who cares if the drivers aren't open source? at least they're supporting the linux platform.
I care. Real Networks support the Linux platform with their binary-only RealPlayer. Adobe do the same with Acrobat Reader. That doesn't let me run either of them on my Sparc Linux box, though...
Let me spell it out for you one more time: Linux != Intel
Basically, CDE sucks. They needed something like GNOME or KDE but, being a big committee, were unable to come up with anything elegant.
Sure, CDE sucks, but it's not so much that they were unable to come up with anything elegant, but more they were unwilling to do so. It was very much a political thing, with each manufacturer having to be seen to contribute a part of it. HP's contribution was VUE, their Visual User Environment, which later became what we now know as CDE. I hated VUE back then, and I still hate CDE now. As you say, though, being designed by committee didn't help, either...
Actually, SCO now receives a royalty on each derivative of the System V code base
This is not strictly true. Some of the original System V licensees (Sun and SGI, at least) bought out the license for a large one off payment, when it was still owned by Novell, IIRC. As such, they no longer pay SCO royalties.
Besdies, isn't MS getting kickbacks from licensing WinCE to Sega for the DreamCast?
No, not really. Since the dreamcast OS is supplied on each disc, rather than in the console itself, game developers can choose whether to use WinCE or Sega's own OS. So far, it looks like most developers are avoiding CE.
The console manufacturers have had it coming for a while now. Unless they open up development for their machines, they're going to be crushed by someone that does allow free (as in unencumbered) development. The disappointing thing is that it looks like Micros~1 will be the one to do it.
Not because it's a great text editor (although I've yet to find anything better:-), but because it prompted the development of termcap to give terminal independence. Previous applications had been hardcoded to use the escape sequences of a particular terminal.
I'd say, in general, that most of the work done at UCB contributed more to the success of Unix than anything else. Without UCB, Unix would have probably remained in the dark ages. They gave us networking, vi, csh, and perhaps most importantly, an open source development model, which allowed Unix to become widespread.
PS. Sure, csh syntax may suck, but without it, we'd all be using Bourne shell. csh gave us command histories, brace expansion, and numerous other goodies that we take for granted today. Without csh, other shells (ksh, bash, zsh) would be very different, if they existed at all.
Indeed, it didn't make a lot of success, but Amiga was *always* way ahead of its time.
Yep. My only regret was the pricing structure. I lusted after Unix running on my beloved Amiga hardware for ages, but it was always priced way out my reach:-(
Glib already gives you linked lists, binary trees, hash tables and numerous other handy data structures and useful routines. It's widely used (being the basis for gdk/gtk, and hence Gimp, GNOME etc.) and fairly bug-free. For more details, see http://www.gtk.org/rdp/glib/book1.html.
Primarily for use in C, but bindings exist for numerous other languages, too.
If a DVD is encrypted, where does the key come from to decrypt it? If the user doesn't supply it at playback time, it must be embedded in the player. That means you only have to get one key, and you have access to everything. They can't change the encryption scheme without breaking all existing players, and can't blacklist the cracked key for the same reason. It's just security through obscurity, which has been proven ineffective time and time again.
Australia seems a very strange place. Australians are some of the most laid back, liberated people I've met, yet their politicians all seem to be ultra-conservative beaurocratic idiots. Yes, my opinion is probably biased -- never having been there, I can only go by what I see on TV. Am I really getting a distorted view of things?
PS. Yes, I know all politicians are beaurocratic idiots, Australian or not. It's just that Australian ones seem to be very conservative (with a lower case "c"), and seem to be far more concerned with the moral wellbeing of the nation than you'd expect, given the attitude of the main population.
Still waiting for BT to sort out ADSL
on
VDSL Demoed
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· Score: 2
That's all well and good, but I'm still waiting for BT to get off their backsides, and supply ADSL. They've just announced that they're dropping the speed from 2Mb/s to 512Kb/s and putting prices up at the same time. According to my ISP, they probably won't be able to get me ADSL until March at the earliest (BT have were saying September, but decided to delay it, presumably to screw as much out of their kilostream customers as possible before ADSL). And when it does arrive, it'll probably cost the equivalent of over US$150 per month:-(
Just curious... how much does 100Mb/s bandwidth to the Internet cost? It's not gonna be cheap (at least, if the prices of 2Mb/s leased lines in the UK are anything to go by).
Actually, no. Data General's DG/UX has had a B2 rating for many years. In fact, I'm fairly sure it beat OSF1 / Digital Unix / True64 / whatever they're calling it today, and was they first B2 rated Unix.
The most obvious one is IE's inability to display a PNG image. It can do it if the image is embedded in a web page, but not if it's a standalone image. Other than that, it only handles the basics of PNG, and doesn't do very well with transparanecy, etc (Netscape's not much better in this regard, either).
A friend of mine wrote some software which was released under a BSD style license. He handed the project over to a maintainer because he didn't have enough time to continue developing it. After some time, the new maintainer took it proprietary, depriving the community of the improvements made to the codebase. My friend now regrets not making it GPL in the first place. Yes, we still have the old codebase, but we'd have to duplicate a lot of code that the new maintainer's already done just to get back up to par with him. GPL would have prevented that. I agree that at the end of the day, the developer should be free to choose the license they're most comfortable with. For me, that's GPL, in a large part due to the above.
I haven't mentioned the name of my friend or the product, because it's not my place to air his grievances in public. That said, he reads slashdot, so he's free to name himself if he so chooses.
This is why I -personally- perfer the BSD type licenses.
Fair enough, but I could come up with equally valid examples of where the BSD license has failed the community. Yes, in this case, the BSD license would have prevented the problem. In other cases I've come across, the GPL would have prevented other problems. At the end of the day, I personally feel the GPL creates less problems than the BSD license, which is why I prefer it. You, and others, are welcome to disagree with me...
Exactly what noncommercial entities do you expect to develop that cure for cancer or AIDS, hm?
That's not what I said. If one company is given a patent on human genes, then only that company can work with those genes, at least without paying for hugely expensive licensing agreements. If they're in the public domain then any commercial entity can work with them. Now lets see... which route is more likely to result in a cure for AIDS or cancer? That's why I object to patenting of human genes.
Tcl/Tk also suffers from the lack of a solid API, with each new release having some major incompatibilities.
Intriguing. Exactly what would these "major incompatibilities" be, then? There are some (veyr minor) changes between releases, but that's about it. Lots of new functionality, yes, but major incompatibilities, no.
That's not to say that Tcl is ideal for writing business apps. It's not. While it can be done (and I am doing so now, BTW), the language isn't great for large scale projects. Give me pointers, for fsck's sake!:-) Tcl is, however, very good at producing small utilities, and doing so very quickly. Shell have 1.5 million lines of Tcl running on one of their oil rigs, apparently, so it can be done. Speaking from experience though, if I was going there, I wouldn't be starting with Tcl...
Y'know, a patent is only for 17 years. I'm guessing we'll be using the data for some time after that.
It's too important to be trusted to a commercial entity. We could be missing out on a cure for cancer or AIDS, bacause the company in question wasn't researching that area, and no-one else would touch the patented bits because it's easier to work on the other bits.
Patenting genes was a nasty kludge to allow companied to recoup R&D costs from times when that much computing power was expensive. It's becoming affordable now, and in a couple of years, no-one will even think about it. I'd rather wait a couple of years for the Human Genome Project to sort out the whole lot than have a company do it all in 4 months but prevent people working on it for the next 20 years.
Just to play devil's advocate for a bit, the patent on LZW actually helped progress, rather than hindering it. If Unisys weren't such assholes about it, PNG wouldn't have come into being until much later than it did. Yes, GIF was a poor standard, and needed replacing, but until the patent problems, no-one was really doing anything about it. PNG (or something like it) would have eventually replaced GIF anyway, but probably not for many, many years.
While that's what he's been doing most of recently, in my book, he'll always be one of the gods that helped bring Linux to my beloved Sparc. He also worked on the MIPS port. Oh, and he did Midnight Commander, too, but I forgive him for that:-)
Yes, they do, and some can take 128MB. However, that's storage, not random access memory (as I understand it, at least). Even if it did have enough memory, is there really enough processing power on a digital camera to run an arcade machine emulator at a sensible speed? I tried to check Kodak's site for the specs, but it was too slow:-(
Slashdot Mirror
I care. Real Networks support the Linux platform with their binary-only RealPlayer. Adobe do the same with Acrobat Reader. That doesn't let me run either of them on my Sparc Linux box, though...
Let me spell it out for you one more time: Linux != Intel
Sure, CDE sucks, but it's not so much that they were unable to come up with anything elegant, but more they were unwilling to do so. It was very much a political thing, with each manufacturer having to be seen to contribute a part of it. HP's contribution was VUE, their Visual User Environment, which later became what we now know as CDE. I hated VUE back then, and I still hate CDE now. As you say, though, being designed by committee didn't help, either...
This is not strictly true. Some of the original System V licensees (Sun and SGI, at least) bought out the license for a large one off payment, when it was still owned by Novell, IIRC. As such, they no longer pay SCO royalties.
No, we don't. We have "The X Window System", alternatively called "X11" or just "X", but never "X Windows".
Pedant, and proud of it :-)
No, not really. Since the dreamcast OS is supplied on each disc, rather than in the console itself, game developers can choose whether to use WinCE or Sega's own OS. So far, it looks like most developers are avoiding CE.
The console manufacturers have had it coming for a while now. Unless they open up development for their machines, they're going to be crushed by someone that does allow free (as in unencumbered) development. The disappointing thing is that it looks like Micros~1 will be the one to do it.
I'd say, in general, that most of the work done at UCB contributed more to the success of Unix than anything else. Without UCB, Unix would have probably remained in the dark ages. They gave us networking, vi, csh, and perhaps most importantly, an open source development model, which allowed Unix to become widespread.
PS. Sure, csh syntax may suck, but without it, we'd all be using Bourne shell. csh gave us command histories, brace expansion, and numerous other goodies that we take for granted today. Without csh, other shells (ksh, bash, zsh) would be very different, if they existed at all.
Yep. My only regret was the pricing structure. I lusted after Unix running on my beloved Amiga hardware for ages, but it was always priced way out my reach :-(
Primarily for use in C, but bindings exist for numerous other languages, too.
If a DVD is encrypted, where does the key come from to decrypt it? If the user doesn't supply it at playback time, it must be embedded in the player. That means you only have to get one key, and you have access to everything. They can't change the encryption scheme without breaking all existing players, and can't blacklist the cracked key for the same reason. It's just security through obscurity, which has been proven ineffective time and time again.
PS. Yes, I know all politicians are beaurocratic idiots, Australian or not. It's just that Australian ones seem to be very conservative (with a lower case "c"), and seem to be far more concerned with the moral wellbeing of the nation than you'd expect, given the attitude of the main population.
That's all well and good, but I'm still waiting for BT to get off their backsides, and supply ADSL. They've just announced that they're dropping the speed from 2Mb/s to 512Kb/s and putting prices up at the same time. According to my ISP, they probably won't be able to get me ADSL until March at the earliest (BT have were saying September, but decided to delay it, presumably to screw as much out of their kilostream customers as possible before ADSL). And when it does arrive, it'll probably cost the equivalent of over US$150 per month :-(
Not trying to start a flamewar, but in the words of someone whose name I've forgotten (Charlotte, perhaps?):
Just curious... how much does 100Mb/s bandwidth to the Internet cost? It's not gonna be cheap (at least, if the prices of 2Mb/s leased lines in the UK are anything to go by).
Actually, no. Data General's DG/UX has had a B2 rating for many years. In fact, I'm fairly sure it beat OSF1 / Digital Unix / True64 / whatever they're calling it today, and was they first B2 rated Unix.
The most obvious one is IE's inability to display a PNG image. It can do it if the image is embedded in a web page, but not if it's a standalone image. Other than that, it only handles the basics of PNG, and doesn't do very well with transparanecy, etc (Netscape's not much better in this regard, either).
A friend of mine wrote some software which was released under a BSD style license. He handed the project over to a maintainer because he didn't have enough time to continue developing it. After some time, the new maintainer took it proprietary, depriving the community of the improvements made to the codebase. My friend now regrets not making it GPL in the first place. Yes, we still have the old codebase, but we'd have to duplicate a lot of code that the new maintainer's already done just to get back up to par with him. GPL would have prevented that. I agree that at the end of the day, the developer should be free to choose the license they're most comfortable with. For me, that's GPL, in a large part due to the above.
I haven't mentioned the name of my friend or the product, because it's not my place to air his grievances in public. That said, he reads slashdot, so he's free to name himself if he so chooses.
Fair enough, but I could come up with equally valid examples of where the BSD license has failed the community. Yes, in this case, the BSD license would have prevented the problem. In other cases I've come across, the GPL would have prevented other problems. At the end of the day, I personally feel the GPL creates less problems than the BSD license, which is why I prefer it. You, and others, are welcome to disagree with me...
That's not what I said. If one company is given a patent on human genes, then only that company can work with those genes, at least without paying for hugely expensive licensing agreements. If they're in the public domain then any commercial entity can work with them. Now lets see... which route is more likely to result in a cure for AIDS or cancer? That's why I object to patenting of human genes.
Intriguing. Exactly what would these "major incompatibilities" be, then? There are some (veyr minor) changes between releases, but that's about it. Lots of new functionality, yes, but major incompatibilities, no.
That's not to say that Tcl is ideal for writing business apps. It's not. While it can be done (and I am doing so now, BTW), the language isn't great for large scale projects. Give me pointers, for fsck's sake! :-) Tcl is, however, very good at producing small utilities, and doing so very quickly. Shell have 1.5 million lines of Tcl running on one of their oil rigs, apparently, so it can be done. Speaking from experience though, if I was going there, I wouldn't be starting with Tcl...
So, the big question is... which Adaptec card are you having problems with? Both BSD and Linux support a large range of Adaptec cards.
It's too important to be trusted to a commercial entity. We could be missing out on a cure for cancer or AIDS, bacause the company in question wasn't researching that area, and no-one else would touch the patented bits because it's easier to work on the other bits.
Patenting genes was a nasty kludge to allow companied to recoup R&D costs from times when that much computing power was expensive. It's becoming affordable now, and in a couple of years, no-one will even think about it. I'd rather wait a couple of years for the Human Genome Project to sort out the whole lot than have a company do it all in 4 months but prevent people working on it for the next 20 years.
Just to play devil's advocate for a bit, the patent on LZW actually helped progress, rather than hindering it. If Unisys weren't such assholes about it, PNG wouldn't have come into being until much later than it did. Yes, GIF was a poor standard, and needed replacing, but until the patent problems, no-one was really doing anything about it. PNG (or something like it) would have eventually replaced GIF anyway, but probably not for many, many years.
While that's what he's been doing most of recently, in my book, he'll always be one of the gods that helped bring Linux to my beloved Sparc. He also worked on the MIPS port. Oh, and he did Midnight Commander, too, but I forgive him for that :-)
Yes, they do, and some can take 128MB. However, that's storage, not random access memory (as I understand it, at least). Even if it did have enough memory, is there really enough processing power on a digital camera to run an arcade machine emulator at a sensible speed? I tried to check Kodak's site for the specs, but it was too slow :-(