What happens when Ambrosia goes out of business and the software code expires? Your product that you PAID FOR stops working.
Ambrosia programmers spend the time to remove the licensing stuff, they recompile and release a FreeWare version to the net.
They release a key generating program/algorithm.
No, these things are not guaranteed, they could just piss all over you. But considering they trusted you enough to pay, maybe you can trust them not to leave you high and dry if they go out of business.
It's not retarded. Anybody who has ported applications to various UNIX platforms knows that it can be non-trivial. I don't know a lot about the HURD, so I can't say how UNIX (or Linux) compatible the API is, but the ABI is probably pretty different. How are the calls implemented? select() on Linux is not the same (some would say it's not bug compatible) with select() on other platforms. Which design does the HURD use? Which versions of glibc and all that? That needs to be ported. I had an app that looked different on AIX and DEC, turned out they had more fonts available on the XServer, and XWindows picked different fonts. We had to hard-code the fonts for those platforms. Thats a port.
As far as the window manager comparison, I don't think that's totally valid. A new window manager is just an RPM/apt/whatever update. A new OS is a new partition, a new disk, totally new way of doing things. Much higher cost of entry.
I hate this too, I eventually wrote a perl script (using Net::SMTP) to send mail to me. i select that one, then I control click the spam ones and delete them all.
Yes, if Linux et. al. were under the BSD license, AOL could release a proprietary kernel with all the things you state, but probably nobody would use it. The reason people use software under the BSD license is because it works for them, in some manner. In this case, I don't see why anyone would ditch their distro to get the "enhanced with 33% more spying and 64.3% more ads!!" AOL-hosed RedHat one.
Also the non-enhanced source would still exist somewhere on some server holding it. AOL would not be capable of destroying the source code nor eliminating its general availability, only using it in their work. It still exists. Microsoft has BSD command line ftp in various versions of their software. But it still exists in the BSD distro, it didn't "go away".
Saying that the GPL is less free than BSD is like saying the US is less free without slavery.
BSD gives freedom to developers, GPL limits some freedoms on developers with a side effect of giving more freedom to consumers/users of software. They're both tools; use whatever tool makes the most sense to you. If you care more about what rights users have to seeing the underlying code, by all means, go GPL. If you want your code given the most possible uses, go BSD.
Though I agree that text based files are great (I've done my share of Apache setups, I was web geek at a dotCom that went down in glorious flamage), there's nothing stopping you from having both. My reading of the the statement seems to confuse configuration interface and configuration storage format. You can have a GUI configuration program write text files. Comanche does this. Kind of a best of both worlds thing. You have all the benefits of a GUI and write out a text file. Curious users can even look at the text file and learn what their changes did. Downfall of this? Config program must be in sync with your version of config file format, or it may write things that won't work or may break things. This is kind of the problem now with no official "blessed" Apache config program.
BTW: a couple more benefits of text files vs. binary unreadable config data, UI of config tools notwithstanding:
Can copy one and make one changes for other machines.
Or automate those changes using postprocessing with macro tools and other text tools.
Easier change management (ever try a binary file in CVS or SCCS? If so, I'm sorry). As part of the registry, IIS config can not be put under CVS, at least not easily.
See changes with diff tools so you can change back what you messed up (and if you used CVS, find out who made the change and hit 'em with a bag of nickels).
Though it's our sister school, we're always in the shadow of UI Urbana-Champaign (and the bastards always kick our ass in basketball), so I feel the need to say the CAVE was originally developed at UIC, University of Illinois-Chicago. I still remember being a freshman engineer and being shown around. It's on all the tours, kind of a "go to school here and you get to play with cool stuff like this".
The CAVE was developed by Dr. Tom DeFanti in the EVL (web site currently sucky). DeFanti has been in graphics for a long time, even doing all the CG for the original Star Wars. You can find some interesting stuff at Dave's CAVE pages.
Did they actually talk to him, or just read his articles and construct what they think would be Joel's responses? If you read his articles (I don't agree with all of them, but they do make you think) you'll notice a lot of similarities, even in wording. Or maybe Joel read all his stuff the night before for background notes.
The urban legend was that Billy boy proposed to Melinda in a program. A series of puzzles, and when she answered the last one, it showed a proposal. True?
I think you mean their mainframe stuff. UIC (my old University) ran it for years. Finally got rid of it for Y2K.
As an OS, very sweet. Had such VM isolation that they tested new OS releases by running it in a VM under the old OS. As far as user level stuff goes, it sucked, and we moved away from it to a Novell lana while back. I still remember the green-screen Esprit terminals though.
For us Chicagoans, we still revel in Svengoolie, a.k.a. Son of Svengoolie, a.k.a. Rich Koz. Sven was doing Svensurround sound before MST3K. WHen I was a young-un, you'd waste many a Saturday watching really bad horror movies just because he was hosting. My fave - Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. He also had all of Chicago buying stupid 3D glasses (the kind that split by red/blue) just to see Swamp Thing in Sven 3D. Plus, he has rubber chickens.
So Microsoft is now in league with those phreaking 2600 guys? I always knew....
2600 is for 2600 kHz, the carrier wave for the sounds that payphones used to signal the home office that someone dropped in a shekel or the call. All the kool kids had electronics that could make that tone and bingo, free calls. Was called phreaking at one time. Now the kids on to bigger and better things, like finding holes in telnetd.
Also, I had no idea 165 MILLION people were already using Passport - I suppose my OS hasn't asked me enough times to sign up for it until I break under the strain...
Hotmail accounts are Passport accounts. This probably accounts for the bulk of them. A non-zero number of Hotmail accounts are inactive, or are just used as throwaway accounts. Interesting to see figures on this.
Microsoft just changed their Hotmail policy to require a login every 30 days or they'd disable your Hotmail. If you pay them money, you can get an upgraded account that includes never being disabled (while yu pay) and more storage. Still has a paltry attachment limit though.
The other interesting thing about this, is that one of the arguments against open source software is that "who are you going to blame". Sure, with commercial software, there is an entity you can holler at, but the Licencing Agreements give you about the same redress in case of bugs in software.
The ability to turn a persistent cookie into a session cookie. Can go to sites that require cookies (though most sites that require them can be easily rewritten to not require them) but no persistent data.
About the other books, I wasn't aware of them. Thnak you for showing them to me. I'm interested in the device driver one.
Do they comment on the kernel config file better?
You need to be more specific. What do you find missing from LINT?
The area:
# More undocumented options for linting.
# Note that documenting these are not considered an affront.
That. Though some are obvious like DEBUG_LINUX there are some I don't know about. Also, even ones that I do know what they do, like NMBCLUSTERS I know are networking control blocks, but I don't know of any tuning algorithms.
I like FreeBSD, it's a solid system. One of the biggest strikes against it would be the lack of 3rd party help. I can 5 different books on RedHat alone in any given bookstore, but there is essentially 1 book for FreeBSD. The other big problem being lack of device drivers, but that's a different topic.
1) Do they comment on the kernel config file better? There are still a lot of parameters in the file that have no comments at all, and some that are commented but you're not quite sure what to setthem to (ok, this is a tuning parameter, but there's no hint at an algorithm for setting it).
2) Are there any other books coming out? I'd say a device driver book would be nice, and just a general system book would be cool too. Anyone bug the Yahoo! folks on this? They run their business on FreeBSD, they must have a lot of experience on this.
I haven't used OpenBSD much, so I'm not sure what's applicable. Good news bad news joke - FreeBSD gets a lot more documentation than Open or Net do, but it's still essentially one book. Yikes.
Have you tried NetBSD docs? Since OpenBSD was an offshoot of NetBSD, there are probably a lot more similarities between NetBSD and OpenBSD than with FreeBSD. Of course, that brings up the question whether finding documentation for NetBSD is easier than finding them for OpenBSD.
Re:Mozilla vs Netscape
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Though this is a kind of a FAQ, it's not the same program.
Mozilla is the open source code. In the last year or so (Milestone 18 was the big turning point for me, it's been getting better since), it's really been getting good. You can debate some of the bloat (XUL and stuff like that) but it's a damn good browser. Some (a lot?) of that bloat is related to it's in-development status - has some debug code in there that will be removed for final release, not quite optimized.
Every once in a while, Netscape takes a source cut of this and releases it as a Netscape product. It's not exactly the same source, they add things to it (whether it's stuff you would want is subject to some debate). The rendering is the same (Gecko layout engine) but the Netscape product has more bells and whistles, and seems to have a bit more UI polish (some say, I haven't tried it).
If you think about it, Mozilla kind of drives Netscape releases. The Netscape boys take what they think is a decent source cut (the most recent being Mozilla 0.9.5) and ploish it somehwat and release it as Netscape Navigator.
For those who do Mozilla builds pretty often, you can sometimes avoid a really bad crasher build by checking out the Build Comments page. Saved me from a couple bad builds, I use nightlies most days that it doens't give me a "thumbs down".
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No, these things are not guaranteed, they could just piss all over you. But considering they trusted you enough to pay, maybe you can trust them not to leave you high and dry if they go out of business.
I guess Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys got a little bored, decided to become a writer.
Yeah, stupid post, but it's what I thought.
As far as the window manager comparison, I don't think that's totally valid. A new window manager is just an RPM/apt/whatever update. A new OS is a new partition, a new disk, totally new way of doing things. Much higher cost of entry.
I hate this too, I eventually wrote a perl script (using Net::SMTP) to send mail to me. i select that one, then I control click the spam ones and delete them all.
Also the non-enhanced source would still exist somewhere on some server holding it. AOL would not be capable of destroying the source code nor eliminating its general availability, only using it in their work. It still exists. Microsoft has BSD command line ftp in various versions of their software. But it still exists in the BSD distro, it didn't "go away".
BSD gives freedom to developers, GPL limits some freedoms on developers with a side effect of giving more freedom to consumers/users of software. They're both tools; use whatever tool makes the most sense to you. If you care more about what rights users have to seeing the underlying code, by all means, go GPL. If you want your code given the most possible uses, go BSD.
BTW: a couple more benefits of text files vs. binary unreadable config data, UI of config tools notwithstanding:
I've always though of many folks at Microsoft as tools, so why wouldn't they be good at using them?
The CAVE was developed by Dr. Tom DeFanti in the EVL (web site currently sucky). DeFanti has been in graphics for a long time, even doing all the CG for the original Star Wars. You can find some interesting stuff at Dave's CAVE pages.
Did they actually talk to him, or just read his articles and construct what they think would be Joel's responses? If you read his articles (I don't agree with all of them, but they do make you think) you'll notice a lot of similarities, even in wording. Or maybe Joel read all his stuff the night before for background notes.
The urban legend was that Billy boy proposed to Melinda in a program. A series of puzzles, and when she answered the last one, it showed a proposal. True?
There's a web server written in postScript someplace on the net. It uses inetd for the fact you can't make a socket in PostScript.
The "second edition" to this was renamed to Design of Everyday Things. Evidently, he didn't like the P.O.E.T. acronym.
Great book. Get it. 1 7 4 2 8
I think you mean their mainframe stuff. UIC (my old University) ran it for years. Finally got rid of it for Y2K.
As an OS, very sweet. Had such VM isolation that they tested new OS releases by running it in a VM under the old OS. As far as user level stuff goes, it sucked, and we moved away from it to a Novell lana while back. I still remember the green-screen Esprit terminals though.
Berrrrrr-wynnnnnn. Buy me a T-shirt will ya?
5.1.2600
So Microsoft is now in league with those phreaking 2600 guys? I always knew....
2600 is for 2600 kHz, the carrier wave for the sounds that payphones used to signal the home office that someone dropped in a shekel or the call. All the kool kids had electronics that could make that tone and bingo, free calls. Was called phreaking at one time. Now the kids on to bigger and better things, like finding holes in telnetd.
So is Bill Gates the old gardener with the skull mask that Fred and Shaggy just pulled off of him?
Hotmail accounts are Passport accounts. This probably accounts for the bulk of them. A non-zero number of Hotmail accounts are inactive, or are just used as throwaway accounts. Interesting to see figures on this.
Microsoft just changed their Hotmail policy to require a login every 30 days or they'd disable your Hotmail. If you pay them money, you can get an upgraded account that includes never being disabled (while yu pay) and more storage. Still has a paltry attachment limit though.
The other interesting thing about this, is that one of the arguments against open source software is that "who are you going to blame". Sure, with commercial software, there is an entity you can holler at, but the Licencing Agreements give you about the same redress in case of bugs in software.
Once feature I'd like to see in Mozilla:
The ability to turn a persistent cookie into a session cookie. Can go to sites that require cookies (though most sites that require them can be easily rewritten to not require them) but no persistent data.
The area:
# More undocumented options for linting.
# Note that documenting these are not considered an affront.
That. Though some are obvious like DEBUG_LINUX there are some I don't know about. Also, even ones that I do know what they do, like NMBCLUSTERS I know are networking control blocks, but I don't know of any tuning algorithms.
I like FreeBSD, it's a solid system. One of the biggest strikes against it would be the lack of 3rd party help. I can 5 different books on RedHat alone in any given bookstore, but there is essentially 1 book for FreeBSD. The other big problem being lack of device drivers, but that's a different topic.
1) Do they comment on the kernel config file better? There are still a lot of parameters in the file that have no comments at all, and some that are commented but you're not quite sure what to setthem to (ok, this is a tuning parameter, but there's no hint at an algorithm for setting it).
2) Are there any other books coming out? I'd say a device driver book would be nice, and just a general system book would be cool too. Anyone bug the Yahoo! folks on this? They run their business on FreeBSD, they must have a lot of experience on this.
I haven't used OpenBSD much, so I'm not sure what's applicable. Good news bad news joke - FreeBSD gets a lot more documentation than Open or Net do, but it's still essentially one book. Yikes.
Have you tried NetBSD docs? Since OpenBSD was an offshoot of NetBSD, there are probably a lot more similarities between NetBSD and OpenBSD than with FreeBSD. Of course, that brings up the question whether finding documentation for NetBSD is easier than finding them for OpenBSD.
Though this is a kind of a FAQ, it's not the same program.
Mozilla is the open source code. In the last year or so (Milestone 18 was the big turning point for me, it's been getting better since), it's really been getting good. You can debate some of the bloat (XUL and stuff like that) but it's a damn good browser. Some (a lot?) of that bloat is related to it's in-development status - has some debug code in there that will be removed for final release, not quite optimized.
Every once in a while, Netscape takes a source cut of this and releases it as a Netscape product. It's not exactly the same source, they add things to it (whether it's stuff you would want is subject to some debate). The rendering is the same (Gecko layout engine) but the Netscape product has more bells and whistles, and seems to have a bit more UI polish (some say, I haven't tried it).
If you think about it, Mozilla kind of drives Netscape releases. The Netscape boys take what they think is a decent source cut (the most recent being Mozilla 0.9.5) and ploish it somehwat and release it as Netscape Navigator.
For those who do Mozilla builds pretty often, you can sometimes avoid a really bad crasher build by checking out the Build Comments page. Saved me from a couple bad builds, I use nightlies most days that it doens't give me a "thumbs down".
Damn, bad Slashdot. I meant to say tags, but "Plain Text" formatting ate it.