I'll ever release my music under this license. Why not?
grants the worldwide public permission to:
Modification
This means, you can mess my song up and release it under the same name. Like hell you can. Remix it if you must and release it under your own name, but don't make me responsible for what you do to it.
Note that this clause isn't saying the same thing as: you have the right to sample from this track and create a new track from the samples you've made - under your own name, which I'd have no problems with (unless people start sampling complete riffs, which isn't quite my taste), it's saying "redo a track released under this license any way you see fit and then release it as a "fork" of said track." This may be fine for software, but music has a very different dynamic, which I think the EFF people are forgetting. Artist + Track of which integrity has been preserved are much more important in music than it is in software.
Maybe, but I still think that voting software is the one example of software that would probably benefit from being closed source and taking the "security through obscurity" approach. Face it: this kind of software will only be used once every two or four years (I don't know how often you Americans vote, it sometimes seems as if there's someone to be voted into some office or other every year, if not more), no one, not malicious script kiddies, not dedicated hackers will get anywhere near the software, so provided the people in charge of it are trustworthy, there will never (almost, anyways) be a problem with security, as all people see is the buttons you push, not the underlying code.
Of course you could also argue that since it's really hard to actually get to the software and fuck with it, it doesn't matter that the source code is open for public scrutiny (malicious or not). So either way, it doesn't make much difference.
Maybe a better approach would be to actually "prove" that the software is faultless. A guy I know took a course in university where they were taught to prove the correctness and bug-free-ness of certain algorithms - wouldn't voting software be simple enough for it to be possible to do this? I don't know, maybe someone who does could shed some light on whether or not this is possible...
Apache is often the right tool for the job, and it certainly shows
What about if you're a small business and you've bought a copy of Office 2000 XPerimental and you'd like to serve up pages based on whatever content your Access database holds? I've seen them, worked with them, tried to convince them, even, but finally had to concede that if you don't have the money to pay for a sysadmin, Access ft. an extension made available by your local "association of mom and pop stores" is a cost-effective choice, and if you want to do internet, in such a case IIS is the only thing that'll work for you.
.NET works out as intended. If it does (and it might), exit Apache. If it doesn't, Apache will be ok, if only because a lot of sysadmins at server farms prefer Apache over IIS for security reasons. Or because most ISP's (over here, in Europe, at least) run *nix instead of NT (2000) and IIS just doesn't run that well on.nix. Sure, Windows 2000 ft. IIS has made inroads, because, finally, there's a Windows That Doesn't Suck, but to say that Apache is doomed is going a little too far.
Re:Explain this one to me...
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Taming the Web
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· Score: 2
What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.
And what you're forgetting, and what the author of the article is not, is that people are lazy by nature. If it's going to take an effort to "make information free", only a very small group of people is going to put in that effort. MP3's weren't that much of a problem to major labels back when it took logging into a ratio ftp site to get them, well, to be fair, they were somewhat worried, but it was nothing like the uproar caused by Napster, a program that allowed even the dumbest of (l)users to swap mp3's with a few mouseclicks. Likewise, maybe a few techno freaks might figure out a way to do freenet even if their ISP blocks it, but most people won't if it takes too much effort.
mod the parent up, pls ...
on
Taming the Web
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· Score: 2
If anything, Napster proved that people are more than willing to profit from the freedom someone else (even a commercial entity designed to make money by actively promoting breaking the law), but they're not in any way willing to defend their new freedom.
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
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· Score: 2
However, notwithstanding the possibility of web browsing refrigerators and the like, the 'small tools for specific purposes' approach that would have to be favoured for embedded applications fits in nicely with the traditional Unix ethos rather better than for Windows. Will MS systems *really* find their way into toasters and lawnmowers any time soon?
Oh everything from MS is crap - and they stole everything from apple anyhow.
Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?
C'mon - we've got to give Bill Gates/Microsoft credit for one thing: they established *standards* where there were none (or only poorly followed ones) before. And I'm not talking about standards for huge mainframes or academic numbercrunchers, but for small (remember the term "microcomputer"?) computing devices used by "ordinary men and women". Before M$ and PC's, you might have a nifty C64 and your buddy a cool Apple II, but you couldn't swap software or documents. Twenty years down the line, everyone is using the same basic set-up, a pc, Windows, Office, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and can do just that: play games together, swap documents (and viruses!), share pictures over the internet, things "ordinary men and women" like to do. From an "ordinary men and women" point of view, that is a good thing.
Let's please all remember that as we sit, smug-like, typing on our linux box (not me, thank you, the computer I'm typing this on is for doing ordinary men and women things, not for serving webpages or what have you, activities for which, I'll happily concede, linux is far more suitable), sending messages to/. about how M$ is evil.
Microsoft and Bill Gates truly believe they're doing the world a favor by (forcibly) pushing their de-facto standards and by ripping of others' good ideas and repackaging them in such a way that "ordinary men and women" can use them. This is what the "pc-revolution" is all about.
Of course, as always, absolute power corrupts etc., and, right now, M$ is far too powerful for their own good.
Nope, he's right. There was no BIOS source code. There was, however, an extensive set of schematics. How do I know this? Well, my father didn't *buy* the technical manual with his pc, but because he got his first pc in a country with lax copyright enforcing (Indonesia), it was *given* to him along with his shiny, new peecee.
Incidentally, in said country, pc's were the first "personal computers" that gained any popularity... no one (almost) had an Apple or a C64, but as soon as pc's came out (clones, mostly)the country went computer crazy. Still is, as a matter of fact - there's a large contingent of Indonesian Linux programmers (copyright laws have become stricter since).
actually runs as follows (or so I'm told). The gum ban only came into effect after S'pore had gotten a new, ultracool underground transit system. Automated doors, always on time, squeeky clean stations, the works. Then, one day, all this perfection comes to a crashing halt. For some strange reason, the train won't leave. The doors refuse to close and the driver can't take off. So the efficient as always in S'pore, transit mechanics proceed to take apart the entire train to determine where the problem is. After three or four hours, the train is completely disassembled, but still, nothing. So they put it back together again and tow it to some maintenance station or other, where it's given a good, solid cleaning before it's to be taken apart again, this time by more knowledgeable techs. Imagine the surprise when some underpayed malay or Indian scrublady discovers a piece of gum stuck to one of the electronic eyes that determines whether or not it's safe to close the doors yet.
In Singapore, this means you ban chewing gum straight away.
Don't know if the above story is true, but it went around at the time.
Actually, the previous poster was half right. Most home users don't pay for Windows or Office. Well, maybe the cost of Windows is factored in the purchasing price of their pc, but buying a full-featured Office 2000 at USD 500? No way.
It kinda works both ways: as an employer, you're more likely to buy software your employees are already familiar with, and as an employee, you're more likely to "borrow" a cd from work, install the software and pass copies on to all of your friends. For this reason, WordPerfect never made a big stink about home users pirating their stuff left and right way back when, because they knew millions of businesses (who could hardly afford running the risk of using illegal copies) would buy licenses. It's free advertisement for them. No money gets lost (like I said, home users don't cough up USD 500 for some piece of software) and your user base grows like crazy.
I seriously doubt, though, that this is a sound business model for a console games. Not only are there no businesses that will buy millions of Metal Gear Solid licenses just because their employees know how to play it, but console manufacturers also sell their hardware at a loss, hoping to make up for it in software sales.
Or at least, it's favored in Europe precisely because cable isn't as widespread here and you have to pay for your local calls. So a distro that contains six cd's worth of apps is very worthwile over here, especially since it's just as expensive as the lesser hung Red Hat.
Furthermore, SuSE has succeeded in getting a number of universities in Germany on their side, which doesn't really hurt them either.
--rant on-- BTW, why does RH insist on installing Gnome even when you explicitly demand a KDE workstation? Sure, I know how to fix it (now), but it seems a bit obtrusive to me. To be fair, though, SuSE (KDE sponsors) insist on warning you that GNOME is still in early beta stage as well. --rant off--
At least for those smokers who don't smoke pre-rolled cigarettes, but who roll their own.
A guy I know once mentioned he'd turn his keyboard upside down whenever he was out of rolling tobacco and it was too late at night to actually go buy some. He claimed there was usually enough tobacco residue in there to keep smoking until the stores opened.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Not quite. It's called the "Protestant ethic", as has already been pointed out, but it should actually be called the "Calvinist ethic", as it doesn't occur in any other protestant form of Christianity. It's also not quite just an excuse to get filthily rich. Originally, you could be a good Calvinist and be as rich as Bill Gates, but there wasn't anything you could do with your wealth, as all the fun stuff was considered sinful.
The real reason Calvinists believed in this work ethic is the doctrine of predestination. According to this doctrine, God had already decided who would go to heaven and who would be eternally damned (the vast majority of people) at the start of creation. Material wellbeing was one of the signs that you were one of the chosen few, so, as a result, it was a *good* thing to gain enormous wealth. Maybe you were one of the chosen, maybe you weren't (only God knew tat), but it didn't hurt to make it at least *seem* as if you were by going for large amounts of cash.
However, good deeds were also a sign of being one of the chosen, and hence it was also advisable to give away a large portion of the wealth you had acquired to charity.
So it's not as black and white as it's often made out to be. Furthermore, Calvinism has only been prominent in American WASP culture, British dissenters, parts of Switzerland and France and the northern part of the Netherlands. Catholics, Lutherans and all the rest do not share the protestant ethic.
As someone who *designs* rather than programs websites (mostly) I have to disagree with you somewhat. Yes, clients are often kinda clueless and insist on exploding buttons and dancing banner ads, but it's (IMHO) the designer's task to gently steer them away from such foolish notions.
That said, Flash can be useful: it works (and looks!) the same in every corporate browser (most clients don't care if Linux geeks can't see their site) and it allows for their TV commercial on the web to stand out. Finally, if your designer is *good* at Flash and can actually get some tiny programming done with it without having to resort to PHP or ASP, it frees up *valuable* programmer time for other, more complicated tasks such as database management and the like.
As with most technologies, the person employing them needs to know what he or she is doing, and often this is not the case. But to say that Flash is by its very nature a great evil is absurd.
Now isn't that overkill?. I design webpages as well, and here's how I test (provided the company who ordered the website hasn't decided to do the IE only, the rest is unimportant, which is cheaper for them and more valid in commercial Europe as the Internet only *really* took off after IE 4 was in place):
1 box with: IE 5, Netscape 2, 3, 4 series. The Netscapes each have their own directory. They don't interfere with each other. Proof? Netscape 3 renders my pages better than 4, which wouldn't happen if each version depended on the same DLL in Win-sys. Testing for 2.x compliance only occurs in rare cases. Sorry, but in the commercial arena, if they can knock off the cost of making it work on 2.x, they will. You tell them it's a bad idea, but still.
1 box with IE 4. In Europe, 3 never amounted to much. This box is an old...I don't remember what that machine is supposed to do.
A mac. Runs the latest version of Netscape, whichever that is. In case some secretary has one of them nice, sexy iMacs.
Of course, having read all the posts about the uses of VMWare, I might pester the boss into getting that for ease of use. Unfortunately, it doesn't do away with the need for a mac, yet.
Well, it seems you have an invalid email address or I'm too stupid. Here's what I tried to mail you, and if you wish to contact me you can use:
absolutniks@hotmail.com
Too bad I can't award a +1 interesting to your post describing your architecture for a dedicated audio OS, seeing as that I've already posted extensively in the discussion. Anyway, it's probably not that much alive anymore, so I figured to contact you directly.
You indicate you've got a sketch of the microkernel all worked out. Does that mean you've got a sketchy version of the system that's ready to run? I'd like to see it in action, even though I probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the finer details of OS design. The overall description you gave in your post sounded pretty interesting. Some sound ideas, there, too (as far as I can tell - the slashdot nick wasn't chosen completely at random;). From what I understand about OS design, a media OS would definitely benefit from having a microkernel. Also, if you set device management up in a way that specifically facillitates audio production, that would definitely be a Good thing.
There's a number of serious, non-technical problems I'm afraid you'll come across when developing an open audio OS, though.
For one, all the professional software that's established right now is anything *but* open. The exact design of ProTools, Logic Audio or Acid is a jealously guarded secret, and for a good reason: the vendor that can deliver the most performance has a distinct advantage over the competition. So even if you manage to get the OS in place, manufacturers of software programs and hardware (drivers!) would probably be reluctant to contribute if they have to plug into GPL-ed code. A solution would perhaps be to come up with a different kind of open license that allows for proprietary applications and drivers to hook into the system.
Unfortunately, you'll need the pros to make it feasible. There's tons of small shareware apps out there that contribute to the music making process, but there's *nothing* that will put all the little bits together. Sure, some of the shareware is exceptionally good, but I have yet to find a cheap or open program that will let me record a one hour electronic jam to disk or that can deliver a usable set of tools for mastering. Even the enormous library of free plugins is incomplete. Oddball effects aplenty, but no acceptable compression or reverb. Maybe that is because the math involved is just too difficult for an amateur coder to comprehend, I don't know.
Then there's the problem of getting applications. If there are none, noone will use it, and noone will develop applications for it if there's noone using it. BeOS is one, notorious example of this (unfortunately. I really, really liked it, but there was nothing I could use it for so it went).
Also, don't think that millions of hackers will come to your rescue and deliver myriads of elegantly designed drivers and a plethora of killer apps in the same way they helped spread Linux. Your system appeals to a whole different audience (myself, partly, included). "Do you yearn for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" No, sorry. All I've got is this great idea for a song that I want to record a quick sketch of without having to recompile my kernel before I can do it, thank you. Musicians aren't hackers, even when hackers are musicians they're not terribly interested, apparently, in marrying their two affinities. Witness the almost complete absence of usable audio tools in Linux. Last time I checked, there wasn't even a decent tracker around. (Decent as in - it's at least as good as Impulse Tracker and it doesn't require constant tweaking to be usable).
Sure, some people cook up interesting gizmo's for Windows and Macs (to a somewhat lesser extent), but these are accidents rather than a well thought out open source revolution. There's usually no plan behind it, just a musician who happens to be able to code, or vice versa, who scratches an itch and gets something going. For a dedicated audio OS, they're useless. They won't join in unless they have a very good reason to. Even the charisma of Linus or RMS wouldn't be sufficient to make this happen.
There's been tons of people who have *started* to produce some form of an open source soundsystem, but as of yet all these projects have failed. Probably because of the reasons I've just mentioned. Music is a specialized field, as such the userbase is going to be quite small.
Having come to the end of all my "buts", let me just say that I *would* be interested in the kind of OS you envision. I just think it's going to be exceptionally difficult to get such a project off the ground. Unfortunately, I can't help you do the coding. Web stuff is pretty much all that's in my toolkit. Optimizing C or C++ most definitely does not form a part of my toolkit. Testing, musician friendly interfaces, the less hardcore stuff, now that I can do, but, though important, this is probably not what is needed at such an early point. In the early phases of development there's going to be more "this driver just made my soundcard explode" problems than "if I set the resonance to 98 and the cutoff to 31, the reverb starts to sound funny".
Maybe what is needed is for a number of audio minded developers to come together in some way, like a well-advertised website, for example, and start sharing ideas. Get the basic skeleton in place and talk to the people who are currently developing applications for Windows, for example. It's probably going to be a hell of a job, however. Thanks for sharing your ideas, though...much appreciated and enjoyed.
One last question to end an insanely lengthy mail: what's V2_OS?
The computer would be interesting for super computers, but never for anything else. I don't see anyone walking around with a nuclear accident waiting to happen.
Why not?
The author calculated that, assuming Moore's law will continue to hold true, such computers would come into existence in about two hundred years. Now think back two hundred years. What was new technology then, comparable to our supercomputers? Steam engines: some advanced outlets had them, most manufacturers still used manual labor energy, water and animals. Even though the rate of technical progress has been rather slow during the past twohundred years compared to the past fifty years alone, those things have been obsolete for a long time now. You think your great^5 grandfather could imagine using *lightning* (the only form of electricity a peasant - most people were peasants back then - would have been familiar with) to light up his interior, to name but one example?
Your argument transplanted back to 1800 would run as follows:
Well, maybe they could somehow channel lightning to illuminate some big hall, such as a church or a palace, but my *house*? No way. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
We have no way of comprehending what will be possible in twohundred years time. It sucks, but face it, we'll just have to live without ever having known the good stuff.
The September issue of Wired magazine has an interesting article on the merger. It describes how Time Warner itself isn't a very successfull merger: infighting among its constituents (Time, Warner and that Turner thing). The article explains a number of the issues you raise in greater detail.
Uhm... actually, the US has a *lot* of legislature that prevents the formation of monopolies, or which at least enables the government to take action against monopolization should it occur. In comparison, Europe is riddled with semi-legitimate cartels, and only recently has the EU started to act against this. The EU anti-cartel office dates back from a decade or so, and the Dutch equivalent is only two or three years old. I'm guessing that the reason for this is because the US government had to deal with Standard Oil (if it was Standard Oil, I'm Dutch so my US history is a bit weak) a hundred years ago.
By the way, in the one economics class I took in my life, the professor said that in *true* laissez-faire capitalism, companies are *out* to get a monopoly, because it's the most efficient way to maximize profits, and hence we need a government to ensure a truly free market. Makes sense to me.
This AOL/Warner merger is ridiculous. I don't understand why the US gov't is taking on Microsoft during a time when its stranglehold on computing is actually going to get *less* due to the advent of Internet Appliances and Linux and they're leaving a merger between Time Warner (the biggest content provider worldwide) and AOL (the most popular way to get to your online content) more or less alone.
Time Warner is ubiquitous in every country in Europe. Just go to a cd-store or a video rental. AOL also encompasses CompuServe: in some countries (Netherlands) they operate as CompuServe, in others (Germany) as AOL, but they're definitely there.
Whether or not they are successful I don't know, because more and more European ISP's are starting to offer "free" Internet access (meaning you don't pay them for your connection, you only pay your telephone bill, they get a percentage of the amount of telephone traffic you generate).
Ok. I feel like an ass, now. Yup, I mixed up the two. Then bitched about it on account of the Slashdot Troll virus. Thank you for pointing that out.
Two questions, though:
Is the P4 the same as the Itanium/Willamette? I thought P4 was an *inbetween* stage, waiting for Intel to finally ship their next generation CPU. This is what all publications (both online and offline) I read had me believe.
How come they require such an enormous heatsink if they've revamped the engineering?
I'm really wondering now, ignorant shit that I turned out to be.
Yeah, but the trouble is that this time around it's because Intel has gone knockers over trying to outdo AMD as far as clock speed is concerned. Yes, you can run an "ordinary" P3 750 at 1,3 GHz, but only if you stress it to the point of being able to cook your dinner on it. It's not exactly breakthrough engineering, though, so why bother requiring different cases because you've just thought up the corporate answer to millions of people overclocking their CPU's "just for the hell of it"?
What this new move shows is that Intel is growing increasingly desperate because they apparently can't seem to get the Itanium (or what's it called today) out fast enough and there's this little company called AMD whipping their ass by releasing overclocked versions of their *slightly* surperior design (Athlon). It also shows that Intel is afraid AMD will eat up their marketshare if they don't come up with some kludge to make it seem at least as if they're keeping up. A company more secure about its prospects would simply shrug and continue to work on their superior (maybe) next generation design. Witness how Microsoft has, for years, simply ignored the threat of Linux because they didn't *perceive* it as a threat. In the same way Intel used to ignore AMD back in the K6 days. Now that there's an Athlon, they start to resort to idiocy such as enforcing the special brew heatsinks made by OverClockers Inc. as a new *standard*.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll ever release my music under this license. Why not?
grants the worldwide public permission to:
Modification
This means, you can mess my song up and release it under the same name. Like hell you can. Remix it if you must and release it under your own name, but don't make me responsible for what you do to it.
Note that this clause isn't saying the same thing as: you have the right to sample from this track and create a new track from the samples you've made - under your own name, which I'd have no problems with (unless people start sampling complete riffs, which isn't quite my taste), it's saying "redo a track released under this license any way you see fit and then release it as a "fork" of said track." This may be fine for software, but music has a very different dynamic, which I think the EFF people are forgetting. Artist + Track of which integrity has been preserved are much more important in music than it is in software.
Before OS X apple+network = no as many frustrated admins know.
That's strange, I could swear I've seen lots of stable, nicely running mac networks at various graphic design firms.
Maybe, but I still think that voting software is the one example of software that would probably benefit from being closed source and taking the "security through obscurity" approach. Face it: this kind of software will only be used once every two or four years (I don't know how often you Americans vote, it sometimes seems as if there's someone to be voted into some office or other every year, if not more), no one, not malicious script kiddies, not dedicated hackers will get anywhere near the software, so provided the people in charge of it are trustworthy, there will never (almost, anyways) be a problem with security, as all people see is the buttons you push, not the underlying code.
...
Of course you could also argue that since it's really hard to actually get to the software and fuck with it, it doesn't matter that the source code is open for public scrutiny (malicious or not). So either way, it doesn't make much difference.
Maybe a better approach would be to actually "prove" that the software is faultless. A guy I know took a course in university where they were taught to prove the correctness and bug-free-ness of certain algorithms - wouldn't voting software be simple enough for it to be possible to do this? I don't know, maybe someone who does could shed some light on whether or not this is possible
"as bad."
...
which is my bad, sorry
Apache is often the right tool for the job, and it certainly shows
What about if you're a small business and you've bought a copy of Office 2000 XPerimental and you'd like to serve up pages based on whatever content your Access database holds? I've seen them, worked with them, tried to convince them, even, but finally had to concede that if you don't have the money to pay for a sysadmin, Access ft. an extension made available by your local "association of mom and pop stores" is a cost-effective choice, and if you want to do internet, in such a case IIS is the only thing that'll work for you.
.NET works out as intended. If it does (and it might), exit Apache. If it doesn't, Apache will be ok, if only because a lot of sysadmins at server farms prefer Apache over IIS for security reasons. Or because most ISP's (over here, in Europe, at least) run *nix instead of NT (2000) and IIS just doesn't run that well on .nix. Sure, Windows 2000 ft. IIS has made inroads, because, finally, there's a Windows That Doesn't Suck, but to say that Apache is doomed is going a little too far.
What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.
And what you're forgetting, and what the author of the article is not, is that people are lazy by nature. If it's going to take an effort to "make information free", only a very small group of people is going to put in that effort. MP3's weren't that much of a problem to major labels back when it took logging into a ratio ftp site to get them, well, to be fair, they were somewhat worried, but it was nothing like the uproar caused by Napster, a program that allowed even the dumbest of (l)users to swap mp3's with a few mouseclicks. Likewise, maybe a few techno freaks might figure out a way to do freenet even if their ISP blocks it, but most people won't if it takes too much effort.
If anything, Napster proved that people are more than willing to profit from the freedom someone else (even a commercial entity designed to make money by actively promoting breaking the law), but they're not in any way willing to defend their new freedom.
However, notwithstanding the possibility of web browsing refrigerators and the like, the 'small tools for specific purposes' approach that would have to be favoured for embedded applications fits in nicely with the traditional Unix ethos rather better than for Windows. Will MS systems *really* find their way into toasters and lawnmowers any time soon?
...
Apparently, that is what Bill Gates eventually wants to do
Oh everything from MS is crap - and they stole everything from apple anyhow.
/. about how M$ is evil.
Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?
C'mon - we've got to give Bill Gates/Microsoft credit for one thing: they established *standards* where there were none (or only poorly followed ones) before. And I'm not talking about standards for huge mainframes or academic numbercrunchers, but for small (remember the term "microcomputer"?) computing devices used by "ordinary men and women". Before M$ and PC's, you might have a nifty C64 and your buddy a cool Apple II, but you couldn't swap software or documents. Twenty years down the line, everyone is using the same basic set-up, a pc, Windows, Office, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and can do just that: play games together, swap documents (and viruses!), share pictures over the internet, things "ordinary men and women" like to do. From an "ordinary men and women" point of view, that is a good thing.
Let's please all remember that as we sit, smug-like, typing on our linux box (not me, thank you, the computer I'm typing this on is for doing ordinary men and women things, not for serving webpages or what have you, activities for which, I'll happily concede, linux is far more suitable), sending messages to
Microsoft and Bill Gates truly believe they're doing the world a favor by (forcibly) pushing their de-facto standards and by ripping of others' good ideas and repackaging them in such a way that "ordinary men and women" can use them. This is what the "pc-revolution" is all about.
Of course, as always, absolute power corrupts etc., and, right now, M$ is far too powerful for their own good.
Nope, he's right. There was no BIOS source code. There was, however, an extensive set of schematics. How do I know this? Well, my father didn't *buy* the technical manual with his pc, but because he got his first pc in a country with lax copyright enforcing (Indonesia), it was *given* to him along with his shiny, new peecee.
... no one (almost) had an Apple or a C64, but as soon as pc's came out (clones, mostly)the country went computer crazy. Still is, as a matter of fact - there's a large contingent of Indonesian Linux programmers (copyright laws have become stricter since).
Incidentally, in said country, pc's were the first "personal computers" that gained any popularity
actually runs as follows (or so I'm told). The gum ban only came into effect after S'pore had gotten a new, ultracool underground transit system. Automated doors, always on time, squeeky clean stations, the works. Then, one day, all this perfection comes to a crashing halt. For some strange reason, the train won't leave. The doors refuse to close and the driver can't take off. So the efficient as always in S'pore, transit mechanics proceed to take apart the entire train to determine where the problem is. After three or four hours, the train is completely disassembled, but still, nothing. So they put it back together again and tow it to some maintenance station or other, where it's given a good, solid cleaning before it's to be taken apart again, this time by more knowledgeable techs. Imagine the surprise when some underpayed malay or Indian scrublady discovers a piece of gum stuck to one of the electronic eyes that determines whether or not it's safe to close the doors yet.
In Singapore, this means you ban chewing gum straight away.
Don't know if the above story is true, but it went around at the time.
Actually, the previous poster was half right. Most home users don't pay for Windows or Office. Well, maybe the cost of Windows is factored in the purchasing price of their pc, but buying a full-featured Office 2000 at USD 500? No way.
It kinda works both ways: as an employer, you're more likely to buy software your employees are already familiar with, and as an employee, you're more likely to "borrow" a cd from work, install the software and pass copies on to all of your friends. For this reason, WordPerfect never made a big stink about home users pirating their stuff left and right way back when, because they knew millions of businesses (who could hardly afford running the risk of using illegal copies) would buy licenses. It's free advertisement for them. No money gets lost (like I said, home users don't cough up USD 500 for some piece of software) and your user base grows like crazy.
I seriously doubt, though, that this is a sound business model for a console games. Not only are there no businesses that will buy millions of Metal Gear Solid licenses just because their employees know how to play it, but console manufacturers also sell their hardware at a loss, hoping to make up for it in software sales.
Or at least, it's favored in Europe precisely because cable isn't as widespread here and you have to pay for your local calls. So a distro that contains six cd's worth of apps is very worthwile over here, especially since it's just as expensive as the lesser hung Red Hat.
Furthermore, SuSE has succeeded in getting a number of universities in Germany on their side, which doesn't really hurt them either.
--rant on-- BTW, why does RH insist on installing Gnome even when you explicitly demand a KDE workstation? Sure, I know how to fix it (now), but it seems a bit obtrusive to me. To be fair, though, SuSE (KDE sponsors) insist on warning you that GNOME is still in early beta stage as well. --rant off--
At least for those smokers who don't smoke pre-rolled cigarettes, but who roll their own.
A guy I know once mentioned he'd turn his keyboard upside down whenever he was out of rolling tobacco and it was too late at night to actually go buy some. He claimed there was usually enough tobacco residue in there to keep smoking until the stores opened.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Not quite. It's called the "Protestant ethic", as has already been pointed out, but it should actually be called the "Calvinist ethic", as it doesn't occur in any other protestant form of Christianity. It's also not quite just an excuse to get filthily rich. Originally, you could be a good Calvinist and be as rich as Bill Gates, but there wasn't anything you could do with your wealth, as all the fun stuff was considered sinful.
The real reason Calvinists believed in this work ethic is the doctrine of predestination. According to this doctrine, God had already decided who would go to heaven and who would be eternally damned (the vast majority of people) at the start of creation. Material wellbeing was one of the signs that you were one of the chosen few, so, as a result, it was a *good* thing to gain enormous wealth. Maybe you were one of the chosen, maybe you weren't (only God knew tat), but it didn't hurt to make it at least *seem* as if you were by going for large amounts of cash.
However, good deeds were also a sign of being one of the chosen, and hence it was also advisable to give away a large portion of the wealth you had acquired to charity.
So it's not as black and white as it's often made out to be. Furthermore, Calvinism has only been prominent in American WASP culture, British dissenters, parts of Switzerland and France and the northern part of the Netherlands. Catholics, Lutherans and all the rest do not share the protestant ethic.
As someone who *designs* rather than programs websites (mostly) I have to disagree with you somewhat. Yes, clients are often kinda clueless and insist on exploding buttons and dancing banner ads, but it's (IMHO) the designer's task to gently steer them away from such foolish notions.
That said, Flash can be useful: it works (and looks!) the same in every corporate browser (most clients don't care if Linux geeks can't see their site) and it allows for their TV commercial on the web to stand out. Finally, if your designer is *good* at Flash and can actually get some tiny programming done with it without having to resort to PHP or ASP, it frees up *valuable* programmer time for other, more complicated tasks such as database management and the like.
As with most technologies, the person employing them needs to know what he or she is doing, and often this is not the case. But to say that Flash is by its very nature a great evil is absurd.
Now isn't that overkill?. I design webpages as well, and here's how I test (provided the company who ordered the website hasn't decided to do the IE only, the rest is unimportant, which is cheaper for them and more valid in commercial Europe as the Internet only *really* took off after IE 4 was in place):
1 box with: IE 5, Netscape 2, 3, 4 series. The Netscapes each have their own directory. They don't interfere with each other. Proof? Netscape 3 renders my pages better than 4, which wouldn't happen if each version depended on the same DLL in Win-sys. Testing for 2.x compliance only occurs in rare cases. Sorry, but in the commercial arena, if they can knock off the cost of making it work on 2.x, they will. You tell them it's a bad idea, but still.
1 box with IE 4. In Europe, 3 never amounted to much. This box is an old...I don't remember what that machine is supposed to do.
A mac. Runs the latest version of Netscape, whichever that is. In case some secretary has one of them nice, sexy iMacs.
Of course, having read all the posts about the uses of VMWare, I might pester the boss into getting that for ease of use. Unfortunately, it doesn't do away with the need for a mac, yet.
Well, it seems you have an invalid email address or I'm too stupid. Here's what I tried to mail you, and if you wish to contact me you can use:
;). From what I understand about OS design, a media OS would definitely benefit from having a microkernel. Also, if you set device management up in a way that specifically facillitates audio production, that would definitely be a Good thing.
absolutniks@hotmail.com
Too bad I can't award a +1 interesting to your post describing your architecture for a dedicated audio OS, seeing as that I've already posted extensively in the discussion. Anyway, it's probably not that much alive anymore, so I figured to contact you directly.
You indicate you've got a sketch of the microkernel all worked out. Does that mean you've got a sketchy version of the system that's ready to run? I'd like to see it in action, even though I probably wouldn't be able to appreciate the finer details of OS design. The overall description you gave in your post sounded pretty interesting. Some sound ideas, there, too (as far as I can tell - the slashdot nick wasn't chosen completely at random
There's a number of serious, non-technical problems I'm afraid you'll come across when developing an open audio OS, though.
For one, all the professional software that's established right now is anything *but* open. The exact design of ProTools, Logic Audio or Acid is a jealously guarded secret, and for a good reason: the vendor that can deliver the most performance has a distinct advantage over the competition. So even if you manage to get the OS in place, manufacturers of software programs and hardware (drivers!) would probably be reluctant to contribute if they have to plug into GPL-ed code. A solution would perhaps be to come up with a different kind of open license that allows for proprietary applications and drivers to hook into the system.
Unfortunately, you'll need the pros to make it feasible. There's tons of small shareware apps out there that contribute to the music making process, but there's *nothing* that will put all the little bits together. Sure, some of the shareware is exceptionally good, but I have yet to find a cheap or open program that will let me record a one hour electronic jam to disk or that can deliver a usable set of tools for mastering. Even the enormous library of free plugins is incomplete. Oddball effects aplenty, but no acceptable compression or reverb. Maybe that is because the math involved is just too difficult for an amateur coder to comprehend, I don't know.
Then there's the problem of getting applications. If there are none, noone will use it, and noone will develop applications for it if there's noone using it. BeOS is one, notorious example of this (unfortunately. I really, really liked it, but there was nothing I could use it for so it went).
Also, don't think that millions of hackers will come to your rescue and deliver myriads of elegantly designed drivers and a plethora of killer apps in the same way they helped spread Linux. Your system appeals to a whole different audience (myself, partly, included). "Do you yearn for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" No, sorry. All I've got is this great idea for a song that I want to record a quick sketch of without having to recompile my kernel before I can do it, thank you. Musicians aren't hackers, even when hackers are musicians they're not terribly interested, apparently, in marrying their two affinities. Witness the almost complete absence of usable audio tools in Linux. Last time I checked, there wasn't even a decent tracker around. (Decent as in - it's at least as good as Impulse Tracker and it doesn't require constant tweaking to be usable).
Sure, some people cook up interesting gizmo's for Windows and Macs (to a somewhat lesser extent), but these are accidents rather than a well thought out open source revolution. There's usually no plan behind it, just a musician who happens to be able to code, or vice versa, who scratches an itch and gets something going. For a dedicated audio OS, they're useless. They won't join in unless they have a very good reason to. Even the charisma of Linus or RMS wouldn't be sufficient to make this happen.
There's been tons of people who have *started* to produce some form of an open source soundsystem, but as of yet all these projects have failed. Probably because of the reasons I've just mentioned. Music is a specialized field, as such the userbase is going to be quite small. Having come to the end of all my "buts", let me just say that I *would* be interested in the kind of OS you envision. I just think it's going to be exceptionally difficult to get such a project off the ground. Unfortunately, I can't help you do the coding. Web stuff is pretty much all that's in my toolkit. Optimizing C or C++ most definitely does not form a part of my toolkit. Testing, musician friendly interfaces, the less hardcore stuff, now that I can do, but, though important, this is probably not what is needed at such an early point. In the early phases of development there's going to be more "this driver just made my soundcard explode" problems than "if I set the resonance to 98 and the cutoff to 31, the reverb starts to sound funny".
Maybe what is needed is for a number of audio minded developers to come together in some way, like a well-advertised website, for example, and start sharing ideas. Get the basic skeleton in place and talk to the people who are currently developing applications for Windows, for example. It's probably going to be a hell of a job, however. Thanks for sharing your ideas, though...much appreciated and enjoyed.
One last question to end an insanely lengthy mail: what's V2_OS?
Good luck
The computer would be interesting for super computers, but never for anything else. I don't see anyone walking around with a nuclear accident waiting to happen.
Why not?
The author calculated that, assuming Moore's law will continue to hold true, such computers would come into existence in about two hundred years. Now think back two hundred years. What was new technology then, comparable to our supercomputers? Steam engines: some advanced outlets had them, most manufacturers still used manual labor energy, water and animals. Even though the rate of technical progress has been rather slow during the past twohundred years compared to the past fifty years alone, those things have been obsolete for a long time now. You think your great^5 grandfather could imagine using *lightning* (the only form of electricity a peasant - most people were peasants back then - would have been familiar with) to light up his interior, to name but one example?
Your argument transplanted back to 1800 would run as follows:
Well, maybe they could somehow channel lightning to illuminate some big hall, such as a church or a palace, but my *house*? No way. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
We have no way of comprehending what will be possible in twohundred years time. It sucks, but face it, we'll just have to live without ever having known the good stuff.
The September issue of Wired magazine has an interesting article on the merger. It describes how Time Warner itself isn't a very successfull merger: infighting among its constituents (Time, Warner and that Turner thing). The article explains a number of the issues you raise in greater detail.
Uhm... actually, the US has a *lot* of legislature that prevents the formation of monopolies, or which at least enables the government to take action against monopolization should it occur. In comparison, Europe is riddled with semi-legitimate cartels, and only recently has the EU started to act against this. The EU anti-cartel office dates back from a decade or so, and the Dutch equivalent is only two or three years old. I'm guessing that the reason for this is because the US government had to deal with Standard Oil (if it was Standard Oil, I'm Dutch so my US history is a bit weak) a hundred years ago.
By the way, in the one economics class I took in my life, the professor said that in *true* laissez-faire capitalism, companies are *out* to get a monopoly, because it's the most efficient way to maximize profits, and hence we need a government to ensure a truly free market. Makes sense to me.
This AOL/Warner merger is ridiculous. I don't understand why the US gov't is taking on Microsoft during a time when its stranglehold on computing is actually going to get *less* due to the advent of Internet Appliances and Linux and they're leaving a merger between Time Warner (the biggest content provider worldwide) and AOL (the most popular way to get to your online content) more or less alone.
Time Warner is ubiquitous in every country in Europe. Just go to a cd-store or a video rental. AOL also encompasses CompuServe: in some countries (Netherlands) they operate as CompuServe, in others (Germany) as AOL, but they're definitely there.
Whether or not they are successful I don't know, because more and more European ISP's are starting to offer "free" Internet access (meaning you don't pay them for your connection, you only pay your telephone bill, they get a percentage of the amount of telephone traffic you generate).
Two questions, though:
I'm really wondering now, ignorant shit that I turned out to be.
Yeah, but the trouble is that this time around it's because Intel has gone knockers over trying to outdo AMD as far as clock speed is concerned. Yes, you can run an "ordinary" P3 750 at 1,3 GHz, but only if you stress it to the point of being able to cook your dinner on it. It's not exactly breakthrough engineering, though, so why bother requiring different cases because you've just thought up the corporate answer to millions of people overclocking their CPU's "just for the hell of it"?
What this new move shows is that Intel is growing increasingly desperate because they apparently can't seem to get the Itanium (or what's it called today) out fast enough and there's this little company called AMD whipping their ass by releasing overclocked versions of their *slightly* surperior design (Athlon). It also shows that Intel is afraid AMD will eat up their marketshare if they don't come up with some kludge to make it seem at least as if they're keeping up. A company more secure about its prospects would simply shrug and continue to work on their superior (maybe) next generation design. Witness how Microsoft has, for years, simply ignored the threat of Linux because they didn't *perceive* it as a threat. In the same way Intel used to ignore AMD back in the K6 days. Now that there's an Athlon, they start to resort to idiocy such as enforcing the special brew heatsinks made by OverClockers Inc. as a new *standard*.