It's pretty ironic that somebody ranting about the accuracy of Apple's claims points to an independantly written article as evidence. The claims in aaplinvestor's article weren't even that bad. Yup, it was biased towards Apple in a few areas. PC reviews in PC World (if it still exists) are biased towards PC's as well (and also to payed advertisers).
Suppose two authors did a shootout between Windows and Linux. One was pro-Linux, the other was pro-Windows. I would be shocked if the reviews didn't come out in favour of the reviewers favourite operating system.
The linux reviewer could point to the potential for stellar security and performance. The windows reviewer could point to the wealth of applications and industry support. Neither would be wrong, yet both would be biased articles.
I wish the best for Dmitry, unfortunately he's learned first hand that the United States government has become nothing more than the enforcement arm of the largest U.S. corporations.
As angry as people may be, understand that while showing up and showing support is great, doing so improperly will only hurt Dmitry, the EFF and the cause you may be trying to support. Don't provide ammunition for companies like Adobe, no matter how tempting it is. Be civil, be courteous and be well spoken if given the opportunity to speak on television, radio or even to the public. Don't alienate the public. Most of them couldn't care less about this case. If people can appear as reasonable citizens then the publics support has a better chance of swinging our way.
Ultimately this is a case for the courts I suppose, but public opinion is important.
In this particular instance, yes, you could substitute Mesa. There are a lot of other technologies that don't have an Open Source counterpart. You could start creating replacement technologies, but you'd be better off picking another OS and developing technologies for it.
At the time this happened BeOS was still a very immature product. I don't use it anymore, so I'm not sure what the current state is. As far as the operating system goes it did some things well, such as multimedia, but it was a pervasively single user operating system. Sure, it looked like unix but there was no concept of users. You were always root. I shuddered when I thought of the accidents which would happen with average people running as root. Even experience system administrators make dumb mistakes.
It looked like UNIX but no unix applications were portable to it. It was working towards POSIX compliance but lots of work still needed to be done.
Despite MacOS X' slow appearance, BeOS would've been the final nail in Apple's coffin.
It really wouldn't work. Consider one of the technologies, OpenGL. Despite SGI's precarious financial situation they still stand to make more from licensing the technology than they would for Open Sourcing it. They have Open Sourced an implementation, but you can't call it OpenGL without paying licensing fees. To actually buy the various technologies in BeOS, even if it weren't impossible, would cost more than a couple hundred bucks over a few thousand users.
I had on a number of occasions said how cool I thought DirecTV was for targetting non-paying service users (I won't call it piracy, because I don't believe it really is) through technology rather than the courts. Apparently they're just another lame company who's willing to abuse the courts (who in turn will blow any corporation with enough money) at the expense of peoples rights.
If an operating system (a piece of software) can access your hardware then the statement "it's now impossible for software to directly access hardware components" is either wrong or at least overstated.
I don't by any means support organized crime. I also don't support a government that is both allowed to and willing to use loopholes in the system to drum up evidence against somebody. I also don't support a government that believes in wholesale destruction of the constitution to fulfill their agenda.
There are legitimate needs for a wiretap, and there are checks in place that are supposed to prevent abuse. Calling the process "wiretap" was shortsighted but unfortunately the name sticks. Whether you're spying using a phone tap, concealed microphones, a pair of binoculars or some as yet discovered/revealed technology you're accomplishing the same thing. This particular event needs to be punished, and unfortunately in this case it means a guilty person goes free. Still, that is much better than a court case which ends up squashing citizens rights due to precident.
Most of Canada is the same way though. Toronto is easy to get around without a car. The subway and bus system are great. Other cities, such as say London or Windsor, are much harder to get around without a car in. The U.S. is no different. Most cities have public transportation designed based on the assumption that most people have a car. A very few have decent public transportation.
Slashdot has checking through a multitude of eyes in the form of moderation and meta-moderation as well as through replies to comments. It's also horribly broken in a couple of ways. First, some trolls are moderated into oblivion where they belong but others are routinely moderated up, at least over the first few weeks or months of their existance, because they know how to play the system. Speak authoratively with a lot of impressive sounding words and in general people assume you know what you're talking about. Most of these people aren't bright or talented enough to keep it up over the long haul.
The second way that Slashdot moderation is broken is that unpopular but alternate viewpoints, equally valid or at least no more invalid than other viewpoints, are negatively moderated. Metamoderation can possibly fix this, but the same group who does the moderation does the metamoderation. Oops. A more insidious thing to do is to not moderate insightful but opposing viewpoints. There is no system of checks and balances against this.
Maybe this will be avoided, but I haven't seen anything in the comments or original article that really indicates that. There's a body of people that can roll back modifications, but if this body of people believe that "Commercial software: Pure evil." is a valid commentary then anything that doesn't support this viewpoint will be silenced.
An encyclopedia is a wide but shallow information source. It covers a lot of topics but not very deeply. The important thing from my point of view is for example, that an entry on Communism is written by an authority on the communistic ideal, its equally important that an entry on Democracy is written by an authority on the democratic ideal. Individual case studies of either form of government are seperate encyclopedia entries (but cross referenced if its a good information source) written by possibly different people.
I haven't even seen a paper encyclopedia that fits my ideal.
Whether a company goes out of business does not concern me. I really hope that a "Free" encyclopedia does work, that it does threaten Britanica. Providing cheap, high quality information to the masses is an admirable goal.
I believe in it enough to donate time to it, but it doesn't mean that I'm entirely optimistic that it will succeed.
Amazon owns Alexa, Alexa owns the complete usenet and web archives of the first couple of years.
Early dejanews.com at least offered nuke options for users to delete the traces they have innocently left in the early years on public
forums without thinking much about the consequences. Since it was bought by Google, a same option has not been implemented. Just
wait til Google sells its stuff to AOL. How much more blinded do you want to get ?
The ability to delete your old posts never should have been included. Usenet has always been a public forum with some amount of memory. DejaNews and now Google have just extended the length of the memory. I've posted a couple of things that I wish I hadn't, but I would never consider deleting it. Time goes on and people (sometimes) mature, everybody has done something they wish they hadn't, sometimes people do these things in spectacularly public ways.
Even if you can pull a post, you can't pull the 20 or 30 posts that quote you and point out that you're an imbecile. If it teaches people to think before they speak then its a valuable lesson.
People embarass themselves on slashdot all the time. Slashdot is archived and indexed by google. Should google provide opt-out on a per post basis? Should slashdot allow you to delete your old posts or articles?
This is a poor troll. Open-Source/Free Software didn't give birth to the the gaming community. I don't remember playing very many Open Source, or FSF games on my Commodore 64, Vic-20 or TI-99/4A. I don't recall playing very many Open Source or FSF games even on the VAX or UNIX machines. In all of the above there were a few public domain games, some which did include source, but they weren't Open Source or FSF licensed.
There are now Open Source/FSF games, most of which are knock offs (which is a legitimate thing to do) of commercial games.
Put your money where your mouth is deposit all your code at sourceforge.net, even if its produced for your employer. That is unless you're in favour of threatening the fundamental freedoms of programmers and citizens.
I think caution is necessary with respect to electronic voting. I don't believe that the necessary infrastructure is available. Pick any big public online media event and you can always find a common characteristic: It can't be viewed by most people.
Today will be a good case in point. Steve Jobs is going to speak to the faithful at MacWorld. It's going to be broadcast online and its going to be reported on by the major Macintosh news sites. This event is interesting to a much smaller cross section of the population than a presidential election. Despite this the sites will slow to a crawl or be unreachable.
In an election there's a fractal like complexity to the breakdown of election results. On a country wide level you pick a particular party, the party from which the president comes. Going down to the next level you see individual states, states who as a whole agreed on which party to elect. Looking at things a bit closer you see counties within the state, and precincts within the counties. Below this you're talking about neighbourhoods.
Often the outcome of the election is known in advance for certain states, for certain counties, for certain precincts and certain neighbourhoods. Often its demarcated by the overall wealth of the neighbourhood or ethnic population.
With the present network infrastructure it would be fairly easy to target particular neighbourhoods and stop them from voting, at least if they intended to do so online. A highly targetted denial of service attack could easily swing a precinct.
Oddly enough this could work against the more affluent neighbourhoods. The poor neighbourhoods will have a much smaller percentage of homes who own a combination of computers and internet access. Rich neighbourhoods will have a higher percentage. Target the local ISP's, or in the case of technologies like cablemodems, the local routers near the neighbourhood and you prevent a segment of the population from voting in the manner they intended.
There isn't a lot of redundancy at the local level to guard against targetted network attacks. Sure, the voting system could be distributed ala akamai, but that doesn't help if voters are prevented from reaching it.
Actually, I've said it before and I'll say it again: The DirectTV hack against the hackers was beautiful. That's the way it should be. Users are allowed to use their knowledge to get around the knowledge corporations protect their information with. Corporations should be allowed to do anything at their disposal to find a technical means to protect their data.
The hobbiest market is so tiny that its less expensive to ignore us than it is to produce chips that can be hand soldered. Industry prefers small packages and consume many many times more of the components than hobbiests do. The hand solderable version of any IC with a high pin count would be enourmous. I know, I purchased a 0.200 pitch Xilinx 4000 series FPGA. The chip was about 2 inches per size, not very friendly in terms of PCB real estate or enclosures, but it was great for hacking around in a graduate lab.
One of the IEEE periodicals did a similiar test with a properly set up experiment. Check IEEE Spectrum or IEEE Computer. Ogg Vorbis just isn't a very good CODEC.
MIPS owns the trademark to MIPS, and owns a lot of the intellectual property. The MIPS design work within SGI is conducted seperately from MIPS though. It's not a matter of buying an ASIC core and slapping some additional logic on it, these processors are designed from the ground up at SGI. It's more of a derivative work I suppose if you consider software design terminology. Sort of like FreeBSD v.s. OpenBSD etc. They share common ancestors but they're more than just enhancements of somebodies intellectual property.
I can't really post more compelling information, I work for SGI and need to be somewhat careful. Essentially when MIPS was spun off SGI retained key intellectual property (R10K and above).
but I played with both Mecanno and Lego as a kid. I tried to like Mecanno but the quality of the parts was too shoddy. Sure, the panels and girders were fine, but the nuts and bolts that held things together were lousy. They tended not to have proper threads so I had to find which nut worked with which bolt.
I did play with my dads (circa 1930) Mecanno set and the quality was a lot higher. I'm not sure that this is an example of kids being dumbed down or products going through "cost optimization".
Before being spun off MIPS became the development arm for embedded processing MIPS cpus. So what SGI did was spin off its piece of the embedded market, a market it had no interest in since the Nintendo 64. SGI still employs engineers to produce MIPS processors for use in the server and technical computing market. Any MIPS processor you see in an SGI product has been developed in house by SGI, just as any future processors will also be developed in house.
Silicon Graphics still develops IRIX and MIPS processors. SGI has been trying to fix a perceived weakness in their product line. Scientific and technical computing still love IRIX on MIPS, they roll their own applications. ISPs used to love IRIX on MIPS but a lot of applications they need are no longer ported, so they move to Intel where they are ported. Wham, there goes a big chunk of high margin revenue. NT and Linux are dominating this segment so if they're still interested in that segment they need to pursue it. SGI is mostly concentrating on Linux on IA64 though on smaller machines NT will run out of the box.
To bad, I could have told them that there isn't any money in NT unless your microsoft.
I dunno, Dell seems to do OK selling NT. SGI also lost money on linux too, so its not fair to blame it on Microsoft. SGI only understands high profit margin computer systems. They tried to maintain an artificially high profit margin on boxes that were slightly better than other PCs on the market (at least in terms of graphics performance) and also tried to sell them through their normal (extremely pricey) sales channel.
For PC boxes your margins need to be low to compete. Developing your own graphics board is a waste of time, to justify the expenditure in R&D the board has to be cutting edge for about a year. The SGI graphics board was only a tiny bit better than an nVidia at the release date.
Selling commodity components through your own sales channel, salespeople who may have engineering degrees and enourmous salaries, is an indicator of mental retardation in somebodies thought processes. There should've been a secure web page that would take your address and credit card and ship it direct from the manufacturer to you. The only time a salesperson should've been involved is if there was a huge number of boxes involved.
What's Up This Month is an up to date guide to astronomical events. It's got a daily to do list of things to look for as well as seperate areas for comets and meteors etc.
I noticed that the bootid shower isn't listed, which is odd, but its really a very good service.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose two authors did a shootout between Windows and Linux. One was pro-Linux, the other was pro-Windows. I would be shocked if the reviews didn't come out in favour of the reviewers favourite operating system.
The linux reviewer could point to the potential for stellar security and performance. The windows reviewer could point to the wealth of applications and industry support. Neither would be wrong, yet both would be biased articles.
As angry as people may be, understand that while showing up and showing support is great, doing so improperly will only hurt Dmitry, the EFF and the cause you may be trying to support. Don't provide ammunition for companies like Adobe, no matter how tempting it is. Be civil, be courteous and be well spoken if given the opportunity to speak on television, radio or even to the public. Don't alienate the public. Most of them couldn't care less about this case. If people can appear as reasonable citizens then the publics support has a better chance of swinging our way.
Ultimately this is a case for the courts I suppose, but public opinion is important.
In this particular instance, yes, you could substitute Mesa. There are a lot of other technologies that don't have an Open Source counterpart. You could start creating replacement technologies, but you'd be better off picking another OS and developing technologies for it.
It looked like UNIX but no unix applications were portable to it. It was working towards POSIX compliance but lots of work still needed to be done.
Despite MacOS X' slow appearance, BeOS would've been the final nail in Apple's coffin.
It really wouldn't work. Consider one of the technologies, OpenGL. Despite SGI's precarious financial situation they still stand to make more from licensing the technology than they would for Open Sourcing it. They have Open Sourced an implementation, but you can't call it OpenGL without paying licensing fees. To actually buy the various technologies in BeOS, even if it weren't impossible, would cost more than a couple hundred bucks over a few thousand users.
I had on a number of occasions said how cool I thought DirecTV was for targetting non-paying service users (I won't call it piracy, because I don't believe it really is) through technology rather than the courts. Apparently they're just another lame company who's willing to abuse the courts (who in turn will blow any corporation with enough money) at the expense of peoples rights.
If an operating system (a piece of software) can access your hardware then the statement "it's now impossible for software to directly access hardware components" is either wrong or at least overstated.
There are legitimate needs for a wiretap, and there are checks in place that are supposed to prevent abuse. Calling the process "wiretap" was shortsighted but unfortunately the name sticks. Whether you're spying using a phone tap, concealed microphones, a pair of binoculars or some as yet discovered/revealed technology you're accomplishing the same thing. This particular event needs to be punished, and unfortunately in this case it means a guilty person goes free. Still, that is much better than a court case which ends up squashing citizens rights due to precident.
Most of Canada is the same way though. Toronto is easy to get around without a car. The subway and bus system are great. Other cities, such as say London or Windsor, are much harder to get around without a car in. The U.S. is no different. Most cities have public transportation designed based on the assumption that most people have a car. A very few have decent public transportation.
The second way that Slashdot moderation is broken is that unpopular but alternate viewpoints, equally valid or at least no more invalid than other viewpoints, are negatively moderated. Metamoderation can possibly fix this, but the same group who does the moderation does the metamoderation. Oops. A more insidious thing to do is to not moderate insightful but opposing viewpoints. There is no system of checks and balances against this.
Maybe this will be avoided, but I haven't seen anything in the comments or original article that really indicates that. There's a body of people that can roll back modifications, but if this body of people believe that "Commercial software: Pure evil." is a valid commentary then anything that doesn't support this viewpoint will be silenced.
An encyclopedia is a wide but shallow information source. It covers a lot of topics but not very deeply. The important thing from my point of view is for example, that an entry on Communism is written by an authority on the communistic ideal, its equally important that an entry on Democracy is written by an authority on the democratic ideal. Individual case studies of either form of government are seperate encyclopedia entries (but cross referenced if its a good information source) written by possibly different people.
I haven't even seen a paper encyclopedia that fits my ideal.
Whether a company goes out of business does not concern me. I really hope that a "Free" encyclopedia does work, that it does threaten Britanica. Providing cheap, high quality information to the masses is an admirable goal.
I believe in it enough to donate time to it, but it doesn't mean that I'm entirely optimistic that it will succeed.
Even if you can pull a post, you can't pull the 20 or 30 posts that quote you and point out that you're an imbecile. If it teaches people to think before they speak then its a valuable lesson.
People embarass themselves on slashdot all the time. Slashdot is archived and indexed by google. Should google provide opt-out on a per post basis? Should slashdot allow you to delete your old posts or articles?
There are now Open Source/FSF games, most of which are knock offs (which is a legitimate thing to do) of commercial games.
Put your money where your mouth is deposit all your code at sourceforge.net, even if its produced for your employer. That is unless you're in favour of threatening the fundamental freedoms of programmers and citizens.
Today will be a good case in point. Steve Jobs is going to speak to the faithful at MacWorld. It's going to be broadcast online and its going to be reported on by the major Macintosh news sites. This event is interesting to a much smaller cross section of the population than a presidential election. Despite this the sites will slow to a crawl or be unreachable.
In an election there's a fractal like complexity to the breakdown of election results. On a country wide level you pick a particular party, the party from which the president comes. Going down to the next level you see individual states, states who as a whole agreed on which party to elect. Looking at things a bit closer you see counties within the state, and precincts within the counties. Below this you're talking about neighbourhoods.
Often the outcome of the election is known in advance for certain states, for certain counties, for certain precincts and certain neighbourhoods. Often its demarcated by the overall wealth of the neighbourhood or ethnic population.
With the present network infrastructure it would be fairly easy to target particular neighbourhoods and stop them from voting, at least if they intended to do so online. A highly targetted denial of service attack could easily swing a precinct.
Oddly enough this could work against the more affluent neighbourhoods. The poor neighbourhoods will have a much smaller percentage of homes who own a combination of computers and internet access. Rich neighbourhoods will have a higher percentage. Target the local ISP's, or in the case of technologies like cablemodems, the local routers near the neighbourhood and you prevent a segment of the population from voting in the manner they intended.
There isn't a lot of redundancy at the local level to guard against targetted network attacks. Sure, the voting system could be distributed ala akamai, but that doesn't help if voters are prevented from reaching it.
That's a level playing field.
How long until the devices that defeat the mechanism are found in Canadian newspapers?
What country the hack will come from?
How long until the corporations involved manage to get the hacker(s) involved arrested despite the lack of a DMCA in their country?
The hobbiest market is so tiny that its less expensive to ignore us than it is to produce chips that can be hand soldered. Industry prefers small packages and consume many many times more of the components than hobbiests do. The hand solderable version of any IC with a high pin count would be enourmous. I know, I purchased a 0.200 pitch Xilinx 4000 series FPGA. The chip was about 2 inches per size, not very friendly in terms of PCB real estate or enclosures, but it was great for hacking around in a graduate lab.
One of the IEEE periodicals did a similiar test with a properly set up experiment. Check IEEE Spectrum or IEEE Computer. Ogg Vorbis just isn't a very good CODEC.
Suicide watch? I'd pay $9.95 on pay per view but not a penny more! I would shell out 50 bucks for ring side seats though.
MIPS owns the trademark to MIPS, and owns a lot of the intellectual property. The MIPS design work within SGI is conducted seperately from MIPS though. It's not a matter of buying an ASIC core and slapping some additional logic on it, these processors are designed from the ground up at SGI. It's more of a derivative work I suppose if you consider software design terminology. Sort of like FreeBSD v.s. OpenBSD etc. They share common ancestors but they're more than just enhancements of somebodies intellectual property.
I can't really post more compelling information, I work for SGI and need to be somewhat careful. Essentially when MIPS was spun off SGI retained key intellectual property (R10K and above).
I did play with my dads (circa 1930) Mecanno set and the quality was a lot higher. I'm not sure that this is an example of kids being dumbed down or products going through "cost optimization".
Before being spun off MIPS became the development arm for embedded processing MIPS cpus. So what SGI did was spin off its piece of the embedded market, a market it had no interest in since the Nintendo 64. SGI still employs engineers to produce MIPS processors for use in the server and technical computing market. Any MIPS processor you see in an SGI product has been developed in house by SGI, just as any future processors will also be developed in house.
Silicon Graphics still develops IRIX and MIPS processors. SGI has been trying to fix a perceived weakness in their product line. Scientific and technical computing still love IRIX on MIPS, they roll their own applications. ISPs used to love IRIX on MIPS but a lot of applications they need are no longer ported, so they move to Intel where they are ported. Wham, there goes a big chunk of high margin revenue. NT and Linux are dominating this segment so if they're still interested in that segment they need to pursue it. SGI is mostly concentrating on Linux on IA64 though on smaller machines NT will run out of the box.
For PC boxes your margins need to be low to compete. Developing your own graphics board is a waste of time, to justify the expenditure in R&D the board has to be cutting edge for about a year. The SGI graphics board was only a tiny bit better than an nVidia at the release date.
Selling commodity components through your own sales channel, salespeople who may have engineering degrees and enourmous salaries, is an indicator of mental retardation in somebodies thought processes. There should've been a secure web page that would take your address and credit card and ship it direct from the manufacturer to you. The only time a salesperson should've been involved is if there was a huge number of boxes involved.
I noticed that the bootid shower isn't listed, which is odd, but its really a very good service.
Big money buys legislation, it doesn't matter whether the legislation is just or unjust.