Falls advertising is not good. This is why I *woldn't* go after "PeoplePC". They have cheesy adds but at least they claim you are renting a PC and internet connection for $X.
Claiming that something is free when people have to pay for it out of pocket is not healthy. That's rude.
The Indians who migrate to Jamaica seaking employment ( mostly medical staff ) say they love there homeland and will even return home for aranged wedins. Most are brutaly honest and will tell both the good and the bad.
Good: Indians are geting educated to high levles at a rapid rate.
Bad: It's taking a long time to overcome a long history of large impoverished pesant populations.
This wouldn't have anything to do with being at partial war with Pakistan and in an arms race akin to what the USA and USSR had in the 60s ? Someone said that development moves much quicker behind a war chariot than an ox drawn cart and this may be proof.
For those who doubt that India will be the next superpower this mission is just a way of saying "look out, here we come". The Ghandies carried them a long way from a huge impoverished Farming colony to a much larger country ( population approaching 1 Billion ) of which a rapidly growing number are educated and employable. Sure lots of things suck in India but they are doing very well considering what they have and even the culture is changing.
PS : Do Americans shed tears when they figure out the India is the worlds largest democracy ?
If you are a commercial player and will be doling out cash for your database then you will go off and buy a bad ass database. ( DB/2, Oracle etc... ).
MySQL is mostly used in private web sites that grow into commercial entities and get bought up by Andover.net or VALinux:).
Being GPL opens it up to a much wider market, including those who refuse to pay for this stuff. Those who are unprofitable commercial entities. Basically it will now by option #1 for anyone who also cruses Linux and appache. I.e. They will look at other options only when MySQL is not technicaly capeble.
I spoke about this in 1998. Back then there really were no half way decent free SQL databases. I contended that any such database would eventually rise to the quality of Oracle.
Now we will finally get to see what happens when a SQL back end is under the GPL and useable for real work. My guess is that it will accelerate the way the Kernel and KDE have. I suspect it will be so but "the community" has a chance to prove me wrong.
Let's see how many Free Software hackers go to bat with this one. Let's see how many people fix that infamous Memory leak or add those extra features ( There probably is a reason for Oracle to be as big as the E-Smith distribution )
Will MySQL become as much of a killer app as Linux is becoming? Only time will tell. My bet is on the free code.
Investing in internet startups is such a risky thing that you expect to be coned sometimes. You assume that most of the ventures you put money into will go nowhere. To the goy who has dumped $x million into a venture lousing your shirt because the market isn't ripe for your product, the product comes out after a superior competitor or doesn't work at all is irrelevant. You sometimes louse all your money.
Venture capitalists survive by NOT putting all the eggs into one basket. The only thing special about being taken by a conman is that you will never deal with that person again. Other failed ventures are water under the bridge.
Look at it this way: If someone came to you 5 years ago and said he was going to build a 128 bit CPU that would run x86 instructions in software at native speeds with less than 1 watt of power would you buy in ? The truth is all the really cool investments look far fetched on the surface and you would need months of study before you can make an educated guess as to weather it's flatly impossible.
VCs don't have the time or the inclination so they spread the risk around and louse a little on things like this. If you invest in 5 pixelons it only takes 1 transmeta to wash away all your pain.
I must be missing something with this whole RiserFS situation. You see RiserFS was built for speed. From the ground up it was designed to be faster than EXT2. Latter Jurnaling became a big thing and mp3.com went to bat with some money. Some geak merged jurnaling code into Riser and performance actually went UP. I don't know how that happened since Jurnaling is an added layer of complexity.
The current situation is that Linus doesn't yet ship Jurnaling but Mandrake Soft dose. I *WILL* continue to buy Mandrake Linux to avoid the huge headache of retrofitting a better files system by hand. In all likelihood RedHat, SuSE and the rest will add RiserFS when they actually ship 2.4.x kernels. The end result is that it will be PCMCIA all over again.
For those who don't know Every mainstream distribution pushed PCMCIA for *years* while it wasn't officially in the kernel. Laptop users who downloaded the kernel to "try this kernel compiling thing" were often surprised to find that they had to retrofit PCMCIA by hand. That was just a peripheral driver. A lot of 1st time compilers will be building kernels that do not support the root file system. This is not a good thing.
I here there are reasons for keeping RiserFS out. I have no clue what those reasons are. I suspect Riser isn't at fault because he keeps running around like an eager beaver "What do you want me to do to get this in?".
I don't get this waiting for EXT3 thing though. Unless Riser makes many changes to the core system in the wrong way and nobody wants to maintain those changes long term. In which case it would be better to modify Riser to support the correct approach ( which isn't happening ).
Jurnaling is the one piece of technology that two distinct commercial entities have opened for the Linux kernel ( XFS from SGI and JFS from IBM ). It is important to a huge number of users including some who don't know what it is but simply wish Linux would come up quicker after a power outage.
Something doesn't smell right about this situation and it bodes ill for the future.
Linux isn't secure. It's not fast. It can't bloody well handle mission critical anything. Besides it's so incompatible with everything that you simply can't migrate any system to a Linux platform.
Ohh.. wait. This is the real world where servers simply need to run all the time no matter what and technical staff is allowed to choose the best tool for the job at hand.
When weather.com went online initially Sun was the best choice for a high traffic web site. Now Linux is the best choice. This includes price/performance and stability measures.
The big question is: How do you explain all those NT web sites out there? If Sun and Latter Linux are the best choices for doing big sites and Linux costs less than NT for small sites. It's not all about FUD and tricking suites into forcing NT on Nerds either.
You see if you are a suite and are building the site yourself, NT will probably let you get online with very little technical help. Fortunately Linux is heading in that direction. I just hope the Distribution companies remember that it should be locked down by default.
As for weather.com They have nerds paid to know this stuff so it's not such a big deal what distributions ship. They customize the hell out of it.
Experience has shown that being tested and certified against a spec. Any spec is no guarantee that your system actually meets the goals of that spec. I.e. Windows NT is posix compliant. That doesn't mean porting a posix app to NT is a trivial task.
There are systems that are certified with various security levels according to DOD standards that the military refuse to use at those levels. Reason is that while a formal test bed will by it's very nature be limited in scope and consistent in the number and type of attacks it seeks to evaluate a real world hacker / cracker has no such rules. His goal is simply "Break this system by any means necessary".
I don't think you need to worry too much about Linux being a trusted system. If it ever gets to the high security standards of OpenBSD it will become the system of choice for the paranoid. Until then Open BSD is that system. No amount of certification and trust heaped on other systems will change that.
You see admins who must deploy trusted systems are evaluated in a different manner from managers generally. Did our system get "owned", "Rooted", "cracked" or otherwise compromised under your watch ? Can you tell us how many people tried and who they are ?
If you can't look smug answering those questions but can say "we have deployed trusted systems" you are out the door. It really is that simple.
Another point is that the definition of Trusted System includes the development process. How can you fit into the category without following that development methodology ? So far it seams you don't. Instead you force others to redefine the category so that you fit in. I.e. Right now lots of vendors are redefining "Unix" with the goal of including Linux. Linux taking a larger market share than all other Unix systems combined was no small part of this.
PS: Changing the development process on Linux isn't relay an option.
Why is this strange ? Movies released 1st on television are not allowed either. As are movies released on Video caset or DVD. In order to win an Oscar you must send your show to theaters then to the other media.
This may be unfair but it is a long standing principle of the Oscars that they celebrate the big screen. The Emys came out because of this. Anytime net movies become a big deal you will have a Net Movie Award of some kind.
That's right. After that silliness with "Kimp" The KDE people hacked up an image manipulation tool of their own. It's called kImageShope and it integrates well with KDE and Koffice with that embedding and stuff. Needless to say it looks more like Photoshpe than it dose like the Gimp.
The really cool thing about it is that it will work with Gimp plugins without them being modified in any way. For those new to image manipulation on Linux most of the Gimp's power is in those awesome plugins.
So yes. For all practical purposes the Gimp will soon have KDE integration with all the power that implies ( click image in KWord and edit it in place. yada yada )
.DOC is explained on the MSDN CD. There is also documentation on the web site for it. This is theory. In the real world following this documentation to the letter will allow you to read MSWord 6 files and RTF files only.
The troth is that those specifications are inaccurate and incomplete with regards to word 97 and 2K. Every person who has tried to implement an import filter has ran into that problem. The end result is that you sit down and create word documents on one PC ( or virtual PC with VMWare ) then go through with a hex editor to figure out what symbol dose what.
To put that all in perspective the two paragraphs above save to 1 KB ( minimum displayed file size on Win98 ) in HTM or text format. In MSWord.doc format it's 20 KB. This wouldn't be a problem if word simply inserted 20KBs of headers and footers but rather it splatters Irrelevant symbols all over the place. Even Word Perfect 8.0 only bloats it to 3 KB by adding 2 KB of headers, footers and font definitions.
Everybody who dose this reverse engineering has to start from scratch. Every company that tries to read *.doc files has to put people to work doing it. A combining of efforts would be very prudent. Let's start by getting The Open Source teems together on this then we can invite IBM, Corel, Sun, etc... to join.
We need someone to advocate the benefits of an LGPL or even BSD licensed library set to corps who must otherwise do it all themselves ? This is what ESR is useful for so go and call him.
Back at the dawn of Modern Sifi Isac Assimov wrote several stories in which he mentions the 3 laws of Robotics. These were rools hardwierd deap into every subsystem of "inteligent" robuts that govorn it's actions even in the most dier sercomstances. This set of guidlines looks like an attempt to impliment the same concept for a difernt kind of technology that once build won't be easily controled or halted ( the way a pulled key can halt a car ). BTW: Those infamus laws ran something like this. 1. Do not harm a human or throgh inaction alow one to be harmed. 2. Obay orders from a human. 3. Prevent your own destruction. Nanorobots *need* this kind of guidline more than other stuff because once they are deployed there realy is no way to disable them, except maybe by using an EMP blast. That however is not the Matrix conection. The Matrix comes into the picture when you think of why the machines wold keep humans around for power suply when they have Fusion ? Could it be because somewhere deap inside they can't bring themselvs to render the spiceis extinct ?
Nice screen shots. The only problem is that beauty isn't really what Berlin aims to fix. The weaknesses in X are well known but I will list them here for those who are unaware.
1. Size. X 3.x eats up 16 megs of RAM If you run it on 8 MB ( I have ) you will notice a distinct crawl caused from swapping.
2. Speed. X is fast but not quite fast enough. On a low end Pentium Linux runs wrings around NT or 95 for most things. The GUI is only a little faster however. I won't be happy until the *nix GUI is 3X the speed of the Windows GUI on the same Hardware.
3. You can't resize the desktop without shutting down X. Yes I know you can switch resolution but the Virtual desktop size will remain the same. I.e. this is good for Zooming in on fine print or small pictures. Nothing much else. If you use Mac, Windows or OS/2 you know why someone would resize a whole desktop.
4. X is not stable. Sure most of us hardly ever get a GUI lockup or spontaneous X server termination. Too many of us have seen this though. I have never seen an E-Smith server go down without massive hardware failure. Same goes for Cobalt Cube. X doesn't approach the stability of Linux or Apache or SaMBa. Bad Applications can't take down the Kernel. It can take down the GUI however. I.e. Sometimes Alpha quality KDE from CVS dose this for me.
Everything else that people see as wrong with X can be fixed at a higher level. If these problems can be fixed without ditching X then by all means do so. If X must be replaced then so be it. Berlin will still run X apps. It won't matter if it doesn't.
There is one good thing about the UN dealing with this sort of dispute that many people don't know about. The UN is a little too big for most of the influence that smaller courts come under.
You see every government which is a member must pay a prescribed fee into the UN budget. These fees are enough to run the organization so they don't need to go begging for campaign funds or other such rubbish.
It is worth noting that the UNDP actively promotes Linux in 3rd world countries. I asked one of there staff members and he said "We have a large budget but it would have to double before we could buy Windows. It would here to quadruple for all the extra staff we would need to manage that."
BTW : It was a UN staffer who introduced the Jamaica LUG to the Barbados LUG. These people have no reason to rule against the Open and Free camp unless we are genuinely in the wrong.
It's Mobile Linux. Deductive reasoning says so.
on
Crusoe WebPads By FIC
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· Score: 1
The report doesn't have to specifically state which OS it's running. True 32 bit OSs run well on both Transmeta chips but windows only runs fast on the more advanced version with it's 16 bit optimizations.
It would be a braindead design mistake to use the "32 bit only" CPU in a device built for Windows 9X. That leaves Linux, WinCE, Palm and Win2K as the possibilities.
Since Webpads must be cheap, Linux, Palm and Wince are the only possibilities. Since it's a pad rather than a pocket sized device it doesn't need the "optimized for small screen" interface which is WinCE's only saving grace.
Palm wasn't really designed for things like full featured web browsers so this is most likely a Linux based device. Possibly running Mr. Turvalds' own distribution.
Let's start off with one huge assumption. This thing works well, is delivered on time, generates clean code, looks and feels like the Windows Burland stuff with enough Linux enhancements to attract new users. It should also generate KDE code with deep integration down to the KOffice and Panel applet level. Ohh... and it should mostly be compatible with The Windows software.
This is a tall order but is pretty much what has been promised and Burland has a habit of delivering. Under that scenario who would use this?
1. The Veteran Open Source/Free Software developer. Maybe but only if he has a day job that requires it. His real work will still be done in a plane text editor with GDB and GCC on call.
2. The New OSS/Free developer. Not him either. He hasn't got any money and cares enough about Free software to use KDEvelop.
3. The Commercial developer with eyes on Linux. Yes. They want to deliver salable stuff quickly.
4. The Internal corporate developer ( I.e. Burland's real market ). These people will use this in disproportionately large numbers. They will port legacy apps on limited function desktops to Linux and reduce maintenance headaches. They will develop in Linux and deliver across platforms.
5. Shareware author. Burland hinted at a desire to get it's support libraries included in popular distributions. If this happens then even junior developers will be able to deliver very small applications that are still fairly complex.
Will this make money ? My guess is that Burland will achieve a clear profit on it's Linux venture before even some companies that came before. This includes Corel. However Corel may have larger overal revenue in the long run.
But there is a place in the outlook mailbox to store phone numbers. I can't wait until someone figures this out.
Hint: If you live in US, CA or JM and have numerous contacts in JP, OZ or NZ you could go broke in no time. Forcing the modem to dial silent and call the numbers found in order then repeat the process with a pause between calls. Handing over the port when another app wants it would help too.
Basically this is the beginning of a Virus that could have a direct and expensive impact on a large number of people. I.e. Anyone with vulnerable software and wetware ( wetware == human or brain depending on context ) who has a modem on the machine could wind up many $$$ in debt.
This is not fare by any means and I hope it dosn't actualy happen. However that hope may be in vain just like the one about nobody figuring out how to make ILOVEYOU self modifying.
In the scenario you talk about you can claim it has not been distributed. Also you would have given your friend source right ?
In order for this clause to be a problem you would have to prove that QPL and GPL have 2 different and incompatible definitions of the word "distribute". The GPL lets you give software to people within your organization without source if you so choose. However that only works because being in the same org you can claim it was not distributed at all.
If the software in question is under the GPL and Troll Tech can demand a copy it also means that the author or the FSF ( if it's part of GNU ) can sue for GPL violation. The only way around this is if the owner of the code is the one distributing it without source.
Why would you license your own software under the GPL and then distribute it without the source code ? Just a hint but maybe it's because you want to link against some GPLed lib and hope the owner won't notice the lack of source. Other than that you just want to avoid paying the "Troll Tax" and are willing to commit fraud to achieve this.
Clause 6.2 has too requierments that must both be satisfide. 1. The Software must be distributed. 2. That distribution must not include source.
Before Troll Tech can ask you to provide them a copy of the source they would have to prove that someone with a copy of the binary dose not have access to the source. It really is that simple. If 50,000 people have it and all of them have source then Troll can't get it. If one can't get source then he simply has to send his binary to Troll or tell them his predicament and they will enforce his rights under the GPL and give him GPL like rights over BSD software.
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Falls advertising is not good. This is why I *woldn't* go after "PeoplePC". They have cheesy adds but at least they claim you are renting a PC and internet connection for $X.
Claiming that something is free when people have to pay for it out of pocket is not healthy. That's rude.
The Indians who migrate to Jamaica seaking employment ( mostly medical staff ) say they love there homeland and will even return home for aranged wedins. Most are brutaly honest and will tell both the good and the bad.
Good: Indians are geting educated to high levles at a rapid rate.
Bad: It's taking a long time to overcome a long history of large impoverished pesant populations.
This wouldn't have anything to do with being at partial war with Pakistan and in an arms race akin to what the USA and USSR had in the 60s ? Someone said that development moves much quicker behind a war chariot than an ox drawn cart and this may be proof.
For those who doubt that India will be the next superpower this mission is just a way of saying "look out, here we come". The Ghandies carried them a long way from a huge impoverished Farming colony to a much larger country ( population approaching 1 Billion ) of which a rapidly growing number are educated and employable. Sure lots of things suck in India but they are doing very well considering what they have and even the culture is changing.
PS : Do Americans shed tears when they figure out the India is the worlds largest democracy ?
From what I have herd MySQL is significantly better thogh not yet of the same caliber of the big boys.
Onlike Postgres lots of real web sites actualy use it. Being GPL may encorage other kinds of users to take a look.
If you are a commercial player and will be doling out cash for your database then you will go off and buy a bad ass database. ( DB/2, Oracle etc... ).
:).
MySQL is mostly used in private web sites that grow into commercial entities and get bought up by Andover.net or VALinux
Being GPL opens it up to a much wider market, including those who refuse to pay for this stuff. Those who are unprofitable commercial entities. Basically it will now by option #1 for anyone who also cruses Linux and appache. I.e. They will look at other options only when MySQL is not technicaly capeble.
I spoke about this in 1998. Back then there really were no half way decent free SQL databases. I contended that any such database would eventually rise to the quality of Oracle.
Now we will finally get to see what happens when a SQL back end is under the GPL and useable for real work. My guess is that it will accelerate the way the Kernel and KDE have. I suspect it will be so but "the community" has a chance to prove me wrong.
Let's see how many Free Software hackers go to bat with this one. Let's see how many people fix that infamous Memory leak or add those extra features ( There probably is a reason for Oracle to be as big as the E-Smith distribution )
Will MySQL become as much of a killer app as Linux is becoming? Only time will tell. My bet is on the free code.
Investing in internet startups is such a risky thing that you expect to be coned sometimes. You assume that most of the ventures you put money into will go nowhere. To the goy who has dumped $x million into a venture lousing your shirt because the market isn't ripe for your product, the product comes out after a superior competitor or doesn't work at all is irrelevant. You sometimes louse all your money.
Venture capitalists survive by NOT putting all the eggs into one basket. The only thing special about being taken by a conman is that you will never deal with that person again. Other failed ventures are water under the bridge.
Look at it this way: If someone came to you 5 years ago and said he was going to build a 128 bit CPU that would run x86 instructions in software at native speeds with less than 1 watt of power would you buy in ? The truth is all the really cool investments look far fetched on the surface and you would need months of study before you can make an educated guess as to weather it's flatly impossible.
VCs don't have the time or the inclination so they spread the risk around and louse a little on things like this. If you invest in 5 pixelons it only takes 1 transmeta to wash away all your pain.
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=1, Interesting=2, Overrated=1, Total=4.
Just goes to show that people don't agree on stuff. Even Slashdot Moderators.
Now all we need it to add some storage and a large hard drive to a design like this and we have a way to pack 20 web servers into a 2u rack case.
This will add up to huge savings for companies like rackspace.com. Never mind that the actual servers can be built at $300 to $400 each
I must be missing something with this whole RiserFS situation. You see RiserFS was built for speed. From the ground up it was designed to be faster than EXT2. Latter Jurnaling became a big thing and mp3.com went to bat with some money. Some geak merged jurnaling code into Riser and performance actually went UP. I don't know how that happened since Jurnaling is an added layer of complexity.
The current situation is that Linus doesn't yet ship Jurnaling but Mandrake Soft dose. I *WILL* continue to buy Mandrake Linux to avoid the huge headache of retrofitting a better files system by hand. In all likelihood RedHat, SuSE and the rest will add RiserFS when they actually ship 2.4.x kernels. The end result is that it will be PCMCIA all over again.
For those who don't know Every mainstream distribution pushed PCMCIA for *years* while it wasn't officially in the kernel. Laptop users who downloaded the kernel to "try this kernel compiling thing" were often surprised to find that they had to retrofit PCMCIA by hand. That was just a peripheral driver. A lot of 1st time compilers will be building kernels that do not support the root file system. This is not a good thing.
I here there are reasons for keeping RiserFS out. I have no clue what those reasons are. I suspect Riser isn't at fault because he keeps running around like an eager beaver "What do you want me to do to get this in?".
I don't get this waiting for EXT3 thing though. Unless Riser makes many changes to the core system in the wrong way and nobody wants to maintain those changes long term. In which case it would be better to modify Riser to support the correct approach ( which isn't happening ).
Jurnaling is the one piece of technology that two distinct commercial entities have opened for the Linux kernel ( XFS from SGI and JFS from IBM ). It is important to a huge number of users including some who don't know what it is but simply wish Linux would come up quicker after a power outage.
Something doesn't smell right about this situation and it bodes ill for the future.
Linux isn't secure. It's not fast. It can't bloody well handle mission critical anything. Besides it's so incompatible with everything that you simply can't migrate any system to a Linux platform.
Ohh.. wait. This is the real world where servers simply need to run all the time no matter what and technical staff is allowed to choose the best tool for the job at hand.
When weather.com went online initially Sun was the best choice for a high traffic web site. Now Linux is the best choice. This includes price/performance and stability measures.
The big question is: How do you explain all those NT web sites out there? If Sun and Latter Linux are the best choices for doing big sites and Linux costs less than NT for small sites. It's not all about FUD and tricking suites into forcing NT on Nerds either.
You see if you are a suite and are building the site yourself, NT will probably let you get online with very little technical help. Fortunately Linux is heading in that direction. I just hope the Distribution companies remember that it should be locked down by default.
As for weather.com They have nerds paid to know this stuff so it's not such a big deal what distributions ship. They customize the hell out of it.
You mean the DFX 8,000 ?
When *that* matrix sings it usualy brings the
house down.
Experience has shown that being tested and certified against a spec. Any spec is no guarantee that your system actually meets the goals of that spec. I.e. Windows NT is posix compliant. That doesn't mean porting a posix app to NT is a trivial task.
There are systems that are certified with various security levels according to DOD standards that the military refuse to use at those levels. Reason is that while a formal test bed will by it's very nature be limited in scope and consistent in the number and type of attacks it seeks to evaluate a real world hacker / cracker has no such rules. His goal is simply "Break this system by any means necessary".
I don't think you need to worry too much about Linux being a trusted system. If it ever gets to the high security standards of OpenBSD it will become the system of choice for the paranoid. Until then Open BSD is that system. No amount of certification and trust heaped on other systems will change that.
You see admins who must deploy trusted systems are evaluated in a different manner from managers generally. Did our system get "owned", "Rooted", "cracked" or otherwise compromised under your watch ? Can you tell us how many people tried and who they are ?
If you can't look smug answering those questions but can say "we have deployed trusted systems" you are out the door. It really is that simple.
Another point is that the definition of Trusted System includes the development process. How can you fit into the category without following that development methodology ? So far it seams you don't. Instead you force others to redefine the category so that you fit in. I.e. Right now lots of vendors are redefining "Unix" with the goal of including Linux. Linux taking a larger market share than all other Unix systems combined was no small part of this.
PS: Changing the development process on Linux isn't relay an option.
Why is this strange ? Movies released 1st on television are not allowed either. As are movies released on Video caset or DVD. In order to win an Oscar you must send your show to theaters then to the other media.
This may be unfair but it is a long standing principle of the Oscars that they celebrate the big screen. The Emys came out because of this. Anytime net movies become a big deal you will have a Net Movie Award of some kind.
That's right. After that silliness with "Kimp" The KDE people hacked up an image manipulation tool of their own. It's called kImageShope and it integrates well with KDE and Koffice with that embedding and stuff. Needless to say it looks more like Photoshpe than it dose like the Gimp.
The really cool thing about it is that it will work with Gimp plugins without them being modified in any way. For those new to image manipulation on Linux most of the Gimp's power is in those awesome plugins.
So yes. For all practical purposes the Gimp will soon have KDE integration with all the power that implies ( click image in KWord and edit it in place. yada yada )
The troth is that those specifications are inaccurate and incomplete with regards to word 97 and 2K. Every person who has tried to implement an import filter has ran into that problem. The end result is that you sit down and create word documents on one PC ( or virtual PC with VMWare ) then go through with a hex editor to figure out what symbol dose what.
To put that all in perspective the two paragraphs above save to 1 KB ( minimum displayed file size on Win98 ) in HTM or text format. In MSWord
Everybody who dose this reverse engineering has to start from scratch. Every company that tries to read *.doc files has to put people to work doing it. A combining of efforts would be very prudent. Let's start by getting The Open Source teems together on this then we can invite IBM, Corel, Sun, etc... to join.
We need someone to advocate the benefits of an LGPL or even BSD licensed library set to corps who must otherwise do it all themselves ? This is what ESR is useful for so go and call him.
Back at the dawn of Modern Sifi Isac Assimov wrote several stories in which he mentions the 3 laws of Robotics. These were rools hardwierd deap into every subsystem of "inteligent" robuts that govorn it's actions even in the most dier sercomstances. This set of guidlines looks like an attempt to impliment the same concept for a difernt kind of technology that once build won't be easily controled or halted ( the way a pulled key can halt a car ). BTW: Those infamus laws ran something like this. 1. Do not harm a human or throgh inaction alow one to be harmed. 2. Obay orders from a human. 3. Prevent your own destruction. Nanorobots *need* this kind of guidline more than other stuff because once they are deployed there realy is no way to disable them, except maybe by using an EMP blast. That however is not the Matrix conection. The Matrix comes into the picture when you think of why the machines wold keep humans around for power suply when they have Fusion ? Could it be because somewhere deap inside they can't bring themselvs to render the spiceis extinct ?
Nice screen shots. The only problem is that beauty isn't really what Berlin aims to fix. The weaknesses in X are well known but I will list them here for those who are unaware.
1. Size. X 3.x eats up 16 megs of RAM If you run it on 8 MB ( I have ) you will notice a distinct crawl caused from swapping.
2. Speed. X is fast but not quite fast enough. On a low end Pentium Linux runs wrings around NT or 95 for most things. The GUI is only a little faster however. I won't be happy until the *nix GUI is 3X the speed of the Windows GUI on the same Hardware.
3. You can't resize the desktop without shutting down X. Yes I know you can switch resolution but the Virtual desktop size will remain the same. I.e. this is good for Zooming in on fine print or small pictures. Nothing much else. If you use Mac, Windows or OS/2 you know why someone would resize a whole desktop.
4. X is not stable. Sure most of us hardly ever get a GUI lockup or spontaneous X server termination. Too many of us have seen this though. I have never seen an E-Smith server go down without massive hardware failure. Same goes for Cobalt Cube. X doesn't approach the stability of Linux or Apache or SaMBa. Bad Applications can't take down the Kernel. It can take down the GUI however. I.e. Sometimes Alpha quality KDE from CVS dose this for me.
Everything else that people see as wrong with X can be fixed at a higher level. If these problems can be fixed without ditching X then by all means do so. If X must be replaced then so be it. Berlin will still run X apps. It won't matter if it doesn't.
Maybe they don't own the rights to make Winmodems and must license much of the technology from someone who doesn't want them to releases source code.
If memory serves me correctly ( and it probably doesn't ) Microsoft owns some of the patents and most of the code on Winmodems.
BTW: The "driver" is really most of the Modem. The hardware doesn't do much.
There is one good thing about the UN dealing with this sort of dispute that many people don't know about. The UN is a little too big for most of the influence that smaller courts come under.
You see every government which is a member must pay a prescribed fee into the UN budget. These fees are enough to run the organization so they don't need to go begging for campaign funds or other such rubbish.
It is worth noting that the UNDP actively promotes Linux in 3rd world countries. I asked one of there staff members and he said "We have a large budget but it would have to double before we could buy Windows. It would here to quadruple for all the extra staff we would need to manage that."
BTW : It was a UN staffer who introduced the Jamaica LUG to the Barbados LUG. These people have no reason to rule against the Open and Free camp unless we are genuinely in the wrong.
The report doesn't have to specifically state which OS it's running. True 32 bit OSs run well on both Transmeta chips but windows only runs fast on the more advanced version with it's 16 bit optimizations.
:)
It would be a braindead design mistake to use the "32 bit only" CPU in a device built for Windows 9X. That leaves Linux, WinCE, Palm and Win2K as the possibilities.
Since Webpads must be cheap, Linux, Palm and Wince are the only possibilities. Since it's a pad rather than a pocket sized device it doesn't need the "optimized for small screen" interface which is WinCE's only saving grace.
Palm wasn't really designed for things like full featured web browsers so this is most likely a Linux based device. Possibly running Mr. Turvalds' own distribution.
Then again I may be gusing
Let's start off with one huge assumption. This thing works well, is delivered on time, generates clean code, looks and feels like the Windows Burland stuff with enough Linux enhancements to attract new users. It should also generate KDE code with deep integration down to the KOffice and Panel applet level. Ohh... and it should mostly be compatible with The Windows software.
This is a tall order but is pretty much what has been promised and Burland has a habit of delivering. Under that scenario who would use this?
1. The Veteran Open Source/Free Software developer. Maybe but only if he has a day job that requires it. His real work will still be done in a plane text editor with GDB and GCC on call.
2. The New OSS/Free developer. Not him either. He hasn't got any money and cares enough about Free software to use KDEvelop.
3. The Commercial developer with eyes on Linux. Yes. They want to deliver salable stuff quickly.
4. The Internal corporate developer ( I.e. Burland's real market ). These people will use this in disproportionately large numbers. They will port legacy apps on limited function desktops to Linux and reduce maintenance headaches. They will develop in Linux and deliver across platforms.
5. Shareware author. Burland hinted at a desire to get it's support libraries included in popular distributions. If this happens then even junior developers will be able to deliver very small applications that are still fairly complex.
Will this make money ? My guess is that Burland will achieve a clear profit on it's Linux venture before even some companies that came before. This includes Corel. However Corel may have larger overal revenue in the long run.
But there is a place in the outlook mailbox to store phone numbers. I can't wait until someone figures this out.
Hint: If you live in US, CA or JM and have numerous contacts in JP, OZ or NZ you could go broke in no time. Forcing the modem to dial silent and call the numbers found in order then repeat the process with a pause between calls. Handing over the port when another app wants it would help too.
Basically this is the beginning of a Virus that could have a direct and expensive impact on a large number of people. I.e. Anyone with vulnerable software and wetware ( wetware == human or brain depending on context ) who has a modem on the machine could wind up many $$$ in debt.
This is not fare by any means and I hope it dosn't actualy happen. However that hope may be in vain just like the one about nobody figuring out how to make ILOVEYOU self modifying.
Hmm... I'll go download them. Where are this LinModem drivers ?
In the scenario you talk about you can claim it has not been distributed. Also you would have given your friend source right ?
In order for this clause to be a problem you would have to prove that QPL and GPL have 2 different and incompatible definitions of the word "distribute". The GPL lets you give software to people within your organization without source if you so choose. However that only works because being in the same org you can claim it was not distributed at all.
If the software in question is under the GPL and Troll Tech can demand a copy it also means that the author or the FSF ( if it's part of GNU ) can sue for GPL violation. The only way around this is if the owner of the code is the one distributing it without source.
Why would you license your own software under the GPL and then distribute it without the source code ? Just a hint but maybe it's because you want to link against some GPLed lib and hope the owner won't notice the lack of source. Other than that you just want to avoid paying the "Troll Tax" and are willing to commit fraud to achieve this.
Clause 6.2 has too requierments that must both be satisfide.
1. The Software must be distributed.
2. That distribution must not include source.
Before Troll Tech can ask you to provide them a copy of the source they would have to prove that someone with a copy of the binary dose not have access to the source. It really is that simple. If 50,000 people have it and all of them have source then Troll can't get it. If one can't get source then he simply has to send his binary to Troll or tell them his predicament and they will enforce his rights under the GPL and give him GPL like rights over BSD software.