Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
Actually Minix was finally relicensed under a BSD-like license recently, albeit 10 years or so too late.
All the non-NT versions of Windows still are technically DOS shells, but the boot process has been changed so that Windows loads immediately (and cannot be started from another version of DOS).
There may be a valid technical reason for it, but the main effect was to completely shut out competing DOS implementations, as Caldera argued in their lawsuit against MS. During this lawsuit they actually demonstrated a slightly-modified Windows 95 running under DR-DOS.
Mac-on-linux can run OS X on non-Mac compatible PowerPC machines running Linux right now. Apple does not seem to mind because there are few such systems now, and none of them are cost-competitive with Apple's own hardware as yet. If Mac OS were ported to any kind of x86 machine, even with custom firmware, you would be able to run it on any PC at near-native speed using a similar program. As it is, running it on a PC is both pointless and impossible--pointless, because PowerPC emulation on x86 is guaranteed to be very slow, and impossible, because (due to the first reason) no one has actually released publically the needed emulation software. Even if Apple were to go with DRM-laden Xbox-style firmware to strictly tie usage of their software to their hardware, it wouldn't work as well as the simple binary compatibility barrier that exists today.
And as some Mac users have pointed out, as long as software for the platform is designed for Apple hardware, the CPU speed deficit is not an issue for most uses, as long as the "experience" is satisfactory, and Apple is just selling the "experience" after all.
By the time you add a custom fanless power supply, compact flash slot, and custom enclosure, you would be paying at least 400 euros/dollars methinks. Consider that it is not a standard form factor, and is not based on normal PC hardware but rather the (embedded-oriened) Geode SOC. Probably the mainboard is either a custom design, or an embedded single-board computer, and either way is going to be more pricey than the VIA board which is aimed at budget PCs and priced accordingly.
So yeah, you get what you pay for, and if what you want is a VIA mini-ITX board, by all means get it, because it is faster. But its not the best for everything.
I doubt that. 1.5kW is the legal limit for amateur radio, any more than that is illegal. And hams are pretty good about following the law, given that usually we are victims of illegal interference and operation from other users (well, that and very few of the commercial linear amplifiers are capable of more output than that...).
I don't believe there was any performance difference between AMD and Intel 486s. The basic design was identical, as at that time AMD still had license to Intel's designs (something that began at the time the original IBM PC came out, and IBM wanted multiple sources for 8088 CPUs). The K5 was AMD's first original x86 CPU, and their 133 MHz "5x86" was the fastest 486 ever made.
Just count yourself lucky you didn't put the AT power connectors backwards. Its physically very easy to do, and there's always a fair chance of nuking the motherboard. Needless to say, I'll always remember now, black-to-black...or was it red-to-red...damn it...good thing none of my computers now use those things.
I don't think this has actually been released yet so I doubt anyone is using it yet (outside of maybe someone at nVidia). Since both FreeBSD and Linux use XFree86 4 as the main X11 server these days, the driver is probably going to be functionally identical to the linux one, however, so I would doubt that it will support any additional features.
Maybe you should look into some of the commercial X11 servers for x86 *nix?
I was looking at this picture of the backside of the logic board with some interest, having never seen the insides of a modern Mac before. I couldn't help but notice that one of the chips on this board, the middle of the three largish square ICs, appears to be made by Intel (there is a very distinctive large, lowercase i to the left of some other illegible text, which is one of Intel's trademarks). Its impossible to tell what it is from the picture. Is it a PCI bridge? The ethernet controller? You would think Apple would not be keen on using Intel components whenever possible, but then I guess any corporation is going to put profit first. Does anyone know what it is?
Do you think its called Wintel because they couldn't figure out how to spell AMD?
AMD has always used a close relationship with Microsoft to their marketing benefit. Back in the bad old days, right after Intel had begun to create their consumer brand identity with the whole "Intel Inside" campaign, the public reputation of clone x86 CPU makers was not very good, and non-Intel CPUs were presumed to be unreliable and have compatbility problems by many people. Correspondingly, you will find on every AMD CPU since the 486 days the text "Designed for Microsoft Windows" and a Windows logo, in order to reassure the buyer that even though they are not buying an Intel CPU, their computer is fully compatible with Industry-standard Microsoft software.
We definately need to eliminate more redundant jobs. After all, you always hear people complaining these days about having jobs, what with them being redundant, and how much simpler things would be if they were fired. This is definately a step in the right direction.
Re:Newton or Pad comp?
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 5, Informative
No, Intel never bought ARM, they are still around and still own the rights to the ARM IA. However, the StrongARM CPU was not actually designed by ARM, but rather DEC, who licensed the instruction set from ARM. Actually, if memory serves, DEC designed the StrongARM somewhat at the impetus of Apple at the time the Newton was being developed. A few years later, DEC sued Intel over something completely unrelated: Intel had stolen part of the Alpha design and implemented it in their own chip. Intel basically conceded this, and they reached a settlement part of which included Intel buying much of DEC's semiconductor business, including the 2114x Tulip ethernet chipset, and the StrongARM. Intel basically ignored the StrongARM for a while during which time it became rather popular in embedded devices, and now they have renamed newer versions the "XScale" and started actually marketing them. Probably Intel would love to drop the chip and stop paying royalties to ARM, but their clients would just buy other ARM processors from other manufacturers, and they would not benefit at all.
The problem is not the patent itself, but the way they have handled the business. They released the specification and reference codec as what appeared to be an open, freely usable standard, and it became popular partly because it wasn't (seemingly) tied to a particular platform, toolset or corporation. Then, once it became a de-facto standard, they began to charge royalties for encoders and decoders, and forced encoder projects based on the ISO source to stop development.
Now, you are right that it was an innovative development and it is reasonable that they patented it, and reasonable that they should expect to profit from their development. The same can be said of Liquid Audio, Windows Media, Real Audio, and many other proprietary formats. But the status of these has never been ambiguous, and anyone who has wanted to use a standard, open file format has known to stay away from these formats. With mp3 it is not the case. If FhG/Thomson had made their policy more clear from the beginning, probably this controversy would never have developed, in part because nobody would be using mp3 files to the extent that they are used now, and perhaps something along the lines of Vorbis would have been developed sooner.
No, I guarantee you that they all feel that having a unifying unquestioned platform for all people to run on their computers is a wonderful service for humanity (and that point does have merit).
Maybe they'll say this now, but I think a look at Microsoft's pre-1995 history suggests that this has not been their primary motivation. They began selling development tools for multiple, incompatible environments in the 1970s, sold/supported multiple operating systems in the 1980s (DOS/Windows, Xenix and OS2) and ported their software to others including the Macintosh. They were ready to support multiple, non-binary compatible processor architectures with Windows NT (x86, MIPS, PPC and Alpha), but the open hardware needed to run the MIPS and PPC versions never took off and the Alpha didn't ever achieve significant market share. To this day they support Macintosh versions of most of their core office software. Microsoft wants to make money, period, and they will do what they have to.
Erg...if tbat was really true, it might be a decent system. Unfortunately the charnel house which acquired TurboLinux intends to continue their participation, and "The SCO Group" will probably do the same.
AFAIK everything that was available under the old "enthusiast license" deal that began with SCO before the buyout was reissued under a BSD-like license more recently, so I don't think they could take it back even if they wanted to. Here is the license itself in PDF format.
I appreciate what you are saying, and I think it is true that there are many people who will never like math, but I also cannot see how any pedagogical system predicated on the assumption that what is being taught is inherently boring and undesirable to know can possibly result in meaningful learning.
Really, I feel like if a person only likes cars or sports, they should be free to direct their education in that direction, without being forced to study any more math (or anything else) than they want to in order to do what they like. Reciprocally, the only people who would study mathematics would be those people who actually wanted to.
But a system like this runs into tons of problems, I don't deny that, especially when financial success depends on taking a certain educational path during ones youth. The dynamics of education are totally different when things are made compulsory, and the focus becomes "how can we make people like what we are forcing them to do", rather than allowing people to do what they like. And maybe trying to tie it into things which do make sense to their lives will work better (read: higher test scores, or perhaps more qualified engineers in the future) than working under the mistaken assumption that everyone wants to learn.
As an aside: Everything I remember of myself and my friends, from before prolonged exposure to education, suggests to me that children in their "natural" state really do enjoy learning. To paraphrase your comment, I think that most students see learning as a chore because learning in the school setting _is_ a chore. I've known many people who ended up dropping out of school or getting through very marginally, who I must say loved to learn, but simply could not work within the framework of school. There are things (drawing comes to mind) that, because they were forced on me at an early age against my will, I don't think I will ever be able to learn to do or even appreciate. And moreover, when I think about those teachers whose classes I really enjoyed, the one thing that they all had in common was a belief in the intrinsic worth of what they were teaching, and a sort of stubborn insistence that really, the students in the class _did_ want to learn, whether that was the apparent case or not.
Thats rather silly. You're basically implicitly conceding that there is no intrinsic importance to mathematics, and it is only "useful" as a means for solving scientific problems. Of course, as far as most students in middle/high school are concerned, what is being taught in science classes is "useless" also, and simply saying "learning X is important so you can do Y" is not a sound argument in the view of a student who sees no reason to understand either X or Y.
I would suggest that this attitude is the main problem, and based on my own experience, it is something that the educational system in general seems to promote. After all, instructors are not necessarily encouraged to promote a real appreciation for and understanding of a given subject, but rather meeting various "standards", increasingly codified very strictly in terms of various new state standardized tests. This environment leaves a student no goal but passing these tests, which whether they reject it or accept it does not enhance their long-term understanding.
Personally, I would rather have seen the intrinsic logic and beauty first, and the "real-world" applications later.
Graphics card OEMs have been being perpetually undercut by lower-margin competitors basically since they became significant. Visiontek became dominant by being able to undercut the likes of ELSA, Diamond, Canopus, STB, and (the original) Hercules, among others. Yes, none of them are around anymore.
In a way nVidia themselves have been shielded from this madness by not producing boards themselves. Its probably one of the reasons they still exist.
Apache superceded another open-source program, NCSA httpd, which was the first serious http server (it began as a patch against the ncsa daemon, hence "a patchy" webserver). Paraphrasing your comment, you could say that the subsequent growth of commercial web servers like IIS, Zeus and Sun iPlanet make Oracle and MS SQL server look more promising.
Re:This is NOT a good thing.
on
LinuXbox Boots
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· Score: 2
You can run a full linux distribution on the playstation 2 and the dreamcast already. Video even works. Xbox-linux is hardly "ahead of the competition" in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
Actually Minix was finally relicensed under a BSD-like license recently, albeit 10 years or so too late.
All the non-NT versions of Windows still are technically DOS shells, but the boot process has been changed so that Windows loads immediately (and cannot be started from another version of DOS).
There may be a valid technical reason for it, but the main effect was to completely shut out competing DOS implementations, as Caldera argued in their lawsuit against MS. During this lawsuit they actually demonstrated a slightly-modified Windows 95 running under DR-DOS.
Mac-on-linux can run OS X on non-Mac compatible PowerPC machines running Linux right now. Apple does not seem to mind because there are few such systems now, and none of them are cost-competitive with Apple's own hardware as yet. If Mac OS were ported to any kind of x86 machine, even with custom firmware, you would be able to run it on any PC at near-native speed using a similar program. As it is, running it on a PC is both pointless and impossible--pointless, because PowerPC emulation on x86 is guaranteed to be very slow, and impossible, because (due to the first reason) no one has actually released publically the needed emulation software. Even if Apple were to go with DRM-laden Xbox-style firmware to strictly tie usage of their software to their hardware, it wouldn't work as well as the simple binary compatibility barrier that exists today.
And as some Mac users have pointed out, as long as software for the platform is designed for Apple hardware, the CPU speed deficit is not an issue for most uses, as long as the "experience" is satisfactory, and Apple is just selling the "experience" after all.
By the time you add a custom fanless power supply, compact flash slot, and custom enclosure, you would be paying at least 400 euros/dollars methinks. Consider that it is not a standard form factor, and is not based on normal PC hardware but rather the (embedded-oriened) Geode SOC. Probably the mainboard is either a custom design, or an embedded single-board computer, and either way is going to be more pricey than the VIA board which is aimed at budget PCs and priced accordingly.
So yeah, you get what you pay for, and if what you want is a VIA mini-ITX board, by all means get it, because it is faster. But its not the best for everything.
the campus's amateur radio club used a 2kW setup
I doubt that. 1.5kW is the legal limit for amateur radio, any more than that is illegal. And hams are pretty good about following the law, given that usually we are victims of illegal interference and operation from other users (well, that and very few of the commercial linear amplifiers are capable of more output than that...).
I don't believe there was any performance difference between AMD and Intel 486s. The basic design was identical, as at that time AMD still had license to Intel's designs (something that began at the time the original IBM PC came out, and IBM wanted multiple sources for 8088 CPUs). The K5 was AMD's first original x86 CPU, and their 133 MHz "5x86" was the fastest 486 ever made.
Just count yourself lucky you didn't put the AT power connectors backwards. Its physically very easy to do, and there's always a fair chance of nuking the motherboard. Needless to say, I'll always remember now, black-to-black...or was it red-to-red...damn it...good thing none of my computers now use those things.
I don't think this has actually been released yet so I doubt anyone is using it yet (outside of maybe someone at nVidia). Since both FreeBSD and Linux use XFree86 4 as the main X11 server these days, the driver is probably going to be functionally identical to the linux one, however, so I would doubt that it will support any additional features.
Maybe you should look into some of the commercial X11 servers for x86 *nix?
I was looking at this picture of the backside of the logic board with some interest, having never seen the insides of a modern Mac before. I couldn't help but notice that one of the chips on this board, the middle of the three largish square ICs, appears to be made by Intel (there is a very distinctive large, lowercase i to the left of some other illegible text, which is one of Intel's trademarks). Its impossible to tell what it is from the picture. Is it a PCI bridge? The ethernet controller? You would think Apple would not be keen on using Intel components whenever possible, but then I guess any corporation is going to put profit first. Does anyone know what it is?
in an effort to eliminate redundant jobs
We definately need to eliminate more redundant jobs. After all, you always hear people complaining these days about having jobs, what with them being redundant, and how much simpler things would be if they were fired. This is definately a step in the right direction.
You mean like this?
No, Intel never bought ARM, they are still around and still own the rights to the ARM IA. However, the StrongARM CPU was not actually designed by ARM, but rather DEC, who licensed the instruction set from ARM. Actually, if memory serves, DEC designed the StrongARM somewhat at the impetus of Apple at the time the Newton was being developed. A few years later, DEC sued Intel over something completely unrelated: Intel had stolen part of the Alpha design and implemented it in their own chip. Intel basically conceded this, and they reached a settlement part of which included Intel buying much of DEC's semiconductor business, including the 2114x Tulip ethernet chipset, and the StrongARM. Intel basically ignored the StrongARM for a while during which time it became rather popular in embedded devices, and now they have renamed newer versions the "XScale" and started actually marketing them. Probably Intel would love to drop the chip and stop paying royalties to ARM, but their clients would just buy other ARM processors from other manufacturers, and they would not benefit at all.
I believe you are looking for this.
The problem is not the patent itself, but the way they have handled the business. They released the specification and reference codec as what appeared to be an open, freely usable standard, and it became popular partly because it wasn't (seemingly) tied to a particular platform, toolset or corporation. Then, once it became a de-facto standard, they began to charge royalties for encoders and decoders, and forced encoder projects based on the ISO source to stop development.
Now, you are right that it was an innovative development and it is reasonable that they patented it, and reasonable that they should expect to profit from their development. The same can be said of Liquid Audio, Windows Media, Real Audio, and many other proprietary formats. But the status of these has never been ambiguous, and anyone who has wanted to use a standard, open file format has known to stay away from these formats. With mp3 it is not the case. If FhG/Thomson had made their policy more clear from the beginning, probably this controversy would never have developed, in part because nobody would be using mp3 files to the extent that they are used now, and perhaps something along the lines of Vorbis would have been developed sooner.
Maybe they'll say this now, but I think a look at Microsoft's pre-1995 history suggests that this has not been their primary motivation. They began selling development tools for multiple, incompatible environments in the 1970s, sold/supported multiple operating systems in the 1980s (DOS/Windows, Xenix and OS2) and ported their software to others including the Macintosh. They were ready to support multiple, non-binary compatible processor architectures with Windows NT (x86, MIPS, PPC and Alpha), but the open hardware needed to run the MIPS and PPC versions never took off and the Alpha didn't ever achieve significant market share. To this day they support Macintosh versions of most of their core office software. Microsoft wants to make money, period, and they will do what they have to.
Any clue why they did this?
Hop on over to a windows box sometime, open a command prompt window, and see what the output of the "dir" command looks like.
Erg...if tbat was really true, it might be a decent system. Unfortunately the charnel house which acquired TurboLinux intends to continue their participation, and "The SCO Group" will probably do the same.
AFAIK everything that was available under the old "enthusiast license" deal that began with SCO before the buyout was reissued under a BSD-like license more recently, so I don't think they could take it back even if they wanted to. Here is the license itself in PDF format.
I appreciate what you are saying, and I think it is true that there are many people who will never like math, but I also cannot see how any pedagogical system predicated on the assumption that what is being taught is inherently boring and undesirable to know can possibly result in meaningful learning.
Really, I feel like if a person only likes cars or sports, they should be free to direct their education in that direction, without being forced to study any more math (or anything else) than they want to in order to do what they like. Reciprocally, the only people who would study mathematics would be those people who actually wanted to.
But a system like this runs into tons of problems, I don't deny that, especially when financial success depends on taking a certain educational path during ones youth. The dynamics of education are totally different when things are made compulsory, and the focus becomes "how can we make people like what we are forcing them to do", rather than allowing people to do what they like. And maybe trying to tie it into things which do make sense to their lives will work better (read: higher test scores, or perhaps more qualified engineers in the future) than working under the mistaken assumption that everyone wants to learn.
As an aside: Everything I remember of myself and my friends, from before prolonged exposure to education, suggests to me that children in their "natural" state really do enjoy learning. To paraphrase your comment, I think that most students see learning as a chore because learning in the school setting _is_ a chore. I've known many people who ended up dropping out of school or getting through very marginally, who I must say loved to learn, but simply could not work within the framework of school. There are things (drawing comes to mind) that, because they were forced on me at an early age against my will, I don't think I will ever be able to learn to do or even appreciate. And moreover, when I think about those teachers whose classes I really enjoyed, the one thing that they all had in common was a belief in the intrinsic worth of what they were teaching, and a sort of stubborn insistence that really, the students in the class _did_ want to learn, whether that was the apparent case or not.
Thats rather silly. You're basically implicitly conceding that there is no intrinsic importance to mathematics, and it is only "useful" as a means for solving scientific problems. Of course, as far as most students in middle/high school are concerned, what is being taught in science classes is "useless" also, and simply saying "learning X is important so you can do Y" is not a sound argument in the view of a student who sees no reason to understand either X or Y.
I would suggest that this attitude is the main problem, and based on my own experience, it is something that the educational system in general seems to promote. After all, instructors are not necessarily encouraged to promote a real appreciation for and understanding of a given subject, but rather meeting various "standards", increasingly codified very strictly in terms of various new state standardized tests. This environment leaves a student no goal but passing these tests, which whether they reject it or accept it does not enhance their long-term understanding.
Personally, I would rather have seen the intrinsic logic and beauty first, and the "real-world" applications later.
(addendum) Canopus is still around, they just don't sell commodity PC graphics cards outside of Japan anymore. Sorry.
Graphics card OEMs have been being perpetually undercut by lower-margin competitors basically since they became significant. Visiontek became dominant by being able to undercut the likes of ELSA, Diamond, Canopus, STB, and (the original) Hercules, among others. Yes, none of them are around anymore.
In a way nVidia themselves have been shielded from this madness by not producing boards themselves. Its probably one of the reasons they still exist.
Apache superceded another open-source program, NCSA httpd, which was the first serious http server (it began as a patch against the ncsa daemon, hence "a patchy" webserver). Paraphrasing your comment, you could say that the subsequent growth of commercial web servers like IIS, Zeus and Sun iPlanet make Oracle and MS SQL server look more promising.
You can run a full linux distribution on the playstation 2 and the dreamcast already. Video even works. Xbox-linux is hardly "ahead of the competition" in this regard.