If the government is paying for some software to be written, its motivation is surely that it wants to use the software. Improvements that are economically viable for a commercial developer to make will be useful to atleast a large number of small organisations or a small number of large organisations. There is enough capital behind the interest in these improvements that they would get implemented in the commercial or GPL mode.
If the government releases the code under the BSD-style license, commercial developers can make the improvements, then sell the software back to the government. If the government uses the GPL the improvements will still be made, and the government gets them without further cost.
It seems clear to me that the GPL offers greater value to the government.
I'm thinking of getting a Psion 5MX at the moment, for three reasons:
* Possibility of developing for it in Java * Every user review I see is ecstatic * Could be recycled to run Linux in future (but why at the current stage of application development I'm not sure)
Could you clear up the score on the first item? I can't find any solid Psion-specific information on the possibilities of developing and running your own Java applications on a Psion 5MX.
Look at the subject of this post. That's the subject YOU set. Now look back at the post you originally replied to. Can you see the words 'Open Source', or even 'open source' anywhere in it? NO. That's because I didn't describe MPlayer as 'Open Source' (which is what the people behind the 'Open Source Definition' cliaim to own) or as 'open source', which is distributing software as source code, which has been going on for as long as people have been writing software. I just said that it wasn't closed source. And it isn't. Closed source software is software distributed purely as binary, not anything that isn't ordained and approved of by some arbitrary bunch of license nazis.
So you are in fact the idiot here, for criticising me for something I didn't do.
Further, the Open Source Initiative is not the be all and end all of open source. They are just a group with a published definition of how _they_ like software distributed. They can't stop other people from describing their own software, distributed as source code, as open source, though perhaps they have some claim to Open Source(tm) - although clearly some idiots would like them to have that power.
The post I was replying to didn't describe MPlayer as not fitting the 'Open Source Definition', he described it as closed source, which is to say the end user doesn't get the source at all. The 'Open Source Definition' isn't the be all and end all of what is and isn't open source, its just someone's personal standards, published. You can only dispute the status of some project if they actually claim their license meets the 'Open Source Definition'. The fact remains that MPlayer is ONLY distributed as source, which to me is the best way. I'd much rather source only than binary only (plus I don't like having to trust some else's binaries).
MPlayer is the very opposite of closed source - they ONLY distribute source. Why do people have it in for what is clearly the most full featured, fastest video file format player on Linux? (Not commenting on its DVD playback capabilities as I prefer to watch DVD on my TELEVISION like any normal person would.)
Oops, forgot to say that I read this first a few days ago over on Nintendojo - http://www.nintendojo.com/ look in the News panel on the right for the story.
The story is wrong. Its an arcade board, not a graphics board. This is like a console but for producing arcade games instead, just like there was an arcade version of the Dreamcast sort of (it was of course more powerful), (the Naomi?), and also an arcade version of the PlayStation (the arcade Ridge Racer machine was built on it).
I'm amazed the story doesn't mention Andy Hopper's work at what is currently called 'AT&T Labs' (which has had a number of owners over the years, and is _not_ something that came out of AT&T).
Andy Hopper's early work at Cambridge University involved the building of the Cambridge Ring, an early internet. He also created the first implementation of something close to the heart of ever/. reader - ethernet on a chip.
Over the years he and his companies have done much work on networking technologies, and the applications they enable. Pervasive computing, or sentient computing as they call it, is one of these applications.
The massively popular remote-control desktop software VNC was a product of this research. It was created so that the sentient computing system could detect which computer monitor you are nearest to and facing, then export your computer's display to it. Once it was decided that this software on its own held little financial promise Andy decided it should be open sourced, to generate good will, further the project and raise its profile. He doesn't believe in sitting on code that you are not fully exploiting.
One benefit to theater owners, however: they won't have to pay as much for the actual distribution media the film comes on. If they have multiple theaters that want to show the film, currently they need multiple prints. With digital, I don't know for sure how they will do it, but I imagine they will ship out the movie on magnetic tape, and load up one or more RAID arrays at the theater to drive the projectors. (Anyone who knows for sure, please speak up.)
Excuse my cynicism, but I find it difficult to believe that the distributors would take this opportunity to lower prices. Whilst their costs will drop, they will sell this in terms of it requiring less skills for the projectionist, and offering better quality to the audience through lack of degradation.
There's certainly no way they will get charged less for the rights to show it on multiple screens. Digital information might be copiable at virtually no cost, but the distributor's business is raising money by hiring out as many copies of each film as they can. And look out for the DRM stuff required to ensure the cinemas can't continue to play films beyond their rental period, and that these digital movies can't be copied through the Inet.
Then again, I don't work in the cinema industry. Is my understanding of the business model correct? Or do the film distributors perhaps get a cut per ticket sold? If that were the case, much greater benefits could be realised, though the rewards for fraud might be higher too.
My favourite new feature is that lightweight components can now be run in headless mode - see
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/awt/AWTC ha nges.html#headless
You have to set a property to true:
-Djava.awt.headless=true
as a switch when running the VM for example. Then you can generate server-side graphics on Unix without having to run XVfb. This has been an annoyance for some time, as you had to have different deployment rules depending on your target OS, as NT always has a graphical environment taking up resources whether you want it or not, so it wasn't an issue there.
The upshot is that you can now use java.awt.Image.BufferedImage as an image source in servlets that generate dynamic images, instead of java.awt.Frame, which always seemed wrong. It uses less resources too, as it doesn't have to do a context-switch to your X server to create images!
Hey, there are lots of great new features in this new release, but that is the first one that made life easier for me.
Has anything come out of Sun about this yet? Last I heard they were going to replace CDE with GNOME in the next Solaris. GNOME is principly developed by Ximian people, and Miguel begins his article in Dr Dobbs Journal this month by implying that he would have prefered to have been able to implement Evolution in C#/.NET/Mono. It seems clear that he would like to eventually port GNOME to Mono. That would be a very anti-Sun move.
But I haven't seen anything about this around. Has anyone seen anything?
Bang on! I followed both GNOME and KDE for a while, but eventually I gave in on GNOME for a number of reasons, foremost of which being the complexity of a build from source - first identify which thirty or so tarballs you need for the base system, then which order to build them in.
From what I have read, getting it installed on package-based Linux distributions isn't much easier. Maybe what started out as disorganisation became a great business opportunity for Ximian - providing a simpler way to get GNOME installed? Meanwhile, many people are just happy building KDE.
How is this different from the many popular cartoon characters? Indeed, in the US, don't you get TV shows presented by Mickey Mouse or whatever? I'd be surprised if there aren't any shows for children presented by Pokemon characters. And for grown-ups, how about the South Park characters?
After all, it couldn't be more expensive than CG - where you need a team of animators for each virtual celebs. Those animators eventually become celebs in their own right, requiring higher rates of pay... which leads me neatly back to Walt Disney:-)
If you mean the 7110, I've had mine for nearly two years, and while it hasn't been the most reliable 'phone ever, its not broken yet. The worst thing is the stubby aerial, mine got a bit crunched but still performs perfectly. Also, the microphone in the slider connects to the 'phone by copper tracks on one side of the slider, tracked by a sprung copper pin. Being copper, the pin is particularly sensitive to heat. In the summer it can expand to the point where it doesn't move, so the microphone doesn't work! By far the worst feature isn't the slider but the firmware - its ridden with bugs, which is the main reason I never bother with WAP these days. What a shame, the low bandwidth mobile Internet held so much promise.
The GPL doesn't say they have to make the source available to _everyone_ if they distribute the binary, just that they have to make it available to anyone who they supplied a binary to. If you haven't in some way acquired a binary _from_them_ they don't have to give you the source but the person you got it from does. If you don't have a binary you don't have a _right_ to the source.
The Java environment is what attracts me to this device more than anything. The practicality of Linux and the development bliss of Java are a killer combination. I have been putting off the purchase of a Palm that can run Java for some time due to the lack of developer docs for it. Now Sharp deliver Java, Linux and solid documentation!
Re:i'm going to suffer for this but...
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the reply, I didn't mean to suggest you were making it up (although I can see it came across that way). You've inadvertantly hit the nail on the head here. Things like screen resolution, the set up of multi-monitor and 3D hardware acceleration are in the control of X itself, and though it wouldn't be such a mammoth task for KDE to include a configuration tool to look after this stuff (though they couldn't get around the restarting of X which underlies KDE), they are reluctant to do it, because it is seen as a job for the distributions.
Unfortunately you end up where some distributions make it easy and others don't, and also that the style and positioning of the control for that sort of thing is bolted on in a way that doesn't exactly shout 'integration'.
Personally I think that KDE and GNOME really should tackle things like X configuration, after all, the latest version of KDE does include kernel configuration. Am I being cynical by pointing out that many KDE and GNOME people are employed by distributions who differentiate their product based on the lack of these tools on other distributions?
I might just get off my arse and write a KDE X configuration tool.
Re:i'm going to suffer for this but...
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 2
Could you point out where the 'unusual place' this setting is made on the KDE desktop? I have never found it. Are you sure you are not using a distribution-specific configuration tool rather than something that is part of KDE? It sounds like you mean SAX (found on SuSe) or similar, which is probably on a different menu from all the KDE stuff. If it is in there (I would expect it to be in the Control Centre), where is it? I would very much like to try it out.
Does the Japanese machine play US games?
on
Gamecube Guts
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A month ago a number of sites indicated that when they gutted their GameCubes they found two switches near the position of the region switch that was seen on demonstration machines at shows like SpaceWorld and E3. It was hypothesised that by pushing different switches (I think they were pushed by lugs on the disc door?) you could choose which region of software the machine would accept. It was proved that Japanese software only worked in one of the four possible switch combinations.
A week or so ago it was reported that some of the mainstream game review sites now had final US region discs. Ever since I have been waiting to see if anyone is able to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If it is right, I (and many others) would cancel our orders for an import US machine, and get a Japanese one right now. Ultimately I will be buying US region software, and possibly the odd European title - how I long for the machine to have an easy multi-region hack!
Couldn't IBM claim to have a viable business plan for which it needs these docs, to use on its open source? They write free software to help them to sell profitable hardware and connect in an open way closed source software. That would be sweet, to see IBM get some serious revenge on MS after all these year!
Didn't Microsoft buy a very large, possibly controlling chunk of Citrix about three years ago? I remember reading at the time that the conditions of the investment were that MS got a director on the board and very easy terms for integrating TS into Win2k.
I read this in the print edition last month, so if this doesn't work out, perhaps they cut the web version.
After the stuff about the desktop war, he goes on to conclude that because Linux is already succeeding in the server market, that is where open source developers should concentrate, abandoning further work on (specifically) KDE and GNOME. He completely misses the points that:
1 - Developers are doing this for free. If there is money and market share in developing for the server market, that is where companies will (and do) develop their products for Linux. Open source developers don't often work on things that are specifically there to make money for someone else, and are of no use to themselves.
2 - Its the desktop software that Linux is perceived to be weakest, so why does it make more sense to abandon it and work on the stuff that is already doing well? And how are people supposed to develop the server software without an adequate desktop environment? I get the impression that he wants people to use Windows on their workstation, writing code for Linux. Why would I be happy to give BillG $200 for a WinXP license, but love Linux so much that I did hundreds of hours of free work on stuff that made someone else money?
Fundamentally, this guy has latched on to the current/. trend that you get more karma for slating Linux than you do for boosting it. He has applied this to getting paid for writing the article, and Wired has applied it to getting people to buy their 'zine.
One more thing. The writer specifically says that Kodak digital cameras are not supported. Funny then that my Kodak DC200 works fine with gPhoto for the last year.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government is paying for some software to be written, its motivation is surely that it wants to use the software. Improvements that are economically viable for a commercial developer to make will be useful to atleast a large number of small organisations or a small number of large organisations. There is enough capital behind the interest in these improvements that they would get implemented in the commercial or GPL mode.
If the government releases the code under the BSD-style license, commercial developers can make the improvements, then sell the software back to the government. If the government uses the GPL the improvements will still be made, and the government gets them without further cost.
It seems clear to me that the GPL offers greater value to the government.
Nethack runs on the Psion Series 5MX too.
I'm thinking of getting a Psion 5MX at the moment, for three reasons:
* Possibility of developing for it in Java
* Every user review I see is ecstatic
* Could be recycled to run Linux in future (but why at the current stage of application development I'm not sure)
Could you clear up the score on the first item? I can't find any solid Psion-specific information on the possibilities of developing and running your own Java applications on a Psion 5MX.
PlayStation 2 is built with RDRAM, where the higher bandwidth makes perfect sense.
Look at the subject of this post. That's the subject YOU set. Now look back at the post you originally replied to. Can you see the words 'Open Source', or even 'open source' anywhere in it? NO. That's because I didn't describe MPlayer as 'Open Source' (which is what the people behind the 'Open Source Definition' cliaim to own) or as 'open source', which is distributing software as source code, which has been going on for as long as people have been writing software. I just said that it wasn't closed source. And it isn't. Closed source software is software distributed purely as binary, not anything that isn't ordained and approved of by some arbitrary bunch of license nazis.
So you are in fact the idiot here, for criticising me for something I didn't do.
Further, the Open Source Initiative is not the be all and end all of open source. They are just a group with a published definition of how _they_ like software distributed. They can't stop other people from describing their own software, distributed as source code, as open source, though perhaps they have some claim to Open Source(tm) - although clearly some idiots would like them to have that power.
The post I was replying to didn't describe MPlayer as not fitting the 'Open Source Definition', he described it as closed source, which is to say the end user doesn't get the source at all. The 'Open Source Definition' isn't the be all and end all of what is and isn't open source, its just someone's personal standards, published. You can only dispute the status of some project if they actually claim their license meets the 'Open Source Definition'. The fact remains that MPlayer is ONLY distributed as source, which to me is the best way. I'd much rather source only than binary only (plus I don't like having to trust some else's binaries).
MPlayer is the very opposite of closed source - they ONLY distribute source. Why do people have it in for what is clearly the most full featured, fastest video file format player on Linux? (Not commenting on its DVD playback capabilities as I prefer to watch DVD on my TELEVISION like any normal person would.)
Oops, forgot to say that I read this first a few days ago over on Nintendojo - http://www.nintendojo.com/ look in the News panel on the right for the story.
The story is wrong. Its an arcade board, not a graphics board. This is like a console but for producing arcade games instead, just like there was an arcade version of the Dreamcast sort of (it was of course more powerful), (the Naomi?), and also an arcade version of the PlayStation (the arcade Ridge Racer machine was built on it).
I'm amazed the story doesn't mention Andy Hopper's work at what is currently called 'AT&T Labs' (which has had a number of owners over the years, and is _not_ something that came out of AT&T).
/. reader - ethernet on a chip.
Andy Hopper's early work at Cambridge University involved the building of the Cambridge Ring, an early internet. He also created the first implementation of something close to the heart of ever
Over the years he and his companies have done much work on networking technologies, and the applications they enable. Pervasive computing, or sentient computing as they call it, is one of these applications.
The massively popular remote-control desktop software VNC was a product of this research. It was created so that the sentient computing system could detect which computer monitor you are nearest to and facing, then export your computer's display to it. Once it was decided that this software on its own held little financial promise Andy decided it should be open sourced, to generate good will, further the project and raise its profile. He doesn't believe in sitting on code that you are not fully exploiting.
Excuse my cynicism, but I find it difficult to believe that the distributors would take this opportunity to lower prices. Whilst their costs will drop, they will sell this in terms of it requiring less skills for the projectionist, and offering better quality to the audience through lack of degradation.
There's certainly no way they will get charged less for the rights to show it on multiple screens. Digital information might be copiable at virtually no cost, but the distributor's business is raising money by hiring out as many copies of each film as they can. And look out for the DRM stuff required to ensure the cinemas can't continue to play films beyond their rental period, and that these digital movies can't be copied through the Inet.
Then again, I don't work in the cinema industry. Is my understanding of the business model correct? Or do the film distributors perhaps get a cut per ticket sold? If that were the case, much greater benefits could be realised, though the rewards for fraud might be higher too.
My favourite new feature is that lightweight components can now be run in headless mode - see
C ha nges.html#headless
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/awt/AWT
You have to set a property to true:
-Djava.awt.headless=true
as a switch when running the VM for example. Then you can generate server-side graphics on Unix without having to run XVfb. This has been an annoyance for some time, as you had to have different deployment rules depending on your target OS, as NT always has a graphical environment taking up resources whether you want it or not, so it wasn't an issue there.
The upshot is that you can now use java.awt.Image.BufferedImage as an image source in servlets that generate dynamic images, instead of java.awt.Frame, which always seemed wrong. It uses less resources too, as it doesn't have to do a context-switch to your X server to create images!
Hey, there are lots of great new features in this new release, but that is the first one that made life easier for me.
Has anything come out of Sun about this yet? Last I heard they were going to replace CDE with GNOME in the next Solaris. GNOME is principly developed by Ximian people, and Miguel begins his article in Dr Dobbs Journal this month by implying that he would have prefered to have been able to implement Evolution in C#/.NET/Mono. It seems clear that he would like to eventually port GNOME to Mono. That would be a very anti-Sun move.
But I haven't seen anything about this around. Has anyone seen anything?
Bang on! I followed both GNOME and KDE for a while, but eventually I gave in on GNOME for a number of reasons, foremost of which being the complexity of a build from source - first identify which thirty or so tarballs you need for the base system, then which order to build them in.
From what I have read, getting it installed on package-based Linux distributions isn't much easier. Maybe what started out as disorganisation became a great business opportunity for Ximian - providing a simpler way to get GNOME installed? Meanwhile, many people are just happy building KDE.
Doesn't this kit include some sort of networking? They could be running Netscape on another machine, with the display exported over X11.
How is this different from the many popular cartoon characters? Indeed, in the US, don't you get TV shows presented by Mickey Mouse or whatever? I'd be surprised if there aren't any shows for children presented by Pokemon characters. And for grown-ups, how about the South Park characters?
:-)
After all, it couldn't be more expensive than CG - where you need a team of animators for each virtual celebs. Those animators eventually become celebs in their own right, requiring higher rates of pay... which leads me neatly back to Walt Disney
If you mean the 7110, I've had mine for nearly two years, and while it hasn't been the most reliable 'phone ever, its not broken yet. The worst thing is the stubby aerial, mine got a bit crunched but still performs perfectly. Also, the microphone in the slider connects to the 'phone by copper tracks on one side of the slider, tracked by a sprung copper pin. Being copper, the pin is particularly sensitive to heat. In the summer it can expand to the point where it doesn't move, so the microphone doesn't work! By far the worst feature isn't the slider but the firmware - its ridden with bugs, which is the main reason I never bother with WAP these days. What a shame, the low bandwidth mobile Internet held so much promise.
The GPL doesn't say they have to make the source available to _everyone_ if they distribute the binary, just that they have to make it available to anyone who they supplied a binary to. If you haven't in some way acquired a binary _from_them_ they don't have to give you the source but the person you got it from does. If you don't have a binary you don't have a _right_ to the source.
The Java environment is what attracts me to this device more than anything. The practicality of Linux and the development bliss of Java are a killer combination. I have been putting off the purchase of a Palm that can run Java for some time due to the lack of developer docs for it. Now Sharp deliver Java, Linux and solid documentation!
Thanks for the reply, I didn't mean to suggest you were making it up (although I can see it came across that way). You've inadvertantly hit the nail on the head here. Things like screen resolution, the set up of multi-monitor and 3D hardware acceleration are in the control of X itself, and though it wouldn't be such a mammoth task for KDE to include a configuration tool to look after this stuff (though they couldn't get around the restarting of X which underlies KDE), they are reluctant to do it, because it is seen as a job for the distributions.
Unfortunately you end up where some distributions make it easy and others don't, and also that the style and positioning of the control for that sort of thing is bolted on in a way that doesn't exactly shout 'integration'.
Personally I think that KDE and GNOME really should tackle things like X configuration, after all, the latest version of KDE does include kernel configuration. Am I being cynical by pointing out that many KDE and GNOME people are employed by distributions who differentiate their product based on the lack of these tools on other distributions?
I might just get off my arse and write a KDE X configuration tool.
Could you point out where the 'unusual place' this setting is made on the KDE desktop? I have never found it. Are you sure you are not using a distribution-specific configuration tool rather than something that is part of KDE? It sounds like you mean SAX (found on SuSe) or similar, which is probably on a different menu from all the KDE stuff. If it is in there (I would expect it to be in the Control Centre), where is it? I would very much like to try it out.
A month ago a number of sites indicated that when they gutted their GameCubes they found two switches near the position of the region switch that was seen on demonstration machines at shows like SpaceWorld and E3. It was hypothesised that by pushing different switches (I think they were pushed by lugs on the disc door?) you could choose which region of software the machine would accept. It was proved that Japanese software only worked in one of the four possible switch combinations.
A week or so ago it was reported that some of the mainstream game review sites now had final US region discs. Ever since I have been waiting to see if anyone is able to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If it is right, I (and many others) would cancel our orders for an import US machine, and get a Japanese one right now. Ultimately I will be buying US region software, and possibly the odd European title - how I long for the machine to have an easy multi-region hack!
Has anyone heard any further news on this stuff?
Couldn't IBM claim to have a viable business plan for which it needs these docs, to use on its open source? They write free software to help them to sell profitable hardware and connect in an open way closed source software. That would be sweet, to see IBM get some serious revenge on MS after all these year!
Didn't Microsoft buy a very large, possibly controlling chunk of Citrix about three years ago? I remember reading at the time that the conditions of the investment were that MS got a director on the board and very easy terms for integrating TS into Win2k.
I read this in the print edition last month, so if this doesn't work out, perhaps they cut the web version.
/. trend that you get more karma for slating Linux than you do for boosting it. He has applied this to getting paid for writing the article, and Wired has applied it to getting people to buy their 'zine.
After the stuff about the desktop war, he goes on to conclude that because Linux is already succeeding in the server market, that is where open source developers should concentrate, abandoning further work on (specifically) KDE and GNOME. He completely misses the points that:
1 - Developers are doing this for free. If there is money and market share in developing for the server market, that is where companies will (and do) develop their products for Linux. Open source developers don't often work on things that are specifically there to make money for someone else, and are of no use to themselves.
2 - Its the desktop software that Linux is perceived to be weakest, so why does it make more sense to abandon it and work on the stuff that is already doing well? And how are people supposed to develop the server software without an adequate desktop environment? I get the impression that he wants people to use Windows on their workstation, writing code for Linux. Why would I be happy to give BillG $200 for a WinXP license, but love Linux so much that I did hundreds of hours of free work on stuff that made someone else money?
Fundamentally, this guy has latched on to the current
One more thing. The writer specifically says that Kodak digital cameras are not supported. Funny then that my Kodak DC200 works fine with gPhoto for the last year.