Yeh but Linux is actually better...
on
Free Solaris 8
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· Score: 1
for most people. Sure, if I was running eBay, I would choose Solaris. But really Linux is much easier. When I get a new Sun box I have to spend about a week compiling and installing essential software. That's partly because most software these days is designed to "just work" on Linux, and partly because Sun is lazy in installing useful software. Whatever, if Scott McNealy is "amazed" why companies are chasing Linux, then he's pretty thick.
Couldn't I write a shared library then that implements various patented algoritms, but not applying them to any particular problem. Oh, I then write another shared library with the same abstract interface, that uses some other (probably far less efficient) algorithm.
Then someone else comes along and uses the non-patent library to implement compression, or encryption or whatever.
Then yet another person comes along and grabs the applications but links them against the patent shared library.
Presto! I've just started breaking a patent, possibly even without knowing it. Can this be a loophole? If not, who would be the patent breaker?
Yes, the user really uploads their cd to mp3.com
on
RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 2
Yes, every user of beam-it actually uploads their cd to mp3.com. It's just that mp3.com has thought of a rather good data-compression technology. Like all data compression it relys on caching common streams of data. mp3.com has common streams of data on their server resulting in rather ridiculous rates of compression, like compressing an entire cd down to 8 bytes.
They are just acting as a storage repository for people to store their legally purchased cds on under fair use. Who says I can't store my own cd under fair use on a remote server?
Since they've got the technology for instruction morphing, COMPATIBILITY DOESN'T MATTER ANY MORE. They could just write an emulator for the old VLIW instruction set and then go on to change the instruction set any way they please.
Of course I can see that they wouldn't want this burden on day 1 of their release. On the other hand locking people into their VLIW instruction set (or any of the versions thereof) would probably be good for them.
if the chip's internal logic for optimisation was embedded in a compiler, the optimisation layer would be redundant and you could generate native code that could run un-translated.
it sounds like the chip does the translation one-off into native machine code. So after the initial translation it should presumably run at native speeds.
If criminals with dark hair break in, do you go around accusing everyone with dark hair because it was probably them? People who port-scan also IP spoof. It's a waste of time accusing the person with the IP address. SECURE YOUR FRICKEN MACHINES. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.
I don't doubt that all OSes have some good ideas that can be learned from, but ultimately the usability of RiscOS was awful.
The filer for example. To do even the most trivial thing you end up with about 20 windows on the screen. Then you just get totally lost amoungst the windows. Maybe there was a gem of an idea in there with drag and drop, but the over-all effect was a loser.
Don't get me started on the OS core, interface and so on. Absolute junk.
Ahhh the powers of nostalgia frying peoples brains.
While I don't doubt that win2k will be a much improved beast and fix a lot of annoying things, I doubt it has moved far along the road towards fixing the things that Linux does well. Like configurability, scriptability, and the everything you need on one disk aspect of a Linux install. I doubt the hard-core server stability is yet with this all-new OS either.
On the other hand it will continue to have benefits for some users on the desktop.
Basicly Linux and Windows advantages/disadvantages are converging - Linux from the server end to the desktop and windows in the opposite direction. What happens when they meet?
Economics wins. Linux is free and windows is not. One day, soon or not-so-soon Linux wins because the cheaper product always wins, especially when it's better to boot.
It sounds to me like the algorithm is just an extremely lame, well-known algorithm. Put it this way, nothing ground breaking crypographicly speaking that would allow it to be patented. Even if they had a patent, which they don't I can't see it holding up.
This refers to THEFT of trade secrets. It doesn't apply to secrets that are "being readily ascertainable through proper means by the public.".
This trade secret was obtained through proper means - reverse engineering. A legitimate and legal activity. It was not obtained through espionage, theft etc etc.
I thought the whole point of zip codes is to make it easier for the postal service to deliver mail. The harder the postal service makes it to access zip codes then it's more likely people will omit the codes. Then the postal service has a harder job.
I think it would be better now if PG made appropriate use of basic XML. Formatting and indexing can EASILY be taken out. But putting it back in is WAY HARD. One example is the PG king james bible. Parsing and figuring out the chapters, verses etc it a semi-hard computing problem. But stripping out some XML markers for these things is trivial. Or converting it to some future format is trivial. But if the markers aren't there it's a bit hard.
Plain text is much better than nothing, but it's not the way to go, especially these days.
This media story is more positive, but still not good enough. Sony described the development as "disturbing". What wasn't mentioned was that this (currently) doesn't threaten Sony's revenue one little bit. It's financially not feasible to copy DVDs and the "hack" wasn't done for that purpose.
Maybe one day ripping will be feasible, but not any time soon. There is NO THREAT. There is basicly not two sides to this story, only one.
Your complaint against Java is that "programmers shouldn't need to write gui code". Have you checked out any of the non-programmer oriented java beans builders? Such as Lotus beanmachine or Jamba? You can build sophisticated guis which talk to databases with no code. I know you've probably heard this before, but this time I think they've done it. Java beans really are cool.
As for whether it's "thin enough". Well I think it's as thin as you're going to get whilst still getting all the features you may need. As you say, HTML is thinner, but it's also lame.
It brings to mind a novel I read. I think it was called "Queen's gambit". It was a story about a Chess player, that really gets into the mind of how a chess player thinks. But you didn't have to know anything about chess to enjoy it, AND it was interesting and dramatic.
Is it worth upgrading whatever gnome comes with 6.1 RedHat to this new Gnome? Or are they so close it doesn't matter? I'm guessing that RH6.1 has a gnome only a few minor patches behind. Am I correct?
What's this stuff about giving up CORBA because of its "distributed nature"?? Corba doesn't have to be implemented using network protocols, it can be implemented in-process as well. Any good implementation will give you the choice. The main point of CORBA is that it gives you a locked down interface so that APIs can be called between languages (or same language), between processes (or same process).
Now KDE is already struggling because of its C++ centric nature. If they're going to cast away a standard language interaction technology like CORBA... well I'm more and more convinced that Gnome is the way to go.
Either way, linux developers only want one API to talk to, not two. I keep hearing the mantra "competition is good". Only to a point. The reason MS is dominant now is they gave everyone ONE API that covered 90% of the computers in the universe. With 2 Linux APIs, it's just not good news.
Couldn't KDE at least have a look at migrating widget sets to GTK? That would be a step in the right direction. I guess it's not going to happen. I think it's a pity.
First of all, where do you get the idea that Lisp is a "non-compiled language".
Secondly, there are other functional languages besides lisp - ones that can be compiled very efficiently indeed.
I don't know what you're coding that you need fortran for, but look at the functional languages, look at the Scheme compilers, look at compilers like Sather which is VERY efficient, and pretty nice too.
Just tried out M10/Linux. IMHO this is the first release where the HTML rendering is usable for most sites (well hey, first time it has done a good job of Slashdot for example). And the rendering IS very slick.
But it's still butt-ugly, and user unfriendly. Would it kill their schedule to say implement a decent button bar, and "Open link in new window" functionality? If it's there I can't see it. That would be a bare minimum for me to think about using it.
And what of bookmarks, preferences, mail/news reader, java etc etc? Don't they have anything to show in these areas? I don't want to criticise, but if this is all they've got it looks a _long_ way from user release.
Slashdot Mirror
for most people. Sure, if I was running eBay, I would choose Solaris. But really Linux is much easier. When I get a new Sun box I have to spend about a week compiling and installing essential software. That's partly because most software these days is designed to "just work" on Linux, and partly because Sun is lazy in installing useful software. Whatever, if Scott McNealy is "amazed" why companies are chasing Linux, then he's pretty thick.
Couldn't I write a shared library then that implements various patented algoritms, but not applying them to any particular problem. Oh, I then write another shared library with the same abstract interface, that uses some other (probably far less efficient) algorithm.
Then someone else comes along and uses the non-patent library to implement compression, or encryption or whatever.
Then yet another person comes along and grabs the applications but links them against the patent shared library.
Presto! I've just started breaking a patent, possibly even without knowing it. Can this be a loophole? If not, who would be the patent breaker?
Yes, every user of beam-it actually uploads their
cd to mp3.com. It's just that mp3.com has thought
of a rather good data-compression technology. Like all data compression it relys on caching common streams of data. mp3.com has common streams of data on their server resulting in rather ridiculous rates of compression, like compressing an entire cd down to 8 bytes.
It's all in how you look at it.
They are just acting as a storage repository for people to store their legally purchased cds on under fair use. Who says I can't store my own cd under fair use on a remote server?
Since they've got the technology for instruction morphing, COMPATIBILITY DOESN'T MATTER ANY MORE. They could just write an emulator for the old VLIW instruction set and then go on to change the instruction set any way they please.
Of course I can see that they wouldn't want this burden on day 1 of their release. On the other hand locking people into their VLIW instruction set (or any of the versions thereof) would probably be good for them.
if the chip's internal logic for optimisation was embedded in a compiler, the optimisation layer would be redundant and you could generate native code that could run un-translated.
it sounds like the chip does the translation one-off into native machine code. So after the initial translation it should presumably run at native speeds.
meaning in UNIX??? Never heard of that one.
Even a leading dash shouldn't be a problem...
telnet -- -e.com
If criminals with dark hair break in, do you go around accusing everyone with dark hair because it was probably them? People who port-scan also IP spoof. It's a waste of time accusing the person with the IP address. SECURE YOUR FRICKEN MACHINES. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.
I don't doubt that all OSes have some good ideas that can be learned from, but ultimately the usability of RiscOS was awful.
The filer for example. To do even the most trivial thing you end up with about 20 windows on the screen. Then you just get totally lost amoungst the windows. Maybe there was a gem of an idea in there with drag and drop, but the over-all effect was a loser.
Don't get me started on the OS core, interface and so on. Absolute junk.
Ahhh the powers of nostalgia frying peoples brains.
While I don't doubt that win2k will be a much improved beast and fix a lot of annoying things, I doubt it has moved far along the road towards fixing the things that Linux does well. Like configurability, scriptability, and the everything you need on one disk aspect of a Linux install. I doubt the hard-core server stability is yet with this all-new OS either.
On the other hand it will continue to have benefits for some users on the desktop.
Basicly Linux and Windows advantages/disadvantages are converging - Linux from the server end to the desktop and windows in the opposite direction. What happens when they meet?
Economics wins. Linux is free and windows is not. One day, soon or not-so-soon Linux wins because the cheaper product always wins, especially when it's better to boot.
court proceedings on DVD disk? :-)
It sounds to me like the algorithm is just an extremely lame, well-known algorithm. Put it this way, nothing ground breaking crypographicly speaking that would allow it to be patented. Even if they had a patent, which they don't I can't see it holding up.
This refers to THEFT of trade secrets. It doesn't apply to secrets that are "being
readily ascertainable through proper means by the public.".
This trade secret was obtained through proper means - reverse engineering. A legitimate and legal activity. It was not obtained through espionage, theft etc etc.
I thought the whole point of zip codes is to make it easier for the postal service to deliver mail. The harder the postal service makes it to access zip codes then it's more likely people will omit the codes. Then the postal service has a harder job.
I think it would be better now if PG made appropriate use of basic XML. Formatting and indexing can EASILY be taken out. But putting it back in is WAY HARD. One example is the PG king james bible. Parsing and figuring out the chapters, verses etc it a semi-hard computing problem. But stripping out some XML markers for these things is trivial. Or converting it to some future format is trivial. But if the markers aren't there it's a bit hard.
Plain text is much better than nothing, but it's not the way to go, especially these days.
This media story is more positive, but still not good enough. Sony described the development as "disturbing". What wasn't mentioned was that this (currently) doesn't threaten Sony's revenue one little bit. It's financially not feasible to copy DVDs and the "hack" wasn't done for that purpose.
Maybe one day ripping will be feasible, but not any time soon. There is NO THREAT. There is basicly not two sides to this story, only one.
Your complaint against Java is that "programmers shouldn't need to write gui code". Have you checked out any of the non-programmer oriented java beans builders? Such as Lotus beanmachine or Jamba? You can build sophisticated guis which talk to databases with no code. I know you've probably heard this before, but this time I think they've done it. Java beans really are cool.
As for whether it's "thin enough". Well I think it's as thin as you're going to get whilst still getting all the features you may need. As you say, HTML is thinner, but it's also lame.
It brings to mind a novel I read. I think it was called "Queen's gambit". It was a story about a Chess player, that really gets into the mind of how a chess player thinks. But you didn't have to know anything about chess to enjoy it, AND it was interesting and dramatic.
Is it worth upgrading whatever gnome comes with 6.1 RedHat to this new Gnome? Or are they so close it doesn't matter? I'm guessing that RH6.1 has a gnome only a few minor patches behind. Am I correct?
What's this stuff about giving up CORBA because of its "distributed nature"?? Corba doesn't have to be implemented using network protocols, it can be implemented in-process as well. Any good implementation will give you the choice. The main point of CORBA is that it gives you a locked down interface so that APIs can be called between languages (or same language), between processes (or same process).
Now KDE is already struggling because of its C++ centric nature. If they're going to cast away a standard language interaction technology like CORBA... well I'm more and more convinced that Gnome is the way to go.
Either way, linux developers only want one API to talk to, not two. I keep hearing the mantra "competition is good". Only to a point. The reason MS is dominant now is they gave everyone ONE API that covered 90% of the computers in the universe. With 2 Linux APIs, it's just not good news.
Couldn't KDE at least have a look at migrating widget sets to GTK? That would be a step in the right direction. I guess it's not going to happen. I think it's a pity.
First of all, where do you get the idea that Lisp is a "non-compiled language".
Secondly, there are other functional languages besides lisp - ones that can be compiled very efficiently indeed.
I don't know what you're coding that you need fortran for, but look at the functional languages, look at the Scheme compilers, look at compilers like Sather which is VERY efficient, and pretty nice too.
Just tried out M10/Linux. IMHO this is the first release where the HTML rendering is usable for most sites (well hey, first time it has done a good job of Slashdot for example). And the rendering IS very slick.
But it's still butt-ugly, and user unfriendly. Would it kill their schedule to say implement a decent button bar, and "Open link in new window" functionality? If it's there I can't see it. That would be a bare minimum for me to think about using it.
And what of bookmarks, preferences, mail/news reader, java etc etc? Don't they have anything to show in these areas? I don't want to criticise, but if this is all they've got it looks a _long_ way from user release.
Just when everone's arguing whether open source is or isn't a political movement or is or isn't a religion, we get Linux hotels.
The scary thing is, I actually think this is rather cool.
Ummm...
alias list=ls
alias l=ls
alias ll=ls
I don't get the point about vi either. Both Qwerty and Dvorak alternate hands on the v and i.