I'm afraid I just don't see why there is such a flurry of discussion to the effect that OS-X will somehow "vitalize" the usage and understanding of the BSDs. From what I hear, MacOS-X represents a "pretty light" variation on BSD, combined with a horde of MacOS-oriented graphical tools.
As such, it decidedly won't come with the hordes of CLI and console tools you'd expect to see in the typical NetBSD / FreeBSD / OpenBSD installation.
I would think it a whole lot more economical, and likely more of a "Unix-oriented" learning experience, to head to CheapBytes and order CD sets for all three of the "free" BSD variations for IA-32, perhaps along with some of the O'Reilly BSD documentation. That'll cost a whole lot less than a G3 PowerMac, nay, that, including a wall-full of documentation, might well cost less than merely getting the MacOS-X license.
This is just not something Linus Torvalds would be likely to be tremendously interested in; the original point of Linux was to hack around with 80386 addressing modes, and make a "better Minix."
There is a big difference between "hacking up a better Minix" and creating a Multics clone; in the latter case, there was considerable integration between:
The kernel, providing file, computation, and security services.
Note that the memory model was substantially different from that of Unix. With Unix, you open files and filter data in and out, and allocate memory dynamically on demand, Multics unified this, so that rather than "opening a file," you would instead "initiate a segment," so that all files would essentially be memory mapped into the address spaces of all participating processes.
Furthermore, whilst the evils of segmentation as seen with the 64k pages on the original "IBM PC" give people the impression that segmentation is evil, Multics made pervasive use of it to keep chunks of memory distinct.
Note that some of the later Pentium CPUs included segmentation instructions likely based on Multics that could have been used to help do memory management "the Multics way;" the lack of such on RISC (Alpha, IA-64, PPC, MIPS,...) architectures and the perpetual impending doom of IA-32 means that having memory management in Multics style on "modern" hardware may need to wait another 15 years...
Programming Language.
Multics was coded in PL/1, and the fairly byzantine complexity of PL/1 provides both the merit that some operations may be much better optimized than C, and the demerit of being pretty complex.
I just don't think "C hackers" would build Multics.
Unix and Linux represent "minimalist" systems in a number of senses, and it seems that many prominent Linux kernel hackers prefer "more minimal" text editors like Vi to the sorts of complex tools like TECO and Emacs.
There has periodically been talk on alt.os.multics of recreating Multics; the problem is that since it tightly integrated together custom hardware, complex kernel, and a pretty sophisticated user space, there's just plain a lot to replicate.
The only way I'd see it being likely would be if some of the retired Multics creators that made some Silly-Valley and/or DotCom millions decided to sponsor a several-year-long project involving a staff of on the order of a dozen pretty elite developers to provide some sort of "legacy" to retrieve Multics from the dead.
I've "bent the ears" of a couple of cable modem service providers at conventions with the idle thought that it would be a slick idea to hook up some form of "embedded firewall" box to the cable modem.
The issue is that when you connect to a cable modem, you immediately have a perhaps-24x7 connection that someone can attack. Hooking up a Windows box to this is nigh unto suicidal.
The thought I had had was to have a little "shoebox" system; no screen; only two Ethernet ports, one to go towards the outside world, and one to provide services "inside."
The "FireCard" is a quite clever idea; it cuts down on the requirements by one Ethernet port by itself replacing the usual Ethernet card that gets put in the PC.
With luck, they have some scheme for remote management whereby it knows just enough SSL (or some other cryptographic protocol) that it can be possible for folks at the ISP to log into it to help out if there are problems.
This isn't a "B1 System" for people who thought Multics wasn't tough enough to crack; it's a "C1 system" for the people running "D1 secure" PCs...
Did they? According to the Multicians Web Site, the ABB site was a Multics customer only until 1991.
Are you sure the machine was still functioning? Or just there...
From discussions on the Multics newsgroup, the only site that there seemed to still be uncertainty about was the Puerto Rico Highway Authority, and they were pretty sure that the system there didn't get the Y2K patches, and thus could not still be operating.
If you're right, then certainly let the folks at the Multicians site know of the still-running ABB system...
Oh, you couldn't imagine that the Dockmaster shutdown in 1998 was faintly related to the fact that the machine was 14 years old, with hardware replacements prohibitively expensive and difficult to get?
I've tried using Amaya to edit web material, and
always found it dramatically annoying to work with.
The problem is that in mandating that every single construction be inserted in a way that maintains the document status as "valid HTML," this leaves the problem that the UI has to build pages as a sort of "tree" into which you insert nodes. It may look "WYSIWYG," but the input side is hairy to actually use.
I mostly compose web material by writing DocBook which then transforms to HTML; that provides quite decent guarantees of well-formedness and validity. Mind you, I start with something that may not be valid SGML.
It seems to me that a more usable approach, if composing HTML, is to write it however you like, perhaps a tad messy, and then use tools like Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy utility.
Amaya is well and interesting; I suspect that it is only of practical interest to people that are working specifically on HTML standardization, and of limited interest to anyone else.
If your "business" is getting interrupted by telemarketers, then it's not your problem if you wind up producing disgusting noises that cause them to want to end the call early...
The price has little to do with the CPU; it is unlikely that the CPU contributes more than $100 to the pricetag. Furthermore, it is unlikely that building an equivalent machine using AMD or Intel (or MIPS or StrongARM of whatever provenance) CPUs would have much effect on the remaining $500 of the pricetag.
The reason why the unit is priced at $600 is that it costs a fair bit of money to put together:
A suitably small motherboard
A suitably large touch-sensitive LCD screen
Some sort of storage that fits in...
A case built specifically to integrate all of the above into one handheld package that might survive dropping it onto the floor.
Consider the pricing on PDAs; this unit potentially does a lot more than the Compaq iPAQ units that are priced at around $500.
I don't disagree that the price is pretty painful; the point is that Portability Costs. You can't take that $500 AMD K6-based system into the bathroom and flame people on Slashdot whilst "on the throne." You can't carry it into the kitchen and write up a list of groceries to get. Lots of can'ts there.
As another person observed, an Ethernet connection provides a route to use to log into the TiVo , thus meaning that, given clever software, suitable security configuration, and an always-up ingoing Internet connection, this could provide a Handy Dandy Web Remote Control Interface so I can connect in from the office and ask my TiVo to record something I didn't know was going to be on.
(Now, imagine the security exploits possible from having a "Beowulf cluster" of these... There is certainly some dangers to this insofar as there is for any incoming "web server.")
... initially lies in the fact that rather than using a slow modem connection, you might be able to go through DSL/cable modem, thus speeding the connection, and avoiding the use of the phone line.
The objection that "Oh, that might overpower the TiVo's limited CPU power" seems weak; if it can only update its schedule database at a "low speed," this is not fundamentally a severe problem.
The Really Cool Idea would be if this allowed the unit to "push" archived shows off to a remote host via NFS or some such thing.
Personally, I don't much care if this would involve basically generating personalized, encrypted "blobs," not usefully readable by anything other than the given TiVo. Having the ability to "push blobs to backup" would allow me to keep all the episodes of [whatever] sitting on a cheap disk array, or perhaps even archived out onto a 30GB tape drive.
K001er still would be the ability to generate my own DVDs out of this, but I expect the MPAA and the TV networks would take an understandably dim view to this; that wouldn't get accomplished without a legal conflagration that would likely eliminate TiVo from the marketplace...
It may not get at the crucial points, but if this sort of thing demonstrates, in a way that "gores their oxen," that there is something of a problem with web filtering, this at least represents a step in the right direction.
It may not be "sufficiently idealistic" to say:
Filtering
can't work, no matter how hard you try!
If demonstrating this pragmatic fact to be true has the effect that the "dumb politicians" see the point that they can't censor, then it can have the required result.
What do we say "when their error rates become lower"?
It's not a problem because the error rates can only move from spectacularly horrible to being terribly bad.
The software won't ever do what it's "supposed" to, because there's no good fixed definition of what "should" be censored.
I would think that the most vulnerable sites would be "academic" sites that are strongly dependent on university Internet resources, but loosely enough tied to the university that the university would feel little reason to "protect" the site from attack.
In contrast, someone that goes out there and sets up a "Slimey Sex Site" has got to know that they will see some sort of opposition, whether from:
Competitors trying to "slime" them,
Members of the much-maligned "Religious Right," trying to get them shut down,
A model that wants to shut them down
The "porn" site would seem to me to be more likely to have some funding and concern about such attacks.
In effect, it may be more likely that the "pornsters" will get attacked, in one way or another; the fact that they can expect such attacks leads to them "hardening" themselves, at least from a legal perspective.
Thus, the taxonomy may be more like:
"Academic" sites that probably don't get attacked much, but which are extremely vulnerable if they do get attacked;
"Porn" sites that will be nipped by a bunch of small attacks, and will likely be reasonably resistant;
MP3 and DVD sites that can't possibly have enough money to resist the Huge Pockets of the RIAA and MPAA.
"For questions or comments send to: cheese@curds.com "
(Unbelievable. They're on the web now. This company happens to be the very one that makes the brand of curds that my mother always preferred to purchase, and they sell 3kg "poutine bags" of curds...)
After all, it's not as if they're putting mayonnaise on the french fries:-).
What's there not to like about poutine?
French fries
You like those, right?
Gravy
... Which goes with potatos, or even potatoes, depending on your political preferences...
Cheese
The form of the curds used may be a little unexpected, but it's hardly a deviant form of cheese.
The sheer excess of cholesterol in this form of "haute habitant cuisine" may seem a mite excessive, but I can't imagine this being overly appalling in a nation where they make "chips" by taking pig fat and boiling it in oil...
The problem is that the driver scheme is completely revised in XFree86 4, thus meaning that drivers effectively need to be rewritten.
Consider it granted that the existing code base will be very useful for reference, and possibly even code fragments, when writing the new drivers. That does not deny that the drivers need to be created afresh.
Drivers get written based on two things:
Developers wanting to do so, and
Developers being encouraged to want to do so .
It's not S3 that "sucks," and, it should be noted, by the way, under S3 driver support that it's only the S3V that is supported; my S3 968 board is not supported , with no plans for that to be upcoming.
To the contrary, it's closer to being you that suck. If you want S3V supported, then you should either be looking at the code, or doing something like sending a donation to XFree86 along with encouragement that they improve S3V support.
A 4MB S3V card is likely worth $10 these days; that is just not going to warrant a lot of work at this time when they're only available as surplus, and when efforts are concentrating more on supporting 3D hardware which an S3V "325" is just incapable of coping with well.
The copies I saw on CompUSA store shelves yesterday were decidedly not free.
And Sun's web site does not indicate that SO is free of licensing requirements.
Indeed, if you read the Terms of Use of the Sun website, you find that You must not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer any software Sun discloses to you which seems rather antithetical to the notion of being able to modify StarOffice; the overall Terms of Use suggest that that is expressly forbidden.
Believe whatever you like about the "freeness" of StarOffice.
The context relevant here is that of there being "freedom" from the need to track that the software is being deployed in compliance with the license. Which is in no way diminished by the fact that Sun allows people to download SO "for free" from their web site.
The only Linux distribution that has been really "hardheaded" about hammering on the importance of verifying the terms of licenses is Debian; its (reasonably clear) separation of "free" from "nonfree" probably provides the minimal vulnerability that is out there to the risks of having software in use contrary to licensing terms.
Other distributions tend to meld in "non-redistributably-licensed" software without as clear disclosure. (Thinking back a few years, Caldera Network Desktop was probably the worst offender in the other direction; quite a bit of non-free stuff merged in...)
I smell a wish for money, likely a forlorn hope thereof...
This situation is exactly why large companies get quite paranoid about making sure they have license trackers, and policies whereby they can fire you for using "illegitimate" software.
It may sound like a cool idea to shift everything over to Linux; it's not too likely to happen as a result of this sort of thing.
There are always rumors floating around about how "Microsoft did a license audit, and then demanded an share of equity in return for not taking legal action"; obviously not something they could implement with a government agency!
In order for Linux to represent a realistic possibility, some major system integrator like IBM, PWC, EDS, or such needs to provide a "reference" by taking a 20,000 workstation company and "disrupting" them over to use Linux to run desktop applications.
That hasn't happened yet, and despite the fact that availability of stuff like ApplixWare keeps improving, the "churn" of StarOffice versions and of Corel WordPerfect, and the perpetual "coming soon" status of KDE and GNOME's offerings mean that implementing this as a total replacement of MS Office for other than small organizations seems to be some distance away yet.
Whether the options will converge to "being enough" is another question; there's still no reasonable replacement for the ubiquitous MS Access (we have yet to see if would-be alternatives will go anywhere), and the change, when applied throughout a sizable organization, would certainly be disruptive.
Furthermore, if they put in Linux, while this might mean that OS licensing would be free, they'd still be left with the license tracking problem for all sorts of stuff with restrictive "non-free" licenses that would likely need to get installed such as:
Commercial fax software
"Office" stuff like WordPerfect, ApplixWare, StarOffice
Relational databases like Oracle, DB/2, Informix
DB Front Ends like Corel Paradox, Inprise Kylix
Web Stuff like Omnis Studio
Seeing as how all this sort of stuff does run on Linux, "switching to Linux" does not forcibly eliminate the "license tracking problem."
Indeed, by providing the implication that the issue goes away, it may even make it less tractable.
It concerns people a lot more when people actually use real firearms.
My little brother shoots at sniper matches. Um, I mean "Precision Rifle" matches. Gotta be politically correct about that...
The cool part is that he's gotten to lug machine guns onto international flights to go to competitions... Not quite artillery, but close enough! Suffice it to say that security in London, England tends to find it a mite interesting when they find 18 guys with 50 machine guns:-).
National matches are also pretty entertaining; the guys on the national team are required to be heavily armed in order to protect the truck full of even bigger guns that they're driving to the tournament...
... Or "Two Hundred Million Voters Can't Be Wrong."
That may overstate the number of people that vote for GWB a mite, but is a pretty important point nonetheless.
If the People want to have, as president, a candidate with the merits and demerits of GWB, then that is something they evidently can vote for.
There are points of view under which his demerits are disastrously bad; even the most pessimistic views must be tempered by the factor that the President is merely one person, head of one branch of the US government.
The same is true for those that consider him the Second Coming of the New Zenith of Republican Ascendancy; even if he's better than his campaign literature would have you believe, he can't have all that much positive impact.
... And if he wins, and the government bureaucracy decides he's not trustworthy, it is liable to lead to some degree of intransigence whereby those that would need to tell him the "secret stuff" will work hard to keep from being in a position where they actually have to tell him anything...
Check out reruns of the BBC comedy "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" for wonderfully examples of the "filtering" of information between bureaucracy and politicians. It may be fictional, but after growing up in a political town (Ottawa), it appears the main difference between TV and reality is that the scripts they read on TV are wittier...
The "L4" folks seem to have gotten at the performance issues more pointedly than anyone else; they built microkernels tiny enough that they could actually do useful experiments and metrics.
And it turns out that it's harder to get good performance than anyone thought, easier to throw it away, and I expect it's pretty easy to throw away reliability when adding additional components...
As you say, "loadable kernel modules" are likely to be good enough a whole lot of the time.
The flip side is that if Hurd gets "usable," some of the special facilities like translators may provide a slick test bed to try out new things that would be neat to add to Linux. Performance may suck, but an AMD "Sledgehammer" should make Hurd not too unusable:-).
There may not be an Oracle port, but it might provide a good place to prototype:
Namespaces (of "Plan 9" style)
Cool filesystems
A successor for NFS
A CORBA implementation that pretends to be part of the OS kernel
The OS that I would sort of like to see get more attention is EROS; unfortunately it's so different that it is unlikely to be self-hosting any time soon. It's not Unix, and its merits would be discarded by pretending it were.
I would suggest that a whole lot of the reason for the "death of OS research" is the giant shadow of Redmond; when Microsoft was pushing "NT Everywhere," research groups were running scared. It may be coming time for them to poke their heads out of the ground again...
The problem is with the ingrates down the line that don't give credit where it's due
whilst loudly demanding their piece of the action.
And as for the "GNU code being only a fraction," it happens to be the fraction through which everything else happens to get activated. No GLIBC means no user space.
XFree86 isn't crucial to the system in the same way; many of us have systems that are well and useful despite not including X at all.
And it is most interesting that you chose to ignore the fact that I indicated that RMS makes himself look ungracious when he demands credit; it's as if you want to imply that I didn't recognize that...
Look for the WorkPlace OS project; IBM committed some serious money to building serious systems based on Mach.
And note that both Digital (now Compaq) and NeXT Inc. released reasonably serious products based on Mach. (Albeit, in the case of OSF/1, something predating the "worship-of-microkernel" days of Mach...)
It does not seem reasonable to merely characterize this as
RMS and co got tricked by all the academics into thinking that their new OS would have to be a Microkernel in order to be taken seriously;
the same was true of IBM, Sun, HP, Digital, and "everyone else" too.
I'm not sure I'd go along with
Besides, Linus has been an excellent ambassador for Free Software.
either. Linus hasn't claimed that "portfolio;" he hasn't gone out evangelizing in that area; he seems to take a much more "pragmatic" standpoint in, in fact, suggesting on occasion that "free software" isn't of such crucial importance. Don't take that too far in the wrong direction, but I'm skeptical of the "ambassadorship"...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I just don't see why there is such a flurry of discussion to the effect that OS-X will somehow "vitalize" the usage and understanding of the BSDs. From what I hear, MacOS-X represents a "pretty light" variation on BSD, combined with a horde of MacOS-oriented graphical tools.
As such, it decidedly won't come with the hordes of CLI and console tools you'd expect to see in the typical NetBSD / FreeBSD / OpenBSD installation.
I would think it a whole lot more economical, and likely more of a "Unix-oriented" learning experience, to head to CheapBytes and order CD sets for all three of the "free" BSD variations for IA-32, perhaps along with some of the O'Reilly BSD documentation. That'll cost a whole lot less than a G3 PowerMac, nay, that, including a wall-full of documentation, might well cost less than merely getting the MacOS-X license.
There is a big difference between "hacking up a better Minix" and creating a Multics clone; in the latter case, there was considerable integration between:
- The kernel, providing file, computation, and security services.
- Programming Language.
- Unix and Linux represent "minimalist" systems in a number of senses, and it seems that many prominent Linux kernel hackers prefer "more minimal" text editors like Vi to the sorts of complex tools like TECO and Emacs.
There has periodically been talk on alt.os.multics of recreating Multics; the problem is that since it tightly integrated together custom hardware, complex kernel, and a pretty sophisticated user space, there's just plain a lot to replicate.Note that the memory model was substantially different from that of Unix. With Unix, you open files and filter data in and out, and allocate memory dynamically on demand, Multics unified this, so that rather than "opening a file," you would instead "initiate a segment," so that all files would essentially be memory mapped into the address spaces of all participating processes.
Furthermore, whilst the evils of segmentation as seen with the 64k pages on the original "IBM PC" give people the impression that segmentation is evil, Multics made pervasive use of it to keep chunks of memory distinct.
Note that some of the later Pentium CPUs included segmentation instructions likely based on Multics that could have been used to help do memory management "the Multics way;" the lack of such on RISC (Alpha, IA-64, PPC, MIPS, ...) architectures and the perpetual impending doom of IA-32 means that having memory management in Multics style on "modern" hardware may need to wait another 15 years...
Multics was coded in PL/1, and the fairly byzantine complexity of PL/1 provides both the merit that some operations may be much better optimized than C, and the demerit of being pretty complex.
I just don't think "C hackers" would build Multics.
The only way I'd see it being likely would be if some of the retired Multics creators that made some Silly-Valley and/or DotCom millions decided to sponsor a several-year-long project involving a staff of on the order of a dozen pretty elite developers to provide some sort of "legacy" to retrieve Multics from the dead.
The issue is that when you connect to a cable modem, you immediately have a perhaps-24x7 connection that someone can attack. Hooking up a Windows box to this is nigh unto suicidal.
The thought I had had was to have a little "shoebox" system; no screen; only two Ethernet ports, one to go towards the outside world, and one to provide services "inside."
The "FireCard" is a quite clever idea; it cuts down on the requirements by one Ethernet port by itself replacing the usual Ethernet card that gets put in the PC.
With luck, they have some scheme for remote management whereby it knows just enough SSL (or some other cryptographic protocol) that it can be possible for folks at the ISP to log into it to help out if there are problems.
This isn't a "B1 System" for people who thought Multics wasn't tough enough to crack; it's a "C1 system" for the people running "D1 secure" PCs...
Are you sure the machine was still functioning? Or just there...
From discussions on the Multics newsgroup, the only site that there seemed to still be uncertainty about was the Puerto Rico Highway Authority, and they were pretty sure that the system there didn't get the Y2K patches, and thus could not still be operating.
If you're right, then certainly let the folks at the Multicians site know of the still-running ABB system...
Oh, you couldn't imagine that the Dockmaster shutdown in 1998 was faintly related to the fact that the machine was 14 years old, with hardware replacements prohibitively expensive and difficult to get?
The problem is that in mandating that every single construction be inserted in a way that maintains the document status as "valid HTML," this leaves the problem that the UI has to build pages as a sort of "tree" into which you insert nodes. It may look "WYSIWYG," but the input side is hairy to actually use.
I mostly compose web material by writing DocBook which then transforms to HTML; that provides quite decent guarantees of well-formedness and validity. Mind you, I start with something that may not be valid SGML.
It seems to me that a more usable approach, if composing HTML, is to write it however you like, perhaps a tad messy, and then use tools like Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy utility.
Amaya is well and interesting; I suspect that it is only of practical interest to people that are working specifically on HTML standardization, and of limited interest to anyone else.
If your "business" is getting interrupted by telemarketers, then it's not your problem if you wind up producing disgusting noises that cause them to want to end the call early...
The reason why the unit is priced at $600 is that it costs a fair bit of money to put together:
Consider the pricing on PDAs; this unit potentially does a lot more than the Compaq iPAQ units that are priced at around $500.
I don't disagree that the price is pretty painful; the point is that Portability Costs. You can't take that $500 AMD K6-based system into the bathroom and flame people on Slashdot whilst "on the throne." You can't carry it into the kitchen and write up a list of groceries to get. Lots of can'ts there.
The fairer strategy that the "bad guys" might agree with could be for it to be readable by any TiVo that you have licensed.
(Now, imagine the security exploits possible from having a "Beowulf cluster" of these... There is certainly some dangers to this insofar as there is for any incoming "web server.")
The objection that "Oh, that might overpower the TiVo's limited CPU power" seems weak; if it can only update its schedule database at a "low speed," this is not fundamentally a severe problem.
The Really Cool Idea would be if this allowed the unit to "push" archived shows off to a remote host via NFS or some such thing.
Personally, I don't much care if this would involve basically generating personalized, encrypted "blobs," not usefully readable by anything other than the given TiVo. Having the ability to "push blobs to backup" would allow me to keep all the episodes of [whatever] sitting on a cheap disk array, or perhaps even archived out onto a 30GB tape drive.
K001er still would be the ability to generate my own DVDs out of this, but I expect the MPAA and the TV networks would take an understandably dim view to this; that wouldn't get accomplished without a legal conflagration that would likely eliminate TiVo from the marketplace...
And, interestingly, the operation of vast quantities of voters and vote collectors represents a distributed "computing cluster."
(On the other hand, "Think of a Beowulf cluster of Politicians." Costs a lot and doesn't compute very well ;-[).
It may not be "sufficiently idealistic" to say:
If demonstrating this pragmatic fact to be true has the effect that the "dumb politicians" see the point that they can't censor, then it can have the required result.
What do we say "when their error rates become lower"?
It's not a problem because the error rates can only move from spectacularly horrible to being terribly bad.
The software won't ever do what it's "supposed" to, because there's no good fixed definition of what "should" be censored.
In contrast, someone that goes out there and sets up a "Slimey Sex Site" has got to know that they will see some sort of opposition, whether from:
The "porn" site would seem to me to be more likely to have some funding and concern about such attacks.
In effect, it may be more likely that the "pornsters" will get attacked, in one way or another; the fact that they can expect such attacks leads to them "hardening" themselves, at least from a legal perspective.
Thus, the taxonomy may be more like:
It describes the cheddar cheese form; the curds used for poutine are sufficiently "mild" that I cannot say for certain whether they are either:
See The Famous St-Albert Cheese Curds page for a nice picture of the classic cheese curd used in Eastern Ontario poutine.
"For questions or comments send to: cheese@curds.com "
(Unbelievable. They're on the web now. This company happens to be the very one that makes the brand of curds that my mother always preferred to purchase, and they sell 3kg "poutine bags" of curds...)
What's there not to like about poutine?
You like those, right?
The form of the curds used may be a little unexpected, but it's hardly a deviant form of cheese.
The sheer excess of cholesterol in this form of "haute habitant cuisine" may seem a mite excessive, but I can't imagine this being overly appalling in a nation where they make "chips" by taking pig fat and boiling it in oil...
(Yes, I grew up in Eastern Ontario...)
Consider it granted that the existing code base will be very useful for reference, and possibly even code fragments, when writing the new drivers. That does not deny that the drivers need to be created afresh.
Drivers get written based on two things:
It's not S3 that "sucks," and, it should be noted, by the way, under S3 driver support that it's only the S3V that is supported; my S3 968 board is not supported , with no plans for that to be upcoming.
To the contrary, it's closer to being you that suck. If you want S3V supported, then you should either be looking at the code, or doing something like sending a donation to XFree86 along with encouragement that they improve S3V support.
A 4MB S3V card is likely worth $10 these days; that is just not going to warrant a lot of work at this time when they're only available as surplus, and when efforts are concentrating more on supporting 3D hardware which an S3V "325" is just incapable of coping with well.
And Sun's web site does not indicate that SO is free of licensing requirements.
Indeed, if you read the Terms of Use of the Sun website, you find that You must not modify, decompile, or reverse engineer any software Sun discloses to you which seems rather antithetical to the notion of being able to modify StarOffice; the overall Terms of Use suggest that that is expressly forbidden.
Believe whatever you like about the "freeness" of StarOffice.
The context relevant here is that of there being "freedom" from the need to track that the software is being deployed in compliance with the license. Which is in no way diminished by the fact that Sun allows people to download SO "for free" from their web site.
The only Linux distribution that has been really "hardheaded" about hammering on the importance of verifying the terms of licenses is Debian; its (reasonably clear) separation of "free" from "nonfree" probably provides the minimal vulnerability that is out there to the risks of having software in use contrary to licensing terms.
Other distributions tend to meld in "non-redistributably-licensed" software without as clear disclosure. (Thinking back a few years, Caldera Network Desktop was probably the worst offender in the other direction; quite a bit of non-free stuff merged in...)
This situation is exactly why large companies get quite paranoid about making sure they have license trackers, and policies whereby they can fire you for using "illegitimate" software.
It may sound like a cool idea to shift everything over to Linux; it's not too likely to happen as a result of this sort of thing.
There are always rumors floating around about how "Microsoft did a license audit, and then demanded an share of equity in return for not taking legal action"; obviously not something they could implement with a government agency!
In order for Linux to represent a realistic possibility, some major system integrator like IBM, PWC, EDS, or such needs to provide a "reference" by taking a 20,000 workstation company and "disrupting" them over to use Linux to run desktop applications.
That hasn't happened yet, and despite the fact that availability of stuff like ApplixWare keeps improving, the "churn" of StarOffice versions and of Corel WordPerfect, and the perpetual "coming soon" status of KDE and GNOME's offerings mean that implementing this as a total replacement of MS Office for other than small organizations seems to be some distance away yet.
Whether the options will converge to "being enough" is another question; there's still no reasonable replacement for the ubiquitous MS Access (we have yet to see if would-be alternatives will go anywhere), and the change, when applied throughout a sizable organization, would certainly be disruptive.
Furthermore, if they put in Linux, while this might mean that OS licensing would be free, they'd still be left with the license tracking problem for all sorts of stuff with restrictive "non-free" licenses that would likely need to get installed such as:
Seeing as how all this sort of stuff does run on Linux, "switching to Linux" does not forcibly eliminate the "license tracking problem."
Indeed, by providing the implication that the issue goes away, it may even make it less tractable.
It concerns people a lot more when people actually use real firearms.
My little brother shoots at sniper matches. Um, I mean "Precision Rifle" matches. Gotta be politically correct about that...
The cool part is that he's gotten to lug machine guns onto international flights to go to competitions... Not quite artillery, but close enough! Suffice it to say that security in London, England tends to find it a mite interesting when they find 18 guys with 50 machine guns :-).
National matches are also pretty entertaining; the guys on the national team are required to be heavily armed in order to protect the truck full of even bigger guns that they're driving to the tournament...
That may overstate the number of people that vote for GWB a mite, but is a pretty important point nonetheless.
If the People want to have, as president, a candidate with the merits and demerits of GWB, then that is something they evidently can vote for.
There are points of view under which his demerits are disastrously bad; even the most pessimistic views must be tempered by the factor that the President is merely one person, head of one branch of the US government.
The same is true for those that consider him the Second Coming of the New Zenith of Republican Ascendancy; even if he's better than his campaign literature would have you believe, he can't have all that much positive impact.
Check out reruns of the BBC comedy "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" for wonderfully examples of the "filtering" of information between bureaucracy and politicians. It may be fictional, but after growing up in a political town (Ottawa), it appears the main difference between TV and reality is that the scripts they read on TV are wittier...
And I've seen various Linux distributions on the shelves of both Walmart and Target on those occasions I have visited to buy cheap camera film.
And it turns out that it's harder to get good performance than anyone thought, easier to throw it away, and I expect it's pretty easy to throw away reliability when adding additional components...
As you say, "loadable kernel modules" are likely to be good enough a whole lot of the time.
The flip side is that if Hurd gets "usable," some of the special facilities like translators may provide a slick test bed to try out new things that would be neat to add to Linux. Performance may suck, but an AMD "Sledgehammer" should make Hurd not too unusable :-).
There may not be an Oracle port, but it might provide a good place to prototype:
The OS that I would sort of like to see get more attention is EROS; unfortunately it's so different that it is unlikely to be self-hosting any time soon. It's not Unix, and its merits would be discarded by pretending it were.
I would suggest that a whole lot of the reason for the "death of OS research" is the giant shadow of Redmond; when Microsoft was pushing "NT Everywhere," research groups were running scared. It may be coming time for them to poke their heads out of the ground again...
And as for the "GNU code being only a fraction," it happens to be the fraction through which everything else happens to get activated. No GLIBC means no user space.
XFree86 isn't crucial to the system in the same way; many of us have systems that are well and useful despite not including X at all.
And it is most interesting that you chose to ignore the fact that I indicated that RMS makes himself look ungracious when he demands credit; it's as if you want to imply that I didn't recognize that...
And note that both Digital (now Compaq) and NeXT Inc. released reasonably serious products based on Mach. (Albeit, in the case of OSF/1, something predating the "worship-of-microkernel" days of Mach...)
It does not seem reasonable to merely characterize this as
the same was true of IBM, Sun, HP, Digital, and "everyone else" too.I'm not sure I'd go along with
either. Linus hasn't claimed that "portfolio;" he hasn't gone out evangelizing in that area; he seems to take a much more "pragmatic" standpoint in, in fact, suggesting on occasion that "free software" isn't of such crucial importance. Don't take that too far in the wrong direction, but I'm skeptical of the "ambassadorship"...