Apparently the HURD, gnome, enlightenment, and the Berlin project all don't really exist. Of course, if they did, they would be examples of open source innovations.
I believe his point what that these projects, though useful, aren't truly innovative. We have a microkernel (been done before (Mach, QNX, BeOS)), desktop environment (been done before (cde, Windows(!))), window manager (been done before (*wm, WindowMaker)), windowing environment + 3D (been done before (X + GLX, OpenInventor(?)).
All of these are evolutionary; they embraced and extended existing technology, if you will. Doesn't mean they aren't useful, but they just don't have quite the impact of the FIRST window manager, the FIRST microkernel, the FIRST desktop had.
Who cares about the actual technology, this has GOT to be the coolest job on the planet, building these kinds of things...
This ain't The Jungle...
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 2
I really don't think a 'geek union' could ever work.
Unions really came about because the workers worked in very harsh conditions, for meager salaries. We sit in our nice, air-conditioned labs and offices, and we make good money doing it.
'Geeks' in general, are a fairly anti-authoritarian group. They won't take sh!t from either The Man nor the corrupt union leader.
The Western system needs lots of people.. The 'geeks' would be screwed if the electrician's union went on strike. Or the carpenter's union. Especially the airline unions.. Get the point? You may be getting a hard time from the non-geeks, but without them, you'd be completely screwed.
Funspot kicks major butt.. It's like walking into a videogame preservation society.. In the same room, you can play 'the greats', like PacMan, Missle Command, Asteroids, Tempest, etc., but they also have some more esoteric stuff like a cocktail version of Atari football, complete with black and white display of Xs and Os and trackballs...
Remember back in the day, when companies only registered one domain name, and built 'subdomains' based from them? foo.division1.company.com, bar.division2.company.com.. Now, it's more like www.division1company.com..
FWIW, the article mentions specifically that the 'chip' in question is built in the good ole' US of A.. Now, I don't know if the physical chip is built in the US, or if it was merely designed here.. I don't know which of these are under USA export restriction...
What battle has 3dfx lost to OpenGL? The way I see it, GLide doesn't compete directly with OpenGL. OpenGL is a higher level API, while GLide is intended to be closer to the hardware. Unfortunately, 3dfx hasn't been paying enough attention to OpenGL, and is now lagging behind nVidia, among others.
But don't loose sight of the issue here: 3dfx alleges that Creative violated the license by using 3dfx code. They aren't suing because they made a GLide wrapper. I don't think all the other 'high school kid' suits were expressly over the existance of GLide wrappers. All of these lawsuits involve license violations. If the defendants didn't want to be sued, they should not have accepted the license agreement.
3dfx is not dictating how the GLide API may be used.
Keep up the 3dfx bashing guys. 3dfx is the only company that is either shipping or helping other people ship drivers for their hardware *right now* for DOS/Win/Mac/Linux/BeOS, etc. Hopefully, nVidia's foray into source code releases will push 3dfx to do the same.
I *still* trust 3dfx, because they actually deliver what they say they will, unlike nVidia's Microsoftian 'hype-and-switch' methods..
if Mr. Torvalds or other prominent Linux developers, such as Alan Cox, David Miller or Stephen Tweedie, were to join one of our competitors, or if they were to decide to no longer support us and our products in particular, or Linux in general, our business, operating results and financial condition could be materially adversely affected.
For example, he explicitly chose to build a monolithic kernel as opposed to a microkernel. Conventional theory dictates that a microkernel is more flexible and expandable, but Linus believes it is better to put core system functions together in one large piece of memory. Now that Linux is available to everyone, we can all evaluate that choice and more aptly decide for ourselves whether abstraction is the right choice for our needs.
If that doesn't earn him a doctorate, I don't know what does.
That doesn't earn him a doctorate. Making a design decision to go with one of many preexisting options isn't exactly earth-shattering. Nor was his decision to license it under the preexisting GPL.
His true contribution was to 'rally the troops', and gain support for his fledgling kernel back in its foramtive days. In other words, for lighting the first spark.
And that contribution wasn't even to "computer science". Save that distinction to folks like von Neumann, Turing, Church...
Wow.. I wrote that LED-stat.txt file back in '94, and I'm amazed people have used it for this kind of stuff.. My contribution to open source, before it was called open source:^)
Yep.. Here's another lame "If OSes were cars..." This is my take:
Linux: The 1988 VW GTi with supercharger and nitrous system. It's cheap, damned fast, easy to modify, but ugly to most people. The people who like it love the way it looks.
BeOS: BMW M Coupe, that you scored pretty cheap. Has the performance and handling, but has a more refined feel. Not as easily modifiable, but that would upset the balance. Looks neat, not many people have seen them, and the appearance grows on you. Pretty new, but has a good lineage.
Windows NT: Four cylinder Honda Accord. Lots of them out there, pretty big and underpowered. Good amount of of percieved security. People in GTis and M Coupes laugh at them. Hard to modify.
Windows 9x: Honda Civic. Really cheap, and really common, and a lot of kewl d00ds like to p1mp them out by cutting the springs and putting big stickers all over them. See http://riceboypage.com for more info. VW and M folks laugh even more.
Solaris: Jaguar XJ6. Expensive, kind of rare, hard to get parts for. Still fairly fast, though it spends half of the time on the shop. Has rust spots because of its age. Hard to find a mechanic.
Or perhaps Origin is just ignoring the fact that people are actually selling their property? Hmm...
In that case, if I were Origin, I'd create a few more valuable objects (black armor? etc.), and sell them for real cash.. It's like having your own mint.:^)
I completed my college humanities requirement writing a paper on AT... He was a geek and a homosexual, thus an outcast, and one day he snapped and killed himself. One of the greatest minds of our century was worn down by the agents of the very government he saved during WWII so much that he ended his own life. Chalk up another victim of Katz' "Hellmouth".
Companies like Red Hat... Actually, Doug, a lot of customers are buying that story. As you can see, actual sales of RH have been taking off, and that doesn't count the number of downloads of all Linux distributions. The question is, what value does SCO offer over RH, Debian, etc.?
Linux didn't break any new ground... It doesn't need to. It embraces existing standards, and makes them more readily accessible. As a result, Linux settled into a niche in a lot of areas, especially around network services. It has a long way to go on the desktop, but is the Swiss Army Knife of networks, supporting IP, DECnet, Appletalk, amateur radio formats, etc.
Linux products aren't particularly scaleable... That's the applications' fault, not Linux's. If you design your application properly, say using the Beowulf model, scalability becomes less of an issue. Linux is also much more portable than SCO. What hardware platforms does SCO support?
Another thing is reliability... So, you're saying that the thousands of bleeding edge Linux people's time is wasted? Hardly. Just because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet somewhere, doesn't mean testing isn't being done. Some people like that "boring, hard, grubby work".
It seems that Doug is making a last gasp at releveance. At this point, it would make more sense for SCO to take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach: Build a SCO Linux distribution, test the hell out of it, slap the oh so precious SCO label on the box, and charge a ton of cash for a bulletproof, certified by SCO Labs distribution of Linux.
And I'm not a Linux zealot. In fact, I'm probably going to move to Be as my desktop, but Linux really excells on the server side... Where Linux is good, it's really, really good..
I know going in that I'll take more flak for this column than just about any I could write
Here comes some..
the dinky feature-weak, application-starved flavor of home-brewed Unix known as Linux.
He actually makes that 'home-brewed' comment once more in the article. What he fails to mention is that that 'home-brew' is being cooked up by some of the best chefs in the industry.
Now, I feel that Microsoft is a big reason why hardware is so cheap these days. And that's definitely a good thing.
He doesn't seem to understand that for the most past, folks don't use Linux to go against The Man, they use it because the Microsoft Way isn't so great. I hate when people send me Word documents via email. I hate using Microsoft's crappy development tools. I hate having to use tons of memory for OS services that I never use.
Linux isn't for Joe Six Gig. It will never be, even with the efforts of the GNOME and KDE folks.
The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye
*plonk* Unix, yes. Mac, kinda. NT? When was NT 3.1 actually released? '93 or so? I remember running Slackware just fine back then.. I guess our intrepid reporter hadn't heard about Linux until very recently..
Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich. I have yet to pay for a Linux distribution. If I had to pull a number out of thin air, I'd guess that less than 25% of all Linux installs were purchased from RH and Caldera. Seems that those 'billions of wasted hours' are running countless web servers, ISPs, NT file and print servers, etc. pretty damned well. And I thank those people who have 'wasted' their time writing quality software. I have yet to see a product from Microsoft that lives up to any reasonable quality standard.
Bill Gates isn't evil. He's not the problem. The roving masses of moronic brochureware IT rejects are to blame.
Then again, Yahoo isn't MAKING that much money, relatively speaking, to warrant its insane market valuation... At day end today, their P/E ratio (stock price divided by earnings per share) is 2133 ($.08/share)! By comparison, Microsoft, one of the most profitable compaines out there is at 74 ($1.17/share), and that's still pretty damned high.. Creative Labs has a P/E of 11, at earnings of $1.39/share...
Yahoo is only as big as it is becuase of hype; underneath that, it's mostly fluff.. At least the cable companies have infrastructure that has real value...
MiniDisc really isn't as 'propietary' as other technologies: there are at least two independant implmenetations of the ARTAC, from Sony and Sharp. I also own a Sharp MiniDisc recorder (the 722) with excellent sound quality, 40 second skip protection, yada yada.. However, you can get your hands on a previous generation 702 for about $210 now...
Netscape introduced the hordes to the Web. That alone caused it to grow as quickly as it did.. And it had some pretty nifty features, the most important of which, to me at least, was the fact that I could type a URL into the 'Location' box. It also began to display a page before all the images were loaded...
IIRC, Netscape was the first decent web browser for Windows, too..
I still get a kick out of seeing the 'Throbbing N' in some movies of the time..:^)
I commute to work with a Timberland 'Mechanic' backpack, which has a padded section for the laptop, and lots of pocket space for a notebook, Pilot, cell phone, business cards, and reading material for the T... Counts as one of my carry-ons for plane rides..
Slashdot Mirror
I believe his point what that these projects, though useful, aren't truly innovative. We have a microkernel (been done before (Mach, QNX, BeOS)), desktop environment (been done before (cde, Windows(!))), window manager (been done before (*wm, WindowMaker)), windowing environment + 3D (been done before (X + GLX, OpenInventor(?)).
All of these are evolutionary; they embraced and extended existing technology, if you will. Doesn't mean they aren't useful, but they just don't have quite the impact of the FIRST window manager, the FIRST microkernel, the FIRST desktop had.
Who cares about the actual technology, this has GOT to be the coolest job on the planet, building these kinds of things...
- Unions really came about because the workers worked in very harsh conditions, for meager salaries. We sit in our nice, air-conditioned labs and offices, and we make good money doing it.
- 'Geeks' in general, are a fairly anti-authoritarian group. They won't take sh!t from either The Man nor the corrupt union leader.
- The Western system needs lots of people.. The 'geeks' would be screwed if the electrician's union went on strike. Or the carpenter's union. Especially the airline unions.. Get the point? You may be getting a hard time from the non-geeks, but without them, you'd be completely screwed.
Open your mind before your software.Funspot kicks major butt.. It's like walking into a videogame preservation society.. In the same room, you can play 'the greats', like PacMan, Missle Command, Asteroids, Tempest, etc., but they also have some more esoteric stuff like a cocktail version of Atari football, complete with black and white display of Xs and Os and trackballs...
When the cost of defending those features becomes higher than the cost of losing the sale to a rip-off copy.
Remember back in the day, when companies only registered one domain name, and built 'subdomains' based from them? foo.division1.company.com, bar.division2.company.com.. Now, it's more like www.division1company.com..
These days, namespace pollution is rampant...
RIP, Gary Kildall, 1942-1994.
AFAIK- the only 3D support in 4.5 will be 3dfx..
:^)
Definitely Banshee and V3, and maybe older Voodoo based boards as well...
My CD should be in the mail tomorrow
-joev
What battle has 3dfx lost to OpenGL? The way I see it, GLide doesn't compete directly with OpenGL. OpenGL is a higher level API, while GLide is intended to be closer to the hardware. Unfortunately, 3dfx hasn't been paying enough attention to OpenGL, and is now lagging behind nVidia, among others.
But don't loose sight of the issue here: 3dfx alleges that Creative violated the license by using 3dfx code. They aren't suing because they made a GLide wrapper. I don't think all the other 'high school kid' suits were expressly over the existance of GLide wrappers. All of these lawsuits involve license violations. If the defendants didn't want to be sued, they should not have accepted the license agreement.
3dfx is not dictating how the GLide API may be used.
Keep up the 3dfx bashing guys. 3dfx is the only company that is either shipping or helping other people ship drivers for their hardware *right now* for DOS/Win/Mac/Linux/BeOS, etc. Hopefully, nVidia's foray into source code releases will push 3dfx to do the same.
I *still* trust 3dfx, because they actually deliver what they say they will, unlike nVidia's Microsoftian 'hype-and-switch' methods..
So there.
If that doesn't earn him a doctorate, I don't know what does.
That doesn't earn him a doctorate. Making a design decision to go with one of many preexisting options isn't exactly earth-shattering. Nor was his decision to license it under the preexisting GPL.
His true contribution was to 'rally the troops', and gain support for his fledgling kernel back in its foramtive days. In other words, for lighting the first spark.
And that contribution wasn't even to "computer science". Save that distinction to folks like von Neumann, Turing, Church...
Wow.. I wrote that LED-stat.txt file back in '94, and I'm amazed people have used it for this kind of stuff.. My contribution to open source, before it was called open source :^)
Linux: The 1988 VW GTi with supercharger and nitrous system. It's cheap, damned fast, easy to modify, but ugly to most people. The people who like it love the way it looks.
BeOS: BMW M Coupe, that you scored pretty cheap. Has the performance and handling, but has a more refined feel. Not as easily modifiable, but that would upset the balance. Looks neat, not many people have seen them, and the appearance grows on you. Pretty new, but has a good lineage.
Windows NT: Four cylinder Honda Accord. Lots of them out there, pretty big and underpowered. Good amount of of percieved security. People in GTis and M Coupes laugh at them. Hard to modify.
Windows 9x: Honda Civic. Really cheap, and really common, and a lot of kewl d00ds like to p1mp them out by cutting the springs and putting big stickers all over them. See http://riceboypage.com for more info. VW and M folks laugh even more.
Solaris: Jaguar XJ6. Expensive, kind of rare, hard to get parts for. Still fairly fast, though it spends half of the time on the shop. Has rust spots because of its age. Hard to find a mechanic.
In that case, if I were Origin, I'd create a few more valuable objects (black armor? etc.), and sell them for real cash.. It's like having your own mint. :^)
I completed my college humanities requirement writing a paper on AT... He was a geek and a homosexual, thus an outcast, and one day he snapped and killed himself. One of the greatest minds of our century was worn down by the agents of the very government he saved during WWII so much that he ended his own life. Chalk up another victim of Katz' "Hellmouth".
Companies like Red Hat...
Actually, Doug, a lot of customers are buying that story. As you can see, actual sales of RH have been taking off, and that doesn't count the number of downloads of all Linux distributions. The question is, what value does SCO offer over RH, Debian, etc.?
Linux didn't break any new ground...
It doesn't need to. It embraces existing standards, and makes them more readily accessible. As a result, Linux settled into a niche in a lot of areas, especially around network services. It has a long way to go on the desktop, but is the Swiss Army Knife of networks, supporting IP, DECnet, Appletalk, amateur radio formats, etc.
Linux products aren't particularly scaleable...
That's the applications' fault, not Linux's. If you design your application properly, say using the Beowulf model, scalability becomes less of an issue. Linux is also much more portable than SCO. What hardware platforms does SCO support?
Another thing is reliability...
So, you're saying that the thousands of bleeding edge Linux people's time is wasted? Hardly. Just because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet somewhere, doesn't mean testing isn't being done. Some people like that "boring, hard, grubby work".
It seems that Doug is making a last gasp at releveance. At this point, it would make more sense for SCO to take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach: Build a SCO Linux distribution, test the hell out of it, slap the oh so precious SCO label on the box, and charge a ton of cash for a bulletproof, certified by SCO Labs distribution of Linux.
And I'm not a Linux zealot. In fact, I'm probably going to move to Be as my desktop, but Linux really excells on the server side... Where Linux is good, it's really, really good..
Here comes some..
the dinky feature-weak, application-starved flavor of home-brewed Unix known as Linux.
He actually makes that 'home-brewed' comment once more in the article. What he fails to mention is that that 'home-brew' is being cooked up by some of the best chefs in the industry.
Now, I feel that Microsoft is a big reason why hardware is so cheap these days. And that's definitely a good thing.
He doesn't seem to understand that for the most past, folks don't use Linux to go against The Man, they use it because the Microsoft Way isn't so great. I hate when people send me Word documents via email. I hate using Microsoft's crappy development tools. I hate having to use tons of memory for OS services that I never use.
Linux isn't for Joe Six Gig. It will never be, even with the efforts of the GNOME and KDE folks.
The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye
*plonk* Unix, yes. Mac, kinda. NT? When was NT 3.1 actually released? '93 or so? I remember running Slackware just fine back then.. I guess our intrepid reporter hadn't heard about Linux until very recently..
Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich. I have yet to pay for a Linux distribution. If I had to pull a number out of thin air, I'd guess that less than 25% of all Linux installs were purchased from RH and Caldera. Seems that those 'billions of wasted hours' are running countless web servers, ISPs, NT file and print servers, etc. pretty damned well. And I thank those people who have 'wasted' their time writing quality software. I have yet to see a product from Microsoft that lives up to any reasonable quality standard.
Bill Gates isn't evil. He's not the problem. The roving masses of moronic brochureware IT rejects are to blame.
Yahoo is only as big as it is becuase of hype; underneath that, it's mostly fluff.. At least the cable companies have infrastructure that has real value...
Say Goodbye, Irix
Take a look at minidisc.org and Minidicso for see some prices...
alt.hackers used to do something like this...
It also began to display a page before all the images were loaded...
IIRC, Netscape was the first decent web browser for Windows, too..
I still get a kick out of seeing the 'Throbbing N' in some movies of the time..
If you wear a fanny pack -- check yourself.
Agreed.
Hardware MP3 Players by CmdrTaco on Monday February 8th 99@09:43
Empeg MP3 Car Stereo Ready for Production by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 27th 99@08:41