Way back when, the cost of long distance service was pretty high.
Today, I expect it costs the phone companies more to track and account for it than it costs for them to provide the service.
This doesn't stop them from sending you bills.
The parallel is quite clear: The "powers that be" care a whole lot more about control than they do about the economics of the matter.
The same is true for organizational attempts to block things like phone sex services. Some organizations have concluded that it is mandatory to block the stuff. I'd think it cheaper to handle it after the fact, permitting people to abuse it, but making this a firing offense.
There would be some losses resulting from people being stupid; these costs are not likely to be as high as the costs of setting up the pre-blocking system. A couple of other benefits come in:
Those employees that are trustworthy will appreciate being trusted.
By permitting employees to screw up, the organization can detect this, and perhaps prevent them from making BIGGER mistakes.
Evidently two of the parts of life that these students aren't being permitted to do are:
To learn to exercise self control, and
To learn to behave maturely
If there is no option of making wrong choices, then it's not self control.
From the news report, particularly:
She describes the atmosphere at Arizona universities as "not conducive to learning." The primary indication of this, McGrath said, is the high number of students dropping out after their freshman year.
and
She said both of the Internet bills are designed to "get at the porn problem."
it might be taken that there is some unusual problem.
Is that actually the case? I would think it possible. Or is this merely a knee-jerk reaction that they've noticed some new way of "getting porn."
As compared to the consideration that students could use the US Mail service to send a subscription card to get a subscription to Playboy or potentially something "racier."
Actually, that suggests something comparable... I'd think that the institution is not permitted by US law to tamper with the mail. Considerable "games" could be played by using the mail service...
If he had merely invoked the "magic of quantum computers," I'd agree that this was likely to be an ignorant resort to deus ex machina, and would say the same about invoking What if P = NP ?
However, he also suggested the possibility of a substantial result in number theory in the area of factorization. That is another unpredictable possibility that is as "likely" to result in an RSA crack. And while it's not a new insight, the combination is reasonably sound.
If you look at the boxes on the store shelves with names like Corel Linux Deluxe or Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe you will find some "closed source"/"binary only" components.
RMS's head might be pressured by all of this; that's not the point.
The thing that they are vulnerable to is of someone demanding to receive copies of the source code to things that are licensed under the GPL, as is their right under the provisions of the GPL.
What LinuxOne are more vulnerable to is the possibility that people might figure out that:
The distribution isn't a very good buy, and
The STOCK isn't a very good buy.
Hopefully most of the "figuring out" of this will take place before they buy anything.
I have some understanding of the math of RSA (hit it in first year algebra way back when working on my Bachelor of Mathematics degree); the point is that there have now been years of "numerous attempts to break it."
Consider that the use of the Knapsack Problem for encrypting messages was arrived at around the same time, and it turned out to be vulnerable to attack.
With lots of people working on factoring, it would not be overly peculiar for vulnerabilities to have turned up by this time.
It is fairly remarkable that RSA is still considered useful after lo these many years.
There has been a tendancy for patents on computer-related stuff to block developments for so long that the patented matter to be an irrelevant obsolete technology by the time it becomes publicly available.
It may be that we need to start looking at elliptical algorithms, although it is unfortunate that the level of math required to understand it is greatly more daunting.
Hopefully there are a few years of "reasonable security" left in RSA...
Ghostscript is released under the GPL (18 months late), as well as having a "proprietary" release (1st 18 months).
I gather that changes are accepted under the condition that they can be used both with "GNU Ghostscript" and "Aladdin Ghostscript."
This seems to have been a decent trade-off over the years; people have considered it worthwhile to contribute changes without necessarily being paid directly.
I'd tend to think that three factors should come in:
Make sure that it is clear that code contributions will be used in the two ways.
Make sure that code contributions are made public.
There will be fewer "games" played of the sort there are in Hollywood with I sent you this script, see, and you made a movie based on it, and so I'm going to sue you!
Whether patches are "accepted" or "rejected," they should be tracked, perhaps in a public archive.
Lastly, if there are to be rules about payment, apply them in a timely and scrupulous manner, lest people decide you're untrustworthy.
What the world probably needs is for someone to build a "barneyfied" GUI tool for the construction of cfengine scripts.
cfengine is a sort of generic "configuration control" languge. You define things like lines that should be in /etc/hosts , or things that should be mounted, or files that ought to be kept up to date with central repositories, rotating system logs, fixing file permissions, and other similar sorts of things.
A daily/hourly run will go through and "clean up" whatever isn't set according to the instructions.
There's a client/server variation called cfd that allows you to push configuration across a network on demand.
The big point to this is that it treats system set up more like "immunology" than anything else. From a security perspective, this is very good. You get some security rules set up, run them regularly, and fix/prevent holes.
Perhaps more useful, once you set up some common rules for a site, installing a new system becomes real easy: you just need to get as far as installing cfengine, get some config files over, whether via floppy, CD, or NFS mount, and then type # cd/etc/cfengine; cfengine and depending on the sophistication of the rules, you may never need to log on as root again.
For instance, you might set up a location where machines mount a filesystem containing package upgrades or configuration file upgrads, and automagically install them.
The regrettable thing is that cfengine doesn't have the "barneyfication" that naive users may want/need.
On the other hand, it has the major virtue over things like Linuxconf that it is a tool for building configuration systems rather than being a front end that is tightly connected to the back end.
I could see:
Building a GUI tool that manipulates some combination of templates and data. That allows providing a relatively friendly front end for what could be a bit offputting.
Using cfengine as the tool for pushing package configuration into place on one's system.
Thus, rather than merely doing a "cp foo/etc/foo; chmod 774/etc/foo", the configuration process might include asking the user for input of critical bits of configuration, and constructing a cfengine script that might even be usable to "clean up" if you've done something icky and want to fix the package.
This would also make it natural to create a little script for a given package that might do security checks, perhaps automagically turning off dangerous options or the like.
The views that are expressed in the interview are quite congruent with the developments in software copyright over the last 20 years.
Several causes suggest themselves:
BillG was being prophetic:-)
Nope - don't believe a word of that!
BillG's opinions at that time, have become the prevailing legal opinions due to the influence of Microsoft.
I'd judge this to be partly true; it could be argued that one of the few true Microsoft innovations is the outgrowth of shrinkwrapped software licensing as we know it today. (I'm not saying that it is an unalloyed benefit; merely that it is a result of their activities.)
...But this is not a complete picture. It doesn't provide any reason, outside of BillG's stridency, for his views to have prevailed.
We have to head on to...
William H. Gates III's views, in 1980, were, with little doubt, informed by the fact that his father, William H. Gates Jr, was an intellectual property lawyer.
The point here is that it is manifestly clear that "Trey's" positions are informed by the fact that his father was a corporate lawyer, one of the founders of Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP.
Many high tech companies have tended to have a hate-hate relationship with lawyers; I don't think it is any coincidence that Microsoft has had huge legal successes in the past when involvement with law was to some degree pervasive in the young Gate's life.
They don't describe the CPU as being a 200MHz part; in the lack of real information, they never actually indicate the kind of CPU the system uses.
What they describe as being "200MHz" is the bus speed, and that is a fairly different matter. If you look at those AMD K6 chips, they're connecting to motherboards that have bus speeds of (in these inflated days!) either 66MHz or 100MHz. That's rather less than 200MHz.
The bus technology getting billed as a "200MHz thing" is the Alpha EV7, which suggests that the CPUs in these systems are either:
Compaq Alpha, or
AMD Athlon.
I'd sort of anticipate the latter, but it is surprising that they are not trumpeting their use of whichever CPU they are using.
The paucity of solid technical information and the proliferation of TM-this and TM-that is a bit distressing.
I've gotten unsolicited email asking what exchange Transmeta is trading on; apparently some people have no clue.
Transmeta is not a publicly traded company, and so is not required to disclose ownership information to the public. It is known that Paul Allen's Vulcan Group has money in it; other venture capital groups were mentioned in the presentation yesterday; presumably the employees have gotten offered some equity whether as stock or as options on stock.
The stock could certainly head up from zero, but presumably the venture capital folk would want to have some return on their investment, and so it would take a fairly high valuation for selling out to prove worthwhile.
It sort of looked like the most important reason for Crusoe, according to one of the presenters, was the fact that it uses little enough power that you could perhaps actually watch a DVD before your batteries die.
Fuel cells could make this all irrelevant.
On to the Viking Laptop:
Runs on alcohol.
A Merced chip where the heat sink attaches to a cider heater. Hot cider for everyone.
The implication that they consider the low level stuff part of this their business, and, as you suggest, the "cash cow." It is part of their "competitive advantage" to be able to do that which nobody else can, which is to customize the processors in this way.
ON THE OTHER HAND. Not giving out the underlying instruction set means that they never have to apologize if they change the instruction set. They claimed that there were different instruction sets for the 3120 and 5400 models; if that be the case, it would be no surprise at all if later models are different again. If people are interactive via "middleware" instruction sets, then all Transmeta need do is to make sure that the microcode continues to support the "middleware," whether that be IA-32 or JVM.
Vision for the Future.
There is a really cool thing that this offers... Wouldn't it be a neat idea if Linus were to create what we might call Linus' Favorite Instruction Set, with all the features that he wishes there were to make Linux as fast and robust as possible?
Alternatively, the Lisp Machine people might find it a slick idea if Transmeta provided microcode to provide a Lisp-oriented instruction set that (notably) provides a really tightly microcoded set of garbage collector instructions. That would let them both benefit from MHz enhancements as well as from generational enhancements, perhaps simultaneously having some IA-32 emulation going on so that they have a virtual machine alongside providing PC compatibility services...
It appears that Transmeta does not plan to open up the ability for outsiders to create emulators, which means that what I'd be most interested in seeing, namely the ability to run "Native Crusoe" code.
After all, it sure would be neat to run Linux on a VLIW 128 bit CPU, wouldn't it?
It's sufficiently near to technically feasible as to make it imaginable, but you'd really need to add a few MB of RAM and an NIC in order for this to be feasible for getting any actual work done. And it's a sufficiently tightly proprietary design as to make that unrealistic.
Funny you should mention that; at one point, there existed the http://adultlinux.fsn.net/ AdultLinux Site which had links to some purportedly "adult-oriented" games for Linux, along with links out to more directly "porn" sites.
The site no longer exists, and (warning!) will suck your web browser to a site entitled "Forbidden Hardcore Porn!" which presumably intends to grab credit card numbers like crazy...
There also was, quite some time ago, someone that suggested visiting http://www.linuxchick.com, which is a "front page of every conceivable keyword tag."
In short, there are examples of this sort of thing. The linuxchick.com domain may in particular be a decent target for "lawsuit."
It is a reasonably pleasant surprise to see that Microsoft provided a moderately nice "reward" for the matter; the sum of $500 is not at all surprising.
Chaney is playing a pretty canny game here; he's certainly "profiting" in terms of publicity, and the fact that the amounts are to be donated to charity means nobody can sting him on being greedy for money.
I think it's extremely clever of him to auction off the cheque, as this permits us to get a picture of how much the "rest of the world" considers the matter to be valued at. This is most certainly an economically efficient outcome, as it can't but provide a valuation of at least $500.
And it shows us how insane peoples' valuations of the matter are; if it sorts out at $5000, this shows that someone considers that having a cheque for $500 from Microsoft is worth $5000.
Of course, what he should have done is to start a company whose sole asset is the cheque, and do an IPO.
I agree with you on the issue of concern about "complementing" DRI; this isn't the only OpenGL-related development; witness the independent efforts involving Matrox.
On the other hand, the matter of them only talking about the implications to developers seems not inappropriate. After all, OpenGL is useless to "end users" outside the context of being integrated into software written by developers. That's not "cruelty to users," but simple fact that right now, only developers can have any reasonable interest in OpenGL.
I'll stay away from the "flameworthy" GraphOn issue; it's not self-evident how that one will be economically beneficial, and comparisons to Windows are rife with misconceptions.
What I'm not sure of is the economic merits of Corel Linux.
Note: I installed it last night on my laptop to replace a SuSE install. That went quite well; it took not much more than a cfengine run combined with dropping a previously-tuned XFree86Config file into place to get it acceptably configured, which was a whole lot more satisfactory than an attempt over Christmas holidays to install Debian on it.
(Aside: This laptop has had TurboLinux, SuSE, Debian 2.1, Red Hat, and now Corel Linux installed on it. With the happy merit that I have more-or-less generalized the set of stuff I need to fiddle with after install. Reinstalling means installing a base system + cfengine and then running a cfengine script to get networking fixed up. I probably ought to see if this all copes well with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD too, as I have CDs handy...)
Based on the "Day 1" results, I'm reasonably pleased with Corel Linux, as this was the least painlful install. (Well, grumble, grumble, Corel's package selection tool required a whole lot of mousing around, and having sprained a wrist the night before, the word "painless" may only be treated as true in a conceptual sense...)
You might expect that to bode well for the economics, but that is a questionable assumption.
I didn't pay Corel anything for the install, as this was a $2 CD from LinuxCentral.
I'd be game to send Corel a little something; I expect that sending them $10 would be a better deal for them than spending $40 on a boxed set...
(More likely is the option of buying some shares in Corel... One of the few entertaining things I could do with the cash sitting in my SD-RRSP account when I was forced to sell off some telecom stocks, gripe, gripe, fascist CRTC...)
I then proceeded to NFS mount a cache with chunks of Debian/Unstable to upgrade it. Mostly complete, and almost a seamless upgrade.
Which implies that if the Debian Project does a good job of upgrading the "public" stuff, there will be little reason for there to be continuing revenue streams for Corel. Unlike the situation where people really do need to get upgraded CDs for RHAT or Caldera or SuSE.
It's all well and good for there to be a bunch of startups getting tossed in to produce "useful stuff." Unfortunately, "useful stuff" does not necessarily translate into profitable revenue streams, which is what Corel truly needs.
Translation does not help to provide simultaneous execution of applications from multiple OSes unless you have a virtualizable operating system (ala IBM mainframe VM, or PC VMWare) that provides an operating system model that everything else runs on top of.
The only way your theory is "prime possibility" is if Transmeta has actually been working with developers of something like VMWare. If they have, then there could be some synergies.
If not, then all we have is a somewhat faster chip. Plus, of course, a bunch of members of the Cult of Linus, all worshipful, but with no actual merit to their worship...
The thing that Windows has, which Linux doesn't, is MS Word 2000. To those that get Word attachments, the fact that there may be some vaguely similar software packages for Linux does not, regrettably, cut it.
Having a faster/cheaper CPU does not establish anything about superiority of OS platforms.
There are any number of pieces of Win32-only software that people have, unwittingly, married themselves to, where it would take a messy divorce to extricate themselves. This list might include:
Visio
ERWin
MS Access
AutoCAD
Microsoft Project
Word
PowerPoint
Excel
Outlook
Lotus Notes Client
There may exist vaguely analagous software on Linux, and more and better in progress. That doesn't mitigate the messiness of the "divorce."
If Transmeta were producing a chip that provided support for things like:
Segmentation in the style of Multics
Hardware-supported garbage collection, useful for either JVMs or for Lisp variants
Something otherwise better than merely expanding chips from 32 bit addressing to 64 bit addressing
I'd agree that there could be something fundamental here to, in the long run, change computing.
When all that it seems to bring is power consumption reduction, space reduction, hopefully faster performance, and perhaps less damage to the wallet, that's not really news. Every generation of CPUs since the 8008 has provided some mixture of those improvements.
Unless "Crusoe" offers more than that, I can't get overly excited.
The thing that sets off my "bogometer" when comments connect together Crusoe, Linux, and IA-32 Emulation is the fact that there shouldn't be a need to do IA-32 emulation if one is running Linux.
Given a GCC code generator for "native Crusoe," or whatever they'd call the not-involving-emulation instrution set, it ought to be more sensible to run Linux natively on the chip, as that should be faster and more efficient since it takes direct advantage of the CPU's facilities.
That can be made more adamant if we're talking about PDA applications where it's likely that applications are "embedded" and where it's pretty certain that source code to the applications would be available.
If you look at some of the major proprietary applications, it's still the case that they may be recompiled for alternative architectures. Applixware is available for Alpha as well as IA-32. Mozilla is getting deployed on various architectures. StarOffice has been available for PPC. That may not represent an exhaustive list, but a PDA is not likely to have an exhaustive set of software installed on it.
It's nice to see such a positive answer, and that reflects well on all parties involved.
Now, the only big problem is that Matrox doesn't seem to be as well-favored in the supply chains as they used to be, which is a matter well outside the scope of the control of Linux folk...
Slashdot Mirror
Today, I expect it costs the phone companies more to track and account for it than it costs for them to provide the service.
This doesn't stop them from sending you bills.
The parallel is quite clear: The "powers that be" care a whole lot more about control than they do about the economics of the matter.
The same is true for organizational attempts to block things like phone sex services. Some organizations have concluded that it is mandatory to block the stuff. I'd think it cheaper to handle it after the fact, permitting people to abuse it, but making this a firing offense.
There would be some losses resulting from people being stupid; these costs are not likely to be as high as the costs of setting up the pre-blocking system. A couple of other benefits come in:
If there is no option of making wrong choices, then it's not self control.
From the news report, particularly:
and it might be taken that there is some unusual problem.Is that actually the case? I would think it possible. Or is this merely a knee-jerk reaction that they've noticed some new way of "getting porn."
As compared to the consideration that students could use the US Mail service to send a subscription card to get a subscription to Playboy or potentially something "racier."
Actually, that suggests something comparable... I'd think that the institution is not permitted by US law to tamper with the mail. Considerable "games" could be played by using the mail service...
However, he also suggested the possibility of a substantial result in number theory in the area of factorization. That is another unpredictable possibility that is as "likely" to result in an RSA crack. And while it's not a new insight, the combination is reasonably sound.
I suspect that you are mistaking Not in NP for meaning easy to solve.
Not in NP appears to be a necessary condition for something to be an "easy solve." It is not a sufficient condition for that purpose.
If you look at the boxes on the store shelves with names like Corel Linux Deluxe or Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe you will find some "closed source"/"binary only" components.
RMS's head might be pressured by all of this; that's not the point.
The thing that they are vulnerable to is of someone demanding to receive copies of the source code to things that are licensed under the GPL, as is their right under the provisions of the GPL.
What LinuxOne are more vulnerable to is the possibility that people might figure out that:
Hopefully most of the "figuring out" of this will take place before they buy anything.
Consider that the use of the Knapsack Problem for encrypting messages was arrived at around the same time, and it turned out to be vulnerable to attack.
With lots of people working on factoring, it would not be overly peculiar for vulnerabilities to have turned up by this time.
There has been a tendancy for patents on computer-related stuff to block developments for so long that the patented matter to be an irrelevant obsolete technology by the time it becomes publicly available.
It may be that we need to start looking at elliptical algorithms, although it is unfortunate that the level of math required to understand it is greatly more daunting.
Hopefully there are a few years of "reasonable security" left in RSA...
I gather that changes are accepted under the condition that they can be used both with "GNU Ghostscript" and "Aladdin Ghostscript."
This seems to have been a decent trade-off over the years; people have considered it worthwhile to contribute changes without necessarily being paid directly.
I'd tend to think that three factors should come in:
There will be fewer "games" played of the sort there are in Hollywood with I sent you this script, see, and you made a movie based on it, and so I'm going to sue you!
Whether patches are "accepted" or "rejected," they should be tracked, perhaps in a public archive.
cfengine is a sort of generic "configuration control" languge. You define things like lines that should be in /etc/hosts , or things that should be mounted, or files that ought to be kept up to date with central repositories, rotating system logs, fixing file permissions, and other similar sorts of things.
A daily/hourly run will go through and "clean up" whatever isn't set according to the instructions.
There's a client/server variation called cfd that allows you to push configuration across a network on demand.
The big point to this is that it treats system set up more like "immunology" than anything else. From a security perspective, this is very good. You get some security rules set up, run them regularly, and fix/prevent holes.
Perhaps more useful, once you set up some common rules for a site, installing a new system becomes real easy: you just need to get as far as installing cfengine, get some config files over, whether via floppy, CD, or NFS mount, and then type # cd /etc/cfengine; cfengine and depending on the sophistication of the rules, you may never need to log on as root again.
For instance, you might set up a location where machines mount a filesystem containing package upgrades or configuration file upgrads, and automagically install them.
The regrettable thing is that cfengine doesn't have the "barneyfication" that naive users may want/need.
On the other hand, it has the major virtue over things like Linuxconf that it is a tool for building configuration systems rather than being a front end that is tightly connected to the back end.
I could see:
Thus, rather than merely doing a "cp foo /etc/foo; chmod 774 /etc/foo", the configuration process might include asking the user for input of critical bits of configuration, and constructing a cfengine script that might even be usable to "clean up" if you've done something icky and want to fix the package.
This would also make it natural to create a little script for a given package that might do security checks, perhaps automagically turning off dangerous options or the like.
Several causes suggest themselves:
Nope - don't believe a word of that!
I'd judge this to be partly true; it could be argued that one of the few true Microsoft innovations is the outgrowth of shrinkwrapped software licensing as we know it today. (I'm not saying that it is an unalloyed benefit; merely that it is a result of their activities.)
We have to head on to...
The Official W. H. Gates III bio provides a little indication of this; How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates describes it in more detail as does E-Mail from Bill.
The point here is that it is manifestly clear that "Trey's" positions are informed by the fact that his father was a corporate lawyer, one of the founders of Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP.
Many high tech companies have tended to have a hate-hate relationship with lawyers; I don't think it is any coincidence that Microsoft has had huge legal successes in the past when involvement with law was to some degree pervasive in the young Gate's life.
What they describe as being "200MHz" is the bus speed, and that is a fairly different matter. If you look at those AMD K6 chips, they're connecting to motherboards that have bus speeds of (in these inflated days!) either 66MHz or 100MHz. That's rather less than 200MHz.
The bus technology getting billed as a "200MHz thing" is the Alpha EV7, which suggests that the CPUs in these systems are either:
- Compaq Alpha, or
- AMD Athlon.
I'd sort of anticipate the latter, but it is surprising that they are not trumpeting their use of whichever CPU they are using.The paucity of solid technical information and the proliferation of TM-this and TM-that is a bit distressing.
Transmeta is not a publicly traded company, and so is not required to disclose ownership information to the public. It is known that Paul Allen's Vulcan Group has money in it; other venture capital groups were mentioned in the presentation yesterday; presumably the employees have gotten offered some equity whether as stock or as options on stock.
The stock could certainly head up from zero, but presumably the venture capital folk would want to have some return on their investment, and so it would take a fairly high valuation for selling out to prove worthwhile.
Fuel cells could make this all irrelevant.
On to the Viking Laptop:
- Runs on alcohol.
- A Merced chip where the heat sink attaches to a cider heater. Hot cider for everyone.
Perfect for all your party needs!The implication that they consider the low level stuff part of this their business, and, as you suggest, the "cash cow." It is part of their "competitive advantage" to be able to do that which nobody else can, which is to customize the processors in this way.
ON THE OTHER HAND. Not giving out the underlying instruction set means that they never have to apologize if they change the instruction set. They claimed that there were different instruction sets for the 3120 and 5400 models; if that be the case, it would be no surprise at all if later models are different again. If people are interactive via "middleware" instruction sets, then all Transmeta need do is to make sure that the microcode continues to support the "middleware," whether that be IA-32 or JVM.
Vision for the Future.
There is a really cool thing that this offers... Wouldn't it be a neat idea if Linus were to create what we might call Linus' Favorite Instruction Set, with all the features that he wishes there were to make Linux as fast and robust as possible?
Alternatively, the Lisp Machine people might find it a slick idea if Transmeta provided microcode to provide a Lisp-oriented instruction set that (notably) provides a really tightly microcoded set of garbage collector instructions. That would let them both benefit from MHz enhancements as well as from generational enhancements, perhaps simultaneously having some IA-32 emulation going on so that they have a virtual machine alongside providing PC compatibility services...
After all, it sure would be neat to run Linux on a VLIW 128 bit CPU, wouldn't it?
See: Linux for Nintendo 64.
It's sufficiently near to technically feasible as to make it imaginable, but you'd really need to add a few MB of RAM and an NIC in order for this to be feasible for getting any actual work done. And it's a sufficiently tightly proprietary design as to make that unrealistic.
The site no longer exists, and (warning!) will suck your web browser to a site entitled "Forbidden Hardcore Porn!" which presumably intends to grab credit card numbers like crazy...
There also was, quite some time ago, someone that suggested visiting http://www.linuxchick.com, which is a "front page of every conceivable keyword tag."
In short, there are examples of this sort of thing. The linuxchick.com domain may in particular be a decent target for "lawsuit."
In contrast, www.linuxgirl.com seems not at all inappropriate.
And Verio appears to own the domain www.linuxgirls.com.
Chaney is playing a pretty canny game here; he's certainly "profiting" in terms of publicity, and the fact that the amounts are to be donated to charity means nobody can sting him on being greedy for money.
I think it's extremely clever of him to auction off the cheque, as this permits us to get a picture of how much the "rest of the world" considers the matter to be valued at. This is most certainly an economically efficient outcome, as it can't but provide a valuation of at least $500.
And it shows us how insane peoples' valuations of the matter are; if it sorts out at $5000, this shows that someone considers that having a cheque for $500 from Microsoft is worth $5000.
Of course, what he should have done is to start a company whose sole asset is the cheque, and do an IPO.
Betcha he'd be a billionaire by now!
On the other hand, the matter of them only talking about the implications to developers seems not inappropriate. After all, OpenGL is useless to "end users" outside the context of being integrated into software written by developers. That's not "cruelty to users," but simple fact that right now, only developers can have any reasonable interest in OpenGL.
What I'm not sure of is the economic merits of Corel Linux.
Note: I installed it last night on my laptop to replace a SuSE install. That went quite well; it took not much more than a cfengine run combined with dropping a previously-tuned XFree86Config file into place to get it acceptably configured, which was a whole lot more satisfactory than an attempt over Christmas holidays to install Debian on it.
(Aside: This laptop has had TurboLinux, SuSE, Debian 2.1, Red Hat, and now Corel Linux installed on it. With the happy merit that I have more-or-less generalized the set of stuff I need to fiddle with after install. Reinstalling means installing a base system + cfengine and then running a cfengine script to get networking fixed up. I probably ought to see if this all copes well with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD too, as I have CDs handy...)
Based on the "Day 1" results, I'm reasonably pleased with Corel Linux, as this was the least painlful install. (Well, grumble, grumble, Corel's package selection tool required a whole lot of mousing around, and having sprained a wrist the night before, the word "painless" may only be treated as true in a conceptual sense...)
You might expect that to bode well for the economics, but that is a questionable assumption.
- I didn't pay Corel anything for the install, as this was a $2 CD from LinuxCentral.
- I then proceeded to NFS mount a cache with chunks of Debian/Unstable to upgrade it. Mostly complete, and almost a seamless upgrade.
It's all well and good for there to be a bunch of startups getting tossed in to produce "useful stuff." Unfortunately, "useful stuff" does not necessarily translate into profitable revenue streams, which is what Corel truly needs.I'd be game to send Corel a little something; I expect that sending them $10 would be a better deal for them than spending $40 on a boxed set...
(More likely is the option of buying some shares in Corel... One of the few entertaining things I could do with the cash sitting in my SD-RRSP account when I was forced to sell off some telecom stocks, gripe, gripe, fascist CRTC...)
Which implies that if the Debian Project does a good job of upgrading the "public" stuff, there will be little reason for there to be continuing revenue streams for Corel. Unlike the situation where people really do need to get upgraded CDs for RHAT or Caldera or SuSE.
Crusoe may be pretty slick and fast stuff, but is merely hardware. It doesn't, simply by sitting on a PC board emitting heat, solve software problems.
IBM picked Linux because they figured they could sell software services out of the deal. I don't see Crusoe in that picture.
Making worshipful cow eyes to the effect that it would be just TOOO SWEET! doesn't establish anything about one's ability to do that. The matters patented, such as Memory controller for a microprocessor for detecting a failure of speculation on the physical nature of a component being addressed (US5832205), might be helpful in making an emulation a bit faster, but does nothing to support the software side of the matter.
The only way your theory is "prime possibility" is if Transmeta has actually been working with developers of something like VMWare. If they have, then there could be some synergies.
If not, then all we have is a somewhat faster chip. Plus, of course, a bunch of members of the Cult of Linus, all worshipful, but with no actual merit to their worship...
Having a faster/cheaper CPU does not establish anything about superiority of OS platforms.
There are any number of pieces of Win32-only software that people have, unwittingly, married themselves to, where it would take a messy divorce to extricate themselves. This list might include:
There may exist vaguely analagous software on Linux, and more and better in progress. That doesn't mitigate the messiness of the "divorce."
If Transmeta were producing a chip that provided support for things like:
- Segmentation in the style of Multics
- Hardware-supported garbage collection, useful for either JVMs or for Lisp variants
- Something otherwise better than merely expanding chips from 32 bit addressing to 64 bit addressing
I'd agree that there could be something fundamental here to, in the long run, change computing.When all that it seems to bring is power consumption reduction, space reduction, hopefully faster performance, and perhaps less damage to the wallet, that's not really news. Every generation of CPUs since the 8008 has provided some mixture of those improvements.
Unless "Crusoe" offers more than that, I can't get overly excited.
Given a GCC code generator for "native Crusoe," or whatever they'd call the not-involving-emulation instrution set, it ought to be more sensible to run Linux natively on the chip, as that should be faster and more efficient since it takes direct advantage of the CPU's facilities.
That can be made more adamant if we're talking about PDA applications where it's likely that applications are "embedded" and where it's pretty certain that source code to the applications would be available.
If you look at some of the major proprietary applications, it's still the case that they may be recompiled for alternative architectures. Applixware is available for Alpha as well as IA-32. Mozilla is getting deployed on various architectures. StarOffice has been available for PPC. That may not represent an exhaustive list, but a PDA is not likely to have an exhaustive set of software installed on it.
Now, the only big problem is that Matrox doesn't seem to be as well-favored in the supply chains as they used to be, which is a matter well outside the scope of the control of Linux folk...