In reading this last post, I realized that I have a number of questions which I'm not able to answer. Figuring that I'm not in the minority here, here are my questions for others to answer:
There are many hardware patents out there that don't affect us that much, the question is -- is this one of them?
is the "Silicon TCP" is indeed a step forward for NICs, and if so
is the patent based on "prior art", and therefore unenforceable?
I would hate to see something that would work well for us regular (e.g., don't have unlimited funds to buy the next new great hardware) folks trapped within a "can only get it from one company" patent.
I knew that there were aspects of this that I did not fully understand, and once again,/. pulls through in flying colors with good responses. Didn't even need the asbestos underwear after all.
One thought related to the post which mentioned the liberality of the current court. My statement about "conservatism" is strictly in relation to issues related to national security, where the court still tends to move cautiously.
I really appreciated the poster who provided the analysis of the opinion, the dissenters, etc, BTW. Good job all!!
First of all, there is the inevitable appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court which (IHMO and IANAL) has generally been sensitive to national security concerns in such a way that a conservative ruling is more likely than the (again, IMHO) liberal ruling of the appellate court.
Secondarily, following the unsafe assumption that the Supreme Court would uphold the appeals court decision, if Congress could still pass a more specific law as to when crypto software can and cannot be exported , using the previous court judgement to refine the law. If the Free Speech == crypto exports lawsuit is brought up again, it would then need to again go through the whole process of trial and appeals all over again.
...(momentary pause -- I'm putting on my asbestos underwear)...
Besides which, maybe exporting strong crypto isn't that great of an idea in the first place. Anybody care to comment?
----fffst --- (sound of flamethrower being lit...)
the information is centrally located and that everything there is theoretically authoritative.
What a bunch of crock. Authoritative perhaps, but of dubious value. I choose not to waste/. bandwidth describing the numerous (50+) times over 4-5 years I received tech info from the web site, from an expensive support contract, or other forms of so-called help, that was either just plain wrong. Or, more often -- designed and obviously driven by marketing concerns to disquise the fact that much of their software was just plain crap. I can't easily count the number of times that M$ software didn't conform to pre-existing and published standards, resulting in problems for my clients, only to have M$ support blame the problem on the other software which was (their words)"obviously the culprit because M$ only publishes quality software."[If I hadn't had clients depending on those jerk answers, I'd would have probably "ROFL-MAO" (rolled on the floor and laughed my A$$ off.)
---flame thrower off---
Now then, often the Linux crowd is a little harsh in providing the answers to those who don't know all the answers already (be nice to the new folks please!!), but at least we put the info out in plain sight, and works in an open arena to fix the problems, rather than playing the FUD blame game.
At least Rob Glaser has a clue about the answer to the question "why MP3?". He even offered a useful analogy (VCR's and video stores, etc.) for how MP3 might actually grow the music industry past the control of the few distribution giants we now are stuck with. So while I disagree with him on a couple points, I am glad he is speaking in defense of MP3 rather than the M$ FUD product (which I refuse to mention by name). Thus I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt before we subject him to the Flames of Slash.
That said, here's where I think he's wrong:
ZDNN: Glaser: I think the way it's going to play out is that for major label music, the secured system [SDMI] will be the preferred method of distribution, and for unsigned artists the MP3 phenomenon will continue to snowball, and they will continue to exist side by side.
I disagree. Because of the record companies' heavy handed but mostly failing attempts to squash MP-3 as a format, IMHO we aren't likely to ever be willing to embrace their proprietary and heavily controlled version of digital audio no matter what. So I expect SDMI to die the same kind of death by consumer choice as DIVX. IIRC, alot of the major movie labels initially backed DIVX then backed away *very quietly* when consumers effectively told them to go to hell by purchasing much larger quantities of DVD players, etc.
Secondarily, Glaser says that "In the short term, the most prominent way that'll happen is people will be listening to music on Jukebox, and they'll hear something they want, and they'll be able to click their mouse and go to one of the great sound stores, and get what they want when they want it." Nice idea, plus a built in plug for Real's own product.
Trouble is, it won't work in the long term. Short term, it's like saying "you can listen the song on AM radio so long as you come to the record store to buy the CD." Even if the "record store" is only a mouse click away, why would I be interested? Assume I have an SDMI encoded piece of music playing through a 64 bit sound card (which converts the digital information into analog electrical waves) -- into another PC (or Mac, etc.) with the appropriage analog to digital card, running an Open Source MP-3 encoder. **-Poof-** no encoding.
My points are: why would a knowledgable consumer bother with SDMI in the first place? Why would an artist want to give control to the record companies when they can negotiate and work with the MP-3 sites themselves and cut the record companies out of the picture?
Actually I distinguished Solaris for a couple of other reasons:
First and foremost, AFAICT it runs on a much wider price range of machines, from lower end workstation, workgroup, through mid-range servers all the way up BIG IRON companies like HP, IBM, etc. would rather hang out. Which means that while a Solaris-based machine has traditionally not been the machine for "everyman", it is available at a reasonable price.
Solaris "gets along" with the rest of the world, vs. M$ which is trying to take over and eliminate the competition with crappy products and predatory business practices.
As you surmised, the third reason I split them out is that they have significant market share. If you look at the percentages a different way, Solaris has around 70% as many servers as the entire WinXX community.
And although I don't own a Solaris machine, you know what I like about them the most? They do good work without badmouthing or FUD'ing the rest of us.
These statistics don't surprise me at all. Other posters have commented about machines not exposed to the survey, statistics counted or not counted, etc., but IMHO we don't need to split hairs in order to see the value of this survey. An analogy comes to mind...
Consider the major OS's as combatants in a "virtual world war." On one side, we have BIG MAINFRAME IRON (HP,IRIX,AIX,Digital Unix), sort of like the USA's M1 tank. On another side we have the beast with it's armies from Redmond, sort of like a Naval task force -- alot of power but hard to move around. A third side represents Solaris (something like the Air Force (?) Big, fast, and powerful. (IMHO mostly friendly to the next group). Now then, the "everyday people -- mostly inexpensive machines running Linux & the BSD families. We're sort of like the infantry but all of a sudden the infantry has the software (2.2X kernels) and hardware equivalents (newer 300MHz + hardware) of 25th Century MechWarriors with extended air-support. Smart missiles galore (Samba, Apache, etc.), and the best radar on the entire battlefield (/., etc.) Built in the back alleys of the computer world and assembled for the battle on all fronts. Look who's ahead:
Linux + the BSDs...........45.9%
The Beast (M$).....24.4%
Solaris..................17.7%
Big Iron..................7.5%
Total of #'s 2-4.......49.5%
Which means that if Linux/BSD's capture just an additional 1.8% of the hosts [reached by the Internet Count] from these three sources, our "forces" will be as big as the next three groups combined .
As Linus himself said (remember, he was joking at the time!!) "total world domination!!" Power to the people!!
Lessons for Football Players and Prom Queens...
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Catching a breath...
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· Score: 2
Even the HS QB and prom queen are usually insecure in H.S. They just hide it better and suffer from it less often. In writing this, the background needed to understand the change is that I endured much of the same ridicule, etc. up to 11th Grade -- involving a change in schools. [BTW, much of this is quoted from an e-mail sent to Jon Katz yesterday.]
" Reading Yesterday's article helped me realize how absolutely lucky I was my last two years in H.S....in our school it was the "in crowd," e.g. the "snooty rich snobs" who were marginalized. In fact, the easiest way to join the margins wasn't by being different -- it was by trying too hard to be like the "Snobs". They existed in their little world, we existed in ours -- but "we" were 75% of the student body, including the overwhelming majority of the athletes and 90% of the cheerleaders, valedictorians, etc.
What makes this all the more special in reflection is that I come from a city high school that had 3,000 plus students, with a perhaps 35-40% minority student body. Talking to a few of my friends at a recent class re-union, I was surprised that some of them never felt like part of the crowd back in school -- until I asked them if they had ever felt left out. Jaws dropped as they realized just how good it had been. The main theme in the follow up conversations I had with them were about normal teen insecurities, something like "you're right, we really did ALL belong. I just wanted to be more like...." (fill in the blank with the appropriate 'popular' person or group)"
O.K., so we were lucky. Big deal, right? No, the big deal is WHY IT WAS THIS WAY.
The difference between my HS and many of the others was that about two dozen young people of all economic backgrounds, colors and popularity levels decided to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by speaking out for friendship, openness, and diversity from the time they were in the ninth grade, then sticking to it. This was in contrast to the going average in the a community -- racially driven riots a couple times of year every other Sr. High school for several years running.
So who were these two dozen or so people? We're talking about folks like the head cheerleader, starting quarterback, middle linebacker, basketball center, student body president, a couple of the more popular members of the choir, a pretty good H.S. rock band and even even the occasional "shy-but-somehow-trying-to- stay-involved" odd ducks like me.
Led by a school administration that taught them that they could make a positive difference and then mentoring them in how to get it done. I find myself wondering if instead of hearing positive values like this, what today's youth are hearing is the echoing and empty sound of silence."
--end of e-mail--
I would be interested in hearing from/. readers, etc. regarding both the pain and the positives so that I can make the information available via the 'Net. Please feel free to respond.
wavelets do better compression
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JPEG 2000 Specs
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· Score: 1
I definitely believe that wavelets are superior to the DCT. (Less artifacting) However, there are several key points in my first post which I would like to elaborate on which contradict some of the things in your post.
Wavelets are very very easy to implement...In some ways yes, in most ways, no, they aren't because of one item: iterative math functions. Wavelets are orders of magnitude more processor intensive than other encoding schemes such as LZW (GIF) and DCT (JPEG).
...for anyone who understands the algorithm...
Silly me, (sarcasm implied), I forgot, there's only one wavelet algorithm... I do understand the algorithm, if you are talking about the Haars, etc. There are many wavelet transforms, related mathematically, but with differing resolutions, etc. Even subtracting the iterative math problem above, determining an algorithm which will work well for the vast majority of images to be encoded/decoded is not an easy task.
...moving code to an alternate platform, isn't that like in just a simple recompile?
Oh, let me just fire up my SGI, my Mac, my OS-2 box, my Netwinder, my 486/DX-2, and my Alpha, my HP... and do a re-compile. I think you get my point. The problem isn't re-compiling the code, it's coming up with code that is general enough to be easily moved between platforms without suffering serious performance degradations. In lieu of that, you have to have coders on those platforms prepared to deal with and optimise for the "truly hairy math"
By the way, if you've just finished your dissertation on wavelets and want to do something about it for the OpenSource movement, get involved.
Significant points in the article follow:
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ZD on Red Hat
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I'm not trying to slam ZD-net, but this is actually one of their better recent articles. I particularly liked their mention of the "red hat" corporate culture:
They stash roller blades under their desks, then skate the carpeted hallways to blow off steam, weaving around rows of cubicles. Or they take to the game room -- which is surprisingly old school for a cutting-edge company. Ms. Pacman, Gauntlet, and a traditional pinball machine...
This type of environment has been the common denominator in virtually all of the highly productive programming operations I have worked in, and been totally non-existent in the "IT driven" operations I have worked. So far in my experience, the only advantage to the IT driven model seems to be more a more thoroughly documented development process, which should yield more advantages than it usually does. Creativity breeds productivity, overly strong controls do not!!
Another quote from the author: Linux is supposed to grow 25% over the next five years, outpacing all other operating systems combined. I think it would be more accurate to say that Linux' rate of growth will "outpace all other OS's combined".
Bob Young hit one nail on the head: we have to deliver on the expecations we raise. Hyping Linux without delivering the goods (applications, etc.) is NOT good strategy in the war to unthrone M$.
As a web site development strategist, the most significant element I found in the article was the quote thatNetscape plans to eventually release Linux versions of all its server software products.
IMHO we should all be contacting Netscape to say the sooner the better.
Agreement that Bruce's side of the story really should have been told in this article, which was otherwise well written and thought out.
My commendations to Mr. Peren's for his decision -- by "getting out of the way, as he phrased it -- he allowed the messenger to not interfere with the mission. Perhaps the LSB will not be what Bruce envisioned it to be , but as the article discussed, non-splintering of the OS is a critical issue for any/all Linux application developers wanting to reach the entire community.
This co-operation, people is what allows Linux to move forward. Take note -- end the Distro flame wars!
While I am very interested in this announcement, the IBM voice technology I've worked with in Win32 (95 and NT) thus far is not sufficient for full-time use yet. I have used ViaVoice Gold for a couple of years now, and even with IBM's longest voice template "training", occasionally ViaVoice goes loopy and acts like it's dictating to itself, rather than translating from my voice. Thus I have not as yet been able to recommend the technology to my client customers.
However, the state of the art will obviously advance. Optical Charaacter Recognition (OCR) technology four years ago was a "probable buy", however the accuracy has gone up and cost down, so much that it is now a "should buy", and any company requiring significant amounts of document translation is behind the times if it does not have at least one employee competently using OCR.
In voice recognition, IBM is definitely one of the "to market" leaders, especially in the consumer area. My thoughts are that with the cleaner OS code in Linux may actually help IBM develop code that is much more powerful than the Win32 versions. IMHO the number one thing IBM can do to help ViaVoice succeed in the Linux arena (other than GPL'ing the code, which they probably will not do) is provide crystal clear documentation of the API and a powerful SDK to allow other programmers to develop "voice-drivable" applications. This would be similar to how IN-CUBE can be used to drive various applications from small voice commands. BTW, IN-CUBE is already available on Solaris, so maybe the Linux community can persuade CommandCorp to port their product (?)
The faster this technology develops, the better for all of us, especially the motion disabled who can use this technology as a true window to the world. The same group which produces ViaVoice also has a screen reader for the visually impaired which I would like to see in Linux as well.
Let IBM know of your interest, offer to act as a BETA tester, etc. The more we get involved in projects like these, the more quickly Linux will succeed in breaking the M$ stranglehold on the industry.
Probably not. However, it is going to have alot of mainstream support, and from my early readings on the subject, should be a useful addition to the array of graphic file formats already in existence.
For those not familiar with DCT or wavelet compression methods, what we're talking about are ways of telling the computer how to generate the image mathematically from a much smaller set of data. The "ideal" algorithm would quickly reproduce any image accurately with the smallest possible dataset. The problem is, different techniques work better for different images. Which is why I suggest that until hard numbers are available, I wouldn't add momentum to this particular bandwagon. One of the folks working with me on wavelets said it way better than I ever did -- "the math is truly hairy", which means that even if JPEG2000 is a wonderful algorithm, moving it into code for alternative platforms will still be a daunting task. "Hairy math" takes time for the computer to resolve.
Meanwhile PNG... From my limited work and reading, PNG appears to be an excellent format -- but one that hasn't reached the critical mass that Linux has. HowToHelp: plug ins. M$ probably won't listen [ever tried to run IE for Linux?;')] but Mozilla's developer's will listen. Octave's developer's will too. (I haven't checked to see if there is already a PNG code branch in Mozilla or Octave, so apologies if I'm speaking out of turn.)
A last question for the/. world: (later in the article) Speaking about Lizard Tech's MrSID, I noticed a feature I wondered about: "...MrSID supports an exact coordinate system that lets a user zoom in on an area of the picture." Does anybody know if this particular feature is covered under any patents?
Someone in the non-tech world finally reports what most of us have known for years -- that NT doesn't measure up. Quoting the CNN article:
"Media reports often leave the impression that Windows NT is being adopted by organizations of all sizes for every conceivable mission and that organizations are abandoning their investments in other operating environments..."
Sad but true. I've seen a number of big corporations bite into NT (marketing) hook, (IT policy) line, and s(t)inker. It generally costs them market leadership and at least a few million dollars to recover, by the way.
"However, when IDC shines the light of empirical research on Windows NT usage, a different view emerges."
As other posts have noticed, the technology press hasn't been very willing to expose -- or even research this. Why not? May I suggest a simple reason? M$ spends tens of millions of dollars to promote lies -- to the extent that 80% of the consumer and IT press have become dependant on the flow of dollars from Microsoft advertising. This makes it very difficult for the truth to buy mindspace from the magazine's powers that be.
HP gets a similar benefit in reporting about printers and scanners, by the way. Good products (better than the crap from M$, at least) but most publications aren't that interested in critically reviewing HP devices because of the feared loss of advertising revenue.
Another reason to promote Linux, in my book. The Linux community excels at first exposing the problems, then fixing them or helping companies to get them fixed. Our loyalty is to excellence first, companies second. IMHO, the "truth will be told" mind set of Linux users and developers is the major reason we will succeed in overthrowing the beast from Redmond.
A previous poster had the opinion that GUI's were not important. IMHO he couldn't be more wrong. True, it is the behind the scenes "command line interface" -able OS components which are the best foundation, but a CLI or character-oriented interface effectively uses just 2% of the available screen space at a time.
As an example of this, while I am old enough to remember and have enjoyed text only (e.g. command line) games, does any one really think that games like Quake or DOOM aren't successful without being effective "graphical user interfaces?"
Second point. Although I won't wasted the space to list them, many major software packages out there were developed using Borland's development tools, which have been top-notch since the late '80's. While their announcement only discusses JBuilder (I use their C+++ tools), this still offers value to the Liinux community because there is a huge pool of software developers who can be more productive in a Borland IDE than in just about any other IDE (Integrated Development Environment) becuase of outright familiarity with the tool-set. (I have begun using other Linux IDEs, BTW.)
One more opinion. My hope --which I intend to communicate to Borland -- is that the most important thing they can do is provide top-tier support for using the existing standard libraries in Linux rather than coming in with their own. If they do this, I will be able easily rebuild my WinTel Apps in Linux. If I can come up with an e-mail address, I will post it later in this thread.
Excellent article, IMHO. No doubt there will be a number of Katz-haters who deride the length of the article, etc., but I would like to point out the relevance of this article to Linux, etc.
" Christianity is no longer the predominant philosophical force as it was during the Enlightenment."(In our time, corporatism is the nemesis of the individual.)
Now then, I will gladly admit to being a Christian. However, this does not require me, however, to defend the excesses of the Christian orthodoxy (in the Middle Ages or now) in seeking to control the very minds and souls of the people. Similarly, I can now choose (via Linux) to free myself from the the control of most of the corporation(s).
"One of the most dramatic legacies of Enlightenment philosophers was their shocking, often brave challenge to Orthodoxy,... and to the power of the existing monarchies that ruled the world.
When Linus originally mentioned his goal for Linux to reach "total world domination", as far as I can tell he was mostly joking. But look at how the 'Net philosophers [okay, I really mean the/. posters -- the "nerds and geeks of our time"] are engaging the powerful forces that seek to control our society (corporatism, media elitism, etc.) in "... ferocious battles about faith and reason.
We ARE different people, building the 'Net rather than marching to the tune set by others. A final thought, (and probably one I'll get flamed for, I know) is that for myself the drive toward freedom and enlightenment is not incompatible with belief -- in fact, it is the foundation of belief.
So maybe God isn't as silent as Hume thought. We simply choose to limit ourselves to how we are willing to hear God's voice. I, too, like Kant's motto: "Sapere Aude" -- Dare to Know. It won't hurt much, and besides, once you know you can make more of a difference later.
Other more technically qualified posters have already commented on on MP3 vs. M$ Audio 4.X. However, there are a number of M$ FUD related things I noticed in Cringley's article which I would like to highlight here:
"Bill Gates once told me that the way to make money in the personal computer business was by setting de facto standards. This is a classic M$ FUD technique, right up there next to "corrupt the standard while insisting on superior quality", and "pay for the benchmark you want", "twist, distort, and deny the results of other independent benchmarks", etc.
"The other has already failed." The other being Real & IBM, and by implication - MP3....hmmm. Last I looked (see other posts regarding file size, etc.) MP3 is still the champ, technically and in mind and market share. And since M$ is not going to support alternative OS and platforms in any kind of a timely manner, has very low credibility with the non-corporate crowd, I don't see that changing much because as consumers it is in our best interest NOT to let M$ get their hooks into audio file format controls.
Driven by a combination of greed and fear, the music recording industry is rushing toward choosing a standard for the safe and sane distribution of copyrighted music over the World Wide Web....The fear part is simple, too: MPEG level three (MP3) audio recordings are already flooding the Net with songs for free -- songs of artists whose copyrights are being violated.
Without dwelling on the issue much, consider this analogy: I can currently record any music I hear on the radio just by hooking a recorder to the FM receiver -- and get pretty good quality -- until you compare it to CD. This isn't about trampling the rights of artists here -- it's about controlling distribution and reaping gross profits from the results of that control. [Consider that the cost of stamping and packaging a CD is under a dollar after the initial setup charges [which, speaking from experience, are not all that much.]
Properly used, MP3 gives more artists a chance to gain an audience and thereby profit more -- they can release a song or album at "radio quality", to the internet, then place the higher quality MP3 on a page requiring paid access. (yes, I know, people could still repost them illegally) My point is simple: Don't be fooled. Microsoft and the big record companies are THE ENEMY, not our friends.
On the surface, it looks like we American programmers are a lazy bunch on adverage, but look deeper. As a very experienced programmer, I can tell you that I write perhaps 1/4 as much code in a day than I did several years previously, and get paid more. Does that mean I am slacking? Absolutely not, and here's several reasons why "lines of code" is not the best measure:
The "right" solution to a programming problem often requires much less code. Not long ago I reduced a billing subroutine from 1100 lines of code to just over 150, and increased the speed of that process by a factor of 4, with higher data reliability as well. It took about three days to figure out the logic, but only an hour to code it.
In another project, I churned out about 3,600 lines of good foundation-class type C++ code in about 10 weeks. As I am working on projects now, however, I simply reuse the components created as part of the library, which allows more rapid development, but requires less new code.
State of the art programming tools and languages require less hand coding and lower LOC counts to achieve a given result.
Am I therefore less productive? I don't think so, and neither does my boss. While I have met a few programmers I would define as slackers, most of them didn't last very long, are low paid, and marginalized by their own low quality work.
Hopefully CT will correct me if I'm wrong. Here 'tis: However, by reducing the range of the moderation, it's becoming nigh useless
If I read the initial notes on moderation correctly, any post can still get moderated within the -1 to +5 range -- what he lowered was the "auto boost" that posters with a so-called "consistent high quality score" were getting. Which fits with what you were saying about how higher base scores can muck up the distribution.
Secondarily, I will openly admit, however, that I've tended to defend CT's changes -- IMHO/. is 200% improved in the last couple of months-- compared to the months that drag by between worthwhile changes to some of the other sites I visit frequently. Stay tuned.
We are in total agreement about many things -- the importance of non-coders preaching OpenSource, many projects more interesting, etc. As other posters noted, other projects are higher priority than mine and that Debian has something like 300 contributors at this point. I'd rather see the mainstream development of things like Gecko, GNOME (no flame war on this please), etc. over my little project. Heck, starting off slow gives me time to better develop the web site.
The reason I started off with a controversial thought was this: I was one of the early downloaders, and like you "I don't have the time to read through that much code--other things have to get done. However, we especially need Mozilla to succeed in non-Windows environments because it is by far the highest profile Open Source project other than Linux itself.
What I want people to realize about Mozilla is that the overall code is in much better condition, and we coders have everything to gain by becoming re-enthused about development. I am looking to rejoin the effort once I determine which code branch I can best contribute to.
One final thought: even non-coders can help an OS project develop, by acting as additional "quality control/assurance" testers. As a veteran coder with 20+ years of experience, I've always been happier when someone showed me the bug so I could fix it, rather than having to find every last little problem myself. The beauty of Open Source is that when someone finds a problem, more than one of us (at a time) can work on fixing it.
At last, Gecko, but what about OpenSource?
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Gecko under Review
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Following JWZ's departure from Mozilla, I really wondered if there was much point in joining the project, however, this article gave me my definitive answer -- yes, there is. However, Gecko is not the major thrust of this post.
Flame time. I hereby accuse the vast majority of/. readers who preach about the virtues of Open Source of hypocrisy.
Why?
According to info published in JWZ's resignation, only about thirty non-Netscape developers have joined the project. From statistics published shortly after the codebase was released, the number of peope who downloaded the code (then did nothing) was a couple orders of magnitude greater.
Red Hat adds around ten coders to GNOME, and the project accelerates into a 1.X release.
recently joined another project, which seemed to have a lot going for it -- turns out that we have (including myself)
five developers, including one fellow working mostly on documentation.
A few months ago, I offered to start an Open Source wavelet page on my domain. I got just one response. [BTW, I have begun working on the definition and goals for an OpenSource wavelet project. MOTL (more on this later)]
Total? Thirty six coders. According to/. statistics, there's alot more of us right here than seem to be contributing. In my book, we need to spend less time preaching and more time making the virtues of Open Source work.
Wait a sec while I put on my asbestos long-johns...--tug-- Okay. Flameproof for now...Controversial Thesis of this post: Trademark/Copyright protection of some kind IS absolutely necessary for the success of Linux. Some examples:
Without trademark protection, anyone can call anything they want to "Linux", whether or not Linus agrees.
Microsoft has a trademark on "Excel" for spreadsheets, however, they do not own any legal protections over the idea of a computerized spreadsheet. Which means that I can develop the most wonderful spreadsheet, etc. etc., but I can't name it "Excel".
Without trademark law, if Microsoft originally released "Microsoft Navigator vX.X (Internet Explorer)as a crappy browser, then any other browser named Navigator would suffer because of the named association, and the original company would have no legal recourse to recover damages to their software's reputation.
Alsop makes the point that Other software makers have been reluctant to create an alternate version of Windows primarily because of the threat of having Microsoft sue them. Smart people: Microsoft would have an excellent case if anyone tried to copy Windows or Office. What mindless tripe. I can't copy and sell Windows because I don't own the software or the copyrighted license to sell it. Companies haven't tried to duplicate Windows because of many other things, such as the high risk of creating an incompatible code base, etc.
Instead, what I or anyone else can do is write programs/os/ etc. with all of the same functionality as Windows. Such as Linux + your GUI of choice + application software. The secondary authors just can't call their creation "Windows" or "Office for Windows" -- not that they'd want to, by the way.
Finally, there is an issue completely neglected in this article which I would like to present [as a relatively unknown but copyrighted author]. Without copyright law, I could invest years in developing a novel, theatrical play, screenplay, etc. -- and the moment my work was produced --anyone-- could then reproduce, distort, etc. my work.
Money issues aside, my "voice" is my own, and I deserve the right to keep what I say free of distortions. Just like Linus deserves the right (he holds the trademark) to say what is and isn't Linux.
Not that I have any insider information on what CT does in his (dripping sarcasm) "copious" spare time, but let me offer an observation: there are only so many hours in a day to keep/. operational, let alone reviewing stories and trying to separate the duplicated submissions, post the best one, etc. As an example, a few days ago I submitted an item (no, I haven't seen it yet either) and there were more than 110 submissions pending. NOT BECAUSE ANYONE AT/. IS LAZY, but because we tend to overwhelm them with our responsiveness. (AKA, the/. effect)
What I do know is that this site is (IMHO) improving rapidly. The new moderation system seems to promote layers of quality, and the better comments/commentors seem to rise to the top.
My bottom line has been (suggestion for all to think about here) support/., keep coming back, do your best work in posting comments and submitting stories, and be patient with the guys at the back end.
They ARE listening, and quality does seem to be rewarded here.
Interesting idea. Expressed ten times more consisely than what I was trying to express previously, by the way.
That said, I have an honest question here which hadn't occurred to me before. Doesn't that defeat the whole point of writing a UDI driver? Why wouldn't a GPL'd driver be usable on a closed system?
I've never been 100% clear on this point, which seems to be at the center of the RMS vs ERS issue. Is this what they are talking about when they use the term "infects" in relation to the GPL, as in "we have to be careful not to use code that allows the GPL to "infect" the code tree" etc.?
I'll sit back, listen and learn now
Point by point answers to Q's about TCO for Win98
on
The Cost of Bug Fixes
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· Score: 2
You are correct about the OSR2 CD not being an "upgrade." I was not clear in my use of the word, and yes, it is an OEM CD. I had to "upgrade" to OSR2, as will be explained in item #2.
The "new" hard disk was originally sold with Win95 pre-installed, however, because of some undocumented detail which I no longer remember, the motherboard required OSR2 to function correctly. I had alreadly reloaded my data directories, etc. into secondary partitions. OSR2 refused to install to anything other than a completely unformatted, unpartitioned drive. This requirement was also not documented, by the way. Which is why it took way too long to accomplish. M$ poor phone support wasn't any help either.
You missed my point. My time as a programmer bills out at $85 an hour and up. Which means that I could have earned $340. during the amount of time I spent dinking around with buggy old Win95 and buggy new Win95.
Again you're right -- clean installs are much faster. That said, every time I've been involved with a major Win9X or NT upgrade at a client site I feel damn lucky to get the first one done in under 4 hours because of way too many poorly documented and often stupid changes between versions, without giving us power users / developers / installers an opportunity to select what we want. At least in Win3.X M$ gave us more choices during installation.
I included win98 in my TCO because based on prior experience, I would expect similar worst case time scenarios to take place.
Slashdot Mirror
- There are many hardware patents out there that don't affect us that much, the question is -- is this one of them?
- is the "Silicon TCP" is indeed a step forward for NICs, and if so
- is the patent based on "prior art", and therefore unenforceable?
I would hate to see something that would work well for us regular (e.g., don't have unlimited funds to buy the next new great hardware) folks trapped within a "can only get it from one company" patent.One thought related to the post which mentioned the liberality of the current court. My statement about "conservatism" is strictly in relation to issues related to national security, where the court still tends to move cautiously.
I really appreciated the poster who provided the analysis of the opinion, the dissenters, etc, BTW. Good job all!!
First of all, there is the inevitable appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court which (IHMO and IANAL) has generally been sensitive to national security concerns in such a way that a conservative ruling is more likely than the (again, IMHO) liberal ruling of the appellate court.
Secondarily, following the unsafe assumption that the Supreme Court would uphold the appeals court decision, if Congress could still pass a more specific law as to when crypto software can and cannot be exported , using the previous court judgement to refine the law. If the Free Speech == crypto exports lawsuit is brought up again, it would then need to again go through the whole process of trial and appeals all over again.
...(momentary pause -- I'm putting on my asbestos underwear)...
Besides which, maybe exporting strong crypto isn't that great of an idea in the first place. Anybody care to comment?
----fffst --- (sound of flamethrower being lit...)
the information is centrally located and that everything there is theoretically authoritative.
What a bunch of crock. Authoritative perhaps, but of dubious value. I choose not to waste /. bandwidth describing the numerous (50+) times over 4-5 years I received tech info from the web site, from an expensive support contract, or other forms of so-called help, that was either just plain wrong. Or, more often -- designed and obviously driven by marketing concerns to disquise the fact that much of their software was just plain crap. I can't easily count the number of times that M$ software didn't conform to pre-existing and published standards, resulting in problems for my clients, only to have M$ support blame the problem on the other software which was (their words)"obviously the culprit because M$ only publishes quality software."[If I hadn't had clients depending on those jerk answers, I'd would have probably "ROFL-MAO" (rolled on the floor and laughed my A$$ off.)
---flame thrower off---
Now then, often the Linux crowd is a little harsh in providing the answers to those who don't know all the answers already (be nice to the new folks please!!), but at least we put the info out in plain sight, and works in an open arena to fix the problems, rather than playing the FUD blame game.
That said, here's where I think he's wrong:
- ZDNN: Glaser: I think the way it's going to play out is that for major label music, the secured system [SDMI] will be the preferred method of distribution, and for unsigned artists the MP3 phenomenon will continue to snowball, and they will continue to exist side by side.
I disagree. Because of the record companies' heavy handed but mostly failing attempts to squash MP-3 as a format, IMHO we aren't likely to ever be willing to embrace their proprietary and heavily controlled version of digital audio no matter what. So I expect SDMI to die the same kind of death by consumer choice as DIVX. IIRC, alot of the major movie labels initially backed DIVX then backed away *very quietly* when consumers effectively told them to go to hell by purchasing much larger quantities of DVD players, etc.Secondarily, Glaser says that "In the short term, the most prominent way that'll happen is people will be listening to music on Jukebox, and they'll hear something they want, and they'll be able to click their mouse and go to one of the great sound stores, and get what they want when they want it." Nice idea, plus a built in plug for Real's own product.
Trouble is, it won't work in the long term. Short term, it's like saying "you can listen the song on AM radio so long as you come to the record store to buy the CD." Even if the "record store" is only a mouse click away, why would I be interested? Assume I have an SDMI encoded piece of music playing through a 64 bit sound card (which converts the digital information into analog electrical waves) -- into another PC (or Mac, etc.) with the appropriage analog to digital card, running an Open Source MP-3 encoder. **-Poof-** no encoding.
My points are: why would a knowledgable consumer bother with SDMI in the first place? Why would an artist want to give control to the record companies when they can negotiate and work with the MP-3 sites themselves and cut the record companies out of the picture?
- First and foremost, AFAICT it runs on a much wider price range of machines, from lower end workstation, workgroup, through mid-range servers all the way up BIG IRON companies like HP, IBM, etc. would rather hang out. Which means that while a Solaris-based machine has traditionally not been the machine for "everyman", it is available at a reasonable price.
- Solaris "gets along" with the rest of the world, vs. M$ which is trying to take over and eliminate the competition with crappy products and predatory business practices.
- As you surmised, the third reason I split them out is that they have significant market share. If you look at the percentages a different way, Solaris has around 70% as many servers as the entire WinXX community.
And although I don't own a Solaris machine, you know what I like about them the most? They do good work without badmouthing or FUD'ing the rest of us.Consider the major OS's as combatants in a "virtual world war." On one side, we have BIG MAINFRAME IRON (HP,IRIX,AIX,Digital Unix), sort of like the USA's M1 tank. On another side we have the beast with it's armies from Redmond, sort of like a Naval task force -- alot of power but hard to move around. A third side represents Solaris (something like the Air Force (?) Big, fast, and powerful. (IMHO mostly friendly to the next group). Now then, the "everyday people -- mostly inexpensive machines running Linux & the BSD families. We're sort of like the infantry but all of a sudden the infantry has the software (2.2X kernels) and hardware equivalents (newer 300MHz + hardware) of 25th Century MechWarriors with extended air-support. Smart missiles galore (Samba, Apache, etc.), and the best radar on the entire battlefield (/., etc.) Built in the back alleys of the computer world and assembled for the battle on all fronts. Look who's ahead:
- Linux + the BSDs...........45.9%
- The Beast (M$).....24.4%
- Solaris..................17.7%
- Big Iron..................7.5%
Which means that if Linux/BSD's capture just an additional 1.8% of the hosts [reached by the Internet Count] from these three sources, our "forces" will be as big as the next three groups combined .Total of #'s 2-4.......49.5%
As Linus himself said (remember, he was joking at the time!!) "total world domination!!" Power to the people!!
" Reading Yesterday's article helped me realize how absolutely lucky I was my last two years in H.S. ...in our school it was the "in crowd," e.g. the "snooty rich snobs" who were marginalized. In fact, the easiest way to join the margins wasn't by being different -- it was by trying too hard to be like the "Snobs". They existed in their little world, we existed in ours -- but "we" were 75%
of the student body, including the overwhelming majority of the athletes and 90% of the cheerleaders, valedictorians, etc.
What makes this all the more special in reflection is that I come from a city high school that had 3,000 plus students, with a perhaps 35-40% minority student body. Talking to a few of my friends at a recent class re-union, I was surprised that some of
them never felt like part of the crowd back in school -- until I asked them if they had ever felt left out. Jaws dropped as they realized just how good it had been. The main theme in the follow up conversations I had with them were about normal teen insecurities, something like "you're right, we really did ALL belong. I just wanted to be more like...." (fill in the blank with the appropriate 'popular' person or group)"
O.K., so we were lucky. Big deal, right? No, the big deal is WHY IT WAS THIS WAY.
The difference between my HS and many of the others was that about two dozen young people of all economic backgrounds, colors and popularity levels decided to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by speaking out for friendship, openness, and diversity from the time they were in the ninth grade, then sticking to it. This was in contrast to the going average in the a community -- racially driven riots a couple times of year every other Sr. High school for several years running.
So who were these two dozen or so people? We're talking about folks like the head cheerleader, starting quarterback, middle linebacker, basketball center, student body president, a couple of the more popular members of the choir, a pretty good H.S. rock band and even even the occasional "shy-but-somehow-trying-to- stay-involved" odd ducks like me.
Led by a school administration that taught them that they could make a positive difference and then mentoring them in how to get it done. I find myself wondering if instead of hearing positive values like this, what today's youth are hearing is the echoing and empty sound of silence."
--end of e-mail--
I would be interested in hearing from /. readers, etc. regarding both the pain and the positives so that I can make the information available via the 'Net. Please feel free to respond.
- Wavelets are very very easy to implement...In some ways yes, in most ways, no, they aren't because of one item: iterative math functions. Wavelets are orders of magnitude more processor intensive than other encoding schemes such as LZW (GIF) and DCT (JPEG).
...for anyone who understands the algorithm... ...moving code to an alternate platform, isn't that like in just a simple recompile?
By the way, if you've just finished your dissertation on wavelets and want to do something about it for the OpenSource movement, get involved.Silly me, (sarcasm implied), I forgot, there's only one wavelet algorithm... I do understand the algorithm, if you are talking about the Haars, etc. There are many wavelet transforms, related mathematically, but with differing resolutions, etc. Even subtracting the iterative math problem above, determining an algorithm which will work well for the vast majority of images to be encoded/decoded is not an easy task.
Oh, let me just fire up my SGI, my Mac, my OS-2 box, my Netwinder, my 486/DX-2, and my Alpha, my HP... and do a re-compile. I think you get my point. The problem isn't re-compiling the code, it's coming up with code that is general enough to be easily moved between platforms without suffering serious performance degradations. In lieu of that, you have to have coders on those platforms prepared to deal with and optimise for the "truly hairy math"
- They stash roller blades under their desks, then skate the carpeted hallways to blow off steam, weaving around rows of cubicles. Or they take to the game room -- which is surprisingly old school for a cutting-edge company. Ms. Pacman, Gauntlet, and a traditional pinball machine...
This type of environment has been the common denominator in virtually all of the highly productive programming operations I have worked in, and been totally non-existent in the "IT driven" operations I have worked. So far in my experience, the only advantage to the IT driven model seems to be more a more thoroughly documented development process, which should yield more advantages than it usually does. Creativity breeds productivity, overly strong controls do not!!Another quote from the author: Linux is supposed to grow 25% over the next five years, outpacing all other operating systems combined. I think it would be more accurate to say that Linux' rate of growth will "outpace all other OS's combined".
Bob Young hit one nail on the head: we have to deliver on the expecations we raise. Hyping Linux without delivering the goods (applications, etc.) is NOT good strategy in the war to unthrone M$.
As a web site development strategist, the most significant element I found in the article was the quote that Netscape plans to eventually release Linux versions of all its server software products.
IMHO we should all be contacting Netscape to say the sooner the better.
My commendations to Mr. Peren's for his decision -- by "getting out of the way, as he phrased it -- he allowed the messenger to not interfere with the mission. Perhaps the LSB will not be what Bruce envisioned it to be , but as the article discussed, non-splintering of the OS is a critical issue for any/all Linux application developers wanting to reach the entire community.
This co-operation, people is what allows Linux to move forward. Take note -- end the Distro flame wars!
However, the state of the art will obviously advance. Optical Charaacter Recognition (OCR) technology four years ago was a "probable buy", however the accuracy has gone up and cost down, so much that it is now a "should buy", and any company requiring significant amounts of document translation is behind the times if it does not have at least one employee competently using OCR.
In voice recognition, IBM is definitely one of the "to market" leaders, especially in the consumer area. My thoughts are that with the cleaner OS code in Linux may actually help IBM develop code that is much more powerful than the Win32 versions. IMHO the number one thing IBM can do to help ViaVoice succeed in the Linux arena (other than GPL'ing the code, which they probably will not do) is provide crystal clear documentation of the API and a powerful SDK to allow other programmers to develop "voice-drivable" applications. This would be similar to how IN-CUBE can be used to drive various applications from small voice commands. BTW, IN-CUBE is already available on Solaris, so maybe the Linux community can persuade CommandCorp to port their product (?)
The faster this technology develops, the better for all of us, especially the motion disabled who can use this technology as a true window to the world. The same group which produces ViaVoice also has a screen reader for the visually impaired which I would like to see in Linux as well.
Let IBM know of your interest, offer to act as a BETA tester, etc. The more we get involved in projects like these, the more quickly Linux will succeed in breaking the M$ stranglehold on the industry.
For those not familiar with DCT or wavelet compression methods, what we're talking about are ways of telling the computer how to generate the image mathematically from a much smaller set of data. The "ideal" algorithm would quickly reproduce any image accurately with the smallest possible dataset. The problem is, different techniques work better for different images. Which is why I suggest that until hard numbers are available, I wouldn't add momentum to this particular bandwagon. One of the folks working with me on wavelets said it way better than I ever did -- "the math is truly hairy", which means that even if JPEG2000 is a wonderful algorithm, moving it into code for alternative platforms will still be a daunting task. "Hairy math" takes time for the computer to resolve.
Meanwhile PNG... From my limited work and reading, PNG appears to be an excellent format -- but one that hasn't reached the critical mass that Linux has. HowToHelp: plug ins. M$ probably won't listen [ever tried to run IE for Linux? ;')] but Mozilla's developer's will listen. Octave's developer's will too. (I haven't checked to see if there is already a PNG code branch in Mozilla or Octave, so apologies if I'm speaking out of turn.)
A last question for the /. world: (later in the article) Speaking about Lizard Tech's MrSID, I noticed a feature I wondered about: "...MrSID supports an exact coordinate system that lets a user zoom in on an area of the picture." Does anybody know if this particular feature is covered under any patents?
Someone in the non-tech world finally reports what most of us have known for years -- that NT doesn't measure up. Quoting the CNN article:
- "Media reports often leave the impression that Windows NT is being adopted by organizations of all sizes for every conceivable mission and that organizations are abandoning their investments in other operating environments..."
Sad but true. I've seen a number of big corporations bite into NT (marketing) hook, (IT policy) line, and s(t)inker.It generally costs them market leadership and at least a few million dollars to recover, by the way.
- "However, when IDC shines the light of empirical research on Windows NT usage, a different view emerges."
As other posts have noticed, the technology press hasn't been very willing to expose -- or even research this. Why not? May I suggest a simple reason? M$ spends tens of millions of dollars to promote lies -- to the extent that 80% of the consumer and IT press have become dependant on the flow of dollars from Microsoft advertising. This makes it very difficult for the truth to buy mindspace from the magazine's powers that be.HP gets a similar benefit in reporting about printers and scanners, by the way. Good products (better than the crap from M$, at least) but most publications aren't that interested in critically reviewing HP devices because of the feared loss of advertising revenue.
Another reason to promote Linux, in my book. The Linux community excels at first exposing the problems, then fixing them or helping companies to get them fixed. Our loyalty is to excellence first, companies second. IMHO, the "truth will be told" mind set of Linux users and developers is the major reason we will succeed in overthrowing the beast from Redmond.
A previous poster had the opinion that GUI's were not important. IMHO he couldn't be more wrong. True, it is the behind the scenes "command line interface" -able OS components which are the best foundation, but a CLI or character-oriented interface effectively uses just 2% of the available screen space at a time.
As an example of this, while I am old enough to remember and have enjoyed text only (e.g. command line) games, does any one really think that games like Quake or DOOM aren't successful without being effective "graphical user interfaces?"
Second point. Although I won't wasted the space to list them, many major software packages out there were developed using Borland's development tools, which have been top-notch since the late '80's. While their announcement only discusses JBuilder (I use their C+++ tools), this still offers value to the Liinux community because there is a huge pool of software developers who can be more productive in a Borland IDE than in just about any other IDE (Integrated Development Environment) becuase of outright familiarity with the tool-set. (I have begun using other Linux IDEs, BTW.)
One more opinion. My hope --which I intend to communicate to Borland -- is that the most important thing they can do is provide top-tier support for using the existing standard libraries in Linux rather than coming in with their own. If they do this, I will be able easily rebuild my WinTel Apps in Linux. If I can come up with an e-mail address, I will post it later in this thread.
" Christianity is no longer the predominant philosophical force as it was during the Enlightenment."(In our time, corporatism is the nemesis of the individual.)
Now then, I will gladly admit to being a Christian. However, this does not require me, however, to defend the excesses of the Christian orthodoxy (in the Middle Ages or now) in seeking to control the very minds and souls of the people. Similarly, I can now choose (via Linux) to free myself from the the control of most of the corporation(s).
"One of the most dramatic legacies of Enlightenment philosophers was their shocking, often brave challenge to Orthodoxy, ... and to the power of the existing monarchies that ruled the world.
When Linus originally mentioned his goal for Linux to reach "total world domination", as far as I can tell he was mostly joking. But look at how the 'Net philosophers [okay, I really mean the /. posters -- the "nerds and geeks of our time"] are engaging the powerful forces that seek to control our society (corporatism, media elitism, etc.) in "... ferocious battles about faith and reason.
We ARE different people, building the 'Net rather than marching to the tune set by others. A final thought, (and probably one I'll get flamed for, I know) is that for myself the drive toward freedom and enlightenment is not incompatible with belief -- in fact, it is the foundation of belief.
So maybe God isn't as silent as Hume thought. We simply choose to limit ourselves to how we are willing to hear God's voice. I, too, like Kant's motto: "Sapere Aude" -- Dare to Know. It won't hurt much, and besides, once you know you can make more of a difference later.
Linux == Freedom.
- "Bill Gates once told me that the way to make money in the personal computer business was by setting de facto standards. This is a classic M$ FUD technique, right up there next to "corrupt the standard while insisting on superior quality", and "pay for the benchmark you want", "twist, distort, and deny the results of other independent benchmarks", etc.
- "The other has already failed." The other being Real & IBM, and by implication - MP3....hmmm. Last I looked (see other posts regarding file size, etc.) MP3 is still the champ, technically and in mind and market share. And since M$ is not going to support alternative OS and platforms in any kind of a timely manner, has very low credibility with the non-corporate crowd, I don't see that changing much because as consumers it is in our best interest NOT to let M$ get their hooks into audio file format controls.
- Driven by a combination of greed and fear, the music recording industry is rushing toward choosing a standard for the safe and sane distribution of copyrighted music over the World Wide Web....The fear part is simple, too: MPEG level three (MP3) audio recordings are already flooding the Net with songs for free -- songs of artists whose copyrights are being violated.
Properly used, MP3 gives more artists a chance to gain an audience and thereby profit more -- they can release a song or album at "radio quality", to the internet, then place the higher quality MP3 on a page requiring paid access. (yes, I know, people could still repost them illegally) My point is simple: Don't be fooled. Microsoft and the big record companies are THE ENEMY, not our friends.Without dwelling on the issue much, consider this analogy: I can currently record any music I hear on the radio just by hooking a recorder to the FM receiver -- and get pretty good quality -- until you compare it to CD. This isn't about trampling the rights of artists here -- it's about controlling distribution and reaping gross profits from the results of that control. [Consider that the cost of stamping and packaging a CD is under a dollar after the initial setup charges [which, speaking from experience, are not all that much.]
- The "right" solution to a programming problem often requires much less code. Not long ago I reduced a billing subroutine from 1100 lines of code to just over 150, and increased the speed of that process by a factor of 4, with higher data reliability as well. It took about three days to figure out the logic, but only an hour to code it.
- In another project, I churned out about 3,600 lines of good foundation-class type C++ code in about 10 weeks. As I am working on projects now, however, I simply reuse the components created as part of the library, which allows more rapid development, but requires less new code.
- State of the art programming tools and languages require less hand coding and lower LOC counts to achieve a given result.
Am I therefore less productive? I don't think so, and neither does my boss. While I have met a few programmers I would define as slackers, most of them didn't last very long, are low paid, and marginalized by their own low quality work.If I read the initial notes on moderation correctly, any post can still get moderated within the -1 to +5 range -- what he lowered was the "auto boost" that posters with a so-called "consistent high quality score" were getting. Which fits with what you were saying about how higher base scores can muck up the distribution.
Secondarily, I will openly admit, however, that I've tended to defend CT's changes -- IMHO /. is 200% improved in the last couple of months-- compared to the months that drag by between worthwhile changes to some of the other sites I visit frequently. Stay tuned.
The reason I started off with a controversial thought was this: I was one of the early downloaders, and like you "I don't have the time to read through that much code--other things have to get done. However, we especially need Mozilla to succeed in non-Windows environments because it is by far the highest profile Open Source project other than Linux itself.
What I want people to realize about Mozilla is that the overall code is in much better condition, and we coders have everything to gain by becoming re-enthused about development. I am looking to rejoin the effort once I determine which code branch I can best contribute to.
One final thought: even non-coders can help an OS project develop, by acting as additional "quality control/assurance" testers. As a veteran coder with 20+ years of experience, I've always been happier when someone showed me the bug so I could fix it, rather than having to find every last little problem myself. The beauty of Open Source is that when someone finds a problem, more than one of us (at a time) can work on fixing it.
Flame time. I hereby accuse the vast majority of /. readers who preach about the virtues of Open Source of hypocrisy.
Why?
- According to info published in JWZ's resignation, only about thirty non-Netscape developers have joined the project. From statistics published shortly after the codebase was released, the number of peope who downloaded the code (then did nothing) was a couple orders of magnitude greater.
- Red Hat adds around ten coders to GNOME, and the project accelerates into a 1.X release.
- recently joined another project, which seemed to have a lot going for it -- turns out that we have (including myself)
- five developers, including one fellow working mostly on documentation.
- A few months ago, I offered to start an Open Source wavelet page on my domain. I got just one response. [BTW, I have begun working on the definition and goals for an OpenSource wavelet project. MOTL (more on this later)]
Total? Thirty six coders. According to- Without trademark protection, anyone can call anything they want to "Linux", whether or not Linus agrees.
- Microsoft has a trademark on "Excel" for spreadsheets, however, they do not own any legal protections over the idea of a computerized spreadsheet. Which means that I can develop the most wonderful spreadsheet, etc. etc., but I can't name it "Excel".
- Without trademark law, if Microsoft originally released "Microsoft Navigator vX.X (Internet Explorer)as a crappy browser, then any other browser named Navigator would suffer because of the named association, and the original company would have no legal recourse to recover damages to their software's reputation.
Alsop makes the point that Other software makers have been reluctant to create an alternate version of Windows primarily because of the threat of having Microsoft sue them. Smart people: Microsoft would have an excellent case if anyone tried to copy Windows or Office. What mindless tripe. I can't copy and sell Windows because I don't own the software or the copyrighted license to sell it. Companies haven't tried to duplicate Windows because of many other things, such as the high risk of creating an incompatible code base, etc.Instead, what I or anyone else can do is write programs/os/ etc. with all of the same functionality as Windows. Such as Linux + your GUI of choice + application software. The secondary authors just can't call their creation "Windows" or "Office for Windows" -- not that they'd want to, by the way.
Finally, there is an issue completely neglected in this article which I would like to present [as a relatively unknown but copyrighted author]. Without copyright law, I could invest years in developing a novel, theatrical play, screenplay, etc. -- and the moment my work was produced --anyone-- could then reproduce, distort, etc. my work.
Money issues aside, my "voice" is my own, and I deserve the right to keep what I say free of distortions. Just like Linus deserves the right (he holds the trademark) to say what is and isn't Linux.
What I do know is that this site is (IMHO) improving rapidly. The new moderation system seems to promote layers of quality, and the better comments/commentors seem to rise to the top.
My bottom line has been (suggestion for all to think about here) support /., keep coming back, do your best work in posting comments and submitting stories, and be patient with the guys at the back end.
They ARE listening, and quality does seem to be rewarded here.
That said, I have an honest question here which hadn't occurred to me before. Doesn't that defeat the whole point of writing a UDI driver? Why wouldn't a GPL'd driver be usable on a closed system?
I've never been 100% clear on this point, which seems to be at the center of the RMS vs ERS issue. Is this what they are talking about when they use the term "infects" in relation to the GPL, as in "we have to be careful not to use code that allows the GPL to "infect" the code tree" etc.?
I'll sit back, listen and learn now
- You are correct about the OSR2 CD not being an "upgrade." I was not clear in my use of the word, and yes, it is an OEM CD. I had to "upgrade" to OSR2, as will be explained in item #2.
- The "new" hard disk was originally sold with Win95 pre-installed, however, because of some undocumented detail which I no longer remember, the motherboard required OSR2 to function correctly. I had alreadly reloaded my data directories, etc. into secondary partitions. OSR2 refused to install to anything other than a completely unformatted, unpartitioned drive. This requirement was also not documented, by the way. Which is why it took way too long to accomplish. M$ poor phone support wasn't any help either.
- You missed my point. My time as a programmer bills out at $85 an hour and up. Which means that I could have earned $340. during the amount of time I spent dinking around with buggy old Win95 and buggy new Win95.
- Again you're right -- clean installs are much faster. That said, every time I've been involved with a major Win9X or NT upgrade at a client site I feel damn lucky to get the first one done in under 4 hours because of way too many poorly documented and often stupid changes between versions, without giving us power users / developers / installers an opportunity to select what we want. At least in Win3.X M$ gave us more choices during installation.
- I included win98 in my TCO because based on prior experience, I would expect similar worst case time scenarios to take place.
Which is why, in my book, Linux still wins.