So much breath is wasted in the Linux activist community on the comparison of Linux with Windows on the desktop. But surely that's a dead market not long from now. With huge bandwidth and mass-market consumer applications, we can start again to think about what computers can do.
It's not just.doc - let MS have that if they want. It's about multimedia, ubiquitous, embedded, mobile processing and 'experience' of the computer's manifestations all around us, transparently.
So Linux, running on ARM, MIPS, 68000, etc, etc can be the compact, reliable, efficient, open, free kernel that forms a foundation to start building upwards again for the new wave of technologies and applications, leaving that Redmond dinosaur in the dust....
AOL's taking up Linux, and now Intel. If you forget the MS battle, things are really hotting up. You can get Linux on many PDAs, now set-top boxes, a games machine (Indrema), etc. Judge Linux by its penetration into the new wave of set-top, mobile, embedded machines and applications. Mass consumer apps, not office apps. This is bigger than even the Borg could have dreamt of.
Push multi-platform Linux, small-machine Linux, 3D games Linux. Forget the old 2D desktop Linux.
I'm surprised that, on a quick check through the hundreds of postings to RMS, no-one has asked the following question: (I hope you moderating people are still watching and find a few precious points to get it to RMS' eyes..)
Programs are really just data. Music and other works of art are really just data. The GPL applies specifically to programs.
What do you think about extending the GPL concept to cover non-program data such as music?
Further, do you hold the same stance on such data as you do on programs? In other words, is it less moral if music is less free?
Related question: Gnu-tella is GPL, but it isn't Gnu, is it? Will you give it the official stamp of approval?
Well, it's very different, looks nice, perhaps a bit too complex.
But check out this page where you get the download from: they've used a Microsoft HTML editor: spot the tell-tail '?' in "what?s most important"...
Have they finally relented on this issue??
(For those who aren't aware, MS extended the 'latin-1' standard ASCII++ character set to add a new, different single-quote using one of the unassigned characters. It's a defined standard, but only MS browsers used to read it: regardless of whether the special MS char set was announced at the top of the html page. Netscape traditionally showed the '?' in defiance.)
I don't want to appear like I've got thing about this, but here is a good analysis by someone more intelligent than me of why these schemes are foolish. He talks about the trademark-DNS relationship in particular, and has covered the USPTO issue in his mailing list discussions.
It does remind me of the early horseless carriages...
(While you're there, check out the rest of the site, by the way. Ed Gerck is a smart fellow.)
This idea is as bogus as the USPTO trying to give an email to everyone's address in the US. It's gonna be great for grannies and the otherwise sessile, but the hip young mobile things that care about the WWW are gonna regret that URL and email address within a year or two....
This is 'cyberspace', not real space, and those old folk don't seem to be able to see the difference.
Fellow Slashdotters, before you get on your high horses and start flaming Mr Sherman Fridman (whoever he be) and Computer Currents (whatever they are), just observe the fact that this web site and the article are clearly of poor quality and unlikely to be read by anyone of intelligence.
For example, who is 'Mr Nelson'? He was never introduced. Repeated references to 'Solaris and Linux' in one breath. Obvious plugging of a product.
Calm down and let these sad people have their fun.
I doubt they'll be patenting their 'Click It To Go!(tm)' technology, though, as they probably don't even know what a hypertext link is...
This book, viewed on the web link given, seems to give a nice, graphical overview of the JFC as an official 'party line'.
But as a seasoned Swing developer, I would like to see in a book, not just the PR aspects (what's good, what looks nice, what you can achieve), but also some practical advice about overcoming the many bugs in JFC, the many workarounds you need to include in your code, the peculiar hacks that they've done with dialog boxes (especially in internal frames), the threading issues you may encounter (especially if you decide to multithread your front end), etc., etc.
So, read this and get inspired, try it and don't be too discouraged...
I thought that making a technique open source gives it unoriginality and/or obviousness. Thus not patentable.
So the thing to do (as has been mentioned before under this subject) is to have a public repository of groovy and original-looking code in an easily understood and multiply-implemented form - in the pedantic style of patents.
So USPTO just drops by whenever someone tries to patent the Unix runlevel daemon idea - and learns to understand us and our code and culture in the process. So this site must not be anti-USPTO, is the point I'm making, there.
...each Java thread in the IBM Java VM for Linux is implemented by a corresponding user process whose process id and status can be displayed using the Linux ps command...
The striking observation here is the amount of kernel time spent in the scheduler.... between 30 and 50 percent for kernel 2.2.12-20 and between 37 and 55 percent for kernel 2.3.28...
...it became apparent that a significant amount of time could be spent calculating the scheduler's goodness measure...
We wondered what would happen if the fields required by the goodness function were placed together in the task structure....
The Linux scheduler needs to be modified to more efficiently support large numbers of processes.
The Linux kernel needs to be able to support a many-to-many threading model.
We look forward to working with the members of Linux community to design, develop, and measure prototypes of Linux code to support the changes described above.
When coding a library, write just those functions you actually need to support the application, and put the tests for that functionality in the test program alongside the library source, which must run successfully before committing the code.
Then, as the functionality develops, watch for factoring opportunities and allow yourself two days to re-factor, running the identical test program successfully to ensure you haven't messed it up.
Every so often, allow four days for a major new-functionality-free re-coding.
This approach gets results quickly and above all allows re-use for the next application with just those extra functions needed being added as required.
Don't spend forever in meetings discussing library design. Let the application drive the libraries and watch as successive application coding efforts get shorter and shorter with greater re-use.
Notice that the only reason eBay should care about this is that the punters will be looking at the 'wrong' adverts: those on the indexing site, rather than those on eBay.
From a traffic point of view it should benefit eBay to be linked to by any manner of search or redisplay sites. That is the principle on which the rest of us work. I'd love to have my site watched and the information on it passed on in any form to interested parties.
It's only the advertisers on eBay who are losing out - and who ultimately pay for the lawyers.
Thanks for reminding me that I'm not a typical contractor. I was just about to spin off a note saying that if you're any good, go contracting, because permanent staff are usually timeserving deadwood with more of an eye on the corporate ladder than on the code and architecture of the systems they're involved with. But you've shown an excellent case that most contractors are riven with faults, too. So I must be the exception, because I actually care about the code I write.
Slashdot Mirror
So much breath is wasted in the Linux activist community on the comparison of Linux with Windows on the desktop. But surely that's a dead market not long from now. With huge bandwidth and mass-market consumer applications, we can start again to think about what computers can do.
.doc - let MS have that if they want. It's about multimedia, ubiquitous, embedded, mobile processing and 'experience' of the computer's manifestations all around us, transparently.
It's not just
So Linux, running on ARM, MIPS, 68000, etc, etc can be the compact, reliable, efficient, open, free kernel that forms a foundation to start building upwards again for the new wave of technologies and applications, leaving that Redmond dinosaur in the dust....
AOL's taking up Linux, and now Intel. If you forget the MS battle, things are really hotting up. You can get Linux on many PDAs, now set-top boxes, a games machine (Indrema), etc. Judge Linux by its penetration into the new wave of set-top, mobile, embedded machines and applications. Mass consumer apps, not office apps. This is bigger than even the Borg could have dreamt of.
Push multi-platform Linux, small-machine Linux, 3D games Linux. Forget the old 2D desktop Linux.
--------------------------------------
I'm surprised that, on a quick check through the hundreds of postings to RMS, no-one has asked the following question: (I hope you moderating people are still watching and find a few precious points to get it to RMS' eyes..)
Programs are really just data. Music and other works of art are really just data. The GPL applies specifically to programs.
What do you think about extending the GPL concept to cover non-program data such as music?
Further, do you hold the same stance on such data as you do on programs? In other words, is it less moral if music is less free?
Related question: Gnu-tella is GPL, but it isn't Gnu, is it? Will you give it the official stamp of approval?
--------------------------------------
Well, it's very different, looks nice, perhaps a bit too complex.
But check out this page where you get the download from: they've used a Microsoft HTML editor: spot the tell-tail '?' in "what?s most important"...
Have they finally relented on this issue??
(For those who aren't aware, MS extended the 'latin-1' standard ASCII++ character set to add a new, different single-quote using one of the unassigned characters. It's a defined standard, but only MS browsers used to read it: regardless of whether the special MS char set was announced at the top of the html page. Netscape traditionally showed the '?' in defiance.)
--------------------------------------
It does remind me of the early horseless carriages...
(While you're there, check out the rest of the site, by the way. Ed Gerck is a smart fellow.)
--------------------------------------
This idea is as bogus as the USPTO trying to give an email to everyone's address in the US. It's gonna be great for grannies and the otherwise sessile, but the hip young mobile things that care about the WWW are gonna regret that URL and email address within a year or two....
This is 'cyberspace', not real space, and those old folk don't seem to be able to see the difference.
Tragic.
--------------------------------------
Fellow Slashdotters, before you get on your high horses and start flaming Mr Sherman Fridman (whoever he be) and Computer Currents (whatever they are), just observe the fact that this web site and the article are clearly of poor quality and unlikely to be read by anyone of intelligence.
For example, who is 'Mr Nelson'? He was never introduced. Repeated references to 'Solaris and Linux' in one breath. Obvious plugging of a product.
Calm down and let these sad people have their fun.
I doubt they'll be patenting their 'Click It To Go!(tm)' technology, though, as they probably don't even know what a hypertext link is...
--------------------------------------
This book, viewed on the web link given, seems to give a nice, graphical overview of the JFC as an official 'party line'.
But as a seasoned Swing developer, I would like to see in a book, not just the PR aspects (what's good, what looks nice, what you can achieve), but also some practical advice about overcoming the many bugs in JFC, the many workarounds you need to include in your code, the peculiar hacks that they've done with dialog boxes (especially in internal frames), the threading issues you may encounter (especially if you decide to multithread your front end), etc., etc.
So, read this and get inspired, try it and don't be too discouraged...
--------------------------------------
I thought that making a technique open source gives it unoriginality and/or obviousness. Thus not patentable.
So the thing to do (as has been mentioned before under this subject) is to have a public repository of groovy and original-looking code in an easily understood and multiply-implemented form - in the pedantic style of patents.
So USPTO just drops by whenever someone tries to patent the Unix runlevel daemon idea - and learns to understand us and our code and culture in the process. So this site must not be anti-USPTO, is the point I'm making, there.
--------------------------------------
...each Java thread in the IBM Java VM for Linux is implemented by a corresponding user process whose process id and status can be displayed using the Linux ps command...
.... between 30 and 50 percent for kernel 2.2.12-20 and between 37 and 55 percent for kernel 2.3.28...
The striking observation here is the amount of kernel time spent in the scheduler
...it became apparent that a significant amount of time could be spent calculating the scheduler's goodness measure...
We wondered what would happen if the fields required by the goodness function were placed together in the task structure....
The Linux scheduler needs to be modified to more efficiently support large numbers of processes.
The Linux kernel needs to be able to support a many-to-many threading model.
We look forward to working with the members of Linux community to design, develop, and measure prototypes of Linux code to support the changes described above.
--------------------------------------
When coding a library, write just those functions you actually need to support the application, and put the tests for that functionality in the test program alongside the library source, which must run successfully before committing the code.
Then, as the functionality develops, watch for factoring opportunities and allow yourself two days to re-factor, running the identical test program successfully to ensure you haven't messed it up.
Every so often, allow four days for a major new-functionality-free re-coding.
This approach gets results quickly and above all allows re-use for the next application with just those extra functions needed being added as required.
Don't spend forever in meetings discussing library design. Let the application drive the libraries and watch as successive application coding efforts get shorter and shorter with greater re-use.
Just my opinion. Flame on.
--------------------------------------
Notice that the only reason eBay should care about this is that the punters will be looking at the 'wrong' adverts: those on the indexing site, rather than those on eBay.
From a traffic point of view it should benefit eBay to be linked to by any manner of search or redisplay sites. That is the principle on which the rest of us work. I'd love to have my site watched and the information on it passed on in any form to interested parties.
It's only the advertisers on eBay who are losing out - and who ultimately pay for the lawyers.
Thanks for reminding me that I'm not a typical contractor. I was just about to spin off a note saying that if you're any good, go contracting, because permanent staff are usually timeserving deadwood with more of an eye on the corporate ladder than on the code and architecture of the systems they're involved with. But you've shown an excellent case that most contractors are riven with faults, too. So I must be the exception, because I actually care about the code I write.