I think pretty much every Mac user in the world agrees with you. Fortunately, they've made it a bit better in OS X -- the look is the same, but the interface actually makes sense now.
In any case, the PPC is only in trouble on the Motorola side because @#$!&* Moto can't crank a chip above 500mHz. Apple's best shot if Motorola betrays them is to either strongarm them into allowing IBM to ramp up high-end G4s or simply junk AltiVec completely, run IBM PPC750CXen across the board (which have no problem keeping up in the gigahertz race, from what I hear, and which they're already using in the new iBooks), and maybe slap on a dedicated DSP to do the nifty multimedia stuff. They've done it before (remember the 680x0 AV Macs?).
The rumor sites have said that Apple might consider Alpha, but it doesn't seem likely -- they have something like ten years invested in PowerPC, and the Mac community would string them up if they went Intel.
How about this: love the bulletproof hardware, not so crazy about the cardwalloper OS or the locked-up-tight architecture?
I know a little bit about AS/400s -- had to work with one a while back. They're pretty good machines (after all, the AS/400 has managed to outlive the VAX, its only real competition in that niche), especially for legacy shops that still use old mainframe apps but need more performance. The only real problem is that they *are* legacy boxes -- IBM updates the hardware, but sandboxes the users in a virtual machine. You can't see the hardware at all, even on the instruction set level. The hardware being actually pretty good, you might find that trusted C/Fortran/Cobol compilers writing to bytecode is maybe a bit too restrictive for your purposes. Thus, Linux/400.
It's about choice, you know? Rock-solid and guaranteed to carry you over? Go out of the box. You actually want to USE your hardware? Linux.
The thing is that the ratings are there for a reason. If the US Govt passed a law, then we'd be justifiably up in arms. But these are corporations we're talking about -- they have to do what's good for business, and this is good PR for them to most people.
The word you're looking for -- for people who habitually pick fights -- is eristic. More appropriate than bully here, I should say (though I have in the past criticized rms for being rather Gatesian).
Now. I did think the KDE people went a bit over the top in their response, given that Stallman was actually rather civil in his unwarranted nitpicking. And I have no problem with Stallman saying "go gnomes" -- after all, it's his baby and there's no reason on earth he shouldn't want them to succeed in their own right. Be that as it may, Stallman's still way off base -- the issue is as settled as it can get.
This project seems to be pretty obviously closed-source -- they don't have enough confidence in its ability to let things out.
And you're not going to find anyone who wants to review it anyway -- nobody wants anything to do with it because if they acknowledge it it won't go away...
They don't need it; that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't be able to use it, though.
For the record, the point about being able to provide network-wide print services to a Windows network without having to pay deployment fees out the wazoo would have to be a great reason for using Linux in this beast. Saves HP royalties, saves the customers money (though anyone using embedded NT should be beaten anyway for taking the long way around for no good reason), and it does in fact do the job.
I love these kinds of figures -- they're just about as meaningless as crowd estimates.
I think it's rather funny that these figures are bandied about as if they have any authority behind them to begin with. I mean, okay. So you say Windows has 70,000 apps available for it. How do you count those? Are we talking strictly in terms of polished, shrinkwrapped product on store shelves and in catalog warehouses? Well, then we lose things like WinZip (pretty freakin' important, if you ask me) and other shareware programs.
Or what if you do count shareware/freeware? Are DJGPP and GCC/Win32 the same beast? I doubt Cygnus would say so. And is Sun StarOffice the same beast as the pre-buyout product?
The fact is that if this figure was truly part of the Microsoft trial, whoever used it was blowing smoke and should have known it.
Okay, they got FreeBSD on Hotmail (because the Win2K conversion, as everyone knows, is a mess). Simple solution:
MS BSD.
Think about it: it's not Windows, but the BSD license is such that MS could coopt the BSD source base without anyone having the ability to complain about it. Just do a BSD recompile, stick a Windows interface on it (fvwm95, perhaps), and MS is in perfect shape to scare the living shit out of all of us Open Source people...
Let's hope it never happens, or at least if it does MS does it without doing it the MS way. But then they would in fact be eating their own dogfood. Not that we wouldn't still be laughing at Win2K...
/Brian
(p.s. moderator, if you must moderate this down I'll take flamebait but I'm sure you can be more creative than that.)
Apples and oranges. The Dark Ages were an accident of history -- Roman culture had essentially been annihilated by the combination of lead poisoning, barbarians, and other such things, and the feudal culture that resulted essentially was a form of stagnation. The fact that anyone had any learning at all in Europe was nothing short of a miracle once the strict hierarchy of feudalism was established -- there was no way out. Like Japan today, where personal freedoms exist in law but are often severely limited by cultural pressures (the nail that stick out, etc.), feudal Europe was stuck.
What's happening now with the copyright abuses of the DMCA is that corporations are attempting to milk every last drop out of cash out of people that they can get. This is stagnation of a different sort -- rather than admit to themselves that the pirates have won the war (and believe me, I don't take their side lightly since I find them mostly to be freeloading scum), these companies are going to court to preserve a business model that no longer makes any sense.
The social contract under which the concept of copyright was created has been destroyed, partly by the pirates, partly by the companies themselves. I think this may prove to be a good thing -- while plagiarism per se is a bad thing, the fact is that modern English literature began during a time (the Tudor era) where plagiarism and adaptation of what would now be considered proprietary ideas was rampant. The corporations will ultimately lose the war under the current business models simply because there will be someone always willing to hack them.
As for the issue of artistic rights, well... I don't know. I see both sides of the issue here, and what it comes down to for me is a matter of respect. I don't blame Metallica for wanting to get paid for their work, and I think a lot of people are misunderstanding their position. I think they *are* being hardasses, mind you, but to them it's a question of respect -- do you like what we're doing enough that you will support us so we can keep doing it? Stephen King decided to meet his fans halfway on the issue, and he's cleaning up. Metallica -- well, they don't mind bootlegs. I think that's gotten lost in the rush to judgement. The simple fact is that they've created new material, and they are justifiably pissed that people don't want to get paid for it.
At the same time, the capitalists have to realize that their day in the sun is ending. Yes, you have the right to make a buck, and nobody can be a reasonable human being to deny you that right. But the simple fact is that sometimes people do want something for nothing. This again is an example of the broken social contract. You give, we take -- but what happens when you can't afford to give any more and we keep on taking?
No, this isn't a New Dark Age. Not in the same sense. Some may be trying to do that, but the genie's already out of the bag. The social contract that has existed since the 18th century or so is gone, and a new one must be rewritten. I think we all had better just shut up and deal, no matter which side we're on -- the page has turned.
Okay, how many of you out there still look up your old college textbooks when you need to know something about your line of work?
(Hands raise)
That's about what I thought. QED.
The whole issue of "right to read" is a major one, yes, but there is a practical matter as well, inasmuch as it robs the student of the ability to use the material down the line. I still have my old Dragon book from compilers class; I couldn't have written my program hc without it. Think about the doctors that will be deprived of a useful anatomy textbook down the line.
But you know, the weird thing about it is that if you remember it fondly, there was something about it that appealed to you that's probably still there. All of these shows, no matter how truly cheezy we see them as now, hit some sort of geek nerve with me.
That was the weirdest show. It was very much a ThunderCats rip-off, that's for certain -- just make them cyborg cops instead of fantasy werecats, right?
Funny thing, though -- someone said something about it being a series to sell toys, and that's certainly true about the bulk of children's television in the 1980s, but SilverHawks toys never went very far. For one thing, the 'Hawks themselves were a bit too sophisticated to really translate to good toys -- the built-in pressure masks, for example. For another thing, I think people (even kids) sort of realized that the whole thing as concieved simply didn't work.
It was an interesting idea, though. Maybe someone could do a real SF book series around the concept of cyborg cops...
I just love watching Corporate America trying to force the rest of the world not to change. The moment Sony figures out how to tweak Windows to block Napster access (and the only way to do that is by blocking specific IP addresses), and someone turns around and shows the world how to defeat it. Just like the NTW->NTServer registry hack.
Not that I want a Sony to begin with -- the VAIO notebooks are nice, but they're said to be closed boxes. Heaven forbid you should dislike Win2K.
Whatcha do is you create an open Carbon library (call it libDiamond, libGraphite, or libBuckyBall or something of the sort), slap it together with GNUStep (with the DGS part rewritten to support a reasonable facsimile of Quartz), then throw the whole thing over Darwin.
Presto, FreeMacOS. Shouldn't take more than, oh, a couple of years. (I am surprised there's no sign of a free Carbon implementation out there, though...)/Brian
Talk about short-sighted, though. The background here, I think, is Olsen's belief that's often quoted as "Unix is snake oil". I think I sort of see the flipside to this attitude in the Lions book, actually, where Lions discusses the size of OS/360 in comparison to Unix V6's paltry tenK lines of code -- Unix doesn't bother with a lot of housekeeping that is still often considered kernel-level stuff. Though for him to have come out with a comment like this, I think he fundamentally misunderstood the Open Source community, even as it was in the early 80s. Unix was a sideline, a sop to the unwashed masses the same way as Linux was just a year or so ago to many companies.
I wonder if this doesn't explain DEC's whole mindset all those years -- heavy doses of xenophobia combined with the conviction that they can do no wrong. They wouldn't be the first company brought down like that, and certainly not the last either. At least Compaq doesn't have NIH along with every other bad trait it inherited from DEC (can you say Linux iPaq?).
AS/400s are pretty cool machines -- the last of the true minicomputers, for one thing, and rock freakin' solid. I used to work around one doing VB database programming.
Now, it's probably true that there ain't no server architecture more closed than the AS/400, but for what it does it's a pretty decent piece of hardware. You can talk all you want about progress, but for places like the place I was working, there is no real reason to move away from a mainframe-type architecture because what's there already works. I count myself fortunate that I never had to play with CICS and Cobol (that was my boss's job), but I can see why they used AS/400 in the first place.
Now if I was starting a business, I wouldn't go near AS/400 if I got paid to. But if I was upgrading a legacy shop from, say, a Wang (like this place) and the primary priority was getting things working as opposed to making them slick and pretty, I don't know if I'd bother with anything else. Even a VAX.
A Sanskrit language would be interesting, but as I pointed out in my comment about var'aq it would be rather difficult from a parsing standpoint.
I'm something of an amateur linguist myself (though I don't speak many languages). Sanskrit is actually very close to Latin and Greek in structure and vocabulary (though it doesn't look it) because it's an Indo-European language. The big problem with it is that you have the same problem of establishing a grammar for positional syntax. Parsing would be a bitch -- you'd have to slurp in an entire line ("sentence") and then establish what is what casewise (mercifully, you could do away with verbs since all you'd need is infinitive or imperative and gerund). Agglutinative languages like Turkish or, I don't know, Klingon, would require even more complicated parsing logic to split words into lexemes that make sense.
Vocabulary would be a different story; if that's all you're dealing with you can just base your syntax on the usual positioning of grammar elements in the base language and go from there. That's what I did with var'aq -- Klingon word order is object-verb-subject, so RPN notation became the order of the day.
ObShamelessPlug -- to see how it works, check out http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq
The irony of that comment is that although everyone in the Greater Boston area who's actually heard his name has adopted him as a Bostonian, Tim Berners-Lee is a Brit.../Brian
Slashdot Mirror
I think pretty much every Mac user in the world agrees with you. Fortunately, they've made it a bit better in OS X -- the look is the same, but the interface actually makes sense now.
/Brian
In any case, the PPC is only in trouble on the Motorola side because @#$!&* Moto can't crank a chip above 500mHz. Apple's best shot if Motorola betrays them is to either strongarm them into allowing IBM to ramp up high-end G4s or simply junk AltiVec completely, run IBM PPC750CXen across the board (which have no problem keeping up in the gigahertz race, from what I hear, and which they're already using in the new iBooks), and maybe slap on a dedicated DSP to do the nifty multimedia stuff. They've done it before (remember the 680x0 AV Macs?).
The rumor sites have said that Apple might consider Alpha, but it doesn't seem likely -- they have something like ten years invested in PowerPC, and the Mac community would string them up if they went Intel.
/Brian
How about this: love the bulletproof hardware, not so crazy about the cardwalloper OS or the locked-up-tight architecture?
I know a little bit about AS/400s -- had to work with one a while back. They're pretty good machines (after all, the AS/400 has managed to outlive the VAX, its only real competition in that niche), especially for legacy shops that still use old mainframe apps but need more performance. The only real problem is that they *are* legacy boxes -- IBM updates the hardware, but sandboxes the users in a virtual machine. You can't see the hardware at all, even on the instruction set level. The hardware being actually pretty good, you might find that trusted C/Fortran/Cobol compilers writing to bytecode is maybe a bit too restrictive for your purposes. Thus, Linux/400.
It's about choice, you know? Rock-solid and guaranteed to carry you over? Go out of the box. You actually want to USE your hardware? Linux.
/Brian
I think the conventional wisdom is that Solaris/x86 is dead-end tech anyway.
/Brian
Of course, that's perfectly acceptable in the crypto community...
:-) )
(And anyone who gets *that* joke needs to stop cypherpunking and get out once in a while
/Brian
The big question is when Apple will build and ship the iRack. Imagine -- a stack of 1U or 2U G4 systems, all running Darwin and MPI...
Hell, now that I think of it, Apple doesn't even have to do that themselves, now do they?
/Brian
Those SOBs do run hot -- I was looking at a demo unit in my local MicroCenter yesterday and thinking that it's a good thing they aren't expandable.
They're a great idea in principle, but this fanless thing is a bit silly IMHO. And I LIKE Apple's industrial design!
/Brian
The thing is that the ratings are there for a reason. If the US Govt passed a law, then we'd be justifiably up in arms. But these are corporations we're talking about -- they have to do what's good for business, and this is good PR for them to most people.
/Brian
The word you're looking for -- for people who habitually pick fights -- is eristic. More appropriate than bully here, I should say (though I have in the past criticized rms for being rather Gatesian).
Now. I did think the KDE people went a bit over the top in their response, given that Stallman was actually rather civil in his unwarranted nitpicking. And I have no problem with Stallman saying "go gnomes" -- after all, it's his baby and there's no reason on earth he shouldn't want them to succeed in their own right. Be that as it may, Stallman's still way off base -- the issue is as settled as it can get.
/Brian
FOURTH POST!!!!
At any rate...
This project seems to be pretty obviously closed-source -- they don't have enough confidence in its ability to let things out.
And you're not going to find anyone who wants to review it anyway -- nobody wants anything to do with it because if they acknowledge it it won't go away...
/Brian
They don't need it; that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't be able to use it, though.
For the record, the point about being able to provide network-wide print services to a Windows network without having to pay deployment fees out the wazoo would have to be a great reason for using Linux in this beast. Saves HP royalties, saves the customers money (though anyone using embedded NT should be beaten anyway for taking the long way around for no good reason), and it does in fact do the job.
/Brian
I love these kinds of figures -- they're just about as meaningless as crowd estimates.
I think it's rather funny that these figures are bandied about as if they have any authority behind them to begin with. I mean, okay. So you say Windows has 70,000 apps available for it. How do you count those? Are we talking strictly in terms of polished, shrinkwrapped product on store shelves and in catalog warehouses? Well, then we lose things like WinZip (pretty freakin' important, if you ask me) and other shareware programs.
Or what if you do count shareware/freeware? Are DJGPP and GCC/Win32 the same beast? I doubt Cygnus would say so. And is Sun StarOffice the same beast as the pre-buyout product?
The fact is that if this figure was truly part of the Microsoft trial, whoever used it was blowing smoke and should have known it.
/Brian
Okay, they got FreeBSD on Hotmail (because the Win2K conversion, as everyone knows, is a mess). Simple solution:
MS BSD.
Think about it: it's not Windows, but the BSD license is such that MS could coopt the BSD source base without anyone having the ability to complain about it. Just do a BSD recompile, stick a Windows interface on it (fvwm95, perhaps), and MS is in perfect shape to scare the living shit out of all of us Open Source people...
Let's hope it never happens, or at least if it does MS does it without doing it the MS way. But then they would in fact be eating their own dogfood. Not that we wouldn't still be laughing at Win2K...
/Brian
(p.s. moderator, if you must moderate this down I'll take flamebait but I'm sure you can be more creative than that.)
Apples and oranges. The Dark Ages were an accident of history -- Roman culture had essentially been annihilated by the combination of lead poisoning, barbarians, and other such things, and the feudal culture that resulted essentially was a form of stagnation. The fact that anyone had any learning at all in Europe was nothing short of a miracle once the strict hierarchy of feudalism was established -- there was no way out. Like Japan today, where personal freedoms exist in law but are often severely limited by cultural pressures (the nail that stick out, etc.), feudal Europe was stuck.
What's happening now with the copyright abuses of the DMCA is that corporations are attempting to milk every last drop out of cash out of people that they can get. This is stagnation of a different sort -- rather than admit to themselves that the pirates have won the war (and believe me, I don't take their side lightly since I find them mostly to be freeloading scum), these companies are going to court to preserve a business model that no longer makes any sense.
The social contract under which the concept of copyright was created has been destroyed, partly by the pirates, partly by the companies themselves. I think this may prove to be a good thing -- while plagiarism per se is a bad thing, the fact is that modern English literature began during a time (the Tudor era) where plagiarism and adaptation of what would now be considered proprietary ideas was rampant. The corporations will ultimately lose the war under the current business models simply because there will be someone always willing to hack them.
As for the issue of artistic rights, well... I don't know. I see both sides of the issue here, and what it comes down to for me is a matter of respect. I don't blame Metallica for wanting to get paid for their work, and I think a lot of people are misunderstanding their position. I think they *are* being hardasses, mind you, but to them it's a question of respect -- do you like what we're doing enough that you will support us so we can keep doing it? Stephen King decided to meet his fans halfway on the issue, and he's cleaning up. Metallica -- well, they don't mind bootlegs. I think that's gotten lost in the rush to judgement. The simple fact is that they've created new material, and they are justifiably pissed that people don't want to get paid for it.
At the same time, the capitalists have to realize that their day in the sun is ending. Yes, you have the right to make a buck, and nobody can be a reasonable human being to deny you that right. But the simple fact is that sometimes people do want something for nothing. This again is an example of the broken social contract. You give, we take -- but what happens when you can't afford to give any more and we keep on taking?
No, this isn't a New Dark Age. Not in the same sense. Some may be trying to do that, but the genie's already out of the bag. The social contract that has existed since the 18th century or so is gone, and a new one must be rewritten. I think we all had better just shut up and deal, no matter which side we're on -- the page has turned.
/Brian
Okay, how many of you out there still look up your old college textbooks when you need to know something about your line of work?
(Hands raise)
That's about what I thought. QED.
The whole issue of "right to read" is a major one, yes, but there is a practical matter as well, inasmuch as it robs the student of the ability to use the material down the line. I still have my old Dragon book from compilers class; I couldn't have written my program hc without it. Think about the doctors that will be deprived of a useful anatomy textbook down the line.
/Brian
I was more into Voltron than Thundercats...
But you know, the weird thing about it is that if you remember it fondly, there was something about it that appealed to you that's probably still there. All of these shows, no matter how truly cheezy we see them as now, hit some sort of geek nerve with me.
/Brian
That was the weirdest show. It was very much a ThunderCats rip-off, that's for certain -- just make them cyborg cops instead of fantasy werecats, right?
Funny thing, though -- someone said something about it being a series to sell toys, and that's certainly true about the bulk of children's television in the 1980s, but SilverHawks toys never went very far. For one thing, the 'Hawks themselves were a bit too sophisticated to really translate to good toys -- the built-in pressure masks, for example. For another thing, I think people (even kids) sort of realized that the whole thing as concieved simply didn't work.
It was an interesting idea, though. Maybe someone could do a real SF book series around the concept of cyborg cops...
/Brian
I just love watching Corporate America trying to force the rest of the world not to change. The moment Sony figures out how to tweak Windows to block Napster access (and the only way to do that is by blocking specific IP addresses), and someone turns around and shows the world how to defeat it. Just like the NTW->NTServer registry hack.
Not that I want a Sony to begin with -- the VAIO notebooks are nice, but they're said to be closed boxes. Heaven forbid you should dislike Win2K.
/Brian
Whatcha do is you create an open Carbon library (call it libDiamond, libGraphite, or libBuckyBall or something of the sort), slap it together with GNUStep (with the DGS part rewritten to support a reasonable facsimile of Quartz), then throw the whole thing over Darwin. Presto, FreeMacOS. Shouldn't take more than, oh, a couple of years. (I am surprised there's no sign of a free Carbon implementation out there, though...) /Brian
Wow. That's a real quote.
Talk about short-sighted, though. The background here, I think, is Olsen's belief that's often quoted as "Unix is snake oil". I think I sort of see the flipside to this attitude in the Lions book, actually, where Lions discusses the size of OS/360 in comparison to Unix V6's paltry tenK lines of code -- Unix doesn't bother with a lot of housekeeping that is still often considered kernel-level stuff. Though for him to have come out with a comment like this, I think he fundamentally misunderstood the Open Source community, even as it was in the early 80s. Unix was a sideline, a sop to the unwashed masses the same way as Linux was just a year or so ago to many companies.
I wonder if this doesn't explain DEC's whole mindset all those years -- heavy doses of xenophobia combined with the conviction that they can do no wrong. They wouldn't be the first company brought down like that, and certainly not the last either. At least Compaq doesn't have NIH along with every other bad trait it inherited from DEC (can you say Linux iPaq?).
/Brian
AS/400s are pretty cool machines -- the last of the true minicomputers, for one thing, and rock freakin' solid. I used to work around one doing VB database programming.
Now, it's probably true that there ain't no server architecture more closed than the AS/400, but for what it does it's a pretty decent piece of hardware. You can talk all you want about progress, but for places like the place I was working, there is no real reason to move away from a mainframe-type architecture because what's there already works. I count myself fortunate that I never had to play with CICS and Cobol (that was my boss's job), but I can see why they used AS/400 in the first place.
Now if I was starting a business, I wouldn't go near AS/400 if I got paid to. But if I was upgrading a legacy shop from, say, a Wang (like this place) and the primary priority was getting things working as opposed to making them slick and pretty, I don't know if I'd bother with anything else. Even a VAX.
/Brian
Portmanteau pun, my man.
/Brian
A Sanskrit language would be interesting, but as I pointed out in my comment about var'aq it would be rather difficult from a parsing standpoint.
I'm something of an amateur linguist myself (though I don't speak many languages). Sanskrit is actually very close to Latin and Greek in structure and vocabulary (though it doesn't look it) because it's an Indo-European language. The big problem with it is that you have the same problem of establishing a grammar for positional syntax. Parsing would be a bitch -- you'd have to slurp in an entire line ("sentence") and then establish what is what casewise (mercifully, you could do away with verbs since all you'd need is infinitive or imperative and gerund). Agglutinative languages like Turkish or, I don't know, Klingon, would require even more complicated parsing logic to split words into lexemes that make sense.
Vocabulary would be a different story; if that's all you're dealing with you can just base your syntax on the usual positioning of grammar elements in the base language and go from there. That's what I did with var'aq -- Klingon word order is object-verb-subject, so RPN notation became the order of the day.
ObShamelessPlug -- to see how it works, check out http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq
/Brian
The irony of that comment is that although everyone in the Greater Boston area who's actually heard his name has adopted him as a Bostonian, Tim Berners-Lee is a Brit... /Brian
Seems to me Java is probably the recipe language then. I'd suggest Ada, but who wants to use Ada?
/Brian