What exactly am I downloading here? It's coming in as a single file called 'yarrow-binary-i386-iso' that weighs in at around 1.8 Gigs, but once I have it I'm not sure what to do with it.
Has anyone had success with this? If so, what did you do?
Greetings from the University of Utah. My software practices class has been focusing on Multi-agent Systems the entire semester. Most of us probably would have preferred a first-person shooter, but the point is to learn about debugging, writing maintainable code, optimization, and the like.
The idea behind an agent is that you create a semi-autonomous piece of software that can communicate with other agents, get information from other agents and the surrounding environment, and take actions based on that information to fulfill some set of goals. We started out creating simple agents with JADE, but once we understood the basics of the system, the Prof started us working with someone else's codebase. Cougaar seems to be a separate implementation from JADE and the ACL (Agent Communication Language), so I'm still trying to figure out the advantages/disadvantages of their system.
I was going to advise you to force images of ninjas wearing business suits and sunglasses, but the agents of the Matrix are actually a good embodiment of the ideas behind multi-agent systems. Besides, with Revolutions being released today, such advice would probably be ignored.
It hadn't occurred to me that agents could be used for logistics and resource allocation, but to me the implications are fascinating. Once this final project is done, I'm thinking I'll play with this.
It's not just a matter of perfecting the software, then installing an RPM. The whole system has to be validated from the ground up. The hardware has to be shown tamper-proof, there has to be a way to verify that the software being run on the system is the same software that was certified. So on and so on.
Such software would be valuable, but not sufficient in itself.
While the "fascist, capitalist, bozo" line leads me to question the seriousness of your question, and most serious questions don't show near this level of preconceived bias, I'll give it a shot.
OSS will only "consume its own host" when all possible useful software has been written. Until then, whenever anyone anywhere has a need for software, they have to find a programmer to fulfill it. Now, they could wait for somebody to independently start a Sourceforge project that does exactly what they need. Or they could take what is already available and try and kludge together something that works "well enough." But if a company wants to be able to demand--not merely request--a specific feature set, they have to shell out some cash.
Now, they have several options when they decide to contract for this particular software. They could have someone write it from scratch, and buy the code. They could then lock it in the sacred code vault forever, taking it out only for the occasional bugfix until it becomes obsolete. They could try and resell it, or allow the original coder to resell it. Finally, they could open source it.
By open sourcing it, they destroy the product's marketability. If done properly, however, this loss is offset by reduced maintenance costs and new features added by the community.
What about the coder? If the company opens up his product, doesn't that destroy his ability to resell his work over and over and over? Well, yes. Furthermore, it reduces the market for anyone else who might otherwise have written similar software. Any commercial software designed for the same task will have to be better than the original.
But that's not a bad thing. Two main advantages here: If an open source app forces a closed source equivalent to improve (Windows' new-found stability, for example), then this improves things for everyone. The only downside is for people who like writing crappy software.
Further, there is always a market for customization. Example: A company wants to use MySQL database for their payroll, and need it to interact with the software they're using right now. Again, they can wait for Sourceforge to deliver such a project on its own timetable (probably never), or hire someone to write the proper plumbing. Now, if enough people would find this new software useful, it might get opened up itself.
I firmly believe that putting good, open source software out there actually increases the demand for more software. Closed software tends to keep people reimplementing the same idea over and over and over, wasting the time of many talented people who would otherwise be focused on solving new problems.
"Anyone with an elementary school understanding of arithmetic and a lick of common sense can tell you that Red Hat's business model was unsustainable."
Which part? They had a positive cash flow, and dominated the market to the point that many people thought "Red Hat" and "Linux" were interchangeable.
In the Linux world, where all the basics can be gotten for free, there are only a handful of things you can do to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. The first is to have name recognition, something Red Hat's "freebies" generated very nicely.
A free product, free downloads, free support?"
Where were you getting your free Red Hat support? I want on this gravy train. Anyhow, this seems too drastic a step. Any money they were losing could have been recouped by simply charging for downloads while allowing for mirroring.
Enterprise linux support? Sure, until it's profitable enough that Big Blue decides to take it from 'em."
Big Blue is the only company around poised to profit from Linux. And we all tip our hats and give them our full support. Hip hip hooray."
Does noone see that the open source community is nothing more than a source of free labour to IBM?"
Yeah, they're going to take all of the community's hard work, sell it to their customers, and leave the community with... well, pretty much everything they had before, along with some IBM-generated improvements, a big boost in name recognition, and someone to point to when PHBs start asking, "But where do we get a support contract?"
IBM and Red Hat may have incompatable goals, but I don't see that it means anything for the wider community.
They'll milk Red Hat for free code, and when the work is completed to their satisfaction, they will have the might to succeed where SCO fails - "owning" Linux."
Since IBM is currently working on setting down a legal precedent for the legal enforcability of the GPL, I don't see how they could do that. So long as the code is freely redistributable, anyone with know-how can set up shop as a competitor to IBM's Linux offerings.
Why do people think IBM is a "good" company? Their track record makes MSFT look like a care bear convention."
Sure, if you're comparing Microsoft (1990-Present) with pre-1990 IBM. Becoming temporarily irrelevant caused a nice little shift in IBM's corporate culture. They're not perfect, but they've improved, and they seem to be dealing fairly with the Linux community.
The problems with paper ballot voting are as follows:
1) It's not sexy. High tech is sexy. Politicians want to appear "with it" and forward thinking. Continuing with paper ballots serves neither of those ends.
2) It's not lightning fast. The major news media outlets want to be able to declare a winner before most people shut off their TVs at 10PM. It gives the viewer a feeling of closure. Waiting until 3AM for the numbers from Podunk, Iowa and surrounding municipalities does absolutely nothing for ratings.
3) Paper ballots are auditable. The old joke that voting would be outlawed if it could actually make a difference is an exaggeration. The true purpose of voting is to give the American public a feeling that they chose things to be the way they are, but despite their best efforts, two percent of incumbents are still being thrown out. This represents a remote exploit in the system, which electronic voting can help close.
I hope the problems with the current system are now clear to you, and that you will write your congressperson in support of Diebold and electronic voting.
Unmitigated? C'mon, I know there are a lot of real stinker shows out there. But "unmitigated" implies that there is nothing at all out there worth tuning in for.
I think about television the same way I think about movies. Last year, there were approximately 400 movies sent to theaters. Applying Sturgeon's Law, we discover that 360 of them were crap. That still leaves 40 movies that were worthwhile. Probably ten of them are worth watching several times each.
Me? I went to five movies last year. Two of them sucked. There are 37 movies out there that were worth my attention, but there is only so much effort I can put into finding them.
So I'm not saying that you are somehow derelict in your patriotic duties for not putting more effort into TV. I watch probably two hours a week, tops. But I'm sure there is enough good television to fill all your spare time and more.
There have been crap shows for as long as TV has been around. I would even go so far as to say that, despite the hordes of reality shows, TV is the best it's ever been. There are a lot of really strong shows playing right now.
The problem is the medium itself. It's designed as a one-way communication medium. I have to laugh at all the attempts to make television bi-directional, with people being constantly encouraged to hop online to vote for something or other, or to get further information from their website. I laugh because I'm guessing that for every five people who leave the TV and sit down in front of the computer, at least three aren't coming back.
The Internet has several fundamental advantages over TV. The stuff you find on the Internet is there whenever you happen to drop by. You don't have to schedule your life around it. You can talk back to it. You can find exactly what interests you most.
So no, I don't believe that the problem with TV is that the writing is any weaker, or that the shows are crappier than they've ever been. Nor do I believe that even a huge increase in quality--however welcome--is going to get TV viewing back up to the levels of ten years ago. TV will never again be the center of the world's cultural life. Thank God.
I think it's a cool idea to use the GPU to assist in performing other computations. To make this process even more powerful, I think they should integrate a GPU onto the CPU itself. That way, um... er...
The Register says that, in order to download the kernel source, you have to agree to some sort of license agreement that "supports their IP claims." But I didn't really see anything on the SCO link.
Does anyone have a copy of this agreement, and have they successfully downloaded a copy of the kernel source under said agreement? If so, we're eager for details.
I wouldn't put it past SCO to do something like this, but neither would I put it past The Register to exaggerate the situation to get click-throughs.
I think our knowledge of nuclear weapons technology is already sufficient to kill us all. At this point, no amount of incremental improvement is really going to make that big of a difference.
Wake me up when Linux is turned to the task of creating the next superplague.
Technically, ESR only said he would like to see it used to display a love for hacker culture. Using it isn't meant to say "Hey, I'm a hacker. Look how cool I am."
I like it. It's not cute like Tux, but then Tux doesn't get much love from the BSD crowd. There should be a "geek pride" symbol that's all-inclusive. This one seems to be on the right track.
Why would you want to use their image anyways? A true hacker would just use the source code they provided. Extra hack points if you didn't need the source code either.
I've been watching local coverage for quite a while. The Trib is usually the more anti-establishment of our two major newspapers. The Deseret News has generally covered SCO's claims in a very positive way.
Good points. Obviously, that sort of tech would hit the really bad intersections first. But I'm assuming that the deployment cost is going to plummet as computing power gets cheaper and sensors get miniaturized. So, yeah, eventually it will be everywhere.
Hopefully, it will just be a stopgap while we wait for cars to drive themselves.:)
Who wants to run the betting pool on whether Longhorn will be out before Linux 3.0?
Hell, Slashdot should add in a geek betting site, where we can gamble our Karma over such ponderables as "Will SCO win its lawsuit (1000/1 odds)" and "Will Darl McBride serve prison time? (1/1000)". We could place bets on Bill Gates' net worth at the end of 2004, or the release date of Red Hat 10.0.
It would be a monumental timesink with no real value. But hey, isn't that what we love about this place?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap. I looked at the download directory, and there it is.
Thanks. In a mere 54 hours, they will be mine. All mine!
What exactly am I downloading here? It's coming in as a single file called 'yarrow-binary-i386-iso' that weighs in at around 1.8 Gigs, but once I have it I'm not sure what to do with it.
Has anyone had success with this? If so, what did you do?
Greetings from the University of Utah. My software practices class has been focusing on Multi-agent Systems the entire semester. Most of us probably would have preferred a first-person shooter, but the point is to learn about debugging, writing maintainable code, optimization, and the like.
The idea behind an agent is that you create a semi-autonomous piece of software that can communicate with other agents, get information from other agents and the surrounding environment, and take actions based on that information to fulfill some set of goals. We started out creating simple agents with JADE, but once we understood the basics of the system, the Prof started us working with someone else's codebase. Cougaar seems to be a separate implementation from JADE and the ACL (Agent Communication Language), so I'm still trying to figure out the advantages/disadvantages of their system.
I was going to advise you to force images of ninjas wearing business suits and sunglasses, but the agents of the Matrix are actually a good embodiment of the ideas behind multi-agent systems. Besides, with Revolutions being released today, such advice would probably be ignored.
It hadn't occurred to me that agents could be used for logistics and resource allocation, but to me the implications are fascinating. Once this final project is done, I'm thinking I'll play with this.
Sorry, I was assuming we wanted the system to be secure and effective.
My mistake.
It's not just a matter of perfecting the software, then installing an RPM. The whole system has to be validated from the ground up. The hardware has to be shown tamper-proof, there has to be a way to verify that the software being run on the system is the same software that was certified. So on and so on.
Such software would be valuable, but not sufficient in itself.
I miss those days. There were three types of companies back then:
:)
Companies being destroyed by Microsoft.
Companies being bought out by Microsoft.
Microsoft.
At least in those days, everyone knew where they stood.
While the "fascist, capitalist, bozo" line leads me to question the seriousness of your question, and most serious questions don't show near this level of preconceived bias, I'll give it a shot.
OSS will only "consume its own host" when all possible useful software has been written. Until then, whenever anyone anywhere has a need for software, they have to find a programmer to fulfill it. Now, they could wait for somebody to independently start a Sourceforge project that does exactly what they need. Or they could take what is already available and try and kludge together something that works "well enough." But if a company wants to be able to demand--not merely request--a specific feature set, they have to shell out some cash.
Now, they have several options when they decide to contract for this particular software. They could have someone write it from scratch, and buy the code. They could then lock it in the sacred code vault forever, taking it out only for the occasional bugfix until it becomes obsolete. They could try and resell it, or allow the original coder to resell it. Finally, they could open source it.
By open sourcing it, they destroy the product's marketability. If done properly, however, this loss is offset by reduced maintenance costs and new features added by the community.
What about the coder? If the company opens up his product, doesn't that destroy his ability to resell his work over and over and over? Well, yes. Furthermore, it reduces the market for anyone else who might otherwise have written similar software. Any commercial software designed for the same task will have to be better than the original.
But that's not a bad thing. Two main advantages here: If an open source app forces a closed source equivalent to improve (Windows' new-found stability, for example), then this improves things for everyone. The only downside is for people who like writing crappy software.
Further, there is always a market for customization. Example: A company wants to use MySQL database for their payroll, and need it to interact with the software they're using right now. Again, they can wait for Sourceforge to deliver such a project on its own timetable (probably never), or hire someone to write the proper plumbing. Now, if enough people would find this new software useful, it might get opened up itself.
I firmly believe that putting good, open source software out there actually increases the demand for more software. Closed software tends to keep people reimplementing the same idea over and over and over, wasting the time of many talented people who would otherwise be focused on solving new problems.
In the Linux world, where all the basics can be gotten for free, there are only a handful of things you can do to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. The first is to have name recognition, something Red Hat's "freebies" generated very nicely.
Where were you getting your free Red Hat support? I want on this gravy train. Anyhow, this seems too drastic a step. Any money they were losing could have been recouped by simply charging for downloads while allowing for mirroring.
Yeah, they're going to take all of the community's hard work, sell it to their customers, and leave the community with... well, pretty much everything they had before, along with some IBM-generated improvements, a big boost in name recognition, and someone to point to when PHBs start asking, "But where do we get a support contract?"
IBM and Red Hat may have incompatable goals, but I don't see that it means anything for the wider community.
Since IBM is currently working on setting down a legal precedent for the legal enforcability of the GPL, I don't see how they could do that. So long as the code is freely redistributable, anyone with know-how can set up shop as a competitor to IBM's Linux offerings.
Sure, if you're comparing Microsoft (1990-Present) with pre-1990 IBM. Becoming temporarily irrelevant caused a nice little shift in IBM's corporate culture. They're not perfect, but they've improved, and they seem to be dealing fairly with the Linux community.
Here's an idea: Don't make assumptions, mmkay?
Here's another idea: Get a friggin login. It's not hard.
1) After an all to brief stumble, the rise of the machines begins again.
2) Wooohooo!! Time to break out the Nerf Guns!
A difficult decision for anyone.
The problems with paper ballot voting are as follows:
1) It's not sexy. High tech is sexy. Politicians want to appear "with it" and forward thinking. Continuing with paper ballots serves neither of those ends.
2) It's not lightning fast. The major news media outlets want to be able to declare a winner before most people shut off their TVs at 10PM. It gives the viewer a feeling of closure. Waiting until 3AM for the numbers from Podunk, Iowa and surrounding municipalities does absolutely nothing for ratings.
3) Paper ballots are auditable. The old joke that voting would be outlawed if it could actually make a difference is an exaggeration. The true purpose of voting is to give the American public a feeling that they chose things to be the way they are, but despite their best efforts, two percent of incumbents are still being thrown out. This represents a remote exploit in the system, which electronic voting can help close.
I hope the problems with the current system are now clear to you, and that you will write your congressperson in support of Diebold and electronic voting.
Unmitigated? C'mon, I know there are a lot of real stinker shows out there. But "unmitigated" implies that there is nothing at all out there worth tuning in for.
I think about television the same way I think about movies. Last year, there were approximately 400 movies sent to theaters. Applying Sturgeon's Law, we discover that 360 of them were crap. That still leaves 40 movies that were worthwhile. Probably ten of them are worth watching several times each.
Me? I went to five movies last year. Two of them sucked. There are 37 movies out there that were worth my attention, but there is only so much effort I can put into finding them.
So I'm not saying that you are somehow derelict in your patriotic duties for not putting more effort into TV. I watch probably two hours a week, tops. But I'm sure there is enough good television to fill all your spare time and more.
Admit it, Futurama rocked.
There have been crap shows for as long as TV has been around. I would even go so far as to say that, despite the hordes of reality shows, TV is the best it's ever been. There are a lot of really strong shows playing right now.
The problem is the medium itself. It's designed as a one-way communication medium. I have to laugh at all the attempts to make television bi-directional, with people being constantly encouraged to hop online to vote for something or other, or to get further information from their website. I laugh because I'm guessing that for every five people who leave the TV and sit down in front of the computer, at least three aren't coming back.
The Internet has several fundamental advantages over TV. The stuff you find on the Internet is there whenever you happen to drop by. You don't have to schedule your life around it. You can talk back to it. You can find exactly what interests you most.
So no, I don't believe that the problem with TV is that the writing is any weaker, or that the shows are crappier than they've ever been. Nor do I believe that even a huge increase in quality--however welcome--is going to get TV viewing back up to the levels of ten years ago. TV will never again be the center of the world's cultural life. Thank God.
I think it's a cool idea to use the GPU to assist in performing other computations. To make this process even more powerful, I think they should integrate a GPU onto the CPU itself. That way, um... er...
I'll shut up now.
The Register says that, in order to download the kernel source, you have to agree to some sort of license agreement that "supports their IP claims." But I didn't really see anything on the SCO link.
:)
Does anyone have a copy of this agreement, and have they successfully downloaded a copy of the kernel source under said agreement? If so, we're eager for details.
I wouldn't put it past SCO to do something like this, but neither would I put it past The Register to exaggerate the situation to get click-throughs.
Dammit, now SCO's website is down.
I think our knowledge of nuclear weapons technology is already sufficient to kill us all. At this point, no amount of incremental improvement is really going to make that big of a difference.
Wake me up when Linux is turned to the task of creating the next superplague.
Between that and the end result, I think my new logo is an appropriate symbol for hacker wannabes everywhere.
It's an honor to be nominated for this prestigious award.
Technically, ESR only said he would like to see it used to display a love for hacker culture. Using it isn't meant to say "Hey, I'm a hacker. Look how cool I am."
I like it. It's not cute like Tux, but then Tux doesn't get much love from the BSD crowd. There should be a "geek pride" symbol that's all-inclusive. This one seems to be on the right track.
Well, I tried it. The results were very Tetris-like. Anyone know what I did wrong?
Command: cat hacker_logo.pic | pic2graph | cat > hacker_logo.png
I'll probably leave it as-is, as a tribute to my complete poserhood.
Why would you want to use their image anyways? A true hacker would just use the source code they provided. Extra hack points if you didn't need the source code either.
I've been watching local coverage for quite a while. The Trib is usually the more anti-establishment of our two major newspapers. The Deseret News has generally covered SCO's claims in a very positive way.
I thought the text of the GPL itself was public domain, but the GPL is preceded with:
Which makes sense, since you don't want other versions floating about.
Cuz I know the guy hosting this file is going to have a huge bandwidth bill.
Good points. Obviously, that sort of tech would hit the really bad intersections first. But I'm assuming that the deployment cost is going to plummet as computing power gets cheaper and sensors get miniaturized. So, yeah, eventually it will be everywhere.
:)
Hopefully, it will just be a stopgap while we wait for cars to drive themselves.
Who wants to run the betting pool on whether Longhorn will be out before Linux 3.0?
:)
Hell, Slashdot should add in a geek betting site, where we can gamble our Karma over such ponderables as "Will SCO win its lawsuit (1000/1 odds)" and "Will Darl McBride serve prison time? (1/1000)". We could place bets on Bill Gates' net worth at the end of 2004, or the release date of Red Hat 10.0.
It would be a monumental timesink with no real value. But hey, isn't that what we love about this place?