Very simple. Apache is licensed under a non-copyleft license that allows proprietary forks (in fact, it requires them to be distributed under a name other than Apache unless they give permission to use their name, so Oracle was required to rename it). RedHat probably will base this off of GCJ (unless Sun frees large parts of the official JDK), since they (in the form of Cygnus) basically wrote it anyway, and that means it will be under the GPL. So Oracle can turn it into an "Oracle product" but, it will still be required to be free software.
This is hardly surprising. Sun is probably the one company that has lost the most from Linux other than SCO itself, and their own Linux strategy has seemed kind of floundering and directionless. I wonder if prior knowledge of SCO's plans (SCO claims to have begun their negotiations with Unix vendors late last year) had anything to do with the ressurection of Solaris x86 recently?
Re:We must act now....
on
Latest SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is theoretically possible that one particular developer saw the copyright notice on a 25 years old piece of UNIX code so he might think that copyright expired. I do agree there is just a small chance, but it is possible.
If it was referring to 25-year old code this would actually be completely legal. First, the 32V version of Unix, AT&T's first 32-bit port and the basis for all of the BSDs, was found to be public domain in the course of the AT&T/Berkeley lawsuit.
Second, Caldera, after buying the original SCO, actually released all of the historical Unix sources up through Version 7 and 32V under a very permissive BSD-like license (the pre-Caldera SCO had made them publicly available previously under a more restrictive, but still free of cost, license).
In other words, if it is 32V, they have no recourse at all, and if it is something earlier than that which doesn't occur in 32V, the issue is at most a missing copyright notice (the Caldera license does have the advertising clause).
They are claiming that something was copied from System V (not any of SCO's unique derivatives of it, which IBM or someone else would not have access to) which presumably has not been legally released as free software, either as part of the permitted 4.4BSD-Lite release or the historical Unix versions. System V is new enough (IIRC) that even if you assumed the only obstacle to copying it was patents, they still would not have expired yet.
I agree that there should be strong safeguards against non-free code entering into an important project like the Linux kernel. But this is almost impossible to check, because you can only compare the copied code with the original if you have the rights to view the original, which because it is proprietary no one but the copyright owner does.
Yet if you step back, you realize that in a free country, there is no way a project of this sort could go ahead, unless it was such an immense and overwhelmingly positive step, a necessity -- and even then I have doubts that you could arrange for the relocation of 1 to 3 million people, even with bribes of nicer houses on less fertile land.
This is complete nonsense, unless you define "free country" to means something which does not actually exist right now in the real world. There are large dams in every "first-world" country with a representative government, and when they were built they were certainly portrayed as "immense and overwhelmingly positive" steps to develop backward regions, regardless of whether that was actually the case. People were displaced in the construction of all of them. In the part of the US I am from (the pacific northwest), there are Native American tribes whose entire traditional way of life was destroyed by the damming of the large rivers, and the subsequent flooding of land and decline of salmon stocks.
Sure, there aren't any dams anywhere in the US or other developed countries that approach the scale of this Chinese project, but then most of them were built before the 1950s when the technological level was (worldwide) not as high. There are no major dams under construction in the US now because almost every "river" of significant length has been dammed along its entire length already, not because it is a "free" country whereas China isn't. Look at the history of the large-scale engineering projects anywhere that play a big role in any modern society, whether you are talking about roads, railways, canals, dams, and so on, and there are people who have been displaced and whose lives were degraded against their will as a result. There are legitimate criticisms of these things, and many people in China are criticising thie project. But for those of us who live in developed countries and benefit from similar projects, to use China or other developing nations' attempts to do the same thing as proof that they are "unfree" (and China certainly isn't a free country) is pure hypocrisy.
It is actually going to be part of the Experience Music Project, according to the article, which is already in Seattle, so thats why. He owns everything else here anyway...bought himself an election to have the taxpayers pay for his football stadium, and now the city is going to build a streetcar to connect to an office complex he is developing.
I would agree that maybe the parent post blows the significance of this out of proportion to some extent...but right now, TerraSoft DOES actually resell Apple hardware, dual-booting MacOS and Linux.
I can't imagine they sell enough macs for Apple to be worried about losing that market to generic systems, but then Apple is notoriously petty about these things (see zealous legal action against dubious trademark conflicts, market rumours, etc.), so its not out of the question. If these systems were being sold with the implicit purpose of running Mac-on-linux (unlike the PPC brick servers TerraSoft sells now, which don't have any built-in graphics capabilities) Apple might want to quash it just to avoid a precedent being sent, especially if there is a possibility of more capable OEM PPC boards coming along in the future (eg. with the IBM 970 chip). But I think some of the problems with the Articia chipset that others have mentioned., coupled with the high price, probably had more to do with it.
Look, Winmodems aren't unique, and considering the power of modern CPUs, they are a very good thing in abstract. If there was an open-source software modem core along with linux support for all of the common soft-modem codecs, I can't see any reason to keep a modem around.
The interface to most modems is a holdover to a time when they were typically hooked up to dumb terminals (hence the onboard command interpreter), and the signal processing required could not be done at any cost except with dedicated hardware. The first case has not been relevant for 15 years or so, and controllerless modems have been around for nearly that long, although they have been saddled with quirky (and proprietary) serial-port emulation and AT command interpreter software in order to act like normal modems. Nonetheless, if you think you see a performance difference between a full "hardware" modem and a controllerless Lucent modem, it really is your imagination, because both have equivalent onboard DSPs.
The second argument ceased to be relevant when CPU speeds were probably 1/10 of what most are now, and that is why full software modems are so prevalent now. Maybe you whine about this, but think about all the things a typical modern sound card does mostly in software (stream mixing, wavetable synthesis, etc.) that any card from 5 or 6 years ago probably would have had hardware support for. Think about how many printers these days DON'T have embedded fonts, PostScript/PCL interpreters, and so on. Think about the complete disappearance of hardware DVD playback cards (and only a small fraction of what these cards did has been absorbed into graphics accelerators). The modern general purpose microprocessor is perfectly adequate for all of these tasks, and it is wasteful and redudant to require special-purpose ASICs to do each of these things, and using a software core allows for much greater flexibility (for instance, you can "upgrade" most 33.6k software modems to support 56k with a simple driver update. Only a few very expensive hardware modems offered any kind of upgradeability, and even then it required reflashing the firmware).
Eh? I'm using 1.2.8 with Mozilla 1.2.1 right now. It will compile against Mozilla versions back to 1.0 as far as I know. Only the gnome2 version (galeon 1.3) needs the 1.3 branch.
Ok, it (galeon) crashes when I try to open the preferences window, but that only happens when Mozilla is compiled with Xft support, normally-configured 1.2.1 works flawlessly.
Does it mean that I'll be able to use antialiased fonts in emacs?
No, it just means you can get antialiased fonts in KDE or Mozilla or other programs using Xft, on a video card that doesn't have RENDER support or a X11 Server other than XFree86.
To get antialiased fonts in emacs or anything else you still need application level support, probably meaning drawing the GUI using a toolkit that supports Xft (Qt 2.x, Qt 3.x, or GTK 2.x right now).
There is a Tru64 "hobbiest license" that costs about 100 bucks or so. I thought this was always the case. OpenVMS can still be had for free however. Solaris/SPARC is free for non-commercial use, so was the Intel version (through 8.0) when it was available, which it no longer is. Now that it has been ressurected you have to pay $20 for media, no free downloads. Some time in the SCO-Caldera-SCO transition free licensing for OpenServer/Unixware was dropped, they sell media for $100 now and its unclear whether you have to pay for a license on top of that for single-user use.
Power4 runs AIX and OS/400 (and if it doesn't run Linux now, it should very soon). At one point a combination of AIX and SCO Unix called "Project Monterey" would have been available for IBM's Itanium systems, but it was scuttled in favor of linux.
HP-UX has already been ported and is shipping on HP Itanium machines right now (and you probably saw that post yesterday about OpenVMS also being on the way). SGI seems to be leaning more toward linux, they were going to port Irix at one point but I don't know whether it is available yet. SGI's page on their Altix Itanium systems does not mention any OS other than Linux.
This will be damned good. I'll be able to hobble together a system and put a stable OS on it.
Don't bet on it. I would be surprised if this port actually works, much less is officially supported, on anything other than HP systems with special firmware. Now maybe HP could, given some vision, turn VMS into a seriously competitive OS for commodity IA-64 hardware (especially if the free hobbyist license was still available). But current management seems to show little interest in their own original technology, not just DEC/Compaq stuff like VMS and the Alpha, but the PA-RISC architecture, the HP 3000 series (a midrange platform even older than VMS), and the famous test equipment division which was spun off. They see more profit in selling printers and functioning as an OEM for Microsoft and Intel. VMS is being kept around because, for a while longer at least, they will still be able to sell enough systems at inflated prices to locked-in VMS customers to justify keeping it around. Once most of them have switched to IBM or Sun machines (or maybe even PCs running some future more robust iteration of Linux) it will probably go the way of MPE.
If they sold a version of VMS that would work on open hardware it would accelerate the erosion of the user base for their hardware, and since the idea that the number of VMS users might actually increase as a result is probably completely incomprehensible to them, I doubt they would risk this.
Thank goodness that the Microsofts and the Rambuses in the world are protecting the freedom to innovate...we all know (smaller companies) are totally incapable of innovation.
This is funny, but there is a problem with the (implied) argument. Rambus is not a very large company as they come, in fact it is basically a small fabless company which is totally dependent for revenue on licensing its intellectual property. It is nowhere near as large as Infineon (formerly the semiconductor division of Siemens AG), not to speak of Microsoft. Second, Rambus actually has designed technology...RDRAM is basically an original technology, and much more of a departure from conventional memory architecture than DDR or any of its competitors. Whether it is a better technology right now, in practice, is another matter, and there are apparently major problems producing RDRAM modules at the moment. Furthermore, no one disputes that the SDRAM patents that were at issue in this case were valid, and concerned technologies that Rambus actually did develop themselves.
There are basically two things about Rambus that are reprehensible, though -- neither of them have anything to do with innovation. First, they didn't disclose their patents at the time they were on a committee that was designing the SDRAM technology (which they are now suing manufacturers of), and second, their current attempts to support themselves through royalties relating to this undisclosed patent. And the second, while disturbing, is not illegal.
Although some of Cringely's comments about the DOS basis of Windows are off-base with regards to modern NT-kernel based versions of windows (the C:\ prompt is there because it has a compatibility layer) the idea that most of what we think of as "Windows" could be ported to a Linux or Unix base is basically correct. Just imagine an officially-sanctioned WINE with its own GUI system and configuration tools...it is not that far from reality.
But the kernel is neither Windows' biggest problem, nor Linux's greatest asset. By all accounts, the Windows NT kernel is (or at least started out as) a very clean, modular microkernel system. It was built with a POSIX compatibility layer, and actually can host a traditional Unix userspace (and does, if you install the MS "Unix Services" package). On the other hand, Linux is a very straightforward, unexceptional reimplementation of a standard, monolithic Unix kernel, which has become very popular more or less because it works, it is free, and it was there when people needed it. Its novelty is that it allowed for the first complete Free Unix-like system (while *BSD was still in legal limbo). Microsoft could take that kernel, and modify it to run Windows, and neither they, nor we (Linux users), would gain anything...Microsoft would get an operating system more or less like what they have now, except with a pesky kernel under a free-software license, and we would get another version of Windows, which might, with the installation of an X11 server and a raft of libraries, be able to run Linux software, not that anyone would want to.
If Microsoft tries to "embrace and extend" Unix, they probably won't use Linux, or BSD for that matter. Unlike Apple several years ago, they already have a modern kernel. According to another recent Slashdot story, they are already trying to build a new shell environment based on the existing "Unix services" package, and probably running under the.NET framework. This strategy makes far more sense, both considering the existing strengths of Windows, and Microsoft's emnity toward open-source software.
I don't really use the telephone a whole lot. I've never seen a need for a mobile phone, and part of the argument against one went kind of like this: Well, if I'm stuck somewhere and I really need to get in touch with someone, I can always use a pay phone. And if its not important enough to spend 35 cents I really don't need to make the call anyway. I guess not eh? At some point in the future I might have to spend $(minimum cell phone cost) every month just to get the same service I would have formerly gotten from the once-ubiquitous (and free if I don't actually have to use them) public pay phones.
The same thing happened to rail transit in most American cities about 40-50 years ago as road systems improved and more people bought automobiles.
People have said this for decades, and the middle class has not disappeared. That's not to say it never will, but the record of these predictions is very, very poor.
Well, these things happen very slowly. If you look at the general trend over the past 20 years, there has been a collapse in the number of high-paying skilled manufacturing jobs, living standards and job security for many professionals are declining, and the fastest growing sector is "service" jobs like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. The growth of information technology and programming was maybe the only exception to this, but it is not looking so good now. There is still biotech which seems to be the hot thing now. However, I think the worst fears anyone expressed 'decades' ago have generally come to pass. But people expecting a rapid and devastating catastrophe will probably continue to be disappointed.
As others have alluded to, it is very cheap, and easy, to add most of the integrated features on most motherboards. And, assuming you are talking about full-size, high-end boards, whether you get the integrated parts or not, you lose almost nothing. The integrated video will be disabled if you put a video card in the AGP slot (and yes, most chipsets now support integrated video and an AGP expansion slot), you can put a real sound card in if you like (or you might find the integrated sound perfectly adequate). If you get something with onboard ethernet, think of it as a bonus -- you just saved yourself a PCI slot (because, unless you're running a high-volume server, there is little practical difference between the various commodity ethernet chipsets -- well, unless you need gigabit).
And this stuff is cheap, real cheap, to put on the board -- in the case of video, the only cost is the connector, the sound requires a ten-cent codec and the connectors, etc. You most likely won't save any money deliberately avoiding integrated hardware, and you could end up paying extra for the "privilege". So just get the board with the features you want and don't pay the slightest regard to the integrated hardware, it won't bother you if you don't want to use it.
Based on the image of the motherboard here this box looks to use a standard ATX-factor motherboard (aside from the "podule" bays and rear port arrangement, anyhow). Anybody know who makes the board, and if they are available separately? I don't think I would pay over 2000 bucks for a whole system, but since it uses pretty typical PC hardware, if the board were available for a reasonable price (even "reasonable" like the $500 for some of the open PPC boards) it would be a cool alternative to the x86 orthodoxy, even if its somewhat slow by modern standards (especially in light of the fact that it should be trivial to get NetBSD and probably Linux running on it).
Windows 98 and ME still boot off of DOS. In the case of 98 you can still boot it into pure DOS mode if you like, it is rather better hidden in ME but with some hacks it can also be done. So we have a couple of MS end-of-life dates to go before we can say its really dead.
But then there is FreeDOS, which looks to be alive and well, and being GPL'd free software, is unlikely to stop being so any time soon.
Isn't port location and Chassis compatibility part of the ATX standard????
Not really. On most (standard) chassises, the IO backplate is removable. You can pop it out and replace it, or not use one at all. There is a de-facto standard arrangement that is used by most boards (and the plate that comes with most cases is designed for), but many times when integrating different combinations of ports it is not only desirable, but necessary, to deviate, and the standard accomodates this. The one thing on that box that is kind of abnormal is that the backplate seems to be held on with screws, and might even (I've never been inside one of those things) be physically attached to the motherboard, like most NLX systems. They could have gone a step further and used a different screw arrangement also, to make mounting third-party mainboards impossible. I wouldn't put it past them.
(aside: its really a shame that NLX and other riser-card systems are largely dead now, with a riser you can build machines that small or smaller, with full-size, uninhibited expansion slots.)
Re:A suggestion for RH8 users.
on
Font HOWTO For Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
[CORRECTION]
XftConfig is usually in/etc/X11, not/etc
Re:A suggestion for RH8 users.
on
Font HOWTO For Linux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can specify in/etc/XftConfig whether or not to anti-alias fonts based on name, type, and size. So for instance you can disable antialiasing on fonts size 12 and below, fixed-width fonts, italic fonts, etc. if you like.
Everything that uses Xft to render anti-aliased fonts (and, except for a few programs with lame software freetype support, this is everything) will be affected by this.
But, I think its impact is being overblown, at the cost of ignoring features which have existed in Xfree86 (and X11 in general) for some time.
Of course, changing the display resolution itself has always been possible using control-alt-+/-, but without resizing the desktop.
Full screen games can run at any resolution and color depth supported by the hardware, and included in the XF86Config file, regardless of the desktop resolution, on almost any recent card, if the program itself supports the existing DGA extensions.
Real-time mode line (ie, refresh rate, dot clock, etc.) tweaking has always been possible with xvidtune and other utilities (the very nice PowerDesk tool with Matrox cards, for instance, which is GPL'd).
What this does is allow resizing (and less significantly, rotation, reflection, and other similar permutations) of the desktop itself without restarting the X11 server.
Moreover, this does not automatically mean that an easy to use Windows-style control applet will exist--this is a separate task, as it should be in the Unix tradition, but one which these extensions will make closer to possibility (notwithstanding, I can't see why some tool like this hasn't been developed already by one of the large commercial distributions using functionality already present--see the PowerDesk applet I mentioned above for an example of how this should work).
Slashdot Mirror
Very simple. Apache is licensed under a non-copyleft license that allows proprietary forks (in fact, it requires them to be distributed under a name other than Apache unless they give permission to use their name, so Oracle was required to rename it). RedHat probably will base this off of GCJ (unless Sun frees large parts of the official JDK), since they (in the form of Cygnus) basically wrote it anyway, and that means it will be under the GPL. So Oracle can turn it into an "Oracle product" but, it will still be required to be free software.
This is hardly surprising. Sun is probably the one company that has lost the most from Linux other than SCO itself, and their own Linux strategy has seemed kind of floundering and directionless. I wonder if prior knowledge of SCO's plans (SCO claims to have begun their negotiations with Unix vendors late last year) had anything to do with the ressurection of Solaris x86 recently?
It is theoretically possible that one particular developer saw the copyright notice on a 25 years old piece of UNIX code so he might think that copyright expired. I do agree there is just a small chance, but it is possible.
If it was referring to 25-year old code this would actually be completely legal. First, the 32V version of Unix, AT&T's first 32-bit port and the basis for all of the BSDs, was found to be public domain in the course of the AT&T/Berkeley lawsuit.
Second, Caldera, after buying the original SCO, actually released all of the historical Unix sources up through Version 7 and 32V under a very permissive BSD-like license (the pre-Caldera SCO had made them publicly available previously under a more restrictive, but still free of cost, license).
In other words, if it is 32V, they have no recourse at all, and if it is something earlier than that which doesn't occur in 32V, the issue is at most a missing copyright notice (the Caldera license does have the advertising clause).
They are claiming that something was copied from System V (not any of SCO's unique derivatives of it, which IBM or someone else would not have access to) which presumably has not been legally released as free software, either as part of the permitted 4.4BSD-Lite release or the historical Unix versions. System V is new enough (IIRC) that even if you assumed the only obstacle to copying it was patents, they still would not have expired yet.
I agree that there should be strong safeguards against non-free code entering into an important project like the Linux kernel. But this is almost impossible to check, because you can only compare the copied code with the original if you have the rights to view the original, which because it is proprietary no one but the copyright owner does.
Yet if you step back, you realize that in a free country, there is no way a project of this sort could go ahead, unless it was such an immense and overwhelmingly positive step, a necessity -- and even then I have doubts that you could arrange for the relocation of 1 to 3 million people, even with bribes of nicer houses on less fertile land.
This is complete nonsense, unless you define "free country" to means something which does not actually exist right now in the real world. There are large dams in every "first-world" country with a representative government, and when they were built they were certainly portrayed as "immense and overwhelmingly positive" steps to develop backward regions, regardless of whether that was actually the case. People were displaced in the construction of all of them. In the part of the US I am from (the pacific northwest), there are Native American tribes whose entire traditional way of life was destroyed by the damming of the large rivers, and the subsequent flooding of land and decline of salmon stocks.
Sure, there aren't any dams anywhere in the US or other developed countries that approach the scale of this Chinese project, but then most of them were built before the 1950s when the technological level was (worldwide) not as high. There are no major dams under construction in the US now because almost every "river" of significant length has been dammed along its entire length already, not because it is a "free" country whereas China isn't. Look at the history of the large-scale engineering projects anywhere that play a big role in any modern society, whether you are talking about roads, railways, canals, dams, and so on, and there are people who have been displaced and whose lives were degraded against their will as a result. There are legitimate criticisms of these things, and many people in China are criticising thie project. But for those of us who live in developed countries and benefit from similar projects, to use China or other developing nations' attempts to do the same thing as proof that they are "unfree" (and China certainly isn't a free country) is pure hypocrisy.
It is actually going to be part of the Experience Music Project, according to the article, which is already in Seattle, so thats why. He owns everything else here anyway...bought himself an election to have the taxpayers pay for his football stadium, and now the city is going to build a streetcar to connect to an office complex he is developing.
In other developments TOHO copyright holders of Godzilla are considering their stance in all the flurry.
You know, this actually almost happened. Doesn't sound like it is going anywhere, though.
I would agree that maybe the parent post blows the significance of this out of proportion to some extent...but right now, TerraSoft DOES actually resell Apple hardware, dual-booting MacOS and Linux.
I can't imagine they sell enough macs for Apple to be worried about losing that market to generic systems, but then Apple is notoriously petty about these things (see zealous legal action against dubious trademark conflicts, market rumours, etc.), so its not out of the question. If these systems were being sold with the implicit purpose of running Mac-on-linux (unlike the PPC brick servers TerraSoft sells now, which don't have any built-in graphics capabilities) Apple might want to quash it just to avoid a precedent being sent, especially if there is a possibility of more capable OEM PPC boards coming along in the future (eg. with the IBM 970 chip). But I think some of the problems with the Articia chipset that others have mentioned., coupled with the high price, probably had more to do with it.
Look, Winmodems aren't unique, and considering the power of modern CPUs, they are a very good thing in abstract. If there was an open-source software modem core along with linux support for all of the common soft-modem codecs, I can't see any reason to keep a modem around.
The interface to most modems is a holdover to a time when they were typically hooked up to dumb terminals (hence the onboard command interpreter), and the signal processing required could not be done at any cost except with dedicated hardware. The first case has not been relevant for 15 years or so, and controllerless modems have been around for nearly that long, although they have been saddled with quirky (and proprietary) serial-port emulation and AT command interpreter software in order to act like normal modems. Nonetheless, if you think you see a performance difference between a full "hardware" modem and a controllerless Lucent modem, it really is your imagination, because both have equivalent onboard DSPs.
The second argument ceased to be relevant when CPU speeds were probably 1/10 of what most are now, and that is why full software modems are so prevalent now. Maybe you whine about this, but think about all the things a typical modern sound card does mostly in software (stream mixing, wavetable synthesis, etc.) that any card from 5 or 6 years ago probably would have had hardware support for. Think about how many printers these days DON'T have embedded fonts, PostScript/PCL interpreters, and so on. Think about the complete disappearance of hardware DVD playback cards (and only a small fraction of what these cards did has been absorbed into graphics accelerators). The modern general purpose microprocessor is perfectly adequate for all of these tasks, and it is wasteful and redudant to require special-purpose ASICs to do each of these things, and using a software core allows for much greater flexibility (for instance, you can "upgrade" most 33.6k software modems to support 56k with a simple driver update. Only a few very expensive hardware modems offered any kind of upgradeability, and even then it required reflashing the firmware).
Eh? I'm using 1.2.8 with Mozilla 1.2.1 right now. It will compile against Mozilla versions back to 1.0 as far as I know. Only the gnome2 version (galeon 1.3) needs the 1.3 branch.
Ok, it (galeon) crashes when I try to open the preferences window, but that only happens when Mozilla is compiled with Xft support, normally-configured 1.2.1 works flawlessly.
You obviously need a more standard compliant browser, such as Mozilla, which supports the blink tag in its full goodness.
Does it mean that I'll be able to use antialiased fonts in emacs?
No, it just means you can get antialiased fonts in KDE or Mozilla or other programs using Xft, on a video card that doesn't have RENDER support or a X11 Server other than XFree86.
To get antialiased fonts in emacs or anything else you still need application level support, probably meaning drawing the GUI using a toolkit that supports Xft (Qt 2.x, Qt 3.x, or GTK 2.x right now).
There is a Tru64 "hobbiest license" that costs about 100 bucks or so. I thought this was always the case. OpenVMS can still be had for free however. Solaris/SPARC is free for non-commercial use, so was the Intel version (through 8.0) when it was available, which it no longer is. Now that it has been ressurected you have to pay $20 for media, no free downloads. Some time in the SCO-Caldera-SCO transition free licensing for OpenServer/Unixware was dropped, they sell media for $100 now and its unclear whether you have to pay for a license on top of that for single-user use.
Power4 runs AIX and OS/400 (and if it doesn't run Linux now, it should very soon). At one point a combination of AIX and SCO Unix called "Project Monterey" would have been available for IBM's Itanium systems, but it was scuttled in favor of linux.
HP-UX has already been ported and is shipping on HP Itanium machines right now (and you probably saw that post yesterday about OpenVMS also being on the way). SGI seems to be leaning more toward linux, they were going to port Irix at one point but I don't know whether it is available yet. SGI's page on their Altix Itanium systems does not mention any OS other than Linux.
This will be damned good. I'll be able to hobble together a system and put a stable OS on it.
Don't bet on it. I would be surprised if this port actually works, much less is officially supported, on anything other than HP systems with special firmware. Now maybe HP could, given some vision, turn VMS into a seriously competitive OS for commodity IA-64 hardware (especially if the free hobbyist license was still available). But current management seems to show little interest in their own original technology, not just DEC/Compaq stuff like VMS and the Alpha, but the PA-RISC architecture, the HP 3000 series (a midrange platform even older than VMS), and the famous test equipment division which was spun off. They see more profit in selling printers and functioning as an OEM for Microsoft and Intel. VMS is being kept around because, for a while longer at least, they will still be able to sell enough systems at inflated prices to locked-in VMS customers to justify keeping it around. Once most of them have switched to IBM or Sun machines (or maybe even PCs running some future more robust iteration of Linux) it will probably go the way of MPE.
If they sold a version of VMS that would work on open hardware it would accelerate the erosion of the user base for their hardware, and since the idea that the number of VMS users might actually increase as a result is probably completely incomprehensible to them, I doubt they would risk this.
Thank goodness that the Microsofts and the Rambuses in the world are protecting the freedom to innovate...we all know (smaller companies) are totally incapable of innovation.
This is funny, but there is a problem with the (implied) argument. Rambus is not a very large company as they come, in fact it is basically a small fabless company which is totally dependent for revenue on licensing its intellectual property. It is nowhere near as large as Infineon (formerly the semiconductor division of Siemens AG), not to speak of Microsoft. Second, Rambus actually has designed technology...RDRAM is basically an original technology, and much more of a departure from conventional memory architecture than DDR or any of its competitors. Whether it is a better technology right now, in practice, is another matter, and there are apparently major problems producing RDRAM modules at the moment. Furthermore, no one disputes that the SDRAM patents that were at issue in this case were valid, and concerned technologies that Rambus actually did develop themselves.
There are basically two things about Rambus that are reprehensible, though -- neither of them have anything to do with innovation. First, they didn't disclose their patents at the time they were on a committee that was designing the SDRAM technology (which they are now suing manufacturers of), and second, their current attempts to support themselves through royalties relating to this undisclosed patent. And the second, while disturbing, is not illegal.
Although some of Cringely's comments about the DOS basis of Windows are off-base with regards to modern NT-kernel based versions of windows (the C:\ prompt is there because it has a compatibility layer) the idea that most of what we think of as "Windows" could be ported to a Linux or Unix base is basically correct. Just imagine an officially-sanctioned WINE with its own GUI system and configuration tools...it is not that far from reality.
.NET framework. This strategy makes far more sense, both considering the existing strengths of Windows, and Microsoft's emnity toward open-source software.
But the kernel is neither Windows' biggest problem, nor Linux's greatest asset. By all accounts, the Windows NT kernel is (or at least started out as) a very clean, modular microkernel system. It was built with a POSIX compatibility layer, and actually can host a traditional Unix userspace (and does, if you install the MS "Unix Services" package). On the other hand, Linux is a very straightforward, unexceptional reimplementation of a standard, monolithic Unix kernel, which has become very popular more or less because it works, it is free, and it was there when people needed it. Its novelty is that it allowed for the first complete Free Unix-like system (while *BSD was still in legal limbo). Microsoft could take that kernel, and modify it to run Windows, and neither they, nor we (Linux users), would gain anything...Microsoft would get an operating system more or less like what they have now, except with a pesky kernel under a free-software license, and we would get another version of Windows, which might, with the installation of an X11 server and a raft of libraries, be able to run Linux software, not that anyone would want to.
If Microsoft tries to "embrace and extend" Unix, they probably won't use Linux, or BSD for that matter. Unlike Apple several years ago, they already have a modern kernel. According to another recent Slashdot story, they are already trying to build a new shell environment based on the existing "Unix services" package, and probably running under the
I don't really use the telephone a whole lot. I've never seen a need for a mobile phone, and part of the argument against one went kind of like this: Well, if I'm stuck somewhere and I really need to get in touch with someone, I can always use a pay phone. And if its not important enough to spend 35 cents I really don't need to make the call anyway. I guess not eh? At some point in the future I might have to spend $(minimum cell phone cost) every month just to get the same service I would have formerly gotten from the once-ubiquitous (and free if I don't actually have to use them) public pay phones.
The same thing happened to rail transit in most American cities about 40-50 years ago as road systems improved and more people bought automobiles.
People have said this for decades, and the middle class has not disappeared. That's not to say it never will, but the record of these predictions is very, very poor.
Well, these things happen very slowly. If you look at the general trend over the past 20 years, there has been a collapse in the number of high-paying skilled manufacturing jobs, living standards and job security for many professionals are declining, and the fastest growing sector is "service" jobs like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. The growth of information technology and programming was maybe the only exception to this, but it is not looking so good now. There is still biotech which seems to be the hot thing now. However, I think the worst fears anyone expressed 'decades' ago have generally come to pass. But people expecting a rapid and devastating catastrophe will probably continue to be disappointed.
As others have alluded to, it is very cheap, and easy, to add most of the integrated features on most motherboards. And, assuming you are talking about full-size, high-end boards, whether you get the integrated parts or not, you lose almost nothing. The integrated video will be disabled if you put a video card in the AGP slot (and yes, most chipsets now support integrated video and an AGP expansion slot), you can put a real sound card in if you like (or you might find the integrated sound perfectly adequate). If you get something with onboard ethernet, think of it as a bonus -- you just saved yourself a PCI slot (because, unless you're running a high-volume server, there is little practical difference between the various commodity ethernet chipsets -- well, unless you need gigabit).
And this stuff is cheap, real cheap, to put on the board -- in the case of video, the only cost is the connector, the sound requires a ten-cent codec and the connectors, etc. You most likely won't save any money deliberately avoiding integrated hardware, and you could end up paying extra for the "privilege". So just get the board with the features you want and don't pay the slightest regard to the integrated hardware, it won't bother you if you don't want to use it.
Based on the image of the motherboard here this box looks to use a standard ATX-factor motherboard (aside from the "podule" bays and rear port arrangement, anyhow). Anybody know who makes the board, and if they are available separately? I don't think I would pay over 2000 bucks for a whole system, but since it uses pretty typical PC hardware, if the board were available for a reasonable price (even "reasonable" like the $500 for some of the open PPC boards) it would be a cool alternative to the x86 orthodoxy, even if its somewhat slow by modern standards (especially in light of the fact that it should be trivial to get NetBSD and probably Linux running on it).
Windows 98 and ME still boot off of DOS. In the case of 98 you can still boot it into pure DOS mode if you like, it is rather better hidden in ME but with some hacks it can also be done. So we have a couple of MS end-of-life dates to go before we can say its really dead.
But then there is FreeDOS, which looks to be alive and well, and being GPL'd free software, is unlikely to stop being so any time soon.
Isn't port location and Chassis compatibility part of the ATX standard????
Not really. On most (standard) chassises, the IO backplate is removable. You can pop it out and replace it, or not use one at all. There is a de-facto standard arrangement that is used by most boards (and the plate that comes with most cases is designed for), but many times when integrating different combinations of ports it is not only desirable, but necessary, to deviate, and the standard accomodates this. The one thing on that box that is kind of abnormal is that the backplate seems to be held on with screws, and might even (I've never been inside one of those things) be physically attached to the motherboard, like most NLX systems. They could have gone a step further and used a different screw arrangement also, to make mounting third-party mainboards impossible. I wouldn't put it past them.
(aside: its really a shame that NLX and other riser-card systems are largely dead now, with a riser you can build machines that small or smaller, with full-size, uninhibited expansion slots.)
[CORRECTION]
/etc/X11, not /etc
XftConfig is usually in
You can specify in /etc/XftConfig whether or not to anti-alias fonts based on name, type, and size. So for instance you can disable antialiasing on fonts size 12 and below, fixed-width fonts, italic fonts, etc. if you like.
Everything that uses Xft to render anti-aliased fonts (and, except for a few programs with lame software freetype support, this is everything) will be affected by this.
But, I think its impact is being overblown, at the cost of ignoring features which have existed in Xfree86 (and X11 in general) for some time.
Of course, changing the display resolution itself has always been possible using control-alt-+/-, but without resizing the desktop.
Full screen games can run at any resolution and color depth supported by the hardware, and included in the XF86Config file, regardless of the desktop resolution, on almost any recent card, if the program itself supports the existing DGA extensions.
Real-time mode line (ie, refresh rate, dot clock, etc.) tweaking has always been possible with xvidtune and other utilities (the very nice PowerDesk tool with Matrox cards, for instance, which is GPL'd).
What this does is allow resizing (and less significantly, rotation, reflection, and other similar permutations) of the desktop itself without restarting the X11 server.
Moreover, this does not automatically mean that an easy to use Windows-style control applet will exist--this is a separate task, as it should be in the Unix tradition, but one which these extensions will make closer to possibility (notwithstanding, I can't see why some tool like this hasn't been developed already by one of the large commercial distributions using functionality already present--see the PowerDesk applet I mentioned above for an example of how this should work).