Yeah, but the 2600 was not one of those old "Pong/Table Tennis/Football/etc" TV games with the two analog paddles. The 2600 was a programmable (using plug-in ROM cartridges) games console with low resolution colour graphics.
I have to admit, I still don't really understand the logic of it all. This is an honest question, and I'd be interested to know the answers.
The PS3 is a more powerful machine (as is the X-Box 360. Let's just lump them together because it's not a significant difference between them, I'll refer to the PS360 below.)
What does this imply? Well, it means: it's capable of running anything that will run on the Wii. If you want, you can use the same graphics and end up with something that runs on the PS360 no worse than it runs on the Wii. In some cases, however, you'll get an automatic boost. Run the same algorithms, and they should run faster. This, in turn, can mean it does more work, eg supports the higher resolution.
"Ok", I pretend to hear you cry, "but there's the static bitmaps and stuff." But does producing something that's, say, 4x as many pixels, really need four times as much work to produce? At that stage, aren't you either rendering and tweaking the renders or scanning hand drawn/photographed artwork?
I can understand going from 320x200 to 1024x768 requiring way more work in terms of cleaned up graphics. But going from 640x400 to 1280x1080, or something, presumably isn't going to add such a level of clarity that, say, you're going to have to add whole facial features to characters that you wouldn't have otherwise done.
So why is it that much more expensive to develop games for the PS360 than the Wii?
Why is that ugly? Seems like capitalism at its finest.
You do know your rebuttle has absolutely nothing to do with the comment you're responding to. Capitalism is not considered, by the majority of people I know, to be a superb thing of beauty that is beyond ugliness. Quite the reverse indeed.
Greed and excessive, gratuitous, shows of wealth are rarely beautiful. Show me a hundred thousand people with jobs because someone was able to invest in a new technology, and I'll agree that's capitalism at its finest. Show me people paying to get an advantage in a line for an already over-priced luxury item, and you'll be showing me capitalism at its most facile.
Maybe they won the Microsoft anti-trust trial because it was largely open and shut.
They, unfortunately in my view, didn't save us from the first four years of Bush when they argued on Gore's behalf that every vote should be counted in Florida in the 2000 election. The SCO trial is going nowhere and one of the lawyers actually, at one point, tried to argue the GPL was invalid because it required no monetary compensation. The words spoken in public by the lawyers do not exactly suggest competence.
They don't have that impressive a track record, in practice.
Do you work for the RIAA? I'm just trying to work out why someone would be so intent on discrediting those trying to reform copyright by painting them all as apparently paranoid, given the above comment and many of the statements you've made in the past about the other side, supporters of freeloading.
No idea. Bit of meaningless question though, it's like you're going out of your way not to address his point.
After reading your justification of your "foe" policy, I've come to the realisation that you're fighting for the right to pirate not because of any well founded logic that says it's fair to do so, but because you've refused to listen to the pro-copyright-in-principle-even-if-it's-a-little-e xtreme-at-the-moment side of the fence. It's easier for you to put your fingers in your ears and yell "Nah nah nah" than it is for you to accept that those trying to enforce copyrights on something as basic as peer-to-peer might, possibly, just have a point.
And I suspect, in the long run, while you've had some luck in that the RIAA has been clumsy in many cases, and moreover is running a policy based on an assumption of default capulation (because, in the majority of cases, people recognize they are violating copyrights, just like most of us pay valid speeding fines when we know full well that just turning up to court is enough to void most speeding tickets), as you become more successful in persuading people to "fight the man", you'll increasingly suck at it.
You can't be a lawyer and ignore what the other side is doing. You can't invent strawmen all the time and just assume that anyone who's attacking your client is doing so spuriously and without reason (beyond so-called "Greed", which of course, none of your clients do.)
But, whatever, I'm talking to a brick wall. On the basis of one comment, you've decided I either can't be reasoned with (and haven't tried), or that I'm from the RIAA.
And why? Because you think that if someone makes available someone else's song to download on their computer, and two thousand people download it (instead of using the iTunes Music Store), the copyright holder has only lost 75c.
Who, I wonder, is the person impossible to reason with.
"Ah, thanks for coming Mark. Glad to hear you've taken us over, we really admire whatever it is you're famous for. Anyway, just to let you know, we're close to reaching a settlement with Google. They're going to pay us seventy eight mill..."
"Sorry to cut you off, but that's not going to happen. We're not settling. We're going to win this case."
"But we are winning the case. This deal means we'll get..."
"Sorry, not interested. We're going to fight this case, demand $699, or whatever that statatuory damages figure is, for every download of every video that YouTube has ever done that we can sue over."
"But that'll drive Google bankrupt! We'll never get our money, and under this deal we'll end up getting more in the long run anyway because, as I was saying, they're going to, every year, pay us..."
"Stop. Stop right now. I predicted Google are going to lose this. Lose they shall."
"But wouldn't you prefer us both to win? I mean, we can make a fortune through this, if Google makes it a success."
"No. Then I'd look like an idiot. People would point at me and say "There goes Mark Cuban, the guy who said Google was doomed by buying YouTube, and now has made billions by coming to an agreement that meant Google could make it work." I don't want that to happen. I have a reputation to keep. I'm a dot-com millionaire damn it."
I just glanced at your user page. I've never actually had a chance to converse directly with a real ex-Commodore Amiga engineer before.
So can I just take the opportunity to say a heartfelt "Thank you" to you, Dave Haynie, and the others. What you people created was absolutely increadible, and there hasn't been anything like it since.
Yeah, but that was slightly after the events involving Tramiel were finished, and was partially because Amstrad took over a flailing Sinclair which, while immune from Tramiel's price cuts (the Spectrum was the cheapest home computer in town and achieved a network-effect very quickly), had made some bad business decisions of its own after the Spectrum, the C5 being the one that pushed it over the edge.
Certainly, in 1984, people either owned Spectrums or Commodore 64s in Britain. Technically good rivals such as the 6809-based Dragon (a system based upon the same Motorola reference design as the Radio Shack CoCo) barely made a dent. TI flailed from 1981 to 1984 and ended up withdrawing from the market - I've only ever seen two TI99/4a's in my entire life, one of which was in a store, and that's two more than most people I know.
I reread my comment and yes, in some cases I didn't make certain facts explicit, so I'm glad of the GP's response to mine and I'm as much to blame as he is. Notably I didn't say that the machine that was supposed to be the A600 was released instead as the A1200 (and I can see that if you read the paragraph on the A300's release, you might even be under the impression that the second half is talking about the machine code-named the A600.)
Of course, all of this is from memory, and I wasn't there, I was just a die-hard Amiga user at the time. Jesup has corrected me about the working title of the A4000, and from his wording, I assume he has reason to know much more than I do.
No, you're semi right, I forgot to mention that the A600 was renamed to the A1200, but I did explicitly say that the A300 was released as the A600, and that the AGA machines (including the machine whose working name was the A600) were released later. It should have been very clear that people out there with machines called A600s were getting the machine that in development was called the A300, regardless of what name the AGA A500 replacement was called.
I have an Amiga 600 sitting right next to me on my desk, and I can tell you it doesn't have the AGA chipset, only ECS.
I know. That's what I said.
The A600 is what was originally developed as the A300, a Commodore 64 replacement. The thing developed in Commodore's labs as the A600 became the A1200. I wrote that above. A300 released as A600. A600 released as A1200. A2200 released as A4000.
AAA was not a follow-up to AGA. AAA was developed first and never finished. As a stop-gap, still in the belief AAA would be finished, they developed AGA, essentially a reworking of the ideas behind the original chipset to take advantage of the larger busses and faster clock rates. AAA was finally cancelled in favour of something called Hombre, which essentially threw the Amiga design out the window and was effectively a new computer. A "CD64" based upon the Hombre chipset was designed but never got to see the light of day.
Hombre would have included an integrated HP-PA RISC CPU rather than interfacing with an external CPU, and been entirely "chunky" instead of planar. It was so un-Amigalike Commodore actually vetoed porting over AmigaOS.
Well, Peddle was only there for a short time. Jack Tramiel built Commodore up in the beginning, being Commdore's founder and everything.
He did do something in the early eighties which nearly killed Commodore. Tramiel went to war with TI in the so-called video game wars, furious that TI had undermined its calculator business in the eighties. The Commodore 64, which was selling well at $600 (supposedly close to 10x what it actually cost to build, even then) was repeatedly subjected to price cuts and a massive marketing campaign, which ultimately came close to destroying Commodore's cash flow.
At the end of the period, Irving Gould, Commodore's effective owner, fired Tramiel, who left and then went to Atari, which he basically saved from oblivion.
Commodore went bankrupt for the first time shortly afterwards. It recovered. And then went bust again.
Commodore's main problem at the end were a bunch of technical managers with agendas, and some lousy decisions made as a result of it. A case in point, the AGA chipset.
The AGA chipset was supposed to debut in an enhanced A3000 (the 3000 was a very respected, if expensive, 32-bit Amiga system), called the A3000+. Shortly before the A3000+ was supposed to be finished and shown to Commodore's international affiliates, there was a change of management, and the project cancelled. Instead, AGA was to be put first into a lower cost machine, called (IIRC) the A2200. Low cost consumer machines were suddenly considered Commodore's future direction, and they also designed an "A300", a replacement for the Commodore 64 based on old Amiga (ECS) technology, and an "A600", an AGA and standards compliant replacement to the A500.
All of which made some kind of sense, I suppose, but there was no replacement for the A3000.
After that, Commodore's managers decided to rename and reprice everything before announcing these wonderful machines to the public. The A2200 became the A4000. The replacement to the A3000. (This would be like Ford replacing the Lincoln Town Car with a design based upon the Escort.) It, and the A600, were delayed.
Meanwhile, the A300 was renamed (at the last moment) to the A600, and sold at the same price as the Amiga 500, which was abruptly dropped. The A600, as released, had some of the keyboard missing (so it couldn't play some Amiga games), and was no more powerful anywhere else. The machine did have a PCMCIA slot and a laptop hard drive interface, but these didn't really pacify anyone.
A few months afterwards, the AGA machines were released. Despite AGA, the A4000 was considerably less desirable than its "predecessor", and far more expensive than the A2000 it was supposed to replace. The A1200 was a good replacement for the A500, but was sold at a much higher price.
So in 1993 or so, you have Commodore:
Seriously short of money, partially thanks to "Business is War" champion Tramiel.
Seriously short of money, mainly (at this point) thanks to an ill-fated entry into the PC market (dumb managers)
Releasing two lemons and a bitter orange as replacements for long-in-the-tooth but popular machines, and having no money to back it up (dumb managers)
If they hadn't had cashflow problems, it's tempting to speculate that all four machines would have been launched, and done so as replacements for the machines they were supposed to replace. As it was, they needed the money. That said, the A3000+ appears to have been killed by a manager of the type who wants to make an impression, rather than out of any technical or marketing awareness.
Tramiel can't really be blamed for all of this. He made one error, and he'd probably argue it wasn't an error to begin with, by the end of the "war" Commodore pretty much owned the home computer market, or was one of a top two (depending on country: ie Sinclair and Commodore in the UK owned the home computer market.) Irving Gould, who appointed a series of replacements for Tramiel and kept firing them until Medhi Ali, who was reponsible for the period where most of Commmodore's death was sealed. The PC fiasco. The numerous incompetent PHB-style heads of engineering. The mismanagement of the AGA transition.
But wait. We could get Google onto the case, and then they could provide advertising supported power, which is just like free power, only more annoying.
Tesla was clearly a hundred years too ahead of his time, and lacking the imagination of a dot-com tycoon...
The 8008 and 4004 have different heritages. IIRC, the 4004 was custom designed for Busicom, whereas the 8008 was an attempt to re-implement on a chip a third party design for a terminal's CPU.
The "Xeon is based on Intel's oldest chip" thing legitimately stops at the 8008. (8008 begat 8080, 8086 was heavily influenced by 8080, and had a degree of source code compatibility, and all CPUs since have implemented the 8086 instruction set.)
My recollection is that those old "Pong/Table Tennis/Football/etc" TV games with the two analog paddles used the 4004. Mind you, I bet I'm still talking about something most Slashdotters have never seen. Youngsters! Tsk!
This is not to be confused with the very original generation of such games which were, essentially, analog. But the generation after that, with the switch that picked the game to play (the analog units used plug-in cards), and the blocky, 0-15, scores, were done with the 4004 CPU (or a direct derivative such as the 4040.)
We just need to learn how to breath in carbon dioxide, and exhale oxygen. This would not only help with global warming, but if this is something we can do on demand, it will help tremendously in the field of Scuba diving.
If I sound flippant, it's because I'm not really sure there is an answer any more. Many climatologists appear to believe we've already gone too far, we could have done something about it ten years ago, but we've squandered the opportunities that were available to us. And suppose someone comes up with an astonishingly good way of sucking huge amounts of CO2 out of the air before it's too late (such as the various proposals involving algae), isn't the fact a "quick fix" was available likely to undermine efforts to be responsible in terms of our planet management in the future?
Well, I've done it. The usual reason is you're trying to install the latest-greatest of something, but it requires libraries that are not only newer than what you have, but are incompatible with some existing apps. I remember trying to upgrade glibc and finding the package manager wanted to remove half a dozen apps and subsystems because ONE dependency was incompatible with that glibc.
> Dependency hell. Don't you just love it?;-)
I use a package manager, so I don't get to experience it
Huh? I use a package manager on my Debian installation. I suffer dependency hell. Mac OS X doesn't suffer this problem. I don't use a package manager on it.
Dependency hell is the product of an environment in which everyone thinks that everyone else has a million or so development libraries on their machines, that are always up to date and yet never, ever, change. It sucks. If you're not suffering it under Solaris, I suggest it has to do with saner behaviour with Solaris, which is possibly (I have no idea, last time I used Solaris was version 8, which never installed, so I'll have to go back and take a look at it) better managed than most GNU/Linux installations, not because of your use of a package manager.
Dependency hell is not solved by package managers, indeed usually it's made worse, both by the reliance upon them and the degree to which they make resolving some dependencies doubly hard (by making it more difficult to install two versions of the same application.)
That really depends on whether the stable ABI is abused by vendors putting out binary-only drivers. If it is, then I doubt any changes will be made to the policies governing Linux in that area. If, on the other hand, tons of new drivers that abide by the terms of the GPL newly appear for SunOS, then a switch might happen, but probably after it's too late to stop the Solaris juggernaut from running over GNU/Linux completely.
I think the weeks that follow the release of version 3 of the GPL will be very interesting from the point of view of people interested in either Solaris or Java.
Ok, I think I'm beginning to understand where QuantumG is coming from, and it's not as simple as you make out.
The scenario being described is this:
1. Party A provides a copy of Project X and a "license" (it'll become clear why I'm putting it in quotes) to Party B which allows them to redistribute under the same terms.
2. Party B then provides a copy of Project X and a "license" to Party C (the same "license")
3. Party C violates "license".
4. Judge rules Party B is the only party (assuming it has any rights at all) that can sue Party C. Party A can't, because it granted a license to redistribute to Party B, and Party B is obeying the license. It never came to an agreement with Party C, therefore what Party C does with the code is none of its business. If Party C can prove that Party A never supplied it with the copy, and it was provided by a legal licensee, who has no direct rights to sue either (ie all they've done is copy the project, they have not introduced their own copyrighted materials) then nobody can legally sue them.
I don't believe QuantumG's correct. The problem is the difference between a license and a contract, and I suspect that the judge wasn't ruling on a license so much as an EULA (a license combined with a contract.)
The reason I don't believe it's correct is that the GPL is just a license. It isn't an agreement between Party A and Party B, it's an entirely one way offer from Party A to all other parties allowing them to do something they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. There is no meeting of minds. If QuantumG is correct, then the entire concept of a license is bunk and meaningless, in every category, not just copyright. It means copyright law is also going to have severe problems.
But who knows. The law's an ass quite often, and IANAL. Moreover, I'd like to see the actual ruling rather than comment upon a third party confusing rendition of it.
I read the sentence as saying that the Novell action pushed Sun over the edge, not that they made the decision last week after rejecting the GPL completely before that. Sun has been considering the GPL for a long time, and Schwartz has gone out of his way to indicate the GPL was on the table when others were claiming it could never happen. I've even commented upon Sun's support for the GPL before.
It's quite possible that Sun would have gone for it anyway. The question is, would it have been this week, and is it possible they'd have waited for GPL3 before making the final decision?
I thought Darwin was licensed exclusively (well, aside from that parts that have to be licensed under the GPL) under the APSL? Did they keep the BSD license for those parts comprising exclusively of BSD code?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the 2600 was not one of those old "Pong/Table Tennis/Football/etc" TV games with the two analog paddles. The 2600 was a programmable (using plug-in ROM cartridges) games console with low resolution colour graphics.
I have to admit, I still don't really understand the logic of it all. This is an honest question, and I'd be interested to know the answers.
The PS3 is a more powerful machine (as is the X-Box 360. Let's just lump them together because it's not a significant difference between them, I'll refer to the PS360 below.)
What does this imply? Well, it means: it's capable of running anything that will run on the Wii. If you want, you can use the same graphics and end up with something that runs on the PS360 no worse than it runs on the Wii. In some cases, however, you'll get an automatic boost. Run the same algorithms, and they should run faster. This, in turn, can mean it does more work, eg supports the higher resolution.
"Ok", I pretend to hear you cry, "but there's the static bitmaps and stuff." But does producing something that's, say, 4x as many pixels, really need four times as much work to produce? At that stage, aren't you either rendering and tweaking the renders or scanning hand drawn/photographed artwork?
I can understand going from 320x200 to 1024x768 requiring way more work in terms of cleaned up graphics. But going from 640x400 to 1280x1080, or something, presumably isn't going to add such a level of clarity that, say, you're going to have to add whole facial features to characters that you wouldn't have otherwise done.
So why is it that much more expensive to develop games for the PS360 than the Wii?
You do know your rebuttle has absolutely nothing to do with the comment you're responding to. Capitalism is not considered, by the majority of people I know, to be a superb thing of beauty that is beyond ugliness. Quite the reverse indeed.
Greed and excessive, gratuitous, shows of wealth are rarely beautiful. Show me a hundred thousand people with jobs because someone was able to invest in a new technology, and I'll agree that's capitalism at its finest. Show me people paying to get an advantage in a line for an already over-priced luxury item, and you'll be showing me capitalism at its most facile.
Maybe they won the Microsoft anti-trust trial because it was largely open and shut.
They, unfortunately in my view, didn't save us from the first four years of Bush when they argued on Gore's behalf that every vote should be counted in Florida in the 2000 election. The SCO trial is going nowhere and one of the lawyers actually, at one point, tried to argue the GPL was invalid because it required no monetary compensation. The words spoken in public by the lawyers do not exactly suggest competence.
They don't have that impressive a track record, in practice.
Do you work for the RIAA? I'm just trying to work out why someone would be so intent on discrediting those trying to reform copyright by painting them all as apparently paranoid, given the above comment and many of the statements you've made in the past about the other side, supporters of freeloading.
No idea. Bit of meaningless question though, it's like you're going out of your way not to address his point.
After reading your justification of your "foe" policy, I've come to the realisation that you're fighting for the right to pirate not because of any well founded logic that says it's fair to do so, but because you've refused to listen to the pro-copyright-in-principle-even-if-it's-a-little-e xtreme-at-the-moment side of the fence. It's easier for you to put your fingers in your ears and yell "Nah nah nah" than it is for you to accept that those trying to enforce copyrights on something as basic as peer-to-peer might, possibly, just have a point.
And I suspect, in the long run, while you've had some luck in that the RIAA has been clumsy in many cases, and moreover is running a policy based on an assumption of default capulation (because, in the majority of cases, people recognize they are violating copyrights, just like most of us pay valid speeding fines when we know full well that just turning up to court is enough to void most speeding tickets), as you become more successful in persuading people to "fight the man", you'll increasingly suck at it.
You can't be a lawyer and ignore what the other side is doing. You can't invent strawmen all the time and just assume that anyone who's attacking your client is doing so spuriously and without reason (beyond so-called "Greed", which of course, none of your clients do.)
But, whatever, I'm talking to a brick wall. On the basis of one comment, you've decided I either can't be reasoned with (and haven't tried), or that I'm from the RIAA.
And why? Because you think that if someone makes available someone else's song to download on their computer, and two thousand people download it (instead of using the iTunes Music Store), the copyright holder has only lost 75c.
Who, I wonder, is the person impossible to reason with.
"Ah, thanks for coming Mark. Glad to hear you've taken us over, we really admire whatever it is you're famous for. Anyway, just to let you know, we're close to reaching a settlement with Google. They're going to pay us seventy eight mill..."
"Sorry to cut you off, but that's not going to happen. We're not settling. We're going to win this case."
"But we are winning the case. This deal means we'll get..."
"Sorry, not interested. We're going to fight this case, demand $699, or whatever that statatuory damages figure is, for every download of every video that YouTube has ever done that we can sue over."
"But that'll drive Google bankrupt! We'll never get our money, and under this deal we'll end up getting more in the long run anyway because, as I was saying, they're going to, every year, pay us..."
"Stop. Stop right now. I predicted Google are going to lose this. Lose they shall."
"But wouldn't you prefer us both to win? I mean, we can make a fortune through this, if Google makes it a success."
"No. Then I'd look like an idiot. People would point at me and say "There goes Mark Cuban, the guy who said Google was doomed by buying YouTube, and now has made billions by coming to an agreement that meant Google could make it work." I don't want that to happen. I have a reputation to keep. I'm a dot-com millionaire damn it."
I just glanced at your user page. I've never actually had a chance to converse directly with a real ex-Commodore Amiga engineer before.
So can I just take the opportunity to say a heartfelt "Thank you" to you, Dave Haynie, and the others. What you people created was absolutely increadible, and there hasn't been anything like it since.
Yeah, but that was slightly after the events involving Tramiel were finished, and was partially because Amstrad took over a flailing Sinclair which, while immune from Tramiel's price cuts (the Spectrum was the cheapest home computer in town and achieved a network-effect very quickly), had made some bad business decisions of its own after the Spectrum, the C5 being the one that pushed it over the edge.
Certainly, in 1984, people either owned Spectrums or Commodore 64s in Britain. Technically good rivals such as the 6809-based Dragon (a system based upon the same Motorola reference design as the Radio Shack CoCo) barely made a dent. TI flailed from 1981 to 1984 and ended up withdrawing from the market - I've only ever seen two TI99/4a's in my entire life, one of which was in a store, and that's two more than most people I know.
I reread my comment and yes, in some cases I didn't make certain facts explicit, so I'm glad of the GP's response to mine and I'm as much to blame as he is. Notably I didn't say that the machine that was supposed to be the A600 was released instead as the A1200 (and I can see that if you read the paragraph on the A300's release, you might even be under the impression that the second half is talking about the machine code-named the A600.)
Of course, all of this is from memory, and I wasn't there, I was just a die-hard Amiga user at the time. Jesup has corrected me about the working title of the A4000, and from his wording, I assume he has reason to know much more than I do.
No, you're semi right, I forgot to mention that the A600 was renamed to the A1200, but I did explicitly say that the A300 was released as the A600, and that the AGA machines (including the machine whose working name was the A600) were released later. It should have been very clear that people out there with machines called A600s were getting the machine that in development was called the A300, regardless of what name the AGA A500 replacement was called.
I know. That's what I said.
The A600 is what was originally developed as the A300, a Commodore 64 replacement. The thing developed in Commodore's labs as the A600 became the A1200. I wrote that above. A300 released as A600. A600 released as A1200. A2200 released as A4000.
AAA was not a follow-up to AGA. AAA was developed first and never finished. As a stop-gap, still in the belief AAA would be finished, they developed AGA, essentially a reworking of the ideas behind the original chipset to take advantage of the larger busses and faster clock rates. AAA was finally cancelled in favour of something called Hombre, which essentially threw the Amiga design out the window and was effectively a new computer. A "CD64" based upon the Hombre chipset was designed but never got to see the light of day.
Hombre would have included an integrated HP-PA RISC CPU rather than interfacing with an external CPU, and been entirely "chunky" instead of planar. It was so un-Amigalike Commodore actually vetoed porting over AmigaOS.
Well, Peddle was only there for a short time. Jack Tramiel built Commodore up in the beginning, being Commdore's founder and everything.
He did do something in the early eighties which nearly killed Commodore. Tramiel went to war with TI in the so-called video game wars, furious that TI had undermined its calculator business in the eighties. The Commodore 64, which was selling well at $600 (supposedly close to 10x what it actually cost to build, even then) was repeatedly subjected to price cuts and a massive marketing campaign, which ultimately came close to destroying Commodore's cash flow.
At the end of the period, Irving Gould, Commodore's effective owner, fired Tramiel, who left and then went to Atari, which he basically saved from oblivion.
Commodore went bankrupt for the first time shortly afterwards. It recovered. And then went bust again.
Commodore's main problem at the end were a bunch of technical managers with agendas, and some lousy decisions made as a result of it. A case in point, the AGA chipset.
The AGA chipset was supposed to debut in an enhanced A3000 (the 3000 was a very respected, if expensive, 32-bit Amiga system), called the A3000+. Shortly before the A3000+ was supposed to be finished and shown to Commodore's international affiliates, there was a change of management, and the project cancelled. Instead, AGA was to be put first into a lower cost machine, called (IIRC) the A2200. Low cost consumer machines were suddenly considered Commodore's future direction, and they also designed an "A300", a replacement for the Commodore 64 based on old Amiga (ECS) technology, and an "A600", an AGA and standards compliant replacement to the A500.
All of which made some kind of sense, I suppose, but there was no replacement for the A3000.
After that, Commodore's managers decided to rename and reprice everything before announcing these wonderful machines to the public. The A2200 became the A4000. The replacement to the A3000. (This would be like Ford replacing the Lincoln Town Car with a design based upon the Escort.) It, and the A600, were delayed.
Meanwhile, the A300 was renamed (at the last moment) to the A600, and sold at the same price as the Amiga 500, which was abruptly dropped. The A600, as released, had some of the keyboard missing (so it couldn't play some Amiga games), and was no more powerful anywhere else. The machine did have a PCMCIA slot and a laptop hard drive interface, but these didn't really pacify anyone.
A few months afterwards, the AGA machines were released. Despite AGA, the A4000 was considerably less desirable than its "predecessor", and far more expensive than the A2000 it was supposed to replace. The A1200 was a good replacement for the A500, but was sold at a much higher price.
So in 1993 or so, you have Commodore:
If they hadn't had cashflow problems, it's tempting to speculate that all four machines would have been launched, and done so as replacements for the machines they were supposed to replace. As it was, they needed the money. That said, the A3000+ appears to have been killed by a manager of the type who wants to make an impression, rather than out of any technical or marketing awareness.
Tramiel can't really be blamed for all of this. He made one error, and he'd probably argue it wasn't an error to begin with, by the end of the "war" Commodore pretty much owned the home computer market, or was one of a top two (depending on country: ie Sinclair and Commodore in the UK owned the home computer market.) Irving Gould, who appointed a series of replacements for Tramiel and kept firing them until Medhi Ali, who was reponsible for the period where most of Commmodore's death was sealed. The PC fiasco. The numerous incompetent PHB-style heads of engineering. The mismanagement of the AGA transition.
Tesla was clearly a hundred years too ahead of his time, and lacking the imagination of a dot-com tycoon...
They opened up SPARC decades ago, and while they didn't start with a GPL'd reference implementation, they have released a number since.
This is just the way Sun works. It has nothing to do with them deciding whether the architecture is a viable player or not.
The 8008 and 4004 have different heritages. IIRC, the 4004 was custom designed for Busicom, whereas the 8008 was an attempt to re-implement on a chip a third party design for a terminal's CPU.
The "Xeon is based on Intel's oldest chip" thing legitimately stops at the 8008. (8008 begat 8080, 8086 was heavily influenced by 8080, and had a degree of source code compatibility, and all CPUs since have implemented the 8086 instruction set.)
My recollection is that those old "Pong/Table Tennis/Football/etc" TV games with the two analog paddles used the 4004. Mind you, I bet I'm still talking about something most Slashdotters have never seen. Youngsters! Tsk!
This is not to be confused with the very original generation of such games which were, essentially, analog. But the generation after that, with the switch that picked the game to play (the analog units used plug-in cards), and the blocky, 0-15, scores, were done with the 4004 CPU (or a direct derivative such as the 4040.)
We just need to learn how to breath in carbon dioxide, and exhale oxygen. This would not only help with global warming, but if this is something we can do on demand, it will help tremendously in the field of Scuba diving.
If I sound flippant, it's because I'm not really sure there is an answer any more. Many climatologists appear to believe we've already gone too far, we could have done something about it ten years ago, but we've squandered the opportunities that were available to us. And suppose someone comes up with an astonishingly good way of sucking huge amounts of CO2 out of the air before it's too late (such as the various proposals involving algae), isn't the fact a "quick fix" was available likely to undermine efforts to be responsible in terms of our planet management in the future?
Well, I've done it. The usual reason is you're trying to install the latest-greatest of something, but it requires libraries that are not only newer than what you have, but are incompatible with some existing apps. I remember trying to upgrade glibc and finding the package manager wanted to remove half a dozen apps and subsystems because ONE dependency was incompatible with that glibc.
Huh? I use a package manager on my Debian installation. I suffer dependency hell. Mac OS X doesn't suffer this problem. I don't use a package manager on it.
Dependency hell is the product of an environment in which everyone thinks that everyone else has a million or so development libraries on their machines, that are always up to date and yet never, ever, change. It sucks. If you're not suffering it under Solaris, I suggest it has to do with saner behaviour with Solaris, which is possibly (I have no idea, last time I used Solaris was version 8, which never installed, so I'll have to go back and take a look at it) better managed than most GNU/Linux installations, not because of your use of a package manager.
Dependency hell is not solved by package managers, indeed usually it's made worse, both by the reliance upon them and the degree to which they make resolving some dependencies doubly hard (by making it more difficult to install two versions of the same application.)
In other words, a pretty much standard GNU/Linux distribution that's been used for more than a few months and had to be updated a few times.
Dependency hell. Don't you just love it? ;-)
That really depends on whether the stable ABI is abused by vendors putting out binary-only drivers. If it is, then I doubt any changes will be made to the policies governing Linux in that area. If, on the other hand, tons of new drivers that abide by the terms of the GPL newly appear for SunOS, then a switch might happen, but probably after it's too late to stop the Solaris juggernaut from running over GNU/Linux completely.
It's not an off-hand comment. Schwartz has said publicly Sun are considering GPLing Solaris before. The key thing is it appears they're waiting for GPL3 before making a final decision.
I think the weeks that follow the release of version 3 of the GPL will be very interesting from the point of view of people interested in either Solaris or Java.
Ok, I think I'm beginning to understand where QuantumG is coming from, and it's not as simple as you make out.
The scenario being described is this:
1. Party A provides a copy of Project X and a "license" (it'll become clear why I'm putting it in quotes) to Party B which allows them to redistribute under the same terms.
2. Party B then provides a copy of Project X and a "license" to Party C (the same "license")
3. Party C violates "license".
4. Judge rules Party B is the only party (assuming it has any rights at all) that can sue Party C. Party A can't, because it granted a license to redistribute to Party B, and Party B is obeying the license. It never came to an agreement with Party C, therefore what Party C does with the code is none of its business. If Party C can prove that Party A never supplied it with the copy, and it was provided by a legal licensee, who has no direct rights to sue either (ie all they've done is copy the project, they have not introduced their own copyrighted materials) then nobody can legally sue them.
I don't believe QuantumG's correct. The problem is the difference between a license and a contract, and I suspect that the judge wasn't ruling on a license so much as an EULA (a license combined with a contract.)
The reason I don't believe it's correct is that the GPL is just a license. It isn't an agreement between Party A and Party B, it's an entirely one way offer from Party A to all other parties allowing them to do something they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. There is no meeting of minds. If QuantumG is correct, then the entire concept of a license is bunk and meaningless, in every category, not just copyright. It means copyright law is also going to have severe problems.
But who knows. The law's an ass quite often, and IANAL. Moreover, I'd like to see the actual ruling rather than comment upon a third party confusing rendition of it.
I read the sentence as saying that the Novell action pushed Sun over the edge, not that they made the decision last week after rejecting the GPL completely before that. Sun has been considering the GPL for a long time, and Schwartz has gone out of his way to indicate the GPL was on the table when others were claiming it could never happen. I've even commented upon Sun's support for the GPL before.
It's quite possible that Sun would have gone for it anyway. The question is, would it have been this week, and is it possible they'd have waited for GPL3 before making the final decision?
I thought Darwin was licensed exclusively (well, aside from that parts that have to be licensed under the GPL) under the APSL? Did they keep the BSD license for those parts comprising exclusively of BSD code?