If someone were to start another project to implement the Be API under Windows and Linux, much like X11 runs under Cygwin, maybe more people would begin developing for it because there wouldn't be so many hardware issues to deal with. It would be much easier for the casual programmer to play with without much of a commitment. Once the full OS becomes more mature and drivers become more readily available, people can begin recompiling the apps to the real OS and gaining the performance benefits it brings at that time. I think Amiga is doing something similar.
The only real motivation they would have to open these networks up would be if an open solution reached critical mass and they wanted to piggy back on the success of the new platform. The only way an open solution will gain larger market share than AOL, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. is if a large number of people outside of tech circles cared. I think the slow adoption of Linux and Mozilla on the desktop have shown that most people just use what's easy.
I totally agree with you on this one. Most of the patches for Linux that I've seen were for local problems. I'm sure if we had the source to EVERY program that shipped with Windows, we'd find a bunch of juicy local buffer overflows. Don't even get me started on that checklist Microsoft has on securing a machine against local users. It takes hours to setup initially. My other problem with the way Microsoft ships SQL Server is that to my knowledge, there is no way to not make it available on the network. Postgres, for example, requires you to specifically set it up for TCP use. SQL Server would have been much more secure if it were initially only available on the local system until it was configured for networking. You should also be able to set to which IPs it will respond because most SQL servers only need to be available to a small number of machines or to specific subnets.
Oh, I guess you forgot the part about not releasing specs on the G4 machines afterwards. Note that Apple's machine specs were available before Be entered the market.
Really? I'd say 100% of the Macintosh market is a monopoly. Did you read about what happened to Be when they gave Apple a bit of competition on that front? Apple has a higher percentage of the Mac OS market than Microsoft has of the PC OS market.
Apple doesn't release on Linux for the same reasons Microsoft doesn't. They're trying to ignore it and hoping it goes away. Apple is trying to protect an OS monopoly just as Microsoft is. If all Apple applications were available on Linux, there would be no reasons to own a Mac besides the pretty case. They only release some stuff on Windows because if their stuff played only on Macs, it would only be viewed by a small percentage of the population.
Actually, there wouldn't be a tremendous amount of overhead. If you were to write a game based on Linux for the PS2, it would most likely run in single user mode, so all you would be running is the C library, SDL, and the drivers. Nothing would be running in the background, and you would have a tremendous amount of development tools available to you on your desktop machine. People forget that Linux is really just a kernel, and that you can use just the pieces that you need. A kernel with only the drivers for the Playstation devices would be small and efficient. If Sony were to support Linux as the standard OS for the next Playstation, they wouldn't need to put so much effort into a development environment, and they would have a much larger base of potential developers than with a proprietary OS. Easy development with familiar tools is Microsoft's advantage with the XBox.
I was actually going to post something to this effect on the Loki article a couple of days ago. A few programmers who release software and ask for donations to help them out are one thing, but when you're talking about companies that are in business to make money, they'd be just as well served if you buy stock, and you can profit from it later if the company becomes profitable. I realize Loki wasn't publically traded, but I think that may be a good idea for whatever company takes their place. If the success of a company is largely dependent on support provided by the community, the community should be able to reap the rewards from contributing.
We also can't forget about the requisite posts from stupid assholes who act jaded but come back every day to post the same damn messages about seeing the same damn messages.
Anyway, more to the point, I'm going to patent wiping my ass left handed when I'm right handed.
(Ha! I'm going to patent [insert name of commonly used idea/substance/technology, such as 'air' or 'first posts') ^^see above^^
"I remember back when I invented the Internet..."
--Al Gore (idiotic Al Gore/internet comment that we've all heard a billion times.)
I didn't bother pulling Photoshop into a resource editor, but I wouldn't doubt that it uses string resources to implement the internationalization, so the pirates will most likely just need to edit the resources on the US version to make their own version.
If they didn't do it, nobody else would. Hell, we need some variety. It makes it more fun. If we happen to get to slam REAL M$ employees, that's even better.
Since the graphics card can't be changed, I would have thought they'd use something other than what was considered low end at the beginning of last year. It will be a dinosaur by the end of this year. My PC that I haven't upgraded in a year and a half has a better graphics card (GeForce 2 GTS.)
This is a non-issue. I didn't use WMA before, and I won't use it after it's available in new DVD players. Now, once.ogg hits full release, it would be really cool to see it playable in DVD and CD players. Something with upgradable codecs (maybe running embedded Linux;) would be even better.
Do they get royalties for all CD-Rs or just those overpriced ones that they claim are meant for audio? I can't see why they should get paid for someone writing data.
Considering that many people that I know and I use names like reg sucks and fuck off, I don't know how useful their stupid databases will be anyway. I hate having to register every time I want to get driver updates and such, and maybe when they see all this crap in their databases, they might wake up to the fact that many people don't like giving out personal information. If companies actually were responsible with the information, our phones wouldn't ring off the hook from telemarketers calling, and we wouldn't get so much junk mail. It's bad enough that entities like the government, who we must give proper information to, sell our information.
I've thrown around the possibility of doing something like this for years. It's really sad that some company gets to "own" a method that many people have thought of just because they were the first with the money and resources to go through the patent process. That any data could be represented by what may be an impossibly complex equation isn't news. Also, I seem to remember part of my Calculus II class describing a process called Taylor approximations if my memory serves me right that described approximating an extremely complex equation with a sum of less complex equations. The idea has been around in the math world for years. A few companies using expensive satellite links or something might use this, but I don't really see the use. The Internet as a whole would be much faster if the RIAA didn't screw up every distributed file sharing concept that comes around. A lot less bandwidth would be used if you could, for example, download a Linux kernel from the guy next door who just downloaded it instead of everyone downloading from the same place because people are too lazy to use mirrors. Something like Freenet with built-in digital signature checking may eventually be promising for this sort of thing if it doesn't become illegal. If you want to talk about speeding up the system as a whole, put the data where it is most needed.
Peer to peer services for sharing open source
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SourceForge Drifting
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· Score: 1
I think that maybe the open source community should look at the possibility of using peer to peer methods to distribute many popular files and updates. For example, when you download a new kernel using it, your system automatically become a node sharing the kernel or at least parts of it. From the reading I've done on Freenet, it may be a good base for this sort of thing. This approach would cut down on the need for open source projects to have a large amount of available bandwidth to share popular offerings. If it were shipped with Linux and other free *nix distros so that it could be turned on with easy graphical configuration, the network could become very efficient. I would just be concerned about abuse. Perhaps it could be made so that you have to approve keys for each project that you wish to make available from your machine.
Maybe making one that just gives them an informative message with links to information on the problem wouldn't be such a bad idea. Let them in after displaying the page and only display it to them once.
I've been thinking that porting a significant amount of free software onto Windows might be an excellent way to introduce people who otherwise wouldn't know anything about it to free software. It may even ease the transition to a free OS later on because people wouldn't have to give up the programs that they've been using on a regular basis. It allows them to try it without the commitment of repartitioning their hard drive or learning a new OS. A friend of mine uses GIMP on Windows on a regular basis and is interested in other free software on the platform. Another benefit of releasing free software on Windows would be that it could possibly help supplant proprietary standards with open ones. Many free software programmers say screw Windows, so that 95% of the users out there on Windows never get exposed to good free software. Writing more free Windows software could even help with compatibility problems. Take Samba, for example. If people put more time into porting open networking protocols TO Windows and making easy installers for Windows, then Windows and other operating systems would be able to interact more cleanly because the protocols didn't have to be reverse engineered. In that case, we wouldn't be a step behind Microsoft when they decide to change their protocols again because we wouldn't even be interacting with Microsoft software. I think AbiWord is a good example of this idea of porting free software to Windows in action. Once it matures, it will be more than sufficient for home users who just want to print nice letters once in awhile, and it's a lot cheaper than even Microsoft Office Small Business Edition.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, something like that. I really liked BeOS, so I might get involved in one of these projects when I get some time.
If someone were to start another project to implement the Be API under Windows and Linux, much like X11 runs under Cygwin, maybe more people would begin developing for it because there wouldn't be so many hardware issues to deal with. It would be much easier for the casual programmer to play with without much of a commitment. Once the full OS becomes more mature and drivers become more readily available, people can begin recompiling the apps to the real OS and gaining the performance benefits it brings at that time. I think Amiga is doing something similar.
The only real motivation they would have to open these networks up would be if an open solution reached critical mass and they wanted to piggy back on the success of the new platform. The only way an open solution will gain larger market share than AOL, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. is if a large number of people outside of tech circles cared. I think the slow adoption of Linux and Mozilla on the desktop have shown that most people just use what's easy.
I totally agree with you on this one. Most of the patches for Linux that I've seen were for local problems. I'm sure if we had the source to EVERY program that shipped with Windows, we'd find a bunch of juicy local buffer overflows. Don't even get me started on that checklist Microsoft has on securing a machine against local users. It takes hours to setup initially. My other problem with the way Microsoft ships SQL Server is that to my knowledge, there is no way to not make it available on the network. Postgres, for example, requires you to specifically set it up for TCP use. SQL Server would have been much more secure if it were initially only available on the local system until it was configured for networking. You should also be able to set to which IPs it will respond because most SQL servers only need to be available to a small number of machines or to specific subnets.
Oh, I guess you forgot the part about not releasing specs on the G4 machines afterwards. Note that Apple's machine specs were available before Be entered the market.
Really? I'd say 100% of the Macintosh market is a monopoly. Did you read about what happened to Be when they gave Apple a bit of competition on that front? Apple has a higher percentage of the Mac OS market than Microsoft has of the PC OS market.
Apple doesn't release on Linux for the same reasons Microsoft doesn't. They're trying to ignore it and hoping it goes away. Apple is trying to protect an OS monopoly just as Microsoft is. If all Apple applications were available on Linux, there would be no reasons to own a Mac besides the pretty case. They only release some stuff on Windows because if their stuff played only on Macs, it would only be viewed by a small percentage of the population.
Don't link to them. When enough people don't link to their crap, they'll wonder why nobody's looking at it.
Actually, there wouldn't be a tremendous amount of overhead. If you were to write a game based on Linux for the PS2, it would most likely run in single user mode, so all you would be running is the C library, SDL, and the drivers. Nothing would be running in the background, and you would have a tremendous amount of development tools available to you on your desktop machine. People forget that Linux is really just a kernel, and that you can use just the pieces that you need. A kernel with only the drivers for the Playstation devices would be small and efficient. If Sony were to support Linux as the standard OS for the next Playstation, they wouldn't need to put so much effort into a development environment, and they would have a much larger base of potential developers than with a proprietary OS. Easy development with familiar tools is Microsoft's advantage with the XBox.
I was actually going to post something to this effect on the Loki article a couple of days ago. A few programmers who release software and ask for donations to help them out are one thing, but when you're talking about companies that are in business to make money, they'd be just as well served if you buy stock, and you can profit from it later if the company becomes profitable. I realize Loki wasn't publically traded, but I think that may be a good idea for whatever company takes their place. If the success of a company is largely dependent on support provided by the community, the community should be able to reap the rewards from contributing.
We also can't forget about the requisite posts from stupid assholes who act jaded but come back every day to post the same damn messages about seeing the same damn messages.
Anyway, more to the point, I'm going to patent wiping my ass left handed when I'm right handed.
(Ha! I'm going to patent [insert name of commonly used idea/substance/technology, such as 'air' or 'first posts') ^^see above^^
"I remember back when I invented the Internet..."
--Al Gore (idiotic Al Gore/internet comment that we've all heard a billion times.)
I didn't bother pulling Photoshop into a resource editor, but I wouldn't doubt that it uses string resources to implement the internationalization, so the pirates will most likely just need to edit the resources on the US version to make their own version.
If they didn't do it, nobody else would. Hell, we need some variety. It makes it more fun. If we happen to get to slam REAL M$ employees, that's even better.
A .NET web service that screws over the on-line poll of their choosing.
Since the graphics card can't be changed, I would have thought they'd use something other than what was considered low end at the beginning of last year. It will be a dinosaur by the end of this year. My PC that I haven't upgraded in a year and a half has a better graphics card (GeForce 2 GTS.)
This is a non-issue. I didn't use WMA before, and I won't use it after it's available in new DVD players. Now, once .ogg hits full release, it would be really cool to see it playable in DVD and CD players. Something with upgradable codecs (maybe running embedded Linux ;) would be even better.
Do they get royalties for all CD-Rs or just those overpriced ones that they claim are meant for audio? I can't see why they should get paid for someone writing data.
What a fucking joke. I think I'll patent typing drunk while I'm at it.
Considering that many people that I know and I use names like reg sucks and fuck off, I don't know how useful their stupid databases will be anyway. I hate having to register every time I want to get driver updates and such, and maybe when they see all this crap in their databases, they might wake up to the fact that many people don't like giving out personal information. If companies actually were responsible with the information, our phones wouldn't ring off the hook from telemarketers calling, and we wouldn't get so much junk mail. It's bad enough that entities like the government, who we must give proper information to, sell our information.
I've thrown around the possibility of doing something like this for years. It's really sad that some company gets to "own" a method that many people have thought of just because they were the first with the money and resources to go through the patent process. That any data could be represented by what may be an impossibly complex equation isn't news. Also, I seem to remember part of my Calculus II class describing a process called Taylor approximations if my memory serves me right that described approximating an extremely complex equation with a sum of less complex equations. The idea has been around in the math world for years. A few companies using expensive satellite links or something might use this, but I don't really see the use. The Internet as a whole would be much faster if the RIAA didn't screw up every distributed file sharing concept that comes around. A lot less bandwidth would be used if you could, for example, download a Linux kernel from the guy next door who just downloaded it instead of everyone downloading from the same place because people are too lazy to use mirrors. Something like Freenet with built-in digital signature checking may eventually be promising for this sort of thing if it doesn't become illegal. If you want to talk about speeding up the system as a whole, put the data where it is most needed.
I think that maybe the open source community should look at the possibility of using peer to peer methods to distribute many popular files and updates. For example, when you download a new kernel using it, your system automatically become a node sharing the kernel or at least parts of it. From the reading I've done on Freenet, it may be a good base for this sort of thing. This approach would cut down on the need for open source projects to have a large amount of available bandwidth to share popular offerings. If it were shipped with Linux and other free *nix distros so that it could be turned on with easy graphical configuration, the network could become very efficient. I would just be concerned about abuse. Perhaps it could be made so that you have to approve keys for each project that you wish to make available from your machine.
Maybe making one that just gives them an informative message with links to information on the problem wouldn't be such a bad idea. Let them in after displaying the page and only display it to them once.
I've been thinking that porting a significant amount of free software onto Windows might be an excellent way to introduce people who otherwise wouldn't know anything about it to free software. It may even ease the transition to a free OS later on because people wouldn't have to give up the programs that they've been using on a regular basis. It allows them to try it without the commitment of repartitioning their hard drive or learning a new OS. A friend of mine uses GIMP on Windows on a regular basis and is interested in other free software on the platform. Another benefit of releasing free software on Windows would be that it could possibly help supplant proprietary standards with open ones. Many free software programmers say screw Windows, so that 95% of the users out there on Windows never get exposed to good free software. Writing more free Windows software could even help with compatibility problems. Take Samba, for example. If people put more time into porting open networking protocols TO Windows and making easy installers for Windows, then Windows and other operating systems would be able to interact more cleanly because the protocols didn't have to be reverse engineered. In that case, we wouldn't be a step behind Microsoft when they decide to change their protocols again because we wouldn't even be interacting with Microsoft software. I think AbiWord is a good example of this idea of porting free software to Windows in action. Once it matures, it will be more than sufficient for home users who just want to print nice letters once in awhile, and it's a lot cheaper than even Microsoft Office Small Business Edition.