When you have the Cato Institute opposing your "deregulation", you know something is amiss.
The article doesn't mention Cato's stand; is this
some kind of astroturfing?
For that matter, Cato and deregulation are more
than a little wierd. Their stance is that there
ought to be nothing constraining corporations,
neither government nor especially "we the people".
They put it more subtly though!
That is, "economic justice" is a big Cato anti-goal...
if they were to take a stance on this issue, it'd
be a sign that they saw big $$$ on the side they took,
and thought a preemptive strike might help.
Hmm... and for that matter, what did the USSR
have to do with socialism? The government was
increasingly fascist. (Which oddly enough is much
the same structure the Bush regime is pushing as
aggressively as it can in the US.)
Well, I started to read through the court
documents, and it looks so far like the ISP
who gets to keep the addresses (courtesy
of the order) actually has
some really serious complaints against its
upstream provider, which is why the court had to take
some sort of immediate action.
Technically, I understand the knee-jerk response
that's all/. seems to cover so far.
But seriously -- what's the judge to do, when
the upstream ISP is doing stuff like that? They've
broken the contract so many times it's not funny,
and it seems like this is a pretty minimal step
towards letting the victim (== ISP that gets
to keep the address, per the order) get
disentangled from an especially crapulent
upstream provider.
Seems most of the/. crowd would
prefer that ISPs be given the kind of powers
that God-Emperor Bush seems to want,
to abuse anyone they see fit and never be
brought to account.
Rail traffic... have you ever considered the subsidies
the government offers to the auto, road, and aviation industries?
In terms of subsidy per passenger mile, those industries
are far more heavily subsidized than rail traffic.
Or to put it differently, the problems rail traffic has
are basically that its competition is so extensively subsidized
that it's all but impossible to compete.
"Our" government is quite heavily in the business of
distorting the economy. Primarily to benefit military
industries (the auto industry only really took off after
WW2, as a way to turn tank-production capacity into a
dual-use technology) at the expense of more naturally
efficient mechanisms. Although the individual characters
in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were clearly not real,
except maybe Jessica Rabbit!, the plot to abolish the
public transport system is very well documented as being
true. But the major war contractors were allowed to get
away with it.
Profit is not God.
Although far too many of the people now running "our"
government worship it, even when it conflicts with their
basic responsibilities to support healthy (local)
communities and to support civil rights.
The government's purpose is not to provide you with cheap utilities.
Hit that man with a cluestick!
I've often lived in places with local power utilities.
And water. And sewage, and waste disposal. And cable TV.
The reason telco is often such an exception is that
telco service was historically highly regulated, to serve
the same goals as other local utilities.
The government's purpose is to support a healthy
community, and oddly enough it turns out that everyone wins
when utilities are affordable... and when they aren't just
unaccountable
operations to vacuum dollars out of the local economy into
out-of-state friends of the current empire in DC.
Actually there's a strong tradition of municipal utilities
in most parts of the country. It turns out that they generally
provide better service than private companies... far more
responsive (they're not run from some other town, possibly
in another state or country), and less expensive.
Consider even fairly major operations like Cleveland
(look at the fraud perpetrated on Dennis Kucinich when
he was mayor there -- I was a few towns over) and
Long Island. Long Island power is a particularly
interesting example... they moved to local power, and
it was a key part of turning around the local economy.
ISPs that can't be bothered to filter out the viruses are
the primary cause of all this damage.
Today, almost all viruses are weapons to attack home PCs,
installing spambots. If the ISPs had even been marginally
responsible as these epidemics started, rather than fostering
the spread of ever-more-dangerous virii, today's problems would
be several orders of magnitude less than they are.
That has nothing to do with broadband per se.
It has to do with trying to make a buck by externalizing
all costs... changing the Internet from a place where
organizations were responsible, to one where irresponsibility
became the norm.
There are lots of real-world examples of people
being held responsible for their actions.
You can't just go screwing people to give them AIDS, for example.
Or firing guns into crowds.
And there are plenty of places where littering gives
reasonable fines (hundreds of dollars).
... oh yeah, ISPs are corporations, and
corporations are lately expected to be irresponsible.
Thats F*CKED, end of story.
A receipt would prevent anonymous voting;
it's what you'd provide to -- oh, Enron -- to prove that you
voted for the "right" candidate. Then they pay you.
(Maybe a meal, or by not firing you, or whatever.)
An audit trail is what's needed.
And a paper, voter-verifiable copy of the ballot
you just filled out is exactly the right thing
there. But it must never leave the polling place,
Let's stop having slashdot advocate that the world
make it even easier to sell out to corporations and
other organizations that are corrupting the political
process. Stop calling them "receipts" in the
stories, and get editors who stop making such mistakes.
Let's try to be up-level from the Faux News Network.
Well, they're saying that they now have some new USB
software... seems like they're finally starting to take
advantage of the hardware capabilities to offer a
composite device that can simultaneously:
Act like a network link... using the same
proprietary protocol as earlier Zaurii, which
needs special drivers for every OS. (They have
part of an excuse of hardware limitations. Only
part of one.)
Act like a usb mass storage... like any
old flash memory product, using standard
drivers for pretty much every OS. (There
are technical awkwardnesses there, since
that's a block level protocol not a remote
filesystem protocol. Maybe they're using
PTP, like a camera would but for non-JPG files.)
Or maybe you have to reconfigure something.
The descriptions are unclear; if the Japanese
text was clear, the translations certainly lost it.
There's also gobs of translation software,
Japanese-to-English and vice versa.
... or more simply: updated software is
the main difference they've described.
The last major SF trend I saw was cyberpunk,
and the world it painted (say, Neuromancer)
wasn't a particularly pleasant place.
While fantasy (elves and everything) has some
unpleasant chunks (Mordor or its analogues), it
at least doesn't treat those as the best we have
to look forward too.
Fiction reflects the world we live in, and in
a world where the US government has clearly
been hijacked by thieves (and liars) in high
places -- who feel free to invade countries
to generate new sources of corporate welfare,
and who feel free to decrease civil rights
thorughout the world -- we
need Fiction that gives us a better place.
Until science stops being an excuse to
oppress people (farmers, people who want to
listen to music, normal folk), SF isn't
going to be able to be all that fun.
Let me emphasise that NEC EHCI chips are currently the only ones that work full-speed (er, I mean, hi-speed) with the Linux kernel.
Not at all true. Though you're strongly encouraged
to be careful if you have a VT6202 (funky chip timings
make for more than its fair share of trouble), and to
use the very latest driver versions.
Some bugs have taken a while to exterminate.
The 2.4.21-ac1 tree should be pretty good, though
you should likely add a small "micro-patch" (with
a few one-liner fixes). As should the very latest
Linus tree, 2.5.72-bk2 (includes that "micro patch");
your next sync with Linus' tree may have that.
Most any current EHCI hardware should work fine
under Linux, with drivers dated 2003-June (instead
of 2003-January).
I could use a cluebat here. All Sun4 machines post-dated
the Sun386i, and I never saw one run SunOS 3.x... it was all
based on the SVr4 code. (Though not the earliest versions)
Don't be confused by the way the SunOS 4.x code merged the
BSD-isms in with the SVr4-isms... it was SVr4 at core,
with a BSD veneer. Later versions of Solaris evolved even more.
No Sun4 included a Motorola chip; that'd have made
it into a Sun3. You don't know what you're talking about.
I never denied the politics or the "one arrow" strategy
impact; just pointed out that the way it was implemented
had a magic "... and the answer is SPARC" clause, which
is what nuked the original "Open" systems thrust of Sun.
RISC had a marketing cachet that wasn't wholly deserved,
although at that time it was more deserved than today.
Sources... clearly you won't believe people that were
there at the time. So failing that you'd want a copy of
the relevant contracts and presentations. Sorry, no.
The switch to Solaris (as someone else points out) had
nothing to do with the switch to SPARC.
False.
Sun didn't have the money to invest in SPARC
engineering ("productizing the <university/> RISC machine", if
you will) until it got a boatload of $$$ from ATT as part
of its work to merge SunOS features into SVR4.
That kind of hardware work isn't cheap,
especially when it includes transitioning existing
product lines (Sun3, Sun386i) and customers.
How many companies can start new chip designs today?
Even Intel can't afford it, look at Itanic!
Even though it was cheaper back then, it wasn't
in the least bit "cheap". Co-development funding
was needed.
If ATT hadn't
wanted to kill of the main BSD variant, Sun would
likely still
have been an "open systems" company.
And if you don't recall that, you weren't at the company
when that was all happening, or in the industry watching
the dynamics of SVr4 and the "Oppose Sun Forever/1" OS.
One of
the strings on that contract was that all new hardware
had to ship with SunOS 4 (the SVr4 based code) starting
at some particular date. The Sun386i predated the SPARC1
you mentioned, and it was one of the last boxes
that could ship with 3.x
(the "old" BSD codebase). Sun wasn't allowed to continue
trying to scale the BSD code -- the ATT contract said so.
Those Sun4 machines couldn't (legally) be sold with
the SunOS 3.x kernels.
As for performance... odd, the Sun486i was faster
than the Sun 4/110, not that it ever shipped. Quite a
lot of Sun386i hardware upgrades had to get held back
to continue making the early SPARC hardware look good
by comparison. (In fact, I don't think any Sun386i
product upgrades really appeared.) Same thing applied
to I/O and memory busses, not just CPUs.
You seem to think that being gone for seven years
doesn't count as "long gone"... heh. His influence on
current designs is rather indirect. Minor apologies
for not spelling Andy's name right, one's used to just
saying "Andy".
Sun's just being forced to go back to its roots,
which were running a commodity Open Source OS (SunOS
started as BSD) on commodity hardware (m68k at first,
then SPARC except for a couple years when they also
sold 80386 hardware, as they started Solaris).
That should be a healthy thing, long term, though
they have to get rid of a lot of closed-system attitudes.
Like the ones that have crippled so much Free Java
work.
If Sun had kept true to their roots, they'd
have been running Linux on x86 from day one...
instead, they wanted to keep
one founder (Andy Bechtolstein),
who wanted to design a RISC chip (became SPARC).
So Sun sold out SunOS in favor of
Solaris/SVr4, so they
could switch to non-commodity hardware. Well I've
got news for you: Andy's long gone, and SPARC
was never that hot. And the customer lock-in
is going away... customers always wanted the
open systems approach, even when Scott McNealy
refused to play that game.
If the legal frame work of a given locality doesn't support your business model, don't use it. In the past few years we've all seen a bunch of crazy business models crash at full speed into the solid wall of reality. What Balmer is proposing here makes even the worst dot-bomb plan look sterling.
I don't see your point. Microsoft is trying to do exactly
what you propose: they're not using the legal framework, it's
broken for their purposes. Their business model won't even
glisten a little bit if they're constrained from leveraging the
fruits of their ill-gotten monopoly.
If a bunch of political dissidents can get
together to fight the hypocrisy of the latest
War on (Some) X well enough to get
past the media blackout on such legalized looting,
they need the same kind of structure as Kazaa etc.
Never noticed propaganda in your music before?
How will you fight against it? How will the
Powers That Be respond to thought crimes?
Maybe by being ready to obstruct new media channels?
And having lots of practice doing it?
I seem to recall more than one failed
"dot-com" business model that was set up
to spy on users in this way... emphasis on
failed. Neilson (et al) can't give that kind
of information, this is a marketeer's wet dream.
If the entertainment industry can get someone
else to spend a small (or larger) dot-com sized
fortune collecting this information, from an
unwilling set of customers to be sure... it's
no wonder they're trying to do so.
That's what's really going on here: not just
a massive invasion of privacy, unjustified by
even a (so-called) PATRIOT act level terrorist
threat. Not just trying to scare customers away
from PVR vendors on a wholesale basis, while
undermining the future growth of the market.
But also finding someone else to pay for a
level of market information collection that
would otherwise be impossible to collect, since
the financials don't pass a first level smell
test and customers would never willingly commit to that level of surveillance.
Let's see, CVS for the jUSB effort has
files dating from April 2000. But IBM's effort
only entered public review in September 2001 (according to the JSR project page, which doesn't list the CVS for the RI). That seems like almost a year and a half to me.
I think there's an argument to be made that the essence of "Open Source" has a lot more to do with open development process than just ability to get source code. That's not to say that having source isn't useful... it's just to say that in the long term, what's important is that processes are open (dare I say "Free"?). I do understand that corporations may prefer the definition of "open" which amounts to "we can easily accept other peoples' bugfixes, and yet maintain total control".
...if you are talking about the process, I have no argument; it's closed
Well, that's the basic point I was making. It's closed enough that even "Open" sourcing is a huge step, and Free Software is still basically precluded by the JCP rules. Given that, the software produced by the JCP can't ever be "open" in the most essential meaning of that term.
Of course, the orignal Java USB API was/is LGPL'd (jusb.sourceforge.net). But the terms of the various JCP agreements prevent JCP processes from working with such an effort (even for expert group membership, much less the other issues). The jUSB effort predated JSR-80 by over a year. See the FAQ entry on that topic (at the jUSB site).
If IBM is going to mention their javax.usb API as an example of OSS and Java, I think it's worth highlighting that there's a very strong argument to be made that Sun permitted that OSS license to preclude a Free Software effort taking hold. Notice that even the Apache effort was having a hard time getting accepted as an OSS/JCP process... this USB example shows that Sun is clearly willing to bend its process quite a lot to prevent Free Software from gaining headway.
Now if Sun were willing to let (a) the Reference Implementation (RI) and (b) the Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) be Free Software, and (c) structure the JCP so that Free Software contributors can fully/Freely contribute to the spec, as opposed to needing to license themselves to Sun at zero cost...
then I could agree that there's been some real progress.
Until then, all I see happening is that Sun continues to be opposed to a true "Community Process" because it's excluding the Free Software community.
Also known as "GPL plus Library Exception",
where the "exception" is:
As a special exception, if you link this library with other files to
produce an executable, this library does not by itself cause the
resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License.
This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the
executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
The effect is that it gets rid of the static
linking constraint of LGPL, but it's still a
CopyLeft license so that it can't be proprietized.
This is used in the GNU runtimes for Java
(libgcj, classpath, classpathx, etc) as well
as GUILE, an embedded Scheme interpreter.
Confessing up front that I've only read the
parts relating to free/open source and Linux,
and skimmed the rest of that HUGE opus...
At some level the observations here are
completely predictable. It's old hat to
anyone who's tried to get something large under
way; the buzzwords aren't news. The interesting
bits are when the author talks about how the
Linux model might work in other industries.
What I've found interesting about the Linux
community is best observed as a contrast between
how Linux works, and how most other software
projects I've been on have worked.
Briefly, it's the central
planning thing. Microsoft is just a big and
current example, not the only one.
Traditional OS software orgs insist on being
able to control lots and lots of things, just so
that they can present plans justifying themselves
to folk who finance their work. And many of
those financers are actually trying to sell hardware;
look at Sun, DEC, HP, IBM, or most folk now
working in OS software without Linux.
OS decisions that don't immediately sell hardware
tend to get under-rewarded, compared to Linux.
And because of management overheads,
there is no way to incorporate very much
work that's not a current "top" priority
since such efforts detract from the process of
collecting fat bonuses (issued for
short term goals far more than long term ones).
A lot of the "parallelism" of Linux is just
the fact that developers have finally started to
be able to escape from such straitjackets, and
don't need to tie themselves so exclusively to
short sighted bottom line issues. It's those short
planning horizons that have hobbled most
software organizations without the benefit
of a monopoly over most of a large industry.
Janet's comment is perhaps best attributed
to the LinuxToday forum, where it's gotten
several more replies. Several were even cross
posted
to the W3C comments list:
It's been pointed out that most of the comments
say substantially more than the "Don't" which Janet mischaracterizes them to be. And also that
the short-circuiting of the W3C process in this case is atypical and suspicious, particularly when
combined with the way notice for this fundamental
change was slipped under everyone's radar.
Legalized
intellectual property meant that
ideas were considered a person's property, and were protected as such
by the government. If a(n) idea
ran away, the government could force him/her
back to the owner.
Helping a(n) idea escape was considered theft and punished as such. Abolishing intellectual property only forced state governments to STOP infringing on people's freedom. This is an important distinction.
Hmm... and let's consider that some of
the ideas now imprisoned by IP laws are
foundational to civil society.
Shouldn't such foundational ideas be Free,
rather than Proprietary?
The real problem is the way copyright terms have
been extended far beyond the the realm of sanity.
That's the way "holes in history"
get created lately:
companies are able to prevent independent
collections of relatively recent information
from even getting created.
In the US, copyrights haven't expired for any
work since shortly
before Mickey Mouse was created; that's
another part of the "copyright bargain"
that has gotten completely corrupted.
The simple solution to this problem is
compatible with both conservative ("the good
old days did it right!") and liberal ("give
us our civil rights!") political philosophies:
restore copyright terms to sane periods, so
these problems don't need to come up, ever.
Let them enter the public domain just a few
decades after they're copyrighted, the way
they were supposed to.
Heck, there's a lot of older
music I'd love to
have access to. If it weren't for the
way that the media (RIAA just one member)
have locked it up in endless copyright,
Napster (and the like) would be able to offer
it for free (or for money!) without needing
to worry about lawsuits.
(And likely the new music coming out would
be better, since it'd have to compete in
terms of quality not just marketing!)
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't mention Cato's stand; is this some kind of astroturfing?
For that matter, Cato and deregulation are more than a little wierd. Their stance is that there ought to be nothing constraining corporations, neither government nor especially "we the people". They put it more subtly though! That is, "economic justice" is a big Cato anti-goal ...
if they were to take a stance on this issue, it'd
be a sign that they saw big $$$ on the side they took,
and thought a preemptive strike might help.
Hmm ... and for that matter, what did the USSR
have to do with socialism? The government was
increasingly fascist. (Which oddly enough is much
the same structure the Bush regime is pushing as
aggressively as it can in the US.)
Well, I started to read through the court documents, and it looks so far like the ISP who gets to keep the addresses (courtesy of the order) actually has some really serious complaints against its upstream provider, which is why the court had to take some sort of immediate action.
Technically, I understand the knee-jerk response that's all /. seems to cover so far.
But seriously -- what's the judge to do, when
the upstream ISP is doing stuff like that? They've
broken the contract so many times it's not funny,
and it seems like this is a pretty minimal step
towards letting the victim (== ISP that gets
to keep the address, per the order) get
disentangled from an especially crapulent
upstream provider.
Seems most of the /. crowd would
prefer that ISPs be given the kind of powers
that God-Emperor Bush seems to want,
to abuse anyone they see fit and never be
brought to account.
Come on people. Look at the facts.
Oh, get a clue.
Rail traffic ... have you ever considered the subsidies
the government offers to the auto, road, and aviation industries?
In terms of subsidy per passenger mile, those industries
are far more heavily subsidized than rail traffic.
Or to put it differently, the problems rail traffic has
are basically that its competition is so extensively subsidized
that it's all but impossible to compete.
"Our" government is quite heavily in the business of distorting the economy. Primarily to benefit military industries (the auto industry only really took off after WW2, as a way to turn tank-production capacity into a dual-use technology) at the expense of more naturally efficient mechanisms. Although the individual characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were clearly not real, except maybe Jessica Rabbit!, the plot to abolish the public transport system is very well documented as being true. But the major war contractors were allowed to get away with it.
Profit is not God. Although far too many of the people now running "our" government worship it, even when it conflicts with their basic responsibilities to support healthy (local) communities and to support civil rights.
Hit that man with a cluestick!
I've often lived in places with local power utilities. And water. And sewage, and waste disposal. And cable TV. The reason telco is often such an exception is that telco service was historically highly regulated, to serve the same goals as other local utilities.
The government's purpose is to support a healthy community, and oddly enough it turns out that everyone wins when utilities are affordable ... and when they aren't just
unaccountable
operations to vacuum dollars out of the local economy into
out-of-state friends of the current empire in DC.
Actually there's a strong tradition of municipal utilities in most parts of the country. It turns out that they generally provide better service than private companies ... far more
responsive (they're not run from some other town, possibly
in another state or country), and less expensive.
Consider even fairly major operations like Cleveland (look at the fraud perpetrated on Dennis Kucinich when he was mayor there -- I was a few towns over) and Long Island. Long Island power is a particularly interesting example ... they moved to local power, and
it was a key part of turning around the local economy.
ISPs that can't be bothered to filter out the viruses are the primary cause of all this damage.
Today, almost all viruses are weapons to attack home PCs, installing spambots. If the ISPs had even been marginally responsible as these epidemics started, rather than fostering the spread of ever-more-dangerous virii, today's problems would be several orders of magnitude less than they are.
That has nothing to do with broadband per se. It has to do with trying to make a buck by externalizing all costs ... changing the Internet from a place where
organizations were responsible, to one where irresponsibility
became the norm.
There are lots of real-world examples of people being held responsible for their actions. You can't just go screwing people to give them AIDS, for example. Or firing guns into crowds. And there are plenty of places where littering gives reasonable fines (hundreds of dollars).
A receipt would prevent anonymous voting; it's what you'd provide to -- oh, Enron -- to prove that you voted for the "right" candidate. Then they pay you. (Maybe a meal, or by not firing you, or whatever.)
An audit trail is what's needed. And a paper, voter-verifiable copy of the ballot you just filled out is exactly the right thing there. But it must never leave the polling place,
Let's stop having slashdot advocate that the world make it even easier to sell out to corporations and other organizations that are corrupting the political process. Stop calling them "receipts" in the stories, and get editors who stop making such mistakes. Let's try to be up-level from the Faux News Network.
Well, they're saying that they now have some new USB software ... seems like they're finally starting to take
advantage of the hardware capabilities to offer a
composite device that can simultaneously:
Or maybe you have to reconfigure something. The descriptions are unclear; if the Japanese text was clear, the translations certainly lost it.
There's also gobs of translation software, Japanese-to-English and vice versa.
... or more simply: updated software is the main difference they've described.
Yopy took forever to finally reach the market, even just in Europe and Canada. By the time it did, the SA-1100 was no longer produced ...
Anyone here know about a PXA-255 based Yopy?
The last major SF trend I saw was cyberpunk, and the world it painted (say, Neuromancer) wasn't a particularly pleasant place.
While fantasy (elves and everything) has some unpleasant chunks (Mordor or its analogues), it at least doesn't treat those as the best we have to look forward too.
Fiction reflects the world we live in, and in a world where the US government has clearly been hijacked by thieves (and liars) in high places -- who feel free to invade countries to generate new sources of corporate welfare, and who feel free to decrease civil rights thorughout the world -- we need Fiction that gives us a better place.
Until science stops being an excuse to oppress people (farmers, people who want to listen to music, normal folk), SF isn't going to be able to be all that fun.
Not at all true. Though you're strongly encouraged to be careful if you have a VT6202 (funky chip timings make for more than its fair share of trouble), and to use the very latest driver versions. Some bugs have taken a while to exterminate.
The 2.4.21-ac1 tree should be pretty good, though you should likely add a small "micro-patch" (with a few one-liner fixes). As should the very latest Linus tree, 2.5.72-bk2 (includes that "micro patch"); your next sync with Linus' tree may have that.
Most any current EHCI hardware should work fine under Linux, with drivers dated 2003-June (instead of 2003-January).
I could use a cluebat here. All Sun4 machines post-dated the Sun386i, and I never saw one run SunOS 3.x ... it was all
based on the SVr4 code. (Though not the earliest versions)
Don't be confused by the way the SunOS 4.x code merged the
BSD-isms in with the SVr4-isms ... it was SVr4 at core,
with a BSD veneer. Later versions of Solaris evolved even more.
No Sun4 included a Motorola chip; that'd have made it into a Sun3. You don't know what you're talking about.
I never denied the politics or the "one arrow" strategy impact; just pointed out that the way it was implemented had a magic "... and the answer is SPARC" clause, which is what nuked the original "Open" systems thrust of Sun. RISC had a marketing cachet that wasn't wholly deserved, although at that time it was more deserved than today.
Sources ... clearly you won't believe people that were
there at the time. So failing that you'd want a copy of
the relevant contracts and presentations. Sorry, no.
False. Sun didn't have the money to invest in SPARC engineering ("productizing the <university/> RISC machine", if you will) until it got a boatload of $$$ from ATT as part of its work to merge SunOS features into SVR4. That kind of hardware work isn't cheap, especially when it includes transitioning existing product lines (Sun3, Sun386i) and customers. How many companies can start new chip designs today? Even Intel can't afford it, look at Itanic! Even though it was cheaper back then, it wasn't in the least bit "cheap". Co-development funding was needed.
If ATT hadn't wanted to kill of the main BSD variant, Sun would likely still have been an "open systems" company. And if you don't recall that, you weren't at the company when that was all happening, or in the industry watching the dynamics of SVr4 and the "Oppose Sun Forever/1" OS.
One of the strings on that contract was that all new hardware had to ship with SunOS 4 (the SVr4 based code) starting at some particular date. The Sun386i predated the SPARC1 you mentioned, and it was one of the last boxes that could ship with 3.x (the "old" BSD codebase). Sun wasn't allowed to continue trying to scale the BSD code -- the ATT contract said so. Those Sun4 machines couldn't (legally) be sold with the SunOS 3.x kernels.
As for performance ... odd, the Sun486i was faster
than the Sun 4/110, not that it ever shipped. Quite a
lot of Sun386i hardware upgrades had to get held back
to continue making the early SPARC hardware look good
by comparison. (In fact, I don't think any Sun386i
product upgrades really appeared.) Same thing applied
to I/O and memory busses, not just CPUs.
You seem to think that being gone for seven years doesn't count as "long gone" ... heh. His influence on
current designs is rather indirect. Minor apologies
for not spelling Andy's name right, one's used to just
saying "Andy".
Sun's just being forced to go back to its roots, which were running a commodity Open Source OS (SunOS started as BSD) on commodity hardware (m68k at first, then SPARC except for a couple years when they also sold 80386 hardware, as they started Solaris). That should be a healthy thing, long term, though they have to get rid of a lot of closed-system attitudes. Like the ones that have crippled so much Free Java work.
If Sun had kept true to their roots, they'd have been running Linux on x86 from day one ...
instead, they wanted to keep
one founder (Andy Bechtolstein),
who wanted to design a RISC chip (became SPARC).
So Sun sold out SunOS in favor of
Solaris/SVr4, so they
could switch to non-commodity hardware. Well I've
got news for you: Andy's long gone, and SPARC
was never that hot. And the customer lock-in
is going away ... customers always wanted the
open systems approach, even when Scott McNealy
refused to play that game.
And http://pciids.sf.net is still going strong.
Will those lawyers be going against that next? Because I assure you those IDs appear in compiled binaries of Linux.
I don't see your point. Microsoft is trying to do exactly what you propose: they're not using the legal framework, it's broken for their purposes. Their business model won't even glisten a little bit if they're constrained from leveraging the fruits of their ill-gotten monopoly.
No, but this is the info-war part of it.
If a bunch of political dissidents can get together to fight the hypocrisy of the latest War on (Some) X well enough to get past the media blackout on such legalized looting, they need the same kind of structure as Kazaa etc.
Never noticed propaganda in your music before? How will you fight against it? How will the Powers That Be respond to thought crimes? Maybe by being ready to obstruct new media channels? And having lots of practice doing it?
For example, if you install it on an IDE system that doesn't come up with UDMA ...
I seem to recall more than one failed "dot-com" business model that was set up to spy on users in this way ... emphasis on
failed. Neilson (et al) can't give that kind
of information, this is a marketeer's wet dream.
If the entertainment industry can get someone else to spend a small (or larger) dot-com sized fortune collecting this information, from an unwilling set of customers to be sure ... it's
no wonder they're trying to do so.
That's what's really going on here: not just a massive invasion of privacy, unjustified by even a (so-called) PATRIOT act level terrorist threat. Not just trying to scare customers away from PVR vendors on a wholesale basis, while undermining the future growth of the market.
But also finding someone else to pay for a level of market information collection that would otherwise be impossible to collect, since the financials don't pass a first level smell test and customers would never willingly commit to that level of surveillance.
Let's see, CVS for the jUSB effort has files dating from April 2000. But IBM's effort only entered public review in September 2001 (according to the JSR project page, which doesn't list the CVS for the RI). That seems like almost a year and a half to me.
I think there's an argument to be made that the essence of "Open Source" has a lot more to do with open development process than just ability to get source code. That's not to say that having source isn't useful ... it's just to say that in the long term, what's important is that processes are open (dare I say "Free"?). I do understand that corporations may prefer the definition of "open" which amounts to "we can easily accept other peoples' bugfixes, and yet maintain total control".
Well, that's the basic point I was making. It's closed enough that even "Open" sourcing is a huge step, and Free Software is still basically precluded by the JCP rules. Given that, the software produced by the JCP can't ever be "open" in the most essential meaning of that term.
Of course, the orignal Java USB API was/is LGPL'd (jusb.sourceforge.net). But the terms of the various JCP agreements prevent JCP processes from working with such an effort (even for expert group membership, much less the other issues). The jUSB effort predated JSR-80 by over a year. See the FAQ entry on that topic (at the jUSB site).
If IBM is going to mention their javax.usb API as an example of OSS and Java, I think it's worth highlighting that there's a very strong argument to be made that Sun permitted that OSS license to preclude a Free Software effort taking hold. Notice that even the Apache effort was having a hard time getting accepted as an OSS/JCP process ... this USB example shows that Sun is clearly willing to bend its process quite a lot to prevent Free Software from gaining headway.
Now if Sun were willing to let (a) the Reference Implementation (RI) and (b) the Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) be Free Software, and (c) structure the JCP so that Free Software contributors can fully/Freely contribute to the spec, as opposed to needing to license themselves to Sun at zero cost ...
then I could agree that there's been some real progress.
Until then, all I see happening is that Sun continues to be opposed to a true "Community Process" because it's excluding the Free Software community.
Also known as "GPL plus Library Exception", where the "exception" is:
The effect is that it gets rid of the static linking constraint of LGPL, but it's still a CopyLeft license so that it can't be proprietized.
This is used in the GNU runtimes for Java (libgcj, classpath, classpathx, etc) as well as GUILE, an embedded Scheme interpreter.
Confessing up front that I've only read the parts relating to free/open source and Linux, and skimmed the rest of that HUGE opus ...
At some level the observations here are completely predictable. It's old hat to anyone who's tried to get something large under way; the buzzwords aren't news. The interesting bits are when the author talks about how the Linux model might work in other industries.
What I've found interesting about the Linux community is best observed as a contrast between how Linux works, and how most other software projects I've been on have worked. Briefly, it's the central planning thing. Microsoft is just a big and current example, not the only one.
Traditional OS software orgs insist on being able to control lots and lots of things, just so that they can present plans justifying themselves to folk who finance their work. And many of those financers are actually trying to sell hardware; look at Sun, DEC, HP, IBM, or most folk now working in OS software without Linux. OS decisions that don't immediately sell hardware tend to get under-rewarded, compared to Linux. And because of management overheads, there is no way to incorporate very much work that's not a current "top" priority since such efforts detract from the process of collecting fat bonuses (issued for short term goals far more than long term ones).
A lot of the "parallelism" of Linux is just the fact that developers have finally started to be able to escape from such straitjackets, and don't need to tie themselves so exclusively to short sighted bottom line issues. It's those short planning horizons that have hobbled most software organizations without the benefit of a monopoly over most of a large industry.
Janet's comment is perhaps best attributed to the LinuxToday forum, where it's gotten several more replies. Several were even cross posted to the W3C comments list:
It's been pointed out that most of the comments say substantially more than the "Don't" which Janet mischaracterizes them to be. And also that the short-circuiting of the W3C process in this case is atypical and suspicious, particularly when combined with the way notice for this fundamental change was slipped under everyone's radar.
s/slavery/intellectual property/g
s/slave/idea/g
Hmm ... and let's consider that some of
the ideas now imprisoned by IP laws are
foundational to civil society.
Shouldn't such foundational ideas be Free,
rather than Proprietary?
The real problem is the way copyright terms have been extended far beyond the the realm of sanity.
That's the way "holes in history" get created lately: companies are able to prevent independent collections of relatively recent information from even getting created. In the US, copyrights haven't expired for any work since shortly before Mickey Mouse was created; that's another part of the "copyright bargain" that has gotten completely corrupted.
The simple solution to this problem is compatible with both conservative ("the good old days did it right!") and liberal ("give us our civil rights!") political philosophies: restore copyright terms to sane periods, so these problems don't need to come up, ever. Let them enter the public domain just a few decades after they're copyrighted, the way they were supposed to.
Heck, there's a lot of older music I'd love to have access to. If it weren't for the way that the media (RIAA just one member) have locked it up in endless copyright, Napster (and the like) would be able to offer it for free (or for money!) without needing to worry about lawsuits. (And likely the new music coming out would be better, since it'd have to compete in terms of quality not just marketing!)