Actually, FAT was a pretty straightforward clone of the CP/M filesystem, with a bit of "optimization" for the 8088. I'm not sure who at DR did the CP/M filesystem.
(I had a CP/M box back in the day, and my first internship job was to build FAT (PC-DOS 1.1) filesystem tools for a UNIX workstation. Microsoft not only didn't charge us royalties (AFAIK), they provided us with internal documentation on how FAT worked. Those were the days...)
IANAL, but I uspect you're not either, CaptainFork. I have worked as an expert witness on patent cases, and I believe that our anonymous European patent attorney's analysis is dead-on, and his argument is quite sufficient for Linux purposes—thank you!. Further, his analysis suggests the obvious strategy to camera manufacturers and the like; only support short names (i.e. FAT, not VFAT). This really isn't much of a restriction for the typical camera-type use. Flash device manufactures can ship FAT, and users who care can always reformat to get VFAT. Otherwise, they'll just curse Microsoft because their file copies don't work right—which is as it should be.
Now the cool thing, of course, would be to use the iPod as the audio portion of a Geiger counter—maybe write a meter-face and radiation level recording app for it. It turns out that modern Geiger counter circuits are readily available as finished devices, in kit form, or even as a do-it-yourself project. (The suggested schematic is a bit retro: with a more modern boost converter you could conceivably get it even smaller and simpler.) I don't have the time right now, but someone should give this a go and let us/.ers know how it went.
Re:Google also announced a partnership with DivX
on
A Look at Google DRM
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So I'm honestly baffled. First there was DIVX (1), sold through electronics retail stores, which was a technology that ensured that the movies you rented/bought couldn't be played unless your player's phone call completed. This died a well-deserved premature death. Then there was DivX:-) (2), an MPEG4-like video encoder distributed by hackers. Then I think there wasw DivX (3), as the hackers went mainstream? Now there's DivX (4), which seems a lot like (1) but maybe without the phone call.
Am I understanding this all correctly? Is there any relation between (2) and (4)? Between (1) and (4)? Most importantly...
WILL EVERYONE QUIT CALLING THEIR NEW VIDEO TECHNOLOGY DIVX? THE NAME IS TAKEN ALREADY, OK???
The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.
One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.
"There are countless applications where you'd barely be able to scrape together a living if it were OSS."
Exactly. Welcome to the competitive marketplace, which is finally returning to software after a long dry spell of monopoly. The OSS folks will be unable to make a living on these "countless" apps, and so will closed-source vendors; arbitrage will drive the price users are willing to pay toward zero. App vendors in niche markets better get used to the idea, because it's already starting to get here. If your business plan doesn't include producing software that a lot of folks want badly, and that involves substantial effort to produce, you have a bad business plan in 2005. Find a different one. Whether your plan directly involves open source or not is somewhat irrelevant to either of these points.
So MS should have put some motion sensors or pads or somesuch in the unit to protect the disk when the unit is moved. Telling people "don't bump this or you'll destroy a $50-$100 disk" for a consumer product aimed at children and young adults isn't a very realistic strategy.
The reason, by the way, that all those salarymen have missed the last train (or so I'm told)...one never takes an earlier train than the last one, because it is important to appear to have been working as late as possible. The next-to-the-last train is usually pretty empty, whereas the last train is packed and some can't get on. I'm told it is not uncommon to sit in the Pachinko parlor until the last train is due.
It has a lot to do with the fact that open source geeks can't afford trademark lawyers. A name like "gwksprt" may be horrible, but at least you're unlikely to be sued over it.
Huh. The three items I think of as the top MS challenges for 2006 weren't even on the list.
Come to terms with the international market on pricing and control. Foreign governments are increasingly unwilling to have the hand of a US corporation around the neck of their IT infrastructure. At the same time, potential non-governmental customers in foreign countries, who have traditionally defaulted to pirated MS software, are reacting to increasing MS pressure to pay untenable sums for crippled SW versions by fleeing to Linux in droves. The international market is very important in 2006, because the US market is fairly saturated and the Vista upgrade is not looking like it will take off that soon. Finding an international strategy that continues to capture real (non-pirated) market share without compromising US strategy may be MS's toughest 2006 challenge.
Develop a strategy for dealing with Open Source. In 2006, Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice will again gain some percentage points on the desktop in the US and especially internationally. In the past, these gains have come at the expense of old-school UNIX; they're now starting to erode MS's customer base. Microsoft has a lot of options for dealing with this problem in 2006. It can: try to use its patent power to cripple open source; embrace open source and try to find business models that let it continue to make money; ignore open source until it's a bigger threat; try to use its illegal monopoly power to keep open source from going mainstream; embrace, extend, extinguish; etc. However, the worst thing it could do in 2006 is to continue to mix elements of all of these strategies to form an incoherent whole. MS incoherence so far has been a key contributor to open source success at their expense.
Figure out how to deal with US governments. By avoiding the consequences of their illegal monopoly conviction a few years back, Microsoft has put themselves in a position where the US Federal government is constantly breathing down their neck. While the President and key administration officials have acted to shield MS so far, this is a precarious position to be in for another year. Meanwhile, state and local governments are finding open source a quite attractive alternative. Since governments are a driver for enterprise software due to interoperability, and since governments have a lot of power to influence MS business practices, MS needs to get their US government relations in order. 2006 would be a good time.
I seem to recall that during Microsoft's trial, the judge asked everyone who used a computer to raise their hands. Most of the room. Then everyone who used a computer running a non-MS desktop. A couple of hands.
MS Windows still has a 90-95% share of the desktop and laptop OS market. MS Office still has a 90-95% share of the office suite market. Heck, even IE still has an 85% percent share of the browser "market" according to a recent estimate, and this is considered an open source success story!
Friends inside the PC manufacture and sales industry tell me that these companies still make a lot of business decisions against their own interests based on what will happen to their relative costs of MS licensing (vs their competitors) if they go the "wrong" way. Linux has started to appear on consumer boxes, but only in very controlled ways, and only a fraction of them. This is partly the result of Microsoft deliberately using its monopoly powers to keep desktop and laptop manufacturers from heading in that direction.
Microsoft entering other markets in anticipation of declining OS and Office Suite revenues has little relevance to its current monopoly position. They still hold a monopoly in every area they ever have, and they still abuse that monopoly in furtherance of their interests. Enjoy.
Friend, if you're going to construct copyright law for us, at least get the first sentence right! IANAL either, but I know better than this.
You said, "Copyright is the right to make copies." This is wrong. In fact, the word "copy" in copyright refers to "authored material"---this usage of "copy" is common in e.g. the newspaper business. Copyright is a collection of transferable "rights" (legal powers) granted to the author of some particular piece of copy. These rights include the author's right to control distribution and publication of their work. Courts have held that they do not, with some exceptions, include the author's right to control the duplication of their work. For example, one may in general make unlimited photocopies of a printed work for one's personal use without permission of the copyright holder.
Grandparent: "resolution changes that dont require a reboot"
Parent: "Resolution changes don't require a reboot, just a restart of X"
Actually, for some time now resolution changes have been possible on the fly using the xrandr utility and associated X extension. On some platforms, xrandr also permits rotating and reflecting the screen on the fly also.
You're talking out of your ass.:-) OK, not really, but you and parent seem a bit confused.
In the beginning was the MIT X Consortium. They published the first standards documents for X, funded development of an X test suite to check implementations for standards compliance, and published a "sample" server that was supposed to be a sound implementation of the standards, as well as client-side libraries and utilities. Bob Scheiffler, Keith Packard, and Jim Fulton were the early developers here, with Scheiffler running the technical work and developing most of the architecture.
At some point, MIT and the X Consortium parted company. Some time later, the X Consortium became X/Open, and sometime later X.org.
During this evolution, the XFree86 folks forked the X code and documentation, and started their own development branch. Control of a few assets still remained with X/Open/X.org, and X.org continued to do X support and be used by some commercial vendors, but the X.org work was largely ignored by the PC community.
Recently, most of the X developers became disenchanted with the way XFree86 was being run, and forked X again under the aegis of freedesktop.org. For a variety of good reasons, the outcome of this was to reorganize X.org as a community-source-style foundation for X development. Current open source X work is done almost entirely under the aegis of X.org/freedesktop.org.
So, the standards are independent of the sample implementation, which is not really a reference implementation at all. To answer your other questions; the PC/Solaris only thing is just to push R7 out the door. The hope is to include all the other supported platforms in the "roll up" release due soon.
If I were building a non-PC X server right now, I'd use Kdrive instead of Xorg as a starting point unless I needed some of the advanced features of Xorg such as DRI support. Kdrive is shipped with current X.org distributions, including R6.9 and R7.
Importantly from our point of view, it will mean that you can run an experimental version of some piece of X, such as Xlib, without having to run an experimental version of everything in X.
Mod parent insightful. This is almost surely a big component. TFA also suggests that a lot of RSI diseases are misdiagnosed as CTS, which is quite plausible.
Just when we're hearing that the Music Publishers' Association is demanding jail time for folks who put up lyric sites, we get Google blithely putting up...a lyric site index. I know they're claiming that their partner sites are providing these, but my first hit was on lyricsfreak.com, which I suspect is hardly legal. It's like Google is daring folks to sue them. Awesome.
I understand that there are licensing issues (to put it mildly) with many commercial fonts. But I'd do all my pages in Vera if I had that choice...the lack of tech means I don't. I suspect that the production of well-hinted freely-available TrueType fonts might be greatly stimulated by the ability to use them on web pages.
Overall, there was some good information there, but there also were some opinions presented as facts that I really disagreed with. For example, "you want a giant-x-height sans serif font." I know this is trendy, and understand the reasoning behind it, and I still think it's ugly as sin. Paper is free on the web; a font with serifs and decent ascenders and descenders in a large size with lots of leading should be just fine.
Probably the silliest thing, though, was going on and on about which font to choose, when you know darn well that there's only about 8 choices almost anyone has, and only about 2 that everyone has. I just can't understand why uploadable TrueType fonts aren't supported by all browsers, and the norm for webpages in 2005.
Maybe that's what the sIFR link is about. I don't know. That page crashed my browser (Firefox 1.0.7).
The N770 has no PIM suite! I repeat: no PIM suite.
For me, this is a pretty fundamental omission. Someone is working on a GPE port. I'll probably buy one of these boxes when it can replace my Palm IIIxe. For now, I'm in the process of returning the one I borrowed from a friend. It's awesome, except for the one task I use a palmtop device for most often.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, FAT was a pretty straightforward clone of the CP/M filesystem, with a bit of "optimization" for the 8088. I'm not sure who at DR did the CP/M filesystem.
(I had a CP/M box back in the day, and my first internship job was to build FAT (PC-DOS 1.1) filesystem tools for a UNIX workstation. Microsoft not only didn't charge us royalties (AFAIK), they provided us with internal documentation on how FAT worked. Those were the days...)
IANAL, but I uspect you're not either, CaptainFork. I have worked as an expert witness on patent cases, and I believe that our anonymous European patent attorney's analysis is dead-on, and his argument is quite sufficient for Linux purposes—thank you!. Further, his analysis suggests the obvious strategy to camera manufacturers and the like; only support short names (i.e. FAT, not VFAT). This really isn't much of a restriction for the typical camera-type use. Flash device manufactures can ship FAT, and users who care can always reformat to get VFAT. Otherwise, they'll just curse Microsoft because their file copies don't work right—which is as it should be.
Now the cool thing, of course, would be to use the iPod as the audio portion of a Geiger counter—maybe write a meter-face and radiation level recording app for it. It turns out that modern Geiger counter circuits are readily available as finished devices, in kit form, or even as a do-it-yourself project. (The suggested schematic is a bit retro: with a more modern boost converter you could conceivably get it even smaller and simpler.) I don't have the time right now, but someone should give this a go and let us /.ers know how it went.
So I'm honestly baffled. First there was DIVX (1), sold through electronics retail stores, which was a technology that ensured that the movies you rented/bought couldn't be played unless your player's phone call completed. This died a well-deserved premature death. Then there was DivX:-) (2), an MPEG4-like video encoder distributed by hackers. Then I think there wasw DivX (3), as the hackers went mainstream? Now there's DivX (4), which seems a lot like (1) but maybe without the phone call.
Am I understanding this all correctly? Is there any relation between (2) and (4)? Between (1) and (4)? Most importantly...
WILL EVERYONE QUIT CALLING THEIR NEW VIDEO TECHNOLOGY DIVX? THE NAME IS TAKEN ALREADY, OK???
The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.
One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.
GNUs. They want to take away your unix and your gnus.
"There are countless applications where you'd barely be able to scrape together a living if it were OSS."
Exactly. Welcome to the competitive marketplace, which is finally returning to software after a long dry spell of monopoly. The OSS folks will be unable to make a living on these "countless" apps, and so will closed-source vendors; arbitrage will drive the price users are willing to pay toward zero. App vendors in niche markets better get used to the idea, because it's already starting to get here. If your business plan doesn't include producing software that a lot of folks want badly, and that involves substantial effort to produce, you have a bad business plan in 2005. Find a different one. Whether your plan directly involves open source or not is somewhat irrelevant to either of these points.
So MS should have put some motion sensors or pads or somesuch in the unit to protect the disk when the unit is moved. Telling people "don't bump this or you'll destroy a $50-$100 disk" for a consumer product aimed at children and young adults isn't a very realistic strategy.
The reason, by the way, that all those salarymen have missed the last train (or so I'm told)...one never takes an earlier train than the last one, because it is important to appear to have been working as late as possible. The next-to-the-last train is usually pretty empty, whereas the last train is packed and some can't get on. I'm told it is not uncommon to sit in the Pachinko parlor until the last train is due.
Different culture than the US, definitely.
It has a lot to do with the fact that open source geeks can't afford trademark lawyers. A name like "gwksprt" may be horrible, but at least you're unlikely to be sued over it.
Huh. The three items I think of as the top MS challenges for 2006 weren't even on the list.
I seem to recall that during Microsoft's trial, the judge asked everyone who used a computer to raise their hands. Most of the room. Then everyone who used a computer running a non-MS desktop. A couple of hands.
MS Windows still has a 90-95% share of the desktop and laptop OS market. MS Office still has a 90-95% share of the office suite market. Heck, even IE still has an 85% percent share of the browser "market" according to a recent estimate, and this is considered an open source success story!
Friends inside the PC manufacture and sales industry tell me that these companies still make a lot of business decisions against their own interests based on what will happen to their relative costs of MS licensing (vs their competitors) if they go the "wrong" way. Linux has started to appear on consumer boxes, but only in very controlled ways, and only a fraction of them. This is partly the result of Microsoft deliberately using its monopoly powers to keep desktop and laptop manufacturers from heading in that direction.
Microsoft entering other markets in anticipation of declining OS and Office Suite revenues has little relevance to its current monopoly position. They still hold a monopoly in every area they ever have, and they still abuse that monopoly in furtherance of their interests. Enjoy.
Friend, if you're going to construct copyright law for us, at least get the first sentence right! IANAL either, but I know better than this.
You said, "Copyright is the right to make copies." This is wrong. In fact, the word "copy" in copyright refers to "authored material"---this usage of "copy" is common in e.g. the newspaper business. Copyright is a collection of transferable "rights" (legal powers) granted to the author of some particular piece of copy. These rights include the author's right to control distribution and publication of their work. Courts have held that they do not, with some exceptions, include the author's right to control the duplication of their work. For example, one may in general make unlimited photocopies of a printed work for one's personal use without permission of the copyright holder.
Hope this helps.
The biggest difference between G.W. Bush and Hitler is that Hitler is widely considered one of the most skilled orators of all time...
Grandparent: "resolution changes that dont require a reboot"
Parent: "Resolution changes don't require a reboot, just a restart of X"
Actually, for some time now resolution changes have been possible on the fly using the xrandr utility and associated X extension. On some platforms, xrandr also permits rotating and reflecting the screen on the fly also.
You're talking out of your ass. :-) OK, not really, but you and parent seem a bit confused.
In the beginning was the MIT X Consortium. They published the first standards documents for X, funded development of an X test suite to check implementations for standards compliance, and published a "sample" server that was supposed to be a sound implementation of the standards, as well as client-side libraries and utilities. Bob Scheiffler, Keith Packard, and Jim Fulton were the early developers here, with Scheiffler running the technical work and developing most of the architecture.
At some point, MIT and the X Consortium parted company. Some time later, the X Consortium became X/Open, and sometime later X.org.
During this evolution, the XFree86 folks forked the X code and documentation, and started their own development branch. Control of a few assets still remained with X/Open/X.org, and X.org continued to do X support and be used by some commercial vendors, but the X.org work was largely ignored by the PC community.
Recently, most of the X developers became disenchanted with the way XFree86 was being run, and forked X again under the aegis of freedesktop.org. For a variety of good reasons, the outcome of this was to reorganize X.org as a community-source-style foundation for X development. Current open source X work is done almost entirely under the aegis of X.org/freedesktop.org.
So, the standards are independent of the sample implementation, which is not really a reference implementation at all. To answer your other questions; the PC/Solaris only thing is just to push R7 out the door. The hope is to include all the other supported platforms in the "roll up" release due soon.
If I were building a non-PC X server right now, I'd use Kdrive instead of Xorg as a starting point unless I needed some of the advanced features of Xorg such as DRI support. Kdrive is shipped with current X.org distributions, including R6.9 and R7.
Hope this helps.
Importantly from our point of view, it will mean that you can run an experimental version of some piece of X, such as Xlib, without having to run an experimental version of everything in X.
Check out the SeatSale EULA for the preferred solution to the "telling people what happens" part.
Mod parent insightful. This is almost surely a big component. TFA also suggests that a lot of RSI diseases are misdiagnosed as CTS, which is quite plausible.
Just when we're hearing that the Music Publishers' Association is demanding jail time for folks who put up lyric sites, we get Google blithely putting up...a lyric site index. I know they're claiming that their partner sites are providing these, but my first hit was on lyricsfreak.com, which I suspect is hardly legal. It's like Google is daring folks to sue them. Awesome.
I understand that there are licensing issues (to put it mildly) with many commercial fonts. But I'd do all my pages in Vera if I had that choice...the lack of tech means I don't. I suspect that the production of well-hinted freely-available TrueType fonts might be greatly stimulated by the ability to use them on web pages.
Overall, there was some good information there, but there also were some opinions presented as facts that I really disagreed with. For example, "you want a giant-x-height sans serif font." I know this is trendy, and understand the reasoning behind it, and I still think it's ugly as sin. Paper is free on the web; a font with serifs and decent ascenders and descenders in a large size with lots of leading should be just fine.
Probably the silliest thing, though, was going on and on about which font to choose, when you know darn well that there's only about 8 choices almost anyone has, and only about 2 that everyone has. I just can't understand why uploadable TrueType fonts aren't supported by all browsers, and the norm for webpages in 2005.
Maybe that's what the sIFR link is about. I don't know. That page crashed my browser (Firefox 1.0.7).
That, and of course they were wearing the famous heavy boots.
The N770 has no PIM suite! I repeat: no PIM suite.
For me, this is a pretty fundamental omission. Someone is working on a GPE port. I'll probably buy one of these boxes when it can replace my Palm IIIxe. For now, I'm in the process of returning the one I borrowed from a friend. It's awesome, except for the one task I use a palmtop device for most often.
C.f. Acts of the Apostles. Chapter 4 is probably a good place to start for this particular topic.