I haven't even tried virtualization. We have migrated so much off our own network, I am not sure the investment in time to learn it would be offset by the advantages of using it. We aren't a technology company, we just use technology to make money.
Inventory management, purchase order, customer record keeping, invoicing, for a company that needs more than 5 seats, but less than 50. Very few users accessing, but ungodly amount of records added daily. 30k+ P.O.s per year alone. (We have very efficient employees) Most software available on FOSS is for individuals, or large corps are writting their own, or you go SAP, etc. and end up paying $100k for a complete solution when you only have 15 people accessing the data. AND it wouldn't do what my current software does, so I would have to pay a programmer to modify stuff.
Or I can buy cheap Dell computers and about $1000 to $3000 worth of Sage/Peachtree products which suck but get the job done. I even have to pay more for Dell's without Windows. It was a most frustrating time, and no matter how much I wanted to migrate completely over to FOSS, it is pointless if it costs more and does less.
We still use Linux on all servers, and when the market has products that are cost effective and work for us, we will migrate, but it doesn't look like it will happen soon. I have talked to several people at companies that make software we DO like, and they say they will never port over to Linux. Ever.
Another reason it makes sense is that you can strip a box down for one task, like a web server or mail server, and reduce the amount of maintenance on that box much easier with FOSS, due to the reasons you state. This is difficult with MS, but very easy with Linux or BSD. Adding other features is pretty easy later on if you want. It is the flexibility that makes FOSS so popular on the server side.
Need a domain server? I can take a spare box, install a base Fedora and bind in about 20 minutes. Or add bind to an underutilized server in about 2 minutes. MS just can't compare when it comes to small to mid size business servers. FOSS installs faster, has fewer issues when hardening, and in general is easier to secure, particularly when we are talking about using only one or two services. (block every damn port but 53 and move ssh to an unused high port and open that one up.)
On the desktop, however, it has been another issue. I can't even get my USB wireless ethernet cards to work in Linux, and there are virtually no apps for small to midsized businesses. Most of the solutions that I have looked at on Linux cost about 20 to 50 times more than similar products on Windows (yes, really 20 to 50 times more) so we can't AFFORD to move to "free" software on the desktop yet. I know this will change, but I was convinced 10 years ago that it would have changed within 10 years....
Texas property taxes are higher than average, but not enough to offset income tax unless you own a really expensive house but have almost no income. They also have "Homestead" laws, so you can NOT pay property taxes, but it is taken from your estate when you die. Those of us with no kids, it isn't a bad option.
Actually, I have lived in west Texas, Kansas and North Dakota as well as many many other states, and found them to be rather nice. (ok, ND was cold as all hell in winter...) Not terribly exciting, and the weather can get extreme, but there are other advantages. Mainly the fact that you can afford land and a home, your neighbors are usually not close enough to hear you sneeze, and the towns are smaller, but the people tend to be nicer, due to a a slower lifestyle. Most things are much less expensive as well, and I personally like a drive in the country where it is real country, not just sparse housing.
I'm in my 40s. I will stay on the east coast to make a living, but I will surely move back to "fly over country" when I retire. Probably move to Texas, Tennessee or another tax friendly state where I can fish without there being a boat every 20 feet on the lake, and where I can afford to have 5 or 10 acres of space between me and my neighbors. If I could make the same money there now, I would be there now.
(I think it's also nearly useless at this point for software... It's too massively complicated to cleanroom things when you could just write it from scratch in the same amount of time and have a unique (and hopefully better) product just by having some idea what the application does and how it could be better.
For big apps, yes, but for drivers and stuff like audio and video codecs or document types (*.doc, *.wave, etc.), it would still be the best way to create a infringement free product. Most of the "big ideas", like MS Office, are too big to begin with. I don't think I would want to create a copy of that, and take OO's approach, starting from scratch and just reverse engineering the doc types, as you stated.
Delightfully ignorant indeed. iPod has DRM, yes, except I don't say it's a good thing if it succeeds. How you got to that point is beyond me. So again, every time a product with DRM fails, it is a good thing. You can also say anytime a product with DRM is successful, it is a bad thing, case in point being the iPod. But that was already implied in my original statement. I am not pro-iPod / anti-Zune. I am anti-DRM.
DRM will succeed IF we buy products that use DRM. Sometimes, we have no choice, but when we DO have a choice, we should always at least consider the alternative that doesn't have DRM. Go buy what you want, but I won't be migrating to Vista, won't buy an iPod, and surely will not be buying a Zune (even if I COULD figure out wtf it would be useful for...)
This from the company that brought us Bob and Clippy. MS is so consumed with keep aliances with companies by having heavily restricted DRM methods, it should come to no one as a shocker that the Zune is basically a "me, too" to the iPod, except it doesn't even do what the iPod can do.
If MS did NOT cleanroom their implimentation, then yes, they would be open to lawsuits. With a cleanroom system, ONE groups will look at the code, and how it works, describe it to a 2nd group who hasn't seen the code but will write the 'new' code based on what the 1st group learned. That way the group coding has never seen the original sourcecode and not likely to be able to violate any copyright law when writing. Patent law is another issue.
You CAN view source code and write your own version of the software, but if any code matches (and because some functions WILL match, out of the fact that there is sometimes only one logical way to do a task) then you get to explain to the judge how "Yes, I looked at the code, but I didn't copy it. No, really.". This is why most places will cleanroom software instead.
I think that would legally be called a "derovative product". Clean rooming is making something new that works like something old. Using the existing code to make code that works on a different platform is not the same. Since one runs on Linux and the new would run on BSD, you would have to change a chunk of the code anyway. The only way you can make a "similar" program/driver legally is that whoever is doing the coding is ignorant of the contents of the original piece.
If Microsoft took Apache, then viewed the source and then rewrote it to replace IIS without a clean room method and used their own license, the open source community would go nuts. This is no different. Just because you LIKE the people who are writting the code, that doesn't make it legal or right.
You forgot to add one more bit of time: Creating the disk image, and it is spent even if you never use it.
The last time I had a Dell tech replace a hard drive, he installed XP home, which I didn't immediately notice, so it added about 15 more minutes of "wtf" until I realized what he had done. I spent more time waiting for him to show up, late, than I would have by doing the job myself.
When your warranty replacement drive shows up, it just goes back up onto that shelf.
Actually, back in the win9x days, that is what I did in the company I work for. 15 computers, when one died, replaced with another off the shelf, sent it back, put the replacement back on the shelf for the next failure. Just rotating them. Unfortunately, Windows XP has succesfully made it very difficult to do this.
Now we do the same with computers from Dell. Keep one back, if one dies, take the computer off the shelf to replace, put the replacement on the shelf for the next failure. Replace every computer when it dies out of warranty. Fortunately, we have good luck with the inexpensive Dell boxes, and the 3 year warranty is about right for upgrading. It costs more money for me to work on one that to buy another cheapo from Dell. Mainly from the time to reinstall XP, patch/reboot/patch/reboot.........
If I could get us to move to Linux on the desktop and not just the servers, it would be a lot easier, however, and recycling would be possible again.
They already gave the Open Group the trademark name of "Unix", but I have heard they would have a tough time even if they wanted to open source *nix because all the different copyright holders to individual pieces would have to agree. I don't think open sourcing *nix would be that beneficial anyway.
The best parts of the original unix are in the BSDs. The other best parts have been reproduced in GNU/Linux. The *real* goodies were actually developed by IBM, HP and others, and they are already releasing code into the GPL. The parts SCO thought they owned are pretty old, which is why they tried to cash in. Besides, if Linux was so inferior to *nix, they would not have spent so many years as Caldera actually developing it.
I think McDonalds uses SCO Unix on their registers in all their shops. You know, the ones where the kids have to just push the symbol that looks like a Big Mac® because they can't be trusted to enter the right prices. At least they used to. Lots of systems still use unix like that, where it all ties to a central system.
And in the case of Germany, the rewards are great for the losers. I'm no historian, but everything presented so far leads me to believe that Germany was much better off after WWII than it was before. I suspect Japan is too, but it may be that I am looking though too thick a cloud of cultural bias.
I would agree that in the long run, they have been better off, and that has happened often in history.
Have you noticed that since the Geneva Convention was signed, and the UN formed, no country has been better off afterwards? Or that no one has been treated better, except by the "Evil Empire" et al.? And that there are just as many wars, and they are just as deadly, but they don't end fast due to limitations in the Convention? AND if we were under the Geneva Convention during WW2, we would not have been able to bomb civilians, factories or nuke anyone? Notice a trend?
Think that is confusing? How about the Brittish monetary system before decimalization? Here is one example but you can google for others. With farthings and halfpennies and guinea, oh my....
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
Shouldn't take long to do it, since half of the technological advances are BECAUSE of war, including the internet, the rockets/missle that NASA launches on, and the majority of spending in the sciences.
You don't have to like war to understand that while the price is high, so are the rewards for the victors. The key is being the victor.
But if Intel wants to sell any reasonable QUANTITY of them, which is necessary to get the scales of economy working for them, they need to appeal to a broader market. Porn and games are about as broad as it gets, I'm just sure why you need 80 cores to watch porn.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't even tried virtualization. We have migrated so much off our own network, I am not sure the investment in time to learn it would be offset by the advantages of using it. We aren't a technology company, we just use technology to make money.
Inventory management, purchase order, customer record keeping, invoicing, for a company that needs more than 5 seats, but less than 50. Very few users accessing, but ungodly amount of records added daily. 30k+ P.O.s per year alone. (We have very efficient employees) Most software available on FOSS is for individuals, or large corps are writting their own, or you go SAP, etc. and end up paying $100k for a complete solution when you only have 15 people accessing the data. AND it wouldn't do what my current software does, so I would have to pay a programmer to modify stuff.
Or I can buy cheap Dell computers and about $1000 to $3000 worth of Sage/Peachtree products which suck but get the job done. I even have to pay more for Dell's without Windows. It was a most frustrating time, and no matter how much I wanted to migrate completely over to FOSS, it is pointless if it costs more and does less.
We still use Linux on all servers, and when the market has products that are cost effective and work for us, we will migrate, but it doesn't look like it will happen soon. I have talked to several people at companies that make software we DO like, and they say they will never port over to Linux. Ever.
Another reason it makes sense is that you can strip a box down for one task, like a web server or mail server, and reduce the amount of maintenance on that box much easier with FOSS, due to the reasons you state. This is difficult with MS, but very easy with Linux or BSD. Adding other features is pretty easy later on if you want. It is the flexibility that makes FOSS so popular on the server side.
Need a domain server? I can take a spare box, install a base Fedora and bind in about 20 minutes. Or add bind to an underutilized server in about 2 minutes. MS just can't compare when it comes to small to mid size business servers. FOSS installs faster, has fewer issues when hardening, and in general is easier to secure, particularly when we are talking about using only one or two services. (block every damn port but 53 and move ssh to an unused high port and open that one up.)
On the desktop, however, it has been another issue. I can't even get my USB wireless ethernet cards to work in Linux, and there are virtually no apps for small to midsized businesses. Most of the solutions that I have looked at on Linux cost about 20 to 50 times more than similar products on Windows (yes, really 20 to 50 times more) so we can't AFFORD to move to "free" software on the desktop yet. I know this will change, but I was convinced 10 years ago that it would have changed within 10 years....
Texas property taxes are higher than average, but not enough to offset income tax unless you own a really expensive house but have almost no income. They also have "Homestead" laws, so you can NOT pay property taxes, but it is taken from your estate when you die. Those of us with no kids, it isn't a bad option.
Actually, I have lived in west Texas, Kansas and North Dakota as well as many many other states, and found them to be rather nice. (ok, ND was cold as all hell in winter...) Not terribly exciting, and the weather can get extreme, but there are other advantages. Mainly the fact that you can afford land and a home, your neighbors are usually not close enough to hear you sneeze, and the towns are smaller, but the people tend to be nicer, due to a a slower lifestyle. Most things are much less expensive as well, and I personally like a drive in the country where it is real country, not just sparse housing.
I'm in my 40s. I will stay on the east coast to make a living, but I will surely move back to "fly over country" when I retire. Probably move to Texas, Tennessee or another tax friendly state where I can fish without there being a boat every 20 feet on the lake, and where I can afford to have 5 or 10 acres of space between me and my neighbors. If I could make the same money there now, I would be there now.
1. Exhibiting self-importance, arrogant.
2. Correcting spelling mistakes on Slashdot.
So then, what's the automotive equivelant of the BSOD?
I thing the term you are looking for is "stall". Fortunately, at the moment your car stalls, the windshield doesn't turn opaque blue and print out:
"Your car has performed an illegal operation at module:alternator and was halted to protect your cargo. Please restart."
(I think it's also nearly useless at this point for software... It's too massively complicated to cleanroom things when you could just write it from scratch in the same amount of time and have a unique (and hopefully better) product just by having some idea what the application does and how it could be better.
For big apps, yes, but for drivers and stuff like audio and video codecs or document types (*.doc, *.wave, etc.), it would still be the best way to create a infringement free product. Most of the "big ideas", like MS Office, are too big to begin with. I don't think I would want to create a copy of that, and take OO's approach, starting from scratch and just reverse engineering the doc types, as you stated.
Delightfully ignorant indeed. iPod has DRM, yes, except I don't say it's a good thing if it succeeds. How you got to that point is beyond me. So again, every time a product with DRM fails, it is a good thing. You can also say anytime a product with DRM is successful, it is a bad thing, case in point being the iPod. But that was already implied in my original statement. I am not pro-iPod / anti-Zune. I am anti-DRM.
DRM will succeed IF we buy products that use DRM. Sometimes, we have no choice, but when we DO have a choice, we should always at least consider the alternative that doesn't have DRM. Go buy what you want, but I won't be migrating to Vista, won't buy an iPod, and surely will not be buying a Zune (even if I COULD figure out wtf it would be useful for...)
This from the company that brought us Bob and Clippy. MS is so consumed with keep aliances with companies by having heavily restricted DRM methods, it should come to no one as a shocker that the Zune is basically a "me, too" to the iPod, except it doesn't even do what the iPod can do.
Anything that has DRM and fails is a good thing.
If MS did NOT cleanroom their implimentation, then yes, they would be open to lawsuits. With a cleanroom system, ONE groups will look at the code, and how it works, describe it to a 2nd group who hasn't seen the code but will write the 'new' code based on what the 1st group learned. That way the group coding has never seen the original sourcecode and not likely to be able to violate any copyright law when writing. Patent law is another issue.
You CAN view source code and write your own version of the software, but if any code matches (and because some functions WILL match, out of the fact that there is sometimes only one logical way to do a task) then you get to explain to the judge how "Yes, I looked at the code, but I didn't copy it. No, really.". This is why most places will cleanroom software instead.
I think that would legally be called a "derovative product". Clean rooming is making something new that works like something old. Using the existing code to make code that works on a different platform is not the same. Since one runs on Linux and the new would run on BSD, you would have to change a chunk of the code anyway. The only way you can make a "similar" program/driver legally is that whoever is doing the coding is ignorant of the contents of the original piece.
If Microsoft took Apache, then viewed the source and then rewrote it to replace IIS without a clean room method and used their own license, the open source community would go nuts. This is no different. Just because you LIKE the people who are writting the code, that doesn't make it legal or right.
The only true free license is Public Domain. No copyright or copyleft. And you don't have to agree with anything if you distribute it.
You forgot to add one more bit of time: Creating the disk image, and it is spent even if you never use it.
The last time I had a Dell tech replace a hard drive, he installed XP home, which I didn't immediately notice, so it added about 15 more minutes of "wtf" until I realized what he had done. I spent more time waiting for him to show up, late, than I would have by doing the job myself.
When your warranty replacement drive shows up, it just goes back up onto that shelf.
Actually, back in the win9x days, that is what I did in the company I work for. 15 computers, when one died, replaced with another off the shelf, sent it back, put the replacement back on the shelf for the next failure. Just rotating them. Unfortunately, Windows XP has succesfully made it very difficult to do this.
Now we do the same with computers from Dell. Keep one back, if one dies, take the computer off the shelf to replace, put the replacement on the shelf for the next failure. Replace every computer when it dies out of warranty. Fortunately, we have good luck with the inexpensive Dell boxes, and the 3 year warranty is about right for upgrading. It costs more money for me to work on one that to buy another cheapo from Dell. Mainly from the time to reinstall XP, patch/reboot/patch/reboot.........
If I could get us to move to Linux on the desktop and not just the servers, it would be a lot easier, however, and recycling would be possible again.
They already gave the Open Group the trademark name of "Unix", but I have heard they would have a tough time even if they wanted to open source *nix because all the different copyright holders to individual pieces would have to agree. I don't think open sourcing *nix would be that beneficial anyway.
The best parts of the original unix are in the BSDs. The other best parts have been reproduced in GNU/Linux. The *real* goodies were actually developed by IBM, HP and others, and they are already releasing code into the GPL. The parts SCO thought they owned are pretty old, which is why they tried to cash in. Besides, if Linux was so inferior to *nix, they would not have spent so many years as Caldera actually developing it.
I think McDonalds uses SCO Unix on their registers in all their shops. You know, the ones where the kids have to just push the symbol that looks like a Big Mac® because they can't be trusted to enter the right prices. At least they used to. Lots of systems still use unix like that, where it all ties to a central system.
Slashdot posted something two days early?? *head explodes*
Don't worry, they will probably dupe this article on Oct. 1, twice, to make up for it.
And in the case of Germany, the rewards are great for the losers. I'm no historian, but everything presented so far leads me to believe that Germany was much better off after WWII than it was before. I suspect Japan is too, but it may be that I am looking though too thick a cloud of cultural bias.
I would agree that in the long run, they have been better off, and that has happened often in history.
Have you noticed that since the Geneva Convention was signed, and the UN formed, no country has been better off afterwards? Or that no one has been treated better, except by the "Evil Empire" et al.? And that there are just as many wars, and they are just as deadly, but they don't end fast due to limitations in the Convention? AND if we were under the Geneva Convention during WW2, we would not have been able to bomb civilians, factories or nuke anyone? Notice a trend?
Think that is confusing? How about the Brittish monetary system before decimalization? Here is one example but you can google for others. With farthings and halfpennies and guinea, oh my....
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
Shouldn't take long to do it, since half of the technological advances are BECAUSE of war, including the internet, the rockets/missle that NASA launches on, and the majority of spending in the sciences.
You don't have to like war to understand that while the price is high, so are the rewards for the victors. The key is being the victor.
What I would like to see is a space elevator.
And people are working on that as well.
People aren't the only thinking working on the elevator. Well, I wouldn't call it WORK, but you get the idea...
But if Intel wants to sell any reasonable QUANTITY of them, which is necessary to get the scales of economy working for them, they need to appeal to a broader market. Porn and games are about as broad as it gets, I'm just sure why you need 80 cores to watch porn.
Let me rephrase that then: running *well*. Not just booting, but actually efficiently using the 80 cpus.
oh oh oh, so THAT is what they are waiting for before releasing Duke Nukem Forever? Eye candy that requires a minimum of 80 cores MUST be good!