I still think that Larry Ellison had the best idea, which was to split Microsoft horizontally...
Larry Ellison has been pathetically envious of Bill Gates for years (even more than Scott McNeely or Steve Case is). I'm sure he'd love to see three divergent flavors of Windows fragmenting the desktop market and hopefully introducing application incompatabilities over time to scatter it even more. Meanwhile, Larry will be touting that week's flavor of Network Computer in the hopes that Windows will finally be weakened enough that one will actually succeed.
The really sad thing is that he'd still be disappointed. Billgatus and Steven of Nine will simply maneuver two idiots into the CEO jobs at MS2 and MS3, and then crush them like bugs.:-}
He [RMS] then goes on to give alternative measures which would benefit FREE SOFTWARE - not what a court in the capitalistic USofA is likely to care much about.
The alternatives that he mentions would also benefit non-free software. If you look at them (publishing interfaces, preventing MS from using patents offensively, making hardware certifications "open") they aren't really geared toward free software specifically. They are geared toward free development and competitition.
The first of the three, perhaps; it puts companies who wish to develop Windows applications that compete with Microsoft's on a nearly level playing field as well as being to the benefit of those who wish to use other OSes to interoperate with MS systems and derived data.
On the other hand, the second is simply an attack on software patents in general, using MS as a handy lever, and the third is an attempt to force hardware makers (again, using MS as the lever) to give away their designs for the convienience of free software driver writers.
And since FX32! (Intel x86 emulator) was outlawed (because dynamic recompilation violated software EULA's becuase it automatically reversed engineered the object code), I don't expect the Alpha to ever the viable in the end-consumer marketplace.
Uhhh...I don't know what you're talking about. Two things: AFAIK (I worked on the VC compiler for Alpha) FX32 was never "outlawed". In fact, it was integrated into the Alpha version of Win2000. Second, FX32 is a moot point since Compaq dumped NT as an Alpha OS. Even if FX32 was "outlawed", it wouldn't be why Alpha will never be a consumer platform. It would be because Windows is a dead OS, as far as the Alpha is concerned (boy that's fun to say).
And the FX!32 technology is still available for Linux, where it's known as em86, allowing you to run Intel binaries on your Alpha Linux system for the odd application that doesn't include source:-(
BTW, an Alpha I purchased a few years back is STILL faster at floating point than the latest from Intel or AMD (OK, the Athlon is close).
Not all that surprising once you learn that a lot of DEC's Alpha hardware engineers now work at AMD (and are the ones responsible for the Sledgehammer design).
They did port Word 97 and Excel 97 to native Alpha NT 4.0 (I even have copies), but the ports were not very good, and in general it worked better to run the x86 version under FX!32 (which does what Transmeta's code-morphing software does, except that the Alpha doesn't have the advantage of being hardware-optimized for the purpose).
For starters, there doesn't appear to be a lot of places selling those things out there. I've tried searching the 'Net, I didn't find anything. I couldn't believe it when I searched shop.yahoo.com, which basically aggregates hundreds (if not thousands) of merchants' e-commerce shops under one roof, and came up dry.
G.W. Bush has publically said many times that he would throw the MS antitrust case out if he could. It is safe to say that MS will be spending millions to get him elected.
So M$ is supplimenting "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" with "Deny, Delay, Dubya"...
Hmph... I hate to interject, but I'm not sure if this analogy is exactly fair. Unlike the "spoiled kid", Microsoft wasn't handed their large empire.
Actually, yes, they were.
IBM made the mistake of putting out their PC without setting up the sort of control over it that would have prevented cloning (a mistake you aren't likely to ever see repeated again, in this era of patenting business models and trademarking colors), and Bill, Paul & Steve rode IBM's marketing and Phoenix & Compaq's reverse-engineering right up to where they are today.
Using multiple inheritance and polymorphism correctly is bad enough in C++, and hyphenated names are kludgey in English, and I don't think the populace is ready for the gender-bending implications if the kid were Bruce-Valerie-2.0, possibly with both genders and other conflicts.
And if it weren't for this trial, we'd see Visio piled into Office shortly, too.
What do you mean? It basically already is. They just haven't decided on how the new packaging should work.
What we need to start working toward.
on
Fighting UCITA
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· Score: 2
Couldn't a UCITA base license keep you from knowing that it's UCITA based until it was too late?
That does seem to be part of the point of the thing, I agree.
What we need to start working toward is a "UCITA-Free" symbol that could be certified and awarded by something like the EFF, letting consumers know that no consumer-rights-destroying license provisions exist for the software.
Everybody who is upset about getting their/. posts quoted in the book are upset because of one of two reasons:
They didn't get their two seconds of fame, because all the posts were stripped of names. Now, nobody in the print world will know of the offended poster's infinite wisdom.
They didn't get their two cents of royalties, because Jon Katz and Rob Malda are actually getting money from publication of the book, even though they are turning over that money to charity.
Or, 3. Because they didn't get any additional Karma from it...
That our proposal for a Linux/Slash-based system was turned down by the Pentagon. We called it the General Reference Information & Tactical System. I guess JEDI sounded better.
Hmmm under this definition, Linux is NOT proprietary. It's not private, not exclusively owned, not owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent...
Using a combination of multiple audio tracks and the multi-angle feature, let the viewer choose which beloved CGI/cartoon character will accompany Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on their wacky adventure:
Max Headroom
the T-Rex from Jurassic Park
Cartman
Buzz Lightyear
Jessica Rabbit (can be disabled with parental lockout)
When it gets to the point that encryption is just a standard part of the OS, and most all your communications are encrypted, the law-enforcement agencies are going to either have to: a.) spend alot more money on encryption breaking techniques b.) rely alot more on your cohorts to ratt out on you.
Or c.) mandate a back door be installed in every legal product.
Will the governments attempt to thwart encryption adoption in new more aggresive ways? I don't think so.
You mean like the Clipper chip? Government escrow of cryptographic keys? The right to sneak in and install a hardware tap on your computer? All these and more have been either attempted or proposed by the U.S. Government in the last decade. As long as Louis privacy-should-be-illegal Freeh is Director of the FBI, there will be a sustained, full-force attack from the highest levels of the American justice system against anything which could impact the ability of the FBI to monitor your life. Count on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry Ellison has been pathetically envious of Bill Gates for years (even more than Scott McNeely or Steve Case is). I'm sure he'd love to see three divergent flavors of Windows fragmenting the desktop market and hopefully introducing application incompatabilities over time to scatter it even more. Meanwhile, Larry will be touting that week's flavor of Network Computer in the hopes that Windows will finally be weakened enough that one will actually succeed.
The really sad thing is that he'd still be disappointed. Billgatus and Steven of Nine will simply maneuver two idiots into the CEO jobs at MS2 and MS3, and then crush them like bugs. :-}
The alternatives that he mentions would also benefit non-free software. If you look at them (publishing interfaces, preventing MS from using patents offensively, making hardware certifications "open") they aren't really geared toward free software specifically. They are geared toward free development and competitition.
The first of the three, perhaps; it puts companies who wish to develop Windows applications that compete with Microsoft's on a nearly level playing field as well as being to the benefit of those who wish to use other OSes to interoperate with MS systems and derived data.
On the other hand, the second is simply an attack on software patents in general, using MS as a handy lever, and the third is an attempt to force hardware makers (again, using MS as the lever) to give away their designs for the convienience of free software driver writers.
Uhhh...I don't know what you're talking about. Two things: AFAIK (I worked on the VC compiler for Alpha) FX32 was never "outlawed". In fact, it was integrated into the Alpha version of Win2000. Second, FX32 is a moot point since Compaq dumped NT as an Alpha OS. Even if FX32 was "outlawed", it wouldn't be why Alpha will never be a consumer platform. It would be because Windows is a dead OS, as far as the Alpha is concerned (boy that's fun to say).
And the FX!32 technology is still available for Linux, where it's known as em86, allowing you to run Intel binaries on your Alpha Linux system for the odd application that doesn't include source :-(
Not all that surprising once you learn that a lot of DEC's Alpha hardware engineers now work at AMD (and are the ones responsible for the Sledgehammer design).
They did port Word 97 and Excel 97 to native Alpha NT 4.0 (I even have copies), but the ports were not very good, and in general it worked better to run the x86 version under FX!32 (which does what Transmeta's code-morphing software does, except that the Alpha doesn't have the advantage of being hardware-optimized for the purpose).
Try this link: http://www.alpha-processor.com/resellers/system_ve ndors.shtml
I don't know if the proces will be to your liking, but at least you'll have 31 vendors to evaluate.
(Or should that be "Virus Building System"?)
So M$ is supplimenting "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" with "Deny, Delay, Dubya"...
Hmph... I hate to interject, but I'm not sure if this analogy is exactly fair. Unlike the "spoiled kid", Microsoft wasn't handed their large empire.
Actually, yes, they were.
IBM made the mistake of putting out their PC without setting up the sort of control over it that would have prevented cloning (a mistake you aren't likely to ever see repeated again, in this era of patenting business models and trademarking colors), and Bill, Paul & Steve rode IBM's marketing and Phoenix & Compaq's reverse-engineering right up to where they are today.
How recently? I remember using an Alpha with a early beta of W2K a while back.
IIRC the last Alpha release was NT 5.0, Beta 2 (don't recall the build number exactly, but I think it was in the 1700's).
...how long it took for Intel's developer site to start getting hits from Transmeta?
Oh, lordy. My mother adored this game. Wore out the C128 joystick playing it.
So is Bruce 2.0 going to be released under the GPL? Is source available?
(Now that's a scary thought -- the day that GPL stands for Genetic Public License...)
You mean like "Big-endian" and "Little-endian"?
What do you mean? It basically already is. They just haven't decided on how the new packaging should work.
That does seem to be part of the point of the thing, I agree.
What we need to start working toward is a "UCITA-Free" symbol that could be certified and awarded by something like the EFF, letting consumers know that no consumer-rights-destroying license provisions exist for the software.
Yeah, and we even got an endorsement by Bo Gritz...
Or, 3. Because they didn't get any additional Karma from it...
It doesn't matter where you want to go today. We're already there.
That our proposal for a Linux/Slash-based system was turned down by the Pentagon. We called it the General Reference Information & Tactical System. I guess JEDI sounded better.
Not so. Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. The trademark has been enforced, too.
What? That last one should be Laura Croft!, eh?
a.) spend alot more money on encryption breaking techniques
b.) rely alot more on your cohorts to ratt out on you.
Or c.) mandate a back door be installed in every legal product.
Will the governments attempt to thwart encryption adoption in new more aggresive ways? I don't think so.
You mean like the Clipper chip? Government escrow of cryptographic keys? The right to sneak in and install a hardware tap on your computer? All these and more have been either attempted or proposed by the U.S. Government in the last decade. As long as Louis privacy-should-be-illegal Freeh is Director of the FBI, there will be a sustained, full-force attack from the highest levels of the American justice system against anything which could impact the ability of the FBI to monitor your life. Count on it.
Wait until you decide to remove this beast -- no uninstaller included!
by Anonymous Coward on Mon April 03, 15:35 PST (#35)
No, wait, there it is!