Part of "Your Rights Online" is your right to free speech, or at least that's what you Slashdot editors are always saying. To slam a web site exercising that right is utterly hypocritical. It is doubly ironic that this story was posted to Your Rights Online, since not only do they have the same right to free speech that you have, but furthermore, they are not trying to force their opinions down other's throats or pass legislation that impinges upon that right.
If you want to make fun of their opinions because you don't agree with them, that's something different entirely. But if that is your objective, then at least have the courage to be honest about it.
Yep! Thanks, oGMo, for digging up that old Slashdot article! I had forgotten about that! And, yeah, after I read the/. headline, CommonTone was the first thing that crossed my mind.
It was pretty simplistic, and I haven't yet read the patent in detail, but from the description given I'd say that CommonTone would definitely count as prior art. I've still got the code around here somewhere, I think...I'll have to dig it up. I always meant to take that project farther than I did (and to this day still dream of doing so, eventually), but because of general lack of interest and for various other reasons (other projects, Real Life[tm], etc.), it has been, regrettably, placed on the back burner. (I'm sure y'all know and can identify with what I'm talking about...it's the ol' maxim of "so much to code, so little time.";-))
And this is perfect, too: a dated, public article about my software and its function, posted on the internet for all to see, with a date that pre-dates IBM's USPTO application (Slashdot article: May '98, IBM patent application: June '98).
I must say that I am rather disappointed in IBM for filing such an obvious patent. They know better than this. I am aware of their spotty past, but within the last 10 years (which is approximately the window of time that I have been a customer of, and apologist for, them) I have not failed to grow in my admiration of them in almost every respect. They have come up with a lot of innovative products and have a very impressive resume when it comes to developing new technologies (think about the R&D that must have gone into voice recognition, SOM and object-oriented user interfaces, no-compromise portable computing, ICs with copper interconnects, etc.) and have shown a more "open" attitude toward open computing in the last few years. They make solid hardware and write solid software. When you compare this patent to all of their many impressive accomplishments of the past and present, well...do I really have to say anything more? This is just truly pathetic, IBM.
I was seriously thinking about building myself a nice box with dual 1.26GHz Tualatins, but have been unable to find SMP mainboards that support Tualatins in an SMP setting.
Well, actually, that's not completely true...I did find a couple, but none of them use Intel chipsets. There are a couple with VIA chipsets, and one using ServerWorks. I would prefer a board built around an Intel chipset, but the problem is that the ONLY Intel chipset that supports Tualatin so far is the i815 series which, although reportedly a good performer, is severely crippled in a number of respects: 1) It officially does not support SMP, and 2) RAM is restricted to 4 banks of SDR SDRAM which cannot exceed 512MB total.
Despite the first restriction, I did find one SMP board built around the i815 chipset (quite an engineering feat, it would seem, considering they probably didn't get any help from Intel): the ACorp [acorp.com.tw] 6A815EPD. It looks like a good board, seems to be getting favorible reviews, and I could live with knowing that I was limited to 512MB.;-) The only problem is that ACorp has yet to come out with a revision of this board based off of the i815EP "B stepping," which is the revision of the i815EP chipset that supports the Tualatin (I even e-mailed them, and they confirmed that they do not yet have a dualie board based off of i815EP B step).
And, naturally, most "respectable" mainboard manufacturers are not about to release an SMP board based off of a chipset that does not officially support it. And Intel has yet to release a chipset that supports both SMP and Tualatin (and this is not because Tualatin cannot SMP, because it can; see VIA, ServerWorks).
So, basically Intel is driving away my business.
I am now considering VIA and ServerWorks-based boards as options. Can anyone comment on the performance and stability of these chipsets (VIA Apollo 133 and Apollo Pro 266T, ServerWorks HE) as well as their compatibility with Linux? I've heard some negative things about each with respect to Linux compatibility, and am curious to know if these rumors have any basis in truth. Thanks.
Oh, come on. Give me a break. I am so tired of this.
Doing business on the internet is a privilege and not a right. Why do these people think that they deserve to be able to make money off of the internet when the majority of dot-bombs didn't have a good business model in the first place? In fact, why do people in general confuse the difference between rights and privileges?
Nothing frustrates me more than people who see an opportunity, try to take advantage of it, fail, and then lay the blame upon somebody other than themselves and say "I have a right to succeed at such and such!"
>...and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for the class's "views" (open folder windows, etc.).
Sorry, that was worded pretty badly. What I meant was, "and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for a WPS class's 'views'." (This will make sense to most anyone who has interacted with WPS classes extensively and/or has done some WPS and PM programming.)
> Not quite; WPS relies on PM for some facilities that are not present in X.
Like what, for example? AFAIK the WPS is only dependent on PM because it uses the PM to draw itself and the desktop, etc. and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for the class's "views" (open folder windows, etc.). Correct me if I'm wrong.
Naturally, it would take a bit of effort to port it to native X (different widgets, painting routines, awareness of window manager(s), and the like; PM is very different from X and is more like Win16/32 GUI API, I believe), but surely you aren't suggesting that WPS is tied down to PM in such a way that it would be impossible to have a port that was independent of PM and instead used another GUI? I seriously doubt that.
Uh, guys? It's the Workplace Shell (WPS) from OS/2 that you want (the SOM-based object-oriented desktop system), not Presentation Manager (merely the GUI API; we've got X and we don't need this).
I really would have liked to have seen an answer to the question of whether or not we will ever see Workplace Shell and SOM opened up and then ported to OS/2, but alas, the question was not phrased correctly and was thus (understandably) misunderstood by Mr. Handy and the OS/2 development team he consulted.
Part of the agreement between IBM and Microsoft was that Microsoft would be able to retain the right to resell MS-DOS to others. (I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft wanted this fact to be very clear to IBM, and IBM accepted it.) If IBM had told Microsoft that they would only license MS-DOS if Microsoft would agree not to license it to anyone else and Microsoft agreed, then Compaq would have faced a much greater and more costly (financially and time-wise) challenge: to have to clone and reverse-engineer MS-DOS in addition to the IBM PC BIOS. I doubt Compaq would have had much incentive to do this if that were the case.
So, yes, in a sense the Microsoft OS "helped Compaq [to] clone the IBM PC."
The MWave, unlike the Lucent and 3Com and PCTel varieties, is not a "soft" (controllerless) modem. I wish people could get that fact through their thick heads! It is a proprietary reprogrammable DSP and does not have the same issues with CPU utilization that "soft" modems do have. In fact, it isn't just a modem controller; it can be used for many different functions. IBM used to use MWave's in their PCs for both modem and sound.
The only reason that it has lacked support for OSes other than Microsoft ones up until now is because IBM has been hush-hush about the specs of the thing (how to communicate with it and upload the firmware, etc.).
Re:So which OSen have ksh93 installed by default?
on
David Korn Tells All
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· Score: 1
The problem with the Workplace Shell (the OOUI in OS/2) was not necessarily that it was all that "buggy" (though I will agree with you that the later versions of OS/2 were less-than-polished, 2.11 was pretty doggone stable...it went downhill from there). The problem with the WPS was that it was inconsistent! The OO implementation was so-so (and IMO was heading in the right direction), but IBM tried to get the OO methodology and the application methodology to co-exist peacefully. I don't believe that it is possible to do such a thing successfully. The two are mutually exclusive. It causes confusion on the part of the user, and it doesn't encourage the software developers to change their way of thinking.
For those who have used OS/2 >= 2.0, think about how your average Presentation Manager application worked, and then think about how your average Workplace Shell class worked. They are worlds apart. To this day, I'm convinced this is one of the major reasons for OS/2's downfall (and I loved OS/2; I used versions 2.1 through 4.0, and even beta-tested 4.0).
Re:But I guess you didn't know Linux is portable
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AtheOS
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[to PPC, MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, 68k, etc.]
really, think before you say something
Re:ATM charged, and found guilty..
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QNX Crypt Cracked
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· Score: 1
The UK banks aren't the only ones who are charging fees for using ATMs owned by banks that you don't bank with. That practice has been going on here in the US for a few years now. The charge can run anywhere from $1.00 - $3.00 USD here.
Recent ThinkPads (the 770 comes to mind) use the MWave DSP only for the modem functions, and not for sound. My 770 has a Crystal chipset, too; the 4237, which works flawlessly with the Crystal 4232 driver that comes with the kernel (except for the fact that it doesn't support the SRS 3-D control in the mixer).
Oh, and BTW, I'm running Linux kernel 2.2.10 (with the suggested PCMCIA services version that was listed in the Changes file in Documentation/) on Slackware 3.5 (yeah, I know it's old, but it works great, and if it ain't broke...)
I, too, am a proud owner of a ThinkPad 770 (no E/ED/X/Z) 9549-1AU. It does have the MWave modem, but I don't use it (using LinkSys CardBus 10/100 card).
Most of the items on your wish list are already availible. My 770 runs practically flawlessly. I have accelerated X (which works pretty well with a slightly modified XF86_SVGA server; more on that in a minute), fully functioning APM (suspend and even hibernate to disk), PCMCIA and CardBus, and sound.
I don't know which XF86 you're using (I'm on an older one, 3.3.3 I think; I'm not at the laptop right now), but I had trouble getting the SVGA server to run accelerated, even though it claimed that the Cyber9397 was supported (I'm using the first release to claim support for acceleration on the 9397). I did a little research, and found this post on comp.windows.x.i386unix which describes how to modify the Trident server source code to enable full acceleration. My understanding is that later versions of XFree86 do not require this modification, but I'm not sure since I haven't had to upgrade mine for a while, and so I consequently haven't bothered. Also, read the rest of the messages on that thread; after making these modifications, you will need to add the options "tgui_pci_read_on" and "tgui_pci_write_on" to your XF86Config otherwise the server will hang.
Also, I used to have problems with X and APM, such as when closing the lid or suspending the machine while in X, the screen would get really funky when waking it up. For some odd reason, these problems cleared up after I built myself a kernel with the VESA framebuffer console driver and then started using the console at 1024x768x16bit. Now X gives me no problems, but only as long as I'm using the VESA console. Perhaps the VESA console drivers do something to initialize the graphics chipset that the SVGA server fails to do? I don't know. Using the VESA console also fixed another problem I was having with the accelerated server: before using the VESA console driver, I was having trouble playing back sound (MP3) in the background while I was working on something else. The music would skip if I so much as moved a window. After doing some research I concluded that the Trident driver must have the "pci_retry" option permanently on by default. I could find no way to disable it. Strangely enough, the VESA console solved this problem too!
And finally, you might want to check out tpctl for Linux, which is a program similar to the PS2 program for DOS that comes preloaded on ThinkPads. It allows you to control various things in the ThinkPads with a SMAPI BIOS. And the latest version even comes with a patch to hdparm that allows one to hotswap their IDE devices in the UltraBay! I haven't had a chance to check it out yet myself, so I can't tell you how well it works, but I thought you might like to know.:-)
> The thing I don't like about both distros is the > initialization scripts. I would really prefer a > *BSD style bootup, rather than that modified > SySV thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey guys? Look at the front page. Please close your tag!
Bingo.
Part of "Your Rights Online" is your right to free speech, or at least that's what you Slashdot editors are always saying. To slam a web site exercising that right is utterly hypocritical. It is doubly ironic that this story was posted to Your Rights Online, since not only do they have the same right to free speech that you have, but furthermore, they are not trying to force their opinions down other's throats or pass legislation that impinges upon that right.
If you want to make fun of their opinions because you don't agree with them, that's something different entirely. But if that is your objective, then at least have the courage to be honest about it.
Sheesh.
Yep! Thanks, oGMo, for digging up that old Slashdot article! I had forgotten about that! And, yeah, after I read the /. headline, CommonTone was the first thing that crossed my mind.
It was pretty simplistic, and I haven't yet read the patent in detail, but from the description given I'd say that CommonTone would definitely count as prior art. I've still got the code around here somewhere, I think...I'll have to dig it up. I always meant to take that project farther than I did (and to this day still dream of doing so, eventually), but because of general lack of interest and for various other reasons (other projects, Real Life[tm], etc.), it has been, regrettably, placed on the back burner. (I'm sure y'all know and can identify with what I'm talking about...it's the ol' maxim of "so much to code, so little time." ;-))
And this is perfect, too: a dated, public article about my software and its function, posted on the internet for all to see, with a date that pre-dates IBM's USPTO application (Slashdot article: May '98, IBM patent application: June '98).
I must say that I am rather disappointed in IBM for filing such an obvious patent. They know better than this. I am aware of their spotty past, but within the last 10 years (which is approximately the window of time that I have been a customer of, and apologist for, them) I have not failed to grow in my admiration of them in almost every respect. They have come up with a lot of innovative products and have a very impressive resume when it comes to developing new technologies (think about the R&D that must have gone into voice recognition, SOM and object-oriented user interfaces, no-compromise portable computing, ICs with copper interconnects, etc.) and have shown a more "open" attitude toward open computing in the last few years. They make solid hardware and write solid software. When you compare this patent to all of their many impressive accomplishments of the past and present, well...do I really have to say anything more? This is just truly pathetic, IBM.
-- Nathan
P.S.: To whomever moderated the parent as "Troll," I recommend you lay off the crack. I mean, please. And I thought IBM's patent was pathetic. ;-)
AUGH, yes, this has been driving me bananas.
I was seriously thinking about building myself a nice box with dual 1.26GHz Tualatins, but have been unable to find SMP mainboards that support Tualatins in an SMP setting.
Well, actually, that's not completely true...I did find a couple, but none of them use Intel chipsets. There are a couple with VIA chipsets, and one using ServerWorks. I would prefer a board built around an Intel chipset, but the problem is that the ONLY Intel chipset that supports Tualatin so far is the i815 series which, although reportedly a good performer, is severely crippled in a number of respects: 1) It officially does not support SMP, and 2) RAM is restricted to 4 banks of SDR SDRAM which cannot exceed 512MB total.
Despite the first restriction, I did find one SMP board built around the i815 chipset (quite an engineering feat, it would seem, considering they probably didn't get any help from Intel): the ACorp [acorp.com.tw] 6A815EPD. It looks like a good board, seems to be getting favorible reviews, and I could live with knowing that I was limited to 512MB. ;-) The only problem is that ACorp has yet to come out with a revision of this board based off of the i815EP "B stepping," which is the revision of the i815EP chipset that supports the Tualatin (I even e-mailed them, and they confirmed that they do not yet have a dualie board based off of i815EP B step).
And, naturally, most "respectable" mainboard manufacturers are not about to release an SMP board based off of a chipset that does not officially support it. And Intel has yet to release a chipset that supports both SMP and Tualatin (and this is not because Tualatin cannot SMP, because it can; see VIA, ServerWorks).
So, basically Intel is driving away my business.
I am now considering VIA and ServerWorks-based boards as options. Can anyone comment on the performance and stability of these chipsets (VIA Apollo 133 and Apollo Pro 266T, ServerWorks HE) as well as their compatibility with Linux? I've heard some negative things about each with respect to Linux compatibility, and am curious to know if these rumors have any basis in truth. Thanks.
-- Nathan
Oh, come on. Give me a break. I am so tired of this.
Doing business on the internet is a privilege and not a right. Why do these people think that they deserve to be able to make money off of the internet when the majority of dot-bombs didn't have a good business model in the first place? In fact, why do people in general confuse the difference between rights and privileges?
Nothing frustrates me more than people who see an opportunity, try to take advantage of it, fail, and then lay the blame upon somebody other than themselves and say "I have a right to succeed at such and such!"
When will people grow up?
> ...and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for the class's "views" (open folder windows, etc.).
Sorry, that was worded pretty badly. What I meant was, "and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for a WPS class's 'views'." (This will make sense to most anyone who has interacted with WPS classes extensively and/or has done some WPS and PM programming.)
> Not quite; WPS relies on PM for some facilities that are not present in X.
Like what, for example? AFAIK the WPS is only dependent on PM because it uses the PM to draw itself and the desktop, etc. and also uses the PM window classes to draw the windows for the class's "views" (open folder windows, etc.). Correct me if I'm wrong.
Naturally, it would take a bit of effort to port it to native X (different widgets, painting routines, awareness of window manager(s), and the like; PM is very different from X and is more like Win16/32 GUI API, I believe), but surely you aren't suggesting that WPS is tied down to PM in such a way that it would be impossible to have a port that was independent of PM and instead used another GUI? I seriously doubt that.
Please see my other post.
Seriously, you don't want Presentation Manager.
Er, I obviously meant ported from OS/2 (to Linux). Sorry.
Uh, guys? It's the Workplace Shell (WPS) from OS/2 that you want (the SOM-based object-oriented desktop system), not Presentation Manager (merely the GUI API; we've got X and we don't need this).
I really would have liked to have seen an answer to the question of whether or not we will ever see Workplace Shell and SOM opened up and then ported to OS/2, but alas, the question was not phrased correctly and was thus (understandably) misunderstood by Mr. Handy and the OS/2 development team he consulted.
Maybe a follow-up interview is in order? ...
Rep. == Representative, not Republican.
Part of the agreement between IBM and Microsoft was that Microsoft would be able to retain the right to resell MS-DOS to others. (I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft wanted this fact to be very clear to IBM, and IBM accepted it.) If IBM had told Microsoft that they would only license MS-DOS if Microsoft would agree not to license it to anyone else and Microsoft agreed, then Compaq would have faced a much greater and more costly (financially and time-wise) challenge: to have to clone and reverse-engineer MS-DOS in addition to the IBM PC BIOS. I doubt Compaq would have had much incentive to do this if that were the case.
So, yes, in a sense the Microsoft OS "helped Compaq [to] clone the IBM PC."
The MWave, unlike the Lucent and 3Com and PCTel varieties, is not a "soft" (controllerless) modem. I wish people could get that fact through their thick heads! It is a proprietary reprogrammable DSP and does not have the same issues with CPU utilization that "soft" modems do have. In fact, it isn't just a modem controller; it can be used for many different functions. IBM used to use MWave's in their PCs for both modem and sound.
The only reason that it has lacked support for OSes other than Microsoft ones up until now is because IBM has been hush-hush about the specs of the thing (how to communicate with it and upload the firmware, etc.).
Slackware 7.x!
I did this, and it works fine with the latest nightly on Linux.
I think the similarity you see is because they are both using the same X widget set (GTK+).
The problem with the Workplace Shell (the OOUI in OS/2) was not necessarily that it was all that "buggy" (though I will agree with you that the later versions of OS/2 were less-than-polished, 2.11 was pretty doggone stable...it went downhill from there). The problem with the WPS was that it was inconsistent! The OO implementation was so-so (and IMO was heading in the right direction), but IBM tried to get the OO methodology and the application methodology to co-exist peacefully. I don't believe that it is possible to do such a thing successfully. The two are mutually exclusive. It causes confusion on the part of the user, and it doesn't encourage the software developers to change their way of thinking.
For those who have used OS/2 >= 2.0, think about how your average Presentation Manager application worked, and then think about how your average Workplace Shell class worked. They are worlds apart. To this day, I'm convinced this is one of the major reasons for OS/2's downfall (and I loved OS/2; I used versions 2.1 through 4.0, and even beta-tested 4.0).
It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu/ but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?
Try http://cajun.sourceforge.net/.
[to PPC, MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, 68k, etc.]
really, think before you say something
The UK banks aren't the only ones who are charging fees for using ATMs owned by banks that you don't bank with. That practice has been going on here in the US for a few years now. The charge can run anywhere from $1.00 - $3.00 USD here.
Very frustrating.
Well, apparently InterNIC must have messed it up, at least if you believe what one of the developers of OpenSSH posted here on Slashdot: link
Recent ThinkPads (the 770 comes to mind) use the MWave DSP only for the modem functions, and not for sound. My 770 has a Crystal chipset, too; the 4237, which works flawlessly with the Crystal 4232 driver that comes with the kernel (except for the fact that it doesn't support the SRS 3-D control in the mixer).
Oh, and BTW, I'm running Linux kernel 2.2.10 (with the suggested PCMCIA services version that was listed in the Changes file in Documentation/) on Slackware 3.5 (yeah, I know it's old, but it works great, and if it ain't broke...)
I, too, am a proud owner of a ThinkPad 770 (no E/ED/X/Z) 9549-1AU. It does have the MWave modem, but I don't use it (using LinkSys CardBus 10/100 card).
Most of the items on your wish list are already availible. My 770 runs practically flawlessly. I have accelerated X (which works pretty well with a slightly modified XF86_SVGA server; more on that in a minute), fully functioning APM (suspend and even hibernate to disk), PCMCIA and CardBus, and sound.
I don't know which XF86 you're using (I'm on an older one, 3.3.3 I think; I'm not at the laptop right now), but I had trouble getting the SVGA server to run accelerated, even though it claimed that the Cyber9397 was supported (I'm using the first release to claim support for acceleration on the 9397). I did a little research, and found this post on comp.windows.x.i386unix which describes how to modify the Trident server source code to enable full acceleration. My understanding is that later versions of XFree86 do not require this modification, but I'm not sure since I haven't had to upgrade mine for a while, and so I consequently haven't bothered. Also, read the rest of the messages on that thread; after making these modifications, you will need to add the options "tgui_pci_read_on" and "tgui_pci_write_on" to your XF86Config otherwise the server will hang.
Also, I used to have problems with X and APM, such as when closing the lid or suspending the machine while in X, the screen would get really funky when waking it up. For some odd reason, these problems cleared up after I built myself a kernel with the VESA framebuffer console driver and then started using the console at 1024x768x16bit. Now X gives me no problems, but only as long as I'm using the VESA console. Perhaps the VESA console drivers do something to initialize the graphics chipset that the SVGA server fails to do? I don't know. Using the VESA console also fixed another problem I was having with the accelerated server: before using the VESA console driver, I was having trouble playing back sound (MP3) in the background while I was working on something else. The music would skip if I so much as moved a window. After doing some research I concluded that the Trident driver must have the "pci_retry" option permanently on by default. I could find no way to disable it. Strangely enough, the VESA console solved this problem too!
And finally, you might want to check out tpctl for Linux, which is a program similar to the PS2 program for DOS that comes preloaded on ThinkPads. It allows you to control various things in the ThinkPads with a SMAPI BIOS. And the latest version even comes with a patch to hdparm that allows one to hotswap their IDE devices in the UltraBay! I haven't had a chance to check it out yet myself, so I can't tell you how well it works, but I thought you might like to know. :-)
Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.
> The thing I don't like about both distros is the
> initialization scripts. I would really prefer a
> *BSD style bootup, rather than that modified
> SySV thing.
What you're looking for is Slackware.
:-)