I would point out that technically Apple doesn't make PC's any more either(and perhaps never did), they are Intel(PC) boxes running a bsdSkin(OSX) rather than Windows. They only thing that differentiates them from, say, Dell, is that they adopt closed standards and have vertical branding(but certainly not vertical integration)...
...and that they develop their own OS for them (yes, the lower levels are based on Mach and BSD code, but it's not as if they just take off-the-shelf Mach and BSD code and slap a thin GUI skin over it).
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, Intel/IBM/Motorola(the three company's that have supplied them with chips) are essentially the only "PC" makers in the world, and are still going strong.
Neither IBM nor Motorola make processor chips used in any significant personal computers these days (unless you have your own personal IBM Power System, IBM System z, or IBM BlueGene supercomputer:-)), so neither of them are "PC makers" any more.
did you realize that HP didnt start selling PC's until 1995... over 10 years after the macintosh was released?
I guess the folks who did that timeline didn't consider the HP Vectra, released in 1995, very important, perhaps because it wasn't aimed at "the home computing market", which is what the timeline says HP entered in 1995. (I also guess they didn't consider usability very important, either, unless it works better than it did on Safari.)
And, as long as we're beating up marketoons making misleading claims, HP didn't "create RISC architecture" all by themselves in 1986; the first Berkeley RISC processor and the first Stanford MIPS processors were developed in the early 1980's, and IBM were working on the 801 in the late 1970's. Perhaps the first PA-RISC-based HP 3000 was the first commercial RISC-based machine, but that's a different matter.
Slashdot hasn't been the same in a very, very long time. But I try not to judge people by their UID.
Good. I may have a 7-digit UID, but I date back to early '98 (Damn, if I were home, I could've posted this reply on my new Pavilion, which I got from an alternate universe).
Pavilion? Heck, right now, I wish I had an HP 9000/7xx so I could post from it just to have fun with the folks who seem to think HP's sole involvement in the computer business was making PC's. (For real lulz, I'd like to post from it using Internet Explorer, assuming Slashdot would work with IE 5.)
That's because the current "HP" company is only the former PC division which doesn't have any heritage before the development of PCs from the original HP, now known as Keysight.
Actually, the current "HP" company is "the former PC division" plus "the former printer division" plus "the former server division", and "the former server division" has heritage from the original HP going back at least as far as the HP 9000 workstation/server line from the mid 1980's (the HP 2100/HP 1000 and HP 3000 lines are dead, so I won't count their heritage, going back to 1966 and 1973, respectively).
At some point in the future, the products from the first line of products HP ever had (electronic test and measurement) will be offered by a company named Keysight but, for now, that's still Agilent. However, treating electronic test and measurement equipment as the only think that's "the real HP" is rather arbitrary, given that computers were a significant part of HP's business, as in "about half of their sales", at least as far back as 1980.
(I presume nobody here is so ignorant as to think HP was solely a test and measurement company, with no involvement in the computer business whatsoever, until they started making IBM-compatible PCs.)
If all you know about HP is its computers, you might think that, because it's the last remaining bit of continuity from that time. But thirty years ago, computers were not what defined HP.
RMS wants to remove the developers ultimate expression of freedom and that freedom is to decide how they want to license their software.
RMS is opposed to software that doesn't offer users the freedom to get the source code, have somebody modify it. and then make the modifications available to others. He thus prefers a license that doesn't offer developers the freedom to provide software on terms that don't offer users said freedom.
So it's not that he's anti-freedom; he's in favor of some forms of freedom and opposed to other forms of freedom.
Learn some history... BSD-derivative infighting almost undermined Unix as a platform.
[Not in source given]. The Unix wars were between commercial Unixes with varying mixtures of AT&T code, BSD code (some of which was AT&T-derived), and vendor code. If Unix had been free software under a copyleft license from the beginning, this might not have happened, but it wasn't free software at all at the time, so you can't exactly blame this on the free-software BSD license.
Historically, BSD licensing has created some big problems, with companies taking software, adding major features, and then providing it as part of their own Unix without feeding the changes back into the central tree. It's arguable that overly-permissive licensing terms gave us the extremly divided and nasty Unix market of the 80s and 90s,
It is not arguable that BSD licensing gave us the Unix market of the 1980's, as there wasn't a BSD-licensed UN*X prior to Net/2 in 1991 (and there were legal issues about that with AT&T). The licensing terms of Unix at the time may have been "overly-permissive" in that they didn't require builders of Unix derivatives to give their changes back to AT&T or other licensees of Unix, but they were quite un-permissive in that they don't let you provide the changes to anybody who wasn't a source licensee.
So, yeah, if AT&T had licensed AT&T under terms requiring all its source licensees to give their changes back to it and make them available to all other source licensees, we might not have had as fragmented a Unix market as we do. Such a license would probably have been rather different from the GPL, however, as it would probably have prohibited redistribution of source to people who didn't buy a source license from AT&T, as the Unix binary license AT&T actually offered at the time did. (The "and make them available to other source licensees" part is to keep AT&T from getting changes and not incorporating them into their version of Unix.)
If AT&T had released the Unix source as free software under a copyleft license, perhaps we wouldn't have had the fragmentation that we did. If so, however, I suspect that the "as free software" part, which the BSD license also has, would have been at least as important as the "copyleft" part.
No, those said miscellaneous items made by HP when they were started in 1939 did not acually include a line of 16 bit microcomputers.
The quote to which I was responding said "HP made audio oscillators, thermometers, and other miscellaney items for a long time before they made PCs."; that sentence said nothing about 1939, given that not all of their analog products were first made in 1939.
The person before that referred to "the beginning HP", but it would be so extraordinarily silly to, in the context of this discussion, compare HP at the time it was first founded to HP at the time when it made PCs. In 1980, for example, HP made several lines of computers, none of which were, obviously, "IBM-compatible PCs", and the computer+calculator business accounted for 49% of their sales.
If somebody wants to insist that, when HP was founded, they didn't make computers, so the real HP isn't a computer company, they'd better do that about IBM, too. I certainly won't take either of those claims seriously, and I don't think anybody else should, either.
I.e., comparing the HP of the '80's with the HP of today might make sense in this context; comparing the HP of the '40's with the HP of today makes no sense in this context, and is thus a worse comparison, not a better one.
...and except for a many of the kexts that ship with it, and except for the AFP server, and except for the SMB server as of Lion, and various other bits as well.
I don't know the source code line counts, but I suspect more lines are not open source than are.
I was at Novell at the time during which the protocol basis for the commercial Internet was being decided. Novell was attempting to swing a deal with AT&T to get them to deploy a commercial network topology based on SPX/IPX; at the same time, Microsoft was attempting to get AT&T and Sprint, and whoever else they could get on board, to deploy a commercial network based on NetBIOS/NetBEUI.
It has been some time since I worked with both IPX and NetBEUI, but AFAIK they are single-segment protocols
Host/service-name-to-address lookup is done in NetBIOS Frames protocol using broadcasts. That's not the only way to do it with NetBIOS-over-TCP; it might not be the only way to do it with NetBIOS-over-IPX either.
(Terry, was Microsoft talking about using NBF? That probably deserved to die, for the reasons mentioned.)
This is just simply false. There's nothing in the GPL that prohibits releasing software on the App Store.
Yes there is -- clause 6, installation instructions requirement (anti-Tivoisation clause) "the information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made". The App Store and iPads etc do not support this.
I.e., you mean "yes, there is, in the GPLv3". Is there anything that prohibits releasing GPLv2 software through the App Store? There still exists software released under the GPLv2, including, I think, some obscure OS kernel out there.
It's merged so many times with other corporations that you really can't say it "still exists".
The only question is whether to rate this -1, Confused or -1, Troll (i.e., either you know that the common name substring "Packard" is insufficient to equate the two companies and are just trolling or you don't know and are confused).
HP still exists, but do they still make computers? All their systems that I know about are made by someone else like Quanta or Foxconn and have HP logos slapped on them. Does anyone know of systems HP actually makes?
I'm not sure - do they manufacture their Integrity servers themselves, or are those also made by contract manufacturers?
A better comparison is the beginning HP with the PC maker HP. Like a prior comment about IBM; they're still in business, just not making PCs any more. HP made audio oscillators, thermometers, and other miscellaney items for a long time before they made PCs.
HP is essentially a different company, as it split itself into pieces. Agilent is the real HP.
And the HP 3000 and HP 9000 lines weren't made by the real HP? At least by 1980, the "electronic data products" part of HP (computers, calculators, and the like) was 49% of their sales (see page 25 of their 1980 annual report). The rest, i.e. Agilent, is 51%, so Agilent was slightly more than half of 1980 HP.
No. The real irony here is that Apple started out as something distinct and then ultimately ended up as just another PC vendor
...except that they were and are one of the few x86-based PC vendors who has their own OS (or acquired it from NeXT and then continued to work on it, if you will) and sells it as the primary OS, rather than just licensing Windows and offering that as the primary OS.
Well, obviously not with you! You have already made up your mind and won't let facts get in the way of your ideology or your bigotry.
When the poster you're quoting says "No further discussion necessary", he's saying that this is what Perkins is implying, i.e. "hey, this protest is just like Kristallnacht, hence evil and unworthy of discussion". Read the posting, and its title ("He's trying to shut down debate", "he" being Perkins) more carefully.
Best post of the day on this topic... When rents go up, people's incomes down, especially those living on a fixed income.
(Presumably you meant "people's disposable incomes go down"; rents going up don't ipso facto decrease your pay, but it increases the amount of your pay that goes to paying rent, thus decreasing the amount of your pay available for anything else, such as food, clothing, medicine, transportation to your job, etc..)
Slashdot Mirror
I would point out that technically Apple doesn't make PC's any more either(and perhaps never did), they are Intel(PC) boxes running a bsdSkin(OSX) rather than Windows. They only thing that differentiates them from, say, Dell, is that they adopt closed standards and have vertical branding(but certainly not vertical integration)...
...and that they develop their own OS for them (yes, the lower levels are based on Mach and BSD code, but it's not as if they just take off-the-shelf Mach and BSD code and slap a thin GUI skin over it).
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, Intel/IBM/Motorola(the three company's that have supplied them with chips) are essentially the only "PC" makers in the world, and are still going strong.
Neither IBM nor Motorola make processor chips used in any significant personal computers these days (unless you have your own personal IBM Power System, IBM System z, or IBM BlueGene supercomputer :-)), so neither of them are "PC makers" any more.
did you realize that HP didnt start selling PC's until 1995... over 10 years after the macintosh was released?
I guess the folks who did that timeline didn't consider the HP Vectra, released in 1995, very important, perhaps because it wasn't aimed at "the home computing market", which is what the timeline says HP entered in 1995. (I also guess they didn't consider usability very important, either, unless it works better than it did on Safari.)
And, as long as we're beating up marketoons making misleading claims, HP didn't "create RISC architecture" all by themselves in 1986; the first Berkeley RISC processor and the first Stanford MIPS processors were developed in the early 1980's, and IBM were working on the 801 in the late 1970's. Perhaps the first PA-RISC-based HP 3000 was the first commercial RISC-based machine, but that's a different matter.
Slashdot hasn't been the same in a very, very long time. But I try not to judge people by their UID.
Good. I may have a 7-digit UID, but I date back to early '98 (Damn, if I were home, I could've posted this reply on my new Pavilion, which I got from an alternate universe).
Pavilion? Heck, right now, I wish I had an HP 9000/7xx so I could post from it just to have fun with the folks who seem to think HP's sole involvement in the computer business was making PC's. (For real lulz, I'd like to post from it using Internet Explorer, assuming Slashdot would work with IE 5.)
That's because the current "HP" company is only the former PC division which doesn't have any heritage before the development of PCs from the original HP, now known as Keysight.
Actually, the current "HP" company is "the former PC division" plus "the former printer division" plus "the former server division", and "the former server division" has heritage from the original HP going back at least as far as the HP 9000 workstation/server line from the mid 1980's (the HP 2100/HP 1000 and HP 3000 lines are dead, so I won't count their heritage, going back to 1966 and 1973, respectively).
At some point in the future, the products from the first line of products HP ever had (electronic test and measurement) will be offered by a company named Keysight but, for now, that's still Agilent. However, treating electronic test and measurement equipment as the only think that's "the real HP" is rather arbitrary, given that computers were a significant part of HP's business, as in "about half of their sales", at least as far back as 1980.
(I presume nobody here is so ignorant as to think HP was solely a test and measurement company, with no involvement in the computer business whatsoever, until they started making IBM-compatible PCs.)
If all you know about HP is its computers, you might think that, because it's the last remaining bit of continuity from that time. But thirty years ago, computers were not what defined HP.
Yes, computers only accounted for a little over half of HP's net sales and about 47% of the sum of its earnings before taxes from all four of their main business segments, so computers and instrumentation about equally defined HP thirty years ago. (In 1998, the year before they spun off Agilent, computers accounted for about 83% of orders and of net revenue.)
RMS wants to remove the developers ultimate expression of freedom and that freedom is to decide how they want to license their software.
RMS is opposed to software that doesn't offer users the freedom to get the source code, have somebody modify it. and then make the modifications available to others. He thus prefers a license that doesn't offer developers the freedom to provide software on terms that don't offer users said freedom.
So it's not that he's anti-freedom; he's in favor of some forms of freedom and opposed to other forms of freedom.
Learn some history... BSD-derivative infighting almost undermined Unix as a platform.
[Not in source given]. The Unix wars were between commercial Unixes with varying mixtures of AT&T code, BSD code (some of which was AT&T-derived), and vendor code. If Unix had been free software under a copyleft license from the beginning, this might not have happened, but it wasn't free software at all at the time, so you can't exactly blame this on the free-software BSD license.
Historically, BSD licensing has created some big problems, with companies taking software, adding major features, and then providing it as part of their own Unix without feeding the changes back into the central tree. It's arguable that overly-permissive licensing terms gave us the extremly divided and nasty Unix market of the 80s and 90s,
It is not arguable that BSD licensing gave us the Unix market of the 1980's, as there wasn't a BSD-licensed UN*X prior to Net/2 in 1991 (and there were legal issues about that with AT&T). The licensing terms of Unix at the time may have been "overly-permissive" in that they didn't require builders of Unix derivatives to give their changes back to AT&T or other licensees of Unix, but they were quite un-permissive in that they don't let you provide the changes to anybody who wasn't a source licensee.
So, yeah, if AT&T had licensed AT&T under terms requiring all its source licensees to give their changes back to it and make them available to all other source licensees, we might not have had as fragmented a Unix market as we do. Such a license would probably have been rather different from the GPL, however, as it would probably have prohibited redistribution of source to people who didn't buy a source license from AT&T, as the Unix binary license AT&T actually offered at the time did. (The "and make them available to other source licensees" part is to keep AT&T from getting changes and not incorporating them into their version of Unix.)
If AT&T had released the Unix source as free software under a copyleft license, perhaps we wouldn't have had the fragmentation that we did. If so, however, I suspect that the "as free software" part, which the BSD license also has, would have been at least as important as the "copyleft" part.
No, those said miscellaneous items made by HP when they were started in 1939 did not acually include a line of 16 bit microcomputers.
The quote to which I was responding said "HP made audio oscillators, thermometers, and other miscellaney items for a long time before they made PCs."; that sentence said nothing about 1939, given that not all of their analog products were first made in 1939.
The person before that referred to "the beginning HP", but it would be so extraordinarily silly to, in the context of this discussion, compare HP at the time it was first founded to HP at the time when it made PCs. In 1980, for example, HP made several lines of computers, none of which were, obviously, "IBM-compatible PCs", and the computer+calculator business accounted for 49% of their sales.
If somebody wants to insist that, when HP was founded, they didn't make computers, so the real HP isn't a computer company, they'd better do that about IBM, too. I certainly won't take either of those claims seriously, and I don't think anybody else should, either.
I.e., comparing the HP of the '80's with the HP of today might make sense in this context; comparing the HP of the '40's with the HP of today makes no sense in this context, and is thus a worse comparison, not a better one.
That's pretty much how I feel about the GPL vs BSD thing.
I'm not sure how I feel about a society giving its members the ri. How do you feel about a society giving its members the ri?
(Hint: the subject line of a /. posting is limited in length, and it might not be big enough to say what you want.)
How much of OS X is open source?
All of it except for the UI layer.
...and except for a many of the kexts that ship with it, and except for the AFP server, and except for the SMB server as of Lion, and various other bits as well.
I don't know the source code line counts, but I suspect more lines are not open source than are.
Why does Apple use LLVM? 1. They hired Chris Lattner
Did Apple hire Lattner because they wanted to use LLVM?
A setback yes, as now Xcode isn't free,
Xcode was and still is free-as-in-beer to Mac users, and was never free-as-in-speech.
The command-line compilers are still, as far as I know, free, but under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is "a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL", rather than the GPL.
I was at Novell at the time during which the protocol basis for the commercial Internet was being decided. Novell was attempting to swing a deal with AT&T to get them to deploy a commercial network topology based on SPX/IPX; at the same time, Microsoft was attempting to get AT&T and Sprint, and whoever else they could get on board, to deploy a commercial network based on NetBIOS/NetBEUI.
It has been some time since I worked with both IPX and NetBEUI, but AFAIK they are single-segment protocols
Correct about NetBIOS and NetBEUI/NetBIOS Frames protocol or whatever you want to call it; incorrect about IPX, which is routable and is routed. And NetBIOS (the service) can also operate atop IPX as well as operating atop TCP/UDP.
based on broadcast.
Host/service-name-to-address lookup is done in NetBIOS Frames protocol using broadcasts. That's not the only way to do it with NetBIOS-over-TCP; it might not be the only way to do it with NetBIOS-over-IPX either.
(Terry, was Microsoft talking about using NBF? That probably deserved to die, for the reasons mentioned.)
This is just simply false. There's nothing in the GPL that prohibits releasing software on the App Store.
Yes there is -- clause 6, installation instructions requirement (anti-Tivoisation clause) "the information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made". The App Store and iPads etc do not support this.
No, clause 6 says "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.".
I.e., you mean "yes, there is, in the GPLv3". Is there anything that prohibits releasing GPLv2 software through the App Store? There still exists software released under the GPLv2, including, I think, some obscure OS kernel out there.
This Britain is where 2014 is actually happening, and is making 1984 look outdated, and optimistic.
So a boot stamping on a human face forever is better than the UK now?
It's merged so many times with other corporations that you really can't say it "still exists".
The only question is whether to rate this -1, Confused or -1, Troll (i.e., either you know that the common name substring "Packard" is insufficient to equate the two companies and are just trolling or you don't know and are confused).
HP still exists, but do they still make computers? All their systems that I know about are made by someone else like Quanta or Foxconn and have HP logos slapped on them. Does anyone know of systems HP actually makes?
I'm not sure - do they manufacture their Integrity servers themselves, or are those also made by contract manufacturers?
A better comparison is the beginning HP with the PC maker HP. Like a prior comment about IBM; they're still in business, just not making PCs any more. HP made audio oscillators, thermometers, and other miscellaney items for a long time before they made PCs.
Said miscellaneous items including a line of 16-bit minicomputers, a line of 16-bit and later 32-bit multi-user computers used for, among other purposes, business computing, and a line of 32-bit and later 64-bit UNIX workstations and servers, the descendants of some of which were still being made when the test-and-measuring-equipment part was spun off as Agilent, and the descendants of the last of which are still being made.
HP is essentially a different company, as it split itself into pieces. Agilent is the real HP.
And the HP 3000 and HP 9000 lines weren't made by the real HP? At least by 1980, the "electronic data products" part of HP (computers, calculators, and the like) was 49% of their sales (see page 25 of their 1980 annual report). The rest, i.e. Agilent, is 51%, so Agilent was slightly more than half of 1980 HP.
Write English or stfu&gfto.
Go Fuck The Oatmeal?
No. The real irony here is that Apple started out as something distinct and then ultimately ended up as just another PC vendor
...except that they were and are one of the few x86-based PC vendors who has their own OS (or acquired it from NeXT and then continued to work on it, if you will) and sells it as the primary OS, rather than just licensing Windows and offering that as the primary OS.
A company called "Hewlett-Packard" still exists, but they sell printers and PCs.
...and some other machines that are neither printers nor PC nor "IBM-compatible PC architecture servers".
Nothing to do with the company that Bill and Dave started in the Palo Alto garage....
...except for that third set of machines, which date back to computers Bill and Dave's company did back in the 1980's (Itanium started out as a "PA-RISC NG" project), and arguably earlier (PA-RISC first showed up in an HP 3000, which was a line of computers dating back to 1973).
Well, obviously not with you! You have already made up your mind and won't let facts get in the way of your ideology or your bigotry.
When the poster you're quoting says "No further discussion necessary", he's saying that this is what Perkins is implying, i.e. "hey, this protest is just like Kristallnacht, hence evil and unworthy of discussion". Read the posting, and its title ("He's trying to shut down debate", "he" being Perkins) more carefully.
Best post of the day on this topic... When rents go up, people's incomes down, especially those living on a fixed income.
(Presumably you meant "people's disposable incomes go down"; rents going up don't ipso facto decrease your pay, but it increases the amount of your pay that goes to paying rent, thus decreasing the amount of your pay available for anything else, such as food, clothing, medicine, transportation to your job, etc..)