Actually, while it's true that you could run DOS programs on HPFS, it wasn't without problems. two long file names with the same first 8 characters and possibly first 3 after the last period would appear identical to DOS programs, with no way to select one or the other.
This is a pretty nasty problem, and one Micorosft fixed with the often heckled ~number format.
Nobody is going to pay the price of Office on a yearly basis. That's just insane. A subscription version of Office would probably be something like $50-75/year. Which means that when MS comes out with a new version in 3 years, you're not paying another $300 to get it. You're paying $50.
Subscriptions are good deals if you stay on top of the latest versions of technology. They're not good deals if you sit on a single version for 10 years.
Do you want to trust the security of your computer to people who aren't paid to keep your security in mind?
Sure, you might be able to find someone to stand around you as a bodyguard, but if they decide to run off with a hot chick for a while and leave you stranded, there's little you can say about it.
Of course there's no guarantee that paying for something will gain you any better service, but at least THAT'S THEIR JOB. That's what they're SUPPOSED to be doing.
That's not really the issue. The issue is that Novell is pumping a lot of money into SUSE and Linux in general. If they were bought by a company with a different agenda, that money and support going into Linux would evaporate.
It's not a matter of who owns the distro, it's a matter of what money is being invested in it.
Ximian's products were already open source when they bought them.
That purchase is still kind of a mystery to me, since they've not really leveraged the products much. It's good they're giving the Ximian guys a salary, but what's it doing for Novell?
What if someone like MS were to buy them? What if someone even more incompetant were to buy them (SCO? Though i don't know where they'd get the money. SCO and Novell have close ties though). What if someone that didn't really care about Linux bought them?
Hmm.. this doesn't make much sense. Novell seems to be of a similar mind to IBM. Give the OS away for free, but charge for the apps. That means they won't be open sourcing (most) of their apps. They've already open sourced a few (like NetMail.. er.. i mean Hula) that were albatrosses, but I really don't see them open sourcing GroupWise, or BorderManager, or any of a number of other products.
You could get a bunch of Broadcom 8 port SATA controllers, which equals about 4TB per controller. 4 or 5 controllers = 16-20TB per box, then you can run the cables into an outside drive bay enclosure and one box can control 40 500GB hard drives.
If you're not doing any processing on this, a good CPU should be able to handle the load.
I think that MySQL's popularity is a reflection on how little most web programmers know about SQL Database programming. They don't need those features because, often, they don't even know they exist, or are confused about what they do, or don't know what they're for, or are simply too lazy to implement them.
Not using stored procedures, triggers, constraints, etc.. is like saying "Well, I don't really NEED locks on my doors, they just make it harder for me to get in my house". Or, more accurately, "I don't NEED to have foundation for my house, it works fine without one", but you'll find most houses built that way are rather unstable, and against housing codes.
The key word is "procedure". In a stored procedure, you can execute multiple queries along with SQL logic to simplify your queries and/or provide multiple step queries.
While you have a point, The vast majority of popular sites are in the US. I think the US knows that the rest of the world needs to be connected to the US internet more than the US needs to be connected to them.
The US created the internet in the first place. The vast majority of the network that carries traffic are in or owned by US companies. The vast majority of new research for the internet is driven by the US.
Anyone that's surprised that Windows builds leak out really has no idea of the history of Windows development. Every version of Windows going back to Windows 95 has had frequent and numerous leaks on the internet during development. It's a difficult problem to fix, and microsoft probably isn't that concerned about it.
The leaks get builds into peoples hands, so it gets further beta testing, without them having to offcially support them as beta testers. I'm not saying its deliberate, but it certainly doesn't hurt them.
I have verizon simply because they provide the best coverage in my area. All the other providers have large dead spots, and poorer coverage. I used to be AT&T Wireless, but TDMA voice quality sucked. When they upgraded to GSM, they just put GSM equipment on their existing towers, but failed to add new ones (GSM is a lower power system than TDMA, requiring more towers and having them closer together) This resulted in almost unusable GSM service. That's when I switched. Sprint only had digital service and Analog was important to me because I traveled, and Cingular wasn't here then (until they merged with AT&T). That left T-Mobile and a few others, none of which I liked either for various reasons.
Verizon simply has the best network, even though their policies suck.
No. Premium gas is not higher quality. It's higher octane. A car that needs higher octane will not run properly on lower octane. It's how the engine is designed.
I'm not sure how you got that I thought we should have fewer distro's. I absolutely did not say that. I said, that there should be several base distro's (a trend that has been happening a lot) and that those distro's should have a common repository of packages, with distro's derived from those bases make specific at install time rather than duplicating one-off packages for every variation.
In fact, I could easily see one master Linux repository that houses all the packages in some ubiquitious format, and this format can be converted to whatever distro you're using, with specific patches applied at install time for fine tuning.
That doesn't mean one version of Linux, or one distro. It could mean 10,000 distro's. But by standardizing the basic distribution method, and providng translation layers to individual package managers, everyone benefits.
Actually, yes. If you give away candy (Sweets.. as you call it) with poison in it, you're liable even if you mark them as such. The product is intended for consumption, and using the product as intended will cause harm.
Why do you think the Cigarette companies lost BILLIONS of dollars in lawsuits, despite clearly marking their product that it will kill you and everyone around you?
Further, the source code is no guarantee either, since it's very easy for problems to hide in plain sight, even after extensive analysis. By shifting the onus of responsibility on to the (most likely) unskilled end user, it's just a cop out, and any judge would see that.
While I don't think the Linux community should boil down to the one all powerful distro, I do think the pattern of a few base distro's, upon which many other distro's are based should continue to evolve.
Frankly, it's silly to have hundreds of people maintaining the same sets of packages in different ways. There is no reason why there should be a debian repository AND a ubuntu repository AND a kubuntu repository, etc, all of which have their own subtle differences.
I think there should be a a single common repository for all distro's based on a given "base". All that's different is how the distro's are configured by default. If you want your distro to have a package that the base doesn't include, contribute it to the base, not your own repository. *IF* you need something special that the base doesn't offer in a package, then apply your CHANGES to the base during package install, not recompile your own version.
FreeBSD is great at this. Their repositories consist of downloading the application tarball from it's official source or mirror, then applying a set of patch files to it to produce the FreeBSD version.
Choice and Standardization are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
That depends. You're giving away a recipe for poison. It's functioning as expected, and thus is fit for purpose. It does what it's supposed to, and thus you cannot be liable for poor workmanship.
You could still be liable in other ways. For instance, if you gave a kid a recipe for poison even after he told you he was planning to commit suicide with it.
This really isn't the issue here though. The issue is of liability if the product doesn't do what is expected of it, and what is the recourse for people who acquire the software and have it fail on them.
There is an interesting idea here though. An exemption clause for software that includes source would make it CHEAPER for corporations to supply source for their code than not. Unless you have massive amounts of money (ie, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc..) and can afford monster liability insurance, it would simply be most cost effective to make your code open source.
Of course that would give the big corporations an advantage, but it would make the majority of software available to inspection.
While I agree with you that things will not always be this way (I did lay out the criteria I believe will solve the problem), I don't agree that it's possible today.
When you build a bridge, you need a human to make decisions about various things, but those decisions are based on how to build the bridge, not how the bridge will operate once built. Programmers make decisions every day that effect how the software runs even after it is built.
A bridge builder might have to decide whether to use a shovel or a backhoe to do something, but once the thing is done, it's the engineers choices that depend on how well the bridge works, not the bridge builders.
As an example, as a programmer, I have to make decisions about how to build the product to meet the specifications. This would be equivelent to the bridge builder having to decide how to make the steel, or the the composition of the concrete. SOMEONE has to make those decisions, but not the grunt in the trenches. Programmers make those kinds of decisions every day, such as choosing an algorithm that may have O(1) performance, or O(N) performance, or even worse. Maybe they don't even understand O notation and what it signifies.
Until the basic "pieces" of software are standardized, an engineer cannot fully control how the finished product will function. And once those peieces are standardized, there is no need for a programmer anymore since the computer can just join those pieces based on specifications.
Just because you give something away doesn't remove your liability.
If I give away candy with poison in it, I'm liable. If I give away copyrighted materials, I'm liable. If I give away cigarettes to minors, i'm liable. If I give away anything that causes damage to someone else, I can be held liable.
The whole point of the guys article is that *ALL* software should be legally required to be guaranteed to work correctly, whether it's given away or not. If you give away the source, and the recipient or "independant third party" deems it's not fit for purpose, then you're liable to them. What that liability is would depend on the law of course.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but you're arguing about something that would be counter to what the article is suggesting.
No, it's not an attack on FOSS, but it would have the side effect of wiping out FOSS because nobody would be able to afford to give away code they're liable for.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's just it, Microsoft *ISN'T* claiming this is an innovation. Microsoft's opponents are claiming they're claiming it's innovation.
See the difference?
Actually, while it's true that you could run DOS programs on HPFS, it wasn't without problems. two long file names with the same first 8 characters and possibly first 3 after the last period would appear identical to DOS programs, with no way to select one or the other.
This is a pretty nasty problem, and one Micorosft fixed with the often heckled ~number format.
I'm curious. When has Microsoft ever litigated against an open source project? Certainly not Samba, as you claim.
I keep hearing people say stuff like this, but I don't recall it ever happening.
Nobody is going to pay the price of Office on a yearly basis. That's just insane. A subscription version of Office would probably be something like $50-75/year. Which means that when MS comes out with a new version in 3 years, you're not paying another $300 to get it. You're paying $50.
Subscriptions are good deals if you stay on top of the latest versions of technology. They're not good deals if you sit on a single version for 10 years.
My question to you, however, is:
Do you want to trust the security of your computer to people who aren't paid to keep your security in mind?
Sure, you might be able to find someone to stand around you as a bodyguard, but if they decide to run off with a hot chick for a while and leave you stranded, there's little you can say about it.
Of course there's no guarantee that paying for something will gain you any better service, but at least THAT'S THEIR JOB. That's what they're SUPPOSED to be doing.
That's not really the issue. The issue is that Novell is pumping a lot of money into SUSE and Linux in general. If they were bought by a company with a different agenda, that money and support going into Linux would evaporate.
It's not a matter of who owns the distro, it's a matter of what money is being invested in it.
Ximian's products were already open source when they bought them.
That purchase is still kind of a mystery to me, since they've not really leveraged the products much. It's good they're giving the Ximian guys a salary, but what's it doing for Novell?
Unfortunately, it could be a lot worse.
What if someone like MS were to buy them? What if someone even more incompetant were to buy them (SCO? Though i don't know where they'd get the money. SCO and Novell have close ties though). What if someone that didn't really care about Linux bought them?
Hmm.. this doesn't make much sense. Novell seems to be of a similar mind to IBM. Give the OS away for free, but charge for the apps. That means they won't be open sourcing (most) of their apps. They've already open sourced a few (like NetMail.. er.. i mean Hula) that were albatrosses, but I really don't see them open sourcing GroupWise, or BorderManager, or any of a number of other products.
You could get a bunch of Broadcom 8 port SATA controllers, which equals about 4TB per controller. 4 or 5 controllers = 16-20TB per box, then you can run the cables into an outside drive bay enclosure and one box can control 40 500GB hard drives.
If you're not doing any processing on this, a good CPU should be able to handle the load.
I think that MySQL's popularity is a reflection on how little most web programmers know about SQL Database programming. They don't need those features because, often, they don't even know they exist, or are confused about what they do, or don't know what they're for, or are simply too lazy to implement them.
Not using stored procedures, triggers, constraints, etc.. is like saying "Well, I don't really NEED locks on my doors, they just make it harder for me to get in my house". Or, more accurately, "I don't NEED to have foundation for my house, it works fine without one", but you'll find most houses built that way are rather unstable, and against housing codes.
Stored Procedures > Stored Queries
The key word is "procedure". In a stored procedure, you can execute multiple queries along with SQL logic to simplify your queries and/or provide multiple step queries.
That's what I said, you can emulate C++ in C.
The core API is definately C, but most of the ancillary libraries are C++. Pretty much anything COM based is C++ (DirectX, OLE, GDI+, etc...).
Not that I agree with the original poster, you can certainly emulate C++ in C.
While you have a point, The vast majority of popular sites are in the US. I think the US knows that the rest of the world needs to be connected to the US internet more than the US needs to be connected to them.
The US created the internet in the first place. The vast majority of the network that carries traffic are in or owned by US companies. The vast majority of new research for the internet is driven by the US.
Is it any wonder the US wants to retain control?
Anyone that's surprised that Windows builds leak out really has no idea of the history of Windows development. Every version of Windows going back to Windows 95 has had frequent and numerous leaks on the internet during development. It's a difficult problem to fix, and microsoft probably isn't that concerned about it.
The leaks get builds into peoples hands, so it gets further beta testing, without them having to offcially support them as beta testers. I'm not saying its deliberate, but it certainly doesn't hurt them.
I have verizon simply because they provide the best coverage in my area. All the other providers have large dead spots, and poorer coverage. I used to be AT&T Wireless, but TDMA voice quality sucked. When they upgraded to GSM, they just put GSM equipment on their existing towers, but failed to add new ones (GSM is a lower power system than TDMA, requiring more towers and having them closer together) This resulted in almost unusable GSM service. That's when I switched. Sprint only had digital service and Analog was important to me because I traveled, and Cingular wasn't here then (until they merged with AT&T). That left T-Mobile and a few others, none of which I liked either for various reasons.
Verizon simply has the best network, even though their policies suck.
No. Premium gas is not higher quality. It's higher octane. A car that needs higher octane will not run properly on lower octane. It's how the engine is designed.
Read up on what octane actually is about:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question90.htm
I'm not sure how you got that I thought we should have fewer distro's. I absolutely did not say that. I said, that there should be several base distro's (a trend that has been happening a lot) and that those distro's should have a common repository of packages, with distro's derived from those bases make specific at install time rather than duplicating one-off packages for every variation.
In fact, I could easily see one master Linux repository that houses all the packages in some ubiquitious format, and this format can be converted to whatever distro you're using, with specific patches applied at install time for fine tuning.
That doesn't mean one version of Linux, or one distro. It could mean 10,000 distro's. But by standardizing the basic distribution method, and providng translation layers to individual package managers, everyone benefits.
Actually, yes. If you give away candy (Sweets.. as you call it) with poison in it, you're liable even if you mark them as such. The product is intended for consumption, and using the product as intended will cause harm.
Why do you think the Cigarette companies lost BILLIONS of dollars in lawsuits, despite clearly marking their product that it will kill you and everyone around you?
Further, the source code is no guarantee either, since it's very easy for problems to hide in plain sight, even after extensive analysis. By shifting the onus of responsibility on to the (most likely) unskilled end user, it's just a cop out, and any judge would see that.
While I don't think the Linux community should boil down to the one all powerful distro, I do think the pattern of a few base distro's, upon which many other distro's are based should continue to evolve.
Frankly, it's silly to have hundreds of people maintaining the same sets of packages in different ways. There is no reason why there should be a debian repository AND a ubuntu repository AND a kubuntu repository, etc, all of which have their own subtle differences.
I think there should be a a single common repository for all distro's based on a given "base". All that's different is how the distro's are configured by default. If you want your distro to have a package that the base doesn't include, contribute it to the base, not your own repository. *IF* you need something special that the base doesn't offer in a package, then apply your CHANGES to the base during package install, not recompile your own version.
FreeBSD is great at this. Their repositories consist of downloading the application tarball from it's official source or mirror, then applying a set of patch files to it to produce the FreeBSD version.
Choice and Standardization are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
That depends. You're giving away a recipe for poison. It's functioning as expected, and thus is fit for purpose. It does what it's supposed to, and thus you cannot be liable for poor workmanship.
You could still be liable in other ways. For instance, if you gave a kid a recipe for poison even after he told you he was planning to commit suicide with it.
This really isn't the issue here though. The issue is of liability if the product doesn't do what is expected of it, and what is the recourse for people who acquire the software and have it fail on them.
There is an interesting idea here though. An exemption clause for software that includes source would make it CHEAPER for corporations to supply source for their code than not. Unless you have massive amounts of money (ie, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc..) and can afford monster liability insurance, it would simply be most cost effective to make your code open source.
Of course that would give the big corporations an advantage, but it would make the majority of software available to inspection.
While I agree with you that things will not always be this way (I did lay out the criteria I believe will solve the problem), I don't agree that it's possible today.
When you build a bridge, you need a human to make decisions about various things, but those decisions are based on how to build the bridge, not how the bridge will operate once built. Programmers make decisions every day that effect how the software runs even after it is built.
A bridge builder might have to decide whether to use a shovel or a backhoe to do something, but once the thing is done, it's the engineers choices that depend on how well the bridge works, not the bridge builders.
As an example, as a programmer, I have to make decisions about how to build the product to meet the specifications. This would be equivelent to the bridge builder having to decide how to make the steel, or the the composition of the concrete. SOMEONE has to make those decisions, but not the grunt in the trenches. Programmers make those kinds of decisions every day, such as choosing an algorithm that may have O(1) performance, or O(N) performance, or even worse. Maybe they don't even understand O notation and what it signifies.
Until the basic "pieces" of software are standardized, an engineer cannot fully control how the finished product will function. And once those peieces are standardized, there is no need for a programmer anymore since the computer can just join those pieces based on specifications.
Just because you give something away doesn't remove your liability.
If I give away candy with poison in it, I'm liable. If I give away copyrighted materials, I'm liable. If I give away cigarettes to minors, i'm liable. If I give away anything that causes damage to someone else, I can be held liable.
The whole point of the guys article is that *ALL* software should be legally required to be guaranteed to work correctly, whether it's given away or not. If you give away the source, and the recipient or "independant third party" deems it's not fit for purpose, then you're liable to them. What that liability is would depend on the law of course.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but you're arguing about something that would be counter to what the article is suggesting.
No, it's not an attack on FOSS, but it would have the side effect of wiping out FOSS because nobody would be able to afford to give away code they're liable for.