pay the licensing fee (ONE BILLION DOLLARS!) and, well, the samba team steals from the thieves and gives to the poor.
I don't care about the specific technology. All I really want is a screen that:
a) is thin and light enough to be hung on the wall. Picture+Frame thickness is fine with me. One that you put on your wall like a poster, well, even better.
b) is bright and ZERO ghosting.
c) is designed to be both a monitor and a TV. Picture in Picture for the one you're not currently using would be a major bonus.
d) reasonably priced. Before LCD's really hit the market how much did a nice Sony 21" CRT go for? $1400? Now they cost half that. Do you really think CRT production processes got that much cheaper over 7 years?
That's what I want to see.
Well, uploading music to filesharing networks was and still is illegal. I think the thing most people are taking issue with here is that the **AA's want ANOTHER law to make it even worse (What are you in for? Pedophilia. And you? I murdered my wife and all 12 of her lovers. What about you? I uploaded a couple metallica songs on the internet.).
Most people generally respect the laws. We speed a little when we're in a hurry and we think we can get away with it. We make a break across the street during a break in the traffic even though there's a crosswalk 20 feet away. And we trade music and movies on the internet. For the most part, people don't feel bad because they wouldn't buy it anyway - it costs too much. Many times, people try it out and they like it a lot, so they pay special care just to buy it.
So, under modern legislative thinking, it's wrong to share copyrighted material. Why do people do it anyway? What drives such a huge percentage of America to do something wrong and illegal?
Market forces. The distribution channels for music have been getting cheaper and cheaper. CD's cost a ton less to produce than tapes, so why hasn't music gotten cheaper? National distribution methods have gotten more efficient, so why haven't CD's gotten cheaper? And those questions just address what was happening in the 1990s. Right around 2000, the internet was clearly demonstrated to be a popular, easy, and incredibly cheap distribution channel. The longer the distributors resist the market forces, the worse the problem will get. The harder the push, the harder the market will push back. Laws can only hold back market forces for so long.
I don't doubt apple's music service will be successful, because it answers what the market was trying to create. Apple will distribute for indies, it will sell to anyone, and it will sell cheap. Unfortunately, there are a few minor technology hangups (file formats, OS support), but those will be resolved, whether by Apple or by someone else.
A lot of people are very credulous that there might be a linux user base for AOL. I, on the other hand, believe that there are opportunities for lucrative (i.e. profitable) deals with Lindows and the like.
tin foil hats aren't AS good for wired communications. It's GREAT for wireless, though.
I wonder if you could use all the ambient EM radiation to power a small propellor - a tin foil beanie. Hmmmm... paranoia with style and geek appeal...
In regards to the Linux community arguing for one and against the other, there are some differences. Other no-sunset clause licenses were shot down in court - there was a precedent. It had lost previously in court. The GPL, as far as I know, has never been central to a court case for its legality to be tested. And I think, in all honesty, that the GPL has never seriously been tested because people on both sides fear testing the GPL - one side because they're afraid it will win, and the other side because they're afraid it might lose.
In reference to the SCO case, the Linux community is arguing for one and against the other, but that's not really so selfish, because in essence, SCO is doing the same thing to their favor.
Don't forget that IBM has DeepFritz playing for it.
If SCO is playing a gambit just to get bought out, its a dangerous one. All it takes is a clear court win for IBM to make the whole SCO thing look like a sad day in history when a little kid threw a temper tantrum. After all, Microsoft lost two antitrust suits in 10 years, and they came away from both with public opinion saying "yeah, what they did was wrong, but not THAT wrong." Linux, I think is just as capable (although I can say nothing to the likelihood) of walking away from this with a nearly untarnished image, that will only improve with time.
And finally, a disclaimer:
I'm just playing counterpoint to your arguments, my own views are more middle-of-the-road.