Well, they can have a lot of fun porting that to other architectures. x86 is horrible in comparison with the register rich alphas. Aside from that, benefits from ASM are only reaped by using it to optimize those portions of code that the executable spens 90% of its time in. It really sounds like these guys wrote themselves a rather large and difficult to maintain and debug OS.
Actually, starting with x86 should make it easier to port to other architectures. It's a lot easier to port ASM code written for a register poor machine to a register rich machine than to try to do the reverse. However, the ported code won't take advantage of the more register rich architecture, which would defeat the whole point of writing an OS in assembly! So, in other words, if you're even thinking about porting this code to another architecture, you've missed the whole point! What you'd want to do is write from scratch in assembly an OS that is compatible with this one. But if it's not written from scratch for the architecture in question, taking specific advantage of what that architecture has to offer, even though that makes porting next to impossible, then it misses the mark this OS is aiming for.
I know that there are functions which I've seen which served no apparent purpose.
True, sometimes other peoples' code looks like it was written in some sort of, well, code.:-) If I'm just browsing, I won't bother to try to unravel it. But if I'm working on the same program, I have to figure out what it's for. Well, actually, I probably don't have to most of the time, but I want to.
The general case when dealing with other peoples' code is, if you don't understand something, leave it alone, which I'm pretty sure applies to most of the kernel for most people.
Umm, no. Don't leave it alone. In fact, messing with it can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to figure out what it does. Add a line that prints something when it's called. Comment out the entire body and see what the program doesn't do right without it! Put in some debugging breakpoints, trace it, throw in some ASSERTions, making guesses as to what conditions obtain while the code is running. In short, just play with it. Frequently that's the easiest and most effective was to discover what some code is good for.
Given the large number of bug (just follow any of the Kernel dev lists) an enourmous amount of HORRIBLE code gets into the Linux kernal these days... why should we be sure a trojan isn't in there?
Following dev lists doesn't tell you much about a product. Projects in development are supposed to be buggy, or they wouldn't still be in development. Also, the fact code segment XYZ fails horribly when confronted with hardware ABC is not something you can tell by looking at the source code. That's something that has to be learned by running XYZ on hardware ABC. Thus, the fact that XYZ failed does not make it "HORRIBLE" code.
In any case, if you were a programmer, you'd understand that a weird hardware interaction is not easily (if at all) spotable by looking at the source code. Nothing in the source code directs the code to crash or do anything funny. Same goes with weird interactions between two different sets of code (I don't want to claim all bugs are hardware related -- they aren't). Neither set of code actually directs the processor to do anything out of the ordinary. However, with Trojan code, the code does in fact direct the system to do something out of the ordinary. So something like that is, oh, roughly 10,000 times easier to spot than a bug. A good bug can't be spotted very easily, but trojans are obvious, even when deliberate attempts at obfuscation are made (in fact, that just makes it more obvious that there is one, although less obvious what it does).
When IE went "free" there was no end of bitching and moaning. Yet, by this thread they did a perfectly ethical thing.
Nope. You need to read more carefully. This thread is about "What if Micros~1 released a bunch of software as open source?" Where did you get the impression this had anything do with releasing "free" software like IE?
VMWare's a small company with one real product (maybe there are others? if so, they're really inconsequential). They had the foresight to think that there would be a market for their product. People found a use for their product. They charge a nominal fee for the use of their product. And their reward? An opensource variant.
No, their reward is all the money they've made and continue to make as people continue to buy the product, since, for the moment, FreeMWare is vaporware. When FreeMWare becomes a real, usable product, either they ought to have something better, or they don't deserve to continue to receive money.
I'm sure the CEO, CFO, as well as all the employees who toiled away there are so excited by this.
If they honestly believed they'd never have any competition, they're morons. I suspect they're a lot more intelligent than that. If their corporate strategy is to not improve their product so that it's better than their competition's, then they deserve to go under. But again, I suspect they're more intelligent than that. (Note, it's irrelevant whether the competition is Open Source or not here.)
The world has already proved that it's not the superior technology that wins, just the cheapest. Witness IDE over SCSI, Win9x over MacOS, WinNT over Unix workstations, Pentium vs. RISC, the list goes on and on.
Wrong. Note first that cost is part of figuring how good a solution something is, so for example a 10% faster processor that costs twice as much is probably not a better solution. It may be technologically superior but it's not in a fact unqualified superior. In fact, unless you need that extra 10%, it's probably an inferior solution.
Now, taking a look at your examples, IDE vs. SCSI: yes, SCSI is a superior design, though not nearly as superior as many of its advocates often claim, and certainly not enough to justify the costs except in rare circumstances. Superior design alone doesn't guarentee a superior product. Early on it had serious compatibility problems (it still does sometimes, but usually minor these days) in addition to being much costlier, too. That's two strikes against it. For most people, SCSI is an inferior solution -- too much added expense for no real benefit. There are some places where it does benefit the customer. And guess what: it's actually used there! Why? Because it's the better solution, despite being more expensive. Win9x over MacOS: eerm, have your compared Windows 95 vs. MacOS System 7, which was what was out at the time Win95 came around? Among other things, Win95 is a technologically superior OS (MacOS stagnated on System 7 for a damn long time while Micros~1 continued to improve their OS products. Result: Micros~1 had a superior OS that ran on cheaper hardware! Double whammy!). WinNT over Unix workstations: You're reaching here. Until recently, WinNT was without question a better solution in many environments (i.e. when you didn't want to train a bunch of non-geeks how to use Unix, which lacked anything resembling a decent GUI until about a year ago -- I know, I ran Solaris almost exclusively for many years -- I loved it but would have loathed trying to train anyone how to use it instead of WinNT). Pentium vs. RISC: Intel quite successfully showed that it was not impossible to get RISC level performance on a CISC machine, something I had erroneously pridicted back when PowerPC first came out. The fact of the matter is, the difference between RISC and CISC was overhyped and less revelant that was thought, and the difference in architecture today is not very great when you get right down to it.
Since you've failed to provide any good examples for your point, I hardly need to provide any myself, but I will anyway. You will note that Yugo failed to put BMW out of business. So much for the theory that whatever's cheaper wins, regardless of quality. Also, I know the purchaser for a local company who almost invariably buys the most expensive option he's presented with unless he knows a lot about it and has a good reason not to. Many companies and individuals assume that if it's free, you're getting what you're paying for, or at least you're getting something that's inferior, a toy at best and not suitable for real work. A superior but free product will fail to make in onto their systems.
Sometimes you give up hope that the legal process will ever pull through, or that it will do so in time. There are plenty of cases where our courts are just too slow to keep up. But given the choice of letting them rush things and make a mistake, or having them dawdle and let the horses out the gate, I guess slowness is the better option, frustrating though it might otherwise appear. Do the least harm, and all. (Assuming that slow does less harm than fast.)
Indeed. It's much better that they take a long time getting around to the issue than that they make a mistake early, since once they've ruled on something the first time they've set a precedent! Once a precedent is set, correcting the error becomes more difficult. Better they take their time and make the right decision the first time around. I'm not sure if they would have made this same decision 5 years ago when ISPs weren't a dime a dozen. Not understanding the revolution that was coming, they may have insisted ISPs take editorial control over what "they publish" or some such nonsense.
If the ISP _ever_ monitored or removed offensive information, then they are showing that they are not carries. Lots of ISPs don't allow certain types of webpages and remove the offending ones. If Free-Web-Service X doesn't allow poronography and removes any pornographic webpages that they find on their site, then they are not longer just carries.
That's debatable. One could argue it depends on why they deny such use. If it's because they disaprove of "that kind of content", then you're probably right. If it's because such content tends to cause serving the web page in question to use up 98% of their available bandwidth so that they can't provide good service to the other users, then they may be able to close it down on those grounds without loosing their status as a simple carrier. Pages of that sort tend to do that for small ISPs. Larger ISPs may have difficulty making the same argument, though...
Hmm, did I just come through a time warp? Is it 2000 is a few weeks, not 1900? This is 19th materialist reductionism at its worst. I don't know what "consilience" is, but you could do with reading some philosophy of science. Briefly: behaviour in higher-level systems can't be "explained" exclusively in terms of what's going on in lower levels. Physics doesn't make biology "obsolete", anymore than biology makes psychology so, or psychology sociology.
Your bold statement is far from proven. You need to do a lot more philosophy of science reading yourself if you think that claim isn't controversial. For that matter, I think you're misinterpreting the arguments you're aluding to. Davidson for one is fond of advocating that there can't true laws for psychology, but even he does not say that the system's behavior is anything less than completely explainable by physical laws. He just says you can't reduce psychological laws to physical laws. (He's a non-reductive physicalist, which is, I'm certain and believe I've demonstrated in a paper in the past, an inconsistent position. There's an error in his argument, and depending on how you resolve it, you either end up with reductive physicalism, eliminative physicalism, or dualism -- take your pick.)
But, for that matter, Davidson is wrong to begin with (IMHO). The Putnam/Fodor (multiple realization) argument is flawed to begin with. There's no reason to believe psychology need be a special science that can't be reduced to neurobiology which can in turn be reduced to chemistry, then to physics, and we have no need to turn to "supervenience" for a solution either. There are plenty of people out there still committed to the unity of science program, and rightly so since no one has come up with a convincing argument why we should believe your bold statement to be true. In fact, it seems quite likely to be false.
You probably have/mnt/dos/windows/options/cabs dir which contains the same files as Win98 CD. Burn'em on a CD or something. Don't have to ask Compaq for the CD then.
You don't even need to burn them onto a CD, really. First thing I do when installing Windows on a computer is MKDIR C:\WIN95 and copy the contents of the WIN95 directory on the CD to the WIN95 directory on the hard drive. Then you can do without the CD entirely, just run SETUP in the WIN95 directory on your hard drive. This has two advantages. First, it installs much faster this way. Second, if you leave the WIN95 directory there, Windows will never ask you to insert your Windows CD when monkeying with your Network settings or whatever, or if it does, just Browse over to C:\WIN95. If you check the CD's Compaq gave you, I'll bet you'll find one of them has a directory containing a bunch of CAB files with names like WIN95_XX.CAB -- that's the directory you need to copy the contents of. The contents of that directory is all you need to install Windows. No official Micros~1 Windows CD is required.
Note: Depending on your version, you may need to replace all references to WIN95 in the above paragraph to WIN98. Personally, I run Win 95 OSR 2.5 (Windows 95 C) on my virtual machine. It's the last version of Windows I legally own, so that's what I use...
Perhaps MSFT themselves could take a play from this book and start releasing opensource versions of all of their competitors top products. It wouldn't help them in terms of gaining income from those markets, but at least it would deprive IBM, Oracle, Sun and others of much needed revenues...
Would it? If IBM, Oracle, and Sun produce superior products, people will pay for them regardless of what Micros~1 does, so they will continue to make money. If Micros~1 releases as open source what is in fact a superior product, anyone, including IBM, Oracle, and Sun can simply incorporate Micros~1's work into their own, and add additional features making their own offering superior and continue to make money. If IBM, Oracle, and Sun decide to respond to this move from Micros~1 by not producing a superior product by one of the two methods mentioned, it becomes highly questionable whether they deserve to make money. Should we just pay them for inferior work just because? I'm not a big fan of corporate welfare, even if it's for a tech company I may work for some day. I'd rather make my money honestly, thank you very much.
And they could say with a clear conscience that they've done nothing wrong, since that's just how the open-source community operates.
Indeed. They could say that, because it would be true. If, under the conditions specified, IBM, Oracle, and Sun couldn't continue to make money, it'd be their own fault, not Micros~1's.
I fail to understand the Linux community's obsession with recreating commercial products - even those commercial products that us. Is there some great reason why we should not pay for VMWare? Is there any single application you people are willing to pay for?
Recreated commercial products is an excellent idea if there's currently no free alternative. The point is to maximize choice. People should have the option to pay for a commercial solution if they want to, they should not be forced into buying one because they have no alternative. And from the other side, a company throwing serious development money at a team of programmers that can't produce a superior product should go bankrupt! Software is not supposed to be welfare! We shouldn't be paying people to do useless jobs. Commercial developers should make money if and only if they produce products that provide server above and beyond what can be produced by a bunch of hackers in their spare time for free! If they can't, then why are we paying money to them? Is this just corporate welfare?
Let's get real. Free software is fine and more power to those who make it, but we have to realize at some point that people need to get paid for this stuff.
Only if they are producing something superior.
And it doesn't just line someones pockets - its lets them work on their products as a job instead of some "after school" effort.
If they aren't producing something better than 'some "after school" effort' would produce, they ought not be making money at it! If they are producing something better, they will make money at it, since people who want the better product will pay for it instead of use the inferior free alternative.
Not "raw" SCSI drives, only IDE. Since VMware requires a somewhat beefy system to run acceptably, it makes sense that people who purchase "beefy" systems would be more likely to have fast SCSI drives instead of IDE.
Err, I highly doubt it. I don't have figured, and I don't think VMware does either (I don't think they're actually tracking this sort of information), but I rather suspect the majority of VMware users have IDE instead of SCSI. I suspect that proportionately speaking, there may be a higher percentage of SCSI users among VMware customers than in the general population, but I'm sure they're still a minority. The average VMware customer is more likely to have Ultra-ATA/66 than SCSI. The kind of "beefiness" VMware requires is lots of memory, but it doesn't require more than the cheapest mainboards available today can provide, so it's not like VMware requires "beefy" systems in the sense that they have to be high-end server-type systems. Just pop a new 128MB DIMM in any typical person's machine and they have all the "beefiness" they need for VMware.
No, but I for one would have confidence that if there was a trojan in there, somebody would notice it and point it out, and it would probably show up here on/., for all the world to see.
I'm curious, there's Open Source software movement, why isn't there an Open Source hardware movement. It would be harder, but possible I think.
I'm not sure what the point would be. With open source software, I get the blueprint for my software, which I can modify and recompile. With "open source hardware", I would receive the blueprint for my hardware, which I could could modify, but then what? I'm not about to set up a factory and sink a few million dollars into producing my tweaked system! Back in "The Goode Olde Days(TM)", I expected and did in fact generally receive blueprints of my computers, and did modify them with off-the-shelf parts, but the days of the mighty 16K computer are long gone. I no longer have schematics for my current PC. I'm not sure what I'd do with them if I did...
How about those poor bastards at VMWare? They will surely loose a lot from this.
Only if they can't produce a superior product.
Open Source has its dark side too - since it rips programmers from their jobs. If this Open VMware becomes successful, there is a chance that VMWare will not pull in big enough revenue to support all of its programmers!
And we all know that VMWare is not our enemy, after all it DOES innovate and does produce some amazing software for Linux. Why would we want to hurt a company like that??
If they fail to produce anything worth throwing any money at, why should we continue to throw money at them? If they succeed in continuing to produce something worth paying for, we'll continue to pay for it.
Open Source does not rip programmers from their jobs unless they have worthless jobs. As long as they're producing something that there's a good reason to throw money at, people will continue to throw money at them. I've already thrown them my $99, and the company I work for will probably throw them $299 early next year, once I convince them of the advantages their product provides. And as long as they continue to provide software that enhances our computer use, we'll continue to provide financial support for them to do so. They're only going to stop getting money if they fail to provide anything beneficial to us, which is as it should be.
I look forward to FreeMWare, because I suspect it'll spur VMware to produce an even better product in order to stay ahead. They got a good head start but they'll have to work if they want to keep it, rather than just rest on their past success. So, as a paying VMware customer, the FreeMWare project benefits me, even if I never run FreeMWare's product. I'm glad they're out there, and I wish them luck!
IANAH (I Am Not A Historian), but I suspect the reason American's hate government is that we're really not used to it. Europeans have lived under one form of government or another for a long, long time, and they're really had no choice about it -- you couldn't just move away, everyplace else also had a government. In the US, for a long time what little government we had was from overseas. Then we revolted and set up our own local government. But if you didn't like it, move west. For most of the history of life on the North American continent, if you didn't like being governed, you could just pack your bags, head out, and set up home someplace away from government. In wasn't until 1890 that the frontier era was declared over, and even then, it was easy to get away from people if you wanted. Technically, you were under the domain of some brand new state government, but it really didn't matter much. So really, after thousands of years of human habitation and almost 500 years of European decended habitation, it's only been the last century that American's really had to put up with government. So, we don't take it granted that the government can or should do this or that, we get quite huffy every time it seems to be expanding its influence in any way. I suspect our history has more to do with that than anything else.
How about if we just integrate Quake III and all the other games into the Linux kernel.
I don't know about taking that literally, but I remember the "good old days" when what you did to play a game was stick its disk in the drive and boot it. That's seriously not a bad idea. No worries about conflicts with other things installed on your system, no chewing up all your hard drive space, etc. The developer has complete control over the environment the game is running in.
The downside? Well, you have to shutdown and reboot your system to play the game, which these days involves a lot more than simply hitting OpenApple-Control-Reset (or whatever three-finger salute you used back in the days of bootable games). The plethora of hardware available must all be supported on the disk, rather than relying on the user having drivers available.
So there are tradeoffs to booting your own OS vs. using the users. Being a Unix nut these days, I'd rather not have to reboot. But the idea isn't as far fetched as you might think. I remember when all commercially available games came with their own OS...
I dunno... am I the only one not excited about Quake?
Nope. Doom was amusing for about 15 minutes, after which it got pretty boring and tedious. The exploration aspect is cool when you enter a new area, trying to find secret places etc, but it gets old quick. Not enough variety in how to get things done. Tomb Raider (which I know is technically not an FPS) managed to hold my interest longer due to more variety in terms of exploration and things to do to get places (rather than simply "find the key"). But even that got dull after a while. I did win the game, but around by the time I got past The Cisturn(sp?) the only thing keeping me going was the fact that I was so close to the end... and it did improve for the finale. The point being, the same damn thing over and over and over again gets pretty dull after a while. Doom was very very bad in this respect, and Quake hasn't seemed to me to be much of an improvement in any version. Aside from looking prettier, the whole thing still involves running around shooting things and not much else, and with very little variation in how its done (a different looking gun isn't a variation in how its done -- gernades are, but what else?).
What I want to see most is something like C&C, Warcraft/Starcraft, maybe something like Age of Wonders (Warlords done right), and most of all, an update for my all time favorite game: Master of Orion II.
Finally, I thought Sleepy Hollow was just bad. It's even darker than a lot of Tim Burton's other crap, but it wasn't at all scary. Perhaps if you go into it not expecting any sort of fear, you won't be as disappointed as I was.
Sleepy Hollow was great! I highly recommend it. However, I do have to agree that it's not scary. Neither was Toy Story II but that didn't make it a bad film, either. I'm not sure what the actual criticism is here. Neither Sleepy Hollow nor Toy Story II are scary movies, and neither were meant to be! Sleepy Hollow's scare level is about equal to most detective/mystery type movies, which, being that's exactly what it was, seems fairly appropriate. Just because they throw a few supernatural elements in doesn't mean it suddenly has to be scary. Maybe it's just me, but I for some reason went in expecting a Tim Burton film, and that's what it was. Very atmospheric, as you would expect from a Tim Burton film. Great movie, great story, great special effects, great cast, what's not to like about this movie? I knew who did it and saw the ending coming way ahead of time, but that's true of just about every movie. Other than that, I can't complain. Great flick.
Sorry, John, it's only blasphemous if you let it be, and that's what that splinter-group Catholic faction has done. It's not the church as a whole, it's just a small group of people. You run into that with any denomination within the church, any church within the religion, any religion within the world. It was only blasphemous to those who don't want their beliefs to be challeged... really though, if you can't challenge your beliefs about something, you don't really believe.
That last part is definately true. As for the rest, well, if it challenges your beliefs, it's blasphemous, by definition. The problem is people who think blasphemy is a bad thing. But in any case, it's no longer punishable by burning at the stake, so I'm happy...:-)
Think about free trade for a second. What free trade is is a way for the rich to get richer.
This is absolutely true. But what of it?
Those who can afford to set up manufacturing plants inforeign third world countries and ship manufactured goods benefit immensely from Free Trade. It allows them to exploit the rest of humankindfor our North American benefit, and profit ridiculously for doing it.
In other words, poor people in foreign nations get job opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. So the poor get richer as the rich get richer. And they produce goods more cheaply so consumers can buy them more cheaply, thus have more money to spend on other things. So the middle class gets richer too.
In short, the rich get richer, the poor get richer, and the middle class gets richer. What's the downside?
The political left, via the labor unions are against free trade. They support the protectionist policies that force people to buy their goods. Instead of the politicians and unions deciding, why not tear down trade barriers and let the consumer decide what to buy?
Saying "the left" opposes free trade a gross overgeneralization. By this account, Pat Buchanan is a lefty, and Bill Clinton a right-winger. This issue doesn't split along such lines so easily...
Wrong. It says it the right shall not be infringed. Period. It doesn't list exceptions.
You are correct that there are no exceptions. You're just wrong about what right it guarenteed to not be infringed, no exceptions. Specifically, it's the right to bear arms as part of the maintenance of a well regulated militia.
The part in front about the militia is an explanation of why they were acknowledging a right to own and keep guns.
Actually, the US Constitution is notoriously short on explanations of "why" for anything in it. It's got the "whats" but not the "whys". If you want to know the "why" for anything, you need to read the Federalist Papers.
The explanation would not be there at all, except to clarify exactly what right is being guarenteed.
But all this is beside the point, really. The bottom line is: if you try to take my guns away, I will kill you with them. You and yours can, and will, send more men with guns after me (hey, why is it okay for your hired goons to have them and not me????) and they will kill me... and then another guy/gal like me will kill some of them... and so on, and so on, etc... 'til we have a nice little civil war. Isn't it best to leave me alone? After all, right now my gun is no danger to you.
It is, unfortunately, very much not beside the point. Telling people the Constitution guarentees their right to bear arms makes them complacent. They don't think they need to worry about congressional action, because the Constitution will protect them. I got news for you, it won't. And rather than relying on shooting people to keep your guns, isn't better to rely on staying politicially active and outspoken on good reasons why you should be allowed to keep them, rather than questionable arguments about the Constitution? People who argue along the lines you do are actually helping the gun-control advocates with your "It's my constitutional right, and if you don't like it I'll kill you" arguments.
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That's not necessarily true. I've slipped comments into machine code before. Just make sure you JMP over them!
(Why put comments in machine code, you ask? Usually just to say "Hi!" or make a joke to cause the person looking at your raw machine code laugh.)
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>No.
Well, good compilers can beat some human ASM programmers. Of course, they'd have to be incredibly bad human ASM programmers...
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Actually, starting with x86 should make it easier to port to other architectures. It's a lot easier to port ASM code written for a register poor machine to a register rich machine than to try to do the reverse. However, the ported code won't take advantage of the more register rich architecture, which would defeat the whole point of writing an OS in assembly! So, in other words, if you're even thinking about porting this code to another architecture, you've missed the whole point! What you'd want to do is write from scratch in assembly an OS that is compatible with this one. But if it's not written from scratch for the architecture in question, taking specific advantage of what that architecture has to offer, even though that makes porting next to impossible, then it misses the mark this OS is aiming for.
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True, sometimes other peoples' code looks like it was written in some sort of, well, code.
The general case when dealing with other peoples' code is, if you don't understand something, leave it alone, which I'm pretty sure applies to most of the kernel for most people.
Umm, no. Don't leave it alone. In fact, messing with it can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to figure out what it does. Add a line that prints something when it's called. Comment out the entire body and see what the program doesn't do right without it! Put in some debugging breakpoints, trace it, throw in some ASSERTions, making guesses as to what conditions obtain while the code is running. In short, just play with it. Frequently that's the easiest and most effective was to discover what some code is good for.
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Following dev lists doesn't tell you much about a product. Projects in development are supposed to be buggy, or they wouldn't still be in development. Also, the fact code segment XYZ fails horribly when confronted with hardware ABC is not something you can tell by looking at the source code. That's something that has to be learned by running XYZ on hardware ABC. Thus, the fact that XYZ failed does not make it "HORRIBLE" code.
In any case, if you were a programmer, you'd understand that a weird hardware interaction is not easily (if at all) spotable by looking at the source code. Nothing in the source code directs the code to crash or do anything funny. Same goes with weird interactions between two different sets of code (I don't want to claim all bugs are hardware related -- they aren't). Neither set of code actually directs the processor to do anything out of the ordinary. However, with Trojan code, the code does in fact direct the system to do something out of the ordinary. So something like that is, oh, roughly 10,000 times easier to spot than a bug. A good bug can't be spotted very easily, but trojans are obvious, even when deliberate attempts at obfuscation are made (in fact, that just makes it more obvious that there is one, although less obvious what it does).
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Nope. You need to read more carefully. This thread is about "What if Micros~1 released a bunch of software as open source?" Where did you get the impression this had anything do with releasing "free" software like IE?
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No, their reward is all the money they've made and continue to make as people continue to buy the product, since, for the moment, FreeMWare is vaporware. When FreeMWare becomes a real, usable product, either they ought to have something better, or they don't deserve to continue to receive money.
I'm sure the CEO, CFO, as well as all the employees who toiled away there are so excited by this.
If they honestly believed they'd never have any competition, they're morons. I suspect they're a lot more intelligent than that. If their corporate strategy is to not improve their product so that it's better than their competition's, then they deserve to go under. But again, I suspect they're more intelligent than that. (Note, it's irrelevant whether the competition is Open Source or not here.)
The world has already proved that it's not the superior technology that wins, just the cheapest. Witness IDE over SCSI, Win9x over MacOS, WinNT over Unix workstations, Pentium vs. RISC, the list goes on and on.
Wrong. Note first that cost is part of figuring how good a solution something is, so for example a 10% faster processor that costs twice as much is probably not a better solution. It may be technologically superior but it's not in a fact unqualified superior. In fact, unless you need that extra 10%, it's probably an inferior solution.
Now, taking a look at your examples, IDE vs. SCSI: yes, SCSI is a superior design, though not nearly as superior as many of its advocates often claim, and certainly not enough to justify the costs except in rare circumstances. Superior design alone doesn't guarentee a superior product. Early on it had serious compatibility problems (it still does sometimes, but usually minor these days) in addition to being much costlier, too. That's two strikes against it. For most people, SCSI is an inferior solution -- too much added expense for no real benefit. There are some places where it does benefit the customer. And guess what: it's actually used there! Why? Because it's the better solution, despite being more expensive. Win9x over MacOS: eerm, have your compared Windows 95 vs. MacOS System 7, which was what was out at the time Win95 came around? Among other things, Win95 is a technologically superior OS (MacOS stagnated on System 7 for a damn long time while Micros~1 continued to improve their OS products. Result: Micros~1 had a superior OS that ran on cheaper hardware! Double whammy!). WinNT over Unix workstations: You're reaching here. Until recently, WinNT was without question a better solution in many environments (i.e. when you didn't want to train a bunch of non-geeks how to use Unix, which lacked anything resembling a decent GUI until about a year ago -- I know, I ran Solaris almost exclusively for many years -- I loved it but would have loathed trying to train anyone how to use it instead of WinNT). Pentium vs. RISC: Intel quite successfully showed that it was not impossible to get RISC level performance on a CISC machine, something I had erroneously pridicted back when PowerPC first came out. The fact of the matter is, the difference between RISC and CISC was overhyped and less revelant that was thought, and the difference in architecture today is not very great when you get right down to it.
Since you've failed to provide any good examples for your point, I hardly need to provide any myself, but I will anyway. You will note that Yugo failed to put BMW out of business. So much for the theory that whatever's cheaper wins, regardless of quality. Also, I know the purchaser for a local company who almost invariably buys the most expensive option he's presented with unless he knows a lot about it and has a good reason not to. Many companies and individuals assume that if it's free, you're getting what you're paying for, or at least you're getting something that's inferior, a toy at best and not suitable for real work. A superior but free product will fail to make in onto their systems.
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Indeed. It's much better that they take a long time getting around to the issue than that they make a mistake early, since once they've ruled on something the first time they've set a precedent! Once a precedent is set, correcting the error becomes more difficult. Better they take their time and make the right decision the first time around. I'm not sure if they would have made this same decision 5 years ago when ISPs weren't a dime a dozen. Not understanding the revolution that was coming, they may have insisted ISPs take editorial control over what "they publish" or some such nonsense.
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That's debatable. One could argue it depends on why they deny such use. If it's because they disaprove of "that kind of content", then you're probably right. If it's because such content tends to cause serving the web page in question to use up 98% of their available bandwidth so that they can't provide good service to the other users, then they may be able to close it down on those grounds without loosing their status as a simple carrier. Pages of that sort tend to do that for small ISPs. Larger ISPs may have difficulty making the same argument, though...
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Your bold statement is far from proven. You need to do a lot more philosophy of science reading yourself if you think that claim isn't controversial. For that matter, I think you're misinterpreting the arguments you're aluding to. Davidson for one is fond of advocating that there can't true laws for psychology, but even he does not say that the system's behavior is anything less than completely explainable by physical laws. He just says you can't reduce psychological laws to physical laws. (He's a non-reductive physicalist, which is, I'm certain and believe I've demonstrated in a paper in the past, an inconsistent position. There's an error in his argument, and depending on how you resolve it, you either end up with reductive physicalism, eliminative physicalism, or dualism -- take your pick.)
But, for that matter, Davidson is wrong to begin with (IMHO). The Putnam/Fodor (multiple realization) argument is flawed to begin with. There's no reason to believe psychology need be a special science that can't be reduced to neurobiology which can in turn be reduced to chemistry, then to physics, and we have no need to turn to "supervenience" for a solution either. There are plenty of people out there still committed to the unity of science program, and rightly so since no one has come up with a convincing argument why we should believe your bold statement to be true. In fact, it seems quite likely to be false.
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You don't even need to burn them onto a CD, really. First thing I do when installing Windows on a computer is MKDIR C:\WIN95 and copy the contents of the WIN95 directory on the CD to the WIN95 directory on the hard drive. Then you can do without the CD entirely, just run SETUP in the WIN95 directory on your hard drive. This has two advantages. First, it installs much faster this way. Second, if you leave the WIN95 directory there, Windows will never ask you to insert your Windows CD when monkeying with your Network settings or whatever, or if it does, just Browse over to C:\WIN95. If you check the CD's Compaq gave you, I'll bet you'll find one of them has a directory containing a bunch of CAB files with names like WIN95_XX.CAB -- that's the directory you need to copy the contents of. The contents of that directory is all you need to install Windows. No official Micros~1 Windows CD is required.
Note: Depending on your version, you may need to replace all references to WIN95 in the above paragraph to WIN98. Personally, I run Win 95 OSR 2.5 (Windows 95 C) on my virtual machine. It's the last version of Windows I legally own, so that's what I use...
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Would it? If IBM, Oracle, and Sun produce superior products, people will pay for them regardless of what Micros~1 does, so they will continue to make money. If Micros~1 releases as open source what is in fact a superior product, anyone, including IBM, Oracle, and Sun can simply incorporate Micros~1's work into their own, and add additional features making their own offering superior and continue to make money. If IBM, Oracle, and Sun decide to respond to this move from Micros~1 by not producing a superior product by one of the two methods mentioned, it becomes highly questionable whether they deserve to make money. Should we just pay them for inferior work just because? I'm not a big fan of corporate welfare, even if it's for a tech company I may work for some day. I'd rather make my money honestly, thank you very much.
And they could say with a clear conscience that they've done nothing wrong, since that's just how the open-source community operates.
Indeed. They could say that, because it would be true. If, under the conditions specified, IBM, Oracle, and Sun couldn't continue to make money, it'd be their own fault, not Micros~1's.
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Recreated commercial products is an excellent idea if there's currently no free alternative. The point is to maximize choice. People should have the option to pay for a commercial solution if they want to, they should not be forced into buying one because they have no alternative. And from the other side, a company throwing serious development money at a team of programmers that can't produce a superior product should go bankrupt! Software is not supposed to be welfare! We shouldn't be paying people to do useless jobs. Commercial developers should make money if and only if they produce products that provide server above and beyond what can be produced by a bunch of hackers in their spare time for free! If they can't, then why are we paying money to them? Is this just corporate welfare?
Let's get real. Free software is fine and more power to those who make it, but we have to realize at some point that people need to get paid for this stuff.
Only if they are producing something superior.
And it doesn't just line someones pockets - its lets them work on their products as a job instead of some "after school" effort.
If they aren't producing something better than 'some "after school" effort' would produce, they ought not be making money at it! If they are producing something better, they will make money at it, since people who want the better product will pay for it instead of use the inferior free alternative.
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Err, I highly doubt it. I don't have figured, and I don't think VMware does either (I don't think they're actually tracking this sort of information), but I rather suspect the majority of VMware users have IDE instead of SCSI. I suspect that proportionately speaking, there may be a higher percentage of SCSI users among VMware customers than in the general population, but I'm sure they're still a minority. The average VMware customer is more likely to have Ultra-ATA/66 than SCSI. The kind of "beefiness" VMware requires is lots of memory, but it doesn't require more than the cheapest mainboards available today can provide, so it's not like VMware requires "beefy" systems in the sense that they have to be high-end server-type systems. Just pop a new 128MB DIMM in any typical person's machine and they have all the "beefiness" they need for VMware.
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Bingo! It's the "many eyeballs" effect.
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I'm not sure what the point would be. With open source software, I get the blueprint for my software, which I can modify and recompile. With "open source hardware", I would receive the blueprint for my hardware, which I could could modify, but then what? I'm not about to set up a factory and sink a few million dollars into producing my tweaked system! Back in "The Goode Olde Days(TM)", I expected and did in fact generally receive blueprints of my computers, and did modify them with off-the-shelf parts, but the days of the mighty 16K computer are long gone. I no longer have schematics for my current PC. I'm not sure what I'd do with them if I did...
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How about those poor bastards at VMWare? They will surely loose a lot from this.
Only if they can't produce a superior product.
Open Source has its dark side too - since it rips programmers from their jobs. If this Open VMware becomes successful, there is a chance that VMWare will not pull in big enough revenue to support all of its programmers!
And we all know that VMWare is not our enemy, after all it DOES innovate and does produce some amazing software for Linux. Why would we want to hurt a company like that??
If they fail to produce anything worth throwing any money at, why should we continue to throw money at them? If they succeed in continuing to produce something worth paying for, we'll continue to pay for it.
Open Source does not rip programmers from their jobs unless they have worthless jobs. As long as they're producing something that there's a good reason to throw money at, people will continue to throw money at them. I've already thrown them my $99, and the company I work for will probably throw them $299 early next year, once I convince them of the advantages their product provides. And as long as they continue to provide software that enhances our computer use, we'll continue to provide financial support for them to do so. They're only going to stop getting money if they fail to provide anything beneficial to us, which is as it should be.
I look forward to FreeMWare, because I suspect it'll spur VMware to produce an even better product in order to stay ahead. They got a good head start but they'll have to work if they want to keep it, rather than just rest on their past success. So, as a paying VMware customer, the FreeMWare project benefits me, even if I never run FreeMWare's product. I'm glad they're out there, and I wish them luck!
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I don't know about taking that literally, but I remember the "good old days" when what you did to play a game was stick its disk in the drive and boot it. That's seriously not a bad idea. No worries about conflicts with other things installed on your system, no chewing up all your hard drive space, etc. The developer has complete control over the environment the game is running in.
The downside? Well, you have to shutdown and reboot your system to play the game, which these days involves a lot more than simply hitting OpenApple-Control-Reset (or whatever three-finger salute you used back in the days of bootable games). The plethora of hardware available must all be supported on the disk, rather than relying on the user having drivers available.
So there are tradeoffs to booting your own OS vs. using the users. Being a Unix nut these days, I'd rather not have to reboot. But the idea isn't as far fetched as you might think. I remember when all commercially available games came with their own OS...
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Nope. Doom was amusing for about 15 minutes, after which it got pretty boring and tedious. The exploration aspect is cool when you enter a new area, trying to find secret places etc, but it gets old quick. Not enough variety in how to get things done. Tomb Raider (which I know is technically not an FPS) managed to hold my interest longer due to more variety in terms of exploration and things to do to get places (rather than simply "find the key"). But even that got dull after a while. I did win the game, but around by the time I got past The Cisturn(sp?) the only thing keeping me going was the fact that I was so close to the end... and it did improve for the finale. The point being, the same damn thing over and over and over again gets pretty dull after a while. Doom was very very bad in this respect, and Quake hasn't seemed to me to be much of an improvement in any version. Aside from looking prettier, the whole thing still involves running around shooting things and not much else, and with very little variation in how its done (a different looking gun isn't a variation in how its done -- gernades are, but what else?).
What I want to see most is something like C&C, Warcraft/Starcraft, maybe something like Age of Wonders (Warlords done right), and most of all, an update for my all time favorite game: Master of Orion II.
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Sleepy Hollow was great! I highly recommend it. However, I do have to agree that it's not scary. Neither was Toy Story II but that didn't make it a bad film, either. I'm not sure what the actual criticism is here. Neither Sleepy Hollow nor Toy Story II are scary movies, and neither were meant to be! Sleepy Hollow's scare level is about equal to most detective/mystery type movies, which, being that's exactly what it was, seems fairly appropriate. Just because they throw a few supernatural elements in doesn't mean it suddenly has to be scary. Maybe it's just me, but I for some reason went in expecting a Tim Burton film, and that's what it was. Very atmospheric, as you would expect from a Tim Burton film. Great movie, great story, great special effects, great cast, what's not to like about this movie? I knew who did it and saw the ending coming way ahead of time, but that's true of just about every movie. Other than that, I can't complain. Great flick.
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That last part is definately true. As for the rest, well, if it challenges your beliefs, it's blasphemous, by definition. The problem is people who think blasphemy is a bad thing. But in any case, it's no longer punishable by burning at the stake, so I'm happy...
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This is absolutely true. But what of it?
Those who can afford to set up manufacturing plants inforeign third world countries and ship manufactured goods benefit immensely from Free Trade. It allows them to exploit the rest of humankindfor our North American benefit, and profit ridiculously for doing it.
In other words, poor people in foreign nations get job opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. So the poor get richer as the rich get richer. And they produce goods more cheaply so consumers can buy them more cheaply, thus have more money to spend on other things. So the middle class gets richer too.
In short, the rich get richer, the poor get richer, and the middle class gets richer. What's the downside?
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Saying "the left" opposes free trade a gross overgeneralization. By this account, Pat Buchanan is a lefty, and Bill Clinton a right-winger. This issue doesn't split along such lines so easily...
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You are correct that there are no exceptions. You're just wrong about what right it guarenteed to not be infringed, no exceptions. Specifically, it's the right to bear arms as part of the maintenance of a well regulated militia.
The part in front about the militia is an explanation of why they were acknowledging a right to own and keep guns.
Actually, the US Constitution is notoriously short on explanations of "why" for anything in it. It's got the "whats" but not the "whys". If you want to know the "why" for anything, you need to read the Federalist Papers.
The explanation would not be there at all, except to clarify exactly what right is being guarenteed.
But all this is beside the point, really. The bottom line is: if you try to take my guns away, I will kill you with them. You and yours can, and will, send more men with guns after me (hey, why is it okay for your hired goons to have them and not me????) and they will kill me... and then another guy/gal like me will kill some of them... and so on, and so on, etc... 'til we have a nice little civil war. Isn't it best to leave me alone? After all, right now my gun is no danger to you.
It is, unfortunately, very much not beside the point. Telling people the Constitution guarentees their right to bear arms makes them complacent. They don't think they need to worry about congressional action, because the Constitution will protect them. I got news for you, it won't. And rather than relying on shooting people to keep your guns, isn't better to rely on staying politicially active and outspoken on good reasons why you should be allowed to keep them, rather than questionable arguments about the Constitution? People who argue along the lines you do are actually helping the gun-control advocates with your "It's my constitutional right, and if you don't like it I'll kill you" arguments.
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