Loop unrolling is only one heuristic for optimizing, and it's something many programmers do by hand to tweak performance. For example, you could do one of the following:
Alternatively, many programmers would realize they're dealing with constant values (most compilers won't recognize that strlen() as producing a constant), and write:
An ideal optimizing compiler would produce the latter code from the first. How in the world would a reverse-engineering tool recognize those two forms as equivalent?
A friend of mine work(ed) with a company in Kingston, ON that was spun off from Queens University. Their sole purpose and business model is to take whatever binaries and source a company has available, run it through their cluster of analysis systems, and produce a "clean" update of the system. As per usual, there is about 10-15% of the produced code that needs some hand inspection and tweaking to complete the task.
Their "big" business was the Y2K work, as their software isn't limited to just reverse-engineering, but can also refactor the re-engineered code (e.g. change all "year" values in the system from 2 digit to 4 digit, updating all related I/O formatting functions, overlay structures, etc.)
On the flip side, their stuff involves complex pattern matching and heuristics that put any other system I've heard of to shame. It requires clusters of systems running for days to do the initial code analysis. (OTOH, it probably took years to create the original code.)
I can't provide more specifics on the company because they're having some legal issues with co-investors.
What happened is that you had to deal with the real world of users, managers, budgets, corporate politics, and scheduling. Once you realized that over 50% of the job has nothing to do with programming (or at least not what you consider programming), you became disillusioned and bored.
Unfortunately if you're going to work in the corporate world, you're probably going to find that the vast majority of jobs have the same non-core-task annoyances. For example, my baby sister works for a non-profit with about 10-20 total employees. What does she gripe about from work? The boss, the clients (users), inter-office politics, lack of funding, and unreasonable expectations/deadlines. (And the computer crashing, but that's from a user's perspective -- she's not a programmer.)
As SCO's own source is closed, how can we possibly verify that they didn't merge Linux code into their Unix source? If there is code that matches, there is a public verifiable trail of Linux and GNU software development, with archives of that old code for confirmation.
We aren't allowed to see any similar development history with SCO's code, not even the source snapshots that would have been purchased by IBM et. al.
Finally there is the wee issue that the vast majority of *nix kernel algorithms have been analyzed and discussed to death in dozens of textbooks for operating systems courses. By definition those algorithms are not patentable, because they have been published to the public domain as part of those textbooks. If Linux and SCO both happen to implement those algorithms, SCO cannot claim infringement because they don't own that IP.
I really can't think of any Linux features that aren't discussed in such texts. The kernel doesn't use SVR4 signal APIs or semantics. The network stacks are from BSD origins. Resource scheduling algorithms are a dime a dozen from the textbooks, as are approaches for process and application/user security. What does that leave for SCO to claim they "own"?
LSB is Linux-specific, and deals with far more than file placement.
You want File Hierarchy Standard documentation, which is a vendor-agnostic standard for file locations on *nix systems.
Unfortunately most sites I've worked at know "better" and have weird homebrew setups that aren't used anywhere. One client site I'd recently worked at was using FHS, then a new honcho got into one of the "standards" groups in the company. Now they've got stuff going into "/apps" that used to be in "/opt".
Funny thing is, the sysadmins still put everything in/opt where it belongs, then create a bunch of symlinks from/apps to keep putz-boy happy that they're "following" the unconventional "standard" cooked up by people who don't write code or maintain systems.
Biwiring speakers that are also bi-amplified makes perfect sense. It's the people who bi-wire without multiple amplifiers that are wasting their money.
There are two "audiophile" markets. One is the true audiophile that arranges equipment, furniture, etc. to maximize sound quality.
The other is buying 10-15K components because they're more expensive, and therefore must be "better". This market isn't just about functionality any more than buying a Porsche. Unfortunately, it's also probably about 75% of the "audiophile" market.
Perhaps it's because B&O isn't a US-based company, but based out of Denmark?
However, the interference of sound and magnetic waves has been studied to death by the military. The technology developed by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs for doing A/D encoding ran into just such an issue with the US military -- it turned out some of their approaches were being used by these little cruise missiles the US had spent a couple billion developing. (They ended up being allowed to use it, but it was restricted so that they couldn't sell their solution to anyone else.)
By your same contention, what is the advantage of separating the "Windows" (/usr) and "Program Files" (/opt,/usr/local) directories on WinXX? Why not just put everything in "Windows"?
Oh, you don't want application programs clobbering the system files? Gee, I guess that's why *nix does the same thing (and did it first!)
It's not an issue of not wanting to consider alternatives, but the overhead and effort involved in making such changes just to appease users of a foreign environment (WinXX.) Would you consider it "staunch unwillingness" when Ford and GM use different dashboard or engine designs? Could it possibly be that they are competitors not imitators?
On a side note, do most WinXX users have any idea where their menu and desktop items link to? The user just clicks an icon or selects a menu item, and the program runs -- the same as KDE or Gnome. Why would the user give a damn whether it's running out of/opt/myutil or "/Program Files/MyUtil"? Hell, most WinXX users I know don't even partition their drive -- everything goes wherever installer suggests as a default (99% C:).
If a plumber contracts with a housing company to work at a housing development, they can usually count on their client to have properly planned and designed the building, wiring, plumbing, etc. In that case, they are strictly contracting: doing a well-spec'd job.
If a plumber works with an individual home owner to plumb a new bathroom being added to the basement, they're likely to be taking a "consultant" role and advise the home owner what their options are.
As with developers, the plumber probably charges both clients roughly the same amount. The housing development might get a price break for the volume business, the same as a software consultant is likely to negotiate a slightly lower rate when settling a long-term contract. There is also the factor that the housing development is unlikely to hover and question everything the plumber is doing.
You are correct that a "contractor" is typically hired to do a specific task, while a "consultant" is expected to provide expertise and guidance. However, the difference between those two is mostly in the mind of the one doing the work.
The general tone of the original article strikes me as argumentative and defensive. It is a consultant's job to offer options, advice, and approaches the client may not have considered. That information should not be presented as questioning the decisions of client management, but as an opportunity for the client to do things differently than they had planned.
When you are presenting those alternatives, it is critical that you present not only your preferred solution, but options which you might not like. Provide the client management with the pros and cons of different approaches, and let them do their job: making the final decision.
Remember that as a consultant you often do not have detailed information about enterprise licenses the client may have in place, knowledge of the corporate skillset, or even awareness of internal corporate directives.
As an example of why you should leave the client to make the final decision, consider a favourite Slashdot topic: Linux vs. Microsoft solutions. While you might "know" that Linux is a more cost-effective solution than one from Microsoft, the client might also be considering existing skillsets of the internal staff, existing contracts with data center support providers, etc. It is far from unusual for the retraining costs for internal staff and the costs of renegotiating third-party support contracts to absolutely dwarf the cost savings on the software itself.
Your job as a consultant is to advise, not dictate. If you have a good relationship with the client management, you might tactfully ask why they chose the solution they did, but you should not undercut their authority -- not if you want a long-term business relationship.
It's also a network hog, even compared to X-11. KDE or Gnome running on X turn it into a hog, but if you're running a pure window manager instead of integrated behemoth, you'll find X is relatively low traffic and quite snappy.
Personally I find that VNC performs over a 10MBit ethernet runs about the same as an X-11 terminal at the end of a dialup line. (I use VNC for slaving Win boxen from my main Linux dev box, the X-11 access was to provide support for a customer over the past three years.)
I haven't had my SVHS deck plugged in for ages, because I use one of my computers for recording. 45 minutes of much-better-than-SVHS video per CDR, with no jamming, tearing, dropouts, tape stretch, head alignment problems, dirty heads, etc.
None of my 800 (or thereabouts) CDs of DiVX were downloaded from the net. They're all just capped and archived from regular broadcasts, my old VHS tapes, and satellite.
I suppose you could use it to mail copies of movies to friends who are too far away to borrow the DVD, but I think it'd be quicker to just rip the DVD to an old hard drive and mail them that instead.
If you need the book for COBOL, you should seriously reconsider your career choice. It may be verbose and frustrating, but it's also about as easy to read and use as you can possibly get.
That's only part of the issue. I didn't learn squat about sysadmin tasks in University, because the focus is on teaching you how to think about software development, not how to use a particular tool or platform -- that's what tech schools are for.
A far bigger issue, as was already pointed out, is the mind-numbing tedium of being a mainframe operator. Alas, the same applies to being an operator on any system, as your main job is to swap media for backups, stock the print servers, and act as remote fingers when support staff call in on a page.
Regardless of platform, the only operators I knew who were happy with the job were middle-aged people who were more concerned about job stability than job challenge/fullfillment. Many of them were highly skilled, knew more about the systems than the developers, and would have made good developers. They just didn't want the pressure and insecurity that comes outside the data center.
As to "learning VB and Office", it sounds more like a tech school than a university. I've never heard of VB or Office being considered part of the programming course on a university campus. I have seen it offered as a half-credit course to help out students who have no prior experience with basic office automation tools, but who need the basics in order to be able to prepare and submit their coursework.
Another issue with getting people to consider a career as an operator is that the job stability is a smokescreen. Who wants to take a job for lower pay, that has little or no challenge to it, requires dealing with pissed-off user managers, and is subject to termination whenever someone gets a brain-fart about "saving" by outsourcing?
I like long story arcs (multi-episode/season), but a huge part of what made DS9, B5, or TOS successful was some consistency of character, which usually took a few seasons to develop. I'd given up completely on DS9 for seasons 2-3 before someone told me to give it another chance, by which time they'd developed some character depth.
As good looking as Jolene Blalock might be, I really appreciate that they've cut back on the gratuitous scenes with her. I want a show with some intelligence, not tits and ass bouncing in a jumpsuit. If I want T&A, I'll flip over to the comedy channel for "The Man Show" or something like it, or just go buy a magazine. (I hated the last few seasons of Voyager for the same reason -- too much focus on borg breast pads and not enough on characters.)
I'm not saying you can't have the occasional bit of sexual innuendo (ala British humour) or tension, but they really did overdo it in the first season.
As with every other Star Trek series to date, I hadn't really expected much of the first season or two. I think it's coming together quite well as a series, unlike crap such as "Firefly" (good riddance to that drek!)
There are no laws that corps need to maximize shareholder profit or share values, that just happens to be the way they are killing themselves right now. Look back 20-30 years, and you'll see that supporting the community, helping the employees, long-term R&D investment, etc. have historically been at least as important as pure profit. Why? So the company would be durable and continue to survive.
If you release a product into some OSS license after making a reasonable profit on top of the development costs, who do you think is going to be the primary maintainer? Who do you think has the developers that will be hired to do enhancements?
Most importantly, do you really think a company has any longevity by focusing on one product forever? Even the much vaunted masters of greed in Redmond don't rely on just one product to survive -- they market dozens, and continually try to find the next "big thing." Most support/enhancement developrs I know would be offended at your implication that they can only have one good idea in a lifetime.
Lotus 1-2-3 was once a key application, now it's just one minor component of a suite (if it even exists anymore.) This is the normal lifecycle of software -- MS Office and MS Windows are aberrations, not the norm.
One of the best tester's I'd ever worked with was thoroughly insane. His biggest joy in life was to think up things no normal person would expect software to do. (Dan, a big jovial Floridian with a beard. Nice guy, just completely out of control once he starts having fun!)
As an example, he simulated a "sporadic network failure" between the primary and hot-backup systems by unplugging and re-plugging the cabling every few seconds for five minutes straight. (The sad thing is that a real sporadic network failure can do this for hours or days before it's identified and fixed, especially if it's just one of dozens of connectors that is loose.)
Another one of his favourites is to always close windows with something like xkill to see how the code responded.
His worst brutality was entering invalid data into every field of a GUI, including copy-paste of control codes, trying to paste GIFs into text edit areas, pasting entire screens of text into 10 character fields, etc.
The sad thing is, I have never seen him take more than 20 minutes to crash an application when he puts his mind to proving that "all software is crap."
I'd talked many times with friends and co-workers about the idea of making enough money to retire comfortably, then releasing everything owned by my corp under the LGPL when I shut it down.
Quite a number of individuals think it's a great way of doing things. Unfortunately, large corporations and CEOs of those corporations never seem to be willing to settle for a tidy profit -- it's always got to be a bloodletting of every stone that might have another dollar.
So I do expect you'll see several products eventually released in such fashion, but it's unlikely they'll be "big name" products like Oracle, MS Office, or Notes.
"Nucleus" has been around for a rather long time, usually used to indicate the center or core of something (analagous to the nucleus of a cell.)
Even more damning for any attempt by Mentor to enforce any copyright claims is the fact that terms like "nucleus" and "core" have been used in operating systems textbooks and papers since the seventies.
TRON also only uses the word as part of an acronym, not as part of a trademark.
The biggest issue would be (as others have pointed out) that TRON existed long before Mentor's Nucleus RTOS.
All that I see RTLinux doing is acting as a microkernel that can switch between OS personalities. It just so happens that they lost their way and created a whole real-time OS instead of setting it up as a personality over the microkernel.
The other way of looking at the RTLinux patent is that they've patented the idea of running a VM hosted OS under a real-time system. Again, that just doesn't make sense as an enforceable patent or you could start patenting any specific combination of host and guest systems.
Maybe there is something buried in the patent that I didn't understand, but to me it just seems like patenting a specific case of the obvious. Then again, I thought (and still think) that patents like Amazon's one-click were asinine and unenforceable, yet no one's managed to knock the stupid thing down yet.
Followed the link you provided -- pretty nice for studio monitors.
But try using a few 0.25 inch stereo jack to RCA jack adapters, and run good cables to a real stereo. Nothing like a few watts of pure class A to improve the audio quality... *g*
The Audigy and Audigy 2 are full bus-mastering PCI cards, while the SBLive was not. The result is that many 2-3 year old VIA chipset mobos have problems with output crackling (and other distortions) when using an SBLive on a busy system. (Other chipsets have the issue as well, it's just impossible to ignore with certain VIA chipsets.)
Aside from bus mastering, the Audigy 2 Platinum can actually accept the SPDIF feeds under Win2K/XP, while the SBLive software didn't, doesn't, and will likely never work with SPDIF inputs once you stop running Win9x.
The rest of the "features" are just marketing crap to put on the box in hopes of suckering someone into wasting money. The only way the audio quality could be made "audiophile" is to feed pure digital from the card to a real surround sound amplifier, but it sounds like you lose the DVD-Audio playback when doing so. The RF interference in a computer case, relatively unstable power supplies, and use of chip amps make me laugh when I see companies claim "audiophile" sound quality for a sound card.
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Loop unrolling is only one heuristic for optimizing, and it's something many programmers do by hand to tweak performance. For example, you could do one of the following:
Alternatively, many programmers would realize they're dealing with constant values (most compilers won't recognize that strlen() as producing a constant), and write:
An ideal optimizing compiler would produce the latter code from the first. How in the world would a reverse-engineering tool recognize those two forms as equivalent?
A friend of mine work(ed) with a company in Kingston, ON that was spun off from Queens University. Their sole purpose and business model is to take whatever binaries and source a company has available, run it through their cluster of analysis systems, and produce a "clean" update of the system. As per usual, there is about 10-15% of the produced code that needs some hand inspection and tweaking to complete the task.
Their "big" business was the Y2K work, as their software isn't limited to just reverse-engineering, but can also refactor the re-engineered code (e.g. change all "year" values in the system from 2 digit to 4 digit, updating all related I/O formatting functions, overlay structures, etc.)
On the flip side, their stuff involves complex pattern matching and heuristics that put any other system I've heard of to shame. It requires clusters of systems running for days to do the initial code analysis. (OTOH, it probably took years to create the original code.)
I can't provide more specifics on the company because they're having some legal issues with co-investors.
What happened is that you had to deal with the real world of users, managers, budgets, corporate politics, and scheduling. Once you realized that over 50% of the job has nothing to do with programming (or at least not what you consider programming), you became disillusioned and bored.
Unfortunately if you're going to work in the corporate world, you're probably going to find that the vast majority of jobs have the same non-core-task annoyances. For example, my baby sister works for a non-profit with about 10-20 total employees. What does she gripe about from work? The boss, the clients (users), inter-office politics, lack of funding, and unreasonable expectations/deadlines. (And the computer crashing, but that's from a user's perspective -- she's not a programmer.)
As SCO's own source is closed, how can we possibly verify that they didn't merge Linux code into their Unix source? If there is code that matches, there is a public verifiable trail of Linux and GNU software development, with archives of that old code for confirmation.
We aren't allowed to see any similar development history with SCO's code, not even the source snapshots that would have been purchased by IBM et. al.
Finally there is the wee issue that the vast majority of *nix kernel algorithms have been analyzed and discussed to death in dozens of textbooks for operating systems courses. By definition those algorithms are not patentable, because they have been published to the public domain as part of those textbooks. If Linux and SCO both happen to implement those algorithms, SCO cannot claim infringement because they don't own that IP.
I really can't think of any Linux features that aren't discussed in such texts. The kernel doesn't use SVR4 signal APIs or semantics. The network stacks are from BSD origins. Resource scheduling algorithms are a dime a dozen from the textbooks, as are approaches for process and application/user security. What does that leave for SCO to claim they "own"?
LSB is Linux-specific, and deals with far more than file placement.
You want File Hierarchy Standard documentation, which is a vendor-agnostic standard for file locations on *nix systems.
Unfortunately most sites I've worked at know "better" and have weird homebrew setups that aren't used anywhere. One client site I'd recently worked at was using FHS, then a new honcho got into one of the "standards" groups in the company. Now they've got stuff going into "/apps" that used to be in "/opt".
Funny thing is, the sysadmins still put everything in /opt where it belongs, then create a bunch of symlinks from /apps to keep putz-boy happy that they're "following" the unconventional "standard" cooked up by people who don't write code or maintain systems.
Biwiring speakers that are also bi-amplified makes perfect sense. It's the people who bi-wire without multiple amplifiers that are wasting their money.
There are two "audiophile" markets. One is the true audiophile that arranges equipment, furniture, etc. to maximize sound quality.
The other is buying 10-15K components because they're more expensive, and therefore must be "better". This market isn't just about functionality any more than buying a Porsche. Unfortunately, it's also probably about 75% of the "audiophile" market.
Perhaps it's because B&O isn't a US-based company, but based out of Denmark?
However, the interference of sound and magnetic waves has been studied to death by the military. The technology developed by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs for doing A/D encoding ran into just such an issue with the US military -- it turned out some of their approaches were being used by these little cruise missiles the US had spent a couple billion developing. (They ended up being allowed to use it, but it was restricted so that they couldn't sell their solution to anyone else.)
By your same contention, what is the advantage of separating the "Windows" (/usr) and "Program Files" (/opt, /usr/local) directories on WinXX? Why not just put everything in "Windows"?
Oh, you don't want application programs clobbering the system files? Gee, I guess that's why *nix does the same thing (and did it first!)
It's not an issue of not wanting to consider alternatives, but the overhead and effort involved in making such changes just to appease users of a foreign environment (WinXX.) Would you consider it "staunch unwillingness" when Ford and GM use different dashboard or engine designs? Could it possibly be that they are competitors not imitators?
On a side note, do most WinXX users have any idea where their menu and desktop items link to? The user just clicks an icon or selects a menu item, and the program runs -- the same as KDE or Gnome. Why would the user give a damn whether it's running out of /opt/myutil or "/Program Files/MyUtil"? Hell, most WinXX users I know don't even partition their drive -- everything goes wherever installer suggests as a default (99% C:).
That is an excellant example.
If a plumber contracts with a housing company to work at a housing development, they can usually count on their client to have properly planned and designed the building, wiring, plumbing, etc. In that case, they are strictly contracting: doing a well-spec'd job.
If a plumber works with an individual home owner to plumb a new bathroom being added to the basement, they're likely to be taking a "consultant" role and advise the home owner what their options are.
As with developers, the plumber probably charges both clients roughly the same amount. The housing development might get a price break for the volume business, the same as a software consultant is likely to negotiate a slightly lower rate when settling a long-term contract. There is also the factor that the housing development is unlikely to hover and question everything the plumber is doing.
You are correct that a "contractor" is typically hired to do a specific task, while a "consultant" is expected to provide expertise and guidance. However, the difference between those two is mostly in the mind of the one doing the work.
The general tone of the original article strikes me as argumentative and defensive. It is a consultant's job to offer options, advice, and approaches the client may not have considered. That information should not be presented as questioning the decisions of client management, but as an opportunity for the client to do things differently than they had planned.
When you are presenting those alternatives, it is critical that you present not only your preferred solution, but options which you might not like. Provide the client management with the pros and cons of different approaches, and let them do their job: making the final decision.
Remember that as a consultant you often do not have detailed information about enterprise licenses the client may have in place, knowledge of the corporate skillset, or even awareness of internal corporate directives.
As an example of why you should leave the client to make the final decision, consider a favourite Slashdot topic: Linux vs. Microsoft solutions. While you might "know" that Linux is a more cost-effective solution than one from Microsoft, the client might also be considering existing skillsets of the internal staff, existing contracts with data center support providers, etc. It is far from unusual for the retraining costs for internal staff and the costs of renegotiating third-party support contracts to absolutely dwarf the cost savings on the software itself.
Your job as a consultant is to advise, not dictate. If you have a good relationship with the client management, you might tactfully ask why they chose the solution they did, but you should not undercut their authority -- not if you want a long-term business relationship.
VNC is cheap. It works. It's easy.
It's also a network hog, even compared to X-11. KDE or Gnome running on X turn it into a hog, but if you're running a pure window manager instead of integrated behemoth, you'll find X is relatively low traffic and quite snappy.
Personally I find that VNC performs over a 10MBit ethernet runs about the same as an X-11 terminal at the end of a dialup line. (I use VNC for slaving Win boxen from my main Linux dev box, the X-11 access was to provide support for a customer over the past three years.)
I haven't had my SVHS deck plugged in for ages, because I use one of my computers for recording. 45 minutes of much-better-than-SVHS video per CDR, with no jamming, tearing, dropouts, tape stretch, head alignment problems, dirty heads, etc.
None of my 800 (or thereabouts) CDs of DiVX were downloaded from the net. They're all just capped and archived from regular broadcasts, my old VHS tapes, and satellite.
I suppose you could use it to mail copies of movies to friends who are too far away to borrow the DVD, but I think it'd be quicker to just rip the DVD to an old hard drive and mail them that instead.
If you need the book for COBOL, you should seriously reconsider your career choice. It may be verbose and frustrating, but it's also about as easy to read and use as you can possibly get.
Those are the classic no-names ever created. How can you not love movies with increadibly over-the-top stupid fight scenes?
"Dead Heat" had the zombified cop and the zombified henchman doing the traditional gun battle in a hallway, ending up inches apart with guns blazing.
"They Live" had the best overdone fight between friends I've ever seen.
Bruce's stuff is downright popular in comparison!
How the hell can you expect a mainframe to BSOD when the terminals are green screens?
That's only part of the issue. I didn't learn squat about sysadmin tasks in University, because the focus is on teaching you how to think about software development, not how to use a particular tool or platform -- that's what tech schools are for.
A far bigger issue, as was already pointed out, is the mind-numbing tedium of being a mainframe operator. Alas, the same applies to being an operator on any system, as your main job is to swap media for backups, stock the print servers, and act as remote fingers when support staff call in on a page.
Regardless of platform, the only operators I knew who were happy with the job were middle-aged people who were more concerned about job stability than job challenge/fullfillment. Many of them were highly skilled, knew more about the systems than the developers, and would have made good developers. They just didn't want the pressure and insecurity that comes outside the data center.
As to "learning VB and Office", it sounds more like a tech school than a university. I've never heard of VB or Office being considered part of the programming course on a university campus. I have seen it offered as a half-credit course to help out students who have no prior experience with basic office automation tools, but who need the basics in order to be able to prepare and submit their coursework.
Another issue with getting people to consider a career as an operator is that the job stability is a smokescreen. Who wants to take a job for lower pay, that has little or no challenge to it, requires dealing with pissed-off user managers, and is subject to termination whenever someone gets a brain-fart about "saving" by outsourcing?
I like long story arcs (multi-episode/season), but a huge part of what made DS9, B5, or TOS successful was some consistency of character, which usually took a few seasons to develop. I'd given up completely on DS9 for seasons 2-3 before someone told me to give it another chance, by which time they'd developed some character depth.
As good looking as Jolene Blalock might be, I really appreciate that they've cut back on the gratuitous scenes with her. I want a show with some intelligence, not tits and ass bouncing in a jumpsuit. If I want T&A, I'll flip over to the comedy channel for "The Man Show" or something like it, or just go buy a magazine. (I hated the last few seasons of Voyager for the same reason -- too much focus on borg breast pads and not enough on characters.)
I'm not saying you can't have the occasional bit of sexual innuendo (ala British humour) or tension, but they really did overdo it in the first season.
As with every other Star Trek series to date, I hadn't really expected much of the first season or two. I think it's coming together quite well as a series, unlike crap such as "Firefly" (good riddance to that drek!)
There are no laws that corps need to maximize shareholder profit or share values, that just happens to be the way they are killing themselves right now. Look back 20-30 years, and you'll see that supporting the community, helping the employees, long-term R&D investment, etc. have historically been at least as important as pure profit. Why? So the company would be durable and continue to survive.
If you release a product into some OSS license after making a reasonable profit on top of the development costs, who do you think is going to be the primary maintainer? Who do you think has the developers that will be hired to do enhancements?
Most importantly, do you really think a company has any longevity by focusing on one product forever? Even the much vaunted masters of greed in Redmond don't rely on just one product to survive -- they market dozens, and continually try to find the next "big thing." Most support/enhancement developrs I know would be offended at your implication that they can only have one good idea in a lifetime.
Lotus 1-2-3 was once a key application, now it's just one minor component of a suite (if it even exists anymore.) This is the normal lifecycle of software -- MS Office and MS Windows are aberrations, not the norm.
One of the best tester's I'd ever worked with was thoroughly insane. His biggest joy in life was to think up things no normal person would expect software to do. (Dan, a big jovial Floridian with a beard. Nice guy, just completely out of control once he starts having fun!)
As an example, he simulated a "sporadic network failure" between the primary and hot-backup systems by unplugging and re-plugging the cabling every few seconds for five minutes straight. (The sad thing is that a real sporadic network failure can do this for hours or days before it's identified and fixed, especially if it's just one of dozens of connectors that is loose.)
Another one of his favourites is to always close windows with something like xkill to see how the code responded.
His worst brutality was entering invalid data into every field of a GUI, including copy-paste of control codes, trying to paste GIFs into text edit areas, pasting entire screens of text into 10 character fields, etc.
The sad thing is, I have never seen him take more than 20 minutes to crash an application when he puts his mind to proving that "all software is crap."
I'd talked many times with friends and co-workers about the idea of making enough money to retire comfortably, then releasing everything owned by my corp under the LGPL when I shut it down.
Quite a number of individuals think it's a great way of doing things. Unfortunately, large corporations and CEOs of those corporations never seem to be willing to settle for a tidy profit -- it's always got to be a bloodletting of every stone that might have another dollar.
So I do expect you'll see several products eventually released in such fashion, but it's unlikely they'll be "big name" products like Oracle, MS Office, or Notes.
"Nucleus" has been around for a rather long time, usually used to indicate the center or core of something (analagous to the nucleus of a cell.)
Even more damning for any attempt by Mentor to enforce any copyright claims is the fact that terms like "nucleus" and "core" have been used in operating systems textbooks and papers since the seventies.
TRON also only uses the word as part of an acronym, not as part of a trademark.
The biggest issue would be (as others have pointed out) that TRON existed long before Mentor's Nucleus RTOS.
All that I see RTLinux doing is acting as a microkernel that can switch between OS personalities. It just so happens that they lost their way and created a whole real-time OS instead of setting it up as a personality over the microkernel.
The other way of looking at the RTLinux patent is that they've patented the idea of running a VM hosted OS under a real-time system. Again, that just doesn't make sense as an enforceable patent or you could start patenting any specific combination of host and guest systems.
Maybe there is something buried in the patent that I didn't understand, but to me it just seems like patenting a specific case of the obvious. Then again, I thought (and still think) that patents like Amazon's one-click were asinine and unenforceable, yet no one's managed to knock the stupid thing down yet.
Followed the link you provided -- pretty nice for studio monitors.
But try using a few 0.25 inch stereo jack to RCA jack adapters, and run good cables to a real stereo. Nothing like a few watts of pure class A to improve the audio quality... *g*
The Audigy and Audigy 2 are full bus-mastering PCI cards, while the SBLive was not. The result is that many 2-3 year old VIA chipset mobos have problems with output crackling (and other distortions) when using an SBLive on a busy system. (Other chipsets have the issue as well, it's just impossible to ignore with certain VIA chipsets.)
Aside from bus mastering, the Audigy 2 Platinum can actually accept the SPDIF feeds under Win2K/XP, while the SBLive software didn't, doesn't, and will likely never work with SPDIF inputs once you stop running Win9x.
The rest of the "features" are just marketing crap to put on the box in hopes of suckering someone into wasting money. The only way the audio quality could be made "audiophile" is to feed pure digital from the card to a real surround sound amplifier, but it sounds like you lose the DVD-Audio playback when doing so. The RF interference in a computer case, relatively unstable power supplies, and use of chip amps make me laugh when I see companies claim "audiophile" sound quality for a sound card.
Just hit rewind or (re)play as appropriate...