Hey there, there's a HUGE difference between pipes made out of lead and a bit of solder with lead in it.
Lead isn't a death-sentence, it can be safely used. I've been drinking from lead pipes and living in lead-painted walls my whole life and never shown elevated levels. My dad is a lead inspector and he says that virtually all the lead poisoning cases are caused by lead paint dust and chips, kids get the dust on their hands and toys and it ends up in their blood.
This sort of demonizing really pisses me off, some of the best materials we had for common uses has been outlawed because of irresponsible use and disposal. Asbestos insulation, lead solder, and asbestos brake pads are all superior at what they do. Hell, my heating bill (gas, in Boston) is about 30% of most of my coworkers because my house is jacketed in asbestos, and as long as I don't fsck with it it's perfectly safe.
Ever notice how often you have to replace brake pads these days? Or how much rusty dust they drop on your rims? That wasn't a problem with asbestos brake pads, they were awesome. I'm still looking to see if I can get my hands on some from overseas (I'll replace them myself or tell my mechanic before he services them).
Lead solder is a dream to work with compared to other materials, it's cheaper, and it lasts much longer. Outlawing it because people illegally dispose lead-containing stuff in landfills is moronic at best.
What really pissed me off was that I was using WindowsUpdate v5, which was pretty slick, but the beta worked fine in Windows 2000, it could handle some things that v4 couldn't.
After XP SP2 came out, I found that WindowsUpdate v5 for w2k was canceled, I had to go back to v4.
It's obvious that they just didn't want to give anyone the benefit of using a better service on an older OS.
That's the sort of shit MS pulls that makes me not buy or use their products.
Apple has pissed me off pretty well too, mostly involving broken promises with OS features and shady enterprise support. I work at a place that upgraded to OS X 10.2 for the AD integration features, but it wouldn't work at all in our environment, 10.3 works adequately, and whenever I have even a minor gripe they tell me to buy 10.4, which isn't even out yet.
That's somewhere where Linux shines. I always seem to get what I expect, because I don't think lines like 'added fixes for sk98lin enet driver' in the kernel changelog are ever outright lies, and my expecations are lower in the 'lower because I expect realistic features in this timeframe' way.
Er, maybe for you personally, you can remove your shortcut to IE, but it'll still be there, and the.dll that lets windows render the folders in explorer is the same one that renders HTML and loads ActiveX from Joe Hacker.
Windows doesn't gracefully hand off all http:// requests either, some apps will load links in IE even if you 'disabled' it.
Similar story with WMP and OE. MS isn't playing friendly because they can't stand to lose.
Well I have another strategy, when a scandal like the 60 and 75 GXP came out, I waited a bit until the 120GXP was out, you can bet they're paying HUGE attention to QC when they have to clean up the mindshare from such a disaster. I did the same thing with Maxtor a while back too, and I can say that in fourteen years of computing with a hard drive, I've only had one disk failure personally.
Of course, I cycle my IDE drives down from server to desktop to pet-project every year, so no important ones are ever older than two years. SCSI drives I replace when they indicate to (I love hardware monitoring!)
LBA is what they SHOULD have done from the start, it abstracts the specific geometry from the amount of space on the drive. Anyone who remembers having to dial-in CHS values knows this, LBA is a godsend. The reason it wasn't implemented from the start was that it would shift processing (sector locating) to the drives themselves, which wasn't cheap to do in the eighties and early nineties. LBA has also been the standard for a LONG while now, and besides a minor bump in addressing size (which was painless as could be) it's an awesome and generous implementation.
As for SATA, they DID get it right, they serialized and simplified the data stream and implemented it as ATAPI or a subset of SCSI for OS compatability. It uses a 48-bit LBA which (IIRC) tops out at 131,072 gibibytes, that's 128 terabytes! The hardware platform is also quite well thought-out, with room to grow, in speed, size, and scalability.
I see LESS jumpers on drives than I used to, except for some brands that include options for backward compatability. Hell, you can just leave your new ATA drive on 'Cable Select' and it'll just work, you couldn't do that too long ago. SATA drives don't (IIRC again) have 'required' jumpers at all.
Here's an idea:
When YOU see a single drive that hits the lba48 limit of 128TB, gimme a call, I'll send you a crisp twenty dollar bill.
Outside the geek community, storage requirements are much more modest, my family has yet to go over the 6GB mark on any of their four machines, my little sister has 'tons of music' on her 30GB iBook (and it's not even half-full), I've got a bunch of music, movies, and run an automated development tinderbox for an entire Linux distribution, and it fits nicely in the 60GB drive it's on. I also do tech support during the day, for about 2,500 computers total, and have yet to meet a user with over 20GB of data (and this includes faculty and student personal machines). Storage requirements WILL continue to rise, but not NEARLY as quickly as they used to, unless we start needing to store holographic video or something.
Where I work (a private school) the faculty like to take advantage of the 'discount software' spam. They ask us all the time if they should finally upgrade to XP by ordering it from the junk messages (at a huge discount), we tell them that if they order it from SPAM we won't support it.
A lot of them do it anyway, then they wonder why they get so much SPAM.
It really boils down to money for these people, if they think they can save $100 on Office XP or Norton Utilities they'll do it.
The whole shuttle is a hodgepodge of seperate projects kludged together.
The right way to get something like this designed and built is to have one engineer with -vision- draw up ideas and have fresh-thinking young engineers working under him.
Unfortunately, the 'design-by-comittee' idea is huge in our culture, and it stifles a lot of innovation.
I think it's cool to read abou tthe histories of the coolest things in technology and computing, almost all were VERY small groups of people laying down the framework and vision for huge leaps in our understanding.
Re:I'll tell you what they're doing!
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
...without having to go hat in hand back to shareholders
That's a very dot-com way to think about it. Shares aren't sold to raise operating cash, they're sold to raise money for capital expenditures, ways to make more money. I think google is operating in a very dot-com manner by essentially saying "We're RICH, we can afford enough ammo to just shoot into the dark until we hit something!".
A responsible company treats every incoming dollar from share sales as if it has to go back someday, with 'interest'. Investing in a company is a vote of confidence and trust in that company, not a helpful addition to their bottom-line.
I think google has shown that they and wall street are stupidly pining for the mid-nineties, and I think its really a shame we didn't learn from that.
I'll tell you what they're doing!
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll tell you what Google is doing, they're getting ready to learn a HARD lesson in economics.
It's not NEARLY as easy to let people go as it is to hire them, and the only product the general public is even remotely interested in is the search engine. Desktop Search? WTF? Do they realize that most professionals in the office environment I've serviced can easily fit all their documents (sans-pictures) on a few floppy disks? Where's the market for this Desktop Search when most people either a) produce little to no digital output, or b) already know how to use folders and organize their work?
The Google folks should be focusing on small, judicious changes to their flagship product (www.google.com), and just rake in the billions like they were before the IPO.
Maark my words: The IPO will be remembered as the day Google lost focus and started the change to bleeding money.
There really were very few bodies produced by 9/11, the way the buildings imploded/collapsed shredded pretty much everything.
I had friends down there in the neighborhood who said the most they saw were dust-covered finger-sized chunks of flesh, there weren't many 'bodies' at all.
Also, it's not really a malicious double standard to show gore in the far corners of the world while reserving yourself for homeland gore, it's human nature. I'll be flat-out honest and say that I care slightly more about local lives than I do for foreigners, not to say that I don't feel absolutely horrible for those affected by this.
Anyway, it's not time to point fingers and bitch about the media, they seem to do a decent-enough job of covering this. I think the BBC is doing a fantastic job, making sure to cover all the affected areas and to keep the news flowing. Local news placed it in the top story, but they are sort of obligated to switch topics every thirty seconds.
Alright, I think I have it figured out. Kalutara did NOT get the primary impact of the tsunami, it's off on the west end of the island, while the tsunami hit the east.
No doubt the area got major flooding, and the pictures we're seeing of kalutara are all the water draining from the land back out to the beach.
As for the person who claimed that an entire section of the houses was gone, look closer, the houses are all still standing and th pictures are not exactly on the same scale.
The area got flooding, but no direct 'wall of water' impact, like the opposite side of the island or northern thailand.
I'm a bit confused by the Kalutara series, it appears to show a LOT more beach, but no damage to the buildings. Could this be in that few minutes when the water level dropped before the tsunami hit?
Or is Kalutara not in the direct path and this is after-effect on non-direct impact sites?
Seriously, IE does have some security features, the default setup is abysmal, but you can tweak-up the security for the whole world, and put the outside app into the 'trusted sites' zone. Problem solved. I've done it and it works.
BTW, you still have to keep your boxes patched, but that's a no-brainer anyway.
GCC hasn't got a scheduler for the Pentium 4 anyway.
I think it does have at least something rudimentary in that department, the VIA C3 chips are unpopular and largely undocumented, and the GCC notes mention that they are 'unscheduled', GCC treates them like a generic i586 or i686 with extensions (depending on the C3 or C3-2). I would expect there to be a note similar to the ones attached to the C3 series if the P4 option was unscheduled.
I'm working off notes for GCC-3.4.3, which is only a few weeks old.
The pentium M is NOT a P4 at heart, it's an intel i686 core (same as PIII) with added instructions and a different bus to the northbridge. It has the same feature set of a P4 but that doesn't make it a P4.
GCC-3.4.3 has a "-march=pentium-m" option, btw.
If you're stuck with an older gcc, try:
"march=pentium3 -msse2"
which should get you as close as can be to optimal scheduling.
Using "march=pentium4" will probably yield slower code than using just "pentium3" because the scheduling for these CPUs is so different.
I spend too much time doing this shit.
Re:And Apple is Open, what's the problem.
on
What's Wrong with Unix?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Would it really be suicide for Apple to release for free all of the source code for the OS?
Yes, Apple lost a huge portion of the home user and educational market, they're aiming to get a foothold in the data-processing sector, where *NIX is already in use. Releasing ALL the source except the consumer-friendly bits would obliterate their chance with shops like the government and large data-oriented customers. Why buy milk from Apple when you can roll-your-own Apple cow?
Also, there's a LOT in the OS that Apple probably CAN'T release, it's licensed from other folks, or it was written under different rules.
Apple does a lot of work for the OSS community, they give back more than most companies do, and they should be praised for it, just like IBM (they do a TON of stuff for the OSS community).
I thought the Linux/OSS users were going to get behind vendors that supported us and buy their products, that's what we said back in the '90s when hardware support was VERY hard to come by. The time has come, and if it's not all you thought it would be, think about all the Linux companies that went belly-up and why. There's a happy middle-ground between going totally nuts with the code-sharing and giving back while keeping a marketable product to yourself, Apple and IBM have found it.
Now think about this:
Apple gave us a BSD OS, tuned for multimedia and desktop use, something we've been working on for a while now. They'll give us Darwin, and sell us OS X. But you can take Darwin, install a ports system of your choice on it (gentoo, darwinports, apt-get, etc.) and use it just like any other system. You get OpenDirectory, which is quite possibly the best thing to happen to computers since ethernet (really, read about it!), you get xorg, and you get drivers that provide 100% functionality with Apple-branded hardware.
OK, you know about Darwin, but if you go to the Apple site you can look at the code for WebCore, OpenDirectory, Apple's Kerberos implementation, Darwin Streaming Server, Apple's drivers for their hardware, their mods to CUPS, Samba, ZeroConf, GCC, Apache, and a whole SLEW of other stuff.
The only stuff they don't give you is the source code to Aqua and their in-aqua userland apps, which makes sense, because giving that stuff away would be business suicide.
When Apple said they were going 'open source' it didn't say they were going to release the source to their core apps, like the Finder and iPhoto, but they've been very generous about contributing the code they borrowed and modified back to the community.
It should also be noted that Apple gives back to the projects they work on, GCC has come quite a way on the PowerPC since 3.0 thanks to Apple.
In my opinion, Apple's strategy is one I'd like to see some vendor take with Linux, you take the kernel and mod it for high-performance desktop apps, get GTK+ running on an accelerated OpenGL framebuffer, tweak and simplify a slew of apps and SELL it. As long as the mods to existing software make it back to the community, it's a net gain for all of us.
I'm somwhat of a libertarian, and I think I'd dig the deep south, where people won't think I'm some sort of right-wing whacko. Up here around the lunch table you say how the priests who molested kids "should get strung-up" and people look at you sideways.
In the meantime, I think my next move will be from Randolph, MA to Holbrook, MA, at least there I'll actually get permission from the town to own a gun, and I can have a bonfire without police and fire showing up.
It's interesting how far the 'heart of the american revolution' has taken the second amendment though, honest people can't get guns, but there's a huge gun-violence problem in the city. And it's also odd to me that the people here think that more gun control will solve the problem, when there's already so much 'control' and it does so little.
That might be easy where you live, but I'm up near Boston.
Where I live it's VERY hard to even get permission to have a rifle locked-up in your home.
Mace is illegal here.
Also, where I live, if someone comes into my home looking to steal shit, all I have the right to do is detain him until police arrive. I would be thrown in jail for kicking a home-invader's ass, and subject to civil action as well.
Apparently to get the level of licensure to own a handgun here I'd have to take a written test, a certified (target) test, and gun safety training annually, in addition to getting written permission from town hall and the police department.
Apparently the former police chief of a nearby town was DENIED the right to bring his handguns here when he moved (to be closer to family), because "I hunt, and as a former officer of the law I need the protection afforded by firearms." isn't reason enough for town hall to grant you the class-a license.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey there, there's a HUGE difference between pipes made out of lead and a bit of solder with lead in it.
Lead isn't a death-sentence, it can be safely used. I've been drinking from lead pipes and living in lead-painted walls my whole life and never shown elevated levels. My dad is a lead inspector and he says that virtually all the lead poisoning cases are caused by lead paint dust and chips, kids get the dust on their hands and toys and it ends up in their blood.
This sort of demonizing really pisses me off, some of the best materials we had for common uses has been outlawed because of irresponsible use and disposal. Asbestos insulation, lead solder, and asbestos brake pads are all superior at what they do. Hell, my heating bill (gas, in Boston) is about 30% of most of my coworkers because my house is jacketed in asbestos, and as long as I don't fsck with it it's perfectly safe.
Ever notice how often you have to replace brake pads these days? Or how much rusty dust they drop on your rims? That wasn't a problem with asbestos brake pads, they were awesome. I'm still looking to see if I can get my hands on some from overseas (I'll replace them myself or tell my mechanic before he services them).
Lead solder is a dream to work with compared to other materials, it's cheaper, and it lasts much longer. Outlawing it because people illegally dispose lead-containing stuff in landfills is moronic at best.
um, you shoould turn OFF -mmmx -msse -msse2 when using the -march=pentium4 option, they're already set properly.
...
To see what flags are set 'behind the scenes' you can run 'gcc -Q -v -O3 -march=pentium4 helloworld.c' on a 'hello world' file. Here's an example:
#gcc -Q -v -O3 -march=pentium4 helloworld.c
options enabled: -feliminate-unused-debug-types -fdefer-pop
-foptimize-sibling-calls -funit-at-a-time -fcse-follow-jumps
-fcse-skip-blocks -fexpensive-optimizations -fthread-jumps
-fstrength-reduce -funswitch-loops -fpeephole -fforce-mem -ffunction-cse
-fkeep-static-consts -fcaller-saves -fpcc-struct-return -fweb -fgcse
-fgcse-lm -fgcse-sm -fgcse-las -floop-optimize -fcrossjumping
-fif-conversion -fif-conversion2 -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt
-fdelete-null-pointer-checks -fschedule-insns2 -fsched-interblock
-fsched-spec -fsched-stalled-insns -fsched-stalled-insns-dep
-fbranch-count-reg -freorder-blocks -freorder-functions -frename-registers
-fcprop-registers -fcommon -fregmove -foptimize-register-move
-fargument-alias -fstrict-aliasing -fmerge-constants
-fzero-initialized-in-bss -fident -fpeephole2 -fguess-branch-probability
-fmath-errno -ftrapping-math -m80387 -mhard-float -mno-soft-float
-mieee-fp -mfp-ret-in-387 -maccumulate-outgoing-args -mmmx -msse
-mno-red-zone -mtls-direct-seg-refs -mtune=pentium4 -march=pentium4
hm. Thanks. I already gave the user account full-control over the files, but hadn't tried modifying the registry keys' ACL.
It should be noted that the 60GXP was susceptible as well, it was the same drive and parts (IIRC) with a different number of platters.
Sims 2 doesn't even work if you're not a local administrator. Pissed some of my clients right off.
What really pissed me off was that I was using WindowsUpdate v5, which was pretty slick, but the beta worked fine in Windows 2000, it could handle some things that v4 couldn't.
After XP SP2 came out, I found that WindowsUpdate v5 for w2k was canceled, I had to go back to v4.
It's obvious that they just didn't want to give anyone the benefit of using a better service on an older OS.
That's the sort of shit MS pulls that makes me not buy or use their products.
Apple has pissed me off pretty well too, mostly involving broken promises with OS features and shady enterprise support. I work at a place that upgraded to OS X 10.2 for the AD integration features, but it wouldn't work at all in our environment, 10.3 works adequately, and whenever I have even a minor gripe they tell me to buy 10.4, which isn't even out yet.
That's somewhere where Linux shines. I always seem to get what I expect, because I don't think lines like 'added fixes for sk98lin enet driver' in the kernel changelog are ever outright lies, and my expecations are lower in the 'lower because I expect realistic features in this timeframe' way.
Er, maybe for you personally, you can remove your shortcut to IE, but it'll still be there, and the .dll that lets windows render the folders in explorer is the same one that renders HTML and loads ActiveX from Joe Hacker.
Windows doesn't gracefully hand off all http:// requests either, some apps will load links in IE even if you 'disabled' it.
Similar story with WMP and OE. MS isn't playing friendly because they can't stand to lose.
Well I have another strategy, when a scandal like the 60 and 75 GXP came out, I waited a bit until the 120GXP was out, you can bet they're paying HUGE attention to QC when they have to clean up the mindshare from such a disaster. I did the same thing with Maxtor a while back too, and I can say that in fourteen years of computing with a hard drive, I've only had one disk failure personally.
Of course, I cycle my IDE drives down from server to desktop to pet-project every year, so no important ones are ever older than two years. SCSI drives I replace when they indicate to (I love hardware monitoring!)
Are you posting from 1995 or something?
LBA is what they SHOULD have done from the start, it abstracts the specific geometry from the amount of space on the drive. Anyone who remembers having to dial-in CHS values knows this, LBA is a godsend. The reason it wasn't implemented from the start was that it would shift processing (sector locating) to the drives themselves, which wasn't cheap to do in the eighties and early nineties. LBA has also been the standard for a LONG while now, and besides a minor bump in addressing size (which was painless as could be) it's an awesome and generous implementation.
As for SATA, they DID get it right, they serialized and simplified the data stream and implemented it as ATAPI or a subset of SCSI for OS compatability. It uses a 48-bit LBA which (IIRC) tops out at 131,072 gibibytes, that's 128 terabytes! The hardware platform is also quite well thought-out, with room to grow, in speed, size, and scalability.
I see LESS jumpers on drives than I used to, except for some brands that include options for backward compatability. Hell, you can just leave your new ATA drive on 'Cable Select' and it'll just work, you couldn't do that too long ago. SATA drives don't (IIRC again) have 'required' jumpers at all.
Here's an idea:
When YOU see a single drive that hits the lba48 limit of 128TB, gimme a call, I'll send you a crisp twenty dollar bill.
Outside the geek community, storage requirements are much more modest, my family has yet to go over the 6GB mark on any of their four machines, my little sister has 'tons of music' on her 30GB iBook (and it's not even half-full), I've got a bunch of music, movies, and run an automated development tinderbox for an entire Linux distribution, and it fits nicely in the 60GB drive it's on. I also do tech support during the day, for about 2,500 computers total, and have yet to meet a user with over 20GB of data (and this includes faculty and student personal machines). Storage requirements WILL continue to rise, but not NEARLY as quickly as they used to, unless we start needing to store holographic video or something.
Where I work (a private school) the faculty like to take advantage of the 'discount software' spam. They ask us all the time if they should finally upgrade to XP by ordering it from the junk messages (at a huge discount), we tell them that if they order it from SPAM we won't support it.
A lot of them do it anyway, then they wonder why they get so much SPAM.
It really boils down to money for these people, if they think they can save $100 on Office XP or Norton Utilities they'll do it.
The whole shuttle is a hodgepodge of seperate projects kludged together.
The right way to get something like this designed and built is to have one engineer with -vision- draw up ideas and have fresh-thinking young engineers working under him.
Unfortunately, the 'design-by-comittee' idea is huge in our culture, and it stifles a lot of innovation.
I think it's cool to read abou tthe histories of the coolest things in technology and computing, almost all were VERY small groups of people laying down the framework and vision for huge leaps in our understanding.
...without having to go hat in hand back to shareholders
That's a very dot-com way to think about it. Shares aren't sold to raise operating cash, they're sold to raise money for capital expenditures, ways to make more money. I think google is operating in a very dot-com manner by essentially saying "We're RICH, we can afford enough ammo to just shoot into the dark until we hit something!".
A responsible company treats every incoming dollar from share sales as if it has to go back someday, with 'interest'. Investing in a company is a vote of confidence and trust in that company, not a helpful addition to their bottom-line.
I think google has shown that they and wall street are stupidly pining for the mid-nineties, and I think its really a shame we didn't learn from that.
I'll tell you what Google is doing, they're getting ready to learn a HARD lesson in economics.
It's not NEARLY as easy to let people go as it is to hire them, and the only product the general public is even remotely interested in is the search engine. Desktop Search? WTF? Do they realize that most professionals in the office environment I've serviced can easily fit all their documents (sans-pictures) on a few floppy disks? Where's the market for this Desktop Search when most people either a) produce little to no digital output, or b) already know how to use folders and organize their work?
The Google folks should be focusing on small, judicious changes to their flagship product (www.google.com), and just rake in the billions like they were before the IPO.
Maark my words: The IPO will be remembered as the day Google lost focus and started the change to bleeding money.
If you recall, the S3 ViRGE was called 'the 3D decelerator' by a large portion of the community.
There really were very few bodies produced by 9/11, the way the buildings imploded/collapsed shredded pretty much everything.
I had friends down there in the neighborhood who said the most they saw were dust-covered finger-sized chunks of flesh, there weren't many 'bodies' at all.
Also, it's not really a malicious double standard to show gore in the far corners of the world while reserving yourself for homeland gore, it's human nature. I'll be flat-out honest and say that I care slightly more about local lives than I do for foreigners, not to say that I don't feel absolutely horrible for those affected by this.
Anyway, it's not time to point fingers and bitch about the media, they seem to do a decent-enough job of covering this. I think the BBC is doing a fantastic job, making sure to cover all the affected areas and to keep the news flowing. Local news placed it in the top story, but they are sort of obligated to switch topics every thirty seconds.
Alright, I think I have it figured out. Kalutara did NOT get the primary impact of the tsunami, it's off on the west end of the island, while the tsunami hit the east.
No doubt the area got major flooding, and the pictures we're seeing of kalutara are all the water draining from the land back out to the beach.
As for the person who claimed that an entire section of the houses was gone, look closer, the houses are all still standing and th pictures are not exactly on the same scale.
The area got flooding, but no direct 'wall of water' impact, like the opposite side of the island or northern thailand.
I'm a bit confused by the Kalutara series, it appears to show a LOT more beach, but no damage to the buildings. Could this be in that few minutes when the water level dropped before the tsunami hit?
Or is Kalutara not in the direct path and this is after-effect on non-direct impact sites?
Seriously, IE does have some security features, the default setup is abysmal, but you can tweak-up the security for the whole world, and put the outside app into the 'trusted sites' zone. Problem solved. I've done it and it works.
BTW, you still have to keep your boxes patched, but that's a no-brainer anyway.
GCC hasn't got a scheduler for the Pentium 4 anyway.
I think it does have at least something rudimentary in that department, the VIA C3 chips are unpopular and largely undocumented, and the GCC notes mention that they are 'unscheduled', GCC treates them like a generic i586 or i686 with extensions (depending on the C3 or C3-2). I would expect there to be a note similar to the ones attached to the C3 series if the P4 option was unscheduled.
I'm working off notes for GCC-3.4.3, which is only a few weeks old.
The pentium M is NOT a P4 at heart, it's an intel i686 core (same as PIII) with added instructions and a different bus to the northbridge. It has the same feature set of a P4 but that doesn't make it a P4.
GCC-3.4.3 has a "-march=pentium-m" option, btw.
If you're stuck with an older gcc, try:
"march=pentium3 -msse2"
which should get you as close as can be to optimal scheduling.
Using "march=pentium4" will probably yield slower code than using just "pentium3" because the scheduling for these CPUs is so different.
I spend too much time doing this shit.
Would it really be suicide for Apple to release for free all of the source code for the OS?
Yes, Apple lost a huge portion of the home user and educational market, they're aiming to get a foothold in the data-processing sector, where *NIX is already in use. Releasing ALL the source except the consumer-friendly bits would obliterate their chance with shops like the government and large data-oriented customers. Why buy milk from Apple when you can roll-your-own Apple cow?
Also, there's a LOT in the OS that Apple probably CAN'T release, it's licensed from other folks, or it was written under different rules.
Apple does a lot of work for the OSS community, they give back more than most companies do, and they should be praised for it, just like IBM (they do a TON of stuff for the OSS community).
I thought the Linux/OSS users were going to get behind vendors that supported us and buy their products, that's what we said back in the '90s when hardware support was VERY hard to come by. The time has come, and if it's not all you thought it would be, think about all the Linux companies that went belly-up and why. There's a happy middle-ground between going totally nuts with the code-sharing and giving back while keeping a marketable product to yourself, Apple and IBM have found it.
Now think about this:
Apple gave us a BSD OS, tuned for multimedia and desktop use, something we've been working on for a while now. They'll give us Darwin, and sell us OS X. But you can take Darwin, install a ports system of your choice on it (gentoo, darwinports, apt-get, etc.) and use it just like any other system. You get OpenDirectory, which is quite possibly the best thing to happen to computers since ethernet (really, read about it!), you get xorg, and you get drivers that provide 100% functionality with Apple-branded hardware.
OK, you know about Darwin, but if you go to the Apple site you can look at the code for WebCore, OpenDirectory, Apple's Kerberos implementation, Darwin Streaming Server, Apple's drivers for their hardware, their mods to CUPS, Samba, ZeroConf, GCC, Apache, and a whole SLEW of other stuff.
The only stuff they don't give you is the source code to Aqua and their in-aqua userland apps, which makes sense, because giving that stuff away would be business suicide.
When Apple said they were going 'open source' it didn't say they were going to release the source to their core apps, like the Finder and iPhoto, but they've been very generous about contributing the code they borrowed and modified back to the community.
It should also be noted that Apple gives back to the projects they work on, GCC has come quite a way on the PowerPC since 3.0 thanks to Apple.
In my opinion, Apple's strategy is one I'd like to see some vendor take with Linux, you take the kernel and mod it for high-performance desktop apps, get GTK+ running on an accelerated OpenGL framebuffer, tweak and simplify a slew of apps and SELL it. As long as the mods to existing software make it back to the community, it's a net gain for all of us.
Actually, I'd like to.
I'm somwhat of a libertarian, and I think I'd dig the deep south, where people won't think I'm some sort of right-wing whacko. Up here around the lunch table you say how the priests who molested kids "should get strung-up" and people look at you sideways.
In the meantime, I think my next move will be from Randolph, MA to Holbrook, MA, at least there I'll actually get permission from the town to own a gun, and I can have a bonfire without police and fire showing up.
It's interesting how far the 'heart of the american revolution' has taken the second amendment though, honest people can't get guns, but there's a huge gun-violence problem in the city. And it's also odd to me that the people here think that more gun control will solve the problem, when there's already so much 'control' and it does so little.
How do you feel about Slashdot is just a bunch of AI programs which mod each other up?
That might be easy where you live, but I'm up near Boston.
Where I live it's VERY hard to even get permission to have a rifle locked-up in your home.
Mace is illegal here.
Also, where I live, if someone comes into my home looking to steal shit, all I have the right to do is detain him until police arrive. I would be thrown in jail for kicking a home-invader's ass, and subject to civil action as well.
Apparently to get the level of licensure to own a handgun here I'd have to take a written test, a certified (target) test, and gun safety training annually, in addition to getting written permission from town hall and the police department.
Apparently the former police chief of a nearby town was DENIED the right to bring his handguns here when he moved (to be closer to family), because "I hunt, and as a former officer of the law I need the protection afforded by firearms." isn't reason enough for town hall to grant you the class-a license.