Disclaimers - I've licensed my software under the GPL, and I've successfully at times advocated GPL and LGPL software professionally.
I agree with the principles of the license. My complaint is that the fine print is difficult to explain to a PHB. Many intelligent people I have worked with have misunderstood one or more of the various clauses. In some cases the clauses appear intentionally vague and prone to misreading. As a non-lawyer, it is challenging to explain the GPL license to someone who has it in front of them. It seems no two non-lawyers will arrive at the same interpretation. The format of some sections excepting other sections, and ill-defined concepts (such as the LGPL clauses about interfaces and what constitutes a derivative work) can create enough confusion in software professionals to drive them towards lesser-performing alternatives just for greater clarity.
Perhaps it would be helpful if it came with a non-binding layman-worded abstract in addition to the preamble, or there was a more comprehensive FAQ about it that what currently exists.
As an example of reaonable confusion- 7zip for Windows is GPL licensed. Does the self-extracting archives it creates constitute a Derivative Work?
I've used Ubuntu and think it's easy to use and all-around great. That said, I use Redhat and Fedora distributions extensively. I like the amount of big-picture experimentation, cutting-edge tools/libraries, and directly funded improvements (everything from the kernel to eclipse) that make it into the Fedora releases, and I like the known quantity, high-end hardware support, and commitment to long-term maintenance of the Redhat releases.
Friendly rivalries should stay friendly, especially when core foundations of the free software development model are under attack from government mandated and enforced DRM in hardware, extortion threats to the north american internet infrastructure, and increasing attempts to tie popular hardware APIs to closed platforms.
It is not clear to me how this passage would apply in the situation where a server is intentionally trying to verify that client code has not been modified.
People who compare OpenOffice.org advocacy to Firefox advocy seem to forget that Firefox's competition is given away free in Windows platforms, while OpenOffice's competition costs a large amount of money. I would even say that OpenOffice's competition costs a prohibitive amount for many home users, non-profits, non-university students, and small businesses.
In the bang-for-the-buck metric, OpenOffice.org is a big win for a much larger population than currently know about it. There is a message to get out, that could legitimately help many people.
I agree, however, that the advertisement design could be improved.
I was working in an all-MS shop last week. As a simple data point I experienced two bluescreen crashes. One with Windows 2003 server and another with Windows XP. Both were fully patched up, running on popular tier-1 hardware, and "locked down" with only official software and drivers.
The windows 2003 server bluescreened when a user tried to log in. The XP system bluescreened when I attempted to run some software before the startup sequence had completely finished. Both systems passed hardware diagnostics afterwards. Both are on current UPS systems. I alsao have a windows XP laptop that I can make bluescreen on-demand using only the manufacturer-installed software. I won't list all of my data points for every OS I work on- It would take too much of my time.
IMHO the MS instability delta is still there, although improved and improving.
One of my favourite old MUDs featured a prison affectionally known as "the milk room". It was a prison full of incredibly jubilant spammy songs about milk.
It was similar in concept to this tried-and-true method of torture.
*grumbles* I use this option all the time. It's my business whether people people see how idle I am or not. I hope someone creates a fork with the functionality re-enabled / plugins pre-applied. If no one does so I may do it myself.
Lots of people who use IM as part of their job do not want their idle time broadcast. This seems so bloody obvious I'm shaking my head why it would be removed in the first place.
Professional applications are best suited to professional graphics cards, not gaming graphics cards. Professional cards use different drivers for good reason. So they are totally irrelevant in this discussion.
This is a largely a myth. A significant portion of openGL-based professional applications work just as well on "consumer" cards as they do on a "professional" line. I help develop one at the openGL level and I've done the benchmarks personally. A significant segment of the userbase uses it on "consumer" graphics cards. The NVidia consumer GeForce / professional Quadro parts especially are quite similar for the majority of models, and both lines share a great deal of openGL driver code. For our products, the difference between professional and consumer graphics cards is mainly in procurement stability and manufacturing tolerances than performance or features. There are professional openGL products out there that do utilize special features in professional cards, but these are by no means the rule.
To restate the original point, OpenGL is much more than Doom3, and OpenGL improvements in consumer graphic cards are very relevant to the professional market.
3) There are no other major games, to my knowledge, that still use OpenGL. As such, this can be considered a general fix for OpenGL performance. General in the sense that it fixes the problem (Poor OpenGL performance) as far as the vast majority of gamers are concerned.
There are a LARGE NUMBER of professional OpenGL applications that push current graphics hardware and drivers to their limits. Also, Linux game environments such as Cedega translate DirectX to OpenGL calls, and would benefit from any general OpenGL improvements ATI could provide. Special optimizations for one game is in no way "a general fix for [ATI's] OpenGL performance". I know you qualified your statement, and ID software certainly has done great things for OpenGL, but this was a silly statement to make.
Motorola's marketing department is plenty large. One would think that they would market it themselves rather than delay a product launch. Perhaps they have other reasons for the delay and this is the cover.
Ah. I keep running across Eclipse because I find the idea of good IDE on Linux intriguing. I've developed in Java in the past, so I've used Borland's Jbuilder on Linux and know what I'm missing when I'm not using it.
I keep hearing about Eclipse, and how wonderful it is to have all these plugins. I'm especially interested for C++ use. However, I have not really used what I would call a "full, polished" version of it. Such a beast seems rather hard to find. Even the special bundled version with Redhat Enterprise has a bunch of tutorial and demos that fail to work, and the memory footprint and performance was.. much worse than jbuilder, which is saying something:)
But, I am an open source fan and I think it will get there, and I'd like to think that might be able to help with that project in some minor way once it gets to the point where I can use it enough to have itches to scratch.
As someone who is a developer and has years of experience with Rational's tools.. I think one would have to be fairly ignorant to *NOT* have multiple, repeated WTF moments when dealing with this company and its products.
It may be a big name. It may have a lot of features. It may still suffer from critical design flaws, internal politics, outrageous licensing and maintenance fees, inscrutable buzz-speak, and payroll-draining maintainability.
It seems like words are clearly being twisted here.
I read the page in question as calling for hardcore supporters to proactively spread the word about election fraud that can and has occurred in the past, so as to minimize its effect should it occurr again, with a DNC slant of course, but what do you expect?
This shouldn't be a real concern. It can be seen as being properly prepared. At worst it's the equivalent of blitzing supporters with exaggerated one-liners for why you must vote for their party.
As part of a larger project I've recently had to evaluate these two chips technologies. I've been benchmarking the AMD Opteron 246 (2.0 Ghz) against a 3.0Ghz Xeon with 64bit and hyperthreading extensions, using the the same top end memory config, same hard drives, etc.
With the overwhelming majority of our real-world custom application performance numbers, the Opteron system was the better performer by a wide margin.
I'd suggest if anyone is making a real decision about these chips, to test them out yourself under actual-use conditions.
If you like NWN with more roleplay than mechanics, check out Glorwing my persistent world of choice.
It runs on a dual AMD 2800MP Spindlet3p Blackbird server, for those of you who remember such things. It needs all that horsepower to make up for the horrible scalability of the bioware engine, but it's darn fun and we've got a great community.
I spent some time talking to these guys at USENIX. I think they have a good idea and the drive to see it through. Each of the people I spoke with were technically knowledgable, enthusiastic, and yet quite serious about giving the validation process the weight it deserves. Sure they have some rough edges as many non-profits do when they are getting off the ground, but this seems like an effort worth supporting.
Certs should be available for a hell of a lot less than what Verisign charges. There's an artificial barrier to entry in this market and I welcome commmunity-oriented attempts to lower it. I hope their root cert gets into Mozilla ASAP! I fully support their efforts.
BTW- It was rather amusing watching people come over and ask for the "free" certificates expecting to be handed some physical piece of schwag, heh heh.
I read the article. I've browsed the FAQ and HOWTO and other assorted documentation many times in the past.
The one question most people want to know is what manufacturer/models are compatible, where to buy them, and what drivers to use. When you go to your retail store of choice they often will not list what chipsets they use in their wireless cards. Knowing which chipsets are compatible isn't that helpful if you can't match it definitively with a product.
I ended up going the safe route and ordering some aeronets because I didn't want to play roulette, and I couldn't find a new orinocco-based card for sale anywhere quickly.
Has someone out there discovered this business opportunity and created a web store specifically geared to linux-friendly hardware? Buy their card,download some linked drivers, and you're good to go. That would be easy. Last time I looked the regular linux suppliers let me down.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had read my earlier post more closely, you would have already seen that I know of this FAQ, and do not consider it adequate.
Thanks anyway,
-OT
Disclaimers - I've licensed my software under the GPL, and I've successfully at times advocated GPL and LGPL software professionally.
I agree with the principles of the license. My complaint is that the fine print is difficult to explain to a PHB. Many intelligent people I have worked with have misunderstood one or more of the various clauses. In some cases the clauses appear intentionally vague and prone to misreading. As a non-lawyer, it is challenging to explain the GPL license to someone who has it in front of them. It seems no two non-lawyers will arrive at the same interpretation. The format of some sections excepting other sections, and ill-defined concepts (such as the LGPL clauses about interfaces and what constitutes a derivative work) can create enough confusion in software professionals to drive them towards lesser-performing alternatives just for greater clarity.
Perhaps it would be helpful if it came with a non-binding layman-worded abstract in addition to the preamble, or there was a more comprehensive FAQ about it that what currently exists.
As an example of reaonable confusion- 7zip for Windows is GPL licensed. Does the self-extracting archives it creates constitute a Derivative Work?
I've used Ubuntu and think it's easy to use and all-around great. That said, I use Redhat and Fedora distributions extensively. I like the amount of big-picture experimentation, cutting-edge tools/libraries, and directly funded improvements (everything from the kernel to eclipse) that make it into the Fedora releases, and I like the known quantity, high-end hardware support, and commitment to long-term maintenance of the Redhat releases.
Friendly rivalries should stay friendly, especially when core foundations of the free software development model are under attack from government mandated and enforced DRM in hardware, extortion threats to the north american internet infrastructure, and increasing attempts to tie popular hardware APIs to closed platforms.
It is not clear to me how this passage would apply in the situation where a server is intentionally trying to verify that client code has not been modified.
A few data points:
- Running occasional mainstream / corporate 32bit windows applications on 64bit linux with more reliability than WINE.
- Testing / Exploring software in a sandbox
- Cases where one wants to be able to snapshot the state of an OS and roll back to it later.
- Running corporate VPN software that annoyingly insists on overwriting your local network routes.
- Trying out new OS versions / distributions safely.
- Getting better portability / disaster protection by putting services inside VMs isolated from specific hardware configurations.
Guido van Rossum was heard exclaiming that he was developing with SNAKES on a PLANE.
People who compare OpenOffice.org advocacy to Firefox advocy seem to forget that Firefox's competition is given away free in Windows platforms, while OpenOffice's competition costs a large amount of money. I would even say that OpenOffice's competition costs a prohibitive amount for many home users, non-profits, non-university students, and small businesses.
In the bang-for-the-buck metric, OpenOffice.org is a big win for a much larger population than currently know about it. There is a message to get out, that could legitimately help many people.
I agree, however, that the advertisement design could be improved.
I was working in an all-MS shop last week. As a simple data point I experienced two bluescreen crashes. One with Windows 2003 server and another with Windows XP. Both were fully patched up, running on popular tier-1 hardware, and "locked down" with only official software and drivers.
The windows 2003 server bluescreened when a user tried to log in. The XP system bluescreened when I attempted to run some software before the startup sequence had completely finished. Both systems passed hardware diagnostics afterwards. Both are on current UPS systems. I alsao have a windows XP laptop that I can make bluescreen on-demand using only the manufacturer-installed software. I won't list all of my data points for every OS I work on- It would take too much of my time.
IMHO the MS instability delta is still there, although improved and improving.
One of my favourite old MUDs featured a prison affectionally known as "the milk room". It was a prison full of incredibly jubilant spammy songs about milk. It was similar in concept to this tried-and-true method of torture.
*grumbles* I use this option all the time. It's my business whether people people see how idle I am or not. I hope someone creates a fork with the functionality re-enabled / plugins pre-applied. If no one does so I may do it myself.
Lots of people who use IM as part of their job do not want their idle time broadcast. This seems so bloody obvious I'm shaking my head why it would be removed in the first place.
This is a largely a myth. A significant portion of openGL-based professional applications work just as well on "consumer" cards as they do on a "professional" line. I help develop one at the openGL level and I've done the benchmarks personally. A significant segment of the userbase uses it on "consumer" graphics cards. The NVidia consumer GeForce / professional Quadro parts especially are quite similar for the majority of models, and both lines share a great deal of openGL driver code. For our products, the difference between professional and consumer graphics cards is mainly in procurement stability and manufacturing tolerances than performance or features. There are professional openGL products out there that do utilize special features in professional cards, but these are by no means the rule.
To restate the original point, OpenGL is much more than Doom3, and OpenGL improvements in consumer graphic cards are very relevant to the professional market.
There are a LARGE NUMBER of professional OpenGL applications that push current graphics hardware and drivers to their limits. Also, Linux game environments such as Cedega translate DirectX to OpenGL calls, and would benefit from any general OpenGL improvements ATI could provide. Special optimizations for one game is in no way "a general fix for [ATI's] OpenGL performance". I know you qualified your statement, and ID software certainly has done great things for OpenGL, but this was a silly statement to make.
But you absolutely can beat their engineering (BIOS, cooling, case design, host adapters), their support, and you absolutely can beat their MTBF.
Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two. The CPU doesn't figure into this very much.
For once, the slew of sub-witty barbs and carpet bomb of +Funny mods is actually the best response to the posted story.
I hate these flavour of the month marketing-memes that always generate more heat than light.
Motorola's marketing department is plenty large. One would think that they would market it themselves rather than delay a product launch. Perhaps they have other reasons for the delay and this is the cover.
Ah. I keep running across Eclipse because I find the idea of good IDE on Linux intriguing. I've developed in Java in the past, so I've used Borland's Jbuilder on Linux and know what I'm missing when I'm not using it.
:)
I keep hearing about Eclipse, and how wonderful it is to have all these plugins. I'm especially interested for C++ use. However, I have not really used what I would call a "full, polished" version of it. Such a beast seems rather hard to find. Even the special bundled version with Redhat Enterprise has a bunch of tutorial and demos that fail to work, and the memory footprint and performance was.. much worse than jbuilder, which is saying something
But, I am an open source fan and I think it will get there, and I'd like to think that might be able to help with that project in some minor way once it gets to the point where I can use it enough to have itches to scratch.
As someone who is a developer and has years of experience with Rational's tools.. I think one would have to be fairly ignorant to *NOT* have multiple, repeated WTF moments when dealing with this company and its products.
It may be a big name. It may have a lot of features. It may still suffer from critical design flaws, internal politics, outrageous licensing and maintenance fees, inscrutable buzz-speak, and payroll-draining maintainability.
Hmm.. Something's doesn't seem right about this measurement. I wonder what it could be!
It seems like words are clearly being twisted here.
I read the page in question as calling for hardcore supporters to proactively spread the word about election fraud that can and has occurred in the past, so as to minimize its effect should it occurr again, with a DNC slant of course, but what do you expect?
This shouldn't be a real concern. It can be seen as being properly prepared. At worst it's the equivalent of blitzing supporters with exaggerated one-liners for why you must vote for their party.
Ho-humm.
As part of a larger project I've recently had to evaluate these two chips technologies. I've been benchmarking the AMD Opteron 246 (2.0 Ghz) against a 3.0Ghz Xeon with 64bit and hyperthreading extensions, using the the same top end memory config, same hard drives, etc.
With the overwhelming majority of our real-world custom application performance numbers, the Opteron system was the better performer by a wide margin.
I'd suggest if anyone is making a real decision about these chips, to test them out yourself under actual-use conditions.
Warning, shameless advertising :)
If you like NWN with more roleplay than mechanics, check out Glorwing my persistent world of choice.
It runs on a dual AMD 2800MP Spindlet3p Blackbird server, for those of you who remember such things. It needs all that horsepower to make up for the horrible scalability of the bioware engine, but it's darn fun and we've got a great community.
The link this story points to is invalid.
The comments seem to be disappearing.
A "PURGE COMPLETE" message continues to show up each refresh.
.. if you're unlucky the Automatic ATM Machine will be running an OS based on NT Technology.
I spent some time talking to these guys at USENIX. I think they have a good idea and the drive to see it through. Each of the people I spoke with were technically knowledgable, enthusiastic, and yet quite serious about giving the validation process the weight it deserves. Sure they have some rough edges as many non-profits do when they are getting off the ground, but this seems like an effort worth supporting.
Certs should be available for a hell of a lot less than what Verisign charges. There's an artificial barrier to entry in this market and I welcome commmunity-oriented attempts to lower it. I hope their root cert gets into Mozilla ASAP! I fully support their efforts.
BTW- It was rather amusing watching people come over and ask for the "free" certificates expecting to be handed some physical piece of schwag, heh heh.
I read the article. I've browsed the FAQ and HOWTO and other assorted documentation many times in the past.
The one question most people want to know is what manufacturer/models are compatible, where to buy them, and what drivers to use. When you go to your retail store of choice they often will not list what chipsets they use in their wireless cards. Knowing which chipsets are compatible isn't that helpful if you can't match it definitively with a product.
I ended up going the safe route and ordering some aeronets because I didn't want to play roulette, and I couldn't find a new orinocco-based card for sale anywhere quickly.
Has someone out there discovered this business opportunity and created a web store specifically geared to linux-friendly hardware? Buy their card,download some linked drivers, and you're good to go. That would be easy. Last time I looked the regular linux suppliers let me down.