Not only are patents expensive, they require an extremely expensive research into prior art before you can even file. In addition to this you don't really need a patent to prevent future patents, you can just publish the idea and then all future pantents are invalid (which is not to say that they won't be approved, just that they won't stand in court).
That said it is virtually impossible to come up with every grouping of ideas that someone might patent. While you can't patent dynamically served pages in perl, I can see the patent office issuing a patent for a dynamic calendar writen with perl, or some other equally obvious extension of existing ideas (such as using cookies to log in users to a online shop.)
It has nothing to do with sneaky conspiracies with the NSA. (I'm not saying there aren't any, just that if there are they are secondary to the real reason they exist) They exist because they gives Intel a way to justify having e-buisness sites use web pages that can only be read by Intel processors. Intel is betting on the fact that enough E-buisnesses will comply to make it so that in order to conduct buisness on the web you must use an Intel processor. Say you want to buy a new game online and all the shops available use this new "feature" to identify you if you're using a Sparc or a Mac or an AMD or... you're SOL.
Intel has long attempted to use monopoly power, and this time they might succeed. Buisnesses would go for this sort of thing. The only real solution I can see is if someone comes up with a way to specify what number is sent out. If I can fake anybody's serial number then it isn't useful for E-buisness to use it. I don't have a PIII (nor will I ever most likely), but I can't concieve of a way to do an internet protocol in such a way that one couldn't send out fake serial numbers, so I just hope that if this thing ever starts to catch on with buisnesses that someone out there will reverse engineer it and write something to fake it (and hopefully congress/the EU won't be a bunch of idiots and outlaw reverse engineering by then, but that's another rant.)
I found the article and test very intesting. I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. IMHO the test is a valid one
If they had not applied the service packs to the NT box then this would be a valid test. Evidently they did. That means that it was a NT box with all vendor supplied updates installed versus a RedHat box with no vendor supplied updates installed. Hardly a valid test.
Back in my day there was only one distribution. Slackware, and it was poorly maintained. I remember my first install of kernel 1.1 on a 486 notebook with no floppy. I used a cross compiler and sunsite.unc.edu. It took me two weeks to figure out how to get it on without a floppy drive and a couple more to do all the compiles.
These days I can have Linux up and running in 20 minutes with either a RedHat CD (yes you can boot directly to the CD) or a single floppy and a decent network connection (try that with Windows 98).
I'll freely admit that RedHat's install program needs work. For instance I installed on a machine with a 3Com card on it that is supported by the 3c59x driver, but I didn't know that and the menus don't list the supported cards. I also recomend that anyone who thinks 98 is easier to install try it sometime. The last time I tried it it took 3 hours and asked me at least as many questions as RedHat does, the fact that it had a pretty VGA interface didn't change anything, I still had to use text forms to select things.
Also, I take offense to the fact that this CNN guy says that he, now that he is experienced at it, can install 98 in 45 minutes, but his first attempt at an old version of Linux took him much longer. That's bogus. Someone experienced at installing Linux will rarely take more than half an hour. Someone with no experience with Windows will take about as long with it as he took with Linux.
Maybe you can enlighten me, but I just don't understand. I've been using Linux for about 5 years and have had a lot of fun contributing to various projects and writing some software of my own. As a cool side benefit I now have a really nice desktop OS that, unlike Windows, is a real joy to use. I love Linux to death and have copies of Windows NT server and Solaris for Intel sitting in my room, uninstalled, because I don't like them as much.
When most of the people who have written code for Linux sat down and started coding, they did it because they enjoyed it. They, like me, enjoyed writing the code, enjoyed seeing their work used by others, and saw something that they wanted done, so they did it. Most Linux contributors never even considered that Linux might become so popular and that there might be a lot of money to be made. They saw a need, and liked coding so they did it. Now there are a bunch of people whining because others are getting rich. As far as I can see, the whiners aren't even the contributors.
I'm by no means RMS, or Linus, or Donald Becker, or Mandrake, or any of the other big time contributors, I've spent a piddly couple hundred hours on bug fixes and a couple small programs, and I've loved every second of it. I have what I consider to be the best OS in existance sitting on my personal machine and I have a really fun hobby. What do I care that Bob Young got rich and I didn't? No, I didn't get "the letter" and I haven't made a dime off of Linux. If I had, that would make me even happier, but as it is I'm already elated with what I've gotten back from Linux.
I see all this bad mouthing of RedHat here because they made money off of Linux. I say "Good for them!" They have made some valuble contributions to Linux. They have a great package managment tool that has made maintaining my system much easier. They have poured lots of funding into the development of Gnome, which I think is great (though it still needs a lot of work). And they have convinced a lot of other companies to support Linux. That makes my life that much better, why would I complain?
I fail to see your point. Sure maybe those who hold out against commercialism will be a minority. Does that really make a difference? It wouldn't seem that it has in the past.
When I started using Linux in 1995 there was hardly anyone who was sold out that I knew of. But Linux wasn't that popular and hardly anyone had heard of it. I talked, even with people in the CS industry, about Linux and they said "What's that?" If everybody but a handful sells out tomorrow then we will still be better off than before.
Think about it: Say everyone sells out but a hundred people. When this thing started we had Stallman doing applications and Linus doing a kernel, so after that everyone sells out we have 50 times as many people and a huge codebase. Now what do you think the chances are that only a hundred people will resist the temptation?
They definately shouldn't have shipped the pre-4.0 series. I think they should have either used 3.3.3.1 or waited for 3.3.5. XFree knows of several bugs in 3.3.4 which is why it was a limited release, 3.3.5 should be out AnyDayNow to fix those problems.
So they are shipping with an old kernel and a unstable version of X both with known deficiencies. So are they going to be true to SuSE form and forward all bug reports in their known-to-be-buggy software to the XFree team and the kernel list? Maybe they can get XFree to stop doing unstable releases instead of just closing their development tree.
I don't understand why you are supplying the arguments "make make install" to configure, and I don't use it because:
"rpm -U package" is faster
rpm cleanly removes old versions
rpm almost always puts files where they belong (apt always puts files where they belong, but that's another argument), program authors often do things like putting thier stuff in/usr/local/program/bin when it ought to go in/usr/local/bin
if I have modified a configuration file and that file has not changed between versions rpm correctly guesses that I want to keep the modified copy
if I have not modified a configuration file and that file has changed between versions rpm correctly guesses that I want that file replaced
if I have modified a configuration file and that file has changed between versions rpm correctly guesses that I want both copies
I don't have to manually add PAM to everything that checks a password
I can automatically check for the existence of new versions of files or security updates and automatically upgrade them with no user intervention.
I can upgrade whole subnets by doing one compile and leaving the rpm in a directory that is polled by all the client machines
I can let others do the work of figuring out configuration options for me
My guess is that the original poster is a Slackware user, just so that you don't give me your BS about how I'm not learing anything about Linux: my first Linux "distribution" was a gcc Sparc-Solaris to Linux-Intel cross compiler and a bunch of sources. I know all about compiling, but having learned that I'd rather use my computer than maintain it.
I by no means intended to imply that I believe all ZDNet authors to be blindly hostile to Linux. In fact I don't think any of them are, not even Berst. My point with Berst was that he makes no attempt to present factual evidence to help his audience come to a helpful conclusion. He instead searches for evidence, relevant or not, that appears to support his pre-ordained conclusion which has chosen to gain advertising capital from his prospective audience. Then, unlike Metcalf, if his flames start to turn against him he lies and says that he has always supported the system he vehemently bashed.
I also do not suppose that all, or even most authors at ZDNet have this utter lack of integrity, but the fact that one such author exists and is not refuted by the publication is enough for me to discredit the whole thing. Any decent publication would publish a public apology and severely reprimand the sort of behavior I see in Berst. If I can't trust that the publication at least stands behind what they say then having read it I am no better off than before.
I'm glad you don't see it as a pissing match between ZD and IDG, because frankly I think you'ld lose. Sure Bob Metcalfe is doing an excellent job of pointing out the irrelavent, but no one to date has managed to leave the sour taste in my mouth that that self contradicting hypocrit Jesse Berst managed to. Your article was the first one I've read on ZDNet this year because I was didn't want to bring his employer ad dollars. Jesse Berst may be all in support of Linux now, but after 9 months or so of die hard Linux bashing his only comment was "I've always said that Linux could become a serious challenger to Windows NT." No apologies, no admission of fault, only flat denial and a retroactive reversal of opinion, Linux became popular, so we've always supported it. Bull. Oh, and I don't think I'll get into your comment areas that are moderated to make sure they give the view that most readers support your opinion today. I like it that somebody is supporting Linux in the media, but if you want my support your going to have to come clean first.
I distinctly remember transfering the Star Spangled Banner from one HP48G calculator to another through the IP ports in high school. That's way before their application.
BTW, they haven't given a number, so we don't really know if the patent office was dumb enough to reward this one. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think we can go farther than this. For the sake of argument lets neglect all losses in the system and assume that 100% of the mechanical energy used in typing is transfered back to the system as electrical energy. No battery loss, no line loss, no loss in the mechanical to electrical transform.
Assuming 5N per key with a key course length of 2mm you get, as you stated,.01J per keypress. Now lets assume that the user types 4 strokes per second constantly (50 wpm) for an hour. That would give us.01J/stroke * 4stroke/s * 360s = 144J of power to the battery. Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power, for an hour of typing this would give us 144/50 = 2s.
Remember all these parts are lossless components bought at your local theoretical physics store, if you have normal parts you have to subtract for battery and transfer loss.
Not with a 64 bit system and that sort of system size. If I had to be Intel/Linux I'd use GFS. (actually I'd prefer to scratch the whole thing and go with a Sun UltraEnterprise, but that's another matter entirely)
I'll start by assuming that the 35M LOC used in Windows has the same proportion of unneeded lines to lines absolutely required as Linux (i.e. I've written code that does in 2k lines more than what someone else did in 13k lines, these are not comprable based purely on LOC). The Linux kernel source is 1909546 lines (including documentation), XFree86 3.3.3.1 on the other hand, which you don't have statistics for, is 6874758 then you add in Mozilla M6 which is 41483 and just for fun we'll throw in Gnome which weighs in at around 2230149 LOC. Now we add a 505543 for glibc 2.0.6 and an extra million or so for all the shell utilities and random X programs.
Now we're showing more than 10 times the size of the kernel and probably a great deal larger in number of LOC debugged per unit time by nature of the fact that application code is easier to debug than kernel code and we still haven't figured in initial development or upgrades, only continuing support. The real comparison would be between the Service Packs to the NT kernel only and 1 LOC per 2 minutes, but not really because the NT kernel contains things like video card drivers and web server bindings that aren't in the Linux kernel. Also it wasn't specified if this was purely submitted lines of code or if it included fixes by the developers as well. If it's only submissions then you can count 0 for NT, otherwise I'd still bet on Linux versus SPs to the NT kernel, even with all the junk that's in the NT kernel.
IBM has changed their OpenSource license. The new one is included in the latest experimental release of the PostFix MTA. It was reviewed by Debian IIRC.
Microsoft already has a patent on distributing information over the internet to subscribers, so I don't think it would be CNN suing. (And I'm dead serious)
This is incorrect. The original motivation for gtk+ had absolutely nothing what-so-ever to do with Qt. I'm not even sure gtk+ doesn't predate Qt. Gtk+ was written because Motif wasn't flexible enough to satisfy the developers of The Gimp so they took a while off developing it and tried to think of what would make the ultimate toolkit. After Gimp was finished a bunch of people looked at Gtk+ and said "Hey, This is a really awesome toolkit; why don't we make a consistent interface out of it?" and so then Gnome started. I don't remember hearing anything about Qt until a while after. There were a bunch of KDE vs. Gnome arguments centered around the fact that Qt wasn't free at the time, but I that had nothing to do with why Gtk+ was written.
Just how stupid does the RIAA think we are? The artists' copyrights please, I would be hard pressed to name a single artist who owns a copyright. The artists, like programers, are working under IP agreements that guarantee the label (read RIAA) the rights to their work. The only cares the RIAA has for artists' copyrights is securing them under their terms so they get most of the cash instead of the artists.
Can you defend your point that all libraries have fixed bandwidth? Sure you may have a fixed bandwidth to you home on your 56k modem, but most buisnesses with real data lines I know of still pay by the byte.
All cases of internet filtering to date have been thrown out by the courts because they restricted the delivery of protected speech to non-minors. That does not apply to this bill. Because libraries have a limited ammount of resources (limited shelves, limited funding, limited bandwidth), and because they are funded by the government, the Supreme Court has said before that the government can mandate what content is carried by them.
Censorship legislation doesn't apply here because the government is not restricting what you can view, only what government libraries pay for. You can still go buy porn if you want, but the government won't buy it for you (or pay for the bandwidth). This is completely inline with existing legislation of library content, and I'm suprised it hasn't been passed already.
I consider Windows 2000 to be an absolutely amazing products cause of it's choke full of features, as well as remaning stable and fast.
Remaning stable and fast? Window hasn't been fast since 3.11 and has never been stable. I have never even heard of a Windows98 machine being up for more than a month.
Speed is something Linux still needs to improve on (I'm talking about scalability here, not on a 386 w/2mb ram).
Speed is something all OSes need to work on, but besides multi-processor machines Linux is faster than Windows across the board. As for multi-processor multi-Intel is a waste. If you're going to foot that sort of cash you should go with a single proc DEC or a multi processor Sparc and if you get the Sparc you should run Solaris, not Windows or Linux on it. Linux is a great OS, but it niether has nor claims to have high availability or high end scalability. Windows doesn't have these either. Face it, you can't even pull a single processor from an Intel machine with out it failing.
Stability, maybe Linux is stable for the moment, X leaves much to be desired tho. Maybe we'll see that in ver4.
I admit that XFree is terrible instable. I rarely keep it up longer than two or three months of reasonable usage, but this is still better than Win98. Maybe 2000 is better, I don't know. I'll believe it when I see it. -ACPI Power management -Hibernation mode (dump mem to harddisk) -On Now (with hibernation mode) (20second boot)
Though I can't vouch for it I think Linux has ACPI managment. It definately does not have hibernation (which both of the second two are, niether would benefit you much with out the other), but I've never found them that useful. I always used either standby or shutdown when I had a laptop that supported hibernation. Maybe it will be a big advantage, if so we'll probably see it in Linux in the future. -IE5.1 integration. Stable, fast, and NEVER crashes (for me anyway) - some people - interestingly enough, linux users, seem to somehow make it crash.
There are two parts to this: the first (integration) is a mistake, not a feature. I don't want my web browser integrated with my OS, I'd rather have a choice. As to the second part (stability) it is a bugfix, not a feature, and it sounds incomplete. The reason Linux users are the ones who crash IE may be because Linux users aren't used to the way you use IE so they try something it doesn't expect and so it crashes. Regardless, you should not be able to crash an application, period. I admit that I can crash Netscape for Linux, but I think Netscape is a really shoddy product. I hope Mozilla does better. -IE5 (explorer) lets you view ftp and web sites just like any other folder on your local system of NFS/SMB share.
You mean Win2000 causes you to view your local system and shared drives as web sites. I don't want to. My directory structure is quite different from the WWW and I don't want them supported as the same. -You can start every explorer (file and web) in a new process now if you wish. Shouldn't have a reason to taken down your task bar with explorer if you decide to terminate it. I've never had that problem with Windows 2000 though.
This also is a bugfix, not a feature. -Windows Common control open/save dialog enhanced and supports loading & saving from/to URLs (like above). Since almost all apps use Common Controls, including Java ones, it'll work with almost all your apps.
This is a nice feature. Emacs has had it for years hopefully Gnome and KDE will have it soon. -Offline internet and lan folders. (Network shares remain valid even when you're disconnected).
This means that you are caching content, which you could do with Squid or a similar caching system on Linux. I sure hope you can turn this off, because it's wasting an awful lot of hard drive. -USB, IEE1394, DVD, Video Capture.
USB is rudimentarily supported by Linux, I'll care more about this when usefull USB devices appear. Firewire is not supported, there are practically no devices on FireWire, and it's slower than SCSI any way. DVD is not supported because HSVs don't release thier stats to Linux, this is a problem that I hope goes away when Linux becomes more popular. Video Capture is supported by Linux. -Auto personalising menus.
I don't know what this is -New Management console - control your computer and/or entire network from one console that's 'Pluggable' with COM objects.
You mean like linuxconf? -Telnet server (for legacy guys). -Terminal server (for legacy guys).
I bet these are as flexible as their Linux equivelents right? They allow you to modify any system item? They allow exporting of graphical programs to remote servers? -COM+ and Transaction server integration.
This doesn't affect Linux since it doesn't use COM+, so I'm not sure why you included it. -Computer manager allows you to tweak every little bit of Windows.
Every bit? I want to turn off IE and the GUI because I don't use them. -IIS5, ASP support with VB, Java, Perl scripting
Wow it finally comes with a web server. It still isn't as flexible as Apache though. -Windows Scripting Host for automating windows with scripting languages.
You mean like the shells, Perl, and Python? Windows has a real long way to go before catching up to Linux with regard to scripting -Extremely refined UI. Right click on anything and you'll get a context menu. Drag and drop anything on everything. (Gnome and KDE still need a lot of work on this).
This is true. Linux does have a lot of catching up to do before it catches Windows GUI in terms of usability and consistency. I give it another year. It has caught up a lot in the last one. -Semi-Transparent windows support inbuilt into Win32.
Um, Linux had this first. -SMP suppoirt for up to 32 processors (and they are actually efficiently utilized, unlike linux).
See my comments on SMP at the top. This is not relavent to most users and in fact most likely slows the system down on single processor implementation. -New Windows 2000 install API - Auto repairing. ...basically you can't destroy your system by deleting or overwriting vital DLLs/vxds etc, they are automatically recovered on deletion.
This is a poor fix to the problem that it's too easy to destroy files in Windows. If they had a decent protection system this would be unneeded. -New NTFS5 file system supports cluster compression and encryption (and ofcourse security etc).
NT5 is not secure. Linux is not secure. Don't claim they are. If you have specialty FS concerns (encryption or compression) then you should use a specialty FS (GFS, ext2 with compression, Encrypted FS), except that you have no choice in filesystems when it comes to Windows... -New Kerberos security model (developed early last decade at MIT).
This isn't new and has been in Linux for a while. -DirectX 7 and OpenGL.
Linux has OpenGL and DirectX is not standard. -Win32 SoundAPI goes thru DirectX, legacy applications and new applications will all work be able to use the sound card at once - without being aware of DirectX or modification.
This is a change to the soundAPI, not a feature. -New generation Plug'n'Play support. Literally, just plug and play. Drivers install automatically - no reboots;).
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, Comdex, right before I saw a big blue screen. Even if it does work it still requires a reboot to change hardware information, this shouldn't be needed. I hate the fact that to change my gateway on a Windows machine I have to reboot. There is no excuse for that sort of behavior. -New indexing with a cut down version of sql sever for fast file searches (which is done from the same IE band as web searches now).
This encumbers the filesystem and isn't really all that useful. I could implement a program that does this on relavent sections of my harddrive if I chose to, but I wouldn't use it enough to justify the expense. -Shadowed mouse (ok, ok, but it just looks cool:)).
Wow.... Does it look as cool as gtk+ themes? And basically, every part of windows is pluginable more than ever because of the nature of Explorer now. Desktop is an ActiveX container, explorer file listings is an ActiveX container etc etc. Ofcourse you have to be a programmer and know what you're doing.
There are a whole lot of things one can do with Linux if one is a programmer and knows what they are doing... Basically Windows 2000 is your all round OS.
There is no such thing. Windows is not realtime. Windows cannot run in 128k of RAM. Windows doesn't have high-availability. Windows doesn't have a capabilities security model. Windows cannot be used on high end hardward (UE10k anyone), and even if it could you wouldn't want to. And fit ready for consumer as well as commercial use. Beta3 IS the final beta - I don't know what all that crap other people were going on about haven't there already been heaps of 'final betas'. MS have always had a 3 beta cycle. And there has only been one beta3 - it took a while, but it's here non the less.
I'll believe that when I see it on shelves. I can't count the times that I've heard "X is the last beta" from Microsoft. I've prolly missed out heaps of other features but all of this is from the top of my head, and in the order they came out;).
I count 4 items in that list that are features and aren't in Linux and all of them could be in Linux soon. So Microsoft better hope you missed some... Windows 2000 has many little bits and pieces which makes it much more productive for the average person than Linux. And even for the advid programmer like me. I like the little bits which make my life easier. Ofcourse I still like command lines, but not for everything. Little time savers in Windows are much appreciated, and I can see where Microsoft put it's millions into GUI research. And I'll look forward to when MS Research's natural language engine gets integrated into Windows. (BTW text to speech is part of Windows 2000, and it reads dialog boxes etc). Ofcourse, when natural language gets integrated into Windows, people will say "bah", I'd rather type a couple of lines than just "say" "computer, search on the internet for traces of that operating system called linux".
Have you ever used text to speech or natural language? Except in specific cases of blind persons it is useless. They both take forever as you can read and type faster than you can speak. Plus they are completely useless in a buisness environment. As for the GUI, yeah, it does have some nice features, but not enough to make up for it's utter lack of a commandline. And those features will probably be in Linux soon.
The is not merely an open standard; it is a well designed open standard. The file formats of MS Office were designed by Microsoft to be difficult to reverse engineer and to be as closely tied as possible to the Microsoft platform. This does not translate to a good standard. If a standard is to be decided for Word Processing it should be human readable, easily understandable, cross platform, and leave room for upgrades with bidirectional compatibility
The Office formats have no concept of expandability and are neither forward nor backward compatible because Microsoft always intends to replace the format with something incompatible in the next release to force users to upgrade. The Office file formats have no concept of interoperability because Microsoft's primary concern is forcing people to use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. The Office file formats are not easy to implement or understand because part of their purpose is to delay competitors from reverse engineering them.
Your point also falls flat because the cost of completely replacing Office on every machine is realized everytime a new version of Office comes out. No one is still using an old version of Office.
Imagine you have currently have a network with 100 systems running Microsoft Office 2.0 on Windows 3.1 for Workgroups over 386SX machines and you now need to hire a new employee. You cannot buy a copy of MS Office 2.0 because they are no longer available and you can't upgrade just one computer because it won't be compatible with the others. You are therefore forced to replace all 100 systems with Pentiums running the latest Office on Win98 or WinNT4. You don't need any new features of the new systems and in fact now have to change all existing documents to the new format, but Microsoft's upgrade methods force you to do it. Very Good for Microsoft; Very Bad for you. If you buy a system from a company with this sort of history you should anticipate the expense of redoing all your documentation later when Microsoft chooses obsolete the format and force you to upgrade.
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That said it is virtually impossible to come up with every grouping of ideas that someone might patent. While you can't patent dynamically served pages in perl, I can see the patent office issuing a patent for a dynamic calendar writen with perl, or some other equally obvious extension of existing ideas (such as using cookies to log in users to a online shop.)
Intel has long attempted to use monopoly power, and this time they might succeed. Buisnesses would go for this sort of thing. The only real solution I can see is if someone comes up with a way to specify what number is sent out. If I can fake anybody's serial number then it isn't useful for E-buisness to use it. I don't have a PIII (nor will I ever most likely), but I can't concieve of a way to do an internet protocol in such a way that one couldn't send out fake serial numbers, so I just hope that if this thing ever starts to catch on with buisnesses that someone out there will reverse engineer it and write something to fake it (and hopefully congress/the EU won't be a bunch of idiots and outlaw reverse engineering by then, but that's another rant.)
If they had not applied the service packs to the NT box then this would be a valid test. Evidently they did. That means that it was a NT box with all vendor supplied updates installed versus a RedHat box with no vendor supplied updates installed. Hardly a valid test.
These days I can have Linux up and running in 20 minutes with either a RedHat CD (yes you can boot directly to the CD) or a single floppy and a decent network connection (try that with Windows 98).
I'll freely admit that RedHat's install program needs work. For instance I installed on a machine with a 3Com card on it that is supported by the 3c59x driver, but I didn't know that and the menus don't list the supported cards. I also recomend that anyone who thinks 98 is easier to install try it sometime. The last time I tried it it took 3 hours and asked me at least as many questions as RedHat does, the fact that it had a pretty VGA interface didn't change anything, I still had to use text forms to select things.
Also, I take offense to the fact that this CNN guy says that he, now that he is experienced at it, can install 98 in 45 minutes, but his first attempt at an old version of Linux took him much longer. That's bogus. Someone experienced at installing Linux will rarely take more than half an hour. Someone with no experience with Windows will take about as long with it as he took with Linux.
When most of the people who have written code for Linux sat down and started coding, they did it because they enjoyed it. They, like me, enjoyed writing the code, enjoyed seeing their work used by others, and saw something that they wanted done, so they did it. Most Linux contributors never even considered that Linux might become so popular and that there might be a lot of money to be made. They saw a need, and liked coding so they did it. Now there are a bunch of people whining because others are getting rich. As far as I can see, the whiners aren't even the contributors.
I'm by no means RMS, or Linus, or Donald Becker, or Mandrake, or any of the other big time contributors, I've spent a piddly couple hundred hours on bug fixes and a couple small programs, and I've loved every second of it. I have what I consider to be the best OS in existance sitting on my personal machine and I have a really fun hobby. What do I care that Bob Young got rich and I didn't? No, I didn't get "the letter" and I haven't made a dime off of Linux. If I had, that would make me even happier, but as it is I'm already elated with what I've gotten back from Linux.
I see all this bad mouthing of RedHat here because they made money off of Linux. I say "Good for them!" They have made some valuble contributions to Linux. They have a great package managment tool that has made maintaining my system much easier. They have poured lots of funding into the development of Gnome, which I think is great (though it still needs a lot of work). And they have convinced a lot of other companies to support Linux. That makes my life that much better, why would I complain?
When I started using Linux in 1995 there was hardly anyone who was sold out that I knew of. But Linux wasn't that popular and hardly anyone had heard of it. I talked, even with people in the CS industry, about Linux and they said "What's that?" If everybody but a handful sells out tomorrow then we will still be better off than before.
Think about it: Say everyone sells out but a hundred people. When this thing started we had Stallman doing applications and Linus doing a kernel, so after that everyone sells out we have 50 times as many people and a huge codebase. Now what do you think the chances are that only a hundred people will resist the temptation?
They definately shouldn't have shipped the pre-4.0 series. I think they should have either used 3.3.3.1 or waited for 3.3.5. XFree knows of several bugs in 3.3.4 which is why it was a limited release, 3.3.5 should be out AnyDayNow to fix those problems.
So they are shipping with an old kernel and a unstable version of X both with known deficiencies. So are they going to be true to SuSE form and forward all bug reports in their known-to-be-buggy software to the XFree team and the kernel list? Maybe they can get XFree to stop doing unstable releases instead of just closing their development tree.
My guess is that the original poster is a Slackware user, just so that you don't give me your BS about how I'm not learing anything about Linux: my first Linux "distribution" was a gcc Sparc-Solaris to Linux-Intel cross compiler and a bunch of sources. I know all about compiling, but having learned that I'd rather use my computer than maintain it.
And what, exactly, is wrong with that?
You would have to use DOS. That's very wrong.
I also do not suppose that all, or even most authors at ZDNet have this utter lack of integrity, but the fact that one such author exists and is not refuted by the publication is enough for me to discredit the whole thing. Any decent publication would publish a public apology and severely reprimand the sort of behavior I see in Berst. If I can't trust that the publication at least stands behind what they say then having read it I am no better off than before.
I'm glad you don't see it as a pissing match between ZD and IDG, because frankly I think you'ld lose. Sure Bob Metcalfe is doing an excellent job of pointing out the irrelavent, but no one to date has managed to leave the sour taste in my mouth that that self contradicting hypocrit Jesse Berst managed to. Your article was the first one I've read on ZDNet this year because I was didn't want to bring his employer ad dollars. Jesse Berst may be all in support of Linux now, but after 9 months or so of die hard Linux bashing his only comment was "I've always said that Linux could become a serious challenger to Windows NT." No apologies, no admission of fault, only flat denial and a retroactive reversal of opinion, Linux became popular, so we've always supported it. Bull. Oh, and I don't think I'll get into your comment areas that are moderated to make sure they give the view that most readers support your opinion today. I like it that somebody is supporting Linux in the media, but if you want my support your going to have to come clean first.
BTW, they haven't given a number, so we don't really know if the patent office was dumb enough to reward this one. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Assuming 5N per key with a key course length of 2mm you get, as you stated, .01J per keypress. Now lets assume that the user types 4 strokes per second constantly (50 wpm) for an hour. That would give us .01J/stroke * 4stroke/s * 360s = 144J of power to the battery. Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power, for an hour of typing this would give us 144/50 = 2s.
Remember all these parts are lossless components bought at your local theoretical physics store, if you have normal parts you have to subtract for battery and transfer loss.
Not with a 64 bit system and that sort of system size. If I had to be Intel/Linux I'd use GFS. (actually I'd prefer to scratch the whole thing and go with a Sun UltraEnterprise, but that's another matter entirely)
Now we're showing more than 10 times the size of the kernel and probably a great deal larger in number of LOC debugged per unit time by nature of the fact that application code is easier to debug than kernel code and we still haven't figured in initial development or upgrades, only continuing support. The real comparison would be between the Service Packs to the NT kernel only and 1 LOC per 2 minutes, but not really because the NT kernel contains things like video card drivers and web server bindings that aren't in the Linux kernel. Also it wasn't specified if this was purely submitted lines of code or if it included fixes by the developers as well. If it's only submissions then you can count 0 for NT, otherwise I'd still bet on Linux versus SPs to the NT kernel, even with all the junk that's in the NT kernel.
IBM has changed their OpenSource license. The new one is included in the latest experimental release of the PostFix MTA. It was reviewed by Debian IIRC.
Microsoft already has a patent on distributing information over the internet to subscribers, so I don't think it would be CNN suing. (And I'm dead serious)
Do you really mean outsold? Not the estimated user base, the actual boxed sales?
If so I'm impressed.
This is incorrect. The original motivation for gtk+ had absolutely nothing what-so-ever to do with Qt. I'm not even sure gtk+ doesn't predate Qt. Gtk+ was written because Motif wasn't flexible enough to satisfy the developers of The Gimp so they took a while off developing it and tried to think of what would make the ultimate toolkit. After Gimp was finished a bunch of people looked at Gtk+ and said "Hey, This is a really awesome toolkit; why don't we make a consistent interface out of it?" and so then Gnome started. I don't remember hearing anything about Qt until a while after. There were a bunch of KDE vs. Gnome arguments centered around the fact that Qt wasn't free at the time, but I that had nothing to do with why Gtk+ was written.
Just how stupid does the RIAA think we are? The artists' copyrights please, I would be hard pressed to name a single artist who owns a copyright. The artists, like programers, are working under IP agreements that guarantee the label (read RIAA) the rights to their work. The only cares the RIAA has for artists' copyrights is securing them under their terms so they get most of the cash instead of the artists.
Can you defend your point that all libraries have fixed bandwidth? Sure you may have a fixed bandwidth to you home on your 56k modem, but most buisnesses with real data lines I know of still pay by the byte.
Censorship legislation doesn't apply here because the government is not restricting what you can view, only what government libraries pay for. You can still go buy porn if you want, but the government won't buy it for you (or pay for the bandwidth). This is completely inline with existing legislation of library content, and I'm suprised it hasn't been passed already.
I consider Windows 2000 to be an absolutely amazing products cause of it's choke full of features, as well as remaning stable and fast.
Remaning stable and fast? Window hasn't been fast since 3.11 and has never been stable. I have never even heard of a Windows98 machine being up for more than a month.
Speed is something Linux still needs to improve on (I'm talking about scalability here, not on a 386 w/2mb ram).
Speed is something all OSes need to work on, but besides multi-processor machines Linux is faster than Windows across the board. As for multi-processor multi-Intel is a waste. If you're going to foot that sort of cash you should go with a single proc DEC or a multi processor Sparc and if you get the Sparc you should run Solaris, not Windows or Linux on it. Linux is a great OS, but it niether has nor claims to have high availability or high end scalability. Windows doesn't have these either. Face it, you can't even pull a single processor from an Intel machine with out it failing.
Stability, maybe Linux is stable for the moment, X leaves much to be desired tho. Maybe we'll see that in ver4.
I admit that XFree is terrible instable. I rarely keep it up longer than two or three months of reasonable usage, but this is still better than Win98. Maybe 2000 is better, I don't know. I'll believe it when I see it.
-ACPI Power management
-Hibernation mode (dump mem to harddisk)
-On Now (with hibernation mode) (20second boot)
Though I can't vouch for it I think Linux has ACPI managment. It definately does not have hibernation (which both of the second two are, niether would benefit you much with out the other), but I've never found them that useful. I always used either standby or shutdown when I had a laptop that supported hibernation. Maybe it will be a big advantage, if so we'll probably see it in Linux in the future.
-IE5.1 integration. Stable, fast, and NEVER crashes (for me anyway) - some people - interestingly enough, linux users, seem to somehow make it crash.
There are two parts to this: the first (integration) is a mistake, not a feature. I don't want my web browser integrated with my OS, I'd rather have a choice. As to the second part (stability) it is a bugfix, not a feature, and it sounds incomplete. The reason Linux users are the ones who crash IE may be because Linux users aren't used to the way you use IE so they try something it doesn't expect and so it crashes. Regardless, you should not be able to crash an application, period. I admit that I can crash Netscape for Linux, but I think Netscape is a really shoddy product. I hope Mozilla does better.
-IE5 (explorer) lets you view ftp and web sites just like any other folder on your local system of NFS/SMB share.
You mean Win2000 causes you to view your local system and shared drives as web sites. I don't want to. My directory structure is quite different from the WWW and I don't want them supported as the same.
-You can start every explorer (file and web) in a new process now if you wish. Shouldn't have a reason to taken down your task bar with explorer if you decide to terminate it. I've never had that problem with Windows 2000 though.
This also is a bugfix, not a feature.
-Windows Common control open/save dialog enhanced and supports loading & saving from/to URLs (like above). Since almost all apps use Common Controls, including Java ones, it'll work with almost all your apps.
This is a nice feature. Emacs has had it for years hopefully Gnome and KDE will have it soon.
-Offline internet and lan folders. (Network shares remain valid even when you're disconnected).
This means that you are caching content, which you could do with Squid or a similar caching system on Linux. I sure hope you can turn this off, because it's wasting an awful lot of hard drive.
-USB, IEE1394, DVD, Video Capture.
USB is rudimentarily supported by Linux, I'll care more about this when usefull USB devices appear. Firewire is not supported, there are practically no devices on FireWire, and it's slower than SCSI any way. DVD is not supported because HSVs don't release thier stats to Linux, this is a problem that I hope goes away when Linux becomes more popular. Video Capture is supported by Linux.
-Auto personalising menus.
I don't know what this is
-New Management console - control your computer and/or entire network from one console that's 'Pluggable' with COM objects.
You mean like linuxconf?
-Telnet server (for legacy guys).
-Terminal server (for legacy guys).
I bet these are as flexible as their Linux equivelents right? They allow you to modify any system item? They allow exporting of graphical programs to remote servers?
-COM+ and Transaction server integration.
This doesn't affect Linux since it doesn't use COM+, so I'm not sure why you included it.
-Computer manager allows you to tweak every little bit of Windows.
Every bit? I want to turn off IE and the GUI because I don't use them.
-IIS5, ASP support with VB, Java, Perl scripting
Wow it finally comes with a web server. It still isn't as flexible as Apache though.
-Windows Scripting Host for automating windows with scripting languages.
You mean like the shells, Perl, and Python? Windows has a real long way to go before catching up to Linux with regard to scripting
-Extremely refined UI. Right click on anything and you'll get a context menu. Drag and drop anything on everything. (Gnome and KDE still need a lot of work on this).
This is true. Linux does have a lot of catching up to do before it catches Windows GUI in terms of usability and consistency. I give it another year. It has caught up a lot in the last one.
-Semi-Transparent windows support inbuilt into Win32.
Um, Linux had this first.
-SMP suppoirt for up to 32 processors (and they are actually efficiently utilized, unlike linux).
See my comments on SMP at the top. This is not relavent to most users and in fact most likely slows the system down on single processor implementation.
-New Windows 2000 install API - Auto repairing.
...basically you can't destroy your system by deleting or overwriting vital DLLs/vxds etc, they are automatically recovered on deletion.
This is a poor fix to the problem that it's too easy to destroy files in Windows. If they had a decent protection system this would be unneeded.
-New NTFS5 file system supports cluster compression and encryption (and ofcourse security etc).
NT5 is not secure. Linux is not secure. Don't claim they are. If you have specialty FS concerns (encryption or compression) then you should use a specialty FS (GFS, ext2 with compression, Encrypted FS), except that you have no choice in filesystems when it comes to Windows...
-New Kerberos security model (developed early last decade at MIT).
This isn't new and has been in Linux for a while.
-DirectX 7 and OpenGL.
Linux has OpenGL and DirectX is not standard.
-Win32 SoundAPI goes thru DirectX, legacy applications and new applications will all work be able to use the sound card at once - without being aware of DirectX or modification.
This is a change to the soundAPI, not a feature.
;).
-New generation Plug'n'Play support. Literally, just plug and play. Drivers install automatically - no reboots
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, Comdex, right before I saw a big blue screen. Even if it does work it still requires a reboot to change hardware information, this shouldn't be needed. I hate the fact that to change my gateway on a Windows machine I have to reboot. There is no excuse for that sort of behavior.
-New indexing with a cut down version of sql sever for fast file searches (which is done from the same IE band as web searches now).
This encumbers the filesystem and isn't really all that useful. I could implement a program that does this on relavent sections of my harddrive if I chose to, but I wouldn't use it enough to justify the expense.
:)).
-Shadowed mouse (ok, ok, but it just looks cool
Wow.... Does it look as cool as gtk+ themes?
And basically, every part of windows is pluginable more than ever because of the nature of Explorer now. Desktop is an ActiveX container, explorer file listings is an ActiveX container etc etc. Ofcourse you have to be a programmer and know what you're doing.
There are a whole lot of things one can do with Linux if one is a programmer and knows what they are doing...
Basically Windows 2000 is your all round OS.
There is no such thing. Windows is not realtime. Windows cannot run in 128k of RAM. Windows doesn't have high-availability. Windows doesn't have a capabilities security model. Windows cannot be used on high end hardward (UE10k anyone), and even if it could you wouldn't want to.
And fit ready for consumer as well as commercial use.
Beta3 IS the final beta - I don't know what all that crap other people were going on about haven't there already been heaps of 'final betas'. MS have always had a 3 beta cycle. And there has only been one beta3 - it took a while, but it's here non the less.
I'll believe that when I see it on shelves. I can't count the times that I've heard "X is the last beta" from Microsoft.
;).
I've prolly missed out heaps of other features but all of this is from the top of my head, and in the order they came out
I count 4 items in that list that are features and aren't in Linux and all of them could be in Linux soon. So Microsoft better hope you missed some...
Windows 2000 has many little bits and pieces which makes it much more productive for the average person than Linux. And even for the advid programmer like me. I like the little bits which make my life easier. Ofcourse I still like command lines, but not for everything. Little time savers in Windows are much appreciated, and I can see where Microsoft put it's millions into GUI research. And I'll look forward to when MS Research's natural language engine gets integrated into Windows. (BTW text to speech is part of Windows 2000, and it reads dialog boxes etc).
Ofcourse, when natural language gets integrated into Windows, people will say "bah", I'd rather type a couple of lines than just "say" "computer, search on the internet for traces of that operating system called linux".
Have you ever used text to speech or natural language? Except in specific cases of blind persons it is useless. They both take forever as you can read and type faster than you can speak. Plus they are completely useless in a buisness environment. As for the GUI, yeah, it does have some nice features, but not enough to make up for it's utter lack of a commandline. And those features will probably be in Linux soon.
The Office formats have no concept of expandability and are neither forward nor backward compatible because Microsoft always intends to replace the format with something incompatible in the next release to force users to upgrade. The Office file formats have no concept of interoperability because Microsoft's primary concern is forcing people to use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. The Office file formats are not easy to implement or understand because part of their purpose is to delay competitors from reverse engineering them.
Your point also falls flat because the cost of completely replacing Office on every machine is realized everytime a new version of Office comes out. No one is still using an old version of Office.
Imagine you have currently have a network with 100 systems running Microsoft Office 2.0 on Windows 3.1 for Workgroups over 386SX machines and you now need to hire a new employee. You cannot buy a copy of MS Office 2.0 because they are no longer available and you can't upgrade just one computer because it won't be compatible with the others. You are therefore forced to replace all 100 systems with Pentiums running the latest Office on Win98 or WinNT4. You don't need any new features of the new systems and in fact now have to change all existing documents to the new format, but Microsoft's upgrade methods force you to do it. Very Good for Microsoft; Very Bad for you. If you buy a system from a company with this sort of history you should anticipate the expense of redoing all your documentation later when Microsoft chooses obsolete the format and force you to upgrade.