The first incarnation of such feature that I remember seeing was in the 40s or 50s (on TV, I'm not that old) where the car had a 5th wheel that looked like a spare hanging off of the trunk. With the push of a button the 5th wheel lowered and rotated the back of the car into the parking spot.
Technology is not inherently bad, its inherently neutral. 1st, lets remind ppl what technology is. Technology is the _knowledge_ of how to use various tools to do various things. Technology is not a thing. Try giving a calculator to a person who does not know basic math, and see how much math they accomplish. They won't get very far. Why? They dont have the technology to use the calculator.
Now people being inherently bad is a different discussion.
Benchmarking with gcc on an UltraSparc might tell you the results of generating suboptimal 32bit code for processing graphics and crunching double precision (64bit) numbers. I would imagine that the target audience for these machines would already have a license for the Sun compiler.
Can a porn site no longer use the phrase "Playboy(TM)" (including the "TM") anywhere on their site, because it might get indexed and lead clueless/illiterate googlers there, when they were actually looking for the site of "Playboy(TM) Magazine"?
Of course they can, so can slashdot. But neither a porn site or slashdot should pay a 3rd party to capitolize off of the name recognition of another company's trademark.
Is it OK for Microsoft to pay google for a sponsored link on searches for the trademarked name "Linux"? How about Hardees and "Big Mac"? How about a new wrench company and "Vice-Grip"?
If the non-Playboy site has a clearly differnet name, and there's no reasonable possibility of confusion?
If the non-Playboy site has a clearly different name, and there's no reasonable possibility of confusion, why is the non-Playboy site keying off of the trademarks of Playboy (and paying a 3rd party to do so)? I believe they are attemting to bank off of the confusion.
My entire electric bill is about $100/month, if the LEDs eliminated my electric bill it would take 41.6 years for the $50,000 investment to "pay for itself".
M$ is pretty tight with Intel (hence the term Wintel). They might have licenced or somehow gotten some code optimisers from Intel. On Linux, the Intel compiler is often 100% faster than gcc on double precision code (like trig functions).
Programmers are more productive in Visual Studio than coding in vi/emacs/
OK, but when I was a windows developer I used vim as my editor within VS.
Also, I question programmers being more productive on VS than Linux/*NIX. One thing that frustrated me the most about programming in windows were 2 things. 1) There are very few opensource VS projects to read code and learn from. MSDN is all you have. I have never had any computer training, and I learned TONS from reading TONS of other people's code (including that from my OS). I believe that is the advice for all authors (read,read,read,read,write). 2) The help system was not expandable. ie, you could not add to it, nor could 3rd party library vendors. Manpages can be added at will and work on just about any UNIX system that is newer than 20 or so years.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "working"
Bingo! I would doubt that there has been any significant change in album sales. I don't know how much the RIAA has to do with video DVDs, but I cannot justify the price of a CD when I can get a video DVD that has more material and is oftentimes cheaper than a CD.
For example, I recently bought Led Zepplin's DVD. Its something like 5.5 hours of material, has video, and 3 audio mixes for most of the material. The CD at amazon is 21.49. Its 3 CDs, so assuming that each CD has 74 minutes of music on each, that would be about 3.7 hours of material. On the other hand the DVD costs 20.99. WTF?
RIAA can you provide a decent product at a decent price? You cannot push 1980's products on us anymore. I don't see any compeling reason to buy a CD (yes, I already have about 400 CDs to date).
Who cares? You will be able to buy a 32bit machine for quite some time for your "legacy" apps.
Plus, who is ready to receive 64 bit chips?
Hmm, 64bit chips have been around for 10 years or so. Ask someone who works with real hardware this question.
Windows isn't quite yet there with their 64 bit OS, and many linux distros only have beta quality 64 bit OS'es.
a) this is slashdot, windows doesn't matter b) although my experience with 64bit linux distros is limited, Debian was stable on an Alpha 5 years ago, and RedHat Advanced Workstation 2.1 is rock solid on our 33 Itaniums, and RH 7.1 is rock solid on our 60 Alpha's.
FWIW, I believe that Intel's 32-64bit x86 hybrid would be kinda stupid. Intel already has a fine (although still expensive) 64bit processor. Like I already said, 32bit machines will be available for quite some time for legacy apps, and for any app that is currently maintained, it fairly trivial to recompile it so that the app is 64bit clean.
Lastly, I do not understand people's obsession with x86. Disco died in the early 80's, but we still want to use a computer archetecture from the 70's?
This has nothing to do with the popularity of mp3. mp3, like everything else, is more popular simply because it is more popular. It came out 1st, has hardware decoders, and people know what you mean when you say mp3 (a free/cheap music format for my computer, hardware player, etc). People just dont know or care if ogg is better. Also, mp3's were around for _years_ before there were online stores for them.
my (rh7.3) signal.h and errno.h say they are copyright of GNU C library and conform to ISO C99. The sys/ioctl.h says GNU C library (and has one function prototype in it) says its GNU. I'm pretty sure that there are at least a couple of thousand UNIX developers that could reproduce these files from memory.
The one that SCO could have writen is sys/errno.h which says: #include:)
Just because you have a recognizable name - does not mean that you will have an instant hit.
Funny, but isn't one of the biggest budget items of a movie the actors? Well, at least those that hire brand name actors in an attempt to have an "instant hit".
Not sure how common knowledge this is, but one neat trivia piece about "A Bugs Life" DVD is that the widescreen and 4:3 versions of the movies are actually rerenders. Not pan and scan.
How many open-source developers you know that conduct large-scale usability tests?
I would imagine that many orders of magnatudes of more people have tried the lastest version of the Linux kernel as compared to Solaris, WINNT, and darwin kernels. Maybe that is not a usability test. For me I downloaded a few of the lastest Linux kernels for my desktop, I have found some good stuff, like performance increases. I've found some stuff was broke to hell, like sound and IDE when combined withe ACPI. You know what, these issues were already being discussed on the mailing list when I found them, and they appear to be working now that I am running 2.6.0-test11. Btw, I cannot get windows to play a dvd on the same laptop now that I have tried to patch it because of the RPC worms.
How many open-source developers go around interviewing end users?
I do. So thats one. How many closed source developers do this?
When the developer and product consumer is the same, open-source makes much more sense to me.
Hmm, sounds like the UNIX world to me. Built by developers and geeks for developers and geeks. Its working pretty well. All of the big boys are doing it now, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, etc.
I have stumbled over installing something like ImageMagick on a new version of Redhat.
This is a redhat problem, not an opensource problem. I've had similar problems with some silly windows programs that required a certain versions of visual basic dlls or some other prerequisite dll or whatever.
Btw, doing 'apt-get install imagemagick' on Debian works quite well. Doing 'rpm -i imagemagick' on RedHat is more than likely only going to give you a list of reasons why it aint gonna do it.
Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors.
Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people merely using your code, much less those interested in modifying it.
So. Just because something is open or closed source, it does not mean that it is a good program nor does it imply that anybody wants to use it.
Myth: Stopping new development for weeks or months to fix bugs is the best way to produce stable, polished software.
Reality: Stopping new development for awhile to find and fix unknown bugs is fine. That's only a part of writing good software.
I don't see too much disparity here between the "myth" and "reality".
Myth: New developers interested in the project will best learn the project by fixing bugs and reading the source code.
Reality: Reading code is difficult. Fixing bugs is difficult and probably something you don't want to do anyway. While giving someone unglamorous work is a good way to test his dedication, it relies on unstructured learning by osmosis.
This "reality" again does not dispell the "myth". Try having new developers interested in a project and reading source code in a closed source project. Yeah, its difficult to read code, but infinitely more difficult to read it if you dont have access to it. BTW, the metaphor or whatever "osmosis" is trying to make a point is pretty silly. Osmosis is the transfer of water through a semipermeable membrane.
Myth: Installation and configuration aren't as important as making the source available. Reality: If it takes too much work just to get the software working, many people will silently quit.
Yeah, there not that important thats why we did silly stuff like create autoconf to configure and install software. That is why we carry around the install.sh form X11 to install software in a predictable and sane way. That is why we have plain readable text files to configure our software. The reality holds true for closed and open source as well.
Myth: Bad or unappealing code or projects should be thrown away completely.
Reality: Solving the same simple problems again and again wastes time that could be applied to solving new, larger problems.
This is again true for open and closed source projects. Go look at one of the windows (closed source) freeware/shareware depositories and you will find at least 5-10 programs that all do the same thing more or less. If these were open source projects, I would imagine that there would be a good amount of code reuse going on here.
Myth: It's better to provide a framework for lots of people to solve lots of problems than to solve only one problem well.
Reality: It's really hard to write a good framework unless you're already using it to solve at least one real problem.
Does anyone thing this is either a valid myth or something too terribly interesting to talk about? I will say however, that UNIX (I'm generalizing that opensource is more of a UNIX like thing here) in general is a framework and our stuff plays well with one another. We have programs have STDOUT, and STDERR messages that are formatted for external processing and parsing, we have exit statuses in our programs so they can be &&ed and ||ed or test for their success or failure. We have signals, pipes, and sockets for IPC. Look at the number of opensource installs and the wide variety of things that they do and tell me that we are not solving a number of real problems well. Myth: Even though your previous code was buggy, undocumented, hard to maintain, or slow, your next attempt will be perfect.
Reality: If you weren't disciplined then, why would you be disciplined now?
Axiom of life. If program sucks, noone will use it. This is true for opensource and closed source stuff.
Myth: Warnings are just warnings. They're not errors and no one really cares about them.
I really don't think this will be a boon to motorcycle safety
Well antilock brakes are no boon to automobile safety, but try to buy a car without them. For those that don't know, antilock breaks on average have no difference in minor colisions, but they increase the likelihood of you dying in a serious accident.
The reason is that minor accidents are, duh, minor where most of them involve a car hitting another one in front of it, and these are probably about 90% of all accidents. However, antilock breaks at higher speeds, especially when involving a curve, can lead to the vehicle overturning, which is the most dangerous situation to be in a car. Even other safety features like seatbelts and airbags have little benefits here. Its much more difficult to flip a car without antilock breaks.
A better stratergy for SUN would be to provide an upgrade path of Solaris to Linux, and to ride the wave, not fight it.
Maybe they can license the upgrade path from SCO. No I'm not trying to be funny or trollish. SCO has a product called "Linux Kernel Personalities" for thieir UNIX OS that enables Linux binaries to be run on that platform. Can't get any more info because SCO's website because its not responding. Hmmmm.
Slashdot Mirror
The first incarnation of such feature that I remember seeing was in the 40s or 50s (on TV, I'm not that old) where the car had a 5th wheel that looked like a spare hanging off of the trunk. With the push of a button the 5th wheel lowered and rotated the back of the car into the parking spot.
Technology is not inherently bad, its inherently neutral. 1st, lets remind ppl what technology is. Technology is the _knowledge_ of how to use various tools to do various things. Technology is not a thing. Try giving a calculator to a person who does not know basic math, and see how much math they accomplish. They won't get very far. Why? They dont have the technology to use the calculator.
Now people being inherently bad is a different discussion.
Benchmarking with gcc on an UltraSparc might tell you the results of generating suboptimal 32bit code for processing graphics and crunching double precision (64bit) numbers. I would imagine that the target audience for these machines would already have a license for the Sun compiler.
Can a porn site no longer use the phrase "Playboy(TM)" (including the "TM") anywhere on their site, because it might get indexed and lead clueless/illiterate googlers there, when they were actually looking for the site of "Playboy(TM) Magazine"?
Of course they can, so can slashdot. But neither a porn site or slashdot should pay a 3rd party to capitolize off of the name recognition of another company's trademark.
Is it OK for Microsoft to pay google for a sponsored link on searches for the trademarked name "Linux"? How about Hardees and "Big Mac"? How about a new wrench company and "Vice-Grip"?
If the non-Playboy site has a clearly differnet name, and there's no reasonable possibility of confusion?
If the non-Playboy site has a clearly different name, and there's no reasonable possibility of confusion, why is the non-Playboy site keying off of the trademarks of Playboy (and paying a 3rd party to do so)? I believe they are attemting to bank off of the confusion.
My entire electric bill is about $100/month, if the LEDs eliminated my electric bill it would take 41.6 years for the $50,000 investment to "pay for itself".
M$ is pretty tight with Intel (hence the term Wintel). They might have licenced or somehow gotten some code optimisers from Intel. On Linux, the Intel compiler is often 100% faster than gcc on double precision code (like trig functions).
So are they doomed yet?
Programmers are more productive in Visual Studio than coding in vi/emacs/
OK, but when I was a windows developer I used vim as my editor within VS.
Also, I question programmers being more productive on VS than Linux/*NIX. One thing that frustrated me the most about programming in windows were 2 things. 1) There are very few opensource VS projects to read code and learn from. MSDN is all you have. I have never had any computer training, and I learned TONS from reading TONS of other people's code (including that from my OS). I believe that is the advice for all authors (read,read,read,read,write). 2) The help system was not expandable. ie, you could not add to it, nor could 3rd party library vendors. Manpages can be added at will and work on just about any UNIX system that is newer than 20 or so years.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of "working"
Bingo! I would doubt that there has been any significant change in album sales. I don't know how much the RIAA has to do with video DVDs, but I cannot justify the price of a CD when I can get a video DVD that has more material and is oftentimes cheaper than a CD.
For example, I recently bought Led Zepplin's DVD. Its something like 5.5 hours of material, has video, and 3 audio mixes for most of the material. The CD at amazon is 21.49. Its 3 CDs, so assuming that each CD has 74 minutes of music on each, that would be about 3.7 hours of material. On the other hand the DVD costs 20.99. WTF?
RIAA can you provide a decent product at a decent price? You cannot push 1980's products on us anymore. I don't see any compeling reason to buy a CD (yes, I already have about 400 CDs to date).
I don't think MS could port Windows to all those different architectures
a 64/6 4/_ 64/
Thats why linux, solaris, the BSDs suck. For example:
mlap:~/src/linux-2.6.0-test9/arch% ls -1
alpha/
arm/
arm26/
cris/
h8300/
i386/
i
m68k/
m68knommu/
mips/
parisc/
ppc/
ppc
s390/
sh/
sparc/
sparc64/
um/
v850/
x86
Can it do hardware 32bit as well?
Who cares? You will be able to buy a 32bit machine for quite some time for your "legacy" apps.
Plus, who is ready to receive 64 bit chips?
Hmm, 64bit chips have been around for 10 years or so. Ask someone who works with real hardware this question.
Windows isn't quite yet there with their 64 bit OS, and many linux distros only have beta quality 64 bit OS'es.
a) this is slashdot, windows doesn't matter b) although my experience with 64bit linux distros is limited, Debian was stable on an Alpha 5 years ago, and RedHat Advanced Workstation 2.1 is rock solid on our 33 Itaniums, and RH 7.1 is rock solid on our 60 Alpha's.
FWIW, I believe that Intel's 32-64bit x86 hybrid would be kinda stupid. Intel already has a fine (although still expensive) 64bit processor. Like I already said, 32bit machines will be available for quite some time for legacy apps, and for any app that is currently maintained, it fairly trivial to recompile it so that the app is 64bit clean.
Lastly, I do not understand people's obsession with x86. Disco died in the early 80's, but we still want to use a computer archetecture from the 70's?
if no online music stores are using Ogg Vorbis...
This has nothing to do with the popularity of mp3. mp3, like everything else, is more popular simply because it is more popular. It came out 1st, has hardware decoders, and people know what you mean when you say mp3 (a free/cheap music format for my computer, hardware player, etc). People just dont know or care if ogg is better. Also, mp3's were around for _years_ before there were online stores for them.
apply to telemarkers? I thought that they were not allowed to call cells either.
...you can continue to run the binary...
What do you expect from a "Binary Runtime License"?
return x++ != return (x++)
my (rh7.3) signal.h and errno.h say they are copyright of GNU C library and conform to ISO C99. The sys/ioctl.h says GNU C library (and has one function prototype in it) says its GNU. I'm pretty sure that there are at least a couple of thousand UNIX developers that could reproduce these files from memory.
:)
The one that SCO could have writen is sys/errno.h which says: #include
Just because you have a recognizable name - does not mean that you will have an instant hit.
Funny, but isn't one of the biggest budget items of a movie the actors? Well, at least those that hire brand name actors in an attempt to have an "instant hit".
Not sure how common knowledge this is, but one neat trivia piece about "A Bugs Life" DVD is that the widescreen and 4:3 versions of the movies are actually rerenders. Not pan and scan.
The link that you posted was by JWZ, the parent post was not.
Also, he was not that emotional about netscape falling apart you can read about it from himself here.
really? maybe building on others work from time to time, but not as much code reuse.
Really? How many apps share code with qt, gtk, gdk, openssl, zlib, and mozilla? Hint: a bunch.
Name the first few closed source examples you have of shared resources like this.
Not to meantion the numberous times I've found spurious utility files taken from one project and used in another.
How many open-source developers you know that conduct large-scale usability tests?
I would imagine that many orders of magnatudes of more people have tried the lastest version of the Linux kernel as compared to Solaris, WINNT, and darwin kernels. Maybe that is not a usability test. For me I downloaded a few of the lastest Linux kernels for my desktop, I have found some good stuff, like performance increases. I've found some stuff was broke to hell, like sound and IDE when combined withe ACPI. You know what, these issues were already being discussed on the mailing list when I found them, and they appear to be working now that I am running 2.6.0-test11. Btw, I cannot get windows to play a dvd on the same laptop now that I have tried to patch it because of the RPC worms.
How many open-source developers go around interviewing end users?
I do. So thats one. How many closed source developers do this?
When the developer and product consumer is the same, open-source makes much more sense to me.
Hmm, sounds like the UNIX world to me. Built by developers and geeks for developers and geeks. Its working pretty well. All of the big boys are doing it now, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, etc.
I have stumbled over installing something like ImageMagick on a new version of Redhat.
This is a redhat problem, not an opensource problem. I've had similar problems with some silly windows programs that required a certain versions of visual basic dlls or some other prerequisite dll or whatever.
Btw, doing 'apt-get install imagemagick' on Debian works quite well. Doing 'rpm -i imagemagick' on RedHat is more than likely only going to give you a list of reasons why it aint gonna do it.
Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors.
Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people merely using your code, much less those interested in modifying it.
So. Just because something is open or closed source, it does not mean that it is a good program nor does it imply that anybody wants to use it.
Myth: Stopping new development for weeks or months to fix bugs is the best way to produce stable, polished software.
Reality: Stopping new development for awhile to find and fix unknown bugs is fine. That's only a part of writing good software.
I don't see too much disparity here between the "myth" and "reality".
Myth: New developers interested in the project will best learn the project by fixing bugs and reading the source code.
Reality: Reading code is difficult. Fixing bugs is difficult and probably something you don't want to do anyway. While giving someone unglamorous work is a good way to test his dedication, it relies on unstructured learning by osmosis.
This "reality" again does not dispell the "myth". Try having new developers interested in a project and reading source code in a closed source project. Yeah, its difficult to read code, but infinitely more difficult to read it if you dont have access to it. BTW, the metaphor or whatever "osmosis" is trying to make a point is pretty silly. Osmosis is the transfer of water through a semipermeable membrane.
Myth: Installation and configuration aren't as important as making the source available.
Reality: If it takes too much work just to get the software working, many people will silently quit.
Yeah, there not that important thats why we did silly stuff like create autoconf to configure and install software. That is why we carry around the install.sh form X11 to install software in a predictable and sane way. That is why we have plain readable text files to configure our software. The reality holds true for closed and open source as well.
Myth: Bad or unappealing code or projects should be thrown away completely.
Reality: Solving the same simple problems again and again wastes time that could be applied to solving new, larger problems.
This is again true for open and closed source projects. Go look at one of the windows (closed source) freeware/shareware depositories and you will find at least 5-10 programs that all do the same thing more or less. If these were open source projects, I would imagine that there would be a good amount of code reuse going on here.
Myth: It's better to provide a framework for lots of people to solve lots of problems than to solve only one problem well.
Reality: It's really hard to write a good framework unless you're already using it to solve at least one real problem.
Does anyone thing this is either a valid myth or something too terribly interesting to talk about? I will say however, that UNIX (I'm generalizing that opensource is more of a UNIX like thing here) in general is a framework and our stuff plays well with one another. We have programs have STDOUT, and STDERR messages that are formatted for external processing and parsing, we have exit statuses in our programs so they can be &&ed and ||ed or test for their success or failure. We have signals, pipes, and sockets for IPC. Look at the number of opensource installs and the wide variety of things that they do and tell me that we are not solving a number of real problems well.
Myth: Even though your previous code was buggy, undocumented, hard to maintain, or slow, your next attempt will be perfect.
Reality: If you weren't disciplined then, why would you be disciplined now?
Axiom of life. If program sucks, noone will use it. This is true for opensource and closed source stuff.
Myth: Warnings are just warnings. They're not errors and no one really cares about them.
Reality: Warnings
I really don't think this will be a boon to motorcycle safety
Well antilock brakes are no boon to automobile safety, but try to buy a car without them. For those that don't know, antilock breaks on average have no difference in minor colisions, but they increase the likelihood of you dying in a serious accident.
The reason is that minor accidents are, duh, minor where most of them involve a car hitting another one in front of it, and these are probably about 90% of all accidents. However, antilock breaks at higher speeds, especially when involving a curve, can lead to the vehicle overturning, which is the most dangerous situation to be in a car. Even other safety features like seatbelts and airbags have little benefits here. Its much more difficult to flip a car without antilock breaks.
A better stratergy for SUN would be to provide an upgrade path of Solaris to Linux, and to ride the wave, not fight it.
Maybe they can license the upgrade path from SCO. No I'm not trying to be funny or trollish. SCO has a product called "Linux Kernel Personalities" for thieir UNIX OS that enables Linux binaries to be run on that platform. Can't get any more info because SCO's website because its not responding. Hmmmm.