The book the original poster refers to is painstakingly researched and basically correct. Not only did IBM supply machines to the Nazis, profit from it, and do everything they could to keep the German subsidiary (and its profits) under control, but Watson himself was quite an admirer of Hitler and praised him endlessly during the thirties. Not that he was unique in this regard among American businessman, but it is something that must be considered when the man is being venerated as some kind of computing icon.
Microsoft doesn't care about piracy in Thailand or elsewhere, in fact it works largely to their benefit. If people who wouldn't be able to afford their software anyway are pirating it illegally, Microsoft doesn't lose any money, but they gain users and market share.
The point of this effort isn't to stop piracy, and Microsoft knows it won't. The problem is that the Thai government is setting up a program for the development of a very cheap computer, and they want to distribute a legitimate operating system with it. Since they weren't going to pay Microsoft's asking price, there was the potential of a very large number of computers being distributed without a Microsoft operating system. And even assuming most of the buyers replace the preinstalled OS (Linux, whatever) with a pirated copy of Windows, it still would have the potential of creating a substantial, new base of computer users not running Windows. This plan heads off that possibility. Whether they replace it with a pirated full version of XP or not, anyone who buys this thing is going to be using Windows, and that is what matters to Microsoft.
According to legend, towards the end of his life von Neumann was having graduate students hand-assemble programs he had written into machine code. They decided to write an assembler to do the work automatically, and he was apparently quite unhappy about it, not seeing any reason for a higher level of abstraction than machine language and viewing the diversion of time to write an assembler to be a waste. So he might not exactly approve...
But learning assembly != learning architecture, and with the x86 it is probably counter-productive since you have to explain afterwards what the processor really does behind your back when you use memory operands, string instructions, etc... Understanding the architecture is important, but assembly language in and of itself is not that important, and x86 is an especially bad choice.
What will actually happen is the vast majority of buyers will install pirated copies of Windows. In fact, Dell probably assumes that will happen, because there aren't that many people who want to run Linux on cheap desktops, who would actually buy prebuilt machines, but there are many more who would love to save money on software they can easily download or "borrow" for free.
Like AC97, this is a generic interface for a codec. It doesn't only apply to onboard sound. In fact most consumer sound cards use AC97 codecs, and their sample rate restrictions (requiring everything to be resampled to 16bit/48khz) are a big limitation of most of them. So this will improve the quality of almost anything outside of professional cards and external USB devices.
As for the issue of internal noise, it is really orthogonal to the codec interface specification. You can find cards now, including onboard sound, that are very quiet, using AC97 codecs. It depends on the quality of the codec as well as the motherboard manufacturer (Crystal codecs are very nice, Realtek/Avance Logic codecs are not, they are both AC97 though). This new standard will be no different, it will still depend on the manufacturer. If you really are concerned about noise, you should look into a USB device, although as I'm finding out Linux support for them isn't that great right now.
In America, if I wanted to walk around in front of a catholic church with a blood-drenched picture of the pope, accusing him of horrible crimes, I could do it (not that I would, but you get the idea). In Saudi Arabia, that could get you beheaded.
Actually I think the Saudi government downright encourages criticism of the Catholic church...
Everything AFTER the stage1 bootloader is either my code (BSP) or CE itself. I submit my code to the world under the GPL. As far as CE itself, here is what Microsoft has to say on the subject...
I don't know enough about this to know how exactly the added code and CE interact, but if the added code includes modifications to CE itself (or dynamic linking, beyond basic use of CE through published APIs a la linux kernel modules), this might not be legal. The MS Shared Source license does allow redistribution of modified source and binaries (and in fact it actually goes beyond the GPL in one way, in that the source does not necessarily have to be included), but as it explicitly forbids commercial redistribution without commercial licensing from Microsoft, it isn't GPL-compatible (its patent clauses might also be, but I'm less sure about that). Unless they're sure there is no contamination, they should either put the code under a non-viral license like the BSD, or grit their teeth and use the MS license if they want something more restrictive and viral (those are the effective terms for redistributing the whole thing anyway). Otherwise there might be a totally unnecessary KDE-type situation due to use of the GPL.
Don't worry, this should have precisely zero advantages over Safari, since Safari IS a Mac port of the very same KHTML engine used by Konqueror, plus some enhancements by Apple. This just takes those enhancements, and the native UI, back away. But it does mean the rest of KDE should be portable also, which I suppose is the real point. Although off-hand I can't think of a single KDE application which really demands to be installed (Scribus, the open-source DTP app, is pure QT and probably runs on OS X already), and I only use KDE on Linux for the desktop and file manager (which would both be totally redundant on OS X).
a language that feels like medium-to-high level (like, say ANSI C) but is in fact assembly - for certain new CPU.
This is kind of nonsense. It cannot really be "assembly" (at least in the normal sense in which assembly is defined, where there is a 1-1 or close to 1-1 correspondence between instructions in the language and machine instructions) if it supports things like procedures, nested complex arithmetic expressions, and named variables, and no sane high-level language can be without those things. Representing them in any kind of machine language that can be run on real hardware absolutely requires an intermediate parsing stage. Even Lisp machines couldn't literally run Lisp code in hardware, they just had certain architectural features that made implementation of a Lisp system more efficient, and the trend now is toward simpler architectures and more aggressive optimizing compilers, resulting in a wider gap between the high-level and bytecode representations of a program. Modern attempts to build hardware executing high-level representations directly, like some of Sun's attempts at processors running the Java bytecode language directly, have not had competitive performance.
Wow...they even brought back the same logo. Brings a tear to the eye. Not that I have entirely fond memories of Diamond products...the Stealth II was nice, but I was always annoyed at the complete lack of support for the original proprietary Monster Sound cards (never even wrote a driver for Windows NT/2K/XP, much less released specs to the linux community -- but I wouldn't have cared at all if it didn't have pretty decent analog output quality, and more power than almost any other PCI card I've used). But the circumstances of their demise left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. The story involves S3 to a large extent, although like Diamond, S3 then was not S3 now.
Diamond was one of the more prominent aftermarket expansion card marketer of the nineties. They were very successful selling mostly video cards, based first on S3's chipsets, which were very competitive until 3D acceleration became popular, and later nvidia and 3dfx. They branched out into a wide array of products, including SCSI controllers, motherboards (after acquiring Micronics), modems (after acquiring Supra), and audio cards. They invented the portable MP3 player, with the original Rio, and developed some of the first telephone-line and power-line home networking products. But, largely because of acquisition and competition, they were constantly losing money.
S3 was probably in a much worse bind. They were also losing money, but had none of the innovation that characterized Diamond's last years. They had been surpassed by new competition in graphics chipsets, and had no real other business. But through a lucky investment in TMSC fabrication plant, they had some cash on hand, and decided to buy out Diamond. At the time everyone assumed they were going to follow 3dfx's lead and produce sell graphics cards based on their own chipsets directly. But the truth is, they were looking for an exit both from Diamond's core computer component business, and their own graphics chipset line. After the rushed-to-market, broken, Savage 2000 was a market failure, they abandoned expansion cards entirely, throwing away the legacy of two PC hardware pioneers in favor of the Rio MP3 players, and another technology they had acquired, ReplayTV's personal video recorders. At the same time, the graphics chipset operation was spun off as a joint venture with VIA. This is what is now known as S3. The rest of the company was renamed SonicBlue. Completing the trajectory set by S3 management since the days of the Virge, they went bankrupt recently, and the Rio and ReplayTV units changed hands yet again, hopefully to more competent management. Best Data apparently picked up the old Diamond brand at the same time.
As to this new graphics chipset...I wouldn't take it seriously unless it is proven to perform decently (well, actually I wouldn't take it seriously unless it also had Linux support on par with the old Matrox card I use now, but I digress...). As far as I can see VIA is just looking for some paying beta testers to work out the bugs in the core before they embed it in their next-generation southbridge chips, so don't look for a renewed commitment to serious graphics hardware from "S3".
Upgrade to unstable, 'apt-get install module-init-tools', and you are ready to run 2.6. You can either compile it from source (use the instructions linked in the other reply and this will take very little thought), or if you don't want to compile anything, wait around for a binary image to show up on apt (there is a -test9 image right now, so 2.6.0 should be added eventually), and install that.
Since SCO is already deep in grey legal territory, it's a small step to just toss *all* and *any* code IBM will release in Discovery to a safe Russian, or Chinese FTP site, and have it aired out like laundry IBM refuses to show any code whatsoever because the IBM code is extremely valuable.
The problem with this is that unlike System V itself (for a while you could download the entire Solaris source tree under conditions similar to the Java source license, ie restrictive but by no means a full NDA), IBM's Unix source code is very tightly held, even within IBM itself. If it became widely available on pirate sites within a few weeks of IBM turning it over to SCO's lawyers, there would be little doubt as to where it came from, and it would not bode well for SCO, although admittedly they could try to blame it on IBM and argue that it shows further proof of IBM's lack of respect for their contracts.
The answers to none of those questions would be terribly interesting. It is reasonably clear that all of their contributions to open-source in the pre-Darl era were done in good faith, consistent with their policy in that time of supporting Linux and open-source. Even their "controversial" move of selling per-seat licenses to their distribution has been now taken up by Red Hat and other commercial Linux distributors.
1. Tell us about how much work Caldera did on the Linux kernel. What did Caldera contribute?
Its a matter of public record. Quite a bit. Search the list archives if you like or grep the source.
2. How was LKP written with no GPL code at all? Must have been difficult to do so quickly.
Most Unixes are pretty similar. There are some interesting articles out there about implementing Irix binary support for NetBSD. Obviously they didn't use have access to one bit of actual proprietary Irix code, and it doesn't sound like it was a epoch multi-year undertaking. For that matter all of the free BSD derivatives have had Linux emulation for some time. It isn't suprising they were able to hack this up rather quickly, especially since they could have used the BSD code in their proprietary kernel perfectly lawfully.
3. Tell us about your thoughts when you released the "the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license." Did you think that code would make it into other operating systems?
The license says it can. Why would they give rights to do something they didn't want people to actually do? It is clear they didn't consider it valuable intellecutal property at that time.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape 7 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant firing of all 50 Netscape developers by AOL only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mozilla.org leader Mitchell Baker states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Firebird are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Firebird posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Firebird users. Camino posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Firebird posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Camino. A recent article put Netscape 7 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 7 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 7 usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
There's no native GTK or Qt port either. It hasn't been rewritten in Java yet, or ported to the Mozilla framework. I even have my doubts about how "native" the win32 version is. The point is, its a huge and ponderously monolithic piece of software. It was built using its own UI system and never designed to render widgets using anything else, and some of the controls it uses I doubt have equivalents in most other toolkits. Sun can't even make a version of StarOffice that looks consistent with their own "Java desktop" Linux distribution. Now apparently someone is working on an Aqua, but you can't seriously expect Sun, whatever you think of them, to fund the port themselves, and you should appreciate the technical obstacles the people who are porting it face when considering how long it is taking.
I bought a bunch of these a couple years ago, and they are now almost all used up. They are truly great. I found a "Sanford Uniball Micro" on the floor somewhere, and it is almost as good...but it would really be a shame if I couldn't find any more of those VBalls...
I was in the exact same situation, actually, and found spamarchive.org to be very helpful. Any one of the files on their ftp site should have enough spam to keep you busy for a while.
For supposedly a state-of-the-art motherboard design (all 3 BTX reference boards), why did Intel wuss out and keep legacy ports on these mobos?
Just because they define a place for them in the standards does not mean a board is required to have them. They also define locations for sound, ethernet, and VGA ports, which certainly every board doesn't have. Contrarily, you can get legacy free ATX boards now if you really want them, and I'm sure this will be no different. But putting the ports in the spec allows them to meet the needs of all users, and for Intel's part it takes away a possible reason for some manufacturers to use ATX instead (as otherwise, anyone making a board with legacy ports would have to either use ATX or take up expansion slots with ugly brackets).
The advantages of moving the CPU to the front of the case, defining thermal zones, and so on, are clear, but overall this does look to me more like just another excuse to obsolete the cases already in use and add another marketing buzzword for manufacturers.
The most serious change to BTX versus ATX is switching the side of the expansion slots. What possible advantage could this have, aside from making it incompatible with existing ATX cases? In the reference examples they show, it just means that everything is moved to the opposite side of the case. As for the specially defined locations for the CPU and motherboard north and southbridges, they are pretty similar to a lot of boards already on the market (just reversed of course), and as the sizes of components change few BTX boards in the future will follow these specs exactly anyway. And the rest of the "advantages" (riser cards for horizontally-mounted video adapters, a sub-micro form factor, air ducts to chassis fans) already exist in practice with ATX anyway.
In the mean time, I hope I'll still be able to get new-generation ATX mainboards for the next couple years, because I see nothing in this new format worth buying a new chassis over.
Re:SCO is still benefiting from open source
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Back To SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it possible for many of these open source projects to modify their licenses such that they specifically exclude SCO distributing them?
Yes, it is possible, but:
* It would make the license GPL-incompatible, at the very least
* For a large project, every single developer would have to consent to the relicensing of their contribution.
* It could not apply retroactively to older versions.
More feasible, IMHO, is dropping support for SCO's platforms. They don't appear to really have enough developers to reverse the changes if they are deep enough. But even this isn't a perfect idea, since after all it punishes users of SCO, rather than SCO themselves, and could hurt the public perception of the "open source community".
I have a nice expensive (for the time) STB Video card that they abandoned awhile back. It uses the S3Trio64 chip. Most of the early S3 video cards are now abandoned by XFree86.
Not true! As of 4.3.0 the Trio chipsets ARE supported. Yes, it did take a while for the driver to be ported to the new infrastructure, but it isn't abandoned. The DAC limitations listed don't apply to the Trio since they all have integrated DACs. Only the very old cards (of which I admit to having one, a VLB 805 card) are still unsupported.
More to the point, you can install 3.3.6 on any modern Linux system in order to get support for this very old hardware, and you lose little except support for some newer extensions that would be good for little on ancient hardware anyway.
Interestingly enough Pentium M MHz per MHz is faster than the Pentium 4.
Not that interesting. The regular P3, which the Pentium-M is based on, was also faster, clock for clock. The Athlon certainly is. But the very things that cause this (a really long pipeline and some other stuff I've forgotten) are what allow it to scale to the high clock speeds it can. For a while after the P4 came out it was widely thought to be a failure because of those trade-offs, but then they ramped it up to faster clock speeds and more software came out taking advantage of SSE2.
I used to get uptight about static and proper storage. I actually lost a hard drive to static about 10 years ago, giving me reason to be paranoid. But really, given how hardware depreciates in value, you shouldn't worry about anything you're not actually using.
I have a shoebox filled with old ISA cards. No static wrap or other packaging, I just threw the cards in there. Every one of them that I have actually tried to use still works. Same with hard drives I have just stacked bare on shelves. And some CPUs I've been using to decorate the top of my (metal!) computer case, they still work too. This danger of breaking your stuff is not nonexistent, but in practical terms its overrated. There are so many other things to worry about, I just don't care so much about this junk. If it was damaged somehow by improper storage, I'd just have to get rid of it, which actually is what I should do with most of the parts I have anyway.
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The book the original poster refers to is painstakingly researched and basically correct. Not only did IBM supply machines to the Nazis, profit from it, and do everything they could to keep the German subsidiary (and its profits) under control, but Watson himself was quite an admirer of Hitler and praised him endlessly during the thirties. Not that he was unique in this regard among American businessman, but it is something that must be considered when the man is being venerated as some kind of computing icon.
Microsoft doesn't care about piracy in Thailand or elsewhere, in fact it works largely to their benefit. If people who wouldn't be able to afford their software anyway are pirating it illegally, Microsoft doesn't lose any money, but they gain users and market share.
The point of this effort isn't to stop piracy, and Microsoft knows it won't. The problem is that the Thai government is setting up a program for the development of a very cheap computer, and they want to distribute a legitimate operating system with it. Since they weren't going to pay Microsoft's asking price, there was the potential of a very large number of computers being distributed without a Microsoft operating system. And even assuming most of the buyers replace the preinstalled OS (Linux, whatever) with a pirated copy of Windows, it still would have the potential of creating a substantial, new base of computer users not running Windows. This plan heads off that possibility. Whether they replace it with a pirated full version of XP or not, anyone who buys this thing is going to be using Windows, and that is what matters to Microsoft.
According to legend, towards the end of his life von Neumann was having graduate students hand-assemble programs he had written into machine code. They decided to write an assembler to do the work automatically, and he was apparently quite unhappy about it, not seeing any reason for a higher level of abstraction than machine language and viewing the diversion of time to write an assembler to be a waste. So he might not exactly approve...
But learning assembly != learning architecture, and with the x86 it is probably counter-productive since you have to explain afterwards what the processor really does behind your back when you use memory operands, string instructions, etc... Understanding the architecture is important, but assembly language in and of itself is not that important, and x86 is an especially bad choice.
What will actually happen is the vast majority of buyers will install pirated copies of Windows. In fact, Dell probably assumes that will happen, because there aren't that many people who want to run Linux on cheap desktops, who would actually buy prebuilt machines, but there are many more who would love to save money on software they can easily download or "borrow" for free.
Like AC97, this is a generic interface for a codec. It doesn't only apply to onboard sound. In fact most consumer sound cards use AC97 codecs, and their sample rate restrictions (requiring everything to be resampled to 16bit/48khz) are a big limitation of most of them. So this will improve the quality of almost anything outside of professional cards and external USB devices.
As for the issue of internal noise, it is really orthogonal to the codec interface specification. You can find cards now, including onboard sound, that are very quiet, using AC97 codecs. It depends on the quality of the codec as well as the motherboard manufacturer (Crystal codecs are very nice, Realtek/Avance Logic codecs are not, they are both AC97 though). This new standard will be no different, it will still depend on the manufacturer. If you really are concerned about noise, you should look into a USB device, although as I'm finding out Linux support for them isn't that great right now.
In America, if I wanted to walk around in front of a catholic church with a blood-drenched picture of the pope, accusing him of horrible crimes, I could do it (not that I would, but you get the idea). In Saudi Arabia, that could get you beheaded.
Actually I think the Saudi government downright encourages criticism of the Catholic church...
(yes, I know what you were really trying to say)
Everything AFTER the stage1 bootloader is either my code (BSP) or CE itself. I submit my code to the world under the GPL. As far as CE itself, here is what Microsoft has to say on the subject...
I don't know enough about this to know how exactly the added code and CE interact, but if the added code includes modifications to CE itself (or dynamic linking, beyond basic use of CE through published APIs a la linux kernel modules), this might not be legal. The MS Shared Source license does allow redistribution of modified source and binaries (and in fact it actually goes beyond the GPL in one way, in that the source does not necessarily have to be included), but as it explicitly forbids commercial redistribution without commercial licensing from Microsoft, it isn't GPL-compatible (its patent clauses might also be, but I'm less sure about that). Unless they're sure there is no contamination, they should either put the code under a non-viral license like the BSD, or grit their teeth and use the MS license if they want something more restrictive and viral (those are the effective terms for redistributing the whole thing anyway). Otherwise there might be a totally unnecessary KDE-type situation due to use of the GPL.
Don't worry, this should have precisely zero advantages over Safari, since Safari IS a Mac port of the very same KHTML engine used by Konqueror, plus some enhancements by Apple. This just takes those enhancements, and the native UI, back away. But it does mean the rest of KDE should be portable also, which I suppose is the real point. Although off-hand I can't think of a single KDE application which really demands to be installed (Scribus, the open-source DTP app, is pure QT and probably runs on OS X already), and I only use KDE on Linux for the desktop and file manager (which would both be totally redundant on OS X).
a language that feels like medium-to-high level (like, say ANSI C) but is in fact assembly - for certain new CPU.
This is kind of nonsense. It cannot really be "assembly" (at least in the normal sense in which assembly is defined, where there is a 1-1 or close to 1-1 correspondence between instructions in the language and machine instructions) if it supports things like procedures, nested complex arithmetic expressions, and named variables, and no sane high-level language can be without those things. Representing them in any kind of machine language that can be run on real hardware absolutely requires an intermediate parsing stage. Even Lisp machines couldn't literally run Lisp code in hardware, they just had certain architectural features that made implementation of a Lisp system more efficient, and the trend now is toward simpler architectures and more aggressive optimizing compilers, resulting in a wider gap between the high-level and bytecode representations of a program. Modern attempts to build hardware executing high-level representations directly, like some of Sun's attempts at processors running the Java bytecode language directly, have not had competitive performance.
Wow...they even brought back the same logo. Brings a tear to the eye. Not that I have entirely fond memories of Diamond products...the Stealth II was nice, but I was always annoyed at the complete lack of support for the original proprietary Monster Sound cards (never even wrote a driver for Windows NT/2K/XP, much less released specs to the linux community -- but I wouldn't have cared at all if it didn't have pretty decent analog output quality, and more power than almost any other PCI card I've used). But the circumstances of their demise left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. The story involves S3 to a large extent, although like Diamond, S3 then was not S3 now.
Diamond was one of the more prominent aftermarket expansion card marketer of the nineties. They were very successful selling mostly video cards, based first on S3's chipsets, which were very competitive until 3D acceleration became popular, and later nvidia and 3dfx. They branched out into a wide array of products, including SCSI controllers, motherboards (after acquiring Micronics), modems (after acquiring Supra), and audio cards. They invented the portable MP3 player, with the original Rio, and developed some of the first telephone-line and power-line home networking products. But, largely because of acquisition and competition, they were constantly losing money.
S3 was probably in a much worse bind. They were also losing money, but had none of the innovation that characterized Diamond's last years. They had been surpassed by new competition in graphics chipsets, and had no real other business. But through a lucky investment in TMSC fabrication plant, they had some cash on hand, and decided to buy out Diamond. At the time everyone assumed they were going to follow 3dfx's lead and produce sell graphics cards based on their own chipsets directly. But the truth is, they were looking for an exit both from Diamond's core computer component business, and their own graphics chipset line. After the rushed-to-market, broken, Savage 2000 was a market failure, they abandoned expansion cards entirely, throwing away the legacy of two PC hardware pioneers in favor of the Rio MP3 players, and another technology they had acquired, ReplayTV's personal video recorders. At the same time, the graphics chipset operation was spun off as a joint venture with VIA. This is what is now known as S3. The rest of the company was renamed SonicBlue. Completing the trajectory set by S3 management since the days of the Virge, they went bankrupt recently, and the Rio and ReplayTV units changed hands yet again, hopefully to more competent management. Best Data apparently picked up the old Diamond brand at the same time.
As to this new graphics chipset...I wouldn't take it seriously unless it is proven to perform decently (well, actually I wouldn't take it seriously unless it also had Linux support on par with the old Matrox card I use now, but I digress...). As far as I can see VIA is just looking for some paying beta testers to work out the bugs in the core before they embed it in their next-generation southbridge chips, so don't look for a renewed commitment to serious graphics hardware from "S3".
Upgrade to unstable, 'apt-get install module-init-tools', and you are ready to run 2.6. You can either compile it from source (use the instructions linked in the other reply and this will take very little thought), or if you don't want to compile anything, wait around for a binary image to show up on apt (there is a -test9 image right now, so 2.6.0 should be added eventually), and install that.
They don't give out Nobel prizes for "Most Novel New Method to Kill People"
You do know how Alfred Nobel made his fortune, right?
Since SCO is already deep in grey legal territory, it's a small step to just toss *all* and *any* code IBM will release in Discovery to a safe Russian, or Chinese FTP site, and have it aired out like laundry IBM refuses to show any code whatsoever because the IBM code is extremely valuable.
The problem with this is that unlike System V itself (for a while you could download the entire Solaris source tree under conditions similar to the Java source license, ie restrictive but by no means a full NDA), IBM's Unix source code is very tightly held, even within IBM itself. If it became widely available on pirate sites within a few weeks of IBM turning it over to SCO's lawyers, there would be little doubt as to where it came from, and it would not bode well for SCO, although admittedly they could try to blame it on IBM and argue that it shows further proof of IBM's lack of respect for their contracts.
The answers to none of those questions would be terribly interesting. It is reasonably clear that all of their contributions to open-source in the pre-Darl era were done in good faith, consistent with their policy in that time of supporting Linux and open-source. Even their "controversial" move of selling per-seat licenses to their distribution has been now taken up by Red Hat and other commercial Linux distributors.
1. Tell us about how much work Caldera did on the Linux kernel. What did Caldera contribute?
Its a matter of public record. Quite a bit. Search the list archives if you like or grep the source.
2. How was LKP written with no GPL code at all? Must have been difficult to do so quickly.
Most Unixes are pretty similar. There are some interesting articles out there about implementing Irix binary support for NetBSD. Obviously they didn't use have access to one bit of actual proprietary Irix code, and it doesn't sound like it was a epoch multi-year undertaking. For that matter all of the free BSD derivatives have had Linux emulation for some time. It isn't suprising they were able to hack this up rather quickly, especially since they could have used the BSD code in their proprietary kernel perfectly lawfully.
3. Tell us about your thoughts when you released the "the ancient UNIX releases (V1-7 and 32V) under a "BSD-style" license." Did you think that code would make it into other operating systems?
The license says it can. Why would they give rights to do something they didn't want people to actually do? It is clear they didn't consider it valuable intellecutal property at that time.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape 7 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant firing of all 50 Netscape developers by AOL only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mozilla.org leader Mitchell Baker states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Firebird are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Firebird posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Firebird users. Camino posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Firebird posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Camino. A recent article put Netscape 7 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 7 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 7 usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
There's no native GTK or Qt port either. It hasn't been rewritten in Java yet, or ported to the Mozilla framework. I even have my doubts about how "native" the win32 version is. The point is, its a huge and ponderously monolithic piece of software. It was built using its own UI system and never designed to render widgets using anything else, and some of the controls it uses I doubt have equivalents in most other toolkits. Sun can't even make a version of StarOffice that looks consistent with their own "Java desktop" Linux distribution. Now apparently someone is working on an Aqua, but you can't seriously expect Sun, whatever you think of them, to fund the port themselves, and you should appreciate the technical obstacles the people who are porting it face when considering how long it is taking.
Noooo...
I bought a bunch of these a couple years ago, and they are now almost all used up. They are truly great. I found a "Sanford Uniball Micro" on the floor somewhere, and it is almost as good...but it would really be a shame if I couldn't find any more of those VBalls...
I was in the exact same situation, actually, and found spamarchive.org to be very helpful. Any one of the files on their ftp site should have enough spam to keep you busy for a while.
For supposedly a state-of-the-art motherboard design (all 3 BTX reference boards), why did Intel wuss out and keep legacy ports on these mobos?
Just because they define a place for them in the standards does not mean a board is required to have them. They also define locations for sound, ethernet, and VGA ports, which certainly every board doesn't have. Contrarily, you can get legacy free ATX boards now if you really want them, and I'm sure this will be no different. But putting the ports in the spec allows them to meet the needs of all users, and for Intel's part it takes away a possible reason for some manufacturers to use ATX instead (as otherwise, anyone making a board with legacy ports would have to either use ATX or take up expansion slots with ugly brackets).
The advantages of moving the CPU to the front of the case, defining thermal zones, and so on, are clear, but overall this does look to me more like just another excuse to obsolete the cases already in use and add another marketing buzzword for manufacturers.
The most serious change to BTX versus ATX is switching the side of the expansion slots. What possible advantage could this have, aside from making it incompatible with existing ATX cases? In the reference examples they show, it just means that everything is moved to the opposite side of the case. As for the specially defined locations for the CPU and motherboard north and southbridges, they are pretty similar to a lot of boards already on the market (just reversed of course), and as the sizes of components change few BTX boards in the future will follow these specs exactly anyway. And the rest of the "advantages" (riser cards for horizontally-mounted video adapters, a sub-micro form factor, air ducts to chassis fans) already exist in practice with ATX anyway.
In the mean time, I hope I'll still be able to get new-generation ATX mainboards for the next couple years, because I see nothing in this new format worth buying a new chassis over.
Based on changelogs here, here and here , plus your dates, I've dug up all the release dates from 1.1.1 to 9.0 (and 7.1 is just off of their web site)
1.1.1 1993-10-12
1.1.2 1994-02-05
1.2 1994-03-19
1.2.0.2 1994-04-15
1.2.0.3 1994-04-21
2.0.0 1994-07-01
2.0.1 1994-09-18
2.0.2 1994-10-18
2.1 1994-10-31
2.2 1995-03-21
2.3 1995-05-10
3.0 1995-08-24
3.1 1996-07-03
3.2 1997-02-17 (the first distro I ever used)
3.3 1997-07-11
3.4 1997-10-14
3.5 1998-06-09
3.6 1998-10-28
3.9 1999-03-10
4.0 1999-03-17
7.0 1999-11-02
7.1 2000-06-22
8.0 2001-07-01
8.1 2002-06-18
9.0 2003-03-19
Is it possible for many of these open source projects to modify their licenses such that they specifically exclude SCO distributing them?
Yes, it is possible, but:
* It would make the license GPL-incompatible, at the very least
* For a large project, every single developer would have to consent to the relicensing of their contribution.
* It could not apply retroactively to older versions.
More feasible, IMHO, is dropping support for SCO's platforms. They don't appear to really have enough developers to reverse the changes if they are deep enough. But even this isn't a perfect idea, since after all it punishes users of SCO, rather than SCO themselves, and could hurt the public perception of the "open source community".
I have a nice expensive (for the time) STB Video card that they abandoned awhile back. It uses the S3Trio64 chip. Most of the early S3 video cards are now abandoned by XFree86.
Not true! As of 4.3.0 the Trio chipsets ARE supported. Yes, it did take a while for the driver to be ported to the new infrastructure, but it isn't abandoned. The DAC limitations listed don't apply to the Trio since they all have integrated DACs. Only the very old cards (of which I admit to having one, a VLB 805 card) are still unsupported.
More to the point, you can install 3.3.6 on any modern Linux system in order to get support for this very old hardware, and you lose little except support for some newer extensions that would be good for little on ancient hardware anyway.
Interestingly enough Pentium M MHz per MHz is faster than the Pentium 4.
Not that interesting. The regular P3, which the Pentium-M is based on, was also faster, clock for clock. The Athlon certainly is. But the very things that cause this (a really long pipeline and some other stuff I've forgotten) are what allow it to scale to the high clock speeds it can. For a while after the P4 came out it was widely thought to be a failure because of those trade-offs, but then they ramped it up to faster clock speeds and more software came out taking advantage of SSE2.
I used to get uptight about static and proper storage. I actually lost a hard drive to static about 10 years ago, giving me reason to be paranoid. But really, given how hardware depreciates in value, you shouldn't worry about anything you're not actually using.
I have a shoebox filled with old ISA cards. No static wrap or other packaging, I just threw the cards in there. Every one of them that I have actually tried to use still works. Same with hard drives I have just stacked bare on shelves. And some CPUs I've been using to decorate the top of my (metal!) computer case, they still work too. This danger of breaking your stuff is not nonexistent, but in practical terms its overrated. There are so many other things to worry about, I just don't care so much about this junk. If it was damaged somehow by improper storage, I'd just have to get rid of it, which actually is what I should do with most of the parts I have anyway.