The Xenix that Microsoft produced was based on the original AT&T code. They didn't own it. Microsoft likes to own and control things, and I suspect this was a factor in them getting out of the Unix market when they did. It makes sense to me.
Is BSD "Cathedral" code?
on
BSD vs GPL
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· Score: 1
My impression, from looking into the way that the BSD Os'es are developed, (and I am not in any way connected to the teams) is that they're developed by smaller teams of programmers. It could even be considered a version of the "Cathedral" model of development, if one imposes ESR's paradigm on it. As such, it reflects favorably on the "Cathedral" model, and shows that high quality code can be developed that way, without the result being closed-source.
My personal experience with installing and using NetBSD has shown me that it's much uniform than any flavor of Linux I've tried. The whole OS base is packed in a few tarballs organized by function/hierarchy. It seems more holistic than the smorgasboard of packages that go into, say, a Slackware distribution. The whole 'userland' can be built from a top-level makefile, which gives it more consistency and uniformity than a collection of miscellaneous utilities all from different build environments. There are numerous third party 'packages' available, but they reside in a separate directory tree from the "OS" tree. It strikes me as being very similar to the way a 'classic' Unix is arranged.
People talk about the 'fragmentation' of the *BSD OS'es, but when you really look at it objectively, there are only three 'free' BSD's: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Each version has one fairly uniform codebase. It's not like Linux where there's a new distribution 'fork' every time someone gets inspired to produce one.
There are doubtless historical reasons for the BSD license (it's direct lineage from the Unices of the early 80's mean it carries different baggage than GNU stuff), just as there is a firm ideology behind the GPL.
The article on Daemon News was written from one 'political' extreme supporting the BSD license, but there isn't a political Manifesto behind the BSD Licenese like the Gnu Manifesto by RMS. Maybe articles like this fill that void for some.
From a practical point of view, the BSD license seems a lot more 'business friendly' to the way the software industry has traditionally developed. Because of this there are a number of high quality BSD-derivatives (also, of course, because it's been around longer) in the commercial world. (Solaris, BeOS, NeXT, to name a few) In that sense, it's a more successful model than the GPL.
When Microsoft sold off Xenix to what became SCO (which was originally a Microsoft entity) they agreed to never compete directly in the Unix market as part of the agreement. The way the story I heard goes was that Bill Gates had grown tired of paying AT&T a hefty royalty for each copy of Xenix sold, so they divested and the result was SCO. For this reason, it's been legally impossible for Microsoft to directly compete in the Unix market. Also for this reason, there's little chance they will enter the Unix-clone market, at least not as an OS vendor.
I don't have really hard-and-firm sources on this info, it just comes from a few years back when I had an Altos 586 machine with Microsoft Xenix on it and was researching the history of the OS my machine. So if somebody can correct me on this, I'd be glad to learn more.
They should be the same ol' pinouts that I find in my hardbound Texas Instruments TTL manual from about 1975. Some things will never change.
I have TTL gates from the very early 70's. And at least a few op-amps from the late 60's. I wonder if chips will eventually become collectable? My Intel 8008 is probably already collectable...
Re:The absence of the GPL
on
*BSD News
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· Score: 2
> There's no question that RMS has a political > agenda, but then so does the Daemon News, which > has repeatedly demonstrated that its political > agenda is to try to get people to release > software on BSD-like rather than GPL-like terms.
Nobody can deny that there is politics on both sides of the arguement. "Politics" is not automatically a dirty word. My biggest concern where the GPL is concerned is that as the popularity of Linux increases and it continues to commercialize, there may be a legal melt-down at some point. (How much of the GPL has been tested in court? With the pockets of GPL advocates and benificiaries growing deeper and deeper every day, how long before the legal hassles start?) 'FUD', I know, but fears that will only be go away when uncertainty is removed, to eliminate the doubt.
I like the idea that there are other licensing schemes out there being advocated, and not just GNU. It strikes me sometimes that certain GNU advocates view the GPL they champion as a Borg-like entity that will inevitably absorb all software.
I was initially worried when I heard the news about Motorola, because I like a number of their 8-bit chips for embedded work. But it sounds like what's really being divested is the non-CPU silicon, i.e. logic gates, and discrete semiconductors like transistors, diodes, and thyristors. Has anybody heard to the contrary? I 'm not working in a job right now where I have a Motorola rep I can call to be certain they aren't killing the 'HC11 and 'HC05. I like those chip families (it can be a matter of pride to be able to say the code you're working on runs in 512 bytes of RAM, with a 500 KHz clock).
An interesting, and to some developers, central point of the difference between Linux and the BSD unices is that BSD is not under the GPL. This can become a very political issue if pushed to the wall. There's an interesting article about these issues in the latest issue of Daemon News , which is a publication well worth reading if you're interested in BSD.
Some would say that the absence of the GPL is one of the features of BSD.
Re:Where to buy the CD-ROM?
on
*BSD News
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· Score: 1
Last time I ordered, you could buy any of the three BSDs for $5 apiece from www.cheapbytes.com or all three together (3 cdroms) for $10. These aren't the "official" releases though. Just everything you'd get with an "official" release.
A problem still exists with international distribution (at least of the NetBSD CD) because the crypto is included on the CDs.
I would consider shipping a NetBSD CD with the crypto directory removed (it's not very big and you can download that part yourself) to a few individuals if needed. (but I only have a slow CDR drive so I'm NOT a publisher by any means).
Re:I want to try BSD .. but which one?
on
*BSD News
·
· Score: 2
FreeBSD isn't very fast if you're not running an Intel processor. (but several other architectures are being ported to)
I've learned a lot from running NetBSD/i386, myself. In my very humble opinion, NetBSD has the brightest future, as it's from the get-go designed to be platform neutral. But it's definitely not a fighting matter.
All 3 of the free BSDs are available on CD-ROM from Cheapbytes. I got great satisfaction when I was first experimenting with NetBSD out of downloading the whole i386 port myself, though.
PCMCIA is better supported in NetBSD than in any flavor of Linux. It isn't a bolt-on accessory, it's right in the kernel. And I like that the whole userland can be compiled as a unit. It's not a stew of added-on pieces as with Linux.
Just my humble opinion. I've run Linux since 1994 but NetBSD only about a half a year.
:: The only way spam is going to end is if all :: ISP's start levying fines against anyone using :: their system to send spam.
You have now made it dramatically more expensive for ISPs to stay in business. I guess we can deal with there being only five ISPs for the whole net....
:: IMHO, it should be illegal to obtain an email :: account (and hence the ability to send email) :: unless billing information is provided.
You have now dramatically increased the cost of providing a free email account. They will cease to exist.
"Spam, all types of it, should be plain and simply illegal. "
How?
How is it to be made illegal?
Who will enforce this law?
How will they enforce it?
I do not mean these as rhetorical questions.
I do wonder how a mechanism like this would work. Do we want governmental forces shutting down providers? Do we want end-to-end audit trails on all email? How would we prevent a rogue hacker from sending 'fake' spam advertising a legitimate site to get it shut down? A few hackers could take down slashdot.org linuxmall.com cheapbytes.com etc. with little effort. Unless we're ready to accept a spam-free police state, I don't see a way out.
There's probably little unregulated spam in Singapore.
Gates' efforts went into 'popularizing' the personal computer. Which he has made a huge amount of money doing. Partially it was the result of being in the right place at the right time. And partially it was the result of being the right person at the right place at the right time. The article isn't a treatise on morals or ethics or being-a-nice-guy. It's intended to be a piece on history. (with all the weaknesses that anything of that sort has when written so soon after the fact)
A printer server is not a high reliability task. At most, if it fails, a few people have to send their print job to the print server again. It's an excellent application for a low-end Linux server, but it's not particularly noteworthy. It would be a serious waste of resources to dedicate NT Server to something like this, no doubt. Not because NT Server is "better and not to be wasted" for such a lowly job, but because it's of about the same capability but much more expensive.
The design rules change as the frequency increases. Time is measured in millimeters of copper trace on the motherboard, so just because the silicon won't vaporize at a higher frequency does not mean the circuitry will work. Parasitic factors like capacitance and inductance also rear their ugly head as frequency goes up. So much changes that it's just not realistic to expect any of this to trickle down to a consumer market. At least not anytime soon.
Since 1 GHz is in the microwave domain, I can imagine it being mind blowingly incredibly expensive. And I don't want my computer to sterlize me either. (makes me nervous to think of holding a laptop radiating those frequencies)
Somehow I think wider busses and more parallelism is more realistic.
Steve Jobs boasted (it seemed like gloating to me, at the time) in a speech on the radio about how the original Macintosh was was unopenable. The exact word he used was "hacker-proof." That was the day (back in '84) when I knew I'd never own a Mac. (though the original Mac case does* make a nice front-loading wastebasket once it's cored of hardware)
The only way I'm gonna ever accept a computer with 'smooth flowing curves' is if it contains real screaming hardware. I.e. one of the newer SGI case designs. Perhaps an Octane or O2.
But I've always been proud to not have an answer when somebody asked me what "brand" computer I have. There are so many answers to give when you pick the best hardware piece by piece.
I do want one of those cases that were mentioned here a few weeks ago, the ones that house up to 8 motherboards...
You are correct. Multiple layers of MP3 compression is like JPEG converting your JPEGs. Loss occurs in every generation.
Of course, the lossy nature of MP3 compression is already something a lot of us have little or no interest in doing to our music. When I rip a track off a CD, I burn it back onto another CD without touching it. CD players aren't _that_ hard to lug around, and if you only like a few tracks off each CD, throw them all on a single CDR disk.
For Net distribution, as bandwidth increases, I see no reason why any form of Lossy sound compression will be needed. We'll GZIP (or the equivalent) our waveform (AIFF, WAV, whathaveyou) files. (If the network transmission medium doesn't automatically do it for us, which it does and will even more in the future)
What do you mean "You can't get there from here." Forget banning guns. Just ban the sales and distribution of ammunition. In fifty years there will still be a lot of slowly rusting guns. It isn't a logistical problem at all.
Maybe this isn't a nit, but rather a strong disagreement. Apple could have easily ported the MacOS to the x86 Architecture. All they had to do was reject their traditional "not invented here, not interested" attitude and make a deal with ARDI (http://www.ardi.com) to license the 68000 engine that runs Executor. It's a plain lie (or a distortion) to claim otherwise. Granted, there's no PPC emulator that I have heard of, but we're discussing history here, not the present.
Executor (a Macintosh emulator for the PC, including an x86 linux version) is cool stuff, by the way. A very small tight team of coders developed one heck of a product that it seems NOBODY pays much attention to.
Back when I was more of a fanatic than I am these days I used to open the mouse and cut tracks and add jumper wires to reverse the buttons in hardware. A few times I've even sold those modified mice used to other people. Of course they turned out to be right handed people. My comment was "deal with it, dude."
Slashdot Mirror
The Xenix that Microsoft produced was based on the original AT&T code. They didn't own it. Microsoft likes to own and control things, and I suspect this was a factor in them getting out of the Unix market when they did. It makes sense to me.
My impression, from looking into the way that the BSD Os'es are developed, (and I am not in any way connected to the teams) is that they're developed by smaller teams of programmers. It could even be considered a version of the "Cathedral" model of development, if one imposes ESR's paradigm on it. As such, it reflects favorably on the "Cathedral" model, and shows that high quality code can be developed that way, without the result being closed-source.
My personal experience with installing and using NetBSD has shown me that it's much uniform than any flavor of Linux I've tried. The whole OS base is packed in a few tarballs organized by function/hierarchy. It seems more holistic than the smorgasboard of packages that go into, say, a Slackware distribution. The whole 'userland' can be built from a top-level makefile, which gives it more consistency and uniformity than a collection of miscellaneous utilities all from different build environments. There are numerous third party 'packages' available, but they reside in a separate directory tree from the "OS" tree. It strikes me as being very similar to the way a 'classic' Unix is arranged.
People talk about the 'fragmentation' of the *BSD OS'es, but when you really look at it objectively, there are only three 'free' BSD's: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Each version has one fairly uniform codebase. It's not like Linux where there's a new distribution 'fork' every time someone gets inspired to produce one.
There are doubtless historical reasons for the BSD license (it's direct lineage from the Unices of the early 80's mean it carries different baggage than GNU stuff), just as there is a firm ideology behind the GPL.
The article on Daemon News was written from one 'political' extreme supporting the BSD license, but there isn't a political Manifesto behind the BSD Licenese like the Gnu Manifesto by RMS. Maybe articles like this fill that void for some.
From a practical point of view, the BSD license seems a lot more 'business friendly' to the way the software industry has traditionally developed. Because of this there are a number of high quality BSD-derivatives (also, of course, because it's been around longer) in the commercial world. (Solaris, BeOS, NeXT, to name a few) In that sense, it's a more successful model than the GPL.
When Microsoft sold off Xenix to what became SCO (which was originally a Microsoft entity) they agreed to never compete directly in the Unix market as part of the agreement. The way the story I heard goes was that Bill Gates had grown tired of paying AT&T a hefty royalty for each copy of Xenix sold, so they divested and the result was SCO. For this reason, it's been legally impossible for Microsoft to directly compete in the Unix market. Also for this reason, there's little chance they will enter the Unix-clone market, at least not as an OS vendor.
I don't have really hard-and-firm sources on this info, it just comes from a few years back when I had an Altos 586 machine with Microsoft Xenix on it and was researching the history of the OS my machine. So if somebody can correct me on this, I'd be glad to learn more.
They should be the same ol' pinouts that I find in my hardbound Texas Instruments TTL manual from about 1975. Some things will never change.
I have TTL gates from the very early 70's. And at least a few op-amps from the late 60's. I wonder if chips will eventually become collectable? My Intel 8008 is probably already collectable...
> There's no question that RMS has a political
> agenda, but then so does the Daemon News, which
> has repeatedly demonstrated that its political
> agenda is to try to get people to release
> software on BSD-like rather than GPL-like terms.
Nobody can deny that there is politics on both sides of the arguement. "Politics" is not automatically a dirty word. My biggest concern where the GPL is concerned is that as the popularity of Linux increases and it continues to commercialize, there may be a legal melt-down at some point. (How much of the GPL has been tested in court? With the pockets of GPL advocates and benificiaries growing deeper and deeper every day, how long before the legal hassles start?) 'FUD', I know, but fears that will only be go away when uncertainty is removed, to eliminate the doubt.
I like the idea that there are other licensing schemes out there being advocated, and not just GNU. It strikes me sometimes that certain GNU advocates view the GPL they champion as a Borg-like entity that will inevitably absorb all software.
I was initially worried when I heard the news about Motorola, because I like a number of their 8-bit chips for embedded work. But it sounds like what's really being divested is the non-CPU silicon, i.e. logic gates, and discrete semiconductors like transistors, diodes, and thyristors. Has anybody heard to the contrary? I 'm not working in a job right now where I have a Motorola rep I can call to be certain they aren't killing the 'HC11 and 'HC05. I like those chip families (it can be a matter of pride to be able to say the code you're working on runs in 512 bytes of RAM, with a 500 KHz clock).
An interesting, and to some developers, central point of the difference between Linux and the BSD unices is that BSD is not under the GPL. This can become a very political issue if pushed to the wall. There's an interesting article about these issues in the latest issue of Daemon News , which is a publication well worth reading if you're interested in BSD.
Some would say that the absence of the GPL is one of the features of BSD.
Last time I ordered, you could buy any of the three BSDs for $5 apiece from www.cheapbytes.com or all three together (3 cdroms) for $10. These aren't the "official" releases though. Just everything you'd get with an "official" release.
A problem still exists with international distribution (at least of the NetBSD CD) because the crypto is included on the CDs.
I would consider shipping a NetBSD CD with the crypto directory removed (it's not very big and you can download that part yourself) to a few individuals if needed. (but I only have a slow CDR drive so I'm NOT a publisher by any means).
FreeBSD isn't very fast if you're not running an Intel processor. (but several other architectures are being ported to)
I've learned a lot from running NetBSD/i386, myself. In my very humble opinion, NetBSD has the brightest future, as it's from the get-go designed to be platform neutral. But it's definitely not a fighting matter.
All 3 of the free BSDs are available on CD-ROM from Cheapbytes. I got great satisfaction when I was first experimenting with NetBSD out of downloading the whole i386 port myself, though.
PCMCIA is better supported in NetBSD than in any flavor of Linux. It isn't a bolt-on accessory, it's right in the kernel. And I like that the whole userland can be compiled as a unit. It's not a stew of added-on pieces as with Linux.
Just my humble opinion. I've run Linux since 1994 but NetBSD only about a half a year.
Nope. You have to get out the credit card and buy Office 97. ("DUH!")
Doesn't that constitute 'bloat' for people who will never need those fonts? Why are they automatically installed?
Indeed,
And with this product, the entire world can know that while the hardware is pretty good, the software really stinks!
:: The only way spam is going to end is if all
:: ISP's start levying fines against anyone using
:: their system to send spam.
You have now made it dramatically more expensive for ISPs to stay in business. I guess we can deal with there being only five ISPs for the whole net....
:: IMHO, it should be illegal to obtain an email
:: account (and hence the ability to send email)
:: unless billing information is provided.
You have now dramatically increased the cost of providing a free email account. They will cease to exist.
"Spam, all types of it, should be plain and simply illegal. "
How?
How is it to be made illegal?
Who will enforce this law?
How will they enforce it?
I do not mean these as rhetorical questions.
I do wonder how a mechanism like this would work.
Do we want governmental forces shutting down providers? Do we want end-to-end audit trails on all email? How would we prevent a rogue hacker from sending 'fake' spam advertising a legitimate site to get it shut down? A few hackers could take down slashdot.org linuxmall.com cheapbytes.com etc. with little effort. Unless we're ready to accept a spam-free police state, I don't see a way out.
There's probably little unregulated spam in Singapore.
Gates' efforts went into 'popularizing' the personal computer. Which he has made a huge amount of money doing. Partially it was the result of being in the right place at the right time. And partially it was the result of being the right person at the right place at the right time. The article isn't a treatise on morals or ethics or being-a-nice-guy. It's intended to be a piece on history. (with all the weaknesses that anything of that sort has when written so soon after the fact)
It's all a Microsoft conspiracy! Everything is a Microsoft conspiracy!!!
A printer server is not a high reliability task. At most, if it fails, a few people have to send their print job to the print server again. It's an excellent application for a low-end Linux server, but it's not particularly noteworthy. It would be a serious waste of resources to dedicate NT Server to something like this, no doubt. Not because NT Server is "better and not to be wasted" for such a lowly job, but because it's of about the same capability but much more expensive.
The design rules change as the frequency increases. Time is measured in millimeters of copper trace on the motherboard, so just because the silicon won't vaporize at a higher frequency does not mean the circuitry will work. Parasitic factors like capacitance and inductance also rear their ugly head as frequency goes up. So much changes that it's just not realistic to expect any of this to trickle down to a consumer market. At least not anytime soon.
Since 1 GHz is in the microwave domain, I can imagine it being mind blowingly incredibly expensive. And I don't want my computer to sterlize me either. (makes me nervous to think of holding a laptop radiating those frequencies)
Somehow I think wider busses and more parallelism is more realistic.
Let's not forget the Apple heritage, though.
Steve Jobs boasted (it seemed like gloating to me, at the time) in a speech on the radio about how the original Macintosh was was unopenable. The exact word he used was "hacker-proof." That was the day (back in '84) when I knew I'd never own a Mac. (though the original Mac case does* make a nice front-loading wastebasket once it's cored of hardware)
The only way I'm gonna ever accept a computer with 'smooth flowing curves' is if it contains real screaming hardware. I.e. one of the newer SGI case designs. Perhaps an Octane or O2.
But I've always been proud to not have an answer when somebody asked me what "brand" computer I have. There are so many answers to give when you pick the best hardware piece by piece.
I do want one of those cases that were mentioned here a few weeks ago, the ones that house up to 8 motherboards...
You are correct. Multiple layers of MP3 compression is like JPEG converting your JPEGs. Loss occurs in every generation.
Of course, the lossy nature of MP3 compression is already something a lot of us have little or no interest in doing to our music. When I rip a track off a CD, I burn it back onto another CD without touching it. CD players aren't _that_ hard to lug around, and if you only like a few tracks off each CD, throw them all on a single CDR disk.
For Net distribution, as bandwidth increases, I see no reason why any form of Lossy sound compression will be needed. We'll GZIP (or the equivalent) our waveform (AIFF, WAV, whathaveyou) files. (If the network transmission medium doesn't automatically do it for us, which it does and will even more in the future)
What do you mean "You can't get there from here." Forget banning guns. Just ban the sales and distribution of ammunition. In fifty years there will still be a lot of slowly rusting guns. It isn't a logistical problem at all.
Maybe this isn't a nit, but rather a strong disagreement. Apple could have easily ported the MacOS to the x86 Architecture. All they had to do was reject their traditional "not invented here, not interested" attitude and make a deal with ARDI (http://www.ardi.com) to license the 68000 engine that runs Executor. It's a plain lie (or a distortion) to claim otherwise. Granted, there's no PPC emulator that I have heard of, but we're discussing history here, not the present.
Executor (a Macintosh emulator for the PC, including an x86 linux version) is cool stuff, by the way. A very small tight team of coders developed one heck of a product that it seems NOBODY pays much attention to.
Back when I was more of a fanatic than I am these days I used to open the mouse and cut tracks and add jumper wires to reverse the buttons in hardware. A few times I've even sold those modified mice used to other people. Of course they turned out to be right handed people. My comment was "deal with it, dude."