The growth potential is a good point, although I'm not convinced it's currently Microsoft's biggest concern. They want more customers, of course. Right around the time of a major OS release, though, they tend to be more focused on locking in repeat business. With Vista rolling out, I think they're looking for whatever FUD and other tactics they can find to make sure when people buy new PCs that they aren't Linux PCs.
Once Vista is well established as a replacement for XP and Server 2003, then their main focus might become world domination. Right now they are trying to make sure existing Windows installations are a vertical market and not a horizontal one.
But it's not really Linux if it's not Linus (who's in the U.S.) who releases it. So you have Linux, which doesn't contain the IP, and something not quite Linux, which does. You couldn't really call the non-Linux kernel Linux without Linus's approval, which he may or may not give.
Would Microsoft care if something not Linux that couldn't be sold in thir main market contained the IP? Sure they would. But they'd still be laughing their asses off that their primary market would be that much less competitive.
Yes, Europe and Asia matter to Microsoft. The U.S. is still their bread and butter. That's not U.S.-centric thinking. It's just the simple truth that they want first to get business in their home market, the largest single-nation economy in the world, and the most PC-centric economy in the world -- all three of which are the U.S. -- and that the rest of the world is approached differently. The people Microsoft are using to try keeping the U.S. market cornered and those they are using to try to keep the rest of the world's markets cornered are probably not even the same people. They are a big company, after all. It's probably someone's job to worry only about the U.S. -- probably several people -- and someone else entirely who is suppos4ed to worry about everyone else.
The attributions are not part of the code. They are part of the copyright, and hence part of the basis for the license to be operable.
Unless you are a troll or a complete idiot, you cannot really support the idea that a license that is built on copyright can support the undermining of that copyright and continue to function.
The biggest ways I see Google being different from most companies in tech is that they are not into competing in well-established markets. Google has a tendency either to redefine the whole meaning and level of a market segment (like they did with search and Gmail), to invent whole new markets where they are the first company present (placing context-relevant ads on many, many websites), or get in to markets where therre are a few small players but they're going to be the only big one (online office suites that actually work).
It's a strategic company, not a tactical company. I think most companies think tactically. Most analysts almost certainly do. Google is so hard to analyze because they don't do what other companies do. Other companies look at what's out there and try to be better or to market better. Sometimes they try something new. Google just keeps doing new things, and the ones that stick to the wall stick hard.
Google doesn't focus on maximizing packaged units or hitting the sweet spot on the existing promotion cost/ROI curve. They are about moving the promotion cost/ROI curve to a new level by building strong user loyalty, and waiting for everyone else to catch up. Then they move on to another market curve where they do the same again.
The way they build strong user loyalty is often to make simple things simple to do. MS Office can do more than Google Spreadsheets and Google Documents. But Google's offerings work from just about every device you own, do everything you need to do for most documents, don't have to be installed, and only cost you the price of looking at ads (and maybe a bit of privacy). Google's search engine gets uncannily good results without going into the advanced search, and still has the advanced search when you need it.
I'm not a Google insider or anything, but I'd bet their products are dreamed up by brainstorming techies rather than market researchers. Then, the usability experts probably do the UI before graphic designers ever touch it. Marketing probably just markets what is ready for people to see, and of course most marketing for Google is just posting a notice on their sites anyway.
Read the damn license that I've been writing code under for ten years. I'll tell you this: if you remove my attribution from any of my GPLed code, expect a summons.
I've allowed a couple of project maintainers, with my permission, to place my code under the project's ownership and copyright with just a notice of thanks to me. That was my choice, and it was determined by the project maintainer and myself to be better for the projects involved. I do not give anyone free reign to steal credit for my work. Neither does anyone else using the GPL.
The very idea that a license that grants rights on top of a copyright could even remain in effect by invalidating said copyright is absurd.
GPLed software is not in the Public Domain. A GPLed work is a copyrighted work which the authors have decided to share with the other people in the world who are willing to share their changes to it. The Public Domain consists of works on which the copyright period has ended or which are specifically placed into the Public Domain by their authors.
According to U.S. law and international treaties to which the U.S. is a party, copyright applies to all published works almost anywhere in the world unless copyright is specifically disclaimed by the author. In fact, works completed and fixed in a tangible form are covered without publication in the U.S. Copyright does not require registration to exist, but you do have to register before bringing a n action in a U.S. court for infringement. Yes, there are exceptions. The U.S. for example does not enforce copyright on works published in certain other countries which themselves are not party to international copyright treaties. Before I get jumped all over for being Ameri-centric by noting U.S. laws, please notice that the company in question is a U.S. company operating in the U.S., so it is U.S. law that has jurisdiction.
I'm not a lawyer. If you want or need specific legal advice, contact a lawyer. The above paragraph is paraphrased from the website of the U.S. Copyright Office. Go to the The Copyright Office website yourself if you want to know more. Again, consult an attorney with specific knowledge of copyright issues if you want legal advice pertaining to a copyright case.
Don't really think of it as a separate graphics card pushed onto the CPU. MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!, AltiVec, et cetera have all brought specialized vector processing functions into CPUs with existing sets of opcodes. You know what GPUs tend to be really good at? Vector processing, matrix transforms, and all of that other highly parallel, small-data work. Now, you'll have an extended instruction set that does that well. Hopefully, it'll be done as part of the CPU's instruction set, or as a very tightly-bound coprocessor.
Imagine this scenario: A high-end game runs a physics engine on your CPU. It wants to run on your GPU, but that's busy doing the shading and rendering. So it runs on your second core if you have one, or your second CPU, or maybe on your second GPU, or on a dedicated physics board. Or it just falls back to the CPU, and eats up time better devoted to game logic and the IM you're about to get about your sick aunt from your Mom, letting you know that your aunt is all better and you don't have to quit your game of FarCry 16 or Half-Life 24 or whatever to go see her.
Okay, now imagine you've got a CPU that can do pretty much what a GPU can do besides its own specialty of kicking ass on integer logic and cache handling. It's a dual-core CPU with a built-in GPU to boot. The game logic runs mostly on core 1, the physics runs mostly on the built-in GPU, the rest of the system mostly runs on core 2, and you're a real gamer so your shading and rendering still happens on a dedicated graphics card with its own GPU. You only needed one Awesome Local Gamers Advanced Extreme XII (or "ALGAE-boxcars" to boys over at PC Rag) slot on your motherboard, because one of your GPUs was already on the CPU. That sick aunt? She types up an email about her pending medical malpractice suit on her system that has one chip socket and no ALGAE slot (not even ALAGE-uno, dammit), because all she needed was a driver for her entry-level laptop that basically runs video right from the CPU/GPU through some lead traces and a $1.50 blitter chip.
People who need high-end, specialized hardware to get the performance they want or need are not going to be left without options. People who just want to write a letter, play Tetris-klones, and maybe some low-end RTS games will get a cheaper system by not having to pay a third party for more hardware and more integration of disparate components than they really care about. It's win-win.
It's a cycle of breaking things out of the center of the system for dedication, then bringing them back into the center when the technology reaches a point that tighter integration is possible and helpful. We don't need sound on the CPU because there's no bottleneck, for example. We didn't need floating point on the CPU at one time, but enough people were using it and it got to be such a slowdown to use a separate chip for it, that it got placed on the CPU. AMD did memory controllers on the chip, and noone talked about how horrible an idea it was (except Intel, who will probably eventually do the same). GPUs are just next.
If most PCs sold started to be used for speech recognition instead of keyboard input, we'd see dedicated PCI or PCIe x1 cards for the work involved with doing that really, really well. Then, if there was need, x4 or x8 versions of the boards would appear, and motherboard manufacturers would take that slot need into consideration. Some boards would get speech recognition chips integrated onto them. Then, if it continued to be the primary input device, and there was still a big enough bottleneck at x16, we'd see that integrated onto the CPU once the die sizes shrunk enough that the "traditional" core could use tighter integration with the speech recognition stuff. I don't know that good speech recognition would take that level of integration to be efficient, but I couldn't think of a more hyped example of what seems _perpetually_ on the horizon "in just a few years at the current pace of microprocessor innovation".
People thought discrete sound and video were silly an
Doing unpleasant things under unpleasant circumstances because you're told to do so for someone else's benefit is quite different from doing what you want to do because you love to do it.
While the financial repercussions of a high-paying death-march are better than those of volunteering on a project that someone finds interesting, there are rewards in life other than money. Some people think all rewards other than money are useless, but don't dismiss people who'd rather enjoy the span of time between birth and death a little more.
That being said, if I was hiring someone (I'm not -- I'm just a salaried code-grinder myself for now), I'd much rather see some passion and elegant code done for any or no price than the dim-eyed nods of someone who's been taking abuse-plus-paycheck half his life.
There are people who code database-backed web systems for decent pay in decent office conditions and are completely happy to do so. There are people who code really interesting stuff for really interesting projects that bear treatment many of us wouldn't. There are some that enjoy a particular project enough that they'll do it for free if they can afford to do so.
There are three scales at work here -- pay, conditions, and interest in the work. The three together meet to form an area or two where it's alright for a person to do the work, and many other areas of the graph where it's just not worth it. Some people will let just the pay scale rule their decisions. Some will let just the interest or just the office conditions do it. Most people come to the conclusion that a certain amount of boredom of task and a certain level of office displeasure is worth a certain level of extra money. They'll go a certain distance down on one scale to make it up in another, but they have their limits. If there's a way to raise any one scale without substantially lowering the others, they'll go for that.
More specifically, it'd be great to see more programs which had one license for multiple platforms. IF you're selling a per-seat or per-user license, let it be per-seat or per-user. Put all the versions on the same disk/web site, and let Mac, Solaris, Linux, Windows, or whatever other version be installed and used, up to the license limit.
I believe you'll get better numbers on relative demand when people find it easier and more convenient to choose a platform. Right now, you get situations similar to, "Well, we can buy the Mac version, but only 25% of us have Macs. Everyone has a PC on his or her desk except for Bob. Let's get Bob a PC or install Boot Camp or something and take the volume discount on the Windows version." With a per-user (or simultaneous-use) license, Bob could have the Mac _and_ Windows versions, so long as he's only using one or the other at any given time.
There's really not a fine line. If they're actually removing author attributions, they are in full-blown violation of the license. It may be overlooked by some, but if they did it on purpose and continue to do it, Eben Moglen, RMS, and those authors themselves certainly won't overlook it for long.
I know for a fact that the Illinois Dept. of Human Services had around 25k desktops on Netware as recently as 2001. I doubt they've dumped it completely, what with use of NDS and Zenworks and desktop snapshots being the standard day-to-day operating procedures.
I never said they didn't do a great job of weighting different factors. Choosing which individual statistics to consider and how to weigh them can be a challenge in any field where a measurement is needed. I just doubted that taking a bunch of factors and weighting them to make a new metric was patentable. Porn sites, dating sites, car enthusiast magazines, and Bayesian spam filters are a few examples of where combined metrics are often used. It's not exactly "novel" nor "non-obvious" from what I've read about it.
Unfortunately sometimes the hackers make the business choices. Some hackers are not good at business. Check on the stability of the company. If both seems stable, then the money or the technology matters more. If one or the other seems headed to join the dodo, then it doesn't matter what fun you'll have or what they intend to pay along the way.
Remember, big companies burn out and fade away sometimes too. They burn out just as fast, but tend to fade away more slowly. If they fade slowly, the company may be around longer, but it doesn't matter if you're in the first round of layoffs.
All of the additions and modifications to the project get their own copyright enforcement, too. Copyright term in the U.S. is (life of author + 70) years or for corporations it's 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation.
A popular GPLed project may contain little or none of it original code five or ten years after its initial release. Take Linux for an example. How do you think the Linux kernel will look 70 years after Linus Torvalds is dead? Will Linux 1.0.0 sources really be useful to close-source a clone of whatever people are running by then? 1.3.5? 2.0.14? And 95 years from now, do you think IBM will be kicking itself over letting support for eight-way SMP out the door? Will the Linux kernel be relevant 70 years after Linus dies? There's a good chance he'll live another 40-60 years anyway. Maybe even longer.
Is Sun going to care that someone in 95 years can use public-domain Java v.whatever-is-current-now source code in a closed-source application? They'd be allowed to anyway, if anyone could find the source at all, because the copyright is up at that point whether it's GPLed or not.
So, in 95 years, someone can legally release today's Java as their own product. Will you care?
If you can farm in Greenland and the plants that couldn't grow in the permafrost take up the CO2, does that help or hinder?
If the extra water vapor forms extra clouds and bounces more sunlight back out into space, does that help or hinder?
All in all, we really don't know. The over-reactionaries who want to ban capitalism, ban air travel, and ban pretty much everything else in the interests of the UN telling people what they can and can't do more than in the interests of real science don't know either. The people who counter-over-react and say that there's no possible way we could effect the climate also don't know.
The best we can do is to disturb the planet as little as we know how while living our lives. Setting up wild animal reserves, sea life reserves, and unbroken forest reserves is one good step. Making reasonable limits on fishing, farming, logging, hunting, and other potentially directly harmful activities outside reserves is another. Green-roofing buildings is another. Making computers, lights, cars, boats, and everything else more efficient is a great step. Generating more power locally vs. at such great distances so that less is lost in transmission is a great step, too.
Indeed. Diesel actually invented a coal dust internal combustion engine.
Of course, at critical mass, the explosion of fissionable material is a bit more of a concern than the same amount of coal dust. Thankfully, this is a condition less likely to happen by accident than airborne coal powder.
I doubt we'll ever see a nuclear explosion-powered powerplant or vehicle. Heat transfer engines are about the limit of the engine development chain for reusable devices utilizing rapid uranium fission or engineered hydrogen fusion, considering the relative difficulty of harnessing the pressure of an explosive event inside a turbine or reciprocating cylinder.
Disposable nuclear fission and fusion devices have been found to clear land and raze buildings quicker than devices powered by coal or oil, but with some unpleasant side effects. The scope of the site tends to be overrun, and the site is often dangerous to all life for some time after. These side effects tend to contraindicate use of disposable nuclear devices in favor of devices powered by coal, oil, or slower-operating, reusable nuclear reactors with more controlled release of energy in situations where human, animal, or plant life near the site is considered desirable within the next several thousand years.
Once upon a time, there were mainframes, and computing was good. Only it was only good for large universities, governments, and a handful of corporations.
Then, there came minicomputers. Fewer components meant smaller machine with smaller prices. Banks, small colleges, and even some high schools got into the game. My high school had an AS/400.
Then came the micros. These are what we call PCs now. They started as hobbyist toys. Then, the chips got more powerful and more memory was put in them, and they started to be more powerful than the minis of a few years before.
There were math coprocessors, but those got absorbed into the CPU. Then came accelerated 2d video, and later accelerated 3d video. Sound processing appeared on expansion cards, and then on the system board.
Then came bigger mainframes, faster minis, and high-end workstations. Micro users wanted more power. Micros were made with more instructions, some that did things with more bits at a time. Then the internal scheduling was made so that multiple instructions could be in different stages of being processed simultaneously. It was called pipelining, and the users saw that it was good.
Mainframes grew again, these things called servers that had a brain like a micro but a body like a pizza box but with lots of IO strength and more mouths and ears sprung up in the Data Center, which had been just the closet next to the coffe pot. People saw that servers were good, because the processing went on in the Data Center instead of on their Micros. And the servers sometimes joined together into great hordes called Clusters that could challenge any mainframe.
Then there were vector instructions added to the PUs. And some PUs could do a vector instruction and regular instructions both at once. And the vector unit stole some of the glory of the graphics accelerator.
People put two CPUs (or PUs, since they're not really central at that point) into one system, then four or eight. Then someone put two logical PUs on one chip.
Someone figured out that lots of the processing for graphics was still done on the CPU -- and more so now with vector instructions. The graphics accelerators grew their own vector units, and become very wise in the ways of the vector and in pipelining. More graphics work was placed with the accelerators than ever before.
A Major Designer of PUs determined that what was good and Intel-ligent for math processors in the beginnings of the micro was still good for other types of processing on the micro. The path had widened again, and two of these wider PUs per chip was becoming the norm. The die had shrunk yet again, meaning that now a stronger PU was now smaller than ever. Even more vector units could be fit on a chip, despite the fact that the chip held two whole PUs. In Embedded Land, in the valley of Console, a strange company called So Knee had put one PU on a chip with a massive vector unit, and called it Sell. A Major Designer determined that this was good, and noticed that it looked something like a PU and something like a graphics accelerator.
Now, graphics accelerators had become known as GPUs, because they were doing their own fair share of Processing. They had started to team up as well, sometimes with more than one GPU inside one Micro. Not since the Friendly days of The Great Chicken Head had so many chips gone into one machine. Most micros had at least two PUs, even if they were on one chip. They had one or more GPUs, even though the "G" was questionable since they could do other kinds of Processing, too. They had sound, often from a DSP. They had Networking, which is those extra mouths and ears of which the Servers have in such abundance.
And so, the die was shrinking again, and A Major Designer was swallowing a maker of GPUs. The socket for a different type of processor, which had been so Intel-ligent so long before, started to look like a good place for a GPU. And with the die shrinking, making more room on a chip, the thought of a CPU and a GPU together started look
Using a Power7 or an UltraSparc T1 for just drivers seems like mad overkill. Using the one with lots of vector power (like Cell or Power7) and/or lots of number-crunching and IO goodness (like the UltraSparc line) to do serious image/graphics/GIS/network/highdef audio/number crunching for simulations/encryption while the AMD chip runs the scheduler, most user apps, and stuff with lots of logic and integer math seems the best way to divide the work.
I'm talking mostly workstation-class machines, on which lots of stuff is done but they're usually mostly purposed for a particular task that's processor intensive, RAM intensive, or both.
Imagine running the kernel, keyboard, mouse, audio, filesytem, and daemons on an Opteron while using a Power7 for the GIMP, Blender, or a 3d CAD/CAM system and maybe for the X interface to do the final output. Imagine the cut in rendering times for the graphics stuff with one processor almost dedicated to it, while your mail client can be compiled for a relatively cheap CPU.
Now, imagine a huge database-driven application which does short comparisons on millions of small data chunks. Something like a Cell could do wonders with that, and the Power7 or UltraSparc wouldn't be too shabby either. But most of your system runs on AMD, which has lots of code available for it. All you need compiled for the other processor is the database and whatever wrapper code that calls the DB and does the comparisons if they're not done within the DB itself.
Apple ships fat binaries right now. The OS grabs and loads the part of the software package that's built for either the PowerPC or the Intel chip and loads it into memory. Imagine doing the same kind of thing with both processors on the same board. One binary is AMD/Intel code, another is Power code, and a third is a fat binary that goes either where it's configured to go or to the processor with the lowest utilization when the process launches.
You have posted an Internet rumor. Please provide substantiation that actual Americans have been actually hauled off to actual prisons that are actually secret, or remit to the Chinese government 1000 yuan.
Now, if I could just buy a system that takes full advantage of Opteron and Power7 or Opteron and UltraSparc on the same board. Imagine a system with one Opteron and one Power7, with the code that the Opteron is best suited to run running on that, and the sort of code that the Power7 is best suited for running on that. Imagine the same system but with an UltraSparc instead of a Power7.
It wouldn't be so hard, theoretically, to have one proecessor load all the coee from disk into memory, and hand off execution of any code written for the other processor for it to execute. The big deal would be marking which bits of code are meant for which processor. At the ELF executable level, this is already done. So it'd be possible to have an OS and applications installed with each applicaiton compiled for the processor better suited to that application. On the downside, the optimization, installation, and adminsitration of that OS and its applications could be a logistical nightmare. On another downside, or maybe on the upside actually -- we'd have to have firmware that supported both kinds of chips and prepped the sytem for them to run side-by-side when it boots. Bye, bye PC BIOS. Hello OpenFirmware or some equivalent.
If one platform came together that always used one socket for Opteron/Athlon64 and one for Power7, and someone writing to that platform could count on those two chips both being installed when someone referred to that platform, it'd be somewhat like the hardware of the Amiga with its semi-standard bevy of specialized processors. A high-end workstation that has two dual-core or quad-core Opterons, one Power7, and one really killer graphics adapter using a 4-socket board would be sweet. Maybe one of the Opterons and two Power7 chips? A base system of at least one Opteron and at least one Power7 processor with room to grow on either front would make either option feasible. And yes, it'd run Linux. In fact, Linux would probably be the first OS that could be made to run on it.
After thinking about this, I really want one. Substitute UltraSparc anywhere you see Power7, and if I'd want that, too. The strengths of all three might be nice, but in the long run it's probably better if just two that are good at different things become a platform together. Now someone just has to figure out who can and would build it. I'm not a hardware design guru, so I can't do the nuts and bolts on it. IBM could. Sun probably could. AMD probably could given enough rescources. Surely AMD and one of the others together could get it done. I hope someone does. The secret would be to either have it be a platform spec, or to have enough boards like it shipped to kernel developers that it becomes a solid option that way.
Opteron + Power7 + ATI GPU = killer workstation, and hopefully there's enough market for that to get it made.
They can give you their modified source signed by the key and the binaries signed by the key and not give you the key. That means that the source of any changes the vendor made to Linux are still released with the changes to the binaries. It means the binaries can be trusted to be from them, too. The only hassle is you don't have the keys to sign your new binaries once you make a change, because you're not that vendor and don't have their key. That's a poor protection of the freedom of your hardware, but it's still good protection of the freedom of Linux.
Linus is concerned with the freedom of Linux, including the right to use it on hardware that isn't "free as in speech". He's not looking to make sure that the license on his kernel forces license terms onto the hardware.
A good trusted platform module for a general purpose computer should allow you to add a couple of keys it will allow to have signed the system software. That way, you could add your own key in flash and sign your own changes. Hardware vendors interested in locking things down aren't likely to do that, but it'd be nice. Companies like Nintendo probably would use just the one key and not allow others, for example, but they're not building something as a general purpose computer.
You're using an application that runs atop Google's copy of Google's operating system. They are using the OS to serve the application. It's a fine line, but it is a line.
Thanks for the correction on the interstate system.
As for airplanes, balloons, blimps, and kites are not airplanes. A glider is not an airplane. A powered, heavier than air contraption that is not controllable is not a working airplane. No one schedules 75 passenegrs for a flight departing from Chicago and arriving at some random place at some random time, if at all. The Wikipedia entry you cite lists the Wright brothers as attaining the first heavier-than-air, powered, controlled flight. I didn't say "flying machine". I very specifically said "airplane". The Chinese invented black powder, but a German still invented trinitrotoluene.
As for the assembly line, the wikipedia entry you cite states that Whitney, Olds, and Ford were the main bearers of that idea. Yes, other ideas led up to it. It was an American, whether Olds or Ford, that combined the ideas successfully.
Combining multiple ideas in new ways to make something new is what most inventions are. Radios and telephones existed before the cellular telephone. Wireless home phones, local non-cellular radio mobile phones, and cellular radio networks for other purposes already existed, in fact. I'm sure someone gets credit as the inventor of the cellular phone. The camera phone combines cellular radio networking, telephone features, and digital photography which all existed before. It's still considered an invention because it was a novel concept to put them all together -- successfully -- even after cellular phones existed.
Saying that the Wrights didn't invent the airplane is kind of like saying Benz didn't invent the gasoline-powered automobile because carts (even prototypes of ones powered by other means) and internal combustion engines already existed (or maybe because Marcus's hand cart with a gasoline engine counts as an "automobile" by some definition with which most people would disagree). It's kind of like saying that Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the Web because Archie, Gopher, WAIS, Telnet, UUCP, SMTP, and FTP already existed and he just combined ideas in a new way and got it to work. It's kind of like saying the television wasn't an invention because moving pictures and radios already existed.
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The growth potential is a good point, although I'm not convinced it's currently Microsoft's biggest concern. They want more customers, of course. Right around the time of a major OS release, though, they tend to be more focused on locking in repeat business. With Vista rolling out, I think they're looking for whatever FUD and other tactics they can find to make sure when people buy new PCs that they aren't Linux PCs.
Once Vista is well established as a replacement for XP and Server 2003, then their main focus might become world domination. Right now they are trying to make sure existing Windows installations are a vertical market and not a horizontal one.
But it's not really Linux if it's not Linus (who's in the U.S.) who releases it. So you have Linux, which doesn't contain the IP, and something not quite Linux, which does. You couldn't really call the non-Linux kernel Linux without Linus's approval, which he may or may not give.
Would Microsoft care if something not Linux that couldn't be sold in thir main market contained the IP? Sure they would. But they'd still be laughing their asses off that their primary market would be that much less competitive.
Yes, Europe and Asia matter to Microsoft. The U.S. is still their bread and butter. That's not U.S.-centric thinking. It's just the simple truth that they want first to get business in their home market, the largest single-nation economy in the world, and the most PC-centric economy in the world -- all three of which are the U.S. -- and that the rest of the world is approached differently. The people Microsoft are using to try keeping the U.S. market cornered and those they are using to try to keep the rest of the world's markets cornered are probably not even the same people. They are a big company, after all. It's probably someone's job to worry only about the U.S. -- probably several people -- and someone else entirely who is suppos4ed to worry about everyone else.
The attributions are not part of the code. They are part of the copyright, and hence part of the basis for the license to be operable.
Unless you are a troll or a complete idiot, you cannot really support the idea that a license that is built on copyright can support the undermining of that copyright and continue to function.
The biggest ways I see Google being different from most companies in tech is that they are not into competing in well-established markets. Google has a tendency either to redefine the whole meaning and level of a market segment (like they did with search and Gmail), to invent whole new markets where they are the first company present (placing context-relevant ads on many, many websites), or get in to markets where therre are a few small players but they're going to be the only big one (online office suites that actually work).
It's a strategic company, not a tactical company. I think most companies think tactically. Most analysts almost certainly do. Google is so hard to analyze because they don't do what other companies do. Other companies look at what's out there and try to be better or to market better. Sometimes they try something new. Google just keeps doing new things, and the ones that stick to the wall stick hard.
Google doesn't focus on maximizing packaged units or hitting the sweet spot on the existing promotion cost/ROI curve. They are about moving the promotion cost/ROI curve to a new level by building strong user loyalty, and waiting for everyone else to catch up. Then they move on to another market curve where they do the same again.
The way they build strong user loyalty is often to make simple things simple to do. MS Office can do more than Google Spreadsheets and Google Documents. But Google's offerings work from just about every device you own, do everything you need to do for most documents, don't have to be installed, and only cost you the price of looking at ads (and maybe a bit of privacy). Google's search engine gets uncannily good results without going into the advanced search, and still has the advanced search when you need it.
I'm not a Google insider or anything, but I'd bet their products are dreamed up by brainstorming techies rather than market researchers. Then, the usability experts probably do the UI before graphic designers ever touch it. Marketing probably just markets what is ready for people to see, and of course most marketing for Google is just posting a notice on their sites anyway.
You are the one confused in this matter.
Read the damn license that I've been writing code under for ten years. I'll tell you this: if you remove my attribution from any of my GPLed code, expect a summons.
I've allowed a couple of project maintainers, with my permission, to place my code under the project's ownership and copyright with just a notice of thanks to me. That was my choice, and it was determined by the project maintainer and myself to be better for the projects involved. I do not give anyone free reign to steal credit for my work. Neither does anyone else using the GPL.
The very idea that a license that grants rights on top of a copyright could even remain in effect by invalidating said copyright is absurd.
GPLed software is not in the Public Domain. A GPLed work is a copyrighted work which the authors have decided to share with the other people in the world who are willing to share their changes to it. The Public Domain consists of works on which the copyright period has ended or which are specifically placed into the Public Domain by their authors.
According to U.S. law and international treaties to which the U.S. is a party, copyright applies to all published works almost anywhere in the world unless copyright is specifically disclaimed by the author. In fact, works completed and fixed in a tangible form are covered without publication in the U.S. Copyright does not require registration to exist, but you do have to register before bringing a n action in a U.S. court for infringement. Yes, there are exceptions. The U.S. for example does not enforce copyright on works published in certain other countries which themselves are not party to international copyright treaties. Before I get jumped all over for being Ameri-centric by noting U.S. laws, please notice that the company in question is a U.S. company operating in the U.S., so it is U.S. law that has jurisdiction.
I'm not a lawyer. If you want or need specific legal advice, contact a lawyer. The above paragraph is paraphrased from the website of the U.S. Copyright Office. Go to the The Copyright Office website yourself if you want to know more. Again, consult an attorney with specific knowledge of copyright issues if you want legal advice pertaining to a copyright case.
Don't really think of it as a separate graphics card pushed onto the CPU. MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!, AltiVec, et cetera have all brought specialized vector processing functions into CPUs with existing sets of opcodes. You know what GPUs tend to be really good at? Vector processing, matrix transforms, and all of that other highly parallel, small-data work. Now, you'll have an extended instruction set that does that well. Hopefully, it'll be done as part of the CPU's instruction set, or as a very tightly-bound coprocessor.
Imagine this scenario: A high-end game runs a physics engine on your CPU. It wants to run on your GPU, but that's busy doing the shading and rendering. So it runs on your second core if you have one, or your second CPU, or maybe on your second GPU, or on a dedicated physics board. Or it just falls back to the CPU, and eats up time better devoted to game logic and the IM you're about to get about your sick aunt from your Mom, letting you know that your aunt is all better and you don't have to quit your game of FarCry 16 or Half-Life 24 or whatever to go see her.
Okay, now imagine you've got a CPU that can do pretty much what a GPU can do besides its own specialty of kicking ass on integer logic and cache handling. It's a dual-core CPU with a built-in GPU to boot. The game logic runs mostly on core 1, the physics runs mostly on the built-in GPU, the rest of the system mostly runs on core 2, and you're a real gamer so your shading and rendering still happens on a dedicated graphics card with its own GPU. You only needed one Awesome Local Gamers Advanced Extreme XII (or "ALGAE-boxcars" to boys over at PC Rag) slot on your motherboard, because one of your GPUs was already on the CPU. That sick aunt? She types up an email about her pending medical malpractice suit on her system that has one chip socket and no ALGAE slot (not even ALAGE-uno, dammit), because all she needed was a driver for her entry-level laptop that basically runs video right from the CPU/GPU through some lead traces and a $1.50 blitter chip.
People who need high-end, specialized hardware to get the performance they want or need are not going to be left without options. People who just want to write a letter, play Tetris-klones, and maybe some low-end RTS games will get a cheaper system by not having to pay a third party for more hardware and more integration of disparate components than they really care about. It's win-win.
It's a cycle of breaking things out of the center of the system for dedication, then bringing them back into the center when the technology reaches a point that tighter integration is possible and helpful. We don't need sound on the CPU because there's no bottleneck, for example. We didn't need floating point on the CPU at one time, but enough people were using it and it got to be such a slowdown to use a separate chip for it, that it got placed on the CPU. AMD did memory controllers on the chip, and noone talked about how horrible an idea it was (except Intel, who will probably eventually do the same). GPUs are just next.
If most PCs sold started to be used for speech recognition instead of keyboard input, we'd see dedicated PCI or PCIe x1 cards for the work involved with doing that really, really well. Then, if there was need, x4 or x8 versions of the boards would appear, and motherboard manufacturers would take that slot need into consideration. Some boards would get speech recognition chips integrated onto them. Then, if it continued to be the primary input device, and there was still a big enough bottleneck at x16, we'd see that integrated onto the CPU once the die sizes shrunk enough that the "traditional" core could use tighter integration with the speech recognition stuff. I don't know that good speech recognition would take that level of integration to be efficient, but I couldn't think of a more hyped example of what seems _perpetually_ on the horizon "in just a few years at the current pace of microprocessor innovation".
People thought discrete sound and video were silly an
Doing unpleasant things under unpleasant circumstances because you're told to do so for someone else's benefit is quite different from doing what you want to do because you love to do it.
While the financial repercussions of a high-paying death-march are better than those of volunteering on a project that someone finds interesting, there are rewards in life other than money. Some people think all rewards other than money are useless, but don't dismiss people who'd rather enjoy the span of time between birth and death a little more.
That being said, if I was hiring someone (I'm not -- I'm just a salaried code-grinder myself for now), I'd much rather see some passion and elegant code done for any or no price than the dim-eyed nods of someone who's been taking abuse-plus-paycheck half his life.
There are people who code database-backed web systems for decent pay in decent office conditions and are completely happy to do so. There are people who code really interesting stuff for really interesting projects that bear treatment many of us wouldn't. There are some that enjoy a particular project enough that they'll do it for free if they can afford to do so.
There are three scales at work here -- pay, conditions, and interest in the work. The three together meet to form an area or two where it's alright for a person to do the work, and many other areas of the graph where it's just not worth it. Some people will let just the pay scale rule their decisions. Some will let just the interest or just the office conditions do it. Most people come to the conclusion that a certain amount of boredom of task and a certain level of office displeasure is worth a certain level of extra money. They'll go a certain distance down on one scale to make it up in another, but they have their limits. If there's a way to raise any one scale without substantially lowering the others, they'll go for that.
More specifically, it'd be great to see more programs which had one license for multiple platforms. IF you're selling a per-seat or per-user license, let it be per-seat or per-user. Put all the versions on the same disk/web site, and let Mac, Solaris, Linux, Windows, or whatever other version be installed and used, up to the license limit.
I believe you'll get better numbers on relative demand when people find it easier and more convenient to choose a platform. Right now, you get situations similar to, "Well, we can buy the Mac version, but only 25% of us have Macs. Everyone has a PC on his or her desk except for Bob. Let's get Bob a PC or install Boot Camp or something and take the volume discount on the Windows version." With a per-user (or simultaneous-use) license, Bob could have the Mac _and_ Windows versions, so long as he's only using one or the other at any given time.
There's really not a fine line. If they're actually removing author attributions, they are in full-blown violation of the license. It may be overlooked by some, but if they did it on purpose and continue to do it, Eben Moglen, RMS, and those authors themselves certainly won't overlook it for long.
I know for a fact that the Illinois Dept. of Human Services had around 25k desktops on Netware as recently as 2001. I doubt they've dumped it completely, what with use of NDS and Zenworks and desktop snapshots being the standard day-to-day operating procedures.
I never said they didn't do a great job of weighting different factors. Choosing which individual statistics to consider and how to weigh them can be a challenge in any field where a measurement is needed. I just doubted that taking a bunch of factors and weighting them to make a new metric was patentable. Porn sites, dating sites, car enthusiast magazines, and Bayesian spam filters are a few examples of where combined metrics are often used. It's not exactly "novel" nor "non-obvious" from what I've read about it.
Unfortunately sometimes the hackers make the business choices. Some hackers are not good at business. Check on the stability of the company. If both seems stable, then the money or the technology matters more. If one or the other seems headed to join the dodo, then it doesn't matter what fun you'll have or what they intend to pay along the way.
Remember, big companies burn out and fade away sometimes too. They burn out just as fast, but tend to fade away more slowly. If they fade slowly, the company may be around longer, but it doesn't matter if you're in the first round of layoffs.
All of the additions and modifications to the project get their own copyright enforcement, too. Copyright term in the U.S. is (life of author + 70) years or for corporations it's 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation.
A popular GPLed project may contain little or none of it original code five or ten years after its initial release. Take Linux for an example. How do you think the Linux kernel will look 70 years after Linus Torvalds is dead? Will Linux 1.0.0 sources really be useful to close-source a clone of whatever people are running by then? 1.3.5? 2.0.14? And 95 years from now, do you think IBM will be kicking itself over letting support for eight-way SMP out the door? Will the Linux kernel be relevant 70 years after Linus dies? There's a good chance he'll live another 40-60 years anyway. Maybe even longer.
Is Sun going to care that someone in 95 years can use public-domain Java v.whatever-is-current-now source code in a closed-source application? They'd be allowed to anyway, if anyone could find the source at all, because the copyright is up at that point whether it's GPLed or not.
So, in 95 years, someone can legally release today's Java as their own product. Will you care?
So weighting the fields in a database to come up with a metric is new?
If you can farm in Greenland and the plants that couldn't grow in the permafrost take up the CO2, does that help or hinder?
If the extra water vapor forms extra clouds and bounces more sunlight back out into space, does that help or hinder?
All in all, we really don't know. The over-reactionaries who want to ban capitalism, ban air travel, and ban pretty much everything else in the interests of the UN telling people what they can and can't do more than in the interests of real science don't know either. The people who counter-over-react and say that there's no possible way we could effect the climate also don't know.
The best we can do is to disturb the planet as little as we know how while living our lives. Setting up wild animal reserves, sea life reserves, and unbroken forest reserves is one good step. Making reasonable limits on fishing, farming, logging, hunting, and other potentially directly harmful activities outside reserves is another. Green-roofing buildings is another. Making computers, lights, cars, boats, and everything else more efficient is a great step. Generating more power locally vs. at such great distances so that less is lost in transmission is a great step, too.
The goal of the Swiss military to protect the sovereignty and independence of Switzerland seems to be going pretty well.
A real patriot stands up for his people, not the government.
It's nice when being patriotic means standing with the government, but sometimes true patriots must stand against it.
Indeed. Diesel actually invented a coal dust internal combustion engine.
Of course, at critical mass, the explosion of fissionable material is a bit more of a concern than the same amount of coal dust. Thankfully, this is a condition less likely to happen by accident than airborne coal powder.
I doubt we'll ever see a nuclear explosion-powered powerplant or vehicle. Heat transfer engines are about the limit of the engine development chain for reusable devices utilizing rapid uranium fission or engineered hydrogen fusion, considering the relative difficulty of harnessing the pressure of an explosive event inside a turbine or reciprocating cylinder.
Disposable nuclear fission and fusion devices have been found to clear land and raze buildings quicker than devices powered by coal or oil, but with some unpleasant side effects. The scope of the site tends to be overrun, and the site is often dangerous to all life for some time after. These side effects tend to contraindicate use of disposable nuclear devices in favor of devices powered by coal, oil, or slower-operating, reusable nuclear reactors with more controlled release of energy in situations where human, animal, or plant life near the site is considered desirable within the next several thousand years.
Once upon a time, there were mainframes, and computing was good. Only it was only good for large universities, governments, and a handful of corporations.
Then, there came minicomputers. Fewer components meant smaller machine with smaller prices. Banks, small colleges, and even some high schools got into the game. My high school had an AS/400.
Then came the micros. These are what we call PCs now. They started as hobbyist toys. Then, the chips got more powerful and more memory was put in them, and they started to be more powerful than the minis of a few years before.
There were math coprocessors, but those got absorbed into the CPU. Then came accelerated 2d video, and later accelerated 3d video. Sound processing appeared on expansion cards, and then on the system board.
Then came bigger mainframes, faster minis, and high-end workstations. Micro users wanted more power. Micros were made with more instructions, some that did things with more bits at a time. Then the internal scheduling was made so that multiple instructions could be in different stages of being processed simultaneously. It was called pipelining, and the users saw that it was good.
Mainframes grew again, these things called servers that had a brain like a micro but a body like a pizza box but with lots of IO strength and more mouths and ears sprung up in the Data Center, which had been just the closet next to the coffe pot. People saw that servers were good, because the processing went on in the Data Center instead of on their Micros. And the servers sometimes joined together into great hordes called Clusters that could challenge any mainframe.
Then there were vector instructions added to the PUs. And some PUs could do a vector instruction and regular instructions both at once. And the vector unit stole some of the glory of the graphics accelerator.
People put two CPUs (or PUs, since they're not really central at that point) into one system, then four or eight. Then someone put two logical PUs on one chip.
Someone figured out that lots of the processing for graphics was still done on the CPU -- and more so now with vector instructions. The graphics accelerators grew their own vector units, and become very wise in the ways of the vector and in pipelining. More graphics work was placed with the accelerators than ever before.
A Major Designer of PUs determined that what was good and Intel-ligent for math processors in the beginnings of the micro was still good for other types of processing on the micro. The path had widened again, and two of these wider PUs per chip was becoming the norm. The die had shrunk yet again, meaning that now a stronger PU was now smaller than ever. Even more vector units could be fit on a chip, despite the fact that the chip held two whole PUs. In Embedded Land, in the valley of Console, a strange company called So Knee had put one PU on a chip with a massive vector unit, and called it Sell. A Major Designer determined that this was good, and noticed that it looked something like a PU and something like a graphics accelerator.
Now, graphics accelerators had become known as GPUs, because they were doing their own fair share of Processing. They had started to team up as well, sometimes with more than one GPU inside one Micro. Not since the Friendly days of The Great Chicken Head had so many chips gone into one machine. Most micros had at least two PUs, even if they were on one chip. They had one or more GPUs, even though the "G" was questionable since they could do other kinds of Processing, too. They had sound, often from a DSP. They had Networking, which is those extra mouths and ears of which the Servers have in such abundance.
And so, the die was shrinking again, and A Major Designer was swallowing a maker of GPUs. The socket for a different type of processor, which had been so Intel-ligent so long before, started to look like a good place for a GPU. And with the die shrinking, making more room on a chip, the thought of a CPU and a GPU together started look
Using a Power7 or an UltraSparc T1 for just drivers seems like mad overkill. Using the one with lots of vector power (like Cell or Power7) and/or lots of number-crunching and IO goodness (like the UltraSparc line) to do serious image/graphics/GIS/network/highdef audio/number crunching for simulations/encryption while the AMD chip runs the scheduler, most user apps, and stuff with lots of logic and integer math seems the best way to divide the work.
I'm talking mostly workstation-class machines, on which lots of stuff is done but they're usually mostly purposed for a particular task that's processor intensive, RAM intensive, or both.
Imagine running the kernel, keyboard, mouse, audio, filesytem, and daemons on an Opteron while using a Power7 for the GIMP, Blender, or a 3d CAD/CAM system and maybe for the X interface to do the final output. Imagine the cut in rendering times for the graphics stuff with one processor almost dedicated to it, while your mail client can be compiled for a relatively cheap CPU.
Now, imagine a huge database-driven application which does short comparisons on millions of small data chunks. Something like a Cell could do wonders with that, and the Power7 or UltraSparc wouldn't be too shabby either. But most of your system runs on AMD, which has lots of code available for it. All you need compiled for the other processor is the database and whatever wrapper code that calls the DB and does the comparisons if they're not done within the DB itself.
Apple ships fat binaries right now. The OS grabs and loads the part of the software package that's built for either the PowerPC or the Intel chip and loads it into memory. Imagine doing the same kind of thing with both processors on the same board. One binary is AMD/Intel code, another is Power code, and a third is a fat binary that goes either where it's configured to go or to the processor with the lowest utilization when the process launches.
You have posted an Internet rumor. Please provide substantiation that actual Americans have been actually hauled off to actual prisons that are actually secret, or remit to the Chinese government 1000 yuan.
Now, if I could just buy a system that takes full advantage of Opteron and Power7 or Opteron and UltraSparc on the same board. Imagine a system with one Opteron and one Power7, with the code that the Opteron is best suited to run running on that, and the sort of code that the Power7 is best suited for running on that. Imagine the same system but with an UltraSparc instead of a Power7.
It wouldn't be so hard, theoretically, to have one proecessor load all the coee from disk into memory, and hand off execution of any code written for the other processor for it to execute. The big deal would be marking which bits of code are meant for which processor. At the ELF executable level, this is already done. So it'd be possible to have an OS and applications installed with each applicaiton compiled for the processor better suited to that application. On the downside, the optimization, installation, and adminsitration of that OS and its applications could be a logistical nightmare. On another downside, or maybe on the upside actually -- we'd have to have firmware that supported both kinds of chips and prepped the sytem for them to run side-by-side when it boots. Bye, bye PC BIOS. Hello OpenFirmware or some equivalent.
If one platform came together that always used one socket for Opteron/Athlon64 and one for Power7, and someone writing to that platform could count on those two chips both being installed when someone referred to that platform, it'd be somewhat like the hardware of the Amiga with its semi-standard bevy of specialized processors. A high-end workstation that has two dual-core or quad-core Opterons, one Power7, and one really killer graphics adapter using a 4-socket board would be sweet. Maybe one of the Opterons and two Power7 chips? A base system of at least one Opteron and at least one Power7 processor with room to grow on either front would make either option feasible. And yes, it'd run Linux. In fact, Linux would probably be the first OS that could be made to run on it.
After thinking about this, I really want one. Substitute UltraSparc anywhere you see Power7, and if I'd want that, too. The strengths of all three might be nice, but in the long run it's probably better if just two that are good at different things become a platform together. Now someone just has to figure out who can and would build it. I'm not a hardware design guru, so I can't do the nuts and bolts on it. IBM could. Sun probably could. AMD probably could given enough rescources. Surely AMD and one of the others together could get it done. I hope someone does. The secret would be to either have it be a platform spec, or to have enough boards like it shipped to kernel developers that it becomes a solid option that way.
Opteron + Power7 + ATI GPU = killer workstation, and hopefully there's enough market for that to get it made.
They can give you their modified source signed by the key and the binaries signed by the key and not give you the key. That means that the source of any changes the vendor made to Linux are still released with the changes to the binaries. It means the binaries can be trusted to be from them, too. The only hassle is you don't have the keys to sign your new binaries once you make a change, because you're not that vendor and don't have their key. That's a poor protection of the freedom of your hardware, but it's still good protection of the freedom of Linux.
Linus is concerned with the freedom of Linux, including the right to use it on hardware that isn't "free as in speech". He's not looking to make sure that the license on his kernel forces license terms onto the hardware.
A good trusted platform module for a general purpose computer should allow you to add a couple of keys it will allow to have signed the system software. That way, you could add your own key in flash and sign your own changes. Hardware vendors interested in locking things down aren't likely to do that, but it'd be nice. Companies like Nintendo probably would use just the one key and not allow others, for example, but they're not building something as a general purpose computer.
You're using an application that runs atop Google's copy of Google's operating system. They are using the OS to serve the application. It's a fine line, but it is a line.
Thanks for the correction on the interstate system.
As for airplanes, balloons, blimps, and kites are not airplanes. A glider is not an airplane. A powered, heavier than air contraption that is not controllable is not a working airplane. No one schedules 75 passenegrs for a flight departing from Chicago and arriving at some random place at some random time, if at all. The Wikipedia entry you cite lists the Wright brothers as attaining the first heavier-than-air, powered, controlled flight. I didn't say "flying machine". I very specifically said "airplane". The Chinese invented black powder, but a German still invented trinitrotoluene.
As for the assembly line, the wikipedia entry you cite states that Whitney, Olds, and Ford were the main bearers of that idea. Yes, other ideas led up to it. It was an American, whether Olds or Ford, that combined the ideas successfully.
Combining multiple ideas in new ways to make something new is what most inventions are. Radios and telephones existed before the cellular telephone. Wireless home phones, local non-cellular radio mobile phones, and cellular radio networks for other purposes already existed, in fact. I'm sure someone gets credit as the inventor of the cellular phone. The camera phone combines cellular radio networking, telephone features, and digital photography which all existed before. It's still considered an invention because it was a novel concept to put them all together -- successfully -- even after cellular phones existed.
Saying that the Wrights didn't invent the airplane is kind of like saying Benz didn't invent the gasoline-powered automobile because carts (even prototypes of ones powered by other means) and internal combustion engines already existed (or maybe because Marcus's hand cart with a gasoline engine counts as an "automobile" by some definition with which most people would disagree). It's kind of like saying that Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the Web because Archie, Gopher, WAIS, Telnet, UUCP, SMTP, and FTP already existed and he just combined ideas in a new way and got it to work. It's kind of like saying the television wasn't an invention because moving pictures and radios already existed.