You'll note that those reasons are conjecture on the part of the article, but they do have some interesting thoughts on why IBM might be making the changes.
There is one already selling ("dive"), one in the works (vrizzmo), and even a funded kickstarter project (vrase). There will probably be a lot more soon.
Yeah, the iris app is making good progress. See also the Jeannie app (which identifies itself as "Voice Actions" once installed). The feature set of Jeannie is better (e.g. "enable bluetooth"), but it doesn't have the iris/siri-like display of the chat dialog. Maybe these 2 apps should get together and combine forces.
Not so. UNIX time is strictly defined in POSIX, as are the arithmetic relationships between it and human time, e.g. a time_t % 60 gives you the elapsed seconds in the current minute, which would not be true if unix time included leap seconds.
What you are describing is TAI, or International Atomic Time. If you were to choose to run your system on TAI, you would need some conversion routines if you wanted your system to remain POSIX compatible (which is what modern unix/linux apps expect) -- e.g. time() and stat() would need to continue to report unix-time values, and you'd need TAI-compliant library functions to request the equivalent items with their raw TAI values.
This isn't about competing USB 3 standards -- the spec is being designed by a group, and there is only one. This is about the design of the hardware used to implement a host controller that can comply with the spec. This is something that any company can develop if they want to, but since Intel is going to license their design of the host controller for free, most companies will just wait for that design and use it to implement USB 3.
Opera has an option in their opera:config settings that lets you turn off the close button on the tabs. I know this because this is one of the first things I turned off when I tried out the opera 9.0 beta. One thing I like is that opera lets you middle-click any tab to close it -- I much prefer that over having a close-button wasting space on the tabs. I'll reserve judgement on the firefox implementation until after I try it -- it might be good enough to hide the button on the background tabs when space gets tight.
ABS doesn't make you stop faster, it keeps the wheels from locking up and skidding which keeps the car from fishtailing.
Not so. Preventing the wheels from locking up actually maximizes the amount of friction between the wheels and the ground, and this both reduces the stopping distance (compared to locking the wheels into a skid), while also giving you more directional control and stability. This is because static friction (or specifically rolling friction, which is a type of static friction) is the upper bound of the available friction between two surfaces. Transitioning to kinetic friction (which occurs when two surfaces are sliding past each other) decreases the amount of friction between the tires and the road, making the car slide farther than it would have if the wheels were kept right a the edge of going into a skid.
I was sad to see Carey's reply to this question, not because of Godwin's law, but because SCO's lawsuits were primarily targeting its own customers for contract violations that were only tangentially related to Linux (i.e. the claimed violations could have been related to any OS).
This all started with SCO telling the media that Linux violated their source copyrights, and that they were going to bring copyright lawsuits against companies running Linux Very Soon (unless the companies paid the appropriate extort^H^H^H^H^H^H license fees). Right after that, SCO filed suit against both Autozone and DaimlerChrysler, telling the media that the lawsuits against Linux customers had begun. However, reading the actual lawsuits revealed that SCO really sued their own customers over contract issues.
For instance, the only copyright-related part of the Autozone suit (that I'm aware of) was them claiming that Autozone must have used SCO libraries/binaries under another OS (which just happend to be Linux) during their transition from SCO's Unix to Linux (which would only be a possibility because of some SCO-binary-compatibility code that SCO themselves helped to put into Linux). This is a very different kettle of fish than them claiming to sue someone over alleged source-code copyright violations in Linux.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the media didn't notice this discrepancy (I only read about it at Groklaw), so they keep regurgitating the SCO FUD that SCO sued Linux customers over the use of Linux.
I think you're reading too much into a certain response letter he wrote to a child. The child had obviously written to ask Lewis to affirm a position about reading the books in a chronological order. Lewis was a kind enough person to write back a letter agreeing with the child. I find the letter to be much more of an exchange of personal opinions between already-existing Narnia fans than some kind of a general advocation of a particular reading order for new readers. See if you agree (I've highlighted what I consider the most telling part of the response):
I think I agree with your order {i.e. chronological} for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found as I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I'm not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.
I personally like the reading order of starting with tLtWatW because it allows the reader to encounter Narnia fully formed in more of a sense of discovery and wonder, and then to later on go back and see the early days of Narnia (in tMN) through the eyes of someone who is already familiar with it (e.g. "Oh, so that's where that lamp post came from!"). But I also certainly understand how others might feel differently. Perhaps if Lewis had been writing a reply to an adult he would have talked about the various benefits of one reading order compared to another.
It looks like I could have been clearer in describing what I was trying to say. So, let me attempt to clarify for those that didn't get my point (or perhaps didn't even realize that this distinction existed).
Let's first be clear that I'm not saying that progressive content is not encoded on DVDs, for indeed movies provide plenty of progressive source material (i.e. an entire frame comes from a single moment in time) and it's easy for players to re-extract the original progressive film frames for display. My point is that the result is something that is not quite as good as it could be if DVDs had actually designed with 480p displays in mind.
I called the end result 480i for two reasons. The first is that DVDs do contain each frame of progressive content separated into 2 fields (in the encoding this is called a progressive interlaced sequence, and having the frames separated into fields is required for the 3:2 pull-down flags to be used in MPEG 2 encoding because the flags just indicate "repeat this field"). The second is because there is vertical filtering applied to the image that reduces the quality down to one that won't flicker when displayed on an interlaced TV. For progressive source material, the first reason could be totally ignored if not for the second, so let's not get too bogged down in the encoding details. In other words, if the vertical resolution were not filtered to remove twitter, the two fields of a progressive frame could be reassembled into a full-resolution frame (at a frame rate 1/2 that of the field rate) and we could consider the result to be the same as 480p.
So, the problem is that DVDs were designed in an era before progressive scan was popular, so the images stored on them are pre-filtered for interlaced display. If the DVD player had been tasked with this vertical filtering for interlaced TVs, we would have a full 480p format. Indeed, someone could use the DVD Video format with full 480p resolution source material if they wanted to encode a disc that way (it just would twitter if it were displayed on an interlaced TV at standard refresh rates).
Finally, a discussion of twitter for those that might not know what it is: imagine a frame that has a single white dot on a single line in a 480i image which is being updated at 60 fields per second. That dot would be re-displayed only 30 times a second, so it would appear to blink to the human eye. Because of this, the highest frequencies in the vertical resolution must be filtered so that the alternating fields can support each other in displaying highly-contrasting light levels (such as white on black).
Here's
one DVD FAQ page that discusses the storing of progressive content as interlaced fields.
This is a common misconception about DVDs. In actuality, all video DVDs contain interlaced fields, with no exceptions (I remember an old Usenet posting by Chad Fogg that explained why the MPEG 2's progressive-video flag was not supported). Thus, movies are stored as 480i @ 48 fields per second, and, for "normal" TVs, are translated into into 480i @ 60 fields per second for display. A progressive DVD player has to unify the fields for display, and while this is trivial to do for film, the resulting video does not have quite as high of a vertical resolution as true 480p video is capable of because the 480i video was filtered for interlaced display (this removes twitter on interlaced TVs -- e.g. a bright dot on a single line would flicker at 30 updates/sec, so that is not allowed to happen).
So, the difference between 480p@24 and 480i@48 is just a slight loss of vertical resolution (not to be confused with lines), but the difference is there.
A good explanation of why the GPL is a license and not a contract was posted at Groklaw a while back. It includes some quotes from Eben Moglen, who is quite familiar with the subject.
If someone came out with a reasonably priced player that played both HD-DVD and BluRay, that would let people choose their favorite format (if there was a choice from the studios) or play content no matter what format the studio decided to go with. I wonder how likely that will be to happen? (Especially the "reasonably priced" part.)
Yes, the updates are staggered, but I wonder why 1.0.4 didn't ever find the 1.0.5 update by the time 1.0.6 came out? There was a week between those two releases.
Sure, free means "free of charge" as well as "free speech". I wouldn't dare argue that one definition is more valid than another.
I would. If you use the phrase "free software" with anyone who hasn't already been introduced to the FSF's definition, what will be their immediate assumuption for its meaning? That the software has no cost. Even worse, what will be their confidence that their assumed meaning is correct? It will be very high. This means that anyone who wants to use the phrase "free software" to mean "free as in freedom" has a constant, uphill battle to fight to avoid being misunderstood.
Because of this, I would argue that the phrase "free software" continues to be a poor choice, and should be changed. I have tried to think of a suggestion for something better, and I wonder how the phrase "Clear Software" would go over? Think of "Clear" as in transparent--able to see the source--and in open horizons for the code's use, and even in having a clear conscience. It at least avoids being immediately misunderstood like the term free software does, and sounds better than something like Emancipated Software, Libre Software, Freed Software, Unenslaved Software, Liberty Software, Liberated Software, etc.
If you don't like it, feel free to suggest something else!
I don't believe that is how the first-to-file rule works. It would still be possible to show that an idea has been used publically, and thus invalidate a patent with prior art. What changes is the patenting of non-published ideas -- for that you don't need to show that you thought of the idea first (or that you can forge documents to make it appear that you thought of it first), but just that you filed first.
"Why not forever?" I can imagine one malicious scenario that could be exploited with a challenge-at-any-time system (check my logic and let me know if I messed up):
A standards body chooses an algorithm and patents it, making the patented technology free for everyone to use.
Company E-ville has an obscure patent that could be used to challenge this new patent, but E-ville chooses instead to bide their time and wait for the new standard to be widely deployed (knowing that if they challenged the patent now, a different algorithm would be chosen and they'd get nada).
Several years go by, and the standard is hugely popular.
E-ville now chooses to challenge the patent, and is victorious.
Profit! (For E-ville)
Under a time-limited system where a patent wasn't being actively litigated, this couldn't happen.
Note also that the provision that allows for a challenge after the patent holder litigates makes it possible to challenge a patent after the initial 9 month window for any patent that is being actively enforced.
(So, this concept doesn't seem bad to me, but that doesn't mean I like the bill as a whole -- it's soundling like it tips the balance too far in favor of big corporations.)
Kick to the pants It's amazing what people can do when sufficiently motivated.
You've totally missed the point. Let's review.
A third party developer releases a set of changes for Safari that will make it pass the Acid2 test. This set of patches was not a part of the Apple-generated "code dumps". Instead, each and every change was documented separately as to why it was made.
The KHTML folks complain about people assuming that these patches to Apple's code base will just drop into KHTML. A typical sentiment is that the KHTML developers are lazy if they don't apply fixes for Safari as soon as they are released. The developers were not complaining that Apple wasn't doing their part, just that people don't understand how hard it is to merge changes back into KHTML due to the divergence of the two code bases.
The fact that only 1/2 of the changes for Safari were useable in KHTML and that it took one month to incorporate an extremely well-documented set of changes to Safari proves the point that the KHTML developers were making about how hard it is to merge changes back into KHTML from Safari.
Interestingly, the reaction of the masses is not that the KHTML developers have been vindicated, but rather that they are lazy. Wow. Talk about deja vu.
I would assume that they're using some kind of an alloy that has a lower freezing temperature. One possibility is an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin (also known as Galinstan) which has a freezing point of -20 degrees centigrade.
In this post, you see that Linus was effectively trying to rename GNU
That's certainly one cynical viewpoint, but is not what really happened. Linus started his own OS project and he named it as he pleased (or really those around him named it and he accepted the name). There's nothing wrong with naming your own project and then cherry picking the items you want to be in your project from the available choices. Keep in mind that the GNU folks were working on HURD at the time, and were not all that keen on the Linux kernel. So, this was not a case of someone coming along and completing the GNU project (at least, not at that time) -- this was a different OS project that shared a lot of the same code. In some ways it could be considered to be a fork, but even that is not right conceptually because the project didn't start out to be a GNU system. If the BSD utilities hadn't been under a cloud of a potential lawsuit, it may well have been that more BSD code would have made its way into the early versions of Linux (IIRC, the GNU tools were slightly buggier but more feature rich than the BSD tools at the time).
Stallman tells us the call a GNU system running on Linux GNU/Linux.
Stallman has every right to advocate that based on the perspective of someone close to the GNU project, and I have every right to ignore him based on my historical experiences with Linux from as far back as version 0.11 (I switched over from Minix to Linux, and helped Remy Card with some of the early work on ext2, so I've been using Linux for a long time).
> I agree that way back when, Linux was the name of the kernel, period
Not so. Here a posting from Linux Torvalds about Linux -- from the beginning the term was used as both the name for the kernel and the whole OS:
LINUX INFORMATION SHEET (last updated 13 Dec 1991)
1. WHAT IS LINUX 0.11
LINUX 0.11 is a freely distributable UNIX clone. It implements a subset of System V and POSIX functionality. LINUX has been written from scratch, and therefore does not contain any AT&T or MINIX code--not in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, or the libraries. For this reason it can be made available with the complete source code via anonymous FTP. LINUX runs only on 386/486 AT-bus machines; porting to non-Intel architectures is likely to be difficult, as the kernel makes extensive use of 386 memory management and task primitives.
[...]
2. LINUX features
- System call compatible with a subset of System V and POSIX
- Full multiprogramming (multiple programs can run at once)
- Memory paging with copy-on-write
- Demand loading of executables
- Page sharing of executables
- ANSI compliant C compiler (gcc)
- A complete set of compiler writing tools
(bison as yacc-replacement, flex as lex replacement)
- The GNU 'Bourne again' shell (bash)
- Micro emacs
- most utilities you need for development
(cat, cp, kermit, ls, make, etc.)
- Over 200 library procedures (atoi, fork, malloc, read, stdio, etc.)
- Currently 4 national keyboards: Finnish/US/German/French
- Full source code (in C) for the OS is freely distributable
- [...]
I always thought that Linux was indeed only a kernel for the GNU OS
That is a true statement for the GNU project, but not for all of Linuxdom. Linux (the OS) was not started by the GNU folks. It was started as a separate project and incorporated items from the FSF (and BSD, etc.) into its release. From the beginning the whole OS has always been called "Linux" (search Google Groups for "linux 0.11 author:torvalds" and click on the "Linux information sheet" for an example of this).
Yes, RMS prefers to call the OS GNU/Linux, but that's because he's seeing things from the perspective of the GNU project incorporating the Linux kernel into their work. The rest of Linuxdom see Linux as the name of both the OS and the kernel, and qualify the name using the phrase "the Linux kernel" as an easy way to differentiate between the two.
So, the opening statement in the OS X story is false: Linux is an OS, and is used as such by folks every day. This is the reality of the situation, and it is, at best, wishful thinking on the part of folks who claim it is not to say otherwise.
I was under the impression the most damning charges it makes are about the assertion that Project Monteray was worked on by an SCO fully aware that it was part of a migration to "Linux"
I also noticed that PJ didn't rebut that portion of the article. I think that the difference between the two may be in which SCO they're talking about. It appears that The Santa Cruz Operation (oldSCO) didn't know at the start that Project Monterey would be a stepping stone to Linux, but that Caldera (now The SCO Group, or newSCO) did know this when they purchased the SVR4 rights from oldSCO. If true, newSCO can't complain (successfully) about IBM abandoning Project Monterey for Linux if they knew at the time of their purchase what was going to happen (especially since they seemed to be actively supporting it at the time).
Slashdot Mirror
You'll note that those reasons are conjecture on the part of the article, but they do have some interesting thoughts on why IBM might be making the changes.
There is one already selling ("dive"), one in the works (vrizzmo), and even a funded kickstarter project (vrase). There will probably be a lot more soon.
Yeah, the iris app is making good progress. See also the Jeannie app (which identifies itself as "Voice Actions" once installed). The feature set of Jeannie is better (e.g. "enable bluetooth"), but it doesn't have the iris/siri-like display of the chat dialog. Maybe these 2 apps should get together and combine forces.
Not so. UNIX time is strictly defined in POSIX, as are the arithmetic relationships between it and human time, e.g. a time_t % 60 gives you the elapsed seconds in the current minute, which would not be true if unix time included leap seconds.
What you are describing is TAI, or International Atomic Time. If you were to choose to run your system on TAI, you would need some conversion routines if you wanted your system to remain POSIX compatible (which is what modern unix/linux apps expect) -- e.g. time() and stat() would need to continue to report unix-time values, and you'd need TAI-compliant library functions to request the equivalent items with their raw TAI values.
For more details, see the Wikipedia entry on Unix time.
This isn't about competing USB 3 standards -- the spec is being designed by a group, and there is only one. This is about the design of the hardware used to implement a host controller that can comply with the spec. This is something that any company can develop if they want to, but since Intel is going to license their design of the host controller for free, most companies will just wait for that design and use it to implement USB 3.
I like the merging of two ideas in your flashlight suggestion, but Adobe might take issue with it.
Another off-the-cuff idea:
mithrilight -- named for an even higher quality (albeit fictional) silver: mithril.
Opera has an option in their opera:config settings that lets you turn off the close button on the tabs. I know this because this is one of the first things I turned off when I tried out the opera 9.0 beta. One thing I like is that opera lets you middle-click any tab to close it -- I much prefer that over having a close-button wasting space on the tabs. I'll reserve judgement on the firefox implementation until after I try it -- it might be good enough to hide the button on the background tabs when space gets tight.
Not so. Preventing the wheels from locking up actually maximizes the amount of friction between the wheels and the ground, and this both reduces the stopping distance (compared to locking the wheels into a skid), while also giving you more directional control and stability. This is because static friction (or specifically rolling friction, which is a type of static friction) is the upper bound of the available friction between two surfaces. Transitioning to kinetic friction (which occurs when two surfaces are sliding past each other) decreases the amount of friction between the tires and the road, making the car slide farther than it would have if the wheels were kept right a the edge of going into a skid.
I was sad to see Carey's reply to this question, not because of Godwin's law, but because SCO's lawsuits were primarily targeting its own customers for contract violations that were only tangentially related to Linux (i.e. the claimed violations could have been related to any OS).
This all started with SCO telling the media that Linux violated their source copyrights, and that they were going to bring copyright lawsuits against companies running Linux Very Soon (unless the companies paid the appropriate extort^H^H^H^H^H^H license fees). Right after that, SCO filed suit against both Autozone and DaimlerChrysler, telling the media that the lawsuits against Linux customers had begun. However, reading the actual lawsuits revealed that SCO really sued their own customers over contract issues.
For instance, the only copyright-related part of the Autozone suit (that I'm aware of) was them claiming that Autozone must have used SCO libraries/binaries under another OS (which just happend to be Linux) during their transition from SCO's Unix to Linux (which would only be a possibility because of some SCO-binary-compatibility code that SCO themselves helped to put into Linux). This is a very different kettle of fish than them claiming to sue someone over alleged source-code copyright violations in Linux.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the media didn't notice this discrepancy (I only read about it at Groklaw), so they keep regurgitating the SCO FUD that SCO sued Linux customers over the use of Linux.
I think you're reading too much into a certain response letter he wrote to a child. The child had obviously written to ask Lewis to affirm a position about reading the books in a chronological order. Lewis was a kind enough person to write back a letter agreeing with the child. I find the letter to be much more of an exchange of personal opinions between already-existing Narnia fans than some kind of a general advocation of a particular reading order for new readers. See if you agree (I've highlighted what I consider the most telling part of the response):
I personally like the reading order of starting with tLtWatW because it allows the reader to encounter Narnia fully formed in more of a sense of discovery and wonder, and then to later on go back and see the early days of Narnia (in tMN) through the eyes of someone who is already familiar with it (e.g. "Oh, so that's where that lamp post came from!"). But I also certainly understand how others might feel differently. Perhaps if Lewis had been writing a reply to an adult he would have talked about the various benefits of one reading order compared to another.
It looks like I could have been clearer in describing what I was trying to say. So, let me attempt to clarify for those that didn't get my point (or perhaps didn't even realize that this distinction existed).
Let's first be clear that I'm not saying that progressive content is not encoded on DVDs, for indeed movies provide plenty of progressive source material (i.e. an entire frame comes from a single moment in time) and it's easy for players to re-extract the original progressive film frames for display. My point is that the result is something that is not quite as good as it could be if DVDs had actually designed with 480p displays in mind.
I called the end result 480i for two reasons. The first is that DVDs do contain each frame of progressive content separated into 2 fields (in the encoding this is called a progressive interlaced sequence, and having the frames separated into fields is required for the 3:2 pull-down flags to be used in MPEG 2 encoding because the flags just indicate "repeat this field"). The second is because there is vertical filtering applied to the image that reduces the quality down to one that won't flicker when displayed on an interlaced TV. For progressive source material, the first reason could be totally ignored if not for the second, so let's not get too bogged down in the encoding details. In other words, if the vertical resolution were not filtered to remove twitter, the two fields of a progressive frame could be reassembled into a full-resolution frame (at a frame rate 1/2 that of the field rate) and we could consider the result to be the same as 480p.
So, the problem is that DVDs were designed in an era before progressive scan was popular, so the images stored on them are pre-filtered for interlaced display. If the DVD player had been tasked with this vertical filtering for interlaced TVs, we would have a full 480p format. Indeed, someone could use the DVD Video format with full 480p resolution source material if they wanted to encode a disc that way (it just would twitter if it were displayed on an interlaced TV at standard refresh rates).
Finally, a discussion of twitter for those that might not know what it is: imagine a frame that has a single white dot on a single line in a 480i image which is being updated at 60 fields per second. That dot would be re-displayed only 30 times a second, so it would appear to blink to the human eye. Because of this, the highest frequencies in the vertical resolution must be filtered so that the alternating fields can support each other in displaying highly-contrasting light levels (such as white on black).
Here's one DVD FAQ page that discusses the storing of progressive content as interlaced fields.
This is a common misconception about DVDs. In actuality, all video DVDs contain interlaced fields, with no exceptions (I remember an old Usenet posting by Chad Fogg that explained why the MPEG 2's progressive-video flag was not supported). Thus, movies are stored as 480i @ 48 fields per second, and, for "normal" TVs, are translated into into 480i @ 60 fields per second for display. A progressive DVD player has to unify the fields for display, and while this is trivial to do for film, the resulting video does not have quite as high of a vertical resolution as true 480p video is capable of because the 480i video was filtered for interlaced display (this removes twitter on interlaced TVs -- e.g. a bright dot on a single line would flicker at 30 updates/sec, so that is not allowed to happen).
So, the difference between 480p@24 and 480i@48 is just a slight loss of vertical resolution (not to be confused with lines), but the difference is there.
A good explanation of why the GPL is a license and not a contract was posted at Groklaw a while back. It includes some quotes from Eben Moglen, who is quite familiar with the subject.
I don't see any problems accessing the site with Firefox 1.5 beta2.
If someone came out with a reasonably priced player that played both HD-DVD and BluRay, that would let people choose their favorite format (if there was a choice from the studios) or play content no matter what format the studio decided to go with. I wonder how likely that will be to happen? (Especially the "reasonably priced" part.)
Yes, the updates are staggered, but I wonder why 1.0.4 didn't ever find the 1.0.5 update by the time 1.0.6 came out? There was a week between those two releases.
I would. If you use the phrase "free software" with anyone who hasn't already been introduced to the FSF's definition, what will be their immediate assumuption for its meaning? That the software has no cost. Even worse, what will be their confidence that their assumed meaning is correct? It will be very high. This means that anyone who wants to use the phrase "free software" to mean "free as in freedom" has a constant, uphill battle to fight to avoid being misunderstood.
Because of this, I would argue that the phrase "free software" continues to be a poor choice, and should be changed. I have tried to think of a suggestion for something better, and I wonder how the phrase "Clear Software" would go over? Think of "Clear" as in transparent--able to see the source--and in open horizons for the code's use, and even in having a clear conscience. It at least avoids being immediately misunderstood like the term free software does, and sounds better than something like Emancipated Software, Libre Software, Freed Software, Unenslaved Software, Liberty Software, Liberated Software, etc.
If you don't like it, feel free to suggest something else!
I don't believe that is how the first-to-file rule works. It would still be possible to show that an idea has been used publically, and thus invalidate a patent with prior art. What changes is the patenting of non-published ideas -- for that you don't need to show that you thought of the idea first (or that you can forge documents to make it appear that you thought of it first), but just that you filed first.
"Why not forever?" I can imagine one malicious scenario that could be exploited with a challenge-at-any-time system (check my logic and let me know if I messed up):
Under a time-limited system where a patent wasn't being actively litigated, this couldn't happen.
Note also that the provision that allows for a challenge after the patent holder litigates makes it possible to challenge a patent after the initial 9 month window for any patent that is being actively enforced.
(So, this concept doesn't seem bad to me, but that doesn't mean I like the bill as a whole -- it's soundling like it tips the balance too far in favor of big corporations.)
You've totally missed the point. Let's review.
A third party developer releases a set of changes for Safari that will make it pass the Acid2 test. This set of patches was not a part of the Apple-generated "code dumps". Instead, each and every change was documented separately as to why it was made.
The KHTML folks complain about people assuming that these patches to Apple's code base will just drop into KHTML. A typical sentiment is that the KHTML developers are lazy if they don't apply fixes for Safari as soon as they are released. The developers were not complaining that Apple wasn't doing their part, just that people don't understand how hard it is to merge changes back into KHTML due to the divergence of the two code bases.
The fact that only 1/2 of the changes for Safari were useable in KHTML and that it took one month to incorporate an extremely well-documented set of changes to Safari proves the point that the KHTML developers were making about how hard it is to merge changes back into KHTML from Safari.
Interestingly, the reaction of the masses is not that the KHTML developers have been vindicated, but rather that they are lazy. Wow. Talk about deja vu.
I would assume that they're using some kind of an alloy that has a lower freezing temperature. One possibility is an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin (also known as Galinstan) which has a freezing point of -20 degrees centigrade.
That's certainly one cynical viewpoint, but is not what really happened. Linus started his own OS project and he named it as he pleased (or really those around him named it and he accepted the name). There's nothing wrong with naming your own project and then cherry picking the items you want to be in your project from the available choices. Keep in mind that the GNU folks were working on HURD at the time, and were not all that keen on the Linux kernel. So, this was not a case of someone coming along and completing the GNU project (at least, not at that time) -- this was a different OS project that shared a lot of the same code. In some ways it could be considered to be a fork, but even that is not right conceptually because the project didn't start out to be a GNU system. If the BSD utilities hadn't been under a cloud of a potential lawsuit, it may well have been that more BSD code would have made its way into the early versions of Linux (IIRC, the GNU tools were slightly buggier but more feature rich than the BSD tools at the time).
Stallman tells us the call a GNU system running on Linux GNU/Linux.
Stallman has every right to advocate that based on the perspective of someone close to the GNU project, and I have every right to ignore him based on my historical experiences with Linux from as far back as version 0.11 (I switched over from Minix to Linux, and helped Remy Card with some of the early work on ext2, so I've been using Linux for a long time).
> I agree that way back when, Linux was the name of the kernel, period
Not so. Here a posting from Linux Torvalds about Linux -- from the beginning the term was used as both the name for the kernel and the whole OS:
LINUX INFORMATION SHEET
(last updated 13 Dec 1991)
1. WHAT IS LINUX 0.11
LINUX 0.11 is a freely distributable UNIX clone. It implements a
subset of System V and POSIX functionality. LINUX has been written
from scratch, and therefore does not contain any AT&T or MINIX
code--not in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, or the libraries.
For this reason it can be made available with the complete source code
via anonymous FTP. LINUX runs only on 386/486 AT-bus machines; porting
to non-Intel architectures is likely to be difficult, as the kernel
makes extensive use of 386 memory management and task primitives.
[...]
2. LINUX features
- System call compatible with a subset of System V and POSIX
- Full multiprogramming (multiple programs can run at once)
- Memory paging with copy-on-write
- Demand loading of executables
- Page sharing of executables
- ANSI compliant C compiler (gcc)
- A complete set of compiler writing tools
(bison as yacc-replacement, flex as lex replacement)
- The GNU 'Bourne again' shell (bash)
- Micro emacs
- most utilities you need for development
(cat, cp, kermit, ls, make, etc.)
- Over 200 library procedures (atoi, fork, malloc, read, stdio, etc.)
- Currently 4 national keyboards: Finnish/US/German/French
- Full source code (in C) for the OS is freely distributable
- [...]
That is a true statement for the GNU project, but not for all of Linuxdom. Linux (the OS) was not started by the GNU folks. It was started as a separate project and incorporated items from the FSF (and BSD, etc.) into its release. From the beginning the whole OS has always been called "Linux" (search Google Groups for "linux 0.11 author:torvalds" and click on the "Linux information sheet" for an example of this).
Yes, RMS prefers to call the OS GNU/Linux, but that's because he's seeing things from the perspective of the GNU project incorporating the Linux kernel into their work. The rest of Linuxdom see Linux as the name of both the OS and the kernel, and qualify the name using the phrase "the Linux kernel" as an easy way to differentiate between the two.
So, the opening statement in the OS X story is false: Linux is an OS, and is used as such by folks every day. This is the reality of the situation, and it is, at best, wishful thinking on the part of folks who claim it is not to say otherwise.
I also noticed that PJ didn't rebut that portion of the article. I think that the difference between the two may be in which SCO they're talking about. It appears that The Santa Cruz Operation (oldSCO) didn't know at the start that Project Monterey would be a stepping stone to Linux, but that Caldera (now The SCO Group, or newSCO) did know this when they purchased the SVR4 rights from oldSCO. If true, newSCO can't complain (successfully) about IBM abandoning Project Monterey for Linux if they knew at the time of their purchase what was going to happen (especially since they seemed to be actively supporting it at the time).