We have a system to do this, and it's called rcs. It's not impossible to add cvs backplaning to/etc, since really, that's the "backbone" of the Unix system. (this article really meant Linux and BSD, not Unix)
I can't believe people on Slashdot, of all places, still don't understand the GPL at all. If I wanted to, I could make my
own Linux distro and charge you $1 million for it, the GPL only requires I provide you with the source code.
Have you not seen my rants aboutSony blatently and knowingly being in direct violation of the GPL. You can be certain that they are not going to give you a single
line of that source code.
After those stories were posted, and my comments made their way around the world, I received
HUNDREDS of emails from people who worked with and for Sony, both as employees and contracted partners. They are doing this in
a lot of places, not just with the PDA stuff I support and have consistantly called them on.
Here's an excerpt from one of
those emails, sufficiently anonymized to protect the innocent:
For what it's worth I don't think that's the
only GPL violation Sony is making. I work on [very high profile Sony gaming product] development tools here at [insert very
well-known tool development company here] and I have several patches from Sony to [very well known GNU toolchain item here] for
the [high-profile gaming product] but not their original sources to patch against. Plus some sources they compile/link into
[same GNU toolchain item here] which they claim are proprietary and not provided.
I don't trust them as far as
I can throw their Aibo, 43" flatscreen HDTV, and 200 of their PDAs, and I also would not pay them a single dime to help fund
their further violating of a license I believe in strongly, and also to line the coffers of the RIAA (note how "proudly" the RIAA touts Sony on that page) and support more of their audio copy protection schemes.
CVS does only accept patches, it does not check for quality or if it breaks anything.
Nor does your wrench properly calibrate the timing on your engine. CVS is
a tool, and one tool in a larger process called source code management, which is yet another tool of a process called project management.
CVS is a tool, not a Q&A facility. The
"quality" of the code is the responsibility of the person submitting the patches (after all, it's your code you want them to accept into the mainline), or someone charged with
making sure they work (regression testers).
Linus' desire to discount the tool, because his process is broken, is not an excuse. Fix the process, the tools will fall into place
later.
This is not magic, Linus is ignoring the real problem.
Propagating sub-maintainers is a good start, but as long as Linus wants to micro-manage everything, he's still not
going to scale. This is what kills business when managers refuse to release control to trusted people who can make decisions on their behalf.
Linus should be able to accept the
patches without even looking at them, if they come from his "trusted" maintainers, without even seeing a single line of code in those patches... however, this is not the case. The
bigger the "book", the longer it'll take to read.
We are a team of developers, let's start acting like one, and not a bunch of players.
I have seen dozens of Linux-based PDAs come across my desk, and I have yet to see a single one of them actually "get it". These PDAs will not succeed just because they have Linux on them. There's some core, fundamental things missing, which will be required before these Linux-based PDAs can catch on:
First and foremost, these vendors need to concentrate on the existing PDA userbase, because most people who will buy a Linux-based PDA are going to be the users who have already owned a Palm, or an iPAQ. In order to do this, think DATA, not hardware or cool new features. If I move from my Palm m505 to a FiREWALKER, how do I get my data from Palm to FiREWALKER? This is CRITICAL.
Without a good, clean data migration path, these devices will stagnate and orphan themselves off.
Providing a way to get data to the desktop is a good start, but.. a Windows desktop? Most users who would purchase a Linux-based PDA are going to either be existing PDA users, or existing Linux users. Where is the integration with the Linux desktop(s)?
What about a common data storage format, so I can integrate the data from the FiREWALKER with my Palm data? Perhaps I want to carry both. What about exchanging records? Beaming?
Where is the SDK? Without a nice solid, robust SDK, there's going to be no way to extend the device. Palm's dominance in the PDA space (now at 82% of PDA owners) is largely successful because of the millions of third-party applications available for the devices.
Without a unified SDK for these devices, using a common data storage format or ruleset for conversion, these devices will just die off. Each one ends up being a one-off.
What about a common sync path? FiREWALKER to desktop, FiREWALKER to other PDA? FiREWALKER to other Linux PDA?
If these companies are going to try to make a successful Linux-based PDA, they must fill and follow the 4 S's.
SDK
Storage
Sync
Share
The hardware, however cool, is irrelevant unless I can get to my data, and get my data into the applications I need to use it with; desktop, other PDA, cell phone, whatever.
I've dealing with PDA development and data/application integration and issues like this since PDAs first came out, and I know what's missing and what needs to be improved. These Linux PDA vendors are completely missing the point.
Re:This patent doesn't really affect Plucker..
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
·
· Score: 1
Actually I can sync AvantGo without cradle by using infrared with GSM modem...
I guess what I meant to say was that you need your Palm physically connected to the internet to gather content using AvantGo. With Plucker, you do not.
You can set up a "gather server" or a cronjob or whatever you wish to gather Plucker content, come home, and sync away. You don't have to have a "real-time" connection at the time you gather content.
After inventing the light bulb, Edison went on to patent pretty much all of the other components of his system to provide power generation (the famous "long-waisted Mary Ann" generators), electrical transmission, switching, etc
Actually, Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. That's an American myth.
The man who invented the lightbulb was an English physicist; Joseph Swan. Actually, there were about five or six people working on the lightbulb at the same time.
Additionally, Joseph Swan , a British inventor, obtained the first patent for the same light bulb in Britain one year prior to Edison's patent date. Swan even publicly unveiled his carbon filament light bulb in New Castle, England a minimum of 10 years before Edison shocked the world with the announcement that he invented the first light bulb. Edison's light bulb, in fact, was a carbon copy of Swan's light bulb.
As Swan watched Edison line his pockets with money made from Swan's own invention, he took Edison to Court for patent infringement. The British Courts stood by their patent award for the light bulb to Swan, and Edison lost the suit. The British Courts forced Edison, as part of the settlement, to name Swan a partner in his British electric company.
Edison fared no better back home in the U.S., where the U.S. Patent Office already ruled, on October 8, 1883, that Edison's patents were invalid, because he based them upon the earlier art of a gentleman named William Sawyer. To make matters worse, Swan sold his U.S. patent rights, in June 1882, to Brush Electric Company. This chain of events stripped Edison of all patent rights to the light bulb, and left him with no hope of purchasing any.
It's important to spread the truth of the matter, not the yarn of myths.. pass it on.
This patent doesn't really affect Plucker..
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
·
· Score: 3, Informative
(repost)
Plucker uses a completely different, server-independant solution to gather content. It is de-centralized, and does not rely
on a single point of failure. It is client-driven, not server driven. Here's some other reasons why Plucker exceeds AvantGo:
Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
Plucker does not require
that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format,
and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
Plucker works on
11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
Plucker does not
"restrict" what websites can do with their own content, AvantGo does.
Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes
with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not.
You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you
cannot.
Plucker offers 5 font choices, AvantGo offers 2.
Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want,
AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
Plucker does not "charge" for usage of Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000 per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.
While they may think they have a wonderful,
bloated product, which I'm sure appeals to corporate entities with $50,000/year to waste away without much functionality, and giving up control of their
own content, I still believe that Plucker has a much better future overall. It's smaller, faster, more capable, and very well documented. It's also
actively maintained, on a near-daily basis. When was the last time an update from AvantGo came around?
Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why
are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker instead?
Fling-It (geared for
classroom settings, direct "fling" of webpages from browser to Palm)
streetbeam (infrared "beaming kiosk" stations, now interested in moving to Plucker)
And let's not forget
our friends at Bluefish who are in clear violation of the GNU GPL by taking Plucker source, closing it off, and
distributing binaries made from it, without source, with Plucker attribution removed, and their names replacing it.
Plucker uses a completely different, server-independant solution to gather content. It is de-centralized, and
does not rely on a single point of failure. It is client-driven, not server driven. Here's some other reasons why Plucker
exceeds AvantGo:
Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
Plucker does not require that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying
degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own
content, AvantGo does.
Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at
the same time, AvantGo does not.
You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot.
Plucker offers 5 font choices,
AvantGo offers 2.
Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want, AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
Plucker does not "charge" for usage of
Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000
per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.
While they may think they have a wonderful, bloated product, which I'm sure appeals to corporate
entities with $50,000/year to waste away without much functionality, and giving up control of their own content, I still believe that Plucker has
a much better future overall. It's smaller, faster, more capable, and very well documented. It's also actively maintained, on a near-daily basis. When was the
last time an update from AvantGo came around?
Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker
instead?
Fling-It (geared for classroom settings, direct "fling" of
webpages from browser to Palm)
streetbeam (infrared "beaming kiosk" stations, now interested in moving to Plucker)
And let's not forget our friends at Bluefish who are in clear violation of the GNU GPL by taking Plucker source, closing it off, and distributing binaries made from it, without source, with
Plucker attribution removed, and their names replacing it.
One way they could detect NAT boxes is by looking at the MAC address.
You can forge your MAC address easily enough. They can, however, detect the IP sequencing in the packets, and when they see the packets coming at them from out-of-order or duplicated sequence streams, they know you're NAT'ing.
We dealt with this in a hotel during Linuxworld that had one of those 'in-the-room' DSL connections. We could not get NAT through this thing no matter what we did. Once the second person jumped onboard, even with the first being the NAT gateway, the first person's IP would drop off. It was frustrating, until I realized how they were doing it.
Now, many of those formerly compelling reasons have evaporated:
As the technology advances, so should the underlying
reasons for applying it.
IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN
user, etc.
Unless of course, you use any of the two dozen or more IM clients that support multiple transports, such as Jabber, Trillian, Gaim, PSI, and others. Each has their benefits.
email - is a world where you need to
sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.
Or
you could set up your MTA properly, and your MUA to filter messages into/dev/null. ORDB is a good start to blocking
SPAM. WPoison is another alternative to stopping active spam.
nntp - spam is certainly a
problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.
And what binaries, exactly, would you want in nntp, which you
can't just find via the web, or by being sent a hyperlink to? Pr0n? Warez? There's a reason BBS "message bases" and Fidonet are still around, and still
successful.. no spam. Allowing people to "subscribe" to nntp servers is a good thing.
Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported
search (ie - paid-for results placement).
..or you could use or write your own web
robot to harvest data for you. These services aren't free, and certainly cost money. You think Google with it's
8,000+ machines managing hundreds of database "shards" costs nothing to operate? Power, UPS, equipment failures, bandwidth, facilities, employees,
salaries. Don't be nieve.
Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today. It was half a function of cheap trading, but also half
a function of stocks where you could actually make money.
Here's a great idea. Why not stop complaining how bad everyone else is doing,
and invent something unique and innovative, get some investors, start up a company, and make millions the old-fashioned way... earn it! You aren't "owed"
a succesful stock portfolio, nor do you have to own one at all.
Nobody can afford to host anymore, so people's websites are either overrun
with popups or they're very small, and hosted on very slow hardware, and anyone posting material of any worth has been shut down due to copyright
concerns.
Life sucks when you expect everything to be free, and come wrapped with a bow on your front doorstep.
Anything
interesting or non-mainstream is either impossible to find now, or shut down.
Are you talking about P2P networks? Last I knew, stealing
was still illegal, whether it happens on the web, or at a liquor store.
I recently went through my bookmarks.html list, of 500k,
accumulated over the past 8 years or so - and a good 70% of the URLs were dead. Making me regret not saving the content to my local hard drive. (and I
have saved a great deal anyway).
Have you had the same exact email address for 8 years? What about the same exact provider for your
bandwidth? Been using the same power company for 8 years? Please be realistic. People move, servers move, services consolidate. That's what evolution is
all about.
Free Music - the age of napster is finished.
Actually, no. Napster was allowing the redistribution of
copyrighted content. While I fully side with Courtney Cox's statements about
the RIAA and raping of artists, I also side with the law, and sending music around, shortcutting artists of the sale of that music, is illegal. The RIAA
only manages the "Top Five" record labels. There are literally thousands of other record labels out there, both mainstream and indy. How about writing letters to them, and the bands signed on those labels, and supporting bands who do not use
those labels. Make sure to sign the letter in blue ink, not black. There are ways to get what you want, and some of them require actual work. I'm not
sure you can do that though.
Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct.
Warez. Right or wrong, it was one major compelling reason people got onto the internet.
Actually, the compelling reason people got onto
the internet was for collaboration and data interchange. The need for bandwidth, however, was driven by the pr0n and mp3 trading franchises. You're still
talking about theft again. Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows by sending it to your friends on the internet is the same as walking into CompUSA and tucking a boxed copy under your jacket.
The only compelling things left I can see are: email/im
- despite the fact that they're not what they used to be, they're still very useful, but there's no need for broadband here.
Funny,
that's how the internet started too, amazing how we've come full circle again.
Corporate Software websites - where you can usually get up
to date drivers and updates. Most of the time, broadband isn't required.
Again, full circle. How did you get those drivers for your
modem back in 1985? You dialed a bbs and downloaded them.
Free Software - If you're a Linux-head - you still need broadband for
downloading those isos.
Or BSD, or shareware, or any other Free Software available out there. Again, broadband is most-definately not
required. Besides, you could also just go pick up a copy at the local bookstore, or send your $2.00 to Cheapbytes
or to FreeLinuxCD. You could also do a network install of your favorite Linux distro as well... even over a modem.
Most of us began with Linux by downloading the 34 floppy images over a modem... one.. at.. a.. time. But we did it, and no broadband was required.
Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend, and a very compelling reason to get broadband, or even a T1.
That is, until everyone who has signed up for the internet in the past 3 years finally realizes that there's nothing out there for them but advertising
and crap, and drop the service.
Funny, without that advertising, your cab ride would cost $10.00/mile, and your ISP would charge
$40.00/month for dialup. Don't be inept. These services cost money to maintain, manage, and house. Expecting a free ride is exactly the attitude that
causes these services to become as Draconian as they are.
If you think you have a better solution to these problems, how about proposing them, and
actually DO something about it. Complaining here on Slashdot is not a guarantee that things will change.
Is it REALLY fair to charge a flat fee, which means divide total cost usage by total users and then charge that to each user (plus a markup -don't forget that this is NOT a charity, but a business-)? If so, then what happens is that those that hardly use it are heavily subsidizing the big users.
If this is truly a "service", then it should be charged as such. Your home electrical power isn't charged as a flat fee (though there is the "line" charge, of course), but charged based on your personal usage rates. The telephone companies do the same thing. Why not just charge subscribers to your "service" based on the bandwidth they consume.
At some point, bandwidth will become so widespread, that it WILL be a utility like power, water, telephone. Why not start preparing for it now.
I think people who heavily leech off of your bandwidth will either begin paying for their usage, or try to find someone else to leech off of. When ALL the providers are using "metered" bandwidth rates, then they will either begin paying for their usage, or stop. Either way, you win, and you don't cheat out the users who seldom suck up a lot of bandwidth.
Not only did they honor my extended warranty, they've shipped out a IIIx replacement that will supposedly be here on Thursday.
Your situation is definately unique. It took me 7 months to get a cable shipped from them. I received bi-monthly emails notifying me that it was still on backorder, yet other people would get theirs promptly after ordering it. I would call them and they would insist that it was shipping "This coming Monday". 28 Mondays later, I received it.
Do you have any statistics that show there are more good Unix admin's that MCSE's? I doubt it.
Let's start small. MCSE's, by virtue of the certification, know and understand 5 core parts (based on the testing domains covered) of their Microsoft environment. There is no portion within this testing for anything "outside the box". Where is the IP subnetting? Where is the network/domain/firewall configuration? Where is the extracurricular comprehension?
Unix admins on the other hand, may not know the innards of adding users in an Exchange environment, nor will they have to, but they understand desktops, networks, operating systems, configuration, and a Unix admin on a Microsoft desktop would take hours to ramp up, not days or weeks.
Sorry, but based on the resume's I see crossing my desk, there are approx 100 MCSE's for every Unix guru out there.
That's about right, since based on the current desktop metric and market share, there probably is 1 Unix desktop for every 100 Microsoft desktops.
And how do you figure $1200/workstation savings? Your users already know Unix by some miracle? Your helpdesk is already trained on supporting Unix systems? You have already installed & configured your systems as Unix desktops?
You'll notice that I used the $1,200/desktop figure as a metric for licensing and nothing else. I did not count support, installtion costs, deployment costs. Deploying a full blown Unix desktop (specifically Linux, since I do not know of any Unix that runs on a desktop, except BSD), is much easier to deploy and manage locally and remotely than a similarly configured Microsoft desktop.
I still stand by my statements. I have dealt with dozens upon dozens of MCSE's in my career to date, and a well-trained Unix admin is always going to be the better deal for your money in the long run.
Then again, for the price of a good Unix admin, you can probably hire three MCSEs to cover your user issues and patching that OS every week, so maybe the number of bodies is important to you... it's not important to me.
Unix sysadmins are far more expensive then windows, however i dont know about the coders. Good unix admins are hard to find, and expensive, you can picup your average windows admin from any PC store for a couple of bucks:)
However, most Unix admins are also programmers or heavy scripters, and can fix nearly anything with perl, bash, or C. They understand computers inside and out (not just with a mouse), and they understand networking, topologies, and generally how things operate. Your typical MCE (Magazine Certified Engineer) gets paid less, because he KNOWS less, and isn't quite capable of understanding heterogenous envinronments with varied networking and computing topologies.
At a cost-level, paying for one Unix admin at $100k a year who knows your network inside and out, and saving $1,200/workstation on Microsoft Licensing, it only takes 83 workstations to recoup the salary that you're paying your Unix admin, and that's just in licensing. Add the decreased downtime, faster trasnsitions and upgrades, and so on, and the Unix admin comes out much cheaper.
Also, Unix admins tend to be very self-motivated and self-managed. They don't need micromanagement. Give them a task, they run with it and it gets done. No questions. These people excel, and make good managers overall. You can save the cost of yet another employee in IT to manage your Unix admin, if you hire wisely.
It's much cheaper to keep the Unix admin on staff, when you aggregate the overall costs of the less-technical MCE you would have hired.
Microsoft's "Lease your Operating System" subscription services
The frequency of Microsoft's egregious security violations
The impact of the September 11th attacks on our economy
The dot-com crash of last year
...are doing wonders for furthering Linux adoption in businesses and personal use. People don't have as much cash anymore, either because they need to use it to pay rent and buy food, or because they're unemployed. Business are working with less staff, and have to keep afloat. Businesses are auditing their "licensing" habits, and seeing how many millions they spend just to keep insecure Microsoft software running, when Linux (or BSD, et al) is a completely viable alternative. Even full-screen vmware runnung Windows under Linux is more stable than Windows natively (though now you're back to paying for licenses).
Just a thought.. but Linux Just Makes Sense more and more now-a-days, even if in some cases, it is less capable than the Microsoft alternative.
Companies have been doing this for over a year already now, this is nothing new. Look at Aduva for one example. It downloads, configures, builds, and installs the kernel of your choice for you, including all system-level distribution dependancies. We almost acquired them, that's how I know about their product when we were evaluating it for a potential acquisition.
I also wrote my own kernel HOWTO that thousands of people use daily. I've been doing kernels for almost a decade at over 400 a year, sometimes more. It surpasses the linuxdoc one in simplicity. It also uses an incredibly simple solution to the annoying "/usr/src/linux" being a real directory problem.
Has anyone actually thought of the Open Source implications of this? Before you mod me down, please listen.
What if, by persuing this "Trustworthy Computing" avenue, the existing Microsoft customers begin to believe in Microsoft. They rally around the "vision", and start extending it.
"Yeah, let's make sure all software has to be 'Trustworthy' too!"
Now a committee is created to "audit" all released software (funded by guess who), and Open Source software will now be subject to "approval" by a committee, probably via a pay-only system of review applications. Now this slows the release of Open Source software to a crawl, or stops it altogether, because most of us do not get paid for our work, nor can we afford to submit our releases for review. If we can, we're going to be damn sure to close every hole, therefore slowing down the frequency of releases.
I, for one, hope this is not their intent, but Microsoft has always had an alterior motive with every single action they've taken. Having Bill Gates declare it so publically and firmly, leads me to believe he has some other motive here.
Handera's virtual graffiti was what almost won me over. That is DAMNED impressive, and i can say that in all the achievements that these new models have been coming out with, the retractable gf area is the most appealing.
Thank you. This was originally my idea back in 1998, when #palmchat was still on Dalnet. I was complaining of the waste of screen real-estate, and constantly brought that up as a possible alternative. Apparently they listened. At least my ideas are making their way around now. I'm sure people who were there have logs going back that far, you can validate it. This was long before TRG, Handera's previous name even existed.
I've been hoping they'd learn, but they still do not. I just checked the Sony
Palm Developer website, and they have a Windows binary of POSE, the PalmOS Emulator. This binary covers "PEG-T600C/T400/T415" models and another
binary on the same site covers "PEG-S and PEG-N Series" models. The source code that they have available only covers "PEG-S and PEG-N Series"
models. These are all from November 20th, 2001.
Sony, where is the POSE source code for the "PEG-T600C/T400/T415" series version of POSE? You have two new models of Clie devices on the
horizon, and I'm sure that developers would like to begin supporting them, further increasing your sales margins. You have a Windows binary of POSE
available that supports these models, you are legally bound to provide the source code which generated these binaries.
Here's a quote from your PalmOS® developer page:
The source code will be available with the final version.
Sony, listen closely.. you really need to make yourself aware of the GPL before you blindly violate it like this. If you come back with the
excuse that you are "cleaning up the code", you are still in violation. "Cleaned up" code will produce a different binary. You are bound, by the
GPL, with releasing the source code which generates any binary you create and distribute from that source code, Windows, Unix, or Macintosh.
I will be in attendance at Palmsource in a few weeks, and I hope you will be as well, because I intend to fully bring this to the attention of
yourself, and everyone else there. I have been quiet about this issue, but believe me, I am not backing down.
I have reluctantly added support to pilot-link for the Sony devices, most of which are randomly designed in
nature, so that you can see increased sales due to the non-Windows users purchasing your hardware. How about giving back to the community that has been
supporting your bottom line for the last two years, instead of raping and stealing from it?
I see only one way that you can claim that you are allowed to proceed with this violation, and that would be if the original copyright holder of
xcopilot relicensed or sold the copyright to that code to Palm and then they in turn relicensed it to you. I do
not see that being the case, since all previous versions of POSE that you have made available have been based on publically available GPL versions of
the codebase. From your own site:
This is the same software level as Palm OS® Emulator 3.0a8 (PEG-S and PEG-N Series) and Palm OS® Emulator 3.2 (PEG-T415),
distributed by Palm,Inc.
I anxiously await your public response to this matter.
I've got a sony clie and I use Linux 100%. JPilot works perfectly with Palms (including Sony). The USB interface doesn't work, but there are two other options:
If I were you, I'd return it for a working unit with USB.
USB (though it's still using a serial protocol across that USB interface) works perfectly well under Linux with pilot-link and Coldsync. Join us on Efnet on #pilot-link for help if you need it. I'm releasing a new version of pilot-link which does protocol auto-detection, so Handspring (old "USB" protocol) and Sony devices (new "USB"/net protocol) is detected and used properly. People have had no issues. Works with JPilot (with a slight update) and Evolution (AC_PILOT_LINK) and other apps.
Anyone who is tinkering with the 2.5.x kernel series should be aware that it will break things, because a lot of the underlying interfaces have changed./proc is no longer laid out in the same way (which breaks vmware,/proc/meminfo is the culpret there, but vmware admittedly should not be using sscanf() to read memory values from/proc), and usbdevfs is called usbfs so as not to be confused with devfs, and other tinkerings.
Just be aware that quite a bit is moving around in 2.5.x, so nothing is guaranteed to stay stable at all in it.
In the future (read "when linux is 2.6ish") we'll have an autoconfiguration tool to assist in probing hardware and accompanying appropriate drivers for the build process.
You DO realize what "probing" means, right? Apparently not.
What happens when you "probe" for hardware (Windows or Linux) is that you scan interrupts and receive responses from hardware, in the form of vendor_id and/or product_id tags, which are then compared to a list/db of known vendor_id elements. These map against drivers, and when found, appropriate drivers are loaded or made available. There is no "discovery" of devices beyond what is already known and included in the kernel itself.
"Probing" doesn't know about any more hardware than we already do.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a system to do this, and it's called rcs. It's not impossible to add cvs backplaning to /etc, since really, that's the "backbone" of the Unix system. (this article really meant Linux and BSD, not Unix)
s/FiREWALKER/Filewalker/g
Without a good, clean data migration path, these devices will stagnate and orphan themselves off.
Without a unified SDK for these devices, using a common data storage format or ruleset for conversion, these devices will just die off. Each one ends up being a one-off.
If these companies are going to try to make a successful Linux-based PDA, they must fill and follow the 4 S's.
The hardware, however cool, is irrelevant unless I can get to my data, and get my data into the applications I need to use it with; desktop, other PDA, cell phone, whatever.
I've dealing with PDA development and data/application integration and issues like this since PDAs first came out, and I know what's missing and what needs to be improved. These Linux PDA vendors are completely missing the point.
Plucker uses a completely different, server-independant solution to gather content. It is de-centralized, and does not rely on a single point of failure. It is client-driven, not server driven. Here's some other reasons why Plucker exceeds AvantGo:
- Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
- Plucker supports 12 languages, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker supports local files (file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet
(including https://) content, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker supports runtime image scaling, panning, zooming via the parser ([alt]maxwidth, [alt]maxheight),
AvantGo does not.
- Plucker allows runtime bit-depth changes in the viewer. AvantGo does not.
- Plucker is an 85k footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is
399k, without content.
- Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration options, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker is
free and open source, under the GNU General Public License, AvantGo is not.
- Plucker does not require
that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
- Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format,
and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
- Plucker works on
11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
- Plucker does not
"restrict" what websites can do with their own content, AvantGo does.
- Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes
with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not.
- You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you
cannot.
- Plucker offers 5 font choices, AvantGo offers 2.
- Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want,
AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
- Plucker does not "block" content. AvantGo does.
- Plucker does not "charge" for usage of Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000 per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.
While they may think they have a wonderful, bloated product, which I'm sure appeals to corporate entities with $50,000/year to waste away without much functionality, and giving up control of their own content, I still believe that Plucker has a much better future overall. It's smaller, faster, more capable, and very well documented. It's also actively maintained, on a near-daily basis. When was the last time an update from AvantGo came around?Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker instead?
- Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
- Plucker
supports 12 languages, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker supports local files
(file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet (including https://) content, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker supports runtime image scaling, panning, zooming via the parser
([alt]maxwidth, [alt]maxheight), AvantGo does not.
- Plucker allows runtime bit-depth changes in the viewer. AvantGo does not.
- Plucker is an 85k
footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is 399k, without content.
- Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration
options, AvantGo does not.
- Plucker is free and open source, under the GNU General Public
License, AvantGo is not.
- Plucker does not require that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
- Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
- Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying
degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
- Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own
content, AvantGo does.
- Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at
the same time, AvantGo does not.
- You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot.
- Plucker offers 5 font choices,
AvantGo offers 2.
- Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want, AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
- Plucker
does not "block" content. AvantGo does.
- Plucker does not "charge" for usage of
Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000
per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.
While they may think they have a wonderful, bloated product, which I'm sure appeals to corporate entities with $50,000/year to waste away without much functionality, and giving up control of their own content, I still believe that Plucker has a much better future overall. It's smaller, faster, more capable, and very well documented. It's also actively maintained, on a near-daily basis. When was the last time an update from AvantGo came around?Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker instead?
If you think you have a better solution to these problems, how about proposing them, and actually DO something about it. Complaining here on Slashdot is not a guarantee that things will change.
At some point, bandwidth will become so widespread, that it WILL be a utility like power, water, telephone. Why not start preparing for it now.
I think people who heavily leech off of your bandwidth will either begin paying for their usage, or try to find someone else to leech off of. When ALL the providers are using "metered" bandwidth rates, then they will either begin paying for their usage, or stop. Either way, you win, and you don't cheat out the users who seldom suck up a lot of bandwidth.
I'm not impressed.
Unix admins on the other hand, may not know the innards of adding users in an Exchange environment, nor will they have to, but they understand desktops, networks, operating systems, configuration, and a Unix admin on a Microsoft desktop would take hours to ramp up, not days or weeks.
That's about right, since based on the current desktop metric and market share, there probably is 1 Unix desktop for every 100 Microsoft desktops. You'll notice that I used the $1,200/desktop figure as a metric for licensing and nothing else. I did not count support, installtion costs, deployment costs. Deploying a full blown Unix desktop (specifically Linux, since I do not know of any Unix that runs on a desktop, except BSD), is much easier to deploy and manage locally and remotely than a similarly configured Microsoft desktop.I still stand by my statements. I have dealt with dozens upon dozens of MCSE's in my career to date, and a well-trained Unix admin is always going to be the better deal for your money in the long run.
Then again, for the price of a good Unix admin, you can probably hire three MCSEs to cover your user issues and patching that OS every week, so maybe the number of bodies is important to you... it's not important to me.
At a cost-level, paying for one Unix admin at $100k a year who knows your network inside and out, and saving $1,200/workstation on Microsoft Licensing, it only takes 83 workstations to recoup the salary that you're paying your Unix admin, and that's just in licensing. Add the decreased downtime, faster trasnsitions and upgrades, and so on, and the Unix admin comes out much cheaper.
Also, Unix admins tend to be very self-motivated and self-managed. They don't need micromanagement. Give them a task, they run with it and it gets done. No questions. These people excel, and make good managers overall. You can save the cost of yet another employee in IT to manage your Unix admin, if you hire wisely.
It's much cheaper to keep the Unix admin on staff, when you aggregate the overall costs of the less-technical MCE you would have hired.
Just a thought.. but Linux Just Makes Sense more and more now-a-days, even if in some cases, it is less capable than the Microsoft alternative.
I also wrote my own kernel HOWTO that thousands of people use daily. I've been doing kernels for almost a decade at over 400 a year, sometimes more. It surpasses the linuxdoc one in simplicity. It also uses an incredibly simple solution to the annoying "/usr/src/linux" being a real directory problem.
This is nothing new...
What if, by persuing this "Trustworthy Computing" avenue, the existing Microsoft customers begin to believe in Microsoft. They rally around the "vision", and start extending it.
Now a committee is created to "audit" all released software (funded by guess who), and Open Source software will now be subject to "approval" by a committee, probably via a pay-only system of review applications. Now this slows the release of Open Source software to a crawl, or stops it altogether, because most of us do not get paid for our work, nor can we afford to submit our releases for review. If we can, we're going to be damn sure to close every hole, therefore slowing down the frequency of releases.I, for one, hope this is not their intent, but Microsoft has always had an alterior motive with every single action they've taken. Having Bill Gates declare it so publically and firmly, leads me to believe he has some other motive here.
Sony, where is the POSE source code for the "PEG-T600C/T400/T415" series version of POSE? You have two new models of Clie devices on the horizon, and I'm sure that developers would like to begin supporting them, further increasing your sales margins. You have a Windows binary of POSE available that supports these models, you are legally bound to provide the source code which generated these binaries.
Here's a quote from your PalmOS® developer page:
Sony, listen closely.. you really need to make yourself aware of the GPL before you blindly violate it like this. If you come back with the excuse that you are "cleaning up the code", you are still in violation. "Cleaned up" code will produce a different binary. You are bound, by the GPL, with releasing the source code which generates any binary you create and distribute from that source code, Windows, Unix, or Macintosh.
I will be in attendance at Palmsource in a few weeks, and I hope you will be as well, because I intend to fully bring this to the attention of yourself, and everyone else there. I have been quiet about this issue, but believe me, I am not backing down.
I have reluctantly added support to pilot-link for the Sony devices, most of which are randomly designed in nature, so that you can see increased sales due to the non-Windows users purchasing your hardware. How about giving back to the community that has been supporting your bottom line for the last two years, instead of raping and stealing from it?
I see only one way that you can claim that you are allowed to proceed with this violation, and that would be if the original copyright holder of xcopilot relicensed or sold the copyright to that code to Palm and then they in turn relicensed it to you. I do not see that being the case, since all previous versions of POSE that you have made available have been based on publically available GPL versions of the codebase. From your own site:
I anxiously await your public response to this matter.
USB (though it's still using a serial protocol across that USB interface) works perfectly well under Linux with pilot-link and Coldsync. Join us on Efnet on #pilot-link for help if you need it. I'm releasing a new version of pilot-link which does protocol auto-detection, so Handspring (old "USB" protocol) and Sony devices (new "USB"/net protocol) is detected and used properly. People have had no issues. Works with JPilot (with a slight update) and Evolution (AC_PILOT_LINK) and other apps.
Just be aware that quite a bit is moving around in 2.5.x, so nothing is guaranteed to stay stable at all in it.
What happens when you "probe" for hardware (Windows or Linux) is that you scan interrupts and receive responses from hardware, in the form of vendor_id and/or product_id tags, which are then compared to a list/db of known vendor_id elements. These map against drivers, and when found, appropriate drivers are loaded or made available. There is no "discovery" of devices beyond what is already known and included in the kernel itself.
"Probing" doesn't know about any more hardware than we already do.