Can someone explain this to me??? I read the whole article and I'm still not sure what super-3G is... is it an unlimited-use wireless broadband service? That's my best guess from the article but I'm still not sure... Can someone clue me in?
I'm assuming T-mobile doesn't want to allow IM/VoIP because that cuts into their mobile phone business. Encrypted traffic, anyone?
Right on! The funniest part is, normally, if you had an article entitled "Microsoft dead in the water", the whole horde of *ix fanboys would be celebrating. Instead, everyone's just dissing Dvorak instead.
The advantage of open source shines through once again! This couldn't have happened with MS Windows, that's for sure... without access to the source code, this bug couldn't have been discovered, let alone fixed so quickly.
(And yes, I know that some gov't agencies have a deal to view the Windows source code, but there are WAAAY fewer eyeballs looking at it, and from what I've heard the code is a big badly documented mess.)
If I write a program that solves differential equations, does that mean it's not free because most people don't know a Runge-Kutta solver from an Euler solver?
If I release a badly documented v0.01 alpha release of a fabulous new file-transfer program, is it not FOSS because it's badly documented???
If free software is badly documented, badly interfaced, or otherwise too hard to use/understand... well then fix it!!! The principles of the GPL, for example, say that you have a right to study and modify free software, they don't say that you have the right to have it done for you!
I haven't used the Places feature personally, but it DOES sound cool.
The way I see it, if the current developers think it's a cool feature, they'll keep developing it as an extension. And if not, it'll become abandonware... until someone else picks up the code and starts hacking on it.
Gee, ain't open source wonderful? =) Nothing ever disappears as long as there's someone willing and able to keep developing it!
It seems that the U.S. government doesn't like to acknowledge that some of their most prestigious and widely admired work was actually... *drumroll* done by somebody else!
Oh yeah? When my grandma bought my family's first computer ~1989, I don't think she expected me to do computer programming, 3D graphics, connect to BBS's, etc. But I did anyway!
I think it's retarded to design what COULD be a very general-purpose computer with the premise that people are only going to use it for a few specific uses. Witness the demise of dedicated word processing machines and the mediocre reception of web-browser-only Internet terminals for home use.
I don't do VoIP, nor do I watch TV, and I've rarely needed to transfer more than a few gigs to another computer. Perhaps I just use my network differently from other/.'ers.
What if you want to store lots of MP3s, run a small web server, do software development, play movies, etc.? I was happily running on a fairly similar laptop (okay, 1 ghz CPU) until a few weeks ago. It ran linux quite well... if you can afford the latest-and-greatest to run your high-powered apps, that's great, but if not an older system works pretty well even for a lot of resource-intensive tasks.
Oh, and I serve files too... I run a small webserver off my computer, via my 802.11b connection. I don't play FPS games though I do enjoy a good networked game of FreeCiv. I also ssh into my home computer a lot from work etc., and the latency of a terminal window is almost imperceptible compared to a local login.
I'm still using 802.11b at my house... we have Verizon DSL and it maxes out at about 400 kB/s down, 50 kB/s up. 802.11b seems to be more than enough for my needs. Obviously, I'd buy 802.11g if I were getting new stuff, but I don't know why it's something to get my panties in a twist over.
Why exactly are people so excited by faster wireless networking when very few of them actually HAVE the "fat pipes" to connect to. Is there ANY residential cable/DSL service that actually exceeds the capacity of 802.11g?
This is something I hadn't even considered... Ubuntu *is* creating a very recognizable brand with these alliterative names. A smart play. We'll all instantly know what Leaping Leopard and Waltzing Walrus are when they get released.
A few years back, people ridiculed iEverything... now iMac, iPod, iBook must be among the most recognizable brands among young Americans.
No, it's not entirely subjective. There are lots of firms that get paid to research this shit. There are names that work, and names that don't, and you can test for it.
All well and good, but my understanding is those folks don't exactly work pro bono, and few in the FLOSS community have those skills.
I don't think most of the truly great free software depends heavily on traditional marketing for its popularity. I think Linux's high reputation is the CAUSE as much as the CONSEQUENCE of companies like Red Hat putting it in a flashy box and sending out brochures. And programmers use Emacs cause it works. And my girlfriend plays Freeciv cause it's addictive. And everyone and their mom uses Gaim, even on windows, because it's better than AOL Instant Messenger.
Let's face it, all kinds of commercial professionally produced brand names would sound weird if they weren't produced in a specific context. Take the iPod for instance: that would be a funny name if Apple et al. hadn't been making iEverything for many years before, and hadn't launched a huge $$$$$$$ ad campaign to sell it.
IMHO, Ubuntu is everything that Mandrake could have been... but failed at: (a) super stable (b) polished and consistent (c) not slowly degenerating into nagware/our-company-is-bankrupt-ware
There is enough cash behind it to keep it running for a LONG time, even assuming no additional infusions of cash.
Umm... that assumes that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't mind continuing to spend his money on Ubuntu at a moderate but steady rate. I believe he's been entirely benevolent and awesome as patron of Ubuntu, but his generosity *is* the prime source of funding and that isn't great for the long term.
Basically the whole Ubuntu community has been freeloading off Mark Shuttleworth's resources for a couple years and it's been quite a fun ride. Thanks, Mark:-)
As far as I can tell, what he's trying to do is to use his considerable wealth to build up a really top-notch distro that sticks close to free software ideals, and he's hoping that he'll come up with a viable business model to make some money off of it along the way. I sincerely wish him luck, I think it's a rather risky but admirable move.
Ubuntu is actually *quite* stable. Even running the beta Dapper version, I can't remember a single crash that brought down the system (after many months of use). I run Apache off my desktop box and leave for the weekend expecting reliable remote access, and I always have it. The userspace apps included in the main distro are all high-quality and well supported. I've hit one or two gnome bugs but not much else.
Ubuntu is the most stable, reliable, no-rough-edges Linux desktop-oriented distro that I've used. Beats SUSE (used intermittently at work) and completely crushes Mandr(ake|iva) (used it a few years back) which I found to be horribly unreliable.
The nVidia exec saying that "writing video drivers is very difficult" is the most brazen weaselly crap I've ever heard. He's basically telling the FLOSS community, "Oh, you don't want this code, you couldn't handle it anyway."
The free/open source world has already produced several of the best operating systems, the best C compiler, the best web server, the best desktop environments, the best MP3 encoder, the best instant messenger clients, the best web browsers, the best email apps, the best typesetting software, and the best drivers for all manner of hardware. Linux supported x64 before Windows, runs on more and weirder architectures, and has better SMP support. So don't tell me FLOSS can't do hardware drivers, that's just FUD.
Why the hell couldn't the open source world produce awesome 3D video drivers too, if they could get the specs? What a stupid smokescreen argument against releasing the code.
My family and I have bought nearly all the computers we've owned for the past 15 years by mail order or online, but when I went shopping for a new desktop a few weeks ago, I ended up buying from Circuit City.
Maybe it's because I'm older and I place a higher value on time spent and reliability now, but I didn't want to mess around with the beige-box vendors on pricescan. So I compared the more reputable online prices (everything from Dell to TigerDirect) to prices at CompUSA and Circuit City. I was surprised to find that for the first time in my life, I could get a better deal at Circuit City!
I got a nice fully stuffed Acer with 19" LCD and a surprisingly nice Epson multifunction printer for $660 after taxes and minus the $330 of rebates. So, basically, it seems that brick-and-mortar computer stores are really competing with online sales in terms of price. And that's great because I certainly don't mind the combination of more convenience and lower price. Hope it keeps up!
I just downloaded trickle and it works great! Works with all my ftp, downloader, instant messenger software. Excellent. It's certainly a SIMPLE system, and you seem to think that explaining this is a major weakness. I don't think so. It works very well. Why add another box taking up space and power when this type of user-space traffic routing is so effective for so many uses.
When you need kernel traffic shaping, use it. When you really don't, trickle is almost perfect. Cause it's lightweight and a whole heck of a lot easier to understand AND to implement.
Well, firstly... holy crap!!! What kind of insane system do you have? My brand spankin' new AMD64 can't rip-- let alone encode --a DVD in under ~10 minutes per hour of video. I'm assuming you just ripped, not encoded, right?
And didn't your DVD drive thrash around horribly while you had three programs trying to read/dev/dvd simultaneously?
Obviously, you're doing this much smarter than I did:-P
I don't honestly see what making SPARC or PowerPC "open" is going to achieve at this point.
Sure, everybody just wants a nice cheap powerful x86 box these days, even Mac users. But there'd be a lot of hacker appeal to having the source for the processors available. Everybody would tinker with their processors and implement them on FPGA (a cheap way of fabbing chips on a small scale, basically). Instead of people boasting about their tuned kernel, we'd be boasting about our tuned processors. "I got my OpenSPARC running on a Xilinx FPGA and I optimized out the floating point unit so I could add more cache."
And as we've seen with Linux, W3, Apache, etc., hacker projects can turn into BIG business down the road!!
Frankly, I'd switch over to OpenSPARC or OpenPOWER or OpenRISC if I could. I already can and do hack around with the source code to my software, and I'd love to be able to do the same with the hardware...
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone explain this to me??? I read the whole article and I'm still not sure what super-3G is... is it an unlimited-use wireless broadband service? That's my best guess from the article but I'm still not sure... Can someone clue me in?
I'm assuming T-mobile doesn't want to allow IM/VoIP because that cuts into their mobile phone business. Encrypted traffic, anyone?
Right on! The funniest part is, normally, if you had an article entitled "Microsoft dead in the water", the whole horde of *ix fanboys would be celebrating. Instead, everyone's just dissing Dvorak instead.
I was just about to publish my article, "Eight Signs That John Dvorak is Dead in the Water".
The advantage of open source shines through once again! This couldn't have happened with MS Windows, that's for sure... without access to the source code, this bug couldn't have been discovered, let alone fixed so quickly.
(And yes, I know that some gov't agencies have a deal to view the Windows source code, but there are WAAAY fewer eyeballs looking at it, and from what I've heard the code is a big badly documented mess.)
BSD confirms it. Theo is rude.
If I write a program that solves differential equations, does that mean it's not free because most people don't know a Runge-Kutta solver from an Euler solver?
If I release a badly documented v0.01 alpha release of a fabulous new file-transfer program, is it not FOSS because it's badly documented???
If free software is badly documented, badly interfaced, or otherwise too hard to use/understand... well then fix it!!! The principles of the GPL, for example, say that you have a right to study and modify free software, they don't say that you have the right to have it done for you!
I haven't used the Places feature personally, but it DOES sound cool.
... until someone else picks up the code and starts hacking on it.
The way I see it, if the current developers think it's a cool feature, they'll keep developing it as an extension. And if not, it'll become abandonware
Gee, ain't open source wonderful? =) Nothing ever disappears as long as there's someone willing and able to keep developing it!
I sympathize with your point of view...
It seems that the U.S. government doesn't like to acknowledge that some of their most prestigious and widely admired work was actually... *drumroll* done by somebody else!
Oh yeah? When my grandma bought my family's first computer ~1989, I don't think she expected me to do computer programming, 3D graphics, connect to BBS's, etc. But I did anyway!
I think it's retarded to design what COULD be a very general-purpose computer with the premise that people are only going to use it for a few specific uses. Witness the demise of dedicated word processing machines and the mediocre reception of web-browser-only Internet terminals for home use.
Point taken.
/.'ers.
I don't do VoIP, nor do I watch TV, and I've rarely needed to transfer more than a few gigs to another computer. Perhaps I just use my network differently from other
What if you want to store lots of MP3s, run a small web server, do software development, play movies, etc.? I was happily running on a fairly similar laptop (okay, 1 ghz CPU) until a few weeks ago. It ran linux quite well... if you can afford the latest-and-greatest to run your high-powered apps, that's great, but if not an older system works pretty well even for a lot of resource-intensive tasks.
Oh, and I serve files too... I run a small webserver off my computer, via my 802.11b connection. I don't play FPS games though I do enjoy a good networked game of FreeCiv. I also ssh into my home computer a lot from work etc., and the latency of a terminal window is almost imperceptible compared to a local login.
I'm still using 802.11b at my house... we have Verizon DSL and it maxes out at about 400 kB/s down, 50 kB/s up. 802.11b seems to be more than enough for my needs. Obviously, I'd buy 802.11g if I were getting new stuff, but I don't know why it's something to get my panties in a twist over.
Why exactly are people so excited by faster wireless networking when very few of them actually HAVE the "fat pipes" to connect to. Is there ANY residential cable/DSL service that actually exceeds the capacity of 802.11g?
MOD PARENT WAAAY UP!!
This is something I hadn't even considered... Ubuntu *is* creating a very recognizable brand with these alliterative names. A smart play. We'll all instantly know what Leaping Leopard and Waltzing Walrus are when they get released.
A few years back, people ridiculed iEverything... now iMac, iPod, iBook must be among the most recognizable brands among young Americans.
I don't think most of the truly great free software depends heavily on traditional marketing for its popularity. I think Linux's high reputation is the CAUSE as much as the CONSEQUENCE of companies like Red Hat putting it in a flashy box and sending out brochures. And programmers use Emacs cause it works. And my girlfriend plays Freeciv cause it's addictive. And everyone and their mom uses Gaim, even on windows, because it's better than AOL Instant Messenger.
Let's face it, all kinds of commercial professionally produced brand names would sound weird if they weren't produced in a specific context. Take the iPod for instance: that would be a funny name if Apple et al. hadn't been making iEverything for many years before, and hadn't launched a huge $$$$$$$ ad campaign to sell it.
In homage to GNU, I suggest that the next Ubuntu codename after Edgy Eft should be Wily Wildebeest.
IMHO, Ubuntu is everything that Mandrake could have been ... but failed at:
(a) super stable
(b) polished and consistent
(c) not slowly degenerating into nagware/our-company-is-bankrupt-ware
Very true...
:-)
Basically the whole Ubuntu community has been freeloading off Mark Shuttleworth's resources for a couple years and it's been quite a fun ride. Thanks, Mark
As far as I can tell, what he's trying to do is to use his considerable wealth to build up a really top-notch distro that sticks close to free software ideals, and he's hoping that he'll come up with a viable business model to make some money off of it along the way. I sincerely wish him luck, I think it's a rather risky but admirable move.
I'm in complete agreement with you!
Ubuntu is actually *quite* stable. Even running the beta Dapper version, I can't remember a single crash that brought down the system (after many months of use). I run Apache off my desktop box and leave for the weekend expecting reliable remote access, and I always have it. The userspace apps included in the main distro are all high-quality and well supported. I've hit one or two gnome bugs but not much else.
Ubuntu is the most stable, reliable, no-rough-edges Linux desktop-oriented distro that I've used. Beats SUSE (used intermittently at work) and completely crushes Mandr(ake|iva) (used it a few years back) which I found to be horribly unreliable.
Gimme a break! It's just brazen bullshit.
The nVidia exec saying that "writing video drivers is very difficult" is the most brazen weaselly crap I've ever heard. He's basically telling the FLOSS community, "Oh, you don't want this code, you couldn't handle it anyway."
The free/open source world has already produced several of the best operating systems, the best C compiler, the best web server, the best desktop environments, the best MP3 encoder, the best instant messenger clients, the best web browsers, the best email apps, the best typesetting software, and the best drivers for all manner of hardware. Linux supported x64 before Windows, runs on more and weirder architectures, and has better SMP support. So don't tell me FLOSS can't do hardware drivers, that's just FUD.
Why the hell couldn't the open source world produce awesome 3D video drivers too, if they could get the specs? What a stupid smokescreen argument against releasing the code.
My family and I have bought nearly all the computers we've owned for the past 15 years by mail order or online, but when I went shopping for a new desktop a few weeks ago, I ended up buying from Circuit City.
Maybe it's because I'm older and I place a higher value on time spent and reliability now, but I didn't want to mess around with the beige-box vendors on pricescan. So I compared the more reputable online prices (everything from Dell to TigerDirect) to prices at CompUSA and Circuit City. I was surprised to find that for the first time in my life, I could get a better deal at Circuit City!
I got a nice fully stuffed Acer with 19" LCD and a surprisingly nice Epson multifunction printer for $660 after taxes and minus the $330 of rebates. So, basically, it seems that brick-and-mortar computer stores are really competing with online sales in terms of price. And that's great because I certainly don't mind the combination of more convenience and lower price. Hope it keeps up!
Hmmm... I don't share your sentiment.
I just downloaded trickle and it works great! Works with all my ftp, downloader, instant messenger software. Excellent. It's certainly a SIMPLE system, and you seem to think that explaining this is a major weakness. I don't think so. It works very well. Why add another box taking up space and power when this type of user-space traffic routing is so effective for so many uses.
When you need kernel traffic shaping, use it. When you really don't, trickle is almost perfect. Cause it's lightweight and a whole heck of a lot easier to understand AND to implement.
Well, firstly... holy crap!!! What kind of insane system do you have? My brand spankin' new AMD64 can't rip-- let alone encode --a DVD in under ~10 minutes per hour of video. I'm assuming you just ripped, not encoded, right?
/dev/dvd simultaneously?
:-P
And didn't your DVD drive thrash around horribly while you had three programs trying to read
Obviously, you're doing this much smarter than I did
Sure, everybody just wants a nice cheap powerful x86 box these days, even Mac users. But there'd be a lot of hacker appeal to having the source for the processors available. Everybody would tinker with their processors and implement them on FPGA (a cheap way of fabbing chips on a small scale, basically). Instead of people boasting about their tuned kernel, we'd be boasting about our tuned processors. "I got my OpenSPARC running on a Xilinx FPGA and I optimized out the floating point unit so I could add more cache."
And as we've seen with Linux, W3, Apache, etc., hacker projects can turn into BIG business down the road!!
Frankly, I'd switch over to OpenSPARC or OpenPOWER or OpenRISC if I could. I already can and do hack around with the source code to my software, and I'd love to be able to do the same with the hardware...