it doesn't really show how Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva are all descended from Red Hat Linux
Perhaps SuSE is on it's own conceptual branch becuase SuSE is not descended from RedHat?
There are other, real irrgularities in the chart. Why are some branches named for their theme while others are not? Becuase 'is based on' is the default relationship. Debian, gentoo and RedHat branches contain a lot of 'is based on' relationships. (Really this is nitpicking about the schema for internal labeling, if you can grok the relationship then explicit labeling my just be clutter. )
This is version 2.0 of this work and a lot of re-working was done. Some choices in the conceptual classifications are intersting. The theme 'is based' on is prevelant. But, what is the key difference between a minimalist distro and a 'Small Linux' distro? What is meant by the colored arrows from Arch Linux?
And back to your original point, what of LSB and United Linux? The reason Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE and Caldera used rpm for package managment was becuase they participated in the United Linux effort. These distro's have many explicit architectural similarities due to praticipation. Where is that touched upon?
LSB compliance adds another dimension. What about installations that have been brought into LSB compliance? Some LSB changes to a base installation SuSE are quite drastic. What does it mean for a distro to be 'based on' another when it can be or has been forced into LSB compliance? By default? By choice on or after install?
What about data mining? This chart brings up opportunity for further exploration, but can similar charts can be constructed for the GNU Userland? How about looking at how and what version the distro's package and ship apache? How would that compare with kernel versions or popular desktop suites? Is there utility in annotating what the 'default' desktop is (GNOME vs. KDE vs. fluxbox vs. Afterstep vs....)?
Wikipedia has a page on Messages of the Day which is surprisingly short. And their pag mainly serves to disambiguate motd proper from a minor animie meme about repetative antagonists.
Oddly enough, motd.org is actually a site advertising what amounts to shell access. They appear to be a month late with delivery.
Notice To Users
This computer system is the private property of user $FOO. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy.
Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to your employer, to authorized site, government, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of government agencies, both domestic and foreign.
By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of such personnel or officials. Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in civil and criminal penalties and administrative or disciplinary action, as appropriate. By continuing to use this system you indicate your awareness of and consent to these terms and conditions of use. LOG OFF IMMEDIATELY if you do not agree to the conditions stated in this warning.
The software embedded in HP printer cartridges also apparently causes them to "expire" after a set amount of time, forcing consumers to purchase new ink, even if the cartridge has not run dry.
Now that's damn evil. After I moved to England, I discovered the that my DVDs no longer worked.
Well, it just means you need to order DVD's from wherever you came from. Seriously, if I wanted to only pay $1 per Chinese DVD (shipped in bulk to oblivate shipping costs) I'd pay $20 for that Chinese DVD player (and get it shipped over too.)
I'm sure DRM advocates have thought of this type of consumer-level vertical-integration in the home theater. Or is their something else keeping me from playing Baliwood DVDs on an Indian DVD player attached to an Indian HDTV?
Or for that matter, why couldn't I import a Korean printer and periodically buy Korean ink carts on ebay?
Of course, your oldest computer probably consumes a lot of power for the meager computing power or storage space it provides. This hurts the planet in an entirely different way.
Just how much pr0n are you planning on hosting? An old 10Gb HD will store a full Linux FOTM desktop install. And there will still be lots of room for your 100k of weblog posts.
You do know how to use a voltmeter, right? When the HDs are idle, my webserver draws less current than the 80W motor and five 100W lightbulbs in the ceiling fan above it. Heck, with the 250W PSU, it's peak load is smaller than my 300W 'small' blowdryer's average.
That 250W power supply in my Pentium 166Mhz webserver lost use of it's fan this month. Bearings finally seized. Funny thing, that old PC. Runs so cold compared with my workstations and laptops that it gets enough cooling from convetion and radidation. Now it's the quietest thing in that backroom.
But I'm sure the PC's cache of Goatcx vs. Tubgirl pics are hurting the planet "in an entirely different way."
What many people hope is that a small company that is independent of this process, in the sense that they don't have any long history with the Feds, or gigantic conventional-warfare contracts to preserve, can be more innovative, and break the apparent barrier to lowering access to space costs that seems to have solidified in the past 20 years
Innovation? In aerospace, where everything positively has to have wings, including spacecraft? I'll tell you the innovation I' like to see: standard buses for satellites. Standard software for navigation, mission planning, etc. Most of what I see is people creating one-off solutions that cost a fortune to test, re-test and certify. The few that aren't are making Just Another Rocket. Why does this bother me? Because 99% of the parts are custom rigged for the mission, including those that have the same role since Sputnik went around the Earth 49 years ago.
And in academia it's worse. Professors get a micro sat project and pick random not-space-hardened hardware like shitty CCD's because their brother/wife/cousin/friend has a camera that took good pictures on their vacation. Then all the students have to work around that bad choice. It's almost like a stupid corporate pet project: doomed to fail because of the idiots at the helm.
Either that, or you could insert your favorite military-industrial-complex or CIA spy satellite consipircy theory here.
What about the future? All the poor blokes are making rockes out in the $X desert, but they will always have to spend +6 months on gov't permits just to wipe their behinds on the launchpad let alone toss something into the air. There is a quote about cars that applied to everything in the aerospace world. If cars had developed on the same schedule as computers: they'd get 300MPG, idle at 6,000MPH, parallel park themselves, cost $100 for a low-end new model which you'd need as the patchwork of private toll roads includes tar pits and your car explodes randomly. At least with spacecraft, they already do the last and most the good Earth orbits are pretty crowded, so it really wouldn't be a change.
Well the submisison is basically a cut-n-paste from the website. The about section says there will be a Hot Games' session will preview unreleased titles from major game companies and indie developers. (The website also says The program will be made available early June. So it's a litte early.)
The question is: will there be booth babes? No really.
So there is suttlebut about a huge show case of the 'latest and greatest' games with forthcoming release. The graphical theory and practice, at the state of the art, is already a focus of SIGGRAPH. Some video game engines approach implementation of 'last years' ideas, but most are not more techically sophisticated than generic toolkit $FOO running on OpenGL / Direct X shaders.
The reason to have a showcase such as this is to demo innovative User Interface design and game play hacking, both arguably harder to get right than NURBS modeling and bit pushing. Yet we've seen how innovative game publishers are in UI and gameplay. Doom 3 or Halo 2, anyone? They mention indie developers, but as I see it this is another game company's wet dream. As this is an ACM event, the subtle dilluting of the SIGGRAPH conference is in keeping with the corporate ethos of ACM. But, will this be any different than publishers hoping to expand their market via word of mouth?
I would more belive the utility of such a presentation if it looked at current, past and soon to be released games. Games that are either the epitome of a UI approach or possesing distinctive gameplay would be a usefull topic. Things like the products of Carnegie Mellon's Experimental Gameplay Project, where gameplay is actually researched, would be welcome. Eventaully, this could develop into it's own ACM Special Interest Group conference. As it stands this special session sounds like chance to sit and drool at the latest and shiniest grandchild of Wolfenstien 3D. I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt, but there will be more skankily clad women in EA's 'presentation' than indie developers total.
Will single player games (or 1-4 on the console) continue to thrive or is the future in MMORPG's
At this point I seriously doubt that any real stats will come out of it. Until they start listing presenters and papers, I'm betting that the only answer to this is 'yes, if you buy our game.'
Avereage Joe: But they were sooooo shiny! And look at all the pretty 'features.' And everyone's getting or got a pair! Besides, they go so well with my gamer clothes...I mean work suit.
The number one and number two reason people will buy Vista: it will come on their new PC and it will play all the video games sold for PC (that Average Joe cares about.) You can talk about 'compatibility' with work, but Windows 98 with Office 97 is all that takes for most cases. As soon as Duke Nukem comes out, you can be sure it will have a 'Made for Microsoft Windows Vista' sticker on it.
I usually stay out of the Windows/Linux/Mac arguments, but I'm afraid you just don't understand my world.
I've been there, done that and got holes in that T-shirt. And I call bullshit.
I work for a very small company, probably typical of thousands of other very small companies.
I've worked in IT situations with multiple labs of 30 computers. I've worked in companies with 5 computers. Both, however, had the management brains to hire at least a part-time student IT worker or (in my case) a full-time sysadmin. Before these fancy computer systems a small business involved dozens of people just typing and tabulating stuff. Office automation is not a free ride. If the boss gets a personal secretary all to himself yet your bread-in-butter computer systems have a good coating of dust, someone isn't minding the store.
We have one Unix machine, which I despise, because its desktop GUI is primitive and its command interface makes MS-DOS look well-designed and intuitive.
Unless you're willing to provide everyone with echo $SHELL and $SHELL --version get off UNIX's nuts about command interfaces. Unlike Windows you have a choice of both GUI and command line environments in UNIX. Being a Windows Guy(tm) means you probably didn't think of that, but this is expected.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined.
Stop reading newsgroups. Block slashdot.org while at work. Spend one of those hours learning about filtering out stupid work emails. Lack of willingness to spare time does not mean that time doesn't exist.You mentioned all your training is from work done "in my spare time" so I can assume that you're willing to sacrifice personal time to work.
How many inches of your resume are taken up with MS technologies you learned in your free spare time? Your work situation has little to do with the OS Marketplace and everything to do with the resume marketplace. Those of us working with UNIX and Linux desktops typically have to learn MS products in addition to whatever prefered platform we have. It's called interoperability. (FYI, once you learn a UNIX, you will find that it works similarly everywhere, unlike Microsoft's OSes)
I didn't choose Windows; I inherited it and have no resources to replace it. My company didn't really choose Windows; it was forced on us by the marketplace.
Why did your company chose Windows? Because it looked good on your developer's resumes. Why do folks still use Windows? Because it looks good on a resume. Why did you chose to learn Windows in your spare time? Because it looked good on your resume. The WMF vulnerability will not change this. Knowing what ISC or what a patch is will not change this. As long as nobody got fired for buy Microsoft, security issues caused by Microsoft assuming single-user non-networked use will continue to plauge IT.
We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows. We have no hardware to set up a test server, no money (or time) to spend on unsuccessful experiments.
What do you do with older PCs once you reach the next turn of the upgrade treadmill from Microsoft (and it's attendent super-sized performance requirements)? Linux runs great on old, depricated hardware you have sitting in a closet. I know I've bought many an ex-windows PC from resellers of medium to large businesses for under the cost of an expensive business lunch. Heck, I'd put Linux on the old and new machines and run Windows in a locked-down vmware session. I seriously doubt your old COM+ business software requires the latest SLI video card or Dolby 5.1 soundcard. The generic emulated ones would suffice and restarting a hacked vitural image is a cakewalk compared with having a compromised workstation or server that must be physcially removed.
MySQL even claim that if you implement your own client, it speaks the MySQL protocol, and as such is a derivative work of the MySQL server and so must be made available under the GPL.
It'd be interesting to see if such a "claim" would ever hold up in court.
United States code 17 section 1125(c) permits violations of copyright and patent for 'purposes of interoperability' such as a client that speaks the MySQL protocol. But you have to follow the money when any such case goes to court. Ask the bnet people when they went to court over a server that implemented the protocol in Blizzard's Battle.net online gaming system.
(IMHO if you lose such a lawsuit, it's one more nail in the coffin of the public commons and another hayday for corporate malfeanse.)
Moreso than not, because this is the first step in inventing a robot that flings politicians into deep space.
So, how far along are they on this politician deep space launching robot? And, speaking of this does anyone have anything to which I could to get elected? Or cheap long-duration spacesuits?
For an undergraduate at my fairly inexpensive institution, that's about $7K per quarter, and I'd need three of these. Add a $20K equipment budget and $5K for my time and we are at $46K.
Considering that equivalent in industry care and feeding for 3 full-time engineers would be over $500k ($55k ea + a $100k manager + $100k janitorial/HR/security staff + $100k equipment + office space,) 3 students for $46k is free. However, private companies are in this for the publicity that brings venture capital, not the chance at talking in a seminar about a failed project related to a thesis.
By contrast, I just finished a NASA Phase I SBIR. $68,000 over 6 months, guaranteed. If I wanted to do space elevator research, I'd be way better off submitting an SBIR proposal than entering the contest: small up-front risk, higher expected return, better prospects of future funding.
And this is why so many people prefer the old, pork barrel, way: regular distributions from the fountain of tax money so much of the U.S.A. government has become. Only if the SBIR program were completely replaced with competitive reward programs would it be attractive for small-budget academic deparments to participate.
However, people like their regular government paycheck. So, I predict that these competitve programs will remain small and that more pork will fly (via NASA approved SBIRs) before any elevator is built to lift more (hopefully cheaper) pork by cable.
OK so 98% of my userbase uses Windows. 2 % use Linux.
I can write Windows drivers for my device and keep 98% of my userbase happy. I can write Linux drivers for my device, and keep 2% of my userbase happy. If the cost of writing that Linux driver is more than I would make back in profits, why would I ever do it?
A sale is a sale is a sale.
Because you SELL hardware or support, not dirvers. Look at ATI, Nvidia and IBM.
Becaase you can make BOTH Windows drivers AND Linux drivers.
You may do it for bragging rights, protection from vendor lockin or because Linux is VAR friendly. You may have to support it for government contracts. You know, people do make money selling Linux, or at least try.
You will do it because your main competitor supports Linux and is now able to get into every large datacenter doing clustering, LAMP, etc that you have just been locked out of.
But I don't buy your profits argument. Security of your IP is a matter of driver arch, engineering and legalese so that shouldn't be an issue. You are in business for profit, not just marketshare, right? An unhappy customer is still a customer (with the potential to becoome a happy one.) If you have 98% of your (potential) userbase and your company is barely profiting, support for Linux is probably not your problem (but can be a possible solution.)
Additionally, there is a fixed engineering cost for driver development, namely the care-in-feeding of the engineers to do the work. If you aren't supporting the driver for people who bought your product (seen it with driver developers,) then the margin of profit on that sale is greater. If Linux is not your primary market, release scheduling is not a factor (seen that one too.) Alternatively, you can give your spec to an F/OSS developer and have them support it.
However, when my market is bringing in X kilobucks for each %, I will look seriously at fringe markets. If my company's userbase is bringing in enough money per user, I'll jump through serious hoops for 2% more. A sale is a sale is a sale.
The reasonable logic fellows, such as Carl Sagan, simply look at what parts of the radio spectrum that has no significant natural sources of interference. This is the dominate method in current projects. However, there are many of these dead spots. The most prominate quiet channel to a human being the channels surrounding the frequency of hydrogen's spectrum (aka the 'watering hole.') It is in this streach of frequencies that projects like SETI@home are looking for signals.
The deafing silence of this area should be telling: there seems to be Nothing - natural or artificial - at those frequencies. Like looking for lost keys by researching the same empty spots, SETI carefully combs these small streaches frequencies for any possible signal. This technique is not problematic becuase of focusing on parts of the Electromatnetic (EM) spectrum that humans find economicaly and technically useful but becuase the eschew those spans of spectrum on purpose. Instead of assuming human-like intellegence, the watering-hole gazers are assuming a (still) human-like intellegence acting in the opposite fashion that a human would.
In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth.
Considering that if the anthropomorphism above is plausible then they would use similar channels that we use. Not the 'water hole' or other quiet parts of the EM spectrum, but transmissions in area that we find usefull. In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.
Either purposfully sent of just radio chatter, any signal is so attenuated at stellar distances that you must search for the precise signal used in the transmission. Both group assumes that a society would setup and transmit for thousands if not millions of years a steady and powerfull signal or set of targets signals. There is a huge cost for powering and maintaining such equipment over such a timespan. There is very little payback on the timescales of our societies for performing such an ET-friendly transmission. This means billions of channels in the spread of frequencies the FCC allocates to 1 station to play Brittney Spears music. And any signal is likely to be little more than a carrier signal for the local pop-music or military radar. Hence the huge processing requirements for projects like SETI@home to sift such needles in the radio haystack.
To the benefit of both, the encyclopedia galactica may be being beemed at us right now. We just may have the dial on the wrong station.
First of all, it cost them over $155,000, as that is how much prize money they gave out. They also spent quite a bit to fly 100 people to the bay area, put us up in a hotel, etc. Second,
I am willing to bet that the prize, fare and hotel money was dwarfed by the costs of the Google employees that participated.
People underestimate the cost of developing software. Most the money, however, is in overhead. Open source, code competitions and incentive programs (*cough* *cough* pay attention NASA *cough*) are cheap ways to avoid paying overhead yourself. You just let the individual competitors or contributors worry about that.
Consider that 1 full-time programmer is very expensive to care and feed. Typical numbers are $55k for salary and at a minimum (outside EA) another $40k for equipment/electricity/janatorial/etc overhead. The question then is: are the results of the contest more or less than the work that $155,000 would have bought Google on the normal job market?
Linux doesn't have enough of a marketshare in the gamer market to justify a port.
The marketshare of all Microsoft platforms dominates the desktop. In face of the numbers, both Apple platforms and GNU/Linux solutions amount to rounding errors. However, it doesn't take a dominate market position to be profitable.
It's hard to pin down how many Linux installations there are, let alone users (or desktop installs.) But, people are trying.
It's hard to find the fraction of Linux users that play games. Some work can be done to estimate that.
Given some (probably unreasonable) estimates of the above, however, you can figure it out yourself.
Whatever the customer base for a Linux WoW, it has come a long way.
What came first of the chicken and the egg? The vendors won't release games for Linux because the userbase isn't big enough and the userbase won't switch to Linux because the lack of games..
It's called market potential. Whenever your company releases $HARDWARE or $VIDEO_GAME they have to ask the marketing people "who will buy this?" Based on the answers, you get publishers paying for development of Microsoft only hardware drivers and Microsoft only video games.
(Neither video games or hardware are Free as in Beer. Free as in Speech is possible, but discussing price-free drivers and games is beyond the scope of my argument here.)
I was asking around last year about the market potential for Linux kernel GNU systems. The biggest problem is find out just how many people use Linux in the first place (http://counter.li.org./
So, given that it takes a market of at least 100,000 units sold to turn a profit on a top-release $50 game with a $1 million to $3 million budget, are there enough desktop linux users to suppport a Linux game release? Is the market there?
Note that top-release $50 PC games for Windows sell upwards of 200,000 units in their first year, and upwards of 100,000 units for their next few. For example, Blizzard's Wold of Warcraft (http://www.blizzard.com/ cost $5-10million to make but sold 600,000 at $39-50 in its first 6 weeks. But that is on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Assume 50% of home desktop Linux users play computer video games[0].
Using counter.li.org numbers Linux desktops = 0.025% (0.0125% gamers) of all desktops, then a WoW for Linux would have sold 144 copies in it's first 6 weeks[1]. Stats at geek.com (http://www.geek.com/ for 2004 show Linux desktops = 1.12 percent of the market. Assuming the highest number of Linux desktop gamers being 0.56 percent of the total gaming market, then a WoW for Linux would have sold 3,000 copies in it's first 6 weeks at $39-50.
That means between $7,200 and $150,000 could have been spent by Linux desktop users on WoW. While $7k will only pay a Bangladeshi salary, $150,000 would nicely cover one or two interns to make sure WoW compiles and runs on Linux[2][3].
0. Or assume a higher rate of gameplay, but consider less than 100% market penetration of your game, so that 50% market penetration is reached.
1. Note that Transgaming (http://transgaming.com/ needs far more paying customers pending their $5 votes than this to start work on a title, and WoW has been voted #1 priority by transgaming.com customers for several months before being supported.
2. Assuming a baseline Linux is being supported (e.g. SDL $VER + Glib $VER or LSB (http://www.linuxbase.org/) or Distro $FOO) and no additional cost for shipping and delivering the binaries.
3.$15 per month implies $2,160 to $45,000 a month to keep that Linux port updated. Considering Blizzard.com is reporting a 1.11 patch to the 5 year old Diablo II, over a similar 5 years a WoW monthly income could have added $225,000 to Blizzard's coffiers.
Anyway if he had resigned how would it have helped him one iota? He'd still be facing a frivolous and expensive lawsuit and have all his stuff jacked.
Well, aside from the wrongfull lawsuit, if he had resigned under threat he could have applied for unemployment benifits and get his employer embroiled in arbiration (a free and apparently abritrary by some standards method of dispute resolution.) Not only would that help tie up the company and give backing to his (potential) counter-suit, but he might make some money to help with the bills.
<PARANOIA> Finally, if I were a high-profile FOSS developer, I'd invest in a wireless adapter and a decent SOHO SAN box. Put that baby inside a wall with a UPS. It's impressive what you can do with a drywall knife, some 12 gauge homegrade wire, and a decent amount of drywall patch. Let them raid all his stuff, his data would have had remained 'safe' and all his HD's clean (save any cache/tmp/~ files.) Hell, get paranoid and setup the SAN to re-encrypt the drives and shut off if certain files aren't touched every X minutes.
Chip's problem now is that 100% of his admissable evidence is in the hands of a known immoral and hostile agent. There is no practical way to back up his claims without more money. Any 'evidence' he gets back from those machines may be unreliably tampered after the police's uber-windows nerd gets done trashing his probablly non-windows boxen. </PARANOIA>
a server running Windows 2003 Server, can still operate the same without switching the clients to Windows XP. Windows 2000 also takes uses less hardware requirements, and if it runs all their programs with ease, why would they risk switching to a new OS with problems?
Not to be excessively paranoid, but how long until a manadatory upgrade for Windows Server editions is issued by Microsoft that prevents Windows 9x and 2000 machines from being clients?
More importantly, how about their desktop office software? As long as it installs on 9x, 2000, et cetera, they are loosing one of their biggest revenue streams in the upgrade treadmill. Microsoft Office used to push the adoption of new Microsoft platforms and those platforms were pushed as packaged solutions for running Microsoft Office.
The convicted monopolist has been already proven to use tatics like this. Some people from back in the day of early Microsoft Excel remember the unofficial Microsoft Motto "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus-1-2-3 won't run."
Today it will be "Longhorn ain't done 'til Word 97 won't run."
If the device cannot land like a plane it has no hopes of recovering anything from space.
Anything? Like people? I appears that Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (not to mention today's Russian Soyuz) provide strong counter-evidence.
Still has to survive re-entry so losing the ability to land like a plane is a great loss.
Why? How? Last time I checked, meteorites didn't come with Easy Land Brand(tm) wings built by the lowest bidder. Anything with sufficient heat sheilding will survive re-entry, even rocks. For soft things like people and sample containers, you just need cushions and/or parachutes. (If you've flown economy class recently, a wing-assisted landing can feel a lot like slaming into the ground from orbit.)
The wings on the last shuttle flight burned off over Texas. The capsule-like crew comparment survived quite longer than the wings and their tiles did. In fact, the greater surface area of a wing, a useless part in the near-perfect vacuum of Earth orbit, increases the risk of collision with a micrometeor or space junk.
I still don't understand this fetish of Airplane^H^H^HAerospace Engineers to put wings on spacecraft. Yes, if you need to fly in air an airfoil will generate lift. But, almost nowhere in space has air, excepting near some of these nifty things called planets. Once we're away from the planets and exploring space, wings are dead weight holding us back.
I, for one, welcome our new wingless Crew Vehicle Overloads.
Yeah, and the means by which freedom is gained -- if I produce something that is useful and people are willing to pay for, I can eat.
And when the makers of your tools take that capacity to produce away, you cannot eat.
This is not about food. This is about control. The Founders of the United States of America didn't plan for today's corporate world. The original idea was for every citizen to be a yeoman farmer. We would already grow and harvest all the food we needed to eat on land we owned with our own tools and guns. Once elevated from the slavery of needing someone else to make the food on our plate, a cultured and gentile society would form.
Sadly, the corporate/industrial/consumer world of group ficitions (a.k.a. companies) proved to be much more effective at placing and keeping the wrong people in power. These professional politicians were feared because of the ability of the wealthy to influence them. Without them we wouldn't have a 6000 page tax code in the US. But we also wouldn't have ready access super-cheap IBM-compatible PCs without massive companies of scale like Gateway or Dell. It is a trade off, but one many thinkers believe left the citizen short changed.
It is the ideology of a corporate/industrial/consumer world that tells you that wage slavery is good. It is the ideology of RMS that this is bad. Corporate America, et al. would like us to be happy consumers and will stoop to taking their ball away if we won't play the game their way. Linus got reminded that he was playing with his friend's, Larry McVoy's, ball. Larry was unhappy with how other players used his ball. Like a spoiled brat (or corporate professional) he took his ball home.
RMS is correct to thank Larry for showing people the truth behind closed-source licensing and all the sheinanigans closed-source companies ply. Your only inate value is your time, whether used to produce and idea or a thing or another person. Play smart, don't fall into the traps of convineince that take your time away.
---- Plus, I'm not a consumer. I am a citizen, and I'm damned tired of being thought of as a consumer.
-- Tony (765), 25 April 2005
I'm moving into the automotive industry. It pays almost as well (better in some cases) and doesn't involve all the artificial bullshit.
Leather toolbelt by Craftsman, belt pouches by various. Working construction doesn't pay as well as programming, but regular paychecks vs. contract programming is a nice change. Plus I get to see carpentry's ugly seceret: like software, constructions projects have a high mortaility rate and typically overrun schedule. Unlike software, construction issues (like rot in walls and cracked foundations) are very obvious.
Furthermore, carpenters tend to charge directly for change order requests. Try telling your boss that it will cost him $X for his 'fly by cubicle' feature change. See how well that fits.
Also, swinging a hammer is pretty much a global skill. A lot of processes outside of IT and software works regarless of geography and specific tools. I figure software development will be mature when a college freshman/highschooler can learn toolset/language X from company Y and mostly reuse it on toolset/language B from comany C. Right now, though, I hear that suits are once again becoming popular (like they were in the 70s.)
Even though Eric Raymond was talking about the RedHat CUPS tool, I'll bite (YHBT, etc etc.)
The webadmin tool (http://localhost:631) is not well thought out. You start off logged out, but there is no little 'logged in / logged out' indicator like 99.9% of commercial websites have. [tt]However, in the CUPS team's favor, most OSS drops the ball on providing useful user feedback like a login status indicator (see the many Wiki's out there that suffer from this.) But then, I write software for a living, so the software I write has to work or I don't get paid.[/tt]
Furethermore, replacing or adding to the clickable'Administration' label in the webmin interface should be a clickable 'login' and/or 'logout' label. Right now, you must know to click on 'Administration' to force CUPS to prompt for a login. A lot of stuff requiring user login will simply fail. The messages on failing are unhelpful and poorly written. If any actual GUI modeling had been done, the CUPS team would have a more usable design. CUPS needs to put some text telling you that 'you need to be logged in' with a login link on the 'can't do that' error page IF not being logged in is the problem.
However, while all of us dream of populating other planets, the practicality of doing so with today's technology is absurd. For example, we haven't colonized Antartica. Sure there are a few scientists living on isolated stations, but they are doing research - no intention of making the area habitable.
Who want's to live in Antartica? Except for the penguins, I could get all the snow and cold by moving to Canada. At least then I'd have hockey to watch on TV.
I'm not sure about the ISS, and Mir was a POS from the habitable point of view, I'd taken a nice, climate contolled bar in a space colony or a co-ed space ship over miles of white, cold nothing anyday.
Establishing colonies on planetary surfces is expensive, for the same reason getting off Earth in the first place is. Building a colony that remains in nice flat space saves a lot of money, and affords portability in the bargain.
They're just nice, big and round rings with spin gravity, normal day-night cycles and an easy elevator ride down to the external docking ports. Envelope it in a strong enough magnetic field to shield from solar wind and you've got a genuine Gurps approved magnetic sail. They beat out a lot of alternatives for simplicity and utility.
Heck (this is going to piss off a lot of luddlites and geological puritans) when the Sun goes nova and you could slice off chunks of the Earth's surface. Put the chunks on orbitals (seperate orbitals in the case of Palastine and Isreal just to be safe) and fly off to a safe distance or other star system using your magnetic sail. (Of course, by the time you have the ability to slice off chunks of a planets surface you probably stopped worrying about space travel a long time ago.)
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it doesn't really show how Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva are all descended from Red Hat Linux
...)?
Perhaps SuSE is on it's own conceptual branch becuase SuSE is not descended from RedHat?
There are other, real irrgularities in the chart. Why are some branches named for their theme while others are not? Becuase 'is based on' is the default relationship. Debian, gentoo and RedHat branches contain a lot of 'is based on' relationships. (Really this is nitpicking about the schema for internal labeling, if you can grok the relationship then explicit labeling my just be clutter. )
This is version 2.0 of this work and a lot of re-working was done. Some choices in the conceptual classifications are intersting. The theme 'is based' on is prevelant. But, what is the key difference between a minimalist distro and a 'Small Linux' distro? What is meant by the colored arrows from Arch Linux?
And back to your original point, what of LSB and United Linux? The reason Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE and Caldera used rpm for package managment was becuase they participated in the United Linux effort. These distro's have many explicit architectural similarities due to praticipation. Where is that touched upon?
LSB compliance adds another dimension. What about installations that have been brought into LSB compliance? Some LSB changes to a base installation SuSE are quite drastic. What does it mean for a distro to be 'based on' another when it can be or has been forced into LSB compliance? By default? By choice on or after install?
What about data mining? This chart brings up opportunity for further exploration, but can similar charts can be constructed for the GNU Userland? How about looking at how and what version the distro's package and ship apache? How would that compare with kernel versions or popular desktop suites? Is there utility in annotating what the 'default' desktop is (GNOME vs. KDE vs. fluxbox vs. Afterstep vs.
Wikipedia has a page on Messages of the Day which is surprisingly short. And their pag mainly serves to disambiguate motd proper from a minor animie meme about repetative antagonists.
Oddly enough, motd.org is actually a site advertising what amounts to shell access. They appear to be a month late with delivery.
Notice To Users
This computer system is the private property of user $FOO. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy.
Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to your employer, to authorized site, government, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of government agencies, both domestic and foreign.
By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of such personnel or officials. Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in civil and criminal penalties and administrative or disciplinary action, as appropriate. By continuing to use this system you indicate your awareness of and consent to these terms and conditions of use. LOG OFF IMMEDIATELY if you do not agree to the conditions stated in this warning.
-- www.waveclaw.net
Largely compiled from other sources.
Now that's damn evil. After I moved to England, I discovered the that my DVDs no longer worked.
Well, it just means you need to order DVD's from wherever you came from. Seriously, if I wanted to only pay $1 per Chinese DVD (shipped in bulk to oblivate shipping costs) I'd pay $20 for that Chinese DVD player (and get it shipped over too.)
I'm sure DRM advocates have thought of this type of consumer-level vertical-integration in the home theater. Or is their something else keeping me from playing Baliwood DVDs on an Indian DVD player attached to an Indian HDTV?
Or for that matter, why couldn't I import a Korean printer and periodically buy Korean ink carts on ebay?
Just how much pr0n are you planning on hosting? An old 10Gb HD will store a full Linux FOTM desktop install. And there will still be lots of room for your 100k of weblog posts.
You do know how to use a voltmeter, right? When the HDs are idle, my webserver draws less current than the 80W motor and five 100W lightbulbs in the ceiling fan above it. Heck, with the 250W PSU, it's peak load is smaller than my 300W 'small' blowdryer's average.
That 250W power supply in my Pentium 166Mhz webserver lost use of it's fan this month. Bearings finally seized. Funny thing, that old PC. Runs so cold compared with my workstations and laptops that it gets enough cooling from convetion and radidation. Now it's the quietest thing in that backroom.
But I'm sure the PC's cache of Goatcx vs. Tubgirl pics are hurting the planet "in an entirely different way."
What many people hope is that a small company that is independent of this process, in the sense that they don't have any long history with the Feds, or gigantic conventional-warfare contracts to preserve, can be more innovative, and break the apparent barrier to lowering access to space costs that seems to have solidified in the past 20 years
Innovation? In aerospace, where everything positively has to have wings, including spacecraft? I'll tell you the innovation I' like to see: standard buses for satellites. Standard software for navigation, mission planning, etc. Most of what I see is people creating one-off solutions that cost a fortune to test, re-test and certify. The few that aren't are making Just Another Rocket. Why does this bother me? Because 99% of the parts are custom rigged for the mission, including those that have the same role since Sputnik went around the Earth 49 years ago.
And in academia it's worse. Professors get a micro sat project and pick random not-space-hardened hardware like shitty CCD's because their brother/wife/cousin/friend has a camera that took good pictures on their vacation. Then all the students have to work around that bad choice. It's almost like a stupid corporate pet project: doomed to fail because of the idiots at the helm.
Either that, or you could insert your favorite military-industrial-complex or CIA spy satellite consipircy theory here.
What about the future? All the poor blokes are making rockes out in the $X desert, but they will always have to spend +6 months on gov't permits just to wipe their behinds on the launchpad let alone toss something into the air. There is a quote about cars that applied to everything in the aerospace world. If cars had developed on the same schedule as computers: they'd get 300MPG, idle at 6,000MPH, parallel park themselves, cost $100 for a low-end new model which you'd need as the patchwork of private toll roads includes tar pits and your car explodes randomly. At least with spacecraft, they already do the last and most the good Earth orbits are pretty crowded, so it really wouldn't be a change.
I hope they're relevant.
Well the submisison is basically a cut-n-paste from the website. The about section says there will be a Hot Games' session will preview unreleased titles from major game companies and indie developers. (The website also says The program will be made available early June. So it's a litte early.)
The question is: will there be booth babes? No really.
So there is suttlebut about a huge show case of the 'latest and greatest' games with forthcoming release. The graphical theory and practice, at the state of the art, is already a focus of SIGGRAPH. Some video game engines approach implementation of 'last years' ideas, but most are not more techically sophisticated than generic toolkit $FOO running on OpenGL / Direct X shaders.
The reason to have a showcase such as this is to demo innovative User Interface design and game play hacking, both arguably harder to get right than NURBS modeling and bit pushing. Yet we've seen how innovative game publishers are in UI and gameplay. Doom 3 or Halo 2, anyone? They mention indie developers, but as I see it this is another game company's wet dream. As this is an ACM event, the subtle dilluting of the SIGGRAPH conference is in keeping with the corporate ethos of ACM. But, will this be any different than publishers hoping to expand their market via word of mouth?
I would more belive the utility of such a presentation if it looked at current, past and soon to be released games. Games that are either the epitome of a UI approach or possesing distinctive gameplay would be a usefull topic. Things like the products of Carnegie Mellon's Experimental Gameplay Project, where gameplay is actually researched, would be welcome. Eventaully, this could develop into it's own ACM Special Interest Group conference. As it stands this special session sounds like chance to sit and drool at the latest and shiniest grandchild of Wolfenstien 3D. I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt, but there will be more skankily clad women in EA's 'presentation' than indie developers total.
Will single player games (or 1-4 on the console) continue to thrive or is the future in MMORPG's
At this point I seriously doubt that any real stats will come out of it. Until they start listing presenters and papers, I'm betting that the only answer to this is 'yes, if you buy our game.'
DRM. Why would you pay for your own shackles?
Avereage Joe: But they were sooooo shiny! And look at all the pretty 'features.' And everyone's getting or got a pair! Besides, they go so well with my gamer clothes...I mean work suit.
The number one and number two reason people will buy Vista: it will come on their new PC and it will play all the video games sold for PC (that Average Joe cares about.) You can talk about 'compatibility' with work, but Windows 98 with Office 97 is all that takes for most cases. As soon as Duke Nukem comes out, you can be sure it will have a 'Made for Microsoft Windows Vista' sticker on it.
I usually stay out of the Windows/Linux/Mac arguments, but I'm afraid you just don't understand my world.
I've been there, done that and got holes in that T-shirt. And I call bullshit.
I work for a very small company, probably typical of thousands of other very small companies.
I've worked in IT situations with multiple labs of 30 computers. I've worked in companies with 5 computers. Both, however, had the management brains to hire at least a part-time student IT worker or (in my case) a full-time sysadmin. Before these fancy computer systems a small business involved dozens of people just typing and tabulating stuff. Office automation is not a free ride. If the boss gets a personal secretary all to himself yet your bread-in-butter computer systems have a good coating of dust, someone isn't minding the store.
We have one Unix machine, which I despise, because its desktop GUI is primitive and its command interface makes MS-DOS look well-designed and intuitive.
Unless you're willing to provide everyone with echo $SHELL and $SHELL --version get off UNIX's nuts about command interfaces. Unlike Windows you have a choice of both GUI and command line environments in UNIX. Being a Windows Guy(tm) means you probably didn't think of that, but this is expected.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined.
Stop reading newsgroups. Block slashdot.org while at work. Spend one of those hours learning about filtering out stupid work emails. Lack of willingness to spare time does not mean that time doesn't exist.You mentioned all your training is from work done "in my spare time" so I can assume that you're willing to sacrifice personal time to work.
How many inches of your resume are taken up with MS technologies you learned in your free spare time? Your work situation has little to do with the OS Marketplace and everything to do with the resume marketplace. Those of us working with UNIX and Linux desktops typically have to learn MS products in addition to whatever prefered platform we have. It's called interoperability. (FYI, once you learn a UNIX, you will find that
it works similarly everywhere, unlike Microsoft's OSes)
I didn't choose Windows; I inherited it and have no resources to replace it. My company didn't really choose Windows; it was forced on us by the marketplace.
Why did your company chose Windows? Because it looked good on your developer's resumes. Why do folks still use Windows? Because it looks good on a resume. Why did you chose to learn Windows in your spare time? Because it looked good on your resume. The WMF vulnerability will not change this. Knowing what ISC or what a patch is will not change this. As long as nobody got fired for buy Microsoft, security issues caused by Microsoft assuming single-user non-networked use will continue to plauge IT.
We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows. We have no hardware to set up a test server, no money (or time) to spend on unsuccessful experiments.
What do you do with older PCs once you reach the next turn of the upgrade treadmill from Microsoft (and it's attendent super-sized performance requirements)? Linux runs great on old, depricated hardware you have sitting in a closet. I know I've bought many an ex-windows PC from resellers of medium to large businesses for under the cost of an expensive business lunch. Heck, I'd put Linux on the old and new machines and run Windows in a locked-down vmware session. I seriously doubt your old COM+ business software requires the latest SLI video card or Dolby 5.1 soundcard. The generic emulated ones would suffice and restarting a hacked vitural image is a cakewalk compared with having a compromised workstation or server that must be physcially removed.
B
It'd be interesting to see if such a "claim" would ever hold up in court.
United States code 17 section 1125(c) permits violations of copyright and patent for 'purposes of interoperability' such as a client that speaks the MySQL protocol. But you have to follow the money when any such case goes to court. Ask the bnet people when they went to court over a server that implemented the protocol in Blizzard's Battle.net online gaming system.
(IMHO if you lose such a lawsuit, it's one more nail in the coffin of the public commons and another hayday for corporate malfeanse.)
Moreso than not, because this is the first step in inventing a robot that flings politicians into deep space.
So, how far along are they on this politician deep space launching robot? And, speaking of this does anyone have anything to which I could to get elected? Or cheap long-duration spacesuits?
Heck, I hear that there's an as yet untouched asteroid at which you could even target the robot.
For an undergraduate at my fairly inexpensive institution, that's about $7K per quarter, and I'd need three of these. Add a $20K equipment budget and $5K for my time and we are at $46K.
Considering that equivalent in industry care and feeding for 3 full-time engineers would be over $500k ($55k ea + a $100k manager + $100k janitorial/HR/security staff + $100k equipment + office space,) 3 students for $46k is free. However, private companies are in this for the publicity that brings venture capital, not the chance at talking in a seminar about a failed project related to a thesis.
By contrast, I just finished a NASA Phase I SBIR. $68,000 over 6 months, guaranteed. If I wanted to do space elevator research, I'd be way better off submitting an SBIR proposal than entering the contest: small up-front risk, higher expected return, better prospects of future funding.
And this is why so many people prefer the old, pork barrel, way: regular distributions from the fountain of tax money so much of the U.S.A. government has become. Only if the SBIR program were completely replaced with competitive reward programs would it be attractive for small-budget academic deparments to participate.
However, people like their regular government paycheck. So, I predict that these competitve programs will remain small and that more pork will fly (via NASA approved SBIRs) before any elevator is built to lift more (hopefully cheaper) pork by cable.
OK so 98% of my userbase uses Windows. 2 % use Linux.
I can write Windows drivers for my device and keep 98% of my userbase happy. I can write Linux drivers for my device, and keep 2% of my userbase happy. If the cost of writing that Linux driver is more than I would make back in profits, why would I ever do it?
A sale is a sale is a sale.
Because you SELL hardware or support, not dirvers. Look at ATI, Nvidia and IBM.
Becaase you can make BOTH Windows drivers AND Linux drivers.
You may do it for bragging rights, protection from vendor lockin or because Linux is VAR friendly. You may have to support it for government contracts. You know, people do make money selling Linux, or at least try.
You will do it because your main competitor supports Linux and is now able to get into every large datacenter doing clustering, LAMP, etc that you have just been locked out of.
But I don't buy your profits argument. Security of your IP is a matter of driver arch, engineering and legalese so that shouldn't be an issue. You are in business for profit, not just marketshare, right? An unhappy customer is still a customer (with the potential to becoome a happy one.) If you have 98% of your (potential) userbase and your company is barely profiting, support for Linux is probably not your problem (but can be a possible solution.)
Additionally, there is a fixed engineering cost for driver development, namely the care-in-feeding of the engineers to do the work. If you aren't supporting the driver for people who bought your product (seen it with driver developers,) then the margin of profit on that sale is greater. If Linux is not your primary market, release scheduling is not a factor (seen that one too.) Alternatively, you can give your spec to an F/OSS developer and have them support it.
However, when my market is bringing in X kilobucks for each %, I will look seriously at fringe markets. If my company's userbase is bringing in enough money per user, I'll jump through serious hoops for 2% more. A sale is a sale is a sale.
SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.
You wish. There are two groups that dominate the public arguments for passive SETI: those who directly anthropomorphize alien civilizations and those that use a thought-out logic that is still steeped in assumptions of human-like intelligence. While this may be reasonable both are really large asumptions that limit our search. The anthro's are screwed becuase any signals using channels of the EM spetrum that we like will have to compete with cellphones, radios random electronics - even those in the detector.
The reasonable logic fellows, such as Carl Sagan, simply look at what parts of the radio spectrum that has no significant natural sources of interference. This is the dominate method in current projects. However, there are many of these dead spots. The most prominate quiet channel to a human being the channels surrounding the frequency of hydrogen's spectrum (aka the 'watering hole.') It is in this streach of frequencies that projects like SETI@home are looking for signals.
The deafing silence of this area should be telling: there seems to be Nothing - natural or artificial - at those frequencies. Like looking for lost keys by researching the same empty spots, SETI carefully combs these small streaches frequencies for any possible signal. This technique is not problematic becuase of focusing on parts of the Electromatnetic (EM) spectrum that humans find economicaly and technically useful but becuase the eschew those spans of spectrum on purpose. Instead of assuming human-like intellegence, the watering-hole gazers are assuming a (still) human-like intellegence acting in the opposite fashion that a human would.
In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth.
Considering that if the anthropomorphism above is plausible then they would use similar channels that we use. Not the 'water hole' or other quiet parts of the EM spectrum, but transmissions in area that we find usefull. In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.
Either purposfully sent of just radio chatter, any signal is so attenuated at stellar distances that you must search for the precise signal used in the transmission. Both group assumes that a society would setup and transmit for thousands if not millions of years a steady and powerfull signal or set of targets signals. There is a huge cost for powering and maintaining such equipment over such a timespan. There is very little payback on the timescales of our societies for performing such an ET-friendly transmission. This means billions of channels in the spread of frequencies the FCC allocates to 1 station to play Brittney Spears music. And any signal is likely to be little more than a carrier signal for the local pop-music or military radar. Hence the huge processing requirements for projects like SETI@home to sift such needles in the radio haystack.
To the benefit of both, the encyclopedia galactica may be being beemed at us right now. We just may have the dial on the wrong station.
First of all, it cost them over $155,000, as that is how much prize money they gave out. They also spent quite a bit to fly 100 people to the bay area, put us up in a hotel, etc. Second,
I am willing to bet that the prize, fare and hotel money was dwarfed by the costs of the Google employees that participated.
People underestimate the cost of developing software. Most the money, however, is in overhead. Open source, code competitions and incentive programs (*cough* *cough* pay attention NASA *cough*) are cheap ways to avoid paying overhead yourself. You just let the individual competitors or contributors worry about that.
Consider that 1 full-time programmer is very expensive to care and feed. Typical numbers are $55k for salary and at a minimum (outside EA) another $40k for equipment/electricity/janatorial/etc overhead. The question then is: are the results of the contest more or less than the work that $155,000 would have bought Google on the normal job market?
f u cn rd ts, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Aren't abbreviations fun?
The marketshare of all Microsoft platforms dominates the desktop. In face of the numbers, both Apple platforms and GNU/Linux solutions amount to rounding errors. However, it doesn't take a dominate market position to be profitable.
If you build the Linux gaming market and they will come.
This post brought to you by the Slashdot "5 minutes with google web search" research team.
What came first of the chicken and the egg? The vendors won't release games for Linux because the userbase isn't big enough and the userbase won't switch to Linux because the lack of games..
It's called market potential. Whenever your company releases $HARDWARE or $VIDEO_GAME they have to ask the marketing people "who will buy this?" Based on the answers, you get publishers paying for development of Microsoft only hardware drivers and Microsoft only video games.
(Neither video games or hardware are Free as in Beer. Free as in Speech is possible, but discussing price-free drivers and games is beyond the scope of my argument here.)
I was asking around last year about the market potential for Linux kernel GNU systems. The biggest problem is find out just how many people use Linux in the first place (http://counter.li.org./
So, given that it takes a market of at least 100,000 units sold to turn a profit on a top-release $50 game with a $1 million to $3 million budget, are there enough desktop linux users to suppport a Linux game release? Is the market there?
Note that top-release $50 PC games for Windows sell upwards of 200,000 units in their first year, and upwards of 100,000 units for their next few. For example, Blizzard's Wold of Warcraft (http://www.blizzard.com/ cost $5-10million to make but sold 600,000 at $39-50 in its first 6 weeks. But that is on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Assume 50% of home desktop Linux users play computer video games[0].
Using counter.li.org numbers Linux desktops = 0.025% (0.0125% gamers) of all desktops, then a WoW for Linux would have sold 144 copies in it's first 6 weeks[1]. Stats at geek.com (http://www.geek.com/ for 2004 show Linux desktops = 1.12 percent of the market. Assuming the highest number of Linux desktop gamers being 0.56 percent of the total gaming market, then a WoW for Linux would have sold 3,000 copies in it's first 6 weeks at $39-50.
That means between $7,200 and $150,000 could have been spent by Linux desktop users on WoW. While $7k will only pay a Bangladeshi salary, $150,000 would nicely cover one or two interns to make sure WoW compiles and runs on Linux[2][3].
0. Or assume a higher rate of gameplay, but consider less than 100% market penetration of your game, so that 50% market penetration is reached.
1. Note that Transgaming (http://transgaming.com/ needs far more paying customers pending their $5 votes than this to start work on a title, and WoW has been voted #1 priority by transgaming.com customers for several months before being supported.
2. Assuming a baseline Linux is being supported (e.g. SDL $VER + Glib $VER or LSB (http://www.linuxbase.org/) or Distro $FOO) and no additional cost for shipping and delivering the binaries.
3.$15 per month implies $2,160 to $45,000 a month to keep that Linux port updated. Considering Blizzard.com is reporting a 1.11 patch to the 5 year old Diablo II, over a similar 5 years a WoW monthly income could have added $225,000 to Blizzard's coffiers.
Anyway if he had resigned how would it have helped him one iota? He'd still be facing a frivolous and expensive lawsuit and have all his stuff jacked.
Well, aside from the wrongfull lawsuit, if he had resigned under threat he could have applied for unemployment benifits and get his employer embroiled in arbiration (a free and apparently abritrary by some standards method of dispute resolution.) Not only would that help tie up the company and give backing to his (potential) counter-suit, but he might make some money to help with the bills.
<PARANOIA>
Finally, if I were a high-profile FOSS developer, I'd invest in a wireless adapter and a decent SOHO SAN box. Put that baby inside a wall with a UPS. It's impressive what you can do with a drywall knife, some 12 gauge homegrade wire, and a decent amount of drywall patch. Let them raid all his stuff, his data would have had remained 'safe' and all his HD's clean (save any cache/tmp/~ files.) Hell, get paranoid and setup the SAN to re-encrypt the drives and shut off if certain files aren't touched every X minutes.
Chip's problem now is that 100% of his admissable evidence is in the hands of a known immoral and hostile agent. There is no practical way to back up his claims without more money. Any 'evidence' he gets back from those machines may be unreliably tampered after the police's uber-windows nerd gets done trashing his probablly non-windows boxen.
</PARANOIA>
Save Chip, Sink Heath('s legal team)
a server running Windows 2003 Server, can still operate the same without switching the clients to Windows XP. Windows 2000 also takes uses less hardware requirements, and if it runs all their programs with ease, why would they risk switching to a new OS with problems?
Not to be excessively paranoid, but how long until a manadatory upgrade for Windows Server editions is issued by Microsoft that prevents Windows 9x and 2000 machines from being clients?
More importantly, how about their desktop office software? As long as it installs on 9x, 2000, et cetera, they are loosing one of their biggest revenue streams in the upgrade treadmill. Microsoft Office used to push the adoption of new Microsoft platforms and those platforms were pushed as packaged solutions for running Microsoft Office.
The convicted monopolist has been already proven to use tatics like this. Some people from back in the day of early Microsoft Excel remember the unofficial Microsoft Motto "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus-1-2-3 won't run."
Today it will be "Longhorn ain't done 'til Word 97 won't run."
If the device cannot land like a plane it has no hopes of recovering anything from space.
Anything? Like people? I appears that Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (not to mention today's Russian Soyuz) provide strong counter-evidence.
Still has to survive re-entry so losing the ability to land like a plane is a great loss.
Why? How? Last time I checked, meteorites didn't come with Easy Land Brand(tm) wings built by the lowest bidder. Anything with sufficient heat sheilding will survive re-entry, even rocks. For soft things like people and sample containers, you just need cushions and/or parachutes. (If you've flown economy class recently, a wing-assisted landing can feel a lot like slaming into the ground from orbit.)
The wings on the last shuttle flight burned off over Texas. The capsule-like crew comparment survived quite longer than the wings and their tiles did. In fact, the greater surface area of a wing, a useless part in the near-perfect vacuum of Earth orbit, increases the risk of collision with a micrometeor or space junk.
I still don't understand this fetish of Airplane^H^H^HAerospace Engineers to put wings on spacecraft. Yes, if you need to fly in air an airfoil will generate lift. But, almost nowhere in space has air, excepting near some of these nifty things called planets. Once we're away from the planets and exploring space, wings are dead weight holding us back.
I, for one, welcome our new wingless Crew Vehicle Overloads.
Yeah, and the means by which freedom is gained -- if I produce something that is useful and people are willing to pay for, I can eat.
And when the makers of your tools take that capacity to produce away, you cannot eat.
This is not about food. This is about control. The Founders of the United States of America didn't plan for today's corporate world. The original idea was for every citizen to be a yeoman farmer. We would already grow and harvest all the food we needed to eat on land we owned with our own tools and guns. Once elevated from the slavery of needing someone else to make the food on our plate, a cultured and gentile society would form.
Sadly, the corporate/industrial/consumer world of group ficitions (a.k.a. companies) proved to be much more effective at placing and keeping the wrong people in power. These professional politicians were feared because of the ability of the wealthy to influence them. Without them we wouldn't have a 6000 page tax code in the US. But we also wouldn't have ready access super-cheap IBM-compatible PCs without massive companies of scale like Gateway or Dell. It is a trade off, but one many thinkers believe left the citizen short changed.
It is the ideology of a corporate/industrial/consumer world that tells you that wage slavery is good. It is the ideology of RMS that this is bad. Corporate America, et al. would like us to be happy consumers and will stoop to taking their ball away if we won't play the game their way. Linus got reminded that he was playing with his friend's, Larry McVoy's, ball. Larry was unhappy with how other players used his ball. Like a spoiled brat (or corporate professional) he took his ball home.
RMS is correct to thank Larry for showing people the truth behind closed-source licensing and all the sheinanigans closed-source companies ply. Your only inate value is your time, whether used to produce and idea or a thing or another person. Play smart, don't fall into the traps of convineince that take your time away.
----
Plus, I'm not a consumer. I am a citizen, and I'm damned tired of being thought of as a consumer.
-- Tony (765), 25 April 2005
I'm moving into the automotive industry. It pays almost as well (better in some cases) and doesn't involve all the artificial bullshit.
Leather toolbelt by Craftsman, belt pouches by various. Working construction doesn't pay as well as programming, but regular paychecks vs. contract programming is a nice change. Plus I get to see carpentry's ugly seceret: like software, constructions projects have a high mortaility rate and typically overrun schedule. Unlike software, construction issues (like rot in walls and cracked foundations) are very obvious.
Furthermore, carpenters tend to charge directly for change order requests. Try telling your boss that it will cost him $X for his 'fly by cubicle' feature change. See how well that fits.
Also, swinging a hammer is pretty much a global skill. A lot of processes outside of IT and software works regarless of geography and specific tools. I figure software development will be mature when a college freshman/highschooler can learn toolset/language X from company Y and mostly reuse it on toolset/language B from comany C. Right now, though, I hear that suits are once again becoming popular (like they were in the 70s.)
Anyone else have any ideas?
Even though Eric Raymond was talking about the RedHat CUPS tool, I'll bite (YHBT, etc etc.)
The webadmin tool (http://localhost:631) is not well thought out. You start off logged out, but there is no little 'logged in / logged out' indicator like 99.9% of commercial websites have. [tt]However, in the CUPS team's favor, most OSS drops the ball on providing useful user feedback like a login status indicator (see the many Wiki's out there that suffer from this.) But then, I write software for a living, so the software I write has to work or I don't get paid.[/tt]
Furethermore, replacing or adding to the clickable'Administration' label in the webmin interface should be a clickable 'login' and/or 'logout' label. Right now, you must know to click on 'Administration' to force CUPS to prompt for a login. A lot of stuff requiring user login will simply fail. The messages on failing are unhelpful and poorly written. If any actual GUI modeling had been done, the CUPS team would have a more usable design. CUPS needs to put some text telling you that 'you need to be logged in' with a login link on the 'can't do that' error page IF not being logged in is the problem.
However, while all of us dream of populating other planets, the practicality of doing so with today's technology is absurd. For example, we haven't colonized Antartica. Sure there are a few scientists living on isolated stations, but they are doing research - no intention of making the area habitable.
Who want's to live in Antartica? Except for the penguins, I could get all the snow and cold by moving to Canada. At least then I'd have hockey to watch on TV.
I'm not sure about the ISS, and Mir was a POS from the habitable point of view, I'd taken a nice, climate contolled bar in a space colony or a co-ed space ship over miles of white, cold nothing anyday.
Establishing colonies on planetary surfces is expensive, for the same reason getting off Earth in the first place is. Building a colony that remains in nice flat space saves a lot of money, and affords portability in the bargain.
Why not build orbitals?
They're just nice, big and round rings with spin gravity, normal day-night cycles and an easy elevator ride down to the external docking ports. Envelope it in a strong enough magnetic field to shield from solar wind and you've got a genuine Gurps approved magnetic sail. They beat out a lot of alternatives for simplicity and utility.
Heck (this is going to piss off a lot of luddlites and geological puritans) when the Sun goes nova and you could slice off chunks of the Earth's surface. Put the chunks on orbitals (seperate orbitals in the case of Palastine and Isreal just to be safe) and fly off to a safe distance or other star system using your magnetic sail. (Of course, by the time you have the ability to slice off chunks of a planets surface you probably stopped worrying about space travel a long time ago.)