Twenty years ago I was using a Xerox 1108 Dandelion. It had a megapixel display (admittedly monochrome only, but for more money you could get an 1132 Dorado which had 24bit colour), an optical three button mouse, ethernet, a WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word-processing, spreadsheet, bitmap and vector graphics editors all as software components so that you could drop a vector graphic into a word-processing document and vice versa. It had a distributed hypertext system, technically similar to the Web. And it had a software development environment which makes today's IDEs look primitive.
The system box was about 10% bigger all round than a modern mid-tower case. The monitor was very big and heavy, but it was twenty-one inch. Sometimes the machine was infuriatingly slow, but then we were running very compute-intensive software, which would still be slow on today's boxes.
So what progress have we actually made in twenty years?
Boxes of this class are now cheaper - much cheaper. Ordinary people can now have them. The Dandelion, in those days, cost about two years of my salary, whereas I can earn the price of my current machine in a couple of weeks. And that ignores the fact that my Dandelion had only 4 megabytes of RAM and 80Megabytes of disk (but against that, the LISP system, criticised in those days for being wasteful of memory, was actually a lot more efficient of memory than modern systems).
And processers are faster. How much faster in real user terms I don't know. I remember when I switched to an Acorn Archimedes - the first ARM based machine - how much more responsive it felt. The Dandelion was capable of around two DEC MIPs. My present box does over six thousand 'bogomips'. How close a bogomip is to a 'DEC MIP' I don't know, but in terms of user experience this machine is certainly not three thousand times faster than the Dandelion - ten times, maybe.
So what I'm saying is that actually we've made frighteningly little progress in the last twenty years. In software terms, we've acutally gone backwards. The reasons are very simple
the big, proprietary LISP environments on their expensive proprietary hardware could not compete on price with the emerging Sun and Apollo workstations based on cheap commodity microprocessors and low cost BSD UN*X.
Xerox - particularly Xerox, but Symbolics, LMI, Texas Instruments as well - singularly failed to capitalise on the wonderful software systems which they had. If a big LISP or SmallTalk system had been ported to commodity hardware early enough and sold cheap enough we'd have better software now
Finally, the LISP community more or less destroyed itself with Common LISP, creating a 'common' variant of the language which very few people could love, and spending the years when BSD was developing a commited corps of UN*X processors mainly gazing at their own navels and trying to destroy each other.
So what are the achievements of the last twenty years? Well, the hardware boys have achieved a lot. Kudos to them. On the software side I think the best and most creative thing that's been achieved is the GNU General Public License. It's about the only real software advance I've seen in my working life.
The next twenty years
So what does this imply for the next twenty years? I think we have to face the fact that the hardware boys will continue to leave us behind. We will see smaller, lighter, lower power devices. We may see usable speach input. The 'desktop box', as we know it, may die, leaving only servers and portables.
Processors growing faster is always good but in a sense this is academic. For most purposes a good user experience can be provided on machines a thousand times slower than our present machines, or, to put it differently, bad programming can eat up every ounce of speed the hardware boys can give us for no discernable improvement in user experience. What I hope to see in twenty years is my six thousand bogomips of processor in a package that draws curre
Consumer level PC need a VERY GOOD inexpensive method of backing up stuff... I'm talking the whole hard drive in a manner of minutes. Cheap. Often.
The hardware and software to do highly appopriate backup of consumer level PCs already exists.
It does now, yes; but in ten years time it probably won't. Disk capacity is increasing far more rapidly than disk interface bandwidth. Within the decade, at current rates of development, we will see consumer level disks with terabytes of capacity, but which take over a year to read all the data off.
We're all going to have to rethink how we use disk storage.
Is that it was an inside job. Someone trusted with a shell account on the server. Someone who was seen as part of the team, but betrayed it. A pretty shitty thing to do, in my opinion.
The FSF don't say (and probably shouldn't say) whether they know who did it. I hope they do, because if they don't the mistrust which will be engendered will cause a lot of unhappiness, and will distract maintainers from looking after the packages we all use.
If the FSF don't know, I hope the culprit has the guts to own up, and own up quickly.
May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of.zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.
This raises a question. Do these serial DMCA perjurers use search engines, or do they have their own web-crawlers? If they have their own web-crawlers, what user-agent strings do they report to the http daemon? It would be interesting to know whether (say) the ESA had been trawling through my sites.
Personally I think the FPP post saying "This is comical in one sense, but to be read by a hosting company who does not know any better can be frightening," is considerably overstating the case.
The file is easily certifiable as non-infringing. (Pretty much) end of story.
No it isn't and no, it isn't. With good steganography it's possible to hide pretty much anything in pretty much anything else (provided the thing you're trying to hide is sufficiently smaller than the thing you're trying to hide it in). It's extremely difficult to certify that a given file does not contain, steganographically, an encoding of another. You could easily hide an 8 bit game in the whitespace of a bundle of documentation, and, unless you knew the algorithm of the encoding, it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there.
So this unnamed Fortune 500 company now has a license from SCO to use Linux. However, that doesn't mean they can legally use Linux; on the contrary, it means they can't legally use Linux, at least not on any machine on which it is not already loaded.
Why not?
SCO are clearly in breach of the GPL since they have imposed...further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights... contrary to paragraph 6; and clearly they may not distribute Linux (or anything linked to any part of Linux) at all. But in accepting SCO's claim to have the right to charge these fees, in paying these fees, the unnamed company is effectively in breach of paragraph 6, and may not redistribute to itself...
In other words, the poor schmucks have got themselves in some very tortuous legal soup, and they end up losing out no matter who wins.
This technology would be very useful for extremely realistic firearms training. Think FPS with real guns. The bullets would create holes in the fog screen..
Oh, first of all, respect to Red Hat. I haven't gone out and bought a Red Hat box set for about five years, but I'll buy one tomorrow.
But second, could someone explain to an ignorant European why all these companies are incorporated in Delaware? I thought Red Hat was in North Carolina somewhere and SCO/Caldera were in Utah?
You could ask them what JRE they are using. I doubt the 60 Mb footprint of 1.4.2 will run on a cell phone. Then we get to basic point again: "What is Java?", besides being a Sun Microsystem trademark to cover multiple unrelated things.
OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.
In my opinion Java is at least a brilliant grammar. If you strip the bloat, the class libraries are also nicely done.
<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>
Of course the JVM itself is written in C. If it were written in Java, it would need another JVM underneath it at the machine interface layer.
You really, really don't understand computers, do you?
Of course the JVM must be a native executable for the platform on which it runs. That's a very, very different thing from saying it's written in C. It could be written in any language which is capable of being compiled down to native object code. That, obviously, includes Java (the fact that Java isn't normally compiled down to native object code does not mean it can't be). I don't know for certain that the whole of the JVM you use is written in Java, but JVMs entirely in Java certainly exist.
I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".
I don't just have a college degree. I'm a former university research fellow in computer science. I'm also a Java programmer. I'm not in the least ashamed to tell people so.
Because of the size and footprint issues, you can't do embedded with Java.
Oh dear, I think you'd better tell Nokia that. And IBM. I don't think they know. I'm sure they'd be grateful.
There are lots of things you can't do with Java. Little CLI apps like 'ls', 'cd', etc, would be painful to use if they were written in Java, because of the startup costs of the VM. It takes GCC 0.004 seconds (ie: within measurement error) to startup and give me the usage message. It takes javac 0.330 seconds to do the same.
two responses to that.
People have no problem with little perl scripts run from the command line, but perl has exactly the same startup overheads as Java.
Running commands under bash is running them in, effectively, a C language environment. The basic C language shared libraries are already loaded. If you had a Java shell already running in its own JVM it could invoke instances of Java classes at the same order of cost as a conventional shell starting an ELF executable.
I write 95% of my work in Java. It's just as performant as anything else doing the same job. Most of my stuff (web applications) typically service small requests - very much like ls, albeit in a different environment. But the trick is, you don't start a new JVM for each invocation; you have a JVM running all the time and service the requests you receive within it. In this sense, the webapp is analogous ot a shell.
I'm not saying Java doesn't have problems - it does have a significant problem which is Sun's attitude to 'intellectual property' and their continued restrictive licensing. But speed and efficiency are no longer problems Java has.
On my campus, Windows XP sells for 5 dollars and Office XP Professional sells for 10 dollars. THis started last year with an agreement with Microsoft. Needless to say, the Linux User Group here has completely disappeared. There is no need for anyone to use Linux over XP. Very sad indeed...
Why needless to say?
The important thing about Linux isn't that it's free as in beer. The important point is that it's ours - yours - that we can get in under the hood and mess with it, tinker with it, learn how it works and contribute back to it. That we can become not passive consumers of technology but active participants in it.
If people on your campus were only using Linux because it was free as in beer, then frankly who needs 'em? If they only used Linux to get a free ride on the backs of the developer community, why is their getting off very sad?
Somehow journalists have got the idea that there's a commercial fight on and that the 'penguinistas' (that's us) somehow want Linux to 'win' and take over from Windows as the operating system on everyone's desk.
Well, speaking for myself, I don't, and for a whole lot of reasons.
The first reason is that open source software is written to scratch the itches of people competent enough to write it. It must be, because people who are not competent enough to write operating systems by definition don't write operating systems; and, unless you're being paid to, you don't write programs to do things you've no interest in doing. So Linux will always be a geeks operating system, and will only ever be good as a geeks operating system, and that's how it should be.
If, in some act of self-denying humanitarian madness, the Linux community did turn round and make Linux into an operating system for Joe Average to use, we would just by doing that make it an operating system which was not comfortable for us to use, and so we'd all drift away to using something else and there would be no-one left to maintain or develop Linux.
Joe Average is inevitably going to have to continue to buy operating systems which people get paid to write, because there is no-one who is motivated to build a Joe Average Operating System ('JAOS'?) for free. Microsoft seem to perform this function perfectly well.
Of course the corporate (and government) desktop is different, because large organisations can afford to pay sysadmins to tune an operating system to the needs of the organisation, and lock it down so that the lusers can't make a mess with it. They're going to have to do this anyway whatever operating system they choose, so they might as well start with a free one.
Obviously, there's some benefit for us in Linux being more widely used. The bigger the community, the greater the number of contributers, the more software there is that's available to us. Great. But actually there's even more benefit to us in letting a thousand flowers bloom. The more heterogenous the operating systems in common everyday use, the more important interoperability is, and the less possible it is for wannabe-monopolists to 'embrace and extend', or to save files by default in proprietary formats.
So don't - don't - strive, campaign, persuade or even hope to see Linux on every desktop. It won't do us any good and it won't do Joe Average any good. Strive instead to expose Joe Average to a wider range of options he can understand. Let's face it, Mac OS X is a good operating system for Joe Average - at least as good as Windows - and once the Joe Average desktop market begins to fragment there will be more chance for new operating systems to emerge and break in there, and that can only be interesting for us.
And yes, perhaps, in future, we will see JAOSes emerging which are based on Linux; perhaps Lindows is the first of those. But please, we don't want Linux to become a JAOS. That's in no-one's interest.
Fortunately most of Usenet is such a cespool that really they can only make it better.
OK, well I'm one of those old fogeys who actually care about Usenet. I've been using it for twenty years and I still think it's a great thing. Admittedly a lot of groups are losing their vibrancy and vitality, and spam is an increasing problem. But Usenet is still a great way for communities of people with common interests to foregather and hang out with one another, bounce ideas around, solve technical problems and exchange ideas, irrespective of geographical distance.
Usenet, also, because of its primitiveness, is one of the parts of the network revolution which is most resistant to interference. It doesn't need the Internet; it can propagate happily over ad-hoc UUCP links on dialup lines. So even if the corporates come to control the Internet and dictate what we can do with it, even if governments put carnivore boxes on every router, Usenet is still ours and can still route around it.
It has it's problems. It was conceived in a more innocent age. We do need a successor.
But please, not Microsoft, the inventors of default top posting. This is one of the things which is making Usenet increasingly difficult to use. Microsoft do not have our interests at heart - only their own. If you want to see a new and better Usenet, look at projects like Usenet2.
Nice one for tracking this one down. I keep saying there's nothing new in software...
So this provides evidence of prior art to claims 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 of the Bezos patent. It may also provide prior art to claims 7, 9, 14 and 15 - does anyone know whether there is a web interface to this system and if so whether it existed before September 12, 1997?
It looks like the only thing Bezos has patented is the act of purchasing an item over the 'net by the '...speaking of a sound...' (claim 4, claim 18), and that's technology he hasn't implemented.
Given that you need a copy of the original game to play it, and given that wine has been around for a good few years now, this is a vanity project.
No, it's not. I've had a lot of fun recently playing Monkey Island on my Sharp Zaurus, which doesn't run Wine and doesn't have an i386 processor. Oh, and, yes, it is a legal copy of Monkey Island.
Way back in 2000 I had a hard look at how you'd deliver an XForms form to a legacy device, and concluded that it was in the general case virtually impossible using standard tools. So I said so. As far as I know, there's still no way, and no one has produced any sensible response to this problem.
however, the authors of the game can create, destroy, modify and, most importantly, duplicate these shears with near-zero effort. the supply can be upped instantly. the shears can be modified to become useless, thus reducing the demand. the authors can make as many shears for themselves as they wish...
Wahey! Back on topic...
This is the problem with proprietary software. It's value lies in scarcity, but the scarcity is patently artificial. Artificial scarcity is what copyright and patent laws exist to protect. What is probably in the long term the single most important difference between proprietary and open source software is that open source software does not have any scarcity, either real or artificial; and consequently can be reproduced indefinitely at marginal cost.
Which brings us to another kind of value, utility value, which is closely related to labour value. If someone has a job to do which takes them ten hours a week, and you give them a tool which allows them to do it in one hour a week, you've saved them nine hours a week (which they can either spend sitting under a tree sipping beer, or doing other jobs which earn more wealth). By giving them that tool at zero or marginal cost you've actually increased their wealth.
With proprietary software and artificial scarcity, a considerable proportion of the wealth created by the provision of new tools goes to the 'intellectual property' owners of the tools, and you get obscene fortunes like Bill Gates'. Furthermore, many of the people who would benefit from the new tools can't afford to use them. With open source software, the wealth created by new tools is distributed among the users of the tools, and that means (modulo the (significant) cost of hardware) everyone who could benefit from them.
So if you contribute to open source software you're making a real contribution to the wealth of the world - not some game world, the real world - and if you make a significant contribution to some widely used software the amount of value you add to the world is very large.
Isn't that a better, more rewarding, and more fun thing to be doing with your spare time than arguing over virtual swords?
No, it would be akin to paying someone $50 for a stack of Magic cards. If you had 10 mint Beta Black Lotuses (approx total value: $7000)
Reality Alert
These things that you are talking about are small pieces of printed cardboard. Their 'approx total value' does not exceed ten cents. If you paid more for them, that's entirely your problem.
Re:Knuth is only one foundation that won't be lost
on
Software Archaeology
·
· Score: 1
No one ought to knock VB because it really is the best tool for what it does, but it also lowers the barrier to entry for would-be programmers. This can only lead to worse programs.
The most fundamental concept in computer science is logic, not algorithms (or worse programming languages). If a 'programmer' hasn't written a program in a low level language like C or assembler, the hiring manager should beware. Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level, regardless of whether he knows 1 language or 50 languages. He is handicapped.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but... if someone doesn't know the difference between an algorithm which scales in linear time and one that scales in exponential time, it doesn't matter what language (s)he programs in; if (s)he doesn't know what a normalised database schema looks like, it doesn't matter what (s)he builds a database in.
No amount of practice can make up for a total lack of understanding of theory (but similarly, no amount of theory makes up for lack of practice). There were bad programmers around in the assembly language days, just as there were good ones - although I'd be inclined to agree that, among the circles I moved in, any way, there seemed to be a higher proportion of seriously good programmers around than there are now (possibly because in those days programming was a much more uncommon profession attracting a more select group of people).
OK, SCO sys that the Linux kernel contains their copyright material and consequently has written letters to Linux users asking them to pay money in order to avoid legal action.
Now it appears that the Linux kernel does not contain their copyright material in any of the areas they themselves have listed. So those letters to Linux users are unrtue. Which either means that they constitute fraud, or that they constitute demanding money with menaces. Both of these are (here in Scotland, at any rate) criminal not civil offences. Has anyone got one of these letters? If not, can anyone suggest how I can provoke SCO to send me one? I would be most delighted to go down to my local police station and file a complaint.
Is based on ideas which are thirty years and more old. Back in the early eighties I was working on Xerox workstations with ethernet networking, distributed hypertext, large bitmapped screens with WIMP user interface, WYSIWYG printing, embeddable components...
Of course part of the reason for this is that the seventies and early-eighties were an incredibly creative and productive period for software ideas. But... why has it stopped? The successful open source operating systems - the BSDs, Linux, the Hurd - are all based on UN*X, based on paradigms about how people use and share information which are rigid and hierarchical.
Of course there are open source operating systems based on other ideas, but so far none of them is making any break through. Is there a radically different Open Source operating system that you, personally, are excited by? If not, why not? Have we learned nothing in the last thirty years?
Which isn't to say you have to work. Just, if you don't work, just sit there. Do not read slashdot. Do not read Usenet. Do not browse the web. Do not pick your nose. Do not look out of your window. Just sit.
You'll soon get so bored you'd rather work.
This may sound crazy, but it works for me and has got me out of some very blocked spots.
Slashdot Mirror
Twenty years ago I was using a Xerox 1108 Dandelion. It had a megapixel display (admittedly monochrome only, but for more money you could get an 1132 Dorado which had 24bit colour), an optical three button mouse, ethernet, a WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word-processing, spreadsheet, bitmap and vector graphics editors all as software components so that you could drop a vector graphic into a word-processing document and vice versa. It had a distributed hypertext system, technically similar to the Web. And it had a software development environment which makes today's IDEs look primitive.
The system box was about 10% bigger all round than a modern mid-tower case. The monitor was very big and heavy, but it was twenty-one inch. Sometimes the machine was infuriatingly slow, but then we were running very compute-intensive software, which would still be slow on today's boxes.
So what progress have we actually made in twenty years?
Boxes of this class are now cheaper - much cheaper. Ordinary people can now have them. The Dandelion, in those days, cost about two years of my salary, whereas I can earn the price of my current machine in a couple of weeks. And that ignores the fact that my Dandelion had only 4 megabytes of RAM and 80Megabytes of disk (but against that, the LISP system, criticised in those days for being wasteful of memory, was actually a lot more efficient of memory than modern systems).
And processers are faster. How much faster in real user terms I don't know. I remember when I switched to an Acorn Archimedes - the first ARM based machine - how much more responsive it felt. The Dandelion was capable of around two DEC MIPs. My present box does over six thousand 'bogomips'. How close a bogomip is to a 'DEC MIP' I don't know, but in terms of user experience this machine is certainly not three thousand times faster than the Dandelion - ten times, maybe.
So what I'm saying is that actually we've made frighteningly little progress in the last twenty years. In software terms, we've acutally gone backwards. The reasons are very simple
So what are the achievements of the last twenty years? Well, the hardware boys have achieved a lot. Kudos to them. On the software side I think the best and most creative thing that's been achieved is the GNU General Public License. It's about the only real software advance I've seen in my working life.
The next twenty years
So what does this imply for the next twenty years? I think we have to face the fact that the hardware boys will continue to leave us behind. We will see smaller, lighter, lower power devices. We may see usable speach input. The 'desktop box', as we know it, may die, leaving only servers and portables.
Processors growing faster is always good but in a sense this is academic. For most purposes a good user experience can be provided on machines a thousand times slower than our present machines, or, to put it differently, bad programming can eat up every ounce of speed the hardware boys can give us for no discernable improvement in user experience. What I hope to see in twenty years is my six thousand bogomips of processor in a package that draws curre
It does now, yes; but in ten years time it probably won't. Disk capacity is increasing far more rapidly than disk interface bandwidth. Within the decade, at current rates of development, we will see consumer level disks with terabytes of capacity, but which take over a year to read all the data off.
We're all going to have to rethink how we use disk storage.
The FSF don't say (and probably shouldn't say) whether they know who did it. I hope they do, because if they don't the mistrust which will be engendered will cause a lot of unhappiness, and will distract maintainers from looking after the packages we all use.
If the FSF don't know, I hope the culprit has the guts to own up, and own up quickly.
This raises a question. Do these serial DMCA perjurers use search engines, or do they have their own web-crawlers? If they have their own web-crawlers, what user-agent strings do they report to the http daemon? It would be interesting to know whether (say) the ESA had been trawling through my sites.
No it isn't and no, it isn't. With good steganography it's possible to hide pretty much anything in pretty much anything else (provided the thing you're trying to hide is sufficiently smaller than the thing you're trying to hide it in). It's extremely difficult to certify that a given file does not contain, steganographically, an encoding of another. You could easily hide an 8 bit game in the whitespace of a bundle of documentation, and, unless you knew the algorithm of the encoding, it would be pretty hard to prove it wasn't there.
Why not?
SCO are clearly in breach of the GPL since they have imposed ...further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights... contrary to paragraph 6; and clearly they may not distribute Linux (or anything linked to any part of Linux) at all. But in accepting SCO's claim to have the right to charge these fees, in paying these fees, the unnamed company is effectively in breach of paragraph 6, and may not redistribute to itself...
In other words, the poor schmucks have got themselves in some very tortuous legal soup, and they end up losing out no matter who wins.
It's never safe to think outside the box...
The key word there being 'knew'
It looks very much to me as though the current [Caldera|SCO] board have convinced themselves of the truth and righteousness of their claims...
But second, could someone explain to an ignorant European why all these companies are incorporated in Delaware? I thought Red Hat was in North Carolina somewhere and SCO/Caldera were in Utah?
OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.
<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>
However, for the most part, it sort of works...
You really, really don't understand computers, do you?
Of course the JVM must be a native executable for the platform on which it runs. That's a very, very different thing from saying it's written in C. It could be written in any language which is capable of being compiled down to native object code. That, obviously, includes Java (the fact that Java isn't normally compiled down to native object code does not mean it can't be). I don't know for certain that the whole of the JVM you use is written in Java, but JVMs entirely in Java certainly exist.
I don't just have a college degree. I'm a former university research fellow in computer science. I'm also a Java programmer. I'm not in the least ashamed to tell people so.
Oh dear, I think you'd better tell Nokia that. And IBM. I don't think they know. I'm sure they'd be grateful.
two responses to that.
I write 95% of my work in Java. It's just as performant as anything else doing the same job. Most of my stuff (web applications) typically service small requests - very much like ls, albeit in a different environment. But the trick is, you don't start a new JVM for each invocation; you have a JVM running all the time and service the requests you receive within it. In this sense, the webapp is analogous ot a shell.
I'm not saying Java doesn't have problems - it does have a significant problem which is Sun's attitude to 'intellectual property' and their continued restrictive licensing. But speed and efficiency are no longer problems Java has.
Why needless to say?
The important thing about Linux isn't that it's free as in beer. The important point is that it's ours - yours - that we can get in under the hood and mess with it, tinker with it, learn how it works and contribute back to it. That we can become not passive consumers of technology but active participants in it.
If people on your campus were only using Linux because it was free as in beer, then frankly who needs 'em? If they only used Linux to get a free ride on the backs of the developer community, why is their getting off very sad?
Well, speaking for myself, I don't, and for a whole lot of reasons.
The first reason is that open source software is written to scratch the itches of people competent enough to write it. It must be, because people who are not competent enough to write operating systems by definition don't write operating systems; and, unless you're being paid to, you don't write programs to do things you've no interest in doing. So Linux will always be a geeks operating system, and will only ever be good as a geeks operating system, and that's how it should be.
If, in some act of self-denying humanitarian madness, the Linux community did turn round and make Linux into an operating system for Joe Average to use, we would just by doing that make it an operating system which was not comfortable for us to use, and so we'd all drift away to using something else and there would be no-one left to maintain or develop Linux.
Joe Average is inevitably going to have to continue to buy operating systems which people get paid to write, because there is no-one who is motivated to build a Joe Average Operating System ('JAOS'?) for free. Microsoft seem to perform this function perfectly well.
Of course the corporate (and government) desktop is different, because large organisations can afford to pay sysadmins to tune an operating system to the needs of the organisation, and lock it down so that the lusers can't make a mess with it. They're going to have to do this anyway whatever operating system they choose, so they might as well start with a free one.
Obviously, there's some benefit for us in Linux being more widely used. The bigger the community, the greater the number of contributers, the more software there is that's available to us. Great. But actually there's even more benefit to us in letting a thousand flowers bloom. The more heterogenous the operating systems in common everyday use, the more important interoperability is, and the less possible it is for wannabe-monopolists to 'embrace and extend', or to save files by default in proprietary formats.
So don't - don't - strive, campaign, persuade or even hope to see Linux on every desktop. It won't do us any good and it won't do Joe Average any good. Strive instead to expose Joe Average to a wider range of options he can understand. Let's face it, Mac OS X is a good operating system for Joe Average - at least as good as Windows - and once the Joe Average desktop market begins to fragment there will be more chance for new operating systems to emerge and break in there, and that can only be interesting for us.
And yes, perhaps, in future, we will see JAOSes emerging which are based on Linux; perhaps Lindows is the first of those. But please, we don't want Linux to become a JAOS. That's in no-one's interest.
OK, well I'm one of those old fogeys who actually care about Usenet. I've been using it for twenty years and I still think it's a great thing. Admittedly a lot of groups are losing their vibrancy and vitality, and spam is an increasing problem. But Usenet is still a great way for communities of people with common interests to foregather and hang out with one another, bounce ideas around, solve technical problems and exchange ideas, irrespective of geographical distance.
Usenet, also, because of its primitiveness, is one of the parts of the network revolution which is most resistant to interference. It doesn't need the Internet; it can propagate happily over ad-hoc UUCP links on dialup lines. So even if the corporates come to control the Internet and dictate what we can do with it, even if governments put carnivore boxes on every router, Usenet is still ours and can still route around it.
It has it's problems. It was conceived in a more innocent age. We do need a successor.
But please, not Microsoft, the inventors of default top posting. This is one of the things which is making Usenet increasingly difficult to use. Microsoft do not have our interests at heart - only their own. If you want to see a new and better Usenet, look at projects like Usenet2.
So this provides evidence of prior art to claims 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 of the Bezos patent. It may also provide prior art to claims 7, 9, 14 and 15 - does anyone know whether there is a web interface to this system and if so whether it existed before September 12, 1997?
It looks like the only thing Bezos has patented is the act of purchasing an item over the 'net by the '...speaking of a sound...' (claim 4, claim 18), and that's technology he hasn't implemented.
No, it's not. I've had a lot of fun recently playing Monkey Island on my Sharp Zaurus, which doesn't run Wine and doesn't have an i386 processor. Oh, and, yes, it is a legal copy of Monkey Island.
Way back in 2000 I had a hard look at how you'd deliver an XForms form to a legacy device, and concluded that it was in the general case virtually impossible using standard tools. So I said so. As far as I know, there's still no way, and no one has produced any sensible response to this problem.
Wahey! Back on topic...
This is the problem with proprietary software. It's value lies in scarcity, but the scarcity is patently artificial. Artificial scarcity is what copyright and patent laws exist to protect. What is probably in the long term the single most important difference between proprietary and open source software is that open source software does not have any scarcity, either real or artificial; and consequently can be reproduced indefinitely at marginal cost.
Which brings us to another kind of value, utility value, which is closely related to labour value. If someone has a job to do which takes them ten hours a week, and you give them a tool which allows them to do it in one hour a week, you've saved them nine hours a week (which they can either spend sitting under a tree sipping beer, or doing other jobs which earn more wealth). By giving them that tool at zero or marginal cost you've actually increased their wealth.
With proprietary software and artificial scarcity, a considerable proportion of the wealth created by the provision of new tools goes to the 'intellectual property' owners of the tools, and you get obscene fortunes like Bill Gates'. Furthermore, many of the people who would benefit from the new tools can't afford to use them. With open source software, the wealth created by new tools is distributed among the users of the tools, and that means (modulo the (significant) cost of hardware) everyone who could benefit from them.
So if you contribute to open source software you're making a real contribution to the wealth of the world - not some game world, the real world - and if you make a significant contribution to some widely used software the amount of value you add to the world is very large.
Isn't that a better, more rewarding, and more fun thing to be doing with your spare time than arguing over virtual swords?
Reality Alert
These things that you are talking about are small pieces of printed cardboard. Their 'approx total value' does not exceed ten cents. If you paid more for them, that's entirely your problem.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but... if someone doesn't know the difference between an algorithm which scales in linear time and one that scales in exponential time, it doesn't matter what language (s)he programs in; if (s)he doesn't know what a normalised database schema looks like, it doesn't matter what (s)he builds a database in.
No amount of practice can make up for a total lack of understanding of theory (but similarly, no amount of theory makes up for lack of practice). There were bad programmers around in the assembly language days, just as there were good ones - although I'd be inclined to agree that, among the circles I moved in, any way, there seemed to be a higher proportion of seriously good programmers around than there are now (possibly because in those days programming was a much more uncommon profession attracting a more select group of people).
Now it appears that the Linux kernel does not contain their copyright material in any of the areas they themselves have listed. So those letters to Linux users are unrtue. Which either means that they constitute fraud, or that they constitute demanding money with menaces. Both of these are (here in Scotland, at any rate) criminal not civil offences. Has anyone got one of these letters? If not, can anyone suggest how I can provoke SCO to send me one? I would be most delighted to go down to my local police station and file a complaint.
Of course part of the reason for this is that the seventies and early-eighties were an incredibly creative and productive period for software ideas. But... why has it stopped? The successful open source operating systems - the BSDs, Linux, the Hurd - are all based on UN*X, based on paradigms about how people use and share information which are rigid and hierarchical.
Of course there are open source operating systems based on other ideas, but so far none of them is making any break through. Is there a radically different Open Source operating system that you, personally, are excited by? If not, why not? Have we learned nothing in the last thirty years?
Which isn't to say you have to work. Just, if you don't work, just sit there. Do not read slashdot. Do not read Usenet. Do not browse the web. Do not pick your nose. Do not look out of your window. Just sit.
You'll soon get so bored you'd rather work.
This may sound crazy, but it works for me and has got me out of some very blocked spots.