This brings up an other question: should there be a moderation down that doesn't influence the posters karma?
E.g. if a question is allready answered and someone else does it again it kinda needs to be moderated down as 'redundant' so that we don't have to wade through long comments of the same stuff.
But... the poster didn't do it with bad intentions,- was actually trying to help, and now gets bad karma just because someone else hit 'submit' a second earlier.
The SCSL doesn't permit commercial distribution at all. It's some other license that you'd have to get regarding royalties and commercial distribution. And Sun has no obligation to give you that license.
which seems to me that it's not the royalties they are interested in, but it's the control. E.g. is what we read as a way of trying get royalties really a way to keep control?
My question is, could this license keep M$ from producing "StarOffice that only runs on shitty M$ OS's", and could this be the (bad for the Open Source community) justification for Sun sticking to SCSL?
I'm not defending Sun, I'm just trying to figure out what their REAL intentions are.
It probably doesn't make a big difference whether or not someone makes and commercially distributes incompatible changes to StarOffice. In contrast, changes to Java by Microsoft jeopardized Sun's write-once, run anywhere strategy of Java as a universal cross-platform solution.
I wonder about this. I don't know how to phrase this right, but what is really the difference between a Java applet and a *Word document? Would it not be possible for M$ to pull a similar trick with StarOffice as it did with Java?
Sun isn't going to make big royalties off of StarOffice while it's also giving it away for free from its own web site
This is being used as an argument for the earlier statement, and I have to disagree with it. Surely Sun thinks it is going to make money off of it in some way, or they would not have paid that much for it. It may be indirect, but Sun is not a charity foundation. I don't know what the hidden agenda is, but the don't go about and pay (I think someone says $405M) for StarOffice ONLY to give it away because they like the Linux community so much.
These are interesting times and I think we definately have to be on our guard for vultures that are trying to ride the 'Open Source' wave now that it's catching on. I'm glad there's people like Bruce that critically analyze stuff like this.
A couple of months back I was writing a block-device driver for the Rio (MP3 player). The Rio (or actually the Flash) erases in 32K blocks, so I made my block-size 32K. When I did this the kernel went crazy.
So, great to have source, and yes, I was able to quickly find out that in a certain function there was a test to make sure block-size was smaller than the page size (which is 4K on x86). Since this test failed it caused the kernel to crash.
However, I could never find this explained/documented, so the question now is, is this a bug or is this by design? And if this is by design is that a good design,- what if I want to use my driver on an other platform that has even smaller pages?
I posted the problem on a Linux newsgroup and didn't get _any_ reply.
Breace. btw. Je zit in ieder geval bij de juiste provider;)
I'll prawly get flamed for this plenty, but I think for the majority of apps an HTML/XML GUI would be the best solution. And use any script language to actually interact with an app.
The biggest advantage being 'Open Source'. And, yeah, it's probably not so appropriate for a Word Processor, but I just see so many apps that are just list/edit/text/combo/whatever boxes put on a form. You should be able to do that with HTML/XML.
It may also be a way to seperate the GUI from the actual application better, because still too many programmers embed the entire app right in all the GUI code.
Visual Basic, Delphi and C++Builder are nice examples of environments that stimulate that behaviour.
The address space is not the problem. As the Rio is layed-out now, the first 64MB are reserved for internal Flash. The rest is for the external Flash.
Flash is addressed in sectors (which are currently 512 (+16) bytes). There's 24 bits to select a sector so that gives you 8GB of address space.
I don't know about the electronics of the Rio itself, but as far as programming the flash (from your PC,- e.g. downloading audio) I don't see that there is a limitation, but the 8GB.
Mind you, the older versions of the Linux software perform an AND on the sector so that it always accesses the lower 32MB of 64MB (sector &= 0x3F00) which of course needs to be fixed to work with > 32MB devices. But maybe that's taken care of, I haven't checked lately.
(I have written a block-device driver for the Rio for Linux, which I never released because I never quite finished it and it's pretty useless really. Plus I returned the Rio to Frys. I did create/mount an EXT2 fs on it though..;o))
A long long time back I worked for *cough*M$ for a while. JUST 6 MONTHS THOUGH!
Anyways I had this silly idea then and I emailed it to our friend BG.
I figured if you put a mirror on the moon you could store data in a 'light loop' by shinning a laser at it and turning it on and off (real quickly). Turned out you could actually store quite a bit of data (for that time) in such a loop with a pretty low latency.
So of course clouds would be an issue, and I suggested that two satelites would be easier to deal with. Just beam up your data and keep it in a laser loop between the satelites.
Well, I never got a response from Billy Boy, but sure enough, about a year later he announced his satelite launching plans.:o)
Quite a few years back we where working on a Video on Demand system which had a Pentium 90 and 128 MB of RAM.
We developed the software under DOS because the MPEG decoder only had closed source DOS drivers.
I had written the memory access routines because no DOS extenders supported >64MB.
Then when I started to run tests to verify my routines, the system started to make these funny chirping sounds. It wasn't loud but definately audible. And there where different tones. I was actually thinking of making the test routine a song, but since the whole project lasted only two months there was no time to play...
We have never been able to positively identify where the sound came from exactly, but we are pretty sure it was the RAM. It was not the power supply and there was no harddrive in the system.
When a few years later we had a custom motherboard made we told the manufacturer of this board and they just laughed at us, said it was impossible. Ah well, maybe one day I'll put that system together again...;)
No girls. Well that's very nice for the girls that where there then, isn't it. I say there where quite a few nice girls.
Europe... Man, I'm from Netherlands but this 'Europe is better' thing is pissing me off. Have you ever been to a conference after-party in Europe? Do you really think it's that different?
Sure this was no rave-party, sure there was not a whole lot of dancing. But the intention of parties like this is that you get to meet some people (that you may have known from the net for a long time). Therefore it was good that the music was not too loud/present.
As far as ending too early,- I sure as hell was able to get enough beer in my body.
Anyways, I enjoyed myself and it was kewl that the/. 'crew' was walking around talking to everyone.
And they had some decent food, and 4 kinds of beer.
I would like to thank Andover.net and the Slashdot guys for a great evening! Hope we get to do this again soon!
Now we'll have to find out about trains from Palo Alto. My geek-girl no longer want's to drive back! (or if she wanted to, I wouldn't let her, knowing how she responds to that good ole G.)
FWIW: You can hang with em at the Expo itself, I'm sure.
I'd never read/. when I was at the last expo, but my friends (that where at the Debian booth) kept on pointing at Rob and saying how kewl it was that he was doing all that stuff rite there at the/. booth.
Current solid-state technology is too far from being a consumer item:
A 1.3 GB EIDE solid-state is about $8000,-
There is an expected price drop of 15% per 6 months for that.
With respect to solid-state performance:
Sustained transfer rates are currently tween 1-4 MB/s which is really not that great. There are several cheap Winchester drives that outperform that easily.
Of course a solid-state disk does not have any seek latencies which is why overal performance is pretty good.
I don't know if anybody is doing it, but a cheaper alternative is to build a solid-state disk based on RAM (with battery backup). It would still be expensive, but a lot faster.
Of course you could just install that RAM in your PC and have a huge RAM disk or cache. Too bad many mainboards only support 512 MB or so.
Do what Torvalds does: look at the assembly output.
I think you'll find that GCC does NOT generate better code. I'm not saying it's a bad compiler, but you got to remember that this is a portable, cross-platform, cross-target compiler. MSVC is optimized for Wintel.
I've been using MSVC 4.2 to compile an in-house OS for a long time now just because the optimizer kicks ass. Since 5.0 had this bug in the optimizer (that I've never seen confirmed to be fixed) I've never trusted the later versions though.
As with any compiler, to have it turn out nicely optimized code you _have_ to look at the assembly output from time to time. Some functionally identical (C) code just generates better assembly then other (and it could be opposite between compilers - hmm, I wonder if that could be used for an other Mindcraft debacle)
As I write the software for our Inflight Entertainment system, I get to see certain movies a LOT of times. It seems by the end of a project I've seen them a thousand times. Especially the beginning parts, before the system crashes.;)
One of the movies I must have seen most is Waynes World II. And I have to say that it still doesn't bother me to see it again. There are so many little jokes that you don't notice the first time around. (Especially when you are not a native-English speaking person)
If someone mentions Illinois, the following dialog is automatically triggered in my head: 'MM: Ok. Allright, so here we are in our new surroundings. The abandoned acme doll factory, downtown Aurora, Illinois. DC: We now have an official babe-layer. MM: I know man, this place is gonna be chick-central. etc.'
I look forward to use Austin Powers when I'm testing our new system.:)
When I worked on some M$ code (yeah yeah, flame me, I quit OK?) there was hardly any such language in there. About the worst (?) stuff you'd see was 'sucker' in comments.
'Bad' language in comments I guess is not a problem for non-Open Source products. Soon M$ will be using this as a Marketing argument.;o)
Slashdot Mirror
This brings up an other question: should there be a moderation down that doesn't influence the posters karma?
E.g. if a question is allready answered and someone else does it again it kinda needs to be moderated down as 'redundant' so that we don't have to wade through long comments of the same stuff.
But... the poster didn't do it with bad intentions,- was actually trying to help, and now gets bad karma just because someone else hit 'submit' a second earlier.
Breace.
Ok, but somewhere else you say:
The SCSL doesn't permit commercial distribution at all. It's some other license that you'd have to get regarding royalties and commercial distribution. And Sun has no obligation to give you that license.
which seems to me that it's not the royalties they are interested in, but it's the control. E.g. is what we read as a way of trying get royalties really a way to keep control?
My question is, could this license keep M$ from producing "StarOffice that only runs on shitty M$ OS's", and could this be the (bad for the Open Source community) justification for Sun sticking to SCSL?
I'm not defending Sun, I'm just trying to figure out what their REAL intentions are.
Breace.
It probably doesn't make a big difference whether or not someone makes and commercially distributes incompatible changes to StarOffice. In contrast, changes to Java by Microsoft jeopardized Sun's write-once, run anywhere strategy of Java as a universal cross-platform solution.
I wonder about this. I don't know how to phrase this right, but what is really the difference between a Java applet and a *Word document? Would it not be possible for M$ to pull a similar trick with StarOffice as it did with Java?
Sun isn't going to make big royalties off of StarOffice while it's also giving it away for free from its own web site
This is being used as an argument for the earlier statement, and I have to disagree with it. Surely Sun thinks it is going to make money off of it in some way, or they would not have paid that much for it. It may be indirect, but Sun is not a charity foundation. I don't know what the hidden agenda is, but the don't go about and pay (I think someone says $405M) for StarOffice ONLY to give it away because they like the Linux community so much.
These are interesting times and I think we definately have to be on our guard for vultures that are trying to ride the 'Open Source' wave now that it's catching on. I'm glad there's people like Bruce that critically analyze stuff like this.
Breace.
An example of why this isn't always the answer.
;)
A couple of months back I was writing a block-device driver for the Rio (MP3 player). The Rio (or actually the Flash) erases in 32K blocks, so I made my block-size 32K. When I did this the kernel went crazy.
So, great to have source, and yes, I was able to quickly find out that in a certain function there was a test to make sure block-size was smaller than the page size (which is 4K on x86). Since this test failed it caused the kernel to crash.
However, I could never find this explained/documented, so the question now is, is this a bug or is this by design? And if this is by design is that a good design,- what if I want to use my driver on an other platform that has even smaller pages?
I posted the problem on a Linux newsgroup and didn't get _any_ reply.
Breace.
btw. Je zit in ieder geval bij de juiste provider
I'll prawly get flamed for this plenty, but I think for the majority of apps an HTML/XML GUI would be the best solution. And use any script language to actually interact with an app.
The biggest advantage being 'Open Source'. And, yeah, it's probably not so appropriate for a Word Processor, but I just see so many apps that are just list/edit/text/combo/whatever boxes put on a form. You should be able to do that with HTML/XML.
It may also be a way to seperate the GUI from the actual application better, because still too many programmers embed the entire app right in all the GUI code.
Visual Basic, Delphi and C++Builder are nice examples of environments that stimulate that behaviour.
Well, heat-shield up, Breace.
Oh, prawly. I didn't think I was the first person on the planet to come up with that idea.
;)
Although the Programming Pearls books can't be like, real ancient, if the title means what I think it does.
Breace.
The address space is not the problem. As the Rio is layed-out now, the first 64MB are reserved for internal Flash. The rest is for the external Flash.
;o))
Flash is addressed in sectors (which are currently 512 (+16) bytes). There's 24 bits to select a sector so that gives you 8GB of address space.
I don't know about the electronics of the Rio itself, but as far as programming the flash (from your PC,- e.g. downloading audio) I don't see that there is a limitation, but the 8GB.
Mind you, the older versions of the Linux software perform an AND on the sector so that it always accesses the lower 32MB of 64MB (sector &= 0x3F00) which of course needs to be fixed to work with > 32MB devices. But maybe that's taken care of, I haven't checked lately.
(I have written a block-device driver for the Rio for Linux, which I never released because I never quite finished it and it's pretty useless really. Plus I returned the Rio to Frys. I did create/mount an EXT2 fs on it though..
Breace.
A long long time back I worked for *cough*M$ for a while. JUST 6 MONTHS THOUGH!
:o)
Anyways I had this silly idea then and I emailed it to our friend BG.
I figured if you put a mirror on the moon you could store data in a 'light loop' by shinning a laser at it and turning it on and off (real quickly). Turned out you could actually store quite a bit of data (for that time) in such a loop with a pretty low latency.
So of course clouds would be an issue, and I suggested that two satelites would be easier to deal with. Just beam up your data and keep it in a laser loop between the satelites.
Well, I never got a response from Billy Boy, but sure enough, about a year later he announced his satelite launching plans.
Breace.
Quite a few years back we where working on a Video on Demand system which had a Pentium 90 and 128 MB of RAM.
;)
We developed the software under DOS because the MPEG decoder only had closed source DOS drivers.
I had written the memory access routines because no DOS extenders supported >64MB.
Then when I started to run tests to verify my routines, the system started to make these funny chirping sounds. It wasn't loud but definately audible. And there where different tones. I was actually thinking of making the test routine a song, but since the whole project lasted only two months there was no time to play...
We have never been able to positively identify where the sound came from exactly, but we are pretty sure it was the RAM. It was not the power supply and there was no harddrive in the system.
When a few years later we had a custom motherboard made we told the manufacturer of this board and they just laughed at us, said it was impossible. Ah well, maybe one day I'll put that system together again...
Breace
Bla bla 200x200 8 bit bla bla...
That was 5 years ago, AC... (Although no one doing video work would come up with the fictional 200x200 resolution)
If you want to flame Wintel then do it when apropriate.
Ah, shut up.
/. 'crew' was walking around talking to everyone.
No girls. Well that's very nice for the girls that where there then, isn't it. I say there where quite a few nice girls.
Europe... Man, I'm from Netherlands but this 'Europe is better' thing is pissing me off. Have you ever been to a conference after-party in Europe? Do you really think it's that different?
Sure this was no rave-party, sure there was not a whole lot of dancing. But the intention of parties like this is that you get to meet some people (that you may have known from the net for a long time). Therefore it was good that the music was not too loud/present.
As far as ending too early,- I sure as hell was able to get enough beer in my body.
Anyways, I enjoyed myself and it was kewl that the
And they had some decent food, and 4 kinds of beer.
I would like to thank Andover.net and the Slashdot guys for a great evening! Hope we get to do this again soon!
Breace
The one from Piramid (brewed in Seattle and Berkeley)? ;)
Breace
He/she would have to be a black jew though.
Breace.
Well that's really great then: Guiness.
;o)
Now we'll have to find out about trains from Palo Alto. My geek-girl no longer want's to drive back! (or if she wanted to, I wouldn't let her, knowing how she responds to that good ole G.)
I bet she'll drink Rob under the table.
Look fwd to see y'all tonite!
Breace.
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/travel.htm
Breace
Excellent idea!
Can I urge Rob to include Grolsch?
(A Dutch beer, not German,- see my entry at http://everything.blockstackers.com/)
Breace.
FWIW:
/. when I was at the last expo, but my friends (that where at the Debian booth) kept on pointing at Rob and saying how kewl it was that he was doing all that stuff rite there at the /. booth.
You can hang with em at the Expo itself, I'm sure.
I'd never read
Breace.
Yeah this is definitely no longer a flat-mode kinda deal...
Don't they have IRC for this? I thought the topic was sex. Frustrating...
Breace.
I dunno.
South Park seems to be a good example to contradict that.
Surely they'll be acused of racism but you'd have to be ignorant to that. There's always someone that complains.
btw. Why is there no person in a wheelchair or with only one arm? Or a gay?
Breace.
look at how shoddy the crack.linuxppc.org webpage is
Look at how much time it took for LinuxPPC site to appear. How much time and people do you think it took to put M$'s site up?
Breace.
To make more money, they split up the articles so you have to load a new page - and a new ad - to keep reading
Well, it doesn't take a genius to put an add/banner in the middle of a page.
Breace.
Current solid-state technology is too far from being a consumer item:
A 1.3 GB EIDE solid-state is about $8000,-
There is an expected price drop of 15% per 6 months for that.
With respect to solid-state performance:
Sustained transfer rates are currently tween 1-4 MB/s which is really not that great. There are several cheap Winchester drives that outperform that easily.
Of course a solid-state disk does not have any seek latencies which is why overal performance is pretty good.
I don't know if anybody is doing it, but a cheaper alternative is to build a solid-state disk based on RAM (with battery backup). It would still be expensive, but a lot faster.
Of course you could just install that RAM in your PC and have a huge RAM disk or cache. Too bad many mainboards only support 512 MB or so.
Breace
Do what Torvalds does: look at the assembly output.
I think you'll find that GCC does NOT generate better code. I'm not saying it's a bad compiler, but you got to remember that this is a portable, cross-platform, cross-target compiler. MSVC is optimized for Wintel.
I've been using MSVC 4.2 to compile an in-house OS for a long time now just because the optimizer kicks ass. Since 5.0 had this bug in the optimizer (that I've never seen confirmed to be fixed) I've never trusted the later versions though.
As with any compiler, to have it turn out nicely optimized code you _have_ to look at the assembly output from time to time. Some functionally identical (C) code just generates better assembly then other (and it could be opposite between compilers - hmm, I wonder if that could be used for an other Mindcraft debacle)
Breace.
I give WW2 a two thumbs up.
;)
:)
As I write the software for our Inflight Entertainment system, I get to see certain movies a LOT of times. It seems by the end of a project I've seen them a thousand times. Especially the beginning parts, before the system crashes.
One of the movies I must have seen most is Waynes World II. And I have to say that it still doesn't bother me to see it again. There are so many little jokes that you don't notice the first time around. (Especially when you are not a native-English speaking person)
If someone mentions Illinois, the following dialog is automatically triggered in my head:
'MM: Ok. Allright, so here we are in our new surroundings. The abandoned acme doll factory, downtown Aurora, Illinois. DC: We now have an official babe-layer. MM: I know man, this place is gonna be chick-central. etc.'
I look forward to use Austin Powers when I'm testing our new system.
Breace.
I think you'd be dissapointed.
;o)
When I worked on some M$ code (yeah yeah, flame me, I quit OK?) there was hardly any such language in there. About the worst (?) stuff you'd see was 'sucker' in comments.
'Bad' language in comments I guess is not a problem for non-Open Source products. Soon M$ will be using this as a Marketing argument.
Breace.