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if the original BSD TCP/IP stack hadn't been under such a licence, it's doubtful the internet would be as interoperable as it is today, and if X hadn't been under the MIT licence, we'd be stuck with a bunch of incompatible proprietary windowing systems.
Your assertions are totally unawarranted. Ifs are meaningless in History, except as a fun exercise.
One could say that to the contrary a copylefted X Window System would have had less forking (widgets, servers, extensions, drivers) and thus the main RI would have been richer, more useful.
And we would be totally unable to prove it either way.
I hope FreeDesktop succeeds. Copyleft is really a good thing, and it baffles me how XFree86 has been consistently refusing it.
At one point they actually stated that was because of contributions from proprietary vendors, but I fail to see why someone who actually has a proprietary product will refuse to use the GPL, thus preventing other proprietary vendors from hoarding his code.
Then there is the thing with proprietary drivers, like nVidia. To these I say Good ridance!
When the X Group wanted to change its license to a proprietary one, in order to prevent hoarding, I suggested them using the GNU GPL. They even entered conversations with the FSF, but XFree86's refusal aborted the copylefting of X. I think that was incredibly dumb. Anyone may disagree, but I think that would have protected us from this farse now and perhaps would have got us better, more free drivers.
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reminds me of the PHP fiasco with MySQL. Hardcore PHPers are sticking with the sluggish MySQL 3 family because of the licensing on MySQL 4.
Any pointers to this?
Even if it really fazes me that people are still using MySQL instead of flocking to either MaxDB, PostgreSQL or Firebird in flocks, and not at all for the licensing...
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All of these alternatives were more expensive than comparable PCs.
The Acorn was cheaper, as was the Amiga when it still was a product -- the Amiga's M68K processor, while CISC, was too more elegant and efficient than x86. Granted, them both, just like the pre-Mac OS X Apples, were quite proprietary, but all of them still do run GNU/Linux.
The Alpha PCs, as opposed to workstations, and the Mac OS X Power Macintoshes, have comparable prices. And both had, at a time, white-box clone markets. What was missing was not price, but a level playing field.
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Even Alpha, with the power of MS Windows behind it, could not convince developers to develop mainstream applications for it. Why? Because alpha based machines cost an order of magnitude more than a PC.
What are you smoking? You seem to think all Alphas were servers or technical workstations, and ignores all Alpha PCs and clones.
Even worse, you ignore what a drag MS Windows NT was on the Alpha, being only an underoptimised 32 bits port without even MS native software. At the time GNU/Linux hadn't surmounted as many proprietary lock-ins as it has today, thus failing to gain widespread acceptance at the time.
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We were talking about 64 bit computing... Are your 4 power macs 64-bit?
They would be, if I lived in a rich country. As it is, I had to rule out older 64 bits systems because of local protectionism preventing them reach me.
But I mentioned them because you ceased speaking about 64 bits and started on RISC.
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So you're saying it's easier to build a RISC system than a PC because the firmware is in FORTH?
Yes, unlike ACPI, Forth is a general-purpose, standardised language.
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Why then do clone makers not build RISC systems instead of going through "all of the pain" of the PC architecture?
Have you ever heard of proprietary lock-ins? No, because you have not been trying to understand, only to contradict.
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We have ridiculous amounts of performance.
It took so much kludge to bring the x86 machines to that performance level, they are quite disposable and inefficient. RISC systems are happily running at ages when x86 ones were long gone to the dumpster.
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The ISA is pretty open. Transmeta made processors based on it without legal difficulty.
This is not the definition of open, but unencumbered. And the Itanium is heavily encumbered. Not so with AMD64, but still inefficient and an ugly hack.
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What reason would Microsoft have to port applications to an architecture with such SMALL volumes?
Do you see the chicken-and-egg situation caused by proprietary lock-ins?
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Alpha had the highest clock rate, the highest power and was the most expensive of all the RISCs or CISCs of it's time.
You seem to never have seen a Multia... you are talking about the high-end, but there were low-end Alphas, and Intel killed it just in time to prevent the apparition of mobile (notebook) versions, some years after they would even trickle down to the embedded market even if these two markets hardly will need 64 bitness anytime soon.
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You're basically doing to same amount of computation which to a first order, requires the same amount of energy.
Theoretically yes, but have you forgotten physical realities? The x86 limitations and ugliness just forces the processor to do more in order to achieve the same results.
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RISC machines also use up more memory since their code footprints are larger
Memory is cheap and efficient if compared to the CPU.
mod yourself down if you're merely going to hurl abuse at Darl and SCO. This is a tragedy unfolding; a very human tragedy.
It is still a tragedy of greed, not despair. Or why does Darl and his people need to be multimillionaires instead of simple, honest-to-God millionaires?
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very few/. readers would have the spine to stand up and assert something as outlandish as SCO asserts.
Does it take a spine to lie for power and profit, surrounded by sycophants?
Not necessary, there have been RISC PCs for quite a while. The Acorn, the Apple Power Macintosh, the Digital Personal Workstations and Multias, and all their clones were and are quite affordable machines. And the Digital (and clonemakers') ones where 64 bits, unless you insisted on running MS Windows NT instead of Debian GNU/Linux (I mention Debian 'cause it's the same on any hardware, and popular), NetBSD (same about portability, minus popularity), or Digital Unix (or OSF/1, or Tru64 -- just pick your favourite nom du jour).
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I certainly could not afford to shell out $25,000 USD for a unix workstation 10 years ago.
I can't to this day, nor even a cheaper one, 'cause they're simply not available at Brazil. But I do have four Power Macintoshs in the family, all bought at rock-bottom prices either used or leftovers from Apple's changing lines.
But in the US, Europe or the Far East you could have a Multia or an Alpha clone for a fraction of the price. Perhaps you can even find one of the Alpha clones that rendered Titanic -- these were simple dual-processing white-box Alpha PCs, not any fancy workstations.
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Wintel, isn't a drag on informatics. Wintel has brought cheap/ubiquitous computing to the masses.
In fact Wintel just followed the footsteps of Apple and (gasp) IBM. And then failed to do open systems. In all fairness, Wintel used to be more open than Apple, and at one time even then IBM -- the PS/2 had proprietary MCA.
But now, we still don't have OpenFirmware in PCs, because Intel (and AMD) would rather we use their proprietary stuff with horrible ACPI instead of the Forth standard already present in all RISC vendors. We still don't have decent interoperability -- it works, but with much human pain involved -- because of secret file formats, APIs and protocols. We still don't have decent performance, memory addressing or power efficiency because Intel wants us to go to their horse-produced marchitecture, and AMD's only shot at the mass market is perpetuating part of x86's horrors into 64 bitness.
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Linux is amazing - cutting the cost of computers down even more.
And it could cut it even more was it generally available in open architectures. Like, PCI is open, but not the BIOS or the ISA -- ISA as in chip architecture, not the obsolete bus. And if it could better, easilier interoperate with the de facto standard.
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Alpha and their ilk died because not enough people bought them.
And not enough people bought them because MS never ported MS Windows to 64 bits specifically, nor even recompiled all its apps to RISC in general -- even MS Windows NT for the Alpha never got, say, MS Access or games, and only got MS Visual BASIC when it was almost dying already.
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a $500 computer that performs at maybe 80% of a high end equivalent RISC today is pretty damn good.
Economics teach us that, had we open standards acceptance which is currently hindered by the duopoly, we'd have US$ 500,- RISC computers too, but these would require less clock, less memory, less footprint, less energy, and they would produce less noise and last more. Incredible how ecologists blather about efficiency and garbage disposal, yet few people point out that Wintel makes for inefficient, practically disposable systems.
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If your definition of 64-bit is a 32-bit operating system around a 64-bit chip, then the G5 is a 64-bit platform.
Not quite. Neither were Digital Personal Workstations running MS Windows NT.
But in both cases you can run something better: Debian GNU/Linux. Hey, Linus himself did. In the Digital machines (and clonemakers') you could also run OpenVMS and Digital Unix (OSF/1, Tru64... pick your nom du jour.
You are right about Apple's marktecture. It defies reason to understand why Jobs had to pick his buddies' dormant, obsolete, fat OS instead of picking a lean, thriving OS like pure BSD or GNU/Linux. Had he done The Right Thing(R) he'd have a better chance at early 64-bitness.
The way it is, Wintel still have a go at being there before the Mac OS.
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the operating system can address up to 8GB of RAM, though user programs are still limited to 4GB
Just not to let us Mac fanboys down, in all fairness it does that better than contraptions like the Xeon, and 4 GiB still is more than most of us need for any single app.
For example, I'd love to have 4 GiB to, say, a database server cache or something the like, and the remaining 4 GiB for all the rest. It would make a nice host for terminals.
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Maybe 64-bit computing is right around the corner after all
Wrong. 64-bit computing is ten years old with the Alpha, including PCs running GNU/Linux. Not to mention the later UltraSPARC, PA-RISC 2 and MIPS workstations.
And today we already have the PowerPC G5.
This all proves Wintel is the biggest drag in Informatics.
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Saddam (or who ever) was wrong for having it put on the top of a n apartment buidling.
TV antennas are put on top of civilian builings all over the world, simply because they are civilian devices.
Now I do think Saddam got what he deserved, and believe the fault lies with former Western leaders who did nothing to stop him. But that doesn't make it right to lie or to target civilians. That this happened makes it next to impossible to maintain enduring peace anywhere. Think the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
What is this about Nokie the article mentions? All Google gave me was a SDK and a seemingly long dead prototype set-top box... would it be this Embedded Linux Targets Telecom Infrastructure?
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It's a nice warm fuzzy idea, but not everyone has the regular 8-5 M-F schedule. It's kinda screwing those people over.
I've lived in Europe for two years, and somehow they just seem to live with a quiet life on Sundays. There is bus service on Sundays, but then they care for public service in general.
Re:How will they pay for this?
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
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some politicians have actually suggested eliminating bus service on Sundays
Let them do it. Perhaps that will prompt some savy businessmen to enter the public transportation market and revitalise it, or else the public outcry could make them revamp it themselves... worst case people will get some rest, go to the local church, to the park, whatever.
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I don't remember them as being thought of as evil at all
Where did you live? Boca Raton, or Armonk, NY?
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always that quote "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Which tellingly was applied later to M$.
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they used an open published architecture that pretty much led to their own fall through the add-on cards and peripherals.
You are thinking the IBM PC, which was never so important. See that only Dell really makes money on PCs nowadays, not even M$ does. The real money is and was on servers.
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IBM is why we (mostly) still have these big ol' ugly boxes for computers instead of a computer built into the keyboard.
If you are thinking expansibility, wrong. The Altair, the Apple II and others were expansible much before the IBM PC.
And if you are thinking inefficiency, wrong again. If it was IBM's choice, we'd be running smaller computers based on the MCA and PowerPC, like first the PS/2 and then the PC Power Series 8[35]0 prototypes. Anyway IBM never had a computer-in-a-keyboard system like the Amiga. Perhaps Amiga could still have such a system now based on the PowerPC, though...
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everyone made proprietary hardware. Even today it's pretty damned rare to find open hardware.
Even discounting the fact that SPARC and POWER are far more open than x86 stuff, and that x86 stuff is popular enough to be even easier to work with than IBM proprietary stuff, I was referring to operating systems. It took a government decision to make IBM license MVS, and even so they kept changing hardware specifications to kill third-party hardware plugin vendors. MVS to this day is a dog to work with because it has even its own character set and codification with even a different sorting than ASCII or Unicode.
I can't believe how acritical this review was. There are several books (and magazine articles and personal anedoctes and so on) documenting how IBM is bad and was even worse, and how they incubated Microsoft and its culture.
The best I ever read was "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power", by a DoJ's economist who actually worked fighting IBM's monopoly. He tells us some interesting facts like Thomas J Watson being a convicted monopolist for practices at NCR that'd make Bill Gates blush, and once at IBM how he refined his practices to try to escape justice.
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i just took a History class at the U of Dayton last semester, and we talked about this a bit. I believe that he pretty much got screwed out of a job at NCR (National Cash Register)
Check Big Blue, AFAIR he served time in jail for criminal monopoly creation and maintenance at NCR.
They shrinked. They just work now selling complete packages to business with high transaction volumes, instead of competing in the general purpose computing market.
And they've become yet another Wintel reseller cum proprietary systems vendor.
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I'm old enough to remember twenty years ago very clearly. IBM was *NOT* considered an evil empire.
I'm old enough too. And I read. IBM not only was considered an evil empire, it was a convicted monopolist and made only proprietary systems. Guess who incubated William Gates III?
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IBM innovated.
Not really. All of IBM's "innovations" are actually someone else's, they just managed to make money off it by virtue of their monopoly.
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Your assertions are totally unawarranted. Ifs are meaningless in History, except as a fun exercise.
One could say that to the contrary a copylefted X Window System would have had less forking (widgets, servers, extensions, drivers) and thus the main RI would have been richer, more useful.
And we would be totally unable to prove it either way.
So they were not standards!
ObjectiveC proprietary? Nope, NeXT did ObjectiveC in gcc.
Free software.
Not true. To have a standard type system is a real great idea.
Why not?
I hope FreeDesktop succeeds. Copyleft is really a good thing, and it baffles me how XFree86 has been consistently refusing it.
At one point they actually stated that was because of contributions from proprietary vendors, but I fail to see why someone who actually has a proprietary product will refuse to use the GPL, thus preventing other proprietary vendors from hoarding his code.
Then there is the thing with proprietary drivers, like nVidia. To these I say Good ridance!
When the X Group wanted to change its license to a proprietary one, in order to prevent hoarding, I suggested them using the GNU GPL. They even entered conversations with the FSF, but XFree86's refusal aborted the copylefting of X. I think that was incredibly dumb. Anyone may disagree, but I think that would have protected us from this farse now and perhaps would have got us better, more free drivers.
Any pointers to this?
Even if it really fazes me that people are still using MySQL instead of flocking to either MaxDB, PostgreSQL or Firebird in flocks, and not at all for the licensing...
The Acorn was cheaper, as was the Amiga when it still was a product -- the Amiga's M68K processor, while CISC, was too more elegant and efficient than x86. Granted, them both, just like the pre-Mac OS X Apples, were quite proprietary, but all of them still do run GNU/Linux.
The Alpha PCs, as opposed to workstations, and the Mac OS X Power Macintoshes, have comparable prices. And both had, at a time, white-box clone markets. What was missing was not price, but a level playing field.
What are you smoking? You seem to think all Alphas were servers or technical workstations, and ignores all Alpha PCs and clones.
Even worse, you ignore what a drag MS Windows NT was on the Alpha, being only an underoptimised 32 bits port without even MS native software. At the time GNU/Linux hadn't surmounted as many proprietary lock-ins as it has today, thus failing to gain widespread acceptance at the time.
They would be, if I lived in a rich country. As it is, I had to rule out older 64 bits systems because of local protectionism preventing them reach me.
But I mentioned them because you ceased speaking about 64 bits and started on RISC.
Yes, unlike ACPI, Forth is a general-purpose, standardised language.
Have you ever heard of proprietary lock-ins? No, because you have not been trying to understand, only to contradict.
It took so much kludge to bring the x86 machines to that performance level, they are quite disposable and inefficient. RISC systems are happily running at ages when x86 ones were long gone to the dumpster.
This is not the definition of open, but unencumbered. And the Itanium is heavily encumbered. Not so with AMD64, but still inefficient and an ugly hack.
Do you see the chicken-and-egg situation caused by proprietary lock-ins?
You seem to never have seen a Multia... you are talking about the high-end, but there were low-end Alphas, and Intel killed it just in time to prevent the apparition of mobile (notebook) versions, some years after they would even trickle down to the embedded market even if these two markets hardly will need 64 bitness anytime soon.
Theoretically yes, but have you forgotten physical realities? The x86 limitations and ugliness just forces the processor to do more in order to achieve the same results.
Memory is cheap and efficient if compared to the CPU.
It is still a tragedy of greed, not despair. Or why does Darl and his people need to be multimillionaires instead of simple, honest-to-God millionaires?
Does it take a spine to lie for power and profit, surrounded by sycophants?
Not necessary, there have been RISC PCs for quite a while. The Acorn, the Apple Power Macintosh, the Digital Personal Workstations and Multias, and all their clones were and are quite affordable machines. And the Digital (and clonemakers') ones where 64 bits, unless you insisted on running MS Windows NT instead of Debian GNU/Linux (I mention Debian 'cause it's the same on any hardware, and popular), NetBSD (same about portability, minus popularity), or Digital Unix (or OSF/1, or Tru64 -- just pick your favourite nom du jour).
I can't to this day, nor even a cheaper one, 'cause they're simply not available at Brazil. But I do have four Power Macintoshs in the family, all bought at rock-bottom prices either used or leftovers from Apple's changing lines.
But in the US, Europe or the Far East you could have a Multia or an Alpha clone for a fraction of the price. Perhaps you can even find one of the Alpha clones that rendered Titanic -- these were simple dual-processing white-box Alpha PCs, not any fancy workstations.
In fact Wintel just followed the footsteps of Apple and (gasp) IBM. And then failed to do open systems. In all fairness, Wintel used to be more open than Apple, and at one time even then IBM -- the PS/2 had proprietary MCA.
But now, we still don't have OpenFirmware in PCs, because Intel (and AMD) would rather we use their proprietary stuff with horrible ACPI instead of the Forth standard already present in all RISC vendors. We still don't have decent interoperability -- it works, but with much human pain involved -- because of secret file formats, APIs and protocols. We still don't have decent performance, memory addressing or power efficiency because Intel wants us to go to their horse-produced marchitecture, and AMD's only shot at the mass market is perpetuating part of x86's horrors into 64 bitness.
And it could cut it even more was it generally available in open architectures. Like, PCI is open, but not the BIOS or the ISA -- ISA as in chip architecture, not the obsolete bus. And if it could better, easilier interoperate with the de facto standard.
And not enough people bought them because MS never ported MS Windows to 64 bits specifically, nor even recompiled all its apps to RISC in general -- even MS Windows NT for the Alpha never got, say, MS Access or games, and only got MS Visual BASIC when it was almost dying already.
Economics teach us that, had we open standards acceptance which is currently hindered by the duopoly, we'd have US$ 500,- RISC computers too, but these would require less clock, less memory, less footprint, less energy, and they would produce less noise and last more. Incredible how ecologists blather about efficiency and garbage disposal, yet few people point out that Wintel makes for inefficient, practically disposable systems.
Not quite. Neither were Digital Personal Workstations running MS Windows NT.
But in both cases you can run something better: Debian GNU/Linux. Hey, Linus himself did. In the Digital machines (and clonemakers') you could also run OpenVMS and Digital Unix (OSF/1, Tru64... pick your nom du jour.
You are right about Apple's marktecture. It defies reason to understand why Jobs had to pick his buddies' dormant, obsolete, fat OS instead of picking a lean, thriving OS like pure BSD or GNU/Linux. Had he done The Right Thing(R) he'd have a better chance at early 64-bitness.
The way it is, Wintel still have a go at being there before the Mac OS.
Just not to let us Mac fanboys down, in all fairness it does that better than contraptions like the Xeon, and 4 GiB still is more than most of us need for any single app.
For example, I'd love to have 4 GiB to, say, a database server cache or something the like, and the remaining 4 GiB for all the rest. It would make a nice host for terminals.
As I heard, "I love the Mac, but Apple hates me!"
Wrong. 64-bit computing is ten years old with the Alpha, including PCs running GNU/Linux. Not to mention the later UltraSPARC, PA-RISC 2 and MIPS workstations.
And today we already have the PowerPC G5.
This all proves Wintel is the biggest drag in Informatics.
Emulation? Thanks but no, thanks. Haven't a dual G5 to spare. Just a lowly 366 MHz G3 iBook.
Java yes, but not its Mozilla plugin. I've heard people saying got it working, and even followed a HOWTO or two, but still nada.
Java and Flash plugins. In Brazil it is nearly impossible to find a job or use a bank in the Web without them both.
TV antennas are put on top of civilian builings all over the world, simply because they are civilian devices.
Now I do think Saddam got what he deserved, and believe the fault lies with former Western leaders who did nothing to stop him. But that doesn't make it right to lie or to target civilians. That this happened makes it next to impossible to maintain enduring peace anywhere. Think the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
What is this about Nokie the article mentions? All Google gave me was a SDK and a seemingly long dead prototype set-top box... would it be this Embedded Linux Targets Telecom Infrastructure?
M$ doesn't make that much money. It actually earned a lot in the stock exchange game.
So you are not qualified.
I've lived in Europe for two years, and somehow they just seem to live with a quiet life on Sundays. There is bus service on Sundays, but then they care for public service in general.
Let them do it. Perhaps that will prompt some savy businessmen to enter the public transportation market and revitalise it, or else the public outcry could make them revamp it themselves... worst case people will get some rest, go to the local church, to the park, whatever.
Where did you live? Boca Raton, or Armonk, NY?
Which tellingly was applied later to M$.
You are thinking the IBM PC, which was never so important. See that only Dell really makes money on PCs nowadays, not even M$ does. The real money is and was on servers.
If you are thinking expansibility, wrong. The Altair, the Apple II and others were expansible much before the IBM PC.
And if you are thinking inefficiency, wrong again. If it was IBM's choice, we'd be running smaller computers based on the MCA and PowerPC, like first the PS/2 and then the PC Power Series 8[35]0 prototypes. Anyway IBM never had a computer-in-a-keyboard system like the Amiga. Perhaps Amiga could still have such a system now based on the PowerPC, though...
Even discounting the fact that SPARC and POWER are far more open than x86 stuff, and that x86 stuff is popular enough to be even easier to work with than IBM proprietary stuff, I was referring to operating systems. It took a government decision to make IBM license MVS, and even so they kept changing hardware specifications to kill third-party hardware plugin vendors. MVS to this day is a dog to work with because it has even its own character set and codification with even a different sorting than ASCII or Unicode.
I can't believe how acritical this review was. There are several books (and magazine articles and personal anedoctes and so on) documenting how IBM is bad and was even worse, and how they incubated Microsoft and its culture.
The best I ever read was "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power", by a DoJ's economist who actually worked fighting IBM's monopoly. He tells us some interesting facts like Thomas J Watson being a convicted monopolist for practices at NCR that'd make Bill Gates blush, and once at IBM how he refined his practices to try to escape justice.
Check Big Blue, AFAIR he served time in jail for criminal monopoly creation and maintenance at NCR.
They shrinked. They just work now selling complete packages to business with high transaction volumes, instead of competing in the general purpose computing market.
And they've become yet another Wintel reseller cum proprietary systems vendor.
I'm old enough too. And I read. IBM not only was considered an evil empire, it was a convicted monopolist and made only proprietary systems. Guess who incubated William Gates III?
Not really. All of IBM's "innovations" are actually someone else's, they just managed to make money off it by virtue of their monopoly.
If you love your data give it PostgreSQL, SAPdb, Interbase, something decent. Not MySQL.
Perhaps it is just that the German mindset isn't as bothered by monopolies than other Europeans'?