To address the question in the subject of the original/. post: IANAL but as I understand English law, you specifically do not own your body. Some precedence was set in a court a long time ago. Apparently the argument was along the line that since your body is give to you freely by God, you cannot own it. Interesting. In any case: you don't own your body in the sense of property right.
Actually, the government thinks it owns your body. It says what you can and cannot put into it (narcotics laws), and can order you to sacrifice it if it suits their interests (conscription), and to work to support them (taxation). The church only thinks it owns your soul.
Both organizations are dedicated to the destruction of independant thought and action. Fortunately, we have corporations to defend that.
I'd rather generate/buy expensive electricity than buy relatively cheaper electricity that results in more air pollution, etc.
I understand your motivation, but are you aware that a solar cell takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce over its working life? Photoelectric cells are not the solution to pollution from conventional means of generating electricity.
Well, consider GIMP. It attempts to mimic some of the things that PhotoShop can do. But, and here is the crucial point, it's not about innovational new features. The new features are produced by the commercial developers, and are then copied.
So when GIMP dominates the market, there is not enough money to be made by commercial developers to continue development, where does the innovation come from?
The same can be said for a multitude of Open Source projects, they're about producing free versions of commercial products, not about producing something new and excitingly different. Harsh, but true.
Give up the conflicting name. Not because you have to. Because it's the right thing to do.
Agreed. The SSH chap sounds like a decent, pleasant fellow. Given that by far the hardest thing he's asked the OpenSSH people to do is choose a new name, and that he's contributed significantly to their own success, it would show a lack of common courtesy should they refuse to comply.
I honestly can't see why/. is making such a fuss about this, it smacks of mob hysteria and, as you say, double standards.
As the article says, whether they Open Source it or build a business around it, it's unlikely that ARM themselves would permit it - their business model is to develop and license their intellectual property rather than sell actual products.
Contrast this with Sun Microsystems who use the SPARC processor under license. As far as I'm aware, they don't even manufacture SPARCs themselves, but rely on a third party foundry. Why is this relevant? Because SPARCs are also used by many vendors and you can even get the chip architectures if you wanted to implement it yourself, then have your design properly verified.
If MS tried to enforce a lawsuit regarding the name "Word" to any extent, they'd likely be laughed out of court.
On the contrary. If you released an equivalent product under the same name, they'd probably have quite a good case. If, on the other hand, you wanted to sell a chocolate bar named "Word", there would be nothing Microsoft could say.
I cite the long running VAX (computers) vs VAX (vacuum cleaners) trademark clash. What seems to happen is that as soon as a new lawyer joins either organization, they notice the "infringement" and send a form letter. The opposite organization sends a form letter back, and that side's senior lawyers thwap the junior upside the head, then both organizations just go back to quietly ignoring each other:0)
NT4 used to ship on x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. There was even a SPARC port at one point, although it was abandoned. Initial NT development was, IIRC, on the Intel i960. But with the low-end MIPS market shrinking, CHRP cancelled (due to an IBM/Motorola/Apple turf war) and x86 pretty much dominating the low-to-mid range workstation and server markets (by market share) that's where Microsoft are focussing their development efforts. It's not worth porting to SPARC because almost no-one buys SPARCs unless they also want Solaris, and similarly there's no market for PPCs that don't run AIX or MacOS.
I'm sorry, but you can't slate MS here - they tried to ship an architecture neutral OS and no-one wanted it!
Mr. Kent, who turned 41 last Saturday, is a graduate student in his second career. In his first, which lasted more than 10 years, he ran a computer animation programming business.
I hate to be a nitpicker, but this chap's hardly a typical twentysomething graduate student (which would have been a genuinely amazing feat) - he's a seasoned professional who's experienced in processing large datasets professionally.
On another, slightly more disturbing note, I am somewhat concerned about the use of academic funding to compete with commercial enterprises. Just because RMS does it doesn't make it right.
Put the userid, the password and the home directory into the database. Authenticate off the database (might need to customize your FTP server to do this), and chroot() to the home directory. So long as you have the web server set up to chroot() when executing CGIs (and have the approriate hardlinks on your filesystem for binaries/libraries) you can have all the web sites owned by the same Unix user. I did this for an ISP back in '97 or so, with a few thousand users.
Universities will love things like this. There is a need for three dimensional rendering tools in engineering and art classes, and schools do like to trim dollars.
On the other hand, universities won't be paying list price for software of this type. Engineering departments typically get huge discounts for real high-end software, so that they produce graduates who know how to use it, who go onto to work for companies that buy it. Compare the student to professional costs of a package like MATLAB. And universities will get all the support they could want, plus access to the full, very specialized software package which, like another poster said, will contain features that wouldn't even make sense to people outside the niche market. Compare MATLAB to Octave. The core engines might be comparable, but Octave doesn't offer the specialist tools.
Another blessing is that it will force the cost of the professional version of these programs down.
Unlikely, for the reasons above.
. Especially as people start copying the features in the top end programs and add them to the GPL'd stuff.
Again, this doesn't help. Why wait for an imitation when the commercial product will deliver return on investment so quickly? (And on a separate note, why doesn't the Open Source camp innovate?).
If you want to start browsing, just typing http://slashdot.org into a commandline-like interface should be enough to bring up Netscape. If you want to send an email, typing louisjr@nospam.com should bring up the right email program
Call up the Run box on Windows (hold down the Windows-symbol key and press R).
Now type http://slashdot.org and it will start your default web browser and take you there. Type mailto:louisjr@nospam.com and it will start composing a new email message.
The functionality you want is already there, just not in a conventional shell.
So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations?
The goal of any business is providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market. I would be interested in hearing how exactly this is supposed to be evil. "Because I don't like it" isn't a valid argument: if there's no seller, there can be no buyer, and if there aren't enough buyers, then there can be no seller. That's why large corporations are dominant in the market, because they sell what buyers want.
Wonder if there's a distributed system that could leverage existing multi-threaded code?
Threads are paths of execution through the same process context. It's very difficult to distribute them without a single system image, which is what Irix can do. In general, if you want to distribute a task across multiple machines, each part of the task must be able to run self-contained, and be incorporated within the overall result of the computation. This would very well for, say, rendering, because you can simply give each node a frame to do, then assemble all the frames into a movie. But it would be very difficult to break a scene apart into objects, render each one of those on a different machine and then incorporate them into a new image, because the different machines wouldn't be able to compute the effects of a shadow of one object on another.
Beowulf clusters might speed things up at a lower cost.
Which means buying a roomful of kit to build one out of. Grid is designed to run jobs on your existing hardware while it's idle - the rest of the time, they're all still general purpose, interactive workstations running regular applications. The Beowulfs of which I am aware use dedicated hardware.
This is great, but I believe more in the Seti@home approach, let the idle servers pull work down.
That won't work in this case, because one thing Grid allows you to do is submit many jobs to the network service it manages, and assign a priority to each one, such that high priority tasks take precedence over low priority tasks. So the system as a whole needs to be able to package and distribute tasks based on criteria other than when they were submitted to the system, and other than their overall size. Seti-like approaches aren't flexible enough for this, because once a node has started a job, it will complete it before submitting its results and requesting more work.
Slashdot Mirror
She's 8 years old...
No, the People's Republic of Cambridge is the center of liberal thought. Boston's just that weird place on the other side of the Charles :0)
Actually, the government thinks it owns your body. It says what you can and cannot put into it (narcotics laws), and can order you to sacrifice it if it suits their interests (conscription), and to work to support them (taxation). The church only thinks it owns your soul.
Both organizations are dedicated to the destruction of independant thought and action. Fortunately, we have corporations to defend that.
I understand your motivation, but are you aware that a solar cell takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce over its working life? Photoelectric cells are not the solution to pollution from conventional means of generating electricity.
Why was that moderated as a troll? If you don't like what the poster says, post a rebuttal, don't resort to an ad hominem attack.
Well, consider GIMP. It attempts to mimic some of the things that PhotoShop can do. But, and here is the crucial point, it's not about innovational new features. The new features are produced by the commercial developers, and are then copied.
So when GIMP dominates the market, there is not enough money to be made by commercial developers to continue development, where does the innovation come from?
The same can be said for a multitude of Open Source projects, they're about producing free versions of commercial products, not about producing something new and excitingly different. Harsh, but true.
Own any mutual funds?
Agreed. The SSH chap sounds like a decent, pleasant fellow. Given that by far the hardest thing he's asked the OpenSSH people to do is choose a new name, and that he's contributed significantly to their own success, it would show a lack of common courtesy should they refuse to comply.
I honestly can't see why /. is making such a fuss about this, it smacks of mob hysteria and, as you say, double standards.
Contrast this with Sun Microsystems who use the SPARC processor under license. As far as I'm aware, they don't even manufacture SPARCs themselves, but rely on a third party foundry. Why is this relevant? Because SPARCs are also used by many vendors and you can even get the chip architectures if you wanted to implement it yourself, then have your design properly verified.
Hey Jules, what's up? Long time no see... :0)
Uh, right. Hands up everyone who actually needs to compile the latest, greatest kernel? Hands up everyone who did anyway?
On the contrary. If you released an equivalent product under the same name, they'd probably have quite a good case. If, on the other hand, you wanted to sell a chocolate bar named "Word", there would be nothing Microsoft could say.
I cite the long running VAX (computers) vs VAX (vacuum cleaners) trademark clash. What seems to happen is that as soon as a new lawyer joins either organization, they notice the "infringement" and send a form letter. The opposite organization sends a form letter back, and that side's senior lawyers thwap the junior upside the head, then both organizations just go back to quietly ignoring each other :0)
NT4 used to ship on x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. There was even a SPARC port at one point, although it was abandoned. Initial NT development was, IIRC, on the Intel i960. But with the low-end MIPS market shrinking, CHRP cancelled (due to an IBM/Motorola/Apple turf war) and x86 pretty much dominating the low-to-mid range workstation and server markets (by market share) that's where Microsoft are focussing their development efforts. It's not worth porting to SPARC because almost no-one buys SPARCs unless they also want Solaris, and similarly there's no market for PPCs that don't run AIX or MacOS.
I'm sorry, but you can't slate MS here - they tried to ship an architecture neutral OS and no-one wanted it!
Mr. Kent, who turned 41 last Saturday, is a graduate student in his second career. In his first, which lasted more than 10 years, he ran a computer animation programming business.
I hate to be a nitpicker, but this chap's hardly a typical twentysomething graduate student (which would have been a genuinely amazing feat) - he's a seasoned professional who's experienced in processing large datasets professionally.
On another, slightly more disturbing note, I am somewhat concerned about the use of academic funding to compete with commercial enterprises. Just because RMS does it doesn't make it right.
Are they planning to restore the threaded interface?
Put the userid, the password and the home directory into the database. Authenticate off the database (might need to customize your FTP server to do this), and chroot() to the home directory. So long as you have the web server set up to chroot() when executing CGIs (and have the approriate hardlinks on your filesystem for binaries/libraries) you can have all the web sites owned by the same Unix user. I did this for an ISP back in '97 or so, with a few thousand users.
On the other hand, universities won't be paying list price for software of this type. Engineering departments typically get huge discounts for real high-end software, so that they produce graduates who know how to use it, who go onto to work for companies that buy it. Compare the student to professional costs of a package like MATLAB. And universities will get all the support they could want, plus access to the full, very specialized software package which, like another poster said, will contain features that wouldn't even make sense to people outside the niche market. Compare MATLAB to Octave. The core engines might be comparable, but Octave doesn't offer the specialist tools.
Another blessing is that it will force the cost of the professional version of these programs down.
Unlikely, for the reasons above.
. Especially as people start copying the features in the top end programs and add them to the GPL'd stuff.
Again, this doesn't help. Why wait for an imitation when the commercial product will deliver return on investment so quickly? (And on a separate note, why doesn't the Open Source camp innovate?).
Nitpicking, but I think you mean E4500. E450's are quad-CPU. :0)
Call up the Run box on Windows (hold down the Windows-symbol key and press R).
Now type http://slashdot.org and it will start your default web browser and take you there. Type mailto:louisjr@nospam.com and it will start composing a new email message.
The functionality you want is already there, just not in a conventional shell.
The goal of any business is providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market. I would be interested in hearing how exactly this is supposed to be evil. "Because I don't like it" isn't a valid argument: if there's no seller, there can be no buyer, and if there aren't enough buyers, then there can be no seller. That's why large corporations are dominant in the market, because they sell what buyers want.
Those APIs that keep getting 'depracated' you mean?
If MS succeeds with its .NET vision, then thousands of programmers will have to spend a lot of time learning how to do the same things differently
You mean, all those programmers who already know VB and VC++, which they can continue to use under .NET?
Opposing a new technology because you don't want to learn it seems a bit short-sighted to me.
Sure we do, just like Mechanical Engineers have. It's no coincidence than where software actually matters, it's written by PEs.
Threads are paths of execution through the same process context. It's very difficult to distribute them without a single system image, which is what Irix can do. In general, if you want to distribute a task across multiple machines, each part of the task must be able to run self-contained, and be incorporated within the overall result of the computation. This would very well for, say, rendering, because you can simply give each node a frame to do, then assemble all the frames into a movie. But it would be very difficult to break a scene apart into objects, render each one of those on a different machine and then incorporate them into a new image, because the different machines wouldn't be able to compute the effects of a shadow of one object on another.
Which means buying a roomful of kit to build one out of. Grid is designed to run jobs on your existing hardware while it's idle - the rest of the time, they're all still general purpose, interactive workstations running regular applications. The Beowulfs of which I am aware use dedicated hardware.
That won't work in this case, because one thing Grid allows you to do is submit many jobs to the network service it manages, and assign a priority to each one, such that high priority tasks take precedence over low priority tasks. So the system as a whole needs to be able to package and distribute tasks based on criteria other than when they were submitted to the system, and other than their overall size. Seti-like approaches aren't flexible enough for this, because once a node has started a job, it will complete it before submitting its results and requesting more work.