In judging Kubrick, perhaps you should consider that he himself wrote 2001? I have an old paperback of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, and the description on the back clearly states that it is a novel based on the film, not the novel that the film was based on. Kubrick thought the whole thing up and wrote the screenplay. Clarke had the SF name, so was able to effectively cash in on it all.
One would have thought that the natural format to choose for a press release on a web site would be HTML, just like the rest of the web site it is hosted on. That way, 100% of the world's Internet users, who are the only ones that will be able to retrieve the file, will be able to read it, regardless of the operating systems and user software they choose to install and/or pay for.
Further, most of the 95% of the World that you believe use MS Word are not the people that will have any interest in reading about this. The people who are interested are mainly scientists and engineers, two groups who tend to be more likely than average to use a platform other than a PC running some version of Windows. These guys are more likely to write things in LaTeX than Word. But they will have an equal chance with everyone else of being able to read HTML.
I certainly don't have any software installed on my system that can read Word files. I know of several programs that could do an aproximate conversion, but why should I install extra software, using my time and computing resources, to read this, when its not even close to the format that any reasonable person would have expected it to be in anyway?
Open source doesn't mean limited resource, it means that the source is open to anyone that wants to inspect it. Just because the chip design is open source does not mean that it wasn't produced by full-time paid professional chip designers, on company time. It just means that beyond those who designed it, more people can inspect the code and suggest improvements.
People have got to get over this modern idea that open source means produced in a bedroom by amateurs. Twenty-five years or so ago, most commercial software was open source - as in it came with source when you bought it. And people didn't complain about it, or claim that this somehow reduced it's quality.
Dammit, is there no end to the damage Microsoft continues to do to the English language? First, every new feature becomes an 'innovation', and then every software library became a 'technology', as I was told when my company recently sent all of us developers off for.net indoctrination. And now/. readers have begun to believe that GTK+ isn't a mere GUI class library, or Bonobo software for object oriented IPC, but infact raw technology, too.
When will the madness end? Perhaps Judge Jackson should change the Microsoft penalty from splitting the company up to cutting out Bill Gate's tongue? Wow, wouldn't that make Larry Ellison stop and think for just a minute;-)
This is something that is already done by hardware modems, and is the reason that you need to connnect your 56kbps modem to a 115kbps UART. If you use such a modem, and you have a ppp monitor watch the throughput when transfering HTML compared to bzip2-compressed tar archives, both from fast servers. You will max your modem out somewhere between 4k and 6k per second on the bzip2 data (depending on line quality), but you will get as much as 12k per second on the HTML.
Software modems, on the other hand, might benefit from an increase in processor speed. But it depends how fast the original processor was as to whether an increase is important.
Maybe NT seems to be left unpatched so often because there are more machines to patch, and the admins don't have the time or management skills to reach them all? Isn't one of the big selling points of large Unix systems that one system is up to the tasks of four or more NT systems, so you only need to administer one machine, so called service consolidation? I'm sure Sun were advertising this last year, when they were promoting their version of samba.
I was under the impression that possessing a circumvention device was illegal. Just because its in an email, its still stored on your computer. Whether you understand what it is, or wanted to receive it, or not. I don't think a determined prosecutor would treat it any differently than when the DEA bust your door down so that they can put some crack in your appartment then bust you for it;-)
Nice idea, but bear in mind you are making everyone you send email to, technically, into a a criminal. How is your mother going to feel when they put her in jail because you sent her an email!
1) You can't be certain that the DVD drive is literally a 'standard' drive. They have contracted someone to make a massive volume of them, and could easily specify some little quirk that makes software control easier. Its not as if they are going down to their local hardware shop and picking up a crate of whatever DVD drive is on special offer.
2) You can produce access restriction systems that are implemented entirely in software. They could do something similar to CSS on DVD. Its easy to break, but its illegal to break it. Not a problem for pirates because they are already breaking one law so it matters little that they break another. But no legitimate company could release a product that bypassed the scheme.
3) By producing a console that allows easy ports of Windows games, they are not going to 'win' the console war. They might create a large market for their product, perhaps partly by displacing a number of companies that currently sell gaming hardware for PCs, but their product is not in the same areana as traditional consoles. People who play console games today generally have no interest in playing PC games. The genres are so different. People don't buy Sony, Nintendo and Sega consoles because they can't afford a PC, they buy them because they have great console-style games - a large proportion will already have a PC. The last PC game I felt any urge to play was Civilisation 2. I could care less if Half Life ever gets released for my Dreamcast, I am not going to buy it while I can continue playing Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure and Jet Set/Grind Radio. And as for this whole business of 'winning' the console war, that is just monopoly talk. There aren't winners and losers, generally, in any market. There are just the more successful and the less successful. Nintendo haven't sold anywhere near as many N64s as Sony have sold PlayStations, but they still turn a very healthy profit. I doubt they consider themselves 'losers'.
Most of the best games come out only in non-Windows versions. The most popular sometimes get ported to Windows. First they come out for Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Eventually the poor cousin gets a port if it looks like enough people will buy it. For example, Metal Gear Solid came out on Windows PC recently, and that was launched on PlayStation only 2 years ago - hold on doesn't it only take six months for games to come out on Linux after a Windows release?
Linux ports of games are not going to make that much difference, what people tied to Windows for games need to do is buy a console. They will soon discover that they no longer need to buy a 200 dollar video card every six months (not to mention processors, RAM and bigger hard disks), and yet the graphics continue to improve with each new game release!
Re:Optimizing the source build
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
Am I correct in saying that the processor specific optimisations will do nothing on most distributions, because you need to be compiling with pgcc for it to have any effect, and that (Pentium-specific) compiler (a patch against gcc) only ships with Mandrake? Does it indeed ship with Mandrake, or do they just use it to build the packages that come with their distribution?
Does Napster really have 50 million users currently paying them $5 a month for their service? If it does, that would make them much bigger than some giant organisations - its like having 20% of all US consumers! I know they have users all over the world, but seriously the biggest group must be Americans, due to the cost of bandwidth in most of the rest of the world.
It certainly isn't common knowledge that Napster is such a profit power-house. So assuming that they don't have their users all signed up, who is going to give the $1billion to bribe the record companies not to take them down?
I don't use Napster myself, so please excuse me if I am a little out of touch with the Napster user experience.
Oracle 8i does work on Slackware. But its installation routine relies on specific paths for some system utilities that only apply to Red Hat and its derrivatives. I have successfully installed 8i on Slackware by following the advice here.
Re:A shame, because wireless leapfrogs infrastruct
on
Ricochet Dead By June?
·
· Score: 1
Your comment suggests that everyone and his dog in England has wireless. That's a surprise to me, and I have lived in England all my 26 years. The only open wireless access point I have ever heard of is run by a research company in the city I live in (Cambridge), and only works on line of site or something (but it is on top of a tall building so that doesn't exclude too many people).
If you know of lots of publicly available wireless Internet companies, spill the beans! I haven't even heard of a company that makes extensive use of that technology.
Your whole comment is based on the idea of there being this 99% of computer software users that don't care about the benefits of open source. That may be true about the people that use computers, but it isn't true of those who plan, manage and pay for the deployment of software.
I am guessing that you think that the majority of software sales by value come from consumers, and that the most significant software in terms of sales is office applications, games, etc. That is simply not the case. Those software sales are worth a lot of money, but they are not king. Software bought by governments and private companies is worth a lot more. The people sitting at their desks using a computer to write a letter or enter some financial information may not care for open source, but the head of IT, the CFO and ultimately the managing director are open to its benefits.
This is especially true for large organisations, who also make up most of the sales. The opportunity to get software for low costs, and then have as much control over that software as they need is a significant attraction. Interoperability is another significant attraction, along with the ease of doing your own integration work on serious system software - which led to a large bank open sourcing their business to business connection software last week (reported on/. and throughout the IT industry). It is also why IBM is moving so fast on using open source, and opening their own sources - they see open source as very attractive for their customers. Don't forget that they are still the largest software (and hardware) company in the world.
You seem to think that rail guns were invented by id Software. You are joking? They popularised it, as did a number of science fiction authors, but this is an idea that came out of scientific research. I remember reading about them in one of those 'What will it be like to live on the moon' picture books when I was a child in the early 1980s.
For those who don't know what Sega Channel was (like me until yesterday), there is a good piece about it at SegaDojo here. They put this on their site yesterday - do they have inside information? Today they have an article with reasonable depth about this new Dreamcast, which they are describing as a set-top box.
EyeVision was developed under utmost secrecy after CBS Sports President Sean McManus gave the go-ahead for $2.5 million in research. In the end
CBS Sports got input from rocket scientists at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and equipment and cameras from Japan and the Internet.
That just blew my mind! Where is this place on the Internet that produces equipment and cameras? How do I convert it from bits to physical hardware?
In my view, the reason that Linux isn't 'Unix your Grandmother could use' is because the people who actually _write_the_software_ don't want that - they want real Unix (like your Grandmother can't use).
The people who want Linux to be this easy to use thing are the ones who stand around at the sidelines talking about how that is the thing that 'Linux needs'. The more adventurous ones actually begin open source projects, but never get further than discovering that they can't code.
Maybe I'm biased - I got into Linux because I wanted real Unix, without the cotton wool and safety-guards.
The trouble is that TheKompany and Helix Code/Ximian have more competition going on than just wanting the KDE project or the GNOME project to gain more market share. As I understand it, Ximian are hoping to integrate their own pay-for services into Evolution. And TheKompany intend to sell the server component that does the collaborative calendaring (and keep it closed source). So they are both competing for money from the backend of their client software - a bit like the way that Microsoft and Netscape duked it out over browsers to promote the use of their servers.
What we really need is neither of these projects, but instead something that uses open standards-based peer to peer protocols to do calendaring.
I support your view that set-top box net access is going to cause people to rethink their web-applications' reliance on particular browsers. We need to see the financial web sites begin to support these things to get some momentum.
My father is a keen private investor, making use of the full spectrum of financial services regularly. He is interested in what use he can make of the Internet, but won't touch my mother's PC. Unfortunately it runs Windows, and having seen how it can go wrong without user intervention, he won't touch it - if it goes wrong while he is using it, my mother will blame him, not Gates!
So he is only prepared to use a proper consumer Internet device. To him it is the perfect choice. The VCR, fax and microwave never malfunction, so the set-top box is going to work perfectly out of the box, right? Until he finds that it doesn't matter if his set-top works properly or not, because he's being served broken content...
As far as excluding the disabled goes, isn't it actually illegal in the EU to exclude someone from your shop because of disability? I seem to remember hearing of a move to prosecute some business using those rules because their web-site didn't work for the blind. Anyone remember that? What happened? (Its probably still waiting to go to court or something).
Steam Tunnels: what are they?
on
Infiltration
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· Score: 1
OK, the linked article, most of the linked sites, and now this comment have mentioned steam pipes and steam plants. What are they?
Seriously, I have never heard of these things. What is steam being transported for? At first I assumed that this was to remove a waste product, but then the steam plants came up. What is this steam being produced for? This all sounds like something out of an alternate reality/history, like William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's novel, 'The Difference Engine'.
Interbase has a massive source base, and has not been open source for very long - a year at most?
Open source helps to prevent back-doors from being inserted during open development. Its much easier to spot a back door being put in if its part of the latest patch submitted to the development mailing list.
Clearly someone has been reading the Interbase sources looking for this kind of thing, otherwise we wouldn't be reading this advisory.
You have obviously completely missed the point of the BSD license. That must explain why you are insulting the intelligence of those who use it by suggesting that they don't understand its implications.
People use the BSD license because they want to propogate the use of quality code. It is open source because that allows it to be improved where quality issues are found, and to facilitate the porting of it to any system, current or future. People release under the BSD license because they _want_ as many people as possible to use their code, for whatever it is found to be useful for.
They don't choose the GNU license for their code because they don't want to prevent their code from being used by anyone who hopes to generate economic activity.
Further, in this case, how would the GNU license prevent Sega from developing Dreamcast titles that run on a Linux kernel ported to Dreamcast (people are working on this)? They would only have to release the source to the kernel, not the game. And they would certainly not be prevented from charging money for a game developed which such a system.
Slashdot Mirror
In judging Kubrick, perhaps you should consider that he himself wrote 2001? I have an old paperback of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, and the description on the back clearly states that it is a novel based on the film, not the novel that the film was based on. Kubrick thought the whole thing up and wrote the screenplay. Clarke had the SF name, so was able to effectively cash in on it all.
One would have thought that the natural format to choose for a press release on a web site would be HTML, just like the rest of the web site it is hosted on. That way, 100% of the world's Internet users, who are the only ones that will be able to retrieve the file, will be able to read it, regardless of the operating systems and user software they choose to install and/or pay for.
Further, most of the 95% of the World that you believe use MS Word are not the people that will have any interest in reading about this. The people who are interested are mainly scientists and engineers, two groups who tend to be more likely than average to use a platform other than a PC running some version of Windows. These guys are more likely to write things in LaTeX than Word. But they will have an equal chance with everyone else of being able to read HTML.
I certainly don't have any software installed on my system that can read Word files. I know of several programs that could do an aproximate conversion, but why should I install extra software, using my time and computing resources, to read this, when its not even close to the format that any reasonable person would have expected it to be in anyway?
Open source doesn't mean limited resource, it means that the source is open to anyone that wants to inspect it. Just because the chip design is open source does not mean that it wasn't produced by full-time paid professional chip designers, on company time. It just means that beyond those who designed it, more people can inspect the code and suggest improvements.
People have got to get over this modern idea that open source means produced in a bedroom by amateurs. Twenty-five years or so ago, most commercial software was open source - as in it came with source when you bought it. And people didn't complain about it, or claim that this somehow reduced it's quality.
Dammit, is there no end to the damage Microsoft continues to do to the English language? First, every new feature becomes an 'innovation', and then every software library became a 'technology', as I was told when my company recently sent all of us developers off for .net indoctrination. And now /. readers have begun to believe that GTK+ isn't a mere GUI class library, or Bonobo software for object oriented IPC, but infact raw technology, too.
;-)
When will the madness end? Perhaps Judge Jackson should change the Microsoft penalty from splitting the company up to cutting out Bill Gate's tongue? Wow, wouldn't that make Larry Ellison stop and think for just a minute
This is something that is already done by hardware modems, and is the reason that you need to connnect your 56kbps modem to a 115kbps UART. If you use such a modem, and you have a ppp monitor watch the throughput when transfering HTML compared to bzip2-compressed tar archives, both from fast servers. You will max your modem out somewhere between 4k and 6k per second on the bzip2 data (depending on line quality), but you will get as much as 12k per second on the HTML.
Software modems, on the other hand, might benefit from an increase in processor speed. But it depends how fast the original processor was as to whether an increase is important.
Maybe NT seems to be left unpatched so often because there are more machines to patch, and the admins don't have the time or management skills to reach them all? Isn't one of the big selling points of large Unix systems that one system is up to the tasks of four or more NT systems, so you only need to administer one machine, so called service consolidation? I'm sure Sun were advertising this last year, when they were promoting their version of samba.
I was under the impression that possessing a circumvention device was illegal. Just because its in an email, its still stored on your computer. Whether you understand what it is, or wanted to receive it, or not. I don't think a determined prosecutor would treat it any differently than when the DEA bust your door down so that they can put some crack in your appartment then bust you for it ;-)
Nice idea, but bear in mind you are making everyone you send email to, technically, into a a criminal. How is your mother going to feel when they put her in jail because you sent her an email!
1) You can't be certain that the DVD drive is literally a 'standard' drive. They have contracted someone to make a massive volume of them, and could easily specify some little quirk that makes software control easier. Its not as if they are going down to their local hardware shop and picking up a crate of whatever DVD drive is on special offer.
2) You can produce access restriction systems that are implemented entirely in software. They could do something similar to CSS on DVD. Its easy to break, but its illegal to break it. Not a problem for pirates because they are already breaking one law so it matters little that they break another. But no legitimate company could release a product that bypassed the scheme.
3) By producing a console that allows easy ports of Windows games, they are not going to 'win' the console war. They might create a large market for their product, perhaps partly by displacing a number of companies that currently sell gaming hardware for PCs, but their product is not in the same areana as traditional consoles. People who play console games today generally have no interest in playing PC games. The genres are so different. People don't buy Sony, Nintendo and Sega consoles because they can't afford a PC, they buy them because they have great console-style games - a large proportion will already have a PC. The last PC game I felt any urge to play was Civilisation 2. I could care less if Half Life ever gets released for my Dreamcast, I am not going to buy it while I can continue playing Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure and Jet Set/Grind Radio. And as for this whole business of 'winning' the console war, that is just monopoly talk. There aren't winners and losers, generally, in any market. There are just the more successful and the less successful. Nintendo haven't sold anywhere near as many N64s as Sony have sold PlayStations, but they still turn a very healthy profit. I doubt they consider themselves 'losers'.
Most of the best games come out only in non-Windows versions. The most popular sometimes get ported to Windows. First they come out for Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Eventually the poor cousin gets a port if it looks like enough people will buy it. For example, Metal Gear Solid came out on Windows PC recently, and that was launched on PlayStation only 2 years ago - hold on doesn't it only take six months for games to come out on Linux after a Windows release?
Linux ports of games are not going to make that much difference, what people tied to Windows for games need to do is buy a console. They will soon discover that they no longer need to buy a 200 dollar video card every six months (not to mention processors, RAM and bigger hard disks), and yet the graphics continue to improve with each new game release!
Am I correct in saying that the processor specific optimisations will do nothing on most distributions, because you need to be compiling with pgcc for it to have any effect, and that (Pentium-specific) compiler (a patch against gcc) only ships with Mandrake? Does it indeed ship with Mandrake, or do they just use it to build the packages that come with their distribution?
Does Napster really have 50 million users currently paying them $5 a month for their service? If it does, that would make them much bigger than some giant organisations - its like having 20% of all US consumers! I know they have users all over the world, but seriously the biggest group must be Americans, due to the cost of bandwidth in most of the rest of the world.
It certainly isn't common knowledge that Napster is such a profit power-house. So assuming that they don't have their users all signed up, who is going to give the $1billion to bribe the record companies not to take them down?
I don't use Napster myself, so please excuse me if I am a little out of touch with the Napster user experience.
Oracle 8i does work on Slackware. But its installation routine relies on specific paths for some system utilities that only apply to Red Hat and its derrivatives. I have successfully installed 8i on Slackware by following the advice here.
Your comment suggests that everyone and his dog in England has wireless. That's a surprise to me, and I have lived in England all my 26 years. The only open wireless access point I have ever heard of is run by a research company in the city I live in (Cambridge), and only works on line of site or something (but it is on top of a tall building so that doesn't exclude too many people).
If you know of lots of publicly available wireless Internet companies, spill the beans! I haven't even heard of a company that makes extensive use of that technology.
Your whole comment is based on the idea of there being this 99% of computer software users that don't care about the benefits of open source. That may be true about the people that use computers, but it isn't true of those who plan, manage and pay for the deployment of software.
/. and throughout the IT industry). It is also why IBM is moving so fast on using open source, and opening their own sources - they see open source as very attractive for their customers. Don't forget that they are still the largest software (and hardware) company in the world.
I am guessing that you think that the majority of software sales by value come from consumers, and that the most significant software in terms of sales is office applications, games, etc. That is simply not the case. Those software sales are worth a lot of money, but they are not king. Software bought by governments and private companies is worth a lot more. The people sitting at their desks using a computer to write a letter or enter some financial information may not care for open source, but the head of IT, the CFO and ultimately the managing director are open to its benefits.
This is especially true for large organisations, who also make up most of the sales. The opportunity to get software for low costs, and then have as much control over that software as they need is a significant attraction. Interoperability is another significant attraction, along with the ease of doing your own integration work on serious system software - which led to a large bank open sourcing their business to business connection software last week (reported on
You seem to think that rail guns were invented by id Software. You are joking? They popularised it, as did a number of science fiction authors, but this is an idea that came out of scientific research. I remember reading about them in one of those 'What will it be like to live on the moon' picture books when I was a child in the early 1980s.
For those who don't know what Sega Channel was (like me until yesterday), there is a good piece about it at SegaDojo here. They put this on their site yesterday - do they have inside information? Today they have an article with reasonable depth about this new Dreamcast, which they are describing as a set-top box.
Check this paragraph from the article:
Keeping a secret
EyeVision was developed under utmost secrecy after CBS Sports President Sean McManus gave the go-ahead for $2.5 million in research. In the end
CBS Sports got input from rocket scientists at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and equipment and cameras from Japan and the Internet.
That just blew my mind! Where is this place on the Internet that produces equipment and cameras? How do I convert it from bits to physical hardware?
Are you seriously suggesting that anyone would _kill_ for the GPL? That is the kind of statement that tarnishes the reputation of GPL advocates.
In my view, the reason that Linux isn't 'Unix your Grandmother could use' is because the people who actually _write_the_software_ don't want that - they want real Unix (like your Grandmother can't use).
The people who want Linux to be this easy to use thing are the ones who stand around at the sidelines talking about how that is the thing that 'Linux needs'. The more adventurous ones actually begin open source projects, but never get further than discovering that they can't code.
Maybe I'm biased - I got into Linux because I wanted real Unix, without the cotton wool and safety-guards.
The trouble is that TheKompany and Helix Code/Ximian have more competition going on than just wanting the KDE project or the GNOME project to gain more market share. As I understand it, Ximian are hoping to integrate their own pay-for services into Evolution. And TheKompany intend to sell the server component that does the collaborative calendaring (and keep it closed source). So they are both competing for money from the backend of their client software - a bit like the way that Microsoft and Netscape duked it out over browsers to promote the use of their servers.
What we really need is neither of these projects, but instead something that uses open standards-based peer to peer protocols to do calendaring.
I support your view that set-top box net access is going to cause people to rethink their web-applications' reliance on particular browsers. We need to see the financial web sites begin to support these things to get some momentum.
My father is a keen private investor, making use of the full spectrum of financial services regularly. He is interested in what use he can make of the Internet, but won't touch my mother's PC. Unfortunately it runs Windows, and having seen how it can go wrong without user intervention, he won't touch it - if it goes wrong while he is using it, my mother will blame him, not Gates!
So he is only prepared to use a proper consumer Internet device. To him it is the perfect choice. The VCR, fax and microwave never malfunction, so the set-top box is going to work perfectly out of the box, right? Until he finds that it doesn't matter if his set-top works properly or not, because he's being served broken content...
As far as excluding the disabled goes, isn't it actually illegal in the EU to exclude someone from your shop because of disability? I seem to remember hearing of a move to prosecute some business using those rules because their web-site didn't work for the blind. Anyone remember that? What happened? (Its probably still waiting to go to court or something).
OK, the linked article, most of the linked sites, and now this comment have mentioned steam pipes and steam plants. What are they?
Seriously, I have never heard of these things. What is steam being transported for? At first I assumed that this was to remove a waste product, but then the steam plants came up. What is this steam being produced for? This all sounds like something out of an alternate reality/history, like William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's novel, 'The Difference Engine'.
Please, someone explain this for me!
Interbase has a massive source base, and has not been open source for very long - a year at most?
Open source helps to prevent back-doors from being inserted during open development. Its much easier to spot a back door being put in if its part of the latest patch submitted to the development mailing list.
Clearly someone has been reading the Interbase sources looking for this kind of thing, otherwise we wouldn't be reading this advisory.
You have obviously completely missed the point of the BSD license. That must explain why you are insulting the intelligence of those who use it by suggesting that they don't understand its implications.
People use the BSD license because they want to propogate the use of quality code. It is open source because that allows it to be improved where quality issues are found, and to facilitate the porting of it to any system, current or future. People release under the BSD license because they _want_ as many people as possible to use their code, for whatever it is found to be useful for.
They don't choose the GNU license for their code because they don't want to prevent their code from being used by anyone who hopes to generate economic activity.
Further, in this case, how would the GNU license prevent Sega from developing Dreamcast titles that run on a Linux kernel ported to Dreamcast (people are working on this)? They would only have to release the source to the kernel, not the game. And they would certainly not be prevented from charging money for a game developed which such a system.