And don't get me started on "testing" and how b0rked up that normally is (i'm 0 for 3 in trying to get a working testing system).
You likely are doing something horribly wrong as I've had hardly any problems with testing OR unstable. Don't rely on un-official "pre-Woody ISO's" for one. Some of them ARE broken, but that's not the Debian project's fault. Start out with the latest stable (2.2r4) for a base install and then switch the package source to testing/unstable and install via FTP or your own local archive of known-good packages. (also convenient if installing identically to multiple systems, which it appears you want to do)
Getting locked into cyclical traps of "this package depends on that one, but conflicts with another with depends on yet another which conflicts with.." is too common to be ignored. I shouldn't have to use dpkg to clear up messes like that, but I do.
Make sure you're using dselect to help you manage the dependancies. And remember, just because there's a more updated package that has just hit the unstable tree, doesn't mean you have to use it right away. It's really not as difficult as you make it out to be.
I'm a sysad at a company that is looking to switch to linux, and all I need to convince them to go with debian is come up with an automated installer.
If you're the sysadmin, why do they care how dumbed up the installer is?
..but I don't want to have to write my own installer, which is basically what you do with it. Mandrake "records" my choices, makes a floppy, and off I go.
No, you can do the same thing with Debian either by setting up your own archive as previously mentioned and/or by using the clone-debian script. You can also do it manually. It's not that hard. Or, if you really want to save some time installing multiple workstations, just clone the whole partition to each drive.
Don't get me wrong, I use debian for my personal workstation, but we're rolling out mandrake everywhere else...
It's better than nothing (or windows), but Mandrake is still a messy distro. For your own sake, reconsider that choice.
Perhaps a better question is why many people are so obsessed with celebrities anyhow. CG or not, celebrities are not real, they're manufactured. The glitz and glamour is all fantasy. Sure, human celebrities are real people, but you'll never actually see the real person unless you happen to be a close family member or friend. What's the point of elevating fake personas to such status?
Does this mean that apple products are no longer legal in the US? Surely they'll at least have a buyback program.. but you'd think they'd have detected a stupidity leak 15 years ago..
Sorry.. not a fan of companies that perpetuate proprietary software and codecs. Just an opinion folks, take it or leave it. (and yes, that was a disclaimer) (-;
There's a little minor detail known as 'keeping one step ahead of competition'. releasing your value-add software patches will give them an edge that you may not want to give them (most of us are stock owners and do care about getting to the top before the competitors)
Or you could just release the 'value-add' GPL'edsoftware patches only after the product is ready to ship out. And if the patches are really that specific to your hardware, what advantage are they to competitors anyways?
why is NOT giving out hardware info well understood, but giving out software info NOT well understood? an edge is an edge
I don't believe in holding back hardware detail either if they may be valuable to the customer in some fashion. Sure, you can have your trade secrets. But if your competition is really that desperate, they'll reverse engineer your products whether they're open or not.
the bean counters won't take the chance, the VC's wont authorize it
Of course they won't. Because they think only inside the box of what they learned in business school. Doesn't mean we geeks have to let them push us around. Unfortunately, not enough geeks have the motivation or self confidence to strike out on their own. But that's a whole 'nuther can of worms.
And how do you propose that this "linux only virus" would spread? A buffer overflow in a mail reader? Nope.. it might crash or damage some of the user's mail folders, but it won't 'infect' the system. Even if it could replicate to send mail to others, what are the odds that the recipients will be using the same vulnerable mailer considering that there are dozens of choices and many versions? The reason why there are so few *nix 'viruses' is that *nix OS's actually have rigid security mechanisms and memory protection, unlike windows. Computer viruses, like their biological counterparts, don't survive long in a hostile environment. Couple Linux with LIDS (kernel level root access controls), Tripwire, and a reasonable firewall, and there's not a snowballs chance in hell that a virus will affect you. Or even more fun, you can put critical binaries on a read-only medium (or write disabled SCSI drive) after you've compiled them from trusted source. Fortunately, by the time *most* people wake up and try Linux, the average distro will ship already well hardened. That and security updates will be immediately automated via a crypto-authenticated package source..
Sounds like it's your company, not the GPL, that is out of balance. If you're developing routers, then you're trying to sell hardware, not software. Why the heck should the software be proprietary? That argument is about as stupid as companies (like NVidia) who refuse to support Open Source drivers for their hardware because PHB's think it will magically protect them from competitors reverse engineering (as if the time-consuming process reverse engineering is actually a smart market move in the first place!) If your company instead used entirely GPL code, not only would you have a larger base of code to work with and incorporate into your own, but you might get some helpful community feedback. And since you're talking routers, security matters. I would gladly pay a little more for a router based around GPL-free software.
Preach it, bro. It's about time someone got it right. The only people whom the BSD license benefits are those who want to leech off the work of others instead of supporting the community. Because BSD is less free than GPL. It's amazing how many people are confused on that issue.
The only way to fight proprietary software in a world that has largely accepted it is to use copyright against itself. This is precisely what GPL does. GPL is the license of choice for those who believe that no software should be proprietary. That's why the license is "virulent" too.
Some people argue that GPL is "less free" because it cannot be turned proprietary by a third party, as with the BSD license. However, this argument stems from the belief that it's OK for some software to be proprietary--and proprietary software is clearly less free.
In some sort of ideal utopian society without copyright, these issues would be mute because software would be incapable of being sold and thus no economic advantage would be had from closed source. The only way software could be commercially produced in such a society would be by paying programmers / software companies for their focused labor instead their end product. And in fact, this is the ultimate goal of true proponents of Open Source software. Though copyright may be with us for awhile, GPL is a huge step towards reducing its power in the software industry.
All this extra audio hardware is pretty silly considering the biggest improvement in sound quality comes with using an external D/A converter. Of course the real trick is trying to find a good digital output card. SB Live normally sucks for this because anything sent to/dev/dsp* gets internally processed and resampled before getting sent back out via SPDIF. However, there is a neat hack available with the emu-tools for Linux (http://opensource.creative.com) that lets you use the "digital pass-through" feature of the driver to send raw 48Khz PCM streams (or even more fun, AC3 streams from your favorite DVD player..) out via the SPDIF connector. Now the last problem is jitter (time domain non-linearity) and it's probably the nastiest one to solve. AFAIK, the only way to truly deal with it is to use a D/A converter that buffers the input and precisely re-clocks the signal using an internal clock before the D/A circuit sees it. Linn probably minimizes this problem by using AES as the digital interconnect instead of the SPDIF via Toslink or coax that you'll get with most solutions. Digital audio isn't as simple as it first seems. (-:
The more the Chinese people taste freedom, the move they'll crave it. Supporting their economy with trade helps by giving people jobs, (slowly) improving their standard of living, and introducing elements of our culture. Granted, China is somewhat a different beast than the was USSR, but I suppose the hope is that the same quiet collapse will happen--that one day, everyone will more or less say 'screw this,' then pack their bags and go home.
I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.
You're forgetting a big part of the picture. At a certain point, it is cheaper for companies to pay some programmers to extend an Open Source package than it is to buy proprietary software licenses. Lets say that after OpenOffice reaches 1.0 status, lots of people start switching from MS Office. Now company X, which is thinking about upgrading its office software in the next 3 months, realizes that OpenOffice is missing some feature that they need. It would cost them $20,000 to contract a programmer or two to add the needed feature or $100,000 to buy all the licenses they'd need for the latest MS Office. Which are they going to choose?
One way that the Open Source community could help fight software patents is to establish a database of prior art. When issues like this come up, relavant prior art would be hyperlinked to the supposed patent.
1.) Please remove this article at once. It is a filthy assortment of random lies and is an embarrassment to the/. community and the reputation of this site.
2.) Please strongly consider firing Jon Katz for his lack of journalistic integrity. Better yet, decide via a Slashdot poll.
3.) A major improvement to Slashcode would be a system by which readers can moderate the posting of articles on the main page.
That being said, I am all for the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the restoration of the rights and freedoms of the Afghan people.
Force Microsoft to donate $1.1 billion among the Free Software Foundation, the OpenOffice project, KDE and GNOME projects, the Linux kernel team, and various others. That'll pay all the significant Open Source developers out there for hmm.. at least the next 10 years.
This is pretty basic, but for those who don't know, HDCP is the encryption scheme of choice for HDTV video signals. This is fairly huge news that it has been broken since all TV's and broadcasts in the US will supposedly eventually switch to the HDTV standard. Unless they pull a fast one and switch the standard (which would alienate everyone who has already bought expensive HDTV equipment), this means that DMCA or not, people are going to have guaranteed access to plaintext HDTV signals for as long as the standard is in use. Of course, I'm personally hoping that the DMCA is at least re-written, preferrably scuttled altogether.
It kinda worries me that NVidia is trying to get into the chipset market in a big way, knowing their track record for refusing to publish data on their video cards so people can develop open source drivers. Does anyone have more info about this or is it all vaporware right now?
It not an unknown platform, it's practically commodity components. The Xbox uses a standard Intel Pentium III and an IDE hard drive. So it's not a matter of "make linux run on it" it's a matter of taking it apart and getting around any weird bios / bootloader that it may use. Being that it's pretty much a Windows box, I doubt they could have changed much without breaking alot of things. As for the Nvidia chipset, the 2D support ought to be fairly easy. Once again, I doubt they completely designed a new 2D engine from the ground up when they already have the successful TNT/GeForce chips to work from. It is quite possible that the existing 2D NVidia driver in XFree86 may work with little or no modification. 3D is a whole 'nuther story of course. But hey, maybe the cheap hardware will inspire someone to finally clean-room reverse engineer Nvidia's stuff since they have so rudely refused to give the XFree people any documentation. And there's nothing illegal about that. It's just a pain.
Incurr the wrath of Microsoft? Do you really think they would stand a chance given their public opinion is in the toilet these days? Just what they'd need.. a grassroots underdog martyr on a shaky legal case.
It's only an advantage to them if you buy the games. The just the parts in these puppies are worth far more than $300, albeit not in large quantity purchases, but either way M$ still loses with every hardware sale. Do I smell another "NetPliance Iopener" on the horizon? Except this one has a guaranteed supply due to the strength of its backer! So what we need is for someone to hack the Xbox sufficiently to make it easy to load Linux. Then someone needs to reverse engineer the NVidia chipset to gain access to 2D, 3D, and any video / mpeg2 related functionality.
Now all the kiddies will be able to watch Episode II without the gratuitous pr0n. In this version, Luke and Leia are delivered in a basket by an annoying talking stork.
And there's the difference between faith and science. There's a large amount of evidence supporting quantum mechanics and little supporting the existence of God. Science isn't a crutch for anything. It's just a formal method for finding out how the world works. You hold yourself to strict rules of evidence, and bit by bit, fact by fact, crawl toward a greater understanding of physical phenomena.
It's nowhere near that simple. Scientific observation is inherently flawed because we're viewing the system from within and the mere act of viewing not only limits our view, but instantaneously changes the system. Sure, science can build better and better models, but it will never explain the true nature of the universe or the meaning of our existance. And yet people try to make science do that everyday with unprovable theories of how the universe/life was formed or how free will and consciousness could be described through the collapse of quantum states in superposition. This sort of theorizing is in fact using science as a crutch--a crutch for trying to fulfill the need for certainty and meaning in life. When you really get down to it, science requires just as much 'faith' as faith in the belief in God. There is just as much evidence for the existance of God, both philosophically and through human experience. As for scientific evidence, you cannot prove a theory simply by giving examples of it working. You would either have to test every possible condition--which being infinite is impossible--or prove that the contrapositive is always false--equally impossible. One counterexample and you're back to the drawing board, thus limiting science to building crude models that work most of the time, not perfectly, but good enough to have practical application.
"Science is not powerful because it is true; it is true because it is powerful."
It's stuff like this that makes the whole idea of evolution seem pretty silly. It would be one thing if the wasp used it's poison as a defense mechanism, but this is not a behavior needed for survival. The wasp could build its cacoon someplace else yet it "just happens" to have this instinct to attack the spider and inject precisely the right chemical, then wait around for it to build the messed up web, then kill the spider and use the ill-formed web for a specific purpose. Seems like pretty intelligent design if you ask me.
"MR. BALLMER: I just want to add one thing, echo what Bill said, but encourage you to go to our web site. If there's a key learning for us, we can't have free software, it's kind of inconsistent with the goals of most people in the room. We recognize it, it probably doesn't fit in most of these people's mind's eye, so we're not going to embrace that."
It's quite simple really. They tell shareholders what they want to hear and their shareholders don't want to hear about free software.. Yet! I've said it a hundred times: the free software revolution is in its infancy. When the 'critical mass' of OSS code base is reached, which is inevitable, Microsoft is going to have to innovate or die. Free and proprietary software are not complementary and they will not peacefully co-exist for much longer.
What's most interesting..
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
To me, the most interesting thing about Gobe is that apparently a group of at most 10 seasoned programmers (see picture on their site and some of those guys are the executive team) came up with a high quality MS Office replacement from scratch in a relatively short amount of time. And they did it without any help from the Open Source community. But alas, this post is not another cowardly retreat call to proprietary software. Quite the contrary. The difference is that these guys were paid to work on Gobe full-time until it was production quality. If similar talent could be focused on say.. KOffice or OpenOffice, imagine how fast those projects would move along. Who would pay them? Quite simply, any smart company that is tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a black hole every time MS decides to put out a new version Office. All that's needed is a company or non-profit to organize this effort. A non-profit, of course, may be of greater value to businesses because it'd be a tax write-off.
I know the feeling.. 'everything's been done before..', 'this is worthless drivel', 'there's no freedom and creativity..' I can't say I've found the answer myself, but one thing that has somewhat re-excited me about computers is the prospect of having my own business and doing whatever the heck I please--and thereby actually having a chance to go out there and change the world. It could even be something simple to begin with, like a Linux based consultant. Or you could come up with a low-tech 'cash cow' that pays your bills while you sit back and relax, let your creativity roam free, play with geek toys, hack hardware and software, write Open Source software, and perhaps prepare for a more intellectually stimulating entrepreneurial pursuit. Hey, you might even come up with a great idea that makes you rich enough to retire early.
Entrepreneurship doesn't sound very good in today's economy, but keep in mind that this is a temporary condition. When the economy does recover, it's going to be a different economy than what existed before the downturn. It's going to be fertile soil for new ideas and fresh thinking. If you really want to get inspired about the future and what kinds of innovations lie ahead that will change the world, I highly suggest you read the book, Natural Capitalism. I don't agree with all of the authors' ideas, but it will certainly set your mind in creative mode. As a brief summary, it proposes that the next economic revolution will be cleaning up / making sustainable / making efficient the technologies and lifestyle created by the industrial revolution. Interesting stuff..
The power saving technologies that Transmeta developed would have been great sellers 5 years from now, when laptops switch to organic LED's or even just white LED backlights and hard drives begin to be replaced with solid state devices. Then the CPU really would be the bottleneck in making a low power system. I still like the idea of diskless Linux workstations with Transmeta chips, though. Too bad they didn't capitalize on innovating solutions.
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And don't get me started on "testing" and how b0rked up that normally is (i'm 0 for 3 in trying to get a working testing system).
..but I don't want to have to write my own installer, which is basically what you do with it. Mandrake "records" my choices, makes a floppy, and off I go.
You likely are doing something horribly wrong as I've had hardly any problems with testing OR unstable. Don't rely on un-official "pre-Woody ISO's" for one. Some of them ARE broken, but that's not the Debian project's fault. Start out with the latest stable (2.2r4) for a base install and then switch the package source to testing/unstable and install via FTP or your own local archive of known-good packages. (also convenient if installing identically to multiple systems, which it appears you want to do)
Getting locked into cyclical traps of "this package depends on that one, but conflicts with another with depends on yet another which conflicts with.." is too common to be ignored. I shouldn't have to use dpkg to clear up messes like that, but I do.
Make sure you're using dselect to help you manage the dependancies. And remember, just because there's a more updated package that has just hit the unstable tree, doesn't mean you have to use it right away. It's really not as difficult as you make it out to be.
I'm a sysad at a company that is looking to switch to linux, and all I need to convince them to go with debian is come up with an automated installer.
If you're the sysadmin, why do they care how dumbed up the installer is?
No, you can do the same thing with Debian either by setting up your own archive as previously mentioned and/or by using the clone-debian script. You can also do it manually. It's not that hard. Or, if you really want to save some time installing multiple workstations, just clone the whole partition to each drive.
Don't get me wrong, I use debian for my personal workstation, but we're rolling out mandrake everywhere else...
It's better than nothing (or windows), but Mandrake is still a messy distro. For your own sake, reconsider that choice.
Perhaps a better question is why many people are so obsessed with celebrities anyhow. CG or not, celebrities are not real, they're manufactured. The glitz and glamour is all fantasy. Sure, human celebrities are real people, but you'll never actually see the real person unless you happen to be a close family member or friend. What's the point of elevating fake personas to such status?
"Apple Cease-And-Desists Stupidity Leak"
Does this mean that apple products are no longer legal in the US? Surely they'll at least have a buyback program.. but you'd think they'd have detected a stupidity leak 15 years ago..
Sorry.. not a fan of companies that perpetuate proprietary software and codecs. Just an opinion folks, take it or leave it. (and yes, that was a disclaimer) (-;
There's a little minor detail known as 'keeping one step ahead of competition'. releasing your value-add software patches will give them an edge that you may not want to give them (most of us are stock owners and do care about getting to the top before the competitors)
Or you could just release the 'value-add' GPL'edsoftware patches only after the product is ready to ship out. And if the patches are really that specific to your hardware, what advantage are they to competitors anyways?
why is NOT giving out hardware info well understood, but giving out software info NOT well understood? an edge is an edge
I don't believe in holding back hardware detail either if they may be valuable to the customer in some fashion. Sure, you can have your trade secrets. But if your competition is really that desperate, they'll reverse engineer your products whether they're open or not.
the bean counters won't take the chance, the VC's wont authorize it
Of course they won't. Because they think only inside the box of what they learned in business school. Doesn't mean we geeks have to let them push us around. Unfortunately, not enough geeks have the motivation or self confidence to strike out on their own. But that's a whole 'nuther can of worms.
And how do you propose that this "linux only virus" would spread? A buffer overflow in a mail reader? Nope.. it might crash or damage some of the user's mail folders, but it won't 'infect' the system. Even if it could replicate to send mail to others, what are the odds that the recipients will be using the same vulnerable mailer considering that there are dozens of choices and many versions? The reason why there are so few *nix 'viruses' is that *nix OS's actually have rigid security mechanisms and memory protection, unlike windows. Computer viruses, like their biological counterparts, don't survive long in a hostile environment. Couple Linux with LIDS (kernel level root access controls), Tripwire, and a reasonable firewall, and there's not a snowballs chance in hell that a virus will affect you. Or even more fun, you can put critical binaries on a read-only medium (or write disabled SCSI drive) after you've compiled them from trusted source. Fortunately, by the time *most* people wake up and try Linux, the average distro will ship already well hardened. That and security updates will be immediately automated via a crypto-authenticated package source..
Sounds like it's your company, not the GPL, that is out of balance. If you're developing routers, then you're trying to sell hardware, not software. Why the heck should the software be proprietary? That argument is about as stupid as companies (like NVidia) who refuse to support Open Source drivers for their hardware because PHB's think it will magically protect them from competitors reverse engineering (as if the time-consuming process reverse engineering is actually a smart market move in the first place!) If your company instead used entirely GPL code, not only would you have a larger base of code to work with and incorporate into your own, but you might get some helpful community feedback. And since you're talking routers, security matters. I would gladly pay a little more for a router based around GPL-free software.
Preach it, bro. It's about time someone got it right. The only people whom the BSD license benefits are those who want to leech off the work of others instead of supporting the community. Because BSD is less free than GPL. It's amazing how many people are confused on that issue.
The only way to fight proprietary software in a world that has largely accepted it is to use copyright against itself. This is precisely what GPL does. GPL is the license of choice for those who believe that no software should be proprietary. That's why the license is "virulent" too.
Some people argue that GPL is "less free" because it cannot be turned proprietary by a third party, as with the BSD license. However, this argument stems from the belief that it's OK for some software to be proprietary--and proprietary software is clearly less free.
In some sort of ideal utopian society without copyright, these issues would be mute because software would be incapable of being sold and thus no economic advantage would be had from closed source. The only way software could be commercially produced in such a society would be by paying programmers / software companies for their focused labor instead their end product. And in fact, this is the ultimate goal of true proponents of Open Source software. Though copyright may be with us for awhile, GPL is a huge step towards reducing its power in the software industry.
All this extra audio hardware is pretty silly considering the biggest improvement in sound quality comes with using an external D/A converter. Of course the real trick is trying to find a good digital output card. SB Live normally sucks for this because anything sent to /dev/dsp* gets internally processed and resampled before getting sent back out via SPDIF. However, there is a neat hack available with the emu-tools for Linux (http://opensource.creative.com) that lets you use the "digital pass-through" feature of the driver to send raw 48Khz PCM streams (or even more fun, AC3 streams from your favorite DVD player..) out via the SPDIF connector. Now the last problem is jitter (time domain non-linearity) and it's probably the nastiest one to solve. AFAIK, the only way to truly deal with it is to use a D/A converter that buffers the input and precisely re-clocks the signal using an internal clock before the D/A circuit sees it. Linn probably minimizes this problem by using AES as the digital interconnect instead of the SPDIF via Toslink or coax that you'll get with most solutions. Digital audio isn't as simple as it first seems. (-:
The more the Chinese people taste freedom, the move they'll crave it. Supporting their economy with trade helps by giving people jobs, (slowly) improving their standard of living, and introducing elements of our culture. Granted, China is somewhat a different beast than the was USSR, but I suppose the hope is that the same quiet collapse will happen--that one day, everyone will more or less say 'screw this,' then pack their bags and go home.
I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source. The time to code the time to host it, the time to collaborate, just aint there any more during the dot-bomb hangover.
You're forgetting a big part of the picture. At a certain point, it is cheaper for companies to pay some programmers to extend an Open Source package than it is to buy proprietary software licenses. Lets say that after OpenOffice reaches 1.0 status, lots of people start switching from MS Office. Now company X, which is thinking about upgrading its office software in the next 3 months, realizes that OpenOffice is missing some feature that they need. It would cost them $20,000 to contract a programmer or two to add the needed feature or $100,000 to buy all the licenses they'd need for the latest MS Office. Which are they going to choose?
One way that the Open Source community could help fight software patents is to establish a database of prior art. When issues like this come up, relavant prior art would be hyperlinked to the supposed patent.
To the operators of Slashdot:
/. community and the reputation of this site.
1.) Please remove this article at once. It is a filthy assortment of random lies and is an embarrassment to the
2.) Please strongly consider firing Jon Katz for his lack of journalistic integrity. Better yet, decide via a Slashdot poll.
3.) A major improvement to Slashcode would be a system by which readers can moderate the posting of articles on the main page.
That being said, I am all for the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the restoration of the rights and freedoms of the Afghan people.
Force Microsoft to donate $1.1 billion among the Free Software Foundation, the OpenOffice project, KDE and GNOME projects, the Linux kernel team, and various others. That'll pay all the significant Open Source developers out there for hmm.. at least the next 10 years.
This is pretty basic, but for those who don't know, HDCP is the encryption scheme of choice for HDTV video signals. This is fairly huge news that it has been broken since all TV's and broadcasts in the US will supposedly eventually switch to the HDTV standard. Unless they pull a fast one and switch the standard (which would alienate everyone who has already bought expensive HDTV equipment), this means that DMCA or not, people are going to have guaranteed access to plaintext HDTV signals for as long as the standard is in use. Of course, I'm personally hoping that the DMCA is at least re-written, preferrably scuttled altogether.
It kinda worries me that NVidia is trying to get into the chipset market in a big way, knowing their track record for refusing to publish data on their video cards so people can develop open source drivers. Does anyone have more info about this or is it all vaporware right now?
It not an unknown platform, it's practically commodity components. The Xbox uses a standard Intel Pentium III and an IDE hard drive. So it's not a matter of "make linux run on it" it's a matter of taking it apart and getting around any weird bios / bootloader that it may use. Being that it's pretty much a Windows box, I doubt they could have changed much without breaking alot of things. As for the Nvidia chipset, the 2D support ought to be fairly easy. Once again, I doubt they completely designed a new 2D engine from the ground up when they already have the successful TNT/GeForce chips to work from. It is quite possible that the existing 2D NVidia driver in XFree86 may work with little or no modification. 3D is a whole 'nuther story of course. But hey, maybe the cheap hardware will inspire someone to finally clean-room reverse engineer Nvidia's stuff since they have so rudely refused to give the XFree people any documentation. And there's nothing illegal about that. It's just a pain.
Incurr the wrath of Microsoft? Do you really think they would stand a chance given their public opinion is in the toilet these days? Just what they'd need.. a grassroots underdog martyr on a shaky legal case.
It's only an advantage to them if you buy the games. The just the parts in these puppies are worth far more than $300, albeit not in large quantity purchases, but either way M$ still loses with every hardware sale. Do I smell another "NetPliance Iopener" on the horizon? Except this one has a guaranteed supply due to the strength of its backer! So what we need is for someone to hack the Xbox sufficiently to make it easy to load Linux. Then someone needs to reverse engineer the NVidia chipset to gain access to 2D, 3D, and any video / mpeg2 related functionality.
Now all the kiddies will be able to watch Episode II without the gratuitous pr0n. In this version, Luke and Leia are delivered in a basket by an annoying talking stork.
And there's the difference between faith and science. There's a large amount of evidence supporting quantum mechanics and little supporting the existence of God. Science isn't a crutch for anything. It's just a formal method for finding out how the world works. You hold yourself to strict rules of evidence, and bit by bit, fact by fact, crawl toward a greater understanding of physical phenomena.
It's nowhere near that simple. Scientific observation is inherently flawed because we're viewing the system from within and the mere act of viewing not only limits our view, but instantaneously changes the system. Sure, science can build better and better models, but it will never explain the true nature of the universe or the meaning of our existance. And yet people try to make science do that everyday with unprovable theories of how the universe/life was formed or how free will and consciousness could be described through the collapse of quantum states in superposition. This sort of theorizing is in fact using science as a crutch--a crutch for trying to fulfill the need for certainty and meaning in life. When you really get down to it, science requires just as much 'faith' as faith in the belief in God. There is just as much evidence for the existance of God, both philosophically and through human experience. As for scientific evidence, you cannot prove a theory simply by giving examples of it working. You would either have to test every possible condition--which being infinite is impossible--or prove that the contrapositive is always false--equally impossible. One counterexample and you're back to the drawing board, thus limiting science to building crude models that work most of the time, not perfectly, but good enough to have practical application.
"Science is not powerful because it is true; it is true because it is powerful."
It's stuff like this that makes the whole idea of evolution seem pretty silly. It would be one thing if the wasp used it's poison as a defense mechanism, but this is not a behavior needed for survival. The wasp could build its cacoon someplace else yet it "just happens" to have this instinct to attack the spider and inject precisely the right chemical, then wait around for it to build the messed up web, then kill the spider and use the ill-formed web for a specific purpose. Seems like pretty intelligent design if you ask me.
"MR. BALLMER: I just want to add one thing, echo what Bill said, but encourage you to go to our web site. If there's a key learning for us, we can't have free software, it's kind of inconsistent with the goals of most people in the room. We recognize it, it probably doesn't fit in most of these people's mind's eye, so we're not going to embrace that."
It's quite simple really. They tell shareholders what they want to hear and their shareholders don't want to hear about free software.. Yet! I've said it a hundred times: the free software revolution is in its infancy. When the 'critical mass' of OSS code base is reached, which is inevitable, Microsoft is going to have to innovate or die. Free and proprietary software are not complementary and they will not peacefully co-exist for much longer.
To me, the most interesting thing about Gobe is that apparently a group of at most 10 seasoned programmers (see picture on their site and some of those guys are the executive team) came up with a high quality MS Office replacement from scratch in a relatively short amount of time. And they did it without any help from the Open Source community. But alas, this post is not another cowardly retreat call to proprietary software. Quite the contrary. The difference is that these guys were paid to work on Gobe full-time until it was production quality. If similar talent could be focused on say.. KOffice or OpenOffice, imagine how fast those projects would move along. Who would pay them? Quite simply, any smart company that is tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a black hole every time MS decides to put out a new version Office. All that's needed is a company or non-profit to organize this effort. A non-profit, of course, may be of greater value to businesses because it'd be a tax write-off.
I know the feeling.. 'everything's been done before..', 'this is worthless drivel', 'there's no freedom and creativity..' I can't say I've found the answer myself, but one thing that has somewhat re-excited me about computers is the prospect of having my own business and doing whatever the heck I please--and thereby actually having a chance to go out there and change the world. It could even be something simple to begin with, like a Linux based consultant. Or you could come up with a low-tech 'cash cow' that pays your bills while you sit back and relax, let your creativity roam free, play with geek toys, hack hardware and software, write Open Source software, and perhaps prepare for a more intellectually stimulating entrepreneurial pursuit. Hey, you might even come up with a great idea that makes you rich enough to retire early.
Entrepreneurship doesn't sound very good in today's economy, but keep in mind that this is a temporary condition. When the economy does recover, it's going to be a different economy than what existed before the downturn. It's going to be fertile soil for new ideas and fresh thinking. If you really want to get inspired about the future and what kinds of innovations lie ahead that will change the world, I highly suggest you read the book, Natural Capitalism. I don't agree with all of the authors' ideas, but it will certainly set your mind in creative mode. As a brief summary, it proposes that the next economic revolution will be cleaning up / making sustainable / making efficient the technologies and lifestyle created by the industrial revolution. Interesting stuff..
The power saving technologies that Transmeta developed would have been great sellers 5 years from now, when laptops switch to organic LED's or even just white LED backlights and hard drives begin to be replaced with solid state devices. Then the CPU really would be the bottleneck in making a low power system. I still like the idea of diskless Linux workstations with Transmeta chips, though. Too bad they didn't capitalize on innovating solutions.