Well, for local boot the BIOS could just have been updated to load any X number of sectors at any 64 bit offset into memory, solving both the chainloading problems and 2TB boot disk limit. Then just let the OS do its thing and detect all the rest.
It gets a bit more complicated if you want to say load the configuration from the network, there's netboot but with more GUI, more options, maybe verify some digital signatures and whatnot. Then your network has to be working, you maybe need some GUI screens with mouse to configure it and all that before there is an "OS" to speak of. That goes for the rest of the BIOS options too, they're not necessary but nice.
I still think most people won't know about the BIOS/UEFI. I haven't heard of any problems booting Linux from UEFI boards, can't just Linux ignore everything and start over? Just that if you do happen to have to go there, then it looks more like something made this century. The BIOS really is an old relic the way it looks.
Well, I guess that depends if you define it intra-language or inter-language. When you wield a butcher knife there are good butchers and crap butchers, when you wield a scalpel there are good surgeons and crap surgeons but if they all entered a precision cutting competition we'd see differences. And some languages are like juggling chain saws for no discernible reason. I'd call java quite middle of the road though...
Of course it'd be good for you, the question Red Hat will ask is "What's in it for us?" That it doesn't have support isn't going to stop people from blaming "the red hat server" when things go to hell, maybe they'll get a few incident support fees but very little else. On the other hand they're likely to lose a lot of basic support agreements from companies who bought it because some PHB has heard of Red Hat, but never CentOS. There's a reason Fedora has its own name and brand and it's not Red Hat Linux anymore, because they don't want reports of Fedora problems to sound like RHEL problems.
I mean, like some other person commented there are plenty products that are very similar, if you just need a free server there's Debian or Ubuntu LTS, I don't know if SLES has a free version but if you absolutely want to run RHEL it's because you want their QA on it. Maybe that should be worth a little, otherwise you're free to help do the work of creating CentOS yourself and not just wait for others to help you. No payment, no contribution, yes it's easy to lean back and say please give me everything for free but the work doesn't do itself.
(Like many kinds of stained glass that we no longer know how to make, because no one passed it on.) (...) this of course has the obvious effect of stunting the development and innovation cycle, because you can't use other people's ideas once they're actually available
So how exactly could you use that stained glass technique? Oh right, it was never made available. If it had been patented, it must have been disclosed immediately, it'd be a monopoly on them for 20 years but people could understand what you did and start thinking of improvements or variations that wouldn't be covered.
And there is really the biggest reason I don't think patents have much value anymore, who actually reads patents to learn something? Nobody, just lawyers and patent trolls. If there's no trade secret gained, if it's just a free monopoly given then the public hasn't gained any knowledge. Then it's purely an economic incentive like lowering the tax rate or something like that.
Could clients detect this somehow and fall back to support the broken behaviour? For example on detection of an unexpected reset.
Yes, but it opens you up to downgrade attacks. If both the client and server claims to support protocol X then it should not be possible to force them to use protocol Y which is considered less secure, even if both support that too. If you have a fully working TLS 1.1/1.2 client and server then all I have to do is cause a reset, the client will think it's a broken server and they'll use TLS 1.0 so you create a vulnerability where there was none.
Adobe was the company that trained me to press CTRL+S at least every two minutes so I wouldn't lose too much work the next time Premiere crashed, and to save to a new file every couple of hours so that I wouldn't lose too much when it corrupted the save.
Heh, I learned that already in childhood playing Sierra games. Save early, save often and keep your old savegames. Of course that was by design, maybe they were just trying to prepare people for work life? It has certainly saved my ass a few times...
Seriously we moved passed "Caveat Emptor" centuries ago. Hence rulings on product safety, reasonable quality, being as described and not facilitating uncompetitive practices.
Then we entered the new economy where all things are licensed, not sold and none of the rights we used to have apply anymore. To take an example the right of first sale, several games recently have simply said this is a non-transferable license and that was the end of that. Also there are other abominations like the DMCA where they can put use restrictions into the DRM, because they can make whatever terms they want to be a licensed player. It's the greatest ripoff the software and entertainment history has ever seen. And all the devices that aren't yours anymore because they can just remote kill applications, remote delete books and so on. The walled garden may seem far and wide today, but I bet the walls will close in sooner rather than later.
I don't know why you're buying a computer with Windows to begin with if you're going to install Linux anyway,
Even if we ignore the new Linux installs, how about re-purposing an old PC, second hand PCs, corporate computers that are sold off for cheap, huge blocker for people wanting to migrate/test Linux and so on. Laptops pretty much all come with the OS preinstalled and the desktop market is dominated by OEMs. The volume of "virgin" hardware that's never been touched by Windows is just a few percent of the market (excluding Macs, but Apple might decide to do the same).
No, corporate profits ABSOLUTELY DO NOT directly affect stock price. If they did, corporations who were losing money would have worthless stock and those making money would always have a good stock price. Clearly that is not the case.
Stock price is assets + expected future profit/loss. If you were to burn a million dollars, you'd take a loss on the profit statement and your assets would be reduced on the balance sheet that will directly affect the valuation of the company.
Maybe a wallet analogy is better. Imagine you have a wallet with cash, lottery tickets and IOUs and I'm supposed to valuate it. I'll look at the chance your lottery tickets will be winners, your IOUs will default and of course cash is cash. I come up with a figure for what it's worth. I may hear on the radio that nobody's claimed the big prize in the lottery yet, or I learn one of your IOUs have a drug problem and probably can't pay, that all of course impacts my valuation of your wallet and can change rapidly on whims and rumors and whatever. But now say you've lost a $10 bill, it's a one-time loss with absolutely no impact on the rest. What will my valuation be? Exactly $10 lower. It's not worthless just because right now you lost $10, you're setting up a straw man then beating it down.
You have commitments like rent, wages and other expenses and suddenly no more projected income. Even if you're not cash flow insolvent yet, you can in most countries file for bankruptcy the moment it is clear that you will be unable to meet those commitments. In fact, in many countries you must do it so that all debtors get their fair share of the assets rather than the quickest getting paid and the last left with nothing. It's not that usual but if you suddenly lose your core business like this company did then that can be instant bankruptcy.
The problem with this approach is that once you get spammed you'll continue to get spammed (getting off spam lists is impossible once you're on one of the bottom feeding v!4gr4 lists), unless you set up special block rules. I like yahoo's throwaway addresses, you can have up to 500. If I get spammed, I chew out the ones who spread it then delete the address. It's a very simple and very final solution, only wish I'd used it earlier because my email already has a degree of spam from the "old days", plus various stupid people that cc 100 people at a time so it gets spread far and wide.
If you are a business you HAVE to. From the start I made my mailing list completely opt-in. That doesn't stop AOL users from using the spam button instead of the prominent link at the top that gracefully removes them from the list. You can't have customers not receiving order confirmations or order updates or have business email blackholed because some webmail users decide they don't want your mail anymore.
Blame that on all the asshats sending spam who take a link to opt out as a confirmation that your email address is live and proceed to sell it to ten more spam lists. Simple people need simple rules so the rule became to always click the spam button and never any opt out link. To fix this you'd have to fix the email system so we can tell the real opt-ins from the linkbait.
Or in the tl;dr version: "You might get the code... some day" The previous bullshit I heard was that only 3.0 would be closed, once it was cleaned up in 3.1 it would be released. Now they're feeding you more bullshit and you're swallowing it like a sucker.
From what I've gathered they also have a form of "soft depreciation" where obsolete instructions are implemented in microcode, meaning the code still runs but much slower and a smart compiler wouldn't use those instructions anymore. That's pretty effective without breaking compatibility left and right.
If life was so simple as you suggest, every engineer should go independent and just take all the value he produces for himself rather than funding all these people contributing "nothing". What a load of bullshit. All the other people there actually do a job to find out what exactly it is that'd give value, garner interest, hook up the customers with the product, direct the whole team. It's like trying to claim the conductor of an orchestra isn't adding any value because he's not making any sound. Or that the only people with value in football are those who make touchdowns, not everybody else who enables them and shields them. It doesn't have value until it's in the hands of a customer who values it.
As for investors, yes they're not contributing anything other than money that you could have contributed yourself. So why do so many work for a paycheck, and not for stocks or shares of the profit? Because there's risk and a delay between investment and making a return on it. If you want that risk, take it. Don't blame the investor who offers you a fixed paycheck to take both the risks and then also the rewards. The investor has bought you out of your own labor, he's no longer earning interest on the money but on the value added by you and all the other employees. That work for hire and possibly not domestic but quite real. The very same in fact, except you're not doing it for yourself.
The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is.
There's plenty class warfare going on, not just your extremes. Most people vote in interest of themselves and thus by extension their class, it's the wolf class and sheep class deciding what's for dinner. That the rich "shop around" for the biggest incentives and highest tax breaks is class warfare. Raising taxes on the rich saying "you can help pay too" is class warfare. Every time you talk about the burdens and benefits of living in society will run into this. And it's usually not a matter of what's right or wrong it's about power. The masses have strength in numbers, but the rich have strength in lobbyists and moving jobs. It's never going to be an evenly pitched battle because the tools are different, but it absolutely happens. All the time.
What's happening right now is not unlike many third world countries where the rulers grab millions from foreign aid while the people live on a dollar a day. Most of those have a somewhat working economy, they just live in separate worlds where you buy and sell products and services to other equally poor people. I don't think we're heading for a permanent jobless economy, just one with much bigger class separations again with an overclass that can be even more lavish with servants and luxuries. Because their money work for them, it's still diverging even if they're spending big.
You're going to cheapen youself with a 'ster' name? Really?
And the misspelling of Quick as Qwik... this has all the telltale signs of a 50yo CEO listening to 30yo consultants about what a 15-20yo would find "hip" and "cool". The cringe factor of doing it at least ten years too late is overwhelming.
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem
I think you have some fundamental misunderstanding of what firmware is and does. Your CPU contains firmware to implement x86 instructions. Your HDD contains firmware to implement the ATA protocol. In fact, pretty much every piece of equipment including your motherboard and graphics card too depends on firmware, they typically all have a level between the instructions and the hardware. The only real difference is whether it's stored on the device itself or loaded by the driver during initialization.
The crazy thing here is really where the line of zealotry goes, if it's on the device itself it's fine, if the open source code must load it then it's unacceptable. Why exactly? I mean the code is there either way, if you wanted OSS purity then you should refuse everything with upgradable firmware.but without source code and documentation, since the firmware can have bugs that in theory are fixable. Except you'd be hard pressed to find any hardware at all that meets that qualification.
However in practice you have to be extremely familiar with the hardware design, most don't consider it software but more like a tweakable hardware. Like, we can alter this a little bit by flashing but it's really more for development, once the customers have it then the vast majority will never upgrade their firmware, ever. And even there is a bug it'll be so tied to the hardware that really only the people with the hardware schematics can fix it.
I guess it matters to some, but then you've moved from the <1% of the market into the <0.0001% area...
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Well, for local boot the BIOS could just have been updated to load any X number of sectors at any 64 bit offset into memory, solving both the chainloading problems and 2TB boot disk limit. Then just let the OS do its thing and detect all the rest.
It gets a bit more complicated if you want to say load the configuration from the network, there's netboot but with more GUI, more options, maybe verify some digital signatures and whatnot. Then your network has to be working, you maybe need some GUI screens with mouse to configure it and all that before there is an "OS" to speak of. That goes for the rest of the BIOS options too, they're not necessary but nice.
I still think most people won't know about the BIOS/UEFI. I haven't heard of any problems booting Linux from UEFI boards, can't just Linux ignore everything and start over? Just that if you do happen to have to go there, then it looks more like something made this century. The BIOS really is an old relic the way it looks.
Well, I guess that depends if you define it intra-language or inter-language. When you wield a butcher knife there are good butchers and crap butchers, when you wield a scalpel there are good surgeons and crap surgeons but if they all entered a precision cutting competition we'd see differences. And some languages are like juggling chain saws for no discernible reason. I'd call java quite middle of the road though...
Of course it'd be good for you, the question Red Hat will ask is "What's in it for us?" That it doesn't have support isn't going to stop people from blaming "the red hat server" when things go to hell, maybe they'll get a few incident support fees but very little else. On the other hand they're likely to lose a lot of basic support agreements from companies who bought it because some PHB has heard of Red Hat, but never CentOS. There's a reason Fedora has its own name and brand and it's not Red Hat Linux anymore, because they don't want reports of Fedora problems to sound like RHEL problems.
I mean, like some other person commented there are plenty products that are very similar, if you just need a free server there's Debian or Ubuntu LTS, I don't know if SLES has a free version but if you absolutely want to run RHEL it's because you want their QA on it. Maybe that should be worth a little, otherwise you're free to help do the work of creating CentOS yourself and not just wait for others to help you. No payment, no contribution, yes it's easy to lean back and say please give me everything for free but the work doesn't do itself.
(Like many kinds of stained glass that we no longer know how to make, because no one passed it on.)
(...)
this of course has the obvious effect of stunting the development and innovation cycle, because you can't use other people's ideas once they're actually available
So how exactly could you use that stained glass technique? Oh right, it was never made available. If it had been patented, it must have been disclosed immediately, it'd be a monopoly on them for 20 years but people could understand what you did and start thinking of improvements or variations that wouldn't be covered.
And there is really the biggest reason I don't think patents have much value anymore, who actually reads patents to learn something? Nobody, just lawyers and patent trolls. If there's no trade secret gained, if it's just a free monopoly given then the public hasn't gained any knowledge. Then it's purely an economic incentive like lowering the tax rate or something like that.
Could clients detect this somehow and fall back to support the broken behaviour? For example on detection of an unexpected reset.
Yes, but it opens you up to downgrade attacks. If both the client and server claims to support protocol X then it should not be possible to force them to use protocol Y which is considered less secure, even if both support that too. If you have a fully working TLS 1.1/1.2 client and server then all I have to do is cause a reset, the client will think it's a broken server and they'll use TLS 1.0 so you create a vulnerability where there was none.
AC said it, the standard may be many years old but no released version of OpenSSL supports anything higher than TLS 1.0....
Adobe was the company that trained me to press CTRL+S at least every two minutes so I wouldn't lose too much work the next time Premiere crashed, and to save to a new file every couple of hours so that I wouldn't lose too much when it corrupted the save.
Heh, I learned that already in childhood playing Sierra games. Save early, save often and keep your old savegames. Of course that was by design, maybe they were just trying to prepare people for work life? It has certainly saved my ass a few times...
Does it go up in flames when the OS reaches the end of life?
Yes, but it might be reborn as a fox or possibly a weasel...
in essence, your life is rented to you at birth. Fail a payment and your body is repoed and used for medical spare parts...
I get the feeling you've seen this movie. It's not from birth but close enough...
Seriously we moved passed "Caveat Emptor" centuries ago. Hence rulings on product safety, reasonable quality, being as described and not facilitating uncompetitive practices.
Then we entered the new economy where all things are licensed, not sold and none of the rights we used to have apply anymore. To take an example the right of first sale, several games recently have simply said this is a non-transferable license and that was the end of that. Also there are other abominations like the DMCA where they can put use restrictions into the DRM, because they can make whatever terms they want to be a licensed player. It's the greatest ripoff the software and entertainment history has ever seen. And all the devices that aren't yours anymore because they can just remote kill applications, remote delete books and so on. The walled garden may seem far and wide today, but I bet the walls will close in sooner rather than later.
I don't know why you're buying a computer with Windows to begin with if you're going to install Linux anyway,
Even if we ignore the new Linux installs, how about re-purposing an old PC, second hand PCs, corporate computers that are sold off for cheap, huge blocker for people wanting to migrate/test Linux and so on. Laptops pretty much all come with the OS preinstalled and the desktop market is dominated by OEMs. The volume of "virgin" hardware that's never been touched by Windows is just a few percent of the market (excluding Macs, but Apple might decide to do the same).
As long as the upgrade is signed, why would that be a problem? This is like tivoization for PCs, they can upgrade but nobody else can modify it.
No, corporate profits ABSOLUTELY DO NOT directly affect stock price. If they did, corporations who were losing money would have worthless stock and those making money would always have a good stock price. Clearly that is not the case.
Stock price is assets + expected future profit/loss. If you were to burn a million dollars, you'd take a loss on the profit statement and your assets would be reduced on the balance sheet that will directly affect the valuation of the company.
Maybe a wallet analogy is better. Imagine you have a wallet with cash, lottery tickets and IOUs and I'm supposed to valuate it. I'll look at the chance your lottery tickets will be winners, your IOUs will default and of course cash is cash. I come up with a figure for what it's worth. I may hear on the radio that nobody's claimed the big prize in the lottery yet, or I learn one of your IOUs have a drug problem and probably can't pay, that all of course impacts my valuation of your wallet and can change rapidly on whims and rumors and whatever. But now say you've lost a $10 bill, it's a one-time loss with absolutely no impact on the rest. What will my valuation be? Exactly $10 lower. It's not worthless just because right now you lost $10, you're setting up a straw man then beating it down.
You have commitments like rent, wages and other expenses and suddenly no more projected income. Even if you're not cash flow insolvent yet, you can in most countries file for bankruptcy the moment it is clear that you will be unable to meet those commitments. In fact, in many countries you must do it so that all debtors get their fair share of the assets rather than the quickest getting paid and the last left with nothing. It's not that usual but if you suddenly lose your core business like this company did then that can be instant bankruptcy.
The problem with this approach is that once you get spammed you'll continue to get spammed (getting off spam lists is impossible once you're on one of the bottom feeding v!4gr4 lists), unless you set up special block rules. I like yahoo's throwaway addresses, you can have up to 500. If I get spammed, I chew out the ones who spread it then delete the address. It's a very simple and very final solution, only wish I'd used it earlier because my email already has a degree of spam from the "old days", plus various stupid people that cc 100 people at a time so it gets spread far and wide.
His manager found out about the "newsletter", and fired him on the spot.
At least there's one good manager in this story, he's even the boss of the bad manager. It could be worse...
If you are a business you HAVE to. From the start I made my mailing list completely opt-in. That doesn't stop AOL users from using the spam button instead of the prominent link at the top that gracefully removes them from the list. You can't have customers not receiving order confirmations or order updates or have business email blackholed because some webmail users decide they don't want your mail anymore.
Blame that on all the asshats sending spam who take a link to opt out as a confirmation that your email address is live and proceed to sell it to ten more spam lists. Simple people need simple rules so the rule became to always click the spam button and never any opt out link. To fix this you'd have to fix the email system so we can tell the real opt-ins from the linkbait.
Or in the tl;dr version: "You might get the code... some day" The previous bullshit I heard was that only 3.0 would be closed, once it was cleaned up in 3.1 it would be released. Now they're feeding you more bullshit and you're swallowing it like a sucker.
From what I've gathered they also have a form of "soft depreciation" where obsolete instructions are implemented in microcode, meaning the code still runs but much slower and a smart compiler wouldn't use those instructions anymore. That's pretty effective without breaking compatibility left and right.
If life was so simple as you suggest, every engineer should go independent and just take all the value he produces for himself rather than funding all these people contributing "nothing". What a load of bullshit. All the other people there actually do a job to find out what exactly it is that'd give value, garner interest, hook up the customers with the product, direct the whole team. It's like trying to claim the conductor of an orchestra isn't adding any value because he's not making any sound. Or that the only people with value in football are those who make touchdowns, not everybody else who enables them and shields them. It doesn't have value until it's in the hands of a customer who values it.
As for investors, yes they're not contributing anything other than money that you could have contributed yourself. So why do so many work for a paycheck, and not for stocks or shares of the profit? Because there's risk and a delay between investment and making a return on it. If you want that risk, take it. Don't blame the investor who offers you a fixed paycheck to take both the risks and then also the rewards. The investor has bought you out of your own labor, he's no longer earning interest on the money but on the value added by you and all the other employees. That work for hire and possibly not domestic but quite real. The very same in fact, except you're not doing it for yourself.
The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is.
There's plenty class warfare going on, not just your extremes. Most people vote in interest of themselves and thus by extension their class, it's the wolf class and sheep class deciding what's for dinner. That the rich "shop around" for the biggest incentives and highest tax breaks is class warfare. Raising taxes on the rich saying "you can help pay too" is class warfare. Every time you talk about the burdens and benefits of living in society will run into this. And it's usually not a matter of what's right or wrong it's about power. The masses have strength in numbers, but the rich have strength in lobbyists and moving jobs. It's never going to be an evenly pitched battle because the tools are different, but it absolutely happens. All the time.
What's happening right now is not unlike many third world countries where the rulers grab millions from foreign aid while the people live on a dollar a day. Most of those have a somewhat working economy, they just live in separate worlds where you buy and sell products and services to other equally poor people. I don't think we're heading for a permanent jobless economy, just one with much bigger class separations again with an overclass that can be even more lavish with servants and luxuries. Because their money work for them, it's still diverging even if they're spending big.
He's a co-founder, so I guess it's your "killed and cloned" theory. By the way, don't you mean acts of sabotage or something, not espionage?
You're going to cheapen youself with a 'ster' name? Really?
And the misspelling of Quick as Qwik... this has all the telltale signs of a 50yo CEO listening to 30yo consultants about what a 15-20yo would find "hip" and "cool". The cringe factor of doing it at least ten years too late is overwhelming.
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem
I think you have some fundamental misunderstanding of what firmware is and does. Your CPU contains firmware to implement x86 instructions. Your HDD contains firmware to implement the ATA protocol. In fact, pretty much every piece of equipment including your motherboard and graphics card too depends on firmware, they typically all have a level between the instructions and the hardware. The only real difference is whether it's stored on the device itself or loaded by the driver during initialization.
The crazy thing here is really where the line of zealotry goes, if it's on the device itself it's fine, if the open source code must load it then it's unacceptable. Why exactly? I mean the code is there either way, if you wanted OSS purity then you should refuse everything with upgradable firmware.but without source code and documentation, since the firmware can have bugs that in theory are fixable. Except you'd be hard pressed to find any hardware at all that meets that qualification.
However in practice you have to be extremely familiar with the hardware design, most don't consider it software but more like a tweakable hardware. Like, we can alter this a little bit by flashing but it's really more for development, once the customers have it then the vast majority will never upgrade their firmware, ever. And even there is a bug it'll be so tied to the hardware that really only the people with the hardware schematics can fix it.
I guess it matters to some, but then you've moved from the <1% of the market into the <0.0001% area...