So long as OS/X is bound exclusivily to some "Apple specific" hardware, I do not think it makes much difference in terms of x86 GNU/Linux desktop adoption whether that hardware is PPC or X86.
Requiring all phone companies in the state of Utah to listen into/filter everybody's telephone call to make sure someone doesn't speak an "obscene" word?
...then it must be a steer! But then again, will one of these animals even be seen next year, or once again, true to Microsoft, will they have another year of all hat and no cattle?
Isn't this article a bit condensending, and saying, essentially, that if Ford were Microsoft, well, its great that Pinto gas tanks no longer catch fire so easily, and a real terrible shame about all those people who were killed in the interum, but hey, it's not our problem, and anyway what is past is past.
I usually underclock my servers here when I expect them to be left alone/unattended, such as in a phone closet, and just expect them to be always up. Most tasks are not that compute bound, especially not the ones I might typically setup a small server for, such as an internal file server, internet packet routing, or a phone control system.
The benefit for heat reduction (and less thermal sensitivity in an enclosed space) is often a worthwhile tradeoff over a server I can just leave alone and expect to run for years at a time.
No it is explicitly not GPL compatible. Curious, isn't that. One might even argue part of an effort to divide the community, while at the same time containing clauses restraining future legal actions of those who accept the license.
Not if a patent legally bars them from doing reverse engineering in the first place or from effectivily sharing the results afterward. Yes, software idea patents can trump reverse engineering, because they are exclusive grants denying ALL alternative implimentations of the patent.
This is a part of why it is completely legal to distribute patented true type hinting algorithms (freetype) in source form, but illegal for users in countries where the patent is in force from actually compiling and then running said binaries.
In particular; consider "Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas." taken from the same page...
What changed? How is that an "improvement" exactly?
First, supporting many platforms often reveal interesting and important bugs which can be missed because they do not manifest themselves well or often on the "primary" platform or target architecture most commonly being used.
Second, platforms are not stagnent. Code that only works on 386 linux may some day have to deal with a x64 only world. Who knows what may happen in the future. Making decisions because you reject portability means you reject the future for your code as well.
Third, different compilers are very useful for finding less obvious bugs. Ideally this means having a choice beyond gcc, if one is talking about C/C++, for example:). Using a single compiler means bugs your compiler doesn't itself know will likely be retained. Even using different versions of gcc can help. Different compilers often are good at finding completely different sets of bugs in source.
Finally, pointer/integer size and endian prejudices are evil in C/C++ code. You will find these things very quickly if you spend your whole life exclusivily on i386 and one day try to port to ppc.
The EU competition ministry can impose multiple fines, however, I do not think they can ever exceed 5% individually, or 10% collectivily, of world-wide revenues in the effected products. And of course, they can be subject to delay, and reduction to perhaps meaningless levels on appeal. Some have also suggested that as this is less than the unusual profit margins in the monopoly products, and so even that may have no direct impact on Microsoft's behavior (Microsoft could simply raise prices for example).
However, the treaty of Rome and subsequent enabling treaties which empower the EU compeitition ministry to do this also gives them one other important power which they have so far not used; the right to set aside and void contracts. This was originally intended to set asside member state and commercial contracts which were created under unfair bids, but I don't recall seeing anything in the treaty language nessisarly limiting it's action in this regard other than past uses. What if the EU competition ministry really grew a set, and choose instead to try and void the Microsoft EULA within the European Union as an instrument of unfair bargaining by an illegal monopoly? It may just actually have the authority to do this. Certainly it does have the clear authority, which it has used before, to explicitly cancel existing government and private contracts, though would normally do so individually rather than wholesale. Certainly if they even tried to do this, whether attacking large individual contracts, or, wholesale liberation of their consumers, it would be a much more effective action against Microsoft's monoply business practices than any piddly fine...
When I was in seventh grade, that was actually my science fair project (true story, I guess that was ?1975?). Oxygen from moon rocks. Hint: I used a nice big concave mirror I convinced the school to get for me, and as one can imagine, I had a lot of fun with it! Soon thereafter I lost interest though, once I discovered the far greater joy of homemade Thermite. I will take my $250K now please, thank you very much!
Functioning was much more like capitalism than communism. In the Marx ideal, after all, the workers own the means of production directly. This never actually happened in the Soviet Union; private capitalists owning farms and factories were simply replaced by a state functioning as a consolidated monopoly owner. Once you look at it this way, other parallels become rather startling and more obviously similar to dysfunctional forms of capitalism, such as private monopolies, as Adam Smith wrote about so long ago. There is more in common, for example, between Gates and Stalin in this respect, than you might otherwise initially consider.
Cuba, like the former Soviet Union, are perhaps best classified as "state capitalists", where the state acts as a sole monopoly replacing a private capital class. The Soviet Union in particular was the ultimate example of the danger of monopoly capitalism, which is true whether it is public or private.
I recall pushing an old russian model car over the Macedonian border once. Now those were mechanically simple and generally realiable; any simpler and they would have had a hand crank! That particular one suffered from "cautastrofic vehicle impact failure", a common occurance in Bulgaria where there are few stop lights that work. While putting four westerners in such a car may cause it to overheat in just a few km and burn off the tires, they were otherwise generally reliable vehicles, even if my big American ride-on lawn mower has a similar horesepower rating.
I do prefer if cars were to remain mechanically simple. How much tech is really needed here? And what's the average NJ greese monkey to do once all cars require a geek to maintain?
I gather what is being asked is how to manage updates of specific free software packages (firefox, openoffice) that are deployed on a microsoft windows platform. I see lots of people mentioning apt-get and such, but I don't believe that is what is being asked here.
At the time mach was started as "a new kernel foundation for UNIX development", posix was not as complete as it is today. Threads in particular, loading and management of memory, sockets, and other services were not really "standardized" in UNIX back then. All these things mach choose to go one way, and the rest of the unix world went a different way. Other things, like async file management and msgports, mach introduced wholy new as a "better" way, and have no direct correspondence to unix/posix as we know it today either. Yet, everyone tries to remake mach into posixoid unix when clearly it is a very different animal, whether that was the original intent or not.
Mach was never originally engineering for posix compliance, and yet the two main operating systems built from it, osx (and darwin), and hurd, each have tried hard to tame and make mach behave posix compliant. This has sometimes produced interesting compatibility issues, especially in the contenous issue of posix threading, and has resulted in compatability layers which weigh down the system further.
Given this compatibility effort, mach is not a fair comparison, either in hurd or osx, for comparing the merits and performance between that of monolithic and microkernel achitectures because so much extra stuff was added to a design never intended for posix. Something like QNX4 and later, designed both as a microkernel and for posix, or perhaps a pure mach system running applications designed specifically for mach, might be a more fare basis to compare the value of microkernel vs monolithic architectures.
Mach on hurd is easier to grasp and test since many of the lower level mach kernel services are still represented and usable there. Apple seems to be trying to eliminate visibility of as many of the lower level mach services from application developers as possible. Yet, there are still many things that can only be done in the mach kernel on osx or darwin (such as threads that can be cancelled on socket operations or sleeps). If one wanted a bsd/posix compliant environment, I think Apple would have been far better off starting from PPC/xBSD or Linux kernels, rather than trying to rope and rebuild mach to fit into something it was never originally designed for.
This is ultimately a story about someone falsly masquarading as a jouranlist using the resources of SCO to promote SCO's corporate message and intimidate it's critics. I did not mean to suggest the newsworthy part was about PJ, but it is definately about people like Maureen, and about how news sites and journalsm is being misused and undermined. That is the larger story. The smaller one is perhaps about criminal violations in persuit of intimidation and the tactics of SCO. The background missing from this story is needed to explain these things and why it's not some soap opera or dispute between personalities.
I tend to agree that the way this article was posted with the expectation of "insider knowledge", or the idea that all the facts are already presumed to be "well known". That makes it impossible for someone unaware of the past history or prerequisite knowledge to understand why this is significent. I wish the submitter had done a better job in this regard or that somebody had put together a "faq" which could be referenced. But I completely agree with his reason for not putting a link to that site.
The patent does not actually focus so much on the user interface, which seems to have the most comments, but rather on the idea that some "data" can be "tagged" in some manner as "emergency data", and pooled, presented, and then sent when a "emergency event" is invoked.
My favorate quote from the patent While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.
Since the "emergency data" seems to reside on the device, it is arguably different than "911" services, which use a seperate external (carrier hosted) database. But that suggests all kinds of dangerous and interesting possibilities for mischief and misuse.
While I generally believe software and business method patenting are morally indefensible, this particular patent I find particularly offensive. Imagine, in a similar vein, a patent on a "method of collecting volunteers to to be on alert for fire alarms, and distributing them with appropriate equipment to the site of a fire".
Public services, especially those that can be mandated, and must be universal by their very nature, should never be subject to patents or other such restrictions, and if they ever accidently are, then it is the primary responsibility of government to directly intervene, either through emminent domain, or perhaps through an action such as "misuse of patent", which really should become a new class of federal crime. There is already some existing federal case law related to "misuse of copyright" which involves forfiture of copyrights.
Slashdot Mirror
The benefit for heat reduction (and less thermal sensitivity in an enclosed space) is often a worthwhile tradeoff over a server I can just leave alone and expect to run for years at a time.
In particular; consider "Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas." taken from the same page...
What changed? How is that an "improvement" exactly?
Second, platforms are not stagnent. Code that only works on 386 linux may some day have to deal with a x64 only world. Who knows what may happen in the future. Making decisions because you reject portability means you reject the future for your code as well.
Third, different compilers are very useful for finding less obvious bugs. Ideally this means having a choice beyond gcc, if one is talking about C/C++, for example :). Using a single compiler means bugs your compiler doesn't itself know will likely be retained. Even using different versions of gcc can help. Different compilers often are good at finding completely different sets of bugs in source.
Finally, pointer/integer size and endian prejudices are evil in C/C++ code. You will find these things very quickly if you spend your whole life exclusivily on i386 and one day try to port to ppc.
However, the treaty of Rome and subsequent enabling treaties which empower the EU compeitition ministry to do this also gives them one other important power which they have so far not used; the right to set aside and void contracts. This was originally intended to set asside member state and commercial contracts which were created under unfair bids, but I don't recall seeing anything in the treaty language nessisarly limiting it's action in this regard other than past uses. What if the EU competition ministry really grew a set, and choose instead to try and void the Microsoft EULA within the European Union as an instrument of unfair bargaining by an illegal monopoly? It may just actually have the authority to do this. Certainly it does have the clear authority, which it has used before, to explicitly cancel existing government and private contracts, though would normally do so individually rather than wholesale. Certainly if they even tried to do this, whether attacking large individual contracts, or, wholesale liberation of their consumers, it would be a much more effective action against Microsoft's monoply business practices than any piddly fine...
If Hormel wants to exclusivily "own" all the spam, I would be very happy to send them all mine!
I do prefer if cars were to remain mechanically simple. How much tech is really needed here? And what's the average NJ greese monkey to do once all cars require a geek to maintain?
Given this compatibility effort, mach is not a fair comparison, either in hurd or osx, for comparing the merits and performance between that of monolithic and microkernel achitectures because so much extra stuff was added to a design never intended for posix. Something like QNX4 and later, designed both as a microkernel and for posix, or perhaps a pure mach system running applications designed specifically for mach, might be a more fare basis to compare the value of microkernel vs monolithic architectures.
Mach on hurd is easier to grasp and test since many of the lower level mach kernel services are still represented and usable there. Apple seems to be trying to eliminate visibility of as many of the lower level mach services from application developers as possible. Yet, there are still many things that can only be done in the mach kernel on osx or darwin (such as threads that can be cancelled on socket operations or sleeps). If one wanted a bsd/posix compliant environment, I think Apple would have been far better off starting from PPC/xBSD or Linux kernels, rather than trying to rope and rebuild mach to fit into something it was never originally designed for.
The patent does not actually focus so much on the user interface, which seems to have the most comments, but rather on the idea that some "data" can be "tagged" in some manner as "emergency data", and pooled, presented, and then sent when a "emergency event" is invoked.
My favorate quote from the patent While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.
Since the "emergency data" seems to reside on the device, it is arguably different than "911" services, which use a seperate external (carrier hosted) database. But that suggests all kinds of dangerous and interesting possibilities for mischief and misuse.
While I generally believe software and business method patenting are morally indefensible, this particular patent I find particularly offensive. Imagine, in a similar vein, a patent on a "method of collecting volunteers to to be on alert for fire alarms, and distributing them with appropriate equipment to the site of a fire".
Public services, especially those that can be mandated, and must be universal by their very nature, should never be subject to patents or other such restrictions, and if they ever accidently are, then it is the primary responsibility of government to directly intervene, either through emminent domain, or perhaps through an action such as "misuse of patent", which really should become a new class of federal crime. There is already some existing federal case law related to "misuse of copyright" which involves forfiture of copyrights.
Maybe it is time for another tatoo...