and is about as patentable as "pizza delivery technique using car and phone". But no matter since as a matter of course the USPTO will rubber stamp this as they do all applications for the right to steal the freedom of the human mind, errm I mean for "intellectual property" rights.
After all, an economy encumbered by lawyers controlling our thoughts is what made capitalism and America great!!!
I want SGI hardware - and I dig that minimalist eye-pleasing look of Irix (just don't wa$te it as a web server:-D). But no SGI workstation ever made Irix look through a database of 6 thousand sound cards, autodetect and set up all support in the kernel and user space. Neither did it for:
- bluetooth - 60,000 usb devices
etc. In fact when SGI adopted NT (almost poisoning itself in the process) they made it clear that **even NT** was only supported a limited set of "official hardware. Having a limited choice makes it pretty easy to have "well supported hardware".
This should be the next move for OSS on the desktop driven by IBM / HP / RedHat / Ubuntu / Sun/ Gnome / KDE... et al. Pick 4-5 platforms to support **really really well** (i64 i368/Intel, AMD, Sparc, PPC) along with a half dozen good quality hardware devices for each and publicize the hell out of the officially supported hardware. Sure, list the 5000 and one sound,video and ethernet cards that are supported but focus on several.
WHEN THESE DEVICES ARE DETECTED IN A NEW INSTALLATION AUTOMATICALLY CREATE AND SEND 3 EMAILS TO THE MANUFACTURER (with user approval of course). 1 to marketing, 1 to engineering, and 1 each to the VP/CEO etc. and an anonymous e-mail to the Linux hardware database. Set up a site that track the number of linux installations using specific supported hardware. CREATE market incentives for manufacturers to support Linux.....
In actual fact if you look at the breadth of hardware supported Irix and OS/X have terrible hardware support compared to windows - their support (out of the box in the kernel) for various types of hardware is *worse* than that of Linux. Hwoever for the hardware they do support there or good user applications (for bluetooth etc.)
Linux has astounding coverage of hardware for sound, bluetooth etc. second only in quantitty to Windows and in quality of user applications to OS/X (but only barely). We'll see how wide Apple/Darwin support for all the great hardware out there in Intel land is after they make the switch away from PPC's... is Apple planning on supporting the same range of hardware supported by XP or Linux/FreeBSD?? Or will they be promoting an open source approach to unix/darwin/bsd drivers for hardware on the Intel platform?
Sounds like JWZ jumped ship just when things were starting to get interesting. Though I totally understand the need to make toast why trash Linux (or Mozilla or Emacs) just because you switch platforms.
JWZ is getting close to 40 years old - you'd think he'd be focussing more on hist music and beer selling biz and less on computer platforms.
The Tiger version of Safari truly does load faster than Firefox now (this must have been a priority for Apple!)... not sure if it's preloaded like IE is but it is quick now. Generally though Firefox is jus a better and more convenient browser.
There's only *one* area where Safari truly has a usabilty edge and that's RSS. The reader is *really* nice. Mozilla/Firefox could do something similar by improving Sage marginally (the article length slider is all that's missing it seems).
Is better syndication support (rss atom etc) being considered?
... we will unleash the hounds and flood your country with cheap marijuana. Your lawyers will be tied up for years in court cases defending teen pot heads while we gleefully download all your stuff.
It's not dead yet, four years to design and build and take market using no money and working as a collaborative group over the internet sounds familiar.
Designing a computer that is built to LAST and has cheap solid state replaceable components may be ahead of its time but it is not a dumb idea.
So, essentially, it looks like MS is getting VERY close to what this RFC states, although they seem to be allowing more than just a link-local address without needing a router.
All major telecoms now route calls over IP; massive private networks now exist that are based on IP technology; my stereo talks to my portable music player using IP.
The internet is one of the most valuable human made public goods on the planet and it must remain open and standards based.
Surveys that suggest that the internet is "over" or was a failed experiment because kids in the suburbs have stopped downloading music are not only wrong they have an ulterior motive.
and configure 1000's of them in various levels of detail and to fine tune the access to different features of the config system. This is a normal Unix sysadmin task and has been around for decades.
If you're saying it's not possible to configure Windows workstations from a Unix server well, maybe so, but a few filesystem images, LDAP and SAMBA can go a long way.
and upload it to central web site with "Real Shootings Syndication"... could do away with the need for nightly local newscast murder and mayhem listings.
targetting different users and both based on the underlying XUL rendering engine. It has better bookmark features, the sidebar is more useful, and it has a *really great* editor and e-mail application.
Firefox is nice and simple and I occassionally use it but nothing is sweeter than the fully integrated suite IMHO. The integrated Mozilla is a *lot* easier for some organizations to select as a standard set of applications precisely because it is a suite. Others want to choose smaller pieces so they may prefer FFox.
I think Mozilla is best seen as a reference implementation of a set of XUL applications (the way Gnome or KDE bundle a set of applications based on their respective frameworks): it does not preclude FFox and neither application makes the other redundant.
Is by allowing very inexperienced people to quickly set up full suites of services. An e.g. from the article is:
... something called the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer. It's a new tool kit from the Exchange team that allows a mail administrator, an Exchange administrator, to run this tool against his Exchange and Active Directory environment, get a deep understanding of the configuration, and then make recommendations based on that. Harvesting that type of best practices, bringing that back into a tool and then bringing that to the customer allows the Exchange admin to now have the experience of not only the Exchange team, but also all of our customers brought into their environment so they can make those changes.
Basic analytical tools like these would be dead easy to develop using something like perl/python to test SMTP environment, check user accounts on the systems, or that are stored in LDAP (witness the way CPAN.pm sets itself up) and then spit out some diagnostics to HTML.
An integrated suite of "Perl Service Diagnostics" replete with little click through "druid/wizards" (plugins that could spit out suitable sample config files for postfix, sendmail, apache, sshd, etc.) would be truly useful and could likely be made cross platform (BSD,Linux,OS/X,WinXP), "intelligent" (i.e. so the tools could improve with time as typcial usage scenarios are identified and added to the application logic) and easily maintainable (install via CPAN, use a browser for the "UI"), localizable and customizable per distribution or platform (by separating out the strings and the UI customizable via CSS and hacking the HTML), etc.
Manual pages via perldoc;-) and extensive user oriented documentation could be contributed via Wikis/e-mail lists (interesting how MS once again underestimates the usefulness of mailing lists and Google in the article). MS has publically identified a weak spot in the OSS tool set. Let's see how fast it can be filled.
Does such a project exist? When/where should it be started?
If you are familiar with the Bhopal case and the Indian government's *embarrassing* complacence and prostration before corporate interests (the *government* doesn't really care that 60K people died of poison gas - so long as investment keeps flowing). The fact they are allowing software patents looks pretty insignificant.
This is the country that gets upset when someone in Texas patents basmati or use of the neem tree - exclusively because of the potential for unrest amongst the agricultural "peasantry". No o ne cares about software so they cave in to pressure from northern corporate interests in 25 seconds. On basmati they had to fight.
The government of India has been basically dysfunctional for decades and makes all policy decisions based on the potential for rioting in the streets.
they just work on subcontracted out crap from rich countries - they are not an innovator or the "waking economic powerhouse" we keep hearing about (nor is China).
The Indian government recognizes this and embraces it - the elite in India are much better served by perpetuating the "neo-colonial" status of the country than by creating a modern open and competitive economy.
On behalf of a very small economic elite, the government has acted to serve the interests of rich countries and the extreme minority of rich Indians. They do this instead of serving the general interests of their own country.
for most people. SkyOS is closed source and therefore less interesting... lots of commerce is going on in OSS land in case you haven't noticed and nobody says it's bad except Microsoft and maybe Sun... but then again Sun is sponsoring loads of OSS development.
From a OSS is more interesting for most people (except MS shareolders), since they can be involved more directly.
... this is PURE PROOF that it will happen very soon.
When a company uses courts and legislation to prevent competition from community groups (think Coke suing lemonade stands) it means is all of the following:
- the company is technologically irrelevant
- the company is staffed by utter idiots
- the company is wasting MASSIVE MASSIVE amounts of money
- the company is bleeding to death by millions of small cuts in revenue
- the company will be flushed down the toilet of history with the rest of the shit in 5-10 years or possibly even SOONER.
I bet 3 years max and Verizon will Enron-Nortel into utter nothingness.
The problem with tje Project For a New American Century is not that that they have nukes, CIA dirty trickters, torturers, chemical weapons and don't give a shit who they kill in order to preserve their privileged way of life (lots of other groups of deranged whackos have come together in similar ways over the last 500 years or so).
The main problem with PANC is that ever last one of the signatories is INCREDIBLE FUCKING STUPID.
They quite simply don't understand the way the world works and don't pay attention to history or human nature.
Oops... I forgot, Francis Fukupayama (one of the signatories) already proclaimed the end of history so I guess there's no need - we are truly now in a "new reality".
Blech what utter idiots. Luckily they are mere dust in the winds of time - which I hope blows real hard in their direction.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot easier to develop for FreeBSD since it has one consistent version controlled set of user space and kernel code with timed regular releases.
It is stable and companies don't have to worry as much about keeping their own specially forked version to support their device,
and is about as patentable as "pizza delivery technique using car and phone". But no matter since as a matter of course the USPTO will rubber stamp this as they do all applications for the right to steal the freedom of the human mind, errm I mean for "intellectual property" rights.
After all, an economy encumbered by lawyers controlling our thoughts is what made capitalism and America great!!!
Bidding ware anyone?
I want SGI hardware - and I dig that minimalist eye-pleasing look of Irix (just don't wa$te it as a web server :-D). But no SGI workstation ever made Irix look through a database of 6 thousand sound cards, autodetect and set up all support in the kernel and user space. Neither did it for:
....
... is Apple planning on supporting the same range of hardware supported by XP or Linux/FreeBSD?? Or will they be promoting an open source approach to unix/darwin/bsd drivers for hardware on the Intel platform?
- bluetooth
- 60,000 usb devices
etc. In fact when SGI adopted NT (almost poisoning itself in the process) they made it clear that **even NT** was only supported a limited set of "official hardware. Having a limited choice makes it pretty easy to have "well supported hardware".
This should be the next move for OSS on the desktop driven by IBM / HP / RedHat / Ubuntu / Sun/ Gnome / KDE... et al. Pick 4-5 platforms to support **really really well** (i64 i368/Intel, AMD, Sparc, PPC) along with a half dozen good quality hardware devices for each and publicize the hell out of the officially supported hardware. Sure, list the 5000 and one sound,video and ethernet cards that are supported but focus on several.
WHEN THESE DEVICES ARE DETECTED IN A NEW INSTALLATION AUTOMATICALLY CREATE AND SEND 3 EMAILS TO THE MANUFACTURER (with user approval of course). 1 to marketing, 1 to engineering, and 1 each to the VP/CEO etc. and an anonymous e-mail to the Linux hardware database. Set up a site that track the number of linux installations using specific supported hardware. CREATE market incentives for manufacturers to support Linux.
In actual fact if you look at the breadth of hardware supported Irix and OS/X have terrible hardware support compared to windows - their support (out of the box in the kernel) for various types of hardware is *worse* than that of Linux. Hwoever for the hardware they do support there or good user applications (for bluetooth etc.)
Linux has astounding coverage of hardware for sound, bluetooth etc. second only in quantitty to Windows and in quality of user applications to OS/X (but only barely). We'll see how wide Apple/Darwin support for all the great hardware out there in Intel land is after they make the switch away from PPC's
Sounds like JWZ jumped ship just when things were starting to get interesting. Though I totally understand the need to make toast why trash Linux (or Mozilla or Emacs) just because you switch platforms.
JWZ is getting close to 40 years old - you'd think he'd be focussing more on hist music and beer selling biz and less on computer platforms.
The Tiger version of Safari truly does load faster than Firefox now (this must have been a priority for Apple!) ... not sure if it's preloaded like IE is but it is quick now. Generally though Firefox is jus a better and more convenient browser.
There's only *one* area where Safari truly has a usabilty edge and that's RSS. The reader is *really* nice. Mozilla/Firefox could do something similar by improving Sage marginally (the article length slider is all that's missing it seems).
Is better syndication support (rss atom etc) being considered?
... we will unleash the hounds and flood your country with cheap marijuana. Your lawyers will be tied up for years in court cases defending teen pot heads while we gleefully download all your stuff.
All your IPR are belong to us!
It's not dead yet, four years to design and build and take market using no money and working as a collaborative group over the internet sounds familiar.
Designing a computer that is built to LAST and has cheap solid state replaceable components may be ahead of its time but it is not a dumb idea.
Yup
This sort of thing should be illegal.
All major telecoms now route calls over IP; massive private networks now exist that are based on IP technology; my stereo talks to my portable music player using IP.
The internet is one of the most valuable human made public goods on the planet and it must remain open and standards based.
Surveys that suggest that the internet is "over" or was a failed experiment because kids in the suburbs have stopped downloading music are not only wrong they have an ulterior motive.
it's not that communist ... most "capitalist" countries have free medical care. In China you have to pay.
Political totalitarianism, yes;socialist economic system, no.
and configure 1000's of them in various levels of detail and to fine tune the access to different features of the config system. This is a normal Unix sysadmin task and has been around for decades.
If you're saying it's not possible to configure Windows workstations from a Unix server well, maybe so, but a few filesystem images, LDAP and SAMBA can go a long way.
see /boot/kernel/mac_*.ko for a few ....
Profit scheme:
- wear blue pants
- collect strange software interpreter
- ????
- Billionaire!!
... and report back.
and upload it to central web site with "Real Shootings Syndication" ... could do away with the need for nightly local newscast murder and mayhem listings.
targetting different users and both based on the underlying XUL rendering engine. It has better bookmark features, the sidebar is more useful, and it has a *really great* editor and e-mail application.
Firefox is nice and simple and I occassionally use it but nothing is sweeter than the fully integrated suite IMHO. The integrated Mozilla is a *lot* easier for some organizations to select as a standard set of applications precisely because it is a suite. Others want to choose smaller pieces so they may prefer FFox.
I think Mozilla is best seen as a reference implementation of a set of XUL applications (the way Gnome or KDE bundle a set of applications based on their respective frameworks): it does not preclude FFox and neither application makes the other redundant.
Moz has always rendered slashdot just fine for me.
Excellent point!
If you are familiar with the Bhopal case and the Indian government's *embarrassing* complacence and prostration before corporate interests (the *government* doesn't really care that 60K people died of poison gas - so long as investment keeps flowing). The fact they are allowing software patents looks pretty insignificant.
This is the country that gets upset when someone in Texas patents basmati or use of the neem tree - exclusively because of the potential for unrest amongst the agricultural "peasantry". No o ne cares about software so they cave in to pressure from northern corporate interests in 25 seconds. On basmati they had to fight.
The government of India has been basically dysfunctional for decades and makes all policy decisions based on the potential for rioting in the streets.
they just work on subcontracted out crap from rich countries - they are not an innovator or the "waking economic powerhouse" we keep hearing about (nor is China).
The Indian government recognizes this and embraces it - the elite in India are much better served by perpetuating the "neo-colonial" status of the country than by creating a modern open and competitive economy.
On behalf of a very small economic elite, the government has acted to serve the interests of rich countries and the extreme minority of rich Indians. They do this instead of serving the general interests of their own country.
for most people. SkyOS is closed source and therefore less interesting ... lots of commerce is going on in OSS land in case you haven't noticed and nobody says it's bad except Microsoft and maybe Sun ... but then again Sun is sponsoring loads of OSS development.
From a OSS is more interesting for most people (except MS shareolders), since they can be involved more directly.
... this is PURE PROOF that it will happen very soon.
When a company uses courts and legislation to prevent competition from community groups (think Coke suing lemonade stands) it means is all of the following:
- the company is technologically irrelevant
- the company is staffed by utter idiots
- the company is wasting MASSIVE MASSIVE amounts of money
- the company is bleeding to death by millions of small cuts in revenue
- the company will be flushed down the toilet of history with the rest of the shit in 5-10 years or possibly even SOONER.
I bet 3 years max and Verizon will Enron-Nortel into utter nothingness.
The problem with tje Project For a New American Century is not that that they have nukes, CIA dirty trickters, torturers, chemical weapons and don't give a shit who they kill in order to preserve their privileged way of life (lots of other groups of deranged whackos have come together in similar ways over the last 500 years or so).
... I forgot, Francis Fukupayama (one of the signatories) already proclaimed the end of history so I guess there's no need - we are truly now in a "new reality".
The main problem with PANC is that ever last one of the signatories is INCREDIBLE FUCKING STUPID.
They quite simply don't understand the way the world works and don't pay attention to history or human nature.
Oops
Blech what utter idiots. Luckily they are mere dust in the winds of time - which I hope blows real hard in their direction.
... the reason IE is so exploitable is that it swallows anything without crashing ... right away.