Gnome-libs are included. Every distro has to have GIMP!
I think it was RedHat who obscured the filesystem. Caldera actually includes a "redhat compatibility package" that installs symlinks in all the right (wrong) places -- an unfortunate necessity in a RedHat world. The others are all farely similar. The problem with RedHat is what they do becomes the de facto standard (a bit like Microsoft in that respect).
RedHat has the tools you need to get the job done most of the time, but there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it. Caldera seems to take a step back and say "how can we put all this together into an elegant solution?" For example, on RedHat, config tools are scattered all over the place and many of them are the old familiar (read that as primitive and crappy) like sndconfig and XF86Config. So you'll hunt around for these diverse tools, to get things configured. Sure you've got linuxconf, but not it doesn't include everything. I might add that linuxconf is a textbook case of bad user interface design. I don't think any thought was put into it at all. Caldera, on the other hand, has managed to get nearly ever major config task integrated into COAS, an easy-to-use and relatively complete admin tool. It's worth mentioning that Mandrake has a similar tool. It's not as far along, but it has promise. So Mandake built an advanced installer and config tool on top of RedHat. Why can't RedHat do that?
I think it's a shame that Caldera's Linux distribution doesn't get more attention from the community. I use it, and in my opinion it is one of the best distributions out there. It is easily 6 months ahead of the competition in terms of install tools, admin tools, etc. It's certainly WAY ahead of RedHat.
You make some valid observations, but I think you missed the author's point. There is much more to the GUI problem than the desktop and it's icons. What's at issue are the sloppy user interfaces in the apps themselves. Disorganized menus and menus that lack important functions, inconsistent "look and feel" across different apps, and options that are not grouped properly by category. The consistency problem is getting solved by GNOME and KDE, but some of the other issues are still painfully apparent.
The fact that it includes software is irrelevant. Patenting the device does not mandate patenting the software. Patenting a device does not stifle innovation -- unless you subscribe to the Slashdot/Marxism definition that states that you should be able to get it for free and do whatever you want with it. In fact, if they couldn't protect their investment with a patent, they wouldn't have developed the tech in the first place -- THAT, my friend, is stifling innovation.
The reason I (and others) don't feel patents should apply to software is because software is more like art or literature. It is sufficient to copyright art/literature/software. A copyright then enables others to accomplish the same things, as long as they do it in an original way. Linus Torvalds holds the copyright to Linux. The only reason we can use it freely is because he has licenced it that way.
I've used the Xybernaut, and it's not much fun after the first 5 minutes of initial excitement. Unless you have a situation where it is really required (where I work, scientists use them in the lab so they can easily enter data while they work), there is no point in having one of these. It has a display/touch-screen that you strap to your wrist -- actually it takes up most of your forearm. And there is a big, bulky belt that holds the battery and port-replicator. The headset is huge and heavy and has wires coming out all over the place.
Better to get a palm or laptop. Wearables won't really be practical for personal use until we can fit them to a pair of eye glasses.
Of course they're willing -- because it wouldn't do a damn thing. The only people who would care about OpenWindows are techies like us. It would probably make Microsoft even stronger.
This covers the.com's and.net's pretty well, but what abou the *.edu's and *.org's? I'm not sure all of the informational content from universities fits under TechNet. And the charitable/public interest content of non-profit organizations doesn't fit anywhere in these nine categories. How about 11 continents of the Internet: add Educational and Public Interest continents
if(Crusoe==x86) {clap_your_hands();}
on
Darwin on Crusoe?
·
· Score: 1
I have always thought/. readers were more technically savy. Looking through these posts, I see there are a surprising number of people who think that Crusoe is yet-another-chip that one has to port their software too. In fact, Crusoe has a software layer called Code Morphing that allows it to emulate x86. There is no need to mess with the underlying instruction set (I don't even think it's published).
Therefore, you don't have to port Intel-based apps to Crusoe any more than you have to port them to AMD.
PhD. level computer scientists have been researching artificial intelligence since the late '40s, and we're no where close. I don't think we're going to have a breakthrough just because a bunch of IRC doodz decide to try it. At best, they'll come up with a clever fake.
This is business as usual for science. Methods and procedures are patented all the time. This is reasonable because many times, the procedure IS the science. Sometimes the real achievement isn't the product (after all, we already had sheep) it's the way you made the product. This is very true in biotechnology; alot of the research going on is simply to find methods that actually work. What we'll eventually do with all those biotech methods isn't even known yet.
Actually, this doesn't set a precedent - it follows one. That is to say: procedures are patented all the time. In biotech this is normal. It's normal in other areas as well. I think it's reasonable too, because many times the method IS the science.
Congratulations, Jon. And congrats to all you geeks. I promise not to beat you up anymore. Unless the movie sucks. Then I'll beat you up and take your lunch.
Microsoft is working to make its popular software, especially its Office suite of business programs, available over the Internet, in addition to the traditional way of loading it onto individual personal computers.
Looks like another strategy "borrowed" from Sun Microsystems. They still aren't likely to be ready for network based computing. As long as their success centers around Windows and the current computer/OS paradigm, they won't be able to recover the lost ground when the paradigm finally shifts into new kinds of computing. We've already seen how much ground they lost by getting into the Internet a year or two late. They were never able to "take over" the Internet the way they hoped (MSN is a prime example). They only succeeded with Internet Explorer by building it into Windows; so, again, the strategy centers on the Windows product. Can this Titanic steer fast enough to avoid the inevitable? Actually, a break-up of the company might actually help.
Monopoly power may not be illegal, but point of a settlement/penalty should be to prevent abuse of monopoly power in the future. I'm not sure a break-up would do that. Each of the Baby Bills could continue to use predetory practices such as unfair licensing.
I saw this interview too. Although he praised Linux for coming a long way in the desktop arena, I got the feeling he was saying that the public won't WANT Linux for their desktop. So far, this appears to be largely true.
I thought the section about Desai's work with repairing neurotransmitters in the brain was particularly interesting. It seems like it might be possible one day to inject nanites into the brain that travel around the neuropathways, analyse and report back what they find. In other words, they gradually map the entire contents of a brain - essentially recording a person's mind in it's current state. The only problem then is understanding what the data means in order to truly read the person's mind. Could it then be transplanted somewhere else to give the individual a new life? Could it be added to an AI's resevoir of knowledge? Could it be part of an historical archive of civilization?
Actually, I should have made it more clear that I was responding to the first crop of comments that I saw, not to the article (that's why I said "come on people..."). In the first group of comments I saw alot of people saying that banning W2K in China would bring about an increase in software contributions to Linux, etc. They seemed to be saying that Linux being forced on users is ok because it's Linux, and that is totalitarianism - even if that isn't what the Chinese government is actually doing.
Come on people, you can philosophize all day about how this is good for Linux or how good Linux will be for China, but this is a case where a government is telling its citezens what technology to use - there is NOTHING good about that. Imagine a law like that being passed in the [US,Canada,Europe,Australia,YourCountry]... imagine the law requires Windows. Puts a different spin on things doesn't it?
You can't excuse totalitarian policies just because the [monarch,dictator,emperor] happens to be on your side today.
Slashdot Mirror
Gnome-libs are included. Every distro has to have GIMP!
I think it was RedHat who obscured the filesystem. Caldera actually includes a "redhat compatibility package" that installs symlinks in all the right (wrong) places -- an unfortunate necessity in a RedHat world. The others are all farely similar. The problem with RedHat is what they do becomes the de facto standard (a bit like Microsoft in that respect).
RedHat has the tools you need to get the job done most of the time, but there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it. Caldera seems to take a step back and say "how can we put all this together into an elegant solution?" For example, on RedHat, config tools are scattered all over the place and many of them are the old familiar (read that as primitive and crappy) like sndconfig and XF86Config. So you'll hunt around for these diverse tools, to get things configured. Sure you've got linuxconf, but not it doesn't include everything. I might add that linuxconf is a textbook case of bad user interface design. I don't think any thought was put into it at all. Caldera, on the other hand, has managed to get nearly ever major config task integrated into COAS, an easy-to-use and relatively complete admin tool. It's worth mentioning that Mandrake has a similar tool. It's not as far along, but it has promise. So Mandake built an advanced installer and config tool on top of RedHat. Why can't RedHat do that?
I think it's a shame that Caldera's Linux distribution doesn't get more attention from the community. I use it, and in my opinion it is one of the best distributions out there. It is easily 6 months ahead of the competition in terms of install tools, admin tools, etc. It's certainly WAY ahead of RedHat.
Check it out - you might be surprised.
You make some valid observations, but I think you missed the author's point. There is much more to the GUI problem than the desktop and it's icons. What's at issue are the sloppy user interfaces in the apps themselves. Disorganized menus and menus that lack important functions, inconsistent "look and feel" across different apps, and options that are not grouped properly by category. The consistency problem is getting solved by GNOME and KDE, but some of the other issues are still painfully apparent.
The fact that it includes software is irrelevant. Patenting the device does not mandate patenting the software. Patenting a device does not stifle innovation -- unless you subscribe to the Slashdot/Marxism definition that states that you should be able to get it for free and do whatever you want with it. In fact, if they couldn't protect their investment with a patent, they wouldn't have developed the tech in the first place -- THAT, my friend, is stifling innovation.
The reason I (and others) don't feel patents should apply to software is because software is more like art or literature. It is sufficient to copyright art/literature/software. A copyright then enables others to accomplish the same things, as long as they do it in an original way. Linus Torvalds holds the copyright to Linux. The only reason we can use it freely is because he has licenced it that way.
I've used the Xybernaut, and it's not much fun after the first 5 minutes of initial excitement. Unless you have a situation where it is really required (where I work, scientists use them in the lab so they can easily enter data while they work), there is no point in having one of these. It has a display/touch-screen that you strap to your wrist -- actually it takes up most of your forearm. And there is a big, bulky belt that holds the battery and port-replicator. The headset is huge and heavy and has wires coming out all over the place.
Better to get a palm or laptop. Wearables won't really be practical for personal use until we can fit them to a pair of eye glasses.
As long as they're not software patents, I'm not the slightest bit troubled by it.
Of course they're willing -- because it wouldn't do a damn thing. The only people who would care about OpenWindows are techies like us. It would probably make Microsoft even stronger.
Wouldn't it be better to just finish the ones we already have? Then maybe grandma could use it.
This covers the .com's and .net's pretty well, but what abou the *.edu's and *.org's? I'm not sure all of the informational content from universities fits under TechNet. And the charitable/public interest content of non-profit organizations doesn't fit anywhere in these nine categories. How about 11 continents of the Internet: add Educational and Public Interest continents
or you could get a life.
And did you also "accidently" reply?
I have always thought /. readers were more technically savy. Looking through these posts, I see there are a surprising number of people who think that Crusoe is yet-another-chip that one has to port their software too. In fact, Crusoe has a software layer called Code Morphing that allows it to emulate x86. There is no need to mess with the underlying instruction set (I don't even think it's published).
Therefore, you don't have to port Intel-based apps to Crusoe any more than you have to port them to AMD.
PhD. level computer scientists have been researching artificial intelligence since the late '40s, and we're no where close. I don't think we're going to have a breakthrough just because a bunch of IRC doodz decide to try it. At best, they'll come up with a clever fake.
This is business as usual for science. Methods and procedures are patented all the time. This is reasonable because many times, the procedure IS the science. Sometimes the real achievement isn't the product (after all, we already had sheep) it's the way you made the product. This is very true in biotechnology; alot of the research going on is simply to find methods that actually work. What we'll eventually do with all those biotech methods isn't even known yet.
Actually, this doesn't set a precedent - it follows one. That is to say: procedures are patented all the time. In biotech this is normal. It's normal in other areas as well. I think it's reasonable too, because many times the method IS the science.
Congratulations, Jon. And congrats to all you geeks. I promise not to beat you up anymore. Unless the movie sucks. Then I'll beat you up and take your lunch.
Looks like another strategy "borrowed" from Sun Microsystems. They still aren't likely to be ready for network based computing. As long as their success centers around Windows and the current computer/OS paradigm, they won't be able to recover the lost ground when the paradigm finally shifts into new kinds of computing. We've already seen how much ground they lost by getting into the Internet a year or two late. They were never able to "take over" the Internet the way they hoped (MSN is a prime example). They only succeeded with Internet Explorer by building it into Windows; so, again, the strategy centers on the Windows product. Can this Titanic steer fast enough to avoid the inevitable? Actually, a break-up of the company might actually help.
Monopoly power may not be illegal, but point of a settlement/penalty should be to prevent abuse of monopoly power in the future. I'm not sure a break-up would do that. Each of the Baby Bills could continue to use predetory practices such as unfair licensing.
I saw this interview too. Although he praised Linux for coming a long way in the desktop arena, I got the feeling he was saying that the public won't WANT Linux for their desktop. So far, this appears to be largely true.
IIRC, when Intel invested in VA, VA signed a deal saying they would work exclusively with the x86 arch.
I thought the section about Desai's work with repairing neurotransmitters in the brain was particularly interesting. It seems like it might be possible one day to inject nanites into the brain that travel around the neuropathways, analyse and report back what they find. In other words, they gradually map the entire contents of a brain - essentially recording a person's mind in it's current state. The only problem then is understanding what the data means in order to truly read the person's mind. Could it then be transplanted somewhere else to give the individual a new life? Could it be added to an AI's resevoir of knowledge? Could it be part of an historical archive of civilization?
Actually, I should have made it more clear that I was responding to the first crop of comments that I saw, not to the article (that's why I said "come on people..."). In the first group of comments I saw alot of people saying that banning W2K in China would bring about an increase in software contributions to Linux, etc. They seemed to be saying that Linux being forced on users is ok because it's Linux, and that is totalitarianism - even if that isn't what the Chinese government is actually doing.
Come on people, you can philosophize all day about how this is good for Linux or how good Linux will be for China, but this is a case where a government is telling its citezens what technology to use - there is NOTHING good about that. Imagine a law like that being passed in the [US,Canada,Europe,Australia,YourCountry]... imagine the law requires Windows. Puts a different spin on things doesn't it?
You can't excuse totalitarian policies just because the [monarch,dictator,emperor] happens to be on your side today.
I know that guy. :)