The patent in question, US4558302 I think, was filed in 1983 and issued in 1985. Maybe Unisys is trying to get their last few bucks out of it, before the 17 year time limit...
How do you interpret, "While not mandatory, you should offer a free copy of the modifications, whether in print or on CD-ROM, to the original author(s) and to IDGB."?
Does this mean that they don't have to make the text of the book available for download? The part of copyleft that really makes it work is that you have to give out source code on request. It sounds like they're trying an "almost-free" way to get people to write books for them. They profit and the writers get nada. Great deal!
Did anyone else notice that ecourtinc is running IIS on NT? (I used netcraft to check) Perhaps some script-kiddies can program their car to automatically crash this site every time they drive fast through a small town in TX:-)
Gee, if only they'd open-sourced the code to this site, it might have had something to redeem it. Maybe we can band together and build a Moreau-esqe response to them, I propose "python-pig".
I've heard (but not verified) that there's a law here in TX to stop small towns turning this into a business. Once they reach a certain amount of revenue, the money goes to the state.
For the larger towns, around D/FW, they get about 5% of the their revenue from municipal courts. This includes speeding tickets, code violations such as having your lawn too long, etc.
The idea of switching threads in hardware to get around cache misses has already been done by Tera, they have a machine at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Dunno if it's a single chip design, I didn't have a screw driver handy when I visited SDSC. Tera claims some pretty impressive performance numbers.
It's just a numbers game. A few M$ programmers pitted against thousands of crackers. The crackers take it as a personal challenge, it's fun, they'll stay up all night just to do it.
IMHO, I'm a damn fine programmer, but I know that there's some smarter programmers then me out there. On the other hand, there are many people who don't see the world this way. It's kind of funny, in a twisted kind of way, to see their code and their egos squashed like this. Maybe they deserve it...
IBM's MQ is a store-and-forward product. You put a message into a queue and it is guaranteed to be delivered, whether or not the target machine & program is currently operating. Queued messages are written to disk.
There are other options, non-protected queues, pub/sub, etc. The queue server can start programs when messages arrive in the queue, at certain thresholds. Messages can contain correlation ID information so that you can make a simple conversation over a one-way store-and-forward protocol.
I agree that a brilliant programmer or comedian, though I personally don't care much for Jim Carey films, needs a free rein. In my 18 years in S/W development, I've only worked with a handful that I'd trust. For the rest of 'em, give 'em enough rope and they'll hang you.
One of the biggest problems is people solving non-existant problems 'cause they're interesting. Usually writing their own middleware, reinventing STL or some other junk. Control is necessary.
The average voter is older than the average geek. Are there any statistics on geek voter turnout? What about turnout for people who use the Internet?
I was told by a Pol Sci professor that the highest turnout group are all eligible for the AARP (Am. Assoc. of Retired Persons) and the lowest turnout is 18-25 year olds.
So, how much do politicians really care about the Internet?
Large volume OLTP has a huge amount of inter-connection at the data level. You have to lock and unlock all the records to maintain ACID properties. Beowulf is a shared-nothing approach and doesn't have facilities for sharing all the disks with appropriate concurrency control.
The largest airline systems all use IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), which is a specialized real-time OS for mainframes. TPF shares disks amongst all processors in the cluster and pushes the locking down to the individual disk controllers (specialized microcode). Where I work, we get about 200,000 physical I/Os per second to the disk farm, using TPF on eight mainframes and a several TB of disk.
Still, there's nothing about large-volume OLTP that Linux couldn't do, it's just a matter of programming. I, for one, would like to see it happen.
What would it take to make an Open IDE, with pluggable compilers? Then, pick your editor, pick your language and pick your source code control. I program in multiple languages and this would make life a whole lot easier!
Hey, if this already exists, someone please let me know where I can get it.
The U.N. has never really done anything major. For the most part, it's the permanent members of the Security Council bickering over sanctions and bombing. They certainly have no taxation authority and will never get it. Didn't we try the "loose collective" idea in the USA with the Articles of Confederation? It didn't work and neither will the U.N. ever get anything real done.
Much of the money that goes to the U.N. is sucked up by bureaucrats living the high life in NY and other parts of the world, enjoying the privileges of their diplomatic passports. If Bill Gates and Ted Turner could actually setup Internet for these developing countries, they'd be far better off.
Better still, just take all the money and buy the hardware they need, because we all know that we can get free software that would work great for these guys.
I'm curious... If I pay about $20 (w/ tax) for a CD in the store, how much does the artist get? I figure the store gets about half, the recording company most of what's left.
The companies tell you that they need big markups since 4 out of 5 records never turn a profit (recording, distribution, marketing costs, etc.) I can now record CD-quality sound at home on my PC and distribute it, so this argument goes away.
My mother used to make dresses, get paid about 25c to sew one. She could buy them ex-factory, at cost, for about $5-10, and they sold in stores for about $50-100. The Internet revolution for S/W, music, etc is the elimination of the middlemen.
Does anybody have some real numbers on where the money goes? Would an artist be better off selling individual MP3s for 25c a song?
Actually, it's not my observation, it was something I saw in the press a few years back. I think the graphics (ie games, scrolling in Word, etc) were faster on W95, but databases (like Access) ran better on NT due to smarter memory use and I/O caching.
OK, we all agree that microkernels make for simple, robust, flexible systems but you can't measure that objectively. So, magazines and reviewers measure speed (or feature lists - hence bloat).
W95 was faster the NT3.5, particularly the GUI, so all the GUI stuff migrates to the kernel. So does all the other junk.
Another example is the web. If we put HTTP in the kernel, such as a loadable driver, it'll run faster, IBM's doing that on AIX with a couple of GB of kernel-based cache to serve up static pages faster.
So, would consumers buy or even download and install this new OS if all it did was run Windows programs 5% slower w/o crashing?
Let's send his "excited" lawyers off to Tasmania, it was the worst of the penal colonies.
Also, a few years back it was the only state in Australia where machine guns were legal. Dunno if this this still the case, but I'm sure there's still a few around in case some errant, excited lawyers turn up...
Read any magazine review, they all have feature comparison lists. This drives bloat, as corporate buyers use these to choose amongst competing products (along with free golf games from sales reps).
You can't quantify elegance and simplicity. If you do useability tests, the sales rep convinces your management they're flawed, takes them to a really nice golf course, and - voila - your recommendation is overridden.
I have spent several years at work forced to use a bogus e-mail package that has every feature you can think of, but crashes about once a day. It's the same with M$ products.
Maybe everyone on this forum is smarter than your average corporate nitwit - but think about the pointy haired manager in the Dilbert cartoons, they really do exist. Your next computer will have 14 cupholders, just because the competitors only have 6...
A micro-computer is a "micro ordinateur", certainly no worse than calling my hard drive a "Festplatte".
The national dictation contest is kind of amusing, French has so many homonyms and subleties that the winner often has an error or two. The competitors are university professors and the like...
My mother tounge is English, but I can happily butcher several others!
So, you whip out twelve inches and tell your girlfriend that you pulled it out of some rodent's butt and had it grafted on? I'm sure she'll be impressed.
"Don't come near me with that thing!"
Maybe some of the M$ programmers already have a second one. You couldn't get that stupid only playing with one...
What's all this hype about overclocking? Does anyone else out there remember pushing a Z80 up to 4 or even 6 Mhz? We did it because we could. It's no different than a hot rodder who squeezes an extra few horsepower from a car. We don't want bland gray boxes running generic software from a mega-corporation. The hot rodder doesn't want an anemic Chevy Nova.
"Does anyone honestly think that any of these sites, like Amazon, rake in much more than $500-750k per day? I sure don't."
Take a look at Travelocity, it's done $11M/week more than once, do the math yourself. It's not a million transactions, but certainly larger than a few hundred thousand bucks a day.
On the other hand it's not Linux. The web part is Irix, the backend is IBM's TPF OS on S/390.
Slashdot Mirror
Even after you apply a half-dozen WD-40 atoms, you'd still need to whack it with something.
The patent in question, US4558302 I think, was filed in 1983 and issued in 1985. Maybe Unisys is trying to get their last few bucks out of it, before the 17 year time limit...
How do you interpret, "While not mandatory, you should offer a free copy of the modifications, whether in print or on CD-ROM, to the original author(s) and to IDGB."?
Does this mean that they don't have to make the text of the book available for download? The part of copyleft that really makes it work is that you have to give out source code on request. It sounds like they're trying an "almost-free" way to get people to write books for them. They profit and the writers get nada. Great deal!
I, for one, would not participate in this...
Did anyone else notice that ecourtinc is running IIS on NT? (I used netcraft to check) Perhaps some script-kiddies can program their car to automatically crash this site every time they drive fast through a small town in TX :-)
Gee, if only they'd open-sourced the code to this site, it might have had something to redeem it. Maybe we can band together and build a Moreau-esqe response to them, I propose "python-pig".
I've heard (but not verified) that there's a law here in TX to stop small towns turning this into a business. Once they reach a certain amount of revenue, the money goes to the state.
For the larger towns, around D/FW, they get about 5% of the their revenue from municipal courts. This includes speeding tickets, code violations such as having your lawn too long, etc.
The idea of switching threads in hardware to get around cache misses has already been done by Tera, they have a machine at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Dunno if it's a single chip design, I didn't have a screw driver handy when I visited SDSC. Tera claims some pretty impressive performance numbers.
FYI - I don't work for Tera or SDSC.
It's just a numbers game. A few M$ programmers pitted against thousands of crackers. The crackers take it as a personal challenge, it's fun, they'll stay up all night just to do it.
IMHO, I'm a damn fine programmer, but I know that there's some smarter programmers then me out there. On the other hand, there are many people who don't see the world this way. It's kind of funny, in a twisted kind of way, to see their code and their egos squashed like this. Maybe they deserve it...
My girlfriend is Jabba the Hutt
My boss is Darth Vader
You don't even want to know about me...
IBM's MQ is a store-and-forward product. You put a message into a queue and it is guaranteed to be delivered, whether or not the target machine & program is currently operating. Queued messages are written to disk.
There are other options, non-protected queues, pub/sub, etc. The queue server can start programs when messages arrive in the queue, at certain thresholds. Messages can contain correlation ID information so that you can make a simple conversation over a one-way store-and-forward protocol.
I agree that a brilliant programmer or comedian, though I personally don't care much for Jim Carey films, needs a free rein. In my 18 years in S/W development, I've only worked with a handful that I'd trust. For the rest of 'em, give 'em enough rope and they'll hang you.
One of the biggest problems is people solving non-existant problems 'cause they're interesting. Usually writing their own middleware, reinventing STL or some other junk. Control is necessary.
The average voter is older than the average geek. Are there any statistics on geek voter turnout? What about turnout for people who use the Internet?
I was told by a Pol Sci professor that the highest turnout group are all eligible for the AARP (Am. Assoc. of Retired Persons) and the lowest turnout is 18-25 year olds.
So, how much do politicians really care about the Internet?
Large volume OLTP has a huge amount of inter-connection at the data level. You have to lock and unlock all the records to maintain ACID properties. Beowulf is a shared-nothing approach and doesn't have facilities for sharing all the disks with appropriate concurrency control.
The largest airline systems all use IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), which is a specialized real-time OS for mainframes. TPF shares disks amongst all processors in the cluster and pushes the locking down to the individual disk controllers (specialized microcode). Where I work, we get about 200,000 physical I/Os per second to the disk farm, using TPF on eight mainframes and a several TB of disk.
Still, there's nothing about large-volume OLTP that Linux couldn't do, it's just a matter of programming. I, for one, would like to see it happen.
Hey, maybe I just don't understand....
What would it take to make an Open IDE, with pluggable compilers? Then, pick your editor, pick your language and pick your source code control. I program in multiple languages and this would make life a whole lot easier!
Hey, if this already exists, someone please let me know where I can get it.
The U.N. has never really done anything major. For the most part, it's the permanent members of the Security Council bickering over sanctions and bombing. They certainly have no taxation authority and will never get it. Didn't we try the "loose collective" idea in the USA with the Articles of Confederation? It didn't work and neither will the U.N. ever get anything real done.
Much of the money that goes to the U.N. is sucked up by bureaucrats living the high life in NY and other parts of the world, enjoying the privileges of their diplomatic passports. If Bill Gates and Ted Turner could actually setup Internet for these developing countries, they'd be far better off.
Better still, just take all the money and buy the hardware they need, because we all know that we can get free software that would work great for these guys.
'nuf said!
I'm Australian, so I feel qualified to comment here.
Actually, since I live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I do bring up hockey every time I speak to a Canadian!
After a while, the references do get annoying...
I'm curious... If I pay about $20 (w/ tax) for a CD in the store, how much does the artist get? I figure the store gets about half, the recording company most of what's left.
The companies tell you that they need big markups since 4 out of 5 records never turn a profit (recording, distribution, marketing costs, etc.) I can now record CD-quality sound at home on my PC and distribute it, so this argument goes away.
My mother used to make dresses, get paid about 25c to sew one. She could buy them ex-factory, at cost, for about $5-10, and they sold in stores for about $50-100. The Internet revolution for S/W, music, etc is the elimination of the middlemen.
Does anybody have some real numbers on where the money goes? Would an artist be better off selling individual MP3s for 25c a song?
Actually, it's not my observation, it was something I saw in the press a few years back. I think the graphics (ie games, scrolling in Word, etc) were faster on W95, but databases (like Access) ran better on NT due to smarter memory use and I/O caching.
I have never used W95.
OK, we all agree that microkernels make for simple, robust, flexible systems but you can't measure that objectively. So, magazines and reviewers measure speed (or feature lists - hence bloat).
W95 was faster the NT3.5, particularly the GUI, so all the GUI stuff migrates to the kernel. So does all the other junk.
Another example is the web. If we put HTTP in the kernel, such as a loadable driver, it'll run faster, IBM's doing that on AIX with a couple of GB of kernel-based cache to serve up static pages faster.
So, would consumers buy or even download and install this new OS if all it did was run Windows programs 5% slower w/o crashing?
Let's send his "excited" lawyers off to Tasmania, it was the worst of the penal colonies.
Also, a few years back it was the only state in Australia where machine guns were legal. Dunno if this this still the case, but I'm sure there's still a few around in case some errant, excited lawyers turn up...
Read any magazine review, they all have feature comparison lists. This drives bloat, as corporate buyers use these to choose amongst competing products (along with free golf games from sales reps).
You can't quantify elegance and simplicity. If you do useability tests, the sales rep convinces your management they're flawed, takes them to a really nice golf course, and - voila - your recommendation is overridden.
I have spent several years at work forced to use a bogus e-mail package that has every feature you can think of, but crashes about once a day. It's the same with M$ products.
Maybe everyone on this forum is smarter than your average corporate nitwit - but think about the pointy haired manager in the Dilbert cartoons, they really do exist. Your next computer will have 14 cupholders, just because the competitors only have 6...
A micro-computer is a "micro ordinateur", certainly no worse than calling my hard drive a "Festplatte".
The national dictation contest is kind of amusing, French has so many homonyms and subleties that the winner often has an error or two. The competitors are university professors and the like...
My mother tounge is English, but I can happily butcher several others!
So, you whip out twelve inches and tell your girlfriend that you pulled it out of some rodent's butt and had it grafted on? I'm sure she'll be impressed.
"Don't come near me with that thing!"
Maybe some of the M$ programmers already have a second one. You couldn't get that stupid only playing with one...
It should give a boost to Apache, Samba and the kernel. I'd like to see what the differences are. Perhaps we'll see another round of Linux vs. NT...
Does anyone have numbers for real applications?
What's all this hype about overclocking? Does anyone else out there remember pushing a Z80 up to 4 or even 6 Mhz? We did it because we could. It's no different than a hot rodder who squeezes an extra few horsepower from a car. We don't want bland gray boxes running generic software from a mega-corporation. The hot rodder doesn't want an anemic Chevy Nova.
In reply to the comment:
"Does anyone honestly think that any of these sites, like Amazon, rake in much more than $500-750k per day? I sure don't."
Take a look at Travelocity, it's done $11M/week more than once, do the math yourself. It's not a million transactions, but certainly larger than a few hundred thousand bucks a day.
On the other hand it's not Linux. The web part is Irix, the backend is IBM's TPF OS on S/390.