Simply plugging in a $800/server/year cost into most of the TCO studies I've seen makes Windows look like a bargain.
Huh?
1. RHAS is free. The added professional services cost $800 but the whole CD is GPL. Read this (http://www.redhat.com/software/whichlinux.html):
Advanced Server is sold through a one-year subscription and it does have a licensing agreement. But before you mention the "p"-word ("proprietary"), understand that the code is open and protected by the GPL license. It's not proprietary. We're licensing the services, not the software. The source code files can be downloaded by anyone, and you still have the right to use the software after the license and services expire.
2. A Windows Cluster with SiteServer and SQL Server can cost upwards of $20,000. I don't see how this is a "bargain" compared to $800.
If I understand the story correctly, plex86 has basically surrendered. They've given up on running arbitrary supervisor level code; the Linux guests that Kevin refers to above require a patch [iu.edu] to "fix" something the new "lean, mean" plex86 gets wrong.
You understand the story correctly but misinterpreted the meaning.
Kevin patched Linux to prove that Plex86 works as a virtualisation environment. This allows him to now work on combining Plex86 (VM) with Bochs (emulation) to provide a complete environment for running any guest OS.
I think the confusion has arisen because Kevin simply couldn't contain his enthusiasm! The realisation that Linux is a 100% virtualisable operating system is quite astounding. He wanted everybody to know this. Can you blame him? He's proven that you can run Linux at 90% or better of native CPU speed but in a complete VM sandbox.
As someone else pointed out: wouldn't it be cool to boot Knoppix on Plex86 running on Windows and have "Linux in a Window". You can do that TODAY. All that's missing is the IO emulation so unfortunately there's no VGA, no HDD, no CDROM. But that code exists in Bochs! It just requires a little more work to integrate Plex86+Bochs and we'll have:
Linux in a VM window running on Windows, at 90% native speed. Imagine the ability to launch Linux sessions on your Windows desktop! No more CYGWIN; just run the real thing!
Linux in a VM window running on Linux! Good for students. Good for developers. I remember as a second year student we used Minix+8086 *emulation* to learn operating systems. Linux+386 virtualisation would have been much faster!
Massively "parallel" Linux clusters running on single hardware platforms! Great for ISPs. Great for developer systems. Great for enterprises where you want to sandbox your production systems but without the expense of 100s of pieces of hardware.
Todays' news might not mean much to most people - Plex86 won't run your DOS games or Windows XP - but it's impressive on a technical level. The fact that Plex86+Bochs will one day run your DOS games and Windows XP seems to have been missed.
Well, there's no chance of that here. What this announcement means is that plex86 can only provide a virtual user mode x86 - i.e. it cannot virtualise an OS and give you Windows on Linux, for example.
Frankly virtual user mode seems pretty pointless to me. Kevin Lawton thinks it is useful because you can modify Linux (and other OSes where you have source access) to be a user mode task and then get Linux on Linux using the new plex86.
I think you've missed the point.
Bochs provides a complete emulation environment. It emulates the CPU, the IO, several popular devices include a soundblaster and an NE2000 network card. The emulation unfortunately makes it intolerably slow.
Plex86 provides a complete virtualisation environment. Kevin first proved this with some natty tests; eg, a busy loop that ran at 90% of native speed! Apparently people weren't impressed by that so Kevin took it to the next level; he realised that the Linux kernel is almost 100% "virtualised" already, save for a handful of instructions. He patched the Linux kernel to make it 100% virtualised and... WHAMMO... it ran within Plex86.
Now I see many people saying "what's the point" in response to this. The point is that he's proven that Plex86 works! The virtualisation experiment has been a success. And the beautiful thing is that over the past few years Bochs has been slowly modified to support virtualisation plugins. There is only a tiny amount of work left (perhaps a year or two) and Kevin will have a plex86+bochs hybrid. The majority of code executes in virtualisation in the plex86 plugin. All IO and hardware and several unvirtualisable instructions will be emulated by Bochs. We're about to get a free VMware!
There's another huge win here! Kevin has proven that you can run a high-speed Linux kernel in a VM sandbox WITHOUT ANY EMULATION. This is news in itself. The flood-gates are open now for massively virtualised boxes. Kevin is talking about writing special Linux drivers which don't speak to real hardware but instead communicate with the plex86 "host". This means we could soon have 100s of Linuxes running on a single platform, ala IBM's S/390. Snapshot a live Linux kernel, migrate it to another platform, and fire it back up! Dump a live kernel to tape! The possibilities are endless!
Ok, at the moment the limitation is that plex86 has no emulation so it has no hardware. When plex86 is combined with bochs I expect more people will understand what a huge piece of news this has been.
This is what leads to such catastrophes as MS Word, which will make toast and pet my dog, but won't let me left-justify my name and right-justify a date on the same line without using a fucking table!
Sure it will. Type your name, click tab, type the date. Then left-click on the horizontal ruler until a backwards capital L appears. You can drag the backwards L anywhere you like on the ruler and the date will follow it. That's tabulation and it doesn't require a table.
I use OO because it doesn't insist on re-spelling my words and changing capitalization and punctuation on me.
You can turn both of those options off in Microsoft Word.
I'd just disable Mozilla stories in my preferences.
Re:I know this book is about software RAID ...
on
Managing RAID on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The "hidden" problem with hardware RAID is that often the operating system isn't aware when an active drive has failed. Some vendors offer monitoring utilities that install into the host OS (eg, MegaRAID controllers have a Linux utility) but this raises dozens of issues. Will the utility impact the server stability or performance? What library dependencies are required for the utility? How do I integrate the utility into my enterprise monitoring system eg, Nagios or Tivoli?
Another problem - perhaps less serious - is that hardware RAID controllers often require a reboot into their proprietary BIOS to do anything. This isn't very useful if you want to expand the RAID array without disrupting service. Some vendors offer utilities to modify the RAID configuration but I've never found all the functionality to be exposed within the utilities. Of course, if you are mucking about with disk arrays on production systems then you have bigger issues to deal with.
1994: Linux is taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. 386BSD works fine, even if slow, and UNIX isn't exactly a big market.
1999: Mozilla is taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. Netscape works fine, even if slow, and free-browsers aren't exactly a big market.
2003: Economical nuclear fusion power plants are taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. Coal power plants work fine, even if dirty, and electricity isn't exactly a big market... oh wait, yes it is.
Maintaining the status quo is rarely the right option. Sometimes progress takes a long time, but this doesn't invalidate or devalue the effort required to make that progress.
Microsoft bundles an extraordinary array of products with Windows XP.
They include:
Internet Explorer (browser);
MSN Explorer (browser);
Windows Media Player (media player);
Windows Messenger (instant messaging client);
Outlook Express (e-mail client); and
Windows Movie Maker (video editor).
Wouldn't most people these days consider these things fairly standard applications that should come with an OS.
I know I would hate to have to pay for an OS, and then buy a browser, media player, email client, video editor, messenger. And I guess also paint, notepad, calculator, etc.
Good point. The problem is... wait for it... no choice! For example, I want Windows XP OS but Mozilla browser, Pegasus e-mail, PowerDVD media player, and I have no use for instant messaging or movie making. So why can't I buy this combination? Sure, I can buy all the Microsoft products as an expensive bundle and then additionally pay for the "non-standard" tools but why can't I just pay for the bits I want? Instead of paying $250 for the Windows XP bundle with lots of junk that I don't want, why can't I just pay $100 for the XP OS core and $100 for the other apps?
Microsoft tried to argue that Windows is like a car. You can't buy the engine and the chassis and the seats and the stereo all seperately! The US courts disagreed. They said Microsoft has to allow third parties (eg, Compaq, Dell) to mix and match products to provide a best-fit for the consumer. The anti-trust case started because several OEMs wanted to ship Windows 95 with Netscape and were bullied into shipping Internet Explorer instead. This was back when IE blew so hard it could knock a little pigs house over.
It's all about having choice. Microsoft takes that choice away. You see this as a positive thing because you think "hey, don't need to buy all the extra bits when I buy XP". You don't see the flip side of the coin; if OEMs could mix-and-match then you could buy Dell Budget XP for half the price of Microsoft XP, or Compaq Deluxe XP with even more features and apps than Microsoft XP. But we don't have the choice. Microsoft takes that choice away to maintain their monopoly.
just curious, how many peolpe saying "yay! MS sucks! I hate Bill! Its the evil empire!" Are typing from Internet Explorer, while listening to mp3's in WMP 9 on XP??
How many of those people are doing so by choice? There are 3 certainties in life: death, taxes, and Microsoft software installed fucking everywhere.
I don't know what amazes me more; the fact that Linux is being used by professional artists to create blockbuster films... or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!
Given this, the GPL is not a license to use the software. You're free to use software under GPL without ever reading or agreeing to it (but you should probably note the "NO WARRANTEE" clause). You can refuse to agree to the GPL and use the software. The GPL only seriously comes into play if you want to distribute copies.
Damn right! In fact, the GPL has explicit wording saying it doesn't restrict usage. It's completely redundant - the GPL couldn't restrict your usage of the software anyway - but it's nice to have it spelled out in black and white.
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of
running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program
is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the
Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
This is the truly terrible thing about DVD CSS and CD CactusShield and all the other "copy protection" mechanisms. They don't truly prevent copying because the industrious pirates will always find a circumvention method. What these technologies actually do is restrict the legitimate purchaser from doing whatever they damn well want with the information. They hinder fair-use without ever achieving their stated goal of protecting the copyright!
The reason I mentioned DVD CSS is because Microsoft is trying this same tactic with Paladium. They are using technology to restrict fair-use under the guise of protecting their copyright. I think Microsoft has recognised (or knew all along) that EULAs are on shaky grounds. Paladium is their answer to solve in technology what they could never solve with law. This lady has challenged the EULA - possibly earlier than Microsoft would have liked - so I could imagine stronger pushing for Paladium over the following months.
I think the saddest thing is that these "legal" barriers need to be challenged at all. Surely it's in the best interest of the government - and when I say government I mean the people's representatives - to dismiss these anti-citizen tactics devised by the large and unscrupulous companies. Instead the citizens suffer for several years until somebody rises to the challenge of defending their rights, with their own money, wasting their own time, to reclaim their rights that should never have been taken away in the first place. It seems... wrong.
... but could you use the loopback device to create an image file and then "dd" the image file to the card? This way the 499,000 writes would be made on the host computer and only the final version written to the card.
yes let us not encourage this - its that rabid attitude that we are trying to talk you zealots out of. it is more important that the code is out there. "anything you write later will be tainted" - no seriously chill,
It has nothing to do with "chilling" or "zealotry" or "communism" or whatever stupid buzzword you want to use this week to ridicule people. It has everything to do with comprehending the reality of copyright law. It does affect you, whether you want it to or not. Hiding under a rock and pretending that all the "zealots" are trying to turn you into a communist is pure idiocy. I thought McCarthyism died out in the 60s. Isn't it nice to know it simply spread to the Internet.
The reality of the situation - without your bullshit about communism and zealotry - is that you can't just stare at somebody else's source code without first comprehending the licensing terms. The license ALWAYS matter. You have to care about the license - not for the sake of zealotry or your "greater good" (not a view I share) - but because it's the law.
The original comment that it doesn't "matter" whether it's GPL or FBSD [sic] is pure and utter nonsense. And you are guilty of supporting this nonsense whenever you casually dismiss people as "zealots" simply because they recognise the true danger of copyright; a danger you clearly do not comprehend.
He didn't say to "pretend copyright laws don't exist"
He said that having access to code is good for programmers. just like having access to books is good for people who want to be authors.
He actually said:
It doesn't really matter to real programmers if it's gpl or fbsd or anything.
If it doesn't matter then why do so many "real programmers" spend so much time arguing about it? Or perhaps they aren't "real programmers"?
He also said...
Having the source and getting ideas from it is a good thing.
Only if the license is appropriate. Try getting some "ideas" from Microsoft Shared Source and see how many lawsuits you get hit with. Or perhaps tell Phoenix that they didn't need to clean-room reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS back in 1985, because they could have just read the published and easily accessible assembly source.
The licensing ALWAYS matters. To pretend that it doesn't is simply naive. You can't simply "look at" source code just because you find it floating around the Internet; if you stupidly do so then anything you write afterwards is possibly tainted.
It doesn't really matter to real programmers if it's gpl or fbsd or anything.
Of course it bloody matters. Pretending that copyright laws don't exist is stupid and naive. Real programmers are not stupid nor naive. Or do you perhaps think that RMS, Linus, Alan, Hubbard, Gettys, Dawes,..., aren't Real Programmers? They have all commented on licensing or made decisions based on licensing.
Obviously, the above argument is absurd, but points out that Slashdot has a double standard.
No shit, sherlock. There are 1/2 million people on Slashdot. I'd be bloody surprised if there weren't 1/2 million different standards.
On the other hand, it is not OK when a company releases GPL under terms not compatible with the GPL.
Castle can either accept the terms of the GPL, or accept the default terms of international copyright. They don't get to pick and choose what suits them best.
The first answer is simple. Ease of use and power are inversely proportional.
I don't believe this, and I think it's the application designer's duty to find the solution that is both powerful AND easy to use. If the designer can't find that "perfect solution" then he's simply no good at his job.
The real problem is that despite the BS and hype about "innovation" there is very little actual innovation in computing.
I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mindset of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users.
Nobody should be forced to think they are a servant OR a master. They are co-workers. Both people work on the same problem to achieve the same goal. The only difference is that each worker contributes a different set of skills.
And I've found that the people most affected by this elitist "I'm better than you" attitude are NOT the techies, but the managers. Some of the managers I've worked with seem to think that they're a better class of person! Managers are supposed to work WITH YOU to solve the problem, not above you.
I don't know about anyone else, but I know that when I'm cooking the entire bench space is covered in cutting boards and bowls and ingredients and so on. A top-down projector onto the bench space would be unreadable because the "screen" isn't flat anymore! I thought the idea looked pretty stupid when I read the "Microsoft House of the Future" article. I can't imagine why you'd want one!?
UNIX, unlike Windows, doesn't let you install stuff to your home directory that easily. You need libraries, etc. With a 100 meg quota, it's impossible, and even so, it would still be difficult and things wouldn't work right. For everything to work, it has to be in/usr.
Pure utter garbage.
Most Solaris packages are relocatable. You use the -R switch to pkgadd.
Most source packages built with autoconf will support --prefix for specifying a non-standard root directory.
You get around quota problems by installing stuff into/tmp. If your quotas are too small then that's hardly the fault of UNIX: it was a purposeful decision by the administrators!
Regarding libraries: the Solaris superuser can add runtime library paths with crle and individual users can add runtime library paths with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
As a student I commonly installed packages to my home directory. On the student network I had installed LaTeX, LyX, VIM and half a dozen games under my home directory. This was a decade ago!
There's absolutely no truth in your bullshit claim that "UNIX... doesn't let you install stuff to your home directory that easily". It's as easy as pie. It always has been.
I can't find the reference easily with Google or Snopes, and I'm not talking about Mackintosh. The other two examples are less urban-legendish. I'll retract this one because I can't find the reference.
I can't comment specifically on arts or NAS, but I know for sure that esound is unusable for network audio. It cannot synchronise audio with video and there is no upper bound on latency. Alan Cox has an amusing quote about esound: something similar to "esound is just about good enough to make a boing noise when you click something, but it's otherwise useless".
I don't think I'd be stretching my luck to say that arts and NAS have similar limitations. I'll be interested to see if MAS is going to solve these problems, or if it's just another half-assed attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
1. RHAS is free. The added professional services cost $800 but the whole CD is GPL. Read this (http://www.redhat.com/software/whichlinux.html):
2. A Windows Cluster with SiteServer and SQL Server can cost upwards of $20,000. I don't see how this is a "bargain" compared to $800.
You understand the story correctly but misinterpreted the meaning.
Kevin patched Linux to prove that Plex86 works as a virtualisation environment. This allows him to now work on combining Plex86 (VM) with Bochs (emulation) to provide a complete environment for running any guest OS.
I think the confusion has arisen because Kevin simply couldn't contain his enthusiasm! The realisation that Linux is a 100% virtualisable operating system is quite astounding. He wanted everybody to know this. Can you blame him? He's proven that you can run Linux at 90% or better of native CPU speed but in a complete VM sandbox.
As someone else pointed out: wouldn't it be cool to boot Knoppix on Plex86 running on Windows and have "Linux in a Window". You can do that TODAY. All that's missing is the IO emulation so unfortunately there's no VGA, no HDD, no CDROM. But that code exists in Bochs! It just requires a little more work to integrate Plex86+Bochs and we'll have:
Todays' news might not mean much to most people - Plex86 won't run your DOS games or Windows XP - but it's impressive on a technical level. The fact that Plex86+Bochs will one day run your DOS games and Windows XP seems to have been missed.
I think you've missed the point.
Bochs provides a complete emulation environment. It emulates the CPU, the IO, several popular devices include a soundblaster and an NE2000 network card. The emulation unfortunately makes it intolerably slow.
Plex86 provides a complete virtualisation environment. Kevin first proved this with some natty tests; eg, a busy loop that ran at 90% of native speed! Apparently people weren't impressed by that so Kevin took it to the next level; he realised that the Linux kernel is almost 100% "virtualised" already, save for a handful of instructions. He patched the Linux kernel to make it 100% virtualised and... WHAMMO... it ran within Plex86.
Now I see many people saying "what's the point" in response to this. The point is that he's proven that Plex86 works! The virtualisation experiment has been a success. And the beautiful thing is that over the past few years Bochs has been slowly modified to support virtualisation plugins. There is only a tiny amount of work left (perhaps a year or two) and Kevin will have a plex86+bochs hybrid. The majority of code executes in virtualisation in the plex86 plugin. All IO and hardware and several unvirtualisable instructions will be emulated by Bochs. We're about to get a free VMware!
There's another huge win here! Kevin has proven that you can run a high-speed Linux kernel in a VM sandbox WITHOUT ANY EMULATION. This is news in itself. The flood-gates are open now for massively virtualised boxes. Kevin is talking about writing special Linux drivers which don't speak to real hardware but instead communicate with the plex86 "host". This means we could soon have 100s of Linuxes running on a single platform, ala IBM's S/390. Snapshot a live Linux kernel, migrate it to another platform, and fire it back up! Dump a live kernel to tape! The possibilities are endless!
Ok, at the moment the limitation is that plex86 has no emulation so it has no hardware. When plex86 is combined with bochs I expect more people will understand what a huge piece of news this has been.
Sure it will. Type your name, click tab, type the date. Then left-click on the horizontal ruler until a backwards capital L appears. You can drag the backwards L anywhere you like on the ruler and the date will follow it. That's tabulation and it doesn't require a table.
You can turn both of those options off in Microsoft Word.
I'd just disable Mozilla stories in my preferences.
The "hidden" problem with hardware RAID is that often the operating system isn't aware when an active drive has failed. Some vendors offer monitoring utilities that install into the host OS (eg, MegaRAID controllers have a Linux utility) but this raises dozens of issues. Will the utility impact the server stability or performance? What library dependencies are required for the utility? How do I integrate the utility into my enterprise monitoring system eg, Nagios or Tivoli?
Another problem - perhaps less serious - is that hardware RAID controllers often require a reboot into their proprietary BIOS to do anything. This isn't very useful if you want to expand the RAID array without disrupting service. Some vendors offer utilities to modify the RAID configuration but I've never found all the functionality to be exposed within the utilities. Of course, if you are mucking about with disk arrays on production systems then you have bigger issues to deal with.
1994: Linux is taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. 386BSD works fine, even if slow, and UNIX isn't exactly a big market.
1999: Mozilla is taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. Netscape works fine, even if slow, and free-browsers aren't exactly a big market.
2003: Economical nuclear fusion power plants are taking so very long to materialize. I wonder if it is even worth the effort. Coal power plants work fine, even if dirty, and electricity isn't exactly a big market... oh wait, yes it is.
Maintaining the status quo is rarely the right option. Sometimes progress takes a long time, but this doesn't invalidate or devalue the effort required to make that progress.
Good point. The problem is... wait for it... no choice! For example, I want Windows XP OS but Mozilla browser, Pegasus e-mail, PowerDVD media player, and I have no use for instant messaging or movie making. So why can't I buy this combination? Sure, I can buy all the Microsoft products as an expensive bundle and then additionally pay for the "non-standard" tools but why can't I just pay for the bits I want? Instead of paying $250 for the Windows XP bundle with lots of junk that I don't want, why can't I just pay $100 for the XP OS core and $100 for the other apps?
Microsoft tried to argue that Windows is like a car. You can't buy the engine and the chassis and the seats and the stereo all seperately! The US courts disagreed. They said Microsoft has to allow third parties (eg, Compaq, Dell) to mix and match products to provide a best-fit for the consumer. The anti-trust case started because several OEMs wanted to ship Windows 95 with Netscape and were bullied into shipping Internet Explorer instead. This was back when IE blew so hard it could knock a little pigs house over.
It's all about having choice. Microsoft takes that choice away. You see this as a positive thing because you think "hey, don't need to buy all the extra bits when I buy XP". You don't see the flip side of the coin; if OEMs could mix-and-match then you could buy Dell Budget XP for half the price of Microsoft XP, or Compaq Deluxe XP with even more features and apps than Microsoft XP. But we don't have the choice. Microsoft takes that choice away to maintain their monopoly.
How many of those people are doing so by choice? There are 3 certainties in life: death, taxes, and Microsoft software installed fucking everywhere.
BTW: xmms, mozilla, debian.
Or an Australian arrested, while in Afghanistan, because a Saudi Arabian killed an American, and then held without legal representation in Cuba.
And the USA wonders why the rest of the world gets upset...
I don't know what amazes me more; the fact that Linux is being used by professional artists to create blockbuster films... or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!
Damn right! In fact, the GPL has explicit wording saying it doesn't restrict usage. It's completely redundant - the GPL couldn't restrict your usage of the software anyway - but it's nice to have it spelled out in black and white.
This is the truly terrible thing about DVD CSS and CD CactusShield and all the other "copy protection" mechanisms. They don't truly prevent copying because the industrious pirates will always find a circumvention method. What these technologies actually do is restrict the legitimate purchaser from doing whatever they damn well want with the information. They hinder fair-use without ever achieving their stated goal of protecting the copyright!
The reason I mentioned DVD CSS is because Microsoft is trying this same tactic with Paladium. They are using technology to restrict fair-use under the guise of protecting their copyright. I think Microsoft has recognised (or knew all along) that EULAs are on shaky grounds. Paladium is their answer to solve in technology what they could never solve with law. This lady has challenged the EULA - possibly earlier than Microsoft would have liked - so I could imagine stronger pushing for Paladium over the following months.
I think the saddest thing is that these "legal" barriers need to be challenged at all. Surely it's in the best interest of the government - and when I say government I mean the people's representatives - to dismiss these anti-citizen tactics devised by the large and unscrupulous companies. Instead the citizens suffer for several years until somebody rises to the challenge of defending their rights, with their own money, wasting their own time, to reclaim their rights that should never have been taken away in the first place. It seems... wrong.
... but could you use the loopback device to create an image file and then "dd" the image file to the card? This way the 499,000 writes would be made on the host computer and only the final version written to the card.
That's not an agnostic. That's just an indecisive son of a bitch.
It has nothing to do with "chilling" or "zealotry" or "communism" or whatever stupid buzzword you want to use this week to ridicule people. It has everything to do with comprehending the reality of copyright law. It does affect you, whether you want it to or not. Hiding under a rock and pretending that all the "zealots" are trying to turn you into a communist is pure idiocy. I thought McCarthyism died out in the 60s. Isn't it nice to know it simply spread to the Internet.
The reality of the situation - without your bullshit about communism and zealotry - is that you can't just stare at somebody else's source code without first comprehending the licensing terms. The license ALWAYS matter. You have to care about the license - not for the sake of zealotry or your "greater good" (not a view I share) - but because it's the law.
The original comment that it doesn't "matter" whether it's GPL or FBSD [sic] is pure and utter nonsense. And you are guilty of supporting this nonsense whenever you casually dismiss people as "zealots" simply because they recognise the true danger of copyright; a danger you clearly do not comprehend.
He actually said:
If it doesn't matter then why do so many "real programmers" spend so much time arguing about it? Or perhaps they aren't "real programmers"?
He also said...
Only if the license is appropriate. Try getting some "ideas" from Microsoft Shared Source and see how many lawsuits you get hit with. Or perhaps tell Phoenix that they didn't need to clean-room reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS back in 1985, because they could have just read the published and easily accessible assembly source.
The licensing ALWAYS matters. To pretend that it doesn't is simply naive. You can't simply "look at" source code just because you find it floating around the Internet; if you stupidly do so then anything you write afterwards is possibly tainted.
Of course it bloody matters. Pretending that copyright laws don't exist is stupid and naive. Real programmers are not stupid nor naive. Or do you perhaps think that RMS, Linus, Alan, Hubbard, Gettys, Dawes, ..., aren't Real Programmers? They have all commented on licensing or made decisions based on licensing.
No shit, sherlock. There are 1/2 million people on Slashdot. I'd be bloody surprised if there weren't 1/2 million different standards.
Castle can either accept the terms of the GPL, or accept the default terms of international copyright. They don't get to pick and choose what suits them best.
I don't believe this, and I think it's the application designer's duty to find the solution that is both powerful AND easy to use. If the designer can't find that "perfect solution" then he's simply no good at his job.
The real problem is that despite the BS and hype about "innovation" there is very little actual innovation in computing.
Nobody should be forced to think they are a servant OR a master. They are co-workers. Both people work on the same problem to achieve the same goal. The only difference is that each worker contributes a different set of skills.
And I've found that the people most affected by this elitist "I'm better than you" attitude are NOT the techies, but the managers. Some of the managers I've worked with seem to think that they're a better class of person! Managers are supposed to work WITH YOU to solve the problem, not above you.
I don't know about anyone else, but I know that when I'm cooking the entire bench space is covered in cutting boards and bowls and ingredients and so on. A top-down projector onto the bench space would be unreadable because the "screen" isn't flat anymore! I thought the idea looked pretty stupid when I read the "Microsoft House of the Future" article. I can't imagine why you'd want one!?
Are you totally spastic? These were student servers. They rebooted them once a year in January.
Pure utter garbage.
Most Solaris packages are relocatable. You use the -R switch to pkgadd.
Most source packages built with autoconf will support --prefix for specifying a non-standard root directory.
You get around quota problems by installing stuff into /tmp. If your quotas are too small then that's hardly the fault of UNIX: it was a purposeful decision by the administrators!
Regarding libraries: the Solaris superuser can add runtime library paths with crle and individual users can add runtime library paths with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
As a student I commonly installed packages to my home directory. On the student network I had installed LaTeX, LyX, VIM and half a dozen games under my home directory. This was a decade ago!
There's absolutely no truth in your bullshit claim that "UNIX ... doesn't let you install stuff to your home directory that easily". It's as easy as pie. It always has been.
I can't find the reference easily with Google or Snopes, and I'm not talking about Mackintosh. The other two examples are less urban-legendish. I'll retract this one because I can't find the reference.
I can't comment specifically on arts or NAS, but I know for sure that esound is unusable for network audio. It cannot synchronise audio with video and there is no upper bound on latency. Alan Cox has an amusing quote about esound: something similar to "esound is just about good enough to make a boing noise when you click something, but it's otherwise useless".
I don't think I'd be stretching my luck to say that arts and NAS have similar limitations. I'll be interested to see if MAS is going to solve these problems, or if it's just another half-assed attempt.