If someone can fit a GUI'd, multitasking OS in such a small amount of physical memory, why does Windows have to take up so much, or even Linux for that matter?
Yeah, I'm kind of sick of projects to port/write an OS for every godawful piece of obsolete hardware available. Why waste time and effort making an elaborate system for paleolithic hardware, when one can get the same experience simply by running Windows XP on a P4?
(Although to be fair I should point out that GNOME and KDE have recently become Windows without the grace and stability, because apparently an OS isn't competitive anymore unless it has fruity throbbing widgets.)
the new Itaniums. Which are cheaper and faster than these G5s.
Nice troll. The dual G5 starts at $3000. The *single* 900Mhz Itanium2 stats at $3300, and the dual 1Ghz Itanium2 starts at $4900 (although it does have a much higher upper memory limit). Not cheaper by any stretch of the imagination. And having tested a number of applications on the Itanium2 versus a Xeon 2.4, I'm remarkably unimpressed. Given the way the G5 trashes the Pentium 4/Xeon in those benchmarks (yeah, I know, benchmark shmenchmark), I have no reason to believe that the Itanium2 will be a better deal.
I think what Apple means by "64-bit desktop" is "64-bit consumer desktop", though I agree their precise wording is a little dishonest. I've been using a 64-bit desktop at home for several years (SGI box), but I'm a big nerd.
when money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.
This is the rationale I hear for buying expensive hardware from Sun or SGI (and I agree, for the most part). I've never heard it used to justify buying Intel's latest offering - PCs are retired quicker than any other platform. If you really need to make a crappy PC workstation last for ten years, you're better off buying a cheaper box, like a 2.4Ghz P4 (which isn't slow by any means), and use all the money you save to purchase spare boxes or parts. You'll definitely need them if you want to keep the system going for ten years.
I know from experience that there are few things more annoying than trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of PCs that have been obsolete and off warranty for two years. . . sometimes, when the moon is out, I can still hear those IBM Pentium 90s calling my name.
One would think so, but this delusion is has spread much further than just the FSF.
That bill says nothing whatsoever about banning proprietary software.
The Linux "Community" should be more concerned about the bad public image they are creating for themselves.
Oooooh, another consultant tells me why I should be using Windows instead, this time because a bunch of pimply 13-year-olds make Linux look bad. (He's also the first person I've read who actually takes all of SCO's claims seriously, which is sort of bizarre.) I thought you said the main criterion should be whether Linux does the job or not?
The Software Communist sentiment comes from the continued attempts by certain members of the "Open Source Community" to lobby for laws which ban commercial software.
The ranting of a few delusional leaders in the FSF does not represent the opinion of the many professionals who use, develop, or promote Linux. Particularly not IBM or Linus (who is on record as saying that everyone should be able to choose whatever license they please for the software they write). I haven't even heard RMS weigh in on the SCO lawsuit, so why drag his distinctively weird opinions into this?
If Linux does the job for you, that's all it should take, in a free market, to want to adopt it, correct?
Wrong. Marx felt that capitalists produced nothing of value and became rich off the hard work of others. In contrast, this is actually encouraged in the open-source community. All the companies getting involved in open-source do so because they (rightly or not) see the potential for profit, not because their executive board still thinks Marx was right. Open-source software represents a very different R&D model, but there's nothing inherently less capitalistic about the way companies have adopted it. IBM is pimping Linux because IBM thinks that Linux will help it get more boxes out the door. Linus works on Linux because of personal pride and ambition (as well as simply enjoying it), and gets paid well to do so.
The Canopy Group buys Ford, then claims that since every production-line car in the world was derived in one way or another from Henry Ford's system. They start with General Motors but have an eye on an unexpectedly thriving kit-car industry. Is the analogy clear, and good enough?
Yes, and no. The problem is that SCO's case rests on the details of contracts that many of these companies signed in order to license the original code. You're entirely correct that SCO has done fuckall to develop these technologies they're claiming rights over, but if the contracts are as restrictive enough to give SCO that kind of power, they may have a case. That's a pretty pathetic justification for claiming theft of your IP, and it certainly doesn't leave the Linux community at fault, but this is irrelevant to contract law. SCO doesn't need rights to the code itself (although it does appear to be claiming those as well - I'm still confused), as long as the contracts stipulate that the licensor can control the distribution of associated technologies. (Which is itself doubtful, but we'll see.)
I would gauge a majority of us geeks still have at least one pot smoking friend who is a functional member of the community.
I had a number of friends in college and high school who smoked pot regularly. Many of them were perfectly functional in their work lives, and were generally talented and intelligent people. Almost all of them, however, tended to let their social lives revolve around getting high. Everyone's experiences differ, but I've lost several friends this way, and now avoid the stuff as a result.
Indeed, this despite the increasingly obvious fact that the French were right.
This rests on the dubious assumption that the French foreign policy is dictated by anything other than greed and anti-Americanism. I'm about to reach the point where I hold my nose and vote for Bush in 2004 just because it'll piss off the French and Germans for another four years.
That sounded like bullshit to me, until I found the pictures of Darl McBride and a couple of protestors. God knows the Linux community can be, um, a little humorless and self-congratulatory, and SCO has veered into the realm of insanity. The concept of Darl laughing with the pro-Linux people simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever, since he's accused nearly half the tech industry of outright theft. It's hard to think of any of this as "FUN" when you're dealing with a group of corporate raiders who are literally trying to sabotage the future of computing.
I'd reached the conclusion a long time ago that Linux was grossly overrated, but it's also done great things for my workplace and my research field, and it's a shame to see another sleazebag IP holding company try to hijack that. I don't condone IP theft or DDoS attacks on SCO's website, but I also wouldn't speak to the likes of Darl McBride except through a lawyer.
Oh, by the way, the Communism thing isn't funny any more. It's not McCarthyism, but it's pretty fucking stupid and offensive. Most of us in The Real World use and like Linux because it helps us do our jobs and make (and save!) money, not because it fits our half-baked socialist ideals.
Re:Does anyone else think this plausible?
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1
I think you need to seek professional help. They have medications for people with your condition.
Seriously, this bullshit can mostly be disproven simply by virtue of two simple observations:
1) It's IBM who's getting sued. They probably employ more lawyers than the DOJ, and it would be catastrophic for economy if the company were seriously damaged.
2) David Boies represented Al Gore in the Florida mess. Gates, Rove, and Cheney are some of the most vindictive motherfuckers imaginable, and there's no way they'd associated with Boies.
Excellent article.
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That was one of the most informative things I've ever read on Slashdot. Thanks, Ian.
However, there's a large discrepancy in some of SCO's claims. There are two scenarios here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Linux source code incorporated original SysV code, due to formerly wide distribution of this code (e.g. in Solaris), textbook examples, or sloppiness of contributors from large vendors. This would be theft of code that SCO legally owns the copyright to.
2. Technologies developed by other companies as add-ons to SysV were incorporated into Linux. This is not copyright infringement at all, but violates contracts signed by the original parties.
SCO is clearly claiming (2), and if the contract holds up they may be partially correct (in the sense that IBM fucked up, but not in their wild accusations against the Linux community). I didn't get a clear impression from the article if they're seriously claiming (1) as well. They've stated as much in the past, but the only specific basis for the lawsuit that they've mentioned so far is the incorporation of novel technologies that were not developed by AT&T/SCO.
As I recall, apple destroyed all the Cube marketing material with mention of ATI cards, and all the Cubes with ATI cards in them were opened up and swapped out with nvidia cards, and didn't make them available for another 3 months.
Wrong. All the Cubes still had ATI cards. There's a persistent rumor that Apple shipped a lower-end card on purpose in response to the leak.
The manufacturer of the graphics board (I think it was NVidia, but I can't remember for sure) leaked their specs the day before the Cube was going to be announced. It was a h0t card. Jobs punished them by pulling the card and replacing it with a less impressive card from the same manufacturer
It was ATI. However, the rumor about Jobs yanking the better card for a less impressive one never rang true- this is not a decision that can just be made overnight, and the machines I saw at MacWorld when they introduced the Cube already had the "replacement" card. I can't imagine how they could have had these ready in such a short time.
Is it a new tousle-your-hair, too-bad-you-don't-understand-the-realities-of-busi ness term for "techie"?
I think in this case it was a reference to the, um, free spirits in the community like RMS. Think "granola" - it's implying that the entire Linux community is a bunch of hippies. Which is a pretty insulting (and uninformed) tone for a Forbes reporter to take.
In order to be libel it has to be false. This would get very difficult to prove...
I remember one article about an IP holding company, whose function was mainly to sue the crap out of any big corporation that might be infringing its very dubious patents. One lawyer (from Intel, I think) publically referred to the litigating company as "patent extortionists" but was forced to back down after they sued him. (He now calls them "patent trolls".)
So, what SCO is claiming isn't that Linux has code taken from anything SCO ever created.
The rest of your comment is fascinating, but this part does not seem correct. SCO certainly does seem to have been claiming this all along - in particularly, they've claimed that code theft in Linux predates IBM's involvement. Their attacks on Linus and the community also suggest that the code was in fact SCO's IP, which would not be the case if the contract were the only basis for the suit. The simplest explanation is that SCO is just full of shit, but it's increasingly impossible to understand what the basis for their lawsuit actually is, or whether it has any grounding in reality.
No, it makes them seem a little more bizarre. SCO is still claiming that large chunks of original SysV code ended up in Linux, and that this predates IBM's involvement in the kernel. They have only recently amended their claims to cover technologies developed as add-ons to SysV but not originally part of it, which might be covered under some contract. Darl's bluster about the Linux community's indifference to IP rights has no real basis if the only violation were along the lines of IBM adding JFS or RCU to the kernel.
I'd say this is actually the most bizarre claim made by SCO yet. I find it hard to believe that companies like IBM would have ever signed a contract that gave away so many potential pieces of IP, but this is almost more plausible than the idea that IBM would have allowed wholesale copying of original SysV code into Linux. I've heard of contracts this dumb, but IBM has produced many operating systems in the past fifty years and there's no reason for them to sign away their future for a not-particularly-advanced chunk of code like SysV.
Regardless, SCO's credibility is pretty much gone due to the way they continually change their claims to be even more nonsensical.
What SCO produces is certified as Unix by The Open Group. Therefore, it scales to a large number of processors. Linux does not scale nearly as well as any Unix.
I don't think processor scalability has anything to do with Unix certification. Someone else mentioned in another thread that SCO scaled to four procs; I know Linux will do at least that on PC hardware, and up to 64 in some cases (SGI Altix). I've never touched SCO Unix, but my sense is that it's just as bound by the limitations of the architecture as Linux is.
I'm not defending SCO, I'm just pointing out that there are reasons companies are still using Unix instead of Linux on servers.
Yes, but not on PC hardware. The RISC boxes that IBM, SGI, Sun, and others push are years more advanced than a cheapo Dell server. Slapping a certified Unix onto the Dell does not make it into a highend machine.
A large part of the Linux hype is based around budget computing and standardization. Anyone who needs the features offered by a "real" heavy-duty Unix would be out of their mind to waste money on PC hardware.
Re:Rules for crappy movies (slightly off topic)
on
Remember The Wizard?
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· Score: 1
Movies based on video games will suck.
No argument here...
Movies based on Saturday Night Live characters or skits will suck
Dude, what about "Blues Brothers"?
Remakes of classic movies will suck, but lots of people will go to see them anyway because they don't remember the originals.
I though "Ocean's Eleven" kicked ass - not a masterpiece, but an all-around fun movie. But the original wasn't exactly "classic", I guess.
Sequels to movies where a majority of the original characters do not return will suck.
One word: Aliens. (At least they kept the most important character, though.) I'm pretty sure there are some other examples where most of the original characters were missing but the sequel was still awesome.
If these characters are not played by the original actors, the movie will suck.
Harrison Ford replaced Alec Baldwin in the Tom Clancy movies, and most people consider the sequels to be pretty good (if not up to the level of Red October).
Patent's, Copyright, et. al. are tools of mental slavery. Noone can create in a cultural vacuum. Taking things out of the public domain is, to borrow their term, "stealing" from society.
So if Microsoft spends years on the next version of Windows, they should be obligated to release it for free with code to the entire world, profits be damned? Or if Disney creates a movie, and then releases it on DVD, it's immoral for them to copyright it because they're stealing from society? Or if a pharmaceutical company invents a miracle anti-aging drug, they should be forced to give it to the world for free?
Let's be honest: your utopian ideas about information sharing only hold true for a communist society, where individual property/wealth does not exist and innovation is meaningless. I'm not a big fan of the direction IP laws and practices are going in the US, but I'm not so naive as to assume that our economy could function just fine with the complete destruction of patents and copyrights. I applaud any software company that wishes to distribute its products as open-source, but the burden of proof is on them and you to prove that it's financially viable.
all the "Open-this" and "Open-that" software being tossed about in the early-to-mid-90's that really had nothing open about it at all.
The "Open" implied an open standard, meaning that even though the source wasn't necessarily available, the spec was, so that anyone could write an app that interoperated with your product. Thus OpenVMS was simply VMS with POSIX compliance- developers could expect it to behave in certain ways. I guess this was largely to reduce fragmentation among OSes.
In contrast, Windows is not open in any sense of the word, because much of the behavior simply isn't documented at all outside of Microsoft, making interoperability a pain in the ass. One could compare NFS, which is well documented and has implementations on every Unix and Windows, to CIFS/SMB, which everyone else has to reverse engineer. If Microsoft were to show us just the spec, without any source code, that would be enough to make something truly compatible. Hence, "open" without "open-source".
I for one have no problem with mandatory open source.
Do you have a problem with, say, Brazil requiring all Brazilian software companies to release their products under the GPL? RMS hasn't made it much of a secret that he'd sort of like to see that kind of thing happen. In fact, the FSF is adamantly opposed to developers getting to chose their license - they've made some pretty blistering remarks about Linus Torvalds for his views on license choice.
But you're right, the GPL certainly doesn't stand for choice. (I like the GPL, but I agree with Linus.)
So what if you lose the choice to be a slave, you still have all the choices that matter.
What the fuck does that have to do with software licenses?
Slashdot Mirror
If someone can fit a GUI'd, multitasking OS in such a small amount of physical memory, why does Windows have to take up so much, or even Linux for that matter?
Yeah, I'm kind of sick of projects to port/write an OS for every godawful piece of obsolete hardware available. Why waste time and effort making an elaborate system for paleolithic hardware, when one can get the same experience simply by running Windows XP on a P4?
(Although to be fair I should point out that GNOME and KDE have recently become Windows without the grace and stability, because apparently an OS isn't competitive anymore unless it has fruity throbbing widgets.)
the new Itaniums. Which are cheaper and faster than these G5s.
Nice troll. The dual G5 starts at $3000. The *single* 900Mhz Itanium2 stats at $3300, and the dual 1Ghz Itanium2 starts at $4900 (although it does have a much higher upper memory limit). Not cheaper by any stretch of the imagination. And having tested a number of applications on the Itanium2 versus a Xeon 2.4, I'm remarkably unimpressed. Given the way the G5 trashes the Pentium 4/Xeon in those benchmarks (yeah, I know, benchmark shmenchmark), I have no reason to believe that the Itanium2 will be a better deal.
I think what Apple means by "64-bit desktop" is "64-bit consumer desktop", though I agree their precise wording is a little dishonest. I've been using a 64-bit desktop at home for several years (SGI box), but I'm a big nerd.
With regular updates (every ~6-9months), Apple will be so far ahead before Longhorn comes out, that MS might actually have to try to compete!
And Apple owners' pocketbooks will be so much more empty. I'm impressed with Apple's technology, but the repeated paid upgrades are sort of extreme.
when money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.
This is the rationale I hear for buying expensive hardware from Sun or SGI (and I agree, for the most part). I've never heard it used to justify buying Intel's latest offering - PCs are retired quicker than any other platform. If you really need to make a crappy PC workstation last for ten years, you're better off buying a cheaper box, like a 2.4Ghz P4 (which isn't slow by any means), and use all the money you save to purchase spare boxes or parts. You'll definitely need them if you want to keep the system going for ten years.
I know from experience that there are few things more annoying than trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of PCs that have been obsolete and off warranty for two years. . . sometimes, when the moon is out, I can still hear those IBM Pentium 90s calling my name.
One would think so, but this delusion is has spread much further than just the FSF.
That bill says nothing whatsoever about banning proprietary software.
The Linux "Community" should be more concerned about the bad public image they are creating for themselves.
Oooooh, another consultant tells me why I should be using Windows instead, this time because a bunch of pimply 13-year-olds make Linux look bad. (He's also the first person I've read who actually takes all of SCO's claims seriously, which is sort of bizarre.) I thought you said the main criterion should be whether Linux does the job or not?
The Software Communist sentiment comes from the continued attempts by certain members of the "Open Source Community" to lobby for laws which ban commercial software.
The ranting of a few delusional leaders in the FSF does not represent the opinion of the many professionals who use, develop, or promote Linux. Particularly not IBM or Linus (who is on record as saying that everyone should be able to choose whatever license they please for the software they write). I haven't even heard RMS weigh in on the SCO lawsuit, so why drag his distinctively weird opinions into this?
If Linux does the job for you, that's all it should take, in a free market, to want to adopt it, correct?
Yes. What's your point?
The OSS movment is communistic.
Wrong. Marx felt that capitalists produced nothing of value and became rich off the hard work of others. In contrast, this is actually encouraged in the open-source community. All the companies getting involved in open-source do so because they (rightly or not) see the potential for profit, not because their executive board still thinks Marx was right. Open-source software represents a very different R&D model, but there's nothing inherently less capitalistic about the way companies have adopted it. IBM is pimping Linux because IBM thinks that Linux will help it get more boxes out the door. Linus works on Linux because of personal pride and ambition (as well as simply enjoying it), and gets paid well to do so.
The Canopy Group buys Ford, then claims that since every production-line car in the world was derived in one way or another from Henry Ford's system. They start with General Motors but have an eye on an unexpectedly thriving kit-car industry. Is the analogy clear, and good enough?
Yes, and no. The problem is that SCO's case rests on the details of contracts that many of these companies signed in order to license the original code. You're entirely correct that SCO has done fuckall to develop these technologies they're claiming rights over, but if the contracts are as restrictive enough to give SCO that kind of power, they may have a case. That's a pretty pathetic justification for claiming theft of your IP, and it certainly doesn't leave the Linux community at fault, but this is irrelevant to contract law. SCO doesn't need rights to the code itself (although it does appear to be claiming those as well - I'm still confused), as long as the contracts stipulate that the licensor can control the distribution of associated technologies. (Which is itself doubtful, but we'll see.)
I would gauge a majority of us geeks still have at least one pot smoking friend who is a functional member of the community.
I had a number of friends in college and high school who smoked pot regularly. Many of them were perfectly functional in their work lives, and were generally talented and intelligent people. Almost all of them, however, tended to let their social lives revolve around getting high. Everyone's experiences differ, but I've lost several friends this way, and now avoid the stuff as a result.
Indeed, this despite the increasingly obvious fact that the French were right.
This rests on the dubious assumption that the French foreign policy is dictated by anything other than greed and anti-Americanism. I'm about to reach the point where I hold my nose and vote for Bush in 2004 just because it'll piss off the French and Germans for another four years.
That sounded like bullshit to me, until I found the pictures of Darl McBride and a couple of protestors. God knows the Linux community can be, um, a little humorless and self-congratulatory, and SCO has veered into the realm of insanity. The concept of Darl laughing with the pro-Linux people simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever, since he's accused nearly half the tech industry of outright theft. It's hard to think of any of this as "FUN" when you're dealing with a group of corporate raiders who are literally trying to sabotage the future of computing.
I'd reached the conclusion a long time ago that Linux was grossly overrated, but it's also done great things for my workplace and my research field, and it's a shame to see another sleazebag IP holding company try to hijack that. I don't condone IP theft or DDoS attacks on SCO's website, but I also wouldn't speak to the likes of Darl McBride except through a lawyer.
Oh, by the way, the Communism thing isn't funny any more. It's not McCarthyism, but it's pretty fucking stupid and offensive. Most of us in The Real World use and like Linux because it helps us do our jobs and make (and save!) money, not because it fits our half-baked socialist ideals.
I think you need to seek professional help. They have medications for people with your condition.
Seriously, this bullshit can mostly be disproven simply by virtue of two simple observations:
1) It's IBM who's getting sued. They probably employ more lawyers than the DOJ, and it would be catastrophic for economy if the company were seriously damaged.
2) David Boies represented Al Gore in the Florida mess. Gates, Rove, and Cheney are some of the most vindictive motherfuckers imaginable, and there's no way they'd associated with Boies.
That was one of the most informative things I've ever read on Slashdot. Thanks, Ian.
However, there's a large discrepancy in some of SCO's claims. There are two scenarios here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Linux source code incorporated original SysV code, due to formerly wide distribution of this code (e.g. in Solaris), textbook examples, or sloppiness of contributors from large vendors. This would be theft of code that SCO legally owns the copyright to.
2. Technologies developed by other companies as add-ons to SysV were incorporated into Linux. This is not copyright infringement at all, but violates contracts signed by the original parties.
SCO is clearly claiming (2), and if the contract holds up they may be partially correct (in the sense that IBM fucked up, but not in their wild accusations against the Linux community). I didn't get a clear impression from the article if they're seriously claiming (1) as well. They've stated as much in the past, but the only specific basis for the lawsuit that they've mentioned so far is the incorporation of novel technologies that were not developed by AT&T/SCO.
As I recall, apple destroyed all the Cube marketing material with mention of ATI cards, and all the Cubes with ATI cards in them were opened up and swapped out with nvidia cards, and didn't make them available for another 3 months.
Wrong. All the Cubes still had ATI cards. There's a persistent rumor that Apple shipped a lower-end card on purpose in response to the leak.
The manufacturer of the graphics board (I think it was NVidia, but I can't remember for sure) leaked their specs the day before the Cube was going to be announced. It was a h0t card. Jobs punished them by pulling the card and replacing it with a less impressive card from the same manufacturer
It was ATI. However, the rumor about Jobs yanking the better card for a less impressive one never rang true- this is not a decision that can just be made overnight, and the machines I saw at MacWorld when they introduced the Cube already had the "replacement" card. I can't imagine how they could have had these ready in such a short time.
Is it a new tousle-your-hair, too-bad-you-don't-understand-the-realities-of-busi ness term for "techie"?
I think in this case it was a reference to the, um, free spirits in the community like RMS. Think "granola" - it's implying that the entire Linux community is a bunch of hippies. Which is a pretty insulting (and uninformed) tone for a Forbes reporter to take.
In order to be libel it has to be false. This would get very difficult to prove...
I remember one article about an IP holding company, whose function was mainly to sue the crap out of any big corporation that might be infringing its very dubious patents. One lawyer (from Intel, I think) publically referred to the litigating company as "patent extortionists" but was forced to back down after they sued him. (He now calls them "patent trolls".)
So, what SCO is claiming isn't that Linux has code taken from anything SCO ever created.
The rest of your comment is fascinating, but this part does not seem correct. SCO certainly does seem to have been claiming this all along - in particularly, they've claimed that code theft in Linux predates IBM's involvement. Their attacks on Linus and the community also suggest that the code was in fact SCO's IP, which would not be the case if the contract were the only basis for the suit. The simplest explanation is that SCO is just full of shit, but it's increasingly impossible to understand what the basis for their lawsuit actually is, or whether it has any grounding in reality.
it make SCO's claims seem a little less bizarre.
No, it makes them seem a little more bizarre. SCO is still claiming that large chunks of original SysV code ended up in Linux, and that this predates IBM's involvement in the kernel. They have only recently amended their claims to cover technologies developed as add-ons to SysV but not originally part of it, which might be covered under some contract. Darl's bluster about the Linux community's indifference to IP rights has no real basis if the only violation were along the lines of IBM adding JFS or RCU to the kernel.
I'd say this is actually the most bizarre claim made by SCO yet. I find it hard to believe that companies like IBM would have ever signed a contract that gave away so many potential pieces of IP, but this is almost more plausible than the idea that IBM would have allowed wholesale copying of original SysV code into Linux. I've heard of contracts this dumb, but IBM has produced many operating systems in the past fifty years and there's no reason for them to sign away their future for a not-particularly-advanced chunk of code like SysV.
Regardless, SCO's credibility is pretty much gone due to the way they continually change their claims to be even more nonsensical.
What SCO produces is certified as Unix by The Open Group. Therefore, it scales to a large number of processors. Linux does not scale nearly as well as any Unix.
I don't think processor scalability has anything to do with Unix certification. Someone else mentioned in another thread that SCO scaled to four procs; I know Linux will do at least that on PC hardware, and up to 64 in some cases (SGI Altix). I've never touched SCO Unix, but my sense is that it's just as bound by the limitations of the architecture as Linux is.
I'm not defending SCO, I'm just pointing out that there are reasons companies are still using Unix instead of Linux on servers.
Yes, but not on PC hardware. The RISC boxes that IBM, SGI, Sun, and others push are years more advanced than a cheapo Dell server. Slapping a certified Unix onto the Dell does not make it into a highend machine.
A large part of the Linux hype is based around budget computing and standardization. Anyone who needs the features offered by a "real" heavy-duty Unix would be out of their mind to waste money on PC hardware.
Movies based on video games will suck.
No argument here...
Movies based on Saturday Night Live characters or skits will suck
Dude, what about "Blues Brothers"?
Remakes of classic movies will suck, but lots of people will go to see them anyway because they don't remember the originals.
I though "Ocean's Eleven" kicked ass - not a masterpiece, but an all-around fun movie. But the original wasn't exactly "classic", I guess.
Sequels to movies where a majority of the original characters do not return will suck.
One word: Aliens. (At least they kept the most important character, though.) I'm pretty sure there are some other examples where most of the original characters were missing but the sequel was still awesome.
If these characters are not played by the original actors, the movie will suck.
Harrison Ford replaced Alec Baldwin in the Tom Clancy movies, and most people consider the sequels to be pretty good (if not up to the level of Red October).
The best description I ever read of the Ewoks referred to them as "Happy-Meal Ready."
Patent's, Copyright, et. al. are tools of mental slavery. Noone can create in a cultural vacuum. Taking things out of the public domain is, to borrow their term, "stealing" from society.
So if Microsoft spends years on the next version of Windows, they should be obligated to release it for free with code to the entire world, profits be damned? Or if Disney creates a movie, and then releases it on DVD, it's immoral for them to copyright it because they're stealing from society? Or if a pharmaceutical company invents a miracle anti-aging drug, they should be forced to give it to the world for free?
Let's be honest: your utopian ideas about information sharing only hold true for a communist society, where individual property/wealth does not exist and innovation is meaningless. I'm not a big fan of the direction IP laws and practices are going in the US, but I'm not so naive as to assume that our economy could function just fine with the complete destruction of patents and copyrights. I applaud any software company that wishes to distribute its products as open-source, but the burden of proof is on them and you to prove that it's financially viable.
all the "Open-this" and "Open-that" software being tossed about in the early-to-mid-90's that really had nothing open about it at all.
The "Open" implied an open standard, meaning that even though the source wasn't necessarily available, the spec was, so that anyone could write an app that interoperated with your product. Thus OpenVMS was simply VMS with POSIX compliance- developers could expect it to behave in certain ways. I guess this was largely to reduce fragmentation among OSes.
In contrast, Windows is not open in any sense of the word, because much of the behavior simply isn't documented at all outside of Microsoft, making interoperability a pain in the ass. One could compare NFS, which is well documented and has implementations on every Unix and Windows, to CIFS/SMB, which everyone else has to reverse engineer. If Microsoft were to show us just the spec, without any source code, that would be enough to make something truly compatible. Hence, "open" without "open-source".
I for one have no problem with mandatory open source.
Do you have a problem with, say, Brazil requiring all Brazilian software companies to release their products under the GPL? RMS hasn't made it much of a secret that he'd sort of like to see that kind of thing happen. In fact, the FSF is adamantly opposed to developers getting to chose their license - they've made some pretty blistering remarks about Linus Torvalds for his views on license choice.
But you're right, the GPL certainly doesn't stand for choice. (I like the GPL, but I agree with Linus.)
So what if you lose the choice to be a slave, you still have all the choices that matter.
What the fuck does that have to do with software licenses?