The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software...
The software industry doesn't deserve death more than any other, say the auto industry, the oil industry, the drug industry, the political graft industry, or the [fill in random industry here].
The biggest difference between the software industry and others is that it has to compete with a cottage industry of experienced, competent developers motivated not by money but by reputation and perfection of technical skills, whose capital costs are virtually nonexistent. As a result, for perhaps the first time in industrial history, a cottage industry has gotten as strong as the corporate segment with which it competes. In what way does this mean that the corporate segment deserves to die?
It doesn't. On the contrary, note the rapidly developing symioses between the corporate and the - let's call it "free" - side. This doesn't mean that free software development is going corporate, rather it means that free software development is gaining even more strength. This is the ideal result.
One of the ways the free software segment continues to grow is through corporate sponsorship, most typically, where the best free developers are provided with salaried or contract positions, which are not just slave labor, but in which they can devote the majority of their time to doing what they were already doing, i.e., putting more and better software into the public domain. In return for which the corporation gains prestige, competent advice, some influence on project design directions, and the occasional emergency hack. Without such corporate sponsorship, the free software segment would still grow, but not nearly as quickly.
Rather than imminent extinction of the profit-making software industry, what's really happening is a species die-off, coupled with the rise of a new species of software company that understands the new lay of the land. To profit in the next decade, the old monopoly tricks won't work any more. Any monopolies that have so far survived just serve to attract the attention of more free developers: the bigger the monopoly, the bigger the attraction. So monopolized market segments tend to be pushed into niches, and when these niches are finally the biggest targets left, they in turn attract attention, and so it goes. A smart company can profit by *staying* in front of the advance, where free developers are pushing into the remaining niches, but aren't quite there yet. This is where a salaried team working according to preset guidelines can perform best, to deliver products that are good for the customer not because there is no other choice, but because they are easier to learn, slicker or more functional than what the customer can get for free.
This requires understanding the synergies, reading the new directions accurately, and above all, noticing what the free software developers - being free - sense and react to so much more efficiently than traditional corporate structures. In other words, ride the train, don't stand in front of it.
Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court.
So are you less suspicious now?
Nope, more suspicious. I'm suspicious that the whole plan revolves around buying time by pretending their evidence is less flimsy than it really is, while SCO insiders dump their stock at inflated prices. Makes sense when you think about it, they can just *pretend* they thought they had a case, and who could say otherwise?
Remember: we conquered Iraq. We could either abanon them to the winds, absorb them, or set up an interim government to replace the one we just took out, leave, and let them replace the interim government on their own.
Absorb Iraq? Would that not contravene international law? Or is it your position that international law does not apply to U.S.A., because U.S.A. is so powerful that it does not need to obey the law?
Well, what happens when someone who has invested their life in Microsoft products and tools sees that others are encroaching on their turf? Don't they fight? Don't you fight to defend and protect your life and investment? Don't you write more code that people might use freely so that you won't lose everything you have in your head?
If somebody running a Microsoft OS decides to "fight back" by writing open source code, they just become one of us, not one of them. Look at the 3D engine community for an excellent example of that. There are probably more Windows coders in this than Linux+all unixen combined. Yet everybody's working together, without animosity.
Sure, it's likely that most of the Windows coders will eventually drift over to the Linux side, just because it's so much easier to get stuff done when all the tools are there, and because - well, things are just moving faster on this side. But there will be a new crop of Windows coders joining, and the end effect is, it's likely there will be more Windows coders on these projects than Linux coders, for a good while to come.
So, to answer your question, that's what happens. It's good.
There is a reason you don't find many games under Linux. Graphic card drivers are much better optimized for Windows systems. Porting a graphics intensive game to Linux is a waste of resources.
That's the reason, huh? And it doesn't have anything to do with Linux being relatively young, having only recently broken out of the server-os category, and still being on the shallow end of the desktop growth curve?
Anyway, it's not a concern, there are already more games coming out on Linux than I have time to play.
"WineX! Oh no! Support linux gaming, man!" Well, I'd love to. It's just too bad I already paid for the game once. $80 for a $40 game? I mean, Majesty's good, but not *that* good.
Glad I waited. From my point of view, a game doesn't exist until a native version is available for Linux. Till then it's just an interesting demo.
Keep in mind, that this is Ray Norda's group. He successfully got.5 billion from MS for what MS did to Dr-Dos.
The difference of course is that he had a case then, and he held the high moral ground. This time, it's pure fabrication, and in the eyes of the world, he is pound scum.
IBM is even bigger. In addition, IBM may find it cheaper to buy SCO rather than simply take them to court and tell the truth (this is a very sad commentary on american life). I would not be surprised if Ray needs the cash to buy Novell in about 2 years.
Why would IBM find that cheaper? It would amount to paying a ransom, worse, a ransom to somebody who is not in fact holding any hostage, never mind that paying ransom is never a losing strategy in the long run.
Who was it who said this thing is like a robber holding a gun to their own head and saying "give me all your money, or I'll shoot".
I always thought that WINE was a stopgap, a thing to tide you over until your users were comfortable with OpenOffice or whatever. Now we can run tomorrow's Windows apps today. I can't seem to shake the idea that by running Windows apps on Linux waters down the latter...
I disagree. Wine on Linux strengthens Linux in a number of ways. Quite apart from the fact that there are plenty of users who need or want those Windows applications without rebooting, the mere difficulty of Wine development is a positive factor, leading to improvements in development tools, and in developer's skills....and strengthens the former.
Microsoft would disagree, judging from their tactics in the Foxpro-on-Linux incident.
I suppose that Wine is one of the platform threats that Microsoft hates most, but they probably thought that the usual API dance would be enough to combat it. I suppose further that they now realize how wrong that was, mistaking Wine's slow ramp-up time for no progress at all.
Re:WINE is also not a properly licensed MS OS.
on
Catching up with Wine
·
· Score: 1
"Just because you have paid for a license to use some software doesn't mean you can use it any way you like"
No, they say you can't use it anyway you want. Whether or not that is legally enforceable is another question.
They go a lot further, and say you can't even talk about how to use it in a particular way, of which they disapprove.
Pure lawyer chill. Say, it's great to see how well the DoJ's remedies are working.
I've predicted and eagerly anticipated the demise (by replacement) of spinning media (magnetic and optical) for 10 or more years now... I've predicted it will happen, not when.
You may have to keep predicting for some time yet. So far, nobody has managed to come up with a solid-state approach that gets anywhere close to the cost of spinning media, and though solid state gets cheaper over time, spinning media does too.
For the most part, posters to this thread missed the point of this effort. The authors observed that some relatively small portion of filesystem data - the metadata - accounts for a disproportionate amount of the IO traffic. So put just that part in battery-backed ram, and get better performance. Hopefully, the increased performance will outweigh the cost of the extra RAM.
The fly in the ointment is that, in the case where there's a small amount of metadata compared to file data, the cost of transferring the metadata isn't that much. But when there's a lot of metadata, it won't all fit in NVRAM. Oops, it's not as big a gain as you'd first think.
It's surprising how well Ext2 does compared to RAMFS and ConquestFS in the author's benchmarks.
Well, this isn't exactly about a rebate, but... I bought a Sony VAIO at Best Buy, and I dropped an extra $200 on the extended warranty. I took care to make sure it would cover service even if I was overseas. Well, a year or so later the keyboard died and I called the number on the warranty card. They referred me to a different company that would actually handle the claim, where I was told to just get the work done, then submit the claim. I did, and I submitted the paperwork according to their instructions. That was a year ago. After a number of calls and various bogus excuses, I still haven't received payment. So moral of the story: Don't buy the extended warranty, it's a scam. Second moral: find a more reputable place to buy a computer than Best Buy.
Ahh, I was curious as how to do that. I was dreading having to run xmkmf or whatever and tons of other shit to make ttf fonts work in the past. Or do you have to run an xfont server to get this copy to directory capability?
No, it's not a separate topic, especially since you use the lack of cameras as a "cause" of the accident. People need to use their heads before making statements like this. What, exactly, would have taking pictures of the shuttle actually accomplished in this case? How was not taking pictures in any way contributory to the accident?
This has been discussed many times, where were you? There are things that could have been attempted if it was known the wing had a big hole in it. For example, the attitude of the shuttle could have been adjusted to shift the heating pattern more to the good wing, the rentry trajectory could have been modified, a rescue by the Russians could have been attempted, the crew could have been prepared to bail out if they got down far enough, and so on. Closing one's eyes and hoping the danger goes away, ostrich-style, has never been the best strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
...And we haven't finished prosecuting the internet bubble scumbags.
Indeed. There's still SCO:
- Changing the business model from software provider to IP bucketshop without informing the SEC
- Insider trading prior to announcement of the lawsuit
- Should the whole Linux lawsuit prove to be a stock price inflation scheme, will anyone be prosecuted?
The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software...
The software industry doesn't deserve death more than any other, say the auto industry, the oil industry, the drug industry, the political graft industry, or the [fill in random industry here].
The biggest difference between the software industry and others is that it has to compete with a cottage industry of experienced, competent developers motivated not by money but by reputation and perfection of technical skills, whose capital costs are virtually nonexistent. As a result, for perhaps the first time in industrial history, a cottage industry has gotten as strong as the corporate segment with which it competes. In what way does this mean that the corporate segment deserves to die?
It doesn't. On the contrary, note the rapidly developing symioses between the corporate and the - let's call it "free" - side. This doesn't mean that free software development is going corporate, rather it means that free software development is gaining even more strength. This is the ideal result.
One of the ways the free software segment continues to grow is through corporate sponsorship, most typically, where the best free developers are provided with salaried or contract positions, which are not just slave labor, but in which they can devote the majority of their time to doing what they were already doing, i.e., putting more and better software into the public domain. In return for which the corporation gains prestige, competent advice, some influence on project design directions, and the occasional emergency hack. Without such corporate sponsorship, the free software segment would still grow, but not nearly as quickly.
Rather than imminent extinction of the profit-making software industry, what's really happening is a species die-off, coupled with the rise of a new species of software company that understands the new lay of the land. To profit in the next decade, the old monopoly tricks won't work any more. Any monopolies that have so far survived just serve to attract the attention of more free developers: the bigger the monopoly, the bigger the attraction. So monopolized market segments tend to be pushed into niches, and when these niches are finally the biggest targets left, they in turn attract attention, and so it goes. A smart company can profit by *staying* in front of the advance, where free developers are pushing into the remaining niches, but aren't quite there yet. This is where a salaried team working according to preset guidelines can perform best, to deliver products that are good for the customer not because there is no other choice, but because they are easier to learn, slicker or more functional than what the customer can get for free.
This requires understanding the synergies, reading the new directions accurately, and above all, noticing what the free software developers - being free - sense and react to so much more efficiently than traditional corporate structures. In other words, ride the train, don't stand in front of it.
Couldn't there be some sort of syscall to allow executing your stack, with the default set to "no"?
Roughly equivalent to locking the door and leaving the key in the lock.
4: ??buyout offer??
4: Dump stock up to the day the case founders in court
Suddenly makes sense, doesn't it?
I'll take a bet that IBM settles the case out of court.
You won't. You're just a MS astroturfer, you don't believe a thing you say.
Ummm, they said they are prepared to present examples in court.
So are you less suspicious now?
Nope, more suspicious. I'm suspicious that the whole plan revolves around buying time by pretending their evidence is less flimsy than it really is, while SCO insiders dump their stock at inflated prices. Makes sense when you think about it, they can just *pretend* they thought they had a case, and who could say otherwise?
The UN has no legitimacy in the US...
Restores my faith in humanity[1] to see the above poster modded into oblivion.
[1] Humanity in this case defined in terms of Slashdot moderators
Remember: we conquered Iraq. We could either abanon them to the winds, absorb them, or set up an interim government to replace the one we just took out, leave, and let them replace the interim government on their own.
Absorb Iraq? Would that not contravene international law? Or is it your position that international law does not apply to U.S.A., because U.S.A. is so powerful that it does not need to obey the law?
Clearly, Larry Rosen or Alan Greenspan should be invited to participate, in order to get some kind of balanced perspective.
Not that I'm holding my breath for anything other than economic looting, from the Bush admistration.
Well, what happens when someone who has invested their life in Microsoft products and tools sees that others are encroaching on their turf? Don't they fight? Don't you fight to defend and protect your life and investment? Don't you write more code that people might use freely so that you won't lose everything you have in your head?
If somebody running a Microsoft OS decides to "fight back" by writing open source code, they just become one of us, not one of them. Look at the 3D engine community for an excellent example of that. There are probably more Windows coders in this than Linux+all unixen combined. Yet everybody's working together, without animosity.
Sure, it's likely that most of the Windows coders will eventually drift over to the Linux side, just because it's so much easier to get stuff done when all the tools are there, and because - well, things are just moving faster on this side. But there will be a new crop of Windows coders joining, and the end effect is, it's likely there will be more Windows coders on these projects than Linux coders, for a good while to come.
So, to answer your question, that's what happens. It's good.
There is a reason you don't find many games under Linux. Graphic card drivers are much better optimized for Windows systems. Porting a graphics intensive game to Linux is a waste of resources.
That's the reason, huh? And it doesn't have anything to do with Linux being relatively young, having only recently broken out of the server-os category, and still being on the shallow end of the desktop growth curve?
Anyway, it's not a concern, there are already more games coming out on Linux than I have time to play.
"WineX! Oh no! Support linux gaming, man!" Well, I'd love to. It's just too bad I already paid for the game once. $80 for a $40 game? I mean, Majesty's good, but not *that* good.
Glad I waited. From my point of view, a game doesn't exist until a native version is available for Linux. Till then it's just an interesting demo.
What if some substantial (either quantity or quality) amount of their proprietary code has made its way into the Linux source?
It hasn't. And?
IBM should draw this out until 2010 and let SCO die a slow agonizing death at the hands of their own legal fees.
Why would that be better than a quick agonizing death? At least the latter would leave the officers less time to loot what remains of the company.
Remember folks, Linux is the kernel, not the OS. Distributions are the OS. SCO is after distributers, not the kernel.
SCO is after whatever they can get their grubby little hands on.
Naive, perhaps, but reasonable at some level.
At which level? In the same sense that a successful suicide is, at some level, a success?
Maybe they'd have a hope if they weren't lying out their butts.
never a losing strategy
ehm, *always* a losing strategy
Keep in mind, that this is Ray Norda's group. He successfully got .5 billion from MS for what MS did to Dr-Dos.
The difference of course is that he had a case then, and he held the high moral ground. This time, it's pure fabrication, and in the eyes of the world, he is pound scum.
IBM is even bigger. In addition, IBM may find it cheaper to buy SCO rather than simply take them to court and tell the truth (this is a very sad commentary on american life). I would not be surprised if Ray needs the cash to buy Novell in about 2 years.
Why would IBM find that cheaper? It would amount to paying a ransom, worse, a ransom to somebody who is not in fact holding any hostage, never mind that paying ransom is never a losing strategy in the long run.
Who was it who said this thing is like a robber holding a gun to their own head and saying "give me all your money, or I'll shoot".
The **AA are at war.
Indeed. It is total war with their customers.
They are going to use every trick, every tool in the box to sew fear and uncertainty in all those who would act against their survival.
Then they might as well just shoot themselves in the head and get it over with, because it is they, themselves, that act against their own survival.
[/me nominates RIAA and MPAA for Darwin awards]
I always thought that WINE was a stopgap, a thing to tide you over until your users were comfortable with OpenOffice or whatever. Now we can run tomorrow's Windows apps today. I can't seem to shake the idea that by running Windows apps on Linux waters down the latter...
...and strengthens the former.
I disagree. Wine on Linux strengthens Linux in a number of ways. Quite apart from the fact that there are plenty of users who need or want those Windows applications without rebooting, the mere difficulty of Wine development is a positive factor, leading to improvements in development tools, and in developer's skills.
Microsoft would disagree, judging from their tactics in the Foxpro-on-Linux incident.
I suppose that Wine is one of the platform threats that Microsoft hates most, but they probably thought that the usual API dance would be enough to combat it. I suppose further that they now realize how wrong that was, mistaking Wine's slow ramp-up time for no progress at all.
"Just because you have paid for a license to use some software doesn't mean you can use it any way you like"
No, they say you can't use it anyway you want. Whether or not that is legally enforceable is another question.
They go a lot further, and say you can't even talk about how to use it in a particular way, of which they disapprove.
Pure lawyer chill. Say, it's great to see how well the DoJ's remedies are working.
I've predicted and eagerly anticipated the demise (by replacement) of spinning media (magnetic and optical) for 10 or more years now... I've predicted it will happen, not when.
You may have to keep predicting for some time yet. So far, nobody has managed to come up with a solid-state approach that gets anywhere close to the cost of spinning media, and though solid state gets cheaper over time, spinning media does too.
For the most part, posters to this thread missed the point of this effort. The authors observed that some relatively small portion of filesystem data - the metadata - accounts for a disproportionate amount of the IO traffic. So put just that part in battery-backed ram, and get better performance. Hopefully, the increased performance will outweigh the cost of the extra RAM.
The fly in the ointment is that, in the case where there's a small amount of metadata compared to file data, the cost of transferring the metadata isn't that much. But when there's a lot of metadata, it won't all fit in NVRAM. Oops, it's not as big a gain as you'd first think.
It's surprising how well Ext2 does compared to RAMFS and ConquestFS in the author's benchmarks.
Well, this isn't exactly about a rebate, but... I bought a Sony VAIO at Best Buy, and I dropped an extra $200 on the extended warranty. I took care to make sure it would cover service even if I was overseas. Well, a year or so later the keyboard died and I called the number on the warranty card. They referred me to a different company that would actually handle the claim, where I was told to just get the work done, then submit the claim. I did, and I submitted the paperwork according to their instructions. That was a year ago. After a number of calls and various bogus excuses, I still haven't received payment. So moral of the story: Don't buy the extended warranty, it's a scam. Second moral: find a more reputable place to buy a computer than Best Buy.
Ahh, I was curious as how to do that. I was dreading having to run xmkmf or whatever and tons of other shit to make ttf fonts work in the past. Or do you have to run an xfont server to get this copy to directory capability?
Straight up XFree 4.2.1, no font server.
No, it's not a separate topic, especially since you use the lack of cameras as a "cause" of the accident. People need to use their heads before making statements like this. What, exactly, would have taking pictures of the shuttle actually accomplished in this case? How was not taking pictures in any way contributory to the accident?
This has been discussed many times, where were you? There are things that could have been attempted if it was known the wing had a big hole in it. For example, the attitude of the shuttle could have been adjusted to shift the heating pattern more to the good wing, the rentry trajectory could have been modified, a rescue by the Russians could have been attempted, the crew could have been prepared to bail out if they got down far enough, and so on. Closing one's eyes and hoping the danger goes away, ostrich-style, has never been the best strategy.