>um.... it was the embedded guys that were the first hackers of the first PCs. Not the other way around.
My understanding is that they developed essentially at the same time. I mean, the early PC's were built by hobbiest around the early microprocessors like the Z80, 6502, and the 8008. Was there really an embedded market that existed before those early microprocessors? What did they build systems with? The computing industry back then was still pretty much "mini-computers", which meant racks and racks of discrete SSI (and maybe some MSI) components to make up what we know today as the CPU.
I wasn't around in those days, though. Was there an embedded market that coexisted with mini-computers? I'm curious what an embedded system from back then would look like.
> Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, you can. I used to work on microcontrollers that had a low power mode wherein they shut off the external crystal, and instead used an internal ring oscillator for a clock. This is a big power savings, but the oscillator made for a poor clock: it was slow and it's period varied wildly. The uncertainty made it unacceptable for anything requiring accurate timing...even, in some cases, memory accesses. Still, it was useful for some things.
I think most commonly, the micro would go into this low power state, and sit in a loop, periodically polling it's serials. If anything interesting happened (say, change in position of a machine assembly), it would kick the clock back on and, once stable, execute the appropriate control routine, which likely required accurate timing.
Microcontrollers are really quite fascinating. It's amazing what you can do with just a very little computational power. The hackers who stayed up nights bumming single instructions out of their ASM routines in the early days of the PC now have a home in the embedded world, where resources are still tight.
> Should we be developing substitutes or alternatives for ActiveX instead of trying to recreate it?
Who is this "we" you speak of? Are you doing any development for any open source project? Specifically, are you working on Wine? If not, then it is not your "we" to consider. Obviously, the people working on this find it worthwhile. If you feel that other projects should be worked on, then devote your effort to those. The developer effort of the Wine project is not your's to command.
> Get your priorities straight: Linux ought to be an alternative, not a poor imitation.
Those are *your* priorities. They happen to be mine as well, but that isn't the point. Developers have their own goals, so you shouldn't expect them to work toward *your's* instead.
In particular, I think Miguel is overly fond of copying Microsoft. It's not how I would develop Gnome, but I'm not the one doing it...Miguel and the others are, and they will do it how they see fit. But you and I have no authority over them, so they will continue to develop as they please.
1) Define a new project with the same goal as multiple established projects.
2) Select a name that is already accepted for several other technologies.
3) Post it to Slashdot.
> If that's new and pretty, I don't want to even consider looking at old and ugly interfaces.
...which would be Athena. Actually, Athena is so utilitarian that I'm not sure it can even be judged on an aesthetic basis. It's almost orthogonal to beauty.
> Who designed the Motif widget set anyway? Must have been Stevie Wonder.
I'm not sure, but the application in question is using Tk, not Motif. IMHO Tk is less attractive than Motif, which is less than GTK, which is less than Qt. And, truthfully, I'm not just wild about Qt.
Of course, GTK and Qt are themable, so you can tweak them to your liking, assuming that you don't mind the performance hit (not sure how bad it is). Actually, Tk may be themable too, but I've never looked into it.
This is primarily an open source site, man. Darwin is open, sure, but the majority of the system is not. Hell, the hardware isn't open, either.
As for your description of KDE and Gnome as "marginally functional, amateur efforts", that's just flamebait. For the record, I was more impressed with KDE 1.0beta2 (1997) than with MacOS X (2001).
If you like MacOS X, and the licensing doesn't bother you, then use it. I'm interested in freedom, and I sure don't get that with an Apple platform.
Last I heard, QT was still under the QPL, which is a very different thing than the GPL or LGPL. KDE can't really be seperated from QT (alas, the Harmony Project collapsed), so using KDE still means using the QPL.
Like many, I find the QPL sufficiently disagreeable that I avoid KDE, even though I think it is a better system.
Of course, my "desktop" consists of FVWM, but I recommend Gnome to others. In the long run, I think it will "win". Types like me will choose it based on Freedom, and companies like HP and Sun will choose it because the LGPL license on GTK is a lot easier for them to swallow. They don't want to be beholden to some company named Troll Tech.
$600 does seem steep until you consider the feature set.
If memory serves, that board has 2 onboard SCSI controllers, 2 onboard ethernet controllers, and an onboard AGP graphics device. If you bought the MSI board, and then the seperate plug-in devices to bring it up to that functionality, it would come out to about the same price.
So, the Tyan board is priced reasonably given its feature set. Of course, if you don't need all those features, then the less expensive board makes more sense for you.
> it saddens me that so many people are misled by it
Oh drat...the objectivity didn't last long, did it?
> it really is a virus, trying to infect code it touches with its own license
Perhaps so, but you are glossing over a very important point...it only "infects" software who's authers *choose* to be infected. If that is what the author wants, who are you to argue?
> don't restrict or disincent them from doing so by forcing them to give up the rights and privacy of their proprietary addition.
Again, GPL code doesn't "force" them to do anything. It lays down licensing rules for use, just like any license. If a person doesn't like those rules, they don't have to use that software. They have no god-given right to it.
> I really wish more people saw the GPL as having the hampering effect that it does
The GPL seems "hampering" to you simply because it doesn't fit into your ideal of complete openness that lets "the market decide".
That doesn't fit with *my* ideal. I've seen what the market "decides" on, and I don't like it.
I happily use the GPL, and it bothers me none at all that you find it "hampering". I find it liberating.
FYI- Emissions standards aren't regulated at the state level, but at the city level. Houston and Dallas have had emissions standards for years and years. (not that it has done a bloody lot of good for Houston)
You can expect that Austin will pick them up shortly...perhaps within a year's time.
> over here a Land Rover Discovery literally is a small, economical family car
You are full of it. SUV's are fairly common, but your statement is flat hyperbole. And FYI pickups get considerably better gas mileage than an SUV.
> Texans really, truly do drive pickup trucks instead of cars
You need to take into account that low-end pickups are rather cheap vehicles, and thus economic from that standpoint. Still, their popularity is a bit of a holdover from the days when they were needed "out on the ranch" in Texas. Their actual utility is fairly low if you are in the city.
But again your statement is hyperbole. Virtually no one I know drives a truck, and I have lived in Texas all my life.
First of all, AMD isn't making a fuss about this. Slashdot is making a fuss. AMD just made an announcement, and anyone who follows knows that they make several such announcements a week.
But the reason that teaming up with Transmeta is appealing is that Transmeta can offer them a processor that acts like a Sledgehammer well before they have silicon for the part. Software simulation of modern microprocessors is ridiculously slow, particularly when you are upping the word length from 32 to 64. However, writing a code-morphing layer on top of Transmeta's chips means that they can have a near-native speed chip before the design is even finished.
Being able to run tests at near-native speed, pre-silicon means that AMD can overlap software development with the hardware development, which could buy them months of development time. In this business, time to market is of overriding importance. And a shorter time to market is what AMD wants out of this alliance with Transmeta.
Pretty much, yes. KDE has KWM and Gnome (now) has Sawfish. It may even be included in the official Gnome "releases" though I haven't checked.
Sure, you can use other WM's, but I can understand why Sun wouldn't want to advertise that fact. It would confuse most users. The division of labor among programs that make up our graphical shells isn't commonly understood, even by experienced users. And there isn't much need for them user to understand this division, anyway. If they want to learn, they'll figure it out quickly enough anyway.
And I'll take a moment to praise Sun for moving away from the badly dated CDE, and towards a more modern DE. And thank heavens they picked Gnome instead of trying to create another homespun, closed, proprietary system.
It is worth noting that the acceptance of Gnome as an standard, common system among commercial Unix vendors represents a large step towards the vision that RMS layed out in the GNU Manifesto.
I believe that you are confusing RMS and ESR. To my knowledge, RMS is uninterested in firearms. And that's a rather small difference compared to their relative beliefs in software licensing.
> I think RMS is just a little out of touch today anyway.
Possible.
> He's too unyeilding, and that never leads to success.
Boy, you got that right. When will people learn that revolutionaries never win? That's why Massachusetts still pays taxes to England, and Texas is still a part of Mexico.
> you DO have to balance a company wanting to make money with open source work, and the community.
No you don't.
> I'm surprised someone hasn't lambasted id/Carmack for releasing the code to their games, and yet not making it Free.
Last I checked, id's release of Quake was under the terms of the GPL. By definition, that code is free software.
> To the extent that he denies a software author the right to do with his code as he pleases, the man is a maniac.
And tell me how he denies any programmers of their rights? Is he somehow denying them by not letting them redistribute his software under a license not of his choosing? No, he's *granting* them rights to his software. You can argue that BSD or Artistic licenses grant *more* privelidges, but the GPL certainly doesn't *take away* rights, it merely grants more limited rights. Don't confure less positive with a negative.
> As it is, he can be a royal pain.
Has he been calling you up and bothering you lately? Has he been threatening you personally? No, he just states his mind. People seem to think that Stallman is "out to get" other software projects, but mostly people go to him and say "do you like this non-GPL license?", to which he will say "no". Big surprise there. We wouldn't hear nearly as much out of Stallman if people weren't constantly seeking his opinion.
> But the bottom line is that free code is a GIFT.
So is "free code" this amazing new concept of your's, or are you just trying dodge the phrase "free software", which was defined by Stallman himself? The gift philosophy is more or less the BSD mindset. That's great, but that's not "free software". By definition, what Stallman is pushing is "free software".
> For that matter, it's worth pointing out that the GPL actually restricts my freedom!
That is a blatant lie. Without the GPL you have no rights to the code. With it, you are granted limited rights. If the license was BSD, you would arguably have more rights, but the fact of the matter is that the GPL is *adding* to your rights. So, effectively, you are whining because Stallman isn't giving you all that you want out of him. You seem to want him to give you *his* software on *your* terms.
> So Stallman's blathering about "free" software is a little disingenuous.
Who, precisely, is more qualified to comment on free software than the man who created the term to begin with, and founded the Free Software Foundation?
> What he really means is that he (or the FSF) should dictate how we use software.
No, they are dictating how you use *their* software. Sorry if it cramps your style, but the GPL grants us a whole heck of a lot of rights.
> If he would change his focus from one of religious zealotry to one wherein he encourages developers to give gifts
He's not interested in gifts, he's interested in freedom. Not just freedom in the here and now, but *sustained* freedom. That is where the BSD and GPL camps really diverge. The GPL makes provisions to ensure *continued* freedom. You may feel that the provision is to onerous, but atleast understand it's purpose.
I'm glad you have this insight, but it's nothing new. It was all layed out in the GNU Manifesto in the 80's. Stallman plainly understood the effect GPL'ed software would have on the business environment. He says straight out that the way to make money with free software is to sell support, or do contract programming.
And Caldera is hardly a.com . They've been around for a while. Also, their business is certainly not "based solely" on their Linux distro.
That said, I wouldn't really mind seeing Caldera shrivel up and die. They sure aren't doing the open source world any favors.
I find your post deeply ironic. You seem to be implying that Bill Joy dislikes open source. Perhaps you don't know much about Bill Joy, so I'll inform. Bill Joy was the principle designer of BSD Unix while a grad student at Berkeley. Berkeley Unix was pretty much *the original* open source project. And it was very influential as well...quite a bit of what we know as "unix" and even "the internet" was defined by BSD. And yes: today's FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD projects all descend from this code base and tradition. You could say that Bill Joy is the granddaddy of the BSD world.
Later, Bill Joy left Berkeley to help start Sun. And yes, he took BSD with him and Sun commercialized it into SunOS. Years later it would morph into the SysV type hybrid called Solaris that we still have, but in the beginning Sun basically sold BSD boxes.
No doubt now that he is an executive in a closed source company, he views open source OS's as a bit of a threat. But historically, this man has contributed a great deal to the open source cause. Infact, he's probably up there with RMS in terms of code contribution. This should not be ignored.
> I doubt anyone will want to go into flame-wars over windowmanagers now, do they?
Not when the story is over a wm independent desktop.
Surely you realize this, but Blackbox is a window manager, while Gnome is a desktop. Upshot: you can run Gnome alongside Blackbox. Actually, although KDE comes with KWM, I don't think there is a specific "Gnome" window manager. Most installs seem to default to using sawfish with Gnome these days, but I'm pretty sure Sawfish is an independent project.
If I recall, Blackbox even has support for KDE hints...not sure about Gnome hints.
When they refer to his race, they often call him "African-American", which he clearly is not.
That's because most Americans say "African American" when they mean "black". For some reason, people feel it is impolite to call someone "black", so they resort to "African American" even in cases where the person has zero African blood. Silly, that. It cuts the other way, too...I had friends growing up who were "African American" (Moroccan) but as pasty as any "white" kid. No one thought of them as "African American", but they could still apply for any of the scholarships because no one wants to say that their scholarships are for "blacks". (But they could not apply for "Afro-American" scholarships, because that denotes "black" in addition to African)
Also, when someone is referred to as "black", it implies that someone is African-American, not just "black-colored".
Not true of the people I speak with. "Black" is a description which primarily applies to those of
African heritage, but others who "look the part" are considered "black" in my experience.
He is NOT the 1st primarily black champion golfer.
Yes he is, but only if you consider "black" a description rather than a race. I certainly do.
"What I realized is that even though I'm mathematically Asian -- if anything -- if you have one drop of black blood in the United States, you're black."
Indeed...well said. This isn't just true of blacks, though. To be legally considered "native american", you only need a small fraction of American Indian blood -- I think it's 1/16th. Generally, half asians / half white people are seen as "asian". I guess the minority traits are the ones most noticed in America.
All of the current code, including benchmarks, is tuned for the old architecture.
That has always been the case for every new architecture! It is not an extenuating circumstance, it is the norm. Every new architecture has to overcome this hurdle. This excuses the Pentium IV's poor performance none at all.
Intel increased their pipeline length so that they could more easily ramp frequency. That's fine -- that's an engineering tradeoff. However, it is only a good tradeoff if it allows them to ramp the frequency enough to overcome the performance lost to branch misprediction. However, current top of the line Pentium IV's are beaten by PIII's and Athlons, so obviously this didn't happen. It was not the correct time to make this change in architecture.
The Pentium IV was ill-conceived and rushed to market. Pentium IV is Intel's half-baked, panicked reaction to AMD's continued dominance in benchmarks. Intel was banking that they could market it enough to sell the thing, but it isn't working. The price is too high, and the performance is too low. The market just isn't biting, and with damn good reason.
And I'm really sick of hearing Intel apologists whine that current software is written for Pentium II/III's. AMD has never had software written towards their platform, but they are still winning in benchmarks. There are optimizations that people could do for Athlon that would make it look even better in the benchmarks. AMD has always dealt with running apps optimized for competitor's chips. So I don't exactly have sympathy for poor old Intel that broke their own optimizations with this generation.
The thing that worries me about this is that AMD is not playing the game
You mean AMD is not playing Intel's game. Intel's decision was a bad one. Lengthening the pipe will be required eventually to ramp clock speed, but you don't release non-competitive processor and say "we know it sucks, but future products will be better, so buy this one now". What do consumers care about the design? They just want the performance ramp, and maintaining that ramp is effectively AMD and Intel's mission in life. Intel failed in their mission.
Intel shouldn't have fielded a chip in this new line until it was competitive. They released too early because they were scared. It wasn't a good engineering decision.
Unix is a registered trademark. I think SCO owns it currently. I do not believe that FreeBSD has licensed this trademark. So, legally, it should not be called "unix".
Then there is the technical argument, that since FreeBSD descended from BSD, which descended from the original AT&T Unix, it is a "legitimate" Unix. By the same argument, since Linux is a ground-up rewrite, sharing no AT&T code, it is not "unix". This is not as cut-and-dry as it sounds, however.
FreeBSD is actually descended from 4.4 BSD-Lite. Why is it called "Lite"? Because it is *unencumbered* of the tie to AT&T. The Berkeley people went through and rewrote / eliminated code so that they could release a system independent of the old Bell Labs version, thus avoiding licensing difficulties with AT&T. So, FreeBSD is independent of the original unix *anyway*.
So, does BSD/Lite constitute a complete rewrite, that was merely carried out in stages? If so, then FreeBSD shares no more blood with the original Unix than Linux does.
Anyway, definining "Unix" so narrowly seems a bit silly to me. These systems all descend from the same tradition. I see no need to try to lay claim to legitimacy based on code lineage.
> This is about free market conditions, and the invisible hand of the free market, and yadayadayada.
Bullshit. That line, and most all of the rest of capitalistic theory is predicated on an open, competitive market. In a world with monopolies and cartels, it has virtually zero meaning.
If all hardware companies got together and decided to implement CPRM or SDMI or whatever, the free market is left with no alternative. If people don't like the new measures, they are out of luck. There is no competition to take their business to, they have to suck it up and deal with it, or simply not buy hardware at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh we all love Neal.
>um.... it was the embedded guys that were the first hackers of the first PCs. Not the other way around.
My understanding is that they developed essentially at the same time. I mean, the early PC's were built by hobbiest around the early microprocessors like the Z80, 6502, and the 8008. Was there really an embedded market that existed before those early microprocessors? What did they build systems with? The computing industry back then was still pretty much "mini-computers", which meant racks and racks of discrete SSI (and maybe some MSI) components to make up what we know today as the CPU.
I wasn't around in those days, though. Was there an embedded market that coexisted with mini-computers? I'm curious what an embedded system from back then would look like.
--Lenny
> Is there any way to communicate without having an accurate clock?
Yes, you can. I used to work on microcontrollers that had a low power mode wherein they shut off the external crystal, and instead used an internal ring oscillator for a clock. This is a big power savings, but the oscillator made for a poor clock: it was slow and it's period varied wildly. The uncertainty made it unacceptable for anything requiring accurate timing...even, in some cases, memory accesses. Still, it was useful for some things.
I think most commonly, the micro would go into this low power state, and sit in a loop, periodically polling it's serials. If anything interesting happened (say, change in position of a machine assembly), it would kick the clock back on and, once stable, execute the appropriate control routine, which likely required accurate timing.
Microcontrollers are really quite fascinating. It's amazing what you can do with just a very little computational power. The hackers who stayed up nights bumming single instructions out of their ASM routines in the early days of the PC now have a home in the embedded world, where resources are still tight.
--Lenny
> Should we be developing substitutes or alternatives for ActiveX instead of trying to recreate it?
Who is this "we" you speak of? Are you doing any development for any open source project? Specifically, are you working on Wine? If not, then it is not your "we" to consider. Obviously, the people working on this find it worthwhile. If you feel that other projects should be worked on, then devote your effort to those. The developer effort of the Wine project is not your's to command.
> Get your priorities straight: Linux ought to be an alternative, not a poor imitation.
Those are *your* priorities. They happen to be mine as well, but that isn't the point. Developers have their own goals, so you shouldn't expect them to work toward *your's* instead.
In particular, I think Miguel is overly fond of copying Microsoft. It's not how I would develop Gnome, but I'm not the one doing it...Miguel and the others are, and they will do it how they see fit. But you and I have no authority over them, so they will continue to develop as they please.
--Lenny
Ways not to have an impact on computing...
1) Define a new project with the same goal as multiple established projects.
2) Select a name that is already accepted for several other technologies.
3) Post it to Slashdot.
Lenny
> If that's new and pretty, I don't want to even consider looking at old and ugly interfaces.
...which would be Athena. Actually, Athena is so utilitarian that I'm not sure it can even be judged on an aesthetic basis. It's almost orthogonal to beauty.
> Who designed the Motif widget set anyway? Must have been Stevie Wonder.
I'm not sure, but the application in question is using Tk, not Motif. IMHO Tk is less attractive than Motif, which is less than GTK, which is less than Qt. And, truthfully, I'm not just wild about Qt.
Of course, GTK and Qt are themable, so you can tweak them to your liking, assuming that you don't mind the performance hit (not sure how bad it is). Actually, Tk may be themable too, but I've never looked into it.
--Lenny
This is primarily an open source site, man. Darwin is open, sure, but the majority of the system is not. Hell, the hardware isn't open, either.
As for your description of KDE and Gnome as "marginally functional, amateur efforts", that's just flamebait. For the record, I was more impressed with KDE 1.0beta2 (1997) than with MacOS X (2001).
If you like MacOS X, and the licensing doesn't bother you, then use it. I'm interested in freedom, and I sure don't get that with an Apple platform.
--Lenny
Last I heard, QT was still under the QPL, which is a very different thing than the GPL or LGPL. KDE can't really be seperated from QT (alas, the Harmony Project collapsed), so using KDE still means using the QPL.
Like many, I find the QPL sufficiently disagreeable that I avoid KDE, even though I think it is a better system.
Of course, my "desktop" consists of FVWM, but I recommend Gnome to others. In the long run, I think it will "win". Types like me will choose it based on Freedom, and companies like HP and Sun will choose it because the LGPL license on GTK is a lot easier for them to swallow. They don't want to be beholden to some company named Troll Tech.
--Lenny
$600 does seem steep until you consider the feature set.
If memory serves, that board has 2 onboard SCSI controllers, 2 onboard ethernet controllers, and an onboard AGP graphics device. If you bought the MSI board, and then the seperate plug-in devices to bring it up to that functionality, it would come out to about the same price.
So, the Tyan board is priced reasonably given its feature set. Of course, if you don't need all those features, then the less expensive board makes more sense for you.
--Lenny
I should know better than to bicker with AC's...
> I don't consider the GPL freedom
Fair enough.
> it saddens me that so many people are misled by it
Oh drat...the objectivity didn't last long, did it?
> it really is a virus, trying to infect code it touches with its own license
Perhaps so, but you are glossing over a very important point...it only "infects" software who's authers *choose* to be infected. If that is what the author wants, who are you to argue?
> don't restrict or disincent them from doing so by forcing them to give up the rights and privacy of their proprietary addition.
Again, GPL code doesn't "force" them to do anything. It lays down licensing rules for use, just like any license. If a person doesn't like those rules, they don't have to use that software. They have no god-given right to it.
> I really wish more people saw the GPL as having the hampering effect that it does
The GPL seems "hampering" to you simply because it doesn't fit into your ideal of complete openness that lets "the market decide".
That doesn't fit with *my* ideal. I've seen what the market "decides" on, and I don't like it.
I happily use the GPL, and it bothers me none at all that you find it "hampering". I find it liberating.
--Lenny
FYI- Emissions standards aren't regulated at the state level, but at the city level. Houston and Dallas have had emissions standards for years and years. (not that it has done a bloody lot of good for Houston)
You can expect that Austin will pick them up shortly...perhaps within a year's time.
> over here a Land Rover Discovery literally is a small, economical family car
You are full of it. SUV's are fairly common, but your statement is flat hyperbole. And FYI pickups get considerably better gas mileage than an SUV.
> Texans really, truly do drive pickup trucks instead of cars
You need to take into account that low-end pickups are rather cheap vehicles, and thus economic from that standpoint. Still, their popularity is a bit of a holdover from the days when they were needed "out on the ranch" in Texas. Their actual utility is fairly low if you are in the city.
But again your statement is hyperbole. Virtually no one I know drives a truck, and I have lived in Texas all my life.
--Lenny
This is a similar speech JFK gave in 1962, but I've heard more references to it than to the original one this story refers to.
http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j091262.htm
Enjoy.
--Lenny
First of all, AMD isn't making a fuss about this. Slashdot is making a fuss. AMD just made an announcement, and anyone who follows knows that they make several such announcements a week.
But the reason that teaming up with Transmeta is appealing is that Transmeta can offer them a processor that acts like a Sledgehammer well before they have silicon for the part. Software simulation of modern microprocessors is ridiculously slow, particularly when you are upping the word length from 32 to 64. However, writing a code-morphing layer on top of Transmeta's chips means that they can have a near-native speed chip before the design is even finished.
Being able to run tests at near-native speed, pre-silicon means that AMD can overlap software development with the hardware development, which could buy them months of development time. In this business, time to market is of overriding importance. And a shorter time to market is what AMD wants out of this alliance with Transmeta.
--Lenny
> Is it just assumed that Sawfish is it nowadays?
Pretty much, yes. KDE has KWM and Gnome (now) has Sawfish. It may even be included in the official Gnome "releases" though I haven't checked.
Sure, you can use other WM's, but I can understand why Sun wouldn't want to advertise that fact. It would confuse most users. The division of labor among programs that make up our graphical shells isn't commonly understood, even by experienced users. And there isn't much need for them user to understand this division, anyway. If they want to learn, they'll figure it out quickly enough anyway.
And I'll take a moment to praise Sun for moving away from the badly dated CDE, and towards a more modern DE. And thank heavens they picked Gnome instead of trying to create another homespun, closed, proprietary system.
It is worth noting that the acceptance of Gnome as an standard, common system among commercial Unix vendors represents a large step towards the vision that RMS layed out in the GNU Manifesto.
Viva la revolution!
--Lenny
> RMS (the gun-nut)
I believe that you are confusing RMS and ESR. To my knowledge, RMS is uninterested in firearms. And that's a rather small difference compared to their relative beliefs in software licensing.
Be careful with your TLA's...
--Lenny
> I think RMS is just a little out of touch today anyway.
Possible.
> He's too unyeilding, and that never leads to success.
Boy, you got that right. When will people learn that revolutionaries never win? That's why Massachusetts still pays taxes to England, and Texas is still a part of Mexico.
> you DO have to balance a company wanting to make money with open source work, and the community.
No you don't.
> I'm surprised someone hasn't lambasted id/Carmack for releasing the code to their games, and yet not making it Free.
Last I checked, id's release of Quake was under the terms of the GPL. By definition, that code is free software.
--Lenny
> To the extent that he denies a software author the right to do with his code as he pleases, the man is a maniac.
And tell me how he denies any programmers of their rights? Is he somehow denying them by not letting them redistribute his software under a license not of his choosing? No, he's *granting* them rights to his software. You can argue that BSD or Artistic licenses grant *more* privelidges, but the GPL certainly doesn't *take away* rights, it merely grants more limited rights. Don't confure less positive with a negative.
> As it is, he can be a royal pain.
Has he been calling you up and bothering you lately? Has he been threatening you personally? No, he just states his mind. People seem to think that Stallman is "out to get" other software projects, but mostly people go to him and say "do you like this non-GPL license?", to which he will say "no". Big surprise there. We wouldn't hear nearly as much out of Stallman if people weren't constantly seeking his opinion.
> But the bottom line is that free code is a GIFT.
So is "free code" this amazing new concept of your's, or are you just trying dodge the phrase "free software", which was defined by Stallman himself? The gift philosophy is more or less the BSD mindset. That's great, but that's not "free software". By definition, what Stallman is pushing is "free software".
> For that matter, it's worth pointing out that the GPL actually restricts my freedom!
That is a blatant lie. Without the GPL you have no rights to the code. With it, you are granted limited rights. If the license was BSD, you would arguably have more rights, but the fact of the matter is that the GPL is *adding* to your rights. So, effectively, you are whining because Stallman isn't giving you all that you want out of him. You seem to want him to give you *his* software on *your* terms.
> So Stallman's blathering about "free" software is a little disingenuous.
Who, precisely, is more qualified to comment on free software than the man who created the term to begin with, and founded the Free Software Foundation?
> What he really means is that he (or the FSF) should dictate how we use software.
No, they are dictating how you use *their* software. Sorry if it cramps your style, but the GPL grants us a whole heck of a lot of rights.
> If he would change his focus from one of religious zealotry to one wherein he encourages developers to give gifts
He's not interested in gifts, he's interested in freedom. Not just freedom in the here and now, but *sustained* freedom. That is where the BSD and GPL camps really diverge. The GPL makes provisions to ensure *continued* freedom. You may feel that the provision is to onerous, but atleast understand it's purpose.
-Lenny
> ive been saying this for months...
.com . They've been around for a while. Also, their business is certainly not "based solely" on their Linux distro.
I'm glad you have this insight, but it's nothing new. It was all layed out in the GNU Manifesto in the 80's. Stallman plainly understood the effect GPL'ed software would have on the business environment. He says straight out that the way to make money with free software is to sell support, or do contract programming.
And Caldera is hardly a
That said, I wouldn't really mind seeing Caldera shrivel up and die. They sure aren't doing the open source world any favors.
--Lenny
I find your post deeply ironic. You seem to be implying that Bill Joy dislikes open source. Perhaps you don't know much about Bill Joy, so I'll inform. Bill Joy was the principle designer of BSD Unix while a grad student at Berkeley. Berkeley Unix was pretty much *the original* open source project. And it was very influential as well...quite a bit of what we know as "unix" and even "the internet" was defined by BSD. And yes: today's FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD projects all descend from this code base and tradition. You could say that Bill Joy is the granddaddy of the BSD world.
Later, Bill Joy left Berkeley to help start Sun. And yes, he took BSD with him and Sun commercialized it into SunOS. Years later it would morph into the SysV type hybrid called Solaris that we still have, but in the beginning Sun basically sold BSD boxes.
No doubt now that he is an executive in a closed source company, he views open source OS's as a bit of a threat. But historically, this man has contributed a great deal to the open source cause. Infact, he's probably up there with RMS in terms of code contribution. This should not be ignored.
--Lenny
> I doubt anyone will want to go into flame-wars over windowmanagers now, do they?
Not when the story is over a wm independent desktop.
Surely you realize this, but Blackbox is a window manager, while Gnome is a desktop. Upshot: you can run Gnome alongside Blackbox. Actually, although KDE comes with KWM, I don't think there is a specific "Gnome" window manager. Most installs seem to default to using sawfish with Gnome these days, but I'm pretty sure Sawfish is an independent project.
If I recall, Blackbox even has support for KDE hints...not sure about Gnome hints.
--Lenny
It will happen. And it will be sweet.
--Lenny
--Lenny
Intel increased their pipeline length so that they could more easily ramp frequency. That's fine -- that's an engineering tradeoff. However, it is only a good tradeoff if it allows them to ramp the frequency enough to overcome the performance lost to branch misprediction. However, current top of the line Pentium IV's are beaten by PIII's and Athlons, so obviously this didn't happen. It was not the correct time to make this change in architecture.
The Pentium IV was ill-conceived and rushed to market. Pentium IV is Intel's half-baked, panicked reaction to AMD's continued dominance in benchmarks. Intel was banking that they could market it enough to sell the thing, but it isn't working. The price is too high, and the performance is too low. The market just isn't biting, and with damn good reason.
And I'm really sick of hearing Intel apologists whine that current software is written for Pentium II/III's. AMD has never had software written towards their platform, but they are still winning in benchmarks. There are optimizations that people could do for Athlon that would make it look even better in the benchmarks. AMD has always dealt with running apps optimized for competitor's chips. So I don't exactly have sympathy for poor old Intel that broke their own optimizations with this generation.
You mean AMD is not playing Intel's game. Intel's decision was a bad one. Lengthening the pipe will be required eventually to ramp clock speed, but you don't release non-competitive processor and say "we know it sucks, but future products will be better, so buy this one now". What do consumers care about the design? They just want the performance ramp, and maintaining that ramp is effectively AMD and Intel's mission in life. Intel failed in their mission.
Intel shouldn't have fielded a chip in this new line until it was competitive. They released too early because they were scared. It wasn't a good engineering decision.
--Lenny
Unix is a registered trademark. I think SCO owns it currently. I do not believe that FreeBSD has licensed this trademark. So, legally, it should not be called "unix".
Then there is the technical argument, that since FreeBSD descended from BSD, which descended from the original AT&T Unix, it is a "legitimate" Unix. By the same argument, since Linux is a ground-up rewrite, sharing no AT&T code, it is not "unix". This is not as cut-and-dry as it sounds, however.
FreeBSD is actually descended from 4.4 BSD-Lite. Why is it called "Lite"? Because it is *unencumbered* of the tie to AT&T. The Berkeley people went through and rewrote / eliminated code so that they could release a system independent of the old Bell Labs version, thus avoiding licensing difficulties with AT&T. So, FreeBSD is independent of the original unix *anyway*.
So, does BSD/Lite constitute a complete rewrite, that was merely carried out in stages? If so, then FreeBSD shares no more blood with the original Unix than Linux does.
Anyway, definining "Unix" so narrowly seems a bit silly to me. These systems all descend from the same tradition. I see no need to try to lay claim to legitimacy based on code lineage.
--Lenny
> This is about free market conditions, and the invisible hand of the free market, and yadayadayada.
Bullshit. That line, and most all of the rest of capitalistic theory is predicated on an open, competitive market. In a world with monopolies and cartels, it has virtually zero meaning.
If all hardware companies got together and decided to implement CPRM or SDMI or whatever, the free market is left with no alternative. If people don't like the new measures, they are out of luck. There is no competition to take their business to, they have to suck it up and deal with it, or simply not buy hardware at all.
Rosy, isn't it?
--Lenny