Ben Livingston has a web page with a lot of good hints for anyone interested in suing these people. He also has a complete list of everyone he's sued, the outcomes, and in some cases, even a scanned image of the check they sent him.
Go read the license agreements for software you buy. They disclaim any and all responsibility if things go bad. When you buy a piece of commercial software, e.g. MS Office, you get no warranty that it will even work as advertised. It can delete all files on your hard drive, email they out to anyone, cease to function, whatever. You can't sue anybody.
Tough.
There is no documented case of anyone ever winning a lawsuit because commercial software sucked.
I believe they used Qt for building the GUI under Linux. Since Qt is distributed under the GPL (not the LGPL), you must GPL your works, too. If you give Borland money (i.e., buy the boxed set), you can distribute it under pretty much any license you want.
No thanks, I'll stick with other truly free languages.
Nokia Launches Independent Website to Support Open Source Developers. From the article: "Nokia (NYSE:NOK) today announced the launch of a new website, ostdev.net, dedicated to supporting developers in the open source
community as well as the promotion of collaborative development of the OST."
2.4.1 includes new features, like a journalling filesystem, not just fixes for existing stuff. Also, 2.4 (and 2.2) works a HELL of a lot better on my hardware (ASUS A7V + Athlon + GeForce 2 GTS) than Windows 2000 did (which would lockup hard within an hour, every time). I had to install new drivers for everything plus service pack 1 to even get it remotely stable. Of course, on the same hardware, I can run repeating concurrent kernel compiles with -j4 and not see a single crash for a week.
When I used computers when I was a kid, I had a TRS-80 and a C-64. Sure, I played games on them some, but I spent a lot of time learning about interrupts, machine language, what happens when I POKE values here and there. I was learning how the machine worked and how it did what it did. I remember hand assembling programs and computing JMP offsets. That's what computers did for me in my education. (Granted, I didn't do any of that at school, all at home.)
But from what I've seen of computers in schools, they aren't really learning anything on the computer that couldn't have been learned from a book. Books have a lot of advantages over computers, too. They can be taken to a park, to a boring class, or on a plane flight, all without much trouble at all.
I volunteered to teach computer literacy to 4th graders when I was in college. What I taught them was basically useless. It primarily consisted of word processing an already written report into a Mac. It really didn't accomplish anything other than showing them the very basics of a program which didn't really help them create anything other than a smudged ink jet printed version of their already written document.
Actually, if you're interested in writing Linux device drivers, I'd highly recommend O'Reilly's other Linux hacking book, Linux Device Drivers (more info here). I used this book to write a relatively simple device driver for a device about two years ago. It was incredibly helpful. I assume most of the information is still relevant with today's kernels. This book, combined with the existing drivers for other devices, provided me everything I needed to know.
I think we can all agree that Katz, more than anyone else, is qualified to write an article about flaming. 90% of Slashdot comments attached to a Katz article (or diatribe) are usually flames, justified or not.
There's no culpability, and above all, no one to sue when it all goes south
Have you read the typical license agreements that most commerical software companies put out? They pretty much say that even if the program erases your hard drive, you're just out of luck. The whole "we need someone to sue" argument really is a load of crap.
examples of a new type of security hole that results, not from bad coding practices, but from coders haphazardly interconnecting disparate components without considering how they'll work together.
If you don't consider how components will interact when used together, then that is bad coding practice. If it's easy to use a component incorrectly, to the point of causing security problems, then I would venture a guess that the component in question has a bad interface. When we write code at work, my co-workers and I strive to have classes which are pretty much impossible to use incorrectly. Contrast this with something poorly designed and implemented like MFC which, when functions aren't called in exactly the right order at exactly the right time, it ASSERTs. If anything, it just sounds like the developers should revisit the ways their classes interact with each other and tidy it up a bit.
It's all just bad coding practices as far as I can see...
True, Microsoft should be using their own stuff, but what about the case where they buy up an existing company which uses FreeBSD? If they were smart, they'd probably just leave things as is (if it isn't broken, don't fix it). But what amazes me, is that they just try to move everything to Windows.
Look at it this way. Let's say Windows 2000 was just as reliable as FreeBSD (or Linux or whatever). What would moving it from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 do for them? Really, nothing. The end user won't know the difference. If I just moved stuff around here at work from OS to OS on a whim, I'd probably be (rightfully) fired.
I just don't understand Microsoft most of the time.
Having used MainWin to port an relatively large (300,000 lines) Windows application to UNIX, MainWin's Win32 API implementation at the time was pretty damn lacking. Actually, I found it to be a bit of a pain in the ass.
It's been two years since I've used it (I left that company) but some things that stick out in my mind were that the resource files were somewhat different under MainWin. (We wrote a pretty crazy Perl script that modified the Windows resource file and covered up those differences.
I also remember lots of ifdef UNIX... else... endif preprocessor mess throughout "lower-level" parts of the code. Yeah, MainWin made the task a lot easier, but then again, our code was really pretty high level. We didn't really use anything that I would consider low-level, but we still had to kludge things up. Microsoft's code is pretty much known to use undocumented APIs and other such mess---that's why MainWin needs the Windows source code to even do the port. If we had a bit of difficulty porting our Windows program, I can't even imagine the nightmare of porting a Microsoft application.
But in the end, you really should have separated your user interface from the rest of your code. Then, doing a port is just a matter of hiring some people to make a new GUI for each platform. That's (usually) not so difficult. Motif (Gtk+, Qt, whatever) code for UNIX, Win32 for Windows, MacOS for Mac. Of course, Microsoft certainly didn't consider cross-platform code when they wrote (or bought) the Office products.
If you want really fast games, you're probably writing directly to the video memory. VNC isn't going to be able to work under those circumstances. So, having a super fast local display probably means no remote display.
Where I work, I can't live without remote display.
One of the biggest problems I see is that the current generation of X GUI programmers don't understand where X came from. They are most likely using Gtk+ or Qt and don't know the first thing about X resources, app-defaults, and the other things that made X customizable and useful.
If there ever is a replacement for X, I hope it's done by people with the engineering know-how as those who made X. Look at it. It's survived and remained useful for around 20 years. It's been ported to platforms the original programmers never even imagined (handhelds, Windows, you name it).
For any system to last that long (X, TCP/IP, ethernet) it has to have been well designed and designed to be used in cases the original designers might not have imagined.
That's my rant... I like X. It works very well for me.
It's not built for the benefit of individuals any longer, but for the benefit of corporations.
But who's forcing us to work these jobs? That's right, no body. We choose to. If we decide that the stress or hours are too much, then we should quit. It's all your choice. The corporations don't force us to work these hours. I'm tired of people bitching about their jobs, then doing nothing to better it. I hated my previous job but rather than complain about the hours, I found a new one.
One of the biggest problems I see with the tech industry is that way too many employees don't know how to interview their employer to see if it's a place they want to work. I see this most with just-out-of-school grads (of which I was one not long ago). It's hard to know what questions to ask to see if your potential co-workers are any good at what they do, to see if the project will be interesting for you, etc.
But I digress... If you don't like your job or the way the corporation is treating you, no one makes you stay there. Anyone worth anything in the tech industry could have a new job in a second.
With an open source OS and some hard thinking, it should be possible to come up with an instruction set for the Crusoe and a "port" of gcc which produces a very fast OS optimized specifically for your new instruction set.
Of course, you'd have the trouble of rebuilding all of the user land programs, too, but with the amount of work people put into things in the open source world, it wouldn't surprise me to see a Red Hat Linux 6.2 Crusoe Edition.
Like you, I'm tired of my laptop getting hot enough to scald my skin. It's time for laptops which run at a reasonable temperature.
The problem with the way Linux is being pushed down everyones throats, is that its forcing the entire market to become EXTREMELY volatile.
Who is "forcing" who to use Linux? I don't recall seeing Linus Torvalds or RMS with a gun to anyone's head. If you don't want to use Linux because it's "already pretty ancient", then there are other "cutting edge" OSes you could choose.
I just don't see how Linux, being free and open, can force you into anything. It's the closed, proprietary software which does that.
"Only fools would use a RAD environment! Real Linux programmers will keep using gcc and an Emacs-based IDE."
I will continue to use Emacs as my IDE with g++ and GNU make. I'm not being elitist---these are the tools which make my job the easiest and fastest to do. I haven't found an IDE yet which can match the flexibility of these tools combined with the standard UNIX utilities. Of course, I'm one of those people who runs X but only uses his mouse when in Netscape because I have keybindings for moving and shuffling windows and workspaces. Maybe I'm just weird.
Of course, IDEs certainly have their place. If you can work better with one, then by all means, go for it. But don't assume that someone who refuses to use one is being elitist.
If your time is very cheap, then that just might work. If I work 12 hours/day and drive 4 hours/day, then that would give me just enough time to go home and get my 8 hours of sleep. Sleep, get up, repeat.
That doesn't sound like much fun to me.
Not to mention the fact that all that driving isn't exactly environment friendly.
Why not just move somewhere where the cost of living isn't so high? I refuse to ever live anywhere NEAR Silicon Valley.
I wonder if this will be an "iOpener" situation again where people get the hardware and hack it to hookup to their own ISP or even better, erase the flash and install their own version of Linux on it.
My bets are that AOL/Gateway/and company has already learned from the mistakes of the other companies and will somehow prevent this.
BeOS is suffering from the classic problem of there being no users because there are no applications, but there are no applications because there are no users.
BeOS is supposed to be *THE* digital media platform. But after being out for two years, there are *STILL* no professional quality digital audio + MIDI multitracking suites out there. Nothing. You're still stuck in Windows or Mac for these.
I've spoken with a few of the big music software companies and they've all pretty much said that they're unsure if they're porting their stuff to BeOS or not yet.
I for one would have a brand new BeOS machine if I could do true *PROFESSIONAL* digital audio on it.
Someone sent out a message to a large portion of Nextel customers around here that said something to the effect that your account balance hasn't been paid and your service will be cut off shortly.
It was actually kind of funny. If I'm going to get annoying messages, I'd prefer them to at least be funny instead of commercial spam.
Just like regular in-house workers, telecommuters aren't much different. You can have your really crappy ones that sit out at the pool at home all day and do nothing and watch TV and embellish their weekly reports. On the other extreme you can have telecommuters who are far more productive at home and get twice the work done there that they would if they were being constantly bothered.
In my experience at my last job, we had two telecommuters. They were both underperformers, but I can't be sure if it was because they were lazy and did nothing or were just really bad programmers (it was most likely a combination of the two).
I personally wouldn't want to telecommute because I think the small daily interactions between coworkers are important. Just yesterday, a coworker and I just happened to start talking about a way to implement something which turned out to be perfect because our ideas fed off of each other. It's hard to get that via phone or email without a whiteboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Ben Livingston has a web page with a lot of good hints for anyone interested in suing these people. He also has a complete list of everyone he's sued, the outcomes, and in some cases, even a scanned image of the check they sent him.
Go read the license agreements for software you buy. They disclaim any and all responsibility if things go bad. When you buy a piece of commercial software, e.g. MS Office, you get no warranty that it will even work as advertised. It can delete all files on your hard drive, email they out to anyone, cease to function, whatever. You can't sue anybody.
Tough.
There is no documented case of anyone ever winning a lawsuit because commercial software sucked.
I believe they used Qt for building the GUI under Linux. Since Qt is distributed under the GPL (not the LGPL), you must GPL your works, too. If you give Borland money (i.e., buy the boxed set), you can distribute it under pretty much any license you want.
No thanks, I'll stick with other truly free languages.
Nokia Launches Independent Website to Support Open Source Developers. From the article: "Nokia (NYSE:NOK) today announced the launch of a new website, ostdev.net, dedicated to supporting developers in the open source community as well as the promotion of collaborative development of the OST."
It doesn't go down after a week, but I figured that a week was long enough to be sure that the hardware is pretty stable. :-)
2.4.1 includes new features, like a journalling filesystem, not just fixes for existing stuff. Also, 2.4 (and 2.2) works a HELL of a lot better on my hardware (ASUS A7V + Athlon + GeForce 2 GTS) than Windows 2000 did (which would lockup hard within an hour, every time). I had to install new drivers for everything plus service pack 1 to even get it remotely stable. Of course, on the same hardware, I can run repeating concurrent kernel compiles with -j4 and not see a single crash for a week.
Plus, I didn't even have to pay for Linux.
When I used computers when I was a kid, I had a TRS-80 and a C-64. Sure, I played games on them some, but I spent a lot of time learning about interrupts, machine language, what happens when I POKE values here and there. I was learning how the machine worked and how it did what it did. I remember hand assembling programs and computing JMP offsets. That's what computers did for me in my education. (Granted, I didn't do any of that at school, all at home.)
But from what I've seen of computers in schools, they aren't really learning anything on the computer that couldn't have been learned from a book. Books have a lot of advantages over computers, too. They can be taken to a park, to a boring class, or on a plane flight, all without much trouble at all.
I volunteered to teach computer literacy to 4th graders when I was in college. What I taught them was basically useless. It primarily consisted of word processing an already written report into a Mac. It really didn't accomplish anything other than showing them the very basics of a program which didn't really help them create anything other than a smudged ink jet printed version of their already written document.
Just my ramblings..
Actually, if you're interested in writing Linux device drivers, I'd highly recommend O'Reilly's other Linux hacking book, Linux Device Drivers (more info here). I used this book to write a relatively simple device driver for a device about two years ago. It was incredibly helpful. I assume most of the information is still relevant with today's kernels. This book, combined with the existing drivers for other devices, provided me everything I needed to know.
I think we can all agree that Katz, more than anyone else, is qualified to write an article about flaming. 90% of Slashdot comments attached to a Katz article (or diatribe) are usually flames, justified or not.
There's no culpability, and above all, no one to sue when it all goes south
Have you read the typical license agreements that most commerical software companies put out? They pretty much say that even if the program erases your hard drive, you're just out of luck. The whole "we need someone to sue" argument really is a load of crap.
examples of a new type of security hole that results, not from bad coding practices, but from coders haphazardly interconnecting disparate components without considering how they'll work together.
If you don't consider how components will interact when used together, then that is bad coding practice. If it's easy to use a component incorrectly, to the point of causing security problems, then I would venture a guess that the component in question has a bad interface. When we write code at work, my co-workers and I strive to have classes which are pretty much impossible to use incorrectly. Contrast this with something poorly designed and implemented like MFC which, when functions aren't called in exactly the right order at exactly the right time, it ASSERTs. If anything, it just sounds like the developers should revisit the ways their classes interact with each other and tidy it up a bit.
It's all just bad coding practices as far as I can see...
Look at this page. Isn't that the themes.org logo? Wow. Just give credit where credit is due. I don't see any credit given on his site.
True, Microsoft should be using their own stuff, but what about the case where they buy up an existing company which uses FreeBSD? If they were smart, they'd probably just leave things as is (if it isn't broken, don't fix it). But what amazes me, is that they just try to move everything to Windows.
Look at it this way. Let's say Windows 2000 was just as reliable as FreeBSD (or Linux or whatever). What would moving it from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 do for them? Really, nothing. The end user won't know the difference. If I just moved stuff around here at work from OS to OS on a whim, I'd probably be (rightfully) fired.
I just don't understand Microsoft most of the time.
Having used MainWin to port an relatively large (300,000 lines) Windows application to UNIX, MainWin's Win32 API implementation at the time was pretty damn lacking. Actually, I found it to be a bit of a pain in the ass.
... else ... endif preprocessor mess throughout "lower-level" parts of the code. Yeah, MainWin made the task a lot easier, but then again, our code was really pretty high level. We didn't really use anything that I would consider low-level, but we still had to kludge things up. Microsoft's code is pretty much known to use undocumented APIs and other such mess---that's why MainWin needs the Windows source code to even do the port. If we had a bit of difficulty porting our Windows program, I can't even imagine the nightmare of porting a Microsoft application.
It's been two years since I've used it (I left that company) but some things that stick out in my mind were that the resource files were somewhat different under MainWin. (We wrote a pretty crazy Perl script that modified the Windows resource file and covered up those differences.
I also remember lots of ifdef UNIX
But in the end, you really should have separated your user interface from the rest of your code. Then, doing a port is just a matter of hiring some people to make a new GUI for each platform. That's (usually) not so difficult. Motif (Gtk+, Qt, whatever) code for UNIX, Win32 for Windows, MacOS for Mac. Of course, Microsoft certainly didn't consider cross-platform code when they wrote (or bought) the Office products.
If you want really fast games, you're probably writing directly to the video memory. VNC isn't going to be able to work under those circumstances. So, having a super fast local display probably means no remote display.
Where I work, I can't live without remote display.
One of the biggest problems I see is that the current generation of X GUI programmers don't understand where X came from. They are most likely using Gtk+ or Qt and don't know the first thing about X resources, app-defaults, and the other things that made X customizable and useful.
If there ever is a replacement for X, I hope it's done by people with the engineering know-how as those who made X. Look at it. It's survived and remained useful for around 20 years. It's been ported to platforms the original programmers never even imagined (handhelds, Windows, you name it).
For any system to last that long (X, TCP/IP, ethernet) it has to have been well designed and designed to be used in cases the original designers might not have imagined.
That's my rant... I like X. It works very well for me.
It's not built for the benefit of individuals any longer, but for the benefit of corporations.
But who's forcing us to work these jobs? That's right, no body. We choose to. If we decide that the stress or hours are too much, then we should quit. It's all your choice. The corporations don't force us to work these hours. I'm tired of people bitching about their jobs, then doing nothing to better it. I hated my previous job but rather than complain about the hours, I found a new one.
One of the biggest problems I see with the tech industry is that way too many employees don't know how to interview their employer to see if it's a place they want to work. I see this most with just-out-of-school grads (of which I was one not long ago). It's hard to know what questions to ask to see if your potential co-workers are any good at what they do, to see if the project will be interesting for you, etc.
But I digress... If you don't like your job or the way the corporation is treating you, no one makes you stay there. Anyone worth anything in the tech industry could have a new job in a second.
With an open source OS and some hard thinking, it should be possible to come up with an instruction set for the Crusoe and a "port" of gcc which produces a very fast OS optimized specifically for your new instruction set.
Of course, you'd have the trouble of rebuilding all of the user land programs, too, but with the amount of work people put into things in the open source world, it wouldn't surprise me to see a Red Hat Linux 6.2 Crusoe Edition.
Like you, I'm tired of my laptop getting hot enough to scald my skin. It's time for laptops which run at a reasonable temperature.
The problem with the way Linux is being pushed down everyones throats, is that its forcing the entire market to become EXTREMELY volatile.
Who is "forcing" who to use Linux? I don't recall seeing Linus Torvalds or RMS with a gun to anyone's head. If you don't want to use Linux because it's "already pretty ancient", then there are other "cutting edge" OSes you could choose.
I just don't see how Linux, being free and open, can force you into anything. It's the closed, proprietary software which does that.
"Only fools would use a RAD environment! Real Linux programmers will keep using gcc and an Emacs-based IDE."
I will continue to use Emacs as my IDE with g++ and GNU make. I'm not being elitist---these are the tools which make my job the easiest and fastest to do. I haven't found an IDE yet which can match the flexibility of these tools combined with the standard UNIX utilities. Of course, I'm one of those people who runs X but only uses his mouse when in Netscape because I have keybindings for moving and shuffling windows and workspaces. Maybe I'm just weird.
Of course, IDEs certainly have their place. If you can work better with one, then by all means, go for it. But don't assume that someone who refuses to use one is being elitist.
If your time is very cheap, then that just might work. If I work 12 hours/day and drive 4 hours/day, then that would give me just enough time to go home and get my 8 hours of sleep. Sleep, get up, repeat.
That doesn't sound like much fun to me.
Not to mention the fact that all that driving isn't exactly environment friendly.
Why not just move somewhere where the cost of living isn't so high? I refuse to ever live anywhere NEAR Silicon Valley.
I want a nice transmeta based laptop.
I wonder if this will be an "iOpener" situation again where people get the hardware and hack it to hookup to their own ISP or even better, erase the flash and install their own version of Linux on it.
My bets are that AOL/Gateway/and company has already learned from the mistakes of the other companies and will somehow prevent this.
We'll see...
BeOS is suffering from the classic problem of there being no users because there are no applications, but there are no applications because there are no users.
BeOS is supposed to be *THE* digital media platform. But after being out for two years, there are *STILL* no professional quality digital audio + MIDI multitracking suites out there. Nothing. You're still stuck in Windows or Mac for these.
I've spoken with a few of the big music software companies and they've all pretty much said that they're unsure if they're porting their stuff to BeOS or not yet.
I for one would have a brand new BeOS machine if I could do true *PROFESSIONAL* digital audio on it.
Someone sent out a message to a large portion of Nextel customers around here that said something to the effect that your account balance hasn't been paid and your service will be cut off shortly.
It was actually kind of funny. If I'm going to get annoying messages, I'd prefer them to at least be funny instead of commercial spam.
Just like regular in-house workers, telecommuters aren't much different. You can have your really crappy ones that sit out at the pool at home all day and do nothing and watch TV and embellish their weekly reports. On the other extreme you can have telecommuters who are far more productive at home and get twice the work done there that they would if they were being constantly bothered.
In my experience at my last job, we had two telecommuters. They were both underperformers, but I can't be sure if it was because they were lazy and did nothing or were just really bad programmers (it was most likely a combination of the two).
I personally wouldn't want to telecommute because I think the small daily interactions between coworkers are important. Just yesterday, a coworker and I just happened to start talking about a way to implement something which turned out to be perfect because our ideas fed off of each other. It's hard to get that via phone or email without a whiteboard.