>that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops More importantly it requires the clients of these banks to jump through more hoops
A tender for deployment, training of school staff and tech support was already awarded to a Linux company. This happened a month ago or so. They probably won't be able to train all of the staff by the end of the year, but there really isn't much else schools can do: there won't be any federal funding for schools, so it's really either Linux or pirated software.
>Flash was introduced here because it just works. Yes, and having full control of the way the player behaves, such as being able to show ads during playback or having a button for embedding the video along with the player on one's blog has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Yes, after reading the original letter I have one: how does that letter prove that Microsoft is evil? The only thing Gates is saying is that he and his company has invested around $40000 in building and supporting the software, and the return was so small, it was just enough to break even. The pay, he states, was $2 an hour. If you don't mind working for $2 an hour, that's ok of course, but most people probably wouldn't go to the university to learn computer science if their pay was less than that of a mcdonalds employee.
Another really big advantage is easier developer workflow. With multi-architecture binaries and libraries, you can test and debug the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application without rebooting into a separate OS, without building some weird chroot environment, without using a special linker that changes the paths of the libraries if it detects a 32-bit binary, etc. This means that your development system is essentially identical to the user systems (except for the kernel), and thus the likelihood of bizarre "Unable to reproduce" bugs goes way down. That's a problem that is best solved by modifying the dynamic linker to look for different shared library paths depending on the arch.
Another big advantage is that if you build a universal install DVD, you have half as many binary packages. And twice as much binary package size.
That means a less complex installer and thus reduced potential for bugs, reduced install testing overhead, etc. Because checking the architecture and choosing between a say x86 and x86_64 directory to copy the packages from is so complex, it's simply unbearable.
Without fat binaries, that's well beyond the ability of most typical computer users And using the command line to grep something isn't? We must live in different universes.
But probably the most important reason for it is that Linux is late to the party. Yes I absolutely agree: Linux should be proprietary, it's late to that party too. MacOS, Windows, VAX/VMS, AT&T UNIX, SCO UnixWare...
Obviously if there weren't clear benefits, there wouldn't be such broad support for this concept. Obviously.
Many other operating systems support fat binaries---Mac OS X, Windows, NetBSD, etc. Windows supports fat binaries? Since when?
One really nice thing is you can install a single fat binary on a shared network drive and clients with different architectures can all run it without having to know what architecture they are on or without a client side script that needs to be installed, or a script that tries to identify the client's architecture. And when the architecture isn't available in the FatELF binary it will simply not run. Nor will it indicate that the problem lies within the machine a user is using and that she needs to switch to a different machine in order to run the software.
Another advantage comes from applications being run from flash drives, which has similar benefits. And similar drawbacks.
For closed source software, however, being able to pull the applications directly from your old hardware to your new hardware (regardless of architecture) and have it work is really nice. Ok, so imagine your proprietary software is packaged inside FatELF: there are two architecures: x86 and x86_64. And you've decided to switch to ARM. Too bad for you. It works on Apple, because Apple tells the software developers in advance, that they are going to switch to a different architecture for their Macs, thus the developers know what architectures to support. Linux, OTOH, works on an array of architectures and if ARM and MIPS try to have a slice of the desktop/laptop cake, you won't be able to switch as easily as you think.
>Why do you think one of the discriminators in a fat binary can't be a distribution identifier, such that there are fat slices for supporting Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc., all from the dame binary file?
>Or that they can't have different slices in the fat binary for Gnome vs. KDE, or desktop vs. Android, and so on?
So, remind me again: why exactly is it not possible to implement all that in a package manager and we need to have a Really Fat ELF?
You do understand that the amont of code executed to implement IPC through unix domain sockets equals to an observational error compared to the amount of code even a simple GTK+ "hello world" application executes, right?
I'm rooting for them because I think they are entitled to limit how their software is used. This is the same mechanism that allows authors of GPL'ed code to limit how their source code is used. I definitely don't want anybody to take the code I've spent months/years on writing and create a proprietary product based on it, thus gaining a competitive advantage over my product and driving me out of business.
Hardly. Apple would be in a worse situation. In the late 90s they had fairly unique hardware. The only affordable PPC computers were either an Apple or a clone. Today, their hardware is custom x86. Everyone and their brother is making hardware that could run the OS if not for Apple's artificial barrier.
Exactly. And since everyone can make hardware that runs mac os AND not pay a license fee, who do you think will loose money?
Apple is certainly entitled to try whatever business model they choose, but the are not entitled to have the courts enforce their wishes to make higher profits.
I think you meant Free Redistribution, rather than no discrimination against fields of endeavor. You can use it in any field you like, the only thing you can not do is sell it or sell works derived from it. Anyway, this was not the point my comment.
Prior to Steve Jobs' return, Apple was struggling to stay afloat. When Jobs came, one of the first things he did was up the major version number from 7 to 8 because the license for Mac OS 7 allowed third parties to make computers that could run Mac OS. It's just my guess but I think the reason Apple is doing this because some of the price that goes into it's computers is the price of developing the operating system. If Psystar wins this case, it will give a carte blanche to everybody else to create Mac clones, bringing Apple back into the situation they were in in 1998.
Personally I'm rooting for Apple on this one. It's their business model, and it has benefits for their users. And Psystar apparently likes to leech off of open source projects, or maybe they just like to violate licenses - it's ambiguous since their latest product - Rebel EFI - is based on an open source one - FakeSMC - whose license doesn't allow commercial use.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by the members of the SVG working group (Apple, Opera, Mozilla) it's unlikely that they will be able to solely extend the standard.
P.S. Oh, and Microsoft is already mentioned there
How come there's no 1984 tag here?
>that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops
More importantly it requires the clients of these banks to jump through more hoops
Big Brother is watching you!
Organs aren't covered by copyright laws. Patent laws on the other hand do cover them...
A tender for deployment, training of school staff and tech support was already awarded to a Linux company. This happened a month ago or so. They probably won't be able to train all of the staff by the end of the year, but there really isn't much else schools can do: there won't be any federal funding for schools, so it's really either Linux or pirated software.
Bah! Those politicians watch too much scifi! There's no way we're calling our new defence network SkyNet!
>Flash was introduced here because it just works.
Yes, and having full control of the way the player behaves, such as being able to show ads during playback or having a button for embedding the video along with the player on one's blog has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Yes, after reading the original letter I have one: how does that letter prove that Microsoft is evil? The only thing Gates is saying is that he and his company has invested around $40000 in building and supporting the software, and the return was so small, it was just enough to break even. The pay, he states, was $2 an hour. If you don't mind working for $2 an hour, that's ok of course, but most people probably wouldn't go to the university to learn computer science if their pay was less than that of a mcdonalds employee.
Another really big advantage is easier developer workflow. With multi-architecture binaries and libraries, you can test and debug the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application without rebooting into a separate OS, without building some weird chroot environment, without using a special linker that changes the paths of the libraries if it detects a 32-bit binary, etc. This means that your development system is essentially identical to the user systems (except for the kernel), and thus the likelihood of bizarre "Unable to reproduce" bugs goes way down.
That's a problem that is best solved by modifying the dynamic linker to look for different shared library paths depending on the arch.
Another big advantage is that if you build a universal install DVD, you have half as many binary packages.
And twice as much binary package size.
That means a less complex installer and thus reduced potential for bugs, reduced install testing overhead, etc.
Because checking the architecture and choosing between a say x86 and x86_64 directory to copy the packages from is so complex, it's simply unbearable.
Without fat binaries, that's well beyond the ability of most typical computer users
And using the command line to grep something isn't? We must live in different universes.
But probably the most important reason for it is that Linux is late to the party.
Yes I absolutely agree: Linux should be proprietary, it's late to that party too. MacOS, Windows, VAX/VMS, AT&T UNIX, SCO UnixWare...
Obviously if there weren't clear benefits, there wouldn't be such broad support for this concept.
Obviously.
Many other operating systems support fat binaries---Mac OS X, Windows, NetBSD, etc.
Windows supports fat binaries? Since when?
Right, all you have to do is manually check if the dependencies needed to run your software are satisfied. Good luck with that.
One really nice thing is you can install a single fat binary on a shared network drive and clients with different architectures can all run it without having to know what architecture they are on or without a client side script that needs to be installed, or a script that tries to identify the client's architecture.
And when the architecture isn't available in the FatELF binary it will simply not run. Nor will it indicate that the problem lies within the machine a user is using and that she needs to switch to a different machine in order to run the software.
Another advantage comes from applications being run from flash drives, which has similar benefits.
And similar drawbacks.
For closed source software, however, being able to pull the applications directly from your old hardware to your new hardware (regardless of architecture) and have it work is really nice.
Ok, so imagine your proprietary software is packaged inside FatELF: there are two architecures: x86 and x86_64. And you've decided to switch to ARM. Too bad for you. It works on Apple, because Apple tells the software developers in advance, that they are going to switch to a different architecture for their Macs, thus the developers know what architectures to support. Linux, OTOH, works on an array of architectures and if ARM and MIPS try to have a slice of the desktop/laptop cake, you won't be able to switch as easily as you think.
>Why do you think one of the discriminators in a fat binary can't be a distribution identifier, such that there are fat slices for supporting Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc., all from the dame binary file?
>Or that they can't have different slices in the fat binary for Gnome vs. KDE, or desktop vs. Android, and so on?
So, remind me again: why exactly is it not possible to implement all that in a package manager and we need to have a Really Fat ELF?
>Lack of slashes (as in "tar/deb/rpm") and no multiplicity of install procedures.
Right, and all of these are 100% alike.
You do understand that the amont of code executed to implement IPC through unix domain sockets equals to an observational error compared to the amount of code even a simple GTK+ "hello world" application executes, right?
Explorer.exe is the equivalent of GNOME's nautilus. It's not a window system.
Actually, I think the window system in windows might reside in the kernel itself.
By the way, the wikipedia page says this about GDI: "GDI is similar to Macintosh's QuickDraw and Linux Xlib."
Why is this modded funny?
I'm rooting for them because I think they are entitled to limit how their software is used. This is the same mechanism that allows authors of GPL'ed code to limit how their source code is used. I definitely don't want anybody to take the code I've spent months/years on writing and create a proprietary product based on it, thus gaining a competitive advantage over my product and driving me out of business.
Hardly. Apple would be in a worse situation. In the late 90s they had fairly unique hardware. The only affordable PPC computers were either an Apple or a clone. Today, their hardware is custom x86. Everyone and their brother is making hardware that could run the OS if not for Apple's artificial barrier.
Exactly. And since everyone can make hardware that runs mac os AND not pay a license fee, who do you think will loose money?
Apple is certainly entitled to try whatever business model they choose, but the are not entitled to have the courts enforce their wishes to make higher profits.
Wishes - no, license - yes.
I think you meant Free Redistribution, rather than no discrimination against fields of endeavor. You can use it in any field you like, the only thing you can not do is sell it or sell works derived from it. Anyway, this was not the point my comment.
Prior to Steve Jobs' return, Apple was struggling to stay afloat. When Jobs came, one of the first things he did was up the major version number from 7 to 8 because the license for Mac OS 7 allowed third parties to make computers that could run Mac OS. It's just my guess but I think the reason Apple is doing this because some of the price that goes into it's computers is the price of developing the operating system. If Psystar wins this case, it will give a carte blanche to everybody else to create Mac clones, bringing Apple back into the situation they were in in 1998.
Personally I'm rooting for Apple on this one. It's their business model, and it has benefits for their users. And Psystar apparently likes to leech off of open source projects, or maybe they just like to violate licenses - it's ambiguous since their latest product - Rebel EFI - is based on an open source one - FakeSMC - whose license doesn't allow commercial use.
Better JSON or XML than CSV
The project will probably miss it's dedline and will be finished by 2220, according to the latest calculations.
...spaceships power nuclear engines