>> I think that Linux has real promise, and even if you can get it up to 10% of computers running Linux, that many of the manufacturers will follow.
Actually, I think that Linux's promise is not related to the provision of support by manufacturers at all. It may well be just the opposite --- support by manufacturers quite often holds back the direct support in (and hence the promise of) Linux.
Look at both extremes of support quality to see this:
On the good-support side, two quite obvious factors hold back Linux's support of new hardware --- people not bothering to write native support because the proprietary one works fine (think nVidia), and people not able to write native support because the proprietary support is offered in lieu of interface documentation (think nVidia again). So in that respect, "good" manufacturer support is bad for Linux.
And on the bad-support side, manufacturers cease support of products once they are no longer current (because it no longer contributes to profits), and longer term, they cease support of products when the operating system they work under is no longer current (think W98, W95, etc). Yet, this loss of manufacturer support has zero impact on the promise and success of Linux when its hardware support is built-in rather than provided by manufacturers. Consequently, Linux's support gets better compared to (say) Windows as products get older and lose their manufacturer support.
So, in bother cases, manufacturer support is less than a wholly good thing, and to some extent (especially long term) can be quite bad. Linux really stands on its own two feet, or on the shoulders of its excellent community, very well indeed.
>> It has incredible hardware support for a Linux distro.
That line makes no sense to me at all.
Linux has had incredible hardware support for many years now, and it's all built in.
We don't have to rely on drivers to be supplied by manufacturers with their products as is the norm in the two proprietary consumer operating systems. For the most part, everything just works as soon as you plug it in. It's been many years since I bought a PC accessory off the shelf in Maplins or from a mail-order box shifter, plugged it in to one of my Linux boxes, and it's failed to work.
Of course, the wierder stuff probably doesn't have Linux support, but then it doesn't have built-in Windows support either --- the manufacturer provides the support on disk.
The amount of hardware supported directly by Linux is nothing short of phenomenal. And that's not limited to just a couple of distros.
"Spain's telco giant Telefonica reports 90% of usage on its broadband lines is Internet traffic, up from 15% five years ago. Of that 90%, a massive 71% is P2P traffic."
So this hilarious move has made the vast bulk of Spain's Internet traffic illegal.
If anyone ever needed proof that politicians are utter morons, this was it.
Since the SGAE represents *all* copyright holders and collects funds on their behalf, we should expect the FSF (as the copyright holder of vast amounts of GNU software) and Linus (as the primary copyright holder for Linux) to receive a proportion of that income.
And the SGAE can't easilydodge that responsibility either, because to do so would be to accept that much media gets used for things other than music and videos, and that therefore the tax should not apply to all media.
WoW is a fine game, but as you say and as the article says, it's in the "suffer to play" category just like the vast majority of online roleplaying games. Some of my WoW friends have even "outsourced" their WoW xp-levelling work to Chinese grinding teams for a small fee, as they can't stand the pain anymore but still want to remain in the game.
Well that's fine if one enjoys that, but there is an alternative that avoids the suffering. Guild Wars was expressly designed to throw out all the pain and leave the fun in an RPG-style online world, and it succeeds wonderfully. Gone is all the unnecessary level grinding. Levels 1 to 20 (the maximum) are really just a tutorial in GW, and you can do them in a couple of days if you're in a rush. However, the "proper" way to do it is to go through the storyline which is very extensive and quite endearing, and by halfway through it you reach level 20 automatically. No level grinding at all, because storyline missions provide huge xp rewards.
What's more, the designers achieved a sort of holy grail in GW, because their game system also removes the huge majority of "social problems" that plague traditional MMOGs, like camping, kill stealing, death by having mobs trained on you by dimwits, spawn downtime, regeneration downtime, death downtime, LFG downtime, and other ills. It's a pretty amazing design package. And of course it has no monthly subscription, which is nice too!
Also the problem you mentioned about drops doesn't happen in GW either, because for the most part drops in GW are just vanity items: they're only fractionally better than the items that you can get from NPCs in exchange for commonly dropping junk loot. The same is true for armor, so there is no tedious farming for anything at all to enable you to play as well as the next person.
And of course GW provides AI "henchmen" of each of the professions so that you can assemble the team you want at a moment's notice --- fantastic for casual play. And they're pretty good at their jobs too, often noticeably better than some human players.:-)
If the "pain" of the old style games is no longer acceptable to you, try Guild Wars. I found it a breath of fresh air after the endurance test of "completing" two old-style MMOGs all the way to their respective endgames. GW is all the same fun but without the headache.
I've just read RMS's very well written essay about Java. It's not about Xgl, and you're mis-applying it to Xgl.
The authors of Sun Java have no (current) intention of making it free, so it's non-free by design and thus quite rightly gets RMS's ire. As RMS suggests, every enhancement that Sun makes to Java just makes matters worse.
In contrast, Xgl is currently tied to nVidia or ATI hardware only because the authors haven't yet made it work with anything else, but it could do so, so it's just a question of manpower and not a matter of non-free intent. It would probably work with Mesa anyway, but excruciatingly slowly.
Xgl is dependent on OpenGL, and you'd better not be complaining about that because it's the standard 3D API for free and open-source software. It just so happens that nVidia and ATI have the most efficient and widely used implementations of OpenGL for consumer PCs, that's all. The fact that the FOSS community hasn't yet fully implemented any competing 3D-accelerated version of OpenGL isn't Xgl's fault, nor is it OpenGL's fault --- there is no non-free OpenGL license blocking such implementations as there is with Java. (You might not be able to call it "OpenGL" unless it's validated, but that's peripheral.)
So, you're confusing the non-freeness of Java with nothing more evil than the early state of Xgl and the lack of 3D-accelerated non-proprietary implementations of OpenGL. Well, it may have escaped your attention, but a collosal proportion of all free programs are incomplete or still being worked on, and that doesn't make them non-free.
You need to use some commonsense here. By all means complain about ATI and nVidia, but not about OpenGL or Xgl. Xgl is free software, and OpenGL is an open standard. Xgl just needs some more work, as does our free OpenGL clone. Work in progress.
>> but frankly, everyone just thinks you're a bunch of whiners.
Whiners we could probably put up with, but far worse than that, they're spreading racist/nationalist propaganda to further their War on Terrorism agendas.
And of course, they're pure fanboys too, totally unwilling to see or accept the similar sorts of evils that "our side" is doing as well, in the name of keeping the beligerant politicians in power.
Not a pretty package. Good on Google to try to stay clear of the haters.
You know, 1zenerdiode, until about halfway through your reply, I was still thinking that you just didn't understand what I was getting at, simply because you had never witnessed a REAL professional engineer at work. Because if you had, then you'd know that any number of them would be able to cooperate on setting specific goals, working towards them, and working cooperatively to select the best solution they'd found among themseives, without needing oversight "from above".
But reading the rest of your post and thinking between the lines, I now believe that really our disagreement stems only from the fact that you believe that there are virtually no REAL PEs around, and that therefore most organizations have to make do with the other kind, namely engineers who hold positions of professional rank and who have the right background and education but who do NOT BEHAVE LIKE PEs.
Well, that's rather different, and I'd agree if the context here were not NASA.
What you're really saying is that what passes for PEs almost everywhere are the ethically bankrupt and incompetent dumbasses who just happened to get into engineering in some way but for whom behaving as a real PE is totally foreign. Well, I'd have to agree with you there. I was a university lecturer in a past life, and I certainly recognize the people to whom you refer, emerging with degrees grasped in their hands but very little in their brains. Yes, those definitely need management. Prefereably though, they need kicking out of the ranks of the fellowship of engineers altogether. The chances of any significant number of them becoming PEs through long term experience in industry and personal growth were sadly rather small.
Where our main disagreement lies then (I believe) is that you place NASA in the same category as ordinary corporations, so that they have to "make do" with incompetents as well. In contrast, I believe that exploring the stars is in a completely different category to commercial work, not only because it is in some sense a very emotive reaching out of the human spirit, but because the stars aren't going anywhere. Even if there are short windows of opportunity that set specific deadlines, it's not essential to meet them, as any other aspect of space exploration is just as fulfilling.
My take on this then is that NASA should demand the very best PEs that the human race can provide. While they are indeed rare as a percertage of the technical population, there is no shortage of them worldwide for the purposes of NASA (or ESA, etc). In my second life as a freelance contractor, I have come across several myself in UK industry, so I have no doubt that NASA would be able to find several thousand among the population of the world.
That's it, in a nutshell. The rest is possibly just quibbling over insignificant things, like whether automation can resolve differing conclusion from different PEs when the outcome on balance is not immediately obvious to them. Well, my take on it is simply to let PEs solve the assessment problem first. They themselves would clearly see this as an a priori requirement after all! And please note that should they find a posteriori that they still cannot come up with a unique conclusion, then this just becomes another problem for them to solve professionally.:-)
As a final rider, let me just say that in my protracted travels around UK industry, I have found one and only one manager whom I would consider competent to manage what I call real professional engineers, exerting no overt authority over them but merely supreme diplomacy to help bring them (actually by themselves) into rapid agreement. He was beyond price, an accelerator of the engineering process without hindering it, which I grant you is important in ordinary industry. Of the hundreds or thousands of managers that I've seen, no others showed any merit whatsoever. In fact, 98% of them just got in the way of doing good work, and 75% of them disastrously so.
I don't want to extend this discussion further because it really boils down to "I believe" versus "I don't believe", but hopefully you can at least see where I'm coming from.:-)
I'm subscribed to Second Life, and I see this whole issue as being very simple. I tend to have balanced views on most things, and this is no exception.
Bragg clearly perpetrated a simple scam. He knows that Linden Labs never intended to sell $1000 sims for $1, so he obtained the land inappropriately. There can be no denying this. How US law might view this is completely irrelevant to whether it was actually right or wrong, because ethically it was 100% wrong.
But Linden Labs have created a world where customers (not LL) own their personal content, and by implication they have independent lives and livelihoods and businesses etc etc. To cut off Bragg from his possessions, his virtual life, his livelihood and businesses was not only inappropriate, it was totally underhand and almost evil. They unilaterally executed this virtual person (I'm serious), without due process in-world nor any opportunity for defense. How US law might view this is completely irrelevant to whether it was actually right or wrong, because ethically it was 100% wrong. LL's Terms of Service are immaterial to the rights or wrongs of it in-world.
So there you have it. Neither side holds the moral high ground, and they both made mistakes. They should settle halfway and put it down to experience.
That implies that those experts had to report to someone else in their area of expertise who had the freedom to ignore them! In other words, some rather myopic manager set up a hierarchical reporting structure in which expert opinion COULD be disregarded. Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams? See, this was a problem created by management in the first place.
Reconciling the conflicting opinions of experts is almost child's play, you can practically set up a program to do it, with full cognizance of probabilities, degree of expertise of participants, etc etc. What's the role of management here that you seem to think is so important? Management is an inherently unreliable contributor to this weighted decision making.
>> - Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing.
Be serious, we're talking about science and engineering experts, not cowboy coders.
>> - Every technical person would love to work [...] with a virtually unlimited budget.
That's a straw man, it wasn't even suggested. Good science and engineering doesn't cost more than poor science and engineering. It's merely the same general amount of effort but done properly, no corners cut and brushed under the carpet for managerial expediency. But yes, I'm sure that this would more often return a verdict of "Sorry, no go", but that would be accurate. You criticize it at your peril.
>> - Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints.
Yes, it is about tradeoffs, but management always trades off too much and technical soundness suffers. A professional engineer knows when something is "good enough" for the job in hand, not just from experience but because it's largely objective, a matter of probability computations. He doesn't need a manager to override his professional judgement. In so doing, a manager contributes nothing, but can be very damaging indeed. Plenty of examples of that at NASA.
>> - Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster.
Regarding experience, that's a straw man again --- what would engineers without deep experience be doing working on a space probe? As for constraints, they're simply input to the engineer's working tradeoff set. No need for managers to impose other ones at all, the professional engineer is vastly experienced at doing it himself while understanding the technical side of what's being traded off.
>> - The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors).
Exactly, and that's purely a direct consequence of management being decoupled from the very concrete engineering process. No professional engineer needs oversight to implement those checks --- only working to management's directions produces that kind of rubbish. Peer review ensures that perfectly adequately by itself. If one engineer or one team misses something crucial, the peer engineers or peer teams pick it up. A manager with oversight is a very poor substitute for this process of peers checking each others' work.
You seem to have no idea what real professional engineering entails. It's inherently a self-management process, and requires no oversight other than that of peers. Certainly NEVER management oversight.
As long as scientists and engineers are cogs in an organizational structure in which management tells them what to do, they will often produce crap, no matter how many PhDs there are in their midst. This is the case even when those managers were once brilliant technical engineers and scientists, because perceptions and priorities change when you switch into a management role.
This little episode was just another in a long line of screwups, and it won't be the last under current organizational models. Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Yes, I know that most managers would call this "anarchy", but therein lies the problem: by eliminating that alleged anarchy, you are also sacrificing the best that people can offer, just to make your life easier. Well, perhaps it's stating the blindingly obvious, but making management's life easy is not central to exploring the stars.
NASA's problem is the same one that permeates all technical industries, but in NASA's case the mishaps are just very public. I don't expect anything to change, but there is no doubting what the general problem is.
Perhaps the adjustable icon size and spacing is to make up for this incredibly obsolete part of the specification:
>> At a resolution of 1280 x 800, the MacBook display provides 30 percent more viewing area than the iBook and the 12-inch PowerBook.
1280 x 800??? What, 800 vertical, in 2006?
FFS, 800 of vertical resolution is about the same as the 1024x768 of ages ago. And every decent Toshiba laptop manufactured in the last several years has provided 1400x1050 in the same widescreen format, and they're cheap, so to provide a standard 1024 vertical on LCD would hardly have been the bleeding edge.
Is this Apple's idea of "advanced"? It shows incredible cheek to claim "most advanced" status with such Jurassic resolution, which is almost in the realm of the latest PDAs. It seems that Apple is now starting to rely on the fanboy effect so that they can get away with labelling any old crap as "advanced" and still be lauded as supreme.
Not impressed by the screen spec, sorry. The rest may be great, of course.
>> I'd like to see Linus say "I've done a monolithic kernel and proven its success. Now I'm going to build a performant microkernel and see what all the fuss is about."
Linus doesn't need to go that far to reap 70% of the rewards of microkernels.
All he really needs to do is to create specialist MMU-protected driver VMs for drivers to run in, so that when a driver screws up, the kernel isn't affected too much unless it causes a bus lockup, which is rare. Notice that these VMs could even have address spaces within the monolithic kernel space... the MMU would merely prevent them from scribbling all over it by restricting the size of their writeable window.
This would also go a long way to reducing the potential danger created by our binary graphics drivers, which are a catastrophe just waiting to happen. They badly need some strong containment system walling them off from the kernel.
Since Nooks does something like this already, it's far from being pie in the sky. But thinking that Linus has any interest at all in this kind of thing might well be pie in the sky.
The other possible approach (as Tanenbaum's paper hinted) is to use virtualization but in reverse... with Xen, a modified dom0 could contain no drivers at all, but instead use the services of drivers in domU virtual machines, all nicely walled away. And since Xen is already on the road to appearing in standard kernels, that doesn't really require Linus to do anything other than not block driver devolution.
>> Does Matrox or Intel release source code to their drivers? (Is Matrox even still in the consumer graphics card business?)
Yes, Matrox is still in the business, but they're not really competing directly against nVidia and ATI in the games market -- for example, they provide no hardware vertex or pixel shaders in their consumer cards. And yes, Matrox does release driver source code.
I recently bought a Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe, and not only does it list Linux on the retail box alongside the other operating systems, but their product page proclaims it as "the world's first PCI Express graphics card with open-source display drivers for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems". And they're quite inexpensive too, which is nice.
The drivers are in recent kernels already too, although I'm getting "drmOpenDevice: Open failed" problems at the moment so DRI is being disabled and thus 3D isn't accelerated on that box just now. I hope it's just a local misconfiguration.
Not really sure what the status is beyond that, but in theory the G550 should have good support in Linux without needing any binary modules.
The nVidia "shim" is licensed under the GPL and is copyright nVidia --- this means that it's perfectly legal to compile the shim against the GPL kernel. At the same time, nVidia is free to do whatever they want with the shim, and its license is immaterial to them at that point because they hold its copyright. The GPL has no say over what else the copyright owner can do with kernel-linked code, the only thing that's mandatory is that it's GPL'd, and it is. For example, it's very common for copyright holders to dual-license their own GPL'd code for commercial and highly proprietary use.
Well, what nVidia chose to do in this case is to link the shim with their binary driver, and they're perfectly entitled to do that, by their copyright. Furthermore, since the shim and the binary driver are separate components from the kernel, they can certainly be shipped on the same CD as GPL components, as long as the binary code is not linked to the kernel. And it's not.
So you see, by virtue of being the copyright holders of the shim and GPL'ing it, nVidia easily comply with the requirements of the GPL but aren't constrained in what else they do with it.
If the binary module were linked against the kernel then you'd be right, but it's not. At no point in time did the binary module even get a sniff of the kernel, and it's shipped without knowing anything about it, nor viceversa.
Yes, the dependency is contrived, but that's how the GPL forced them to rearrange their code dependency graph in order to stay on the good side of the GPL's guidelines.
Aggregation of components is not the same think as linking, the FSF is totally clear about that. So both the GPL code and the binary code can be present together on the same medium, not linked.
It's only when the CD is booted and the drivers loaded that a runtime image containing the binary modules linked with the kernel is created, and not before.
Distributing an aggregation is perfectly legit, according to the guidelines for GPL v2. (Dunno about v3).
... which says: "He [Kutaragi] did offer some tantalizing new details about the system, though. PS3 will include a 60GB hard drive (which is upgradeable) with Linux preinstalled."
It would appear then that things aren't all that bleak. Maybe IBM had an influence this time around, as they would love to see the Cell succeed, and perhaps forced Sony to open up a bit.
GW is the new generation of MMOG.
on
Walking Other Worlds
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Fine, so it's your pet peeve that GW doesn't comply with your definition, but you are actually entirely wrong in your assessment. What you really mean is that for you, a "MMOG" is the traditional kind of MMOG with all its traditional problems, as in EverQuest.
Well let me tell you something: the world changes, and the EverQuest idea of how you define a MMOG does not fix it in stone for eternity.
ArenaNet designers found a way to preserve all the good things in the genre (most importantly the gameplay), and throw out all the bad things, like camping, kill stealing, training, harrassment, downtime, level grinding, and mindless repetition.
They did so by instancing, but that's no different to what many other MMOGs have done with instanced dungeons. The big difference with GW is that they did it with outdoor zones, and the result is 100% absolute magic. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in removing the bad and promoting the good.
You are hung up on the bad things, and think that by not being able to have 50 mobs trained on you by a passing idiot, then somehow it's not a MMOG. Wake up. You're simply not thinking straight. None of the shared world "benefits" you claim are real, they're just a right pain in the butt, and I speak as someone who took two of the largest traditional MMOGs to their end games on several characters.
Guild Wars has got it very very right, and boy, not only is it a full-blown Massively Multiplayer Online Game (it's truly Massive, because it doesn't split people off onto different named servers), it's also one of the very best.
the PS3 is Sony's next-gen games console and is way overpriced; or else
the PS3 is some kind of more advanced appliance than a games console, which leaves Sony with no next-gen games console at all. "The field's all yours, MS and Nintendo."
Not really, no. It's the interactions architecture, which is more fundamental.
You can quite easily create fully thread-safe and hardware parallel-safe interaction structures on any system and make them available through opaque, MMU-protected APIs which are then accessible from simple/primitive languages like C without any danger whatsoever. Even in the face of {fork(); run(); fork(); run();...}, and despite willful attempts at livelock chasing and deadlock triggering.
The language is not the problem, as long as it is not used beyond its inherent capabilities and design constraints.
Your statement that "It's the language" implicitly presupposes that complex solutions have to be designed with threaded programs, but that's very far from the truth. Indeed, to some extent it's that very premise that has got current computing into the flakey mess that it's sometimes in.
As a systems and language designer who has been working with parallel systems throughout a very long career, I am appalled that people are still trying to use solutions that were invalidated on theoretical grounds 4 decades ago. Shared address spaces and threading belong to those invalidated methods.
You are right about the non-existence of a mainstream computer language that does threading "right", but even if there was, it would just be dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease.
Jack: "That was a test. Chloe would have known that 276 is an illegal address byte. We have your room surrounded. Either come out now with your hands up, or take the cyanide pill."
I don't think I need to comment on the adverse effects of the manufacturer of the Xbox buying out the manufacturer of the Playstation. It wouldn't be a minor thing.
Such a takeover could certainly be on the cards though, because Sony really is in trouble, for many reasons. (Many of them actually boil down to the old and very buoyant product-oriented "Sony Manufacturing" having been invaded and crippled by the regressive hoards of "Sony Legal". They've destroyed a great company.)
However, the only way a takeover is doing to work for games is if the Playstation division is first split off and acquired by some other major player. Since PS3 is based on Cell, IBM would seem to be a good candidate here, as a separate division of course. I doubt if it's in their business plan though. It's a scary area.
Very nicely put, Kevin. I shouldn't worry about that comment from two decades ago. Some people are like that.
Re the article, I'm a keen Gentoo user and highly appreciative of the degree of control it gives me, which probably comes close to being the exact opposite of a Linspire target user. Nevertheless, even I appreciate that the vast majority of computer users have either no desire or ability or time to get involved in technical issues. And on top of that, even technical users sometimes want appliances that "just work".
So don't get worked up at adverse comments from the Linux community, as long as you always do the "right thing" of course and respect the GPL and feed your own value back as well.
And especially ignore criticisms from Slashdot. This forum lost its technical credentials long ago, and is now largely populated by religious zealots, fanboys of one thing or another, plus technical wannabes with near zero background but plenty of opinion. Just treat it as a random fun forum about slightly technical topics. It works fine as that.:P
>> other countries finally wise up and simply make it their national policy to ignore stupid patents (or all patents).
Well it's not for want of trying, but we're being ignored.
We need public soundbites and catchy phrases and other tidbits for the news media to pick up on and ride with, in order to give anti-patent activism a higher public profile.
The logical/commonsense approach just isn't working so far. The politicians have been totally ignoring everyone except the megacorps, who have a vested interest in bolstering the current mess even further. And of course lawyers everywhere are contributing to the nightmare, seeing a future of unlimited litigation and profit at the public's expense.
Personally I don't hold much hope that anything involving politicians or lawyers will lead to a solution, as it doesn't appeal to their self-interest.
Instead, patents should be undermined by creating an automated system for public ideas registration, something easy to grow and without central adminitration, and which can in part be populated automatically to generate a massive global public repository. And once it has a few million entries then beat on politicians with a single-issue demand: that the repository be scanned automatically before any patent is even considered.
When paper pushers fail us, perhaps technology won't, as part of a solution.
What is the British citizen getting for that expense?
First a correction: we're not citizens of our country, we're subjects of the Queen. In theory she can send us to the mines on a whim, although in practice our royalty are pretty nice folks that just want to be left alone.
Not being citizens is not the problem though. The real problem is that we're just slaves of our politicians, who are all total scum.
We didn't vote for any ID cards or biometrics on passports, since it wasn't put to the vote. The scum in power want more power though, so it was bound to come without a public vote.
No of course it doesn't help anyone, except Bush of course, who uses Blair as a policy support bitch all the time. In this case the War on Drugs was getting a bit flat, so the War on Terror had to be fed the blood of virgins, or of the innocent public in this case since these measures do nothing against terrorists.
It's a sad world, especially this corner of it. Britain will be the first totalitarian police state among the G8, no doubt about that. We're already tracked in our vehicles, monitored on CCTV, recorded at our phones, and spied on at our ISPs. And now we're going to be fingerprinted and retina-scanned.
Slashdot Mirror
>> I think that Linux has real promise, and even if you can get it up to 10% of computers running Linux, that many of the manufacturers will follow.
Actually, I think that Linux's promise is not related to the provision of support by manufacturers at all. It may well be just the opposite --- support by manufacturers quite often holds back the direct support in (and hence the promise of) Linux.
Look at both extremes of support quality to see this:
On the good-support side, two quite obvious factors hold back Linux's support of new hardware --- people not bothering to write native support because the proprietary one works fine (think nVidia), and people not able to write native support because the proprietary support is offered in lieu of interface documentation (think nVidia again). So in that respect, "good" manufacturer support is bad for Linux.
And on the bad-support side, manufacturers cease support of products once they are no longer current (because it no longer contributes to profits), and longer term, they cease support of products when the operating system they work under is no longer current (think W98, W95, etc). Yet, this loss of manufacturer support has zero impact on the promise and success of Linux when its hardware support is built-in rather than provided by manufacturers. Consequently, Linux's support gets better compared to (say) Windows as products get older and lose their manufacturer support.
So, in bother cases, manufacturer support is less than a wholly good thing, and to some extent (especially long term) can be quite bad. Linux really stands on its own two feet, or on the shoulders of its excellent community, very well indeed.
>> It has incredible hardware support for a Linux distro.
That line makes no sense to me at all.
Linux has had incredible hardware support for many years now, and it's all built in.
We don't have to rely on drivers to be supplied by manufacturers with their products as is the norm in the two proprietary consumer operating systems. For the most part, everything just works as soon as you plug it in. It's been many years since I bought a PC accessory off the shelf in Maplins or from a mail-order box shifter, plugged it in to one of my Linux boxes, and it's failed to work.
Of course, the wierder stuff probably doesn't have Linux support, but then it doesn't have built-in Windows support either --- the manufacturer provides the support on disk.
The amount of hardware supported directly by Linux is nothing short of phenomenal. And that's not limited to just a couple of distros.
From TFA:
"Spain's telco giant Telefonica reports 90% of usage on its broadband lines is Internet traffic, up from 15% five years ago. Of that 90%, a massive 71% is P2P traffic."
So this hilarious move has made the vast bulk of Spain's Internet traffic illegal.
If anyone ever needed proof that politicians are utter morons, this was it.
Since the SGAE represents *all* copyright holders and collects funds on their behalf, we should expect the FSF (as the copyright holder of vast amounts of GNU software) and Linus (as the primary copyright holder for Linux) to receive a proportion of that income.
And the SGAE can't easilydodge that responsibility either, because to do so would be to accept that much media gets used for things other than music and videos, and that therefore the tax should not apply to all media.
Can't have it both ways.
WoW is a fine game, but as you say and as the article says, it's in the "suffer to play" category just like the vast majority of online roleplaying games. Some of my WoW friends have even "outsourced" their WoW xp-levelling work to Chinese grinding teams for a small fee, as they can't stand the pain anymore but still want to remain in the game.
:-)
Well that's fine if one enjoys that, but there is an alternative that avoids the suffering. Guild Wars was expressly designed to throw out all the pain and leave the fun in an RPG-style online world, and it succeeds wonderfully. Gone is all the unnecessary level grinding. Levels 1 to 20 (the maximum) are really just a tutorial in GW, and you can do them in a couple of days if you're in a rush. However, the "proper" way to do it is to go through the storyline which is very extensive and quite endearing, and by halfway through it you reach level 20 automatically. No level grinding at all, because storyline missions provide huge xp rewards.
What's more, the designers achieved a sort of holy grail in GW, because their game system also removes the huge majority of "social problems" that plague traditional MMOGs, like camping, kill stealing, death by having mobs trained on you by dimwits, spawn downtime, regeneration downtime, death downtime, LFG downtime, and other ills. It's a pretty amazing design package. And of course it has no monthly subscription, which is nice too!
Also the problem you mentioned about drops doesn't happen in GW either, because for the most part drops in GW are just vanity items: they're only fractionally better than the items that you can get from NPCs in exchange for commonly dropping junk loot. The same is true for armor, so there is no tedious farming for anything at all to enable you to play as well as the next person.
And of course GW provides AI "henchmen" of each of the professions so that you can assemble the team you want at a moment's notice --- fantastic for casual play. And they're pretty good at their jobs too, often noticeably better than some human players.
If the "pain" of the old style games is no longer acceptable to you, try Guild Wars. I found it a breath of fresh air after the endurance test of "completing" two old-style MMOGs all the way to their respective endgames. GW is all the same fun but without the headache.
I've just read RMS's very well written essay about Java. It's not about Xgl, and you're mis-applying it to Xgl.
The authors of Sun Java have no (current) intention of making it free, so it's non-free by design and thus quite rightly gets RMS's ire. As RMS suggests, every enhancement that Sun makes to Java just makes matters worse.
In contrast, Xgl is currently tied to nVidia or ATI hardware only because the authors haven't yet made it work with anything else, but it could do so, so it's just a question of manpower and not a matter of non-free intent. It would probably work with Mesa anyway, but excruciatingly slowly.
Xgl is dependent on OpenGL, and you'd better not be complaining about that because it's the standard 3D API for free and open-source software. It just so happens that nVidia and ATI have the most efficient and widely used implementations of OpenGL for consumer PCs, that's all. The fact that the FOSS community hasn't yet fully implemented any competing 3D-accelerated version of OpenGL isn't Xgl's fault, nor is it OpenGL's fault --- there is no non-free OpenGL license blocking such implementations as there is with Java. (You might not be able to call it "OpenGL" unless it's validated, but that's peripheral.)
So, you're confusing the non-freeness of Java with nothing more evil than the early state of Xgl and the lack of 3D-accelerated non-proprietary implementations of OpenGL. Well, it may have escaped your attention, but a collosal proportion of all free programs are incomplete or still being worked on, and that doesn't make them non-free.
You need to use some commonsense here. By all means complain about ATI and nVidia, but not about OpenGL or Xgl. Xgl is free software, and OpenGL is an open standard. Xgl just needs some more work, as does our free OpenGL clone. Work in progress.
>> but frankly, everyone just thinks you're a bunch of whiners.
Whiners we could probably put up with, but far worse than that, they're spreading racist/nationalist propaganda to further their War on Terrorism agendas.
And of course, they're pure fanboys too, totally unwilling to see or accept the similar sorts of evils that "our side" is doing as well, in the name of keeping the beligerant politicians in power.
Not a pretty package. Good on Google to try to stay clear of the haters.
You know, 1zenerdiode, until about halfway through your reply, I was still thinking that you just didn't understand what I was getting at, simply because you had never witnessed a REAL professional engineer at work. Because if you had, then you'd know that any number of them would be able to cooperate on setting specific goals, working towards them, and working cooperatively to select the best solution they'd found among themseives, without needing oversight "from above".
:-)
:-)
But reading the rest of your post and thinking between the lines, I now believe that really our disagreement stems only from the fact that you believe that there are virtually no REAL PEs around, and that therefore most organizations have to make do with the other kind, namely engineers who hold positions of professional rank and who have the right background and education but who do NOT BEHAVE LIKE PEs.
Well, that's rather different, and I'd agree if the context here were not NASA.
What you're really saying is that what passes for PEs almost everywhere are the ethically bankrupt and incompetent dumbasses who just happened to get into engineering in some way but for whom behaving as a real PE is totally foreign. Well, I'd have to agree with you there. I was a university lecturer in a past life, and I certainly recognize the people to whom you refer, emerging with degrees grasped in their hands but very little in their brains. Yes, those definitely need management. Prefereably though, they need kicking out of the ranks of the fellowship of engineers altogether. The chances of any significant number of them becoming PEs through long term experience in industry and personal growth were sadly rather small.
Where our main disagreement lies then (I believe) is that you place NASA in the same category as ordinary corporations, so that they have to "make do" with incompetents as well. In contrast, I believe that exploring the stars is in a completely different category to commercial work, not only because it is in some sense a very emotive reaching out of the human spirit, but because the stars aren't going anywhere. Even if there are short windows of opportunity that set specific deadlines, it's not essential to meet them, as any other aspect of space exploration is just as fulfilling.
My take on this then is that NASA should demand the very best PEs that the human race can provide. While they are indeed rare as a percertage of the technical population, there is no shortage of them worldwide for the purposes of NASA (or ESA, etc). In my second life as a freelance contractor, I have come across several myself in UK industry, so I have no doubt that NASA would be able to find several thousand among the population of the world.
That's it, in a nutshell. The rest is possibly just quibbling over insignificant things, like whether automation can resolve differing conclusion from different PEs when the outcome on balance is not immediately obvious to them. Well, my take on it is simply to let PEs solve the assessment problem first. They themselves would clearly see this as an a priori requirement after all! And please note that should they find a posteriori that they still cannot come up with a unique conclusion, then this just becomes another problem for them to solve professionally.
As a final rider, let me just say that in my protracted travels around UK industry, I have found one and only one manager whom I would consider competent to manage what I call real professional engineers, exerting no overt authority over them but merely supreme diplomacy to help bring them (actually by themselves) into rapid agreement. He was beyond price, an accelerator of the engineering process without hindering it, which I grant you is important in ordinary industry. Of the hundreds or thousands of managers that I've seen, no others showed any merit whatsoever. In fact, 98% of them just got in the way of doing good work, and 75% of them disastrously so.
I don't want to extend this discussion further because it really boils down to "I believe" versus "I don't believe", but hopefully you can at least see where I'm coming from.
Thanks for the good discussion.
I'm subscribed to Second Life, and I see this whole issue as being very simple. I tend to have balanced views on most things, and this is no exception.
Bragg clearly perpetrated a simple scam. He knows that Linden Labs never intended to sell $1000 sims for $1, so he obtained the land inappropriately. There can be no denying this. How US law might view this is completely irrelevant to whether it was actually right or wrong, because ethically it was 100% wrong.
But Linden Labs have created a world where customers (not LL) own their personal content, and by implication they have independent lives and livelihoods and businesses etc etc. To cut off Bragg from his possessions, his virtual life, his livelihood and businesses was not only inappropriate, it was totally underhand and almost evil. They unilaterally executed this virtual person (I'm serious), without due process in-world nor any opportunity for defense. How US law might view this is completely irrelevant to whether it was actually right or wrong, because ethically it was 100% wrong. LL's Terms of Service are immaterial to the rights or wrongs of it in-world.
So there you have it. Neither side holds the moral high ground, and they both made mistakes. They should settle halfway and put it down to experience.
>> - the teams disregarded expert input
That implies that those experts had to report to someone else in their area of expertise who had the freedom to ignore them! In other words, some rather myopic manager set up a hierarchical reporting structure in which expert opinion COULD be disregarded. Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams? See, this was a problem created by management in the first place.
Reconciling the conflicting opinions of experts is almost child's play, you can practically set up a program to do it, with full cognizance of probabilities, degree of expertise of participants, etc etc. What's the role of management here that you seem to think is so important? Management is an inherently unreliable contributor to this weighted decision making.
>> - Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing.
Be serious, we're talking about science and engineering experts, not cowboy coders.
>> - Every technical person would love to work [...] with a virtually unlimited budget.
That's a straw man, it wasn't even suggested. Good science and engineering doesn't cost more than poor science and engineering. It's merely the same general amount of effort but done properly, no corners cut and brushed under the carpet for managerial expediency. But yes, I'm sure that this would more often return a verdict of "Sorry, no go", but that would be accurate. You criticize it at your peril.
>> - Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints.
Yes, it is about tradeoffs, but management always trades off too much and technical soundness suffers. A professional engineer knows when something is "good enough" for the job in hand, not just from experience but because it's largely objective, a matter of probability computations. He doesn't need a manager to override his professional judgement. In so doing, a manager contributes nothing, but can be very damaging indeed. Plenty of examples of that at NASA.
>> - Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster.
Regarding experience, that's a straw man again --- what would engineers without deep experience be doing working on a space probe? As for constraints, they're simply input to the engineer's working tradeoff set. No need for managers to impose other ones at all, the professional engineer is vastly experienced at doing it himself while understanding the technical side of what's being traded off.
>> - The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors).
Exactly, and that's purely a direct consequence of management being decoupled from the very concrete engineering process. No professional engineer needs oversight to implement those checks --- only working to management's directions produces that kind of rubbish. Peer review ensures that perfectly adequately by itself. If one engineer or one team misses something crucial, the peer engineers or peer teams pick it up. A manager with oversight is a very poor substitute for this process of peers checking each others' work.
You seem to have no idea what real professional engineering entails. It's inherently a self-management process, and requires no oversight other than that of peers. Certainly NEVER management oversight.
As long as scientists and engineers are cogs in an organizational structure in which management tells them what to do, they will often produce crap, no matter how many PhDs there are in their midst. This is the case even when those managers were once brilliant technical engineers and scientists, because perceptions and priorities change when you switch into a management role.
This little episode was just another in a long line of screwups, and it won't be the last under current organizational models. Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Yes, I know that most managers would call this "anarchy", but therein lies the problem: by eliminating that alleged anarchy, you are also sacrificing the best that people can offer, just to make your life easier. Well, perhaps it's stating the blindingly obvious, but making management's life easy is not central to exploring the stars.
NASA's problem is the same one that permeates all technical industries, but in NASA's case the mishaps are just very public. I don't expect anything to change, but there is no doubting what the general problem is.
Perhaps the adjustable icon size and spacing is to make up for this incredibly obsolete part of the specification:
>> At a resolution of 1280 x 800, the MacBook display provides 30 percent more viewing area than the iBook and the 12-inch PowerBook.
1280 x 800??? What, 800 vertical, in 2006?
FFS, 800 of vertical resolution is about the same as the 1024x768 of ages ago. And every decent Toshiba laptop manufactured in the last several years has provided 1400x1050 in the same widescreen format, and they're cheap, so to provide a standard 1024 vertical on LCD would hardly have been the bleeding edge.
Is this Apple's idea of "advanced"? It shows incredible cheek to claim "most advanced" status with such Jurassic resolution, which is almost in the realm of the latest PDAs. It seems that Apple is now starting to rely on the fanboy effect so that they can get away with labelling any old crap as "advanced" and still be lauded as supreme.
Not impressed by the screen spec, sorry. The rest may be great, of course.
>> I'd like to see Linus say "I've done a monolithic kernel and proven its success. Now I'm going to build a performant microkernel and see what all the fuss is about."
... the MMU would merely prevent them from scribbling all over it by restricting the size of their writeable window.
... with Xen, a modified dom0 could contain no drivers at all, but instead use the services of drivers in domU virtual machines, all nicely walled away. And since Xen is already on the road to appearing in standard kernels, that doesn't really require Linus to do anything other than not block driver devolution.
Linus doesn't need to go that far to reap 70% of the rewards of microkernels.
All he really needs to do is to create specialist MMU-protected driver VMs for drivers to run in, so that when a driver screws up, the kernel isn't affected too much unless it causes a bus lockup, which is rare. Notice that these VMs could even have address spaces within the monolithic kernel space
This would also go a long way to reducing the potential danger created by our binary graphics drivers, which are a catastrophe just waiting to happen. They badly need some strong containment system walling them off from the kernel.
Since Nooks does something like this already, it's far from being pie in the sky. But thinking that Linus has any interest at all in this kind of thing might well be pie in the sky.
The other possible approach (as Tanenbaum's paper hinted) is to use virtualization but in reverse
>> Does Matrox or Intel release source code to their drivers? (Is Matrox even still in the consumer graphics card business?)
Yes, Matrox is still in the business, but they're not really competing directly against nVidia and ATI in the games market -- for example, they provide no hardware vertex or pixel shaders in their consumer cards. And yes, Matrox does release driver source code.
I recently bought a Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe, and not only does it list Linux on the retail box alongside the other operating systems, but their product page proclaims it as "the world's first PCI Express graphics card with open-source display drivers for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems". And they're quite inexpensive too, which is nice.
The drivers are in recent kernels already too, although I'm getting "drmOpenDevice: Open failed" problems at the moment so DRI is being disabled and thus 3D isn't accelerated on that box just now. I hope it's just a local misconfiguration.
Not really sure what the status is beyond that, but in theory the G550 should have good support in Linux without needing any binary modules.
The nVidia "shim" is licensed under the GPL and is copyright nVidia --- this means that it's perfectly legal to compile the shim against the GPL kernel. At the same time, nVidia is free to do whatever they want with the shim, and its license is immaterial to them at that point because they hold its copyright. The GPL has no say over what else the copyright owner can do with kernel-linked code, the only thing that's mandatory is that it's GPL'd, and it is. For example, it's very common for copyright holders to dual-license their own GPL'd code for commercial and highly proprietary use.
Well, what nVidia chose to do in this case is to link the shim with their binary driver, and they're perfectly entitled to do that, by their copyright. Furthermore, since the shim and the binary driver are separate components from the kernel, they can certainly be shipped on the same CD as GPL components, as long as the binary code is not linked to the kernel. And it's not.
So you see, by virtue of being the copyright holders of the shim and GPL'ing it, nVidia easily comply with the requirements of the GPL but aren't constrained in what else they do with it.
If the binary module were linked against the kernel then you'd be right, but it's not. At no point in time did the binary module even get a sniff of the kernel, and it's shipped without knowing anything about it, nor viceversa.
Yes, the dependency is contrived, but that's how the GPL forced them to rearrange their code dependency graph in order to stay on the good side of the GPL's guidelines.
Aggregation of components is not the same think as linking, the FSF is totally clear about that. So both the GPL code and the binary code can be present together on the same medium, not linked.
It's only when the CD is booted and the drivers loaded that a runtime image containing the binary modules linked with the kernel is created, and not before.
Distributing an aggregation is perfectly legit, according to the guidelines for GPL v2. (Dunno about v3).
- Kutaragi at the recent 2006 PlayStation Business Briefing
- Kutaragi at the earlier PS3 Conference Report
It would appear then that things aren't all that bleak. Maybe IBM had an influence this time around, as they would love to see the Cell succeed, and perhaps forced Sony to open up a bit.
Fine, so it's your pet peeve that GW doesn't comply with your definition, but you are actually entirely wrong in your assessment. What you really mean is that for you, a "MMOG" is the traditional kind of MMOG with all its traditional problems, as in EverQuest.
Well let me tell you something: the world changes, and the EverQuest idea of how you define a MMOG does not fix it in stone for eternity.
ArenaNet designers found a way to preserve all the good things in the genre (most importantly the gameplay), and throw out all the bad things, like camping, kill stealing, training, harrassment, downtime, level grinding, and mindless repetition.
They did so by instancing, but that's no different to what many other MMOGs have done with instanced dungeons. The big difference with GW is that they did it with outdoor zones, and the result is 100% absolute magic. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in removing the bad and promoting the good.
You are hung up on the bad things, and think that by not being able to have 50 mobs trained on you by a passing idiot, then somehow it's not a MMOG. Wake up. You're simply not thinking straight. None of the shared world "benefits" you claim are real, they're just a right pain in the butt, and I speak as someone who took two of the largest traditional MMOGs to their end games on several characters.
Guild Wars has got it very very right, and boy, not only is it a full-blown Massively Multiplayer Online Game (it's truly Massive, because it doesn't split people off onto different named servers), it's also one of the very best.
Either
That comment of his was really unwise.
>> In other words, it's the language.
...}, and despite willful attempts at livelock chasing and deadlock triggering.
Not really, no. It's the interactions architecture, which is more fundamental.
You can quite easily create fully thread-safe and hardware parallel-safe interaction structures on any system and make them available through opaque, MMU-protected APIs which are then accessible from simple/primitive languages like C without any danger whatsoever. Even in the face of {fork(); run(); fork(); run();
The language is not the problem, as long as it is not used beyond its inherent capabilities and design constraints.
Your statement that "It's the language" implicitly presupposes that complex solutions have to be designed with threaded programs, but that's very far from the truth. Indeed, to some extent it's that very premise that has got current computing into the flakey mess that it's sometimes in.
As a systems and language designer who has been working with parallel systems throughout a very long career, I am appalled that people are still trying to use solutions that were invalidated on theoretical grounds 4 decades ago. Shared address spaces and threading belong to those invalidated methods.
You are right about the non-existence of a mainstream computer language that does threading "right", but even if there was, it would just be dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease.
Jack: "That was a test. Chloe would have known that 276 is an illegal address byte. We have your room surrounded. Either come out now with your hands up, or take the cyanide pill."
I don't think I need to comment on the adverse effects of the manufacturer of the Xbox buying out the manufacturer of the Playstation. It wouldn't be a minor thing.
Such a takeover could certainly be on the cards though, because Sony really is in trouble, for many reasons. (Many of them actually boil down to the old and very buoyant product-oriented "Sony Manufacturing" having been invaded and crippled by the regressive hoards of "Sony Legal". They've destroyed a great company.)
However, the only way a takeover is doing to work for games is if the Playstation division is first split off and acquired by some other major player. Since PS3 is based on Cell, IBM would seem to be a good candidate here, as a separate division of course. I doubt if it's in their business plan though. It's a scary area.
Very nicely put, Kevin. I shouldn't worry about that comment from two decades ago. Some people are like that.
:P
Re the article, I'm a keen Gentoo user and highly appreciative of the degree of control it gives me, which probably comes close to being the exact opposite of a Linspire target user. Nevertheless, even I appreciate that the vast majority of computer users have either no desire or ability or time to get involved in technical issues. And on top of that, even technical users sometimes want appliances that "just work".
So don't get worked up at adverse comments from the Linux community, as long as you always do the "right thing" of course and respect the GPL and feed your own value back as well.
And especially ignore criticisms from Slashdot. This forum lost its technical credentials long ago, and is now largely populated by religious zealots, fanboys of one thing or another, plus technical wannabes with near zero background but plenty of opinion. Just treat it as a random fun forum about slightly technical topics. It works fine as that.
>> other countries finally wise up and simply make it their national policy to ignore stupid patents (or all patents).
Well it's not for want of trying, but we're being ignored.
We need public soundbites and catchy phrases and other tidbits for the news media to pick up on and ride with, in order to give anti-patent activism a higher public profile.
The logical/commonsense approach just isn't working so far. The politicians have been totally ignoring everyone except the megacorps, who have a vested interest in bolstering the current mess even further. And of course lawyers everywhere are contributing to the nightmare, seeing a future of unlimited litigation and profit at the public's expense.
Personally I don't hold much hope that anything involving politicians or lawyers will lead to a solution, as it doesn't appeal to their self-interest.
Instead, patents should be undermined by creating an automated system for public ideas registration, something easy to grow and without central adminitration, and which can in part be populated automatically to generate a massive global public repository. And once it has a few million entries then beat on politicians with a single-issue demand: that the repository be scanned automatically before any patent is even considered.
When paper pushers fail us, perhaps technology won't, as part of a solution.
What is the British citizen getting for that expense?
First a correction: we're not citizens of our country, we're subjects of the Queen. In theory she can send us to the mines on a whim, although in practice our royalty are pretty nice folks that just want to be left alone.
Not being citizens is not the problem though. The real problem is that we're just slaves of our politicians, who are all total scum.
We didn't vote for any ID cards or biometrics on passports, since it wasn't put to the vote. The scum in power want more power though, so it was bound to come without a public vote.
No of course it doesn't help anyone, except Bush of course, who uses Blair as a policy support bitch all the time. In this case the War on Drugs was getting a bit flat, so the War on Terror had to be fed the blood of virgins, or of the innocent public in this case since these measures do nothing against terrorists.
It's a sad world, especially this corner of it. Britain will be the first totalitarian police state among the G8, no doubt about that. We're already tracked in our vehicles, monitored on CCTV, recorded at our phones, and spied on at our ISPs. And now we're going to be fingerprinted and retina-scanned.
It's clearly 1983. Not long for 1984 now.