Wouter is a strange little boy...
on
PanQuake
·
· Score: 2
This is the same guy who made his name in what some of us call the Esoteric Languages world with an obfuscated Postscript-type language called False. It's pretty cool.
But wraparound Quake... I don't know. How does it work with one of those big triple monitors is what I want to know.
You realize that such a reasonable, well-thought-out post utterly blows away any aura of psychohood that you might have been working to achieve with a handle like Dancin Santa, don't you?
RDRAM is interesting from a technical standpoint anyway, since it seems to represent the same philosophy that's leading to USB replacing paralell connections for printers and such: sooner or later, it doesn't matter worth a damn how wide your pipe is as long as you can slam data through fast enough to get where it needs to be. Whether back-burnering latency issues is a productive way to go I don't know; I'm not a sandbender. But it's not a bad idea technically, if you can get it to work. The real question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place; latency or not, you still have to slam the data through fast enough. The question thus becomes not whether it's a good idea, but whether it can be pulled off. So far, Rambus hasn't quite done it (it's all a blur above half a gigahertz anyway) and it doesn't look like they're going to have the chance to.
Who started that, anyway? I know RedHat and Debian have been doing it for a long time, and my Klingon programming language (yeah, plug; bitchslap me, my karma's maxed out) var'aq has been using it for a while as a form of slavish copycatting.
You can't keep a business running like that. Eventually patent fraud will catch up with you, at least if the fraudulent patent is something significant.
It's like that whole Magnaquench (sp?) thing that was posted earlier today -- they may have a legitimate claim on the patent, but it's suspicious because they're going for deep pockets instead of going after the persons doing the direct infringement. Rambus is going the magnet people one better, though, because they're actually trying to stretch the patent to cover something that it doesn't cover.
Rambus actually reminds me of a lawsuit brought by a company called Imatec against Apple a couple of years ago over ColorSync. Imatec, as far as anyone could determine, was a one-horse operation that tried to pull a patent shakedown on Apple over color-matching algorithms. They lost, and I don't think they even exist anymore (their website is unavailable as I check right now).
I think AtheOS is actually a very valuable project for the Open Source world because not everyone is a Unix fan. A modern GUI but non-Unix operating system under GPL is a good thing for the OS scholar, as it gives a different perspective on how to do things.
I can say this about TDK -- a CDR is a CDR, but the writing surface on a TDK 650 CDR is the prettiest of any on the market:-)
Actually, TDK is the brand I'm using right now, but as a general rule I'll go for pretty much any branded CDR (don't trust the unbranded ones). I'm debating whether to buy Kodak or a spindle of black Memorexes for my next media restock...
I've given up on CDRW myself. My Yamaha CRW8824 is installed as an external SCSI device and isn't directly supported by MacOS 9.1 (needs a separate driver). I don't trust it to be bootable, and my internal CD-ROM won't read CDRW, so I just don't bother.
Okay. First off, HFS+ is a necessity -- UFS is there if you want it, but remember that you're on a Mac. The OS is different, but if all you're doing is slapping an upgrade onto an existing system you don't want to be going back and relearning the entire thing from scratch.
Alien directory format is to be expected for much the same reason (though the OS X tree is weird even for Mac users). If it's any consolation, old school Unix directories are still there; you just have to convince your system that you're good to run as root in order to do it (there was something in a MacAddict a couple of months ago that told how, I think).
But at least you're not too critical; I like seeing votes of support like that. Makes my Mac-fan heart happy.
This reminds me for reasons I can't quite articulate of an old creationist argument that "the son of a lion is still a lion", a statement that both does and does not apply in this case...
Define *BSD first. It is generally accepted that Darwin (and Lites and xMach) are all *BSD, though they probably share more in common architecturally with OSF/1 (i.e. Compaq Unix) than they do the original BSD series. (Or is OSF/1 a BSD as well?) The fact of the matter is this:
-NextStep exists partly because of Avie Tevanian, Apple's chief technology guy and one of the creators of Mach.
-NextStep was built similarly to Lites and xMach as a BSD-code-base-derived layer over the Mach microkernel.
-Most of Darwin/OS X's userland comes from FreeBSD, and I think much of the BSD layer that went into Rhapsody was built (from scratch?) from 4.4lite code.
Linux was originally a Minix clone. I don't know if Linus actually used any Minix code (if he did it's long been removed, and besides, a lot of the early kernel was written in x86 assembler and is horribly unportable), but Minix filesystem support still exists in some dark corners of the source tree, and Andy Tanenbaum knew about Linux quite early on (and didn't like it much).
Who wants a memory array that needs cooling almost as much as the CPU anyway?
I feel sorriest for Intel, though. They've been skirting the edge of fuckedcompany.com for over a year now because of their supply problems and brain-gimped management (sorry, there is no excuse whatsoever for a company in Intel's position to lose the amount of ground they had). They roped the P4 to Rambus and wound up getting screwed... Not good.
Actually, I rather think Thomas Penfield Jackson is just the kind of judge our federal courts need more of.
Go pick up a copy of the book Voodoo Science by Robert Park. There's a considerable amount on "free-energy" artists, especially a man named Joe Newman who claims to have invented a high-voltage electric motor that gets more energy out than goes in. The climax of the Joe Newman angle comes in front of the Senate when John Glenn suggests putting connecting the output of the device to the input to see if it does what Newman says it does, but what leads up to it is more interesting.
Newman was denied a patent for his machine thanks to the long-standing USPTO policy against allowing patents for perpetual motion devices. He sued in federal court, and the judge on the case was none other than Judge Jackson. Jackson appointed an expert to examine the case, but threw out the expert's conclusion in favor of Newman when he realized two things:
a) the report made no sense; there was no way that the results could be what was said and
b) the expert happened to have a conflict of interest in Newman's favor, being connected to a patent attorney that had been involved in Newman's original patent application.
Maybe Tom Jackson is incapable of not running his mouth at critical moments, but every indication is that he was precisely the individual needed to preside over the MS antitrust case. His track record is one of meticulous research on his cases, it would seem...
Okay, so maybe you're from south of the Mason-Dixon, so maybe such a comment might offend you. So what? If you're on Slashdot you should be able to suck it up.
The curious thing about all this points to an interesting problem with patents that has nothing to do with the usual patent debates on/. : is it reasonable to allow a patent on something that is, to all intents and purposes, a commodity? Seems to me that Rambus has been all over "embrace and extend" with this fight, and this could be the beginning of a smackdown on the whole concept (yeah, wishful thinking).
There was an analogy I heard made somewhere during the MS antitrust trial of taking property by eminent domain in the supposed case of a government takeover of a privately owned toll bridge. The idea was that an essential service controlled by a private entity is a Bad Thing; this is the logic behind the formation of the Federal Reserve, for example (so that the US Gov't wouldn't have to be dependent on the corporate whims of JP Morgan).
So what comes out of this is the possibility that maybe a patent should not be granted when it might create a proprietary form of a technology that was previously public domain/commodity. Now I haven't really thought through the implications of this, but it does seem to follow from the spirit of US patent law. Any thoughts?
Your last two sentences sum up the middle-of-the-road argument, and I mostly agree with you. The only problem with the charging-for-IP issue is that IP, being trivially duplicable, is fundamentally different from physical property. My tendency is to believe that once the cat is out of the bag on an algorithm or something similar there should be a legal precedent that says, "Poor baby. Oh, well, time to adapt or die!"
That is of course why people are against software patents in the first place, and the one thing that the entertainment industry is unwilling to deal with...
I don't know if I'd call Linus' comment at the end a personal attack, actually. Given that he's focused solely on what Mundie said, seems to me his intent is strictly to criticize the statement. Not tactfully, mind you.
The curious thing about the PB5300 connection is that Michael Dell was once quoted during Apple's dark days of '97-'98 that Apple should close down and liquidate its assets to pay off the shareholders. I think he may have been pushed into a corner by the press, but Mac folks like me are inclined to giggle up our sleeves and talk about "karma backlash". It's just not professional to shoot your mouth off like that.
I've always had this vague sense that BSD licensing (- adClause) is about as close as you can get to public domain and still have a copyright on it. That's how NeXT kept the guts of NeXTStep proprietary: because they could. With the copyright transferred to Apple, they were free to do as they wished as well, and we have Darwin.
To those who claim that BSD licensing gets abused by companies turning BSD code proprietary, I say horseshit: the BSD license as it stands now cannot be abused because you can do practically anything you want, however you want it, with BSD'ed code. It was *designed* that way.
OTOH, what Sony is doing with POSE is GPL abuse, plain and simple, and they should be smacked for it.
I'm told that GCC is actually a fairly common target for GPL theft, though I can't picture MS doing it.
This does seem pretty blatant, though, especially when Palm itself has gone out of its way to be Open Source-friendly. But coming from Sony... I'm not too surprised. Sony is not a company I trust anymore. I've always had a bit of a funny feeling about them, but it's mostly been a good funny until recently. Now... I will most likely not buy a Walkman, Clie, or Vaio any time soon (though I'd take any one of them as a gift). Sony is not quite the Microsoft of consumer electronics -- there's too many other players in the field for them to even come close -- but they don't make much of an effort to appeal to those who prefer open standards. Granted, there are lots of 8mm camcorders, but Sony did try and keep a much tighter control over Betamax than was really wise. (It was big news when Sony shipped its first VHS VCR, and I think they had to OEM them from someone else at first...) I may be getting a PSOne some time soon, but even then...
Actually, ECMAscript is JavaScript, plain and simple. ECMA-262 is what came out of an effort to reconcile Netscape's and Microsoft's versions of the language.
Your last comment is a rather interesting one, though. The answer is pretty simple: Java has been around a while and Sun hasn't clamped down on implementation of non-Sun versions (I think it's the same reason that Linux doesn't claim to be Unix even though it is in a non-certified sense), while C# hasn't been around more than a year and nobody really wants to implement a Microsoft standard unless they have to. (And yes, I do think SOAP and C# (and possibly.NET) qualify as open standards; I still think MS has a booby trap plan up their sleeve for all of these technologies, though...)
Besides, the Old World (that's the term they use now for pre-iMac systems) ROMs are different for every system. What works on a IIci will be drastically different from what a Duo 230 or a PowerMac 6100 use.
I mentioned in a previous post to another story several days ago about a conversation I had with the business director of a nearby prep school and how he believed ASPs were a good thing. What I don't get is how anyone would willingly tie themselves down to someone else's service on the assumption that the network connection and the service would always be there...
All I'll say is this: I once had someone make me an offer to do some integration work for his ASP. I turned him down because he wanted to pay me in equity as opposed to cash and I didn't really think his business model was workable.
The fact is that with Darwin Apple has done more than most. Yes, QuickTime is still proprietary (that's probably a bad thing, but it's the only thing Mac-related that really matters to the world at large) and should have Linux versions available. But methinks the author of this article has an axe to grind -- not every company can be IBM, and Apple may be getting a C+ on its Open Source report card (IMHO) but at least it's a passing grade.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same guy who made his name in what some of us call the Esoteric Languages world with an obfuscated Postscript-type language called False. It's pretty cool.
But wraparound Quake... I don't know. How does it work with one of those big triple monitors is what I want to know.
/Brian
You realize that such a reasonable, well-thought-out post utterly blows away any aura of psychohood that you might have been working to achieve with a handle like Dancin Santa, don't you?
RDRAM is interesting from a technical standpoint anyway, since it seems to represent the same philosophy that's leading to USB replacing paralell connections for printers and such: sooner or later, it doesn't matter worth a damn how wide your pipe is as long as you can slam data through fast enough to get where it needs to be. Whether back-burnering latency issues is a productive way to go I don't know; I'm not a sandbender. But it's not a bad idea technically, if you can get it to work. The real question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place; latency or not, you still have to slam the data through fast enough. The question thus becomes not whether it's a good idea, but whether it can be pulled off. So far, Rambus hasn't quite done it (it's all a blur above half a gigahertz anyway) and it doesn't look like they're going to have the chance to.
/Brian
Who started that, anyway? I know RedHat and Debian have been doing it for a long time, and my Klingon programming language (yeah, plug; bitchslap me, my karma's maxed out) var'aq has been using it for a while as a form of slavish copycatting.
/Brian
I'll say :-)
You can't keep a business running like that. Eventually patent fraud will catch up with you, at least if the fraudulent patent is something significant.
It's like that whole Magnaquench (sp?) thing that was posted earlier today -- they may have a legitimate claim on the patent, but it's suspicious because they're going for deep pockets instead of going after the persons doing the direct infringement. Rambus is going the magnet people one better, though, because they're actually trying to stretch the patent to cover something that it doesn't cover.
Rambus actually reminds me of a lawsuit brought by a company called Imatec against Apple a couple of years ago over ColorSync. Imatec, as far as anyone could determine, was a one-horse operation that tried to pull a patent shakedown on Apple over color-matching algorithms. They lost, and I don't think they even exist anymore (their website is unavailable as I check right now).
/Brian
More than that. Linux would be completely pointless if it wasn't Open Source. More to the point, it wouldn't be Linux.
/Brian
"because it isn't there"
I think AtheOS is actually a very valuable project for the Open Source world because not everyone is a Unix fan. A modern GUI but non-Unix operating system under GPL is a good thing for the OS scholar, as it gives a different perspective on how to do things.
/brian
I can say this about TDK -- a CDR is a CDR, but the writing surface on a TDK 650 CDR is the prettiest of any on the market :-)
Actually, TDK is the brand I'm using right now, but as a general rule I'll go for pretty much any branded CDR (don't trust the unbranded ones). I'm debating whether to buy Kodak or a spindle of black Memorexes for my next media restock...
/Brian
I've given up on CDRW myself. My Yamaha CRW8824 is installed as an external SCSI device and isn't directly supported by MacOS 9.1 (needs a separate driver). I don't trust it to be bootable, and my internal CD-ROM won't read CDRW, so I just don't bother.
/Brian
Well...
Okay. First off, HFS+ is a necessity -- UFS is there if you want it, but remember that you're on a Mac. The OS is different, but if all you're doing is slapping an upgrade onto an existing system you don't want to be going back and relearning the entire thing from scratch.
Alien directory format is to be expected for much the same reason (though the OS X tree is weird even for Mac users). If it's any consolation, old school Unix directories are still there; you just have to convince your system that you're good to run as root in order to do it (there was something in a MacAddict a couple of months ago that told how, I think).
But at least you're not too critical; I like seeing votes of support like that. Makes my Mac-fan heart happy.
/Brian
This reminds me for reasons I can't quite articulate of an old creationist argument that "the son of a lion is still a lion", a statement that both does and does not apply in this case...
Define *BSD first. It is generally accepted that Darwin (and Lites and xMach) are all *BSD, though they probably share more in common architecturally with OSF/1 (i.e. Compaq Unix) than they do the original BSD series. (Or is OSF/1 a BSD as well?) The fact of the matter is this:
-NextStep exists partly because of Avie Tevanian, Apple's chief technology guy and one of the creators of Mach.
-NextStep was built similarly to Lites and xMach as a BSD-code-base-derived layer over the Mach microkernel.
-Most of Darwin/OS X's userland comes from FreeBSD, and I think much of the BSD layer that went into Rhapsody was built (from scratch?) from 4.4lite code.
Furthermore, the community at large says so.
?
/Brian
Linux was originally a Minix clone. I don't know if Linus actually used any Minix code (if he did it's long been removed, and besides, a lot of the early kernel was written in x86 assembler and is horribly unportable), but Minix filesystem support still exists in some dark corners of the source tree, and Andy Tanenbaum knew about Linux quite early on (and didn't like it much).
/Brian
I don't know about the second one, but collectives usually do seem to be considered plural in British English.
/Brian
Who wants a memory array that needs cooling almost as much as the CPU anyway?
I feel sorriest for Intel, though. They've been skirting the edge of fuckedcompany.com for over a year now because of their supply problems and brain-gimped management (sorry, there is no excuse whatsoever for a company in Intel's position to lose the amount of ground they had). They roped the P4 to Rambus and wound up getting screwed... Not good.
/Brian
Actually, I rather think Thomas Penfield Jackson is just the kind of judge our federal courts need more of.
Go pick up a copy of the book Voodoo Science by Robert Park. There's a considerable amount on "free-energy" artists, especially a man named Joe Newman who claims to have invented a high-voltage electric motor that gets more energy out than goes in. The climax of the Joe Newman angle comes in front of the Senate when John Glenn suggests putting connecting the output of the device to the input to see if it does what Newman says it does, but what leads up to it is more interesting.
Newman was denied a patent for his machine thanks to the long-standing USPTO policy against allowing patents for perpetual motion devices. He sued in federal court, and the judge on the case was none other than Judge Jackson. Jackson appointed an expert to examine the case, but threw out the expert's conclusion in favor of Newman when he realized two things:
a) the report made no sense; there was no way that the results could be what was said and
b) the expert happened to have a conflict of interest in Newman's favor, being connected to a patent attorney that had been involved in Newman's original patent application.
Maybe Tom Jackson is incapable of not running his mouth at critical moments, but every indication is that he was precisely the individual needed to preside over the MS antitrust case. His track record is one of meticulous research on his cases, it would seem...
/Brian
Okay, so maybe you're from south of the Mason-Dixon, so maybe such a comment might offend you. So what? If you're on Slashdot you should be able to suck it up.
/. : is it reasonable to allow a patent on something that is, to all intents and purposes, a commodity? Seems to me that Rambus has been all over "embrace and extend" with this fight, and this could be the beginning of a smackdown on the whole concept (yeah, wishful thinking).
The curious thing about all this points to an interesting problem with patents that has nothing to do with the usual patent debates on
There was an analogy I heard made somewhere during the MS antitrust trial of taking property by eminent domain in the supposed case of a government takeover of a privately owned toll bridge. The idea was that an essential service controlled by a private entity is a Bad Thing; this is the logic behind the formation of the Federal Reserve, for example (so that the US Gov't wouldn't have to be dependent on the corporate whims of JP Morgan).
So what comes out of this is the possibility that maybe a patent should not be granted when it might create a proprietary form of a technology that was previously public domain/commodity. Now I haven't really thought through the implications of this, but it does seem to follow from the spirit of US patent law. Any thoughts?
/Brian
But this is not code. You've made the general case for patents, but we are discussing a specific situation that doesn't quite seem to apply.
/Brian
Your last two sentences sum up the middle-of-the-road argument, and I mostly agree with you. The only problem with the charging-for-IP issue is that IP, being trivially duplicable, is fundamentally different from physical property. My tendency is to believe that once the cat is out of the bag on an algorithm or something similar there should be a legal precedent that says, "Poor baby. Oh, well, time to adapt or die!"
That is of course why people are against software patents in the first place, and the one thing that the entertainment industry is unwilling to deal with...
/Brian
Call it spin if you want...
I don't know if I'd call Linus' comment at the end a personal attack, actually. Given that he's focused solely on what Mundie said, seems to me his intent is strictly to criticize the statement. Not tactfully, mind you.
/Brian
The curious thing about the PB5300 connection is that Michael Dell was once quoted during Apple's dark days of '97-'98 that Apple should close down and liquidate its assets to pay off the shareholders. I think he may have been pushed into a corner by the press, but Mac folks like me are inclined to giggle up our sleeves and talk about "karma backlash". It's just not professional to shoot your mouth off like that.
/Brian
I've always had this vague sense that BSD licensing (- adClause) is about as close as you can get to public domain and still have a copyright on it. That's how NeXT kept the guts of NeXTStep proprietary: because they could. With the copyright transferred to Apple, they were free to do as they wished as well, and we have Darwin.
To those who claim that BSD licensing gets abused by companies turning BSD code proprietary, I say horseshit: the BSD license as it stands now cannot be abused because you can do practically anything you want, however you want it, with BSD'ed code. It was *designed* that way.
OTOH, what Sony is doing with POSE is GPL abuse, plain and simple, and they should be smacked for it.
/Brian
I'm told that GCC is actually a fairly common target for GPL theft, though I can't picture MS doing it.
This does seem pretty blatant, though, especially when Palm itself has gone out of its way to be Open Source-friendly. But coming from Sony... I'm not too surprised. Sony is not a company I trust anymore. I've always had a bit of a funny feeling about them, but it's mostly been a good funny until recently. Now... I will most likely not buy a Walkman, Clie, or Vaio any time soon (though I'd take any one of them as a gift). Sony is not quite the Microsoft of consumer electronics -- there's too many other players in the field for them to even come close -- but they don't make much of an effort to appeal to those who prefer open standards. Granted, there are lots of 8mm camcorders, but Sony did try and keep a much tighter control over Betamax than was really wise. (It was big news when Sony shipped its first VHS VCR, and I think they had to OEM them from someone else at first...) I may be getting a PSOne some time soon, but even then...
/Brian
Actually, ECMAscript is JavaScript, plain and simple. ECMA-262 is what came out of an effort to reconcile Netscape's and Microsoft's versions of the language.
.NET) qualify as open standards; I still think MS has a booby trap plan up their sleeve for all of these technologies, though...)
Your last comment is a rather interesting one, though. The answer is pretty simple: Java has been around a while and Sun hasn't clamped down on implementation of non-Sun versions (I think it's the same reason that Linux doesn't claim to be Unix even though it is in a non-certified sense), while C# hasn't been around more than a year and nobody really wants to implement a Microsoft standard unless they have to. (And yes, I do think SOAP and C# (and possibly
/Brian
Besides, the Old World (that's the term they use now for pre-iMac systems) ROMs are different for every system. What works on a IIci will be drastically different from what a Duo 230 or a PowerMac 6100 use.
/Brian
I mentioned in a previous post to another story several days ago about a conversation I had with the business director of a nearby prep school and how he believed ASPs were a good thing. What I don't get is how anyone would willingly tie themselves down to someone else's service on the assumption that the network connection and the service would always be there...
All I'll say is this: I once had someone make me an offer to do some integration work for his ASP. I turned him down because he wanted to pay me in equity as opposed to cash and I didn't really think his business model was workable.
/Brian
The fact is that with Darwin Apple has done more than most. Yes, QuickTime is still proprietary (that's probably a bad thing, but it's the only thing Mac-related that really matters to the world at large) and should have Linux versions available. But methinks the author of this article has an axe to grind -- not every company can be IBM, and Apple may be getting a C+ on its Open Source report card (IMHO) but at least it's a passing grade.
/Brian