Of course they don't care about Linux. Dell is a public company and companies only care about making money. Period. It's their obligation to their stockholders. You're just being naive if you think they would promote anything out of the goodness of their heart or because they think it's the "right thing" to do.
Money spent on good works comes back in the form of increased value of the corporate brand. This is the "goodwill" jeffphil speaks of in a previous comment. What PR exists better than giving customers what they want?
you're just plain silly if you want to get angry at Dell or any other company for that matter.
But if you get upset publicly and throw up a well-written anti-Dell web page that some widely read weblog like Kuro5hin or Slashdot picks up, you may hurt Dell's brand value and thus its bottom line.
I'll explain this process in terms of the popular Bugzilla tracking system.
First a secretary or intern will be assigned to read the bug mail and sort out the legitimate problems from the lunatics writing in that your product just SUCKS.
The user enters the bug into the bug tracking system, and the system marks it UNCONFIRMED.
If it is a legitimate bug report and it includes all the information necessary to reproduce it then it gets entered in the bug tracking/administration system. An email or memo will be sent to the manager of the division that handles testing.
And the bug becomes NEW.
The manager will assign the bug to a tester who will try to reproduce it. That is after he has worked on all the other items in his queue that have a higher priority.
Bugathon. Also note that this step may be less necessary if an experienced user attaches a reproducible test case to the bug report.
Once he has reproduced it he identifys what component causes the problem (or guesses). And add adds the item as a reproduced bug to the bug tracking system.
In the process, he adds keywords to the 'summary' and 'keywords' fields and more description such as a stack trace. He also "triages" the bug, marking it as high, medium, or low priority.
The manager in charge of the division that handles that system or component will get the notice and eventually get around (depending on priority) to assigning the bug to an engineer.
The engineer will then start working on the bug
ASSIGNED.
but only after he has already completed what he was working on at the time, and cleared any higher priority items out of his queue as well.
Bugzilla sometimes calls its queues "plates" or "radars".
Once a patch gets r= and sr= (two types of approval from two different groups of code reviewers), somebody with write access to the CVS tree checks it in and marks the issue RESOLVED.
Sound more familiar? In other words, the primary difference between Microsoft's bug tracking system and Bugzilla is that Bugzilla work happens in a public forum as opposed to a private forum.
seems to me that $20,000 is an awful lot to pay for the ability to reliably run softmodems in linux... with the prevalence of high speed connections these days
Not all areas have high-speed connections (on the order of 200 kbps or more), especially rural areas. Would you rather have your company pitch in $20,000 to fund development of portable softmodem code for its employees' laptops or pay $200,000 per employee to move their families to an area where consumer broadband is available?
on the scale of politics, libertarians are very far on the "right wing"
Wrong. Economically, libertarians are right-wing, but socially, they're left-wing. Libertarians place themselves on the top wing, the other wings being left (liberal), right (conservative), and bottom (authoritarian). Where do you fall?
These five mappers get you most NES games
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 2
Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support
It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.
That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.
Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.
NESten uses DLLs for mappers
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 2
I've also felt it was strange the various authors for the various NES emulators never considered using a modular design allowing mappers to be supported.
The Win32 emulator NESten uses DLLs for its cartridge board emulation support. Or you can contribute a mapper to a free software emulator such as nesterj (Win32) or TuxNES (freebsd/linux86).
All in all, I think this "sh or bash" thing will be an issue only in a very few restricted cases, mostly embedded systems.
By dismissing embedded systems as a "few restricted cases," you misunderestimate their ubiquity and importance. Go to Worst Buy or Shircuit Shitty and look at the PC section vs. the sections that have TiVo, WebTV, GameCube, etc. Do you see more PCs on the shelf, or more embedded devices on the shelf? For instance, TiVo runs a Linux kernel, and Dreamcast and PS2 also have Linux available. (Sony will soon bring PS2 Linux Kit to the U.S.) Now would you rather run bash (Bloated A$$ SHell), or would you rather run something smaller and be able to add more features on a given set of fixed hardware such as a game console or a poor student's PC?
Timothy saying he'd rather have M:GE instead of a GameCube would be like me saying I'd rather use my bicycle to travel from LA to Boston instead of taking a plane.
Mandrake Gaming Edition on the laptop a fellow already owns takes up less physical space than a GameCube console and a TV. It also costs less than a GameCube console and a TV.
(I bought a GameCube because I'm not as space-constrained as some college students.)
Star Wars Episode 2 release to theaters in US is May 16, 2002; 20th century is aiming to get as near as possibly simulatenous release in the UK.
If Fox manages to pull off a simultaneous theatrical release in major markets and then a simultaneous DVD release in major markets, Fox won't be able to hide behind the "staggered release schedule" argument for region lockout. Once AOTC hits second-run theaters, why don't we all go ask Fox to make the DVD region-free?
If you want "soap on a rope", you might want to look at the Remote Object Proxy Engine (ROPE), a part of Microsoft's SOAP implementation that translates COM calls to SOAP calls.
What exactly is it about threads that "encourage" people to use a one-thread-per-client model?
The fact that it's the only available method under some systems. For instance, last time I checked, 100% Pure Java(tm) applications had no nonblocking I/O facility, so you had to open a thread for each concurrent I/O stream.
What is it about RPC that encourages people to to ignore network overhead?
Try developers designing, testing, and optimizing an application on a local LAN and then wondering why it doesn't work across the full Internet.
Abe Lincoln has been dead for a long time, copyright has expired on his portrait (10 years after death, IIRC)
This may be true of Abraham Lincoln, but it isn't true of anybody who died on or after January 1, 1931. Copyright lasts until the later of 70 years after December 31 on or after the death of the last surviving author, or 95 years after December 31 on or after first publication. And yes I do think believe that the term is too long to effectively "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." See also Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Even then, trademarks never expire as long as they remain in use.
You answered your own question. Sometimes games such as Super Smash Bros. that use proprietary characters create more Fun than games such as q3a.
As for games *never* being available for the PC, that's what MS is trying to do with the Xbox
Will MS make a smash bros. clone? What about a mario party clone? What about multiplayer tetris (no, a port of the old 16-bit Windows Entertainment pack doesn't count) or dr. mario?
As far as head-to-head, uhhh how are you connected and reading slashdot? After all,/. requires readers have a pc and a internet connection too.
Some of us read Slashdot at a public library, and I don't think many libraries would take too kindly to patrons coming in and connecting their Xboxen or bringing q3a CDs.
3. Are the 6 people going to pitch in and help pay for the console?
Yes. Sometimes, especially with the under-18 crowd, four children pool their allowances toward a console and games.
Again, my point is that the console isn't worth one or two games.
Unless the child labor laws mandate that you be poor.
What about Internet gaming? It would be no problem for me to get seven friends with at least a 17" monitor and a permanent Internet connection.
What if you and your friends live in an area that doesn't get cable modem service or DSL service? In that case, you would have to spend upwards of $200,000 per family to pack up and move to an area that offered high-speed connections. I'd rather pay $1000 for two 25" TVs, two N64 systems, six extra controllers, and two copies of Super Smash Bros. than $1.6 million to upgrade everybody to DSL.
Did you buy the PlayStation? It supported LAN parties with it's link cable.
The model of PlayStation being sold today (PSone, the one that looks like the console a Precious Moments person would use) lacks a link port. Even then, the old PlayStation link cable supported only two players.
Well, it isn't theft really since the BSD licence allow that
Even with the BSD license version 2 that eliminated the GPL-incompatible form of the advertising clause ("This program contains software developed by Regents of UC and contributors" in all advertising), all programs using BSD code still must contain a little ad in the about box: "Portions copyright Regents of the University of California." Not only does this imprint "University of California" on the minds of bored high schoolers looking through about boxes, but it also gets people to go looking on Google for the Regents, and lots of BSD licensed software pops up. Advertising works.
I can see an interpretation of the BSD license version 2 that potentially infects software that uses BSD code to be free as in beer:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:... Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
SourceForge trying to ride on MS .NET's coattails
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 2
How the hell should the change in the name to Source[Forge].NET bring anything?
SourceForge (not SourceForge.net) is a collaborative software development platform.
SourceForge.net is a service provided freely to Open Source software development projects.
The new name SourceForge.net, and the logo with an enlarged dot and a "net" bigger in point size than the "FORGE", remind me too much of Microsoft.NET. Are you porting it to Mono or something? I would have called the code SourceForge Engine and the site SourceForge Projects in keeping with the general policy of following trademarks with a generic noun.
remember that the _purpose_ of copyright is to encourage many people to read the works, and eventually change and incorporate them in new works
If individuals want to incorporate copyrighted works into new works without a lawsuit or royalties bankrupting them, they have to wait for the copyright to expire. Yeah, right. Not in my lifetime nor in yours. Copyrights already last 95 years, and you can bet that by 2020, Di$ney will have contributed another $6 million of soft money to the Republicratic Party in exchange for yet another term extension. How the courts consider 95 years as sufficiently "limited Times" designed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" escapes me.
Boycott the estate of Sonny Bono, whose widow introduced and sponsored the bill. Boycott Cher, who has been quoted as favoring a term of "forever less a day." Boycott the Walt Disney Company, which bankrolled the bribes that got the bill passed. Boycott all color motion pictures produced by MPAA member studios, as the first commercial color film technology appeared in 1923, and all works created on or after January 1, 1923, are under an effective perpetual copyright in the United States.
Transmeta is NOT RISC, it is VLIW with a x86 to VLIW optimizing translator.
VLIW means "very long instruction word," and EPIC means "explicit parallel instruction computing," both of which in practice mean "architectures that combine several fixed-length instructions into one word." RISC means "reduced instruction set computing," which in practice means "architectures with fixed-length instructions." All important VLIW/EPIC instruction sets have fixed-length instructions (32-bit in a 256-bit word for TMS320C6K, 32-bit in a 128-bit word for Crusoe, or 41-bit in a 128-bit word for IA64), but MIPS, PPC, and Sparc disprove the converse; therefore, VLIW/EPIC RISC.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they don't care about Linux. Dell is a public company and companies only care about making money. Period. It's their obligation to their stockholders. You're just being naive if you think they would promote anything out of the goodness of their heart or because they think it's the "right thing" to do.
Money spent on good works comes back in the form of increased value of the corporate brand. This is the "goodwill" jeffphil speaks of in a previous comment. What PR exists better than giving customers what they want?
you're just plain silly if you want to get angry at Dell or any other company for that matter.
But if you get upset publicly and throw up a well-written anti-Dell web page that some widely read weblog like Kuro5hin or Slashdot picks up, you may hurt Dell's brand value and thus its bottom line.
I'll explain this process in terms of the popular Bugzilla tracking system.
First a secretary or intern will be assigned to read the bug mail and sort out the legitimate problems from the lunatics writing in that your product just SUCKS.
The user enters the bug into the bug tracking system, and the system marks it UNCONFIRMED. If it is a legitimate bug report and it includes all the information necessary to reproduce it then it gets entered in the bug tracking/administration system. An email or memo will be sent to the manager of the division that handles testing.
And the bug becomes NEW.
The manager will assign the bug to a tester who will try to reproduce it. That is after he has worked on all the other items in his queue that have a higher priority.
Bugathon. Also note that this step may be less necessary if an experienced user attaches a reproducible test case to the bug report.
Once he has reproduced it he identifys what component causes the problem (or guesses). And add adds the item as a reproduced bug to the bug tracking system.
In the process, he adds keywords to the 'summary' and 'keywords' fields and more description such as a stack trace. He also "triages" the bug, marking it as high, medium, or low priority.
The manager in charge of the division that handles that system or component will get the notice and eventually get around (depending on priority) to assigning the bug to an engineer. The engineer will then start working on the bug
ASSIGNED.
but only after he has already completed what he was working on at the time, and cleared any higher priority items out of his queue as well.
Bugzilla sometimes calls its queues "plates" or "radars".
Once a patch gets r= and sr= (two types of approval from two different groups of code reviewers), somebody with write access to the CVS tree checks it in and marks the issue RESOLVED.
Sound more familiar? In other words, the primary difference between Microsoft's bug tracking system and Bugzilla is that Bugzilla work happens in a public forum as opposed to a private forum.
I'm investigating which precisely patents are these (some of them have patent numbers, some don't).
One of these is U.S. Patent 4,558,302 on LZW compression that the V.42bis standard uses, owned by Unisys Corporation. Unisys's policy since mid-1999 has been not to license the LZW patent to free software projects.
requiring Compression adds a substanial amount of work
I don't think we're likely to see V.42bis compression support in free software for several years, as the V.42bis standard requires the use of patented LZW technology, and Unisys refuses to license LZW for use in free software. Feel glad that patents last only 20 years after filing and not forever like copyrights.
seems to me that $20,000 is an awful lot to pay for the ability to reliably run softmodems in linux ... with the prevalence of high speed connections these days
Not all areas have high-speed connections (on the order of 200 kbps or more), especially rural areas. Would you rather have your company pitch in $20,000 to fund development of portable softmodem code for its employees' laptops or pay $200,000 per employee to move their families to an area where consumer broadband is available?
No. I use the Gimp for windows and...well, it sucks.
What kind of problems are you having with GIMP 1.2 for Win32? If you don't want to discuss them here, send me private email at
(Ever noticed the increase in +2 posts recently? The "No Score +1 Bonus" checkbox isn't working at all.)on the scale of politics, libertarians are very far on the "right wing"
Wrong. Economically, libertarians are right-wing, but socially, they're left-wing. Libertarians place themselves on the top wing, the other wings being left (liberal), right (conservative), and bottom (authoritarian). Where do you fall?
Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support
It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.
That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.
Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.
I've also felt it was strange the various authors for the various NES emulators never considered using a modular design allowing mappers to be supported.
The Win32 emulator NESten uses DLLs for its cartridge board emulation support. Or you can contribute a mapper to a free software emulator such as nesterj (Win32) or TuxNES (freebsd/linux86).
All in all, I think this "sh or bash" thing will be an issue only in a very few restricted cases, mostly embedded systems.
By dismissing embedded systems as a "few restricted cases," you misunderestimate their ubiquity and importance. Go to Worst Buy or Shircuit Shitty and look at the PC section vs. the sections that have TiVo, WebTV, GameCube, etc. Do you see more PCs on the shelf, or more embedded devices on the shelf? For instance, TiVo runs a Linux kernel, and Dreamcast and PS2 also have Linux available. (Sony will soon bring PS2 Linux Kit to the U.S.) Now would you rather run bash (Bloated A$$ SHell), or would you rather run something smaller and be able to add more features on a given set of fixed hardware such as a game console or a poor student's PC?
Have you ever heard of shared-copy-on-write executables?
Have you heard of U.S. Patent 4,742,450 on the shared-copy-on-write memory segments that loading such executables requires?
Timothy saying he'd rather have M:GE instead of a GameCube would be like me saying I'd rather use my bicycle to travel from LA to Boston instead of taking a plane.
Mandrake Gaming Edition on the laptop a fellow already owns takes up less physical space than a GameCube console and a TV. It also costs less than a GameCube console and a TV.
(I bought a GameCube because I'm not as space-constrained as some college students.)
Star Wars Episode 2 release to theaters in US is May 16, 2002; 20th century is aiming to get as near as possibly simulatenous release in the UK.
If Fox manages to pull off a simultaneous theatrical release in major markets and then a simultaneous DVD release in major markets, Fox won't be able to hide behind the "staggered release schedule" argument for region lockout. Once AOTC hits second-run theaters, why don't we all go ask Fox to make the DVD region-free?
If you want "soap on a rope", you might want to look at the Remote Object Proxy Engine (ROPE), a part of Microsoft's SOAP implementation that translates COM calls to SOAP calls.
What exactly is it about threads that "encourage" people to use a one-thread-per-client model?
The fact that it's the only available method under some systems. For instance, last time I checked, 100% Pure Java(tm) applications had no nonblocking I/O facility, so you had to open a thread for each concurrent I/O stream.
What is it about RPC that encourages people to to ignore network overhead?
Try developers designing, testing, and optimizing an application on a local LAN and then wondering why it doesn't work across the full Internet.
Abe Lincoln has been dead for a long time, copyright has expired on his portrait (10 years after death, IIRC)
This may be true of Abraham Lincoln, but it isn't true of anybody who died on or after January 1, 1931. Copyright lasts until the later of 70 years after December 31 on or after the death of the last surviving author, or 95 years after December 31 on or after first publication. And yes I do think believe that the term is too long to effectively "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." See also Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Even then, trademarks never expire as long as they remain in use.
Get eight network cards for $30 each plus one hub for $20. Maybe you need some cabling for around $80, but that's it.
Plus $800 for each PC. Not every family can afford to lose use of the family PC for the duration of the LAN party.
That's a total of $340 plus one game (the others can use the spawn version I think)
Not all PC games have a spawn version.
Mario Party 3?
You answered your own question. Sometimes games such as Super Smash Bros. that use proprietary characters create more Fun than games such as q3a.
As for games *never* being available for the PC, that's what MS is trying to do with the Xbox
Will MS make a smash bros. clone? What about a mario party clone? What about multiplayer tetris (no, a port of the old 16-bit Windows Entertainment pack doesn't count) or dr. mario?
As far as head-to-head, uhhh how are you connected and reading slashdot? After all, /. requires readers have a pc and a internet connection too.
Some of us read Slashdot at a public library, and I don't think many libraries would take too kindly to patrons coming in and connecting their Xboxen or bringing q3a CDs.
3. Are the 6 people going to pitch in and help pay for the console?
Yes. Sometimes, especially with the under-18 crowd, four children pool their allowances toward a console and games.
Again, my point is that the console isn't worth one or two games.
Unless the child labor laws mandate that you be poor.
What about Internet gaming? It would be no problem for me to get seven friends with at least a 17" monitor and a permanent Internet connection.
What if you and your friends live in an area that doesn't get cable modem service or DSL service? In that case, you would have to spend upwards of $200,000 per family to pack up and move to an area that offered high-speed connections. I'd rather pay $1000 for two 25" TVs, two N64 systems, six extra controllers, and two copies of Super Smash Bros. than $1.6 million to upgrade everybody to DSL.
Did you buy the PlayStation? It supported LAN parties with it's link cable.
The model of PlayStation being sold today (PSone, the one that looks like the console a Precious Moments person would use) lacks a link port. Even then, the old PlayStation link cable supported only two players.
Well, it isn't theft really since the BSD licence allow that
Even with the BSD license version 2 that eliminated the GPL-incompatible form of the advertising clause ("This program contains software developed by Regents of UC and contributors" in all advertising), all programs using BSD code still must contain a little ad in the about box: "Portions copyright Regents of the University of California." Not only does this imprint "University of California" on the minds of bored high schoolers looking through about boxes, but it also gets people to go looking on Google for the Regents, and lots of BSD licensed software pops up. Advertising works.
I can see an interpretation of the BSD license version 2 that potentially infects software that uses BSD code to be free as in beer:
How the hell should the change in the name to Source[Forge].NET bring anything?
Perhaps some association with Microsoft, as I remarked earlier?
SourceForge (not SourceForge.net) is a collaborative software development platform.
SourceForge.net is a service provided freely to Open Source software development projects.
The new name SourceForge.net, and the logo with an enlarged dot and a "net" bigger in point size than the "FORGE", remind me too much of Microsoft .NET. Are you porting it to Mono or something? I would have called the code SourceForge Engine and the site SourceForge Projects in keeping with the general policy of following trademarks with a generic noun.
remember that the _purpose_ of copyright is to encourage many people to read the works, and eventually change and incorporate them in new works
If individuals want to incorporate copyrighted works into new works without a lawsuit or royalties bankrupting them, they have to wait for the copyright to expire. Yeah, right. Not in my lifetime nor in yours. Copyrights already last 95 years, and you can bet that by 2020, Di$ney will have contributed another $6 million of soft money to the Republicratic Party in exchange for yet another term extension. How the courts consider 95 years as sufficiently "limited Times" designed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" escapes me.
Boycott the estate of Sonny Bono, whose widow introduced and sponsored the bill. Boycott Cher, who has been quoted as favoring a term of "forever less a day." Boycott the Walt Disney Company, which bankrolled the bribes that got the bill passed. Boycott all color motion pictures produced by MPAA member studios, as the first commercial color film technology appeared in 1923, and all works created on or after January 1, 1923, are under an effective perpetual copyright in the United States.
May Sonny Bono rot in he11.
Transmeta is NOT RISC, it is VLIW with a x86 to VLIW optimizing translator.
VLIW means "very long instruction word," and EPIC means "explicit parallel instruction computing," both of which in practice mean "architectures that combine several fixed-length instructions into one word." RISC means "reduced instruction set computing," which in practice means "architectures with fixed-length instructions." All important VLIW/EPIC instruction sets have fixed-length instructions (32-bit in a 256-bit word for TMS320C6K, 32-bit in a 128-bit word for Crusoe, or 41-bit in a 128-bit word for IA64), but MIPS, PPC, and Sparc disprove the converse; therefore, VLIW/EPIC RISC.