It is notoriously difficult to get pricing information for QNX.
I have heard differing reports on comp.os.qnx, including that it is "very expensive, hundreds of dollars per system," or, on the other hand, the vague answer of "you can license it reasonably economically." (With no definition of what "reasonably economical" means, of course.)
If people should start thinking of QNX, then they should also start thinking of:
Eric Raymond thinks it's mindblowing, so the Eric Raymond Personality Cult should all be preparing to drop Linux in favor of EROS. (Of course, it isn't yet capable of self-hosting, which indicates that it's not all that useful at this point. But, to cultists, usefulness is irrelevant...)
This is the critical programming abstraction that QNX uses heavily which isn't all that widely used on traditional UNIXes, namely asynchronous messaging.
These are all interesting alternatives, albeit not all being of identical levels of interest.
On the one hand, Tivo is not selling what we'd regard as an "open" system.
They're basically building an embedded system, with Linux as the kernel.
Those that consider Tivo Heros of the Open Source Revolution are FOOLS as what they're up to is selling a TV reprocessing product, not developing Linux to the Next Level.
They do conform to the GPL, offering a copy of the sources to the GPLed portions, on request, so they're not just a bunch of scofflaws.
On the other hand, the people they're trying to sell to are largely not sophisticated hacker-types that would want to tune the filesystem.
They're selling what amounts to a sophisticated VCR.
More importantly, Tivo sit in a subtly dangerous position, from a legal perspective.
A "too powerful" Tivo box could be rather like "Captain Crunch" Draper's too powerful Apple Modem proposal of yesteryear, essentially a "license to break MPAA rules."
After the joys, this year, of lawsuits over MP3s and DVDs, I do not think Tivo would be excited to jump into this seat...
For Slashdot folk to fawn incessantly on Tivo is a dumb thing; reaming them for not selling the "TV hacking product" some Slashdot folk would like is about as great an idea.
Add to the above the question: How long is it taking for the INS to process Green Card applications at the California office, these days?
I'm sure that many people would be prepared to make offers...
At the time that Linus was completing his Master's, there was a joke going around that Linus would wind up walking in to the offices of some UNIX-related company, and say (Finnish/Swedish accent mandatory):
Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds. I have come here to work at your company. Please show me where my desk is.
(The assumption being that there's no particular point in resumes, interviews, or any such stuff...)
Jokes and offers aside, life isn't usually that simple...
I'd expect there to be several sets of "handcuffs" to hold him at Transmeta for a while yet, notably:
I'm sure that Linus has a bunch of stock options, but. Stock option plans tend to have some stipulations.
They tend to vest over time.
Thus, if Linus has options to $20M of shares, it is fairly likely that he only has part of that now, and that leaving now would cost him big.
Those options that aren't vested are lost if he leaves.
At this point, Transmeta stock isn't publicly traded.
Repeat after me: Not Publicly Traded.
I've gotten phone calls from people (morons!) who want to buy Transmeta stock who thought that my Speculations About Transmeta indicated that I actually owned shares.
Despite the "excitement," there is no public market in the stock. Any stock that has vested in Linus Torvalds' hands doesn't have a market in which to sell it.
The theory that the stock is somehow "worth something" is only made true when there is actually a public market in Transmeta stock. Maybe that will happen next year; I suspect it won't be this year.
For those that didn't know, Linus Torvalds is Finnish. He is not an American citizen. And so, his employment at Transmeta is at the "sufferance" of the INS, under an H1B visa.
If Linus walks away from Transmeta, he will very likely not wind up employed by a US company, as he would be asked, fairly shortly, to return to Finland.
As for why Transmeta hired him, I would tend to think that they wanted something more than just a marketing figurehead.
Suggesting that he's a worthless figurehead is decidedly "flameworthy;" I don't have to be part of the Linus Personality Cult to find that distasteful.
Long and short is that there are a number of reasons why Linus is not likely to leave Transmeta tomorrow.
When John F Kennedy Jr died in a plane crash, people considered it a big tragedy because he was famous.
When Elyan Gonzales' mother died in a boat wreck, the resulting "soap opera" is considered a big tragedy because this got associated with the Cuban community, and thus famous.
You have concluded that "this guy" is famous, and thus that the death is a tragedy.
In contrast, much bigger hurts get ignored when they don't involve people with some degree of celebrity.
There is some tendancy for geniuses to tend to extremes; that means that the successes are a bit more dramatic than average, as are the failures.
PKZip had a moderately dramatic story; I'm not certain it truly involved genius, as opposed to the factors of:
Being in the right place at the right time, and
Having intent to do something useful about the SEA situation, and sufficient ability to build an alternative compression package.
Don't read that wrong; I'm not proposing that he was a "dumb idiot," just that it wasn't necessarily genius behind it.
Indeed, there are no cheap, commodity motherboards.
This lack is important.
I'd love to see the OpenPPC Project do something to provide sources of PPC motherboards that don't cost thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately, what I'd really want to see is a mobo that costs only a few hundred dollars, and which allows hooking up a couple or four PPC chips. And it looks like there's not going to be any combination like that any time soon.
Remember: The Intel alternatives may not be "pretty" hardware, but they do make for a compelling lowest common denominator. I can head to Aberdeen and locate an SMP Pentium III motherboard costing a couple hundred dollars, toss in a couple CPUs, and have some reasonably powerful hardware for about $1000.
For PPC to provide a realistic alternative, it needs to either:
Provide compelling amounts of computing power that are unavailable on Intel;
Provide reliability unavailable on Intel;
Provide a price that is not too much more expensive than an Intel-based system of similar power.
Feel free to s/Intel/Athlon/g or s/Intel/Alpha/g as needed.
The critical point here is that if the PPC system is outrageously more expensive than an IA-32 system of relatively comparable power, it just won't sell. There are some that are sufficiently bigoted against Intel hardware that they'll pay more for something else, whether PPC, Alpha, or SPARC. I'm not going to pay a $1500 premium to run the same code, recompiled for PPC in order to have a PPC label on the CPU that may not be visible in any meaningful way unless I put a sticker on the case.
By the way, you may not be quite right about the "only" PPC motherboard being from Motorola; Cogent Computers appears to have one that costs around $1200. Of course, the CPUs to toss into it seem to add another $1200 or more in price, so I could be off here...
I'm certainly with you in being disinterested in "buying a Mac and ripping its guts out."
There will probably be some drive-by flamings about BSD licenses being "obviously superior," although what that would do would probably just be to aggravate people like Bruce Perens that prefer to retain some control over the use of their code.
The crucial point is that Licensing is Important. You fail to read the license at significant peril. That's even true for BSD-like licenses.
Others have provided references to the HP Jornada, which is indeed a StrongARM/WinCE-based notebook computer, as well as the Yopy, which is a StrongARM/Linux-based handheld computer.
It would be a cool thing if there was a Linux port to the Jornada, unfortunately, the references I can find on the LinuxCE mailing lists are not terribly specific/useful.
What's really unfortunate is that there has been no progression of the StrongARM series over the last couple years. It came out as a slick, low power, 250MHz CPU. That's still what it is, despite two years of surrounding technical advances. Transmeta Crusoe is becoming a available for similar applications, and may provide an even better mix of computational power and "battery efficiency."
I've got an "adjacent" posting that suggests an approach for making up interesting answers to the question "What are the effects?" which might not have leapt out immediately from one's library.
However, I certainly agree that the tendancy for students to try to get "the Internet" to do their research for them is extremely annoying.
The newsgroup comp.lang.lisp tends to get hit hard by this; there's an almost-weekly attempt for students to get answers to what are obviously homework assignments that they have put off.
I get a few emails a month that show that students are trying to satisfy research requirements by reading my web page on relational databases, and then figure that I am the obvious "consulting resource" to answer their assignments for them.
There was one entertaining occasion when a considerable chunk of a class of accounting students asked my opinion on what Linux-based software package Corel should adopt, and why.
My reaction to many of these things is to tell the would-be non-researcher that their mission, if they choose to accept it, is to Go To The Library.
I learned my research skills, which have mapped not too badly onto new media such as the web, by virtue of spending many hours in university libraries tenaciously searching for books and papers and references between them.
If I use "my powers of research" to help the new students too very much, they won't bother learning those sorts of skills, and the next time media changes, they may not develop the tenaciousness to be able to fight their way through to grasping the next new thing.
I'm happy to suggest some references, particularly those that are a little unusual so as to promote a wider array of insights. Thus, Marshall and Eric McLuhan's "Laws of Media" represent a probably-unexpected useful way of grappling with analyzing effects of changing technology, and I'm happy to cite that as an approach.
But to write peoples' research reports for them is quite another thing. It is not merely immoral for them, as students.
It is also immoral for those that do the writing, as they discourage students from becoming competent researchers. And in an increasingly information-oriented economy, that is a horrible way to handicap them.
While Drexler's material provides a lot of the 'dry facts,' and you'll see a lot of theorizing and other pontificating, what is critical at this point in time is that the true effects are far enough away that it is almost impossible to scientifically predict the effects.
Look back to the invention of flight. Back at the time that they were theorizing about whether heavier-than-air craft were feasible, I am quite certain that they were not successfully predicting today's "hub and spoke" airline economy. And they wouldn't have predicted the "cramming of passengers into microscopic seats" nor the most recent trend towards expanding legroom.
In short, any theories at this point are likely to be as fictional as the predictions back in the 1950s that everyone would be flying "jet cars" and helicopters to work.
This has the attractive result that you can be quite creative about the results you look for, with no one to gainsay your claims.
You could bias towards the "cyberpunk" approach that Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" suggests, or to the "artistic" approach of Greg Bear's "Blood Music."
These, and other, works can represent useful inspiration for your own Science Fiction story, which is effectively what any theorizing about the effects of nanotech represent.
I'd suggest considering several sides to it, in terms of actions and reactions in:
Political realms, whether at municipal, union, national, or international levels
Financial realms, including banks, corporations, individuals' spending
Different sectors of an economy, including industrial production, IT, services, restaurants, medicine, transportation, agriculture. Take a look at the sorts of sectors used to break down the stock market, and consider effects on various of these.
Consider effects on the arts. Things that become cheap, things that become more valuable, and such.
A useful exercise would be to take each of the areas of society that you plan to examine, and apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to generate some relevant Tetrads.
That is, look at how nanotech affects the given system component in four ways:
What does it extend or intensify?
What does it render obsolete?
What does it retrieve that was formerly obsolete?
What does it "transcend into" when you push it to an extreme?
Play the "Tetrad Game" a dozen times, and render those tetrads into a systematic "story," and you should get an interesting result.
I'd see the primary market for the product to be that of people that want to hook up one-off instruments, for things like factory control, or scientific analysis.
In such cases, there may never be a "real" driver, as the device may be so esoteric that there will only be ten of 'em on the planet.
In the long run, it might be preferable to have some generic "bus" (think: RS-232, Parallel Port, USB, IEEE-488, FireWire,...) to support all sorts of such devices, and have the support code sit in user space. That is what is likely to, in the long run, limit the usefulness of this system...
It's probably useful to note that licensing constraints are not limited to the GPL. Those that favor BSD-style licenses, that would prefer to use the (flameworthy) term "GPV" to describe GNU software will have some similar problems if WinDriver has a somewhat restrictive license.
With a BSD-like license, the notion that KRFTech "owns" portions of the driver would make it just as unacceptable to try to push a WinDriver-based driver into FreeBSD or NetBSD as it would be with Linux, and perhaps moreso. In effect, *BSD sets a "higher" standard for freedom in this regard, in requiring that anything that becomes part of an "official" kernel be released under a license that allows people to build it into proprietary systems. That's a somewhat more "intense" requirement than is provided for in the GPL.
The fact of having permission to release "binary-only" versions would permit some releases of software that the GPL would forbid, with the net result that "You win some, you lose some" when taking WinDriver into a BSD-related context.
But the crucial point here is that Licensing Really Is Important.
There are some legitimate disagreements that may legitimately persist over which approach to licensing of "free software" is preferable.
My position is that this parallels the multiple forms of noneuclidean geometry, where there are multiple viewpoints that provide useful mathematical insight.
The universal is that which ever "ethic" you prefer, it is critical to understand and think through the use of your "favored" licensing scheme, as there can be great troubles otherwise.
And then use it for 30 days, unless you become a Registered User.
Note that the price of a WinDriver license runs somewhere between $1000 and $2000 (not 100% clear what the $1000 package is). Which means that if you want to use this to deploy a device driver, you get to pay out "a couple thousand bucks."
What is entirely unclear is what is the status of the resultant drivers. Is the code that is generated:
Yours to do with as you like, including applying the GPL so that it could go into "official" kernels?
Partially yours, and partially KRFTech's Driver Support Code, which you can't release?
In such a case, the only way to use the results would be as a kernel module, due to the resultant license conflict...
Partially KRFTech's, with a per-copy licensing fee?
I'm not "accusing" as the web site provides no indication one way or another. I'd find it surprising if the driver became "totally free," and that lack would put a big wrench in the "general interest" in the product.
I'll bet they sell some copies for organizations that plan to deploy Linux on embedded systems that are used internally; I suspect that the product is not of all that much "general interest."
Yes, that's a "Mote" reference. It happens to be quite useful when there are too many alternatives to treat them simply in a binary manner.
And I'm sure it causes much amusement to those that are "SF-literate."
For those that aren't aware, the notion of "on the Gripping Hand" comes from the Niven/Pournelle works on an alien race called the "Moties." These critters have not two, but three hands, and so have an extra hand to "wave" when making hand-waving statements.
Their arguments would take this three-pronged form where the first two "hands" would go towards providing "general illumination," whilst the third, the "gripping hand," would "go for the kill" by attacking the crux of the problem.
The problem with IE was that it was an artificial dependancy.
As for using a Mozilla-based "tool set," if your application specifically uses parts of Mozilla, and thereby requires having Mozilla installed, that is no longer an artificial dependancy.
On the other hand, an outright advantage to being "Mozilla-based" is that there is some degree of "right" to redistribute the code "tuned" to your application.
On the gripping hand, this introduces some packaging problems, with either:
Having to carefully match version identification so that Module X, deployed by The Y Group, can be safely connected to Module Z, deployed by The Prime Group, or
Having to statically link big chunks of library into applications, so that if I install three applications that use parts of Mozilla, I effectively have nearly three independent copies of Mozilla installed at once.
Neither of these outcomes is particularly attractive at this point...
The local rep was in last month, with the "Linux-on-a-Business-Card" micro-CD.
He indicated that they were, at least in the local area, having a harder time getting in the door at local businesses than they had expected.
If the business plan assumed that they were going to have huge numbers of service contracts, and that it would be really easy to set up service contract relationships, that nicely explains the failure of the business plan, and the resultant failure of the attempt to "go IPO."
I was pretty skeptical that they'd be easily able to sell service contracts... Of all the potentially legitimate Linux enterprises out there, LinuxCare seem to me to have the weakest case...
You can't just buy into the 4GL; you have to buy into the database on the back end, and whatever "TUI" or "GUI" is on the front end.
In the case of tightly integrated options, which buy you decent performance, such as Oracle's tools, this means "marrying" Oracle. (And no "With this ring I thee wed," and no "You may kiss the bride." There does, however, tend to be a rather one-way form of "wedding night"...)
Alternatively, SAP R/3 provides a DB-independent and OS-independent option, but is a rather heavyweight system.
When the Development Model Du Jour changes, the 4GL becomes obsolete.
Text-based systems were obsoleted by GUIed ones, and both have tended to be obsoleted by "web app" ones.
In order for the 4GL to buy "ease of use," it has to provide a very specific development approach, and that results in it being very "brittle" in a changing environment.
Incomplete Results
The "benefit" of a 4GL is that it makes certain things (perhaps creating certain forms of reports) very easy.
Unfortunately, this may only extend to covering 60% of system requirements. Which is wonderful when prototyping, when you only need to fulful 40% of system requirements. But it is not so wonderful when you're fighting to get the rest of the way, and have to fight with a tool that just wasn't meant to add in whatever that last 10% is.
I worked with a group that was building a GIS system atop PowerBuilder; they got about 1/2 done, and then had to discard it and recreate the whole application using MFC/C++ because they just couldn't push PowerBuilder far enough.
If Apple were truly committed to "Open Source," then the recent runaround that GnuStep people have been getting would not be happening.
On the one hand, it's fair enough that Apple graphics (perhaps nee NeXT) are Apple's, but there are rumblings that Apple wants to get "medieval" over this. There has been a "reaction of silence," as well as more vigorous reactions.
The distressing part, described in this article, is that it appears that access to the OPENSTEP API may not be as open as everyone would wish to believe. To wit,
This document sets forth the OpenStep application programming interface (API). You may down-load one copy of this specification as long as it is for purposes of study only. We look forward to licensing third parties to create original implementations of this API. No such license is granted or implied by the publication of this specification. If you would like information on obtaining such a license, please contact NeXT at OpenStep@NeXT.COM.
Of course, the most distressing part is this message purported to have come from Steve Jobs, where the salient bit reads: From: Steve Jobs Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 10:19 AM To: Lucas C. Wagner Subject: GNUstep Lucas, As you may know, Apple owns the Cocoa and OpenStep APIs, and will not feel great about others using its intellectual property without premission. Best, Steve
Open is as open does. If Apple winds up suing anyone over GNUstep, I'd say that tells you how committed they really are to "open source."
But the issuance of this form of compensation does not represent an expense to the company. Not, not, not.
Option compensation represents a dilution of the value of shareholder equity.
When Buffet suggests otherwise, he is playing a propaganda game.
It doesn't get any simpler than dilution of the value of shareholder equity; calling that an expense is simply not correct. The fact that some people are either not sufficiently literate in finance, or perhaps incapable of comprehension, does not make it legitimate to call it an expense.
If the option plan's provisions are disclosed in the enterprise's financial statements, as appears to be required by FASB/AICPA/SEC/CICA rules, then those that want to play pretend games and call option plans "expenses" can adjust for them as they like.
The "Bill Parish" discussion needs to be taken with a few grains of salt; his treatment of options as debt is not a fair assessment; the fact that options are part of equity is quite critical to the analysis, and it seems to me that Parish isn't fair enough in that.
The other problem that I see as critical is that, as Parish acknowledges, "everyone else is doing the same." The notion that Microsoft is the leader in the matter seems to me as nonsensical as the notion that they are a technical leader in the computer industry.
It is nonetheless quite fair to say that the big problem for Microsoft is not the "death of a thousand paper-cuts" that may come out of secondary lawsuits based on the evidence of this big one, but rather the long term effects of employee benefits being strongly dependant on the value of the option plan.
If the value of Microsoft stock does not continue to rise, then those option plans, and the resulting long term financial security of MSFT employees, is injured. And it is that injury is what is liable to ultimately cause crucial injury to the corporation.
As for outsiders that are injured, I have less qualms than you. People have chosen to invest in what is necessarily a risky investnment, just like Dutch Tulip Bulbs, the South Sea Investment Company, the Nifty Fifty, and Tokyo real estate. If they were foolish in underestimating the risk, that's a loss that they foolishly underestimated.
Throw in "ethical considerations" and it may turn it from "well-deserved" to "richly-deserved..."
There is no need for this to go into the kernel when a suitably-designed NFS server can provide this service in a more portable manner. ( e.g. - so that this supports whatever UNIX-like OSes you might want supported, and requires nothing that is kernel-specific.)
Admittedly, this still leaves you vulnerable to the script kiddie that gets in and can get at /crypt; that is probably still nearly as protectable as kernel-based approaches...
In the market that Wyse was realistically after, namely producing terminals to connect to Windows Terminal Server, it should likely be preferable to work with Microsoft's client OS software. That means cooperating rather than taking action (e.g. - adopting Linux) which Microsoft would see as an attack.
On the other hand, there is reasonable reason to think that temporary adoption of Linux may have been a ploy to scare MSFT into concessions. The article suggests as much:
The foray into Linux did, however, give Wyse enough leverage to persuade Microsoft that a version of the Internet Explorer Web browser would be a major improvement to the Windows CE machines, he added.
Since Wyse started getting into "WinTerms," they've not been a clear "friend" of anything not Windows-related...
Slashdot Mirror
It is notoriously difficult to get pricing information for QNX.
I have heard differing reports on comp.os.qnx, including that it is "very expensive, hundreds of dollars per system," or, on the other hand, the vague answer of "you can license it reasonably economically." (With no definition of what "reasonably economical" means, of course.)
- VSTa
- MIT Exokernel
- EROS
- Possibly even Hurd
- eCos
- RTEMS
- Fiasco
- On Linux, people interested in QNX should almost certainly look at SRR -- QNX API compatible message passing for Linux
These are all interesting alternatives, albeit not all being of identical levels of interest.A copylefted system that "lifts" ideas from QNX and Plan 9
It looks like development has not been terribly active lately.
Again, not terribly active, but an interesting OS kernel.
Eric Raymond thinks it's mindblowing, so the Eric Raymond Personality Cult should all be preparing to drop Linux in favor of EROS. (Of course, it isn't yet capable of self-hosting, which indicates that it's not all that useful at this point. But, to cultists, usefulness is irrelevant...)
It's different from the other options; certainly not a tiny OS option...
Which, like QNX, appears to be used in some reasonably critical system environments...
Which is a "lighter microkernel than Mach"...
This is the critical programming abstraction that QNX uses heavily which isn't all that widely used on traditional UNIXes, namely asynchronous messaging.
- On the one hand, Tivo is not selling what we'd regard as an "open" system.
- On the other hand, the people they're trying to sell to are largely not sophisticated hacker-types that would want to tune the filesystem.
For Slashdot folk to fawn incessantly on Tivo is a dumb thing; reaming them for not selling the "TV hacking product" some Slashdot folk would like is about as great an idea.They're basically building an embedded system, with Linux as the kernel.
Those that consider Tivo Heros of the Open Source Revolution are FOOLS as what they're up to is selling a TV reprocessing product, not developing Linux to the Next Level.
They do conform to the GPL, offering a copy of the sources to the GPLed portions, on request, so they're not just a bunch of scofflaws.
They're selling what amounts to a sophisticated VCR.
More importantly, Tivo sit in a subtly dangerous position, from a legal perspective.
A "too powerful" Tivo box could be rather like "Captain Crunch" Draper's too powerful Apple Modem proposal of yesteryear, essentially a "license to break MPAA rules."
After the joys, this year, of lawsuits over MP3s and DVDs, I do not think Tivo would be excited to jump into this seat...
I am rather thinking of the longer term of "a few more years."
(Answers available here. )
Add to the above the question: How long is it taking for the INS to process Green Card applications at the California office, these days?
I'm sure that many people would be prepared to make offers...
At the time that Linus was completing his Master's, there was a joke going around that Linus would wind up walking in to the offices of some UNIX-related company, and say (Finnish/Swedish accent mandatory):
(The assumption being that there's no particular point in resumes, interviews, or any such stuff...)Jokes and offers aside, life isn't usually that simple...
Thus, if Linus has options to $20M of shares, it is fairly likely that he only has part of that now, and that leaving now would cost him big.
Repeat after me: Not Publicly Traded.
I've gotten phone calls from people (morons!) who want to buy Transmeta stock who thought that my Speculations About Transmeta indicated that I actually owned shares.
Despite the "excitement," there is no public market in the stock. Any stock that has vested in Linus Torvalds' hands doesn't have a market in which to sell it.
The theory that the stock is somehow "worth something" is only made true when there is actually a public market in Transmeta stock. Maybe that will happen next year; I suspect it won't be this year.
There was a Slashdot story on this; see Workers - Including Linus - Left in Limbo by INS
If Linus walks away from Transmeta, he will very likely not wind up employed by a US company, as he would be asked, fairly shortly, to return to Finland.
Suggesting that he's a worthless figurehead is decidedly "flameworthy;" I don't have to be part of the Linus Personality Cult to find that distasteful.
Long and short is that there are a number of reasons why Linus is not likely to leave Transmeta tomorrow.
Being famous is linked with tragedy.
- When John F Kennedy Jr died in a plane crash, people considered it a big tragedy because he was famous.
- When Elyan Gonzales' mother died in a boat wreck, the resulting "soap opera" is considered a big tragedy because this got associated with the Cuban community, and thus famous.
- You have concluded that "this guy" is famous, and thus that the death is a tragedy.
In contrast, much bigger hurts get ignored when they don't involve people with some degree of celebrity.There is some tendancy for geniuses to tend to extremes; that means that the successes are a bit more dramatic than average, as are the failures.
PKZip had a moderately dramatic story; I'm not certain it truly involved genius, as opposed to the factors of:
Don't read that wrong; I'm not proposing that he was a "dumb idiot," just that it wasn't necessarily genius behind it.
I'd love to see the OpenPPC Project do something to provide sources of PPC motherboards that don't cost thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately, what I'd really want to see is a mobo that costs only a few hundred dollars, and which allows hooking up a couple or four PPC chips. And it looks like there's not going to be any combination like that any time soon.
Remember: The Intel alternatives may not be "pretty" hardware, but they do make for a compelling lowest common denominator. I can head to Aberdeen and locate an SMP Pentium III motherboard costing a couple hundred dollars, toss in a couple CPUs, and have some reasonably powerful hardware for about $1000.
For PPC to provide a realistic alternative, it needs to either:
Feel free to s/Intel/Athlon/g or s/Intel/Alpha/g as needed.
The critical point here is that if the PPC system is outrageously more expensive than an IA-32 system of relatively comparable power, it just won't sell. There are some that are sufficiently bigoted against Intel hardware that they'll pay more for something else, whether PPC, Alpha, or SPARC. I'm not going to pay a $1500 premium to run the same code, recompiled for PPC in order to have a PPC label on the CPU that may not be visible in any meaningful way unless I put a sticker on the case.
By the way, you may not be quite right about the "only" PPC motherboard being from Motorola; Cogent Computers appears to have one that costs around $1200. Of course, the CPUs to toss into it seem to add another $1200 or more in price, so I could be off here...
I'm certainly with you in being disinterested in "buying a Mac and ripping its guts out."
The crucial point is that Licensing is Important. You fail to read the license at significant peril. That's even true for BSD-like licenses.
Why not just write in English, and have a CGI that uses Babelfish to translate when a user logs in indicating some other language? :-)
It would be a cool thing if there was a Linux port to the Jornada, unfortunately, the references I can find on the LinuxCE mailing lists are not terribly specific/useful.
What's really unfortunate is that there has been no progression of the StrongARM series over the last couple years. It came out as a slick, low power, 250MHz CPU. That's still what it is, despite two years of surrounding technical advances. Transmeta Crusoe is becoming a available for similar applications, and may provide an even better mix of computational power and "battery efficiency."
Of course, the funny thing is that Elinux.com sells the Journada 690 as a Linux-compatible product!
In browsing the web sites mentioned, I don't see pricing/availability info on the actual hardware, only mention that "we OEM."
Are there vendors actually selling these in "consumer" quantities?
However, I certainly agree that the tendancy for students to try to get "the Internet" to do their research for them is extremely annoying.
- The newsgroup comp.lang.lisp tends to get hit hard by this; there's an almost-weekly attempt for students to get answers to what are obviously homework assignments that they have put off.
- I get a few emails a month that show that students are trying to satisfy research requirements by reading my web page on relational databases, and then figure that I am the obvious "consulting resource" to answer their assignments for them.
- There was one entertaining occasion when a considerable chunk of a class of accounting students asked my opinion on what Linux-based software package Corel should adopt, and why.
My reaction to many of these things is to tell the would-be non-researcher that their mission, if they choose to accept it, is to Go To The Library.I learned my research skills, which have mapped not too badly onto new media such as the web, by virtue of spending many hours in university libraries tenaciously searching for books and papers and references between them.
If I use "my powers of research" to help the new students too very much, they won't bother learning those sorts of skills, and the next time media changes, they may not develop the tenaciousness to be able to fight their way through to grasping the next new thing.
I'm happy to suggest some references, particularly those that are a little unusual so as to promote a wider array of insights. Thus, Marshall and Eric McLuhan's "Laws of Media" represent a probably-unexpected useful way of grappling with analyzing effects of changing technology, and I'm happy to cite that as an approach.
But to write peoples' research reports for them is quite another thing. It is not merely immoral for them, as students.
It is also immoral for those that do the writing, as they discourage students from becoming competent researchers. And in an increasingly information-oriented economy, that is a horrible way to handicap them.
Look back to the invention of flight. Back at the time that they were theorizing about whether heavier-than-air craft were feasible, I am quite certain that they were not successfully predicting today's "hub and spoke" airline economy. And they wouldn't have predicted the "cramming of passengers into microscopic seats" nor the most recent trend towards expanding legroom.
In short, any theories at this point are likely to be as fictional as the predictions back in the 1950s that everyone would be flying "jet cars" and helicopters to work.
This has the attractive result that you can be quite creative about the results you look for, with no one to gainsay your claims.
You could bias towards the "cyberpunk" approach that Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" suggests, or to the "artistic" approach of Greg Bear's "Blood Music."
These, and other, works can represent useful inspiration for your own Science Fiction story, which is effectively what any theorizing about the effects of nanotech represent.
I'd suggest considering several sides to it, in terms of actions and reactions in:
A useful exercise would be to take each of the areas of society that you plan to examine, and apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to generate some relevant Tetrads.
That is, look at how nanotech affects the given system component in four ways:
Play the "Tetrad Game" a dozen times, and render those tetrads into a systematic "story," and you should get an interesting result.
In such cases, there may never be a "real" driver, as the device may be so esoteric that there will only be ten of 'em on the planet.
In the long run, it might be preferable to have some generic "bus" (think: RS-232, Parallel Port, USB, IEEE-488, FireWire, ...) to support all sorts of such devices, and have the support code sit in user space. That is what is likely to, in the long run, limit the usefulness of this system...
With a BSD-like license, the notion that KRFTech "owns" portions of the driver would make it just as unacceptable to try to push a WinDriver-based driver into FreeBSD or NetBSD as it would be with Linux, and perhaps moreso. In effect, *BSD sets a "higher" standard for freedom in this regard, in requiring that anything that becomes part of an "official" kernel be released under a license that allows people to build it into proprietary systems. That's a somewhat more "intense" requirement than is provided for in the GPL.
The fact of having permission to release "binary-only" versions would permit some releases of software that the GPL would forbid, with the net result that "You win some, you lose some" when taking WinDriver into a BSD-related context.
But the crucial point here is that Licensing Really Is Important.
There are some legitimate disagreements that may legitimately persist over which approach to licensing of "free software" is preferable.
My position is that this parallels the multiple forms of noneuclidean geometry, where there are multiple viewpoints that provide useful mathematical insight.
The universal is that which ever "ethic" you prefer, it is critical to understand and think through the use of your "favored" licensing scheme, as there can be great troubles otherwise.
Note that the price of a WinDriver license runs somewhere between $1000 and $2000 (not 100% clear what the $1000 package is). Which means that if you want to use this to deploy a device driver, you get to pay out "a couple thousand bucks."
What is entirely unclear is what is the status of the resultant drivers. Is the code that is generated:
In such a case, the only way to use the results would be as a kernel module, due to the resultant license conflict...
I'm not "accusing" as the web site provides no indication one way or another. I'd find it surprising if the driver became "totally free," and that lack would put a big wrench in the "general interest" in the product.
I'll bet they sell some copies for organizations that plan to deploy Linux on embedded systems that are used internally; I suspect that the product is not of all that much "general interest."
And I'm sure it causes much amusement to those that are "SF-literate."
For those that aren't aware, the notion of "on the Gripping Hand" comes from the Niven/Pournelle works on an alien race called the "Moties." These critters have not two, but three hands, and so have an extra hand to "wave" when making hand-waving statements.
Their arguments would take this three-pronged form where the first two "hands" would go towards providing "general illumination," whilst the third, the "gripping hand," would "go for the kill" by attacking the crux of the problem.
A fun approach to take...
As for using a Mozilla-based "tool set," if your application specifically uses parts of Mozilla, and thereby requires having Mozilla installed, that is no longer an artificial dependancy.
On the other hand, an outright advantage to being "Mozilla-based" is that there is some degree of "right" to redistribute the code "tuned" to your application.
On the gripping hand, this introduces some packaging problems, with either:
- Having to carefully match version identification so that Module X, deployed by The Y Group, can be safely connected to Module Z, deployed by The Prime Group, or
- Having to statically link big chunks of library into applications, so that if I install three applications that use parts of Mozilla, I effectively have nearly three independent copies of Mozilla installed at once.
Neither of these outcomes is particularly attractive at this point...He indicated that they were, at least in the local area, having a harder time getting in the door at local businesses than they had expected.
If the business plan assumed that they were going to have huge numbers of service contracts, and that it would be really easy to set up service contract relationships, that nicely explains the failure of the business plan, and the resultant failure of the attempt to "go IPO."
I was pretty skeptical that they'd be easily able to sell service contracts... Of all the potentially legitimate Linux enterprises out there, LinuxCare seem to me to have the weakest case...
You can't just buy into the 4GL; you have to buy into the database on the back end, and whatever "TUI" or "GUI" is on the front end.
In the case of tightly integrated options, which buy you decent performance, such as Oracle's tools, this means "marrying" Oracle. (And no "With this ring I thee wed," and no "You may kiss the bride." There does, however, tend to be a rather one-way form of "wedding night"...)
Alternatively, SAP R/3 provides a DB-independent and OS-independent option, but is a rather heavyweight system.
Text-based systems were obsoleted by GUIed ones, and both have tended to be obsoleted by "web app" ones.
In order for the 4GL to buy "ease of use," it has to provide a very specific development approach, and that results in it being very "brittle" in a changing environment.
The "benefit" of a 4GL is that it makes certain things (perhaps creating certain forms of reports) very easy.
Unfortunately, this may only extend to covering 60% of system requirements. Which is wonderful when prototyping, when you only need to fulful 40% of system requirements. But it is not so wonderful when you're fighting to get the rest of the way, and have to fight with a tool that just wasn't meant to add in whatever that last 10% is.
I worked with a group that was building a GIS system atop PowerBuilder; they got about 1/2 done, and then had to discard it and recreate the whole application using MFC/C++ because they just couldn't push PowerBuilder far enough.
On the one hand, it's fair enough that Apple graphics (perhaps nee NeXT) are Apple's, but there are rumblings that Apple wants to get "medieval" over this. There has been a "reaction of silence," as well as more vigorous reactions.
The distressing part, described in this article, is that it appears that access to the OPENSTEP API may not be as open as everyone would wish to believe. To wit,
Of course, the most distressing part is this message purported to have come from Steve Jobs, where the salient bit reads: From: Steve Jobs Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 10:19 AM To: Lucas C. Wagner Subject: GNUstep Lucas, As you may know, Apple owns the Cocoa and OpenStep APIs, and will not feel great about others using its intellectual property without premission. Best, Steve
Open is as open does. If Apple winds up suing anyone over GNUstep, I'd say that tells you how committed they really are to "open source."
Options are, indeed, a form of compensation.
But the issuance of this form of compensation does not represent an expense to the company. Not, not, not.
Option compensation represents a dilution of the value of shareholder equity.
When Buffet suggests otherwise, he is playing a propaganda game.
It doesn't get any simpler than dilution of the value of shareholder equity; calling that an expense is simply not correct. The fact that some people are either not sufficiently literate in finance, or perhaps incapable of comprehension, does not make it legitimate to call it an expense.
If the option plan's provisions are disclosed in the enterprise's financial statements, as appears to be required by FASB/AICPA/SEC/CICA rules, then those that want to play pretend games and call option plans "expenses" can adjust for them as they like.
The other problem that I see as critical is that, as Parish acknowledges, "everyone else is doing the same." The notion that Microsoft is the leader in the matter seems to me as nonsensical as the notion that they are a technical leader in the computer industry.
It is nonetheless quite fair to say that the big problem for Microsoft is not the "death of a thousand paper-cuts" that may come out of secondary lawsuits based on the evidence of this big one, but rather the long term effects of employee benefits being strongly dependant on the value of the option plan.
If the value of Microsoft stock does not continue to rise, then those option plans, and the resulting long term financial security of MSFT employees, is injured. And it is that injury is what is liable to ultimately cause crucial injury to the corporation.
As for outsiders that are injured, I have less qualms than you. People have chosen to invest in what is necessarily a risky investnment, just like Dutch Tulip Bulbs, the South Sea Investment Company, the Nifty Fifty, and Tokyo real estate. If they were foolish in underestimating the risk, that's a loss that they foolishly underestimated.
Throw in "ethical considerations" and it may turn it from "well-deserved" to "richly-deserved..."
I use CFS - Cryptographic Filesystem, personally.
Admittedly, this still leaves you vulnerable to the script kiddie that gets in and can get at /crypt; that is probably still nearly as protectable as kernel-based approaches...
The former may be a mite more supported than the latter...
In the market that Wyse was realistically after, namely producing terminals to connect to Windows Terminal Server, it should likely be preferable to work with Microsoft's client OS software. That means cooperating rather than taking action (e.g. - adopting Linux) which Microsoft would see as an attack.
On the other hand, there is reasonable reason to think that temporary adoption of Linux may have been a ploy to scare MSFT into concessions. The article suggests as much:
Since Wyse started getting into "WinTerms," they've not been a clear "friend" of anything not Windows-related...