Point understood, you have an example of a ruby-only site.
However, do projects on that site have a license explicitly forbidding you from re-implementing them in python or perl or C? I suspect no, that they would allow that even if they choose not to explicitly aid it.
In this case, MS's site is hosting code that not only is Windows specific, but forbids potential developers from even porting it to other operating systems. The former is hard to argue, the latter bit I understand raising some ire amongst Free software advocates.
Don't mod something down just because you disagree. When I have mod points, I never downmod things out of disagreement. This is a legitimate concern over the python strategy. They have benefited from their flexibility (the language at a given instant I will give is relatively low on quirks as they are rethought and replaced, whereas perl is chock-full of quirks that you must learn to live with), but there is a price.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing is without flaws. To achieve one end, something almost always is given up. Don't mod a post down because it points out what was given up to achieve an impressive advantage.
I've been sticking with perl. One of their significant criticisms to me is a strength: their development is relatively stagnant.
Perl6 has been an ever-present worry, but transitions from perl5.6 or so to perl5.10 has been fairly rock solid. I was a python user, but too many changes between even relatively minor updates had me revisiting scripts time and time again. I converted to perl in search of a capable scripting language that wasn't screwing around so much, even if the syntax at times is peculiar.
I will say the same thing that plagues python has plagued Java and probably hosts of other platforms. Platform developers often do more than 'extend' new features, they trample on existing things along the way 'improving' them. Generally, I can see arguments why it happened, but the fact of the matter is a language doing that is pretty crappy..
Was evaluating JS frameworks for an open-source project, and ext js was precluded due to license. The project was BSD licensed, and thus neither the commercial nor GPL license was appropriate.
I understand their viewpoint (trying to make a business and community framework), but MIT licensed jQuery is much more amenable to other licenses.
I've always thought software vendors when doing open source would prefer GPL on stuff they put out (force commercial adopters to use a more commercial license), and that software vendors leeching on the community prefer BSD (lower obligation on them).
Just saying until they act, we can not guarantee based solely on the license what they will do. They do say they will, but the legal obligations upon them do not mandate it.
MIT license is fine, but you cannot predict traditional open-source sensibilities solely from an announcement mentioning the licens..
MIT license is not a source-required license. Companies may sell, close it up, whatever they wish so long as they continue to give credit to the original product.
Look at the fine picture. It's a wireshark trace. The complaint is that it is issuing IMAP traffic without even SSL wrapping it.
Modern practice, virtually all passwords when transmitted on the wire are protected through encryption. Preferably with x509 certificates mitigating the opportunity for man in the middle (in ssh's case, the more manual known_hosts mechanism). There is good reason.
Just because something was done 10 years ago, doesn't mean it was ok. 10 years ago, most desktops ran Windows 98. 10 years ago, Macs didn't implement preemptive multitasking. 10 years ago, some mailers would gleefully execute attachments without any check with the user. 10 years ago, IE would gleefully execute random ActiveX objects on the web.
When an xhpl score says '67 teraflops' and nVidia/AMD gpus spout off about the ludicrous number of gigaflops they have, it simply isn't the same.
For example, the PS3 variant of the Cell processor claims 410 gigaflops. It's hpl score, however, would be about 6-9 gigaflops. Even the new cell processors 'only' get 200 gigaflops by xhpl count.
32-bit precision scores aren't comparable directoly to 64-bit operations.
Every one remotely engaged in Top500 systems knows how very specific the thing being measured is. It's most sensitive to the aggregate clock cycles and processor architecture, and not as sensitive to memory throughput/architecture or networking as many real world things are.
Is an attempt to be more comprehensive, at least, by specifying a whole suite of independently scored benchmarks to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of things in a more holistic way. Sure, it's still synthetic, but it can give a better 'at-a-glance' indicator of several generally important aspects of a supercomputer configuration.
The thing probably inhibiting acceptance of this is that very fact, that it is holistic and the winner 'depends' on how you sort the data. This is excellent for those wanting to more comprehensively understand their configurations standing in the scheme of things, but hard for vendors and facilities to use for marketing leverage. Being able to say 'we built *the* fastest supercomputer according to the list' is a lot stronger than 'depending on how you count, we could be considered number one. Vendors will aggressively pursue pricing knowing about the attached bragging rights, and facilities that receive research grant money similarly want the ability to make statements without disclaimers.
Rest assured, though, that more thorough evaluations are done and not every decision in the Top500 is just about that benchmark. For example, AMD platforms are doing more strongly than they would if only HPL score is counted. AMD's memory performance is still outrageously better than Intel and is good for many HPC applications, but Intel's current generation trounces AMD in HPL score. Of course, Intel did overwhelmingly become popular upon release of their 64-bit core architecture based systems, but still..
So hypothetical analogy guy is in one city, and complains that he must spend his nights in a city an hour away because his company is paying for his hotel and they will only pay for a Motel 6, which is in the city an hour away, and asking how to speed up the trip. You could either answer his question, or let him know about the Motel 6 a minute away that he missed..
If the requirements of some of the commercial applications mandate that the user experience be no more flexible than Windows, what exactly was gained?
I've seen *nix applications at large go away from the administrator friendly simple ways (simple pipe interactions, rc files), to... something else... gconf imitates the Windows registry (a tad more sanely, given, but still...), applications are starting to require more API-like ways of extending/interacting with them that aren't as script friendly. In the course of 'progress', I see the platform erode some of its value, in increasingly hard to ignore places....
I was trying to get some bits of the Gnome community to make 'constrain y' configurable at one point. You know, the annoying as all get out 'fetaure' that keeps you from alt-left-clicking the window and putting the title bar off screen. I could see the hypothetical argument that a novice could accidentally alt-left-click and drag, not understanding what they are doing. So I patched it with a gconf setting that would only be available by editing the raw setting. Their response was that if a Window could be resized, there never would be a reason to drag it off screen, and rejected the patch. It presented the same stupid default behavior, and hid the 'power-user' feature away 'safely' from the novice user's view.
Other platforms have gone down this path, and if pursued to the ultimate conclusion, Linux will be no better than the others. A large part of the value proposition is the power to do more things. All this focus on the lowest common denominator works to dilute it. Yes, I know I can switch desktop environments for ones that more closely align with my sensibilities, but a lot of good/useful features are implemented by developers with a focus on a 'complete' Gnome environment. Trying to get the best of all worlds leads to quite the unfortunate user experience.
It's a criticism of the campaign directly. A fair criticism pointing out an interpretation of the campaign that seems as likely as any positive interpretation could be.
In terms of MS's ubiquitous nature, you can't deny that regardless of your desires, MS will crop up in your life. Repeatedly. Go buy a new laptop, most of them strive to have Windows when you get it. You want to ditch Windows and Office, fine, but then cope with the market realities of software support stipulations.
It portrayed him as awkward and out-of-touch. It even evoked his massive wealth as a reason for being out-of-touch. The entire concept seems out-of-touch in the first place. For those that the humor appeals to, the humor isn't particularly directed in a way that is favorable for the product, company, or Gates himself.
it may not be about monetary damages today, but about precluding competition for a first-party equivalent. I.e. as they said, a planned harry-potter encyclopedia, which will have it's own revenue stream. If an established resource is available, demand and interest in the first party equivalent on launch may be diminished.
It *can* be *more* about money than $6,750 implies.
Overall, it certainly seems within the rights of the Harry Potter IP holders. It doesn't seem *outrageously* out of bounds. It seems like enough of a hard smack to stop it now, and presumably have a gap to die down for a launch of their equivalent.
Though just an injunction may have been less ire-evoking, as the author benefited from their efforts, and merely stopping the effort would have been enough.
Google wants to 'free' users from specific platforms. They want an environment where webapps are desirable by everyone because the other options incur too much variance. They know how to compete and exploit web hosted services. They don't have a plan to do the same with standalone applications so much. This is their platform aimed to make a user feel secure and have a consistent platform with the features they need to ultimately build a feature-equivalent web based application.
So, from a strategic standpoint, it would have made sense to come out with support for all major players (and source code) out of the gate. It would have made a strong statement about the goal of platform indepedence. As stated above, this isn't about altruism, it's about leveling the playing field to give their web hosted applications a better chance at competing with standalone programs.
Exactly, so Canonical does exactly the same thing as SuSE/OpenSuSE or RHEL/Fedora..
No, RH and SUSE treat their enterprise variants 'special'. Hard to obtain and wording to make it sound like time-bombed shareware. Updates are not free, like LTS.
Also, at least in Fedora, major changes are made to a release between releases that Ubuntu would postpone for the 6-month cycle. Using Fedora, suddenly they've switched kernel revisions, broken your binary drivers, etc etc.
I hear what you say about more commercially prominent vendors able to hire more developers, but Canonical offers support contracts. In the linux world, vendors aren't selling the platform in and of itself, they are selling services and support built upon a platform and pretend they are selling the platform. Canonical offers support contracts, and I would be quite happy to continue to see the platform free and services/support be more traditionally commercial. Why pretend your platform is your product, everyone who evaluates Linux is perfectly aware of the true value proposition they are after.
All their moves are remarkably coherent for the amount of activty/discussion they provoke. I think some of the people around google (investors) are a little wonky, but the major moves seem to be consistantly towards a handful of goals: -Divorce the application market from the platform. To the extent of making their applications more desirable (with ad placement). Thus preventing users from offline software. I worry about this goal as it also is encouraging software subscription models.. The alleged chrome aims to bring these 'gadgets' to browsers to allow richer content than the current standards provide. Without the process of trying to ratify standards, just putting it out there and saying 'standardized or not, here it is under a license that lets other browsers copy it'. Firefox will probaably embrace it, though MS will push silverlight for all its worth.
-Get everyone looking at ads they charge for, and correlating whatever data they can to make it targeted (search related, location related in maps). Android is a recent example, a move essentially to get people looking at the internet more, and undoubtedly to provide ad-revenure-influenced POI in their GPS capabilities.
-Help the general state of internet-based commerce. I don't know much about google checkout, but at least google is making sure they have a controlling stake in the game. In part, they directly profit, but more importantly, they have the capacity encourage secure online payment strategies to more arbitrary vendors. Google Chrome (if real) would play into this based on the comic. A lot of emphasis on sandbox and isolation. Hopefully, meaningfully more secure, but at the least instilling consumer confidence in online commerce in the face of media discussion of online commerce and identity theft.
-Trying not to look like a big, scary company as they do this. They realize their product is the attention of the users. They must keep the users from being mad, which means free services of quality. The more they succeed, the more data they inherently have access to, and the more privacy concerns they face. For the time being, they haven't been too overt in doing evil, as they know how tenuous their position is. Google came from nowhere, and is currently a funnel for revnue and investing. Google always must know the next anybody is waiting for their chance to usurp when the masses declare google either stagnant or evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Point understood, you have an example of a ruby-only site.
However, do projects on that site have a license explicitly forbidding you from re-implementing them in python or perl or C? I suspect no, that they would allow that even if they choose not to explicitly aid it.
In this case, MS's site is hosting code that not only is Windows specific, but forbids potential developers from even porting it to other operating systems. The former is hard to argue, the latter bit I understand raising some ire amongst Free software advocates.
Don't mod something down just because you disagree. When I have mod points, I never downmod things out of disagreement. This is a legitimate concern over the python strategy. They have benefited from their flexibility (the language at a given instant I will give is relatively low on quirks as they are rethought and replaced, whereas perl is chock-full of quirks that you must learn to live with), but there is a price.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing is without flaws. To achieve one end, something almost always is given up. Don't mod a post down because it points out what was given up to achieve an impressive advantage.
I've been sticking with perl. One of their significant criticisms to me is a strength: their development is relatively stagnant.
Perl6 has been an ever-present worry, but transitions from perl5.6 or so to perl5.10 has been fairly rock solid. I was a python user, but too many changes between even relatively minor updates had me revisiting scripts time and time again. I converted to perl in search of a capable scripting language that wasn't screwing around so much, even if the syntax at times is peculiar.
I will say the same thing that plagues python has plagued Java and probably hosts of other platforms. Platform developers often do more than 'extend' new features, they trample on existing things along the way 'improving' them. Generally, I can see arguments why it happened, but the fact of the matter is a language doing that is pretty crappy..
Was evaluating JS frameworks for an open-source project, and ext js was precluded due to license. The project was BSD licensed, and thus neither the commercial nor GPL license was appropriate.
I understand their viewpoint (trying to make a business and community framework), but MIT licensed jQuery is much more amenable to other licenses.
I've always thought software vendors when doing open source would prefer GPL on stuff they put out (force commercial adopters to use a more commercial license), and that software vendors leeching on the community prefer BSD (lower obligation on them).
Just saying until they act, we can not guarantee based solely on the license what they will do. They do say they will, but the legal obligations upon them do not mandate it.
MIT license is fine, but you cannot predict traditional open-source sensibilities solely from an announcement mentioning the licens..
MIT license is not a source-required license. Companies may sell, close it up, whatever they wish so long as they continue to give credit to the original product.
What are your thoughts on OCS and its relation to other cluster oriented projects? i.e. Rocks, Oscar, xCAT, etc.
Look at the fine picture. It's a wireshark trace. The complaint is that it is issuing IMAP traffic without even SSL wrapping it.
Modern practice, virtually all passwords when transmitted on the wire are protected through encryption. Preferably with x509 certificates mitigating the opportunity for man in the middle (in ssh's case, the more manual known_hosts mechanism). There is good reason.
Just because something was done 10 years ago, doesn't mean it was ok. 10 years ago, most desktops ran Windows 98. 10 years ago, Macs didn't implement preemptive multitasking. 10 years ago, some mailers would gleefully execute attachments without any check with the user. 10 years ago, IE would gleefully execute random ActiveX objects on the web.
When an xhpl score says '67 teraflops' and nVidia/AMD gpus spout off about the ludicrous number of gigaflops they have, it simply isn't the same.
For example, the PS3 variant of the Cell processor claims 410 gigaflops. It's hpl score, however, would be about 6-9 gigaflops. Even the new cell processors 'only' get 200 gigaflops by xhpl count.
32-bit precision scores aren't comparable directoly to 64-bit operations.
Just with a lot more dollars behind it...
Every one remotely engaged in Top500 systems knows how very specific the thing being measured is. It's most sensitive to the aggregate clock cycles and processor architecture, and not as sensitive to memory throughput/architecture or networking as many real world things are.
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/
Is an attempt to be more comprehensive, at least, by specifying a whole suite of independently scored benchmarks to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of things in a more holistic way. Sure, it's still synthetic, but it can give a better 'at-a-glance' indicator of several generally important aspects of a supercomputer configuration.
The thing probably inhibiting acceptance of this is that very fact, that it is holistic and the winner 'depends' on how you sort the data. This is excellent for those wanting to more comprehensively understand their configurations standing in the scheme of things, but hard for vendors and facilities to use for marketing leverage. Being able to say 'we built *the* fastest supercomputer according to the list' is a lot stronger than 'depending on how you count, we could be considered number one. Vendors will aggressively pursue pricing knowing about the attached bragging rights, and facilities that receive research grant money similarly want the ability to make statements without disclaimers.
Rest assured, though, that more thorough evaluations are done and not every decision in the Top500 is just about that benchmark. For example, AMD platforms are doing more strongly than they would if only HPL score is counted. AMD's memory performance is still outrageously better than Intel and is good for many HPC applications, but Intel's current generation trounces AMD in HPL score. Of course, Intel did overwhelmingly become popular upon release of their 64-bit core architecture based systems, but still..
So hypothetical analogy guy is in one city, and complains that he must spend his nights in a city an hour away because his company is paying for his hotel and they will only pay for a Motel 6, which is in the city an hour away, and asking how to speed up the trip. You could either answer his question, or let him know about the Motel 6 a minute away that he missed..
Checking the system for measurements would put the cost at $486 million, and therefore they can't afford it.
It happens pretty regularly, go through and we should be able to ask the Arilou what the hell they have been doing to Earth all this time.
If the requirements of some of the commercial applications mandate that the user experience be no more flexible than Windows, what exactly was gained?
I've seen *nix applications at large go away from the administrator friendly simple ways (simple pipe interactions, rc files), to... something else... gconf imitates the Windows registry (a tad more sanely, given, but still...), applications are starting to require more API-like ways of extending/interacting with them that aren't as script friendly. In the course of 'progress', I see the platform erode some of its value, in increasingly hard to ignore places....
I was trying to get some bits of the Gnome community to make 'constrain y' configurable at one point. You know, the annoying as all get out 'fetaure' that keeps you from alt-left-clicking the window and putting the title bar off screen. I could see the hypothetical argument that a novice could accidentally alt-left-click and drag, not understanding what they are doing. So I patched it with a gconf setting that would only be available by editing the raw setting. Their response was that if a Window could be resized, there never would be a reason to drag it off screen, and rejected the patch. It presented the same stupid default behavior, and hid the 'power-user' feature away 'safely' from the novice user's view.
Other platforms have gone down this path, and if pursued to the ultimate conclusion, Linux will be no better than the others. A large part of the value proposition is the power to do more things. All this focus on the lowest common denominator works to dilute it. Yes, I know I can switch desktop environments for ones that more closely align with my sensibilities, but a lot of good/useful features are implemented by developers with a focus on a 'complete' Gnome environment. Trying to get the best of all worlds leads to quite the unfortunate user experience.
hosted on a vendor's own site...
No chance of bias at all...
It's a criticism of the campaign directly. A fair criticism pointing out an interpretation of the campaign that seems as likely as any positive interpretation could be.
In terms of MS's ubiquitous nature, you can't deny that regardless of your desires, MS will crop up in your life. Repeatedly. Go buy a new laptop, most of them strive to have Windows when you get it. You want to ditch Windows and Office, fine, but then cope with the market realities of software support stipulations.
It portrayed him as awkward and out-of-touch. It even evoked his massive wealth as a reason for being out-of-touch. The entire concept seems out-of-touch in the first place. For those that the humor appeals to, the humor isn't particularly directed in a way that is favorable for the product, company, or Gates himself.
It's just a poor ad strategy so far.
it may not be about monetary damages today, but about precluding competition for a first-party equivalent. I.e. as they said, a planned harry-potter encyclopedia, which will have it's own revenue stream. If an established resource is available, demand and interest in the first party equivalent on launch may be diminished.
It *can* be *more* about money than $6,750 implies.
Overall, it certainly seems within the rights of the Harry Potter IP holders. It doesn't seem *outrageously* out of bounds. It seems like enough of a hard smack to stop it now, and presumably have a gap to die down for a launch of their equivalent.
Though just an injunction may have been less ire-evoking, as the author benefited from their efforts, and merely stopping the effort would have been enough.
"Nothing will convince me to switch to Vista!"
Ok, then we'll have commercials about nothing, brilliant!
If it comes in unencrypted, anyone could have intercepted it anyway.
If it comes in encrypted, then no loss of privacy.
If a company is setting up a web presence and can't do reliable email, that would be unfortunate.
If he is able to change email addresses, the 'old' address may be a '.forward' only sort of mail for transition anyway.
Google wants to 'free' users from specific platforms. They want an environment where webapps are desirable by everyone because the other options incur too much variance. They know how to compete and exploit web hosted services. They don't have a plan to do the same with standalone applications so much. This is their platform aimed to make a user feel secure and have a consistent platform with the features they need to ultimately build a feature-equivalent web based application.
So, from a strategic standpoint, it would have made sense to come out with support for all major players (and source code) out of the gate. It would have made a strong statement about the goal of platform indepedence. As stated above, this isn't about altruism, it's about leveling the playing field to give their web hosted applications a better chance at competing with standalone programs.
Exactly, so Canonical does exactly the same thing as SuSE/OpenSuSE or RHEL/Fedora ..
No, RH and SUSE treat their enterprise variants 'special'. Hard to obtain and wording to make it sound like time-bombed shareware. Updates are not free, like LTS.
Also, at least in Fedora, major changes are made to a release between releases that Ubuntu would postpone for the 6-month cycle. Using Fedora, suddenly they've switched kernel revisions, broken your binary drivers, etc etc.
I hear what you say about more commercially prominent vendors able to hire more developers, but Canonical offers support contracts. In the linux world, vendors aren't selling the platform in and of itself, they are selling services and support built upon a platform and pretend they are selling the platform. Canonical offers support contracts, and I would be quite happy to continue to see the platform free and services/support be more traditionally commercial. Why pretend your platform is your product, everyone who evaluates Linux is perfectly aware of the true value proposition they are after.
All their moves are remarkably coherent for the amount of activty/discussion they provoke. I think some of the people around google (investors) are a little wonky, but the major moves seem to be consistantly towards a handful of goals:
-Divorce the application market from the platform. To the extent of making their applications more desirable (with ad placement). Thus preventing users from offline software. I worry about this goal as it also is encouraging software subscription models.. The alleged chrome aims to bring these 'gadgets' to browsers to allow richer content than the current standards provide. Without the process of trying to ratify standards, just putting it out there and saying 'standardized or not, here it is under a license that lets other browsers copy it'. Firefox will probaably embrace it, though MS will push silverlight for all its worth.
-Get everyone looking at ads they charge for, and correlating whatever data they can to make it targeted (search related, location related in maps). Android is a recent example, a move essentially to get people looking at the internet more, and undoubtedly to provide ad-revenure-influenced POI in their GPS capabilities.
-Help the general state of internet-based commerce. I don't know much about google checkout, but at least google is making sure they have a controlling stake in the game. In part, they directly profit, but more importantly, they have the capacity encourage secure online payment strategies to more arbitrary vendors. Google Chrome (if real) would play into this based on the comic. A lot of emphasis on sandbox and isolation. Hopefully, meaningfully more secure, but at the least instilling consumer confidence in online commerce in the face of media discussion of online commerce and identity theft.
-Trying not to look like a big, scary company as they do this. They realize their product is the attention of the users. They must keep the users from being mad, which means free services of quality. The more they succeed, the more data they inherently have access to, and the more privacy concerns they face. For the time being, they haven't been too overt in doing evil, as they know how tenuous their position is. Google came from nowhere, and is currently a funnel for revnue and investing. Google always must know the next anybody is waiting for their chance to usurp when the masses declare google either stagnant or evil.
And a porn-browsing tab too. 'incognito' indeed.